Influences

Pass the Acid

SK
That I wasn't at an acid test? Bwahahahahaha!

X
I'm sort of trying to counter the literalism of that person's quip.

SK
Oh, God.

X
I'll connect it to music too, because the music of the Dead, and the music of Zero - and there's a lot of other bands that could probably be described this way - is listened to by people who are under the influence of acid, quite a lot, and acid affects your sense of time and your sense of delay - the visual trails effect, for instance.

SK
Right, according to the individual listener in that moment, but that's it. It's not across the board. We've done this already before. Different kinds of music affect you in different ways at different times in your life. There's no absolute about it, whatever the music is.

Thank God we grew up in a generation when there were some psychedelics available, in spite the fact that some people seem to have suffered permanent damage behind doing some of them, because we all know people that just aren't the same. I'm glad that that was available to our generation, but if you think you have to do it every day to maintain some kind of perspective, well, I don't think that's right.

Whoever that guy was that didn't trust anybody that hadn't been to an Acid Test, tell him to bring his guitar over and tell him to bring his acid over, you know? I'll test him! I've done plenty of acid. I've played plenty of guitar. What kind of bullshit is that anyway? That's silly.

David Lindley's Rig

SK
I love reggae music.

X
Why?

SK
It just feels good. It's party music. As far as I'm concerned, Bob Marley kind of wrote the book, and I love Bob Marley, and I love playing reggae, and I love hearing reggae. It's a cool thing. You know who did reggae good that I liked? David Lindley. I liked what he did with the reggae thing. I love Lindley's playing.

X
When Zero plays Mercury Blues, I always hear it as a David Lindley tribute.

SK
Absolutely. I don't know how it came up that we did that song. But what was the other one we did? Oh, the Sexual Healing thing. John Kahn used to come out to the barn and play with us and hang out. He would always be pulling out all these old Motown tunes and soul tunes, and once he says, "Let's play Sexual Healing," because he liked the bassline. He played the changes and I went, "This is a great tune and everything but this is lame," because I didn't want to do it like that, but it's the same changes to one of those Lindley things. [Plays on the guitar to demonstrate, the melody used for Zero's instrumental tune Tongue 'n' Groove] You know? So that's Lindley.

When I made my little Kimock & Friends disc, I said right on there: if you copy this disc send five bucks to Dave Lindley. [Laughs]

I used to go see Lindley play all the time. I used to stand right at the edge of the stage, and watch all the stuff that he did.

X
Have you ever played with him, or would you like to?

SK
I would love to. I'm not worthy. All my shit, man, is Lindley's shit. The same kind of guitar, the same kind of pickups, the same kind of tuning, the same strings, the same amp, the same all that stuff. So, whatever people say about all the rest of this stuff, I'm using Lindley's rig. That's where that's at.

Slidey Stuff

SK
I listen to north Indian classical music. Ali Akbar Khan mostly, on the sarod, the slidey stuff. I've been listening to a lot of this Keith and Jewel Dominion Church service stuff from Florida, which I'd like to play for you before you go. The churches were so poor that they didn't have organs, so they used steel guitar, lap steel, to accompany the service. You should hear these guys play. It's the best. You'd have to be into steel guitar, I guess, but I never heard anything so good in my life. It's just incredible.

X
Is that how Freddie Roulette got into lap steel?

SK
Well, Freddie's a special case. He's from another planet. I've been listening to some Freddie Roulette too. I love Freddie's playing. I think Freddie Roulette was the guy that got Lindley into playing the lap steel, that's where that works, and I think the instrument that he plays mostly was a gift to him from Mr. Dave.

Jazz Guitarists

SK
Yeah, you could do that or I could make a list that would take all day to read.

X
Yeah, I'm afraid of that. That's why I thought I should prompt you. For instance, I wanted to ask you did you ever spend any time listening to Joe Pass?

