April 2001 The Psychedelic News

Mike Vernon produced Savoy Brown's first single, Willie Dixon's "I Cant Quit You, Baby" in 1966 along with the band's first four albums. He also produced John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack and others. What was working with him like and how much of a learning experience was it for you and the others.

Mike Vernon was very, very important to us all. He recorded John Mayall first. Savoy Brown was his second project after John Mayall. We had opened the club you talked about and it was the mid-sixties and in London everything was dance. Nothing's changed. Essentially we want music to dance to. Every now and then there's a group of people who come along and want to get serious about music. We were at that vanguard in the mid- sixties, The Stones had moved on and become pop stars. In London, the club scene had gone back to dancing. Hendrix hadn't properly hit, in fact, I don't think he was around at the time. The Animals had moved on to become pop stars as well so there was a vacuum. So, we said let's open a Blues club. People thought we were absolutely, raving mad; "You're barking mad, what the hell are you doing? You're going to fall flat on your face, it's been done, it's finished with. The Stones have moved on, everybody's moved on. You're crazy." But, I didn't think it had been done properly. I thought it had been done but almost with a Folky influence. As much as I love The Stones with Brian Jones, there was still something lacking. I even thought Mayall at the time, who I love dearly, was Folkie influenced. Lighter sort of thing. I got it into my head that Blues was heavy, heavy, loud, crashing music. That had never really been explored properly. So, we opened the club and really had about six people show up the first night. We went around London and put up flyers on lampposts. A few more people then showed up. Every Monday night we'd play a Blues Monday and eventually it just got packed. Eventually it turned into a proper venue, Freddie King played there, Fleetwood Mac played there, everybody. So it just hit at the right time. There were tons of people who would come down there and jam, this was the place to go on a Monday night in London. It became the place to be because something was starting. Anyway, to bring it around full circle, Mike Vernon came down. My brother was managing me at the time and he invited Mike Vernon to come down and he loved the band. I think we recorded for his label for those first singles, I think it was four sides. Then he became a producer for Decca and produced Mayall with Eric Clapton and then brought us in. He said a few things to me when I was quite young, if I played a particularly good solo on one of the records, he said, "You better watch out or you're going to be a guitar star", or something. It was very important for me to hear that from someone who I admired so much. I was like, "Oh yeah, perhaps I can be this." He was very, very important to me and he was very important to the whole Blues scene. I don't think we did him particularly well. We all eventually left and wanted to do our own thing but he's done better than anybody. He's living in a mansion in England and he's very well off, so I can't feel too sorry for him!

Tell us a little about putting Savoy Brown together.

I was living in inner city London and I wanted to form the group. I'd met John O'Leary at a Blues import store in London and found out he played harmonica and lived just a few blocks away from me. We got together for some record listening sessions and that's when it crystallized for me. I had a love of lots of music, roots music. I loved Gospel music, I loved James Brown, R&B, I loved Rock and Roll. Anything that was simple, to the point, heavy with emotion and Black. John was the same, so we started playing and decided to put a Muddy Waters type band together. Now, who do we know? He knew a guy called Bob Hall, who had played with the Groundhogs, and he told us not to do it. He thought we were totally crazy, it was over and done with and that the Blues had gone. We managed to convince him to do it, though! I knew a friend of mine down the road that played drums, that was Leo Manning. I think we put an advert for the bass player and perhaps Leo knew Brice, one of those kind of things. Before we knew it we had a band and were rehearsing in my bedroom. Then we would take the equipment in a cab to the Nag's Head to get a real life experience because it was a large room. Then it was like, "OK, let's do it." So, we had known that The Nag's Head had this Folk club earlier on and had been successful but it had become a banquet room upstairs of this pub and nothing was happening. The pub owner was a fantastic guy, absolutely fantastic, and we said, "Hey, can we rent the upstairs room and put a club on every Monday night?" He said, "Fine", and it was as simple as that. So, this small banquet room is where it all started really. We called it Kilroys, and we just went from there. I think it just hit at a good time. Of course, John Mayall was around playing and all those kind of groups, but we were kind of the new kids on the block.

Then along came the inimitable Chris Youlden.

Yeah, then Chris came along. The bass player said to me one day, "I used to be in a group with this guy who is fantastic." That first (Savoy Brown) group had some success but there were definitely some problems within the group. Leo, my great friend, wasn't a great drummer. Brice Portius, the singer, would constantly sing off key. So, there were problems. John O'Leary left the group, who was a founding member with me, to get married and so forth. We brought in a guitar player, that brought drugs into the band and so it started getting crazy. I left the band, I think I was kicked out actually. Then we re-shuffled and I sat down with my brother and said, "This is not going where it should go. This is not what the band should be. Let's figure this out." He rallied around me and we said, "OK, lets take the band back to where it should be." Chris Youlden had joined when the whole thing was splintering so he was sort of already in place. We decided to reform the group, with Chris and myself, and take it where it was supposed to go. That was a very good decision.

