Bringing the blues

When a couple of high school friends turned him on to some Buddy Guy and B.B. King records, it was a life-changing experience for a young Robert Cray. He was into playing guitar at the time, and the blues licks on those records were a revelation.

“After school that’s all we did. It was almost a religious experience. As high school kids, we really liked all that double entendre stuff,” Cray said during a recent phone interview about the blues predilection for disguised sexual references.

The blues took on an added dimension during his senior year when Cray caught a local performance of Texas blues guitarist Albert Collins. Cray lobbied his classmates to have The Iceman perform at their 1971 high school graduation dance. An election was held and Collins out-polled a group called Crow, who had an AM hit “Evil Woman,” later covered by Black Sabbath.

Cray had a chance after the dance to talk to Collins. Never in a million years did Cray imagine he one day would record an album — 1985’s Grammy-award winning “Showdown” also featuring Johnny Copeland — with Collins.

After that life-altering high school dance, Cray went on to become a multiple Grammy and W.C. Handy Blues awards winner. He brings his band, including longtime collaborator Richard Cousins, to the Newport Yachting Center Saturday, July 12, in a double-billing with John Hiatt. Tickets can be purchased on the center’s website at www.newportwaterfrontevents.com.

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Back when he was honing his chops, Cray tried to play all the blues greats.

“I listened to everybody. Albert (Collins) was cool because he was the first I ever saw live. I just loved his stage presence,” Cray said. “I liked the minor key groove of Otis Rush, the re-verb of Magic Sam, and Buddy Guy’s music has some funny edges to it.”

Cray and Cousins left Tacoma, Wash., in 1974 and headed for Eugene, Ore., where they created the first incarnation of The Robert Cray Band. Four years later, at age 24, Cray was finishing a four-day gig in Eugene when a casting director approached him and asked if he wanted to be in a movie. Thinking it was a joke, Cray said sure and promptly forgot about it. A short time later he was performing in northern California when the director called him and asked him to return to Oregon for a fitting.

Cray returned and became the bassist for the Otis Day Band in the movie “Animal House,” one of the most popular films of 1978. Cray didn’t even know the movie’s plot line. He just showed up for three days of shooting, during which the band lip-synched the lyrics to pre-recorded music.

Just before that, Cray was playing with his close friend Curtis Salgado, who once performed with Rhode Island’s own Roomful of Blues, in a splinter band called the Cray Hawks. Turned out, John Belushi was in the audience one night.

“I said, ‘Who?’” Cray recalled.

Salgado and the “Saturday Night Live” comic later got into a conversation, which led directly to Belushi’s formation of the Blues Brothers with SNL colleague Dan Akroyd.

In those days, it was all about the music, Cray said. Although they weren’t making a fortune playing, they were loving it all.

“We were in our early 20s. We didn’t know what a struggle was,” he said.

After putting out critically acclaimed albums on the High Tone label, Cray got a big break when Collins invited him to sit in on the “Showdown” sessions. Cray signed a deal with Mercury Records the year after that and released “Strong Persuader,” which broke into the Top 20 in the United States with its single “Smoking Gun.”

“That did catch us by surprise,” Cray said. “When ‘Strong Persuader’ hit big in the states we didn’t think we could work any harder.”

During a career that has spanned more than 40 years, Cray has played with some legendary blues men, including Collins, Copeland, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and Eric Clapton. Cray said he wishes he could have traded licks with legends Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James.

Before a show, Cray likes his “quiet time,” although his band mates like to listen to some good music to get them pumped. He walked in on them cranking James Brown before a recent show, he said. When asked what present day artists he likes to listen to, Cray cited Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks.

“(Trucks) is a really great player with a really open mind, and I appreciate that,” he said. “For the music to advance you have to keep an open mind.”