As legendary as the music and touring regiment of blues rock pioneers Savoy Brown was, those who played alongside founding guitarist/singer/songwriter Kim Simmonds would go on to become equally as legendary. There was rhythm guitarist “Lonesome” Dave Peverett and drummer Roger Earl, both of whom would go on to form Foghat. Drumming virtuoso Bill Bruford would play with the band before achieving icon status with Yes and King Crimson, as did keyboardist/guitarist Paul Raymond before joining UFO. However, none of these names lasted longer than drummer Garnet Grimm and bassist Pat DeSalvo. For 13 years, this was the rhythm section who backed Simmonds on 7 studio albums and countless shows. We had a chance to sit down with Grimm and DeSalvo to discuss their memories of working with Simmonds, Savoy Brown’s final album (for now), Blues All Around, and much more.
Greetings Garnet and Pat! Welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Garnet Grimm: We are doing awesome! Thank you for having us.
Pat DeSalvo: Very good! Incredible *laughs*.
Thank you both for taking the time to do this interview, especially considering the unfortunate circumstances. I’d like to send my condolences for Kim Simmonds’ passing, and would also like to congratulate you on an excellent swansong in Blues All Around.
GG: Yeah, thank you. It’s still a little raw. We’re missing Kim for sure.
When did work get started on this album and did the band have any idea it would be their last?
PD: Well, we knew Kim was sick. How it came about was he had these demos for quite a while. He just sent them to me and Garnet and we worked on them. I’ll let Garnet explain that process in a minute of how we actually recorded it, but we really didn’t know. Kim, before he passed, had sent demos to me and Garnet. A week before he passed, he texted me the songs he wanted to be played first on this record. We talked for a couple minutes, but he couldn’t really talk at that point. He was really out of it. This is unchartered territory for us. We thought we’d keep playing. We’d be touring more. We had all these plans and then Kim got sick. He was going through chemo. He had cancer before, but survived. I was anticipating him getting well, but it became very evident that he was on his way out unfortunately.
GG: Kim was so tenacious. We always thought he’d keep going *laughs*. I’ll explain the process a little bit. Like Pat said, Kim sent us all demos, including Ron Keck at SubCat Studios where we were set to record. I think that was Ron’s idea actually. We studied it for a bit because Kim wasn’t feeling 100% and Pat is now living in Florida, so we couldn’t really rehearse. We were all a little bit apprehensive because, as a band, we always recorded live. We did a lot of rehearsing. This time, it wasn’t to be.
Kim had these ideas. Pat and I went in together and we knocked out our tracks in a day or two. I think the second day we were there, Kim came in and was able to give us some direction and some support. He added some stuff, some harmonicas and keyboards that day. I had some percussion stuff that I had ideas for, but that was added later. We kind of had to build the record from the ground up, which was a lot different than what we had ever done with our time in the band.
Did this approach impact the final outcome of how the songs were recorded or the overall direction of the album?
PD: No, not really. I went and revisited the last couple records. It was pretty interesting. Kim would try to get a different tone for each record. City Night was in a minor key. He always had ideas on how he wanted the record to go, but I listened to the records and they all wound up pretty much sounding the same. When you’ve got three guys who’ve worked together this long, it’s gonna be consistent no matter what we do. I was really happy the way it came out actually.
I didn’t know what it was gonna be like because we were using a different producer, a different studio, different everything. I should say a different engineer, because Kim really produced it. With Kim not being there and us not practicing, I hadn’t seen Garnet in a year at that point. The last show we did was up near you at the Arcada in St. Charles. That’s a nice place to play.
Oh yeah, the Arcada is great!
GG: I love in the lobby area, they have the drum shells that are like chandeliers. It’s pretty cool *laughs*.
PD: Yeah, and the people who work there are really gracious and they get you to have a great show.
The title, Blues All Around, really sums up Savoy Brown’s career. Whose idea was this title and were there any others in mind?
PD: That was all Kim.
GG: Yeah, that was all Kim. Kim was the premiere songwriter of course. He really had some ideas that he wanted to get across. I think it’s an appropriate title for the album because I kind of get the feeling that he was serving up some music like, “Hey, here’s some more blues for everybody.” That was a nice compliment, a nice thing. I think he had some urgency to this album, that he really wanted to get it out. But still, we didn’t really know that it would be his last. I wanted to believe that he still had more gas in the tank, but I’m not sure that he thought that. I don’t know.
