Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This classic
Speaker 1: episode was produced by the team at Pandora. What's Up?
Speaker 2: This is on paid bill from Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 3: For the next COLS classic, We'll get back to Steve
Speaker 3: Miller's January tenth about eighteen appearance rock and Roll Hall
Speaker 3: of Famer talks about the early lessons he learned from
Speaker 3: Les Ball and Tibo and Walker, singing on a Promptu
Speaker 3: recording session with the Beatles and performing with greats like
Speaker 3: Chuck Berry, slyestonemor Fly Like an Eagle.
Speaker 2: Back to episode sixty.
Speaker 4: Six, Suprema Sun Sun Supreme, Roll Suprema Sun Sun Suprema
Speaker 4: Roll Suprema So Sun Supreme, Roll Suprema Supreme.
Speaker 1: Quest Love in the Place. Yeah, I want to talk
Speaker 1: about what space? So Yeah, I'm starting a question inside
Speaker 1: the theme song. Steve Miller, I just have to ask you,
Speaker 1: that was what was on your mind when you were
Speaker 1: making Blue Odyssey in Space and just in less than
Speaker 1: thirty seconds, please.
Speaker 2: I had just got a really really cheap synthesizer, my
Speaker 2: first one, and I immediately hooked it up to my
Speaker 2: echo plex, and I had an eight track tape recorder,
Speaker 2: and I just was building electronic soundscapes, like broadening the
Speaker 2: horizon so I could put something in it.
Speaker 1: Beautiful.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 5: Oh, Suprema Supremo, Role Suprema Suprema.
Speaker 2: Roll call.
Speaker 1: My name is Fante, Yeah, your favorite rapper. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: work my magic. Yeah, abracadabra, Oh Supremo, Roll.
Speaker 4: Up, Supremo.
Speaker 2: Roll call.
Speaker 6: My name is Sugar Yeah, Sugar sugar Baby, Sugar Baby,
Speaker 6: Sugar sugar Bet.
Speaker 2: Supremo. Roll call Supreme.
Speaker 7: So Supremo rolls bills in the place. We're gonna have
Speaker 7: some fun, yeah and learn how the biz. Yeah, take
Speaker 7: some money in runs.
Speaker 1: Supreme Supreme Supremo.
Speaker 2: Roll call. Yeah.
Speaker 8: Steve Miller, I'm stoked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 8: You want to say smokering joker. Yeah, That's how I feel.
Speaker 1: Sure, m Supremo.
Speaker 2: Roll call. Some people call me Maurice, some people call
Speaker 2: me the space Cowboy. Some people call me Stevie. But
Speaker 2: I'm gonna tell you that cowboy Supreme.
Speaker 5: Roll Suprema Supreme, Roll Suprema Suprema, Roll Suprema son Supreme.
Speaker 2: Wow. Well, good morning, good morning. I feel much better.
Speaker 1: Cool ladies and gentlemen, we are honored here today to
Speaker 1: have the legendary the artist artist. I'm very glad that
Speaker 1: you're on the show because I've always wanted to talk
Speaker 1: to someone that to whom it took more than seven
Speaker 1: albums to finally break on through to the other side.
Speaker 1: So I'm not alone this world. No, no, you're not.
Speaker 1: I yeah. I would like to think, if I can
Speaker 1: insert myself inside my own radio show, that if yeah
Speaker 1: the first time, that if we were out in the sixties,
Speaker 1: if the roots were out in the sixties, we probably
Speaker 1: traveled the same path that Steve Miller took. A guy
Speaker 1: who had relentless, uncompromising artistic goals in life that he
Speaker 1: set and he didn't cow town or bowed down to
Speaker 1: the man. And you know, true a true story of
Speaker 1: artist development and innovation. And we thank you for coming.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Steve Miller ourselves supreme.
Speaker 2: Well, that's that's pretty humbling. You know, we would have
Speaker 2: had had we been rolling at the same time, we
Speaker 2: probably would have been touring together because trying to do artistics,
Speaker 2: make pop music intellectual, and do artistic things and be
Speaker 2: political and make a change and in our society that
Speaker 2: was those were all things that I see the roots
Speaker 2: is being very interested in it. When I listened to
Speaker 2: your records, I kind of go, oh, yeah, I know who. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're in this studio now, you know. And it's it's
Speaker 2: really really sweet of you to say all those nice things,
Speaker 2: you know, because nobody really says that stuff, and you
Speaker 2: feel like that when you're working on it. In seven
Speaker 2: albums was a long time, you know, but well you
Speaker 2: did it well. You know, I was never not going
Speaker 2: to you know, so that's the way that goes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I mean being as though, I mean, you
Speaker 1: definitely came from an era in which songs had to
Speaker 1: speak for themselves, where there's actual grassroots, uh kind of
Speaker 1: work put into spreading the word and word of mouth
Speaker 1: and those sort of things. It wasn't like you know today,
Speaker 1: where your celebrity determines how far you're going to go.
Speaker 1: And you know, even sadly as of twenty seventeen, I mean,
Speaker 1: talent really isn't even a fact. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: it could be a hindrance, see, you know, to say
Speaker 1: the least, So come on now, buck up, cheer up.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying, a lot of talent out here, you know,
Speaker 1: But I understand what you're what you're getting. I know
Speaker 1: a lot of your music, but I just don't know
Speaker 1: a lot of your your journey and your life that
Speaker 1: that got you to the point.
Speaker 2: So my journey's crazy. I can give it to you
Speaker 2: an im areagraph. I'm so. I was born in Milwaukee
Speaker 2: to a family. My mother's side of the family were
Speaker 2: all musicians, and my father's side of the family they
Speaker 2: were kind of inventors and doctors. So my dad was
Speaker 2: a pathologist. He had a tape recorder. And when I
Speaker 2: was four years old, I met Les Paul And this
Speaker 2: was nineteen forty nine. Are you ready for that? Really? Yeah?
Speaker 2: It was just a few years after World War Two
Speaker 2: and Les Paul showed up with an electric guitar.
Speaker 1: And how does your family know Les Paul?
Speaker 2: Well, he came to Milwaukee to put his act together
Speaker 2: with Mary Ford before he went to New York to
Speaker 2: do a TV show. It was one of the first
Speaker 2: TV shows. It was a real weird little TV show.
Speaker 2: It was like fifteen minutes long. It had kind of
Speaker 2: come on at three point thirty in the afternoon from
Speaker 2: his house. Wow, and they were putting They were rehearsing
Speaker 2: at a supper club just down the block from where
Speaker 2: we lived. My dad went down and said, I have
Speaker 2: a tape recorder, which was this brand new technology that
Speaker 2: came over from Germany after World War Two. It was
Speaker 2: one of the first tape recorders. So he said, can
Speaker 2: I record your shows? And Les said, yeah, of course.
Speaker 2: So I went down with my father with Pops and
Speaker 2: we watched Les Paul play every night. And I was
Speaker 2: like four years old sitting on the bench next to him,
Speaker 2: watching this guitar player. And then they would come over
Speaker 2: the house to listen to the tapes and party. So
Speaker 2: there were lots of parties, lots of drinking, lots of smoking,
Speaker 2: lots of musicians, lots of people hanging out. And that's
Speaker 2: the beginning. And I knew that you could speed tape up,
Speaker 2: you could slow it down. You know, if you sped
Speaker 2: the tape up and recorded and then slowed it down,
Speaker 2: you know, the guitar would sound like a bass. Or
Speaker 2: if you recorded at three and a half and you know,
Speaker 2: played a lead bart and then put back up to seven,
Speaker 2: it'd be twice as fast. And I understood that Mary
Speaker 2: Ford was singing multiple tracks. And this is like nineteen
Speaker 2: forty nine. Overdubbing wasn't even a thing yet. They had
Speaker 2: just invented it seeing Patty Page and Less with the
Speaker 2: multi tracking, and so I just there. I was. I
Speaker 2: was like five years old, kind of going yeah, multi tracking.
Speaker 2: And then of postcards came to our house after they
Speaker 2: went New York and they had their TV show and
Speaker 2: there was one hundred postcards and they were all stamped
Speaker 2: and they were all addressed to the same radio station
Speaker 2: in Milwaukee, but they were all written in kind of phony,
Speaker 2: different handwriting, and that was to promote their next single.
Speaker 2: So it's nineteen fifty and I'm walking around going, guy, man,
Speaker 2: I love show business, and you know, I wanted to
Speaker 2: be a musician, and Meade lugs Lewis was my guy.
Speaker 2: He Honky Tonk Trained was the greatest shuffle in the
Speaker 2: world and he's just listened to that over and over
Speaker 2: and over as a baby, and that's what I wanted
Speaker 2: to do. And you know, my godfather Les Baul was
Speaker 2: doing it, so I was watching him from a distance.
Speaker 2: So I had all that. And then we moved to Texas,
Speaker 2: and Texas was like really amazing because it was segregated
Speaker 2: and I had never been in a segregated community before.
Speaker 2: And I was a Yankee. I didn't know what anybody
Speaker 2: was talking about. I was in the second grade and
Speaker 2: I was going, what what are you talking about? You know?
Speaker 2: And I was going to Stonewall Jackson Elementary School. It
Speaker 2: was like that. And my dad was running this lab,
Speaker 2: this pathology lab, and a friend of his was taking
Speaker 2: care of this guy named T bone Walker, And so
Speaker 2: my dad goes he introduces himself to T Bone and
Speaker 2: they become friends, and T Bone comes over to the house.
Speaker 2: So my parents rented a piano. I'd never seen a
Speaker 2: piano before, and I got sick and stayed home from
Speaker 2: school and played with a piano all day. And this
Speaker 2: is true. At five o'clock in the afternoon, Tea bone
Speaker 2: Walker drove into our We lived in this suburb where
Speaker 2: there were like five thousand houses that looked the same,
Speaker 2: and everybody had this little yard and that was the deal.
Speaker 2: And T Bone pulled into the driveway and a flesh
Speaker 2: colored Cadillac convertible with leopard skin seats and a suit
Speaker 2: and tie on and a great, big, old Gibson guitar case.
Speaker 2: And he came in and he opened up his case
Speaker 2: and I was just all over him. You know, it's
Speaker 2: just like, are you t Bone Marker? How do you
Speaker 2: do this? How do you do that? And they he
Speaker 2: would come over and play parties, and my dad recorded
Speaker 2: all of this. So I have the recordings of like
Speaker 2: the first night I met t Bone Walker, Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: And they're really great recordings. And t Bone is whoever
Speaker 2: it was on piano is just unbelievably cool. And t
Speaker 2: Bone played from about six o'clock at night till about
Speaker 2: five o'clock in the morning. And so I have these
Speaker 2: tapes from nineteen fifty one and fifty two, and so
Speaker 2: he taught me how to play the guitar behind my
Speaker 2: head and do the splits. I was nine when I
Speaker 2: met him, and so I was the main thing was
Speaker 2: I was sitting there watching Ta boat and play lead
Speaker 2: guitar this far away from them, and there's I was
Speaker 2: listening to one of these tapes just the other night.
Speaker 2: We listened to them all the time, and t Bone
Speaker 2: turns and me. He says, what you want to sing, Steve,
Speaker 2: And I said nothing, I don't want to do. It's
Speaker 2: just like watching. But so from there, I'm in Texas
Speaker 2: and there's like country music. There's a big Djamboree. There's
Speaker 2: like black radio stations, there's white radio stations. Jimmy Reid
Speaker 2: is like pop music. It's just full of great music.
Speaker 2: And I ran into a kid who had been taking
Speaker 2: drum lessons since he was five years old, and he
Speaker 2: was like twelve, and he was like a professional drummer.
Speaker 2: He was just absolutely together and his dad was really cool.
Speaker 2: He had a music room, and we used to go
Speaker 2: over and listen to screaming Jay Hawkins records and stuff,
Speaker 2: and we started playing together and we started a band.
Speaker 2: It was nineteen fifty six, and mimeographed a letter sent
Speaker 2: it out to all the high schools and colleges and
Speaker 2: fraternities and sororities and churches and boys and girls clubs
Speaker 2: and synagogues, any place that had live music, saying we
Speaker 2: had a rock and roll band, and there weren't any
Speaker 2: rock and roll bands there was nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1: Can I ask one thing? Yeah, what city in Texas
Speaker 1: was this?
Speaker 2: Dallas, Okay? And Freddy King was on television in the afternoon.
Speaker 2: Saturday afternoon, there was an R and B show on TV,
Speaker 2: and Lightning Hopkins was coming through town. There was a
Speaker 2: lot of jazz all over h. Charles's band lived in
Speaker 2: Fort Worth that had Newman. Those guys were in and
Speaker 2: out of town and and so there was this really
Speaker 2: cool music scene going on. And I was listening to
Speaker 2: Jimmy Reid and Bill Doggett. Those were when I was
Speaker 2: eleven and twelve. That was the stuff I really liked,
Speaker 2: and that's what our band played. And so we sent
Speaker 2: these letters out and I had the band booked for
Speaker 2: like a whole school year, like in three weeks, and
Speaker 2: nobody knew how old we were because we're twelve. But
Speaker 2: it was a really good band. Boss Eggs was in
Speaker 2: the joined the band the next year, and you know,
Speaker 2: we had a really good repertoire. We did a lot
Speaker 2: of blues out of R and B tunes and that
Speaker 2: band stayed together all through high school and then followed
Speaker 2: me into college. And so I grew up in the
Speaker 2: in the middle of this sort of jazz scene. My
Speaker 2: parents loved jazz, and jazz musicians were always coming.
Speaker 1: Over and how accessible were because I mean, the story
Speaker 1: that you're telling is just not the average story where
Speaker 1: like TV and WATS. So first of all, I mean
Speaker 1: as as a five year older or even okay, I'll
Speaker 1: put you up further as a ten year older. I mean,
Speaker 1: are you truly absolutely knowing that you're witnessing history right
Speaker 1: here and this should be preserved and and huh.
Speaker 2: So No, I just thought what I was witnessing was
Speaker 2: great music, and being a musician was a lousy job,
Speaker 2: you know, like in growing up in a middle class family,
Speaker 2: you know, and I had I had, like my my
Speaker 2: uncle my mother's side, had been in the Paul Whiteman orchestra.
Speaker 2: He was a hot jazz violinist and he played in
Speaker 2: that orchestra. And then when the depression came, he and
Speaker 2: his brothers all went to medical school and became doctors.
Speaker 2: So in my family, it was kind of like my
Speaker 2: father and my grandfather had really raised themselves up. You know.
Speaker 2: My grandfather was an orphan and he became a doctor.
Speaker 2: He went to medical school and he was forty four
Speaker 2: years old. Oh wow. And so it was all like,
Speaker 2: you're gonna get an education, you're gonna work. You know,
Speaker 2: you're gonna take care of yourself, you're gonna provide, You're
Speaker 2: gonna be a provider. And boy, do you just love
Speaker 2: this musician music. But you're not gonna be a musician
Speaker 2: there's never any to then encourage you to. It's really amazing,
Speaker 2: you know. It's like my father, like I was playing
Speaker 2: rock and roll, he would every now and then he
Speaker 2: would show up at some gig and he just embarrass
Speaker 2: the hell out of me. I'd stand there and go
Speaker 2: like turn it down, you know. And this was when
Speaker 2: we were like playing through one Fender amp and I
Speaker 2: was set on volume three, you know, right way too well.
Speaker 2: So I didn't know, and I didn't get I didn't
Speaker 2: make my leap into the great unknown until I was
Speaker 2: about twenty one years old because the whole time I
Speaker 2: was playing, I was just having the greatest time in
Speaker 2: the world. I had always had the best band in
Speaker 2: town wherever I was, and was working more than anybody,
Speaker 2: you know, just we had We just had the best
Speaker 2: time and it was just fun. And I went to
Speaker 2: University Wisconsin, went back to Madison, and I spent about
Speaker 2: eight months. I took a year and went to Europe
Speaker 2: and I went to the University of Copenhagen, and I
Speaker 2: was going to be a writer and a journalist in
Speaker 2: comparative literature, creative writing, that kind of stuff. And it
Speaker 2: was the first time since I was twelve years old.
Speaker 2: I hadn't had a band, you know, I didn't actually
Speaker 2: play any gigs for about seven months, and I just
Speaker 2: couldn't stand it. And I got back to the States,
Speaker 2: got my band right back together at the University of Wisconsin,
Speaker 2: and then I just had a meeting one day with
Speaker 2: my student advisor or counselor, you know, and I was
Speaker 2: looking at these guys arguing over the size of their
Speaker 2: desks and stuff, and I just went, I'm done. I'm
Speaker 2: a musician. And I was lucky because Muddy Waters and
Speaker 2: Helen Woolf and Paul Butterfield were all playing in night
Speaker 2: clubs in a small area in Chicago all the time,
Speaker 2: So just ninety miles away, that's as far as I
Speaker 2: had to go to jump into this very mature, beautiful
Speaker 2: music scene that I was.
Speaker 1: Going to ask you how I knew that Milwaukee and
Speaker 1: Chicago in proximity to each other, But how did those records,
Speaker 1: How did those how did that blue scene even get
Speaker 1: to you at the time?
Speaker 2: And was it was like everybody's all records?
Speaker 1: So were they on the radio at the time or
Speaker 1: was it still like race.
Speaker 2: Music in in Texas?
Speaker 9: Uh?
Speaker 2: Was? I mean? In Milwaukee? Was all records, and you know,
Speaker 2: when I got to Texas, Texas was like a really
Speaker 2: different place. And and radio Top forty radio was invented
Speaker 2: in Dallas at KLIF by guy named Gordon McClendon. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I used to play sitar on those radio ads that
Speaker 2: k Yeah, those were all made of Pam's recording studio
Speaker 2: in Dallas and sold all over the United States, and
Speaker 2: guys who owned radio stations went, Okay, we liked this program,
Speaker 2: let's do this top forty thing, this top ten thing,
Speaker 2: and they built all that there. Before that happened, you
Speaker 2: heard all kinds of music on pop radio, on AM radio,
Speaker 2: and we had we had like there was a station
Speaker 2: called WRR in Dallas that played nothing but blues at
Speaker 2: night and it was like a blues pedagogy. This guy
Speaker 2: Jim Low was just the greatest DJ in the world
Speaker 2: and he just played all blues records. So that was
Speaker 2: like something that everybody growing up listened to. Blues like blues.
Speaker 2: We were we were into like, you know, Little Walter had
Speaker 2: hit records in Dallas when I was like thirteen and
Speaker 2: fourteen years old. You know, Bo Diddley, all those guys
Speaker 2: were just right there and they came through town a
Speaker 2: lot and played a lot. So there was this music
Speaker 2: scene that people went to and it.
Speaker 1: Was can you receive these shows?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So back then, like how much would a show cost
Speaker 1: to to see these acts? Like what was the typical building?
Speaker 2: Oh, Frankie Avalon, I mean Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers
Speaker 2: and Al Hibbler and Chuck Berry and the Cadillacs or
Speaker 2: somebody like that would come through and it'd be like
Speaker 2: two dollars at the sport of Toory, you know, and
Speaker 2: as a package tour and just yeah, they were all
Speaker 2: package tours.
