A Conversation with The Rides’ Stephen Stills, Kenny Wayne Shepherd & Barry Goldberg – HuffPost 8.21.13

Mike Ragogna: Guys, what was the inspiration that brought all of you together?

Stephen Stills: Well, Barry and I got together and said, “Let’s try and write a couple of blues songs over the weekend.” It tuned out to be six, but then I went on the road for like a year so we forgot three of them. That was like right away. Then I wanted to do a blues album and I was whining to my manager who happens to be Barry’s manager, and we’re going, “Guitar players! Guitar players!” Then it turned out that I’d been playing with this kid for the Indianapolis Colts Superbowl parties for years and it was like, “Kenny the cool guy, the guitar player,” and I hadn’t put it together that he was Kenny Wayne Shepherd because guys with three names, it’s like athletes referring to themselves in the third person. [laughs] So I’m on the phone with Elliot Roberts and he’s like, “We have this guy named Kenny Wayne Shepherd, he says he knows you and he’s big now and you should work with him.” I went, “Who?” I swear, this was a true story, I was in a casino and I was facing the wall away from the window and I said, “I have no idea who you’re talking about.” I turned around and there was an eight-story marquee with his picture that said, “Friday, Saturday, Sunday–Kenny Wayne Shepherd,” it all clicked and I went, “Oh, I’m a moron!”

MR: Maybe just pleasantly surprised. [laughs]

SS: And then they all came to my house, and the rest, as they say, is history. We had five or six songs right away and then Kenny had these great covers. His singing voice bears a remarkable resemblance to the real Elmore James as recorded in 1940.

MR: “Talk To Me Baby,” yeah. And The Rides also recorded the Muddy Waters song, “Honeybee.”

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: I love Muddy Waters. When I was a kid one of my first concerts–

SS: You are a kid!

KWS: When I was a YOUNGER kid, when I was three years old, I saw Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. When I was thirteen years old, this guy that worked at my dad’s radio station, he did the night shift and my dad had the morning show. I’d come to work with my dad at the radio station and I’d hang out there all morning until it was time for me to go to middle school. I’m like thirteen years old and then the guy who did the night shift would drive me to middle school. What my dad didn’t know was as soon as we would get into the parking lot, he would throw me my dad’s keys and I would drive to school with him in the passenger seat and I’ve got Muddy Waters blasting on the radio every single morning. I’ve always loved Muddy Waters. If I could take any guy’s voice and implant it into my throat, I would want Muddy Waters’ voice. I don’t claim to sound anything like Muddy Waters, I appreciate them saying that I sound more like Elmore James, but I’ve always wanted to.

Barry Goldberg: It was just on the one song.

KWS: But I think it’s great. I’ve always wanted to do that song.

SS: Even though you’re half my age, literally, we grew up exactly the same way. We were listening to Muddy Waters and all of those great old blues records when we were at a very formative age. In my case, from eight to thirteen or so, me and my friend next door would tune in to WSMV in Nashville, Tennessee–fifty-thousand watts of solid power. On the late night special, they would have these singles they would send out really on the cheap and they would be fabulous combinations of records. That’s what I grew up on, learning how to play like Jimmy Reed and listening to Howlin’ Wolf and trying to figure out what he was saying, and the same with Robert Johnson. But the spirit of it and the feeling of it… It’s uncanny that despite our ages, we grew up exactly the same way, chasing the blues like it was the most beautiful woman in the world.

MR: Nice line. So blues came to a lot of kids the way that rock ‘n’ roll came to a lot of kids. I wonder if rock ‘n’ roll might never have happened if blues had a stronger presence in this country at that time.

KWS: I have to say, even though it was before my time, blues, at one point, was what you would consider popular music. For lack of a better comparison, blues was the rap of its day. As big as rap is with the R&B community, that’s how blues was back in the day. It was the hot thing. We’re talking about a genre that is a hundred years old and is still relevant today.

SS: It was underground music. It helped us overcome racism in my generation. I’ll never forget my reaction to it, being a child of the South at five years old. “What do you mean I can’t play with that little boy?” That and the folk music of the thirties has grown us in ways that are very profound. That’s probably the attraction for us, although God knows, Mozart moves me.

MR: Though this album is blues-based, you guys are being somewhat intellectual with your lyrics, I think more than the simplicity found in blues music.

SS: For that, I thank my English teacher and my grandfather who was a great writer and who read me poetry from when I was knee high to a grasshopper. Poetry and an elegant turn of phrase has always been part of my DNA.

MR: Especially when you look at something like “Wordgame.” That’s a loaded song.

BG: Yeah, that’s your basic M79 right there.

MR: [laughs] Stephen and Barry, I think you guys were on a few of the same records back when. What was your first meeting way like?