SK
Yeah, some, but I spent more time listening to George Barnes and Carl Kress. They had a great jazz duo I listened to Joe Pass, but I listened to way more Wes Montgomery than I listened to Joe Pass, and I listened to as much Lenny Breau as I listened to Wes Montgomery. Lenny Breau was probably the best guitar player on the planet before they found him in the bottom of a swimming pool.

X
Are there specific Lenny Breau albums or cuts that people should look for?

SK
There's a Live at Shelly's Manhole that I thought was real good. Any of the Lenny Breau stuff. He was an incredible, incredible player. Unbelievable.

Charlie Christian and Jimi Hendrix

SK
I listened to a bunch of Charlie Christian, but when I was younger. I listened to a lot of Django Reinhardt, but again when I was younger. And then all the second-generation electric blues guys.

X
Yeah, I was going to say Jimi Hendrix.

SK
Obviously, huge Hendrix fan. Getting the hit off the Hendrix thing is different from getting the hit off of almost any of the other stuff, because he was one of those guys that slammed it. He didn't close the chapter. He slammed the door shut on the thing. Charlie Christian might have had something to do with getting the door open on the electric guitar thing, but Hendrix was like, It's done. Bang! Case closed.

X
So how do you persist? Do you have to go in another direction to avoid retreading?

SK
Yeah, you can't. The thing that was cool about Jimi Hendrix was that he was completely utterly all the way original, and so as soon as you play his shit you've just taken the best part of it away. So what do you do with that? I'll get a little Hendrix quote in there once in a blue moon, but stylistically for me it would be a dead end. It's not a style that you can emulate successfully because, as far as I'm concerned, the impact of his playing was in its originality.

X
I heard Stevie Ray Vaughan once or twice do an arrangement of Voodoo Chile (slight return), and he was good - he had the chops, from my perspective - but to me it seemed more like a tribute, and Jimi Hendrix deserves tribute, that's legitimate, but...

SK
Right, but the tribute that Jimi Hendrix deserves is for everybody to be original with their stuff. That's what he was saying! Don't do it like those guys! Do it different!

Small-Band Improvisors

SK
Oh, yeah. All the obvious, Miles Davis and Bill Evans. Miles Davis on the trumpet or just as an incredibly influential musician. I think he influenced how everybody heard and played music. I love Bill Evans' playing on the piano. I was a big Cannonball Adderley fan.

X
Mostly jazz guys outside of guitar?

SK
The post-bop jazz thing got me real hard. I liked that. But, to bring it back around to the Grateful Dead thing, when I did finally begin to listen to some of the Grateful Dead, after the other listening that I had done - because I was never really into that band so much, but I heard it and I dug it, and I loved Jerry Garcia's playing, but I didn't really listen to it that much - when I finally started listening to it, I went, Oh, this is small band improvisation. This isn't a rock band. This is the shit. This is the stuff. These guys are actually going for it. And the time signatures and the tonalities, and the juxtapositions of the tonalities that were being used, it was all very jazzy, and I thought it was really cool. [Laughs]

But it's small-band improvisation, and that's mostly the stuff that we're talking about getting off on here, whether it's Wes Montgomery or Roy Buchanan or David Lindley, small-band improvisation. It's not big-band charts, and it's not 164-track Madonna mixes. It's the guys getting on stage and...

X
...and listening to each other while the play.

SK
Yeah. So Hendrix was a huge one who basically I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Clapton's stuff I enjoy playing and don't mind covering. I don't know why.

X
Maybe because he left a lot of possibilities out there.

SK
Yeah, maybe it's a little easier to deal with than the Hendrix thing. I love the Allman Brothers. The Allman Brothers kick my ass totally. Stevie Ray Vaughan I liked a lot, but he came along a little late for me and, as much as I love his playing, I would put his entire output - and I'm a total asshole for going on record as saying this because everybody loves Stevie Ray Vaughan and so do I - but still, for me personally, from where my listening came from, I would put all his stuff up against In Memory of Elizabeth Reed [makes balance with his hands] and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed would dump it all. [Tips to one side] I thought Dickey Betts was a fuckin' incredible player.

