by Paul Zollo
I got fired, actually. I got fired. And then when I was seventeen and out of school, I thought I would go to a bigger town and try to get into a bigger group. Got on a Greyhound bus, went to Tampa, Florida, checked into this really weird hotel, [Laughs] this really scary place. And got myself a room in this hotel, and got a job working in a barbecue restaurant. And it was such a gross job, washing these terrible trays of greasy shit. And I would sweep the floor. They fired me pretty fast from that. I couldn’t handle it. So when I got fired from that, I drifted back to Gainesville, because I never did get anything going in Tampa. I couldn’t link up with anybody.
Was Jim Lenahan in Mudcrutch?
Yeah. He was the lead singer for a while. I met him in high school, and he was actually a drummer in another band called The Agents. And he had long hair, and he was one of the five or six guys in town with long hair, so you would kind of group together so that you wouldn’t get your ass kicked. Because there was the real danger of rednecks beating the shit out of you. He wore an eye-patch, too, which was kind of exotic, I thought.
For effect, or did he need one?
Just for effect. [Laughs] We met in an art class in high school. He was a couple years ahead of me, but we were in the same art class together. I remember we got thrown out and had to take our desks to the sidewalk. [Laughs] And I really liked him. And he was old enough to drive, so he was my transportation for a long time. He drove me around.
And then he quit playing, and I kind of lost touch with him for a while. So when The Epics guys quit Mudcrutch and we were trying to put it back together, we thought we needed a singer. So we got Jim to join the band. And he now is our lighting guy. He’s been with us ever since. He quit singing. We actually fired him at some point over some silly issue. We fired Lenahan, and that’s when I really had to start singing a lot.
Were you okay with being the singer?
I always thought I wasn’t that good. I always thought we should have a proper singer. My voice is such a specialized, stylized thing. Though I’m actually a much better singer now than I was then, in terms of tone and things like that. But I always felt we needed a real singer. It took years to kind of realize that I was the singer. I always felt like I’m the singer till we get one. [Laughs]
Did you start doing your own songs at this time?
Oh yeah. Definitely. And I have to thank Jim Lenahan. He was the first person to really encourage me to do it. Because we met up over a lonely Christmas holiday. I was living in a shack with no heat. [Laughs]
You left your parent’s home?
Yeah. At 17. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I just lived in abject poverty.
Did you all live together in the shack, or was that your place?
No, we didn’t all live together. I lived in the shack, which was really kind of a run-down duplex apartment. Randall and Mike lived in a place we called the Mudcrutch Farm, which was kind of a run-down tin-roofed house. And it sat on maybe five or six acres of land. It had once been a ranch or a farm, and had become very run-down. I lived in the apartment for a while, and then I moved back home, probably a year later. And I slept there, but I was never there. It was one of those things where I stayed at the Mudcrutch Farm, but there was no place for me to sleep there. So at night I’d usually go back to my parents’ house and sleep there. But I was never really seen. I came in the night, and I’d sleep there, and there’d be nobody there when I woke up.
Were your folks okay with this lifestyle?
I guess so. I think by then I had broken the bronco. They were accepting of whatever went on. They felt that they just had to let me go my own course now. And I was paying my bills. And so I think they respected that. That I worked really hard and made some money. My mom kept telling me that I’d better learn to do something for when this burns out. I said, ‘It ain’t gonna.’ ‘Something to fall back on.’ That was the phrase she always used. And I used to say, ‘We ain’t gonna fall back. There ain’t gonna be no falling back, you know?’ [Laughs]
Did you have a car?
No. I didn’t have a car but Jim did. He had a van. And he’d come over, and we’d sit up and drink wine and talk. I’d play him songs I’d written, and he was really enthusiastic about it. He encouraged me to write. And I’d sort of write one just to show it to Jim. And that’s when we decided he should be in the band. Because we’d sing them.
Would you show your songs to Mike?
