Dave Tice (Buffalo) Interview

While Led Zeppelin was “Dazed and Confused”, Deep Purple was “Space Truckin'”, and Black Sabbath was drifting “Into the Void”, a rough and ready band of hellraising long hairs was lumbering about down under, giving all three a run for their money. That band was Buffalo. Formed in 1971, the band’s first three albums, Dead Forever… (1972), Volcanic Rock (1973), and Only Want You for Your Body (1974), are early metal classics. They are also credited as being a key factor in the development of the stoner and doom movements. We had the chance to sit down with the band’s frontman and co-founder, Dave Tice, to discuss this impact, as well as those early years and the upcoming release from his current band, Buffalo Revisited, entitled Volcanic Rock Live.

Greetings Dave and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?

Dave Tice: I’m good Joe. What’s the weather like in sunny Chicago?

*laughs* It’s not too sunny at all. It is utterly freezing and my hands look terrible. They’re all chapped up. We’re probably gonna get snow or flurries or something this weekend. How’s the weather down there? I know there was a storm last night.

DT: It was pretty spectacular. “Thunderbolts and lightning” as as Queen sang *laughs*. But today, the sun is shining. The birds are singing. The pool is looking pretty good out there, although I doubt I’ll go for a swim. The world is fine here man. It’s good.

And of course, *points to Thin Lizzy shirt* Thunder and Lightning!

DT: *laughs* Yeah!

We’re nearing the end of 2021, but you guys are gonna be starting 2022 with a bang. Friday, January 14 is going to be the release of Volcanic Rock Live with your current band, Buffalo Revisited, in which you perform the classic 1973 album in full. What inspired you to revisit this album and how did the show go?

DT: Well, the show went very well. To be honest with you Joe, I haven’t done much in terms of Buffalo stuff for quite some years now. Surprisingly enough, around 2013, I was approached by some festival promoters who were very keen to have me do an appearance on one of their festivals. I was a little reluctant. We do music and kind of move on with our lives. We’re talking about the early 1970s when that band was going. I thought, I can’t really put the band back together with original members, because by then Pete Wells had already passed away. The other two guys, Jimmy (Economou) and John (Baxter), had moved to different states and hadn’t played music in years.

Nonetheless, they talked me into doing something. They said, “Look Dave, put whatever lineup of guys you prefer that you think would be able to successfully do the show.” Still I was reluctant until they told me how much they were gonna pay me *laughs*. I’m not really like that usually, but sometimes, it’s like the mafia say, “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” So I put something together and did that show. Surprisingly, I was immediately asked to do others in different parts of the country. Once again, the finances were too good to ignore. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve done a number of things, but the lineup hasn’t stayed the same all the time for various reasons. Other guys had other projects they were involved in, but eventually I ended up with the crew that I did the 2018 with, which is the recorded show that’s gonna come out. That was a really, really strong lineup. Luckily, the production crew that day were able to record it. The result, which I’m very proud of, is about to be released on January as you say on Ripple Music.

It’s a funny thing Joe. For years, I assumed that Buffalo no longer had currency. I’ve done a lot of other things musically since then anyway. It came as quite a surprise to me that these things have come up, and even more of a surprise what sort of response we got. It’s quite amazing man. When you stand on a stage, and you’ve been doing this for the best part of 50 years, which is what I’ve been doing, you don’t expect to be confronted by an audience that’s partly made up of people your own age, but predominantly of people 20, 30 years younger than you are. I stood on stage seeing these guys singing the words back to me and I thought to myself, “How do these guys know this stuff?” But they did! It is quite amazing.

It’s funny you mention that because I remember back in the early 2010s, when I was in junior high and getting into metal, there was this wave of bands such as Pentagram and Bang and yourself with Buffalo. All of a sudden, here was a new generation saying, “Wow, there was more than Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.” Was that a shock for you after decades of dormancy to all of a sudden see this resurgence?

DT: As I said, initially it surprised me, but I’ve thought about it a little bit since then. It seems to me that this particular type of music has a very strong connection to young men. Back in the day, when Buffalo were going strong, we used to have a lot of female fans as well. In many ways, we were classed, even though we weren’t, in the same genre as the pop bands that were going around: screaming girls and all that sort of business *laughs*. But I know that there’s a certain thing about young men especially, that they enjoy and get off on the more aggressive type of music. They want something that is orally exciting. They don’t want soft cock shit *laughs*. I think that that’s true of each generation. In some ways, I think that gangsta rap has fulfilled part of that desire, but I don’t think that you could ever really replace a group of four or five guys with loud electric guitars strung around their necks, and obviously putting a lot of energy into it. You can’t replace that with keyboards and digital noises. It’s just not the same.

