Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob What set God Kiss. My guest today is Raiy Quiz, who has a new album, Colors and Passions. Prairie tell us about this album.
Sees, I don't know where to start other than the fact that my sister was a big fan of Ken Norden back in the late fifties early sixties, and she turned me on to his word jazz records when I was a youngster. And over the years, I've always enjoyed, you know, poetry, writing poetry, and always went back to the memory of listening to his stuff when I was young.
And one day my sister said, you should really maybe take up where he left off and do a spoken word, you know, collaboration with some of your friends and different musicians. And so I took it from there and listened to his album from nineteen sixty seven called Colors. She said, well you should. Just my sister, Leslie. I got to say her name, because he's one of my biggest inspirations in my life.
Ten years older.
Was into jazz and beat beat music and was a beatnik and before that, you know, early rock and roll, and so I grew up with her and all of that kind of inspiration. So she said, yeah, you should maybe take off on where Ken Norden left off and do your version of Colors. And so that's what I did, and it's taken a while to get it going, but I finally have finished it.
Tell us about this jazz artist again.
Well, his name was Ken Norden, and he was originally he was a I think it was a disc jockey in Chicago in the fifties, and he came up with these these records called Word Jazz, and then he had Son of Word Jazz, and they were you know, his his beat, beat take on anything really just you know, like going to the refrigerator at midnight, getting a midnight snack and talking about it. And he had this beautiful
resonating voice. And then he'd accompany these scenarios with some jazz music or or you know, just some sort of a little background. The kind of music was only the most important part of it, but the stories were what intrigued me. And and then when I finally heard Colors, it was much more about the relationship with the music
and his description of these colors. And for example, like yellow, he would be talking about yellow and there'd be kind of a happy flute sound just accompanying his his poetry. And so I mean it's a long, it's a long. I started this like eleven years ago, So it was a long story starting starting in how to develop these songs, and a lot of it became you know, much more over overproduced than his simple versions of it. But anyway, that's what I came out with.
Okay, the listening experience, how would you describe? Is there a story in every song? Is it more jazz music? Is it more free form? Well?
I got to say that each songind Oft started with my idea about a color. Obviously I would have to give you examples because each song is really radically different from the next, and it was really about, you know, over the years, developing each one of these colors and the association with a passion also, so for example, red is a passion with desire, and I always thought that the color red kind of reminded me of sex and you know, desiring not only sex, but desiring something. And
where am I going with I can't remember. So then I thought to myself, well, maybe I should collaborate with some of my musician friends and some of my relatives and come up with a way of producing these these one of these songs, it's one of these tracks. And so it was really a development series of pretty much
improvisation for my friends that would come in. I would start off with maybe a drum track and a little bit of the of the poetry that I'd written about the song and the passion, and then have my friends come in and listen to that and then collaborate and kind of come up and improvise whatever they felt from that idea and the color. So it was really a very collaborative project.
Okay, where did the words come from? I wrote?
I wrote most of the words from poetry about what I thought about the color and the passion and how it made me feel and different relationships.
When you laid down the drum track and your friends came in, were the words already written or wordten after the fact, They were mostly firse. Yeah, they were written first.
It was like a poetry about this color and a passion, and then I would like take how I felt about how I wrote that piece and take a particular percussion instrument, which in each each track sort of features one particular instrument, although it builds with other percussion instruments, but the first one, for example green kind of dominated by the kongo drum.
And each one of these tracks is associated with a piece of artwork that I did, depending on how it developed it got over the years, but I did paintings of each one of my drums and each one of the concepts. Okay, now we have the Internet, we can discover things. But for decades I was wondering where the hell did the name Prairie prince come from?
Oh you really want to know? Yeah, So I'm a junior. My father's name was Charles Lomprier, Prince senior. I became Charles lomp Prier, Prince junior. And the word Lomprier came from a family name from the isle of Jura of Jersey, actually English Channel island that was French citizens mostly, but they were ruled by the English. So the lom Prier was a French name, but it was actually an English
English governed. And when my dad was a little boy, he grew up in the South, in North Carolina, and he had this old guy named will that took care of the kids. His dad was a doctor, and they had you know, eight or nine kids, and my father was one of the younger ones, and this guy says, well, long Prier, that's what your mom wad calls you. But I'm gonna nickname you Prairie. And that's how I came. It's literally from old Will liking the word Prairie as
opposed to loan Prier, which was I guess hard for him. Yeah, hard for him to do it. But before I was I mean before I was born, they were gonna name me Prairie anyway, they were gonna call me Prairie England. So I was never really called Charles or Charlie or Chuck or anything. It was always Prairie from the from day I popped out. So I did not make up the stage name.
Okay, you go to first grade, is your name Prairie or Charles?
Unfortunately it's Prairie, And uh god, I just wish they could have been a Mic or a George or Jim, but no, it was Prairie.
And you know, I got a lot of got a lot of guf that's my question. Prairie is a cool name when you're old. When you're young, not cool. Not cool.
And plus I got like fairy princess because my last name is prince right, and I got that a little bit, but you know, I called cocked some of those guys out in the recess yard later.
Well, what kind of kid were you? Were you a kid who was you know, you have all these artistic pursuits. Were you a member of the group? Were you always an outsider? What kind of kid were you? Like?
I mean, I grew up with my mom and dad, who were they thought outside the thing a little bit. I mean, my dad was really into music, so I really got a lot of my music theory and my ideas about music and especially jazz and stuff from him. And then my mom was really into art and we used to go to art classes and stuff. But no, I was a pretty normal kid. I had grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, which was pretty normal, and by then, you know, early fifties, it was pretty much just like
living in the desert. So yeah, I didn't have much money. I didn't have any you know, necessarily, any like hoodlums waiting around the corner, although a few times there were, you know a couple of guys that wanted to I wanted to knock me out, but I ran. And what did your father do for a living? He was a cotton broker. He first in North Carolina. He worked for like the company store kind of thing and managed it
and stuff. And then he got a job opportunity to move from North Carolina in the early fifties right after I was born and and start broking cotton in Arizona because there was a lot of business there from the Pima Indians and the you know, the Native Americans that were growing cotton way back day, way back when. Still today, Pema cotton sought after really fine, great cotton.
Okay, the country is shrunk, but when you're growing up in Arizona, that's like off the grid. People aware there was a stayed out there California where they had Hollywood Arizona. All they knew was hot and there was Phoenix, and people really didn't know anything. So I realized that your only experienced for what was it like growing up in Phoenix.
Like that like being a lizard the sun. You know, you had your boat bedposts in jars of formaldehyde so the scorpions wouldn't crawl up and bite you while you're asleep.
You know.
We didn't have any real air conditioning for the first probably four or five years, and had these swamp coolers, and yeah, your brain got a little bit fried. And we didn't even have a television yet. But when we finally did, you know, there's a lot of a lot of indoor and air conditioning, a lot of indoor television watching, which has you know, kind of led me into the uh, you know, the tubes and the things that came later.
But yeah, growing up being a vidiot and watching television and being exposed to all the advertisements and stuff in Arizona, and you know, but I think I'm not absolutely certain about this, but I think the first McDonald's was there. It's kind of like a testing ground for a lot of the fast food joints or for everything. Was kind of try it out in Phoenix before you move it, move it, take it to La or anywhere else in the country. So it was kind of like a guinea pig area.
Okay, Historically Arizona was a very conservative state, especially when you were growing up. Did you feel that, Well, I certainly my father did. I mean, he.
Did not appreciate he was a full on Democrat. He did not appreciate the Republican onslot there Bury Goldwater and all that. Sure, Yeah, we all felt we all felt restricted and refined. I mean, I couldn't wait to move out of Phoenix when I was and they followed me as soon as I left in sixty nine, they followed me to San Francisco. So, yeah, we grew up running around dodging, dodging stuff all the time. Seems like we were hiding from the police or the principals or the you know, the the guards.
Yeah, okay, So talk about this older sister. How many kids in the family.
