Interview with Alex Durig, May 21, 2017

Chip Nold:Okay, all right, we're going to have to start again. And I apologize for that. So, when and where were you born?

Alex Durig:San Francisco, California. 1959.

CN:Tell me again how you came to Louisville.

AD:My dad was a sociology person. He got his Master's Degree, San Francisco State, first person to do that, brand-new department. Then he decided to go to one of the great departments, Indiana University. So, I was two years old when he arrived there, my first memories in Bloomington. I would eventually go back and get my PhD in Sociology Indiana, even had some of the same professors my dad had then, which is a Freudian nightmare, I can assure you, that I've never been 1:00able to live down completely. But in any case, so then everything in my life centered from Bloomington around that to Louisville after that. After he finished his coursework, we went to Indianapolis for a year then Jeffersonville four years back to Indianapolis four years at Butler. Then by the time I was 10, 1970, came to U of L. And so ever after I considered Louisville my hometown, and being in Jeffersonville, you know, I was already here, and this is very definitely my home, my hometown since 1970 officially since I was 10.

And then just immediately we moved to Waggener District. My mom wanted to send me -- wanted to find out where was the best place to send the kids to school. She found out Waggener was the best High School and so that was great story because I always enjoyed growing up in St. Matthews, going to Waggener, very proud of that. And that's pretty much how I ended up where I was in Louisville.

CN:Then how did you get exposed to music?

AD:Big exposure, I took music lessons when I was a kid. I took piano lessons. I guess a lot of parents have their kids do that. And then I played in school I was in -- by the time I was in high school I was on drums in the marching band, clarinet in the concert band, sax in the jazz band, so I loved that.

CN:What do you think you are best on?

AD:I wasn't terribly good at any of this to tell you the truth. I really wasn't. I wasn't -- I was good enough to be known as somebody that didn't suck, let's put it that way. I was not really great at any of them. Just good enough to have 3:00fun, which is all I really wanted. When I started playing guitar that was something different, which was a lot more fun, and I think that's why I got a lot better at it.

CN:So, you came to that a little late you'd say?

AD:I actually bought the guitar the day I graduated high school. So, that was my friend, Steve Rieder, played guitar. I was a writer. I started giving him lyrics. And then he gave me, probably got a guitar one day I mean, gave me a guitar lesson. And it took off just from there, which was easy because I'd already been playing music.

CN:You said he said to you that you would only need one lesson just to--

AD:I love this story because it's true. Steve's a great guy, he's an accomplished guitarist in high school, and everybody looked to him and knew 4:00that. So, it was a great kind of thing that we had that I admired him for his guitar playing. He said he didn't have any lyrics, so I told him, "Well, I'm a writer," because I was a writer before I was a guitarist. Now, I make my living as a freelance writer. I was always a writer, but he said he had trouble with that. So, I invited him to my house to look at poetry I had been writing for years in high school, a drawer full of crap.

And he found something he liked. And he and I put that together with a song that got on the Homegrown album from Lexington, from UK, which was great. It was called "Friend of Mind," and then on the album he actually said -- he had the class to say -- this song is dedicated to Alex Durig. So, I always thought that was great. But then roughly the same time I told him, you know I really want to play guitar. And he says, I got a friend who's got a guitar for sale, it's hot. Which the issue was it's not going to be good karma.

CN:When you say "hot," you mean stolen?

AD:Stolen guitar, but for 100 bucks. And he goes, "you know you got to look at it." And I didn't have any money, and so I went to look at it and his friend Alex Sagan started playing the B-side of Pink Floyd's Animals. And he says it's good enough to do that. So, I took the damn guitar and a tiny little amplifier, but if you could play Pink Floyd through it is definitely good enough to start. So, then Steve said, "Look, you know music, you're in a band, I'm going to give you one lesson and that's all you're going to need."

And he goes, "Here's your lesson," he showed me what bar chords were, he showed me the regular chords, and then he goes, "Here's the blues scale, and you can see how this is related to 'Stairway to Heaven,' so you can see how that's all you need to know." And so, it's kind of the contrarian in me. I'm very much a contrarian, everything that I do I have to do it the wrong way and I have to break all the rules, and I have to not be standard, and not be formal. It gets me into constant trouble and also gets me my best memories.

So, I just decided that I was going to pursue that and not take any other lessons, not do it in a standard or formal way be "self-taught," even though I've been playing music my whole life.

CN:So you had a decent formal knowledge.

AD:I was far from clueless. And I had a really good ear, so I could pick stuff off just by listening to it, which was a great skill of mine. I was lucky to have that talent. I could pick anything out by ear. So, I had all lots of private lessons as a kid, too boring, everybody hates anyway. So yeah, that's how I started playing. And so then contrarian finally gets to play some music and express himself the way he really wants to - not just playing clarinet in the concert band, which I never really wanted to do. It just ended up happening and--

CN:So, go back to -- you're talking about, learning about rock and roll and your taste. Your earliest memories of the music that you liked, the rock and roll music you liked.

AD:Well, that was, I guess, also the same strand of contrarian in me that when I spent the summer in Columbia with my cousin, 1972, I'm 12 he was 16. He had every record, great record collection. He had older brothers, sisters, cousins. So, he had the complete everything, and these are all still my favorite records: Grand Funk, E Pluribus Funk; Black Sabbath, Paranoid. I was listening to these and all these other great albums, Ten Years After and Santana, and I just got, I 8:00learned to like it.

And they were acquired tastes, because I remember the first time I heard hard rock it scared me. I walked in a record store in St. Matthews and they were playing some hard rock, and I thought, "this is pretty scary music." I was 11 and -- but I guess in the comfort of my cousin's house I learned to like it. But especially Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath, then to me, being a contrarian, they didn't represent mainstream music. They had the obligatory top 40 hit, but that's not what they're really about. If you were a fan, you were a fan because they were weird and different.

And so especially Black Sabbath really converged with the punk thing for me, just for me to grow up loving and listening to Black Sabbath, to start playing guitar, and to -- and learn how to play the songs. And then to have this 9:00opening, it was punk rock where I could actually do something myself. There was no gap in any of that, it was all -- there was a red thread that ran through it. It was a contrarian, iconoclastic need to express yourself in a way that's not standard, kind of thing.

CN:And you said that that was Black Sabbath it was byword, something that lots of people in the punk scene liked.

AD:It really was. I can't tell you just how many times it would happen that people would want to talk to me about my guitar or my influences and very quickly, there was a "wink, wink" on Black Sabbath. You know, "I could tell you were into Sabbath," that was a great compliment for me. Or you know, "That reminded me of Black Sabbath," well that's my favorite group. And there was always that convergence going on. So plenty of people in punk rock, no matter how much they wanted to reject the mainstream, were secretly huge fans of Black Sabbath. That I can guarantee you.

CN:Well, so talk about how you got specifically exposed to punk, what you remember, and who the people were involved, and the bands involved?

AD:Well, the real specific introduction for me was that, I guess it was summer of '78, a year after I graduated, with Joe Frey at Karma Records. I knew him from Waggener, and he said, "Do you want to start a band?" I said, "Sure." And then he goes, "The only thing is you'll have to teach me how to play bass." I said, 11:00"Okay." But he had a great punk rock collection. He had been away to school at Oberlin, and he was really into the scene.

And so, kind of like the way my brother had that -- my cousin had collection in '72 of what's now called classic rock, he had the Dead Boys, and the Pistols, and X-ray Spex, and just all of it. And so he said, "This is what I'm really into." So I just loved it, and so somehow he had already met Steve Rigot. And so then, I guess it was that summer, we had the first incarnation of Endtables, which was just a bunch of people playing in Joe's Garage every night. None of us had ever played before any music. So, we don't even qualify as bad. It was worse 12:00than bad.

