The great Jazz R&B artist George Benson never wrote more truer words about himself than those in his 2014 autobiography, Benson. Eternally humble, always gracious, with a keen instinctive musical mind, he has stood strong from his beginnings in Pittsburgh to the lights of Hollywood, New York and beyond. He is respected, has earned more awards than the day is long, has performed with the elite of the music business, and now he is about to share his knowledge and skills with his first-ever Breezin’ With The Stars event. 

A lot of musicians participate in master classes and retreats for everyday players, sharing with them what they, as longtime professional artists, have learned after many years of good, bad, and ugly. It is their gift to the like-minded who may or may not want to follow in the footprints they have laid down. To be held in Phoenix, Arizona, from January 3^rd to the 6^th, 2025, it will encompass everything from Q&A’s to jam sessions with lots of learning in-between, with guests such as Toto’s Steve Lukather, Lee Ritenour, Tommy Emmanuel, Esperanza Spalding, Andy Timmons, Stanley Jordan and others. [You can find out more information on tickets and the event itself here https://breezinwiththestars.com/] It is something Benson is very much looking forward to. “I’m going to learn quite a bit too,” he told me during our recent interview.

Whether you are a fan of soul, Jazz, R&B, rock & roll, folk or just smooth vocals with funky rhythms, the name George Benson has somehow passed by your musical atmosphere. He started on the ukulele when he was a small kid, switched to guitar, played in clubs before he hit double-digits in age, and before long, he hooked up with the Jack McDuff Band, where he learned to listen and absorb other artists. “When you hear something that touches you,” Benson wrote in his memoir, “learn it, absorb it, then make it your own. The number of Wes Montgomery solos I’ve listened to over the past fifty years can’t be counted, so he’s in my DNA – and my fingers for that matter – but even when I’m not covering one of his tunes, Wes is along for the ride.” Albums started happening, tours, special appearances with major stars; and then Quincy Jones broke him wide-open in 1980 with Give Me The Night, which charted in the Top 10 worldwide and earned him three more Grammys to add alongside the four he’d already won.

At 81, Benson is considered a legend in music – not just Jazz or R&B. He has spawned hits and accolades, more than he himself can count, and yet he still loves learning and listening and creating. Although his latest album, Dreams Do Come True: When George Benson Meets Robert Farnon, began in 1989 and was abandoned due to record company bullshit, it’s now been tweaked by Benson and released. Full of beautiful songs that fit his voice like satin honey, it’s a shame they sat quiet for so long. His version of “Song For You,” written by Leon Russell, alone is worth it’s weight in gold; add in “Yesterday,” “At Last” and “My Romance,” and you’re floating on dreams.

Before we get to my quick chat with the man himself, I do want to throw out these couple of tunes you should listen to as soon as you finish reading: “Sweet Alice Blues,” “Giblet Gravy” and on YouTube his performance from the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival. All from early in his career but show his prowess as a guitar player, especially the latter.

From his home in Phoenix, Benson shared with me stories from his youth, details about his upcoming event, and what makes a song beautiful.

Where are you at today, may I ask?

I am in Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve been there for many years. I love this place. Sunshine is my favorite thing.

You grew up in Pittsburgh, you live in Phoenix and you’ve been all over the world. When you were a little boy playing in the streets like all the other little kids in your neighborhood, did you ever imagine being anywhere but that neighborhood?

No, I never imagined being anywhere and I’d never even heard of Phoenix (laughs). As a matter of fact, people were telling me that I ain’t going to get anywhere until I went to New York, but New York was about four hundred miles from us. “You can’t make it here in Pittsburgh. There’s nothing here in Pittsburgh!” I thought Pittsburgh had a lot growing up. But not in the music world. There was a lot of music coming THROUGH there, and musicians came through there all the time because they were on their way to New York, and they had that great new turnpike called the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was a three hundred mile stretch straight to New York from Pittsburgh. So they had to come through Pittsburgh. So they’d stop in Pittsburgh and have jam sessions with people who are now some of the greatest names in Pittsburgh – Billy Eckstine and Lena Horne and people like that, Art Blakey on drums, just great musicians. So I grew up with that. They were grown when I was a little boy but I heard those names on jukeboxes all my life.

Did New York end up being your goal eventually as well?

For me, people said that’s where you had to go. That was it. That was like going to Hollywood, California, on the west coast. New York made more movies than they did in Los Angeles, California, but people didn’t know that then (laughs). So when I got to New York, I finally hooked up with the biggest record company in the world, RCA Victor, and I cut my first record. It didn’t sell any big records or anything, and it never got famous outside of Pittsburgh. I was ten years old, but I was very popular in my hometown (laughs). 

But my mother didn’t like what it did to my life because I couldn’t live like a kid anymore. Now I know that happened with Michael Jackson and a few others. They lost their childhood because music snatched them up into the entertainment world, which was vicious from a lot of different points of view. You couldn’t be that innocent kid that you grew up with trusting everybody and just living your life, you know. 

So my mother saw that when I was a little boy. My manager was going to take me to California to make me a movie star and she said, “No, not my Georgie. You’re not going to take my son to California.” So she stopped it all right there. So I went back to school and acting like the rest of the kids. And I think it was the right thing to do.

So would you say it was your mother who has always been in the back of your head keeping you grounded and humble all these years?

She was the one who gave me my way of looking at life. When I was a little boy, I used to have trouble with people, you know, getting along with people. She said, “Are you approachable? Can somebody approach you and talk to you about something? Or are you mad all the time about something? People are afraid to talk to you.” I thought about that, and that was the answer. When I loosened up, they loosened up, and I finally had friends. My whole life has been about being approachable. She taught me that and about music. She took me to all of those musicals back then. A lot of great singers back then, and I saw probably all of that stuff, and that stayed in my mind my whole life, those movies, and when I went to school, they called me up on stage to sing or to participate in every event that came along so I got used to doing that (laughs).

In January, you’re going to be sharing your knowledge and your skills with others at your Breezin’ With The Stars. What do you hope these people will learn from you?

Some people, they look to me for many things that I’m not really capable of doing. I’m not a musical scholar but when I hear a song, I know instantly what should be done to make it better. That’s been my legacy in life. When I heard “On Broadway,” I knew why I couldn’t do it the way the original was done. My managers hated that cause they wanted me to do it exactly like the original. I said, “No, that’s already been done. Why are we doing that for?” So I’d take the song and do something else with it, you know. And “Breezin’” was the same way. I had heard the original version of “Breezin’” and I said, “That’s a nice version, leave it alone, you can’t improve on that. That’s the way it sounds. But let me work with it.” And I did and it came out a smash. 

“This Masquerade,” when I heard Leon Russell singing it, I said, “It ain’t going to get better than that. What do you want me to do with it?” The manager said, “People would like to hear you sing it.” I said, why (laughs). So I said, “Okay, let me do something with it.” We put it on and started doing the do-da and putting the guitar and singing with it. They didn’t think it would work at first. “That’s no good.” I remember the first time I tried that the producer said, “That’s no good, let’s cut this short and go to something else.” So you never know where life is going to lead you but go, get some experiences.

So you’ll be playing guitar at your event and putting on a show?

I don’t really know. I got some great musicians who are going to be there for the event so something tells me that we’re going to get involved (laughs). I’m always open for everything cause you don’t know what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is all about, different inspirations make you think differently.

But I have worked with them before, maybe a couple of Japanese names I know them but I don’t think we’ve worked together but I look forward to working with them because I know their musicianship is outstanding. So yeah, I’m looking forward to all of that stuff. I’m going to learn quite a bit too (laughs). I’m not going to call it stealing; we’ll call it borrowing. I will borrow what I’m going to sing to (laughs).

Dreams Do Come True, your rediscovered album, has such beautiful songs on it and you finally got to put it out.

Well, I asked the great Quincy Jones, “Who is the baddest cat? Who is the greatest arranger in the world?” I thought he was going to say, “Me! I’m the baddest.” (laughs). I didn’t really think that cause he’s not that kind of guy. But anyway, he came up with a name I had never heard. He said, “George, for you it’s one of two names. I think this man Robert Farnon is the man you want.” So I found Robert Farnon, who was living in London, and I was over there doing a concert and I looked for him and I found him and he agreed to write and he wrote seventeen arrangements for me. I think we recorded about, no, we recorded all seventeen, cause we did it in a couple of days in a gigantic studio that held eighty-seven musicians. They borrowed them from the London Symphony Orchestra. And it was quite the day. I was amazed and mesmerized. I said, I could never live up to this music. But I’m going to take it with me and try it. I took it to New York and the songs that we didn’t finish in the studio, I worked on them. And boy did some wonderful sounds come in my head. I just was so glad I had done that. Unfortunately, the record company said, “No, we like you just the way you are, George. We like those hit records you coming up with. We don’t want anything new.” (laughs)

So I put it up and thirty years later they called me and said, “We got this stuff here and they want us to throw it out.” I said, “Don’t throw nothing out until you tell me what it is.” They said, “Robert Farnon,” and I said, “Oh man, I wondered what happened to that stuff.” So they sent it to me on an 18-wheel truck, that’s how much stuff it was they sent me from my warehouse. I whittled through the stuff and I found those tapes. Man, I couldn’t believe what was there. So we started there.

To you, what makes a song beautiful?

Songs are nothing but musical expressions of people’s thoughts. It’s like a language, you know, but if you’re talking to somebody you want them to get the point, you want them to get the whole point and not just partial. Everybody speaks English but not everybody speaks English with a conviction; not everybody speaks it with a great diction. Sometimes you like the slang that people have when they talk, you know. So all of that comes into play: What kind of song is this? Is this a song you should sing straight up and down? Or do you want to add some funky to it? Or some pop to it? What is it? So that is the kind of thing that goes through my mind. My mind knows automatically, it seems, what to do with a song when I hear a song. If somebody was singing this to me, how would I want them to tell this to me? And that’s the way I project it out from my point of view.

When you first started learning to play a real guitar, cause you started on ukulele, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?

I had small hands cause I was a little kid when I started playing and that’s why I was playing the ukulele, cause I didn’t have enough fingers to stretch across the guitar neck (laughs). So when I was ten years old, or nine years old actually, my mother and father bought me a guitar for Christmas, a little cheap instrument that kept cutting my fingers up cause of the strings. They kept sticking me in the finger and it taught me a technique that I use today. I play very light with my left hand and it gives me a lot of staccato in my playing. One thing that staccato does is you got to be fast because before you get finished with the note, you’re off of the note. You can’t be suspended in air, you got to put something in there. So I started playing fast notes (laughs) and that took me to another place in my career.

You were building a career in the sixties when there was a lot of tension happening around you in the world – the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights demonstrations, the assassinations. Did you let that affect you?

I didn’t. Because of my religion, I didn’t get tied into any of that stuff cause I knew me as an individual wasn’t going to change nothing to any real degree. The world going to be what it was or what it is today. There is no one guy going to turn this into something wonderful. It’s not going to happen, cause when that one goes the devil finds another way to get mankind to hate each other, you know. So I realized that at a young age and I stopped trying to do that. Let me just do what I do. I’m going to sing a little Georgie Benson song, I play a little ukulele and guitar and let me do that. People seem to like that and they started paying me to do that. I said, “So you’re going to pay me?” (laughs) “Yeah, man, we’ll pay you to come down and do this in our building, this school or church.” In the beginning it was churches and I didn’t stay with that long.

You went towards Jazz but you could have easily gone straight blues with your playing. Why didn’t you?

When I was a little boy, I grew up in the ghetto and the ghetto was full of different kinds of people. They had a lot of Italians and a lot of Irish people and so forth and so on, so it was a multi-racial neighborhood; a lot of Jewish people in the neighborhood. So we learned a lot of things from different angles, but you learned it from your neighbors. Some of them were kind and some of them were not. We learned who to stay away from and who to make friends with. But I started selling newspapers when I was seven years old. In my whole life, I sold one newspaper (laughs). As I was selling newspapers, I had to go to the bars and I was a little boy, I was only seven, so the jukebox speaker was almost right at my ear as I walked through the bars. I’d holler out and they couldn’t hear me. “Would you like a newspaper?” They didn’t hear me. They’d walk by me like I didn’t exist and bang me all around the room with their knees cause they didn’t know I was there (laughs).

So one guy, he said, “Hey,” he hollered at me from across the street as I came out of one of those bars. “Say little boy, gimme one of those papers, son.” And I was so happy I didn’t know what to do. Remember, we only got a penny and a half for every newspaper we sold. Newspaper sold for five cents so we got a penny and a half for that. When he bought the paper, I remember crying cause he had a quarter and I couldn’t give him any change. “That’s alright, keep the change.” I said, “Keep the change?” That’s more money than I would have made if I had sold all seven papers. 

So I took the papers back and turned in the papers I had and I went to a drug store or confectionary store next door and I saw all this candy. I was looking up at all this candy and a guy came up to me, cause now I had my ukulele with me, cause I had given it to the newsstand guy to hold for me while I sold papers. So I was at this drug store buying this candy and a guy walked up, “Hey little boy, can you play that thing?” And I turned around and strummed that thing and folks crowded around, everybody in the place crowded around me. I only got two hands so I couldn’t play the guitar and count money at the same time (laughs) and my cousin walked in and he took off his baseball cap and went around the audience and collected money. That was my first manager, I guess (laughs).

But in the jukeboxes they were playing blues mostly. They used to sing them like their long lost soul. It was very popular but every now and then I’d hear something incredible. I heard Nat Cole sing (singing) “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” Not that song then cause that was too early but his songs would come on and he sang some very pretty songs. And when I heard his voice, I said, who is that? I found out his name and I said, that is the kind of songs I like. It had a story, you see. In blues, the first two lines were always sung two times: (singing), “Well, my mama loves me and I love my mama too.” Then the next verse was, “Well, I love my mama, I love my mama too.” The same thing over and over and I didn’t like that. I liked Nat Cole when he sang, (singing) “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you.” A story, you know. (singing) “You’re so like the lady with the mystic smile.” Man, that is the way I want to sing. 

So I grew up under that influence. But that was slightly Jazz influence cause Nat Cole was considered a Jazz piano player even though he was very popular singing pop tunes. He had that great voice to go along with it. Then I heard Charlie Parker, the biggest influence in my whole life was Charlie Parker. I didn’t believe anybody could play an instrument and make me feel it like that. It was better than anybody’s talking. You couldn’t tell me a story that sounded better to me than Charlie Parker playing “Just Friends.” When I heard that I said, nobody will ever beat that and I don’t think anybody ever did. It was great.

Portraits by Matt Furman; live photo by Leslie Michele Derrough

The post Guitar Great George Benson Keeps On Breezin’ at 81 & Shares Stories Past & Present (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

With a wonderful new album on the cusp of being released on September 20^th (you can preorder here), Douglas has a lot to smile about. He’s on the road with his solo band and their first recording in seven years, The Set, features musical reflections from his soul and his roots. The lead single, a swirlingly lovely rendition of The Beatles “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” hit the airwaves a few months ago to glowing reviews. Of course, anytime Douglas places those fingers of his on a dobro’s strings, it’s like magic. He can conjure up emotions ranging from sadness to love to peace to giddiness to every little crook and cranny sensation in between. He has The Touch. And I’m sure he’d get a big laugh out of me saying that too.

A staple of Union Station with Alison Krauss since the late 1990’s, he’s also been with The Earls Of Leicester since their inception in 2013, and has played with such legendary artists as Ray Charles, Elvis Costello, James Taylor, Paul Simon and Garth Brooks, and his collaboration with John Hiatt on the singer-songwriter’s Leftover Feelings in 2021 was a five-star hootenanny of a record. “Jerry, besides being the best dobro player alive currently, he is just an amazing musician,” Hiatt told me during a 2021 interview for Glide. “He’s gone so far beyond just the instrument, the dobro, and he can play any style of music on that instrument, which is saying a pretty good deal. It’s not a fretted instrument, it’s a slide instrument, but he’s just incredible.”

One of the lucky musicians who kept working regularly during the pandemic – “I played all the way through the pandemic, on people’s records and live stream things, so I played every day but not with the band,” he said during a 2021 interview – he is now happy to be playing side-by-side with his band: Daniel Kimbro on bass, Christian Sedelmyer on fiddle and Mike Seal on guitar. And they are playing most of the new album live alongside a few oldies but goodies like “King Silkie,” “Who’s Your Uncle” and Tom Waits’ “2:19.”

With The Set, Douglas has really set his bar high while digging down deep into his Scottish roots. He once jokingly told me about his ancestors, “We had castles, we had lakes, we had lochs, we had everything. We ruled! But we also stole sheep and cattle to keep the English mad.” That fun and naughty ancestral DNA certainly shines through on such songs as “From Ankara To Izmir,” “Gone To Fortingall” and Sedelmyer’s “Deacon Waltz,” while that devilish joviality sparks friskily on “Something You Got” with Douglas himself on vocals.

“I’m proud of it. I’ve left no stone unturned,” Douglas stated. “I’ve been producing records for a long time, so I really, really put on that hat for this record. Usually, I like instrumentalists to have free rein in whatever they do. It’s the way they speak. If anybody had an idea, we chased it down to the end. I feel like it’s really finished. I’m really happy with the outcome of this whole experience.”

So while Douglas was sitting back eating candy on his tour bus on the highway to New York, we talked about the new album, bringing his roots more into the forefront, meeting Eric Clapton and some exciting news about Union Station.

The Set is filled with the sounds and vibrations from your ancestral roots in Scotland. When you knew it was time to do another record with your band, was that your original intention to go back to your so-called core?

Yeah, I think it was going to happen. It didn’t matter what kind of record I was going to make, that was going to happen cause that is just part of me now. That’s part of me as much as Flatt & Scruggs at this point. The Celtic music and listening to it, just the feeling of being there, all of that, I feel I’m from both places now. And I used what I learned from both places. They’re combined. So yeah, there’s a lot of it.

And the album cover certainly reflects what’s inside.

Oh, yeah. William Matthews is a western watercolor artist, a pretty famous guy and a friend of mine and he was in Scotland with me a few years ago and he was traveling around the Highlands painting different things that he saw. And this castle that’s on the cover is a famous castle that was actually the castle that was used in a Monty Python film. It’s a castle that was built out in the water so the only time you can get to it is by boat. But when the tide goes out, you can actually walk to it but it’s a mucky kind of a walk. You wouldn’t like it (laughs). Horses didn’t have a choice. But it didn’t stay dry long. It comes right back in. So yeah, the cover and all the music on it has that tinge as well. At this point in my life, I’m so about things over there and it’s infiltrated my musical brain.

When you go over there, do you go to the pubs where they have music and do you ever get up and play with locals?

I have, totally, yeah. That’s part of the gig. If you go in there, well, first of all, there aren’t many pubs where you just go and they’ve got a dobro for you to play (laughs) so I get out of a lot of them that way. But it makes me WANT to play. Even if I’m not playing, it makes you want to play. It’s so infectious. I don’t drink anymore so I don’t go there to drink. I go there to hang out with friends and watch people and I have just as much fun. I get drunk on the music, it’s the same thing (laughs).

How far back does your relationship go with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”?

The first time I heard that song was a million years ago but who ever forgot that song? It is ingrained in all our DNA at this point and it was a song that George Harrison wrote that The Beatles didn’t want to record so he went and got his friend Eric Clapton and they recorded it and made it a big smash hit anyway (laughs). I never got to play with George, even though I heard he was a fan, and I was definitely a fan of his, but I’d never played the song. I’d heard it all my life but I’d never played it. So I just started playing it one day and it lays so easy on the guitar it was like it was written for dobro. I started playing it and I said to the band, “Hey, let’s play this,” cause they all knew it as well as I did, and it was a real pleasant song, a nice edition to what we do. 

