GARRET T. WILLIE
Where: Capital Ballroom, 858 Yates St.
When: Friday, 8:30 p.m.
Tickets: $34.48 from
Campbell River resident Garret T. Willie is often regarded as an old soul, a Texas-style bluesman with a gift for guitar pyrotechnics that would not be out of place on the Mississippi Delta.
The constant chatter about his age and experience is all the more impressive when you consider his background and the fact that Willie is largely self-taught. He’s just 25 years old, and split his time growing up between Kingcome Inlet on the central coast of sa国际传媒, Alert Bay on Cormorant Island, a 45-minute ferry ride from Port McNeill, and Campbell River, where he was born.
The soft-spoken rocker downplayed his reputation in a recent Times Colonist interview, and seemed almost sheepish when talking about his talent. “I’ve got a lot of outdated bio stuff out there,” he said, chuckling.
“I don’t really think about all that age-related stuff too much, I just kind of play what I feel. I have a deep well of emotion to draw from, whether that’s fun times or pain. When I’m up there on stage, it all comes full circle. Not to sound too out there, but everything that has happened to me through my life, my experiences, leads up to that moment.”
The age-centric narrative which surrounds Willie’s story in the press isn’t incorrect, despite his objections. He does, in fact, sound well beyond his years, and not simply because he’s playing a form of electric blues born a century ago. His baritone is a cavernous wail, a cross between the lacquer-stripping growl of recent Buddy Guy recordings and the output of new-school blues phenom Marcus King. And his guitar playing is incendiary, suggesting a guitarist decades his senior.
Willie said he first picked up a guitar 18 years ago at the age of seven; it was an old acoustic that was laying around the house, Willie said. He was given a guitar of his own the following year, a black Fender Stratocaster. His uncle, Tyler Cranmer, taught him his first power chords (“It was AC/DC’s Highway to Hell,” Willie said with a laugh) and he was off and running. He gave his first paid performance in 2010, a 10-minute set a music festival in Alert Bay.
“We did two songs by AC/DC, Shoot to Thrill and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” Willie said, laughing. “I played the same solo on both of them.”
The Rolling Stones were an early influence on his songwriting, and when he dug deeper into the blues, he discovered Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and Little Walter.
Like any blues performer of the last 40 years, he eventually happened upon the music of the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, who is the most influential musician in the history of blues music, and one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He said he resisted incorporating Vaughan’s trademark tremolo picking (the up-down motion strumming subsequently emulated by an entire generation of players) into his bag of tricks, partly out of necessity. “I’ve always loved Stevie, but I shied away from it for a long time because it seemed too hard.”
He didn’t have any insecurity when it came to choosing the types of guitars he wanted to play. His Gibson SG is a tip of the hat to everyone from Jimmy Page to Duane Allman, and his Fender Stratocaster is his tribute to Vaughan, the performer frequently associated with that particular brand of guitar. What’s more, “you want to get a good Strat tone when you’re playing a 12-bar blues [chord progression],” Willie admitted.
Willie’s beloved Gibson SG is, in fact, more closely identified with his guitar-god idol, Angus Young of AC/DC. “I’ve played that one the longest, and it’s the one I’m most familiar with. I always gravitate toward that.”
Willie took the guitar to Nashville recently, for the recording of his forthcoming album with Grammy Award-winning producer Tom Hambridge. Willie and Hambridge caught the Ryman Auditorium stop on the Experience Hendrix tribute tour while he was there, and he met legends like Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Chris Layton of Double Trouble, and Christone (Kingfish) Ingram and during a post-show backstage visit.
The whole experience was a highlight for the young bluesman, who said he felt more like a peer and less like the young understudy when he was in the presence of the decorated veterans. “We didn’t really see age, I guess, because we were all speaking the same language,” he said.
Willie, who comes from a family of considerable renown in the Vancouver Island area, learned long ago how to acquit himself in a variety of situations. He is the grandson of the late Bill Cranmer, hereditary chief of the ‘Namgis First Nation, and nephew of Bob Chamberlin, former chief councillor of Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation and current chair of the First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance.
His background isn’t what one immediately considers when they think of blues music. But something in the genre spoke to him, Willie said.
“It was a mixture of things, I suppose. I grew up hearing it around the house, and hearing it around town. When I grew up a little bit, I started living and experiencing for myself what those guys were singing about.”
He wrote his first album, Same Pain, when he was 22 years old, which netted him Western Canadian Music Award nominations for blues artist of the year and Indigenous artist of the year. He expects the songs on his next record will point to an artistic progression that should put to rest all persistent talk about his age and experience. “I feel like I’ve come into my own a lot more, and my playing has matured,” he said. “I’ve grown a lot as a human being.”
