Jack Casady played bass guitar for the Sixties band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit”. Their albums Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing At Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers are amongst the best of the psychedelic rock genre. Casady also played on “Voodoo Chile” with Jimi Hendrix, and “Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)” from David Crosby’s first solo album. As the Sixties wound down, Casady and Jefferson Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen’s attention shifted to their new band Hot Tuna, which focused on acoustic and electric folk- and blues-based music. (L. Paul Mann photo)

This interview was conducted by phone on 12/29/11.

Jeff Moehlis: What can we look forward to at your upcoming concert in Santa Barbara?

Jack Casady: Jorma and I have been doing a lot of playing this year. As you know, we released a new album Steady As She Goes, and we’ve been touring that album and playing all the material off that album, either in our electric format or our acoustic format. So in this acoustic format with David Bromberg, a long, long time friend of ours, we look forward to featuring a lot of the new material, and having a good full night with Barry Mitterhoff at our side playing mandolin and many other musical instruments of acoustic picking for the fans and the audience to enjoy.

JM: Am I correct that David Bromberg has guested with Hot Tuna before?

JC: Yeah, we’ve done quite a few shows together, aside from really being longtime friends. Both Jorma and David have done a bunch of tours together, and Hot Tuna – Jorma and myself- and David have done some together as well. David just joined us in New York City for two nights at the Beacon Theatre, on the 9th and 10th of this year. And we had a ball. We had a ball. He’s really just an amazing performer and player, and we can’t wait to get in the same room together and do some more. And who knows, there may be some surprises during the evening.

JM: Hot Tuna has played with a huge number of guest musicians over the years. Are there any favorites for you to play with?

JC: Well, I think whenever you change the mix a little bit with a different performer, your music takes you in a slightly different direction. So I think when we do that, we always look forward to the new personality to see where it’s going to lead us. It’s kind of like an artful stew, and you listen to each other and see where it’s going to take you.

Barry has been playing with us now for quite a few years, and Barry brings so much to the table. His knowledge of music, his classical background, but also his knowledge of many forms of ethnic music, bring such a uniqueness to the format, that we really just can’t wait to play with him all the time.

So there will be Jorma on acoustic guitar, myself Jack on bass, and Barry on mandolin and sometimes ukulele, sometimes tenor guitar, sometimes banjo, all kinds of things like that.

JM: Going way back, I was interested to read that before Jefferson Airplane you played in the backing band for Ray Charles.

JC: I think what happened is there is a lot of incorrect information out there. I don’t know how that one worked out, but I did back up Little Anthony and the Imperials for a two-week stint when I was about 16 years old, or 17. It was pretty much early in my bass playing career, and I got that job through a drummer that had played with James Brown in the D.C. area. Of course, James Brown went through quite a few drummers. But that drummer got me a lot of R&B gigs in the Washington D.C. area. But no, I never played with Ray Charles.

JM: Of course, nowadays with the internet these things propagate.

JC: I’m glad to set the record straight.

JM: Excellent, I’m glad to as well.

JC: I’ve seen Ray Charles many times, and I saw him at the Howard Theater in the late Fifties, when I was 15 or 16 years old. I’d go down to the Howard Theatre and see Ray Charles and many other artists of that genre.

JM: Moving forward a little bit, how did you get involved with Jefferson Airplane?

JC: Actually, my involvement was a direct result of a conversation with Jorma. Jorma’s three and a half years older than I am, and we had a high school band together in 1958. When high school finished, he went to college. We kept in touch, and I continued in the various R&B and sometimes country circuits in the D.C. area.

We kept in touch all through the early Sixties. When he moved out to California from the East Coast, in the early Sixties, from time to time we’d talk about stuff. But one of the conversations we had over at a mutual friend’s house, he said he’d just joined a folk-rock band. And I said, “You, the purist? I didn’t think you’d be playing anything electric,” you know? And he said he’d just been approached a month earlier, this was was late summer of 1965, to join this group of people. And he asked me what I’m doing, and I said I’m playing guitar, and going to school, and playing a lot of bass. And he said, “Bass? I didn’t know you were playing bass,” and I said, “Yeah, I’m playing bass.” So he said, “Let me call you back. I’m gonna talk to these people.” So he went and made his pitch for me, and then I flew out to San Francisco and, essentially, I guess I auditioned for the Jefferson Airplane. In any case, he always told me he wanted an ally in the band, and I said “You’re on!”

So we played a gig. I think we rehearsed a couple of days, and we played a gig. The first gig was I think at Harmon Gymnasium on the 16th of October. And I was in the band. I replaced the first bass player, who was a stand-up bass player in the band. I had a Fender Jazz Bass, that’s what I played.

JM: I understand that you were the one who essentially recruited Grace Slick to join the band. Is that correct?

JC: Yeah. Well that was much later. Much, much later. We made our first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, in early 1966. That following summer Signe Anderson, our singer on the first album, wanted to leave the band. She was pregnant, and she wanted to leave the band and raise the child. So Grace was one of the other female singers in the local music scene of San Francisco, and I approached her and asked her if she’d join the band, and she said yes. So there you go.

JM: And she brought some songs to the band as well. I was listening yesterday to The Great Society’s version of “White Rabbit”, and the Jefferson Airplane version is certainly different. Of course your bass is quite prominent at the beginning. Do you remember how the Jefferson Airplane arrangement came together?

JC: It came together like most of our arrangements. I mean, we fleshed them out – get the material, start rehearsing, and move things around. Working with those changes that were reminiscent of Bolero, the kind of rhythm that snare would play in that, I just transferred it over to the bass and started playing it. So then we decided to start the song out with that, kind of a low atmospheric feeling. That’s how the arrangement came together.

You know, everybody has their own personality, and the great thing about the Airplane and what we were doing at the time was – compared to what I’d been doing in the Washington D.C. area, which was a lot of cover songs – the atmosphere in San Francisco was to create your own music, write your own lyrics, write your own songs, play your own parts, you know, write your own parts. And so it was a very healthy atmosphere for a musician to break away from mimicking songs that had been put out to being responsible for creating and writing your own material.

JM: On the album Crown of Creation, it seems that your bass playing is particularly inspired. Somehow there’s an openness to the songs on that album that allows the bass to really come through. Could you reflect on that album specifically?

JC: That album was an interesting album. I think we had done a fair amount of moving our style forward to a much more aggressive and open feeling onstage, and we wanted to get some of that on the album. The interesting thing about those years is that each album really reflects a different stage in the development of not only the musicians, but also the songwriting and the way you play. So I thought that album, for a studio album, represented where we were headed at the time, for a more aggressive sound, and a much more open sound. Both for the singers, and rhythmically and melodically for me as a bass player.

JM: On that album your bass is credited as “Yggdrasil bass”. What does that mean?

JC: [laughs] I haven’t the slightest idea of what it means. We had a lot of friends at the time who were clever with words, and so I had a friend, Owsley Stanley, who would join the sessions from time to time, and I think he came up with that phrase as some sort of a description of the growling nature of what I was doing. So that sort of stuck.

A lot of things back in those days didn’t necessarily make sense. They were often done to not make sense.

JM: You mentioned the live experience [with Jefferson Airplane]. How would you compare the studio recordings versus the live experience?

JC: I think the progress that you can hear through the albums, from 1965 to, say, when the band stopped recording in ’72, was to capture more of that fire and energy that we were experiencing and developing as a live band. But at the same time, we were able to use the studio as a means to multitrack, and as a means to experiment with sound and tone, and the quality of the sound.

Don’t forget, it isn’t like today where everybody has their own studio in their MacBook Pro. The only way you could get into a studio was to get a record contract, basically, unless you had the money to pull together for a session independently. But that was pretty much it. You didn’t get a chance unless you were a signed act and you were able to get in the studio in that atmosphere. So that’s what the unique thing was. That was what was also so exciting.

I really always have enjoyed the studio atmosphere. For some it’s a very frustrating thing, if they don’t get exactly what they were getting live. And I certainly had moments like that. But at the same time, I would have a lot of fun with multitracking, and sometimes putting a song together and putting the bass on last, you know, in order to pull the song together. Things like that, that you just couldn’t do when you presented music as a full ensemble.

JM: I’m a huge fan of Jefferson Airplane, but it’s also cool that you played with Jimi Hendrix on “Voodoo Chile”. How did that come about, and what was it like?

JC: The second question first – it was great. It was a lot of fun. Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, and I had become friends. Particularly Mitch and I. I really enjoyed his drumming style.

Bill Graham was our manager for about a year and a half in the early years of Jefferson Airplane. We had a rehearsal hall next to the Fillmore Auditorium, and sometimes we used the Fillmore to rehearse in. In any case, when various acts would come through, quite often when we were in town we got a chance to meet the musicians, and that was always really exciting. Cream was a very exciting band to listen to, and Jimi Hendrix was an exciting band, and I struck up a friendship with Jimi and with Mitch.

So a year or so later, when he was recording in New York City, and we were doing a TV show – I think it might’ve been the Dick Cavett show – when we finished our work we went to hear Traffic, and Steve Winwood was in the band along with all of the other guys. Jimi had taken a break from recording what was to become a double album [Electric Ladyland], and we hooked up in the club, Steve Paul’s The Scene, and he had invited us and a whole gaggle of other people over to the studio to watch him do some work, listen to him do some playing. After most of the night being spent in various ways, at daybreak he said, “Let’s play a version of this song, in kind of a slow blues format”. We fleshed out the chord changes, and did it in about a take and a half. I say a take and a half because we started to play it and I think he broke a string, and we noodled around a while, then put the song together and basically did it as a one take song.

It was very fun. He was a very generous musician, just what another musician likes when they’re playing together. It’s exciting, you get down to business, there was nothing else but the music to deal with. So it was a great time.

We played the song, and we all got into our station wagons and drove down to D.C. for the gig the next night. So I didn’t really think much about it, and then I got a call from Jimi about a month or so later, and he said, “Would you mind if we put this track on the album?” And I said, “Oh great!”

It was quite different, because nobody put a fifteen minute track on an album. I think, except on a jazz album. So that was one of the progressions of bands getting more artistic control as their records sold, and they’d renegotiate their contract. Part of the renegotiation was that they’d start to produce themselves, and have more control in the studio, you know. And for better or worse, that allowed us to spend much more time in the studio in our following albums, and do more of that experimentation in the studio.

JM: A bit later you produced Jorma’s first solo album Quah, an album that really resonates with me. Could you reflect on that album?

JC: That album, I thought, was really essential for Jorma to do at the time, and present his acoustic guitar work, which was always the beginning of any songs we started out with Hot Tuna. We would work on material, and he would be playing the acoustic guitar, and he’d play it in the [fingerpicking] style with his thumb and two fingers. And I was always amazed by that approach, because it’s complete music. You know, the thumb is keeping the rhythm and doing bass lines and a pulse, and a melody comes off of the first two fingers and/or combinations thereof. I always likened it to two hands on the piano. It was complete music.

When we started putting together some of this music drawn from folk and blues and Piedmont-style blues players, like Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Blake, people like that, we would work together to try to find out how to marry the sound of the bass guitar and the guitar. What was interesting, because that pulse was going on with the thumb, it allowed me to also extend the range of the bass without necessarily the pulse and the bottom end falling out of the song. So that style of guitar playing really freed me up as a bass player. We were able to take some of the elements that had come out of jazz and ragtime and other music, and kind of merge them together into where we were as young players, and see where it would take us.

When we added drums later on, Jorma would use that style on some of the music, for the fingerpicking stuff – he was using Fender Stratocasters at the time. Of course, then, he would play a regular electric guitar style with a flat pick. Later on, he would move those styles around, and pretty soon he was playing electric guitar with finger picks, as well. So he really changed a little bit of the traditional approach of the way we entered into the songs, and it made for, what I thought, was a fascinating approach which we still work on today.

JM: You’ve been playing with Jorma off and on since the late 1950′s. How would be describe what Jorma brings to your musical collaboration?”

JC: In the earlier years, it was that uniqueness of having the fingerstyle approach, as well as that really interesting stabbing, melodic approach on the electric guitar. But really, what has slowly developed throughout this whole process is his songwriting ability. The chord structures, and the lyric content of the songs that we write, really get us into different musical areas, as well. For me, that was great. I always had something new to work on, some new atmosphere to create with the songs. To me, I think it’s really important in each song to create that world. And that’s what he brings to it. He brings that opportunity for me to do a lot of things on the bass, but also to try to create interesting atmospheres.

JM: I had the pleasure of talking to Jorma before the last Hot Tuna visit earlier this year, and I asked him about you, and he marveled that when you do bass solos you never play the same thing twice. How do you keep it fresh after all these years?

JC: You know, I had my period of time listening to really great jazz players. I got to hear Roland Kirk, and I got to hear Charlie Mingus, Yusef Lateef, and Eric Dolphy. I think Eric Dolphy really had a large impression on me for a period of time. But as well, a lot of the Twenties and Thirties players – Jelly Roll Morton, people like that. Those players, they always seemed to draw something new every night, and I think my philosophy is I try to really put myself into the particular night I’m in.

When I teach at the Fur Peace Ranch in Pomeroy, Ohio – the Jorma Kaukonen Fur Peace Ranch guitar camp – I’m asked how do you improvise. And I think the nature of improvisation is to pay attention to what you just played, to tell you where you’re going to go. It’s almost like looking in the rearview mirror as you drive down the road, looking forward at the same time. You listen to those combinations of notes you’ve put together, and the melodies, and you let it bring you to the next stage. And when it’s successful, hopefully you concluded in an artful manner, so that it completes a thought. It’s not always successful, and sometimes you’re left hanging out over the edge. But I think the nature of it is you have to be prepared to fail at the same time. That’s not your aim at all, but you have to enter into a bit of that world of danger.

JM: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

JC: Well, I think nowadays there’s so much opportunity to investigate music. When I was a kid, I would get on a bus in Washington D.C., and go down to the Library of Congress. You’d get signed in, and you’d get to pull out records and take them into booths, and listen to world music – that it’s called now. Music from all over the world. Later on, in the early Sixties they started to be put out in collections on albums. But nowadays you have the Internet, you can do so much exploration of music from all over the world, and I think that’s really fascinating for any young musician, and to hear music from all different time periods. I mean, you’ve got recorded music for a hundred years now, so I think that offers a tremendous opportunity to expand your horizons, and hear different approaches, and to be intrigued and inspired to work on the music yourself.

There’s that aspect, and then there’s the good old know your instrument, know the theory. It always pays to take lessons and explore the harmonic aspect of your instrument as well as music in general. I tell my bass players, you should play another instrument that has chords. You should at least play a guitar, and learn piano. It would expand your horizons terrifically. Particularly in songwriting, and writing music in general.

JM: Thanks for taking the time to chat. One last question, where am I reaching you at?

JC: I’m at home. I live in Los Angeles, so I’m just down the road from you.

Jorma Kaukonen was the lead guitarist for the Sixties psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” from the album Surrealistic Pillow. His signature song is the instrumental “Embryonic Journey” from the same album. Other acclaimed Jefferson Airplane albums include After Bathing At Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers. As the Sixties wound down, Kaukonen and Airplane bassist Jack Casady’s attention shifted to their new band Hot Tuna, which focused on acoustic and electric folk- and blues-based music. Kaukonen has also released multiple solo albums, including 1974′s masterpiece Quah. Kaukonen continues to tour in Hot Tuna, and with his wife owns and operates the Fur Peace Ranch which runs a yearly music and guitar camp.

This interview was conducted by phone on February 23, 2011.

Jorma Kaukonen: This is not a typical Hot Tuna show. Normally we just tour by ourself, as I think most people who are interested in us know. This thing is actually more of a showpiece. We have the great Charlie Musselwhite, a great bluesman, Jim Lauderdale, a great singer-songwriter, a great player. And G. E. Smith is on the tour also.

We start off on the show playing five or six of our acoustic numbers, and we sort of add people as that part of the show goes on. Jim Lauderdale comes on and plays some songs; we back him up, we sing with him. Charlie comes out and does some stuff.

Then after the break we sort of do the same thing, but electrically. It’s really a lot of fun. It’s kind of hard to describe, it may sound silly, but it’s really a great show. We’ve been having a lot of fun with it, and it’s been very well received.

JM: Will you be playing songs off the new Hot Tuna album Steady As She Goes?

JK: Sure, absolutely.

Hot Tuna has been through a lot of different personnel. It’s always [bassist] Jack [Casady] and myself, obviously. The last Hot Tuna studio recording was made 21 years ago now. We recorded [the new one] in November of last year. We’ve been working with Barry Mitterhoff who’s a member of Hot Tuna also, a guy that I work with all the time, a great string player. He plays mandolin-like instruments, tenor guitar, etc, etc. Plus a fine drummer named Skoota Warner.

My last solo record was produced by Larry Campbell at Levon [Helm]‘s place, so when Jack and I got an opportunity to do this, we also did it at Levon’s place. Larry produced it, and he and his wife played and sang on it also.

An obvious question is, why did you wait so long to do another album? The plain and simple answer really is, and I don’t think we thought about it like this, because I don’t sort of plan my life out, but the time wasn’t right. But I wrote a bunch of new songs for this, Jack and I co-wrote some songs, we wrote with Larry. The moment was just right for a team effort to make a good album.

JM: Is the new album a mix of electric and acoustic, or more one?

JK: You know, because of the stuff that Hot Tuna does, electric and acoustic, and like the show we were just talking about, that’s a valid question. But it’s not really like that. I mean, the answer to your question really is, yes, it is a mix. But I don’t really think about it like that. It’s just songs. Some of the songs tend to be more acoustically oriented, and some of them are more electrically oriented.

JM: I see from the track list posted online that album covers Reverend Gary Davis, and I know he’s a longtime influence of yours. Did you ever interact with him while he was still alive?

JK: Not in the same way that guys like Stefan Grossman and Ian Buchanan, the guy who taught me, etc, did. My connection to Reverend Davis was this gentleman Ian Buchanan, who’s long since passed away. I moved to New York for a while, and I didn’t have – I forget what Reverend Davis was charging, six bucks and hour or whatever – I didn’t have that kind of money then. I was working at a hospital for 75 bucks a week before taxes. You know I was hanging out in the Village all the time, and because my friend Ian knew the Reverend I got to see him many times. But even though I didn’t study with him, I did get a chance to see him live.

And when I moved to California later on – because I got a chance to meet him also, and he would come to California and play – one of the things that always made me feel good was that I would say “Reverend Davis, it’s Jorma Kaukonen”, and he would remember me. Now years later I thought he was just being polite, my friend Ernie Hawkins, one of the Reverend’s students who lives in Pittsburgh, told me, “No, if he said that, he remembered you.” And that always made me feel really good.

JM: My first exposure to Reverend Gary Davis was on your first solo album Quah. You know, sometimes you read people say, “that’s my Sunday morning album.” And for me, that would be my Sunday morning album.

JK: That’s a high compliment. I have to say even after all these years, I’m still extremely pleased with that album myself.

JM: Can you describe a little bit about how it came together the way it did?

JK: Well, you know, Hot Tuna was already in existence at that time, in its sort of nascent stage. But I had this buddy Tom Hobson, that was on Quah. If Tom were alive today, he would just be an alternative singer-songwriter. But back in those days, because that category didn’t really exist, he was an extremely quirky, kind of country oriented folkie, and I just loved his stuff. You know, when I moved to California in 1962, I met Tom. He was a little bit older than me, and he was married at the time, which meant there was always food at his place. He had kids, and stuff. And so we hung out a lot, and he sort of introduced me to folk scene, and I learned a lot of stuff from him.

