I don't think there's any danger of me playing Indian music. However, I did a song of George Harrison's 'Beware of Darkness' that was kind of like that. That was an illusion. I was playing that on a thumbtack piano, and Jim Gordon was playing tablas. He's an amazing player. That was as close to India as I ever got.
California always struck me as a police state.
I've avoided the press and a lot of stuff that would have made me more visible just because it's not my style.
I'm just concerned with going about my business and making the records I want to make.
I belonged to the Columbia Record Club, and that's where my records came from. For some reason, I was in the 'jazz' category. I got Benny Goodman records and Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and that kind of stuff. I really was not a jazz guy at all, but I knew some of those names.
I think probably my main advice to new artists is if you want to be in the music business, you need to be dang serious about it because it's a rough business.
I didn't start out to become famous, so when it disappeared, I thought, well, that happens sometimes.
I was afraid of the press.
When I was born, I had a birth injury in my second and third vertebrae. It gave me what they called spastic paralysis, which is actually cerebral palsy.
I was always trying to write standards, songs that anybody can sing. I figured that's where the money was.
My feet are giving out on me. But I have a wheelchair that folds out on my tour bus. I've also got this little tricycle, so if I want to go someplace, I get those out.
I started playing in nightclubs when I was about 14 in Oklahoma.
I'll work as long as I can. I'm happy with my life.
Sometimes one misses the sign posts as you're going down the road. They aren't as obvious as they become when you get to the end of the road, so to speak.
I was raised in the Methodist Church, which is a very Germanic, military kind of music they have there. I heard this other music on the radio: Pentecostal. That was right up my street.
The doctor who pulled me out at birth damaged my second and third vertebrae. But without those tugs, I probably would have been a regular guy selling insurance in Texas or something.
I'm almost totally politically inactive.
I got this book called 'How to Write the Popular Song.' I read that and went through all the things they suggested, and I learned how to do it.
The Pentecostals had horns, drums, guitars, huge choirs, and screaming and dancing and all kinds of stuff. That was for me.
There was a period in my life when I was trying to write standards: songs that everybody recorded. I did a pretty good run of it.
