Honeydripper - John Sayles interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
VETERAN writer-director John Sayles talks about the inspiration behind his new film, Honeydripper, which chronicles the little-known story of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the electric guitar…
Q. Was the initial idea for Honeydripper to tell the story of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll?
John Sayles: That was the beginning of the process for me. There really was a Guitar Slim and there’s this rock ‘n’ roll story, which isn’t even a legend, because it actually happened. Guitar Slim had a big hit in the early 50s with a song called The Things I Used To Do – that was actually arranged by Ray Charles when he was in his teens. Slim was known for two things: one was he had a very long extension chord and he would go out into the street and go to the doors of the other clubs and kind of play people back into his club. And he was known to not show up for gigs because he’d partied a little too hard and had some health problems. And he just couldn’t be in every place at the same time.
So, Earl King was the best known of them but there were several other guys who later became very famous blues and R’n‘B artists who, when they were young men, had a club owner turn to them and say: “Learn the song, tonight you’re Guitar Slim.” And because that was before there were rock albums and MTV and video or any of that stuff, nobody knew what he looked like – it was a name next to a jukebox hit. So, in those days, if you could play the people were happy; they didn’t care about the celebrity so much. As far as they were concerned, they saw Guitar Slim play that song and whatever else he played on that night.
So, I was interested in that story and that kind of led me to listening very carefully to what I think is a forgotten era in American music. Just as The Korean War is considered the forgotten war in American history, there’s this era between the Swing era and rock ‘n’ roll, which all these stations started in 1954 with Rock Around The Clock. In their day they were really famous but then overnight they were on the second part of the bill and had almost disappeared. So I wondered what it must have been like for those players, because musicians are survivalists, and because it’s their living, they sense things way before the audience does.
So, when they heard that solid body electric guitar and the amplifier – especially if they were piano players who were about to get blown off the stage by the guitar players – what must that have been like to say: “The train is leaving the station and if I don’t hop on this, that may be the end for me. If I can’t make this transition, I may not make a living.”
Q. And, of course, there was the changing style of technology…
John Sayles: The technology was like the final blow; the music was going to change and was already changing. It was getting faster and louder. That honking saxophone had taken over from the kind of smoother horn section of the swing era and all of a sudden it was really, really like a car horn. It was really raunchy, really loud and really hard edged compared to that smooth Benny Goodman kind of sound. But then when the electric guitar showed up, that instrument – which had really been kind of to the side a little bit and was considered “oh, that’s what those old blind guys play out on the porch” – all of a sudden it could compete with the other instruments, and it was cheap compared to the piano, it was easier to play than a lot of other instruments and it was really portable. It didn’t come in any bigger case, you could carry the amp in the other case and you could jump on a train and hitchhike with it.
So, for me what’s always interesting is how all these things kind of come hand in hand. You don’t have the music without the world. I don’t think you have the blues, for instance, unless people need to disguise something because the lyrics are really metaphorical. I don’t think you get the music without the context that creates it and so in writing Honeydripper I wanted all of those things in there. I wanted not only the technology but all the music that led into it and also the world that it happened in.
I can’t tell you how many biographies and autobiographies of blues and rhythm and blues musicians I’ve read that within the first two paragraphs state: “And I didn’t want to pick cotton…” That was almost as big a motivating factor as their love of the music. If that’s where you grew up in that cotton picking world there were no other places to go; there were no factories and if you were going to leave you better have had a skill… and what’s a better portable skill than being a great slide blues guitar player? Most of those guys would play locally and then the bold ones, like Robert Johnson and Memphis Slim, would go up north. And even when they were up north, they’d go from city to city and introduce their style to that place.
Q. Have you loved this kind of music your whole life?
John Sayles: When I was fairly young I only heard straight rock ‘n’ roll. I grew up in the 50s. But definitely I also remember driving down south to visit relatives and the radio got an awful lot better once you got south of Baltimore or so. You started hearing stuff that you didn’t hear on normal radio; you started hearing gospel, raw gospel, and raw country and rockabilly. Patsy Cline I heard for the first time while driving south. So, all these sounds that were the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. So, yeah I was always interested but I really didn’t discover the blues or the gospel until I was 14 or 15-years-old.
Q. How did you come to hear about Gary Clark Jr, who plays the young guitarist in the film?
John Sayles: It was really serendipitous. Our friend, Lewis Black, is the editor of the Alternative Weekly in Austin, and we told him what we were up to and he said: “Oh, you’ve got to meet Gary Clark.” He’d grown up in Austin and had started playing in clubs when he was 14, so we went down to hear him play during South By Southwest two years before we began the movie. He’s an amazing guitar player. He’d grown up with all these great musicians. After we met him, we sort of said: “Hang in there, and learn how to play while walking on furniture because if we get to make this movie you’re going to have to walk up on something.” Two years later we then signed him…. we couldn’t get the money in the first year, even with Danny Glover in the lead, so we decided to fund it ourselves.
Q. You’re also known for script writing and script doctoring. Have you been busy with that of late since the writers’ strike?
John Sayles: People have been asking me about Jurassic Park IV, which I worked on three years ago. I have no idea if they’re going to make it or not. And I wrote a really nice movie for James Cameron’s company called Brother Termite that’s about bald-headed aliens running The White House. So we’ll see.
Read our review of Honeydripper