talking to my brother about playing bass with him but I’m not exactly sure why it didn’t happen but they were good friends back in the day. He said he used to do some of the songs off that first Pure Prairie League album at some J.D. Blackfoot shows but I think he told me that he wouldn’t do “Amie” though, because he was saving it for his own album. He knew it was a good song. If I remember correctly.
How old were you when you moved to Houston? I was around 23 or something like that, you know, 23 or 24, and I stayed there for about 25 years,.
I read someplace that that’s when you really, really started kicking into the whole blues genre. I don’t know if that’s true or not… Yeah, I was playing in country bands down
here and I started hosting a Monday Night Jam and realized that when I played blues and classic rock kind of stuff, that people re- ally dug what I was doing a lot more than when I was doing like the country thing or whatever. I was getting a lot more reaction, and Stevie Ray Vaughan was real popular here in Texas. I’m in Houston now, but you know, it was really getting big and I just started slipping into doing shuffles and differ- ent things during my country gigs - as much as I could get away with without people get- ting mad at me, and I eventually just decided I was going to start a blues band and just got some guys together and started playing all the time, playing blues .
Oh yeah. At that point it seemed like you had a real Albert Collins kind of thing going on. Yeah. I really got into Albert Collins and I re- ally loved that Showdown album with him and Johnny Copeland and Robert Cray. That’s one of my favorite albums and to this
day I still do a couple of songs off that album. I’ve been doing ‘em for years. Can’t seem to let ‘em go. “Black Cat Bone” and “T Bone Shuffle.” Some of those, you know. I really got into the Albert Collins thing because he played with a little bit of overdrive and power and I guess since I kinda had a rock and roll background I could relate to it more than some of the guys that played a little cleaner at that time. I really got into it.
Tell me a little bit about Mark May and the Agitators, how that project came about. Yeah, started that in the early 90s and we started playing around Houston and I had a girlfriend at that time who said that I needed to find a career and she gave me a book that had a list of careers in it and descriptions of them. She said, “Look through this, see if you can find something.” And I looked through it a couple of times and I couldn’t find anything and she said to me, “Well, you’d better get your music going then.” So, I was working in a music store that wasn’t very busy so I sat down and wrote my whole first CD, Calling the Blues at that music store basically, and I recorded it and just thought, “Well, even if it’s just my local fans and family and friends who like this album…” you know, I set myself up in case it didn’t go over that good, people didn’t like it, that I was just doing it, you know be- cause I was spending a lot of time playing music and didn’t have a lot to show for it. But it ended up getting picked up by Johnny Phillips there at Icehouse Records in Mem- phis. You know, Johnny’s uncle was Sam Phillips, I believe. I think it was his uncle. But you know, he was related to the Sun Records people. It was kind of a cool set up for me, you know and they had good distribu- tion and everything and I got my career going that way.
One thing I noted in one of the re- sources that I was looking at was there
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