John Beaudin - Hi John, it's always refreshing connecting with you since you don't seem to take yourself too seriously. With the music you do but you always seem to have that devilish grin on your face!

John Doheny - Well, you got to laugh to keep from crying in this world don't you think? I've always found that audiences are more accepting of what I'm doing if I can get a chuckle out of them. When you think of a guy like Dizzy Gillespie, who always struck me as a guy who never went too long between gigs and his policy always seemed to be that serious music should not preclude smiles and fun. Now if I could just have Dizzy's chops too…

John B. - (laughing) I hear ya! Where did the nick name 'Pip' come from?

John D. - My father was reading Charles Dickens 'Great Expectations' when I was born and named me after the novel's protagonist. My full name is actually John Steven Pip Doheny. I'll show you my drivers license if you like.

John B. - Are you watching American Idol?

John D. - No. I tried to but it was just too weird and dysfunctional. The contestants all seem so desperate for fame and attention and it seems to me that if you want a life in music you should be in it for the music's sake because the chances of achieving celebrity status are slim and none and slims out of town. If you love to do music then success is measured in whether you get to play not whether you get famous doing it. Obsession with fame just seems to me to be a recipe for unhappiness. That English guy, Simon what's his name, strikes me as mean spirited. I know people think he's edgy and funny and everything but he comes across to me as just nasty. You know when I was a kid I couldn't watch 'Ted Mack's Amateur Hour' for the same reasons. It was just too painful, I'm such a wuss.

John B. - You helped me and the CHUM team out applying for a Smooth Jazz application a few years ago. What did you think of the process of applying for a radio station?

John D. - It was fun hanging out with you guys and some of the CHUM guys have been in the business since the early pre Can-Con days of the Canadian music industry. So, I got to hear some great stories but I was, however, quite disappointed in the Vancouver jazz community's failure to get behind the bid. As I said at the time this is commercial radio we're talking about here so a 24 hour all Miles Davis format is probably not going to happen. But the term 'Smooth Jazz' is such a dirty word to some of these folks and they forget that the format includes artists like Stanley Turrentine and George Benson. I for one would be pretty happy to turn on my car radio and hear Stanley playing 'Sugar.'
The other thing it really drove home to me was how utterly youth oriented popular culture has become in the last 30 years or so. When I was a kid the world was pretty much run for the benefit of adults with the occasional crumb thrown our way like the Buffalo Springfield getting to play on Ed Sullivan between Vic Damone and Topo Gigio. Now the entire enterprise is directed at adolescents with pretty much nothing left over for actual grown ups. This isn't the kid's fault all the marketing types that engineer this stuff are baby boomers. But the tragedy of it is that these underground youth cultures like Grunge and Hip-Hop never have a chance to mature before they're co-opted by the main stream. Jazz was an underground music for twenty years before it started percolating up to white folks in the 1920's. All the great literature and poetry that the beat movement produced was developed in the late 1940's away from the public eye. It wasn't until the 1950's that 'beatnik' characters like Maynard G. Krebs started showing up on TV. But by the time you get to punk rock and the grunge movement in Seattle, man it only took about 18 months for there to be models on the catwalks in Paris wearing Kurt Cobain's clothes from the year before. So we'll never really know what great works of art these scenes could have produced because they never had a chance to develop and mature. Everything now gets re-commoditized and sold back to us practically overnight.

John B. - So was the Clarinet just not popular with the babes growing up? Is that why you switched to the Sax? Of course I know you're also pretty handy with the Clarinet now(laughing).

John D. - You have uncanny insight into my character, Sir. The 'gloom tube' as it is sometimes known is definitely not a babe magnet, not in my social set anyway. Plus, when you get into your teenage years that's the time in your life when you're inclined to want to do stuff that annoys your parents and since my mother had ambitions for me to play Clarinet in an orchestra, playing Rhythm and Blues on the Saxophone for strippers was a pretty effective way of pissing her off. But that kind of motivation will only get you so far and there are much easier ways to be a teenaged miscreant than spending a few thousand hours in the practice room. I could have just gotten a tattoo or something. So, ultimately playing the instrument became its own source of pleasure and a sense of accomplishment. The funny thing is that since I started playing Clarinet seriously again about 10 years ago, I've found there's a fair bit of demand for it. It's really easy to turn the old 'Cane of Pain' into money.

John B. - Well, at 19 you were backing up strippers and my job at 19 was in a warehouse, so you got me beat by a zillion times!

