A Conversation with Pat Buchanan (continued)

PB: And during those years, I was teaching guitar and breaking into the jingle scene. It was crazy, because I'd teach guitar at this music store in Smyrna, called The Music Mart, and teach in thirty-minute intervals. And I was a great teacher. I'd teach them what they wanted to know.

PM: Yeah. The ideal rock 'n' roll teacher, yeah.

PB: Yeah, so three chords, and you can play "Panama" by Van Halen.

[laughter]

PB: E, A and D.

PM: And after all, that's what you want to play.

PB: "You want to play this? All right, do me a favor. Learn this." And I would get a session and I would call all of my students, and I would have all their good graces to go do the session. So essentially I kind of was able to build it up where I could play sessions--just mainly jingles, a few records here and there. And that was kind of what was happening in Atlanta at the time.

PM: So you started getting your chops in studio world pretty down.

PB: Yeah. I mean, jingles sometimes are like thirty-second music-like structures to sell Jell-O. But then you have reading, and just learning how to basically negotiate a chart and stuff, and do whatever they throw at you.

PM: Right.

PB: Because music for film, often times facilitates picture, which might musically translate into, "Well, there's a bar of 5/4 that they're going to throw in here."

PM: Right.

PB: And et cetera. So I got some studio chops going. And through that, I knew a great drummer from Atlanta, still lives in Atlanta, named Sonny Emory. And he played in Cameo. He called me up one day and said, "All right, man. Here's your national gig. Call these cats."

PM: Wow.

PB: And I did. And they were in New York. They were based out of Atlanta, and recording in New York by then. It was on the album before the one that broke huge, which was Word Up. This album was called Single Life. And I don't know exactly how it happened, but I talked to them on the phone, and they flew me up and tried me, and I played on a couple tracks. And they said, "Great. You're in." [laughs]

PM: Wow. So what was Cameo like? I don't really know that band.

PB: Well, Cameo did "Word Up," their big mid-'80s chart hit, which is now a funk milestone. And the chorus goes "Word up, ptt, tt, go, doe, go, go, psh, doenk, gagoenk, nn, go, go, go." And the verse goes, "Yo, pretty ladies around the world."

PM: [laughs]

PB: And it was like number six on the pop charts--

PM: Wow!

PB: --in '86, and stuff. So it was just thrown straight into this touring--my first touring experience was actually in England, because the English have always been the ultimate fans.

PM: Right.

PB: And they've always, always been into black music and funk and R&B--I mean, serious.

PM: Big time.

PB: Big time. So we were doing theaters over there. The first tour was like the small to medium-sized theaters over there, which were all cabaret theaters. And they sound great. They were designed to project from the stage.

PM: Right.

PB: And awesome, just great, great crowds and great theaters. We did two nights at the Hammersmith.

PM: So, super fun gigs.

PB: Oh, yeah. Well, in hindsight, musically it was great. The very first gig we did was The Tube with Jools Holland.

PM: Wow!

PB: And I got there, and the gear I ordered was all wrong.

PM: [laughs]

PB: And my tech was Scottish, and I couldn't understand a word he was saying.

PM: [laughs]

PB: And I have footage of that somewhere.

PM: Oh, that's freakin' funny.

PB: But it's like in typical English tradition there were three sound stages. There was The Cult, Cameo, a reggae band, and a folk duo.

PM: Wild.

PB: And they loved it, because it was all great music. That was the first gig, no pressure.

PM: [laughs]

PB: And then we had to like wear tights and stuff. They had this whole wardrobe.

PM: "We had to wear tights"!

PB: Yeah, from an old wardrobe case from the '70s, where like everybody had their gig tights. But anyway, I was backstage, and I saw Billy Duffy, the guitarist from The Cult, who at the time had like a two-foot white pompadour and a Gretch White Falcon.

PM: Whoa!

PB: He scared me. And he came up to me backstage by the dressing room. And he had seen my rig, and he said, "Right. I saw the Strat and the Marshall. I thought you might go in for a bit of the old widdley woo."

PM: [laughs]

PB: And I just thought I'd died and went to England, which is like I was just beside myself.

PM: [laughs]

PB: And I met Jools Holland. I was a huge, huge Squeeze fan.

PM: Right.

PB: Anyway, a big experience. And then the very next gig, you pull out and you're on the wrong side of the road in the front of a bus, and you go, "Oh, shit, we're going to crash." And of course, you don't.

PM: [laughs]

PB: I also discovered Tandoori that year. And being in a fourteen-piece funk band there weren't too many guys that were into Tandoori, but the bus driver knew where there was a great little Tandoori restaurant and pub within walking distance of every gig.

PM: [laughs]

PB: But anyway, so that was the first touring experience. And then recording on Word Up the album--

PM: Wow. I got to hear that. Did you get to play really cool guitar on that?

PB: Yeah, I played funk guitar on that. And then like rock Whammy Bar guitar--

PM: [laughs]

PB: --on the song "Candy." That was another hit. You'd probably kind of know them if you heard them. They were big.

PM: Wow, so you have classic guitar riffs on what were big hit songs in the mid-'80s, just kind of out of the gate.

PB: It's pretty wild, yeah. But the weird thing was, I was like the funk rock guy in the same song. So I mean, it would be straight-up funk licks, and then step on an A/B switch and--

PM: Be the Whammy Bar guy.

PB: Yeah. Be the Marshall Whammy Bar in-your-face guy.

PM: [laughs]

PB: So yeah, it was pretty wild.

PM: So you were a cross-stylist right from the beginning of recording.

PB: Yeah. I got my funk card on that one.

PM: Right.

PB: Because their show was like so classic, horn band show and review band. It was great. In the Earth, Wind & Fire--

PM: So it was a black band? It was a white band? It was--

PB: Oh, it was mixed. There were probably two or three white guys in the first band, three horn players, two keyboard players, bass and drums, and the three guys out front.

PM: And the three guys out front were obviously black guys.

PB: Yeah. And there were two or three white guys in that lineup. So it was mostly black guys. But it was kind of like I'd grown up playing some funk and some soul music, because if you played, you could play that with the brothers and play a little funk music.

PM: Right, you had to.

PB: If you were a redneck, and you played football, then you did that.

PM: [laughs]

PB: And so I was fortunate enough to be able to be pretty good right from the get--

PM: Right.

PB: Good enough to be asked to play.

PM: You were one of those guys with a guitar that was kind of good right away.

PB: Pretty much.

PM: Some guys it's just like, yeah, he was good right away.

PB: Although I didn't like sit around and really learn a lot of licks off records. I was always trying to play along with records and find my own voice--for better or worse, I think it's probably better, because if you find your own voice on guitar--there's a lot of great guitar players, but if you have that distinctive thing--I was always trying to find it from the beginning. And I would sit and jam along with a record, but I wouldn't really take too much time to like learn it note for note. Because I had some innate sense of "Well, they've already done that. Why don't you try to find your own thing?”

PM: Right. continue

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