How did you end up in Springfield, Queen City of the Ozarks?
I majored in real estate. I was in bands, but I never ever thought that bands would be my deal. I hadn't been educated in that realm. I was going to take a job, get married, and have a family. I interviewed for a job with a nationwide real estate firm that was headquartered in Springfield, Missouri. I came here and took a job. Then I subsequently became myself. I had no interest in the job, but I wanted to find out about all the bands. This was a very musical town, for a lot of reasons. The Ozark Jubilee [country music television show] had been here, and there was a lot going on in this town. There were publishing companies. Si Siman was a publisher; Ronnie Self, the songwriter, had been here.
Was that mostly because of the Ozark Jubilee?
Absolutely. This town got put on the map. Visionary guys like Si Siman and Ralph Foster got the Ozark Jubilee to come to Springfield, which meant that a nationwide network television show was broadcast every week from Springfield for several years. That's a big deal. As a kid, I watched the Ozark Jubilee. I remember watching Johnny Cash on there, and a young Willie Nelson. It was star after star. Wayne Carson Thompson, the guy who wrote "The Letter" lived here. He's my hero. He also wrote "Neon Rainbow" and "Always on My Mind." You can't even count the number of songs he wrote by himself. Big hits. He had a little studio called Top Talent at the end of Elm Street and Glenstone Avenue. There's an insurance agency in there now. I had met Wayne one time before, so it didn't take me long to find my way in there. It also didn't take me very long to find my way into disfavor with the management of the company that I had chosen to work for. I was terminated for lack of interest in corporate real estate.
How old were you?
Twenty-seven. It took me six years to get out of college. I still had a healthy interest in playing. I noticed right away that there were some good players here, like Lloyd Hicks, D. Clinton Thompson, and Wayne Carson. There was a nucleus of these players who rose above it all. They wrote their own songs and had the benefit of being in Springfield. Si Siman, by virtue of his hookup with the Ozark Jubilee, met big dogs in other cities. There he learned about music publishing, royalties, and ownership of copyrights. He got into the publishing business and provided a home for people who were creative enough to come up with a song; he also offered them criticism and help. He'd say, "Hmm, you might be a little deprecating on your bad girlfriend there. People don't want to hear that." I'd sit there and listen to him; it'd go in one ear, out the other, then back in, but everything that the guy told me turned out to be spot-on. He was Wayne Carson's publisher and manager, and they owned the studio together. I started hanging around with these guys, as well as different people in the Springfield crowd. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils came from here; they were one of the first bands to bust out in the early '70s, writing their own songs.
And you were married at this point?
I got divorced and married again, to Maralie. She was a keyboard player and we played together over the years. Springfield was always home. We were on the road, off around the country playing; but even if the address in Springfield happened to be a storage bin for several months, most of the time we had a residence here. Finally we came back to Springfield and stayed for a while. Then I started forming solid relationships with guys like D. Clinton Thompson and Lloyd Hicks. We had similar musical interests and humorous-type personalities. We made fun of the same stuff. I'm sure other people made fun of us in reverse. Being a guy who plays bass, you get in between guys like Lloyd Hicks and Donnie Thompson and you look pretty good. We started a milieu of bands over the years.
That was the genesis of what obviously became The Skeletons and The Morells.
Prior to that, I got really interested in the songwriting thing.
When did you become a recording engineer and producer?
Well, I had a gift for organizational skills, I think. I could talk to the bartender, I could talk to the bar manager, and I could get the job. In college I had gone to a recording studio that was very minimal. I liked recorders, and I was interested. I was always the guy who would look at a record and wonder, "What is BMI? What is any of this?" I slowly learned by absorbing it. I really got my interest in recording while watching Wayne Carson do his thing. I would hang around the studio and I'd watch Wayne write a song. The songs he came up with would impress me. I got interested in writing songs and pitching them. I even got some recorded and published, back in 1970. I got more into the playing side of it, playing bass, booking the band. PA responsibilities started to fall to me. I would sit around at home during the day with a couple of Webcor and Sony recorders. I would sit and play some rhythm part, or some Eddie Cochran-y thing on one machine. Then I'd dub over onto the next machine playing some drums by beating with my hands on a cardboard box or something. Then I'd play it back and record a bass part. I'd go back and sing, and then sing a background part. I'd mess around on my own, making demos. Then, up around Fort Leonard Wood, in the waning days of Vietnam, we were playing at a bar. There was a recording studio; this guy had a 4-track Ampex. His name was Del Mac. He was a pretty good old R&B-type singer. Donnie [D. Clinton] Thompson, Maralie, a drummer from Phoenix, and I played up there, and we got Del to sing with us. Then I'd go to the studio and monkey around with gear at night. I learned a little bit more there on the 4-track. I wrote some songs, made some demos, and came back to Springfield. I mostly spent the next few years improving the bands we were in. We'd get a house gig up in the country and play at one bar for 18 months straight. Brewer & Shipley lived up there. They really liked Donnie's playing, so they took Donnie out on the road with them. Donnie was out there watching the big- time. His idea was that wasn't impossible to have a band that could generate interest beyond a cocktail lounge or a bar. So we expanded upon that and started forming some bands that had some material with originality. We took it from there.
