PT:
So, when did you start playing the guitar?
SS: I
guess it started in 1962, I was watching the Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday
night and saw Elvis doing 'Hound Dog'. I implored my father to get me a
guitar and once I had one I locked myself into my room and practised and
practised. At the end of that year I formed a band with Michael McDonald,
who was later one of the Doobie Brothers. The band was called Mike & The
Majestics and was a really good, tight little R&B band. We played a lot of
songs by groups like The Kinsmen at fraternity parties at Washington
University in St. Louis. If you've ever seen the film 'Animal House', then
that was what it was like!
PT: Were are the band members locals?
SS: The
whole band grew up on the same block, so we all went way back together.
Another kid on our block was Bruce Cole, so that's where I first met him as
well. There were two types of band back then, bands who played soul music
and bands that wanted to be like the Beatles and English invasion type
bands. In 1964 Michael went off and joined a soul band and I formed The Good
Feelin', who did stuff by the Pretty Things and the Yardbirds. Later on we
got into groups like the Blues Magoos and Love. We stayed together about 4
years, by which time I was in my late teens - I'd really got into playing
the blues and following guys like Albert King, who was from my home town. I
decided to quit The Good Feelin' so I could pursue being a blues guitar
player and straight away joined a country rock band called Aero Memphis. We
did a lot of Buffalo Springfield songs, which was of course the opposite
thing to what I'd left Good Feelin' for... one day I got a call from a band
from Champaign, Illinois which is about two and a half hours away from St.
Louis; they were called R.E.O. Speedwagon and they wanted me to audition for
them. There was a bad connection on the line and I thought they'd said they
were the Illinois Speedpress who were a group I really would have liked to
play with. So anyway I went up there thinking it was this band and it turned
out to be R.E.O. Speedwagon who I'd never heard of, but I went ahead and
auditioned and got the job. I ended up staying with them for two years,
between 1969 and 1971. At the time I didn't think the band was that good,
even though we were very popular in the Midwest. We played all the college
towns and it was really good experience, but in the end I decided the group
just wasn't good enough to get a record deal so I quit the band - and the
rest, as they say, is history. R.E.O. Speedwagon went on to fame and
fortune.
PT: Do you regret your decision to leave R.E.O. Speedwagon?
SS: I did
what I thought was right at the time. When their first album finally came
out they'd done a couple of my songs on the record, which I thought was nice
until I realised that all the songs were credited to 'R.E.O. Speedwagon'.
Being young and foolish I hadn't copyrighted my songs, so they could just
steal them away. I kinda got screwed by those guys.
PT: A charming move on their part.
SS: I
reckon so. After that I moved back to St. Louis and sat around thinking what
to do with my life. After a brief spell in Los Angeles working as a studio
musician and then running around St. Louis playing gigs and picking up girls
for a couple of years I decided to get back into playing original music, and
that's when I got together with the guys from Pavlov's Dog. At that time
they were called 'Pavlov's Dog And The Condition Reflex Soul Revue And
Concert Choir' so I immediately asked that they changed their name... They
were a real special band, I was totally blown away by David Surkamp who was
definitely a world class writer. As a singer he was simply amazing. At that
point in my life I'd worked with some great singers, like Mike McDonald, and
I'd lived with Dan Fogelberg in Champaign during my R.E.O. Speedwagon days
so I'd heard some top-flight singers, but David was truly fantastic. I don't
think he ever got the credit he really deserves. But he wasn't the only one
in the band that was special. Siegfried Carver on violin was incredible -
the whole band as a unit created a sound that I'd never heard before. So we
played around St. Louis and really built up a following, spent a lot of time
writing songs and doing demos. Bob Safron, our drummer's elder brother, was
getting us all the gigs and kind of acting as our unofficial manager. He
introduced us to a promoter named Ron Powell who had a lot of clout in the
music industry in 1974. We wound up signing a management contract with him.
Unfortunately he was a con man, although it took us a while to figure that
out. Even though we signed what was at that point the biggest contract in
the history of the record industry for an unknown group, none of us received
anything out of it because we were taken to the cleaners by Ron Powell.
Eventually he was taking all the money from the concerts and the albums and
investing it in all kinds of illegal activities. He ended up getting busted
by the Inland Revenue Service and thrown into jail. He spent a lot of his
life in jail. I just found out a few weeks ago that he's dead, and I can't
say I shed a tear for the guy.
PT:
So all you got out of it was the music.
