by Paul Zollo
No, we had these little Kay and Harmony electrics. And Robert Crawford actually had a Gibson SG, a really nice guitar. Richie had a Harmony solid-body guitar. So the instruments weren’t too bad, really. And we practiced a lot. We loved playing.
Did you have an amp?
Yeah, I had a little Gibson amp. I’ve still got it. A Skylark. A very small amp. Did you start writing your own songs then?
Yeah. I started writing songs because I didn’t really know how many songs went, and so in my idle hours, I would sit and try to invent my own songs with the chords I knew. And that came surprisingly easy. I think I was probably writing songs as soon as I could play, as soon as I knew enough chords, I was trying to put together my own song.
The words were coming easily too?
Yeah. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with it. Though I wasn’t taking it real seriously. It was just a hobby. The bands didn’t really play original songs, they were all playing the hits of the day. But it was something I did love.
What was your first song called?
I think it was called “Baby, I’m Leaving.” It was a 12-bar blues kind of thing. It was in C. My first chords were C, F, G, and A minor.
Nice to have that A minor in there.
Yeah. A minor was really good.
When you started learning new chords, would you put those in your songs?
Oh yeah. Right away. [Laughs]
Would you write down your songs?
Yeah, I’d write down the words. Though I could usually remember how they went.
Was your father proud that you could play?
Yes. He was really proud of it. When he would have a friend over, he’d say, ‘Bring your guitar out, and play a song for this guy.’ He was very proud of it.
Would you play your songs for your mother?
Sometimes I would. She was amazed that I could do it. Just amazed. She’d say, ‘I can’t understand how you can do it if you didn’t have any lessons, and you don’t know how to write music. How do you do it?’
And I said, ‘I don’t know. I just learned it from other kids.’
Were your parents musical at all?
No. My dad wasn’t musical in any way, and I don’t think he was a huge music fan. He did like some country music. My mother, though, she liked records. She liked musicals and show tunes. I remember her buying the West Side Story soundtrack, and I really loved all those songs. I still really do. I think it’s an incredibly well-written piece of music, that whole show. It was incredible. She bought things like that, and Nat King Cole. Which I thought was really square at the time, but now I look back on it, and it was very good music. She played the phonograph. She liked gospel and stuff like that. But nobody really played any instruments.
When you started playing, did your parents encourage you?
Yeah, they thought music was a good thing. They didn’t like the length of my hair. They were really shocked by that. That me and my buddies were letting our hair grow long. They were really shocked by that. Because it was unusual in ‘64. We wanted to look like The Beatles. We thought it would be hip for our hand. And then you could let it grow through the summer, and then school would start and they’d make you cut it again. There was a dress code in school where they wouldn’t let you have long hair. But me and my dad fought many a battle about hair. For years, there, it was just like he didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it at all, [Laughs] why we were doing that. But eventually they gave up. Do you remember the first time you heard The Beatles?
No, I don’t remember exactly the first time. But I remember that period. I think I heard “I Saw Her Standing There” before “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” That was the B-side, and they were playing both sides. I’m not sure, but I think I heard that one first. And I bought the single. That great single with the picture-sleeve on the front of them in their collarless gray jackets. And I just loved it. I just played it to death.
I think that I probably had two singles by the time we saw them on television. I had “She Loves You” as well, with “I’ll Get You” on the back. It was on the Swan record label. This black label that said “Swan Records.” And once we saw them, we were never the same.
There was nobody else with a self-contained band like them. There were singers. The only bands I had seen were at the teen rec center, and they played surf music, mostly instrumental music. Maybe the sax player took a vocal every now and then. But pop stars weren’t self-contained units then. I’d never even dreamt of that. To me, I would have loved to have been a rock ‘n’ roll star. But I just didn’t understand how you got to be a rock ‘n’ roll star. How did you suddenly have a mohair suit and an orchestra? But the minute I saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show—and it’s true of thousands of guys—there was the way out. There was the way to do it. You get your friends and you’re a self-contained unit. And you make the music. And it looked like so much fun.
