J: My music? Oh I’m getting more and more into Jazz and alternative stuff. I’ve started doing Tuva singing or throat singing, and ......A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing for the past two years including Tuva singing, and tuning all the strings of the guitar to the same note, and playing steel, I didn’t know what I was doing so I recorded a lot of it and took it around to various record stores and two or three people told me that what I was doing has already existed and it’s called Gothic Industrial ambiance and it’s a lot of fun because you get to scream and make noises. But I’m not giving up guitar playing per se.
S: How does it feel to get up on stage and play a tune that you wrote in 1959 /1960 and people still want to hear that?
J: Well I do feel a little dragged by that because I’d prefer to do what I’m doing at the time but I also realize that you have to keep a lot of those songs in your repertoire and up to practice. Any professional musician realizes that keeps them around. And keeps trying to get the audience to go forward with them, but they don’t always want to go, but that’s OK.
S: Lastly, what happened at the time of the Vietnamese war, finger picks, thumb picks, chains, talk about that, about how that affected your music.
J: Well I initially started using Dobro thumb picks, Japanese finger picks, here in Berkeley, I saw Perry Lederman do it, and I like to be heard, you know I’d go to parties and if I just used my hand and my fingernails nobody could hear me, so I started using those and they are louder and most of my records were cut with finger picks. But sometime back, the company that made large size Dobro thumb picks, changed the dyes and this new batch came out and I can’t use them. This also happened to you, we both had to change our styles of playing, and went back to just using what nature gave us. I personally am glad because I like the tone better. But I can’t play quite as fast or quite as noisy as I used to be able to.
