Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to Bob Leftstt's podcast. My guest today is guitarist producer Kenny Greenberg. Kenny, how'd you get the gig playing on the road with Kenny Chesney?
I got the gig playing with Kenny Chesney because I'd been playing on his records for a while and we became friends doing that. It's like when you overdub with someone and it's just you and the artist in the room. That's a good way to get to know somebody. And and then I went and did a tour with Bob Seger, and I sent him a couple of clips of playing with Bob, and I think a thing went off in
his head. Oh, he plays live too, And so when he was going to do a tour in two thy twelve, he called me and said, hey, one of my guitar players quit, want to come out and play? And I said, yeah, absolutely, And also knowing that Bob was winding down. Bob had told me a couple of times, I think I'm about to wrap it up, maybe one more, but that's about it. So I thought, well, I think I'll go play with Kenny. And it was a That's how I got the gig.
Well, let's back up a step. How'd you get the gig? Played for Bob.
Seeger playing on his records. I played on like two or three of his records, and he's just I can't say enough good things about him. He's just like a great guy to be around. He's one of those kind of guys that laughs all the time and he's just was awesome. And then we cut a couple things where
we cut him kind of live. We had reached windings on the B three and I think when someone's called Gypsy and we cut it live RCA studio, everybody in the room and we stood up and played, and I think he recognized, oh, he stands up and he can play live. So he called me up and asked me to come out and play with him.
Well, how do you feel about going on the road as opposed to being in Nashville, you know, being in the studio or losing gigs? What are your feelings?
I mean, everybody, I'll put it to you this way. I think fifty you know, twenty years ago, I think studio players were more concerned about not going on the road and making sure they kept all the studio gigs. But the landscape has changed a lot, and most studio players have some kind of a road gig because the studio thing is just smaller now. So, I mean, there are a few exceptions, but I mean I know a lot of the guys that do are really the top guys right now. A lot of those guys have road gigs.
And it's also worth noting that, especially in the country sphere, the road gigs are usually either just Friday and Saturday or Thursday through Saturday, and then you come back to Nashville and then you go back out and then you come back. So a lot of the sessions during the week you just don't miss. You know, they're still there, and everybody understands, Oh, you're out playing with Chesney. Wow,
what a cool gig. So we also all have our mobile rigs in our hotel rooms and they send us files and we overdub and send them back.
Okay, when we were scheduling this, you said you might have to cancel if work came through. Is it a last spinted thing or is this just a busy time. What's it like in a studio player in Nashville now.
Well, it's just a lot of things come up at the last minute. And actually I had a couple people say I might need you either Wednesday or Thursday of this week, but we're not sure yet. So that's why I said that. And I'm also you know, is a full disclosure. I'm not a full time session guy and really never have. I've always produced records, written songs, played on the road. So there are guys who are much
busier in the studio than me. I like to do different things, so I've always I've always done that, you know, maybe to my detriment. Maybe if I did one thing it might have been better, but I just really enjoyed doing different things, so I would have to say that I'm really not as concerned about losing sessions. And also the sort of arc of a session player, I'm probably on the backside of that because of my age. I mean, I just am.
Well, how did you end up playing on Kenny's Records? To begin with?
The way I got into play on Kenny's Records is his co longtime co producer. His name is Buddy Cannon. He's it's a wonderful guy, and the I was going to produce a record for Sony on an artist named Shelley Fairchild, and they said, man, what if we put you together with Buddy Cannon, who I'd never met, And this is in two thousand and early two thousand and three, and I said, man, Buddy Cannon, I'd love to work with Buddy Cannon.
Who wouldn't.
So we made a record on this artist named Shelley Fairchild, and Buddy and I hit it off, and he liked my playing, and probably in the fall, he said, what doul come and play on this Chesney record that I'm working on. So I went into a studio and did one day, and then I did another day, and then they had me on a tracking day and I was sort of in the band then, I mean not on the road in the band, but I was in the studio band, and we just hit it off right away.
So I was fortunate to have that opportunity.
Now in the ensuing years, when Kenny goes to make a record, how involved are you in making a record with Kenny?
I usually play on the tracking date. The tracking date for those listeners that don't know, that's when you lay the foundation. Sometimes it's the whole song. Sometimes it's just the sort of rhythm track, basic foundation, And I'm usually there and I'm usually the leader and help arrange the songs. And but I will say that it's really his thing. I mean more and more as the years have gone by and he's become more confident in his record making. It is really his vision. I mean, he is is
a guy who's like it's like not to digress. But when you play live with him, it's loose, it's fun. We jam, songs are extended. He throws out stuff at the last minute when we're in the studio, especially now, it's very very much his vision and very controlled, and this is what I want and this is how I want it to sound. And then he'll actually sing me the parts that he wants me to play. So I will say that it just answers your question. It's I'm
pretty involved in playing. But it is really his vision.
Okay, Well, he say show up in the studio on Wednesday and then sing you the parts, or will he send you the material in advance?
He sends me the songs him or Buddy Cannon send me the songs a couple of days before, and then I make a chart and make the Nashville number chart. And so I've heard the songs and I have an idea in my head about what everybody ought to play and maybe what we ought to do. And then we all get in the room and it's usually a fairly good sized band, and a lot of the band is his roadband, because he's got a great band now, so his road it's a good part of his roadband is
in the studio as well. And we go in and we listen down to the song and we all hold our charts and the players and this is standard stuff, and the players have all heard it for the first time, and we listen down and Chesney says, I hate what they're doing on the intro. Do not do that. After I learned the intro overnight, you know, I got to learn how to play the intro. I learned the intro. And he goes, I hate the intro. Don't do that.
So then we'll come up with a new intro, or we'll just lay a bed and he'll say, I want to think about the intro. I'm going to come back to you with my idea when we overdub of what I think that intro should be. He really likes to take a basic track and think about what he wants today. He's very thought and it is really really his vision
of how he wants the songs to be. Whereas when I first started recording with him, which is sort of the era of Heman Ways Whiskey and Living in Fast Forward and some of those kind of stadium rock songs, it's pretty loose. I mean, we just go in there and jam and play live solos, and that's kind of the way those records are. He doesn't do that as much anymore. He's kind of more thoughtful about how he
wants to do it. And you know, really, for better or worse, as an artist, he's changing and he's doing different things, and it's probably a good thing.
Okay. He originally worked with Barry Beckett, famous and Muscle Sholes, and then he went to work with Buddy. He's been working Buddy for eons. Now, what's Buddy's special sauce.
Buddy is he is really like he's with Kenny because Kenny is so hands on and such a song guy that Buddy just kind of sits at the back of the room and it doesn't say much and Buddy and Kenny comes in and goes, Hey, the intro, this is
what I want to do. There's and we start, and we go and we start to record the song, and Buddy hits the talk back and he's got this sort of southern drawl, kind of a slow talking guy, and he goes like it's too fast, and then and we go, oh, it's too fast, and he's right, and then we slow it down and then we start to record it, and then he'll say he'll say, Kenny, this isn't a great key for your voice. We need to we need to change the key. So we'll try and change the key.
So Buddy just sort of direct from the back, and he doesn't have an ego. He's very cool about stuff. You can't piss the guy off. He's just gonna sit back there, and but he has really really great things to say. That's sort of how he's not a I'll put it this way. You're not gonna spend hours moving around microphones on guitar cabinets with Buddy. He doesn't care about that. He's more of the big picture guy.
Okay. Some people Jimmy Iavin famous for being on the phone while he's producing records. Rick Rubin, you know, is constantly telling the band to do things by themselves. Where he shows up is Buddy there paying attention the whole time.
Absolutely, he's paying attention. He's sitting in the back of the room. He's actually he's the first guy there and he's sitting in the back of the room. He's got an assistant that's always there with him. He is very much paying attention. He's not on I've never seen him on the phone, you know, he just sort of sits back there. And yeah, he's also been making the Willie Nelson records for a long time. He's he's been making all those records.
Have you worked with Buddy on anybody else at this one? Yeah?
