Month: March 2010

Photo: Frank Vig.

Coco Montoya’s voyage to headlining blues-rock guitarist wasn’t exactly the same road most artists of this nature have taken.

Montoya was a drummer through his teens and actually made it all the way to drumming with blues great Albert Collins. “I always thought that was my calling, but two things ended up ending my drumming career. When you have bad habits and learn only what you want to learn, there are going to be big holes in your ability… Big holes where you should have learned certain things. That and a change in pop music killed my drumming.” With a laugh, he adds, “When funk and disco became popular, I just didn’t have the skills! I can thank (former Tower of Power drummer) David Garibaldi for single-handedly ending my drumming career. I had no knowledge of how to play like that. There was no way I was going to handle that.”

As fate would have it, though, things turned out okay. Montoya’s latest record, Dirty Deal is his sixth as a band leader. He always enjoyed the guitar, even back in his drumming days. “I got an acoustic when I was 13. I was one of those kids who didn’t play baseball or football – I was always in the garage playing drums or guitar. I’d put my fingers everywhere I could to try and make some noise. I thought I invented the E chord, because I found it on the fretboard. I almost got killed walking around the house hitting that chord. I didn’t know what else to do with it!”

From that point, Montoya learned stuff from other kids. But he didn’t get into soloing until he heard Eric Clapton in Cream. Still, for awhile in the mid 1960s, it wasn’t looking like the music business held his calling. “I quit the business for awhile after Top 40 sort of passed my drumming by,” he said. “I got a day job and actually had money in my pocket. No bar owners were yelling at me. So I bartended and worked at an electronics place where I wore a tie and had a desk. It was great because I ended up going to bars at night to jam and I was just really having fun.”

By that point, Montoya was strictly a guitarist – the drums were history. And it was at one of the jams he enjoyed so much where fate took a turn when a former Clapton bandleader stopped in to jam and was impressed by his playing.

“John Mayall saw me at the old Central Club, which is now the Viper Room, and brought me back into the music business. They had these unbelievable Tuesday night jams where nobodies and superstars played together. I did a bastardized version of ‘All Your Love,’ and lo and behold, when Mick Taylor quit his band, he called and offered me the gig. I figured if I could last a few months, I’d get in the book (laughs) – I could say I was a Bluesbreaker. But I ended up staying almost 10 years.”

When he started planning for the new record, Montoya talked with Alligator Records president Bruce Iglauer and producer, friend, and Little Feat guitarist Paul Barerre.

“We decided to just take a more bare-bones approach. We wanted to try and capture how my live efforts feel. It’s rough-edged, but that’s what we were looking for.” Montoya has known Barerre since the ’80s when the latter was spending time away from Little Feat, and playing in his own band, the Bluesbusters. Barerre brought in Little Feat buddies Kennie Gradney, Richie Hayward, and Bill Payne to help on Dirty Deal. “It was a great influence having those guys, and they’ve been really, really kind to me.”

Photo: Frank Vig.

The band has since invited Montoya to its annual Feat Festival in Jamaica two years in a row.

Most pictures of Montoya feature a white offset double-cutaway guitar that has been his favorite since his days in Mayall’s band. It was made for him by Albert Molinaro of Guitars-R-Us in Hollywood and has Bill Lawrence pickups. He recently acquired two more similar guitars from L.A. Guitarworks, also with Lawrence pickups.

“I’ve always liked Bill’s pickups. The ones I have in my guitars are the L250 Humbuckers.”

Montoya has a couple of new guitars made for him by Mark Lippe. One is a 335-style guitar, the other a large-body jazz guitar Montoya used to record some of the rhythm parts on the new record. His amps include an 80-watt Carr Slant 6. “Steve (Carr) made it for me because I loved the amps, but needed something a little bigger than the 40 watt.” He runs the amp through an old open-back Bogner cab modified to 2×12″. He also employs several pedals, but really likes the Hoochie Mama made by Tim Brown. It adds what he calls “that Bluesbreaker sound.”

Montoya still very much loves to play live and will be hitting the road in support of the record. He feels blessed to have enjoyed the career he has forged in the music business. “Through my time with Albert and John, I’ve met folks like Lowell Fulson, Pee Wee Crayton, Big Joe Turner. You can’t pay for an education like that!”

In closing, he tells of a meeting with Albert King. “He was a cantankerous old man, but such a wonderful guy. He took my whiskey away one time and told me he never wanted to see me drinking before a show again. He said ‘After the show, I’ll have one with you. But don’t drink before a show.’ And he added something that’s always kind of stuck with me – ‘You gotta play!’” More than 30 years later, it’s a different instrument, but Montoya is still doing what he loves.

Photo courtesy Mitch Easter.

When “Southern rock” became synonymous with jangly power-pop instead of Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, Mitch Easter was a pivotal figure.

The Winston-Salem native formed the band Let’s Active in 1981, the same year he produced R.E.M.’s debut single at his aptly named garage studio, Drive-In. He subsequently produced R.E.M.’s Chronic Town EP and the band’s first two full-length albums, Murmur and Reckoning.