Roy Buchanan was a huge influence. We've talked about David Lindley. Johnny Winter was a big influence; I love Johnny Winter's playing. And then there's just a million other guys. The other influence, the other instrument would be sarod. Sarod's a big influence.

X
When you talk about small-band improvisation, it sounds like defining it that way has to do with bucking the assigned labels or genres. This is rock 'n' roll, and this is jazz. This is r'n'b and this is blues. I've often heard musicians not accept those distinctions or categories, and I was wondering, do you think of yourself as someone who plays jazz?

SK
No. I'm influenced by it, of course, but I wouldn't say I play it. No, no.

X
Would you say you play rock 'n' roll, then, is that your home-base genre?

SK
Yes and no. I play electric guitar, so it's more rock 'n' roll than it is jazz. Electric guitar is not really like a jazz instrument. A couple of guys got in there and played some. John McLaughlin, for example, another huge influence. I love McLaughlin's playing, with Miles and later on.

I hate making these kinds of distinctions, but we all know what the fuck good jazz is, and it's not what's on the FM radio these days that they call jazz. That's not jazz, right?

X
How about the Meters? Zero tackles Meters stuff.

SK
I'm totally into the Meters. All those little bands that play together, four guys or five guys, like the Meters or Booker T, that kind of stuff, I just thought that was great.

Newer Music

SK
Yeah!

X
Anything you like?

SK
No! [Everyone laughs] Some of it's cool. I went and saw the Ramones, you know? No, I thought their hearts were in the right place, but really by the time the punk thing showed up on the scene, I'd pretty much already found my footing. It wasn't a big influence.

X
Have you ever been aware of the improvisational music scenes that have come and gone in San Francisco, recently, such as the acid-jazz thing, such as Charlie Hunter or Will Bernard, who opened for Zero recently? Do you hear those guys?

SK
Some of it I hear. Some of it people are kind enough to make me aware of and will get me a tape, and I'll get a chance to listen to it, but honestly, I don't have the resources to go out and look for it. I've been a musician for so long that I'm down to: I stay here at Kene's place without a car. I don't have a car, I don't have a bank account, I don't have anything. I have a pile of guitars, and if I can get a gig I'll go out and play. So it's not like I get to go out and chase music around, which I would love to do, but I don't get to do it.

The Jerry Garcia Thing

SK
I really do not think of it like that at all. I don't think there's any amount of pressure that could be brought to bear on my thinking about it that could be greater than the pressure I put on myself anyway just to play.

I knew Jerry Garcia. I didn't know him well, but we hung out and we talked, and we played a couple of times. He dug where I was coming from and I dug where he was coming from, and we kind of worked the same side of the street. When he died, I had the weirdest kind of feeling about it. Remember the Maltese Falcon, where Humphrey Bogart's partner gets snuffed by the girl? It was like that. I felt like I had to do something, like I couldn't just let it be that Jerry was dead, that the music was not happening or something.

X
So there's this feeling of obligation or responsibility.

SK
Yeah, it was like a work thing. It wasn't like an emotional thing. It was like a work thing. It was like, it doesn't look good. It's not good for business. Just like in the movie, you know? It's not good for anybody, not to do something about your partner getting killed. It's the Humphrey Bogart thing. I was being totally Humphrey Bogart about it. And then Vince all fell apart, and we picked him up, "Come on, let's go play," and got him playing.

The whole Jerry Garcia issue for me, again, has followed me around and followed me around. He played in a style, and yeah, he was Jerry Garcia, and yeah, he was the best guy in that style, but it wouldn't be any different if it was B.B. King, and there was only one blues band, right? and it was B.B. King's band, and B.B. King died, and they needed to get a guitar player because you gotta have some guitar. Well, then you'd get a guy that played the blues with a friggin' hollow-bodied guitar, you know?

