Chewing the Gristle with Greg Koch
Listen in on Greg Koch's conversations with his guitar-hero friends. Every episode Greg unleashes his fiendish humor and unique perspective as "one of the most famous unknown guitar players in the world", asking his often-famous musical friends the questions that we all want to know the answers to! Each episode is brought to you by Fishman and Wildwood Guitars
Chewing the Gristle with Greg Koch
Dweezil Zappa: Navigating Musical Legacy and Creative Freedom
Greg Koch sits down with guitar virtuoso Dweezil Zappa for a fascinating deep dive into musical authenticity, technical mastery, and the challenge of preserving a legendary legacy. Their conversation reveals the extraordinary dedication required to perform Frank Zappa's intricate compositions, with Dweezil candidly sharing his 14-year journey to truly internalize his father's musical vocabulary.
What begins as a discussion about guitar techniques evolves into profound insights about musical connection. Dweezil explains why, despite growing up as Frank Zappa's son, he initially gravitated toward more guitar-centric players, such as Eddie Van Halen, before tackling his father's complex work. He compares performing Frank's arrangements to an "orchestral mindset" where precision and teamwork are paramount, revealing that despite years of touring, he must essentially relearn most pieces before each performance.
The conversation takes unexpected turns through musical philosophy, modern guitar culture, and the realities of today's music industry. Dweezil offers a valuable perspective for independent musicians, suggesting that cultivating meaningful relationships with a dedicated fanbase is far more sustainable than chasing mainstream success: "Instead of trying to get a dollar from a million people, what if you cultivated a relationship with 10,000 people who want to spend a hundred dollars every year?" Throughout their exchange, both guitarists reflect on finding balance between technical skill and emotional connection, agreeing that the ability to move an audience often transcends pure virtuosity.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time once again for another season of Chewing the Gristle with yours truly Greg Kauk. Can you believe it's already season six? We've got so many cool interviews lined up. Are we going to talk about music, you betcha? But what else are we going to talk about? Well, quite frankly, anything that comes to mind. So stay tuned, doggone it. Let's chew that doggone gristle. Season six come.
Speaker 1:Ladies and gentlemen, this week on Chewing the Gristle we have the legendary Dweezil Zappa, guitar player, extraordinaire torchbearer for his dad's glorious legacy, of course, that would be frank zappa and just all-around cool cat. My buddy dweezil zappa, this week on chewing the gristle. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome once again to another installment of Chewing the Gristle with yours truly Gregory Cochrie. I'm here today with the majestic Dweezil Zappa, a man who needs no introduction, but someone I've been very fortunate to know for a few years here. We've actually played a little bit together. I'm a huge fan, of course, his playing, his father's legacy and playing the whole nine yards, and just a pleasure to be able to just shoot the breeze today, or chew the gristle if you will. How's it going?
Speaker 2:Very good Thanks for having me. And of course, many people may or may not know the Gregory Cochrie is very close to Gregory Peckery. Yes, One of my dad's songs.
Speaker 1:And that's no accident?
Speaker 2:Yes, I figured as much, but perhaps other people have no idea where that comes from, so it might be good to give them some insight into the rest.
Speaker 1:Yes indeed. Insight into the rest of it? Yes indeed. So you sent me a video the other day of you playing for the 4th of July, unleashing the powers of Ed Van Halen and Slim Jim Hendrix in one fell swoop for some revelers of the Independence Day activities.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it was done on a guitar with no locking tremolo, so a very bold move, Indeed my friend Well, it sounded, spot on, you got that Aylan thing down.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it's the nuances and the details that I like to try to recreate as best as I can, and I know that that's a thing that is very much in your playing style as well, for the people that are your influences, you know, getting the vibrato stylings of Eric Clapton or other players and incorporating it on the deepest level of your own playing. So when I was doing that as just a fun thing for the neighborhood shindig, I wanted to play it as well as I could, and it's always interesting to see if you can actually, in a live situation, play something as close as possible to the original. So in the case of Eruption, that might have been the best time I ever played it. Yeah, it was spot on.
Speaker 1:It was spot on and the tone was glorious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was from my fractal. I spent a lot of time making a sound that would recreate the album as best as I could, and I tried a lot of different ways to go about getting the sound as close as I could. These days, the tools that we have in terms of being able to make sounds and utilize them in various different live playing situations are better than they have ever been. So you know, of course I love actual tube amplifiers and whatnot, but I didn't have the manpower to drag out a bunch of gear.
Speaker 2:We were setting up for this little shindig in the middle of the street in our neighborhood and I figured it was going to be easier for me to just use my fractal FM nine and a couple QSC wedges than to try to wrangle some major Marshall amplifiers and other effects and things to try to get into that ballpark. And I wanted it to be a decent recording and not be too crazy loud because there was kids in the strollers and all. So, uh, I was happy with how it turned out. But, um, you know, at the end of the day, when people want to freak out on, oh, you can never get a modeler to sound like a real amp. I think you can, I and I think you can actually be happy with the results, especially when you hear the finished recording.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it comes down. It always comes down to who's perpetrating the music activities at that particular juncture in time.
Speaker 2:Yes, that definitely has something to do with it. But you know, for the people that want to get into the corksniffing things and talk about how terrible it is that people are moving to modelers versus amplifiers, you know, everybody loves the sound of an amp, but it's not always practical these days in some environments to be able to use very loud amps et cetera. This is true. But you know, we wouldn't have modelers if people didn't love the sound of amplifiers. You know, so it's. It's not that people are so obsessed with trying to replace it with digital stuff. It's that if you really love that sound and you need an alternative, this is a good practical application.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. You know I was interested. I know you've probably answered this many times, but you know I remember back in the day, you know you were always, you know, initially inspired by old Ed Van Halen and I remember when you played on that Don Johnson record years ago. And I'm just wondering, you know, with your dad being Frank, who I'm a big fan of his guitar stylings, I mean, he did very cool things.
Speaker 1:I know he was not one that perhaps I always remember hearing that he would never practice until he went on the road and would just kind of get his chops together as he went. But he always played amazing stuff to me, especially all the as we were talking about earlier, all the weird little nuanced blues stuff that he had gleaned over the years and whatever, and his tones were always killer and so on and so forth. But a lot of times when a dad is the guitar player or really good at a particular thing, the son kind of goes yeah, I'm going to go over here. So how much was that a place when you started playing guitar? They're like I'm going to do something different from the old manner. Did you see it as, uh, consistent, or was it an act of rebellion? What? What was your?
Speaker 2:I think the the thing is. I've always been a fan of my dad's music, but I always knew that it was way more difficult than any other music. So even when I heard it and was inspired by it, I thought to myself one day I will get to that.