So when the Airplane got our Grunt label going, I just really wanted to do something with him. Now we really didn’t play the same style, so we didn’t play much together, which is the reason I wanted to split the album with him on one side and me on the other. And he was just too bizarre for RCA at the time, so I wound up with more songs. But anyway, it was sort of my homage to a guy that really, in a way, was kind of like a musical father to me in the very early Sixties. And so we got a chance to do it, and Jack produced the album for me, and it was just really a lot of fun to make it. I’d written a couple of songs, I guess “Genesis” is one that comes to mind mostly, and I’d recently learned Gary Davis’ “Light of this World”. I mean, stuff that’s just become staples in my musical life all came together on that album.

JM: Before Quah and before Hot Tuna, and even before Jefferson Airplane, I was reading that you backed up Janis Joplin on guitar. How did that come about?

JK: Well, it sounds sort of like you got a gig in Janis’ band, you know, the way you talk about it like that. But the way it came about, simply, was that when I moved to California in 1962, one of the first weekends I was there I went to a hootenanny – we had hootenannies back then in San Jose, which is where I was living – and a bunch of guys and gals would come down from Berkeley and from San Francisco, and Janis was one of them. And she was a great singer, and even though she played a little guitar, we got to talking, and she realized that I knew a lot of her Memphis Minnie stuff, and her style. So she asked me to play with her, and it was a lot of fun. And so, on a number of occasions after that, when she needed somebody the Penninsula I would get the call.

JM: What sorts of venues did you play, was it like coffee shops?

JK: Yeah, exactly, you bet. You’re always fighting against the roar of the espresso machine.

JM: Well, there’s a tape also, as you probably already know, called the Typewriter Tape. So it was also fighting with typewriters?

JK: Right, yeah. We were rehearsing for a gig we were going to do at the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco, I’m guessing that was made in ’64. I was married to my ex-wife, that was her. She was from Sweden, and she was writing a letter home.

Sometimes people think that the typewriter’s part of the music, or “I can’t believe that she was playing while you were recording”. We weren’t really recording. I had a tape recorder, I turned it on all the time. Janis and I were just practicing songs together.

JM: Fast-forwarding a little bit, how did you get involved with Jefferson Airplane?

JK: I was going to school at the University in Santa Clara, and Paul Kantner had dropped out the year before I got there. We’d met through a mutual friend, and he was a folkie, too. So we sort of moved in the same circles. In 1965 he’d moved to San Francisco, and he met Marty [Balin], and they were putting this band together. It wasn’t called the Airplane yet, and he asked me if I’d be involved, and I sort of agonized over this because… I didn’t know what rock ‘n’ roll was anymore, you know, but I went up and I tried out. It was seductive, and it was fun. And there you go.

JM: Looking back, do you have a favorite Jefferson Airplane album?

JK: You know, that’s a good question. I don’t think we did anything that I didn’t like. But I really think, honestly, my favorite one is Surrealistic Pillow.

JM: For me, I guess that was the first one that got me into Jefferson Airplane. But I like that the music and the albums really evolved. They didn’t sound like that one.

JK: You’re absolutely right. They absolutely evolved, no question about it. And really, in terms of what the Airplane wound up sounding like, the birthplace of that was Surrealistic Pillow.

JM: Were the instrumental arrangements for a typical Jefferson Airplane song carefully planned out, or was it spontaneous in the studio?

JK: The Airplane songs, as you know, especially after Surrealistic Pillow, tended to be very complicated. In those days we rehearsed endlessly, endlessly. We went through the kind of stuff that nobody… I mean, some of us were married at the time, and there was a while where we all lived in a two-level apartment in West L.A. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that no sane adult would do, you know? But the upshot of that was that we rehearsed endlessly, and most of the songs required a lot of preparation because of the many parts of them. That said, the parts themselves weren’t scripted.

JM: I think of a song like “Wild Tyme”, which is pretty short, but you have the very cool psychedelic guitar part over it, and the chord progression isn’t trivial. Obviously it took some work to do that.

JK: You know the deal. To get a chance to record in a studio back in those days was a huge deal. It took a lot of money, and unless you had a record deal it wouldn’t happen. Today, I’ve got a thirteen year old son that can record stuff like that in Garage Band on his computer. And that’s great, because it frees all these artists, of all ages, it frees all of us from the necessity to have somebody with money backing you, and perhaps requiring something in return. I mean, anybody can do that now. But in any case, in those days it required money.

For example, Surrealistic Pillow was a 4-track recording, our first record Takes Off was a 3-track recording, no noise reduction. You could only do maybe two overdubs without loss of sound quality – the tape degraded. So most everything was done live, which required rehearsal, and you really had to nail those parts in an overdub, otherwise you wrecked the track on the tape. Now, you can take three years to finish [laughs]. I’m thinking maybe about a Hot Tuna Auto-Tune album – no, just kidding.

JM: A club mix.

JK: Exactly.

JM: With so many talented musicians in Jefferson Airplane, did you find it difficult to get your ideas heard?

JK: No, as much as we haggled about trivial things, we never haggled about music. You know, I didn’t write much. I learned to write songs in the Jefferson Airplane. I didn’t write much, but every time I wrote a song my pals in the band heard it, and they helped with vocal harmonies and all that stuff. So the answer is that everybody was very supportive about each other’s art.

JM: You were at a lot of key events of The Sixties. I was wondering if you could reminisce a little, starting with the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park?

JK: Right, well, you know, it’s funny when you look back, because there were so many things that in retrospect seem to be sort of iconic events – the Human Be-In, Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock, Altamont. I mean, all those things. It’s just what was going on in our life, and I don’t think anybody ever thought about them as being seminal events one way or the other. Things like the Human Be-In – I was born in 1940, nothing that even vaguely approached that would have existed in the world that I grew up in. And all of a sudden, all of these extremely odd things were happening in the Sixties, and it was like the Wizard of Oz, where it turns from black and white into color.

JM: You mentioned Woodstock. What was your Woodstock experience like?

JK: Oh boy. You know, we had been to the site two weeks before the concert, so we saw them sort of getting it together. We just went in for our day. I think the thing that really is very difficult to describe adequately is when you stood on the stage – and I do remember this – you stood on the stage and looked out and saw that sea of people. Nothing can adequately describe that. And that feeling that the world that was sort of evolving in that moment became “real”, if you know what I mean?

JM: Not long after Woodstock there was Altamont, which you also mentioned. What do you think went wrong there?

JK: Well, you know, I guess it’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback after something like that. I mean, first of all, I’m sure you’ve probably driven up on 580, where Altamont was and is. It’s a wind generator farm now, and that’s what it always should have been. I mean, there were no sanitary conditions, it was just a really poorly thought out place to have any concert, much less a free concert with a lot of big stars and a lot of people going to come. It was poorly planned. I mean, you can assign blame to a lot of people, but when you look at that area today, when you drive over that road from San Francisco, it’s like, “What were we thinking?”

JM: I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Kantner about a year ago, and I was asking him about Altamont. He was talking about how Marty got hit onstage.

JK: He did!

JM: What was the band’s reaction?

JK: If you see the movie, you will notice that Jack and [drummer] Spencer [Dryden] and I played on until finally, I think, one of us got pushed over the drumset, which pretty much ended that portion of the show. I guess Marty had got in some Hells Angel’s face, and he got hit, yeah. I mean, once again, you know, all those things were just accidents waiting to happen. It’s easy to look back on it. At the time, “Yeah, we’ll do a free concert, that’ll be great!” Poorly thought out, I say from many years later.

JM: What were the origins of Hot Tuna?

JK: Well, Jack and I have been playing together since 1958, and we’ve been buddies – he’s my oldest buddy – and we always had something going on. It wasn’t always Hot Tuna, but we always had something going on. He and I started working out what became the first Hot Tuna album, the acoustic album, in hotel rooms when we were on the road with the Airplane. And it sort of gained a life of its own.

Then we messed around with various different electric incarnations. Marty was in one of the early versions of Hot Tuna. Joey Covington. This friend of mine Paul Zeigler who was staying with my brother. A lot of different people in the rock ‘n’ roll version of it, just because the rock ‘n’ roll was a little bit different from the Airplane rock ‘n’ roll, even though we used some of the same people. It just started out as something that was fun to do because we could, and it sort of gained a life of its own and it became something. It ultimately became something that was more compelling for me and Jack than the Airplane was.

JM: You mentioned that you’ve played with Jack since 1958. What does Jack bring to the music?

JK: Oh gosh. We played a show last night in Durham, North Carolina, and we were doing one of these old Hot Tuna songs, “Funky #7″, and there’s this bass solo. I was standing with my buddy Barry at the side of the stage watching, and I go, “Where is he going to take this tonight?”

Jack is an amazing musician. His voice is the bass. But through that voice he tells a lot of stories. When you’re playing a song he’s got powerful parts that make the rhythm section drive the song. But in all that, and especially when he gets a chance to solo, he never does the same thing twice. Now, listen, I’ve been playing the guitar for a long time, and I’m pretty good at what I do, but I have a realm, I have a roadmap of things that I draw from to do stuff. Every now and then something magical happens, and you try to remember it. But, you know, you play what you learned. Now, I don’t know what goes on inside Jack’s head, because we’ve never had this conversation, but I’ll tell you, he never ceases to amaze me with the things that he comes up with. It’s like a bottomless well. That, and the fact that when we play together he always listens to what me and the other guys do. He listens, he interacts. If marriages were like that, there’d never be a divorce rate.

JM: Can I ask for your reflections on a few specific songs that you’re known for? First, the one that people probably will still be listening to a hundred years from now, “Embryonic Journey”.

JK: Wow. Well, you know, “Embryonic Journey”, I wrote that in ’62 or ’63. At that time, I’d only been fingerpicking for two or three years. It’s one of those things…

You know, people used to ask Reverend Gary Davis where he got a song, or how he wrote a song, and he’d go, “I didn’t write that song. The Lord give it to me.” Then he’d tell a story about it. It was an inspiration, it was something that just happened. I happened to have a friend who had a tape recorder running. I was just messing around when I did what became “Embryonic Journey”. Later on I listened to all that – “I think that could be a song.” I never thought of myself as a songwriter. I never thought I’d even ever write a song back then. It truly popped up, and I was lucky enough to be able to catch it.

JM: I remember being surprised on the last episode of the TV show Friends that suddenly they played that song. I hope you got a lot of payback for that.

JK: Well, there’s not much money in that, but obviously I was thrilled when that happened. Now with that Friends episode, this is funny because I had never really watched Friends, it’s just not my kind of a show. But I knew it was popular, and at the time a lot of my friends’ kids really loved it. Well, anyway, they had a number of songs in the queue for using for the closer, and none of us knew which song was going to be picked. If you remember, the last episode of friends was a two hour special, and the first hour was a retrospective of all the others. So here’s me, who’s never watched Friends. I turn it on, I sit through the second hour, the closing. It gets up to the top of the hour, and I thought, “I guess they’re not going to use it”. But if you recall, the show actually ran like eight or nine minutes after the hour. And there it was at the end. I flipped! I go, “Wow, they used the song!” And then later I got emails from these friends of mine, who at the time had mostly teenage daughters who loved it. “We used to think your music really sucked, dad, but now we really like it.”

JM: Another song from Surrealistic Pillow, “She Has Funny Cars”, which I understand was co-written with Marty?

JK: With Marty and a friend of ours named Steve Mann, who has passed away since also. Yeah, I remember it was early in the Jefferson Airplane stages. We were in this apartment that I had on Divisadero, it’s long since been torn down – it was near The Fillmore. I remember Marty and Steve and I were sitting around, and we’d just started messing around with these licks. And that lick [sings descending guitar part at beginning of song], Steve and I came up with that, and then we just started putting things together, and we co-wrote the song. It’s a cool song. I wish I still remembered how to play it.

JM: It’s a great opener for the album also.

JK: It is, it is, yeah.

JM: Now on the next album [After Bathing At Baxter's] you wrote “The Last Wall of the Castle”. What do you remember about that?

JK: It’s been so long since I’ve played or heard that song, that’s a question I probably can’t get you a very incisive answer to. But the question ties in with what we talked about earlier, where the other guys in the band supported those of us that were trying to learn how to write. You know, I have no idea at this point what inspired me to write that, but like I tell my wife when I write things, a lot of times you get maybe a hook, or a musical line, or a lyrical line, and it’s almost like chasing the rabbit down the rabbit hole. You know, you just follow it, and if you’re lucky it comes out someplace interesting. I suspect that’s what happened with that.

Of course, when we started rehearsing, when we got into the studio, because I was playing with so many inventive people, it came together in a much more sophisticated way I’m sure than I could see for it at the beginning.

JM: Another song that is associated with you, although you didn’t write it, is “Good Shepherd” from Volunteers. I think it’s such a cool arrangement.

JK: Thanks. There’s a great story behind it. I learned that song probably in ’62 or ’63 from an itinerant folk singer from somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley named Roger Perkins. And I never knew who wrote the song.

Within the last ten years, however, I found out that the song was written by a guy from somewhere in the Tidewater area of Virginia named Jimmy Struther. He was a blind musician who’d gone to prison for killing his wife. He recorded that one song. And by the way, you can get it. I think it’s on the Smithsonian site for 99 cents. Anyway, he recorded this song, went to prison, and somebody heard it and they were going to discover him when he was released from prison. Never seen or heard from again. But if you download this song, you will hear “Good Shepherd”. Now, he plays it more like a Gospel blues than I did. I play it more like a folk song, you know. But the changes are the same. And they’re such pretty changes, they must have been incredibly inventive for the time that he wrote and recorded the song. I’ve always loved that song. And, for me, I learned in in dropped D. It was my first experience in dropped D – this is guitar geek stuff. Actually “Embryonic Journey” is a dropped D song, too. It’s just a cool sound.

JM: You mentioned before the song “Genesis” from Quah. What are your reflections on that song?

JK: Well, I was going through sort of a turbulent time with my ex-wife, and that’s when I wrote that song. That’s something, we were just having some problems, the kind of problems that Jack and I don’t have [laughs]. A little married man humor there. Anyway, and I wrote the song. That’s one of those things, you know, it’s basically a simple song, it’s a repetitive figure. If I heard that song written by somebody else, I’d go, “That’s a really good song.” I wish I could write them like that all the time.

JM: Also, from Quah – you know I mentioned this was my first exposure to Reverend Gary Davis – you have “I’ll Be All Right” and “I Am The Light Of The World”, which are phenomenal songs and great arrangements.

JK: I love them, too. I remember “Light of the World” has some cool little Gary Davis nuances in it. A friend of mine named Ken Ellis showed me how to do some of the contrapuntal stuff. He opened the door for that, then I made my own arrangement out of it. I’ve always loved both of those songs. I love the melody, the chord structure. And I really love the upbeat worldview of both of them.

JM: Another song – this is now getting to Hot Tuna – “Hesitation Blues”.

JK: That was one of the first songs that I ever learned. “Hesitation Blues”, the version I have, is a Reverend Gary Davis version. I learned it from Ian Buchanan, and I worked out my own arrangement over the years. It’s always been a great song, and again, because when I learned it I wasn’t really interested in sourcing it – I was just interested in playing it – it was many years later I realized that it was a Reverend Gary Davis song, a secular song.

JM: I didn’t realize that.

JK: It’s a cool song. It’s one of the sort of hidden blues things that the Rev did.

JM: As an example of an electric Hot Tuna song, “I See The Light”. Could you reflect on that?

JK: That’s interesting, because a lot of those Hot Tuna electric songs, then and now, I write on acoustic guitar. And so that was written on acoustic guitar, and on the recorded version the basic track has the acoustic guitar in it. Although there’s lots of electric guitar overdubs, too. I don’t know, once again, I think I got an idea from a lyric and I just chased it down and wound up writing the song. But it started out from a fingerpicking acoustic thing.

JM: That’s how you normally write songs? You start out on an acoustic?

JK: Most of the time, yeah. Most of the time.

JM: Do you want to set the record straight about anything from your career in music?

JK: I guess I could say one thing. You know, every now and then people go, “Was the original name of Hot Tuna ‘Hot Shit’?” I go, “No”. It’s from a Blind Boy Fuller song – there’s a lyric of the song that goes “What’s that smell like fish”, and some wise guy who sang the song said “Hot Tuna”. “Wow, that’s a great name for a band.” Anyway, listen, in our defense, it was the Seventies.

JM: I think it’s a great name. And you remember it.

JK: It is, it is funny. Who knows what sort of name is going to stick. But you’re absolutely right. It gives us a lot of ideas for cool T-shirts.

JM: What are your plans, musical or otherwise, for the near future?

JK: My wife and I have the Fur Peace Ranch music school in southeast Ohio. We’re moving into our fifteenth year there. So I teach a lot – that’s a huge part of my life. We have a radio show, we have a 200-seat theater, so that occupies a lot of my time. I have a four-and-a-half year old daughter. When I’m home that occupies a lot of my time, obviously. I’m so lucky because at my age I’m still healthy, I’m still able to do what I want to do. I just want to keep on doing what I’m doing.

JM: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

JK: I guess the most important thing is, first and foremost, to love whatever it is that you do. Whatever your muse, whatever kind of music, whatever instrument that you play, you love that first. Every now and then you meet people that are chasing stardom. If that works for you, then that’s great. If you’re lucky it might happen. It probably won’t. But if you love to play music you’ll have a great companion for your whole life.

JM: Last night I went to see to Robin Trower in concert, and afterwards I asked him the same question. There have been a few others that have answered like this. He said, “Become a barber”

JK: [laughs] Yeah, right. I mean, the music business is such a funny thing. Jack and I and my buddies, we’ve been so fortunate because we’ve been doing it, really, all of our life. Not everybody gets that opportunity, but if you want to be a professional musician there’s a lot of stuff you can do. You know, you could play locally, you could teach, you could be a studio musician. There’s just so many sub-categories of all that stuff. But mainly, if you love to do it… I mean, I’ve had the same job all my life, and I’ve been able to do, from a professional point of view, exactly what I wanted to do. It doesn’t get any better than that.

JM: And I’m sure, in many ways, it doesn’t seem like a job.

JK: No, you know what the job is? The job is traveling. I’m on this long tour right now, and I don’t have to drive myself anymore, we have a bus. But I’d rather be home watching my kids grow some of the time. We play for free, we get paid to travel.

Review of Jefferson Starship concert 4/30/10 at Oreana Winery, with openers Country Joe McDonald and Quicksilver Messenger Service

Photos from the concert.

Paul Kantner was a co-founder, singer, rhythm guitarist, and songwriter for the Sixties psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit”. His songwriting credits include “Crown of Creation”, “We Can Be Together”, “Volunteers” (co-written with bandmate Marty Balin) and “Wooden Ships” (co-written with David Crosby and Stephen Stills). Kantner stayed onboard when Jefferson Airplane morphed into Jefferson Starship.

This interview was conducted by phone on 4/21/10. It formed the basis of a preview article for Jefferson Starship’s 4/30/10 show in Santa Barbara.  Photo by L. Paul Mann

Jeff Moehlis: What should we expect from your upcoming concert in Santa Barbara?

Paul Kantner: We’re bringing back a couple songs, and doing a couple songs that we’ve never done before, and then our usual usual, and God only knows what will happen. I always look for an exciting time onstage, because it’s always so unexpectedly different every night.

We do have an extraordinary new woman singer named Cathy Richardson.

JM: She sang with you at the Heroes of Woodstock tour, right?

PK: Yes. We haven’t played for a little while, and I’m looking forward to getting back into the mode as it were.

JM: Will Marty Balin be joining you?

PK: Not in Santa Barbara, no. He gets out with us now and again, but lately he’s been less than more.

JM: How is touring now different from touring in the 1960′s and 1970′s?

PK: The music business has gone into quite a whirl. I hesitate to use the word “business” even, because record companies are going down, and record stores are going down, and the electronic stuff that’s out – I don’t mean the music but but the production of things – has all changed.

