Kathy & the Kilowatts: Groovin' with Big D!

Interview by Chuck Williamson

November 6, 2015

Following their seventh time playing with Casper Rawls at his recurring Sunday afternoon "Planet Casper" at Austin's Continental Club, Kathy Murray and Bill Jones talked with me about their latest release, "Groovin' with Dig D!", which is dedicated to Doyle Bramhall, Sr., their friend and drummer on those recording sessions.

Kathy's first exposure to live blues triggered an instant conversion. She started out as just a fan, but she also documented much of Austin's early blues scene as a photographer, soon becoming part of it herself as a singer and songwriter.

How did you end up getting together with Doyle Bramhall?

Kathy: The first night I ever heard live music, when I was 16, was at Armadillo World Headquarters where he was playing drums for Stevie [Vaughan]'s band, the Nightcrawlers. So I met all those people that night, 'cause my little brother knew Stevie. I had taken pictures of them that night and a picture from that is in the tray card under the CD in our "Groovin' with Big D!!" CD. The next time I met Doyle was at Buffalo Gap on Guadalupe. That was the second night I ever saw live music, and I took those pictures out there and gave him some copies of those. That was also the first night I heard Angela Strehli sing, and she completely blew me away. It was Denny [Freeman], Angela, Doyle, and I think Alex Napier on bass. I thought immediately that they were the biggest stars in the world. They were so fantastic, and there was nobody there... pretty much, it was just us. Doyle was always such a sweetheart and so encouraging. So when we decided to record a project and we did have some label interest, Doyle was between bands...

Bill: Yeah, he'd just finished a stint with Marcia Ball, and so we jumped on the opportunity. We asked "Since you're not playing with anybody right now, would you be willing to go into the studio, because we need a drummer who can play this kind of shuffle." It was hard to find drummers who knew that style of music like Doyle Bramhall did. So when he agreed, it sparked our juices. We thought "If we get Doyle in there, we're gonna cut as many tunes with him as we can."

Kathy: And I really wish we had kept these voicemails from him. The week before we cut those sessions, we came home to a series of about six voicemails from Doyle saying "Hey guys, I'm at the studio waiting for you to show up." … "Hey guys, when are y'all gonna be here?", and finally on the sixth message, "God, I'm sorry! I'm a two week non-smoking idiot. I checked my calendar and it's next week." He was living in Fort Worth at that time, so I felt bad. He drove all the way down here, but then the next weekend, in two days we cut eighteen tracks and every one of those tracks hold up.

Bill: Yeah, whatever magic things that go on in the universe, they were on for that session. He was plugged in, and we were plugged in with him.

Kathy: We just put out a vinyl 45 called "Halloween Hits", and it's from those sessions that Doyle's playing drums on. One of them is called "Till the Following Night"... is that Screaming Lord Such?

Bill: Yes, Screaming Lord Such! [laughter all around]

Kathy: It's the closest the Kilowatts have ever come to punk rock.

Bill: Yeah, it was at the very end of the session, and he was so tired he was beating those drums, BOP-BOP-BOP-BOP-BOP!

Kathy: It's killer! Caveman... it's my favorite side on that 45.

Tell me about some of the other musicians on the sessions. Obviously, Floyd Domino [piano]... well, anybody who knows Texas music knows who Floyd Domino is.

Kathy: He's out on the road with Merle Haggard right now.

Bill: We always loved the way he played a great boogie-woogie style of Moon Mullican. His playing just rolls on, very fluid. It was a bucket list dream when he agreed to play on the session.

Kathy: Dan Torosian [dantorosian.com] played soprano, tenor, and baritone sax on that project. He did a fantastic job.

It's a perfectly replicated horn section. You'd never know that's just one person doing it all.

Bill: He came from Boston and he was into the blues scene there, and he was trying to make a name for himself here in Austin. I forget how we hooked up with Dan, but he came with us and he learned a lot from us. I think this recording session helped him move forward in arranging and getting a lot of his horn stuff together.