When and how did you meet Clapton?

I met him in Anaheim, California, when he was recording Riding With The King with BB King. I was with Alison and we played a gig in Anaheim and so we were on our way back off the stage and our road manager said, “Would ya’ll like me to bring back Eric Clapton now?” And Alison said, “Yeah, sure, bring him on back.” (laughs) And I thought, I don’t know man, Frank doesn’t just say things like that, he means what he says. Then I heard this British accent in the hallway and Alison was so gobsmacked she could hardly speak (laughs). But that is how I met him. And that was through Russ Titelman, who produced a record for me, Traveler. He produced a bunch of things for Eric and he was working on that record with them, with BB King, at the time. 

But Eric came in and started talking and asking questions and we were just like, God, this is Eric Clapton! We were trying to decide, were we supposed to bow or what (laughs). So I just kind of kept in touch with him and did his first Crossroads Festival and I’ve done every one of them except one. I think the one in New York I did not do cause I was out with Elvis Costello and I couldn’t go. But he’s a good friend. The guy plays amazing guitar and always has and no one has done more for guitar than Eric Clapton. His name is emblazoned everywhere and is etched in stone.

Tell us about more about The Set, because the majority of the songs are ones you’ve done before. 

When we went in to record this record, it’s called The Set but it could be confused with the setlist that we play because it’s pretty much what we play onstage live right now. A lot of those songs, some of them we don’t play as often and some of them are really older songs of mine that I believe have more to do with where we are and where I am in my playing in my career. I know the songs so well now. When you record a song the first time, you don’t really know it. You’re just sort of going through the motions, by the essence of what the song was. So reading down through The Set, the way we’ve laid the record out, it’s like our show. 

Plus it’s an album package. It’s two discs so it’s got a fold out, got lots of information in it. It’s like records were in the seventies. I love the whole idea of the throwback when vinyl was king and vinyl is king again. Vinyl albums outsold CDs two or three years in a row now. We’re a streaming world but we have this thing called vinyl that sounds better than anything else. So I’m trying to tie all the loose ends up in one record here. It’s not my last record. I don’t want anybody to think this is it. I’ll make another record. This is just on my own label and it’s songs that people ask for when they leave the show. They’ve heard this song and they say, “What record can I get that on?” and I have to tell them it’s out of print or you can’t get it or you’ve got to go online and pay $150 for a copy of it. So I recut a lot of those things and I like them better now.

Is that why you chose to redo “From Ankara”, cause you’ve recorded it twice already.

Yeah, it was on Skip Hop & Wobble and it was on Under The Wire, which that was the MCA Master Series. I just thought I’d put it out there on this record. I could’ve put more things like “We Hide & Seek” or something like that but that’s been on a ton of records. It’s been heard enough and I didn’t need to record that again. I just wanted to record things that I had changed and that I had really learned the songs better and can play better now. And the way the band sounds, I love this band, the sound of this band, and that’s how I want to put these songs out there, that’s how I want to entrée these songs (laughs).

Over your career, did you struggle with staying traditional versus being innovative?

I would go back to TOO traditional once in a while, just to make sure I could still do that, because that is where my encyclopedia begins, you know. So you have to stay in touch with the things that you know. You want to really know those things cause those are the roots of your musical history and the direction you are going. It’s good to go back, it was great to go back to that with the Earls Of Leicester, to really go visit my roots’ roots. I feel good about that and we did well with that. And it’s part of my pie. My life is a pie (laughs). And part of it is this band, part of it is Earls Of Leicester and part of it is just freelancing and producing records. You’ve got to divide it up, have a plan and stick to it.

We’ve always talked about someone you’ve worked with, like Elvis Costello and Ray Charles and John Hiatt, so I wanted to ask you about playing with James Taylor, because his voice and your playing fit perfectly. How did ya’ll get that started?

The first time I met him was when we did a cut of a song called “Ol’ Blue” on Mark O’Connor’s record and James came in for that. And through the years we’ve all played with him together then we’ve all split off and done things with him, he’s called us for different things and we’re just part of that community now. So Hugh Prestwood wrote a song called “The Suit.” Hugh Prestwood is a really great writer and one of his biggest songs was “The Song Remembers When” and Trisha Yearwood sang it. He just writes the most incredible songs. He wrote “Ghost In This House,” and “The Song Remembers When,” is a masterful writing of a song; and he’s done that throughout his career. They should be carved in stone somewhere. 

But he wrote a song called “The Suit” and I had asked James if he would do something on one of my records and he said, “Yeah, I have this song I really want to do.” He said, “I didn’t write this song but I love this song and I want to do it but I need a way to do it and you’re giving me the perfect way to do this.” (laughs) So we recorded it in Boston. I was up there doing Down From The Mountain, I think, at the time. So we went in the studio and recorded it and he came back in and hung out with me. I had taken people who were on the tour for the Oh Brother tour and we went in the studio – Barry Bales and Ron Block and Stuart Duncan, I forget else who we took in – and James was in there and Ron Block played guitar and he was so nervous cause he was playing guitar for James Taylor. He was like, how do you do that? (laughs) And James was playing another guitar so it’s really cool. 

Then these folks in New York City just did a short film and entered it in contests for film, film festivals, all over the country and it’s “The Suit” and it’s the story about a farmer in Nebraska who never owned a suit because he was a farmer and he didn’t need a suit. But then he died and he needed a suit and that is what this whole thing was about. 

What is the oldest dobro you have in your collection and do you ever use it?

No, I have a 1928 dobro. That was the first year that they actually manufactured and sent them out to the public but I don’t take those out. I think they’ve made it this far without me doing any damage to them so I think they’ve earned a place of respect and rest (laughs). But I check on them once in a while and I restring them and I make sure they sound like they’re supposed to sound. They are just the most beautiful sounding things. But yeah, I have some old ones and a lot of new ones but the old ones sound different than the new ones. We’ve made improvements in some ways and then in other ways it changed a little bit but they’re more hybrid guitars now than they were when the Dopyera brothers were building them.

What can you tell us about “Deacon Waltz”?

Christian wrote that for a friend of his that was getting married. He just wrote it and dropped it on the fellow and probably played it at the wedding. It’s a wedding song and yeah, it’s beautiful. That’s Christian, he plays that way, that’s how he sounds. Sometimes he sounds faster (laughs).

You’ve got a really fun song on the new album called “Something You Got” and you’re singing. How was that for you?

I like to sing (laughs). For so long I didn’t sing because who needs to sing when you have Vince Gill and Allison and James Taylor? (laughs) Not until I got a band of my own and got out on the road. I like vocal interruptions in the instrumental shows. I do not like totally instrumental shows, unless it was Chick Correa or something like that. I’m not interested in it otherwise. My shows, I thought, we need vocals and maybe I should start singing again and see what it sounds like. The first few outings were pretty terrible (laughs) but the more you do it, it’s an instrument, you have to do it, you have to keep it up. You can’t just drop it for fifty years and think, oh, this is going to come right back. This is something you have to work on every day. All those muscles are all different. But I love to sing. As a kid, I sang. When I started playing dobro, I stopped singing.

You didn’t sing in the early days of your career?

I sang parts, I sang baritone, parts that somebody needed to fill at night so I’d do it cause I can hear the part. It’s kind of hard to play dobro which has no stopping points, like frets or anything like that. Your fret is you’re holding it in your left hand and you’re in total control of your pitch so you have to be on with it. You don’t want to be out of tune and making bad sounds up there (laughs). I have a lot of trouble singing and playing at the same time. It’s real hard to do but with this great band behind me, I mean, I can stand there and sing and not have to worry about what’s going on behind me, what the music is. It’s a lot easier. I love it.

So the rest of your year, are you out on the road?

No, well, yes. I’m on the infinity tour. I’ll never stop. But I’m going to slow things down in a couple of years. Next year Union Station is going back out. We’re going to tour and do that for two years in a row. We have two records that are finished. The first one is going to drop next March and then we’ll start touring. Then another record will drop a year from then and we’ll tour again. We’ll see what happens after that. It’s really something we all have missed, you know. But we got so burned out. We played so much for twenty-five years, we were just gone and that wore everybody out. We’re all touring but not at that pace and this pace is enough for me.

You ought to go hook up with Robert Plant for a little while, like Alison.

No, I don’t need to do that (laughs) but I hope I look like that when I’m that old. Print that please! (laughs)

We’ll just call you the Golden God from now on, how about that, Jerry

I’ll take it (laughs)

Portraits by Madison Thorn (band) & Scott Simontacchi; live photo by Leslie Michele Derrough

The post Dobro Master Jerry Douglas Talks New Album ‘The Set’, Meeting Eric Clapton & Future Of Union Station (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

For Part Two of our double feature with the gentlemen behind the Texicali album, Gilmore lets us in on some good stories, old and new. He’s been around the world with his music, he’s studied philosophy and protested against the Vietnam War, has recorded and/or shared a stage with such a diversity of artists from Mudhoney to Natalie Merchant to Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris, and stood toe to toe with The Dude in The Big Lebowski. “I don’t think I ever doubted that what I wanted to do with my life was be a musician,” Gilmore told me recently during a break in his tour with Alvin. 

Although he is best known for being a solo artist, his second most notable entity is The Flatlanders with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. More recently, he’s been hanging out with Alvin on a long tour that will take them coast-to-coast before the year ends. Performing many songs from Texicali, such as “Borderland,” “Roll Around,” and the very fun “We’re Still Here,” these rascals are enjoying kicking up their heels. “I always felt that Jimmie was a great blues singer, even though he’s known more for folk-country singer-songwriter or Texas singer-songwriter stuff,” Alvin told me during our interview a few weeks ago. Although their styles can be different, they have melded together so nicely, like sprinkling cayenne pepper on the most succulent cream sauce – it’s divine.

So without further ado, here is Jimmie Dale Gilmore. 

I understand you’re doing a songwriter workshop while you’re on a break in the tour. 

Yeah, I teach a one week, well, I say teach but it’s more I conduct a workshop and they call me the teacher (laughs). But the way I look at it, I’m more like the facilitator. It’s in upstate New York at a place called the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. I set up a collaboration between small groups of people, about three members to each group, and generally, we try to set it up so that it’s people that don’t know each other, people that haven’t met before. It’s getting a little harder because a lot of people take the class every year, so a lot of them have already worked together, so it’s hard to enforce that rule. Anyway, we set it up for them to collaborate on a song during the course of the week and present it to a live audience on the night before the last day of the course.

When you have a chance to be home, what do you like to do? Are you sitting around writing songs or are you trying to be normal like me?

(laughs) We just finished a little run. We did Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio. That was the heels of a giant West Coast tour we just finished. But you know, I’ve gone through phases of writing. I’ve never been a very prolific writer, and I don’t spend a lot of time on writing cause most of my songs I’ve ever written have come from inspiration. I don’t set myself down and make myself write a song, even though in some ways I kind of regret that I haven’t had that policy. I know many people with a strong work ethic about songs and end up having a lot of material. But I just never have worked that way. In the time off, I do a lot of getting together with family, all of my kids and grandkids and their various spouses live close, in the Austin area. So we spend a lot of time together.

Your son Colin is a singer-songwriter as well. Where do you see YOU the most in HIM as a musician?

Well, that’s really hard to say because he was so surrounded by a bunch of my friends his whole life, and in some ways, I think he was at least MORE influenced by Joe Ely and Butch Hancock than he was by me (laughs). But we all were such an integral part of his growing up. We’ve all been like family all these years, and when I say family, it also includes a big group of friends.

Your friends aren’t too shabby. You’re lucky.

(laughs) I am lucky. I am really aware that I just lucked into having some close friends that turned out to be world-class musicians, you know. None of us were that early on (laughs). We were just doing it because it was fun.

Dave Alvin told me that the seeds for him to do another album with you came from when you visited him while he was having some chemo treatments. He knew then that he wanted to do another album with you. When did you know you were ready to do another album with him?

Well, for me, it was any time they wanted to. We did a year together of just the two of us playing acoustic, a duet. We thought it would be like a song swap; we’d trade songs, but we kind of really quickly discovered that we had a whole bunch of songs in common that we both knew and that we both could play together on. So we had a year of that, and in the course of that, Dave decided we needed to make a record together. That was the seed of Downey To Lubbock. 

So we made the record and toured for a year behind that. What happened was, during that year, the band, The Guilty Ones, and Dave was the one that pointed this out to me, in that year of touring we became an actual band; not just backup musicians. We traveled so much and did so much together and enjoyed it so much that it became like, wow, at my late age, I’m suddenly a new member of a new band! (laughs). When Dave was sick, gosh, we weren’t sure he would be able to do anything more. When it worked out that he recovered and recovered enough, for me, it was like, anytime Dave says he’s ready to do this, I am too. It wasn’t a decision on my part; it was just a given, a certainty.

Tell us about the song “Trying To Be Free.” I understand that it has a history that goes way back.

Oh yeah, it’s got a very interesting history. That song was on a set of songs I recorded in the sixties. I had been a folk singer, just a solo performer. Joe Ely and I had done some stuff together, the two of us. Joe had played in bands and other stuff, which I had never done when I was younger. I was totally solo. But Buddy Holly’s father put up the money for me to make a demo tape and that was one of the songs on it. I put together a band to do that recording, which ended up being the springboard for a lot of the stuff that came out of Lubbock later on. The Ely Band and The Flatlanders sprung off of the band we put together to do a six-song demo. Then we started performing around Lubbock, and I started playing in a band because of that. It was just unexpected good luck of meeting Mr Holly. He was a sweet old gentleman, kind of a salt-of-the-earth West Texas gentlemanly old guy. His wife, Buddy’s mom, was just a sweet, wonderful woman, and they both liked my music. You know, I was younger than Buddy but I didn’t ever get to meet him. I was just a fan from the distance. When I did meet his parents years later, it was after Buddy was gone.

When you listened to that song after such a long, long time, did you change it much?

Oh yeah, the style we recorded with Dave and The Guilty Ones was quite a bit different from the original recording. It’s just a different treatment of it. Dave said since it was from the sixties, he decided we’d just imitate some of the sixties music. There are little things in it, sort of like inside jokes in it. It’s got like the Everly Brothers, the little interlude thing like on “Wake Up, Little Susie,” where it goes [humming melody]. They stuck that in there. There are little things throughout the recording that kind of harken back to different songs and styles from the sixties. When I originally recorded it, we didn’t do any of that. We just recorded it straightforwardly, pretty much a country rock thing.

Both you and Dave play guitar. Where on Texicali is a moment when you feel Dave shines as a guitar player?

On everything. That’s Dave’s thing. Dave is one of the best lead guitar players around. And also, he’s the producer, so his mind is sort of behind all of it, the sounds and the arrangements and everything. Although, like I said, since it’s a band and the whole thing was recorded with this band, everybody had an input, maybe accidentally came up with something while we were doing a cut or when we were going through a tape or going through a rehearsal, it was like, “Oh man, let’s keep that in there!” I’m sort of like an adequate accompanying guitarist (laughs). I only play acoustic. I don’t ever play electric. But Dave and Chris Miller are both monsters on the electric guitar.

When did you start?

I was very young, but the ironic thing was that my dad was one of the earliest electric guitar players in Texas, but I never did learn to play electric. I have always been a music lover. I always was involved in the music that my dad loved. When I was a little bitty kid, I was just steeped in it, and that music was Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, real country stuff, real honky tonk country kind of music. And it was all on the radio. I didn’t hear it in honky tonks (laughs). But that was the genre that I was steeped in. 

When I came to the age that I started wanting to learn to play the guitar, my dad taught me a few chords. However, I had become interested in folk music and songwriting. So, I drifted more to that direction than to being an instrumentalist. So, I learned how to play the guitar well enough to accompany myself. I learned how to fingerpick and strum it as a backup to myself. Then, when I started recording, what I did was, I surrounded myself with people who were better than me. I kind of figured that out real early on that that was a necessity (laughs). I never did compete musically with the band members or anything. I was, this is your part now, this is where you shine. That set it up perfectly with Dave and me because Dave can take care of that aspect better than anybody.

Do you remember when you tried to write your first song with lyrics? Was that easy for you when you were younger?

It was in a way. The way I work, well, first of all, there is another story behind that that is kind of interesting. Terry Allen was in the same high school I was in, and Terry was a couple of years older. I knew him very slightly, but we weren’t like friends cause you know that age difference is huge when you’re in high school; you don’t hang out with guys two years older than you (laughs). But I heard Terry playing at a school carnival, and he was singing his own songs, and it was great. I was probably a sophomore, and he was a senior in high school. So I became aware of him, and I got a little bit acquainted, and then a few years later, I went and hung out with Terry out in California, and we became very close friends. 

I kind of think that I always assumed that I was going to be a musician, even though I was interested in a lot of different subjects. I read a lot and was interested in science, philosophy, and all kinds of stuff. I don’t think I ever doubted that what I wanted to do with my life was be a musician. But at that age, I thought to be a songwriter you had to be older and experienced and everything. And here was Terry, only two years older than me, already writing these really good songs. That somehow broke the spell for me, and I started writing.

What did you write about?

The way it worked for me, like I mentioned earlier, I don’t work at it. I sort of let it come to me. If an idea popped into my head of like a melody or a line, a tagline, if it stayed with me, if it kept popping up later on, then I would finally go, I think this is good, and I’m going to work on it, and then I would sit down and finish it. But I had to be convinced it was something worth messing with. Now, later on, of course, Butch was one of my best friends, but Butch and I didn’t know that each other were playing music until we were college-age. It’s very strange. We were friends at junior high school, but you know, that kind of thing where you had friends at school, but outside of school, you didn’t hang out with them cause you lived too far apart. So by the time Butch and I started spending time together, it turned out we both were playing music (laughs). Butch was playing banjo originally, and we both liked a lot of bluegrass music and especially blues music that we share in common. That’s the common thread with Dave too. The blues influenced all of us real deeply. But anyway, I don’t have a set way of going about it. I wait for the songs to happen to me.

When you started The Flatlanders, and that was the early seventies, what were those early concerts like for the band? 

Well, for the most part, The Flatlanders mainly just played at parties and at home, for friends and stuff. We didn’t play out very much. We played only a few kind of real gigs in Lubbock. We ended up going to Austin and playing in Austin. We were living in Lubbock, but we played more in Austin than we did in Lubbock, and we had a good reaction there. Joe and I both had already spent some time in Austin before The Flatlanders ever happened so we had connections there and knew the club people and stuff like that. So we were strangely almost like an Austin band than a Lubbock band, except that we were from Lubbock (laughs). 

Like I said, we played mostly for friends and for each other. In a way, we didn’t set out to be a commercial enterprise. Joe and Butch, and I were just mutual fans of each other and learning each other’s songs. That was the origin of the band really, that and Joe and I had earlier done a little bit of playing around places and then done the recording that Mr Holly subsidized. The Flatlanders were kind of an anomaly (laughs). We didn’t set out to be some kind of trailblazing thing. We were just doing what we loved. There were a lot of other members of The Flatlanders that sort of didn’t go on to be professional musicians or anything. Joe and Butch and I were the only ones that kept with it. 

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of chaos in the world. How did you feel about Vietnam? Were you worried that you would have to go there?

