Parlor Showcase

I've been playing since the vinyl days. Before CDs. I've seen a lot of changes. I've seen bands come and go like chewing gum. They all come in sweet, fresh – get chewed up in this crazy mill for a while – and "phew!" most of them go back to the curb, eventually becoming one with the sidewalk.

I tell my wife, Joanna, there are two kinds of musicians: there are those who look at a room of 20 people and see 20 people. And then there are those that look at the same bunch and see 20,000. It is interesting to observe how this factors into a person's longevity as a musician. And then it is interesting to note those who took the long road in music – at least to me, because, well, I'm a longhauler, too. And I know why longhaulers take that long road. While we all salivate at the thought of having enough money to buy our moms a new house – even if we don't get that far – we're still doing this. And at this point, it's a soul

matter.

I remember hearing the name Joey Harris in the early '80s. I think he was in the Speedsters at the time. And then there was the Beat Farmers, which was pretty big deal in case you are unaware. By now, the entire landscape of the local scene has evolved and supplanted itself with scene after scene after scene.

Joey's still here.

I don't even remember when we actually became friends, but eventually folks get acquainted around here if they keep working. We were playing some songs jacked on coffee a few Saturdays ago. We were taking out our guitars. I'm watching him scrape the ends of his guitar strings that extend above the tuning machine into perfect loops using a file or a pen knife or something.

"What the hell are you doing?" I ask.

"A little trick I learned…," he says, continuing to finish off the rest of six. "I dunno, I guess I'm just to lazy to snip 'em like everybody else does."

He bums a smoke.

I bum a string.

He starts telling stories while teaching me "What I mean to Say," my favorite Harris tune – one of about 10 tunes that actually changes my total emotional state – the same way the "nah-nah-nah" section of "Hey Jude" does. Or the Johnny Cash version of "Hurt." Or the line in Counting Crows' "Mr. Jones" – "gray is my favorite color … man I wish I was beautiful…"

The stories are as vivid as his music. They're kind of one and the same.

He's telling me some crazy stuff about a band he was in that I hadn't heard of.

CS: When did you get started, anyway?

JH: We lived the early part of the sixties on my grandparent's ranch in Alpine. TV reception was bad, so the turntable was always on – everything from Elvis and Hank Williams and Flat and Scruggs to Sinatra and Andy Williams and Broadway musicals like the Music Man. Of course there was a lot of excitement for my uncle Nick Reynold's group, the Kingston Trio. When the Beatles played the "Ed Sullivan Show" three or four Sunday nights in a row, the whole family was gathered around, and we all got the Beatlemania thing and I believe it was there I started thinking this music scheme looked like fun.

CS: I remember Beatles on Ed Sullivan. I was a tyke, already in bed when it came on the TV. I could hear screaming. I came out and curiously asked my Mom what was on. She said, "Oh, don't worry honey, it'll go away. Go back to bed."

Anyway, now that we've established our probable ages, what happened after you got the bug?

JH: We had a band in high school, Johnny Cook. I played the most beautiful little Pelham blue Gibson SG, called a Melody Maker, and I took it to woodshop and fitted it with a gold humbucker in the bridge position. That guitar was stolen from our rehearsal house and I've searched for a replacement ever since. We played the rec center and a couple dances and every Fourth of July we set up on my folk's front porch in Coronado, facing Star Park, the place where the parade floats and horses all came to rest.

I spent my early teenage summers on my uncle Nick's ranch, on the Elk river on the Oregon coast. Nicky exposed me to so much music, drawing from his large record collection. B.B.King, Jimi Hendrix, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, James Taylor, Poco, Tim Hardin. After dinner we'd sit around the fireplace listening to the radio broadcast – "War of the Worlds" or a collection of wolf calls recorded in the wild. This is where I heard John Stewart's record California Bloodlines. John had been in the Kingston Trio with my uncle Nick and he'd heard I was a guitar player. John offered me a tryout to play in his band, and I got the job.

John was a master fingerpicker and his lyrics and melodies were finely interwoven. His songs told powerful stories of real Americana and lust on the high plains and the blanched desert. "July You're a Woman" is a love song of deep yearning and sin and redemption and just plain ol' horny, sweaty sex. Tom Waits would come sit with John for hours in the dressing room of the Palomino in North Hollywood.

It was my four years with John Stewart that taught me the rules of the road and some of the rules of the music business. Never give up your publishing. Treat your record company like your mother-in-law...show them respect, but don't let them pick out your curtains.

While John had made friends with Lindsey Buckingham and was recording his biggest radio hit, "Gold," and the album that surrounded it without the band, I started making trips back home to San Diego.

