August 16, 2005
Interview by Shannon West

Imagine being a musician and having a group of favorite songs. Songs you grew up with that were a big part of your life, both as entertainment and musical influence. Fast forward almost three decades and you end up in the studio not only recording music that was inspired by those songs, but having the guys who played on them backing you up! That is how it happened on Euge Groove's new CD, Just Feels Right, and it does just feel right! His enthusiasm and passion for this project are contagious, and the amount of fun these musicians had in the studio is evident in the grooves from the minute the needle hits the record, or to bring it into this century, from the minute you hit the play button. The liner notes he wrote for the CD will give you a lot of insight into an artist at work and having the time of his life. By the time I talked to Euge about this CD, it had been stuck in my car and home players for over a month, so the conversation was fueled by repeated listening and some booty shakin' to several tracks.  

SmoothViews (SV): What is it about 1976?
Euge Groove (EG): 1976 was the last thing I came up with. It was through a whole process. I tried to identify what my favorite records were. I got a stack of them, then I thought about why they were my favorite records. What was it about them that I liked? Once I got that narrowed down, I started looking at how they were made and '76 became the cohesive year. During the time I was doing the writing for this disc, I was touring with Guitars and Saxes and I remember mentioning to Jeff Golub that it seemed like my favorite albums all came out in 1976. He said it was a little bit earlier for him, that his favorite year was his first year in high school. 1976 was my first year in high school. I don't know if there is some magical madness to it, but it is the stuff that makes me smile when I hear it. There's something about it the way the chords were structured, the way that the songs were structured, that just sounds right. There's this great verse, the hooky chorus, and this huge bridge that's bigger than life. These are the things I loved about these songs.

SV: What were some of these songs?
EG: I was a huge George Benson fan. "This Masquerade" knocked me out. So did "Breezin'." All the instrumental stuff that was on the radio back then. "Sweet Thing" from Chaka Khan and Rufus, too. I had an 8-Track player and my favorite 8-Track was the Rocky soundtrack. I loved all the instrumentals and orchestration. The way that album was produced sounded absolutely amazing. I think my favorite sounding record of all time was Bill Withers' Menagerie.

SV: Paul Brown talked about that, too, during the interview last month, so I went back and listened to Menagerie and just didn't hear the things that you guys hear on that. To me it did sound dated In a way I can't quite pinpoint. The songs sounded kinda clunky as far as hooks and momentum.
EG: They're probably not as typical of what he had been doing, except when you look at songs like “Lovely Day.“ That's about as big as it gets. The production, orchestration, performance, the feel of that record just slayed me; it absolutely kills me! And he's in top form, voice-wise. That was the album that I said I want this record to sound like. I don't think Paul was that familiar with it outside of "Lovely Day." We were listening to it but I don't think he was as intimate with the whole album as I was. There is a version of “Lovely Night for Dancing” without the vocals that has this amazing orchestration and that was the inspiration.

SV: I guess I hear the songs on your album as having a lot more hooks and energy.
EG: Some people don't even pick up the '70s vibe when they hear it.

SV: I could see people who did not get the press kit or read the liner notes not being able to pinpoint it.
EG: I saw a review out of Atlanta from a guy who had not read the press at all and he nailed every influence on the record! I felt like there ya go...its not as transparent as people might think.

SV: The ones that sounded like they had the most retro influences to me are "This Must Be For Real" and "Just Feels Right."
EG: Those are the ones that are most like the Menagerie album as far as the writing and the players. These are the cats from the ‘70s that are playing on it and they are all 100% organic. There's nothing programmed, no computers. "12:08 AM" is another one, one of those 12/8 ballads like “Me and Mrs. Jones” or Tower of Power's “You're Still a Young Man." Again 100% organic. That drum groove on "Get 'Em Goin' " is inspired by Barry White. Michael White played that live. We listened to Barry White stuff and came up with that groove. Even if you don't hear it in the first place, when you listen to it with that in mind, you can hear that‘s where it is from. Another comment that I heard was that the string arrangements sounded a little over the top. That it sounded like an orchestra. That's exactly what I was going for. From the reviewer, I think it was meant to be kind of a negative thing, so it just depends on where you're coming up from and the music that you grew up with.

SV: You've had an enviable streak of hit singles and CDs that established an identifiable sound for you and familiarity is considered really important when it comes to marketing and airplay. What made you decide to not stay on that path, which would have been the safe, familiar way to go?
EG: I think a lot of it is personal growth. You can only do so many records that sound alike before you start sounding like you are putting stuff out just for the sake of having something out. What I was listening to at the time really inspired me to write music like this. I felt like I've had success so I didn't have to really prove myself and make another radio song. You look at guys who have #1 songs and don't sell, and guys who don't get much airplay and sell a ton of records and you start thinking let's just try to make good music and not really worry about making it for radio. Any time you become true to yourself and just do what you want to do without any other purpose, it ends up being the most truthful music you can make. I think people relate to that.