Oh yeah, that was part of it. We were very anti-war people at that time. In the late sixties, we had to deal with that all the time, you know. I actually was almost drafted, and then somehow, and I don’t know how this happened, but my papers got lost or something, and I never got a classification. So I didn’t get drafted. It was very weird. But Butch was in college, and Joe actually didn’t graduate from high school, and I just did a couple of years of college. I never did graduate. I did study for mainly Philosophy for a couple of years. I studied a lot of different subjects, but philosophy was the one thing that I was interested in enough to get good grades. But I also got married very, very young, and we had a daughter, and then our marriage broke up very young. So it was tumultuous all the way around because of all the Civil Rights movement and everything.

Were they having protests in your area?

Oh yes, the general population was so conservative that it was strange. In Lubbock, it was sort of dangerous to be perceived as hippies or outsiders, you know. A lot of the young people in Lubbock didn’t agree with us, even a lot of our old friends.

Did you go to any of the protests?

Oh sure, we were in them, we caused them. It was a very small number of us that were like that and we definitely did protests and stuff but it wasn’t enough people. But we traveled around a bunch too. I was in Berkeley when a lot of the riots happened. It wasn’t just Lubbock, it was the whole country. A lot of young people now don’t really realize how really dangerous it was to be an anti-war person in that time.

The opposite of all that chaos is that you lived in an ashram for a little while.

I lived in what they called an ashram for a very short period in New Orleans on Napoleon Street. But that was after The Flatlanders happened. Then I lived in Denver in a large community of people that were doing the same meditation that I was studying under this same guru. I think it got put into Wikipedia or something, like I lived in an ashram in Denver, but that’s not true. I lived in a community of people, and there were ashrams, but I wasn’t in one of them. But I was very deeply involved in that community, the study of Asian Philosophy.

What did you learn about how the consciousness works?

That question would take volumes of books to be written about (laughs). It’s still, to this day, what my main preoccupation is. I’ve been studying with a Buddhist Lama, Tibetan Lama, for many years now. My wife Janet is actually an ordained teacher in that. We’ve been studying with this same teacher for a long time. At one point he asked her to be basically his representative for our group here in Austin. When you were asking what I do with my time, a lot of it is that.

How did you get involved with a band like Mudhoney? On paper, it seems like an odd pairing, but it sounded great.

It was in the period when I was on Elektra Records and Nonesuch Records. The people there that had brought me into the label and signed me and everything were just very imaginative, innovative people. There were several individuals that were a big part of causing all that to happen for me and David Bither, who is now head of Nonesuch Records, was one of them. Natalie Merchant was a big part of getting me a record deal back in that period. I had done a record on Hi-Tone early on and that was the first one I had made under my name, not as The Flatlanders but as Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Then I went from there to Nonesuch Records and then from Nonesuch they signed me to Elektra for a couple more albums. 

So during that period, they just saw me, I think, as an experimental artist, even though I was sort of lumped in as country or whatever. They kind of recognized I was a little bit more than that and that was what brought it about. Plus it was mutual friends that were friends of that music gang in Seattle where Mudhoney was based that brought us together. You know, I probably never would have thought of it myself but I was certainly willing to experiment. It’s kind of like what still goes on even with Dave. I’m just willing to try it and see if it works.

I wanted to ask you about Townes Van Zandt. Where do you see the importance in his music?

Oh, Townes was immensely important to me, both musically and personally. We were really good friends, and it’s a tragedy that his life worked out the way it did. It’s ironic, Townes and I used to have arguments. He’d say to me, “I’m going to be like Hank Williams. People don’t know much about me and then I’ll get famous after I’m dead.” And I used to say, “Townes, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re making that happen.” He was right and it turned out to be true. But he made it be true. But Joe Ely used to say that Townes was the Patron Saint of The Flatlanders. I don’t know if you’ve heard the story before about how Joe picked up a hitchhiker and it turned out to be Townes. We’d never heard of him and he was coming from San Francisco and hitchhiking through Lubbock. He was on his way to Houston and he had a backpack with only LPs in it. He didn’t have clothes (laughs). All he had was this record he had just made. It was just so strange, you know. 

But Joe and I had been like mutual fans of each other before that but we didn’t really know each other. But Joe called me up and said, “Hey, I’ve got this record that this hitchhiker gave me. You’ve got to hear this.” We got together and that was the beginning of Joe and I hanging out all the time. That was several years before The Flatlanders happened. So Townes kind of incidentally triggered what grew into The Flatlanders.

Do you have a favorite of one of his songs?

There is so many of them. I’ve recorded a couple of them. I recorded “White Freightliner” and “No Lonesome Tune” and I always did, in very early days when Joe and I were singing as a duet, I always did “Tecumseh Valley.” He wrote so many truly great songs, it’d be hard for me to really pin it down. There are some that I think I sing really well but not necessarily that I like them better than some of the other ones.

Is there one you are itching to record that you haven’t already?

I haven’t really thought about that but now I will (laughs)

How is the rest of your year looking? You’re going back out with Dave and then what?

That’s going to take up a lot of the year. After I finish the songwriting class, we’ll be touring the East Coast, and then we’ll have a few days off, and then we’re going to do the Midwest. We’re doing the whole country with this record. I don’t really have a plan beyond that because that’s sort of a handful in itself (laughs).

And you’re playing some of these new songs?

Oh, we’re playing nearly the whole record. That’s pretty much our set, and it’s really been going over really well.

Are you doing “Roll Around” that your buddy Butch wrote?

Yes, I love it and it’s very difficult. That song is very hard to memorize the lyrics because they’re so dreamy and non-linear (laughs).

Did you change it any when you went to record it?

The presentation of it is not even similar to the way Butch did it. The song is the same and the melody and the lyrics but it’s a reggae rhythm and Butch didn’t do reggae at all. I think Butch likes reggae but that’s not his style, even in the least.

Last question: What did you like the most about filming the video for “We’re Still Here”?

It was fun doing it and the video is just as light-hearted as the song is. It was fun and that’s part of the whole deal with this band. The people in it are fun and the music is fun.

Portraits by Leslie Campbell; live photo by Leslie Michele Derrough

The post Jimmie Dale Gilmore Shares Flatlander Tales, Jamming With Mudhoney & Art of Songwriting (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

Alvin, known for his fiery guitar licks in The Blasters, and Gilmore, a soft-spoken, honest-speaking storyteller from The Flatlanders, first laid down vinyl together with 2018’s Downey To Lubbock. With Texicali, the music is sweet and salty, like it should be when the components are all comfortable with each other’s individuality of styles. “Broke Down Engine” and “Blind Owl” feature Alvin’s signature souped-up rockabilly guitar solos, while “Borderland” showcases Gilmore’s clear Texas rasp. And “We’re Still Here” is a fun homage to these two musical rascals with more road miles on them than many of the musicians out there today. 

I was honored to be able to interview both of these gentlemen separately, allowing for a two-part feature, beginning with Dave Alvin this week and Jimmie Dale Gilmore next week. Both had a lot to say about their lives and their music. It was recently announced that Alvin will be honored in September with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association alongside Don Was, Dwight Yoakam, the Reverend Gary Davis, Shelby Lynne, and the Blind Boys Of Alabama. A poet with several books of poetry and no doubt hundreds of songs to his name, Alvin is a true icon. Not even cancer could stop him, the fighter spirit beating the evil disease into remission.

The California native burst onto the scene with his brother Phil in The Blasters, a punk and rockabilly band whose song “Marie Marie” gained them national attention. Tension between them helped cause a departure by Dave following 1985’s Hard Line but the guitarist didn’t sit back on his laurels. He released solo material, joined John Doe in X for their See How We Are record, two Knitters albums, and some recordings with The Flesh Eaters. More recently, he has been experimenting within The Third Mind, an ensemble featuring Camper Van Beethoven’s Victor Krummenacher, who told me in a 2015 interview for Glide that, “I learned an awful lot about music from watching [Dave] play … He’s not scared of falling flat on his face. That was very inspiring.”

Producing the new Texicali, Alvin has brought a sharpness to everything about it without leaving out the spontaneous fun and improvisational jaunts that were there in the moment. I spoke recently with Alvin about making this record, his time in The Blasters, playing guitar after chemotherapy, and his camaraderie with Gilmore.

So you and Jimmie Dale are currently on a little break right now.

Yeah, Jimmie does things every year where he teaches at this place called the Omega up in New York. He teaches a songwriting class for about a week and a half. Then we’ll all go meet up in Boston or North Hampton, Massachusetts, and start the tour back up.

Is that how the rest of your year is going to look like? Ya’ll are going to be on the road?

Hopefully (laughs). We have gigs booked through early November, and then I have this side project called The Third Mind. I’ll go on tour with them in December and do some West Coast shows.

You just don’t stop

Well, you know, it’s kind of the plan, isn’t it (laughs)

And how long have you been on the road in your life? 

I’ve been touring full-on interstate/highway life since about 1981.

So what do you do when you’re home?

Well, today, I’m not doing anything except this. But I’m a cancer survivor if you want to use that word. I had stage four colorectal cancer that had metastasized onto my liver. It was a drag. The metastasized cancer in my liver kept coming back. They’d cut it out, and it would come back. But I’ve been in remission now since October of 2022. You know as a survivor, people talk about beating it but you don’t beat it, you just learn to live with the threat of it coming back. It’s the old Greek myth, you know, the sort of Damocles hanging above our heads. But I live on a hillside, and my hillside has this kind of semi-out-of-control garden of mine (laughs). Through the whole cancer and chemo, my garden became a place of a little sanity. So that’s what I do.

When did you and Jimmie Dale decide it was time to do another record? 

I decided it – and I don’t know if Jimmie did (laughs) – when I was hospitalized through my treatments, and Jimmie and his wife came out after one of my hospitalizations and hung out for like a week, which was really nice. But it was just various things like, when I get out of here, I want to do another record with Jimmie Dale, and I want to do this, and I want to do that, and I want to do this. So that’s when I decided, around 2020, when I was hospitalized for like nine days. 

When did you go in the studio? 

Last year. You get into remission and you start getting some of your energy back and your muscles back and that kind of stuff. The first record we did out here in California, and I had friends of mine, and friends of Jimmie’s, a variety of people, playing on it. But then we went out on tour with my band and in the process of touring, we toured for about a year and a half, it became A BAND. It wasn’t just the back-up band, it was, “Oh we’re a band!” Jimmie Dale Gilmore is in a rock & roll band! (laughs) 

So we decided for this record, we’ll cut it in Texas, because all my band members live in or around Austin. Lisa Pankratz, my drummer, her father was friends with this guy who has a recording studio in Dripping Springs, Texas, which is southwest of Austin, and that’s the town where she was from, and it’s out in the Hill Country, and it’s away from the city, and it’s just kind of like a peaceful place where you’re not bothered; cause Austin is not what it was thirty or forty years ago. It’s Seattle now: the terrible traffic and crowds and everything. So it was like, let’s cut it in the Hill Country and use the band. And that’s what we did.

Do you remember what were the early songs you guys picked out or had ready for the record?

“Borderland” and a song of mine called “Southwest Chief.” “Borderland” came pretty easy, but “Southwest Chief,” the way it’s on the record, is the way I wrote it, but I tried to do it in a couple of different ways. Then, as often is the case, you just go back to the idea you had when you actually wrote the song, the kind of guitar figures and things like that that you were playing. So we goofed around with that; we goofed around with a few things. I made four trips and drove out from California to Texas. I won’t fly my amplifiers and guitars and all that. Plus, I like driving through the desert. And we finally got “Southwest Chief” right. Then it’d be like, Jimmie would call and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s try this,” or “My wife Janet found a song called ‘Trying To Be Free’,’’ that he had written in the sixties and not only had he forgotten that he had written it but he forgot the whole song. He played it for me and I was like, “This is really great. Me and the band can do sixties radio kind of things behind it.” So there is a little bit of Motown, a little bit of Stax, a little bit of The Who. Let’s mix a little bit of everything into it. So it was nicely organic, the whole process.

And that’s the best way to do it

Kind of, yes. Sometimes, it’s alright if you have a gun at your head (laughs). “You need a song by Tuesday!” But especially when you’re really grooving after COVID and after cancer and after all these things, to kind of take our time.

You guys do a great cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine.” What about his version attracts you, and how did you most want to reinterpret your version? 

Oh, I’ve loved Blind Willie McTell since I was about fourteen, and I love the way he sings, and I love the way he plays. One of the things I love about older music – like pre-war blues and pre-war rural folk music – I like one person with one instrument kind of thing, like a person with a guitar, whether it’s Robert Johnson or Jimmie Rodgers. There is just something about the intimacy and I think that is one of the reasons that a lot of that music is still as attractive to certain people, is the intimacy between like Robert Johnson or Blind Willie McTell singing to you with just the guitar. 

I always felt that Jimmie was a great blues singer, even though he’s known more for folk-country singer-songwriter or Texas singer-songwriter stuff. One of the first gigs we ever did together when we did these acoustic tours, which started the process of us playing and recording together, he played a Blind Lemon Jefferson song, and his voice was so great at that. I was like, Wow! That really hadn’t been captured that much. He’s got such a unique phrasing, and there is a poignancy in his voice that is great for blues. A lot of them, we’ll call them Caucasians (laughs), when they attempt to sing blues, they try to put on the [sings growly], and then they go to the Dairy Queen and sound [different]. Jimmie doesn’t have that. Jimmie just sounds like Jimmie. There are a lot of versions of “Broke Down Engine,” and everybody does it roughly the same way – one person with the guitar, and they try to do it like Blind Willie McTell. If you’re good, then that could work, you know. But I’ve always loved the song, and I’ve always heard Jimmie singing it in my head if that makes sense.

There is another song on the record, an old country song by Stonewall Jackson called “Why I’m Walking,” and that’s the same thing. I’ve always heard Jimmie singing that in my head. Anyway, so with “Broke Down Engine,” I thought instead of doing a folk-blues kind of version of it, which is what people would expect, let’s do it as if it was a New Orleans rhythm section from the 1950s with Earl Palmer on drums and Lee Allen on saxophone – although there’s no saxophone (laughs). But that kind of groove, that kind of fifties New Orleans R&B groove. Then, instead of acoustic guitars, I’ll put a bunch of electric guitars on there and make it scream. Like I said, a lot of people have done the song but nobody’s done it like that.

Which guitars did you use?

The solos were done on this little high-pitched 1968 Goldtop Les Paul that belonged to my recording engineer friend. My signature guitar is my Strat.

When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?

Playing guitar (laughs). It’s true, it’s true. I grew up in an area that had so many great guitar players, and this is true, it’s only really been in the past like ten years that I’ve considered myself good.

Why?

Just because I grew up around these great guitar players. And I mean great guitar players. When I was a little teenager, they were all older guys. My brother Phil had a teenage blues band, so for whatever reason, our area around Downey was fostering great guitar players. So I’m still to this day intimidated. I could mention a couple of names of guys that just scare me (laughs). I’m good, I’m not great, but I’m good, and I certainly get my point across on guitar. But after the chemotherapy, I couldn’t play for seven months because my hands were so swollen. Then, I had to relearn how to play guitar after chemo.

Was it harder the second time?

No, it was just more painful. After seven months, your calluses are gone. The hardest part was you don’t know the pressure that you are putting on the strings. Your finger is on the string and on the right fret and everything but the tendons in your fingers aren’t feeling the pressure of the string. The best way to describe that is like if you’re playing a scale – da-da-da-da-da-da – but for a while there I’d be playing da-da-da … da-da. I’m playing it, my fingers are in the right spot but the pressure wasn’t, so it was really weird. 

Anyway, the hardest thing for me about learning to play is the same problems I have now – when to play what. I’m all about wild abandon. That is one thing that has stayed the same since I was in The Blasters. I can summon up wild abandon at the drop of a hat. So I try when I am practicing at home to NOT play with wild abandon (laughs) and on records like the one with Jimmie Dale. I’m holding back a lot that maybe in live situations, I don’t. But in the studio, you try to be a little tasteful (laughs).

You and Jimmie Dale are both storytellers. Do you remember the first story you ever tried to tell in a song?

Oh yeah. For The Blasters, I wrote a song called “Marie Marie,” and I was trying to tell a story and NOT tell it at the same time; sometimes, cause when you are writing, and I write a lot of story songs, sometimes you want to get as much information in as you can, and then other times you want to leave stuff out and let the listener decide. If somebody actually gets to the lyrics, you know what I mean, cause most people hear the beat, right, when you’re playing rock & roll or hip hop or whatever. It’s all about the beat, and then the lyrics are secondary. It’s like you got the hook phrase, “I love you, baby,” and I love that beat, and I love that message. And then maybe you’ll get around to listening to the actual words of the song and realize, hey, maybe he doesn’t love her that much (laughs). 

So with “Marie Marie,” there’s a line about a guy sitting in a car looking at a girl playing guitar on a porch, and he has to leave, and the folks say I have to go, and he’s asking her to go with him. You can take it from there anywhere you want. Why does he have to leave or why is she playing guitar and singing sad songs on a porch? So you try to fill it in enough so people get the idea and leave enough empty space so they can fill in the gaps on their own.

Tell me about the first show that you did with The Blasters. How did the crowd like you guys?

Well, that’s hard to say because our first gig was really a wedding reception with friends. It’s how we started. Somebody was getting married, and they needed a band, so we were kind of thrown together. My brother and I hadn’t really played guitar together because my brother was a really good right-time country blues finger-picking guy, and I was more, again, wild abandon. But people really liked it, you know. We were doing blues and rockabilly stuff and a couple of country things. In the early part of our career, it could vary, you know. In the very early days of The Blasters, we used to play this biker bar in West Long Beach and that was a tough joint. But they liked us (laughs). Then we started getting into playing gigs in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and it could vary. You get people that love you, you get people that throw stuff at you (laughs). 

We did this tour early in our career opening for Queen in arenas and you really haven’t lived until you’ve had like 19,000 Queen fans booing you. So you get used to rejection (laughs). But it’s good for you. For us, it really cemented our band sort of attitude and chemistry. We all grew up together; we were all childhood friends, so it was just another childhood adventure. Suddenly, we’re opening for Queen, and 19,000 people are really upset about that (laughs). But that wasn’t going to stop us. Our attitude was, well, wait for a second, Queen is paying us to be here, and they are hanging out with us in the dressing room, and you guys had to pay to get in here, and they don’t speak to you, and you’re going to boo the US? (laughs)

“We’re Still Here” is such a fun song and video. Did you and Jimmie Dale write that side-by-side or was it going back and forth?

It was going back and forth cause Jimmie and I write differently. When you co-write with people, one of the first things you suss out is, okay, what is your method? And Jimmie’s just got his own thing, and you can tell in the lyrics Jimmie is kind of a little more philosophically upfront. And mine is a little more, well, I’m going to hide it inside of this very kind of straight talk. Like, Jimmie is talking about, “Well, if you’ve never been in trouble, you’ve never been alive,” and mine is, “I had wild times in Houston at the Allen Park Inn,” which was this wild old hotel that used to be in Houston. We’re just different. So the couple of songs that we’ve written together, like the title track of the first album we did, Downey To Lubbock, we wrote together pretty much the same way – get a groove going – and they were written with the band’s musicians that were playing with us, so that was inspiring. Then Jimmie would throw out something, and I would throw out something, and it just kind of works. But this one was particularly spur of the moment; this is how we feel, you know.

What kind of truck are ya’ll riding around in in the video?

