Interview: Spencer Davis

“Everything happened in 1966 for The Spencer Davis Group,” says someone who would know – Spencer Davis himself. And what a year it was for the band. They started off with a UK Number One song “Keep On Running”, which knocked The Beatles’ single “Day Tripper” / “We Can Work It Out” off the top spot. Another UK Number One song, “Somebody Help Me”, followed a few months later.

But the highlight of the year for the band was the release of the timeless classic “Gimme Some Lovin'”, co-written by Davis, Muff Winwood, and Muff’s kid brother Steve, the band’s lead singer who also played organ and a bit of guitar.

Now, 1966 wasn’t actually the only year that things happened for The Spencer Davis Group. Their song “I’m A Man” was released in early 1967 and hit the Top Ten; a couple years later it was memorably covered by Chicago. But Steve Winwood left the band in 1967 to form Traffic, and as Spencer Davis puts it, they “lost a huge amount of momentum”.

This interview was for a preview article for noozhawk.com for the concert by The Spencer Davis Group as part of the Happy Together Tour at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara on 7/13/16. It was done by phone on 6/29/16. (Liz Barry photo)

Interview: Tata Vega

Tata Vega is one of the featured artists in the Academy Award winning documentary film 20 Feet From Stardom, thanks to her amazing career as a backing vocalist with artists including Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Madonna, and Leon Russell.

In addition to backing other artists, she was in the groups Pollution and Earthquire, and has released eight solo albums. She was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Soul female Gospel Performance in 1985, and sang on four songs for the soundtrack of The Color Purple, including one (“Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister)”) which was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Song category.

This interview was for a preview article for the benefit concert for The Rhythmic Arts Project (TRAP) at SOhO in Santa Barbara on 3/13/16. Tickets to the event are available here. It was done by phone on 2/26/16. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Interview: Chuck Negron

Chuck Negron was one of three lead singers for Three Dog Night, which had a whopping twenty-one Top Forty songs between 1969 and 1975. Three of these hit Number One – “Mama Told Me (Not To Come)”, “Black and White”, and “Joy to the World”, the latter featuring Negron’s vocals and the familiar opening line “Jeremiah was a bullfrog”. He also sang lead vocals on “One”, “Eli’s Coming”, “An Old-Fashioned Love Song”, and “Easy to be Hard”. These, like most of Three Dog Night’s songs, were covers, often in very different arrangements from the originals.

Negron went through a period of serious drug addiction, which he finally overcame in the early 1990’s. His book Three Dog Nightmare is a harrowing account of his rock and roll excess, and starts with the line, “I should be dead.”

This interview was for a preview article for the Happy Together Tour show at the Chumash Casino on 7/11/13, for which Lindsay is one of the featured performers. (Mac O’Brien photo)