Up-Close with Jimmy Vivino
UP CLOSE
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Jimmy Vivino
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UP CLOSE ⭐️ Jimmy Vivino ⭐️
The blues-drenched Gonna Be 2 of Those Days is singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Jimmy Vivino’s Gulf Coast Records debut. Raised in Paterson, and raised musically as part of the Conan O’Brien house band for three decades, his purview extends to Hollywood movie soundtracks, Broadway and radio. He’s made the music of Levon Helm, Phoebe Snow, Al Kooper, John Sebastian, James Cotton, Laura Nyro, Odetta, Donald Fagen, Darlene Love, Felix Cavaliere and Warren Haynes all sound better. Currently, he’s in Canned Heat and The Fab Faux.
The Jersey Sound: I’ll never forget your guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gentle Weeps” at a Fab Faux show.
Jimmy Vivino: That came about when I told the guys, “if I can’t really get to play, I can’t do this gig.” I couldn’t just copy Eric Clapton’s solo on the original Beatle recording of that song for the white album in 1968. I need to do more. You may notice at the end of “Day Tripper” and “Paperback Writer,” we turn into Cream! The Beatles loved to play like that too but they never put anything out when they were just jamming.
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“Everyone in that band was tripping their balls off except for Fito. I heard that makeshift Woodstock stage almost collapsed due to 300-pound singer Bob “The Bear” Hite jumping up and down so violently. I think that anybody who played at Woodstock should be in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame.”
TJS: I’ll also never forget when you pulled out a huge sitar for “Within You Without You.”
JV: [Fab Faux bassist] Will Lee told me to just go get a sitar. “You can figure it out!” To him, I’ve always been kinda like the Brian Jones of the band. He’d always say, “give it to Jimmy. He’ll figure out what to do.” [Fab Faux singer-keyboardist] Jack [Petruzzelli] is like that too. If you give Jack something, he’ll figure it out. And Will! Everyone in The Fab Faux, actually, can do it all. It’s like the guys in The Band. They would run around on stage and switch instruments all the time. I think a part of that was to keep themselves amused. Will will run back and play drums sometimes. Drummer Rich [Pagano] likes to play bass on “Revolution #9.” Getting an electric sitar wasn’t exactly our idea of what was right. But I got one. Then I got another one because, it turns out, you have to retune them for certain songs. Then I got a third one. But I really enjoyed playing it. Once I got a really good one, though, I thought, “ok, I’m starting to get the hang of this.” When I got my first sitar, I remember playing “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” the 1937 Sonny Boy Williamson blues song.
TJS: You’re also in Canned Heat.
JV: Right before Covid hit, I was looking for something to do. My bassist Rick Reed—who played with Paul Butterfield—subbed for Larry Taylor in Canned Heat and when Larry died, [drummer] Fito [de la Parra] was just going to hang it up. Rick suggested he keep Canned Heat going with him and me. We really got along great. I told Fito I would do it only if we made a record and really got back into the blues like when they started. They were getting lost in pop music. I felt they never got the respect they should have within the blues community. They’re a lot like the Rolling Stones, Cream or The Yardbirds: British bands who played their versions of old blues songs. Hell, Canned Heart resurrected John Lee Hooker’s career in a beautiful way with that Hooker’n’Heat album in 1971. So we did the Finyl Vinyl album. Joe Bonamassa—who is on my new record—was on that too. Joe and I are good friends and anytime one of us can be on the other’s records, we do it. Fito had no idea that when I was 13, I got that first Canned Heat album and listened to it over and over and over. And I’ve bought every record since.
TJS: I was a huge Canned Heat fan ever since I saw them at Woodstock when I was 18 in 1969.
JV: Yeah, they were rockin’ that night. And they were so gone. Everyone in that band was tripping their balls off except for Fito. I heard that makeshift Woodstock stage almost collapsed due to 300-pound singer Bob “The Bear” Hite jumping up and down so violently. I think that anybody who played at Woodstock should be in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame.
