Interview for Beatlology Magazine

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Wings’ first drummer shares some fond memories of his days with Wings and sheds some light on why he left the band on the run…

BM: To start off with your background in music—the liner notes to Wing’s Wildlife LP states that there are eight generations of drummers in your family.

DS: Well that’s a little stretched! [laughs] My dad was a drummer. He was playing with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s band because they were from the same part of Pennsylvania that I was born in. Before I was born. And then when I came along, I was the first kid, my dad [said] ‘Time to get a real job!’ My kid brother’s a drummer too and there’s a lot of musicians in my family but I don’t believe there’s eight generations of drummers.

BM: So I guess someone was joking?

DS: Linda had a little bit to do with the funniness of that album, saying my wife was drunk again — my wife is a tea-totaller by the way!

BM: Tell us about your upbringing in PA?

DS: Oh just a real small town, you know, the Beaver family [laughs]. I mean it was really, you know, church on Sundays, uh, sister and her brother. I was the kid with all the potential that spent an extra year in the eleventh grade because I had so much fun growing up. I was just always, from the time I was thirteen, always involved in music and playing in bands and stuff like that. Nothing seemed to matter to me except music.

BM: You got into music in your early teens?

DS: Music when I was five. My dad wouldn’t let me play his drums, so I, I just like, bang on anything I could bang on. And then by the time I was seventeen he enrolled me in a local band association, a boys’ band association. So I got lessons and stuff like that and started playing with concert bands. So from the time I was seven I started studying. By the time I was thirteen I had read every drum that had, that was available at the time. And started to learn other instruments.

BM: How did you begin working as a session musician in New York in the early seventies?

DS: I started my career in, actually, when I came back from the service, I was in the Navy band for my Vietnam period, and got out of there. And that’s where I met my wife, in the south of France actually. Yeah, I was stationed, living on the french Riviera my last stationment, or whatever you call it. Playing in the jazz clubs and stuff. So when I came home I got a gig up in the Poconos, and the Catskills, playing in the hotels for a couple of weeks, or couple of months, while she was arranging to come to the states, she came over. And we kinda moved into New York. I got the gig at the Half Note, which is a legendary jazz club. Which kind of, I was playing with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, and these legendary jazz guys, and so when you’re in that situation you get to be known as one of the young players right away. And that led me right into the studios. It was also the time that Rock ‘n’ Roll was becoming, uh, oh how should I say this? It was commercialized enough so that Rock ‘n’ Roll was being accepted in the studio world and TV commercials and what-have-you were having light pop feels rather that old style swing music, you know? It was at that transition time that I came to New York and because I had been kinda used to that type of playing, I immediately got into the studio world and became one of the top guys within the first year I was there.

BM: And what time was that?

DS: Oh that was ’67, ’68, ’69. Around in there.

BM: And what pop musicians did you work with in that time?

DS: James Brown. John Denver, uh…

BM: Billy Joel on Cold Spring Harbour.

DS: Yeah. There was a guy named Paul Davis [sings] ‘A little bit of soap now.’ We did a lot of R&B records. I mean, what’s his name, uh, TV commercials, what’s the great country artist. The old guy with the hair?

BM: The old guy with the hair? Well that narrows it down! [laughs]

DS: Yeah, I can never remember this guy’s name and he’s one of the biggest country musicians… We played with every… you know, in those days we were doing a record a week. And we were doing TV commercials—two, three a day. And it was just a lot of work, you know. Melissa Manchester. We were doing all kinds of stuff. I played on her very first demo when she was 18 years old. We were just playing with everybody. And I was also working with people like Astra Jiberto, the Brazilian singer. I did a tour of Japan with her. And I also did… my first recording was with J.J. Johnson and Kay Winding, the trombone players. The jazz recording with Robert Calloway and Tom Scott. Joe DiMinone and Joe Beck from New York.

BM: So you weren’t with any particular studio or label?

DS: This is all freelance, word-of-mouth, you know, they get the hot new, young hot heavy-breathers, you know, gun-slingers, and they call them in to make records. It was just a great time and a great time to be in New York. There was lots and lots of work coming through New York. A lot of recording going on. I mean I was playing with large orchestras down at the Columbia 30th St. studio, I don’t even remember some of the people. It wasn’t Tony Bennett, but people of that ilk. All kinds of recording.

