By Martin Popoff
Martin Popoff caught up with Gregg Rolie during
the production of the now released album Rain Dance Live.
The disc features Rolie’s love of all things Santana, a band in
which he founded, sang lead vocals for and played the organ.
The Greg Rolie band does more than simply pay homage to his
Santana days, however. The band continues the tradition of
excellent musicianship and solid songwriting. Live, his band is
amazing. A wall of sound fills the room and the audience is
truly taken on a musical journey.
In the interview that follows, Popoff and Rolie
have a conversation about the earliest days of Santana, the
advent of hard rock, Rolie’s tenure in Journey and stolen Harley
Davidsons.
Martin:
Give me the lay of the land, what we can expect with this new
DVD.
Gregg: It was filmed in Sturgis two years ago and
we’ve been trying to get it all together. The next thing is to
do the editing. There were 17 cameras, a 17-camera HD shoot, and
the sound is phenomenal. There were cameras everywhere. I saw
parts of my body that I didn’t want to see ever again. It was
almost like a colonoscopy [laughs]. They’ve got to go through
all the editing. They go through cuts on each song, and they’ve
only done a few at this point, and there is an hours worth. So,
I think it’s about nine songs, something like that. And it’s the
Santana stuff I did, the first three albums is what I cover,
about six or seven songs from that, all the major hits, “Evil
Ways,” “Gypsy Way,” “Black Magic Woman,” “No One I Can Depend
On,” “Oye Como Va,” all that kind of thing, with new material
that is, as of yet, unreleased, and it’s in the same genre. And
also, “As the Years Go Passing By,” which Santana covered a
long, long time ago. When I got in the band, Abraxas Pool,
which was the original members of Santana with Neal Schon on
guitar, minus Carlos and David Brown, who had passed away we did
a rendition of that, which I do now, and it’s about 10 or 12
minutes long. Musically, it goes places you never would expect
in a blues song. That’s part of the DVD as well.
Martin: Do
you consider this band kind of the keeper of the Santana flame,
essentially?
Gregg: Well, we just play this stuff. I’ve got
guys that really understand what that music is, and within that
explanation is the fact that the music was created by six guys,
back in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, and there are only a handful
of guys who get it and play it right. It’s not traditional Latin
music, it’s a fusion of jazz, rock, blues, Latin, I don’t know,
you name it; it’s in there. We broke barriers in music. We did
something that no one had ever done before. When we created it,
we played what we knew, and I’ve had to find guys who could play
more than that, in order to play the stuff correctly, and to get
what they learned. Alfonso Johnson is my bass player, and he
said about David Brown, “I tried changing some of these bass
lines and you can’t do it because the music falls apart.” So he
really understood it. The bass lines are really important to
everything and the percussion kind of floats on top of it while
still carrying it. It’s a unique kind of music, so I have guys
that love this stuff and play great. I’ve got a seven-piece band
and they’re terrific.
Martin:
What is the role of the keyboardist in a band like that, versus
a band like Journey?
Gregg: Well, you know, when people tried to
explain what Santana music is… it’s not Latin rock; I hate that
term. It’s really focused around guitar, organ and percussion.
To explain it simply, the organ is huge in it. It carries a lot
of the rhythms. I have a keyboard player on top of that, on
certain songs, where I had overdubbed things years ago, for
piano and organ and things like that, which I want to keep. Plus
he plays horn lines, which are incredible. His name is Wally
Minco; he played with Jean-Luc Ponty and is a tremendous player.
The keyboards have a tremendous role. The guitar player takes
the signature lines and takes it where he wants without losing
it. Because it’s kind of blues-based you can stretch it a little
bit but if you stretch it too far it gets lost. You can’t do
some kind of modern rock on it, or ‘80s rock, or any of that
stuff because it won’t flow right.
Martin: You
know something that I’ve always found weird, and never
investigated, is there something melancholy about the melodies
in Santana, versus a Journey, for example?
Gregg: How
do you mean? I don’t understand.
Martin:
Well, dark, minor chords, diabolus in musica - everything sounds
dark melodically in Santana.
