Interview Questions-SoucyName: Christopher D. Soucy
(aka Soucetopher, Birdman, Doc)
Instrument: electric guitar, slide guitar, mandolin, backing vocals, whistling, general smart aleck comments
DOB: declined to answer
So you grew up in New Jersey, what are your musical influences? Who inspired you to start playing guitar?
Sally's not the only one who comes from a musical family. Both my folks play piano. Mom is also a terrific ukulele player and Dad played accordion and guitar in his day. They listened to a lot of country music when I was growing up - all the Hanks: Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Hank Thompson, Hank Locklin, Hank Cochrane. Some of my earliest musical memories are of the concerts they took me to see: Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, Don McLean, Don Williams, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I guess my affinity for American country roots music comes from my parents, though somewhere along the way I became very interested in the blues and ragtime guitar. I've been into rag and gospel guitarists like Blind Arthur Blake, Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Willie Johnson for some time. As raw and poorly recorded as they were, Willie Johnson's recordings are still some of the most transcendental things I've ever heard. Of course, I listened to a lot of rock guitarists - Jorma Kaukonen, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter - but most of them were rooted in the older styles, too. Despite being from New Jersey, I'm not very heavily influenced by Bruce Springsteen, though he's a great performer and he's done more to put New Jersey on the map than anyone since Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb in Menlo Park.
You've been in many bands. Tell me what one of your funniest gigs was.
When I lived in New Mexico I played with an acoustic blues and ragtime group called Skunk Cabbage. Our regular gig was every other Friday at a cool saloon in Santa Fe called the Cowgirl Hall of Fame (great chile relleños). They had a separate room in the back that they rented out for special events, but it did not have a bar, so anyone attending a special event in there had to walk pretty much right in front of the band to get to the bar and back. One night the local lesbian newspaper held their annual fundraising dance in the back room. Our set list consisted of mostly old blues tunes - you know, "my woman left me, my woman mistreated me, I'm gonna shoot my woman down" tunes like Robert Johnson's "Cross and Evil Woman Blues." It wasn't really going over very well, as you can perhaps imagine. People were bumping the microphones right into our faces, stepping all over our equipment. The manager signaled for us to just pack up and go, which we did. She told us later that six women got into a big fistfight right on the stage a few minutes after we left. Good timing.
What's your favorite thing about the road? Your least favorite thing?
Are you kidding? I travel all over the country with a bunch of folks I'm lucky enough to call my friends and I get to play guitar for a living. Who's happier than I am? I love this - the travel, seeing friends and family all over the country, making music, meeting other musicians. I love the Mongolian Barbecue in Seattle; the calamari at the House of Blues in Cambridge; the pale ale at the Rock Bottom Brewery in Bellevue, Washington; the wheat berry salad at The Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; the lobster at Lobster in the Rough in York Beach, Maine; the free t-shirts and coffee mugs we get at clubs and radio stations everywhere. I don't always love being in the van for hours and hours on the long cross-country trips and hauling the amplifiers, guitars and drums up and down staircases. My back often hurts, my ears ring after shows and sometimes we don't get enough sleep, but it's a part of the job I can live with because all in all, it's a great thing and I feel lucky.
Name your favorite thing about each band member in the STB.
Sally Taylor: Her shoe collection. I mean it takes up waaaaay too much room in the van and I don't like having to live around it, but it is a collection even Imelda Marcos would envy and just the fact that something like that could exist in nature in its current form is really phenomenal. A miracle of modern foot science of immense proportions, really.
Kenny Castro: His impersonation of Rev. Jesse Jackson, though I haven't see it lately. Extremely accurate and very funny!
Chris Delucchi: He will always be a KID. He can spend all day buying old LP's (yes, actual vinyl) reading comic books and watching cartoons and be as happy as can be. He's so cute and innocent it makes you want to just pinch him.
Kyle Commerford: His skill and finesse at the controls of a video game of pinball machine is truly remarkable. If he were only deaf, dumb and blind we could compose some sort of rock opera about him or something.
What in your opinion, is the hardest thing about being a touring musician? What makes it worth it to you?
I sometimes feel a little disconnected from things. We are away from home 7 or 8 months of the year, so even home feels foreign for a while when we get there. I don't keep up with the news much and, except for the five of us in the band, I don't see the same people every day. Sometimes I wake up and I can't remember where we are or where we need to be later on that day. Living on the road disrupts any sense of a regular schedule you might like to have in your life. However, I pretty much live for a few cool chord changes - the nice tension and release of a suspended chord resolving itself to a major 7th or a half diminished lick that fits nicely over a minor key 2-5 change. Seriously, few things do it for me like some big fat chord voicings. It makes it all worthwhile to be able to do that and have people respond to what we play and say that they enjoyed the music. I'd do it for myself at home if I had to, but it's a blessing to be able to share it with other people and have it work.