I agree. You said it had been some time since you’ve revisited some of this music. When it came to this 2018 show, were there any songs that you hadn’t played since those early days or at all?

DT: All of them *laugh*! I hadn’t played a Buffalo song in any format since 1977. Frankly, one of the things that worried me about doing these things is that it takes an enormous amount of energy, and you have to put a lot of power into the vocals fronting a band that’s doing that sort of music. I had some concerns about whether I was physically going to be able to handle a full show singing at those sort of volumes and levels. In some ways, I surprise myself. I felt quite comfortable. After the first couple songs, I settled in and we actually did two sets that night. We did one set which was all the Volcanic Rock stuff, and then we did another set that was even longer, which we also recorded, which was selections from the other five albums.

Is there any chance that second set will be released in the future?

DT: I wouldn’t say no. The quality is pretty much the same as what’s on the Volcanic Rock stuff. I don’t think we lost anything in anyway doing those songs. It’s a selection of mainly the first three albums and one or two from later stuff. I have video of the whole show as well. You may have seen bits and pieces of it that I forwarded to Ripple for promotion purposes. It shows up on Facebook and things like that now and again. I have to admit that it’s not something I would want to do a lot of at the moment. It’s sort of fun to do every now and again. I couldn’t see myself doing it five nights a week and touring around the country though *laughs*.

Besides anything else Joe, my main musical projects these days aren’t like that. I do much smaller venues, more intimate settings. Nowadays I’m a guitar player as well as a singer, and I like that. When I went to England in ’77 to join The Count Bishops, I continued on being a frontman singer for three years, followed by another four years around England. But when I came back to Australia in ’84, I had made up my mind that to make sure that I continued doing what I loved, and that’s making music, I had to be able to do it without necessarily relying on other musicians. I discovered along my travels that bands are fragile things. They don’t always stay together, even though they may be quite good, because people have different priorities as they grow up. Maybe somebody gets married or has a drug habit or something *laughs*. I don’t know, but they fall by the wayside. So unless you’re able to continue without relying on what can often be unreliable people, then you must do it yourself. That’s what I’ve taught myself. I’ve now turned myself into a guitar player. In fact, I play in a trio now where I’m the only guitar player.

And it took a long journey to get there. I’d like to go back in time to those early days. You grew up during a golden era of rock music. Were there any bands or artists in particular that inspired you to pursue music as a career?

DT: I was born and raised in England up until I was the age of 13. Until that age, I hadn’t really seen or experienced too much music apart from the BBC on the radio. I grew up on a farm that had no electricity. We had a battery operated radio and listened mainly to the BBC. People like Cliff Richard would appear on it every now and then. It never really inspired me, but just before I moved to Australia, I happened to visit a friend’s place in England whose family had electricity and a black and white television set. While I was there, The Rolling Stones appeared on a TV show doing “Not Fade Away”. I immediately connected with that, whereas I hadn’t really before. The Beatles, I can take ’em or leave ’em. I know they’re a great band, but they’re not really for me.

From The Rolling Stones, when I got to Australia, there were other kids on the migrant hostel that I was on for 18 months that had come from urban areas in England and had record collections. We used to sit on the steps and listen to these records, and I started noticing that the songs that these bands were playing, mainly the English bands, Them, The Stones, The Animals, The Yardbirds, that the songwriting credits didn’t include their names. I thought, “Where do these songs come from?” I started trying to find out where they did and I discovered that most of them came from the black blues artists in America. So I started trying to find those records and listen to them by those guys: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf who was my great favorite, Robert Johnson. You know the names. That is really what inspired me and drove me to attempt to get involved in it myself.

I love that honest music. There’s no half-assing about it. They tell the truth, these guys, and they tell it in a raw and real manner. I love that. What I hate is bullshit. I have no time for it. I can appreciate the craftmanship of the pop bands and pop music, but it really doesn’t connect with me very much. I find it disposable.

From there, after hearing all those bands, you started singing for bands in the 60s. One of those bands was Head, who 50 years ago this year changed their name to Buffalo. Were there any other names the band was considering at the time and why did you settle on Buffalo?

