Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Tom Ball interview

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 54

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Tom Ball joins me on episode 54.

From Los Angeles, but long time resident of Santa Barbara, he started playing guitar in the popular local folk scene before Sonny Terry turned him on to the sound of acoustic harmonica.
He then met Kenny Sultan, to form possibly the longest surviving acoustic blues duo. They have now been performing together for over 42 years and have recorded eight albums together. As well as session work for commercials, television and film, and toured the world together.

On top of this Tom has over 300 album credits as a sideman with other artists, has written three harmonica instruction books, a guitar instruction book, two fictional books and released some solo guitar albums.

Links:
http://tomballkennysultan.com
http://www.tomball.us

Discography:
http://www.tomball.us/discography.html

Sonny Terry licks book:
https://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=178&searchcategory=0&refer=search&type=product&keywords=sonny+terry+licks

Little Walter / Big Walter licks:
https://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=276&searchcategory=8&refer=new

Music Library sampler clips:
http://tomballkennysultan.com/gallery.html


Videos:

Filthy Rich with Kenny Sultan:
https://youtu.be/jH18jbva4c4

David Barrett interview: demo of wah and growl
https://youtu.be/IH_fzzS9mwI

Nagasaki Sails From Uranus:
https://youtu.be/4Hw4Utb5ZvQ

NHL festival 2003:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zBgQ7jTLi8

Spah 2012, playing Don’t Get Around Much Anymore:
https://youtu.be/YkgPNAZQ6Bs


Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.com/

Support the show

SPEAKER_01:

Tom Ball joins me on episode 54. From Los Angeles, but long-time resident of Santa Barbara, he started playing guitar in the popular local folk scene before a sunny terrier turned him on to the sound of acoustic harmonica. He then met Kenny Sultan to form possibly the longest surviving acoustic blues duo. They have now been performing together for over 42 years and have recorded eight albums together, as well as session work for commercials, television and film, and toured the world together. On top of this, Tom has over 300 album credits as a sideman with other artists. He has written three harmonica instruction books, a guitar instruction book, two fictional books and released some solo guitar

SPEAKER_03:

albums.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, Tom Ball, and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_04:

Well, hi, Neil. How are you? Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01:

No, it's a real pleasure. I've been listening to you for many years, so it's great to have you on. You're a Californian player on the West Coast there, the US, and I think you were born in Los Angeles initially, and now you live in Santa Barbara, yeah?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I was born in West LA, and I've been in Santa Barbara for about 45 years now.

SPEAKER_01:

Great. So what got you into playing the harmonica in LA and then up to Santa Barbara?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, I was playing guitar since I was about 10. And at that point, there was what I like to call the big folk scare. All the Kingston Trio and those kind of collegiate folk music acts were very popular, and you heard them on the radio. And I got sucked up into that because I played guitar. And then by listening to that, I got exposed to people who played harmonica with a rack, Eric Anderson, and of course, early Bob Dylan. So I went out and got a harmonica and bent myself a little rack out of a coat hanger and kind of learned how to breathe along with it. And then by listening to the radio, I got exposed to Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry, and that really twisted my head. I'd never heard anybody play in the harmonica like that before, so I figured I'd better start exploring this instrument. In those days, there was no books or DVDs or any kind of instructional material, but playing along with Sonny Terry was what really put me on the path. As you probably know, he liked to record using an A harp and playing in the key of E, and most of his songs are in the key of E. Quite a few are also in F. So if you have a B-flat harp and an A harp and you play in cross position, you sort of accidentally find yourself playing some of the right stuff. He didn't use an amplifier. He didn't use effects. He didn't play chromatic. He didn't overblow. He played in second position all the time. So it sounded like what your harmonica sounded like. And I found that playing along with his records was very much instructional for me. I more or less copped all of his licks. And little by little, I got exposed to the electric guys, you know, Little Walter and James Cotton and Big Walter and all those people. But it was Sonny Terry that got me into it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And again, you added to the long list of people whose first inspiration was Sonny Terry. It's incredible the amount of people on here who say Sonny Terry was the first they heard. And I think that was partly down to the fact that he was the one who was being played on the radio a lot back then.

SPEAKER_04:

Well, there weren't any sort of acoustic blues radio shows that I could find back then, but there were lots of folk music shows. And so, you know, you'd hear, you know, Joan Baez or Ian and Sylvia. And I liked that music and I would listen to that. But interspersed, you know, they'd play Lead Belly or Lightning Hopkins or Brown and Sonny. That really, really caught my ear. Luckily, we had a club down in LA called the Ash Grove, an amazing club that was down there for about 20 years. And they brought in all of these people, not only the blues guys, but the folk guys and lots of jazz and lots of gospel. For two bucks, you could go see Muddy Waters and Lightning Hopkins. There was always two acts. And you didn't have to be 18 years old. You could be a minor. And so I pretty much lived at the Ash Grove and got my whole musical education out of that place. And there's a lot of people down here in LA that could say the same thing. I've heard in interviews, I've heard Tosh talking about the Ashgrove and Ry Cooter and Dave Alvin. And it was like a lighthouse. It was a beacon for people interested in this music. And I pretty much lived in the place. I mean, I loved it.

SPEAKER_01:

There's a great wealth of harmonica players coming from the West Coast, yourself and Rick Estrin and William Clark and Rob Piazza. Lots of people have had on the show from the West Coast. What is it you think about the West Coast? Was it that scene, the Ashgrove, maybe in Los Angeles, something else around the West Coast? To

SPEAKER_04:

an extent. I mean, the Ashgrove more or less focused on acoustic harmonica players. They did have some electric bands. There was also another scene going on, you know, in the ghetto down in Watts and Florence and, you know, South Central LA, where you had George Smith and Drift and Slim and, you know, all those kind of people that lived in LA. And I think a lot of the people like Bill Clark and Rod and Kim, you know, they were more involved in the electric blues, the West Coast sound. For me, I was more into the acoustic stuff. But we all interconnected and we all knew each other, sure.

SPEAKER_03:

So

SPEAKER_01:

you mentioned that you started off playing with harmonic on a rack and guitar. Is that something you gave up quite quickly, trying to do that combination?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, yeah, what I found is I couldn't really excel at either. You know, trying to do both, it just split my personality up. I ended up being a worse guitar player and a worse harmonica player because I had to sort of think about two things at one time. So I just figured I'll do one thing at a time.

SPEAKER_01:

And were you singing back then as well?

