“Music also lets me express feelings that I might not be comfortable talking about in an ordinary conversation. Sometimes you have things inside you that are difficult to explain. Singing about those feelings gives me a way to get them out.”

Reverend Raven: Way Back Home

“Way Back Home” (2026), the first album in nine long years from Reverend Raven & The Chain Smokin' Altar Boys, brings all the fire and then some. The second album in Rik Raven's canon with longtime co-conspirator Westside Andy on harp - and, for the first time, playing with the Rev on every track - Way Back Home celebrates 30 years of throwing down some of the finest blues the midwest (or anywhere, for that matter!) has to offer. It's a collection of requested fan favorites from their decades of live shows, none of which have made it onto studio recordings until now. "For years now," Raven explains, "people would be buying CDs at our shows and asking 'what record is that song on?' Originally, this was just going to be an album meant to be sold at shows, but it morphed into something else entirely." The addition of special guest Altar Boy Dennis Wade on keys to the core quartet of Raven, Andy, PT Pedersen (bass) and Craig Panosh (drums), sends everything into overdrive and makes this record, arguably, the band's crowning achievement.

(Photo: Reverend Raven & Westside Andy with The Chain Smokin' Altar Boys)

“Once Dennis wanted to be on it, we realized we had to do this right and see what happens. What's nice is we've been playing for so long we can just go in and know what's going to happen. We get in one room, the baffles go up, and we just lock it in." Across nine covers and two originals, Raven and Andy are the perfect foil for each other. There's an unconscious synergy between the two, as they trade leads, that elevates everyone's game and lets the music flow with a tight looseness few bands can achieve.

Interview by Michael Limnios                  Archive: Reverend Raven, 2018 interview

Special Thanks: Larry Kay (Night Train PR)

It’s been nine years since your last album, yet Way Back Home sounds less like a comeback and more like the band picking up where it left off. What kept the fire burning during those nine years?

Our last CD, My Life, was supposed to be our 20th-anniversary record, although we ended up doing it a year late. For the nine years since then, we’ve just kept playing, touring, and doing four or five shows a week. Over that time, the band has really grown together. We’ve gotten incredibly tight and developed a confidence and musical shorthand that you only get from playing together night after night. We’re still pushing each other, still trying new things, and the band has more momentum now than it did when we made the last record.

The rhythm section is solid as a rock, so Andy and I can lean into each other, trade ideas, and take chances without worrying about what’s underneath us. There’s a lot of room for improvising, and the whole thing has a natural, loose feel to it, but it’s still tight enough that we can turn on a dime when we need to. That’s really become the sound of this band.

We’re a band of brothers. We’re adults, we’re friends, and there aren’t any hidden agendas. We look out for each other, and everybody has a stake in what we’re doing. When we decided to make Way Back Home, we were able to pick up where we’d left off and record songs we’d been playing for years but had never put on a CD.

Our engineer, Steve Hamilton, at Sausage Factory Music Studios, put us in a room with baffles and let us play together the way we do on stage. We could play the songs as we would at a show, then fix a flat vocal note or a badly mangled guitar line if we needed to. We kept that kind of repair to a minimum.

We also financed the record ourselves and split the expenses and, hopefully, the profits four ways. That’s different from my last several CDs, where I was the one putting the record out and paying the musicians. This is a real band record—not just a Reverend Raven record with some guys playing on it. It’s our record: four guys who have been playing together for years, taking what we’ve built on the road and putting it down on a record. That’s what Way Back Home means to me.

After 30 years of doing this, I think we’ve finally reached the point where we don’t have to think about being a band—we just are one.

“Music also lets me express feelings that I might not be comfortable talking about in an ordinary conversation. Sometimes you have things inside you that are difficult to explain. Singing about those feelings gives me a way to get them out.” (Photo: Reverend Raven & Westside Andy with The Chain Smokin' Altar Boys)

The new album “Way Back Home” began as a collection of songs fans kept asking you to record. What does it mean when people remember specific songs and want them on a record?

When I’m on stage playing or singing one of my originals and I see people singing the words back to me, it’s very gratifying. During breaks, people come up to the merchandise table and say something like, “That song you played in the first set—the third song—is that on a CD?” Sometimes they’ll hum it for me, and I’ll say, “Oh, yeah, that’s one we haven’t recorded yet.”

