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Back to the Band
Southside
Talks Asbury
Music and Martinis: The Day Southside
Johnny Met Second City Influences Southside Johnny: Puttin' Up
His Jukes From Nashville to Jukesville I’d interviewed Southside before, back in 1991 and 1995, but this was undoubtedly the longest of our meetings. Initially thwarted by the logistics of the tour, we finally got together in his hotel room on a rare day off for the band, accompanied only by a tape recorder, a microphone, a couple of beers and a bottle of Jack Daniels, the latter for medicinal purposes, as he was obviously still suffering from the after-effects of the heavy cold that had afflicted him for the previous 10 days. Despite this, he was happy to talk to me for a full 90 minutes. Adopting the game plan I’d used previously, I avoided compiling a list of specific questions, preferring instead to discuss a wide range of subjects and allow the conversation to develop naturally, wander off on unexpected tangents and include fascinating stories and anecdotes which may not have been revealed if I’d stuck to a prepared script. My own contributions were minimal, consisting of occasional questions, comments or prompts, which inspired Southside, an enthusiastic storyteller, to launch into a series of lengthy responses. As time ticked by, we discussed the recording of Going To Jukesville, the filming of Live At The Opera House, the Ruff Stuff mini-albums, co-producer Matt Noble, playing with Blues Deluxe in California, the meaning of the blues, his family background, his relationship with his father, his mother’s anecdotes, singing at parties as a teenager, the sixties drug culture, escaping to Texas during Woodstock, the Asbury Park scene, making a living without a recording deal, the creation of this website, his plans for the future, perfectionism, his musical rapport with Bobby Bandiera and the metaphysical reasons why he still loves to sing.
MS A lot of fans have spoken to me about the album and they think it’s the best thing you’ve done for years. Not that your other stuff was crap! [Laughs]
SJ No, I know what you mean! I don’t expect everything to be even, either. People have this weird expectation that it’s going to be this linear pattern of progress up the hill, but you’re gonna indulge yourself, you’re gonna go through fallow periods. To me it’s just not life and death. You make records, that’s all. I mean it’s funny, I bought all these soul record collecting books and you think of all those poor bastards that made one or two records or maybe they had a long career of small success but they’re considered these great artists. Then they’ll have one record that [people dismiss] and you think well, Jesus, this is one moment in a guy’s life. That’s what a record really is, it’s just a moment in your life.
MS Messin’ With The Blues was more specialist, but this one just hits you straight in the face, literally.
SJ Well, the genesis of this album is a little strange. I guess all of ‘em are, really. When Garry [Tallent] got me back into recording with Messin’ With The Blues, he said: “Let’s do this blues album, straight blues.” To Garry and I that means all these different types of blues. He doesn’t wanna hear that 1-2-3-4 slow blues, plodding along kind of thing. We both know what we’re talking about when we say that. But once I’d finished that, we toured and it did well and I was very happy with it and I thought well, maybe it’s time to make this soul album. So I thought of all the soul songs that I wanted to do and things that we’d covered in the past live. I bought a lot of these obscure soul CDs looking for material. [But] when I started writing with the album in mind, my writing didn’t go that way. It just seemed like I was being pulled more into the traditional Jukes, if there is such a thing, stuff. And when Bobby and I sat down to write at the Bruce shows [Convention Hall, Asbury Park, December 2001] that’s what came out. He’s more rock and roll, I’m more R&B. It’s the same thing that Steven and I had. Steven was rock and roll and Motown and I was blues and Stax Volt. Not that I didn’t like Motown, not that he didn’t like Stax Volt, but we combined those impulses into that kind of rock and roll soul thing, or R&B, whatever you want to call it. And that’s what Bobby and I ended up doing. He had these guitar things and I had these lyrics. “Baby Don’t Lie” is more of a rock and roll song than most soul people would do. Whereas “I Won’t Sing” is more of an R&B song or soul song than most rock and rollers would do. That’s what Steven and I were doing on the first three albums. As much as we loved all the soul stuff, there was still that screamin’ guitar and a little more frantic backbeat within us. We were both big fans of the Yardbirds and things like that. It wasn’t even really a conscious effort, although we knew what we were doing. It was more: “This is what we like, but this is the way we like it.” Instead of that slinky, sexy, sensual soul stuff, ours was more rock-based. Except for “Fever.” The funny thing is that “Fever” became…well, you’ve heard the bootleg of Bruce. It’s less soul and more, I don’t know what you would call it. [There was] more sensuality to our version than his. His is more of a longing kind of thing. That’s just the way it works out sometimes. None of us feels bound by any tradition, that when I make a blues album, I have to make a Blues album, or when we make soul records, they have to be strict Soul or anything. I think that’s the most freeing thing. I think early on we realised that none of us wanted to do that route of slavish imitations of the stuff we’d loved in the past. We wanted to throw it all together in a mix and just let it come out of us. And that’s what we did.
MS How quickly did it come together? It sounds like one of those albums that was literally…Bang! Like that.
SJ Well, some of the songs are old. “Passion Street” goes way back. That was the first time I went to Nashville with Dennis [Locorriere] and Leroy [Preston]. Matt Noble and I wrote some of the songs six to eight years before for a little project that never got off the ground ‘cos I went through all of those upheavals. But once the idea was there, that we were gonna do this, all of the…I knew I was gonna do a Dusty Springfield song. I thought I was gonna do three, ended up being one [“No Easy Way Down”]. But that was more time constraints than anything else.
MS What were the other two?
SJ [Sings] “There’s something in my soul, always brings me back to you.” I can’t remember the title of it now. [“I Can’t Make It Alone”]. And the other one was “Breakfast In Bed.” It’s a great song, I just can’t figure my way around it though.
I noted that all three songs were from the famous “Dusty In Memphis” album and that “No Easy Way Down” reminded me partly of Allen Toussaint’s “On Your Way Down,” as covered by Little Feat.