SPEAKER_04:

Not until I was about 15, I got involved in this band called the Yerba Buena Blues Band, all of whom were older guys than myself. They already had some gigs. They were working at clubs on the sunsets strip and we did some of those uh well we did the first love in in Elysian Park on Easter Sunday 1967 I was 16 years old and it was all these um all these San Francisco peanut butter conspiracy and the doors but we were able to play that and we played some clubs and it was uh it was great it was great fun and at that point that's when I began singing

SPEAKER_01:

great yeah and obviously you're you're a singer and harmonica player as well as a guitar player which we will touch on as well so you know that combination of singing and harmonica plays is that what you've done from that age saying you've always been the main singer from then?

SPEAKER_04:

I guess I have. I mean, I don't consider myself a great singer, but I can hold a tune and play harp. For me, it's easier to sing and play harp than it is to just play harp because, you know, you're mostly inhaling when you're in second position playing harp. And then, of course, you're exhaling when you're singing. So it gives you a chance to get your wind back. When you're only playing harp, to me, it's like the opposite problem that horn players have. You have to stop to expel air rather than horn players have to stop to get air. So for me, it was easier to do both play phrases on harp in between the vocals than to just be a harmonica player.

SPEAKER_01:

it's a question i touch on a lot on here which is you know how necessary is it to be the singer if you're a harmonica player obviously is that a decision you consciously made you know to make yourself you know more prominent in the band

SPEAKER_04:

well most of what i did for the last 40 plus years has been in a duo you know with kenny and um kenny doesn't sing so you know i i ended up singing by default really but of the almost 300 records I've played on, I would say 90% of them, I'm not singing at all. I'm just a sideman.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, just talk a little bit more about your guitar playing. So as you say, you started off playing guitar and you do play guitar to a good level. Yeah. So you've got, I think, four solo guitar albums released to your names. You know, what about your journey with guitar? Is that something you've obviously kept up all through your career?

SPEAKER_04:

Oh, yeah. In fact, I'm recording another album right now. I'm about three quarters done with it. Yeah, that was my first instrument, and I still love to play it. But what I found is I'm not particularly good at playing guitar with other people. I tend to regard it as a solo instrument, and I'm a fingerstyle player, so I have to work up these solo pieces. Sometimes they're blues, but more often they're almost an amalgam of classical and other types of music. So the guitar gives me a chance to stretch out and play other idioms.

SPEAKER_01:

Any particular way do you think the guitar playing has informed your harmonica playing?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, sure. I mean, in that by playing guitar first, at least I had a knowledge of what a chord was and what a three chord progression was and, you know, what a fifth was and what a minor seventh was. So it made it easier to learn harmonica by having a background in guitar. But then they sort of separate too, you know, as you get better on both of them, because kinds of music that I'm exploring on harp are so much different than what I'm exploring on guitar. So,

SPEAKER_01:

you know, it's both. So great. So you mentioned Kenny Sultan there. So we'll talk about your duo now with Kenny. Kenny. And then we'll get on also later to the fact that you also alluded to the fact that you've worked on lots of sessions. So you've had this kind of double life, haven't you, as a musician of your career?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, yeah. I mean, I think you pretty much have to if you want to do this for a living. You can't rely entirely on live gigs unless you're really, really popular. And this kind of music is never going to be the flavor of the month. So I've kind of learned early on that if you want to do this for a living, you better have some other income streams, whether it's playing on other people's records or maybe writing songs, getting some mechanical royalties, writing books, teaching. I mean, there's all these other ways that you can drum up some money. So I've explored a lot of that in session work. But the main thing I do for performance is playing with Kenny in a duo. And we met in 1979 and started playing together. And it took off from there. And we're still together. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_01:

It is incredible. Yeah. So I've read that you're America's good time blues ambassadors. Nice quote about you. So I also read that you are the longest surviving blues duo because obviously Sonny Terry and Brown and McGee aren't going Sepperson Wiggins I think were the other ones vying for that title but now at I think 42 years together you're the longest surviving acoustic blues duo in the US is that right?

SPEAKER_04:

Well that's what I'm told yeah

SPEAKER_01:

You must get on well with Kenny, do you?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, we do. Yeah, we're good friends. And we travel well together. And we're compatible musically. Neither one of us steps on the other person. We both give each other a lot of room. We get along. We're good friends. So it works out well.

SPEAKER_01:

And of course, you are a duo. But some of your albums, it is a full band, isn't it? You've got a rhythm section. You've got fiddles. You've got a mandolin. So there are other instruments in there as well.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, there are. Usually, one of our albums will be, oh, roughly half will be just Kenny and I and the other half we were going to have some guests. The last two records we did were just Kenny and I. But prior to that, yeah, we would have other people on there.

SPEAKER_01:

So let's talk about how you guys got together. I think you say you met in 1979, I think in Santa Barbara.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, yeah. I had just moved to town and I had found this group of people here in town called the Santa Barbara Blues Society, and they were putting on shows, and they put on a show with Big Mama Thornton and Eddie Cleanheaded Vinson. Kenny was at the show, and now my wife had seen him performing prior to that, and so she pointed him out to me, and I went over and said hi, and we got together a couple days later, and we played together, and it worked. It clicked, and he says, well, he says, I'm going to be playing on the local college radio station. This is a little station out at UCSB, and he says, I'm trying to drum up some business for my team. And if you want to come out and jam with me on the radio, why don't you do that? And I said, yo, yeah, man, I'd love to. So we get out there and we're playing on the radio and phone rings and it's this little club in Santa Barbara. And they said, if you want to come in on Friday night, we'll give you a pizza and 15 bucks. So I says to Kenny, you want to do this for a pizza and 15 bucks? And he says, well, hold out for free beer. So I did. They hired us. So we went down there and played and it went well. And next thing you know, we're playing there pretty regularly. And then we started playing other places. And, you he got better and we got a little better known and before you know it it's 43 years later you've

SPEAKER_01:

traveled all around the world you've you know you played all sorts of places haven't you

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, we've done a lot of traveling. We haven't gone anywhere in the last few years, you know, with the pandemic and all. Yeah, we have done a lot of traveling. I had a lot of fun and it's been a good career so far. You know, hopefully we can keep it going another 40 years.