I worked on a Willie Nelson record. I worked on a Jamie Johnson record, a couple other things. He's brought me into overdub on just on and off. Yeah, I work with the Willie record I worked on. It was really fun.
So what's the style of making a Willie record?
It was more loose and let's move fast. There was a lot of people there, a lot of people in the control room. His bus was parked out back. Everybody wanted to go on the bus and smoke pot is.
It was.
It was a kind of a circus. And but my great experience with that record. I've played on a couple of his records, but on the record that Buddy did we cut on my birthday. We cut got to Serve Somebody, And so I didn't tell I didn't say it's my birthday because I didn't want the whole thing where they give me the cake and you know, so I just I'm just thinking, this is freaking amazing. I'm playing with Willie.
I can see him in the vocal booth across the studio, and we're playing got to Serve Somebody, which I love that song. I mean, it's so and so we're playing that song. But my story about it is is that so we do two or three takes and Willie's playing his guitar the way he plays guitar, and he plays through this weird old Baldwin amp and it I don't think there's a ground on the plug, and the radio station was coming through and they were having trouble with
the amput. But we're cutting the song and his amp's kind of kind of noisy, but he's playing the way he plays.
It's great.
It's Willie Nelson. So we cut Serve Somebody and we get into the oultro of the song, and a lot of times in the studio, on the outro, which is the end part of song, you can kind of jam stretch out and they'll edit that out or do what they want to do, but it's always fun for us
to do. So we're cutting surf somebody. We get to the end of the song and Willie plays a little bit and then I answer him, and then he plays a little bit, and so we're having this conversation and we're playing and I'm thinking to myself, it's my birthday. I'm trading licks with Willie. He's playing Trigger, the famous guitar. This is freaking amazing. And I was so excited and and and I knew that his part was a little rough in his amp was making some noises, but who cares, you know.
And so.
I get the record and they replaced it with Jim Horn on sacks on the outro. So so our little conversation we had is gone, and they've got this wailing sax solo, which was really great, you know. I mean, Jim Horn is he's Jim Horn, you know that played on all those great records, and it was it was great. But I was like, oh man, you know, so that's that's my story from that record.
I mean, Baldman was a piano maker that made amplifiers for like ten minutes. At the end of the sixties early seventies.
They make this big, tall solid state amplifier called the Baldwin Exterminator. And if you see Neil Young play, he has a couple of old Vinage Fender amps. He's got these pile of amps he plays through live, and in the middle of it, he's got a Baldwin exterminator and it has a very particular, weird solid state sound. But for whatever reason, Willie with his very unusual classical guitar, gut string guitar, it's got a mic in it. That's the empty plays through. I think, I mean, I guess
that's the ampies always played through. I don't know, you know, but that's what he had.
So he plays the same guitar he plays with live with a hole in it. That's what he records with.
That's what he records with, that same guitar, and it was just it's amazing.
Let's go back. You talk about creating a chart. Tell my audience for those who don't know about creating a chart.
A chart is it's really you know. I think if you were in a on a string session in la you would get a transcription with the notes and a full score that you would read off of, and you would find the guitar part and play those notes, and you would read those notes. We don't really do that
in Nashville. What we do is they have a thing called the number system, and each like, if you're in the key of C, a C is a one, a D minor is a two with a with a negative sign next to it, and you do a little bit of transcription in the case of where you might notate above it that you're going to one measure, you're going to play a one chord and a two minor, but the two minor starts on the two and and you'll make a little notation of the notes above it. And
so everybody knows how to read a little bit. But the reason that my understanding of the reason why the Nashville number system came into being because country music and acoustic music uses acoustic instruments. If you change or even forget about that, if you just change the key, if you do it once and the singer goes, oh, it's too high. So you're in the key of D, so you got so you go down to you go down
to B flat. Well all the all the names of the chords have changed, but if you use the number system, it's just the intervals of the chords, so the numbers stay the same. So you read the same chart. Does that make sense what I'm saying?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So that's.
That's And also because guitar players use KPO's, so the song might be in G, but you may kpo up three frets and you're playing out of E, and so you're looking at the guitar and you're playing an E chord, but it's really a G chord. But if you if it's just a one, if the song's in the key of G, it's just a one. No matter where you are, it's just a it's a It simplifies things and it makes it easy to adapt and change.
Let's go back to the road as we're jumping around here. You know, you talk to a lot of artists. They love the hour two on stage and the rest of the time is dreadful. What's it like for you?
It's you know, I have to say, you know, I didn't really start to tour. Until I was in my fifties, I just was always playing club gigs or I would occasionally do a one off with somebody in a large hall or something, but I was never really and when I was really young, I was on the road in the van, but that's different. I was in my twenties
and that's a whole other thing. But my experience with Bob c Or We're out for three months, and it was difficult for me on the days off because it was my first time doing that, and I didn't enjoy it was fun being in Pittsburgh for three days in exploring the city and whatever, but I didn't like playing a gig having two days off. Playing a gig having two days off, that was foreign to me because I hadn't done that in a long time and when I was a kid on the road playing gigs, we were
played every night. So for me, I didn't really love that, but I adapted to to it and actually had a great time because the gigs were just so incredible. I mean, playing with Bob is just like, this was incredible. It's a great experience. So it was all new. But then I went right from that to Chesney, which is you're either out Friday and Saturday and then you come right back, or you're out Thursday through Saturday and you come right back. So it's I really love it.
Okay, So if you go out and come back, everybody fly on the same plane. Or does can he take his own transportation?
Well, he's got his own plane, so and he's got a full time crew. And so the way it works. When I first went out with him, he was pretty separate from us, and we would either take a bus and the band has her own vie and his organization is so big, it's like a hundred people. So you have this army of buses and the band has her own bus. It's a very comfortable and nice bus. Or if we were going to the West coast, we'd fly
and we'd fly out Southwest or American or whatever. In the last four years, since the pandemic, we have a newer band, and I mean his other band. His old band was great. It was kind of more of a for lack of a better word, like a country rock bar band, which was really fun and there were great guys, but they were guys he had come up with, but he was sort of separate from them and they weren't studio guys, and now the band is more he feels like, in my mind, I think he feels like we're more
his equals or something. I'm not sure if that's the right way to say, but what I'm getting around to saying is that we'll fly on his plane. Some of the time. He'll call and say, hey, guys, let's it'll call the band and say, do you guys ride with me? So we'll jump on the plane and ride to Pittsburgh. We'll leave it four in the afternoon and get there at seven, zip over and play the gig, get back on the plane and be home at one in the morning.
And that's that's a that is a luxury. And so we do that sometimes and it's great because we have great conversations and we talk about recording and what we want to work on, and everybody's in it together. But then sometimes we're on the bus and I don't mind the bus. I actually like the bus. I think the thing I like the least is flying commercial. That's it's just hard.
Okay. When you do have downtime, how do you entertain yourself?
I do yoga, I like to work out, and then I have a traveling pro tools rig and whatever records that I'm working on, or songs that I'm writing, or whatever i'm doing. I'll set up my stuff in my hotel room and work. And there's something about being in a hotel room where I'm not distracted. I'm not going to take a break and go up and hang out with my wife or run up to the store or something. I'm just there. I get a lot of work done and actually really like that. And the other guys in
the band all do the same thing. We all do the same thing. We're all in our rooms with our pro tools, rigs, And I think if you talk to most bands on the road, a lot of the guys will say, yep, I've got my ableton or my logic or whatever they use. It's on my laptop and I'm in my room and I'm working on stuff. So there's a lot they can do during the day.
Well, in the old days, if you're doing twenty six dates in thirty days, you were burnt crisp on both ends, you know, So when you want to work today, you know, are you awake enough for being a musician? You can run on empty? How does it work?
I go to bed early. I'm gonna go to bed. And really, I almost hate to say this, it's almost embarrassing, but the when we play and we get done in eleven, we play like from nine to eleven, kind of sort of somewhere in there, and then by the time you're back at your hotel room or whatever you're doing, it's midnight. I mean, that's usually the latest time ever up. And I still get up early, but most of the time I go to bed early, and I get up really early,
and I get a lot done in the morning. That's and if I need to, I take a nap in the afternoon.
