Al Basile

Al Basile Tells Us “He’s Through With Cool”

By Kevin Wildman Eight-time Blues Music Award Nominee Al Basile has just released his new album titled Through With Cool, On Sweetspot Records. Overall, this is actually Al’s 19th solo album, however you’ll also find his touch on albums for Roomful Of Blues and Duke Robillard to name a couple. Al is a true Renaissance Man. He is a writer, playwright, songwriter, musician, poet, teacher, singer, producer, and probably one of the best horn players you’ve ever heard., however his specialty is the coronet. Al’s previous 8 albums have all made the top 20 of the Living Blues charts and he’s been nominated eight times for a BMA as Best Horn Player. His 2016 album, Mid-Century Modern was nominated as Best Contemporary Blues Album. It will come as no surprise to us if Through With Cool gets nominated for a few awards as well. This album is spectacular.

Through With Cool is probably anything but ‘uncool’. The album is filled with 14 of the coolest songs you’ve ever heard. The entire album is packed full with great melodies, smooth solos, and some of the most thought-provoking lyrics you’ve ever heard. Basically every song on this album tells a story. Some of these stories are really deep. Some have warnings, some have really deep meanings, and some are just plain fun. Inspirations for these songs come from so many places. Some are inspired by just a line he had said to him or heard somewhere. Some are from observations he has seen over the years, and some of the songs are from personal occurrences. Whatever the source may have been, the result of each is a very fine crafted song.

This is actually Al’s third time of producing himself and he does a fine job here. The album was recorded and engineered by Jack Gauthier at Lakewest Studios in West Greenwich, Rhode Island. Besides Al, the stars on this album are definitely the musician he hand picked to record with. They are Bruce Bears (keyboards), Brad Hallen (bass), Mark Teixeira (drums), Doug James (tenor sax0, Jeff ‘Doc’ Chanonhouse (trumpet) and last but not least, he has the amazing Kid Andersen on guitars. Needless to say, but Al handles all the vocals and does some amazing horn playing on here as well. Let me tell you, Al’s vocals are nothing less than first-class. He delivers a smooth vocal style somewhat reminiscent of the traditional Blues singers we’ve grown to love over the years. When it comes to horn playing, Al definitely hits a new ‘high’ here. Check out his cool solos in “Take Your Time” and “We Lie On Your Grave.”

“Through With Cool is the most completely realized of my 19 albums - the closest to what I heard on my head when I first conceived of the songs,” Basile says. “I’ve worked with Mark, Bruce, and Brad on ten CDs, and they know my music inside and out. The horns have been together on my projects multiple times. And Kid Andersen has outdone himself on his second time out, coming up with great rhythm parts and a rainbow of different guitar colors, each an enhancement to the songs. His versatility and taste show his nomination as best guitarist at this year’s BMAs was apt, and I turned him loose on a few extra-long solos that are spectacular. We’ve also stepped up our production game, with seamless teamwork between Jack Gauthier in the studio and Glenn Halverson in mastering on this, their second project together. It’s my best sounding record.”

We had a chance to sit down and talk to Al recently in what might be one of the best interviews we’ve ever had. It was certainly a lot of fun and at times we both just ended up laughing about a lot of what we talked about. It was very refreshing. In this interview we touch on a lot of subjects ranging from his starting out in the business to his methods of writing and the meanings of all the songs. It was really quite enlightening.

Rock And Blues International: Hi Al, what are you up to right now?

Al Basile: I’m sitting at my keyboards working on demos. Rock And Blues International: I guess it’s time to get back to work again and start on the next album. You’ve got quite a few albums under your belt now.

Al Basile: Yeah, I go into the studio in January to work on the next record. I’ve done one every year basically for the last 20 years and so, I’m on a cycle. I write the songs in the early Spring and Summer and early Fall. I’m doing demos and doing horn arrangements and getting everything ready to give out to the musicians before the holidays so they can come back after the turn of the new year and get ready to go.

Rock And Blues International: When you present them with the music do you give them scores of all the arrangements with a demo tape to follow?

Al Basile: Actually, what I do is make demos that are for the bass players and the horn players. The horn players have charts. The bass player has a line that I want him to play. For the chord guys, I give them chord chords. They get a piece of pager with the chords on it and everybody gets a breakdown of the form and they also get the lyrics. I’ve had most of the same guys, except for the guitar player, for over 10 years, so they really know how to work with me. The guitar player is a new guy. That’s Kid Andersen and this is our third project together. He’s fitting in

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great, so he knows how to do what I need right away.