Kathy: He had the opportunity do a three part horn section himself, and boy, did he step up and knock it out of the park. He'll be playing for the official release of the CD with us at C-Boy's Heart & Soul on South Congress on November 6th [2015]. I like those funky lines he played on "Help the Bear [a Ted Taylor cover]." He came up a riff [Kathy sings] and he was like "Is that too cheesy?", and we said "No, you're right on track. Do more of that!" [laughter]

Bill: We heard the original version of "Help the Bear" on Paul Ray's Twine Time radio show here in Austin.

Kathy: Paul Ray hipped us to a lot of great music.

How about the bass player and organist, Hans Alehag?

Kathy: He is a word class musician. He's from Sweden. I think it was just off the cuff that he played the organ.

Bill: Right. He's worked on a lot of his own projects. He used to come sit in and play guitar with us in the clubs, and when we needed a new bass player he said "Well hell, I'll play bass for you. It took a short while for him to get used to playing bass, to stop playing guitar lines, and learn what bass is all about, but he really caught on, and really connected with that. He's still playing bass today for a lot of people.

Thinking about all these sidemen, you two have had a lot of different players in your rhythm section over the years. Does anybody in particular stand out that you'd like to mention?

Kathy: Keith Ferguson, for sure. Getting to play with him was a dream come true, and we've played gigs with Mike Buck [from the original Fabulous Thunderbirds, Leroi Brothers, Eve and the Exiles].

Bill: And Curly... remember Curly, the bald drummer? He was a drummer who, when he was on, he was the most snappy, powerful drummer that you'd ever heard.

Kathy: He never played anything the same way twice, but like Bill said, when he was on he could not be beat. We've always been kind of down in the trenches, so we always wanted to get the best rhythm section we could. That meant getting whoever was available and in town at that time, but we really weren't in the position to keep somebody like Keith Ferguson or Mike Buck busy enough to commit to us full time. So instead of sticking with a, not to be offensive, B or C player all the time, we'd get the best players we could at that time. We've played with a lot of people!

Bill: One thing for us is that we've learned to give good traffic directions for musicians, for instance if you're changing chords, like from the 1 chord to the 4 chord, to give everybody a heads up at the proper time. To learn the lingo, to tell everybody in shorthand, what the song's going to do. That's a skill that we've learned, from playing with all these people.

Kathy: Bill and I are so tight together, having been together for thirty-three years, and we're so fortunate to play with these A+ players like Jackie Newhouse, Ernie Durawa, Chris Alcaraz, Lynn Davis, Dylan Cavaliere, Nina Singh, and Mike Buck sometimes. All we need for it to be a Kathy and the Kilowatts shows is Bill and me and a killer rhythm section, and we can give them signals and it can happen, because Bill and I are so tight.

And good musicians like that know the shorthand. You don't have to spell it out for them, you just give then a nod or a turn and they're right there.

Bill: Casper Rawls was just giving us little visual cues. At our Planet Casper gig this afternoon, he was doing Hank Williams' "Your Cheating Heart", but he does it in such an interesting way that you think "Is that 'Your Cheating Heart'?"

Kathy: That's why they call it Planet Casper... he takes it into outer orbit! [laughter]

Bill: He is a consummate musician. He can play just about any style and play it really well... country and blues and rock 'n roll...anything.

Kathy: Yeah, we even got funky! My hair stood on end no less than five times today... just really awesome. He and Bill play off each other beautifully; they love playing together.

Bill: Yeah, I'll be like "Hey Casper, check this out" and I'll play something real crazy, and he'll come back with something even crazier!

I've known y'all for a long time, but I don't think I know this actual story. Kathy, how did you come to steal Bill away from the Kingpins? [an early Austin blues band with fellow Port Arthur natives Paul Orta on harmonica and Jivin' James Higgs on vocals]

Kathy: [Laughing] Well, let's see. Bill said later on that when I called him up, when I needed a guitar player for a gig, "Wow, you were really cut and dried!" I think, being a single woman in the music biz, I had walls up. "Can you do this gig, this time, this much money...", but the first gig that I played with Bill, we had chemistry and I loved playing with him. I know that the Kingpins were and are a great band. Paul Orta is a fabulous lead harmonica player, and he ran his band, but I knew that Bill had a lot more lead in him than what I heard with Paul. So in my band I encouraged Bill... he had to play a lot of leads in my band. There was no harmonica player, so he had to play all the leads. He was pushed into the deep end. He was already a great rhythm player and a good lead player, but with me he quickly became a great lead player also. I think that was probably one thing that made him want to join my band.

