Absolutely. You gotta recharge, and if you don’t recharge spiritually and with your fam- ily, then the music suffers so you gotta have that aspect of your life together, you know.
That’s true. And also, at the same time, you sort of recharging your cat, so that helps too. My cat. Absolutely! Well, we had to go to Washington on Monday to film a TV show that will be airing about three or four months from now. Now, the cat is quite old. I picked her up back in 1997, believe it or not. She’s still with us and she’s about 18 now. And soon as we got back from Washington and I walked in the door, she’s walking towards me, barking orders, that she needs to be fed and stuff so… she got to sleep a little bit while I was gone, but as soon as I came through the door, she was telling me what she wanted and I had to feed her. (Laughs.)
Yeah. They’re like that. You gotta take care of your kitties. Yep.
Yeah man, cool, that’s cool. Well, let’s go back a little bit here. I want to ask you how old were you when you “got bit by the music bug.” When did you first decide that you wanted to play gui- tar? Well, I grew up in a musical family where my dad played a little guitar and my older brother, Gary, played guitar, and then we had a cousin moved up from South Central Ken- tucky, near Louisville, in the early sixties and he played guitar as well. Then I had an Uncle who played guitar and sang in the honky- tonks around Louisville. He actually wrote, “High Steppin’ Daddy” that was on our first album. He recorded it first and it was kind of a semi-hit around Louisville. You know, that definitely planted a seed, having all that music around me and I can remember being in the back of my dad’s Plymouth, going
places round Louisville and just hearing country music and sometimes hearing rock & roll on the radio and growing up in a mixed neighborhood in the late fifties and the early sixties. I was hearing an influx of country, rock, and blues and R&B, all this stuff around me. That was all planting a seed but I am sure seeing the Beatles in 1964 on the Ed Sullivan Show made a huge impact. I mean, seriously. This poor guy with semi-long hair, playing cool rock & roll! And I’m going, ‘Oh yeah, this is neat.’ I mean, I didn’t quite know what to make of it but it, but didn’t take me long to embrace that and then, I think the next big moment was my cousin and my brother took me to see the Lovin’ Spoonful in the Fall of 1956 at Memorial Auditorium in Louisville, and that pushed me even further into wanting to play music. I’d already picked up the guitar because guitars were around the house and I just started dabbling with it. The next thing you know, in 1968, my cousin took me to see this group in Louisville called Legion Field who were on Imperial Records at the time, and they were a 3-piece rock and roll band, and I could tell you right then, that just trig- gered something inside of me and I said, ‘This is what I’m going to do the rest of my life.” And it wasn’t but about two weeks later I met Richard and Fred! (Laughs). You know, it was like that.
Wow. It was kind of like fate. But I was probably, like I about 14 or 15 years old when I made that decision, you know and then gradually you open one door, one door shuts, but you just keep walking through doors and things work out you know…
That’s true. Perseverance is a big part of it, I find. Just don’t ever give up. Yeah! Right! And if you love something, it doesn’t matter if you “make it” or not, if you are doing it you have already made it, you know.
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