It's important to collect unusual characters. It keeps you sharp.

Experience is definitely the high road once driven. It actually enhances the songwriting and song sourcing process.

It's important to collect unusual characters. It keeps you sharp.

Lightnin' Hopkins was something of a fixture on the Houston coffee house scene so we were witness to eccentric blues brilliance close up. Then, believe it or not, along came the wave of the English cats like John Mayall, Eric Clapton and the Stones embracing the great American art form - the blues.

In 1950, the biggest amp you could get was no bigger than a tabletop radio.

When I was around 7 or 8 my Dad took me to a B.B. King recording session, well, that really did it. Huge and lasting impressions. After all that I pretty much knew playing guitar was something I was going to do because I just had to do it. And I did.

They prospect of seeing oneself in the mirror clean-shaven is too close to a Vincent Price film... a prospect not to be contemplated, no matter the compensation.