Legendary Percussionist Russ Kunkel Talks about His Life in Music, The Immediate Family and a Cruel Twist

By: Rick Landers

Driving the beat on a few thousand milestone recordings is the legendary percussionist, Russ Kunkel.

For decades he’s been a first call drummer for folks like George Harrison, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Jackson Browne, Lyle Lovett, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Seger, Warren Zevon, Harry Chapin, Bob Dylan, Crosby, Carly Simon, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Steve Nicks, Dan Fogelberg and a long, long list of others.

Today, he’s hanging with his friends in their new super group, The Immediate Family, that include: Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, Leland Sklar and Steve Postell. They’re “all rounders”, having worked on recordings that run the full gamut of music, some as producers, singer-songwriters, music directors, and more. And, they’ve recently landed a deal working with a great label, Quarto Valley Records.

As The Immediate Family, they’ve launched a series of video streams, recorded enough tracks to pull in a large group of followers, and have been involved in the making of a movie about the group.

During the Sixties, Russ would catch the wave of surf music, before the British Invasion unleashed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Dave Clark Five grabbed his attention, along with a bit of folk, as he worked with John Stewart and  The Kingston Trio.

Having played jazz earlier, Russ’s hands-on education made him a perfect fit for Asylum records session group, The Section (1972-1977), where he joined forces with Danny Kortchmar (guitar/vocals), bassist Leland Sklar, and keyboard player, Craig Doerge. The Section would back now legendary acts, as well as release three albums of their own: The Section (1972 – Warner Bros.); Forward Motion (1973 – Warner Bros.) and Fork It Over (1977 – Capitol).

Kunkel’s pummeled his drum kits with abandon, found the space on recordings to make nuanced marks, and followed in the footsteps of greats like Jerry Allison who slapped his lap for the Buddy Holly & The Cricket track, “Everyday” and The Beatle’s Ringo Starr who played a suitcase on The Beatles’ recording of Holly’s, “Words of Love”. Russ joined in on “Nothing But Time” on Jackson Browne’s tour bus, playing a cardboard box.

Russ has had a storied career, that’s included contributing to such songs as the aforementioned, “Nothing But Time”, on Jackson Browne’s Running On Empty album, percussion on Harry Chapin’s, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972 – Elektra), having a cameo on, This is Spinal Tap (1974) as Eric “Stumpy Joe” Childs, a character that died on someone else’s vomit, played drums on Joni Mitchell’s, Blue and For the Roses albums,  and forming friendships with Danny, Waddy, Leland and Steve that led to the creation of The Immediate Family.

There’s more, much more, but let’s get to Mr. Kunkel’s interview where we talk about his career, drumming, surf music, producing, work-for-hire versus royalties, his ’57 Chevy and, of course the challenges of COVID-19 and all the hard work that The Immediate Family has been doing that making them one of the best known groups in the country and beyond.

******

Rick Landers: Hi Russ, looks like you guys have been keeping busy.

Russ Kunkel: You know, we have been busy. We’ve been just working. The band’s working a lot. We’ve been doing videos from home and writing, and fortunately we had an album in the can before this whole thing happened so.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. That’s coming out in the fall, right?

Russ Kunkel: It is coming out in the fall, or the first part of next year.

Rick:  I was talking to Danny (Kortchmar) about it a couple days ago. And so, hey, when I was talking to Danny, he gave you a compliment. He said that I’d enjoy talking to you. And he said, Russ is a real smart guy, real intelligent, and he’s well read.

Russ Kunkel: [Laughs] Well, that’s very nice. That’s very nice of him to say.

Rick: I was looking at a few sites, and I think it was Wikipedia, which I tend not to, you know, it’s not real authoritative, I don’t think. But, I saw that there were a lot of instruments that were listed that you played, as far as percussion instruments, and I thought that some of them were pretty unique, some that I’d never heard of before. So, when you’re in a studio, or when you decide what you’re going to play, do you have a list of these things? Or do you just intuitively say, “Oh, I think I’ll play this?”