CN:And so you had not been in a band before this?

AD:Oh, no. And then that kept going, and then he went away to school and everything quit. But then when he came back he said, "You should keep this thing going. You should get together with Rigot and keep it going." So that just came out of my friendship with Joe.

CN:So that first summer. I mean, my recollection the first time I ever saw The Endtables, there was a party at Marc Zakem and Tim Harris's apartment on bar -- on Cherokee Road.

AD:I remember it well.

CN:And so, I remember there being, I mean, it seemed there were a bunch of people on stage just compared to the classic Endtables lineup--

AD:There were eight people.

CN:Right. But Joe Willenbrink, I think. Wasn't Alice up there, Alice Howard?

AD:You'd better believe it.

CN:Okay. And then who -- was Mark Dixon a part of it?

AD:Yeah.

CN:All right. And then Rigot and you and--

AD:Joe Frey.

CN:And who was drumming?

AD:I think it was Mark Dixon. Wasn't it?

CN:Oh, it was Mark Dixon. I always think of him as the keyboard player. But it might have been. But anyway, so you had this whole big group of people. And so just tell me about what the feeling was. I mean, you denigrated it. But there was something about it that Joe -- the joke you say, you need to keep this going. What I mean -- did you feel a spark of something at that point? Do you remember?

AD:Well, I guess I'm having trouble answering the question because I'm not sure I can give you an answer that would make sense and be expected. I mean, I -- the 14:00spark it kind of focuses on that word -- that there is one thing that I think about always, whenever I think back, especially that night at Marc Zakem's house, because that was the first night I saw Babylon Dance Band. Was that Joe Willenbrink was this really weird friend of Joe Frey. And he was a really great guy, he was just completely weird.

And just off the edge in just a really fun way. And he said we're going to play, and the Babs are already a group, they have a name, and nobody knows us. But we got to come out with a splash, we've been practicing all summer. And you know, we sucked, there's is no question, it was barely worth listening to, but 15:00personally, I had a blast doing it. The whole thing was a spark for me, just to -- I love to play music, and we were just friends having a whole lot of fun.

But that night Joe Willenbrink did something that I always remember. It's just a little point of genius that sometimes little things keep things going in a way that's not obvious. So, when you say, "What was the spark?" I'll tell you what, for me, was the fucking spark. This is crazy, but right before we played, see if we had just played in the garage for all summer and then just showed up and just played, it would have just been just what would have been expected.

And we would have said, "Well, yeah, we just did it and we played our first gig. We'd like to thank you. We hope we do it again." And it would have been blah, 16:00blah, blah. But Joe Willenbrink said, "We're going to do something really, really memorable and really special," because we wanted to be a cool group. "And so, you guys, you start playing, start the group without me." And we start with, I think we started with, "I'm Not a Baby," which was the first Endtables song. It really is a great Endtables song. You know, we sucked, but it's a great song.

And it's great song because it combined, which is what The Endtables did, my little ability to come up with a great hook once in a while and Steve's ability just to do his thing on top of it. We had a good simpatico relationship, we could work together. So, this is like this long introduction where Steve Rigot 17:00is saying "I want to go on dates. I want to go to the mall." He's talking about all these things that teenagers want to do when they get old enough, and then he says, "Daddy, Mommy, I'm not a baby. I'm not a baby." And then the song kicks in, hard rock. I mean, it was great. That was fucking great. It was so much of a release around that stupid fucking song. It was so great. And so he goes, "So you start with, 'I'm Not a Baby,' and you guys start off with that that slow intro, and start off starts off with a slow monotone thing." And he was doing his thing, "And you start doing that and then once it's ready to kick in, then I'm going to run in from outside." And it's going to be kind of an "aha" kind of experience, like a dramatic thing. And we went, "Well, sure Joe, whatever you say." Or, it's John Willenbrink, sorry--

CN:Oh, it's John, okay. I can't remember.

AD:Getting pretty old, already. But so, what Willenbrink did not tell us was 18:00that he had the ability to make his nose bleed easily, and he went out there and he bloodied his nose. And so when he ran in, there was blood dripping out from his nose, blood all over him. And we didn't know that he was going to do that. And of course, nobody in the audience knew. So, we all have this immediate electric moment that was one of those things that just harkens back to when all of our ancestors we're dancing around the totem under the light of the full moon. It was one of those things, it was just so original. You talk about a spark, there was a spark. And when Willenbrink left and went off to school and ended up apparently doing great things in software or something. But that was a moment, because that was just pure excitement.

It was the thing that the punk rock scene seemed to offer, the chance to find excitement far, far beyond REO Speedwagon.

CN:Right.

AD:So, this is not REO Speedwagon. This is not something that would happen at an REO Speedwagon concert, not something that anybody would, in a normal mind, would ever expect to happen. And the guy came out, blood running down his face, and picked up the mic started screaming and we all just -- we all had this moment, and it was just like, that's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about.

And I was done, and I was happy, and everybody went back to school, and I was just done. And that was good, that was a hell of a summer. Then so then Joe comes back for Thanksgiving break and says "Well, let's just keep it going." I hadn't even thought of it. But I honestly think that the excitement from Joe bringing blood into the whole process was probably one of the greatest things. 20:00It was right up there with seeing you guys play that night and then seeing No Fun play the art school before that.

CN:Okay, so you'd seen them -- you'd seen that.

AD:It was at No Fun at the art school, and then seeing you guys, and then playing and Willenbrink bloodying his nose, and that was enough to keep me interested. People having more fun than you could have at an REO Speedwagon -- right here in Louisville, Kentucky. That was enough.

CN:Okay, so then you were going to -- were you going to U of L--

AD:It was also especially great that The Babs had a lot of these people who were stars to me in academics from Waggener High School. And I was so proud. My mom had to move for us to grow up in Waggener High School. And now all these people that were stars to me when I was in junior high, people I looked up to, now they're in this band and now I got to be in this band at their house that -- 21:00that was a real connecting of dots, and that was a real comeuppance for me. That was a whole lot of Louisville, growing up in Louisville, just smacking me in the face, and I was just extremely happy about all of it.

CN:That's really wild. I've just got to say, that it's really wild that, that that was an element of it for you.

AD:It completely was it. It's like my whole life in Louisville was all meant to be. It was like my mom moving to Waggener because she had to go to the best place, and then all of sudden you guys had that year -- you had more semifinalists than anybody in the country. It's like, yeah, we're fucking bad ass at Waggener. Yeah, we're smart people, a bunch of smart families around here. And then growing up in the Waggener district, having my great friends, and the poetry, and the guitar lessons, and I met Joe Frey at Waggener and then he says, "You want to play in this band?" And I met all these other weird people. And then all of a sudden there's the No Fun which was just completely from 22:00another planet. Then the Babylon Dance Band, it's like -- so there's just two bands like this that are completely from a different planet. And we get to play at that house with this band and this band has -- who is in that band? You know there's Marc Zakem, and Chip Nold, and Tim Harris. It's like, "What? I'm not completely crazy? I can't be completely crazy."

CN:It was a folie à quatre, I guess.

AD:It was real coming together of everything for me, it really was and so that was great and it's neat that we can talk about it and document it. Because I'm not sure that the very best things that happened that they get known always or advertised, they're not always obvious. It was a lot of fun times, a lot of fun energy, a lot of great sparks -- just in these things that you helped me to recall -- that made everything else worth pursuing, hoping you'd have a repeat. 23:00How can Endtables have another night where somebody bloodies himself. And everybody's shocked and the music's already playing and all of a sudden, it turned into a primeval festival. Yeah, I'll do that again.