I have two older siblings, both of them girls. I'm my older sister, Leslie Prince Raymond, and she lives in the East Coast. Now my younger sister, her younger sister, Helen, passed away about five or six years ago from Parkinson's disease. She was a scientist and research you know, a genius, and she was a film editor and she got into
arts and science more than anything. My sister Leslie ran the arts council in their city, Chestertown, Maryland for years and years with her husband, Vince, and they, you know, I did productions and I you know, did a few backdrops and some set designs for them over the years, and they're just you know, amazing to sick family. And my mom same thing. She was an art historian, and yeah, we grew up with a lot of wonderful resources for art and music.
So what's it like having a sibling ten years older? They so into their life, they're ignoring you, or you precious because you're the young child. I am so precious. You're right, you got it right. They used to treat me like their little baby doll when they were a little d eight and ten years older. With my sisters and they, yeah, they both loved me, and I love them. I missed my other sister so much. But I still see my oldest sister, Leslie a lot, and she travels
back and forth. She has granddaughters and sons that live in San Francisco, and so she continues to travel. She's eighty five, just turned eighty five, and happy birthday, Leslie. Okay, so what comes first? Art or music? Well, this is one of those.
And see you you picked those questions that I've tried to answer my whole life because they're always and.
Let me let me clarify. Okay, did you take music lessons first? Or were you always drawing from a young age?
The same thing, right, just next to each other. And I'm still doing it right next to each other like I took, you know, I took early drawing classes my neighborhood. We had a magazine and we would draw pictures of dinosaurs and had a little printing machine and we'd print them up and make little magazines. And that was you know, like fourth grade, I started taking snare drum lessons and drum lessons from the school band, and probably fourth fifth
grade I was in the school band. But at the same time, my art teacher, whoever was teaching art at the same time, was just enjoying, enjoying watching me and teaching me art. And I would have millions of sketch books and coloring books and everything my whole life. So I guess you'd have to say, if you have to find me, it'd have to be a renaissance man in the wrong era.
Okay, what inspired you to play drums? Because they come there with all the instruments of clarinet, the trombone. Why the drums? Yeah?
Again, my dad inspired me when he was young because he used to tap dance in the kitchen. He would throw some sand down, do some soft shoe and a little tap dancing and claims I never really heard him play the drums, but he claimed he played drums along with silent movies when he was young, really young. He would piano player and he had a snare drum and he would play along with the Silent movies that were
playing in the tournament. Whenever it was twenties, I guess, no, maybe earlier and so, and he could taught me how to handbone, so that was my first drum, really was my leg. And he taught me how to play the spoons, some spoons and yeah, that kind of thing. So I latched onto the drums. They tried to get me to play piano. I took some piano lessons for a few years. My other sister played piano, so she always had a
teacher coming over to the house. And I started taking piano lessons, and I got to a point where I just went, really.
Hate this music that they're trying to teach me. It's just it's just not good. I mean, Mary, Mary had a little lamb or something, but you know, can you just boogie woogiet it a little bit? Learn how you know, you just play it like that, and then the exercises the handle exercises hand and I think that's what they're called. And then all of a sudden, one day.
The phone rang and my mom answered, and she goes, well, I'm sorry I tell you about your piano plate. The teacher just died, and he died in a car accident. I didn't laugh. I felt bad for the guy. But anyway, I got out of that. So that then right after that, I got a snare drum. They bought me a snare drum for Christmas, and that was it. And then I just started building up my drum set, you know, piece by piece for the next few years.
Okay, Yeah, you take drums in school, you play in the school band orchestra, whatever you call it. Yeah, were you playing in bands before the Beatles or was it like so many people you saw the Beatles that this is where I'm going.
I mean, the Beatles definitely did that to me. For sure, I saw them. But yeah, I was playing in the school band and that was boring too, because it's like I was in the percussion section. So you play either the bass drum, the snare drum, or the symbol big crashing at the end of each you know, phrase or something. And then I saw the Beatles on but no, I wasn't in a band yet, but it was shortly after that I got into a surf band. But that's that's
a different story. But yeah, I saw the Beatles and I just went, wow, that's just so amazing, and so yeah, a couple of my friends in my neighborhood started a little surf surf band. We were called the Regents, and I think it was nineteen sixty six, early nineteen sixty six, so the Beatles had already been out for a couple you know, at least a year and a half are already,
so I was already really in tune with them. The surf band didn't last very long, and then I got a call from from who ended up being the guitar player on the Tubes, Roger Stein, and he said, I'll have this band. We're doing mostly Beatles songs and we're called the Bards bar Ds, and come over and try out for it. If I did. We had a band called the Bards and we played it was it was you know, we're doing mostly the Beatles, sixty five sixty six stuff, which was no reply and all that kind
of stuff. So yeah, I was in a Beatle band early on. How did you know Roger Steve? I knew him through somebody else that went to my school and he was in. He was the other guy in the Bards was knew me from my school and Roger was already playing with him. So I guess it was the guy from my school that said go come over an audition, so.
He knew you were a drummer.
Yeah, he already knew I was a drummer because of the surf band. Yeah, I think we played. I think our band played at like the Junior prom or something like that.
We wait the Bards or the surf band.
The surf bands were called the Regents.
Yeah, the Regents actually played some paid gigs. We we didn't get paid. I don't think actually we did. We got the first gig we did was I think we only did two. We did one at a Chinese restaurant on New Year's Eve and we got paid like fifteen or twenty dollars or something like that. And then the school hired us for one of the dances and we did that and then lee guitar player's name was Quirky Kirky Anderson, and he was kind of a juvenile Blink when he went and got in trouble and so the
band broke up. Are you with piand of surf music? I am?
I am a big fan of surf music. And it was funny because we lived in Arizona and there was no surf. We just wanted to go, you know, be surfers and you know all that kind of stuff. And we actually, I mean I still believe that we started or kind of invented skateboarding because I hadn't really heard the songs about skateboarding, you know, sidewalk surf and all that stuff. Jana Deine and uh and we used to
make our own and just go. There were these sidewalks out in the desert and we would skateboard on the sidewalks and make him you know, just make him out of roller skates and plywood. Anyway, where am I going?
Am I going with this? Well we'll talk about grab were to go sidewalk surf, it would be so yeah.
So I was a big surf fan. I started getting you know, in my bedroom, so I had my set drum set up in my bedroom. My parents were so wonderful because they they really stuck up for me. They the neighbors would go like, well, god, you know, he's banging on the drum set, you know, and we're trying to have our five o'clock news hour or something like that. My parents would go, well, usually you know, just you know, put some of your plugs in or you know, I
don't know what. I don't know what they told them, but they they backed my neighbors off, and I was able to pretty much play anytime I wanted to, along with my stereo which was next to my drum set, and I put on Surf music ventures I recall Dick Dale and I just you know, play alongder that crazy surf and I have still have all my forty fives. I put my Surf forty fives and then you know, then that phased into the Beatles and the Stones and
all of the English Invasion stuff. But yeah, Surf was my first love for learning how to play the drums.
Listen. Surf was my first love. Janet d Oh, Janetded, I love Janed. Yeah, yeah, I could talk about I mean, I know Deed at this point, but no kidding. It's like those records. There's an album, a live album called Command Performance. I just played that at infinitum. But now you're in the Bards. What's the status of the Bards or the Bards playing gigs? You know that.
I don't know if we ever really had a gig, and we must have played somewhere like at a cyo thing, or maybe we did a few shows that like the Insane Asylum, like lunchtime gigs stuff like that, which was kind of crazy in Phoenix, but I don't really recall. I think it kind of broke up. At least the one guy that got me in that was from my school. He moved on or got fired or some of the bass player that we got later was more into blues, and so Roger and I and this guy John John
Larson was his name. We we moved on and we changed our name from the Bards to the Mouth, and we were in the Mouth, and I, you know, did the bass drum head, and I did it pretty much the way the Sticky Fingers record looked much later on, you know, four years later or whatever. It was a big mouth, you know, the tongue sticking out and the teeth and stuff.
That was the bass drum head, and the.
Mouth played it a few of the high school shows. I think We used to do some shows out in the desert as well in that version of the band, and it's hard to remember really, but and then we got a couple other members kind of eased eased in, and then uh, this guy named Pinky who ended up later going with Doctor Hook and Goose Creek Symphony. He ended up playing with those guys, but he kind of moved in and he was our second guitar player next
to Roger, and we got a new bass player. The other bass player left, he went on to medical school, he gave up the local rock scene. We got this guy named David Killingsworth who was our new bass player.
