| |
Frank Marino
Interviewed by Bruce Stringer
|
|
 |
|
Interview With Frank Marino from 2002
|
|
|
|
|
| MSJ: What sort of things are you recording at the moment? |
|
I'm just editing and finishing this live record that was supposed to come out last year. We did it at the end of 2001 and I ended up sitting with it for so long and I ended up getting side tracked with a bunch of other things. Now I've finally got to finish it and get it out there. It's a 2-CD - it was actually 3-CDs, it was much too long. I don't think too many people are going to want to buy a 3 CD show. So I managed to cut it down to two 80-minute CDs and it's pretty packed full of stuff and maybe I only lost about six, maybe seven tunes… My tunes are pretty long. It's pretty good: I haven't done a live album in a long time and I think it's way better than the other two live albums I'd done in the past. I'm really surprised about how good it was, 'cause you know we record everything we do and then when I get home from the road I basically end up with all these hard-drives that I have to sit down and look at. I've got, like, about forty of them! So we were going through them one day and I managed to capture this show from Montreal. It was actually the ending show of a tour that we had done, and I went wow! It actually sounded really good and we played well and stuff. So I said that sounds like something I could do something with and I started working on it and it ended up taking a really long time, because we had to cut it down yet still make it flow like it really happened that way, you know?
It's jam sessions - it's really hard to cut down jam session, because it's not like a song where you can cut it at a chorus or verse…
|
|
| MSJ: To splice it at a natural point of change. |
|
| Yeah, so I'm doing all the edits on it to finally get it to sound really real and flow really nicely and change the song order around and then it's ready to go. So then we can finally get it out there - we should have had it out there a long time ago, Bruce! There's a guy here from Justin Time that's been after this for a year and I really should have got it to him a long time ago. Better late than never! |
|
| MSJ: True and it's always good to look forward to these things: build up a bit of momentum with the fans towards the release. |
|
| Yeah. I think people will like it. We play pretty good, you know - the playing is pretty good on it, but I like going through most of it because it sounds really, really… It sounds better than most of the other ones. I don't know why, it just sounds really good from a sonic point of view. |
|
| MSJ: Obviously a good mix, good acoustics, good playing… |
|
It was just like everything just worked, it was magical. The guitar sounds very round and warm and doesn't have that… Usually live records have that board-tape sound that ends up sounding too raw, you know? We had a nice guitar sound, the drums sound very high fidelity. The vocals are really good - which is unusual for me! (Laughs) It was pretty magical!
We didn't know we were making an album: it was just a show, we were just recording a show. There are jams on there that are twenty-eight minutes long and they're not just single tunes: they're medleys. So there might be one tune that goes for sixteen minutes long that then goes into a medley of jamming.
|
|
| MSJ: Of course that's where the problem: is picking out points to splice between |
|
| Actually, I've gotta tell you I think this is the best editing I ever did in my whole life. You wouldn't believe how many edits there are on this record. The bad thing about having this kind of a long, jamming show is that none of it will ever get played on the radio. I can't imagine what they'd play because the songs are all so long. |
|
| MSJ: Then again, what about internet-radio stations? |
|
| Do they play things that long? |
|
| MSJ: Maybe not, but the market seems to be moving away from three and a half minute pop songs. |
|
| Right, yeah. The other thing is that no two shows are ever alike and no two songs are ever alike. Every show is always different so it's a question of getting that magical night where that particular tune was a good version. The songs that I ended up cutting out of the show are the songs that ended up sort of the same. Four, or five of those tunes appeared on other live albums and I didn't feel like putting them on again so I included most of the songs that I've never recorded live. So it's pretty fresh stuff with the exception of one song nothing on the record has ever been recorded before on a live record. |
|
| MSJ: So this could be a kind of 'part three' of live through the years?. |
|