There's some kind of West Coast psychedelic improvisational music style that Garcia played in, and he was obviously the king of that thing, but it was still a style, and John Cipollina played in that style. He was a West Coast psychedelic improvisation kind of guy. There's a bunch of guys. Jerry Miller was another one. Terry Haggerty was one of those guys who would just go for it, and get out. Obviously Garcia's contributions, just to the culture and the Dead and everything like that, are immeasurable, but he did play in a style, and I play in that style.

When you hang out in a room full of people and they've all got colds, you catch a cold. And when you hang out in a room full of people who are playing a certain way, you catch that too. And I did the thing with Merl, and I did the thing with Nicky Hopkins, and I did the thing with Cipollina. I did the thing with all the same people. John Kahn. All the same time, the same style of music, and did not have any success doing it, none. Zero success. And I've either been living in a car, or living in a tree, or camping on somebody's couch since '75, since I got to California. The pressure to maintain some kind of integrity to play in that kind of music and to do that improvisational small-band thing without any rewards is a lot more pressure to maintain than what does it feel like to be playing with these guys or being in Jerry Garcia's place or something like that. That's not it.

X
You've had to deal with people pigeonholing you, or people coming from a perspective where they never heard Terry Haggerty, let's say, they never heard John Cipollina, they're fifteen years old! but they heard the Dead, or they went on tour, so they hear you and that's their only reference point.

SK
But I still have to answer to myself. I still have my own integrity, if there's anything you hear in my music that makes any sense to you. If nowhere else in my life, I've got some integrity there in my music. It's not about the audience perception about what's the deal with the Jerry Garcia thing. I have nothing to prove to those people. I'm just going to go play, and I think it's appropriate that I do that, and if anybody else thinks it's appropriate that I do that, fine. And if they think it's inappropriate to do that, fine, I'm going to play anyway. I have every expectation of going out there and doing a good job, and I have every expectation of being out on my ass in the snow when the thing is over. I have every expectation of not allowing any of that to bother me, and to continue playing.

X
Would you make a point of not playing any of that material again, outside of that context, or could some of that stuff enter your repertoire or influence the way you play?

SK
I've never willingly played that material. When I did the gig with Bob Weir and he wanted to do one of those tunes, I'd say OK, because that's my job. Right? And when I did the gig with Merl, if he wanted to play Bertha or something like that then I'd play that. When I did the gig with Vince, if he wanted to play a Dead tune, it was like, OK. But for exactly the same reasons I've had to stay away from that, because that's not it.

I think it's OK that I play in that style. It's a style, and I look up to those guys, and I look up to what they did. It's great and I'm not trying to copy what they did. I'm not even so presumptuous to think that I could add something to what they did. I just happen to think that that's a cool way to play, and that's where it wound up. It didn't get there the same way, and it's not going to wind up going the same place, but it's in that style. And there's not a lot of guys that played that.

It's an incestuous little community here. Everybody plays with everybody else. Everybody knows everybody else musically. I played with all the same people, drank the same water, and saw the same shit. I did the gig with Keith and Donna. When somebody said, play in this band. I'd say OK. They'd say, play this material. OK. Go over here in this band, play this material. I'd play it. And when I play my own stuff, I play my own stuff.

X
How did you hook up with Keith and Donna?

SK
After they left the Dead they had a band. I think Cipollina was playing the guitar for them, and then he couldn't do it. Somebody in the band said, Call Kimock up, and Donna called up. I was heavy into this jazz thing, doing all this fingerstyle gut-string guitar stuff. She called up and said, "Is this Steve Kimock? This is Donna Godchaux," and I said, "Fuck you. No it's not. Who is this really?" So that was fun. I dug playing with them. I just have a feel for that stuff. I don't know the material, and I'm clueless, and I'm learning a lot about it, and I'm enjoying learning a lot about it, but I'm not going to pretend that it's me and I'm not going to try and take advantage of it.

