He (Tommy) called me months later and asked me to come up and jam with him at his house. I did and we played some Merle Haggard and truck driving tunes. We both had fun. I joined the band because I liked the music and the energy. The live shows were always like it was the last night any of us were going to play. When you have five musicians playing from the same place there's nothing like it. The musicians were a big reason why I joined. I loved the way Paul Slivka played. Jimmer knew how to play a truckdriving song. Milsey was an extraordinary musican. And then there was Tommy. Here was a guy who knew rock and roll intimately. He also knew blues and jazz. I learned a lot from Tommy.

Do you think Tommy Conwell’s audience was ready for the country/blues direction?
Whether Tommy was doing a blues, a rockabilly, a country, or a jazz tune, he would make it his own. I believe his audience was ready for anything coming from the Conwell camp. Now whether they liked it that was another story. The ones I met dug the new stuff. They were ready. And they were willin' to go for the ride. The Cabaret gigs certainly confirmed their acceptance of the new things that were happening.

What was a typical day like in the Los Angeles studio recording Tommy Conwell’s third recording effort, "Neurotic Maximus"?
We tracked the drums at A and M studios at Sunset and Lebrea in Hollywood. We were cutting to two inch tape running at thirty IPS. Andy Kravitz was drumming. He was alot of fun to play with. He hit hard and had great instincts. Though all of us were playing live the producer, Ed Stasium was focusing on the drums. We would show up at the studio around 11:00 A.M. We would cut a tune six or seven times in a couple of hours. Then Ed would ask us to take a lunch break and we would come back several hours later and Ed would have a composite drum track that came from the best parts of the seven takes. It was truly amazing. We did that for about two weeks to track the drums. The studio served seven different flavors of yogurt at the time, which was pretty cool. From that moment on I really judged studios by how many flavors of yogurt they had.

Next we went to a studio called Rumbo Recorders. This was a studio that was used primarily for guitar, bass, and keyboard overdubs. Ed had about fifteen different guitars to pick from depending on the tune. The room also had about ten different amps to choose from, Fenders, Marshalls, Voxes. The room had a low ceiling and a stone slanted wall for early reflections to be caught on tape. We would show up at around 11:00 there also. We did the guitars first before the bass I believe. The guitars were cut by Tommy, myself or Rob. I played either a Fender Strat or a Paul Reed Smith. We would stand in the control room just behind Ed and rock and roll. Ed liked to see things move fairly quickly. I liked it that way also. It took a couple of weeks to cut the guitars.

Each day was different because each song was different. A typical day would start at 11:00 and was usually over by dinnertime. It was a nice schedule. Sometimes we would have dinner at a sushi bar called Delves just across the street from where we stayed. Danny Beirne and I had some nice talks at Delves. We both thought that if either one of us would have been a therapist that we would send our patients there if they were depressed. It was a place that really made you feel good. They played seventies party music really loud. It rocked!

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