| Yes, it's definitely very different from the other two live records, it's not as… The first live record is twenty-two minutes a side, it's a vinyl LP and it's all on 'ten' the whole time - it's all high, high energy. The second live record was a little bit longer to do as a double vinyl album, but I never liked the sound of that record you know I always thought it sounded tinny and harsh. This one has a lot more hypnotic moments, more of the psychedelia stuff: more of the spacey… It's got the rock'n'roll and everything but it's more head-space and that's why I like it. It sounds really good. I am in fact doing it as we speak. I've got a real pile of work - I'll tell you that. It's unbelievably detailed. I never thought it would be that detailed, but I guess the more you have tools the to be able to do these things the more you find things to do with them, right? |
|
| MSJ: True |
|
| I guess they say, "work expands to fill the time available". |
|
| MSJ: And sometimes the time unavailable! |
|
| Right! It's coming along pretty good and it's at the point where I could finish it right now, it's pretty ready. But I'm always finding these little details and I never really want to commit to actually mixing, you know. I think oh, I'll fix this or I'll fix that. That type of thing, you know. And it's all stuff that's not really audible it's more technical in nature. I'm at the point where I'm fixing stuff with peaks and distortions and levels, stuff with mastering. I've got to put it away sometime, you know? |
|
| MSJ: How many tracks are you using per song? |
|
Well, in a live situation not that many, I think maybe I've only got something like twenty-two because basically we don't have overdubs. And we're not a big vocal band, so we don't have a lot of vocal mic's. We've got the guitar on 2 mic's, the rhythm guitar one 1 mic - so that's 3, and we've got a set of drums which is probably about 16… 12 to 16 tracks. We've got some room mic's and there's some bass and vocals and crowd. It really comes out to about 22 tracks in all.
The problem with cutting live music - as opposed to cutting studio music - is that in studio music you often edit according to what is necessarily musically pleasing. Live sometimes what's musically pleasing you are not able to edit it, because every time you edit, let's say a chorus or something like that or you take out a solo or something, the pieces that you put back together… The room is different, the background room is different like there's a different ambience in it at that point 'cause maybe a snare drum or a kick drum previous to what you had cut out had energised the room unto a reverberant sort of way. So when you cut that together you hear all this reverb that just comes out of nowhere, or you hear the wrong note tailing off. In a hall I might play an E note and musically I could see that I could go from this E chord to this G chord, which happens a minute later and musically that works. But when you put it together and you've got the hall, you've got this E chord ringing out where you want to cut it so you really have to really pay attention to not just the decision of what works musically but what's technically possible. Often I'm the type of person who if it doesn't seem technically possible I'll try and find a way to make it technically possible, because I'd rather go for the musical edit than for the 'what's technically possible edit'. What ends up happening, to give you an example, is that I'm looking at a solo that I played that was maybe 18 minutes on stage and I want it to be 12. I'm going to naturally want to cut out certain parts and I find this very nice musical way of doing it, but I have that problem where a note is holding over in the background. What that means is I have to go and find another part of the show where I'd played the right note and cut all 20 tracks - not just the guitar - across the room and paste that whole moment… That little moment where that note tails-off properly to the other one so that the reverb tails-off properly and then you have to create a cross-fade at every little joint. This is what takes time. I've got over 30,000 edits in this record, because it was a 4 hour show that's brought down to 2 CDs. And it's not like I'm just cutting out whole songs - I am cutting out whole songs, but there's maybe 6, 7 or 8 songs that aren't on the record. But in taking out those songs, now you find out that the order of the show doesn't work. For instance we might've played The Answer followed by Dragon Fly followed by Red House and now when I take out The Answer and Dragon Fly Red House has to join up to (let's say) S***** of the Hero it doesn't work. The crowd doesn't work, the volume is different so back to the drawing board and we say "okay let's put Red House second" and now you've changed entirely the structure of the background. Again you're back into this 20-track split where you have to cut across all 20, find the right note, stick it in, blend it, smear it and it works properly. This is the kind of work that I'm doing on this and I didn't think it would be that hard to do: I thought it would be a lot more straightforward.