The second album, the excellent "Getting To The Point", was then released (1968). Do you think that it was around this time that the band came into its own and developed its own sound?

Well, we went into the studio and did that second record and it's a very good Blues album. In fact, I heard from John Lee Hooker's guitar player not so long ago that John had it in his car. So, I think it is a terrific Blues record. We started writing our own material and immediately all the influences we had came out. We wrote a song called "Train To Nowhere" which really was our take on "Mystery Train" by Presley. It was like, "OK, I love "Mystery Train", so let's write our own "Mystery Train" song and that was "Train To Nowhere". We started bringing our influences into the Blues and so it started to develop. Chris Youlden grew up on Nina Simone and people like that, so when he started writing songs he started bringing in a certain quirkiness. So, yeah, it started, I suppose, to become something other than the Blues but we were still a Blues band. When we came to the States in the late sixties we were just a stoned-out Blues band. The records might have been developing somewhere but, saying that, the highlight of the show was "Honey Bee" by Muddy Waters, which Chris was dynamic on to say the least.

Chris Youlden is such an incredible Blues singer. Tell us what playing with him was like.

We went to a club and Bobby Bland was playing there. Bobby Bland gets us on stage, probably had no idea who we were. I'm playing guitar and we did "Three O'clock In The Morning Blues". Chris is probably one of the greatest white singers who has ever graced the planet. We do "Three O'clock In The Morning Blues" and Chris is standing there, I'm playing guitar, and Chris looks like he's just walked out of a garbage can. Bobby Bland does a chorus of moaning, which Bobby Bland always did, it's like his trademark, and hands the mike to Chris! Now, it was the worst thing he could have done because there's nobody who can moan better than Chris Youlden. I mean I've never in my life heard anybody come close to singing the Blues like Chris Youlden. So, he hands Chris the mike, after Bobby did his moaning chorus, Chris immediately then does a moaning chorus! I've never seen anybody's jaw drop so low as Bobby Bland's! His face went all sorts, he just could not believe it! He was amazed to say the least! Essentially it was the Kim Simmonds/Chris Youlden show at the time. We would go around jamming with people in London but we were absolutely, completely out of control. We'd hit the stage and it was madness. All it was with Chris and myself was sheer emotion. How can we get the most emotion across in two seconds. So, I would be just absolutely strangling the guitar, Chris would be absolutely singing like he's just lost his mother, his dad and five children the minute before in a car crash! It was unbelievable!

You've recruited some incredibly talented vocalists over the years. Just to name a few: Chris Youlden, Chicken Shack's Stan Webb, Keef Hartley's Miller Anderson, Idle Race's Dave Walker and, more recently, Nethaniel Peterson.
Does your guitar playing change with different singers?

Oh, yeah. My guitar sounds incredibly different with different singers. When you're playing with a great singer, you sound better. That is the case with a drummer, a bass player and so on. I'm looking back now and the times when my playing has been the best is because it was fashioned along with the right band and the right singer. As a Blues player you play off the singer. That's all you're really doing. Blues right from the beginning, right from the "cotton fields back home", you had a guy singing, playing guitar, and the guitar would echo the vocal. That's exactly what you do in Blues, nothing has changed. That's why guitar is such a dominant feature because it really should, in Blues anyway, echo the vocalist. Now, if I've got a great vocalist I can do that very well and that's been a strong point of mine right from the early days. I listen to the vocalist, I play against the vocalist. If the vocalist will shout hard, then it's time to play the guitar hard along with the vocalist; if he sings sweetly, you play sweetly. It's a wonderful experience to have that sort of empathy with a singer and I think I've really had it probably twice in my life. I'm not saying that all the other singers weren't great but the empathy I had with Chris Youlden and Nethaniel Peterson was unique, where you really kind of felt that closeness. I would say Lonesome Dave as well, but less so. That's not to say Dave Walker, who is a fantastic singer, all these guys, Stan Webb, Miller Anderson, all these guys are great. A singer can really take you to great heights.

What are some of your memories of Lonesome Dave? Was it a surprise when Lonesome Dave Peverett, Roger Earle and Tone Stevens quit to form Foghat?

