April 2012 / Emended for length and clarity
ED: So, this project. What are you guys doing?
GC: I’ll try to explain to you. (pause) I’ve been here about eight years, I love music, I’m not a musician—
ED: We need you. (laughs)
GC: And talking to a musician about the past, I think would be entertaining and should be written somewhere.
ED: Certainly. Probably—for musicians everyone has a story.
GC: Yeah.
ED: It’s so funny—I could tell you stories about some of the insides of the music business that most people are not aware of, legally. I was on a plane going to Vegas for a show, and this guy looked like he was out of the Sopranos. They were kind of giving me a hard time about my guitar case. And this guy finally, I get the guitar case put away, and he says to me, you get your axe put away? And I looked at him like, what a strange word for you to use, my axe. And turned out my seat was next to him. Sat down, and it turned out he’s Shanana’s original drummer.
GC: (laughs)
ED: The one that was in the film Grease. So we get to talking, and he’s on his way to Vegas to do a show, and I was going to do a show, there are thirteen Shananas in the United States.
GC: Really.
ED: He has to sue ‘em all. Anybody that had anything to do with Shanana at the time that didn’t have a release form can use the name Shanana and make money!
GC: Ow. Yeah that’s . . . that’s pretty. . . .
ED: Isn’t that incredible?
GC: That is incredible.
ED: So they just got tired of suing them all.
GC: Where were you born?
ED: I was actually born in Oakland, CA, at the naval hospital.
My family lived in San Francisco, but my real father was in the navy. He was a navy man. I never met him. In fact, I have this great story: last November, I actually finally went to San Antonio, TX, and found his grave. He was buried in Fort Sam Houston Cemetery, with his gravestone and from there I found his high school, and I found a historian in the town that he grew up, who’s 90 years old who told me a lot about him growing up.
One door kept—I was there for a week—one door kept leading to another, I finally—I found the high school. I was looking in the wrong place: they changed districts in the early fifties, so his high school was a different high school, so the historian sent me to the right high school, I found his yearbook, I got pictures of him.
GC: That’s—
ED: No, it gets better! I met his last wife, who was 79 years old and still alive. Who introduced me to my half-brother and half-sister.
GC: What at trek!
ED: Incredible. Yes. And before I left, she gave me my dad’s wallet. And the coolest thing about the whole thing, Gary, is that she said, we knew you were out there. He told us you were out there someplace.
So, you know, here I was, I’d been looking for him since I was 12, and he left when I was six months old, he was 19 when I was born, just a kid. You know my mom had nothing but good things to say about him. He turned down a scholarship to Julliard as a singer to go to Korea. And he came back pretty messed up alcoholically, and a lot of Benzedrine in Korea, a lot of people didn’t know about that, but they used a lot of Benzedrine in Korea, for the soldiers. So he came back pretty messed up. And they divorced, like I said when I was six months old, and I found him on the Internet a couple of years after he passed away. And he died 17 years ago. But this one week was just incredible—so now I have this brother, Randy, and my sister Anna-Marie, who these people are in my life. And my kids just couldn’t be happier. My kids are grown—I have two grown, a boy and a girl, and now they’ve got some legacy on their dad’s side, you know?
GC: Are they musically inclined?
ED: No, one of them is a lieutenant commander in the Marine Corps, studying for his Masters degree right now. He’s 42. And Anna-Marie is a—runs a beauty salon in the hill country of Texas with her husband, and they have a couple of kids. And neither one of them—she said, when I talked to her she said, I might’ve found you one time on YouTube. I thought that could’ve been you —and it was! It was. She just didn’t know, you know. She said the greatest thing about the whole experience really was that they both—both my brother and sister said, Dad told us you were out there somewhere. So you weren’t forgotten.
GC: Do your kids currently play?
ED: Yeah, my daughter has toured the world with a punk band out of San Francisco.
And she’s in LA right now, in fact I just got off the phone with her on my drive over here. She’s starring in a new indie movie called Speed Demon, which they’re shooting right now. She plays the star of a rock band, of an indie rock band. She has her hands in a lot of projects, she tours up this way with a couple of different projects: all-girl band, Bad Cop Bad Cop. Got a new CD out that’s getting some nice reviews, called Knives of Gasoline: Love Songs for Crime Scenes.
