Vince Gill Interview (page: 2 / 7) Country Music Hall of Fame	Print Interview

Teachers aside, was there somebody who inspired you or opened up new possibilities to you?

Vince Gill: All of those musicians did. They were countless. I had my favorite records. I loved Chet Atkins, and I loved the Beatles, and I loved the people that I loved. But just that element of collaboration, of people gathering together and playing music. I saw it as a kid, didn't realize it. You know, my mom played a little bit, she played a harmonica, and she played two or three songs and ran out of breath and she was done.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My dad played the banjo and the guitar, and he had some friends, and they had a little band that would occasionally go play at an outdoor thing. You know, not professionally, but always just for fun. And I always got to play along, and just being around musicians was to me the neatest thing. I had garage bands, you know, where you found two or three guys in school that played. "Hey, let's start a band!" you know, and away we went. We'd go in the garage and bash away. I still work with a kid that I grew up with since seventh grade. We started playing music together when we got in junior high school and we're still together. He works with me and travels on the road and takes care of all my guitars. So it's remarkable to have your oldest friend out there, going through this experience with you. I called him when I had a couple of big hits and said, "Hey, do you want to go on this ride with me?" He was like, "Yeah, sure. Why not?" He was a musician too. And that to me was -- the beauty of collaborating was what I was really drawn to. I never wanted to just be me by myself with music. I liked a lot of people playing it.

What did your parents think when you first told them you wanted to be a professional musician? Did you tell them? Did you know yourself?

Vince Gill: I think they knew early on that that was the only thing that was in store for me. I mean, I was a decent golfer. I played on the high school golf team, and I went through high school and I played out a lot.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My mom and dad were not real strict, in the fact that they would let me go play in bars, you know, while I was in high school in different bands. And they said, "You get to school and keep your grades up and don't give us any reason to not let you." So I tried to be respectful of all of that. So I had so many years under my belt, even when I was a freshman, junior, and all through high school, that I was out playing gigs and traveling around some with bands and to different parts of the States. I think they saw the writing on the wall, and they weren't surprised when I didn't really have a plan to go to college when I got out of high school. I wouldn't advise that for anybody, it just worked for me. Somebody called me -- I was 18 -- and said, "Hey, do you want to come be in this band in Kentucky?" and I said sure. So I packed up everything and I moved there and started playing with that band for a while. That led to another band, and then I moved to California, and that led to another band. It's just interesting. Everything that happened to me was a result of just going and trying to get better.

I've tried to always play with better musicians. That's how I got discovered, I guess, if you want to use that word. But that camaraderie that you had. You know, one musician would say, "Hey, if you're looking for this kind of player, this guy is really good." And your reputation would then be with some of the people you were associating with and playing with. I didn't have goals, I didn't have dreams of stardom. I wasn't saying I have to be famous.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I have the best time playing music. And my folks saw that. And so they never said, "When are you going to go get a real job?" because I had really put a lot of effort into it long before it was time to move on and go to college and think about something else. I think that's another reason maybe a lot of young musicians fall by the wayside. They're not willing to do what I did, which is go out there and play on street corners once in a while to make enough money to pay your rent and be willing to starve. You know, they only want that safety net. They want that cushion. And I never needed it. I don't feel any different today at 52 than I did at 18. And what's in the bank account has never changed one ounce of what I loved doing. I'd still be doing it at 52, if I was still playing those same beer joints.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

I think that was the objective of my mother and father in a sense. I talk to my mom these days. She said, "I think my job as being your parent was to make you be a happy person." And that to me is what parenting is. It's not about how much money can you make. She said, "I feel like I've done a good job, because he's getting to do what he loves and he's happy doing it, and he doesn't seem to care that he's struggling to pay the rent most of the time. So why should I worry? He's a happy boy."

Setting out on your own, were you ever afraid of failure?