BM: So let’s take it to October of ’71 and Paul and Linda fly to New York to begin Ram sessions. They had contacted the Apple offices in New York and put out feelers for drummers. What can you tell us about your first contact with either Apple, or Paul directly, who you first spoke to?

DS: Yeah, I didn’t know this was an audition. I got a call from my service radio registry saying ‘You’ve just had something cancel out but Barry Cornfeld asked us to book you for a demo, if you would do it, down at some address on, like, 43rd St. between 8th and 9th Avenue.’ I said ‘Geez, that’s kinda weird, I didn’t even know there’s a studio there.’ [laughs] ‘But yeah, OK.’ So I go to this building and it really looks like its about to be torn down. You know—busted windows and everything. It looks like it’s not inhabited at all. And I walk in and I say [to myself] ‘Oooh this doesn’t look good.’ And there’s a guy sitting there at the desk, and I said ‘Is there a demo going on here?’ He said ‘Yeah, basement.’ And I went ‘Oh, shit!’ So I go down to the basement and there’s no furniture, no nothing, it’s just brick, dirt floor, bricks and a set of drums in the middle of it. And there’s Paul and Linda sitting over there in the corner.

BM: And you immediately recognize them?

DS: Yeah, I said ‘Oh, you’re Paul Mc…’ [Paul] ‘Yeah, how ya doin’?’ And he said ‘Yeah, we’re in town, we’re looking to do a record here and we just wanted to look at some players, would you mind playing for us?’ And I said ‘Sure, I don’t mind. D’you have a guitar or something?’ He said ‘No, just you!’ ‘Sure, OK.’ And I had actually had a couple of tom-toms with me from another session and the set of drums there was less than desirable. So I said ‘Do you mind if I just throw my ‘toms’ up?’ He said ‘Sure, go ahead.’ Two seconds later I had my ‘toms’ up, I sat down and just started wailing away.

BM: Anything in particular.

DS: Oh he said ‘Play some Rock ‘n’ Roll time, shuffle times, some of this… And soon as I played any kind of Rock ‘n’ Roll beat I went right to Beatles! [laughs] The tom-tom stuff and uh, I mean I don’t play an ‘in the End’ drum solo or any of that stuff but I, you know, just sat down and played a groove, you know. He liked my attitude as well as my playing. Because initially he was gonna start with… about a week later I got the phone call. Not a week, a few days later I guess, I got the phone call. He said ‘I’d like you to do this record with me and I want to book you for a week.’ And I understand that he was going to have me do the first week, a drummer named Donald McDonald do the second week and then Herb Lavelle do the third week. And that’s the way it was going to go. And after the first couple of days he just cancelled those guys and I did the whole six weeks. We did 24 tracks.

Another funny story was, the Museum of Famous People in New York had gone out of business and they were having an auction for the stuff that they had in their museum. And my friend Frank Hippolito who owned the Pro Drum Shop in New York said ‘Hey, they have The Beatles’ Shea Stadium set of drums.’ [laughs] ‘Would you like to buy them if the auction is reasonable?’ I said ‘Yeah!’ Frank calls me a day later and says ‘I got you The Beatles’ set of drums!’ So in the meantime Paul calls me and asked me to do Ram with him, his recording with him, we didn’t have a name for it yet. So the first day of the recording I show up at the Columbia 52nd St. and I had The Beatles’ drum set in there with my father’s snare drum. And Paul comes in, we shake hands and say ‘Hello, how you doin’?’ And he does a double-take on the drum set. Kinda cute.

BM: Was there any conversation around those?

DS: Yeah, he said ‘Where’d you get those?’ You know, we just laughed and went right into work. He’d just start, he’d come in and Linda’d make tea, with the kids in the control room, Heather and Mary’d be in the control room with Linda and she’d make a pot of tea and we just start in. He’d play us a song. Dave Spinozza and I were the other two musicians with him. He’d strap on a guitar, or [play] piano and start playing and singing a tune and we’d learn the tune a little bit and start recording. We just did a tune a day! It was just incredible, that whole album. The process was wonderful.

BM: Did Paul show any signs of frustration at all, starting from scratch?

DS: Not at all, not at all. You know, the one thing I have to say about the whole time element that I was with Paul in the beginning there, both Ram and Wings [Wildlife] he never brought any of that ugly stuff from The Beatle break up into our situation. We were really isolated from that and I think I thanked him at that point.

BM: Because business-wise he was still quite entangled at that time.

DS: Very much so, and very hurt. But didn’t bring that to the table either. I mean he always showed up with a great attitude. He just loves working. It’s play, it’s not work for him.

