Musician 'sliding' around the world

• By STEVEN K. LANDRY
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Nov 2, 2009

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LAFAYETTE — By early 2010, Sonny Landreth will have his own signature slide-guitar Stratocaster series, an honor normally reserved for the Eric Claptons and Jeff Becks of the world.

But, around Acadiana, fans knew of 58-year-old Landreth’s genius since the early 1970s when he first jammed with zydeco king Clifton Chenier.

His hard-to-describe style will be on display Friday and Saturday at Rock’n’Bowl in New Orleans.

It’s almost more fun to watch other fans watch slide-blues guitarist Landreth — a Breaux Bridge resident when he’s not on the road here in America and in Europe — than it is to watch Landreth.

As a mid-October Downtown Alive! attendee can attest, fans watch in wonder while Landreth plays his own version of glissando slide, in which he magically melds a Chet Atkins picking style with a Robert Johnson slide technique with, well, what seems like theremin-like hocus-pocus.

His between-the-notes technique leads to a “heavenly squall” of sonic beauty, as “Rolling Stone” magazine noted in the mid-1990s.

You can tell who the guitarist fan-boys are, too. They “air-guitar” along with Sonny and then they nudge their buddies next to them with a “did you see that?” amazement.

And then, a watershed moment: The sound system goes out for a few tense moments. But Sonny keeps playing anyway, with only his monitors sounding out over Lafayette’s downtown.

“Well,” Landreth says with a laugh a few days later. “You just have to keep going. I’m old-school when it comes to that. I’ll go until they tell me to stop.”

He learned to “keep going” from a show he saw featuring Johnny Winter, brother to “Frankenstein” hit-maker Edgar Winter.

“I played the very first Downtown Alive! (in the early 1980s),” the soft-spoken Landreth said. “And for this one (on Oct. 16), my family came out. So, the sound company brings a brand-new digital console right out of the box and, wouldn’t you know, we’d be the guinea pigs!

“Lucky I had my sound guy there,” Landreth said. “He figured out what to do and how to fix the problem. Now, if my guitar amp goes out, that’s where I draw the line.

“Although, having said that, I can tell my Johnny Winter story. At the Atlanta International Pop Festival (in July 1969), his rig went out and he just kept on playing — you know, no guitar amps or anything. And yet he was all over the stage, jumping around.”