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An Interview With John Kay

Part 2...questions 13-24

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Q#13: Who have you influenced among the younger generations of musicians?

A#13: As far as Steppenwolf having influenced others is concerned, there are, of course, numerous incidents where as we travel and do our concerts people who are in local or regional bands or what have you come up and tell you how they do this song of yours or that song or they grew up in a household with your music and they were influenced by it. As far as well known performers are concerned, it's difficult to say because you don't want to imply something like this.....this is almost like I don't feel right about being the one to even say it. But I know that, for an example, I know that Travis Tritt has done "The Pusher" on stage; I know that Bruce Springsteen has done "Born To Be Wild" on stage (and so have others)....I know that Slash from Guns N Roses has mentioned Steppenwolf and there may be a couple other people that I can't think of right now. It is, of course, something that I take (I don't want to say pride in) but it's something that I'm glad about, particularly when it's someone whose work and whose artistic direction or integrity you respect and admire......it's nice to know that somewhere along the line they were aware of what you did or a song that you did. I know how I feel about the likes of Little Richard and the rock & roll pioneers and my blues Icons......you know, the Muddy Waters and the Howlin Wolves and people like that....who had a tremendous influence on me. But there are so many......if I had to draw a list of whose songs did you really listen to or try to play, the list is phenomenally long because it goes through just about all of the outstanding people that were in the country music field of the late 40's into the early 60's, as well as the same counterparts in R&B and rock & roll....so there's just so many people. It's something that, I'm assuming, is similar with most other contemporary performers where they have crossed the path musically of dozens, if not hundreds, of people and it you were one of those it's not half bad.

Q#14: Does being called a "rock legend" make you feel uncomfortable? How does it strike you?

A#14: A rock legend? Well, again it's one of those things were I think of Little Richard as a rock legend but I'm aware of the fact that someone who is younger than I often will come up to me and say, "Oh, you're a legend." Well, as long as I'm not a legend in my own mind. Mack MacAnnally one time when I was down in Muscle Shoals in '78 or thereabouts, they were all kicking around album titles for somebody and it was the old thing-- "a man and his music," no, no that's not it, "a legend in his time," no, no. Mack said finally, "so and so, a rumor in his own room." I like to think of it along those terms a little bit more because for me to view myself as a legend, I think, is kind of inappropriate. I mean, that pretends that you could crawl inside the head of someone else and see yourself through the eyes of the other person.....I certainly don't profess to be able to do that. I am aware of the fact that others view me this way, some do, and it's something I'm not uncomfortable with, but it's certainly something that I don't (I don't want to say encourage) but it's something...I'm kind of neutral on it because I don't want to step on somebody else's...You know, if I was standing in front of whoever, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles, somebody like that, and I was searching for the words to express my admiration without making a fool of myself I would appreciate it if they didn't cut me off at the legs saying, "No, legend. I don't want to hear that word." So when I hear others use it in the context of what I've done I let them choose their own words and I appreciate the favorable comments and if they choose to use legend I can live with that.

Q#15: Of the songs that you've performed on stage, is there one that would surprise people that it's your favorite?

A#15: Some songs wear a little better than others. I think that I've been asked the question many times as to which is my favorite, and I'm wondering whether my attitude towards that is a little bit like the parent that might have numerous children but it tends to maybe gravitate towards the one that is a little overlooked cause that one's a little too shy or it's the one that needs a little extra push or help because....they just do. There are tunes that over the years did not get the recognition that the "Born To Be Wild's," and "Magic Carpet Rides" and others did. But by the same token, I know through the letters and comments of those who listen closely that it didn't go out there and never connect and those are songs like "Desperation" and another one that I really like a lot is "It's Never Too Late." And oddly enough, that song...in fact both of those tunes....are songs that have brought a lot of specific letters over the years, where at someone's darkest hour this was one of the songs that they played......I'm assuming along with others by other artists, that gave them a little of that......for instance, Peter Gabriel has a wonderful tune called "Don't Give Up" and there are many other songs of similar orientation by a variety of artists. So a couple of tunes that I've always been very partial to from the early Steppenwolf days are those particular ones....and in many ways that red thread of, I don't want to necessarily say that at the core of those lyrics is a spirituality, but there's a tinge of that, and that has found its way through many songs over the years with Steppenwolf. My own friend and financial advisor in L.A. called me up from his car a few weeks ago and said, "You know, I've been listening to all those Steppenwolf albums I had over the years and never really realized how there's a degree of spirituality in this that I never somehow caught." And I said, "well, it wasn't something that was intentional".....I wasn't sitting there with, you know, a clerical white collar writing these deep hidden messages as to the meaning of life. But yeah, there is..John Kay does have some inner life that does, in fact, find its way into some of the lyrics. Whether it was in more recent years "Hold On" or from our newest release which is the Feed The Fire CD the title cut "Feed The Fire," there are certain tunes I am very partial to because they come from the deepest part from which I have yet been able to find some motivation for my lyrics. So, I guess it's a little bit self-indulgent on my part but as long as some of our own tunes can still give me goose bumps on occasion then this is one of the big reasons why I'm still doing this.