Okay, you know, Canny sometimes play stadiums, sometimes play sheds, as big a building as he wants. You're there, you're performing, and it is a perform it's in front of fifty thousand people. How do you calm down in an hour such a you can go to sleep.
I don't know how to answer that, and I don't really ever think about it. There's something about playing his gig, and it's kind of different than other gigs. I don't know how to answer this exactly. It's I'm in it's exciting, and you run around and there's tons of people and it's very very loud, you know, and it's but it's there's this weird I'm kind of relaxed doing it. I enjoy it so much. And if I'm having a good night, I do this mindfulness. It's the meditation that I do.
And if I'm having a good night, I can get into mindfulness while I'm playing, and I just sort of stop thinking and just play, and it's this very relaxing and I just look out at all the people and all the lights, and I'm a side man. I'm over on the side, even though I get to step out and plate, so all those and stuff, I'm a side man, and so I can sort of watch the world from my little side of the stage and look at all
the people and all the crazy shit they're doing. Or if we're outdoors the lights at a festival, you know, and if I'm in a good place, which isn't every night, but when i am, I get into this mindfulness thing where I just play and that's a really great place to be. And then when I get done, I'm not I'm not stressed or i'm not jazzed. I'm just sort of relaxed. And it's easy for me to either get on the bus. I'm usually the first one to sleep
on the bus. I'm also way older than everybody else, but it's like I can.
I could just get.
On the bus, have a whatever, coconut water because I don't drink, and go to sleep.
Tell me more about mindfulness and how you get in that zone.
It's it's a discipline and I move in and out of it, and it's like a meditation practice and it's a Buddhist thing that it started that way. But there's tons of mindfulness apps, Like Sam Harris has a great app. I'm a big Sam Harris fan, and he has a daily meditation that's very mindfulness based. And there's also ten percent Happier, which is also a great app. And that the guy that has that app is the guy that was a he was a newscaster. I can't remember his name,
but it's his app. And you just try to stop your mind from going on the treadmill and thinking about what I gotta do tomorrow, what just happened, what do I regret, what do I wish happen? You know, you just sort of let that go and I find that I play my best when I stopped thinking and there's a there's a mindfulness expert named George Mumford. Have you ever heard of him? He no, he has a book out and he was he's a sports guy and he with Michael Jordan was the first guy I did it
with was Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan's thing on the court was mindfulness and talked to him by George Mumford. And so what he did was it was the same thing where you stop thinking, you forget about the people out there. I mean they're still there and you still see him, but you just let go and you play your best. And he also worked with Kobe and a couple of other people, but he was a he works with sports people and gets them. It's sort of a way to
unstress and to play their best. So I find in playing music as far as performing and actually in the studio sometimes too, if I can shut off the noise and just and it doesn't always work. There's some days where you just you can't shut it off. You know, there's stuff you're thinking about, or you got to do something tomorrow and you're stuck thinking about it. But if I or are you thinking about yourself?
Do they like me?
Do they not? Like me. Do they like what I played? Do they not like what I played?
You know?
But if you can stop that and just let go, you're still aware. I play my best that way, So playing gigs, I play my best when I do that.
Okay, how do you avoid making mistakes when you're playing live?
Practice? For me, I'm a big practicer. I get up in the morning and I practice every morning. And if I I mean, once you're out on two and you've played songs a bunch, you don't have to practice the songs as much. But for me to avoid to get my hands to do what my brain is thinking, I have to practice. It's like a physical thing. Some people don't have to. I absolutely have to. So for me, I get up in the morning and I practice, and I get my hands going, and then like for instance,
Friday night, tonight Night's Wednesday Friday. I'm playing with Pat mcgloughlin. I'm not sure if you know who he is. Yes, if you ever get a chance to see him play live, it's the greatest. He's amazing to play with. But it's for me. It's a lot of playing. And he likes me to play a lot, and he'll send me I'll probably get it tonight or tomorrow. He'll send me an MP three and say, here's the new songs I just wrote I want to do, so I have to learn
those songs. Or sometimes I'll also say sometimes we get there and he just starts playing new songs and we follow him. He's a great bandleader and so but what I'm getting around saying is that the next couple days I'll work on playing his songs. Even though it's just a club gig, it's not being recorded. No one cares. It's a club gig. You know, there'll be a lot of people there, but playing at this club called Third
and Lindsley. And but for me to really enjoy myself and to be able to relax and play great, I have to practice and learn what I'm going to do, and then I make less mistakes. I still might make a few mistakes. I mean, that's just going to happen. But yep, that's what I do.
Okay, when you're on the road with Kenny, how many musicians, backup singers, how many performers?
We have a six person band and there is drummer, a bass player. We have this female bass player named Harmony Kelly who's just freaking great. She's like the crowd favorite. And then the keyboard player, Wyatt Beard, he's the band leader and he sings all the backgrounds and actually on the record sings all the backgrounds. He's a great background singer. And then there are three guitar players and one guy sort of is the guy. Well, actually the other two
guitar players both play like well. One guitar players are great banjo player. He'll do all the banjo stuff and all the mandolin stuff, but he plays and he plays a lot of acoustic guitar. And then the guy that stands next to me, John Conley, he plays fiddle, a little bit of mandolin, acoustic and electric. And then I used to play a lot of acoustic and and electric. I'm kind of more doing just electric playing now I mostly do that. And so there's it's a six person band.
That's kind of how it works.
So if you're going to go on the road and this is a well oiled machine, how far in advance do you start to rehearse.
Well, i'll tell you about this year. We're going to do the Sphere again, So we're going to rehearse starting in March. We'll do about a week and a half and we'll that first week will just makes you our sounds are good. Our front of house guy, Robert Scovil, who's like the famous front of house guy that was Tom Petty's guy for a long time. He's really great.
He'll be there, we'll get our sounds. We'll maybe change some things this year for our sound and so we'll do that for the first week and then we'll get so that'll be like a week and a half in March, and then in April we'll probably do two weeks of rehearsal and we'll learn all the new stuff that we're going to do, all the changes that we're going to make.
And I think we're playing a couple of festivals at the end of April, and then May and June we'll be at the Sphere and we'll do probably a week on a sound stage in Las Vegas that has this mini sphere thing technology where it's similar and it has the surround speakers so they can get the same on going and we'll spend you know, maybe four or five days there and then we'll be in and we'll start playing.
But I also will say that Kenny does not like to rehearse, and I don't think he'll mind me saying this, and we'll so. Rehearsing with him is a great gig because you get he'll book you for the week and we'll do Monday and Tuesday and we'll run through stuff and he'll go, man, you guys sound great. He said, let's stick the rest of the week off. What do you think and we'll go.
Sounds good to us.
He does not like to rehearse this. It's funny because he's so meticulous about everything else in the video and the lights and the recording. He just sort of leaves the live thing up to us as long as we don't take advantage of that. You know, if you take advantage of it, we're gonna hear about it.
But you know, yeah, okay, Kenny has a lot of production forgetting this. If you're just going out at a normal summer, do you then go to Pennsylvania or some other place to rehearse with all the production.
For about a week. Yeah, And usually in my experience, we go to Tampa. I've done this two or three times with him. We did one time in Nashville. We went to Jacksonville one time, but he kind of likes the water and likes having his boat nearby. So we go. We going down to Tampa and and we rehearse for a week and that's really fun. I mean, you're the
tours are about to start. Everybody's super stoked and excited. You meet the new crew people, and there's a lot of dinners, and everybody hangs out and there's a real I think a lot of big road artists would tell you that there's a culture and a family to their to their road thing where everybody hangs out and you and with Kenny's thing, because it's in a stadium, they have this whole thing set up with a bar in a grill backstage and they're grilling, you know, fresh seafood and it's pretty fun.
So what was your experience playing the Sphere.