SJ [Sings the main riff of On Your Way Down]. I was going to steal that riff for a song. I actually wrote a song around that riff, but I realised that people would recognise it! But anyway, I’d been listening to “Dusty In Memphis.” I knew I wanted to try some of that stuff. Bobby and I wrote those two songs for Christmas and that was really when everything started. You just go. And I got back in touch with Matt Noble, who I’d not heard from in a long time and he hadn’t heard from me, which is really the point. I sat with Matt and wrote. I wrote myself. Jeff, I went over to his house and wrote some things. It was very easy. Once we started going, once the direction was clear, you just start writing. You have lyrics. I said I want something uptempo, I want something slow, I want something like this, something like that.
MS And you re-recorded three songs from More Ruff Stuff. Were they completely re-recorded or did you keep any parts?
SJ We kept bits of “I Will Be Strong.” The rest of it’s all re-recorded. I think we kept the vocal. We put horns on it. And piano, I think. Matt and I sat down one day and I said: “You know, I really love that vocal.” I actually prefer the mix on More Ruff Stuff!
MS For demos [the songs on More Ruff Stuff] they were fantastic quality.
SJ Well, it’s all synths and things for horns and I think there’s one or two songs that have real horns, but those really were for another project that just didn’t get off the ground, much to Matt’s regret.
I then asked Southside about Matt Noble, who features strongly on Jukesville and co-wrote songs on both Ruff Stuff CDs.
SJ I met Matt, I guess, 10 years ago. He was workin’ for David Sonenberg [who] was my manager back then. David’s one of those guys that kind of spins around and attracts people to him. Matt was doin’ some work for him. Matt is a keyboard player who’s also very much a studio kind of guy that can do everything and he’s also a songwriter and he’s just a great, really talented guy. David Sonenberg could send a chick singer who wanted to be a songwriter over to him and he could help her write songs. Or he could say: “Matt, I need some music for the back of this movie” and he could demo that. He can do everything. And he’s a very calm and decent kind of guy, so he’s a joy to work with. And I was lookin’ to write and David hooked me up with him. And we really hit it off. And we wrote a lot of songs and we demoed a Muddy Waters song and all sorts of strange things happened with that. He lives in this really great town right above New York City called Bronxville and I would just go up and spend the day writing. But then the world kind of collapsed in on me, so I kinda just disappeared for a while. Which I’ve done to other people. I used to feel bad about it but then I realised that’s just really who I am, so I try to tell ‘em in advance now! So when we started this project, I thought, I wanna do these things from these demos, we’ve got these other songs, I need to get Matt and he said: “C’mon, let’s do some more writing.” I thought great, I really feel comfortable with this guy. And that’s pretty much how it is.
MS I guess you pick your partners carefully in terms of writing, it’s not just you can write with anybody.
SJ Well, I try with everybody. I mean, I’ve sat down with lots and lots of people and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you think this is gonna be great, nothing happens. I sat down to try to write a song one time with Gary Nicholson. And if anybody can write with anybody, it’s Gary Nicholson. He’s the guy in Nashville who wrote “Somebody To Love You,” but also wrote “She’s Still In Love.” I wrote a number of songs with him when I was in Nashville. Garry Tallent hooked me up. He said: “You gotta write with Gary Nicholson, he’s the greatest.” He is the greatest. You sit down with him, he makes you a cup of coffee, he plays keyboards, plays guitar, he’s got the drum machine, he’s got the little studio in his house, gotta go pick up his kids from school and it’s very comfortable. So he’s known Delbert for years. He’s a Texas guy and I guess they played in bands together or something like that. Delbert was living in Nashville and of course I knew Delbert from years before, we did some shows together. I didn’t know him real well but we got along great. So he said: “You know, Delbert’s in town, you wanna try to write with him?” I said: “Great!” Well these two guys sit down and they’re drinkin’ their coffee and they start tellin’ Texas rock and roll stories. Two hours later, time’s up and not one machine was turned on, not one guitar was picked up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t! Matt is one of the best to write with because he’s capable of [writing songs like] “King Of The Night” [on Ruff Stuff]. [Back then] I played him a couple of records. I said: “I’m really interested in writing a little bit more jazz-oriented, sophisticated stuff. I’ve got these lyrics. I don’t want it to be anything other than this kind of thing, this kind of cool, smoky jazz thing. I played him “Passion Flower” by Billy Strayhorn and a couple of other things. Which I’m sure he knew, but just to give him an indication and we sat down and we wrote all these great chords.
I singled out “Blue Radio” [also on Ruff Stuff] as another example of this modern bluesy approach and commented that Southside had been talking about making a blues album for much of the nineties, a desire which may have been partly inspired by the time he spent playing with Blues Deluxe while living in California between 1989 and 1992.
MS Blues Deluxe. What were they like?
That must have been an interesting
SJ Well, I really wasn’t sure which
way I was gonna go [musically]. I was really
MS Is that when you first met him?