And my son is a writer, in the horror genre. He writes for—he’s a news editor for an online magazine down in LA and writes for, he interviews directors and actors and actresses for the horror genre around the world
And they’re real close—they see each other a couple of items a week so they’ve got support for each other down there in LA. They’re about 15, 20 minutes away from each other; they have dinner together a couple of times a week. They’re seven years apart in age. And from from the same mom, so I was married before I met my current wife, I’d married once before for 20-something years. Two kids. My daughter is the epitome of the jump jet era. She’s 36, she looks like she’s 20 still. If you Google her anytime and see all her stuff, Stacey Dee.
GC: What a legacy. Where else have you lived? And what brought you here?
ED: I lived mostly in San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up a third generation San Franciscan. My grandfather worked on the Golden Gate Bridge and fought with Harry Bridges in the union wars, on the waterfront. And he was in the ’06 quake as a small boy, and my mom grew up there, is buried there. And I lived there most of my whole life and then moved down the coast in the ‘70s , to Half Moon Bay. It’s about 40 miles south of San Francisco on the coast. Beautiful little fishing town. Two-lane highway still, so it hasn’t exploded; the infrastructure can’t handle the big roads. So water and sewage is another one of the reasons. So it stayed pretty much, pretty cool, little artsy place. My kids grew up there, went all through school there, and I found myself moving further and further south. Another half an hour south from Half Moon Bay was a little town called Pescadero, which is at one time the county seat of San Mateo County, when the railroad came all the way down there on the coast. It’s now a little farming community of about 3000 people, really small little town. But it was centrally located, I was about an hour away from San Jose, 45 minutes to Santa Cruz, hour and 15 to San Francisco, so I had these three great directions to go for work, for gigs. And at the same time I was organic farming; I had bought a little piece of property, Gail and I, and we helped get the farmer’s market established in Half Moon Bay and in the city of Pacifica. So we did that for ten years. And, so those are the places I’ve lived. Mostly on the coast there. We found ourselves coming up here when we sold the farm. We had some health issues, both Gail and I, my wife and I. And we came through them, but as we were recouping from it and going through the whole thing, we thought—well, a couple things happened. Jake, my son, he was living with us, he graduated from UC Santa Cruz. And decided he was going to move on, down to LA where the writers are—he wants to screen write. So he left, and then a good portion of my workforce was gone. (laughs) But it was time. It was ten good years of doing the farming, I did it as a—I farmed during the day, played gigs at night. So it was two farmer’s markets a week, a Wednesday and a Saturday, and did a small—a small home-delivery service, a small CSA on Thursdays, mostly people who all knew me from growing up on the coast, you know. And it was just enough to keep an income coming in along with teaching and gigging. So we started looking around. There was a woman who was putting together one of the original rancheros that the Mexican government sold to California. Very few pockets—billionaires—and hedge fund money out of San Francisco. So they had bought all this property around us, and we were the last little crown and jewel. We had 26 acres in this hilltop. And she pushed us, she said if you’re ever ready to sell, please let me know, and so a couple years later, we were ready to sell. So she made us an offer that we could NOT refuse. And she just squashed all other offers by coming in and saying I want this, and this is what I’ll do, including you can stay here for the next year while you figure out what you want to do, rent-free. So we did. We started looking around, and it was a great windfall for us, and we thought, well, close to 60 now, both of us. If we said we were going to retire, we’d still be doing the things we love to do, so let’s look around for what’s next. Gail’s sister lived up here. And we’d come up to visit often. And always liked the area. So as we looked around the United States and even considered coast of Italy, coast of Spain, South America, kinda looked around. Thought, where do we want to go? We found this really nice piece of property up there, an acre and a half, it’s got a great music room built on the side of it, good size. The music room has its own entry—I have everything I need! It’s this big, it’s got a drum set up, organ, bass amps, PA—everything is set up for recording and rehearsing. And it doesn’t bother anybody else in the house. So it was perfect. Plus it had a shop, and some fruit trees, it was just everything we were looking for. And the price—I’ve gotta tell you, Gary, this place that we have now, where we were on the coast of California, would easily have started at a million and a half dollars.
GC: I believe it.
ED: Up here, under $300,000.
GC: Nice.
ED: We put a huge down payment on it, so we had this really small monthly net, and we’re doing what we love to do. My wife is a few credits—her last class away from ordination as a reverend.
GC: Really? For what denomination?
ED: UCC. She changed from—she was Methodist for a long time, and now she switched to UCC. So she was assistant minister in Half Moon Bay Methodist Church for five years.