John D. - It certainly wasn't an unpleasant environment to work in. But believe it or not you get kind of inured to it after a while. I mean I was young and single and I certainly took advantage of whatever opportunities presented themselves but I also learned that for me anyway context is important. Being alone with a beautiful, undressed woman is one thing, it's quite another matter being with one in a room full of drunks and you've got a Saxophone in your hand and you're playing 'Love Potion Number Nine.' Not my idea of an 'erotic' moment and I'd have all these naked women gyrating literally right under my nose night after night and it didn't do a thing for me. Then one night I got to work a little early and ran into one of the dancers, Jenny 'Miss Motion' Dixon out on the street dressed in her 'civvies,' jeans and a t-shirt. It was like, Wow! What a babe! Seeing her fully clothed was much sexier than seeing her naked night after night.
But I'll say this for the strip clubs in that they taught me what it means to be a professional musician. Six 45 minutes sets, three dancers a set, three tunes per dancer and six nights a week whether you feel like it or not really grinding it out. We had quite a bit of latitude in what we played and most of the time the dancers would just say, "Give me a slow one, a funky one, and a Latin one." They usually didn't mind if you took that to mean Ellington's, 'Things Ain't What They Used To Be,' The Meter's, 'Cissy Strut' and Horace Silver's, 'Song For My Father.' I really learned how to play in those places but unfortunately those kinds of opportunities aren't generally available to young players now. They tend to mostly learn in an academic environment.

John B. - Tell me about your years with Albert Collins?

John D. - Yeah! Well, Albert was about as far away as you can get from academia that's for sure. In 1977, I was enrolled in the Jazz and Commercial Music program at Vancouver Community College. I'd gotten tired of playing strip joints and felt like I needed to tighten up the technical side of my playing. I met all kinds of great musicians at VCC and many of whom I still work with. Folks like Colleen Savage, Alan Matheson and Don Powrie who plays with 'Skywalk' now. I was also picking up a few bucks in the evenings playing in a crappy little group called the 'Thunderbird Blues Band.' They had some kind of set up with an agency, I think it was Sam Feldman, where Blues guys would come to town as singles and they would be the accompanying band. So, Albert was coming to town to play a couple of clubs and Thunderbird was going to back him up and they called me and another Tenor player named Dave Woodward, who was with 'Powder Blues' at that time to come down and be a horn section for these gigs. Now you have to understand that the guys in Thunderbird were the worst kind of inflexible blues purists. For example, if Little Walter was drunk the day of the recording session and played a wrong note then by God Thunderbird played it that way too because that's the way it is on the record, man! The bandleader was a kind of wanna-be pimp type guitar player named Bobby Godwin. He knew about three licks on the guitar and very into the image and lifestyle of the 'bluesman' rather than actually learning how to play. He Liked to slap his stripper girlfriends around and take their money and Albert who was not at all like that walked right into the middle of all this. The first week was at a club called the Body Shop and Albert walks in and says, "Okay fellas, now I know you're all young, hip guys who like to play jazz and funk and shit and we gonna play some a that stuff, don't you worry. But we gotta play all the old hits like 'Frosty' and 'Cold, Cold Feelin,' gotta play those songs to keep the customers happy. So y'all just bear with the old man here and maybe later on we can slip in some of your music too." You know there were a lot of different sides to Albert's musicianship that aren't generally known. He could play some passable jazz things like 'Autumn Leaves' and 'How High the Moon.' He loved Jimi Hendrix and liked to play things like 'Hey Joe' and 'VooDoo Child.' But Godwin's guys couldn't play any of that stuff, the simplest blues styles were all they could handle. Once Albert figured that out he just kind of settled in for what must have looked to him to be a very boring three weeks in Vancouver. Another thing Bobby Godwin was known for besides slapping his ho's around was occasionally getting funny with the money especially if there was a boat in from Bolivia, if you take my meaning. So the end of the week comes and instead of a paycheck we get a story. Dave Woodward had the good sense to cut his losses and quit right there but I was an idiot and hung in. Albert was getting his money directly from the agency and knew nothing of this. The next gig was two weeks at the Savoy in Gastown. At the end of the first week, still no money. At this point even I was starting to wise up so I went to Godwin and said, "Look, either bring me up to date on my wages tonight or I won't be back tomorrow." Godwin basically told me to piss off and I figured that was that and I packed up my horn and left. I felt kind of bad about taking off on Albert without saying goodbye, so I phoned him the next day at his hotel and explained a little bit to him about the money and Bobby Godwin's incredible shrinking band. His response to that was to offer me a gig with him and a local rhythm section at Louie's LaBamba Club in Portland Oregon. That turned into some other gigs in Eugene, and at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland California, then some dribs and drabs in the L.A. area. One gig just led to another. The thing about Albert was he didn't sound like anyone else. He was like B.B. King that way and you could identify his playing in about three notes. He had some unorthodox open tunings that he used and I'm not a guitar player so I couldn't really explain this stuff and he never used a pick just his thumb and forefinger. He told me that technique was called 'The Texas Pinch.' If you see somebody like Jimmy Vaughn play today occasionally he plays without a pick and he uses the same technique and gets a similar sound. Hanging with Albert you got a real education in Southern and Southwestern regional blues styles. He could always fill a dance floor and like all old school show biz types he really knew how to work a crowd. He had a 50 foot guitar chord wrapped up on a big wooden telephone line spool and he'd play his way up to the bar and knock back a drink. He'd play his way out to the street in front of the club and hook in customers. When he'd rip into a tune like 'Too Tired' or 'Honey Hush' that sound would shoot through the place like a laser beam and people would just go nuts. Black crowd or white it didn't matter. He was the genuine article and it was a privilege to work and learn from him.