Then we changed our name to the Red, White and Blues Band because we were, you know, had already had been playing a lot of like Sunny Boy Williamson stuff and Muddy Water stuff, and we loved, you know, what was happening in the English Invasion stuff with Hendricks and Cream and Fleetwood Mac and all those guys that were playing that crazy English blues stuff. And we were just aspiring to be another band like those guys.
Yeah, okay, so how do you meet the the players went up in the tubes in Arizona. Well, so we had Roger. We had.
This band of Red White and Blues Band, and then one of our rival bands and so this was like sixty seven sixty eight, right around that time. One of our are not rival bands really, but they were another up and coming band in San Francisco and Phoenix, and that included the members which eventually became part of the Tubes was the Beans, and that was Bill Spooner on guitar, Vince Welnick on keyboards, Rick Anderson on bass, and another
drummer named Bob McIntosh on drums. And they were like the so with the Red White and Blues Band, and the Beans were sort of the top local bands in Phoenix in sixty seven sixty eight.
So you want me to continue how that has continued? Tell us continue with the narrative very.
Okay, Well, try to get this thing straight timeframe wise. So the Red White and Blues Band were just a trio. We we actually guy Bob Bob Hankey left. We had a keyboard player named David Notter as well, and he left and we just became a trio because really all we wanted to do is be like Cream and Hendricks and uh so we kind of dominated the local scene. We opened up for. We opened up for a few big bands that were on tour, such as Manilla Fudge.
And Uh Really Throw Tall Wow.
We were like the opening band for those guys and h in the local team clubs and and then the Beans were kind of on their own their own thing by the time. By the time, well, so then that was the end of sixty eight. Graduated from high school, immediately moved out of my parents' house in two with my girlfriend Kathy MacDonald, and she and I lived in a little house with Roger and David, and we were, you know, just new new kids and living on their own, trying to figure out how how to make that work.
Immediately got busted from marijuana and had to go to jail and move back to our parents' house for another year and probase and under. So that just gave me another end, you know, I was getting ready that following fall to move to San Francisco and go to the Art Institute, which I had already had set up. I got a partial scholarship there, and we had to postpone that whole trip and that whole move to the following year. But so then there's the year of sixty nine, going
into sixty eight. Going into sixty nine was taken up by just I went to junior college and I had a really great art teacher there at Phoenix Phoenix College,
I had a great art teacher there. And our band, the Red Rye and Blues Band, continued to play and get a lot of gigs and all local, but sometimes we go down to Tucson and play or flag Staff, but mostly stayed in Arizona all the time, wishing we could get out of that state of the state of affairs that was so republican and so you know, just so conservative still and then being busted for pot for that there was no pot had like a t meany little bit. They took us a jail, and oh there
was lots of things that happened. Anyway, that whole year went by, and finally got the chance to move to uh moved to San Francisco, But before we did that, we moved to Tucson for that next summer and took a lot of LSD, played a lot of shows down in Tucson, did a bunch of music festivals also with the Beans, who were still in Phoenix, but they would come down. We do these music festivals out in the desert and up in the mountains. It has a great time.
One of those times when we opened for just to kind of backtrack a little bit, when we opened for Jethro Tall. The other supporting act was called Zephyr, and that was the band that Tommy Bolan was in. And he he and we we became, you know, kind of quickly close friends. And you know, he said, you know, what are you guys doing after the show to night?
We're going to party.
We were, well, we were planning on going out to the desert where we usually take a generator and take our instruments and play, and so we did, and he came with us and we played like all night long until the sun came up up on the top of a mountain in the desert outside of Phoenix. And then the rest of his story is he comes back in my life later on. Wait, wait, how does Tommy Bolan come back in your life later on?
So?
Well, uh, the so we did an album with Al Cooper, That's what this is five years later, right six years later something seven years later, and his engineer was a guy named Lee Kiefer.
Well.
He had been associated with Tommy Bolan and Tommy Bolan had just gotten out of like Deep Purple. He was, you know, he had left his other bands and and let's try to start a solo career. Tommy bowlan solo career, and he he got an album deal. I can't remember what it was on, but the album is called Teaser. So they called me up, he insisted, he goes, because Lee had just been working with me with with Al
Cooper previously, like six months before. He goes, you should call Prairie up and you come down into La and play play on your record. And he goes, oh, that would be great. So I did, and then went down there and we went to the record I think it was a record plant in LA, and started playing music and jam and stuff. And I ended up on two of the tracks on that his first solo record. One track was called Wild Dogs and the other one was
called Savannah Woman. And he was just amazing. It was an amazing It was an amazing experience to play that stuff and then and then to watch him do his crazy overdoves until dawn. We were just beside ourselves. And the bass player on that was a guy named Paul Stalworth. He was in a band called attitudes, La band.
Okay, you spend this one year post high school, then you're going to Sean Francisco. You're going to the Art Institute. What are you thinking about your musical career? Oh?
Well, the musical career. So I'm going to the Art Institute. Sixty nine just started it as a painting major, still had and I was living with or so before that, I'm starting to get whose I'm talking so much. Before we moved to San Francisco, we hooked up with fee Waybill and I left that part of the story out. So he was our roadie and our vegetarian chef and
supplier of peyote. And he because he lived in northern Arizona, lived on a ranch and he was like fucking cows and branding cows and bucking horses and rope and stuff. And he lived in this on this ranch called the Perkins Ranch up there, and he was a legitimate cowboy, kind of hippie cowboy. And so we hooked up with him and he said, I'm moved to San Francisco with you guys, and to carry your equipment whatever. We're going
to be vegetarians. Okay. So we turned out we are so we all moved to San Francisco.
Where just one thing, there are two bands. When does it become one band?
Okay, comes one band? Yea a year later really like seventy the Beans moved because they heard how much fun we were having in San Francisco.
So who went to San Francisco?
Me Fi Roger and this guy David killing Zworth. And our manager was the original drummer from the Spiders, which turned into be the Nas, which turned into Alice Cooper. His name is John Spear, so he was he wrangled us together. He's trying to manage us, and we all live together in a big old house there in San Francisco, which I don't live far from right now. I still live out there, and it's called the Sunset District.
Okay, when everybody moves to San Francisco Urine School, the rest of them are not in school, right No, no, no, no, they followed me there? Really? Okay, So were you guys playing music? Did the band continue? Oh?
Yeah, we never stopped, you know, we never stopped playing music. We auditioned a few times at like the Fillmore and a couple of places and just didn't really as as that trio. We Actually part of the story is that we changed our name from the Red, White and Blues Band to Arizona and then we moved to San Francisco, where we thought, oh, this is great. It's like Chicago. You know, we'll be representing We'll be representing the good parts of Arizona that we loved, which was the desert
in the sunset, some of the beautiful women. But then we got a job. I mean, I'm jumping forward, but this is part of the history. We got a job offer to play at the World's Fair in Osaka nineteen seventy in the summer, and.
We wade ahold lot of a second hold of Yeah, they smartly. Crew moves to San Francisco. Yeah, you're in school. What are the others doing to survive? They don't know.
We had food stamps, you know, and I had I had Actually, my uncle was giving us a little money. He supported me, sent me a check us. It turned out to be us. It was any it to me, but I shared it, and you know, helped paid the rent. And people were doing little things. I really don't remember what people were doing. I know I was going to school and I was getting supported by my uncle a little bit. So, yeah, they were. They were not going to school. They were writing songs. Okay, learning how to
play their instruments. Okay, you're there. You're living the life of hippie Sores speak definitely. And is there a dream that over going to be some big recording artists or are you just fumbling along? Well, I mean you always have to say that there's a dream. Of course, there's always a dream.
Uh.
And then at times I thought we were fumbling along for sure. But you know, we love our dogs, we loved each other, we had we were getting more friends in San Francisco area, and we were meeting other musicians and yeah, and getting to play some parties and some things that were pretty local. But and then so anyway, so we went to Japan, came back, that bass layer left,
the Beans moved to San Francisco. We're looking, you know, me and Roger and Fee basically and our manager, and we're looking to like, what are we going to do now? So the Beans said, why don't we because they came up and they were trying to play some shows around and.
