Jud’s liner notes cover your history through the end of Butch Engle & The Styx. What have you been up to since then?
It’s funny that you ask, because it seems like most of the time the conversation is about what was. In my case I went from there into working for a living. I had a clothing store for a number of years, but then about 20 years ago I ran into acting, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since then. Singing actually helped, because the singing was sort of giving you some timing that you didn’t know you had. Most of the work has been in a lot of $1.95 films that nobody has heard of. You need the same break you needed in rock and roll, you know? But there’s been quite a bit of work, and I’ve started a readers’ theater in the town of Sonoma [The Sonoma Readers’ Theater]. The beauty of the acting thing is you don’t have to quit.
And it’s funny that all these years later the analogy to get a theater group up off the ground seems to be the same kind of thing we were doing when we were kids. One of the wonderful things about the first band is always the same thing: everybody’s such a novice and knows so little about it that the egos aren’t there. You don’t know what the hell is right or wrong, you’re just happy to do it. As a result, that group is a wonderful group because you’re learning together. The one thing I said to the actors when we first began is, “It’s tough to get famous, that I’ll grant you. But there is one thing I absolutely know how to do, and that’s how to be a garage band and make that garage band noticeable in the neighborhood.” The same thing is always true: you just go do it the best you damn can, and show it to everybody. You can make noise in the neighborhood.


What’s it like to finally have an album out after 30-plus years?
Well, I can almost give you a visual explanation. I have a wall in my office that has handbills of the films that I’ve done, posters from plays, a few photographs of performances, a couple little photographs in the center of the wall of the band, I’ve got the plaque of the [H. Liebes] Band Bash — the damn trophy was 20 feet tall, and just wood — and that was wonderful for the longest time. And then I was given one of the albums, and we framed that and put it in the center. Because everything else comes from that.

I think it documents how we began, where we went, and where we were heading. The truth is, we’re the only guys who don’t have perspective. You’re in the middle of it, so you think you’re great when you think you’re great. And if you aren’t living like you thought you shoulda, then you don’t think you were so good. This has been just the opposite of that. Up until you guys put this out, I was never able to listen to any of the material without a jaundiced ear, and now that’s just not the case. Actually, the true answer is, “Thank you, Sundazed, for making me proud of my history!”

After this came out, we had a reunion. We got together in the summer — I hadn’t seen Bob Zamorra in 30 frickin’ years! Bob was the only one who hadn’t heard this yet, and so Michael [Pardee] was putting it on the machine, starting it up, and this look: you could just see this look on Bob’s face. My wife said it was the same look that came on mine when Jud first put it on and it hadn’t started playing, and I’m thinking, Oh my God, I’ve got to live through this crap? And a cut goes by, and another cut goes by, and pretty soon he’s smiling, and everybody is smiling again. What it has done is it showed us that we were really pretty good! And that is something, man, to write down! Any guy in a garage ought to learn: don’t judge it, just do it! Because you may surprise yourself 20 or 30 years later!

One of the guys was talking about playing, and it sounded like a fun thing to do, and there was like a pause in the conversation, you know how that goes … you’re talking good times, old times, and maybe a little bit of reality slips in too? And I said, “My only difficulty with it is I haven’t exactly given up yet!” So I don’t want to just have fun.

Were you aware back then of just how great a talent Ron Elliott was?
You bring your own talent, but someone has got to be the muse and the kick-off, and Elliott was definitely the guy. I’m not so sure that we really knew how brilliant he was, you know: you’re surrounded by the Beatles on one side, and your own aspirations on the other. Elliott opened up the horizons. I was like his little brother — even today the relationship’s like that. But it was pretty hard not to recognize that, yeah, this guy kinda just knew stuff, just had a real different way of looking at it. [Tom] Donahue and [Bobby] Mitchell were the guys that ran Autumn; they were planning him a big career on Broadway, because he wanted to write musicals.