X
I've heard you sit in with a lot of different groups, and always when your turn comes to take the lead or play a solo, I hear you. It's often surprising to me what you decide to do, as if slide in from the side somehow rather than jumping right into the very obvious open space. I guess I hope fans understand that you have your own approach and that you're not on stage thinking about what the 25,000 people out there want to hear or don't want to hear.

SK
I don't know what they want!

X
So much the better.

SK
No, it's great. I don't know.

X
But they don't know either. They want to hear what they used to hear, but they know they don't want to hear it exactly the same.

SK
Right. Well, part of what they want to hear, I'm guessing, is somebody playing in that style, and again I'll get back to the production aspect of it. The basic thing productionwise that you're looking for is a Fender guitar through a Fender amplifier, and kind of a modal improvisational thing that's roots based but at the same time obviously ate too much acid when it was a kid. So in general terms, I'm there. Productionwise, that's what I do. It's not about playing through changes, and it's not about the tune things so much. It's about can I handle that space. So, we'll see how it goes, but I'm not going to go out there and try and prove to anybody that I can do this or that or the other thing. I'm just going to go play.

Calico
It was still pretty clear, that, through all these maneuverings, locally certainly, you were the people's choice.

SK
I got the hint that Phil dug my stuff. I got the hit also that maybe some of the guys were just kind of phobic about guitar in general.

X
Jerry cast this big shadow.

SK
Yeah, absolutely. All my life, I'll go to do a gig, and there'll be nobody there and it's like what's the deal? Oh, Garcia's playing. It's like, you can't book a gig then. Why not? Oh, because Jerry Garcia's playing, down at the whadayacallit. And I'm all, Well, fuck it. Let's go play anyway. So what. Somebody's going to show up. Or maybe nobody's going to show up, but I can't just stop or not try, or do it different, because somebody else is doing it. And I loved Garcia's playing, man. I loved his playing. He was a great player and he was a really, really cool guy, and it was a great loss that he's not with us, or with the band, or with those people, because he was obviously an enormously important-- what was he, not a personality? Something special...

X
He was like a force a nature.

SK
He was real special, and nobody's going to replace that, but in a more mechanical sense of, if these spaces or these frequencies are covered in some fashion does that allow the rest of the thing to function? I think the answer is, Yes, it does.

Dean Webb
Don't sell yourself short, saying it's mechanical.

SK
No, it is to a large degree.

X
But it's mechanical maybe for somebody who's done all the work you've done up to this point. I don't know whether they could take any guitarist and hand him the same equipment and say, now, make these songs work.

SK
I don't know if they can hand me the guitar and say make these songs work. We'll see. Again, I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm not on some mission, or some fuckin' crusade, to prove something to anybody about what side of the bread anything is buttered on. I'm just going to play. I'm making myself available to the thing and to the extent that the Other Ones are able to take advantage of whatever it is I have to offer, it will be them taking advantage of whatever. I'm not going to force anything on them, or try to make it do this or do that. I'm going to do my thing.

X
Are you at all afraid of the obsessive level of the fans, the way they did fixate on Jerry, and they were moved emotionally in some of the ways we were talking about before - I'm saying they, but I'm one of them.

SK
Yeah, me too.

X
Some people theorize that one reason why he became more and more remote and more and more inaccessible was that he felt an enormous pressure of attention and adulation. Your playing's already "great" enough that some of your fans also exhibit a degree of adulation.

SK
Right now I don't get that from people. Right now, at least, it's still at a level where if somebody comes at me with this I can just punch 'em in the arm [punches me in the arm]. You know, "fuckin' wake up!" So that still works. I'm not a bit worried about receiving too much positive attention, and I'm only the tiniest bit worried about somebody deciding the only way to deal with this upstart is to be violent about it. That's the worst of it.

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