SJ No, I met him years and years before. My second wife Jill grew up in Marin County, which is above San Francisco. She was friends with a woman named Katie Hayes, David’s wife. Katie ran KSAN radio, which was a free-form radio station. Jill was a promotion person, but she had actually known Katie before that. And of course I got played on that radio station back in the seventies, so we all became very good friends. They lived half a mile away from Jill, when I was first starting to see Jill, so we would see them all the time, when their kids were real small. David and I really hit it off. He’s a great guy and he’s interesting to talk to. He knows things, he reads, he’s got his opinions, but he’s pretty mellow. Good person for me to know. When I moved out there [in the fall of 1989], I said: “I’m bored. I wanna have a band.” So he said: “Well, I know this guy Mark Jordan,” who played with Bonnie Raitt. Rick Schlosser, drummer, played with Van Morrison. And we all met this guy Doug, who was this phenomenal guitar player, but a handful. Younger guy, really good-lookin’ young guy, but crazy. But just could play any blues style and was really one of those blues players that when he played a note, you listened, because it was real. Instead of this facile kinda: “I can play every riff known to man and I can play in Albert King style, BB King, Freddie King,” whatever, and you go: “So what?” When he played that riff, you went: “Wow, that’s great, he’s really playin’ from inside himself.” Which is what you want. So I said: “Fuck, let’s start a band!” And we did and it was just a little five-piece band and we played the Palomino and all these other clubs and we got into all kinds of arguments with club owners. I said: “You can’t advertise us as Southside Johnny, ‘cos it isn’t.” And most of ‘em were OK with it, but they weren’t happy about it. But it was great. I have some tapes of stuff we made in the studio. We had been in the studio a coupla days. Never had time to mix it. And this kinda ageing hippy was running the studio and I got a phone call, like four o’clock in the morning, from [him]. He goes: “You gotta come down tomorrow, at seven o’clock in the morning.” I said: “Why? What are you talking about?” “I’m being arrested and all the stuff’s being confiscated and you gotta get your tapes outta here!” And it was an old drug bust from like 10 years before that he had been fighting and finally he lost his appeal and that was it, he was going to jail. His place was being seized and he had made an arrangement with the FBI people, or DEA, whatever, that I could go in and get my little tapes. I’m there and he’s in handcuffs, it was terrible! And he said: “Hey, don’t worry about it.”
MS How often did you guys play? Was it a
regular thing or just now and
SJ Whenever we could get a gig. We played on the floor of one club and all these funky, nasty places. Didn’t make any money. It really and truly was for the fun of it. It was a chance to play a lot of blues. We got reviewed in the LA Times. One of the aspects of that band, like Paul Butterfield’s band and all, was everybody gets a chance to play, solo and just let the songs go wherever they want. So the [reviewer], she goes: “Well, they’re really good and he sings real good, but everybody’s always playing all the time, everybody’s takin’ a guitar solo or a piano solo. I mean, what about the songs?” Well, you don’t get the concept lady! It was a strange town for that, you know. They have their expectations of you, too, and we didn’t fit into any of them, which is good.
MS Is blues in general perceived differently on the west coast than it is on the east coast? Is it universal?
SJ I think it’s completely misunderstood everywhere these days. It isn’t anything that anybody plays anymore. My old girlfriend and I went to Bourbon Street in Memphis. We saw a band playin’ at BB King’s and it was all showbiz and we heard a band playin’ at this other club and it was all academic, note-for-note reproductions of other records and we walked into the museum kinda place and there was these three black guys playin’ on this old hamstrung piano and funky little cocktail set of drums and they started playin’ and they just entered into this groove and I went: “That’s it!” And it wasn’t that they were great musicians, they weren’t. But it was just, they were playin’ to play and it just came out of them. It doesn’t have anything to do with that other stuff, it isn’t showbiz. But that’s blues, blues is more of a groove in a sense than soul music is in a way because the all-important ingredient for the blues is this emotion comes through. But the underpinnings of it are this kind of feeling that you’re being moved along and it doesn’t rely on a lot of sonic force, it doesn’t have to have drums or anything, to groove. The west coast is as bad as the east coast. When a true blues player shows up and plays real blues, it’s a little intimidating for a lot of people.
MS I remember when I grew up, the music I was hearing in the early seventies, things like the Allman Brothers doing 26-minute versions of something or other and you think: “That’s not really the real thing.”
SJ They were a great band though. That was a different thing. A lot of people misunderstood that John Hammond and Paul Butterfield and the Allmans and like that weren’t really looking to be BB King and all that stuff. They were lookin’ to find their way, like we found our way, into playing the music they loved the way they wanted to play it. And let it be part of them and part of what they’ve learned. I never expected the Allman Brothers to be deep blues, John Lee Hooker stuff, I wanted them to be the Allman Brothers. We played with them with Doctor Zoom and the Sonic Boom, we opened up for them [in 1971]. And they were sittin’ there lookin’ at us like: “What the fuck?” The Monopoly game and baton twirlers. And then we sat and watched them and they were fantastic. And that was right as that album [The Allman Brothers Live At The Fillmore East] was being made, or had just been made or somethin’ like that. I don’t really remember all of the dates.
MS Back to Ruff Stuff…one of my favourite songs on it, and this is nowhere near a typical Jukes song at all, it’s just a very evocative ballad, and that’s “Time Is Running Wild.” Essentially about your…
SJ Mum and dad, yeah. That song’s gonna resurface at some point. That’s part of something I have in mind that I haven’t really realised yet. I still don’t have the arrangement to that song that I want. Those are lyrics that I wanna resurrect at some point, I just gotta figure out the right way to do it. It’s a very honest song. I don’t usually write about myself in that immediate way, but I figured for that one I would.
MS The lines about your dad and the pier where he used to fish being washed away, the little brass plaque…
SJ That’s totally true. It just wasn’t
a bay, but I couldn’t figure anything else to
MS As you know, I wrote to [your dad] a few times 12 years ago and he would write back and sign his letters: “Tight Lines, Dick.” I thought: “Tight Lines, what the fuck is that?” And it’s a fishing term. I realized this eventually, but I didn’t get it at first.
SJ He was a cryptic kinda guy. He lived in his own world, too.
MS What was your relationship with him, was it a good one?