It was one thing to listen to all the other bands that were huge and successful … you look at the Beatles and you want to do that and you want to be like that, but they’re removed. But what we had in the neighborhood, with Elliott, was one of those guys with that kind of talent. So even if we truly didn’t recognize that, what he did for us was raise the bar. You couldn’t shoot for mediocrity; you had to shoot for something higher. Because that something higher was just the basic thing. That’s where he was all the time.

And the same thing can be said true about the San Francisco scene. The musicians around here were really … the Sons of Champlin, you look at [Terry] Haggerty as a player, you look at Moby Grape, and [John] Cippolina, I mean, I went to high school with Cippolina, he was a few years older than I was, and I remember watching his band play at the teenage dance before I ever thought of doing it. Bill Champlin — In fact, I got into it because of Bill Champlin. He was getting rid of a singer, and I was in a choir class with him and was able to carry a tune, so he invited me to try. And we’d been friends for a long time. But there again, here’s a kid who could play every frickin’ instrument in America, even before he got to high school! And they were all around here and competing, no matter what band they were in. So it really raised the bar. We didn’t know it did — we just started at a higher level because you weren’t competing with the crap people, you were competing with the best. The objective was to do what the Beau Brummels did at the Morocco Room. To get people to stand around the block, waiting to get in.

What are some favorite memories of Butch Engle & The Styx?
The Cow Palace was a great memory, a great moment. What I remember most is having my back to the audience before we began, having the song start up, and turning around to such a bank of lights that the only thing I could see was one orange high heel in the front row! I could see this woman’s foot; I couldn’t see her or anything else! It was the biggest shock of my life, because up until that moment, everything I had ever done was in a room where I could look in your eyes. I also remember having to pee five minutes before, ending up at the wrong end of the stadium, and not being able to get on stage because the cop didn’t know who I was!

After the Cow Palace the city sort of discovered us. We played at California Hall, which was a major place. And it was at that show for the first time that people booed us. That’s when I discovered that the cliques weren’t just in our home town; the cliques were in the city as well. There was a group called the Hedds; they were the big headliners in San Francisco during this period. We had been invited to another band battle. If you were a main group you usually agreed to do the job if they paid you your normal fee, and then hopefully you had a little sway with winning the thing. In this case, the Hedds were that group, and they brought other groups in. We had just won at the Cow Palace, so it seemed like a good idea to bring us in, too.

But everybody were there to see their favorite band, the Hedds. At the first song, they just booed. They didn’t want us there! And about halfway through that song, that started to change. By the time we got to the third song, they had to close the curtain, because the security guard didn’t think the kids were going to be able to handle it! It was the first time they’d had a show there that was a sit-down audience. While I was doing it, I thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they had to sit still in one place and watch. So that certainly helped them get enthusiastic. That was an absolutely astounding experience, actually.

How do the recordings compare to your live show?
We didn’t get a lot of time in the studio. We were always learning, but I’m not sure we ever really learned how that art form worked. Even though at times it sounds awfully live and awfully enthusiastic, at times we may be more contrived. You can hear as we get a little looser, we get a little into our own space. As it comes down to “Puppetmaster” and “Candlestick Maker,” although those were both Elliott’s, I was beginning to start fooling around with lyric. The Lou Dorren tapes were Elliott-inspired and Elliott-written, but we were beginning to figure out what stories we wanted to say. He was wonderful enough to let us have the luxury to do this, so I could putter around with the lyric and change the tale a little myself. So in some ways, we probably would have gone ... I wouldn’t say we would have tried to be the Eagles, but that produced sound to some degree would have been there.

The live show, on the other hand ... I was always a believer that that was the opportunity to look you in the eye and deliver what your heart really thought. I used to have a little box of ribbons that I used to walk out into the audience with — they always wanted an autograph or something, so I decided it would be nice to take something from them, take a ribbon or something from their hair. Elliott used to say, “Claim your space. You’re standing in this little light — claim your space there and let them watch you.” I was the opposite. I was more Presley and Tom Jones, you know, go out to them. And that’s what you don’t get in the album. If one of the deals we landed had been a real deal; if somebody in the business had even had a farm club, where you could go play for the minor league team for a while, it would have been really fantastic to see where it would have gone.