March 3, 2002

A: Actually, Dwight saw Eddy play before I did. Dwight had seen him play with his dad at a club called The Lingerie in Hollywood many years ago when we were just getting started and he remembered Eddy. The first time I heard him play was when we held the auditions for the job. We set up at this rehearsal place in Hollywood and Dwight invited Eddy to come out here. We sent him some songs to learn: "Guitars, Cadillacs" and "Please, Please Baby", and asked him to learn the signature licks. We had our band there, which at the time consisted of our drummer, bassist and fiddle. We didn't have keyboards or steel guitar at that point. The original band was just me, Dwight, J.D. Foster (bass), Brantley Kearns (fiddle) and Jeff Donovan (drums).

We invited three local guitar players from the scene here, plus Eddy. The local guys may have felt some competition with me since we all played the same clubs, so I don't know how serious they were about learning their parts. (laughs) They didn't really play very well. They didn't play aggressively, or play the parts with a lot of authority, or even play them right. Eddy played last and he had it all nailed. He knew everything. I mean, he played the solo off the record on "Guitars, Cadillacs" that I hadn't played since I recorded it. (laughs) I was like, "Wow!"

Eddy said, "Man, listening to that stuff I always thought it was really easy, but I got to my hotel room and was trying to learn it and, man, there's some weird stuff in there. It was really hard." I said, "Look, I sympathize with you because I've never played it the same since. I don't even know that solo." (laughs) I played the solos on the record, and some of the simpler ones I play the same way or close to it every night, but that was like a one time thing. I mean, you scribble a picture out and then someone asks you if you can scribble like that again. Well no, I can scribble something different. Like "Please, Please Baby", I don't play that solo anymore or "Little Sister". I mean those are wild-ass. Those are experimental. (laughs) I play certain parts of the themes of those solos, and they've changed over the years as we've changed, but Eddy played them note for note. I was like, "Wow, that's really good," and Eddy played really aggressively.

I think the key to what I brought to the Dwight band was that we both had parents from rural backgrounds. We listened to country music in our homes, although Dwight grew up in Columbus, Ohio and I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I think Eddy had a similar environment in Texas. If you grow up in Texas, there's tons of blues, rock and country and everything sort of merged together. Eddy had a really aggressive style and he was a really good rhythm guitar player. The Dwight band was just guitar, bass and drums and basically that's what Eddy was doing with his dad. Eddy had to really carry the whole load. Because of that background, I think it was easier for Eddy than the other guys who auditioned. I don't think the others realized what they were getting themselves into. So, it was a no-brainer. It was like, "Wow, great. Let's use this guy."

I met him that day and we hung out and chatted. He was really young and kind of shy. I never had a lot of contact with him because they went right out on the road. But then, a handful of times, just out of the blue, he called me on the phone. It was really sweet and I was very flattered because he was really a great musician. I made a record, WORKING CLASS, and he called and left a message, "I bought your record, call me up." So, I called him back and he said, "Hey Pete, I just wanted you to know that I bought your record and I was listening to it and I loved this, and I loved that…" He was really a student of everybody playing guitar. He just played really hard and aggressively and wasn't afraid to step out there. That was the key to the Dwight band. The guitar chair in that band is that deal. It's a lot of riffs, soloing and rhythm, the whole package. Eddy covered it. He covered it with a lot of youthful exuberance.

Eddy was terrific. He was a sweet guy. His dad's a sweet man. The Dwight band played a show in Nashville early on and Billy Joe came out to see us when we were nobodies and said, "Hey, I really like your stuff." I mean, he was "Old Chunk of Coal". He was the guy! I'd played his songs for years in bars from nine till one-thirty. It was a thrill to meet him and then be involved with Eddy.

A: Unfortunately, once I left the touring band, Dwight tried to make everybody learn everything exactly, probably for his own safety. But, nobody could learn it exactly. The only one who did was Eddy. Nobody else ever got close. Sometimes Dwight would work out new tunes on the road and the soloists, fiddle or guitar, could play their own thing. But, when it came to the "hits", Dwight had Eddy play exactly what was on the record, including the solos.

A: Yeah, Eddy was a Strat guy and Dwight was like, "You've got to play a Telecaster." That's not a big jump. If you're playing Strats or Teles, that's not huge. The scale length and tension of the strings will feel pretty much the same. I think Eddy was playing through more rock amps like Marshalls and thicker sounding amps, but Dwight wanted him to play through a Fender Twin Reverb. However Twins are really loud, deceptively loud, louder than Marshalls because they are so clean and bright. So Eddy went and got his little suit from Manuel's and got his guitar and his amps and just said, "OK" and got up there and smoked. I think as they rolled on down the road Eddy was hiding amps under the stage. (laughs) That's what I heard. He would have a Marshall stashed somewhere. It would be in the house, but not on the stage so Dwight couldn't see it. He'd put a mic on it so that he could switch over and play through it.

A: Yeah, I think he got caught a couple of times. Somebody walked by and said, "Uh, there's an amp in this tractor trailer with a mic on it, blasting." And the roadies were like, "That's Eddy's. Don't say anything."

A: I saw at least two shows. After their first tour, they came back to town and played the Hollywood Palace. That was a great show. That was early on. Eddy played really aggressively and just kind of stayed in his spot and did his thing, played really hard and had the big sound. Then after they'd been touring for a while, I saw them at the Wiltern Theater. That was when Dwight was trying to get Eddy to dance and follow him around the stage. (laughs) Dwight had sort of wandered off the musical map by then. When I was in the band, I could sort of corner a bad idea. Like I could say, "Man, we shouldn't do that." I also produce and arrange. Dwight and I bounce ideas off each other, build the set list together and try to keep the flow going. The other thing too is that if a certain musician wasn't cutting it, I would be a little more apt to say we should replace them.