SJ Well, it was good. Our family was never close in the sense of hugs and kisses and “I love you” and all that stuff. I mean, you never heard any of that stuff. And that was just the way that they were brought up. I realize after all these years that my father had grown up with his parents, my grandparents, who were very, very stilted emotionally. I think his father was a real taskmaster and he broke away from him. He moved into the YMCA in Asbury Park when he was like 15, 16, 17 years old, which wasn’t done back then. Just wasn’t done. My grandparents lived less than five minutes walk from where we kids grew up and we saw them twice a year. My mother would say: “Go over and see your grandmother.” So we’d dutifully go over and she’d give us a glass of milk and some cookies and then that would be it. She wouldn’t say anything, we wouldn’t say anything. She wasn’t very open either. I don’t fault her for that ‘cos I didn’t really know her. I doubt that in the entire time we were growin’ up, two-and-a-half blocks away, we spent more than an hour total time together. Two hours maybe. I doubt we said more than 100 words apiece to each other. That’s the way they were, not the way we were, if you know what I mean. And my father reacted to that by being protective of himself by not letting himself get emotionally involved too much. And we all learned that from him. And I think my mother was somewhat that way. Her mother died when she was very young and her father remarried and she got along great with her stepmom and all, but I think that it makes you retreat inside yourself ‘cos you’re gonna get hurt again. And when you bring up kids in that atmosphere, you get kids that are emotionally stunted too and do not open up very well. And it took me many years to finally get over that. I mean what Bruce says about me on the first album is true. I would use sarcasm to distance myself. I wouldn’t let people get too close and I still don’t like people getting close. I mean, it just doesn’t feel natural to me. But that’s the way my father was. I mean, I loved him. He was an interesting guy to talk to. My mother was, too. I loved listening to them talk together. My father could make friends in a pub and things like that ‘cos he was outgoing in the sense that he liked to talk, he liked to drink, he liked music and all. He just wouldn’t put his arm around you or anything like that. But he liked people.
MS He certainly liked my hometown, Brighton, ‘cos he kept going back [after being posted there during the war]. When you first played there with the Jukes [1977] did that have any kind of resonance for you?
SJ No. My father told me very little about the war.
MS My dad told me everything, I grew up with it.
SJ Is that right? I guess that’s the way you react. He just never really mentioned it. And it wasn’t that it was this terrible ordeal, bodies falling over your head, your buddy’s brains spilling over you. He never saw any fighting.
MS No, my dad went through it all after it had happened. He was a radio operator. Once you’ve had an experience like that in your life, you’re never gonna forget it. I grew up with stories of the war and pre-war London, before [the blitz], and it was fantastic.
SJ My mom, before she died…I would go down and spend some time with her ‘cos she was going through some bad times and all. And she finally started opening up and telling me all these stories about her childhood and all these great adventures and she was obviously very independent, very responsible, but had a very adventurous streak. I remember she told me a story of when she was a teenager. She had a brother who died when he was fairly young, I guess. I never met him anyway. She was born in 1915. [When] she was a teenager, she went babysitting, and she saved a bunch of money. Then one day she read in the paper that in Belmar, which is a town along from Asbury Park on the shore where they lived, this guy was going to give plane rides for five dollars apiece, which was a helluva lot of money. This is the beginning of the Depression, but she had saved up this money and she went: “I wanna plane ride!” This was in the thirties, flight is still fairly new and was really an adventure. So she drags her younger brother down. I guess he’s 10 and she’s 14 or 15, whatever it would be and she marches up to this guy. I mean, this is my mom. She was very reticent, although very opinionated, when I knew her even. She marches up to the pilot, she goes: “Five dollars for the both of us!” And the guy goes: “OK, but he has to sit in your lap.” So she puts her brother on her lap in this little two-seater plane, straps him in and they fly over the house and the ocean and she just thought it was the greatest adventure. And the fact that she took her brother I thought really said a lot about who she was. Wasn’t this selfish thing, she really wanted an adventure, but to share it too. But like I say, she didn’t tell me this story ‘till she was 78 years old! I would have loved to have heard it when I was 13. It would have made me a different person, I think.
MS Every individual’s got this huge history. Some have more interesting lives than others, some have lived through more interesting times than others, but they’ve all got this history. If you just sit them down and get them in the right mood to talk…
SJ I think it’s important to tell your kids that kind of stuff about yourself too, because it makes you more real as a parent, but it also makes life more real to kids. Kids live in too much of a fantasy world these days. Things are presented to them as real that aren’t real, whereas when your parent sits down and tells you the truth about their own life, that’s real, much more resonant than some TV show.
MS As you’ve said before many times, you broke out of Ocean Grove when you were pretty young, crossing over to Asbury Park and drinking on street corners or whatever. But your first experience of playing with any band was with Sonny Kenn, isn’t that right?
SJ Yeah, it’s actually kinda muddled. My friend Dougie Wayne, who also had an interesting life, he was raised by his grandparents, who were English. But he was from a tough town up in northern New Jersey, Union City. And he had gotten in a lotta trouble up there at like 12 or 13 years old, so they shipped him down to his grandparents, who lived in Ocean Grove. But he loved music and I loved music and he really wanted to be somebody. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. But he conned me into singing at parties and stuff. We were like 14 or 15 years old. And girls would be there. And of course I had nothing at all on offer for the girls. Doug was a good-looking guy, though. The girls liked him. He said: “Come on, let’s sing a Righteous Brothers song, or we’ll sing some doo-wop thing, OK?” and put on the record and we would sing to the record and that’s how we got over. Only he got over, I never got over that much. That’s when I really first started singing in public and I guess if I’m honest with myself, the fact is that I probably had the urge to do that for a long, long time, but I didn’t know anybody who really ever made it doin’ that. My father played in bands and that was kinda real to me but not real. I mean, it just seemed an absurd concept to actually sing in a band. I mean, it just didn’t seem like something anybody really ever did, even though I knew people who did. I just never thought of myself that way.
MS And once you’d done it, did it feel like: “This is what I wanna do”?
SJ Yeah. I know that I enjoyed it, but I didn’t take it seriously for a number of years ‘cos we were teenagers. There were a million bands as I say, post-Beatles explosion and it seemed like everybody was startin' to play in bands although at the time it really wasn’t true. We used to get a lot of flak about: “Oh, you’re gonna be in a band, you’re gonna be the Beatles” and all that shit. But I really enjoyed singing. I liked the making of music and I liked finding the emotion inside of myself and I thought that the rest of the stuff was just goofy kid’s stuff. I liked the whole aspect of it. I liked the equipment and the way it looked and loading it in and loading it out. The audience reaction never was really that important to me back then. I always was plagued by the fact that I never thought juvenile stuff was real, was very interesting. I always liked older music with more adult themes. I liked older fiction, more adult reading. To me, it was like your teenage years were this great party that you went through and none of it was real and there was nothing to be made of it. And so I was just kinda biding my time until something presented itself to me that I could do for the rest of my life. And there it was, Godammit!
