Back to Dickey for one more moment, a number of people were curious to know how close he came to joining you last year at the Beacon for the 40th anniversary run?

I really have no idea. I can tell you that an offer was extended to him to join us and pay tribute to Duane. His manager said that he was thinking about it and that there was a chance he’d accept. Now that really surprised me. But then when it didn’t happen, I can’t say I was surprised at all.

Back to the early years of the ABB, a number of people asked about the state of archival releases and whether you still uncover any music from that initial period?

We definitely have tapes and our plan has been to offer up a couple of those each year. It does seem to me that maybe we haven’t done as much with lately and I have to look into it. But to get to the other half of the questions, yeah stuff still surfaces. I’ve seen some film recently of that era and we do still come across music.

A few folks also asked about your favorite moments on stage with moe. at the Roseland WHY benefit in late January.

That was really fun. I’m not sure I can pick one a single moment but all in all it was a fun night. They asked me to play the benefit and I was happy to do it. It turned out that it was about the time of year when I’d do a walkthrough of the venue, so I worked that in as well. But I really enjoyed myself. Their drummer, he’s great, so I was real pleased with that night.

“Even though you’re moving uptown will this year’s New York City run still feature guests, like in years past?” Don C.

Of course. It’s New York City…I think you can expect the Juke horns will come down…Beyond that it’ll certainly happen. We have at least one real surprising guest that appears to be the works and we’ll see how that plays out. But of course they’ll be guests. Some of them we work out in advance and some are last minute.

How last minute is last minute? How close to show time will you extend an invitation?

Sometimes it’ll happen right there during a show. We’ll see someone and ask. Roy Haynes, the first time he sat in, he was on the side of the stage just watching and it was his first rock show and we invited him to come out. He was pretty nervous about it. I stepped off because I wasn’t going to get in his way.

I also remember that Bruce Willis came to two or three shows, I said, “I think that guy looks familiar,” before he worked up the nerve to ask if he could sit in and he was great.

Let’s close out with this one, “When is your memoir going to come out?” Gerard V.

You know I been spending a lot of time thinking about that. I definitely want to tell the story of Duane. I think I owe that to him. But as far as a strict history of what happened, I’m not sure. Everything that happened would be colored by my lenses so while I definitely want to write that book and maybe even a series of books I’m not altogether sure how I’d handle it. But I can tell you that I have a place in France that I plan to retire to one day and that’s when I’ll begin.

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