Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
Peter Greenberg: Since the band got back together again and we recorded Savage Kings, which we released on Munster in 2011, we’ve mainly toured in Europe. We primarily rent Sprinter Vans, which our guy in Paris, Toma, drives us. He’s also our agent booking the venues and manages our tour. He knows how to get us from place to place. Anyone needs to connect with him; it’s Toma Jeannot with the Rockin’ Dogs Agency.
Barrence Whitfield: As The Savages, we were dormant for over a decade.
Greenberg: But not forgotten. Starting from 2013, when we were on Bloodshot, we toured the US extensively. Part of that deal required us to play 80-plus dates a year in The States.
Whitfield: Next year is the 40th anniversary of the release of our Mamou album. The Savages will return to The States, for sure. Starting in Boston, most likely.
Greenberg: Even though we get rentals, we’ve had some breakdowns. Like last year, we were in Spain, broke down, and found we didn’t have a jack. We’re there trying to figure out how to deal with this. We’ve also had other times where we got multiple flat tires, like when we were in England. At first, we got a flat tire in Ireland on the highway on a Sunday, which also was a Holiday. We sat there in the rain for six hours, waiting for someone to show up. We had to wait forever and couldn’t jack it up because it was too heavy. There was too much crap in it. And then, I think it was the next day or something, we were driving back in England, and the other tire went flat. And we managed to roll off the highway right into a Tire Store.
Whitfield: A miracle. Because if we didn’t run into that place to get the tire fixed, man, we’d have gone on that bad tire for a while, and another flat could have happened. It was like somebody was watching us.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Greenberg: Barry, you can answer that.
Whitfield: It wasn’t easy. Just find a cheap place, because we’re on a budget. Though in Spain, it’s not too bad. You can find these little places during Noon and 3:30, Siesta Time. They have different plates like they do Tapas and all that stuff. So that’s usually. Sometimes we run into that. Other times, we just like rough it. France is a little different because when we stop, we go to the boulangeries, and they have the best shit and the best sandwiches, pastries, and stuff. Sometimes, we do what all other bands do when they bring us food for our green room: we just take it. “How much water is here? Get it. What cheese is left? Get it.” You know, things like that. The most important thing is good water. We take away as many bottles as we possibly can.
Also, Don’t do fast food. No way.
Greenberg: One like chain on the highway in England supposedly serves packaged “healthy” food. It’s either Costa or WH Smith. So we often get stuff like yogurt and salads there, as an alternative to meat pies.
Whitfield: Steak and Kidney, yeah, those can kill you. But fast foods. No, you don’t fly all the way to England or Spain just to go to McDonald’s.
Greenberg: Sometimes, Barrence sneaks over and gets a McDonald’s. And then he kind of acts like he doesn’t know how it got into his hand.
Whitfield: Sometimes you just need that cheeseburger to keep going.
Greenberg: I go, “Where did you get that? And he goes, “This?” He looks at it like he doesn’t know how it got there.
Do you visit record stores while you're on tour?
Greenberg: Obviously.
Whitfield: We’re single-oriented kind of guys; we love them. Give us a stack of 45s any day. Peter doesn’t even look at the albums when we hit the record stores. He just goes to every 45. Bang, there’s the box of them as he heads to the register. Those, the 45s, are the lost items of music history. We always find a rare B-side that no one’s ever heard or ignored, or you find a record that, you know, some label released but tanked in sales or wasn’t radio-friendly, but it’s a good song; at least to us, it’s a good song.
Greenberg: King Records. The One-Derful, Marvlus, M-Pac, Soul Conglomerate. Peacock. Labels like that. The Savages have been mining the King Label since our first LP in 1984, with “Fat Mama” by Ronnie Molleen and “Miss Shake It” by Baba Thomas. The cool thing about King was all the genres got mashed together and mixed up. R&B singers sang country, which ended up sounding like Rock and Roll, and Country singers sang R&B, which turned into Rockabilly. And that’s kind of what we are, more of a mash-up of different genres and styles that we just throw together in the most Savages way. We do a song on Glory recorded by Beau Dollar for King,
“I’m Ready, I’m Ready.” It was a double A-side. Also, “I’m Young” was a B-side by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. King is a very underrated label that doesn’t get enough attention. And we like the underdog. As we are, we’re underdogs.
Whitfield: “I’m Ready, I’m Ready” was produced by James Brown. He wrote it, too.
Greenberg: OK, not a total underdog. “Flyin’” by our bassist Phil Lenker was influenced, stylistically, by 1950s rockabilly and black gospel group records like those of The Gospelaires of Dayton, Ohio, who recorded for the Peacock Label, out of Houston.
Whitfield: The blues bass lines, driving rhythm guitar, and foot-stomping percussion rocking under those soul-shouter gospel vocals of those groups are our sound. The Savage sound.
