others company and laughed a lot. But no way did I teach him to play. But it’s still a good story. I’ve even heard that it was me that played on “Love Me Do.” (Laughs)
Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. (Delbert laughs) Tell me a little about when you hooked up with Glen Clark, and ended up mov- ing to Los Angeles.
Well, Glen's about ten years younger than me, and we started playing together back 1n Ft. Worth - I don't know, sometime in the mid- 60's. Then Glen moved out to California, and I had a marriage that was going down the tubes, so several months after he went out there, I went out there too. We got a deal at Paramount Studios in Hollywood to do an album on spec - if they sold it to somebody and made a deal we'd pay then. So we were in there working on it, and Earl McGrath - he was a good friend of Ahmet Ertegun at At- lantic Records- he wanted to get into the record business so Ahmet told him that he would service the record from Atlantic. So we went in and did two records on his “Clean” label, and made a little noise, but nothing much happened. After we made the second record, I decided I wanted to go and try my luck in Nashville. Glen wanted to stay in Cali- fornia, so we kind of split up, not as friends but as a duo. We both went on and had our careers and fortunately did pretty well.
What was your first big record after you went solo? Oh, everyday is a break. (Laughs) I have been on the outskirts and edges and on the low part of the fame thing for a lot of years. I don’t know when the first break came, I am still waiting on it. My career has been ab- solutely wonderful in the sense that I have been able to do and get better at it.
As a songwriter and having your songs
covered by everybody from Emmylou Harris to the Blues Brothers, what has been the biggest kick for you? Well, Vince Gill, before he became Vince Gill, recorded a song called "Victim Of Life Cir- cumstances." He is such a talented guy and he really rocked it hard. That didn’t amount to anything and it was years after that that he became Vince Gill. But you know there have been some people that did my songs and they were awful. Maybe three of my songs have been recorded to my satisfaction or that I thought was well done. I don’t want to start naming names.
I was reading about the Grammy in 1991 for that duet with Bonnie Raitt. How did that come to be? Well, she has been a longtime friend of mine and it was not like we didn’t know each other. We had talked about doing a record together. Then when she had her Luck of The Draw record that did it for her she called me up one day and said that she had found a great duet song and wanted to know if I wanted to do it. I flew out to LA and we did it and won a Grammy on it.
Let’s talk about your new record. Del- bert & Glen Blind, Crippled and Crazy. What made you guys decided to reunite now? Well, we remained good, close friends through the years. And Glen retired a couple of years ago, and we both have reached the point where we can kind of do anything we want to do, and we like to have a good time so we decided to make a new record.
Tell me a little bit about the album- who produced it, where it was recorded... Gary Nicholson produced it. He's got a little studio over at his house, as everybody does in Nashville just about. But first we went out to California and recorded some things just to
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