Interview: Paul Emery, DJ KVMR-FM, and Jimmi Accardi
P: Jimmi, you have a new CD out called Keep on Rockin'! And you are rockin'! Who is in your band now?
J: Ty Smith is the drummer. J.D. Hamilton plays keyboards, and we have Doug Davies on saxophone, and on upright bass is Joe Thayer. A good group of musicians.
P: I listened to this at home. In fact, I liked it so much I kept it on my CD player all week and then forgot to bring it in this morning. But this is really a rock 'n' roll album. Listening to your guitar playing on "Rollin' on Home" - you've listened to a lot of guitar players. You must have listened to Merle Travis.
J: I like Merle Travis a lot, yeah.
P: There's some of that kind of finger picking. Who else did you listen to when you were learning how to play guitar?
J: When I first started learning how to play guitar, I listened to George Harrison and Eric Clapton and Johnny Winter. They were all different from this kind of music. But from even before that, on the radio, I had heard Carl Perkins, and Scotty Moore from Elvis' band. That kind of stuff just always stuck with me. So when I got my guitar I remembered it and just looked for where it was on the neck.
P: That was a time when the guitar was a little bit more of a restrained instrument than it was later on when it became more the guitar hero kind of thing. Solos were short, they were snappy, but there was also a lot of real instrumental music. I mean like that cut that you played.
J: Well, that's more along the lines of Link Wray, Duane Eddy, the twangy stuff. Half the album is twanging rockabilly instrumentals, and the rest is the rhythm and blues songs. Somebody said to me, "Hey, new oldies!" It's got the sound of something recorded in the late '50s.
P: It does, actually. We're going to listen to "I Don't Love You No More". The lyrics were not real deep, in those days.
J: No, these are just songs - no messages or anything like that.
P: I mean the title pretty much says what the song is. You're not going to find out any more information by listening to the lyrics, right?
J: Right, but you can dance to it!
P: Jimmi Accardi and the Wild Cats, that's the name of the band. Another one of those real deep lyrical tunes. I think the message comes across pretty well, Jimmi. "Don't Break My Heart", right? Don't do it. That's pretty much it. Jimmi, when did you first start playing guitar?
J: The late '60s.
P: Rockabilly was really out of fashion by that time, right? This is pretty much a rockabilly album.
J: Rockabilly and old rhythm and blues. But the rockabilly guitar - I learned it from George Harrison doing the Carl Perkins stuff. I was just too young when Carl Perkins was doing it. I didn't even have a guitar yet. But I got it second-hand from a lot of the English groups, then I went and searched for where the originals came from.
P: Gene Vincent. That band is still going on, though Gene Vincent is long gone. It's just the Blue Caps, now, but they are still playing, the original band. It would be really fun to see that. Jimmi, on your CD cover, it shows a Mercury, right? A Mercury car and a Gretsch guitar. That's pretty good. That's half the lyrics to a song right there. The colors are perfectly matching. Did you have the guitar repainted so it would match?
J: No, I was just playing at a car show, with the classic '50s cars. And somebody was there with a camera, and I said I gotta get a picture in front of this car, it's really cool. It just happened to match the guitar.
P: What guitar are you playing on this album?
J: I'm playing the one on the cover, the Gretsch. That one and a Telecaster.
P: Gretsches have an interesting sound. There is nothing quite like them.
J: It's kind of like a cross between a Fender and a Gibson. It's got the twang and the clarity of a Fender guitar, but it has the beefy, fatter tone, like a Gibson.
P: And the neck of a Gretsch guitar is much more conductive to doing finger-style, like single notes, the arpeggio type thing.
J: Kind of like an acoustic with a pickup on it.
P: You're doing a show this Friday night. And who's going to be playing in the band?
J: Everybody on the album. The whole band.
P: That Ty sure is a good drummer, isn't he? He just can keep a beat.
J: The reason I use him is because I don't have to worry about the drummer, what he's doing. I don't have to think about it. He's just there all the time. He's invisible like Ringo.
P: He just does the right parts. Hey, we're going to listen to another cut off the CD. This one is "Promises of Love".
J: R&B. Fifties R&B, not today's R&B.
P: Now "Twang Time" - That was your Duane Eddy tune.
J: Twangin', man. Tremolo guitar.
P: When did you write these songs? You have a partner writing these tunes, don't you? Tell us a little bit about your songwriting partner.
J: My songwriting partner is my wife. We wrote all these songs. I was going around looking for records that I liked, old rhythm and blues, and I kind of bought everything there is that I could find. I wanted to hear more! So we had to write them. We wrote 7 or 8 songs in two nights. We just put on the tape recorder and started writing words, I was playing the guitar. And then I just played them for the band, they came over and we did the album in one day, at my house.
P: Not a lot of studio time involved.
J: No, but I didn't want that anyway. This kind of music, you want it to sound like the old records, it's got to be loose.
P: Jimmi, when you go out and play with your band, this is pretty much the type of show that you do.
J: Yes, I like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, we do a lot of obscure old rhythm and blues tunes that people may not have heard, but they should hear them. They shouldn't get lost in the shuffle. In fact, the next song, "Pretty Little Thing", has some country influence to it too. That's why I liked Chuck Berry a lot, because he had a lot of country background.
P: Jimmi, the hits just keep on coming. This music is actually not even so much a revival, there is a consistent interest in rockabilly music. I would say this is definitely a rockabilly tinged album more than anything.
J: Well, rockabilly and rhythm and blues, that's the roots of rock 'n' roll.
P: This is happening all over the country. I've got a couple of magazines. They dig up these old guys. There are people that recorded in the 1950s, that maybe sold a couple of hundred records, and these magazines like Blue Suede News [see review] find these people. And they go down to Texas or some place like that and bring them up for a concert. . . . Let us know a little bit about the musicians that are on this album.
J: We play a lot in town. We go out of town, too. But when we play at the Nevada Club we rock that place. A lot of people come. We have a good following now. I heard a tape with somebody playing a keyboard, like New Orleans stuff, and I said, "Who is that?" And this drummer friend of mine said, "That's J.D. Hamilton, he lives right down the block." [Pictured above with Jimmi.] And I hadn't heard anybody play like this. And he took lessons from Garth Hudson (of The Band) when he was younger. He just knocked me out. So I got him and Ty, the drummer, and the three of us, with me on the guitar, sounded great. And then we added a standup bass, that's why it's so boomy and nice and thick on the low end. That just ties it all together. And the saxophone is something else. Not a lot of bands with saxophone for a while. So that fits in this music.
P: The next cut is "Suzanne", then "Rockin' on Down the Road". You know what Chuck Berry says, there are only three possible lyrics to write in a rock 'n' roll song: songs about cars, love, and school. I think that about sums it up for rock 'n' roll.
J: That's right. You don't want an intellectual trip going on.
P: No. It's pretty much, the title says the song. That's it. People are so excited about this CD. It's really good, by the way. It's very, very good. It really does rock out, and the musicians just sound fantastic. We're going to listen to one more cut, "I'm Going Crazy For You Baby". And that pretty much tells the story of the song, right?
J: That's right.
P: Jimmi, thank you very much for being part of the show. And Keep on Rockin', I know you will.
J: Thanks, Paul.
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