CN:So, tell me a little bit because I think Joe tends to get overlooked a little bit, because he moved, but and he wasn't in The Endtables for that long, but it did -- particularly what you've already said, he was a little catalyst. Just tell me what he was like, then, why you all were friends.

AD:I mean, he was a great guy. Soft touch, but real high energy, real intense. But not aggressive or rude or anything like that. He was real soft touch. His incredible girlfriend, Alice Howard, was just, again, this great energy, 24:00bubbling over with great energy. So, he's really sweet people. Yeah, and it Willenbrink was like that. And then, of course Rigot was Rigot. So, we'd all get together and jam in Joe's garage, and that was a good time. It was like you could do wrong, it wasn't like they were going to try and go, "You made a mistake."

Playing in Waggener High School Band, "You've made a mistake, now we've got to start, the whole group is going to start over at the beginning." I knew that wasn't going to happen there. Because I was the one in charge, I had more musical spirits than anybody else. So, I was in charge. I mean, it was hilarious, but I loved it. And I would count off the songs and stuff like that and show Joe here's where I'm going. So, you find something that looks like that to on your bass.

And it was it was about the energy, it was about the enthusiasm, and it wasn't about purely the musicianship. It was like we were all able to get together have 25:00a great time in spite of the fact that we were accomplished musicians. So that made it hometown fun, it was homegrown fun. I'm just lucky coming together with friends that liked music or who tried playing it.

CN:So tell me about meeting Rigot. I mean he's not here to tell the story so I want to talk to the -- one of the main things I want to do with these is talk to the people who knew him and worked with him and get their recollections and memories of him.

AD:When The Endtables got really lucky, 30 years after the side we're talking about now, that record company Drag City found out about us and decide to rerelease our record that we put out in '79. Then the chick who was in charge of 26:00publicity just set up all these interviews you see in all these magazines, and it was a lot of fun for me. And it might have been cooler if she set up the interviews for Rigot to do them. But she was living in the Bay Area and I was living in San Francisco at the time. So, when the word came out -- so Steve, his friend was at Drag City, I'm blanking on Steve's last name.

CN:Driesler. Steve Driesler.

AD:Thank you. Steve Driesler comes out through Driesler and Rigot, and I stayed in touch with Rigot. So, I was talking to Rigot on the phone and he's like, Steve Driesler at Drag City, we could do this. And so the publicist for Drag City is out in the Bay Area too maybe you can meet with her. So then I met with her became friends with her. Then she was a publicist, so she set it up so that I got to the interviews. Rigot probably should have, but I got all the fun. That 27:00was a lot of fun for me.

Right now, in just a lot of these big magazines and stuff, it was just fun to get the attention. At one point they asked me, kind of like in this interview, how did it start. I said well, Joe, Joe Frey met me after we'd been out of high school for just a little while, which was a year. He said, "Do you want to start a group?" and then he had met Rigot who had apparently placed a piece of paper in Jeffersonville, Indiana, on a telephone pole saying, "Anybody wants to play music call me." So it was all chance stuff.

Later on, Steve Rigot pulled me aside and said, "You know, Joe didn't start The Endtables by asking you if you wanted to be in a group. I started Endtables with Joe, and then you got recruited. Okay, Alex?" I'm like, "Okay, Steve." So, it 28:00wasn't -- apparently to Rigot that was very important and it wasn't the way I said it. That Joe started by asking me, and then he found Rigot. Rigot and Joe had found each other, and Rigot was looking for a group. Rigot wanted to sing in a punk rock group.

I didn't really give a shit one way or the other, to me it was all just chance circumstance, people living in the area wanted to get together, it was all a miracle. They don't care who gets the credit for it, but there's no question that there's a million shitty garage bands in the world or in Louisville but none of them had Steve Rigot. And he was sort of a larger-than-life figure, physically, emotionally, intellectually. He actually had musical talent which 29:00was never obvious.

He had an incredible rhythm. And I have certain spikes in my musical talent, certain things I'm good at certain and certain things I'm horrible at. I have a really good ear, I can pick out anything by ear. And I have really good rhythm, which is why I could play drums in the Marching Band. Rigot wasn't much on singing a melody. And he always had that monotone delivery, which just -- it really offended everybody that heard The Endtables.

You go, "Why don't you get a singer who can sing, this guy, not even singing." Little did we know that within a few years rap would be all the fucking craze and they're all just monotoning out to the rhythm of the music what they want to say. He was ahead of his time. He just was. He really was. And he had great 30:00rhythm. So that the way that he was mono -- he was rapping to the punk music that I was writing, is basically what was going on.

And he was so good rhythmically, that there was -- there was something between us he wasn't just -- he was really following my music and following my lead. And, just what he did fit the music. So we were a good team. And he could write music. He could -- he would write music. And he'd have the idea in his head. And then he would show me on a guitar. But he couldn't come close to playing guitar.

He would just put his thumb on the top string to show me, "Now here's where it starts and then it goes up to here and it goes down to here." Rigot would take -- so he had these ideas of the song when he'd have the words his mind that he wanted the guitar to start here on this note, and then go up to here and go down 31:00to there. And then I would go, "Well, that would be this kind of chord, then that." and after that, and then I just work it out, kind of blow it up. It was very primitive way of writing songs. But he had enough of a sense of what he wanted. And he had great rhythm. And he had this incredible personality so that anybody that was a contrarian, anybody that was looking for something outside of normal, there was just something crackling going on there that was -- so it was really I guess, his persona and his personality and his unique talent, everything about him and made him a unique person. That absolutely was the core of The Endtables from the very beginning. Yeah, it was all about Rigot.

CN:And so, what's an example of a song that you remember being written in that way you were just saying?

AD:Well, I remember, "They're Guilty" and "Defectors," I really remember those two, especially, because those came out really great; they came out as great songs. But you would never -- and I give me and Rigot both a lot of credit because the words in "Defectors" and "They're Guilty," they're great lyrics, better lyrics than I ever wrote for Steve Rieder and the Homespun album, or whatever it was. I mean Steve Rieder, my friend, he took lyrics from me. Rigot's lyrics were a million times better than mine.

They were way -- he had a great talent for writing lyrics and he would create these -- I can't even express the imagery of his lyrics. There was a secret to Steve Rigot that most people didn't realize that I caught onto right away. They say that pop music is about innocence. Well, Steve Rigot, everything that he did 33:00and all of his lyrics were from the point of view of a 12-year-old girl. And when you get that about him, then you're just dealing with something else, you're just dealing with a unique artist.

And see it goes back to "I'm Not a Baby." "I want to pick my own clothes to go to school, I want to go, I want to drive a car, I want to go shopping at the mall. Mommy, daddy I'm not a baby, I'm not a baby." Steve Rigot was a 12-year-old girl expressing her desire to be a grown up and have some fun. And that was behind all The Endtables lyrics.

"They're Guilty," it was about my parents suck, you fucking suck, you don't understand me, you don't get me, you don't try, you have no idea what you're raising and what's living under your roof, and you're guilty of all of those things. And then "The Defectors" was about a person who has no country, he's 34:00defected from the world but has no country to live in. That was the little 12-year-old girl inside of Steve Rigot.

And it was like, once you've got that, then you want it to do everything you could to just get behind that and just deliver it like something that just hit you between the eyes. And it was great. It was a great source for everything that rock is supposed to be. The rebellion against your parents and the normal world and the mainstream and everything. And to realize that you had this huge guy -- what was he? 6'4", 350 pounds -- I don't know, man, but the last thing you think of when you look at him he was 12-year-old girl.

