An Interview with Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Gary Duncan

By Frank Gutch

PCP is proud to present an exclusive interview with Quicksilver Messenger Service guitarist and sometimes songwriter Gary Duncan, conducted by Frank Gutch on Sept. 8, 2007.

POP CULTURE PRESS: Regarding the early days of San Francisco, I was talking with Tracy Nelson of Mother Earth and she made comments about how drastically things changed within a very short time. You mentioned in other interviews about how things changed when the record labels started to come in. Did it change drastically among the musicians?

GARY DUNCAN: Well, everybody got contracts, made records and started going on the road, so we didn't see each other anymore. Back before that, the Grateful Dead and the Airplane and Quicksilver and Big Brother, we used to play either the Avalon or the Fillmore. Those were the only two places in town to play, so we would play one one weekend at the Fillmore and the next at the Avalon, so between sets we would go over and hang out and jam. We saw one another a lot. Then after everybody got contracts and started going on the road, it was over, as far as that kind of interplay.

PCP: Was that the basic core of what you saw as the San Francisco music scene, the kind of communal music scene?

GD: Well, before 1967, it was kind of a closed scene, actually. I used to live in San Francisco in the late '50s when there were beatniks. “Hippie” was a derogatory term. A hippie was a young nobody. The beatniks of that time were into amphetamines, booze and heroin. Then the hippies came along with LSD and everything changed. I was there for that whole thing, then the bands started playing, thanks to the Fillmore and the Avalon, which were both great places to play because they were always filled. They were just packed with people, dancing this weird kind of dance. Black people had names for their dances, white people didn't. (laughs) They just kind of flailed around. Anyway, that was what we did. We would drive into the city and play one or the other every weekend and that's how we survived. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to pay the rent and eat brown rice and vegetables.

PCP: Is that all you cared about at that time?

GD: Yeah, pretty much. Nobody thought that much about being stars or the like. We were all kids, you know?  I mean, I was 20 and I had a wife and a kid and we lived out in Olema, by Point Reyes, on a farm. We lived in a barn. And life was good. There was no pressure and it was very easy. Then, because of the Monterey Pop Festival and the Summer of Love and all of the publicity nationwide, suddenyl you had all these kids running away from home to go to San Francisco -- the Promised Land of not having to work and plenty of drugs and free love and all that, which wasn't what the case was. What I saw was victims, more than anything else, but I was a musician. I wasn't a hippie.  I didn't hang around with hippies. My job was being a musician. I had been a musician since I was 15. 

PCP: Fifteen? Were those the days around Stockton or wherever it was?

GD: No, I lived down in the Central Valley in Modesto. 

PCP: There was mention in one of the articles that you used to play with the Ratz?

GD: Yeah, I had a band for about three or four months. It didn't last very long. That was right after I got out of prison.

PCP: That was with Bob Segarini?

GD: No, Segarini wasn't in that band. 

PCP: He wasn't? Man, there is a lot of misinformation being passed around on the Internet.

GD: Oh yeah. They even have my wrong birth date, wrong name and everything you know? 

PCP: I'm finding as I'm doing my research for interviews like these, I get a lot of conflicting reports on how the bands formed and things like that.

GD: Well, just from the horse's mouth? I was an orphan. My name was Eugene Duncan Junior when I was born. And I was born in 1945 in San Diego. So you can put that on the Net as the gospel. I was adopted in 1946 by a family named Grubb and they changed my name to Gary Grubb. So I went through high school -- well, two years of high school (I left high school when I was a sophomore) -- as Gary Grubb. Well, one day I was going through my mother's drawers trying to steal money and I found my adoption papers. And I went, wow, my name is Eugene Duncan, Jr. My mother's name was Jeraline Smith and my father's name was Eugene Duncan and he was half Cherokee and half Scot. My mother was full blood Skidi Pawnee. So I'm like three-quarters Native American and one quarter Scot. 

PCP: Does it come out every once in awhile?

GD: Well, I'm Indian from the neck down. (laughs) Least, that's what I tell people. I look like a Scot, but I'm Indian from the neck down. 

PCP: Do you relate to the Native Americans?

