“I called him collect,” says Neal, who has known Buddy Guy all his life, but at that point hadn’t played with him in years. (Guy is a family friend, because Kenny’s father, blues harp master Raful Neal, had a long musical history with the Chicago-based, Louisiana-bred Strat king.) . “Buddy accepted the charges, and he said, ‘I hear you’re playing real good. I need a bass player. Get your suitcase ready.’ It was nerve wracking. I wanted to ask him, ‘What suitcase?’”

Neal took the gig, but leaving his family was difficult. Being the eldest of ten children—all of whom played music together—his departure would certainly create a leadership vacuum. Nonetheless, within the week, he was at his first rehearsal with Guy and his equally mesmerizing stage mate, Junior Wells. The teenage bassist was terrified.

“I didn’t have a clue what they expected from me,” says Neal, “but then they started calling out all these songs like ‘Big Boss Man’ and other Jimmy Reed stuff, and I was relieved. Throwing me into that music was like throwing a rabbit into the briar patch, because, man, I was at home. My dad had taught me all those songs over the years.”

Before he was a year old, Neal was already climbing into his dad’s lap to get closer to the sound of the harmonica. At age three, Slim Harpo, another of his dad’s blues-legend friends, gave him the ultimate pacifier: a harp of his own. By his seventh Christmas morning, Neal had an acoustic guitar, a turntable, and a 45 of the Lowell Fulson single “Tramp.” Armed, hungry, and naturally drawn to the limelight, the young singer/multi-instrumentalist helped front his father’s band at local shows by the time he was nine years old.

Now living in Northern California, Neal recently survived a mountain of family tragedy and personal illness, alchemizing his tough times into musical gold by tracking an uplifting, soul-soothing album, Let Life Flow [Blind Pig].

What was it like growing up so close to the music of your dad and all his friends?
Well, Buddy Guy, Lazy Lester, Slim Harpo, and others were always around the house, but it took me years to figure out they were big stars. To me, they were just my Dad’s friends. The one piece of advice I remember them telling me is that I didn’t have to overplay. They’d say, “Trust the moment. Just let it flow.” My dad would tell me, “You can express yourself a million ways with one note, or one way with a million notes.” It’s just like acting—which I learned a little about while performing in the Broadway musical Mule Bone. If you can deliver one line six or seven different ways, then you’ve got it whipped.

I learned more about that when I joined Buddy’s band, because even though he’d play the same songs every night, he’d always express them differently. That’s the trick. Buddy would have us playing blues for three or four days in a row, and then that firewater would get to working one night, and he’d go off into something wild and Hendrix-y. The other big thing I learned from Buddy was that I could be a frontman, because when I got to Chicago, I saw all these guitar players heading off to tour Europe and Japan, and they weren’t very good.

What is your main guitar?
I’ve been playing an old ’65 Telecaster for 30 years, and everyone from B.B. King on down has played it. I’ve got pictures of Buddy, Luther Allison, Steve Miller—you name it—playing it. It’s stock, except for one special switch—an old Strat-o-Blaster preamp. Johnny Winter used to use those back in the day, and my friend Pat Rush, who played guitar in Johnny’s band, put that thing in my guitar 30 years ago. Man, with the flick of a switch, it takes your guitar from zero to ten. It has saved me on many nights. If they give you a crappy little amp that you can’t get anything out of, well, hit that switch. It’ll either take that amp to the next level, or just blow it up!

And your main amp?
I’m using a King Uptown 33 combo built by Val King here in the Bay Area. One thing I love about the amp is it lets you run the clean and the dirty sounds in parallel. It has a 12" [Jensen P12] speaker, and I also run it with an extra 1x15 [Jensen C15] cabinet.

When I’m sitting around the house playing, though, I play without an amp so I can develop my sounds with just my fingers and the naked guitar. A lot of guitar players come up to me after shows wanting to know what pedals I’ve got on the floor, and I go, “Nothin’, man. I’m old school.” I usually use a .010-.048 set of strings. Sometimes, when I want to do that funky-blues thing, I’ll put a .052 on there for the low E, because I was a bass player, and I can get some nice tones out of big strings.

What was the inspiration behind Let Life Flow?
Well, my dad and I had just returned from a European tour, and he was complaining that his knees had been bothering him. It turned out that he had bone cancer. He passed away in September of 2004—just months after we lost my brother Ronnie to liver disease. We were all trying to get over that, when, in March of 2005, my baby sister Jackie—who had just finished a new CD—had just gotten her hair fixed when her ex-boyfriend came into the beauty salon and murdered her. Shot her in the chest with a .45. Not long after that, I found out that I had hepatitis C, and I had to go through 58 weeks of treatment before I was cured. It was like everything had caved in on me. Having the guitar to fall back on was really healing. Just playing a few notes every day can help you get through rough times like that, and it can even help your treatment. I eventually had to convert all those trials and tribulations into something good. So I got all that stuff off my chest in the form of a new CD.

The album is as rootsy as it is modernsounding.
I guess that’s knowing both generations—the stuff my dad brought me up with, and the stuff the new generation is looking for. That’s why I tried to make the record sound as clean and punchy as possible by not just going in and recording off the floor with two mics like we used to do in the old days. I wanted to get a big sound, so that when you play it on a big system, there’s a little bump happening. I used to dream of that sound when I was younger, because when I’d see these three-piece rock bands just kickin’ butt through these huge P.A. systems, I’d think, “Wow, if Buddy Guy played through something like this, we would be awesome.”

Do you have any advice for young guitarists who want to make a career of playing blues?
Yeah. Don’t think that booze and blues go together anymore. A lot of guys say, “To play blues, you gotta drink the whiskey like they did in the old days.” But that’s why we lost so many of the great musicians. When you’re drinking whiskey, all you’re doing is shortening your life. I’d also tell them to go back farther than the ’80s when studying the music. You gotta dig up some roots. Study some Charley Patton, Leadbelly, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and just go way back into the old school. And have a plan. When I first started, I was just looking for excitement—just wanting to plug in and wail away on the guitar. But I found out that’s only half of what it takes to survive. The other half is learning how to market yourself and achieve specific goals.

How does an old-school blues player adapt to the digital age?
You just keep up with things, and make sure you’re on the same page with everybody else. Right now, I’m moving over from doing CDs to doing a lot of DVDs. I also started a cable show in the Bay Area called Neal’s Place. I interview a lot of other Bay Area guys on the show—Chris Cain, Joe Louis Walker, Jimmy McCracklin, Sonny Rhodes, James Cotton, Taj Mahal—and have them perform. Having that show, playing a little guitar, and riding my horses on the weekends were some of the only things that kept me going when I was ill and grieving.

kennyneal.net