ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCT. 31, 2007
By Steve Newton
When I track down Bronx-raised blues-rocker Popa Chubby at a New York doctor’s office, the heavily tattooed mountain-man of a guitarist is in the process of getting a flu shot. As someone who makes his living on the road, he needs to take precautions.
“I can’t afford to get the flu,” he quips, “I’m not allowed to get sick.”
Local rock-guitar freaks will be hoping Chubby stays healthy enough to make it to Vancouver, as he’s currently touring to promote Electric Chubbyland, a live, two-disc tribute to Jimi Hendrix. He’s been a devotee of the Seattle blues-metal icon since he was a kid.
“The first time I heard Hendrix, I was probably seven years old,” he recalls, “and the AM radio played everything at the time–it played Frank Sinatra, Hendrix, and ‘Snoopy Versus the Red Baron’ all on the same show. I remember it bein’ 1967 and hearing ‘Purple Haze’, and just feeling like, ‘This is deep shit, man.’ Being seven, it just rocked my world.
“Then when I was about 14, I started playin’ guitar,” he continues, “and got ahold of a record that had come out after Hendrix died entitled Crash Landing. It wasn’t really the best Hendrix record, but I remember just identifying with it so deeply. And then I got a copy of [Hendrix’s 1968 double album] Electric Ladyland, and I dropped out of school. I just started listening to that record religiously.”
The idea of recording an album of Hendrix material was first planted in 1996, when a Dutch promoter asked Chubby to join the likes of Pat Travers, Walter Trout, and Steve Lukather at a Jimi Hendrix music festival. In 2005, Chubby fulfilled another request to play Hendrix in the Netherlands, and the audience response was enthusiastic, so last year he taped a performance of Hendrix songs at a club in Middletown, New York, which became Electric Chubbyland.
“Doing that stuff was a challenge,” he explains Chubby, who plays the Yale Hotel on Friday and Saturday (November 2 and 3). “You really had to approach it from the right place. The most important thing was the intention behind it, not to just do it as a commercial venture, but to really do it out of love and respect for the music.”
Of the 24 tracks on Electric Chubbyland, Chubby says the one he most looks forward to performing isn’t a major hit like “Foxy Lady” or “Purple Haze”, but “a great funky jam” off the Band of Gypsys album titled “Who Knows”.
He says the secret to successfully covering Hendrix involves capturing the right vibe, just like the guitar hero did during each and every gig.
“It’s not about copyin’ the notes, man,” he stresses, “it’s about getting to a feeling behind it. It’s about, on any given night, playing something from your soul. That’s why we cut it live, because that kind of stuff happens better live.”
To hear the full audio of my 2007 interview with Popa Chubby–and my interview with him from 1995 as well–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 650 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with musicians since 1982.