This was probably '77 or '78 and was the first iteration of The Skeletons?
Well, first was a band called The Symptoms. The Ozark Daredevils went to England and cut their record, but Donnie and I were living up in Raleigh, Missouri. Once a week we'd make a trip to Peaches [Records & Tapes]. Whole albums cost $3.49, and I was making a couple hundred a week in a bar. I could go up there and spend $50 on records. The new wave thing hit in England, and all these little picture discs showed up at the cash register with Wreckless Eric and Nick Lowe — British pub-rock — and we got interested in that.
The first wave of punk, like the Sex Pistols?
Well, it'd be pre-Pistols. This was an offshoot of the pub- rock in England.
Was this post-Dictators?
The Dictators were going about this time too, in '75. That was pre-Ramones. I've got to say, if there had been no Ramones, you and I wouldn't even be sitting here. They started it all. The Ramones went to England and changed the face of the world, as far as music was concerned. The Sex Pistols saw the Ramones and they were fashion plates. They saw that you don't have to be Genesis to be a huge band. We bought records by Devo. We'd sit at home listening to Devo songs thinking about how crazy it would be if something got on the radio like that, thinking that it never would. Then, three or five years later, it's on the radio in the Top-10. We were buying anything that was left-of-center. Then the punk thing came out. We were ahead of the curve. These bands that came from England put out a lot of independent 45s — we would cover a lot of these songs and people thought we wrote them! We made a little bit of noise. But it's like hopping on a wagon really quick. We hopped on the wagon earlier than everybody else, but soon after that it became passé. The Symptoms broke up. We were still living in Springfield. Donnie, Lloyd, and I got together and we got the idea for The Skeletons. We got Randle Chowning, who was the lead singer for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and he was going to do it on the side. We explored the surf-a-billy side, digging up old songs. We mixed it up. It became popular, and we did quite well. Then Randle got a record deal of his own on A&M; he bailed out because he had to go do some work on that. Nick Sibley came in and played keyboards, guitar, and harmonica.
Does Nick still have his studio here?
Yeah, Ozark Sound/Nick Sibley Music. Still doing it. There's not much retirement in this business.
No, there's not. Is this about the time that The Morells started?
Well, the Symptoms ended. Then the Skeletons started, and then we disseminated the Skeletons a bit. Then Steve Forbert, a singer/songwriter and a great guy, came to Springfield with Bill Jones, a saxophone player, and Jon Goin, a guitarist. Wonderful guy. Jon and Bill had played on Steve's album [Jackrabbit Slim] that he'd recorded in Nashville and he was looking for a road band. Jon and Bill both said, "You might want to check out these guys." They came down; we were playing in the basement of a bowling alley on the south side of town, doing our surf-a-billy thing. Steve liked what he saw, or maybe he drank a little too much that night. Either way, Steve offered us a job! He already had a keyboard player, Paul Errico, in the band. We succumbed to the lure of $350 a week, so I took off and played with Steve for the better part of a year. After we came back from that, we were fishing around for what to do. Lloyd stayed with Steve, so Donnie and I started The Morells at that point in time. We got Ron Gremp for our drummer (now the full-time drummer for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils). We began The Morells. For whatever reason, probably our limited vocals, we pushed off into the crude rockabilly/roots rock thing. Donnie was an amazing guy at finding material to do, and he brought something in that was always a good idea. A significant segment of our songs were rockabilly.
