DC = David Campbell / GC = Gary Custer / September 2012

 

DC: I was born in Colorado. I was raised here in OR. My family came from a little town north of here called Cornelius—that’s my family name. It’s—he was the—Colonel Cornelius—Thomas Cornelius was the man that actually went after the Indians that killed the Whitmans in the Whitman Massacre, he and his group went after them, found them, had them tried and hung [sic] them. He’s famous for being the person that basically brought that whole area into peace. And he was also in the legislature, he was this, he was that, and he was just one of the founders of the country. My family moved out here between 1842 and 1852, and we’ve been founded in the Tualatin Valley ever since, and we’ve spread all over the country. That’s just a small part of the history; if I went on longer we could be here all year.

 

GC: Interesting.

DC: Let’s see, anyway, let’s see. I was born in Colorado, my mother was moving back here from Germany after WWII. Moved out here two weeks later—I was born in Aurora, CO, came out here two weeks later and been here every since. I worked all over that whole area and ended up working at Tektronix. And from Tektronix I took a chance and applied for a job at HP, didn’t even know it was down here, got the interview, came down, did the interview, got hired, moved the whole family down a few months later. Been here since 1981.

 

GC: Your family’s—

DC: We’re established. We live out in the mountains; we’ve lived out in the mountains since we moved here. And it’s just been one of those really nice things. We came from a small town; we moved to a small town. And we only moved 100 miles south of where we both—my wife was born in Hillsboro—and we both just moved 100 miles south of our hometowns.

 

GC: So other than music, what’s been your life?

DC: My family. I’ve totally thrown myself into my family. My kids love life. I spent a lot of time growing up with them. And I’d say I’m growing up because I was a young dad, so I was growing up the same time my kids were growing up. My oldest one is turning 40 this year, and my youngest one is 37, so when my kids are growing up with a dad who’s running rock ’n’ roll, they’re just excited. So they’re involved, I’m involved. And when they were old enough and did everything they were doing and were moving on with their lives, they got involved into what I was doing after I left HP and got into coffee, and they became a part of that as well.

 

GC: Are they musically inclined?

DC: I would say they are, but they tend to play their radios more than anything. They love music; they both do. My daughter dances. My son just does his thing and enjoys it; he does all the mixing and things. He’s more—he can play drums like I can. My daughter can a little bit. They both play other instruments.

 

GC: How about yourself? Do you play any other—

DC: Not really as well as all the other guys. I can bang on a guitar. I really have a nice pre-1960 Martin. We used to have pianos. I can’t really play piano; I can take on and figure everything out, but I’m more of a drummer, singer. I’ve been doing lead singing for—since I was 17, 18.

 

GC: I’ve enjoyed your voice every time I came. Very much so.

DC: Well, thank you. I don’t like my voice. (laughs)

 

GC: Well, it’s a great ‘60s voice.

DC: It’s a ‘60s voice; it really is a ‘60s voice. I have a tendency to set my [indistinct] in a microphone and belt it. I’ve always been able to do that; I used to be in a boy’s choir, things like that. I don’t mind it at all. But thank you.

 

GC: What was your first experience with music, that you remember?

DC: There’s a group out here up in Washington County, it’s called Johnny Limbo and Lugnuts; one of their original band members, Dave White, he and I were in my very first band together. And that was way back in 6th, 7th grade, somewhere in there. And we were playing and the band broke up and we all went our own ways, he went to Hillsboro (OR) and I and the rest of us went to Forest Grove, OR and right in there I was playing with anybody who wanted to play, just playing drums back in the early ‘60s. And I got a phone call one night from this guy from somewhere—I can’t remember, Portland I think, and he said, “Hey, do you know this guy?” And I said “Yeah, I went to school with him. And he said, “Well, he can’t make it for this gig on New Year’s, but we’re willing to pay you $100 to come out and play.” And I said “Okay, where’s it at?” And he told me, and I went “oh my God.” (laughs) Forest Grove was twice as big as this when I was a boy. And I don’t know if you know anything about Buxton or Vernonia, but Buxton is here, Forest Grove is here, and in between is Vernonia. And Vernonia was . . . deliverance. (laughs)

 

GC: Understood.

DC: Understood. Anyway, there was a bar out there, and I’d been hired to go out there and play the bar. Well, my parents had to take me out because I didn’t drive—I was too young. and they had to pick me up. Well, I could only go in and play, and then I had to leave every set; I had to go back out into the restaurant. But I got hired to play for the start on New Years.

