August 2024
He played on “American Bandstand” and saw his song covered by Cher, his ivories can be heard in “The Blues Brothers” and on Gene Simmons and Peter Criss’ solo offerings, he performed and wrote together with Stephen Stills – and then, he disappeared, and the world forgot about Richard Gerstein, also known as Richard T. Bear, and a string of top-notch solo records he’d cut back in the ’70s and ’80s. Yet he emerged anew, re-energized, in 2021 with the robust new album “Fresh Bear Tracks” – accompanied by friends like Edgar Winter and Robby Krieger – which was followed by the brilliant "The Way Of The World" in 2024. And the veteran didn’t stop at strictly studio work: he went on the road with Walter Trout – that’s where this conversation found him.
– Richard, how you, being a New Yorker, ended up playing Southern rock?
Well, it was easy, in a way. I was born in New York, but I was raised in the Caribbean as a kid, so I had a lot of Latin influences and a lot of Caribbean influences. Then we went back to New York when I was a young boy, and in my teenage years, starting at twelve years old, I had a band, and I used to go into the city with my parents and I went to a lot of Broadway, nightclubs, things like that. Later, we moved down to Florida and spent a lot of time in Miami, and a little later on, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I used to travel in the South – I had a VW bus and I used to go down to Atlanta. So, long story short, I liked Southern rock. I listened to it a lot, and I liked the blues a lot. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters and people like that – Chicago blues, Memphis blues. And in Atlanta, when I was in my twenties, I stayed in a place called Sandy Springs and visited a guy called Al Kooper. Al had a record company that he started, Sounds of the South Records, and he kind of mentored me in those days, so I got involved in a lot of that. One of the acts that he signed was LYNYRD SKYNYRD. I loved this band, and THE ALLMAN BROTHERS, and Chuck Leavell’s SEA LEVEL – I was digging the whole scene down there when Jimmy Carter was the governor, not a president yet.
And I also remember hanging out at a store called “Manny’s Music” in New York City. I got a job there – short-lived, but still a job – and all the bands used to come through that music store, so I got to meet a lot of those people, and I got a lot of passes to the Fillmore East. I used to go down to the Fillmore East a lot, and this one time the headliner was IRON BUTTERFLY. They had a song called “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” which I, being a keyboard player, loved, because it had an eleven-minute organ solo, and I wanted to see that. So I was down there and, to my surprise, the opening act comes out, and it’s LED ZEPPELIN – it was their second American show! So I got to see them and then IRON BUTTERFLY, but when Led Zeppelin was finished, I wouldn’t want to follow that. It was the best rock ‘n’ roll show that I’ve ever seen. And they just killed it. So that’s how – this is my DNA, so to speak.
– Still, when I first listened to you, my impression was one of PROCOL HARUM fronted by Leon Russell.
That’s the most generous and nicest thing that anybody has ever said to me, ever! PROCOL HARUM, to this day, is probably my favorite band. And Leon Russell, to this day, is the guy that inspired me more than anybody else. I went to see him at a theater in Port Chester, New York, when he was playing there with MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN – with Joe Cocker, Rita Coolidge, Jim Keltner, Bobby Keys, Jesse Ed Davis – and it was unbelievable. But you go, “PROCOL HARUM!” and I go, “Holy crap, ‘A Salty Dog’!” Just recently I recorded my version of “A Salty Dog” and it’ll come out on the next album. It’s one of my favorites. It’s one of top five songs, in my opinion, in rock ‘n’ roll. I love that. I love “Conquistador” and I loved a bunch of their things. I was a huge, huge PROCOL HARUM fan. A guy that just passed away, a great comedian called Richard Lewis, who was on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” – I came up knowing him and he was a good friend of mine – was the biggest PROCOL HARUM fan I’ve ever met, and the license plate on his car in California said “Procol” on it, may he rest in peace. And Leon Russell… Nobody was quite like that, he was truly the master of time and space – the way he played and the way he wrapped his head around chord changes and certain things. There’s a song on my new album “The Way Of The World” that’s called “Jewel”: if you listen to it, I threw in two or three Leon Russell chords in the bridge. And the way that happened was, I have a great book called “Leon Russell Songbook” and I was going through it one day just to look at the way he put things together and his arrangements, and I saw two or three chords that were the coolest chords ever. I started to play them and I went, “Oh, this is it! I got to write a song around these chords!” And as an homage and an honor to him and his legacy, I threw in those chords.
