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playing, and he would see him a lot. My mom was a song person. She would watch somebody on

television sing Stardust and say that they left out this 12-bar section that was the most beautiful
part of the song. They wouldn't even sing it. My aunt was the same way. they were like song ladies.
She liked lots of music, too. So that's why I heard all this stuff. I heard it from them. My mom took
me to see the Beatles on a school day.

LL: You and I are both native Californians! I hail from hot and dry Southern California, you
from cool, coastal Northern California. What was it like to grow up in San Jose in the 60’s and
70’s?

CC: It was very interesting because at

that time San Jose was mostly orchards
and kind of farmland kind of stuff. Yet,
there was still music in San Jose and
stuff. There was always like a music
scene, a music community. There was a
guy in San Jose, his name was Nick

Dusart, he played blues. My dad would
go see this guy and have the whole
band come to the house afterwards and
play a couple of tunes. And they did!
There were these clubs in San Jose for

underage kids to go. There was one
called the Whatz It Club and there was
one called Alfies Hawaiian Gardens
where like Elvin Bishop would play
with this little side band called
Crabshaw's Outlaws. That was in San
Jose on Monterey Road. I was still in

high school. Gary Smith had his band,
and, at that time Robben Ford was in
his band. A lot of guys that became
leaders in their own bands were guys that came out of Gary Smith's band. He was like Miles Davis
was in jazz.

LL: I first learned music by ear, and later by academia. What was your musical path like?

CC: It was the same thing. I would hear things on records that I would just have to listen to over
and over and over, again. I would have to figure out what the heck that is. I was just trying to figure
out what that thing was that made me want to hear it over and over. I realized that I didn't know
the terminology, the musical terminologies. I saw Robben Ford at this concert called Guitar Explo-
sion and it had like T-Bone Walker, Shuggie Otis, Roy Buchanan, and it also had jazz guys like Mary
Osborne, Herb Ellis and Joe Pass and Lee Ritenour and they all had to play with the same jazz trio

as the backup band. And so the blues guys seemed like they could only do like a shuffle and a slow
blues. It was like they didn't have a lot of variety. The jazz guys didn't seem to have any problem at
all. They seemed to know what they needed to do. And then Robben Ford comes out and he whis-
pers for like seconds but maybe it was longer, I assumed something like what they were getting
ready to play. And then they would kick off the tune with some involved arrangement and it was

like, I thought to myself, what did he whisper to them that suddenly they had a whole arrangement.