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Parts of this interview may have previously appeared on or in the following publications: Guitar.com, Musician.com, Guitar World, Guitar Edge, Guitar, Guitar Shop, Guitar World Acoustic, Frets, Bass Player, Maximum Guitar, Guitar for the Practicing Musician, Los Angeles Daily News, Miami New Times, Denver Westword, Orange County (CA) Register, Fender Frontline Magazine, MusiciansFriend.com or any of the other 50 or 60 publications I’ve written for since the mid-’80s. But hey, I wrote it, and this is my archive — Adam

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies: Zoot Up, Punk

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:35:14 +0000

by Adam St. James

[Editor's note: Another of my Miami New Times articles, from another part of my life.] Rarely has it been ultimately advantageous for a band to affiliate with a suddenly hip musical movement. Cool, maybe, sometimes even financially rewarding, but not exactly good for career longevity. Witness the abrupt demise of successful Eighties big-hair bands such as Warrant, Poison, and Motley Crue at the onset of the grunge movement in 1991. Likewise the sudden trashing a short half-decade later of many of the grunge groups when the masses apparently grew tired of the gloom and doom they so often purveyed.

Without question, public opinion alone does not end a previously popular artist’s career. Record companies and their allies at radio and other music-marketing outlets such as MTV have much to do with this routine changing of the guard, probably more than we know. Not that those commercial institutions can force us to hang on to an artist we’re tired of, or to show enthusiasm for a genre we just don’t care about. Case in point: Early last year we were all informed, in advance no less, that the next big thing, the next musical marvel that would have us all queuing up at cash registers, was electronica.

In a show of support for real music, most of us, quite literally, didn’t buy it. As a result, the music industry has been left in a puzzled state for much of the past eighteen months, unsure of itself, lacking direction. In the absence of a dominant movement orchestrated by, governed by, and generating big bucks for our would-be corporate masters at Sony, Warner Bros., et al., members of the musical underground stepped into the void.

And they brought us ska. As an art form, ska had been biding its time since the early Eighties, when Madness and the Specials became MTV darlings, scrappily surviving in small circles through the efforts of dedicated bands and independent labels such as New York City’s Moon Ska Records. Major labels caught on; soon ska was everywhere. After the huge success of ska practitioners such as No Doubt, smashmouth, and Sublime last year, even more groups materialized. (To be fair, many ska groups that suddenly had the public’s ear had been performing the music for years.)

With or without industry pressure, though, all musical movements eventually lose steam and often return to the underground. The ska craze too will pass. But that won’t negate the fact that its emergence was a tremendously good thing. In the end, it was the will of the people, more or less, that determined ska would jump to the forefront of our musical conscience.

And now it’s happening again, with another underground genre that major labels are finding increasingly difficult to ignore, not that they haven’t tried. That music is swing.

True, South Florida is a little behind on this one, but we’re catching up. Modern swing has overtaken much of the West, packing clubs in every major city from San Diego to Seattle. It’s got a strong following in Denver and Phoenix. It’s exploding in Chicago, throughout Ohio, even down south in Atlanta.

New York City boasts several swing clubs, as do Philadelphia and D.C. And at long last, swing is making its way to Miami, with swing nights popping up at several locales, including Groove Jet and the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach, La Fontaine and the Hungry Sailor in Coconut Grove, Hooligan’s in Kendall, the two O’Hara’s locations, and Fu-Bar in Fort Lauderdale.

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To be sure, swing is primarily dance music, but on a deeper level it’s much more than that. With its bleating horn sections, up-tempo jump-blues foundations, and lighthearted and often silly scatting vocals, swing is an antidote to the depression foisted on us by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, or to the artifice of boom-booming electronic music. Swing is fun music for people who, whether they dance or not, are just plain bored with angst and sickened by Nineties disco.

The modern swing scene has thus far been spearheaded nationally by just a handful of groups: Royal Crown Revue, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Squirrel Nut Zippers, the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.

All were born of a desire, mostly by former punk musicians, to find an alternative to alternative. And while admittedly the kingpins of a very retro revolution — the primary influences on modern swing are Forties legends Louis Prima, Louis Jordan, and Cab Calloway — these artists have attempted (with varying degrees of success) to move the music into the modern age.

“We wanted to reach a rock audience, as opposed to being a karaoke band for swing dancers,” says Cherry Poppin’ Daddies frontman Steve Perry (no, not that Steve Perry). “We wanted to evolve the music, make it a contemporary hybrid.”

Perry, a University of Oregon dropout, formed the band in 1989 to play the college bars around Eugene. His method of contemporizing swing was initially to place full-bore swing compositions side by side with ska and punk tunes on his band’s three early-Nineties indie releases. The group, which soon found itself thriving on the West Coast circuit, would regularly risk angering swing fans by playing ska and punk tunes in the middle of an otherwise swingin’ set.

Their punk and ska attitudes did spill over into the group’s big-band-influenced arrangements, but fighting swing’s rising popularity by performing a 50-50 mix of swing and ska-punk in their live shows finally got old. Last year the band signed with Mojo Records (distributed by Universal) and, recognizing a growing swing scene, agreed to compile the swing tunes from their three indie discs on Zoot Suit Riot: The Swingin’ Hits of the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, while simultaneously downplaying their other influences.

Should that be considered crass commercialism? Probably, but after the album’s release in February, the title track became a hit, the requisite video showed up all over MTV’s 120 Minutes, and the album sold a million copies, so Perry and his crew aren’t complaining.

Though the octet had been touring the West for years as, at the very least, a pseudoswing band, it was preceded into the national arena by Squirrel Nut Zippers with their 1997 hit “Hell,” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s lengthy scene in the seminal 1995 flick Swingers, and by Royal Crown Revue and their turn in Jim Carrey’s 1994 blockbuster “The Mask.”

Before those successes unfolded, however, Perry took inspiration from a 1992 show the band played in Los Angeles with Royal Crown Revue. “It was the first time we ever saw another band playing swing,” he recalls. “It was a revelation: ‘Here’s another band that does what we do.’”

Even six years later, there aren’t a lot of bands exploring the mix of jazz and jump blues known as swing, though considering national ad campaigns — a recent ad for the Gap featured Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail,” and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy has reportedly filmed a commercial for Coca-Cola — and the nationwide club dance craze, that is rapidly changing.

Locally, only a few bands, including Jump ‘n’ Jive (which performs weekly at both the Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood O’Hara’s locations) and Bootsie Baby (which plays La Fontaine in the Grove), have given the genre local exposure. The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies is the first of the major-label swing bands to visit South Florida: The eight-piece band played at the Cameo Theater this past April and at Fort Lauderdale’s Squeeze in June 1997. They will reach a considerably larger audience August 5 at the Pompano Beach Amphitheatre when they perform at the Warped Tour.

For much of the Warped Tour audience, the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies will, no doubt, seem somewhat strange. The band’s pinstripe suits, fedoras, and spectator shoes are not the accouterments of modern punks. The upright bass has rarely been used outside the realm of rockabilly, and the horn section, which has seen a strong resurgence thanks to ska, has been given even more prominence in swing.

Technically the music is not far removed from ska; ironically, that fact gives the genre both its immediate familiarity and credibility, and, by the very nature of that immeasurable cool quotient, conjures up the dim specter of its inevitable doom.

The Warped Tour takes place Wednesday, August 5, at Pompano Beach Amphitheatre, 1806 NE 6th St, 954-946-2402, with the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Rancid, Bad Religion, the Specials, Reverend Horton Heat, NOFX, Sprung Monkey, and Civ. Doors open at noon. Tickets are $21.

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Tinsley Ellis, Road Dawg

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:40:54 +0000

by Adam St. James

Hotshot blues-rocker Tinsley Ellis has been tearin’ up the club and festival circuit for decades, but has never released a live album until now. Returning at last to Alligator Records, for whom he recorded from 1988 to 1997, Ellis has just released Highwayman, a rip-snortin’ platter recorded in late March, 2005, at the great Chicago- area blues club, Chord On Blues.

I spoke at length with Ellis about Highwayman, his guitar gear and style, how he learned to sing better, and a favorite subject for both artist and editor alike: the late, great record producer Tom Dowd (with whom Ellis recorded in 1997.)

Enjoy this in-depth archival interview, be sure to pick up your own copy of Highwayman, and stop by Tinsley’s website TinsleyEllis.com to find out when you can catch him live in your neck of the woods. As of 2012, Tinsley is still out there crankin’ out the blues on stages throughout the U.S. and abroad, and still recording for Alligator Records. Track him down!

Adam St. James:: Hi Tinsley, it’s Adam from Guitar Life Magazine.

Tinsley Ellis: Hi Adam.

St. James:: So you’ve got a new live disc out on Alligator Records, Highwayman, tell us what’s goin’ on in your world.

Ellis: It’s all startin’ up with the CD coming out. They’ve got me doing one interview after the next.

St. James:: That’s good.

Ellis: It’s a good thing. Any kind of roots-oriented artist lives from CD to CD, so this is a good time.

St. James:: Well, the CD sounds great, and I’ve seen you play – in fact I played a festival with you down in Ft. Lauderdale a few years back.

Ellis: The Riverfest?

St. James: No, it wasn’t that one, it was the one that lady put on, FranniPalooza I think it was called.

Ellis: Franni, yeah! That would have been at Schneider Park in Ft. Lauderdale.

St. James:: I think so. Yeah!

Ellis: And it would have been in 1999.

St. James:: Something like that, exactly!

Ellis: FranniPalooza – it was on Memorial Day, 1999. So it would have been six years ago right now.

St. James:: You’re right as a matter of fact! It was Memorial Day. Wow, what a memory!

Ellis: Well, I can remember stuff like that. I can’t remember stuff from last week as well (laughs).

St. James:: I hear ya. I can usually remember dates pretty well, but I have a hard time remembering how my songs go sometimes. (laughs).

Ellis: I’d rather remember the songs and forget the dates.

St. James:: Yeah, me too. So you did this new live album at Chord On Blues, which is a great blues club here in the Chicago suburbs, in St. Charles. I’ve shot video of some great blues artists out there in years past.

Ellis: It’s a great place, and I’m so glad we were able to work that out. The owner, Steve, is a good guy.

St. James:: He’s a huge supporter of the blues. I think Howard and the White Boys and maybe even Ronnie Baker Brooks have done live albums out there.

Ellis: Yeah, he’s a huge supporter. And a lot of our fans flew in from all over the country for the gig. I think we had 11 or 12 states represented. It worked out great.

St. James:: And it’s probably one of the classiest blues rooms in the country.

Ellis: Yeah, that doesn’t call itself “House of Blues.” Yeah, it’s a great one, and we’ll be there on Friday the 15th of July (2005) for our CD release party.

St. James:: Great, I’ll be there. So you did two nights for this recording, nailed a bunch of them the first night…

Ellis: Yeah, we did.

St. James:: And you mixed it within a couple days so it was all very fresh and spontaneous.

Ellis: The whole thing was the most effortless album I’ve ever made. The whole thing went down in a week.

St. James:: That’s got to be relieving.

Ellis: Well, with a live album, it’s like sports photography. You capture the shot, as opposed to something you pose and primp, like with portrait photography. So a lot of the hard work on the album was done over the past 20 years, with the songs. And we had two nights to do, when in there, and things went our way. And if they hadn’t gone our way, we would have had the second night as well. The second night was such a relief because we’d recorded so much good stuff the first night, we knew we had it.

St. James:: And unlike a lot of live albums – no overdubs of any kind?

Ellis: Not a single overdub. And that’s the reason we were able to do it in such a short amount of time. When you start getting into overdubs, and start trying to make things sound like they really happened, it really delays the moment of truth.

St. James:: And then you get carried away trying to fix little things, and then the next thing and the next thing.

Ellis: I know. And the smallest increment of time that exists in a recording studio is one hour. If you say, “I wanna work on that vocal.” One hour. “I need a little less high end on the hi-hat.” One hour.

St. James:: Yeah, that’s the agony of the recording studio. So you’re back with Alligator Records after a few years away.

Ellis: That’s a wonderful thing.

St. James:: I don’t even know what’s up with Capricorn Records, where you went for a few years. Do they still exist?

Ellis: I was the last album project at Capricorn, which is a dubious distinction that seems to be reserved for bluesmen. It seems like something that would happen to Otis Rush or someone. You get your big shot at the major label, and then get caught up in the wheels of big business. So yeah, it could have been so good – but hell, I’m lucky the thing came out at all, to tell you the truth. So I’m back where I belong, at Alligator Records.

St. James:: It’s got to feel like family.

Ellis: Yeah, they really promote their artists well at Alligator. And I learned that lesson the hard way.

St. James:: So tell me about the guys you’ve got in the band right now. Have they all been with you for awhile?

Ellis: Yes, they’re all on the album and we’ve been together – the bass player who goes by the name, “The Evil One,” has been with me for the better part of 20 years, off and on. And then (drummer) Jeff Burch and (keyboardist) Todd Hamric have been with me over a year now – and that’s an eternity in the music world.

We went out and did a lot of shows in preparation for this album. We did 11 weeks on the road, like five nights a week, and really worked on the material. And the songs we chose were a few off each albums we’ve done over the past 10 or 12 years. And we allowed our fans to visit my website, TinsleyEllis.com, and send in song selections. And they did it, and it was nice because the songs they chose pretty much matched up with the songs Alligator president Bruce Iglauer and I chose, which is a good thing.

St. James:: Let’s talk about your guitars and your gear. We’re pretty player friendly here at Guitar Life. You know, besides this site, I run a site called BluesLessons.com, on which we sell blues concert DVDs and thousands of music instructional products….

Ellis: I know about that site! I’m very familiar with that. Some of my fans have been talking about that.

St. James:: Well, I do BluesLessons.com in the hopes that a few Guitar Life visitors will click through and buy something, basically to support my journalism habit! That’s the game plan. If it works I’ll be able to keep doing these interviews.

Ellis: Let me tell you, the modern day person starting out playing guitar now has got it infinitely better than I did…

St. James:: And me too.

Ellis: I remember slowing down Johnny Winter vinyl records to 17 rpm and then having to play the licks an octave lower – and it was roughly the same note because it’s half-speed. That’s how I learned how to play. And nowadays, it’s all there for the kid to do it. And we didn’t know about open tuning. I remember, as a young guy, trying to figure out Albert Collins. And it wasn’t until Guitar Player magazine told me how Albert Collins did it…

St. James:: Right.

Ellis: And it wasn’t until some older guys hipped me – they said, ‘Hey, if you want to sound like Albert King, use skinny strings and don’t use a pick.’ And I tried it and went ‘Oh yeah!’ But it was all word of mouth back then. Nowadays it’s all there in black and white.

St. James:: So that’s how he got those big monster bends?

Ellis: Well, no, actually, my strings – I use an .011 through .048.

St. James:: I mean Albert King. See I didn’t even know that.

Ellis: Oh Albert, yeah. He used a real skinny string, like an .008 or a .009.

St. James:: Wow. Yeah, and I torture myself trying to hit his bends on .011s!

Ellis: I know (laughs). Like Stevie Ray Vaughan – he tuned down, but he used .013s.

St. James:: I interviewed his guitar tech, Rene Martinez, a couple years back. Do you know Rene?

Ellis: Yes I do.

St. James:: And he told me, ‘Everybody knows that Stevie used .013s, but after awhile, on the road, I convinced him to go down to .011s just so he wouldn’t wear out his fingers so much.’ So he did go down to .011s.

Ellis: Uh huh. That’s good to know because there seems to be a big tone difference between .010 and .011. A .010 goes ‘tink, tink’ and an .011 goes ‘ring, ring.’

St. James:: Oh yeah.

Ellis: But there doesn’t seem to be that big of a difference between an .011 and a .012. So the .011 does like 95 percent of what a .012 or a .013 would do, whereas a .010 doesn’t do nearly what an .011 would do. An .011 does it all for me. Who wants to break strings all night? You break a string on a Stratocaster and you have to put it right down.

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St. James:: Right. So tell me about the gear you use on stage. Do you have one main guitar you’ve been using for years and years?

Ellis: I have two main guitars. I have a Stratocaster with a ‘59 neck and a ‘61 body and parts. Rosewood. And I have a ‘67 Gibson ES 345. And I play them through a Fender Super Reverb, pretty much straight in.

St. James:: Pretty much, or completely straight in?

Ellis: Pretty much.

St. James:: What else do you have there?

Ellis: I’ve got a wah-wah pedal that somebody gave me. It’s a boutique wah-wah pedal and I can’t think of the name of it. It’s made in Spartanburg or Greenburg, South Carolina. It’s a true bypass so when it’s off, it’s off. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s based on the Cry Baby, and I love it. I should know the name of it. The guy came up and gave it to me. He gave one to Anthony Gomes as well. I’ve also got a Nobels – it’s not a distortion pedal – it’s a Nobel’s Overdrive. I don’t use it much on the Gibson, but I use it a little on the Strat. And I use it for EQ rather than fuzz tone, just to boost the mids a little bit.

St. James:: And then the Super Reverb, is that a newer one or an older one?

Ellis: It’s a ‘65.

St. James:: So how long have you had these guitars and amps? You weren’t the original owner, were you?

Ellis: I’ve had them since the ’70s.

St. James:: Where did you pick them up?

Ellis: I got the amp from Tommy Doucette, who was the harmonica player on the Allman Brothers Fillmore East and Eat A Peach albums, and Idyllwild South. It was his harmonica amp. And I got the Strat back in the ’70s when nobody was talkin’ Stratocaster – everybody was talkin’ Les Paul or a Gibson Firebird. I traded a four-track tape deck for that Strat.

St. James:: Was that an old Teac?

Ellis: No, what was the other one. It was a Japanese sounding name. But anyway, I thought that was a good trade at the time.

St. James:: Sure.

Ellis: I paid $700 for the tape deck, got some use out of it, then traded it for a nice old rosewood Strat.

St. James:: So have you done anything to these guitars?

Ellis: No, they’re pretty much stock.

St. James:: Even the pickups?

Ellis: Yeah, even the pickups. Definitely stock. I’ve been told by many guitarists who’ve played my guitars that they’re ‘unplayable.’ (laughs) But you know what, I played Stevie Ray’s – remember that old beat up Strat that he used to play? It was not a good playing guitar.

St. James:: Really?

Ellis: His action was high, his strings were heavy. It’s what you’re used to.

St. James:: Do you set your action high?

Ellis: Yes. I get the guitars worked on every once in awhile, when I absolutely have to. And they give them back to me and I usually say, ‘This plays too good, can you make it play worse.’

St. James:: (laughs)

Ellis: I like to fight a guitar. That’s how I get a ringing tone out of a Strat. You raise that action up and the strings just ring.

St. James:: Are these three-position pickup selectors on your Strat?

Ellis: Five.

St. James:: Do you change that selector a lot?

Ellis: Oh yeah. And on a Gibson I use the Varitone on the 345 quite a bit, that five-way selector knob. You can really hear it on the album on “A Quitter Never Wins,” in particular.

St. James:: And what about the volume, do you play with that a lot?

Ellis: A lot.

St. James:: What kind of strings do you use?

Ellis: Ernie Ball, the ones in the silver pack – Power Slinkys. I like those strings.

St. James:: So it’s like a .011 to .046?

Ellis: I think that’s it. And if you wipe them down every night you can get several nights out of them. If you don’t wipe them down every night, they go dead in the case. That’s the key to string saving: cleaning them off every night, especially if you’ve got greasy hands like I do.

St. James:: So what’s the plan for this summer? I’m sure you’re going to be on the road a lot.

Ellis: Yes, go to TinsleyEllis.com and you can see a tour of all four corners of the country: from South Florida to the Northeast to Seattle to L.A. That’s how we do it. Our music is not the type of music that’s on MTV or radio or late night TV, unfortunately. We’ve got to go out and really put it in people’s faces, and wear them out with it as much as we can, on the bandstand.

St. James:: But back in your youth, that’s what you wanted to do anyway, right?

Ellis: That’s really what I wanted to do, although – I’m 48 – but basically watching the Monkees on TV… I was prime time Monkees and “Hard Days Night.” And they never showed the Monkees loading their gear (laughs). They always ended up back there at the groovy crash pad with the chicks. They never showed all the truck stops and motels…

St. James:: And arguing with the record company for a little more money… Somehow they just didn’t show that (laughs).

Ellis: Well yeah. Ricky Riccardo never went on the road either. So yeah, it’s a lot different than what I thought it would be. But on the other side of the coin, if someone would have told me, when I was 16, that I would have sat in with the Allman Brothers, and Otis Rush, and Buddy Guy, and Albert Collins – that would have been my idea of making it. So yeah, there’s been a lot of good stuff. You tend to hang on to that good stuff, and tend to forget about the Tuesday night gig at the disco in Florence, South Carolina. You have to go through a lot of those before the good stuff happens.

St. James:: That’s for sure.

Ellis: And you’ve got to do a lot of those things after the good stuff happens too, unfortunately.

St. James:: Yeah. So summer is festival season, so you’ll be out there hitting a few festivals, right?

Ellis: Oh yeah, all over the country.

St. James:: What are some of the nicest venues that you play at these festivals? I suppose some of them have a nice scenic view, even from the stage.

Ellis: We’ve got some of those coming up. We’re doing the RiverBend Festival in Chattanooga. One of my favorite ones is the Santa Cruz Blues Festival – what a beautiful location, in a natural bowl amphitheater. I’ve got so many of them this summer, from Oregon to Connecticut. We’re doing the Riverfront Blues Festival in Ft. Lauderdale.

St. James:: That’s a huge festival, and a great location. I’ve been to that many times.

Ellis: That’s where I grew up, in Broward County, Florida.

St. James:: That’s right. You know we did speak when I was the music editor at Miami New Times in the late ’90s. And I did an article on you then.

Ellis: That might have been when I was still on Alligator and did the album with Tom Dowd.

St. James:: Probably.

Ellis: That would be the Tom Dowd connection, because he was a Miami guy.

St. James:: Yeah, probably, because I interviewed him down there and wrote about him for Home Recording magazine.

[Editor's note: My Tom Dowd interview appeared in the April, 2000, edition of Home Recording. Unfortunately, magazines have severe word limitations, so only a tiny fraction of all the things Dowd and I spoke about – and we're talking serious musical history, folks – fit in that article. Sooner or later I'll put more of that incredible interview right here on GuitarLifeMag.com. In case you don't recognize the name, Tom Dowd produced most of the Allman Brothers albums, Eric Clapton's Layla and 461 Ocean Blvd. sessions, lots of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and literally hundreds of major albums/artists in a career that spanned from the beginnings of Atlantic Records in 1947 until his passing in 2002.]

