guitarist, recorded March 1995
RHL : What led you to take up the guitar?
SRM: It was one of the instruments we had when I was very
young. I always had one. Though we never had it long because one of my brothers would step on it
and break it. It was something I wanted to play. And when I became a 14 I
got serious about it.
RHL : What was the music you learned then?
SRM : "House Of the Rising Sun" was the first song I learned. It was what my guitar teacher taught me. After that, I got involved with the music of the day. Jimi Hendrix, that kind of thing. Bob Seger. Back then the rock and roll was generated more by some of the older stuff. But I gave up guitar after a while, and just started singing. Everyone in Texas plays guitar, few of them sing, and somebody had to sing, so that's what I started doing. I did that for about two years, then went back to playing guitar. By this time I was back in the church, and they told me if I played that kind of music I was going to hell, so I kinda had to refrain from playing the wilder stuff, I started playing bluegrass, which was good but also acceptable. As long as you didn't sing about drinking. But I really was just into the blues side of rock. I'd get into trouble 'cause we'd be playing bluegrass and I'd start playing the honky-tonk sort of stuff, which I loved. My dad was into the country music, and it was more honky-tonk back then, and that's what I would just naturally play. I didn't know any blues players back then, outside of, say, Hendrix and the popular artists of the day. Even Led Zeppelin was based in blues licks and stuff, but I didn't get into that stuff much. But I was playing bluesy stuff with a country band, and so I went off into country music like Willie Nelson [[Ed.: what Texan didn't??]], who was a more blues-based country. And I kept getting bluesier. And after hearing the blues in the movie "Brubaker", I looked for even bluesier stuff. Then I fell in love with [the music of] Lightning Hopkins, who was a country-styled blues, out of Texas. It was him with an acoustic guitar and I studied him, and I would listen to him all day, and just pick his stuff. By this time I had kinda left the church, you know, because I couldn't deal with the idea that I was going to hell if I just played music. I couldn't deal with not playing music anymore, so I chose to play music and not go to church.
I went off to college [Texas A and M] to study civil engineering,
because I knew that as a musician I'd probably be broke, so I'd better have something to
fall back on. It's what my mom begged me to do, anyhow. As I was in college I
kept getting into more blues. Stevie Ray Vaughan came around, and he was the
culmination of all the artists that I loved. I was breaking into my twenties,
and when you listen to all those blues guys and they each would have
their own thing : Lightning had his own thing, Freddie King, Albert King,
T Bone Walker, all had their own thing. It was like Stevie went and put their
things all on one album. So me and my brother [[Bobby, a bass player]] would
listen to a lot of Stevie, and a lot of Fabulous Thunderbirds. We were into a
lot of the older guys, too. It was one of those things where, the first time I
hit a blue note, I knew that this was what I'd love to do. I didn't know much
about playing guitar, but I knew how to hit one note, bend it up and down and
make people smile, and so I was going to go with it. That's as easy as it was.
My brother was two years behind me, but then he came up to the college
with me, and we lived together. I think we spent more time in the garage of
that house
-- we turned the garage into a studio, and we'd go in there and just play,
and play. And do a little homework. And play. And go out [places] and play.
We loved it together, and we wrote together, and we came to California
together. And it was a blessing, too, to get out of the situation we were in,
because in Texas, your social circles were very heavy into alcohol, a very
destructive type of lifestyle, and the music just runs hand-in-hand with that.
It wasn't until we got to California that we put that kind of crap behind us
and really got serious about playing music. It's hard to get good at this when
you're drunk all the time.
So he came out to California with me, and we started this group called
the Black Sedans, which was a Texas blues band. This was in '84. And we played
the club scenes out in LA for three and a half years. Because they'd never
heard Texas blues out here, we were the newest thing. It sounds ridiculous,
but noone here had heard the Fabulous Thunderbirds or Stevie Ray Vaughan.
The first shows we played, it was like every record executive in town [was
there] : Capitol, Warner Brothers. We were naive. We just wanted somebody to
shake their butt in a bar. We just wanted to see somebody dance. We knew this
music was fun, and we just wanted to play it for that, not to get signed to
any record deal. And when these record companies came around, I had to say
to them that none of the songs we were playing were ours. They belong to Slim
Harpo and Freddie King and the Fabulous Thunderbirds; it turned them off, and
it showed their ignorance of the type of music, it was embarassing. It was
embarassing on our part, too. It was about then that we started to try to
write. And they were saying, 'you gotta get more pop, less blues', and it
kinda took the soul out of it for us. So we disbanded [the Sedans], and me
and my brother started another group, which played for a while.
RHL : How did you get back into the faith?
SRM : I was raised in the church by my grandma. I remember
being saved at a very young age, I remember how real it was to me. They [in
the congregation]
didn't really believe I could be at such a young age, and I heard them explain
how they had 'allowed' me to be saved, as if they had something to do with it.