To give you an example of why I've got so many edits in this particular show… You know, being a good editor is like being a good spy: you never get good credit for your work (Laughs). If you do it right nobody knows that you did it. In this particular show it's turned out to be a really good show. The hard-disk recorder had been left on throughout the sound-check and nobody realised it. For hours this thing was on just eating up hard drive space doing nothing and by the time we got to the show we play our show and consequently we ran out of hard-disk space in the last 7 minutes of the show. When I listened to the last song, which is the song I definitely wanted to have on the record… It's the end of the show and it's a different ending - very different from what we usually do: we happened to do a different ending that night. I really wanted to have this, but the song cuts off halfway through the song. It just stops!
The guys said to me "let's just can the song, throw it out and end with one of the other ones". But I really didn't want to do that and I said to myself "well, let's try to re-build the tune". It wasn't a question of putting our gear back together and playing it again - that's absolutely impossible. You'd have to hire the hall, you'd have to mic it the same way, you'd have to have everything the same in order to put it back together and you can't do that. So what I did was, I had this idea… I went out on my web site and asked the fans who were at the show if anyone had a bootleg copy of the show and a few people did. I asked if they would send me that and a fan sent me a cassette of a bootleg that he'd done of the show. What I did was I laid down the 2-track of the bootleg from the point where the show had cut-off on the hard drive. Now I had a guide of what we actually played, but it sounds like hell 'cause it's a cassette copy done under a guy's coat! Then what I did was probably the most ambitious thing I'd ever done in my life: I decided that I was going to grab snippets of the show and rebuild the ending. In other words I learned on a bar by bar basis, I memorised what we played. I did it 1 bar at a time. Bass player, Peter thought I was nuts. He said "it could never work" and I said "well, let's try it - we've got nothing to lose. Let's see if we can build 1 bar and if we can build 1 bar we can build 2 bars, right?" I sorted it all down to like a little checkerboard and said "okay in this bar I played 2 E's and a G". Now I went "and the drums did this and the snare did that and the hi-hat did this…" So we went into the show, found a strip of 20 tracks that included an E, another one that included a G and basically put it all back together again. If you hear it - and you will hear it, one day - it's unbelievably like the real show! I mean, it's unbelievably excellently perfect, it's exactly what we played. Peter had suggested that we just lay down the rhythm track and we can just play over that and I said "for the people that were at the show, that won't be what we really played that night and some will notice. Somebody's got a bootleg somewhere, obviously you got it from a kid, right?" So I really wanted it to be exactly what we played at the show and I mean exactly!
I basically did this bar by bar thing until I had completed something like 98 or 99 bars of missing music and I basically rebuilt the entire ending. When you hear it you are guaranteed you will not - you will not - notice that it was put back together like this, it's really been re-assembled. That's what I mean about being an editor and not getting any credit for the work.
|
|
| MSJ: That's incredible! |
|
It is incredible: the people that saw it happen have told me that I really ought to put this in for some kind of award for editors. I said, "well, how would I do that? They'd have had to sit there and see me do it - and I've done it for a year that I've been working on it!"
So, it's done now. It's ready and it's identical… the weird thing about it though, Bruce, is that when it goes by it's like yeah great, that's what the band played. It's not like were playing this fantastic stuff, you're not going to be amazed at it because it's exactly what you'd expect to hear. It's the song. But it's a sound conversion of the tune and it's exactly like the bootleg.
