We Made Our Reputation Doing It That Way

The story of the...
The music of the Mothers is the story of, uh...

A combination of what I knew about music from, from my studies
Plus the musical capabilites of the players in the group as I found them, you know
Which had...
Somewhere along the line, I had to teach them a lot of what they didn't know about music

I started out playing rhythm and blues when I was about 14 or 15 years old in San Diego
And, uh, I was playing nothing but blues 'til I was 18 and, you know
I was really honking and I started out playing drums with a band
And got tired of listening to other people's guitar playing
Took up a guitar and started playing lead right away
And then I spent, uh, the early part of my musical teen childhood
Doing the same thing that most of the, uh...
White blues bands are pulling down heavy bread for
But in those days it was, you know
It was the underground music, uh, the unpopular underground music
Because the kids then wanted to hear, you know
Sweeter, easier stuff
They didn't go for hard, screaming blues or Chicago, you know, weirdness
Nobody knew who the Howlin' Wolf was
Nobody, you know, Muddy Waters, what the fuck is that?

And, uh, so I grew up on that stuff but simultaneously buying classical albums
And going to the library and study music
I had albums of Stravinsky and Varèse and Webern and Bartók
And I never bought anything...
I never bought any Beethoven or Mozart or anything like that
'Cause I didn't like the way it sounded, it was too weak

So, eventually I started hearing a little folk music
I didn't like most of the commercial folk music that was around
My taste in folk music was, uh, Sea Shanties and Middle Eastern stuff
I like Indian music, I like Arab music
So that was all my own personal taste-making influences

The original guys in the band had been brought up on nothing but rhythm and blues
Now, rhythm and blues branches out into about four different categories
The way we grew up with it
There was the ooh-wah ballad, you know
With the high falsetto and the grunting bass and all that stuff, that type
There's a Chicago blues type with the harmonica and, you know, and the funky-ness
There was a Texas type with a, you know
Rock, Bobby "Blue" Bland type thing
And then there was the hard drive type James Brown shit

And offshoots of the, uh, of each one of those, like in the ooh-wah classification
You've got the uptempo singers where the...
Like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and the Royales
They had a different type of a thing

All the other guys in the group grew up with just that
Had no knowledge whatsoever of any kind of classical music, uh, or serious music
Above and beyond Mozart or, uh, Beethoven or, you know
Standard concert hall, uh, warhorses
And even that, they didn't give a shit about and they weren't interested at all in folk music
And, uh...

So I had quite a bit of trouble in the beginning, you know
Just making them aware that there were other kinds of music that we could be playing
To top it off, we were in a very sterile area
We kept getting fired because we'd playing anything other than "Wooly Bully" or, you know...
"Twist and Shout" or the rest of that stuff
We'd lost job after job

When is this that you're talking about exactly?
Two years ago
In '65?
Yeah
And so it was
It was rough keeping it together because there's lots of times that, uh...
The guys wanted to quit, I mean, everybody's quit at least 200 times

So we finally got a chance to come into L.A.
And the reason we stood out from the bands in Los Angeles, you know
Why we would attract any attention at all at that point
'Cause we were working out in the sticks, this whole thing was developing out, uh,
Away from any, uh, you know, urban civilization
We were really, you know, just out there with the Okies

And we got to town, we expected to find all kinds of, you know...
All the bands gotta be really far-out
Well, they weren't, they were bullshit and they had no balls, you know
They weren't funky, they weren't, uh, tasteful, they weren't nothin'
They were just, you know, plastic, folk-rock, teenage puker bands
And they were making a lot of bread

And we came on the scene
And we were loud and we were coarse and we were strange
And if anybody in the audience ever gave us any trouble, we'd tell 'em to fuck off
And we made our reputation doing it that way