SPEAKER_01:

So for younger people starting out or maybe not so young, do you think there's been any particular secret to your success? What's your view on that?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, for one thing, I think it's a lot harder for today's young musicians coming up because there's no real record industry anymore. And you can't make any money off Spotify and things like that. It's pennies. I've heard stories about people who have played on or have gold records out and they're still living in a studio apartment because the amount of money you get is so minimal. So yeah, it's tough. But the main thing I think is, like I was talking earlier, is have as many revenue streams as possible. Never give up your copyrights. Try to write your own materials if you can, and try to get your material covered by other people. Living so close to LA for us paid off because there's a film industry down there, TV and commercials down there, and you can get work backing that stuff up. And I would say never turn down a recording session, even if it's terrible musicians. Do it anyway, because if nothing else, the engineer in the studio will hear you play and maybe hire you for another session. So I never turn anything down. You can't afford to. For me, it was better not to have a safety net. My parents would tell me, well, this music stuff is good, but get a degree, have a safety net. But if I had done that, I would have fell back on it, and I probably never would have succeeded as a musician. So for me, I'd say, who needs a safety net? Just go for it, man.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, no, great advice. And congratulations again on such a long career. It's superb. So yeah, another thing characteristic about your acts is a lot of the songs are written by yourself. And funnily enough, the last few people I've had on the podcast, they've been similar. I've had Rick Estrin, he writes a lot of his own songs. Billy Boy Arnold, the last one, he wrote a lot of his songs further back. So it's really important to write your own material, your own lyrics.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, we don't write all our own stuff. I'd say we're 50-50 originals and covers. But when we do cover a song we try to cover something that's unknown i mean we're not going to go out and re-record you know jimmy reed bright lights big city i mean because who could improve on that so we try to pick really obscure material and i've been a 78 collector all my life so i have a big big record collection and it's really easy to dig back and find something that nobody knows about and then you can cover and people think it's yours because they've never heard it before

SPEAKER_01:

yeah

SPEAKER_04:

so you know we do that a lot as well yeah we cheat

SPEAKER_01:

yeah good idea so yeah but it's interesting because i think a lot of you know kind of blues covers bands would want to do the more well-known ones because they get recognized but you've kind of gone the opposite way and think yeah we'll do the more obscure ones and you know make it more unique

SPEAKER_04:

yeah i think so i mean it's one thing to try to cater to a live audience and another thing you know when you're recording i mean do we really need another record of you know key to the highway i i just don't see it but i can understand playing that live and sometimes we play it live because people you know they know it and they like it it's it's a little bit different when you record

SPEAKER_01:

yeah and another thing which is typical of your songs is a it's a lot of fun in them i think you know you write about women gambling and drinking yeah some good blues themes right there and that is but you know they're all very uh they're all very witty very interesting who writes most of the lyrics

SPEAKER_04:

i'm the lyricist it was a conscious decision i think because i remember being 16 and singing with the yerba buena blues band and you know we're singing all these old blues and i'm singing about you know working in coal mines and you know riding my mule and i'm like a 16 year old kid from the suburbs i never did any of this stuff so i felt like a hypocrite and so it you know made more sense to write songs about the stuff I know about which like you say is you know women and gambling and drinking and travel

SPEAKER_01:

and do you think that has been a part of your success that you know these songs have been appealing to people you know to listen to the lyrics I hope so Yeah, so there's some great examples of that. I think Perfect Woman's a good one, where the lyrics are fantastic.

SPEAKER_04:

Well, thanks. That was fun to write. Is

SPEAKER_01:

that your wife, then, the Perfect Woman?

SPEAKER_04:

My wife is a major improvement over the perfect woman

SPEAKER_01:

i'll include that bit so you get some brownie points if she listens to the

SPEAKER_02:

yeah thanks

SPEAKER_01:

so so let's talk then uh through your your recording career with with kenny so uh i think you've done eight duo albums first one back in 1981 confusion

SPEAKER_04:

life is so confusing believe i got to lose my mind

SPEAKER_01:

wow

SPEAKER_04:

That was a record label owned by a friend of ours named Peter Feldman. Mostly that label was a label for instructional material, how to play bluegrass fiddle and things like that. Although he did do some reissues by early country musicians. And he liked our stuff and offered to bring out a record and nobody else wanted to. And Peter was a good guy. So we said, sure. And that record came out and then decided we would benefit by having a little bit better distribution. So we sent that record to Kicking Mule Records, a label that had been founded by Stefan Grossman. They signed us. So we did a record for them called Who Drank My Beer. And then we decided to go for Flying Fish after that and see what they would do. And they rejected us for a long time. They said, you don't tour enough. Well, what can you do when you don't tour enough? Well, what we started doing was I'd go on vacation to New Orleans with my wife and I sent a postcard to Flying Fish. We're out here on tour. And I get friends from all over the country to send them postcards I had written saying, we're here, we're on tour. And it would have a postmark of Wyoming or something. So after a while, Flying was the first one that bloodshot eyes won yeah bloodshot eyes

SPEAKER_01:

was the first

SPEAKER_04:

And then Too Much Fun. And then Filthy Rich. And then the head of Flying Fish Records passed away unexpectedly. And the label was sold to Rounder. So we negotiated with Rounder and did another record called Double Vision. And then we figured it was about time to do a live record. So we went ahead and professionally recorded a real good concert. We sent it off to Rounder. And they got back and said, well, you know what? Live records don't sell. You know, we're not interested. So, okay. Well, by then we had some connections with a record label in Germany called Taxim Records. And they wanted to start a US division. So they signed us and they brought out the live record and another one later called Happy Hour. As it turned out, the live record outsold all of the studio records. You know, we've done all those. We haven't done a record as a duo in a few years now.

SPEAKER_01:

I was going to ask about that. I think your last album with Kenny is 2005, is it? The

SPEAKER_04:

Happy Hour one. That is the last Tom and Kenny record yeah yeah but you're

SPEAKER_01:

still playing together you're still performing together

SPEAKER_04:

oh yeah

SPEAKER_01:

yeah yeah so any particular reason you haven't done another album

SPEAKER_04:

oh i've been too lazy to write lyrics and you know and also i think partly nobody's buying cds anymore it's hardly cost effective these days to bring out an album unless you're a big star because you're only going to get back pennies on the dollar i mean for me i'm still recording a guitar record because a solo guitar record is you know pretty cheap to make but when you're doing a duo record you know you're going to have expenses and i'm not sure you can sell enough copies be still warrant going through that anymore

SPEAKER_01:

yeah it's a very interesting point it's almost like creating an album is almost like a vanity project these days isn't it you've got to put a lot of money into it up front yeah and like you say you know you're not going to sell lots of cds so you know you might sell some at gigs but now most people are streaming yeah so how are you ever going to make that money back

