Year: 2006

Greg V.’s Tailgate Troubadour is an outstanding album that crawls under your skin and sticks with you. But it wasn’t really meant to be.

“It was basically a deluxe business card. It wasn’t really to establish me as a solo artist,” says the Virginia native, now in L.A. And it may do just that, even if Greg V. (real surname Vorobiov, “It’s been slaughtered since kindergarten!” he says) has to take time off to play for some lucky singer/songwriter

The road to Tailgate Troubadour has been one of many moves (hence the clever title), and many gigs. In fact, Greg might be the only guy who served as guitarist for the former rhythm sections of both Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan! Vorobiov started playing guitar at about 13, loving the Beatles and old Elton John. “I realized early on I just didn’t want to listen to music, I wanted to be a participant.” He practiced six hours a day, laughingly noting, “All I had was school and guitar. No girlfriend.” His earliest influences include Lynyrd Skynyrd and Ted Nugent, followed by a flirtation with fusion.

“I liked Al DiMeola and Alan Holdsworth, and tried to get into that world,” he says. “But ended up splitting the difference with the Dixie Dregs and Steve Morse.” Pat Benatar’s guitarist and husband Neil Geraldo was also a favorite. “He played with such fire. He has that real on-the-edge feel that I love.”

Those influences melded with Greg’s work ethic to make him the player he is now. “I just applied myself in a very intense manner, and never really tried to copy anyone. I learned solos, but as stepping stones. I just wanted to get the emotion from the playing into my soul and playing.”

His first gig was at a Moose Lodge at age 15, subbing for the guitarist in his buddy’s dad’s band. “I showed up with my Peavey Mace, a 2×12, and a 4×12,” he recalled. “As you can imagine, they looked at me like I was crazy!”

In the 11th grade, his parents bought a farm in the Florida panhandle. The move was a turning point. “I hooked up with players 10 years older than me and was gigging every weekend,” he said. “When I graduated from high school, I packed my bags and moved to San Francisco.”

In the early ’80s, he was invited to play in a guitar contest held by Mike Varney, founder of Shrapnel records. “I was fortunate enough to win, and Chris Hayes, Huey Lewis’ lead guitarist, was one of the judges. He ended up getting me a gig with his sister, who wrote songs for Bonnie Raitt. That gig cracked open the Bay area for me.” Calls came in to do jingles and TV work like “Max Headroom” and “Baywatch.” He was eventually referred to Ronnie Montrose.

“I was kind of blown away – I was just a kid from Virginia. But Ronnie was great, and we’re good friends to this day.” Next was a gig with Buddy Miles that lasted three years. “Buddy is probably the most incredible musician I’ve ever worked with. If all he had was coconuts, he’d be the baddest coconut player in the world!”

After playing with Miles, Greg toured Europe with David Halliday, son of famous French rocker Johnny Halliday. He says the gig was great because of the music, and the chance to see the world. A while later, he moved to Hawaii when his wife was transferred. There, he “got lucky” when one of the island’s big acts, the Swingin’ Johnsons, needed a guitarist. He signed on and played about 250 dates each year for the next three. He then caught a case of “island fever,” and he and his wife moved to Austin, Texas. “I didn’t know anybody there, so I started slugging it out.”

There, he caught the ear of vocalist Malford Milligan and producer Derek O’Brien, who passed his name to Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon. “They had just released Been a Long Time, and needed a band to tour.”

That gig lasted six months before Greg’s wife was transferred to L.A., where he got a gig with former Men At Work lead singer Colin Hay. It was fun, but because anyone who read his resume considered him a “Texas blues” guitarist, he had an idea for a solo record.

Tailgate Troubador was the result, and it carried more than its share of challenges.

“The record was made in the worst year of my life; my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer two weeks before I was going to start. I was going to call it quits, but she said ‘No’.”

He hired Kevin McCormick to play bass and Jim Christie on drums, and after his wife started recovery, Greg took the basic tracks and started playing. The result was a very strong album, with great tones and sounds.

Today, Greg is still a Tele guy and has two favorites from the Fender Custom Shop. “I also used a Gretsch Corvette,” he noted. “They’re inexpensive, with big necks, and I love big necks.” On the album, he also played lap steel, baritone, dobro, and mando guitar on the record through three main amps – ’66 Fender Pro Reverb, ’65 Super Reverb, and a Victoria Double Deluxe. Greg says he’d like to play with a singer/songwriter and points to Mark Goldenberg (with Jackson Browne), Buddy Miller, David Rawlings (Gillian Welch), and Bill Frisell as folks he admires as players.