But going on the road and going onstage never changes in its own quiet kind of way. A certain thing occurs onstage that doesn’t occur anywhere else. The connection between live musicians and an audience is unrealizable in any other fashion, much like a theater play. It occurs in its own unique way almost every night, and one of the great things that I like about music, particularly live music but all music, is the way it connects to the brain and causes emotion to occur. Whatever the emotion may be. But that it can do that in the first place is almost like magic to me. Magic isn’t the right word, but it’s very metaphysical, if you will. Why that occurs after forty or whatever years, I still have yet to figure out. And I don’t know that I really want to. I just know that I can wield the music, and play it, and enjoy it, and watch other people enjoy it, and then see repercussions over time that come from both the music and the ideas specified in the music. That’s very satisfying on many levels.

I always remind myself that when musicians go to work, they play. I intend to keep it that way as long as I can.

JM: You’re probably planning to play some Jefferson Airplane songs at the show?

PK: We play everything. We play some stuff sometimes from before Jefferson Airplane, even.

JM: Such as?

PK: The song of a guy named Fred Neil. We do a song of his that I did long before Jefferson Airplane was even a thought called “Other Side of This Life”. Occasionally we’ll do another song called “High Flying Bird” which is an old modern folk song.

We do from that all the way to Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship and my solo albums and Blows Against The Empire, to our latest album which has a whole lot of, oddly enough, folk songs on it again: the Weavers, to sailing songs, to a Bob Dylan song we do that I’m really quite fond of. So we do a whole of different stuff. It changes every
night, and I usually don’t make the set up until a half hour before the show. We have about a hundred songs that we can draw from, so we’re pretty well flush with songs.

JM: You have quite a songbook to draw from.

PK: And half of them aren’t even on the list yet. We’re bringing a couple this next tour, one called “Lightning Rose” and maybe another one called “Go To Her” over the period of the spring and summer.

JM: Can I ask for your reflections on a few songs that you wrote or co-wrote?

PK: Sure.

JM: First, how about “Wild Tyme” from After Bathing at Baxter’s?

PK: That was our most extreme, out-there album, I think.

JM: It seems that song captured the time, the craziness and all.

PK: It’s a sweet, gentle song, though. It is unusual, both for the subject matter and the structure of the song. I usually don’t write songs like that. The body of it was just me reflecting on the times around us in a quiet kind of way. Just to be unusual.

JM: Also on that album is “The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil”.

PK: That’s just a kick-ass rock and roll song that draws on Winnie the Pooh and Fred Neil and others that contributed ideas to the thing. Basically it’s just a good rock and roll song. We still play that lots, and it kicks.

JM: Then there’s “The House at Pooneil Corners”.

PK: “Pooneil Corners” is a follow-up to “You & Me & Pooneil”.

JM: It has a much darker vibe. Had things gone sour by that point?

PK: No, no. I gave that to Marty to write [laughs], and he made it a sour, end-of-the-world kind of song. The chord changes sort of speculate on that kind of idea, as well.

One of the particular things I like about “Pooneil Corners” is Jack Casady’s bass part. It almost drives the whole song. We tried to do it last year. Sometimes we play without a bass player, and our keyboard player takes over the bottom end. But there’s nothing that drives that song like a live, regular bass, and so we sometimes tried it, and at the moment it’s in the B-list. But it’s one we know.

JM: Another one that has a darker vibe is “Crown of Creation”.

PK: Well, it has a darker vibe. But at the end, where it goes “Life is change / How it differs from the rocks” is pretty positive, I think. It speaks of things that are difficult, and then hopefully gives you a direction to go to overcome that difficulty, or live with it and deal with it properly.

JM: On the next album, there are are a couple of, for the lack of a better term, classic hippie songs. What’s your reflection on “We Can Be Together”?

PK: “We Can Be Together” – yeah, that was sort of my countercultural song, where it celebrated a lot of the stuff that was going on at the time. Which was basically the “fuck authority” kind of feeling that came out of The Sixties. Some of the lyrics actually came from graffiti. And then it resolves itself into what I think is one of my more beautiful choruses, with harmony and hopeful forward motion. In the midst of all that chaos we can be together. For what it’s worth, sometimes we even are together [laughs] on several different issues.

JM: Then there’s another song on that album, “Volunteers”.

PK: It’s sort of a short version. Marty wrote most of the lyrics, and I wrote most of the music. We just came up with that almost as an afterthought, when we were making the album. We just took the lick from “We Can Be Together” and extended it for like three or four minutes, and then riffed on it. I thought Marty sings a great lead vocal on it, and it sort of specifies the whole situation, that you’ve got to do something about this. You can’t just sit around and complain about it.

You know, that was the big difference between Berkeley and San Francisco in The Sixties. Berkeley was still on this soapbox kind of way of doing things. Get up and whine and bitch about this, that, and the other thing, and try to get people to do something.

We had the unusual fortune in San Francisco, almost accidentally, of being able to focus on good things in life. And rather than complain about bad things, to a great degree we spent a lot of time musically and lyrically pointing out things that could make your life better, that had made our lives better. And we focused on doing those a lot more than normal, as opposed to just complaining about things that are. We find that a lot of things that are bad tend to go away when people are concentrating on things that they are doing that are good. And they just dissolve of their own lack of attention. That’s sort of what that’s about.

JM: Same album, the song “Wooden Ships”, written with David Crosby and Stephen Stills. How did that come about?

PK: David had this beautiful series of chord changes for about two years, and he couldn’t write anything to them. I know that David is a big fan of sailing boats on the ocean, and I went with Grace [Slick] and visited his boat one time, and just decided to write that song for David. He liked it, and we went from there. David added a few lines here and there, Stephen Stills added one verse, and I did most of the rest of the lyrics. David did most of the music. I did the beginning part a little, but most of the music was written by David, lyric-less.

JM: There was a music critic back in The Sixties, Ralph Gleason…

PK: Gleason, yeah, he was very helpful to us.

JM: He wrote a book about Jefferson Airplane, and he asked what albums you guys listen to, and one of the band members – I don’t remember which one – said, “We don’t need to listen to albums. Crosby, Stills, and Nash are hanging out at our place, and we just listen to them all the time.” Is that really what was happening back then.?

PK: Yeah. It was a very rich time. There was a guy from L.A. called Wally Heider who opened a studio in San Francisco called Wally Heider Studios. He was a really good studio builder from Los Angeles, and there were like three or four different studios in it from large to small. At this, that, or another time there was always Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Jerry Garcia, The Dead, Santana. All these people were going in and out of this studio.

They sort of built it around us, actually. When they finally got a studio together we went in there, and they were still building the studio while we were recording Volunteers, which I think was the first album we recorded there. All these people were there.

You know, making records, or CDs now, is somewhat akin to movie making, in that you spend a whole lot of time waiting for them to set this, that, or the other thing up properly. So while they were doing that we would just wander around to the other studios to see who was doing what where.

I had the great fortune later, when I was doing an album called Blows Against The Empire, a science fiction album, to have all of those people around and available. They would just come in, and “Oh, I could play something on there” they’d say, and I’d say, “Well, go right ahead” [laughs]. And I got some of Garcia’s best pedal steel work. He was just starting to learn the pedal steel, so he was a little out there in terms of what he did, and I said, “Just go as far as you want.” We recorded almost everything that he did, and chose amongst it all, what to put on the album. And Crosby and Nash, particularly, came in and did some really beautiful harmonies, and David wrote a song with me called “Have You Seen The Stars Tonite”. It was just a very nutritious time musically in San Francisco for that to occur. I got to, accidentally, take full advantage of it.

JM: I was born in 1970, so I missed all the fun…

PK: That’s what my children say. They say, “Oh Dad, you got to do everything. I don’t get to do anything.” And I say, you can find something to do. But then I joke that the sex, drugs, and rock and roll has turned into AIDS, beer, and Barry Manilow. [laughs]

JM: That’s depressing.

PK: To a certain extent, through the disco era and into The Eighties, music did sort of filter to a non-communicate-able level for me. I just got stuck listening to the old folk singers that I’m particularly fond of. Specifically the Weavers and Pete Seeger. As I say, we used a couple Weavers songs on the last folk album that we made, Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty that came out last year. We used several Weavers songs, and a Bob Dylan song, and then some older folk songs, a slave song that might have been appropriate… we’re working on an album right now of Civil War songs. There’s a song called “Follow the Drinking Gourd” which was a slave song that fit on [Jefferson's Tree of Liberty] but would’ve also fit on our Civil War album.

There’s a huge amount of great music, a lot of it Irish, which is my favorite music in the world really, Irish and Scottish music. For some reason those chord changes get me the same way that blues songs get people who love blues. I do that for Irish music. It just clicks with me instantaneously. That’s where a lot of my vocal harmonies, and ways of doing harmony come from. From that and the Weavers who used a lot of that same kind of music.

JM: Speaking of harmonies, back when Jefferson Airplane was recording in the studio, did you work out the harmonies beforehand?

PK: At the very beginning, with our first singer, I would write out some harmonies. But then when Grace got in the band, the combination of not knowing what you’re really going to do between Grace and Marty and myself, produced some of the most extravagantly lovely, in my opinion, harmonies. Most of them accidental, and very few bad notes.

I was the one who was responsible mostly for the harmony songs in the Airplane and the Starship. Marty did his solo business, and Grace did her solo business, and it was left to me to fashion these harmony songs, coming from the Weavers and God knows where else. We just did it, accidentally. I’d have a song, I’d go out and sing it once, and then they would start singing along, and they’d find places where to go, and where their range was good. They just came together, almost as an accident really. A fortuitous accident, but accidentally nonetheless.

JM: What about the instrumental arrangements? I asked you about the song “Wild Tyme”, which has a really cool psychedelic lead guitar line. Was that worked out beforehand?

PK: Same thing. In terms of my songs, I would write a song and play the chords on the guitar, and sing a background vocal or a vocal, and then we’d just go out in the studio. I’d give them chord changes on paper, and we’d just go out and start playing. Whatever came out – same way with the vocals – came out. Jorma [Kaukonen] was that kind of a guitar player, where he would just play. Even live onstage it would be different every night in its own way. Same with Jack on bass.

Like Grace and Marty and me singing together, the things just came together without a great deal of what you call planning or arranging. The only arrangement we had was the chord changes, and then we’d play whatever we liked in the middle of them. We’re not the kind of band, never have been, like The Eagles who go out and play their exact album exactly. And I can see the value in that from their point of view, but for us it would get very boring after less than a week on the road. It would just be too repetitively boring for me. And you would miss all of the surprises that come when you’ve got instrumentalists and vocalists working a capella or straight ahead without any serious arrangement to have to follow. That works very well for me, and us, and always has.

JM: You’ve brought up the names of the musicians in the classic line-up of Jefferson Airplane. They’re all very talented musicians, they they wrote songs, and so on. Was it difficult for people to get their ideas heard in the band?

PK: Not at all. The principal songwriters in those days were me and Marty and Grace. Then we encouraged Jorma to write a song or two out of his lexicon. He started writing songs, so we’d add those to the mix. That was about the extent of it in Airplane.

In Starship it was still Grace and me at that point. David Freiberg, who had joined us, wrote a couple songs. Pete Sears wrote a couple songs. But it was mainly me and Grace who wrote most of the songs.

The last album, like I said, was folk songs, and the next album is Civil War folk songs. I’ll probably manage to jam at least one crazy song of mine in there as well.

JM: Speaking of “crazy songs”, one which I’d like to get your reflection on is “Stairway to Cleveland”.

PK: I was going with a girl who had come from Cleveland, and I wanted to do a just a good trashy – not quite punk – but thrashing rock and roll song. And it just came out on its own really, without much plotting or planning. Just putting lyrics together with that strange beat that is in there, that is unusual for us. It was just a creation of its own expression about rock and roll and all the things that were going on with us at the time.

JM: I love that on the lyric sheet it says “Your manager is a wonderful person” but you sing “Your manager’s an asshole”.

PK: We were just skirting around an issue, I think. I think RCA gave some complaint about using “asshole” on the lyric sheet, even though it was on the record. That might be the reason I changed it, just to be amusing.

JM: In Jefferson Airplane you were at a lot of the key events of The Sixties. What are your memories of the Human Be-In?

PK: Well, we went into the park expecting two or three hundred people to show up, like we normally did. And it turned out to be twenty thousand, or something like that. Just that alone was exhilarating, to know that there were that many crazy people in the nearby area of San Francisco, where we thought we weren’t very many. All of the sudden there’s all these people who have this inclination to go in that direction. It was a great surprise. It was quite joyous to be there. It was a great joy to be there amongst the crowd.

The show, as always in San Francisco, at the Fillmore and everywhere else, was really secondary to the gathering itself. Almost like a harvest festival. It was good luck if the night you went to the Fillmore for this festival there was somebody good playing as well, but it wasn’t the draw. It wasn’t the prime draw. The prime draw was just all of these people recognizing that they’re here and enjoying each other, and doing what you do. The music, like I say, was secondary. As Grace once said, it was a good place to be at the party, because you could be up on the stage and see the whole party in front of you, and see what was going on where, and that sort of thing.

JM: Another big event, obviously, was Woodstock. What is your take on the original Woodstock?

PK: It was pretty much fun. It was rainy and muddy, and had all sorts of problems. Again, the gathering was extraordinary, and everything that went on over and above the stage was extraordinary. Despite the rain and the mud and the this and the that, I personally had quite a good time.

JM: Then the dark side came. What went wrong with Altamont?

PK: I think that the normal Hell’s Angels, who even we used – not quite for security but watching out for this, that, and the other thing at shows in the park and other things – didn’t come that day because they were having a meeting. Much of what we had was a bunch of glue-sniffing wannabes, and new Angels who were trying to prove themselves. Then people started mildly bumping into their motorcycles, and they got all out of hand, and had been using too many variations of this, that, or the other drug. And it just descended into what I refer to as “one life that I could have lost.” How many I have, I don’t know, but that was a dangerous thing.

JM: Is it correct that Marty got hit while he was onstage?

PK: He did. Because told them to fuck off, or something like that. The guy who hit him came back to apologize, when he found out who it was, and said “Sorry I hit you.” And Marty was sort of half waking up, and looked up and said, “Fuck you”. The guy hit him again. “You don’t say ‘fuck you’ to a Hell’s Angel. Don’t you know that?”

I went up and gave some shit to the guy later. There’s this picture of me with this big, huge, eight foot tall guy with an animal hat on his head, and I’m looking up at him with my head back and my glasses on, reading him out like some teacher reading out a high school guy that fucked up. He’s going, “I’m sorry, man” but he could have just as easily popped me. I didn’t say “fuck you”, knowing what not to do. I just gave him the principal attitude, and he apologized for it. And I said, “don’t let it happen again.” Then he invited me back for a party at the Hell’s Angels house after the show, and I said I had to go back to San Francisco.

JM: So was it one of the Hell’s Angels that hit Marty?

PK: I’m pretty sure it was one of the Hell’s Angels. It may have even been the guy I was reading out.

JM: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

PK: Just keep playing. Play your guitar as many places as you can. If you want to work with other musicians, go to places where other musicians are. And learn from them.

Hopefully you’ll have some favorite musicians and music. The way I started out was copying and learning things from people that I liked, like Fred Neil and the Weavers, and stuff like that. Eventually I started writing a song or two. The first song I ever wrote actually became part of the lyrics of “Wooden Ships”. Part of the lyrics of the first song I ever wrote.

Go places that music exists, and immerse yourself in it in as many ways you can find enjoyable and possible. And be around people who play music, and give you new ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of. Just sitting in your back room making up music and putting it on a tape recorder is fine for a certain element of things. But for me I love the interaction between musicians, which for me produces usually a “one and one equals three” kind of situation. And things occur that you never would have thought of by yourself, and other people’s influences touch you and move you. So, yeah, other people.

JM: You had mentioned science fiction before. How would you say that science fiction has influenced your songwriting?

PK: I’ve been reading science fiction since I was a child. I read all of the basic guys, Asimov and Heinlein, etc, etc. One of the first books that got me into reading was science fiction. So I’ve always treasured it, and for some reason I’ve been drawn to it. The concepts involved allow almost anything to occur within the story. And just the idea of exploring the world. Much like I was talking about before between us and Berkeley, where they complained about this, that, and the other thing, and we explored new areas of things to do. God knows why, but we got away with it. We all probably should have been thrown in jail for twenty years. But we got away with exploring. So science fiction is just another mode of exploring for me, and I love to explore the unknown.

JM: Is it true that you were the one who coined the phrase, “If you remember The Sixties, then you weren’t actually there”?

PK: Everybody has credit for that. I think Robin Williams was the first one that I know of who said it.

JM: But maybe you said it and don’t remember, right?

Pete Seeger is a legendary folk singer with quite a colorful history. In the early 1940′s he performed with the Almanac Singers, whose ranks also included Woody Guthrie. In 1948 he co-founded The Weavers, which had a number one hit with their cover of “Goodnight, Irene” by Leadbelly. In 1953, The Weavers were dropped by their record label and their songs were denied airplay because of suspected communist activities. When Seeger was called to testify before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, he refused to name his personal and political associations, which led to him being found in contempt of Congress and blacklisted. Seeger was a key figure in the 1960′s folk revival, and wrote or co-wrote the folk classics “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer”, and “Turn, Turn, Turn!”. He also helped to popularize “We Shall Overcome”, which became an anthem for the American Civil Rights Movement. Seeger also recorded multiple albums for children. In January 2009, at age 89, Seeger led the crowd in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” at President Obama’s inauguration.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter?

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Sir George Martin

Sir George Martin, commonly referred to as the “fifth Beatle,” is recognized as one of the top producers in the history of recorded sound. His musical arrangements and use of studio experimentation elevated many of The Beatles’ songs, with notable examples including “Yesterday”, “Strawberry Fields”, “I Am The Walrus”, and “Eleanor Rigby”. Martin also produced albums by Jeff Beck, Mahavishnu Orchestra, America, Cheap Trick, and others.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Sir George Martin: So much depends on the talent and abilities of the individual. If one is suited to perform or compose music and has a genuine talent, then the age old adages apply: the advice is consistent hard work in training and practice to develop the talent and then persistence in finding the opportunity to perform.

Many thanks to Brooks Firestone for passing this question on to Sir George Martin while he was in the Santa Barbara area, and for sending his reply.

Steve Reich

Steve Reich is a pioneering composer, who along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is viewed as one of the most important figures in minimal music.

Reich’s early compositions “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Come Out” (1966) made use of tape loops which went out of phase with each other, an idea which he extended to live instrumentation with “Piano Phase” (1967) and “Violin Phase” (1967). He also explored the concept of “music as a gradual process” in pieces such as “Pendulum Music” (1968), in which microphones as pendula swing over a speaker, causing feedback.

His music took a new turn with “Drumming” (1971), inspired by a trip to Ghana. Steady pulse and rhythm became a dominant element of his compositions, including in the acclaimed “Music For 18 Musicians” (1976), widely viewed as one of his most important pieces.

Reich’s pieces began to incorporate themes from history and from his Jewish heritage with “Tehillim” (1981), which is the original Hebrew word for Psalms. Such themes continued with “Different Trains” (1988) which uses voices including those of Holocaust survivors, “The Cave” (1993) based on The Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron which uses videos developed by his wife Beryl Korot, the opera “Three Tales” (1998-2002) about The Hindenberg, the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, and cloning, which also uses visuals by Korot, and “WTC 9/11″ (2011) which uses voices related to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Reich’s compositions have been highly influential in the world of classical music, and he has been called “America’s greatest living composer.” In the rock music world, his influence has been cited for artists including Brian Eno, King Crimson, The Residents, and Tortoise. Reich is currently working on a piece based on the music of Radiohead.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring composer or musician?