They weren't getting getting this.
They left a big they were a big fish, you know in Phoenix and then they moved to San Francisco and everybody was just like, Okay, there's a four hundred other bands that are better than you guys, are more well known. So we had to make a name for ourselves. So we decided, well, maybe we should join forces. Two drummers, uh, you know, two guitar players. The same was going to be maybe uh still working as a in a tech position. We call it tech now roady and that all developed
over the next year or so. We became the well I think you know, I just listened to an interview you did with Fee and he held kind of exposed that whole story about the Beans. Anyway, there was a band called The Beans came out with the record. So we changed our name to the Tubes and it was the Seven of Us. Fee was now delegated as the lead singer, you know, Danny Kay character. We could dress
him up at like anything. He would do whatever we told him to do, you know, throw wonderbread and stuff stuff and dress up and bonded to do anything.
Well.
Bill Spooner was still, you know, the singer mostly he was kind of the lead singer for a lot of the stuff on the first first album, for sure, and then Fee took over and you know, became a really great singer. So that's how it kind of developed from the two bands into one band. Okay, yeah, so it becomes one band. Yeah, tell us how it becomes the name the Tubes. Oh, well, that I think that story
has also been exposed. But anyway, I think it was mostly like well, I mean, it definitely developed from the idea that we were a lot of watching a lot of television in Arizona when we were growing up, and we called it the tube group tube kind of thing, and we thought, well, tubes, and we were kind of we were into kind of gnarly stuff and birthmarks and freak shows and that kind of stuff. We thought, well, tubes,
you know, that could be like your fallopium. Tubes can mean a lot of things, surfing the tube, surfing tube. So we thought it was kind of a well rounded name. And you know, there was probably some other reasons why why it ended up, but I think eventually it was more like the we had a bunch of names and people were throwing names around and that one popped out to be the favorite. So we stuck with that.
And when we depot the.
Whole idea of the show around the video monitors and a lot of televisions.
That's where I'm going. You're in a blues band, the beams move. Where does because the tubes were all about sensibility, Where did the sensibility come from?
A sensibility came from you know, trying to find our way through the masses and the you know, the things that we were exposed to in advertisement and politics and drama and television and movies and everything that we were exposed to. We were like, well we could write a song about that, or we could do a production around that, or even just a character around that concet and you know, just exposed uf to whatever is going on in our lives that way. Before that, you're the blues band, and
I know it's a psychedelic rock band. We play blues light.
Okay, there are a lot of those bands. We know what that paradigm is. Yeah. Now you're in a band with vision with props with this. Does this evolve or when you merge with the Beans, do you say this is what we're gonna do.
Well, no, it really happened after we emerged with the Beans.
Okay, so you emerged, did someone in the band say this is going to be the vision or did you play a few gigs ago, this isn't going to work. We have to do something different.
Well, I got to say that probably Bill Spooner, who was sort of the founder of the Beans and then sort of became the founder of self proclaimed founder of the Tubes. We always you know, the Beans back as
the four of them did a few productions. They did one called Terrors from Tantros and it was a sci fi you know, a sci fi opera, uh and with costumes and with extras with females and stuff, and the story was you'd have to ask Bill exactly what the story was, but it was about all woman run planet and their lord was.
A hot dog.
That was like comedy, but it was amazing and there was some great music written around it. One of them was called When Stars Collide, the Ascension of the Mother Load, all these great things. And so that was really the sort of a first production things that happened, and that was in Phoenix originally, and then we redid it again at the Art Institute in the in the gallery at the at the Art Institute, which I you know, I hooked it up. I said, we said, you know, we
should do a gig here the art students. These people will love a show. So we did. We did the next version of that. We airbrusht our bodies. Just learned how to use an airbrush and a spray gun, and we use body painted our bodies and had these crazy space outfits and did that whole ascension of the Motherload thing again, the ascension the terrorism tantras at the Art Institute, and it was like seventy one maybe, and so that's how the production things sort of started and evolved into
whatever else happened. Okay, if that's seventy one. The first album doesn't come out until seventy five. What happened between seventy one and seventy five. We did a lot of local shows. We did a lot of local shows, played every like little nightclub feed dressed up like Carma Miranda, who put like a bowl of fruit on his head.
He would do they put on the turbine and add the fruit and stuff, and we would do like Brazil ill and do some Karme Miranda stuff and then he ripped that out costume off and come out with like a cowboy outfit. We would do raw hide and tumble and Tumbleweeds and and uh Mail Passo. So he started building up this show mentality of doing these shows with him at base as the character the character. So that was just two or three years to just develop all
these different characters. And the English character came out in about seventy three. His name was Rod Planet. It was before kawal Ude, right, we had started taking kual Dude, so we knew what they were about. But in any way, the character was based on Robert Plant and uh, you know Rod Stewart and just the shag Rock and the platforms and really more more based on Johnny Thunder and
the New York Dolls than anything else. Michael Cotton and I were in New York in like seventy one early seventy two, and we saw the dolls at the Mercery Arts Center and we went that that would be a great you know, his take on it. Those guys, but they're the real thing. I mean, I don't know if they were the real thing, but they were a thing. And so anyway, that that's kind of where that character
of Kailud could of develop. But one of the stories for the first time we feed did that character was opening for led Zeppelin here in San Francisco, and that was summer of seventy three, and we opened at ten in the morning, and there must have been I don't know how many people there are fifty thousand people that had been waiting in line for Zeppelin as an outdoor concert, waiting in line for a week, you know. So all the people that were right up in front probably needed to go to the bathroom.
And get to eat.
So we come out and the first thing he does is throw a bunch of powder on the audio out of a big bag, and some pills and saying.
Come on, everybody, let's say some drugs and have a good time.
Well, when they realized it was just baking soda and mints.
We got them.
We ah, just people are throwing stuff at us for the next forty minutes. But we but we played it and it was classic and you know some i've heard, you know, and the much later I heard that people saw that who saw it were just blown away with how great we were.
Okay, it takes four years before the first record comes out, how does it being stay together? Usually in that time people say I'm going to graduate school, I'm going home, I'm getting married, I'm leaving this, I'm done. But these were the same guys. How did it all stay together?
Well, yes, some of them got married, and some of them got married on stage even and had kids, and well, I don't know. We were just a we were a pretty tight knit organization. And we actually got a choreographer named Kenny or Kaga, probably like seventy six, you know, seventy five, No, definitely seventy four. We met him in seventy four, so he was already charging us with all of these ideas that we partially developed over the few years before that, and that really taking it to a
whole other level. And you probably saw that when you saw the Roxy, right, I mean those are the first those are the first shows that we what.
Is everybody living on?
I mean we must have been making a little bit of money, but we had managers that had some kind of idea, but how to pay us a weekly salary? I mean, I think we were getting not much. I don't remember really how we were living. I mean, we were living very frugally, I'm sure, but there was enough money coming in from playing music that you could survive. I apparently there was well for an unsigned local beer. Yes,
we certainly didn't you know, have any hits. You know, they were bringing in a lot of money, that's for sure. So how did you get a record deal? The record
deal came through. It was funny the h We met this guy named Kip Cohen and he came up and he was like an an R guy from A and M Records, and he came up and saw a couple of our early performances in probably seventy three maybe seventy four, and reached out to us and said, you know, I really liked I worked for A and M Records, really like to go back and talk to my friends and my associates there and Herb Albert and Jerry Moss and see if they would indeed like to sign you guys,
because you think you're very unique.
And we liked the mule.
I like the music that I've heard so far, So.
You did that.
And but before that happened, Michael and Cotton and I had a sort of an art business going on, and we did murals around San Francisco and we were hired by A through Kip Cohen to come and paint a big mural on the outside of the the records.
Wait, believe me, I know the mural, Yeah, the Flying record, right, you had the deal to do the mural before the Tubes had a record deal.