 

GC: That must have been exciting, though.

DC: I was the only one they’d ever met, in all the years that these guys had played, who knew how to play Wipe Out.  (laughs)  I’m only like 12 or 13, so I’m going oh my God; you know, I was young, I was 12 or 13.

 

GC: It sounds like the music of your youth is pretty much the music that you’re playing, in a sense. Or has it changed dramatically?

DC: It’s changed dramatically, in a lot of ways. I notice like if you were to come out to hear our playing on Wednesday nights now, at Dixie Creek, it’s going backwards—I’m going backwards to the blues. And the blues have always been pretty much the same. It doesn’t matter what generation you’re in; if you listen to the blues, no matter what level it’s at, what tempo it’s at; it can go from generation to generation the same. If you listen to Clapton over the years, playing the blues, it’s the same. And it’s just this quality sound. I’ve never been into the blues, but I—when I went out there and droned this, I went backwards and became part of the relearning situation. And—‘cause I’ve always, for the last 15, 20 years I’ve been writing all my own music. Myself and this other guy write all our own music, we played it, we didn’t do anybody else's music; we just did ours and ours alone. So for awhile I was writing nothing but fusion. Did that for 15, 20 years.

 

GC: Was this always a secondary part of your life? Or was it—were you making it as a musician?

DC: I tried to make it as a musician a little bit after high school.

 

GC: Were you a starving artist?

DC: No, actually, it was pretty good. I always had jobs in sight; I always knew I had to have a day job. I paid attention to something I’d seen a long time ago in the ‘60s, when Dave Clark 5 came out. Dave Clark 5 had said in one of their articles, they asked him, so how much bigger do you think you guys are going to get? And Dave Clark made the comment, “We don’t know, but we retained our day jobs just in case.” (laughs)

 

GC: Smart man.

DC: And I thought “Smart man!” (laughs)

 

GC: Do you remember the first song you ever played?

DC: Yeah, yeah. It was a country tune. And I believe Cheating Heart was the first time I ever played in front of a crowd, it was the first song I ever played. I probably can’t remember that again; you just happened to catch me at the right moment. (laughs)

 

GC: That was a great break-in.  So you consider yourself a professional musician, I guess, is—?

DC: Yeah. Since I was about 12.

 

GC: Since you were about 12. Okay. Who was your greatest supporter coming up? Or was there little or no support—was this all on your own?

DC: Umm. My parents were my biggest supporters. They bought me my first drum set for Christmas, because the teacher at grade school says “Do something! He pounds on everything!” And it was true. I didn’t realize it, but it turns out it was true. So they bought me a Radio King set of Slingerlands, which are now antiques that I have put away. And that was the first set I ever had; it was a jazz set. So I learned how to play on those. My parents were always my biggest supporters for years and years. My wife and my children are now my largest supporters. Anytime it’s music, they’re right there with me. My wife knows that if I don’t play music somewhere someplace, she knows I’ll go nuts.

 

GC: How do you relax?

DC: (laughs) I relax by . . . fishing. I relax by reading; I love to read. I like to fish and I like to read. I can sit and listen to music for hours. If you pair a set of headphones on me with the right music—I love Vivaldi, like the Four Seasons? I can sit and listen to Vivaldi all day. You could play the Four Seasons over and over and over and over. I would never get tired of it. Same with Beethoven—I love Beethoven, I love Bach. Rachmaninoff, Puccini every once in a while—I have to have a little bit of light opera in there—I love the Marriage of Figaro. Now for a hard rocker that came out of the ‘60s to sit here and discuss that, that’s pretty cool.

 

GC: Yeah. I was once impressed that Chet Atkins, said he practices by playing classical guitar.

DC: I love it. Absolutely love it. One of my favorite classical guitarists, believe it or not, was Jesse Cook, he plays a cross between—he’s a flamenco guitar, so he plays Latin and Arabian. And you listen to any of his albums, and they’re just like—holy mackerel. And he has this huge band line; just go to Jesse Cook on YouTube, and pull up—what’s a good one? Closer to Madness. (Aside: I watched this and it is awesum) And just listen and watch. And you’ll find the live version from Montreal or the cut on the album and either one’s good.

 

GC: I saw Segovia in concert once.

DC: Segovia just made me melt, watching him.

 

GC: Yes. He was amazing. This man, at the time—and here’s where I’m going to rattle on for a minute—just to give you a breather.

DC: That’s okay!