Rock And Blues International: Kid is one of those ‘go-to guys’. He has his own studio. I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to that go to his studio in California to record. He seems to be the right guy to use on the Blues

Al Basile: Yeah, he’s exceptional. You know, in my case I’m in Rhode Island, so we do the rhythm section track and the horns and stuff, then we can send the files out to Kid and he’s got his own studio so he adds the guitar parts and solos right in his own studio. It’s very easy. You don’t have to set up sessions with somebody out of state for example, he’s right there.

Rock And Blues International: That works out just great for you, doesn’t it. You just send him the files and he loads those into his computer and adds all his guitar parts for you without you having to fly out to California and help him handle it.

Al Basile: It’s just as if he had us there playing with him, It’s great.

Rock And Blues International: You’ve had a pretty long and prestigious career. You were the first horn player for Roomful Of Blues. I’ve bet you’ve got some stories to tell about that time in your life.

Al Basile: That was my first professional job. I was playing locally around Providence (Rhode Island) in the year before that. I had played the trumpet as a child. I had a private teacher and for five years learned how to read music and learned how to play the instrument, and so, I was a reader. When I was in boarding school, I was in the orchestra and the marching band, the pep band, the brass choir. I did every musical group that they had, but it was always playing from sheet music, so I was that kind of player. I was okay, I wasn’t great at it, but I was serviceable. Then in College, I went to Brown (University) in Rhode Island and put the horn away… didn’t touch it for four years and did other musical things. I started writing lyrics, song lyrics, and musical plays. I had a partner who wrote music. I was the ‘words’ guy, and then we graduated and my partner went to law school and became a lawyer, started making money, and stopped making music.

Rock And Blues International: Yeah, there’s something strange about that, right…

Al Basile: Yeah, but by then I had become friends at the end of my college career with Duke Robillard and with Scott Hamilton, who’s a great tenor player and they both said to me, ‘you used to play an instrument, if you ever want to pick it up again… they used to have jam sessions. Scott said, ‘you can come and play at my house. We know you’re just starting out and it’s okay for you to struggle. You’re among friends and you’ve got a place to kind of learn the basics.’ That was exactly what I needed… a safe place to learn. So I started doing that and I played in public for the first time with Scott… I think about 1972 and then Duke heard about it. He already had the three horns in Roomful (of Blues) at the time and three saxes. That band was doing ‘swing’ stuff, it was doing ‘jump’ blues, it was doing classic ‘rhythm and blues,’ like tenor sax tunes, as well as B.B. King guitar stuff, and all the guitar stuff that Duke did. They hired this great rhythm and blues tenor player, Red Prysock, who had had hits in the ’50s… this was now the ’70s… and he had become a jazz guy and was touring with his brother Arthur. Arthur Prysock was a very well known jazz vocalist. Anyway, they hired him to play a gig and they were trying to headquarters here in Rhode Island at the Knickerbocker Café, which is still running and they played there. So for that special gig, Duke hired me because a lot of Red’s songs had the trumpet in the arrangement. I played on that one gig. That was the first time I played out professionally. At the end of the night, Red was going, ‘you guys have a great band here.’ and Duke said, ‘thanks, but actually the seven of us are the band and this guy (Al) was hired for this gig because a lot of your arrangements.’ Red said, ‘Well, you got to hire this man, that trumpet puts fire into your arrangements,’ and so they hired me. So that’s how I got started into Roomful (of Blues). That was like going to finishing school (laughs), learning how to play, and learning how to be a professional. We did 300 dates a year, so I’m learning how to travel, and learning how to run what’s left of your life after you get home from every day. That’s how I started.

Rock And Blues International: Right… on the job training…

Al Basile: Yep, and then because it was Duke, a few years later after Duke had left the band, which he did in ’78, he and I got together and started writing. And so I wrote a bunch of tunes with him and for him, but I wrote a lot of his Rounder albums and Point Blank albums and a lot of the Shanachie albums that he did in the ’80s going into the ’90s. I also played as a sideman on a lot of those sessions. And so, I was keeping things going, but at the same time I had become a full-time teacher. I was teaching at a private school here in Rhode Island. I was teaching Music, English, and Physics.

Rock And Blues International: Well, sometimes a person needs to get a steady paycheck, so I understand that.

