of Tom Dowd’s because I’m known as a song- writer, guitarist, singer, all that kind of stuff, but I made my living as an engineer for a lot of years, and Tom Dowd was at the top of the list of influences. He was great. When I started actually doing engineering for a living, it was four-track. We used to have two four- tracks, and we would record stuff on one four-track and transfer it over to the other one, and over-dub that way. Four-track was the thing, and then eight-track came in right after that, real close, in the 60’s. Round knobs, it wasn’t sliders. And, the knobs were as big as your hand, you know? When you bumped the volume up or down you moved your whole arm, because it wasn’t the little bitty knobs that they got now. They were the size of a softball, really. And then sliders came out.
I recently wrote up Leon Russell and did not know that he fronted a band when he was a teenager that played on the road with Jerry Lee Lewis for a couple of years back in the 1950’s. Both of you guys grew up in Tulsa, Okla- homa. How old were you when you first met Leon? We used to play gigs around the Tulsa area. He was the up and coming piano player. And, like all towns, the musicians interchange. ‘Hey, do you wanna play this gig tonight? It pays ten bucks and all the beer you can drink.’ And then Leon and the rest went out to Cali- fornia. Leon got a job working with Ricky Nelson, so he was in what we called ‘the big time.’ Then he moved into session work, and then bought some recording equipment, bought a four-track. He and I would get in there and play like we were Les Paul. Yeah, I spent some time with Leon. He is a couple of years younger than I am. The thing about Leon was that he could read music. Many of us guitar players, and blues players, and
country players, we didn’t know one note from another. So Leon was the one that got in on the sessions in LA. Put a chart in front of me and I’d go, ‘Oh God,’ me and James Bur- ton.
James Burton, who played with Elvis for a while, is a hell of a guitar player. He played on some albums of yours, I believe. Yeah, James and I got acquainted when I first went out to California. James was from Louisiana, and he was on the Ricky Nelson TV show, which we thought was the big time back then, and it was. Ricky Nelson was huge. We became friends, and every once in awhile I’d see him in the studio. So, yes, I put him on one of the albums I made years later.
You have had some excellent steel gui- tar players on your albums over the years. Buddy Emmons and Lloyd Green to name two. Yeah, and Weldon Myrick. Audie Ashworth, who produced those first eight albums that we did in Nashville, he would get those guys. I took Buddy Emmons on the road for a while. Buddy Emmons was the kind of guy that would play with anybody, and could play any- thing. We would be at a gig and Buddy would set up his steel guitar and start playing. I would say, ‘Pick one, Buddy,’ and he’d start playing and he was so astronomical that we’d look at him and almost quit playing. With Buddy you kind of stood back and let him do whatever it is he wanted to do. He was an amazing steel guitar player. He was way ahead of everyone else. A very technical guy, he was constantly working on his steel trying to get a new sound out of it, trying the latest gizmo, trying to modify his guitar. He would be doing that on an airplane, he was always drawing up diagrams to do an electronic thing on his steel guitar.
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