– Leon influenced you, but he had been influenced by guys like Dr. John and Professor Longhair. So could we say that you come from this New Orleans tradition?
Yeah, absolutely! I loved Professor Longhair and I loved Mac Rebennack, who was Dr. John. I was a huge, huge Mac fan, and I met him a few times and got to talk to him about things. He had a very interesting way of putting things. He talked like no one else. He was quite a character! (Laughs.) I loved the way he dressed. I loved the way he thought. And I loved Professor Longhair as well. And there’s also Allen Toussaint, for that matter, and Ivan Neville as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a guy down in New Orleans now, called Jon Cleary, and he to me is the embodiment of those guys, he’s really great.
– A song from your previous album, “Dear John”… Did you refer to Dr. John or John Lennon in it? It sounds like a mix of those two to me – musically, not lyrically.
Yeah, musically, it is a bit of a mix like that. But no, it had to refer to a guy called John Prine, so that was an Easter egg you missed. (Laughs.) He is my favorite American songwriter. Well, my favorite songwriter really is Bob Dylan, but if Bob Dylan had another baby, it would be John Prine. In fact, Dylan says Prine is his favorite American songwriter, too.
– No offense to you, but I always preferred British writers to American ones, as they sounded more adventurous to me. And that’s why I wanted to ask you about your producers. Tony Braunagel is an American, but first time I heard him was on Paul Kossoff’s recordings, and Laurence Juber is also an Englishman. So there’s this British thing going on your records, what with that PROCOL HARUM influence thrown into the mix.
I met Tony Braunagel when I was doing some work for Warner Bros with Rickie Lee Jones, and he was her drummer who’d had a really interesting career. You were mentioning Paul Kossoff, and that was a band he was in, called BACK STREET CRAWLER, and I was a big fan of that. I’m a big fan of British music. I mean, I adore it. Nicky Hopkins is one of my favorite keyboard players. I think I got Tony Braunagel because I took a hiatus from music for about twenty, twenty-five years, and when I decided to get back into it, I contacted Tony and I said, “Hey, I need some help. I want to make a record.” And he said, “Well, you’ve helped me so many times…” And I kind of saved his bacon once in a big way, by flying Rickie Lee Jones in to Austin, Texas in a Learjet provided by Warner Bros, because she had missed the plane. She forgot what day it was. She was a little crazy in those days. And the Warners said, “If she doesn’t make it down to the show, we’re going to cancel her tour!” And so at the last minute, I found out where she was and flew her down to Texas, and got to the show fifteen minutes before the show time. And it was Tony’s first job with a real kind of artist. From then on, he went on to BACK STREET CRAWLER and other bands and things like that. And he was a fabulous, fabulous drummer. Not only did he play with Rickie, he played with Bonnie Raitt, he played with LITTLE FEAT, he played with Taj Mahal, he played with Robert Cray – and he’s a great, great producer. So I was really happy when he decided to come and help me with “Fresh Bear Tracks.”
And I know Laurence Juber for forty-something years. I met him when he was in WINGS, when he and Steve Holley were in New York promoting a WINGS album. I was doing a jam session at a club and they came in and started to jam with me, and we all kind of had a great time together. Laurence and I have been friends ever since. Interesting fun fact: we put a little band together called THE CUTOUTS and went to the bar on a break, and he looks next to him and meets a young lady that was there with her girlfriend – and that was the moment he met his wife, Hope. They’ve been married for forty years now. He’s a phenomenal, phenomenal guitar player. Not for nothing Paul McCartney hired him! I put Tony and Laurence together for “The Way Of The World,” and it worked out beautifully. It just couldn’t have been any better. And in fact, to this day and this moment. I have a band made up of Tony Braunagel, Laurence Juber, and Ricky Cortes from John Mayall’s band. So that’s our live quartet, yeah. Oh, and then the other guitarist that we use a lot is Jon Woodhead who was in Leon Russell’s band. So that’s an interesting mix.
– Talking about Laurence meeting his wife, you sounded quite romantic, and there’s a perfect balance of romanticism and cynicism in your songs. How do you work on that?