Al Basile: Well, it was a normal life. I moonlighted and kept my music stuff going and right around the end of the ’90s I started my own record company and started doing my records where basically every record that I released were songs of mine that I wrote. Duke produced me for the first twenty plus years and I always had him and his band and the rest of my friends

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left over from Roomful, like Doug James and Carl Quefurth on a lot of my sessions, so there was a ‘Roomful’ thing and a Duke thing. So, I did my own records all the way through the 2000s and up to 2020 and then I just switched over the last two years to producing my own self, and Kid’s the guitar guy now.

Rock And Blues International: Now that you’re producing yourself, do you find that more satisfying or is it added pressure?

Al Basile: There’s a lot more satisfaction. When I started, Duke was like my University, so when I started playing, I was learning how to play in a band and I was learning how to improvise. He kind of brought me along. Then when he started producing me, I started to pay attention to what the producer actually did and how many decisions that the producer made that affected the overall sound of the album when it was finished. I decided right about the time I switched over because Duke just got more and more involved in his own projects and it was harder and harder for me to get to him. I had worked with Kid with the Blues Music Awards down in Memphis and I knew he could do all the stuff I write. Duke could play all the stuff that I write. So, I thought, I’ll get Kid. And I also thought, ‘I think I’m going to try to learn to produce.’ The first record I did was two years ago and it was called Last Hand. All I had behind me was a piano and organ trio, so I didn’t have horns. I didn’t have guitar. So the production end of it was stripped down and I learned how to go through just the basics with the trio behind the voice. I didn’t play horn on it except for a couple of times and so that was my undergraduate time of learning all the decisions that the producer makes. I worked real closely with my engineer Jack Gauthier, which we had been working at his studio, Lakewest Studios, for forty years, and so Jack helped me through it. Then after we did that, I thought that now I’m going to go back and have a full band. That was last year’s B’s Testimony, and it was the first full production that I did with a bigger band and this year is the third time out… the second time with a bigger band. But yeah, if you’re the person who wrote the songs, wrote the arrangement, sang and played on it, then you can be the person who makes all the decisions about all the different sounds and the mixing with the engineer. The record couldn’t be more mine. I literally made the decisions from before the song existed to what you hear on the record, so I’m very happy with what we’ve got. I like the way the record sounds. People seem to like the production. So yeah, to answer your question, It’s always been satisfying, but I keep expanding the ways that it satisfies me.

Rock And Blues International: Were there any agonizing decisions on your part where you wanted to do something, but you thought, ‘I want to do this, but maybe I should do that’, perhaps a little overthinking on certain parts?

Al Basile: No, there wasn’t much of that because to tell you the truth, when I write a song, I actually hear the arrangement while I’m writing the song. In other words, I hear the horn parts, I hear the bass line, I know what the groove is and I write the song out of the rhythm, out of the groove. I use horns most of the time to answer the vocal phrasing, so I’ve got everything in my head when I start. I know the melody, I know the lyrics. I know what my vocal phrasing’s going to be. I know how the horns are going to interact with that. I know what the rhythm section is going to be doing. If I only second-guess myself, it’s because I had it at the very beginning and all I’m doing is bringing it to life because I’ve been living with it from the start.

Rock And Blues International: I understand that you had a little throat problems for a while, but they’ve since healed. How much did your vocals or vocal style change from your last couple of albums to this album? Al Basile: Well, I’m going to go a little further back than that. Back when I was doing Roomful, I started doing jazz gigs around Rhode Island and so I was always doing the jazz standard repertoire. I was very heavily into Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole and I was singing standards, soft blues, but mainly standards in being a jazz guy. And so, that was my phrasing. My vocal phrasing was built around that kind of approach of holding notes and the stuff that Frank did and Tony Bennett did so well. Now when I started writing my own tunes, they’re not in that style any more. Now they’re more rootsy. They’re blues and soul based and classic R&B based, so now my vocal mentors were different people. Now they’re like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Percy Mayfield, and all those kind of people and that’s a different vocal approach. Over the last 20 years I’ve been working on that. Now when I had my vocal problems a few years back, what basically happened was it turned out I had a fungal infection in my larynx. I didn’t know it. All I knew was for me to sing what I wanted to sing, I had to push and I could do it, but it sounded like I was pushing. It didn’t sound easy, it sounded like work.

Rock And Blues International: Were the vocal a little more contrived? Did they come with great difficulty?