For a look at Greg’s guitars, cars, or to get some info on him, check out gregv.us

In the late 1980s, the Pixies’ unique brand of punk, pop, and guitar rock almost singlehandedly created the alternative music movement that flourished in the early ’90s. Its sound served as the blueprint for a host of new artists including Nirvana, and was cited as a major influence on more established artists, including U2 and David Bowie.

When asked by Rolling Stone about the inspiration behind “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Kurt Cobain said, “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies.”
The Pixies were formed in Boston in 1986 by guitarist/songwriter Charles Thompson and lead guitarist Joey Santiago, who recruited bassist Kim Deal and drummer David Lovering. Thompson then assumed the pseudonym “Black Francis” and the group assumed its name after flipping through a dictionary.

Francis’ often brilliant songwriting employed extraordinary dynamics – they practically invented that “soft verse/loud chorus” technique – and vivid imagery, and his guitar playing was tight and focused. Santiago’s inventive and unconventional melodies were refreshing amongst the slew of hair metal players of the day, making him a sort of “anti-hero” guitar hero.

After quickly gaining a cult following on the local level, the Pixies were signed to 4AD Records and released the EP Come On Pilgrim, in 1987. The following year, the Pixies released their first full-length album, Surfer Rosa, produced by Steve Albini. The album’s international success caught the attention of Elektra Records, who later went on to release their three biggest selling albums.

In 1992, after the group released the hard-rocking Trompe Le Monde and opened for U2 on its 1992 Zoo TV Tour, the Pixies broke up. During this period, bassist Kim Deal worked with the Breeders, and Black Francis worked under Black’s other assumed name Frank Black, and Joey formed The Martinis with his wife, Linda Mallari. Drummer Dave Lovering went on to join Cracker, then spent time working as a magician, opening for several rock tours (including Black’s).

As with all good rock and roll breakups, reunions seem inevitable, and in April of 2004, the Pixies got together for the first time in more than a decade for a critically acclaimed world tour.

VG recently caught up with Francis and Santiago, both of whom are big fans of vintage instruments.

Vintage Guitar: Your reunion tour has you playing together for the first time in more than 10 years. How does it feel?
Black Francis: It feels like it did before, basically. No lie. There’s a lot of muscle memory involved in playing music, and when you go back to old songs, it looms larger than poignant thoughts. It’s a more gut-level thing.
Joey Santiago: It felt good. The anticipation was exciting, and when the actual playing was happening, I felt pretty much like “Just don’t f*** up!” (laughs).

Your guitar styles are very different, yet work well together. When developing a song, do you consciously plan parts, or do you sort of weave them together?
BF: I hate to dumb it down too much, but basically I’m the guy who just shows up with the chord progressions. So, obviously, I’m going to play the chords, many times chunky, as they typically are in rock music. And Joey is the “lead” player, so he’s gonna play higher and more single-note stuff. Sometimes he does a solo, sometimes a repeated riff, a motif. So we start from a sort of Joe Blow place… I’m the rhythm guitar player “chugga chugga chugga” and he’s the lead player “reeneeneeneenee.” You can reduce it all to that. That’s not to say that we play in a conventional way, although sometimes we play a combination of really conventional stuff and oddball stuff. That’s probably true about the Pixies in general. It sounds kinda normal, but there are subtle oddities going on (laughs). Joey is the unsung hero of the Pixies… maybe not now, but in the earlier days, a lot of magazines were personality-driven and wanted to talk about the grouchy lead singer or the drunk bass player, and what’s going on between those two… so the guitar player got left on the back burner.

I think there are several things that Joey does, though, that have made his style stand out. He’ll play something that’s seemingly very simple, and his whole subtle touch just sort of makes it sound classy and makes it pop out.
JS: Back in the old days, I’d just record Charles on his acoustic, or the practices with a cassette tape, remember those things (laughs). Then I’d take it home and practice, and come up with my stuff.

How has your songwriting changed since you started?
BF: When I started out, I was very much into abstraction and very short songs, and a certain type of surreal thing in my songs. If I’ve changed one thing, I’ve tried to adopt more styles into my songwriting, like doing some classic things like love songs or singer/songwriter kind of stuff, trying to expand. When you’re young, you tend to try to be a more avant-garde type of guy, and when you do it long enough, you want to go where others have gone before, and hold your own. You’re not as embarrassed to embrace formulaic or highly stylized things. When you’re young you’re trying to avoid horrible clichés and mediocre music, so the last thing you want to say is “Hey, let’s do a country and western song”…you’re all about breaking everything up. You do things for awhile, and you’re less conscious of people thinking you’re dorky. I think you learn respect for some of the forms of music that will live on.