Q#16: Could you reconstruct the writing of the lyrics to "Born To Be Wild?"

A#16: "Born To Be Wild" is, at this point, an animal of its own. It has its own sort of life. It is, of course, joined at the hip to Steppenwolf but it really does have its own. A good example of that was when I, some years ago, woke up and turned on CNN and I heard "Born To Be Wild," but what I saw on the screen was the guys in the space shuttle doing stuff. It turned out, CNN said, Houston control wakes up the crew every morning with a different tune..... this morning happens to be "Born To Be Wild". Wolf In Space. Well, these sort of things happen without us ever having any sort of input control or even knowledge, at times, of it. Give you an idea: Recently some fan said he found a vinyl, a 45, of "Born To Be Wild" many years old issued in Angola, of all places. I mean, we hear about Thailand, we heard about Saudi Arabia. Angola, that one threw me for a loop. So, the tune has become this perpetual motion machine and it was created initially by Mars Bonfire, the writer, who had changed his name from Dennis Edmonton which was his name when he was a guitarist in The Sparrow, a Canadian band that I also belonged to, and that his brother, Jerry Edmonton, was drummer of.... and Jerry and I together with a couple other people started Steppenwolf. Dennis went his own way, called himself Mar Bonfire, and one day handed a demo to his brother Jerry saying, "I wrote this new tune. You guys are starting a band, would you consider it?" We listened to it and here was "Born To Be Wild" written I a somewhat subdued, semi-ballad flavored manner. That's due to the fact that Dennis, or Mars, has a very soft voice. Well, later Dennis explained, or Mars explained, that he had walked down Hollywood Boulevard and saw a poster which depicted a motorcycle (a Harley probably) breaking through the pavement. You know, the "bike from hell." There were chunks of asphalt flying every which was and it said "Born To Ride." Well, I know that a year or so prior to this we, The Sparrow, while still playing in Yorkville Village in Toronto, had all gone to see John Hammond, Jr., who we were fans of. John, who has become (as I recently once again saw in Nashville) just a real consummate blues musician and singer, was already at that early age very intense and had a lot of cool guitar riffs, one of which was in flavor reminiscent of what later became the key riff in "Born To Be Wild". Not a cop, not a rip-off, but something that in terms of the approach and the mood if it was something that inspired Mars. He wrote the riff, he saw "Born To Ride", the lyrics "Born To Be Wild" resulted and, of course, "heavy metal thunder." I like smoke and lightening, heavy metal thunder" that was something that someone later down the line arguably altered or adapted to become the tag for a whole new type of intense rock & roll called heavy metal. Now there's another camp that subscribes to the theory that heavy metal was something used in Naked Lunch by William Burrows, which is also true. Who knows?....who was the first person to go out there and say this is "heavy metal music"...but we've been accused and/or credited (depending on how one views these things) with having something to do with it as well.

Q#17: Tell us the story behind "Magic Carpet Ride"....

A#17 "Magic Carpet Ride" was a bass riff to begin with that our original bassist, Rushton Moreve, was always noodling around with during sound checks and what have you. When we in the midst of recording our second album, and oddly enough Mars Bonfire arrived in order to help out where he could, I think more importantly at the time he has a new song called "Faster Than The Speed Of Life" which he wanted us to hear, we were during a break, and guys picked up their instruments, and sure enough Rushton started playing that bouncy bass riff of his again. Well Mars, who is an excellent guitarist and particularly a very tight rhythm guitarist, joined in, and so did the rest, and pretty soon what became the basic track for Magic Carpet Ride emerged. Well, Richard Podolor, our main engineer...(at that time Gabriel Mekler was still our producer) and everybody kind of said "....don't forget that" and they started to roll tape right away to capture what was going on. From that, we then said, "well, it's a nice groove, but it needs this, it needs that" and we spent a couple more hours doing the various things which then eventually comprised what came out as the single. It was really at that point, the first time that everyone involved with the project said "....if this ain't a hit, we need to switch professions". In fact, initially, it out sold Born To Be Wild, it's predecessor....it was due to the fact that Born To Be Wild was included in the film "Easy Rider" some months later, that gave Born To Be Wild it's second lease on life and spread it internationally which was very useful for Steppenwolf, because when we then went touring in Europe and elsewhere, they at least knew who we were because of "The Pusher" and "Born To Be Wild" having been in the movie "Easy Rider".