BM: The studio was where in New York?

DS: Columbia Studios 52nd St. The tracking dates were done there. And then the ‘sweeping’ dates, the orchestral stuff was done over at Phil Ramone’s 799 7th Ave. A&R Studios.

BM: At the same time, John is also in New York in late ’71. Do you know if there was any contact at all between Paul or any of the other Beatles?

DS: Briefly, up at Apple’s offices. Paul asked me to take the Wildlife, this is actually a little later on [after Ram]. I was in New York in the time and he asked me to go and master it [Wildlife] it had been mixed and everything, and just take it up to Sterling Sound and oversee the mastering, make sure that it was cut ‘nice and hot’ and everything. And Sterling Sound was the mastering lab in New York at the time. And I took the record up there and got it mastered for the American release and then dropped the masters off at Apple. And John and Yoko were there. He goes [impersonates, more like Ringo] ‘Oh, you’re Paul’s new drummer, eh?’ And that was about all I, I really wanted to spend a little time, because I respected him so much but we really didn’t get any time to ‘hang’ at all.

BM: You mentioned you did a few Beatles tunes when you were doing your audition, but did you ever do any jam sessions where you did any Beatles or Rock standards?

DS: Maybe a little bit of that. Not really. I mean he came with a whole ton of songs ready to roll. He’d written a bunch of songs. And so we had so much to do that he wasn’t ‘dipping back into the old well,’ there. I mean, he’d come in every day with something fresh. You can imagine what it was like though, I mean the first tune we did was Another Day. Right into Uncle Albert, Monkberry Moon Delight, Back Seat of My Car, Get on the Right Thing. We had all these incredible tunes to… Too Many People. We had all these incredible tunes to do. Oh Woman, Oh Why? The list went on and on. He had a plethora of incredible material there. I didn’t do any Beatles tunes with Paul. [thinks] Until the very end I think we might have rehearsed, or something. We did a little bit, Yesterday.

BM: When touring?

DS: No. The TV show [James Paul McCartney]. And we’d fool around with it every once in a great while. But this is years later.

BM: Speaking of all the music Paul was bringing into the studio, were there times when you thought of Paul as being intimidating as a musician in terms of his musical force?

DS: Not at all. I mean, it was brilliant. I mean, we knew that we were being asked to participate in something that was going to be very special, and very timeless. That this music was going to be longer, lifespan than a normal pop group by all means. And so therefore it was awesome in that respect, but it wasn’t like being star struck or anything. It was just, we were all very grateful to be a part of something that immensely important in the time of music.

BM: Did you ever present any song ideas or co-write any songs with Paul?

DS: No, although when we were working on Red Rose Speedway, uh, we had recorded Little Lamb Dragonfly and uh, in the Ram dates, and Little Lamb Dragonfly was, I think it was supposed to be used with the Rupert the Bear film. And the song wasn’t finished and I remember one day we were over at Trident Studios in London and he was sitting at the piano and he was saying ‘I never really finished this.’ And I helped him kinda finish a little bit [laughs] I wouldn’t call it co-writing. Especially, you’re sitting next to a guy like Paul McCartney, but I wrote some background harmonies.

BM: Which brings us to our next question—what kind of creative input did Paul give you on his songs?

DS: It was total creativity. He’d play us a song on a guitar, an acoustic guitar, or something and sing the vocal, just so we could hear his idea of the song. And then we’d just start playing.

BM: As far as the drum playing goes?

DS: Oh yeah. And if I played a part, uh, there was like in Uncle Albert, for example, if I just play a kinda normal drum part, he’d say ‘That’s good but you know what? I’m hearing something a little different in there, can you make something that, you know, has more tom-tom and less time, a more of a melodic part. [Paul would say] ‘I’m gonna rough sing something to ya.’ And it’d be a great idea. It’d be something drummer wouldn’t think of so I’d experiment and he’d say ‘Yeah, that’s it, try that.’ And then you’d just find a part that works and remember it. Usually it was, uh, he never, never dictated a part to me. Like those times, the late Beatles stuff when they said he was dictating parts to people and stuff, he never did that with us.

BM: Linda, at the time, had really only just gotten into playing with Paul and had limited musical ability, especially very early on.