MS And do you still feel the same way that you ever did?
SJ No, I don’t feel anything like that anymore! No, you can’t after all these years. I mean I still love singing. I must admit that the great moments of my life have always been when I’m lost in a song. It’s not release so much, of course there is that aspect, but it’s a finding of…It’s so hard to put into words that are easy to understand. A lot of people, metaphysically, want to know why they’re here. They may not know that consciously, but subconsciously they’ve got some reason to think…They’re faced with death and all the other things and there’s a part of you that gnaws at you, that goes: “But why are we here?” And when I hit that, I know why I’m here. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna give anything to anybody. Or make beauty in the world. I mean, that’s all great. But it’s a pure communication with your inner spirit. I know that all sounds like bullshit, but it gives that insight into what the pure human feeling is. Not layered over with all the social stuff that has to go on just to live. And it makes me feel as though that one brief two-minute segment or 30-second segment or whatever it was, maybe a verse to a song, would have made all the rest of it worthwhile in a sense. Not because it was so pleasurable, because it was so revealing. I mean, that’s a hard way to explain what it feels like!
I suggested that it was also difficult to find the right words to describe how it feels watching the Jukes night after night.
SJ “Duck!” I think is the word! But I mean I talked to a number of guys, and women too, but the guys [said things like]: “I held my baby in my arms and it finally became real to me.” And I thought well, that’s kinda what I’m talking about. You have to go through life. People who lose themselves in nature get close to that feeling. I’m sure they get the same feeling that I do. I’m sure they get those moments where they go: “Phew, I’m a part of the universe.” But it’s hard for a modern person to do that, because it is relentless in the world. Especially the western world. You never wake up in the morning blank. And when you can reach that emotional heart, it just blows off all of the other stuff and you are really just an entity. There’s a great feeling of purity that is hard to beat. I see it in certain Van Gogh paintings and all. You just know that at that moment, there was a feeling of: “I’m not Van Gogh anymore, I’m not this poor miserable bastard!”
MS And he was, too.
SJ He was a poor miserable bastard! But for that one brief moment when he was painting that painting, he was not. And I sometimes wonder…Like the sniper in Washington. I think some of that may be a reaction to the excretion of all the crap that society, civilisation, culture, whatever you want to call it, throws at you. And I think there’s this great longing to reach into that and find me. And I think that some of these guys just blow up because of that. I know that’s what drugs are about. And drinking too, sometimes, although not so much drinking, I really don’t think. I think that’s more numbing. Experimenting with acid and all that stuff back in the sixties, it seemed to me that that was the point of a lot of what drug people did. Certainly heroin and all, but I think there’s also a great desire in all human beings to find that inner self that seems to have been just lost. Fortunately for me, music is a legal substance! It’s only brief glimpses of it, but it’s enough for me to keep me going. That’s what I used to get when I used to listen to records, too. I mean, there would be a moment when I’d have the speakers against my head and it would be the right record at the right moment and I just would sink into the music and cease to exist. And that’s what I think we’re all looking for, that oblivion or whatever it is, you know.
MS There’s a great story you told some years ago of when, I suppose it was the late sixties sometime, you went off on a trip across the States, just bummin’ around.
SJ Yeah, I did that a coupla times, actually. I got songs…”Rosa” came outta that. There’s a couple of others.
MS That’s where I was going with that one, “Rosa.”
SJ It’s not a true story in the sense that those events didn’t happen to me, but I can see them happening. I lived in El Paso, Texas. This was the year of Woodstock [1969]. I remember gettin’ the paper [and reading about the] “Hippie Love Fest in New York.” And I’m in El Paso, Texas, which was perfect for me. El Paso at that point was a rough town and we lived on Fred Wilson Boulevard, which was the road that the army base was on. My friend Doug, who would get me to sing at parties, had gone to Vietnam and come back and was bored. He went AWOL a bunch of times, so they put him in the stockade in Fort Bliss in El Paso. So his wife and I drove down and rented an apartment, ‘cos he was going to get out in another month or so. And we just hung out there. Didn’t have any money and I got little odd jobs. But we would go across the bridge to Juarez and buy drugs, speed and all that kind of stuff and come back and drink beer and Doug would finally get out and we’d spend some time there and then we went from there to California. But we saw a lot of things in Juarez that were very wild. And that was when I still didn’t give a shit whatever happened.
MS Did you ever make a pilgrimage to Chicago [in the early days]?
SJ No, I never did. I never got to Chicago until the Jukes. There was a time, I forget when this was. Walter had died. Little Walter. And I wanted to get out to Chicago before the rest of ‘em died. It was either Walter had died and Elmore James was still alive or Elmore had died and Walter was still alive. Whatever it was. But I remember reading about the death of one of those great blues guys that I always wanted to see live and I kept talking about it to my friends and this was in the beginning of the drug era. Mid-sixties. And I guess I just bored ‘em to tears with the whole thing. “I’m gonna go to Chicago!” Then I got real high one night and they put me on a bus to Chicago! With a bunch of money in my pocket and a little valise full of clothes. And I got out to Pennsylvania and sobered up and realised I didn't know where I was going. I didn’t know anybody out there. I was a teenager. I didn’t have a whole lot of money. I didn’t have any ID. We didn’t have ID back then. I didn’t anyway. And so I went up to the conductor and said: “I gotta get back to New Jersey.” So he put me on a train back. I realise too that on reflection, I was walking into who-knows-what. This little skinny white kid from New Jersey, maybe 25 bucks in his pocket. It was not a good idea!