GD: Of course. Yes. It's my attitude, I guess. I always wondered why I had certain traits and just didn't quite fit in. When I found out I was Indian, I though, okay, that makes sense. And the Skidi Pawnee -- that's the northern Pawnee. They were called the Wolf People. They related largely with the wolf. They were from Nebraska. There weren't a lot of Pawnees. I looked up Pawnee on the Internet and found that at the turn of the (20th) century there were like sixty Pawnee left. Now, I think the tribe is up to maybe 900 or a thousand. They were constantly at war with the Sioux. They were Plains Indians. Pawnee means horn. They had the hair down the middle of the head with the sides shaved. They looked like Mohicans. They were the only tribe that never went to war with the United States. They were the best trackers of all the Native Americans. That's what they did best. The way they hunted buffalo was to sneak into the herds and slit their throats. Interesting tribe. You should look it up. Skidi Pawnee. Now, the Cherokee were from the South and got basically moved to Oklahoma. I was raised in Oklahoma. We moved to California when I was about seven. I was raised in Oklahoma about a quarter of a mile off the Indian Reservation. My adopted family were Cherokee. 

It gets a little confusing. My biological father's name was Eugene Duncan. My biological mother's name was Jeraline Smith. Eugene Duncan was half Cherokee and half Scot. Jeraline Smith was full blood Pawnee. They just gave me up at birth. My father was a cook in the Navy. His nickname was Snag. (laughs) I have no reason why, but I still use that nickname. I saw a picture of him once. An old friend of mine who was in the Navy was on a boat with him. He said, you know, there was a guy on the boat named Duncan who was the cook. He said, his nickname was Snag. Let me look through my books here.  He said, I got a picture of everybody I ever sailed with. He showed me this picture and he said, see that guy there with the little bit darker skin there? I said, yeah. He said, well, that's him. And it looked like me. 

But I never met my mother or father. I was adopted by a Cherokee family, because in those days, if you were Native American, you had to be careful of the Mormon Church. The Mormon Church in those days would take Indian babies and cut their hair and turn them into servants. In fact, they made a lot of money doing that until the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1972, which put an end to that. Native Americans and Polynesians have this concept of extended family. In other words, your mother may leave you with her sister for six months while she takes care of business. It was very common for kids of a family to live with an aunt for six months or a year. Well, as soon as this would happen, the Mormon Church would come in and say, this woman has abandoned her family and they would take the Indian children and cut their hair, not allow them to speak Native American anymore and, basically, sell them. It was like a slave trade. It was amazing that they got away with it as long as they did. I hope you're not a Mormon. (laughs) But that was a goal and that was what they did. I read the Mormon doctrine and as they see it, Native Americans were the Lost Tribe of Israel who, because they cannibalized their brothers were cursed by God, who gave them red skin and did not them the ability to speak English. That's bullshit, you know? But back to the other stuff. What was the next question? (laughs)

PCP: (also laughing) I don't know how much of this we will be able to use, but it sure is interesting. Okay, from the earliest days of Quicksilver, what were the steps to getting to the recording contract?  Now, you joined the band after they were all together as Quicksilver?

GD: No. I was living in North Beach with Greg Elmore. We were living in the basement of a house owned by a lady named Chris Brooks on Water Street in North Beach. She had seen John Cipollina play somewhere and had invited him over. His car broke down, so he spent a week there. David Freiberg was in jail and I had just gotten out of jail, so we sort of put the band together like that. 

PCP: So, Cipollina was coming over to talk with you, his car breaks down and Freiberg was in jail? So you knew Freiberg from before?

GD: No, I didn't know Freiberg at all.

PCP: Who knew him?

GD: John did.

PCP: Was John thinking of getting Freiberg involved if things started to pop?

GD: Yeah. He said, we have a bass player, but he's in jail. He'll be out in two weeks. He plays the violin, but we can teach him to play bass. So, I basically taught David Freiberg to play bass because he didn't know how. I'd played bass before, so I just showed him how to play. So, that was how the band started. Originally, we had Jimmy Murray also, who was a friend of John's. I didn't see any reason to have three guitars. At that point, I had a Stratocaster and a Super Reverb amp that we traded in for some amplifiers and I just sang. So in the beginning, I was just a singer. I mean, I played guitar, but I didn't played on the stage. I just sang. Then we got a manager named Ron Polte who came over to my house one day while I was playing guitar and he said, damn, how come you're not playing guitar. I said, they don't need another guitar player. And he said, you need to be playing guitar. You sound great. You play the blues. And I said, yeah, that's what I always play. So he bought me a guitar and shortly after that, Jim Murray left the group. To be honest, he wasn't that good of a guitar player. He was adequate, but ...  I'm not trying to put him down or anything, but he was a very lazy guy. He didn't want to rehearse, didn't want to practice, didn't want to learn any new songs. So he left right after the Monterey Pop Festival. And after that, we were a four piece group. 