Ellis: He was amazing! What a guy.

St. James:: I know, he really was. I really had always hoped that I’d be able to spend more time with him down the road. What a guy, and what a bunch of amazing stories he had about basically everyone who is anyone in the music business since 1947.

Ellis: You know, we recorded that album with him (Fire It Up) and he brought Duck Dunn along to play bass. I had the ultimate Eric Clapton – Albert King fantasy going. Just the stories those two guys would tell! It was amazing.

St. James:: Did he ever tell you about driving in the car with Ray Charles – with Ray driving?

Ellis: NO! That sounds like a myth! (laughs)

St. James:: But Dowd didn’t joke around. He told me it happened and I believe him.

Ellis: I’ve heard about Ray Charles flying a plane…

St. James:: Yeah. I was waiting to see something about that in the movie “Ray,” because of course Dowd is represented throughout that movie, engineering Ray’s recordings along with Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler (the Atlantic Records honchos and record producers in the movie who keep advising Ray on how to play/sing/record, etc.) But it wasn’t in there. So I’ve got Tom Dowd on tape saying it, and I believe it’s true. He said Ray picked him up at a studio in a Corvette and, well, that’s for another BluesQuest interview…

Ellis: No way! Tom was too smart to get in a car driven by a blindman! Isn’t that wonderful! What a great story.

St. James:: Did you work with Tom a couple times?

Ellis: No, just that one time on the Fire It Up album. And when I was up making the live album this year and I was staying over at Bruce Iglauer’s house, we were talking about all the – because we hadn’t really kept in touch that much over the years – and we were talking about some of the albums. We did so many albums together. And I said, ‘Can you believe that we made an album with Tom Dowd!’ At the time it seemed like, ‘this is great, we’re doing it.’ But now that he’s gone, all the stuff that Bruce and I learned in the studio from the guy – it’s amazing. He was the engineer, he was the arranger. He would take songs completely apart. He would use all different methods of coaxing a good performance out of you: Praise, and anger, and…. He was really, really good at it. And he worked right up to the end, so that’s good.

St. James:: And he would have kept on working for many years to come, knowing Tom. (Cancer took Tom Dowd’s life on October 27, 2002, after almost 60 years in the music industry.) Did you record that album in Miami?

Ellis: No, we did it here in Atlanta at Southern Tracks.

St. James:: When I interviewed him I was living in Miami, and we got together at his condo and at Criteria Studios for a photo shoot. I made it down to Criteria a few times, but that time with him was the best. He pulled out the piano and started playing – he was really good – and then he said, “This is the piano that “Layla” was recorded on.”

Ellis: “We’re not worthy!”

St. James:: Yeah, that’s exactly how I felt.

Ellis: So you’re a fan like me: You get into stuff (laughs).

St. James:: Oh yeah.

Ellis: That’s important, because that’s all you’re left with. And of course you saw the Tom Dowd documentary. (Tom Dowd & The Language of Music)

St. James:: That videographer spent seven years around Tom!

Ellis: Yeah, that was really well done.

St. James:: Yeah. Let’s get back to you now: probably a subject you know more about. (laughs)

Ellis: Well, Tom Dowd’s a part of what I’m a part of…

St. James:: So what do you listen to these days? What keeps you fired up?

Ellis: I listen to everybody’s demo tape or demo CD that they give me.

St. James:: Do you get a lot?

Ellis: Yep. From labels and from opening acts, and people in the audience. And I actually learn as much from those as I do from albums that I listen to. Let me just look in my stereo and see what I’ve got in there that I’m listening to right now: B.B. King, Blues Is King; Otis Rush, Ain’t Enough Comin’ In; Fleetwood Mac, Live at the Boston Tea Party; Lonnie Brooks, Turn Up The Night; and a big old stack of demos. I listen to Leo Kottke.

St. James:: Have any of these people who’ve given you demos gone on to have notable careers, that you know of?

Ellis: Yes, they have, actually. And I’ve actually recorded some songs off of people’s tapes – and they were very appreciative.

St. James:: Cool. So if you’re a songwriter, somebody like Tinsley Ellis is open to taking a listen.

Ellis: Well, I think anybody who stays around the business long enough needs to keep their ear to the track and see what’s comin’ and what’s goin’. I can think of all of these people who have opened for me over the years, and gone on their way to surpass me.

St. James:: Really?

Ellis: Oh my gosh, yeah: Johnny Lang…

St. James:: Who has recorded a track of yours.

Ellis: Yeah. And Derek Trucks. It’s a very long list. I used to think, ‘If you want to get famous, just open for Tinsley Ellis.’ It’s nice. You treat people right, and they’ll be nice to you on their way up, hopefully. Jonny Lang played for the first time at Buddy Guy’s opening for me, and played for the first time in New York City opening for me. He would get up and do “A Quitter Never Wins,” with us. And I just watched his album climb the charts… In my living room I’ve got a platinum CD for the album, as a songwriter. It sold millions of copies.

St. James:: And that helped you pay a few bills I suppose.

Ellis: It was very nice. And then the tables turned, and we were Jonny Lang’s opening act, and he couldn’t have been nicer to us. It was great. So it’s good when it works out like that.

St. James:: I was an editor with Fender Frontline magazine at the time he came along at 16, and they were setting him up with guitars and all that. The hot new teenager.

Ellis: Yeah, that’s a scary trend. For a second there it looked like you couldn’t be a blues star unless you looked like a teenage underwear model.

St. James:: Yeah, exactly. (laughs). You’ve probably played shows with Kenny Wayne Shepherd over the years as well.

Ellis: No I haven’t, actually. I admire his work. He’s a great guitar player.

St. James:: Yes he is. He’s taken over singing a lot of his material now, and is now relying on his former frontman less.

Ellis: Well, you and I are from the era and mindset where, just like B.B. King or Johnny Winter, or Freddie King – you play a lick and sing a lick. And if you have a dedicated guitarist and a separate dedicated singer, there’s just not that coupling between the call and response. You get a call… and a response. It doesn’t lay together like that. That’s why I always track my guitar solos and lead vocals at the same time. It’s just the way they lay together, sometimes it’s the attack.

St. James:: Well that’s some good advice.

Ellis: And it also presents to the audience a total package.

St. James:: When you first started playing, did you sing too, or did it take awhile?

Ellis: I sang always like a featured, one-song-per-set kind of thing. I was here in Atlanta in the early ’80s, working with different singers like Nappy Brown, and Chicago Bob Nelson. I would do one song. And then one day I noticed the singer and it was not good at the beginning. I was very tentative, and I took a lot of heat. Some people, like Jonny Lang, can just step up to the mic at the age of 13 and deliver. Others of us have to really work on it. And we need people like Bruce Iglauer in our lives to say things to us like, ‘You know that song you do where you hit that really high note?

Don’t do that song anymore! That doesn’t sound good.’ He has to police your material. And then you want to kill the messenger when they break that kind of news to you (laughs), but it’s necessary. I’m one of those people who really has to work on it. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t do a live album for so long, and that’s one of the reasons I really chose the material on this one.

I wanted to make sure it was not going to be an album which exposed a weak side. It’s like any time you’re talking about a Caucasian, blues-singing, guitar player, the vocals are probably going to be the weak link. So I’m pretty please with the way it came out, with no overdubs. And we had three different versions to choose from too, in some cases. So that helps.

St. James:: Yes it is. Do you ever just practice singing, or even just sing in the shower or something?

Ellis: I have a studio in my basement and I do the demos, and I work out the key and everything. The key is the big thing. The two producers I’ve worked with over the years who helped me the most over the years were Tom Dowd and David Z. Those guys really… Tom Dowd gave me the start into being a better singer – gave me a lot of insight into it. And David Z, when I made that album for Capricorn (Kingpin), he really hit the point home. He’s probably my best vocal coach.

St. James:: What kind of advice did he give you?

Ellis: He told me not to draw out long vocal phrases, because that was the white, operatic, European way to sing. He told me to sing more in clipped phrases, because that’s more poly-rhythmic, Gospel sounding. He tried to get me to sing at the top of my vocal range, key-wise, but not over, because there would be a lot more energy in the music. You push it right to the point of excitement, instead of singing monotone. You get it right up to the top, take it over and then bring it back a half-step.

St. James:: That sounds like good advice.

Ellis: And Tom Dowd told me not to sing with your mouth in an “O” shape. He told me to sing with my mouth wide…

St. James:: With a smile…

Ellis: Yeah.

St. James:: Did he show you the match trick?

Ellis: The what? Where the match doesn’t go out?

St. James:: Yeah. If you sing with a smile on your face, you can’t blow out a match held right in front of your mouth – and therefore you’re not going to pop the microphone. And if you don’t pop the microphone, the soundman can turn your mic volume up more, which then of course makes it easier to sing and hear yourself, which keeps you from wearing yourself out.

Ellis: I remember that!

St. James:: He told me he taught that to Aretha, and Rod Stewart.

Ellis: Right – elongate your mouth and not pucker it up. That’s a rule that I always break, but at least it’s nice to recognize what I’m doing wrong.

St. James:: Well, breaking through the denial is the first step to recovery, right?

Ellis: Right. Well, you’re talkin’ my kind of talk. And then I had a female back-up singer on one album who taught me how to breathe and sing from my diaphragm, instead of from my throat. And although I thought I understood what that meant, she taught me how to do it.

St. James:: That takes practice.

Ellis: It was when I was making the Hell or High Water CD in 2000, and she was in there doing some background vocals, and then stayed around watching me do some overdubs. She took me aside and said, ‘I see you breathing in through your mouth before you sing. Breathe in through your nose and it will fill up your diaphragm.’ And it was like an epiphany.

This is what I’ve been hearing about for all these years! And now when I’m on stage and I’m singing a ballad, and I breathe in through my nose and fill up my diaphragm as much as I can, now I can get the note, and it sounds powerful, and it sounds good. The downside of it is that if you do that enough, you feel like you’re gonna pass out. You almost get high.

St. James:: I’m trying that as you say it, and you’re right. Breathing in through your nose does fill your diaphragm better than when you sing through your mouth.

Ellis: Are you a singer, Adam?

St. James:: Yes.

Ellis: Well the next the gig you do, if you’re singing a song you’ve had trouble with – if you listen to the play back and you think, I don’t sing that song as well as some of the others – if, between phrases, don’t breathe in through your mouth like 99.9 percent of singers do. Fill you body up with air through your nose and you’ll get tons more air, and if you don’t hold the note out, the notes themselves sound better.

St. James:: I’ll try that. But how do you remember to do that in the heat of battle?

Ellis: You just do.

St. James:: You just train yourself, doing it over and over, and eventually it becomes unconscious.

Ellis: Yeah, it’s one of those things – like I was saying earlier: I really have to work on my vocals. I’m not a natural. You get a guy like Buddy Guy, and that guy can sing the phone book. Whereas like me, there’s so many songs I want to do. I want to sing Marvin Gaye songs but guess what: I just can’t do it. So I have to really police the material, police the keys, police the tempo – everything. It would be nice to be like a Buddy Guy, a total natural singer. But some of us aren’t. And we have to really make sure we’re not making asses of ourselves.

St. James:: You know, the breathing through the nose thing is something I’d heard years ago in relation to sports: When you’re running, you want to breathe in through your nose, and breathe out through you mouth.

Ellis: It’s not the easy thing to do.

St. James:: No, it isn’t. And I’d never even considered that advice in relation to singing. I’m definitely going to work on that.

Ellis: You try that and let me know how it worked out. I’m big on it. I just never heard it put that way. She told me how to do it, and I went in there and all the sudden it seemed like I was singing better than I’d ever sung before. And then I said, ‘Can I record the last seven albums over again?’ (laughs).

St. James:: Cool. So do you play acoustic guitar once in awhile?

Ellis: Yes I do. I’ve got a Washburn Cumberland. And we actually recorded a good amount of acoustic material for this live album, but it didn’t make it on there. In fact, we’ve got enough good material for a whole other album. There’s about a half-dozen acoustic songs, and more electric stuff too. Bruce and I had a hard time deciding which songs to be on the album. And we had an even harder time deciding which versions to put on there.

St. James:: When you’re playing acoustic, do you approach the instrument differently?

Ellis: Well, you’ve got to put a lot more – you’ve got to manhandle it a little more. Especially if you do it like I do. I’m kind of a Pete Townshend type thrasher on the acoustic guitar. Son House, Charley Patton like. A lot more body English seems to go into it, at least the way I do it. Unless I’m having a James Taylor moment, which I like to do from time to time – but not on this album, at the request of my label president. He doesn’t like that side of my music. I do, but he doesn’t like to feature it at all.

St. James:: Oh well.

Ellis: Yeah. Maybe he knows something I don’t.

St. James:: Well, he’s doing well.

Ellis: Yeah.

St. James:: So you’ve called Atlanta home for a long time, haven’t you.

Ellis: Since 1977. In fact I was born here in ‘57.

St. James:: It’s a good mid-point for touring, isn’t it?

Ellis: I used to think so, but now it seems like most of my good work is up around the Lakes and on the West Coast.

St. James:: Those areas have picked up for blues?

Ellis: They’ve always been good. But the Southeast, which is where this music came from, is not where this music is most appreciated. If you go to Mississippi, you see R.L. Burnside and he’s playing a little gas station. You go see him somewhere else, and he’s in a theatre. That’s the way it is.

St. James:: What about international gigs?

Ellis: I’ve been over to Europe many, many times. Australia. South America. Canada has been real good to me over the years. We’re primarily an American band, though. And my music borders – certainly – on Southern Rock. I think European audiences, if they have a blues act, they want the whole package. They prefer African-American blues acts – as do I.

And if they can’t have that, then they want some pompadours and retro outfits. And I don’t fit that mold either. So I think internationally I slip somewhat between the cracks. And if you look at the amount of gigs the Allman Brothers have done overseas, and I can’t even remember the last time they went to Europe.

St. James:: Really? I didn’t realize that.

Ellis: Do you know that Elvis Presley never played in Europe?

St. James:: No, I didn’t. Wow. There’s somethin’ funny goin’ on there. (laughs) (hey, I’m joking!)

Ellis: Well, another thing that’s interesting about Europe is that you can be a gigantic star in Europe, and be an American, and then come back to America and have no circuit whatsoever.

St. James:: Like Luther Allison.

Ellis: Well, he built it up, of course. But there’s a lot of people like that. I would say I have a great circuit here in the States, but I don’t particularly have a circuit over there. I might go over and do a festival or two, and connect it with some club dates. There’s something about that big body of water.

St. James:: What about Australia?

Ellis: Australia I enjoy very much. It really rocks.

St. James:: Is it more conducive than Europe, people leaning more toward rock-blues?

Ellis: Oh yeah, they definitely do that. And actually Europe is turning that way too.

St. James:: That’s kind of where I fit in. I’m a long-haired guy, grew up on blues rock and Southern Rock, and I play blues with a rock edge. I don’t fit the pompadour mold, and I’ve wondered about that from the marketing side.

Ellis: You might not be big in France (laughs). I don’t know that I’m every going to be a big name in Europe, but I’m certainly going to keep trying. It would be nice to have it catch on and have that be yet another place to play. But I’ve been looking at my itinerary that just got emailed to me, and the places that I play: certainly Atlanta, Memphis, New York, Des Moines, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Chicago – that’s my circuit.

I know that’s where I need to be playing. I sing very American, working-class themes, and I’m also a long-haired, Allman Brothers-loving musician, and so, I is what I is. That’s why I hired Tom Dowd: The ultimate Southern Rocker’s fantasy.

St. James:: Oh yeah, that’s true. When you’re out supporting an album with live shows, or not being able to make it to a certain area, how much of an album sales difference does it really make? Would you sell a few more albums because you played there, or would you sell a thousand percent more albums after a show there?

Ellis: A lot of times it has to do with whether there’s a cool radio station there that plays your albums, or whether it’s all programmed radio coming out of some corporate headquarters. An example of where I do well is Des Moines, Iowa.

There’s great record stores there. Great promoters. Really good specialty music shows, mixed with a little bit of real airplay. When all that stuff comes together is when it happens. When none of it comes together, then it generally doesn’t happen. So I kind of have my little pockets of popularity.

St. James:: And how do you see satellite radio affecting all this? Certainly it’s got to help.

Ellis: Oh it’s a welcome addition to what we do. It’s wonderful.

St. James:: Have you done any interviews for satellite radio?

Ellis: I haven’t done any yet. I need to. That’s something that Alligator stresses above the other labels because they know it’s something you can get. It’s on the “can-get” list, so you have to go after those things first.

St. James:: Well, another thing on your can-get list, I’d love to sit down with you in the future and shoot a video guitar lesson for BluesQuest.

Ellis: I’d love to do that!

St. James:: Well, great Tinsley! Thanks so much for your time today, and have fun out there this summer on the road!

Ellis: Thank you so much Adam! Take care.

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Tony Rombola of Godsmack: Smack This!

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:06:02 +0000

by Adam St. James

Godsmack was one of the most popular touring acts of the early 21st century. Their hard-hitting sound resonated through amphitheaters and auditoriums throughout the country on tours such as OzzFest and other high-profile jaunts.

I had spoken with guitarist Tony Rombola a couple of times before. In this highly-detailed archival interview, Tony fills us in on the band’s five-month working vacation in South Florida, his and vocalist Sully Erna’s growing Les Paul collections, and why struggling musicians should keep their eye on the prize for at least a few more years.

St. James: Tony, tell us about the new album, Faceless. Where did you record this time around, New York?

Rombola: No, down in Miami at Criteria.

St. James: Oh. Been there a few times. It’s a historic studio.

Rombola: Yeah, it was cool. We actually rented a house down there for like five months. We spent like two and a half months just going to a rehearsal room and just jamming, writing songs. And the last six weeks we recorded.

St. James: Criteria is actually called something else now, isn’t it?

Rombola: The Hit Factory.

St. James: Yeah.

Rombola: Lot of hip-hop bands there.

St. James: Oh really?

Rombola: We were hearing the low bass coming through the walls half the time.

St. James: I did an interview down there one time with Tom Dowd, the guy who produced all the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd CDs, and Derek and the Dominos.

Rombola: Wow.

St. James: And he got out the piano and was letting me mess around with it, and he was playing it. He was a really good piano player. And he was playing “Layla” on the piano it was actually recorded on.

Rombola: Oh wow.

St. James: It was pretty cool.

Rombola: There’s a lot of history down there.

St. James: So you guys got to take a good amount of time with this one. That’s cool.

Rombola: Oh yeah. It’s the first time we’ve ever been able to do this, really. The first record we wrote as…we didn’t expect to go on tour. We weren’t thinking we were going to make it like. That was years of songwriting accumulated for that record. The second one was like, we were on tour the whole time, and we had to write out of soundchecks and dressing rooms, so it kind of felt like really pushed, like under a lot of pressure. We had to play all these shows, the thing was growing so fast, there was so much going on, that it seemed like it took away from the songwriting time that we would normally have. Where we didn’t have that problem with this record. We really had like more than enough time.

St. James: That’s cool. Did you do anything unusual with this record, especially with the guitar tracks?

Rombola: Not too unusual. We were pretty standard with the basic heavy sound that we had. We did it pretty much the same way with two…we’d both play a track of the rhythm track with our Mesa’s, and then I did one more track, with like a different tone – like something real mid-rangey, to kind of fill in where the other ones were, with what frequencies the other one’s didn’t have. There’s only three tracks, really, on almost all the tracks. All our records have been like that. And we did a few different things. We actually had acoustic on a couple songs, that we used, which is different for us in the studio. We’ve never recorded with acoustics before. So that was new too.

St. James: What kind of acoustics were you using?

Rombola: We had some Ovations that they sent us. They were really great. I don’t even know the actual model, but it was a six- and a 12-string. They sounded really great. I’m lovin’ ’em now.

St. James: Are these still the guitars with the plastic backs?

Rombola: Yeah. Yep. The round backs on ’em. They sounded great. One of ’em doesn’t even feel like it’s wood. It’s like this other kind of material. I don’t even know what it is, but it sounded great and it tracked great, it recorded well.

St. James: Do they still slide off your lap when you’re sitting down with them?

Rombola: (laughs) A little bit. A little bit. You’re right. I did notice that. See I never had played one before but like I was really impressed with how they sounded. But I did feel that when I was playing it. I had to keep my leg up real high to keep it tight to my body.

St. James: I haven’t played one in years, but they should put some sort of edge or angle there.

Rombola: Or some grip material. Sandpaper.

St. James: Yeah, there you go. So what kind of Mesa/Boogie amps are you using?

Rombola: I use the same ones I used on the second record, Triple Rectifiers. They’re the two-channel ones.

St. James: Then you must have effects for distortion and stuff?

Rombola: Uh, no, no. I just crank up the pre-amp, and that’s it. And we used the recording pre-amp for that nasally tone.

St. James: So you’re just straight into the amp?

Rombola: Yeah.

St. James: Even live?

Rombola: Live I go through a noise gate, a little Boss noise gate. And then into an Ashly EQ, just to get rid of this – when I play in big rooms a lot and it’s loud, I get this low-end feedback I have to kind of contain. So I use a parametric EQ for that. But that’s it, you know, I mean the effects I use live, I run them through a switching system, a GCX.

St. James: Ground Control?

Rombola: Yeah, exactly. And so it’s a pretty straight-forward signal, for the most part, until I kick in an effect, and then it just re-routes it to that.

St. James: So you’ve got all the tone you need right out of the amp?

Rombola: Yeah definitely. I never use any kind of overdrive with the amp. It has plenty of gain by itself, I think.

St. James: Do you pull back on the volume on the guitar when you’re playing rhythm?

Rombola: No, I have the gain all the way cranked up, and I leave my volume all the way cranked up on my guitar. That’s how we’ve always done it.

St. James: And then there’s probably a lot of right-hand muting in there.

Rombola: Oh yeah. In the studio it wasn’t as bad ’cause I wasn’t near the cabinet, but live I have to have a noise gate, just to quiet it down, ’cause it’s so much louder too. I didn’t play as loud as I would live.

St. James: So when do you hit the road, do you know?

Rombola: It’ll probably be right after the record comes out, so right around the same time.

St. James: Late-April?

Rombola: I think May is when we’re gonna start touring, some time in April is when the record’s coming out. I should know this. This is terrible.