I don't think so. I think we'd gone in the studio and I tried some ideas out. I think I even tried "Street Corner Talking" out with Dave in the studio but it just wasn't working out properly. I wanted to move in a different direction, the guys wanted to rock out. Dave was a Rock and Roller at heart, more so than me, even though I I'm a big Bill Haley fan and so forth. I wasn't as old as Dave for it to really take root. Those influences come through in my playing but I am essentially a product of the Blues with those early influences where Dave was really a product of the Rock and Roll generation, the fifties. Don't get me wrong, there's nobody that understood the Blues better than Dave. Dave's understanding of the Blues is second to none, but in his heart he was a rocker. When you see him dressed in the gold lame suit with Foghat, that is Dave Peverett! So there was the splits straight away. I was still non-commercial, wanting to play the Blues and those guys wanted to rock out and so we went our separate ways.

You're about halfway through your solo acoustic tour. What are the things you enjoy most about temporarily getting away from the band/electric environment and going with a duo/acoustic format?

This acoustic thing has really turned into a viable alternative. I love it. It hasn't got the pressures associated with a band. In any experience in the workplace, whether it's a band or not, you've got to deal with people coming, going, leaving, moods. It doesn't matter whether you're in a ten-piece band or a three or four piece group, it's exactly the same, you're dealing with personalities. Of course, when you're in a band you're living with people twenty-four hours a day, literally. So, that's very tiresome and very difficult. The acoustic thing is just a blast because at the moment it's just a duo and very, very manageable. I recall John Lee Hooker saying that he loves playing on his own more than anything else and really, the only reason he puts a band together is because, of course, there is much more profile available to you. I just read that Robert Lockwood Jr., who played with Robert Johnson back in the twenties and thirties, I think one of the only people alive now with any connection to him, said Robert Johnson just liked playing on his own. So, there is certainly something to playing acoustically and since I've made it a duo it really has enabled me to stretch out. If I'm on my own playing the acoustic thing, you tend to pretty much have to follow a certain patent to kind of fill in the sound. With another guitar player I can almost approach it in an electric fashion, I can do lead lines while the rhythm is held as opposed to doing material that is compatible to a solo acoustic thing. So, I get the best of both worlds. Judging by the gigs I've done so far, the turn out and the performances, I think it's what I've wanted it to be, a viable alternative to the band. Not to supplant the band at all, because what I do is play electric guitar. I think it's absolutely necessary to be able to challenge yourself, because it is a challenge. I probably work harder at the acoustic thing than I do at the electric thing just because one feels that you haven't got thirty odd years to hide behind like I do with electric. I'd like to see it develop as it is because it gives me more options as I get older and I have a blast at it. I absolutely love it. There's something about simply being able to have to wrench a sound out of an acoustic guitar. There is certainly a beauty to it and you get back to that pristine condition of the instrument. I find that I can still get the same expression out of it that I do with the electric guitar and I communicate the same way.

Part of classicrockpage.com is our Internet radio station, CR Net Radio, which plays solely the great, rarely played music of the late 60s and early 70s and is programmed by listener suggestions. The following songs are an example of the Savoy Brown songs that have been requested by listeners and are currently in the loop and playing: "Train To Nowhere", "Mr Downchild", "Sunday Night", "Tell Mama", "Street Corner Talking", "All I Can Do", "Hellbound Train", "Second Try", "Stranger Blues". Can you tell us a little something about them? Either about creating them, recording them or performing the numbers in concert.

You mentioned earlier that "Train To Nowhere" was your take on "Mystery Train"

That was it really. I always loved "Mystery Train". And if you think about the structure of the song it just goes to the fourth chord, exactly like "Mystery Train" does. Trains are a very traditional thing to sing about anyway and that was the whole reasoning behind that song. It was a single, I think it was one of our first singles actually. It wasn't just a straight Blues structure. I think because it wasn't a straight Blues structure it lent itself to some inventive arrangements with the horns that were put on there and so forth. And I think that was the beginning of saying, "Yeah. We can do our own material and not lose the integrity of the music, but perhaps add something to it."

"Street Corner Talking"

I had grown up in Wales, moved to London. In London at the time it was The Mods and The Rockers. On a Friday night everybody would congregate to figure out what they were going to do. The Mods would be on one side of the street, this was inner city London, and The Rockers would be on the other side of the street. I was a Mod, but a closet Rocker. I loved Presley but I couldn't tell my friends that. So, we all used to hang out on the street corners and even before I was too young to do that, I would see all these cool guys hanging out, and I'm talking about a hundred people, and then everybody would disperse. I never lost that atmosphere and that's really what "Street Corner Talking" is about.

