[intro music]
Dan Aaronie:  And welcome to Makin’ Music. My name is Dan Aaronie and I will be your host this week. We are going to do something a little bit different, we have now been on the show, and Makin’ Music has been for two years now, and we wanted to bring you a few highlight films from the last two years. We’re going to start with one of my favorite interviews, with Y&T, Dave Meniketti and John Nymann joined us, and for just some fun talk about a band from the east bay self promoting themselves, and they were just a blast to be with that day. [music] So here let’s go on and talk to Dave. [music]
[audience clapping]
Dan:  Welcome live Dave, the special guitarist whose 16. It’s kind of late by most people standards.
Dave Meniketti:  We have taken lessons in the beginning.
Dan:  I did, I took about two or three lessons. [laughter]
Dave:  And the guy came over one day after like the third lesson, and he’s like, did you learn your scales? And I didn’t know him, but I was doing like [plays guitar] . And he goes, ‘How did you learn to do that?’ What were you doing to stretch and string thing is that I don’t know, I’m just messing around, he heard me play to Marty said maybe you should just learn on your own. I think he was a little frustrated with me, but he can also tell that I was learning a lot of staff sort of doing things myself.
Dan:  Yeah, but if you don’t automatically turn in to someone who’s just stretch and strings. It’s to do in what you were doing with the albums.
Dave:  Yeah I know. That’s why I’m tired of life, I don’t know what I’m doing because I’m doing it. [laughter, crosstalk]
Dave:  My sister was dating this guy that Herbie Herbert, and this didn’t happen because of her, but there was a weird back story later on, that she remembers going into Herbie’s place, and Herbie was playing this new band, that he was putting together journey, right? And he goes listen to this guitar player Neil Shaw, and he is amazing, nobody’s like this and my sister goes, my brother plays as good as that. [laughter]
Dave:  And Herbie’s like oh yeah, sure, sure. Here it was a year later, and Herbie had found out about me through somebody else, somebody had taken a demo tape, a first demo tape that we had put together, and went into the city and found out woah, these were the guys you know, he hyped us up and said, put our guitars on fire. You know it was all BS, but just to say because he’s like I’ve got to see these guys just for fun, because I think he was just going to laugh.
Dan:  Now you’re calling yourself Y&T, or yesterday.
Dave:  We were yesterday and today, and so he came out to a show because we used to put our own shows on, we were kind of revolutionary in that way that we’d go out to like these local halls whatever the union halls or something, we’d rent it for $100.
Dan:  And sold it back to yourself.
David:  Yeah, we sold the tickets for itself and we put up fliers of the high school, and say Hager party whatever, but we would pack the places, and we would start doing original material. All of a sudden started becoming this popular local band at least sort of in the east Bayer area. So when Herbie shows up and his partner Loo, we’re playing this little dinky weeks part, community center point, I think the whole is like about 200 feet more. There were tons of people outside, and it was just crazy stuff, but they saw us play, and they were like oh my god, these guys are a trip. And then it was I guess six months later they ended up signing us to a deal, and it was just us in journey with them for a couple of years and we played.
Dan:  So you’re touring with [inaudible 05:08] ?
David:  Yeah, we were both managed by them and we were constantly hanging, we were constantly playing shows together, probably did something like 30 or 40 shows within the next two years or so together and bundled up.
Dan:  We’re back, and if you’re just joining us. We are Makin’ Music, and we’re doing some highlight films of the last two years. We have over a hundred shows and if you ever want to see any, and you’ve seen some of the shows and you’d like to replay them, come to the guitar showcase 39 South [unintelligible 05:34] in San Jose. We have the DVD’s. There is no charge. Now our second interview was with Peter Grant, a great musician from the bay area. He started and went to San Jose state university. He played with Cherry Garcia. He was a staff musician on Dallas dynasty, Fulcrum crust, and that’s landing for 10 years so whenever you saw those TV shows, and they had musicians in the background, Peter was invariably one of those musicians.
And also he was played with [unintelligible 06:04] for several years and tored with him, and we have a great tape showing Peter playing “Petal Steel.”
[music]
Dan:  Well, we’re going to go, you brought some pictures along and each one tells a little story. So, we’re going to get these pictures brought up on the screen. Now tell us about this one.
Peter:  My first electric guitar and growing hair to Beatles length, and first Fender Jazz Master.
Dan:  Yes.
Peter:  Yes, sir.
Dan:  And it looks, I’m going to guess by looking at it 1962, 1963?
Peter:  That would be 63′.
Dan:  Tell us about this one.
Peter:  That’s a band called Weird Harold, for a very short time I was in that band. It was a local San Jose band. That was after I was in People, I was in People for a while. I played bass for People while Rob had mononucleosis.
Jeremy:  Both killer bands.
Dan:  Now what does that prop… Now tell me what’s the prop in that picture? It looks like a spaceship a little bit but I can’t really tell.
Peter:  We might have been abducted at that point. It could be, but it was somewhere up in San Francisco, went on a photo shoot. Countdown! I played the Countdown for three years six nights a week and there’s Pete Grant, Coy Henry, Roy McMeans, Linda Henson, Don Cox, and Greg Cobin. Greg Cobin is the son of the late Psycho who not only wrote “Sweet Violets” but he wrote “Good Woman’s Love” and a bunch of other great songs.
