Boss of the blues

Jul. 21—details

Robert Cray Band

* $40-$60; check for ticket availability

* 7:30 p.m. Sunday, July 23

* Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco Street

* lensic.org or robertcray.com

Blues legend Robert Cray was on the verge of a breakthrough when he heard his music being played in an unlikely place: in the hotel room of a Rolling Stones member.

Cray, a 2011 inductee to the Blues Hall of Fame, turned back the clock more than 35 years during a recent conversation with Pasatiempo. When asked what it was like to play in Chuck Berry's backing band in the 1987 motion picture Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, he recalled a surreal moment during rehearsals with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

"We had our band together, and I got the invite through Keith Richards, who had become a fan of the band," says Cray. "It was before the release of Strong Persuader; the record had been recorded, but it hadn't come out yet. I can remember when we had rehearsals, we all met in Keith's hotel room. He had a boombox and he was playing Strong Persuader."

For Cray, who will be playing the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Sunday, July 23, that's just one of the mileposts in a career that has seen him win five Grammy Awards and sell millions of albums around the world. He had an uncredited role in the 1978 film Animal House as the bassist in Otis Day's band, and nine years later, he stood shoulder to shoulder with one of the architects of rock 'n' roll.

"It was great being around Chuck Berry, and if you've seen the movie, you know the antics and the relationship he had with Keith," Cray says. "Keith was trying to pay homage to one of his main heroes and being treated like a bad stepchild.

"At the same time, I'm the new guy on the block, and Chuck's treating me like a nice father figure. It was a real contrast, but it was funny."

Truth be told, Cray was hardly an upstart at that point in his life.

In fact, he had already won a Grammy for his 1985 Showdown! album, and Strong Persuader would go on to garner another one.

Cray says he learned guitar while still in his teens and was inspired by the Beatles and by seeing Jimi Hendrix live in concert. The Georgia native, who will turn 70 in August, was still a teenager when he saw Hendrix play, and he was gravitating to the blues right around that time.

"My parents had a great record collection," he says. "They had a wide variety of music: gospel, blues, and jazz. I listened to a lot of that growing up. I listened to Hendrix, and I listened to the Beatles when I was just learning to play guitar. But right before getting out of high school, I was hanging out with some other guitar players who had just started listening to people like Buddy Guy and Magic Sam and B.B. King and all. I gravitated to that at about 15 or 16 years old."

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Cray says he still doesn't think he's mastered his instrument, but he built his skill the old-fashioned way: by practicing and playing and touring as often as he could. The Robert Cray Band took shape in 1974 and didn't release its first album until 1980, and its lead guitarist says that's because the band was taking time to build its musical muscles.

"That's how you do it. They call it woodshedding," he says. "In the early days of this band, we worked four or five nights a week in clubs playing three or four sets every night. But you don't see that same kind of thing happening these days. You don't have the same kind of opportunities. Bands don't really have that anymore, but that's what we had when we were coming up."

Cray and his band took a five-week tour of Europe earlier this summer, and he enjoyed a brief lull in early July before starting up his tour of West Coast cities. He has history with each of the musicians who are part of the Robert Cray Band, he says, to the point that they've shared stages for years.

"Richard Cousins is our bass player. Richard started the band in 1974," says Cray. "He was in the band up until 1992, and then he left and did some work with Etta James for a bit. He came back to the band in about 2006 and has been with us ever since. Our keyboard player Dover Weinberg is an old alumni; he worked in the band in the late '70s and came back about 2008 and has been with us ever since. Les Falconer is the drummer; he's been back with the band the last four years and was in the band in the early 2000s as well. We've got a couple of crew members that have been in the band 30 years. It's a family."

Cray says that nothing has come easy over the years — not learning to play guitar and not sharpening his skills at singing.

But that's part of what makes them a worthwhile challenge.

He doesn't play other instruments and doesn't necessarily play guitar for hours a day anymore, but it's always out and ready for him to grab at a moment's notice if and when he's inspired. And when it comes to songwriting, he says, either the words or the music can come first.

"You can have a good story that just pops in your head when you're walking around or cooking or whatever you're doing," he says. "And maybe a musical idea can happen when you're in the shower, and you've got to get out real quick and get to the tape machine. Sometimes it might happen at a sound check or a rehearsal when everybody is in a frame of mind to create. We're just getting together and starting to warm up. All of a sudden, we've got a song. Boom."

Over the years, Cray and his band have frequently found themselves rubbing shoulders with other great musicians. Cray played with Tina Turner in a 1987 TV special, and he has frequently toured with Eric Clapton. The Robert Cray Band played as backing musicians on albums for John Lee Hooker and B.B. King, and Cray collaborated with Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland on his Showdown! album.

In 1990, Cray famously played "Sweet Home Chicago" live on stage in Troy, Wisconsin, with Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jimmie Vaughan, and Stevie Ray Vaughan; the performance became infamous because Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash shortly after leaving the show.

Cray, who received an Americana Music Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance in 2017, says that continuing to tour the world and play is a dream he's had since he was a teenager. He wants to play as long as he can, and he looks up to the Rolling Stones in that regard.

His last album came out in 2020 about a month before the pandemic began, and he hopes to return to the studio with his band mates either late this year or early next year. Until then, Cray can be content with looking out at the audience and surveying the crowd.

"We do get some younger people, but we have some longtime fans," he says. "Sometimes it cracks me up; I see a lot of older people out there and go, 'Are these really our fans? Am I this old, too?' We get different generations. Fathers and sons and daughters and mothers. People come to see us and comment about how they got turned on to our music by their parents."