– In 1981, when I was living in Northern New Mexico, I had the great fortune to play bass in the Bud Green Band. I wasn’t much of a bassist, but they needed someone to complete the lineup and they let me be the one. Playing music with David Phillips and Dick Padberg, two of the most amazing musicians I have ever encountered, was one of the greatest highlights of my life. I’m sure Howard Stoneback, who played the drums with us for those couple of years, felt the same way.
– Our practices each week were certainly the highlight of my week, especially when David would let loose and start vamping on the keyboards and making up hysterical lyrics until the rest of us were laughing too hard to play our instruments. In those days, we used a little portable cassette player, a cheap low fidelity unit, to record the practices just to capture what we were doing. I wound up with the cassettes, and 30 years later I have used modern desktop computer tools to import them into a modern format on modern media. This is the first excerpt I’ve extracted, a couple of minutes from a practice when we had just picked up a song by The Animals, and were starting to get the hang of it. David starts singing some goofy lyrics (“Bubbula, sometimes I feel a little kvetchy“), and then lets loose at the end with a wild organ ride that is half fooling around, and half jaw dropping fabulous improvisation.

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