You grew up in Missouri. We had an interview with Lou Whitney in issue #98. I know you were in different cities, I think...
I knew those guys, and they were my heroes, but they were just a lot older than me. When The Morells played their last show in 1984 I would have been 15 or 16 years old, and I was standing outside the club, on my tiptoes peering in the windows, watching them play their last show. I wound up getting the set list from their last show. Those guys were a huge influence, but they were also kind of these scary older guys to me. I think it was in 1990 that the Untamed Youth actually recorded a record at Lou Whitney's.
Column One?
Yeah, with their drummer, Bobby Lloyd Hicks. He played drums for us, because our drummer had just quit. We actually got Donnie Thompson to play second guitar on a song with me. I idolized those guys.
Lou seemed like — minded.
Definitely. When I was 15, or maybe 16, The Morells had broken up and they had a spin — off band called Maralie and Her Boys. It was Lou's wife Maralie on keyboard. They asked me to join the band while I was still in high school. I went down to Springfield for a week and rehearsed with her and a couple of other guys. She took me by Lou's place, and it was so funny, because I idolized Lou Whitney. He said, "Let me give you the best advice I could possibly give you. Get out of the music business now, while you still can!"
That shows up in his interview, too. "Become a lawyer. Do anything else."
At the time I was like, "Wow, man that guy's really cynical." Now here I am at 45 years old, probably the same age he was when he told me that, and I'm like, "That was probably the best advice I ever got."
I think you're sort of a brand, and people recognize that if you're presenting a show, or putting together a band, or your name's listed, there's something identifiable. I think that people who follow that support it, too.
Absolutely. I think a lot of (for lack of a better term) cult musicians build up that brand over time. You just have to make sure that if you attach your brand to something, you're going to deliver what people are expecting, and it's not going to suck.
Do you ever feel it's limited? I imagine that any musician's taste is wider than what the artist expects of them. Do you feel like sometimes you'd like to do completely different stuff?
Well, I feel like I do. I feel like I challenge my audience to like different things. Actually when you listen to this EP I did with Nikki Hill [Soul Meets Country!], it's like a soul — funk record. I was worried that a lot of the rockabilly people wouldn't get into it, but luckily Nikki Hill has really kind of blown up over the last year, and people love her. It's mostly been really positive feedback on it. I'm more interested in doing stuff that interests me. I guess if there's a comparison, it would sort of be Neil Young, a guy who does all these weird projects and sort of invites the audience to follow along with him. It's like, "Hey man, if you like me, then you should like this. If you don't, give it a couple of listens, and I bet you will like it." It's sort of a different career path than like The Ramones, who did 31 albums of the exact same sound.
feel like anybody worth their salt's going to be drawing a bunch of different genres and styles.
I sort of get identified as a rockabilly guy, but it's funny because rockabilly is just a tiny slice of what I do. But once you get the tattoo of rockabilly on your career, it's like you can never shake it. I've done all these different projects, and I could do an avant — garde experimental record, but people would still call me rockabilly. I just roll with it. A lot of people who pigeonhole people are like the least knowledgeable ones. My favorite example of that was when I did this record with Biller and Wakefield, this steel guitar combo. They were just fantastic sort of Western swing/jazz musicians. I recorded six songs with them, just straight live — to — mono tape. It was great. It sounded like a 1952 recording. They were going to do a record on HighTone, and the guy from HighTone records said, "Look, the playing is great on this, but I can't put out a mono record. You have to put out a stereo record." I said, "Okay, well if we're going to get an advance, I'll record this record in stereo for you." Basically what I did was the exact same recording, using RCA ribbon mics and everything else. I just recorded it to stereo with stuff slightly panned. When I played it for him, he's like, "No, this sounds old! I need it to sound stereo!" To him, the term stereo meant new, radio — friendly, modern. I was like, "Oh, I thought stereo meant that there's stuff in the left and the right speaker that's different." Yeah, the people who always want to pigeonhole you as retro or whatever usually know so little about what it is they're putting down.
Have you ever had to take someone who's been making records for a long time and convince them to try to make them the way that they were made in the old days?