Russ Kunkel: Well, the first off, you can’t trust Wikipedia for anything. The Truthapedia is basically a database that anybody can add to.

Somebody, somewhere along the way, there was something mentioned that I was good friends with Jimmy Hendrix.  I wasn’t. I met him once, but that probably came from a Japanese interview that I did where I said that a band that I was in, in the late ’60s, was a house band at the Whisky A Go Go, and we’d opened for Cream and Jimmy Hendrix, and a lot of other people, and somehow they misconstrued that as me being his good friend.

I don’t know what percussion instruments they listed as me playing, but I play all the kind of standard stuff, you know?

That anybody would have in their bag of tricks. I’ve never played a tabla, although it’s a fantastic instrument, but pretty much just the normal stuff. And then the second part of your question, I just kind of wait for the muse to kind of intervene and give me an idea of something to play. And for the most part, whether it’s drums or percussion, I try to play something that I’ve never played before. I try to come up with something different and unique.

Rick: In the studio, the studios that you go to, do they have a lot of stuff available for you to use, or do you bring your own gear?

Russ Kunkel: Oh, I always brought my own. I have all my drums would be there, and then I would have congas and bongos, cymbalas, and then a whole box of things to shake and hit.

Rick: So and you’re playing DW drums?

Russ Kunkel: DW, yes.

Rick: I saw that you played a cardboard box on something. Is that true?

Russ Kunkel: I’ve played cardboard boxes on lots of things, but the one that probably got the most notoriety was on the Running on Empty album.

Rick: Oh really? What songs did you play that on? Do you recall?

Russ Kunkel: I think that was on, what’s the name of that song? It’s a song we recorded on the bus. [“Nothing But Time”]

Rick: I’ve got the album. I’ll give it a listen, and maybe it’s listed on the album.

Russ Kunkel: I also played a tape box on a James Taylor song. I think might be on the Flag album. I just put a tape box down where the snare drum would be and kind of played it. It’s kind of a jazzy kind of a thing. It wasn’t one of his famous songs, but I’ll think of it before this whole thing’s over.

Rick:  I understand that one of the epiphanies for you was hearing “Wipeout” from your brother. Is that right?

Russ Kunkel: Not from my brother, and my brother was a drummer. He was the one, he’s responsible for getting me interested in playing drums. I grew up with his band rehearsing in the house, and so I was introduced to drums pretty early on. But, I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I moved out to Long Beach, California, when I was nine. So, I kind of grew up right in the middle of the surf era.

And right on the West Coast. So, everybody was in a band, and I was in lots of bands during that period of time. Everyone knew how to play “Wipeout”. It was a standard, you kind of had to play that.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

So, what was the band you were in? Was it a surf band, or what were you playing?

Russ Kunkel: Yeah. There were so many bands I was in. There was a band called The Barons, there was a band called the Birnam Woods, and then we were called Things to Come. And then that band, Things to Come, that’s the band I went to Hollywood with, that became the house band at the Whiskey and opened up for all those people.

And after that I just got into doing session work and moved forward.

Rick: So, were you into The Beach boys, and Jan and Dean and Dick Dale?

Russ Kunkel: All of that, yeah. I saw them all play live. At The Golden Bear and lots of different places, yeah.

Rick: Who were you drawn to when you were younger? Was it rock or jazz, or people like Charlie Watts?

Russ Kunkel:  I mean, a lot of the Rolling Stones, a lot of the British bands who were basically playing American blues. I liked all of them, like The Pretty Things and The Rolling Stones, you know?

Eric Burdon and The Animals, all of that stuff. And the bands that I was in, we played a lot of their songs.

Rick: Yeah. Did you play stuff like Cream, like Ginger Baker and …

Russ Kunkel: Yeah. We, in the Things to Come, we actually did a song that was kind of pretty much influenced by that, that we recorded. I guess it was single that came out on Warner Brothers, but didn’t do very much. But for sure, I mean, Cream was a huge influence on all of us, absolutely.

Rick: Yeah, and Keith Moon. Remember Keith?