Gregg: You know what, I’ve never looked at it
that way, but it is all minor chords; it’s true. But that’s kind
of the essence of that music, and I don’t consider it dark, as
much as I do heavy. You know, it is blues-based. “Black Magic
Woman” was written by Peter Green, from Fleetwood Mac, when he
was in the blues era and he came from playing straight blues.
Some minor songs are beautiful. So it all depends, but yeah, it
is. Most major melodies seem to be a little happier, it’s true.
Martin:
Sturgis – do you have any biker connections yourself? Is it a
different crowd when you play something like that?
Gregg: Oh it is a different crowd, that’s for
sure. They are quite attentive. We played a bunch of biker
rallies and even one in Mexico. That was something else. I won’t
be going to Mexico soon, with what’s going on over there. But
anyway, we played a few of those, and they are out for a good
time, let’s put it that way. I don’t care what age they are;
they’re out for a good time.
Martin:
Any stories? Do they try to give you gifts?
Gregg: No, but if someone gave me a Harley, I’d
take it. I had two Harleys years ago, but they were stolen by
the Hells Angels, so I just gave up on it; that was back in the
early ‘70s. I kept my bikes at this guys shop and they came in
and took them, or at least that’s what he told me. Let’s put it
that way, who knows? He could’ve sold them for all I know.
Martin:
But it wasn’t a personal vendetta or anything.
Gregg: No, no, no, nothing like that. I’ve got
no bone to pick with those guys anyway. It was just one of those
things. I didn’t have a place to keep it at the house I had as
all I had was a carport. This guy had a garage and he actually
worked on the bike and this and that, and his story to me was
that that would happen. So I just dropped the whole thing. Maybe
somebody saved my life as I don’t belong on the back of bike.
Martin:
What other bands played with you in Sturgis when you made this
DVD?
Gregg: Steve Miller, The Fabulous Thunderbirds
and Cheap Trick.
Martin:
Any stories of hanging with any of those guys?
Gregg: Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick is a heck of
a guy. I think he has more fun than anyone I’ve ever watched
play. They just really have a good time, so do I but it took me
years to figure it out. He’s always been doing it [laughs]. And
Miller has been doing that stuff for a long time, and he does
really well with that. And The Fabulous Thunderbirds I really
dug as well. Great guys.
Martin:
How about a few words on the Journey years? I guess which are
your favorites there, and why did you eventually leave?
Gregg: My favorite albums... Infinity is
probably one of my favorites. I like Departure as well. I
played harmonica on it. I mean I did a lot of different things.
That album was pretty good. Roy Thomas Baker, I thought, gave us
a great sound, with all the multi-track layers. He made it sound
thick and huge and I like that. I like that album, I like the
music on it, you know, it’s kind of the first one with Perry,
and it was that metamorphosis from me being a lead singer to
having another lead singer. In fact, we had one prior to that,
Robert Fleischman, who wrote a couple of the songs that we did
on that album. So it had a, I don’t know, a special meaning to
me. Mainly that it gave us a sound with the multi-track and the
guitar and the way he went about recording things, even though
he was technically different.
Martin:
How about some stories about Roy?
Gregg:
He’s a very colorful guy. We went out and got a chair and put
some red velvet on it and went to a theatrical place and bought
him a throne because he did Queen’s records. We made him the
throne and we got him a crown and he loved it. He goes, “Oh,
this is perfect!”
Martin:
Did he have his Rolls Royce already?
Gregg: Old, I think he said several of those. He
stayed at my house and he truly was a character. I really like
him a lot. He is so flamboyant and different, but it didn’t
bother me. It was a lot of fun.
Martin:
Did he work hard? He was right in there?
Gregg: Oh yeah, he was right in there. He worked
hard and he played hard too [laughs]. But he worked with a lot
of bands. He created a lot of bands sounds for an awful lot of
fans. The Cars, Queen and City Boy. Oh, maybe I’m thinking of
Mutt, with City Boy. Roy Thomas Baker did Queen, he did all
that first stuff with the multi-track but he treated each of
them a little differently. He experimented a lot and he brought
that to America. Both of those guys have done tremendous work,
both Mutt Lange and Roy Thomas Baker.