By the time I had gone into junior high, and we were doing the music thing,
we started smoking pot. [In my own head,] I didn't have any problem with coming
home stoned and reading the Bible, I didn't know that that was wrong, you know,
though there was something inside of me that said so. My mom had been divorced
and she remarried, so we were away from my grandma, and we didn't go to church
much anymore. When I was 15 I got back into the church, because this girl I
started dating, I couldn't date her unless I was going to church, and that
was fine with me, I was glad to go back. We were Southern Baptist, and we
learned a lot of good stuff about the faith and the Word of God, but there was
down in that Bible belt a lot of religion that inhibits someone's personality
and their walk with God. There was no talk of grace, little evidence of it.
So when I 'fell from grace', meaning that I went and danced with a
girl, I thought it would be okay 'cause she was Southern Baptist too, but it wasn't
good enough. I was feeling too guilty to deal with it. And then I had a
beer, and that really crushed the cake, 'cause I was [[for a brief while]]
going to be a pastor and going to Bible school. I fell away hard.
That was in 1980. So, from then on, my life style was getting worse, with a
lot more drinking, trying to cover up God's call on my life. I never entirely
forgot the Lord, and He kept calling me back, but I kept wanting to clean up
my life to do it -- again, I didn't understand the grace.
It was in 1991, and Chris Lizotte called and asked me if I could play
guitar with him. [Lizotte] had just done an album for New Breed [the Vineyard's record
label], and he was about to go on the road with it. I told him, 'send me your CD
and I'll see if I enjoy it'. He sent it, and it was more folky than blues or
anything, and I kinda declined because that just wasn't my style. Shawn
Tubbs played on the record, and if you know Tubbs' playing with the Violet Burning,
well, we just didn't have similar styles. And [Lizotte] said, no, I just want
you to come play blues with me, and play your stuff with what I've got going.
So for six months or so, I'd go play with him, and that was mostly in church, but
I'd never stay for the church services. For I knew God, and I didn't need
to be in the church to know God. (I'm sure you've heard that line before...)
I didn't realize then that the Church was a blessing in my life, it wasn't a
curse. Yet in the midst of all that, I kept wanting to get closer to God.
For a while, when I was younger, I had really walked with the Lord, I had seen
prayer answered, and had brought people to the Lord. So I knew what it
was like to walk with the Lord. I knew it was an all-or-nothing type thing,
so it wasn't easy to come back, 'cause I knew there'd have to be some changes to
my life. So i struggled with that for seven months. And then I said, 'Lord, I
want you to have control of my life'. And I was dating a girl at the time, and
I just kinda flippantly said, 'if you want to take her out of my life, just go
ahead, take her out of my life'. And it was as if he said right then, 'when
she comes back from Tennessee, she'll tell you it's over'. And she came back
a week later, and told me it was over. But that was the start of a decline, for
I went into a self-pity spiral for about three months. I was about to turn
thirty, and that was the point in my life when I was supposed to be a
millionaire, wasn't it?
[His grandmother died, and he went back to Texas to the funeral.]
......and I was about to head out to the airplane, and I was leaving a friend's
apartment complex, they had a doorman actually, and he was an old black gentleman
named George, and I'd known George for a while, and he reached out and grabbed me
by the arm as I was going out to go to the airport, and he gave me his testimony
in Christ, for an hour and a half. And I started out thinking, 'I'm going to
miss the plane, and this guy's going to talk to me about Jesus?!' It got me
to thinking. I don't know what was with that guy, but he just flat gave me
his testimony. And when I got onto a plane, I knew something was going on.
And so I got back and saw my grandmother buried, and my cousin said, 'let's me
and you go out'. We used to go out, have some beers, more than *some*, a
lot of beers, and I thought, 'I don't want to get drunk with him this time,
I don't want to live this way anymore'. But we went out to the bars, and he
was buying shots, and I was passing them over to his other drunk friends
who didn't even know they'd done theirs. And I finally got rid of them, and
I went to a table at the bar, and --- you know, when the Holy Spirit's hitting
hard on you, you're kinda flustered, and then I was just sitting there, and
there was this girl on the little stage singing. And she was very beautiful, and
she came down from the stage and was trying to pick me up. Which I knew was
weird because this certainly didn't happen on a regular basis! I was wondering,
'why was this pretty girl doing this?' And it was at that time that God kinda
pulled back the curtain, and said, 'tonight, I'm calling you back, and Satan's
going to throw everything at you that he can, and you're gonna
have to make that decision. I got up, thanked the lady for her time, and left, and for the
next two days the Lord began to deal with me, and there were some very
supernatural things that happened over those next two days that I could
expand upon if you want it...
RHL : no.
SRM : That was just a time that the Lord called me to the
all-or-nothing. I had to get down on my knees and give everything up. And I realized then just
how much I was holding on to. That was in January of '92. And I came back to
LA knowing that I was going to live my life for Jesus and that I wanted to
be a minister of the Gospel, and that the music He gave me was a blessing.
He wanted it to be a blessing, but He wanted it to be a blessing that would come
through Him, not on my own understanding. And it's been three years now and
there's been a lot of tests and trials that have grown me up.
RHL : the church you're going to now is what?
SRM : Anaheim Vineyard. [The church of John Wimber.]
Since the album was recorded :