There was a little sense of urgency to it, which again caused Pat and I anyway to, when we talked about it, it was like, “I hope this goes OK.” It came off really good, I think. It ended up being a very solid album. I have to say I’m pretty happy with it, and you see a bunch of styles too. You see a little bit of stylistic changes and changes in Kim’s tonality. The guitars change a little bit, so it’s pretty cool. You get a little taste of everything.
Yeah, this is a very diverse album. There’s the English blues sound obviously, which Kim was at the forefront of back in the 60s. There’s a bit of that dirty Texas blues, that I think everyone appreciates. There’s some Latin flavor, some hard rocking moments. It’s a very well rounded blues album that I can’t recommend enough. Of course, I’m biased, but still.
GG: *laughs* Right on!
PD: Thank you!
What are your favorite songs on this album and why?
GG: For me personally, there’s two I really like. One is “Texas Love”. I just love the raunchy shuffle. The guitars are wide open and the amp is screamin’. I love those kind of things. That’s one of my favorites. My other favorite would have to be “California Days Gone By”, just because of the way it evolved. Pat and I didn’t really write anything. We just kept playing grooves because what happened was the demo that Kim had presented didn’t quite fit the lyric, at least we weren’t sure about it.
It was about a rock band hanging out in California in the 60s, but the demo that he sent had a country feel to it *laughs*. After some discussion, we decided we would just start playing grooves and see what we could come up with. Ron the engineer had his finger on the record button for an hour while we just messed around. What you hear on the record is a result of us messing around, trying to come up with the right groove for that song. That was kind of fun too.
PD: Yep, that was. I just got the record and I’ve been listening to it. I like “Going Down South”. I like the whole record. There’s nothing I really don’t like, and we’re really critical on ourselves. I usually think everything sounds terrible. I’m like, “I should’ve done better. I should’ve done this.” Blah blah blah. This came out very organically. It sounds good. I really like it. It shows different veins of music that he liked, and he’s paying homage to certain people on the record. It was good. I just like the whole vibe of the record.
GG: I do like how Kim sandwiched the beginning and the end with the instrumental, and he ends it with the instrumental. It’s a cool thing.
I meant to ask about that last song, “Falling Through the Cracks”, which is just Kim alone, guitar and vocals. Was it planned to leave the song stripped down like this?
GG: Yeah, I think Pat tried to play bass on it once and Kim said, “No.” *laughs*
PD: I wanted to bring my upright in and bow some stuff and he said no. I wasn’t quite grasping what he was going for, but he started the band by himself and he ended the band. He was probably looking at his life. I had so many conversations with him over the years. He’s looking at his life like, “This is where I started. This is where I’m going.” He never got the acknowledgement that he should’ve gotten. I’m not saying this because I played with him, but there’s guys like him, Alvin Lee, Steve Marriott, Rory Gallagher, that never got what they deserved. They never got that like Clapton or Page or Beck. And they’re all great in their own way. It’s amazing how many bands came out of the UK. It’s amazing. Bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. A lot of great bands came out of there and it’s a small country.
GG: Black Sabbath.
PD: Yeah, look at that whole concept. They were writing the book back then. They were coming up with this stuff. They grabbed it from the blues guys out of Chicago and the south, and they just repackaged it and sent it back over the pond to us. I read an article about Jimi Hendrix where it said Chas Chandler brought him purposely over to England because he didn’t think he’d get the respect and the acknowledgement and that it’d take his career longer because he looked at the black guitar players in America and nobody was really going to their shows.
If they got 20 people, they were doing good. They go over to England and they’re packing places out. People want to see them. It was a smart marketing move to bring Hendrix over there, get some guys to back him up, record over there, and become a sensation overnight. Then send him back, even though he played the Chitlin’ Circuit forever. It was interesting. It was very wise the way they did that. It probably would’ve taken longer or, who knows, never would’ve happened. I doubt it. Look at the groundbreaking stuff he did with his guitar playing. He was phenomenal.