SS: You know, what’s funny is that we missed each other by a day, because I worked with Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks and Eddie Hoh because Mike Bloomfield had an anxiety attack and ran away and Barry went to chase him down. Al had a very limited budget, much like ours, only we had seven days and he had three. So I went, “I’ll do it! How many guitar players down the list was I?” “Oh you were right at the top.” “Okay, I’ll come do it.” So we did “Season Of The Witch” and the rest is history. It was my first gold record and I’m forever indebted to Al for thinking of me. But Barry and I did not meet, and we’re part of this great record.

MR: I also want to ask you about a couple of covers on this album, like “Rockin’ In The Free World” by Neil Young.

SS: It’s a great song. It’s never more than that, it was not some homage to Neil or anything. It was the end of the day and we said, “Let’s cut this,” and we blasted through it and I just ripped it. We wanted to get home so we left it. I didn’t listen to the vocal, and I came back the next day and they played it for me. I said, “What did you guys do to my vocal, I sound thirty!” They said, “We didn’t do anything. There’s no nothing!” I said, “What on Earth did we do? Did I drink a cup of tea? What is it? Can I patent it? Steal it?”

KWS: Yeah, and we only did one take of that. That was it.

SS: There’s an enormous mistake at the end that we’ll show you.

MR: I imagine it came of so well from your being pals with Neil, right?

SS: Yeah, I had the chance to play with it time and time again on the tour, so I had it down. Then when listening to the record, I went, “Okay, don’t play any fills. Just play straight,” because the root itself is so cool and to sing the vocal is so much fun. That was it. The relationship with Neil had precious little to do with it other than the fact that it was just the genre we needed at that day at that time and we were trying desperately because we were running out of studio time trying to find things to do. So I said, “Let’s try this” and boom! It just went through the wall.

MR: And with Iggy Pop’s “Search And Destroy,” I wouldn’t think of it in this context, but you guys easily slip it into the bluesrock universe. That was a really clever spin on it.

SS: I was very resistant on that, I cannot tell a lie, and my daughter happened to be in the room shooting us and said, “Dad, dad, shut up. That’s one of my favorite songs.” She’s twenty-five now and she’s doing the photography. She’s a college graduate, and when they speak, I listen, so Eleanor, thank you. When we started playing it and I got this Keith Richards lip in it, all of a sudden, it lifted up into this new universe and it’s really cool and I can’t wait to play it on stage except it’s too short!

KWS: Same thing happened with you Barry, right, where your son was digging on the song?

BG: Oh yeah! Stephen and I looked at each other and I really wasn’t too familiar with Iggy Pop.

SS: I didn’t even know who wrote it! All I knew was the relationship of the changes was weird.

BG: It didn’t feel right! It wasn’t in the rock ‘n’ roll or blues vibe that we were doing. But as soon as we started playing it, we put our own stamp on it. My son, Stephen’s daughter… Elliot’s son was in there shooting a video and these kids came alive. Kenny loved it from the very beginning, he just put his stamp on it and blazed.

SS: And his voice just sounds great on it! I could kick myself for wasting so much time being like, “I don’t know about this song,” when we could have been working out ways to lengthen it. Because on stage, trust me, we’re going to play it for about seven minutes.

BG: When the kids start digging it, we’re like, “Oh wow, we might have something,” and then Stephen and I started playing it and we felt like twenty and thirty again.

MR: Barry, do you fee like The Rides is in the same lineage as Electric Flag and the projects you’ve worked on over the years?

BG: Well it’s related to that, being a combination of American music, blues and rock ‘n’ roll and all that, but this is more fun. It’s a lot looser, it’s not as intense. We don’t have to get ready for Monterey Pop or anything.

SS: Everything was so heavy.

BG: “Let’s do the horn arrangements and let’s get migraine headaches over on it.”

SS: When I get that heavy I turn to rust. Thank you, Woody Allen.

BG: We just want to rock ‘n’ roll together and play the blues and have a good time doing it. I think that the people will see that and, hopefully, they can groove with us, too.

KWS: Just a little side note, he’s indicating that for the most part, this is a stress-free environment and we’re just having fun. The whole point behind this was to make a record playing music that we enjoy and enjoy doing it together. But “Search And Destroy” is a perfect example. Considering the amount of talent that’s involved here, everybody left their egos at the door. There were a few times where Stephen suggested something to me that was completely counterintuitive to what I would do if left to my own devices. He’s like, “No, no, try it this way,” and I was like, “Okay.” “Search And Destroy” was an example of that, where at first, Stephen and Barry were both very resistant to it, but they walked out there and played the song anyway. Nobody was dictating anything, we were willing to entertain everybody’s idea. The bottom line is when you do stuff like that, “What’s the worst that can happen?” We might waste an hour on a song that doesn’t make it onto the record, but sometimes magic happens, and I think that’s what happened on that song.