So that came about after we met. So we’re both doing what we love to do still, and that’s what brought us up here, was finding this great little piece of property, plus the weather’s very similar—you wouldn’t think so, but it’s very similar to the coast of California, when you’re right on the coast in the Bay Area. Because it’s damp all the time. There’s a lot of fog. So it’s wet a lot, and temperatures are just a little bit more extreme on both ends up here: little hotter in the summer, little cooler in the winter, but not much, you know? And we always loved the area up here. Not too far from the coast—I love the coast.
GC: How long have you been here?
ED: One year exactly. Last March. (2011)
GC: It really is—such a fantastic place.
ED: Yeah. I’ve made such great connections already up here, like meeting this guy Matt, who came up with me. He’s the one who introduced me to Gracewinds, and now it looks like I’m going to be kicking off their lesson loft upstairs, doing their guitar teaching. They’re having their kick-off opening for that on the 21st of April, and I’ll teach two classes that day: a Guitar 101 and then an improv class.
GC: I heard you just say your drum kits. What other instruments do you play?
ED: Well, I’m really a guitarist. But I play around a bit. I play a little piano, certainly bass guitar, and drums. I fiddle around with most stuff. A little bit of pan flute. Yeah, just—
GC: Pan flute?
ED: Yeah, I fell in love with the Pan-Flute.
I met these guys in San Francisco, these indigenous guys were playing, and I just—
Just really liked it. I bought a couple and then I taught it with them. But yeah, keyboard, little keyboard, and the guitars. And—both acoustic and electric, electric bass. Not so much stand-up bass, but more like—and then my drum kit, and then vocal work. And I write—that’s what I do. I like to write.
GC: How would you describe your music to the audience, what type of music do you play?
ED: Well that’s always a good one. I play Americana music. The industry will classify me as AC, or adult contemporary, because I song write across so many genres: I do country, light jazz, blues, I write pop, you know; I write across a lot of genres. So whenever people ask me who are fans, I usually will say, let’s talk about it a little bit. What do you like? Because the truth is I don’t want to pigeonhole our conception, both of us, about what I’m doing. So Americana, adult contemporary is really what I do as a songwriter. And yet as a guitarist, as a musician, I am a blues guitar player. I’m really—and that also goes into a lot of different areas from Delta blues to jazz blues to Chicago blues, you know. I’m more of a blues player as a soloist than I am any other, than I would say a jazz guy, even though I play some jazz. As a rhythm guitar player, I believe that’s really my strength. I have a very strong sense of rhythm, and I write from that place. So I would say that’s one of my strengths.
GC: what I was most impressed with the very first time I saw you play was the music that you wrote—wonderful.
ED: Wow, thank you!
GC: I mean, I go to many performances and people do some of their songs and you know, it’s a struggle. It was obvious to me that it was there for your group and for yourself.
ED: Thank you
GC:. As a child—we’ll go back a little bit—what was your first experience with music? Was it always there in the family?
ED: My mom had a—my mom raised five kids, worked for a telephone company in San Francisco, rented, so we lived in a lot of different places in San Francisco. But her mother was a concert pianist, and came from some wealth, and had lost their—she was from Canada, and they had lost their money in the Depression. And I guess it was a great uncle was the first mayor of Alameda, they had a house on Canary Road down in Alameda. Bradley was his name, and that’s my middle name, Bradley. And then she married my grandfather, who was the one that worked on the Golden Gate Bridge. And there was always a piano in the house, but my mother was an artist, she was a very, very fine self-taught portrait artist. And also a seamstress, she loved making clothes and was always sewing on something. First day of school, all three boys and both sisters had a new shirt and new dresses for the first day of school, handmade by my mom.
GC: Really?
ED: Yeah. And at fifteen I moved out, because you could do that in San Francisco in those days, because there was no place for me to play music at home with so many brothers and sisters and me disturbing everybody. And culturally what was happening in the streets, the whole time I was very lucky to grow up as a teenager in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. And see that whole thing. I got my first guitar actually as a caddy for this guy, used to caddy for him on Lincoln golf course. One day after caddying for him, he paid me, asked me what I was doing for the rest of the day. I said no plans, he said you want to go to the race track. He took me to the horse track, bet my money on a horse for me, the horse came in, he said what do you want to do with the winnings, I said take me to a hockshop. Went in and got my first guitar.