Paul Kamanski, Billy Thompson, Victor Paul Vicena, Chris Sams, and I rehearsed for three months in the abandoned offices of Steck Aviation at Brown Field. By the end of these intensive rehearsals we had a tight, intricately orchestrated, three-guitar-attack, three-part-harmony super new wave punk rock band called Fingers, ready to take the world by storm. It was 1979 and the Spirit Club became our home base as we mingled with the other San Diego groups of the time.

David and Douglas Farage's band DFX-2, the Penetrators (cool drummer!), the Puppies, Four Eyes, the Dinettes, and Trousers.

In 1981 I began working with Bruce Donnelly. Bruce had wrangled some session work from an Australian fellow living in L.A. named Roger Davies. Davies, who had been to a few Fingers shows and was a fan, arranged a publishing deal for me and Bruce Donnelly with ATV/Northern Songs. I had a band of Australia's best musicians on what would eventually be released as the Joey Harris and the Speedsters LP.

CS: This is right about the time I became familiar with your music. At which point I was attached to the Beat Farmer era.

JH: So I get a call from Dan McLain tellin' me to pick up Paul Kamanski and a six-pack of beer and come on out to the Pen house for a meeting of the minds. That night I met Robin Gayle Jackson, who knows every Hank Williams song, Nino Del Pesco of the Puppies, and Country Dick Montana. Without any discussion we became Country Dick and the Snuggle Bunnies. We played every Sunday at the tiny Spring Valley Inn, which was was packed to the rafters. There was more drinkin' goin' on...more romancin' goin' on...more music and laughter comin' out of that place than any I've heard of since.

My happy time as a Snuggle Bunny had to end as Roger Davies began tying up the production on, and organizing the release of, Joey Harris and the Speedsters in the spring of 1983. Bruce Donnelly and I had collected a drummer, Mark Spriggs, and bass player, Lee Knight, and were busy rehearsing in anticipation of a big promotional tour. Country Dick was not happy about losing his favorite Snuggle Bunny, but Dan McLain, the schemer, had already set the wheels in motion for a new stripped down, faster, heavier rock 'n' roll party machine.

Regarding Joey Harris and the Speedsters, what can one say about a big fat golden egg landing in one's lap? I suppose my best advice would be to remember from whence the big shiny thing came. The Speedster record is a pop record. It sounds a bit like a Brian Adams record, also of the early eighties era. Mixed by Steve Lillywhite, the Speedsters has all the polish and bigness of a radio friendly mega-hit. Roger Davies had used a bit of his newly acquired leverage, (he was at the helm when Olivia Newton John had her super-smash "Physical") to nudge MCA into giving him his own label. It was an exciting summer. MCA had bought a full page advertisement inside the cover of Billboard magazine. We shot a video for one of the songs ,which made it onto all the local broadcasts and even got a little MTV action. "I Believe in Mary" was the song of the summer on San Diego's KGB-FM. We did a few shows outside San Diego, opening for Quarterflash in Yuma (!) and Tina Turner up in Huntington Beach, but for the most part we played the Spirit and the Dystillery and the Rodeo in La Jolla, as well as the very first Street Scene. One day the program manager of KGB called me at home to warn me that the MCA rep had just been through and had said outright the Speedster record was dead. Okay, so we'd do another one, right? Utilizing the basement studio at MCA, Bruce and the band and I recorded 12 or 13 new tracks, all musically brilliant and lyrically brain dead. MCA passed on a second record and Roger Davies was now working exclusively on Tina Turner's career and gently advised me to find other management. I was devastated. The whirlwind had died and deposited me high up in a tree.

CS: Ouch!

JH: I did get a good song out of the whole thing, "Wintertime in Wonderland."

Meanwhile, out at the Spring Valley Inn, Country Dick and Jerry Raney and band members Buddy Blue and Rolle Love needed a band name, so they held a name the band contest. The winning name would award its creator a case of Schaefer light beer. Dude Raunch was an early favorite, but the biggest crowd pleaser that afternoon was the Beat Farmers.

Joey joins Beat Farmers...

CS: Yes, I've heard.

JH: Country Dick dies. A pretty girl – I don't remember her name – stepped up to me at the bar and said, "I'll drive you to the hospital." My grief was unmanageable. I will always miss my friend Dan McLain and I believe it's my small mission to keep the memory of Country Dick Montana alive with my shows.

Right now I'm playing with Mighty Joe, Jeff and Joel Kmak in Joey Harris and the Mentals.

CS: Was it as fun to be in that band as it was for us all to scream at you?

JH: My years with the Beat Farmers were exactly the way you've always imagined your rock star dream to be. A week or two into the job I found myself playing a huge festival in Belgium – on stage in front a crowd of people that stretched to the horizon. All those people are very loud. Hanging out back stage with Mike Scott and the Waterboys.