That’s an interesting point you make. I’ve used my webzine as a platform to call out the big “rock” media and corporate owned “rock” stations. Why is it we hear Clapton and Page every single day, yet Savoy Brown, Humble Pie, Gary Moore, Johnny Winter, Rory Gallagher we’re lucky if we hear on a “deep tracks weekend”. I can’t tell you how many people I see on social media calling out Chicago’s local classic rock station. They ask, “Why don’t you play “Hellbound Train” or “Tell Mama”?” Yet here’s “Cocaine” for the ten zillionth time. Why? Especially when you consider in the heyday of these acts, they were all peers. It’s not like any one band was over or under another. So why with the sands of time did some remain in the spotlight and others retreat underground?
GG: Well, there’s no two minute answer to that. There’s a lot of business, politics, and things that go into that answer. I don’t think there is a quick answer to that. I think that some of it had to do with management. Some guys got a hold of really good management. Look at Led Zeppelin. They had great management.
PD: Peter Grant was amazing. It’s management, publicity, the right lawyer to make the deals and push things through. There’s great songs, but we all know you play a song enough and it becomes catchy and people like it. That’s a whole other thing, but yeah. Right place, right time.
GG: The significance of Kim and Savoy Brown is he was a pioneer. He really was at the cutting edge of that blues rock movement. He helped launch quite a few careers. I don’t know that he meant to do that, but he did. That’s really what set Kim apart. Well, there’s a few things actually. Kim, his guitar playing was just phenomenal. I was stunned at how much music he could write. He would send Pat and I demos. Some days he’d send us five and I haven’t got to listen to one *laughs*. Then you might get to rehearsal and he’d say, “Oh, forget about that. Let’s try this one.” He was just writing all the time.
PD: I forget what song he wrote. He wrote this one song and we rocked. It became a metal song and he goes, “Oh stop! I don’t know what we’re doing. I should give that to Judas Priest.” I can’t remember what song it was, but it was really catchy. He was not into that. He was always trying to set himself a little aside. Sometimes I’d go, “That’s a real catchy song.” And he’d say, “Yeah, I don’t like that then.”
GG: Did you know Judas Priest brought Savoy Brown out for a short tour?
PD: Yeah, they helped Kim out. I know K.K. Downing liked him a lot. They also opened for Deep Purple…until one of the guys got obnoxious on the plane and threw the whole band off. It was probably Dave Walker. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, so I shouldn’t say, but Dave Walker…he was in Sabbath for a short time! They actually recorded some stuff.
Yeah, many forget that Walker was the original replacement singer in Sabbath when Ozzy first left in ’77.
PD: Yep, not Dio!
Exactly. Like you said Pat, all of those English bands from that era are interconnected in some way or another.
PD: They are. Walker wound up in Fleetwood Mac for a while and I think the bassist from Fleetwood Mac or The Yardbirds ended up in Savoy for a while. One of the guys went off with The Kinks, and then Stan Webb and Miller Anderson…
GG: I think Hellbound Train had all of the Chicken Shack guys on it.
PD: Someone joined Wishbone Ash or UFO too.
GG: Yeah, Paul Raymond was in Savoy Brown for a while!
Paul Raymond, who was also in Chicken Shack.
GG: Yes *laughs*!
I think everyone was either in Savoy Brown or Chicken Shack at one point in time.
PD: Or John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, or The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds became The New Yardbirds, and all of a sudden they were Led Zeppelin.
Yeah, it’s wild the evolution of these bands. When recording Blues All Around, or any Savoy Brown album of the past decade for that matter, were there any songs that didn’t make the cut? If so, is there potential for another posthumous Savoy Brown release?
GG: Yeah, there were quite a few songs that didn’t make the cut. There were songs we liked that we worked on that Kim said, “No, I don’t think it’s gonna fit on this record.” The demos were done. I think we recorded several of those. To answer your question, yes, there were several demos that were finished that didn’t make it on the records for one reason or another, and I’d like to think that there probably will be something in the future from Savoy Brown. There’s certainly enough material out there still that that could happen, but I always like to say the caveat is if there is gonna be another one, it’s gotta be done with the same conviction that Kim would’ve put into it. It’s really gotta be worked on.
PD: There’s all those tapes at his house that someone should go through. I never even thought about that. There’s a bunch of stuff there.
How far do those go back? The 70s?
PD: Shit yeah! He’s got the master tapes for Hellbound and all those early albums. He finally got them back. Debbie (Kim’s widow) should do something about that. They’re two inch tapes. But he’s got a lot of stuff, cassettes…he had this really weird recorder that took this special tape. He also had a Neve board and we used to record on it all the time. Me and Garnet started recording with him in 2009. We did an acoustic record with him.
