It was 37 years ago that Walter Trout had a life-changing conversation with his friend and fellow musician Carlos Santana.
The four-time Blues Music Awards winner got sober nearly four decades ago, a decision he made following that impactful conversation. While Santana provided the moment of clarity that made all the difference, Trout recalled during a recent interview with Blues Rock Review that he’d had prior exchanges with musician friends that had him thinking about making the major change to his lifestyle.
It started with Richie Hayward, the Little Feat drummer with whom Trout played in the mid-1980s while he wasn’t touring as part of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers.
“He was sober, and I was not,” Trout said of Hayward. “He kept on me, man, like, ‘What are you doing?’ You know? Because we’d start the evening, I’d be playing great, and by the end of the evening I was hammered, and I couldn’t play.”
Trout was on the receiving end of similar encouragements to stop drinking from John Mayall, who was also sober by that point. “He would talk to me quite a bit about it,” Trout said of Mayall, adding that getting sober “was always kind of in the back of my head.”
But the real “turning point” for Trout came while he was touring with the Bluesbreakers in 1987. While in what was then East Berlin, Germany, to play a concert, Trout found himself staying in the same hotel as Santana’s band.
“He was at the gig, and he kind of came up to me and said, ‘What are you doing?’” Trout said as he recalled the moment Santana approached him. “He said to me—I’ll never forget this—he goes, ‘First off, Walter, you’re in a band that 100,000 guitar players around the world would give anything to be John Mayall’s lead guitarist and stand in the spot of Eric Clapton and Peter Green, Mick Taylor, these great musicians. And you’re there.’”
It was then that Trout said Santana drove his point home. “He goes, ‘And you have a gift of music. But you’re so drunk up there’—I’ll never forget, he went—‘You’re doing that to where you got the gift.’” With “that,” Trout mimicked his memory of Santana pointing two middle fingers at the sky.
After offering a copy of an inspirational book that Trout said he still has in his possession, Santana spent the next couple of days “having these amazing conversations” with Trout at their shared East Berlin hotel. The experience shifted something in Trout, inspiring him to make a major change—not only to the way he performed onstage, but to how he lived his life.
“I finally went to John Mayall and said, ‘You will never see me messed up again.’ And it’s been 37 years,” Trout said.
Looking back on those monumental days with Santana, Trout recognizes that he had reached a low point and needed to undergo that transformation to prevent the situation from getting worse.
“Once I made that decision, it was not that difficult,” Trout said. “But I had to really hit bottom. It seems like a cliché, ‘You’ve got to hit bottom.’ But it’s true. But sometimes the bottom keeps getting lower and lower. And I was there.”