 

GC: He was in his 80s, early 80s, and I thought, I’m never going to get a chance to see this guy again. And I went to the concert hall of our symphony in St Louis, Missouri, at the time. And it’s a huge stage—it’s a symphony—but he’s doing a solo act. He came out and he was just, shuffling, people were standing up and applauding, and about halfway everyone stopped applauding a little bit, and then they start applauding again, but he still had not gotten yet to the chair in the middle of the stage. And then when he starts, it’s like his hands were that of an 18-year-old. It was just phenomenal. Phenomenal. That was an experience.

DC: He is an experience. He is an experience.

 

GC: Yes.

DC: Even though he’s gone, I still think of him when I see things on YouTube of him—to me he is an experience, because if you don’t pay attention to what he did, musically—I don’t care if you’re a drummer, I don’t care if you’re a cellist; if you don’t pay attention to him you don’t understand what it’s all about. It’s like listening to Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky—one of my other favorites—if you don’t listen to those people, you’ll never understand what music really is. So when people tell me “Oh, I don’t listen to that crap,” —“Excuse me? You have no idea what music is. Go to your room.” (laughs)

 

GC: Who influences you now?

DC: Well, my first influence was Sandy Nelson, the drummer. Before that, I would say it was Gene Krupa.  My probably all-time favorite for drummers. Gene Krupa was always a given. I didn’t understand jazz till I got older, and once I found out what it was all about I really got into it. Sandy Nelson was the beginning of my idea of what it was all about. I never did like the Beach Boys, you know I buy a couple of their songs, but I tend to lean towards extremely hard, druggy rock ‘n’ roll. Deep Purple. Jimmy Hendrix. Clapton. Things like that. If you move into the 70s, Eddie Van Halen, those kinds of people. I tend to lean towards hard, driven rock ‘n’ roll. And it’s always been kind of interesting when I did. Because even when I plonked  into discord, I tend to lean towards those with the best musicality.

 

GC: Have there been any strange experiences with weird fans or over exuberant—?

DC: You know, the one I always talk about—there’s several things I’ve done over the years when I’m on stage, and then there’s things that have happened when I’m on stage and I have nothing to do with it.

 

GC: Let’s hear one of each.

DC: There are three. One when I was 18—the band I was in when I was 18, we were a high school band, and we played nothing but colleges. Nothing but. And we were playing at Pacific University, in Forest Grove, one of the few things we were actually back home playing, and we were doing all this stuff, and had flashing lights and blue lights and all the garbagey clothes and weird things you wore back then, and we were doing Eight Miles High, you remember that one? Anyway, back then, drumsticks were not made well. You’d be playing—since it’s hard rock you’d be hitting them hard, which you did because everyone was loud, you’d get about halfway through a song and break a stick and just grab another one. And I had probably ten sticks all the way around my drums and more on the seat just in case something broke. Well, I broke a stick and just flicked it. And I hit somebody. The guy came up on stage after me. And it actually hit him—hit him hard. And I apologized, promised I would never do it again. Never did it again. Just—without thinking just flipped it. And they used to do that in concerts, drummers would break sticks and flip them into the audience and didn’t care who they hit. People would be like “Oh, he hit me in the eye, he put my eye out, I love it!” (laughs)        

         And let’s see, the second one. The other two were after I was married, and I was playing in Portland both times. One was in West Linn and one was in Portland. The first one I was playing in a country group. This guy hired me over the phone because his drummer couldn’t make it, this guy said to try Dave so he called me, he said “Can you fill in?” so I said sure, and he said “what do you play? Okay, just make sure your in tempo,” so I said “I’ll do it,” so we went in and I was in there and this guy had a really nice, expensive Guild hollow body. And these two drunk guys got in a fight out in front of him, ‘cause one guy looked at the other guy’s wife and kinda leered while he was drunk, and this other guy tried to hit him and knocked him right into the guitar player. And one guy went after me, pushed him off, and this other guy went to swing at me, picked up his guitar without thinking and just went WHAM. Belted the guy right over the top of his head. Destroyed the guitar. Also destroyed the evening. Dropped the guy like a stone, and the other guy was trying to get up and he picks up the microphone stand and just literally bends it right over the top of the guy’s head, just drops him, and he looks at the two women and says, “I want every bit of cash in there and if they have credit cards, I want them.” He went out and bought all new equipment, microphones, guitars, everything, and those guys had to pay for it. He had three hundred witnesses. (laughs) They had no choice. And he got himself a new Guild.  I played two more times for him.