GC: (laughs) Fantastic. Tell me it was a red one from Sears.
ED: It was a red one, it was electric with four pickups. Push buttons on the side. I remember it fondly. And there were some older kids that lived down the street who were playing some surf music, they were a couple years older than me. They kinda took me under their wing, helped me tune it. But I remember having a teacher in the 6th grade, in band—and I took trombone for a couple years in junior high, but I wanted a guitar. And she brought her guitar in one day—she’s a folk guitar player—and finger picked, and one day she brought her guitar in and did a couple things for the class and I was just mesmerized. And my mother also was a great listener, so she had all the male singers and one of the rat pack was Trini Lopez.
GC: Well that era, as I remember it, the guitar was not held in that high esteem.
ED: No, it wasn’t. It was just coming into its own. So guys like Trini Lopez, he got away with it because of his ethnicity, Hispanic ethnicity, you know, having a guitar. But he did some really nice things with it, you know Lemon Tree. Then Alvino Rey of course, you hear him on Lawrence Welk, you hear a guy who could make a guitar talk, so I started being drawn to it, you know.
GC: Product of the times, definitely.
ED: Yes
GC: Since you’re back there I’ll start you a little further into memory, do you actually remember the first song you ever played?
ED: First song I ever played was probably “Louis Louis” or “Satisfaction” or—
Yeah, one of those from that era. One of those three-chord (laughs)
Well I was really lucky. From there—I left high school as a junior, in the eleventh grade, dropped out. And I had an art teacher who kept in touch with me and talked me into coming back to this alternative education school that they were going to start up, a quote continuation school for problem kids, or kids who just couldn’t seem to fit in. So because I had such respect for her, for the art teacher, I went down and checked it out—and I graduated. I was in the first graduating class, came back. It was in the San Francisco Unified School District, it was called Opportunity High School—I think there were 12 students in my graduating class, first class. And then they offered me a job. And I taught there as a student teacher for the next five years. I taught the music program and I taught reading. And from there I did a song writing class with Country Joe McDonald through that school, I worked with Bill Graham to put together a class called the Music Business of Theory and Practice, we did a series of concerts at Bimbo’s, San Francisco, where the students did every facet of putting on concerts, from promotions to ticket sales to lighting, and Bill Graham funded it. And it was all because of a teacher named Ron Cabral, who wrote a book of his experience with Joe in the navy. Him and Joe were friends in the navy, and Ron Cabral was one of the teachers at this school. So he brought Country Joe into the school, that’s how I met him, and Joe got us into Bill Graham to fund this project.
GC: And I hear about music programs going away in our schools, it just kills me.
ED: It’s tragic-and don’t get me started on teaching tests. It just doesn’t work. This school was so effective for the kids that came through here. I was one of six who became, through the course of the next five years, student teachers there. Students who had graduated. Had dropped out, come back, finished up, graduated, and then stayed on to teach something that they were extremely good at.
GC: Your music back then, and that upbringing, do you see any big difference or anything that’s similar in terms of the music you played then, do you consider the music of your past the equal to the music of your current posture.
ED: Equal? In how?
GC: Well, I was thinking in terms of quality.
ED: Hm.
GC: Musical quality.
ED: I didn’t—I play much better today than I did back then—technically. As a player, I understand the theory of what I heard much better today than I did back then. However, my song writing I think was still valid back then. Country Joe took one of my songs and actually toured with it—I got a nice write-up from John Wasserman in the Chronicle when I was 17 for this song that Joe McDonald was doing of mine.
GC: Which was?
ED: Called the Lover was in Love. And I still do the song. Well I had a few stops in between.
For a good twenty years of the marriage I couldn’t make a living and raise kids. It was really difficult, and in San Francisco with so many musicians, it was really—twofold. Here’s the truth. The truth is it was difficult, and the other part of that is that I didn’t have the courage to do it.
GC: How so?