Greenberg: Those 1950s gospel groups cook it down to its most rockin’ heart-felt basics. Nothing extra added. Straight, no chaser. That’s how it’s supposed to be and what we strive for.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
Greenberg: None. I change them every show. And, I almost never break them because of that.
Whitfield: Fresh.
Greenberg: About 4 dollars. I get them in ten packs, D’Addario ten packs online, Amazon, wherever. So, I only need to bring one guitar.
Where do you rehearse?
Greenberg: We don’t have one.
Whitfield: Everyone is everywhere else but in the same space before we go on tour. I’m outside Boston, Peter is in D.C., Andy is in Cincinnati, and Tom and Phil are around Boston.
Greenberg: We rehearse in the town that the first show is in. On that last tour, we rehearsed in Paris. In the one happening in January [2024], that will be Madrid. Real studio spaces when we can find them.
Whitfield: One week, we rehearsed for about three days in France near Blois, south of Paris. A friend of ours had a nice little setup in his house where he had a PA system, a small one, drums, and stuff. He had immortalized us on the wall Barrence Whitfield And The Savages.
But yeah, it was a pretty nice set up. He’s one of the nicest guys, really Bol Bolito. Leto. He’s in a band punk band in France.
Greenberg: Bol plays with Boycott with Eric Baconstrip. It was a nice house in the country.
Whitfield: Beautiful, it was beautiful. We stayed there for about three or four days. And then we did a special concert for everyone living around there, and a crowd all showed up. Even bought merch. I’m serious. They bought merch right after the show. So it was really nice. Bol is the coolest guy. Now I’ve got a place to stay whenever I get down there: “You come to my house, you stay there! Any of you guys!” Might just do that.
How did you meet?
Whitfield: Where did we meet? Well, Des McDonald, who worked at Nuggets in Kenmore Square, Boston.
Peter Greenberg: They’ve got boxes and boxes of everything—classical, Blues, Opera, Garage.
Whitfield: Yeah, Des. We’re working there together, just sitting around the store and stuff. He had heard me singing, harmonizing with the records we played in the store, and he said: “I like your voice. I know someone who’s looking for vocals, specifically wants a black singer, like Little Richard.” I said I could possibly do that.
Peter Greenberg: And then that’s how we hooked up. Barry came over so we could listen to the music I wanted to do.
Whitfield: You were living in Back Bay. He made some chili, and we were eating and listening to records. First one Peter puts on is “Mama Get the Hammer (There’s a Fly on Papa’s Head)” and says “I want to do this.”
Greenberg: Bobby Peterson. I thought it was a good one.
Whitfield: It was a really good one. I said, “This sounds great. Continue.”
Greenberg: The next one was a rockabilly, though they called it hillbilly singing back then. Benny Hess. “Wild Hog Hop.”
Whitfield: Wild. In the background, all you can hear is Benny doing hog-snorting sounds like this. (Snorts a few snorts) I knew this band was going to be fun. We stayed up all night going through his records. I didn’t sing a note, but he knew.
Greenberg: When we talked about the band, I said I wanted him to scream like Little Richard, James Brown, Esquerita.
Whitfield: And Archie Brownlee from the Five Blind Boys Of Mississippi. All of them at once.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Whitfield: Jesus…it must have been “Bloody Mary” don’t you think?
Greenberg: That was off the second album.
Whitfield: Right. Was it “Walk Out?”
Greenberg: We had “Walk Out” and “Ship Sailed At Six.”
Whitfield: Ship sailed at six/at six to eight/no time I missed/ship sailed at six.
Greenberg: Barrence lets it rip right from the start when he screams: Ship sailed at six! Ship sailed at six!
Whitfield: If you’re not on your feet by then, man.
Describe your first gig.
Whitfield: Was that with the Del Fuegos?
Greenberg: Maybe, where was it at?
Whitfield: Del Fuegos, where could that have been?
Greenberg: This was forty years ago. Was that at Storyville or Cantone’s?
Whitfield: I don’t remember. The second one we did was at Storyville with Johnny Copeland. I think it was five or six months later. I don’t remember the name of the first one. It was a small club, and it was with the Del Fuegos. It could have been Cantone’s, in ‘83.
Peter’s played a lot at Cantone’s. It’s just a regular dive. That’s what it was. Everybody played there, they started to get a crowd. Because we didn’t play the Rat (The Rathskeller) a little much later…in 84? Storyville, I remember that night. That was a second show. And we opened up for Johnny Copeland, and my glasses flew off my face into the audience. I thought I lost them for good. At the end of the night, someone caught them as they flew into the audience and I got them back. That was a good show. That’s where I think Peter got his signature guitar—a red Fender.
Greenberg: From Johnny Copeland.
Whitfield: A nice guitar.
