body at the record company liked the song so I let them go ahead and put it out. But, the banjo playing is pretty bad, so I don’t want to talk about no banjo playing.”
Who do you admire, as far as banjo players go? Well, Earl Scruggs, of course. And I was a big admirer of John Hartford. He used to play banjo and write songs. Bela Fleck is good, he’s real modern. You have to like jazz to appreci- ate him. I’ve met Bela. I remember when he was with the New Grass Revival.
And New Grass Revival played on that live album with Leon Russell. Yeah, that’s how I came in, through Leon. I really liked the guitar player in that band, Pat Flynn. When they split up, I don’t know what happened to him, but I thought he was an ex- ceptional guitar player. He wouldn’t necessar- ily blow you away with his licks, but I liked his whole approach with the guitar. And, I like some of the old guys. I really like Uncle Dave Macon. He was one of my favorites, the first big banjo star.
I have a guitar question for you; I heard a story about Peter Frampton trying to buy a guitar from you at a gig once back in the 1970’s. Is that true? He did. About 1975 I was playing the Roxy in LA. He was playing in town, and that is when he had that ‘talking box’ record out. He was real young, and he had a hit record, and I was playing the local Hollywood bar, the Roxy, there on Sunset Strip. He came on down and got up on stage and played with me. I’ve got a tape of it somewhere. In fact, Waylon Jen- nings came down the same night, man. All the big time stars would come down to the Roxy after their gigs. I had a tape recorder rolling, so somewhere in the vaults there is a tape. That is where I met Peter, and that is
the only time I met him. He was real hot and he had an entourage along with him.
But didn’t he try and buy a guitar off of you that night, right there and then? He may have……oh, my old Harmony. Oh yeah, that’s right! I had an old Harmony that I played for years. It was a $50 round hole acoustic guitar. I took the back out of it and put pickups in it. It became a Frankenstein. I turned it into an electric guitar, is what I did. I still have it, but it is a bummer because the airlines ruined it. It had a very unique sound. It’s on some of my early records. He wanted to buy it. But, it was in the days when I only had one guitar.
Groups like the Allman Brothers band and Lynyrd Skynyrd played some of your songs. Did you ever jam much with the southern rockers? I opened for them after Duane was dead. Bonnie Bramlett was on the show, and I opened for them on one show in the 70’s in Atlanta, Georgia at a 15,000 seater. That was the last time I seen them. I ran into Dickey once or twice, and Dickey and I were going to get to together two or three times but we never did. And, I was going to go out on tour with Skynyrd, but when they were on tour I wasn’t, and when I was on tour they weren’t, and so on.
Do you ever do any fishing out there in California? There is not much water in southern Califor- nia. (Laughs) My fishing days, I lived in Ten- nessee a long time, and in Oklahoma, and my fishing days kind of quit when I moved to southern California. There are lakes here, and people fish, but I was never much on fishing on the ocean. I like to fish the creeks, that kind of thing. There are not really many creeks out here. There are man-made lakes
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