Russ Kunkel: Keith Moon is just a force to be reckoned with. Like, such an amazing player. What a free spirit. And, I mean, it’d be impossible to emulate him. But, he was just… I loved watching him, and I loved the stuff he chose to play.

Rick: Yeah, even the way he held his drum sticks was pretty cool, you know?

Russ Kunkel: It’s more like a drum ballet than almost anything else.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it, I think. So, when you got into being a session player, or when you were working on a song, do you ever systematically kind of go down a list of possibilities of what sound you want? Or like you said earlier, you said more of an intuitive thing, you just sort of get into the mood or into the zone?

Russ Kunkel: Well, like I said, the thing that I really rely on is, I try not to do something normal.

I try to come up with something that I haven’t played before, so that requires a little bit of thinking. I’m just trying to do well, and I’ll give you an example.

Somebody who does that, I think, better than anybody is Manu Katché. If you listen to his playing on some of Sting’s records, or listen to him on the Robbie Robertson’s first solo record, he plays like a … The only way I can say what I’m thinking is if you look at a black and white photograph, right?

Rick: Okay, yeah.

Russ Kunkel: Manu plays the negative of that photograph. So, if you invert that black and white photograph to a negative, so the black turns white and the white turns black, that’s what he does. He plays, he finds a groove that’s in-between all the beats that normal people would play.

Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s like looking at leaves in the tree, and looking at the space between them rather than the leaves themselves.

Russ Kunkel: Yes, exactly, and I really try to do that. I think about that a lot. If a song, if normally the first thing that would come to mind is like a two and four chopping wood groove, you know?

I try to go, “Well, can I get some kind of rhythmic groove without doing that, by breaking it up? So, I would play what you would normally play with your right with the foot, and play what you would normally play with your left hand with your right hand, and just kind of change it, you know?

Rick: Yeah. That takes a bit of talent, I think. So, do you listen to drummers from Africa or different countries, or even from India, that have different types of beats?

Russ Kunkel: I don’t enough, but I love that. That’s one of the things I love about going up to L.A., is going to Amoeba Music, which I think just closed. Which is terrible, because they had music from all over the world in there, and listen to music from Sri Lanka or, you know?

These crazy islands in the world that you’ve never ever heard of, but there’s people there making music.

Rick: Yeah, and making their own drums.

Russ Kunkel: Absolutely, yeah.

Rick: You’ve worked as a producer as well, right?

Russ Kunkel: I have.

“Tender Is The Night” – Written by Jackson Browne, Danny Kortchmar and Russ Kunkel

Rick:  How did you get into that? And it seems like the terms producer, engineer, mixer, they all kind of get intertwined when people are talking about it. And a lot of people, including me, I mean, I’ve worked with producers and mixers and stuff, but sometimes it’s the same person. How do you differentiate those roles when you are a producer or whatever?

Russ Kunkel: Well, the projects that I’ve produced, I produced six Jimmy Buffett records. I co-produced a Dan Fogelberg record.

Rick: Ah, wow.

Russ Kunkel: I co-produced a Clannad record. And most of the things that I’ve done, I’ve known the artist really well. They entrusted me with the responsibility of putting together musicians in the studio, and the place, and doing their projects with them. I mean, with Jimmy, I think one of the ways that I got with him is I gave him some ideas for songs to cut, and made demos and sent them to him. And he liked them, and then he recorded them, and he wanted me to come produce it. And then he asked me to do albums after that, so.

Rick: How’d you get into doing the technical side of the business?

Russ Kunkel: Well, I’ve always had a studio in my house and just kind of taught myself to be an engineer, you know? Early on, I liked that.

Rick: So, you were doing that when you were a kid?

Russ Kunkel: No. When I first came up to Hollywood, and I had enough money to buy the stuff.

I mean, put a studio in my house and started writing and recording stuff. I was just doing that today, before I called you.

But, I don’t have a studio in my house anymore, but these days there aren’t that many producers, really. I mean, there’s a handful of people that still produce stuff, but not like it used to be. Anyone now with a credit card can go buy all the gear to make a record and do it in their house.