I commented that it was somewhat surprising that he didn’t go to Chicago early on, given that the south side of the city was where much of his favourite blues music was made.
SJ Well, I never really believed that either. I didn’t think it was Chicago that made that. I think it was Muddy Waters and Little Walter and Willie Dixon and the Chess Brothers. That was all Chicago, but it could have been Miami. I didn’t think Chicago was the reason, I just thought that was the place. I was never a big believer in a lotta that stuff. I never really had the urge to go to San Francisco when all that was happening, although it sounded very interesting. I wanted to see San Francisco, I wanted to see Chicago. But I figured, I guess, maybe I understood because of the Asbury Park scene when it really started happening, that when a thing happens, it happens, and going there to be part of it, it’s kind of, it’s not artificial, it just seems like it’s not really yours, you know what I mean? Maybe that’s just me, but it seemed like if I had gone to any of those places to inject myself into it, it would have been artificial. Some kind of construct. “I’m going to be part of a scene.” Whereas with Asbury Park, it kind of happened around me and I was! And it was great. I guess I’m just too much in love with spontaneity, that’s all.
MS Apart from the albums you’ve put out recently and the Ruff Stuff’s, you’ve now got a website. Was it your idea to have it? Or was it forced upon you?
SJ I think it was a logical thing. I mean, everybody else…I kinda wanted one, but I didn’t want to be in charge of it, ‘cos graphically I’m completely stumblefooted. And also I didn’t really wanna get that involved in it. I try to keep those responsibilities at arm’s length because I have one responsibility, that’s to be the best I can onstage and to keep the band going and like that. I’m not capable of a lot of other stuff. Also I know that I wouldn’t be that good at it. But I knew that it was something that I needed to do. After Better Days I really…Record companies were just…I don’t hate everybody in record companies, I know some people in record companies I really like. I’m not made for that, that’s all. I’m just not made for ‘em. They don’t want me, I don’t want them and I think that’s a good way to be. They don’t hate me, I don’t hate them. Some of us don’t belong there, that’s all.
MS There’s a lot of people in your position, that haven’t got a deal with a major company or anything, they’re just doing their own thing. But I guess if you do that, you’ve not got the distribution, the power and whatever you get with a major deal.
SJ Yeah, you do miss out on a lot of things. John Prine is one of the guys who really made it work and there’s a lot of other people that do it, too. For me it’s a bit different in that I’ve got a big band so that when we tour, I have to make a certain amount of money or financially it’s a disaster. For John, he can go out [and do acoustic shows]. Bobby and I certainly have done that and Rusty and Bobby and I and all of those configurations, but you don’t make a lot of money doing that and also it’s really not the whole thing I wanna do. I wanna go out with the Jukes, I want that sound, so it’s a little tougher for me in that respect in that my overhead is higher. We’re just starting to explore it and I’m going to try to plug into more outlets that will actually…I see reviews in all these newspapers and stuff and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be reviewed there either, but we don’t pursue it. I mean, I know it’s gotta be half a dozen people at Rolling Stone, but they’re not gonna review the album unless I make them aware of it. And I have to do it. I don’t have anybody that can do that. That’s what you get with a record company. I mean, they make their one phone call, they say: “Hi, this is Irving from EMI…” But I know these people, so I just gotta get off my ass and actually do it.
MS The music is your thing, that’s what you love. Everything else is something you gotta do to get it out there, but it’s hard work and it must drive you crazy sometimes.
SJ No, I take it as part of the job. I don’t like to do it that much anymore because I don’t have that much more to say about a lotta the things they wanna talk about. But when I started out makin’ records, it was five or six interviews a day. I mean, they would set up days and days and days in every city we played in. Every high school newspaper and…But that was fine with me. I thought great, as long as I can make the music I wanna make, I don’t mind grabbing people by the lapels and saying: “This is what we do.” I’m a little past that now because I’ve done so much, but I love the album and I love the band, so it’s not a hardship for me to say: “We’re really good, come and have a good time.” It’s just that it’s never quite that simple. Conan O’Brien, they got half of my band. I’ve done that show before. David Letterman, we did Jay Leno, but the guy who books those shows, the person in each of those shows who books those shows has a relationship with [record companies] and I’m sure they’re greasin’ each other and doin’ all that kind of stuff, but what do I have to offer? “We’re really good.” That doesn’t put gas in the car for this guy. It’s like I say, I’m willing to do a lot of things ‘cos I believe in the band, but I’m not willing to do everything I possibly can. I’m not gonna put on a clown suit and I’m not gonna cater to a lot of assholes. And that’s not my contrary nature, which I know I have, it’s just I don’t feel it’s worth it. I don’t wanna feel badly about doing a gig. I wanna go onstage and feel like this is where I belong and what I’m doing and what I really wanna do. The only way I can do that is to try to pick and choose the things that are important to me. It’s an imperfect world, I’m not gonna let it kill me. I mean, I see all the artificiality that so-called rock and roll’s become and if the price I have to pay for not taking part in that is a little less financial happiness, that’s OK with me.
We then talked about what it feels like to walk out in front of an audience. While I would want the ground to open up and swallow me, the stage is Southside’s natural habitat.