SPEAKER_04:

well you probably won't but you know at this point i'm doing this guitar record because i mean i know i'm not going to make my money back but it's something i want to do and i'm not getting any younger and i you know i'd like to be able to leave another piece of my legacy behind you

SPEAKER_01:

know

SPEAKER_04:

life is short

SPEAKER_01:

oh yeah for sure yeah it's nice getting it down isn't it

SPEAKER_04:

well i want to be filthy bitch and hang around with some beautiful chick and get respect wherever i go

SPEAKER_01:

i

SPEAKER_04:

want to be rolling in

SPEAKER_01:

it's quite a worry this particularly around the albums isn't it like you said producing an albums unless you've got a record company paying for you whether we're going to get a lot less of lower level albums where you know particularly in the sort of music that we like you have we're talking about blues music here there's not a lot of uh big record companies paying to produce those albums is there

SPEAKER_04:

well not anymore no no i mean not like the old days you know there used to be a ton of independent labels you could count on that would actually give you a budget to go out and record now now the thing is that budget would be used against your future artist royalties and you wouldn't start to see any royalty until all of that budget including mastering and advertising and all that was paid back out of your artist royalties so you probably weren't going to see any money down the road but at least you wouldn't have to spend your own money to make the damn record you know so I don't know I mean we've done it both ways but our little niche of music is never going to sell the kind of stuff you know that mainstream music sells so it doesn't make much sense to do another record not right now anyway now maybe things will change in the future I hope they do

SPEAKER_01:

Anyway you've got a good catalogue out there you talked through some of the albums and picking out a few of the songs so one from the Butcher Eyes albums The song that I actually play in an outfit is That'll Never Happen No More. But that's a good example of a song which is a little bit more obscure, but a great song, yeah? So does that fall into that type?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, sure. I mean, Blind Blake is one of our heroes. Both Kenny and I are fingerstyle guitarists, and some of the first tunes that ever perplexed me and made me into a better guitarist were Blake's songs. And That'll Never Happen No More is one of his. He's one of my heroes, really, musical heroes. I mean, you can't get better than Blake. He's got that bounce. He's got that syncopated bass line. The ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. kind of bass line that nobody else has got.

SPEAKER_01:

And on the Too Much Fun album, again, that album title shows the kind of fun approach you had to everything. You've got a song with some great lyrics again called It Should Have Been Me.

SPEAKER_04:

It Should Have Been Me On

SPEAKER_01:

Filthy Rich, do a Sonny Terry song, Tater Pie on there, which shows your homage to Sonny Terry.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that was one of the first songs I learned on harp was Tater Pie. What happened was the first Sonny Terry record I owned was called Sonny is King. It's still in print.

SPEAKER_01:

I have the album.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, great record. And side one is all Sonny with Lightning Hopkins on guitar and side two is Sonny with Brownie on guitar. What I discovered was everything on side one was played with an A harp. So I could put that record on when I was young and I wouldn't have to worry about whether or not I had the right harp. All you needed was one harp and you could play for, you know, 25 minutes. And I learned almost every song on that record. Tater Pie and Change the Lock on the Door and She's So Sweet. And it just goes on and on. It's great stuff. Yeah, that's Tater Pie. Sonny's one of my heroes.

SPEAKER_01:

And of course, you've written a book of Sonny Terry licks. And then you've also written a book of Little Walter licks as well. So which one came first?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, the first one was even before either of those two, and it was just called Blues Harmonica. Then the Sonny came second. Big Walter, Little Walter came third. And then I did a couple of guitar books as well. And then I like to write fiction as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, yeah, you've written, I think, two fictional books out now, aren't they? I'll put links onto the books onto the podcast page. But talking about the Lit books that you've written there, as you say, Sonny Terry one and the Lit Walter, Big Walter one. So when you did that, how did they come about? I think what

SPEAKER_04:

happened is Kenny got approached by Centerstream Books, which is a division of Hal Leonard, to bring out a couple of guitar instructional books. And they were successful, you know, and he was telling me about it. And he says, you ought to call this guy. Maybe he'd do some harmonica books. So I called him up and he was amenable. So I did this book and it came out and sold quite a bit more copies than I would have expected. And so I decided to do another one and you know after a while i had done about five of them but nowadays nobody buys books either because they're all pirateable you can go online if you wanted that sanitary book you could google it and find it for free online and you can find the music for free too so nobody's buying books anymore so there's no future in that either it's it's gone down it's like cds have

SPEAKER_01:

yeah so when you were putting together the licks did you did you use exact licks so you have to change them slightly you know what was the process we're doing the selecting the licks that you did

SPEAKER_04:

I pretty much did them the way they did them with one exception. The waltzers, of course, tongue block and I don't tongue block. So, you know, I was puckering the stuff they were tongue blocking, but I was hitting the same notes either way. So I pretty much left it up to the student whether or not they want to do this, you know, via tongue blocker or pucker. I do tongue block when I want to hit splits or hit octaves or, you know, block out something, but I don't tongue block to hit single note bands. I just pucker to hit single note bands. So it's a combination of the two. And Sonny didn't hardly ever tongue block. He was 99% puckerer And of course, both Walters were strict tongue blockers. So it's kind of hard to be absolutely perfect when you do these kind of books. But I figure that anybody that's got a good enough ear to hear where it's not exactly perfect probably also has a good enough ear that they don't need a book to begin with. I don't know. It's fun to do, but I'm not really going to do it again.

SPEAKER_01:

No. So you mentioned, well, obviously you're a pucker there. And one thing which you get great is you get a really great growl and a really great wall. back to california so yeah this this great growl you get on the on the harmonica you talk about that

SPEAKER_04:

yeah um Well, it's done by inhaling. You can't do it. At least I can't do it, exhaling. And what it is, is it works best on like holes, one, two, three, four, five, maybe. And three, of course, is exceptionally good because as you know, hole three inhaled has the most bendability of, you know, can get three half steps out of that. So if you bend that note all the way down to its most bendable area to the absolute bottom of the gutter and then keep going. For me, at least, this growl just happens. I mean, it's something, it's like snoring in reverse. It's like, I mean, it's a obnoxious kind of sound, but it's really effective if you don't overuse it. So it's an inhaled thing and it's done at the deepest part of a bend.

SPEAKER_01:

And the other thing is you get a tremendous wall. You know, one of the best walls I've heard, and obviously you're playing acoustic most of the time, so What about that great wall that you can get?