GG: 1999! We started to record with Kim back in ’99. We did a side project with him unrelated to Savoy Brown. We just became friends at that point, but it wasn’t until 2009 that we officially joined Savoy Brown. I was going to say, wasn’t it the summer of 2008 that Gerry (Shortino) was sick?
PD: No, that was 2009. In May, 2009, we did that show with Pat Travers where we did the acoustic set. Then Pat came on and they were yelling at him because he was too loud. That was funny *laughs*. They were rocking it up and this guy had a dB meter in front of him.
GG: Yeah, we played this little outdoor amphitheater and they had Pat Travers and Kim Simmonds. The guy’s walking around with a dB meter and I’m going, “You hired the wrong band. These guys want it one more louder.” *laughs*
PD: Their amps went to 12! It was Spinal Tap 2.
GG: Kim would turn on his amp and the dB meter would go into the red *laughs*.
PD: I remember one time he played a chord and the sound guy was going, “Lower!” We were like, “What the hell? We’re playing live!”
GG: Pat and I got to a point where we’d have to intercept some of the sound people because one of the worst questions you could ask Kim at soundcheck was, “Do you think you can turn your amp down a little bit?” He would go ballistic.
PD: These were good sized rooms and he’s using a twin now. He got rid of the Marshalls and he was loud! Those twins are freakin’ loud amps. We were playing 400, 500 rooms like the one in Seattle. That was a pretty good sized room. The sound guy would say, “Turn it down.” and I’d say, “Just don’t put it in the goddamn PA! You’re just here to amplify it. You’re sound reinforcement. We’re not making a record here. Let’s not get crazy with it, OK?”
GG: It got to a point where we were on tour where, like I said, Pat and I would intercept the sound guy and say, “Please don’t ask him to turn down. Just let him get his settings and then we’ll figure it out.” *laughs*
Together with Kim Simmonds, you two comprised the longest running incarnation in Savoy Brown’s history. How did you end up in Savoy Brown and what do you attribute this lineup’s longevity to?
PD: Well, I first met Kim in ’88. He came out to a show I was doing and we became friends. We kept this relationship up, but he knew I had this job and was starting a family and had young children. He would come over sometimes and have coffee. We would just talk. What happened is Gerry got sick. He wound up having a quadruple bypass two days after doing a show with Kim. Kim asked me to sit in. At first I said, “No, I can’t do it. I really need to rehearse.” He said, “I’ll give you more money.” I said, “It isn’t the money. I just don’t want to go on stage and do a bad job.”
He was doing a festival in New York City. I didn’t want to go there and bomb and make the band look bad. Ironically, the bass player had something to do and couldn’t do these dates. When Kim came back, he said, “I need you to play bass for a while. Gerry’s not gonna be able to make it.” He had three weeks or a month’s tour on the west coast. I asked Garnet to come in and drum and I just rehearsed with him. I wanted to sound good. I don’t like doing a bad show.
Anyways, I got the gig. Kim got off the plane after we did the tour and he looked at me and goes, “Do you want to join the band?” I went and talked to my family and the guys I work with. I have a full IT job, so I went back and asked them, “Could I do this?” Everybody was already fans of Kim’s, so they went, “Yeah, do it!” The main thing is, me, Garnet, and Kim really respected each other. We were friends and he appreciated our work ethic. There was no babysitting to do with us. Total that all up, he realized he had a good lineup and players that he could count on and that wanted to grow. I just wanted to grow and get better. He allowed ma and Garnet to do that.
GG: I think, just to broaden what Pat was saying, what happened was Pat was asked to do those shows and I learned the set so I could help Pat along. We were all friends at the time anyway, so we would go out to Kim’s and rehearse the set. I had to learn 90 minutes of music, so when it came time to join the band, Pat was very instrumental in trying to get me in the drummer’s seat. It all worked out. Kim agreed and we all began to rehearse as Savoy Brown.
The first record we did together as Savoy Brown was Voodoo Moon in 2010 or 11, but we had really been playing together for a good while. We were all adults at this point. The good thing was we all met each other at a good time in life because I think all of our bad boy days were over for the most part. We were good with working on music. I also want to say it worked out well because the whole time Pat and I were in the band, we never had a road manager. It was just the three of us. Kim’s wife, Debbie, would book flights, advance the show for us, get us directions sometimes.
