July 2012
GC: George, just start off with the basics—where were you born?
GT: I was born in Santa Barbara, CA.
GC: Another Californian here.
GT: Yup. Lived there for 42 years, then moved to Oregon in 1989.
GC: These have been the two principal places you’ve lived?
GT: Yeah, I lived for two years in Salt Lake City when I was in graduate school in ’73, ’75.
GC: What was graduate school? What did you study?
GT: I studied meteorology. Got a master’s degree in meteorology from the University of Utah, in 1975.
GC: So music is not your main concern?
GT: Well, I love music. Music has been a favorite thing of mine for a long time and I’ve been a musician since my freshman year in college.
GC: What do you play?
GT: I play guitar. Nothing else.
GC: Do you sing?
GT: I sing, yes.
GC: Great. What would you describe—if you had an audience in front of you, how would you describe your music? What do you play; what do you like to play?
GT: I guess my favorite is probably classic rock, including ballads. And I had some real favorite musicians, Emmylou Harris has been a favorite of me for a long time. Jimmy Buffet; I know a lot of Jimmy Buffet songs. Good-time songs. And then some more obscure songs, like some [indistinct] stuff and [indistinct], people like that, that aren’t as well known.
GC: I certainly enjoy them myself, yeah.
GT: Yeah, they’re fun.
GC: What was your first experience with music, when you go back to your past, your parents, your childhood—anything stand out?
GT: The first thing that comes to mind is the TV show “Sing Along with Mitch,” with Mitch Miller. That was a favorite of the family, and we all—my sister and I and my parents all sat and followed along the bouncing ball and sang along with that. That was probably not the earliest recollection, but that one just popped into my head as being really significant.
GC: Currently, do you listen to music that’s on the popular charts these days?
GT: Not as much. I guess I’m still a classic rock guy. It’s interesting to me because we’re at a period when a lot of musicians have had incredibly long careers. I’m thinking the Rolling Stars, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton—one of my favorites. So I guess I tend to listen to a lot of them. But there are some new artists I really enjoy. I have really acquired in the last 20-30 years a strong liking for country music, country western music. Among the younger artists, I think my favorite is probably Brad Paisley. I love Brad Paisley’s music; I’ve seen him live and I really like him a lot. And there are a lot of other modern country stars who I very much enjoy.
GC: You mentioned Emmylou Harris. Is there—I guess meteorology was your first love, or was there something that prevented you carrying your music further, or was it just where your interests happened to lie?
GT: I went through a decision process in college, like a lot of musicians do, where you get to a point when you’re in a band, and you’re pretty good, and maybe if a few things change you could be really good, and you make that decision of whether to really pursue music as a career or go off into other things. And I did the latter. Partly because I felt that the talent level that I had, that the band I was associated with in Santa Barbara had, was probably not sufficient to really breakthrough in a big way in music. You never know in music. It’s not always directly proportional—the success is not directly proportional to skill, necessarily. A lot of its timing and getting the right breaks and who you know. But music is a very—highly competitive career, and it’s one where making it big is not very common. To even be able to support yourself as a musician is difficult. So I made the decision, along with my band mates, to pretty much maintain what we were, which was kind of a party band.
GC: What was that band?
GT: There were several. The main one was a band called Middle Earth. A friend of mine had just read what was the brand-new Tolkien trilogy, and we liked the name Middle Earth and I hadn’t read the book, didn’t read the book until years later, but that was the name of our band in Santa Barbara.
GC: As a child, did you enter any competitions, or as a youngster or as a band when you were in college?
GT: Not really. As a band in college we played at fraternity parties, school assemblies, sometimes for business meetings as entertainment.
GC: Fraternity parties must have been . . . an experience.
GT: They were actually a lot of fun. Although I do remember the time—there was a fraternity party that we were playing at where the beer was really flowing rather freely. And our band took a break and put our guitars on the guitar stands and all that, and suddenly we heard noise coming from the stage, and some very drunken fraternity guys were playing our instruments without permission. And we quickly put an end to that. But generally speaking, fraternity parties were a lot of fun, probably because of the drinking—I think when you’re drinking, bands often sound a lot better than when you’re sober. So we’d be treated like royalty.
GC: So you weren’t really going through a starving artist phase, or mostly just a hearty artist at that time.
