I have known Scott since we were in the seventh grade together in Piedmont, Ca. We got our first band together in eighth grade and have been playing music together ever since. Scott's musical output has been phenomenal. He's a very inventive guitarist and a prolific songwriter. He's been living and playing around Chico since 1974, and can be heard these days with Spark & Cinder (having just rejoined after an eight year leave of absence), Danny West and the Lonesome Cowboys, The Hofner Brothers, and on rare and special occasions, the Night Knights.

Scott...OK, well, it all started back in Piedmont, Ca. You know, home of the blues. It actually had alot to do with the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. And me and my pals at our sock-hops, I can't remember when we used to have 'em.

Lunch time, seventh grade.

OK, in the multi-purpose room. [These sock-hops took place at Piedmont High School during the years 1965 through about 1967...kg]

I think they were in the gym.

Oh, they were in the gym, 'cause I remember the wooden floors.

I remember the echo.

Yeah, and I remember everybody saying that they could do this, and I didn't know what I was gonna do. I was sort of the singer I guess.

In what?

Well, now this is my recollection, but it seems to differ from yours. I think the first band that we had was, was it Midnight Express?

Yeah.

And the tickets that were printed for our first gig said "The Midnight Specials." I still have a ticket somewhere.

See, my recollection is that you must have bought it, because it was me and John Schroeder, and Doug Duncan, and Kent Hagen.

And who was the lead singer?

I think Hagen and I were.

See, I was the lead singer, but I got bumped off.

Right, OK.[laughter]

Actually, I was playing the broom at home alot. My mom and dad got me an acoustic guitar for Easter one year. It's kinda funny because I'm Jewish. So, I got this acoustic guitar, and I painted it psychedelic. It was a Suzuki. Then I think it was at Christmas [chuckle] that I got an electric guitar. It was an Orpheum, or Orpheus, or something.

Was it orange?

It was sunburst. I had an orange Kay guitar that had a white pickguard, and it had gold stripes, and the pickup was under the pickguard. And it belonged to a mannikin at one of my relative's clothing stores. And I got the Kay amp that went with it. But before that was the Midnight Express, and we also played at St John's [Chruch] or something.

Well, the first gig was St. Peter's [Church], out on Broadway in Oakland.

My girlfriend was Melody, and I got pissed off at some guy because he said, "Bend over, Baby," or something, and she had mirrors on her shoes.

That's all part of the Piedmont legend, anyway.

It's all legend, and maybe some of it's right and some of it isn't. I remember practicing at your house and Schroeder would sing "Janis." Was I playing guitar then?

Yeah, you were playing guitar, but it was before you really got good. There was a definite point, about tenth grade, and we hadn't played together in awhile, maybe you were in the band for awhile, and then you weren't. Anyway, I was playing with these other guys, and all the sudden we played again together, after school in Mr. Harvey's music room. And suddenly I realized, wow, you had actually gotten good.

Yeah, then I started playing with these Skyline [High School] guys. Paul Hewitt, and was not very good compared to them; they were great. And of course, we have to mention guys like [Jim] Foreman, and all those guys.

Rich Butler.

Right, those guys were watching Fleetwood Mac.

Jim Foreman, Rich Butler, Chip Foreman, Dave Smith.

Yeah, all those guys, and a pivitol point in our whole lives was when Steve Miller came to town.

Right, and they played our keyboard guy's keyboard. John Schroeder had a Farfisa Mini-Compact.

Anyway, there was a point where I guess I was getting pretty good, and then the T-Birds happened in twelfth grade.

That's when the forces rejoined. We'd been sort of not playing together, except jamming a little in the afternoon, but then we kind of got the cream of the crop together to form the Sha-Na-Na thing.

The T-Birds, the greatest performers of all time.

. . . . .

You'd been going to the Fillmore all along.

