| which had. |
| .. . |
| Somewhere along the line, I had to teach them a lot of what
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| they didn’t know about music.
|
| I started out playing rhythm &blues when I was about 14 or 15 years old in
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| San Diego. |
| And, uh. |
| .. I was playing nothing but blues 'til I was 18 and, you
|
| know, I was really honking and I started out playing drums with a band and
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| got tired of listening to other people’s guitar solos. |
| Took up a guitar and
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| started playing lead right away. |
| Then I spent, uh. |
| .. the early part of my
|
| musical teen childhood doing the same thing that most of the, uh. |
| .. uh,
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| white blues bands are, uh, pulling down heavy bread for. |
| But in those days it
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| was, you know. |
| .. it was the underground music, uh. |
| .. the unpopular
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| underground music because the kids, uh, then wanted to hear, uh. |
| .. you
|
| know, sweeter, easier stuff. |
| They didn’t go for hard, screaming blues or
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| Chicago, uh, you know, weirdness. |
| Nobody knew who the Howlin' Wolf was,
|
| nobody. |
| .. you know, Muddy Waters, what the fuck is that? |
| And, uh, so I
|
| grew up on that stuff but simultaneously buying, uh, classical albums and,
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| uh, going to the library to study music. |
| I had albums of Stravinsky and
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| Varèse and Webern and Bartók. |
| And I never bought anything el. |
| .. I
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| never bought any Beethoven or, uh, Mozart or anything like that because
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| I didn’t like the way it sounded, it was too weak.
|
| So. |
| .. eventually I started hearing a little folk music. |
| I didn’t like most of
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| the commercial folk music that was around. |
| My taste in folk music was, uh,
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| sea shanties and, uh. |
| .. uh, Middle Eastern stuff. |
| I like Indian music,
|
| I like,
|
| uh. |
| .. Arab music. |
| So, that. |
| .. that was all my own personal taste-making,
|
| uh, influences.
|
| The original guys in the band had been brought up on nothing but rhythm &
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| blues. |
| Now, rhythm &blues branches out into about four different categories
|
| the way we grew up with it. |
| There was the ooh-wah ballad, you know, with
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| the high falsetto and the grunting bass and all that stuff. |
| That type. |
| There’s
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| a Chicago blues type with the harmonica and, you know, and the funky-ness.
|
| There was a Texas type with a, you know. |
| .. rock, uh, Bobby, uh, «Blue»
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| Bland type thing. |
| And then there was the hard drive type James Brown shit.
|
| And offshoots of the, uh. |
| .. of each one of those, like in the ooh-wah
|
| classification you’ve got the uptempo singers where the. |
| .. like Hank
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| Ballard and the Midnighters and the Royales. |
| They had a different type of a
|
| thing.
|
| Uh. |
| .. all the other guys in the group grew up with just that and had no
|
| knowledge whatsoever of any kind of classical music, uh, or serious music,
|
| the. |
| .. uh, above and beyond Mozart or, uh, Beethoven or, you know,
|
| standard concert hall, uh. |
| .. warhorses. |
| And even that, they didn’t give a
|
| shit about and they weren’t interested at all in folk music. |
| And, uh. |
| .. so I
|
| had quite a bit of trouble in the beginning, eh. |
| .. just making them aware
|
| that there were other kinds of music that we could be playing. |
| To top it off,
|
| we were in a, uh. |
| .. very sterile area. |
| We. |
| .. we kept getting fired because
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| we’d playing anything other than «Wooly Bully"or, uh. .. you know. .. uh,
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| «Twist and Shout"or the rest of that stuff. We’d lost job after job.
|
| Interviewer:
|
| When. |
| .. when is this that you’re talking about exactly?
|
| FZ:
|
| Two years ago.
|
| Interviewer:
|
| In '65?
|
| FZ:
|
| Yeah. |
| And, uh. |
| .. so it was. |
| .. it was rough keeping it together because
|
| there’s lots of times that, uh. |
| .. the guys wanted to quit, I mean,
|
| everybody’s quit at least 200 times. |
| So. |
| .. we finally got a chance to come
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| into L.A. and the reason we stood out from the bands in Los Angeles, you
|
| know, why we would attract any attention at all at that point. |
| .. 'cuz, uh,
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| we were working out in the sticks, this whole thing was developing out, uh,
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| away from any, uh. |
| .. you know, any urban civilization. |
| We were really,
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| you know, just out there with the Okies.
|
| And we got to town, we expected to find all kinds of, you know. |
| .. uh, all
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| the bands gotta be really far-out. |
| Well, they weren’t, they were bullshit and
|
| they had no balls, you know, they weren’t funky, they weren’t, uh, tasteful,
|
| they weren’t nothin'. |
| They were just, you know, plastic, folk-rock, teenage
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| puker bands. |
| And they were making a lot of bread. |
| And we came on the
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| scene. |
| .. and, uh, we were loud and we were coarse and we were strange
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| and if anybody in the audience ever gave us any trouble, we’d tell 'em to
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| fuck off. |
| And. |
| .. we made our reputation doing it that way |