By the time he was in the band, every rehearsal was usually original songs. We worked really hard at originals. Because we knew that there wasn’t any way out unless we did. There wasn’t any way to get a record contract if you were just covering the Stones.
Would you write out lead sheets? [The chords and lyrics of a song notated on music paper.]
No. [Laughs] It would be like, ‘Here’s how it goes, here are the chords.’ It’s still like that. [Laughs] It’s still like, ‘Here’s how the chords go, you take it from here.’
Were you still playing bass at that point?
Yeah, I still played the bass, but I bought an acoustic guitar somewhere around ‘69 or ‘70. I traded in my 6-string Rickenbacker for an acoustic Gibson Dove.
Which I still have, and on which I wrote almost all my music on until about 1990. I actually wore it out.
You recorded your song “Up In Mississippi.” Which is a really great-sounding track, and a good song.
We were pretty good. I mean, for the time. For really being novices. I hadn’t written a lot of songs at that time. And, yeah, we made a little record and brought it out on a 45. It got played in Gainesville quite a bit. ‘Cause we bribed our friends into calling the request line. So it actually got into the Top Ten in Gainesville. And it really helped us as far as our gigs. We started to draw more, and could charge a little more, because we had a record.
There are two solos on it. Did Mike play both of them?
No, one is Tom Leadon and one is Mike.
Did you record that live?
We overdubbed the vocal. And I think there’s an acoustic guitar. So that was probably overdubbed too. That was on 8-track.
Was that fun for you to record?
Oh God, yes. We fell in love with it. Totally. We just fell in love with the whole idea of being in the studio and hearing it come back on those great big speakers. And it sounded so good. But it was all the dough we had to pay for one session.
And we had a friend of ours—he owned a pepper farm. And he had a big year and made some money, so we talked him into investing it into a record. So it came out on the Pepper Records label. [Laughs] And the odd thing is, to this day, someone will come up to me with that record and want me to sign it. They’re very rare, I guess, but there are people who have them. How they got them, I don’t know. We used to take them to the stores, and say, ‘Hey, would you put this in your racks? And then we’ll come back by, and if you sold any, you can keep the money. But just put them in your racks.’
And they’d do it. They’d put it right up on the counter in a rack, with a sign that said, ‘Here’s Gainesville’s Mudcrutch.’ And we never sold very many, but the airplay helped us a lot.
What was that like, hearing yourself on the radio the first time?
Oh man, it was such a gas. Such a gas. They had this thing every day at 5:00, they would take requests. People would call in and vote on what the Top Ten was for that day. And then at 6:00 they would play the Top Ten. So we’d go around, and get all our friends, and everybody we knew to call the radio station at 5:00 and vote for us. So we were frequently in the Top Ten every day because we had so many people calling. To get votes to be in the Top Ten.
Did Mudcrutch play with Lynyrd Skynyrd?
Several times. Groups were really good back then. You had to be pretty good to get a gig. There was a lot of competition. Somewhere I had a poster of that, of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mudcrutch. Actually, Mudcrutch was on the top of the bill. Lynyrd Skynyrd were from Jacksonville. They would come to gigs when we played. People came from everyw
here, they came from Daytona Beach, and from Miami. Literally, everyone in Florida came to Gainesville to play. There were just so many gigs and so much opportunity to play. And then as the Sixties started to boom, and the hippie thing happened, there were a lot of outdoor gigs, and what they called love-ins, in those days. So everybody came through there.
So Gainesville was a good place for you to be?
Incredibly good place. So many musicians came out of there. Two guys from Gainesville started a band out here [in L.A.] called The Motels. And then there were the two guys in The Eagles, Bernie and Don. Really good musicians. You had to be a good musician to compete. There was intense competition for shows. So we worked really hard at it. It was all we did.
Is it true that you would put on rock festivals called the Mudcrutch Farm Festivals?
