by Rick Landers
*****
Rick Landers: Let’s start with a couple of Beatles’ points since you just got this Beatles tribute. And then we’ll move on to Godfrey.
Godfrey Townsend: I like the Beatles.
Rick: Everyone likes the Beatles.
Godfrey: Some people don’t. I don’t trust them. [Rick laughing] Somebody says “I don’t like the Beatles.”
Rick: How can you not like the Beatles? Knowing that the Beatles inspired you early on, what’s it like now knowing you’re the musical driver for the tribute to them, A Walk Down Abbey Road?
Godfrey: I got brought onto that tour from John Entwhistle. John was asked to do the tour and I used to sing his tunes in his band. I was in his band for six years so I sang all the stuff that Daltrey sang. He knew he couldn’t pull it off [both laughing], so he invited me, he worked it out so I could come on the tour and work for that summer with him.
Alan Parsons was actually musical director. We had two days rehearsal at this place in Portland, Oregon. Todd Rundgren was there, Ann Wilson, David [Pac] from Ambrosia and it was like a lot of noise going on. Alan would be sitting in the middle of it on a stool going, “Uh, gentlemen? Um, uh…” [both laughing] like really proper and nobody was listening. Nobody was hearing, so at one point, I grabbed a hold of the situation like, “We’ve got two days to learn all these tunes,” and somebody would say, “I don’t know this part. What’s this thing here?” and I kind of knew what it was on keyboards, or “What’s this harmony?” or “The bass line doesn’t do that. It does this.” “There’s another guitar playing this rhythm thing,” because they saw that I knew a lot about the musical part of it. They made me the musical director. The second year that it went out, I was brought back on the tour. John wasn’t doing the tour because he was gonna go out with The Who, so they brought in Jack Bruce, the drummer from the Entwhistle band was not involved because he was a real pain in the ass and didn’t want him back. [Rick laughing] They weren’t gonna get John so I said I would bring my drummer who was Steve Murphy and we ended up being the band with Jack Bruce on bass, me on guitar, Steve on drums, Alan Parsons – keyboard player, John Beck was on keyboards. That year it was Mark Farner, Christopher Cross, Jack Bruce, Alan Parsons and Todd Rundgren.
Rick: What a lineup, eh?
Godfrey: Yeah. Eric Carmen was supposed to be on, too, but he only made it through the first two shows and then split. At the end of that tour Alan asked us to put a band together for him, Steve and I. Jack Bruce asked me to play with him at the end of that tour. I did some shows with Jack Bruce. We were just supposed to do a tour with him a couple of months ago but it got canceled because he went into the hospital. So we got a lot of work out of it. We became the Alan Parsons Live project. But being the guy, yeah, I grew up listening to this music, Beatles music, and over the years just dissected it.
Rick: Just note by note?
Godfrey: Yeah, so it’s kind of good to be in that position where you get to put that to use. Otherwise it’s just…there are a lot of people that go to Beatles conventions and stuff [Rick laughing], know every single note. “He used a 13” tom for that and it was miked three feet away”. They know all this useless information. But it’s kind of good to be able to have that knowledge and put it to use.
Rick: Tell me about the Clapton thing you’ve been working with.
Godfrey: The Clapton thing is something I’ve been wanting to do for years. I wanted to do it back in the ’90s. There’s a guy who actually taught me how to play guitar, I have to say. He was my guitar teacher. That’s how I learned how to play lead guitar, listening to old Creem, live Creem, developing my style. I can kind of mimic his style pretty well. My singing voice is similar to his in a way that it’s a little bluesy and raspy. His phrasings are just embedded in my brain, guitar and singing. I would cover a couple of tunes in cover bands and people would say, “Wow! You should do a Clapton thing. You sound just like him.” It took me a couple of years and I went, “You know what? I love the music and all of it,” and I just thought it would be good to put something together like a full band. Keyboards, bass, drums, backup singers, another guitar player would be great and that’s how we started it with a couple of girl singers. Now it’s kind of condensed down to four of us. Greg Smith is not our real bass player but we’ve played with him a lot. Our real bass player is a guy named John Montegna who’s in the Alan Parsons Project. He has done “Walk Down Abbey Road” shows with us. We’ve played with Denny Lane and Joey Molland with him.
Rick: So personality mixes as well.
Godfrey: He’s done some Hippie Fests. He just had a baby so he didn’t want to go far from home this summer, so we got Greg Smith. The four of us, everybody sings. I was able to condense the band because of that. I don’t need the girl singers in the background because everybody sings. You can pretty much cover all the vocals of anything we do. We started out doing a lot of stuff from the Journeyman album because it was still pretty new, then it started sounding real dated. We covered everything from Creem up to the present, but now we’re kind of having fun getting into the Derek and the Dominoes era, Blind Faith era.
Rick:Great album, yeah.