PCP: At that time, were you starting to get serious?

GD: Oh, we were serious. In fact, shortly after that we made our first record. Which was difficult because we signed with Capitol and they didn't know what to do with us because we played really loud and we didn't have a producer. Well, we had an “executive” producer, just to make sure we didn't go into the studio and waste a whole lot of money. To record the way we sounded was really hard because we played so loud. The engineers didn't know how to handle it, so we boxed us all off in little sections and we played the way we always played.

That first album we did took me years and years and years to be able to even listen to it.  It didn't really sound like we sounded live. Now that I can listen to it, it does have some good moments on it.

PCP: You're talking about the first album, Quicksilver Messenger Service.

GD: Yeah, and then after that, we did Happy Trails. Happy Trails was live -- most of it. That's basically the way we sounded. 

PCP: When you did Happy Trails, was Anthem of the Sun already out? Because the thing that I noticed about the two was that they were both live and studio, kind of interwoven. Did that happen independently?

GD: It was independent. I don't even know if I've ever listened to Anthem of the Sun. I was never a big Grateful Dead fan.

PCP: But you got along with them okay.

GD: Oh yeah. Especially Garcia. Garcia and I were like brothers. I loved Jerry Garcia. He was my buddy, you know? But like I said, after everybody had record deals, we all went our separate ways and didn't see each other for years. 

PCP: Did you miss the contact?

GD: Actually, the old San Francisco scene, before it became this nationwide phenomenon, was really nice. It was neat. You could just go play. There were a lot of houses you could hang out in with artists and painters and poets and other musicians. You could walk down the street and smoke a joint and nobody even knew what it was. It was all pretty much an underground thing. Then, when it got publicized, we got all these kids running away from home, like I said, for whatever reason. Recently, I had an interview with somebody who took me over to Haight Ashbury where we took photographs and walked around, and it's still the same. It's amazing that the Haight Ashbury is still just like it was. Kids sleeping on the sidewalks, drunk, stoned, obnoxious. That's pretty much the way Haight Ashbury was. I don't know what people think it was like, you know.  They call it the Summer of Love. I didn't really feel a lot of love. I saw a lot of kids being victimized and a lot of people victimizing kids. But like I said before, I was a musician. I wasn't a street person. I played shows and made money and that was my job. I stayed away from the hippie culture as much as possible. When I was younger, I hung out a lot with the Beatniks, with whom I got along much better. 

PCP: Didn't you find it hard to stay out of that culture, say at the point where you were recording? Wasn't the culture pretty strongly entrenched at that point?

GD: Yeah, it was, but we weren't involved with it. We had shows to play and records to make and we had lives to live. We weren't living on the streets like hippies. We had houses and responsibilities.

PCP: But didn't you ever pick up anything, say, like Time or Newsweek and read what they were saying? Did it ever make you wonder what they were talking about?

GD: Yeah, I read it and it was kind of like ... well, let's put it this way. When they had the Human Be-In. You know what that was. David and I were living together somewhere in the city with our families and he said, we have to go play this gig in the Park today. I said, really? He said, yeah, it's free, but what the hell. So we drive down there and as we got closer, there were more and more people. Finally, we had to park the car and walk.  Suddenly, we come upon all these people -- thousands of people -- at the Human Be-In. And news people:  cameras and people from the press. David looked around at the whole thing and said to me, it's over. He said, when those guys get involved, it's the end. And it was. I think that was in 1967, before the Monterey Pop Festival, and after that, it was over. There was no more underground scene in San Francisco. It was all out in the open. 

PCP: Did you realize it at the time he said that, or is that just looking back?

GD: When he said it, I realized what he was talking about. I didn't think about it until he said it, but then I looked around and saw all these news cameras and people from the press interviewing people and I went, oh man, it's over. 

PCP: Is that why you guys didn't speak to the press much?

GD: I never talked with the press much. John Cipollina did, a lot. He liked to talk to the press, but I never did because I didn't have anything to say. You were asking me if I had a lot of interviews this year. I've had maybe twenty interviews this year about the Summer of Love and this and that, and I basically tell them all the same thing, which is that for me, it was a gig. It was a show. It was a job. I wasn't involved in the hippie counterculture. I wasn't for or against the war. I had no qualms about being in a war. The United States has been in wars since it started, you know? I mean, it's never changed. I wasn't protesting anything. I was just playing my guitar, and trying to get better at it.

PCP: If you were so into that, why did you take the year off?