When all this stuff started to come together in my head it was pretty amazing and it was pretty special. Rigot had this way of, found his voice and his art 35:00form, as a 12-year-old girl. And I just did everything I could to just back it up. So, when he showed me how "Defectors," he goes -- he had the whole song in his head and the lyrics and everything for "They're Guilty" -- but all he could do is show me and move his thumb along the fret board.

And so for "Defectors" I took what he basically showed me what you would call the chord progression. But then I made it my own. I did something with that, that that nobody else would play. Nobody else -- you could have shown that chord progression to 100 other guitarists, and none of what a written "Defectors." It was a unique thing about Steve's piece of talent and my piece of talent and how they came together. And we had this really unique respect for each other because he knew that no other guitarist would have taken what he did with his style, when he showed me "Defectors," and turn it into when I turned it into. It was the exact same chord progression. It was not what anybody else would have 36:00played. And so, we had this really great camaraderie. We had a really great respect for each other. Because we knew that we were playing off of each other.

And we were giving each other permission and a platform to do something that would just for some reason he needed to do. He needed to scream out that I'm a 12-year-old girl and nobody gets me. And I needed to scream out something forceful. And so that was really special the way that he could come up with these great lyrics. Even the chord progression of the song allowed me to take it and make it my own. Turn it into something that was not something either one of us would ever done in a million years on our own, and we both knew that. Rigot could have teamed up with any other guitarist it wouldn't have come out that way. And he knew that. And where the fuck would I have been if I never met 37:00Stephen Rigot? Absolutely nowhere.

CN:That 12-year-old girl thing is such an interesting perspective. Did he ever express that to you, or is that your--

AD:No. That's what made him so profound to me. Because this was long before people talked about, "We should have a third bathroom for transgender people." This was 1978, '79. You weren't even allowed to, say the word "condom" in public. We said, "rubbers" in private. This was a long time ago. Now, things have changed a lot and change fast. So, there was no way to grab ahold of what was going on inside of Steve. And I'm not pretending that I ever knew or understood Steve completely either.

CN:But that's your perspective on him?

AD:My perspective was he was very profound person and was very aware of himself, and there's just no question. I mean, I guess it comes from just hanging out with him. And just, we play at night, like at Joe's House. Or I'd go to his house during the day to get the songs he'd been working on, to write the songs so that by the time we got together to practice, then we had a song. So, me and him would work privately and then we'd show it to the group. We kept doing that for the couple of years that we played together. And I don't know how it dawned on me.

Like I said, a lot of it just goes back to "I'm Not a Baby." But it just dawned on me that we're not dealing with the regular person. And this person is really seeing the world or writing about seeing the world from point of view of a 39:0012-year-old girl. And that just makes it twice as exciting as everything else. Because most rock stars that the guys are talking about and we know, it's about the adolescent rebellion and all that. But it's very straight. We were not playing this straight.

This thing that I'm talking about right now, for me, that was the best part of The Endtables, just this way that we understood each other, me and Rigot. And the way that we respected each other, we were always very nice to each other, very good to each other, very respectful to each other, always. And at the beginning of every practice, he would come up to me, and he'd have this pathetic look on his face.

And he would hand me the end of his cord, the microphone cord, he'd go like this, so I could plug it in for him, because he didn't even know where to plug 40:00it in. But after a while, it became a ritual, and it was a little thing between us. He would come to me -- and I go, there you go Steve, buddy. It was just our little thing and it represented our whole relationship in a nutshell. Just this little, tiny, little quiet understanding that we had.

It wasn't even spoken verbally between us, but musically, that's -- it was, and that's what it was. And we got each other, I felt like he got me better than anybody else did. He knew what my talent was, he knew what I wanted to do. He respected it, he loved my rhythm, because it worked with his rhythm. He was just -- there's this thing in rock and roll about a guitarist and a singer, and you have these great pairs of guitarists and singers and they write songs together 41:00and become these great groups.

So, I just ended up looking at, this is just my little Louisville version of that, I'm just lucky I met this guy, and I'm lucky that together we actually formed this team. And there's something about us being able to write songs together. And that was the best part of it. And one of those people that interviewed me 30 years afterwards for when the record came out. He said, "You got a certain amount of credit because probably at Louisville in the 70s to even be in a band with a guy like Rigot was you're risking getting beat up or something, you're out of the mainstream.

So, I was always out of mainstream, both my parents were gay but it was never spoken either. You just had to find out as you grew up. So, I didn't have any problem hanging out with weird people, or gay people or bi-people or whatever it was, that wasn't even an issue for me. I was looking for an outlet. And so, 42:00we're -- I guess I had -- I don't conform to a liberal politics nowadays. But I was absolutely a pre-1980s liberal all the way. And I had no problem hanging out with Rigot.

I had no problem at all. All my friends did, soon as they found out, they were like, "What are you doing? Who is that person? What are you doing with these people?

CN: Yeah, just think of how conventional people were at that time. And, and he was just so unusual. I mean --

AD:Just Visually.

CN:Yeah, yeah. I mean, his manner. I mean, that was the main thing to be that big to be somebody who could have played the line in the NFL, he was the size of a lineman in the NFL.

AD:He really was.

CN:And then he has that, I always said it was like a Hollywood starlet almost, 43:00that manner he would have. It was so, it was just surprising. And I think it did, it challenged -- I mean, I think that was a very interesting aspect of that whole scene. I mean, there were -- I had known some gay people at college and stuff. But I've never been in such a gay scene before. I mean, where I knew so many people who were and I was, I mean, it was an aspect of it. But I think this really signaled.

CN:I'm going to stop this for one second. I forgot to slug the first one. But I'm supposed to say it. This is Chip Nold interviewing Alex Durig on May 21, 2017, at his home on East Oak Street in Louisville. This is the second part. So, we 44:00were -- so you were talking about The Endtables, and you talked about just thinking about it chronologically, you talked about Joe coming back at Thanksgiving saying you should keep this going. And my recollection is the next time I saw you play was there was a new wave festival at U of L. And I think Joe was still in the group.

AD:Yeah.

CN:But he was still going to college. So he just came down to do it.

AD:It's funny when you get older, you stop remembering things. I do remember that very well. But do you remember by any chance when that happened?

CN:I'm thinking it was in January or February of 1979, it would have been.

AD:Yeah, I mean, that sounds about right. That was an interesting gig The 45:00Endtables weren't even together two years. I think I wrote down your things '77 or '79, but it really probably should be '78, '80. You get foggy when you get old, I don't have a great memory. But we didn't -- we didn't, we weren't around a long time, we didn't play a whole lot of gigs. But it saddled us a lot of great friends, which is why people remembered us. I remember a lot of those gigs really well, because there weren't a whole lot of them.

And that gig was also, the first one with you guys was, it's entirely memorable to me, we talked about. But that also that that was, that was really important. 46:00I can tell you a really funny story associated with that gig. Somehow -- Joe was real social, real active -- I'm not a real social person, much more of an introvert. Joe is a very social person. He knew people, somehow he got us, somehow he found that they're going to do this punk rock thing at U of L. And I don't even remember real well, who else played, do you?

CN:I do not. I think if -- I think there's a poster for it on Doug Maxim's website, Louisville Punk Award space or whatever where he as all the flyers and stuff. I can't remember if we played, it would seem like we would have had to, because we were together at that point.

AD:For some reason, I'm thinking that it wasn't all groups from the scene. There were some groups that almost shouldn't have been there, but they just did what they could.

CN:I think you're right.

AD:They called it punk rock, just because they wanted to have a punk rock night thing, but it wasn't really necessarily punk all the way.

CN:I think you might be right on that.