Speaker 2:But right now is not the time because I don't know enough to be able to do it, it you know. So the stuff that was easier for me to wrap my ear around was Van Halen and Randy Rhodes, which is not to say that their playing is easy to emulate or learn at all, it's just that it's so guitar centric that I could focus my attention on that and tune everything else out and only hear the guitar. And it was easier to do that with that music than it was with my dad's music, because it was far more harmonically complex and sophisticated and it was harder to be able to learn any of the stuff that my dad was doing, just because he was a composer who used a guitar as his main instrument but started as a drummer. So, rhythmically, the stuff that he did was very advanced and it was complicated as hell. So to some people it sounds like random things are happening, but he's very, very precise with the rhythms and the things that are happening are very hard to duplicate. So, like I said, it was much harder for me to go from the beginning and say, hey, I'm going to do this because, uh, who would you know? It's hard, uh, and when I did really dive into it even at that point.
Speaker 2:Uh, so that was 2004.
Speaker 2:I started really learning the music in depth and then we started touring it in 2006.
Speaker 2:But I toured it up until the whole crazy world shut down in 2020 on an annual basis, and it was really that whole 14-year period that I got to the point where I could feel like I started to understand where he was coming from as a guitar player and learn the vocabulary and the nuances that were important to be able to then play in a way that evoked his style but still allowed me to play as myself in that moment, at the speed of thought. And that's the real tricky thing is, if you're trying to play in context to the music of my dad, for example, it won't sound like my dad at all. If you don't have the knowledge of his vocabulary, it'll start to sound like some lame fusion experiment where you know you're opening at Magic Mountain for a puppet show and that kind of thing just doesn't appeal to me. So it did take a long time to hone the skills to create enough knowledge of his vocabulary so that I could actually use it in real time.
Speaker 1:Got it. So when you were coming up with stuff, would he sit down with you and say hey, check this out. Or was it you just kind of were on your own, or were you asking little questions about this In?
Speaker 2:the early days of me playing. You know he has such an idiosyncratic style of playing and technique so he didn't think that what he had to offer was a good place for me to start. He thought well, you know, he himself thought I play so much in a style that's my own. This might not be the way that you should try to learn how to play the guitar. You need some more fundamental basics and at the time Steve Vai was in my dad's band, so he was about 21 years old.
Speaker 2:I was 12 when I started playing and Steve wrote down a few lessons in a notebook that basically had some chord diagrams and he mapped out the pentatonic scale in the key of A, and so essentially I took that and ran with it. I just sat and listened to records and tried to figure out stuff on the guitar and over the years I really never learned to read music well. Other people in my band can read very well, but I have to learn everything by ear. So all the complicated stuff that I ever learned to play, I learned it by ear and just try to have that get internalized somehow.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm going to kind of jump ahead a little bit too, because it reminded me, as you were saying, that you know the arrangements of Frank stuff. I mean it's insane, there's a lot of memorizing of very complicated parts and there isn't. You know, there there's some room to. You know, extemporize a little bit with. You know the attitude or whatever of a specific part. But how did you get in the mindset and the discipline to memorize those parts so that they were performance ready and maintain them in such a way?
Speaker 2:It is a challenge. It remains a challenge, but the best way to think about it is that if an orchestra is going to play the music of Bach or Beethoven or whoever the contemporary composer might be, the notes are on the page with specific rhythms and guidelines as to how the stuff is meant to be played. There are instructions from the composer, and my dad's music was all written in that same way. So when you're in a band that's playing this stuff, if you're going to do it correctly, you have to have an orchestral mindset, meaning everybody has parts to play and they're part of a team and the team brings the whole piece to light. And if you're going to play it under the instruction of the composer, you want to adhere to those things and you have to be familiar enough with the colors and textures that are used when the stuff is performed. And so we always reference it to recordings. We double check notes because you know sometimes on the page it might be different than what you hear in a recording. Double-check notes because you know sometimes on the page it might be different than what you hear in a recording. Something might've been changed on tour because my dad preferred it a different way at that point.
Speaker 2:So we're always doing the due diligence, and it's a very, very difficult task to maintain any of that stuff, even when we're learning stuff for a tour where, let's say, we're going to play 60 shows in a year's worth of touring, we might learn 35 or 40 songs, and some come in and out during that period. But I, as much as I try to learn the stuff in advance, I just never have enough time for this stuff to to really be fully internalized to where I feel like I go out on stage and I know it very, very well. It's always a tightrope act where at any moment something could go seriously wrong, and then I would have to bail on a part, and, and so that's the reason why, when it's arranged for the band, the most difficult melodic parts are usually split between two to three instruments, so that if anyone bails, the part still continues.
Speaker 1:Right gotcha.
Speaker 2:And that's the same way it would be in an orchestra Right Gotcha in the music. So a lot of people have to do double duty. So sometimes you'll see Sheila Gonzalez, who plays saxophone and keys, playing saxophone and keys at the same time. You know two different instruments at the same time and you know there's just a lot that goes on in all of this. But at the end of the day it's one of the greatest challenges you could ever have as a musician to learn this music and try to play it so that it is commensurate with the way that my dad had his bands play it. You know that is a great accomplishment and at the end of the day, like, what I always say is that the music has to speak for itself. You know I don't need to tell anybody, hey, my band is really good. Like, just listen to what is being done and then think to yourself could I do that? And the answer is most likely no.
Speaker 1:You know it's going to ask you about you know, like those parts and bailing on a part, and it reminded me of something I was describing to someone about. I was asking somebody about this. This same type of thing in regard to you know you can learn something and you will have it like muscle memory in a state of preparedness, like muscle memory mode and and, and that kind of leads it to what we, what we just discussed, where you might get to the point where you just have a brain fart and it's gone, and then there's that deeper level of really having internalized it that at any point you could start at any point during that head and know exactly where you're going. So with 35 tunes, I would imagine it's hard to and of course, other tunes in the whole arsenal depending on the year, from year to year. But to have that level of preparedness for each one of the songs there's got to be a sliding scale.
Speaker 2:There's no way. And over a period of time, even if I've played certain songs many times over the years, they don't stick. Songs many times over the years they don't stick. At the beginning of every rehearsal period I have to relearn most of the things. Now it does come back faster if I've played them many times over the past 15 or 16 years, but I still have to relearn pretty much anything that I have ever played. I have to spend time to relearn before we're in rehearsals and then by the time we're at the end of the rehearsal process I'm hoping to have enough muscle memory that I can get through the show where I'm cued by the muscle memory because a lot of the melodies might be sort of obtuse and if you can't sing it.