Bill: Kathy gave me a kick in the ass, if you want to put it that way. That was part of my growth as a guitar player and it really helped me out. I was at the right place; the Kingpins had gone through some changes. We had a lead singer, then this lead singer left, so we were sort of in flux, and when Kathy called me the timing was perfect and it gave me the opportunity to really stretch out some boundaries and to grow as a guitar player.

Kathy: Remember that killer blond bass player I used to have, Dee Harrell? She's a great musician, and we were just kidding Bill... we would just tease him before the gig and we would give him the eye and say "You better play good tonight!" and we'd laugh, and we thought he knew we just kidding. But he told me six months down the road he thought we were serious. We just teasing, but I guess it wasn't a bad thing to say!

On the "Groovin' with Big D!" CD, there's no producer listed, so I'm assuming you and Bill co-produced .

Kathy: Doyle certainly gave input, and so did Hans, and Ben Blank, who owned the recording studio helped, too, but we had the final word on everything. ? Needs the answer separated from the question

Bill: A lot of times when we'd go in the studio we only had a certain amount of money, and we knew we had this many hours... we need to get this stuff done and get it recorded. But on this project I said "Let's take our time, do the best that we can do, and record whatever we want to record 'till it's finished." And I think that's what we did on that one. It's the first time we ever really took the amount of time that we wanted to take and said "We want to do this, we want to do horns on this", and it was nice to have that kind of freedom and not be boxed in by time constraints.

Where did you do the recording for the "Groovin' with Big D!" sessions?

Bill: Ben Blank Audio on Guadalupe Street. It's not there anymore, but he still has a studio in town.

Kathy : We've been recording, of late, in two different studios - Murray Music, my brother David Murray's studio, and we've got a final mix on a song called "Let's Do This Thing" that I'm real happy with, and then we're also recording in Bouncing Baby, Jeff Botta and Nina Singh's studio. Jeff's played bass and Nina played drums on a couple of our new cuts.

Your mentioning Jeff Botta gets us back to the excellent musicians you often have the opportunity to play with, like his wife, drummer Nina Singh.

Bill: I saw videos of Nina playing drums, and I thought man, we've got to get her. That's how I found Dylan [Cavaliere]. I saw videos of him and said "We're gonna play with this stand-up bass player!"

It's nice, as you were saying, to have different people like that to play with in your rhythm section because it doesn't completely change your sound, but obviously working with a stand up versus an electric bass player, and one who's got a rockabilly background like Dylan changes the flavor a bit on some of the songs.

Kathy: It really does, and it keeps it exciting. One night you've got Jackie Newhouse, one of the great Texas blues players on electric bass... it doesn't get any better than that, and then you've got Dylan Cavaliere on the upright bass... he plays all of the blues stuff great and then he gets down on the rockabilly. When we started out there weren't that many rhythm players who really knew the roots music, and the ones who did were really in demand and it was hard to get them for gigs. Now, one of the good by-products of Austin being "The Live Music Capitol of the World" is that there are so many great players in town, and it's so much fun to play with them.

Before the "Groovin'" CD release was finalized, did y'all go back to the old tapes and re-record things, like new overdubs, changing vocals or solos you might not have liked, or is it all pretty much what you laid down during the original sessions in 1991?

Kathy: You know, that's a really good question. I can't believe you thought to ask that. You know how singers are... I would have loved to redo the vocals. The studio threw away our masters, so we couldn't. There's nothing I would have changed with the instrumentation - it's perfect, but Bill helped me to see and understand that it's a historical document of where we were at then, and let it stand as it is and we'll be following it up with a whole new project of all new originals soon. I am really proud of "Groovin' with Big D!" I think it's a great project.

I think it is, too. The temptation would be there to redo tracks, since your playing and singing skills evolve and improve over the years, but in this case it wasn't an option.