"All I Can Do"

I was deliberately analyzing music at the time and I thought that the best music, the best music I liked, had a melodic section, but then it wouldn't get too melodic. If it got too melodic it would lose me because I was a big Blues nut. I liked the music to go a stage further, but I didn't want it to go too far and become a pop song. I wanted to write something like that. So with "All I Can Do", I had that melodic verse with the descending chords, which are rather nice, but then I brought it right back to just a two chord groove. So that all of a sudden you're out there, this is nice and then wham, we're back in where we should be. So, it was a deliberate attempt by me to actually do that and it absolutely worked and I've never been able to do it again! So, it's very, very rare you can do it. I think that some of the best songs are like that. You take people out and bring them back.

"Second Try"

Literally about getting married a second time. I was trying to write material that really meant something to me, say something about my life. Tell a story. I keep forgetting to do that. I suppose we all do, whatever we do we keep forgetting the basics. Whether you're a soccer player, hockey player you've got to come back to the basics every time and I think the basics with songwriting are telling a story. At the time my manager said, "Oh, you're getting too close to the bone. You can't write stuff like this" in our kind of music" But I got away with it.

"Hellbound Train"

Growing up in the early sixties I was a big reader of science fiction, all my friends were as well. Ray Bradbury, all the great writers we were fans of before it became a mainstream movement. Robert Bloch actually wrote a story called "The Hellbound Train", a short story. Of course, Robert Johnson had that song, "Hellhound On My Trail" and I had read a lot about how the devil plays a part in Blues music and how it really haunted a lot of people that were performers. In science fiction they're always talking about doing deals with the devil and selling your soul, so it was something I was reading about and also it played a very real part in Blues music. Believe it or not, I was listening to The Temptations, who were very popular at the time, doing these very long songs. "Papa Was A Rolling Stone", these great, long epics. I love that kind of thing and I wanted a song like that. It's got nothing to do with The Temptations but I enjoyed those things so much, I thought, "Hellbound Train" could be an epic. It could be a long song, an epic about somebody who has really sold his soul. It could be moody and Bluesy. Then I had help from the bass player, Andy Silvestor. It was all in my mind but I couldn't quite figure out how to get it down and he helped me put it into musical form.

"Mr. Downchild"

Well, "Mr. Downchild" must have been influenced by John Lee Hooker. He did a song called "Downchild". We were actually in the studio doing our second record and I started played the piano a bit and if my memory serves correct, this is how it went: I was playing those chords and at the time I was heavy into arranging and atmosphere. When I play those old records it surprises me when I hear the arrangements that I'm almost back there. I'll remember saying to the band, "Let's do this." It's amazing how they transport me right back. So, I was in the studio, hitting those piano chords, and I'm envisioning this really heavy atmosphere laid down and I think it might have been my idea for the title. Chris (Youlden) came in and we wrote the song there and then. I don't think we've ever played it live. It's not easy to pull off live, it's very much a studio type of thing. It's very dynamic. It's just one of those things where some songs grow from the studio environment. I think one of the reasons John Lee Hooker is so successful is that when he goes into the studio he uses that intimate atmosphere of a studio to create that sound. It's very difficult to create that in a live environment because it never gets as intimate as a closed room.

Intimacy is one of those critical elements for certain songs, especially for a number like "Mr. Downchild".

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We never did do that song (live) though. We might have done it at that point in time in England when we were touring in the sixties. By the time we became a concert act we were doing intimate songs. I recall one of the highlights of the set at that time was a Muddy Waters song where it was just Chris and two guitars and nothing else. It was very, very dynamic. "Downchild" starts with Chris Youlden almost talking. So, basically it was just born in the studio environment.

You toured relentlessly for years and you've always had a passion for live playing. It's really evident for anyone who's ever seen you live and for anyone who's heard any of Savoy Brown's live releases. Stuff that comes to mind immediately are things like "Louisiana Blues" from the album "Blue Matter" (1969) and "Walkin and Talkin" from 1976's "Skin and Bone" right up until the more recent live releases like "Live in Central Park" (1985) ,"Live n' Kicking" (1990) and last year's "Looking From The Outside". Some artists view touring as a necessary evil while others love it. Tell us a little about the importance of bringing your music to audiences in a live setting and your feelings about playing live.