SS: Do not mistake being over-resistant to just the fact that the truth of the matter is that Barry and I are actually grumpy old men. When your age is going to start with a seven really soon, you’re allowed to be. [makes growling noises] We had children to grow out of that. The cantankerous moments in the studio is when Jerry [Harrison] would say, “Would you just do the song?” and he and I were grousing and the bass player is trying to write the chart down and he’s fast. But it’s like there’s all this arguing going and suddenly somebody says, “Just play the song,” and Kevin [McCormick] jumps right up, gets right in his face, and he’s about a foot taller than this guy, and he says, “We will play it when we have had time for me to write it so I can play the correct changes, do you mind?” “Oh. Uh. Yes. Okay. Fine.” And ten minutes later, the record was done.

MR: Yeah, and as you said earlier, this record was finished pretty quickly.

KWS: Yeah, in about a week. We had a self-imposed tight schedule. My wife and I were expecting our fourth baby. The whole time, I was expecting a phone call and to have to run out of the door at any moment. Thankfully, our child cooperated and came late so we were able to finish the whole album. Stephen also had some things going on and we were heading into the holiday season and we didn’t want to go in and rent a studio out for three months and put everything under a microscope and start overthinking things. We wanted to go in and make an authentic recording the way records are supposed to be done, and that’s what we did.

MR: Nice. Of course, you named the child Elmore or Muddy.

KWS: I think my daughter would have killed me if I would have named her Elmore or Muddy.

MR: [laughs] That’s great, congratulations Kenny. Guys, what do you think of the state of blues these days?

SS: Well, it rests in the hands of John Mayer and Eric Clapton and the Surrey Trio… Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page… But there’s a new generation coming along and there are a couple of kids that need a little more living experience before they’re really going to get this, but there are some monsters out there and this genre is not going to go away. It’s just too rooted in the American Psyche.

BG: I just did a show in Chicago with The Chicago Blues Reunion band with my friends Charlie Musselwhite and Elvin Bishop. Buddy Guy’s protégé sat in, this thirteen-year old kid, Quinn Sullivan. We’re sitting there playing “Sweet Home Chicago,” and the kid was on fire. I looked over at him, a thirteen year-old kid, just blazing, playing the blues. I talked to him afterwards. I said, “Man, you haven’t had time to have your heart broken yet. How do you do it?” “I just have a natural feeling for it.” He loves the blues.

MR: Kenny, what do you think?

KWS: I feel like I’m on the front lines of the blues scene every day, and I’m part of that younger generation that’s trying to do my part to keep it going and keep it relevant and keep contributing fresh music to the genre. What’s interesting is that my career… I’m going on twenty years of my professional recording and performing career, and I’m thirty-six years old, but music is cyclical. If you’ve watched any genre of music that has any kind of staying power… Country music has these waves of huge popularity and then it subsides a bit. It’s the same thing for certain kinds of rock and certainly for blues. You can look at it historically and see the peaks and the valleys. But the thing about the blues that is amazing–and I know this from my own experience–is that the fans of the blues are lifelong fans, just like the three of us when we were all young and we were affected by this music. It’s still very endearing to us and we love it as much today as we did when we first heard it. That is the same for blues fans across the world and once you become a fan of the blues, you become a fan for life and they support you. Right now, I see a resurgence in popularity of the blues, especially overseas in Europe, but even here in the States. You can see it by the attendance of the shows and the kinds of albums that are coming out. There are me and my band, Jonny Lang, Joe Bonamossa, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi… There’s no shortage of people from my generation that are contributing. But then, like Barry mentioned with Quinn Sullivan, there are many others that I’ve seen that are coming up and are going to do their part.

SS: When you get your foundation in blues or really true, free, national country, it evolves into other songs and popular and modern American music, but it’s all got a bridge back there at the beginning of the country.

MR: Stephen, I would say there’s virtually no difference in how you approach the material you’re featured on in this album and what you recorded with Crosby, Stills & Nash or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I never thought of you in the blues world because you’ve always been genre-fied as that whole singer-songwriter, California rock thing. But when I listen to this album now, the blues seems so natural to you. But I think it’s because it’s really what you’ve been doing all along.

SS: Well, I don’t know about that but I will tell you that I’ve learned a heck of a lot from Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and being with Barry is like putting on an old shoe because he and I write together like guys before Crosby, Stills & Nash, before I ever met the three. We just slip into a song and it’s just graceful. There’s no, “This is my part, this is my presence,” it’s just graceful and easy. I’d say, “Let me go polish these lyrics,” and I’d go upstairs and sit at the typewriter and type them out and look for a nice turn of phrase. That’s the one thing that we do the same as Crosby, Stills & Nash. We used to walk in there and write a little and then, “Oh, you know what? You could use that line there,” “Oh, thank you.” And you never wanted credit for it. There’s a lot of that in Crosby, Stills & Nash.