Steve Reich: To the aspiring composer, the advice that I would give you is be around a community of players. Don’t be sitting around a classroom talking about music, analyzing music. Go where there are lots of players and where you can write a piece and get it played, and write another piece and get it played, and learn what works and what doesn’t work.

And also, if you can, get involved in performance. I had an ensemble for forty years – we’re now on hold because I really can’t take the responsibilities of being a bandleader – so when I travel around now I coach, and I sometimes sit in for certain pieces that can be done easily, like “Clapping Music” or something like that. But, you know, my ensemble was a very active presence, and lots and lots and lots of recordings were made, and we still occasionally play together, I mean with individuals. I just played with Russell Hartenberger at Ohio State about a month ago.

So get involved, I would say to them. Get involved in the performance of your own music. If you play an instrument, play an instrument. If you conduct, conduct. If you program a drum machine, program a drum machine. But get involved on a practical level.

Another thing, if you write a piece, make sure that it gets played. And hopefully it gets played more than once, because if you write something that’s not worth playing more than once, then you better write another piece fast.

For full interview with Steve Reich, click here.

Jeff Barry

Jeff Barry is one of rock and roll’s most accomplished songwriters, and was recently selected for a 2010 Ahmet Ertegun Award by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Barry and his songwriting partner Ellie Greenwich co-wrote such early rock and roll classics as “Be My Baby”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Chapel of Love”, “River Deep, Mountain High” (all co-written with Phil Spector), “Leader of the Pack” (co-written with George “Shadow” Morton), “Hanky Panky,” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” Later, Barry co-wrote the bubblegum smash “Sugar, Sugar” with Andy Kim, and theme songs for the TV shows “The Jeffersons,” “One Day at a Time,” and “Family Ties.” Barry also was the producer for many well-known songs, including “I’m A Believer” by The Monkees, and early Neil Diamond songs such as “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” and “Kentucky Woman.”

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter?

Jeff Barry: [long pause] Have a clear vision of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. All show-biz, all entertainment has one thing in common, whether it’s film, TV, writing a novel, a song, or a script, painting, anything. Almost all creativity that is even commercial design, cars, you know, designing…, what do you call that, when you’re designing products? That’s what I was studying to be, too, before I quit. It’s all about creating emotion. There’s an old adage that if you leave them like you found them, you blew it. So it’s all about creating emotion, and a songwriter needs to understand that as well. That’s why people want to buy, and own I should say, the thing that you’re presenting, because it creates an emotion. Otherwise why would they want it? I think that’s fact #1.

You’re communicating. You could even say songs to some degree are a little like greeting cards. People buy them to express something to someone else that they can’t make up themselves. So it’s all about communication and creating emotion. If you’re writing strictly for yourself, and the lyrics are obtuse and unavailable and people don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, then you sure are limiting your ability to create emotion. So write those songs, get that stuff out, that’s fine.

But if you want to make a living at it, you need to write songs that are commercial. Commercial is a good word. There is nobody in show business that is not trying to be commercial. I don’t care how obscure and weird they are, they want to sell, which is commercial. Pop is short for popular, and that’s the idea. If you’re not looking to make a career of it, it doesn’t matter. Write songs, that’s great. Play them for family and friends, and whatever, that’s beautiful, there’s nothing wrong with that.

But your question, I think, is aimed at people that want to make a living at it, which is tough these days. I’m very thankful that when I came into the industry the songs were more valued than they are today. Today record companies are interested in things other than the songs, a lot of the time. And the artists who are writing their own songs, they’re having hits, maybe not based on the song all the time, [instead] on the rhythm and the haircut and the tattoo and the weirdness and the publicity. Which is different from what it was back then. In my heyday, it was certainly more based on radio play, what it sounded like. The E Channel didn’t exist, and TV wasn’t such a source of entertainment as it is today. The visual, let’s put it that way. It was more about the audio than it is today, which is a lot to do with the visual.

So the advice would be to basically create emotion, keep it simple, keep it clear. When you’re trying to get to somebody in the industry, take the three to five best songs, most commercial songs, most valuable songs, and put them on a disk. Don’t present 25 songs. You don’t have 25 hits, you just don’t. Take the best five, even if you have 25 smashes. Take the best five. Get that to whoever you can. And the emotion you want to bring out in anyone that you’re pitching to is greed. No one is going to do you any favors. Greed is a healthy word, whether it’s a music publisher, or a recording artist, or an A&R person at a label, or a record producer. You want them to want the material. No one is going to do you any favors, record it just because. If it’s a relative, perhaps. But otherwise, as it should be, they have to hear something that is going to make them look good, make them a success. So keep that in mind.

The other hint would be, sometimes you start a song and you write the first verse and you write the chorus, and then you get to the second verse and you can’t come up with the second verse. It could be that you’ve already written it. You take the first verse, make it the second verse, and then write the first verse [as] pre-story, set-up. That will free you up. So in other words, the beginning, middle, and end, I mean you might have already written the middle. And if you have, and you put it at the beginning, you’re messed up. Because then you’re going to write the ending for the middle, and you’ll have no ending. So I find that, for myself, that works. Because basically if you have an idea for a song you’ll write the core idea instantly, and the core, which is represented in the chorus usually too, but story-wise many times it’s overrepresented in the first verse. So you can take a look at that. That might be a good hint for songwriters in general.

For full interview with Jeff Barry, click here.

Graham Nash

Graham Nash is an English singer and songwriter best known for his contributions to British Invasion band The Hollies (he co-wrote “Carrie Anne”, “King Midas in Reverse”, “On a Carousel”, and “Dear Eloise”, and sang on many others including “Bus Stop”), to Crosby, Stills, & Nash & sometimes Young (he wrote “Teach Your Children”, “Our House”, “Wasted on the Way”, and “Marrakesh Express”, and sang on nearly all of their output) and as a solo artist (he wrote “Chicago” and “We Can Change the World”). In 2010 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his service to music and to charity.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Graham Nash: Gotta mean it. Gotta believe it. You gotta have a passion for it. ‘Cause if you don’t you’re fucking wasting your time.

Fats Domino

Fats Domino is one of the pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll, bringing New Orleans rhythm & blues into the fledgling genre. His first hit, “The Fat Man”, was released in 1950 and sold over a million copies; it is sometimes argued to be the first rock ‘n’ roll song. His 1955 song “Ain’t That A Shame” become a #1 pop hit for Pat Boone. The next year, his version of “Blueberry Hill” reached #2 in the pop charts, and spent eleven weeks at #1 on the R&B charts; it sold more than 5 million copies. Another notable song was “I’m Walkin”, which hit #4 on the pop charts in 1957. All told, between 1956 and 1960 Domino sold 65 million records, second only to Elvis Presley.

From the 1980′s onward, Domino rarely left New Orleans, not even for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or an invitation to perform at the White House. He was feared to have been killed when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but he survived; his home is being restored, and he hopes to return there someday.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Fats Domino:

Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson is an American icon, a country music legend who has written and/or recorded hit versions of classics including “Crazy” (a hit for Patsy Cline), “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain”, “Georgia on My Mind”, “Blue Skies”, “All of Me”, “On the Road Again”, “Always on My Mind”, “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”, “Good Hearted Woman”, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”, and “Pancho and Lefty”. His #1 country albums include the outlaw country classic Red Headed Stranger, Stardust, and Always on My Mind. He has also lent his talent to a number of fundraisers, including the 1985 Farm Aid concert which he set up along with Neil Young and John Mellencamp. He continues to tour extensively.

Willie’s response was transmitted by his granddaughter Raelyn Nelson, herself an aspiring songwriter/musician. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Willie Nelson: Don’t stop writing and keep playing.

George Clinton

George Clinton is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the development of funk music, along with James Brown and Sly Stone. Clinton was the mastermind of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic, whose notable 1970′s albums include Mothership Connection, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, Maggot Brain, and One Nation Under a Groove, and whose songs include “Flash Light” and “One Nation Under A Groove” (both of which reached No. 1 in the US R&B charts), “Give Up The Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)”, “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)”, and “Dr. Funkenstein”. Clinton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, and continues to tour.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

George Clinton: Hang the fuck in there.

Wanda Jackson

Wanda Jackson is often referred to as the “Queen of Rockabilly”, and for good reason. After some success as a country singer, Elvis Presley himself encouraged her to try singing rockabilly, resulting in a string of hot tracks including “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad”, “Mean, Mean Man”, “Fujiyama Mama” (which hit No. 1 in Japan), “Funnel of Love”, and “Let’s Have a Party” (which was a Top 40 hit in the U.S.) She blazed the trail for women in rock ‘n’ roll, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. Not content to rest on her laurels, earlier this year she released an album of smoking covers called The Party Ain’t Over, which was produced by and featured the guitar of Jack White.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Wanda Jackson: Well, things have changed so much in the industry. So I really don’t know much about the workings of it. Even country music is big business these days. It’s a big thing. So everything’s different.

But I would say I think it’s a good time. People are loving music, and they’re accepting people who are different, and want to do it their own way.

So, golly, I would say, you have to get a record contract, that’s your first step. And I don’t know how to tell anybody how to do that. They’d have to ask someone… People come to me now to record, so I really don’t know how to go about going out.

But you just knock on doors and talk to people, and sing everywhere that you have the opportunity. And hold on to your dream, and don’t be swayed. You might get detoured, but that’s OK. If something happens in your life, that you can’t sing or something for a while, it’s OK. Go ahead and do what you have to do. But hang onto that dream, and continue to be determined.

For full interview with Wanda Jackson, click here.

Jon Anderson

Jon Anderson is, quite literally, the voice of Yes, the band whose albums The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close To The Edge are amongst the most beloved of the progressive rock genre. Songs from this era co-written by Anderson include “Roundabout”, “Yours Is No Disgrace”, “I’ve Seen All Good People”, “Heart Of The Sunrise”, and many others. His first solo album was 1976′s Olias of Sunhillow, and he sang on Yes’ 1983 runaway hit “Owner of a Lonely Heart”. Anderson also had a long-running collaboration with Vangelis of Chariots of Fire fame. (Robin Kauffman photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Jon Anderson: Never give up…. keep practising, music will always give you a life… a special life.. be true to your dreams…

For full interview with Jon Anderson, click here.

Chuck D

Chuck D is one of the most important figures in the history of hip-hop music. He is the founder and lead rapper for the hugely influential (and controversial) band Public Enemy, which created a powerful mix of politically-charged lyrics and layered, aggressive sounds. Their second album, 1988′s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, is widely regarded as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, and is considered to be hugely important for making rap music popular with white audiences. Other notable Public Enemy albums include Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987), Fear of a Black Planet (1990), Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black (1991), and How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? (2007).

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Chuck D:

1. Truly do what you do from your training and belief.

2. TRY NOT TO ASK other people opinions of your art.

3. Give music away like an advertisement for your performance as an act.

4. Make a video for 33% of your music, we live in a visual audio age, not audio visual.

For full interview with Chuck D, click here.

Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones is an acclaimed singer-songwriter who released her first album in 1979 and won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1980. Her song “Chuck E.’s In Love” was a huge hit, as were her first two albums, both of which reached the Top 5 in the U.S. She went on to release a dozen more albums in various styles, and her 1989 duet with Dr. John, “Makin’ Whoopee!”, won her another Grammy Award.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Rickie Lee Jones: Remember the Music. Concentrate on how you feel when you sing it. If there’s a place you don’t like, fix it. That’s the place that’s not true. Have fun always. Even sad songs, have fun. Go there to the place the song Is. And remember, it’s your job to make Them cry, not to cry yourself.

For full interview with Rickie Lee Jones, click here.

Todd Rundgren

Todd Rundgren has worn many musical hats, from principal songwriter and guitarist for the 1960′s Anglophile band The Nazz, to the pop meister who wrote the 1972 hit “Hello, It’s Me” and co-wrote the 1983 anti-work anthem “Bang the Drum All Day,” to a member of the prog-rock ensemble Utopia, to the lead singer of The New Cars after Ric Ocasek decided not to join a reunion of The Cars, to the producer of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, The New York Dolls’ debut album, and albums by many other artists including Patti Smith, Grand Funk Railroad, and XTC.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Todd Rundgren: Well, as you will recall, I gave you this whole dissertation about the difference between being a musician, and a performer, and an entertainer. The first thing to do is to have a clear distinction of what you’re trying to accomplish in that regard.

So if you want to be a musician, the first thing you need to do is get a day job [laughs]. You need to find something to do to feed yourself because music is one of these things where there aren’t success guarantees. It’s not like going to business school, getting an MBA, and then finding a job in a company somewhere. You’re going to go through this period of mystery regarding whether or not you are going to be able to ever make a living at making music. At some point you will have to make a decision that, yes, this is the life that I want to live, and that this is enough success for me to at least make a commitment to that lifestyle. Or you’re going to give up and find something else to do.

The question that you’ll have to answer for yourself at that point is, “am I really any good at it?” If I’m good at it, then regardless of what I have to do otherwise, I’m going to continue to do it. Because I’m good at it, you know? Because it means something to me to do it. And being good at it means that people respond to you.

I mean, you could say that there are egg-headed measures that only a musician would understand, in order to determine if something’s good. But really, the bottom line is, do other people enjoy listening to what you do? If they enjoy it enough to eventually go out of pocket to hear it.

But if you really just believe that you’re doing something musically important, and other people don’t understand it yet or whatever, and you’ll be lauded after you die for your incredible musicality that nobody was yet ready to listen to, then I don’t have any advice, you know [laughs]. You already have the level of self-assurance that makes you keep going regardless of what kind of success you have.

If the kind of advice is, how can I succeed as a musician, in other words, to get paid to do it… you know, I’m having enough trouble myself and I don’t need the competition. So if I knew how, I wouldn’t reveal it [laughs]. And I wouldn’t be telling you how to do it.

For full interview with Todd Rundgren, click here.

Alan Parsons

Alan Parsons has had a truly amazing career in music. His start was as an assistant engineer on the Abbey Road and Let It Be albums by The Beatles. He went on to engineer Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and their sonic masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon. He also engineered and/or produced works by Paul McCartney (Red Rose Speedway, Wildlife), The Hollies (“The Air That I Breathe”), Pilot (“Magic”), Al Stewart (“The Year of the Cat”), and Ambrosia. He then focused his attention on The Alan Parsons Project, with classic albums including Tales of Mystery and Imagination, I Robot, Pyramid, Eve, The Turn of a Friendly Card, and Eye in the Sky, and songs including “Eye in the Sky”, “Games People Play”, “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”, and “Sirius”, the latter of which is particularly beloved by fans of the Chicago Bulls.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Alan Parsons: Never give up. It’s tough, but never give up.

[different day, asked same question]

Alan Parsons: I think the basis of successful rock music is collaboration. I think too many people try to do it on their own, and sit in front of their laptop and try to be creative, and think that they can do the whole thing themselves. All the best records have come from successful collaborations, co-writing, co-performing. I would encourage musicians to work with others.

For full interview with Alan Parsons, click here.

Mark Volman

Mark Volman and long-time collaborator Howard Kaylan were founding members of The Turtles, whose 1960′s hits include “Happy Together” and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”. When The Turtles disbanded, Volman and Kaylan joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and due to contractual reasons adopted the names Flo & Eddie. Flo & Eddie performed on the Zappa albums Chunga’s Revenge, Fillmore East June 1971, and Just Another Band from L.A., and in the movie 200 Motels. Flo & Eddie also sang background vocals for T. Rex, including on the worldwide hit “Get It On (Bang A Gong)” and the albums Electric Warrior and The Slider.

And that’s just scratching the surface. They also sang on records by notable artists including Bruce Springsteen (“Hungry Heart”), The Psychedelic Furs (“Love My Way”), Stephen Stills, Alice Cooper, Ray Manzarek, Keith Moon, The Ramones, and Blondie. Volman is also the Chair of the Entertainment Industry Studies program at Belmont University in Nashville.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Mark Volman: Well, learn the business. In this day and age, any young musician who is trying to have any kind of success at all should strengthen themselves emotionally, spiritually and creatively. And one of the ways you do that is by becoming much more aware of the business of music, because it will allow you to become more valuable in all of the areas of your career. And it will help you to be able to look at what’s going on management-wise, and creatively that is very important to understand ownership, and understand publishing, and understand what record companies are about.

If you’re really moving towards the music in a business way, then you definitely have to take the time to take yourself more seriously, and the way you do that is to become much more in tune with the elements that come into the music business in terms of ownership and what makes a good manager, and what makes a good record company. So that you can protect yourself. The saddest thing is for a musician to have a great record lost in the shuffle because he didn’t know what needed to be done. Just because you make the record doesn’t allow you the ability to ignore the necessities of marketing, and public relations, and advertising, and understanding what needs to be done in the most important things.

For full interview with Mark Volman, click here.

Howard Kaylan

Howard Kaylan and long-time collaborator Mark Volman were founding members of The Turtles, whose 1960′s hits include “Happy Together” and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”. When The Turtles disbanded, Volman and Kaylan joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and due to contractual reasons adopted the names Flo & Eddie. Flo & Eddie performed on the Zappa albums Chunga’s Revenge, Fillmore East June 1971, and Just Another Band from L.A., and in the movie 200 Motels. Flo & Eddie also sang background vocals for T. Rex, including on the worldwide hit “Get It On (Bang A Gong)” and the albums Electric Warrior and The Slider. And that’s just scratching the surface. They also sang on records by notable artists including Bruce Springsteen (“Hungry Heart”), The Psychedelic Furs (“Love My Way”), Stephen Stills, Alice Cooper, Ray Manzarek, Keith Moon, The Ramones, and Blondie.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Howard Kaylan: Don’t give yourself a fallback plan. Never give yourself a fallback plan. Because the minute things go wrong, you’ll fall back. Go straight ahead with your career, and pretend that it’s the only important thing in your life, because it is. If you give yourself something to fall back on, like another career, you’ll be selling shoes.

Richie Furay

Richie Furay is best known for co-founding two notable bands: Buffalo Springfield, which is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and for which Furay was one of the primary songwriters along with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, and Poco, which is regarded as one of the pioneering bands of the country-rock genre. After leaving Poco in the early 1970′s, Furay was in the short-lived supergroup Souther-Hillman-Furay, and has since released several solo records. His song credits include “Kind Woman”, “A Child’s Claim To Fame”, “Hurry Up”, “Keep On Believin’”, “You Are The One”, and “Let’s Dance Tonight”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Richie Furay: Enjoy the gift; be serious about it but don’t take yourself too seriously.

For full interview with Richie Furay, click here.

Ted Nugent

Ted Nugent is known as the Motor City Madman for his gonzo persona, music, guitar playing, and right-wing punditry. He was in the Detroit band The Amboy Dukes best known for the 1968 acid-rock song “Journey to the Center of the Mind”. After going solo in the 1970′s, he recorded the multi-platinum classic hard rock albums Ted Nugent, Free-for-All, and Cat Scratch Fever, plus the live album Double Live Gonzo!

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ted Nugent: Stay clean and sober and treat your mind, body and soul as a sacred temple. Eat smart, remain athletic. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Be early, stay late. Carry yourself with confidence and pride. Demand accountability from yourself and everyone around you. Put your heart and soul into everything you do and demand the same from everyone around you. Avoid losers. Get a bow and arrow, discover the spirit within. Aim small, miss small. Listen to every black soul artist, R&B and blues artist you can. Listen closely. Be one with the groove. Trample the weak, hurdle the dead.

For full interview with Ted Nugent, click here.