The Morells got quite popular, and you guyshadarecordthatgota4or5star review in Rolling Stone.
We were lucky during that period. There was a band that became acclaimed worldwide that was doing a lot of rockabilly; the Stray Cats. We rode their coattails. Rockabilly became incredibly popular; if you did even one or two songs, you became a rockabilly band. The rockabilly thing didn't hurt us. The record [Shake and Push] was great. We recorded that in Springfield, not on this board but that 2-inch machine.
This was at Column One Recording?
Column One. Done by a gentleman named Jim Martin, who died a couple years ago; he was a good friend of mine. He'd had some publishing success with Boxcar Willie and he started this recording studio. He traveled with us and would play saxophone.
He was the engineer at Column One?
No, he wasn't. There was another engineer, Jim Rhodes. Jim was an accomplished engineer from the east part of the state and had experience with Nashville, but he was an old-school guy. We recorded our record and we butted heads a little bit; but we finished it and it came out. Jim left the studio, so there was a vacuum there. This was in '84. The Skeletons were winding down, because we hadn't made it to the next level like The Morells. We had an offer from Universal, and I was even called out to New York. We really got close. We had some management offers, but it didn't pan out. We couldn't make it go to the next level, so it was time to hang it up. At that point I was interested in studios. I was going to Column One, hanging out, assisting Jim with what I could. They had a session coming up, doing demos for the publishing company, and we were going with The Morells to Lincoln, Nebraska, to play the Zoo Bar. I took the manual for that Harrison 32x32 [console] with me on the three-day weekend we played at the Zoo Bar. I studied that thing, then I came back and called Jim. I said, "Jim, I think I can do that session for you." So, I did it. That was how I started. About that time I was going through a divorce and everything, so I was a single guy and I delved into recording. That was a time that I was also living alone, so I spent my nights in the studio with my feet up on the console. I had a kick drum going through a [URIE] 1176, seeing what attack and release did, what 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, 10:1 were, and how it affected a vocal — the nuts and bolts of it. I acquired a Lexicon 224x, and I tried to make records. I'm so glad that you'll never find any of those. They were really heavy into the publishing thing; my job was to produce and record. Jim did a lot of the production. But I did all of the engineering and some of the producing, making demos for the Nashville market for songwriters that were in the publishing company. You'd hear a song and find a drummer, a bassist, and I was the engineer.
How did the Del-Lords sessions come about?
The Morells gained favor in the New York market; we'd been out there a few times and I'd met the Del-Lords guys. They were putting their band together, from the pieces of The Dictators. We all became great friends. We'd come hang out with them and bring them back to the Midwest to do shows. The Del-Lords started getting pretty serious and gaining notoriety. They needed a demo, so I said, "I can run this thing." I wish you could see the van they brought down here. They came rattling into the studio and we spent a week cutting songs and demos. We rocked, we rolled, we went out to eat, and we went to Red's. Then they wanted me to come up to New York after they got funding for a record. We picked A&R Studios to record. I was ostensibly going to produce it; but it was produced, of course, by the band. They were tight and they had good songs. They got signed in the middle of that record to EMI. Right away record label dudes started showing up. We got the record finished and we went to Nashville. We mixed it in Memphis with Terry Manning [Tape Op #58], a very well-known engineer. The record came out and bubbled under the Hot-200. After that I did a Charlie Burton record, a band out of Omaha.
I know you were producing a lot of local music.
Oh yeah.
In 1986 you made a record that I loved, Eric "Roscoe" Ambel's Roscoe's Gang record. That was Roscoe, as well as pieces of The Morells and The Skeletons?
It was us. It was Ron from The Morells, myself, Donnie Thompson, and Joe Terry who joined The Morells in the last half of the band — that was Roscoe's Gang. We cut a couple songs and brought in some guest artists. You'd almost have to have been there, but it was a scene. We were nuts! We were crazy. We were single; we were doing the best we could with what we had, thinking that we knew everything.
A little later you did the Jonathan Richman record, Jonathan Goes Country.
It was a good little record. That was on Rounder Records. I met Jonathan on the road, and we built up a fast friendship. He wanted to come and record a record; Donnie Thompson and I both produced that together. We did that here, utilizing our crew in the studio.
Around this time I slid into working at Column One. I think I hung out a lot.