It’s a juggling act, it really is, and cynicism and romanticism is a good way to put it. I have a song called “Before The Fall” which is on the new album – that’s what you got when you put together Amy Winehouse, Brian Wilson and Mozart. I’m a romantic at heart. I really believe in romance and I really believe in love. And I believe that love can cure everything. But I have to give all my musical sense and sensibilities to my late wife, Nina. After I got divorced, I met a woman who was a huge music lover. I used to go over to her house and go out on a date, and music was always a part of our relationship. I fell in love with her and we ended up getting married. And she nagged me for two years to put a band together. so I put this band called ROUTE 66 together, which was this New Orleans- and Memphis-flavored, nine- and ten-piece band with two keyboards, drums, bass, two guitars, Laurence Juber and Jon Woodhead, and a horn section of two guys from Bruce Springsteen’s E STREET BAND, and a sax player from Boston, Texas, Joe Sublett, who was Stevie Ray Vaughan’s roommate and played in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band. And that just launched me again in LA. Nina then said, “You got to make a record.” So I went over to Robby Krieger’s studio, Robby Krieger from THE DOORS, and he gave me the studio as long as I wanted it. I just said, “Robby, I don’t have the money to pay for this.” And he said, “Don’t worry about it. Just pay the engineer. Everything will come together, but you got to let me play on the record.” “Sure, sure, Robby!” (Laughs.) That album [“Fresh Bear Tracks”] got finished, and we were getting ready to mix it, when Nina got diagnosed with terminal cancer. Unfortunately, she passed away shortly thereafter, but she made me promise to not quit music, to go out on the road, go out on tour, to finish the record and make all the records I can make. The last song on that album is called “Nina’s Song”: it’s a beautiful homage to her, as I owe her my career.
– Was it you who arranged the strings on that song?
It was Nina, she told me the string lines to use – very classical, very Debussy in many ways – and I recorded it all on my phone. Then and I went over to a guy called Stevie Blacke and played him what she wrote to go along with the track, and he sat down and did a little string arrangement.
– I assume “Dinner For One” comes from a later period, when you were left alone. There’s a Cuban air to it – is that the result of your upbringing in the Caribbean?
That’s right. There is a Cuban influence, it’s very much like “Buena Vista Social Club” and Ry Cooder. And the romance, as you were calling it, the romantic flavor of it had a lot to do with the way I heard Cuban artists sing songs of lament, of lost love and things like that, in the Fifties and Sixties. That’s the way they described love. And so it was my lament of now having to have dinner alone or make dinner alone after Nina was gone. That was the way that one came about. It was during the Covid – Nina dies and Covid hits – and that was a pretty quiet time to be in my house. Very heartbreaking, very hard.
– You promised, as you said, that you would return to touring. But I watched this interview of yours from back in the day, on “American Bandstand,” where, you mentioned that you were going to go play in Europe. Did it happen?
Oh yeah. I had this song called “Sunshine Hotel” which went to Number three or four in the world, in the dance charts, and it was a huge, huge hit in Europe. It was played in every disco, on all the radio stations. At the time I had a pretty good band and was going around the United States as an opening act for J. Geils for a lot of shows, for Johnny Winter, for THE OUTLAWS, for THE DOOBIE BROTHERS – and all of a sudden I had a hit and was sent over to Europe as a headliner. So I went and had a great time over there, especially in Germany.
– Since you mentioned “Sunshine Hotel”.. There’s this reference to it on “I Don’t Care” from “Fresh Bear Tracks” that’s hard to ignore.
“I Don’t Care” is definitely the sequel to “Sunshine Hotel” – and I throw another Easter egg in there in the bridge where it says “Sunshine Hotel. You just walk on in, no need to ring the bell.”
– And there was a song called “Bring On The Night” that you put on two of your albums, “Red, Hot & Blue” and “Fresh Bear Tracks.” Why?
I’ll tell you why. Because on my first album, “Red, Hot & Blue,” on that particular track, there was a guy called Mike Finnigan, an organ player and great blues singer who died three years ago. Mike Finnigan played organ on that song, and I played piano – and we were together when I was making my comeback album, “Fresh Bear Tracks.” And I said, “Mike, you know, I was just listening the other day to some of the tracks on ‘Red, Hot & Blue,’ and I love what you played there, especially on “Bring On The Night’!” And he said, “Yeah, man, that was a great track. That should have been the hit.” And I went, “You know what, that’s so funny that you say that because I always thought that was a great song. When I play it live, people go wild!” He said, “Man, why don’t you cut that again?” I said, “That’s a great idea!” So I went to Tony Braunagel with Finnigan, and we all sat down and we went, “Yeah, let’s cut that!” And on that day when we were cutting other things, we cut that song. It was a complete circle from my relationship with Mike: he’s on my first solo album and he’s on my comeback solo album with that song.