Martin:
And towards the end of your time with Journey, they came up with
a sound that was dirtier and brasher. Up into Departure.
Gregg: Well, yeah, we kept it going until I left
and then it became a little more pop, I guess you could say. But
they wrote tremendous songs and had big hits and then got huge
after I left.
Martin:
Did you see Steve kind of pulling away, not liking fame?
Gregg: I don’t know, Steve was a hard read. I
don’t know if he planned things or just fell into things or
whatever. But you know, I guess that it ended on Raised On
Radio, which had a lot of R&B on it. I think that’s where
he wanted to drive the band and I wasn’t into it. I’m not an R&B
player; that didn’t fly for me anyway. Plus I thought the band
was better on the other side. I was more on the rock to blues
side, but that’s because I came from Santana, that’s what I
know.
Martin:
And what were your reasons for wanting to leave?
Gregg: Oh, I just had enough of traveling and I
wanted to start a family, which is really one of the major
reasons. I saw a lot of kids on the road that I just wanted to
go hang on a tree somewhere. And it’s not their fault, nor their
parents, they just needed stability. It was probably the most
mature thing I did in my immature life [laughs]. So anyway, that
was my major reason. Perry made that an easy decision to make.
He was always saying, “We’ve got to have a band meeting about
this, about that, about this, about that,” where you didn’t have
to have one at all. The band was being run by manager Herbie
Herbert, who did a great job, and it was unnecessary. I was
pretty much through with it anyway. I just did not like touring
anymore. You know, the funny thing about travel, or anything
that you do, is that you do it because it’s fun and when it’s
not, it’s over. You recognize it or you don’t. I just didn’t
like doing it anymore and here I am doing it again [laughs].
Martin:
Looking back, who are your main keyboard influences?
Gregg: Mine really started with Jimmy Smith. I
was in a band in San Francisco that was a Top 40 band, and we
covered a lot of things. It was like Paul Revere & The Raiders,
The Animals, the Beatles, the Yardbirds, that kind of music.
When we started creating our own, the band fell apart. A friend
of mine found Carlos playing with three guys from high school,
one of which was Mike Carabello, who became the conga player. I
lived in Palo Alto, and we went up to San Francisco for Tuesday
night at the Fillmore, where Bill Graham would have local
nights. He would have local bands come in and play, and on this
night, Carlos and Mike were playing. He saw him and he told me
about him. He went and got Carlos and picked him up in San
Francisco. The Fillmore guys found out where Carlos worked or
whatever, and dragged him down to Mountain View, which is right
next to Palo Alto, and he told us we were going to jam. We
jammed until the police came. There were various substances
about and I looked over and said, “We’d better get out of here,”
and I looked over and Carlos was already 50 yards down the road
because he was very street-smart from living in Tijuana; he was
very hip to things. We hid in a tomato patch until the cops
left and then went back and picked up his amp and my stuff and
that’s how we met.
Martin:
And Journey, putting that act together, did feel like it was
something that needed to be done or did it feel like an
assembled band, somewhat?
Gregg: It was an assembled band, as a matter of
fact. I have to say the band really belonged to Neal and Herbie
because they started it. They called who they wanted to call and
put that together and it turned into a band pretty quickly. I
got a call like a week after they started thinking about it, so
I could say I am a founding member of that group, easily. But it
really was their brainstorming that started it. It became a band
and we started working and then we worked harder, as opposed to
Santana. For me, Santana was a phenomenon. We worked hard at it
for a few years, when it exploded after Woodstock. Journey was
more of an effort. It was three or four years of real hard work.
We almost got dropped from the label and all kinds of things
happened. We could sell more tickets than albums and the band
was really good; the music was terrific. I still hear that to
this day. We decided to really go for it and get a singer and
all that stuff, which I wasn’t opposed to at all. I’d always
done lead singing and played keyboards and harmonica. We had two
keyboards, three sometimes, and it was pretty spread out; so it
didn’t bother me.
