the first four strings of a tenor guitar. I ended up trading that tenor guitar, but I have te se- rial number for it and in the back of my mind I’m always hoping to find it again one day. I found one in a store once just like it, but it was one serial number off so I didn’t buy it. (Laughs)
But you still have the 335? I still have it. It’s at the Country Music Hall of Fame, its something that can represent me and my first guitar rig. It’s pretty special. What’s interesting is there were times in my life when I was 16, 18 or 20 I’d call my dad and say “I’m looking at getting another guitar, and I’m thinking about trading the 335. But it was my first guitar, and dad said “you cant ever get your first guitar back,” so I decided to keep it.
That was good advice. Yeah, I’ve still got the Super Reverb too. (Laughs)
Well who were your influences as a young aspiring musician from Okla- homa? The first artists were Jimmie Rogers and The Carter Family. It was the music of our history. One was born out of the blues and one was born out of the blues. That’s where it all comes from for me. I’m so grateful to have grown up in the time period I grew up in with such great music. You’ve got Jimmy Page, you’ve got Clapton, you just can’t run out of great people to listen to and aspire to imulate. It was a great era to grow up in and be in- spired. Its not like I grew up in the punk era or the grunge era. I grew up in the era of maybe the greatest musicianship ever.
So would you say you grew up with country and bluegrass and then as a teenager got into the bands like The Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin? Yeah. And I didn’t really know much about
bluegrass until I was in high school. I came into bluegrass late. Into the party. I think that most everyone is a product of the records that their big brother, big sister or parents owned. I didn’t buy records for a long time. I couldnt. When I finally did, I discovered the things that I liked.
Didn’t you open for KISS one time? I opened for KISS in high school - in a blue- grass band! (Laughs) That was fun! I got the biggest kick out of that.
Did you wear makeup? (Both laugh) No. This was 1975 so they were just getting started. They were just starting to catch fire. The only reason we opened was because there was a real popular local band in Oklahoma City, and the they cancelled at four or five o’- clock. So we got a call and asked if we were available and we said yeah! We made fifty bucks apiece. We went running down there and when we saw the marquee it said “Ap- pearing tonight: KISS.” I said “uh oh.” (Laughing) You couldn’t have made people more mad if you tried, putting a bluegrass band up there with banjos and fiddles in front of all these racks and stacks of amps.
I’d be interested to know if Gene Sim- mons has any idea that Vince Gill once opened for him. He does. We had a conversation about it. And I like Paul Stanley. We wound up on the same label years later when I was in the Pure Prairie League. One night I asked Paul if he remembered a few years earlier when a blue- grass band opened for them. He said “yah.” I said “I was in that band.” (Both laughing)Gene wasn’t very friendly about it. He wasn’t amused, but Paul was laughing and he was real cool.
You joined Pure Prairie League in 1979, right? Tell us about that experience and what you learned from it.
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