Oh, that’s an old 1949/1950 Chevy. I would love to have that, that thing was such a joy to drive; especially if they fixed the brakes, it would really be a joy. It was one of those things where if you had to stop, you had to press the brake about, I don’t know, half a block from where you wanted to stop. Once you figured that out, then you were good (laughs). But that was a beautiful Chevy. Some of the street scenes and all that stuff were shot in Austin, but then the scenes driving around were up in the Hill Country. It belonged to a guy who had some classic old cars on his property up there and he was nice enough to loan it to us. And he trusted us so much that he brought the truck over and then split (laughs). I got behind the wheel, and I was like, oh yeah, I like this.

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

It’d be like Brian May from Queen. He was very nice; all the guys in Queen were very nice. They had seen us playing in a bar in Hollywood, and we were at this point we were getting pretty popular in Southern California, and they were out on a night off, or whatever, and they said, “Hey, we’re going on tour, you want to go out on tour with us?” And we were like, “Okay, sure.” (laughs) So that would be like the first ROCK STAR. I’ve known a lot of musicians, and in growing up, my brother Phil and I were friends and followers of various older blues musicians, like Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker, people like that. So we knew those guys. 

Actually, I take it back. Probably if you want to really go back to like the first rock star, it was probably Bob “The Bear” Hite from Canned Heat. Our piano player in The Blasters, Gene Taylor, we’d all grown up together but he was the first guy to get out of Downey. You know, the word got around somehow in the blues underground that there’s this guy in southeast LA that has a killer boogie-woogie blues pianist, so he was like nineteen or so, and he was in Canned Heat for like two years. We went to a couple of shows and met everybody and got to know Larry Taylor, everybody in the band except for Alan Wilson cause he had passed away before then. So that would probably be the first one, but Brian May would be like the ROCK STAR STAR STAR (laughs).

You attended university, what were you intending to be?

In those days, I had a couple of goals. If I couldn’t be a musician, and in those days it didn’t look like I would’ve been, I probably would have ended up being either a history or literature teacher or running a dusty used book shop somewhere. I love books.

What are you reading right now?

I usually read about three books at once (laughs). I’m one of those kind of guys. Right now, I’m reading a book by Guy de la Bédoyère about everyday life in Ancient Rome, based on not only the writings of Pliny The Younger but also just off of the tombstones and things like that. It’s sort of a compendium of everything we know at this point about how to skip by in Ancient Rome. Then I’m reading a book on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I just finished a book on the fall of Berlin.

Reading about Rome, do you know where your ancestors are from? Are you a Roman?

Oh God, no (laughs). My ancestors were the barbarians (laughs). I’m half Polish and half Californian. My dad’s family was an immigrant family from Eastern Europe. My mother’s family goes back to the Salem Witch Trials and I’m not kidding. I have an ancestor who was, unfortunately, one of the judges (laughs). I don’t know which one, you’d have to ask my sister, but it’s not one we want to talk about (laughs). 

Well, you do read some heady stuff

Yeah, I don’t know what it means but I read it (laughs)

Do you get ideas from what you’re reading?

Oh yeah, yeah. I don’t read a lot of modern fiction, contemporary fiction, because like, it’s hard to discuss modern poetry of the past, say, fifty years because it’s all subjective, you know. If somebody writes a terrible poem but somebody else says, Oh, that’s great, then guess what? It’s a great poem. And it’s kind of gone that way with fiction for me. People will recommend things to me, fiction, I’ll give it a couple of pages and if you haven’t grabbed me by then, life is short, I got more to read (laughs). But the ones that really influenced me are Raymond Chandler and, to some extent, Eudora Welty and early Hemingway, things like that, things that might be at odds with each other. But every now and then, I’ll read some Fitzgerald. I’ll read Mark Twain, and you can’t go wrong there. But yeah, modern fiction is either too conceptual or it’s too commercial or it’s too intentionally obscure. 

What else is coming up for you?

I have this side-project called The Third Mind that is like an improvisational band, and we’ve done two albums, and we just did our first tour early this year. We’re putting out a live record at the beginning of next year and then we’ll do some dates with that. That is a really fun and fulfilling way to play because the songs are different. It’s the same songs every night, roughly, but we play them differently every night. Everybody in the band is a great musician, with the exception of maybe me (laughs), but it’s challenging, and it’s fun, and there are moments in parts of the shows that I do on my own – my solo shows or my shows with Jimmie Dale – that are improvisational where maybe on this song we don’t know how we’re going to end. In The Third Mind, the whole show is that. That’s really fascinating to me cause it’s very different from the way I’ve grown up playing and what I’ve done throughout my career. But yeah, at some point, I’ll do another Dave Alvin record, and when my brother gets well enough, I want to do another record with my brother. So yeah, I’ve got things I want to do.

What about with John Doe? He’s going to be having some time on his hands.

We did a Knitters reunion a couple of months back at the Mojo Nixon Memorial at the Continental Club. But John’s got his thing. He doesn’t need me wrecking his stuff (laughs). We did a couple of Knitters albums, and I did one X album, and I played on like three of John’s solo records, and then we did The Flesh Eaters right before the pandemic and all, did an album, did a tour. John is great, love playing with John, he’s fun. But, like I said, I don’t think he needs me wrecking his deal (laughs).

Portraits by Leslie Campbell

The post Americana Legend Dave Alvin Shares Wondrous Stories, Favorite Books & New Album With Jimmie Dale Gilmore ‘ Texicali’ (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

That small dream that started in a tiny house out back of Young’s family property in Kentucky with Young, singer Chris Robertson and guitar player Ben Wells has metamorphosed into hit records, sold-out shows and a reputation for being the go-to band on big-ticket tours. With a catalog of rockers like “Lonely Train,” “White Trash Millionaire,” “Feeling Fuzzy” and “Me & Mary Jane” add in “When The Pain Comes,” “Nervous,” “Not Afraid” and “R.O.A.R.” from their latest album and why would you ever want to miss out on seeing them live when they pass through your neck of the woods.

Conscious of wanting to rock out but have meaningful lyrics has always been a top priority for BSC, according to Young. “It’s always straight from the heart and I don’t mean to sound like cliché or anything but they come to us, you know. It’s through personal life events. So I think that’s what makes those songs genuine. It’s not something we set out to write, it’s something that we go, you know what, this happened and we’re going to let it come out and that’s not something we try to do. So they’re genuine and they mean something to people … [and] if you’ve written something that will live on forever and generations will listen to it. That’s cool.”

With a new tour supporting legends Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top, you have plenty of shows left to catch them; albeit playing a limited set but a knockout set at that. Thrilled to be back on the road after the confining times of the pandemic where they weren’t able to promote Human Condition, it’s pedals down for these southern boys. With the addition of Steve Jewell on bass, who brings a surge of energy to an already charged-up group, Black Stone Cherry are back, baby, watch them roar!

Speaking with Young a few days ago before he headed out for some weekend shows, he talked with me about the new album, this killer ticket tour, Jewell fitting right in with BSC and learning to tone down and play for the song.

You guys are currently out on the road on a big tour. How long has it being going on?

Let’s see, we did Shiprocked at the start of February and that was wonderful. We did about a week out there on the open water and had a great time. Then we came home for about two days, home just enough to wash clothes, and then we headed out with Saint Asonia. We did a really cool co-headlining tour with those guys and that was about a month long. So I guess we started with Skynyrd probably about three weekends ago and it’s been awesome. Those guys are legends and heroes to us, growing up and listening to them; and obviously ZZ Top too. Getting to be out with them is a big honor for us.

Speaking of ZZ Top, what makes Frank Beard such a great drummer, at least to you? 

Well, if you go back and listen to all those records, you can hear he’s a world-class drummer and it’s just crazy to be out with those guys and think about all that stuff. Like, growing up, my favorite record was Tres Hombres and Rio Grande Mud, and then later on Recycler and Eliminator. Obviously Dusty passed [in 2021] and I hated to hear about that. The last show Dusty played was in Louisville, Kentucky, and we opened for them on that show – it was a one-off – and then he passed a couple of days later. But those guys are legends. Nobody will ever be ZZ Top and Frank did some great stuff on those records. It’s just cool. It’s like, being out with Skynyrd and ZZ Top and watching these guys that are world class musicians go up there and play these phenomenal hit songs that you hear on the radio sixty times a day, or 6000 times a day (laughs). You have to kind of pinch yourself every once in a while and go, “Oh yeah, okay, this is real life,” (laughs).

So tell us about making Screamin’ At The Sky

We were talking about where did we want to record and where did we want to do the drums at, cause you have to have a great-sounding room for drums. With technology now, you can get amazing guitar sounds and bass sounds anywhere but the drums, you want to try to get a great drum sound in a great room. We tossed around some ideas and there’s an old theatre called the Plaza Theatre in Glasgow, Kentucky, and we do our annual Christmas charity shows there every two years and the sound in there is amazing. The place was built probably in the 1920’s or 1930’s, so we actually hauled all our gear over and set it up downstairs in the basement dressing room and we recorded the drums there. When we got that done, we went back to my house and recorded everything else in my back two bedrooms. I built a vocal booth out of PVC pipe and moving blankets (laughs). It was DIY but we made it work. We had our buddy Jordan Westfall, who does our front-of-house for us, our engineer on the road, and he engineered and mixed it for us and did an amazing job. 

We actually did it in two sessions. We recorded one portion, about seven or eight songs, in the wintertime. So we’re hauling all this gear and the drums and mics and everything into the Plaza Theatre and we’re going down these icy steps and trying not to fall (laughs). After we got those tracks done we went out on the road and then we actually went back in in the summertime. 

I remember the first time that I sat down and recorded some drum tracks. Chris and Steve got some scratch guitar tracks, you know, reference to the songs we were going to play, and I remember going downstairs and listening and I was like, man, it was like listening to John Bonham recordings in the castle. It was amazing. I thought, we really captured a great, great organic drum sound and I’m really pleased with the record. We wrote the record at soundchecks and on the road and we’re super, super proud of it. We got a new single, “When The Pain Comes,” that is actually doing really well right now. It’s on the radio and I think it just moved to #22 this week. A lot of stations are playing it and we’re really thankful people are digging it.

You said this album was written pretty much on the road. You must have some really good equipment on the bus for recording.

Yeah, it’s pretty wild. Chris brings out his laptop and he’s got a small interface and we kind of get in the back of the bus on days off and when we’re in kind of writing season, that’s what we call it, and we’ll put like what we call thumb drums down, which are just kind of place markers, and if somebody has a riff or an idea, technology has been great for the process of demoing stuff, for sure. I think there was even a solo or two that Chris recorded on the back of the bus that we might have even used on the record. But at the end of the day, I think the most important thing is having an amazing song that really reaches out and grabs people. That is going to always replace the amount of studio gear or anything you have. 

But we’re lucky. We’re still writing stuff that people, our fans, really still dig. And we’re always trying to reinvent the wheel but also keep it to the core of what we do as Black Stone Cherry, and what we’ve always done. You can’t make the same record twice, for sure, cause you’re going to grow; you grow as artists and you grow as a band and writers. You don’t hardly have the time anymore, the turnaround time, or the budget for it, to go into the studio and just demo stuff. You kind of have to have that done so when you go into the studio, you’ve got everything the way you want it. Of course there is stuff that always changes in the studio. But we’ve written a lot of our records that way, on the back of the bus and at soundchecks, hotel lobbies, things like that, on the fly.

Chris’s lyrics continue to be very revealing and very emotional. Was there a song in particular on Screamin’ At The Sky, lyric-wise, that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you heard him put those words out?

I think a lot of this record, it’s very transparent with a lot of emotions that we were all feeling. Of course we all four write lyrics and music, we all four have these different interpretations of how we feel, and when it comes together that’s what’s nice about having four guys that write in a band. But I love the heavy stuff. I always have, and always will. So like “Nervous” and “When The Pain Comes,” “Screamin’ At The Sky,” all of those songs are bangers, just sick to play live, and every time the guys come up with a killer riff, it’s always magical and stuff. But I think two of the songs me on the record that probably stuck out more, just because of the topic of the songs, was a song called “Here’s To The Hopeless.” That song, I remember when we were writing it, it was like, man, this is an anthem. It’s got a great positive message to it. And there’s a song called “R.O.A.R. (Raindrops On A Rose)” and that song is really special. Jordan our engineer, him and Chris started writing that song back during, I think, 2020. So those two songs definitely I think are my hair on the back of the neck songs. But we’re proud of the whole record, from top to bottom, every song on there. There’s just a lot of great stuff. 

So it’s not easy to figure out what to add into a setlist

As you progress, I think as a musician in a band, if you put out a lot of records it’s hard because on a new record, you want to play just about darn every song on the record. But you’ve also got to play the stuff that you put out in the past. It’s like we got to play “Lonely Train” and “White Trash” and “Blame It On The Boom Boom” and “In My Blood” and “Burnin’” but at the same time, you got to play your current single off the record. But there is also so many songs on records that you want to play but it depends on if you’re opening or not. We’re opening for ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd, we’re doing thirty minutes, so we can’t obviously do a lot. We do maybe seven songs but even on a headlining show, if we’re doing an hour and a half, it’s hard to get everything you want to in there and that’s the bittersweet thing. Sometimes you don’t get around to playing everything you want. But it’s a good problem too cause you’ve got that catalog of so many albums and we’re fortunate enough to have eight records. It’s a good problem (laughs).

On which of these songs do you see Black Stone Cherry’s sense of humor the most?

I don’t think there was a lot of humor on this one really (laughs), if I’m being totally honest. It was probably more on the side of true transparent emotion on this one, I think, than probably humor. Probably the next one will be a comedy record, I promise (laughs). We try to always balance everything out, you know, the dark and the light. We did do a really cool cover this time of “What’s Love Got To Do With It” by Tina Turner. We were actually in England and we were like sitting in a hotel and we were going to do a premier for the Live From The Royal Albert Hall DVD and we rented out this small theatre in London and we flew in and went to the hotel and we were just hanging out and doing some promo that week while we were in London. I think we were at the Hard Rock and I was sitting in the lobby and Chris went to his room for a minute and her song came on and I was like, man, Chris could tear that up lyrically, he could sing the crap out of that. When he came back, I said, “Chris, we need to do a cover of this, man.” So one day we were on the road when we got back to the States, and at soundcheck, I said, “Let’s see what it’s like,” and we started working on it and that’s a special song. Obviously, she passed away and we had no idea that we’d be covering that song and she would be passing but she was such an iconic artist and I’m glad we did our version of that.

How easy was it for Steve to become one of you guys?

We’ve known Steve for probably fifteen years, at least. Steve fit right in, man, he’s just a country boy like we are. He had grown up in the music scene too. He’s about eight years younger than we are and he doesn’t have as many wrinkles (laughs). He’s just a super, super, great human being, an amazing musician, funny as heck. He played guitar in a lot of local bands and had done stuff in Nashville. Him and a bunch of our buddies around home had a band called Otis that were a great blues rock band and he played guitar in that band. But man, he’s just a monster bass player and it’s super fun being onstage with him. He’s all over the place and such a great entertainer. We’re just all kind of cut from the same cloth of growing up around southern Kentucky so it fit perfectly.

Speaking of southern guys, I spoke with Artimus Pyle a few weeks ago and he mentioned you guys.

Oh, did you talk to Artimus! We love him! Artimus is like the coolest dude, man. He came up and did a show at the Plaza Theatre I was telling you about, him and The Headhunters did a New Year’s Eve show there. I came over to see them, and him and Fred during Fred’s drum solo started doing a double solo and they got me up there so I switched out with Fred and there’s some footage of Fred and Artimus and then I stepped up and it was Artimus and I doing a solo together and then Fred gets back up. It’s really cool and he’s such a great guy and talented musician. He’s a living legend for sure.

What it was like during the pandemic for you guys? When we talked for Human Condition, you were being John Fred the farmer.

Yeah, I did a lot of farming things with my uncle. I cut a lot of wood that year, but man, my dad and uncle have cattle and they’re always getting out of the fences every other day so there is something going on here at the farm all the time. I had some really pretty Orpingtons and this amazing, awesome black rooster and he was just the sweetest thing ever. But we have a bunch of coyotes down here and it’s like, man, it’s so hard (laughs). Everybody loves chickens but it’s just part of nature and it happens sometimes.

But I always try to look at the positive on anything that’s a negative. It was a change, obviously, a great disruption for everything on Earth. That year we toured six dates. We played some shows with Steel Panther in Florida and maybe one in Tennessee and one at home. It was just crazy, not being able to tour, not being able to go out and do what you’ve done and worked for your whole life. Definitely don’t want to go through that again. But I think that the positive of it, my wife and I had our third daughter born that year in August so I was home and that was a great time to me to just have time home with my family. But it was a nightmare (laughs).

Is there a song in your catalog where you had to actually tone yourself down because you were going so far over the top on the drums and it wasn’t right for the song?

That’s probably every song (laughs). There’s a bunch of different, I think, mindsets that drummers have and I think some guys don’t show off and play for the song and there’s guys that do their own thing, like Keith Moon. I think I fall somewhere in the middle there but I probably lean more toward the Keith Moon. I always want my drum parts to stand out and be noticed and be unique and different; but also, as you grow as a musician, you understand where to put those things. I think as a songwriter too, I’m terrible at guitar – I can’t play guitar for crap and my dad tried to teach me as a kid, bless his heart – so I picked up the drums. Growing up, I loved The Beatles and the Motown stuff. 

But I’ve always tried to find drum parts that actually complement the vocals. I’m kind of in an amazing situation cause I’m in a band with dudes I love to death and respect and they’re fabulous musicians so when it comes to studio stuff too it’s cool because there’s a lot of times if I get stuck on something, they’ll help me out. They’ll say, “Hey man, try this fill or try something right here.” Just like on guitar parts, I’ve hummed guitar part ideas and things to the guys. But as far as recording goes, I think when you’re in there, I always look at it as I’m going to play what I feel but also play what makes the song feel amazing. And just have fun with it and I think that’s the most important thing – to express your personality. 

There’s a cool thing that Drumeo did, the drum channel, where they take a famous drummer and they give him a song that is stripped of the drums and it’s totally in a genre that he would never play. Like, they had Liberty DeVitto from Billy Joel, they threw up a Deftones song, “My Own Summer,” and he crushed it. The drummer in the studio is playing to a guitar, vocal, and bass track and the drums are stripped out so it’s the drummer’s interpretation of what they would play on it. And they try to find songs that these drummers never heard. If they have a Jazz guy, they’ll play like some kind of crazy rock song. If they’ve got a rock drummer in, they’ll play something off the wall in like Jazz or whatever. It’s a really, really cool thing but I think one thing that makes a great drummer is being able to play many different styles of music but put your thumbprint on that drum track, make it sound like yourself. I think that is the best advice I could ever give any young drummer, or any young musician: play what you feel and make sure you put your thumbprint on it. When you’re growing up you have these musical idols and you’re trying to imitate these amazing artists, and that’s part of it for sure, but as you grow you start taking what they did and you form your own thumbprint.

Did you do anything new with the drums? Cause you don’t have a big kit.

No, I don’t. I have like one rack tom, two floors, bass drum, snare and I use a gong on my left side a lot of times; it’s just a bass drum that is turned up vertically and it has mounted legs. But I don’t have a really big drum kit. When I sit down on somebody’s drum kit and they’ve got a bunch of toms and stuff, I love it cause I can play around. But I’ve always stayed with kind of a smaller kit. I think probably for me, I think I may be more creative when I don’t have as much if that makes sense. I try to pull out or create different patterns and things like that from less, you know. Sometimes less is more. But it is fun to get behind somebody’s double bass drum kit that has ten toms. That is really fun.