My experience playing the Sphere was I really really enjoyed the setup and we did I'm in my studio right now. You can see it's a studio we're in, and we did some of the content here at my place, which would be the music before the show starts and as the show starts, and some in between song stuff. So I got to see some of the content. It was exciting coming up with sort of cinematic sounds to start the show, and so we did that in my studio
and I loved all that. That was great. I'm really into doing music for film and TV now, so this is sort of a parallel to that, and that was really good. And I really enjoyed the first week at the sound stage where we dialed in and we changed the arrangements and we're trying new things. Everybody's super excited. We're having a great time. And the first couple of shows,
it's kind of amazing being in there. I mean, it sounds really great in there, and you know, you see the whole you know, the three sixty spectacle of it. And I also mentioned, especially in light of the past few weeks, is that for this past week, is that while we were at the sound stage, the Dead was doing their their last set of dates and we had passes to get into the sphere, so I went and saw the Dead a couple times, which was just absolutely fantastic.
I can't say enough good things about what a great band they had become, you know, sort of a new I've heard you mentioned it in your email. It was kind of a it's a different thing now, but it's and they're tight in a different way that they weren't tight before. And also the whole culture of the dead looking at all the people, and I just I really loved it so so I enjoyed that week, and the first couple of shows were great, and then after that it was because we had the floor open and the
people were down on the floor. It was just like a regular Kenny Chesney show. It was not like I heard that Vince Gill has this famous quote that everybody I've heard ad nauseum where he says, it's the most amount of people I've played for that weren't watching me. And I did not have that experience. I felt like it was pretty normal. It was kind of like a regular big gig and it was exciting and the people were very excited at the front to see all that
was going on, but they were watching us too. And but then being stuck in Las Vegas for another six weeks, you know, yeah, I don't drink or gamble, and it was like one hundred and seventeen degrees out and I don't really love Las Vegas. It's kind of a dark, dark place.
I'm with you on that. When you're on stage with the band. You know with Kenny's band, you know most of the people there, they know the hits, they may know more. They're just thrilled to be there. But the what degreed does the band lock in certain nights and it's better certain nights the other nights? And when do you feel that? And when do you feel it?
Mesh, I think it's inevitable that every night isn't perfect. And part of the beauty and the magic and the mystery of music is it's always different. And we play through two amplifiers, We play loud guitars through two amplifiers, and they sound different. They sound different every night, especially when you travel that they sound different. And I think that's a good thing. And it's not always great, But this particular band is just it's kind of a special
group of people. We've just discovered. This band came together at the end of the pandemic quick aside and once again not to guest any aspersions on the guys that aren't in the band anymore. Two of the band members would not wear a mask or get tested or any of that kind of stuff. So when we all started
to go back out in twenty twenty two. You had to you had to do that, and they refused to do it, couldn't so, and it was an opportunity to have a new band, which is probably and they were great, they were great players, but it was probably time to have a new band. This is an exceptional band. And we also record on our own and have a record out that gets played on No Shoes Radio, and we're
in the process of recording a second record. So yeah, we're and what is that bill as the name of the band is Rosie and the Revival, and the reason it's part of the reason it's called that is we At one point he wanted to do a whole lot Rosie, which is a ac DC song, and so our bass player, Harmony Kelly, she can really soul shout and she can sing really high, so she could sing that's not Bond Scott, that's the other guy whatever his name is. It's that guy.
It sing but he sings really high, so she could do that. So we we we did that song and we rehearsed it at a sound check and Robert Scovil was recording all the soundchecks so we could check our parts and everything, and he made a little mix of that and we listened back to it and went like, holy shit, just sounds amazing. So on our record is the first time we played that our sound check our that's on the record, so that's hence the name. So so she's kind of Rosie, but she doesn't sing all
the songs, and so then we did. So then through the rest of that tour, we did we would record our sound checks. We did a Tom Petty song, we did a song by the Stones, and we did a meters instrumental. So I in my studio, I kind of cobbled that together and then I also write songs, and a couple of the other people in the band write songs. So we came to my studio, we recorded those songs and we really liked it. We played it for Kenny.
He loved it, and so I just we came up with the idea to call the record sound checks and tape decks, which is apropos of what of what of what we did? And so yeah, that's out and it's gotten. You know, it's not like a huge hit record or anything, but for us, it's been great. And he'll we'll play a gig and he'll have us do one of our songs on the gig. You know, he's very gracious in that way.
So how much equipment? What equipment do you bring on the road?
I mean the overall thing is huge. I mean it's a stadium gig. So but I like to play through a Marshall amplifier and the other two guitar players they do a lot of switching of instruments, and they do there's this sort of thing that guitar players do now where they play a lot of different guitars. Like if you go see whoever, they're changing guitar every song. I kind of bugs me. And when I when I.
See like.
A clip of Exile on Main Street that tour, Keith is playing a strat the whole night. So I have this firebird guitar and unless it's in a weird tuning or I have to switch guitars or play a baritone guitar, which is a low tuned guitar, I just play a fire through a Marshall and my setup is is pretty simple. I have amps off stage that are miked.
So where'd you grow up?
I grew up in Cleveland and moved to Louisville in the sixth grade and moved to Nashville right when I turned twenty one.
Okay, so did you play music before the Beatles or was more you saw the Beatles and you got to pick up.
I saw the Beatles in the Hall deal, the standard deal. But I also around that time heard I heard the Beatles and loved that, and I didn't really play. And then I heard of Jimmy Hendrick's record, like when I was in grade school, and that was it. I was it, and then I had to get a guitar, and then I just I didn't. I just played in your typical garage band, maybe at a high school dance or something like that.
What'd your parents do for a living?
My parents are in Cleveland. We grew up in this sort of working class, middle class area and my dad was an engineer, a mechanical engineer. My mom was just a housewife. And like when I was young, I would say we were working class. Then as my dad started to do better, we were middle class, you know.
And how many kids in the family.
There's three. There's three of us. I'm I'm the youngest, and two brothers. And it's also interesting that in Cleveland it was an entirely Jewish part of town where there was nobody that wasn't one of us. We're all Jews living in this area. And looking back on that, that was a really great thing. The whole ethnic of the northern ethnic culture.
That was that was good. So what happened to your two brothers? How did their lives play out?
My next oldest brother who I'm very very close to, that's a couple of years older than me. He's a therapist and he's in Santa Rosa above San Francisco. And then my oldest brother, who's a good bit older I'm not very close with. He was a classical musician, but never really did that well and he got into sales and then his life just sort of fell apart and he's had a lot of health problems.
Well, if he's a classical musician, sounds like there was a lot of music in the home growing up.
There was. Yeah, there was a lot, Yeah, definitely.
And did your parents make you take piano lessons?
No, but I played trombone and they got me trombone lessons. They didn't like the guitar thing very much. They sort of discouraged that. But I enjoyed trombone and play in the youth orchestra. I played in the band and I played cello in the orchestra, so I was always very involved in those things, and my parents were very much behind that, but they didn't like the thing of playing
in garage bands and loud. I had a amp and a guitar in my room and I blasted really loud and play along to Hendricks and Cream and you know those kind of records. Then they were not into that too much.
Well, if you play the trombone in the cello, are you the kind of guy who can pick up anything and figure out how to play it. No, I'm not.
I have to practice and work at everything. I also play steel guitar, and I love playing steel guitar. I'm not really great at it because I don't play it enough, but I have to really work at something. And I played bass, so on a lot of the things that I record here at my studio, I play bass. I play guitar. I can eke out a key part, you know, just sort of get a sound and play some chords because I know the notes. But I'm not really a keyboard player. Yep, that's what I do.
And what kind of kid were you? Were? You good? In school. Did you play spoards? Were a loaner? Did you have friends?
I was kind of a loaner. Our family was a very dysfunctional family, and we once we grew up in I mean, we didn't know this as kids, but once we grew up, especially when my brother is a therapist, we realized that my dad was on the autism spectrum, probably a little closer to Asperger's, but he was. He was, And so he was this guy that I kind of didn't know. He was a guy that was around, but I didn't. I had no relationship none with him, and my mom was in the hospital all the time. So
we kind of raised ourselves. I didn't have any I mean, I can tell you to an extreme amount, I had zero parental supervision in any way whatsoever. There's just I mean I did. I could come and go as I please. I could stay all night and show up the next day. And it's kind of weird, you know, so, and that's probably not the best way to grow up.