AD:But anyway, I'm having a little trouble with my memory. But that was like playing a real gig, not just--

CN:Yeah. We did play, I remember that now. Well, we wanted to see, we had stage, we had lights, and the sound system--

AD:The Red Barn. And you got a poster bill for it. And everybody knows. And then so that was like, if you're going to play a real gig, then you're going to be a real band you should really be doing -- you should try to find another real gig to play. None of it was done professionally, the way a professional band would 48:00be handled, handled themselves, or the way the management would handle the band, which was always the thing. By the way, I'm just going to interject this real quickly.

The thing that was really the greatest thing to me always is artistic freedom. And I knew good and darn well that if I had been in a establishment band and a proper band and doing things the professional way, that there would be some management involved getting me the gigs and they'd also be telling me what to do. And I was the kind of guy that nobody's going to tell me what to do. So I'm not playing the guitar, I'm playing somebody else's guitar. It's like fuck that, so I was very happy to be not professional. I was very happy with the thought that you could actually have a group that would play -- didn't have to be totally professional to get gigs. So anyway, all of this is there in just that one gig. But it was another step towards saying, "Look we had fun playing and 49:00all and then we had that great first gig. But look now we're doing this and keep this going. Then somehow I guess Joe just pretty much just never really came back after that. He took off and finished school and went to New York. We never really saw him again and then that was a big change. But that night the press was there, Channel 32, and WLKY was 32 that back then. And so, we knew that the press had been there. So, we went back after playing to watch on TV. And then they said, "Next on the news: a punk rock festival at U of L, you're not going 50:00to believe what was going on there."

And I thought: I hate the news, I hate the media, I can't believe I got suckered into being excited about this, I'm not mainstream, I hate society, but there I was, I got suckered into it, "Oh I'm going to be on the news." And that lady dissed us so bad. She goes, "You're not going to believe what was going on at the punk rock festival tonight at U of L, next on Channel 32." You fucking bitch. And so anyway that was pretty much that gig.

CN:I remember a song I don't think I ever heard you play again. "Satan's Camera Shot."

AD:That little thing has haunted me forever. We tried to remember it and we couldn't. And it's just an example of Rigot's creative lyrics. We talked about "Satan's Camera Shot" 30 years later when we were doing our 30-year gig. It was 51:00one of those little things that we just couldn't remember.

CN:So, you said the Joe departed and so obviously and now at this point yeah, you had Max Pappas join you, is that right? Who drummed with Chris Lee I think.

AD:Yeah, but he was never regular. I mean, he was most undependable person in the world. Really nice, great guy, you couldn't count on him for anything. I don't think he was. So, he was great but couldn't count on him. I don't think, I don't remember him as a drummer in the Endtables.

CN:And then, so then how did it come about that you got your little brother to--

AD:Well, it just I guess between, just what we've talked about, playing all summer and having it be something completely unremarkable, and yet we have remarkable memories from it. And that night playing at Zakem's house. And then 52:00from there to U of L, the Red Barn. It's like well, maybe it could be somebody, you know? You got all excited, but it's really hard to recruit players to be in a weird band in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1970's. And somehow, I don't know how, Rigot met Steve Humphrey. And he was perfectly weird and qualified on the weird part. He overqualified on the weird part, he was a real character.

And then my brother came in and at this point you might want to go to the 30-years clause. I don't have anything good to say about his Steve Jan Humphrey or my brother. We were The Endtables, just four of us, for the rest of the year or year and a half that it lasted. But it happened in spite of us. I didn't want 53:00my brother to be in The Endtables. I didn't like Steve Jan, but it was all we had, and it worked for some crazy reason in spite of me and what I wanted, it worked. And I recognize that and I went with it.

CN:So was it somebody else's suggestion or did he pipe up or did you.

AD:I don't even know how Rigot met Steve Jan.

CN:I was talking about your brother, I guess.

AD:Well, that was just brother thing, I mean me and my brother were never close. Never. And so I start showing up Steve Jan's house, he had this tiny little house, it was smaller than this apartment. It was a house.

CN:I remember, I can't remember that place. Yeah, it was over by where Shenanigans is now, right?

AD:Yeah.

CN:Off Norris Place?

AD:Yeah, and so we start jamming and learning songs, but we need a bass player. And so, one day I mention, "My brother plays bass." But they're like, "Bring him, bring him." I'm like, "He's four years younger than me. He is this little, snotty little punk." And I avoided that for months, three or four months. And meanwhile my brother's begging me, "Let me come play with you. Let me come play, I'm playing bass, I've been practicing bass. I can do this, I know you need a bass player." And Rigot's like, "Will you bring your brother, just bring him."

Steve Jan's like, "Look man, we need a bass player." And I resisted for months and then finally I said, "Albert, you want to go to come?" "Yeah!" Okay, let me teach you some songs and try it out and see how it goes. "Okay!" He learned the 55:00songs. We were out there the first night in Steve Jan's little cottage and introduced everybody, "This is my brother and he's going to fill in for us until we get a bass player." And we taught him some songs and some -- at least we can practice as a group now. I said, "Let's do, I don't know, 'Defectors.'" And he goes, "Okay. One, two, three --" And I went, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" I put my hands on my hips. And I go, "I count off the songs, okay? He's like, "Whoa." That was it in a nutshell. That was our relationship in a nutshell from the word "go." It never changed. He always wanted to own and run that group because that's my brother's personality. He's a very controlling person. Little did I know that he 56:00would become completely not just accepted, but loved by the people in the scene. It was perfect. I mean, Rigot was already just as weird as you thought it could get. But what could be weirder, having a little kid playing bass?

It just -- and then Steve Jan is just scary. He was punk rock meets fucking horror rock, he was a scary guy. He was always in a bad mood. I mean his girlfriend had done him wrong and he was not about to get over it. He'd tell you all about it. He cried in his beer and he beat the shit out of the drums. He looked like he was ready to beat the shit out of you, if you looked at him in the wrong way. And things just got weirder and weirder. But for the audience it just got better and better. And I recognized that. Who was I to argue with fate? It was crazy. And so, you had a real band for about a year and a half, we had a 57:00real band where you have real tugs and pulls between people's egos and people's desires, and just magical convergence where it all comes together.

There will be times. I mean you talk about talent. This interview, we've talked about opinions and memories and know the talents recognized, how they come together, all this sane and normal. Things that we're not sane and normal happened when the four of us played for that year and a half to two years. I mean, even to say it out loud now, it just -- you're not going to believe it. We would all fuck up at the same time. We were so in tune together we practiced a 58:00lot. I was big on that, because I knew -- I was the only one that knew anything about music and I said, "Look, you guys don't know what you're doing. I have some idea what's going on here. And I'll telling you what, we need a lot of practice." And we practiced a lot.

CN:What do you mean by a lot?

AD:We practiced every night.

CN:I remember the same routine because we were in the same position. None of us had ever been in band before. So, we'd just go through the set again and again.

AD:I mean, it's all you had. You had to prop it up and get ready for the presentation of all you had was your preparation. I mean, I had that sense that if there's any chance to have this go over as anything worth dancing to, or partying to, or having fun with, it's got to be, it's got to start and it's got to keep going until it ends. It's got to be coherent somewhat.

Well, music is complex. And especially when you're playing the kind of music we 59:00were playing. This upbeat, moving fast, there's some changes in it, we couldn't handle a lot of changes. We could even write a song with a bridge in it. There's no Endtables song has an actual bridge in it.

CN:That's interesting.

AD:We weren't that good. We were very raw. But we just wanted to do it. Each of us wanted to do it really badly. And we practiced a lot. And then by some providence of the gods, not only do we practice enough to be able to get from the beginning to the end in some coherent fashion, but we actually were in tune with -- and it came with me and my brother. You often see siblings in bands, and they're obviously also a good match and it's because they have the same rhythm, and they have the same ears, and they have the same everything. So, it's just perfect harmony for those two musicians. You have two brothers in a group or two sisters, they're just tight. Tighter than any other people could be no matter how much they practiced. It's just a biological tightness that comes through in 60:00the music.