            The other time, let’s see, what was that. I was playing for another group that were friends of mine from my hometown, and there’s this one song I’ve been known for doing especially back in my hometown, I’ve been known for doing anytime they want it, I was there to sing it, even if I wasn’t playing drums, I was there to sing it, they always asked. And that’s the rarest version of Get Ready. And I was playing drums. And they asked me to sing it, and they’re at the town hall in Portland. The town hall holds about a thousand people. And this crowd, they were all dancing and cruising. And the drummer—not the drummer, the bass player and I had been in the group in high school together. But I knew the other guys, and he and I knew each other, and we knew what we were going to do. And he turns around to me, comes back and whispers to me, and he says, “Okay, I’m just going to carry it, just get up there and let ‘em have it.” So we just got down and I said “Okay, I’m getting up; everyone’s going to be ready because I’m leaving the drums!” And I got up and ran to the front. And the crew behind me, without even missing a beat, the bass player just kept ‘em going, and they all just quietly went “Get ready, get ready,” and I started dancing back and forth across in the front of the stage and singing the song and telling them they didn’t know how to dance, and I said, “You people really need to learn how to dance,” and there were three people in front of me who really did not know how to dance, and I stopped and said “You guys!” And I started yelling at them. And I said “You dance like this!” and I showed ‘em how to dance started showing them, and everyone’s going, go on, go on… (laughs) I was up there and I sang the whole song, dancing back and forth in front of the crowd, dancing in front of the stage like James Brown a couple of times, got ‘em going, springing and yelling and I said “Now I’m going back,” and I went back toward that place and parked for another few minutes, stopped, and—they didn’t quit screaming for five minutes. (laughs) I heard afterwards, from several people, they said they have never seen anything like that. And I said “That’s because white guys aren’t supposed to know how to dance.”

 

GC: Well, that’s hard to follow.

DC: (laughs) Well, there’s other times. Those are the main three.

 

GC: How do you—do you have any thoughts about file sharing and the way iTunes has been put out?

DC: I think it’s all just moving too fast. My own opinion is that it’s really nice because I like to be able to get the music I like for a reasonable price and also I’m still trying to figure out how in the heck I post music to the web and all that stuff, but I think it’s really cool, because right now if you and I were to land on Facebook, you could go to my site and I’ve posted the gig that we did with the band just the other night, we posted that whole thing on Facebook, and you could sit and listen to each of the songs individually—one of the guys did it—and it’s been really nice. I kind of like all that because you can actually follow what’s going on. But music moves so fast now. And people do something on YouTube and they’re instant stars, and it’s like “okay. . . .” It just moves too fast.

 

GC: Have there been people . . . I’m going to use Eric Clapton’s name because he’s an outstanding, outstanding musician. But have there been people who have the name—like he has the name for being outstanding—who you think just have the name, they don’t have the talent?

DC: There’s a lot of people I can say that about. Yeah, there’s a lot of people. I’ve seen guitar players I wouldn’t give two cents for. But everybody thinks they’re great. Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like this guy. But I saw him live, and when I did, the last time he was in Portland, I was not impressed at all. I thought, the rest of his band was fabulous, what’s wrong with him? And they came out in the paper the next day, in the Oregonian, with a huge headline: “First time band overstars Santana.” And I love Santana. And his band was just like fourteen times what he was on stage that night. He just kept going [drum noises] and I thought, “What the hell kind of a beat is that?”

 

GC: Taking a break for the night.

DC: Yeah. And I thought, “Bring your art on. They want to listen to art.” And right in the middle of the whole thing that night, they had this flamenco guitar in a solid stand, and this stagehand—moves the guitars and things—he walks out at one point and grabs that guitar in his overalls and his hat, and for ten minutes played nothing but flamenco on that guitar. And he was all over that thing. He had the whole place on their feet screaming for this guy. And it’s like—holy mackerel. And the guy walks off, doffs his hat, bows—he was given a standing ovation three times. The band got nothing of what that guy got.

 

GC: That’s phenomenal.

DC: He was amazing. Amazing.

 

GC: Is there someone that you haven’t—that you would like to play with, maybe, dead or alive?

DC: I want to play one song with the Stones. (laughs)

 

GC: With the Stones! Well, there you go; you can’t beat that.