And nowadays most of the artists are their own producers. They’ll have collaborators, and they might actually need a mix engineer at the very end to kind of put all the stuff that they do together and make it make sense. But, I haven’t been doing any producing other than the stuff with The Immediate Family, but we’re all doing that together.

Rick: Yeah. I was watching some of your videos that you’d pulled together. And I think, Waddy told me, that you were using, I mean maybe it was Danny, who told me you’re using Acapella?

Russ Kunkel: We started using Acapella, but we ditched that, because it did the job, but the audio quality is just not that good. And so what we started doing now is we’re using an app for our phones called FiLMiC Pro, which turns the camera.

The camera in your iPhone’s actually a really good camera, but FiLMiC Pro allows you to adjust the white balance and the ratio, and the aperture and all kinds of things, so you can actually take good videos that don’t look like they’re homemade. And then we’ve just been recording simultaneously into some DAW for the audio.

Rick: I was watching you guys play “Somebody’s Baby”. That was a really good video, I thought. I thought you guys came together really well, and I thought that the way Steve sang the song, which was different than Jackson Browne, he really added a nice nuance on some of the parts.

Russ Kunkel: Oh no, absolutely. I mean, we worked hard to make those things sound good, and mixed them after the fact. I mean, that was using Acapella, I think.

I think it was Acapella. But yeah, we’re going to try to move on and do our own editing and stuff now. Steve is kind of more like the technical guy of the group. Waddy has a studio, and Steve has a studio. And Steve’s going to, he’s been working on Final Cut Pro, so we’re going to start trying to do our videos with a little more pizzazz.

Rick: Okay, that’ll be cool to see once you do that. But the “Somebody’s Baby” one was really good. I was thinking, “Oh, that’s one of the better … I mean, for some people that’s going to be the original “Somebody’s Baby” they heard, it won’t be Jackson Browne’s, and so especially for this new generation.

So, it’s kind of interesting of the nuances, and sort of the different things that you all do, I guess, it’ll then become maybe the standard for a new generation. And then they’ll listen to probably Jackson Browne after, and they’ll go, “Oh, okay.” and then they’ll compare the two, like we do the old blues players, you know?

Russ Kunkel: Yeah, well that quite possibly could be the case.

Rick: Yeah. So when you’re working with folks, you mentioned Dan Fogelberg, do you find that friendships grow from those situations, you just sort of click with people?  I mean there’s a connection other than  a musical connection, but maybe a personality connection, who are some of those people that come to mind that you just sort of fit like a glove?

Russ Kunkel: Well, God, I’ve been so fortunate to work with so many great people. And I try to always maintain a level kind of personality so that, one, I never wanted to get fired, so I was never a squeaky wheel, so to speak. And that people have asked me a lot why do you think you work so much with all these people? And my answer is I think I’m easy to get along with, you know?

And like I said, I’m co-dependent enough to know that I want people to like me.

I think that’s at the root of it. But, I mean, all the people that I’ve worked with over the years I’m still very close friends with. I don’t see them all the time, but I’ve talked to them on their birthdays, or we stay in touch with various different ways. And they’re all special relationships. Everybody moves on a little bit though, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Russ Kunkel: And I don’t know that there’s any one group that has, I mean maybe The Beatles had the same producer for the longest period of time, being George Martin. But people move on, and their music styles change. And somebody’s the flavor of the month, and everybody wants to use them, and it’s just different now.

But, I’d have to say the relationships that I have that came out of collaborating, whether it be songwriting or producing with artists, I still have today, you know? And they mean a lot to me.

Rick:  When you’re doing this live streaming and you’re working, I suppose, virtually now, how much do you miss the audience? I mean, since you’re a session player, a lot of times you didn’t have audiences. Is it kind of the same thing or do you … But you’ve had audiences recently, and you’ve been on tour I know, so is that a big dynamic that you miss?

Russ Kunkel: It’s always more fun to be in front of an audience, no doubt, but I was thinking about this last night. It’s interesting you should ask. Because of this pandemic, and we’re kind of all forced to work individually from home, I find that we’re working and writing and collaborating more now than we were before. Before, we’d have to all get together, right?