That's the real feather in my cap for that, but I don't think I'd ever do it again. It was one of those things where I just wanted to see if we could do it and I did and it really worked.
|
|
| MSJ: I suppose it could be considered the audio equivalent of the digital film editing of Brandon Lee's parts in the Crow after his passing. |
|
| Yes, exactly! It is the audio version of that. |
|
| MSJ: I actually wanted to ask how: impressed are you by new recording technologies? |
|
There are 2 sides to that question. From an editing standpoint it's absolutely fabulous, the new technology. But from the recording standpoint it's not even close to analog and so many people believe that digital is better. And it is not better - trust me! There's a thousand reasons why digital recording is completely wrong in terms of trying to capture something that happened. A digital recording is basically a series of audio pictures, like a still movie where the digital recorder is taking little snapshots every 44,000th of a second. But the thing is, it can't really understand between the first 44,000th of a second and the next 44,000th of a second, and the next 44,000th of a second. A lot of things happen between those 2 thousandths of a second, so the digital devices try to imitate what they assume - it's called interpolation - what they assume might have happened to the sign wave between those 2 moments. It's much the same as if you look on a graphics program on a computer: when you zoom way in it becomes pixellated. This is what happens to the audio. It's very pixellated, but it's resolved to such a high resolution that it appears not to be. But it is! An analog recording is not pixellated at all. An analog recording is, for instance - if you look at one shot of film rather than a drawing on a computer screen, you could zoom in a thousand times and still have the proper curve on it. It's an actual vector image rather than a bit-map image.
A digital recording uses this weird technology to try to mimic what reality is but it can never do that because it is done in a stop-motion manner. Until they get those 44,000th's of a second up to 2,000,000th's of a second it's never going to approach the actual recording in analog.
|
|
| MSJ: I remember the original CD releases many years back where the mastering just couldn't capture the sound. |
|
It doesn't because it spits it out, Bruce. It strips all the interesting parts out. I'll give you one quick example. Lets' say a guy tells you…. I don't know how much you know about digital recording. When we record at 44.1 kHz, or 48 kHz the reason they pick those numbers is because they're saying that (- because of the stop-motion thing), if you take a picture every 44,000th's of a second the only thing you can miss is the halfway point in-between them. That would be 22,000th's, okay? So in other words, the sampling rate of 44,000th's is double the actual audio frequency. They make it double so that they'll capture the highest possible frequency of 22,000th's. If you didn't go that high it would be possible for 22 to slip by you while you're taking pictures of, let's say 38. So something slips by and doesn't get photographed and they figure that the human hearing goes up to 22,000 cycles, 22k. Actually, it really goes up to 16, but they are saying that at 22k nobody can hear above that so let's capture everything up to 22k and therefore we'll be capturing all the sound.
In a sense, that's true, but here's where the problem comes in… Do you play guitar?
|
|
| MSJ: I do. |
|
| Okay, you're aware that if you want to tune your E-string, your open high E-string, to the B-string below it you can press on the 5th fret of the B-string and play both strings and tune one of them until they are perfectly in pitch. When they're not in pitch, if you de-tune one of them slightly what do you hear? |
|
| MSJ: Waves oscillating. |
|
You hear a beating, right? Oscillation. That oscillation can be described as a low frequency because it's frequently happening every, let's say second. Now E is way above 440 Hz - A is 440 Hz, right? So, the E-string is…actually it's a little below… It's about 400 Hz. The proper E is oscillating 400 time a second, yet it's possible to have 2 E's and create a third frequency at 1Hz or even 10 Hz. So the addition of 2 high frequencies when placed close to one another but slightly out of tune create a low frequency that wasn't there in the first place. So, yes - we don't hear above 22 kHz, but the things that happen above 22 kHz create low frequency oscillations that we do hear and those oscillations colour the overall sound. So if we only take pictures and were missing everything above 22 kHz - missing 23, 24, 25, 26… all the oscillations created by all of those high frequencies in the low register, due to their harmonic distortion, will not be there.
The listener will listen to the music and say well, it doesn't sound real. It sounds harsh. What he's really telling you is that his mind knows that there are missing frequencies. His ears can't really know that, but his mind picks up on that. Therefore he describes it in terms of harsh, or cold or blue or yellow or whatever…and this is the problem with digital recording. They're very limited as to what they're taking in, so the short answer to the question is: I absolutely detest digital recording but we couldn't possibly do the editing that we do without digital recording. That is where it really comes in handy!
