’97 to 2000, so I’ve been doing radio about 16, almost 17 years now. It’s fun. It’s a blast.
For sure. Getting back to when you first met Richard Young and them, so your first band wasn’t the Headhunters. Was it you guys who did that Itchy Brother project? Yeah. The funny thing is how I met Richard in the Fall of ’68, as I was saying earlier. I’d seen this band in Louisville called The Legion Field, and right then I went, “This is what I want to do.” I want to play rock & roll guitar through a big amp and get those sounds that Clapton and Hendrix and Jeff Beck and this guy in Legion Field were getting… they were all singing through their instrument. You know, Michael Bloomfield, people like that… and that’s really where I basically, I went home, my brother saw that I was really inter- ested in playing guitar. He had recently got- ten married and he was changing from rock & roll to bluegrass. So he had this really cool 50’s Gretch guitar in shambles. He had taken it apart and he had even painted it. So he ba- sically gave it to me and said, “Here, keep it and learn how to play.” And about two weeks after that, I met Richard Young. I had my cousin Larry Sullivan get on the bus one morning, I was going to school and he started telling me about the 4-H Talent Show that was going to be taking place in a couple of weeks, and about this new guy that had come to our school system because his dad had to do some student teaching there. And that was Richard Young. And so I took my Gretch down to the lunchroom one day and I jammed with Richard and we played “Born to Be Wild,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” “In-a- Gadda-da-Vida,” “Hey Jude” and a couple other songs and we decide, “Okay, we can do this talent show.” And I can tell you the date - November 21, 1968, that was the first time I ever played with Richard in front of anybody on a stage, and after the show we decided we’d get together with Fred and their other
cousin Anthony, and that was the origin of what was to become the Headhunters later on. Our first name was The Truce. We went through a different set of names and ended up with Itchy Brother in the seventies, and then, as you know, in ’86, the Kentucky Head- hunters. But going back to when I met Richard Young, that was around October or November of 1968.
Wow. We’re like brothers, you know, like family. We do have disagreements, but the main thing is we all love each other and that covers any kind of disagreements you’d ever have.
Oh yeah. Of course. Love conquers all.
I couldn’t be crazier about Richard. I haven’t talked to him in a long time but... Oh, he’s the best.
I had just a blast when I interviewed him years ago. We got so off track dur- ing his interview, we went about an hour around and came back to the in- terview. (Greg laughs.) Because we were talkin’ about Spartanburg and Marshall Tucker and connections, and of course Eddie Hinton, Muscle Shoals, and everything else. Oh gosh yes, man, when you’re passionate about stuff then you know… what else is there? You gotta have passion in your life.
Yeah. Totally agree. Richard’s got passion. He loves doing the business side of the Headhunters, and I’m glad he does ‘cuz I can’t imagine doing what he does, and I’m very appreciative of what he does, you know.
No doubt. So when was the Kentucky Headhunters - what year was that? The
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