Like Mike Portnoy

Oh yeah, he’s got a big kit for sure but I don’t think anybody will ever touch Terry Bozzio’s kit, though. That’s a monster in a different universe. I got to sit behind that kit. I went out to a drum workshop back in 2013 and got to sit down behind his kit and it was pretty neat. That would be a twelve hour load-in for sure (laughs). 

Portraits by Jimmy Fontaine; Live photograph by Leslie Michele Derrough

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At the moment though, Pyle is enjoying a cloudless sky with the release of his hard-fought-for new album, Anthems: Honoring The Music Of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which dropped last month on Groundhog’s Day. Featuring his APB bandmates and a host of incredible singers like Dolly Parton, Warren Haynes, and Sammy Hagar, the songs of the southern rock band are shined up and given new crisp interpretations. Canadian singer Lindsey Ell does a knockout vocal on “The Needle & The Spoon” while Haynes conjures up chill bumps from the get-go on “Saturday Night Special.” But it is Parton who brings angel wings to “Freebird.” As only Dolly can, she sends the words of Ronnie Van Zant heavenward and the tears well up in even the hardest of souls. “I cried like a baby,” Pyle told me during our interview recently.

Although the album was a project near and dear to Pyle’s heart, he had to fight the powers that be in Nashville and the Skynyrd organization to get it done. It’s no secret the man has had his run-ins with music authorities but once Parton and her producer Kent Wells were on board, that was basically all she wrote. It even broke the longtime ice between Pyle and Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington, who passed last year on March 5^th, and he added his iconic guitar solo just for Dolly, and she included it on her Rockstar album to resounding praise. If you didn’t feel misty-eyed before Anthems came to its last track, you were overflowing with tears by the time Dolly was through with you.

Arriving at this moment has given Pyle some peace. Honoring his bandmates who fell to the earth with him on October 20, 1977, but did not survive, he feels he is giving back to their children and grandchildren, and to ours, the songs that will probably go on forever. 

I had a long conversation with Pyle about making Anthems, recording his first song with Skynyrd, fighting with Nashville and the plane crash near Gillsburg, Mississippi. 

Artimus, for you personally, which song, lyric-wise, on Anthems touches you or speaks to you the most and why?

Well, that is a great question. I’ve never had that question exactly. It’s always been, What’s your favorite Skynyrd song? You know, after the plane crash and everything and losing everybody and being the last living member of the band, which is not a good feeling, every single song is sentimental and dear to my heart. But the way you put the question, I would have to say when Dolly Parton played “Freebird” for me. I was extremely emotional. When I’m playing with my band in front of sold-out crowds, I get emotional in the midst of the songs. But when Dolly played me “Freebird,” took me into the control room and sat me down, and played her vocal on the track we had recorded for her, I cried like a baby. Now, it’s more poignant than ever and more pertinent: “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me; because I must be traveling on now, there’s too many places I have to see.” That was Ronnie’s words and hearing Dolly’s little gigantic voice singing those words, it broke me down. She put her arm around me and said, “I understand.” That was before we lost Gary.

So getting Gary on there with Dolly was the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It meant so much to me and it brought Gary and I close. I cherish the texts that went back and forth between Gary and I, him saying, “Hey man, Ronnie would love this song, the way you did it. Dolly is amazing. I get such amazing feelings of nostalgia.” I mean, Gary waxed poetic on me in his texts. 

But getting this album from conception to realization was not easy, I understand.

It was not easy navigating the ins and outs of Nashville, Tennessee. That whole music business side of it, I don’t like. I love the music but the music business has definitely disappointed me. Navigating all that and getting it done and getting Gary Rossington on “Freebird” with Dolly Parton, and it’s the last thing Gary ever recorded and it brought Gary and I together closer than we had been able to be for years because the management company wanted to keep Gary and I apart. The management company lied to Gary and said that Dolly had pulled out of the project. I had to get Kent Wells, who has been Dolly Parton’s friend and producer for thirty-five years and is highly respected in Nashville, on the phone and I said, “Kent, they’ve lied to Gary and said that Dolly’s pulling out of the project.” Five minutes later, I got an answer from Gary saying, “Don’t worry, Artimus, Kent Wells called me. I know that Dolly didn’t pull out of the project. I’m laying my track down. I was lied to.”

In my new book that I’m coming out with, and the book is finished really but I’m going to add a couple of chapters because some things happened since I finished the book and I will tell about this process of trying to do this tribute album. I can only do one major project at a time. The movie that came out [Street Survivors: The True Story Of The Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash, 2020], that was a major process and the book was finished even before the movie was. So the book is sitting on the back-burner and I got to write a couple new chapters for it because things have happened that I want people to know what happened, why it happened and how it happened. That will be done in due time. 

But all of the men that wrote these songs, their children and grandchildren, will benefit financially because the royalties will be paid. All the T’s were crossed, all the I’s were dotted. There’s a lot of shenanigans up there in Nashville, Tennessee, Leslie, and we navigated it and I can’t believe it but on February 2^nd, Groundhog Day, which is my daughter Misty’s birthday, our album dropped against all odds. I had been threatened with lawsuits, holding my album hostage, wanting me to sign all these papers saying I would never say that I was from Lynyrd Skynyrd, that I would never use Ronnie Van Zant’s name; just ridiculous stuff. It was all a big fat bluff. 

When I did my movie, they sued me with a bunch of thousand dollar an hour New York City blood-sucking weasel attorneys that would sue their mothers and they’d do anything for money. And we beat them in the Court Of Appeals. They said I couldn’t do a movie, I couldn’t tell a story about my life and we beat them. And their side ended up having to pay two-million dollars or so, maybe more, in legal fees for being stupid and bringing a frivolous lawsuit when I asked all of them to come to the table with me to make this movie. Instead, they decided to attack me.

So I wanted to call the album Against All Odds (laughs) but our management and record company came up with Anthems, which I love, because Ronnie didn’t write just hit songs and hit albums. He wrote anthems with his band and that’s what this album is,it’s honoring the music of Ronnie Van Zant and his band, which I am very happy to be included. I was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2006 because of Ronnie Van Zant, because of his prolific songwriting and his vision. I never dreamed I’d be in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. I just loved playing drums. So I’m glad we got this album done against all odds.

Your band plays on this album with you. Tell us a little about them.

We’ve been together fifteen years and they are all successful businessmen, they have beautiful wives and children and homes and businesses. I’m seventy-five and they’re all like sixty. They don’t need this band to make money. They play this music cause they grew up with Lynyrd Skynyrd music and they love it as much as I do and we play it with respect and honor and accuracy. So it’s Jerry Lyda on vocals and lead guitar, Scott Raines on lead vocals and guitar, then our lead singer Brad Durden, he was in a lot of southern rock bands and worked with the great Tom Dowd. Brad, Scott, Jerry and I put this band together. And on bass is Dave Fowler, who introduced us to Dolly Parton. We do stuff to raise money for breast cancer awareness with Dolly and we’re so proud about that. 

Dave has brought so many good things to our band. He lives up in Nashville and he got us on the Grand Ole Opry on October 20^th, which was the forty-sixth anniversary of the plane crash. Dave talked to his good friend who he had played with, Lorrie Morgan, and Lorrie called the country music people there at Opryland – it’s not the Ryman, it’s the new place they built, which is humongous. We had been in San Antonio, Texas, playing for the Veterans, we raised a couple hundred thousand dollars for Veterans, got on our bus, came back east to Nashville and played the Grand Ole Opry and did a bunch of television shows to promote our new album, we dropped a single, “Sweet Home Alabama” with Ronnie Dunn from Brooks & Dunn singing it – he did such a great job, every one of the vocalists did amazing jobs – and we dropped that single in Nashville that day and then the next day, the 20th, on the forty-sixth anniversary of the plane crash, we were on the Grand Ole Opry. We did “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Swamp Music.” The place was packed.

 Vince Gill was on the show with us and he sang a song for us that he had written for his brother when his brother passed away. It was a beautiful song and there wasn’t a dry eye at Opryland because of the significance of the fact that it was the forty-sixth anniversary of the plane crash. All I could do, Leslie, was just kind of look heavenward and just think to myself, well, we’ve got this beautiful album that is honoring Ronnie and the band and here we are onstage at the Grand Ole Opry representing, still keeping that music in the public eye. It was a tearful moment for me. 

Lindsey Ell does a knock-out version of “Needle & The Spoon” on the album.

Oh yeah, I stayed in the studio with her all day long, my son and I. She’s thirty-three, hotter than a firecracker, sweet as she can be. She’s from Canada, I think Toronto or Montreal, and she’s really great. She’s super sweet, super nice and she killed it. She has a very clear voice like Sheryl Crow. You can actually understand the words that are being sung. 

There were a couple African American artists that I wanted to get on this album and they just weren’t available. You know, trying to schedule the different artists on this was not easy but it’s done and maybe we’ll do another one sometime with another batch of Skynyrd songs and bring in Bob Dylan, cause I was listening to the TV from the kitchen and I heard this voice and it was Bob Dylan. I walked in and he’s in this documentary, it was on CNN, and he said, “All you have to know, all you have to do is listen to the words of Ronnie Van Zant and his band Lynyrd Skynyrd on that song ‘Simple Man’ and that tells you everything you need to know.” He was basically saying, Listen to your mom, listen to your grandmother. I knew Ronnie’s mother and he wrote the song for her and his grandmother. And to hear Bob Dylan, I think tears came to my eyes. The Poet Laureate of the world – a lot of people would argue with that and say it’s Merle Haggard – but hearing Bob Dylan say something like that, I thought, maybe we’ll do another album someday and go for some of the deeper tracks, and bring in people like that. Eric Gales is a friend of mine and a monster guitar player. Tab Benoit. I love Tab. And all those Zydeco guys that try to help save the wetlands and the Neville family that works down there. I’d love to do another Skynyrd record and bring Tab and Eric Gales and really show the world that Ronnie wrote songs that cross all the genres. 

He spoke to humans

He did, he really did. When I lived in Jerusalem, Israel, in the Castle Of King David on Mount Zion at the school of Diaspora Yeshiva, that’s one thing I realized: we’re all the same. We want to raise our children, feed our children, keep the enemy from our door and live in peace. I’ve got friends over there that are Muslim and Arab, which aren’t necessarily the same thing, Israeli and Jewish, which aren’t necessarily the same thing, and I’m worried about all of them right now because of what’s going on. I saw with my own eyes the Arab people, they’re totally mistreated because they keep them ignorant, pissed off, hungry and these Arab leaders are living in gold-plated palaces and living that kind of life when most of the Arabic people are not enjoying that oil money. They’re kept ignorant, in the dark and downtrodden. 

And this country has been divided between the people that don’t like black people and people that like everybody. And I’m one of the people that like everybody. If you’re a good person, I don’t care what your gender, your background, the color of your skin, what religion. If you’re a good person then you’re a good person. If you’re a scumbag then it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, whether you wear a suit, if you’re a scumbag then you’re a scumbag. And that’s what Ronnie was saying to Neil Young in “Sweet Home Alabama”: don’t blame all the men in the south for the actions of some. We’re not all racist.

Warren Haynes does an amazing “Saturday Night Special” on Anthems.

Warren is the best. He’s from Asheville, North Carolina, and he is good friends with my band. They all knew each other growing up, all the different bands that Warren was in. So that’s how that came about that Warren sang on the record, because the guys in the band knew Warren and offered it to him. Also, Warren co-wrote a song for the movie that we did called Street Survivors. He wrote a song that we did in there and it’s the title track and I would put it up against any southern rock song ever written and it was written by Scott Raines, Jerry Lyda and Warren Haynes. So with that going down on the movie, they told Warren we’re going to be doing this album and I believe Warren chose “Saturday Night Special” cause he liked that song. That’s the first song that I ever recorded with Lynyrd Skynyrd in Atlanta for the movie The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds.

What do you remember about recording that song?

I remember that the day I recorded “Saturday Night Special,” that morning at 9:00, I flew from Atlanta, Georgia, to Columbus, Ohio, and signed the papers on my father’s wrongful death. He was hit from above and behind by a B-57 Weather Reconnaissance Bomber in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was in a brand new Cessna 150 with a man that had thirty-six thousand hours of flying time named Robert Stubblefield, and Dad was flying over property that he was going to build on. He was an architect and a builder, developer, and he always liked to see from the air the geographical lay of the land so he would set his homes on the lots and how he would put in his storm drains. Dad had just soloed, gotten his solo pilot’s license, and I was about to solo. I was in the Marines and I was going to go to flight school and fly jets for the Marine Corps after I got my Captain’s bars. That was the dream. Then when Dad was killed, everything changed and I became the drummer of a Southern rock band called Lynyrd Skynyrd. Life throws you some curves.

But that morning I flew up there, signed the papers to Dad’s wrongful death, met with my mother at the attorney’s office, gave the money to my mother and I had a dollar in my pocket and I flew, they had bought me a ticket, and I took my round-trip back to Atlanta. I didn’t have six dollars to pay to get out of the parking lot. Back then it was six dollars in 1973/1974. Nowadays they’ve got huge fences and electronics and cameras but I was able to walk my Volkswagon Microbus over the eight inch curb that prevented you from getting out of the parking lot and not paying. I didn’t pay the six bucks. I went directly to a gas station, put one dollar’s worth of gas in my Volkswagon Microbus, drove across Atlanta, went into the studio, Studio One, with Al Kooper [producer] and I’m behind my drums and we’re playing “Saturday Night Special” for this movie. 

I had tears, I was upset, and Al came out and said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Well, I just signed the wrongful death papers to my father and I’m upset.” And Al Kooper said, “I don’t mean to be insensitive but use that emotion.” So you can hear by the way I played “Saturday Night Special,” I’m full-on. My pedal is to the metal. When I start playing my snare drum in the beginning of that and I’m pounding, and I play it live that way to this day and I think about my father to this day and I think about that moment with Al Kooper when he said that, “I’m not trying to be insensitive but use that emotion, use whatever you’ve got.” And I did. And that was a huge hit for Lynyrd Skynyrd and the first song that I ever recorded. So “Saturday Night Special” is a very deep cut to me considering what happened to my father and what Al told me. So when you bring up “Saturday Night Special,” it goes very deep to me, and Warren did an incredible job. You can hear the pain in his voice. You can hear the hurt in his voice. And I absolutely love all the performances but especially that one.

You said you were a Marine and you enlisted in the late sixties during Vietnam. Did you have any concerns about that?

I joined the Marines to go to Vietnam. I went to every school. I was an expert on firing every weapon. I flew backseat in our trainer jets that we had in my squadron. I was an Aviation Electronics Electrician. I worked on fire control, missile control, navigation communication aboard Skyhawks and I flew backseat. That’s why they said my physiology was good, because I could take seven G’s in a dive, that’s seven times your body weight pulling against your own body. I could take +7 G’s without passing out. Also, I never threw up. You know, when you went up in one of those trainers flying backseat, a lot of the pilots would have what is known as a barf bag. Like, if you’re doing 4-point snap rolls or you’re in a dive dropping bombs out in the desert of Arizona practicing for Vietnam. But I never once threw up and that’s why they said that I was perfect for the flight program.

But you never went over there, did you?

I did not. I had my orders in my hand to go to Vietnam when my father was killed in a mid-air collision in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They canceled my orders and sent me home to be with my mom. I had a short time on my enlistment left, cause I was going to ship over and become a pilot and an officer in the Marine Corps. It was all in place. Then after Dad was killed, my life completely changed.

Do you think your time as a Marine helped you when the Skynyrd plane crashed?

Oh absolutely. Before I left the crash site, I did some triage, you know, some tourniquets, pressure bands. “Here, take this shirt and hold it on that wound.” Definitely my Marine Corps training saved lives and then putting one foot in front of the other and going to the farmhouse and bringing help back to the crash site, which is what I was trained to do. So absolutely. There were twenty-six of us on board, six people were killed on impact and myself and nineteen other people lived. In most plane crashes, that doesn’t happen. I was able to stop the bleeding. That’s the first thing you learn in combat training and I was in extensive combat training, although I didn’t go to Vietnam. Then right after my orders were cancelled, we basically pulled out of Vietnam. If I would have gone over there, I would have had to turn around basically and come right back. And I’ll tell you, Leslie, I did not want to kill anybody and I didn’t want to get killed, and I was trained how to kill people. Marines are trained how to kill people and I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to get killed, so I’m glad I didn’t have to see that. But I had a lot of friends that went over there and came back different and I had a lot of friends that went over there and didn’t come back.

You said you didn’t pass out as a pilot so did you stay awake through the plane crash?

Of course. That was my third airplane crash. One when I was eleven with my uncle, one in the Marine Corps on a search & rescue mission for a downed pilot on the coast of North Carolina in the swamps. Then of course the Skynyrd plane crash. I have never been knocked unconscious. I’ve been hit in the head really hard a lot of times and I’ve got a lot of scar tissue on my head and hair will not grow (laughs).

That’s why you keep it so long

(laughs) Yeah, I still am a hippie, you know, so I still have long hair. But the thing about the Skynyrd crash, I was never knocked unconscious and really, honestly, never in my life, and I’ve been in a lot of situations where I’ve had car wrecks and motorcycle wrecks where I could have been knocked unconscious very easily. 

But in that plane crash, I got out of the wreckage, I went back in the wreckage to help a friend of mine get his legs out, the whole time thinking the plane was going to burst into flames. It didn’t occur to me that we had no fuel. We took on 400 gallons in Greenville, South Carolina. 

Of course after the plane crash, I was my own investigator and I went back and talked to people. Our pilots did not put a wooden stick into the wing tank and check the gas, which every pilot knows you do not trust gages on old airplanes; you look at what the gasoline level is with a wooden stick, that’s widely known, and our pilots failed to do that. They made a crucial mistake. We were sixty miles away from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we spiraled in from nine thousand feet, we hit the ground about two-hundred miles an hour, and the Mississippi pine trees tore our plane completely apart. And no, I was never knocked unconscious.

The immediate thing that I knew after the period of time where we were actually crashing through the trees, when everything stopped and it was suddenly silence, and I listened to that silence and I can hear that silence right now, the first thing a man does, only as a man I can tell you, the first thing a man does after an unbelievably violent plane crash, is to check and make sure that he’s still a man. And that’s exactly what I did. The second thing was to push through the jagged metal and get out of the piece of wreckage I was in. Once I got out, I heard Don Kretzschmar yelling that he was trapped, he was pinned. So I’m thinking the plane is going to burst into flames and I went back through the hole that I had pushed through the jagged metal, cut myself up, and I went back in there and threaded Don out of that wreckage through the hole and dropped out under the plane on the ground.

Had he been sitting by you?

He was next to me. I was on the aisle over the left wing on the left side of the plane and he was sitting next to me by the window. Cassie Gaines was directly in front of me in her seat and she was killed on impact. Billy Powell for years said that Cassie had lived through the impact and Billy was wrong. He wasn’t lying, he was just wrong. She was killed on impact. I know that for a fact. If you ask ten people that see a car wreck what happened in the car wreck, you’ll probably get ten different versions. I forgave Billy for that. He said on an interview one time, “I don’t know why Artimus is so mad at me. I took back all that stuff that I said about Cassie.” I said, well good, it’s about time you take it back cause it wasn’t true. 

Have you been out to the Memorial in Mississippi?

Sure, yeah. I stopped by there one time. We were on our way to Texas and we went over to the memorial and my entire band and crew spent about an hour there. Nobody said anything, a couple of quiet questions to me about the memorial itself from members of our crew and I answered. But it was a very quiet time. Where the memorial is, it’s close to where we crashed and it’s out in the country and it’s very quiet, away from the interstate. And it’s beautiful, the memorial is beautiful.