I just don't think you can ever reach your full potential playing in your living room, it's just as simple as that. It's not the same as painting or writing. With music you need an audience. That's just the way it is for my take on it. You get way more out of playing live than you get pouring into it. That's the thing. It's totally inspiring. It's very, very hard and most people can't do it for any length of time. Those of us that can do it find that it's incredibly stimulating. There's no way I want to play my guitar completely in a studio environment or in a front room for people. That's not what it's all about for me. I have no idea of what is in me until I walk on stage and then I find myself playing and really enjoying the stuff. It's an absolute joy. It always has been. I look at the old photos of myself and I see a pretty jolly guy up there obviously loving the situation. As I said, basically you want to be your best. You want to be the best you can be and you can only be the best you can be by playing in front of people. Songs take a life of their own and your playing develops. I don't know what to say without being clich�. Everybody says they love it, it's fun and all that stuff. I find it incredibly hard. It gives me an amazing charge to be able to play, as hard as it is and as challenging as it is. It's what I do. Some people do enjoy playing in the studio, some people do enjoy sleeping in their own bed every night. I certainly don't like sleeping in hotels anymore. When I think about it, "Man, I've been doing this all this time and this is what I am." I would like to re-write my life in many ways! It would be nice to re-write something and put myself in a nice position of some sort, but the reality is, this is what I am. This is what I do. This is what I love. And this is where I'm going to be, whether I like it or not. Playing live is incredibly rewarding. It's like anything else, like riding a bicycle up a mountain, "Who wants to do that?" I've done it, it's killing! Then you get to the top and it's like, "Wow, that's why I did it. The exhilaration is fantastic." I think it's the same with playing, the exhilaration knowing that you've actually achieved something, you're being the best you can be. And the only way I can be the best I can be is to put myself in a challenging, demanding and hard working situation and then I become the best I can be. I wouldn't be the best I can be sitting in my front room having it comfortable. You never get anywhere being comfortable.

Tell us about your site savoybrown.com. Was it your idea and do you like that immediate availability and feedback to and from fans?

It's been up for four years, at the very beginning of the whole revolution. I was always into computers. Again, I had some good support people, some friends around me that nurtured me. As soon as it became apparent to me where things were going I got the web site up, again not so much from my own foresight but having good people around me. I wanted people to find me. It's enjoyable to see how much the music has meant to people because again it reinforces my own love of music. Being a professional and having to deal with a lot of the behind the scenes downside of music sometimes can jade you and certainly disappoint you and so it's really great to be reminded by people who write in from far flung corners of the world and say how important a song or a record is. It reminds me exactly how I feel about music and it keeps me going. I'm not going to make it a commercial thing. My take on this is I don't like going to sites and suddenly being sold something. People come to my site simply as a place to come to get in touch with me or to see what's going on. I'm not interested in making it a commercial venture. That doesn't interest me, but I do have to develop it.

There seems to be a lot more PR and selling yourself type responsibilities involved with being a musician nowadays.

As more time goes by, I don't want to do a lot of the stuff. I just want to be a musician. The older you become you have to take on more responsibility. I don't have a manager, I manage myself. I have the wherewithal to do that. I'm able to apply myself to a lot of areas that obviously when I was in my twenties I didn't have a clue what to do. I didn't want to know. With age comes responsibility and so I've had to be responsible in a lot of areas that I don't want to be responsible for! I just want to be a musician! But to be a musician I really do have to wear many hats and nowadays of course one of them is looking after the web site. Not to a very big degree but enough. I want people to know that I'm there. I've gone into some artists web sites and you know the manager is writing the letter. I see through it and I hope other people see through it. But like I say, the focus of the web site is I'm hoping to keep it real.

In the end, you'd rather be playing guitar.

Exactly. Like this morning, I spent an hour playing the guitar and doing some Country-Blues stuff. I get up in the morning, I have coffee and that's what I do. I don't want to go into the office. I don't want to do any of that stuff.

Is that pretty much your daily routine?

Yeah, pretty much. Have two or three cups of coffee to get myself jolted and then I write songs or play guitar because I find that I'm completely fresh and I'm not worn down by the day. I find that it's a great time for me to be excited about playing. Right now I'm working a lot with the twelve-string.

Any thoughts about what's next after the tour this summer?

I thought that after this recent acoustic thing finished off that I'd kind of out-drilled that vein. I thought that maybe I'd said all that I could say acoustically, but not so I think. You were talking about the live thing; I mean the live acoustic show has taken on a completely new life since I brought in a second guitar player, David Malachowski. All of a sudden the live show has completely moved ahead of the recordings. On the new one, it's singer -songwriter, I've relied on the songs, I think it's a good record, but on stage I'm just out there acoustically communicating in a different way with my instrument. So, it occurred to me that there might be a live acoustic record down the line here! So again, what you were saying about playing live, I just seem to have an affinity with that.

visit Kim Simmonds on the web @
www.savoybrown.com