St. James: Especially if you’ve been doing three days of press. (laughs)

Rombola: Well you know Sully usually does most of the talking.

St. James: Oh. But don’t you talk to the guitar magazines?

Rombola: Actually both of us did.

St. James: But you can’t get in a word with him around, right?

Rombola: He loves to talk. They asked me like the technical stuff ’cause Sully doesn’t give a shit about guitar. He only uses it to write songs, you know? He doesn’t care about any scales or any kind of technique kind of thing. But he’s gotten great on the guitar. Since I started this band, he barely could play, when I first started it. He plays live on a few songs, he plays great rhythms, he writes great riffs. I’m impressed that he’s come as far as he has on the instrument.

St. James: Well, touring doesn’t hurt, does it?

Rombola: No. No, playing all the time like that. He doesn’t play all night, he’ll play like two songs a night. He has a guitar in his dressing room. He picks it up. Like I said, he uses it to write with. You’ll never catch him playing any kind of scales or any kind of old songs or anything. He strictly uses it to write with.

St. James: Do you write some riffs too?

Rombola: Yeah. Yep.

St. James: You kind of fit things together?

Rombola: Yeah, sometimes. He’s really the king at that – the arrangement thing. If anything, I’ll have a riff, or even a couple riffs, and he’ll arrange it, ’cause he knows drums really well. Sometimes he’ll have a song without a B section, and I’ll have something that will go with it musically, if it’s the right tempo and the right groove. A lot of times we put stuff together like that.

St. James: Do you…….I’m sorry, I’m being distracted. I’m watching your DVD here on one of my computers at the same time.

Rombola: Is it the live show?

St. James: It’s the “Smack This” home video. It’s all the stuff, I guess, right?

Rombola: Is it us f$#&’ around?

St. James: Yeah, a lot of that, and a lot of live stuff.

Rombola: Oh all right. I haven’t seen that one yet.

St. James: It’s pretty cool. Lot of chicks, man.

Rombola: Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s crazy. And I’m married. Figure that out. (laughs).

St. James: Oh well. So what kind of tunings are you using? Are you using standard or open?

Rombola: No, open tunings, but it’s just the low string. It’s Drop D, and what I would call Drop C.

St. James: The whole guitar is down a step to D standard, and then the low string is down a step below that to C.

Rombola: Right. Exactly.

St. James: And then does Sully do the same with his guitars?

Rombola: Yeah, that’s the whole reason we use this tuning, because of Sully’s being a rookie on the guitar when I joined the band, he couldn’t really play any kind of bar chords for the most part. So he did that because he could play it that way. And it just turned out to be an easy way to do a lot of percussive riffs. I found out right away that you could pull off chords and hammer on chords instead of having too….y’know what I mean? It opened up a whole new way of playing, really, for me, where I’d never used that tuning before I joined Godsmack. And I saw how easy it was to pull off strings and hammer on chords, like I said. It opened a whole new room for me, like, ‘Wow, look how easy this is!’

St. James: (laughing) I’m watching your DVD and Sully is shaving the back of one of your crew members…

Rombola: (laughs) Oh yeah….oh yeah…

St. James: I’ve got to turn this off dude, hold on…

Rombola: Yeah, there’s some stuff on there….(laughs)

St. James: Anyway, pretty crazy……crazy. So you guys obviously have a lot of fun out there on the road.

Rombola: Yeah, we do. We do have fun.

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St. James: Did you do any shows when you were down in Miami and doing the studio thing?

Rombola: We did one show after, New Years, in Orlando at the Hard Rock. And it was great.

St. James: Yeah, that’s a great venue, holds about 1,500 or so, right? But otherwise, you’ve been off since last spring, right?

Rombola: Yeah.

St. James: A well-deserved rest I suppose.

Rombola: Too much, really. We’re really itching, we were itching to get the hell out of here. But it takes time. Everything takes so long, you know, to record the record, now they have to mix it, then master it, then all the artwork has to be put together. It’s just everything takes time. Then they’ll set it up at radio. It’ll come out on radio for about a month before. Y’know, it’s a big operation they got planned for us. (laughs)

St. James: Why don’t you just hit the road in the meantime?

Rombola: Because they think it’s better to time it with the record. They think it will be a bigger impact, and it will be a bigger deal.

St. James: Couldn’t you be doing Europe in the meantime?

Rombola: Yeah, we will go to Europe. Probably only for a couple weeks though. We’ve been there three times and we’re still not doing shit over there.

St. James: Well, it just takes work, huh?

Rombola: Yeah it does. You’ve gotta keep going back and prove yourselves.

St. James: But summertime is the time.

Rombola: Yeah, I’ve heard. We’ve actually gone…one summer we did a tour with Limp Bizkit over there, and that was the most people we’ve played to [in Europe] on a regular basis. But then Fred (Durst) decided to quit the tour. He had enough of it. It kind of sucked for us because we were really starting to reach some people, and they canceled the last week and a half.

St. James: Oh that sucks.

Rombola: But oh well. I guess he couldn’t sing, or some shit.

St. James: I guess he does whatever he’s gonna do, huh?

Rombola: Yeah. I think he was probably homesick.

St. James: So what are you guys gonna do in the meantime, until the record comes out?

Rombola: We have to design the stage, we’ll do rehearsals for the Europe thing. And then I know we’re going to have to do a video for our first single that’s coming out. We have a couple weeks off in there. And then probably start rehearsals, I’m sure, a few weeks before we go on tour. So, it seems like we have a lot of time left, but there’ll be stuff to do. They’ll figure something out for us.

St. James: What kind of rehearsal routine do you go through before a tour?

Rombola: Typically the band will play together…well, it’s been different at different times. But if we’ve been off this long, we’ll probably want to get in a room and just jam for a week or so straight, and then maybe go in for the full rehearsals for probably two days or something. That usually is enough to whip us into shape. But the show in Orlando we did, we only rehearsed for two days in the studio, then we had one day at the venue. So it was only three days that we rehearsed for that, and everything worked out great. Y’know, you don’t forget, really. You play that stuff so much on stage it just gets to be like a routine in a way. And the songs, to me, aren’t that hard to play.

St. James: So you got a couple Grammy nominations huh?

Rombola: Yeah, for “I Stand Alone.”

St. James: Is that cool?

Rombola: Yeah, that’s very cool. I mean, who woulda known, y’know?

St. James: That’s pretty prestigious stuff, man.

Rombola: Yeah I know, for a song that was a joke in a way. Not the song is a joke, but Sully came up with that – y’know the opening riff?

St. James: Uh-huh.

Rombola: He came up with that, we were playing at a gig in the daytime, we were doing our soundcheck, and he’s fuckin’ around way up high on the E string, and he didn’t have that riff yet, but he was just bouncing off notes and stuff, and he was like, ‘How come no one ever plays up here?’ And I go, ‘I don’t know, ‘cause it’s hard to reach.’ And he ended up coming up with that riff just like that from fuckin’ around. It started as a joke but it turned into one of our biggest songs.

That’s how he is, he’ll come across something. And being a rookie on the guitar is probably a good thing for creativity, y’know, ‘cause you bump into stuff and find stuff that someone else would go, ‘Oh, that doesn’t work, you’re not supposed to do that.’ All the sudden you have rules and have limitations on yourself because you start knowing stuff.

St. James: Did you end up interacting with any of the people from the movie, “The Scorpion King”?

Rombola: Hardly. We did the video and The Rock showed up, and that Kelly Hu girl. But that was it. They were there for a few hours and they left. But we got to meet ’em.

St. James: What did you think of the movie?

Rombola: I didn’t even see it. I haven’t even seen it. I heard it wasn’t that good. I mean, I love “The Mummy,” but I heard this wasn’t even close.

St. James: Well sometimes they get a hold of a person they think they can make a star out of, and they throw a bunch of effects at it, and they don’t pay as much attention to making the movie be a good story.

Rombola: I just saw a movie like that, that “XXX” movie, the other day. I finally saw it ’cause my wife got the video, and I watched it. I thought it was the same thing. I thought it was good special effects, he seemed like a cool character, but the story sucked. I didn’t like the lines he was saying. He sounded stupid.

St. James: Well, y’know, there’s creative people, and then there’s people who just have the ability to get the stuff done, without the creativity.

Rombola: I liked the special effects…

St. James: Yeah, those were killer.

Rombola: That was about all there was too it, though.

St. James: So what are you doing about a drummer?

Rombola: We have a drummer. We’ve had one since June or so.

St. James: Oh, OK. It doesn’t say anything about that on your website, it just says that Tommy left the band.

Rombola: It should say something. It really doesn’t say anything? We have a video on there you can click on, we played a show in July with Shannon, and it actually shows on one of the songs, “I Stand Alone,” he’s playing on there. It should be on there anyway.

St. James: Well I was looking in the news section and there’s the announcement that Tommy had left, from June of last year, but there wasn’t anything since then about it.

Rombola: Oh yeah, we definitely have a drummer, we’ve had one for awhile.

St. James: What’s his name?

Rombola: Shannon Larkin. He used to play for a band called Amen.

St. James: How did you hook up with him?

Rombola: Sully has known him from before this band even started. He’s a drum buddy of Sully’s, really. And we got in touch with him and made this switch.

St. James: Was that band from Boston?

Rombola. No, I think they were from somewhere out in L.A., I believe. It was kind of a punk band, and they played around. They’ve been to Europe, and they do all right. But that came to an end and it just happened at the right time when we were looking for somebody.

St. James: Sully started as a drummer, right?

Rombola: Yeah. Sully is a total drummer. He’s a great drummer. He’s better than just about anyone I’ve played with.

St. James: Oh really?

Rombola: Oh yeah. He played on the first two records. That’s him playing the drums.

St. James: All the drum tracks?

Rombola: Oh yeah. He did everything. And he would have done the drum tracks on this one too, but Shannon’s one of his heroes. He’s right there writing the drum tracks. He wrote drum tracks for the most part, but Shannon played them all on the record.

St. James: So how has Shannon changed the sound of the band?

Rombola: You know, he plays more like Sully does. We were pretty fortunate when we had Tommy, who is a great drummer. And we had Sully, who is a great drummer. But before Tommy, for probably two and a half or three years, we played as a band with another drummer, this kid Joe, who wasn’t that good. And right before we got signed, Sully called Tommy, who was another drum buddy of Sully’s, and Tommy came in right before we got signed to a major label.

So, at the time, I remember Sully was trying to get Shannon, but Shannon had just joined Amen. Sully wanted Shannon because Shannon plays like Sully, because he was Sully’s idol as a kid. Sully incorporated Shannon’s stye into his own. And that’s why he knew that Shannon would be perfect for this band, because he already had the same style, the Godsmack style. So it’s been a perfect marriage as far as styles go. And he’s a great guy to boot. So it’s been great.

St. James: That’s cool. So what are you going to do between now and the tour? Are you going to get any new guitars or anything?

Rombola: Yeah, I do want to…I might paint some more of my own, or I might get in touch with Gibson and have something made. I was thinking about a few different things, but I’m not sold on anything yet. I did have an idea for Gibson. I want to have a Les Paul, kind of a customized one for myself, but I’m not really done designing it. Me and my guitar tech have been working on it. We’re trying to pick all the best things that would look cool and sound great. We’re still thinking about it. But it is something I’ve been thinking about, ’cause I have a few months now to get ready for the tour. And we’ll be going for a couple years, so it’ll be worth it.

St. James: Are Les Pauls all you take with you?

Rombola: So far, yeah. Sully got an Explorer and I kinda thought it was a pretty nice feeling guitar, so I might end up getting’ a couple of those for the next tour, just for a change. But when I started this band, I’d never played a Les Paul before, and I got one – ’cause Sully, he was all about the Les Paul. So I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get one and try it out.’ And I ended up falling in love with it, so that’s all I’ve been using since.

St. James: What were you playing before?

Rombola: Strat-style, like I had a G&L Strat. I had an Ibanez RG550, kind of a Strat style. That was the stuff I was playing before this band. With a whammy bar. (laughs) I haven’t seen a whammy bar since Godsmack.

St. James: And what kind of strings do you use?

Rombola: GHS. I use .010s on the standard tuned guitar, and .011s on the C, with a bigger E string that would come with elevens.

St. James: What is it?

Rombola: You know, I don’t even know. My guitar tech takes care of that for me. He makes custom sets for me. I know it’s bigger cause it was too floppy with a regular .011 low string tuned down two whole steps.

St. James: What do you use the standard tuned guitar on?

Rombola: Well, not standard. What I mean by standard is that the A through the E are all standard, it’s just the low string down to D. So they’re .010s on that guitar.

St. James: So that one is a Drop D? And the other guitar is a Drop C, more or less?

Rombola: Right, exactly.

St. James: So which songs do you use the Drop D on?

Rombola: Uh, “Faceless” is Drop D. I don’t even remember right now. What we do is, it kind of more or less to facilitate Sully’s vocals. If he has a song that he’s singing and he’s having trouble, and the chorus is a little bit too high, we’ll play the C guitar, and vice versa. We can kind of mess around, have our options vocally. That’s ultimately what is the most important thing. We’ve got to have the melody and the vocals in the right register for his voice.

St. James: OK. But Sully’s playing open tuning?

Rombola: No, Sully is doing the same thing I am.

St. James: Oh OK. Did he used to play open tuning?

Rombola: No, it’s always been just a drop tuning, with the low string. The rest of the strings are standard in relation to each other.

St. James: When you were talking about pull-offs and stuff, you’re just talking about the pull off to the sixth string.

Rombola: On the low strings, the first three strings. When you have a chord and you can pull stuff off. Almost all our songs have that kind of thing.

St. James: And what amps is he using on tour?

Rombola: Same thing, the Mesa Triple Rectifier.

St. James: And straight into the amp?

Rombola: Yep. A noise gate, Ashly EQ, and then the amp. We’re wireless too. I think it’s a Shure wireless.

St. James: Which one?

Rombola: (laughs) I don’t know. I haven’t seen my rig in a year. I took the amps when I was in the studio, but I didn’t take my wireless.

St. James: What did you take to Florida, just a couple of guitars?

Rombola: I took a bunch of guitars: like a bunch of (Les Paul) Standards, a couple (Les Paul) Studios, and some (Les Paul) Customs. And we took four heads: One had 6L6 (power tubes), the other ones had all EL34s (power tubes). We made that switch in the studio, when we were rehearsing, we had a rehearsal room. And Mesa had spent a bunch of tubes to us and we loaded one of them with EL34s, something we never did before. I always had 6L6s. And we were A/B-ing them and digging the way the EL34s sounded, so we were sticking with those.

St. James: Did you do any gear shopping while you were down there?

Rombola: No, not really. I went to a guitar store and just picked out a bunch of effects that (I thought) I might use in the studio, which a lot of them I didn’t even ended up using. But I did shop around for some stuff as far as effects. But not really guitars or amps. I’m pretty happy with the tone we were getting. It’s about as good as we can get it.

St. James: Do you collect vintage gear or anything like that?

Rombola: No. No.

St. James: You don’t even look into it?

Rombola: You know what? I probably would. I never had money for that shit. And so far it’s been that we’re endorsed by Gibson, and they can’t send us vintage guitars. So I haven’t spent any of my own dough yet on guitars. I guess if I end up a millionaire, or having a few million bucks I would probably consider it. But right now I’m still saving my money.

St. James: Well that’s wise.

Rombola: I know it’s an investment too, but right now I have so many new Les Pauls around that I haven’t really had the desire to collect old ones.

St. James: How many do you have?

Rombola: I probably have like 15 now.

St. James: Wow. Cool.

Rombola: Sully has even more than that because he smashed about 20 of them. (laughs) And he has 15 or 20 himself.

St. James: And how many do you actually bring on the road with you?

Rombola: I take like five.

St. James: Mostly as backups, just in case?

Rombola: Actually it’s probably six, because I take one just to take to hotel rooms. I can always swap it out with one of my road ones if I want.

St. James: Do you bring an amp to the hotel?

Rombola: Yeah. I have a little Fender Bullet.

St. James: Really?

Rombola: Yeah. I don’t even know why. I was in a town one day and I tried that out, I thought it was cool for a little amp, and that’s what I’ve been using.

St. James: I’m surprised you’re not using a Pod, or something like that.

Rombola: I have a Pod, but I don’t like…I have to powered monitors to hear it, you know. I’ve played it through an amp but I don’t like the way it sounds. I mean it’s all right, but I’d just as soon go through a straight amp. It’s just for noodling around. I do have a Pod. On tour I have a little case that you open up, it’s got a little powered monitor, a Pod, a drum machine. So I can’t sit there when I’m in my dressing room and play my guitar. That’s where I use that. But when I go to a hotel room I don’t play as much. I just have it there in case I want to noodle around.

St. James: So you must have kids coming up to you asking you how you play things, or how you got where you are now. What do you tell people?

Rombola: You know what, it doesn’t happen a whole lot. A few times here and there I’ve had kids that play in a band or play guitar that ask me, ‘What do you got to do to make it?’ And all I can really tell them is don’t give up. Keep trying. Give 100 percent. That’s what we did. I think I was 32 when I first joined Godsmack. Or 31. And I thought at that time that I had been trying for years to make something happen with music. And I would have never expected it to go this far in the past six years.

St. James: That’s another thing: Life itself throws so many things at you in your late 20s and early 30s, but a lot of people might think, ‘If I don’t make it by the time I’m 24 I might as well give up.’

Rombola: Yeah, that’s way wrong! And, who knows. Your dream might turn into something different too. You might think you want to be in a rock band, playing onstage to people. But it might turn into being a studio guy, or something in the business that’s still really cool, and you love to do, but you might not even have pictured. But because you stayed pretty true to your passion, you’ll make it happen.

St. James: It does get frustrating, working regular day jobs, trying to play music, watching the years go by. But I definitely think people should always stick to it.

Rombola: Yeah. The worst-case scenario is, if nothing happens, at least you were doing what you like to do.

St. James: So when you’re out on the road what do you do to keep your chops up?

Rombola: In the dressing room. I always have my guitar right there, and like I said I have a couple powered monitors in this case so it’s there every day. For any minute that I get I can just sit down and noodle around. Plus I’ve been playing for 25 years or something now. I don’t really have to play all the time. I used to pursue trying to play like Yngvie, or trying to play like Steve Vai. I used to have that in me to try to get better and learn this and that. But after years of that I think it’s better to just try to create your own identity and your own sound, ’cause you end up just sounding like someone else, and not even as good of a version of it. To me, you should just do your own thing, and try to be yourself, create a voice.

St. James: Well you guys have done that. You’ve done that, the band has done that.

Rombola: I think so. I think we have a distinct sound. I think Sully’s voice is really recognizable…And we still play solos God damn it!!!!

St. James: Yeah. I know last time you and I spoke we spoke about solos. You got a few on the new album?

Rombola: Yeah. It’s like half, probably. But that’s a rock thing to us. We’re into Aerosmith and Sabbath and Zeppelin and stuff, so that’s just normal. Not every song should have one. And it’s not like it used to be where it’s this over the top thing. But it’s still got attitude and people can still hear some solo in there.

St. James: When you get into solos do you get into any weird scales or anything, or do you keep it pretty straight?

Rombola: Well, I usually mix…I was always into blues so I usually mix the blues scale with diminished and some chromatic stuff. But for the most part I just do stuff with attitude. I try to get a good attitude on there. Sully has always said that from the beginning: He always wants us to play with attitude more than play flashy. And that’s kind of the formula we’ve always gone with.

St. James: Well it works.

Rombola: Yeah.

St. James: All right dude. Thank you for your time. I’ll let you get going, I’m sure you’ve got others to do.

Rombola: Yeah, we’ve been pretty busy, but it’s all part of the job now.

St. James: That’s all right though, it’s not a bad job is it?

Rombola: No, it ain’t. It’s a great job!

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Buddy Guy: Moanin’ the Blues

admin — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:32:41 +0000

by Adam St. James

[Editor's note: This is an interview/article I wrote while doing time as the music editor at Miami New Times.]

Buddy Guy has been waiting, frustrated yet determined, since the days when record stores carried only vinyl. Waiting for the day he can switch on the radio and hear his voice — his guitar, too — on a mainstream, big-city station. Before midnight, preferably.

That radio airplay has eluded the blues legend over several decades of an otherwise stellar career is nothing if not mysterious, especially to the man himself. That may all be changing, however. And the person who may bring about that change isn’t some wizened radio station music director or influential disc jockey. It’s Jonny Lang, a seventeen-year-old guitar-playing blues prodigy turned pop phenomenon.

By the simple act of guest-starring on “Midnight Train” from Guy’s brand new CD, Heavy Love, as well as by hooking up with him for a summer shed tour that should bring both players arenas full of new fans (though not in South Florida, the tour doesn’t visit these parts), Lang may be able to pull off what no one else has: taking Buddy Guy beyond his loyal following and delivering him to the masses.

Lang isn’t the first one to attempt this. Guy owes the resurrection of his once-sputtering career to the efforts of people such as Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Jeff Beck, all of whom have emphatically and repeatedly championed him over the years. In fact, Guy’s successful deal with Silvertone Records — so successful that he won Grammys for his last three studio albums and earned a fourth nomination for his 1996 live album, The Real Deal – can be traced almost directly to Clapton’s campaigning on his behalf.

None of that help should have been necessary. For 40 years Guy, now age 62, has been not only a consummate musician, but one hell of an exciting performer; his lengthy concert solos are inventive and full of energy. Virtually nuclear, in fact, such as when he melts down with a blistering four- or five-minute instrumental rampage on Vaughan’s “Cold Shot” or on his own classic “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues.”

Unfortunately, despite his and his disciples’ best efforts and the short-lived (especially for those who don’t score an appearance during the annual television extravaganza) attention bestowed on Grammy winners, a whole lot of people outside the ranks of devoted blues fans still don’t know Buddy Guy, or his mentors and former recording partners. The very people who laid the groundwork for all that’s happened in popular music — everything from the Beatles to Bush — linger in the shadows, so to speak. Guy would like to turn on the lights.

“I’ve dedicated my life to this music, following Muddy Waters and those guys who dedicated their lives to the music,” Guy said during a phone interview from his suburban Chicago home. “My main goal now is that hopefully we’ll be recognized as a part of this thing. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I want to be as rich as some of these people. I’d feel just as happy if the music gets known. Keep the money — just recognize us as a part of this industry that has something to do with all these billions and billions of dollars of music that everybody loves so well.”