Yes, that was our ace in the hole. It was one of those things you just blundered into. There was a huge field behind the shack. And someone got the idea that we could set up in the back field and put posters around, and have people come, and play. So we got this other group we knew, an R&B band called The Weston Prim Revue. And we got them to play, and we played. And so many people came. And there wasn’t even a Porta-John. There was nothing. This shows how innocent it was.
After that happened, some cats from the college that were real promoters came out and said, ‘Hey, let’s do another one and we’ll help you with it.’ And then for the next one, we had a lot of bands. I can’t remember who they were exactly. But I remember some came from Atlanta. And just a massive amount of people came. Thousands of people. It really upset the neighborhood. You wouldn’t think of trying to do something like that with no organization today. [Laughs]
And so the cops came in, and they said, ‘We can’t shut it down because there are thousands of people here, and there will be a lot of trouble if we shut it down.’ Then the people who owned the property evicted Randall and Mike. They said, ‘You’re out of here, you can’t do this.’ So then we figured, well, if they’re throwing us out of here, we’ll do one more. What can they do?
So by the time we did three, and it really mushroomed into a big deal, that was the key to our success. We became really famous around town, and when we played, a lot of people came. Before that, we used to play at Dub’s. We would play there six nights a week. Five sets a night. Got a hundred bucks a piece a week.
That’s where we really learned to be a band. Playing that much is really going to get you tight. But we didn’t really want to do that. We wanted to get into more concert gigs where we could play original music. They didn’t like original music in the clubs. So we used to say, ‘Here’s one by Santana,’ and we’d play our own song. [Laughs] When that happened, I remember we could play an auditorium and draw a thousand people. Not a lot, but we did it. And we would go on around the state, and get a name for ourselves.
Then they’d have these huge things in this place called the Plaza of the Americas, an outdoor thing at the college [University of Florida], and they’d have shows there with a few thousand people out there. Though they weren’t paying. So Mudcrutch developed quite a big rep, and we got to the point where we’d been around every post there was. We played everywhere you could play ten times. And we realized we were just on a merry-go-round, that we would just keep playing the same bars and the same thing and not really get anywhere.
So that’s when California came into the picture. Because Bernie [Leadon] had gone to California and had a lot of success, and started The Eagles, and he would come home now and then. We’d talk to him. And then Tom Leadon, when he left the group, he got a job with Linda Ronstadt playing bass. And that was before she was really happening. But he was going on tour with Linda Ronstadt. We were really impressed, like, ‘Wow, you got a gig.’
Then he got in some group that actually had a hit single, in some band named Silver. A completely forgettable single, but it was a hit. That did it. Okay, we’re going to California. That’s the way it is. We’re going to L.A. Where the Byrds are. Because the South had become completely inundated with the Allman Brothers. The Allman Brothers had gotten big, and every group had become an imitation of that. Literally everybody but us was an imitation of the Allman Brothers. And they were playing really long songs, and jamming. And we hated it. We liked the Allman Brothers, but we hated all the imitations. We thought it was stupid. We were kind of like a three-minute kind of band. And we didn’t fit in anymore. And we didn’t want to be there any longer. We wanted to go to L.A., where we always felt like we belonged.
Gainesville was great for you, yet you felt you had to leave. Even though you were playing for thousands of people?
We weren’t always playing for thousands of people. We might play a gig for a thousand people. And then on Monday night we might be playing for two-hundred people in some beer bar somewhere. The circuit was wearing out. We had to play anywhere to make enough money to eat and pay our rent. So we were doing all kinds of gigs, like playing in country bars with Wyatt Earp ties on. [Laughs]
Then maybe the next night or the next week we were at a pop festival somewhere. And we were back to that. So we were constantly just trying to keep enough gigs to pay the rent, and keep working. But we could see it wasn’t going anywhere. How big can you get in Gainesville? We had certainly hit the top of the ladder there. We were probably even then the most famous band in Gainesville. I imagine we were. Even then. I still meet people who tell me they saw Mudcrutch. That they were fans, and would regularly go out to see us. But we knew we had to break out of there.