DT: That’s a little bit of a long story. Initially, when we started out in Brisbane, I wasn’t the singer of the band. I was actually supposedly the guitar player. The only reason I was the lead guitar player was because I was at least able to pick out some single notes, whereas the other guy in the band knew a lot of chords, so we had him on rhythm *laughs*. I was never a really good guitar player back in those days. What happened was we were invited at a really early stage, probably our first ever gig, not paid. It was a party for some local kids. We turned up, set up our gear, and as we’re about to start, we couldn’t find the guy who was supposed to be our singer. He got stage fright and ran away *laughs*.

So what happened was, the rest of the guys, we all had a bit of a meeting. “What are we gonna do?” It just so happened that I knew the words to most of the songs we had been playing, so I got nominated. From that point, I was a singer *laughs*. It came completely by, I don’t know, osmosis? I don’t know what it was. Just an accident, really. I’m not naturally an outgoing, party sort of guy. If anything, I seem to be rather introverted. But once I got on stage with a microphone, that disappeared. I felt comfortable and I always felt comfortable there. In fact, I probably feel more comfortable on a stage in front of a few thousand people than I do in somebody’s home trying to make small talk with people *laughs*. I think that maybe it’s true of a lot of guys in this business. They’re able to express themselves in a public forum like that, but not necessarily able to be so expressive and communicative away from it.

And thus Buffalo was born.

DT: Back to the main business *laughs*. Initially, I played in a few blues bands up in Brisbane and formed a long relationship with Pete Wells, who was the bass player at that time. We pretty much played everywhere we could around Brisbane, which was a pretty small town at that time. We decided we needed to move to Sydney where opportunities were going to be more inevitable. We drove 600 miles south and relocated to Sydney. At that time, we were calling ourselves Head. We were unknown in Sydney and of course we went around to every agent trying to get somebody to represent us and give us some shows, give us some gigs, but everybody had a problem with the name. We were told constantly, “You can’t go out calling yourselves Head because it’s got sexual and drug connotations. Nobody’s gonna hire you.”

Eventually, we met with an agent who was prepared to listen to us and possibly give us some shows, but he insisted we needed to change the name. His suggestion was that we come up with a name beginning with B. The reason for that was the bands with names beginning in B were very successful *laughs*. That was his psychology. He gave the examples of The Beatles and The Beach Boys. You can’t argue with that *laughs*. Nonetheless, we weren’t playing that sort of music. Already we were heading towards being a pretty much hard rock band. We wanted to be loud. We wanted to be obnoxious. We were pretty good at that actually. We thought we needed a name that at least gave some idea that there was some weight to what we were doing.

We took a map of Australia and we put a blindfold on, spread the map out. This map also happened to show the location of different fauna, where it was around Australia. We put a pin in the map *boom* and the nearest name beginning with B was Buffalo *laughs*. That’s what we started calling ourselves and the rest of course is notorious history *laughs*.

It definitely fit! Not long after, you’d go on to record your debut album, Dead Forever…, which was essentially banned from Australian radio. Were you and the other members ever given a proper reason for this?

DT: I think we understood the reason without being told. The fact was that Australian radio, especially back in those days, was very conservative. Our reputation had already grown to the point where a lot of people were a bit afraid of us, which we rather liked *laughs*! At that time in Sydney, the biggest commercial radio station was called 2SM. The reason they were called 2SM was because they were a church owned radio station. The “SM” stood for “St. Mary”. You can just imagine the chances of Buffalo and the sort of stuff we were doing getting played on a radio station like that *laughs*. It became pretty much our sort of attitude and that’s the way people used to look at us. The conservative media in Australia really didn’t know how to take us at all.

So when an album called Dead Forever… with a skull and bloody face shows up at the radio station, it’s not gonna go over well *laughs*.

DT: It was immediately filed under “Ahhh”, which of course stands for the rubbish bin *laughs*. We took great pride in this. Because we were quite rebellious about this, and the fact that we were seen in this way, we really quite enjoyed that and we played up to it. I remember seeing headlines when we had articles written about us. Headlines like, “Would you let your daughters go out with these guys?” *laughs*. The funny thing was that their daughters all were *laughs*. You know what the music scene was back then. You’re obviously a bit of a student of this. It was very conservative and the people running the whole thing, they really didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know how to handle the sort of things that kids were going out to see and enjoying.