– You said that he played organ, but I assumed that you play both piano and organ.
I do. In fact, that’s this PROCOL HARUM thing again. It’s exactly the way I want it to be.
– Only they had two separate players. How do you decide what to go for?
For example, in Stephen Stills band Mike Finnigan was the organ player, and I was the piano player. And I would listen to what Mike was playing – I would play a part, and he would play a part. If you listen to “Southern Cross” by CROSBY, STILLS & NASH – a huge, huge hit – Mike Finnigan and Richard T. Bear are the keyboard players on that song. We’d find a way to compliment one another. I’m on tour right now with Walter Trout, okay? And I have a Hammond on my right hand and I have a Nord grand piano on my left hand, and I’m playing the parts that I want to hear on his songs live. And that’s the way it is. That’s the way it is.
– You also write lyrics, and sometimes you adopt this very much conversational tone, with all these colloquialisms. In “Dear John” you sing, “Believe you me; in “They Can Kill You” you say, “kiss your ass goodbye”…
It’s just you feel that way. Here’s one of the reasons why I have lyrics like these: I write the lyrics first before I write the music, and I write short stories first before I put it to music. I’ll tell you about one track on “The Way Of The World” – the one called “Walter Mitty’s Glasses.” It’s a story about somebody that daydreams. There was a movie Danny Kaye made many years ago, and then there was a movie that Ben Stiller, Sean Penn and Kristen Wiig made about ten years ago, a remake. And I wrote a short story about a guy that goes into an antique store, and on the cash wrap, right at the counter, there’s a whole bunch of eyeglasses in a box. He’s looking through them, he takes the glasses, he puts it on and looks in the mirror: “Nah, not me!” He takes another pair out, puts it on and goes, “Whoa, close but no”, grabs another pair, puts it on, and when he looks in the mirror, somebody else is looking back at him. He takes off the glasses, and it’s him; puts them back on, it’s this other person. He’s handsome. He’s got a beautiful head of hair. He’s got a tan. And so he asks, “Where did you get these glasses?” The guy that owns the store goes, “I don’t know. Somebody comes in with a box of glasses. We buy them. We put them out and hope somebody will make a sale.” So the guy looks at the arm of the glasses, an there’s a little piece of tape there, and it says “Property of Walter Mitty.” The guy buys them, and when he goes to an office party, he sees the prettiest girl that’s there, he looks at her with his glasses on and he goes, “Oh, she’s going home with me tonight!” That’s how the story ends. And that’s how the song begins.
– James Thurber’s Walter Mitty was a dreamer. Would you call yourself a dreamer too?
Absolutely. I dream of castles, but I just don’t move into them. (Laughs.) Lyrics are very important. Lyrics are really important. And colloquialisms, as you say. There’s a bonus track on the new album, it’s called “Red Harvest” and there’s a British guy on that. I wrote this particular poem about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it was written the week that Russia invaded Ukraine. My father was born in Poland, and his family had come from that area, from Belarus – they stopped in Warsaw on the way to the United States, and he was born there – so I have that DNA as well. I was watching this terrible tragedy on CNN and I was just heartbroken. And I wrote the poem. As you know, Ukraine is a bread basket – it’s sunflowers, it’s grains, it’s things like that. And I knew that this was the year that there was not going to be a normal harvest; it was going to be a very bloody harvest. I finished the poem, walked over to the piano, put it on there and I started playing – and within no more than ten minutes, the song was finished, absolutely finished. I called Bruce Quarto, who has this great boutique record company and loves artists like myself – a very generous, a very good guy – and said, “Bruce, I’d like to go in the studio and record this. We should put it out, and the proceeds should go to the Ukrainian Red Cross and also the World [Central] Kitchen who are feeding people on the Polish side at the border there.” He thought it was a great idea, so I called up Tony and Laurence, and they said, “Let’s do this!” We went over to Laurence’s house, and I started laying it down. I got a hold of a guy called Leland Sklar, a bass player, and he came over. Ada Pasternak, a Russian violinist, came too. Everybody that I called was very generous and they wanted to work on this.