These are songs we’ve played for years. They don’t necessarily fit into a particular theme or set order the way songs might on a conceptual album. They’re just songs that became part of what we do.

That’s really what Way Back Home is. We finally got some of those songs down on record that people had been asking us for. It’s a nice feeling when the audience tells you what it wants to hear and you actually get the chance to give it to them.

We had fun making this record, the fans get to take these songs home, and now we’ve got a whole new batch of songs to work on for the next one.

You’re celebrating 30 years of Reverend Raven & the Chain Smokin’ Altar Boys. What has changed the most, and what has stayed the same?

A lot has changed over 30 years, but the important things have stayed the same. We still want to play our asses off, make people dance, and give them a good time. We want people to go home smiling and feeling like they got something out of the night.

I started the band as a side project while I was playing with the Blues Disciples in Milwaukee. I wanted to play full time after I got out of the Navy, and Madison Slim needed work when he wasn’t on the road with Jimmy Rogers. That was the beginning. Slim had been part of a legendary blues band, and he was a terrific singer and frontman. I learned a lot from playing behind him.

One of the great memories from that period was a show at Blues on Grand in Des Moines. We drove through a blizzard to get there. The club called to ask if we wanted to cancel because Bernard Allison’s band was stuck in the snow and they were going to offer us that band’s slot. We said no—we were coming. There were about 280 people in a club that held 240, and they had come to see Madison Slim. I didn’t even know the show had been recorded. The soundman, Lee, had a new setup and later sent me a disc while I was on the road. My wife called and said, “You’re really going to like this.” That became Live at Blues on Grand, one of my favorite CDs.

Over the years we’ve had some wonderful musicians come through the band. After Slim, there was Cadillac Pete, who played on Slow Burn and Live at the Kalamazoo Blues Festival. Then Benny Rickun came along after Jim Liban turned me on to him. Benny was an intuitive, soulful harmonica player, and he brought a different kind of feeling to the band. He played on Big Bee, My Life, Live at the Red Rocket, and Live at the Big Bull Falls Blues Festival.

Big Al Groth brought a great old-school saxophone sound—honk and growl—and a tremendous amount of excitement to our live shows. When he left, I wondered how I was going to replace that energy. Then I got lucky with Westside Andy. He brought that same kind of flair on harmonica, with his own originality and an ability to make the instrument sound almost like a saxophone.

We’ve also had some great piano players. Mickey Larson had played with Sam Lay, and Chuck Might led the local band the Bluescasters. Danny “Pork Chop” Moore was a Jerry Lee Lewis fan and a terrific blues pianist. He brought that Otis Spann kind of feel to the band and was featured on Shake Your Boogie, Live at the Red Rocket, Live at the Big Bull Falls Blues Festival, and My Life. One night, after he got a standing ovation during the second song, he leaned over the piano and said to me, “Top that, old man.” I didn’t even try. [Laughs.]

Later, Dennis Wage came back to Wisconsin after Delbert McClinton retired. Dennis had been Delbert’s keyboard player and had played on a Grammy-winning album with him. He’s on Way Back Home.

P.T. Pedersen has been with me for about 22 years. He’s played with Charlie Musselwhite, Jim Liban, Luther Tucker, and Fenton Robinson, among others. He’s a rock-solid bass player, and Craig Panosh is a great drummer. Together, they give Andy and me a foundation that lets us play freely. We’ve also been fortunate to have our roadie, James, who is a gift from heaven. He helps with the equipment and the merchandise, and he’s become an important part of the operation.

What’s changed? We’ve all got more gray hair, and a lot of the people in the audience have gray hair, too. We’re playing for people who have been coming to see us for decades. In Florida, sometimes the first 50 people in the room are wearing our band T-shirts—or Packers shirts.

What hasn’t changed is that we still care about the music and about each other. We’re a band of brothers. If somebody’s in the hospital or needs help, the rest of us pick up the slack, even if that means humping the equipment. I came out of the Navy, so I sometimes think of us as a finely tuned squadron. We listen to each other, we complement what the other guy is doing, and we know when to step forward and when to get out of the way.

After 30 years, the passion is still there. We want to play great music, make people happy, and keep doing this as long as we can.

