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Tab Benoit: the improvised life

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Sept. 30, 2008

Tab Benoit's first big break was somewhat serendipitous, the sort of thing that happens in sitcoms and ridiculous Internet cartoons. He was playing a gig in Los Angeles, when, from out of nowhere, came David Hasselhoff.

"I was playing in L.A. and David Hasselhoff came up between sets and said, 'Hey, I want to talk to you about something,'"Benoit said. "Which is kind of funny right there."

After his encounter with the Mighty Coiffed One, Benoit, an acclaimed blues guitarist from Houma, La., gained exposure with an appearance on the pilot episode of the "Baywatch" spinoff "Baywatch Nights."

"The first thing we did was go into a recording studio just to record the music," Benoit says. "The director says, 'OK, imagine that you're walking and it's late at night and you feel like somebody's following you. So you walk a little faster and you realize they're still following and you walk faster and now you're jogging and they're jogging and now you're running and you're being chased. And you're running and it's dark and then you fall off a cliff and die. Play that.'"

Now Benoit has 15 years' worth of albums under his belt and plays 250 nights a year, according to his Web site. His appearance in Columbia will be his third in the span of about a year and his local fanbase is growing.

"There's always been a real supportive crowd," Benoit says. "There's a good blues fanbase there in Columbia. It makes a lot of sense because you're right between Kansas City and St. Louis. The people have been great and I think it's a great town."

Benoit says he enjoyed playing last year's Roots 'N Blues 'N BBQ Festival, but nothing jumps out in terms of what he expects for this year's weekend.

"I don't have expectations going into anything," he says. "I just kind of let it present itself and do the best job I can do with the situation. I play different kinds of places every night. So we can go from playing a little hundred-seat blues club to 10,000 people at a festival or a theater with 1,000 people in it one day. So you kind of have to be flexible to any situation that comes along."

Benoit got his start playing shows at a tiny rustic Baton Rouge club, Tabby's Blues Box and Heritage Hall, where he played mostly to local blues aficionados and Louisiana State University students. The owner, Tabby Thomas, became his mentor, telling him, "If you play the blues, you'll always have a job," a phrase that is echoed in Benoit's story.

"What he meant is that blues is not going anywhere and it's the root of everything that we call American music," he says. "If you have a good understanding of that, you'll always be able to play. It's the roots of all the music that we listen to so if the root dies, it all dies. Blues should be around for the rest of eternity and it's still universally accepted. I mean there's a wide variety of people who listen to blues. Young, old, rich, poor, everybody, you know?"

Benoit's approach to live shows is all about engaging the audience in the music via spontaneity. Much of his live material is improvised.

"The more you do this, the easier it gets and you realize it's better if you don't know what's gonna happen until it happens," he says. "And the audience doesn't know and the band doesn't know and it creates more excitement, because you just don't know. If you know the outcome of the situation, it's not as exciting as when you don't. It's like somebody ruining a movie you didn't see because they told you the end."

Benoit's ties to the New Orleans music scene have made him passionate about preserving the music, culture and environment of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. 

"New Orleans can't survive the way it's going right now," Benoit says. "There's not a lot of population there to keep this music scene alive. A lot of musicians left and moved to other states, basically because they had to."

"It's up to the musicians to tell people what's happening and be communicators," he says. "It's important that they do come back and fight for New Orleans, but it's difficult to do so."

Benoit is becoming a communicator for the city in many ways. He is heavily involved in the Voice of the Wetlands Organization, which seeks to raise awareness about preserving the wetlands of the Gulf Coast. The organization hosts the Tab Benoit Golf Classic, now in its fourth year, and an annual music festival in Benoit's hometown of Houma.

But Katrina wasn't Benoit's catalyst to become involved. He had been working with the organization on a documentary about the effects of natural disasters on the Gulf for two years before the hurricane hit.

"It was an awareness campaign trying to get people to understand that this area is in trouble and couldn't handle a major hurricane," Benoit says. "And then it happened right at the end of the filming. Right on cue, it came true."

The film, "Hurricane on the Bayou," premiered in 2006, after it was updated for Katrina.

Aside from saving the wetlands, Benoit's life is pretty much lived off-the-cuff. He says he lives like he plays: improvised. He tours, he records and occasionally, he'll fix the tour bus with a Swiss Army Knife (for real).

"I don't plan too far ahead on things, because things will continue to change," Benoit says. "So I live my life pretty much the same way I play, and that's improvised. So when an opportunity comes around, you're ready for it."