Who did you work with, and what led you to 1969 ?
I used the same backing band, but I decided to do all the leads—lead guitar and rhythm and bass on a handful of songs. When I was a kid in 1969, I liked all kinds of music—rock, Motown, James Brown, and funk. I thought if I could make an album with all these different music influences—the Monkees, the Beatles, the Byrds, songs like [the Lemon Pipers’] “Green Tambourine”—I could create almost like a time machine. You should be able to go back and re-create a time period, because time is just a frame of mind. If I could put myself in that time period and go back and create, I would create this album.
Who inspired the first track, “We All Need Somethin’ ”?
I would say Sly. If Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly had a baby, it would be that song. Jimi was definitely a big influence for this record.
Tell me about “California Way”—what was the inspiration behind it?
I had gone to Malibu with my family, we drove to the beach, and that’s when that song kind of popped into my head. My daughter was out here. It was just beautiful, just one of those days. Me and my ten-year-old came up with the beat. The concept for that particular song came from the day I went to the Prince memorial on Wilshire. On my way there, I kept him humming “do do do.” I was talking to [former bandmates] Dez [Dickerson], talking to Bobby [Z]. I kept humming it and my son helped me come up with the beat.
Were you able to reunite with the family for the Prince tribute?
other guys were getting kind of restless. Prince was like, “Let’s see what happens if we do something with the band.” So we called ourselves the Rebels and we went out to Boulder, Colorado, to record. We did rock-climbing. We went out on the local college scene. We got to know each other. I got to know those guys a lot better because we were stuck in a weird place. I didn’t take it seriously. We took a gang of pictures. Me and Dez and Gayle [Chapman] did the [Rebels’] “You” song hanging out by the swimming pool. We were maybe nineteen, twenty years old. We did a whole album’s worth of material. I don’t think it was ever meant to be released. I think it just gave us something to do.
I agreed to do their tribute first. Then the Revolution asked me to do theirs. They said we are going to do ours before the family. I thought that was interesting, so I said, “Let me ask the family.” I wanted to make sure they didn’t have a problem with it. They didn’t, so I did it. They originally had two shows and they sold out in ninety seconds. I originally wanted to do just a couple of songs, and I ended up doing eight.
You decided to put out the EP, Black Man in America , first.
Tell me how the July 1979 sessions known as the Rebels project came to be.
Yes, those songs on the EP are speaking to where we are right now. “Hot Night in the Neighborhood” isn’t on the [new] album and that’s something I wrote right after Mike Brown died [after being shot multiple times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014]. “Hallelujah” is a song that’s, hopefully, the bridge, the redemption where we can get past all of this and get to the other side. Those two [songs] aren’t on the [new] album.
I think the concept came about just to keep us busy. We had just come off tour and people get antsy and start getting involved in other things if you don’t find something for them to do. Our first tour Prince lost his voice in Philadelphia, so we put off the Rebels project. We had to go right back out, and after we came off that tour, he was going to make the Dirty Mind album. I think, somewhere in between, there was the Rebels project. Dez did a lot of writing. I did a lot of writing, but I think some of the
Was it the label that didn’t want it to be released?
It was either Prince, his management, or the label that didn’t want it released. We never knew anything.
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