The first Pixies stuff represents my earliest songwriting, and as they say, you have your whole life to write your first album, and six months to write your second, so the first two Pixies records represent a lot of the writing that started when I was a teenager.

How has your technique changed since you began playing guitar?
BF: I probably have changed, but can’t properly analyze how. Initially, I learned so much on the guitar, and then just didn’t try too hard to break out of that, so I’ve just learned little things through time, like new fingerings. Especially from watching people who have original styles. You work hard at things like songwriting or rehearsing for a tour, but really don’t put the effort into the learning curve… I just try to let that happen on its own – that’s how you develop your own style.
JS: Mine hasn’t (laughs)… I’m trying to change it, but I can’t! Technique-wise, I hope I’m a little better now. But Charles has a style of his own, too… his rhythm playing is to die for – it’s really, really good.

When did you start playing?
JS: I started playing in junior high, and never really took it that seriously. But then, around high school, I started getting more interested in it. I used to plug my electric guitar in at parties and we’d all get s***faced (laughs).

To many, your music was unlike anything that came before it, and doesn’t sound derivative of earlier genres. What type of music did you listen to as a kid?
BF: I would say Neil Young’s Decade album was a huge influence on me. That was probably the first record I heard as a teenager that made me think about the artist, it got me into a lot of different types of material and it gave me a good sense of him. Before Neil, I would say that I was big into Bob Dylan and The Beatles when I was really young, and Donovan. I was a huge Leon Russell fan, and still listen to him. I also used to listen to a lot of ’60s stuff when I was a teenager. I wasn’t really into the current stuff or the punk stuff that was going on in the ’70s. In the ’60s, there were these “rock family trees” and I used to work my way through them. I listened to Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, The Yardbirds, and a Christian rock guy named Larry Norman, whose heyday was the early ’70s; a folky guy who was too rock and roll for religious people and too religious for rock and roll people.
JS: I was into the usual suspects – Hendrix and all that. I really liked the Beatles, too.

Do you remember your first good instrument and amp?
BF: I had an EMC amp that worked okay, and played a Guild acoustic electric through it, which I started playing in high school. That was my first setup with The Pixies, and I played it for a lot of the early Pixies gigs. The amp didn’t make it too far, though. It stopped working, so we got a butter knife to open it up and see if we could fix it (laughs). And of course, we couldn’t! So the EMC was not revived (laughs). Then we both got into Peavey amplifiers, which worked for him.
JS: The first good instrument I had, my mother bought for me, just after junior high. It was an Ovation Viper. Remember those? It was a good guitar, too. It had the full 24 frets, and was made for someone with tiny hands, so it would sit in my hands every night, and I liked it. I tried a more expensive Les Paul and it didn’t fit as well for my hands. For an amp, I got a Peavey Special.

I got my first Les Paul when we formed the band in Boston. I actually initially wanted to be the Tele guy, but Charles already had one, so not to be redundant, I went with the humbuckers, something totally opposite of what he was playing.

I believe it was Brian Eno who said “Only about a thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every one of them formed a rock and roll band.” Something similar could be said for the Pixies, whose impact perhaps belies its popularity. What was it about your music that attracted fans?
BF: Oh, I don’t know. I suppose enough people found what they wanted to find in it. In other words, people were looking for something that was kind of pop or aggressive were able to find it in the music. Other people who were looking to find something humorous and not taking themselves too serious, even a bit nerdy, were able to find that, as well. Some wanted music that was sort of quirky, arty – dare I say avant-garde – and were able to find it in our music. Different types of people were able to focus on different elements.
JS: I’d say that it was unique at the time. I don’t mean to sound like an old fart, but that was when “alternative” was actually alternative. We didn’t consciously rebel against the norm; I think it was just a natural thing for us to be alternative. This was in the days of hair metal. I remember going through Electra Records offices, and looking at their posters on their wall, and thinking “They’ll really like us…”

Obviously, Kurt Cobain was greatly influenced by the Pixies.
BF: It’s unfortunate for Nirvana that they got so hot so fast. That’s exactly the sort of thing that makes me not want to listen to a band or makes me not want to see a movie. So there’s stuff I’ve missed over the years, because if it’s like “Everybody’s going to see that movie,” guess what I’m not going to see? I tend to have a problem with things that become that popular.
So you consider yourself a contrarian?
BF: Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it. I mean, I hear Nirvana at places like the grocery store now, and they were good and they were talented and all that, but it’s hard to talk about something that’s so huge for so many people. I hesitate to really analyze their music.