And that’s where Lang comes in. It’s not that Heavy Love needed beautifying by any fresh-faced kid. Hardly. Guy has simply churned out another winner. The funky, slippery title track, brought to the table by producer David Z (former Prince protege and mastermind of both Lang’s and blues wunderkind Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s debut albums), is all but guaranteed to have ‘em dancin’ in the aisles. Likewise for Guy’s up-tempo cover of Waters’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” His rendition of Tony Joe White’s “Did Someone Make a Fool Outta You,” meanwhile, is achingly emotional.

He even throws in covers of ZZ Top (”Need You Tonight”) and Forties swing-jazz star Louis Jordan (”Saturday Night Fish Fry”), the man Guy and fellow blues luminary Robert Jr. Lockwood decided some years back, on the eve of a Cleveland, Ohio, performance, is the true inventor of rock and roll. But it’s the duet with Lang, lively and modern, with its gritty vocals and overdriven bass riffs, that might just land Guy his first Top 40 hit, a feat that has thus far escaped him. That some hotshot kid might turn a spotlight on the under-appreciated guitar hero’s career is actually quite ironic: Guy was once the hotshot kid.

Born in 1936 to sharecropper parents, he grew up working farms in Louisiana. He didn’t know electricity until the age of fourteen; he rode horses for transportation, long before ever slipping behind the wheel of an automobile. Guy picked up the guitar at a young age after hearing regional recording stars such as Roscoe Gardner and Smiley Lewis; he decided that picking the blues beat picking cotton hands down. By his teens he was playing roadhouses from Lettsworth, his hometown, to Baton Rouge, the nearest big city.

With an eye on grander accomplishments, the ambitious young man moved to Chicago in September 1957 and immediately set out to make a name for himself. That didn’t take long. Weekly guitar battles against established Chicago players such as Otis Rush and Magic Sam, with a bottle of whiskey at stake, introduced everyone to the new kid in town.

Using showmanship tricks he learned watching Guitar Slim, like plugging in a 150-foot cord and beginning his solo in a car outside the club, Guy energized an otherwise sedate scene. “When I first came to Chicago, most of ‘em would sit down,” he recalls. “They were playing blues kind of quiet and had chairs on the stage. And when I saw that I said, ‘I’ll win this bottle of whiskey.’ And I won it every Sunday for quite a while.”

But it wasn’t really the booze Guy was after. He used these “head-cutting” competitions to work his way into the circle of influential local players. Before long Guy was hanging with the big boys. Damn cool, but every relationship has its give and take.

“When I first came here and met ‘em,” he remembers with a laugh, “I had a little three-piece band — keyboards, drums, and myself — and no one knew who I was. I didn’t have a record out. And I had met Muddy and them, and they said, ‘Well look, if you play at these small clubs, we’ll come by and just stop in, and that’ll give you a boost.’ And I was making three dollars a night, and they would come in and say, ‘Hi.’ And Muddy would walk up there and say, ‘I’m a Hoochie Coochie Man,’ and somebody would say, ‘I saw Muddy Waters at the last place.’

And I’d get off that night, and they’d done drank two bottles of whiskey — and [my bar tab was] twelve dollars, and I didn’t have but three comin’. They would tell me later, ‘You didn’t think I would come around there for nothin’, did you, motherf$&*#@?’ And I’d say, ‘Okay, man.’ I would do it again if I had to.”

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The work that followed more than made up for the pay-to-play gigs Guy unwittingly found himself working. Rush and Willie Dixon soon hooked Guy up with a small label named Cobra, where he cut his first tracks. He didn’t have any success there, however, and in 1960 he followed Dixon to Chess, where he would record regularly until 1967. Besides releasing a slew of singles — some originals, some Dixon compositions, and tracks like Eurreal Montgomery’s “First Time I Met the Blues” (included on the excellent compilation Buddy’s Blues, part of the Chess 50th Anniversary Collection released last year by MCA), Guy worked as a regular session ace. His Chess legacy includes recordings with Dixon, Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and numerous other legends.

Guy went on to enjoy a creative yet sporadic partnership with harp player Junior Wells throughout the Seventies and early Eighties. He released albums on a variety of labels, then spent ten years without a recording contract. During that lean time, Guy concentrated on running his own nightclubs, first the Checkerboard Lounge and later, after he sold the Checkerboard, Buddy Guy’s Legends, both still popular Chicago blues hot spots. (In addition to international tours, Guy sits in at his club with performers throughout the year and plays there every year for most of January.)

It was in the late Eighties, after Eric Clapton started telling anyone who would listen that Buddy Guy was the “greatest living electric blues guitarist,” that Guy’s fortunes began to pick up. His Silvertone deal produced the 1991 barnstormer Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues, still his biggest seller, and the albums Feels Like Rain (1993), and Slippin’ In (1994), all three Grammy-winning discs and fine examples of Guy’s striking fretwork and expressive singing voice.

As is Heavy Love, the eleven-track opus that Guy hopes to hear screaming out of car radios nationwide this summer. That depends, of course, on radio programmers paying attention this time around, even if only because of his collaboration with a charismatic singer and guitarist young enough to be his grandson. Regardless, Guy isn’t concerned with how he gets the job done. As one of the few remaining caretakers of the blues heritage, Buddy Guy just wants to know that his music will never be forgotten.

“That’s been kind of worrying me all of my life. But it didn’t disencourage me to say, ‘Well, don’t play blues no more; jump on the bandwagon.’ I still play my blues, so I still think one of these days I might hit the right note that somebody will say, ‘Oh shit, I gotta play this [on the air]. I can’t refuse to play this.

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Roy Rogers: Slip Slidin’ Away

admin — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:52:10 +0000

by Adam St. James

The San Francisco Bay area has long harbored a healthy blues scene, due in part to the open-minded hippies who hung around Golden Gate Park and the neighborhood known as Haight-Ashbury in the late ’60s. Those care-free individuals spent the “Summer of Love” embracing up and coming rock legends such as the Greatful Dead and Jefferson Airplane right alongside traditional blues artists such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Regular concerts at San Francisco concert venue, the Fillmore West, often featured the elder bluesmen performing with the hot rock acts of the day.

Naturally that strong blues influence found it’s way into the lives of many young local musicians, whether they were hippies or just guitar players. Roy Rogers is one of those guitar players who grew up within a bus ride of the Fillmore and that wide-open music scene, and it lead him down a path that began with rock ’n’ roll, but evolved more and more into the blues world.

Today he’s known as one of the hottest slide guitar players on the blues scene. He’s released nearly a dozen of his own discs, including a 2002 duet with Steve Miller Band harmonica player, Norton Buffalo, called Roots of our Nature. Rogers was also a member of John Lee Hooker’s band for four years, and produced two great albums by Hooker before Hooker’s death, The Healer and Mr. Lucky, working with folks like Keith Richards, Carlos Santana, and Bonnie Raitt along the way. As of 2012, Roy has been performing shows with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, with whom he recorded the album, Translucent Blues.

In this archive interview, Rogers discussed with me his relationship with Hooker and Sammy Hagar, his classic slide technique, his favorite guitars, and more.

Adam St. James: Hi Roy. Thanks for speaking with me today. You also have a show that’s coming out on PBS?

Roy Rogers: I did a live DVD and it’s going to air on PBS and then it’s going to roll over to BET Jazz.

St. James: Cool.

Rogers: And so it’s going to be on PBS for three months and then as you probably know, local PBS stations can use it or not use it. They just make their own local decisions.

St. James: Right.

Rogers: And then they may use it for some pledge stuff and we may give some away and then it’s going to roll over to BET after that They’re (BET) expanding their format so that’s cool.

St. James: Cool. What’s the title of the DVD?

Rogers: The title is Roy Rogers: Live at Sierra Nevada.

St. James: OK. And this will be in stores too, right?

Rogers: Correct.

St. James: And then on BET Jazz.

Rogers: Correct.

St. James: Good, I’m really looking forward to that.

Rogers: Yeah, it should be good. It’s really a nice one. As you know, man, capturing the live thing is always the toughest and people don’t realize it so I’ve always kind of fought against it. But we did a seven-camera shoot and it was really a couple of good nights of the band to choose from, alternate takes and that kind of thing. That’s really what you need to do. We finally did it, so…

St. James: And in front of a live audience?

Rogers: A live audience. It’s a small audience maybe 400 people, 500 people. It was a nice little theater. It’s really a pro shot so I’m very pleased that we could do it in that manner.

St. James: You’re also involved with a slide that is being marketed through Planet Waves, right?

Rogers: I put them in touch with Tom Harrison who made the electro polish slides which they’re gonna market as EP Slides and I’m really a big fan of these slides. I knew Tom before I met up with Planet Waves. He had sent me his slides and I kinda linked them up and then Tom and I flew to New York and met with all those guys. That was a couple of years back.

Now they’re marketing them as EP Slides…EP meaning electro polish. So I did a blurb for them…for their marketing for that because it’s really quite an amazing process that..it basically feels like a glass slide, it’s that smooth.

You know, normally a lot of slides have regular stainless steel and there are various degrees of thickness kind of thing. But this one has really got a great feel and everybody that they ever sent it to, I guess including Johnny Winter and all kinds of folks, they really flipped out about this slide. And me to so I’m the one that put him in touch with Planet Waves.

St. James: I see.

Rogers: He licensed it to them. That’s a whole separate deal.

St. James: So it’s a metal slide but it feels like glass?

Rogers: Exactly.

St. James: What did he do to it? Is it coated or something?

Rogers: It’s coated with this electro polish. The way the metal adheres to…it’s real soft. It’s not like a stainless steel, like a knife or something. It’s got a totally soft kind of feel. It’s glass-like. So when you’ve got a tool like that, it’s very different. I use both. I don’t just use metal slides. I mean I think that every guitar player evolves into slide, he should have a metal and glass. This is a different kind of deal. But this one is glass-like in feel which is the best of both for me. So that’s what that blurb was all about.

St. James: And you did do an educational video for Homespun Tapes a few years back, didn’t you?

Rogers: I did one for Homespun about 10 years ago. A slide video

St. James: Yeah, OK.

Rogers: A slide video.

St. James: Right. You still link to that from your site, right?

Rogers: Yeah, exactly. So I’ve just done that one and that’s probably over ten years ago.

St. James: I see. Any thoughts about doing any others?

Rogers: That’s a lot of work. Maybe. I have to defer on that, Adam. I could do another one cause I have a very, I guess a distinctive style of playing so I get asked a lot of questions about that stuff, but….maybe. Nothing in the works. I’ve got other stuff going on.

St. James: You have a long and interesting musical history. So tell me what really made you want to get into slide and bluesy stuff when you first started.

Rogers: When I first started I was a little rock ’n’ roller. I started playing guitar in a band in ’63.

St. James: And you lived in the San Francisco area.

Rogers: I live in Vallejo. A town called Vallejo. I started playing when I was 12 but I got in a band when I was 13 with older musicians, with high school guys. So I was like a budding young 13-year-old and I was playing with 16- and 17- year-olds.

St. James: Well that’s cool.

Rogers: So like a little sponge, you learn….and we were playing “the book.” And in those days the book was Chuck Berry, Little Richard, “Louie Louie,” all that stuff. So that was really where I started playing and then in the course of playing, of course, we started doing some Jimmy Reed stuff….blues oriented. And I was just attracted to the whole feel of the blues. It had an allure just from a feel….an emotional standpoint. Just the music about it and the rhythm, no question, that was a great part of it for me also. So I learned that obviously through Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

It’s a really close trip back to heart of blues. But really, the role of the Rolling Stones was big for me also ’cause when the Rolling Stones hit after I was in this band, we started doing some of that stuff. You know you check people’s records….it was kind of at the same time, you know, we were starting to do some Jimmy Reed stuff, but then along comes the British bands and I didn’t know who McKinley Morganfield was and Chester Burnett. These people were not played on the radio. So when the Stones and people like that covered their songs…I’m sure you’ve heard this many times: You would say, ‘Well who is this guy?” And you’d find out that they covered that song and then that was it.

As the story goes, I have an older brother – 4 years older than me – and when I was like 14 or 15 (yeah, he was what 18, 19) and he brought home the king of the Delta blues singers, Robert Johnson, his red Columbia record. And that just blew my mind. Robert Johnson just completely….the whole country blues things….I hadn’t heard that up until then. I mean there was no…..and then you’d get like a Sing Out magazine. Do they still print Sing Out magazine?

St. James: Yes. http://www.singout.org

Rogers: That was the folk magazine. And all these guys had been re-discovered, of course, as you know and they were being re-recorded by Vanguard and people like that. So this whole thing ….the picture…I was one of those guys….I was already playing guitar and playing rock ‘n roll at that time, but it was such an exciting time because you had all these converging things; the British bands covering blues, you had Sing Out magazine, you had Sun House re-recorded, you had Mississippi John Hurt, all these people and the blues just hit me and bonked me on the head and that was it. And slide guitar in particular, when I heard Robert Johnson, that was….it was just one of those light bulbs that clicked on. And in my early years I started pursuing slide guitar and started incorporating that in early bands in high school….

St. James: Did it come to you pretty easily?

Rogers: Pretty easily, yeah. I would learn it off the record, I never really had a mentor for slide guitar. Learned it off the records and then just continued. I had a duet. My first recording was with a harmonica player, David Bergen, we were slide guitar and harmonica playing traditional stuff, you know, “Wish I was in Heaven Sittin’ Down,” stuff like that. We just got more into the Delta blues, it’s just what appealed to me. At the same time I was playing other kinds of music, but I was ….over the course of playing, now it’s been many years, it’s really become expanding the envelope….it’s got the Delta blues as the foundation, but I’m by no means a traditionalist, nor ever wanted to be.

It’s about taking the music outside the box. So that’s really what it’s about and it’s really exploring through my recordings now which, I don’t know how many – I’ve got 12 or 13 records. It’s various explorations of….some records are more, shall we say, traditional than others, but all are just exploring slide guitar as I see it and the sky’s the limit. But I still consider myself based on Delta because I use open tunings. I don’t like playing slide guitar outside of open tunings because that’s just the feel that I like so that’s how I explain it. When you base your music, whether you’re playing jazz or taking it outside or doing whatever you’re doing with it, if you’re playing straight ahead, when you’re on an open chord and you can do the base, the rhythm and the lead at the same time, and stomp your foot, that serves to help define your music.

St. James: Right.

Rogers: And that’s the music that I like. Is that enough of an explanation?

St. James: That’s excellent. So these days what kinds of open tunings are you into? I know you play a variety of them, don’t you?

Rogers: Yeah. I use open E (depends on the guitar), for the Martin I use open E major, then I’ll use open D, which is of course, the same intervals, but just a step down. And I’ll use open G. Every once in a while I’ll use like a G7 or a minor. On the Buffalo record I used minor open tuning, but mainly I’m in major tuning Delta style, either open D or open E or Vestapol.

St. James: Can you please explain Vestapol tuning?

Rogers: That’s open G. Where you have….hold on just a second….I just wanted to see…. Wait, no, Vestapol is the open D not G. I was confused there. But open G is D, G, D, G, B, D. But the Vestapol is open D which is D, A, B, F-sharp, A, B.

St. James: Is that the open D that you’re talking about?

Rogers: Correct.

St. James: And then what’s your open E?

Rogers: Open E would be….well, it just a whole step up so it would be E, B, E,
D-sharp, B, E.

St. James: Cool.

Rogers: And that’s mainly the ones I use. And that’s pretty much what you’re talking the Robert Johnson stuff and Sun House. And I just am comfortable in that setting. Whether or not you’re using a pick or your fingers, you can get that thumpin’ style. But not everything is, you know…you can still take it pretty outside. I mean, I don’t see it as any limitations. Some guys say, ‘Well aren’t you limited ’cause you’re in open tuning?’ And I say, ‘Not at all. You can hit any kind of 9th chord, any kind of weird chord you want. You just gotta know how to do it.’

St. James: Did it take time for you, when you first got into a certain new tuning, did you put a lot of thought into where the notes had moved from your previous tuning or did you just search for sounds?

Rogers: Really just searched for sounds. It’s really becoming comfortable. I mean, you’re searching for what works and what doesn’t. For me as an improviser it’s about the trial and error of that. Improvising is something that you’ve gotta kinda be willing (to experiment with). As I tell people you’ve got to be willing to take it to the edge and you have to be willing to make a mistake because you got to go for it. And that’s the way I feel about improvisation. You know when you listen to like Slideways, with the band, it’s going for it, it’s stretching the limit of slide. It’s not…it doesn’t sound real traditional to my ear anyway.

St. James: Especially the tune “Avalanche.” That one rocks, man.

Rogers: Yeah, so it’s just balls to the wall. So to do that you’ve gotta be ready to fail and say, ‘Man, I’m just blazing…I’m gonna go for it.’ That’s how you can reach higher ground. I always just kinda tell that to people when they ask me about producing Johnny Hooker. I say well, you know, we just want the music to go to higher ground and the only way to do that is to like…you don’t put it in the box to begin with. As Johnny never did. He never did the same tone twice…the same way twice, which is cool. That’s a cool thing.

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St. James: How did you hook up with John Lee Hooker?

Rogers: Well, I went on the road with him. I became a member of his band.

St. James: But I mean how did you first get that gig?

Rogers: I had a guy playing with me, Steve Ehrmann, who currently plays bass with me still. I’ve known Steve for over 25 years and he used to play around the clubs with me in and around San Francisco Bay area, and he played some bass on my first record and he was going on the road with John Lee Hooker and a guy left the band….actually the organ player left the band and said why don’t you come down and see if you can fill the bill and I did and I went on the road site unseen. I just tried out for the band. First gig was in Detroit. I met John in Detroit. So, I stayed with John for about 4 years and became very close friends with John and then I left the band to do my own thing and then he called upon me in ’88 to produce The Healer, and then Mr. Lucky.

St. James: Right, right.

Rogers: That was the beginning of the production stuff. But we were real close,
I mean, I became a real close friend of John’s other than just a sideman in a band kind of thing. We were like family.

St. James: What was he like?

Rogers: Oh John, he was just an amazing man. He really cared about the people around him. He was an extremely gentle man and as soulful as you could possibly get. He could take the music as deep as he wanted at any particular time. Very few people on the planet that can do that. He was a wonderful guy and had a great sense of humor.

St. James: Did he?

Rogers: Oh yeah. Loved to laugh; enjoyed life. He had a great life. Every time I think of John Lee Hooker I’m not sad…great life. He lived to be 83 years old, just shy of his 84th birthday, played a gig four days before he passed away. Went home and died in his sleep.

St. James: Wow. I guess that’s the way to go, huh?

Rogers: Not a bad run.

St. James: Yeah. When you produced his stuff, was there any contention in the way you were doing things or was he pretty easy going about that too?

Rogers: You know we had a real mutual respect for each other. We disagreed sometimes. John was not one that wanted to do multiple takes. And we didn’t do many multi-takes, but when I did request multi-takes sometimes, he was a little reticent. ‘You sure we want to do that again?’ ‘Yeah, I’m sure…I am sure we want to do that again (laughs).’ But other than that, no, no contention. I did that in a friendly fashion.

I tell people when you work….working with John Lee Hooker, I can’t imagine doing that without being good friends, you know, because you can’t be in awe. We were friends and like family and you can’t be in awe of somebody. I mean, I got to work with great folks, you know…Keith Richards and… I’m sure you know all these folks and, I mean when you’re working with people you can’t be in awe of them. It’s about getting the job done.

Same thing with interviewing. I’m sure you must feel the same way. You may think about it later, but when you’re there doing it man, you have a job to do and you want to do it the best you can. That’s the way you get great work. So it was really that. It was about that and of course, with John Lee Hooker, you know, I was there to facilitate and just kinda set it up for him, because it’s the musicians that play the stuff in a studio. It’s not the producer. The producer helps it and facilitates it, hopefully with the set up, but once the people start playing, you can try a song a little faster or a little slower, or you change something, but it’s about the musicians. You want to really create a comfort zone.

I’ve said that many times. If people have a comfort zone about what they’re doing, and they don’t feel at risk and they feel comfortable, then you have the possibility of the music going higher – and higher than you ever could have thought possible. And if you just try to organize everything and say, ‘Well this is what we’re going to do,’ it has no possibility of going anywhere other than how you define it. That’s no good. Why would you want to do that? Especially with the blues.

But I’d say that’s true of any music. But then again, if somebody doesn’t know… I was working with a John Lee Hooker, so he was tried and true. If you’re working with a young artist and someone who needs direction, that would be a whole different thing. They need more help. But I’ve had the good fortune to work with two of the real greats in their respective fields; John Lee Hooker and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. So these guys have been around the block more times and you and I my friend.

St. James: What about your album, Slideways? You didn’t produce this album?

Rogers: I co-produced it.

St. James: Did you? Okay, because it lists Scott Matthews as producer.

Rogers: Well, it’s actually both of us.

St. James: I’m sorry, yes it does. Why do you bring somebody else in to do that? Is it too much to be playing and producing at the same time?

Rogers: It’s good to have another set of ears in there. Since I’m doing the playing and when I’m on a session, I mean, I can wear both hats, but I prefer to have another set of ears. It’s good to have someone that’s coming at it from a different aspect. I feel that it can enhance the music and make it easier to assess things. If I’m in the middle of doing a take and I’m involved in the playing session of it, it’s good to have somebody else on the other side of the glass as opposed to me having to come back [into the control room all the time]. Scott Matthews is a very talented producer. He’s done a lot of stuff. I’ve known Scotty for a long time and I’ve done that on other projects by the way; Arne Frager [Editor’s note: Vaunted blues and jazz producer Arne Frager co-produced Roy’s Pleasure & Pain record.] It’s the same kind of thing. It’s just a better set of ears and another prospective that is helpful to have in the studio.

St. James: And what about when you do session work. You’ve done quite a bit before. And do you still do.

Rogers: Yeah, I just did a video game for Lucas Arts.

St. James: How cool.

Rogers: It’s called “Full Throttle Two.” I do some commercial work and that kind of stuff.

St. James: The Sammy Hagar stuff you did, I’m interested in that because I know Sammy pretty well. I heard those tracks and they’re really cool tracks. How did that come about?

Rogers: Well, I met Sammy I think at the Plant [Editor’s note: The Plant is a famous recording studio in Sausalito, California]. He was just dropping by. He was checking out something he was going to do some years back and I think we met through Arne Frager, the owner of the plant. And he was looking for a slide guitar…well he already had Slash I think for part of it when he did “Little White Lies.” When he first left Van Halen he wrote this song called “Little White Lies” about leaving the group. And I mean that was really a fun track.

