ND: Then came Richard Buckner and Alejandro Escovedo, right?
EH: Richard opened for Son Volt a lot during those years, and I liked him immediately. So I would play with Richard during the opening set, too, and Richard started taking me out on his own, just him and me driving around in his Toyota truck. We were an odd duo, really loud and noisy. There was one point where we had four amps onstage, each of us playing in stereo. It sounded good from where we were sitting, anyway.
Alejandro was another guy I got to know from him opening for Son Volt. He contacted me later and I toured with him quite a bit for a couple of years, sometimes with him and Richard together as one big group. He was pretty open to anything I did, mixing pedal steel and cello [from Brian Standefer] into orchestral parts into this very nice, wide open mixture of stuff.
ND: It seems like any act you’re on a bill with, you wind up playing with them, too. Is that the best way to network?
EH: I’ve been real lucky. It’s always been word-of-mouth and friends of friends, happening organically and more for musical than business reasons. Joe Henry introduced me to a lot of people, Jay Bellerose among them — he’s an amazing drummer, played on the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss record. I’ve done a lot of work with him and Jennifer Condos, including a record we did with my wife, Kristin Mooney. I met Ray LaMontagne through them, too. The music is wonderful, they’re a great rhythm section and the gigs are beautiful. They’re in theaters with a really quiet audience that’s there to listen. That’s nerve-wracking, but it’s still better than bashing away in a rock club trying to overcome noise and shitty PAs.
ND: Do you still play a Williams pedal steel guitar?
EH: Yeah, I had Williams build me the custom guitar I play now, an eleven-string single-neck. They cost anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000. I’m not a real super gearhead. The search for tone is a lifelong thing, but to me it has more to do with pickups and amps and the way you play. The differences between pedal steel guitars are a little more subtle, more for the players themselves. It’s hard to experiment too much because they’re so expensive and they take up a lot of room. I’m pretty happy with my sound on the Williams, so I don’t go searching around too much.
Williams is a family business, Bill Rudolph makes them himself with his son.
I love cool old tube amps, like a little late-’30s/early-’40s Kalamazoo or a Supro Thunderbolt type with the original 15-inch Jensen speaker. I used an early-’60s Vox AC 50 head with a 2-12 cabinet for all the Son Volt stuff — the original cabinet had the Allman Brothers stencil on it.
But I mostly use one of two different custom-made amps. One is a Savage Audio Rohr 15, designed and built by Jeff Krumm and Andy Wolf up in Minnesota. The other is a Richtone 30-watt 2-12 combo, designed and built by Rich Lovato here in Los Angeles. They’re both wonderful. If I have to rent on the road, I usually go for the Fender blackface deluxe reissue. They’re reliable and sound pretty good. And I use a Goodrich LDR volume pedal, a Goodrich matchbox and a few pedals on a small pedal board, including delay and a hint of reverb.
ND: Do you write songs yourself?
EH: No. I’ve dabbled, but I could never be happy with anything I did. I’m really more about the sound of things. Someday I may do an instrumental record. That’s conceivable. We’ll see.
ND: Do you prefer playing live or recording?
EH: Well, I want to keep doing both because they’re really different. Playing live is really important to me — a good live night is one of my favorite things. But I love making records, too. Live, it just happens right then and you only get one chance to get it right. So there’s an intensity to it, and a crowd egging you on and looking for something. That’s the origin of music, playing for the sake of playing and once it’s done, it’s gone.
Making records, there’s not the pressure to make it happen right then. The great thing about it is you can sit back and analyze and redo. You’re making an object that’s going to be around, so you pay attention to the details. Although it’s better if it’s like live music. At least with what I’m involved in, the days of laying down a kick and then a snare and a bass and the guitar player comes in a week later, that’s gone. My favorite records tend to be done pretty live rather than pasted together in a chopped-up collage of half performances.
ND: What’s it like to listen to records you’ve played on?
EH: It can be satisfying or disturbing. A lot of times, it can be a bummer to hear, just torturous. You hear things you would’ve done different, if you could. It’s really hard to please myself with my own playing. But it’s a good way to learn, and every now and then it’s good to hear something that really worked. It’s like what they say about baseball, a guy with a .333 average is an all-star — and that’s a success rate of only one out of three. Music is kind of like that, a lot of misses. Those occasional things where you really hit it out of the park, though, they’re a pleasure to listen back to.