“What I like to do is imagine how one of the musicians I grew up listening to might approach the song differently. How would Albert Collins play a Slim Harpo tune? How would Albert King approach “Got Love If You Want It” as a rumba? What might Freddie King, B.B. King, Magic Sam, or Jimmy Rogers do with it? Those guys had their own ways of interpreting music. They weren’t simply copying somebody else’s record.” (Reverend Raven / Photo by Larry Crane)

You’ve had a long musical partnership with Westside Andy, who plays on every track of Way Back Home. What makes that chemistry work so naturally, especially when you trade guitar and harmonica leads?

I first met Andy in the early ’90s. He had a great band based out of Madison called the West Side Andy/Mel Ford Band. They were the premier band in Wisconsin and set a standard of musicianship that we all looked up to.

When Jimmy Voegeli, the keyboard player who now has a band called The Jimmys, left, Andy and Mel started hiring me as the fifth piece. They preferred to have some rhythm guitar going on in addition to Mel’s guitar playing. Mel was one of the great Midwest blues guitar players, as well as a great singer. That was a really fun time.

That’s also when Clyde Stubblefield, James Brown’s legendary drummer, was living in Madison. He sometimes played the Thursday night shows at the Club Tavern with Andy and Mel, and I got to play with him the first night I was hired. When I got to the club, everything was already set up. When we got on stage, I turned around expecting to see Steven Dougherty, and there he was. I recognized him immediately and blurted out, “You’re Clyde Stubblefield!”

He looked at me, laughed, and said, “Yes, I am.”

Here I was, playing with one of the guys whose records I’d listened to, and he was just sitting there behind the drums like it was another Thursday night. I was starting to meet musicians I’d admired for years through Madison Slim, West Side Andy, Ken Saydak, and others. I was a little starstruck for a while, but I got past that.

Then, about 14 years ago, Big Al Groth had just left my band, and Andy came on board. Immediately, it took us to another level. We had to learn how to back him up at the level of musicianship he was used to, and we had to learn how to weave in and out between the two of us playing.

When Andy and I trade guitar and harmonica, it’s a combination of instinct and conscious thought, although it’s more instinct than anything else. Sometimes I’ll think afterward, “Wow, that would have sounded good,” or I’ll hear something in my head that I remember from a record I’ve listened to over the years and think it would fit perfectly. We do that with each other. Sometimes we’ll throw in little reference licks from some of the greats, and we both pick up on them. Other times we’ll trade fours, then trade twos, and we both know when to lay back and let the other guy stretch out a little.

Andy might start playing a line from a melody we both know, and I’ll immediately come up with a different rhythm to complement it, or I’ll repeat the line back to him. It’s like saying, “Hey, do you remember this lick?” And I’ll answer him with it. Sometimes we’ll throw in a repeated motif from “Honky Tonk” toward the end of a shuffle in E. It doesn’t matter what song we’re playing. If the tempo and key are right, we might go there. It doesn’t happen every night, which is part of what makes it fun. Maybe it’ll happen once a week, maybe once a month. You never know.

Sometimes we end up playing horn lines together, too. Usually, I’ll start that, and Andy picks up on it. We might carry it for 12 bars or trade phrases back and forth. I’ll play the root while he plays the third, the minor third, or the fifth, and we’ll build these little harmonized lines together. It can sound like a horn section.

He does that with Dennis Wage, too, when they play “Way Back Home” together live. Dennis and Andy will start playing the horn lines from the song, and it’s really cool. That’s the kind of thing that happens on stage. If you sit there thinking about it, it’s not going to happen. You have to be in the moment.

That’s the great part about playing with Andy. I never get tired of playing with him, and that says a lot after 14 years together. I’ve had the same band for a long time, and that shows in how tight we are, especially when I’m playing rhythm guitar and backing Andy up. Sometimes I won’t even take a guitar solo because it doesn’t serve the song. If we’ve got a great groove going and the song needs to get in and out, there’s no reason to stretch it out just because I can.

What Andy brings to the band that I don’t think I could replace is his originality. I don’t hear him playing a lot of familiar harmonica licks or solos unless he’s doing it deliberately as a reference to somebody like Little Walter, Big Walter, or James Cotton. He’s his own player. He doesn’t sound like any other harmonica player I’ve ever played with, and you can see it in the reaction he gets from audiences every night.

I’ve had two musicians who brought that kind of excitement and originality to the band. When Big Al Groth left, I wondered how I was going to replace that kind of live excitement. Then I got lucky with Westside Andy. He brings that same kind of flair, but on harmonica. He can make that instrument sound almost like a saxophone, and he has one of the best ears I’ve ever played with.