DS: You mean Wildlife or Ram? Of the Ram album, Linda didn’t play any of the tracks. We were just the three of us in there. Linda did vocals on Ram. And she might have done some overdubs and stuff when we were not recording basic tracks. You know, two of them were alone in the studio. She really started being a part of the group when Wings was formed. It was just the four of us [Paul, Linda, Denny Laine and Denny Seiwell] and she had to learn keyboards parts. And yeah, it was pretty much of a strain because, you know, like Paul said in that story [Wingspan] one night we were playing a university gig and he kicked off Wildlife and she forgot how it started and she started it! [laughs] And uh, we had to just make a laugh of it. And Paul went over to play… show her the piano part and he forgot it! [laughs] He says ‘Oh I remember now!’ and then kicked off and there we went. It was very difficult. She got the raw end of the stick I must say.

BM: Did you find early on that perhaps Linda was doing more of the tour work as opposed to the recording sessions.

DS: No, she really, Paul listened to her a lot, because she had great ideas. You know, she might not have been a trained super musician by any means, but boy she had some Rock ‘n’ Roll knowledge and she knew what was good and what was, what she liked and what would be better than, you know… she had a very good musical knowledge and Paul respected that. Great ideas actually.

BM: You mentioned Linda coming into the studio with the kids and so on, how was that having family in the studio when working on the albums.

DS: It was great! It was absolutely great.

BM: Did you have family of your own there?

DS: No, I am the kid!

BM: Wildlife is really not considered one of McCartney’s strongest albums, in fact, was met with negative reviews upon its release. Did this affect Paul or any of the other musicians?

DS: No. I’ve read some stuff in the press where Paul didn’t think it was one of his better efforts. But I’ll tell you something man, we’d be going along on tours and stuff and people would come up and say how much the Wildlife album meant to them. It was another thing, this was the first release, you know, this was being compared to Paul’s last band [laughs]. And how do you make a record that compares to last Beatles record? I believe the idea in mind was to go ahead and give the world a clear-cut… a real truthful, honest look at a new band starting from scratch. Somebody picking up where The Beatles left off. And five of the eight tracks on that record were first takes. So, I mean, we were really being as honest as we could and that record was knocked together in very little time.

BM: He wanted it to be very much like the early Beatles days, but with him being married you have a van full of equipment and family. What was that like?

DS: It was always like that, it started like that in the university tour. I mean, it was the kids, the dogs, the wives [laughs]. Jump into a rented van and the roadies would set off with the equipment in a rented truck and we’d find a place to play. My wife held Stella backstage while we were performing. Stella was seven months old and my wife would always stand close to the drums to see me and every time I smacked the cymbals Stella would twitch. Boy this kid’s never going to be right! And it was always that family thing and then it was, the European tour we had the English double-decker bus that you might have seen on the ABC show [Wingspan]. That bus was just laden with… we had mattresses up on the top deck for sunbathing in the south of France and you know, we were always like a band of gypsies—big old Rock ‘n’ Roll family, just hanging out. We hung out before, after and during the gig. It was just that. There was never no wild, backstage, weird groupies, Rock ‘n’ Roll hang-oners, there was never any of that stuff. It was just kinda ‘us.’

BM: The ‘university tour’ was driving around to find, well, driving towards a university, just to show up…

DS: Not necessarily! We just headed up north and said ‘Oh, there’s a town! See if they’ve got a school.’ They were all universities, I believe.

BM: What can you tell us about the reaction of some of the people when you showed up to play?

DS: Well, the one time was really funny, we’re all sat out there in the van and Ian and Trevor, the roadies, went in to see if they could land a student union or something to give a show that night and they went in and said ‘I’ve got Paul McCartney out there in the van with the band, would you allow us to put on a show tonight?’ And they said ‘Yeah, right!’ So they dragged this kid out to the van and he goes ‘Oh my god, it’s Paul McCartney.’ [doing Paul] ‘Hullo! How are you?’ [laughs] So that stuff used to happen quite a bit. And then at the end of it, we did it for two weeks, we did ten shows. And near the end we were in Wales, down at Cardiff or Swansea, or something like that. And we stopped and asked if we could do a show that night. And they said ‘No. The students are having finals.’ And they almost had a riot on their hands! And the kids only had to pay 50p, or 75p, which is like a dollar and a quarter to a dollar seventy-five to come and see Paul McCartney and Wings.

BM: And obviously you’re working under a time constraint with two roadies that would have to set everything up.