Oh yeah, I went to the Fillmore constantly. I was seeing Cream, Paul Butterfield. My biggest influence was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band with Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop. Those two guys were like, the cream of the crop. And B.B. King, Aretha. Aretha at the Fillmore was like, the tip-top. And of course, all the San Francisco bands, and the Sons of Champlin, and Fleetwood Mac, and we saw Sha-Na-Na about a zillion times. At that point, rock and roll was here to stay, and we all realized there was something special going on in Piedmont. There was no stopping it, with the T-Birds, and people like Hagen. The T-Birds went on to win the Piedmont High Talent Show, and we did the tour of the [Foothill Athletic League] high schools. Were you on the tour?

No, I missed the tour.[I was on another tour at the time, playing all over the State of California with the Oakland Youth Symphony Orchestra...kg]]

You missed the tour and we had Don Little, who did a fine job.

Yeah, he did OK.

Yeah, he was, you know, not great. He made it so we could get through the tour. And then we all went away. I had applied to Humboldt State and not gotten in. So when I told my mom I didn't get into Humboldt State and that I wanted to go Feather River College [in Quincy], she said she was so dissapointed in me. We were out by the pool, you know, my aunt was there, and I told to her fuck off! I left the next day to be a camp counselor .So I stayed away all summer. By the time I had gotten home, Mom had taken it upon herself to enroll me at Feather River College. She got me an apartment, she called me at camp, we made up, and my grandmother and my mom drove me to Feather River.

It was there that Chip Foreman was living. Chip was the king of bass players, and we formed a band up there. It was kind of an oldies band, so I got to keep playing music, and I met Buzzer Garz [Steve Goldhor]. He was a big influence on my life. We had a duo up there, and then we had a trio with a singer named Craig. My Piedmont associate Kim Gimbal, of course called "Hank," was at Chico State. I was at Feather River, and before you knew it I was down there visiting him and man, was it ever the sweetest scene!

It was a scene, Gene.

Oh, there was like, people going to the park all the time, and there was music, and there was some things going on there that I couldn't fully comprehend, and Big Hank was in the middle of it all. if you know what I mean. There was Sheri Farb and Barb Zappas, who were good friends too.

Yeah, they were wonderful.

Everybody was so happy. Kalimba Dan [Dan Farney] was there. And you were all roommates in the dorm. I knew then and there that I had to go to Chico. I spent two years at Quincy, then I moved back down to the Bay Area where I found my T-Bird friends were still around, because Kim had moved to Berkeley to finish his college career with a degree in music.

Yes, thank you.

So, we got together, the nucleus of the T-Birds, to form what was probably one of the great Bay Area unsigned bands. It centered around a certain street in Oakland, what was it called?

I'm not sure.

You lived there!

Oh, Boulevard Way. That was actually in Piedmont, just on the border with Oakland.

That's where Ace in the Hole was formed. That was with Bass Beck, and Kim Gimbal, and me, and Duncan and Hank Moreira. We started doing original songs with that band.

That's right, we started doing your songs. You'd come to practice with three songs, I remember, that we worked out. One of 'em was "The Tuna Blues" I can't remember the others.

Me neither.

So, we're in Piedmont, we're playing with Ace in the Hole, and we played some parties. I was going to Merritt College, I had mono at one point, and then I transfered to--this was the big pivitol moment: I transfered from Merritt College to Chico. So I moved to Chico probably in the spring of '74.

Right, I spent that next year at Berkeley, and you weren't around.

I was in Chico. We spent a year where I was in Chico, and you weren't.

That would have been '74-'75.

So in '74-'75 I went to Chico State, and right off the bat, I was at a party and met a guy who was into the blues like me. His name was Ralph Shine. We decided to form a blues band, and we got Bob Clements on drums, and Dave the bass player. Then Rick Clements joined the band for about a week, and it didn't work out, and he said, "I will take your whole band, and you will be nothing." And so he took them and formed Skyway. Now, we looked around, and we didn't know what to do, and my neighbor said that he wanted to play bass. He bought himself a Rickenbacker, and the rest is musical history.

That was Natchez.

Yeah, his real name was John Varga. And he was the boy-wonder on bass. He just picked it up and learned how to play. And he played with a pick. A pick and a Rickenbacker. And then we got Rex Macon on drums and the rest was history. We went for probably a year and kept trying to convince the Buzzer to move down to Chico. He was still in Quincy. Finally he did, and we got him in the band, and then it was Makin' Bakin as it was to be known, with the Buzzer on guitar, me, Natchez, Rex Macon, and Ralph...Shine.