ED: To just throw caution to the wind with a new baby and try and do it. But the path is the path. At 40, when my first marriage ended and I was a single dad, I got injured at my union job. They pinned my shoulder together and said, you’re done with construction. I was in construction all those years when I raised the kids. Kinda kept the guitar in the corner but didn’t do much. Had all these fragments of songs but never finished anything, I didn’t go out and play, I wasn’t doing anything except beating on it at home. And actually pretty frustrated with it. So here I am single, recuperating from the shoulder, they’re telling me I’m done with construction and think, I’m 40 years old, and I think, if I’ve got another 40 years of this circus, it’d be great to make half of my living doing what I love to do. So I went to an open mike, hadn’t played in 15, 17 years. And I did three songs at this open mike, and somebody came up to me and said, do you give lessons? And I went—sure. I do now! And one door started opening, and another door opened, and another door opened, and pretty soon I was pulling income from this. And teaching and playing these gigs, people—bands were picking me up so I was getting a bit of side work, little bit of studio work. And I thought, you know what, this may not last, so I’d love to make a CD before I’m done with this whole thing. So I set out to make a CD, and I made a six-song CD, it was my first CD, and that led to doing another one, led to somebody hiring me to work on their CD, and that led me to working on another CD of theirs, a woman blues jazz artist in the Bay area, who recorded some of my songs. And I went back in and they busted out my third CD.
GC: Fantastic.
ED: I’m working on one right now.
GC: Was there any breakout, any big break, like people talk about so-and-so let me play on the stage with them or something—was there anything like that that happened?
ED: Yeah, I think I have a mentor, I would say to this day, a guy who’s just so gracious with his time, even to do this day he still is. His name is Garth Weber. And he is a guitarist in the Bay area, and he also has a little studio down there that has done all of my CDs. And it’s called Red Rooster Studio, and all of the—I would say everybody in the bay area who’s anybody knows Garth Weber and his studio. Mostly because he’s such a great engineer, but also because he was Miles Dixon’s guitarist. He toured with Miles Dixon back in the seventies, and he said I got the gig because of my tone, not so much of my lisp. And he’s a good friend of the Ford brothers, Robin Ford and—um, I just went blank on Robin’s brother’s name, the harmonica player. Oh, he’s gonna kill me. Um . . .
Yeah! Robin gave Garth the guitar that he plays to this end. It’s a Robin Ford model. And Garth has recorded everybody from Bonnie Raitt to Peter Lewis, he’s worked with Kingfish, he’s worked with Huey Lewis, just a kind of who’s who of who’s worked with in the Bay Area. And the most generous, sweetest guy. But he taught me not only about—more about the guitar and about recording, but just the whole ball of wax about music, and how to—He gave me such confidence about what I was doing, even though a lot of what I was doing was pretty juvenile still. Still pretty—he was just the most gracious.
GC: Everybody needs that.
ED: Yeah. Well, I think it is the Buddha says that the one that—who creates teachers is the most worthy. The people who create teachers. Garth Weber is somebody who you should absolutely check out his stuff online.
People will just be amazed. He’s very big in Europe, still sells a lot of stuff there, but he’s also on chat rooms around the world for sound engineers. He’s just one of those guys.
In fact, one last little thing about Garth. When I took my CDs down to Capital Records, where I master them in LA, the engineer down there he was their union steward and master engineered for Capital for 17 years, guy by the name of Mark Schelecky. And he said, who recorded these? And I told him, and he says, please give me his number; I have people I want to send up to him. He is that good. He says it’s a pleasure to master somebody who understands the recording—who understands recording like this.
GC: High praise. Who is your greatest supporter, I think you don’t need to answer that.
ED: Yeah.
GC: You said your wife did some artwork. How about yourself—do you have any other creative outlets?
ED: Yeah, I paint, I sketch. Always loved that.
GC: How do you relax?
ED: This way. It’s almost meditative when I—I can sit around with the television or the TV on or the radio on, and be playing my guitar, and be checked out. I mean I could be just zoned into what I’m doing and not even be part of what else is going on. Although I do find that one of the greatest ways —I teach my students to use as a teaching and practice tool, is to do that very thing. Put on one of their favorite radio stations or CD and play whatever song comes on by ear. Try to find the key to the tune and try to find a place in the song that you could play something with. And you may not find it until the end of the song. But leave it when it’s done, because it trains your ear so quickly to get—to respond quicker, and it’s a great teaching tool.
GC: Anybody who’s influencing you now?.
ED: I’m a huge fan of Procal Harem. I love the—even though I don’t play anything like what they do, well that’s not true, they do some well-rounded—they get well-rounded in some of their songwriting too, but I love the idea of a grand piano, a ham and organ guitar, and a bass and drums. I think the combination is so musical, and Tuck and Patty also—Tuck Andress is a guitarist who blows my mind. In fact he’s coming to the coast, in Gleneden, next month. And I’m gonna go out and see him. They’re a San Francisco treasure, I got to do a jazz camp with him and studied with him for a week. He’s a guy who I always look at what he’s doing and how he interprets music, so as songwriters Procal Harem because they’re still doing it.