Of all the albums that you recorded with Skynyrd, as a drummer, in your opinion, which one top to bottom do you feel you were the most locked in at your highest potential as a drummer?

Well, I didn’t like any of the sounds that they got me back in the days. It was thin. Bob Burns before me got a beautiful, warm fuzzy sound. When I came along on Nuthin’ Fancy, my tracks sounded thin against the tracks. I was very disappointed. Then later on when they digitally remastered everything and made my drums sound like the thunder that it is at the point of origin, tears came to my eyes the day I was driving down the road and heard it come on the radio. The DJ goes, “Here’s a brand new cut from Lynyrd Skynyrd that has been digitally remastered,” and they played it and it was unbelievable how good my drums sounded up against the track. 

There is no one song or one album that I can say is the height of my performing. Each album, each song, has places that I said I would change. I would have been told, “We’ll fix it in the mix,” and they don’t fix it in the mix. But when everything in our entire catalog was rebooted and recalibrated and digitally remastered with the modern technology, that’s when I had a smile on my face because I thought, now my catalog is going to stand. The remaster made a huge difference.

And Anthems sounds very crisp

It’s crisp, thank you for that. That’s why we did it, because Ronnie Van Zant deserves it. We picked these songs up, shined them up, polished them off, dusted them off. And you know, they’re still played all over the world every day on radio stations. These songs are a part of the fabric of this planet. With all of these great new vocalists, it just couldn’t be better. Thank you, Leslie, for letting me talk about this. I’ve done interviews all over the world and everybody loves the record. It’s a very special record and what made it special is people like Dolly Parton and her producer Kent Wells and all of the people that were involved. Getting Gary Rossington on there and Judy Van Zant [Ronnie’s widow] signed off on us using the wordage, Ronnie’s name and the name Lynyrd Skynyrd. Judy was fine with it because she knew the album is beautiful and she was the one who called me the night that Gary passed away. Judy called me, and we haven’t spoken that much over the years and there’s been some contention at times, but I love Judy and she called me that night and said, “Artimus, I wanted to let you know that Gary’s gone …” She didn’t want me to hear it on the television or the radio. So I thanked her. But getting Gary on there with Dolly and having those texts between Gary and I, I wouldn’t take a million dollars for that.

What, to you, was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s greatest gift to music?

Ronnie Van Zant was the impetus. It was his vision. He had the songs, he wrote those words that people could relate to. He had that gift. His little brothers don’t have it. The rest of the band were able to write some things but the words are what made the connection to everybody with that music. So I have to give it to the visionary, which is Ronnie Van Zant. The gift to music that the entire band gave us being a band going through being on the road, traveling thousands of miles all over the planet, going to Japan and all over Europe a dozen times. When we crashed, we were on a ninety-five-city world tour on our way to Australia. But Ronnie could turn a phrase and the one song that I wrote with Ronnie that I’ll give myself credit, cause I never asked for credit and said, “Hey, I came up with an idea on that” or “I wrote my own drum part” – because Ronnie let me write my own drum parts. They used to drive Bob Burns crazy telling him what to play but my deal with Ronnie when he hired me, and I was hired by Ronnie Van Zant, nobody else, I said, “My deal is I write my own drum parts. If they suck, we’ll change them.” And he said, “Deal.” 

The one song that I know in my heart that I wrote with Ronnie is the song called “That Smell.” It’s basically like a cautionary tale: be careful drinking and drugs because you might end up wrapped around a tree and you might not wake up. That was a warning from Ronnie. A lot of his songs, like “Saturday Night Special” was about gun control. Ronnie said it in many interviews, “I hate guns.” I’m the same way, I hate guns. I wish I could blink my eye and every weapon and bullet and bomb in the world would disappear. I could get on a soapbox at this point, but I won’t (laughs)

But yeah, our little album is an incredible album. The package looks great and they got a picture of me on the back and I look like I’m from Yellowstone or something (laughs). This one lady in the parking lot at Lowe’s, I was getting some bird seed for all my bird feeders, and she goes, “Does this have something to do with Yellowstone?” (laughs) And I’m going, “No ma’am, that’s not Kevin Costner, that’s me” (laughs). I’d like to be in Yellowstone. I can ride horses. I’ve been on horseback my entire life (laughs).

But Leslie, I’ve done interviews in the last month or so in Sydney, Australia; Athens, Greece; Paris, France; London, England; Edinburgh, Scotland; Montreal, Toronto, everywhere in America; and the consensus is that we have a beautiful album. And it is truly a tribute album. And when you think about the fact that we did this on purpose, by design, that the children and grandchildren of all of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd who are now in rock & roll heaven – I’m the only one still here – the royalties and the licensing fees and all the things we had to do, that money will go to the men that wrote those songs, which are the men of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which are the men in rock & roll heaven; along with our back-up singers – JoJo Billingsley, Cassie Gaines and Leslie Hawkins, who is still living in Florida and an amazing woman and singer. I got her on my last album that I did, a solo album that I did called Artimus Venomus. I wrote a song about forgiveness and Leslie is wailing on that song in perfect voice. I listened to it the other day and it’s been out for years, since 2006, when we were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.

And life is good

I’m in beautiful North Carolina in the foothills of the mountains. We’re surrounded by mountains. I’ve been married and I’ve got great memories and the girls that I was married to were incredible people but nobody can live with me, I’m an idiot (laughs). So I clean my own house, I wash my own clothes, I wash my own dishes and I’m pretty good at it (laughs). But I love playing drums. I have eight children and grandchildren and we all play drums together. We get pretty tribal and that makes my life happy.

Photographs courtesy of 2911 Media/Artimus Pyle; monument photo by Leslie Michele Derrough

The post Artimus Pyle of Lynyrd Skynyrd Talks New Album, ’77 Crash Details, Recording With Dolly Parton & More (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

Still just as lovely at 76, Boyd spent this past weekend in NYC at The Fest For Beatles Fans, and on February 13^th, an update of her 2013 book, Icons Of Rock: In Their Own Words, will be officially released. Not your run-of-the-mill music book, Boyd has always been interested in creativity, especially how musicians write songs. Having access to some of the world’s most famous artists – George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Don Henley – gave Boyd a chance to pick their brains about the muse that haunts them and how they capture the transcendental images she releases. Featuring over 75 songwriters and running 432 pages, this book is truly a holy grail for those who wonder how a song is given birth.

Boyd earned her degrees over time, ending up with a Masters in Counseling Psychology and a PhD in Humanities. Before that, the mother of two daughters with Fleetwood had been a rising star in London. Not only a model, she also worked at The Beatles Apple shop and helped run a clothing store in the heart of Flower Power San Francisco. She traveled to India with her sister, The Beatles, and the infamous Maharishi. 

Boyd had spent her earliest years in Kenya on her grandparents’ estate, which sister Pattie described in her 2007 autobiography Wonderful Tonight, “stood at the bottom of a long, winding gravel drive … with glorious views in every direction across the game reserve that surrounded it.” As idyllic as that may sound, it was not perfect, with barely-there parents who divorced and remarried other people. Jenny’s own memoir, Jennifer Juniper, was released in 2020.

With both of us having busy schedules, we decided upon an email interview right before Boyd left for the Fest. She wrote about updating her book, talks with Sinead O’Connor and Eric Clapton, and what she learned from their revelations on creativity.

When did you decide that you wanted to update your Musicians In Tune book and what did you want to add to it?

I decided to update Musicians In Tune at the end of 2022 and worked on it for most of last year. I had 8 of my original audiotapes from the 1988 – 1990 interviews and I wanted to include them in the new book in their entirety. These interviews, which had never been heard or seen before, were of Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Ringo, Eric Clapton, Don Henley, Graham Nash, Ravi Shankar, and Tony Williams. The interviews from the original book are still there but under the heading of each individual artist rather than parts of their interview in different chapter headings to do with the creative process. I also wanted to interview four current musicians to show the reader the difference between the music world in the late eighties compared to the present day.

What fascinated you about the creative process, especially with musicians and their songs?

What fascinated and inspired me, was reading psychologist Abraham Maslow’s book about the transcendent moments in a Peak Experience and how much more likely it is to take play during artistic, athletic or religious activities. I had experienced these moments occasionally while writing and I wanted to know more, I wanted to know if the musicians I interviewed ever felt any of their songs came through them.

When and how did you realize that you wanted to pursue a degree in Psychology? Was that sparked by something in particular? And how long did it take for you to pursue this?

I read Carl Jung’s book Memories, Dreams and Reflections in my early teens and was fascinated by it. I was always a deep thinker, trying to make sense of the world I was brought up in, wondering if there was more to life other than the mundane. I was a spiritual seeker, which seemed to resonate with what made people tick. I’d already got my Masters in Counselling Psychology, but after a short bout of counseling, I realized I didn’t want to become a therapist. What I wanted to do was research and knew that if I went for a PhD at the college I was already attending in LA, I would have to write a dissertation. 

Of all the musicians you talked to for the book, did anyone’s creative process surprise you, and how so?

I was surprised by American singer-songwriter and guitarist Stephen Bishop’s description of what gave him the drive to create. His stepfather hated rock and roll, and so Stephen would shut himself in the bedroom closet, trying to finish off a song or a melody before his angry stepfather returned home. That became his drive.

What did you find similar in all these artists regarding creativity? 

Except for Stephen, they all had nurturing parents or grandparents, or in the case of George Harrison, the man down the street, who encouraged them with their creativity. Another thing that surprised me was they all had humility, and this was because of the Peak Experience they felt while composing songs or playing their instrument. At times it would feel as if the words or the music was coming through them. Certain songs they had no memory of writing, it was as if they were channels to a higher power. 

I’d like to ask you about a few particular artists, starting with Sinead O’Connor whom we lost last year. You wrote in her intro that you “had the feeling she rarely felt listened to.” Can you elaborate more on your thoughts about her and how she may have confirmed that to you?

After doing my interview with Sinead, she came to my house in Malibu a couple of times with one of her friends and her small son. She wanted to borrow my daughter’s old teddy bear for her son to play with. I could tell she enjoyed being there and talking to me and my kids. I think the questions I’d asked her in our interview touched something deep inside her and allowed her to feel that someone understands her. Maybe because there was a sense of familiarity, she felt safe enough to open up. 

Regarding Peter Green, you wrote that it was the first time you had seen “creativity become a disruptive force.” Knowing him personally, can you describe him from that earliest time to how you saw him change, personally and creatively? Was he such a sensitive soul?

Peter was a sensitive soul; you could just tell when you saw him play. His persona, when I first met him while both of us were in our late teens, showed him as an East End lad with mutton chop sideburns and a great sense of humor. A couple of years later when Fleetwood Mac was in full swing as a Blues band, gone were the mutton chops, jeans, and short hair, replaced by long hair, velvet trousers, and robes. It was the beginning of his dissatisfaction with playing the circuit for money, and the beginning of what was to become schizophrenia. I would see him occasionally during this time either on meds or without, but although I heard he did the occasional gig, I never got to see him play again.  

I thought John McVie’s enthusiasm for creating music was very enlightening since we often see him as the quiet one, but his love for the art is unmistakable. Any comments on what you learned from him?

John was just always a very cool guy! It was a treat to interview him having known him for many years. He really opened up and revealed another side of himself. 

You spoke with blues artists like BB King, Buddy Guy, and John Lee Hooker. Did you find they reached down to more of a spiritual place than modern songwriters tend to do?

The word ‘Spiritual’ has a different meaning when spoken about by one of the blues artists, it is more in the context of the religion, of their church. The other musicians described their Peak Experience as spiritual, as an all-encompassing feeling of a connection to something greater than themselves, when the moment, whether playing or writing a song, can become timeless.

Eric Clapton talked about “potentially life-taking experiences.” How did you see music saved his life?

Like any artist, these moments of feeling a connection to a higher power through their music which they all describe, feed their soul and allow them to have a deeper understanding of themselves. A lot of the musicians I interviewed, including Eric, believed they were here for a reason, a sense of destiny. He felt he’d been handed something to carry on in this generation and with that came a very strong sense of responsibility to do exactly that.  

Was modeling satisfying for you?

It was for a short while, usually the photographers were young and easy to work with.  I danced along catwalks to great music instead of the more traditional walk. I enjoyed working with Pattie, and it was during a time when models, photographers, and musicians often hung out together. It was fun until I needed to find out more about life. 

What inspires you today?

Writing inspires me, connecting with other people, a beautiful sunset or sunrise, nature in general. Listening to music, dancing, and discussing creativity.  

Who was the first real rock star you ever met and how/when did you meet them?

George Harrison in 1964. My sister introduced me to him when they both started going out with each other. 

What song did you obsess over the most as a kid? And what about it do you think made it so much fun?

I was obsessed with listening to Buddy Holly when I was about eleven or twelve. It touched something deep inside me but also some of his songs made me want to dance. 

What did you love – and not love – about living in Africa in your early childhood?

I loved the smell of the earth, the big skies during the day, and the twinkling stars at night. I didn’t like and was scared of the snakes.

What was something you learned about yourself while writing Jennifer Juniper that maybe you hadn’t realized before?

I have tenacity, even through the rejections from publishers, I just kept writing and never thought for a minute I would give it up. I felt as though I had found my voice and how it felt being true to myself. 

And lastly, what’s up next for you?

Talking at the 50th anniversary at the BeatleFest in New York this coming weekend!! Just enjoying life, my family, my friends and being open to what presents itself next.

Portrait by Steve Bainbridge

The post Jenny Boyd – Sister In Law To George Harrison & Eric Clapton – Talks About New Book ‘Icons of Rock–In Their Own Word’ (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

With only a few more shows left on his 2023 tour – Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on December 07, December 08 in Ponte Vedra, Florida, and December 10 in Clearwater, Florida – Summers is already thinking about what 2024 could bring: more shows, more photography and perhaps a new album. “I like to be doing things. I never really stop,” he acknowledged. And in truth, he really hasn’t, despite the pandemic, which shut down the original dates on this tour back in 2019. 

From the time he was a young kid learning guitar, through his time in London with British blues and psychedelic bands, his fame with The Police and the after years of working on film soundtracks and exploring his musical horizons with solo albums, Circa Zero, Brazilian musicians and his love of Thelonious Monk, the Rock & Roll Hall Of Famer hasn’t let idleness seep in and distract him into complacency. “Playing music is a reward in itself. I play music. I don’t care whether I get paid or not,” he said during our previous interview in 2014. “I still love being a musician and I love playing music as being my life and I’m very happy about that, you know. It still thrills me.”

Summers touched on that as well as his current tour, book, and photography during our chat several weeks back. 

You seem to be having a very, very good year – you have the tour, the book, music, photography. Is this your ideal life now?

(laughs) That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I think along the lines of every project I can get because everything is a struggle to get done. It’s amazing if it comes off but I’m doing fine with it. I like to be doing things. I never really stop. I’ve got photo exhibitions and touring and they all have to fit together at the right times. So I’ve managed to pull off quite a bit this year.

Your book, A Series Of Glances, came out in the spring. When picking the photographs, was it more by visual context or the feelings they evoked?

It’s probably a mix between feelings, which can be sort of hard to pin down, and actually the formal laying out of a book; what makes sense, you know, and there are visual connections between each picture as you sequence them. Sequencing is a very big thing and it’s something that I enjoy. This book took about six months to put together in terms of the sequence and the layout and what I wanted to have in it. Each photograph should stand on it’s own, which is not always the case because every picture has to be super strong and there’s a sort of rhythm to the impact of each photograph. And this is a complicated, slightly abstract subject, which I don’t know if we can really get into here, but it’s very similar to music in a way, how you live with it, edit it, then move one thing and it suddenly enlightens up the rest. It’s very much like editing music with guitar solos. It’s a paradox so it’s an area that I’m used to working in cause obviously I edit my own records and mix them and all that, with an engineer, but it’s a process I’m used to. Sometimes you just have to sit and wait and let it reveal itself. There’s not a set of instructions (laughs).

When you first really became serious about photography, in those earliest photographs, how critical were you of yourself and what were you most critical of?

Well, you know, I didn’t have, in the very earliest stages, a whole set of critical faculties for photography. I was learning sort of on the job. Suddenly I had this great enthusiasm for shooting pictures and seeing them and most of my information came from the books of people like Cartier-Bresson that I would have looked at and tried to understand and then probably tried to somehow replicate in my earliest sort of rough attempts at photography. You know, again, like music, you practice, you practice, you practice and in terms of photography your eye gets better, your mind gets better, your taste for the abstract gets stronger and so on and so forth. It’s a process. It takes time and you usually start off in any medium basing yourself on someone else’s model and then you proceed on from there and try and find your own way.

As the technology advances with photography, how keen are you to advance with it?

I’m not very keen. Obviously, at this point, I pretty much 99% end up choosing digital. I went to that in 2012 after my last giant foray through Asia for three weeks. I shot ninety rolls of film. It was very difficult to deal with, going through customs and border patrols and all kinds of things like that and not to lose it and get it wiped out. But I don’t need the very latest Leica. I use a color M10 and a black & white M10 and I’m very happy with them. And of course, the superb thing about Leica photography is the lenses so I am there with that and I feel that’s the way I do it and I practice with it and that’s what I’m really comfortable with. So Leica cameras have advanced on from the M10 but I don’t particularly feel the need for it.

How about the advances in technology in terms of music and the guitar?

Well, all these things are like, to an extent, toys and you can play with them and spend a lot of time trying to get fancy sounds or fancy effects. I have some stuff but I’m not over the top with it. In my studio I have a plethora of pedals. That sounds like an album title (laughs). But I’ve got all these things, you know, and people send them to me and I have a sort of mild interest in all those guitar effects pedals. But I’m not like a dog for it, chasing after every single one, because I’m a player, a real player. And because I’m onstage at the moment and I’m alone on the stage, I have a fantastic guitar sound. But I’m only using a few pedals to achieve it. I don’t even have amplifiers anymore. So you find your own voice with it. For me, it’s all in the playing and the way you hear scales and chords, expression, composition. That’s music. Pedals are something else. Pedals aren’t music. You might make some music with them but they’re not music. Music comes from a lifetime of studying and practicing.

For the live shows you’re doing this year, which song would you say you twiddled with the most?

Twiddled with? (laughs). I like it. But it’s a bit deeper than twiddling; more like twaddling (laughs). You know, I have a show and I play to sequences of photography so it’s kind of the oldest one in the book. People have been doing this since the 1920s when piano players played to the silent screens. This is the modern version of that in a weird way but it’s a gorgeous guitar sound that comes out in huge stereo through the PA system and I have some fairly exotic photographic sequences and I play to them. 

In the set, the overall almost two hours I’m onstage, I did bring some Police material in eventually, like “Tea In The Sahara” and “Roxanne,” and the ones that I do play I slightly adapted them to be played instrumentally. The melodies are strong and I worked out a way to play these in the show to keep people happy, cause they expect a little bit of that. Then I match the photography to go with it. A good example would be a song called “Tea In The Sahara.” In that case, the reality is that I actually went to the Sahara and I photographed the Sahara scenes – sand dunes and all that kind of stuff – and it goes beautifully with the lyric of the song, which people know. I hope they remember when I play it (laughs) but I’m playing the melody essentially and it’s very moody and very strong and it works really well. 