Speaker 1: Then how long would those shows be? Because I'd see
Speaker 1: the marquis of some of these shows and I would
Speaker 1: think that, okay, even at three to four songs each,
Speaker 1: this could be a three to four hour fair. But
Speaker 1: I know that they're doing matinee shows, afternoon shows, evening shows,
Speaker 1: night shows.
Speaker 2: And yeah, they were, you know, I kind of remember
Speaker 2: him as being like three hours long. You know. We
Speaker 2: used to go to the Sportatorum. The Sportatorium had the
Speaker 2: big Djamboree and it had all the R and B
Speaker 2: shows and they had the There really weren't a lot
Speaker 2: of rock shows there, you know, there wasn't a lot.
Speaker 2: Like I remember when Carl Perkins showed up at one
Speaker 2: of these shows and did blue suede shoes and that
Speaker 2: was like a oh wow, this is really different. And
Speaker 2: they came up out of the crowd. They had a
Speaker 2: big double bass and a cocktail drum and he just
Speaker 2: like jumped up out of the stage. It was during
Speaker 2: Al Hibbler's act and came and did a few things
Speaker 2: and everybody went nuts and then he left. So that's
Speaker 2: kind of what it was. You'd do three tunes and
Speaker 2: then move on. It wasn't anything like it is now.
Speaker 1: And so you're saying that these shows that you saw,
Speaker 1: it was mostly black acts and the idea of like
Speaker 1: Elvis culture and more white oriented rock acts or the
Speaker 1: people that would established.
Speaker 2: It, you know, like like like that was that they
Speaker 2: were R and B shows that came came through that
Speaker 2: everybody went to. And then when the white acts came through,
Speaker 2: like I remember seeing Ricky Nelson, you know, with James Burden.
Speaker 2: Wanted to go see James Burden play guitar, and and
Speaker 2: he was big enough to come and do a show
Speaker 2: in a theater. He played at the Majestic Theater, but
Speaker 2: mainly it was like, you know, these arena kind of
Speaker 2: big all star review kind of shows what the.
Speaker 8: Term rock and roll even popular?
Speaker 1: But at point kind of not still race music.
Speaker 2: No, it was you know, we didn't call it race music,
Speaker 2: but uh, it was totally segregated on the airwaves, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't. I mean people, you know, everybody listened, like
Speaker 2: everybody I went to school with listened to K and okay,
Speaker 2: which was the black radio station, because that was always
Speaker 2: going to be a lot better than k l i F,
Speaker 2: which had like, you know, Frankie Avalon. You know, like
Speaker 2: if you go back and sort of look at the
Speaker 2: pop list and stuff and don't make fun of the
Speaker 2: Mills brothers, they're great, you know, that's ever. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean it was like there was this really square
Speaker 2: white music, and like guys like Pat Boone. Pat Boone
Speaker 2: had a TV show in Fort Worth where he dressed
Speaker 2: like a soda jerk. He had that you know, the
Speaker 2: little white paper had on and saying all those groovy
Speaker 2: versions of it and he was going to be like
Speaker 2: big Crosby, that's that's where that was going. We were
Speaker 2: it interested.
Speaker 1: So even then there was counter you're saying that there
Speaker 1: was counterculture, totally mainstream squares, totally, that's that's sort of play.
Speaker 2: So I was walking around in the seventh grade with
Speaker 2: my Jimmy Reid records going listen to this baby, okay,
Speaker 2: you know, and.
Speaker 8: What were people saying back to you?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, everybody loved it. Everybody loved it, and we
Speaker 2: uh hell, I used to back up Jimmy Reid when
Speaker 2: I was fourteen years old. We played and backed up
Speaker 2: Jimmy Reid, and Jimmy Reid was like one of the
Speaker 2: most popular acts in Dallas. In Dallas for white kids,
Speaker 2: black kids, it didn't matter, you know, he was those
Speaker 2: were hit records.
Speaker 9: So you must have been the ship at fourteen to
Speaker 9: like your peers, right because you're playing behind him.
Speaker 8: So what was that like?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, nobody even cared about that. There wasn't anybody, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: no no. We were a bar band. There weren't you know,
Speaker 2: these careers that exist now people like us sitting here right,
Speaker 2: you know, pontificating about how important it was and how
Speaker 2: deep we thought didn't even exist. If you were a musician,
Speaker 2: you know, you were working in bars and nightclubs, or
Speaker 2: you were on the Dick Clark Bus, you know, with
Speaker 2: forty people, you know, to going to town to town
Speaker 2: to town, and there wasn't nothing was you know. The
Speaker 2: people that had the big careers were like Bob Hope
Speaker 2: and Annette Funachello. Yeah it was they were on TV
Speaker 2: and you know, careers lasted eighteen months and you weren't.
Speaker 2: Nobody thought they could make a living doing this. And
Speaker 2: I never thought I would ever make a record until
Speaker 2: I saw Paul Butterfield when I was twenty one, and
Speaker 2: he was like, he had signed a record and they
Speaker 2: were writing about him, and I went, he got a record, man,
Speaker 2: I can do that. I could get a record deal. Now.
Speaker 2: I'd been fooling around with tape all my life, playing
Speaker 2: with it, never thinking anything like we think now or
Speaker 2: did in the sixties or the seventies to days, none
Speaker 2: of that even existed as an idea in the fifties.
Speaker 1: You mentioned about these shows in sports arenas, Okay, because
Speaker 1: I know that you're a stickler for sound and engineering,
Speaker 1: just because I'm from an era in which you know,
Speaker 1: big speakers and backline and those things. How were those
Speaker 1: shows able to translate sonically in a large sports arena
Speaker 1: with what I would assume was inferior sound.
Speaker 2: Well, an audience was generally they weren't big, big, huge
Speaker 2: sports are anything like the Sportatorium, is what I said.
Speaker 2: The Sportatorium was like this funky kind of I think
Speaker 2: it held like twenty five hundred people or something, and
Speaker 2: it was a place where they had boxing matches and
Speaker 2: they had music, and so it was small enough that
Speaker 2: you know, you could sing through your amplifier. And the
Speaker 2: volume levels were totally different. There were nothing like rock
Speaker 2: and roll volume levels. The first big rock show I
Speaker 2: saw was, I mean where I went, Holy Cow, look
Speaker 2: at that. Was Paul Revere and the Raiders at Chicago.
Speaker 2: They were playing to nineteen thousand people and they had
Speaker 2: two voices of the theater five foot by five foot
Speaker 2: speaker boxes, one on each side of the stage, and
Speaker 2: we were just going, oh, look at that. And of
Speaker 2: course you couldn't hear a word. And the shows were like,
Speaker 2: you know, it was like those Frank Sinatra shows where
Speaker 2: everybody was just screaming and passing out stuff like that,
Speaker 2: and so you didn't hear anything.
Speaker 1: He's wondering about that, because I know that's why the
Speaker 1: Beatles stopped doing shows, because they're like you can't hear
Speaker 1: us anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, the Beatles stopped doing shows because they thought they
Speaker 2: were going to be assassinated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I was about to say, you were there
Speaker 1: for that mighty argument. I'll get to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they thought they were going to be killed. But
Speaker 2: like if you look at the Shea Stadium show, you know,
Speaker 2: like the way I see this, that Shay Stadiums show,
Speaker 2: I go, well, look at that. They're on second base.
Speaker 2: There are put one hundred and twenty feet away from
Speaker 2: the audience, and look, there's three bookshelf speakers. There's one
Speaker 2: on the ground named here, there's one there, and there's
Speaker 2: a little under the front, you know, and you just go,
Speaker 2: what were these people thinking?
Speaker 1: I can't hear them?
Speaker 2: You couldn't hear anything. So that was like one of
Speaker 2: the things I'm proud of that I actually worked hard on,
Speaker 2: was we went from that era to building the pas
Speaker 2: to getting the stuff that everybody enjoys right now in
Speaker 2: your monitor. Yeah, the flight for you know, in your monitors. Man,
Speaker 2: I spent three hundred thousand dollars developing those you know,
Speaker 2: oh wait you literally yeah, you know, speak well, very interesting.
Speaker 2: So there was this guy in California was kind of nuts.
Speaker 2: Who Stevie Wonder had hired, and uh, he had. Stevie
Speaker 2: was playing. He had one little earpiece, and it was
Speaker 2: the way they figured out how to do it was
Speaker 2: you had a little transformer and a little FM transmitter
Speaker 2: and you made this custom aarpiece and one earpiece. And
Speaker 2: then he stopped doing it, and it just sat there
Speaker 2: for five years. And I'd taken a lot of time
Speaker 2: off in the eighties. I thought my career was over
Speaker 2: there from eighty three to like eighty eight or something
Speaker 2: like that, and was convinced, Hey, no, man, come back.
Speaker 2: You know you can do shows and everything. So I
Speaker 2: was doing shows and when I got back, the size
Speaker 2: of the monitors on the stage or the size of
Speaker 2: an ice box laying on the floor. And I had
Speaker 2: a twenty two year old kid running my monitors and
Speaker 2: it was so loud. I fired him. I got hired
Speaker 2: another kid, fired him, and then I got an audiologist
Speaker 2: out and I put a body cavity, one of those
Speaker 2: plastic things, but started measuring and I said, you see, man,
Speaker 2: it's one hundred and twenty one dB out here. You're fired.
Speaker 2: And I tested everybody's hearing, and I tested we had
Speaker 2: a crew and everything. It was like fifty five people
Speaker 2: and we were doing these big, big outdoor shows. And
Speaker 2: I tested everybody's hearing, from the truck and bus drivers
Speaker 2: to the musicians, and the guy that had the best
Speaker 2: hearing was my house mixer. The guy had the second
Speaker 2: best hearing was my monitor mixer. I had the third
Speaker 2: best hearing, and everybody else was deaf. They had just
Speaker 2: dropped at four thousand, kid, just nobody could hear any siblings,
Speaker 2: nobody could hear anything from all this damage. So we
Speaker 2: went and found this guy. We built five FM transmitters.
Speaker 2: We had separate power units because if the Feds caught us,
Speaker 2: they would take the power cool so we had Japanese
Speaker 2: Japanese FM radios for our transmitter receivers because they had
Speaker 2: a lower FM frequency than we had here. And we
Speaker 2: broadcast the shows. I mean it was a three block area,
Speaker 2: and so what was cool about it was if you
Speaker 2: were one of the bus drivers, you could turn on
Speaker 2: the radio and listen to the show. What was dangerous
Speaker 2: about it was all the sound checks were being broadcast.
Speaker 2: Every time we turned the thing on. We were broadcasting
Speaker 2: about three block area.
Speaker 1: You couldn't talk about last night's.
Speaker 2: Meal or hey, what the you know? What are you?
Speaker 2: You know you had I mean it was like, we're
Speaker 2: on the air and we could really be fine. Seriously,
Speaker 2: so we snuck around and did that.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, so you had to even though it was
Speaker 1: for monitor purposes use FCC.
Speaker 2: Well, no, we were illegally broadcasting FM.
Speaker 1: Radio radio.
Speaker 2: We had five pirate radio stations stacked up so each
Speaker 2: guy could hear. And and I this is this is
Speaker 2: how gets invented. It's always simple and really dumb. And
Speaker 2: and so here we are, and we're setting this up
Speaker 2: every night and we're broadcasting. And we're the first band
Speaker 2: that ever went out wearing ear monitors. And the ear
Speaker 2: monitors were made out of clay and they really hurt.
Speaker 2: And we went out there and I remember the first
Speaker 2: night I went out on a stage in front of
Speaker 2: like eighteenth people in ear monitors, the whole bands, and
Speaker 2: it were the first band, and it was like kind
Speaker 2: of dangerous. But then you know, then we went, okay,
Speaker 2: now we gotta like process the sound. You know, everything's
Speaker 2: got to sound good. Oh, now we got the sound processed.
Speaker 2: Now we gotta figure out how this transmission stuff is
Speaker 2: gonna work. And then some A guy named Marty Garcia
Speaker 2: came in and said, FM transmitters, are you guys nuts?
Speaker 2: Let me show you how to do this, and here's
Speaker 2: the money, man build it and went from there in
Speaker 2: the ears yeah in ears.
Speaker 9: Wow, did you get any thank yous from the neighborhood,
Speaker 9: Like anybody ever come up to you? Like, Man, that
Speaker 9: show was awesome last night, I said on my.
Speaker 2: Couching, you know, and we never got busted. Oh, you know,
Speaker 2: we got away with it. I still have these things, man,
Speaker 2: they're in my warehouse suits. Like it's like, you know,
Speaker 2: it's like the first space capsule or something that say
Speaker 2: you look at it, just go. But you know, it's
Speaker 2: like tape echo and the stuff less Paul worked on.
Speaker 2: All of these ideas start from you know, you kind
Speaker 2: of go like, I gotta get this done. Honey had
Speaker 2: me that vacuum cleaner. I'm gonna hook this thing up
Speaker 2: and blow that thing out there and turn this on
Speaker 2: and make this organ work.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just you do what you gotta do. And
Speaker 2: and it's, uh, you know, I just did it because
Speaker 2: I needed it. I didn't do it do it to
Speaker 2: you know, to start to start a company or do
Speaker 2: anything like that. I just knew that I wanted to
Speaker 2: protect my hearing for life.
Speaker 1: Well that's the show, Leason, gentlemen.
Speaker 2: I brought an out audiologist and we're gonna test everybody, now, Larry,
Speaker 2: come on, we need that.
Speaker 1: Did you develop it to the point where it was like,
Speaker 1: did you patent it? Did you sell it to Shore?
Speaker 2: No? No, I gave it to Marty and look there
Speaker 2: are you know, it's like all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: A lot of people were thinking about it, but I
Speaker 2: was the guy who went like, I can't work in
Speaker 2: this situation. You guys got to stop this. This is nuts,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, if you're on a stage and
Speaker 2: it's one hundred and twenty GB, you can't sing, you
Speaker 2: can't think, you can't rest, you can't sleep after the show,
Speaker 2: you can't hear the next day. You know, you know
Speaker 2: all that. So that's that had to be fixed. So
Speaker 2: that was all. And I remember kind of thinking, like,
Speaker 2: you know, it took off really quickly people, you know,
Speaker 2: right away people wanted to know about it, and the
Speaker 2: Marty started a company and started you know, doing your
Speaker 2: inn your monitors, and the last in your monitor story
Speaker 2: was like so now it's like nineteen ninety two or
Speaker 2: ninety three or something, and the Dead want to have
Speaker 2: an inner monitor system and they know that we had
Speaker 2: used we'd been using it now for four years, you know.
Speaker 2: They said, well, we want to work with you guys.
Speaker 2: Let's go do ten shows together or something. And I said, okay.
Speaker 2: So in my Innure monitor system with the band, I
Speaker 2: have a little foot switch where I can like step
Speaker 2: on the switch and it takes my voice out of
Speaker 2: the PA, but I can talk to the sound guy
Speaker 2: or the light guy, or I can say, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: there's some guy down here. There's two guys in a
Speaker 2: fight in the front row. You need to come fix that,
Speaker 2: or you know, if something's wrong or go to the
Speaker 2: bridge or forget the next song or whatever. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: it's it's so weird because you know, it's like I'm
Speaker 2: talking to you and that's gonna yeah, well all right,
Speaker 2: then we're gonna go. You see when you're doing it,
Speaker 2: and you like you came to realize people they don't
Speaker 2: they don't even notice. It's like weird. You can do
Speaker 2: all this year. So that's that's the band leader control.
Speaker 2: So the first show doing with the Dead at some
Speaker 2: football stadium there's eighty thousand people. We go out, they
Speaker 2: immediately invite me to come out and jam. I go
Speaker 2: out and put on my ear in ear monitors and
Speaker 2: they're all arguing with each other while somebody's playing a
Speaker 2: solo stuff. Listen, man, you just this giant conversation. Everybody.
Speaker 2: Everybody's got their own pedal, everybody's got their own thing,
Speaker 2: nobody's listening to anybody. They're just like, it was just
Speaker 2: all my blog. You know, I just went, man, how
Speaker 2: can you guys do that? Sir?
Speaker 1: You've literally described that is crazy?
Speaker 10: Steve, was that in Buffalo by any chance?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: That was the last gig of that tour?
Speaker 10: Okay a show?
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, yeah, that was. That was a really amazing run.
Speaker 10: It was like ninety one, ninety ninety two maybe.
Speaker 2: I think there's ninety two, you know, because.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I was in the parking lot during the opening.
Speaker 2: And what were you doing?
Speaker 1: A grateful show?
Speaker 2: You know, those shows were really funny, and bands that
Speaker 2: played with a grateful dead usually got shunned, you know,
Speaker 2: like I sting had done it before I had done it,
Speaker 2: and they said, yeah, you know, like there'd be eleven
Speaker 2: thousand people in the stadium while Sting was doing his set. Well,
Speaker 2: that wasn't gonna happen with me, and so, uh, we
Speaker 2: went out and we just started and we just started
Speaker 2: with like four or five hits, and by the third hit,
Speaker 2: people just running into the stadium and by the time
Speaker 2: our set was over, the whole stadium would be singing
Speaker 2: along and then we'd turn it over to Jerry.
Speaker 8: So did they figure?
Speaker 9: It's interesting because you said when you got with them,
Speaker 9: it was kind of like a two for one deal,
Speaker 9: like on top of getting the band, they get the
Speaker 9: any our monitors. Is that what most bands were thinking
Speaker 9: at that time about guy.
Speaker 2: No No, they had they had got a system. They
Speaker 2: wanted they wanted to see how we used it. They
Speaker 2: wanted to learn how, They wanted the best. They wanted
Speaker 2: to learn how to do it, you know, and see
Speaker 2: see how it worked. And that was you know, uh
Speaker 2: real comment. I remember Guns N' Roses came by. Oh okay,
Speaker 2: you wanted to see how because we were the guys
Speaker 2: at the monitors, you know.
Speaker 1: And that's weird because I've I've thought that it was
Speaker 1: invented because by the time we started using it in
Speaker 1: like two thousand, I felt like, well, okay, this is
Speaker 1: probably like three years old already. I felt like just
Speaker 1: came around like yeah, nineteen ninety seven or something.
Speaker 2: No, I was like ten eleven years old by then.
Speaker 2: But you know, you have to develop that stuff. But
Speaker 2: for me, I think because the less you know, and
Speaker 2: being around him when I was little, and like you
Speaker 2: were saying, well, did you know, I didn't know he
Speaker 2: was a genius. I didn't know anything about him except
Speaker 2: that he he was like this great, great guitarist and
Speaker 2: he was really funny. Every show he did was always
Speaker 2: sold out, and uh, you know, he always had somebody
Speaker 2: come and sit in with him. So one night I'm
Speaker 2: in the club and tal Farlow comes into the club
Speaker 2: and it's like a gunfighter cutting session, you know. I
Speaker 2: remember tal Farlow's here and Les Paul's right in the
Speaker 2: middle of some great solo and he just puts the
Speaker 2: handkerchief over his hand and he's just playing in so
Speaker 2: cow can't steal his licks. That Yeah, man, man, I
Speaker 2: just you know, pulled the handkerchief without you know, it just.