Godfrey: We do a killer version of “Had to Cry Today”. Steve Murphy, the drummer, just has this incredibly high voice.
Rick: So, he sounds like Stevie Winwood?
Godfrey: Great stuff. It just sounds good. I’ll see if I can get you a copy of some of the live stuff. I actually have DVDs with me of a couple of the shows because I was going to try to put a promo together while I’m on the road.
Rick: I understand there’s a story, it’s on your website so let’s review if you don’t mind, with John Entwhistle talking to Lee Dixon.
Godfrey: Yeah.
Rick: I interviewed Lee Dixon. That was one of my first interviews.
Godfrey: Did you really? What had happened was one year that John went out with The Who, he was using Lee Dixon as his tech. That was his bass tech. We had already toured, John and I. What we used to do was whenever he was in town with The Who, like when he came in and played the Garden for a few nights, he’d be staying over, we would put together some kind of a jam event at a local club in New York.
Rick: Just a pickup band?
Godfrey: Just put some guys together. Actually, me and the drummer from the Entwhistle band and a couple of other guys and we would do a show, cover stuff and John would show up, sit in with us and everybody would get that treat of having a surprise visit from John Entwhistle. He came along to the club that night with Lee Dixon and some of the crew guys and some of the other Who band guys, [Ronnie] Townsend, [Rabbit Hole], [ Guy Canezack] and they were upstairs in this place [Lombardo’s]. There’s an upstairs lounge where you can go to have a little more privacy, hang out, whatever. So he was up there and when he was finished playing, I stayed onstage with him, brought up a couple of friends and we would jam some old Creem stuff, Crossroads [ ] and Lee Dixon was watching. That’s a cool thing about life is that you never know who’s watching and he goes in to tell John, “There’s this guy out there. He’s got Clapton down better than Clapton. [Rick laughing]. You’ve got to see this guy.” John comes out finally and he looks down and he goes, “Who?” “That guy right there playing Clapton.” He goes, “That’s my guitar player, you asshole,” and that’s the story. John actually told me that story.
Rick: For his guitar tech to tell him that. You had to be like spot on. So you’ve been a musical director. What exactly does that mean? What’s your relationship you have with the play director? What’s your role and how does that tie in with…?
Godfrey: Musical director does all the stuff that’s necessary to make it happen. The band does their part. You can see the book there with all the lyrics. I sat down with the songs and downloaded the lyrics but what I do when I download lyrics is I always play the song while I’m looking at them. I edit out what’s not there, what words are wrong.
Rick: That happens a lot.
Godfrey: And the arrangement. How many times they say that line, how many times it does that, solo comes in here and I make my notations as I’m doing it. Once I’m finished with that, I make a master and if I need chords, I put chords in there and then I put them out. I give them to everybody so everyone has a running chart of…
Rick: Do you have to time these to whatever the length of the play’s gonna be?
Godfrey: I try to…we’ve kind of got it figured now how much a half hour set is or a 20-minute set, four or five songs may give you 20, depending on if you want to tell a story in between. We always make it work somehow. When Chuck first sent me his list, it was eight songs and I was saying “Don’t you want to tell some stories or…”
Rick: Yeah, some patter in between.
Godfrey: A little bit of banter onstage in between and you might not have enough time to do eight songs. So we left out one song. Plus we were limited on time. We had to learn five artists worth of songs and I had to bring in a couple of sub musicians because these guys went and did a couple of dates with Alan Parsons. I was supposed to also, but I couldn’t find a sub for myself. They got a sub for me on that end. I was rehearsing two different rhythm sections too. It got a little busy
Rick: As much as you like doing that, did it become somewhat overwhelming?
Godfrey: Yeah, because you always put it off till the last minute. It’s like, three months before the tour I’m not gonna start learning these songs. [Shad and Newman] and these guys are like, “Everybody’s pretty quick study.” We kind of leave it to like two weeks before. Then we go, “Oh, wow. There’s a little more involved in this than I thought,” like pulling out all the harmonies and then the subs come in and what parts are they gonna play? Me and the bass player are staying on the tour so we should sing the two main parts so it doesn’t differ that much. There’s a lot of that. So, musical director figures out what needs to be done musically, arranges the rehearsals, runs the rehearsals.
Rick: Any staging involved as far as what people do?
Godfrey: Staging is not really part of it, no.
Rick: Sort of impromptu.
Godfrey: What my job has to do is making that band sound as good as possible behind those guys up there. That’s it.
Rick: Your own guitar-playing…I read that review and I love the album. Your playing has some classic touches to it but you’ve also got some explosive riffs like in “Cold” [onomatopoeia guitar sounds], all right, that was okay. Then it was like, “Oh, Jeez. This guy really cranks out some guitar!” It’s just wonderful. How long did it take before you finally felt like you’d got your own, what I would call a signature sound, that you really got your own sound? That you recognized that you had your own sound?