You went to school at Smith College and people have questioned whether or not you are in fact a lesbian. Can you comment on that?
Here's the truth. In 1989 I was living in Northampton, Massachusetts, working as an elementary school teacher and I wanted to pursue a Masters degree in education. I liked Northampton and didn't really want to move, so I applied to the graduate program at Smith. The education program there is very good, I already lived in town, and they accepted me. At the undergraduate level Smith is indeed still an all women's college, but the graduate program is coed. Yes, Smith and Northampton in general have been widely publicized as being full of lesbians, but I went there for my Masters in Elementary Education, not because I am, or have ever been, a lesbian. I mean, I'm a male member of my species anyway. Geez.
Compare being a 5th grade teacher to being a touring musician.
In some ways they are similar. You are sort of in front of an audience in both fields, trying to connect with people. I did use music a lot in the classroom, for example using the songs of a particular era to help teach that era's history. I guess you could compare preparing lessons to making set lists and practicing scales, but that might be a stretch. In most ways they are pretty different. I do miss teaching and sometimes the idea of a regular schedule still appeals to me. I do still teach here and there; I have some guitar students whom I work with when we are not on the road and I really enjoy it. The main difference is that there is much less daily paperwork for me playing in the band, much less drinking on the job while I was teaching in the classroom.
What was it like making Apt. #6s?
It was a lot of work, and we all bit our nails to stay on schedule and get the right sounds at times, but it was great experience and there were certainly some memorable moments. The days we worked on guitar overdubs were tons of fun for me - like ten amplifiers and dozens of guitars all set up at the same time. It was a veritable smorgasbord of tone! There was one day we couldn't get exactly the right bass tone from Kenny's amp in the room, so we put it outside in the driveway and let it roar. The sounds rumbled all through the canyon. It disturbed the neighbors, but it sounds terrific on the record. Getting to work with the guests who played on the record - Maceo Parker and Abdoul Doumbia - was incredible. I mean, Maceo Parker played saxophone on a tune I helped write. What a treat.
Do you have any advice for kids who want to be musicians?
I think one really important thing to learn is the history of the music you love, whether it's classical, jazz, hip hop or punk. All music comes from a deep foundation, a set of roots, and knowing those roots gives you a wealth of knowledge to draw on and to help inspire you. Sure, you can move to Chicago and be the fanciest, flashiest, loudest and best-dressed player on the blues session, but if you haven't listened to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Muddy Waters you'll never get the feel and the soul of what it all about. The same with the roots of country - it's fine to be hip to Hank Williams, but HIS influences, like Jimmie Rogers and the Carter Family are essential listening if you want to understand even the first thing about country music. It all comes from something, and I believe it's in any aspiring musician's best interests to learn the history. Dedication and persistence are critical too. We all have heard stories about the geniuses of generations before - that Beethoven continued compose even after he had gone deaf, that Woody Guthrie became even more prolific in his songwriting even as Huntington's chorea ate away at his body, that Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn could play at all, let alone the way they did, under the influence of all those drugs and alcohol. But let's face it, only one in a million of us is a genius of that order. For the rest of us, it takes work. I still sit at home and practice scales, and I spent a lot of time growing up learning music theory and studying chord changes. I've been playing for twenty years and I only now feel like I'm getting the hang of it all. Lots more to learn. Lots more.
What are some things that people don't know about you that you think they probably shouldn't know….but what the hell?
My favorite color is green. I like to memorize the scientific names of birds. My favorite names are the ones where the species name and the genus name are the same, like the black-billed magpie, which is Pica pica. I have a tiny scar under my right nostril left over from a really bad bicycling accident I had when I was three. I never played professional baseball, but I used to play in a competitive amateur league. I'm chronically organized and on time. Bad grammar, misspellings and the misuse of the English language irritate me. I believe that music is truly spiritual and can take you to a higher place, though I'm not sure that I believe in the reincarnation of the spirit. Not yet anyway. I've never cheated on a girlfriend (except for once in high school, but I had found out that she was cheating first). I have a little red blotchy birthmark, like Gorbachev but on the back of my neck, and I only discovered it a few months ago when I shaved my head.
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