He hired me to come in and….it was just kind of an experiment I think for Sammy. He didn’t know how I was gonna….I mean he’d heard of me, but I came in and did this acoustic stuff and then I did some blazing electric stuff and Slash was already on there doing some power cord stuff and it just worked fabulously. And then we went on Letterman together. And I played on, I think, three of his records, just one track and…you know Sammy: He’s one of my favorite fellows. I mean he’s really a great guy and we just formed a friendship and he would call me for these very specific songs. He’d say ‘Roy, I’ve gotta have you play on this track,’ or ‘I got this idea and what would you do on this kind of thing?’ I came down and one was I think a Wilson Pickett tune, “Don’t Fight It,” and I forget what the other one was. Anyway…I became friends with Sammy…we’re still good friends.

St. James: Wasn’t it that one about Cajun food and stuff? Wasn’t that one a slide tune?

Rogers: Yeah, what was that. I forget.

St. James: I don’t remember.

Rogers: Anyway, I sat in on shows with him and had a ball. Like I said, I did the Letterman thing. He’s just a great guy. I run into him all the time.

St. James: Yeah. I wrote his tour program a couple of years back. He called me up and asked me to do that. And I teched for him down at Cabo Wabo during his Birthday Bash shows.

Rogers: Did you? I played down there once and the other guest was John Entwistle.

St. James: Oh yeah, cool.

Rogers: That’s a wild place isn’t it. Holy mackerel.

St. James: It’s hard to get any sleep down there.

Rogers: Yeah, you gotta force yourself to sleep down there.

St. James: But it’s a good time. That show is a good time. Those birthday bashes and everything.

Rogers: Unbelievable birthday bash. Had a ball. That’s the other place we sat in. I had a ball. Actually I went down and I did an opening set for the band. He said just do an opening set so I used Mona and the drummer…Dave Lauser…and we did a trio thing before…and it was fun and Vic’s a great player…great band. But it’s Sammy’s attitude that really carries the day. He’s really open for stuff and he’s, you know, hell he’s a little older than I am, but he’s going strong. Age has nothing to do with it does it Adam?

St. James: No it sure doesn’t.

Rogers: Those Stones guys are still rockin.

St. James: Still out there, man. It’s pretty amazing.

Rogers: Little did we know.

St. James: Well, I hope I die before I get old. So tell me about the way you take the music to new places. As you said, you are not a traditionalist, you lean on the tradition, but you expand on it. Is that a conscious decision every time you sit down to write a song?

Rogers: Not really. It’s not something I think about, but it’s just something that’s part of it for me. Because sometimes I’ll do something that feels way traditional to me…it’s much more in that direction. Like a finger picking tune. For example, I’ll do “Stones in My Passway.” I was just reading an article today that John Mellencamp just made a blues record. He covered “Stones in My Passway” and I guess Joel Sullivan and the San Francisco Chronicle was reviewing the thing and they said it’s pretty good.

So I’ll do more traditional blues oriented things every once in a while. But I think just on the whole, it’s about taking the music outside a box ’cause that’s real safe, and music is not about being safe. I think that speaks true for an artist trying to do something. You don’t do it just…you just don’t do it to do it, it’s gotta mean something obviously. So I mean, you don’t just do it and say I’ve got to do something different. Nevertheless, related to that thought, you’re always looking for new ways to apply what you can do in a different musical context. Whether that be writing a new song or, like I’ve done some songs with some Latin feels.

I did a song called “Blues for Brazil” after I went on a tour to Brazil one time. I came home and did this whole rhythmic thing and it was great fun. I had Norton play some harmonica, but it’s called “Blues for Brazil” and it’s way different. It’s gotta mean something….it’s gotta mean something. And that’s an individual choice and some people are gonna be, I suppose, better at it than others. It’s OK to be traditional by the way. It’s not a value judgment about being traditional. Just for me, I don’t want to be in a tradition [prison]. It doesn’t appeal to me to do that. It’s much more appealing to take it outside the box, and a good way to do that is obviously co-writing or having special guest musicians, like I did on Slideways. That helps.

St. James: Do you ever find that….especially with fans, there’s a lot of people that kind of lean in one direction or the other. They either want to hear something a little more modern and/or they get upset when you start stretchin’ those traditional boundaries?

Rogers: Don’t worry about those people. Nope.

St. James: Yeah. Are they a minority?

Rogers: Doesn’t matter to me. I think a lot of people, I don’t know about most people, but a lot of people want to know what they’re getting as opposed to not know what they’re getting. But musically speaking, I don’t sell like millions of records. That has probably more to do with a marketing thing for people and selling lots of records and appeal and demographics and that stuff.

St. James: How did people like John Lee Hooker feel about that kind of thing.

Rogers: He didn’t even worry about it.

St. James: He didn’t care?

Rogers: Nope. Just did what he did, played a song. we would spend a great deal of time searching for the right songs to do with the right artists or for John, something new or something out of the past that was real for him at that stage of the game. There was a great deal of time spent pre-sessions. We didn’t just go into session saying, ‘What are we going to do today?’ You know, we spent a lot of time on it. I’d make a recommendation for a song or maybe something would come to his mind or maybe if he’d write a new song. We did a lot of re-recording of old song in new ways. That was a lot of fun to do, you know? We didn’t worry about comparing it to the original. Who cares. If it looked good for John to do it and it was cool and we wanted to redo it, like “Crawlin’ King Snake” with Keith Richards, which Keith wanted to do anyway, and we wanted to do it. That was the one.

St. James: Right.

Rogers: You know, “I’m in the Mood,” that was one of his first hits. His first hit was “Boogie Chillin’.” Well everybody knew that. But “I’m in the Mood” was his second major hit. Well, that was the cross gender song to do with Bonnie Raitt….that they both could sing. Now the Santana song, that was different. Santana, here’s a great story: Carlos had written a song that was already an existing instrumental song and Carlos and keyboardist Chester Thompson had written that. Carlos came to me and said, ‘Well I’ve got this instrumental song, “Curandero,” which means the healer. See if John or you guys can come up with some lyrics.’ So we kept playing that song over and over, just kind of the rough version that Carlos gave us, and low and behold, we came up with the lyrics to “The Healer.”

So John and I co-wrote the lyrics and Carlos and Chester had already written the song, so that was really a stretch for John. There’s no Johnny Hooker stamp of guitar in a traditional sense there, but it works because it’s got the feeling, and it’s got…it’s really Carlos and his band as you can tell and just John singing. That was John doing his thing, but it worked. Those were the kind of things like I’m saying, like you know, you’ve just got to go for it. And in that context, probably a traditionalist, although a lot of people do like that song, but a real traditionalist probably would not like that song.

St. James: But you feel artists should ignore those people? Don’t worry about those people?

Rogers: Not ignore them, just ……I don’t ignore them. I’m not trying to belittle the fact… Music is such a thing that appeals to you from so many different levels, you know? As a musician, you just have to do what’s right for you and I’ve always done that and I’m from that yolk. And it’s carried me this far, it’ll carry me out, I’m sure regardless of success. Some people are interested in appealing to a certain this or that; a mass or… It’s never is how I approached my music, never.

St. James: Right. Personally I play bluesy rock. I grew up with the Beatles and the Stones, Zeppelin and Aerosmith and all that kind of stuff. About ten years ago, for various reasons, I started moving more towards the bluesy stuff and I like traditional stuff, but I like to play it with a more….with a rock edge, you know? And now I’ve got it to the point where it’s like, you know, I really miss writing and I want to get back to it and do this thing, but I’m a little…..I wonder, like okay, I wanna’ do the stuff that’s blues, but it’s going to be pretty rock blues oriented. It’s not going to be hard rock, it’s going to be bluesy stuff, and I wonder about that, you know, is there going to be too much guitar solo-ing going on?

Rogers: Yeah, exactly.

St. James: ….is there going to be too…is the tempo going to be too much for this song or that song? You know, how are people going to deal with this, you know, but it’s what I want to do.

Rogers: That’s what you should do.

St. James: So I’ve just got to follow my heart.

Rogers: You really should because…you know what I tell people? Because I’ve had this conversation many times: You can’t lose going that way. You see? Even if nobody likes the music, you haven’t lost. You pursued your music and you did it regardless. You won. You can’t lose.

The other way you’re not winning because even if you got more successful, you didn’t really win because you didn’t do it like you wanted to. It’ll be like a little nick in your side. If you didn’t quite do it like you wanted to, that far outweighs any success that you might have. You look at the scheme of things and careers and whatever, money, that far outweighs anything else in the scheme of things. You read biographies, you read stories of people in the music business or anything. If you follow your music, you can’t go wrong because you win whatever happens. And I think if you look at it that way, it gives you the perspective of the long term. Wherever you go or whatever decisions you make. Now you might say, well I just think this is going to be more commercial and I’m well aware of what I’m doing and this is what I’m going to do and then I’m going to do that. Well, that’s totally cool. I’m just saying for the long term, if you follow the muse, then you’re doing yourself a favor. And I think that’s more of a win. So that’s kind of how I analyze that.

St. James: Right, right. Do you have any studio tips for recording? Especially with your originals and the songs that are coming from your heart?

Rogers: The best studio tip is go in prepared. That is the best, you know. Not rehearsed to death, but whether or not you’re laying tracks or doing it live, whatever, you have to be prepared and have a vision for how you want to do it. A lot of people don’t.

St. James: A production vision for the song?

Rogers: Yes. Yes, and that’s the best advice you can have. There’s so many
different tools. I mean, I don’t have any secret method or anything. Most of my records have been recorded on analog. But I’m a fan of Pro Tools like everybody else these days. I still probably prefer basics in analog, simply because they sound better to me. I’m not against digital recording whatsoever, I mean digital recording is just here to stay. It sounds so good these days. It didn’t use to sound so good to me, but that’s history now.

So you know, I’ll go either way. Certainly the editing, if you want to do that for digital, it’s like the way to go. But if I had my druthers, I would record basics on analog still and move it over to Pro Tools. That’s the main thing. I would still use analog. I love analog. In fact there was an article, I’ll mention it again for this Mellencamp record. I know a little bit of his music, but I can’t say I know much about him. I know he was a big rock guy, but…. He pulled out a 16-track analog machine and recorded his record in analog and he was describing in this article about how he loved it and about how good this sounded.

St. James: That’s cool.

Rogers: Yeah, it is cool. I think it doesn’t have to be an either or situation. For so many years, not to get technical on you here, but if you thought it was going to be either/or, it’s not either/or. I mean, it hasn’t been either/or for a long time. When they make machines, as you well know, they try to put the analog back in your digital. I had to laugh. They’ve been out for a number of years now, but the human ear, I mean, we grew up with distortion for God’s sake. We like distortion, don’t we?

St. James: Yeah, a little bit.

Rogers: The good kind though.

St. James: When you’re recording your acoustic guitars, how do you mike them up?

Rogers: Oh, I like the [Neumann] KM 184s, double miked in stereo. Great mikes.

St. James: Where do you place the mikes?

Rogers: Usually one at the base of the neck and one almost to the….just below the bridge. Just so you get one getting the liveness of the frets and one getting the real body of the guitar.

St. James: Right. How close to the guitar do you put them?

Rogers: Oh maybe 6-8 inches. Not too close.

St. James: And when you’re doing an electric guitar, are you playing straight through an amp? Or what do you do.

Rogers: Straight through an amp, I like little amps. I have an array of many little amps, from old Epiphones to Gibsons to DeFalcos, Epiphones….my rig from my live stuff is a live Boogie, about 25 years old. I like the old ones. They have more of a tonal aspect. But yes, I’m going through an amp, usually a small amp. I record with a lot of little amps. You get more controlled sound and just more of a warmth. You don’t have to play super loud in the studio to get it to be really crankin’. That’s not necessary. Though I do it sometimes! Also I use a Leslie.

St. James: An actual full size Leslie cabinet?

Rogers: Not full size, it’s about ¾ size. It’s an extension cabinet. I just have the low end. It doesn’t have the high end horn. But I’ve used that before. I find that I just need the bottom end.

St. James: There’s a small manufacturer down in Southern California that makes something called the Little Lanilei (http://www.songworks.com/rotary.htm). It’s a little tiny Leslie cabinet, basically, with a rotating speaker in it. Have you ever seen it?

Rogers: Well I have something on another company. I don’t know if it’s the same company, but there’s …..what are they called? Maybe it’s the same one you’re talking about.

St. James: This is just like a little box, it’s probably about a foot tall by about 8 inches square and it’s got a pretty cool little sound to it.

Rogers: Really?

St. James: And it’s a hell of a lot easier to carry around than a big old Leslie.

Rogers: Well, these other ones are a little bit bigger, so I think it’s a little bit different. I want to say it’s a transponder, but I don’t see it. I’d be interested in those kinds of things. They’re getting better and better at that stuff…..puttin’ them in little boxes. I very seldom use the fast Leslie, I just use the slow because I like the low end just going (makes woo sound), a nice 60 cycle or whatever it is, a little hum to it. Nice sound.

St. James: So what else are you using? Is your main guitar still the New Yorker?

Rogers: A New Yorker with a DeArmond pick up, but I usually have four guitars with me, when I’m playing with a band; a ’57 Strat reissue, and a ’57 ES125 Gibson ¾ neck.

St. James: It’s an actual ’57? Not a reissue?

Rogers: Nope. And it’s got one P90; it’s a honker. And then I have a very unique 12-string Dobro electric. And that’s a neat sound.

St. James: Uh huh. And you take all four of those with you?

Rogers: Uh huh.

St. James: And what do you usually take on the road, amp wise? The Mesa Boogie?

Rogers: Mesa Boogie with extension cabinet and the Leslie.

St. James: Do you use any effects of any kind?

Rogers: I use a chorus pedal. Just a basic chorus pedal, that’s the only effect I use. No others. I like to crank the amps, I don’t like any kind of distortion pedal. Haven’t found any to my liking. I like to have the tubes glowin, that’s the best kind. And then the guitar and the amp should be one. Just to my ears, the distortion pedals, you just don’t have the air moving. What can I say.

St. James: The chorus pedal is what brand?

Rogers: Actually, it’s an old Arion that gives it a little bit of gain boost and I
keep buying them and now I can’t get them anymore. I have to keep getting them repaired. It’s a cheap one…a little cheap one. It was made by Arion and I don’t think they’re making them anymore. The reason I like that one….Actually I’m looking for one. I’m looking for a good chorus pedal. The reason I like the Arion is because it gave it a little gain boost and most do not. I like that little gain boost when I push it, so I’m looking for one.

St. James: Do you go on line much?

Rogers: Not much, but every once in a while.

St. James: Are you familiar with a site called GBase.com? It’s like a vintage gear website?

Rogers: Nah….but I’ve….GBase?

St. James: It’s gbase.com. It’s the other site that we run. It started out as a vintage guitar site about 7 years ago and it’s got about 24,000 items in the database.

Rogers: I bought many of these pedals off of Ebay, but you probably….

St. James: Basically we’ve got about 320 dealers from around the country and actually a few from around the world that lists their inventory with us so it’s up to them what they list, you know. And some of these guys may have one of these pedals but they just didn’t list it. But a….

Rogers: They use to sell them a lot. I guess it’s like the old school in me, but the simpler, the better. And the same thing with studio gear. I mean, the old Pultec and the 11-77…. I mean, the simpler the better. I don’t like gadgets that can do everything on the planet. I much prefer a piece of gear and this is the function it does, and it does it well.

St. James: Right, I hear you.

Rogers: It’s much more desirable than trying to cover all the bases, and then you’ve got to figure it out. And then you can get lost trying to get whatever you need. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

St. James: Anyway, you should check out Gbase.com once in a while and see if there are some of those things in there. These dealers post new things every day.

Rogers: Yeah, very cool, very cool. It’s got a direct and a stereo and it’s very nice. Three buttons, no fuss, no muss.

St. James: But they break down on you a little bit?

Rogers: Yeah, they’re not built to last. In the last 15 years I’ve probably bought 15 of them. So I have a lot of them and sometimes you can fix them and sometimes you can’t. It costs like $60. I have many to be repaired. Plus on the road, you know, they can get whacked and all. I don’t use a full blown pedal rack like a lot of folks. Maybe I should get one of those things that protects them, but I don’t. I only have one pedal and an AB box. That’s it. I change guitars and just hit it and have it go off while I change guitars and plug in something else.

St. James: Right.

Rogers: So it’s a pretty straight forward rig for me. I should say something about the set up for the strings for the Martin because it’s a rather unique string set up of which I have D’Addario to thank. I use silk and steel strings on my Martin which is rather unique to get it to sound the way it does because normally you wouldn’t think of silk and steel strings as slide strings. Of course, the silk strings don’t have any metal core, but, I still get plenty of sustain.

St. James: They’re purely silk?

Rogers: Well, the core is silk. And then it’s wrapped with metal and that’s what a silk and steel string is. The top two strings are metal; the E and B strings, but then the bottom four are just a silk core. They’re not a wire core.

St. James: What does it do for you.

Rogers: Just better playability. I like the tone. It gives a softer, mellower tone. And with the old DeArmond pickup it just kicks butt. I mean, I have more guitarists come up to me and say, ‘That guitar can’t sound like that. That’s a little acoustic guitar with a pick up,’ and, ‘What kind of strings do you use, silk and steel strings? That guitar can’t sound like that.’ (laughs) I kind of have a secret delight. I’ve used that for years.

St. James: That’s cool.

Rogers: That’s very cool and the strings are very good. It’s a very unique sound, but you know, whatever you think about D’Addario, they make good strings. I like D’Addario strings. Their electric strings are good, so I’m happy to be associated with them. They do good work. They don’t break. My strings don’t break at all. That’s very nice.

St. James: That’s great. How often do you change?

Rogers: You know, the Martins I change quite often because silk and steels, you know, the way I play them, I have to change often with those. Otherwise my electric guitar strings, oh I don’t know, once in a great while. It depends on how many gigs I have. Maybe once every 4 or 5 or 6 gigs, maybe. But the Martins I’ll change like every other gig because the silk and steel, since it doesn’t have a steel core, the bottom strings go a little bit dead on you simply by the nature of the string. And I’m hard pickin’, but I don’t mind.

St. James: This guitar….this Martin…did you wear out the finish like that?

Rogers: I did.

St. James: Have you had it all those years?

Rogers: I have.

St. James: Yeah? When did you get this guitar? Early in your career.

Rogers: Oh yeah, 25 years ago. They’re all my marks. I’m not known for being Mr. Finesse with guitars. Like I say, I weigh a little bit so the guitars do get…shall we say, trashed a little bit. But that’s just the way we do it.

St. James: Hey, it works!

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George Benson — Balancing Act

admin — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:22:50 +0000

by Adam St. James

[Editor's note: I spoke with 10x Grammy winner George Benson for this article while doing time at a newspaper in Miami.]

In their dreams young musicians bask comfortably and happily in the luxury of immense success. Those REM-induced illusions can be mapped out fairly easily: Critical acclaim and financial reward have settled on them like UV rays on a sunny day, rooms packed with beautiful new friends fall hushed in silent awe when they enter, and any momentary desire can be satisfied with the snap of a finger.

Of course, the thicker-skinned can forgo the critical acclaim part but, still, the fact that these slumbering rock stars will pull down big bucks for shouting into a microphone or beating up on a drum kit is akin to throwing a few Franklins at a jobless drunk for helping to clear out an overstocked liquor cabinet.

The entertainment world, though, isn’t quite that utopian. Eventually even the most talented musician must wake up and face his or her own rain-soaked reality: Cash flow does not increase proportionately with instrumental ability and the critics do not automatically smile on those with the fleetest fingers.

Jazz players learn this lesson as early as anyone. Some accept that sad fact and eke out a living performing musical obscurities for small but reverent groups of fans in tiny clubs until their maker mercifully relieves them of their charge. Others, such as jazz-pop superstar George Benson, jump headlong into the mainstream and then spend a lifetime struggling against the current that is their fame and fortune, hoping not to be carried too far from their artistic ideals.

The widely known, commercially motivated Benson has drifted far from his hard bop and soul jazz days of the early Sixties. But even as he and his producers have channeled his music down more sedate courses — R&B and pop influenced, for the most part — he has maintained at least some degree of his old adventurousness. His extended guitar and scatting vocal solos have routinely polished into pop gems what would otherwise be mostly banal easy-listening elevator music.

In fact, Benson can for better or worse be credited as the creative role model for what has become a hugely popular and profitable segment of the music industry — the jazz-lite phenomenon personified today by everybody’s favorite whipping boy, Kenny G. Before Benson and his late-Seventies hits “This Masquerade,” “Breezin’,” and “On Broadway” (and maybe a couple of admittedly harder-edged cuts by Jeff Beck from the albums Wired and Blow by Blow), high-wattage radio stations rarely played songs with lengthy, jazz-tinged instrumental breaks.

Benson had the good sense to keep his chops up, however, perhaps anticipating the day when Top 40 radio would deem him old hat and the flow of multimillion-selling albums would dry up. By the mid-Eighties, his E-ticket ride was largely over, though he has scored a couple of number ones on the Billboard jazz charts in the past ten years: The 1989 album Tenderly (a collaboration with pianist McCoy Tyner), and 1993’s Love Remembers both reached the top jazz album spot. His efforts to re-establish true jazz credibility after spending time as a darling of the pop world have apparently been successful, but then Benson’s musical pedigree was always largely beyond reproach.

While most of its forty-four plus minutes conform to the airy, easily digestible formula Benson has followed for the past three decades, his new CD, Standing Together, does little to harm his well-earned reputation. The album, his second for jazz label GRP (after the 1996 release That’s Right), hit number one on Billboard’s Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart in early August; the title track is one of the most-added cuts at smooth jazz stations nationwide.

The disc covers all the bases in Benson’s game plan — sultry ballads, steamy love songs, an undeniable groove, and jazzy sparks of his guitar and vocal virtuosity. Five of the nine songs are instrumentals, overflowing with the creamy, rounded six-string tone that has been his hallmark from the beginning — or at least close to the beginning.

Little Georgie Benson, as he was once called, got an early start on a musical career. He picked up a ukulele at age six and was playing guitar by the time he was eight-years-old. He first sang on radio in his hometown of Pittsburgh at age four and had recorded vocal tracks for RCA before his twelfth birthday. He played R&B and rock in his teens, before jazz — in the form of Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, and Charlie Parker — turned him in a new direction.