Did you ever consider going to New York?
New York seemed really cold to us. We knew we weren’t Manhattan kind of guys. And we weren’t. We could kind of picture ourselves in L.A. But we would have never survived being in New York.
We loved the Byrds and we loved the Beach Boys, and Buffalo Springfield and The Burrito Brothers. And we kind of felt we belonged here [in L.A.]. And we always have, though we’re still never referred to as an “L.A. band.” We’re always referred to as a Southern band. But the truth is every bit of music we’ve ever made was in L.A. We’ve been in L.A. for over thirty years. We’re a Los Angeles band.
But at the start, we went all around. We would play in Atlanta. Anywhere we could play.
Booking your own gigs?
Yeah. There was probably a string of manager guys that came through, that weren’t really very good, but they were willing to take on the job of trying to book us. We went through all that.
Did you go to Macon, Georgia first to try to get a record deal?
Yeah, that’s where the Allman Brothers were. Capricorn Records was there. That was the closest place to go. We were told we were “too English” for them. They were into this Southern sound. We were definitely turned down. And we didn’t like the scene in Macon anyway. We hung out and got a gig there. And it was just this down-home barbecue thing. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to go in a whole different direction. So it was a good experience, because it taught us right away that this wasn’t what we wanted to get caught up in. And it’s probably a blessing that we didn’t get signed in Macon.
Did you graduate high school?
Eventually I did. I had to go three summers extra [Laughs] for six weeks a summer. And then they graduated me. But I didn’t graduate with my class. Because I missed huge amounts of school. There was one year I missed 42 days.
Because you were playing?
Yeah. And my parents were really upset about it. There was this constant tug-of-war.
Benmont used to come to some of your gigs, when he wasn’t in the band. And he heard a song you wrote called “Unheard Of Kind Of Hero” and was impressed that it was something you wrote.
Yeah, I remember Benmont coming and seeing us. I think we were playing in a real redneck country bar in Lake City, Florida, where we had to wear those Wyatt Earp ties. [Laughs] But we had to make a living, so we went there, and we knew enough country songs that we could play it. But they were always kind of weirded out by
us because we had long hair, playing country music. And that was completely unheard of in those days.
I remember Ben coming there, and him sitting in a booth watching us.
He was impressed by Mike Campbell’s playing. He said how it wasn’t about flash, it was about fun.
Mike was really good. I’m sure he was about as good as he is now. Just really, really good. He lived to play the guitar. He played it night and day. I was talking to Bugs [Alan Weidel], our roadie, who has always been there since the early days, and I told him how I remember Mike sitting there in a field, a big yard outside of the house where he lived, and I’d see him sitting in the grass by himself with an acoustic guitar, [Laughs] playing away to no one.
But he’s still like that. He still plays all the time. He can play anything with strings. Just the other day he came in to the studio with this huge load of instruments. He brought in a koto. And some kind of crazy Indian instrument he had. And he can actually play them. He can play anything with strings on it except a fiddle. He tried to for a while, and it was really painful hearing it. He couldn’t get the bow thing down.
Did you record a demo in Benmont’s father’s living room?
Yes. There was a guy in town named Rick Reid who had the first mobile recording van. It had a 2-track Ampex recorder in it. He worked in a stereo store, and you could rent him for a day, and he would come over and record you. You know, he made a really good recording. It was all live to the 2-track. If you listen on the boxed set [Playback], there’s a track called “On The Street” that Benmont wrote and I sang. And that’s the actual 2-track recording. Recorded in Benmont’s living room.
If you listen to it, it’s amazing how good it sounds, and how tight we were. We were all singing background harmonies. It’s completely worked out. It’s really one of my favorite tracks we ever did, and it was done right there in his living room. We recorded about seven or eight original songs. And we had reel-to-reel copies made up. And that’s what we took to L.A. when we made our first trip. We had a box of reel-to-reel tapes. The cassette hadn’t come in yet.