thisisjohn wrote:
...one of his old guitarist from around this time, can't remember which one...
It was drummer David Kemper.
I've transcribed his remarks:
We'd go in a rehersal hall and we just would play for three days. And a lot of times before we did
"Love and Theft," like I remember one period of three days where we'd play only Dean Martin songs. And we'd, you know, we'd play 'em on the record player, we'd listen to "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime" and he'd sing it and we, then we're ready, we could do a whole, we could do a gig playing those songs. But we never, ever played them. We just polished them up and that was that. And he would do that with, um, Johnny and Jack songs and Stanley Brothers songs and, you know, real early, earlier American artists too. And he would turn us onto these things and he'd bring records in and give us tapes of these recordings with real early stuff. And then the next day at rehershal we'd run through them and learn to play them and most of them we never would play. And the first day we went in to record
"Love and Theft" I know he said, "Alright, the first song we're gonna start with is this song." And he'd play it for us on his guitar. And then he would say, "You know, I want to do it in the style of this song." And he'd play an early song, and, like, we started with "Summer Days" and he'd play a song called "Rebecca" by Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner. And then it became apparant to me that he'd been training us for, you know, a year, over a year, to learn these old styles, you know? We were far more prepared for what he had in store then had he not done, you know, gone through this procedure. We never talked about this and maybe it's just the way I'm, you know, what I took from that process, but it certainly was like going to college for me or, you know, going to the School of Bob, or the School of Americana really, you know, presented by Bob.