SPEAKER_04:

Thanks. I've heard people that do it better, but thank you. I think it helps to have big hands. I do have big hands. And it also, because I'm not holding a handheld microphone, I tend to hold the harp. Well, if you can envision yourself, you're around a lake and you're really thirsty and you make a cup with your hands in order to bring water to your mouth. That's the way I hold a harmonica. It goes right in that cup. And so if you have big hands, it completely covers the instrument, except for the front. The front, of course, will get covered by your face if you have a big face, which I do. So I'm not afraid to put my right thumb over holes 7, 8, and 9 because I'm probably not going to be using those very much. And then what happens is the harmonica is completely surrounded by either hand or face. That enables you to get a real big wah because you can open your hands at will, partially or fully, to alter the tone of the harp.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so really blocking off any air escaping from your hand cup is key to that, yeah?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, it is, sure. And I can't do that, I've noticed, on the few occasions when I play electric harp and use a bullet mic I'm not able to get a great big wah out of that because you know the mic is in my hands too now I'm I have a lot of admiration for the people who can break off those big wahs while they're holding on to a mic because I sure can't do it

SPEAKER_01:

so yeah you mentioned that so on your albums typically on quite a few of them at least there's generally one or two which are played amplified and then the rest of them are acoustic yeah

SPEAKER_04:

they're mostly acoustic yeah

SPEAKER_01:

any particular you know reason for that you know any approach that you just like to play acoustic and then just throw a couple in for to mix up the sound to play amplified

SPEAKER_04:

yep that's exactly right yeah we just want to throw one or two in there to break things up so Because otherwise it can be sonically sort of boring, really, when you only got two instruments and they're both acoustic. And, you know, the blues by nature is relatively constrictive in terms of its structure. So you don't want to bring out a record where people get fatigued because it all sounds alike. You know, so we like to throw something different out there every couple of songs. And it might be adding another musician or it might be going electric.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and does Kenny playing, is he still playing acoustic when you're playing electric?

SPEAKER_04:

Usually, he's got a couple of archtop hollow body acoustic electrics that he can change over to. He doesn't play a solid body electric, though.

SPEAKER_01:

You mentioned the 20th anniversary live album. That's the album I probably knew you best from, so that's the album I listened to the most. You said it was your best seller. Yeah, it's a great album, captures you really

SPEAKER_03:

well. La, la, la, la, la. La, la, la, la, la, la. La, la.

SPEAKER_01:

You play a lot of the songs from your other albums as well, so it's kind of a best of in a way as well, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04:

Yes, it is. Yeah. And I think that's probably why it is the bestseller because, you know, when people come to see us play and they see this, you know, table full of records and they really only want to buy one, you know, and this one has more of the songs we just got done playing than any of the other ones. So, you know, they picked that one up.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And do you think particularly it captures your energy well in the live? I think you have got a lot of energy in your other albums, but it being live, do you think it's just got that extra energy?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I think so. And it's real well recorded. The room is nice and lively. And what we did was two complete shows, and then we turned the house over and then filled it up again. It was in a converted church that had become a theater. And I think it's seated about 300. We recorded the whole show twice in a row. That way we had two different versions of each song that we could pick from.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

And what we found was for the first show, about the first half, we were kind of nervous, you know, and not really warmed up. In the second show, in the second half, we were kind of buzzed because we'd been drinking beers all night. So what we ended up doing was using the back half of the first show and the front half of the second show. And we just stuck them all together in the order we played them. And it came out great. No editing, no overdubs, nothing. Just one night. There you go. Fantastic, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And then you did another anniversary concert with Kennedy in 2019, which is your fourth 40th

SPEAKER_04:

anniversary, yeah? and then we did another set with Tom Lee on the stand-up bass and our pal Jody Ulitz on playing percussion on a cardboard box so we had a quartet for the second show and you know just the duo for the first and it was great it was really fun really good night Santa Barbara really you know we've been playing here so long and people love them They're either sick of us or they still like us. But either way, they kind of wanted to pay tribute, which was very kind. There was a lot of love in the air, you know. It was a really good night.

SPEAKER_01:

We enjoyed

SPEAKER_04:

it.

SPEAKER_01:

Fantastic. Well, it's a shame you didn't record it, but you'll have to record your 50th anniversary concert.

SPEAKER_04:

By then I'll be, you know, I'll have false teeth and I won't be able to pronounce it.

SPEAKER_01:

So are you going for some sort of world record for longest surviving duo? Do you know what that is? I

SPEAKER_04:

have no idea what it could be, but we're just trying to make a living, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

Famously, Sonny Terry and Bro Well, yeah, you

SPEAKER_04:

know, what's funny is the first time I saw Brownie and Sonny was probably in about 1965 and they got along great. You know, they were kidding each other and enjoyed each other's company and they hung out together in the dressing room and, you know, they were good friends. And then about 10 years later, you know, you go see them and wow, they have to have separate dressing rooms. They can't even stay in separate rooms in the same hotel. They have to have separate hotels. And they sat at the far edge of the stage. You know, one on the far left, one on the far

SPEAKER_02:

right.

SPEAKER_04:

And they were constantly subverting each other. Sonny would be testing his harps during Brownie's solos and Brownie would be tuning over the microphone during Sonny's solos. It was so awkward. It was almost like looking at a bad marriage, you know. They were still both very likable, but you could tell they did not like each other anymore. And fortunately, that hasn't happened to Kenny and I. We get along great.

SPEAKER_01:

It's amazing they still got gigs if they would be that disruptive to each other, wasn't

SPEAKER_04:

it? They really didn't want to do gigs together, but the public wanted to see them together, you know. And so they insisted on being billed as two different acts. It was billed as Brownie McGee and also the second act, Sonny Terry. And then they would consent to getting out there and playing together.

SPEAKER_01:

Very strange. Yeah. So a song you released quite recently, it's called Nagasaki Sails from Uranus, which is the Tom Ball Harmonica Orchestra. I think you play all the different harmonicas on this song,

SPEAKER_04:

yeah? I do, yeah. That was really crazy fun. I had been listening to the Harmonica Rascals and all those 1930s, you know, wacky kind of vaudevillian harmonica bands. And the stuff, I liked it. It was funny, you know. And I just decided I have a bass harmonica. I have a polyphonia. I have a chromatic. I have all these diatonics. Why not put together an arrangement of one of those songs with overdubs of all these harmonicas? And I forget how many I used, but there was, you know, eight or nine or ten or something. And just overdubbed each part and then brought it out as a CD single. It was really fun to do, and I'm really happy that I did it.