But I wanted somebody to sing with me, somebody who had gravitas or was important to music, so I called up David Crosby, as I thought he’d be perfect on it with me. He said, “Oh, send it over to me.” So I sent it over, and I waited. The next day, nothing; the day after, nothing’s happening either. And Braunagel’s going, “We got to put a vocal on this and get this finished!” So I called Crosby up, “Do you want to come in and do this?” He said, “I haven’t listened to it yet.” I said, “Well, come on, David, you got to, you got to listen to this.” And David, may he rest in peace, you had to catch him on a good day. (Laughs.) I don’t know if he was having a good day or bad day, but I said, “We got to get this done!” He says, “All right, I’ll get to it. But nudge me.” And again, I got no response for a couple of days and called him back again. “Cros, what’s up? Can you help us with a song?” And he was in a funky mood that day and he said, “I’ll listen to it on the weekend.” That was a Tuesday or Wednesday, so the weekend was three or four days away. I told everybody, and they went, “If we have to wait, we have to wait, but it would be better to get this thing done this week.” But that night I got a call… (Laughs.) I had been on the phone that day, about getting an agreement between me and the record company taking care of that single to come out, with my music lawyer, Paul Quin, a Brit. He said, “Okay, I’ll call you later and I’ll get it all sorted out with Quarto Valley Records,” and we hang the phone up. And about three hours later, my phone rings and a guy on the other end, a Brit, goes, “Hey, I love ‘Red Harvest’ and I want to sing on it!” I said, “Paul, you’re a lawyer, you’re not a singer!” And he goes, “No, I’m a singer. It’s Paul Rodgers.” And I went, “Oh, shit, I thought it was Paul Quinn!” “No, no, it’s Rodgers. We met in Germany at a TV show a long time ago. I was there with BAD COMPANY, and you were singing ‘Sunshine Hotel’.” I went, “Oh, wow, you have a great memory!” Paul said, “Send me the song, I’d love to sing on it. My wife’s Ukrainian, so let’s help these people.” And I said, “Sure.”
– So you’ve never been in the studio together?
No, no, he’s living in Canada, north of Vancouver. But when he was down in Palm Springs – he and Alice Cooper put on a benefit, trying to save a theater down there, with Brian Ray and a bunch of other people – I went down there and hung out with him and got to know him and his lovely wife. And we’ve been friends ever since, yeah.
– Still, a lot of people associate Richard T. Bear with his other friends, KISS – as if you haven’t done anything else. Would you call it unfair?
It’s a little unfair, but it is what it is. People find things to talk about and they want to know about or they don’t want to know about. You know, it’s funny because when I’m playing with Walter Trout, a lot of the times, when he introduces me, he says, “This guy played on a bunch of KISS records” – but it’s okay. I was a session player. I have this great picture (shows a photo on his phone): that’s Gene Simmons, myself, and Cher – he was dating Cher at the time, and I was in England at Manor Studios outside of London doing his album. I’d been in England doing a bunch of albums, playing on a bunch of things then. KISS were great because they were cartoon characters that came to life. I was very close to Sean Delaney who put on the kabuki makeup on them, and thanks to him, I met a lot of nice people and got a lot of great work. Billy Squire came through my meeting with KISS – he was in a band called PIPER – and Billy and I have been friends ever since: I played on his records, he played on mine. Gene was an interesting character. He taught me a lot about the way things were in certain aspects of rock ‘n’ roll and merchandising, for that matter. And then Peter Criss – I enjoyed playing on his album. He had some really good ideas and he was a really good singer. Working with them and learning a lot about about the way they took care of business was pretty interesting for me. I adapt some of that in my merchandising today.
– I would be more interested in the quote from “Minnie The Moocher” in your song “Cab Calloway” than in the KISS link.
When you’re hired as a studio musician, when you’re hired for sessions, you’ve got to play the way that they want you to sound on their particular song. But I loved Cab Calloway, I was a huge Cab Calloway fan. And “Minnie The Moocher”… You’re right on the money there: that’s really an homage to Cab and also to Donald Fagen, cause I was a huge, huge STEELY DAN fan. That’s the stuff I like to play. That’s my DNA. That’s in my soul.
– Weird but it’s only now my mind connected “Cab Calloway” with you playing on “The Blues Brothers” soundtrack.
Yeah, I played on that. I played on that movie album – the first movie that they made.
– Which pieces are you on?
I think “Jailhouse Rock” and something else. I went in there with [John] Belushi one day when they were recording it, and they saw me walk in and pointed at the piano: play that thing. Then, when the movie came out, I loved watching Ray Charles and Aretha [Franklin] and, of course, Cab Calloway. That was fabulous!