We never had a problem drawing a crowd. Our live shows were always capacity or close to capacity. Yet, as I say, radio, television, and there were a few television shows that had music on. “No, not Buffalo. Sorry.” *laughs*. When you think about it, Led Zeppelin when they were going, for a long time, refused to do any TV shows. Their philosophy was that they’d rather people come to their shows than that they prance around and look like loons miming on a television shows. We were the same. We didn’t care about that stuff.

In between Dead Forever… and Volcanic Rock, you did a handful of shows with none other than Black Sabbath. What are your memories of these shows and was there any camaraderie between the two bands?

DT: For a start, the band had actually pretty much gone into a hiatus before we did those shows with Black Sabbath. I was actually playing in another band while those guys toured. The reason we did those shows was because we had another album we’d recorded and the record company wanted us to go on that show because they thought we would be a good band to be on with Black Sabbath. We basically got back together to do those two shows in Sydney. I actually was doing other gigs in the other band I had already joined. I didn’t even see Black Sabbath play because we did our set and I immediately ran out, jumped in the taxi, and rushed off to a club where I was playing with my other band until 3 in the morning *laughs*. So I never met them, but I do know, because John Baxter’s told me about it, that he actually snuck into Black Sabbath’s dressing room and tried out Tony Iommi’s guitar.

Woah.

DT: He wanted to know what it was like. He thought, “I gotta check this guy out.” He said he was blown away because the strings on Tony Iommi’s guitar, to John, felt like elastic bands. They were that thin and flexible, whereas John was used to playing with 10 to 52s or something. You could grab all of them. They got some meat on them *laughs*. He thought, “Well this guy must be a wimp!’ We did a number of short tours with overseas acts that toured Australia. Black Sabbath, we never met any of those guys. We toured with Slade, Status Quo, Caravan, did shows with Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. Never met any of those guys, even though we were on the same shows.

We are not and never were hero worshippers. I don’t care who you fucking are. We all crap from the same hole and I don’t need to bow down in front of you. But also, you gotta understand that by the time touring bands got to Australia, they had probably been on the road for some months. The last thing they wanted to be doing was socializing with the local guys. They wanted to do the show, get back to their hotel rooms, and snort their cocaine or whatever it was *laughs*. Also, I found that quite often these overseas bands looked down on us. They thought we were the poor cousins. Now I can tell you that I’ve been told thousands of times by fans that we blew Black Sabbath off the stage. I take that with a grain of salt and I do not for one moment claim that it’s true, but nonetheless it’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? People remember those shows and what they remember is how strong Buffalo was.

We were on the road through those years, between ’71 and ’77, almost nonstop. We did things where we would average 12 gigs a week. Not a month, a week. We were doing every weeknight, plus two to three lunchtime concerts through the week. On Friday night we’d do two shows, and on Saturday night we’d do three shows.

How?

DT: We were young! We weren’t much older than you. In fact, we would’ve been about your age. We had a lot of energy. I always say it was the longest party I ever went too. It never stopped! When you’re young, it’s all so exciting. The idea, for me and probably the rest of the guys in the band as well, that we would be receiving the sort of responses we were getting, girls throwing themselves at us, craziness, it just seemed like a dream. Some sort of fantasy that somehow came true *laughs*.

There’s always been this comparison between Sabbath and Buffalo. Personally, I always felt there was little similarity between the two besides that you were both early 70s metal bands. Whereas Sabbath was all about the doom and gloom, Buffalo seemed far more abrasive and even a bit psychedelic at times, as heard on “Sunrise”, “‘Til My Death”, “Shylock”, and so many other classic songs. Would you agree?

DT: Yes, I agree with you. The reason that we landed a recording contract, which was with Phonogram initially and they added on the Vertigo label, apart from the fact that we believed in ourselves so much we sold it to the A&R guy, was because at that point Black Sabbath had just hit in the UK. Personally, I knew nothing about them, but they saw some comparison between the two bands. As you say, personally, and I think for most people who have any sort of knowledge about this sort of thing, we aren’t really that similar apart from the core of being hard rock bands. We had other influences. In fact, I would say we were more towards bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service and those kind of bands, or The Yardbirds and bands like that. That’s really what we were more like, in my opinion. We listened to more American music at that time than we did English music.

