G. Love & Special Sauce
Garrett Dutton aka G. Love
10/29/2011 @ The Electric Factory
Philadelphia, PA
By Jeff Longo
Alicia Longo
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Stubble caught up with G. Love & Special Sauce front man Garrett Dutton aka G. Love at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia on the last stop of their fall tour. We discuss the new album “Fixin’ to Die” (2011 Brushfire Records), 2012 winter US tour, the Occupy movement, and his new line of traditional Louisiana Hot Sauce: G.Love’s Special Sauce.

Click here for G.Love & Special Sauce TOUR DATES.

Click Here – Photo slideshow on Flickr

Stubble: You guys are wrapping up your fall tour right now, supporting your eleventh studio album, “Fixin’ to Die”. How are the fans receiving it?
G.Love: It’s been a good run for us, the record has been a real return to my roots as a blues player, a coffee shop musician, street musician. It’s really felt like a second chance to make a first record again you know, because a lot of the material is material I was working on kinda before I even met the band and um kinda stumbled on mixing and hip hop and blues. I was more of blues player and when I first started writing songs I was into a lot of folk music, Bob Dylan and music like that. This record, “Fixin to Die”, is kinda like that side of my music, kinda like the predecessor of the G.Love and Special Sauce records.

Stubble: You have eleven albums before you actually threw a cover on there…
G.Love: Yep there are four covers on the record: Paul Simon’s “50 ways to leave your lover”, “Fixin’ to Die” the title track is an old blues song by Booker T. Washington ‘Bukka’ White, there’s another one called ‘You’ve got to die’ which is a Blind Willy McTell song, and then a Velvet Underground cover called “Pale Blue Eyes”. So basically I never put out any covers, but once we decided we were going to go in a blues direction I said well let me put some of this material that I’ve had in my repertoire for long time like “Fixin’ to Die”, then we said if we’re going to open the door doing some of our own renditions lets do a hit so we choose ’50 ways to leave your lover’. If you’re going to approach someone else’s tune just make sure you put own stamp on it and I feel like we were able to do that with everything we approached.

Stubble: So what can we expect tonight at the Halloween Hootenanny? You guys going to be coming out dressed like Kiss or the Wizard of Oz maybe?
G.Love: No, no, but yeah we will have a little costumes going, it should be fun. Musically, what we’ve been doing is taking a musical journey, we kinda start with the new record which is more delta blues and we start acoustic and then kinda ramp up into working through some of our older records. We’ve been doing a pretty classic show right now I feel like a lot of old school stuff. Coming home and playing Philly is always been like this big thing you know, it’s kinda aggravating in a way. Sometimes you just want to be in a town where you don’t know anybody and there’s not some big thing, just playing your music and that’s basically what we want to do every night. It doesn’t matter where we are, who’s watching, just go up play the music. That being said like there’s definitely that home town pride and you want to put on the best show possible for the home town crowd and then you have a lot of people you grew up with…

Stubble: What’s coming up in 2012 what can we expect?
G.Love: We’ll be touring in January, February, and March and that will kinda be continuing touring “Fixin’ to Die” and at the same time we’ll looking to work on a new record in the beginning of the year.

Stubble: What’s up with the Occupy Movement, do you support that?
G.Love: Yeah actually I sent a shout out to them on the radio today. I’ve been talking a lot about that with my Dad and I think you have the have and have nots in our society, in any society and I think after the last ten years the economy has been in the pits so bad and there’s a lot more people that have not and want more. They see a lot of injustice with the way the government is set up and the taxation of the rich versus the taxation of the poor and I think there are generally unsatisfied group of people are coming together, being together and demanding someone acknowledge them and hopefully pass some legislation that changes…I think it comes down to the taxation of the very, very wealthy and they would like to see those people taxed more. I saw on CNN one of the placards that kind of summed up for one newscaster, a young person was out there and they’re placard was like “I have $70,000 in college loan debts and I have no medical insurance and I work full time and make $20,000 a year, where’s my bailout?”

Stubble: Cool
G.Love: The other thing we got going on besides the music right now is the G.Love’s and Special Hot Sauce. So make sure you get a chance to go on GlovesHotSauce.com or Philadelphonic.com and you can get you G.Love and Special Hot Sauce.

Stubble: Speaking of which didn’t you have a cooking show with your wife (Sarah Rabby Frigo) that got shelved or is coming out soon?
G.Love: We actually did shop cooking show for awhile but it’s not happenin’ but the hot sauce is happenin’ that’s why we’re talking about the hot sauce.

Brushfire Records – Order “Fixin’ to Die” -Click Here
Official Site - Philadelphonic.com/
G-Loves Special Hot Sauce – Click Here