Q#18: Do you remember the circumstances that led to the inclusion of "The Pusher" and "Born To Be Wild" in the Easy Rider soundtrack?

Q#18: I remember exactly the circumstances because we had been called by our management company saying "You know Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper have made this film, and it seems they've run out of funds, it's kind of a low budget production and so they're not going with the standard Hollywood scoring approach for the music content of this thing. They have invited a number of performers to come and view a private screening they've taken the liberty of placing certain songs in the film to illustrate what their intentions are, and they are hoping that the various artists like the film well enough to permit them to use songs and then work something out". So we went to this private screening. Of course the soundtrack contained works by Dillon, The Band, and Hendrix and The Fraternity of Man (which later more or less changed into Little Feat) etc., including the two songs you mentioned by Steppenwolf. I, for whatever reason, was slightly late getting there....and so I just caught the tail end of "The Pusher" which is early on in the film with the limousine and Phil Spector scene, but by the time Born To Be Wild played in the film, I had settled in and was beginning to get into the flick, and yeah, it came on like gangbusters, and I personally felt it was the right song for the right scene. It may very well have a lot to do with the fact that to this day, obviously the song is very much tied to not just young adolescents who are into their rebellious stage, but also the entire biker community. Little did I know that sitting in the screening room that I was witnessing, really, the launching of the key song. At that point it had been our first hit, and it was a big one, and that was fine but, we already had Magic Carpet Ride under our belt, and it was even bigger....so nobody really knew that this film was going to give us international exposure to the point that these requests for us to come down later this year in Lima, Peru, or Santiago, Chile or, you know, we've played places like Saipan and obviously Japan and Australia, all of those things tend to start with that one song.

Q#19: What prompted the Feed The Fire album? How long was it in the works? Was the material created specifically for the new album?