This is one of the things that happens in the media as well, or at least in traditional media, and that’s they must find some way to put you in a box. They gotta say, “Ah, I know what that is.” If they can’t pigeonhole you somehow, they get very confused and don’t know what to make of you, so it’s much easier for them to go, “Oh, you were Australia’s Black Sabbath.” We never felt that ourselves, but we weren’t about to fight it *laughs*. Free, Deep Purple, bands like that. We weren’t like those bands either, but we took influences from those kinds of bands much more than we would’ve from Black Sabbath. Funny enough, there’s footage of Buffalo at a big concert in Sydney which was shot in black and white by an ABC TV crew. It would’ve been ’73 or 74. It just popped up on Facebook recently and I’ve shared it to my page. It’s live footage of Buffalo doing “Paranoid”.

I saw that!

DT: That may well have been the only time we played that song. It was never part of our usual repertoire. For some reason, we decided to do it that day.

And here we are watching it all these years later.

DT: And it just makes it harder now to say, “No, we didn’t get any influence from Black Sabbath!” *laughs* That’s called making a rod for your own back.

I revisited Volcanic Rock at work this morning and a few things stood out to me. Firstly, I feel that both musically and lyrically, this was a much heavier album than Dead Forever…. Was this an intentional effort on the band’s behalf?

DT: Yes, it was pretty much. Initially, as you’d notice from Dead Forever…, we had two lead vocalists. I was one of them. Alan Milano was the other singer. He was a great singer, but having two singers with reasonably strong egos in the same lineup can be a bit of a problem. Not that we ever had any hassles between ourselves, but Alan wanted to go and do something slightly different, which he did. He put a band together and off he went doing his thing, which left me as the only singer. We’d always tended, especially in our live gigs, to be pretty aggressive. Even though, as you say, there was quite a number of psychedelic elements in the Dead Forever… album, we wanted to distill the heavier stuff and we wanted to make that a stronger part of what we were doing. We certainly, purposely set out with that album to start moving down that path. I think that that album, Volcanic Rock, and Only Want You for Your Body are the real essence of what Buffalo were about.

As you’d be aware, after the third album, things became a little unsettled in the band. There was member ship changes and we inevitably moved away somewhat from what had always been the core of it. Looking back, it wasn’t the best move, but in Australia, you reach a point where you’ve played everywhere. Because it’s such a small scene, you wear out your welcome much more quickly than you would in England, Europe, or America, where you’ve got such a huge population of people. In America, you can travel for years and still not reach everybody *laughs*. Australia’s a huge country, but the population is quite small. Everything in this business works on percentages. You might get a certain portion of the population that like what you do. The rest of them won’t particularly. In America, let’s assume 10% of the population likes heavy rock music. That translates into a number of millions of people. The same percentage in Australia is, if you’re lucky, a couple hundred thousand.

We were basically pushed into a situation where we were heavily overcapitalized, we had a lot of bills to cover, we had an eight ton truck with full PA system and multiple equipment, three roadies, a manager, an agent, a publicist: All these people that keep the machine rolling. Eventually, you get to a stage where you come under pressure to do something that’s more commercial. “Guys, you need a hit single. You gotta get something on the radio.” Management and agents and record companies say to you, “Well, as long as you continue with this lineup, you’re not gonna achieve that. We reckon that you should do this.” When you’re young enough and silly enough, you’re heavily influenced by these kind of things. You take them onboard, much to your detriment. I know now, which I didn’t know when I was younger, that not everybody has your best interest at heart *laughs*. I have developed a healthy suspicion of guys with big fancy cars and many promises.

Rightfully so. The one song on that album that stands out to me the most is “Shylock”. It’s such a powerful, high energy closer. Could you tell me the origin of that song and how it came to be?

DT: It’s hard to know nowadays what the actual motivation for that was. Most of what we wrote back then, and especially for the two albums I just mentioned, Volcanic Rock and Only Want You for Your Body, would begin from a jam. Everything that we did started from a jam. In fact, when the band first started and we were doing the shows, we never had a repertoire of set songs. We used to make them up on stage as we went along. It naturally came to the place where John Baxter, the guitar player, would lead the musical part of things. He would say, “I’ve got this riff man!” and we’d jam on it for five minutes. I’d make up words as we went along *laughs*. The first three albums, we went into a studio without having any finished songs at all. We went in with riffs and the guys would start playing. The engineer would press the tape and we’d record it. I’d be in the control room or in the toilet with a couple sheets of paper, furiously writing words down *laughs*. Then I’d have to go out and sing the damn thing. Hopefully in their jams they had arranged some sort of arrangement *laughs*. Much of it was freeform.