Al Basile: I was more hoarse, it wasn’t as smooth, and there was just pressure in the voice like pushing. I’m trying to be sincere about this, so I won’t say it was contrived, but it was effortable. Well, it thought, geez, I’m getting older. It’s just what happened. As it turned out, they discovered I had this infection and then they gave me medication and it cleared it up. So, from last year’s record to this year’s record is all the difference in the

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world. Now I can go back to singing the way I want to and it doesn’t sound like I’m forcing it. It just sounds like I’m singing within myself, so it’s smoother and it’s less hoarse and it’s more like what I was doing 4 or 5, 8 or 10 years ago, doing this same kind of material. My writing style really hasn’t changed a lot over the last 15 years or so.

Rock And Blues International: Well, I’m not too familiar with your past material. Realistically, this is the first album of yours that I’ve heard and I was knocked out by it. I really enjoyed the whole album. It’s full of tiny stories or short vignettes. There were a couple of themes that seem somewhat traditional, but overall I really enjoyed the variety of all the songs.

Al Basile: Thanks for noticing that first of all because that’s what I do. I am a storyteller. When I was in college, I was a writer. I wrote fiction and I wrote plays, and I wrote some poetry. Writing fiction, the idea of telling a story came very naturally to me and when you’re writing a play you’re also telling a story with characters. When I started writing songs, I adopted the idea of making these songs like a little… it’s almost… it’s not a play, but a lot of times it’s a dramatic situation and a character. Sometimes the person singing is the character, it’s not me personally. I’m just a guy doing the voice of this character and I’ve always done that. I loved it when Randy Newman did it and so I would do that and if your were to go back and look, I’ve got a couple of hundred songs and a lot of them are character based. And musically I would build on the Blues tradition and then try to extend it out, so every record I’ve got has got some straight ahead 12-bar Blues or some homage to Tampa Red or B.B. King style Blues. I’m always doing that stuff to kind of ground it. Then I’ve got these other rootsy songs that are from the blues and soul days and they might have some changes. They might have a bridge, but the grooves are still the same solid grooves and they still tell stories or speak from a particular situation.

Rock And Blues International: I love the subject matter on all the songs. I can’t think of one song on here that turned me off to it or anything negative about it. It was a very, very interesting album. I was very happy that you included the lyrics with it because you get so many albums with no lyric sheets and you try to keep up with what being sung and sometimes you loose little things in there that you should have picked up on.

Al Basile: Well, I’m a writer and every one of my albums has got a big booklet with all the lyrics in it. If you go back and look at my entire catalog, it’s like that. And most of them have… if you look in the booklet of the record, I have those little blurbs, little introductions before each lyric.

Rock And Blues International: Right, I noticed all of those. They were very interesting as well. You refer to opening for Howlin’ Wolf, Roomful of Blues, and other little anecdotes in there.

Al Basile: Right, so sometimes I’ll explain the story, where the idea came from, and then a lot of the story songs sometimes are things that happened to me. Sometimes they’re things that happened to somebody else I know and I’m just kind of adopting their voice. “My Hero” is a good example. I knew a guy that had that problem. He got involved with somebody and they just were just stringing him along to see what they could get out of him. He kept thinking he was going to be the one, the knight in shining armor and of course at the end of that you find out that you can’t. And so that’s why I wrote that song. Of course it sounds like it all happened to me. It kind of did, but that was 40 years ago. It hasn’t happened to me lately.

Rock And Blues International: In the first song, “Keep On Living,” I believe you stated that this song originated from something that Howlin’ Wolf had told you.

Al Basile: Yeah that was Roomful (of Blues) days. There was a guy in the band, one of the guys… I won’t say which one that was, but we were working with Wolf at a festival in Vermont and he was sitting backstage and this guy in the band went by and said, ‘hey old man.’ Wolf kind of looked up at him and said, ‘you just keep on living and you’ll be old too.’ I kept the ‘keep on living’ and then you’ve got to flesh it out. I didn’t write it in the voice of Howlin’ Wolf. I just took the idea and built on it.

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Rock And Blues International: Well, inspiration comes from all sorts of places. You hear something here, you hear something there. Sometimes it just jumps right out at you and it makes more sense on down the line.

Al Basile: There’s no question about that. There’s a couple of songs in there that… I won’t tell you what inspired them, but there’s some real life inspirations on some of those songs.

Rock And Blues International: On “I’m Waiting,” it looks like you want the ‘curves of her face,’ you love the ‘sound of her voice and the taste of her lips,’ but she’s just got to make up her mind what she’s gonna do.