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“When we were kids, sure, we protested the Vietnam war. I attended marches, went to sit-ins, be-ins, love-ins. Our parents, the older generation from The Great War, looked at us like we were the worst thing in the world. It’s hard to remember sometimes what it’s like to be on the other end of that. With all due respect, I do think we’re in an unintelligent time. Idiocracy has set in.”
TJS: You got a guy on your new album playing harmonica who I also saw at Woodstock: The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian. I even saw him play harmonica onstage with The Doors! Bonamassa plays on “Blues In The 21st.” You wrote that during Covid.
JV: It was like a medieval curse! The Black Plague all over again! And the thing that struck me was that nobody knew what to do. With all our technology and research, without getting into politics, nobody knew what the fuck to do!
TJS: “Ruby Is Back” stirs the pot. Man, that Ruby is one bad bitch! She must be a composite, right?
JV: It’s that person who you’re hooked on and can’t help going back to, even when they treat you like shit. And yes, she’s a composite, of course, of a lot of women I’ve known.
TJS: The title track doubles down on Albert King’s “Born Under A Bad Sign.”
JV: Exactly! It also comes from Mose Allison [1927-2016] and his particular sense of humor. Mose was a Mississippi piano player who used to play this little East Side basement in New York City called Gregory’s. He was hilarious. “One of these days,” he’d sing, “I’m gonna get it straight and stop messin’ ‘round with jailbait.”
TJS: His lines are classic. I dig “your mind is on vacation but your mouth is workin’ overtime” or “meet me at no particular place and I’ll be there at no particular time.”
JV: Then there’s Percy Mayfield [1920-1984]. I always used to do some of his songs. The Poet Of The Blues! I always thought the blues was more about the song than it was about the guitar-playing. All too often, though, it’s turned into where the song is just an excuse for someone to solo. That’s fine for cats who want to just be virtuoso guitar players. What they’re missing is that the blues tells a story first. Your guitar is just the punctuation…like BB King. Muddy Waters. I feel there’s a lot of throwaway lyrics out there in the blues world but I come from a place where Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Willie Dixon, Amos Milburn and Johnny Watson TOLD STORIES. That’s what I really love. They wrote funny songs: all-too-human moments in everyday life. Funny but they’re in a predicament all the same. And that’s the blues: a complaint put to music. Sometimes it’s a love story but there’s always a left-turn somewhere that gives you the blues.
Photo by Danny Clinch
TJS: But you get dark too. Here in 2025, in this country, the next two song titles sum it up: “Ain’t Nuthin’s Gonna Be Alright” and “Better Days Past.”
JV: That’s for guys like us. The world is left for young people. When we were kids, sure, we protested the Vietnam war. I attended marches, went to sit-ins, be-ins, love-ins. Our parents, the older generation from The Great War, looked at us like we were the worst thing in the world. It’s hard to remember sometimes what it’s like to be on the other end of that. With all due respect, I do think we’re in an unintelligent time. Idiocracy has set in.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be a time when I was young and following bands around before they all became my friends. Vanilla Fudge, the Rascals, Mountain and all the guys who came out of the bar scene on Long Island, the Bronx and in Jersey. Johnny Winter was around a lot back then too. He had moved from Texas to Connecticut and he was always around. I would go see The Byrds in high school gyms! And The Blues Magoos! They played my high school in Glen Rock [Bergen County] in 1967.
TJS: “We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet”
JV: You remember that? Wow!
TJS: Your most anguished vocal on the record has to be on “Fools Gold” where you reference Dylan’s “Mr. Jones.”
JV: I didn’t know if anyone would get it. That song was written way back for Catherine Russell to sing. She’s now big in the jazz scene but back in the day, she played in my band, The Black Italians. Also with The Vivino Brothers Band. So I wrote that song 33 years ago for her but I was working in Hollywood on a movie and had to shelve it. It’s still one of my favorite songs I ever wrote.
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“For musicians to learn, it’s like an exercise, like when a baseball player finally gets up to the majors and he hits the ball, does he drop down and do pushups? No, you play the game. You play from heart to hand. I learned that from Hubert Sumlin, Johnny Johnson and Mike Bloomfield.”
TJS: Talk about growing up in New Jersey.
