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I tended to lean towards the guys who both sang and played, such as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Steve Wariner... And at the other end of the spectrum, I had Eric Clapton in a rock and blues sense, jazz guys such as Tal Farlow and Les Paul... Then Chet Atkins-type stuff.
I'm no spring chicken. The same arthritis that ate up my left hip that finally got replaced hasn't stopped there... And touring is a lot of work. I'm impressed when I see people like Eric Clapton out there. Gee whiz, Eric, give me a break! I know it's gotta hurt somewhere.
When I was a little bitty kid, I was listening to the stuff my parents were listening to. My mom was a huge Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige fan. My dad had a cover band that I sang with, and he loved Parliament, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, the blues, James Brown.
Punk was sort of an angry stance against things that had happened just before, against the pop of glam rock, against progressive rock. Music had become very staid and it was about the playing and people obsessed. Eric Clapton was God and we needed an enema within the art form, and punk did do that.
My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs.
When I got out of high school, I was in a blues band. It was the kind of music I was interested in, and listening to, mostly because it was becoming a vehicle for a generation of guitarists - like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. Mike Bloomfield. And that's what I wanted to be, principally: a guitar player.
I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles and The Stones and Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I'm just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool.
I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.
I have a lot of analog. I think a lot of people do. There are a lot of people that are re-discovering it. I still have a lot of my old records from back in the day. It's a joy to play things like Junior Wells' 'Hoodoo Man Blues,' and John Mayall & The Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton. There's a warmth that you can still feel.
I kept listening, kept going to see people, kept sitting in with people, kept listening to records. If I wanted to learn somebody's stuff, like with Clapton, when I wanted to learn how he was getting some of his sounds - which were real neat - I learned how to make the sounds with my mouth and then copied that with my guitar.
For my 23rd birthday, I received a nylon string guitar. I told myself that if I could play Eric Clapton's 'Tears In Heaven,' then I could play the guitar. I practised every chance I got, driving my housemates insane, until several weeks later I had a shaky version of the song down. I wrote my first song on the guitar a few weeks after that.
I listened to all those blues records. They were great - Clapton, John Mayall. Then eventually I heard Genesis with Peter Gabriel, and I didn't really understand the difference then, but something struck me about the inversions and the diminished chords... they weren't as bluesy, and I loved it. I found out, that was very baroque-influenced.