Al Basile: Well, the thing about the Blues is, it’s a feeling, it’s an attitude, it’s not just a musical form. It’s always been true things… I don’t write any bullshit. It’s all something that’s happened to people, either me or people I know or people I know that are out there. Pretty much everybody’s been in a relationship like that, where you’re waiting for the yo-yo to come back up and it’s not coming back up.

Rock And Blues International: And I like the metaphors that you use, like in “Two Legged Mule”. It’s about a guy that’s messing around with your woman. I love the way you call him a mule. It’s very visual.

Al Basile: Yeah, well that’s an example of a traditional tune. It goes back to Muddy Waters… ‘another mule is kicking in your stall,’ which I first fell in love with Muddy Waters back in the ’60s. I don’t have a farm and I don’t have a mule, but yeah, it is a metaphor and it builds on a mule kicking in the stall image that Muddy used and a lot of other people use. It’s kind of a traditional part of Blues imagery. I am also a poet. I’ve got three books out, so I’m aware of all that stuff and what you can do with words to make things more vivid. I try hard to use that in my lyrics just like I try to do that in my poetry, but my poetry is more complex. In a poem, the words have to do all the work whereas in songs, the words are doing part of the work, but the music is doing a lot of the work too, setting the mood and taking the people through the song. I’m the same writer, but I don’t write lyrics the same way I write poetry. There’s a difference.

Rock And Blues International: One of the songs on here, “Take Your Time,” is really a smooth number. I really like that. I love the coronet solo in there. It’s a coronet… right?

Al Basile: Yes it is. I’ve been playing the coronet since I joined Roomful. I played the trumpet as a child, but I switched to coronet when I picked it up again. Any time you hear me on my own records or on Duke’s records or anybody else’s records that I’m on, it’s always the coronet. Thanks for noticing because the coronet is like the trumpet, but it’s not the trumpet. It’s got a mellower sound that I like. I like to think that my horn has an alternate voice and I don’t want a piercing stabbing trumpet sound, I want a fat warm kind of coronet sound.

Rock And Blues International: And the second solo on that song, the organ solo, it’s simply unbelievable. It’s fantastic. That just fit in beautifully there.

Al Basile: Yeah, Bruce Bears is terrific and he’s been on… like my last ten records, so he really knows. All those guys really know… Brad Hallen on bass, Mark Teixeira on drums. They just know how to make me sound the best that I can sound. They’re creating the setting for whatever kind of gem I’m trying to stick on top.

Rock And Blues International: And I believe that’s another song that was inspired by something that you heard from Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. in Roomful. In those days he would play sitting down. He would sing sitting down and he would play sitting down, so he would be in the middle of the band. Somebody would be taking a solo and he would kind of lean over and he’d go ‘take your time son, take your time.’ That was his advice on how to solo, don’t rush, don’t try to get it over with, say what you’ve got to say. That’s actually part of the lyrics. That’s where that lyric came from.

Rock And Blues International: On “Couldn’t Live With It,” it’s the character… you said it wasn’t necessarily yourself, it’s the character that couldn’t handle success and drives away the woman that fell in love with him. Elaborate on that a little.

Al Basile: Yep, well I’m happy to say that ain’t me.

Rock And Blues International: Well that why I said it sounds like a character.

Al Basile: It’s not me, but I tell ya, I’ve known people like that. They can’t stand the prosperity. If they start going good, they find some way of messing it up. When you start with an idea for a character like that, then the song sort of spools out from that idea and all you need to do is come up with illustrations of what happened to this kind of person. So if you go verse to verse in that song, every one is a little different till you get to the woman. Of course everybody sits around complaining that nothing ever works out, but for this guy all of a sudden it does and he can’t handle it.

Rock And Blues International: When it comes to the next song, “Not Any Place At All,” I hope that’s not about you either.

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The character’s woman left him, he hasn’t heard from her, he wants to find her, and when he thinks he found her, he can’t make it there…. His car dies on him.

Al Basile: That’s an example of what I call ‘magnification.’ In other words, the real situation happened to me, but what it was, was that I was in touch with somebody for a long time and all of a sudden I stopped hearing from them. So what I did was I magnified that into a situation where two people were married and living together. Then the guy gets up one day and all of a sudden, she’s gone. Her car is gone and she didn’t leave any forwarding address and he’s just kind of left hanging. What comes out of that is you become a detective and try to find out where did she go. That’s where it came from and the idea that there’s a guy named Gus that owns the local cleaners, gives him a little bit of information. By the time you get to the end of the song, you know that he’s not going to find her. Even if he were to find this woman, it’s not going to help. He’s not going to get her back just because he finds where she went to. She left for a reason. That’s why he’s not anyplace at all. He’s just at loose ends. He doesn’t know what the hell is happening.