Godfrey: Only after I put this album out and people wrote a lot of reviews on CD Baby and such saying, “He plays with these guys. He plays with that guy. He can sound like this one. He can sound like that one. But he always manages to put his own stamp on it.” When I worked with Alan Parsons, I had to learn all these solos that he and Berenson played and Ian Berenson is a great guitar player. Different than me, but I was always a fan of the melodic solo, like when Clapton would do a melodic solo in a song or Harrison would do the melodic solo, David Gilmour melodic solo and you can’t really play anything else other than what that is.
Rick: Yeah, it’s gotta be that for that song.
Godfrey: You can’t just play a blues pentatonic scale over these changes. You can, but it won’t sound as good as that. So I was always that kind of a player. In the late ’70s, I got into a band, like a power pop band and the leader of the band, the songwriter…
Godfrey: The leader of the band who wrote the material was always kind of pressing to me Brian May. “Joe, Joe. Violin parts, violin parts.” So a lot of the solos were kind of like that, melodic, just melodic like cello, violin, like string parts almost. I started playing like that at that time. Before that I was playing Mountain, Creem, Zeppelin, Hendrix, stuff like that where it was mostly blues licks. When I got into that power pop band and started recording with that guy, I started playing more of that Brian May melodic style of playing. Classical music, which I was raised on, so it was easy for me to make that transition. Listen to the lines in “Closer to You” after I finish going back and forth with myself, I come in with this line, it’s almost like a cello/violin section. Like in Boston; Tom Scholz does that a lot, too. It’s amazing the melodies he comes up with. They’re unbelievable.
Rick: So, before guitar was like lead instrument, the saxophone tended to be the lead instrument and a lot of people who were starting to learn guitar back then, they learned their leads from saxophone players. Have you gone back and listened to any old sax players and how they constructed their…
Godfrey: It’s funny because I stole a couple of lines. [Rick laughing] One of the songs we play with Alan Parsons is “Old and Wise” and the end solo was played by a sax player and I played on the guitar. Not the solo, but I stole a couple of licks, a couple of melodies and it just made it fit perfectly. So I stole a couple of those things. We were just talking about that…
Rick: Talking about stealing riffs, even “Sunshine of Your Love” has “Blue Moon” in it.
Godfrey: I talked to Joey Molland yesterday on the bus. Joey was sitting there with this little ¾ acoustic K guitar that he has, playing his licks and he was saying, “They’re sax riffs”. He’s playing these licks like Chuck Berry riffs and then he said, “Oh, I met Hubert Sumlin a while ago and he played the solo on such and such,” and it was sax. There are sax riffs. I don’t know where they came from. I just know where I got them from. A lot of Clapton, Creem stuff. Wherever he got his stuff from is where I got my stuff from.
Rick: And he studied the blues a lot.
Godfrey: But, then I stole from Jeff Beck. I stole from Ritchie Blackmore. I stole from David Gilmour and I remember reading an article in Guitar Player magazine years ago from Ritchie Blackmore and his advice was, “Just steal from everybody and that’s how you get your own style.” [Both laughing]
Rick: Well, there’s your answer.
Godfrey: If you steal from just one guy, everybody’s gonna go, “Oh, you sound just like that guy.” But, if you steal from everybody, then you get your own thing.
Rick: Even with Robin Trower, everybody was saying, “The new Jimi Hendrix…”
Godfrey: Yeah, but he took it to a different place.
Rick: True, true.
Godfrey: Guitar players know. You know what I mean?
Rick: Yeah.
Godfrey: Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Rick: What a monster.
Godfrey: There’s a Hendrix guitar player. Took it to a different place though. I love Hendrix. Hendrix was one of my first real influences and he’s definitely the ultimate guitar hero. But, Stevie Ray Vaughan took “Voodoo Child” and slammed it! [Rick laughing]. And what’s even better about it is his rhythm section was better, more solid. Jimi Hendrix’s rhythm section, with the Experience on “Voodoo Child’ is kind of bland. But, Stevie’s guys just lock into that pocket and it’s totally groovin’.
Rick: They almost grew up together though, didn’t they? Double Trouble?
Godfrey: Yeah. Tommy Shannon was on the first Johnny Winter album.
Rick: You’ve been here with the Annual Hippie Fest here for awhile, but how did you end up getting into this gig and what’s the best part of being on tour with them?
Godfrey: This gig? The Hippie Fest tour you’re talking about? It’s the same producer as A Walk Down Abbey Road. Toby Ludwig was the producer of A Walk Down Abbey Road tours. Ron Hostoff was tour manager or road manager and then Ron teamed up with Toby to produce a tour, so this was his first real shot at producing his own tour with Toby. Toby’s more like a silent partner. Ron is the guy out there in the front lines…
