There’s also the 20-year rule of nostalgia. The original teenage Doors fans were in their thirties by then, and they were suddenly nostalgic and playing those songs for their kids.
Are you watching VHS tapes of shows and listening to bootlegs and learning the nuances of Morrison’s singing voice and the way the music was played live? I tried to book it at many of the national-act club venues and theaters. They wanted nothing to do with a show where somebody was doing somebody else’s music.Yeah. Glam. This is before grunge. Glam was probably huge, maybe the biggest. Rock & roll was taking another twist. Also, New Wave was strong in the early Eighties, and glam took over with bands like Poison.I had to put on my own show. Here comes my marketing experience from college. I had very little money. I rented out the Whiskey.
By this time, it’s the early Nineties. This is when the tribute band movement started picking up a lot of speed. In Los Angeles, we were playing all the rooms that the traveling, national club acts were doing, the ones that weren’t playing arenas anymore. We were selling out all the time. I think there were about two million musicians in Los Angeles that saw that, and decided to form their own bands.Yeah. I was actually the first one to read for that part..
I realized that some of the songs are really good showpieces and come off better than other songs. They have more meat for a live performance. So I gravitate towards about 25 to 30 songs out of the catalog. I might put in one or two obscure songs per show, but there are some songs that just bring the place down that have to be in there almost every time.
Yeah. I don’t even know if I can truly explain it. I’m at a loss for words. But perhaps the biggest honor I could ever get doing what I do. It’s crazy it took them so long to just get a great singer and get on the road. It seems like such an obvious move. During this period when they were going through singers pretty quickly, did you think in the back of your head it was possible they’d call you up?
That was terrific. Ray was kind of an alpha dog. He was the captain of the ship, and kind of enjoyed that role. He was very entertaining. A great person to talk to all those times, and travel with. We could be in a situation where we were like, “Here we are, waiting to get on an airplane?” But I remember one time we were leaving St. Petersburg to go to Italy. They had this big piece of plexiglass between the waiting area and outside.