And Steve Jan was able to join in that. It wasn't anything we tried to do, it was the opposite, we tried to do it right, but the fact is we would make the same mistakes at the same time. We would just come up short of finishing the whole 4:4 measure and stumble into the next thing a little bit early, but we'd all do it the same way.

We were making the same mistakes at the same time, and so I think that for the audience it had an effect, because the audience would just walk away saying, "You guys really jam, you guys were good." But I think psychically, when you're in the middle of listening to a band play, when they're going through their steps, and then something wrong happens -- they miss a beat, but they all do it at the same time, and then it keeps going -- somehow psychically you know that 61:00something weird just happened, even if you don't know music.

They didn't complete that 4:4 measure properly, and they all started the next one early, but they all did it together. Are they geniuses of music? How could, you couldn't plan that and do it like -- there were moments where the thing was, part of the fun of The Endtables was that, because we weren't professional or really good, we had this feeling when we were playing that there was a train going down the tracks that was about to fall off the tracks. Because we had this feeling that this band was barely good enough to be a band and they were about to prove it and they were about to just completely fuck up, but we always kept the train on the tracks.

That was the tension in it. It was like, it became really strange because you got to be pretty good to get to be that bad and get away with it. It was a really weird thing that was going on, you got to have some talent to do that. There was some talent in that group. And in the people in that group. But I 62:00can't even explain to you how weird it was, and it happened at practice, that's how I started realizing we would make the same mistakes together in practice. And I'd tell them, "You realize you just --" and then it would happen live. And we always knew how to start -- we have to start the song together and we have end it together, and we may go nuts in between but the audience is going to believe that we're shepherding this thing along properly.

We worked hard on starting together and ending together, and there wasn't a while lot in between because we didn't even have a bridge. But by golly we put our heart and soul into it and then on top of it these really weird things would happen, and again this is a little bit of a payoff that you would probably not have in a professional band with professional musicians that knew what they were doing and did everything in a proper way. We wouldn't have this very strange coming together of three people that did not know what they were doing. They 63:00would struggle to get something together, they would make mistakes, but they would in fact make the same mistakes at the same time together so it seemed to be cohesive. The strangest fucking thing, it was the strangest fucking thing. I'm convinced that that was part of the magic of the group. It existed in spite of us. It wasn't anything anybody could plan. Nobody in their right mind would plan something like that. But it happened, and it kept the group together and it and it kept it going.

There was the other side of it too, which was, that, that for example Steve Jan had a competition with me. A sense of competition with me, that -- it sounds wonderful to have a healthy completion between the guitarist and the drummer, had the same thing in my next group. But it should be a friendly competition. I think it's very typical for guitarists and drummers in rock music to see who can 64:00play faster, and can you keep up with me and can I keep up with you kind of thing. You have these sort of friendly competition rivalries, but -- Steve was a profoundly unhappy person. Steve Jan, he was a profoundly unhappy person. And he was I guess even more of a contrarian than I was. Because he resented me being a leader of the group. Of course, my brother resented it from day one.

So, I'm in a group with somebody who is the real leader of the group, who everybody loves. I'm the musical director of the group. And we're playing with two guys who resent me for being the musical director of the group. They resented the hell out of me writing the songs, teaming up with Rigot, counting off the songs, running the practice. Rigot and my brother didn't like that, they did not like that. So, they made it really hard to work with them.

CN:You said Rigot and my brother, did you mean Steven Jan?

AD:Yes, Steve Jan and my brother they were very much into working against me, which again was part of the tension in the crew. We were a real punk rock group. We acted punk-y and rebellious, and mean and not nice, a lot, even to each other. It was just weird it worked in spite of itself. And I recognized that and I held on as long as I could. And then one day in May, I guess it was May '80, we played at the Windmill, and the owner told me, "We have more people in here than we've ever had before tonight, thanks." I said, "Well, thank you." I told the guys, "I need to talk to you," pulled them outside and said you know, "I can't stand playing with guys, and I'm not going to do this anymore." That was the end of The Endtables. We barely lasted two years.

CN:So, it was just the tension of the personalities that you've been describing that was the thing.

AD:Yeah, it was the thing that brought it together and made it happen and made 66:00it crackle, and it was the thing that tore it apart just as soon as it came together.

CN:Do you feel like there's any particular -- once we get in like we say classic formation, it's a short period of time. But is there any particular arc of progress, are there songs that you see that came at the end that you think we were going heading for a new thing or was it all just such a compressed period of time that--?

AD:Well, that's a really good question because I was starting to branch out, I was starting to move into songs that had a bridge, and songs that had the first part, and then had a second part and didn't sound at all like a first part. And stuff that of more that you would call more the Jethro Tull side of me and less the Black Sabbath side.

CN:What's an example -- is there an example that you recorded out?

AD:Well, the example would be the second group that came after The Endtables because what happened was, whenever I would come up with a song that was a little bit too flowery, Rigot would immediately nix it, you know, "I don't want 67:00to do that." And he had a very good sense of what he wanted, and so the moment I started doing a little bit more than that he's like, "I don't want to do that". And I was like, "I really like this song could we just try it?" He's like, "I don't want to do that." So, then I was starting to -- I'd been playing for a whole two years I was starting to get better and better I wanted to do more and different things. And he didn't, and then these other two assholes I couldn't stand them anyway so it's like, I'm out of here. And at that point I had no trouble putting a second band together because I was known for The Endtables. It was the easiest thing in the world putting a second band together. And I was a musical director, I wrote the songs and we had all these fucking songs and all these changes and everything. It was never one tiny part as popular as The Endtables.

CN:Right, this is Melusian.

AD:Yeah, and that was you know, that was what it was. But The Endtables was just 68:00very, very special, in spite of itself. It just was.

CN:So, talk about Melusian, the only other person I remember from that band is Denise, wasn't that her name? Who'd been married to Jerry. Who else was in that?

AD:Well, Tom Collier a good old friend of mine, played guitar and sang, and we practiced at his place, he had a big practice place, big loft out on main street. Well, my brother got recruited for bass because by then it was just --it just happened. And, Mike Ballard, a friend of my brother's, played drums. And 69:00so, if in The Endtables the tension of the group was the relationship with me and Rigot because things happened, musically, in Melusian the tension was between me and Mike Ballard. He was a very gifted drummer, he was just an amazingly wonderful drummer and--

CN:If he was a friend of Albert's was he younger than you then?

AD:He was younger than me yeah. A super talented guy, I'm still in touch with him, we went and played out it his house last year. But then a friend of mine, Whitt Hardy on guitar for a while, but none of us were that great. And there was some talent there, but Mike Ballard, the drummer, was the most talented one. And it was the same thing, we had a lot of fun, we stayed together in spite of ourselves, then the egos wore it down, just like always.

CN:I remember that as being much more of like a progressive band.

AD:Yeah, like I said, The Endtables were more the Black Sabbath in me, and Melusian was more the Jethro Tull in me.

CN:And by the end of it, and that was a real sharp divergence from the way the scene was, which talk about contrarian, I mean I don't recall -- I might be forgetting something but it seems like the other band -- other bands in our five band scene, or whatever it was, were all in a more of the Black Sabbath--

AD:Melusian was never part of that scene, in fact--

CN:Well, we were on record together.

AD:Well, that was a lot of fun, too, and that was a high point, too. And it was like The Endtables, for some lucky ass reason, we went in the studio one time and it worked. Just something good happened. And again if anything that worked in the studio worked it was because of preparation, because we practiced like 71:00dogs. Because I played for five hours a day, for years. I was going to have my part done if nobody else did. And so yeah, it was very similar but it was not part of the pop scene. In fact, because I broke up The Endtables and then started Melusian right after that, I basically incurred the wrath of most of the people in the scene. I was the object of much hatred for a long time.

