Tommy Castro & The Painkillers return to The Belfry

Published 2:15 am Thursday, February 27, 2020

Blues/soul guitarist, singer and songwriter Tommy Castro will return to The Belfry with his band, The Painkillers, on Thursday. The group released the live album, “Killin’ it Live,” last year.

Blues guitarist and vocalist Tommy Castro has rubbed shoulders with some giants of the genre in his roughly four decades of touring and recording.

As a teenager, he worshipped artists such as B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and especially Elvin Bishop. He’s since played, recorded or hung out with each of them: He toured with King in the early 2000s and featured Hooker on his 2001 album, “Guilty of Love” (in what would be Hooker’s last recording session, in his home, before his death).

“I’ve got a great picture of me sitting on (Hooker’s) couch with headphones on and him sitting on the other end of the couch with a microphone and some headphones on,” Castro said recently from home in Northern California, about a week before heading out on a Pacific Northwest run that will take him back to The Belfry on Thursday. “There’s a little table there and he’s got a glass of beer, and he’s wearing a suit like he always did — he always had his suit jacket and his slacks on — but he’s all loose and unbuttoned and stuff like that. He’s relaxing on his couch in his house. He’s comfortable, but he’s wearing a suit. It’s just the kind of thing — it’s just an amazing thing to witness.”

Bishop is Castro’s neighbor now.

“We’ve played dozens of gigs together over the years and had a chance to sit down, have a cup of coffee or a meal and just rap about life and music,” Castro said.

But even Castro, who has more than 15 albums and thousands of gigs under his belt as a bandleader and with groups such as The Dynatones, gets intimidated by his heroes sometimes. He was hesitant to ask Hooker to record on “Guilty of Love,” he said.

In recent years, he’s struck up a friendship with another hero of his, blues multi-instrumentalist Taj Mahal, through biannual appearances on the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise.

“I haven’t had a chance to collaborate with him yet,” Castro said. “I’ve thought about asking him a couple of times, but I don’t want to bother him. … I just — people like that, I think everybody wants a piece of them and everybody wants them to do something and they’re always getting asked to do things all the time, and I just never want to bother them. I kind of wish I had asked B.B. King to do something with me, and I missed that opportunity. Right now I’m thinking about Taj, going, ‘You know, I should just come right out and ask him.’”

He may have his chance soon: Castro plans to enter the studio in April to record the follow-up studio album to 2017’s “Stompin’ Ground.”

“There’s a concept on this album, and I think that it might be the right time to ask him,” Castro said.

Before that, he and his band, The Painkillers — keyboardist Mike Emerson, drummer Bowen Brown and longtime bassist/right-hand man Randy McDonald — have shows to play. The Belfry has been a regular, near-annual stop for Castro for many years; before that, he was a regular visitor to the Midtown complex.

“(The Belfry) was a nice little find for us when we first pulled up there,” he said. “We didn’t know what to expect a couple of years back. And we were greeted by Angeline (Rhett, owner) and her crew and fed well, and a nice crowd of people showed up for the show. We’ve just been looking forward to going back there every time. It’s a great little scene and a great little town.”

The Painkillers were the result of Castro stripping away his longtime horn section and streamlining his sound in 2012. Last year, the group released its first live album (and Castro’s first live disc since 2000’s “Live at the Fillmore”), “Killin’ it Live,” showcasing the tight unit the group has become. The album is up for a Blues Music Award for Blues Rock Album of the Year.

“We do about 150 (shows) or more a year, so something happens when you play together for a length of time,” Castro said. “You get the right people together for a length of time, it gets to (where) something really cool happens there. It’s hard to describe, but it’s easier to just record it. And that’s what I wanted to do: I wanted to capture the live show with this group while we have this sort of magic going on most of the time.”

That same lineup featured on Castro’s last two studio albums and is set to record the new batch of material. While Castro wouldn’t reveal the concept underpinning his next album, he mentioned the album would probably veer more towards blues rock than the soul-inflected “Stompin’ Ground,” itself a concept album of sorts focused on Castro’s teenage years growing up in San Jose, California, close to the epicenter of the ’60s counterculture scene in San Francisco. The album draws on his blues, rock and soul roots, mixing originals and covers by artists such as Bishop, and features guests such as harmonica virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite, Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and powerhouse vocalist Danielle Nicole.

“I was a teenager in 1969, and you know, there was a lot going on, man,” Castro said. “There was FM radio, that was kind of a new thing. I remember I had a car when I was a kid — I had an old, beat-up Ford Falcon that my sister handed down to me — and it had an AM radio in it. And I only had AM radio for a long time, and when this FM radio was something new, and you’d find a station and they would be playing — it was wide open. They would play one minute The Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane, and the next minute they’d play Albert King or Dr. John. It was such a great time for music, so I was exposed to all that. Elvin Bishop was one of my big influences in those days. … I remember going to every show I could that I could get into at my age.”

More Information

What: Tommy Castro & The Painkillers

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: The Belfry, 302 E. Main Ave., Sisters

Cost: $20 plus fees in advance, $25 at the door

Contact: belfryevents.com

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