Billy Corgan

Billy Corgan is the lead guitarist and singer for Smashing Pumpkins, one of the best known alternative rock bands which broke through in the 1990′s. Their 1993 album Siamese Dream is widely recognized as one of the best and most influential albums of the decade.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Billy Corgan: I don’t know, because in the old days it was just, get your shit together and tour, and now I think that’s a complete waste of time. I think if you go recording first, you know, you end up being sort of a victim to the pitchfork[.com] culture, of “you know, that’s really precious.” I think the lack of bands of great width and power says something about the ground level. When we came in at the ground level, we had to be able to play. And I don’t think that exists anymore, so I don’t know.

I mean, your first album could be hailed as a masterpiece, you can play, and there’s forty guys with beards [in the audience], but it’s not going to translate to Iowa.

JM: I’m from Iowa, by the way [laughs].

BC: That was always the Pumpkins’ thing. Yeah, things like The Strokes and bands like that, that might work in New York, but it doesn’t work in fucking Iowa. That’s the thing. You can’t really truly succeed in America. You see a lot of English bands that come and play New York, Philly, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, LA, they play like eight cities and then they get the fuck out. Because they can’t go through the heartland.

I think it’s really difficult. Honestly, I don’t know. I think, sometimes, well, if I was eighteen, what would I do?

I think at the end of the day, talent is always the great arbiter. Every system is different. But at the end of the day, it should be that the talented win. Right now the mediocre seem to be winning. You know, the ones that… if everything’s niche, then you have to be somebody who kind of basically attracts four niches to add your thing up. Or be really non-offensive. And I don’t know how you do rock and roll and be non-offensive. Coldplay mastered that [everyone laughs]. I think they’re really good, but I’m saying, they mastered the art of feeling a little dangerous without being dangerous at all.

For the full chat with Billy Corgan, click here.

Peter Buck

Peter Buck is guitarist and co-founder of the long-running alternative rock band R.E.M., whose songs include “Radio Free Europe”, “It’s The End of the World As We Know It”, “Stand”, “The One I Love”, “Everybody Hurts”, “Man on the Moon”, “Losing My Religion”, “Shiny Happy People”, and “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”. In 2007, R.E.M. was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Buck has also produced records by The Feelies, Uncle Tupelo, and others.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Peter Buck: Only do it if you have to. It’s a great life, but if you’re doubting that you want to be a musician for life then you shouldn’t be, because it’s tough work. And don’t ever sign anything. I’m one of the only people I know who didn’t get ripped off.

JM: Because you didn’t sign anything?

PB: I’ve been careful.

Bryan Adams

Bryan Adams is the all-time best-selling male Canadian artist, having co-written and performed some of the best known songs of the 1980′s and 1990′s, including rockers like “Cuts Like a Knife”, “Run to You”, “Summer of 69″, and “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started”, plus the ballads “Straight from the Heart”, and “Heaven”. He has also brought us mega-hit songs from movies, most notably the theme song “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” from the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which spent a record sixteen straight weeks as the No. 1 song in the United Kingdom. He has also hit No. 1 with “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” from Don Juan DeMarco, and “All For Love”, performed with Rod Stewart and Sting from The Three Musketeers. He even did the soundtrack for the 2002 DreamWorks animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Bryan Adams: Well, as long as you are OK with the fact that you’ll probably never get paid for your work, thanks to internet and free downloading, then at least don’t sign your songs away. Hang on to everything you can.

For full interview with Bryan Adams, click here.

Maceo Parker

Saxophonist Maceo Parker played on many of James Brown’s most popular songs, including “I Got You (I Feel Good)”, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, “I Got The Feelin’”, and “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud”. He also played with George Clinton on Parliament’s albums such as The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein and Mothership Connection. More recently, he has made guest appearances on recordings with the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Brian Ferry, Living Colour, Deee-Lite, 10,000 Maniacs, and Prince. He has been described as the funkiest saxophonist on the planet, and Music Illuminati would have to agree. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Maceo Parker: Play. You don’t necessarily have to be in a group. If you’re in a group, that’s alright, but just try and find situations where you can play, play, play, play, play. Because the more you play the better you get at it.

“Weird Al” Yankovic

When “Weird Al” Yankovic was sixteen years old, he gave a home-recorded tape of original and parody songs to Dr. Demento, who broadcast them on his radio show. This was the beginning of Yankovic’s career in comedic music, which really took off in 1984 with his hit song with “Eat It”, a parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” with a hilarious video which spoofed Jackson’s own. He has released many other popular parodies, including another song by Jackson (“Fat”) and songs by Madonna (“Like A Surgeon”), Queen (“Another One Rides The Bus”), Nirvana (“Smells Like Nirvana”), Coolio (“Amish Paradise”), and Chamillionaire (“White & Nerdy”). He also has written a number of original comedy songs.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter or musician?

“Weird Al” Yankovic: I would say give up, because all of the slots are filled. There’s really no openings left. So thanks for your interest, but they’re not taking applications anymore.

Abdul “Duke” Fakir

The Four Tops, one of Motown’s premiere music groups, performed the timeless classics “Baby I Need Your Loving”, “Bernadette”, “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, and “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)”, the latter two of which reached #1 in the US charts. The original group members Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, Lawrence Payton, and Abdul “Duke” Fakir stayed together from 1953 until 1997, and The Four Tops continue to perform today with Fakir as the only surviving member.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Abdul “Duke” Fakir: Learn everything you can about being a musician. And just be totally committed. Don’t let nothing stop you. If you really know you’re good enough, and you really feel it in your bones, just follow that. Because you’ll push the doors open. Those doors will come open if you do it and you’re really committed. It just might take a while. Don’t get discouraged.

David “Honeyboy” Edwards

David “Honeyboy” Edwards is a Delta bluesman who was with legendary fellow-bluesman Robert Johnson on the night in 1938 that Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey that led to his premature death. Edwards was first recorded in 1942 by folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Edwards was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996, won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, and in 2010 received a Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy. Edwards died on August 29, 2011 at age 96.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

David “Honeyboy” Edwards: If you’re playing, and you like to play, keep on playin’. Don’t care what anybody tells you, you do what you want to do. Keep on playin’. That’s the way I do it. Keep on playin’. And finally it’ll pay off.

JM: By the time you’re 95?

DHE: Yeah.

Ray Manzarek

Ray Manzarek is best known for being the co-founder and keyboard player for The Doors. Since The Doors didn’t have a bassist, he also usually covered the bass parts on the keyboard as well. The Doors recorded six acclaimed studio albums before Jim Morrison died. Manzarek has also recorded several solo albums, including The Golden Scarab and The Whole Thing Started With Rock & Roll Now It’s Out of Control, both from 1974. His production credits include the debut album by Los Angeles punk band X.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ray Manzarek: Practice, practice, practice.

JM: That’s how you get to Carnegie Hall, right?

RM: That’s how you get to Carnegie Hall, exactly. And if you’re a guitar player, learn your fucking scales. A, E, G, D, C, then when you get good, E flat and B flat. Learn your scales. I want to hear you go [sings] da da da da da da da da. Major and minor. And practice, practice, practice.

John Densmore

John Densmore is best known for being the co-founder and drummer for The Doors, who recorded six acclaimed studio albums before singer Jim Morrison died. Densmore’s jazz-influenced drumming is often credited as an important component of the band’s unique sound. After The Doors’ demise, Densmore and Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger founded The Butts Band, which released two mid-Seventies albums.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

John Densmore: That if you’re completely obsessed, go for it. Otherwise, it’s a big roll of the dice. So keep your day job, but if you have to do it, just do it.

Paul Kantner

Paul Kantner was a co-founder, singer, rhythm guitarist, and songwriter for the Sixties psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit”. His songwriting credits include “Crown of Creation”, “We Can Be Together”, “Volunteers” (co-written with bandmate Marty Balin) and “Wooden Ships” (co-written with David Crosby and Stephen Stills). Kantner stayed onboard when Jefferson Airplane morphed into Jefferson Starship. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Paul Kantner: Just keep playing. Play your guitar as many places as you can. If you want to work with other musicians, go to places where other musicians are. And learn from them.

Hopefully you’ll have some favorite musicians and music. The way I started out was copying and learning things from people that I liked, like Fred Neil and the Weavers, and stuff like that. Eventually I started writing a song or two. The first song I ever wrote actually became part of the lyrics of “Wooden Ships”. Part of the lyrics of the first song I ever wrote.

Go places that music exists, and immerse yourself in it in as many ways you can find enjoyable and possible. And be around people who play music, and give you new ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of. Just sitting in your back room making up music and putting it on a tape recorder is fine for a certain element of things. But for me I love the interaction between musicians, which for me produces usually a “one and one equals three” kind of situation. And things occur that you never would have thought of by yourself, and other people’s influences touch you and move you. So, yeah, other people.

For full interview with Paul Kantner, click here.

Jorma Kaukonen

Jorma Kaukonen was the lead guitarist for the Sixties psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” from the album Surrealistic Pillow. His signature song is the instrumental “Embryonic Journey” from the same album. Other acclaimed Jefferson Airplane albums include After Bathing At Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers. As the Sixties wound down, Kaukonen and Airplane bassist Jack Casady’s attention shifted to their new band Hot Tuna, which focused on acoustic and electric folk- and blues-based music. Kaukonen has also released multiple solo albums, including 1974′s masterpiece Quah. Kaukonen continues to tour in Hot Tuna, and with his wife owns and operates the Fur Peace Ranch which runs a yearly music and guitar camp.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jorma Kaukonen: I guess the most important thing is, first and foremost, to love whatever it is that you do. Whatever your muse, whatever kind of music, whatever instrument that you play, you love that first. Every now and then you meet people that are chasing stardom. If that works for you, then that’s great. If you’re lucky it might happen. It probably won’t. But if you love to play music you’ll have a great companion for your whole life.

For full interview with Jorma Kaukonen, click here.

Jack Casady

Jack Casady played bass guitar for the Sixties band Jefferson Airplane, which is best known for the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit”. Their albums Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing At Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers are amongst the best of the psychedelic rock genre. Casady also played on “Voodoo Chile” with Jimi Hendrix, and “Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)” from David Crosby’s first solo album. As the Sixties wound down, Casady and Jefferson Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen’s attention shifted to their new band Hot Tuna, which focused on acoustic and electric folk- and blues-based music. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jack Casady: Well, I think nowadays there’s so much opportunity to investigate music. When I was a kid, I would get on a bus in Washington D.C., and go down to the Library of Congress. You’d get signed in, and you’d get to pull out records and take them into booths, and listen to world music – that it’s called now. Music from all over the world. Later on, in the early Sixties they started to be put out in collections on albums. But nowadays you have the Internet, you can do so much exploration of music from all over the world, and I think that’s really fascinating for any young musician, and to hear music from all different time periods. I mean, you’ve got recorded music for a hundred years now, so I think that offers a tremendous opportunity to expand your horizons, and hear different approaches, and to be intrigued and inspired to work on the music yourself.

There’s that aspect, and then there’s the good old know your instrument, know the theory. It always pays to take lessons and explore the harmonic aspect of your instrument as well as music in general. I tell my bass players, you should play another instrument that has chords. You should at least play a guitar, and learn piano. It would expand your horizons terrifically. Particularly in songwriting, and writing music in general.

For full interview with Jack Casady, click here.

Martin Gore

Martin Gore is a multi-instrumentalist, sometimes singer, and principal songwriter for electro-pop band Depeche Mode, whose hits have included “People Are People”, “Personal Jesus”, and “Enjoy the Silence”. Depeche Mode has sold over 100 million albums and singles worldwide, and has been called “the most popular electronic band the world has ever known”. Photo: 805Live.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Martin Gore: I would advise any aspiring musicians to just try to be original, and do something that’s unique. Obviously you take influences from something you like, but you have to somehow put a twist on it and do something that comes from the heart that is different from everybody else.

Robben Ford

Robben Ford has been playing guitar professionally for over four decades, and was ranked one of the Greatest 100 Guitarists of the 20th Century by Musician magazine. He has released multiple solo albums, helped launch the jazz fusion band Yellowjackets, and has worked with artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to Jimmy Witherspoon to Kiss to George Harrison to Miles Davis.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Robben Ford: If it was a guitar player, I would tell them to learn chords, and chord voicings. And learn how to play songs. A lot of musicians, and particularly jazz musicians, they want to learn how to solo. How to play a lot of notes. What will always make that an easier road is if you understand harmony, if you understand chords, and how to use chords. If you know chords, you can play songs. If you can play songs, you’re making music. You’re not asking yourself to come up with something out of thin air. That’s a big problem for musicians, too. It’s like they just don’t know what to do. They don’t where to begin, they don’t know where to go. Again, if you know how to play chords on your instrument, and you learn some songs so that you can use these chords, you’re making music right there. And that can be done in a matter of, if not weeks, months. You can be making music. So that would be my advice.

For full interview with Robben Ford, click here.

Bob Cowsill

Bob Cowsill played guitar and sang in The Cowsills, a band of siblings and their mother who recorded some of the most beautiful sunshine pop in the 1960′s, including the hits “Hair” and “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” (think “I love the flower girl”). The Cowsills played on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and The Johnny Cash Show, and were the inspiration for the TV series The Partridge Family. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Bob Cowsill: Well first, get good at what you do. Then once you have something that you’re good at, and you want people to hear it, get on the internet and take advantage of all the free ways of marketing yourself, that cost you nothing. You get a YouTube presence, you play, you put it on YouTube. That’s number one. I only say that because you can do that immediately, without a record deal, without any help. That gets you out there. And when you go looking for bigger stuff, you’re gonna have to be tough, you’re gonna hear “no” a lot, you’ve gotta hang in.

John Cowsill

John Cowsill played drums and sang in The Cowsills, a band of siblings and their mother who recorded some of the most beautiful sunshine pop in the 1960′s, including the hits “Hair” and “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” (think “I love the flower girl”). The Cowsills played on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and The Johnny Cash Show, and were the inspiration for the TV series The Partridge Family. Later, John played drums and sang background vocals on “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone. He is currently the touring drummer for The Beach Boys. (L. Paul Mann photo)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

John Cowsill: [laughs] I don’t have any advice. I mean, you either do it or you don’t do it. You either like it or you don’t. I guess, do it for the right reason – because you have to. I could say “practice”, but an aspiring musician’s going to be doing that anyway.

It’s a weird business. I know so many guys better than me, and so many guys better than the other guy, and certain guys who are shitty have got gigs, guys who are great don’t. I don’t understand the math, actually.

David Pack

David Pack was the lead singer and guitarist for the prog-rock/soft-rock band Ambrosia, whose hits included “Holdin’ On To Yesterday”, “How Much I Feel”, “Biggest Part of Me”, and “You’re the Only Woman (You & I)”, all of which he wrote or co-wrote. He also co-wrote “All I Need”, which was a No. 1 hit for soap opera star Jack Wagner. He has performed on albums by other artists, including The Alan Parsons Projects’ Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Kansas’ Vinyl Confessions. Pack is also an acclaimed producer for artists including producer for Phil Collins, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Loggins, Wynonna Judd, and many others.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician or songwriter?

David Pack: I would just say to follow your heart, and try to hone in on what it is that makes you truly authentic, as opposed to any other artist in the world. Find your own voice, try to be authentic, and don’t give up.

David Lindley

David Lindley was a key member of 1960s eclectic psychedelic band Kaleidoscope, which was described by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page as “my favorite band of all time — my ideal band.” He is best known for his fretwork for Jackson Browne — for example, on the classic albums Late for the Sky and Running on Empty, and he also contributed to music by David Crosby and Graham Nash as part of The Mighty Jitters band, Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt and many, many others. Somehow he also found time for his own project, El Rayo-X, in the 1980s.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

David Lindley: Play all the time. The right way. Practice makes permanent, not perfect. So practice stuff the right way. I mean do it all the time, like all the people who I really like, whose playing I enjoy. Jascha Heifetz said, “If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days of practice, my audience notices it.” [Actual quote: "If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it."]

T-Bone Burnett

T-Bone Burnett is a musician, songwriter, and noted producer of albums by the likes of Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Los Lobos, Leo Kottke, Spinal Tap (!), Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elton John and Leon Russell, Willie Nelson, B.B. King and many others. Burnett also has produced movie soundtracks such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Crazy Heart. Burnett shared the Academy Award with Ryan Bingham for Best Original Song for “The Weary Kind” from the latter film.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

T-Bone Burnett: Learn how to paint [laughs].

Johnny Rivers

Johnny Rivers was the leader of the house band when the Whisky a Go Go opened in 1964 on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. His long residency helped the club to be the place to be. Between Rivers’ sets, go-go dancing was invented. Rivers had many hit songs in the 1960′s; probably the best known is “Secret Agent Man”, originally used in opening of the TV show “Secret Agent”.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Johnny Rivers: Always take your wallet onstage.

Gary Brooker

Gary Brooker is the singer, pianist, and principal songwriter (with lyricist Keith Reid) for Procol Harum, whose 1967 debut single “A Whiter Shade of Pale” melds Bach-inspired Hammond organ with Percy Sledge-like vocals and evocative, cryptic lyrics to give an enduring classic. With Brooker being the constant member through multiple personnel changes, Procol Harum released many acclaimed albums in the 1960′s and 1970′s. The band reformed in the 1990′s, and continues to tour.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Gary Brooker: Have you got about seven hours? I haven’t.

JM: Do you have quick advice?

Matt Pegg (bassist for Procol Harum): Yeah, buy as many lottery tickets as you can.

GB: Find a rich wife…

MP: Yes!

GB: …to support you.

MP: A wife with a real job.

GB: Practice every day, and pick the right muse. Pick the right muse.

Robin Trower

Robin Trower first gained fame as the guitarist for Procol Harum, playing on their classic late ‘60s and early ‘70s prog-tinged albums. When he left after 1971’s Broken Barricades, he followed the direction hinted at on that album’s “Song for a Dreamer” and his earlier Procol Harum song “Whisky Train,” namely Jimi Hendrix-inspired blues-based rock. He went on to release more than 20 albums in this vein, including 1974’s acclaimed Bridge of Sighs.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Robin Trower: Become a barber.

Garland Jeffreys is an acclaimed singer and songwriter whose songs cover a variety of styles including rock, reggae, and soul. His early career included playing on John Cale’s first solo album Vintage Violence which included his song “Fairweather Friend”, and the release of his single “Wild in the Streets” in 1973. His 1977 solo album Ghost Writer led him to be named best new artist by Rolling Stone magazine, and he has since released a number of solo albums, most recently 2011′s The King of In Between.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Garland Jeffreys: What do you want to do with your music, say you want to write songs?

JM: Yeah, say write songs.

GJ: Songs are the most important thing you can have. Great songs. So you’ve got to work your ass off on becoming a very good songwriter. If you’re not a good songwriter it’s difficult, because, say if it’s guitar, you have to rely on your guitar skills to be very, very good. And it’s so competitive. But songwriting is individual. So if you have an idea or a thing that you’re writing about that’s your view of things, you just have to become very good at it.

Airto Moreira

Airto Moreira is a Brazilian drummer and percussionist who has released many solo albums, and also appeared on Miles Davis’ seminal jazz fusion album Bitches Brew, plus Davis’ Live/Evil. He also played on the first album by Weather Report, and the first two albums by Return To Forever. He has been named the top percussionist of the year multiple times by publications such as Downbeat, Jazz Times, and Modern Drummer.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Airto Moreira: How old is this person?

JM: Say a twenty year old.

AM: Make sure that you choose the right instrument, that you really love to play it. Then, you just keep playing. And the more you play with other people, the better. Of course, if you want to practice technique, then you practice by yourself. But the best thing is to play all kinds of music, and to play with other people. Also, nevermind your ups and downs, because life is like that.