Rock And Blues International: On “We Belong Together,” that’s more of a tradition subject there. trying to get things to work out, you’re trying to close the deal that you want to be close to this person for a long time and so you try to convince them. That’s one thing you can try to do. You say ‘look, this is meant to be.’

Rock And Blues International: On ‘Uh Huh,” it sounds like the woman in that song is kind of a tease there, but if she finally finds the lead character in that song, she’ll have finally found a real man.

Al Basile: The idea there is that you’ve got a woman who is used to getting her way and getting men to do whatever she wants. She takes the whole thing as a game and takes it kind of lightly. And then this guy is basically saying, ‘look, I’ve got something more permanent to offer and one of these days you’re going to realize that.”

Rock And Blues International: Yeah, I’ve seen that woman in a lot of clubs out there.

Al Basile: (Laughs) I bet you have. You’ve seen her, her sister, her cousin and their best friend too.

Rock And Blues International: I see them out there every weekend. She’s the kind of girl you would kind of like to have, but you don’t really, because no matter what bar you walk in, everybody knows her name.

Al Basile: Yeah! Yep! That’s what I mean when I say, they’re taking it as a game. They’re not taking it as seriously as the speaker is taking it. So he is basically saying, you can play around, but after a while you’re going to get tired of that and you’re going to want something that’s more real and then you’re going to find out what I’m all about. It’s a confident position to take. It’s kind of like predicting the future when there’s nothing really happening in the present.

Rock And Blues International: On “Turnabout Is Fair Play,” it seems a little like you’re saying a lot of men just don’t understand a woman, they just don’t understand what she wants and it’s a little hard to figure it out and then when they do, it becomes a problem. Or have I read that wrong?

Al Basile: You read the first part of the song exactly right, but the second part of the song shows the other side of the coin. The singer is taking men to task at the beginning for being stupid, but then he gets around to mistakes that women make in the second half. So, by the time you get to the end of the lyrics, both sides have been talked to. This is the teacher in me coming out, because that’s another thing, I continued on next page

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like to tell stories and I like to teach. It’s kind of like a rootsy rock tune. There’s a lot of lyrics in this. What it’s meant to do is say, you’re all making mistakes in the wrong way and misunderstanding what’s really going on. Fair about is fair play. That’s what that is all about. The guy is complaining about the women and the women are complaining about the guys. I’m saying you all need to get yourself together.

Rock And Blues International: The next song is “You’d Better Change Your Tune.” I like the little thing where you relate it somewhat to The Beatles song “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl.” It sounds like a warning… You must be talking to a drummer here.

Al Basile: (laughs) You know, I’m happy to say I never thought of that, but I know what you’re saying has got a lot of truth. I hear from a lot of people that talk to a lot of drummers. (laughs again) Let’s put it that way. Well, The Beatles connection is “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl.” If you don’t treat her right, then I’m gonna steal her away from you and this is the same thing. You’d better change your ways or you’re not gonna what you want. The idea came from The Beatles. It’s been a long time ago since I first heard that song. The first time that I heard that idea in a song was on that Beatles tune. And then, whatever it is, 50, 55 years later I use the same idea. They’re not similar songs really, but the idea is similar.

Rock And Blues International: Well, I’m very familiar with that song. I think we’re probably close to the same age. I’ll be 70 in a few months and you actually look younger than me.

Al Basile: Well, I’m 74.

Rock And Blues International: Really! Well you look a lot better than me.

Al Basile: (laughs) Well I can’t see you on the phone, but I’ll have to take your word for that.

Rock And Blues International: It looks like we grew up in the same era, so I pretty much remember that song.

Al Basile: Yeah, this goes back to me being a playwright. It’s a dramatic situation. It’s like there’s a guy with a girl and the guy’s not treating the girl right. Now who are you? You’re the person talking to that guy, saying ‘if you don’t straighten up, you’re gonna lose it.’ Now there are some other Arthur Alexander songs that do that. There’s some great Arthur Alexander songs that do that. Basically they talk not to the woman, but to the guy and say this. And Sometimes the dramatic situation is Arthur Alexander has lost out to a guy and he’s saying ‘you’d better treat her right because I can’t.’ If you think about who’s singing and who he is singing to, pretty much every song that I right has a situation. The song points at a person with a very dramatic situation with the person who is singing. That’s kind of endless. You can go round and around and around with all kinds of themes. They don’t always have to be romantic themes.