SPEAKER_01:

great and so um you know it's great that's playing tribute to that great time of harmonica group so yeah well done for doing it did uh so how well could you play all these different sorts of harmonicas the bass and the chord on there and the chromatics and

SPEAKER_04:

not very well but you know thank god you can edit in the studio the bass of course i love the bass harmonica and the one i have i bought from dick gardner who was the bass player with the harmonic cats and he rebuilt it i got to where i could play it decently but still very much like c minus you know and one day ken and I were opening for Willie Nelson and Mickey Raphael's backstage. And of course, he's a great harmonica player. We were talking about harmonicas. And I pointed out to Mickey that he had played bass on this Emmylou Harris song that I liked a lot. And I said, I noticed your bass playing on there. I really like it. And he laughed and he said, I don't know how to play bass. He says, I put band-aids on all the wrong holes so that I can only hit the right holes. And I thought, that's brilliant. Why didn't I think of that? When I heard that, I went and got some masking tape and did the same thing and so you know i've only played the damn thing maybe on five or six recording sessions but i always bring some masking tape and just cover up the wrong holes and hopefully that'll see me through

SPEAKER_01:

good tip there yeah it's amazing what you can get away with when you're recording isn't it

SPEAKER_04:

yeah

SPEAKER_01:

and um so getting onto your session work so you've done loads of session where i think you've got over 300 album credits to your name yeah

SPEAKER_04:

I have, yeah. Well, part of that is I live close to Los Angeles, and so there's an awful lot of work down there. And then also, Santa Barbara has a very good number of recording studios and a whole lot of people that want to record. So I've been fortunate. Now, for a while there, I used to have to split these sessions with one of my friends, who's a harmonica player. His name is Mitch Cashmark, wonderful player. And he lived in Santa Barbara, too. So Santa Barbara had two professional-level harmonica players, and so we had to split all this session work. And then Mitch decided to move to Portland about, I don't know, six years ago. So now, I'm in a good position and now, granted, being a studio harmonica player is a very small niche and not in use very often, but if people want that sound, there's really nobody else for 100 miles around that they can call other than me. So, you know, it works out well. In fact, I was out in Dallas six or eight years ago doing a spa convention and I bumped into Mitch Cashmore and I took him out to dinner to thank him for moving out of town.

SPEAKER_01:

So picking out a few of the sessions that you've done, one is Silver Morning that you recorded with Alan Thornhill.

SPEAKER_05:

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Singer-songwriter. He's got influences, country influences and folk influences. But he's a brilliant songwriter and a wonderful guy. And I always like working with him. So, yeah, that was a fun session.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, when you're recording, like you say, with other people, it gives you the opportunity, you know, maybe not just to play blues. So how do you approach doing that?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, it depends on the song. I mean, quite a number of these recording sessions I did, probably almost 100 of them, was for a label called CMH, which is Country Music Heritage. And what they were doing was all instrumental versions played with bluegrass instruments of pop and rock material. So they'd do, you know, picking on the Beatles, picking on the Stones, picking on Pink Floyd, picking on the band, picking on Dylan. And my friend David West... who I've known forever and lives in Santa Barbara, would put these records together. And he plays almost every instrument on almost every song and produces and engineers and writes all the arrangements. He's a brilliant guy. But one instrument he can't play is harmonica. Thank God. So I get a lot of work on those things. And those things are pretty often actual out-and-out country songs and oftentimes rock and roll songs, but played with banjos and fiddles and mandolins. So you have to tailor what you're doing. There's certainly not a lot of blues being played. played on these things it's more melodic it's more harmonic you know you get a lot of solos of course because it's instrumental but it's a whole different way of soloing and it kind of takes me out of my comfort zone which is is really good because it makes you a better musician to get out of your comfort zone and i learned an awful lot about music and david's a wonderful guy to work with

SPEAKER_01:

so yeah so you've recorded with with all sorts and uh well a couple more there's a song with kenny loggins you've done a few a few of these albums haven't you underneath the same sky

SPEAKER_04:

so

SPEAKER_01:

yeah the different styles and calling on different things so plenty of work and plenty of credits I know talking to you you picked out Norton Buffalo as being someone who's who Tony very much admired in his recording I know he was very well thought of talk about a little bit about Norton Buffalo he's probably not as well known I think outside the US as he is there

SPEAKER_04:

yeah he was one of those guys I mean he did have a solo career you know with records out under his own name but I think he's better known as being an accompanist on records by Bonnie Raitt and and Kenny Loggins and Steve Miller and a whole lot of other American bands. He played chromatic and diatonic. He played acoustic and electric. But his acoustic diatonic sound is just lovely. I mean, he's got so much warmth and roundness to his tone. He's a U-block guy, which I could never master. Also a very funny and intelligent and good-hearted guy. He died way too young. Yeah, he's one of my heroes. Good guy.

SPEAKER_01:

And something you've done recently, you've talked about diversifying to earn some money as a musician. You've recorded tracks for a music library.

SPEAKER_04:

We did. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Kenny and I and a fellow named Brian Mann. Now, Brian is a professional keyboard player and accordionist, spent many years playing with Kenny Loggins again, and also many years playing with Michael McDonald. And he's got a studio here in town. And the three of us teamed up. and brought out a whole bunch of stuff for this music library, which is in fact based in the UK called Lemon Cake. And they, uh, somehow find TV shows and movies and commercials that are looking for that particular sound. And, you know, they float all this stuff by them and then sometimes they approve it and sometimes they don't. But what happens is you end up getting little checks in the mail now and then. It's not enough to live off, but it's another source of income. And, you know, the more of those minor sources of income that you can drum up, whether it's a book or a commercial or whatever, you know, we call it mailbox money. You know, it helps you out. You got to do that if you want to be a musician.

SPEAKER_01:

So in this music library you've recorded lots of just short clips of different styles and different little bits of your playing and how do you approach that?

SPEAKER_04:

Well generally they want a 30 second version and a 60 second version so you know we go into the studio and just begin with an idea you know let's do a little shuffle in F let's do a little you know let's do a slow thing in G or something and you know because you never know what they're going to want and it's not all blues I mean sometimes they want like a campfire kind of sound or you know some kind of a folky little melody. Because Brian can play accordion and piano, he can overdub Well, he plays synthesizer as well, so he can overdub bass. He can overdub all these different sounds on top of it. So we give them just a very broad palette to choose from, and then they'll hopefully choose a bunch of it. But more often, they just choose a little bit of it. And I'll be watching television, some silly cable TV reality show, and in the middle of somebody cooking a steak on a barbecue, suddenly it's, wow, that's me, for like 15 seconds. But hey, that generates$2.40 It's another way to try to cash in on this. And for all the problems that the CD and music industry is having right now, one thing that has perked up is television work. Because if you think about it, I mean, when I was a kid, there was seven TV channels and now there's like 600, you know, and all of these shows need music. And they don't have the kind of budget where they can hire a conductor or a composer to specifically do a soundtrack. You know, they don't have that kind of money. So what they do is they go into the music libraries and they start poking around and they pick something they're interested in and they get the rights to use it once. Then they pay for it and you get some money down the road.