Speaker 1: Nonchalantly.
Speaker 2: He must have practiced it a thousand times, you know.
Speaker 2: But but that's what it was like, hanging out with
Speaker 2: him and so I got so lucky to be around
Speaker 2: the technology, the idea of recording, the idea of promoting
Speaker 2: a single, the idea having fun at a show and
Speaker 2: it's a jam session. The cats are all coming by
Speaker 2: and they're all going to play, and so, you know,
Speaker 2: Charles Mingus was at the House of Milwaukee Red and
Speaker 2: they were just adults. They were just people, you know,
Speaker 2: hanging out and listening to the tape recorder and drinking
Speaker 2: and laughing and having a good time, you know. And
Speaker 2: so that was the way I saw life, you know,
Speaker 2: when I started. And then we took that and moved
Speaker 2: it to Texas, and we were considered communists, you know. Uh,
Speaker 2: you know, my dad was arrested for having a race
Speaker 2: party at his laboratory, you know, because he had black
Speaker 2: technicians and white technicians working together in a laboratory. Two
Speaker 2: of the technicians went on to become pathologists, and they
Speaker 2: were arrested, photographed, handcuffed picture on the front page of
Speaker 2: the Dallas Morning News and he was described as like
Speaker 2: a swanky, you know, kind of sleazy, swanky doctor having
Speaker 2: a race party and they were working, they were it
Speaker 2: was like three o'clock in the afternoon on December, probably
Speaker 2: December December twenty third, the lab Christmas Party. Well you know,
Speaker 2: raist racist, you know, and and.
Speaker 10: Uh, I want to be a sleazy swanky doctor.
Speaker 2: You are you are? You are? Yeah? Well you know
Speaker 2: Swanky's good.
Speaker 1: So has have has Less left you any of his
Speaker 1: like artifacts? Like did he give you your first guitar?
Speaker 1: Or do you have like an amp that he oh
Speaker 1: this tape recorder?
Speaker 2: Kids, Yeah, I don't have it, don't have it. I
Speaker 2: have a guitar. I have a one, a Gibson one
Speaker 2: seventy five that he gave me in what I used
Speaker 2: to steal from him as guitar picks. And it was
Speaker 2: a big joke because the well, the first time I
Speaker 2: went to see Less play at Fat Tuesdays. You know,
Speaker 2: he worked at Fat Tuesdays for he stayed in New
Speaker 2: York for thirty years. He had his heart attack at
Speaker 2: sixty three and when he was sixty three years old,
Speaker 2: and then he played until he was ninety three. So
Speaker 2: I hadn't seen him in a while. I mean I
Speaker 2: hadn't seen him in like seven or eight years. And
Speaker 2: I've been on the road and I was in New
Speaker 2: York and he was playing and I went, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go see Less. So I go to see him and
Speaker 2: I go say hi, and come on up here, kid,
Speaker 2: come on, you know, come on play, come on and
Speaker 2: play something, you know, And I said, well, gosh, I
Speaker 2: didn't bring my guitar, which he thought was just awful
Speaker 2: that I was so dumb not to bring my guitar.
Speaker 2: But on top of the piano it was this white
Speaker 2: Less Paul Deluxe model with three gold pickups and just
Speaker 2: beautifully just here take this. And he gives me that
Speaker 2: guitar and I didn't have a pick, hands me a pick.
Speaker 2: I get the guitar, plug it in and we start
Speaker 2: to play. And I noticed that the volume control doesn't work.
Speaker 2: It's totally out of tune. The tuning pegs don't work,
Speaker 2: nothing works on it, you know. So I got the
Speaker 2: stooge guitar, right, you bring your own acts next time.
Speaker 2: And then yeah, so there I am, you know. And
Speaker 2: then I looked down at the pick that I borrowed
Speaker 2: from him, and it was made out of plexiglass and
Speaker 2: it had some sandpaper turned at a certain angle that
Speaker 2: had been glued on. It was a handmade pick. So
Speaker 2: every time I would see him try and get some
Speaker 2: of his picks, and he didn't like it, you know.
Speaker 2: And I finally I was doing a show like this
Speaker 2: that was being filmed, and he was sitting right here,
Speaker 2: and I said, you know, Less is eighty six years old,
Speaker 2: and you know he's such an interesting man. He's always
Speaker 2: working any thing. So I bet you he's got a
Speaker 2: pocket full of custom made picks right now, come on,
Speaker 2: let's let's see. And he pulled him out and put
Speaker 2: him on the table bit and I just scoomed up.
Speaker 2: So I have this beautiful collection and his handmade picks
Speaker 2: and one of his guitars. And but the best thing
Speaker 2: was I used to talk to him at least once
Speaker 2: a month, and he'd call me up and start talking
Speaker 2: to me, and I wouldn't even know what he was
Speaker 2: talking about. He'd be talking about digital this and digital that,
Speaker 2: and I'd be going, well, gee, I don't know. Less.
Speaker 2: He was so far ahead of of everything and everybody
Speaker 2: and that. But it was all simple. His ideas were
Speaker 2: all real simple.
Speaker 1: So I know that the city of San Francisco. I
Speaker 1: was about to say, we do have to start discussing
Speaker 1: your actual music there, I actually stay off topic, out
Speaker 1: of your your discography forever, but you eventually, uh migrate
Speaker 1: to San Francisco, which is we're considering that even though
Speaker 1: there's psychedelic leanings and a lot of your music, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't necessarily peg you as part of that dead kind
Speaker 1: of jam. Yeah, kind of lucky, even though there are
Speaker 1: elements of that and and a lot of your music.
Speaker 1: I'm just like the witty writing and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: But you were straight blues. So how did you get
Speaker 1: into the Bill Graham circle? And more specifically I know that, well,
Speaker 1: your first record with Chuck Berry? How did that even happen?
Speaker 1: Because I know that Chuck is notory. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: about to say, I know you have five hours of
Speaker 1: Chuck Berry's for those who don't know. And this is
Speaker 1: even from my experience of seeing Chuck and person as
Speaker 1: a kid. He never sometimes he would meet his band
Speaker 1: maybe five minutes before going on stage. And similar to
Speaker 1: that the Booty Collins James Brown story. Hey, you already
Speaker 1: know my material, so just hit it, like Chuck is
Speaker 1: notorious for just flying into town and just all right,
Speaker 1: hit it and you're supposed to follow it. What tell
Speaker 1: us a Chuck Berry story? Please?
Speaker 2: Well, Chuck Berry, Yes, my best Chuck Berry story is
Speaker 2: the one I should have told Keith Richards before he
Speaker 2: made the movie. We walk off the stage and I say,
Speaker 2: if you ever fucking do that to me again, you motherfucker,
Speaker 2: get your own fucking band, get your own fucking amplifier,
Speaker 2: and get your own people. Man, fuck you. I'm never
Speaker 2: gonna back you up again. Guarantino. And then from that
Speaker 2: time on he was great.
Speaker 8: What did he do?
Speaker 1: What he was Chuck Berry?
Speaker 2: Broll No, no, no, there are two guys that used
Speaker 2: to do this trick. So now this is a Chuck
Speaker 2: Berry and the Lightning Hopkins story and a San Francisco story. Yes,
Speaker 2: So I dropped acid in Madison in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2: It was lysurgic acid. It was pure.
Speaker 1: I was at that show too.
Speaker 2: And that was before anybody knew what it was or
Speaker 2: what was really going on, and.
Speaker 1: So you were wing your time and everything.
Speaker 2: So my first trip was poetry, Marvin Gay, Robbie Shankar, literature,
Speaker 2: mind expanding consciousness, do anything you know before there were hippies. Okay,
Speaker 2: Then I go to So I'm in Chicago and we're
Speaker 2: hearing about San Francisco, these gigs and San Francis light show.
Speaker 2: Butterfield's out there, man, and he's like making money, and
Speaker 2: they're playing to like eleven hundred people a night, not
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty five US. And I'm working in
Speaker 2: a nightclub in Chicago from nine o'clock at night till
Speaker 2: four o'clock in the morning, six days a week, making
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty five dollars a week. And I'm
Speaker 2: thinking to myself, I got to go to California. Man,
Speaker 2: there's you know, eleven hundred people, five hundred dollars a night.
Speaker 2: Glad I'm going, you know, so, so I'm you know,
Speaker 2: the beat coming from there was just huge. And then
Speaker 2: all the bands were coming through Chicago. Chess Records was there,
Speaker 2: and the Rolling Stones had been through town, and we
Speaker 2: were doing this blue We were in this great blues
Speaker 2: scene that was just magical for a few years. When
Speaker 2: I say magical, it's like, hey, as soon as we
Speaker 2: finished doing this radio show, Holling Wolf's playing across the street, man,
Speaker 2: let's go, Hubert's with him, Let's go, you know, and
Speaker 2: Muddy's going to be here, and Butter's over here, and
Speaker 2: we're over here, and they're over here and this and that.
Speaker 2: It was just like that for like about three years,
Speaker 2: and then it disappeared San Francisco. So I go to
Speaker 2: San Francisco and I get out there and I'm living
Speaker 2: in my Volkswagen bus. Now things have gone down. I
Speaker 2: tried to go to music school at the University of Texas.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't accept me. They wouldn't teach me how to
Speaker 2: read or write music. So I left. I got to
Speaker 2: California and I had five bucks in my pocket, and
Speaker 2: I went to see Butterfield play at the at the Fillmore,
Speaker 2: and I saw what the Fillmore was and I went, Okay,
Speaker 2: I gotta do it here. This is great, man, that
Speaker 2: should be me up there. You know, I want to
Speaker 2: go do that. And I got a gig at the
Speaker 2: Matrix playing bass for Lightning Hopkins for ten dollars a night.
Speaker 2: And this ten dollars was like a million dollars to me. Man,
Speaker 2: that was that three dollars for a tank of gas
Speaker 2: in the Volkswagen bus and food for a week. You know,
Speaker 2: I needed this money. And it's Lightning Hopkins. So I'm
Speaker 2: playing bass with Lightning, and as you know, Lightning plays
Speaker 2: like thirteen and a half bar blues and then fourteen
Speaker 2: barb b losing the ten barb bl loues and he
Speaker 2: kind of kind of watching them. I'm playing with him,
Speaker 2: and I'm kind of doing real good, you know. Now
Speaker 2: I'm kind of beginning to play. He goes, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Everybody stop, Nobody do
Speaker 2: nothing but me, and there's just him and me on
Speaker 2: the stage. I mean, you know, it's the most embarrassing,
Speaker 2: emulating moment in my life. And I needed that ten dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah I did. I kept the gig, you know, and
Speaker 2: and Chuck Berry started doing that to the band and
Speaker 2: I just couldn't tolerate that. And later, like five or
Speaker 2: six years later, I was at home by myself and
Speaker 2: I was watching Austin City Limits and Lightning Hopkins is
Speaker 2: playing a stratocaster with a wah wah pedal, just doing
Speaker 2: this show hell in it with this great blues band
Speaker 2: behind him and they're just ripping it up. And all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, he goes, hold, hold, hold, wait minute,
Speaker 2: everybody stop. Nobody do nothing but me, and I went, oh,
Speaker 2: it's a riff. It's like, let's have a hand for
Speaker 2: what's your name, Welcome to the blues club, you know,
Speaker 2: And so when Chuck did that. You know, I had
Speaker 2: done so many gigs with him, but first gig I
Speaker 2: did with Chuck Berry was like, went like this, Bill
Speaker 2: Graham came to me, he says, and you're right. We
Speaker 2: got First of all, we got to San Francisco and
Speaker 2: I just went, what the hell is this? You know,
Speaker 2: the Grateful Dead were like standing around for fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: and they do like a bad version of in the
Speaker 2: Midnight Hour for twenty minutes and wasn't good, but you know,
Speaker 2: twenty minutes of like come on man.
Speaker 1: You were sober watching them?
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah gee look at the time, you know,
Speaker 11: so it was all the bands were like, uh, they
Speaker 11: weren't really good.
Speaker 2: Bands, and they were like guys who'd been playing acoustic
Speaker 2: guitar who decided they were going to get some beatle
Speaker 2: boots and a groovy coat and a scarf and grow
Speaker 2: their hair long and have a rock band and they're
Speaker 2: going to be rock stars. So I got out there.
Speaker 2: I'd been working in Chicago, where Junior Wells would steal
Speaker 2: your gig if he sat in, if he could, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody had to be really good, and I
Speaker 2: was like on time, great sets, everything was really good.
Speaker 2: So I was like the first real professional band in
Speaker 2: the scene.
Speaker 1: So right now you're destroying the myth of what we
Speaker 1: thought that the San Francisco Musician was about. Like you're
Speaker 1: just saying that they were mediocre at best or just.
Speaker 2: The band, right, The bands were a social phenomena. No, no,
Speaker 2: And you know, the Jeffer Airplane was kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: They did some things good and then other things are
Speaker 2: just like insufferably boring, you know. And and so it
Speaker 2: was what I finally realized was I'm standing there, going,
Speaker 2: what is this? You know, what's going on here? And
Speaker 2: I finally went, it's a social phenomena. This is like,
Speaker 2: this is about acid, This is about an awakening, this
Speaker 2: is about a renaissance. This is about a moment in
Speaker 2: time that's like happens maybe every three or four hundred years.
Speaker 2: It's a music and music is the the the hook
Speaker 2: they're hanging it on. And so I like that once
Speaker 2: I understood it, because I went, I get it. It's
Speaker 2: a social phenomena.
Speaker 1: But I like that.
Speaker 2: I like that, But I want to change things. I
Speaker 2: want to see the world change too. I'm I don't
Speaker 2: want to have a crew cut anymore. I don't want
Speaker 2: to go to you know, some company and get trained
Speaker 2: for six weeks and then work there for the rest
Speaker 2: of my life, you know, and do that that fifties
Speaker 2: early sixties thing. I want a life, a much different life.
Speaker 2: And so, you know, the expansion, the mind expansion that
Speaker 2: took place, and then it filtered into the music, and
Speaker 2: then all of a sudden things started getting good. And
Speaker 2: what was hip was so we go to Bill Graham
Speaker 2: and go, hey, man, you gotta get James Cotton out here.
Speaker 2: You got to get Junior Wells out here. You got
Speaker 2: to get Howland Wolf out here. You got to get
Speaker 2: Rolling Kirk out here. You should get Miles Davis to
Speaker 2: come here. You know, Johnny Cash should come here and play.
Speaker 2: You should have you know, and we just started giving
Speaker 2: him names.
Speaker 1: You were the influence that brought them out, because a
Speaker 1: lot of us were like, no, a lot.
Speaker 2: Of us were, you know, But I was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I was the guy who went and picked up Holland
Speaker 2: Wolf and my bus. You know when he arrived at
Speaker 2: the airport. You know, James and his band stayed at
Speaker 2: my house, you know, when they came to town. But
Speaker 2: and you know, I was there the first night BB
Speaker 2: King played, I was there. I backed up John Lee
Speaker 2: Hooker on his first night. I did Chuck Berry Show
Speaker 2: and the BB King show at the Fillmore. You know,
Speaker 2: they talk about it and bb cried that night and
Speaker 2: all that stuff. It was pretty amazing here. It was
Speaker 2: like everybody was just BB King's going to be here,
Speaker 2: you know, And I'm opening for BB King and uh I,
Speaker 2: you know, I do my sound checking stuff and then
Speaker 2: we're getting ready to play and I noticed, you know,
Speaker 2: BB King's guitar tech has put BB King's loose seal
Speaker 2: on his guitar stand on the stage during my set,
Speaker 2: and they get a little spotlight on it. You know,
Speaker 2: what's this? You know. I don't like that, you know.
Speaker 2: So I'm playing doing as good as I can because
Speaker 2: Bbe's in the house and I break a string and
Speaker 2: I go and I go, fuck it. He's going to
Speaker 2: put his guitar on the picked it up, plugged it in.
Speaker 2: Hey this listen, I'm in competition with BB King. I
Speaker 2: want slot. You know, that's the way music is. You know,
Speaker 2: there's no Once you play in Chicago, you learn very
Speaker 2: quickly this is serious business, you know, And if somebody's
Speaker 2: fucking around with you in your stage, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: But I wasn't looking to until I broke the string. However,
Speaker 2: when I picked up Lucile and plunged it in and
Speaker 2: looked at the controls, I went, what the boom? You know,
Speaker 2: it was just totally basy and everything, and and you
Speaker 2: know it was one of those stereo Gibson things, you know,
Speaker 2: it's never used. And then I got the tone and
Speaker 2: I had a note, and the guitar was so delicately
Speaker 2: set up the bridge collapsed. It just went pop and
Speaker 2: the strings went flat and and uh and I pulled
Speaker 2: it back up and strings back on it and kind
Speaker 2: of like ended the set and got left the building.
Speaker 8: As that's going on.
Speaker 9: How long is this process that that the audience is watching?
Speaker 9: You like grabbed the guitar.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm sure you didn't let the audience know.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no no no, that just was like
Speaker 2: it broke a string, put the guitar down, here's another one,
Speaker 2: picked it up.
Speaker 1: But good night.
Speaker 2: Bb I saw Biby come out and do a show
Speaker 2: one time and break a string and uh, reach into
Speaker 2: his well. First of all, he broke a string while
Speaker 2: he was singing, and he just kept singing, never looked
Speaker 2: at it. He went down here and he like took
Speaker 2: the string off, and I'm not making any of this up.
Speaker 2: Reached into his pocket and pulled out a string in
Speaker 2: a package and took the string out, and he's singing
Speaker 2: the whole time. He put it in here, and he
Speaker 2: just kept doing this and then he went bang and
Speaker 2: off he went, you know, and it was.
Speaker 1: Like without looking once, he just put the string on.
Speaker 2: I'm telling you, man, I to him. It was in
Speaker 2: a little club and Sun Valley, Idaho, was sitting right
Speaker 2: there like that, and I just went, how many times?
Speaker 2: You know, it's like the handkerchief trip? How many times
Speaker 2: do you have to do that before you can or
Speaker 2: have that happen?
Speaker 1: You know? Have you ever tried to do that?
Speaker 2: Uh? No?
Speaker 1: So I know that I know that you had your
Speaker 1: eyes on Paul Butterfield's slot. You know that I want that.
Speaker 1: But one thing you didn't mention was the desire to
Speaker 1: get a record deal, which I'm wondering, why did you
Speaker 1: choose San fran over Los Angeles and how did record
Speaker 1: label start calling?