CN:How did that express itself?

AD:Pretty much in the cold shoulder, silence. You wouldn't have heard the expression, you only felt it if you were me. I was thoroughly reviled for breaking up The Endtables, and I lost everything that I had in that scene, I didn't have any friends. I was persona non grata and when I would try to hang 72:00out I kind of got that. So, later on then, when like that rerelease of that record, 30 years later and all that, that was really nice for me, because basically The Endtables for me was a brief shining moment of fun that collapsed into a lot of hatred and anger. It was nice to get a comeuppance for it 30 years later.

CN:Right, for sure.

AD:And even when people would talk about The Endtables after that, I just really closed the door when I broke up The Endtables, closed the door on a lot of friendships, closed the door on a lot of social stuff. And never got really forgiven. That was how I felt.

CN:So after Melusian, was it Melusiam or Melusian?

AD:We said Melusian, it was, just made up.

CN:Were there other bands after that?

AD:No.

CN:Okay, and obviously you went into academia and got your Doctorate and all that. So, talk about that experience -- you mentioned a little bit just that it's nice to all of a sudden be appreciated for something you did 30 years earlier.

AD:Very nice, just like when you called me up, it's very nice to be appreciated for something you did once upon a time, because you worked really hard on it.

CN:My recollection is, so, Driesler put together -- Steve Driesler put together with Drag City the whole concept of the rerelease. I think that's right. And 74:00then I guess you -- and you said you did some publicity for that, and then you all played at South by Southwest, which was the first time you'd played together since 1980, is that right? Was that 2010?

AD:I guess it was '11 because in spring 2010 it started. And then so the excitement of it all through 2010 and can we get back together and practice, can we do interviews, and here's the record. And can we get a gig? And the big thing was that every gig that they got for us to do Rigot didn't want to do it, he kept holding out he kept saying no like I won't do that, finally--

CN:What are some of the possibilities?

AD:I can't even remember, they weren't big enough for him, he wanted something big. And I agreed with that. And I thought they were going to just say "fuck you guys." Because we turned down a lot of gigs. We turned down a gig in LA, at some venue that was pretty big, and I thought they were going to go like, "If you're not going to play in LA, then fuck you." But he wanted something really big, and so South by Southwest, he said "that's big enough," and we did that--

CN:What was that experience like?

AD:It was horrible. It was -- reunions are usually a bad idea, there's a reason you broke up, and you remember that when you get back together for your reunion. There's a reason we broke up, there's a damn good reason we broke up. And I just remembered what it was, oh shit, and -- so it just wasn't -- nothing about that 76:00reunion was good. It was pro forma, done because we were committed to do it, done because we thought we wanted to do, done because we were all proud to do it. When we got together to do it was just a complete disaster. A complete disaster and I wish it never happened. Just the personalities, even without Steve Jan there. And we going to pull Steve Jan in but Rigot wouldn't allow it.

He said, "I will never do anything with him again." And apparently they had some ugly, very ugly interactions, very ugly conflicts between them. And when Rigot explained to me how Steve Jan had aggressed him more than once and he didn't 77:00really want to be in the same room with I could only understand. Jan was a flaming asshole, he's not a nice guy. And he got rough with Rigot in more than one occasion, so Rigot was like I'm done with him. I could understand that, big gulp so I guess we'll do my brother and try to find a drummer. The publicist for Drag City assured us that she could get a drummer.

But it just didn't work, it just didn't work, I think in fairness to my brother, he was a grown man by now. He wasn't a little freshman in high school. He didn't want to be in his brother's group in his brother's shadow with his brother directing the group, with his brother this, his brother that, and then tag along. He just was his own man. He's getting ready to start running his own company, and it just didn't fit. And so nothing about anything that happened fit, and it just wasn't going to fit. And you know he was going to be his own 78:00man this time around, and I always was, and it just didn't work, it was horrible.

CN:Then the only other gig you all did that one Cropped Out was with Joe, it was with Joe Frey on bass and--

AD:We were on that Cropped Out CD but we didn't do a gig.

CN:I saw you live--

AD:Oh wait, you're talking about after the reunion, right.

CN:Yeah, not that, maybe a year before Steve died?

AD:Right I'm sorry, of course you're right. That was 2013, two and a half years later. I had just moved back to Louisville. I'd been gone from Louisville that whole time. I left Louisville in 1987 and moved to Bloomington, never came back. 79:00So now it's over 30 years later, and I came back. So right after I came back -- a few months after I came back then Joe and Rigot got in touch with and said we could do this gig and they'll pay us, we never got paid, so the idea of doing a gig and we get paid was like -- it sounds like justice. Did that and we found a drummer from that. But that really wasn't any fun either. It just wasn't the same, it just wasn't there, that spark was not there. Maybe we need Joe Willenbrink to bloody his nose for us or something. We needed something -- there 80:00was no spark in those last two reunions. There was just spite, there was no spark.

CN:It was interesting you know, because I was thinking, I think it's the last thing you played together, if I'm remembering right, was you played "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" by The Velvet Underground.

AD:Yeah, that was Rigot.

CN:Am I right, I think that other than -- I think at that first party you all did the "Peter Gunn" thing. I think those are the only two covers you ever played--

AD:I think you're right. You know why we did "Peter Gunn?" Because it's so easy, and we couldn't play. So, if you can't play your instrument, I was he only one that could actually play my instrument, if you can't play your instruments and you want to do something that sounds real bad ass, do "Peter Gunn" because almost any idiot can do that. That was the first song and that's and that's 81:00where Willenbrink bloodied his nose.

CN:And he was playing the saxophone, right?

AD:Something like that, yeah you have a better memory than I do.

CN:There's a little bit of an ethnographic question that they wanted me to ask. I'll just -- if any of this -- you can just say I don't have anything to say about this. I mean what were your impressions of the scene as a whole, the people in it, the music in it, the bands in it, I mean either at the time or as you look back on it?

AD:What I've been talking about, what we've been talking this whole time, it danced around. You just kind of connect all the dots. It's just everything we've been talking about, it was not normal, not mainstream, different, spun, something with a spark, something original, everybody in the scene was looking for that. We all enjoyed sharing that together and we played out together. I think that was definitely it, it was people that were not just satisfied playing it straight.

CN:What was your sense of what we were doing compared to what was going on nationally or internationally, did you think about it in those terms?

AD:Yeah, I did, and I thought that -- I always thought that we were lucky that we had what we had, we just had this unusual collection of people and I figured that everything that I just walk through, that brought The Endtables together in some weird little way and made it work somehow, for a little while. I figured 83:00every other group had their own same exact same experience.

And we were all lucky that we all happened to live in Louisville, because I would keep looking around in other cities and I will not see the same thing going on in those cities. And I know that there were music scenes and were groups and of course there was punk, but I don't think there was a whole lot of cities like Louisville, that had a scene like Louisville had, I don't think there were lots and lots of them, I don't think it was common, I don't think -- I think we had a really great fun time, and I think we are really lucky for that, I think that's part of what kept the memory of it going.

Everybody remembers the nostalgia of their youth. We had some extra special fun memories from our youth. And we really did and just -- I just remember being really aware. I remember thinking everybody knows the big hubs are LA, LA/San 84:00Francisco and then New York, that's where all the people go that really got what it takes, and make the professional music machine hum. And short of that, if you go outside of the box and you're not professional, mainstream and all hooked up -- we were really lucky to have what we had. I mean that was really special, I just don't think it happened a whole lot of time in a whole lot of places. And I think we all just got real lucky. It was a Camelot moment for music in the 70s, people living in the 70s for one brief shining moment we had the best fucking time.