[Back then Ralph Shine pronounced his name as if it were spelled "Shinny."] He wasn't known as Ralph Shine [pronounced "shine"] yet?

Not yet. His big moment hadn't come yet. This must have been about 1975, and at this time I remember seeing Butte Creek Family Band. They were hippies, and we were sort of hippies too, but we were more urban-oriented hippies. Well, there was a couple of them from New Jersey, I think. Who was in that band?

Well, basically it was Michael Cannon and the California crew. John Lapado, Marilyn, but by this point Jimmy Fay and Jerry Morano had gotten into Butte Creek. So that would have been the Jersey City thing that you'd noticed.

Right, and they were playing a little reggae, and I won a reggae album on KFM. I called in and I got my choice of three albums, and I picked "Burnin," by the Wailers 'cause I thought that might be something neat to check out. That was where my reggae kicked in, in late '75.

I remember that they were into a certain thing that you guys weren't really into for awhile. You know, you and I were living together, and I'd go off with Bob the Barber to see Spark & Cinder, and come back and rave about it, and you'd kinda go, "Ahh, yeah, well..."

Did I? I think I did.

I recall this. It wasn't really your cup of tea. It was a little too out there. Your stuff was a little more refined and trimmed down, not so jamming out Grateful Dead-style and all that.

Right, although we did jam out with songs like "Tuna Blues." We were more and more going from blues to originals. I had a song called "Love Same Old Thing," which was sort of reggae, but it was before I actually knew it was reggae. We started getting a little bit more eclectic, and Ralph didn't really like that. That's when we started getting into fights on stage.

Right, actual fist fights, not just yelling.

Anyway, I got the reggae album, and I saw Spark & Cinder somewhere, and it was a complete eye-opener. I remember going to Ray's Rendezvous with you, I think, and seeing them up there, and then we just went to see them all the time. Joe [Hammons] was unbelievable, everything was unbelievable. I tried sneaking in the back of Ray's Rendezvous and I got scolded by Billy [Baxmeyer]. You know, he said, "Why don't yas just go 'round the front. " And it wasn't long after that, really, that I heard they needed a guitar player. I think that the word got out a long time before Joe actually left. [After Joe Hammons made the decision to leave the band, he agreed to stay on until his replacement could be found and rehearsed. --k.g.] This must have been...

Well, he says he quit in '79

Well he must be right, because he's pretty factual. That's one of his things.

Accuracy.

Accuracy. That's not been one of mine. So years go by and Makin' Bakin breaks up, and I was pumping gas.

At the Beacon Station.

Right, at the Beacon Station, and...

[At this point in the interview memories got a little fuzzy. Both of us blanked out on the chain of events during part of the mid-seventies. It's possible that Disco music could have caused a permanent memory loss for that time period. (Maybe we should be thankful for small favors.) We discussed various odd jobs Scott had, and various houses he lived in, trying to reconstruct the time-line with limited success. So here we jump ahead a couple of years, during which time, Scott concludes, he must not have been in a band at all...K.G.]

All this parallel time there was a group of people that were heavily into ganja and the whole Jamaican thing. And pretty much, everything they had to do all zeroed in on ganja. And that was the Spark & Cinder people. Then there was another group of people that zeroed on basically the same thing, only it was called Egus. And these people revolved around a big pipe known as "Gunther." Gunther was Craig's pipe, and it had a big hose on it. So there were two parallel existences going on, and it all revolved around copping some herb, which in a strange way led me to meet Jimmy Fay. We ended up meeting each other through our different needs. I remember our first meeting was on the brick wall in front of the BMU. He was sitting there waiting for me. I showed up, it might have been during a noon concert, and we met there and we worked out something. That's the first time I met him. He was Spark & Cinder, and as far as I'm concerned, he was the greatest. This is probably '77, '78 maybe. And those guys would come and get gas, and I kept telling them, "I play guitar, I play guitar." Then I saw Billy in the [natural foods] Co-op, and I heard him talking to somebody about their still not having found a guitar player yet, and Bobby [Baxmeyer] was playing guitar, and I said, you know, "I'd like to try out," and he said, "Why don't you just come on over," and I did. What does Jerry [Morano]say about this?