Speaker 2: So I had a record deal with Barry Goldberg. We
Speaker 2: had the Goldberg Miller blues band in Chicago, and and
Speaker 2: we got. He had a swanky, sleazy manager, Steve Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and uh swanky and and uh. We were given a
Speaker 2: day and a half to make a record. And while
Speaker 2: we're making the record, some guy came in and was going, yeah,
Speaker 2: you guys, you know, you guys should be doing some
Speaker 2: Jerry Lee Lewiston's. You know, he's trying to tell us
Speaker 2: what to record and what to do and everything. The
Speaker 2: engineers hated us. The earphone was one of his little black,
Speaker 2: hard rubber things, you know, with one side and a
Speaker 2: big pole coming out of it. We made this record
Speaker 2: and went to New York and we were on the
Speaker 2: Hulla Blue Show with the Supremes and the Four Tops. Ok,
Speaker 2: and we got We did the show, and then we
Speaker 2: stayed in New York and went into the A night
Speaker 2: club here right after the Young Rascals left, and we
Speaker 2: saw the whole New York scene went back to Chicago.
Speaker 2: The whole Chicago scene was gone, just in two months.
Speaker 2: It just disappeared. Because what had happened was Woof and
Speaker 2: Muddy had gotten gigs in colleges and now they could
Speaker 2: make a whole lot more money than playing in nightclubs.
Speaker 2: Their careers were over. When we were all working in Chicago,
Speaker 2: they had had their hits. It was done. They were
Speaker 2: back in Chicago and they were just working, you know,
Speaker 2: in nightclubs. That's the only work they got. And now
Speaker 2: they were the whole scene just dispersed. So and I
Speaker 2: had a gig playing rhythm guitar and Buddy Guy's band
Speaker 2: and for three weeks, and you had to have a
Speaker 2: shot of bourbon before each set, and there were like
Speaker 2: seven sets a night when I lasted like three weeks
Speaker 2: and just a buddy a kid, and I went and
Speaker 2: I got to San Francisco. So what happened in San
Speaker 2: Francisco was okay, it had a record deal. I realized
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of things really quickly, and I had
Speaker 2: gotten out of that deal forcefully. I made them fire
Speaker 2: me in Chicago and publicly because I figured I was
Speaker 2: going to have a contractual problem with Berry's manager later,
Speaker 2: which I did, but I kicked his butt. So it
Speaker 2: was so I went to to uh San Francisco and
Speaker 2: was there for about six or seven months. Did the
Speaker 2: Chuck Berry thing, which just came up out of nowhere,
Speaker 2: like hey, Chuck Berry's coming to town, made him rehearse
Speaker 2: for two days.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised he did that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what he did that was upsetting was he rehearsed
Speaker 2: for two days, and we hung for two days, had
Speaker 2: a great time, and then five minutes before the show started,
Speaker 2: a friend has showed up. They went out and got
Speaker 2: high on some smack or something, and he came in
Speaker 2: and did the whole show. Like at halftime. It was
Speaker 2: just that very slow set, and that was disappointing, you know.
Speaker 2: But so now I'm seeing this and now there's a
Speaker 2: feeding frenzy in San Francisco to sign anything that's walking,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean they were given thirty thousand dollars
Speaker 2: to anybody.
Speaker 1: Set and.
Speaker 2: Ten times what it was in Seattle. It really so.
Speaker 2: I mean I had fourteen record companies giving me offers,
Speaker 2: fourteen of them. So now I'm in a feeding frenzy,
Speaker 2: and I got everything's going the way I wanted to
Speaker 2: go because I'd had a little taste of the record business,
Speaker 2: and I learned very quickly that I wanted to complete
Speaker 2: artistic control over everything, every picture, every cover, every album,
Speaker 2: everything they said, anything they put out, any music I did.
Speaker 2: I had to own all the publishing all of it.
Speaker 2: I had to own my songwriting. No, you can't have
Speaker 2: any of that. Wow. And not only that, I need
Speaker 2: enough money in a no cut contract to make five
Speaker 2: albums because I got to learn how to do this.
Speaker 2: Thank you?
Speaker 1: And how did you learn to?
Speaker 2: Yes? I was like, Wow, when you run a band
Speaker 2: from the time you're twelve years old, life is really simple,
Speaker 2: you know, like the things I just told you, You know,
Speaker 2: when you talked to brilliant musicians and they go, come, man,
Speaker 2: how did you How are you so smart to know
Speaker 2: you should keep your publishing because I kept track of
Speaker 2: the money, clown. You know what, you think somebody's gonna
Speaker 2: take care of that for you know, nobody ever takes
Speaker 2: care of that, you know. And so like if somebody said, hey, man,
Speaker 2: we want you to come to Streetport, Louisiana and play
Speaker 2: a gig. We're gonna pay you one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: five dollars, I'd say, well, that'll cover the gas. You know,
Speaker 2: it's gonna be two thousand dollars or whatever. I mean.
Speaker 12: I just and I always said, like I always said,
Speaker 12: I'm not going to like gouge anybody, but I'm not
Speaker 12: going to be taking advantage if I just want to
Speaker 12: be on kind of a little win win situation for
Speaker 12: everybody except with the record company.
Speaker 2: And I had a friend who was a prosecuting attorney
Speaker 2: and San Francisco, and he didn't care about being a
Speaker 2: music industry lawyer because all music industry lawyers work for
Speaker 2: record companies. Rather than I don't worry about that. I'll
Speaker 2: go take care of Jimmy Hendricks. I'll get him signed
Speaker 2: up here and everything will be great, you know. Whatever
Speaker 2: that happened all the time. My guy was didn't care.
Speaker 2: And I went to him and I said, this is
Speaker 2: like slavery. They want to you know, but you know,
Speaker 2: if I sell a million records, they're going to want
Speaker 2: to give me a car, you know, you know, four
Speaker 2: thousand dollars in cash and stuff. This is the way
Speaker 2: it's treated, you know. And I want to own everything
Speaker 2: and these are the things I want. And oh we
Speaker 2: just started and they said, well nobody gets that. And
Speaker 2: he said, well I don't want it. I'm not signing.
Speaker 2: And I wouldn't. What I did was said no for
Speaker 2: nine months. And it's like the term of pregnancy, you know,
Speaker 2: it took nine months. It just nothing, no, no, he's
Speaker 2: not not interested. And I had guys come in to
Speaker 2: see me and asking me to do all kinds of
Speaker 2: stupid things. And every time a record company would say like, well,
Speaker 2: hey man, why don't you come on over to the
Speaker 2: studio tomorrow morning. We'd like to cut some tracks. See
Speaker 2: how you guys do in the studio and go. You
Speaker 2: expect me to carry my gear from this? You just
Speaker 2: saw what I do, and you want me to come
Speaker 2: over and you want to test me. You go back
Speaker 2: to Hollywood and till the president of the record company
Speaker 2: if he wants to talk to me, here's my number,
Speaker 2: you know, and I.
Speaker 1: Have Everyone was a suit.
Speaker 2: Everybody was a switter, and anyone that was like hip
Speaker 2: because you hear people are like, I'm so passionate about music.
Speaker 1: But were they all just suits?
Speaker 2: No, they were all suits, and they were all husted.
Speaker 2: And we really began to look at everybody from las
Speaker 2: kind of like a weasel and a rat. And somebody
Speaker 2: was trying to steal everything. And I did my contract.
Speaker 2: I got my contract done, and I brought my contract
Speaker 2: down to a community band meeting at the Carousel Ballroom
Speaker 2: and gave it to everybody and said, this is what
Speaker 2: you need to get. So there was this kind of
Speaker 2: community going on. We had our newspapers and our poster
Speaker 2: art and our shows, and we were we were inventing
Speaker 2: it all. It was all coming from San Francisco. La
Speaker 2: wasn't turning out anything except pop crap. You know, come
Speaker 2: to San Francisco. Here's some flowers in your hair, you know,
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff. And we were like beginning to
Speaker 2: go out. And so when we would come to your town,
Speaker 2: it was like we were carrying the culture on a platter.
Speaker 2: Here we are, here's the culture. Here's what it is.
Speaker 2: Here's the light show. Excuse us while we jam on,
Speaker 2: fly like an eagle for an hour, you know. And
Speaker 2: it just that's what it turned into. And it grew
Speaker 2: and grew and grew and grew, and people came from
Speaker 2: all over the world. So there was a huge awakening
Speaker 2: and it happened in San Francisco, and it happened around
Speaker 2: psychedelic drugs, really, and it happened in an area where
Speaker 2: there was a lot of leeway for artists and bohemians
Speaker 2: and poets, and you know, San Francisco is a really
Speaker 2: great place. And then it.
Speaker 1: Were you the loan Cynic in that whole atmosphere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for a while I was down h Street and people
Speaker 1: just put a flower in your.
Speaker 2: Lapion, Yeah out like I mean I was, I was.
Speaker 2: I was a cynic about the bands. I sort of
Speaker 2: regret a lot of what I said about a lot
Speaker 2: of these people I have now known for fifty years
Speaker 2: and they're still playing, you know, But I used to go,
Speaker 2: this is just such nonsense.
Speaker 1: Well, I know you're saying it now in hindsight, but
Speaker 1: were you that honest back when you were doing press
Speaker 1: sixty eight, sixty nine to seventy, like, yeah, yeah, Stone whatever, you.
Speaker 2: Know, like, oh no, no, it was there was no
Speaker 2: Sly Stone whatever.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, that was my.
Speaker 2: I was in the studio. Sly was cutting his tracks
Speaker 2: and I never heard rhythm tracks like that in my life.
Speaker 2: Just the whole building was just doing it. I opened
Speaker 2: for Sly one time, another hard gig. This was This
Speaker 2: was when Sly was healthy and he was okay, oh
Speaker 2: damn was and he was unbelievable, is what it was like.
Speaker 2: It was one of the greatest nights you ever saw
Speaker 2: in your life. And I'm down to like playing as
Speaker 2: a power trio, you know. You know, it's like we're
Speaker 2: a power trio now because that's all we could afford.
Speaker 2: We're opening for Sly. You know. It's like nineteen whatever
Speaker 2: it was, and people are going get off the fucking
Speaker 2: stage where Sly and I'm like playing space Cowboys. It's
Speaker 2: really are its I gotta get up the stage. We're
Speaker 2: gonna leave now, so, you know. And I'm watching slide
Speaker 2: play and it's the only time in my life I've
Speaker 2: ever left the building. I said, we have to leave
Speaker 2: the building because the balcony is gonna collapse. Come on,
Speaker 2: we gotta go right now, right now. The balcony was
Speaker 2: doing this, it was going up, you know, and then
Speaker 2: it was kind of going like that, you know. And yeah, seriously,
Speaker 2: I've never seen, never seen that in my line. I'm
Speaker 2: telling you, man, I had. I left the building because
Speaker 2: I just thought, you know, I took my guys with me.
Speaker 2: I said, we have to leave, we have to get outside.
Speaker 2: This is not this isn't gonna last, you know. But
Speaker 2: Sly was until the drug so I was like one
Speaker 2: of the greatest things that ever happened. And I didn't
Speaker 2: like the San Francisco bands, and I didn't like that
Speaker 2: much of the San Francisco music, and I'm you know,
Speaker 2: I like Moby Grape. You know, I kept seeing all
Speaker 2: the bands, like, you know, when Steven Stills in Buffalo
Speaker 2: Springfield came in, you know, like didn't like them. I
Speaker 2: didn't like that kind of cowboy buckskin gretch guitar thing.
Speaker 2: They were all ego maniacs. No, they didn't really get
Speaker 2: down and play, you know. And the band I did
Speaker 2: like was The Doors. Oh wow, okay, you know, Doors
Speaker 2: came up and I comeing, Man, that's that's smart man.
Speaker 2: That guys get that little bass thing there, and it's
Speaker 2: real clear and it sounds good, you know, because most
Speaker 2: of the time it sounded pretty bad, you know. And
Speaker 2: these bands really they didn't have enough experience. I had
Speaker 2: already played you know, a thousand gigs from the you know,
Speaker 2: the seventh grade through college. I mean I had really
Speaker 2: played a lot and was you know, wanted things to
Speaker 2: sound good. You know, sound was a big important part.
Speaker 2: And then you know, when the Dead started like their approach,
Speaker 2: this would be the San Francisco approach to sound. Two
Speaker 2: hundred Macintosh stereo amplifiers hooked up to a bunch of
Speaker 2: speakers stacked right behind the band the temperature behind the
Speaker 2: stage was four hundred and seventy.
Speaker 1: Degree, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, the approach was like crazy and
Speaker 2: drugged out and too much money and too much stuff.
Speaker 2: And like I looked at all those bands, like they
Speaker 2: all had kind of drug dealers for managers. So they
Speaker 2: had all this money. They were the local guys. I
Speaker 2: was from out of town. I had to make my way.
Speaker 2: I had to you know, do my way. I felt
Speaker 2: like I personally kept the film Ore Auditorium open for
Speaker 2: Bill Graham. I played their one hundred and twenty times,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean when they needed help, I was
Speaker 2: the guy that had to be you know. But the
Speaker 2: scene just grew and it kept growing and it it
Speaker 2: got better, and it gave me a place where I
Speaker 2: could do a stake and get a recording contract. My
Speaker 2: concept of a recording contract was like the Beatles or something. Man.
Speaker 2: I was going, Man, I can't wait too get in
Speaker 2: there and make some records. And I'd worked as a
Speaker 2: you know, janitor at a recording studio in Dallas, and
Speaker 2: I had been ping ponging back and forth and quarter
Speaker 2: inch track tapes, you know, stereo machines for years and
Speaker 2: working on all of this stuff trying to you know,
Speaker 2: get stuff together, but very rarely was able to get
Speaker 2: into a studio. And the studios were crappy, you know.
Speaker 2: They were like four track, and then it was eight track,
Speaker 2: and then it was twelve track, and then it was
Speaker 2: sixteen track, and then it was so getting a record deal.
Speaker 2: Being able to do that, I thought, it's going to
Speaker 2: be really great. And I went down to LA to
Speaker 2: do the first sessions at Capitol Records, and I'm thinking, man,
Speaker 2: I'm finally sending the deal. I got everything I want.
Speaker 2: These guys are gonna help me produce my record. This
Speaker 2: is going to be really great. Got there and they said, well,
Speaker 2: your studio time starts at midnight, and so, well why
Speaker 2: is that? And they said, well, you know, the studios
Speaker 2: are booked, but we've got you a session at midnight, okay,
Speaker 2: And we man, we'd driven down in the bus, you know,
Speaker 2: with the we had the B three in there, the
Speaker 2: band in there, everything, you know, the Leslie, all our stuff.
Speaker 2: We get in there and set it all up and
Speaker 2: it's about three o'clock in the morning, about time we're
Speaker 2: ready to really start read. You know, I'm too tired,
Speaker 2: but you know, we're set, but we got you know,
Speaker 2: we got a good drum sound. Let's let's come back
Speaker 2: tomorrow and we'll start, okay, I said, well, it's going
Speaker 2: to be midnight again. I said, well all right. So
Speaker 2: we get there at you know, eleven o'clock or and
Speaker 2: they say you have to move all your equipment from
Speaker 2: studio beat A studio A because somebody else needs studio.
Speaker 2: So we move it, We set it up, and we
Speaker 2: get ready to record, and the engineering department walks out.
Speaker 8: What now, you walk out walked.
Speaker 2: Out of the building. They just left, and we were
Speaker 2: just standing, what do you mean? They what? So I
Speaker 2: go call my executive producer, John Palladin, you know, and
Speaker 2: I say, you know, I'm here at the studio. This
Speaker 2: is what's happened in the last two days. You can
Speaker 2: have your money back, you can have your contract back.
Speaker 2: You know. I'm done here, you know. Oh no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: no no no no no no, no, no no no.
Speaker 2: And that's when yeah, I went, okay, I've been so
Speaker 2: naive and stupid about record companies. You know this. There's
Speaker 2: nobody's going to help me do anything. I'm in a cesspool.
Speaker 2: Everybody's fighting for the same resources, and guess what, all
Speaker 2: the engineers are sort of right wing crew cut, kind
Speaker 2: of Vietnam Vett kind of guys who don't like me
Speaker 2: at all. In fact, they don't really want me here
Speaker 2: because I'm this dirty hippie, you know. And that's what
Speaker 2: it was. So because that had been so smart and
Speaker 2: made that great deal the fact there's stuff up but
Speaker 2: the USS United States and went to London and recorded
Speaker 2: at Olympic Studios.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, because the legendary Glenn Johns was
Speaker 1: involved with the first four records.
Speaker 2: Correct, Yeah, and he was our engineer and he was
Speaker 2: always legendary.
Speaker 1: But I was gonna say, did you purposely for the No,
Speaker 1: like Glenn John's like shaped rolling stone stuff, but I
Speaker 1: mean more importantly, like that's just the way he engineered,
Speaker 1: especially with led Zeppelin's like records.
Speaker 2: No, No, that's his brother Andy.
Speaker 1: Wait so there are two of them, Yeah, there's two.
Speaker 2: So here's the thing. Glenn Johns was this very rigid
Speaker 2: British pop guy who had a pop haircut and an
Speaker 2: alligator skin jacket and a briefcase and drove an xke
Speaker 2: and come on, let's here we go. He was like
Speaker 2: and he had done, and he was He had come
Speaker 2: up as an engineer in the British, the London pop scene,
Speaker 2: pop music, so they made good records. We got to
Speaker 2: Olympic Studios and as soon as we got there, there's
Speaker 2: a guy named Jick Sweatingham who invented a whole lot
Speaker 2: of great stuff, who was like working on the board
Speaker 2: and we just went, oh, this is gonna be great.
Speaker 2: They really really want to make the guitar sound good.
Speaker 2: We'd record in the States and you'd cut something and
Speaker 2: sound great, and you go and listen to it and
Speaker 2: you know it sound this big, and you'd go, God,
Speaker 2: what happened. So start working with Glenn. He's our engineer,
Speaker 2: and I'm just totally at war with him because I
Speaker 2: like the stack sound. I like the otis writing sound.
Speaker 2: I like that dry, real sound, and he's got everything
Speaker 2: going through a plate and it's all kind of in
Speaker 2: a reverb chamber. And we're just arguing about presence every day, argue, argue, argue, argue, argue.
Speaker 2: But you know, at the same time, he knew how
Speaker 2: to like get guys together and organize big. He was
Speaker 2: up for fast multi tracking and stuff. So we started
Speaker 2: learning quickly. You know how to make records, how to
Speaker 2: cut tracks, how to really do it?
Speaker 1: Was this on for eight track by the Time Children
Speaker 1: Futures for Yeah? Okay, okay, Now I have a question.
Speaker 1: A lot of your one of your signature trademarks are well,
Speaker 1: obviously you're you're an albums based artist instead of just.
Speaker 2: For electronic music, aren't.
Speaker 1: Well you don't understand.
Speaker 10: I can't wait for this.
Speaker 1: Wait. But what I'm saying is that a majority of
Speaker 1: your albums sort of have this cinematic intro to it.
Speaker 2: You don't.
Speaker 1: I'm just scouting space, even with the the fatality of records.
Speaker 1: I mean all most of your records. You start this
Speaker 1: album with a damn near a two minute drone, so
Speaker 1: in your mind, I mean, I know that in the
Speaker 1: late sixties the whole don't bores, get to the chorus,
Speaker 1: you know, just throw your hit sing out front and whatever.
