Bobby Sutliff: Another Jangly Website

Autobiography

I was born in Dover, Delaware a long time ago in a galaxy far away - the 50's. At the age of 5, for reasons that still elude me, my parents moved to the south - first to Florida where my brother Robin was born and shortly thereafter to the magnolia state, Mississippi. I had the normal Ricky Nelson type of childhood until the Beatles arrived.

My father was a fine Chet Atkins style of guitarist, but I wanted nothing to do with that. I wanted to play the drums. After 4 or 5 years of begging for at least a snare drum, I was rewarded one X-mas morning with a Teisco electric guitar. I was not happy. Still, it was better than nothing. I began the arduous task of learning to tune the damn thing. Playing it was another matter entirely.

What took most normal kids a couple of months took me a couple of years, but I finally got there. The impetus for learning to play was my purchase of Chuck Berry's Golden Decade 2lp set on Chess. God how I wanted to play like that. From there I moved on to electric blues. I learned to imitate my heroes of the day, Peter Green and Duane Allman. But when I opened my mouth to sing, the horrible realization that I was never going to sound like Otis Rush was devastating.

Around this time my longtime friend Bruce Golden started playing me records from his very esoteric collection. He introduced me to Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, Captain Beefhart and lots of other kindred souls. Then, by a fluke I bought Big Star's Radio City album. It was a revelation to say the least. You could be from the south and play music other than the southern rock that ruled the airwaves at the time. I started writing very bad copies of Alex Chilton songs but it was a start in my eventual sound.

I played in high school garage bands that were uniformly terrible, but we did have great band names. My first band was the Electric Salad Bowl and then I joined Bastille and later on Stonehenge. Stonehenge butchered Free's Wishing Well in a way that can't really be described.

Somewhere along the way I met Tim Lee while we were both standing in the front row at an Alice Cooper/Suzi Quatro show. He likes to point out that while he was ogling Suzi, I was ogling guitarist Len Tuckey's collection of Epiphone Coronets and Les Paul Juniors.

We stayed in touch and also started 2 separate bands. I started the Oral Sox with my all time best friend John Thomas and my brother Robin, and Tim started the Occasions. The Sox were a roots rock band that played all sorts of stuff but we specialized in the Stones. The Occasions were more of 60's pop band but they did play some of the more melodic new wave songs of the day. After a while ( around 1980) the Sox were becoming Jackson's most popular band, but I was getting real tired of playing 20+ R. Stones songs a gig. I eventually quit just as Tim's band the Occasions were breaking up.

We started the Windbreakers right away. Tim played bass, I played guitar along with Jeff Lewis, and Eric Arhelger played drums. We started out as a sort of copy band, but quickly started adding our originals, much to the unhappiness of our audience. After playing a particularly lucrative New Years eve gig at the Port Gibson Mississippi Country Club ($1500!) we went into the studio and recorded a 4 song 7" e.p. "Meet the Windbreakers". It wasn't very good but we had a record. Shortly after that Jeff left and started his own band Radio London, along with David Minchew and Joe Partridge, both of whom joined the Windbreakers after I left in 1986.

Anyway, after Jeff left we continued as a 3 piece - a format that I am totally inadequate with. We quit playing live but continued to write songs. Tim & I both admired the dBs and knew vaguely that Mitch Easter had a studio in North Carolina.

One night in 1982, on a whim, Tim dialed directory assistance in Winston-Salem and got Mitch's number. After a brief call to Mitch, we got directions and Eric, Tim and myself made the 13 hour trip and pulled into his studio, The Drive-In. It was located in the garage at his parent's house. I remember that we unplugged the refrigerator while recording to minimize background noise.

We recorded 2 songs that sounded roughly 1000% better than anything we had done on our own. We went back a few months later without Eric and recorded 4 more songs, this time with Mitch on drums. They sounded even better.

We released these 6 songs on "Any Monkey with a Typewriter" in 1983. They were very well received critically, and we were encouraged to keep at it.

In 1984 we went back to Mitch's and recorded 6 more songs. We also recorded 5 songs in Jackson. On of these was a cover of Television's "Glory" with California's Rain Parade backing us. These 11 songs made up our first full length album "Terminal" and was released in 1985 on the Homestead label.

Shortly thereafter, Tim hooked up with Danny Beard and his dB label. They put up the money for our next album "Run". Mitch Easter came to Jackson with a van full of guitars and we recorded at Jackson's new Terminal studio, with Randy Everett assisting Mitch.

Run was released in 1986 and Tim wanted to tour in support of it. I wanted to, but was absolutely broke and just couldn't afford to go. Tim gave me an ultimatum, so I gave him my share of the band and he put together a new Windbreakers and hit the road. I stayed home and brooded, but I also wrote a bunch of new songs.

Late in 1986 I went to Mitch's and began the year long task of putting together my first solo album "Only Ghost's Remain" It was released in the fall of 1987 and my record compay Jem/PVC arranged for me to go out on tour with my old band, The Windbreakers. I opened shows for them with Tim on guitar. I'm sure audiences were completely confused since I sounded more like the Windbreakers than the real thing.

After the tour, I began work on demos for my next album. When PVC decided they didn't hear a hit, I spent the next year getting out of my contract. I did go out with Tim as his guitarist on a 1988 solo tour. We had a great time, and mended a few fences.

In 1989 Tim decided we should do another Windbreakers album. It was called "At Home with Bobby and Tim". We recorded it with Randy Everett at the Terminal. A year later we did "Electric Landlady" with my good pal Russ Tolman producing. It proved to be our last record.

After a lifetime of happy bachelorhood, I finally was cornered and married my lovely wife Bobbi in 1991. I pretty much retired at that point. I did keep writing and visited Mitch every now and then - just for the fun of it. He was instrumental in talking me into doing another record. I recorded half of my new record at his new studio, Fidelitorium, and the rest on my home computer studio set-up.

These days, I still write the occasional new song, but my main hobby is making acoustic guitars. I'm still not that good at it, but hey - I was a horrible guitar player when I started out.

--Bobby Sutliff, February 2000