There has always been ways of getting expression out. In the sixties I was in High School we had AM radio and FM radio. There was a show called "Morning Becomes Eclectic," that was on a station that played a little of anything. That had all kinds of music including free jazz. In the bigger cities like Los Angeles in the late sixties and early seventies they had everything. There wasn't a lot of country western actually, you had to drive up to Bakersfield to hear that.

When I first moved out to California The Whiskey A-Go-Go was in its heyday.

 Taj was playing at the Whiskey A-Go-Go with Jesse Ed Davis. Jesse got off the stage and I went up on stage and said, "hey man you sound beautiful."

Paul introduced me to Don and Larry Taylor and we did a couple of gigs at The Troubadour. They were pretty well received and then Larry said, "man this ain't it, this is jaaassss...he wanted to do something else and he left. I brought in a friend of mine from Fresno named Victor Conte. Victor became famous for a couple of other things- he played with Tower of Power-he's a great, great bass player. I'm willing to bet that if he hasn't touched his bass in ten years he could pick it up and be as funky as anyone on the planet right now.

Bad jazz is when people are playing real hard and nobodies listening.
Lagos used to call it "Bar Mitzvah Jazz."

No matter what kind of music you play people kind of expect a show. There's so much offer on cable, concerts are huge and the magic of ensemble playing which is people who can play even if there just playing chords behind somebody else. Even when it's a singer it can be smokin" if its ensemble playing and people are listening to each other.

Don't get me wrong, we practiced for hours. It's not a question of practicing, what it is a question of is hearing the other person. Getting off on backing up, you don't have to take a solo to get off. It's not like watching a porn movie. Your part of it. If your playing rhythm guitar behind Sugarcane, your part of it.

Paul (Lagos) knew so much. He used to study Joseph Schillinger compositions. He and Cane used to play duets that would just fly off, you can hear that on the recordings but we did that all the time. Sometimes that's shit would last 15 minutes. We do the intro to the song, Don would sing a couple of versus, he'd take a solo, sing another verse. The bass player and I would stop and he and Paul would play for 15 minutes. When we came back in it was knowing when to come back in. This isn't to say that Victor and I were so brilliant we just came in at the right time. No one ever said, "I needed you cats to come in later or early because their was no later/earlier it was just so obvious from the ensemble playing that we were doing. We would bring it down to a certain level and come back in and that's called music."