Vince Gill: No, I wasn't. I didn't know any better. There's some beauty in that, you know. The best part was I didn't need much. If you don't have much, you don't need much. That felt good to me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. To me, progress was not how much more money I could make, but how much better I could be. How am I as a guitar player, at this point, versus what I was three years ago? And then, who am I playing with? Am I playing with better musicians? Yes. So every step that I felt like I made was progress in my mind. It might not have been financially the same thing. There was one point when I was in my early 20s, I'd spent a few years playing with Pure Prairie League, and I had a few hit records and was on television shows and was the front man. I was the lead singer, and I quit to go be a side man with one of my favorite musicians and songwriter-singers, a guy named Rodney Crowell, to just be his guitar player, harmony singer. He said, "What are you doing? You were the guy in the front!" "Yeah, but this band's better. These songs are better." To me it was a move up. To most people it wouldn't look like that, but I knew in my heart, and my ears told me this is a better thing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It's not always about the attention you get and the dollar bill and how many of them you get. Sometimes you make decisions that defy logic, I guess. But I made one, and years later I was invited by Mark Knopfler to join Dire Straits. And it was at a time where I was pretty broke, you know, I was really struggling. I had had a record deal for several years, but couldn't turn that into hit records, and couldn't turn that into a big career, and even though I was trying. And this would have been a very lucrative, very great move financially, and in a lot of ways. Musically it would have been a great move. But I said, "I can't do it right now. I said, "I just changed record companies and I've invested a lot of my life in country music," and I said, "I don't want to bail on it, because I think I have something to offer it." And you know, it was like, it was the golden egg being dangled in front of me, and I turned it down. And I was lucky, because then the next record I had was this massive hit, and it completely turned my life around. So I made a decision based on my heart, and it hasn't let me down very often.

Why wasn't Dire Straits the fork in the road that you picked? Was your relationship with Mark Knopfler an important factor in that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Vince Gill: When it happened -- it happened I think in 1989 or 1990. And he came to see me play in New York. I was a huge fan of Mark Knopfler's and the band (Dire Straits) and loved their records, and loved the way he played the guitar. Once again, that common bond that would have drawn him to me and me to him was that we liked the way each other played. So there was that, we had something in common. And at the time it was a fork in the road. And the obvious choice, because of what had happened up until then, would have been go and go play with this nationally known band, do a world tour, make a bunch of money, get your family healthy and pay for your house and all that. But I chose the other one, just because I believed in myself. And it was not the decision that would have probably made the most sense for the circumstances that I was in. But once again, I just felt like making that decision was the acceptance of failure.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

I don't know that I was willing to accept that failure. To me, it would have derailed what I was trying to accomplish. And most people would have thought the smart decision would be go get healed up. Musically, I wish I could have. I wanted to badly, just because I would have loved the experience musically. But like I said, in a sense it kind of accepted defeat, that I had not done what I'd hoped I would do. So I kept believing in myself, and that's why I think that I made that decision.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I felt like I had a new shot, with a new company, and new people saying they liked what I did. Because the relationship is still very good that I have with the people that ran RCA at the time, we're still great friends. But you know, everybody knows it didn't work, and who knows why. I can say that my name's on the record, so I can take the fact that they didn't work and I'm okay with that. But it ended in a way where I knew that they didn't believe in me, you know, as a songwriter. Maybe they did as a singer and a player and all that, but they didn't as a songwriter, and that was of equal importance to me, being a songwriter. So I made that move to change and try something else. I wanted to write my own songs. So if I had made that record, When I Call Your Name, and then turned my back on it and gone on to do something else, I just didn't feel like I was giving myself the opportunity that I'd created for myself for some new life, new blood, and a new shot. I don't know that it made any difference which record company it was. I don't think they'd like to hear that, but, you know, they all worked hard with every record I ever made, both companies. I still believe it was the song. It was the right song at the right time.

When you made the decision to not go with Dire Straits, it was because you believed in yourself. Where did that confidence come from?

Vince Gill: I don't know that it was as much confidence as it was my fear of saying I have not succeeded in what I wanted to do. I think that's a much harder bridge to get over. That's a struggle, one that might be associated with failure. You can always react favorably when things are great. That's easy. Anybody can accomplish that. That's confidence in a sense, because you're reacting to something that's done very well. But how you react when something doesn't go very well is really a much truer test of character and a much truer test of who you really are. I really think that it might have been more of a decision based on fear than of confidence.

When you were a kid, living in Oklahoma City, you decided to pack up and go to Louisville, Kentucky. Were you just going to land in Kentucky and figure it out, or had you set some things up? What took you to Kentucky?