Speaker 2: Well that's singles.
Speaker 1: Albums are different, right, But I'm just saying that no
Speaker 1: one's truly thinking in terms of crafting albums.
Speaker 2: So well, there were you know, like the Beatles were
Speaker 2: doing it, and this stuff comes from like symphonic music
Speaker 2: and like Bozo goes to the circus, turn page to
Speaker 2: put the next disc on, and you know, Sparky and
Speaker 2: the radio mystery shows and all of that stuff that
Speaker 2: I listened to all the time as a kid. Made
Speaker 2: making an album cinematic. So it's more like, we're gonna
Speaker 2: go someplace. We're going into this special place, We're gonna
Speaker 2: listen to this thing. It's gonna be real wide and
Speaker 2: broad and deep, and there's a you know, if you're
Speaker 2: willing to do this, you know, And and that was
Speaker 2: always my goal. And I was into stockhaus And I
Speaker 2: don't know if you've listened to Stockhausen, but I went
Speaker 2: to Germany and met him in and went to a
Speaker 2: studio and saw how he did things. And I always
Speaker 2: loved the idea of creating a big horizon or a
Speaker 2: space and having it be like a story, like it's
Speaker 2: a musical journey, it's not just one tune. And at
Speaker 2: the same time, then you have to pull the one
Speaker 2: tune out, and then that's a whole other game. Making
Speaker 2: single records and that's a whole other art. So it's
Speaker 2: two different approaches.
Speaker 1: As far as engineering is concerned. You would re engineered
Speaker 1: and mix a song that was going to be a
Speaker 1: single for specific reasons.
Speaker 2: Or yeah, yeah, as soon as we could. Yes, And
Speaker 2: you know it was always hard. I mean, like back then,
Speaker 2: you know, like if you wanted to change the running order,
Speaker 2: you had to cut all the tunes up and put
Speaker 2: them on separate reels. You know, if you had fourteen
Speaker 2: songs or twelve songs, you had twelve different reels, and
Speaker 2: you go, okay, give me song number six. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: make it song number two. Okay, splice it together. Okay,
Speaker 2: now splice all fourteen of them to give us this
Speaker 2: to that. No, that's not right, take it apart and
Speaker 2: tis do it again. You know, it could take weeks
Speaker 2: just just doing the sequencing. So I always I just
Speaker 2: always like that sort of sense of like you're going
Speaker 2: on a journey. And when I when I tell you
Speaker 2: it's Boso Goes to the Circus, there is an actual
Speaker 2: album called Boso Goes to the Circus, and it's kind
Speaker 2: of like that.
Speaker 1: As far as your approach, I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: that earlier stuff was just blues heavy. How did you well,
Speaker 1: the thing is the one thing I didn't do even
Speaker 1: though I had Okay, So I went through two phases
Speaker 1: of discovering your music naturally having it of course, you know,
Speaker 1: my dad had like a couple of records, and then
Speaker 1: later my sister had a few records, and then once
Speaker 1: hip hop came to play, then I had to buy
Speaker 1: everything that any any artists ever made, just so I
Speaker 1: can study their discography. So the thing is, though I
Speaker 1: never looked at or even knew of rock critics disdain
Speaker 1: for for white blues, of which you know, I mean
Speaker 1: like Rolling Stone, not tourist Lye would tear up well,
Speaker 1: I mean because they were, well, you know, you didn't
Speaker 1: live this authentic blues life, so why are you approximating it?
Speaker 8: You know what white blues is? I mean, it sounds
Speaker 8: weird when you say it like that. What's give me?
Speaker 8: Like the three?
Speaker 9: Like?
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I mean his whole career. I mean,
Speaker 1: the basis of his career is taken. But the thing
Speaker 1: is is that I'm now realizing the life that you
Speaker 1: lived from Les Paul, entering your life into all the
Speaker 1: people that you backed them when you couldn't help but
Speaker 1: take the torch.
Speaker 2: And when I got to Chicago and everybody I met
Speaker 2: in Chicago, these are just a bunch of white kids
Speaker 2: have been listening to records. I just went he's got
Speaker 2: a record contract, give me the mic, youll because where
Speaker 2: I grew up.
Speaker 1: So they were they amazed that, like you listened to
Speaker 1: him I play, he was in my living room, like
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 2: Trying to steal Muddy Water's gig.
Speaker 1: Oh So even then, Muddy Waters wasn't like a god.
Speaker 1: He was still competition.
Speaker 2: And it's like I told you, Muddy's career was over.
Speaker 2: They had had their hit singles, they were done. There
Speaker 2: weren't any gigs for Muddy w except in these night
Speaker 2: clubs in Chicago on the South Side and the near
Speaker 2: North Side. That was it. They might go to Detroit.
Speaker 2: Maybe they were living at home. Muddy was. I think
Speaker 2: Muddy was working as a janitor a Chess Records when
Speaker 2: the Rolling Stones came in. And I mean, it's just
Speaker 2: where it was there, and that was considered normal. You know,
Speaker 2: you made three records, you were a star for eighteen months,
Speaker 2: and you know, now it's the hula hoop. Somebody else's
Speaker 2: got sounds like hip hop today. You know, Yeah, in
Speaker 2: a minute, everything would change. And so when I got
Speaker 2: to Chicago, they were talking about this blues scene and
Speaker 2: they were talking about Paul Butterfield. Now Butter had a
Speaker 2: great band, and it was it was like the Little
Speaker 2: Walter Records sound before Mike Bloomfield joined the band and
Speaker 2: screwed it up in my opinion, And I know, people
Speaker 2: go crazy when they it was. It was so sweet.
Speaker 2: It was such a great blues band, you know. But
Speaker 2: I always felt like these were kids who like sat
Speaker 2: around and you know, did this with records. And I
Speaker 2: never felt that way because I was listening to blues
Speaker 2: all of my life, when I was around blues musicians
Speaker 2: all of my life, and then growing up in Texas,
Speaker 2: I was around them all my life and T Bone
Speaker 2: was the guy I learned to play lead from. So
Speaker 2: I didn't have I didn't have that issue of like
Speaker 2: I want to be a blues artist and I'm gonna
Speaker 2: dress like one and I'm gonna talk like one, and
Speaker 2: i'm gonna I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna get a
Speaker 2: guitar just like that. I mean, it wasn't like that.
Speaker 2: It was just like, I want to play music, and
Speaker 2: this is the music that I'm I can see in
Speaker 2: front of me. So that was my difference.
Speaker 9: But wasn't it technically always going to be a disconnect,
Speaker 9: Cause now I'm getting what y'all was saying about white blues,
Speaker 9: black blues, But wasn't it always going to be a
Speaker 9: disconnect sense? Muddy Water and all the black musicians were
Speaker 9: speaking from a place of pain, and regardless to if
Speaker 9: you were in their room, the room with them at
Speaker 9: the time, you would never really feel right what they are.
Speaker 13: White people have pain, y'all.
Speaker 8: Not in America.
Speaker 2: Different.
Speaker 8: It's a different kind of pain in America.
Speaker 2: So you know, I think, like, first of all, first
Speaker 2: of all, like I used to hear Muddy Waters and
Speaker 2: Otis Span and that great band playing in a room
Speaker 2: the size of the room we're in right now, And
Speaker 2: what I was thinking was how great this sounds, How
Speaker 2: what a phenomenal you know, adults playing adult music. This
Speaker 2: is this is jazz, this is this is incredible. And
Speaker 2: you know, I think, you know, the music just gave
Speaker 2: you empathy. You know, I never, I mean, I didn't
Speaker 2: have this. Are you qualifying to play black blues? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I am. You know, let me show you. Let's play
Speaker 2: some blues. Let's play forty four blues, baby, you know
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff. So I just it was my music.
Speaker 2: I didn't look at it as I'm learning Muddy Waters music.
Speaker 2: And so when I was around Muddy and Hollingwoof, I
Speaker 2: started growing up as a musician and I started seeing
Speaker 2: somebody who like played really great harmonica. I could learn
Speaker 2: some things from that, or I saw somebody who was
Speaker 2: doing something, but I didn't see anybody playing guitar like
Speaker 2: t bon Walker and me I didn't think Buddy Guy
Speaker 2: was you know. I thought Buddy Guy and Junior Wells
Speaker 2: were like pretenders. You know, they were like the Junior.
Speaker 1: Set, whoa they were?
Speaker 2: They were they were clowns, they were clowning around. They
Speaker 2: were just fucking around. In the minute they got their
Speaker 2: record contract, they stopped playing blues, and Junior did a
Speaker 2: solo album and wanted to be James Brown. So everybody's
Speaker 2: human here, you know.
Speaker 1: And so your thoughts on the what was the electric
Speaker 1: album that Muddy Waters did? Were electric clud or even
Speaker 1: that where he said Muddy Waters hates this, Yeah, what
Speaker 1: were your feelings on I didn't.
Speaker 2: Really like that that that approach. And I was asked
Speaker 2: to do a record with John Lee Hooker and I said, well, yes,
Speaker 2: I'd love to. So I go over to the studio
Speaker 2: and there's like, here's what it was like, this is
Speaker 2: the white Blues syndrome. Is a white guy producing the record,
Speaker 2: going okay, John, all right, that's fine, just sit over there.
Speaker 2: And John Lee Hooker's like in a in the corner,
Speaker 2: you know, like he is, you know, kind of stuttering
Speaker 2: and sitting there and very shy man, you know. And
Speaker 2: outside there's like five white guys with long hair and
Speaker 2: guitar cases like next, and inside there's like a good
Speaker 2: rhythm section and they're just coming next and they're just
Speaker 2: going to make this album. So I walked in and
Speaker 2: just said this is all wrong. And I started talking
Speaker 2: to John, and I said, man, let's do this, Let's
Speaker 2: do that, let's work on this, let's get going, you know,
Speaker 2: let's do this stuff. And I did one tune and
Speaker 2: I was gone. You know, when you saw those kind
Speaker 2: of albums, those were terrible. So what you really want
Speaker 2: is the real deal. Now, Butterfield is the real deal.
Speaker 2: You know, there are white musicians who are the real deal.
Speaker 2: There are black musicians who are the real deal. And
Speaker 2: and it shouldn't. You know. It's like I get all
Speaker 2: the social you know, differences and the fight about it,
Speaker 2: but really and truly, when you get into the room
Speaker 2: and you just start really playing music. Some people play
Speaker 2: the real stuff, and when that happens, then all that
Speaker 2: other stuff just falls aside and it becomes great. And
Speaker 2: in the record companies promoted all that bad stuff that
Speaker 2: was just some jive A and R guy doing trying
Speaker 2: to make money.
Speaker 1: Okay, so there's a question. Now, I believe you when
Speaker 1: you're you know, even though I wasn't there to see
Speaker 1: these bands in San Franciso or any bands that you've seen,
Speaker 1: you're like, Okay, he's good, he's not good. Their quality
Speaker 1: they're all right, but sort of the way that the
Speaker 1: three of us would know, and I'm pointing up Fonte
Speaker 1: and Bill, the three of us would know equality producer
Speaker 1: all right, Dyla right like, and we respect his his
Speaker 1: drum patches, all of his you know, his whole arrangement.
Speaker 1: And then we'll hear an unnamed imitator that might be
Speaker 1: more popular, and you're like, a man, his batches are horrible.
Speaker 1: The sounds. So what The one thing I could never
Speaker 1: because the thing is is that because I'm from another generation,
Speaker 1: I saw, or at least feel, the beauty and the
Speaker 1: stuff that you might not necessarily see as the real deal.
Speaker 1: But what what are the qualifications for Yeah, what like
Speaker 1: do you look for technique? Do you look for a
Speaker 1: specific robrato or tone in their guitar playing? You know,
Speaker 1: none of that space in their phrasing, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's presence, it's peeling.
Speaker 2: It's right now, right right here, what you know you're
Speaker 2: doing right while you're here. And some people can be
Speaker 2: just technically totally incompetent and can be great, and other
Speaker 2: people can be just unbelievably technically competent and just. And
Speaker 2: so it's all the idea, you know, it's it's the material,
Speaker 2: in the in the presence.
Speaker 1: Well, can I ask, as a blues guitarist, what is
Speaker 1: what was your opinion of Hendricks as a blues guitarist?
Speaker 2: Great, absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1: Now as an amateur, well at okay, it's not me
Speaker 1: being an amateur. But if I'm coming from an amateur standpoint,
Speaker 1: and I have this problem with musicians today, they think, okay,
Speaker 1: I gotta overplay everything to make up for a technique.
Speaker 1: And I knows that with with with blues guitar players,
Speaker 1: that the guys that are often praised are the guys
Speaker 1: that have the least amount of the least amount of
Speaker 1: of of notes.
Speaker 2: So my favorite blues guitar player is Jimmy Vaughan. Okay,
Speaker 2: Jimmy Vaughan. And Eric clapped it just at his seventieth
Speaker 2: birthday party at the Garden and John Mayer was there
Speaker 2: and was there and Booted boot blas there and how
Speaker 2: do you how I was, you know, and he's got
Speaker 2: all the guitar players and Jimmy's there and everybody's coming
Speaker 2: out and they get to do their cello and they're
Speaker 2: all playing like Eric with that sort of soprano woman
Speaker 2: tone that.
Speaker 10: What's it.
Speaker 2: All over the place right, you know, just fast and
Speaker 2: fantastic and like you think that was good? Dig this
Speaker 2: thing that And Jimmy came out and hit one note
Speaker 2: and kind of went splank and they kind of hit
Speaker 2: the floor and went flap and the whole building kind
Speaker 2: of went oh, oh, oh, okay, you know. And that's
Speaker 2: the difference. And some people have got it. And look,
Speaker 2: there are people who make millions of dollars selling bullshit.
Speaker 2: We know that, you know, and and the public's easily fooled,
Speaker 2: you know. And they go along and their packages are
Speaker 2: sold and things are managed and weights push put behind
Speaker 2: certain things, but when it gets down to the real,
Speaker 2: just unvarnished truth, then somebody who's present, who's really saying
Speaker 2: something or really playing from the heart. That's the first
Speaker 2: thing from that.
Speaker 1: Era never got. Their props are their respect that you
Speaker 1: felt deserved. God, status, My God, We're never going to
Speaker 1: get to fighting. We're not gonna get to fight.
Speaker 2: But I'm not mad is Curtis CeAl Gato and the Stilettos.
Speaker 1: I hate to say this, I've never heard.
Speaker 2: Curtis cell Gato and the Stilettos. Check them out.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: They're phenomenal blues songwriter and singer and great harmonica player
Speaker 2: and badass band leader. And he said like four or
Speaker 2: five bands. He's really funny with his bands. Every every
Speaker 2: time he has a new band, I just go, God, Curtis,
Speaker 2: where did you find that guitar player? I don't like
Speaker 2: that guy. I'm firing him. My rhythm guitar player came
Speaker 2: from Curtis's band. I was just going, when are you
Speaker 2: going to fire him? Great? Thank you?
Speaker 1: All right, I'm gonna try and skip ahead a little
Speaker 1: bit because I gotta talk about you, all right. So
Speaker 1: I want to go to Brave New World now, I've
Speaker 1: heard a lot of stories throughout the year is about
Speaker 1: especially with my Dark Hour. Can you confirm or deny
Speaker 1: that you were witnessed? Well, you guys are smiling already
Speaker 1: because you know I'm gonna come with now. The rumor
Speaker 1: was that you were privy or in the presence of
Speaker 1: the actual breakup of the Beatles, that both from what
Speaker 1: I heard, it was that both of you were an
Speaker 1: olymp Olympia's studios.
Speaker 2: Or yeah, I'll tell you what, tell me what happened.
Speaker 2: So I went to London to mix Brave New World, okay,
Speaker 2: and Glenn was gonna mix it, and he was working
Speaker 2: with the Beatles at Olympic Studios, and he said, they're
Speaker 2: running a couple of days over, so just come and
Speaker 2: stay at my house and you know, uh, we'll we'll go.
Speaker 2: We'll start in a couple of days. And then he said,
Speaker 2: let's go over to George's house. To George's house. He says, yeah,
Speaker 2: George's house. So we go and go to George's house
Speaker 2: and George opens the door and he's just sweet as
Speaker 2: he can be, and he says, oh, man, children of
Speaker 2: the Future, you know, Sailor. I love those two albums.
Speaker 2: I was you do twirl of you know, the prayer
Speaker 2: wheel and look at the synths, and I'm going okay,
Speaker 2: And I was just like that, you know.
Speaker 1: And so you did like the Beatles.
Speaker 2: I loved the Beatles. I thought the Beatles were just
Speaker 2: one of the greatest things that ever happened.
Speaker 1: In the talk Somebody's Lose that, I just didn't think
Speaker 1: that ye was even on your.
Speaker 2: Oh I love pop, We're just talking about one. So uh,
Speaker 2: he says, all right, we're gonna go over there doing
Speaker 2: a session tonight, so come on with me. So I
Speaker 2: go into the control room and John comes in, and
Speaker 2: Paul comes in, and Linda comes in, and Oko Yoko
Speaker 2: comes in, Tom Stop Lo and they're doing Jojo, Get Back,
Speaker 2: Get Back, Yeah. And they just walked in, sat down,
Speaker 2: sang it in twenty minutes and we're done. And then
Speaker 2: John had to leave and go do a TV show
Speaker 2: that was like the Johnny Carson Show of England, and
Speaker 2: he went and he said something that just turned the
Speaker 2: whole country over and shook the change out of it.
Speaker 2: Everybody's pockets or something, you know, And then he came
Speaker 2: back and they didn't do anymore that night, and it
Speaker 2: was like if the Beatles were in this room, it'd
Speaker 2: be like there were like four hundred tubes with cameras.
Speaker 2: These would all be cameras. I mean, that's the way
Speaker 2: it felt, and it'd be like, Okay, John's talking to Paul. Now, okay,
Speaker 2: Paul got up, he walked over toward the country. They
Speaker 2: felt like I didn't know how they did what they did,
Speaker 2: and they were very relaxed, and the whole situation real nice.
Speaker 2: So the next day they're gonna do a session and
Speaker 2: John and Ringo didn't show up. George showed up, and
Speaker 2: Paul showed up, and so we're sitting around and they
Speaker 2: had set up the gear. They had the drums and
Speaker 2: the amps and stuff and glenses. Why don't you do
Speaker 2: you and Paul go out and jam a little bit?
Speaker 10: They said.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I borrowed got Lennon's epiphone and then plugged
Speaker 2: into some cool little lamp, and I'm playing this this
Speaker 2: riff and Paul's playing drums. You know, I don't think
Speaker 2: about all these things the way a fan would think
Speaker 2: about them.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: I was pretty you know, shy meeting the Beatles. But
Speaker 2: the next thing I know, I'm doing this recording with Paul,
Speaker 2: and Paul's a great drummer. You just heard it, and
Speaker 2: I was just going, oh, this guy can and I'm going, yeah,
Speaker 2: well dig this lick. Well yeah, and we're we're in
Speaker 2: here doing this now, you know, and I'm not thinking
Speaker 2: about it. And so we start building a song. And
Speaker 2: we're building a song and Paul comes back out and
Speaker 2: plays the bass. I did the second guitar, and he says,
Speaker 2: I got a pedal steel in the other room. You
Speaker 2: want to play? I said, I've always wanted to play it.