– You also mentioned Cher. She recorded your “Love & Pain (Pain In My Heart)”: how come?
“Love & Pain” came about from that particular photograph that I showed you. She was dating Gene Simmons, and I was playing on the “Gene Simmons” album. I was in England. They were in England. We all flew over together. And she said to me one day, “I’m making a record and Gene loves your record, ‘Red, Hot & Blue’, and he loves the way you write. And I just listened to this ballad on it, called ‘Pain In My Heart’ which I’d love to record on my next album…” And I said, “Yeah, I’d love for you to record that!” It was Sean Delaney who kind of influenced me to write that one. So they just changed the title to “Love & Pain” – and that is, to this day, the best ballad she ever sang. There is no question about it. She says it, critics say it. She did a music video of it on tour, it’s on her “Take Me Home” album. I got a gold and a platinum records from it. I was very lucky that she got to want to do that. I did two more records with her and wrote a song called “Young And Pretty” with somebody called Allee Willis, and had a great relationship with Cher for a long time.
– You seem to have enjoyed working with female vocals. You even worked with Inga Rumpf!
Inga Rumpf ended up showing up in Hamburg at one of my gigs. It was my first time playing in Germany, and I was playing this little club called “Onkel Pö” when Inga was looking for a producer. I really liked the way she sang and I really liked her whole vibe, so I ended up making a record with her, and it was the first by a German artist to be released in America on an American label. So it was kind of history making. I got her to sing “Roxanne” by THE POLICE song, which worked really well for her.
– Had you heard her sing with FRUMPY?
Yeah, I saw her with that band, and she was great. A great singer. I wish she would have broken more internationally, but she was revered in her country.
– Was it you who brought in Neil Jason, Elliott Randall and Bob Kulick to her record?
Yeah. I had this little rhythm section with Neil Jason and Elliott Randall and some of those guys, Allan Schwartzberg and THE BRECKER BROTHERS, and I used that rhythm section for Gene Simmons’ album. When I started working as a producer, I went back to where I felt comfortable and that was the band that I was really comfortable with, the rhythm section.
– Elliott was another STEELY DAN connection, right?
That’s right. “Reelin’ In The Years”: that’s Elliot Randall.
– And another female singer you produced was Pat Benatar.
I met Pat in this comedy club called “Catch A Rising Star” that I used to hang out in. That’s where Laurence Juber and I, as THE CUTOUTS, used to play over. She had come into New York City from Richmond, Virginia. She was a soprano and a very good one, but she was basically a torch singer: she sang “A Taste Of Honey” and “Stairway To Heaven” – things like that. The guy that owned “Catch A Rising Star” was her manager, Rick Newman, and he said to me, “Would you take Pat in the studio and make a demo? I’d like to go to record companies with it and see if I can get a record deal.” So I did the demos for her that got her a record deal.
– Was it easy for you to switch from being a player to a producer?
It was easy for me to make that transition because I always had a good sense and sensibility – maybe it’s a little bit too overhanded but… In some ways, I would have liked the artists themselves to be more clear on what they were attempting to do, and in some ways, I had to be a little heavy-handed on the approach. But I had dinner with Frank Zappa once and I said, “I’m perplexed about being a music producer.” And he replied, “Don’t do it.” I asked, “Why, Frank?” And he answered, “I’ll tell you why. Because if they don’t have a hit, it’s your fault. And if they do have a hit, it was all them.” But I also watched a lot of record producers that I worked with over the years and I saw how they handled certain things. I have a great relationship with a producer called Jack Douglas to this day: I do a lot of sessions for him, and I love the way he works with his artists. What a great, talented man!
– Still, on the last two records you basically delegated all the producer’s work to Tony and Laurence, right?