John B. -Wow! What an experience! Tell me about working with Bobby Curtola? I hear he's quite a character!

John D. - Wow! From the Third Ward in Houston Texas to Southern Ontario goombah, that's quite a jump. Saying Bobby Curtola is a character is like saying Heinz makes a bottle or two of Ketchup. Mr. Curtola is several sizes larger than life and very Italian, every tour stop had a little clan of 'Pisanos' who would come out to see him. It was like touring with the Sopranos only without the violence. That was a package tour actually, with Les Vogt's company, 'Jaguar Productions' around 1988. The other acts on the bill were the Coasters, the Platters and Buddy Knox of 'Party Doll' fame. Curtola walked into the rehearsal and said, "You guys can forget about sleeping on this tour." He knew people in every town on the tour, 'Fuhgeddaboudit!'

John B. - Speaking of Characters you also worked with Doug and The Slugs. Doug Bennett has an interesting sense of humor!

John D. - Bizarre would probably be closer to the truth. I played on an early version of the Slugs, the band that recorded 'Cognac and Bologna' was actually Slugs Mach 3. Doug's guitar player, John Burton and I had played in a strip joint band called 'J.B. and the Unusuals' and later in another band called 'Burning Ground' that worked for the Bruce Allen-Sam Feldman agency in the early 70's. Around the time of their second album, 'Wrap It!' Doug came up with the idea of appearing in disguise as their own opening act. There were a number of these little pranks like a Desi Arnaz shtick called 'Ricky and the Retardos' and I think if memory serves, a Kiss parody called 'Piss.' But the one I was involved in was Doug's version of a fictional broken down old Stax-Volt-Motown soul singer named Otis Spam and his band the 'Soul Crusaders.' Mark Hasselbach and Gordie Bertram from Powder Blues and myself were the horn section known as the 'Revoltone Horns' and Jane Mortifee, June Katz and Bing Jenson were the BG singers. They had some kind of dumb name too but I can't for the life of me remember what it was and the Slugs were the rhythm section. The thing is, it was a put-on but musically it really cooked. We did tunes like Wilson Pickett's '634-5789' and some Sam and Dave stuff and Dan Penn's 'Outta Left Field.' Simon Kendall can really play that stuff on Hammond B3 Organ just listen to his soundtrack stuff these days on 'DaVinci's Inquest.' In fact, all the guys in Doug's band, Rick Baker, Wally Watson and all those guys had played in R&B bands for years before they were in the Slugs so it was really kickin'. It's funny, I just talked to Simon Kendall yesterday and he told me he'd recently given Gordie Bertram a copy of his CD 'Jalsomo' that's reviewed here on your site. It's got a tune on it called 'Bertram's Blues' that's all about when they were in a Company of Young Canadians funded traveling circus back in 1970. It made me realize how far back I go with some of these guys and what a tightly knit community the Vancouver music scene is. Sometimes it really does seem like everybody knows each other.

John B. - You went back to school in 1991 after a lot of road work. Was it hard getting back to that kind of learning? You really did well earning your Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Education degrees.

John D. - If I had my life to live over again I would definitely go to University first then go on the road. I'm glad I went back to school and it was an amazing experience. I learned a great deal and it's made me a much better musician and a broader, better educated person. A place like UBC is not set up for old kacks like me. The experience occasionally got very awkward and there were a number of occasions where I was shocked at how much the younger students took the experience for granted. They didn't give a damn, they lived with their parents who were paying the shot and this was just some nonsense they were enduring on their way to fame and fortune with the New York Philharmonic. Not everybody was like that by any means but there were enough people in that bag to occasionally make the experience a little trying. I recently ran into one of these Prima Donnas who is now a clerk at Future Shop and it restored a certain sense of order to my universe. Of course there's also a whole whack of people from UBC whom I still make music with, people like Bruce Neilsen, Mark Follett, Eartha Anne Hanson and Tony Foster. All are great musicians that I'm proud to know.