Dan:  Of course, Don Cox was very famous…
Peter:  That’s right! Exactly.
Dan:  …Cow Tow for years and years and years and he was the mainstay there and boy what a lot great tunes out of there.
Peter:  Yeah. So, I left that band and immediately joined the Hoyt Axton Band and we can go on from that picture to the next on, I think we can.
Dan:  Now this picture is?
Peter:  That’s me and Hoyt and I’m in the middle there and that’s probably at the Palomino Club.
Dan:  Again, if you’re just joining us, my name is Dan Aaronie and this is Makin’ Music and we’re reviewing a couple of years of shows that we’ve put on. Our third interview was with Scotty Osborne, an Ozzy Osborne impersonator and Jeremy Uppe and myself joined Scotty for an interview and he had some great insight into the life and times of Ozzy Osborne.
Scotty Osborne:  And we wanted to call the band “Speak of the Devil” after the Ozzy album came out, once again in the 80’s, where Ozzy was playing Black Sabbath songs. It was always superb that we play Black Sabbath music or we play Ozzy music we played what ever we wanted too and people just loved it.
Dan:  Now, we got some pictures that we’re going to bring up on the screen.
Scotty:  We do!
Dan:  Let’s get those and tell us a little bit about them as they come up. Here we go.
Scotty:  All right. Thank you very much. All right! [shouting] That’s me! That’s me on the left. This is one of the very, very first shows that Speak of the Devil ever played. The very nice gentlemen on the right side is Mr. Brad Gillis. Brad Gillis is a sweetheart of a man, guitar player for Night Ranger, also the guitar player for Ozzy after Randy Rhodes was tragically killed, Brad Gillis joined the tour and finished their 1982 tour with Ozzy. I was on my way to the show and I got a call from the booking agent and she said, “Are you sitting down?” I said, “Well, I’m in me car so of course I’m sitting down.” She said, “Brad Gillis is here he wants to play with you.” I said, “It’s not nice to tease me that way. Because you shouldn’t do that!”
And she said, “No. Really. Brad wants to play a couple of songs and wants to know if it’s all right and if your guitar player wouldn’t mind if he just played some songs.” I said, “Well, I’m going to have to break me guitar players arms, so Brad can get up and play as long as he wants too.” Luckily we didn’t have to do any arm breaking.
Our guitar player Ken Sabat, excellent musician, gladly gave his guitar to Brad and Brad played Symptom of the Universe, Crazy Train, and Paranoid. It was a fantastic moment in my life and that’s a great picture. The expression of my face says it all.
Jeremy:  I’d say it is a great shot.
Dan:  And we’ve all heard… Well, maybe not a lot of people in the audience have not heard about the bat story or the Alamo. I never knew about the bat story until about a week ago. What don’t you tell us a little bit about what happened there.
Scotty:  I’d be happy to. I’m happy to tell the story because it’s not about me. Now I’ll try to emulate Ozzy as best as I can you see, but there’s some things I just won’t do. Public urination or biting the heads off of flying rodents are up there with things I draw the line on. I won’t do it, won’t do it. The bat story is that onstage Ozzy was playing a concert and somebody threw up a bat up onto the stage, and Ozzy thought it was plastic or fake or what ever it was and ran over and just picked it up. And Ozzy being Ozzy just snatched the head off and threw it back. Sharon is on the side of the stage going, “You idiot, it’s real!”
So, he had to go through a series of rabies shot, it was terrible. But what they say, there’s no such thing as bad press, any press is good. And here we are all these years later still talking about Ozzy biting the head off a bat and urinating on the Alamo and it’s just wonderful stories.
Jeremy:  Yeah. He did that, I don’t think that’s his real… He did that for shock value and it definitely worked.
Scotty:  I think he did it because he was inebriated. I think he was so drunk. The Alamo story came from that Sharon used to have to lock him into the hotel room because Ozzy would just get so ripping drunk and just wander around.
Jeremy:  She would take all of his clothes or whatever!
Scotty:  She would take all of his clothes! So he didn’t have anything to wear but he wanted to go on a little walk about. So, he grabbed the green dress that Sharon left in the closet and he went for a nice walk, you see. And I understand he had a bottle of Courvoisier and while he was walking around he felt the urge that he had to take care of some personal business. Found a nice old looking building he thought he would turn around the corner…
Jeremy:  He didn’t realize what it was?
Scotty:  No. He’s from Birmingham, he wouldn’t know what the Alamo is, he wouldn’t know. He and he just thought nobody would notice, it’s an old building. The next thing you know the police says, “Excuse me sir, when you’re done can you step over here?” And they arrested him. It’s a wonderful story.
Jeremy:  It’s amazing that the police were there at the same time he was doing it. We’re they circling in planes or something?
Scotty:  I wouldn’t be surprised. If you saw a man that looked like Ozzy Osborne walk out of hotel room in a green dress, carrying a bottle of Courvoisier, if you were a police officer you would tail him too.
Jeremy:  You got a good point there.]]>