To tell you the truth, I’m the silent producer on those sessions. My name’s not on the production, but we worked as a trio. I’d come up with an idea and run it by Laurence and Tony. They would think about it and give me their opinion. Sometimes they’d go, “Wow, I never thought of that. That’s a great idea,” and it would be my production idea that surfaced. And sometimes they’d go, “Yeah, let’s keep it a little more minimal,” and I’d go, “Fine, fine… The end result is, we want to make a good record, and we’re going to sound really good. When I made “Fresh Bear Tracks,” we were working together in a studio album; when I made “The Way Of The World” during Covid, it was different. I’d go over to Laurence’s studio with a piano, we’d put a click track down, I’d sing on a pilot, play the song, we’d listen to it, and if it worked and everybody wanted to do it, the Pro Tools stems would go over to Tony Braunagel’s house, where he had his drum set up in the living room, he put the drums on it and send it back to Laurence who would put the guitars on it. So now we’d have drums, guitars and keyboards, and we’d need a bass on this, so we’d send it over to Hutch Hutchinson, who was on the road with Bonnie Raitt, and he’d put something on it, and then percussion that went over to Lenny Castro’s house. That’s the way we made this record.
– If you could produce other artists, why did you have to go on hiatus? I understand that you maybe didn’t want to play, but you moved away from music business altogether, while you were able to make a living as a producer. So why?
I’ll tell you why that happened. The woman that I married, a German Norwegian born in New Jersey, was a force of nature, and when she got pregnant with our first child, she said, “No more touring for you! No more out of town, out of sight, out of mind. I want you around here!” When I met her, I was going back and forth from Europe to the United States, and she said, “No, that’s it. You’re going to have a day job!” So I took a little hiatus, and one year turned into two, two turned into four, four turned into eight, eight turned into sixteen. And then when I got on to around twenty years, we divorced. And as soon as the divorce happened, I was playing music again. But I also had a strange event happen in my career: I made another record that’s never come out. I did half of it in New York and half of it in LA, because we had vinyl in those days, so one side of the vinyl was going to be “The East” and the other side of the vinyl was going to be “The West”! I was signed to Telefunken, or TELDEC, in Germany, and the guy that signed me, Thomas Stein – a great, great music person in Europe who ended up being the head of BMG – left the label. And when I finished up my record and sent it over to TELDEC, TELDEC was bought by WEA, Warner’s Electro Asylum, and there were all new people in the hierarchy – different managing director, different A&R – and that wasn’t the direction they wanted to go.
They wanted to go for the Eighties music, and I was making authentic, genuine American rock, duetting with Rita Coolidge and those kind of people – it was more like DELANEY & BONNIE than synthy drum-machine pop. So they said, “No, we’re not putting it out!” So I called my lawyer Alfred Meyer in Munich and I said, “Alfred, you got to help me with this. You got to get me the album back, so I can go and shop it to other record companies.” He made some inquiries and said, “All right, I’m coming to LA. Let’s talk about it.” He comes to L.A. and we talk about it, and then he says, “I should have an answer within the next thirty days on whether we can get the album back or not.” But I didn’t hear from him, so I called him back, and his assistant said, “Oh, you didn’t hear. His daughter had committed suicide, and Alfred had a massive heart attack last week, and he’s no longer with us” At that point I was just completely disillusioned and I took a break. I went, maybe this album is not meant to come out. And I couldn’t get them to give it back to me.
– And you don’t even have the masters?
I have the multitracks, and there’s some really good stuff on it. But the label have the masters, and they wouldn’t give me the masters because I think they were afraid, because they forgot to pick up my option for this album and during that time it became mine if I wanted it, but I didn’t want to go through a huge legal process. And it just sits on the shelf.
– But since you have the multitracks, can’t you just create a new mix, put it out and be independent from them?
Yeah, but it’s got a completely different sound, so to speak. What I did was, I took “This Bird Has Flown” a couple of other ideas off that record, and I put them into “Fresh Bear Tracks” and “The Way Of The World”!
– You’ve always had a lot of famous artists on your records. How did you work with all the egos and how did you get them to play what you wanted while letting them remain themselves?
I’ll give you two examples on the “Fresh Bear Tracks: album. I was hanging out with Edgar Winter and I said, “Hey, I got this track called ‘River Of Resurrection’: what do you think of it?” I played it for him as I was driving him home, and he went, “Oh, that’s really, really good. But I think there should be an alto sax line there.” I said, “Well, that’s pretty good because I got Tom Scott to play on some of my stuff.” He says, “Yeah, he’s good, but why don’t you let me give a go at it?” I said, “Sure!” So it was Edgar’s idea, and two days later, we went in the studio and did it. Edgar Winter is such a brilliant musician and he has such a uncanny ability to put the notes exactly where they should be, so two takes later, it was done, and it was great.