SJ I feel so comfortable up there now. [Offstage] I’m still self-conscious about stuff, I’m sure you’ve recognised that. I’d rather people didn’t look at me. But as soon as I walk onstage, I go: “OK, I know what goes on up here.” I guess it’s like walking into an operating theatre when you’re a brain surgeon. To anybody else, it’s like: “Oh my God, there’s a guy over there with the top of his head chopped off.” And to this guy it’s like: “OK, I know what I’m doing here.” And that’s the way it is. I’m me up there. I really don’t think it’s another side of me. I’m not all that radically different up there than I am [down here]. I’m still sarcastic and I have fun, I like kiddin’ people. I like things to be somewhat spontaneous, but I also like to be a bit in charge. I can delegate some of that to Bobby and some other guys. But that’s pretty much how I am here. I never liked any of that kind of ‘persona onstage’ thing. I never liked all the stuff that distances you from the song. It always seemed to be counter-productive. If you have a song like “No Easy Way Down” to sing, it’s a great lyric with a real emotion. If I put a lot of crap around it, it means that people have a harder time and I have a harder time getting to the emotion. So that’s why it’s T-shirts and jeans and all that stuff. I’ve tried not to be anything other than the guy that’s standing up there singing the song. Now, especially these days…I was watching some of the Kylie Minogue thing. People are really used to layers and layers of artifice between them and the lyric. So the lyric is really just a throwaway thing. It’s like anybody can be a star and what about the song? “Oh, we’ll get to that!” It’s like the very least important thing of all is the music. Being able to sing is not the be all and end all either, but at some point there has to be some little kernel of art/emotion, and it’s just the least important thing these days. It’s just not my world, that’s all. This is what happened in the fifties, believe it or not. I just remember enough and I know enough about it. All the artificiality that [fifties] rock and roll was a reaction to, was the culmination of Frank Sinatra and all that stuff, real singers singing great songs, becoming a formula that people would manipulate and make these silly, nonsense songs and sell millions of copies. And they didn’t care about the music. Same thing happened in the sixties. Dick Clark, Frankie Avalon, Fabian.
Southside the cited the appearance of Nirvana as an example of a new musical form being born out of a reaction against this kind of sterility.
Then there’s the reaction of the people who really don’t get Nirvana, but they get that other people want it, so they try to construct it and it becomes more and more and more artificial until it is not what it was and is useless. And then somebody goes: “Fuck this!” Boom! And something new comes through. To me, I don’t wanna be any part of any of those things, I just wanna sing.
We moved on to discuss the Newcastle show two days previously, where a film crew was present to record what eventually became the “Live At The Opera House” DVD. In the best tradition of artists never being satisfied with their work, Southside revealed that he had reservations about his performance and as a result, will probably never be happy with the finished product.
SJ I’m not even gonna think about it. I did what I did. I couldn’t get the monitors to give me what I needed and I really wanted to just sink into singing the songs instead of trying to entertain people and I couldn’t do it because I just wasn’t getting anything back and my voice wasn’t completely recovered either. But, it is what it is. That’s like I say, you can’t make everything perfect. Some of these [musicians] try to control everything and I think that’s a mistake. I mean, maybe as a career move it’s a good thing and for history it’s a good thing, but I don’t think psychically it’s a very good thing. You have to stumble occasionally. And you don’t really have to learn from it, it just has to be. You have to be alive and human. Messy. What did you think of it?
MS I enjoyed it, but it’s totally different from our perspective, a fan’s perspective, looking at the show, what we think of it, to your side of things. If you make musical mistakes or something onstage, we don’t see that.
SJ I don’t give a shit about the mistakes. As long as it wasn’t a static, awful show…
MS I didn’t think it was, no.
SJ Good, well that’s all I wanna know. ‘Cos they [the crew] were great. I mean, the interview I did, the guy was really good. And they were very unobtrusive onstage. I think Bill had told them in no uncertain terms that if John catches you onstage and he’s in a bad mood, you’re gonna get hurt! I don’t mean to be that way, but that’s really who I am, and they were great. I never even knew they were there. For their sake, I hope they got something good. I don’t care that much about it. It’s like I say, no Jukes show is the same, so to put that out as a Jukes show is…I guess there is typical, but you know what I mean. I got to dismiss it now because if I dwell on it, I’m gonna get upset about it and I shouldn’t, but there it is. I have a bad streak of perfectionism in me that I’ve been fighting for my entire life. It’s just the worst trait in the world as far as I’m concerned.
MS I’m kind of like that myself…I suppose I’m a bit obsessive too, in the sense of what I do. It comes naturally to me to want to dig deeper into something and get all the figures and the facts and get it all in order and work it out.
SJ Yeah, you’re a researcher. I like that part too, but the thing is, it takes away from your enjoyment of those traits in yourself if you don’t get that last little thing. So all of the great things you’ve done that are behind you are forgotten and it’s just one little thing that makes it so that you can’t be happy in your life. Believe me, I know that! I can do a great show and have a couple of things go wrong and go: “Fuck!” It’s stupid. And I’ve been fighting it like I say. I try not to be unhappy! [Laughs]
MS Most of the time, I mean, we can always tell if you’re not having a great time onstage but it doesn’t really come out in the performance as such, it’s just that you’re not looking particularly…
SJ You mean like when I’m throwing things and screaming at people? [Laughs] That doesn’t necessarily make for me not having a good show, but it just means that I’m not happy.
MS When you’re up onstage, if you’re not in the best of moods and something’s gone wrong, it’s gonna detract from how you feel about your performance.
SJ Yeah, but I want them [the crowd] to have a good time more than I want me to have a good time. I mean, I want what I want, but I want the audience to get what they want, too. And I think that’s more important to me. I know eventually I’m gonna get what I want, but I’m gonna do a couple of hundred shows. They’re gonna see one or two and I want the one that they see to be as enjoyable as it could be and if it means I don’t get what I want, I’ll get it another time.
MS Now that you’ve put out a couple of albums and you’ve got a website and everything’s looking good, what do you see yourself doing [in the future], if you’ve got any plans at all?
SJ I have three more albums I wanna make. I have three albums in mind I wanna make. I’m not gonna tell you what they are ‘cos they’ll change. I’ve got dozens of songs written in all three of the different styles that I wanna do things in. Which one’ll be first, how it comes out, I don’t know. But I definitely have it in mind and I know how to do it now too, and make it so that I can afford to do it on my own, make my money back and move on to the next one, which is great. I don’t have anything planned in my life that way, but at least I have an idea of what I wanna do next. And I know when I want to do ‘em and I kinda know how. Which one it’ll be, I don’t know. Right now, I just wanna get these shows done.
