A couple years back you released, a concert from Englishtown, NJ, are there plans to release more old shows?

Oh yes, straight ahead. We’ve got 3,500 of them. We recorded almost all of our shows the first 8 years. We had all these taper guys – some of them sounded like crap and some of them didn’t. You realize that once I put myself back in the studio with a young engineer, who’s 25 years younger than me and he says with Pro Tools I can take that bad note out and I look at him like he’s a punk because why go back and try to make something better that people originally loved. I’m a real believer in making music real. We all make mistakes. If you put something out, that bad part doesn’t stick out in their head. All the good parts do.

How did you guys record your concerts back in the 70s?

Here’s what we did. We had two or three backup recorders and these guys are still out there. I just thought they were wasting their time away but thank goodness they recorded the shows. Here’s the kicker, when we rode on the buses or the in vans; we would go back and use their old equipment to listen to the 8-track recordings the next day. I think we learned from it in order to know what kind of band we were going to be. We put ourselves into the music. When I sat with the engineer to make the vinyl recording of the Englishtown show, I put myself back on stage and I wanted to sound that good.

Do you still keep in touch with the other original living members of the band: Jerry Eubanks and Paul Riddle?

I haven’t seen Paul in 15 years. When they wanted out, they wanted out. And I’ve seen Jerry once in the last 12 or 15 years. There’s no hard feelings there. Toy decided to leave because his brother had passed away a couple years before. And you probably don’t even know but Toy had a younger brother Tim who had passed away a month before Tommy. I understand the pressure that gets on somebody and I understand the reason that Toy wanted me to keep it going no matter what. We started this thing get together and I’m going to finish it and make it as good as I possibly can for the rest of those guys.

Would you ever reach out to Eubanks and Riddle and see if they want to reunite for one special evening of music?

We did a live show in Spartanburg 10-to-15 years ago and Charlie Daniels came down – it was one of those things. That was probably the last time I saw them. I don’t even know if they’re involved in music anymore.

What was the music scene like in Spartanburg, when you were an up-and-coming musican?

If you look at the history book, there was a band The Sparkle Tones with Joe Bennett and they wore black pants and black socks. These guys had a hit called “Black Slacks.” The Sparkle Tones had a TV show every Sunday mornings when I was a young man and we would all sit around and watch them. Then all of a sudden – the biggest news in the world, they were on the Ed Sullivan Show. And it pushed us a little but further than what I ever expected us to do. We didn’t look to be on Ed Sullivan but we just knew that would be we would be on something. We were on historic shows like Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (1973) Tom Snyder (1981) and Solid Gold. But it was The Sparkle Tones that …. and we were the next band that came through and I look forward to what’s going to happen next.

Getting back to the original lineup, can you talk about the unexpected death of Tommy Caldwell on April 28, 1980.

First of all it was a shocker. We had just played Nassau Coliseum in Long island and it was sold out. All these major entertainers were there including Billy Joel and these different people and promoters. And we get home, the next morning, I go to the studio – that was my norm, and they called up the studio and said Tommy had a wreck on the way. Tommy was driving in his jeep which was fully roll-barred. He just turned over and hit his head and then few days later that was it. How do you face it? I had already been to Vietnam and seen enough stuff. But how do you face it when it’s somebody that you already turned your life over to and given your real heart, your expression, your ability to creative musically. We would let Tommy lead the road. Toy and I couldn’t care less about leading the road. And then to have the rug just pulled out from under us – it made us all weak.

When Tommy had gone into the military and came back out, Toy and I had been out for a while – we had a friend Franklin Wilkie, who was a neighbor to Toy and Tommy and played bass as well. We had Toy invite him back because we wanted Toy to be comfortable and happy; and once we did that, it was like “Let’s go.” We took a month-and-a-half off but we had a date we had to do in Summit, Texas because it was a rodeo place – it was Franklin’s first show. We already rehearsed. We knew Franklin – we had played with him a million times – we just didn’t know what to do at that point in time.

Can you talk about the late George McCorkle (2007) and Toy Caldwell (1983)

George was my friend. He and I wrote a ton of songs together – emotional ones. George was married and I got married at George’s house and stuff like that. We were close and right at the end, he wanted to go off and write by himself; and Toy just wanted to stay home, so everybody did. It wasn’t an argument – we all had the same lawyers. We kind of lost interest. I hate to say we lost interest. We lost that feeling to go out together because we would never be able to get that feeling back together.

I made phone calls to all these buyers, and they said you sing 99 percent of this songs. So I have a lot of people to thank for saying “You can’t let this stop” and so I told the lawyer to make the deal and he made the deal and Toy shook my hand and said, “Keep on going.” I did the best I could and I’m still doing the best I can. When Toy died I was in Nashville and I got a call from my banker, who knew Toy very well and he told me: “I want you to sit down and make sure someone’s around you,” because he knew how it would affect me. He told me about Toy and I have two guys working with me now who were with Toy when he passed. It’s a family – you create a family and they stick right beside you.

Just one last thing, did serving in Vietnam, shape you as a songwriter?

Only in one one song – I wrote one song that had anything to do with the strife and how we were treated when we got back and that song goes nameless right now. You’re taught when something miserable happens – you have to put that in the back of your head, so you have the ability to move forward. It wasn’t easy to do it with Tommy, it wasn’t easy to do with George – because the night before George passed he didn’t know he had cancer for very long. We had stopped to visit him at the hospital and he never woke up the next day. His wife called me the next morning and told me he had passed during the night, so luckily we had a chance to say our goodbyes. This might sound a really hokey but we really did love each other and we still do.

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