By the time Let’s Active disbanded in 1990, after four albums, Easter was in demand as a producer, engineer, and session player – working with the dB’s, Marshall Crenshaw, Don Dixon, Suzanne Vega, Game Theory, Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr., and the Washington Squares.

He played virtually all instruments on Dynamico (Electric Devil), at his new Fidelitorium recording facility. In addition to deft writing, its 14 originals are vivid reminders that Easter is also one hell of a guitar player.

Outsiders’ assumption is that Winston-Salem must have been very isolated when you and [dB] Chris Stamey had Sneakers, whose ’70s recordings were just reissued as Nonsequitur Of Silence (Collectors’ Choice).
Yeah, the South is the official backwards part of the country and all – but we were basically getting our info from the same TV and print and radio sources as anybody else. Everybody was talking about the Who smashing their guitars on “The Smothers Brothers Show” [in 1967] on the school bus here, too. You could pick up New York and Chicago radio stations on your six-transistor radio at night, but local radio was pretty good when I was growing up. We got the British Invasion stuff and always lots of Memphis Soul, so it was a good mix. This was before “consultants” programmed all radio into today’s horrid blandness! We might’ve been hicks, but we didn’t know it, and, as far as I can tell, our record collections were about like everybody else’s.

Who are your biggest influences?
I’m really terrible at lists of any kind and mainly can just think of people I’ve listened to lately! So, if I’ve been listening to Roxy Music, I will say that Phil Manzanera is simply the best, etc. I sort of had to be affected by the Clapton-Beck-Page thing and the general attitudes of the oddly sniffy local guitar teens in Winston-Salem when I was a kid. These guys really knew their stuff, so it was all about vibrato and getting proper tone through your amp. Fuzzboxes were seen as antiquated and dinky. So I think I still mostly sound like a ’70s player. I had great fun messing around with those “’80s sounds,” but I couldn’t really be much of a purist about that, so even in Let’s Active we started veering away from all that cleanness!

Probably Sam Moss was the single biggest influence on me. I met him when I was 13 or 14, and he could play incredibly well then – he was 15 maybe. This really opened my eyes! Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about the eighth grade so much; this guitar business was way better. After I met Sam, I could put on Axis: Bold As Love and really feel like I’d escaped to a superior alternate universe! I especially like the songwriter guitar players. Somehow their parts transcend just plain riffing, you know? Players like Roy Wood, Todd Rundgren, Jimi Hendrix, Randy California, and [Big Star guitarist] Chris Bell.

How is Fidelitorium different from the Drive-In?
Drive-In ended in 1994. I’d been in that garage long enough! We moved the equipment to an old house to [produce] the Motocaster record. After four years in the house, I figured it was high time to have a “proper” studio, with correct acoustic design, etc., so the Fidelitorium studio was built in 1998-’99. There aren’t too many places like this left! It’s a fairly big space – more or less the same size as the legendary RCA Studio B, which we figured had to be the right size for a pop music studio. The equipment goes from the 1950s to completely current, because all these eras produced good, useful gear. I think it’s equally ridiculous to be hung up on newness or oldness, so what we have is just what works. We still use a big analog console, and we still use analog tape, in addition to the computers. Everybody knows why the computers are useful, but when we do a tape session, I’m always impressed by how good it sounds. Same with the console. I’ve yet to hear an affordable digital mixing system that doesn’t seem to shrink the sound.

What equipment did you use on Dynamico?
“Break Through” is a ’68 SG Special plugged straight into a 1975 Marshall 100-watt Super Lead with 6550s, and the lead lines are a ’79 Tokai Les Paul Reborn through a Carr Mercury. “I Want a New Scene” is a Rickenbacker 650 with flatwounds through a Sans Amp and a Lexicon 200 reverb set to a weird inverse-room program. “To Be Cool Thing” is the 650 through a ’70s Big Muff and a Leslie speaker. There’s some AC30, and I still use one of those high-power silverface Fender Twins with EV speakers, which I’ve had since Let’s Active. “Ton of Bricks” was done with a ’72 Stratocaster through that amp, and the bass and fuzz bass were, too. I use a ’72 Jazz with flatwounds and a ’66 Precision, through the Twin, an Ampeg B-18, a Kustom 150, or direct.

Other guitars include a Gibson ’57 SJ, a ’60s Hagstrom 12-string, Rickenbacker 365, some crazy psychedelic Höfner with flatwounds, a ’64 Jazzmaster, and a Moderne. Lately, I’m mostly using a 1980 Tokai Reborn Old, which is the best name ever, and a Girl Brand crazy Telecaster-ish thing that sort of defies description and is an excellent instrument.

I’m about to do a bunch of shows this spring and summer, to see what can be done with this new disc. And then I want to make another record as soon as possible. The world isn’t exactly holding its breath for that, but it’s the main thing I ever wanted to do. I keep thinking I might get it right, eventually.