With a thing like “Shylock”, I hark back to my early education of grammar school in England, where we studied the work of Shakespeare. To me, “Shylock” is an individual who personifies a certain attitude which we can equate now to the greedy corporations and these guys who fiddle around on the bloody stock market. They’re just greedy people, and consequently, not very likable people. I held on to that idea for the lyrics of that song. I tried to use “Shylock” as an example of the sort of things that I found unpleasant: money lenders, money sharks, greedy, unsympathetic, ego. In that particular period as well, I was trying to make my comments about what I saw as the ills of the world, the things that were wrong. We had Vietnam going on, all kinds of nastiness happening around us. Even though we were living in the ass end of the hippie era and it was all peace and love, the truth of the matter is that there was a lot of nasty things going on in the world. Kent State University, the racism, and all those kinds of things. I found these things abhorrent.

I didn’t want to write stuff that was preaching. People don’t need to be preached at, but I just wanted to make my own comments in a reasonably subtle way. Songs like “Freedom”, “Shylock”. Later on, I got to the stage where I was more interested in writing about sexual exploits *laughs*. “Shylock” was a heavy riff that John came up with, we jammed, and I came up with those lyrics to go with it. You may have a basic idea or a plan, but you very rarely write songs to a plan. Many people have said this over the years. They have a way of coming into you. I don’t know how it works. Obviously it may be the things you’re thinking about at the time or what concerns you or maybe you’ve had a breakup with your girlfriend, but to say that you really planned to do that, that’s not really quite right. We didn’t even plan, initially, to be a band like Buffalo, but we became a band like Buffalo because the chemistry between the people involved in it and our concerns took us in that direction.

People try to come up with a plan. Sometimes it works, but it’s always in the pop field. They say, “I want to put together a band like this.” and the proceed to try and gather the people and put that band together. It very rarely works. You can have the greatest players in the world, put them all together in the same room, and you won’t end up with a great band. But by osmosis almost, if you get together a couple of people who are on the same wavelength, and are friends, and just doing something for the joy of it without any real plan, then things tend to take a shape, which you maybe never would’ve been able to predict. That’s true of Buffalo. I quite often look back at it. Even then I looked back at things and thought, “How the devil did we get here? How did this happen?” But you gotta own it. This is what happened, so we’ll own it!

Volcanic Rock Live is the first Buffalo album to receive a proper release in America, thanks to Ripple Music. Were there any attempts at Buffalo getting an American distribution deal in the 70s and why don’t you think the band made it the way bands like Sabbath and Purple did internationally?

DT: The answer to that is very simple: We were in Australia. In those days, Australia was as far from peoples minds as Mars. That’s the truth of it. We were considered some little island down below the equator *laughs*. Nonetheless, I was made aware that at least one Buffalo record was getting airplay at a radio station in New York. When we heard about this, we went to the record company and said, “Guys, we’re getting some radio airplay over in America. We should try and get over there and take advantage of this.” Our record company, in typical fashion for an Australian record company at that time, just laughed at the idea. Their attitude was nobody in America is gonna wanna hear an Australian band. That was prevalent in the Australian music business right up until probably the mid to late 80s.

So what was your reaction, and the Australian scene’s reaction for that matter, when all of a sudden AC/DC broke all the barriers?

DT: Well, we were very happy for them. They deserved it. In my opinion, AC/DC was much more commercial than Buffalo. They had a more singular focus. Buffalo was much more experimental than AC/DC, and AC/DC have continued to churn out pretty much the same stuff since the start. Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re a fantastic band. There’s no doubt about it. I preferred them when Bon Scott was singing, but that’s not to denigrate Mr. (Brian) Johnson at all because he does a fine job. I wouldn’t call him a singer, but he does a fine job *laughs*. These are just personal opinions. We were pleased to see it, but they came along at the right time.