Speaker 2:I'm not a guy that can sing and play what I'm playing while I'm playing it. But some people have that ability and it helps them lock things in because they can kind of sing it and play along to whatever they're hearing in their head. But you know, many of the melodies that we end up playing are you take the black page. It's very hard. You can't.
Speaker 2:The way that the intervallic structure of these compositions put together it's very, very difficult. You would never be able to accurately sing this stuff rhythmically or intervallically. So it does have to come to muscle memory and a good understanding of what the rhythmic components are. And even when it comes to that, I wouldn't be able to if somebody said, hey, explain to me how to play this nested tuplet part in the black page. I wouldn't be able to explain it in a rhythmic discussion, I would just have to play it and go. This is how it goes. I have to just follow along with the band when it's playing it. But yet they can all tell you oh well, yes, it's this and this is a quarter note and you have to think about it like this. And then there's a metric modulation. All that stuff makes no sense to me. I just have to hear it and play it back, as if it's me learning the heartbreaker riff.
Speaker 1:It's all, just a different riff to learn and memorize this is kind of a bizarre question, but do you do you think that frank ever just came up with something like let's see if these fuckers can play this?
Speaker 2:you know, as opposed to sure, right, that's Right, that's funny, the person that drives the bus in my dad's band and you're 22 years old and you're the drummer and, uh, you know it's.
Speaker 2:It's really hard to imagine kids today wanting to be good enough to be able to do that stuff like the ethic now is dog shit compared to back in the middle 70s or late 70s or what you know, when people were like I want to be the best I can possibly be right. So so, yes, the challenge was put forth on the page and then, when terry could do it, then my dad was like okay, great, well, on to the next thing. And so probably one of the hardest pieces of music he ever wrote, which has only been played a handful of times by different versions of his band, is a piece of music called Molenherb's Vacation, and Vinnie Kaliuta was able to sight, read the most difficult parts in that and play them. So we're talking about a. This is like alien ability to do that kind of stuff. Not, this is not normal for someone to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:Right. So, and then you put on top of that that it seemed that in that era it just seems extraordinarily difficult to be able to find someone with that kind of sight reading and that kind of musical technical skill but also have the grease thing. That's understood. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It just seems that that is extraordinarily unlikely combination makes my dad's music stand out is that it's not. For some people, the uninitiated, who don't really know what they're listening for it might sound like technical exercises to them. If they're, if for them, improvisational music is the grateful dead or fish right? They, that's like level one. You know that's right. So the thing is what you're talking about the nuance and detail that's required to be able to play the hard stuff but still give it that cool groove and the syncopated stuff is all working. The whole band is able to just lock in to what that stuff is and have that innate thing propelling the music forward the authenticity of all the different styles that you need to be able to back up. If you're in my dad's band, you have to be able to play everything from crazy jazz to gospel, to blues, to rock to funk. Everything has to be done in a way that is authentic and real to the style. There's no just like oh, I'm faking it here. Everybody has to be well-rounded and can convince you that whatever style that they're playing, they're well-versed in it, and that's how my dad wrote his music. It has so many different flavors and styles at all times, so that's why it's so difficult. You know, the keyboard players did a ton of work to make sure that all of the harmony and, uh, the feel for a lot of, especially the, the bluesy, gospel-y stuff, you know, players like George Duke, amazing stuff, you know but you put the wrong person in that environment and they have the wrong set of um, uh, influences. It's not going to sound good.
Speaker 2:A good example of that, too, would be there's an interview that George Duke did where, early in his time playing with my dad, my dad was having him play some doo-wop chord progressions and George was adding extensions to the chords and my dad was like no, I just want triads. And George was like, yeah, but I'm a jazz guy, I mean there's more that can be done here. And my dad said the music requires triads here, just these triads. And George was continuing to argue a little bit and it was like well, I don't know if this is for me.
Speaker 2:And my dad said what is this beneath you? Then he really had to think about it and he was like I need to play. What serves the music in this? And then he actually kind of really got into the idea of playing in the appropriate way for the music that was being played at that moment it didn't need all this other stuff. Now is there a time when it does yes, absolutely, but you have to have the discipline to be part of the team and do the thing that makes it sound the way it's supposed to sound for what's happening in that moment well, I think that that's that.
Speaker 1:That touches on something that I've been, you know, um, contemplating as I see.
Speaker 1:I mean, obviously, arguably, we are in the time, uh, especially on guitar, but all the other instruments as well with the advent of all the, the social medias, where people, people can put on these amazing displays of technical virtuosity, uh, for 60 seconds and uh, and you watch these things and you're like he gads, you know, and, and the bar just keeps getting raised and so on and so forth. But it seems like all that little nuanced stuff of of of why a simpler thing like a triad would work over a more extended voicing or a simple phrasing with nice vibrato and tone, is something that escapes someone who can do the most technically adept thing. I just think that you know to your point that Frank's music and Frank's whole approach, as much as it was extraordinarily difficult, it was not snobby, you know. I think there's a technical snob craft that looks over all of that minutiae stuff that makes the stuff memorable, for lack of a better term, but soulful, to be a little bit more to the point.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, at the end of the day, people want to connect with music and it makes them feel something, and so I feel like what you're talking about and the challenge as a musician that wants to be good at their instrument in a technical way. There's a lot of time spent practicing the technical things and then applying that to music. So I think it may in some cases take a technically proficient musician many more years to realize how to bring the feeling and the connection to the music to the listener, because they spent so much time trying to be technically proficient to the next level where it's a mind-boggling technical precision. But at the same time, if you're the listener, you only can tolerate so much of that, right, you don't want to just see technical perfection over and over and a billion notes. It becomes the struggle for the technically proficient or technical-minded musician to be able to figure out how to write music that allows for the technical aspect to be present but have enough of the other stuff that makes repeat listening enjoyable, right, you know. So that, I think, is the bigger part of it, which is the bigger struggle. I myself still have a difficulty with that kind of balance, because I like to learn new things, and I like to try to employ them as regularly as I can, because I think the only way that you can propel yourself forward when learning new things is to actually use it in the battle. Sure, absolutely so. But sometimes, you know, let's say, if it's my own playing, if I'm going to be critical about my own playing, if I'm trying to do too many things at once because I'm thinking, oh, this will be fun, let me try this or this other thing, it comes off as the sound of a run on sentence, right, and so that's a hard thing to selfit in the moment when you're improvising.