DC: My hero is Charlie Watts. He is the straight-ahead drummer in the world. The man doesn’t do drum solos, he just plays some of the best backup rhythm music there is. He is my hero. Because I don’t like to do drum solos; I’m not technical and I hear guys that are technical, and they’ll turn around and they say “Do a drum solo,” and I say “No. I’m here to play a rhythm; I’m here to back you up and do accents.” So that’s what I do.

 

GC: Is there a difference? Or what would you say is the difference between a technician—a good technical drummer—and an artist?

DC: Charlie Watts is to me the ideal of artistry, when it comes to drums. He can do anything he wants if he wants to. He also plays jazz on the side. So if you listen to his jazz and you listen to his rock, you’re going “oh, I get it.” As far as technical, I would say John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. He was technical.

            Well, my problem is I’ve listened to so much of the good stuff; I’ve listened to jazz over the years, I’ve listened to all the guys—and I forget their names, I really do—and I’ve listened to the guys who have double drums and triplicates, it’s like listening to Get Ready. Pete Rivera is probably one of the most accomplished power drummers anywhere. When you listen to him now, even later and years after all this, and when you see YouTubes of him up to date when he’s doing something, he’s still a power drummer. He’s the monster. And I’ve heard monsters. But I keep coming back to—but I’m the guy who’s sitting over there in that little bar, who wants to get it across to you how good music really is without all the rest of the stuff. So I listen to people like Charlie Watts.

 

GC: It comes across in your group.

DC: It comes across because myself and the bass player are the ones providing all the rest of the background and—I keep saying—accents to make these guys look good and feel good. And make it sound good. That’s my whole goal.

 

GC: Is there somebody currently who you’ve just discovered late in life, who you’ve thought “Wow, where did I miss them?” or somebody brand new, perhaps?

DC: There’s so many guys out there. I mean, seriously, if I was to sit back and say who would I name, I can’t think of anyone. Alex van Halen is an amazing drummer, still. I can’t name any one particular person who I think is better than the other. I have seen monsters that are across the stage in other places. I was in Venice Beach about 4 or 5 years ago with my daughter, and we were walking down through Venice Beach looking for a place to have dinner that night and came across a bar, and honestly and truly I thought it was Cream. And that drummer back there made Ginger Baker look so damn bad. (laughs) And that guitar player was just as good as Eric. And I’ve played with guitar players who are just as good as Eric.

 

GC: You write songs—you write your own songs. Is there a process that you go through all the time, or is it—?

DC: A lot of people sit down and they say they can just pound them out. There’s only been one song that myself and the other guy have ever just pounded out. We were playing with another band back in the ‘90s and he walked in, and he said—he was sitting there, we were just fiddling around as we got started, and he said, “I’ve got this music I’m working on, do you mind if I play it?” and I said sure, and I sat down right against the speaker and Bill Singer was over here, and I’m sitting there listening, and all of a sudden this melody’s in my head, and all of a sudden I grab a piece of paper and start writing words, just like that. And I turn around and say, “Here’s the words, that’ll probably work. And here’s the idea for the melody.” And I said “Sing it.” And an hour later we had our first song, we called it Blues Highlights, it’s our theme song ever since. And then we wrote the one after that—we wrote two more, and then we wrote one that my wife absolutely hated; it’s called Total Capitulation, and the first line is “She demands total capitulation. She expects you to be hers.” And—but it’s a grabby tune, so my wife hated it, told me she wanted to change it, get rid of it, so I said fine; went out and wrote a whole new set of words, still the same idea but not “capitulation.” But I rewrote it. But my general way of doing things is I tend to come up with words, or I’ll be walking around and a certain something will hit me and I’ll start singing something or humming it, and it could take up to a month for me to write a song. We have actually—myself and the other guy—we have actually sat down, pounded out a couple of chords, gone in there, changed the chords in a practice, gotten a semblance of what a song is, and then if I haven’t already got words, then I work out more words as I’m going. My family are writers, so I tend to write words; whereas everyone else writes books, I write music. So I write the words out, he sometimes does music, most of the time, I’ll add to it, take away from it, add to it, maybe change this, let the melody go like this, maybe like that; get an idea, maybe a baseline like this, whatever. And we’ll try it in public. We do it in public. That’s really cool. A month later we’ll change it. It’ll take me a complete month to actually make it solid the way I want it. And I may change it 6, 8 more times, I may change the wording, I may change the melody, it may go a different direction, we may skip the chorus till twenty bars down the road, we may do something else.