With schedules, and physically go to somebody’s house. Well, it’s actually a lot easier now. All you have to, I mean, we have a text chain for The Immediate Family. We’re talking to each other all day long on text, way more than we would have normally, you know?

We have really good managers, Fred Croshal and David Helfant. I don’t know if you know Fred – Fred ran Maverick Records for Madonna, and signed Alanis Morissette. And he is so savvy on the business, and he has just really educated us into how important the content is on socials, and so everything is content driven now. So, we’re trying to put out a new video every week on all of our socials, like this week we launched our single on Quarto Valley Records, and it debuted on Rolling Stone. I think you know all this.

Rick: I know a lot of it, you guys are sort of my focus for the next few weeks so, yeah.

Russ Kunkel: The single came out today, and we have an EP coming out with some other stuff. And we recorded a record in, well, we have Danny Kortchmar’s album, which we all played on, that was released in Japan. There was a tour that they recorded us playing live. So, we have content from our live record, and content from Danny’s album, and that stuff’s going to be coming up first for the rest of this year.

And then in the can we have an album of all brand-new material that we wrote, and so that we’re holding. And there’s a documentary being made on us by Denny Tedesco, Who’s a writing crew documentary.

Rick: Yeah, I’m familiar with it.

Russ Kunkel: And everything’s been put on hold, so we’re pushing everything until next year for the new content. But for now, what we’ve been trying to do, is put out some new content every week on our socials, and enter Acapella, that was the first thing we were using. And so we’re trying to get something out every week.

And so, we’ve been working more now than I think we ever did, because of this kind of forced retirement, everyone forced to do lockdown, which in a lot of ways I feel that we’re promoting ourselves more than we would have if we didn’t go through this.

Rick: Yeah. Your last gig, was that the cruise?

Russ Kunkel: It was, and it’s funny, it’s funny. Two weeks after we got back from that, the people that booked the cruise called us up and booked us again for next year. It went over really well for us there, so they’ve even given us more money, so it’s great.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. When you’re working like a work-for-hire situation as a session player, I guess that’s what most folks do, and you come up with something percussively that’s pretty unique, I suppose that’s not copyrightable, right? I mean, that’s basically given away. I mean, you would get paid for it, but you don’t get royalties for drum copyrights, is that correct?

Russ Kunkel: Well, that’s a slippery slope, and the the short answer to you is, “No.” If you get hired to play on a session, the parts that you play are then basically owned by the artists, whoever owns the song, who runs the copyright on a song.

But recently, I guess in the past maybe five years, they’ve finally started paying musicians for performance rights, performance royalties. In other words, the Jackson Browne song “Running on Empty”, prior to this, it would get played on the radio, and Jackson would make money as the writer, he would make money as the artist, and the record company would make their money as the emcee that’s putting it out. So, they make publishing royalties, performance royalties, because Jackson’s the writer, but their musicians didn’t get anything.

Now musicians get, with all the streaming that’s going on now, musicians who played on a record, and vocalists, now get it’s a very, very small percentage, but they get a royalty for every time a song is performed, whether it’s on Muzak, or whether it’s on satellite radio, or whatever. And fortunately for me, if you’ve played on enough records that get played a lot, it ends up being a significant amount of money.

Rick: Yeah. I’ve read that the real money is in mass media, like in television and movies and commercials.

Russ Kunkel: Everything, yeah. They pay you on everything.

Rick: Yeah, so I guess they track them?

Russ Kunkel: They’ve been doing that in Europe for years

Rick: Oh, has it?

Russ Kunkel: Yeah, and all the European musicians have been getting that royalty for years. We were just slow to the game. But, as far as your question goes, when you go into a studio, even if you come up with the most, even if I played the part on “Wipeout”, even though that was such a big part of the song, I couldn’t, unless I made an arrangement with the artist and convinced him that it was a very influential part that made up the song, which they hardly ever would agree to, then the answer is, “Yes, you give it away.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah, that’s too bad. That’s a lot of money lost over time for some people.

