where it all happens all the magic happens here joe's a fantastic singer songwriter guitar player i'll just give a little background of how i met him you had been playing at the st plough and as usual probably i didn't have my camera there and i saw you play and i thought oh my gosh i should have my camera running this guy's fantastic and then the next time i finally did see you  titled which happened what about two years ago that right you have two thousand and ten we recorded the cd at the great american at the cd release party for the album prior to this one and yeah originally in doing the show that kind of fell together in the couple weeks before we did the show and then you actually put together a video of a bunch of cellphone well mixed with other professional equipment but a lot of writing on the audience just kind of catching you  california i grew up in a number of different places if you could throw a rock at it from i five i probably live there kind of like me yeah you know bakersfield stockton marysville sacramento when you start to finish picking up the guitar would linda to start listening to music seriously and thought boy i want to do that oh well i mean i was always entranced by it i mean as  the six seven year old kid in bakersfield i lived down the street from this guy who played the pedal steel and i didn't know that's what the instrument was at the time it i never actually saw the instrument i would just hear it as this guy was practicing and i was always kind of entranced by that sound and i didn't it didn't occur to me at you know seven years old or whatever that i could do that but i mean i was certainly i mean sucked into it from very early age so when did you start actually playing guitar you know the first time i think i ever touched an electric guitar was at some friends of my parents had three kids one of them was jeff he had a fender stratocaster i must have been nine or ten years old and like we would go to visit them and he would he would bust out this fender stratocaster he was a few years older than me and he played slide with a nine volt battery and i thought that was the coolest thing i had ever heard and or seen really because  that's and there was something that clicked in my head that vats that sound back in bakersfield that slighty sound of the pedal steel guy that i've been hearing it kind of clicked in my head that only slide something metallic on the string to make that sound and i still i mean it was still a decade or more before i realized that oh there's this whole contraption called a pedal steel and you've got all these levers and things that you bend to actually get that full sound but that was the first time ever touched a guitar was a strata caster that this guy jeff johnson and who were some of the early influences what it you know i mean and i mean there's all sorts of people you heard but who really stuck out in your mind and you thought boy i'd like to play like that guy well i mean i don't know i mean that earliest music that i can recall seriously getting into like even like as young as seven eight nine ten and there was johnny cash and marty robbins my dad you know had had that kind of music on the hi fi that he would play but that was the first album i played over and over and over and over and this next song is a public service announcement joe you have a lot of humor in your in your music where does that come from i mean you know you're if you're a hilarious guy but when did you start thinking i'm going to write some humorous stuff you know i don't really know the earliest songs that i ever wrote were funny songs i mean i think that's you know the the humorous stuff is maybe fifty percent of what i write and you know the serious stuff is the other fifty but the earliest things that i ever wrote were certainly kind of funny songs you  said some of your earliest stuff was listening to johnny cash right right since then who are the like your favorite guitar players the people who you really really feel influenced what you do right  there's so many i would say in no particular order the people that have influenced me the most in terms of guitar would be jerry garcia from x richard thompson chris kirkwood from the meat puppets cause there's so many i mean those those right there are like like the main guys like that i just listen to over and over and over in high school and you know they're kind of from all over the map you know it right yeah and they obviously are and it was funny in high school you know because things were so cliquey you know like i had friends who were in the grateful dead and friends who were into punk and i mean my two favorite bands were the grateful dead and acts who probably are there ever on the show together i seriously doubt it you know i mean i'm yeah all the people that listens to however let's talk about your current lineup and how did you how did all these people come together i'm sure you've been through wouldn't say a thousand bands but you know most musicians before they get to their own thing r away and where you are right now they've you know been in the lots and lots of bands so how did it how did you get your current lineup you know it was kind of like maybe you'd call it a dream team like i've played with a lot of people here i've  been in the bay area since ninety one and i've you know i've played in a lot of bands with a lot of different people and these were just the people that i really wanted to play with when i got together two years ago for that see really show it was it was for a cd that recorded right here for the most part where i did most of the instruments in this room by myself and just just threw over dove so when it came time to record to perform it well there's there's out there of like with an acoustic guitar and say just imagine harmonies in your head or do i try to pull some people together to do the stuff live and i just kind of looked at all the people i played with and said hey here's who i would like if i could pick who i want to play with me you know i was like i want john haynes on drums i want dave just on bass i want steve lucky on keys i want danny allen on guitar and jason climber going fiddle i want valis way ahead of davis on vocals you know like it was just  a like here's who i want to do this with like these are the people that i love i love what they do i love playing with them and then you know we had other guests you know come and sit in a little remark on pebbles to me joe goldmark on pedal steel come on you know k that part i don't know if i should give away your bits but then you threw him off the stage and people were like cho how could you do that yeah i felt the entire room turn against me at that point which is yeah it really is it's kind of really best suited to come to be the the last song because everyone's going offstage and thing things like that but there's a part in there where the microphone starts slowly  falling down you get started getting lower and lower and lower and then there's people from the audience who are trying to help you out by half by making sure you know by fixing it so that you don't have to do that and then i talked about it later and you said no i had someone build that  yeah yeah well actually what happened was at one show i had a mike stand that would not stay up and it was a problem all throughout the show and then we were playing control freak and it seriously just the mike stand was going down about that fast and i'm trying  into it and just getting lower and lower and i just thought it was the most whole areas thing that i could have possibly done because i'm singing the song about being a control freak and want to be in control of everything in the mike stand one even stay up and i just thought that was beautiful so yeah like at that show two years ago the great american i asked my friends act on our fact that's the mike standard sitting right over there it's got to servo motor in it and at the appropriate time he can hit a button and the mike stand will start doing that because i was like well how can we you know it's too hard to set it so that it's going to actually do that so we actually built me a mic stand for people who had never seen that before and it was hilarious because they were at least three people from the audience who were trying to do me a favor and w great great song everybody by the by the end of the song and everyone's left the stage we're going to do a song  artist beyond just being a musician so well is there any advice anything you learned or just like grin and bear it yes if you want to be as successful as i am  know i would say gosh i mean just do what you're going to do and don't you know don't fall prey to other people's expectations of what you're doing you know do it because you truly feel something that you want to express and i mean i'm going to be doing us until the day i die you know i've never made a dime out of this entire operation everything i make goes right back into more music but you have quite a following and oh yeah and you know i mean there's money taken in but it all goes right back into the next project yeah you know so it's like you know i would almost least say you know  the old standby don't quit your day job is probably a pretty good yank because you know there are so many artists out there and the reality it's kind of like trying to be a basketball player right right i mean the truth of the matter is is that if if you're a creative person you are always at any point going to have more projects that you want to do than you have money for and you know what i mean everybody i know that you know is making music or are you know they've all got notebooks full of things i have no books full of projects that i'm never going to do that one but i'm going to write it down you know because if i ever win the lottery that will go back onto the maybe list you know but i mean so yeah i mean you know i would say you know definitely stick to what you're doing just be true to like your own vision and you know find some way to fund you know like what you're doing if you if you happened to be blessed with a trust fund good for you you know if i can use that thing and you know and make some art but it if like most of us you weren't blessed with a  just you know find some way to fund what you're doing shows i'll guarantee you it's worth your money it's worth more than the money that you'll pay to get there what he said