Frank – That is taking the simplistic and taking it to a ridiculous level. That’s like saying “How can he be a Christian if he smokes cigarettes?” Me playing a song like “Voodoo Chile” is like me playing a song like “Happy Birthday”. I’m playing someone’s song. Would I ever write “Voodoo Chile”? No! I don’t even know what the words mean. I also don’t know what they mean when they say “There’s a red house over yonder”. There’s no red house over yonder! By the way, when I did “Red House Over Yonder” I was doing a blues tune that wasn’t actually “Red House”, it was my own blues tune. It was meant to be instrumental. I went up to the mic and I couldn’t think of any blues words so I just took the first thing that came to my mind! Back to “Voodoo Chile”, yes, I can play “Voodoo Chile”. I can play “Light My Fire” by the Doors. There are a million songs I can play and all they are is a guy playing songs. That’s all it is. It’s not a guy believing the songs or writing the songs. 99 times out of 100, if you’re a musician like me, you don’t even know the words to these songs. You sing a Beatles tune, you don’t really understand “A Day in the Life”, you just sing the words. That night we just did a lot of songs by a lot of different artists. In my show, “He’s Calling” has a message. It isn’t there because I’m trying to get a message across though. It’s a song that happens to have a message and it just happens to fall that place in the show. But there is a portion of my show that is motivated by a message. It’s the whole sequence beginning with “Rattle Of Sabres”. From that point, until the end of “Try For Freedom”, that entire gambit is about a continuous, on-purpose message. That might happen on a given night, but on another night I might not play it. The interesting thing about that whole sequence is that I did it on the 8th of September 2001. For some reason I felt like I needed to do that segment. For some reason, I played the American National Anthem, which I had not played in 20 years. Yet I did it that night and I don’t know why. Then three days later, the world changed. There are things in my music and my career that a person looking for a skeleton in my closet could easily find. He could make anything out of anything. But if the criteria is simply what a man did with his music, or what song he picked, then I’m guilty as charged. But I think the criteria is about what motivates a person. Because really, what it comes down to is that God is interested in the type of person that you are and the kind of person you’re trying to be. As you said before, nobody is perfect. This is why I don’t do any records for Christian labels. Me going into that system would be very much like me going into politics. Can you imagine me deciding I wanted to be the Prime Minister and at 13 years old I was an acid casualty? For sure that would be used, so what’s the point? You’ve lost before you’ve one. There’s too much hypocrisy in the systems, simply because they’re organized systems that are set by policy. You’ll end up sitting around answering a bunch of questions defensively.
But what about the truth of how far you’ve come from what happened to you? Your story is a true testimony of what God can do. The triumph should be more important than the tragedy itself.
Frank – That’s right. I was just a 13-year-old child when I went to hell, and I mean hell. You can’t imagine, in your wildest dreams, what that place was like. You can’t imagine how long it lasted and how sick I was or what I had to do to get out of that place. There was nobody to help. There was nobody to explain it to me. I was crazy. I had to find my way back. I went through a lot of wrong roads finding my way back in the early years. It took many, many years. Pain is sure to come to every life. Whether you suffer from it is up to you.
Amen to that. Frank this has been great. I know that I’m going to hate transcribing this, but it was worth it.
Frank – It has been great. You can call me anytime and I’ll talk to you as long as I did today anytime! Just be accurate. (laughs) I don’t have to vet your article, I trust you. We’ve covered a lot of ground in three and half-hours. I hope that the people that read this get from this (most of all) the personal things that we spoke about. Less about me and more about those things.