They had switched drummers on that tour and unfortunately the one they got was speeding up and slowing down and it was driving everybody crazy. I've done this long enough to know that first thing, you've got to have a great drummer.

Dwight had Eddy doing some goofy little dances with him and stuff. I don't think Eddy enjoyed that, but I know I wouldn't have enjoyed it either. (laughs) But Eddy was more apt to look up to Dwight than to tell him what to do, being the new guy. He probably had to suffer with a bad drummer for a while or some of these goofy ideas because that Wiltern show was kind of strange. It was very long and they had slowed a lot of the tempos down. I mean, Eddy played well, but I can't say the band played well. The drummer was hurting them at that point.

A: I don't think so. He was unfazed by that. He was a pro. He was going to go up there and play as hard as he could, whenever he could. He started performing so young that he was really a seasoned player by the time he was twenty-six-years-old. He'd done hundreds and hundreds of gigs in front of all kinds of audiences so he was just going to go up there and do his best and play as hard as he could. He was an aggressive player. He dug in.

A: He probably hadn't done too much prior. His dad was playing that outlaw stuff. Since Eddy was pretty young, I'm sure he was more excited about playing blues and rock, plus being in Austin with the whole Stevie Ray Vaughn thing happening at the time. When we first went to Austin there were like twenty guys playing like Stevie Ray Vaughn. I love his playing, but I was like, "Come on." Every guy in town was Stevie Ray Vaughn Jr.

So I think Dwight and I did more of a "West Coast" thing. When I first came out to Los Angeles, I was in my early twenties so my musical growing-up was in Southern California, so not any different from Buck Owens or Merle Haggard. We played a ton of that kind of music in the bars to make a living. I think at that point Eddy hadn't been exposed to that type of country music. It's aggressive as well, which is cool, so he could step in and dig in and play these licks. Country music is so guitar oriented. That's what attracted me to it. Now country music is a mess, but up through probably 1972 or 1973 I would be willing to bet that ninety-eight percent of every country song you ever heard was written on a guitar. It was guitar music. In the smaller bands, when you started playing clubs, classically you'd have a guy that could sing and play acoustic and you'd have to have a lead player. So if it's a four-piece band, like with Eddy and his dad or with me in the early days of the clubs, the lead played all the solos. And that's fun for a guitar player, not sharing with anybody. (laughs) So I think all that had a similar appeal for Eddy. I brought a little different thing to the Bakersfield sound because being from Detroit, I had a heavy blues background. I think Eddy could adapt to that pretty easily because he was a great blues player.

A: I sort of learned it through osmosis. It was the same thing for me. I would learn licks off the radio or a record and then go into the bars at night and play them. I guess maybe vicariously, through my musical upbringing in California, Eddy got to slip into those shoes and experience it. He thanked me and we got to talk about it, but we never got to sit down and play guitar together.

A: Eddy played completely from emotion, from his heart. A lot of people can talk about that and a lot of people try to do that, but Eddy was a guitar player's guitar player. What he was thinking and what he was doing and projecting is as good as it gets. It's where you need to be mentally to play at that level consistently. It's like a professional sport or anything else. Not every night are you going to go out and hit a home run, but with that consistency and that kind of drive and that kind of emotion in your playing, you're going to go out and hit in the high nineties every night. You might walk offstage and go, "Man, I only got nine out of ten tonight." But to the crowd, it's so far over what they usually get to see that they're experiencing these great performances night after night. You're at a much higher level, not unlike a pro golfer or baseball player.

I think his biggest lesson was his intensity and his emotion. A lot of it is what you think. When people come up to talk to me about playing guitar, they want one of two things. One is normal and the other I find odd. One is they want me to sign their guitars. I've always found that strange. I never wanted to break a guitar or write on it. (laughs) Second is a lot of people just want to learn my licks. That's good ear training, and I've experienced that to a degree, but I think it's more important to impart what you're thinking, what you're trying to get across. How music affects you and how you then, in turn, interpret it through your instrument. That's what Eddy was doing. Eddy understood that. Without ever talking to him about it, I know that's what he did. He internalized what music felt like to him and played it with his emotion through his instrument. That's where you need to be. That's where all the pros are, the people that make you say, "Whoa, how did they do that?" It's not so much about your prowess on the instrument. It's really about your intensity. Stevie Ray Vaughn proved that you can copy Albert King's licks, but you can't play them with the same intensity. That is the difference. I mean, Stevie had it when he did his own thing, he had complete intensity in his playing. To Eddy, that was the key. That's what it's about. I don't know that you pick that up from anybody either. I think that just comes to you. It depends on your feeling about music, how it affects you.

A: He had to have talent above and beyond. He had really great ears. You can't learn that. He could hear music, licks, anything and then turn around and play it on his instrument. A lot of people who started young are not the cats that are out there in bands that people are going, "Wow, this guy is twenty-six-years-old and he's killing me." That's not happening. It's really learning what your instrument is and how you want to speak with it. That goes back to what music does to you, how you internalize it and then bring it out through your instrument. That's really it. The intensity. The real key to Eddy was that he was aggressive, but the reason he was aggressive was because he had an intense feeling about music. He played music aggressively, with intensity, and that's an internal thing that you can't even give to a genius.

A: In 1995, I played Austin on my solo tour and Eddy came to the show at Antone's. We hung out and had a good chat. We talked about music and he talked about what he was doing with his dad. I think his mom was sick at the time, but hadn't passed away. He said that was weighing on his dad. I think that was probably the last time I saw him. He was a great musician. He was gifted. The guitar was his voice.