Confessions of a Glorified Sideman

I recently had a great time tour­ing Swe­den with Swedish blues­man Slidin’ Slim. Besides play­ing in tra­di­tional venues, Slim also arranged for us to teach & per­form at two music clinics.

Now, I’ve been inter­viewed many times, but the Clinic/Question & Answer and then play songs type of gig was new to me, but I really came to dig it.

I like telling sto­ries… OK, let’s be hon­est I love talk­ing shit or basi­cally hear­ing myself pon­tif­i­cate on any­thing. And I got a lot sto­ries. I gotta mil­lion of ‘em… Rule #1 is I have to be louder than any­one else in the band when I solo!

I did enjoy these clin­ics and I actu­ally felt maybe some of my insights could make a dif­fer­ence. Oh who am I kid­ding???!!!

Here are videos of our clinic on Octo­ber 25th at the Music Börsen store in Linköping. They were shot by Dave Maakestad.

I hope you find them as inter­est­ing and enter­tain­ing as the crowd there did.

Part 1 — The Bose peo­ple were so kind to sup­ply the sound sys­tem but we had to crank the vol­ume after the first song. This clip show­cases my ram­bling, coma induc­ing style of Q & A.

Part 2 — Talk­ing a lit­tle about record­ing and tour­ing with Rod Stew­art and how I made it in the music biz before I learned how to read music.

Part 3 — I don’t know if Slim wrote this but it’s our theme song to each other. It’s called “You’ve Been a Waste of Time”… haha… and my sig­na­ture tune, Howlin’ Wolf’s clas­sic “I’m Wor­ried About You” with me on harp and vocals.

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Part 4 — Decod­ing the Jimmy Z fast triplet lick. Prac­tice, know your ax and be a good hang.

Part 5 — Dis­cussing record­ing with Eury­th­mics and Rod Stew­art and why they were the best. The worst: Gene Sim­mons on Kiss ses­sion. Not really all that bad… just funny.

Part 6 — Some sax & vocals for ya on Willie Dixon’s “Ain’t Super­sti­tious”… kinda Howlin’ Wolf style. Big Fred joins us on piano on “Coun­try Girl.”

Part 7 — More songs — Please excuse the abrupt cut-off on ‘My Babe’, but we were close to the YouTube time limit. It was our last num­ber anyway.