LARRY BROWN: You and your beautiful wife, are married to your music as well as to each other. When did you realize you were that devoted to music, that you had no other choice? DAVID MORGAN: I always knew that I loved music. My parents told me that music was something that you whipped out at parties, to get people around a piano having a good time, and that it would make you very popular...I was also told that it was a horrible way to make a living and only dissipated people engaged in it really, that it was full of things like immorality and drug use. LB: Guess we proved that... DM: The first time I realized I was hooked on music, I was with you (referring to sister Nancy Morgan Ritter), sitting in a car in the driveway of somebody's home on the south side of the tracks in Hinsdale, Illinois. We had the radio on, it was all the way on, the station was WLS in Chicago, and they played all the rock songs. The Beatles came on, they were just hitting. (I was doing folk music back then,...Chad Mitchell Trio songs, Kingston Trio songs, and Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, and we had some pretty good harmonies going. But, I was about to go to college to be a med student, and I had no thought, no intention, of playing music for a living. We just played music because people enjoyed it and it was a good way to meet people, and do all kinds of things....(smile) ) So, we were sitting in the car..."Daytripper" came on, (imitates guitar track), then they all started singing, and about half way through that song was the turning point. I remember thinking I've got to do this, that is TOO COOL, that is TOO MUCH FUN not to do; I was completely carried away, we had the radio on full blast, the car was full of the record, that guitar riff, the whole deal, and I thought that this is more fun than anything I had ever HEARD before, more fun than anything I had ever DONE before, and I'm gonna do that, whatever else happens, that's what I am gonna do. And that was the moment. I was a senior in high school. I went off to college where I proceeded to do nothing but play music.. LB: Although you could afford to buy many different cars, you are thoroughly devoted to your 1965 blue Chevy van. What do you like about it so much, given that your lips will have to function as the bumper, should you hit anything? DM: It's the only thing in my life that hasn't changed in the last 25 years. If I were to write a biography right now, I might title it,"Three Wives--One Truck". hahaha .... There are a lot of reasons I am devoted to it...I am intimately familiar with it....no radio, no tape player, no CD player, nothing at all but the sound of the engine and the tires hitting the road; that's all you hear....I haven't had an oil dip stick in years, I don't need one, I know when I need oil...Also, I write in that truck. You know, there are a lot of people in the world, and in Los Angeles as well, that are, well, great people, I have nothing against them, but I wouldn't want to have them in my life. People who really treat other people differently, and think differently of other people, depending on their material possessions. When I am driving that truck, I am invisible to those people. They cannot see ME. It is the quickest way in the world to weed out the folks I don't want to know. Once, there was a girl in a session who just LOVED everything I did."Oh, I'd love to get together with you, maybe write songs with you, yayayaya" So, we left the session. I saw her at the light, waved to her from my truck - never saw her again. That worked for me! LB: You, for many years, have been doing session work in LA. You've sung T.V. series theme songs for Mike Post, and others. You did a myriad of jingles, film work. How good does it now feel to be performing your original music? DM: It's related to why I've played in clubs all these years, in spite of the fact that many session singers don't for many reasons. A lot of session singers won't sing in a club because you can blow your voice out. This has happened to me. You sing a few days in a club, then you get a call the next day asking can you be here in two hours. I have had to say that unfortunately I just did 3 days at the Boar's Head, so I am going to have to turn town this $15,000.00 gig because I just earned $150.00 the last three nights. The reason that I like doing clubs, and the reason I liked doing this CD better than commercials, is because, if you're a singer, and you've worked a long time at it, and you like what you do, then you like to be the one who decides when it's done, when it's right, when this is the way it should sound, this is the way it should be. When you do commercials, TV, you are not the one who decides when it's right...I've had people throw away things that were far superior than what they ended up with, simply out of not knowing. It is not about being good. So sometimes it ends up being a very unmusical operation. This CD has been the opposite of that. I was in a position with people who, if I said this isn't right, it needs to be different, listened to me. And I listened to them. A collaborative effort. ...One of the criterion ot this is that I had to be happy when it was done, same as club work. LB: David, when did you develop your love of Twinkies, and other junk snack food cakes? DM: Way too far back to remember....The term"junk food" didn't exist. in those days. Twinkies were considered as healthy as anything else, except they were bad for your teeth. And, if you had too many Twinkies, you got fat." The carcinogens, and all that s---, people didn't talk about that. As a kid, I remember putting 5 spoons of sugar on Frosted Flakes, and covering the whole thing with chocolate milk, and thinking that it was delicious. And it was! I've always been a sugar junkie, and for some reason, it just kept me wired, instead of making me fat. LB: David, a lot of your songs are predicated on your feelings for