‘It’s about the night me and my best friend Marty Jones hung out with a flamenco troupe, wishing we were cool musicians too – so that we could talk to the girls a little better’
Our first four records had been mostly made in houses in the hills above Los Angeles. August and Everything After was our first major label album, so it was a pretty big deal. Our advance was $3,000 each; I bought a 1971 cherry red VW Karmann Ghia convertible and drove it to LA.
I would get up every morning and listen to Pickin’ Up the Pieces by Poco, which is like the Beatles doing country music. I also had this Benny Goodman album that I was listening to a lot – my dad had picked it up as a free giveaway at a Texaco station when I was a kid.
Mr Jones was on a demo we sent to all the record companies, but it was a very difficult song to finish. We didn’t have a great handle on it. It’s not a slow song, but it’s not a straight ahead, fast song either. It gallops along, so you have to get a real feel for it. It’s soul music – closer to Stax Records than it is to country.
We looked at a few different producers but when I talked to T Bone Burnett about where the band was at, I felt like he really got it. We had a lot of potential, but I didn’t like the way we sounded – we hadn’t learned to be a band yet. We took away all of the synths and guitar effects. Our drummer Steve Bowman couldn’t hear the song how the rest of us did and so T Bone brought in one of Steve’s heroes, Denny Fongheiser to play on it. It’s a funny story now, but it was rough on Steve.