GC: Are they still recording?
ED: They’re still recording and touring! And of course Tuck. Garth for his tone, always. I’m still—you know that elusive tone. My daughter. My daughter Stacey is a fine songwriter. And she—I got to do a show with her last year where I was her lead guitarist, which was just a blessing.
GC: You’ll have to get her up here.
ED: Yeah, next time she tours through. They toured last year with a girl band, Bad Cop, Bad Cop. And they stayed at the house one night but they didn’t have a gig here, they were headed up to Portland, Vancouver, and Seattle.
GC: You mentioned you played the song that you wrote for Country Joe.
ED: Yes
GC: Are there songs that you almost always play at a gig? You know, something that just stands out, a closing song or an opening or something like that.
ED: There’s a few that I seem to always want to put in my set list. There’s a few. There’s a song called Kiss You, a little Boston lover kinda thing. There’s a song I wrote for Paul and Linda McCartney the day that I heard she had passed, called Is it Time, and I actually wrote that that morning when I heard she had passed. I thought they had the kind of relationship that was a model. How their art, their life, their parenting, their—I thought they just had a really, they had their pulse on something that was really special. And I always loved his songwriting and of course his musicality. You can hear that song on the internet.
GC: Does the audiance exspect a certain style from you?
ED: I think so. I think because it’s not, it’s more of a listening—even across the board—even this stuff I do with a band down in the Bay Area, there’s a band I play with down there called Blue, B-L-U-E, it’s a retro Americana rock band, we do everything from the Band to Elvis to Tom Petty to Santana, and some original stuff. So. Even with that, it’s more—I think it’s more probably our age now, than—I think the demographic that we have now is not a 20—the demographic I have is not a 20-30 year old demographic. It’s just not. It’s a 40-60 demographic. And I think we just mellow, you know, as people. We just mellow a little bit. So we’re not so, we don’t drink as hard out in public, we don’t use the way that we may have in some earlier life, and so I think that’s part of it. But I’ve been really pretty lucky. From—every once in a while you get an adoring fan. That’s very flattering, that’s very flattering. And I’ll never say no to that, that’s very flattering.
GC: Rolling Stone magazine said that in 2011 digital sales outstripped physical sales of CDs for the first time ever. Any thoughts on the current state of music?
ED: I think it’s always evolving. To be able to make a living as a musician you have to be able to roll with those times. I have that web presence out there, I sell digitally, on iTunes, on Amazon, on many of those—Rhapsody—on many of the online streaming sites. Where you can buy everything from one song to a full CD of mine. Right now the thing that I’m most pursuing is film and television and mechanical sync licensing.
GC: Interesting.
ED: Yeah, especially for the DIY artist. Somebody like me who owns my property, my intellectual property. I own the mechanical rights, I own the songwriting rights, you know, I own the performance royalties. I paid the musicians on my CDs up front, and got a waiver for it, so they have no right to a song that may go and become a million seller. It was the only way I was taught how as a businessman to reap the most benefit from what I sell. So when I go out and do a show, the CD sales go right in my pocket. When I need a lawyer, I hire one. An accountant, Gail and I are pretty good with that, my wife and I are pretty good with that. Tech stuff—Gail is great with tech stuff, she does a lot of my video and all computer stuff, she’s really computer-savvy. So I have a great partner in that also, she loves doing it.
GC: So it kind of melds right in.
ED: Yeah, it’s like you always have to look. I was taught early on that to look around your world and see where your music can partner with something. That it’s not just about being a record or performing artist, but if you write a song—a great song about strawberries, get to the strawberry board in your state, and see if they need a jingle, you know? You start thinking that way, it’s led me also to my hand at writing. So I have this—I have a book going. I’ve been working on it for awhile, it’s called Sun in San Francisco. Talking about my experience growing up in San Francisco in the sixties with some of the musicians I had the pleasure to run across and play with, got drunk with Janis Joplin once, jammed with—
GC: I think that’s the lead right there.
ED: (laughs) Yeah, I got—. Because of where I grew up, and at the time it was so, it was so generous that you could find yourself at some gathering where you’re in a circle playing and sitting with Jerry Garcia or Carlos Santana.