PD: All the time.
GG: She would come out to the shows very often and sell merchandise. When we got out on the road, it was just us managing us. We all had out jobs to do and we just went to work doing them. We just made it happen. It worked out well. We were a trio, so it wasn’t like there were ten guys in the band. That was good. It’s a lot easier to manage the three of us than it would be a bigger band, but we did well. We were able to manage ourselves.
PD: There were times I had to yell at myself though *laughs*.
What was the band’s songwriting approach? Specifically, how would you two construct rhythm parts to back Kim’s guitar and vocals?
GG: I would say first of all, with how the songs were constructed, we did quite a bit of rehearsing. The 14 years or so we were together, we did a lot of rehearsing. All three of us lived in the same area for a long time, so getting together once a week when we were not on the road was pretty easy. When we were on the road, often we would rehearse songs at soundcheck. Something that Kim was working on, sometime he’d have an idea and we’d just develop it from there.
Kim had ideas of the structure, but he would give Pat and I creative reign with our own instruments. We could come up with our own parts and if something wasn’t working, he’d let you know. Most of the time, we were OK with that. I think it was presented that way where Kim would present the basic structure. “This is the idea. This is what I’m thinking. Let’s see what happens. Let’s try it!” *laughs*.
PD: Yeah, we tried a lot.
GG: Sometimes Kim would say, “Don’t play the first thing that comes to your head.”
PD: He did! I remember where we were. We were in Santa Cruz and I was like, “What the hell did you just say?! What are you talking about?” He’d say, “I’ve got this great idea. Wait, I’m getting another one. OK, I got it. We’re ready to go. Forget about the first one though.” He did say that. He was very serious too. I think it was directed at you Garnet. After he said it, he had this look on his face. We were like, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
GG: We would laugh and he’d say, “You know what I’m talking about, right?” “No, we don’t!” *laughs*
PD: “We have no clue what you’re talking about! Let’s have another cup of coffee.” It was funny. I’m sure a lot of people would’ve liked to have gone on the road with the band for a week or so. Maybe not a week. Maybe a day’s all they could take because we were three weird bastards when we were together. We were all over the place. We would tell the same stories sometimes, but we’d all politely listen. We’d do our shows and sometimes Chicago would be our last show. Then we’d have a ten hour drive, so we’re entertaining ourselves. The radio hardly went on. It never went on! We’d just talk and smoke cigars.
GG: If you were driving back and it was a Sunday, if we were watching football scores, Kim would say, “Don’t tell me! Debbie’s videotaping it! You cannot tell me what the score is!” It was too funny.
That’s a great segue into the next question. Savoy Brown played thousands of shows all over the globe during their 57 year run. Which shows stand out as some of your favorites?
PD: There’s so many. I’ll tell you one that was funny that I’ve told before. We were over in Europe and Kim is telling the German people how much he likes their music, their beer, their women. He’s going on and on and on and I finally had to go behind him and say, “Hey, we’re in Belgium!” As far as good shows, there were so many. There were a bunch in Canada. We did these festivals that were really extraordinary. The Iridium shows were always good in New York City.
GG: I could remember a show we did in Chicago. What was the place we used to play all the time Pat? It closed.
PD: Fitzgerald’s or Reggies?
Fitzgerald’s. Reggies is still open.
GG: Oh Reggies! I love Reggies! I love Robbie (Glick, Reggies owner).
PD: Yeah, Robbie was actually gonna come into town.
GG: Well this show was at Fitzgerald’s. I can tell you something that was very memorable about that for me. Kim used to do a version of “Street Corner Talkin'” where the basic format of the song was the same, but the second guitar solo, he’d bring the band down and then he’d build this solo. He kept building it and building it until it became very loud and raucous. You never really knew where it was going or how it was gonna end. We were just playing off of each other.
Kim brought us in for a safe landing and it was great, but I remember tearing down for that show and there were about three guys standing around looking at Kim’s setup. This one guy says to me, “Where’s the pedals? Did he take the pedals?” *laughs* I go, “There is no pedals! It’s all him!” The guy goes, “Wow, remarkable.” And he just walked away. That was very magical. Some of those jams we would do…we would do those open jams. We would do them in “Louisiana Blues”. There were a few tunes he did that in. It kind of had that 60s psychedelic thing going and that was cool. Those were my memorable moments.