Speaker 2:And improvising a complicated piece of music is way more of a different thing than just performing something that you have rehearsed very well. That's just this acrobatic feat. That's just this acrobatic feat, you know. So there's a big difference between the players that can play something very technical and they've rehearsed it, and they can just do it because it's been rehearsed so much, versus somebody that can go up and play like what Alan Holdsworth could do, or some other players that have a different vocabulary but still a huge ability to improvise. Or some other players that have a different vocabulary but still a huge ability to improvise. A guy like Oz Noy or a guy like Julian Lodge. These guys can improvise in ways where they could play. You. Give them three 10-minute solos in a row. They will play almost zero of the same ideas because they have such a large vocabulary and they can build and structure their compositional ideas based on reacting to the music that's happening in the moment.
Speaker 1:Right, well, I was kind of thinking, as you were talking about that is that you know a couple of different things. First of all, like when there's like different idioms now where the people that are playing this technical stuff online and people are enjoying doing it and they're making a living out of it Fantastic, uh, but that ability to connect at a visceral level and a live performance um, as you were illuminating is is not always predicated on gymnastics from beginning to end, whereas online it seems like you're much more, shall we say, inclined to get massive followership and be able to propel your career on that online situation in a way where it maybe never dictates that you actually perform live. Seen with some of these you know online personalities that when they get found out that they are doctoring their performances or so on and so forth, and that they can't actually play it live, which, again, if people are enjoying what they're doing, you know there's, you know the argument could be made who gives a shit one way or the other? But when you have this other situation of what we grew up on is this live situation and connecting with the crowd, and and and also on top of that, what you're talking about is like when you're learning new stuff.
Speaker 1:I always referred to it as the the gestational period of a lick. You know it's like, it's like you were going to try. You learn like a new word. Now I always use the word like recalcitrant. You learn recalcitrant, you're going to try to throw it in a sentence. Well, if you throw it in, it doesn't make any sense. It's just kind of what are you talking about? But by the same token, you've got to at some point, as things are in a gestational period go, I'm going to try that thing now. And the goal is is to get past the point of I think I'm going to try that thing now, I think it's going to work, versus it's just subliminal and you just do it. But that only happens really, from playing out live a lot and having the freedom to improvise.
Speaker 2:That is true, but also there has to be something that clicks in your brain that gives you enough knowledge of why the thing that you're trying to do will work at the time you're trying to do it.
Speaker 2:So, knowing that you're trying to target a particular chord tone and then you want to lead to something, or knowing that you have a rhythmic element that you want to incorporate, these things, in advance of you doing it, help you actually use the idea, versus just saying I'm going to throw this lick in here. It's better to know what the fundamental idea is and how to use it in a way where you can react to the music and throw it in that way, than it is to say, well, I've learned this lick, I'm just going to play this lick as a thing, because you might not be playing over something that has the right feel or the same practicing that lick for Absolutely, it's going to have to adjust somehow Right, and so that's where the challenge of learning a new thing and implementing it comes in, where the if you understand why you like the sound of something and you think, okay, what I'm doing is I'm blending two triads here and I've got a pattern where it's. These two triads fit within 12 notes. If you know that you can adjust to the rhythm of what you're playing, but still use that same idea, it's easier to filter that into your playing than it is, like I said, to just say, oh, I'm just going to throw this lick in here somewhere Right right, right, right, get away with that.
Speaker 2:but I don't think it's as effective as actually using it, because you know why you're using it.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I get you Absolutely. We interrupt this regularly scheduled gristle infested conversation to give a special shout out to our friends at Fishman Transducers, makers of the Greg Koch signature Fluence Gristle Tone pickup set Can you dig that? And our friends at Wildwood Guitars of Louisville, colorado, bringing the heat in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. So at what point in your development as a guitar player did you make the leap from being, you know, maybe more of a rock-oriented individual to trying to tackle some of these more exotic chord structures and so on and so forth? And I mean, do you remember like I got the Slominski book then at this point? Or I studied this thing and I started adding this kind of different scalar ideas here or this particular harmonic approach? How did that kind of develop? And was there a time where it kind of really took off versus a time where you were just more of kind of a rock dude?
Speaker 2:Well, I've always been interested in different music, because I grew up listening to my dad's music but also what my dad listened to at home, which was oftentimes folk music from different countries, so Bulgarian women's choir or Indian ragas or Arabic music or so microtonal things and things that have weird rhythms and different textures. All that stuff has always been appealing. But the thing that I never really had that much of an interest in was bebop. I mean, I can appreciate what it takes to do that, but I don't love that sound so much. So it's the idea to be able to have the phrasing ability of a player that could easily play through changes in a bebop way, but not necessarily choose those notes, is kind of like the idea of something that would be appealing to me. I never got great at playing over chord changes. That's something I would like to be able to do better and be able to recognize easier. You know there's some people and I bet you're one of them that could be, and I bet you're one of them that could be hear somebody playing, whether it's a blues or any kind of you know, perhaps standard or a pop kind of song and you're going to be able to recognize. Oh, that's kind of a one, four, five or two, five, one or whatever kind of thing is happening and you can adjust to that in real time. I can't do that because I learn things more as the song goes, like this, and I only remember the song based on the arrangement of that particular song. So I'm not able to instantly filter what I'm hearing and say, oh, that's the four chord or that's the five. I don't think that way at this point in time. I wish I did, because it would be better. It would be easier for me to play more different ideas.
Speaker 2:Most of the time when I'm playing something in an improvisational way, I'm hearing it. At the same time the listener is hearing it versus. There are some players that know what they want to do as they're doing it or in advance of doing the thing. They can already see what they're going to do with the finish line. They've got it all mapped out in a way where they can turn the corners of every chord progression and basically tell a whole story versus me. I'm thrown into it. Like I said, it's like a tight rope act where I'm hearing it as everybody else is hearing it, so it's either good or bad and then I'm moving on, you know. But the point is you asked, like, when did I kind of figure out how to start incorporating some of these things that maybe go outside the norm of the rock world? So the first thing that really gave me the idea that you could play notes that maybe aren't the right notes but they still sound good, is the stuff that Edward would do when he was trying to emulate.
Speaker 1:Alan Holder.
Speaker 2:So I started to see these three note per string patterns that he was using, and I want to emphasize the major or the minor third here, or the flat five or whatever the case may be in some of those kind of situations, and that's been only because of playing live on the road for 15 years in a row and playing with a rhythm section that I'm comfortable with, where I can play a lot better with my own band than I could sitting in with somebody else. I'm just not comfortable with the different rhythm sections and oddly enough, I think you can hear that even in Edward Van Halen's playing. He sounds way more like Edward Van Halen when he's playing with Alex Van Halen than he's playing with anybody else Right.
Speaker 1:You know, Yep, absolutely Crazy activity. So when you were in high school, did you have high school bands that you were playing with, and what kind of stuff were you doing?