Speaker 2: Can you just plus listener to me? So put that on.
Speaker 2: And then we're doing the background vocals, doing the my
Speaker 2: Dark Hour parts.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And while we're doing this, the session gets stopped and
Speaker 2: a newspaper article is brought in that Brian Epstein's mother,
Speaker 2: Brian had died. Their manager had just sold the Beatles
Speaker 2: publishing to Northern Songs for I think it was four
Speaker 2: point nine pounds, and that's when they found out that
Speaker 2: they're publishing had been sold.
Speaker 1: The ANTV Northern Song. So happened that moment?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it came in. It was announced in
Speaker 2: an Emmy New Music Express and hey, look at this
Speaker 2: and so we're kind of reading it and I'm sitting
Speaker 2: there going, fuck, you don't own your own published, guest.
Speaker 2: And then we start talking about Alan Klein and John
Speaker 2: wants to sign with Alan Klein and Paul doesn't. And
Speaker 2: I'm going, you don't want to sign with Alan Klein,
Speaker 2: Alan Klein, all your publishers, you know, those guys are gangsters.
Speaker 2: You don't want your right, don't do that. And I'm
Speaker 2: sitting here going, I can't believe that I'm sitting here
Speaker 2: talking to like somebody that one of the few people
Speaker 2: in my life that I really really am just in
Speaker 2: awe as a talent. And I'm I'm good, I'm better
Speaker 2: off than Paul. I own my own stuff. I can't
Speaker 2: believe this, you know. And so there was poison between
Speaker 2: Linda and Yoko, and I remember the one thing that
Speaker 2: Yoko did that that really blew my mind was they
Speaker 2: were mixing get Back and she was on the phone
Speaker 2: and she said, hey, could you turn that down? I'm
Speaker 2: on the phone and I say, every time music, I
Speaker 2: was like a fly in the room, like I didn't
Speaker 2: want to move anything, you know. I was just like, well,
Speaker 2: they were doing it, and they go, what do you
Speaker 2: think about that. See, it's really great. I mean that's
Speaker 2: why I felt while they were doing it. I really
Speaker 2: wasn't relaxed yet. I hadn't played any music with them
Speaker 2: or done anything. You know. The next day was a
Speaker 2: whole different deal. And that wasn't the day they broke up.
Speaker 2: But I saw the stuff that was going on, and
Speaker 2: you know, it was just like Boz and I had
Speaker 2: this kind of thing like Boz wanted to go sign
Speaker 2: a quick deal with some guy. You know. Boz was going, oh,
Speaker 2: we need this guy, you know, Lenny's going to be
Speaker 2: your manager or whatever it was. And I was going, Boz,
Speaker 2: you're nuts. We can't let you know, we have to
Speaker 2: keep control of our business. No, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2: And there was a lot of that. You know. It's like,
Speaker 2: hey kid, I'm going to take care of you. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna you know, the whole deal, you know. And and uh,
Speaker 2: Lennon just it seemed to me like he just wanted
Speaker 2: somebody to take care of this stuff and have it
Speaker 2: stopped driving him nuts. And Paul was kind of going
Speaker 2: like I want to own my own publishing. I want
Speaker 2: to own my own stuff. We need a good manager.
Speaker 2: We got to be smart, This isn't going to work.
Speaker 2: And that was, you know, when it was going on.
Speaker 2: But they hadn't broken up yet, so I wasn't there
Speaker 2: then they broke up, but I saw what the key
Speaker 2: elements were.
Speaker 8: You, Steve, did you ever have a manager?
Speaker 9: Never?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've had a couple people manage me. And my
Speaker 2: first manager got me busted when I was in London.
Speaker 2: I fired in and yeah, he had a heart shaped
Speaker 2: Valentine with a pound of weeds to him, didn't tell anybody,
Speaker 2: it didn't arrive and he left town. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 2: stuff like that, man, you know, I have never had.
Speaker 2: I got a lot of help from a guy in
Speaker 2: Chicago named Frank Freed, who was a good man who
Speaker 2: helped manage me for a while, did get part of
Speaker 2: my publishing but sold it back to me for nine
Speaker 2: thousand bucks, which was the last nine thousand bucks I
Speaker 2: ever had. Yeah, I mean I had at the moment,
Speaker 2: but after that I never could find anybody was smart
Speaker 2: enough to be my manager. And by that I meant
Speaker 2: they didn't know which lawyers to use, they didn't know
Speaker 2: what kind of insurance to get. They were full of shit.
Speaker 2: They were hanging out in some office. They thought it
Speaker 2: was a party.
Speaker 1: They weren't.
Speaker 2: They didn't have the kind of connections I wanted. And
Speaker 2: I was always scared of guys like Irving A's off.
Speaker 2: You know, I was the Irving would skin me. You know,
Speaker 2: it's turned out to be one of the best guys
Speaker 2: there is for artists.
Speaker 1: But you know, during that time period, so mafia infused that,
Speaker 1: you know, you could make.
Speaker 2: Well, everything was mafia or record company. And the managers,
Speaker 2: I mean a manager was a guy who was like
Speaker 2: in Los Angeles going, hey, what what do you mean?
Speaker 2: The hotel's bad, the PA doesn't work. Listen. I got
Speaker 2: to talk to Madonna right right, you know, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean they were just playing everybody and there wasn't
Speaker 2: very much respect for artists, and I just didn't in
Speaker 2: my run, I didn't run into the right people. I
Speaker 2: never ran into somebody who was like going to be
Speaker 2: doing as much as I was doing and earning their
Speaker 2: equal share.
Speaker 10: Of what it was around at that time.
Speaker 2: It was fun and I love Shep, you know, and
Speaker 2: and he's you know, you was the dealer, and you know,
Speaker 2: I didn't want a drug dealer or a kid to
Speaker 2: be my manager. I wanted I realized that I needed
Speaker 2: more than that, you know, and it's taken me a
Speaker 2: lifetime to figure out what a what it really takes,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean I've been doing this now for
Speaker 2: a long, long, long time about you know, sixty sixty
Speaker 2: five years and us it's a it's been a long
Speaker 2: life and I've I've learned a lot about business, and
Speaker 2: there are very few managers people can really actually manage
Speaker 2: you through the stages of a career, and they always
Speaker 2: want to own you forever, you know.
Speaker 1: So what do you want to give advice to anybody
Speaker 1: that's listening on what to look for as a manager,
Speaker 1: like I mean yeah, like or maybe like things for
Speaker 1: them to to you know, sign for them to.
Speaker 2: Go for honestly an organization really well yeah, yeah, an
Speaker 2: organization that's honest. Honesty is the is really important. And
Speaker 2: of course knowledge too, but uh, it's really really, really
Speaker 2: a difficult thing, and you have to u decide. You know,
Speaker 2: when people make these decisions, they don't even know what
Speaker 2: they're getting into. They don't even know what their lives
Speaker 2: are going to be.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 2: It's the only place in the world where you know,
Speaker 2: somebody comes up to you and go when you're eighteen
Speaker 2: or twenty years old, and goes, I'm going to manage you,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to own part of this for the
Speaker 2: rest of your life, and I'll probably sell it and
Speaker 2: make more money off of it than you will later.
Speaker 2: You know, that's kind of what management is really looking
Speaker 2: to do, you.
Speaker 1: Know, honest though. Yeah, yeah, so, okay, I guess we
Speaker 1: show also been at least Space Cowboy on the record.
Speaker 1: Did you plan on that being a main single? Because
Speaker 1: I always wanted to know why I was at the
Speaker 1: end of side too, because I would normally think that, Okay,
Speaker 1: your first single, your big single, should at least be
Speaker 1: in the first three songs.
Speaker 2: I hated Space Cowboy. I would want to put it
Speaker 2: on the record.
Speaker 1: So was it an accidental hit?
Speaker 2: Yeah? It was one of those kind of things like
Speaker 2: I have had. I've written myself out of what I
Speaker 2: call the rock ghetto, right, you know, several times by luck.
Speaker 2: And Space Cowboy was a poorly executed, executed tune, poorly written,
Speaker 2: done in fifteen seconds or was it? But the idea
Speaker 2: was really really great and we knocked it out without
Speaker 2: any respect and we didn't take Like when I was
Speaker 2: talking to Paul about writing to McCartney, was going, man,
Speaker 2: how did you do? What? What about all that? And
Speaker 2: he said, oh, he said, God, we did those things
Speaker 2: so fast. I wish I had taken more time with
Speaker 2: some of these songs. And that was kind of like
Speaker 2: which one the long Winding Road was that too short?
Speaker 2: Or which one was it that wasn't didn't meet your standards?
Speaker 2: You know, But when you look back and you see
Speaker 2: stuff like that, like you know, space Cot was just
Speaker 2: a terrible track and that's why it's stuck on the
Speaker 2: end and everybody's going, are you crazy? You kind of
Speaker 2: put it up.
Speaker 1: You're still maintainment to this day.
Speaker 2: No, it's a great song now. I completely redone it.
Speaker 2: We're killing it now.
Speaker 1: When you hear the original, you're just like, man, so
Speaker 1: I get a sweat and blood.
Speaker 2: Dude.
Speaker 1: I mean, but you see there's a Simpsons episode about it,
Speaker 1: so you're at least like, Okay, maybe I was wrong
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: You know, here's the thing, like, I've never met any
Speaker 2: artist who has any concept to who they are. It
Speaker 2: was so obvious Chuck Berry didn't have a clue who
Speaker 2: he was. You know, didn't know who Chuck Berry was.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know who Steve Miller is. I'm
Speaker 2: inside of Steve Miller trying to think this stuff up
Speaker 2: and do it. So when somebody comes up and goes,
Speaker 2: oh man, Steve Space Cowboy, you know the Stephen Mere
Speaker 2: goes God, that was the lamest track we ever cut.
Speaker 2: I can't believe it sounds terrible as an awful mix.
Speaker 2: Guitar solo is like, what did I have that effect
Speaker 2: on that? Get?
Speaker 9: Ugh?
Speaker 2: Ah, you know that's me. That's the way I'm looking
Speaker 2: at it. And somebody else has gone, god, Man, Space
Speaker 2: Cowboys saved my life, and you have to you know,
Speaker 2: it's really hard to just shut up and go thanks
Speaker 2: and thank you. You know, so it's really hard to
Speaker 2: know who you are to other people. I have a
Speaker 2: hard time with that.
Speaker 1: You said, only take fifteen minutes in one take. Well,
Speaker 1: in contrast, you said in an interview once that I
Speaker 1: think The Joker took three weeks to make.
Speaker 2: Oh no, that's a whole album, okay, not just no
Speaker 2: the Joker album.
Speaker 1: I thought you meant okay, I thought the song The Joker.
Speaker 2: Was really quick. That was like seventeen days for the
Speaker 2: whole thing.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Okay, So even thanks for putting that song
Speaker 1: in guitar heroll.
Speaker 2: My kids love that song, you know, God bless it.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 2: I love the fact that little kids love my music
Speaker 2: and they all sing it, and they all like it,
Speaker 2: and they can sing the parts.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 2: That's that's as good as it good.
Speaker 1: Not that I think, well, I don't know, if you see.
Speaker 1: I like to think that everything that you've done on
Speaker 1: your records had some sort of scientific, purposeful.
Speaker 2: Meaning to it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and I know you're going to be like, sure,
Speaker 1: I don't know what I was thinking. Okay. On the
Speaker 1: Joker album, right at the beginning of Come to My Kitchen,
Speaker 1: I mean, you have this monster group. It's only for
Speaker 1: like eighteen seconds, but it feels like you're going to
Speaker 1: do live concert, and this monster group starts and then
Speaker 1: it just fades away, and then you go into come
Speaker 1: to my Kitchen. Why and where is that group? Because
Speaker 1: that group was.
Speaker 2: Kind of a sound check. Yeah, but and and uh
Speaker 2: and and still have all of it. And it was
Speaker 2: a great groove and and I wanted I want I
Speaker 2: wanted to you know, I wanted to create this environment,
Speaker 2: and I wanted that it was I knew it was
Speaker 2: such a great piece of music. I wanted to put
Speaker 2: it on the record, but I didn't know more what
Speaker 2: to do with it, and and so we mixed it
Speaker 2: with the Kitchen Blues, which was this live performance.
Speaker 1: And it's just like, was it us like walking into
Speaker 1: the concert hall as the It's kind of.
Speaker 2: Like to me, it's always like the spaceship lens, you know,
Speaker 2: it's like there's a lot of that. Like I was
Speaker 2: always playing the echo plexo.
Speaker 10: Woo wool wall wah wah.
Speaker 2: You know, into another thing, you know, and I don't know,
Speaker 2: you know why I didn't take that and write write
Speaker 2: a great piece of music. You know. I was always
Speaker 2: very serious about making my albums and trying to say,
Speaker 2: say entertain people, say good things, kind of educate people,
Speaker 2: have it be a little bit more than maybe what
Speaker 2: they were thinking they were going to get. And so
Speaker 2: it's always, you know, serious about it. It wasn't just like, oh,
Speaker 2: I don't know what I was doing, But sometimes I
Speaker 2: didn't know what I was doing. Like on Space Cowboy,
Speaker 2: I thought it was a great idea. I just you know,
Speaker 2: we made five albums I think in eighteen months, and
Speaker 2: that was the third one or something. You know. It
Speaker 2: was like we were really moving fast.
Speaker 1: When you're making these records, do you, I mean, they
Speaker 1: also have a and it's gonna be weird maybe for
Speaker 1: you to say this. I don't know if anyone's ever
Speaker 1: described it to you before, but I mean, I consider
Speaker 1: these hip hop seeds hip hop records because there's some
Speaker 1: of them are so groove based, and the way that
Speaker 1: you mix them, it's it's like R and B records,
Speaker 1: even with with like I mean, I'm not even talking
Speaker 1: about like take the Money and Run or whatever that
Speaker 1: had breakbeats at the top of them, but just in general, like,
Speaker 1: were you mindful of soul grooves and maybe that somewhere
Speaker 1: out there there's a black audience that would embrace you
Speaker 1: as well or that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: Stop we had a black audience. We had a big audience,
Speaker 2: and everywhere we played it was really a mixed audience,
Speaker 2: and we were a mixed band. And uh so, you know,
Speaker 2: Gerald Johnson is one of the greatest bass players from
Speaker 2: the whole fucking planet. You know, he's great, and uh
Speaker 2: we had you know, before the sheds, it was all integrated.
Speaker 2: And as soon as the sheds were built and they
Speaker 2: moved out to the suburbs, like all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: I was just playing to an all white kind of.
Speaker 1: Like man music. Well, see, our shed is actually in
Speaker 1: the inner city. Actually our sids in the hoods Center
Speaker 1: and Philly Man Music Center is right in the hood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the Plateau.
Speaker 2: Played one of the you know, I played there many
Speaker 2: times and had one of the most corrupt gigs of
Speaker 2: my life was done there.
Speaker 1: Music Center was the name Larry Maggott brought into play.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was okay, Larry Megan stories.
Speaker 1: He's the man my dad, so go ahead.
Speaker 2: So so oh that explains everything. I was reading your book.
Speaker 2: So I was like, yeah, so all right. So Larry Maggott,
Speaker 2: like a friend of mine who had started off as
Speaker 2: an equipment manager for Santana Herbie Herbert, put together created
Speaker 2: and thought up the band Journey. He thought up the
Speaker 2: poster art, he thought up the t shirt business. He's
Speaker 2: the guy who created the t shirt business now. And
Speaker 2: he picked the people in Journey and he said we're
Speaker 2: gonna have a rock pan and we're gonna do this,
Speaker 2: and he was unbelievably successful. And he told me the
Speaker 2: story about Larry. So they played at Philly at the
Speaker 2: Football Stadium stadium and got paid on a sold out
Speaker 2: show fifty six thousand people or something like that. A
Speaker 2: couple of weeks later, to get a satellite photo from
Speaker 2: a friend of theirs in the Air Force. He goes, congratulations,
Speaker 2: you guys had seventy eight, two hundred and forty two
Speaker 2: people at your show. And he said, can you do
Speaker 2: that from a satellite? He said, oh yeah, right to
Speaker 2: the you know there it is. So there's a huge
Speaker 2: lawsuit body against Larry Maggott who was like skimming, like
Speaker 2: by twenty five thousand people. Everything was a skim, right,
Speaker 2: So stealing skimming, stealing, skimming off everybody. So Paul McCartney's
Speaker 2: seeing them, grateful dead, sewing them, journey seeing them. Somebody
Speaker 2: else is seeing them. Somebody Yeah, they see him. A
Speaker 2: vice president from the company has to go to jail
Speaker 2: for eighteen months. And then poll started as an article
Speaker 2: saying so Larry house business ben He says, well, ticket
Speaker 2: sales A is great. Has affect your ticket sales at all?
Speaker 2: So that's a So I'm playing there and I go
Speaker 2: do this. I get there and the building manager is
Speaker 2: not there. The fire commissioner guy is like on vacation,
Speaker 2: and those three hundred pounds Union guys and Philly who
Speaker 2: are all like, hey, yeah, you know, I mean I
Speaker 2: got into it with those guys, Yeah I did. I
Speaker 2: went in. They were all eating chicken, and I said,
Speaker 2: look at you guys. While I was talking, I was going,
Speaker 2: what am I doing? They were like the you know,
Speaker 2: eating half chickens, and nothing was set up, and they
Speaker 2: were trying to charge us an extra ten thousand dollars
Speaker 2: to set up our second laser screen, and you know,
Speaker 2: they were just jerking us around everything. And I go
Speaker 2: out and I look at outside and I go, holy shit,
Speaker 2: this place is so over sold. This is the most
Speaker 2: dangerous house I've ever been in my life. There was
Speaker 2: not space for one more person there was there were
Speaker 2: no aisles, there were nothing, and I just had to like,
Speaker 2: you know, the show was like very delicate. I didn't
Speaker 2: want to get anybody too excited or anything. And then
Speaker 2: the rear fence was broken down and three thousand people
Speaker 2: more came in. And then later we found out that
Speaker 2: the Union had a van that they were selling cocaine
Speaker 2: in the the union. The Union guys at work, they
Speaker 2: were selling coke in the audience, and they were reselling
Speaker 2: the tickets just when you're thinking there, I had a seizure,
Speaker 2: you know. And then and then you know, we get
Speaker 2: in the cars and that's the end of the East
Speaker 2: Coast and we're going to Denver, and you know, three
Speaker 2: days later we're playing it. We fly, the stuff's all
Speaker 2: into it. We get to Denver and we get out
Speaker 2: the Red Rocks and the guys go, what did you
Speaker 2: guys do in Philly? Man? You know, because the union
Speaker 2: had called them. You know, I thought our tires were
Speaker 2: going to be slashed, our equipment stolen, but that that
Speaker 2: was always Philly. You know, it was a very So
Speaker 2: you know, when when people asked me about business and
Speaker 2: you asked me about management, I've been dealing all my
Speaker 2: life with mafia, UH, illegal police, UH, corrupt business people,
Speaker 2: dishonest record companies. The union designed to protect me, never
Speaker 2: protected any of my interests and abused me. And uh,
Speaker 2: you know, the ask caps of the world have you know,
Speaker 2: I'm always in the wrong program. When I when I
Speaker 2: got my hit boy too bad, you know, you would
Speaker 2: have made more shell game, you know, all of that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff. So my whole business experience has been
Speaker 2: dealing with people who are dishonest or trying to steal
Speaker 2: from me and trying to do me harm.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: So that's that's what That's the kind of manager you
Speaker 2: need is you need the space cowboy man, you need
Speaker 2: the champion of justice.