DS: We’d find a place to play. They’d start setting up and then putting some posters up around the campus to let everyone know we were going to be there that night, or next day and we’d go and find a hotel. We’d go find some funky places where, you know, that would take us, a band of crazy people like we were. I mean, dogs running around… we’d be hanging out in a room at night and this little night guy would come up, little Cyril with a kid’s sand bucket and shovel and he says [doing Ringo impersonation] ‘Excuse me sir, is that your dog?’ It’d be like ‘Lucky’ just in the hallway or something. [laughs] Paul would have to go clean up the shit. Really a lot of fun.

BM: Can you think of any highlights of the ten concerts put on?

DS: Well, just, I mean, it was just such a great deal. It was our first effort as a band you know. We didn’t even have enough material to do a whole concert. ‘Oh we just had another request to do Give Ireland Back to the Irish. [laughs] It was great though, it was the formative days as a band. It was like The Beatles’ Cavern days, you know, we were out there sluggin’ away trying to whoop it all together.

BM: And they were not well-staged equipment-wise—monitors, and so on.

DS: Oh, some of these were in the school lunchrooms, and we uh we had a shitty little PA. It was really ‘down-scale.’ There was nothing fancy about it. After the gig we’d take the kid with the money box, he’d jump in the van with us and we’d crack open the money box and uh, ‘One for you, one for you, one for you!’ [laughs] We’d split the money. And then off to the pub and get a cheese and onion sandwich and a pint beer!

BM: Do you recall a particular venue where anything went horribly wrong [other than Paul and Linda forgetting the start to Wildlife]?

DS: Not really. No, it was a lot of fun actually.

BM: Do you know which of the early Wings gigs recorded or filmed, by Paul or news crews?

DS: Geez, I wouldn’t know. I would imagine so because we were doing tunes like Give Ireland Back to the Irish. There was probably… you know what, it wasn’t set up so much for the media though. So, and it was always a surprise attack but I’m sure that there were a few that actually showed up or else some of those stories couldn’t have been written about those early concerts. But I don’t recall.

BM: Towards the end of the European tour Wings had the Rolling Stones mobile truck. This was for recording and filming all concerts?

DS: Recording. And then we had a film crew as well. So at one point in time we had quite a gang of people with us.

BM: In the Wingspan video they show the bus driving around, a shot of the open top deck. Was Paul or Linda filming this?

DS: That was me! Yeah, my wife, we had a little Super 8 camera and my wife used to take pictures or I’d film a little bit, just messing around. And when they put the, when Mary was putting Wingspan together, Mary and her husband Alistair, called me and asked me if I had anything and said ‘Yeah, I got all this old Super 8 stuff.’ They used some of it.

BM: We talked a little about Red Rose Speedway, can you tell us about more of the recording of that album?

DS: We had quite a lot of tunes again for that album and I think the plan was to make a double, that was a little more involved than Wildlife, to actually go in and use all of the studio facilities. And we used several different studios, we used Olympic Studios, and we used Abbey Road and we used Trident, and uh, we bounced around and took a little bit of time with that one. That was during My Love and all those.

BM: Live and Let Die was in there too.

DS: I think that came right after that. My timeline might be a little messed up here, but I believe it was apart from the Red Rose Speedway album. Although it did, that was during the power cuts and everything they were having in England, similar to California today, but I think they were a little more extensive in England. [laughs]

BM: What can you tell us about the Live and Let Die sessions?

DS: That was really an awesome experience because Paul wrote the theme, we kinda watched him write the song in a matter of minutes actually. Knocked the song out. We were up at the house one day and he had read the novel the night before and he just started thinking ‘Bond’ and then wrote a melody and before you knew it he had the whole thing written. So we rehearsed it for a couple of days, we got our parts together, what everybody was going to play. Meantime, George Martin was writing the orchestral score. And we went into George’s studio live with the orchestra and did the takes together. We did no more than three takes I’m sure. You know, a take to make sure the notes were right. Get the sound right, get the notes right. And then a couple of actual recording takes and out of that came the good one! Threw some vocals and some overdubs, mixed it. We were out of the studio with a 40-piece orchestra in three hours! It was awesome, it was like beyond professional!

BM: What can you tell us about the demo work for Band on the Run?

DS: We had it all rehearsed up in Scotland. In fact, there’s somewhere, it might have got taped over, there was a two-track of us all set to go! We had the whole album ready. And then Henry left the band, one day Paul just like, he kinda pushed Henry into a corner where he really needed Henry to do something the same way every time.

BM: Do you recall if this was for a particular song?