A#19: This Feed The Fire project is a very unusual one, even as crazy as some of our things in the past have been due to certain circumstances. We had several tunes written in the late 70's and we were in a demo stage and presented these tunes for the purpose of getting a recording deal. To kind of keep things reasonably short on this, what resulted was that the label that said, "Yeah, let's run with this," accepted these demos as masters and we were kind of scratching our heads going, "Well, wait a minute.....we wanted to set the deal, then we get the budget, then we go in the studio, then we record for real," because on these demos were drum machines, synthesizers. This was during that period of that sort of techno-pop. There was a lot of that stuff going on. They said, "no, no. These are fine. Give us three more and we've got the album and we want to put it out eight weeks from now and you guys got the whole summer tour. Let's go!" Well, it was at a time when our manager had not exactly had tremendous success getting the ear of the various A&R people in the corporate glass towers of LA and New York and this deal was a pretty good one under the circumstances for us. So we ran with this. Well, if was something that never came to pass. The record came out, it had an initial flurry of air play and it died in a relatively short period of time because it as a label that had been involved in other types of musical product and artists and so forth. They were not really experienced and we felt like guinea pigs. In any event, this particular project crashed and we were very disappointed because we had a lot of our..all of the years of rebuilding the Steppenwolf name, all of that gritting your teeth and rebuilding from the little clubs to the big clubs, etc, etc.....all of those human experiences of giving each other in the band moral support and not letting some of the setbacks and the grind of the road make us throw in the towel......all of those things went in the songs "Rock Steady, I'm Rough and Ready," "Hold On, Never Give Up, Never Give In" and a couple of others. And so we felt that some of our better writing had sort of come out and took a nose-dive and went nowhere. Well, not too many months ago, working with what are now my partners on the record end of things in Nashville, TN, listened to these particular recordings amongst other things that we were kicking around and they said, "These songs are really good. These are good songs. Have you ever considered to do it for real, do it the way you had intended to had you had the time and money?" I said, "No. To be honest with you, we were all rather dejected after this o ne." By the time Rise and Shine came out on IRS Records in 1990, we had a fresh batch of tunes and so we were always thinking forward instead of looking over our shoulder because, to a certain extent, we always felt that in order to avoid that nostalgia/run on auto-pilot act keep playing new songs along with the more familiar stuff on stage. Make sure everybody knows how you view yourself in terms of who and what you are and where your focus in the future is. So we didn't look over our shoulder with respect to these tunes. Well, they said you ought to consider it. So Michael, my co-producer and keyboardist and writing parter, and whose been with the Wolf and my right hand man since 1981 now, started the project and we got.... what it deserved..the drums, the organ the big rotating Leslie and all that. Around that time we had also written some additional tunes. Not enough to make an all new album, but songs that seemed to fit together with the cord tunes in terms of their general philosophical orientation. The most surprising, and perhaps the most gratifying, part of this whole particular project was, that an idea that Michael recently written on the bus, on the piano (on the tour bus) which I had been toying with and I finally started to write some lyrics to....and it was a real intense two and a half days.....you know, eat and sleep and do the normal things but other than that your mind was totally preoccupied. Not in a feverish frenzy, but in almost a semi-serene way and the lyrics for "Feed The Fire" came. And then we were all in the band very much gratified by the result of this tune. But I, for one, viewed it as the last tune of the album which hopefully created a mood that could linger with the listener when the entire CD was done playing on its system and hopefully leave a positive, hopeful note. And we didn't want to step on that mood by having a different tune come in.....it need to be the last tune. But other than that, I viewed it as a very private tune and one that was probably going to be, like the songs I mentioned a little earlier, "It's Never Too Late" and so forth, a nice tune, but it's not going to get the spotlight. Well, it turns out that even the case-hardened independent promotion people that are out there chose this song as the single and it's the one that's going to get the video. So that was a left turn of events that none of us had counted on or really dared to hope for because we felt this tune was somewhat less representative..well, I shouldn't say less representative..it was different from what the average Steppenwolf listener would probably expect from us in terms of the intensity of the song and the mood and flavor of the tune. So we, ourselves, felt that it was perhaps not one that was a contender as a single. But now that it is, we're very much gratified by it and we'll give it our best shot, see whether or not it connects. Like the man said, what comes from the heart hopefully goes to the heart.

Q#20: Feed The Fire is a really solid album........!!

A#20: I'm glad you feel that way because there is a lot of honesty in there. And I must tell you that some of the tunes that we've played now on the road for a while, particularly when you consider that it's not always easy sledding to get an audience to really pay attention to a new song that they're really unfamiliar with when you present it to them for the first time on stage rather than in the privacy of their home listening to a CD. When you get a response that is genuine, not polite applause but genuine response, there were a few that sustained all of us in the band many times. When we could by alternating between familiar material and unfamiliar material, we could reach an agreement, a truce with the audience which is .. I know you came to hear this song. Here it is. It made you happy. Now here's a song that's new. It makes us happy. What do you think? When there's a genuine response to that we knew that we not just kidding ourselves that we had something to offer beyond the familiar. Even though, perhaps, in recent years past there would be the well known A&R man at the multi-mega international conglomerate saying, "There's too much echo on the cowbell and I don't hear it." So we have really in recent years tried to reach our fans directly in whatever way we can. That's we have our own publishing companies, recording studio, vehicles, merchandise company, web page and data base and fan club and so forth. Because in order for us to be able to reach them by getting around the obstacles, sometimes of non-existent help or air play or whatever it might be that we had to go through in recent years, we found the more we know were they are and reach them directly, the more we can breathe easier and go out and play our hundred dates a year and make a handsome living doing what we still feel is the best job that we ever hope to have. I mean, who gets to say what's think in the music that they write, to perform in front of what have become real friends and be handsomely rewarded for it and have some sort of balance in your life with respect to professional versus private, inner and material life and other things? I am one of the most fortunate people that I know.....I'm still married to the same woman after 30 years and that is not because she just puts up with it....somebody once facetiously said, "Well, that's because you were on the road for half of that time," and to some extent they have a point. But to actually feel like there is nothing that is a major gap, a major void in your life, that's rare. A day doesn't go by where I don't silently give thanks for my good fortune to live the way I do, to have this sort of balance, to see the people who come to Wolf Fest. It's always an awkward thing....they come to tell you how much what you've done means to them. It's very difficult not to want to sort of say, "No, no, no. You've got it backwards.....you guys are the reason why after 30 years we still get to do this." When the bus leave in the spring and the guys are sitting in the front lounge going "Wow, it's like going on vacation. I've been at home doing taxes. I've got the kid to do this with." Here we're going out. It's kind of like the clich� of Willie Nelson, "on the road again, making music with my friends." Well, there's something to that. I got to tell you I get kind of antsy, restless, when spring comes. As much as I enjoy swimming in the lake here and doing things in and around the house, I also get that itch to get the guitar and get out there and we've got some new tunes and we're gonna play the new stuff for our friends. So it's something that I'm very appreciative of and not the least of which is that in spite of the rebuilding and breaking out, etc., reaching the nadir, I guess, of my own personal life at a certain point and having come all the way through that. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I appreciate so much. It hasn't just been an easy ride. There have been times when you had to find out what you were made of and what you were capable of because you were thrust into a situation that you hated but you were unwilling to throw in the towel and let somebody take something from you that they had no right to.