Speaker 2:No, I started playing when I was 12. The first thing I ever recorded was nine months or so after I was playing. I did my Mother's a Space Cadet with the flip side Crunchy Water Delicious yeah which was produced by Edward Van Halen and Don Landy. But then I made my first album at 15 years old and then the second album at 17 and the third album at 19, so on and on. A couple years. In between records uh, but I I wasn't doing a lot of live shows up through all that time. The majority of the live performance stuff that I've done, uh, has been playing my dad's music starting back in 2006. Prior to that, I had done a few tours of my own music for the Confessions album and the Shampoo Horn record.
Speaker 1:I actually opened up for you in Milwaukee at Shank Hall on the Shampoo Horn tour and I still have that t-shirt someplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I just remember that we did that medley. My band was playing that 200-song, 70s and and I just remember that we did that medley um the band my band was playing that 200 song 70s medley exactly. Yeah, we kept changing the lyrics to every song to be about shank hall, exactly exactly correct the thing about the live experience.
Speaker 2:I would say only in the last maybe four or five years have I started to develop what I would perceive as my own style of guitar playing, a style coming from me sooner than that. But you know, if you listen to any of my records, they don't sound alike from record to record. The song style, the guitar playing style, changes. The tones change pretty drastically. There's no, it's. It's not like ACDC, where you, you know what you're going to get, you know it is that thing, uh, it's. It's very, very different from from record to record. But, um, I think I'm at the point now where I have developed a keen interest in certain things on the guitar and I'm trying to propel those things forward when we do live performances and now with some of the stuff I'm doing with YouTube and whatnot. But I'm at a point now where I feel like it would be fun to do collaborations with people and make stuff that is just different than any of the stuff I've done before and kind of bringing it back to what we were saying earlier, where, if you can do it in a way that's simple but then still has the personality and the nuance and the detail of the thing that you're trying to get across out of simple stuff like just phrasing vibrato, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2:I think a great challenge at this point is like make some music that does have some still cool ideas as far as arranging and tone and and uh song structure, but not have it just have to be super complicated. So if you and me, if we were to do a record of of our two styles blending, I think it would be a very interesting sound. Because it would be a very interesting sound because it would be twisted guitar. Yes, I'm in, let's do it. Yeah, we should. We should just make something that is based on all the things that we were just talking about, have the ability to play freely in where our skill set is at this time, but not have it have to be predicated on complexity, like what we sound like when something's more simple.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, that's one of the things I've. You know we've kind of veered towards with my trio, you know, earlier on. You know I mean my tunes, especially instrumentally. I always felt they had to have a certain level of complexity to be different. And then all of a sudden I started to realize, you know, what's fun is just writing songs where you can either play over the changes or not. You can just kind of, you know, play phrasing and pentatonic-y stuff, or you can actually play over those different changes and it'll sound cool.
Speaker 1:But the point is that, especially since we've been touring so much is you can totally tell what songs resonate with a crowd. There are some songs that I think have the most heart-wrenching chord changes and so on and so forth. But I'm hearing them with my ears right, because we've been playing for so long. You get moved by certain sequences of chords that you hear in a different way than the average jamoke who might listen to it and say, yeah, that's just too complicated, whereas all of a sudden you play like a two, three chord song with a certain kind of groove and they lose their shit.
Speaker 2:So it's like again ACDC as an example. Uh, they are so good at doing what they do and it's not easy to actually play the way that they, they play them.
Speaker 2:I mean, they are masters at that stuff. And the thing is, when it works, the power of that simple thing there really isn't anything better in terms of the power of rock. You just get sucked into it and the energy is there and the whole thing just moving as a giant unit is really cool. You know, when you have the complicated stuff, the more sophisticated things you can have. People really enjoy that too, but it's a more limited audience, right, and I feel like, uh, you know, as an experiment, it would be interesting to be able to, to just try playing in a way that is, um, outside of what I have been doing maybe for the last uh 15, 20 years, and see, see what that's like, um, cause I just I haven't really had a chance to make anything brand new for a long time, uh, but I feel like it would be fun to do some stuff with some different folks and, and now is uh just as good of a time in terms of um, being an independent artist and just making stuff and saying, hey, look, going to do this thing, here's how you find it, and, you know, telling them to go to the website, or or whatever I'm. I'm not ever going to be on a label. You know there's no, no label that would want anything that I do. So it wouldn't be even necessary because you know you have all the tools Everybody does now in terms of being able to get your stuff distributed and out there in front of people.
Speaker 2:You know, the whole point of trying to do something different as you keep progressing is when you get to that point where you feel like the thing that you're motivated to do is do something that actually hits the right way and make somebody feel something. That's a different way of playing and writing than just being like, oh, I have this technical skill and I can do these complicated things and that sounds cool and it's fun, but it is different than when you play a song like what you were saying, where you just you see people react to it a certain way and you know if you can find a few things that are new that you write and you can get that reaction. That's an interesting challenge.
Speaker 1:It is Absolutely Well. You know, what's been interesting is that I know you're going to do some of the Allman family things in the fall right and those tunes and that approach is, you know, I was always a big Allman Brothers fan and what's so crazy about those harmonies is that I mean those tunes, you got to know the parts but at the same time there's a lot of room for interpretation. It's a lot of feel, of course, improvising, they're mostly over one or two chords but you know, as we've been stating, you know, know you can get a lot done in that environment.
Speaker 2:Your dad used to like to solo over one or two chords almost all the time the thing about that is his band was good enough to be able to hear where he would go with that right, adjust to the modal things that he might, uh, allude to, and and then, whatever happened, they could back him up. It could start as something that's simple, but it could go completely in another direction.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And that's the beauty of seeing a live performance, and my dad really loved being able to do something that that audience that night was going to see, that no other audience was going to see.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's the way it should be.
Speaker 2:Unique every time is. It's really cool if you think about it and also the way that he would create arrangements so that that specifically could happen. It was by design. Right could happen. It was by design. A song like Inca Roads, where the structure of the song has difficult things that come in and out, which is the foundational elements, the themes in it, but then there's a wide open guitar solo and a wide open keyboard solo and they can go anywhere.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But you could have that song get performed a thousand times and it will never have the same solo section. It won't have the same attitude, and that's what's cool is that you could create a song that could be different every time it's played. Exactly, and that's the way where every time it's played it will sound different, because it's the name of it is really the instruction. There's certain rhythms that have to be played, but the notes are the choice of the instrumentalists who are playing it. So there's things that will happen. You have to basically follow the. If you just saw a shape of the notes on paper, they're not specific notes, but there is a specific contour to it. So that's what's funny is that if you listen to the song Approximate, the notes are different every single time it's played, but it's still going to be recognizable as the song because of the contoured rhythm of it. You know so that I love that. My dad was always experimenting with those kinds of things in a compositional realm.