SPEAKER_01:

Cool. And you've done, you mentioned lots of TV work, you've done advertisements and you've done film scores. And there's a film called Over the Edge, which won a television award in 1994. So you've done quite a lot of this. And you also did the Levi's 501 advert, which when they had the blues, they had this kind of blues theme in the early 80s, didn't

SPEAKER_04:

they? Yeah, they did. In fact, there were some great commercials that came out on that. Foot Conan Belding was the advertising agency, and they had a guy working for them. His name was Steve Neely, and he had great taste in music. And he managed to get Aaron Neville and Taj Mahal and Dan Hicks and Doc Watson and on and on and on. They did, you know, two big waves of these commercials. And fortunately, we were involved with both of them. Well, the second one was this thing we made up. And they played on guitar and harmonica, and they ran that on the radio for, I don't know, a long time. And what happens is if you write these things yourself, you're not only getting paid for performing them, but you're getting mechanical royalties, songwriting royalties, the same way you would if you recorded a song that was played on the radio quite a bit. So we started getting these residuals, and it was great while it lasted. Of course, it didn't last forever, but it was quite lovely at the time. We did two of them. They came out with a CD, in fact, of all those commercials. Paul Simon's on Great

SPEAKER_01:

company there then.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, it's just called 501, I believe.

SPEAKER_01:

So you've done lots of TV appearances all around the world. You've been on TV channels all around the world. How's that been?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, we have, although not recently. And it's always interesting. It's always fun. One memory that comes to mind, we were out in Eastern Hungary right after the Berlin Wall came down, and we're playing this festival in the ruins of this castle. And it's all Russians and Eastern European acts, except for us and John Jackson, the guitarist, you know, blues guitarist. And so we get to know John, we're hanging out with him, and very sweet guy, really nice fellow. And we're playing music with him, and he's kind of the headliner. And so for the encore, he asked me to get up on stage and play along with him. So I said, sure, man, I'd be happy to. So I get up on the we play this song live on Hungarian national television on the last note of the song the The leg on my chair broke and I fell flat on my ass live on Hungarian television. And John Jackson just starts laughing, you know, and I start laughing. I mean, it was almost like it was on cue. And God, I hope somebody who hears this podcast has a videotape of that because I've been hoping to see that, hoping to see me fall ass over tea kettle on Hungarian television, but I've never seen it.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, great. Well, let's hope. That would be a great achievement if we manage to track that down. So if anyone does have that, do contact us and we'll send it through to Tom. Yeah. Brilliant. Okay. So you've done lots of festivals as well. You talked around, I think you played, you played on the same bill as Bob Dylan and the same festival as Bob Dylan in Denmark.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, we did. That was one of those big Ross killed festivals. There was some, oh, I don't know, maybe 80,000, 90,000 people. And yeah, Paul Simon's on the bill and Dylan and all these other, you know, Iron Maiden. The interesting thing was we did that festival and the next day we drove to the Netherlands and played in the rec room of an insane asylum. It was kind of like, wait a minute, it last night we were like superheroes and today we're sitting in a rec room so that just goes to show what happens you know as a musician

SPEAKER_01:

brilliant and um you played at the nhl festival in the uk where i saw you play in 2003 so there's a clip of that i'll put on the uh on the podcast that's uh 19 years ago now that's scary to think you also played at spa i think you mentioned at dallas and uh there's a great recording of you playing don't get around much anymore so

SPEAKER_04:

Oh, that was fun. Yeah, that's a good time. I'd really like to play for Spa again. Those people are great.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's in Tulsa this year in August. Yeah, cool. So, and you do a little bit of teaching, I think, do you still, you do teach some harmonica?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, I do, but I have maybe four students a year. You know, I don't really go out and try to find, but, you know, occasionally I get some people that are, you know, interested in the kind of style that I have and I'm happy to work with them, but I don't do that much teaching now.

SPEAKER_01:

Another thing I've also read that you're the only musical act to play all four of the 1984 Olympic Games venues.

SPEAKER_04:

That's true. Yeah, that was fun. It goes back a long ways. That was when the Olympics were in L.A. And the venues were, well, they were UCLA and USC and UCSB in Santa Barbara. And then up in Lake Kachuma near Ojai, that's where they did all the rowing events and all the events that happened on water. So, yeah, it was great. And they hired a lot of local musicians from the L.A. area. of all sorts, country folks and blues people, jazz people. It was amazing how much good music there was at all these Olympic villages, you know, I guess you call them. You know, we would go set up and play and the Aussie athletes, you know, were drinking beer like crazy. I couldn't believe it. These guys had to go out and compete the next day and they're just getting hammered, you know. It was pretty impressive.

SPEAKER_01:

Brilliant. They're enjoying the music at least.

SPEAKER_04:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

So a question I ask each time, Tom, is if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing

SPEAKER_04:

well you know I don't practice harmonica if I want to learn something new I just go for it at a gig I do practice guitar because your motor skill you'll lose the motor skills in your fingers if you don't keep them limber but with harmonica it just doesn't seem to matter if I take a month off or you know something I don't lose any sort of motor skills or lip skills or whatever I guess if I'm learning a new song and it's a very difficult song then I might have to practice that but you know I don't know how to for example I don't overblow I suppose if I wanted to do that i would have to practice quite a bit you know to learn it i don't really want to learn it so yeah i'm lazy man

SPEAKER_01:

what about when you were more starting out where you know playing along with records is that the main way you learn

SPEAKER_04:

it really was and and i think nowadays of course young folks who are learning have a definite advantage because there's so much uh material out there so much instructional material dvds and books and tapes and etc back then there wasn't anything now i found out years later that tony glover had written a book you know on it but I never saw that back in the day. And so the only way to learn was playing along with records. Now, fortunately for me, because I played guitar, I could differentiate what key these songs were in, and then I could figure out what key harp I would need. That's a big hurdle, I think, for beginners, because you only got a one in 12 chance of having the right harmonica, really, if you're playing along with the record. So by knowing what harp I needed, and then trying to play along with it. I just basically stole everything I knew. And then when you steal enough stuff, you can kind of string it all together. And after a while, when you run out of stuff to steal, then that's when people say, that you have a style of your own.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, talking about what Harmonica uses, is it right that you're playing the Special 20?