What I've done is assembled a sort of hybrid system for myself which I use my analog desk (-which was owned by a band called 10cc, by the way), my Studer tape machines. I record on those instruments, but always end up transferring the whole thing over to digital to do my editing and then I master it to CD. That's the part it gets killed the most, when it gets mastered to CD because at that point it gets brought down from very high resolution to a quite lousy one. But we all have to do that, what can we do? It's a far cry better than vinyl.
The ultimate would be if we could give everybody on a ½ inch tape at 30-inches per second they'd be able to hear what it was that we really recorded. Since we're all in the same boat we live with what we have.
|
|
| MSJ: It's back to that whole thing where the old Beatles records have that warmth and clarity, but when you hear the CD it leaves me cold. |
|
| I'll give you a tip about the Beatles albums, since the Beatles are my favourite band. When I get the Beatles CDs, like One… Every time I have a birthday somebody gets me something by the Beatles 'cause I love the Beatles. What I do is put them on my stereo and put the stereo in mono and all of a sudden all the harmonies go back together again. What they've done on the new Beatles CDs is separate all the voices. They've put Paul on the right and John on the left. The drums are on one side and the bass is on the other side so you get this super separated version of the Beatles and it's of course exactly like when you play guitar. You know that if you take one guitar and play the E major chord, you strum all the strings, it sounds a hell of a lot better different than if you take 6 guitar players and have them all play one note from E major, together. |
|
| MSJ: True. |
|
There's a certain harmonic content that requires the sound to come from one place. So the Beatles harmonies - you know, the major 6's that they use and all these beautiful harmonies and the orchestrations by George Martin - require that they be coming out of the same speaker in order to create the harmonic content that makes it sound magical. Songs like Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane just sound so much better in mono than in stereo and the technical reason is because if you lump them together you get the harmonic content that sounds like a Beatles record.
Try it with your Beatles CDs you'll see a huge difference, that is if you can still find a stereo that allows you to put your speakers in mono -not every stereo has that button anymore. If you can, try it: you'll love it! It gets right back to the Beatles records you used to know!
|
|
| MSJ: I understand that Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush, Rush and Bullrush all played together at one point. Could you tell me how this came about - who's idea it was? |
|
| (Laughs) I don't know! I don't know, but I guess he wasn't the sharpest pencil in the draw! Yeah, that was very early in our career. It was us, Rush and Bullrush and it was weird! |
|
| MSJ: Really? |
|
| Yeah, it was really weird - I wish I still had a picture of that of that marquee: Mahogany Rush, Rush and Bullrush. |
|
| MSJ: It is kind of ironic that when you enter E-Bay and type Rush you get Mahogany Rush and that you guys are all from Canada! |
|
I know, it is totally ironic because we're both Canadian, we come from 2 cities 300 miles apart and I think we named our bands within a month of each other and we never knew them! It wasn't like we ever knew them - we weren't from the same city, or anything… It's just totally… totally weird.
Well, I like to believe that I came up with the word Mahogany Rush before I even had a band, so I may have named my band before Rush named their band. That was in 1968 that I had the idea of the words Mahogany Rush. It had nothing to do with a band. Mahogany Rush was a description of an experience, of a sensation if you want to call it that. I was in a hospital for LSD and it's 1968 and you're trying to talk to a psychiatrist and at that point nobody even knew what the heck LSD was, it had only just come on the scene. So your explaining things to a psychiatrist and the only way I can describe it is like a Mahogany Rush, 'cause I was trying to describe an experience. So I became known, in the little town that I was in, as that crazy kid that talks about his Mahogany Rush all the time.