The Pixies have used Marshall amps for years. When did you first get into them?
BF: We were opening for Soul Asylum at the original Blue Note nightclub in St. Louis, and they had some that sounded really good. So when we got home, we went down to the music store and bought brand new Marshalls, and have used them ever since.
JS: Yes, from that point on we’ve used Marshalls. Mine is a 50-watt JCM 800. I always liked them, but since we had to lug our own gear around, I was like “What? Are you crazy, I’m not gonna lug that big thing around.” So I stuck with the Peavey until we had some help (laughs). I really like the JCM 800s, but don’t like the 900s. For the studio, I have a blackface Fender Vibrolux reverb.
BF: When we got bigger, we went with two Marshalls each. I do have some old Vox AC30s that I used in my solo band, but went back to Marshalls when we got back together.

Do you collect guitars?
BF: For a while, I was really into ’60s Teles, and then a few years back, a bunch of them got stolen. So to sort of “celebrate,” I went out and bought my first ’50s Tele – a ’57 – which initially felt weird, but eventually became my main guitar up until last year, when my brother showed up at a gig in L.A. at the beginning of the Pixies tour with a ’53 Telecaster. He just gave it to me at the gig, and it sounded, actually, too intense. But eventually I started playing it, and now it’s my main guitar.

As far as other guitars, in the early days I played a bunch of these ’80s Japanese-made Fender Tele Specials. We had a well-known guitar tech named Toru, who stripped them, took them back to Japan, and dried them in some barbeque thing, which made them lighter. He then put vintage-style pickups in them, kept the whammy bridge on them, and cut some old-style saddles.

For the reunion, I could go back to Marshall amps, but not back to the ’80s Teles. Nowadays, I play just the ’53 Tele, and if I break a string, I’ll pickup my ’57.
JS: I like Les Pauls because they’re the easiest guitars (to play). I have a bunch of them, and my favorites include a black Custom that sounds like your run-of-the-mill Les Paul, and then a nice old goldtop that sounds super, super crisp. I just bought a ’52 Guild Aristocrat with soapbars. It’s a very nice guitar that I am dying to record with. It’s less forgiving than a Les Paul, though.

One of our crew, Myles Mangino, had a great super-light Gibson Melody Maker that I loved and wanted to buy, but he just traded it for a drum set. I was like, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I’ve also got a ’65 ES-345 with a Gibson vibrato, that’s a really nice guitar, too. I do prefer vintage guitars; they feel more worn-in, and if it has lasted that long, it must be worth the money (laughs). I’d like a ’50s Les Paul, though.

Joey, on Surfer Rosa, you had some amazing clean tones. What did you use on that record?
JS: I was playing a Fender Twin Reverb on that that Charles used to own. In the studio, I plug straight into the amps.
How about live? Are you using any effects?
JS: Live, I do use pedals, including a ZVex Super Hard-On, a DOD wah, Boss Fuzz pedal, a tremolo pedal, and an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man, which I love, and an SMF Mr. Echo, which is also a fun pedal.

Your style alternated from an almost updated surf rock to extreme hard rock, as on your final studio album, Trompe Le Monde, in ’91. Was there a conscious move to a heavier sound?
BF: We did listen to a lot of surf music, and we did play loud, but you just kind of make up a bunch of songs, and they come out like they come out. We’re not real visionary in that sense. We don’t have a game plan.
JS: I’ll play something a bit heavier if the song is harder-sounding. When I did those hammer-ons on that album, they were sort of a joke – a metal joke – everyone was just laughing when I was recording that.

Are there plans for the Pixies to record a new album?
BF: We don’t have any; we’re sort of hesitant on that. I think we’d like to, but I don’t think that’s what people are interested in right now. Maybe some of our

Considering his lengthy resumé, one might expect Irish guitarist Vivian Campbell would have released a solo album long before September of 2005. And Campbell’s efforts in bands such as Dio, Whitesnake, and Def Leppard might create a stereotype among listeners about the musical direction of the guitarist’s new album, but Two Sides of If (Sanctuary) is a surprise, genre-wise, in that it’s a blues tribute rather than a hard rock effort, and features contributions from ZZ Top’s Billy F Gibbons, vocalist Joan Osborne, and drummer Terry Bozzio

VG spoke with the affable guitarist while he was on the road with Def Leppard, discussing guitars, influences, and his new album. Campbell is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and we inquired if one of his earliest influences was fellow Irish guitarist the late Rory Gallagher (see feature in this section).

