A fierce guitarist and singer, Fish recently teamed up with fellow blues aficionado Jesse Dayton, a guy raised on a steady diet of East Texas/Louisiana Blues, old-school country and punk rock, to deliver Death Wish Blues, a new album of original material they recorded in Woodstock, NY with garage blues guru Jon Spencer.
In separate phone interviews, Dayton and Fish, who open for Buddy Guy on Saturday, Aug. 19, at Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica, talk about the terrific garage blues album they cut with garage blues icon Jon Spencer.
Do you remember when you first met one another and what your initial impressions were?
Dayton: The first time I met Sam, I was in [the Kansas City, MO venue] Knuckleheads backstage area. This guy selling merch for us was upstairs. I asked him who was ripping on guitar on the stage downstairs. He said, “You need to go down there and check it out.” So I heard Sam before I met her, which is kinda cool. I knew something was going to happen with her career because the crowd was really into it. She didn’t play like most girl guitar players. She didn’t play like most human guitar players. That was 12 years ago.
Fish: I don’t remember the exact night. But I had been hearing about Jesse a lot. I came up playing at Knuckleheads. There were several artists who would come through that the owner would get really excited about. Jesse Dayton was one of them. I had seen him several times, and we were on a bill together at one point. I don’t remember the exact meeting, but I remember seeing him a lot. Everything from then is fuzzy.
Talk about your musical influences and how they might be similar or different?
Dayton: I grew up in Belmont, TX on the Texas-Louisiana border, so I got a lot of colloquial stuff from around there like zydeco and blues and honky tonk. I love all that stuff. I’m a tragic nerd for all kinds of different genres of music, but we both grew up listening to similar stuff on the radio.
Fish: He’s from the outlaw country, and I’m known for the roots music and the blues. But we both like to take chances with our music. We like to stretch beyond the genre. When we started co-writing and writing together, we realized we had a lot in common. We like a lot of the same stuff. We have a love for rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s really the catalyst for this whole record.
You initially collaborated on an album of covers. Talk about what it was like to make that record.
Dayton: We did a song by Magic Sam. We did a song by Townes Van Zandt and a song by the Clash. It was fun. Our manager asked us about getting into the studio. They flew me from Austin to New Orleans. We grabbed a bass player and a drummer. We went into this funky little studio in this guy’s background, and we started cutting stuff. I brought the tapes back to Austin and mixed them and Rounder wanted to put it out. That’s kind of how it started. We listen to all the same stuff. We love Freddie King. I probably listen to more country than Sam does, but she probably listens to more pop and R&B. I remind people that back in the day, those bands like the Stones and Zeppelin were all experimenting with everything. For me, it’s not that much of a stretch.
Fish: We were initially supposed to write together. We sat in a writers’ room for two to three days and didn’t write a single song. We knew of each other, but it’s hard to be vulnerable. We were writing for what was going to be a collaborative record. Both of us were a little hesitant. We didn’t want to start off and write the wrong thing. My manager called and said to cut some songs and that we need to pick some that encompassed what we wanted to say. We chose those three songs. We went in there in one afternoon and cut it. It was very raw and live and in the room.
At what point did you decide to do a full-length of originals?
Dayton: We started writing songs after we did that EP, but we had to get back to knowing each other. That was what was so instrumental about that EP. I remember sending [Fish] a text message and saying that it’s going to be like pulling your pants down and showing your bum to the world. We need to be vulnerable. That’s the nice thing of being with someone you are honest with. You get the good ideas faster. We both know what we don’t like. The first thing she did was send me a melody of “Deathwish.” I had been watching these film noir movies, so that’s how that came together. Then, we wrote “Dangerous People” and “Super Duper Bad” in the studio. We were writing like crazy the whole time.
Fish: That recording session helped us know that our voices sounded good together and that our different guitar styles would stand apart. Once we realized we could complement one another, we dove in. We had a short timeline. All of our free time was sending ideas. We had to drop the bullshit. We said we had to promise not to laugh at each other. We rolled into it.
What was it like to work with Jon Spencer?
Dayton: [My manager] said, “What do you think about Jon Spencer producing your record?” He started laughing, but we looked at each other and said that this was our opportunity to take it someplace else. We were intentionally trying to not do all the classic blues rock cliches. We knew some of the traditionalists would want the John Bonham drums and Stevie Ray Vaughan guitars. We’re both good musicians. We could have done that. But Jon became the third Musketeer.
Fish: First of all, let me set him up. I had been wanting to work with him for a long time. I’ve been a fan of his since I was a teenager. I loved [his bands] the Blues Explosion and Boss Hog and his new band the Hitmakers. When i first heard about him, it was that record he did with [blues singer-guitarist] R.L. Burnside. I thought he did something really special. It was appreciated by young people and spawned this big thing with Fat Possum Records. I wasn’t sure what we were going to get into. We walked in there and he was such a nice guy and very good at directing a band. He worked in an artist friendly way. Jesse and I would be setting up, and I would see him whispering to the different musicians, and it would be so different from what we thought it would be but so much hipper. He has a way to make things exciting and not exactly what you’d expect.
I hear Spencer’s influence on the vocals, which often sound uniquely distorted. What was it like having him help with that?
Dayton: Yeah, working on vocals with him was like having an acting coach. He would say, “I don’t care if the notes are right. Just go for it, man.” That’s why he makes fun records. This was a chance to do something different. It was so important to do something that wasn’t safe. There’s so much more to [the blues].
Fish: We have no less than four different voices on the record. There was so much character. I have never had a producer approach things in this way. He would coax these performances out of you like an acting performance. He would tell you how he wanted to feel. It was like acting and channeling the characters. It helped to get a really varied vocal performance. I think some of my best vocals are on the record. Working with Jon helped us avoid making this a one-note kind of project. It’s very colorful.
You’ll be opening for Buddy Guy here in Cleveland. Talk about what your live show will be like?
Dayton: It’s pretty amazing. We have this great band with us. We’ve done a ton of shows and we are in the ESP phase and can read each other’s minds. It’s a really high-energy slamming show. It’s like seeing a big rock show but everything is blues-based.
Fish: We’re doing stuff from the new record. There’s a lot of rock ‘n’ roll on the record, and the winning mixture is to keep it rock ‘n’ roll, but we want to appeal to the blues fans, and I have some great standards we’ll mix in. We need to connect to to the hardcore blues fans who’ll be there to see Buddy Guy.
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This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 11, 2023.
