Painted Horse

The Zoo Crew has got Painted Horse by Anthony Gomes cranked up loud off High Voltage Blues, and if you Zoo Freaks have been riding with THE ZOO for any stretch, you already know this one hits like a two-lane highway at full throttle. Gomes has told more than one interviewer that the painted horse is the mutt, a bit of everything rolled into one badass animal that still wins the race. The lyrics tip the hat to Jimi Hendrix with that line about kissing the sky, and they pay tribute to John Lee Hooker while the riff underneath growls like a supercharged Muddy Waters groove that got left out in the sun too long. He has called the whole thing a song of unity and a celebration of diversity, a gunslinger pulling into town on that mixed-breed horse and knowing he is the baddest ride on the street. That is the kind of story the Crew likes to spin between records.

The track first showed up with Gomes' southern rock outfit New Soul Cowboys, and some longtime listeners figured he had wandered off the blues path. He has said straight out that the project divided the room, that change management was not exactly graceful, and that a chunk of the faithful thought the older songs were being left behind. Years later he circled back, stripped the baggage off, and cut a harder version for High Voltage Blues. Billy Sheehan and Ray Luzier from Korn sat in on the drums and bass for Painted Horse, Born To Ride, and a couple of the other reworked cuts, and Gomes joked that he followed those two around until he had enough leverage to get them in the room. He kept the banjo twang in the arrangement on purpose. One write-up noted that he chose to leave the twang sitting right there in the middle of all that rock muscle. The man has said the new takes had to be ten times better than the originals or the nostalgic versions would always win, and he was nervous right up to release that the whole idea might have been boneheaded. The room ended up liking both the fresh songs and the rebuilt old ones.

Gomes has summed the album up in one line that the Crew keeps coming back to. He likes to think of his style as what it would sound like if B.B. King were in AC/DC, and that is High Voltage Blues in a nutshell. The label, Rat Pak Records out of New Hampshire, had never come after a blues-rock act in twenty years of business. Their president stumbled on the catalog, drank the Kool-Aid, and figured the rock side of the audience would take to this lane if it was marketed that way. Three new songs sat next to the rebuilt catalog cuts. The record opened with Painted Horse and ran all the way out to the melodic close of Blueschild, hit number one on the Billboard Blues chart, and stayed on that chart for 58 weeks. Gomes has said the song is everything the album represents. When the amps are up and the mutt is running, you hear the blues soul and the rock and roll heart in the same bar.

The man behind the riff came up in Toronto, born in 1970 to a Portuguese father and a Canadian mother, and he fell for the guitar around age fourteen after soaking up Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and the local lightning of Jeff Healey. He ground it out in bands around the city and sat in on the club circuit while he worked through school at the University of Toronto. He ended up with a master's degree and a thesis on the racial and cultural evolution of the blues, plus an academic award for the highest overall grade point average by a history major. The open-mic nights at a little blues joint paid in beer. Play well and you got one. Play really well and you got two, which, as he has put it, felt like a million dollars when you were still in college. On a two-beer night he was cooking, and a stranger walked up and asked who his favorite guitar player was. Gomes could have named Hendrix or Beck or Stevie Ray. He said B.B. King. The stranger turned out to be King's bus driver and told him it was good to see somebody young still in the blues.

Front-row tickets showed up at will call the next day. Gomes had run off to an office store and printed business cards that read Anthony Gomes, Professional Electric Blues Guitarist, and he still laughs about that because no working player would ever put professional on a card. King seemed taken with the effort anyway. That meeting opened the door to a string of dates opening for the King of the Blues in 2005, and Gomes has said the courage to chase the music for real came out of those rooms. He spent time on the Chicago circuit, a stretch in Nashville, and settled into St. Louis. Along the way he shared stages with Buddy Guy, Robert Plant, Joe Bonamassa, Heart, Sammy Hagar, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. He has said that early on the lane did not fit neatly into pure blues or pure rock, and that both sides called him too much of the other. He decided the thing people treated like a liability was the superpower, and he stopped trying to fit. A blues soul and a rock and roll heart is the phrase he uses, and Painted Horse is the mutt that carries both.

You can dig deeper into the catalog, the tour, and the stories straight from the source at the Anthony Gomes official website. The Crew also keeps an eye on the official Facebook page, the official Instagram, and the official X account when the road reports and the new riffs start rolling. Zoo Freaks who want to trade stories with other riders can find the active fan circle over at Fans of Anthony Gomes Worldwide. The man still talks about wanting the music to put a smile on somebody who is having a hard stretch, and he still picks up that midlife-crisis Flying V when the studio calls. Painted Horse keeps that promise. The mutt runs, the riff growls, and the Zoo Crew is happy to let it ride all the way through the outro.