Speaker 1:Now, did he? I mean, I can't remember if we talked about this in the past or not, but would he do stuff like? I mean? It seems like a lot of times when you're listening to, especially like in the, you know, the early to mid 70s incarnations of his ensembles and records that he would have a composition that maybe was recorded in the studio but then he'd fly in like the live solo. Would he do stuff like that? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So he had a technique, and this was before DAWs, you know, before digital audio workstations. He was a master with the razor blade edit on tape. So there are solos that are on records where you hear it and you go, wow, this is an amazing solo and the interplay between the guitar and the drums is so cool. Yet it's not what you think. Think because, like, let's say, a song on shake your booty, yo mama, that guitar solo that's from a different performance than the rhythm track. So that is a solo that was placed on top of that rhythm track, completely unrelated to that. Yet it sounds like it was improvised and played with that track.
Speaker 2:So he called that xenocrany. It was basically, uh, the idea of taking two different things and putting them on a similar timeline so that the time could be synchronized. So it's basically two different synchronizations of what could be. Uh, in some cases, like he might take a solo from a relative key right and put it on a song that had a different structure, different uh feel and, and he would just say, what does this sound like? And if he liked it, that became the solo on on that record. So he did stuff like that all the time. He was constantly recording of the shows. I pretty much recorded every show, right yeah, which is really crazy, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's just to me. It's amazing to me, you know, as someone who was never, you know, I was never really interested in getting under the hood of the recording process. I just you know, I was never really interested in getting under the hood of the recording process. I just, you know, let's go to that studio. That guy's good. I know what I want in the studio in terms of, hey, let's do that there, let's do this that sounds like this, or whatever. But to have the minutia level of being able to manipulate all the gear, know how to get all the different sounds, not to mention to be able to compose all this stuff and be able to understand all the different limitations of the different instruments. Get it up to. I mean, the guy must never have slept.
Speaker 2:Definitely worked the back of the clock. You know he liked to work all throughout the late night hours and then sleep in the daytime, so that wasn't great when we were trying to play in the backyard because you couldn't, you know. But yeah, generally a 17-hour workday was nothing for him.
Speaker 1:Insane, insane, but the results speak for themselves. I remember, um, I think it was pre COVID, when I saw you up in Minneapolis and I sat in and you guys played sleep dirt, yep, and uh, and I remember I was like what is the song? And I, you know, I I thought I got 10 Zapper records. You know, I'm a fan. And then you realize that ain't shit. And then I did the big deep dive after that and I got, of course, I started with the sleep dart and I got a bunch of different records and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:But man, it's just, it's amazing the amount of music that was made and it's it's impossible to kind of get your mind around the whole thing. But it was his mind and he really didn't wasn't under the mindset of caring about the legacy. He just wanted to create in the moment, do the thing and be in the moment and go on to the next thing and not worry about it. I mean, I'm sure he wanted to make sure that all the you know, the I's were crossed or whatever that expression is T's were crossed, wanted to keep going full speed ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, he just uh, he had one phrase which was keep going, never stop, uh. But the thing is, um, you know, somebody, uh, towards the end of his life, asked him how would you like to be remembered? And he said I wouldn't.
Speaker 1:Right, I remember seeing that interview. The thing is like.
Speaker 2:He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, but he also had a disdain for somebody that did want a legacy. He's like why are you focused on what your legacy is, you know? So I feel like there's a good lesson in that in terms of like, don't take yourself too seriously. Do what you like. If other people like it, too great. But you know everybody is is gonna have their own experience in life and you know, if you're trying to do too much to influence somebody to behave a certain way, that's not, would you know, try too hard to make what they thought be what they wanted him to think as well.
Speaker 2:He was a very independent thinker and stood up for, you know, all the things that essentially are the most important personal freedoms. It's in his music. He did it as a person and I just think that when it comes to music and what he was able to accomplish, people barely know the half of it. He made over 65 albums in his lifetime and I don't know how many have come out since. Maybe another 40. Right, and there's still tons of music from live performances with things that people haven't heard. But the difference is, when he was curating all of it, he knew what he wanted people to hear, versus let's just pull anything out of the vault and put it out. There's definitely things that have come out that he never would have put out. Right, they have nothing to do with the stuff that comes out, you know, but I know for a fact that there are certain performances that have come out where his guitar is out of tune a lot. He wouldn't have put that stuff out.
Speaker 1:Well, it's the same. It's the same thing with the Hendrix thing. Like he was, you could tell he would. He would just from the stuff that was put out in his lifetime versus what came out. But you know, then there's always the thing of as fans, you're curious because you want to hear it, but the date, but the danger is is that you know, just like with everything nowadays, that people will hear that one thing and go, well, he wasn't that great, Listen to his guitar, it's out of tune.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. But you know, the thing is, you used to be able to, as an artist, curate what you wanted people to hear.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And I think that's still an important factor. These days, everybody bootlegs whatever your performance is, puts it up on Instagram or immediately, so you can't curate what you do. No, absolutely not Bad night. It's going to be out there forever, you know.
Speaker 1:And then people will, you know, see that one thing and judge your entire career, or just be complete randos and never do any research on. Well, who is this guy? Does he have a past? Does he? Has he played with anybody, is it? They'll just like randomly adjudicate in the most horrific way possible. You're just going wow, you know, you've got this thing in your hand. That's like the Oracle and you could find out. You know things that our forefathers would have wished they had access to, and yet you can't even read in the comments to figure the answer to your query. You know what I mean? It's, it's insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's super lame how that stuff works, but uh, but you know you have to just not care.
Speaker 1:No, that's exactly it. I mean you, you, you just can't care and certainly I'm certainly not engaged. I was talking about exactly it. You mean you, you, you just can't care and certainly I'm certainly not engaged. I was talking about this with somebody that, uh, not too long ago, is you can never engage with the people online saying this, that, and the next thing, cause it's just like, oh yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not being dragged down, that particular, uh, alleyway of shame, alleyway of shame. That's our first song that we're going to work on alleyway of shame, alleyway of the knowledgeable things that sound good in the bluesy, jazzy context.
Speaker 2:but then you have the quirkiness of your sense of humor in the playing as well. But what I like the most is that it's everything that you're doing is being done with your hands, specifically, Like you can be playing through anything, but it's still going to sound like you because the way that you bend and all of the quirky things that are in your playing. So for me I appreciate that in your style, in the same way that I appreciate that in Jeff Beck's playing. Oh, thank you very much. And stuff is is. It takes a lifetime to build that and I love it.