GC: Must have been wonderful to be part of. If you could go back to then, is there anybody maybe that’s perhaps passed away or currently alive who you would most love to play—to mix it up with?
ED: Yeah, there’s a pianist named Rich Henley, who I just saw last weekend after—I haven’t seen him in 30 years. I saw him at one of these funerals, he came to the funeral. And he’s still playing, he lives in Santa Rosa, California, but he’s not playing out. And by this time he must be one of the most—he must be just a monster, because he was thirty years ago. He went to Berkeley School of Music, and he was the guy who taught me a lot about theory when I was in my twenties. He taught it from the piano. He didn’t know how to put it on the guitar. But he was able to convey—he was able to say to me things like, Try to find a place where you can play these notes in a chord, in this order, stack them this way. So he would give me theory on the guitar, and all of a sudden I would start to realize, oh, this is a chord form that is known. So pretty soon I started connecting dots. And just a great, great jazz blues pianist with a great singing voice. Another guy, John Lee Sanders, pretty well known, did some work with Paul Williams and has had some success. He’s another great, he’s out of New Orleans I believe, and I’d love to have been able to do some work with him. And Garth, I’d love to do more work with Garth. We did a guitar duo—that All Alone with Me, that’s on the CD that you did get, and we trade off sixteens on that—on electric guitar on that shuffle.
GC: what do you feel distinguishes the artist from the technician? Because I’m sure—there are so many people that play a mean guitar. What puts that—what’s an artist and what’s a technician?
ED: Yeah, I think the artist is in it for the long haul. Sees himself as somebody who’s always taking snapshots of where he is, or where she is, along the path of being an artist. Is always trying new and different things, wherever their ear or their senses may take them, their ear, their eye, their hand. And as an artist, you don’t edit the same way you do when you’re just being a technician. When you’re being a technician, it’s about—well, it’s about looking good as a technician. It’s about showcasing that part of the musicality. So you want to be an outstanding soloist as a musician. But when you’re an artist and you’re songwriting and you’re creating something, you don’t edit so much about how it compares with anybody else. And I think that’s a big difference.
GC: Sounds to me like you just described Bob Dylan.
(laughs)
ED: He’s an artist!: This is the path. And I think that when I got to that place as a, at the time I wouldn’t call myself an artist, but I got to the place where I stopped editing what I wrote. I went you know what, this is fine. I’m not comparing it with anybody. This is just a snapshot of this space in time, and where I am, and what my experience with what this is, whatever the subject is. And once I stopped editing, the floodgates opened and I started writing so much more.
GC: A great answer.
ED: Cool!
GC: If you would just complete a sentence for me, “Music is . . . ?”
ED: (pause)
ED: Yeah, I get so much more cerebral about it because I love it so, and I see it as—I guess I would—I’m almost at a loss for words to finish the sentence. I guess except to say that it’s . . . communal. In that it builds community. No matter where you are in the world, what type of music you’re playing, I mean you can go as a—we can go as visitors, as tourists to another country, and take your guitar, and sit in with somebody, some East African or some Sufi, or some gypsy or some—any kind of music that you would try to find a place to play it, and have a ball doing it. And something would come out of it, something would come out of it that would further the understanding us as a community.
GC: My music makes my feel . . . ?
ED: The best.
GC: And “You should support music because . . . ?”
ED: Because we don’t realize how much our soul needs music.
GC: Is there anything that you want to add, anything you’d like to endorse?
ED: Yes. I would like to just comment that I’m on a—one of my missions in the area up here in Oregon as an artist and musician is to remind and re-teach club owners and restaurateurs that it’s not the musicians’ job to fill their establishment. The same way you don’t expect the cook to bring his family down for dinner every night, you don’t expect the musician to bring a ready-made audience every night to your gig. As an establishment owner, I believe your job is to create a place that the public can count on good music any night, no matter who may be there. And you get that reputation, you will have more success as a business owner, club owner, restaurateur, if you attacked your business model that way. I think for all the wages that have been stagnant in this country for the longest time, musicians are among the most stagnant. It’s hard for artist to make money, you really don’t get paid very well. And —one of my personal missions is to remind artists that you don’t have to take every gig that comes along, and that you should get paid for what you do. And I think, I think I’ll leave it at that.
GC: Fantastic.
ED: Great, man. Well I’m pleased to have been part of it.