Why was your mother in the hospital.
She just had all kinds of health issues and she was we also learned we learned this out actually late in her life. She was adopted and had a very rough start, and she was just a really messed up person, like a very angry, messed up person. And once again I just sort of there was these people that I lived in the same house with them, but I did not really have a relationship with them, and so music was my escape.
You know.
I was grateful to have that. That's kind of how I escaped.
So you live in outside Cleveland, you move moved to Louisville. How is that different?
It was night and day because my dad had gotten a better job and we lived in the suburbs and there were no Jews, and so.
It was it was weird.
It was a little weird, but you know, I in junior high school. In high school, I had some really good friends and I played in some bands, but I also got in a lot of trouble and I got into drugs, and it was sort of I was just sort of the trying to figure myself out. And because I didn't have any supervision, I did some things I shouldn't have done and was around some people I shouldn't
have been around. I actually got arrested a couple of times, and yeah, so it was but actually my I had one really really great friend named Jeff Sipperman, who was Jewish as well. We were the two Jewish kids at our school. There's probably a couple others, but as far as I can remember, it was the two of us,
and we both moved to Nashville together. He played bass, So we moved together to Nashville to seek our fame and fortune at the ripe age of twenty one or twenty I guess I was just turning twenty one my moved.
Okay, before we get there, are you playing in bands in high school?
I'm playing in like garages and rehearsing and basements. Yeah, I'm sort of doing it and sort of kind of doing it, but not really. I mean, I would have a guitar. Then I wouldn't have a guitar. Then I would have a guitar, and I'd been playing trombone and.
So sort of, yeah, what point did the bell go off? I want to do this for a living.
I went to college for a year and I always got really good grades, and I got an academic scholarship and to where to Bradley, to Bradley University, and I wasn't in the music program, but I took a improvisational music course for at that time was an unusual thing to have. And I had my guitar and amplifier at the school in my trombone, and the music teacher was.
Really great, and.
There's a couple of different people. There wasn't a specific person like a mentor or anything like that, but they really encouraged me. And what I realized is that I didn't want to be in college, that I wanted to play. And so I moved back to Nashville and got a gig in a Holiday Inn lounge band.
Wait wait, wait, back to Nashville or Louisville.
I'm sorry, I met.
I moved back to.
Louisville and I lived at my girlfriend's house and her parents were splitting up and no one was ever there. So I was living at my girlfriend's house. I was like eighteen, and I got a gig and a Holiday Inn band, and once again, my best friend Jeff was playing bass, and we had this this lounge gig and we were getting paid like three hundred dollars a week to play and we're like, this is amazing and so and we just were having a ball.
And so.
That's when I started to think I had quit college and I was practicing all day long and trying to learn new things, and we met there. There was a showcase bar in Louisville called the Lemon Tree and they had like touring bands would play there, and we saw this kind of outlaw country band play and we went and we would go there because they would play later than we played, and we would go there and see
who was playing. And there was this one band playing there and the drummer, who's this very friendly guy, were talking to him and saying, hey, we playing a holiday inn band, and he said, you guys need to move to Nashville. This band was from Nashville, and the drummer was saying, you guys, what are you doing up here?
This is the wrong place to be. So we actually went down for a weekend when I was twenty and stayed at his house and went to a couple of clubs in Nashville and he sort of took us around and we said, that's it, We're coming to Nashville. So we came back to Louisville, gave our two weeks notice, put all of our stuff in my car, and this drummer, Rich Kallus, this artist he was playing with, had a single out and they were going to go on the road, and his wife was six months pregnant, and he said,
you guys can save my house for free. So someone was there with my wife, so she's not there by herself. And so Jeff and I looked at each other and said, this is.
This is it.
We got it. We got a way to go. So we loaded up our car and on February second, nineteen seventy.
Eight, we moved to Nashville. A couple of questions. You mentioned Jimmy Hendricks, why I realized the opportunities came up, but you didn't think of moving to LA I mean in the seventies, Nashville, you know, was very country, not like today where it's influenced by rock and roll.
I think to be really well, there's there's two reasons. We loved the whole outlaw movement. Like we love Johnny Paycheck. We're really in it. And this was before take this job and Shove it his Like earlier records we thought they were just great. The Whalen record, Dreaming My Dreams and Rambling Man to Us. Those records were more rock. And this is like nineteen seventy seven, nineteen seventy eight, to us, those records were more rock and roll than
like Kansas. There was this rawness to that, and there was the guitar, the way it sounded, and in particular, there's a Hank Junior song called Feeling Better and it's actually Reggie Young on guitar. It's Reggie Young and Whalen on guitar and something about that song. It was country, but it had this raw it was kind of the blues. I don't know that. I think that song came out maybe in seventy seven, and that was our song. We heard that song like that is the most bad ass
shit I've ever heard. Said they're making it in Nashville. Let's go to Nashville. And on the other side of it, you know, to be honest, is that New York and LA were intimidating. They were far away, and Nashville was one hundred and fifty miles away, and we had a free place to stay. So I really didn't have a plan. It just seemed the next best thing. I didn't have any kind.
Of like looking into the future.
I had no freaking idea what I was going to do. We just we just moved there.
Okay, those records you mentioned the Outlaw country records. At that time, I'm living in LA. We don't even have a station that's playing country when I would drive cross country when I lived on the East coast. Maybe if you were in the hinter leands, you know, there'd be an AM station you're you know, turning the value to hear that. So what did you get exposed to this stuff? I don't.
I think because we had this. We were playing with this lounge singer who was into country music, and we played kind of more. We played some Whalen and we played some whatever was of the day, good hearted Woman, some of those Willies songs, and we just so we found those records and we just liked it. I mean, I don't really know the answer to that question. It's a good question to ask. I think we just sort
of discovered that. I would also say my friend Jeff, he was this very, very bright guy who sadly enough was an addict and ended up it killed them. But he was just this really bright guy and he just found these records. So we found these early Haggard records, and the guitar playing on those early Haggard record they're amazing. And I just listened and it was so kind of raw and funky sound, and I just liked it so And it's funny because I'm not a great country guitar player.
I'm really more of a blues guitar player. But there's something about those records that I liked, and I just thought, Okay, so Nashville is really close. We're just going to go down there with no plan. I have any plan.
Okay. Would your parents see about you dropping out of college?
They were not happy about it, but typical of my parents, they just sort of didn't say much about it.
You were living on your own money, You weren't asking for any money, or were you.
I was totally on my own. I've pretty much always been on my own. I got a scholarship for college, an academic scholarship. They didn't have to pay for anything. And when I moved to Nashville, I mean when I moved back to Louisville, I got a job at this life like home depot type place, and I found an apartment that was I think it was one hundred and twenty five a month, and I had a job that I could walk to and then I got a car soon after that for like no money, almost I bought
an old car and so I was just on my own. Yeah.
Okay, So now you show up in Nashville. You're babysitting the pregnant. Wait, what do you do? You don't know anybody.
Well, here's what happened. I've told the story a bunch of times, and this is I mean, this is what happened. So we drive in my car on February second. We drive to Nashville, and we have a place to stay, and we go there and the wife of rich Sharon, Sharon callus. She's there. She's got a room set up with a couple of mattresses that me and Jeff can stay in. And we each had like our little funky suitcase. We dropped it off, but I had my amp in
my car. And as we were driving to Sharon's house, we heard there's a bar that had twenty five cent beer, and we said, this is our first night in Nashville, let's go celebrate. And it was called the Long Branch Saloon. And so we go to the Long Branch Saloon is twenty five sent beer and we go in there and there's a guy like on a construction palette that you know, you would stack bags of I don't know, feed or whatever. He's on there with his electric guitarists little pa playing
the blues. And I'm always been a blues nerd. So he's in there playing and I just went up to him and his name was Bobby Bradford. And I went up to him and I said, we just moved to town. We have our guitars in the car. Can we play with you? He said, bring them on in. So we got our I got my amp out of the trunk, Jeff had his bass, he plugged it into the PA. I got my guitar and we played with Bobby. He loved it, and he said, I've been looking for guys
that like the blues. And so he had a gig there on Monday nights, and he had a Wednesday night at this Vanderbilt bar called the Villager. And so literally the night we got there, we had two nights a week of gigs. And then this thing happened where we just became the Vanderbilt band, like right away and right away, and then we added dates and we would play frat parties.