So that’s kind of what I’m doing, as well as all other kinds of pieces. I do a whole Brazilian section and talk about how I was influenced by the film Black Orpheus when I was sixteen years old and I’ve spent half my life playing in Brazil. There’s quite a lot of backup to that one song so I play that and we have a beautiful set of film that goes with that. I’ve worked all this stuff out and it’s taken some time to really put it together to the level that it is now. But it’s very successful.

And you had started this before COVID-19, correct?

You’re right, I did start doing it. I don’t know why I didn’t do this like many, many years ago. I wasn’t alive then (laughs). But before Covid knocked it all out, I think we did about eleven shows. The last one was at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York and that was sold out and that was great and gave me great confidence in it. You know, I’m very good onstage and I can talk to the audience. I’m not some uptight guy who remains silent. I’m good at getting into it with the people. 

But yeah, basically we developed it to a point, but it was not really sophisticated as it is now. Three years off or whatever and we’ve come back to doing it and the technology advances and we’ve been able to add a lot more in. Over the course of the tour that I’ve been doing since July, you’re making notes along the way and when we had a little break we added some stuff in and changed things around and before I do these last few gigs this year in Florida, we’re going to go back in and make a few changes. It always seems like it’s such a hurry and never time to really get it right. But in the next couple of weeks, without playing any music, we’ll just run the visuals on the wall in my studio and just say, okay, we can take that one out, there’s a better one we can put in, so on and so forth. You keep sort of upping the ante on what you’re presenting. And we learned a lot. You practice something, a show like this, in your studio, let’s say, and then you go out on the road and you start doing it and it’s when you’re doing it in front of a live audience that you really get the message of I’ll do this, I’ll change that, this should come earlier, so on and so forth until you knock it into a better shape.

You’re still playing “Round Midnight,” which you’ve been doing for a long time.

I do like playing that one. It’s a beautifully constructed song. It’s written by Thelonious Monk and it was always a favorite of mine. A great composer and it’s really nice on the guitar. It’s got a nice amount of complexity to it, beautiful chords that I’ve worked on to make it sound as sophisticated as it is and generally people tend to know the song so that’s good. I mean, I could play a million of these kinds of things but I did do a Thelonious Monk album a few years back [Green Chimneys]. But I just like doing that song.

You were in London in the 1960s when there was all that great music happening. Is there something from that time period’s music environment that you find you’re incorporating into your music today?

It all started in the sixties. I mean, what’s going on today really came out of the sixties, no question about it, and I was part of that. I was in a psychedelic band in the late 1960’s. We were getting into Indian music, which was really surfacing with people like Ravi Shankar. Instead of playing over chord changes and the usual standard music stuff, we started trying to imitate sitars and ouds and do all this stuff. Everything was opening up in all of culture, not just music, and the music reflected what was going on in the arts. So yeah, I’m probably playing the same shit that I was playing back in those days (laughs). 

But you know, Ken Burns did a program about Jazz and he stopped it in 1970. Hang on, mate, it went on after that. What about all the incredible music that came after that? I was playing in that period when it had all opened up and you had Avant-Garde Jazz, Avant-Garde music, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, all these kinds of people. Then after that was the ECM school which was very influential, people like Jan Garbarek, Manfred Eicher.  So there were all these schools of music. As a musician, I think over the years when you’re learning, usually in your teens, you take all this stuff and try and achieve it on your own and practice and try and develop your hearing, your listening, your ability to hear harmony, melody; you try to become a real musician. It’s a lot of effort and time and practice. I don’t know if kids today do that kind of thing. I mean, I came from a different era, or an earlier era, where you were supposed to strive for all of this stuff.

As a guitar player, which Police album do you think, top to bottom, you were at your most creative as a guitar player?

That’s an interesting question. I’ve never been asked that before. It’s a good question but I think I did my best on all of them. Still, for me, I think the first two albums were the best ones. I think the pressure came with the third album and then the fourth and by the time we got to the fifth album, Synchronicity, the pressure was so intense to make every song a hit, it was difficult. You could feel it. We became what they often call a brand, an entity. We were so mega and when you’re that mega it doesn’t really have anything to do with genuine creativity. I think it’s true again with all media. If you’re a Jasper Johns knocking out his first paintings and it becomes so popular, you feel like you’ve got to keep doing that. That’s what people like. I think every artist feels this pressure. If you make something that really works and people really love it, very few artists really turn away from that and start making a completely different style. 

The only one I can think of in painting is Philip Guston who changed his style to what we know him for now. Before that, he was a completely different painter, which was pretty courageous to do that. I don’t know if you know his work but he’s a prime example of that. Or let’s say, for example, Bob Dylan goes electric. That freaked everybody out. There are examples of this all over the place. 

It’s not cynical but by the fifth album of The Police, we were sort of locked into our popular style and everything kind of had to sound like that. We couldn’t really get away from that, which really in a way, sadly, is that it was a good point to stop, cause we would have gone on imitating what we’d already done, artistically, although commercially, of course, everybody would have loved it, and they certainly put that argument out that you can’t stop. But we did stop.

When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?

Nothing really. I’m a born musician, I do have the gift, as I humbly suggest or we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now; you wouldn’t be interested (laughs). But it’s a physical instrument and you have to get your hands onto the physical instrument to be able to play chords, more complicated chords, bigger stretches, speed. It’s a musical instrument and it’s like playing any musical instrument. I’m a completely musical person. It wasn’t the music that was hard for me, it was physically getting your hands to move in the right way to be able to play the guitar. That’s it. I mean, I started to hear all the chords and wanted to be able to play them, wondering what they were, and that was a bit more difficult. After the really early stages, when you get into the basic chords, it gets much more sophisticated; the more you go on, the harder it gets basically.

Has there been a guitar that you totally wished was yours, because it sounded great or was beautiful to look at? 

You know, when I was a kid, fourteen or fifteen, I was actually into American Jazz guitarists so probably what I wanted at that point was the Gibson ES-175. That’s a sort of deep body Jazz guitar with a sharp cutaway. A Gibson model, beautiful, probably from the late 1950’s. That’s what I wanted. And I got it and it was stolen. It was terrible. It was pretty soon after I got it and I left it on a seat in a car. I was chasing some girl and it got ripped off and I never got it back. I got the insurance money and then I went back to London and got a Gibson ES-335, which is a great guitar and it was a breakthrough for Gibson and I’ve played them ever since. Many years later, of course, I did get another ES-175 and I have a couple of them now. 

Is there a song that you haven’t been able to bring to the live stage like you wanted?

I’ve made fifteen albums and many collaborations and I’m working up to a new album but I can’t like say, Oh, there’s one I wrote that, well, I did have a couple in The Police but I can’t remember what they were called. We recorded one song I wrote called “Omegaman” and A&M absolutely loved it and wanted it to be the first single on whatever album that was on [Ghost In The Machine] but it wasn’t written by Sting so Sting got really huffy about it and we put something else out. It’s just par for the course. You go through enough years of doing this stuff and there are bumps on the road. That’s the way it is.

So your live show now is a little bit of Police, a little bit of solo stuff and some stories?

Yeah, I started with one program and I haven’t changed it. I mean, when I started doing it, I had the screen up and the big sort of novelty was, “There’s Andy and he’s playing all his music on tour!” I’ve been doing photography and music for years and it was late in the day I decided to try and put it together. I’m surprised I didn’t do it much earlier. But yeah, I would just play the show and not really say a lot because I was there playing the screen and that was the sort of artistic message project. Now, I’ve got a really strapping manager who said, “You should talk more!” (laughs) So I actually do quite a lot of talking now so I have all these stories from my life as a musician on the road that I tell. I have about four or five of them but I’m very relaxed with it and it’s a very good way as a person onstage to bring the audience into your sphere, if you like. So I’ve been doing that all year so it’s now almost become, and it sounds corny, but An Evening With. I tell stories, I talk to the audience, I play all this shit on the guitar and everybody’s happy (laughs). That’s the way it is and I get a standing ovation every night (laughs). 

Will this continue into next year?

I’m sure we’ll do something next year. It’s wonderful to be on the stage. I love that moment, standing there and showing off and all that and playing flashy guitar. Then you’ve got your driving to the next gig and all the rest of it (laughs). Life on the road is difficult (laughs).

What about more photo exhibitions?

Yeah, they continue on. I’ve got two next year in Japan, one in Tokyo and one in Kyoto. And I’ve got the new book, the latest book is A Series Of Glances, so we’ll try to get those to the galleries there so they can be sold in Japan; that would be the obvious thing to do. So I’m not particularly slowing down. I want to make a new record so we’ll see how it goes. I get offered a lot of things and I can’t do everything. I get offers of TV shows, series and shit like that, so we’ll see. It’s all sort of coming to a boiling point now (laughs).

How do the hands feel?

My hands are great. I play all the time. I’m surrounded by guitars, but I’m a guitarist, you know. I’ve got a guitar in every room and a very nice thing these days, the result of the pandemic, is that one of my kids, Anton, he played drums for ten years as a kid, then he became a martial artist and in the middle of all this pandemic bullshit – I have drums cause I play the drums too – he wanted to play drums with me one day out of the blue, cause he hadn’t for years. So we started playing. Of course, it had been instilled in him since he was a child practically but it all started coming back. So we play four or five times a week, drums and guitar. We play all these songs and for me it’s lovely, cause obviously father/son bonding and we just enjoy playing together and it’s great for my hands. I’m playing very well cause I play all the time (laughs). It’s like I’m doing five shows a week and then we go out on the road and I’m all warmed up (laughs).

It’s very nice. We love each other, we’re father and son and we have a great time doing it. He’s keen, you know. And actually he got better and better and better as we went along. I could see his technique, his chops came up; it’s very good. So we have a book of all these different kinds of songs we play, varying from bossa nova to blues to rock, Jazz; we do all kinds of stuff. Over the course of two years now it’s been really a lovely thing. I didn’t see that coming (laughs).

Photograph by Dennis Mukai

The post Andy Summers Of The Police Talks Lifetime Of Artistic Endeavors, Favorite Guitars & Albums (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

Back in June, they gave us another spectacular showing with Peace … Like A River, their 12^th studio album to date. Recorded at the same time as 2021’s Heavy Load Blues, they kept this entity separate by recording it during the day and recording the blues at night. A personal, reflective album moving from peaceful melodies to psychedelic adventures and snarly blues featuring a wonderfully slithery Billy Gibbons, Peace … Like A River continues to advance the band into the main chapters of music history.

Again, Haynes has brought in some superb friends to add their uniqueness to his songs. Gibbons, especially, feels like he is crawling up your spine like the devil himself breathing temptation into your ear on “Shake Our Way Out.” Ruthie Foster, a gem of a singer who deserves a bigger audience, adds her heartfelt soul alongside the funk crunch of Ivan Neville on “Dreaming Out Loud.” And lo and behold, here comes Billy Bob Thornton preaching over us with a snake oil smile that might be good … or evil on “The River Only Flows One Way.”  “Your Only Friend” is moving and “After The Storm” conjures up The Doors while “Gone Too Long” hums up the spirit of Haynes’ former band, The Allman Brothers.

“The intent was only to make some sort of low-budget one-off record, do a short little tour and then go back to our day jobs,” Haynes explained to me during a 2021 interview for Glide about the origins of Gov’t Mule. “We had no idea it was going to turn into a real band. So in that way, no it didn’t turn out the way I expected. It actually exceeded any of our expectations because it turned out to be something much more that we felt deserved to be brought into the future.” That was back in 1994. In 1995, they unleashed their self-titled debut of mostly original tunes. And they just kept going, weathering through co-founder Allen Woody’s death in 2000 and Haynes’ separation from ABB in 2014 to give his full attention to the Mule. 

Currently out on the road, the North Carolina maestro of guitar, who told me he is “feeling great,” will be taking Mule to Europe in November before starting up their newly announced 30 Years Strong Tour in February. I spoke with Haynes during his stopover in Wilmington about recording what he thinks may be his most personal album yet, how gospel inspired him at an early age, his continued musical connection to Derek Trucks, and a special encounter with Eric Clapton. 

You’re playing tonight. What is a typical show day like?

I usually sleep late and then get up and get prepared to go to the venue around 3:00. We do a soundcheck shortly after, maybe have a bite to eat and make some personal phone calls, etc, etc. Then we do a soundcheck and any rehearsal that may or may not be necessary (laughs). Tonight is an early show, we’re on at 6:00, which is rare. We’re usually on at 8:00.

The last time we spoke, you guys were just releasing Heavy Load Blues and you recorded Peace … Like A River at the same time, I understand. Was that an easy transition jumping from one entity to another all in the same day?

Well, it seems a little daunting on paper but it actually turned out to be pleasantly smooth, or surprisingly smooth, I should say. We were set up in the main room, the big room, at Power Station New England for Peace … Like A River and in the small room next door, which we dubbed The Blues Room, we were set up with a whole different array of equipment: a smaller drum kit, all vintage stuff, a bunch of small old guitar amps and a separate keyboard rig. 

So we would go in around noon and work on Peace … Like A River till about 9:00 pm. Then we would take a dinner break and go next door and play blues for the rest of the night. And that was our schedule every day for several weeks. It turns out that playing blues after you’re done concentrating on complex arrangements all day long it turns out to be like a palate cleanser, a way of shutting your brain off. And that’s what you need to do to play blues, is to turn your brain off and just play. And blues is best played at night. So it all worked out.

The album has been out for several months now, do you find this is one of your most personal albums that you’ve written?

Yeah, I do. There’s a lot of introspection and a lot of self-reflection and soul searching and I think everybody was kind of going through that during lockdown. I just didn’t want to write a bunch of depressing covid-centric songs so I kind of made the acknowledged effort to utilize that mindset but try to write about a lot of different subject matters and in some cases, more personal relationship-oriented subjects. And there’re even a few humorous songs, you know. You got to maintain a sense of humor.

“Your Only Friend” is very moving. Did that story come before or after you had the melody?

They kind of came simultaneously. I was playing that chord progression on the acoustic guitar and the lyrics started coming to me and so once that happened, I put the guitar down and mostly concentrated on the lyric and the story. But the melody was kind of gradually coming into my head during that process. So it was kind of one of those rare times where it all started happening at once.

There’s a line in the song that goes, “Your shadow shows up long before you do.” Can you explain that a little bit more?

The character in “Your Only Friend” is having a really hard time and that’s just a way of saying that everything you drag behind you now precedes you.

The guitar solo is just quiet enough to feel it’s pulse. Was the temptation there to ever let that solo take off?

It never occurred to me to switch to a higher gear. It just seemed like it needed to remain melancholy and I think it suits the mood of the lyric. I mean, especially since we added the strings and everything, I could have taken it more over the top but it just seemed like it needed to be mournful and not angry but sorrowful.

Which guitar were you playing?

The Robby Krieger model Les Paul that was given to me by Robby Krieger. It has a very unique sound and I only played it on a couple of songs on Peace … Like A River. I also played it on “After The Storm,” which is very Doors-influenced. So I intentionally wanted to play Robby’s guitar for that song. And while I had it out, it seemed like the right guitar for “Your Only Friend” as well. I only played it on the solo of “Your Only Friend.”

When you were creating “Shake Our Way Out,” did you hear Billy Gibbons in the back of your head or did that come later when the song was done?

It definitely started early on. I don’t remember if it was from the beginning when I first started writing it or when we got to rehearsal or what but early on I started thinking while there’s a lot of ZZ Top influence that’s kind of creeping into this song, maybe I should give Billy a call.

Ruthie Foster is one of those remarkable singers who needs more people to know about her. When did you discover her?

When we were doing High & Mighty in Texas years ago, we were looking for some female singers to sing background on a couple of songs and somebody brought up Ruthie to me. At that time I was not familiar with her music so I kind of started checking her out and went, Oh my goodness, this person is amazing. So she wound up singing on a few tracks on High & Mighty. Then she and Ivan Neville both sang on my Man In Motion album. I’ve been a fan since I first discovered her music.

There is some gospel tinges throughout this record, as in past records. When did you realize that gospel had something meaningful you could incorporate into your music?

Well, black gospel music was actually the first sound that made the hair on my arms stand up when I was a kid, like six or seven years old; maybe even younger, I don’t know. I remember being in the car with my parents and hearing black gospel music on the radio in North Carolina where I grew up. It was just regional music and it was so powerful that something changed inside of me and even as a kid I was like, I got to figure out what this means (laughs).

That music gave way to blues which gave way to soul music and rock & roll so a huge amount of the music that we all love was inspired by black gospel music. It really wasn’t until someone took the nuance from that music and changed the lyrical concept to a more secular one that soul music and rock & roll music were born. So it’s really part of the foundation of so many of the genres of music that we all love.

You guys do Pink Floyd. For you, where do you find the genius inside the Pink Floyd songs?

Well, the songs themselves are brilliant – lyrically, melodically – and those songs stand the test of time as much as anything you can site. The uniqueness of that music, to me, illustrates the epitome of all the parts equaling something greater than the individual ingredients. All the different influences that come together in that music somehow create something that nobody had ever done before and it’s still with us.

Just recently you played with the Tedeschi Trucks Band. What do you miss most about trading guitar solos with Derek?

We’ve been friends since he was eleven years old and have played together hundreds of times. We had one of those musical connections that we’ve had from the very beginning but has grown and grown through the years, which is what happens when you allow yourselves time to explore these sorts of things. We have one of those musical connections that allows us to kind of know what the other is thinking from a musical standpoint and almost be able to transcendentally connect onstage. And it comes from hundreds and hundreds of hours of being around each other and playing music together. Obviously, there was a connection from the beginning but anytime you can allow yourselves the opportunity to spend enough time for a relationship, musically speaking, to grow, it’s only going to get better and better. So whenever we play together it’s just like drinking water, you know.

For you as a guitar player, what album in your catalog do you feel, top to bottom, you were at your most creative as a guitar player?

That’s a hard one for me. I think High & Mighty has a lot of my best guitar playing but so does Dose, so does Life Before Insanity. That’s a tough question for me because I look at each of them as an opportunity to express myself differently and I’m always thinking from the standpoint of the overall picture, the song itself and what role my guitar plays in the song, and my vocal performance, the overall band performance. It’s hard for me to separate them and that’s one of the reasons, if it makes sense, to say that I prefer keeping the live solos that I play on the live track as opposed to overdubbing. The stuff that I like the most is the solos where the band is having a conversation, musically speaking, and it’s not just the guitar solo itself but the way everybody is responding. It’s a very Jazz-oriented way of looking at it but to me, that is my favorite stuff.

Where do you see your musical explorations leading you to today? What is interesting to you right now?

Usually, I try to write music that is influenced by some direction that I’ve never taken considerable influence from before. And the same with my playing. Anytime I can draw inspiration from something that is not as familiar to me, that always seems to be a spark. I don’t really search for new equipment as often as some people do, I’m sure, but for me creating something that is different than anything I’ve done in the past is always my goal as a songwriter and to a lesser extent as a guitar player.

What was the most beautiful guitar you have ever seen?

I have a beautiful guitar moment. Will that suffice? (laughs) When the Allman Brothers played Eric Clapton’s Crossroads at Madison Square Garden, someone brought Duane Allman’s Les Paul which he played on Layla to the show and Derek Trucks and I were playing it and decided to go show it to Eric Clapton. So we walked back into Eric’s dressing room and across the room, Eric’s eyes lit up and he said, “Is that a copy of Duane’s old guitar?” And we’re like, “No, that’s Duane’s guitar.” And he became silent and said, “I haven’t seen that guitar since we recorded Layla.” But he recognized it from across the room. It was tuned to open E so he played it for a minute and then handed it back to Derek cause Derek plays in open E all the time. But it was a beautiful moment and of course, Derek and I both played that guitar onstage but that stands out. I’ve thankfully seen a lot of wonderful instruments but that was a cool moment.