John B. - I loved Dindi on the album, nice take. Tell me about it?

John D. - We were in the middle of recording our debut CD, 'One Up,Two Back' at Quantum Studios during the day and at night Stan Taylor and I had a gig at the Pan Pacific Hotel with Colleen Savage along with Paul Rushka on Bass and Roy Sluyter on Piano. Colleen and I were talking between a set and suddenly realized that we had met for the first time 25 years ago that month as students at VCC. I had the bright idea that we could commemorate this event by having Colleen come down to the studio and sing on a couple of things and she also thought this would be a swell deal. We recorded 'Time After Time' because Colleen had a fun arrangement of it in her book and 'Dindi' because I liked it. We didn't really know what we were going to do with that tune we just sort of put it together in the studio. You know I was just telling my wife recently that when you look into another musician's face onstage that's a really unguarded moment. All of the person's focus is on channeling the music and all the social and emotional masks fall away. When I think about working that gig with Colleen I remember so many times looking into her face on stage and in the studio while we were playing and it was like we were both in the middle of a kind of luminosity, some really amazing moments.

John B. - I liked 'Killer Chalmations' it really stands out. Tell me about that one?

John D. - It's just a fun little tune in the Bossa Nova style. I basically wrote it as a blowing thing so all the folks in the band could stretch out a bit. The 'Chalmations' in the title are citizens of Chalmette Louisiana, which is a suburb of New Orleans. It has the same relationship to New Orleans as Surrey does to Vancouver, a lot of rusty old cars and broken household appliances out in people's yards. New Orleanians can be a bit snobbish about Chalmations but they're good people just a little unpolished. I recently received an e-mail from Mike 'Mr. Jazz' Gourierre at WWOZ in New Orleans telling me that he's been playing that track on his Monday afternoon 'Jazz from Armstrong Park' show. We're delighted of course but when I told that to my friend Dan Fuselier he said, "Doheny, you ain't never gonna be able to show your Yankee face in da Parish again." He's kidding, I hope.

John B. - As a school teacher now, how do you find the kids? How are they different from when you went to school?

John D. - I'm tempted to say that they're much more of a pain in the neck than when we were kids but I'm starting to think that may be just a matter of perspective since I'm now in charge of the asylum. Also, I'm a sub which makes me kind of fair game. It's like bear baiting to them, like they've got this adult chained to a stump and they can poke at it with impunity. I'm kind of phasing out that gig now and last fall I got a job teaching Concert Band and English Composition 3 days a week at Mount Royal College out in Richmond. So, I'm not working much in the high school system and I find I enjoy teaching at the post secondary level much, much more.

John B. - You also write about music, tell me about some of the things you've written about?

John D. - I wrote a thing on the relationship of Jazz to current popular culture that ran in the Westender last year. It started out as an e-mail to a friend and just got bigger and bigger until it turned into an article. In 1999, I did a big feature on the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival for 'Planet Jazz' magazine that was a lot of fun. My friend Randy Cole took the pictures and my wife Darlene and I went down for 10 days and hung out and interviewed a bunch of people like Charles Neville, Ellis Marsalis and Alvin Batiste who's professor of Jazz Studies at Southern University and a great Clarinet player who's worked with folks like Cannonball Adderly and Ornette Coleman. All the Marsalis kids were students of his and I've been trying to get a Canada Council 'B'Grant to study with him but so far no luck. Darlene and I try to spend time in New Orleans every year and we really love it there. We spent Christmas of 2001 there and you know I've been thinking about pursuing a masters degree and Darlene said, "If you could go anywhere in the world to do this, where would it be?" and I said," I'd do a masters in Jazz History here at Tulane University in New Orleans." She talked me into applying and I didn't think anything would come of it and in any case there was no way we could afford the $27,000 a year in tuition anyway. Then a few months later here comes a letter in the mail offering me a scholarship and a fee waiver. So it looks like I'll be spending winters in New Orleans for the next couple of years but I'll be back in Vancouver in the summertime to play the local festivals with my quintet and to maintain my presence on the scene here.

John B. - John, it's been a pleasure re-connecting with you.

John D. - Thanks John. It was good to talk to you again too.

April 2003