SPEAKER_04:

I am playing Special 20s. I buy them right out of the box. Now, I have to say that Tom Halchak has customized a couple of Special 20s for me, and they are extraordinary. And one of these days, I'm going to cough up some money when I win the lotto and just completely convert to Blue Moon Special 20s because they're wonderful. But the regular Hauner Special 20s are pretty damn good. There was a time when the quality dropped off a about 20 years ago. But they've gotten it back and I use them.

SPEAKER_01:

Have you tried the Hohner Rocket? Because they're the kind of evolution of the Special 20s. I've got one Rocket and I really love it.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I did get one and I couldn't really tell that much difference. It was louder, perhaps slightly easier to play, but it wasn't substantially different enough for me to convert.

SPEAKER_01:

What about, do you play any different tunings at all?

SPEAKER_04:

I have a couple, but I hardly ever use them. You know, for the style of music Kenny and I play, a regular Richter scale seems to be fine. And then for the recording sessions, sometimes I probably could benefit by having some alternate tunings. But what happens is if the song is bizarre and has an odd structure and changes modes constantly, you're in the studio. So you can always just stop and pick up another harp and play a lick and then go back to the first harp. You don't have to do it live. So there's been occasions in the studio where I've switched harps like 50 times during one song, which is going to drive some poor kid crazy 10 years down the road when they try to play along with it because you can't. But that's the benefit you have in the studio, you can stop and start the tape. So

SPEAKER_01:

what about playing different positions?

SPEAKER_04:

I'm mostly a cross harp player, but I've done recordings in first and third and various other positions. What happens is if I need to find a melody, for example, and it doesn't exist in first, second or third, I'll just grab all my harps until I find one where it fits. And then, okay, this one can be used.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, one thing that's definitely characteristic about your playing is quite fast, isn't it? You're playing, you play quite a lot of fast licks. Is that something you deliberately worked on?

SPEAKER_04:

I was I suppose so, yeah. I mean, I don't want to fall into the John Popper category, but I do like to throw some quick stuff out there now and then.

SPEAKER_01:

You've already mentioned that you don't play any overblows. You've already mentioned as well that you're a pucker, yeah? You don't use tongue, block, and soul.

SPEAKER_04:

Well, I use it to get octaves and splits and play chords and block out like two holes in the middle or three holes in the middle of a chord. What I've found is when you listen to Sonny Terry play, for example, he rattles the tongue off the roof of his mouth quite often, and that gives you a... because you have a very sharp beginning and end, almost like a trumpet, because the tongue slap and the roof of the mouth will cut off the wind so effectively. So if your tongue is tied up actually touching the front of the harp in order to do a tongue block single note, then you can't utilize that tongue to rattle off the roof of your mouth and give you this other technique that I use quite often. So unless you have two tongues, you really can't do both at the same time.

SPEAKER_01:

So you're mostly playing acoustic, yeah? So when you're playing acoustic, what acoustic mark are you using?

SPEAKER_04:

Well, I just play a shoe You know, it's a 545. That's what I bring to gigs. Now, I have other better mics, but I find that those better mics, they pick up everything. You know, they're so omnidirectional. They'll pick up a car going by, and that's not what you want. We do a lot of noisy gigs. So for a noisy gig, the 545 is great. Of course, I wouldn't ever use that at a pin drop concert. You know, you want to use something better than that. And of course, you never record with that. I like to record with a good tube mic. And then for electric stuff, I have a variety of... but i also have a 520 sure sometimes you know whoever calls will want a more rock and roll sound you know they might say oh we we really like paul butterfield okay so you know you got to give them what they want you know so i have a bunch of different mics to try to find the tone that the producer wants a lot of times in the studio i'll set up a bullet mic on a stand right next to a good vocal mic and then run the bullet mic into another room into an amp and then mic that amp so what they wind up with is two tracks one of which is dirty and one of which is clean and then they can mix it later. Recording is different nowadays. You know, it used to be they hired you because they liked how you played and they trusted you to play something cool. Nowadays, they just want you to come in there and play everything you know and then they'll splice it together later. So, you know, you wind up with hearing these solos that you never played, never would have thought of. They can make you sound like a genius or they can make you sound like a hack. They can carve you up and spit you out. So you just have to have no ego and go in there and give them what they want. As long as they

SPEAKER_01:

pay you. Yeah. Great, yeah. So when you do play for an amp? Any particular preference on the amps?

SPEAKER_04:

I'm using a Fender, it's an old guitar amp, it's a Deluxe Reverb. I've used other early Fenders, Deluxes, and I used to have a Tweed Deluxe with an outboard reverb unit, which I liked a lot. But it hums, you know, I mean, there's always problems with older equipment. Well, I remember one time I was in Ohio, it was a Kenny Loggins session, and I had my 1956 Tweed Deluxe, and it blew up halfway into the song. Now, what are you going to do? There's nothing, there's no other amp where I can continue continue my part because nothing sounds like that. On my way out of the studio, and here comes this kid from LA and he's carrying a 1956 Fender Tweed Deluxe amp and a fiddle. And he's coming to the session because he's up next. He's going to overdub a fiddle part. With that amp, it was identical to the amp that I had that blew up. And what are the odds of that? I mean, I'm not fond of the big, big, like a 410 Bassman kind of amp because they're too powerful. You know, a lot of people love those amps, but for me, I like a smaller amp that'll break up.

SPEAKER_01:

And you mic it up, do you?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. so we are still playing once a week at our regular sunday gig is at a place called cold spring tavern just north of santa barbara it converted stage coach stop it's been there since the 1860s log cabin beautiful and we've been playing there for over 40 years on sundays and we're still there so thanks very much for joining me today tom ball you're welcome it was great and great to talk to you

SPEAKER_01:

and it was great talking to you too tom thanks so much And thanks so much to the latest donations I received from Joe O'Callaghan and Brian Shoemaker. Great name, Brian. Remember to check out the website, harmonicahappyhour.com. And also thanks to Ashton Johnston, who helped me set up the interview with Tom. Thanks so much, Ashton. And it's over to Tom to play us out from his 20th anniversary concert with Kenny Sultan with Automobile Mechanic.

SPEAKER_04:

When you get your little car back...

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.