Speaker 8: Sounds like we need to Stephen Miller book though publisher,
Speaker 8: you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: I think I think you know, the book's been written.
Speaker 2: You know what the problem I found was what people
Speaker 2: would say, you know, like, well, that's an acceptable contract
Speaker 2: that they would have, you know, fifty percent of your publishing.
Speaker 2: That's that's the industry standard. And I just from my
Speaker 2: twelve year old days of getting paid for what I
Speaker 2: did and what I thought was mine, I would just say,
Speaker 2: well no.
Speaker 9: And that's still you think that's realistic in twenty seve
Speaker 9: seen you think that, you know, some courage field artists
Speaker 9: can go into office and be like I want it all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But it's so different now because you have to
Speaker 2: here's here's the thing, you know, like here, here's the thing.
Speaker 2: You can only do that when the situation's right. So
Speaker 2: when I told you I had a feeding frenzy, I
Speaker 2: thought you understood what a feeding frenzy is. Feeding frenzies,
Speaker 2: you know, when I when I told you that in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty six there was this giant awakening in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about some little scene in the club.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: The world movement.
Speaker 2: A thing popped out. You know, it was like whoa, whoa,
Speaker 2: there's a whole different way this can all work. So
Speaker 2: these things are like you know, situations timing all that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff.
Speaker 8: Or unicorn in a way with the kids call like
Speaker 8: to call it these days.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, if you want to get, if you
Speaker 2: want it so bad, you'll do anything that's man listen,
Speaker 2: then then then you know, I can get all your
Speaker 2: publishing and your shoes and your watch and your ring
Speaker 2: and your wallet. You know, in thirty minutes. That's now
Speaker 2: with three sixties, yeah, and all of that because they
Speaker 2: know it and the kids don't know it. And you know,
Speaker 2: kids always want to you know, you wost want to
Speaker 2: do it, but you have to say no.
Speaker 1: You have to learn the leverage is in your favor
Speaker 1: if you if you have even.
Speaker 2: If it isn't, you have to say no for a while.
Speaker 2: Do you know, Like I never did anything I didn't
Speaker 2: want to do, and I had people trying to get
Speaker 2: me to do stuff. You know, hey, man, go do
Speaker 2: this thing for this DJ for free, and he'll do
Speaker 2: that and go, fuck you man. You know there's going
Speaker 2: to be four thousand people there. Sure you want me
Speaker 2: to come? I always had that attitude. You know that
Speaker 2: you got to pay me if you want me to
Speaker 2: put the amp in the car and drive there and
Speaker 2: set it up and plug it in. Man, It's it's work.
Speaker 2: It's work, Okay.
Speaker 1: So I have a question in in retrospect, was there
Speaker 1: one historical event or one color collaboration or even some
Speaker 1: of his minuscule as a soundtrack song, one slight misstep
Speaker 1: that you made that you regret not doing, Like did
Speaker 1: you get an offer for Woodstock but you're like they
Speaker 1: ain't paying for me gas?
Speaker 2: Nope or wood Stock. I was calling, uh Frank Freed
Speaker 2: in Chicago. The guy was helping me out there. Frank,
Speaker 2: we got to play Woodsuck. We're gonna Yeah, you don't
Speaker 2: want to play there. It's gonna be many, it's gonna
Speaker 2: be in the say and it's already booked, you know what, Frank,
Speaker 2: we gotta come on, Ah, you don't want to you
Speaker 2: know that was one uh Monterey Pop Festival was you know,
Speaker 2: we were talking about how the San Francisco guys really
Speaker 2: considered the La guys gangsters and criminals, which they were,
Speaker 2: and we were right to have that. But the other
Speaker 2: day I was reading about the Monterey Pop Festival and
Speaker 2: somebody was talking about how my manager, in typical San
Speaker 2: Francisco fashion talked my talked us out of being in
Speaker 2: the film. You know, it's like, we're not gonna let
Speaker 2: you guys film us. We're not gonna do that.
Speaker 1: You did it and you're not own film.
Speaker 9: Yeah right, no, wait, but Jannis is saying, your wife
Speaker 9: is saying, some Jess, there we go.
Speaker 2: Jennis just found twelve minutes of us that that Penny
Speaker 2: Baker himself shot anyway, in spite of which shows you right, absolutely,
Speaker 2: yeah yeah. And you know Bill Graham was the same way.
Speaker 2: I mean, he illegally videotaped and recorded every show I
Speaker 2: ever did. There.
Speaker 8: Oh, they're putting it out. Oh you said she said that.
Speaker 8: Janna said they're putting it out.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well we've called them up and said, hey,
Speaker 2: you remember what we said. We didn't mean that sixty
Speaker 2: seven or whatever was.
Speaker 1: Come on, you know, I can't believe this, but we're
Speaker 1: finally getting to nineteen seventy six. I know you got
Speaker 1: you get to Fly like an Eagle already. I promise
Speaker 1: you I'll end it right now. All right, I just
Speaker 1: had a get to Fly like wait, I'm here now
Speaker 1: now I'm so overwhelmed, I don't know what to ask
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: Fly Like an Eagle was a song that was developed
Speaker 2: over two three years. And our gigs used to be
Speaker 2: we'd like, you know, go come to Detroit and play
Speaker 2: the Grandy ball Room, or be in Boston at the
Speaker 2: Tea Party year be you know, whoever it was. And
Speaker 2: a lot of what we did was like we'd play
Speaker 2: a couple hours, two three hours, and we'd have a
Speaker 2: mirror ball and you know, mirror ball is a great thing,
Speaker 2: and you know, it's like a dark room. It wasn't
Speaker 2: like a big show spotlights and all that, and there'd
Speaker 2: be some you know, kind of oily kind of stuff
Speaker 2: going on behind you. The mirror ball would be on,
Speaker 2: everything would be kind of cool and we'd just start jamming.
Speaker 2: And so Fly Like an Eagle was a jam and
Speaker 2: it was a long piece. Back in those days, a
Speaker 2: show wasn't something where you had to come out and
Speaker 2: do like, you know, nine songs and forty five minutes
Speaker 2: like bang bang bang bang bang bang, thank you very much.
Speaker 2: You know, it was like a whole evening and it
Speaker 2: was kind of like we're just tipping the gang and
Speaker 2: everybody's going to relax. You know, it's like music tonight.
Speaker 2: And so that song was developed started like that and
Speaker 2: that riff. You know, my dark hour didn't feel like
Speaker 2: you know, I gave him the song before it was
Speaker 2: really finished and we did it in seven hours and
Speaker 2: it was done, and I wasn't done with that that
Speaker 2: idea at all.
Speaker 1: So yeah, come back to it because there was a
Speaker 1: slow I believe on Midnight Special in seventy three you
Speaker 1: did a version of Flat like Eagle. That's half the halftime,
Speaker 1: the slower version of it. So it's always been your repertoire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like for me personally, like and this is this is
Speaker 1: the whole reason why you're here? Is the next question?
Speaker 1: I wait, you gotta understand, all right.
Speaker 9: So my.
Speaker 1: My my first day of school back in seventy six,
Speaker 1: which is weird because because my dad had both silt
Speaker 1: degrees and fly like an Eagle eight track in the car,
Speaker 1: it was far far drive from school. So like my
Speaker 1: memory of hearing fly like an Eagles on my dad's
Speaker 1: a track player in the car, and also with Bosqua
Speaker 1: as record, which you know, it's kind of weird that
Speaker 1: you two are paired together and we didn't know that
Speaker 1: back then. But you know here in the space intro,
Speaker 1: which Steve will probably want to kill me, because any
Speaker 1: space intro is just my go to reference point for
Speaker 1: anything that in my head that's like slow motion or
Speaker 1: needs atmosphere and whatever like, that's my my go to
Speaker 1: reference for any keyboard play we ever had, Steve.
Speaker 2: So I was listening to one of your records today
Speaker 2: before I came over. I think I understood that, Well,
Speaker 2: it's kind of like we could do. This is the
Speaker 2: same stuff we're.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, just me, when I was a kid, it
Speaker 1: made me feel like I could fly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to. That's that's great because that's
Speaker 2: exactly what the way it made me feel when I
Speaker 2: was playing it and discovering it and doing it, and
Speaker 2: it was so magical to do that, you know, And
Speaker 2: I I I had this this thought, you know when
Speaker 2: before I came over today, because I was listening to
Speaker 2: some things and I kind of went, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: this is like the same kind of work like this
Speaker 2: is these are these people, and I mean this is
Speaker 2: like what I'm doing, This is where where I am
Speaker 2: when I'm in the studio, when I'm laying back, and
Speaker 2: I kept thinking like of Macho City, Dude.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to talk about Manso City because freaking
Speaker 1: hip hop. Like when when you're creating Mancho City and
Speaker 1: the political rap that comes with it, it's like a
Speaker 1: year before the message. What what were you thinking?
Speaker 2: Like were you.
Speaker 1: As far as like, okay, well, hip hop is is?
Speaker 1: I was just going to be a thing because hip
Speaker 1: hip hop really wasn't a thing.
Speaker 2: Here's what you can't understand. I was thinking about hip
Speaker 2: hop at all. I was just doing something.
Speaker 1: So you didn't hear any Grandmaster Flash records like oh
Speaker 1: we could know. I was believe you too, because you know,
Speaker 1: I was just doing what I do and that's it
Speaker 1: wasn't new wave. It has it's sort of a new
Speaker 1: like when new wave came. Like were you aborted? Because
Speaker 1: I felt like if you didn't do Macho City, probably
Speaker 1: talking heads cause have attempted to do it. Who are
Speaker 1: your peers in that moment that.
Speaker 2: I didn't have any peers because what what? What had
Speaker 2: happened was I had uh been sort of, I had.
Speaker 2: I had done Abercadabra, I'd played these shows, I'd been
Speaker 2: playing football stadiums. American Record Company said, Abricadabra sucks, We're
Speaker 2: not going to do anything with it, and sorry, and
Speaker 2: I said, okay, well, I'm canceling my United States tour.
Speaker 2: I'm going to Europe then, because I had a different
Speaker 2: deal with Phonogram from Capital. I went to Europe, and
Speaker 2: it was number one all over Europe. In the United States,
Speaker 2: it was in Europe, but not it was phone so
Speaker 2: so it was number one everywhere. And and I came back.
Speaker 2: I did a whole big tour of Europe and came
Speaker 2: back to the States, and now it was like coming
Speaker 2: up the charts, and then it finally went to number one.
Speaker 2: And I got back and the sheds had just opened.
Speaker 2: It's nineteen eighty three, I think, and I had booked
Speaker 2: eleven of them, and I'd been playing football stadiums. I
Speaker 2: got back at nineteen eighty three and there were like
Speaker 2: three thousand people in each at each gig, and it
Speaker 2: was a whole new place and a whole new thing,
Speaker 2: and I was just kind of going, like God, my
Speaker 2: business is it? Okay, Now I'm at the end, man,
Speaker 2: all right. I sold them, you know, twenty million albums,
Speaker 2: and I played football stadiums and I did all this stuff.
Speaker 2: But I ain't going to come back and playing places
Speaker 2: that are like a quarter full and so and at
Speaker 2: the same time, all the press stuff like I think
Speaker 2: at the same time, I think Macho City in the
Speaker 2: La Times called it unmitigated slop and said that the
Speaker 2: Capitol Records should be embarrassed for releasing my work as
Speaker 2: an artist. And then they ran it again at New
Speaker 2: Year's you know, like that. It was. It really hurt.
Speaker 2: So so I just kind of went like, okay, that's it.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm out of here. So I didn't tour for
Speaker 2: six years.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, you let that.
Speaker 2: Hamper you No, no, yeah, that was the final straw.
Speaker 2: But I had I had just been on the road
Speaker 2: from nineteen sixty five nineteen eighty three, and I just
Speaker 2: just I mean, I was really tired of the whole thing.
Speaker 2: And I didn't have any a manager, and I didn't
Speaker 2: have any plan. I just you know, whatever happened happened,
Speaker 2: and I worked when I worked it to my advantage
Speaker 2: as much as I could, and I was tired. I
Speaker 2: needed a break.
Speaker 1: So were you wear that like amazing mojo not mojojo?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: It let you like they were playing that on black
Speaker 1: radio up at Detroit, like in heavy rotation, like that
Speaker 1: song had legs on it.
Speaker 2: No see, you know, like come no, I was living
Speaker 2: in a farm in Oregon.
Speaker 1: That's a good answer.
Speaker 2: It was good. And you know, that's that's the world
Speaker 2: I want to live in, where everybody where all cultures
Speaker 2: are intertwined, and people are all listening to each other,
Speaker 2: and the audience is diverse, and the music is diverse,
Speaker 2: and you know, in an odd sense, that's kind of
Speaker 2: what was cool about San Francisco is that it was diverse.
Speaker 2: You know, on Monday night, it might be Johnny Cash,
Speaker 2: and on Tuesday night it might be the Modern Jazz Quartet,
Speaker 2: And on Wednesday night it'd be you know, Quicksilver Messenger Service,
Speaker 2: and on Thursday night it'd be Muddy Waters, you know,
Speaker 2: and it was very diverse. Or Roland Kirk or you know,
Speaker 2: Charles Lloyd or a lot of people were just coming
Speaker 2: through all the time. That's the world I want to
Speaker 2: live in and play in and breed in. And you know,
Speaker 2: be in. That's that's the way I feel.
Speaker 1: Okay. You know, like when someone tells you joke and
Speaker 1: then you get the punchline like five years later. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that just happened to me. So I hate going back
Speaker 1: to the filmore. But you said, Rashaan Rolling Kirk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, Now we used to jam all the time.
Speaker 1: This is what I gotta know. With these jazz pairings
Speaker 1: come into the film, Moore, were they truly open or
Speaker 1: did it just look good on the poster? Like looking
Speaker 1: on the poster, it's like, you know, air clapped in
Speaker 1: cream and I'm using hypothetical John Coltran in essence, did
Speaker 1: it really work that night? Or were there people that
Speaker 1: were just like, all right, let me know when the
Speaker 1: sunshine of your love guy comes home outside from smoke?
Speaker 10: No?
Speaker 1: No, no, it was like, were they truly open to.
Speaker 2: You don't understand, man. It was an The whole building
Speaker 2: was different. It wasn't like when you go to work
Speaker 2: and tickets are sold and managers are there and pop
Speaker 2: stars are there and big video screens are on and
Speaker 2: people are in control and people are being wound up
Speaker 2: to be hysterical and ship like that. That's Rolling Stones
Speaker 2: English Ship. This was like warm and real and great.
Speaker 2: I used to go see Rolan Kirk on Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 2: He'd play a set Sunday afternoon and play another set
Speaker 2: Sunday night, or he was whatever he and you know
Speaker 2: who you remind me of. I don't say it the drummer, No, no, no, Buddy, Buddy.
Speaker 2: I know Buddy really, really, really well. I was there
Speaker 2: the day Buddy came to town. He came to my house.
Speaker 2: I definitely wanted to steal him from Mike Bloomfield right
Speaker 2: away and put a band together with him, because he
Speaker 2: was really cool. He went on a long pad trip
Speaker 2: and had you know, a lot of bad things happened
Speaker 2: to him. But I don't know if you know much
Speaker 2: about Clift Engineer. It's Cajun blues, accordion blues. And the
Speaker 2: drummer sits in the middle of the stage with his
Speaker 2: drums like at this level, and it's like he's got
Speaker 2: a bat and he's just going and things are happening
Speaker 2: in the little bass player and the guitar player doing
Speaker 2: a little steps and bomping up to the side and
Speaker 2: off to the side, and Clifton sineers in the middle
Speaker 2: and there's a guy on his knees playing his chest,
Speaker 2: you know, playing the thing, and some of the greatest
Speaker 2: music man funky funky funky stuff. That stuff was going
Speaker 2: on all the time, and everybody was high the lights
Speaker 2: the whole thing. It was like not like show business.
Speaker 2: It was a different It was like church, man, a
Speaker 2: musical church is what it ended up being. That was
Speaker 2: being manipulated by certain groups and certain people. But in
Speaker 2: spite of the Bill Graham's of the world, you know,
Speaker 2: because while all this was going on, Bill Graham was
Speaker 2: stealing from everybody, you know, stealing from the group, stealing
Speaker 2: from the people, over selling the stuff, doing lying about
Speaker 2: the books, bullshitting everybody, you know. But in spite of
Speaker 2: all of that, there was this really great heart and
Speaker 2: soul changing musical scene going on.
Speaker 13: So with the song, with the song the Joker, you
Speaker 13: had this global hit basically right, and that was humongo humongous.
Speaker 1: So and then.
Speaker 13: Did you feel did something click at that point where
Speaker 13: you said, Okay, now I understand what's going to truly
Speaker 13: help me translate to the pop charts and have mega
Speaker 13: hits and then sort of start pumping out like once
Speaker 13: you had just said okay, wow, I found a unique
Speaker 13: sound here.
Speaker 2: It was. It was different than that. When I left down.
Speaker 2: The Joker was my last album at Capitol Records. Nobody
Speaker 2: was talking to me about renewing my contract. It was
Speaker 2: the first album where I kicked all the producers and everybody.
Speaker 2: I was the first record I produced myself with just
Speaker 2: by my So The Joker was yeah. And I brought
Speaker 2: my band in for two days and cut all the
Speaker 2: tracks and sent them home and then spent fifteen days
Speaker 2: doing the vocal overdubs and all this stuff and mixing
Speaker 2: it and putting it together. And I had this little
Speaker 2: playback for the record company, and some kid in the
Speaker 2: playback meeting said that Joker, I like that. I think
Speaker 2: I think that could be a hit single. And I
Speaker 2: turned to him and I said, I don't care about
Speaker 2: hit singles anymore, you know, because I couldn't get played
Speaker 2: on AM radio every single I put. I mean, just
Speaker 2: could not do it. So I said, here's an album,
Speaker 2: here's a list. I'm going to go play sixty cities
Speaker 2: in the next ninety days. Just have some records in
Speaker 2: the towns where I'm playing this time. Okay, thank you
Speaker 2: very much, goodbye, and I got back from that tour
Speaker 2: of ninety days later and there was a check in
Speaker 2: my mailbox for three hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars
Speaker 2: in the junk mail. Kind of went holy yo. And
Speaker 2: I called up my agent and said, I'm taking the
Speaker 2: next year off.
