Yeah, I don’t blame ya. Well, you’ve recorded a good many albums. How many albums have you recorded, do you know?
Several? Oh, I believe… Yeah, I would have to say eight. I could count ‘em up here and tell ya but that sounds about right.
Yeah. Do you have a favorite of all those? Some of those… most… they were all little self-released things. Initially I was on a label called 706 which was the functioning arm of SUN Studio. It was called 706 Records be- cause Sun Studio was 706 Union Avenue. Re- member?
Oh yeah. So that was 706 Records. Did two albums on that. Really had high hopes that something was going to come from that. The second was a record called Telegraph Road. I really thought was a pretty good record. And we got some good press on it. But 706 under the SUN banner just really wasn’t set up to be a promoting record label. They didn’t have the time, the manpower - they had the funding but they didn’t choose to do it, but what they didn’t really have was the time and the man- power to be an active label, you know and ba- sically it was me and Billy C. Riley and there was a handful of other guys maybe that were on there and I mean they weren’t doing all these things that a record label has to do to get you out in the world.
Oh yeah. I got no hard feelings about it. I got to record in SUN Studio and I never thought I’d do that either. It’s kinda like playing Duane’s Gold Top, I never thought I’d get to record at SUN. At some point in my life if somebody would have told me that I would’ve said, “Man, you’ve gotta quit smoking that stuff, it’s mak-
ing your brain soft.”
(Laughing) Yeah, yeah. You’re imagin- ing things! Well, let me ask you this, you’ve got quite a bit, going out and playing. What all do you have going on now and coming up? Well, I’ve got a bunch of festivals this sum- mer. Actually the big deal right now, right this minute is that Blues Music magazine just did a feature on the 2016 International Blues Challenge and I’m in that and they’ve got a tune of mine from the new solo CD on their CD sampler for the new issue. That’s pretty cool.
That is cool. I meant to ask you about the new record, too. This is the first one, Michael, that I’ve ever recorded and engineered and stuff all myself. I did this one at home. For years I worked with a fellow named Erwin Musper. Erwin Musper is from Holland originally but ended up doing a bunch of stuff in L.A. as a record- ing engineer. He’s on, oh geez, Def Leppard albums and Scorpions records and Jeff Beck and Mick Jagger, and Elton John and Van Halen. He recorded all of the different ver- sions of Van Halen at one point or the other, as recording engineer, not as producer and he ended up moving into this area because he was looking for a place outside L.A. but it had to be on a normal airline hub. Cincinnati’s got a big hub airport down in Northern Ken- tucky and he ended up buying a house in Northern Kentucky that already had a studio built into it. You know, that’s what he was looking for was a house by a major airport with a studio already in it so he ended up here. Otherwise I would have never known him. He and I hit it off pretty much early on and he recorded the Live at Cincinnati Blues Fest record. He pretty much retired and moved to Ecuador. He’s a character. There’s times sitting in the studio – I mean he speaks like half a dozen different languages but he’d
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77