He said it was a "perfect mesh." He said they were not only looking for a guy with chops, but they wanted someone who would fit in with the band personally. So, bingo! [For more on this "perfect mesh," see the interview with Jerry Morano...kg]

Bingo. So I went to the audition, and it was great, and Phil [O'Neill] was there, and Jerry, Jimmy, John [Lapado], Billy. I went to a couple more, a couple more, probably a whole week, and I kept going back home to my girlfriend, over on Fourth Ave, and I kept saying, "Well I just don't know, I just don't know."

They hadn't said yay or nay.

No, so I gave up, and I didn't see 'em for a couple of weeks. Then I went to see them at happy hour at Cabo's. They all came up to me, "Where ya been man, where yas been?" And I said, "Well, you know, I kinda thought that I didn't work out or something." "No, no, no. Come on back to the practice." And I went back and I was really kind of excited. It was all overwhelming to me because there was so much music. It was just a big, big list of songs. I just didn't think that I cut the mustard. I went back to the practice and I said, "Well, am I in, or am I out? Why don't you just tell me?" Phil just said, "Look, nobody tells anybody anything in this band. You just happen, it just happens. It's basically up to you. If you wanna be in, you're in." At that point, nobody was a leader, there was no leader. Everybody had equal say, and most of the time there wasn't anything said, there was just big jam sessions. I said, "Well yeah, I want to be in." So that was great. Bobby was still in the band, too. He was playing guitar, but he wanted to play piano. So he switched over to keyboard, and we must have played another few gigs with him, not that many. He wouldn't play at the Led Ram because he thought that was too low-life for him to play. [The Led Ram had been formerly known as the Del Mar Club. The Del Mar had been kind of a seedy, red neck, old man card room where live music was featured occasionally. The Del Mar eventually closed. The owners quickly opened up the Led Ram ("Del Mar" spelled backwards). The Led Ram never flourished, but did feature live music regularly for a short time around 1979 or 1980...K.G.] And we played some Portuguese Hall, some Led Ram, some Old Navy Inn [currently J.B.'s Bar & Grill]. Then we had his last gig at Portuguese Hall, and he flew out the next day to New Jersey and was never seen from again, for years. Then Joe may have played a little bit.

Joe and you may have shared the stage?

Yeah, Joe and I shared the stage a little bit while he showed me some things.

It makes sense that there would have been a transition period.

Yeah, there was a transition period. And then I was on my own. I learned like, three nights worth of different material and that was it, I was in. That must have been in '79 probably. I think one of my first gigs was a big out-door concert at Berry Creek. It was huge. And I think maybe Prairie Biscuit played at it too.

I think we did.

At that time Prairie Biscuit was as big as Spark & Cinder. There was a sharing of top billing. Oh, I just sat in at it. Joe was there. Joe wanted me to play, Joe was really helpful. He said, "Why don't you play?" And real soon after that was the KFM album.

The album that Spark was on, not the one you'd won.

Right.

[About 1980 local radio station KFM ("The Rockin' 94") produced an album of local music on which a Spark & Cinder song appeared...K.G.]

I went down to the studio with them to record it, and Joe said, "You play the part on it."

What song was it?

"Feelins' 'Bout You," I think, I'm not sure. But he told me to play, and I was sicker than a dog, and I said, "I don't even know it," and he said, "That doesn't matter, you just play on it."

What recording studio was this?

I don't remember, but it was on Haight Street. That was thrilling in itself, but I was sicker than a dog, and I had my black Gretch. It was so sweet. (I sold it to [Peter] Berkow, and he sanded the top off it). So I played on that, and that was sort of an official nod to me. Bobby was gone by then, and I was in the band.

Tell me about the "Nothing Yellow Tour."