MS What’s it like playing to people that are sitting down? You had that in a couple of places, [when the crowd didn’t] really stand up until the end.
SJ It’s a little intimidating at first, but then the band seems to fall into a different mode. It’s a different way of playing for us. It’s where you play the songs and concentrate on the playing more than the entertaining and both sides are valid. And we certainly do both every night, it’s just that it brought out a different aspect of us, which was really good, I was really enjoying that. At first I was a little intimidated, I thought: “Why are they all sitting down? We suck!” Forty years on, it’s like: “Nobody’s dancing, we suck!” It’s funny how you defeat yourself so easily. We used to play a place called Warner Theatre in Washington DC and it was one of my favorite places to play. It was like a 3,500-seat theatre, or 2,500 or whatever it was. And it’s all seats and we played there early on and when I walked in I went: “Where’s the dancefloor?” And at first I was intimidated, but then I realised they’re here to listen too, and we had a really good show and since that time it really doesn’t bother me, as long as they don’t not do anything. That’s a terrible feeling when you [end the song] and you hear [people talking] and you think “Fuck, what am I doing here?”. That’s why “Tired Skin” can be a little intimidating. I mean, it’s a rock and roll show, so the audiences are a bit volatile and they’re gonna talk to each other and they’re having a good time and having drinks and all and you do something like “Tired Skin,” which is a very quiet song, you hear ‘em and you gotta say to yourself: “It’s OK.” It’s not that they hate the song, it’s just that they’re worked up. There’s a lot of people out there energised by the show and when you break into those kind of things it’s not so easy to ratchet it down and you can’t take that as some kinda insult, you just gotta go: “You made ‘em crazy, so now they’re crazy!” Now you can’t expect them to be sane for the little three minutes that you want them to be sane and then they get crazy again, you know. [Laughs]
MS I’ve spoken to a lot of people travelling around these last couple of weeks and the general reaction has been extremely favorable. I know for a fact that a lot of the old fans are bringing new people.
SJ Yeah, I’ve heard that on the internet.
MS They’re bringing new people and they’re bringing their kids who’ve grown up with Jukes music. In a way, they’re doing their best to keep it going through the generations or whatever.
SJ You mean I never get to stop? Is that what you’re saying? [Laughs] That’s OK, I can’t anyway. But it’s always gratifying to see new faces and younger people, too. Certainly we’ve played to small, tiny houses and had a good time. We had a great show one time way back in the seventies, maybe early eighties and we played in some college. I don’t remember where, it was the night of the high school prom, the big basketball game and something else and we had like 35 people in this audience, this little kind of a gym, theatre thing. And I looked down, and they looked at me and they were intimidated too, sittin’ in this big place. And I went: “Let’s have some fun” and we did all kinds of crazy stuff. Cover tunes and just…And we had a great time and they were up and dancing and I had 35 people give me a standing ovation! [Laughs] And it was very gratifying because I knew that they all felt like: “Oh shit, I must really be out of it if I’m one of the few people that comes to this show when all this stuff is happening. I guess I’m really a nerd and I’m so ashamed.” I mean, that’s what goes through people’s minds, and so for them to have a great time in that context made me feel [good]. And the band had a great time, too. I mean they were all set, that band at that time, was all set to get on me: “Oh man, this is fucked up!” And in the end, it was like: “That was great!”
MS You and Bobby are very different personalities but you work together musically extremely well, don’t you? You’ve got a rapport going.
SJ The main thing with Bobby and I is that we both want it to be the best it can be. And we’ve had lots of people go through this band between the two of us. Some of ‘em have not been as committed…I mean, very few are committed as much as Bobby and I are, to this band. And some of ‘em have really honestly been very good and we’ve been able to make it work and make it work and make it work, and I think sometimes we look at each other and we realise that this…It doesn’t matter if he gets a guitar solo to him, and it doesn’t matter to me if I get any applause for me, as long as the show is good. There’s that kind of subsuming yourself to the whole thing and a lot of band members don’t do that. I’ve always been grateful for the fact that he is a very unselfish performer. He really is committed, too.
As time grew short, I commented that Southside has a better memory for events and incidents during his career than he gives himself credit for.
MS You can remember stuff from 25 years ago quite accurately. You may not be sure what year it was, but that’s where I come in.
SJ That’s right! You have to figure that out. I know the repercussions of a lot of that stuff too and that’s what makes it stick in my head. I think: “This led to that and all that.”
MS A lot of water under the bridge. I
guess there would be with any band,
SJ The thing with all of us from Asbury Park, I think, from Garry on, is that we all were ourselves and adamant about who we were. Steven, Bruce, it may have taken time to figure that all out, but we weren’t easily moulded into something. We were gonna be ourselves, in whatever context. And I think that stood us in good stead. And it made for a lot of butting of heads and clashing of egos and ideas. But I think sometimes that’s the forge that shapes whatever it is you’re gonna do. I hope that we’re all old enough and mature enough and strong enough to let a lot of the bad stuff that we had to go through, be [in] the past. Because you’re not gonna get to this point in your career without having clashed with people unless you’re just this doormat. And I never saw myself as a doormat. And I don’t think any of them did, either.
MS I’m lucky, I guess, in my life that there’s been very few people that I’ve pissed off, but I have and it’s not necessarily because of anything I did, it’s just that you don’t get on with some people. I have regrets, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
SJ No, like Willie Nelson says: “There’s nothing I can do about it now.” I always used to say I would regret it if it would do me any good. [Laughs] I have things that I’ve done that I’ve… The only thing I ever really regret is hurting anybody. I don’t regret missed opportunities, I don’t regret really badly fucking up, but I regret any pain I caused to anybody, ‘cos that’s not my goal. My aim is just to enjoy myself and make sure everybody else enjoys themselves too. It’s a small thing, but it’s the only thing I can do. Mike Saunders Interview | Southside Talks Asbury | Music and Martinis | Influences | Puttin' Up His Jukes
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