PD: There were so many good shows. We had so many good moments. I just sometimes think of different spots in the country and think of where we played and what we did. Kitchener was great. There’s just so many. There really was.
GG: My favorite shows honestly were those ones where you felt like you were going somewhere unexpected, but you connected with the people. We played that Niagara Falls Blues Festival and I remember we had a pretty good show. I remember that was one where I thought we were doing well in connecting with the people and jamming well. Those are the ones that stick out in my mind as the good ones.
PS: The 100 Club was good too. Under the Bridge at Chelsea Stadium was good. Europe was always good.
GG: There’s a place in London called the 100 Club. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it. It’s not very big, but it’s one of those places where anybody who is anybody seems to have played. In fact, I remember looking at a picture on the wall where Metallica played there. I was thinking, “Wow! How did they get in there?”
PD: The Beatles, Oasis, Sex Pistols…all these people played this place. You can go on and on.
GG: It’s one of the last places left that would’ve been there in the 60s, so even the earliest versions of Savoy Brown would’ve played there. That was kind of magical because we played there on the last tour we did with Kim in the UK. It was cool because a lot of people came out, a lot of older fans that remembered him from back in the day. It was cool. We got to connect with those people. It was really neat.
Do you two have any plans to collaborate musically in the future?
GG: Yeah, I’m gonna see Pat at the end of this week. We’re gonna be jamming somewhere in outer space there *laughs*.
PD: We’re gonna be at the Sarasota Blues Fest at the Music Ranch in Florida. What happened was we met a guy. His name is Sean Chambers. We did a festival with him and we became friends. He’s on the same label we’re on and we went to Europe with him in October. We had talked to Kim about it and Kim was all on board. As we were over there, I would text Kim quite a bit, but we would call and talk to him using Whatsapp. We’re now playing with Sean and we’re hopefully gonna work on a record. Well, they want us to do a record. We just gotta get together and do it now, so we’ll see what happens with that.
He’s a really good guitar player in the vein of Kim and he’s a great singer. He’s a real cool guy to hang out with. When we went to Europe, it was fun because we got along so well and it was like, “This is an easy hang. We can do this.” That’s what we’re trying to do. We’ll see what happens. It’s tough because we don’t want to tour a real lot. We’re all older. We’d like to just fly in, play some shows, and fly back to our homes. Everybody wants you to play all the time and it’s changed so much. Are we gonna have a crowd that night? Live music has changed quite a bit. It’s there still, but there’s so many groups out there trying to do it, especially the younger ones.
GG: I think COVID changed a lot of things, but some things are coming back around. Do you see live shows starting to do well again in Chicago?
The observation I’ve made with the pandemic is, when it started, there was roughly a year and a half with no shows at all. They started picking up in the latter half of 2021. And now it feels from 2022, and definitely into this year, it’s every band touring everywhere at once. There’s times where there will be three, four, or five conflicting shows a night here that would attract the same demographic. That was a big change in the industry post-COVID. The mentality seems to be, nobody’s selling records anymore, so everybody needs to tour. That then creates a problem where people don’t have the time or disposable income to catch five shows a week, every week, for the whole year, or whatever may have you.
GG: That’s a great point.
PD: Yeah, Pantera’s out right now with Zakk Wylde!
Yep! Is it truly Pantera? No, and I think everybody paying to see that tour views it like I do: A tribute touring under the name. In the same breath, as a 24 year old who grew up on that music and never had the chance to experience it live in an arena setting by even half of the guys who recorded it, I’m selfishly all in. I got my pit ticket the day they went on sale. I’ll be honest, it cost a pretty penny, but that’s gonna be my “big show” of the year. But when you’ve got other bands of the same caliber announcing runs now, Guns N’ Roses is doing a stadium tour. There’s rumor The Rolling Stones are announcing something in the next week. You’ve got these mega classic rock arena and stadium acts announcing all their tours at once, but then you have to think. When the average Live Nation show is $100 just to sit in the nosebleeds, is it worth it?
GG: Yeah, exactly.
PD: Agreed.
That’s all the more reason why I enjoy you guys playing the clubs and the theaters. That’s more my scene anyways. I know it sounds ridiculous at 24, but as someone who’s been going to shows regularly for most of my life, it just makes sense. Funny enough, I spent most of my formative years at Reggies and the Arcada Theatre.