June Millington

June Millington sang and played guitar for Fanny, the first all-female rock band to record a full-length album (the self-titled Fanny in 1970) for a major label. Her sister Jean Millington played bass guitar for Fanny. Fanny released a total of five stellar albums in the 1970′s (the last without June), and toured with many of the era’s biggest artists. Both June and Jean played on albums by Ringo Starr and Barbra Streisand. June also played guitar on Cris Williamson’s classic Women’s Music album Changer And The Changed, and co-founded the Institute for the Musical Arts.

Jeff M: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

June M: I’d say, number one, practice. Eat well and get enough sleep. And learn how to schedule, learn how to prioritize. This is a business, it’s not all just glamour. It’s not a hologram. It’s a lot of work. So if you can get your head behind the work part, then all the exciting stuff happens. And if you can not blast yourself out of the universe through bad eating and sleeping habits – it can’t be that forever, it can be that for a bit but it can’t be that forever. So you just kind of have to fit all that in, because, you know, it’s so much fun [laughs]. But the fun isn’t the thing. You get to the fun through hard work. I bet that’s kind of dull and boring, but that really would be my advice.

Jeff M: Well, you’re speaking from experience.

For full interview with June Millington (and her sister Jean), click here.

Jean Millington

Jean Millington played bass guitar for Fanny, the first all-female rock band to record a full-length album (the self-titled Fanny in 1970) for a major label. Her sister June Millington sang and played guitar for Fanny. Fanny released a total of five stellar albums in the 1970′s (the last without June), and toured with many of the era’s biggest artists. Both June and Jean played on albums by Ringo Starr and Barbra Streisand. Jean also appears on albums by David Bowie and Keith Moon.

Jeff M: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jean M: It’s so funny that June said what she said, because I haven’t heard that. But the first thing that I would say is make the decision that nothing’s going to stop you. And practice your butt off. Because that’s the only thing. When I first started learning how to play slap bass, I literally sat in my room for three months, and that’s all I did day in day out. I got tunes, I played along with them, I learned how this thing went. What they call woodshedding. I’m sure they don’t use that term anymore, it’s so ancient.

And one of the most important things is also to keep your mind and your health together. It’s so easy to get caught up with all the addictive behavior, because it’s so darn inviting and seductive. So, I mean, when you’re young, of course you’re going to do that. But the thing is, it’s about trying to keep a balance, to stay in the middle ground. And moderation is the key. The most important thing is you have to take care of yourself.

Jeff M: Do you have any specific advice for females, or pretty much the same?

Jean M: Pretty much the same.

We really thought it would’ve changed so much by now, the attitude toward girls. It hasn’t really changed, and as a matter of fact, with all the single performers, it’s become more sexist than ever. It’s just unbelievable to me, what even say Beyonce has to go through or Rihanna. I mean, the kind of images that they try to live up to. But that’s with the pop music.

KT Tunstall, I just so admire her. She plays like a dream, her compositions are great, it’s very original. And she retains her sense of rock and roll looking sexual, but not being that overt horrible thing. And I very much respect that.

But there still aren’t any girl bands out there. You have all of the individual performers that you admire. You have women as musicians who are recognized just for being a musician, but it’s not an all-girl band.

For full interview with Jean Millington (and her sister June), click here.

Penelope Houston

Penelope Houston fronted the San Francisco punk band Avengers, whose “Pink Album”, consisting of recordings made in 1977-8 but not released until 1983, is often hailed as one of the best punk rock albums of all time. Avengers opened for the Sex Pistols at their final show. Houston re-emerged years later as a folk singer-songwriter, still retaining much of her punk attitude. Houston just released a new solo album called On Market Street, and a new Avengers compilation is coming out soon. (Photo: Ethan Hill)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Penelope Houston: Keep your publishing and your masters as much as possible!

For full interview with Penelope Houston, click here

Jake Shimabukuro is a ukulele virtuoso who gained international prominence from his viral YouTube cover of The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. He has performed with Jimmy Buffett, Bela Fleck, Yo-Yo Ma, Ziggy Marley, and others, and has released multiple albums that include ukulele instrumentals in a multitude of styles. His latest album is called Peace Love Ukulele.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jake Shimabukuro: I usually tell people this. When I first started playing I just played songs that I liked, because that made me always want to pick up my instrument, you know, because I liked playing the songs. I’ve had friends that were more classically trained, and they were always forced to learn the usual songs that you have to know, and for them it was like pulling teeth, you know, they didn’t want to practice. It was like, “I don’t want to play these silly songs.” So for me it was always important to play songs that I love playing, because even if they were difficult I would just be driven to practice. Every time you get through a passage, you’re like, “Well, I know that much more of the song.” So, yeah, I would definitely say play songs that you love.

Country Joe McDonald

Country Joe McDonald was a co-founder of the 1960′s psychedelic band Country Joe & the Fish, whose acid-soaked album Electric Music for Mind and Body is one of the classics of the genre. The band’s best known song, off their next album, is “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag”. McDonald performed solo and with the Fish at Woodstock, and led the massive crowd in the “Fish Cheer” which starts with “Gimme an ‘F’…” Since the band broke up, McDonald has released many solo albums. McDonald is a strong supporter of causes related to Vietnam Veterans. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Country Joe McDonald: Get an audience and make them happy. It’s as simple as that.

Jonathan Richman

Jonathan’s Richman’s place in rock and roll history is assured by the debut album by The Modern Lovers, produced by ex-Velvet Underground multi-instrumentalist John Cale and belatedly released in 1976. This album features the classic Richman songs “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso”, and influenced the emerging punk rock sound. Richman’s later albums moved away from the Velvets-inspired minimalist proto-punk of The Modern Lovers’ debut, as he developed into a quirky singer-with-an-acoustic-guitar. He is featured several times in the movie There’s Something About Mary.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jonathan Richman: Sing what you feel. But do not sing what you do not feel.

Van Dyke Parks

Van Dyke Parks wrote the lyrics for the lost-Beach Boys-masterpiece Smile, which was resurrected a few years ago by Brian Wilson. Parks also played keyboards on many albums and songs including The Byrds’ Fifth Dimension album, Tim Buckley’s self-titled debut album, and the should-have-been-a-hit “Magic Hollow” by The Beau Brummels. His production credits include the first albums by Ry Cooder and Randy Newman, both with Lenny Waronker, and he has also done arrangements for U2, Laurie Anderson, Joanna Newsom, and the song “Bare Necessities” from the Disney movie The Jungle Book. His solo albums include the eclectic Song Cycle from 1968, and the Caribbean-tinged Discover America from 1972.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Van Dyke Parks: I am in no position to advise anyone. Ask my CPA.

Steve Wynn

Steve Wynn was the vocalist, guitarist, and principal songwriter for The Dream Syndicate, a key band in the guitar-driven neo-psychedelic Paisley Underground style which emerged in early 1980′s Los Angeles. Their first album, the Velvet Underground-influenced The Days of Wine and Roses, is considered an early classic of the alternative rock genre. The Dream Syndicate recorded several more albums, including 1984′s Sandy Pearlman-produced Medicine Show. After The Dream Syndicate broke up, Wynn continued his prolific career, with acclaimed albums as a solo artist and with Gutterball, The Miracle 3, and The Baseball Project.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Steve Wynn: Remember: you are always right. No matter what people tell you or what came before, you are always right. If you hear it and you feel it and it rings true to you, then that’s what you’ve got to do.

For full interview with Steve Wynn, click here.

Andy Shernoff

Andy Shernoff was the primary songwriter for The Dictators, a seminal New York City proto-punk rock band whose huge influence was sadly never matched by huge record sales. Shernoff also played bass, keyboards, and sang many of the songs. The band’s first album The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, released in 1975, is a brilliant mix of irreverent lyrics and youthful energy. Two more albums followed – 1977′s Manifest Destiny and 1978′s Bloodbrothers. Their last studio album was 2001′s D.F.F.D. (“Dictators Forever Forever Dictators”), which is arguably their strongest album after their debut. Shernoff also played bass on Joey Ramone’s 2002 solo album Don’t Worry About Me, and has produced and/or played with various other bands/artists.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Andy Shernoff: It takes 10,000 hours to excel in your craft so enjoy the journey.

For full interview with Andy Shernoff, click here.

Tony Kaye

Tony Kaye was the keyboard player in the original line-up of Yes, and played on the albums Yes, Time And A Word, and The Yes Album. After touring with the band in support of the latter, he left Yes and played in Badger, which released two albums. He rejoined Yes for the 90125 and Big Generator albums. He also toured with David Bowie for the Station To Station tour. Kaye is currently playing keyboards in CIRCA:, which recently released the album And So On.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Tony Kaye: It’s a hard road, and you have to love what you’re doing, without thinking of success. You just have to love what you’re doing, and you have to have a love of your instrument. And you have to practice, and you have to become a good band. There’s no real room for mediocrity. You’ve just got to keep on plugging away. We tend to live in an age where things just go by extremely quickly, and even if you’re signed with a record company you kind of have one album to prove yourself. It’s certainly a lot more difficult than it was when we started, you know where record companies kind of kept with you and three albums later you’re still trying. Obviously the thought of and the need for success is a very important aspect of it, but I don’t think that it can be the only inspiration.

For full interview with Tony Kaye, click here.

Glen Phillips

Glen Phillips is best known as the singer and songwriter of the 1990′s alternative rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket, whose songs include “All I Want”, “Walk on the Ocean”, and “Fall Down”. He has released several solo albums, and is a member of the band Works Progress Administration.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Glen Phillips: These days? Diversify. [laughs] That’s a nicer way of saying ‘Don’t quit your day job’. But regardless, yeah, diversify. And work very hard. Learn to write, learn to compose, learn to record, learn to arrange, learn to do website design.

JM: There’s a lot to it nowadays.

GP: There’s a fuck of a lot of jobs involved. [laughs]

Larry Ramos

The Association was one of the most nobable sunshine pop bands, and was the first band on the bill at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Their catalog includes the #1 songs “Cherish” and “Windy”, plus “Never My Love”, which is the second most played song on the radio ever, and “Along Comes Mary”. Larry Ramos joined The Association in 1967, and was the lead singer on “Never My Love”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Larry Ramos: Don’t give up. When things look the bleakest, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. For a lot of people, the reason they never succeed is that they give up too easily. I’ve been very fortunate in the fact that I’ve never really given up [laughs]. Actually, I started when I was so young that I didn’t know what it was like to give up. It was just a part of my life. Another thing, too. There’s a saying, “talent will out”. If you’ve got talent, eventually people will recognize it. But you’ve got to keep at it. You can’t give it up.

Jim Yester

The Association was one of the most nobable sunshine pop bands, and was the first band on the bill at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Their catalog includes the #1 songs “Cherish” and “Windy”, plus “Never My Love”, which is the second most played song on the radio ever, and “Along Comes Mary”. Jim Yester was the original lead singer for The Association.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jim Yester: Practice, practice, practice.

No, the main thing is just keep doing it. Talent will out. Talent will win in the long run. Just keep doing it, don’t give up. That, and desire. If you have that and the desire to do it, you’ll do it. Desire is the key.

And no man can serve two masters. When we started, nobody did anything else. It was the group 24/7. For the first six months we were together we worked six days a week, eight hours a day, writing, rehearsing, working on choreography. You finish a song, one guy’s stepping back, another guy’s moving a microphone, somebody’s handing a guitar.

And you’ve got to have fun. The audience is not going to have fun unless you’re having fun. So if you have fun, 90% chance they’re going to have fun.

And don’t take yourself too seriously.

Gary Lucas

Gary Lucas has been described as “The Thinking Man’s Guitar Hero” by The New Yorker, a “Guitarist of 1000 Ideas” by The New York Times, and a “legendary leftfield guitarist” by The Guardian (UK). He first gained acclaim for his work with Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet), appearing on Beefheart’s 1980 album Doc at the Radar Station and 1982’s Ice Cream for Crow. Lucas was also Van Vliet’s manager during this time. He has since released solo albums – the first being 1990’s Skeleton at the Feast featuring effect-heavy interstellar guitar instrumentals – and albums with his band Gods and Monsters, whose ranks once included Jeff Buckley. He has worked with many other artists, and was nominated for a Grammy for co-writing Joan Osborne’s song “Spider Web”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Gary Lucas: If you really want to make music for a living, go for it! And don’t give up as difficult as it gets, you have to pay your dues to succeed in it like everything else that’s worth doing or attaining.

For full interview with Gary Lucas, click here.

Charlie Musselwhite

Charlie Musselwhite is a blues-harp player who got his start in Chicago before moving to San Francisco and being embraced by the counterculture scene. His 1967 debut album Stand Back! is considered a classic, and he has released over twenty more albums. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2010.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Charlie Musselwhite: Follow your heart. Play what you want to play. Play what resonates with you. Just ’cause somebody else is playing something, don’t feel like, “I’d better play what they’re playing, ’cause people like that”. Play what you like.

That’s what happened to me. I never even thought about being a professional musician. I just love blues and wanted to play it, and the blues overtook me. It took me where I wanted to go.

Carl Giammarese

Carl Giammarese was the guitarist, and is currently the lead vocalist, for The Buckinghams, whose songs include the hit single “Kind Of A Drag” which was #1 for two weeks in February 1967, the Top Ten hits “Don’t You Care” and “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”, plus “Hey Baby (They’re Playing Our Song” and “Susan”.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you gvie to an aspiring musician?

Carl Giammarese: One of the main things is that you have to stay focused. You have to be willing to sacrifice a lot. Otherwise you don’t stand a chance, especially nowadays. But it was always that way. Decide what you want, stick with it, and be willing to sacrifice a lot. I missed so many things in my life because of being a musician. But it was worth it to me. As long as it’s worth it to you…

And just stay true to yourself, and your music, too. You can only do what you do. Nobody can do everything. Just do what you do best, and hope there’s an audience there for you. That’s all you can do.

Martha High

Martha High was a singer in The Jewels, which had a minor hit with the song “Opportunity” in 1964. The Jewels became the opening act for James Brown, and when they disbanded High became a singer with Brown’s live band – this lasted for over thirty years. She also sang on various James Brown studio tracks including the 1977 duet “Summertime”. She has also been in Maceo Parker’s live band. She released a self-titled disco album in 1979, and a solo album It’s High Time in 2009.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Martha High: As far as singers are concerned, if it is their dream, don’t give up the dream, to stick with it. And make sure that you have someone to take care of your business, you know what the older singers went through in the past, getting ripped off and everything. It takes a lot of practice and wanting to really stick with it. You have to stick with it. Because I’ve been doing it all my life [laughs]. The things that you go through are lessons learned. You just try not to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Steve Vai

Steve Vai is a rock guitarist who started his career transcribing music for and then touring with Frank Zappa, who called him the “little Italian virtuoso”. He also played with David Lee Roth and Whitesnake, has released multiple solo albums, and has toured with other guitarists for the G3 series. He also played in the super cool guitar duel in the 1986 movie Crossroads.

Jeff Moehlis:What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Steve Vai: Same advice Frank Zappa gave me: keep your publishing.

Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore is a singer and guitarist for Sonic Youth, the alt-rock band formed in New York City in 1981 which pioneered the use of dissonance, noise, and alternative guitar tunings in the post-punk musical landscape. Sonic Youth’s mid- to late-1980′s albums EVOL, Sister, and Daydream Nation were hugely influential on the emerging alt-rock movement, and they maintained their integrity and credibility with their move to a major label for 1990′s Goo and and 1992′s Dirty. Sonic Youth continues to release albums 30 years after their formation. Moore has also released several solo albums and has worked with artists including Glenn Branca and Lydia Lunch.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Thurston Moore: Make cassettes. Cassettes rule, they always rule. They’re the great balancing leveller of recorded music. To me they’re the best sounding, they’re the most economical. They make sense. If people don’t have a cassette player, then just get one.

Bob Mould

Bob Mould was the guitarist and one of the singers and principal songwriters for the influential indie-rock band Husker Du, which was together from 1979 until early 1988. They released various acclaimed albums, including Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, and Warehouse: Songs and Stories. He later founded the band Sugar, whose 1992 album Copper Blue was hailed as one of the year’s best. Mould has also released multiple solo albums. In 2011 he released his memoir See A Little Light.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Bob Mould: Just make the music that you really care about. Don’t worry about being successful. If you love what you do and you do it well, it’ll happen. So don’t go chasing somebody else’s idea of what success is.

Lou Barlow

Lou Barlow was a founding member and the bass player for Dinosaur Jr., including on their classic album You’re Living All Over Me. When he was dismissed from that band, he focused on his side project Sebadoh, which helped to define the 1990′s lo-fi style of rock music. Another Barlow project, The Folk Implosion, had a Top 40 hit “Natural One” from the movie soundtrack to Kids.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Lou Barlow: Do something weird, and keep doing it over and over again.

JM: And record it, right?

LB: [laughs] Record it. But do something weird.

Cris Kirkwood

Cris Kirkwood is the bassist for the Meat Puppets, which released the indie rock classic albums Meat Puppets II in 1984 and Up on the Sun in 1985. They hit their commercial peak with 1994′s album Too High to Die, which featured the minor hit “Backwater.” Their visibility was helped immensely around this time by Kurt Cobain proclaiming the Meat Puppets to be one of his biggest influences, and by brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood joining Nirvana onstage at their MTV Unplugged performance of three songs from Meat Puppets II. But things crumbled shortly thereafter, in large part because of Cris’ escalating substance abuse problems.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Cris Kirkwood: Yeah… stop. Go back to school. Become a dentist.

God, I don’t know. I’m no one to ask for advice. You know, read about me and don’t do what I’ve done.

[discussion about music]

So I would say to an aspiring musician, do what feels good to you. Then beyond that, I would say sell out when you’re young and make a lot of money.

For full interview with Cris Kirkwood, click here.

Mike Watt

Mike Watt’s musical resume is about as cool as they come. He co-founded the influential San Pedro-based indie-punk band The Minutemen, playing bass and composing many of their songs. After Minutemen guitarist D. Boon tragically died in a car accident, guitarist Ed “fROMOHIO” Crawford joined up with Watt and Minutemen drummer George Hurley to form the somewhat underappreciated late-80′s and early-90′s band fIREHOSE. And since 2003, he has been playing bass with re-formed (but perhaps not reformed) punk rock godfathers The Stooges, fronted by Iggy Pop.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Mike Watt: You’ve gotta find the inside voice. The best analogy I can give for it is writing a novel. You don’t have to invent new words, but there’s ways of using the words that everybody knows, where you can get a very personal work. And I think that’s what you’ve gotta do with music. It’s not like you have to invent new kinds of notes, or instruments, or styles. Though that might be kind of neat [laughs]. I still think you can do it with the stuff that’s there, you know that you learn from other people and stuff. I’m not talking about copying them. I’m saying – you know what I mean – like writing a novel. You might not invent one new word, but you can still write an original novel.

And also, it’s not bigger words. You read “Old Man and the Sea” that Hemingway did, you know, there are no big words. It’s just over a hundred pages. It ain’t that long. It’s still a very good story. And I think the same thing with music. It’s not about incredible technique. It’s finding your voice, finding your expression. Which is probably very difficult. But you know what, maybe it should always be kind of difficult. If there was some system to make that easy, maybe it wouldn’t be as genuine.

For full interview with Mike Watt, click here.

Will Oldham

Will Oldham has been steadily releasing records for nearly two decades now, under different names including (rarely) his own, Palace Brothers, and, for most of the last decade, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. His music receives much (well-deserved) critical acclaim: for example, his 1999 album I See A Darkness – the title track of which was covered by the late Johnny Cash – was ranked as the 9th best album of the 1990′s by the influential indie-arbiters pitchfork.com, who say that it “confirm[s] that Oldham is indie’s detached and brilliant DeNiro.”