Rock And Blues International: Well, the next song kind of sounds like a Edgar Allan Poe story or theme. We’re lying on your grave. What is this… making love in a Cemetery?

Al Basile: Yes. It’s kind of freaky.

Rock And Blues International: Yes it is. It is kind of freaky. I was wondering… is this for real? You’ve got to tell me why. I definitely need to know the back-story on this song.

Al Basile: Well, I can’t give you details, but yes, it’s for real. was nobody around and nobody to interrupt us.

Al Basile: Yep that’s part of it. And the other part of it is that there’s some people that… I guess the way they look at it is the closer I am to somebody that is dead, the more alive I feel.

Rock And Blues International: Okay… that’s an interesting thought right there.

Al Basile: I don’t want to say too

much.

Rock And Blues International: Go ahead and tell us. Nobody’s going to see this story. You can tell us a little more about this… (Laughing) No one is going to know.

Al Basile: No, (laughing) I’m not going to say anything more about this situation, but I will say I think that maybe my favorite horn solo is in this song. I think it’s one of my favorites on the record. It’s definitely one of my favorites that I’ve ever recorded. I was really happy with the way that came out.

Rock And Blues International: That brings us to the last song on the album. Let me ask you… are you too cool? The name of this song is “Through With Cool.” Are you just too old to be cool now? Explain this one.

Al Basile: Well, okay. First of all there’s a story about this. I’m sure that you noticed it’s not a band tune, it’s just Kid and me.

Rock And Blues International: Well, in a way, I can somewhat relate to that. When I was a teenager, we would go off to the local cemetery with a girl because there Rock And Blues International: Yeah.

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Al Basile: And there’s a sound in the background. It could be like a kick drum. The deal about that is, normally I put thirteen songs on an album. When I’ve written thirteen songs that I like, I say ‘okay, that’s it. I’ve got the songs I need.’ And so we go in the studio in January and record them. We get everything put together and then damned if I didn’t write another song, like in March. We already had all the stuff in the can and I wasn’t going to bring the whole band back together. So I said, you know what, I had just done a duo thing with Kid at the hotel in Memphis during the Blues Music Awards about five or six years ago and I was singing and he was playing and I thought, ‘well, why don’t we just do this.’ What’s that about is, and you probably noticed it if you’re as old as you said you were, you get to a point where… I wrote a song on the same topic on Last Hand, the first song is called “Invisible Man.” What it is… you get to a certain age and young women don’t see you anymore. Do you know what I’m talking about? Unfortunately I do.

Al Basile: (laughs) Okay… So I wrote “Invisible Man.” Now this one, I actually heard somebody say the phrase ‘through with cool’. They didn’t mean it in the way I mean it, but the way I mean it is you get to a point where young people don’t think you can be cool. In fact, they don’t pay any attention to you at all. But, we’re the generation that invented the word ‘cool.’

right! Rock And Blues International: That’s

Al Basile: So, give us a break. Basically what I’m saying is that song is… I’ve reached a point where I’ve just passed it. I just have to accept it… I can’t compete anymore. I’m not seen in the same way younger men are seen by women. That’s just the way it is. But, in fact, the reason I made it the title of the album was that I hope that people write reviews and things like that, that they give you a bit of an argument. That they say, ‘wait a minute. This is cool!’ Rock And Blues International: Well this was really an extraordinary album. I really enjoyed it. I enjoy the Blues. I enjoy most Blues songs, but this kept my attention from the first song clear through to the last one. It really did.

Al Basile: Well thank you very much! I would hazard to say that if you go back to pretty much any of my previous albums, particularly during the last 15 years, you’ll find that they’re very consistent in that regard. I don’t like throwaway tunes. I don’t write filler tunes to fill up space the way they used to do in the ’60s where you’d have a couple of singles and a lot of B-side material. I write the songs that come to me and the ones that I like, I record. I don’t record any songs that I think are kind of run-of-the-mill or average. I’m glad that you feel that there aren’t any in this record. I think you would feel that if you listened to my other records. I’ve been doing it a long time, but it also takes a long time for people to catch on to what you’re doing.

Rock And Blues International: Well, I’m going to have to look for those. I do listen to a lot of new albums and I hear a lot of filler material in there. I see it all the time. Bands will go, ‘we have six good songs, but we need four more to do the album. Let’s just write a few real quick.’

