The Dillards

Well, now the excitement is tied down. What do we do? Well, let's start. I remember six to eight years ago, you fellows were playing the Ice House Pasadena and the Golden Bear and Hunting Beach in the Trubidor and those places and Mitch, you always tell a story. Remind the audience that's your hillbillies and came out to the big city to seek your fortune and that's true, is that right? That is very true, ma'am. You all hear each other and say them as early. Right. And you were playing back there? We played back there but we were closet performers. Very noisy closet. Saturday night or something. We actually never played professionally until we left but of course we did an awful lot of practicing to find out whether we were going to be able to do it or not. The first professional gig we did was at Washington University. We went up there and that's at St. Louis to

see if the home folks would buy it and sure enough they wouldn't. So we went to Oklahoma City. In a 55 Cadillac in a one wheel trailer with a turkey. No, it did turkey. Rodney's mother put that turkey in there. The turkey is with us for months. It went all the way to California because we forgot it. We were living in Hollywood. We were staying with somebody which started the story of our first there for years. We were always staying with somebody and I happened to go out the front door one time and there was this line of army ants going into our trailer. Some were coming out carrying little pieces of turkey over there. It had been in there about six months or something. You didn't actually ask about the turkey did he? I was trying to get back to Salem. That's how we started. Did you start playing there and then you? Yeah, well, we got to have in California. We made enough money in Oklahoma City to get to California. California was our, that was well, barely, but that was our aiming point. I mean, we were heading for California because we thought, boy, well, they accept us out there. Wow. We were, we set up voting machines.

I think it was in Oklahoma City before we could get it out. Yeah, we worked for manpower doing different things, stacking crackers or whatever. You could fix the voting machines of vote for whoever you want to. So anybody I saw that I liked the name. I just turned a little screw in there. Well, it's good. Where'd you start playing out there in California? The first place we ever worked in California was the ash grow, which is a little kind of a mungy club down in. It was a museum, Hollywood. Yeah. It was a living museum. It brought everybody in from Tennessee and all those people to preserve exactly as they were. Yeah, they dragged these old cold miners out of the hills and haven't come down here and holler those old songs and stuff and pay them about $2.98 a week, you know, to keep them humble, you know, they want to spoil them or anything. Yeah, it was dreadful. And then if you said more than two syllable words, you weren't ethnic. That's right. You could sing more than two syllable words, but you always try to mispronounce them as much as possible, like down by the crystal sea. They love that stuff. Yeah.

When you risking for him, spread to the woods Do you camp behind the mornin' and the mornin' just good? Do you leave us a traitor without your tellin' to? Share your mind for sure and the rest is part of the term Do you flee, separate the heart and do you leave? Trying to make it all right? Do you leave us a traitor without your tellin' to? Do you leave us a traitor without your tellin' to?

Share your mind for sure and the rest is part of the term Do you flee, separate the heart and do you leave? Trying to make it all right? Do you leave us a traitor without your tellin' to? We're a very hard group to keep down as far as... You know, we wanted to make some money. We could have a good time and sail them. But we were trying to make some money. And we pulled around and finally got a job on the Griffiths show which got us through for a year or two. Playing this family of established spear carriers on the... We didn't get to play a lot of music. All we did was drool and lean and conquer. And lurk. And look flatulent. And hold trip. Is everything okay in there, Dick? I was luck nervously controlled.

Just fell on there. Next question. You've had quite a few albums out and some of your latest albums you're playing more contemporary or recently written song like some reasonably even Eric Anderson's Close the Door. And I noticed last night you stuck pretty much with Bluegrass. Is that sort of your following pretty strictly Bluegrass enthusiasts? No, one of the reasons we did that because we didn't have our equipment for a week. And we haven't really done any of the other stuff. So we thought we'd wait a little while. Sure, warm it up. Yeah. We decided to go... We just finished playing in a club in Denver called the warehouse. And... What? The warehouse? Oh. In Denver, you know? Yeah. That place we worked last time. I did race or race. I did race or race. We decided we were going to go there without electric equipment and try that because in the first place it was one job sort of out in the middle of nowhere and we thought we would try not taking our equipment manager and our 15 tons of equipment this time to see how that would work and it didn't. So we had him come down here and meet us with all the equipment.

So we're playing with all the equipment at the club and after a couple of days we'll start doing some more of the new things. But still most people I've discovered no matter what we do they always think that we're heavily Bluegrass because it sort of leaks through your background. Are you snoring, Dillard? Well, shape up. You used to do that thing a while back for Rodney played the dummy. We did that for years and that helped keep us alive for the first few years because we were playing all Bluegrass then when we first started. And there were about 100 Bluegrass groups just in Southern California alone. And they're all dead and gone and disappeared and they have interchanged parts That was great for me and had all the middle-aged ladies and furs who never had kids. So I always wanted to take me home. And many of them did. That kind of comedy enabled us to survive for a number of years and we kept it up until we didn't need it anymore. And we're still basically of course a humor group but not that kind of comedy.

We cut that comedy when we did the tour without John. You did a tour without John? Oh, did 19 or 20 college? That's quite a switch in music between you guys and Elton John. It was great. It worked very well. Yeah, it was great. That's true. We've always liked to play for college audiences but that Elton John tour really proved to us that that's where we belong. We'd like to not putting down clubs of course because there are lots of fun. You can work out new material in them that you couldn't have a concert tour but we would like to eventually just do college concerts because we have such good luck and we've been so fortunate doing it. I Elton, he wanted us, he'd seen us at the troubadour one time a couple of years ago and he wanted to take a basic American group with him on this tour because it was all colleges. And he picked us to go with him, which was Lord what a surprise that was to ask because I didn't even know he'd ever seen us. There was the idea of well the two kinds of music melt, well the audiences who come to see Elton dig us and say,

and everything worked out beautifully. We did so well that we'd like to do that the rest of our lives, I guess, as far as the college concert, things concerned. Good people. Oh yeah, and their minds are so open. A lot of times in clubs people come and they want you to do everything you did ten years ago and they want you to do the same routines and the same, which is understandable. But the college kids really got their heads open, like they didn't put us down because they came to see Elton. They accepted what we did for what it was. Music Music Music

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