GD: I took the year off because I had been taking amphetamines for about ten years. I was in New York City and I realized that if I kept doing it, I was going to die. I mean, I was shooting amphetamine in my arm for ten years.

PCP: So what did you do? Did you all of a sudden just say I'm going to drop speed and music at the same time to get away from it?

GD: I don't know, but you probably haven't taken amphetamine that long, but when you stop, you just kind of turn into a zombie. I told our manager, I can't do this anymore. I have to stop taking speed and can't do this anymore. The band wasn't rehearsing, we weren't learning any new material, we were playing the same show every night which wasn't what I wanted to do, so I took a year off. Halloween 1968 was when I stopped taking crank and the last show I did with the band was New Year's Eve. The next show I did with the band was New Year's Eve a year later. So the whole year of 1969 I spent basically riding motorcycles and trying to get my brains back together. 

PCP: When you came back, was it hard to not get back into drugs?

GD: No, I have never had a problem with that. Believe me, after doing crank that long, you don't want to do it anymore. After that, except for smoking a reefer now and then, I didn't do drugs. 

PCP: What is your basic impression of Bill Graham?

GD: Bill Graham was a great businessman. As far as my relationship with him, it was always good. He treated me with respect. I was very, very sad when he died. At the Fillmore, when you played for him, you got paid, you went on on time. Everything was run like a ship. It was very tight. He was good at what he did. He was the best. As opposed to Chet Helms at the Avalon, who was very loose. Total opposites, you know. 

PCP: Did you like playing for both of them?

GD: Oh yeah. I just liked playing. But playing for Graham, if you were supposed to go on at nine o'clock, you went on at nine o'clock. If you were supposed to stop at ten thirty, you stopped at ten thirty. And you got paid and there wasn't any bullshit. And I know Graham put a lot of people off because he was a very contentious man at times, but I never had a problem with him at all. At one point way early on, he got in  my face about something and I just told him, Bill, you don't want to do that because if you do, I'm going to kick your ass. (laughs) So we had an understanding.

PCP: Do you think that was a moment of mutual respect or something?

GD:     Yeah.  He just went, okay, fine. He and I have always had a good relationship. I know a lot of people didn't like him and thought he was a maniac, but he was a businessman.

PCP: Do you think he got a bad rap?

GD: I think he got a bad rap, yes. I mean, I can see why, because he was very vociferous and a strong individual. He was a dominant male and dominant males have a hard time in the world, believe me. I know. (laughs)

PCP: The weird thing is, with all of the interviews I've done with musicians who were there during those days, not one has said anything but good things about him. And I'm wondering why the press didn't pick up on that.

GD: I don't know. Maybe it's because he had a reputation of being a hard-nose, but so do I. There are people who think I'm the devil. Because I hung around the Hell's Angels and rode motorcycles and did everything you were not supposed to do if you're a musician. My best friends are members of Oakland's Hell's Angels, you know? All of my buddies are old now, but they're still in the club. Those were the people I hung out with. I didn't particularly like musicians. Because, for the most part, they're flaky and I couldn't depend on them. I knew with the Hell's Angels that if I got in some shit, they'd be there with me. They might kick my ass later, (laughs) and say what the fuck did you do that for, but they'd be there with me. It's almost like being soldiers. Being an orphan and being adopted and not having really ever bonded with a family, I was always looking for brothers, and that's where I found them. 

PCP: And you found them pre-Quicksilver or during Quicksilver?

GD: It was in the mid-60s.

PCP: And it's continued all the way to today?

GD: Yeah.

PCP: Do you still ride bikes?

GD: I don't have one today because I can't afford it. I had to sell my motorcycle about five years ago to pay the rent. (laughs)

PCP: Here's a question: Why don't people know that you have the Shape Shifter CDs out?

GD: I don't know. I put it out myself, on my own label and now it's out on GRA Records.  It just never got any promotion. And Peace By Piece came out in 1986, I think, on Capitol, and was getting really good promotion and then the president of the label got fired, then everybody that he signed got dropped and they just dumped the record. They just stopped promoting it and didn't make any more copies of it. I had a master, so I just put it out myself. 

PCP: So you don't know if you're putting it out legally or not?

GD: Well, I called them up and asked them if they had the masters of that record because I'd like to put it out and they said, no, we don't have the masters. The tape went bad and we don't have a master anymore. We don't even have a copy. Well, I did. I still had a copy of the original mix, so I just put it out myself. I've never had a problem about it. I don't think they care, you know?

PCP: I'll tell you what Gary, we could post a web interview with you about what you are doing now. 

