about doing this album with Johnnie, but lo and behold, in June of 1992, Doug and Ricky left the band to pursue other ventures. So we’re going okay, we’ve got this Johnnie Johnson CD to do, plus we’ve got to do an- other album. What are we going to do? (Laughs) You know? We had to regroup the whole thing and we brought in Mark Orr, then we brought it Anthony Kenny. We got the band back on track again. We did another album for Mercury which was Rave On, and then I think that Fall we got together and started writing songs and started thinking about the album with Johnnie. Johnnie flew down from St. Louis - he came to the practice house, sat in with us. It was like we were all meant to play together. This is like the end of 1992, we go in and cut an album which be- came That’ll Work. So I think ’93 is when it came out, I could be wrong about that. We went out and did some touring and we would always play with Johnnie whenever time would allow. Fast forward to 2003. We heard that Johnnie’s health may have been failing a little bit, and his wife had kind of maybe sug- gested that Johnnie come down and do a recording, a little jamming with us. We were doing an album at that point called Soul for Audium Records.


It’s one of my favorites, yeah. That’s one of my favorites, too. So we needed some piano for a version of “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” written by Billy Miles, and of course, recorded initially by Freddie King on King Records. So Johnnie came in and put the piano down. Well, we just started jam- ming in the studio, this was in 2003. A day later, we’ve got basically enough for another album, you know? But it wasn’t finished. We went on and finished Soul and we sent John- nie back to St. Louis. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2005, so we just put those other tracks, except for “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” we put ‘em all under Richard’s bed. A couple years ago, Johnnie’s widow,


Frances called Richard and wanted to know if we were ever going to do anything with those tracks. She wanted to hear them before she passed away. So in the end of 2014 and into 2015, we finished the album. Bruce Iglaur at Alligator Records picked it up and on June 15th of last year, it came out. That’s the his- tory of Meet Me in Bluesland. (Laughs) Man, so that thing… it took a few years to come out. You’ve gotta remember, when it was tracked Anthony Kenny was playing bass in the band at the time and he actually left the band somewhere around 2006, but the line up on Meet Me in Bluesland is Richard, Fred, Doug, Andy Kenny and myself, along with Johnnie Johnson, you know.


Yeah. Wow. That’s quite an interesting story. It’s cool to learn about these things and what all goes on before they come out. I wish Johnnie could have been around to experience it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we got to do a lot of great things with Johnnie. We got to do Conan O’Brien’s show - we got to do so many really cool dates. We took him to play Jam- boree in the Hills with us one year and if we could do it all over again, I think we would have played with him a lot more, and made him almost a part of our band, because he fit so well, you know and we loved him. He was like our uncle, he was like our dad, he made us play like real men. (Michael laughs) He really did.


That’s cool. Well, Greg, I want to wrap up by just asking you one more ques- tion. Would you give us an update on what you guys have going on right now or coming up soon? Well, since we saw you at the Tabernacle back in November, we’ve been on break except for doing a few dates here and there. We have geared back up and played about three, four shows and we’ve been doing some promo- tional stuff in Nashville. We filmed a TV show


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