Q#21: Talk a little about the show, the act of performing night after night.

A#21: The show is something that while, of course, we try to have consistency of performance quality and so on, it's something that to a certain extent has the element of surprise package about it every night. Will this amplifier blow up? Will this guy break a drumstick in the middle of his solo? Aside from the technical stuff of will it all work, how many shows have we done the last few days and have they been in the desert area and taken a toll on my vocal chords and now I'm barely sort of bluffing my way through the vocal parts, but it has to be done. That's when it's miserable. That's when you are up there going, "Man, I spent a whole day away from a very nice place where I live in Tennessee for express purpose of being on this stage for 90 minutes or whatever it is tonight and make that whole day of whatever it was (it might have been a regular day, it might have been a boring day), you know, whatever it was leading up to being on the stage. Now I can't do my best job." What's worse is that I hate to act and fake but I do feel that I owe it to the audience to not say, "Well, as you can tell the pipes are shot and it's not going to be all that great." They're there to forget whatever their trouble are. They set an evening aside, they spent good money, they probably worked hard for the money to see us do our thing. So I don't have the luxury of laying my difficulties on them. It's really my job to do the best I can under the circumstances and to look like I'm not suffering up there at a minimum. Well, that's when it's bad. When it's good, it's great. When the band is cooking and the sound is good and the audience is into it with us, yeah, those are the nights and thank God we have a fair amount of them. Maybe because of the maturity and the fact we approach it professionally. We try to have everything run like clock-work so there are as few factors at work there that could throw a monkey wrench into the show. When it's one of those things where you walk off the stage just tingling, just buzzing, that's a hard thing to walk away from.

Q#22: Did you ever record in German?

A#22: Although German is, of course, my first language and there are some wonderful German poets like Schiller and Geothe and so forth. I was never one who enjoyed hearing, at least in the early days of rock & roll, German lyrics set to rock & roll tunes. There were feeble attempts in the late '50's when I was still living there to take Elvis songs and others and put a German singer with German lyrics to it. I felt somehow that wasn't the real McCoy. Even though I didn't understand the English lyrics, they just went hand in glove with that rhythm, that music and I didn't want to hear it in German. Now since then, In more recent years, in situations where we toured in Germany and had occasion to hear other performers and recordings over there, the sort of stilted (for lack of a better term) kind of tin-pan ally approach to the early German texts that were attempted while I was still a kid there that in the area of rock & roll, anyway, with self-contained groups who write their own material in German. A lot of that has long gone by the wayside and so there are people doing pretty good creative work where the German is in a conversational manner rather than this sort of stilted thing where they're trying to translate from English into German and it just doesn't fit somehow. There are some people I've heard where I say, "Wow, you know, they're singing it in their own language in the way that I think rock & roll in the States was," that is kind of conversational slang, street language set to music. They're doing that now in Germany and it's working in some instances fairly well. But myself, having grown up with that other earlier version of German, I never really .. and because I came to Canada at the age of, I was just about 14, while German chronologically is my first language, English is my true first language at this point in the sense that I think and dream and whatever in English. While I speak reasonably good German, which is refreshed every time I speak to my family over there by phone or we tour or we visit over there. It is still a language that is in essence frozen more or less at that moment when I left. And so a whole professional vocabulary, the expressions and terminology's that you become familiar with as you get older and you're in your 20's and your 30's, that is missing to a great extent in my German. Consequently, I'm not as comfortable. At times I do interviews in Germany in German but when I'm at a loss as to how to put something I'll just slip into English until I get past that particular hurdle. And most of them speak quite adequate English over there.

Q#23: How many people have been in Steppenwolf?