PD: Robbie is a great club owner, and the guy at the Arcada (Ron Onesti).
GG: He’s in it for the right reasons, Robbie.
PD: Yeah, I know it’s happening, all the old time guys that had venues in the late 60s and early 70s, unfortunately, are dying. The clubs are closing or are becoming disco or whatever they’re gonna put in there. A lot of dance…what is that?
EDM?
PD: Yeah, EDM. Think how long rock’s been around now. It’s incredible. Dixieland didn’t last that long. Jazz didn’t last that long. Even traditional folk music as we know it hasn’t lasted that long or got the popularity that rock does. The staying power is incredible. Led Zeppelin still gets a lot of airplay. The Doors still get a lot of airplay. The Beach Boys, The Stones, that stuff is still there and it still sounds great to me.
And when the Stones are on the brink of announcing their 60th anniversary tour, which is gonna do all football stadiums. I don’t even want to think of how much those tickets are gonna cost. I remember a decade ago when they did the 50th anniversary tour. My parents got me tickets to that show for my 8th grade graduation and I remember them almost falling over for what they paid for those tickets. The hype back then, no pun intended, was “This could be the last time!”
GG: Right *laughs*!
In the early 2010s, 50 years for a rock band was unheard of. Fast forward a decade later and now everyone’s on their 50th, 55th, or 60th anniversary tours.
GG: It’s incredible, but you got to see Charlie Watts!
I got to see Charlie Watts AND Mick Taylor.
PD: Really?!
GG: Wow!
Yes, he rejoined for that tour.
PD: Oh yeah, they did bring him back around. That’s right.
Yep, so my philosophy is if I never see The Stones again, I got to see five of the classic guys on one stage. That’s pretty insane.
GG: Yeah, that is.
And even with Kim, that was what, 57 years?
GG: Let’s see…yeah. Savoy Brown started in 1965.
PD: He led a great life. I’m really happy to have known him. I didn’t like to see what happened at the end when he got ill. I can’t imagine what he was going through, but he was so damn determined to get this record out and do another one. He was like, “We gotta do this.” He really did play for the fans. We had to stop doing meet and greets for a little bit because he was getting so tired. He’d be exhausted some nights because he really played on stage. He really gave his all. When you’re in your 70s and you’re jumping around like a maniac, I give him a lot of credit. I’m glad we got to be part of the history. We’re both very fortunate that we got to play with him and be friends with him.
GG: Yeah, definitely.
PD: We never got fired *laughs*.
In closing, what was the biggest lesson you learned from playing with Kim Simmonds and being a part of Savoy Brown?
PD: For me, to be humble. He was a very humble guy 99% of the time. I always told him, “That’s a problem of yours and that’s why you’re not where you want to be.” He’d go, “Well, I don’t chase the carrot.” He always told me that. “I don’t chase the carrot Pat. I just try to go out and be me and play.” He really did live for that moment on the stage. All the driving, soundchecks, shitty food; it was all about being onstage and playing. That communication, that was our sanctuary.
GG: I would say the same thing. I would add that with Kim, he could talk all day if he wanted to about the things he’d seen and done and how he was on the cutting edge of rock n’ roll in the 60s and the 70s and the people he’s played with, but when you talked to him, there was none of that.
PD: You had to pry it out of him.
GG: He would never really go on and on about that. You just had Kim. There was a good dose of English reserve and humility, but I feel grateful that I got to play with him. He was a creative giant. He taught me how to listen better to the players that I was playing with. He forced you into that creative space. You had to keep up with him or else *laughs*. He was like that. The three of us got to do that very well. I do remember him giving me some advice one time. He would give us solos in a couple of different songs.
One of them I was having a little bit of a hard time transitioning into. He told me, “Take your time man. Don’t rush right into it. Take your time. This is your time to shine. Let people listen for a bit. If you screw up, you screw up. Let things develop.” It’s something I keep in mind to this day because when you get a solo spot so to speak, sometimes you do tend to wanna rush into it and show everybody all the chops you got. He’d say, “Don’t worry about that. Just try to say something and let it develop.” He had a lot of advice that way. Certainly had enough experience *laughs*.
The new Savoy Brown album, Blues All Around, is available now on Quarto Valley Records. For more information on Savoy Brown, visit www.savoybrown.com.