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WP: It was all pretty much country music. It was Dolly Parton. It was Porter Wagoner. It was those

sorts of acts. Very strict Nashville and what we call in the States, old-school country music. That’s
what I was listening to, and I got sick of it. I didn’t like it. My father used to wake me up in the
morning at 5.30 blasting the radio with country music and I just had a bad association with it.

The songs that sort of took my attention, if you will, were the early 70s soul bands — Al Green, the
Chi-Lites, of course, the Stevie Wonder of that era and I just loved those grooves. I loved the
simplicity of the music and it seemed more essential and it just spoke to my heart more. Almost

more rhythmically. I liked the sonics
and the timbres of it, and the rhythm
of it was so much more interesting
to me.

BiTS: All of that aside, I gather for a
time you actually underwent some

kind of fairly mundane course at a
university.

WP: Well, yes. You mean in terms of
some of the other studies that I was
doing?

BiTS: Yes.

WP: Ask the question a different way. I’m not sure I understand.

BiTS: Didn’t you do a business degree or something at the University of Alabama or the University
of Georgia?

WP: Yes, I see what you’re asking. Well, my parents could see that I was heading down this road of
possibly wanting to dedicate my life to the arts and that made them very nervous, unfortunately,

and I acquiesced to their fears, essentially, and made a deal with them. Look, I’ll go to college. You
take care of my education, but I will study something that is practical, and they convinced me that
look, you need to study something just in case you fail at music. You need to study business and,
Ian, I realised that fast-forwarding now to over 45 years later, I realise when you look at life like
that, you’re just planning for your own failure and your own demise. When I realised that in the
third year of college, I leapt out of it. It was a sinking ship, essentially. I was doing very, very well
in school and I took one course called statistics and it just did not gel. It was not in keeping with

the way my brain was wired. I failed statistics and I thought I’m not going to waste my parent’s
money anymore. I’m getting off this train and I just went back into music full time, and I’ve never
stopped.

BiTS: I gather that around that time, you actually had a couple of bands that you were gigging
with.

WP: Yes, I was kind of entranced by jazz at that time and, Ian, I don’t know if this can seem
surprising to you in northern Europe or not but in the United States to have a jazz band that could
fill a club on a Monday night — I’m talking about 200 people every Monday night — that’s the kind
of success that I was enjoying. In the southeast part of the US, I had a jazz band with a black
saxophone player as the leader of the band or the figure. I was the leader of the band, but he was
the perceived leader of the band, and it was almost unheard of. Put it this way, it was not common