JV: I grew up in a show biz family. Paterson. Lotta music. A family of carpenters. My poor father was a great trumpet player but my grandfather wouldn’t allow him to do that. He HAD to be in the carpentry business with his father and my uncle and that was that. There were no two ways about it. Yet when he saw that my two brothers and I had this incredible spark for singing, writing, performing, dancing, playing music and acting, he nurtured it. Didn’t push it, just worked his ass off to pay for us to do things like piano lessons. One time I was slacking off on my own trumpet playing, and I remember he held that trumpet up in one hand, and a hammer in the other, and said, “pick one.”
TJS: Then there’s your 30 years with Conan.
JV: We still do stuff together now and then when we can. I learned so much leading that band for his late night talk show. Now, in my sixties, it all went into the recording of Gonna Be 2 Of Those Days. And each thing was important to get me here. I couldn’t have written these 11 songs right away. I know folks who can write a great song, and have, as teenagers. Not me. More gratification comes out of playing, then writing. Writing invites a lot of failure. It’s really scary. Now I say who the fuck cares? And I say what I want to say. It’s harder to get the music out these days. At one time we had the Aquarian Weekly. Remember that paper?
TJS: Uh, yeah, I do.
JV: It was our source to find live shows.
TJS: With the release of ‘Gonna Be 2 Of Those Days,’ you’re a valid bluesman. Is it correct to assume blues-wise that you now have morphed into that which you used to just emulate?
JV: That should be the goal. For musicians to learn, it’s like an exercise, like when a baseball player finally gets up to the majors and he hits the ball, does he drop down and do pushups? No, you play the game. You play from heart to hand. I learned that from Hubert Sumlin, Johnny Johnson and Mike Bloomfield. You can hear it in early Clapton when he was actually doing a lot of Freddie King…then he brought his own soul into it and, as you say, morphed into what he first emulated.
[Editor’s Note: Hubert Sumlin, 1931-2011, was the Chicago blues guitarist in Howling Wolf’s band. Johnny Johnson, 1924-2055, was Chuck Berry’s longtime piano man and probably co-wrote half of Berry’s hits with no credit. Chicago bluesman Mike Bloomfield, 1943-1981, was the lead guitarist in Dylan’s band guitarist who freaked out patrons of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric for the first time. In 1967, he put together the first rock band with horns, Electric Flag. He was a mainstay of the pioneering Butterfield Blues Band, and recorded the legendary Super Session in ’68 with Al Kooper and Stephen Stills. In San Francisco, he was the guitar teacher of Carlos Santana. Dylan once called him “the greatest guitarist I ever heard” and only settled on The Band to tour with after Bloomfield turned him down.]
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TJS: You’ve worked with a lot of great Jersey musicians. The late singer Phoebe Snow from Edison and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen from Passaic come immediately to mind.
JV: Phoebe was really something. She never wanted to sing her biggest hit, “Poetry Man,” during her concerts. She just wanted to play the blues. I told her, “Phoebe, people come to see you sing that song!” When I first started playing with Fagen, we would just knock out some old R’n’B and the Dylan covers he wanted. I snuck in some Steely Dan hits but when I first suggested “Reelin’ In The Years,” he said, “oh yea? You wanna do that? Really? Why don’t we just put on bellbottoms and platform shoes while we’re at it.” It took him years to finally give the people what they wanted…much to his chagrin. Him and Walter Becker in that band were two of the smartest people in the universe and I learned so much from those two guys. I understand Fagen better now. I mean, he was still writing vital shit, man! The last thing he wanted to do was “Reelin’ In The Years.” How can you have 15 albums and know you must play only that which people want to hear? It’s weird, but the last thing any artist wants is to be relegated to that oldies place.
Same thing with Canned Heat. They’re a blues band. Yet there came a time when they just wanted to play pop and tour with The Monkees and The Turtles. Luckily, we got back on-course and I’m very proud of that Final Vinyl album.
TJS: As I’m sure you are of ‘Gonna Be 2 Of Those Days.’
JV: Yea, but whether it gets accepted or not? I could care less.