After all these years, we can listen to each other, react, and go somewhere neither one of us necessarily planned to go. That’s what makes it exciting. If Andy were gone, I couldn’t replace what he brings to this band. But that’s not something I spend much time worrying about. I’m trying to stay in the moment and take it one day at a time, which is a pretty good way to live when you’re 72.

“What hasn’t changed is that we still care about the music and about each other. We’re a band of brothers. If somebody’s in the hospital or needs help, the rest of us pick up the slack, even if that means humping the equipment.” (Reverend Raven & Westside Andy with The Chain Smokin' Altar Boys / Photo by Larry Crane)

You’ve said that after so many years together, you can walk into a room, put up the baffles, and simply “lock it in.” How important are trust and musical instinct when recording a blues album?

I think it just comes down to having played together all these years. We used to play six nights a week, especially during the summers. Over time, that went down to four nights, and after COVID, three if we were lucky. Now, as I get older, we’re sometimes down to two nights a week. But we still play, and we’re always trying different things on stage. We keep the things that work. If something doesn’t work, I’ll either try to rework it or just let it go.

By the time we go into the studio, we’re usually recording songs we’ve already tried out on stage. We see how the audience responds, tweak things a little, and get comfortable playing them live. So when we get into the studio, we’re not trying to figure out the songs from scratch. We already know what works, and we can concentrate on playing the music.

I much prefer recording together in one room rather than recording everything separately. Recording with headphones on, laying down one part at a time, feels sterile to me. It’s hard to get into the moment that way. When we’re all in the room together, everything is jelling, and it sounds the way we sound when we’re playing in a club. We just pretend there’s a crowd out there and play the best we can.

We’ll do two or three takes and keep the basic tracks from the ones we like. If I need to fix a vocal or repair a really mangled guitar line, I might overdub it, but we keep that to a minimum. I want the record to sound like a band playing together, not a bunch of individual performances assembled afterward.

I think the next CD I’m going to make will be a live album of originals. Andy’s last CD with the West Side Andy/Mel Ford Band was called Live on the West Side. It’s out of print now, but it’s just wonderful. The recording quality and balance are so good that it almost sounds like a studio album, except it’s happening live on stage. And you get that extra little bit of energy from a band playing in front of an audience.

It’s hard to describe exactly what that extra something is. You’re not thinking about what you’re going to do next or how something is going to sound on tape. You’re just playing, reacting to each other, and letting the music take you wherever it goes.

That’s what happened when we recorded Live at Blues on Grand with Madison Slim in 2002. We didn’t even know we were being recorded. I’ve talked about that with Slim since then, and we both agreed that if we’d known, we probably would have gotten in our own heads too much. We would have been thinking about the recording instead of just playing the music.

But we didn’t know, so we just played. And I think that’s when you get some of the best music.

There’s a live energy on Way Back Home even though it’s a studio album. How important is it to preserve the spontaneity, interaction, and raw feeling of your live shows?

I think it’s extremely important to preserve the spontaneity and the ability to interact with each other without getting too polished. That’s how we play our live shows, and those are my favorite kinds of records to listen to, too.

You can hear that in-the-room sound on some of the great recordings by West Coast artists and on a lot of the records by artists on Alligator Records. You can tell the musicians are playing together, listening to each other, and reacting to what’s happening musically. There’s a natural interaction that you can’t always get when everything is recorded separately.

I also like hearing a little conversation between songs. It gives you a sense of being there, listening to the band in a club. Those little moments are part of what makes a record interesting to me. I want people to hear a band playing together, listening to each other, and enjoying what they’re doing. That’s the kind of feeling we try to capture on Way Back Home.

“What excites me about walking into a club, turning on the guitars and the PA system, and playing that first note is that I get to step outside my everyday life for a while. Whatever problems come with life, I can get up on stage and sing and play songs about things that have affected me.“ (Photo: Reverend Raven)

The album includes nine covers alongside two originals. When you reinterpret a blues song that countless artists have played, what are you looking for to make it your own?

We actually have more than two original songs in our repertoire, but I wasn’t ready to record the others yet. I’m going to save them for the next CD, which I’m hoping to record live.