That was the year of [the eruption of] Mt. St. Helens. We went on the road loaded with so much smoke, you could not ever imagine. I mean we had everything. By the time we hit New Mexico we were out. That was maybe the second stop. We got the hotel manager to get us a bag. We were about ready to come home, 'cause we were out.

Just to hell with everything.

Right. So we did that, and it was really rough because we got fired after the first gig, and we had to hang out at Phil's brother's house for a whole week or more. There was alot of ill feelings going on in the band. The manager had finally seen us in Missoula. He said we needed something in our show to liven it up. We need a focus of some kind. If we all maybe wore zipped clothes, or did something. So Billy and I went into this store and saw these yellow jerseys and yellow overalls. We thought it'd be great if we all wore like, painters outfits, and nobody liked them. But we did, so we bought 'em. Were we doing the X-Factors already?

I think so.

Yeah. So we already had a nodding toward something with more of a show. And I was writing songs by then that could be considered New Wave songs. Like "Nothing Yellow" or--well there's a zillion of 'em. But the rift was happening. So we got back from the tour and swore we'd never go out again. Then we went out again two weeks later. By the time we got back from that there were big rifts in the band, and everybody was pissed off. It wasn't long after that we were getting ready to do a gig at Tahoe, and the night before we left Phil's van got broken into, and all the equipment got ripped off. That was a big thing there because John's [Lapado] pedal steel got stolen, my amp got stolen, Billy's bass amp, Billy's bass, Phil's horns, all three horns. It was a devastating blow. We borrowed equipment to go to Tahoe to play, and came back and John decided that was it for him, he was out. He felt that he could not play and nobody would notice. His signature in the band was his pedal steel. That marked the end of a certain sound that [the band] had, that was there from the beginning. It was sort of a country sound on top of a more urban, New Jersey, Piedmont sound. There's alot of parallels between Piedmont and New Jersey, somehow. I don't know how.

I don't either, but they're there, just the same.

Yeah. So then John was out, and it was just me, Jimmy, Billy, Phil, and Jerry. And we were doing songs like "Southern Part of Texas." We'd dropped all the swing songs by then. All the country songs were gone, and it was basically just a funk-reggae fusion kind of a thing. The sound really narrowed down. It became more just Spark & Cinder, not so much "East-West" anymore [ in reference to the East-West Transcendental Spark & Cinder Band]. Now, Cannon was out when I joined. Then he rejoined, and was sort of in and out, here and there. So John was out, Phil bought new horns, Dik [Slax, aka Billy Bax] bought a new bass. Then there was a time when Sam [Yarbrough] came back.

He'd been in earlier, before you were involved.

Right, and he came back in and we had Phil [on woodwinds] and Sam on trombone. Then, for a very brief time, George Souza played in the band, which was for probably a three month period. I have a picture of the band with Sam in it. A promo shot. So Sam was in it for quite a while, and then he left and Kim [Cataluna] rejoined. So Kim was back in the band for awhile, and that was in the "Lucky Man" period. ["Lucky Man" is a song of Scott's that was introduced in the early '80's. -kg] She lasted not very long before she moved to the Bay Area. But she sang "Baby I Love You," and all her hit songs. And she also sang "Guy From Eponima," and it was really bad.

How uncharacteristic.

Yeah, that didn't last. [For more on Kim Cataluna, see the interview with Jerry Morano...kg] This was during the The Old Navy Inn days. I'm not sure how long The Old Navy Inn lasted.

I don't know either, but it was there for a couple of years at least. Prairie Biscuit played there every Wednesday night for years. That was a great time period. It was when you could actually play five nights a week in this town and only be in one band.

Right. Then the Spark & Cinder record came out in '84, and all during this time [since 1980] The Hats were going, and alot of my focus was on The Hats because of all the dissension in Spark & Cinder. It just seemed like a happy time period for the members of The Hats.

It was a very good time.

It was a good time period, a very happy time period for all four members of The Hats. Sylvia was very generous.

Yes, she was.

As we were all pretty giving people.

It was a fertile time period.

Very fruitful. We spent some time in the Bay Area recording what was gonna be our record. We were down there recording at Hyde Street Studios and we stayed at my brother's. That era was give and take.

It was a time of mutual understanding. Kind of a sharing thing.

