Wildcat Tamer

The Zoo Crew has got "Wildcat Tamer" rolling right now off Kirk Fletcher's Heartache by the Pound, and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks riding along with the freeform spins here at THE ZOO, you already know the man does not mess around when he digs into a track like this. Fletcher takes the old Tarheel Slim rocker and turns it into something that feels like it was born in the Muscle Shoals air. The horns punch right on the heels of nearly every line, Reese Wynans comes in with that barrelhouse piano that makes you want to find the nearest juke joint, and then Kirk slides in with a twangy, cutting solo that just lights the whole thing up. It is one of those covers that reminds you why the blues keeps rolling forward instead of sitting still.

Heartache by the Pound came out in 2022 on Ogierea Records, and the story behind the sessions is pure road-warrior stuff. Fletcher spent a stretch of the lockdown living in Switzerland, writing with his longtime friend Richard Cousins, the bass player who has held down the Robert Cray Band for years. They cooked up most of the material long-distance, then when the doors opened again Kirk headed straight to the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals for three days of tracking. That place is still the mother church for soul, the same rooms where Otis Rush and Aretha Franklin cut sides that changed everything. Fletcher has said he needed that exact vibe. He wanted the songs to land where the ghosts of those old sessions still hang in the air. The band he brought in was stacked: Wynans on keys, Terrence F. Clark on drums, Travis Carlton and Randy Bermudes trading bass, Jade MacRae on the background vocals, plus the horns of Mark Pender and Joe Sublett. It is the kind of lineup that makes a producer grin when he walks into the room.

Fletcher produced the whole record himself, and he has talked about how he sat down and let the songs take over once he decided he was making a blues album about real life. "I got back to my gospel and blues roots," he told one interviewer. "I'm a bluesman, and I write about life. That's the concept." He also pointed out that FAME is where all those fantastic people recorded, and he needed that energy for the tracks he had written. "Wildcat Tamer" sits right in the middle of that approach. It is a cover of Allen Rathel Bunn's old number, the one Tarheel Slim cut back in the late fifties as a raw, driving rocker with Wild Jimmy Spruill on guitar. Fletcher keeps the fire but dresses it in that Muscle Shoals suit of horns and piano. The original was already a favorite among the rockabilly and R&B crowd who dig deep; this version just proves the song still has teeth more than sixty years later.

That is the thing about Kirk Fletcher. He has always had a foot in the old records and a foot on the stage where the new ones get made. Born in Bellflower, California, in 1975, he was the younger son of a Baptist minister. His older brother Walter, seventeen years his senior, was already playing guitar in their father's church in Compton. Kirk started picking it up around age eight, watching his brother and then jumping in himself. In those Pentecostal services there was no waiting around for a perfect setup. If you had a guitar and a couple of strings, you played. He has said he almost had a whole other career before the blues; gospel was the first language. His dad did not want secular music in the house, so the church and the records he could sneak became the school. By the time he was twelve or thirteen he was already playing regularly in front of people, building the confidence that comes from standing up every week and making the congregation move.

The big turn came in 1988 at the Long Beach Blues Festival. Albert Collins was headlining, the Staple Singers were on the bill with Pops Staples and that elegant Telecaster, and Bobby Bland was there too. Fletcher has said he still gets goosebumps talking about it. He was young enough that the whole thing rewired him. He went home and wrote papers about it in school. That was the day he decided he wanted to do what those players were doing. Later he started hanging around a little guitar shop in Los Angeles where he met Jeff Rivera, Robben Ford's tech. Seeing Ford up close, helping load gear, hearing that tone live, sealed the deal for him. "Seeing Robben Ford was the thing to make me go, okay, I wanna play for real," he has recalled. Around the same time Al Blake of the Hollywood Fats Band took him under his wing, inviting him over on Sunday nights to spin obscure blues records for hours and then talk about the old players. Blake introduced him to Junior Watson and Lynwood Slim, and the West Coast blues circle opened up.

From there the road work started stacking. Blake connected him with Kim Wilson, which put Fletcher in Wilson's Blues Revue and on the Grammy-nominated Smokin' Joint album. He spent time with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, played with Charlie Musselwhite, and later joined Joe Bonamassa for high-profile runs including the Muddy Wolf shows. Along the way he has kept putting out his own records, earning multiple Blues Music Award nominations for both albums and his guitar work. Heartache by the Pound was his seventh studio album, and it sits right in the middle of that long arc from church kid to the guy who can walk into FAME and hold his own with the heaviest session players around. He has called himself a born accompanist as much as a lead player, and you hear that in the way he locks in with the band on a track like "Wildcat Tamer" before he steps out and burns.

Zoo Freaks who dig the deep cuts will want to keep an eye on what Fletcher is doing next. He has got a newer album out called Keep On Pushing, and he is still out there playing rooms and festivals with that same fire he brought to the Muscle Shoals sessions. You can catch the full story and the music over at his official site kirkfletcherband.com, and he stays in touch with the people who ride with him on Instagram and Facebook. The man came up learning how to make a room move with just a guitar and a congregation, and he is still doing it every time he plugs in. That is the kind of story that fits right in with the freeform spins the Zoo Crew keeps rolling for the Freaks who know the difference between a cover and a claim on the song.