“Everything from Blind Blake to Robert Johnson to the Carter Family to Bessie Smith got played 24/7 around the house,” he says, admitting that he was embarrassed by it at first, preferring to hear the Police and the Beatles like the other kids he knew. He’s lived on the East Coast for a couple of decades now, but he grew up in Berkeley with a hip mother who repaired guitars for a living and had an Americana record collection that rivaled the Library of Congress. Hunter called it “the hippie gravy train,” and could have jumped on the jam band bandwagon, but preferred to go his own way, “getting my ass kicked musically in New York,” he says, kidding. He recorded his debut album in 1993 with the Charlie Hunter Trio, which also featured saxophonist Dave Ellis and drummer Jay Lane, both of whom went on to play with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir in his band Ratdog and in other Dead spinoff groups. Kirk, a band named after Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. “But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”īay Area music fans may remember Hunter playing seven-string guitar in Michael Franti’s the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in the ’90s, and in T.J. “I’ve put a lot of hard work in, and I’m just lucky enough to kind of barely make a living doing it,” he says with a laugh, speaking from the Montclair, N.ew Jersey, home he shares with his wife and their two teenagers. This isn’t something you learn overnight, but Hunter is one of those musicians who loves to practice, wakes up in the morning eager to solve problems and doesn’t care how long it takes to get something right. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear you were hearing two guitarists and a percussionist. “No Money, No Honey,” for example, the single from his new album, “Everybody Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth,” a title taken from a Mike Tyson quote, opens with a nasty hard rock lead riff that he plays with his fingers and, simultaneously, thumps out a big, fat bass line with his thumb. He used to play an eight-string guitar, but now favors a seven-string solid body model with a fan-shaped fretboard made by Santa Cruz luthier Jeff Traugott that allows him to play bass, lead and rhythm at the same time. Hunter, who’ll be playing here with drummer Scott Amendola and saxophonist Michael Blake, is unlike conventional guitarists in that six strings aren’t enough for him to get the full, organ-like sound he’s pioneered. John Fordham, writing in London’s the Guardian, says he “boasts one of the most original techniques in the instrument’s history.” After all, the 50-year-old former Bay Area star is a trailblazer on his instrument. That’s not to say that general music fans won’t dig Hunter’s incomparable brand of jazz-rock fusion just as much as guitar geeks do. So, for serious players and hobbyists alike, this column is a heads up that Charlie Hunter, one of the most inventive and innovative guitarists of his generation, is coming to Marin on Sunday, kicking off the Novato HopMonk Tavern’s Cookout Concert Series.
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