Of course that was a rare and special treat. Mostly it was six to eight hours in a van driving to the next gig. But I loved it! When you get to the club they feed you dinner, then you go to your very own hotel room, where you can do anything you want! Then when you go back to the club, which is full of people who drove for hours just to see you! Everybody has a great time, and you invite a few back to the hotel and have more fun! Then when you get your wake-up call, you go downstairs and have waffles! Back in the van, you do it all again until you just can't stand the fun anymore and have to take a couple weeks off. But I always knew I'd be back out there in a week or two hangin' out with a bunch of people who were glad to see me!

I really miss them. If I let myself, I'll get real low thinking I may never see them again.

And we did the David Letterman Show!

CS: Was David Letterman cool?

JH: I was takin' a squirt when he looked in on the band right before the show, so I missed him. Paul Shaffer was great. We were performing my song "Hideaway" for the show, and I had been worried that someone might ask me about the A chord we play in the verse. It's a regular A with three fingers holding down notes on the second fret, but you drop the third down two notes. I was embarrassed that I didn't know what to call it except "A, drop the third." Shaffer asked me in front of everybody, "What's that A chord in the verse?" I walked over to his keyboard and showed the fingering and he announced, "Ah! A two."

CS: A lot of people cite you as a great writer. Where do you find your inspiration to write? Is it different nowadays than it was in the earlier days?

JH: I didn't consider seriously writing songs until I got the gig with John Stewart. Up until then I really never paid the lyrics of songs much attention. Everything was about the guitar! But listening to John transforming song ideas he would bring into rehearsals really got me interested in the mechanics of writing. At the same time I was being turned onto Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Bruce Springsteen, and Elvis Costello. I looked to every media for ideas in my songs – movies, books, women. Later on, when I started working with Country Dick, I revisited the country writers I loved as a kid – Hank Williams, George Jones. And literary writers like Charles Bukowski.

CS: Any big secrets on how to get tunes rolling?

JH: Well you hear it all the time, so it must be true: write what you know. I'm not so sure. Write down anything that pops into your head. Get a stack of empty notebooks and always be filling them. Good things will fall out.

CS:  Despite the occasional glory, music is a grueling and oftentimes a mean business. At times, I feel like a guy with a wooden leg in a forest fire. How do you survive or deal with the incessant rate of the music biz bullshit factor?

JH: It's always heart breaking. The few breaks that come your way cannot undo the soul destroying disappointments that are lined up against artists. And keep an eye out for the breaks you don't initially identify as legitimate – the ones that get away. I've always been big on self-medication. I used to drink to excess and fornicate unadvisedly. Of course this understandable behavior will pretty much guarantee a short life, so I quit all that in favor of gaining sweet revenge.

CS: What's your most glorious moment in music?

JH: Vicki and I were married on stage during the 1990 Street Scene. Country Dick was the preacher and she said "she would" in front of a huge audience just minutes before the Beat Farmer's set.

CS: You've been around a while. A LOT has happened – changed – and evolved in San Diego music over the years. What are your impressions of the the scene on the local level? And, what do you think of the changes in the music big business climate in general?

JH: I don't even know how the record business works these days. Makin' 'em yourself sounds like a good way to go. But it still would be fun to get a major label to back you...give you some tour money. The problem is everybody and his brother has a band these days. Competition for the attention of a few corporate executives is thicker than ever before. On the local level, things have gone back to how they worked during the Spirit days. The bars can get four bands to play for the door.

CS: You received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998 at the San Diego Music Awards. What does that mean to you?

JH: I like it when people call it the Country Dick Montana Lifetime Achievement Award! It's fabulous! It's fun! It's nice to be remembered.

CS: Who else grabs your attention, musically – local and non-local?

JH: I dig Dirty Sweet and Dottie! I've made friends with and truly dig Taylor Harvey and his crackin' band. I'm a fan of Phil Bensimon of the Tornado Magnets. I loved the band Vertibird, the Truckee Brothers. Eve, of course. Gregory Page. I dig your songs and the Grams. I love Sara Petite.

CS: Having been a road-tripper, is there any city or club scene that strikes you as special?

JH: Well, no place is special. It's the folks who come to see you.

CS: What's the weirdest thing you've ever done on stage or on the road?

JH: There are two famously dumb things I've been credited with doing, directing traffic in the middle of a blizzard, in Omaha, in the nude; and paying five hundred dollars for a bowl of gumbo. In each case I was very drunk, but the traffic thing was funny and the gumbo was really good!

CS: What's new for Joey music?

JH: I've got some new songs to record and the Mentals and I have been rehearsing, normally an annual event.