Vince Gill: A job. There was a band called the Bluegrass Alliance in the world of bluegrass in the mid 70's and early 70's. They were one of the really well-known bands in bluegrass. A lot of great musicians went through that band. So once again, it was a step up for me and an improvement over the situation I had been in before. I didn't know anything. I had all the stuff that I owned in my van. A guitar and a few t-shirts and my golf clubs and whatever I had, and I went off to Kentucky to play in this band. I found a little place to live. My rent was $15 a month and I stayed in an attic in this old cool house in Cherokee Park, a house full of musicians that all loved bluegrass music and, you know, I just followed my muse. It was a great experience. It gave me a chance to travel around the United States a lot and play at different kinds of festivals. It was a really fun time because of the innocence of it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think one of my favorite memories of those days was I ran out of clean clothes. And obviously my mom's not around and always washed my jeans and my t-shirts. And I had this pile of dirty laundry, and I said, "Now what do I do?" So I went to a laundromat and I started watching people. Okay, they put those in there, and they put all the white stuff in there, and they kind of put the money in and dump that stuff on top. And I figured out how to wash my clothes and figured out how to dry them. Then they were all dry, and I said, "How do you fold them?" And this woman was over there just laughing her head off. She said, "You don't know how to fold your clothes, do you?" I said, "No, ma'am, I've never done my laundry before." "Well, God bless your mother, but come here. I'm going to teach you how to fold your shirts." I still fold my t-shirts that way today. So life's about stepping in there and learning and making mistakes. You're never going to learn anything if you don't make a mistake. That's where you find, to me, the real beauty in life, is screwing something up and learning from it. And I did it plenty.

It was a great time. I moved from there to Southern California, a 19-year-old kid, and I moved to Los Angeles to play bluegrass music and be in this great band. It was a great time in Southern California. The music scene there was unbelievable.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The first gig that I did with a band that I had joined was a club there called the Troubadour in L.A. It's like one of the most famous clubs in history, one of those great music clubs. We opened for a guy name Guy Clark who was a great singer-songwriter from Texas. I walked into this gig and I couldn't believe who was there. It was all the people that I was aspiring to be like: Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, all these guys that were all playing with Guy, and I think Linda Ronstadt was there that night. And I couldn't believe it, you know. Here are all these people that I've seen on the backs of these records that I've studied my whole life, and there they were. And I made friends, and you know, they heard me play, they heard me sing. And that just kind of was another rung in the ladder, so to speak, you know. I wouldn't call it networking, but that's exactly what it was. Just getting out there and jumping in the middle of the water and see how deep it is.

Well, the Troubadour is smack in the heart of the Sunset Strip, and it's notorious for agents and who's in the audience. Did that lead you to sign with RCA?

Vince Gill: Yeah. I spent several years in Southern California and loved it, and I got some session work playing on people's records, singing on people's records. I joined Pure Prairie League for three years, three records. They had a major label record deal and that was exciting. Then I stopped doing that, and I started playing with Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash. Rosanne was having big hits, and I was her guitar player, and it was a great job to have for a guitar player, because it featured the guitar a lot. And the people that played before me were James Burton and Albert Lee, arguably two of the greatest guitar players that ever lived. James played with Elvis for years, so I was occupying this pretty heavy seat for a guitar player.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the guys in the band was a guy named Tony Brown, who also used to play with Elvis. He was a piano player, and he played with Rodney and Rosanne, and he was also an A&R guy for RCA Records in Nashville. He said, "Man, you need to start making country records!" And so he signed me to RCA in 1983, and I made my first record and not much happened. I made my second record and not much happened. I made my third record and not much happened. And then I got another chance. I moved over to MCA Records a few years later and got another opportunity. You know, I really am grateful for the years of struggle in looking back. I think at the time it was hard, because you feel like you're beating your head against the walls, saying, "Why isn't this working?" You know? Well, maybe if you go around the wall... you know, so I found some way to go around the wall. In hindsight, I think all those years of struggle was a humbling experience.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It was a learning experience. I got to spend a lot of years really putting my feet in a lot of different places. I sang on so many records in that stretch of time in Nashville in the 80's. I don't know how many artists' records I've worked on over the years. I know it's -- well, over 400 or 500. Something like that. And not that that's bragging, but it's how I made a living. You know, people thought enough of what I did as a supporting cast member to be a part of those records. And in all honesty, that's what I had really aspired to be, more than an artist even. And I said, "I don't want to be one of those guys that their name is down there playing on the records." Even saying it today, I would have been fine had that been my career, you know, because I didn't have to be at the center of it to have it matter. I just had to be a part of it, and it mattered. That's what I loved, was the democracy of making music in that it takes all of those elements that most people aren't even aware of. And that's fine. Some people just listen to music and they focus on the guy up there singing. But I'm listening to the bass player, and listening to the drummer, and listening to what the guitar player plays. I love every note of it. And so that's to me what's beautiful about collaborating with people is that all the notes are equal, and it takes all those notes to make something great.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

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