At least that's the way it seemed. Yeah, I mean I think so, Yeah, I think so. And a lot of the people that were at A and M while we were doing the Mura who were shocked when they saw that the Tubes were actually a musical group that was being signed. They thought it was just an art you know, a couple of guys doing artwork. So yeah, and one of the labels, I don't know if he ever came up, came up. Of course they painted it out unfortunately, but it was up for about twenty years
I think. But one of the labels said blame it on the Tubes on there instead it said A and M. And blame it on the Tubes with the title of one of the just one of the records on them.
In the mirror. Who came up with the idea of the shirts with the faces on them?
Yeah, well, I mean Michael Cotton and I both, you know, we're doing stuff together. We're doing posters for the band, we're doing costumes, we're doing I didn't really have much of a set really other than.
Well, we did.
We had some set set design stuff, but mostly like just the TV monitors and a backdrop or something like that. But then we came up with the idea of doing you know, personal portraits of everybody in the band. We thought, well, that's cool, you know, let's do these stylized brush paintings of caricature versions of everyone in the band. And that ended up on our second album, which was the photo session of this photographed by Norman Seef and he it
was just trains working with him. We had these face shirts on and he would say, you know, we were all friends, take our shirt faces that, you know, so you can see them. And he goes, no, like, we don't really want to see the whole thing. We just want to see glimpses of your eye or your your lips or and re it's kind of profile like this, so we thought it's kind of weird, you know. It turned out to be a pretty classic picture.
But yeah, the.
Face face shirts and then that, you know, that evolved into an actual business. We sent that a few of the designs, not the band shots, but we did some other just sort of generic faces that became a line called body Language and we produced a line of shirts. I don't know where there and he came from. Don't even know where where it ended up, but I still have a lot of They were these kind of transfers
that were called the ultra ultra sublistatic sublistatic transfers. So I still have a bunch of the extra ones over and I have some of the original shirts, and I have most of some of the original hand painted the Tube shirts as well. So that's just that's how it came about. Now I have to interject here and tell a story real quick about the face shirt. So we had a talent hunt and our good friend of ours
was Robin Williams. Well he wasn't a good friend, but he was a friend of ours because he was in the Tube's talent hunt and he won because he was so funny, and he became a friend of ours. And we had these produced shirts and he had was wearing one with a picture of Rie on it. A model I think her name was Pat Cleveland, but we always thought it was Ree. It was just these big eyes
and big lips and stuff. We gave it to him, but then he ended up being photographed in that shirt a whole lot over the years, and this young kid just saw that picture and reached out to his management. His name is Fred Slissinger, and I'm not sure exactly what films he's done, but he reached out to me through his management, and I painted a shirt of Robin Williams's face for him, and I just just sent it to him last week. I haven't seen it on him. I don't even know if it fits. But that's just
a little side story. The face shirts still live on. Okay.
Is it a long drawn out process getting signed to A and M or does it move pretty quickly and smoothly? I think I think it's just not something that I even had anything to do with. I don't remember. I remember our management were. They were called Bag of Bucks, Morton.
And Gary, and you know he had some issues with him later, but they got us the ball rolling for us.
Did al Cooper end up being the producer?
I don't know exactly who contacted him, but it must have been Kip Cohen or somebody from the label that that thought might be a good fit. He had just come from doing Lenyard Skinnyard and had you know, had Sweedome, Alabama and all the big hits and stuff. And maybe somebody approached him with maybe a demo tape of ours and he listened to it or something. He was looking for other things to produce, and he said, I'll take that on. So when we met him, he was just hilarious.
He was so funny, and he was just just taken with our whole thing. And you know, we played him some of the songs that we had been playing for, you know, the last four or five years that we had written, and such as White Punks on Dope and Halo's and Mando Bondage and the Crazy songs, and he had kind of a whole concept but somehow, you know, interweaving these songs and making up more of a more of a I don't know what you call that, just a suite or something like that, you know, not an
individual song. And we tried it for him, you know, we rehearsed with him for a few days before we ended up going into making record, and of course it didn't really work, so we ended up going back to the let's do these songs. But it was quite an experience of our first real serious recording, professional recording experience in la I think we did it at the record plant.
I think in La and.
Played a lot of pong that's when Pong first came out, and spent a lot of time playing pong in the room outside. Didn't get a lot of and a lot of stories from Al. I mean the guy who was just endless stories.
So we get some work done here.
No, no, when first we talked about this and then do that tell me a story about it was all recording thing or whatever.
Okay, So I mean I know, well pretty well, Al can be difficult. So how is the experience making the record other than getting him to stop telling stories?
Well, I think it was. It was really good. I mean most of the time. And we had that engineer, like I told you, Lee Kiefer, who was excellent.
He is really good.
And you know, we enjoyed the experimenting with the different sounds and the drum sounds. And then Al would, you know, come up with a great idea being a keyboard player and a guitar player would probably offer a lot of information to our guitar players and our keyboard players. We had Vince wellningk on keyboards, and we also have Michael Cotton on synthesizers. And I just remember one of the things that that Al said was like all I hear out of Cotton is like boiling cats. You know he
was doing this stuff. But that's not true, because Michael Cotton added so much of an amazing, an original sound to that first record. Well, it's all of our records, but initially for that first record, and you know, and he was he was an experimental guy and experimented with all kinds of sounds and kind of developed a lot of some of the things that later took off and became more popular in the synthesizer world.
Okay, the album is done. Is the band happy with the album?
Well, it's done, but we never really heard all the production that was laid on after we sort of were told to leave. I don't know if you've heard that story before, but it was kind of Yeah, it was like Al just said, you guys are hanging over here, us too much here, and we want you guys to leave. We're gonna we're gonna get up with the Dominic Frontiery, who is a great arranger and you know he's done all these great things for like Twilight Zone and Western Film and all this stuff.
But we didn't I didn't really know who it was.
Maybe Spooner or somebody else, but I wasn't familiar with him, but the TV shows I was anyway, and so we were kind of out of that hole, or at least I was. I don't know where those guys were. But I didn't hear the record until they finally had a listening party, and all of a sudden, these songs that were pretty you know, they were built up around rock and roll instruments, but then now they had strings and whole orchestrations and giant background vocals and all this stuff.
It was like, WHOA.
I think we thought it was wonderful, but it was also very shocking to hear to hear it after it was done and mixed and all that stuff. But we weren't We weren't involved in that. We weren't invited to be involved in that, which I thought was weird to this day. We were too young.
How come you never worked with al again?
Yeah, there's another one of those things. I don't think there was anything really about it that it was actually a kind of a breakup, intentional breakup for any reason.
The next album was produced by Ken Scott. It was I think a lot of a lot of everything had seemed to have to do with the people at the label, what their thoughts were on how things were working, and maybe they thought they could get a better, you know, handle on some sort of a formula that would get us some money a hit because the hit was not on the underground. Loved the first album with white Punks on Dove and Bondage and what do You Want from Life?
And that was a.
Uh, that was you know, this is an amazing first album because, like I said, it was it was everything that we had developed up to that point, which was at least four or five years of just playing those songs and uh and writing those songs, and then the next series of albums that came out it just had to be kind of pumped out within six months. It sounded like we made an album every six or eight months, you know, at least for for A and M until they got thrown.
Off of A and M. Well, were you happy with any of those albums?
I was happy with at least the first two and then and then we had a little bit of a different kind of a feel for the third album, which was called Now. And the producer was a guy named John Anthony, and he was an Englishman and we uh, you know.
We got on.
We got on with him at first, but things happened and there was just all you know, I mean, I have to bust myself and say there was a lot of drug use going on, and people were confused about the songs that we were actually had chosen to record and stuff like that. This was after the Young and Rich One. Young and Rich was well a lot of that kind of stuff too. But as we were still pretty novice in the recording business so far, and we were really listening to Ken Scott and what his advice
was for making a good record. And he was a great engineer I remember him really not I was spending more time on the sound quality and the sounds and the instrumentation and stuff like that as opposed.
To actually producing the idea of the song or something. He was.
Pretty lenient with us for our kind of crazy ideas for each one of those songs. So we were very happy with that. And then we had some great touring done behind both of those albums seventy five, seventy six, seventy seven started with that next record, the Now album.