Martin:
And is that sort of the main catalyst of how the sound changed?
Gregg: Well, I would say it was, to mince a few
words, fusion rock with vocals. It was different. There was a
lot of soloing, but the songs were good. The soloing was the
thing that really drove it very, very high but we did write
songs but they went through a lot of changes.
Martin: I
won’t keep you too much longer, but let me ask you a technical
question about rock music becoming something that could become
heavy metal, in the 60s. I’ve talked to a lot of people like
Jack Bruce and Leslie West saying that heavy music evolved
because of the music but also because of the changes in
amplification and the first PAs. Was that some of the impetus?
Was the technology changing the music as well?
Gregg: You know, I don’t see it that way, as when
heavy metal came in. Is that what you’re saying?
Martin:
Yeah, Cream and Hendrix.
Gregg: Amplification became bigger but it’s minor
compared to what happens now. When all those guys started
getting Marshall’s and just blasting people to hell, which I
think Blue Cheer were the loudest band I ever saw. I said, “Are
you kidding me?” People just couldn’t keep up with them. They
just turned the thing up to a hundred and let it fly. It was
just loud and that’s it. But yeah, I guess they are right in
that fashion, that it became... rock got a little heavier, yeah.
It got a little thicker. You know, when Cream came out and all
that stuff, and it was very cool to have that. We didn’t do that
[laughs].
Martin:
Well, you were a pretty electric band.
Gregg: Oh very but it wasn’t done that way.
Carlos and Neal played through twin reverbs. They were doctored
and they were pretty loud, but it’s nothing like that; it wasn’t
deafening. You’ve got to remember, we played kind of like a jazz
band where we played to each other. There just happened to be an
audience there. We didn’t play to the audience like rock bands
started doing, where they were really focused in on the
audience. We really didn’t. We just played and people watched.
Martin: So
who were the first bands to have two or three or four Marshalls
up on stage?
Gregg: Well, the first one I saw was Cream.
You’re right - that’s the first one. It was awesome. We went to
the Fillmore and saw Cream play and I was blown away by it. It
was totally different. I really liked that stuff, and Hendrix as
well. Hendrix, and I mean, wow, Hendrix created things that
people make buttons for now, you know what I mean? I was telling
my wife that what this guy did with electricity and feedback is
out of control. I think he had a wah-wah and that was it. I mean
he really played with the electric guitar.
Martin:
First guitar hero, you figure?
Gregg: Yeah, it was pretty big. He was one of
those guys, you know, he could play one night and it would be
awful, because of the electric tricks that he learned just
didn’t work because the sonics in the room were wrong or
whatever. It was out of control, which is what made it so cool.
Or he was brilliant, and it was either one or the other and
there was no in-between because if he didn’t do that feedback
stuff that he could get, it wasn’t quite it. And sometimes he
would go over the top and he would hit sonics that he didn’t
even know existed. I saw him a couple times and we played with
him a couple times, once was in San Jose and because it was
outside you couldn’t get that same kind of reaction, so it
wasn’t so great. But then I saw him at the Winterland, in San
Francisco and he was unbelievable.
Martin:
Any other memories of Blue Cheer?
Gregg: No, I just went and saw them play one
time, at the, what the heck was the name of that, the Haight
Theatre on Haight Street? And any rate, we saw them play there
and we sat up in the balcony and it was so loud it was just
deafening and we left. It was just so loud and we weren’t used
to it. Well you know, when you play on a stage it’s not as loud
as it is outside, especially now with the PA systems they have.
It’s way quieter on the stage.
Martin: Do
you have any recording projects coming up?
Gregg: I really don’t have any. I’m going to play
live. Everywhere we’ve got to play in the last seven years,
people have asked, “When are you going to do a live CD?” And we
have it now, so we’ve covered that but I’m really proud of the
band and nothing is lost on the music. It is exactly what it
ought to be and it’s really clear and clean.
www.greggrolie.com
