Aesthetically, we were enormously successful. Economically… there was no success. It was all about music of the future and unfortunately it was a band that didn’t have any future.
As time went on, we formed a number of different bands. We played in rival, neighborhood bands. We learned more songs and we learned how to play Chuck Berry music and we learned Ventures songs.
But when I was a teenager, the idea of spending the rest of my life in a factory was real depressing. So the idea that I could become a musician opened up some possibilities I didn’t see otherwise.
Drugs, sex, booze, all the stuff that we wanted to do. The problem was that we didn’t want to learn the top 40 ’cause most of the music was awful and we had this other idea about what we wanted to do.
Drugs, were a symptom – they weren’t the cause of anything.
I hate that expression, ‘fusion.’ What it means to me is this movement where nothing ever really fused.
I was a little ahead of him but that didn’t matter after awhile.
If you put this in the context of Detroit in ‘64 or ‘65, the economy was booming. Everybody had jobs and there was a whole nightclub culture where bands could work.
It wasn’t a class system where I was the better guy and he was the second-rate guy. That was his role and my role was to play the solos. But he took great pride in his technique as a rhythm guitarist.
We played together for so long and we got to the point where our styles blended together. Even today, sometimes I’ll hear our records and I’m not really sure who played what. And we took a bunch of acid together too.