The nine covers on Way Back Home are songs we’ve been playing for years. People would come up to the merchandise table after a show and ask, “That song you played earlier—is that on one of your CDs?” And we’d have to tell them no. After enough of those conversations, maybe during a long van ride, we finally came up with the idea of recording some of those songs.

When I reinterpret a song, I usually try giving it a different groove. I learned that from Madison Slim. He had a way of taking a song and making it his own. For example, he’d play Slim Harpo’s “Got Love If You Want It” as a rumba. We might take another song, such as “I’ve Got to Be with You Tonight,” and give it a Magic Sam kind of groove. That’s what we do with a lot of the covers we play.

I don’t think any of us has ever sat down and said, “Let’s make this sound exactly like the original record.” If you do that, you’re just mimicking somebody else. You’re becoming a tribute act, and that’s not what Andy and I are trying to do. We’re not out there trying to educate people about vintage blues or tell them how blues is supposed to be played. There are plenty of excellent musicians who do that, and do it very well.

What I like to do is imagine how one of the musicians I grew up listening to might approach the song differently. How would Albert Collins play a Slim Harpo tune? How would Albert King approach “Got Love If You Want It” as a rumba? What might Freddie King, B.B. King, Magic Sam, or Jimmy Rogers do with it? Those guys had their own ways of interpreting music. They weren’t simply copying somebody else’s record.

That’s the fun of it for me. You take a song you love, put your own personality into it, and see where it goes. If people like what you do with it, you’ve accomplished something. And if somebody says, “Why should I listen to your version when I can listen to the original?” I understand that, too. You can’t please everybody. But I don’t see the point of making a record if you’re not going to bring something of your own to it.

“A lot has changed over 30 years, but the important things have stayed the same. We still want to play our asses off, make people dance, and give them a good time. We want people to go home smiling and feeling like they got something out of the night.” (Photo: Reverend Raven)

After 30 years and countless nights on stage, what still excites you about walking into a club, plugging in, and playing that first note? Where does the Reverend Raven story go from here?

What excites me about walking into a club, turning on the guitars and the PA system, and playing that first note is that I get to step outside my everyday life for a while. Whatever problems come with life, I can get up on stage and sing and play songs about things that have affected me.

That goes for the covers, too. When I sing Howlin’ Wolf’s “I’m Leaving You Babe,” I might reference his original intro, and we play the song pretty straight ahead. But when I sing it, I’m drawing on my own experiences. I can picture somebody from my past and sing those words directly to her. In a way, it helps me work through lingering resentments about things that have happened in my life—things I know I can’t afford to keep carrying around if I want to stay healthy and sober.

Music also lets me express feelings that I might not be comfortable talking about in an ordinary conversation. Sometimes you have things inside you that are difficult to explain. Singing about those feelings gives me a way to get them out.

When I look back on my life, I realize how fortunate I’ve been. I had a great career in the Navy, and I’ve been lucky enough to have experiences I never could have imagined growing up as a poor kid on the South Side of Chicago.

When I was 18 or 19, I’d hang out at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago and listen to the blues. I never dreamed that someday I’d be playing at Buddy Guy’s club, have my own night there, or open for B.B. King. Those things were so far beyond anything I thought was possible back then.

Just being able to play at Buddy Guy’s and open for B.B. King—if I’d never done another thing in music after that, it would have been more than enough for me. I mean, think about that. A kid from the South Side of Chicago gets to experience something like that. It’s pretty amazing when I stop and think about it.

I recently played with Bob Stroger, who was our guest at Orson’s Saloon in Cudahy. Bob is 96 years old, and he’s still humping his own equipment. He enjoys himself, and he’s the best-dressed man in the blues. Seeing him out there doing what he loves is pretty inspirational. It reminds me that there’s no reason to stop as long as you’re still able to do it and you love doing it.

I plan to keep playing until I fall over, I guess!

I think it all comes down to living one day at a time, staying in the present, and loving the life you live. If you don’t love it, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. But I’m grateful that I can go out, make a living, pay my bills, and make music with my friends.

After everything I’ve been fortunate enough to experience, I don’t take any of it for granted. It’s a gift to still be doing what I love, and I intend to keep doing it for as long as I can.

Reverend Raven & The Chain Smokin' Altar Boys - Home

(Photo: Reverend Raven & Westside Andy with The Chain Smokin' Altar Boys)