And this is with Bobby Bradford with who.
This is with Bobby Bradford. This happened in the space of about six weeks. Okay, it just I don't I mean, I'm telling you this is I tell the story and I think about it going like this is impossible, but this is what happened. It's like it was this wonderful, amazing thing where all of a sudden it was packed
every night we played, and it was Vanderbilt Kids. And Bobby was a biker and he was in his thirties and so he had and he was affiliated with I don't remember the name of the biker club, but one of the where they would wear the jackets, you know, right, and with their names on the back of it, and like the Fortune Seekers. I don't I can't remember the name of it. And so those guys would all show up. So we would play at the Villager and it would be wall to wall with these club bikers and Van
Dey Preppy's students, and it just became a scene. And so then Bobby Bradford was in the process of leasing this like funky boat house on the outskirts of town, and he made that into his blues club and they had a place to live in the back. And this was about June, so we got there in February. This is in June. He leases the club. Me and Jeff move into the back of this bar, and we're playing
five nights a week at this bar. And although he had let we advertise it at Vanderbilt, so here comes all the Vanderbilt students and the bikers, and I've got a five night a week gig. That is how I got started.
Okay, at that point, what was the dream, Bob? You know?
Man, I don't know, because I felt like I would regularly think what am I doing here? Or people would say to me, what are you doing here? You're like a rock guitar player. Why are you well? You know, I would go like, I don't know. I'm in this blues band and everybody likes us, and I'm twenty one years old. I don't know what I'm doing. And the and we ended up having a quote unquote manager, and we took a church bus and converted it and put our ants in and played all around the South. We
had a little bit of a following. It was not really a great band, it was, but it was a great experience. And I don't know what I was doing. But what ended up happening is that Bobby wisely, in the early part of the week he would have songwriters come play, like where they do the guitar poll, and they'd be in a circle and it was a place for them to come play. So I would do the exact same thing where I would say, Hey, I play in the week on I'm in the house band for
the weekends. Can I come back you up? And you know, a songwriter would say, yeah, back me up. And so the eventuality of that would be that one of those songwriters would say, I'm going into the studio to make a demo tape of my songs. Why don't you come play? I'll pay you forty dollars And it's like, incredible, I get to go to the studio. So that's how I got into the studios.
So what ended up happening with Jeff.
What ended up happening with Jeff is we did about a year hit that bar, maybe a year and a half, and then it was just a disaster of a business and you could see that it was not going to work out. And Bobby was into drugs and selling drugs, and Jeff, who was from a well to do family and he got in with the biker crowd and started
shooting dough. And once he started shooting dope, he became addicted and I would pick him up for gigs and I would go into the house and they'd all be half passed out with the needles, and it was a drag. And he went to prison because he got caught selling heroin or writing fake prescriptions. He went to prison twice. One time got caught with heroin, the other time he was writing fake scripts. He got out the second time and immediately went and shot dope and overdosed and died. Very sad.
Wow, that's a sad story.
Yeah, he was my mate.
Jumping back, you're working with songwriters in the studio? What's the step after that?
That went on for a long for I mean I was not I did not immediately get into being a session player. It was really that I was in this band and I would occasionally go into the studio with songwriters. But maybe I had a tiny bit of a reputation. But what happened is a couple of years after the Bobby Bradford Blues Band, there were other bands around town. There's this really great songwriter named Dave One who has since passed away, and he had a hot band around town,
and I started playing with his band. And there was a singer named Jimmy Hall who was in Wetwillie and he moved to Nashville and he was playing gigs around. So I found myself before I was a session guy. I found myself being the guy that played in five different bands. I was like twenty three, you know, I played in a bunch of different bands. I was just
around town. So then Dave One would get a chance to make another record, and he had a band called the x Rays, and this writer named Don Schlitz who wrote The Gambler. He produced that record, and I got to play on the record, and I met Don and then played on some stuff for Don, and then met all the people from the publishing company he was with and then played with them. And then I played with three or four of the other bands I was in.
Somebody would go in and record, and I would show up and record, but I was very much on the outside of the session. It was still very much of a good old boy kind of a closed thing. But eventually, you know, or occasionally I would get called for something, or I'd play on a songwriter's song, and that an artist would cut that and the producer would say who's playing that guitar? And they would the song and say, well, say it was me, and I would be invited to
come over dub or track on that song. And that's kind of how I made my way into the session scene.
Well, at what point did it turn the corner?
It turned the corner when I was in this band. Two things happened. I got into this band. It was a blues band called the Kingsnakes and we would play at the Bluebird every Monday night. And the drummer was James Stroud, who was a famous record producer and drummer from Muscle Shoals and hear it's from Jackson actually, but was in the Muscle Shoals scene. And the famous studio player Glenn Wharf was on bass. And so we'd play every Monday night and we made a little record and
that band became the band to see. Everybody would everybody who was in town would be there on Monday night, from you know, whoever, from Bonnie Rait to whoever they somebody was in town, they would be there at see us play. And so that and then I produced a couple of demos on an artist named Alison Moore, and she got a record deal on MCA and Tony Brown signed her. And I made that record and played all the guitars on it, and so Tony started to use me.
So right about the mid and late nineties, those two things happened and I found myself playing on a lot of records.
Okay, how did you meet Alison Moore? And how did you say? I'm the guy that produced the demo?
I met Alison Moore because I had right before that, I had There's this guy named Wally Wilson. I know I'm probably saying all these names.
To your little I know the audience can do the research in it. Yeah, yeah, who the hell are all these people he's talking about? So this guy who was in the Kingsnakes with me named Wally Wilson, who is who was a mentor? He was a songwriting mentor to me. It's a lot older than me. And you remember the movie, uh, The Apostle with Robert Duvall. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you ever see that movie where he's this kind of wild guy that picks fights, and so Wally Wilson is a
cross between the Apostle and fog Horn. Leg Horn He's this Texas loudmouth character. And he was in the band and we wrote songs together, and he somehow met Aaron Jacovis, who was an a and are Virgin, and Aaron was hanging around Nashville because Nashville was starting to change and things were starting to happen. So Aaron's hanging around Nashville. Wally is writing for Sony Tree. He's writing at Sony.
So Aaron is, I guess we're looking for songs for somebody, because Wally is the most likable guy you will ever meet. And I mean, he's just this, He's a character, and he says the craziest shit. So Aaron and Wally become friends, and Aaron says, Aaron says, I've been assigned Joan Biez. What am I gonna do with Joan byas she's on Virgin, I don't know, And and Wally goes, well, we should make her record and write.
All her songs. And so Wally says, We're going to San Francisco, by God, and we're gonna go write songs with Joan Bias. This is way, he said it. So so Sony Publishing bought us tickets. We went and got so we went to Joan's house and hung out with her and wrote songs with her, and Wally's going, JONK, we're going to produce your record. And Joan just loved
Wally and said okay. And so when we made a record on Joan with Aaron, and we ended up making two records with her, and so Aaron after that said hey, I heard the singer name Alison Moore and she's amazing. Why don't you cut some sides on her? I said great, And so he also spoke to Tony Brown, so Tony Brown was into signing her. So Tony Brown, through Aaron Jacovis, paid for me to take Alison into the studio to
cut some songs. And one of the songs we cut was called Soft Place to Fall, which ended up in the movie The Horse Whisperer and was nominated for an Academy Award. So that's that's that's how I got started. That's how I got that gig.
Okay, most musicians, especially those who are not the front person, are incredible networkers. Were you working it in Nashville? Were you getting to know everybody, hang everybody, talking to everybody.