Ultimately you work with Todd Rundred, What is your experience there.
My experience was the a few times I met him before we actually started being our engineer and recording with us. I had met him a few times through his dresser designer, clothing designer named Nicky Nichols, who was a friend of Breeze, my girlfriend at the time, and he introduced me to Todd and I painted some outfits for him, air brush some outfits for him, and you know, I just got
to know him a little bit, not too much. But then in about seventy I guess it's seventy eight or something, he came to England when we opened for Or We had a It was a Networth festival in England and it was Frank Sappa, the Tubes, Broomtown Rats, Nick Lowe and the Rock Pile with Dave Edmonds and Peter Gabriel's solo band, and we were all on this stage together and we Todd had come over just to kind of
hang out with us and party a little bit. And it was a day Keith Moon died that we were supposed to perform, or the day before maybe, so we rehearsed, we rehearsed the song Bob O'Reilly and then we did a Medley into the Kids Are all Right, and he came out on stage and played and sang that with us. From that point we became closer friends. And then the next album came around and it was Remote Control, and that was the last record we did for Capital for a and m before we moved to Capitol, So we
got the working experience with Todd then was amazing. We were all big fans of his music, most of us, and he was a bit of a dictator, I got to say, but just you know, because he was hired to produce us, and he was going to take that job on with a lot of authority, and a lot
of us were not quite used to that. We used to do a lot of it with our with our own intentions and standing up for our rights to party, that kind of thing, and he was he was more focused on getting the thing done, and but we did and they came out with a pretty cool record. I mean, a lot of that stuff was after that third album, the Now album. It was kind of a lull, managerial lull and a different different kind of lull that was happening creatively, and we decided that well, maybe we needed to,
you know, get a better producer. So we reached out to Todd. He decided to do it with us. And now I can't remember really what my original question was, other than you just say, what was it like to work with Todd? I'm still working with Todd and it's still amazing, and he's still authoritarian. He tells us what to do, what he wants us to do. Yeah, the open ear every now and then chose some ideas, suggestions,
but it's mostly his latest. His latest tour is called Me We, and it's mostly like me with capital letters and we kind of down here somewhere.
Okay, you switched to Capitol, you work with David Foster. Yeah, you have hits, but Steve Luca Thur's working with you. So on one level you have the success. But it's not the Tube show of certainly the early seventies. So what's your what are your emotions.
About that different show? I mean, we had definitely had a big show still going. It was still that Kenny
or Kaga doing choreography and all that stuff. Yeah, we had a new producer, new producer because we had a new album label, you know, we had to get and there was that we kind of limbo period between a and M and getting onto Capital, which was interviewing different producers, interviewing a guy named Bruce Garfield was and Bobby Columbia were from I saw you interviewed Bobby Columbie right from Capital. They were the they were the guys that were running
Capital at the time, and so they came. We had a bunch of meetings with those guys and they said, well, who, who, who who would you want to produce you and all this stuff? And we were like, I don't know. So they had some suggestions. They had Roy Thomas Baker came, they had who was the guy that Bob Bob Ezrin? A couple of different guys came and listened to our stuff just in our warehouse somewhere kind of CD.
And neither one of them really fit the bill.
And then somebody mentioned David Froster, and I'm not sure exactly how that we pulled it off, but I remember him saying, you're the weird this group I've ever worked with, and I'm really not sure what I can do with you guys, but if you listen to me, you'll probably have a hit. And so some of us listened to him, and some of us didn't just didn't want to listen to him. And those are the guys I had to wait in the parking lot, so I had to get Steep look at her, and get David Page and you know,
some of the people to kind of fit in. I mean, it's just one of those stories you don't really I don't like telling it, but it's what happened, is the truth. Luckily I got to stay in the drum chair. He didn't bring in Jeff Pacaro, which would have been good too. Jeff Caven saw us when we were in the studio and recording that song Tip of my Arm, and I just remember feeling really proud that he heard my drum track and.
He just gave me like that. It's so funky, so funky, and Jeff was a great drummer, such a great drummer. Anyway, So their hits with Foster, you work with Todd again. That album is not commercially successful. How does the group end? Well, the group sort of never really ended. It still hasn't never really ended. How does a group go on a hiatus? Yeah,
it never really went on. If you ask Fee, it did, but no, he just he he kind of took off where you know, he met Richard Marx and he met some of the guys in l A. And he'd moved.
He had moved to Los Angeles to kind of start over again a little bit with some of his new acquaintances in the music business in Los Angeles. The rest of us stayed in San Francisco in the Bay Area and continued on. We got we got another singer actually involved. It was the guy David who was our first original bass player in the Red, White and Bluespan. He stepped up to the plate and uh and tried to fill
Fee's shoes and he did it. He did had an admirable job, but he didn't didn't really have what it was going to take to replace thee So he kind of went He kind of went on a high edus from the tubes, but we kept we kept kind of plug along during probably like so the love Bomb Tour was the last tour we did, and it was with Utopia, Todd's band Cod Building with us in like eighty five, and so that's that's what happened there and Todd and his band Utopia, they opened the show and Todd goes, well,
we're not really opening for you. It's a cop Bill, we just don't want to follow you because you got so much crap on stage, he said, he goes, you know, we're just a totally streamline. I think they had their first in ear monitors and you know, the hidden mics and no amps on.
Stage, and he was just like streamline. You know, it's really cool.
His drummer, Willie had the motorcycle kit that spun around.
Did you ever see that?
So and you know, they were just really cool and they could move in and off the stage and we could build our crazy you know, over the top set with the stage props and kayludes, you know, giant outfits
and everything. So that's what happened in eighty five, and then in eighty six we got the other singer if he went down to La started working on his solo records with Foster and with Richard Marx and do him or songwriting with Richard Mars and we just kept kind of continuing on until I guess this might have been
the early nineties. Oh well, then we lost Vince because he joined well he joined Todd's band first and kind of left the Tubes, and then he got the job being a keyboard player for the Grateful dead and that was like nineteen ninety.
Okay, you know, he ultimately dies at a young age. They say that he was mentally ill. Does that something you picked up on Vince? Yeah, mentally ill? No, but he did smoke a lot of pot and ate a lot of hash and uh, you know, to me, that's that don't make anybody mental.
I'm not sure if it would be a disastrous kind of mental state, but according to some of the people that were around him at that time, I kind of had a little bit of falling out with him. Right before that, we had a band called a Missing Man Formation, which occurred after Jerry Garcia died in like ninety five. But before that he was now he was just Vince. He was a wonderful, wonderful character. But yeah, over the years I always noticed he had he had kind of
a dark side. Yeah, I think he had, you know, I had a bit of a dark side. Maybe took somebody depressant drugs or something. I never really wanted to ask him too much about that.
Okay, So how do you end up working for Todd? So?
Yeah, so let's see, Well, you know, he knew of my drumming obviously from working with the tubes. And then in nineteen ninety I think it was ninety or ninety one, he had hired Vince and Vince was working with him in his band. They did an album called Nearly Human, and that band lasted for a tour or two and then Vince left and they got he got another record deal coming up, Todd did. It was called Second Win, and we called me up and said, do you want
to play drums for me? And we're going to record this whole album that I have worked up called Second Wind, and it's kind of my second Win. He was he had a lull before that that, and I'm not sure exactly, but we recorded the thing live in front of an audience in San Francis, was like five nights sold out in the Palacifying Arts, and the project was he was
going to conduct us. It was a large band, two drummers, you know, two guitar players, two keyboard players, all these different people, background singers, and to record this new album. And we had to grade ourselves each night on our performances. Like he taped it all every night, and then he went back later and pieced the record together judging from the exes on people's like nope, missed that one. All good on this one, you know, for all for fifteen
people that were in the band. I thought that was alone, pretty pretty amazing that he could do that. But he came out with a pretty neat record, and then we went on tour. So that was ninety one. At the same time, I still play with the Tubes. He just kind of off and on. But then Fee came back I think ninety two. He called and said, well, we got an offer from you know, it's like, we don't know,
we're big in Japan. No, it wasn't that, but it was an offer from an offer from some German promoter that offered us some great, great tour and so he goes, well, I'm thinking about it might be a good idea to come back now. So he did, and we had we had a new keyboard player because Vince wasn't with us. We had two new new keyboard players and actually another guitar player, Gary Canberra and Dave med They joined us in the early nineties and we became that that version of the Tubes.