Benson was a natural and by age nineteen was playing soul jazz in a very popular combo lead by organist Brother Jack McDuff. Benson made a name for himself in the jazz community with Brother Jack McDuff Live!, recorded in 1963, and The New Boss Guitar, recorded with McDuff in 1964, both for the Prestige label. He went solo in 1965, mostly because McDuff wouldn’t allow him to sing. Benson, who envisioned himself as somewhat of a Nat King Cole — another instrumental master given to immaculate vocal melodies — gave up the McDuff gig in order to pursue a more lucrative vein of music.

“He hated singers,” Benson says of McDuff during a phone interview from his New Jersey home. “He said, ‘I don’t want no singin’ in my band.’ But those were some strugglin’ and some hard days. You’re playing every night, you’re not really getting anywhere, you’re just barely staying alive. You’re eating, but that’s it. If you miss a week, you’re down, which you can never make up. So who wants to live like that? You can’t live like that when you’ve got a family. That’s out of the question. You do those things when you have no responsibility and you want to get all you can get. You go out and you see the world, and you struggle.”

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Benson saw the world through consistent touring with McDuff between 1962 and 1965, but when family obligations came his way in the mid-Sixties he attempted to reposition himself as an artist earning more than just praise for his blazing instrumental prowess. He recorded his first post-McDuff releases for Columbia under the tutelage of omnipotent talent scout John Hammond, with Fort Lauderdale’s O’Hara’s Pub regular Dr. Lonnie Smith on keyboards.

Later Benson hooked up with producer Creed Taylor, who had helped guitarist Wes Montgomery become a legend before his death in 1968, for several albums on A&M and CTI in the late Sixties and early Seventies. But though Taylor advanced Benson’s career, he missed the point of the ambitious musician’s most recognizable technique — his vocal scat and guitar duo instrumental flights.

“I couldn’t convince the producer to let me do it,” he recalls with a laugh. “When I first asked him to allow me to do that, everybody in the studio said, ‘Boo! Don’t try it. It’s not a good idea.’ So we never got a chance to try it with that record company. As soon as I got a new record company, I said, ‘Hey, put a microphone in front of me, I want to try something.’ The new producer, Tommy LiPuma, said, ‘Okay, George. Hey, this sounds good, let’s put one down.’ And we did. One song — ‘This Masquerade.’ One take. And that became one of the biggest records of that year.”

The Leon Russell-penned “This Masquerade,” and the title track of the 1976 album it was pulled from, Breezin’, earned Grammies for Record of the Year and Best Pop Instrumental Performance, respectively. With “This Masquerade” Benson was the first artist ever to score a number one hit simultaneously on the pop, jazz and R&B charts.

The album sold millions. Benson followed Breezin’ with the multi-platinum 1977 release In Flight and Weekend in L.A., the 1978 live album that spawned the hit “On Broadway.” After these lofty achievements there would be no returning to the financially unstable jazz world. Benson’s place in history — not to mention on the shelves of the chain record stores — was assured.

Still, he regularly seeks opportunities to pick up a musical recharge. Though most of the members of his touring band have been with him for years, Standing Together was recorded with the help of mostly younger musicians, including his son Robert who supplied drum programming to the subtle instrumental “C-Smooth.” Benson also recently recorded with Mary J. Blige on her hit “Seven Days,” found time to jam with the Artist, and on a 1997 trip to Cuba, traded licks with a whole new breed of inspiring players.

“That was awesome. We had a great tour and I sat in every night. We went clubbin’ every night and we played with some of the baddest musicians on the island — if not the baddest. And I also did a seminar at the musical university, and that was one of the highlights of the tour.”

Only somewhat aware of the obstacles Cuban musicians face when attempting to perform in the United States, Benson, a devout Jehovah’s Witness and practicing minister, steers clear of political statement. “I stay away from the politics of anything. I’m not into politics at all. I’m a Bible student myself, and I conduct Bible studies. And the Bible has told us to stay out of politics, and we do. We stay out of world issues, and that’s what I do. And I find that it creates a better relationship on a one-to-one basis with humans all over the Earth, so it’s a good move. I relate to them as musicians only. And they are great musicians.”

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Tommy Emmanuel: Certified Guitar Player

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:33:22 +0000

by Adam St. James

Finger pickers can’t take over the world until everyone on the planet knows Tommy Emmanuel. Tommy’s workin’ on that. Steve Vai is too. Vai signed the Australian acoustic master to his recently formed Favored Nations Acoustic label, the result of which is the brilliant disc, Only.

And Vai isn’t the only one to recognize how phenomenal a player is Tommy Emmanuel. He has toured or worked with everyone from Eric Clapton to Stevie Wonder, from John Denver to Bill Wyman, from Leo Kottke to Joe Walsh. Late guitar legend Chet Atkins, who recorded his final album, The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World, with Emmanuel in 1997, called Tommy “the greatest finger picker in the world today.” We aren’t going to argue with Chet, who bestowed the prestigious title “Certified Guitar Player” on Tommy shortly thereafter.

In this in-depth interview, Tommy told me about his relationship with the late, great Mr. Guitar, shares tips on warming up before an important gig, and reveals how the former member of a rock band called The Midget Safaris has built a solid acoustic solo career for himself. Keep on pickin and grinnin’.

St. James: Hello Tommy. You’re in Denver today?

Emmanuel: Hello. Yeah, I’m playing here in Denver tonight, then Colorado Springs tomorrow, then Albuquerque, then I’ll be in Ireland after that.

St. James: How has your U.S. tour been going?

Emmanuel: It’s been great. It’s been getting better all the time. It’s a slow build, you know? I’ve been coming here for years. I think things are really starting to move along now, so I’m really pleased with that. It’s been an interesting way to do this. I’ve pretty much done it the same way in every country that I’ve toured in: I just start out in smaller places and build my way up, build a crowd.

St. James: I notice you’re playing tonight at a music school. I imagine that performance is in part aimed at the students of that school and meant to be an inspiration to them. Do you do a lot of that?

Emmanuel: I do workshops all over the world, and I do play at music schools. Tonight’s show is at a music school, but it’s also a good concert venue. I’m out there to play for the public, and along the way I try to show students and the younger generation that there’s a lot of great things about playing the guitar, and a lot of great things about being in music in general. It’s a very positive thing.

And of course when I do workshops I tell people about the realities of the business and the realities of the kind of dedication and the kind of sacrifice it takes from yourself and your family. And I do my best to give people the absolute real deal on how it goes.

St. James: How long have you been recording and releasing albums?

Emmanuel: Well, my first recording was made in 1960, with my family. I was a very young little boy at that time. We made an acetate recording at a radio station in Australia. We’ve played it on the radio a few times. Unfortunately I dropped it and broke it when I was about 25 [laughs], so it’s gone forever.

My first album that I made under my own name was called From Out of Nowhere. It was Australia’s first direct-to-disc album, made in 1978. And then in 1986 I recorded the album Up From Down Under. That wasn’t released for awhile because I was trying to get a record company to release it and of course they all turned me down and said there was, No market for what you do. So I went out and created one.

I got myself on tour with John Denver in 1988, and then EMI came through with a release, and the album debuted in the Top 10 (Australia). That caught everyone by surprise. And although I’d been in bands and playing on people’s records for years the public perceived me as a new artist. It was a good thing. The next two albums following that were both No. 1 albums in Australia. The third album, Determination, was in the ARIA chart (The Australian pop charts) for 111 weeks. And I won a lot of awards. That particular year I won Songwriter of the Year, Adult Contemporary Album of the Year, and Best Male Artist, at what we call the ARIA Awards like your Grammy Awards over here. It would be awfully nice to have a Grammy though. It’s a goal of mine.

St. James: You were nominated for a Grammy for the album you did with Chet Atkins, The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World, weren’t you?

Emmanuel: Yeah, I was. I went to the Grammies, actually, with Alison Krauss and her band. And she won, and that was wonderful. The track that they won with was just so damn hot!

St. James: You’ve played in bands as well as doing the solo thing?

Emmanuel: I’ve done that all my life. I only started playing absolutely solo back in the late-80s.

St. James: What spurred you to go solo?

Emmanuel: I was playing in bands and I’d do a little spot on my own. The crowd seemed to go nuts, and it just seemed like something that was a natural evolution. And now I enjoy it a lot. It’s challenging writing music that stands up on its own, and to play the guitar just totally self-contained. Have you heard my new album?

St. James: Yes, it arrived this morning.

Emmanuel: Well thank you so much for taking the time to call after you’d heard something. I really appreciate that.

St. James: I do also have The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the Worldalbum, I listen to that once in awhile too. You were quite close to Chet weren’t you?

Emmanuel: Yeah. We were really like father and son. Making that album with him was a pure labor of love. He was wonderful. His health wasn’t very good and I had to really get everything prepared so he could do his parts. The songs that we needed to play together, that we actually had to do as a duo, we got those done pretty quickly. And everything else he had a little time to work on. And I kind of did all the backing parts and mapped out his parts for him, then he just went ahead and did his solos and harmony parts.

St. James: Did you perform live with him?

Emmanuel: Yes, we did the Grand Ole Opry a couple of times, and we did a show called “Prime Time Country” on TNN. And we did a lot of interviews and things together. Columbia was actually very pleased with the album because it was more like his roots, which is more what I wanted to do for him. I felt that that’s what he should have been doing at his time in life, just playing fingerstyle guitar, which is what he did best. And that’s why I pushed for the album to go in the direction that it did, and wrote some of the songs.

And we had a whole schedule ready the record company and myself had put together a promotional schedule with a promotional company for Chet and I to, to bring him back to the public eye. But unfortunately his health just wouldn?t allow it. And after he had the brain tumor operation, from then on he had to stay home. He was all right. It wasn’t actually that that did him in. I think he just ran out of steam. But he was such a wonderful person.

St. James: Was he a big influence on you throughout your life?

Emmanuel: Yeah, right til the end. It was more than just his guitar playing and his touch and things like that. It was his sense of melody and groove and arrangement ideas ? just having an ear for good songs. And of course the way that he treated me from the moment I met him was a very quality and human experience, to be treated with such respect and love, being a total stranger. The thing about Chet was, no matter where you went whether it was in the presence of the President, or a waiter he treated everyone just as well.

St. James: I suppose you’re involved somehow with the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society?

Emmanuel: I’ve been attending each time since I got the invite, which was 1996. I’ve gone every year since. [Editor's Note: The Chet Atkins Appreciation Society is an organization dedicated to the memory and music of guitar great Chet Atkins. The CAAS sponsors an annual event in Nashville that features hundreds of guitarists, famous and still undiscovered, who gather to play and learn together. ]

I tell people all around the world about it. And I’ve been teaching players in far reaching places like Borneo and Malaysia when I’m there, and they end up coming to Nashville and playing. So it really is fingerpickers taking over the world. There’s a couple of young guys in the northern part of Borneo who have been so inspired by fingerstyle playing, mainly by Chet and myself, and these guys are taking traditional Asian music and making it into fingerstyle arrangements. It’s wonderful. It’s just another side of it, and expanding it out into the world, and giving people something good to focus on.

St. James: I’ve spoken with Muriel Anderson about the gathering a couple of times.

Emmanuel: She’s been a big part of it too. And she’s a wonderful friend. I’ve played her All Star Guitar Nights a few times. It’s good fun. [laughs]. In fact, the last one I did, I was on the show with John Sebastian. And when you’re on the stage with him and you do “What a Day for a Daydream” with the guy who wrote it, it’s pretty extraordinary. And then I played “Dueling Banjoes” with Eric Weisberg, who wrote that and did the original version. That’s a pretty rare thing. At the Chet Atkins convention, in one night, I played with Chet, Duane Eddy, and Arthur Smith. How good does it get?

St. James: Let’s talk about you. Tell me about the hours you put into playing guitar, and the dedication required to reach your level.

Emmanuel: When I was a kid see I’m one of six children, and most of us played music. So when we heard a song on the radio, my brother Phil who was older than me had an incredible ear. He would work out the melody and the chords and then he would show me how it goes. Then I would work out a rhythm part and we’d play that.

When I got older and heard Chet, I spent most of my waking hours after school and homework playing guitar. I’d be in the room there with the record player listening to things and trying to work them out. Then I’d eat dinner and go back and do it again. So when I was younger I was totally dedicated to it and totally obsessed with it.

A little bit later when I was a teenager and I had been on the road for some time with a traveling show, and I had discovered Django and Les Paul and George Benson and Joe Pass and people like that, and I started to listen to different music I then heard Jerry Reed I think I went through a period there where working out and learning songs in as many keys as I could took up all my time.

I can remember when I moved to Sydney and I used to sit and play the guitar all day until I couldn’t stand it any more and I had to eat something. I’d get pizza or something, then play until 11 o’clock at night. Then I’d go out and play with a band or something, get home at 4 o’clock in the morning, sleep an hour or two, then get up and do it all again. I did that for years. I didn’t need a lot of sleep; I needed to learn to play.

And the thing that intrigued me was that the first couple of weeks of doing that I discovered that I could really do it if I just kept at it. And it excited me so much that I just didn?t want to do anything else but that. I was living in a tiny little place and my rent was like $9 a week. It was just a little room. But that’s all I needed was a place to lay down and sit and play. When I wasn’t there I’d be haunting the music shops, playing guitar in the music shops, playing for people, teaching whatever. That’s what I did in those days.

Nowadays, because I play so much on the road, when I’m home I tend to just play the guitar a little bit each day, unless I’m writing something. When I’m writing something I play all day, all the time. That’s really what it takes to work on things. I always give people the same advice if they want to get better at what they’re doing, apart from not quitting: Have a little cassette player and record yourself, then listen back and hear how it’s going and what areas you need to work on.

When you’re just going at it all the time you can become deaf to your own playing. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to let that creep in. So record yourself, listen back, and get another perspective on it. It also keeps you fresh with the songs that you’re playing. You might want to change things, or work on certain areas.

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Best of the Beatles for Acoustic Guitar Instructional DVD

St. James: Do you have a routine of exercises or warm-ups?

Emmanuel: When I pick up the guitar I tend to play tunes at a medium tempo, then maybe practice some harder things. But the guitar is always with me, so I don’t tend to need a warm-up type of thing only if I really feel like it. If I’m feeling a little stiff in the hands, I’ll pick some tunes, and play some scales or chromatic exercises, backwards and forwards. But mostly, the thing that gets me going the best, is playing a couple of tunes that you would play on stage, then sing a song or a couple of songs, and get that creative side woken up. Get that adrenaline in your blood, long before you go on stage. I kind of get into stage mode before I go out there.

St. James: Do you sing in concert?

Emmanuel: Yes I do. I do a little bit. I’m not very good at it, but I do love it very much. Let me just say this too, from a purely technical point of view: A good thing to do for your motor skills and for your expression and your ideas, is to sit down and play a 12-bar blues. I’ll pick a tempo that I like, usually a shuffle, and start to improvise, and then at the end of each 12-bar cycle, move up a fret and play in a different key.

If I start in E I then play F, F#, G, etc. And I keep improvising and I don’t stop. If I mess up, I don’t stop. I just keep going and go for ideas. After you’ve done that for a little while, you’ll find you’ve started to sweat and you’re a little breathless, and you’ve tapped into what happens on stage. And that also makes you create something. That’s a good thing, I think.

St. James: Do you record your playing just to capture ideas, as well?

Emmanuel: Totally. That’s a good idea because sometimes things only happen once, and then they’re gone.

St. James: I know that all too well. I always remember the notes I played, it’s the feel of the rhythm I can’t get back. It’s the rhythm that goes away. That’s a really fleeting thing.

Emmanuel: That’s for sure.

St. James: You use an Australian Maton guitar. Tell us about them.

Emmanuel: They’re made in Melbourne. I got my first Maton in 1959. They’ve been around a long time. The one that is on the cover of Only is my main touring guitar. They’re beautifully made guitars. Mine is a 00 size with a real slim neck. They’re so comfortable to play.

St. James: What kind of strings do you use?

Emmanuel: I vary them. I don’t use the same strings all the time. I discovered that when you use the same strings over and over, the top end of your guitar slowly drops off. I think the guitar gets used to those strings. To keep it real bright I change strings right before every gig and I vary the brands. Sometimes I’ll use D’Addario, GHS.

Last night I tried John Pearse strings. I’m trying out the Everly Brothers? strings at the moment as well, so I put those on occasionally. Elixir gave me some strings last week but they sucked a rotten egg. I put them on and tuned up, then took them off immediately. Why put on a set of strings that sounds like you’ve already played them in too much? It’s such an individual thing.

There was a guy in the bluegrass band that opened for me last night that had a beautiful sounding dreadnought, and he had Elixirs on them that sounded like a million bucks. So people always ask me, ‘What’s the best string?’ and I always say, ‘The one that your guitar likes. If your guitar sounds great, feels good, and really tunes up well, that’s a good string.’

For instance, my small-bodied Maton guitar, I can’t put Martin strings on it. I can’t get it to be perfectly in tune, and the third string always feels the wrong gauge. But I put Martin strings on my other guitars and I love them. So the rule is: The best strings for a guitar are the ones that the guitar likes.

And people always ask, What’s the best guitar? and I always say, The one that you really love to play. Who cares what name is on it and how much it cost? If it works for you then that’s the one.

St. James: That’s right. What gauge strings do you use?

Emmanuel: On the little guitar I use .012 to .054, and on my dreadnought I use .013 to .058.

St. James: Do you use picks at all?

Emmanuel: Do you mean fingerpicks?

St. James: Either fingerpicks or flatpicks?

Emmanuel: I use a thumb pick and a plectrum. And I can swap them around. Because of being a rhythm player for my brother Phil who is mainly a lead player, and then taking solos, I had to work out a way to flatpick with a thumbpick, and also fingerpick with a plectrum. I can swap over and do either. Most of the songs I play I can play with either one.

St. James: What do you do in concert?

Emmanuel: I play some songs with a plectrum, some songs with a thumbpick. And some songs I play without picks at all. It just depends on what’s right for the song.

St. James: But even when you?re playing with a plectrum you’re doing hybrid picking using the other fingers on your hand, right?

Emmanuel: Yeah.

St. James: You’re not just strumming?

Emmanuel: Oh no, no, no.

St. James: So what inspired you to do this new disc, Only, with no other musicians?

Emmanuel: Well I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve always wanted to make an album of totally original music, solo acoustic. Because I had been touring for a long time and playing a lot of concerts just on my own, but the only CDs that were available were the ones that I’d done with bands and with orchestra and stuff like that. So people kept saying, We just want to hear you on your own.

So it gave me the idea in the first place about five years ago, and I since started writing for that. Most of the songs for the Onlyalbum came on the road and through real-life experiences.

St. James: Actually I guess the question should have been, Why didn’t you do it sooner?

Emmanuel: Yeah! [laughs] I was busy trying to do other things. Everything evolves in life in it’s own way, and you’ve got to go with it when it’s time. My next album will be solo acoustic as well. I’ve got all the songs written and I just can’t wait to get in and record them.

St. James: Had you previously toured with other musicians backing you?

Emmanuel: I had a band in Australia. I had a six-piece band, and I played electric as well as acoustic and nylon-stringed. I did a bit of everything.

St. James: This was recently?

Emmanuel: From 1989 through 96. And then I kind of just went totally solo after that.

St. James: Well, I’ve known about you since around 96, and I always thought of you as a solo acoustic player. For you to say you were fronting a band playing electric, that’s news to me.

Emmanuel: Right. That’s what I did. It evolved from the band into the solo thing.

St. James: What kind of stuff were you playing with the band?

Emmanuel: Original material. Stuff I wrote.

St. James: But not along these lines?

Emmanuel: Some of them. I did a lot of rockabilly type stuff as well kind of country-rock. As a songwriter it’s melody and a good feel that I’m after. I think as I wrote for the electric I really tried to make sure that the melody was strong and it was honed and it was always standing up there. And I always gave myself plenty of room for improvisation on stage.

St. James: When you are playing these solo pieces in concert, do you play them different from night to night?

Emmanuel: Yes. A tune like Those Who Wait, the first track on Only, that one kind of speaks for itself. I don’t feel that I need to do anything to that. I feel that everything is where it ought to be, so I play that as best I can, and I leave it as I originally wrote it. But some of the other tracks, I’ll do little variations. I’ll vary the verses or whatever. And some nights I’ll play them a little faster than the records, or some other nights I’ll play them however I feel like. That’s one of the joys of playing on your own. You do what you damn well like! [laughs]

St. James: Do you ever find yourself recording something that, when you go out to play on the road, it presents a challenge to you? That you really out-did yourself and you really have to work on that one to be able to pull it off live?

Emmanuel: Oh sure. That happened years ago with some of the things I had written, and I really had to knuckle down and practice them. I nailed them in the studio cause I’d done them over and over again. I nailed it and was feeling good; had headphones on and so I didn’t have to push. The difference is, when you’re playing live and there’s intensity and adrenaline, you’ve got to try to slow your muscles down so they can perform properly.

It’s like a motor skill thing. If it’s too intense, you can’t pull off something you know you can do in the dressing room quite easily. You go out there and you’ve really got to concentrate. It’s a different matter. I walk out there and I’m totally captivated by the audience and so conscious to make a real good connection with the people, and talk to them and play for them, and try to do my best. But sometimes you forget about the motor skills and you find yourself in deep water. That takes concentration and real effort to try to make everything nice and clean.

St. James: What have been some of your favorite musical experiences the past few years?

Emmanuel: Some of the things that I’ve enjoyed over the past 10 years have been flying to places like Africa and Thailand and Vietnam and teaching and playing at schools. That’s been the greatest joy for me. To go to a place like Hong Kong and play in a very cultural theater, and have the room half-full of Americans who love Chet Atkins music, that again is yet another thing that I really love. Playing over here in America to a lot of Australians wherever I go, it?s really good.

St. James: Do you find that Chet Atkins is a kind of international icebreaker?

Emmanuel: Sometimes. There are a still a lot of people around the world for who I’ll play some of my fingerpicking tunes that are deliberately written in that style, and they’ll say, Wow, where does this come from? And that gives me a chance to tell them about the long line of players that goes back to Kennedy Jones and Merle Travis, and Ike Everly and Mose Rager, and Chet Atkins, and Jerry Reed and that lineage of players and people who influenced the world of guitar.

St. James: When you were young and first starting to play guitar, did you ever imagine that at this point in your life you’d be playing this style of music?