Greenberg: I spray-painted it.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Whitfield: My last full-on day job was working at a health bar factory doing bars getting bars, like, you know, like, health bars. That was 2000, I think. But I’ve always worked in Record Stores. I mean, that’s the best. I’ve been at the Record Exchange in Salem on and off since ‘91. They’re going to do a big display and sale for our Glory LP. A whole wall of LPs. And that’s where I first met Spencer Evoy. Spencer Evoy of the band MFC Chicken. He lays down the Baritone on some of our tracks. Spencer lives in Barcelona now, but originally, he’s from Canada. A few years ago, Spencer, ever on the lookout for cool and rare albums, had heard about the Record Exchange in Salem, Massachusetts. The store is known as a record collector’s haven, a dream for me, and is one of the oldest brick-and-mortar used record stores in the U.S.A. The store is definitely off the beaten path from Boston, definitely from Canada, from almost anywhere except in October. Spencer was stunned that I was there…Barrence Whitfield…of The Savages!…worked there. Great guy. We love Spencer. Recording in Valencia meant we could pull him into the studio to help us achieve that Garage kind of grunge, grind that beat underneath. You put that all together and we are coming at you with a wallop, a Muhammad Ali punch.
Greenberg: Last real job was as a solar power developer out west.
Whitfield: That’s a more prestigious job!
Greenberg: Well, I used to drive around and look for prime pieces of land we could get our hands on, cheap. Then, try and talk utilities into buying the power.
Whitfield: What was your favorite day job?
Greenberg: None are as good as being a guitar player.
Whitfield: There you go.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years?
Whitfield: Some things were added to the list. Most of it’s from touring.
Greenberg: It started low and gets lower and lower.
Whitfield: You had to leave the music business to make enough money to return to the music business.
Greenberg: Right. Yeah, that was pretty much true for me. Yeah.
Whitfield: There were certain times when I got paid a lot more for a solo gig. To do these rockabilly shows or blues shows in Europe. That was before we got that together again. And I was then playing around here (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) with other musicians, like The Movers, Barrence Whitfield and the Seat Sniffers. It was pretty consistent. Recently, I’ve been out with the Soul Savage Arkestra, doing Sun Ra songs, and I have a new live Slim Galliard project.
Greenberg: We’ve made a little bit from our records. The Bloodshot Records releases broke even, and we did get a few checks from them. But it’s pretty hard to make any money from recordings. We probably made a couple thousand bucks or something.
On tour, we do sell merch, and that’s how we eat, basically.
Whitfield: And buy records.
Greenberg: We usually make like $1,000 each or so in merch sales on a tour, which is enough to keep us going. And not much from digital. I just got $70 from SoundExchange. And 30 of it was from The Lyres, actually just from “Help You Ann” and that was it. And the rest was from Barrence stuff. By the way, everybody’s got to sign up for that thing—performance royalties.
With SoundExchange, half the money goes to the (p) copyright holder. You know, the people who own the master. And the other half goes to the performers. The royalty dollars are split in half. We don’t own the copyright on any of our stuff. Actually, we do for Savage Kings. We should own it for the first record, but we kind of don’t.
What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
Greenberg: Not much more. A lot less. But you know, I’m going to digress, I signed up for Spotify, Spotify Artists, or whatever they call it. And I’ve been watching what songs are getting played from the new record. The funny thing is “The Corner Man” is still played the most, even more than the songs off of Glory.
Whitfield: Really!
Greenberg: But the second most played song is off the album, “Cape May Diamond,” for some reason. And then “Bad Situation.” And Under The Savage Sun’s “The Claw” is played a lot. Maybe “The Corner Man” is up there because we were on the BBC’s Later…with Jools Holland?
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Greenberg: I never had any expectations for it. That’s why I bailed when I was young. I just thought you need to either sell your soul to the devil or just accept that you’re not going to make any money or not make much. You know, don’t expect much, then everything is going to be good, whatever you get.
Whitfield: I was in it just because I like playing music. So after getting together and playing, it’s like okay, we’re gonna get this, or we’re gonna get that, we’re gonna do this, or we’re gonna do that. Everything else just came its way. It just was. It’s not like we pushed hard for it. Things just happened. Most people go into this and start pushing for it, pushing for that, and if that doesn’t happen, their expectations drop to the way down low if their life doesn’t become what they think it should be for them. If you don’t expect anything, usually, a lot of stuff comes along that you don’t expect. I never expected to be doing it this long, I never expected that. You know this last record we did, we did it in Spain! We’re touring Europe this January! I’m playing Rockabilly Festivals! Who knows how popular we’ll get from this album? But to come to this point, having recorded all those records and you get to this particular album, and the way it was done, the way we put together, the way it was finished and now released, no one had any idea that would happen. So to get to this place, I feel like, well, you know, everything was worth it. It’s a win-win when that happens. We’ll see from here how far this goes.