Kathy: That's one cool thing about the kind of music we play. We can just keep, God willing, getting better and honing it down, maturing and expanding, until we're 100!

Bill: I want to keep this style of music going and that's another thing. I feel like a lot of these players that we've come in contact with, we've flavored them, seasoned them if you will, added spice to them. We dig this kind of music, and hopefully we've influenced them in some way, seeing what we do.

That's interesting, because that's one of the first things that popped into my head when I knew you were putting out this recording. I didn't know whether you had the time or the will to redo anything. Without the masters, about all you'd be able to do is add something, and it really doesn't need anything added to it because it's already so fully fleshed out musically. It's all there, and it's right, so why mess with it?

Bill: There are a lot of cuts from that session we didn't include on the CD. We've held those back and will probably put them out on a bits and pieces CD or something like that. Kathy's always writing new songs, and we kind of have this stable of songs that we haven't recorded that are in one category: they're ready to go, we need to go in the studio and do it, then we have a stable of other songs that we've touched on, and they're formulating. They're out in the universe returning to the planet.

Kathy: A lot of bands, like when I read Keith Richards' autobiography, and their recording process and how they would kind of have those bits and pieces that Bill's talking about that are simmering on the back burner for us, and that's what they would take into the studio and they had the luxury and the money to flesh them out in the studio. Money's been a concern for us, because it can go very quickly when you're in the studio paying by the hour, so we want to have our stuff together, rehearsed, and ready to go when we go in. We'll do rough recordings before we do the finals... go to some rehearsal space that has recording capability, and usually there'll be huge changes from that before we go in to do final recordings.

Something that's always intrigued me is the process of songwriting and working out the songs from just a rough sketch. Even once you have a solid song - "OK, I've got the chords, I've got the melody, I've got the changes", there are still a lot of different directions you can take that as far as the tempo, the aggressiveness... I've heard takes by artists on the same songs that sound completely different, just because the arrangements or instrumentation or tempo have been altered. How do you decide what sounds best? You think "I wrote this song as kind of a slow song, but it might sound better played twice as fast."

Kathy: That's true.

Bill: Yeah, we've done that.

Kathy: There's a song we're recording right now called "Spell It Out". I look back at my old notes and also we did a rehearsal space recording of it years ago, with Alex Napier playing bass. What ended up being the chorus, the hook of that song, was just a verse of the song.

Bill: Kathy recorded a song called "Loveaholic" which, we thought of it as a country song but it just didn't have any kick to it, so I had the idea of putting it to a crazy-ass rockabilly beat and it gave it a whole new life.

Kathy: It is going over big time now! We recorded it with Dylan Cavaliere on upright bass doing his triple slap, and it sounds fantastic. I wrote that song with my brother David Murray. When it was a country song it was Snoozeville. It just wasn't happening.

I wanted to run through a few of the songs on the CD and hear your thoughts on them. "Off the Clock" seems like the obvious song to start the CD with. As a working stiff, it's one of my favorites.

Kathy: I wrote that song when I managed a color photo lab. I was in the darkroom a lot and it was a really intense job. It wasn't what I wanted to be doing, but it helped pay the bills, and I punched the time clock on that job. I remember punching out one day... I was having a hard time not thinking about the job and not having it weigh on me when I was away from it. It's kind of an anthem of not allowing anything to encroach on your life.

I like Floyd Domino's piano on the tune. There's a lot of good ivory-tickling going on there. Did you just ask him if he'd play on the sessions?

Kathy: Yeah, he had played on our previous project we'd released on cassette in the pre-CD days called "Exception to the Rule." So we've done several things with him, gigs and recordings, and we'll probably work with him again. If he's in town and he's free, he likes to play!

At first listen, "Firefly" didn't really grab me, but like a few other of your songs, after I listened to it a few times I dug it. It's got an interesting arrangement on it with the starting and stopping. Bill has a great solo on it, but also the interplay between the guitar and vocal on the verses.