your fellow man. Tell me about some of the encounters with the homeless that led you to write songs about them. DM: There are two songs,"Dad Like You," which is on the CD, and "Catch Me When I'm Down," which is not. Both of these tell the stories of moments that really happened. Both involved my son Sam, an extremely gregarious young man since he was little. When my wife was working or away, he went everywhere with me. One night late, after a session, we stopped at a now closed coffee shop on Van Nuys Blvd. called "The Happening." They were always very generous about feeding homeless people, giving them a place to sit and a cup of coffee and a doughnut. That night, there was a guy in there named Jesse, who had his shopping cart with him. Sam struck up a conversation with him. After they talked awhile, he reached into his cart, pulled out a brand new pin-wheel, streamers still on it, a new flashlight, and handed them to Sam. I said"Hey, man that's really nice of you, let me give you some money for that." He wouldn't take it, of course. He said "That's a present from me to my friend Sam. Besides, I don't need any money right now. I'm fat!" He started to leave, looked back at me and added,"Catch me when I'm down..." The song was written the next morning. "Dad Like You" (on the CD) was the same thing. Sam and I were at Winchell's one morning, and Sam struck up a conversation with a homeless man. He looked kinda sad, mighty thin, but they had a great time. He turned to me as he left and said,"Man, why didn't I have a dad like you?" The song tells the balance of the story. LB: When you listen to popular music today, what about the production do you appreciate, and what, if anything has been lost in the technical aspects? DM: I haven't listened to a lot of radio in a long time. The music that I enjoy peaked with those incredible soul singers, the Wilson Picketts, Aretha Franklins. As far as I am concerned, Whitney Houston can't touch Aretha. I am sure that I am an anachronism, just as my truck is an anachronism, but nevertheless, that's the way it is. When we produced this particular CD, I did not take current production techniques into account. We sought only to evoke the songs themselves, in a way that worked. In some of those songs, that basically boiled down to the songs the way they were written, sitting down at the piano and playing the songs live. However, many of the people involved, like Gabe Veltri, and Jim Cox, are familiar with current production values and so they may have employed them without my knowing. It was nothing I had anything to do with; I am a songwriter, not a producer. LB: What do you like better, Q & A, or T & A? (laughter) What's the weirdest thing you did that featured your music? DM: You never know where your music will end up being placed. I had several tracks on Porkys II. I was singing love songs, while naked girls were running around on the screen. That was fun. LB: What do you like about LA? DM: Winter's a thing of the past. You don't need snow tires, antifreeze; the climate is wonderful. I also like Los Angeles, as opposed to California, just because there's so much going on here. This is where the music industry is. You can walk into a club, and for the price of a beer, you can hear somebody like Terry Trotter. You can hear some of the very best players in the world, just hanging out. You can play with people who have played on records you have loved as a child. They'll come right over. They'll do the gig for a hundred bucks. You can call up guys like Richie Hayward, from Little Feat. You can get John Molo from the Bruce Hornsby band, people who have played with the Beatles, extraordinarily talented and highly inspiring. The sharpening effect of the competition in Los Angeles, really helps you musically. It forces you to not be lazy. LB: What are your goals for the musical future? DM: Since these songs seem to touch people, they react to these songs, I'd like to get them out there, either singing them myself, or have other artists do them. Or both. Right now, I am being approached by Sticks Hooper to do a jazz album in San Francisco, of Jack Segal songs. That would be great. LB: Being a poppa several times over, how has having kids impacted the feeling with which you write? You wouldn't have any songs about the kids on the new CD would you? DM: Oh, yes, most of them. I was writing in the abstract until I had kids. When you have kids, nothing is more real than that."Gonna Be Rough" I wrote for my son Evan when his mother and I got divorced."Song for a Baby" (previously titled,"Little on the Outside, Big on the Inside,)" was written for my son James, when he was a baby. And, of course, "Dad Like You," was written about Sam. These are songs that wouldn't have happened were there not kids involved, situations that wouldn't have happened without kids, and when you see these things through a kids' eyes, you notice things that you don't see as an adult. Ordinarily, you are thinking and seeing with a goal in mind, rather than seeing what's there.. When you sit in the grass with a kid, and you see a homeless person, you suddenly realize what they're seeing - not a Homeless Person, but a PERSON, a GUY, which is what he is, WHICH IS WHAT HE IS, that's all he is. You can forget that and start detaching labels from people which shouldn't be there. You take those labels off and you get a feeling for the person, which can then be evoked in a song in a way that those folks, who don't look at people the way children look at people, can always remember. The songs can remind them. So the kids have had a huge impact. They have opened my eyes, opened everything about me, to the reality of what you are really looking at when you look at another person. LB: That's a wonderful answer. Interview conducted May 28, 2000, by Larry Brown. Larry Brown is a life long musician, who has played in bands for many years with David. (Used by permission)