When was the first time you played with Mule live?

We played at a place called the Palomino in Los Angeles on a night off when the Allman Brothers were playing in LA. That would have been 1994 and we only knew a handful of songs and I don’t even remember if we billed it as Gov’t Mule or not. But that was our first gig. Now the first time we played together, which was also in Los Angeles, was at a little club called Captain’s Cabin where Matt Abts was playing and Allen Woody and I had a night off and intentionally went down to jam with Matt with the thought in mind that we wanted to form some sort of side project. I had played with Matt and I was currently playing with Woody but Woody and Matt had never played together and I had the idea that the two of them together would be a fierce rhythm section, especially in the context of a trio, and it proved to be right.

We’ve talked about Son House before and you covered Son House on that first Gov’t Mule record. Was that already part of what you guys were playing or was that someone’s choice to put that on a record, cause it’s not necessarily a song you think of immediately to go on a debut record.

No, we actually had not talked about or planned to put that on the record. I had done it a couple of times onstage as an impromptu thing and when we were in the studio recording the first Mule record, we had just finished the first take of “Mother Earth” and were going to perform a second take and I just impromptu sang “Grinnin’ In Your Face” and Michael Barbiero, the producer/engineer, didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know why I was doing it, he had never heard it, we had never talked about it. But he patiently was listening to see where it was all going (laughs). When we finished it, I counted off “Mother Earth” and we started it and we actually wound up using the first take of “Mother Earth” so we moved “Grinnin’ In Your Face” before the first take. And we only did two takes of “Mother Earth.”

Kevin has been with you for a good minute now. What has he brought to Gov’t Mule? 

You know, he’s a great spirit, he’s a fantastic player, he’s a fan of this music and is bringing his own voice to it. He’s really just doing an amazing job. He has his work cut out for him in the way that he has to learn so many songs (laughs). That’s not a task I would wish on anyone (laughs). But he’s up to the challenge and doing an incredible job.

And what do you want to do next with Gov’t Mule?

You know, I’m just curious to see where this chemistry is going with Kevin and where it’s going to lead us from an influence standpoint because I’m inspired now to write a bunch of new Gov’t Mule songs.

Live photos by Leslie Michele Derrough

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“I wanted to get into many different areas,” Rabin said in a press release about his latest record. “Of course, there are ‘prog things’, but overall there are a lot of styles going on.” Truer words have not been spoken. His signature Yes-isms are all over Rio but Rabin also sprinkles the record, which came out October 6^th, with some interesting frolics into country & western, folk, and catchy pop. Love, life, and hope thematically show up, bumping into those prog signature guitar lines like perfect harmony. The debut single, “Big Mistakes” is a prime example. You can tap your toes but you can also swirl around in those outer space melodies.

However, with the new track “Oklahoma,” Rabin conjures up a different vision and attempts to put peace and healing into a horrific act of violence: the 1995 bomb that destroyed many lives in Oklahoma City. “In 1995, I wrote the germ of a lyric inspired by the devastating bombing in Oklahoma,” Rabin explained recently. “It traumatized the entire nation and will always be a dark day for the country. Thirty plus years later I believed the time was right and ok to tackle the song I had written. It’s dedicated to family and friends who lost loved ones.”

Not unfamiliar with songs that appeal to fans, before his multi-million dollar debut in Yes with 90125, Rabin was a bit of a big deal in his home country of South Africa while in the band Rabbitt. An early seventies rock band with a bit of flair, they hit the hometown charts with “Charlie” in 1976 before dissolving two years later following their time in the bright lights of stardom. Rabin would record a solo album during this time before heading to London, working behind the scenes with artists such as Manfred Mann and recording his third solo album, Wolf, with Kinks frontman Ray Davies as a co-producer. Moving to Los Angeles, he eventually hooked up with Chris Squire and Alan White of Yes and recorded four studio albums with the king of the prog rock bands. 90125 contained the mega-hit “Owner Of A Lonely Heart,” a song he already had the beginnings of long before he met the Yes rhythm section. The song hit #1. Rabin would join together with Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman in 2016 to tour as ARW.

But in all that in-between time, Rabin found a niche in the soundtrack business, creating scores for such movies as National Treasure, Con Air, Remember The Titans and Armageddon, as well as numerous TV shows. He would focus on this full-time for many years before time allowed him to put his attention back on solo material that included his vocals. And Rio was born.

I spoke with Rabin recently about his new songs, recording an album after a mega-hit, his artwork and coming to America to find success.

How long has Los Angeles been your home now?

Oh way too long (laughs). I think longer than you’ve been here (laughs). 

What was so attractive about LA?

I didn’t actually know because I was living in London. I’d been there for three years and one thing led to the next. I was producing Manfred Mann at the time and John Kalodner, who was the Geffen A&R guy, met me and asked to hear some stuff I played him some stuff and he said, “We want to sign you to a development deal on Geffen Records.” And David Geffen came out and signed me in a couple of days and next thing we were on a plane to LA and I haven’t left (laughs).

And Geffen was a really, really big deal back then so that must have been a thrill for you.

Oh, it was amazing. You know, he had just formed this company and signed, I think, Donna Summer, Elton John and John Lennon. Unfortunately, I was on the deal for six months or so and then we didn’t see eye to eye, just creatively as to where I should go next, and I was dropped like a lead balloon. But the good news is, he paid for me to get to LA and everything and for a year before I’d been writing and writing so I landed there basically writing what became Yes’ 90125 album. 

When Geffen dropped me, I sent cassettes out at the time and got called back from a couple of companies, one of which was RCA, and a gentleman by the name of Ron Fair who became, ironically, years later the head of Geffen Records. But at the time he was an A&R guy at RCA and he was the first guy to say to me, “Oh, this song, ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart,’ is a smash.” But I didn’t sign with him because Atlantic said to me, “We really like the stuff and we’ve sent it to Chris Squire and Alan White, who are trying to get a band together.” And I thought to myself, well, that’s a pretty damn good rhythm section so we hooked up.

And now you have a new solo record and you’re singing again. How much did you already have prepared going into the studio for Rio vs how much was spontaneous once you got in there?

I would have to say, that most of it was completely spontaneous, although the germs of the ideas were all over the house. My wife used to say, “You’re like an alcoholic except instead of bottles being found in every drawer there’s manuscript paper with notes jotted down.” (laughs) You know, I used to do that a lot for film, obviously, and I’d have ideas for melodies but for this album, a lot of those pieces of paper became quite useful. I had ideas on tape and stuff. But it’s weird, you spend your life doing the first album you do and if you’re lucky enough for it to be successful, then you do it, go on the road, hopefully, and then immediately the record company is going, “We need the next album.” 

So you’ve spent your life doing the first album and you’ve got six months to do the next album. There’s always a lot of pressure with that. Fortunately for me, I hadn’t done a vocal rock album since 1989, I think it was. But it didn’t seem like that much time had gone by because I got into film in 1994 and was lucky enough to get films almost immediately without having to go through any apprenticeships. So I was very familiar with working with the orchestra and arranging and the stuff that goes along with that so that was something I knew I could do; technically I had the know-how. And film seemed like a great place. The problem is, now I look back thirty years and the first movie I did feels like yesterday. But there’s fifty movies and hundreds of TV shows and I realized, my goodness, time went so quickly. The good news is, when I started this album it was so fresh to me I could really approach it like it’s a first album. So it was really an inspiring project to do.

What part of this album do you feel like you gave the most attention to? Where do you think you spend most of your time?

Well, I think if we were to go song by song, I think each one was like kind of a universe unto itself. I would concentrate fully on one song and then if it wasn’t happening, I’d just come back to it. One of the things I knew was I didn’t want to do a record deal or get anything or any input. I just wanted to get in the studio, roll my sleeves up and do this record. And consequently, in my earlier years, at seventeen, eighteen odd years old, I used to do session work from morning till night every day and it’s very non-specialized in South Africa so you would be doing a country song then a rock song and then an orchestral session. So when I started this album I thought, I just want to go all over the place. In fact, my working title for the album was Demographic Nightmare (laughs). So I knew that I was going into all kinds of different areas but it’s got to flow and it’s got to feel like an album as opposed to a whole lot of disjointed things. I spent a lot of time sequencing the album and then the justification in my mind was my voice and my guitar style, whatever that is, will glue it all together. And I’m kind of happy at the end of the day.

In “Goodbye,” you are almost twanging with that country Duane Eddy/Roy Clark type vibe going on. Was that how that song was originally conceived?

You know, it’s quite funny. I wrote that song initially on piano and then when I went into the studio, as I mentioned doing sessions in South Africa where everything is so varied, but country is huge in South Africa. And I’ve always loved those great players, as you say Roy Clark and even Vince Gill, who’s a lovely guitar player, and I’ve always been very, very comfortable in that area. So it was definitely a genre and style I wanted to integrate. Also, the chorus goes into a completely new world almost, intentionally, but there’s still the old twangy banjo that goes through it (laughs).

For the song “Oklahoma,” what came first: the sound, the melody or the vision that it conjures up?

I always had the idea of the theme in the back of my mind. But the lyric and everything, I wrote the essence of the first verse soon after the event happened and I just thought, I’ve got to store that away and at some point write a song; I don’t want to do it now. I thought it a bit crass to do a song when there’s been this tragedy. So I just thought, I’m never going to do that. But it’s a long time since so I think all the people directly related to those who were killed or injured will never get over it so I just thought it was time to kind of almost document it.

You give drummer Vinnie Colaiuta a lot of credit for “Push.” How did he make that a better song?

When I first wrote the song I did a drum machine. I spent a long time doing the drum machine just so I had something to play to. Then I sent it to Vinnie, and it was during COVID so I had to send it, whereas the last time I’d worked with Vinnie he came to my studio and did a couple of tracks here and we became good friends. But during COVID, he had to do it at his studio. So I sent him the files and he said, “Oh no, I’m going to have a ball with this!” (laughs) And he sent me two or three takes and I said, “Vinnie, any one of those were unbelievably perfect.” It was as if he’d been playing it all his life and he’s so perfect in it and such a burst of energy that I ended up redoing a lot of the instrumentation. And it just made the song more exciting.

What is the oldest track?

“Paradise” would be the oldest thing, although it all was kind of realized when I started the album, I guess around eighteen months ago. But that was one of the germs I had years ago. Then the song “These Tears,” I had that idea for that song a long time ago. That’s all about a toxic relationship, almost an addiction. Instead of heroin it’s a partner.

Were they guitar pieces or bits of lyrics?

“These Tears” was mostly a lyrical thought and “Paradise” was I wanted it to be a happy-sounding song but I wanted the lyrics to be really depressing almost.

What were the primary guitars that you used on Rio?

Most of it is an old 1964 Fender Stratocaster that I’ve used always and then I had a signature model Alvarez Pantera that I used quite a lot. Then for acoustic guitars, I have a Martin guitar and for a gut string guitar I have an old Alvarez, which was also given to me when I was endorsing Alvarez, and I’ve never changed. I didn’t know what the price was but I’ve since learned it sold for around $800 or $900, so it’s not a particularly dear guitar but it’s one I absolutely love so that’s one I used. Then the song you mentioned, “Goodbye,” that I used a B-bender on a Telecaster.

When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?

I’d been playing piano, all the kids in my family from five years old you learned piano and you had lessons twice a week and an hour of practice every day, where you can’t go play with your friends, that kind of thing. That was my start. In fact, my dad used to joke, “Trevor could read music before he read English.” (laughs) That’s how I grew up but how I taught myself guitar was from piano exercise books. So it was a very unorthodox way of learning the guitar. I think the difficult thing was just getting the calluses so the strings don’t hurt as much (laughs).

When you were doing the ARW tour, did you pull out the old guitars that you used back then when you were in Yes or did you just modify your rig some for those particular songs?

No, I used the same guitars as I’ve always used, from way before Yes; other than the Alvarez. I guess I’m talking about the Fender Stratocaster, which I’ve had since I was nineteen, twenty years old, and that’s my main guitar. I think the big change in equipment was I used a digital multi-system called the Fractal. You know, there were so many sound changes in all the songs that I did with Yes, and generally my right foot was like a typewriter; I was always hitting things and changing sounds. And with the Fractal you can set up multiple different sounds, as many as you like. A song for example can have five different presets so it became extremely convenient and it can get very close digitally to the sound you would normally get just going through a Marshall and cranking it up or whatever the sound you might need.

You seem to have a great rapport with bass players. 

You know, it’s funny because on my third solo album, I had, once again, an incredible rhythm section in Simon Phillips and Jack Bruce and Jack was extraordinary. That was so inspiring and when the idea came up to work with Chris and Alan, I thought, oh, that’s something I really want to do. So working with very, very strong rhythm sections was always a pivotal thing for me, and certainly, that was the case with Chris and Alan.

But you know, I never really heard Chris other than being onstage with him, other than on records obviously, but he was a very inspiring guy to work with, completely into what he was doing. One of the first things he said to me when we first met was, “Oh so you’ve worked with Jack.” And I said, “Yeah, I have.” And he said, “He’s one of my favorites.” But he said it so nonchalantly, like no big deal (laughs). Him and John Entwistle were Chris’s favorite bass players.

When you joined Yes, the first album you did with them was huge. How did you feel going into Big Generator?

You know, it’s a little bit like what I talked about earlier doing your first album, and we spent months – me, Chris, Alan, and Tony Kaye – rehearsing, for nine months before we started the album, and that time was so crucial to knitting the band together as a unit, to the point where you didn’t even have to say anything, you knew where someone was going six bars down the road. You had this kind of telepathy almost. With 90125, Jon Anderson heard the stuff but he joined right at the end. The album was pretty much done and then he came in and sang. That’s how that album was constructed. 

So, consequently when we started Big Generator, it was a difficult album to do because Jon hadn’t been part of the band for most of the construction and the band knitting together. So it was a little more of a difficult album because it was, how are we going to work together? But at the end of the day, we went through a couple of producers, and then once they were gone, it was kind of, alright, you mix it – they were talking to me – and I was like, oh great (laughs). But I actually had a lot of fun with it because there are some great moments on the album and there are a couple of things that maybe shouldn’t have gone on the album. But it was also a difficult album, a pretty trying album, but we were happy with I’d say 80% of it by the end of the day.

Of all the Yes songs you had to play live, which one gave you the most fits to get it right, at least in your mind of how you wanted it to be?

I’d have to say on the last album I did there was this song, “Endless Dream,” and that took a lot of work to work that live. But I think it was one of our best moments.

Of all the records you’ve recorded during your career, which one do you think you were at your most adventurous creatively on guitar?

I think this is going to sound like a cliché cause I’m sure everyone you’ve ever interviewed said, “Oh, it’s the one I’ve just done by far.” (laughs) But I’d have to say that the four albums that come to mind, this one definitely because I just felt so fresh and new; then Can’t Look Away, a previous solo album; 90125 and then the last Yes album, Talk. I’d say those four. It’s hard to choose because they’re all my kids, if you know what I mean.

Rabbitt was a pretty hot band for you. Looking back, when do you think the band was at its best?

The band started with basically a three-piece: Neil Cloud, Ronnie Robot, and myself. From the age of fourteen we played together so when Rabbitt broke, everyone said, Oh overnight success. But we were twenty-one at the time, I think, and we’d been playing together for years. So the exciting thing about Rabbitt was, it’s kind of what I talked about Chris and Alan, just such a tight unit and between the three of us, it was a very tight unit. But I think the best we ever played was when we had a nine-month residency at a club. Once we started doing big tours and playing big places and the band was breaking and platinum albums and everything, it was still a band but I think we were at our best at that club.

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

Oh boy, it was actually a person that no one would have heard of but he was a rock star in South Africa. So I guess that doesn’t count (laughs). But his name was Julian Laxton and he just passed away. He was a phenomenal mind musically. I would probably say meeting Chick Corea was … oh no, let me change that. We worked at AIR Studios during Yes. I’d met a number of people before, obviously, but meeting Paul McCartney was something pretty special. It was quite extraordinary. We were in his studio and I was at the commissary and Paul walked in. I had said hello to him before in the studio. In fact, he walked into our studio and said, “I heard you guys need a drum machine.” I was like, oh my God, that’s Paul. So in the commissary, he said, “Can I join you?” And it was like, what am I going to say? No, I’m actually busy here and I need to be alone! (laughs) 

So he sat down and I think he was having herb tea or something, I was just having some toast and coffee, but I remember so clearly him saying to me,” I’ve got to ask you a question.” And I didn’t even know if he knew who I was; he just knew I was someone working in his studio. And he said to me, “So what made you think,” or “How did you,” I can’t remember, I’m paraphrasing, but “How did you come up with ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’?” And I thought that’s just unbelievable that he would ask that. And my response to him was kind of stupid but I couldn’t help myself. I said, “I’m sorry, Paul, if you want that question answered, I have about six weeks of questions I’m entitled to ask you before we even get to that.” (laughs) He was fantastic but my point obviously was, you asking ME about a song? You, Paul McCartney, who’ve written the greatest songs, and hundreds of them? I have way more questions than you (laughs). I was absolutely stunned and I didn’t even mention it to anyone. I told my wife and I think my brother but I didn’t even tell anyone because I thought no one is going to believe that so I didn’t bother (laughs).

Do you know where your ancestral roots are?

Yes, Irish Catholic on my mother’s side and Lithuanian and Jewish on my father’s side. As a birthday gift, I was given that thing where you send your saliva in and they give it back to you but I just haven’t ever done it. My niece has done it and it came back probably a little different than mine because her mother is different but I can’t imagine anything because it’s always such a surprise, right (laughs).

You did the artwork for Rio. When did you start painting and how has it evolved to what you do now?

That’s an interesting question. My mother is an artist and I’ve always dabbled in oils and acrylics, which I love doing. And when the possibility of getting into digital art came about I thought, wow, this is going to be a lot less messy! (laughs). We’re going to not have to paint the room and change the carpets every six months. So I just started doing it and it was not my recommendation by any means. Somehow it came up with Thomas, the head of the record company, and myself and he said, “Oh yeah, you do art?” And I said, “I love it. If I’m not doing music I’m doing that.” He said, “I’d love to see some stuff.” I said okay and I sent him some stuff. He said, “Oh my goodness, this would make a great cover.” And I said, “Listen, I’m biased here and that’s fine with me and I’d be delighted to do that but I want you to know that in a week’s time if you change your mind and you say, ‘You know, this art sucks,’ you’re not going to offend the artist. It doesn’t bother me.” (laughs)

Does that particular painting have a name?

Well, ultimately I’ve called it Rio but no, it didn’t have a name until I named the album.

How old is this painting?

It’s around a year and a half old.

What inspired it?

You know, I just find myself starting images and shapes and that’s really where that came from. Then I spent ages on the shading and obviously the color combinations. I’ve got a lot like that and a lot of abstract stuff but I also do portraits and some landscapes as well. But none of that is on the album (laughs).

What do you have planned for the rest of the year into next year?

Well, the rest of the year I’m going to Paris with my son to see the rugby. Every four years we do that. It was Japan four years ago. I used to play rugby so I am a fanatical rugby lover. But yeah, we just started to think about what to do with the album. It feels like I finished it yesterday and now I’m playing catch up doing what we’re doing right now. But ultimately, I’d love to start the next album as soon as possible. There is so much more in the tank that I haven’t explored which I’d like to do.

Portrait by Hristo Shindov; live photo by Leslie Michele Derrough

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