A-LIST FRIENDS
Origins of The Alpha Band
“ITHINK it was all about two years, really ’76 and ’77 — maybe ’78 in there. Steven Soles, David Mansfield and I became close friends on the Rolling Thunder tour. When the second tour was over, we decided to go somewhere and play, because we enjoyed playing. We’d go back after shows and work up songs in the hotel rooms, with no real thought of anything other than playing music together.
“We booked a little club in Taos, New Mexico. It was a pretty little room to play music in. We called my great friend, David Jackson, and Matt Betton, who I’d known since we were in school together in Fort Worth. We all met up there and practised for maybe three weeks. While we were playing, the record companies started coming and we got offers. We had worked up a killer live set when Clive Davis came down and offered us a contract for three records, which we did in about 18 months.
“Arista was an interesting label and interesting place. Patti Smith was there. Lou Reed. The show Clive came to was particularly good. We had it on tape and Bob Neuwirth said ‘Just put that out. Don’t spend money making a record. Are you crazy? The set is great.’ About three years later, I realised he was exactly right. That’s the way we should’ve done it. We did all the records really quickly. They were recorded in Los Angeles. The first one we just basically did the live show in the studio. The second two we did very quickly as well, maybe five days [each], something like that. The third record was completely strange. I still think it’s strange. It was called The Statue Makers Of Hollywood.
“There wasn’t really a split. We were thinking of it as a magazine at that time, that we were the editors and we were publishing stuff. Other people’s songs and other musicians. Ringo Starr came in and played. That was a thrill. We did [Dylan’s] ‘You Angel You’. That was a very different time in the music world. We hung out, we wrote, it was fun; it was a good collaboration. I enjoyed it tremendously and I continued to collaborate with those guys the rest of my life.”