It was something I identified with. I had never been hugely into sports. Sports never really spoke to me. I liked sand lot baseball. But I didn’t like it once it got really organized. I didn’t really watch sports on TV. I was more into the arts. Which I think weirded my dad out for a while. But I didn’t really have a huge interest in knowing what baseball players were or anything. But this really spoke to me. I had been a big fan of Elvis. But I really saw in The Beatles that here’s something I could do. I knew I could do it. It wasn’t long before there were groups springing up in garages all over the place.
When you would write songs, would you tape them?
No, I didn’t have a tape recorder until years later. My mother bought me an Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder for Christmas when I was eighteen. It was really cool. You could overdub on it. It had this thing called “sound on sound.” In mono you could just keep tracking and tracking. It had terrible hiss [Laughs] as you could tell. But it was a lot of fun. That was the first tape recorder I had. Would you do harmonies?
Oh yeah, I’d do everything. Just stack and stack and stack. And it’d all come back like ‘Hissssssssssssssss.’ [Laughs] And it was all in mono, because you had to use one channel to overdub on the other. But that was a great help. I really did learn a lot about recording. I’d plug my bass direct into the tape recorder, and play the bass direct. It was fun. It was great fun.
Were The Continentals the popular band in Gainesville around this time?
Yes. They were the big band in town. Don Felder was in The Continentals, who went on to The Eagles. The first band I got in was called The Sundowners. We were all really young, and our moms had to drive us to the gigs. But we worked. We actually worked.
How did The Sundowners form?
I knew this kid named Dennis Lee. I met him at a dance because he had long hair, and I had long hair, and there were only maybe four or five kids in all of Gainesville who had hair over their ears. So we kind of found each other. And he mentioned, ‘I’m a drummer, I have a set of drums.’ So I went over to his house one day with my guitar, and we kind of played and fooled around. But we didn’t have a band, we just kind of fooled around.
Then there was this chick I was hot on. She was a really good-looking girl. Her name was Cindy Crawford. [Laughs] Go figure. And she was very beautiful.
And I talked to her one night at a dance. And she said something like, ‘So you have a band?’
I said, ‘Sure, I got a band.’ [Laughs]
She said, ‘I’m in charge of this dance in the school. We have a DJ, but we were going to have a band in the intermission. I thought maybe your band would like to do it.’
So, seizing the opportunity, I said, ‘Sure, my band can do it.’ And so I really quickly went and got Richie Henson, who was the guy I sat around playing guitar with. And I told him, ‘We’re forming a band.’ And he went and got Robert Crawford, who was a little older than us and quite good on the guitar. And Dennis Lee on the drums. And we got together one afternoon in my front room and played. And it was the biggest rush in my life, the minute it all happened.
You played guitar, too?
Yeah, we didn’t have a bass. We just had three guitars, and one big Silvertone amplifier that Robert had. And we all plugged into that. It had six inputs. [Laughs] So three guitars and drums.
And we had a guy who played sax. He only played one gig with us and then kind of bowed out. ‘Cause there wasn’t much for him to do.
We learned four songs. All instrumental. “House Of The Rising Sun.” “Walk Don’t Run.” We all wore blue shirts and jeans, so we looked like a band. And it went over great. We wound up playing the next intermission, we played the same songs again. And then at the end of the night, we were packing up our gear, and this older kid came up, and said, ‘Do you guys ever play fraternity parties?’ We said, ‘No, we’ve never played anywhere but here.’ He said, ‘Well, I can get you some bookings. If you learn more songs.’ And we thought, ‘Wow.’ So, literally, that was on a Friday and on that Saturday we were in Dennis Lee’s garage, trying to learn more songs. And it never stopped from that moment.