GD: That would be great because what I'm doing now is what I'm doing now. What I did 40 years ago, that's what I've been doing, as far as interviews, all year. Going back and reliving all of the things we did 40 years ago is something I'm not really into. 

PCP: But that was good music, Gary.

GD: Well, yeah, it was, and the times were good and it was great, but now it's 40 years later. And the music that I play now is totally different, though for this particular year, I've been doing a lot of old Quicksilver tunes. And trying to relive the past, as you say.

PCP: That's part of what's missing, though. A lot of the old musicians who are still out there are unfortunately having to put themselves under the old wing, so to speak. I guess it's the old Rick Nelson syndrome. He always heard the cries from the crowd:  “Garden Party!” and “Hello Mary Lou!” He got tired of that as I suppose you do. 

GD: Well, I've tried to get the word out about what I'm doing now. I've got, I think, about twelve CDs out now. They're all newer. I had a recording studio for about twenty years and recorded everything. Then when 2001 happened, after 9/11, suddenly there just weren't any more gigs. I didn't work for five years and lost my studio, but I had 500 hours of tape, 500 hours of stuff that I'd recorded that was good. If it had been bad, it would have been really easy. I could have just thrown it away, but after listening to it, I realized it was good and I tied up with a guy named Karl Anderson who owns GRA Records -- Global Recording Artists. That's the label all my stuff is released on now. 

PCP: Is he a pretty good guy?

GD: He's a great guy. A wonderful guy. I trust him implicitly. I had stuff on cassettes, I had stuff on DAT tapes, I had stuff on two-track mixes, I had stuff on two-inch tape. We went through all of it and I still have about six more CDs that we haven't put out yet. I'm just putting them out. They sell, but not a lot. I don't make a lot of money off of those CDs. If I got involved with a big label and they promoted them, they might sell. 

PCP: But that's the problem. People don't even know it's out there. That's the big problem with the business these days is that it's so damn hard to get the information out. 

GD: Well, the whole music business is eventually going to be all downloads. There won't be any more hard copies. You'll just go to a site and download it, print the cover and bingo. I mean, Tower Records is out of business. When Tower Records was in business, you practically had to pay them to get your record in their store. 

But I'm watching the whole thing with curiosity. In the next five years, like I said, I don't think there will be hard copies of anything. 

PCP: I'm probably the eternal optimist, but you're the opposite of where I am. I think the hard copies are going to become a kind of toy for this generation which is growing up downloading music into ipods and the like. I think they will eventually discover that quality of music comes at a price and they are eventually going to want the physical media which contains that sound quality. I think it's a matter of showing the youth what can be as opposed to what their parents had, you know. I think it will take a swing back. Just like vinyl. 

GD: Well, I remember when we first signed with Capitol, our manager held out for a long time because he wanted the rights for cassettes. I remember asking him, what the hell is a cassette? He said it's a tape -- a little tape. I said, hell, they're not going to do that. That's not going to happen. Well, he held out long enough that we got the rights for cassettes. It was a good thing, but at that point, I didn't even know what a cassette was. All there was was vinyl, and with a vinyl record, you got this great big thing. With artwork and liner notes and stuff that you can read and look at. The album covers  could be framed on your wall. Nowadays, they're a little bit bigger than a postage stamp and the artwork is basically nonexistent. I used to buy albums just for the artwork. 

Nowadays, there is very little in the way of liner notes. The stuff that I'm putting out, I just list the musicians and the song titles. There;s not enough room to put anything else on there. 

PCP: So, what's on your website is just the basic information and no more?

GD: You can purchase the CDs through the website and when you get them, the information is there. It's just basic stuff like who played what on what tracks.

PCP: I like the liner notes for the story it can tell -- how the record came together, the inspiration behind songs, etc.

GD: Well, in the old days, you could do that. To put a four-page insert full of information, it's so expensive, it's not worth doing it. As far as what you make off of the CD. 

PCP: Maybe it would behoove you to put it on your website.

GD: Well, the guy who has my website has recently been through a lot of problems with his hard drive and there is a lot of stuff that he has that will be going up, but the whole thing crashed on him and he's trying to put it back together again. He has a lot of photos and stuff that should be on the website but isn't at this point. But he's doing it. I'm not doing it. I'm almost computer illiterate beyond e-mail. 