Kathy: Koko Taylor told us one time that people like what they hear, and if she was played more on the radio people would like her, but they wouldn't play her on the radio. I've had that same experience so many times, where on the first listen I'm lukewarm, and then with subsequent listenings I end up passionate about somebody's music. Now "Groovin with Big D!" has been getting airplay all across the U.S., plus Canada, northern Europe, and Australia, and one of the songs that has been played quite a bit is "Firefly." One thing that's interesting to me is that on my "Relatively Blue" CD we worked so hard to have every one of those ten cuts be radio ready, and other than Don O., Mike Buck and Larry Monroe playing other songs, it was the first two tracks that got the most airplay. What we've heard since then is that programmers and deejays are going to listen to the first two cuts and that's it. So getting airplay on a bunch of the other cuts lets me know they're listening to the whole thing.

I find it interesting that you put out old material like this and have it suddenly so well received. I'm sure you find that very gratifying.

Kathy: Yeah, Bill really pushed and said "This thing has been released on cassette, but never given proper treatment', so I gave it the green light and said "Let's go ahead and release it and send it to everybody we can think of." We're getting emails every day that it's getting played.

"Room for More" is a good example of something I like about your songwriting, Kathy, and that is the way you use the lyrics, in this case talking food and eating, to speak metaphorically.

Kathy: I love those bump and grind blues, and Bill plays great on that.

Bill: Some music is played from your head, but that kind of song is played from your pelvis!

"Take a Chance" has a catchy groove. It's got such a good arrangement, with the guitar and organ together, and then there's Dan's classic sax riffs.

Kathy: That was one of the things that made me know Bill was the one for me, because when we started dating he would come to me and say "I think this would be a good song for you to cover". I'd always found my own material, but he was always right in his song choices. He found that semi-obscure Junior Parker song, and I love it. We've done that live with an actual three-piece horn section led by Dan Torosian.

I've heard you playing "Never Trouble Trouble" recently, and I didn't realize it was such an old song until I saw it on the CD. Is it something you've been playing live all this time, or is it one that just comes and goes?

Kathy: It's one that's been on the front burner for a while, because people seem to like its message. "Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you", then you give 'em all you've got!

Kathy: One of the inspirations for that song was another great horn player. I can't tell you who he is because he's a 10th degree Black Belt, and you would never in a million years know that this guy could kick your ass. I took a self-defense class from him many years ago, and one of the things he taught the women in class was that the number one thing you have on your side is the element of surprise. No one would ever think this peaceful guy can do what he can do, but if anyone ever messed with him and he had to protect himself or someone else, he could get the job done. So that's kind of what that song's about.

Another of the great covers you do on the CD is Ted Taylor's "Help the Bear." If I'd ever heard it before, I'd forgotten it. At first I just assumed it was one of your originals, then I looked at the credits.

Kathy: Yeah! "If you see me in a bear fight, don't help me, help the bear." I can relate to that, can't you? If somebody's messing with my love... whoo, I could probably get pretty mean!

Let me ask you about "Mr. Negavibes." The first time I heard y'all play that was at your performance in Allen, Texas at the end of July, so I figured "Oh, here's another new song", but then I assume anything I've never heard you play before is a new song. Little did I know, it's been around forever.

Kathy: You want to know what the inspiration for that song was? You know how Keith Ferguson had such a wicked sense of humor? I'm not going to say who he used to call this, but he used to refer to him as Mr. Negavibes. Every time he'd say that, I'd think it would be a great song! The next thing that came to mind was "Your cold words sparked a fire today. Hot shock tears us apart." I wrote that song pretty quickly. Sometimes it takes a long time; that one came quickly. Keith handed me that title.

The last song on the CD is "Good Rockin' Daddy", which is a classic Etta James song, but y'all do it in a totally rave up version.

Kathy: Yeah, Bill got the idea to do it butt-rockin' style, and I think it was very effective. Doyle told us after we recorded it that the way we did it, not that straight R&B Etta James style, gave him the idea to do the rockin' version of Jimmy Reed's "Baby, What You Want Me to Do" he recorded.

Bill: Sometimes when you take a song that you've heard a million times and give it a different groove, it brings new life to it, and I think that's what we did with this one.

Kathy: I'm not for changing things just to change them, but that one... I thought it really worked.