BR: So how old were you when you got serious about playing?

GC: Well, I had the guitar around early on … but it was probably when I was 16 or so that I’d pick it up and go at it for two or three months – and then I’d just get disgusted because it was boring and hard to figure out how to change chords. A year might go by and then I’d pick it up again. By the time I was 21, I started playing with a bunch of guys in college at Tulane University. That was my first band – The House Levelers.

BR: What did you go to college to study?

GC: Theater.

BR: Really?

GC: Yeah – I went to a play when I was in Alabama and there was this beautiful girl and I said, “Goddamn, I’d like to meet her …” (laughter) So I went and auditioned for the next play. (laughter) And I got the part. (laughter) That’s when I figured out that being a heterosexual theater major was awesome. (laughter)

BR: How long were The House Levelers together?

GC: Oh, man – we went nuts for about three years and just lived on the road. Then a good friend of mine – a really good guitar player – started the band Stavin’ Chain. That was kind of cool: we got signed to this German record label and they had a lot of money to do stuff with. Full-page ads in the Village Voice … we had sold-out shows in New York. Then all of a sudden Polygram merged with Universal and went bankrupt; and the label we were on went bankrupt; and I got a girl pregnant; and that was the end of that. (laughs)

BR: Time-wise, we’re talking …

GC: 2000 – that’s when my daughter was born. By then Stavin’ Chain was done and I was doing the solo thing.

BR: I’ve read in a bio somewhere that you opened for The Replacements at some point …

GC: Yeah, that was at Tipitina’s – that had to have been with The House Levelers in ’88 or ’89. I was working the door at Tipitina’s at the time and we used to get some decent gigs.

BR: And I’m thinking that it also mentioned you crossing paths with Keith Richards …

GC: That was with Stavin’ Chain when the Stones were on the Voodoo Lounge tour. It was actually Ronnie Wood and he was in the audience with Mick Jagger. We’re up on stage and we’d just done a cover of Freddie King’s “Hideaway”. This guy comes up and says (affects a British-by-way-of-Alabama accent), “Hey, man – would you mind doing that one again? And can I play your guitar?” And I look down and it’s like, “Jesus Christ – that’s Ronnie Wood.” (laughter) And then I see Mick Jagger out in the audience, sitting at the bar drinking water. I said, “Ohhhkay … well, we better be good.” (laughter)

BR: Another thing I’d read that I wanted to ask you about was your post-college period, living in New Orleans. Was that the real deal: the shotgun shacks with the extension cords running from one to another?

GC: Oh, man … (laughs) Yeah. (laughs) The one-legged landlord went bankrupt and we were getting notices from, like, three different banks. We figured nobody knew who owned the place, so we didn’t pay any rent for two years. I worked the door at Tipitina’s and played on the streets for money and we had an extension cord running from the one neighbor’s house that had electricity.

My momma cried when she came to see where I was living. I mean, they’d spent a lot of money on my education, right? And here I am, living in this place where the first night a body got dropped off in the street – somebody’d been shot in the head.

BR: Jeez …

GC: Yeah … that was the initiation to the neighborhood. But, you know, it was one of those fruitful times in my life as far as living goes. I mean, I wouldn’t want to do it again, because you’re on the verge of dying the whole time. We didn’t have any money; no insurance; the cars usually didn’t work. It was … It was like Tortilla Flat, you know? Or Cannery Row – it was like living in a novel.

I still go back to it in my mind. I mean, obviously now I’ve got a family and I don’t want to … the chaos isn’t appealing anymore. (laughs) But at the time, it was just perfect, man.

Every day there was something phenomenally funny – just stupid stuff. Like there was this cat named Bullitt that had no tail. And in the middle of the summer he’d sit on the pipe for the water heater that came up out of the roof – steam coming up all around him. (laughs) Meanest damn cat you ever saw. He cornered four dogs one day and mauled all four of them – they crawled on their backs and took off. (laughter)

And then there was Scruffy the dog who was mean as hell and always chained up and his little girlfriend dog named Puddin’. (laughter) And my next door neighbor had a dog named Blackie who would go over and get right at the end of Scruffy’s chain and would plug Puddin’ right in front of him. (laughter) The first day Scruffy ever got off that chain, he went to Blackie and whooped his ass. (laughter) I could go on for days and days, man – and that’s just the animals.

But there was so much of it that was romantic as hell, too. After that, I was living in a place right on the shore of the Mississippi. Having parties and playing music in the middle of the night right there on the banks of the river. More than once one of the tugboat guys would hear us and drive the boat right up on the beach to hang out with us. We were living kind of like Huckleberry Finn, you know? It was amazing.

BR: No kidding, man. So during those years with The House Levelers and Stavin’ Chain, how much of the music you were playing was your own stuff? Were you writing a lot?

GC: Oh, yeah. I’m still going back to stuff I wrote back then. Like, “John The Dagger” and “No Definitions” are both songs on the new record that I wrote then. I’ve probably got a hundred songs that I still haven’t recorded but want to at some point.

There were those times when I didn’t have a job. You wake up when you wake up: you write; you worry about food; you play; and you chase women. That was pretty much it. (laughs)

I really didn’t start doing cover songs until I got into Stavin’ Chain. That was because my buddy John knew a bunch of blues instrumentals and stuff that would keep people dancing at the shows. We’d be playing in these rural areas and if you didn’t have a record out, you needed to play something that people would know.

Now I’ve gotten to the point where people will get mad at me if I do a cover, so that’s good. (laughs)

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