The band was formed maybe two to three years after Buffalo started making records. The Australian business finally started to understand that it maybe was possible for Australian bands to do something overseas, and they also had the right backing. They were signed to the strongest Australian record company. That record company was not dependent on any overseas affiliations. That was Albert of course, which spawned The Easybeats, who were the first Australian band to make a serious attempt at overseas success when they went to England. Harry Vanda and George Young were great songwriters and great producers, and they produced their younger brothers of course (Angus and Malcolm), which are the core of AC/DC. They had a lot of backing, both family backing and record company backing.

They were also still young enough to take the chance to go to England and live on potato peels, which at that time, we would’ve found a bit more difficult to do. Mind you, that’s exactly what I did when I left Buffalo and went to join The Count Bishops. I went to live on potato peels for a while *laughs*. When you’ve spent five to six years touring around Australia, or any other country for that matter, and you’ve built a good solid base which supports the machinery that you now find yourself being part of, it’s difficult to say leave all that behind, transplant yourself halfway across the world in the hope that you may get a chance here.

By the time that those things started to happen for bands like AC/DC, and later Men at Work, INXS, Little River Band, for me personally, Buffalo had lost its interest. I was looking for something new to do. Consequently, when the offer to join The Count Bishops came up, I jumped at that. It meant, as I said, living on the breadline for a while when I went over there, but it was a great experience. It expanded my music horizons and showed me that I had the skills to please audiences outside of my own country.

Hence another chapter in the Dave Tice legacy.

DT: *laughs* The Dave Tice legacy!

That could be your next band!

DT: I’ve done a lot of things since I came back to Australia. I’ve toured with a lot of different people and I’ve had my own bands. Currently, I’ve got a trio going. I spent 22 years doing an acoustic duo with Mark Evans, who you know as AC/DC’s original bass player. He’s now playing with Rose Tattoo. We had a great time. 22 years of nonstop residencies and touring around doing an acoustic duo. We even did a festival in Vienna and an independent release over there. All those things have allowed me to work on my guitar playing ability, gain some confidence in it. It’s all a journey.

You start on a journey and hopefully you progress on your path. It’s not a good idea to reach a certain point and then decide you want to start at the beginning again, because then you never reach your destination. Even then, the destination is not the important thing. It’s the journey that is important, and part of that journey for me is growth. Now apart from being a singer, a songwriter, I play guitar. I run my own little bands. I play harmonica. I’m seen as a guitar player, whereas once upon a time people would’ve laughed at the idea that I would be a guitar player. There’s forward movement here. There’s progress for me. That’s what’s important. I don’t care where I end up. It’s just that I do care of how I travel to get there and what I do to get there.

Money? I don’t care about money. I don’t care about celebrity. I don’t care about that shit. It means nothing to me. What does mean something to me is if I get up to play some music, I can do it well. I don’t embarrass myself, hopefully, and I can please other people. That’s what the great joy is to me. In a good gig, the band, the musicians, and the audience, are one community. They are not separated. I may be the one sitting there playing in front of everybody, and they may be over there, but really we are together. And when we are together, that is the ultimate situation. Nothing can replace that. There’s an exchange of energy, an exchange of love, and an exchange of peace, which hardly anything else can replicate.

With the success of these recent Buffalo Revisited shows and now this subsequent live album, have you considered recording an album of brand new original songs in the style of Buffalo?

DT: No. I don’t know if I could enter that same headspace again. I can, under certain circumstances, revisit, which is why I call it Buffalo Revisited and not Buffalo. Also, I want the truth out there. I don’t want anybody to think that this is actually Buffalo. I’m the singer, blah blah blah, but it’s Buffalo Revisited. It’s not the same thing. I don’t want anybody to ever feel that they’re being told a lie. I can see myself responding to requests to do gigs because I know that I can pick up the phone and contact the people that I would need to achieve that, and they will be happy to accept the idea.

Even though it’s not about the money, to do something like that, I would have to make sure that there was enough money so I can do it comfortably. I’m not gonna be traipsing around in some beat up wagon, sleeping on somebody’s door, and eating McDonald’s every bloody day. I want a few creature comforts, and I think as an elder statesmen as I am now that I deserve a few *laughs*. It would be a wonderful thing if something was financially sensible to maybe present the show live in America, but logistically it’s very difficult now. As I say, without the creature comforts, you’d have a hard time shoehorning me out of my comfortable situation here *laughs*.

Volcanic Rock Live comes out Friday, January 14 on Ripple Music. For more information on Dave Tice and Buffalo Revisited, visit the band’s Facebook here.