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter or musician?

Will Oldham: [laughs, long pause] I don’t think that there’s any broad or sweeping advice that I would have to offer to anybody. If someone said, how can I finish this song, then maybe I could say something.

I’m not sure that I have the same motivation as someone else who writes songs or plays music. In my experience, I’ve found that my advice, in terms of making records and making music, doesn’t really get communicated, or doesn’t really apply to folks.

I don’t know. It would depend on the individual – man, woman, young, or old, and what their motivations were, and what their practices were. I think that there’s very few people that I would have advice that would be valuable to them. [laughs] I have a particular way of doing things, and most people think it’s retarded. They’ll ask me, what would you do about this – they’re writing songs – and I’ll say, and they’ll look at me like I’m from Mars.

JM: Well, this of course begs the question. You say that you have a different motivation, and a different way of doing things. What is your motivation for doing music?

For full interview with Will Oldham, click here.

Bill Callahan

Singer-songwriter Bill Callahan first started releasing his recordings under the alias Smog in 1988. His earliest releases were lo-fi home recordings, but as the years passed his recordings gained more polish, albeit without completely losing their grittiness. Fittingly, his song “Cold Blooded Old Times” appeared on the excellent soundtrack to the 2000 movie High Fidelity, being the type of song that the movie’s music-obsessed characters would put on a mix tape. Starting in 2007, Callahan started releasing his music under his own name, his latest album being 2011′s Apocalypse.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Bill Callahan: All you can do is write more songs, play more music. Share it somehow when you think it’s good.

For full interview with Bill Callahan, click here.

Buzz Osborne

“Buzz” Osborne, also known as King Buzzo, is the guitarist and vocalist for The Melvins, purveyors of sludgy, heavier-than-Black-Sabbath metal. Although never really rising above cult band status, The Melvins are assured at least a footnote in rock ‘n’ roll history because of their connections to Nirvana and that band’s frontman Kurt Cobain, who counted them amongst his favorites. Cobain, Osborne, and Melvins drummer Dale Crover were friends from high school. In 1984, Cobain auditioned to play bass with The Melvins, but he was not chosen. The next year, Osborne and Crover played in Cobain’s first band Fecal Matter (with Osborne on bass). Later, in 1988, Crover played on Nirvana’s 10-song demo, most of which was released on their albums Bleach and Incesticide. After Nirvana went supernova with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the album Nevermind, Cobain championed The Melvins, even co-producing and playing on a few tracks for the band’s 1993 major-label debut Houdini. Obsborne and The Melvins have steadily and uncompromisingly kept at it, having by now released 20-plus albums.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Buzz Osborne: Be as peculiar as you can. There’s all kinds of ways you can be peculiar. That’s the best, I would say. And there’s enough bands playing in tune. Nobody should expect you to.

Dale Crover

Dale Crover is the drummer for The Melvins, purveyors of sludgy, heavier-than-Black-Sabbath metal. Although never really rising above cult band status, The Melvins are assured at least a footnote in rock ‘n’ roll history because of their connections to Nirvana and that band’s frontman Kurt Cobain, who counted them amongst his favorites. Cobain, Crover, and Melvins guitarist/vocalist “Buzz” Osborne were friends from high school. In 1984, Cobain auditioned to play bass with The Melvins, but he was not chosen. The next year, Osborne and Crover played in Cobain’s first band Fecal Matter (with Osborne on bass). Later, in 1988, Crover played on Nirvana’s 10-song demo, most of which was released on their albums Bleach and Incesticide. After Nirvana went supernova with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the album Nevermind, Cobain championed The Melvins, even co-producing and playing on a few tracks for the band’s 1993 major-label debut Houdini. Crover and The Melvins have steadily and uncompromisingly kept at it, having by now released 20-plus albums.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Dale Crover: Practice a lot. Get in a band. It’s great to play with other people because that’ll help you. And it’s a lot more fun than playing by yourself. Or playing with yourself.

Neil Hagerty

Neil Hagerty is a guitarist and songwriter who got his start in the uncompromising underground band Pussy Galore, which released albums including Groovy Hate F*ck and Dial ‘M’ For Motherf*cker. When that band broke up, Hagerty and girlfriend Jennifer Herrema turned their attention to Royal Trux, which recorded multiple albums during the 1990′s including Cats & Dogs and Thank You. Royal Trux’s best-known song is “The Inside Game”, which is on the soundtrack for the movie High Fidelity. After Royal Trux broke up, Hagerty released a couple of solo albums, and also recorded with The Howling Hex.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Neil Hagerty: You just better know what it is you really want.

For full interview with Neil Hagerty, click here.

Bob Bert

Bob Bert was the drummer for two of the most notable bands from the American Underground: Sonic Youth (playing on the albums Confusion Is Sex, Sonic Death, and Bad Moon Rising) and Pussy Galore (playing on their recordings from Exile on Main St onwards). He has also drummed with Bewitched, Knoxville Girls, and The Chrome Cranks, the latter of which just released a cool new swamp/noise/punk/blues album called Ain’t No Lies In Blood. (Carlos Van Hijfte photo, 1982)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Bob Bert: Keep your day job and be original. Don’t be a dick.

For full interview with Bob Bert, click here

Don Fleming

Don Fleming is a musician and producer who has had his hands in an amazing number of projects, mostly in the alt rock universe. As a musician, he was a member of the Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L., Gumball, and Half Japanese. As a producer, he has worked with Sonic Youth, Hole, Teenage Fanclub, Alice Cooper, The Dictators, The Posies, Screaming Trees, and more. Don recently released a cool EP called Don Fleming 4 which includes contributions from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Don Fleming: Get an MBA. Too many musicians think that if they know too much about the business they are sell-outs, but in reality “the man” wants them to think that way so they can be endlessly taken advantage of. That’s why most musicians barely make a living, have no health care, no retirement plans, no salaries. So my advice is to get a real job and play music because you like to, put the stuff out yourself and avoid “the man.”

For full interview with Don Fleming, click here.

Jonathan Wilson

Jonathan Wilson’s producer and musician credits include work with Jackson Browne, Robbie Robertson, Erykah Badu, Elvis Costello, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and young country-folk rockers Dawes. Wilson was also host to a number of all-night jam sessions at his place in Laurel Canyon, which attracted musicians such as Costello, Conor Oberst, and members of Wilco and The Black Crowes, and drew favorable comparisons to the canyon’s musical glory days. His album Gentle Spirit was rated the fourth-best album of 2011 by MOJO magazine, and UNCUT magazine named him the New Artist of the Year.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jonathan Wilson: Definitely to play some other instruments that they don’t play. That’s what I did, and that was really the best thing that I ever did.

JM: So what did you start out on?

JW: I started out on guitar, then moved to drums, and to piano, played some banjo, things like that.

JM: So just get out of your element?

JW: Yeah, exactly.

Ritzy Bryan

Ritzy Bryan is the singer and guitarist for the Welsh rock band The Joy Formidable, who is making waves with their 2011 debut album The Big Roar, and to Music Illuminati’s knowledge is the best Welsh rock trio since Budgie. In 2011 they have played at the Reading and Leeds Festivals and Lollapalooza, and their hit song “Whirring” has become a staple on modern rock radio.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ritzy Bryan: I honestly refuse to give advice because I think every band should just carve their own fucking way. If you do your own thing there’s no rules, because everybody has a different journey.

Kim Manning

Kim Manning is an electrifying, red-hot performer who has been singing vocals with George Clinton and Parliament / Funkadelic / The P-Funk All Stars for ten years. She has also worked with artists including The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg, and Sly Stone, and was “Peaches” on the first season of the reality TV show Flavor of Love. Manning just released a new album called Good People.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Kim Manning: Okay, if you really feel the calling, and you have a gift, then you don’t really have a choice do you, you have to share your gift. If it’s your destiny, you will be miserable doing anything else so surrender to it and practice, a lot, now, before you’re on tour 350 days a year. But you really have to assess if it’s your ego that wants it, like could you be poor and happy and working for 10 years away from your loved ones, playing bar after coffee shop to 50 people at a time, if so then it’s for you. Otherwise, if you want to be a musician, and you don’t pass those tests, you better have lots and lots of money to make yourself a star like Taylor Swift or Paris Hilton did. “Paris is a Porn Star” is one of my songs from “Space Queen”! She understands the power of doing what it takes to be a star, and she’s hot!

For full interview with Kim Manning, click here.

Linnea Vedder

Linnea Vedder is the drummer and one of the singers and principal songwriters for Cliffie Swan, whose new Drag City album Memories Came True is a delightful blend of pop, psychedelia, and sweet harmonies. Cliffie Swan was formerly called Lights, with two albums released under this name including the wonderful 2009 album Rites.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Linnea Vedder: I slept and dreamt that life was Joy./ I woke and saw that life was Duty./ I acted, and behold, Duty was Joy. -Rabindranath Tagore

Click here for the full interview.

Scott McCaughey

Scott McCaughey is a singer and songwriter, and is the leader of the bands The Young Fresh Fellows and The Minus 5. Since 1994 he has made contributions to R.E.M. both live and in the studio. He is also in and writes songs for The Baseball Project with Peter Buck, Steve Wynn, and Linda Pitmon.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Scott McCaughey: Put out your own record. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you whether it’s good or bad or not. Just record your music and release it on whatever level you want to release it, either digitally, make your own CD. It doesn’t cost that much. Anybody can do it these days. So my advice is to do it.

James Jackson Toth

James Jackson Toth is an insanely prolific indie folk songwriter and musician who has recorded most frequently under the name Wooden Wand. His latest album, Death Seat, was produced by The Swans’ Michael Gira, and has been receiving a lot of great press from the likes of The New York Times, Interview Magazine, and Crawdaddy. It’s definitely worth checking out!

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter and/or musician?

James Jackson Toth: “Be great or be gone.” – David Briggs. Also, learn a trade.

For full interview with James Jackson Toth, click here

John Doe

John Doe was one of the primary songwriters and singers for the band X, along with Exene Cervenka. X’s 1980 debut album Los Angeles, produced by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, ranks as one of the best punk albums of all time. This was followed by other acclaimed X albums, and a solo career that explored more of a roots music direction. Doe is also an actor who has appeared in a variety of films and television shows.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

John Doe: Don’t do it.

JM: You’re not the only one to say that.

JD: Because if they’re meant to do it, they will anyway. My second advice would be just to be true to yourself. It’s like Sonic Youth, everybody hated them, or didn’t like them, or they went, “ah, whatever”. But they just kept doing what they did, and eventually it worked out.

JM: And they’re still doing it, too.

JD: That’s right.

For full interview with John Doe, click here.

Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins was the frontman for seminal hardcore punk band Black Flag from 1981 to 1986 – a period which included their acclaimed album Damaged. After that band broke up, he formed the Rollins Band. He also tours as a spoken word artist, and has acted in various movies and television shows including FX’s Sons of Anarchy.

Jeff Moehlis What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Henry Rollins: My advice isn’t all that much to write home about. All I know is what I went through. I don’t know if it’s of any use. I say one must work really hard, harder than they have worked on anything in their lives. Total commitment, that’s the only way. To the point of obsession and losing all your friends. This, to me is the way to do it, all the way or not at all. I never had any talent, just determination.

Jack Grisham

Jack Grisham is the lead singer for T.S.O.L., which stands for True Sounds of Liberty and along with Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Social Distortion was at the forefront of the L.A. hard-core punk movement in the early 1980′s. Their early sound evolved from anti-government hardcore punk, to goth punk, to art punk. Grisham left T.S.O.L. in 1983, but returned in 1999. In 2003, he ran for governor of California in the recall election. Grisham lost the election, and still tours with T.S.O.L.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jack Grisham: Shit man, I mean I ruined my life doing this.

No, I mean, I do it for fun. The minute it becomes work then it’s a drag, you know what I’m saying? Because if this was a real job, it sucks. And we’re successful. You know what I’m saying? Most people aren’t successful. We’re always broke, you never know where the money’s coming from. Totally unstable, you’re away from your family all the time.

It’s rough. If we’re going on tour, we only tour ten days in a row, or two weeks in a row. Because I was in Germany, and my kid called me crying, and she’s like, “Dad, I need you.” And I thought, I’m fucking three days from even getting home to you. That was the last straw. The minute she said she needs me, and I couldn’t get home, I said I’ll never be where I can’t get to my kid within a day. So that’s it.

And all the rest is bullshit, you know?

Ron Emory

Ron Emory is the guitarist for T.S.O.L., which stands for True Sounds of Liberty and along with Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Social Distortion was at the forefront of the L.A. hard-core punk movement in the early 1980′s. Their early sound evolved from anti-government hardcore punk, to goth punk, to art punk. Emory stayed on for a while as the band transitioned to glam metal, and he and the band have since returned to their punk rock roots.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ron Emory: Just learn everything you can about it. Have fun with it.

Joey Burns

Joey Burns is the co-founder, singer, guitarist, and one of the principal songwriters for Calexico, a Tuscon, Arizona-based band which blends Americana and Mexican influences. Notable albums by Calexico include 1998′s The Black Light, 2003′s Feast of Wire, and 2008′s Carried to Dust, and they recently toured in support of Arcade Fire.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Joey Burns: Patience. Patience for your inner critic, and patience on all those around you who are encouraging and inspiring you to be a musician. And I guess just be kind of open and travel as much as you can.

Dallas Good

Dallas Good is the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist for The Sadies, a Toronto-based psychedelic/surf/country rock/garage band that he leads along with his brother Travis, who plays lead guitar and adds exquisite harmonies. They have released multiple acclaimed albums since their 1998 debut, and have worked with notable artists including Neko Case, Jon Langford, and John Doe.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Dallas Good: Only play music you like. That seems like a really stupid, obvious answer, but it’s really easy to get into a situation where you’re playing songs that are like, “I know that he likes this one, but…”

Another answer: we have a song that we wrote with Jon Langford [from The Mekons] that sums it up pretty well: “Get the money and don’t leave anything behind” [laughs].

Michael Chapman

Michael Chapman is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist who has recorded over thirty albums, including 1970′s Fully Qualified Survivor which is considered to be a British folk-rock classic. His guitar playing has been compared favorably to that of John Fahey and Roy Harper.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Michael Chapman: Stick at it. Don’t the bastards grind you down. Nil carborundum bastardum. It you want to do it, do it. Don’t let them put you off. Sometimes are better than other. You’ve got to take the thick with the thin. I’ve been on the road 45 years, some are great and some are not so great. You just keep on going.

Russell Ferrante

Russell Ferrante is best known as the pianist and co-founder of the fusion band Yellowjackets. Before that, he toured with Jimmy Witherspoon and Joni Mitchell. He has also written with and produced records for Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, and Rita Coolidge.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Russell Ferrante: Play with musicians that are better than you are. I think that’s how you learn and grow. Get a great teacher, too.

Jimmy Haslip

Jimmy Haslip is best known as the bass guitarist and co-founder of the fusion band Yellowjackets. He has also worked with other artists including Bruce Hornsby, Rita Coolidge, Tommy Bolin, Alan Holdsworth, Donald Fagen, and Kiss.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jimmy Haslip: First of all, find something that really inspires you – whether it’s music, art, sculpture – something that will inspire you to go and practice. And study as much as you can about as many different kinds of music as you possibly can. Just make sure you find some way to self-motivate yourself, so that you’re not staring at the walls someday thinking, “What am I gonna do next?” There has to be some inner fire that all of us have. You’ve got to find that inner fire. Once you find that, I think then the self-motivation just comes along with it. So finding that, and being motivated, practicing as much as you can, and trying to learn all that you can about all kinds of music – that’s my advice. And when you do that, then that will prepare you for any kind of gig or situation, experience, whatever, you’ll be prepared to jump in there and do a good job.

Eddie Tuduri

Eddie Tuduri is a drummer who has toured and/or recorded with Delaney Bramlett, Bobby Whitlock, The Beach Boys, Rick Nelson, Jim Messina, Dr. John, Ike Turner, Johnny Rivers, and many others. After a 1997 surfing accident, Tuduri founded The Rhythmic Arts Project, which integrates drums into the treatment and education of children with developmental disabilites.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Eddie Tuduri: Take lessons, find a good teacher. Don’t start playing without direction. I studied when I was a kid – when I was twelve, I learned how to read music, I learned the rudiments. It’s very important find a good teacher, so you don’t start off with bad habits.

Brute Force

Brute Force is the recording/performance name of Stephen Friedland. Friedland was a member of The Tokens in the mid-1960′s, and composed songs recorded by The Tokens, The Creation, Cyrkle, and The Chiffons. In 1967, his bizarrely brilliant solo album I, Brute Force, Confections of Love was released, including songs such as “To Sit on a Sandwich” and “Tapeworm of Love”. He is best known for the 1969 single “King of Fuh”, which was admired by George Harrison and John Lennon and was released on Apple Records. Unfortunately, Captiol/EMI refused to distribute this single because some of the lyrics sounded like profanity. Confections of Love was recently re-released on CD, with “King of Fuh” as one of the bonus tracks.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter and/or musician?

Brute Force: Listen to music of the world. Here and There. Learn something to know you can make money, because making money in the arts is not that easy as picking up a consistent paycheck. If you have to make a choice between a day job and dying for your art it’s probably a happier choice to keep the day job. Be kind to yourself for you are the greatest ally you have. That means realizing what a powerhouse you are and how your body is very sensitive to substances which enter into your body.

You may wish to do drugs. If you’re a singer you ought to know that smoke dries the throat. Your consciousness is far superior without drugs. It is what you are prior to any drug.

Remember when Dorothy, Toto, and her three friends walked thru a field of poppies? They fell asleep! Well, making it in life is a good deal more successful when you’re awake.

You don’t have to know a lick of formal music training to be a songwriter, yet it couldn’t hurt to learn notation, how to play keyboard, or guitar, or instrument of your choice. Take vocal lessons. Learn networking in the arts. Remember that if you are looking to make it in show business that it is 2 words…”show” and “business”.

[later] I would add, belief in oneself, maintaining health and Spiritual Reality.

For full interview with Brute Force, click here.

Mark Tulin

Mark Tulin was the bass guitar player for The Electric Prunes, which is best known for 1966′s psychedelic garage-rock classic single “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),” the lead track on the highly-regarded Nuggets collection compiled in 1972 by Lenny Kaye. The Prunes’ original line-up also released 1968′s psych obscurity Mass in F Minor, a Catholic mass, sung in Latin, composed by music producer/arranger/composer David Axelrod – the track “Kyrie Eleison” from this album was on the soundtrack for the generation-defining movie Easy Rider. Tulin passed away on February 26, 2011.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give an aspiring musician?

Mark Tulin: I think there’s two things. One is, you’d better love the process. Because if you don’t love the process, no success makes up for not loving what you’re doing. Especially in art of any form. Because at the end you’re left with your process. And you find that as nice it is that people like what you, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing there’s an empty space somewhere.

And the other thing is, don’t give up. At any age. I think the shame is that my generation took their guitars and put them in the garage, and never picked them up again. I’m a firm believer in dreams, and that dreams come true. And what I think we said on one our newer albums is that dreams never quit. You quit on them. They never give up. So love what you’re doing, and do it.

And keep in mind that someone not liking you is an opinion, not a statement of fact. It’s just somebody’s opinion. And it can be a very high-ranking opinion. If I play a track and Bono goes, “I hate what you just did,” that’s his opinion. So that’s it. I just think it’s internal faith, that is what it basically comes down to.

For full interview with Mark Tulin, click here.

Ian Underwood

Ian Underwood is a multi-instrumentalist who played on classic Frank Zappa albums including Hot Rats and We’re Only In In For The Money. Check out his woodwind playing in “Peaches En Regalia”, which just might give you goosebumps. He later contributed to recordings by Quincy Jones, Barbara Streisand, and many others. He also played on the soundtracks of Blade Runner, Aliens, and Titanic.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give an aspiring musician?