It was a sharing kind of a thing, and we all wrote alot of songs, and they all paralleled what was going on with everyone at the time. And Sylvia was a DJ. We were all DJ's doing something.

We had myself on drums. Billy Baxmeyer now had become Dik Slax.

You had become Kid Crash.

And you became Ska-T. You had been Scotty-Guitar before.

Right. I'd been Scotty-Guitar ever since Piedmont. And I was Scotty-Guitar all the way through the X-Factors.

Well, we were all like, Scotty-X, or Billy-X during the X-Factors thing.

And I met this girl named Lil. Lil named me "Ska-T." And it just stuck.

So we'd had Mike Dufloth and the X-Factors, and there had been alot of dissent in that band as well.

Right. He didn't like the girls, the X-Factresses.

So we kind of canned that band, and then about a half a year later, while reminiscing about it, formed The Hats.

Then we met Sylvia and I had her over at my house learning songs, and she was great. She fit right in. Everybody was writing songs. The song writing thing going really strong now.

[For Spark & Cinder] I wrote "Sing This Song", and I wrote "Lucky Man", and I wrote, oh, a zillion songs. And so basically at this point, from Spark & Cinder going from a universal kind of band, with everybody adding equal parts, and Jimmy Fay being sort of in the background, although maybe focusing it a little bit (he wasn't the lead singer, there was lots of singers, lots of sounds), it was now down to two voices: me and him. I wrote songs and he wrote songs.

Tell me about that [singer/guitarist] Margie.

Oh, Margie! Ok, Dik and I left Spark & Cinder, and we were just gonna do The Hats. And that was in about 1982, maybe. And then they got Paul Abrahms to play bass Dana had been playing guitar. Then I moved to the Bay Area for about a year, and then moved back. Then it was Dana, me, Cannon, Jimmy, Phil, and Jerry. That was the album band. We decided to do the album, and Phil was gonna sponsor the whole album. So we went down to Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati, we did this recording, and it was not a very good feeling. Then right before the album was done, Dana left the band. He said, "You can just mix my parts however you want 'cause I gotta go. I'm going up to Larry's [aka Kalimba Dan, Dan Farney]." So he left, we mixed his stuff, the album came out (we're all the way up to '84 now), and Phil is feeling like he's had it. So it's me, Jimmy, Paul, Jerry's left, and that's when we got Margie. Margie played rhythm guitar and percussion. She sang lead vocals too, and it was great. That was the Ping Pong Palace [now Gold's Gym] era.

There's that one TV show that you guys did up at Woodson Bridge or somewhere, that featured Margie. That's really the only record or proof that she was ever in the band.

Right, I wore a Max Volume batiked purple shirt with stars and red lipstick. The "dress-up" stuff was in full swing. It was the "glam" years for Spark & Cinder, because of The Hats. So there was a spillover happening.

Right, but that didn't spill over to all the members of Spark.

Right, it spilled over to me. I'd have like, a turban on, and lipstick and a purple shirt and nail polish. Anyway, the "Margie" time period was a good one for the band. Then we were going up to Soda Springs alot, and Paul [Abrahms, Dik Slax's replacement on bass] hated the reggae we were playing on the tape machine. He didn't understand I Roy or U Roy or any of that. He hated everything we were doing. And the big rift was coming in the band. I pretty much put my foot down and said, "We have to get Dik back. He should be in the band."

And he kinda wanted to be back by now.

Right, so I got elected to make the call.

The call to Paul.

Yeah, so I called Paul and told him he was out. He said, "Well, you can't just say I'm out, I want to have a meeting." I said, "Well, we can have all the meetings you want to have, but you're out." So Dik was back in.

It was a trim version.

It was a trim, guitar oriented version. [Dana was back by now too.] No horn player. There was a time period with no horn, then [sax/flute player] Kevin Galloway joined around '86 or so. Then in early '87 I got fired.

Right. Oddly enough your last gig (until recently when you permanently rejoined) was my wedding reception in February '87. Even more ironic was that I kinda replaced you.