In the future, I will be working on getting more information up because basically, I'm the only one left out of the old band. There's David Freiberg, who plays primarily with the Starship. In fact, he's played with the Starship longer than he did with Quicksilver. This last tour we have been doing has been with the Starship, so we basically share bands, if you know what I mean. I'm trying to get another agent. And I met this lady from Japan who wants me to play there and Australia. I've never been to Japan or Australia or Europe. I've never been out of the States.

PCP: From what I've seen, those Japanese are music crazy.

GD: Yeah. She said that in Japan, I'm like Jimi Hendrix.

You know, after '67. we rarely played San Francisco. Once a year, maybe, because there wasn't anything going on. We played mostly the Midwest and the South and the East Coast. I never got to go anywhere. I did have a tour of Germany -- 38 shows starting on 9/10, 2001. And on 9/11, it was gone. I didn't work for five years. There were no shows. People were afraid to fly airplanes, the promoters were afraid to book shows because nobody would come. So I didn't play for five years. In 2006, I got back on the road with the Starship, opening for them. I'm working on a deal with Big Brother and the Holding Company to try to put together a package of Big Brother, Quicksilver, Eric Burdon and the Animals for next year. So, though things were hard for five years, they are looking up. 

Karl Anderson is not only an engineer, he's also a video guy. He's filmed most of the shows that we've done recently, some with eight or nine cameras. That's what he does -- he's a videographer. He probably has a thousand hours of just me because he is working on doing a DVD of my life. He has scenes of me pouring cement and working on houses and driving cars and just talking. 

I'm getting a bit more out there recently, though. I don't mind playing these days. It was a long five years. Of course, I run the risk of having people walk up to me and say, hey, John, that was a great solo. Then I have to say, I'm not John.

PCP: I don't understand that at all. The thing about Cipollina's guitar was that it was so unique.

GD: Yeah. It was always out of tune. (laughs)

PCP: But it was so distinctive. Did he use a tremolo bar?

GD: Yeah. He used really skinny strings and he was always out of tune. It was incredible. I could not get him in tune. 

PCP: The good thing about that was that your guitars were so different that they actually worked together. 

GD: Oh yeah. You know, that old four piece band that we had, in San Francisco, we were the band. Because we had a groove. We had a good drummer and we played solid grooves. Let's face it. The Jefferson Airplane was never a groove band. They didn't have a groove. Big Brother and the Holding Company did, but they had Janis and without Janis, can you imagine what they would have sounded like? I remember them before they got Janis and it was, like, damn.

Basically, what the scene was that there were a whole lot of folk musicians trying to play in electric bands. Now, I grew up playing in a band. I never was a folk musician. And there is a way of playing in a band that you just have to know how it works. So what we had in San Francisco was a bunch of folk musicians playing electric guitars who didn't know how to be in a band. So it was real sloppy and loose. I'm not being critical of it because it did have a sound, but we were probably the only group in town that was actually a band. We had a pocket, you know, and people liked to listen to us play because you could dance to it. 

PCP: I only saw you one time, at the University of Oregon in January of '68 with the Grateful Dead. I remember that after you guys left and the Dead played, they finished the set by apologizing because they sucked so bad, so they said come back in a few days and we will play a free gig to make up for this. When they came back, they apologized after that one, too.

GD: Hey, they had their good days and their bad days. When they were good, they were really good. Unfortunately, they were few and far between. Hey, they were a jug band. (laughs) I mean, I grew up playing R&B and jazz, you know. These days, when I can play what I want to, I play jazz, in my own way. But that's what we were doing, anyway.  We were improvising every night we played. We never played the same thing twice and the whole idea was to get stoned, get on the stage, start the song and see where it went. A lot of the other groups had sets that were the same every night. In fact, Big Brother and the Holding Company, if you listen to them now, I can sit backstage and tell you exactly when they are going to holler. It's the same exact set that they played 40 years ago. 

PCP: Are they all working day jobs or something? They don't have time to get together and practice?

GD: I don't think they want to. I love those guys a lot. They're friends of mine. They had a chick singing with them who I think, now, is leaving the band and going with the Jefferson Starship. Kathi Richardson. Who sounds exactly like Janis. I asked David Goetz, I said, hey, aren't you a little upset that Kantner's taking your singer? He said, ah no, we got another girl who sounds just like Janis, too. (laughs)

PCP: I guess singers these days don’t care about being unique.

GD: Well, Kathi Richardson is a great singer. She has her own album out and is a wonderful singer, but she can also imitate Janis Joplin, which is what her job is with Big Brother. I think Diana Mongano, who sings with the Starship, is leaving after October and they are going to get Kathi Richardson to take her place. To be their next Grace Slick.