Vivian Campbell Solo CD

08/25/05
. (press release) After a career spent anchoring some of the most illustrious bands in rock (including the last 13 years with Def Leppard), guitarist Vivian Campbell found himself stealing away to smoky blues clubs around his adopted home of Los Angeles whenever he wasn't on tour. Enamored with the roots of his rock, Campbell decided it was time for a long-overdue history lesson in the music that he had come to make a career of. The Irish axeman journeyed all the way back to the music of the deep south, reliving the early days of the blues and emerged with Two Sides of If, a collection of songs Campbell fell in love with as he taught himself to live, breathe and love the blues. Admittedly, this trek is one undertaken by many guitarists, but none who can claim to have helped influenced Metallica (with his first band, Sweet Savage), helped launch Ronnie James Dio's post-Sabbath career at just 19, and went on to spend over a decade with one of the biggest rock bands in the world. In stores on September 27th (Sanctuary Records), the album is a heartfelt labor of love from Campbell; a thank you note to the great bluesmen of the past for laying the groundwork for upstarts like himself.

Campbell took to the studio like an old time bluesman, recording each song live and in their entirety. He also produced Two Sides of If (along with Tor Hyams), which includes Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top (who contributes guitar work on "Like it This Way" and the new song "Willin' for Satisfaction"), while Joan Osborne adds her soulful vocals on "Spoonful." Prodigious drummer Terry Bozzio also performs on all the tracks. "While researching songs for this record, I was led to look much deeper than I ever imagined I would have to," explains Campbell, "into the history of blues music itself, and into my own traits as a musician, too."

The album wouldn't be a true tribute without at least one homage to Robert Johnson, and Campbell selects two: "Come On In My Kitchen" and "32-30 Blues." But Vivian doesn't shy away from recognizing great contemporary blues compositions as well, like Fleetwood Mac's "Like It This Way" and "Willin' For Satisfaction," written by Gibbons just for this album. He also mixes in Willie Dixon's "I Ain't Superstitious" and "Spoonful" alongside Snooky Pryor's more recent "Good Or Bad Times."

"Since the earliest days of my guitar playing adventures," says Campbell, "when I first saw and heard Marc Bolan on television and knew that I wanted to play guitar for a living, till the night my cousin Richard took me to see Rory Gallagher at Belfast's Ulster Hall and I rushed home to copy his licks, I always knew that roots music had an intangible allure to me. I also knew that I could somehow interpret it. And that's really what blues can still offer: individual interpretation of an otherwise tightly constrictive and well-worn genre." Coming full circle, Campbell includes a recording of Mel London's "Messin' With The Kid" in Two Sides of If, a song Gallagher also covered, as well as Gallagher's own "Calling Card."

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