Speaker 1:Oh well, thank you, I mean that's. You know I was talking with my. My son today, as you know, plays drums in the band and um and I, we were just talking about the fact that you know it's I never stop uh, refining, you know, and it's always and it's not really um, it's all those things you were talking. It's. It's like little bends, little. You know the microtonal things, tone things, you know it's. That that's the reason why you know, um, you know, hendrix, to me, was all my all-time favorite uh, because you would, I mean just a little. You know the, the pick rakes and the and the little pinchy harmonic things that he would do, clean and just all of that cool nitty gritty stuff.
Speaker 1:As, as opposed to uh, but not to say that I don't appreciate somebody who's got more technical, I was a huge holes worth fan. I never wanted to, or even had the patience or the ear to sit down and and dissect what he was doing, but I loved listening to it, you know, and I loved the chord changes spoke to me. But you know, frank had the same effect on me in terms of, you know, I would listen to live at the Roxy and elsewhere, and I could still there's. There's one note, and we've talked about this before, and the torture never not. The torture never stops, but during that solo on live at the Roxy and elsewhere, and he bends one note and it's not quite a whole step down from where it should be and he bends all the way. It's like that's the greatest note in rock history.
Speaker 2:And the tone has got such an attitude. It's got a ton of mid range. It's the SG yes, the wall happening. But yeah, it's one of those things where it's a bend from nowhere into the note that that arrives at the chord change and it's so good because he starts from the wrong note, right and it and it moves. It's not a quick bend, no, so it's like you know, you're going for a ride there, you know yes, and that's.
Speaker 1:That's the kind of stuff I've always gravitated towards, because that, to me, makes makes the flavor yeah, well.
Speaker 2:well, that is the thing, and you know to what we were talking about. When you're doing it and you're doing it with minimal things, like you know you don't have to have a pedal board and you're the kind of player that can just be like I got my amp, I got my guitar, I'm good to go. I am not comfortable. I don't have a specific style. I'm much more like I will play different ways depending on the sound that I have in front of me. So I react to the sound and I play based on what the sound is giving me. I can't just play with a neutral sound and feel like I know that I'm going to be able to play whatever I want to play. A sound will dictate what I'm going to be able to go for.
Speaker 2:Gotcha there's nothing wrong with that either. Well, it does. It makes it harder to do things you know, because you know I have, and then it also depends on how well I can interact with the rhythm section, Right.
Speaker 1:Exactly. You know I was going to ask you something before I was thinking about it. You know so much of, you know the music that was done in the late 60s and 70s.
Speaker 1:You know Frank described it, you know, as maybe one of the reasons why is because the record executives were these old men who were just kind of hey let those kids try whatever they want and then later on it was their hip nephew that would take over, who thought they knew what was going on and became the gatekeepers and so, and then things just got progressively less cool.
Speaker 1:But a lot of that music has, as we well know and I would put Frank in the same uh, uh, echelon there is a like a religious dogmatic worship of these individuals Frank, I think deserves it but of some of these other folks. Just because of that, music meant more to people back then. It was more of an outlier societal shift that was so much different from what happened later, when everything got a little bit more commercialized and it just didn't have as much gravity and so on and so forth. But I think most people, including myself, grew up with this kind of iconography of these individuals and I would imagine that you, growing up in Frank's house, didn't have that same approach to some of those more iconic players, because your dad was one of them. Your dad knew those people and you probably didn't have that same. Am I correct in saying that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think to the extent that I just if I liked something, I would be interested to learn more about it, and I liked players and I would. At that time, you know, you could only buy a record and read the liner notes or maybe buy a magazine that had an interview with somebody. So the connection that you made with the music and the fact that you spent your own money to buy these things and own them the real reason why I think a lot of that music does connect better with people and they have a stronger attachment to it because they spent time with it. It's not, like you know, these days music is just on in the background and a lot of stuff is just like. My dad described it as really just wallpaper for people's lifestyle. It was something that showed who you were in the background and you know, it's almost the same as you see people that effectively just wear a costume so that other people can recognize. Oh, you're that type of person I've been, you know like I know straight away from looking at you that you like these five bands and this is the coffee that you're going to order when you go to a Starbucks, you know. And so, uh, that kind of thing wasn't a thing back in the day, you know.
Speaker 2:And so now I think the appreciation of the music and where it came from, uh, there's a lot of that that's missing for younger generations and the tricky part of it is that they don't really care, they don't really know more about where it came from. You know, they that's. It's just like. Here's a good example, like this happens over and over. But so Van Halen covered. You really got me, but it was written by the kinks. When I was 12, I heard Van Halen's version of it first. So when I heard the Kinks version, I was like man, they can't play that Van Halen song, for shit.
Speaker 1:Right sure.
Speaker 2:And I didn't appreciate what the difference between the two were. But later I'm like wait a minute. You know, when the Kinks wrote that song and it came out and the guitar tone that's on there, it's a killer guitar sound. And back then it was to get people's attention. You had to make something sound different. That guitar never existed before. So you heard it and you go, wow, that's cool, right, but now anybody can just press a button and make a classic sound.
Speaker 2:And so they don't have an appreciation for actually coming up with the sound to begin with, or the history of why it sounds the way it does and why people like it. It becomes the worst version of what we would recognize it as, but it's new to them. So they go, oh, this is cool. It's like, you know, when someone hears Greta Van Fleet, who's you know 20 years old, and like, oh, this is the rock band for me, and it's like, have you ever heard Zeppelin? And they're like, who?
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter when that stuff happens and it flips in that way. I think it's easy for us who have the knowledge and experience of listening to decades of music, it's easy for us to get frustrated by the lack of wonderment from a younger generation to no more. It's like, wait, you like that version, but this version. The original is so much better, but for them it's not because the song they heard in the moment they heard it there's in the way that the original did for us Right, exactly, I always say it all depends on where you start the clock.
Speaker 1:You know it's like, but I think the thing that's that's, I think, is different. Um, is that, uh, you know, when I, my parents, were world war two generation people, my dad was born in 1923. Um, so the music that I got into they did not understand and it was an act of rebellion. You know what I mean. It's like they'd hear, like what is this shit? You know, I want to hear Stan Kenton, you know what I mean, or whatever, and they just they didn't get it, Whereas, you know, grandparents now, and great-grandparents were people that were Frank's age. You know what I mean, and the music is not something that they would, you know. Granted, when you talk about different metal things and all kinds of different music that's out now that maybe you know us older people would be like, ah, that's shit. But for the most part, the kind of medium-level stuff that's accepted really hasn't changed that much in like 60 years, which I think is kind of weird.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot that has been done, so there's less new stuff that can be done.