 

GC: Sounds like it’s an integral part of your creative—

DC: It is, it is. It’s just the way I do things. Same way if I’m taking one of those apart. I have to figure out what the process is, figure out why I’m tackling it, and then I take it one step at a time.

 

GC: If I said “Music is . . .” how would you complete that sentence?

DC: Completes me.

 

GC: “Makes you feel . . .”?

DC: Whole.

 

GC: Why should we support music?

DC: Live music is the essence of what we are raised with and what we’re born with. If anyone watches a baby, when music comes on, I don’t care if they’re black, red, white, purple, or pink, I do not care, that baby dances. And they dance all the time. And every time you see a baby and there’s music—especially with a hard driving beat, if it’s got drums and it’s got a pump to it, that baby’s just bouncing. I don’t care who they are.

 

GC: That’s great. Why don’t we just end it there.

DC: You can.

 

GC: I just scratched the surface, though. I may come back to you.

DC: Yeah, that’s fine. You just scratched the—you didn’t ask anything about what I did from this point to this point, how I came back to Portland, spent all my time in Portland, I became known in Portland. When I’d left, when I left to move to Hewlett-Packard, I broke up the band, unfortunately, and never found anybody else, and I came down here, and it was hard breaking in the scene here, but the scene here is like—wow. This cup. And nobody could get inside the music scene here, if you from were outside the area.

 

GC: Interesting. So it’s getting better, then, I guess?

DC: It’s still a little tight, but you can get into it now. It took me awhile to get into it, but once I broke into it, someone called me up and said “I heard you’re a drummer,” and I said “You heard I was a drummer?” and he said “Yeah, we don’t know if you are,” and I said “Fine,” and I hung up. (laughs) But I got a call back. And they said “Did you just hang up?” And I said “Yeah, but if you’ve only heard that I’m a drummer, then you don’t need me.”

 

GC: Yeah.

DC: “Oh,” and they said, “So, would $200 entice you to come out and play?” And I said “Depends on what you want.” And I said “Where, when, how long?” and next thing I knew I was in the scene.

 

GC: Fantastic. So, the last time I saw you at—

DC: Imagine

 

GC: Yeah. That was just, that was so comfortable, so good.

DC: Wasn’t that fun?

 

GC: Yeah. I said that to my wife, and she was saying the same thing. You could tell that everyone up there was totally experienced with what they were doing, and just blended. You couldn’t have set some new guy in and he would have stood out like a sore thumb.

DC: Yup, yup. And it’s interesting because the Dixie Creek group, the reason I ended up with them jamming on Wednesday nights, that would be Bill the guy who did most of the singing, I take [indistinct] about that, though. And [indistinct] I really don’t need this scene, and there are so many other scenes, I’d rather be happy with my music, and I don’t need this. And the Vicky Steven scene, which is Calapooia, Vicky Steven blues band scene. So I went to Dixie Creek and Bill had asked me, and I had been there—

            I figure I’ve been playing for—almost fifty years. 2012? Yeah, fifty years. And it’s—I feel that I should be able to walk in anywhere and bring anyone I want into it, and sit down and say, pick your songs, don’t worry about what it sounds like when you get out there, don’t worry about what’s going to happen, don’t make the leads perfect—enjoy yourself. And that’s what we did. That was the first time I’ve ever been in a situation like that.

 

GC: And I think the audience knows that and appreciates it. There weren’t a lot of people in the beginning, but it filled up at the end, with people coming later and later from other events in the summertime, I’m sure. But you could feel—it was just, Dave’s in my front room and they’re playing a little.   And that’s exactly what it is.

DC: That’s it.

 

GC: And I’ll tell you—no one thought “Oh, he didn’t hit that note,” it was just totally the other way around.  Totally relaxed.

DC: Well, we really enjoyed it. All the guys did. I heard good things. And I told everyone afterwards, “Gentlemen, we’ve been hired back for August.” I said, “We are not going to practice, we’re going to do exactly what we do. Come up with some new music, we’ll play it as we do.” And George told me afterwards, and he said “I couldn’t really see—when you told me your idea, I really didn’t get the whole idea on the poster, change of pace, change of style,” and he said, “I really like it.” And I said “So do I. I wish other musicians would do this. You don’t need to practice, you guys just go out and jam for a little while and do your thing for a few months, whatever you’re doing, all of you get together from all different aspects, you pick some songs, you pick some songs, you pick some songs, I don’t care if I haven’t played them with ya—let’s just do it.” We’ve all been playing for so long we can just have fun with it.