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| Redd Volkaert |
| Written by Patrick Cosgrove | |
Reddheaded slinger shelves the cookie-cutters.Guitar gods come in all shapes and sizes, just like the rest of us. Some go to great pains to dress and act the part. Some don’t. Redd Volkaert, who looks more like a salt-of-the-earth character in a shoot ‘em up western or the produce manager at Randall’s than one of Austin’s most gifted shredders, belongs to the latter category. But when he plugs in and begins to spray notes from the stage like he’s manning a Gatling gun, or takes it way down with the finesse that belies a man with fingers the size of Elgin sausages, you know you’re witnessing a player who belongs in Guitar Town’s top-tier—the elite of Austin’s vaunted guitar army. Volkaert, who for six years added “lead guitarist for Merle Haggard” to his résumé, is now adding his fourth solo CD (Reddhead) since first arriving in Austin in 2000. After working stints in Los Angeles and Nashville, he found Austin more suited to his lack of pretense. The city’s spirit and supportive music scene have allowed the native of Canada to settle in and establish himself as a guitar player’s guitar player in the Live Music Capital of the World. And he’s digging it. “It’s wonderful,” Volkaert said on a recent Saturday afternoon before his weekly matinee at the Continental Club, “I love it. There’s lots of good live music, and lots of bad live music. There’s something for everybody. If you want to see a guy playing a fiddle with a safety pin in his lip and a diaper on, doing rockabilly, this is the town for you. You get punk rock guys and old grandpas and nobody says nothing, nobody picks on nobody’s hair or nothing, it’s just so laid back—it’s fun!”  Volkaert came to music early. There was never a conflict between law school or taking over the family business and the pursuit of rock star fantasies. He knew what he wanted to do from the get go, and he was an enthusiastic and dedicated student of the icons of his early years. “When I was a teenager,” he recalls, “I wanted to be a rock star, so the rock guys of my day were Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, and Jimmy Page of Lead Zeppelin. And I listened a lot to Albert and B.B. King, Johnny Winter, Mike Bloomfield and Shuggie Otis. Guitar geeks liked the blues thing more than singers. My goal was to find those kinds of people to learn from and steal from. I studied lots and lots of that stuff as a kid.” Country had a place in his heart too, he just had to keep it to himself: “I also had some country records on my stash so that when the kids from school came over they didn’t see those—Buck Owens and Merle Haggard—on the bottom; they saw the rock guys.” The household record collection had a huge impact during those early years: “I mean my dad had a lot of Ventures records and Fireballs, so I tried to learn some of those instrumentals. I just loved that sound and that whole reverb thing.” Immersed for so long in the wide-ranging styles of his idols, Volkaert himself has evolved into one of Austin’s most stylistically versatile players. Catch him center stage Saturday afternoons and you’ll hear him delving into everything from swing to surf rock, jazz to classic country, and he does so with power and precision. But he is also as likely to serve up a musical cocktail of licks all in the same tune, a mélange of all the stuff he has soaked up over the years. “I think now, 30 years later,” Volkaert explains, “it’s just a hodge-podge of a bunch of stuff just slammed together and it all just comes out like sausage.” As a songwriter Volkaert is a little less self-assured. He never fronted his own band before moving to Austin. This is why his new CD, Reddhead , is only his fourth despite a career of supporting and playing on others. He either wrote or co-wrote with Laura Durham half the songs on Reddhead. As a writer, his approach is workman-like. He does not bide his time until a lightning bolt of inspiration strikes. “I just sit down and say, ‘OK, I have to write some songs.’ I mean, I get ideas along the way; someone will say something stupid or goofy and I’ll write that line down and that will be the idea for the song. And it’s about half and half as far as writing the words or already having the music in mind first. [For Reddhead] I already had a bunch of songs, had a bunch half-ready that needed some tweaking. Laura helped me clean up the bulk of them. Some of the rhyming was kind of stinky…she helped me a whole lot fixing up the songs.”  One thing that doesn’t need fixing is his reputation. About the only people who don’t include Volkaert in the list of greatest guitarists are folks who haven’t seen him play. And as usual, Austin is unbelievably lucky in that regard. Among other gigs, Volkaert holds two weekly residencies (both at the Continental Club): the free Saturday matinee—which is becoming stuff of Austin legend—and Sunday night’s with Heybale, a more traditional country set that also includes Earl Poole Ball, who (in his pre-Austin career) tickled the ivories for Johnny Cash and Gram Parsons. And so the unassuming red-bearded guitarist goes about his business. Mostly with a relatively low-key profile. But among guitar geeks nationwide, the kind with subscriptions to Guitar Player and Vintage Guitar, Volkaert holds a revered status. His reputation remains tied to his live performances, which push the envelope farther than his more straight-ahead recordings. And his cult-like following is helping to bring these live sets to wider audiences as more out-of-town festivals call upon Volkaert, where he is pleased to find musicgoers nationwide are catching up to Austin’s taste for adventure. “Folks—like they are in Austin—in these other cities, they come to see a bunch of different [acts], not like the run-of-the-mill, cookie-cutter stuff you hear on Clear Channel,” he says. As long as there’s a market that doesn’t require musicians to style their hair, wear stage clothes, or slim down for the camera, Volkaert will remain at the top of the guitar heap. For sometimes, looking the cookie-cutter part is as stifling as sounding it. |
