Tommy Castro has taken a 16th-century art form, opera, and crafted a musical journey not with classical music but with 21st-century blues and incisive lyrics found on his latest album, “Tommy Castro Presents: A Bluesman Came to Town.”
Castro, a 30-year road warrior as a bandleader celebrating the 10th anniversary of his current band, The Painkillers, subtitled the recording “a blues odyssey.”
In 13 songs on the prestigious Alligator Records label from “Somewhere” and “You To — Hold On To” to “Women, Drugs and Alcohol” and “Bring It On Back” — it tells the story of a young man who hears the blues and decides to dedicate his life to the musical artistry of African slaves brought to the American South, where it evolved into a 12-bar form that laid the foundation for most types of modern American popular music, from jazz to rock and roll to hip-hop.
To his latest project, Castro, who will perform Saturday at the Empress Theatre in Vallejo, brought his blue-eyed, soulful vocals and forceful, razor-sharp guitar licks, informing a mix of blues, blues-rock, ballads, and emphatic grooves in major and minor keys so evident on his many dozen discs recorded over the decades and in his live shows across the country and overseas. These days his decidedly edgy sound is backed by a trio of deeply experienced musicians: longtime bassist Randy McDonald, drummer Bowen Brown, and keyboardist Michael Emerson.
A sampling of the album, a collaboration with Grammy-winning producer and songwriter Tom Hambridge, suggests a “concept album,” a throwback to the 1960s and ’70s recordings by rock bands whose efforts revolved around a central theme or one dramatic idea but with individual songs that could stand on their own. Consider The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” The Who’s “Tommy,” and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”
“Totally, that was the plan,” Castro, 66 and the father of four adult children, said last week during a telephone interview from his Palm Springs area home. “The plan was to make a blues opera. It’s based on a classic hero’s journey — the odyssey of a musician’s life.”
Amid the pandemic, which, as it did for many, led to a lot of down time for Castro, he nourished the idea of a blues opera while having a “conversation with someone close to me,” he said.
He later talked up the concept to managers at his Chicago-based label, including owner Bruce Iglauer.
“He didn’t say anything for a minute,” recalled Castro, adding that Iglauer insisted that every song “will have to make sense” within the larger framework.
“That was the idea,” he continued. “I bounced it off a few people. I bounced it off Hambridge. There’s a story from the first song to the last. I had recently read (Paulo Coelho’s) ‘The Alchemist,’ something based on a hero’s journey. ‘The Odyssey,’ of course (Homer’s tale of war hero Odysseus and his long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War). I fashioned the story around that idea — a professional musician goes on the road and runs into women, drugs and alcohol.”
In the meantime, Castro, a two-time winner of the Blues Music Award (the Grammy of the blues) for Entertainer Of The Year, has once again become the recipient of a passel of plaudits.
He has been nominated for a third Entertainer of the Year honor among five other 2022 Blues Music Awards (the most of any nominee this year), including Album of the Year for “Tommy Castro Presents A Bluesman Came to Town”; Song of the Year (“Somewhere”); Blues Band of the Year; Blues Rock Artist of the Year; and Contemporary Blues Album of the Year.
The recognition may be explained, in part, by Castro’s inventive leap and idea for the latest recording.
“A lot of things qualify as blues,” he explained. “Roots music, blues-rock. We dip into that a little bit. We’ve gotta keep trying. When you have 20 albums under your belt, a lot of ideas have been used. It’s tricky to try to create new music and not drift too far from who you are. I’ve pushed it a little too far sometimes and fans said, ‘Bring it back.’ ”
Over time, Castro, a San Jose native and for decades a fixture on the Bay Area blues scene, naturally has experienced the ups and downs that periodically visit the blues, a genre, while historically important in the still-evolving story of American music, gets overshadowed by the latest musical trends and heated Billboard charts that often reward frothy teen passions, breathless divas who oversing and the machismo of twentysomething rappers.
To him, “the single biggest change” in his corner of American musical landscape is “just a gradual changing of the way things are done. I’m trying to catch up with myself as an artist. I’ve been trying to catch up to the point that I deserve all this.”
“I do what I do,” Castro added matter-of-factly. “I’m always trying to improve on it. It’s been a growing experience. My focus is on songwriting, to write good songs. That’s kind of been my focus. Write the material and giving everything I’ve got on stage.”
The blues, he said, is once again enjoying a resurgence, helped in part by satellite radio and online radio services, such as Sirius XM Radio, in the United States.
The musical form is also helped by videos, such as the title tune from the last album, an uptempo blues-rock number, filmed in Marin County, Castro’s former longtime home before relocating to Southern California. While thoroughly modern as it keys the new album, it pays homage, with vintage black-and-white photos of such blues legends and Fred McDowell, B.B. King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, John Lee Hooker, and Bonnie Raitt.
“It’s an interesting time for this music,” said Castro. “I want to be like B.B. King and John Lee Hooker, playing right up to the end. I asked B.B one time, ‘What keeps you going?’ He was already approaching 80 and still doing 250 shows a year. All he said was, ‘I really love to play.’ ”
.IF YOU GO
Tommy Castro and The Painkillers*
8 p.m. Saturday
Empress Theatre, 330 Virginia St., Vallejo
Tickets: $26.40 to $267.50
(707) 552-2400
www.empresstheatre.org
*Castro and the band also play at 8 p.m. March 11 at Club Fox, Redwood City. For more information, visit www.clubfoxrwc.com.
