A Conversation with Steve Kimock (continued)

PM: What about this last run of SKF dates on the west coast that included Billy in a lot of these songs?

SK: That was a riot. So much fun.

PM: How were the crowds? How was the lineup received?

SK: It was a North Coast kind of scene, which I love.

PM: Oh, yeah. It's a beautiful thing.

SK: The band was very well received, and it was just a whole lot of fun to play. It was a great bunch of cats. Hutch Hutchison on the bass [from Bonnie Raitt's band, currently, though Hutch has played with many greats].

PM: Billy said he's just an amazing dude as well as a great musician.

SK: Those guys have so much fun. It was a great bunch of guys--and Melvin on keys, who is amazing.

PM: What kind of a guy is Melvin Seals? I've never met him, actually.

SK: He's just a great big friendly, sweet, very mild-mannered, soft spoken, very unassuming kind of cat. He'll kind of sit down and you work on the stuff and he'll kind of pad through, and like--I'd better listen to that again. He's not hopping up there going, "Oh, let's just change this to this. Let me go back and do this again." He just sort of sits there and takes it in. He kind of doesn't do anything, and then you get him on the gig, and it's like--oh!

PM: I didn't know you were gonna do like that. [laughs]

SK: He just does the spookiest stuff. It's so cool. He makes sounds on organ that I just don't hear anybody else making. He'll play some very beautiful and funky--very churchy stuff, and then there will be some really nice out kind of harmony stuff, and then the whole thing will end with this sound like the wind blowing through the midnight graveyard trees kind of thing.

PM: Wow.

SK: He really paints some beautiful pictures. Where the rubber meets the road, man, this cat is down. It's beautiful. Anyway, it was big fun. I'm gonna try and do some more of that at some point with Billy, although I don't know the rest of the lineup. Billy and I are both kind of keen on the idea of playing some rock and roll on the guitars, which would be fun, because there are honest-to-god three-chord rock bands, you know, but as many of them as there are, there's just not enough of them.

PM: And there's not enough good ones, I know that.

SK: At some point, we'll do a little bit of that. You know the cool thing that Billy did on this trip? He didn't do enough of it, but he'd get up there in the middle of some of those jams on the slide and just stick his little foot in.

PM: Right.

SK: We got some really cool weaving spaces with the two guitars going and we just sort of held it up there in some equilibrium or something. It wasn't so much about what was being played as the density and the give-and-take of it. It's just rewarding. That was a lot of fun.

PM: Now there are some European dates coming up, right? Duo dates.

SK: Yeah. We're gonna go and attack the continent. [laughs]

PM: Have you done much continental playing yet?

SK: No. Mostly none. I've been over a couple of times visiting and stuff, 'cause my lovely wife Jen is a Swiss citizen also, and has family back there.

PM: Oh, yeah.

SK: We go back once a year, for the last couple years at least--visit and hang out. I love it over there. Switzerland, Italy, southern Germany.

PM: Have you ever seen Ken Zuckerman when you were over there? [A great Indian musician who's from America, one of our oldest friends.]

SK: No. Last time I saw him, he was here.

PM: He came to the house.

SK: Yeah. He had a brand new Sarod, and he was gonna try it out on me--long 26" scale throat and I was trying it out.

PM: Wow. Well, it's great to get up with you. We don't get to talk enough. Sometimes it's even something like this that'll get us on the phone, but it's always great to connect. I like the record a lot and I'm just glad to see it going around, that I'm actually working on some material now that maybe we'll kick down the road together and it may show up in future gigs. I'm working on a song today called "Save it For a Rainy Day" that really has the Goodman Brothers/Kimock thing all over it, and that's what it's about.

SK: Hey, man, there's definitely not enough Monkey Brothers stuff out there. Listen, I know you're writing other stuff these days, but I just want to make this clear. You can always write in that direction and do something with it. That whole thing is never lost to us. When you think of placing stuff--I just don't want you to ever think that there's not ways to go. "Oh, I have an idea for this, but I don't know where to place it."

PM: Yeah.

SK: We can always do the Monkey Brothers bag [another name for The Goodman Brothers], play our guitars and stick a mike in front of it, and get it out there, 'cause it's stuff that we can do I'm sure that nobody else can do.

PM: Okay, well let's write some songs for a band, see where that goes. Before long--in Nashville or in PA or somewhere--we'll do some recording our own selves of jazz and rock and roll and god knows what.

SK: I'm not afraid, Frank. [laughs]

PM: Oh, I know! [laughs]

SK: Very good.

PM: Take care, Steve.

continue to the interview with Billy Goodman

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