Joe Hammons

Kim...Tell me Joe, when did you come to Chico, and what happened to you?

Joe...Ok, what happened to me. Ahh...

When did you first come? You're from L.A. to begin with, right?

Originally, and I had lived in Sonoma County and moved here from there in the beginning of '75, end of 74, I'm not sure exactly when. Before too long I wound up working with Bob Seals in his studio and sound company, and which is, I recall, the pathway that I met the folks in Jack Straw and the Butte Creek Band.

Did you come here initially to go to school?

No, no. I was living with a woman in Sonoma who chose to go to school here, and I was coming up here pretty much every weekend from Sonoma to visit her and actually initially did not like the town at all! I kind of came to town and just, for whatever reason and I can't even remember what it was, I was just seeing the surface of it I guess, and I just didn't see anything I really liked.

Did it began to grow on you a little bit?

Yeah, I pretty quickly fell into circles of people with, if not common, at least complementary interests. I pretty quickly found out who and where the players were, who and where the people who were into audio were. From that I wound up connecting up with Bob Seals and, while I didn't know any of the people in either band [Butte Creek or Jack Straw] prior to that point, I had seen a few of them playing in different scenarios. I think the first time I saw Jimmy Fay play was at a jam behind Greenwoods up in Cohasset. But anyway, I wound up recording Jack Straw at Bobby's studio, Bordello. The band at that time was J.B. Keeter, Billy and Bobby Baxmeyer, Jimmy Fay, and Jerry Morano.

How was it that you eventually started playing with these guys?

I recorded them, and during the course of the session I'd heard the tunes enough that I kind of learned them without having to rehearse with the band. And there was an occasion, and I remember specifically that we were playing "Boogie On Reggae Woman," and I was playing somebody's acoustic guitar, and Jerry was there 'cause he was singing it. This may have been after I had actually joined Jack Straw, but I remember Michael Cannon being there, and maybe a couple of people from Butte Creek. It was at 19th and Hemlock, and at that point somebody had left Jack Straw, and I believe it was J.B., 'cause I don't remember playing a gig with him. And it was maybe not too long afterwards I got a call. This was in January, 1976. I did about two gigs with Jack Straw, and then Jack Straw, I don't know if they broke up because they were breaking up, or whether Jack Straw ceased to exist because everybody joined the Butte Creek folks to form Spark & Cinder. I got the word that Jack Straw wasn't happening anymore and shortly after that I got a call that said, "Well we're not doing this, we're doing that." Then I played my first gig with them at the Odyssey.

Was your first gig Spark's first gig?

Well, at the very beginning of January of '76 there had been another gig or two, and John Glick played guitar.

So when the band got up and going, who all was in it?

The original band was pretty solidly Jimmy, Jerry, Billy, myself, Michael Cannon, Marilyn [Cannon] was in there pretty solid, John Lapado.

Was Bobby [Baxmeyer] gone by this point?

Bobby was gone by that point He wasn't involved in the very beginning of Spark & Cinder.

Was Kim Cataluna in it at the very beginning?

No. We got a little ways before she was in it. She wasn't in it all that long.

Do you remember Ray's Rendezvous [in Paradise] happening right at the beginning of Spark?

Not exactly right at the beginning. We did some stuff at the Odyssey and Portuguese Hall, and it wasn't very long before we started getting into the Rendezvous. It was other stuff first. We didn't immediately jump into that.

Had Jack Straw been doing many of the same original songs that Spark was doing?

Some of the stuff that Jimmy had written Jack Straw had already been playing. Songs like "On the Floor," "Big Apple Pie Face." He already had tunes. I think Billy had a couple of tunes.

And Lapado had a couple and Cannon had a few.

John didn't really have, the only tune that John really wrote was "Let Me In." And that came along later. Michael had some stuff, and we were picking from every place.

Where did the whole Reggae thing come from? When did they discover it? Who discovered it?

They were already into it before I joined them. I'd been listening to it before, but it wasn't something I heard and immediately had to go find every "rock steady" or "dance hall" thing I could find. But I dug it and was aware of the style and had already formed an idea of how I would play it by the time I met those guys. It wasn't music I was really pursuing myself, as a musician. Jimmy is very big into it and was at the time. There was kind of desire on everybody's part at that time to show everybody that Eric Clapton wasn't the person who discovered reggae. "I Shot The Sherrif" had just come out in the previous year.

What were your strongest musical influences at that time?

When I joined them I had a pretty wide range of stuff that I'd been through, from living in L.A. and Sonoma and touching on some of the Bay Area folks. In L.A. I wound up playing, as a kid, alot of surf music, then rhythm and blues. That was the thing that pretty much started it for me. That kind of evolved into discovering Miles Davis and things like that.

What about the Dead? For me, when I first began to see Spark & Cinder, it seemed real Grateful Dead-like. First, in a visual way because there were sort of the scruffy, Jerry Garcia-looking guys. And you had really long hair then, like Bob Weir had. And Billy reminded me of Phil Lesh: the tall blond guy singing high and playing bass. And the music sounded kind of like the Dead. Jimmy's singing sort of sounds like Jerry's singing a little bit, and there was something about the groove and the vibe. And your rhythm guitar playing was real Bob Weir-like I thought, and your soloing was kind of Jerry-like.

By that time I was looking to NOT do that. I consider myself now to be at least a latent Dead Head. But when I was living in L.A. I was driving up to the Bay Area to see shows and stuff like that from as soon as I was able to drive. Like in '67, '68 I was traveling to see the Dead, and used to quite a lot. I was at a Dead show when they announced Janis Joplin died. I was at a Dead show and I saw Cippolina's last night with Quicksilver. I was playing in a band in L.A. that moved up from L.A. to Sonoma together, as a band, and we were doing stuff probably closer to what the Dead were doing than Spark & Cinder ever did with regard to the free-form of the jamming and stuff like that. By the time I'd left LA, and by the time we'd moved that band to Sonoma, I pretty quickly got into the realization of, "Hell it's been done, there's somebody already doing this." By that time I had started to try and actually learn some stylings that were appropriate to that kind of music, and I kind of inevitably wound up to learning some Garcia licks. I never really wanted to learn Garcia licks because I'm of the mind that there's no such thing, given the fact that the Dead were trying to create new shit all the time. To me, to hear people playing the jam off of "China Cat Sunflower" from "Europe '72" here in '96 kind of defeats the whole idea of what is and isn't the Grateful Dead, and I rejected that whole thing. I like to jam and I like to rage and all that, but the last thing in the world I wanted to be in was a Grateful Dead band. At that point I found it to be a trap.

You started playing with Spark pretty much at the beginning and played with them for how long?

Yeah, I played till middle of '79.

And ever since you've been playing guitar and doing audio for people and playing with Tunetown now, freelancing if needed and as needed.

Still working!