E-Mail This Article to a Friend Roomfuls of blues and jazz A healthy Ronnie Earl swings with Duke Robillard, and Jay Geils plays jazz BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Few blues guitarists have mastered the vocabulary of soul as thoroughly as Ronnie Earl. Whether it’s a matter of empathy or energy or spiritual channeling, it’s in his playing. And along with his other instrumental gifts, it’s made him a leader in the genre.

Earl’s latest recording is a long-awaited union with another New England–based blues-guitar hero, Duke Robillard. Although Robillard has a much wider grasp of styles, including jazz, Gypsy swing, and traditional rock, they find common ground in Texas and Chicago blues on The Duke Meets the Earl (Stony Plain). Fans who’ve seen these former Roomful of Blues alums together on stage will dig the instrumental spark showers — especially on the raw "Zeb’s Thing," where they swap sliding chords and slide lines, and on "My Tears," which they turn into an essay in dynamics and relaxed, poetic playing.

But for Earl, who makes a rare appearance at the Regattabar in Harvard Square this Saturday, part of the audible sensitivity and emotional pain in his instrumental language of the soul has been hard won. He’s been fighting a long battle with depression that, in the late 1990s, caused him to retreat from the spotlight of international stardom he’d spent decades winning to his Groton home to heal. The guitarist, who’s feeling better now, opened up over the phone to tell the story of his struggle.

"I felt alone as a child and was attracted to melancholy music," he explains. "When I heard blues, I could really relate to the feelings in it. I felt pain coming from the music, but on the other side of the pain, I could hear joy. When I was 18, I got introduced to drugs. I became a professional musician when I was 25, with the Rhythm Rockers, the house band at [the former Cambridge club] the Speakeasy. I got introduced to cocaine and was off and running. First it was fun, and then it was feeding the disease.

"Last month, I celebrated 16 years sober, and it is my greatest success. But when I was three years sober, I didn’t feel better. I’d see other musicians who were sober and think, ‘I’m not having as much fun.’ At that point, my band, the Broadcasters, were getting pretty well known all over the world. But I was crying a lot, and that’s one of the signs of depression: profound sadness. That was around ’92, ’93. I had management pushing me, so there was a lot of pressure to be great every night. Stress will bring out depression and mania more than anything else."

Fast-forward four years. "I was very excited. I had Tom Dowd producing The Colour of Love [Verve] and was on a major label. I had Pat Metheny’s manager [Ted Kurland] and was opening shows for Ray Charles, Aretha, B.B. King. I played Montreux and Newport. But something didn’t feel right. I was living my dreams but I felt low, empty. Because of the stress of being on the road, I developed diabetes and I got diagnosed with manic depression at almost the same time. Manic depression simply means, though it’s not a simple illness, that you have periods of being way up, with a loss of judgment, and of being way down, totally overwhelmed by life. I had to stop touring.

"It was very hard — a big loss. I had worked my whole adult life so I could go play all over the world in good venues, but I could no longer go where people wanted me due to my illness. That’s hard to accept, but I’ve had to accept it. I tell myself, ‘I did it for 25 years and how many more years could I keep going out there?’ The other thing is, I’m truly in love with my wife, Donna, and I like to see her every day. I need to feel grounded. Sometimes I think the illness helped ground me; it got me off the merry-go-round, which was very important. I discovered the ladder of success was an illusion, which Eric Clapton also told me. Success is what you have in your heart.

"A lot of friends and musicians walked away from me, but I don’t feel like a victim. People don’t know what to say or do when you have a mental illness, which is not unlike having a broken leg but invisible, a brain-chemistry thing, so it’s hard to understand. People don’t come over with casseroles when you have depression. But it’s part of my soul and part of my music and part of the path that God put me on, so I’m trying to help people out by talking about it. It’s an isolating illness, but nothing to be ashamed of."

By changing his ways, Earl has managed to manage. "These days, life is more simple, and I like it. I’m not playing as much, and I’m not leaving New England, and I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s good for my soul, like playing at Donna’s church and for developmentally disabled people and at homeless shelters. Last March, I had a severe attack of mania because I wasn’t on the right medication. I didn’t play for seven months and had to wait for the new medication to work and had to cancel some shows. But I appreciate every chance to play even more now, because I’ve had to lay on my couch and not be able to play concerts because I’ve been so sick. I also feel graced that people in New England have been so kind to me and come out to my shows. And if any of those people are wondering why they don’t see me as much as they used to, well, that’s what happened to me."