A Conversation with Kim Richey (continued)

KR: But then things kind of fell apart, I'm not sure where. Things were falling apart with the people. And then I got a call from Bill one time, and he said, "Why don't you just come up here, and let's just do the record? Let's just not worry about what's going on, and let's just, you know, you and me make a record."

PM: Hmm, that's great. That was the turning point.

KR: Yep. So I went up there. I think he had an engineer hired from L.A. that was going to come up and do all this stuff. And then when we got up there, it was just more like--I don't know, Bill was engineering and producing and playing and writing songs. When I first got up there, it got off a little left-footed. Everything kind of fell apart a little bit before it got back together. And just everything was weird when I went up there. We were talking about hotels and Bill said, "We'd like you to stay with us at our house."

PM: [laughs]

KR: And, you know, I went by myself, and I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do less than go and stay in a house with a bunch of people I didn't know. But I thought, "Just try to be open to all this." So I said, "Okay. I'll stay at your house." Because I thought I could always bail, you know?

PM: Sure.

KR: And so I stayed at Bill's, and I ended up just loving it. It was wonderful. I stayed at Bill's, and Brian and Birdie each had a room.

PM: Oh, everybody stayed there.

KR: Well, no, no. I stayed in the house. Brian stayed in the library for the first half, and then they turned the library into an office, so he got kicked out. And he went down to the studio. And Birdie and Brian each had the two front rooms of the studio that they tricked out from the thrift stores for their own little room.

PM: It's so California, I love it.

KR: I know. That was the nice thing about the record. It was more like we got to be friends, all of us. We hung out all the time. You know, on days off, we'd have a big bonfire down at the beach with a bunch of Bill's and everybody's friends and...

PM: Oh, it makes me so homesick for California.

KR: It's wonderful.

PM: So Brian [McLeod], he was one of the Tuesday Night Music Club guys.

KR: Right.

PM: But who's Birdie? I don't know him.

KR: Birdie is a pal of Bill's. I met Birdie through Bill. He played in a band that Bill had up in Mendocino, the Stokemen.

PM: The Stokemen, okay.

KR: Yeah. Birdie lives in Sausalito.

PM: That's a good little ride.

KR: We went out and did a little warmup before the record tour, just bass and guitar. That was really fun.

PM: What's his real name, do we know?

KR: I think he just wants to be Birdie.

PM: Ah, so be it. So it seems that most of the tunes on the record got written by the quartet, right?

KR: Yes.

PM: Got written by the band together in the studio.

KR: And I had no intention of doing that when I went out there.

PM: I can believe it. How did it come about that you found yourself in a room with a band and you were writing together?

KR: We just started doing that. And I had never done that. You know how, once you get older, you just get stuck in that thinking: "These are things I do, and these are things I don't do. I just don't do them."

PM: [laughs] Right.

KR: Well this was like the big few months of doing things I don't normally do. continue

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