SS: The
only thing we got was the legacy of Pavlov's Dog, which isn't all that bad
because we recorded some unbelievable music, music which I think will last
forever. The first album, 'Pampered Menial', was actually written and
conceived before we signed to a record label and in my opinion it was the
best thing we ever recorded. It was before we had 'producers' assigned to us
by the label, which in my opinion screwed up the music completely by the
time we got to our second album, 'At The Sound Of The Bell'. By that time we
were being creatively stifled, they were trying to make us sound how they
wanted as opposed to how we really were.
PT: Did you tour much?
SS: We
were doing a lot of major tours across the States and we really weren't
making any money; everybody in the band was on $180 a week. We had the
opportunity to go to Australia and Europe and do concert tours there, but it
wasn't in Ron Powell's best interests to let us do that so it didn't happen.
In fact, the sooner the band split up the better it was for him, because
he'd taken all the money from the band and was using it for other business
ventures so once the band split there was less chance of him being caught.
In the end that was the demise of Pavlov's Dog - if we'd been handled right
by the record company and managed properly and not by a crook I believe that
Pavlov's Dog could have been one of the biggest bands in the world.
Unfortunately we weren't though, and that's the way it goes...
PT: You had a different drummer on the second album.
SS: By
the time we got to the second album Michael Safron just couldn't work with
the producers so he wound up not being on the album and we wound up doing
what the record company wanted us to do, which was to hire Bill Bruford as
our drummer. It was an idiotic experience for me because Bill was not into
the music at all, he was just a hired studio musician making a lot of money
out of the gig. He probably made more money out of working for us for a
couple of weeks than I made in the entire career of the band!
PT: What's the story behind the third album?
SS: Well,
by then our manager was in jail and the record company was telling us we had
to either get rid of him or they'd drop us from the label - and that's
exactly what happened. We didn't act fast enough to secure a new management
and there was a lot of disharmony within the band, so the label dropped us.
We did finish the basic tracks and some of the overdubs for the third album
and sent the tapes to New York where the producers added all sorts of studio
musicians. The only song that remained the way it was supposed to be was the
one I sang, 'It's All For You'. I refused to let them touch that.
PT: The album only came out as a bootleg entitled 'The St. Louis Hounds'...
SS: The
original title was 'Has Anybody Here Seen Siegfried', but then we were
dropped by the label and it never came out. Everybody was pretty burnt by
the whole experience. There was just no reason to keep it together any
longer and that's when we broke up.
PT:
That must have been pretty hard to face, the end of such a special band?
SS: I was
broke and broken hearted. I just didn't have it in me to keep pushing
forward with my professional career, so instead I opted to play in Top 40
bands around Florida. I made a pretty good living and actually had quite a
lot of fun over the next three years. Then I joined some old friends from
R.E.O. Speedwagon days in a St. Louis band called Gulliver and spent a
couple of years travelling around the country with them. About four and a
half years ago tragedy struck my life when a girl I loved committed suicide
one night after coming down off a cocaine high. I was devastated, I stopped
playing rock music and removed myself completely from the rock & roll
environment until a year or so ago. About six months ago I put together a
three-piece rockabilly group called The Memphis Underground, started playing
the clubs around St. Louis and people really seemed to like it. I met up
with David Surkamp again who sat in with the band and it was so successful
that we decided to combine forces, so now The Memphis Underground consists
of David and his wife Sarah, myself, Eddie Nickeson and Billy Costello on
drums. We're starting to write music, which is great because for so long
I've been unable to write anything - for a while after my girlfriend died I
couldn't even play guitar. David and I wrote a song recently called 'The
Sins Of Loving You' which I'm really proud of. David also wrote a song
called 'Blowing Out Of Memphis' which is really catchy. The creative juices
are flowing, the gigs are packed out and you can't really hope for more than
that. I've also spent a lot of time collecting Hawaiian guitars in recent
years and those are being incorporated into The Memphis Underground which
really creates a different sound, so I'm looking forward to it all.
As any
fan of the Pavlov's surely should be as well. We'll keep you informed of
developments.
Admirers
of David Surkamp's voice should also hunt down Michael Quatro's 1976 album
'Dancers, Romancers, Dreamers & Schemers' (Prodigal P6-1001051) for his
marvellous appearance on the track 'Ancient Ones', both HiFi albums on Butt
Records ('Moods For Mallards', HAI192 and 'Demonstration Records' FUNEP12-3)
and the David Surkamp single, 'Louie, Louie'/'Summertime' (MGL5003).
Written
and directed by Mick Dillingham Produced and arranged by Phil
McMullen, (c) Terrascope 1992
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