Later on in '70 - '71 when I had become a musician and I had a band, well what was I going to call it? Mahogany Rush - that's all I ever talked about for 2 years. I don't know when Rush really started or when they decided to name their band Rush.
|
|
| MSJ: Did you ever experience spirituality through the LSD experience, like so many others? |
|
No. In the early to mid-'70's when the band came out doing psychedelic music rumours were around about how I started. There were a few magazines, notably Creem and Circus, who wrote tongue-in-cheek stories about this spiritual connection to Jimi Hendrix and going to a hospital, waking up the next day and being visited by spirits and all that kind of stuff! It was just a really ridiculous thing that they wrote. I was next exactly the kind of person they would look up and ask the question to, so consequentially one magazine… I was in Montreal, Canada. In those days you couldn't get arrested if you were from Montreal, Canada. It was like "okay, we heard about this young kid who did this thing", so they'd write these stories about it and no-one ever called me to ask if it was true. Then the stories started to get picked up by other magazines and then it ballooned into this ridiculous legend. That was my only connection between my LSD and what they called spirituality!
However, yes I did get very deeply into spiritual matters but it had nothing to do with the fact that I was in a band or… I wasn't marrying the two, so to speak. I got deeply into spiritual matters to try to save my life, the same reason I got into music. I got into playing music to keep my mind off the LSD trip. It was like a therapy: the longer I would sit with the guitar and play it the less time I would have to think about this horrible acid trip. So that became therapy. Since I couldn't be playing guitar all the time, 24 hours a day I had to do something else not to think about that experience. So what I did was start getting into was very deep spiritual matters and that was really a means of trying to save my sanity and save my life. That wasn't intended to be something that was tied to the band. A lot of people put bands together with the very idea to play music to be in a band, but that was not what why I played music and that's not why the guys played music with me. Being in a band had nothing to do with it. You know, us hanging around and jamming together was very much the same as kids today going to their friend's house with their computers to play their video games. They don't do that so they can be programmers, they do it just to have fun. So, instead of going to other peoples houses with our video games we would go to other peoples' houses with our guitars. It was just to have the same kind of fun. The band thing came later when people say "hey, why don't you play gigs, or why don't you make records?" People were trying to talk us into it actually and since I was into underground music the last thing I wanted to do was be in a band that was especially commercial. To be signed with a record company was like selling out and eventually we did actually sell out - and the only reason they got me to do it in the first place was that they promised me that I could produce my own records. That's why you see my first album, Maxoom, says produced by Frank Marino. I was only 16 years old.
|
|
| MSJ: Which is an incredible feat for someone at that age. |
|
It's because I really, genuinely and truly did not want to do it. Genuinely! I mean, they pursued me for months and they kept coming to the room where we jammed and practised and said "come on, we're gonna make a record, you're gonna make a 45 (- In those days they made 45 RPM singles) and blah, blah, blah". And all I would say to them was "no way, go away, close the door, kick them out". Everything I could to make them go away. So they got together with all the people that knew me and said "what's it gonna take to get this guy to make a record, 'cause he just won't do it?" And they said "he's very, very afraid that what you want to do is commercialise him - he's very much a believer in non-commerciality. So maybe if you approach him and turn him loose in a recording studio and tell him 'hey, we're gonna put you in this place with a lot of toys and just record whatever you want' then maybe he'll do it".
And that's exactly what they did do and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I didn't realise that by agreeing to that I was inextricably being pulled into the contract situation and I'd have to make more records and they'd steal all the money… and everything started from there. Had I to do it all over again, Bruce, I would never, never sign that first contract. I'd just stay in my practise space and play for fun and I tell a lot of budding artists today that get on my webpage and ask me how do we do this and how do we make that happen? I tell them "guys, the first thing you've gotta do is forget about the celebrity thing, just try to be a little anti-celebrity. Try to do it for the fact that you like it, otherwise you're gonna go down the wrong path and that's how you end up being one of those bands with the spandex and the big hair, chasing after the next fad." (Laughs)
I guess in some ways I was a 60's rebel: I really didn't want anything to do with the business side of it and I still don't.