Speaker 1: You didn't want to strike while the iron was hot?
Speaker 2: No, Well, I went. Two things happened. I went to
Speaker 2: the studio to Capitol to try and do something. I
Speaker 2: was exhausted. I was so burned out, man. They said,
Speaker 2: I can't. I haven't written anything, I can't think of anything.
Speaker 2: I'm wasting money here. Let's stop. So we stopped for
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks. Then I went up to Seattle
Speaker 2: and I booked a studio up there, flew the band up.
Speaker 2: The band got there and quit. They flew to Seattle,
Speaker 2: had quit in mass And I said, and Gerald was there,
Speaker 2: and Gerald was giving me all this stuff, and I
Speaker 2: said Gerald, Gerald trilled, listen, never really tired, don't burn
Speaker 2: any bridges. We may want to work together again. Don't
Speaker 2: say it now, man. So they all quit, and I
Speaker 2: was just sitting there kind of going like, yeah, we're done.
Speaker 2: We had been struggling for so long. For so hard
Speaker 2: trying to get this done, and so I took I
Speaker 2: was going to take a year off, and I took
Speaker 2: eighteen months off. And what it did was it allowed
Speaker 2: me to sit down and think, and I basically lived
Speaker 2: alone by myself for eighteen months. And about eight months
Speaker 2: into it, I called up Lonnie and Gary Gary Malbora drummer,
Speaker 2: Lonnie Turner bass player, took him into the studio in
Speaker 2: San Francisco, cut twenty two tracks in eleven days, sent
Speaker 2: them home, and then I just went back to my
Speaker 2: house and engineered everything and just did all the vocals
Speaker 2: and the guitar parts over and over and over and
Speaker 2: over and over, and just worked on this thing that
Speaker 2: felt like a masterpiece. And I just kept working on it,
Speaker 2: and I had to race it all, and I'd do
Speaker 2: it again. I'd race it all, and I'd do it again.
Speaker 2: I had an eight track tape recorder and there were
Speaker 2: two tracks with the stereo mix. One track had a
Speaker 2: sink tone. So they gave me five open tracks, and
Speaker 2: so I did everything that way. I had five open tracks,
Speaker 2: and when I got it all finished, I basically had
Speaker 2: done everything that I had set out to do. McCartney
Speaker 2: had the thing with the Beatles in sixty nine was
Speaker 2: I went there and when I saw what they had
Speaker 2: in the can, I just went, oh my god, they've
Speaker 2: got forty six songs in the can. God, there are
Speaker 2: four albums ahead. They're ahead. That's how they do this timing,
Speaker 2: you know, that's how it is. It's not like the
Speaker 2: boys are trying to write something. They'll be back in
Speaker 2: eighteen months.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: They were way ahead. And Paul, you know, told me
Speaker 2: about that, and so I went, I got to get
Speaker 2: two albums ahead. So I had all these singles and
Speaker 2: I was looking at them and I knew what FM
Speaker 2: rate is needed. I wasn't thinking about AM radio. I
Speaker 2: had to help build FM radio.
Speaker 1: So you purposely did that, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I was making an album for you know,
Speaker 2: AM radio wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole.
Speaker 2: You know. They did with The Joker, but you know,
Speaker 2: and they really did. I mean, when I came back
Speaker 2: from that tour the Joker was, I remember driving to
Speaker 2: do a gig in Oakland and putting the radio and
Speaker 2: just going through to see where it was on. And
Speaker 2: it was on four of the five top forty stations
Speaker 2: et CE. So what I was pissed off because it
Speaker 2: was none there's no joy in any of this. You know,
Speaker 2: you never stop and go. Isn't this great?
Speaker 10: It was like.
Speaker 2: But so I knew that I was writing something really
Speaker 2: great for FM radio, that I was writing something great
Speaker 2: for radio itself, that this was how radio needed to sound,
Speaker 2: that this was where it needed to go. It was
Speaker 2: the material they needed. And my you know, songwriting of
Speaker 2: my music was going on at the same time, and
Speaker 2: my understanding of how to make records had grown quite
Speaker 2: a bit. And I worked on it and worked on
Speaker 2: it and worked on it and worked on it. When
Speaker 2: I was finished, I took it myself, took the tape
Speaker 2: and I had two slides, the cover and the back
Speaker 2: of flylike an Eagle, and I took it to the president.
Speaker 2: I said, this is going to sell four million copies anyway.
Speaker 2: He said, well, let's go down and see the art department.
Speaker 2: So we went down and talked to John Vandervelt and
Speaker 2: he did the cover just like that and put it
Speaker 2: out and.
Speaker 1: We ended up like.
Speaker 2: Dominating AM radio and FM radio at its height when
Speaker 2: it sold when I said, when both of them were
Speaker 2: at its most powerful. And so it was a great
Speaker 2: time to you know, my timing was right. Everything just
Speaker 2: my creative work came together at the right time, and
Speaker 2: the whole thing just went way, way up. I think
Speaker 2: we sold god thirteen million records and I don't know
Speaker 2: two and a half three years something like that, and
Speaker 2: had a lot of singles and dominated Airplane. It was
Speaker 2: really the thing for me that was cool was that
Speaker 2: when the FM radio put the record on, they played
Speaker 2: the whole side. Yes, for the first three months. Man,
Speaker 2: they never took it off. And that was always part
Speaker 2: of the thing was I wanted those segues to just
Speaker 2: bring people in. And you know, when I listened to music,
Speaker 2: that's what I want. I want to go on Bozo
Speaker 2: Goes to the Circus with John Coltrane, you know, or
Speaker 2: Miles or whoever it is I'm listening to when I
Speaker 2: got my eyes closed and I'm in space and I'm
Speaker 2: listening and I'm feeling and I'm enjoying myself. You know,
Speaker 2: that's the way I want to be.
Speaker 13: It's like nice, long good so essentially fly like an
Speaker 13: Eagle and I guess Book of Dreams. That's that group
Speaker 13: of songs that you're talking about. They were all sort
Speaker 13: of made it the same same Yeah, same same equipment,
Speaker 13: same techniques, maybe recording because I was really asking sonically,
Speaker 13: you know.
Speaker 2: You know it's funny. It took seventeen hours to mix
Speaker 2: Fly Like an Eagle, and we did a quad mix
Speaker 2: to just went in the studios supper quad mix. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You were really big on that, weren't you.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Didn't have QUI I mean I had the quad versions
Speaker 1: of some of these records, but I don't have the
Speaker 1: quad needles. Yeah, equipment to.
Speaker 2: It never sounded any good, you know. But if you're
Speaker 2: in a Westwood room, like these are Westwood speakers here,
Speaker 2: and uh, you know this is prob. Maybe this is
Speaker 2: a Western room. It looks like one, and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: we could get the tape here and play it and
Speaker 2: it'd be going. But you know, like stockhausm Man Stockhausen
Speaker 2: built a circle. Two Jesus, don't put them together for
Speaker 2: a circle. But the floor in the middle brought the stairs.
Speaker 2: This is that the Japanese World's Fair. Yeah, stairs up
Speaker 2: and you go up in the middle and you walk
Speaker 2: to it, and the speakers, the sounds going underneath you
Speaker 2: and going like this all around you in circles, you know,
Speaker 2: like three sixty for real. Underneath you and above you,
Speaker 2: all of that kind of stuff just makes the horizon
Speaker 2: better and bigger and more delicious.
Speaker 10: I don't know if I want my music sneaking up
Speaker 10: from me from behind.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 13: We're currently here at Electric Lady Studios in New York,
Speaker 13: home of Jimi Hendrix.
Speaker 10: I never recorded here, ever been here at all.
Speaker 2: No, I think this is my first time here. Wow,
Speaker 2: we brought him here, you did, Thank you very much
Speaker 2: for inviting me, And.
Speaker 10: Well, I just guitars and stuff. You know you clearly like.
Speaker 9: Them, so you know, I mean, Steve wanted to make
Speaker 9: sure you were somewhere special. Seriously, he was like, we
Speaker 9: can't we have to have Steve Miller in Electric Lader.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's only right, Okay, I would be remiss. And
Speaker 1: I know you're tired of telling him about your account
Speaker 1: of it. I want to ask about the Rock and
Speaker 1: Roll Hall of Fame. Oh yeah, the year later, do
Speaker 1: you feel better about it?
Speaker 8: Or what's the controversy? I'm sorry?
Speaker 2: Brief me.
Speaker 10: Well, I mean, are you are you not in it?
Speaker 2: He's in it.
Speaker 1: Yes, he's been inducted. I watched him getting dun Okay, yes,
Speaker 1: you were there with ut I was sitting next to
Speaker 1: David Burton dudekay, amazing. I totally forgot.
Speaker 2: You red sticky fingers, right, yes, yeah, that's that's the
Speaker 2: problem with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1: So I don't get that right. So half the staff
Speaker 1: is on, well what what.
Speaker 2: What bothered me about the Rock and Roll Hall of
Speaker 2: Fame was and and I said all of this in
Speaker 2: the Billboard article the next day was Uh. There was
Speaker 2: no gathering, there was no party, there was no dinner,
Speaker 2: there was no anything from the Rock and Roll Hall
Speaker 2: of Fame at all. I wasn't introduced to any of
Speaker 2: the inductees, not introduced to one I was met at.
Speaker 2: I was told that no, I couldn't make any suggestions
Speaker 2: about who I wanted to induct. I was told that
Speaker 2: if I wanted extra tickets for my band, Remember there
Speaker 2: were ten thousand dollars apiece at my table, ten thousand
Speaker 2: dollars a ticket. I was set a contract that was
Speaker 2: worse than any record contract I'd ever seen in my life,
Speaker 2: that was so purposely written in a way that was
Speaker 2: impossible to understand that I would I just laughed at it.
Speaker 2: And I was asked to start, you know, giving over things,
Speaker 2: delivering guitars, giving special stuff and the contractually. There was
Speaker 2: like a three month argument before I ever got there.
Speaker 2: So when I got there, some women came up to
Speaker 2: me and goes, hi, my name's Shirley, and I'm your minder.
Speaker 2: I'm from like you know, entertainment services or something, you know,
Speaker 2: with a clipboard, and took me to a little cement
Speaker 2: room with two metal chairs. Took Janie and I there
Speaker 2: and said we need you to wait here for an
Speaker 2: hour and then we're gonna call you and we're gonna
Speaker 2: come down and do this thing. Right. So you know
Speaker 2: I was going to do that. So I went out
Speaker 2: of the hall, ran into a few people and stuff
Speaker 2: like that, and then there was some little sort of
Speaker 2: cocktail party that was open to anybody and everybody, kind
Speaker 2: of a hustler party, and got out of that. Next day,
Speaker 2: we go to do the soundcheck. We're giving like about
Speaker 2: twelve minutes. My house mixer can't mix my monitor. Man's
Speaker 2: not allowed to use the monitor mixer. We got a
Speaker 2: guy who's doing the monitor mix and an iPad two
Speaker 2: hundred feet away. Hurry up, you got twelve minutes. Let's
Speaker 2: go let's go, let's go get out of here. So
Speaker 2: we do that, and uh, time goes by, and then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, it's time for the show to start,
Speaker 2: and somebody just takes me out. And I'm sat at
Speaker 2: a table where I don't know anyone at the table,
Speaker 2: so very satisfying. My band, My band is three hundred
Speaker 2: feet over that way somewhere I hadn't seen them, and
Speaker 2: I'm sitting there and and I'm I'm sitting here thinking like,
Speaker 2: let's see, I would have had a party. I would
Speaker 2: have introduced everybody, and then I would have had, like,
Speaker 2: you know, some little kids from the let's you know,
Speaker 2: the rock and Roll Hall of Fame Music School come
Speaker 2: up and play, you know, one of Steve's songs and
Speaker 2: want to you know, they're whoever, you know, NWA songics whatever,
Speaker 2: do this, and and then I'd explained about our music
Speaker 2: education program and how we're really glad I had to
Speaker 2: have these new inductees together, and we really wanted your
Speaker 2: help on these programs and wanted to, you know, rope
Speaker 2: you into the Hall of Fame beacon of light for
Speaker 2: music education. This was like the coldest grab for a
Speaker 2: profit to get money for a TV show. And I'm
Speaker 2: telling you men, when I walked off the stage in
Speaker 2: the back and these little smarmy kids were going like, hey,
Speaker 2: so you were up for twenty three years and they
Speaker 2: didn't put you in. How does that make you feel?
Speaker 2: You know, it's kind of want to fuck you. You know,
Speaker 2: I'll you know this that. And I walked out the
Speaker 2: door man and the door closed, and I had a
Speaker 2: little statue up in my hand, and my lovely wife
Speaker 2: with me, and Jimmy Vaughan and Rob and his wife,
Speaker 2: and we said, well, let's uber a car and go home. Hey,
Speaker 2: uber a car? Wow?
Speaker 8: No car to take you. I feel bad for Janice
Speaker 8: because I know there was a lot of motherfuckers that night, right?
Speaker 8: Was it a lot in that wrong?
Speaker 2: You know? That's what. So the way I looked at
Speaker 2: it was like I could really helped this place. I
Speaker 2: could have really done a lot of good for the
Speaker 2: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And they didn't even ask,
Speaker 2: They didn't even they weren't even interested. And I know
Speaker 2: that I'm in here because they want to make a
Speaker 2: television show. There are two good things that happened. One was, uh,
Speaker 2: the night ended Ice Cuban doctor Dre in the middle
Speaker 2: of them, right, this picture going, this is a cool picture.
Speaker 2: And I don't really care about pictures and stuff, but
Speaker 2: I've got this is gonna be a great picture. And
Speaker 2: I'm really proud to be here. And Soga, So Dre,
Speaker 2: that was a flylike an eagle you sampled on and
Speaker 2: Killer Killer right, yeah, I said, that's okay, Okay, it
Speaker 2: was like classic man, you.
Speaker 1: Know you don't play that. Okay. My last question, and
Speaker 1: that's it. I promise your three, just your three, because
Speaker 1: I know you're passionate about music. Your three all time
Speaker 1: favorite albums, could you And I don't mean like Desert
Speaker 1: disc or whatever. Just kind of blue, okay, Miles Davis
Speaker 1: is kind of blue.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure the name of the album. It's it's
Speaker 2: I think it's Bob Crossby and the Bobcats with a
Speaker 2: big noise from Monetta and honky Tonk trained and probably
Speaker 2: you know, a Jimmy Reid album. Those are you know,
Speaker 2: my those are those that's the music that just really
Speaker 2: rocked my soul.
Speaker 1: Well, I gotta say I got more than what I'm
Speaker 1: barking for it because I thought it was just going
Speaker 1: to be the history of the Steve Miller band. But
Speaker 1: we got way more music.
Speaker 2: I got more than I bargained for it too, I'm
Speaker 2: saying that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like for me, my favorite type of interviews are
Speaker 1: either engineers or like artists that were there for historical
Speaker 1: like these historical beatings or you know, historical moments that
Speaker 1: you never even think about. But yeah, this is such
Speaker 1: a major major education. Before I signed off, is any
Speaker 1: other historical things happened to you that I don't know about?
Speaker 10: That dude has jammed with literally every person.
Speaker 8: Then I was just like, you.
Speaker 2: Know, next time we'll talk about Otis writing a moderat.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait we can, we can. We can go for
Speaker 1: two more minutes. We can go for two minutes.
Speaker 9: If you're having any pains in your dairy, you should
Speaker 9: know to Jimmy jam was forced to do this for
Speaker 9: six hours and didn't even know it.
Speaker 2: His butt was numb.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I will sign off now, but as an encore, yes,
Speaker 1: thank you for tuning the question, and now for our encore,
Speaker 1: the Otis Writing story by Steve Miller.
Speaker 2: So, uh, Monterey Pop Festivals, right, and there's a lot
Speaker 2: of kind of like Johnny Rivers and Laura Nero and uh,
Speaker 2: it's kind of you know what, what's going on? Right?
Speaker 2: And all of a sudden, I'm backstage and I just
Speaker 2: hear this curve and I just jumped snapped just like
Speaker 2: that and said, I gotta go, gotta go, gotta go,
Speaker 2: running to the stage and got up on the stage
Speaker 2: and Spooker t and the MG's and they're just warming
Speaker 2: it up. And then I think it was the barcase
Speaker 2: or the horn section, and the bar case had this
Speaker 2: trumpet player had this little pocket trumpet and he's like,
Speaker 2: they're beginning to do these steps and they're just playing
Speaker 2: these instrumentals and they're walking back in this little This
Speaker 2: little trumpet player is just this mean little guy up
Speaker 2: and I'm sitting there watching this, just going this is
Speaker 2: gonna be the greatest thing in the world. And Otis
Speaker 2: came out on the stage and he grabbed the mic
Speaker 2: and he just hit the first note and it was
Speaker 2: like this giant punch to the solar place. The whole
Speaker 2: audience just went oh, and this mood just came over
Speaker 2: the whole place and he just killed it. Just didn't
Speaker 2: stop for a second. Man, the whole show was just
Speaker 2: the most beautiful show I ever saw in my life.
Speaker 2: And the last thing I remember about it was like
Speaker 2: I was standing outside away from it, and I was
Speaker 2: watching people in the parking lot leave and everybody was happy.
Speaker 2: Everybody man. As far as you could see, there was
Speaker 2: just this warmth and I thought he was like the
Speaker 2: greatest that. I thought that was one of the greatest
Speaker 2: live performances I had ever seen it. I've seen Ray
Speaker 2: Charles and I've seen James Brown with the Flames, and
Speaker 2: I've seen a lot of great shows, and that was
Speaker 2: like probably the most powerful performance I think I ever
Speaker 2: saw an artist do.
Speaker 1: I was just one more night when we have a
Speaker 1: boss Bill, I'm baby Bill Sugar Steve. It's like yea
Speaker 1: and fantigolo. Thank you, Steve Miller. Appreciate it is another
Speaker 1: extravaganza episode of Quest Love Supreme Love You.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a great honor to be here. And
Speaker 2: I really appreciate who you are and what you do
Speaker 2: and and uh your intellectual curiosity and I want to
Speaker 2: play some music with you. I think we should go
Speaker 2: to the studio and we should like start with something
Speaker 2: and just take it somewhere.
Speaker 1: You just don't let them, don't let them use space
Speaker 1: and troll. Don't let him use space.
Speaker 2: From bringing my echoplex and mike from your mouth to Steve,
Speaker 2: because if we've grown up together, we would be doing
Speaker 2: this together. I know we would have. Yeah, thank you
Speaker 2: you have that's awesome, all right, So Steve, we got
Speaker 2: our Yeah.
Speaker 10: Next album sounds good, Timothy and is that you and.
Speaker 1: The state of course that's you. Of course even the
Speaker 1: Smithsonian comes to visit. All right, Thank you very much, Steve, Bill,
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. The next go around, this was Quest.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Kay, Peace, Love and Happiness.
Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This classic
Speaker 1: episode was produced by the team at Mandora. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.