Yeah, I listened to it, and more than once. I'm glad I did - it gave me a better idea of where to go with this. You can tell how the interviewer asked what he thought was a cute and innocent question about Emitt's early band, then all THAT shit comes out. "Boy, did I just step in it!"
He goes into that a bit more in
this interview, with an update on what happened to the poor guy 40+ years later. Not a happy tale. When the article appeared in their magazine, there were several photos from Emitt's scrapbook which have been collected
here.
The sense I get that he enjoys talking, but not so much about the fanboy minutiae of his career and things he barely remembers from forty years ago. So we have a few things to ask about, but basically we're taking him out for an early birthday dinner and letting things flow where they may.
One thing I want to ask him is if he has any memories of the
Fantasy Fair And Magic Mountain Music Festival, which was held a week before the Monterey Pop Festival. It was a pretty star-studded event, but unlike Monterey, there were no film crews. This is the concert that Ry Cooder mentions in the Beefheart documentary when he played his last gig with The Magic Band. I don't expect him to recall it in great detail, but it seems worth bringing up, seeing as the whole event just seems to have been lost to history. Did any of the bands even get audio recordings of their sets?
When I spoke with him on the phone to arrange this, he seemed to be in pretty good spirits, much better than that WFMU interview and CityBeat article I linked further up the page. Finally getting paid for his work probably has something to do with it (as well it should). I've done a few of these over the years, although not in a long while, and I think that what's more important is what you
don't ask. Once they know you're not going to put them on the spot, they relax and open up, answering all the cool questions you didn't even think to ask.
Oh, and this is for the new site bobzilla is doing,
http://www.thelosangelesbeat.com . Bob's friend is the official interviewer, I'm just tagging along to add my joy de veever and jenny say quah.