And then there’s a song on there called “Give It Up” that went to Number One in the Top 100 over in the Netherlands. It was written by Stephen Stills and myself. I was in Stephen Stills band, and we finished the tour, and Stephen and I both wound up in New Orleans, and we stayed there for a long weekend. We started writing some stuff on a piano that they had in the hotel, and we came up with “Give It Up,” so we went in the studio and did a demo because Stephen liked it. And I forgot about it. Thirty years later, I open a shoebox in my warehouse, and there’s a whole bunch of cassette tapes in there. I’m looking, and they’re all from the CROSBY, STILLS & NASH sessions – rough mixes and ideas, and takes that didn’t get on the record, and whatnot. And then I come to one and it says “Stills, Bear,” and I went, “What is this?” And then I come into another one, and it says “Stills, Bear, Who Dat?”.. What the hell is this? I didn’t have a cassette player at the time and I had to go out and buy one so I could listen to this stuff. And I put the first one in, and it was the demo for “Give It Up.” And I went, “Wow, I forgot about that song. That’s a good song!” So I’m in there making “Fresh Bear Tracks,” I play it for Braunagel, and Braunagel goes, “That’s a great song. Let’s cut it!” I said, “Okay,” so I call Stills up: “Hey man, I need you to play on something.” And he says, “I’m not coming down there!” So I said, “Well, I’ll come up to your house. How’s that?” And he says, “That’s the only way you’re going to get me to play on it. You got to come up to Fort Stills!” I mean, we’re good. He and I are good friends. We have dinners on Monday nights. So I went up to his house, which he calls Fort Stills, and I said, “Here it is. What do you think of that?” He says, “Man, I remember that! Yeah, let’s do it!” So turns out he plays guitar on it with Walter Trout, and they trade licks back and forth, and it was perfect. It was perfect! The bottom line would be that all those artists compliment your records just by being themselves. It’s not that I’m looking for a name – I’m looking for a talent more than anything.
– You mentioned Walter Trout and you’re playing with him these days.
We are on tour now, yeah.
– How did you meet him and what did he do to convince you to go on tour with him?
I met Walter when he was playing with CANNED HEAT and we did this picnic together, which was to raise money for musicians that didn’t have any insurance and needed to go into detox or rehab, or whatever, because I was involved in MAP, Musicians Assistance Program, which is now called MusiCares – it’s an arm of the Grammys. And so I met Walter and we became fast friends, and I’d go down to his house in Huntington Beach; and I’d go into a little dive bar that was in Huntington Beach, called “Perqs,” and I’d sit in with his band and have a lot of fun. It was during the years that I took a hiatus, but he called me up a few years back and said, “You got any cool songs? I’m making a record. It’s called “We’re All In This Together” and it’s all duet records.” I said, “Yeah, I got a song called ‘The Other Side Of The Pillow’ that I had just written.” I sent it over to him, and he went, “Oh, this is perfect for me!” So he and Charlie Musselwhite, and myself finished the song, and it went on his Number One album. Fast forward two years, three years, and he’s making an album called “Broken” and he says, “I need another song. You got anything?” I say, “Well, I’m making a record called ‘Way Of The World” and I’ve got a song on it called ‘Breathe’…” He listened to it and said, “Oh, I want to cut that song.” I said, “Okay,” and went in the studio with him, and played organ on “Breathe” on his album. So “Breathe” is on my album and on his too.
He called me out of the blue shortly thereafter and said, “Hey, my keyboard player has got a little health problem for the next month or two. Can you come out on tour?” I said, “You know what? I haven’t been out on tour since I think Reagan’s era, but yeah, okay, it would be fun!” We went to England together and went to Europe together. We played sixteen countries and we had such a good time, and it was so well-received that he said, “Would you do Australia with me?” So I went to Australia with him, and we’ve been playing in the United States ever since then. Walter and I complement each other. We have a great time every night. He’s a fabulous musician and a great guitar player. And so did John Mayall. Walter played with John Mayall for seven years in THE BLUESBREAKERS, him and Coco Montoya.
– And how does it feel to be touring again, to be in front of the audience?
It feels great! I love audiences. And I play in L.A. with my band – with Laurence Juber, Tony Braunagel and Ricky Cortes. I also play alone and I open sometimes for other artists, just like a master class, me and a keyboard. But to go out with Walter and play these blues festivals and things like that, it feels wonderful. People are so genuine and so nice, and they’re so appreciative. And I got to tell you, the blues are alive. They’re very, very much alive.