Okay, how do you part ways with Bill Spooter?
How did we That was just you know, one of those things I really don't want to talk about it too much, but he was a difficult person and you know, high strung and genius. I thought he came up with so many of the original Tubes ideas and the Beans ideas musically and visually, and he had just came to a point where, you know, none of us could really
deal with each other anymore. And that was just one of those things where you sort of say, we have to move on, or you know, we have to take a break from each other and may get back together again someday, who knows, But that's what happened there.
And he was he resentful.
No, I don't think he was. I think he was well, I'm not sure you'd have to interview him. He wrote a song called they Kicked Me out of the band, so I guess that says it all. But he's still writing some great, great music. And of late I've gotten
together with him. You know, we had re Stylesho was original member of the Tubes, and Rick Anderson, our bass player, both passed away in twenty twenty twenty two, twenty twenty two, and Bill and I got together and well, I first wrote some poetry for each one of them, sort as like a little obituary for them, an homage to each one of them. And Bill said, well, it'd be nice if we wrote some songs about them, and we had done one for Vince earlier when he passed away. We
did one then. But we just recently recorded for a song about Ree and a song for Rick. So we're back in the studio again. I'm hoping that maybe we can come up with a new Tubes like album. I don't know about production value. I don't know if we're going to have dancing girls or not.
Could happen. Okay, So since you started working with Todd, does he always call you first to go on the road or does he work with other people?
No, No, it's I'm his drummer. Pretty much after that Nearly Human, he had a drummer named Michael Orbono was a fabulous drummer. He was in a band with Lyle Workman, Larry Tag, Brent Bourgeois and they had a band called Bourgeois Tag and they were from Sacramento, and they taught
had produced one of their albums. So when he was ready to come to record that album Nearly Human, he just grabbed all those guys and brought him in and they were the sort of his backing band for that record, and then after that some of them fell in, fell out I he was the new drummer. Lyle got replaced by Jesse Gress, who was a friend of Lyle's. The bass player was on the record was Ross Vallery from Journey. He got replaced by Larry tag from that Nearly Human Thing.
This was for the second Win record. Mingo Lewis. Mingo Lewis filled the percussion spot for Scott Matthews, who was in the previous one. And I have to say right now I miss Mingo Luis. He just passed away last week for lung cancer. And he was one of my really biggest inspiration, especially in Latin music, in Latin percussion, and just a hilarious character, and we spent a lot of time together. We met him in the you know, in seventy six something like that, and then recorded that
Now album. He played on that and and Remote Control those two albums, and then we tour toward the World with him too.
Okay, you know you end up working seemingly with every San Francisco group, not everyone, but a lot of them. Yeah, how does that happen? How does that happen.
Well, let's see. I mean which one in particular I got. I got up with what became a Jefferson stars which
was originally the Jefferson Airplane. And they had had a big career as the airplane and that big career as the Jefferson Starship in the seventies and eighties, and then in the early nineties their new producer manager slash booking agent Michael Gamon came to me through a keyboard player I've been playing with Tim Gorman, who's also just passed, and said, we're putting together a new version of the
Jefferson Starship. It's called Jefferson Starship the Next Generation. And I said, you know, I'm in, So we started playing. It was Jack Cassidy and Paul Cantner and Marty Ballen and Papa John Creech and this guy named Slick Aguilar guitar and Tim Gorman on keyboards who played with The Who and with John Entwiss Old Bunch. So that was that band. I mean, he carries on, he just carries on that. I played with him for twenty years.
What other bands? Oh, Dick Dale.
I never really got to talk to you about Dick Dale because he was my inspiration in the early surf stuff, learning how to play surf drums. So long to Dick Dale, you know, doing miser Loo and all those songs, Peppermint Twist and all those songs. And Scott Matthews and Joel Salbyn, I don't know, you know who. Joel Salbyn is the music critic and as an author, lives here in San Francisco. And he got contacted by Dick Dale or whoever whatever the record company was, to organize some musicians to come
in and record the next generation of Dick Dale. He had been sort of out of the picture for you know, ten or fifteen years, and he now wanted to come out and talk to the he says, he says, the body peers to people. He wanted he wanted to get that that audience going, you know. So we went in the studio with Scott Matthews, who was sort of the producer and also the second drummer. I was the first drump Well, we shared the drum chair and then Dick had a bass player Ron, and we went in and
recorded some crazy record. It was called it called uh I can't remember, the Tribal Thunder, the Tribal Thunder yet unknown territory. We did two albums with that lineup. San francisc was that I was early nineties as well, and that was crazy and amazing. And you know, I had to tell Dick and I learned to play drums listening to you, and he goes, I've broken I've broken hundreds of drummers. You're one of my favorites. And I was like, after a hundreds of drummers, he broke them like a
Mustang or what. He goes, Yep, they can't play that. They can't play it along with me as fast as I did. I said, well, I can't. I did anyway. That was That was another one of he wasn't even a San Francisco guy, but he was. He was one of the people that I played with Chris Isaac. He was a whole other one that was all through the eighties. I never really got to play with him live, but
I've recorded on his albums. This for four albums and recorded, uh, you know, the song Wicked Game was a pretty big deal for him, and I got a platinum album out of that deal.
That's pretty cool.
But you know, he's always he always had his own drummer, you know, on the road, and then eventually Kat Kenny Kenny Dale Johnson, great guy, great singer, great drummer. But they wanted me on the recordings, on those early early records, so I didn't say no, I needed a paycheck.
Okay, you know, you living the dream in the seventies into the early eighties. You're in action. You may not be making any money, but you're known that there's a day new mold there. You know. It's like you say, the Tubes never really go on hiatus, but they're no longer the focus right of the community. Are you freaking out or you think it? Man, I'll always work. They always need a drummer.
I've always thought that they always need a drummer, and they always needed me as a drummer as they But I have a lot of drummer friends. If I couldn't do it because I was conflicted with the Starship the Tubes or Todd Runggren's touring plans, I'd always I had a little stable of guys that would happily fill in for me and fill in for me in each of one of those bands. They knew all the music, and trace Abatelli is one of them was a wonderful drummer,
Dean Johnson. Jonathan Moover. Jonathan Moover is a great, great drummer and he's played in the two for me a bunch of times.
So yeah, it was. It was one of those things. Okay, okay, the gigs you get are people calling you, go man, you're a great drummer, I need you to work with me? Or are you work at it? Are you putting out the world.
I don't have a manager, I don't have an agent, I don't have any of that stuff. Now, I actually have a pretty good little manager. And she's my niece, and she lives in Manhattan, and she's a go getter. She's actually really instrumental in helping me organize this whole album, along with her mother, which is the sister I was talking about.
Leslie.
Francesca is an amazing works in the you know, the public image, and she works for musicians and authors mostly are her clients. And I'm just the guy that you know, she loves. So she does it pretty much just because he loves me. And throw a bone. Throw a bone every now and then. Thanks franchastic, how's you worked out economically for you.
How has it not so good? Really?
I mean I get a little bit of royalty here there for this and that too mostly but you know, I get some royalties and stuff from and publishing from ISAAC Records and XTC. I get some stuff from xdc's records. Uh yeah, not not great. But you know, I'm managing to get by. I'm going to be seventy six in May, so I don't know how how long I need to really carry on with worrying about money.
I don't have to worry about money.
But I still like to play, and I still make money doing my paintings and my artwork, and and you know, just enough to get by. I live in a rental house. I don't own any house, but I do have some property in western New York that I sh with one of my exes, and we planned to move there someday. Not really, it's too cold. It's too cold there. And do you have any children?
No children? No, No, it was that conscious about wanting to have.