Ian Underwood: I would just say do what you want to do. There isn’t any one thing. There’s no path in the arts. I don’t think there is any one way to do it. The main thing is knowing what you want to do, and applying yourself and saying, “That’s what I’m putting my energy into”.

A lot of times people do that just because they can’t do anything else. I mean, Frank [Zappa] would be useless without doing what he did. And that would apply to a lot of other people. It’s not like, “I could do this or I could have a dry cleaning store. Let’s see, which will I do. If I had a dry cleaning store I’d be making money and supporting my family. Yeah, I think I won’t do music, I’ll do a dry cleaning store.”

But it never works out that way. Because people that do it at any level, you know that’s kind of up there, they’re prisoners of their own brain. They’re complete prisoners of their own brain. That’s it. You could say lots of words to it, but it amounts to just being… I mean, it’s not a bad thing to be a prisoner that way. Everybody lives in their own mind, and you have to just see what the result of that is. If somebody wants to do it, I would always encourage anybody to follow whatever is in their mind, music or something else. But music, absolutely.

Billy Cox

Billy Cox is best known as a bassist who played with Jimi Hendrix, first in the early 1960′s when they were in the army together, and later in the Band Of Gypsys and in Hendrix’s Gypsy Sun and Rainbows at Woodstock. He is the last surviving member of Hendrix’s core bands The Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Band of Gypsys. He is currently part of the Experience Hendrix tribute tour. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Billy Cox: Keep practicing. In order to be good you have to love something greater than you love yourself. If you love that music greater than you love yourself, you gotta be successful. That’s the key. [Hendrix and I] knew we were getting good and getting better, it was just a matter of someone discovering us. He got discovered first, before me [laughs].

Will Cullen Hart

Will Cullen Hart is a co-founder of the Elephant 6 Collective of musicians. He has written and performed songs for The Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory Systems. Hart is also a visual artist, and created much of the the album artwork for these bands.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Will Cullen Hart: Listen to your heart. Even if somebody says it could be better this way, you’re probably right in your heart. That’s really it. That’s what I did. Even if it’s out of fashion, go for it. If you feel like it’s right, then it’s right.

Scott Spillane

Scott Spillane is a member of the Elephant 6 Collective of musicians. He played horns and helped with horn arrangements on the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, wrote “The Fool” from that album, and is frontman for the band The Gerbils.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Scott Spillane: Listen – really listen – to what you’re playing. That’s number one. And kill your babies.

JM: What do you mean by that?

SS: Edit yourself. Don’t be afraid to edit yourself.

Julian Koster

Julian Koster is a member of the Elephant 6 Collective of musicians. He played saw, banjo, and accordian on the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. He is also the leader of the band The Music Tapes.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Julian Koster: Belief and faith. And then more belief and then more faith. And then more belief and then more faith and then more belief and then more faith and then more belief and then more faith.

It’s just there’s so much that’s required to do anything that is truly and sincerely heartfelt. It requires a constant, massive amount of faith and belief. And over, and over, and over again.

Bert Lams

Bert Lams is a guitarist extraordinaire from Brussels, Belgium who is best known as a composer and performer for the California Guitar Trio, which in addition to original compositions plays covers ranging from “Bohemian Rhapsody” to “Pipeline” to “Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor”. He was also part of Robert Fripp’s League of Crafty Guitarists and the Robert Fripp String Quintet.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Bert Lams: Wow, there’s lots of things here. From my own experience, I can say that I learned a lot by finding somebody with experience, to share that with me. So I was lucky enough to find some good teachers, and that’s really important. Genius is not that common, so most of us need to stand on the shoulders of others.

JM: Was that [Robert] Fripp for you?

BL: It’s been different people, it’s been different people all through my life. It can be someone who you’re a fan of, who you listen to the music of and imitate all the licks of. But ideally it’s someone that’s there for you.

That’s one thing. If it’s younger people, if they’re very young, if they’re like teenagers, I always recommend that they just go and play with their friends. That’s how it happened for me, playing with other people as a teenager. That kind of opened me up.

Paul Richards

Paul Richards, from Salt Lake City, Utah, is also a guitarist extraordinaire who composes and performs with the California Guitar Trio, and was part of Robert Fripp’s League of Crafty Guitarists and the Robert Fripp String Quintet.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Paul Richards: The thing that worked the best for us was to find a way to do it ourselves. Because you can’t rely on the elusive record deal, especially now that all the record companies are struggling. So if you can find a way to do things on your own as much as possible, that’s one of the best things. In the beginning we booked our own gigs, we did our own recordings at home, you know, bought good equipment and found ways to good quality recordings and found a way to promote ourselves, all without having to rely on somebody else. So that’s a big part of it.

The other thing is, it took us eight years of constant work to get to the point where we could start to make any money playing music. Some bands can go much quicker than other bands. First we started in L.A. and then we started going beyond L.A. and then beyond California and just gradually expanded. And then we did a whole tour at Borders Bookstores [JM saw them at Borders in Palo Alto way back then] and found other things we could do that weren’t reliant on a big promotional unit. They were things that we could do ourselves.

You know, first of all we could get ten people to come, then maybe twenty people, and then fifty people, and then once we could show an agency that we could sell a few tickets then we got a good agency. I don’t think you need a manager, I don’t think you need a record company, but an agency helps you get good gigs. And you can probably do that on your own, too, but for us that’s the thing that makes the most sense, and it works well for us. An agency typically takes 15%, but for the amount of work that they do, 15% is well worth it. And a good agent will have a lot of connections to venues, to places like McCabe’s where we’re playing tomorrow. On our own we had tried to play McCabe’s for years and years and years, and they never had us until our agency finally had a connection and had some other artists who had played there. Then they got us in the door there. So I think an agency is key. But beyond an agency, doing things on your own is one of the best things that you can do.

Seymour Duncan

Seymour Duncan is the co-founder of the company that shares his name and for 35 years has been making guitar pickups, which convert the mechanical vibrations of a string into an electrical signal that can be amplified. Duncan’s pickups give guitarists some of the finest tones in rock ‘n’ roll, and have been used by artists such as Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, Slash and Joe Satriani. Duncan is also a fine guitarist himself, playing in the Santa Barbara band Flatfoot Joe. (Photo: L. Paul Mann)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Seymour Duncan: It’s best to be very patient, and really believe in what you believe in. Just do it. Just be out there and do it. Don’t let anybody discourage you. Everybody’s different. Everybody has their own soul and their own creativity, and I believe in that. Be your own, and go out there, and just really do it, it’s so important.

For me it’s important to try to help other kids. I got helped by Les Paul, Jeff Beck, The Ventures, they’ve all helped me by asking questions. You know, I want to be there for younger kids, too. I want to try to be a good inspiration for them.

Nolan Gasser

Nolan Gasser is an acclaimed composer, with compositions including American Festivals and two pieces written for NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. He is also the Chief Musicologist for Pandora Media, Inc., which provides the popular Pandora Radio streaming music service; he is the architect of all five Music Genomes (Pop/Rock, Jazz, Hip-Hop/Electronica, World Music, and Classical). Moreover, he is the Artistic Director of Classical Archives which is the web’s largest classical music site.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician/composer?

Nolan Gasser: There are four essentials to building a career as a musician, but I think they apply elsewhere.

You have to have natural talent. You have to be honest with yourself about if you have enough natural talent that’s going to make you stand out in a crowd, and be able to be employable. You have to work hard, because music, like everything else, if you have the audacity to think that you can become a composer, well good luck, buddy. Because there’s been so many geniuses, so many people that you’d be lucky to carry their water. So you just have to work so hard to be the best you can be.

The third thing is you have to be lucky. And luck is one of those things, of course, that you make. You have to be out there, you have to be pushing hard and be daring so that you have the opportunities to be lucky. Getting that email from Tim was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. But I was there. I had put in the time as a musicologist, as a composer, as a rock and jazz musician, so I was ready for that. Because if you’re not ready for the lucky meeting… I always quote Emerson: “I pity he who is a victim of fate, but blessed is he who’s guided by destiny”. Fate is something that happens to you, but destiny is something that you make happen. You can call it luck. You ask anybody who is successful, they say, well I’ve been very lucky. But you make your own luck.

And the fourth thing is you’ve got to be smart. A lot of musicians, including a lot of great jazz musicians and a lot of great rock musicians, are not the most practical people. But if you want to raise a family, send a kid to college, pay your mortgage, and have a nice life, then you need to be smart. You need to figure out how can you take these tools that you have and translate them into making a living. And part of that is, you’ve really got to do all the other things, but you’ve got to have a big toolkit, you’ve got to make yourself indispensable by having skills that other people don’t have.

I always tell young people, do something dramatic. I went to Paris after my undergrad. And that has helped me in more ways than I can count. In part by people just saying ‘wow’, and suddenly you look different in their eyes. You’re not just a kid that grew up in Southern California and stayed there. You went across the ocean. And it wasn’t that hard. It was a lot of fun. But you grow so much. So be dramatic, do something dramatic. And think big. Especially when you’re young. Imagine your wildest dreams, and say OK, I’m going to get there. Maybe you won’t get there, but you’ll get a lot closer than if you say, well, I just want to be able to play at that bar down the street.

For full interview with Nolan Gasser, click here.

Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin is a cognitive psychologist, record producer, and best-selling author of “This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” and “The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature”. He has been a producer or a recording engineer for artists including Blue Oyster Cult, Chris Isaak, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Santana, and The Grateful Dead, and has been a consultant for albums by Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton. He is a professor and the director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. (Photo credit: Arsenio Coroa)

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Daniel Levitin: Practice. Deliberate practice. Not mindless, but mindful. And practice a little bit every day, because your brain has to consolidate the information through sleep. So three hours, all on a Sunday afternoon, isn’t the same as even 15 minutes a day.

David Freiberg

David Freiberg was a co-founder of 1960′s psychedelic band Quicksilver Messenger Service, which was known for extended jams as captured on their classic album Happy Trails. He toured with Jefferson Airplane toward the end of that band’s existence, and stayed on when the band evolved into Jefferson Starship. He was a co-writer of Jefferson Starship’s 1979 hit song “Jane”. Both Freiberg and Paul Kantner quit the band as its sound became more commercial, in particular before the recording of “We Built This City” as Starship. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

David Freiberg: Having fun is more important than going to #1. If you’re in a band and something goes to #1, that’s really good luck. But it’s also a big curse. It’s like winning a lottery. Hardly anyone who wins a lottery is ever happy. Their life goes to hell immediately. Everybody wants to get that money, and they don’t know who their friends are, because everybody’s a friend, right? I don‘t know, it’s kind of like that. Just don’t change.

Steve Young

Steve Young is a singer and songwriter whose best known song is “Seven Bridges Road,” which was covered by and became a Top 40 hit for The Eagles. He also wrote “Lonesome, On’ry And Mean”, which became a trademark song for Waylon Jennings, and “Montgomery in the Rain”, which was covered by Hank Williams, Jr.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would give to an aspiring songwriter?

Steve Young: Become a dentist [laughs]. You know, go to dental school. That’s just my joke.

If you’re a true writer, then you’ve got to write. My real opinion is you should do it, and if you don’t make any money from it, try to have a backup plan and just try to see what happens. Because it’s probably tougher than it has ever been. The music business itself is pretty low-key, let’s face it. So, I think you have to be a little crazy to do it. It’s really an unknown. Just like acting, there are a few people who actually make a living doing it. But again, I don’t want to deny anybody their expression or their art. You should try it, you should do it, if nothing else for yourself and a few friends. Just do it and see where it goes. If it goes nowhere, you still have the pleasure of doing it.

JM: Your answer reminds me… I asked the bassist from the Meat Puppets what advice he’d give an aspiring musician, and he also said “become a dentist.”

SY: He did? Wow, that’s cool!

JM: But then he also said, “Look at what I did, and don’t do that.” Because he got involved in drugs and had problems…

SY: Boy, could I ever say the same thing? It sounds like we have a similar story. I was my own worst enemy in the music business itself. I was just lucky to have any degree of success doing anything.

For full interview with Steve Young, click here.

Justin Roberts

Justin Roberts was in the indie rock band Pimentos for Gus before becoming an award-winning children’s musician who writes clever, thoughtful songs with a well-crafted power pop sound. His latest CD is 2008′s Pop Fly.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give an aspiring songwriter?

Justin Roberts: I think as with anything, it’s practice. Keep doing it, and be willing to write bad songs. Sometimes I look back on some of the simpler songs I wrote early on and think, wow, I wish I could write one of those. But you can’t. So you have to just accept what you’re doing at the time, and try to be content with that. Because you can only do what comes out of you, and you just have to let that stuff come out and not block it too much.

There’s a book called “Art and Fear” that was recommended to me during one of my many sessions of [writer's] block. It’s a great book. It’s mostly about visual artists, but there’s a great story in there where there’s a pottery class, and they divide the class into two groups. They say for one group they say they’re going to graded on the quantity of pots that you make, and for the other group you’re going to be graded on the quality of the pots that you make. They went off and did the thing, and a week later when they came back all of the best work was done by the group that was going to be graded on quantity. And the people who were graded on quality ended up not finishing things or it was half-baked because they were trying to perfect one thing. Whereas the group that was just trying to make as many things as possible came up with the best stuff. I think with songwriting, it’s a lot like that. You have to just try to write as many things as you can, and certainly discard stuff that is not up to snuff, but don’t judge it right away. Try to work with it and see what could happen.

I think being an editor is good, too, for a songwriter. I sometimes find, for me at least, people that make records and have eight million songs on them, I’m like, you know what, this would be a great record if you had gotten an editor and just gotten rid of some of this stuff. No one has the attention span for a 72 minute CD [laughs]. My favorite records are usually over in about 35 minutes. When vinyl was popular, you could only fit about 18 minutes on a side, and that’s it.

So I think it’s a combination of trying to create as much as you can, and then weeding through it trying to only pull out the best stuff.

Also having people that you trust around you that you can play things to that are the best critics. You don’t always agree with what they say but it’s nice to have people to bounce things off, for me.

JM: Would you answer differently if I asked what advice you would give to an aspiring childrens songwriter?

JR: I think the only different advice I would say is to try not to write a song about what you think a kid would like to hear. You just have to write something that is honest, and if you shoot really high then kids will come with you. I think the mistakes people make often is stuff I wouldn’t personally want to listen to, when it sounds like they’re imagining what they think a kid would want to hear a song about and it comes back as condescending and preachy.

For full interview with Justin Roberts, click here.

Taylor Goldsmith

Taylor Goldsmith is the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Dawes, a Southern California band influenced by The Band and the Laurel Canyon style of the 1970′s. Dawes has released two very nice albums, and has been a live backing band for Jackson Browne, who sang backing vocals for one song on their latest release, and for The Band’s Robbie Robertson.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Taylor Goldsmith: I would say play locally until the rest of the country starts hearing about it. Even if you live in nowhere’s-ville, like if you live in Chattanooga, Tennessee but you’re getting 400 people to each show and eventually more, people are going to notice. People always say you just gotta get on tour. I think the only way to do that, and have it mean anything, is if you’re relevant locally.

Larkin Grimm

Larkin Grimm is a well-traveled, eclectic singer-songwriter in the “freak folk” genre. The Swans’ Michael Gira has described her as “the sound of the eternal mother and the wrath of all women”, and also said “her voice is like the passionate cry of a beast heard echoing across the mountains just after a tremendous thunder storm, when the air is alive with electricity.” Grimm’s fourth album Soul Retrieval, which was recorded with the help of famed T. Rex and David Bowie record producer Tony Visconti, will be released in February 2012.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Larkin Grimm: Don’t do it. It is a hard life. We do it because we aren’t suited for anything else. If you can hold onto another job, stick with that! But if you get fired from every job you have ever had and you are a high-strung orchid living on the edge of sanity, GO FOR IT! and try to be kind to the show promoters. They tend to be generous, sensitive, kind people and they deserve respect for what they do.

For full interview with Larkin Grimm, click here.

Jason Reeves

Jason Reeves is a singer-songwriter originally from Iowa City, Iowa. Shortly after moving to California in 2005 he met Colbie Caillat, and co-wrote many of the songs on her debut album Coco, including the hit singles “Bubbly” and “Realize”. He also co-wrote songs on Caillat’s follow-up album Breakthrough, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, plus “The Show”, which was a hit in the UK and elsewhere for Lenka. His 2007 album Magnificent Adventures of Heartache And Other Frightening Tales won acclaim for its heartfelt pop-infused folk songs, and his album The Lovesick will be released by Warner Brothers sometime in 2011.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter / musician?

Jason Reeves: I would say it’s all about insane amounts of patience and belief in yourself. You have to have a vision and know that it’s worth seeing it through. Other than that, just be true to your heart.

For full interview with Jason Reeves, click here.

Buddy Miller

Buddy Miller is a Nashville-based singer, songwriter, musician, producer, and recording artist. He has released several solo albums, and has toured with and/or recorded with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Shawn Colvin, Linda Ronstadt, Alison Krause and Robert Plant, and Robert Plant’s Band of Joy.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Buddy Miller: Just keep doing it. That’s all I’ve ever done. I feel really fortunate to be able to say that. But, you know, if you love it just keep at it.

Black Francis

Black Francis is the primary songwriter, lead singer, and rhythm guitarist of the Pixies, the alt-rock pioneers whose trademark use of quiet verses and loud screaming choruses was a huge influence on Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s songwriting. In fact, Cobain admitted that when he wrote the genre-creating smash hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, he “was basically trying to rip off the Pixies.” Francis’ post-Pixies recordings have been variously released under the names Frank Black, Frank Black and the Catholics, and Black Francis.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Black Francis: Go play. Go play in front of people. That’s the best thing.

Alex Ebert

Alex Ebert is the lead singer for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, whose music mixes elements of folk, rock, gospel, soul, and a touch of glam, and whose live shows – in Music Illuminati’s opinion – are not to be missed. To date, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have released one album, 2009′s Up From Below. They will be playing at the Coachella Festival in April 2010.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?
Alex Ebert: Do it, even if you don’t feel ready. Just do it. And then, be like a child. That’s the most important thing.

Al Kooper

Al Kooper is a legendary songwriter and musician, who is most notable for co-writing the Gary Lewis and the Playboy’s hit “This Diamond Ring”, playing organ on Bob Dylan’s classic “Like A Rolling Stone” and with him at the Newport Folk Festival when he “went electric”, founding Blood, Sweat, and Tears, playing on sessions with Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, playing on the album Super Session with Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills, signing The Zombies to Columbia for their album Odessey & Oracle, and discovering and producing Lynyrd Skynryd.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter/musician?

Al Kooper: Go to law school. I wouldn’t want my son to become one.

Jeff Hanneman

Jeff Hanneman co-founded and plays guitar for thrash metal pioneers Slayer, whose 1986 album Reign In Blood is often hailed as one of the most important and influential heavy metal albums ever produced. He is also one of the band’s songwriters, with credits including “Angel of Death”, “Raining Blood”, “South of Heaven”, “War Ensemble”, and “Seasons in the Abyss”. Slayer’s most recent album was 2009′s World Painted Blood, and the band continues to tour.

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Jeff Hanneman: Kick ass!

Ira Kaplan

Ira Kaplan is the guitarist, and a singer, songwriter, and co-founder of Yo La Tengo, a “cult band” formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Yo La Tengo’s sound is often compared favorably to that of the The Velvet Underground, a band they played in the film I Shot Andy Warhol. Photo taken by L. Paul Mann

Jeff Moehlis: What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?

Ira Kaplan: Don’t take advice from anybody.