No, I've never been a good networker. I just always feel and I did go up to people and say hey, I'd love to play with you, and I still do that, but I am not a networker. I am not good at that. I think it would be fair to.
Say, Okay, so you're playing the guitar and now through Wally you get this opportunity. At what point do you say, well, maybe I want to be a record producer.
That was it. I think when we had our band, The King Snakes and we actually made a record for CURB Records. We got a record deal, but it was kind of ridiculous because nobody would go on the road. They were all I mean, our drummer was the head of us, the head of CBS Records. It's ridiculous there was but we made a record and we actually played a couple of festivals, but it was there's no way
we're going to go on the road. And so I was really involved in the production of that record and just loved it and felt like I don't want to not play guitar and just produce records. I want to play and I like to write song, but I want to do this too. So I started doing it, and we're in this story to get married. I get married in the place where were before Joan Biaz. There's sort of a friend group, you know, how you come up with your group of friends, and you know, we had
there was a lot of these songwriter guys. It was always a sort of left of center folks, you know. And Ashley Cleveland was in that friend group, and everybody loved her. She's an amazing singer, and everybody's talking about, Oh, she's so great. So we're we're in the same friend group and we're all coming up together. And Ashley's writing for Warner Chapel and she's making demos and I get to play on her demos, and then she starts playing gigs. And that was another one of the gigs I had
was I was locally playing with her. She didn't travel and play gigs. She had a small daughter, but she had a publishing deal on Warner Chapel and she's playing around town and I'm in her band. But we're not a couple. We're just friends. And she's seeing other people
and I'm seeing other people. And we had this sort of unique experience where we were you know, you're playing a band with somebody of your friends, give each other a hard time, and I always say, like, you know, what a loser that guy as you were with, you know, And she'd give me a hard time about who I was seeing, and we just we were buds for a
long time. And then she got a record deal on Atlantic, and I was fortunate to get to play on her record because I was in her band, and we sort of fell for each other while she was making that record, and we after our first date, we got engaged two
weeks later. So all of our friends we were like, okay, wait a minute, you're like what you know, because they didn't even know that we were together, you know, and we were all really good friends, but I was sneaking over to her house at night and nobody knew it, you know, for a.
Couple of weeks.
And then we were a couple and we said, well, we're getting married, you know, and they're like, this is not a good idea, you know. And thirty five years later, you know, we're still married.
Okay, you're married. She has a major labeled deal. How long after? She says she has a young daughter. Now you have to support a family. Do you feel like responsibility, Like I'm not like a drifter anymore, I got to go out and earn a living.
Bob, I don't no. I think I was already kind of doing pretty good by that time. I just bought my first house.
She must be doing pretty good.
Yeah, I had bought my first house. I was doing okay. And the weird thing about in Nashville, you know, in the eighties and early nineties, is you could play gigs five nights a week in clubs and get paid. I supposed now, like it is everywhere, you have to wait six months to get a gig. There's five bands on the bill, no one gets paid. The audience is all
the other people waiting to play and their friends. So but back then, you know, so I was doing that, and I was starting to get record dates, and I had enough that I bought the small house. So I was kind of I never really That's another thing where it just I just sort of rolled with it.
I think, So, how many kids do you have at this point?
We have three? So her daughter she had before we were together, her name is Becca. I adopted her because the dad was never in the picture. And then we had two together. And an interesting thing is the you know, a good year before we were a couple. She did a showcase at a bar for I'm at erdigin to at her deal, and we sound checked in the afternoon and an Ahmet and his entourage were going to come. And it was a big deal, I mean a huge
deal for Ashley. Was a good like that's like career, you know, a door opening, you know, a major moment in her life. So after we sound checked, I said, hey, I'll take your daughter and we'll go to McDonald's. And so I took her daughter to McDonald's. And then I had just bought the house but hadn't moved in, and it was close by this bar, and so I took the daughter and said, hey, just so we can drive around and you can eat your drink or shake and whatever.
Here's this house I'm going to buy. And a year later she's living in that house, which is kind of an amazing, kind of an amazing thing, you know. To me, it was amazing.
What are your three kids up to today?
That oldest daughter, she had a long run of addiction, as did Ashley, but she's doing really, really great now. She actually works at an addiction center in San Francisco. My son is an actor in Brooklyn. He has his Masters in theater and he's getting a few things to doing. Okay. And then my youngest is also in New York and runs the grant writing program at Columbia.
Wow. Was Ashley addicted when you were with her?
No, she had actually recently gotten out of treatment. But after we got together, and you know, if you're in AA and NA, it's never about what the other person does, it's about what it's really about.
You know.
It's like, for instance, we have people over, we'll have some wine and serve wine. We won't drink wine, but well, you know, that's just what. So we would go out and I would occasionally have a glass wine. I never really drank much. And actually we always say, you have yourself a glass of wine. I'm in AA, but it's
totally okay, And so I did that. But it ended up that, like right after we got married, she was like, oh, I guess it's okay if I have a glass of wine too, And it very quickly went down the tubes from there and and but she pulled out and she's been sober for almost thirty years. Yeah, she's doing great.
Okay. So you've been talking about this studio that you have when did you build this studio and to what the level is it built out? And what do you do there?
I got this. We bought this house at the end of nineteen ninety six, and we bought it half built. And it's one of those houses that's on a hill. So from the front it's two stories and from the back it's three. So the lower level, which is the same size as the main level of the house, I made into a studio like a I slowly built it like a couple of years after we moved in here, and it has a drum room and a vocal room.
I mean, it's a full on studio. And so we made after Ashley's first record, we made her records here a lot. I do a lot of overdubs here. All of the film and TV stuff I do, I do top to bottom here.
We did the.
Chesney Bands record here. I just produced a song on a really interesting guy that comes out Monday, and we cut the whole track here. And so I'll work here. I'll always do my overdubs here, like I'll do the vocals, and if I need to prepare the drums, I got a great, great drum room. We'll redo the drums but if I have the budget, I like to go to the Sound and Porium or Ocean Way and cut my
basic tracks and then bring it back over here. But I'm you know, Bob, the budgets, they're smaller, and especially for the stuff I do, a lot of times I'll just make the whole thing over here because it's affordable and I can still get paid if I do it over here.
And what kind of equipment do you have in the room.
I have pro tools, which is how I'm recording this now. And I have really really good mic pres I have some vintage mics, I have some newer mics. I've got vintage amps. I've got a piano in the other room. I've got some I got some pretty decent gear.
Okay, what was it like when Ashley lost her major label deal? Uh?
I think for her, her entire recording career was always hard. It never really worked out. I remember she had her she had her first record, and she lost that deal. Then she got signed to this label called Reunion, which was a Christian label and was part of Arista. So the idea was, Okay, we know she's a Christian artist and her songs are spiritual.
At least will do a cod.
Deal with Arista, and so that record, that one was nominated for a Grammy, and we went to the Grammys and Clive was there, and Clive came up to us and said, man, I love your voice, but you have to sing about God, and as she was going, well, yes, actually I do. You know. So it's always been this thing where it was always a struggle. It was it never nothing really ever worked out. I would probably say I think she'd be okay with me saying that.
And what's the status of her music like today?
Well, you know, through the different record labels in the making records, she got three Grammys and so she had a lot of critical acclaim and which is very satisfying and made her feel like the work she was doing was worthwhile. I love some of the records we made. I'm very proud of the work we did. About fifteen years ago, her voice started to change and singing became not as much fun, and so she sort of stopped
doing it. But at the same time, she wrote a book called Little Black Sheep, and it wasn't like a big hit, but it got some notice and did well, and she wrote a second book and she started to lead retreats. She would do recovery retreats, women's retreats, religious retreats, and she also works at a church now and is a spiritual counselor.
So her.
I without a doubt her second career has been more successful and more satisfying than her first.
She's really in a great space.
Okay, you moved to Nashville in the seventies. What's it like being a Jew in Nashville then? And what's it like being a Jew in Nashville today.