Russ Kunkel: I would think so.

Rick: There are a lot of really good session players out there, and I know that you’ve worked with these fellows from The Immediate Family, so was it just the relationships that brought you guys together? Was it just easy to say, “Okay we’re going to form a band now, and now we’re going to be The Immediate Family”, but are you still doing session stuff?

Russ Kunkel: I do from time to time, yeah. I’ve been playing with Lyle Lovett for the last, oh God, 13 years.

Rick: Really? Yeah, he’s cool.

Russ Kunkel: On a bunch of his albums, and playing live with him. So, I’ll do an album, well, we haven’t done one every year, but I’ll record Lyle’s albums. And from time to time I’ll be called to do sessions, but not anywhere near what I did in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, just because everyone’s recording mostly from home.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people are still using Pro Tools and stuff like that, I suppose. So, when you have this feeling of family, and you’ve got what, four or five members?

Russ Kunkel: Five.

Rick: Steve was kind of pulled in later, right, so?

Russ Kunkel: No, he was there from the beginning. I mean, from the beginning of The Immediate Family.

But he, Steve, was just a natural fit for us, and having the extra vocalist, and we wanted it to be a guitar band, so he fit right in. But, Danny and Waddy, and Leland and I, have worked together on so many different projects, just because we kind of all converged in L.A. at the same time, you know?

And I worked with, I played on James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James album with Danny, and I met Carole (King) then. And then I played on Tapestry with Danny, on Carol’s record. Those two albums became iconic records. And then we met Peter Asher, and then through Peter I worked with Linda Ronstadt records, and Karla Bonoff records, and so on and so forth. And became friends with all The Eagles, and we were just all, we were in this melting pot.

Rick: Were you living in Laurel Canyon back then, or what?

Russ Kunkel: Yeah I was. I’m actually in that in those videos. Have you watched it?

Rick: Yeah. I don’t recall if I saw you or not. I saw Henry Diltz. You know, Henry?

Russ Kunkel: Diltz Deanne. You know, the thing about Laurel Canyon, the one that’s out right now, it’s not a bunch of talking heads. They interviewed me for it. All you’d see is my name down in the bottom and hear me talking. And what they did is they just found all this old footage from the time period.

Rick: You know Henry Diltz?

Russ Kunkel: Very well.

Rick: Yeah. I met him at the Hard Rock Cafe, and he introduced me to Brian Wilson (The. Beach Boys). Wasn’t he with, I want to say The New Christy Minstrels, but I thought he was with somebody else. A Modern Folk Quartet or somebody?

Russ Kunkel: The Modern Folk Quartet, yep. Yeah. One of the first gigs that I had, after I stopped playing for Things To Come, and before I worked with James Taylor, was I played with John Stewart, who replaced Dave Guard in The Kingston Trio.

Yeah, and in John’s band, Henry was in the band playing banjo and singing, and that’s how I met him.

Rick:  He played harmonica too, didn’t he? Was that him?

Russ Kunkel: Yep. Yeah. And also he played flute. He played flute, banjo, and Henry has a beautiful voice.

Rick: You guys are playing some cover songs. Do you prefer playing them straight, or do you like to go off and jam a bit beyond that, beyond playing them like you heard them on the radio?

Russ Kunkel: Well, the cover songs, because either Danny or Waddy, or I or Steve, wrote them with the artist that recorded them, so we’re a cover band that plays all original material, as Danny likes to say. So we, yeah, we do different arrangements of them. I mean, not so far from the originals, but different enough. We just try to make them more rock and roll.

Rick: Who’s producing this new album for you?

Russ Kunkel: We are.

Rick: Who’s the lead on that? Is there a lead, or you just collaborate on everything?

Russ Kunkel: On this record that’s going to be coming out, most of the songs are written by Danny and Waddy and Steve. I’d have to say all of the songs, yeah.

I wasn’t involved in the writing on these, because there’s stuff that we already had. But, we’ve been writing a lot more stuff, and I’ll be involved in some of the writing on subsequent records, for sure.