Al Basile: Yeah, exactly. I’m not coming from that direction. In fact, what I said about writing extra songs, normally when I write like that 14th or 15th songs. After I’ve got my first 13, then I’ll go back and decide which two are not up to the standards of the ones remaining and take two out. So, overall the level comes up. And that pretty much happens every year.

Rock And Blues International: I honestly can not think of any song on here that needs to come out. They all seem very vital to me.

Al Basile: Well, you didn’t hear the ones I took out (laughs).

Rock And Blues International: Well, I’m just talking about what I have to work with here right now.

Al Basile: I’ll tell you, you probably won’t ever hear the ones that I took out because I take one or two out every year, but then by the next year I’ve got new songs. One thing about songwriters and artists in general, when you finish, that’s what you think is the best. You don’t want to go back to old stuff.

Rock And Blues International: It makes me wonder sometimes when I see reissues of old albums by an artist that

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died, and they end up putting about 12 more tracks on there of outtakes. You would think that the artist would turn over in his grave if he knew they were issuing songs that he really didn’t want out there. If he had wanted them on there, they probably would have been on there.

Al Basile: Well, every once in a while you run into an artist whose got material that didn’t come out originally that does stand up. I’m looking across genres here, but Prince is like that. If you listen to the stuff that Prince was recording when he put out all his regular albums, he just had too much good stuff to put out any given year. He’s like that. There are some Rock guys like that too. Andy Partridge from XTC is like that. The band hasn’t been together for a while, but he’s got a whole series of records that he’s put out called “Fuzzy Warbles” that are all songs that didn’t get on XTC albums. There’s a ton of great songs on there, but those guys are the exception. You can squeeze the sponge as hard as you want, but you won’t find much. Look at The Beatles. You didn’t find 10 more great songs to find their way onto the albums when they were together. They’re just finding bits and pieces and scraps.

Rock And Blues International: What do you want people to come away with after hearing this album. If you can picture two people together in a room listening to this album, what would you want to hear from them when the last notes of the last song rang out?

Al Basile: The first thing I hope somebody would say was, ‘who is that guy?’ I’ve never heard of him.

Rock And Blues International: Oh, come on, you don’t want them to say that… Really, when they hit the last note, what would you really want them to come away with?

Al Basile: That isn’t all I was going to say, but I wanted to stop at that for this reason. If you go back to my back catalog, you’ll find a lot of songs that are just as good as the ones on this record. But, what I believe is a good song will make it’s way into people’s hearts and minds if they hear it, but they have to hear it. It’s really all about exposure and so if they finish hearing all the record and they say, ‘who is this guy,’ that means that they’ve heard enough to know that they should go back and listen to everything else that they missed up to this point. So that’s what that quote is about. In terms of being more fair to your question, because I know you’re looking for something a little different, I would say, ‘boy, this guy honors the traditions, but he extends it. He’s not a slave to it. He’s not trying to copy what’s been done in Blues, but he uses what’s been done and he does something personal with it. He takes it somewhere else.’ I had one review once that said, ‘This guy is putting another brick in the wall of the Blues tradition.’ That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make my contribution of what I have to offer, but I want to stay on the reservation. I want it to be accessible to people that love Blues and Roots music and not say ‘I don’t understand this music. It doesn’t have a beat or what does those words mean.’ I want it to be understandable and I mean to honor the traditions, but I mean to do something that nobody but me could do. That’s what a good writer does. She or he tells the thing they can do that’s isn’t really anything like anybody else. That’s what it is. I got to tell you this… Everybody expects guitar solos, keyboard solo, sax solos in the Blues. They don’t expect coronet or trumpet solos, but if you go back to the ’20s, Louis Armstrong was playing some of the best Blues ever with Bessie Smith on accordion. That’s another thing that I’d like them to say. ‘Wow! Nobody plays like this guy! I’ve never really heard a coronet on a Blues record, but it fits.’ I’d love for people to say that.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to Al than meets the eye. He is truly a Renaissance Man. He is certainly a welleducated man and one of the finest musicians we’ve had the pleasure of talking to. His writing skills are excellent and the quality of his songs are simply wonderful. After listening to this album, the thought comes to mind, ‘just how is he going to top this.’ The album has got to be the best one he’s done yet. Well, let me tell you… he will. I’m sure the next album that he is currently writing will surely top this one, but in the meantime this one is his finest. I urge everybody out there that loves the Blues to get out and find this album and add it to your collection. You’ll certainly be glad you did. You can pick it up at http://www.albasile.com. While you’re there you might as well order some of his older releases along with a couple of books of his cool poetry.