I think back then it was like it made me feel like an outsider. I never really got much discrimination. I mean occasionally somebody would say something in the good old boy world, you know, but I think with musicians were musicians and we're all in it, you know, it's a brotherhood and that like there was this keyboard player
from Muscle Sholes. It was actually originally from New York, but he made his name and Muscle shows named Steve Nathan who who was Jewish, and he came up and was playing and there were a few of us and it's like if you played good, and I don't think anybody really cared, honestly, And now it's just it's wide open.
Now, Yeah, you've been in Nashville nearly fifty years. How is Nashville The town changed.
It's night and day. It's so completely incredibly different, and there's some good things and there's some not good things. The it was this kind of small, sleepy town that had some artists, little corners of artistry, and there was the publishing business and all the country songwriters and the record making and but it was a sleepy little town. And now it's like the number one tourist destination. They're they're blowing up buildings, property has gone through the roof,
they've overbuilt. It's kind of a mess. So there's great stuff about it. There's a lot of energy here and you know, I you know, and I read in your emails you talk about, you know, the country music is kind of the thing, and so there's a lot of energy in that. And there's a lot of people that come here and there's a lot of great people doing great stuff. But it's it's it's a little bit like how can I say, It's like we've gotten a little
bit too big for the size we are. It's a little out of control.
And tell me how the music business has changed in this interim.
Uh, I think in Nashville, as opposed to some other places, it's fairly healthy. I think the record companies don't know what to do the I think that it's kind of a mess, and that they don't know how to sell
records and artists don't know how to get across. I almost feel like that the quote unquote country music industry is probably more messed up than the Americana indie industry, which is also here, is huge, right, They're thriving and and you know, there's some country records that are doing really good, you know, and but it's kind of a mess. And from the musicians standpoint, we get paid less for
doing more work. So yeah, it's I mean, it's that's sort of a fractured answer, but it's kind of a fractured place.
And what about the old saw of you know, writing gigs and music grow, et cetera. What's the status of that today?
The writing thing is, you don't it's hard to get a publishing deal and get paid to write. Where it used to be, you'd get a publishing deal, you'd get fifty grand a year, and you'd write songs and they'd pay for your demos. And you'd have a band, and there was a whole industry of the younger players.
That come up.
You play on Sony demos and Warner Chapel demos and and uh, that's what you did. That is completely gone. And it's completely gone because they don't pay the songwriters for the most part, and they have to make their own demos because there's no budget to take a band into the studio, so you have to use pro tools and ableton and logic and make your own demos. And then in the last year there's this thing which really we could have a whole separate discussion on called Suno
s U n O. Have you heard of that? Yeah, yeah you can. What songwriters do is you take you even on your iPhone, you sing the song and play your guitar and input into so into Suno, and in thirty seconds it spits out a full blown demo and they're not bad. They're just not bad. So I've played on a number of things recently where you hear the song writer's demo and go, oh, it's a Sono demo, you know right away. And the one particular experience I had was for Chesney, had somebody pitched him a song
that he really liked. It's like weeks ago, we go into the studio and he plays us a song and go, oh shit, it's a sono demo. And the problem with it for us as the players is that a lot of times it'll play, it'll come up with a thing that's sort of a steal guitar but not really and it's a guitar and it's this synthesis of the two. So Chesney goes, I love that part.
Let's get that.
Guy in there. They call the songwriter and the songwriter goes, it's I have to full disclosure. It's a sono demo, and so Jessney says, can you play that part? And I go, you know, sort of it's gonna sound different because that's not that's like two different instruments that have become one instrument. I fucking don't know what it is, you know, So you come up with something that's kind
of similar to that, but it's not exactly that. And but now Suno you can take individual tracks, so if he wanted to, I mean, there's there's copyright issues and I don't know how all that. They're in the middle of trying to get that worked out. But it's like he could take that part and put it into his recording if he wanted to, you know, but we didn't. He chose not to do that. But yes, Suno has changed.
It's dramatically changing things. But I ascribed to the thing of that that it's just change, and it's it's like what a drum machine did, or it's what a synthesizer did, or the first time they had a sequencer, and you'd have all these cheesy demos that they used a sequencer. It's like, and occasionally you'd have a song that would have a sequencer part in it. It's you still have to come up with a great lyric and a great
melody and the stuff. I've seen writers try to input just a word and say, make a great song of that. It can make sort of a generic song from it, but something that's deep and has soul and really says something special. I don't think it's there right now. I don't think it's going to do that. So it's the tools. It's just a tool.
Okay, you got this work with Testney coming up the sphere and other dates, anything else in the schedule going forward.
Uh, I just cut a song that I'm excited about on a singer songwriters, a very young guy from Kentucky and he is from a rural Kentucky like way back in the woods. But he's like a really good lyricist, kind of like a towns van Zandt type guy. So he has a song coming out on MLK Day. Is that is that Monday?
Yeah?
And it's called American War, And it's from the perspective of the guy that lives out in the country that doesn't have any money, and it really doesn't take sides. It says, you know, you know, red or blue, you know you're both at fault, you know, and we suffer, you know, where it war with both of you, both sides, and it's it's it's a good song. And he came over to my studio and played me his other songs. They are really good. So he's not signed yet. He
got a publishing deal. But the way I found out about him is Universal is interested in him. So he's going to put the song out on Monday, and I'm hoping that he gets some traction and I can have a budget and I can make more songs with him. As I thought he was really really good and the Chesney band is in the middle of making another record, so I'm doing that and though and then just some regular sessions, like next week, I have a blues record that I'm playing on that I'm excited to go do.
Yeah.
So just that's that's kind of a good cross section.
And you mentioned TV and film work. What's the status of that.
I write for a company called Big Yellow Dog, and they have a number They have a film and TV department and they call it sink like writing for sinc. And I do that a lot. And in the past year I've gotten a number of things placed and I really really enjoy that a lot. And I like to write words, but I don't write lyrics in the sense of a country lyric is. I'm really not a country guy, you know. And so the music I write is more outside the box, for lack of a better word, And
I like that. They send me a brief from like we're looking for songs for land Man, and here's how they should be. So I get with the writer and we try to write something and we record it over here, sing it over here. And so I'm doing a lot of that and it's for me. It's something I really want to pursue in this next chapter of my life because I really really enjoy it, and having gotten a couple of things, it makes me feel like, Okay, I can do this.
Okay. Do you only get paid when it gets synced?
Or you only get paid when it gets synced? You don't get anything before? That's the And luckily I can play sessions and play gigs and can support myself and I can do this.
And how about do you play any gigs in town or only on the road? Yep?
I'm playing with Pat McLoughlin this Friday, and he has a new record out called what is the name of the record. It's called Nashville after Dark. I don't love that title, that's what it's called. But it's him playing live in a club and he didn't know, we didn't know that we were being recorded. It's just a board two mix, so it's very raw. But man, Pat is
the best, He's just the greatest. In playing with him, the musicians, when we get done playing a gig with Pat, we always say, after the gig, we stand around backstage and go, that was the greatest gig I've ever played. And I'm not making this up and I'm not exaggerating. Pat McLoughlin is the hidden secret of He is the greatest. Playing with him is like, I can't tell you what that does for my soul and for the other guys to play with him.
You know.
As a writer, he's been really successful and he writes like a lot of those little more recent John Prime songs of John Prime and the Dan auerback stuff, all those records of Dan makes and Pat, you know, and they're writing songs on all of them. So I have that. And then on Sunday there's a guy from Manchester, England, I'm named Johnny Lucas who has a band and plays gigs and I wrote a song with him, so I'm gonna go up and play with his band. I'll just
play a few songs with his band on Sunday. So yeah, I love playing clubs.
Okay, we've been talking to Kenny Greenberg, guitarist, producer, works with Chesney. Heard the story of how he made it. Kenny, I want to thank you for taking all this time with my audience. Man, thank you.
I read all your emails. I love it. You know, we're on the same page on a lot of stuff. So it was honored to be here.
Great to hear the stories until next time. This is Bob Lefstad's