“Rory was my first guitar hero, the first concert I saw, and his live album was the first 12” record I owned. I got into him when I was about 12, right around the time of Irish Tour ’74. I wanted a Strat bad; I had a Strat copy, but I was working weekends, trying to save up money. My father finally bought me a Fender, and surprised me with it. He opened up the trunk of his car, and there was a Telecaster (Thinline) – the one with the two humbuckers and an f-hole. That was my first real guitar.”

“Then I really got into (Thin Lizzy guitarists) Brian Robertson and Gary Moore,” Campbell added. “They were Les Paul cats, and by the time I got into Sweet Savage, I was a Les Paul guy.”

Campbell refinished his first Les Paul more than once and played it on the first album by singer Ronnie James Dio’s self-monikered band following Dio’s departure from Black Sabbath. Campbell was 19 years old when he got the Dio gig. By the time of the second Dio album, Campbell had acquired a couple of Charvel Strats from Grover Jackson. After departing Dio, he joined mega-group Whitesnake at the height of that band’s popularity in 1987, and he was an endorser of the Kramer Nightswan model, which had two humbuckers and a reverse headstock. Campbell later formed a short-lived band called Riverdogs, which “made one record that totally fell between the cracks.” He had also attempted to start a solo album in the early ’90s.

“Musically, it was going to be very different for me,” he explained. “I grew up very much a guitar guy, and was writing songs for Dio that were guitar-based. But after doing it for a couple of years with that band, I felt very conflicted, and for the first time in my life I started to listen to soul and pop singers, and I started vocal lessons.”

The guitarist’s shot at a solo effort was abruptly halted when he got a phone call about joining Def Leppard following the death of guitarist Steve Clark in 1991. His first performance was at the Freddy Mercury memorial concert in ’92, followed by tours to support Leppard’s Adrenalize album. He’s been with the band ever since and these days is back to favoring Les Pauls.

As with a lot of original blues recordings, Two Sides of If was done live in the studio. Moreover, blues is typically associated with older guitars, so we asked Campbell if he’d made a conscious decision to use vintage instruments on the album.

“I have a few Gibson reissues,” he said. “So they’re not ‘old’ guitars. I was jamming in a lot of clubs around L.A., and the guitar I was using most was a ’56 Les Paul reissue with P-90s, and I used that a lot on the record. I also borrowed some guitars from Gibson – a dot-neck 335, and an L-5 Custom, a big-bodied jazz guitar of the sort I’d never played before. They all sounded beautiful.
“I put a list on the CD of what gear I used on each song,” Campbell noted. “And the real surprise guitar, for me – the one I used most of the album – was a great-sounding new Yamaha with a Bigsby (vibrato). I also took that guitar to jams around L.A., and people would come up and ask me about it. It turned out to be the shining star of the record.”

Two Sides of If has 12 tracks, including two tributes to Gallagher. “Calling Card” gets particularly close to Gallagher’s tone. “I’ve got to say that comes more from my style of playing, but Rory’s definitely the primary influence, and I did pick up a lot of his habits; I definitely attack too much with my right hand. But I’m particularly pleased with the way the guitar sounded on that song; that was the Yamaha, and I used a Fender tweed amp that (Leppard guitarist) Phil Collen’s guitar tech modified. I think that tonally, that’s probably my favorite song on this record.”

Singer Joan Osborne contributes vocals on a cover of Cream’s “Spoonful,” and the redoubtable Billy F Gibbons wrote and performed on “Willin’ for Satisfaction,” and trades guitar licks with Campbell on a version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Like It This Way.”

Summing up the album, Campbell noted, “I’m really satisfied with the way it turned out. A lot of people wouldn’t expect it. My wife has always been a blues fan, and she told me 20 years ago ‘You play guitar like a blues guy, and you’ve got this rough voice, so you sing like a blues guy. You should make a blues record.’ It finally happened, and nobody knows me as a singer, and some people who think they know me as a guitar player will be surprised, as well. I’m not the same guitar player I was 20 years ago. I’ve come a long way since then.”