KWS: You know what was cool about that whole songwriting experience? What was cool for me was like on “Mississippi Roadhouse,” there’s this guitar riff and it started where we were just jamming and I started playing this riff and Stephen was like, “I like that riff!” He honed in on what I was playing and actually when he played the riff, I liked the way that he played it better than how I played it. So actually what ended up as something that I started to play that he liked, he owned better than I did. Then I said, “You know what, you need to play that riff, because it sounds better when you play it, and I need to find something to play underneath that.”

SS: Man, I can walk off with a badass riff like a thief in the night.

All: [laugh]

KWS: It was great! When I played it, it didn’t sound right and when Stephen played it, it was great even though it was something that I was playing first.

SS: It’s from being a drummer. It’s a feel thing. It’s the stuff you can’t teach.

MR: At the end of the recording sessions with The Rides, and after hanging out together as well, do you guys feel like you came out of the other side pretty changed?

SS: The hanging out together after the sessions, that happens in the car on the way home to the children. We’re the straightest band you ever saw.

MR: Do you feel like the process got you from A to Z? Did you reach a Z with this project where you feel like, “Wow, I wouldn’t have gotten there if we hadn’t all done this together?

KWS: Well, for me, absolutely. I hate to keep harping on the songwriting process, but “Don’t Want Lies” is the most obvious example to me. It’s obvious that none of this would’ve sounded the same if we hadn’t done it together. That’s just the obvious truth of the matter. But when we started writing that song, and I actually had that riff from a long time ago…

BG: It sounds just like a Stephen Stills riff from a long time ago.

KWS: Isn’t that interesting? But like twelve years ago, I actually wrote lyrics and everything, and this was before the age of the iPhone where you can record things instantly. I lost the lyrics and vocals and all that stuff and I never forgot the riff and that was the first thing that I played for the guys where Stephen was like, “That right there, we’re going to write that.” But Stephen wrote this entire chorus and I sat back and I listened to him and he’s singing this melody and the words weren’t quite there yet but he had the melody. He’s working it out and playing these chords and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is absolutely incredible.” It never would’ve ended up that way if we had not written this song together. Just to see that happen, I think the whole experience from A to Z, none of this would have wound up the same if we hadn’t done this together. We’re just very happy with the way this went down because nobody knew until we got together and started trying to write and record. We didn’t know what was going to happen and the end result is really great.

SS: I hope I can bottle that because that is the essence of the difference between flattery and enthusiasm, and I’ve had to explain that to a few people.

MR: You guys are obviously going to go on the road, but are you going to take earlier material apart from The Rides into this act?

SS: I don’t see how it’s possible, but at the same time, it’s going to be us doing it so it’s going to sound different. When you’re singing and there’s a thing in your mind, you go, “I want to sing this like Dionne Warwick.” But if you put that thought in your mind and it comes out as you doing that, it comes out as something altogether different. I’ve done that for all fifty years of my career. God, I hate saying that.

MR: [laughs] I have a traditional question I want to ask all three of you. What advice do you have for new artists?

KWS: I always give horribly cliché answers to questions like that, so you probably won’t be impressed with my answer. But in all honesty, the thing that I have consistently done over the course of my career even when I was sixteen years old and signed my record deal and tried to make my first album is that I knew people were going to come at me trying to tell me what I needed to do and I was able from the very first day all the way up until now to stand my ground and do what I felt was right for my music and my career and not allow anybody to talk me into doing something otherwise. I’ll listen to people’s opinions and I’ll take it into consideration and if they have a good point, I’ll be the first to admit it. There’s no ego or pride in my game, it’s just that I’ll do what I think is right. If you’re going to be a new artist and you think you have a chance at being successful, you need to do what’s right. Don’t let anybody talk you into recording something you’re not sure about because you might have a hit with it, and if you have a hit with it, you’re going to be playing it the rest of your life so you’d better make sure you like it.

SS: And that is the epitome of the difference between a cliché and the profound.

BG: You really have to believe in yourself. You can’t read what other people are going to think about you, what they think about your song. You pick people that you want to influence you, but you take that and you keep your own style and you develop your own sound and your style and you never give up and you believe in yourself. Never give up.

MR: Beautiful. Steve, what do you think?

SS: I think I said it, that cliché that he started with about standing your ground and what Barry said about being influenced by who you like being influenced by, that cliché is what binds these three people together.

MR: Any surprising things we should know about any of you that we don’t know yet?

SS: How to choose the set list. Mouse races.

MR: Mouse races!

BG: You take twenty mice and you put them in a box with the titles of the songs and then you release them into a room with a little hole at the other end and then the order in which they pass through the finish line is the song list.

MR: You guys sound like you had so much fun that you could’ve kept going with this album, couldn’t you.

BG: We already have a comedy album!

MR: [laughs] I appreciate all your time, thank you very much.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne