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Fred’s Album: Part Time Rebel

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Fred Mandel was another person that I stumbled upon during my months long deep dive into Freddie Mercury and Queen.

I learned about Fred when reading Queen Unseen: My Life With the Greatest Rock Band of the 20th Century by Peter “Ratty” Hince, a Queen roadie dedicated to Freddie Mercury. I’ve reached out to Mr. Hince for an interview but finding the time hasn’t happened yet.

Fred is a great guy and was an absolute pleasure to interview. When scheduling the interview he asked me if I had a preference of which of his mics he should use and whether be on video or not to ensure he had a good backdrop and high quality audio. If I’m being completely honest, I’m not very technical so I replied to him and said:

“The gear sounds good to me, I trust whichever mic you decide to use.”

On the day of the recording we had some technical difficulties with the first platform we were going to record on had to jump onto a zoom as a second option. The problem with Zoom is I’m on a free plan so we were capped to 40 minutes and had to leave the call and come back in for the second half of the interview.

Technical difficulties always fluster me and I can hear that fluster in my questions in the interview. Fred is great, we exchanged numbers after the interview and we’ll get him back on the show in a few months to tell some more stories — we barely touched on his time with Elton and didn’t even talk about how he played at Live Aid!

This interview taught me an important lesson for how to approach interviews in the future. The chronology is cool and an easy way to lay out an interview but we never end up having time for the whole story, and it feels very formulaic “okay, and then what happened next?” which is sort of what I did here. What I took away and wrote down when reflecting on this interview was instead of going in chronological order is to focus on lessons from my guest’s career and anchor the interview around those lessons and then let the guest use stories from their career as a way to reinforce those stories. Going from one story to the next is cool, but being able to have a deeper meaning tied to the story will make the interview more resonant. We’ll see how this goes in practice, it’s a theory I have now but one I formulated after interviewing Fred and will be my approach for my next chat with him.

One final fun fact, for the transcript, I linked out to every single reference and name Fred said throughout the interview. This more than tripled the time it took me to do the transcript and I don’t think I’ll be doing it for future episodes but if you’re looking for an education in rock and roll, just scroll through the transcript and click on the links, you’ll learn a ton!

TRANSCRIPT
Note: The transcript has been edited for clarity. Transcripts may contain a few typos. Any and all inaccuracies are the error of The Jacob Kelly Interview Series, and not Fred Mandel.

Where I want to start today, I want to go all the way back. I wanna go back to Estevan, Saskatchewan way back in the day. From my understanding you grew up there until you were 11. And while living there, your dad had a store, right? Mandel’s – it started as a grocery store, but ultimately became a clothing store.

That's correct. It was a general kind of store that specialized in clothing, and his dad had it and was there during the Depression. My grandfather used to help out farmers, there was a lot of problems during the Depression. So anyway, it turned into a basically clothing and shoe store.

He was also an amateur piano player, if I'm not mistaken, right?

Well, he was an amateur piano player at home, you know, but he had no professional experience and he just played for his own satisfaction, for his own fun. I used to sit and listen to him all the time, that was a lot of fun. That's how I think I picked up a lot of stuff.

And your parents had a pretty impressive record collection back in the day, right?

A lot of people in those days had a lot of, you know, like shows from Broadway. We had a lot of those kinds of records at home, and they had a fairly sophisticated record collection for being a small town in the middle of nowhere. And they had Oscar Peterson, Glenn Gould – my uncle was a violinist of the Toronto Symphony, and somehow there was a connection there from my mother, obviously. And they had classical and Broadway tunes and, you know, some kid records, which I really like, you know, Sparky's Magic Piano and a few other things.

And so you picked up piano from listening to your dad, the radio, on these records, right?

Yeah, mostly listening. I didn't know I was picking it up by ear, but that's what I was doing. I was getting what he was playing. He had taken piano lessons from a British guy who lived in Estevan and I didn't realize what I was listening to, but for some reason my dad was learning New Orleans stride piano. I didn't know that ‘till years later what he was playing. But I remember the songs he played and they were of New Orleans kind of barrelhouse blues kind of origin. So it was a strange source that I was picking up in this small little town – ten miles north of the border.

Did you ever go to any [Estevan] Bruins games growing up?

Yeah, I used to go all the time. Let's see, I might have something…

Fred reaches over to his desk and reveals a framed Estevan Bruins hockey puck.

No way. That's amazing.

Yeah, the Estevan Bruins.

That's awesome. So I grew up in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, which is about an hour and a bit from the U.S. border in Manitoba. I had to ask about the Bruins because there was a solid junior team in Portage where I grew up as well. So I was curious if you went to any Bruins games growing up. That's amazing [that] you had a puck right there.

As a matter of fact, this puck is kind of sentimental in the sense that my dad and I went to a Bruins game and we were sitting there and someone hit a slap shot off the ice and this puck went right between us and hit the seat behind. And so it was rolling around on the floor and I picked it up, but it just missed both of us and went right in between us. It would have hurt us I'm sure. You know, a slap shot from center ice would have hurt. I don't know how it got that direction, but anyway, I've got that Estevan Bruins puck to this day.

I love that. And jumping back to piano your first formal lesson was with Mitchell Parks, right?

No, I never had a lesson with Mitchell. Mitchell was a friend of my father's and Mitchell was a pianist for the CBC in Winnipeg and he used to have a show called “Hymn Sing”. He and my dad were friends, so he'd come and visit us and he'd show me little things on the piano. And the thing that he showed me specifically was a Boogie run when I was six years old. It was a complicated run, my hand wasn't even big enough to play that run. So by the time I was 12, I was able to play it and I met Mitch like 30 years later, 40 years later, and I played it for him, played some Boogie Woogie for him. I said, “this is what I remember from you, what you taught me when I was six”.

I'm curious, like what the process is for learning to play by ear. I'm very not musically inclined whatsoever. The idea of being able to just hear something and replicate it is so foreign to me. So how are you able to process sounds now and recreate them?

Well, that's a tough question because this happened before I was cognizant, – before I was an adult. The problem was I was playing by ear when I was four and my parents took me probably on the advice of my uncle, who was a classically trained musician to get a piano teacher in Estevan. I went to this lady, Mrs. McCall, and started with her. But I was already playing rock and roll a little bit by that point, so when she tried to teach me the “Happy Kangaroo”, it was not hip man – to quote the kids of the day. So I just started learning stuff by myself. She would teach me and I would memorize the lesson and come back and play it to her next week. She caught me [though] because I was looking up, reading the music, but she had changed the page – it was on the other side. But she was really cool because she said, “If you learn this piece, I'll let you play one of your own pieces”. So I would go to the recital, I would play one of her kiddy pieces, and then I'd play, you know, Rock Around the Clock or, you know, one of the Elvis tunes that I was hearing that day. So she was pretty good at leaving me – she knew I was progressing. She was pretty lenient with my learning. And then I just sort of continued to learn by ear and I continued to take piano lessons. I think I got maybe into grade six or grade eight because I continued in Toronto, but it was still minimal because I was already playing rock and roll by then, and I really wasn't interested in the lessons. I can play certain things from that, but I couldn't read music very well. I'm just not a great reader and [that] is a problem. I wish I had learned how to read properly. It probably would help me in a lot of ways.

Is their advantages to that though, because you learn almost by feeling the music and that gives you kind of an innate ability to create music? Is there any advantages at all like that?

Well, in the world that I functioned in, nobody was reading. You know, Elton [John] doesn't read. I mean, Queen, nobody there was reading. I was in original bands from the time I was 20–21 on. So I was playing their music and eventually I was playing parts that I contributed. I wasn't in a situation where I had to read. I did a couple of sessions where I just had chord charts and then I did my own chord charts later on, when I go to sessions where I make up the chord charts, but those are pretty loose, and they were just reliant on what I played myself. It wasn't, you know, nobody was handing me specific parts to play. I mean, guys like Steve Lukather and people like that who are A-Team kind of session players, they walk in and they read right off the sheet. That's a difficult thing to do. You have to have special talent. I am not a reader, I don't have that ability. But you know, I functioned in the rock and roll world for so long that it really didn't come up that much.

When creating your own original music, and now working on “Part Time Rebel”, is that just kind of jamming until you find something that sounds good or what's the process for creating music look like for you?

I mean, I write my own stuff and most of the stuff sort of lives in your head and comes through you when you're in the process of writing. I sit down sometimes, most of the time it starts with music and then I sit down and put lyrics to it. But I don't have a big career as a solo artist. I'm putting my first album out in the next few months, so that'll be kind of the test. But with everybody else that I worked on, my whole goal and my approach to what I did was to try and enhance whatever they were doing. So if I put a part on, I would hope that the part would hence the tune and you would miss it if it wasn't there. That's kind of my approach, I want to make things better if I add to the tune. I've been playing a lot of B3, I've done a lot of sessions out of the house here on organ or, you know, simulations, and I kind of ended up being a B3 player on a lot of stuff. I worked with a guy by the name of Dave Cobb out of Nashville, and he was in LA for a while and we did a lot of country stuff and a lot of rock stuff. And so I just try to enhance the tune and put in parts that are memorable or melodic and lift the tune. That's my goal.

And how do you determine whether something enhances a song? Do you have to play it once and when you hear it out loud, you know how it will impact the song? How can you tell?

It's kind of something you just go by your experience and intuition and hope that your guesses are correct. And usually with your experience, you know that things are going to work. With Oregon, I try to build pads and I stay out of the way a lot. I'm not trying to showcase myself. I'm just trying to make the song build and and climax towards the end. With Queen, I was doing a lot of synthesizer stuff. I basically was a rock and roll piano player and a rock and roll guitar player – that's what I was doing in Toronto. But I ended up as a synthesizer specialist because I needed that for immigration to come in [to the United States]. I ended up doing a lot of stuff on synthesizers and that became the in-between guy in a lot of ways because Elton didn't need a piano player, but he needed someone to play second keyboards, and so did Queen. Queen. had done a record called Hot Space and they needed someone to play synth bass on the tracks and on live. So I came in live and played the bass parts that they played on the record. It was a skill set that covered a lot of a lot of ground and I was sort of in between my actual specific aims.

People hear you talk about these big bands, whether it be Elton, Queen, Alice Cooper or Pink Floyd – you've worked with some of the greatest, but it didn't necessarily start that way, right? When you were in Toronto in your early days, from my understanding, you had to pay your dues, you know, playing six nights a week in different sketchy bars and stuff. Can you kind of tell me about that period of your career where you're still trying to kind of figure it out, still trying to make it.

I didn't really have a goal in mind, the music kind of led me, which it’s always done. I didn't sit down one day, write down on paper what I thought I would like to do. I was already playing in high school. We had an original band in high school with a friend of mine, Chris Hall, and we're still friends to this day. There was a few other  guys in that band. We just did a little bit of original material, but music was really everywhere in those days, it was really a vibrant scene. So my first real professional job was with Grant Smith. Grant was a singer in Toronto, and he'd had a band called Grant Smith & The Power, and they'd had a hit with Keep On Running, a Spencer Davis tune, which coincidentally, I ended up meeting Spencer years later and playing Keep On Running with him. It was a very strange coincidence. But so I went on the road with with Grant when I was 20. I had gone to York University and I was going to take law or something, I didn't know exactly. I was a musician, so I didn't know, you know? I went to York and they had a lottery [to select courses] and I was number 265 out of 300. There was nothing left for me to take that was interesting. There was a course on dissecting fetal pigs, there was a thing on sociology, and a couple other things. [Only] the scraps were left. [There] was a course that said”Jazz, Rock, Pop: An Investigation Into the Recording Techniques” and I thought I'll take that. I'll learn how the Beatles recorded, it'll be interesting. Turns out these guys were just into jazz, they didn't want to know anything about rock. I think, as a matter of fact, one of the teachers caught me playing Peaceful Easy Feeling in one of the portables on the piano and I hadn’t heard him come in. He said, “If I catch you playing that shit in here again, you're out”. So I wasn't in an encouraging, loving, nourishing environment. There was a guy named Robin Engelman who had a percussion course and he allowed me to come to his class. He said, “If you come to my class, I'll give you an A”. We sat on the floor and he was a spacey guy, we hit bells and listened to circular things and it was interesting. He was in a percussion group called Nexus. So between the jazz course, which I didn't get along with and the percussion course, I got a passing mark. Now, the funny thing about the jazz course is the guys that went with me and my buddies, Dave Tyson, who's a friend I've known for 50 some years, Eddie Schwartz, who wrote Hit Me With Your Best Shot, and my friend Laurie Sanders, who was the guitar player to all these guys, did stuff in rock and roll. I mean, you know, Dave went on to produce and write Black Velvet, and we kind of ended up in a different profession than our teachers would have hoped. So the jazz thing happened and I was kind of disillusioned as a result of that. I got this offer to go on the road with Grant and I thought, I'm going to try it. We were playing some pretty rough places, you know, bats chasing you down the hall. The first room I got into was like a curved old bed with just a sink beside the bed. No bathroom. You have to go down the hall for the bathroom. Beside my bed was a rope inside a brown paper bag. This is typical Canadian stuff, there was a rope with a bag and that was a fire escape… good luck.

So no five star establishments in the early days.

The nicest thing in that room wouldn't have been the ashtray in a five star establishment. But who cared because we were playing and it was really a good band. The guys in that band were all good players and it was a show band. I mean, we were all wearing suits and stuff and I didn't know anything about where we were going. I mean, Grant said we might go to Vegas and I thought “that'll be great, that'll be the highlight of my career”. I didn't have any idea where we were going. I was just some idiot playing music. That's all I cared about. But we did pay our dues.

Do you think paying your dues is important and do you think now musicians don't pay their dues enough in the process of trying to “make it”?

Well, it's a tough thing to say. I don't want to judge musicians coming up because they have all the technology that we didn't have. You know, if I wanted to see Jeff Beck, I had to go see Jeff Beck and unfortunately, he's gone now. But, I mean, if I want to see Jimmy Page or something, I had to go down to The Rockpile, which was a little club on Avenue Road, actually a fairly big club, but I saw all the best acts that were going through Toronto and Maple Leaf Gardens. That's where you have to go if you want to see somebody. And the only other way to learn was to listen to records and learn off of records. So paying your dues, I don't know, that kind of gives you a little bit of something when things get rough, anything's better than some of the gigs you play[ed]. So it's all going upwards. It's all moving upwards. I think it helps to develop some sort of character and get your playing together because you're playing six nights a week, you know, and a matinee on Saturday. You're playing a lot and that's good and you're playing under adverse situations so when you get down the line, the adverse situations start to disappear and it doesn't bother you as much. Even if you run into them, you've already experienced them. So you know how to deal with a lot of stuff. You know how to read people a little better because you got to know what's going on in those bars because you know, in a Canadian bar, the only thing it takes to start a fight is, “hey, what are you looking at?” and that's it. I don't know if that's still happening up there, but it was when we were younger and you kind of avoid that. You navigate your way through the personnel and you kind of find a way to make your way through those gigs. There's a lot of stories and it's pretty funny when you come to the end of that and start making some money and going on the road. But it was fun.

Are there any stories that stand out?

Well, there's some good and bad stories. I mean, there was a lot of things that happened. I mean, I was chased by a bat in one of our finer hotel establishments in Guelph, I think. I was running down the hall and I was banging on the doors saying, “let me in there's a bat chasing me!” Everybody just thought, “Oh Mandel's just joking around again:, and this thing is flying over me and diving at me and it was pretty scary. But they let me in the room and I haven't seen that bat since, I don't know where he is now. But there were a lot of things, I mean, not great things. You know, there were some guys who didn't do too well on the road and had breakdowns and other things happened to them. That was the negative part of things. But there were a lot of funny things. I mean, with Troiano, there were funny things that happened, but with Donnie, when I finally got into Donnie’s band, that's where the real learning part started as far as, you know, pushing myself – that band set me up for every band that I joined afterwards that I played with.

And that's Domenic Troiano, right?

Yeah.

Would you consider that to be like the “first break” of your career?

Well, no. I mean, I think everything was kind of upward motion once I went out with Grant. Grant really set it up for me. He was the first professional guy that I got on the road and that kind of got my name around a little bit. And then I ended up with Lighthouse on a tour for about a year. Did an East Coast tour, and I played with them for a while. Then after that I was with a band called Devotion for a short period of time [and] that's where Donnie saw me in the Mississauga-Oakville area, I think it was. Donnie came over to see us play. Donnie had been on The Guess Who and he'd taken over from Joe Walsh in the James Gang and had a couple of solo records. So when he came back, he had a lot of credibility as a solo artist, and he put his band together, [and it] was a very strong band, you had Dave Tyson on keyboards, myself, Keith Jones on bass, Jimmy Norman and Wayne St. John singing. So it was a very strong band of musicians who had already worked the circuit in Toronto for a while.

And then how do you go from there to Alice Cooper? What's the connection?

The connection is Dick Wagner and Canadian guys too, Prakash John and Whitey Glan, who had played with Donnie before in a band called Bush. Not the British band, but the Canadian band Bush. Bob Ezrin was producing Dick Wagner, who was Alice Cooper's lead guitar player and co-writer at the time, and leader of the band. He was a guitar player along with Steve Hunter, so we were doing Dick’s Solo album at Nimbus 9 in Toronto, and I was called in to do that through Donnie, and Prakash was playing bass, Whitey was playing drums, Dave Tyson was playing keyboards, and I was playing keyboards and we were recording Dick's record and we're playing some rock'n'roll stuff. At the end of the few days of recording, Dick said to me, “How would you like to join Alice's band? We need a keyboard player, Joey Chirowsky has left and we need a keyboard player and I'd be interested in having you do it”. I'd been with Donnie for a year or so. We'd done a record in New York and everything, and I didn't want to just take off. So I asked Donnie's permission and we talked about it and he said “you should do it”. So on May 10, ‘77, I got the offer, on the 20th, I left and that was it.

For our younger listeners, which will be a majority of the listeners of the show, where was Alice Cooper in his career on May 20th, 1977?

He was pretty high. I mean, he was doing really well. The first gig I played with Alice was 70,000 people in Anaheim Stadium. We did two warm up gigs. We did The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and then we did Stockton, Sacramento, and then we did the Anaheim Stadium, which is Angel Stadium, I guess. And The Tubes were opening. Alice was pretty huge. I mean, he was close to the peak of his career at that point. He's still out there pushing it and doing a lot of stuff. So that was a lot of fun. And the first gig we were playing, we had a magic screen that would open up on stage with kind of a high screen and had slits through it. So you'd get a picture of Alice running towards you on the screen and because there were slits, Alice would come off the screen into real life and start singing. Well, while we were getting ready, somebody threw an M80, which was a quarter stick of dynamite and so there were firemen on stage and clowns and all sorts of things. It was crazy. I thought, “yeah, this is going to be just another night in the life of Alice Cooper”. And that's when things started off and they got crazier from there.

I can imagine even The Tonight Show has got to be a pretty big warm up gig.

Yeah, it was. We were off to the side. We actually played in the band area with Doc Severinsen’s musicians. So we sat there and played. They had dancing chickens who were on stage with Alice. You know, the band got pushed to the side, the dancing chickens got the top bill, which is typical. But it was really cool. I mean, Johnny gave us the okay symbol, and that was kind of cool. It was pretty impressive for me to sit around the guys that I'd been watching on television all those years and Doc Severinsen and the people that we'd watched every night and Carson, which was a pretty unbelievable first experience for me.

I can imagine, especially getting the “OK”, that's big. I've interviewed Tom Dreesen, who was a comedian, you know, getting that okay from Johnny was a big deal, especially back in those days.

It could make or break a career of that “OK”.

Absolutely. And prior to the 70,000 Anaheim Stadium, do you recall with the biggest audience you'd played in front of before then?

I think we had opened up for Santana in Ottawa, and that was an arena – it was a bigger crowd because we were playing clubs mostly with Donnie and I played some bigger places, some festivals with Lighthouse… oh yeah, we played City Hall with Lighthouse and that was pretty packed and that was a big crowd. I think that was in ‘73–‘74, somewhere around there. People were all over the place because of a free concert. So that was a big crowd too. So I played some, I had some experience with that, but not a lot.

Was there any nerves or anything before going out in Anaheim?

Yeah, definitely. But you know, you can't let it get to you because you have to do a job. And I didn't have time. I managed to be able to just, you know, keep myself in my own little world because I knew I had a job to get done and play what I needed to play. And really having played with Donnie, that set me up for every other gig after that, because the music was fairly challenging. We were playing really fast stuff, complicated harmonically and you had to keep up and it was really a school of rock for me and all sorts of other things and that helped me a lot when I go out into other situations because I'd already played complicated stuff and I was able to memorize things and it was really a good school to come from.

And from my understanding, I mean, touring with Alice must have been some kind of otherworldly experience.

Yeah, because I mean, the show itself was pretty crazy. When the lights were all out in the auditorium, it was quite a production. Alice had borrowed from Broadway and other places for his stage show, and there was a guillotine that cut his head off at a certain point in the show. We had a huge spider crawling up the net and the front of the stage was really quite a production. The crowd was pretty rowdy, people [were] throwing things on stage and bottles and, we had to dodge stuff, but it was a lot of fun. AC/DC was opening up for us for a while, Blondie opened up for a while. We had a lot of great acts that we intersected with that opened for Alice, and I got a chance to see some of them in their early formative years. But sometimes it got a little rough. I mean, we were playing Saint Paul in Minneapolis and I’d just finished a piano solo and somebody threw a military tear gas canister on stage, which I didn't know at the time. There was a roadie to my right who was kind of yelling and waving at me, and I was in the middle of a solo. I just finished my solo and I've told this story before, but I didn't understand what he was saying. He was yelling, and I think what he was yelling was, “get out of here, get off!” I didn't interpret it as that, I didn't know. The lights went on and I looked up and it's very disconcerting to see 12,000 people running in the middle of your solo towards the exits. And then I started to feel the gas and it creates panic. So we all ran to the dressing room and then we to get out of there. I jumped in limousine and nobody was taking it. There was a girl coughing – I think 11 or 13 people went to the hospital from our crew and from the audience. It was bad. And then we had a riot in Toronto, where Alice didn't show up to CNE… that was a problem. That was not fun. I had 33 friends there or something and they all had to leave.

You talked about how it was quite the show, quite the production for Alice when you were touring with him.  I know there was a lot of controversy, people used to think he worshiped the devil and all these things like this. But from my understanding, I was just a persona more than anything.

Well, he absolutely was. I mean, Alice was really a Hollywood guy. He was hanging around with Groucho Marx in those days, and he was friends with a lot of guys. He referred to himself in the third person, Alice sometimes. It was something like Lady Gaga has done. I did some stuff with her and she does the same thing when she has to be her. And I think Alice was having some issues because I think he was drinking a lot at this point. But, you know, he was a showman and he understood what that was all about. He used to say, he doesn't care what they say about him as long as they spell his name, right. He understood the whole concept of keeping his career going.

What's the parallel with Lady Gaga there? Just like how she kind of taps into another persona when she's performing or what's the connection?

Well, I was only saying it in the sense that I worked with her for a little bit and she was Stephanie when I was working for her, but she's Lady Gaga when she has to adopt this persona. I think she actually separates that herself. But she's very talented and it was great doing some stuff with her.

From your experience, how have you seen them tap into that persona? Is there like a ritual they do like whether it just be putting on the makeup or something like that that allows them to tap into it? Is it just a quick switch?

I think Alice is Alice. He had been around for quite a while by the time that I met him. As a matter of fact, I had met him, which has happened with several bands I was with – foreshadowing. When I was a kid at 15 we skipped out of school and went up to see Alice, [I think he was] in CFTO. He was appearing at some television station. So my friend and I skipped school and went up to see him and I had a question for him, some stupid question, “I understand you have a device that allows you to hang yourself”, and Alice gave me an answer. Nine years later I was in his band. So, yeah, there was some foreshadowing, but I think he's able to kind of tap into something to become a showman on stage and embellish that character, which he's created. It was his creation, so I don't think it was difficult because he had it. I saw it earlier and I saw it evolve into different things, and by the time I joined the band, it was a fully fledged kind of comic-horror thing.

Do you think that that's a benefit? Do you almost think artists should have a level of mystique around them? You know, like Lady Gaga is able to separate, Alice is able to separate a little bit. Do you think that's a benefit?

It depends on the type of music and how it functions. I mean, like the guys out of Toronto (Domenic Troiano), the band, I think they were just themselves and that's all they did. And that was such a strong thing that it functioned so well for them. Other people adopt a persona and you have to kind of do something to be on stage. Not that you're not yourself, but you want to be at your top performance wise. Some people go the total natural route, which I think the band did. As a matter of fact, they kind of shied away from everything that was going on around them culturally and just set their own path and kind of were the founders of Americana in a lot of ways, which is kind of funny. They’re all Canadian except for [inaudiable]. But I don't know, I think whatever works for you, I know, Elton had his own persona as well. He's not exactly like that offstage. But there are elements of that. Same with Freddie [Mercury]. But Freddie was a lot quieter offstage than he was on stage, you know, he reserved that for the stage. He could be a little bit outrageous, but for the most part, when he was offstage, he was pretty sophisticated, a nice guy, and intelligent.

That’s what I've heard. I spoke with Peter Freestone recently and he was saying a very similar thing about Freddie. Is that separation a benefit, though? Do you think you need that to be able to kind of unplug, I know the rush playing in front of 70,000 people must be quite immense. So do you think having a way to kind of separate yourself from that is important?

Yeah, I do in some ways. I mean, it depends. You know, the artist is doing that. I don't have to do that when I'm playing on stage, but you do have to adopt a certain amount of – just kind of getting the job done. You have to go out and entertain everybody. And, you know, it's a mixture of getting to the audience, projecting at the same time, doing your job, playing all your parts right. You know, you're playing for 20,000 people and then you go back to your hotel room and you're all amped up and then there's nothing much going on. That goes on night after night after night. A lot of people have trouble. That's why a lot of people get into trouble because, they can't calm down from that adrenaline rush. They need something to bring them down or something – I never got into drugs personally, but I know a lot of people who did. Life on the road can just cause a lot of those issues to happen. But I mean, I really enjoyed it from the point of just viewing what happened, you know, being a player and an observer. It was a lot of fun and you have to have a drive, it's the music that carries you because you're going to be playing, whether you're sick, whether you're happy, whether you're sad, no matter what's happening at home, all through the various aspects of your life, you still have to go on stage and and do what you do. It's like the old [saying] “the show must go on”. And I'm not really an entertainer, so to speak, but I've been with these guys who are and I learned that you just have to soldier on no matter what the situation is. I didn't miss a gig in like 20 years. And so you're playing out of a lot of adverse circumstances sometimes and this is maybe where paying your dues comes in a little bit.

[Your dues] gives you something to fall back on. You know, you've pushed through the hard times, so carry through the hard times later on.

Plus, you appreciate when you're staying in nicer places and you're having, maybe a little more luxurious lifestyle, but you're still on the road no matter how you cut it, you're still out there. With Elton we were out for three months, sometimes longer.

[Editor's Note] During the recording of the interview there were technical difficulties and we had to leave the first recording and go to a second one. Before we hit record on the second recording, Fred’s wife, who’d been sitting off to the side, chimed in to say she was glad to hear him talk about learning by ear as a kid because he still does it at 70 years old. The below is the tail end of her describing what it looks like from her perspective.

There's just something about him. He gets this look in his eye and then he'll start playing. And he's playing all of the parts perfectly. It's like, how are you doing that? It's some weird, otherworldly stuff.

I want to dig into that a little bit more. When you're listening to a song and you have that look in your eye, at what point do you pick up the instrument and you feel comfortable enough to play it? Like, at what point do you have it?

Well, I think I was doing it when I was younger. I was just able to hear a song once or twice through and then would be able to play it, you know? And that's how I learned some stuff. That's from kind of ear training, listening to records and playing it. I don't think I'm as good as I used to be, as far as listening to tracks and playing them back. I tend to make up charts now just to safeguard because I don't want to make a mistake if I'm playing in a session, but I don't really know the process. I mean, I was just able to – when you're younger, you don't know how to listen into a record because if somebody says, “can you hear the bass part of that?” I didn't know what that meant when [I was] younger, but the studio guys know how to do that. Separate, listen to a track, and listen to individual instruments in the track. I think it's just something you learned over the years and a lot of guys have good ears. All the musicians I played with have a really good ear. I think it's just from years of playing and understanding the components and how the different instruments function and being able to listen to them in a mix.

So when you listen to a song now, is it something you kind of have to consciously toggle between? For example, I write screenplays in my spare time and when I watch a film, I can analyze it, but I have to actively make sure I'm analyzing it. Otherwise everything just goes right over my head. For you, when you listen to a song, is it always happening every song you listen to or do you kind of have to tune into it?

Sometimes I just listen to it for enjoyment. But some of the time I will want to hear what the guitar player is playing or I'll be listening to a bass part or something, sometimes it's like work all the time when you're listening to something because musicians are checking out different parts. And if you're just relaxing, you hope you can just listen to the whole tune and enjoy it, but sometimes you're going, “oh, I want to check out that piano part in the middle bridge”. I'm not as analytical as I used to be when I was trying to figure out things to learn. Now I do listen more for enjoyment and the production techniques have changed a lot. It's interesting to hear a lot of the stuff that's coming out today.

I mean, it's a skill I'm definitely envious of. Over the last week or so, I've been trying to go back through all your credits and listen to songs and try and pick your parts out of them. And it is just not a skill that I have. I mean, obviously I can find it in “I Want to Break Free”. That one's pretty obvious. But like some of the other songs, I just am not very good. Sometimes I'll hear it and I'll get excited that I was able to pick it out. But it's not a it's not a skill I have.

You have a different skill set. I can't write screenplays, you know? So I watch the movie and I just watch it. I'm not sitting there analyzing the dialog like you probably are. “I wonder if should have said that?” You go to relax and then you're all of a sudden working at the movie. “Gosh, I wonder if I would have written that?”, you know? So it's good and bad.

Of course... Did you work on, like you played B3 on The Wall, right?

Right.

Were you on Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two?

No, I played on two tracks I played on “In the Flesh?” and The Show [Must Go On].

I listened to the whole album, listening for a B3 the whole time.

It's pretty heavy – it's a distorted B3 part. It starts off the record, I think it's like “It's in the Flesh?” starts the album off, I believe. But that was a long time ago, that was ‘79 or ‘80 when I did that. And that was just when David [Gilmour] and Roger [Waters] were in the studio at the time with Bob Ezrin.

I was going to ask if Bob Ezrin was the connection that got you into Pink Floyd.

Yeah, he was actually, I was talking to Bob about Alice or something, and Bob said to me, “can you play B3?” And really, Dave Tyson had been the B3 player in Donnie's band, but I said, I can play B3 because I could, I could play it. I just couldn't remember how to turn it on. So turning a B3 requires two toggle switches. You have to turn on one before the other. I forget what the instructions were and I couldn't remember them, but I just hope that I would be able to remember it. And when I got to the studio it was on, so I didn't have to worry about that. I knew how to set the bars up and everything, and I managed to fake my way through the session. So I got the job done.

What did you do throughout your career that allowed you to get recommended and connected to so many bands for different opportunities? There's a lot of musicians in the world and I'm sure a lot that would love to have been in the position you were in. What were you doing in your career and the sessions, on tour that made people always think of you? Why were you the first name that came to their mind when a band was looking for someone?

You know, I don't have an answer for that question. I just did what I had to do, play as well as I could, contribute to stuff, and get along with people. It was about as simple as that. When I got hired for Queen, I'm not sure how I got that gig. I really don't know to this day, I think maybe it was Roger Powell, I'd switched from keyboards to guitar for the last year I was with Alice because I was writing a lot of stuff for a record with Alice on guitar and Davey Johnstone and Todd Rundgren came in to produce a couple of tunes for us. So I met the Todd Rundgren band Utopia and I became friends with those guys and maybe Roger Powell, who was their keyboard player, an excellent player and good guitar player too. He may have recommended me or Roy Thomas Baker, who was Queen's producer, was producing Alice's record after Todd, he ended up producing a record called Flush The Fashion. So I was friends with Roy and he may have recommended me. I was called to meet Gerry Stickells, who was Queen's Road manager. I didn't know he had been Jimi Hendrix's road manager as well and I didn't know that through the whole time I was with Queen. But I met Jerry in LA at a place called Crossroads of the World. I met him and I got into his office and we were talking and he said, okay, I think you'll do. I said, “don't you want to hear me play?” I didn't see any instruments around. And he said, ‘no, no. I know you can play. I just want to make sure you can get along with the guys”. So I think he was just checking me out to make sure I wasn't a jerk. And so I don't really know. I mean, I wasn't looking for those gigs. They kind of came to me. One thing led to another, and I just tried to do the job and the gig, and that led to another thing. It was basically, as I said, the music carried me from one place to another. I didn't have an agenda. I wasn't looking to get gigs. I'd done a few additions in my life, but not many.  I was just lucky that one thing led to another and I ended up in one band after the other and tried to do the best job I could and it's tough on the road because there's a lot of ups and downs. I tried to maintain as much of a positive attitude as I could, get along with people, and do my gig.

I would imagine a big part of it, too, is not having an agenda. You're getting opportunities, with some of the biggest bands in the world and you're not trying to use it to get to something else. You're just doing it, like you said, as the gig and just to get along with everyone, you're not trying to leverage the opportunity for something else.

Well, you know, once things started, the ball started rolling with Alice in ‘77, there was not a lot of downtime. I took a little bit of time after my daughter was born in ‘81, but then I was right back on the road with Queen in ‘82, Supertramp ‘83 and Elton in ‘84. I got an offer with Foreigner but I couldn't take it because I was going out with Elton. So it was one thing after another and it was just carrying me from one thing to another, until about 1990 when Elton checked into rehab. I had already been playing since I was 20, and now I'm close to 40. At that point, one thing led to another and there wasn't a lot of downtime in between these gigs. I just was carried along with the wave.

When did you finally get downtime? Was it when Elton went and checked into rehab?

Yeah. After that I started doing my other stuff and I hadn't played around LA I started doing gigs around LA because a friend of mine, Bob Birch, I always looked up to [his] work ethic because he'd come off the road with Elton and he'd go do weddings, bar mitzvahs and things. He was a working musician and you like to keep playing, which I did too. The problem was I didn't know a lot of people in LA, so when I came back to LA, I started meeting people and getting gigs and it took me a long time before I started getting recording gigs and doing albums and stuff again. But yeah, it was a whole different thing. I got to the point where I didn't know if I wanted to go on the road. I went out a little bit. I went out with Spencer Davis a little bit for gigs in the Midwest, but those were just short little jaunts. I played around town, did some other stuff, and then started doing some recording stuff with Dave Cobb, who had a studio here. We started doing, you know, we did a band called Black Robot, which was a rock band, very good. And then we did a few other records with some American Idols contestants at the time. Then we ended up doing Jamey Johnson's record. It went to number one in the country album [charts], and that really, I think, started – well, Dave had been working with Shooter Jennings before that, but Jamie had a number one hit with The Guitar Song, and then after that, he moved to Nashville. So that was fun. Getting a number one album in the country world. You know, I'd always played kind of Floyd Kramer country piano, too. I really liked it. I like a lot of different styles, and that's probably another good thing. I'm not a snob in any area. I like them all. So anyway, that kind of led me to that. We finished up that recording and he moved to Nashville and [has] done very well for himself with Chris Stapleton and Lady Gaga, a bunch of other people, Rival Sons. So Dave has really done well. Lately I've been working with Jay Ruston, who's a great producer, does Anthrax and probably one of the top heavy metal producers now, and he's also from Canada, he's from Ottawa and a great guy, and I've done a lot of stuff with him.

Was it hard when things slowed down initially, or was a welcomed break?

It was both a welcomed break and it was hard because you're not getting the same money coming in and it's not the same. I went through some rough years, but I managed to get back on my feet again. Then I started doing more stuff around town. But yeah, it wasn't fun. There was a big dip there for a while… big Dipper.

You mentioned it was Queen ‘82, which was the ‘Hot Space tour’, I believe?

Yeah, that's right, Hot Space tour.

And you had to learn everything relatively quickly from my understanding. You were flown into Montreal on like a Sunday and your first show was a Wednesday?

Yeah, that's true. I asked Gerry Stickells at the meeting I mentioned before what I need to know, what tunes I should know. He said, “well, I don't really know”, which is not very encouraging when you're trying to figure out what you're going to do in front of thousands of people. You know, “I'm not sure” is not a great answer. I had to learn a new synth because I didn't I didn't have a Jupiter-8, and that's what Queen was using in those days. I had an Oberheim-4 Voice, which was a more complicated synthesizer. But, you know, I had to learn a synth in a week and a bunch of tunes, which I managed to. I was also playing the bass on these tunes because they were played on synthesizer. So I had to learn a bunch of stuff in a week, and I don't know how I retained it all. I don't know if I could do that today. So I flew to Montreal on a Sunday night and we rehearsed I think Monday and Tuesday. Monday night they were all going out to a club. They said, “you want to go out to club?” I’ve got my synthesizer in the elevator with me and I'm going back to learn. I'm playing on Wednesday night and I'm playing bass on some of these songs. You can't stop playing bass in these tunes. You can't just [say] “hold on a minute while I just get my breath here and figure out a few more”. You have to play bass. You can't just stop. And John Deacon had stopped playing bass on these songs because he was playing rhythm guitar. I was the only bass player, so I had to know the stuff down cold. And of course when they play it live, the adrenaline is up, and it's faster than the record. I don't know how I did that actually. It was a lot of fun and terrifying at the same same time. After a while, I settled in with that and they liked what I did on that first rehearsal. We were kind of friends from that point on.

That was going to be my next question: how do you build a relationship and earn the trust of these guys? When you step into a band, a band that's been together for so many years, how do you kind of cement yourself in there? Is it just proving you can do it and doing the work?

Yeah, that was basically it. Just proving that I could play and Brian [May] said, “that's what we need”. You know, when I finished playing, he said, “yeah, that's great, that's what we need”. And then we went into the dressing room and I was just joking around and I said to Freddie, I said, “there's two Freds on the road, Fred M and Freddie Mercury – Fred M and Fred M. That's going to get confusing. You're going to have to change your name for this tour”. And he just looked at me and of course I was just being an idiot. But, you know, we had a lot of humor and stuff. We got along and I got along with everybody in the band after that because they had four limos, so I had to ride with somebody. I would either ride with Brian or John or Roger [Taylor], and we became friends over that tour. I think we finished America and then we did Japan. That was my first time in Tokyo and different cities over there and my first experience with jetlag.

Oh, yeah?

Well, we got to Tokyo and it was like a Hard Day's Night there, it was like the Beatles, [Queen’s] extremely popular there. Girls were chasing them through the parking lot as we ran to the cars. Paul McCartney had been busted there. So the customs guys were asking us if we had any marijuana, like Paul McCartney. It was very weird. We got to a hotel and the guys were going to go out to a club. They said, “you want to go out to a club?” And I said, “No, I'm tired. I’m not gonna go to a club”, not realizing that I was going to wake up in a pool of sweat 3 hours later. Then I was awake for the night and they were going to go to bed when they were tired and get back on schedule. I didn't know at the time, so I was kind of screwed up for about four or five days after that. But they were pretty huge over there, it was a lot of fun to watch.

And like you said, you established relationships with each of those guys and then you worked on Mr. Bad Guy with Freddie [Mercury], but I'm curious about the Star Fleet Project. I've heard Brian [May] describe it as one of the best experiences of his life. Can you tell me about those sessions and what they were like?

Yeah, it's funny, I spoke to Brian I guess a month ago. We were going to do something in LA but we didn't end up doing it. But the album is being rereleased, I believe, the Star Fleet Project. That was a collection of guys – it was basically a very loose situation, that's what was so much so fun because it was Eddie Van Halen and Brian playing guitar and Phil Chen from Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart's band and Alan Gratzer on drums from REO Speedwagon, and myself. So we just went into the studio and part of it was organized, we had some specific tunes to play. But we also did some blues stuff, which was very loose. That was a lot of fun, a lot of jamming. So it was half organized, half just free for all. We had a great time, a lot of fun. You can sort of tell by the pictures on the album and everybody smiling had a good time. I think Brian really enjoyed that. We may do something in the future, who knows? But there's only three guys left, unfortunately. Phil and Eddie are both gone.

And those tapes were not supposed to come out, right? I found a quote that they were not intended to be released, and they only got minimal mixing.

That's possible. I don't know the story behind that, but I think they were pretty well mixed. Mack produced the record and he is an extremely efficient guy and a great producer and engineer. I don't know what state they would have been in, but it sounds pretty well mixed to me. I'm not sure what point they were at, if there were any bootlegs or anything. I don't know the stories about those.

With any of the Queen solo projects, they were never as commercially successful as a Queen [group] project. I have a quote of yours here that is not everything artistically is measured by commercial success. I'd like to hear more about that.

When you're in a band like Queen or any band, you function as a brotherhood, three musketeers or five musketeers and you're all aiming to do the best for the band musically and otherwise. That entails a lot of compromise sometimes because you have to sublimate some of your ideas and compromise with other people. Whereas if you do a solo album you have the freedom to do what you want to do artistically, even though it may not be as successful as the band. But it still allows you to get the things off your chest that you have because sometimes creativity, you have things you want to do and you can't do them if they don't conform to what the band has in mind as their format. I think Freddie wanted to step outside that and didn't want to argue with people and didn't want to try and get his point across. So he did his own solo record. With Elton, it wasn't always a solo album, although when I joined it felt very much like a band. They were all friends of mine, so that felt really like a tight band. I think Freddie just wanted to and Brian wanted to do some things outside of Queen, without the constrictions of that band.

What about for you? How does it feel now to you finally working on a solo project?

Well, it's a little late to be doing it now. I mean, I'm probably crazy to be doing it, but I don't care. And that's a nice thing about it. You know, you get to a point where you just don't care. I'm just going to put it out and see what happens. I don't have any delusions. I'm not competing with SZA. I'm just out there doing my own thing and whatever happens, happens. My stuff sounds sort of like traditional rock and roll. My wife describes it as “new classic rock”. We'll see what happens once we get it out. I don't have the same audiences that some of these guys have, so I'll just have to play it by ear and see what happens.

And was making a solo record something you always wanted to do?

Yeah, well, it was something I started before I joined any of these bands. I started recording and I actually came off the road with Alice and I started doing a record and I did some stuff with my friend Paul DeLong, a drummer, and Dave Tyson, and we did some of my solo stuff in Toronto, and that's where I got the bug. But then I got called back on the road and by the time I got off the road, I was working pretty hard and I didn't feel like going into the studio, although guys have done it. But I was pretty burnt out by the time I got off the road from different projects and I would just sort of try and recuperate before the next one happened. I probably should have taken advantage of the time and got in and done some solo stuff. But I managed to get a lot of stuff done here. I've got a collection of 13 tunes, which I think are good. I think people will like them. It's a variety of stuff. It's not all one genre, but it's under the, I guess the cloud of rock. I guess that would be the title.

And it's not out yet, right?

No, I'm expecting to get most of the stuff finished with the art design in the next week or two, and then I'm hoping within two or three months we should have it out.

How long have you been working on the album for?

For a long time. I dropped it for a while, like five, ten years. I did different things throughout the years. I've got stuff on their, tracks that I wrote in the eighties that I always wanted to finish, but I re-recorded some things and because I played everything myself, I tried to get a collection of stuff together and then I brought it into the studio and I had Ryan MacMillan play drums on it in LA and Paul DeLong played a couple of tracks in Toronto, you know, long distance with digital files.

Your wife and daughter sing backing vocals on one of the songs, don’t they?

Yeah, that's true.

Is that fun for you to be able to include them on the project?

Yeah, it was. It was a lot of fun because they didn't think they could do it and they didn't think they'd sound good. They sang just a little bit out of tune on one take and then just a little bit  sharp, a little bit flat. And then when I put everything together, they sounded like a little great little gospel band backing me up. They sounded great. I was really impressed with what they did, and I figured I could make it sound good, but they did a great job. And they’re not professional singers at all. It was a fun thing. It's a fun track. It was just kind of a Jerry Lee Lewis type of thing it’s always fun working with my kid.

How long have you had those 13 songs locked in? Has the track list changed over the course of the last 5-10 years?

Yeah, it has, because I had different versions of the tunes. Some I wrote around the beginning of 2000 and others I've written throughout the years and I just kept stockpiling them and I put together what I thought was a cohesive kind of storytelling album. Not a theme of any sort particularly, but just stuff that I thought worked together. Then I just called in a few [favours], Dave Tyson produced the vocals on it and Jay Ruston did the drum engineering, and I called in a few musician friends of mine, a great guitar player from Toronto by the name of Philip Sayce, played on one tune and also sang. Now Philip is one of the best blues rock guitar players, if not the best in the world. I don't know why he's not huge. He's a logical follow up to Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and a lot of great players. But Philip is a monster and I play with him around town and do records with him stuff, and he's just an immense talent who should be worldwide recognized. I'm just throwing that in because I believe in the guy a lot. He's a friend, but he's also a monster. So anyway, Philip played on my record and a few other people and it was great. A lot of fun.

Talk to me about the concept of greatness with someone like a Philip Sayce, and not having the recognition he deserves. Has greatness been diluted with the overabundance of content today?

You know, that's a very important question, I think that it hits upon a very interesting concept which has happened. I think greatness has been diluted. If this was 1977, and I told Philip this, if this was ‘77, he would be world famous right at this moment. But I don't know whether people relate to it anymore. I don't know why he isn't [world famous]. He's slowly climbing his way up. The people that know, know. It's starting to happen, and I hope it happens soon, because he is certainly deserving of huge recognition. But it did require me to rethink a lot of things [like] Philip's situation. Like, why is this guy not larger in the world than he is at the moment? He's a Canadian, he's been praised by a lot of huge guitar players, Bon Jovi, all those guys have seen Philip play and “holy shit” was the comment. This is a guy who is from Toronto and, I don't know exactly what's happened. I think that there's different things. You know, I'm not the demographic for some of the modern music that’s coming out. Guitar had sort of taken a backseat. It's kind of underground a little bit, it’s not on every track anymore, like it used to be. But I think there's a resurgence. I know there's a lot of great bands under the surface, and I'm just hoping that guitar resurfaces more as a main instrument in the future and Philip is definitely a leading proponent of great guitar players. I don’t think many people can touch him. And as a Canadian, I hope he gets some recognition. He is getting it, but I push him all the time because that guy is an amazing player and I've seen him do things that I've never seen anybody else do. He's the real deal.

And is it just because guitar isn't as culturally significant within the culture – the youth culture, it's not as popular. What do you think is preventing him from kind of rising above and these other great artists from rising to the top?

I just think the genres have changed, tastes have changed and people are looking for different things. A lot of the stuff that doesn't feature a guitar anymore or, you know, electronic music and hip hop and some other things are not guitar based, whereas everything used to be. There was a stigma for a while but I think underneath is a bunch of bubbling groups that you have to look for rather than before they were on the top ten. Now you kind of have to look for some of that stuff, but there's still huge festivals. I mean, I did some stuff with Anthrax. I played live with them. We covered a couple tunes and, you know, a lot of heavy metal bands out there still pushing it. There's a lot of guitar if you look for it, and it's starting to resurface, I believe. It's a matter of taste and the style of music and a variety of things that have combined to kind of push guitar into the background a little bit. And maybe it's associated with the boomers, I don't know. But a lot of young kids are playing great and you can learn from YouTube and you have access to a lot of great players. But I think it'll resurface and I'm feeling that it is, in fact, doing that. We'll see because there's a lot of great players out there that should be recognized.

From your experience working with a lot of the greats, both today and in the past, are there any commonalities you've noticed between them all?

Yeah, I would say that they’re all driven. I would say these guys are pretty heavily driven and you know, they have that it factor, the X factor. I don't know if you get that on American Idol or not, but these guys have something. When you see them, you realize what it is. And it's like pornography, you can't always determine what it is, but you know it when you see it (and I'm just saying that for my wife's benefit). But basically it's something that happens when they start playing. You know, there's a magic involved and not a lot of people have this. But Elton has it, Freddy had it, Supertramp had a certain thing when they played. It was huge for the crowds, you know. It's a kind of indefinable something that happens when these guys play and it comes from a combination of their ability, technical ability and vocal ability, the band – the way they function together with the song is greater than the parts. And the final thing, which you can't determine, you can't put your finger on it, but these guys have something that you can't do and they can do and it's appealing to a large amount of people, you know? It's like an indefinable thing, I don't know if it's a religious thing, but something comes through these people that touches a lot of people that was happening with Freddie, that happens with Elton – I've seen it. Alice had a certain thing, too, where they just are able to channel something and communicate. Of course, if you want to get technical about it, I mean they have great songwriting skills, great vocals skills, great guitar playing, drumming. I mean, all the things that you would want as part of a band or a solo artist they have. You know, Billy Joel is a great piano player and Elton is a great piano player and when you hear it, you know it. Sometimes you don't realize until you hear it. I mean, I’d known about Billy Joel for years, and I was sitting in with Elton's band, rehearsing the band for a period of time, taking [Elton’s] place because he was somewhere else. They called me in to play piano, just to rehearse the band to get it ready [because] they knew I knew all the tunes, and it was with the Billy and Elton [Face to Face] Tour. Billy walked in and we were hanging around and I watched him play and I was so impressed with how great a player he is. And I hadn't really realized until I saw him in person. This guy is a monster, too. I knew Elton was a great player and I just didn't realize Billy was as great as he is, you know? And I have been amazed ever since watching him. I'm really impressed. So sometimes when you see these people, a point is made.

It's a combination of having that natural ability, but not resting on the ability to carry you and having the hard work at the same time and marrying those two things: the hard work with the natural skill.

Yeah, there's a lot of hard work. I mean, Elton was a session player before he was a solo artist. He played on some classic tracks that people Don't even know. I played on Bang a Gong with T. Rex. He played on It's Not Unusual - Tom Jones So he's on some classic hits in the sixties that compared to his career are diminished. You know, the same with Jimmy Page he played all that stuff on a lot of records.

I'm curious, when you look back on everything, what is the feeling when you look back on the journey to this point?

Well, I'm happy I did all the things. It's fun. But then when you're back, you're stuck with you and you've got to do something to continue. I'm still a musician. Musicians don't really retire, they just keep going. I mean, I had this argument years ago with a disc jockey who was saying The Rolling Stones should retire. And I got mad. I said why should they retire? They can keep going. And my point was proved, because 30 years later, they were still going and he's gone – the disc jockey. You wouldn't say that to a classical musician, you know, Stravinsky or any of these other players played until they’re 80 or 90 years old and people appreciated that. I think the matter with music is you just keep going until you can't play anymore or you don't feel that you're doing your best. Oscar Peterson had to retire, he had arthritic problems, you know, but I think you just keep going and like I said, in the past, the music kind of just carries you along and you do what you want to do and hopefully people like it.

Which feels like kind of the summary of the career for you, right?

Yeah, kind of. I mean, yeah. I've been playing so long that it just seems natural to me, you know, one thing led to another, and I was fortunate to have these opportunities. I'm very thankful I had them and grateful to the guys that allowed me to participate in their great careers.

If you go back and give yourself at 20, any advice maybe shortly after you were chased down the hallway by a bat – is there any advice you would give yourself?

Uh, don't hang around bats. I don't know, it's tough to say. I don't know what I would have changed or what I would have done differently, but I don't think that. I think you just have to determine your own level of success, whatever is successful. I'm not a snob. I appreciate working musicians. You kind of define what you're going to do if you're going to be in a cover band and play local bars and if that does it for you, that's fine. You make yourself happy. It's hard to have a balance between life and happiness, and music tends to be a source of happiness for a lot of players. A lot of people are driven by their calling. It's almost a calling for some people. I didn't really have an option in the way, I was exposed to music when I was very little. I think the thing is to just follow your heart  if you're a musician and see what happens and life will tell you pretty soon whether you can continue as a musician, as a professional, or even if you just do it for fun at home, take out a guitar, plink away. It's all valid. I think music is supposed to bring us together and in the current world we live in, I think anything that functions as a solidifying factor amongst people is a good thing because we need that now.

That’s a great note to end it on. Fred Mandel, it is an absolute pleasure. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.

Yeah, keep in touch. It was fun doing it, man. You did a great job. I enjoyed it.