That guy did come through with some gigs. And then there was the Moose Club dance. It was the big teenage dance. They had a battle of the bands. And whoever won got a contract for the whole summer, to play every Friday night. And we won. And we got paid one hundred bucks a gig. Every Friday. Then we started picking up Saturday gigs, too. This was heavy shit—we were fourteen years old. Can’t even drive a car. And we’re getting high school gigs. And Dennis’ mom would drive us. Put our gear in her station wagon, and wait till it was over, and drive us home. And I was just a little kid—fourteen years old. And it’s never stopped since. [Laughs]
My mom was like, ‘Where did you get this money?’ And I told her I got it for the show. But she didn’t believe me.
She said, ‘Really, where did you get this money? If you took this money, you’re gonna have to own up to it.’
I said, ‘I swear to God, mom, they paid me this for playing.’ She didn’t believe me. So she called the Moose Club, and the guy said, ‘Yeah, they get the door, and that’s what they made.’
So by the end of the summer, I’d made a couple hundred bucks. And to be fourteen, that’s a lot of money. Or it was then. I put it all back into my equipment. I got a better amplifier. And my dad, who was really sweet, got me a really nice Gibson bass. So I guess [my parents] were supportive if they were doing that, buying me a nice bass.
When did you switch to bass?
Very early on. Probably that next week [after we put the band together]. I think there had to be a bass. So I tuned my guitar down. But that didn’t work very well, because the strings were all floppy. And my dad bought me a bass. I got out the Sears catalogue and found a Silvertone bass. And I went to him with the catalogue and I said, ‘Will you loan me the money?’ I think it was fifty-five bucks for a bass. And he said, ‘That’s got to be a crummy instrument for that money.’ Though they were actually nice instruments. Though it looked crummy. [Laughs]
And he said, ‘No, I’m not loaning you money for something that cruddy.’ And then I came home a few days later, and he’d bought me a Gibson bass. And a Fender amplifier. And I was stunned. I’d never felt that kind of love from my dad in my life. And he bought it on a payment plan, where I had to make the payments on it. But, you know, God, it blew my mind. So I became a bass player.
He somehow knew Gibson was a good bass?
Yeah, he asked around, and he bought the whole rig off of someone who was selling it. It was a Gibson EB-2 bass. I still have it. Even then, it was a really nice instrument. And a Fender piggyback amp called a Tremulux. Which was a little smaller than the Fender Bassman. It wasn’t really made for bass, so I couldn’t play it real loud because it distorted. But I was in hog heaven. I couldn’t believe it. [My dad] really supported me. It wasn’t hard to make the payments because we were working. But it took all of what I had. It was probably thirty to forty bucks a month payment.
So then [my friends] started to show me the names of the notes. ‘This fret makes A,’ and ‘this fret makes B.’ And that was how I started [on bass], just thumbing the note that the chord was. And then I learned a run and a bass pattern. And I was quite good. I got pretty good at the bass, and singing and playing bass at the same time.
Singing lead?
Yeah, most of the time.
Isn’t that tough, to sing and play bass at the same time?
Well, I didn’t know it was hard. [Laughs] So it wasn’t, really. I didn’t know it was supposed to be hard. So I could do it. I can still do it, to some degree.
I was really determined to play bass well. The guitarist in the band showed me basic scales. So once I knew where the notes were, it wasn’t that hard. I learned all the notes on the neck, and where they were, and then I think I always had a pretty good rhythm. And though I didn’t really realize it, I think I did have a pretty good sense of where the bass should be.
Were you aware that McCartney was the bass player for The Beatles?
Oh hell, yeah. Everybody knew that. And everybody knew that they wrote their own songs. And really, most bands were exactly that line-up. Maybe in a few years you’d see somebody who had a keyboard. There weren’t many portable organs made at that time, until the Vox portable organ came out.
Did you have a favorite Beatle?
No, I liked them all. They all carried that same weight. [Laughs] Ringo was just as important as John. It was kind of like that in those days. So we liked everything.
Did you play Beatles’ songs in your shows?
Somewhat. The Beatles’ songs were really hard to sing. We weren’t good harmony singers so we drifted more to the Stones and the Animals. And The Kinks and The Zombies. But to do The Beatles was tricky because there was a lot of harmony, and we didn’t know anything about singing harmony, really, so it took awhile to do that.