No, No, it wasn't conscious necessarily. It's just the ladies that I had hooked up with that maybe would have been good mothers or wanted to have kids. We are very few and or couldn't have them and so never did. Plus just being on the road all the time. I don't even have a pet, you know, I can't even own a pet. But yeah, I'm a happy, happy bachelor. And I have a wonderful family. All my nieces and nephews live here in San Francisco except for the one
in New York, and we have a wonderful lifestyle. They're all artists and musicians as well. I live with my great nephews, a drummer and a local band, and he's he's getting better than I am, so he might be one of my substitutes in one of these bands.
Monday, So if you stop working today, do you have enough money to get to the end? Wow? You really get personal, aren't too? Yeah? Yeah? Enough money? Yes, I would say yes. Yes.
I saved a few things. I got a few ires and that kind of stuff. I've saved someoney and I didn't have to spend it on a house. Did I really?
Well? Our kid? How did you meet? We? Styles? And where is she today? Oh?
Well, she passed away in twenty twenty two, but we were good friends.
I met her.
Through a photographer friend of mine, Michael Cotton, and I were painting me. I don't know if you ever heard of the Cliff House. It's a yeah, yeah, fabulous restaurant right on the ocean there on the cliff, and we got we got commissioned to paint some giant waves on the outside of that building and it was all scaffolded, and areographer friend used that as a as a site for his photo session, and so he brought Ree over with a brand new pair of Levi's that he was
doing an ad for Macy's at the time. And that was seventy three, and she was also in the Tubes when we played the led Zeppelin. She had just gotten into the Tubes in seventy three. I remember that was I think her first concert with the Tubes. But yeah, I met her and we were just you know, I met her and she said, oh, can I get up
on the scaffolding with you guys? And photographer was taking pictures and I was completely covered with the same Levi outfit, but completely covered with paint at gas mask onco we were spraying these giant waves on the side of it. So that's the photo session. It's all documented. That was the first time I met her and she goes, well, you know, tomorrow I'm supposed to was I was going to leave for Alaska with my girlfriend and become a tripper. I said, well, maybe you could write me a letter
or something. So I did just as left, and I thought I'd never see her again. And then maybe a week later, another friend of the photographer helped me up and she goes, hey, I want you to meet this girl.
Ree said, I think I met her already. So she came out and we rekindled, rekindled and never left each other after that, moved into each other, moved in with each other in seventy three, and she, you know, we had a falling out in the late nineties, mid nineties, so I really didn't see her much for the next twenty years or something. But she held out of the apartment that we both lived in in the seventies and the eighties, and she stayed stayed there until she died.
When you have falling out with these people, are they because you were continuing to have a career and they it did end.
It actually was kind of that's the sort of the case, not with Reed, because we kept on for years after she left the tubes. She left the tubes in like seventy nine. Right after that, remote control to her and I stayed with her until mid mid nineties, so we were still living together. But yeah, it didn't ever get very very good after that because I was always on
the road. She was doing she had changed businesses. She went into a horticulture she was doing flower arrangements and different kinds of jobs that she had.
After that. Yeah, we just you know, drifted apart. So all the people you graduated from the San Francisco it's too correct, Yeah, bachelors and painting, what happened to all this?
The students you went to school with, Wow, I haven't really kept in touch with many of them. One of them was in the film department, a guy named Meno Maas, and he became a screenplay writer and did a lot of stuff with Spielberg, and I still stay in touch with him. He lives in England. Really not so much, not so many people. There's a few other few other people that I just over the years said, oh you remember me from the Art Institute or something. Oh, yeah,
I remember you. You were the guy that worked on that horrible clay sculpture or something. But no, but you know, a lot of the people that will always remember those shows that we did. The Tubes did at the Art Institute, and we did a couple. We did another one called Women's Lip and it was our art school girl girlfriends dressed up with those plastic boobs and aprons and like swept the floor and mopped the floor around the stage. For us, it was their idea, not art. I thought, wow,
that was a strange, strange thing. And one of those girls was Catherine Bigelow. Really we became you know, like the great uh director and one of those and act. That's that same show she was wearing those presidential masks that she ended up in that film called Point Break.
Remember that you remember? Yeah?
That that was the movie where the guy guys robbed the bank with the president's masks.
And that wasn't the Was that the one she directed? I don't know. She did Zero Dark thirty. Yeah, I was as later. You know point Break?
Uh it was it was a blue Crush, you no, it was Point Break. I think it was with Yeah, I think it was. It was Patrick Swaycey and.
Director Catherine Bigelow.
You're right, I think you know who else was in it was Anthony Keatas and he played layed like one of the surf punks in it.
I haven't seen that in a long time.
Yeah, so funny way that was. I just thought it was funny because I saw that movie years after we had done that thing. Hey, those are the same mass and our lew Women's lips show that we did.
And anyway, so the two success in the seventies. There was a sixties sensibility and then the commerciality of the seventies where artists stood a scance risk, you know, and they looked at things in their comment and on them. That is not the world we live in today. What do you think about the world we live in today? What do I think about it?
Well, I think that we're in dire straits in lots of areas, especially our country's politics and the weird weirdness and the segregation and Horacio ConfL and all that stuff, and you know, brought I brought some of that out in my record. I tried not to do too much
political commentary. But the one song called Trash White is about you know, white supremacy and and Todd Ruggren was the co author of that, And we were at a restaurant one day and he goes, I had asked him to, you know, collaborate with me on this record, and it's called Colors and Passions. And he goes, well, I said, well, what color would you maybe want to invest in and with your talents? And he goes, I don't know a lot chartruse. I like that, Okay, I already got green.
But he goes, well, how about.
How about uh.
Try to think of a few other colors. I can't remember what the other colors were, but and then he started thinking, and he goes, what do you mean? You know, trash white is a color. It's the color that doesn't want to be a around any of the other colors in the pay box. It doesn't want to be you know, it's embarrassed to be seeing with these other people or these other colors.
You know.
And I thought, wow, that's pretty cool, amazing. So that kind of we left it. We kind of left it there and said, well, we're going to work on that concept, and sure enough we did, and we had we had a couple other meetings and talked about it. And I said, well, what do you want from me? He todd, and he goes, well,
just send me something. So I sent him a drum track and some little sniveling lyrical stuff about you know, bat to the bone and uh, white trash people and trash white people and this kind of stuff, and he came back with the what ended up being the verses of this stuff, which is just genius, brilliant stuff. So I have to give him so much credit for that.
And he's actually in the video too, doing his best impersonation of well, just like what you're doing right now, inner radio station with a bunch of smoke smoking he was smoking to join anything, but mostly cigarette, talking to a big microphone like this, wrapping his part down and uh. And so that's in the video called trash white anger. That that's the passion, whether it's anger. So I check it out.
To what degree are you still painting? Oh?
Well, like I said, I just did the Robin Williams T shirt.
Last week.
I worked for a client who is, uh, you know, multi millionaire client who has a big, beautiful house in San Francisco up in Pacific Heights, and he has he's sort of my medici, you know, he he's my patron, and uh, I do a lot of work for him, their mural work and faux work and stencil work and doing things like that. So I've got a big project that I'm uh. I should have been there today, but I'm here with you. I do a lot of portraits.
I've got to do portraits I do. I've just got it's not solidified yet, but they're going to do the reopening them the Boo Hi Gardens in San Francisco on Broadway, which was the punk palace back in the seventies, and they got some new owners, they got some new people involved,
and they want some murals from me inside. I'm looking forward to doing that, some Screamers and some off Black Flag, you know, some shing like that, and then some with the new a new generation of punk rockers, which is my great nephew False Flag.
Okay, so looking back at the nearly seventy six years, you're happy the way it played out. I still playing, baby, I'm still playing. But yeah, you're only looking back seventy six after that, you're looking forward. I try not to look back more than about a week. No, I'm very happy with it. And yeah, I remember turning sixty and thinking if I died tomorrow, i'd be happy. That's sixty.
That's fifteen, sixteen years ago. I still feel better now that I've lived those sixteen years and learned so much and spread the joy, spread music to people and love. You know, That's what I'm all about. Well, Prairie, fascinating talk to you. I've seen the tube so many times in different locations. Good to finally meet you. You were an image I didn't know the guy I said to meet. You're a cool guy. Thanks for taking this time with my audience.
I was very very happy to be part of this after seeing the roster you had a.
Interviews, but honored to be here till next time. This is Bob Lefsides