CN:And it was like a magnet. It was a magnet for smart, creative and different people.

AD:It really was, there were a lot of super intelligent people in that scene. A lot kids of professors. There were a lot of gay and bisexual people who had zero 85:00outlet to just be what they thought they wanted to be. I remember I got introduced to so much. I got introduced to S&M watching Ricky Feather hang out with his girlfriend. It's pretty crazy. It was just like a little New York. It was just like, you would expect that to happen in New York City. You would expect a big punk thing to take off with all these weird wild and wonderful people. You didn't expect that to happen in Louisville. Louisville was just such 86:00a dead ass place, in so many ways, we all just said is it the biggest small town in the world or the smallest big town in the world, we couldn't figure out which. And now that I'm older, that's the charm of it. But when we were young it was hell, it was boring, it was hell. But we all came together and had the best fucking time.

CN:As somebody who stayed here, my whole impression of from then to now is just like, the city changed in ways I wanted it to. I mean not that it's exactly what I want it to be but, just like there are good restaurants here now. That matters to me, you can get good beers here now. I think about that a lot. I wanted to ask you about something, I went back and was reading some things. This was in 87:00something, was it in the Courier maybe?

It was actually in an article that Marc Zakem wrote after he left the Babylon Dance Band and he was being a music critic for the Courier, he wrote like a run down of the bands. And it said that you all -- this is probably -- I think it was around the time of that -- no but the second New Wave Festival, or something like that. So, it would've been in early '80, I think. And it said that The Endtables are moving to New York for a month in hopes of landing a record contract, do you remember that?

AD:I remember always saying that.

CN:So you didn't do it?

AD:Oh hell no. Flat out didn't have the money. Flat out didn't have the money, we didn't have the wherewithal, didn't have the means. We were always talking 88:00and that was always the next step of the dream. Which just shows the whole thing was a dream. We just got to live the dream here for a little while, that Camelot moment, then you know what's next? Well, next were going to go to New York. You could barely count on Steve Jan to show up to practice in his own house. Let alone getting him to commit to move to New York, I couldn't even imagine doing anything with him that would require a commitment. He's completely unreliable, psychotic human being. He wouldn't work with, he didn't know how to work or share well with others, he wasn't like that. He's not a nice guy, he's not easy to get along with. I loved him in my own way. And we loved playing in The Endtables, but he was a fucking jackass. He was just a jackass.

CN:There's something else when I was doing this, I was like this is you try to 89:00read up just to jog your own memory. There was a description of a gig in Lexington, were you playing on a farm. And the cops came, can you tell that story?

AD:That's one of the all-time greats. And I thought about that when you led me through the interview to talking about the gig at Zakem's house. And then the U of L gig. And how we didn't play much but those -- each one of those gigs I can remember most of them they had like some significance. And the spark was there that night too. We had that spark phenomenon is what drove the whole singing because we could experience, there was a spark, something happened tonight that was so much fun.

You didn't routinely have that other places, I know everybody didn't routinely 90:00have that at other places. I know they routinely did not have that at Freedom Hall at the big money concerts, if it ever happened once. But anyway, that gig was out in the middle of nowhere and it was an all-day-long punk festival in Lexington. We had some simpatico friendship with the punkers in Lexington, they had some good bands.

CN:There was a guy named Mark Casio who had a farm, and I know we played there on an earlier thing -- I don't think I was there. I was really bummed when I read the description, I don't think I was there for your show.

AD:Well, but you know those things, that spark thing, it comes and goes and it's not even obvious by most people. To me a very clear memory, the thing like the stage was the back of a platform truck. And so, they were very kind and they set 91:00us up to play last. We were going to headline the big punk festival. Well, the thing lasted all day, so by the time it was time for the headliners it was like 11 o'clock in the night, and the fucking cops showed up. And the cops show up and the next thing you know we're getting ready to go step on the truck and play. We waited all day, you know feeling like a bunch of pigs in dirt, and it's time to play, and the cops show up, and the cops made a show of showing up. They had all the cars line up pretty in a row. And they're like, [unintelligible - 01:31:40] -- we can't go on. And we were literally -- I don't know if the cops were watching the whole time, it was too perfect, we were literally standing onstage ready to go. And then they come up and all the cars pull up and they're 92:00like, "You guys listen, this show is over, now." And I just got really pissed off. The contrarian in me and I said -- I just looked at the guys and said, you know I guess this is going to be our last song, turn everything up to 10, fuck the sound check and Steve Jan we're going to play "White Glove Test." Count it off.

And so, everybody knew that the cops were there, everybody knew the cops were shutting us down. And instead of walking off the stage all polite, no, we had to play one more song to say "fuck you" to the cops, because obviously that was going to be our moment of glory. It was, because "White Glove Test" has that great -- it starts off with this darara -- then there's silence, then darara. 93:00And so, when everybody in the crowd knew that the cops were there to shut us down, and when we went ahead and started off "White Gloves Test," this was an exciting moment.

And so, everybody got into darara-hey, darara-hey and then darara. And the thing is that Steve Jan always messed up. He had to do the sync darara shh, darara shh -- there's a timing to it, then it goes darara, dararara it takes off. Jan always messed that up, he could never get that right in practice. Because he wouldn't even play it straight enough to give me four dararas with space in between then start. So, you never knew when exactly he was going to start off -- it was always just a little off with him. I was always trying to catch up with him, because he always had to take the lead, see. He had to be the leader, see, doesn't matter what I said or did or what we did in practice, he was going to be 94:00the leader of the fucking music show, he was going to show me.

And it's really hard when you practice as much as we did, and you know that when it's time to play live that you don't know what the drummer is going to do. You hope that enough of the practice is ingrained so that enough of it is going to come through right enough, to go from one to two to three to four then start over again, I wasn't asking for that much. And on that god damn night he just -- he did it right. And we did darara-hey, darara-hey and dara -- and that was that. And then bang moment came off just like bang. I think even the cops enjoyed it. For one moment we could do no wrong, we might as well have been at Freedom Hall in front of 20,000 people. Because the 120 people there rushed the 95:00stage, it was a real moment. And it was probably our best spark ever. And we worked hard for it, and we earned it and we deserved it.

And it was a great thing. And it happened because Steve Jan did everything he was fucking supposed to do. And I didn't know that it would happen until the second that it did happen. So, what happed inside of me when he fucking started it right with me, I was just happy, I was just as happy as I could possibly be. That's it, that's the story, it was a happy moment.

CN:So, had you played any songs before "White Glove Test" or was that your one and only song?

AD:That was the one and only song, they were about to shut us down and not even let us play. We were the last group and we were like, "You know what? Fuck that." and we did that, and that one song was worth the whole gig.

CN:Then what happened after you played that?

AD:Everybody knew we better hightail it out of there because--

CN:So you just got out--

AD:We got the fuck out. There was no trouble, we all knew that they wanted to shut down, and we all knew that we played one more song because we just decided we were going to, and we all knew that and they let us, then we all knew that we better now fucking put our tail between our legs and leave. That's what happened.

CN:Okay, that's great. I think we've come to a natural stopping place, this was great, every one of these has been great, I hope it was good for you.

AD:Thank you very much for letting me share. These are wonderful, wonderful memories. Sometimes you want to take credit for things, you want to say, I did 97:00this or I was part of that. And I did work hard, I did do my part. But I also hope that I communicated that the best parts of it were bigger than all of us. That something happened, and we all just had to go with it, and we're all just lucky that it happened and we knew it.

CN:I'm going to stop it./AT//