Emmanuel: I wasn’t quite sure when I was a kid, because we were so enthralled with the Beatles and the Shadows and Duane Eddy and people like that. They were big on radio and TV. But when I heard Chet play for the first time, I’ll never forget that. And when I wrote to him I was only a kid. My father had died when I was 10, and so I really lived in my own world, even though I was part of a family ? a pretty big family. But I still sort of lived in my own world. And when Chet wrote back to me, it really gave me hope.

St. James: He wrote back to you that first time you wrote to him?

Emmanuel: Yeah, when I was 11.

St. James: Wow, that’s so cool! So where do you live now? In the United Kingdom?

Emmanuel: Yeah. I live in an area called Suffolk, north of London. North-east of London, right close to the coast.

St. James: Did you move there within the past few years?

Emmanuel: Yes, four years ago.

St. James: How did that happen?

Emmanuel: Well, we wanted to be closer to my in-laws, who are in Denmark. And I wanted to get going in England and Ireland and Scotland. I’d been going over there for some time, and just those long trips back to Australia were just too much. And I’d really done about as much as a person could do in Australia, to be blatantly honest. I could have just kept going around and had a comfortable life, but I think my creativity would have went down the tubes. And I’m the kind of person who needs new challenges and new places all the time. I’m just so used to it. I’m thinking of calling my new album The Endless Road, ’cause that?s the way it seems.

St. James: How much of the year are you on the road?

Emmanuel: I do, on an average, around 300 shows a year.

St. James: Wow, that’s a lot.

Emmanuel: It’s a lot.

St. James: Why didn’t you move to Denmark, if that’s where your in-laws are?

Emmanuel: I wanted to move here, to America. This is where I want to be. But when you have a wife and family who want other things, then you give them what they want. That’s the way it goes doesn’t it?

St. James: Yes, it sure does.

Emmanuel: Life is full of compromises and sacrifices, and that’s just the way it is. Like John Lennon said, Life is what happens to us while we?re making other plans.?

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Royal Crown Revue — Swing Thing

admin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:06:15 +0000

by Adam St. James

[Editor's note: I wrote this article as music editor of a newspaper in Miami at the height of the swing comeback, of which I played a part as a founding member of the Los Angeles-based Swingin' Deacons.]

It’s always tough being ahead of your time, even if you get there by reaching into the past and pulling your shtick from the archives. The swing movement jitterbugging across the country (and only recently embraced by the media) may be seen by many as a retro fad, but to the members of Royal Crown Revue, undisputed pioneers of the revival, the retro tag is an undeserved slam, and the music is no fad.

Though still largely unknown to the multitudes, this Los Angeles-based group has been together for nine years and has just released its fourth album, The Contender. Furthermore, Royal Crown’s seven members, often referred to as the Johnny Appleseeds of this again-hip genre, began playing their horn-heavy tunes when Axl Rose (remember him?) was still king of radio. They didn’t take that route imagining it would give them a shot at a record deal. In fact they would have been laughed out of nearly every major-label office on the planet. They did it because, nearly ten years before the rest of America caught wind of this thing called swing, they were already deeply in love with the music.

Sure the band learned its chops from the legendary likes of Louis Prima, Cab Calloway, and Louis Jordan (whom many credit as the true progenitors of rock and roll), but as far as guitarist James Achor is concerned, Royal Crown Revue is its own animal. “We’re not a nostalgia act,” he emphasizes. “We’re just trying to be who we are. We didn’t live in the Forties, so we can’t try to re-create them. We don’t know what it was like. We can only make our screwed-up hybrid of it, based on the fact that we’ve lived through 50 years of other music since Louis Jordan. We don’t deny that. We’re not looking to be some link to the past. We don’t swing like Duke Ellington; we’re just Royal Crown Revue.”

The Royal Crown Revue heard on The Contender is, in fact, one punchy bunch of musical hooligans, perfectly willing to stretch the boundaries of the style Prima helped define in 1956 with “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail.” The album’s title track, featuring Achor’s reverb-drenched guitar, sounds more Sixties surf than Forties big band. Meanwhile the horn section snorts and snarls, throws in a bridge reminiscent of some long-forgotten spaghetti Western, and emphasizes the bad-boy boasts of lead vocalist Eddie Nichols as he sneeringly rants about his pugilistic abilities.

“Walkin’ Like Brando” begins with a musical feint: An unhurried intro that sounds like a French pop ballad abruptly gives way to an up-tempo celebration of Hollywood toughs. Continuing the back-alley-brawl imagery, “Zip Gun Bop (Reloaded),” has Nichols warning some mug that he’s about to contract a “bad case of lead poisoning.” The “Reloaded” version of “Zip Gun Bop” revives one of Royal Crown Revue’s signature tunes, which the band has chosen for some reason to record on three of its four albums.

Perhaps that’s because the song so neatly captures the group’s gangster sensibilities. While radio faves Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Coca-Cola spokesmen Big Bad Voodoo Daddy may lyrically expound the joys of drinking and dancing, and while Squirrel Nut Zippers may tilt toward jocund New Orleans Dixieland, and while ex-Stray Cat Brian Setzer leads his seventeen-piece orchestra through mostly love-struck musical terrain, Royal Crown Revue typically depicts life as seen from a somewhat dangerous street corner.

Characters in the musical vignettes include all manner of scoundrels, flimflam artists, and heat-packin’ lowlifes. Figures such as Mugsy, Bennie the Shoe, and “a Cuban cat named Geronimo” populate Nichols’s songs, along with quaint idioms such as “peepers,” “dough,” and “knucklehead.” He affects a vocal crustiness that suggests he’s about to unleash a couple of left jabs and a right hook at any moment. Even the horns sound pissed off.

“Zip Gun Bop” should probably be a hit, but big-city radio programmers have not seen fit to add it to their playlists. Consequently the band principally responsible for a musical tidal wave (Royal Crown has been touring since the early Nineties) has yet to receive the public acclaim that some of their imitators have. Achor accepts the ignominy of that oversight with only a trace of bitterness.

“The scene and a lot of the bands that are becoming successful are very Johnny-come-lately,” he says. “And right now there’s more Johnny-come-latelies than ever, which is good, because all the bands are pretty damn good. And it’s good for the sake of preserving the only true American art form [jazz, on which most swing is based]. But it’s a strange place for us to stand after spearheading it for so long. And there are people out there who have whatever swing record but don’t know who the hell we are. Or there are the people who have suddenly become complete authorities on swing in the past year. It’s kind of a funny thing.”

Not so funny to Achor is the way the music industry — the entire pop culture machine, for that matter — will ignore a style for years, then suddenly reverse course and saturate the market with it, even if the innovators are somehow overlooked.

“It’s sort of strange to see how things blow up overnight,” Achor observes. “The hardest thing for us, and for the public too, is that they’re only hearing two singles on the radio [Cherry Poppin' Daddies' "Zoot Suit Riot" and the Brian Setzer Orchestra's version of Prima's "Jump, Jive an' Wail"], so they have this very limited view of what’s going on. Both of those singles are fine, but they don’t have anything to say about what I do, except that I’m being lumped into this pile. It’s kind of weird the way this thing is going. If the people who have the power aren’t careful, they’re going to sell all the credibility out of it and screw themselves in the long run.”

Also damaging to the music’s integrity, according to Achor, is the media’s emphasis on the clothing associated with swing instead of on the music itself. He admits that at one time several years ago he was too infatuated with the allure of the zoot suit, the oversize, double-breasted ensemble favored by many in the scene. Along with a collection of vintage hollow-body guitars, Achor spent plenty on vintage clothing, but he’s mostly over that now.

“For each person it’s a different thing,” he says. “There are people who dress to the hilt and want to learn all the dance steps, and then there are people who just enjoy it on the level of the music. I guess the biggest drag for me in the popularity of it is that they’re trying too hard to represent it with the style of the clothing and not the music. For me as a lover of music and a musician, music comes above all of that. It shouldn’t matter what we wear.”

Part of the reason the band stood out and eventually scored a record deal with Warner Bros., however, was the fact that they not only sounded but looked so different from their contemporaries. But they didn’t plan that in some career strategy session. The elegant manner of dress, like their involvement with the music, evolved naturally.

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Best of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Guitar Instructional DVD

Best of the Beatles for Electric Guitar Instructional DVD

Best of the Beatles for Acoustic Guitar Instructional DVD

Achor met vocalist Nichols in Los Angeles in the late Eighties. Back then they dressed appropriately for their rockabilly gigs as the Rockamatics. The two met tenor saxman Mando Dorame through tattoo artist Mark Mahoney (who has provided voice-overs on several Royal Crown tracks and appears in the video for “Barflies at the Beach”). Dorame led Achor and Nichols into the horn-laden world of early R&B; eventually their combined musical interests pointed toward swing.

By 1991 Royal Crown Revue had added Mark Stern on drums, Jamie Stern on alto sax, Bill Ungerman on baritone sax, and Stan Watkins on trumpet, and had released Kings of Gangster Bop on the Better Youth Organization label. The band continued a steady performance schedule around L.A. and began to take their show on the road, including frequent trips to San Francisco.

In 1993 they caught the ear of a Hollywood director who wrote them into the script of Jim Carrey’s great comedy “The Mask.” During the filming of that comic thriller, the band took on a weekly gig at the Derby, a Los Angeles nightspot they helped transform from a quiet corner bar into a popular swing club. Royal Crown shows soon became a hot ticket, attracting the attention of producer Ted Templeman, who took the band to Warner Bros. Templeman produced the group’s 1995 major-label debut, Mugsy’s Move (Scott Steen, Daniel Glass, and Veikko Lepisto had taken over trumpet, drums, and bass, respectively) and this year’s The Contender. In 1997 the band issued a self-produced live album, Caught in the Act.

Royal Crown Revue was unique when it first began to tour. “We spent a lot of years laying the groundwork for this thing before we ever even ran across another band that did anything similar,” Achor recalls. And largely owing to their hard work, today they have plenty of company on the road.

Still, competition from up-and-comers doesn’t much worry Achor. Neither does the thought that his band may never have a hit single. And he isn’t too concerned about career longevity. He never figured the genre would have received so much attention, but he is unhappy about misguided industry meddling into what might otherwise have been a natural phenomenon.

“I think the scene is not drawing some of the cooler kids any more because they think it’s square,” he muses. “That’s the way it’s being portrayed in the media. Anything that gets this big becomes very superficial, though. So what are you going to do?”

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Greg Koch — Rhymes With Chalk

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:15:48 +0000

by Adam St. James

How do you say it? Greg’s comical answering machine message spells it out once and for all. “Hi you’ve reached Greg “Rhymes with Chalk” Koch. You may know Greg Koch as the monster clinic guy who travels North America demonstrating the CyberTwin and CyberDeluxe amps on behalf of Fender.

He’s hard to miss. He’s about six-foot-seven, he doubles as a standup comedian, and he’ll kick anyone’s ass on guitar. If you haven’t already seen Greg do his thing at your local music store, get out there and prepare to be amazed and inspired.

But better yet, check out Greg in concert. He has been expanding his concert touring schedule further and further from his Milwaukee home since the release of his 2001 Favored Nations debut, The Grip. And with his latest effort for Favored Nations, Radio Free Gristle, only adding to his reputation as one of the hottest axe-slingers alive today, you’re more likely than ever to be able to catch Greg at a venue near you.

In this detailed interview from my archive, Greg talks about his very popular clinics, making money doing sessions, his favorite gear, and of course, the twisted amalgamation of blues/rock/surf/jazz/honky-tonk that fires his original music into the stratosphere.

Adam St. James: Hey Greg it’s Adam with GuitarLifeMag.com

Greg Koch: How the heck are you?

St. James: Pretty good. Are you up in Appleton today?

Koch: I am indeed. Beautiful Appleton, Wisconsin.

St. James: Is it?

Koch: It’s quasi-beautiful. It’s not quite as fragrant as Milwaukee with all the factories and such down there. There is usually a pungent scent in the air. Appleton sometimes gets the waft of the paper mills which is sometimes equally as foul.

St. James: So, somewhat reminiscent of your home in the city that beer built. Where are you playing tonight?

Koch: At a place called Mill Creek. It’s kind of a festive establishment. And there should be plenty of individuals out raising all kinds of hell.

St. James: Should be. Do you do more clinics than shows these days?

Koch: Well it certainly was that way last year. This year is a little different in the fact that Fender is taking quite an interest in taking the whole band on the road to do these clinics, and now I’ve got a national agent that will actually book shows in and around the clinic dates. So it actually is going to work hand in glove.

Tonight is a regular club date. When the record company really wanted us to play out quite a bit in the region the first month the CD came out to try to make as big a splash as we could. So I kept up my end of the bargain and booked up every corner of Cheeseland. So tonight is the Fox Valley Tour – we’re doing Appleton and then Oshkosh on Saturday, which is going to be a good times and great oldies.

Actually the place tonight is very cool – Appleton is a pretty cool town and this club is kind of a cool House of Blues-type establishment. We’ve always done very well there so it should be a good time.

St. James: How long are your shows?

Koch: Well I am brutal. I’ve been doing 3-1/2 hour sets and people go, ‘Why do you play so long?’ Well, I don’t have to talk to anybody. It depends. I like playing straight through to be honest, but tonight we’ll probably do two 75s or two 90s depending on my point of view. [Editor's note to you youngsters who can't play that long without a break: Greg means 75 or 90 minute sets.] Just so we can stop and sell more CD’s and sign whatever and what have you’s, that’s usually what we like to do. We’ve got a wealth of material and it’s impossible to play it all in one night, so we mix it up and play whatever comes off the top of my head pretty much. And away we go.

St. James: Do you make set lists or do you just go for it?

Koch: Well we just play. Sometimes I’ll make a set list but not really in terms of order, just sometimes I forget tunes so sometimes I’ll just put a master list down there which I can draw from. At this point it’s getting to be a ridiculous quantity of tunes. Obviously I’m trying to do as much for the new record as possible and still play the clubs and do the cro-magnan favorites that I like to wield out. I’ve got all kind of strange little medleys and things I’ve put together. There’s a Dick Dale meets Jimmy Page kind of “Miserlou” meets “Dazed and Confused” thing that always gets the kids jumping.

St. James: Cool

Koch: And then there’s a twisted country version of “She’s So Heavy” by the Beatles that goes into a Santana meets the Yardbirds meets the Stones little diversion. All with of course tongue firmly in cheek. But it’s done in fun and the kids love it. Bless ‘em.

St. James: Do you have any live recordings out?

Koch: I actually just recorded last weekend. I had done a CD a few years ago called “Double the Grizzle,” and it was a half studio, half live thing. It’s not currently available here although there’s going to be a bunch of that stuff – I’ve got a record coming out in Europe in the fall that will have some of that stuff on it. There’s too many Hendrix tunes on there and dealing with the Hendrix family in terms of licensing and all that kind of stuff is a little challenging, so in Europe I’ll let them deal with it. So that’s how that works.

St. James: I consider you to be a person that has mastered a whole bunch of divergent styles: some country-ish stuff, some bluesy stuff, some honky-tonk type stuff, some surf stuff. How did you pull all these styles together?

Koch: Well basically, the modus operandi that was always in the back of my mind was kind of this overbearing Catholic guilt thing from my parents – first of all being a musician in the first place, then them saying, ‘If you’re going to be a musician you’d better be as well-rounded as possible or your going to work in a car wash.’ My dad was an attorney so he kind of beat into me that if you’re going to do it you’re going to do X, Y and Z or else you’re going to be destitute and miserable. So, with that kind of dysfunction lurking in the background I pretty much put together things that all kind of made sense in some weird way.

Like when I started with the blues stuff, first of all, it was because I was into Hendrix and I was into Clapton, and I read who they were into. And then I listened to Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Albert King. And I listened to those people and didn’t just blindly say, ‘I like them all’ because my heroes liked them. I specifically gravitated to the ones that made sense to me. Like the blues guys, Albert King is my favorite, B.B. King, some Buddy Guy, some Freddie King stuff and so on and so forth. Stuff that kind of fit into my mutant parameters of what I thought was cool.

And then when I got that Clapton record in 8th grade, when that “Just One Night” record came out and Albert Lee was playing on that live record and I heard that, needless to say, I was like, ‘What the hell is going on there?’ Because all the guitar players I had been into up to then had been or were pentatonic warriors of one sort or another and here this guy was playing a reaching chord change and doing little nuance things I just had no clue about. So then I started getting into Albert Lee and right about the same time I started to get more into some jazz stuff.

Then I got into the Allman Brothers heavily from like my freshman year in high school of course, you know all these records by then were already ten years passe and for whatever reason I started to get into that stuff. Live at the Fillmore was like the lick bible for my freshman and sophomore years in high school, and then one thing lead to another. I started listening to more Albert Lee and then sometime in my junior year in high school that Ricky Skaggs record came out, Highways and Heartaches, and Ray Flacke was on there. I heard that and I said ‘What’s going on here?’

And then I got into Larry Carlton. I went to this jazz camp where I got a scholarship when I was in high school, and the guitar player up there recognized the fact that I was into all this blues stuff and he said, ‘Well you should try to sophisticate your blues playing a little bit by learning to play these changes a la Larry Carlton . I heard Larry Carlton and I thought, ‘Well here’s a way that I can be able to play blues perhaps a little more intelligently.’ So I started to get into that.

That led me to Mike Stern and eventually to Allan Holdsworth, Scott Henderson, and John Scofield, and these types of people. And I would just ping pong back and forth. I would get a record that would particularly inspire me and I would rape it for all I could, and then I’d hear about another new guy or an old guy that I finally got copies of the record – there was plenty of that, especially when I was in high school, because CDs hadn’t come out yet and all the records were out of print. I’d hear about a lot of people, read Guitar Player magazine and hear about X, Y, and Z and fantasize about finally being able to find a copy of it.

Jimmy Bryant was one of those guys. I finally got all the Jimmy Bryant stuff; Jerry Reed, and all that kind of stuff. And then I finally got all the old blues stuff that I’d always wanted. A bunch of T- Bone Walker stuff, Earl Hooker. For slide stuff I was into Ry Cooder, David Lindley, not to mention of course Elmore James, Duane Allman, and all that kind of crap. So it was just kind of a non-stop obsession of just ping ponging between different stuff that I listened to that I wanted to incorporate into my own sick little stew.

And all kind of being cognizant of the fact that I didn’t want to sound like anybody. I wanted to pay respects to the people I thought were my personal favorites but at the same time I knew just sounding blindly like somebody else would eventually get you nowhere. In this day and age, maybe that’s not right.

St. James: What do you work on in your own time these days? Do you have any of your own time?

Koch: I really don’t to be honest. It’s weird – I don’t have as much time because I’ve got young kids and I’m traveling all over the place and when I’m not trying to work on record stuff and trying to get stuff together that way, or dealing with some kind of promotional endeavor, I’m writing these books for Hal Leonard and finishing up that kind of stuff. It’s a pile, not that I’m complaining, but once in a while you just kind of go ‘What day is it?’ When I do get time, it seems it’s a lot more constructive.

I will have heard something that I really want to do so I’ll work on that – I went out and saw Derek Trucks the other day and I stole things left and right, bless his heart. That was very inspiring – it’s been a long time since you could go out and see somebody that is not just tiredly beating the same old bag but is trying to raise the bar a little bit. It was an awesome, awesome show.

I’ll be working on some slide in the very near future. I’ve always said I’ve had the slide in the arsenal, on the latest record there’s a bit more slide than on previous records, but it’s the only part of my plan that I feel that I’m still kind of stuck in what others have done as opposed to taking it someplace new. And I’m going to be working on that a little bit. There’s some different ideas I’ve got in that regard, so we’ll see. It will be a slide world coming up.

St. James: Radio Free Gristle, your second release on Steve Vai’s Favored Nations label, is a pretty interesting project, especially with all of your segues in between.

Koch: Yeah, I had a good time with them.

St. James: What brought that all up?

Koch: Well, it was kind of motivated from a couple of different things. First of all, what was weird was hooking up with Steve Vai’s label. Predominately my stuff in the past has not been all instrumental, I’ve always had vocal tunes involved. Initially I had a lot more vocal tunes, but when I started to do more stuff for Fender and the only vehicle for me to travel nationally and internationally was doing clinics where, clearly, bursting into song is not really the point, I stuck to more the instrumental line of thinking.

The Grip [Editor's note: Koch's first Favored Nations disc, released in 2001.] was made up of all the best instrumental tunes off all my other recordings, which had a bunch of vocal tunes on them. So after The Grip was released I was writing all these instrumental tunes and so I put a bunch of these together. I recorded a bunch here in Milwaukee and there was some kind of rush, one of the guys at the label said, ‘Well you know, The Grip is all old stuff, you need new stuff for us to promote.’ Well, you know it may be old to people in Wisconsin, but it’s new to everybody else. Somehow I thought there was some kind of marketing magic in what this guy was saying and I thought I had to go and record stuff right away.

So I went in for three days and recorded about 13 new tunes – they were all instrumentals – and Vai heard it and he’s like, ‘You know, I like a lot of the stuff, but you know it’s missing that raw abandon that you had from The Grip.’ I said, ‘OK, you want abandon, I’ll give you abandon.’ So then I went out and recorded more stuff with the Mother Ship. And so I had these two kind of different sounding collections of tunes. When I was talking to Steve one day about what he preferred, and asked if he had any input on direction, I mean I had my own ideas but just wanted to get his two cents, he just basically said, ‘You know, you’re never going to get any airplay anyway because if you knew what it took to get airplay on rock radio these days, you’d just quit.’

I said, ‘Well that’s great,’ so I guess what I’ll do is make my own radio show. Part of the whole shtick that I do in these clinics is that it’s as much the humor as it is the playing. I go off on a bunch of different tangents and so on and so forth. Clearly when I play with the band the humor thing is very much there. So I wanted to be able to capture, not only the implied humor in the music, which not everyone catches, but also having some of these little things in between tunes. I did a couple of them just off the top of my head and Steve heard them and was all for it. He said, ‘Do the whole record like that if you want.’

And that’s what I proceeded to do. I either made up little snippets that had something directly to do with the tune, or they had absolutely nothing to do with anything whatsoever. I just had a little fun with it. Then I had this buddy of mine that I went to high school with who is a political cartoonist and asked is there any way you can do like Mad Magazine-esqe type caricatures of me for the cover. I gave him the ideas and he did it. For all intents and purposes I probably made something that probably frightens the vast majority of people.

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St. James: I love the picture on the inside of you with the long blond Robert Plant hair and shirt.