GT: That’s a good way to describe it.
GC: Who was your greatest supporter? As far as it came to your music—were your relatives supportive, or your parents, or were you just on your own in that?
GT: My dad really loved the fact that I learned to play guitar. He was really proud of that and would often have friends come over, and he’d say “Okay, George, pick up your guitar and play,” just to prove that I could do it. He bought me my first guitar. And he was very supportive, all the way down the line.
GC: Do you remember your first guitar? What kind it was? Do you still have it?
GT: I don’t have it. It was a really inexpensive Lasey acoustic guitar. And I really hurt my fingers on it; I ended up putting adhesive tape on my fingers to overcome the pain of the cuts that I got. And that’s inevitable when you play guitar: your left hand—if you’re right-handed—your left hand plays the chords and pushes down on the strings and it always causes pain, until you build the calluses up, but in the case of the guitar I had—which we say is a high action, there was a big distance between the strings and the neck, so you really had to push hard and it really hurt. But nevertheless I learned to play well enough to justify getting a much nicer guitar, it was an electric guitar, made by a company called Hagstrom. So that was my first nice guitar.
GC: So do you have any other interests other than guitar, or other types of music? Anything other than the musical arts?
GT: Sure. I’ve done a fair amount of ceramics. It’s been awhile, but in the past I did a lot of—mostly hand-building, rather than ceramics at the wheel. I’ve done a fair amount of painting and drawing; mostly painting, mostly with acrylics. I’m actually planning to get into oil painting; I’ve bought some oils, but I haven’t used them yet. But I like both of those.
GC: Is that a relaxation for you?
GT: Yeah. Yeah. Plus just an avenue for creativity.
GC: Sometimes something other than music is needed to satisfy your creativity.
GT: Well, music by itself has plenty, and I’ve written some songs, but I like the variety of doing different things. I’ve always been a jack of all trades and a master of none, if anything. The word dilettante comes to mind, which basically means a dabbler. And I’ve tended to dabble in a lot of different things. And some of them I keep up with and others I move away from.
GC: Who influences you now? In your artistic endeavors—is there anybody in the mainstream or outside the mainstream—you mentioned Amy Lou Harris—is there anybody in particular who influences you?
GT: Eric Clapton. I just think Eric Clapton is remarkable. He’s an amazing musician and has been playing for a long time. And I really respect him as a person, as a man. He fought a heroin addiction where he was basically confined to his house for two years and managed to overcome that. And now he gives a lot of money to his charity that he established, the Drug Treatment Center in Antigua. And gives a lot of money to that, so I have enormous respect for him.
GC: Let me ask you a little bit about today’s music. Rolling Stone said that in 2011, digital sales outstripped physical sales of CDs for the first time ever. Do you have any thoughts about the current music industry, how it’s run, do you have things out on the internet yourself?
GT: No, I don’t have anything that’s out there that belongs to me, nor to my band. This whole issue with digital music files, applications like iTunes, is pretty complicated. I know there have been some pretty significant lawsuits with people who have illegally shared music. And I understand why there would be lawsuits from the copyright companies, but it just really feels in a lot of ways like we’re exploring new ground and making new rules as we go along, and I’m not sure where it’s all going to lead. But I can say that I love going to the iTunes music store, for example, hearing samples of the music, being able to download a single song and pay a dollar or so. There was a band that was here last week that played an old—it was actually a Jimmy Hendrix song—that Eric Clapton did on his Derek and the Dominos album that’s called “Little Wing,” and it’s a wonderful song, and I ended up downloading that after hearing it live here. (here is Imagine Café) And you can find some pretty obscure stuff, too; you can find things that you couldn’t find in a music store on a CD. So I think in music, it’s very similar to what Amazon has done for books. They provided an outlet that anybody can access, and you can be very selective about what you buy, only the songs that you buy, for example, and also get some things that you couldn’t get any other way.
GC: What I’m coming to notice more people are rejecting iTunes digital and going to the vinyl. Today Clinton would be asked if he listens to digital or vinyl instead of asking him if he wears boxer or briefs. Do you have any preference, or do you see any big difference?