DS: Some ‘lick’ that he really needed Henry to play this all the time so there was continuity and he could count on that passage being played the same way every time and Henry had a little problem with that and they had an argument and Henry just up and left. That was the start of the whole demise for me because, the next couple of weeks… I went down to England and he stayed in Scotland, Paul and Linda stayed up in Scotland, Denny Laine and his wife stayed up in Scotland, they were about to have a baby, and I went down to London. And, uh, during that time I tried to talk Paul into maybe postponing the trip to Lagos for a little while and we’d replace Henry and get a guitar player, rehearse another guitar player because we’d become a very hot band, uh, unit. And, uh, the album really would have been better I thought if we could keep that band vibe and do as much live recording as possible which really, uh, you know they did a helluva job on it, but, I’ll tell you the truth that live two-track we had from one of the ‘farm’ rehearsals was pretty awesome. It really was. Yeah.

BM: So you felt Henry and Paul were on the splits at that time.

DS: Well, Henry left, yes, he just up and left. When I asked Paul to, uh, kind of consider replacing Henry and trying to get this happening again and he wasn’t up for that. He said ‘Nah, we’ll just go down and we’ll do like Ram we’ll just overdub everything.’ And I thought ‘nah’ after all of this hard work that seemed like a big let down for me. Plus I was starting to miss my roots, my New York studio career, starting to miss playing with a lot of different musicians, playing a lot of different styles, different types of music and what have you. Starting to become a little homesick for that. And there was some business that wasn’t being taken care of and I was starting to feel a little futility in that department. It was just time for me to leave. It’s one of my only regrets in life is the way I did that.

BM: The rumour was that you and Henry had called Paul the night before leaving for Lagos and quit the band.

DS: Henry had left several weeks before. I’m the one, I’m jerk that called. The night that the limo was out front of my apartment in London. And, uh, some other stuff that happened that I just don’t care to elaborate on. But it was just more signs that this was becoming insurmountable and I just thought this is really the bad time to do it, but I was kinda of in a lot of pain and I made a bad decision.

BM: Did you have any contact with Paul after that?

DS: No. Not for a long time. I thought he hated me. [laughs] I mean, I would! Because I really let him down, big time. I was the last person he expected to do that. We were very close. I really should have addressed all of this stuff rather than letting it slide as much as I did. I stayed clear for a long time and then I just couldn’t live with it any more. Because we were so close to end up like this, years going by without any contact. I made an effort to contact him and we started patching up our relationship again. And then of course when Linda passed away I was just there for him as a friend. Just one of his buddies.

BM: When did you get back in contact with Paul?

DS: Oh, I don’t know, seven, eight years ago, we started dropping a note to each other. I think I’m the only one from his past that still has his home phone number. We chat every once in a while and I like to keep and eye on him you know. Just one guy that cares about another man who’s lost his wife. And watched his kids grow up too you know. My wife and I are very close with the family.

BM: You’ve worked with a wide range of people since Wings, including: Paul’s brother Mike’s 1974 LP McGear, and recording with two Wings members—Denny Laine and Laurence Juber. Tell us a bit about some of your more recent work.

DS: Yup. A lot of fun actually. Mike’s a good guy. I saw him once, I spoke at one of the Beatlefest deals, and we were there at the same time and it was really good to see him.

The first record I did after I left [Wings] was… the end of 1973… a record with Henry [McCullough] and I did a record with Donovan. And then I went back several months later to do the Tommy opera with The Who and London Symphony. We did like four or five nights at the Rainbow Theatre. Then Henry and I formed a band called Druhe [Irish for my mouth]. Then had Mick Weaver, he was keyboard player, and Chrissy Stewart, the irish bass player. The four of us were in San Francisco, we did some records. That’s were we did the Janis Joplin farewell song where we replaced Big Brother and the Holding Company. Her vocals [she had already passed away] were perfect but the band was all over the place. So we replaced some of their music. We did a bunch of recordings up there and we were trying to put our own group together but something just didn’t work out. Then I came down here to L.A. and started my career back in the studios. I’ve worked [more recently] for a composer by the name of James Newton-Howard. James used to be the keyboard player with Elton John. Now he’s one of the top composers in the film world. We just did the movie Atlantis [released this month]. We did Dinosaur, Perfect Murder. We do a lot of the big films. I’m just one of a hundred-and-ten piece orchestra. I get to use some of my classical background and training to do some of this stuff

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