Koch: Yeah, good old Bob Plant.

St. James: When you do these clinics for Fender – I’ve seen you do one at NAMM when the Cyber Twin first came out – was I seeing something similar to what you do in the stores?

Koch: Certainly, that was the schtick I did

St. James: That was really more selling the amp. Is that what you do in the stores or are you doing more player’s clinics?

Koch: It’s a pretty good balance. I talk a lot more about technique stuff at this point, but I also talk about the rig. I don’t do it as much as give [general] information about the amp per se as it is about how do you use it and why do you want to use it. Do you know what I mean? Right now I’m going out with the trio and using the new Vibroverb amp, and I’m also using one of the Cyber amps as well. The basic gist is, you know, I’ve gone out and I’ve talked about the product for Fender just basically because I enjoy doing it and needless to say it was effective for them because the Cyber Twin sold like a demon.

And so now they just want me to go out and play and do my thing. I’m not an employee of Fender, but let’s be honest, I’ve been taking a lot of money to do clinics for them. Not a ton of money, but in the musician world, being able to be the sole provider of a family while playing your guitar is no small feat. So now they are really kind of getting behind the whole thing, ‘OK, let’s get this career thing happening, and let’s see what people have been seeing in Wisconsin for years of us doing our thing.’

It’s so hard to be able to get the opportunities to go out there. What’s happening now is because Fender is getting behind me and letting me go out and do these clinics I’m converting people that way, but also it will enable me to be in areas to now get agents interested in me, because all they have to do is book things in between tours. I’ve already flown out there, the gear has already been provided, my hotel is already taken care of, so it’s really kind of a no-brainer. Now it’s a good combination: It’s still entertainment, showing some techniques as well as how the amp works and getting down to playing – which is all good.

St. James: How long are the clinics typically?

Koch: It depends how long they let me go. Usually about an hour-and-a-half to two hours. If we are in a place where I can play a little bit longer I have no problem going forever.

St. James: At this point then, hopefully, you’re going to be doing the clinic on the early evening side and then running off to the club.

Koch: Correct. Maybe staggered day-wise; maybe the next day I would do the club date or whatever the case may be. So we’ll see.

St. James: Right. Actually wouldn’t it be better to do the clinic the next day in the afternoon and then be on your way to the next club?

Koch: That’s probably the right point. I’m kind of experimenting which all these different scenarios. As it works this particular month they’re pretty well separated, the gigs and the in-store appearances. Later this year we’re going to try to put together the traveling scenario, but now that it’s the band, a lot of these stores are actually booking restaurants and clubs, getting hotel halls for us to do our thing, so it’s kind of killing two birds with one stone. So that’s all good.

It’s kind of a round about way of getting it done, but it’s a different world we live in and it isn’t like the good old days where you would have a feature in Guitar Player magazine and you would sell 100,000 records. We’re having to adapt a little bit and certainly the fact that I don’t do one particular style and just beat it over the head and try to seek out the lowest common denominator routine – that’s not made it easier either, but I’m having fun, so what’s the point? If you’re able to pull it off, let the good times roll.

St. James: How much of the time are you on the road with these clinics?

Koch: It has worked out to be maybe four months last year if you put it all together time wise. That was including a couple of week trip to Europe, another week in Europe before that and another two- and-a-half-weeks in Asia. Then I did it all over the states again. Plus I’m doing these clinics for Hal Leonard which are all about technique and so on and so forth.

St. James: What are you doing with those? I know you have a lot of material through them.

Koch: I helped rewrite their guitar method, which is just the basic, ‘Here is the first note on the first string of the first fret.’ Then it goes to a blues book I wrote for them, a country book, then I did one called “Lead Licks” which is just kind of my weird way of amalgamating styles, take a lick and morph it into five different styles which actually turned out pretty cool. I did the same thing for rhythm types of things too. I’ll take a rhythm riff, as I call it, and mutate it into five different genres. It goes from very basic, just starting off to advanced stuff. They wanted me to go out on the road and kind of be their poster child to sell the method.

It’s been going very, very well because I think the method is really cool in the fact that it’s no longer just following the dancing, drinking gourd – there are selections to learn from. It actually teaches some contemporary techniques as opposed to kind of steering away from things that were kind of politically incorrect in the world of academia. I go out and I do these clinics and Fender kind of co-ops most of them and I go in, play my tunes and talk about some of the techniques. I show off my chicken pickin’ techniques and some whammy bar resonance, and some scalar stuff. Then I talk about the method and what we did and how we wrote it and so forth. Then I invite them to purchase it in copious quantities and then I move on to my favorite restaurant of choice. That’s really what it’s all about.

St. James: When you’re home, don’t you do a lot of studio work as well?

Koch: I certainly have been doing a bunch. When I go down to Chicago I’ve been working with a guy in Evanston that has been doing stuff for years and years and he just calls me up. Luckily it’s been working out that I’ve been in town, and I just scoot on down and have been doing a ton of stuff down there, a bunch of stuff up here, whatever it takes. Whether it’s commercials or industrials, or whether it’s playing on other peoples’ records – whatever it takes.

St. James: When you do the commercials and things; these are short pieces, right?

Koch: Correct

St. James: Is the music written out or do they just tell you to do your thing?

Koch: A lot of times it is specific charts with the melody written down, but to be honest, he brings me down to come up with stuff. I’ll usually come up with little hook things and little effect things or whatever the case may be to just round things out. It’s turned out to be very cool – I always joke that one of the ways that I actually was legitimized in the eyes of my in-laws is when we were up at Christmas one time and an Oldsmobile commercial came on and I said, ‘Hey, that’s me.’ Then it was no longer ‘musician boy,’ it was ‘my son-in-law plays on commercials!’

St. James: Are some of these national commercials?

Koch: Yes indeed. There have been quite a few over the years.

St. James: Can you name a few?

Koch: Well there was a Chevy Venture commercial that I was on, an Oldsmobile Aurora commercial, there was a campaign called “Brown Sugar for Kahlua,” it was Brown Sugar by the Stones that we redid.

St. James: Yeah, I remember that. Was that you singing too? Weren’t there vocals on that?

Koch: There were vocals, I didn’t sing it though. It was me and this other guy playing the guitar – the Keith and Mick treatment. There’s been Vidal Sassoon, there’s been Kellogg’s, there’s been some airline commercials; there was some hotel, all kinds of those health care commercials. Those are the ones I’ve been doing a lot lately. Locally there’s a big Wisconsin lottery commercial that I’m actually in the commercial as well as playing the music on it.

St. James: A TV commercial?

Koch: A TV commercial. All the kids at my kid’s school are pretty impressed by that. So there’s been a bunch of different stuff over the years. It just kind of comes up, I do them and you know, you never know which one will be the one where you keep getting paid – depending on how long they run. I did these Bank One commercials years ago and I got paid for a couple of years – that was beautiful.

St. James: How does someone get into studio work?

Koch: What’s weird about it is, as I was just telling people last night when I did that clinic at Gan Music in Northfield, it was at a clinic I did at that same store in 1995 that the owner of the store, Gary Gan, passed my CD along to this other guy who was doing all these jingles. From hearing that CD that I had out at the time he’s been calling me ever since. It’s happenstance, luck.

When I was in college going to this school in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, majoring in jazz guitar, one of the things they always talked about was that Chicago was such a hub of commercial and jingle work. The one thing they would always say was, ‘Well, you know down there they don’t run through it once just to see if you can play it, they run through it to make sure the notes are right on the page.” It was this big intimidation factor that you had to sight read like a demon.

So I was petrified the first session I had to do when this guy called me up and sat me down, I was petrified. Clearly you have to sight read the stuff but you know, they have demos of everything now so you could hear what it sounds like and so on and so forth. The biggest thing they want is an ability to get the sounds, to be able to come up with cool parts. To be able to, when they say, ‘Well the client wants you to somehow accentuate that syrup going down that precipice of piping hot flapjacks on the screen, is there anyway you can do that?’

And for you to say, ‘you betcha!’ You have to be able to transcend the BS layer and actually give them what they want and look like you’re very glad to do so. It’s a combination of weird skills. I enjoy it; I have always enjoyed doing those sessions. It used to be stark terror when I was going down there. I would get about two blocks away from there and I would just start getting so nervous. But now I just know that no matter what, it’s going to
work out one way or the other. I’ve done everything from acoustic things, Dobro things,

I’ve brought my Coral sitar down there, my baritone, and I’ve played slide, distorted stuff, clean stuff, just textural things. Most of the time it’s textural. I think I can count on one hand with a couple of fingers missing when I’ve actually been called on to do my thing. Most of the time it just coming up with weird parts, a little hook and so on and so forth.

St. James: Is there still a lot of studio work out there?

Koch: Well, even in the Chicago jingle circuit, I have a lot of buddies down there and that’s primarily what they do. It used to be you could make a pretty decent living making sessions down there, but that has definitely changed. Part of it had to do with when there was a big strike, the summer before last, the big SAG strike. And things adjusted quite a bit. It was already kind of on the wane, but it’s not what it used to be, that’s for sure. Luckily it’s purely supplemental for me.

St. James: It seems to me that all of the other instruments can be sampled, but guitar playing can’t be matched through samples, so it seems to me that there is a little hope in that at least.

Koch: That’s true. I think that what has happened is that people with Pro Tools and stuff like that, that have the connections, they will just do their own stuff and I don’t think there is as much ability for a guy to like hire a guitar player. It would just be a guy doing all that stuff. I have a buddy that does all this music library stuff, he lives here in Milwaukee but he works out of a company in New York and does CD after CD of these libraries where you buy a CD for a thousand bucks, or whatever the case may be, if you work at some ad agency or wherever else, and you can use these things ad nauseum.

St. James: They’re completed songs or are they sounds?

Koch: They’re completed tunes. They’re 30-second things or 60-seconds. They’re tailor made for whatever you need.

St. James: Different moods and everything.

Koch: Exactly. You pay for one down stroke to have it and I think you have to report when you use it, then whoever wrote it gets publishing, even international stuff, so the potential to make a lot of money is there.

St. James: You haven’t done that yet?

Koch: I haven’t really done it. There were a couple of people in town here that have made really nice stipends of currency doing it, but a lot of it was say, ‘We’ll record one for nothing and then on the back end you may make fabulous cash and prizes.’ I like to have vision, but preferably without blur involved.

St. James: Do you have a home studio?

Koch: I do not. There’s a studio downtown that I use all the time and it’s inexpensive enough where I know it’s going to be of world class caliber, and I don’t have to own the gear, maintain it. I just go in, do my thing and be gone. To be honest, at the home front here, when I’m home, it’s full on domesticity.

St. James: Do you play at home at all?

Koch: I have guitars situated throughout the house and I sneak a few morsels in here and there. I’ve often made the joke that if people knew how little I actually practiced there might be trouble.

St. James: How old are your kids?

Koch: 8, 6, 2 and I’ve got one on the way. Four is a good number

St. James: Congratulations. I’ve got a 3 year old, and a 9 month old.

Koch: Oh, so you know all about the great struggle.

St. James: My guitar playing is suffering greatly right now.

Koch: You know what, as I’ve said, you appreciate more when you can do it. Boy, there’s been times when I sit down and just the smell of it ….

St. James: How did you hook up with Fender? How did you start doing things for Fender?

Koch: About 1990-ish I was working in a music store

St. James: In Milwaukee?

Koch: In Milwaukee. My band was pretty popular in town here we were kind of making waves. I was working at the store during the day and playing out at night and of course when you’re 20-something that’s what everyone aspires to. A couple of Fender guys came to the store and I was swapping jokes. One of the guys heard me playing a little bit and said, ‘What’s your deal? Are you playing around town?’ And I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I’m playing tonight. Why don’t you come on down?’

So these guys came on down with the intention of staying for a couple of drinks. They stayed all night long and afterward one of the guys said, ‘We have to get you into Frontline magazine. Two days later the local Fender rep brought through a guy named Jack Schwartz, who was a clinician. He used to do these bench checks all over the world for them and this guy told me that, ‘He had no intention of staying, I just wanted to get out.’

And he stayed all night. He proceeded to take our tape – we had a cassette out at the time. He grabbed that, he made copies of it, he gave it to everybody at Fender, and then I started doing stuff regionally for them. I did stuff in Milwaukee. I think I did one at Gan down there – I think it was the first one I did. Then up in Minneapolis and then out in the hinterlands of the Dakotas. Word started to spread that I was doing clinics and so on and so forth.

The big break was when they had my band come out and play at the Nashville NAMM show, which I think would have been in ‘96, and after we did that it kind of blew up from there. The big culminating thing being when I did all the stuff for the Cyber-Twin at the L.A. NAMM show [in January, 2000] because then I did seven shows a day for four days straight and everyone in the music business seemingly was coming in that place to check out that amp. So I was able to get a few licks in as it were. So that’s how its just kind of developed.

St. James: Who were the guys from Fender that initially came by?

Koch: One guys name is Don Johnston and the regional rep here at the time was Bob Grimwald. Don Johnston has been with the company since like 1966. He’s the coolest dude; he looks just like Carl Perkins. He’s still involved with the company; he carries a great deal of weight. He’s cool as hell. He’s helped me out immeasurably over the years.

St. James: Is he a rep for this area?

Koch: He actually was the sales manager for North America at one point. He’s been around forever. Occasionally what he will do is he will go out with a rep in an area to make sure everything is taken care of; or if there’s a dealer that’s giving him a hard time or whatever the case may be, they call in Don.

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St. James: I was running Fender’s Frontline magazine back in ‘96 and ‘97.

Koch: No kidding?

St. James: Yeah, so I know a lot of people over there; not all of them, but a lot of them. Oh, the CyberTwin: I have one, but again haven’t dug into it and tried to use it a whole lot. Isn’t it an amp that you can share files on the Internet with?

Koch: Theoretically it is. I have never really gotten to the point of doing all the MIDI out functions of it. What we were going to do is we were going to have all the sounds on a laptop so when I would go into a different region I could just download all the presets into the amp. I never got around to doing it because it was less of a hassle to just put in five of them, lickety-split, than it was to deal with all that stuff. Theoretically you’re able to do that.

St. James: So you don’t have any of those files saved at this point?

Koch: No I don’t.

St. James: Many of the people I’m interviewing these days are using Pods and Cyber-Twins and these digital amps that do have file sharing capabilities. So basically, will you share some of your sounds with our users? That would be the coolest thing.

Koch: I’ve got some sounds that are in Fender Frontline and also on the Fender website. I did four sounds for the Cyber-Twin and four sounds for the Cyber-Deluxe.

St. James: And people can download them?

Koch: No, but I tell how to do it.

St. James: OK

Koch: Actually I’m going to do more; I need to do more of them. I’ve had people say, ‘Those are cool, you have to do more, give us more.’

St. James: I’ll definitely link people through to there.

Koch: Excellent. I think I have a link to it on my site that takes you right there.

St. James: Yeah, you do. What are you having the most fun with these days?

Koch: Playing live is probably the most fun thing for me. Putting together the wacky medleys. I play so much differently in the live context than I do with clinics and so on and so forth. It’s really been my goal my last couple of years when all that stuff started happening with Fender doing the stuff with the NAMM show that they were going to do a bunch of clinics. I always had envisioned that sooner or later we would get the band to do them and then we would get an agent finally interested in booking stuff.

That’s such a hassle to get an agent even interested. Finally all these things are coming to fruition. There’s an extra little bit of glory when doing the gigs now. Plus it’s gotten to the point where it’s always been that way in Wisconsin, we’ve been lucky for the last 10 years, had a pretty good following up here. Now with the fact that I’ve had a little bit wider recognition and people respecting more the original tunes, it’s a blast to go out and have people yelling out tunes, ‘Play this play that’; that aren’t Hendrix tunes.

Whatever the case may be, they’re asking for a bunch of your tunes. That feels pretty good. To be able to pull off a three-and-a-half-hour set and keep people riveted in a place where they’re usually just hanging out and getting blasted, it’s kind of a good thing.

St. James: Your relationship with Steve Vai is a cool thing…

Koch: Yeah, it’s one of these things where he’s always been very cool towards me and very supportive. I guess when you sign with Steve Vai and his label you’re kind of hoping that there’s things mentioned like, ‘What about a G3 type of tour with everyone on the label?’ Or is Steve going to have you open up on a G3 tour, or is Steve going to do anything? Pretty much at this point I’ve kind of resigned myself to the fact that no, that’s not going to happen. Regardless of that, it’s a cool thing and certainly having him tout your wares and telling people what you’re doing and supporting you is pretty unbelievable. He’s definitely got some skills.

St. James: I’ve interviewed Steve several times and talked all about his label, and one comment he made to me at one point was, something along the lines, of I don’t want to be a musician, I want to be a publisher. I’m wondering about the fact that he’s signing all these instrumental artists, it seems to me that he would potentially have the avenues to get a lot of these tunes into movies and things.

Koch: You would certainly hope that would be the case and it certainly seems like the logical thing. I haven’t seen evidence of that kind of activity.

St. James: He also told me that if you think a publisher’s going to do any work for you and get your songs placed anywhere, forget it. If you don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it for you.

Koch: That’s really what it comes down to for all this stuff. It’s one of those things that you always are learning over and over again. People will say, for this record we’re going to do X, Y, and Z. Then you realize unless you follow up every single time, it’s not that peoples’ intentions are bad, it’s just that no one believes in your thing other than yourself to the point where it’s going to make any real difference. I can hear what he’s saying in that regard is that you really have to do it yourself. And again it probably comes down to that kind of happenstance that had me hook up with this jingle guy down in Chicago and the Fender thing. Does ability come into play? Well, you hope so but certainly a bit of happenstance and luck and serendipity comes into play.

St. James: You know also when I talk to younger musicians I often try to tell them, because I feel like I was blind to it was I was in my 20s, I just had my goal of having my hard rock band get signed to a big label and I didn’t pursue or even think about other avenues or other opportunities. I try to tell people now, don’t rule anything out. Try every possible avenue. Especially when you’re in your 20s and especially if you’re into a certain style of music, hard rock or whatever, everything else just seems gay to you. It’s like, don’t shoot yourself in the foot that way. You might want to be getting your heavy metal band signed, but if you’re not playing seven nights a week, then you have five other nights to go out and play in a country band and learn something new, and a jazz band on Wednesday night, and a blues band on Thursday night. You never know what might come from it.

Koch: Exactly right – diversification.

St. James: Real quick, can you give me a run down on the gear you’re using these days.

Koch: Sure. It fluctuates – if I’m doing a session, I got a call right now and the guy wanted me to go down to Chicago I’m going to bring the Cyber-Twin. If I’m doing a session in town or for something quick on the fly, I’ll probably grab the Cyber-Deluxe. If I’m going out to do a duo with this harp player that I do every now and again, I take out my 1954 Fender Super, ’cause it’s the right volume and let’s face it, it’s as sexy as hell. For the band and trio stuff I’m using a combination of all of the above. I might take the Cyber-Twin, tonight I’ll probably bring a Super Reverb and a Vibroverb and run them in stereo and proceed to destroy.

Sometimes I like to go old school. I use the Cyber-Twin all the time, but part of being a musician, is to be able to motivate your creativity by any different number of combination and elements. The new Vibroverb is really a delightful little treat. That’s what I’m promoting on these clinic tours is that amp, and running them in tandem with a Cyber-Deluxe. That is a delightful little combo. But certainly the Super Reverb together with the Vibroverb connected with a couple of screaming shit boxes on the floor.

St. James: What kind of boxes do you use?

Koch: I certainly like that Fulltone stuff. I use a combination of a Maxon OD808, that’s divine. I use a Fulltone Octafuzz. I use a Fulltone Deja ‘Vibe stereo, a Full-Drive 2 and then delay-wise – if I’m not using the Cyber-Twin or Cyber-Deluxe I just have a Boss DD3 that I’ve had since the beginning of time. And then I’ve got a Fulltone Clyde wah pedal, which is the Holy Grail. That’s pretty much it. That’s the current arsenal. I’ve got a Vibrotone Leslie that I may pull out every now and again.

It all depends. I wasn’t using any boxes, with the exception of an Ibanez Tube Screamer when I used the Cyber-Twin. I had everything on board and was really comfortable using that but when I use these older style amps I need a few little treats on the ground. I don’t have them on all the time. Most of the time for my clean sound and slightly overdriven sound, it’s just the amps. I kick it over the top a little bit with the Maxon. If I really want uncontrollable feedback and debauchery I hit the Full Drive, but if I want a little watery succulence I put on the Univibe and the Octafuzz. It’s beyond cool, it’s just Band of Gypsies. It’s excellent. I usually kick that on once I have the Maxon on. It’s wicked.

St. James: And what guitars?

Koch: I use a combination of things. I’ve been using those [Fender] Highway 1 Strats which I highly recommend to anybody who just wants an American-made Strat at a price point of $599 because right out of the box I can beat the living be-jesus out of that thing and it stays in tune. And it sounds great as well. I’ve got a Fender Custom Shop Strat that I use quite a bit that I ordered a couple of years ago.

But my favorite sounding Strat that I’m using right now is a ‘56 Relic Strat from the Custom Shop. I always do a push, pull pot on my 2nd tone control so I can get the back and front pickup combination, and then all three pickups. And then I always put the resistor cap on and the volume control so I don’t loose any highs when I turn it down. I’ve got all my Strats set up like that. Tele-wise, I’ve got a ‘51 Nocaster Relic from the Custom Shop, and I’ve got a B Bender Custom Shop piece that matches my blue Strat. Those are the four I take out, those are the four I’ll be bringing tonight. They’re very nice; I love them to death.

St. James: What kind of strings do you use?

Koch: I use the Fender Bullet, stainless steel, .009 – .046. I used to use 10’s all the time but as I got into more of those Albert King bends and all the country stuff it’s so much easier to do with 9’s. I thought, ‘Why am I in pain?’ Especially when you’re bending up a third, you need to be able to have those light strings without drawing blood.

St. James: Before we go, I want to make sure all our readers know that all your Hal Leonard instructional stuff is out there in the stores.

Koch: That is correct. I also did two Stevie Ray Vaughn DVD’s for them. Those have turned out pretty well.

St. James: Those are new?

Koch: Those just came out not too long ago. I get emails on those on a daily basis. I’m actually doing my own for them next week. Monday or Tuesday we’re recording them.

St. James: Great Greg, we’ll be watching for those! Thanks for your time. Tear it up tonight!

Koch: Great, thanks.

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