Speaker 1:That's true, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so the thing is, when we're in a place now where a 20-year-old doesn't know who the Beatles are and doesn't care Right, that's like that's a line in the sand. For a lot of people from our generation, that will be like wait a minute. You're like you are skipping over really good stuff. You should be interested in this. Like, how come this doesn't matter to you? You should be interested in this. Like how come this doesn't matter to you? You know, but they just want to hear a three-note melody with some guy going yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. And to them it's like that's the greatest song that's ever happened and I don't get it Right.
Speaker 1:Ah, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Well, you know, as I like to say with my whole approach to everything, it's like thank God, I don't need a million people to make a living, I just need enough. So as long as I can find enough people to actually give a shit, we're good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's a good point, you know, because I think a lot of people artists um, they get into this thinking, all right, I'm going to make a go at this, and they have this idea that you have to have millions and millions of people that love what you do in order for it to actually be anything.
Speaker 2:But if you just do a simple numbers game and you look at like, well, wait a minute, instead of trying to get a dollar from a million people, and these million people may never come back and may never be interested in you again, what if you were able to cultivate a relationship with 10,000 people that want to spend a hundred dollars every year, that you're doing something because you are able to give them something that they want and you have a reciprocal relationship with them? Artists don't like the idea that only 10,000 people or less would be their customers. They start to feel like, well, what's the point? But that is the real thing here is, if you're an independent artist, you really need to be able to look at it from a numbers perspective and say you would be thrilled if you had 10,000 people that were willing to buy a hundred dollars worth of merchandise from you on an annual basis.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely, absolutely Well. I think the other thing too is that I think you know to that, to that same point, people want. I mean, I mean, I know, when I was younger I was like, well, someone's going to fucking find me and I'm going to be whisked out of this hell. And then you realize pretty early on, you got to do everything yourself, pal, or you're going to be, you're going to be in trouble. And so nowadays I mean you know, I have a lot of people say, well, how doesn't the road get old?
Speaker 1:I mean it's you. Guys are driving all over the place in that van. I go, listen, it's me, my son and another guy who we get along with great, who hauls a fucking Hammond B3 with him. Everywhere we go we fit in one vehicle. We show up to places where the only reason why people are coming there is to see us play. I set up the merch, I sell the merch before the gig. Talk to all the people coming. We play the gig, I go there.
Speaker 1:Afterwards you make acquaintances and friends that will come back for as long as you're willing to go on the road and come back to wherever you're going. And then you're back in your hotel by 1030 or 11 o'clock at night and you drive to the next place and do it all over again. It's like what's the greatest thing on earth. And then people try to. I was talking about another buddy of mine earlier today as a musician and you know when people give you that. You know why. Why aren't you better known? I mean, why isn't this place packed and just like listen? If you're under the, the delusion that life, and particularly the music industry, is a meritocracy, I hate to burst your bubble, but it's really kind of a bullshitocracy. So, whatever you can get and however they come here and however they're digging it, I have no idea, but I'm just grateful they're coming.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of hard work and people don't know what it really takes to do it, especially when you're in the ranks of being able to do it on a tour bus. You know the cost of a tour bus it's unbelievable. People have no idea. Plus, you have to put a down payment on the rental before the tour even starts. So, uh, you know, back in 2020, before the shutdown, it was already expensive.
Speaker 2:You know it was like 65 grand a month for a tour bus unbelievable. A over a hundred now. A month for a tour bus Unbelievable. Pay over a hundred now. And and you could even get like a shitty, shitty bus that's 25 plus years old with all kinds of problems, and you still have to pay that much because the demand is there and they can they can make you pay that price. That's insane. So, uh, you know, if you have that kind of uh overhead just for the bus, and then you have a band and a crew and all that stuff, it's very difficult to make it all work, oh my God. So, during schedule for us, you know, it's oftentimes six shows in a row and then you have a day off and maybe that day off is a drive day you might not even have it sitting in a hotel room, and then we don't always have hotels, you know you basically live on the bus and you shower at venues.
Speaker 2:Right, you know, this is not, this is not the dream of fancy rockstar land. This is, this is very much, you know, like. Let's just try to make this work and when people show up we're grateful, you know.
Speaker 1:Right, Absolutely Well, and that's the thing of the people who really I mean, you know, if you love music and you love playing, you'll do all that stuff to do it, because that's the main thing. If it's about anything involving oh, I want to become powerful and renowned, and all that other kind of shit, it's like you're in for a long, long or a short one.
Speaker 2:Then it comes back to the whole thing, like we were talking about with my dad, where, you know, people said, well, how would you like to be remembered? And he said I wouldn't so if you're doing this because you want to be remembered. And you want to be remembered and he said I wouldn't. So if you're doing this because you want to be remembered and you want to be this like amazing thing, you know, a lot of people are going to be like fuck you, who cares about what you're doing? Who are you? You know?
Speaker 1:no doubt about it. Absolutely Well, listen my friend. Thanks so much for spending some time today. I I love to chat more. This is fascinating and I'm definitely up for for making some music anytime.
Speaker 2:I have a whole setup but you know I've got a studio where we could just make a whole thing. You know we could bring your guys in. I got some other people we could throw into the mix. But we should, we should just do something and and film it while we're doing it, make like a little mini doc about it and that sounds fantastic, cause that's what I've got in mind for this.
Speaker 1:This next thing you know, devin and Oman and I have done this uh collaborative, um, uh, record project where, uh, you know, he comes up with half the money, I come up with half the money and we're just trying to build my thing and so far it's been really a good relationship and we're talking about doing kind of an instrumental record. Next and I'm kind of just floating around ideas, but that was my main thing was it'd be great if we could video it and have the content, because that's gonna drive everything. You put that up online and people see what's going on. And you know the records are always going to buy to a certain extent, but they want to buy the experience and that promotes the gigs. Yada, yada, yada. That sounds awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we definitely have many avenues to explore, and I think people will probably be interested in some twisted guitar from the two of us. Oh, indeed.
Speaker 1:And the humor level, I rest assured will be of a certain level.
Speaker 2:Well, I appreciate you having me on and we'll make this little thing happen.
Speaker 1:I love it. All right, my friend. Thanks so much. I'm going to turn this off here. Hold on just a second. Well, thanks for tuning in. Ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Chewing the Gristle. We certainly do appreciate you stopping by. Make sure you tell your friends all about us. I think they might enjoy themselves. So thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next time.