Were you a Stones fan?
Oh yeah. We loved the Stones. Everything they did, we just loved it. People weren’t cynical about music then. You were really rooting for everything then. You wanted to like everything. So the only challenge then was having enough money to have the records. I didn’t have a huge record collection because I couldn’t afford it. Every record I got, I really played to death, and I really treasured it. 45s or LPs, anything I could get. I used to go around and collect Coke bottles to cash them in and get three bucks to get a record.
What was the first LP you got?
The first LP I got was Elvis. G.I. Blues it was called. And that’s when I was probably eleven or twelve, before I was playing music. But I remember when we got that Meet The Beatles album. Me and my brother talked my dad into buying it one night. That just blew my head off. So from that moment on, I was trying to get a hold of any Beatles or Stones record that was out.
Did you remain a big Elvis fan?
I was until ‘64, and then Elvis was getting so shitty by then. [Pause] It had never been the music of my generation. I was an odd kid for even being interested in Elvis. So when The Beatles came, I lost interest in Elvis, because [The Beatles] were the music of my generation, and I was a huge record buff. So I lost interest in Elvis, though I kind of felt an allegiance to him. I still went and saw those shitty movies for a while. But I knew the difference by then. It didn’t have the vitality that these new records did.
You said you encouraged your brother Bruce to play music, but he saw all the strife you were going through, and didn’t want any part of it. What strife?
My dad and I fought all the time. About having long hair, and dressing the way I did. It looked really bizarre. It looked really freaky, in that time period. This was before the hippies. It was so weird. I can see why it weirded him out. To see somebody like me, or the guys I was running around with—people wouldn’t serve us in restaurants. They didn’t like it. Especially in the Deep South. And you could get your ass kicked if you were in the wrong spot.
So he was embarrassed by it. He didn’t want to go anywhere with me. I guess it would be sort of like today, if your kid had fifty piercings and a gr
een mohawk. It was kind of like that, to have Beatle-style hair, and boots, and the kind of clothes we were wearing. We thought it was super-hip and we were into it, but older people, they didn’t dig it at all, which made us like it more.
They haled it at school. I’d keep getting kicked out of school for my hair. The school would make you cut your hair. So we would kind of grease it down. We’d go through the whole day with all this Vaseline in our hair. We’d really grease it down behind our ears to try to hide it. And then when the weekend came, you’d wash it all out.
But my dad and I just had constant physical fights. I’d get the shit kicked out of me. And my brother didn’t think it was worth all that. I’m sure it had some kind of traumatic impact on him. He wanted to take the easy road around that. He had short hair. And he was more athletic. Which my dad loved. Because I wasn’t athletic and didn’t have any interest in sports at all. I knew the name of no baseball player; I didn’t give a shit. Never watched sports. I liked to play with my friends, but I didn’t like the idea of organized sports. It just wasn’t for me. There was nothing wrong with it. It just wasn’t for me. And I was this skinny little kid, and I didn’t fit into that whole football mentality of the South. But my brother could play football.
So my dad, I think he liked Bruce better for a long time. ‘Cause Bruce kind of fit the mold of what [my father] wanted in a kid, and I was just this pale, little, skinny kid with long hair.
And yet you did impress him by playing music.
Yeah, he had to give that up, [Laughs] you know? And then the more and more money that started to come in, I guess he started to understand it. But I think he thought we would make more money if we cleaned up our image. And I’d say, ‘No, it doesn’t work that way.’
The Sixties were very turbulent with me and my dad. He hated long hair. He just hated it. He hated me growing my hair out, and it was a constant war. And I remember, early Seventies, when I was in [the band] Mudcrutch, we were playing five nights a week at this place called Dub’s, the big college bar, and one day I was sitting in the front room writing out a set list. And we played five sets a night; we did a lot of songs. And he said, ‘What are you doing? What are you writing?’