|
|
| MSJ: Is that why you had such a long time away from the music industry? |
|
Oh, definitely! When I left the industry in 1993 I just went home, it wasn't a question of 'farewell and let's see what I can get out of this'. I said to my wife (- I'd been with her since '80) "you know, let's just go home". I really hadn't liked the business… I'd never liked the business! Particularly didn't like it between 1980 and 1993, when I quit. I'd been trying to have fun at it again, but I couldn't. I didn't like it, I kept doing it and I kept not liking it. So I just went home. Put the music away and I started a computer company and I started building computers to live.
In 1997, or something, I saw this website… '96 or '97. I saw this website that Willy Parsons had put together. I didn't know him - I was actually on the internet which was a very new thing, researching my family tree. My father comes from Sicily and he never knew his family and when I told him "Dad, there's this new thing called the internet - you can find anyone in the world!" After Windows 95 came out, he said "Could you find my family?" I thought 'well, why not give it a try?' So I went into these things could search engines and I put in the name Marino to search for my Dad's family tree and that's when I saw Frank Marino. I thought 'what's my name doing on here?'
So I started searching and I found this webpage that Willy Parsons had put together and it looked so official! And he had so many fans on. I wrote him a letter asking him why he did it, thanking him for having done it and he asked me if I would come on and do a chat. I didn't even know what a chat was! So, I did it and I started to become friends with these fans and I had been tinkering around having recorded Eye Of The Storm, but I never planned to put it out. It was just recorded for me.
I started streaming it to the people in the chat room and asked what they thought of this or that. I let them hear it live over the NSM system and they said "we love it, can you send me a copy?" Then one thing led to another and they kept asking me to put this record out so I finished the record and put it out only on the page, at first. Then a guy from Just In Time asked if they could put it out on their label and then it was like "will you do 1 gig?"
That year, '98 I think it was, we got back together to do 1 gig. I hadn't seen the guys from the band since '93 - we got together at the gig! It was 5 years later. We literally said "hey, how you been?" got on stage and the show, which was in Ottawa. The next year we did 2 gigs, then the next was 6 gigs…This year (2002) I did what? 10 or 12 in America and then I went and did that thing with Uli (Jon Roth).
|
|
| MSJ: The Legends of Rock shows. |
|
| Yes. Now, people are asking what I'm going to be doing next year (2003), but quite honestly I have no idea what I'm gonna do. I don't have any plans. If promoters call me up and ask if I want to play I'll say yes, sure - especially if it's in Europe. |
|
| MSJ: Do you ever view people like yourself as the role models in music? |
|
Well, I come from a time when music was practised by people who had something to say. We had poets, we had minstrels, we had musicians, we had coffee houses with folk singers - you don't see that anymore. We had festivals of musicians that were like a potpourri - everything was different. You look at a rock festival today and you can't find 2 bands different - then, you couldn't find 2 bands the same! Everything was different but underlying the whole thing was an idealistic mentality that it was the young people with a better idea than the old people…That better idea was Live and Let Live. It wasn't a new idea, it was just the first time people were willing to try it and they got beaten up for it, baton-ed for it. At Kent State (University) they got killed for it: they marched against a war in a country called Vietnam that they'd never even heard of, or seen! They weren't marching for Vietnam they were marching for peace wherever it should happen.
That's the generation that I come from and that shaped my mentality greatly. When I say I'm too old, I mean I'm too old to march! (Laughs) I'm too old to go out and march to stuff like that, but I'm not too old to think it!
|
|
| MSJ: This interview is available in book format (hardcover and paperback) in Music Street Journal: 2002 Year Book Volume 3 at garyhillauthor.com/Music-Street-Journal-2001-and-2002. |
|
|
|
 You'll find concert pics of this artist in the Music Street Journal members area. |
|
|
|
|
|