A#23: At last count, I think in the 29 years of Steppenwolf's existence we had just about 20 people. Now that seems like a lot buy when you consider that the changes were by and large very gradual .. 1 for instance, a lot of people are unaware of the fact that the original line-up of Steppenwolf did not last all that long. That is, we were formed the summer of '67 and after the second album which was delivered at the end of '68, practically a year and a half later, we already had our first change which was a new bass player. Then came a new guitarist, which was Larry Byrom from Huntsville, AL and then subsequent to that the Nashville area, who replaced Michael Monarch, our original guitarist who was 17 years old and had difficulty handling the lifestyle and the hectic pace and the success and the money and what have you. So there was a change of face on average, I would think, every 18 months or so. But since it was one face at a time, It seemed like the audience sort of just took it in stride. It wasn't as though these guys broke up and all of a sudden there's a whole new crew of brand new faces. It was a gradual thing so that by the time the mid '70's rolled around the only original member other than myself was Jerry Edmonton, the drummer. When I went on the road in 1980 at John Kay and Steppenwolf, by that time I was the only one left. Ironically, this current line-up of personnel has been together far longer than any previous one. Michael Wilk, keyboardist and co-producer, etc., has been with Steppenwolf since 1981. Ron Hurst, our drummer, has been with us since 1984. The only one who is a recent addition is Danny Johnson who hails originally from Shreveport, LA., but who has been out on the West Coast for quite awhile and has played with a variety of people that range just a tremendous gap of, tremendous range of people. I guess years ago Rick Derringer. He's been in Alcatraz which was a band produced by Eddie Van Halen. He played with Rod Stewart for a while. He's played with some Cajun musicians. Just a real roots blues rocker that fits wonderfully into this line-up. We're very pleased to have him. He instills a degree of, you know, this may not be perfect but it's real -- that sort of thing. We're enjoying that and we hope that we can really put his talents to use in some of the newer songs that will be written.

Q#24: Does it strike you as extraordinary that your records have never been out of print in 30 years?

A#24: It is fairly remarkable, I think, that after 29 years we continue to sell an astonishing number of records annually world-wide. I distinctly recall a comment that a then financial advisor to Steppenwolf made in the early '70's when we changed labels from ABC Dunhill to CBS. One of the things that ABC Dunhill wanted as a prerequisite for our way out of the existing contract, which was still binding, was that we would give them back the rights to the master recordings that we had over there, the "Born To Be Wild's," etc. We were hemming and hawing and this person said, "God, it's slowly coming off the charts, 18 months, 2 years. How long do you think this stuff will sell?" We kind of looked at him and said, "Well, he's probably right, I guess." So we gave them back the masters. Well, I once told this story to somebody recently who said, "Oh, bad move, bad move. You guys lost millions." I probably would have said yes to him a few years ago but this happened, as I said, very recently and I said, "No, wrong. Good move." We were stupid. We didn't know how good a move it was and it was in spite of ourselves. But here's what happened. We gave them back the masters. We had our period with CBS in the mid '70's and here came the late '70's and I did a solo effort that didn't really go anywhere and here came the bogus Wolf bands. All of a sudden, I'm faced with what am I going to do? What do I want to do? This rubs me the wrong way. I can't stand to see the name being dragged through the mud. Do I want to take another whack at it? Meantime, the person who a few years prior to that said "yeah the stuff won't sell anymore" had, at that point, been a soothsayer. In fact, the catalog had fallen off and wasn't selling all that well, partially because ABC Dunhill and shortly thereafter (this was late 1979) the advent of the compact disk and classic rock radio came. All of a sudden, the catalog of ours that had just about gone out of print not only was revived by a very aggressively marketed MCA Records catalog push but, because of the compact disc, we were reselling two-thirds of the records we ever did sell to the previous fans in a compact disc version around the world. So when 1990 or thereabouts rolled about, looking over our shoulder with respect to the money that we had made was quite phenomenal. The point of all this is that had we owned our own masters 1977-8 or 9, which were pretty lean years of insecurity, or "where now brown cow," we probably, particularly since the catalog was non-existent in sales just about, probably would have sold it, hell, I don't know, for half a million bucks to anybody who would have offered that amount to us and really taken it in the shorts with respect to what we have in future earnings that came to pass because we didn't own the masters. Sometimes your own stupidity .. You know, you pay for your mistakes but sometimes, I guess, you're just plain lucky and we certainly were in this instance. We have tried to use our past as a means of bank rolling our future, and so far, it's worked pretty well for us.

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