GT: I’m not a real audiophile. To me it really doesn’t matter, and most of the time instead of playing CDs, I just play tunes off my computer. I love Pandora, because it gives you a lot of variety and exposes you to some things that are consistent with your likes and avoid your dislikes, but then introduce you to some things that you might not have found otherwise. So I enjoy Pandora lot. But I’ve never been one who was real picky about extreme quality. I had a friend—in fact he was the drummer in my band—who was that way. And he would buy a record, an LP record, and immediately he would put it onto tape, onto 9mm tape, and then he’d give away the album. He’d say, “Now I’ve got the perfect, unblemished one here, from the turntable to my tape, it’s archived on this tape, so you can have it.” But he would play it loud, through big, expensive speakers, and you couldn’t tell the difference between that and one that was used a little bit. But I’ve never been that finicky about things.
GC: What do you think distinguishes the technician—the musical technician—and the artist? Is there a difference? And if there is, what do you think it would be?
GT: Well, I guess the thing that comes to mind is distinguishing between the two hemispheres of your brain. We talk about left brain and right brain. And left brain is the logical one, the right brain is the more creative one. And I guess I associate artists with the mostly right brain, with the creativity part. Technician tends to be more rule-based, playing, for example, on guitar, notes on a scale, whether it be a major scale or a minor or pentatonic or what have you. Ideally, you have both, and you have—I think the best musicians among us are a combination of those two things. They are incredibly skilled—and part of that is just to be good enough so that nobody notices mistakes. And then to be creative as an artist is to be another part of that. To be as perfect in your playing as you can be, just from a purely technical standpoint, while at the same time being creative, doing unusual things, surprising people.
GC: And part of that creativity you mentioned before is writing songs. Do you have any particular method, something that you follow when you write a song, or is it just pure inspiration and just sit down to do it?
GT: It has to be pure inspiration. I seldom sit down and decide to write a song. Usually I feel inspired to do one based on what I’m thinking, or I might get a single line from a song. One of the things I’ve done some in my science talks—I give talks on weather and climate—is to do songs about weather or climate based on other popular songs, tunes to other popular songs. For example I have an El Nino song that’s done to the tune of the song Fernando by Abba, and a La Nina done to the tune of [indistinct] by The Temptations. So its fun to do that, take a familiar tune and change the words a little bit to include some scientific stuff in them.
GC: Speaking of fun, just for fun, you react, give me a word or two or a phrase that follows. Such as, “Music is” . . . ?
GT: Fun.
GC: “My music makes me feel” . . . ?
GT: Creative.
GC: “Support music because” . . . ?
GT: It’s important.
GC: And that last question brings us to—you do support music by your other endeavor, being part-owner and in charge of entertainment here at Imagine Coffee Café. What is that all about? What’s the mission there—what’s your job there?
GT: Well, the mission of Imagine Coffee is to have a place that supports the arts, that supports charities, and provides a place, an environment, where people in an unhurried way can interact with other people. We do have a lot of music here, at least three nights a week and often more. We have music of various kinds, including a group of Celtic musicians that jam here once a week. We have individuals who sing and play, bands; we’re having a corral group for Memorial Day. And we like to have a variety of musicians. The way that helps Imagine Coffee is by bringing in audiences. So one of the criteria that we use for booking bands is we try to emphasize those bands that have good skills but would also have a good fan base that will bring in an audience—customers. We’ve had some really good musicians that nobody knows about, and are hard for us and for them to publicize, so nobody shows up. And that saddens me; it’s frustrating, but it’s the reality of life in the business.
GC: Is there anything else that you would like to add? In terms of music, your thoughts, the business here? I would suggest, to anybody that’s reading this, that they go to Facebook and check out Imagine Coffee or just show up—even better. Everyone I have talked to has said it’s just a wonderful venue for performance, and I’d have to agree.
GT: We hear that too. And a lot of that was just fortuitous—call it serendipity if you like—because we didn’t really design the interior of this building with acoustics in mind. In retrospect, things like the fake brick wall, the shape of the big firewall in the back of the room, the flooring—some of those things really enhance the acoustics in the room. And it’s at the point now where most musicians really do enjoy the acoustics, and often don’t have to use monitors; they just play though the main speakers and that seems to work fine. I’d love to take credit for being the brains behind that, but truthfully it just kind of happened on its own.
GC: It is serendipity, then.
GT: Yeah. Or divine intervention.
July 2012 / Emended for length and clarity.