Rick: And so any of the songs that you’re writing, are any of them so current as to cover the, you know, we had a lot of protest music back in the ’60s and early ’70s. So, are you doing anything along those lines that are maybe more anthemic than regular songs?

Russ Kunkel: You know, not really, not really. We try not to be too preachy, though there’s plenty of other people out there doing that. I’ll leave that to the ones that kind of naturally fall into that so.

Rick: Okay, so how are you overall handling this new era that we’ve gotten – we’re all doing it, I guess – of isolation? What keeps you busy besides the music? Do you have any other hobbies or? I was talking to Lee, and he said he had a hot rod, and a few other things like that, so we talked cars for a while so.

Russ Kunkel: Well, yeah, I have a ’57 Chevy that I restored, as well.

So, he and I have all that in common. But with the pandemic, it limits a lot of the stuff you can do. I mean, I live down in Orange County. I live in San Clemente, and so and I’ve surfed my whole life, so I’m kind of looking to get back into the water.

But, it’s just safer to stay home right now. I mean, I’m not one of these … I’m not of the ilk that goes, “Let’s open the country up. You’re messing with my First Amendment rights.”

Rick: Yeah, me neither.

Russ Kunkel: I’d rather be safe, so I’m going to wait and embark on the rest of the world on the back end of this stuff. It looks like we’re in another spike right now anyway,. We just moved into a new house, so there’s plenty of work to do around the house getting it ready. And well, yeah, I’ve got a Boston Terrier that I’ve got to take care of and, you know? Yeah, just mostly, I mean, I have good neighbors, so it’s mostly just normal stuff.

My musical stuff is completely just going to be confined pretty much to Immediate Family related stuff, and just writing material for whatever, and waiting to see what happens with Lyle (Lovett). I was supposed to be on tour by now already with him.

So, that’s probably all being pushed to next year, so I don’t know what’s going to happen next year, so we’ll see.

Rick: Were you scheduled to come to the East coast?

Russ Kunkel: Yeah, we had a full tour booked, all of July and all of August.

Rick: You’ve now been in the music business for what, 50 years or more. What kind of advice would you give people who are trying to get into the business? And I know it’s different than when you first started, but what kind of advice would you think would be good, for young people especially, who want to enter into the business, like lessons learned or things to be cautious of?

Russ Kunkel: Well, the first advice I would give people is it’s not a sprint, it’s a long race. The most important thing is building a fan base and content. It’s fan base and content driven. It didn’t used to be that way, but it is now.

Well, my first advice is you have to be good. So, find some people that are like-minded people, that play other instruments, and get in a garage and play your ass off. And so you’re going to have to go out and find a place to go play, and let the public see you and start building a fan base. Because, when you can play live, and get paid for playing live, you can actually make money. And making money in the record business? Nah, not so much.

Rick: Yeah, I was telling somebody that yesterday. I said there’s no money in making records. It’s either getting your music in mass media, or it’s going out and playing and getting money at gigs when you can.

Russ Kunkel: Yep. You can start a YouTube channel, and get over 40,000 subscribers, and then you start getting people buying commercial ads on your channel. I know musicians that make $100,000 a month just on their YouTube channel.

Rick: Wow. That’s pretty amazing. So, it’s possible?

Russ Kunkel: Yeah.

Rick: Well, you’ve got to reach for the stars, you know, if you want to be a star.

Russ Kunkel: Yeah, but also you have to be good. And to get good you really have to work at it.

Rick: Well, it kind of amazes me. Some people who aren’t all that good, and they get a lot of action, they get a lot of interest, and but, you know, it doesn’t always happen.

Russ Kunkel: Well that’s true, that’s true, but those things they tend to be, they’re there for a while, and then you don’t hear from them anymore. You know?

Rick: Okay Russ, I think that’s all I’ve got. Anything else?

Russ Kunkel: No. I think it’s just been great talking to you. Check out our new single. [“Cruel Twist”] It just came out. Check it out.