Right, you were the next person in. They didn't get a guitar player, they got a keyboard player. Then about six months later I figured since you were in the band, maybe things had mellowed out, and I'd reapply. That's when Dana decided he didn't want to play with another guitar player.

At that time we had the Night Knights going, so it wasn't like you weren't playing.

Right, we had the Night Knights, and they were in their heyday. It was a three piece band that sounded like six.

And that band continues to this day, even though we haven't had a gig in two years!

Right, and there was the Dub Kings too, during this time period. And actually, two weeks after leaving Spark & Cinder, I joined Brutilicus. They'd already been rehearsing for a few months, but they'd never played anywhere. And also during this time there was all those gigs with Danny West. Billy Rocka and the Space Rangers, The Lonesome Coyboys.

Right. We'd been doing that for years already.

That was actually the Night Knights backing up Danny West. The Lonesome Cowboys have a CD out now, and I'm still playing in that. Brutilicus was practicing where the Lonesome Coyboys were practicing, and that's where I first heard 'em. They were playing ska music, like Skatellites songs, and I just thought it was the greatest. And they just said, "Look, why don't you just play with us?" And I said, "OK."

You fit right into that scene, all the crazy stage antics, because we had been doing that kind of stuff with The Hats.

Oh yeah, they were big Hats fans. We didn't think it was going to last, but the Brutilicus thing lasted all the way from 1986 all the way till now. And basically the same people are in it. The drummer, the bass player, the singers are all the same. And they grew from not knowing how to play to being able to play pretty good.

And are phenomenally successful.

Totally phenomenally successful, popular. So that was great.

Which, to the minds of some who were really competent musicians, was really baffling.

It baffled all the musicians. I think the Brutilicus guys weren't so serious about it that everybody just had a good time.

It proves some axiom, I'm not sure which, but one comes to mind. It's what Zack always used to say, "The worse it is, the better they like it." Not that it was horrible, but you were really the only competent musician for a long time.

Right. So that went on, and Spark went on, sort of paralelling through the late '80's into the '90's, with the Night Knights playing from time to time, for special occasions. Then Dana moved away about a year and a half ago, and Spark started having substitute guitar players.

Dana kept saying, "Well, I'm probably gonna move back soon." So we didn't want to permanently replace him at first. We used you, Steve Cook, Joe Hammons, and Rich Cavanaugh. It's just been within the last three or four months that it's come to where you're actually permanently back in the band, Jerry's permanently back in band, and Jim Hall is permanently back in the band. The band is back up to seven guys, the most beefy it's been in ten years.

I have one more question. What impact has all this music and have all these bands had on this community and on yourself over the years?

Well, it had an impact with a section of the community. It never impacted Chico State or its students. But it impacted more of the community that centered around, say, the food Co-op, Healthrite, the people involved with the Peace Center. I think it just helped make a sense of community. It's helped center the community a little bit, between Spark & Cinder and the offshoots, the bands that crossed Spark & Cinder's path. Bands like Prairie Biscuit and Stevie Cook. The community that I'm talking about kind of rallied behind the bands. And the bands picked up the ball. The music helped rally people together. It just made sort of a sense of a tighter knit community. It was a symbiotic relationship because each of us fed off each other. A time of sharing.

And how 'bout your own life, how has it been enhanced?

Well, at one point when I graduated from Chico State, in 1978, I had the choice of joining my dad's business or I could have gone on to teach. I was with a girl then who wanted me to move down to the Bay Area and join the family business and become well off settled in, monied. That sort of made me want to do the opposite. I decided to stay and play music with Spark & Cinder. I decided to stay and play 'cause I didn't know if I'd ever get the chance again. And I thought at that point it was the big move to the big time in the music biz. I thought we were really gonna go somewhere. As it turned out, we didn't. Not yet. I'm glad that I stayed even if I didn't stay with the band. I ensconced myself in the music scene, and was here with the fellas. I was able to meet the woman of my dreams and have the baby of my dreams.

It's been a "happily-ever-after" kind of thing for you.

Yeah, so far. Yep, I'm sitting here right now with my Telecaster and my nice house. The baby's asleep and the NBA Championship is on. Life is beautiful.