SV: Radio has taken up the first single so in this case it's become a win-win. It's the most added song of the year and it's making a fast climb up a normally slow moving chart. It seemed like “Get ‘Em Goin' “ was a risky choice for the first single because it has a lot of energy and a big funky sound, so maybe you've even opened a door for more music like that to get played since it is becoming a hit.
EG: I think things change and it's a matter of timing. If this song had been mixed in a different way it might have been too aggressive. Bill Schnee did an amazing job mixing the record. I couldn't have been happier with that. Anytime that kind of stuff happens it's like it was meant to be because you can try to force certain things and it won't happen but then you can just do what you do and it works out.

SV: You have a lot of the guys who played on your favorite songs from back then playing on this project. How did you manage to assemble this group of backup musicians and what was it like to go into the studio with them?
EG: It was intimidating to go into the studio with them. I kept listening to these guys play and going "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy!" (laughs) and Paul Brown kept saying "You're worthy, lets get through this, it's all right!" That's the brilliance of having Paul around. He's the calmest guy in the studio and he really knows how to make everyone feel comfortable. He knows when the performance is great, when there's enough, when you need to do a little more. He's flawless at that. I'd worked with James Gadson before. His name came up early on in doing this. Paul had worked with Freddie Washington and I was certainly familiar with him. Those were the two guys we wanted for bass and drums. I was always a huge fan of Ray Parker Jr. and I never in a million years thought he would agree to come down. I think when he found out that James and Freddie Washington were on it, he decided to come down, too. Then David T. Walker, another legend. I love this guy, look at the records he's played on! Once he found out the other guys were coming in, he came in too. These guys did all those sessions back in the day and once they found out the others were doing it, they were really happy to come down and make a record in the old way.

SV: How long do you think it had been since those guys were in the studio together working on a session?
EG: I don't know exactly, but from listening to them talk I'd say maybe a decade. There were lots of hugs and the high fives.

SV: When you got in the studio did things click from the get-go?
EG: Yeah. The drummer shows up first and he kinda gets that stuff going. I'll never forget James Gadson sitting there and playing the groove from "Use Me.” He was the original drummer on that song. He's sitting there playing his drums and I‘m going "That's it, you've got that sound!" He's got this old drum kit from the seventies and he has a different style and a different technique of hitting it. I wrote the charts out for everybody. We'd sit around the piano and I'd play sax along with them so they could get a feel for melody. One thing I noticed about their playing is they never step on each other and they never step on the melody. The drum groove very much accentuates the melody. You feel like he's singing the melody at the same time he's playing the drums, and that's something that comes from 30 years ago.

SV: Paul's productions are usually really sleek and glossy and high tech, with what he calls the "big bottom" and a lot of sound going on in layers. This was a totally different sound for him.
EG: It was. This was a co-production. There were things that he brought to the table and there were very definitive things I knew I wanted. When you co produce there's middle ground. That's the beauty of working with somebody like that. I can't imagine this record without his influence and I couldn't imagine it if I had given it to him 100% without what I had in my mind influencing it. Its one of those situations where things align. The other part of it was the way Bill Schnee mixed it. It was another really positive influence to have him. I think there is a lot of bottom end but it's really different from the way Paul puts it in. The sax sound is different from how Paul puts it in there. Not that either one is right or wrong, just different.

SV: Were the two of you working on your albums at the same time? Paul stepped out of his traditional sound quite a bit on his and he dug up some real gems from back in the day, too, with the title track, the Grover song, and the Johnny "Guitar" Watson song. It makes you wonder if there was a little synergy going on there.
EG: When we first started talking about my CD last fall, he was starting to get into doing his, too, and of course, we are influencing each other and kind of getting back into that era. We were certainly talking about it. We cut the live tracks for this one in January and then I went on the road for 4 months with Joe Cocker, so the tracks kind of sat there while he finished his disc and was working on Jeffrey Osborne's at the same time.

SV: What was it like opening for Joe Cocker? A lot of times opening for a pop act is a great way to get in front of a new audience, especially someone like you who has a lot of pop/rock appeal, but it can also be a good way to throw yourself to the sharks because of the stereotypes that are attached to smooth jazz.
EG: It was a very positive experience. What was really interesting is some of the places I thought were going to be difficult ended up being easy and some of the ones I thought were going to be easy ended up being difficult. I certainly had to make some changes for his audience. I had to custom tailor it more to his audience. It taught me a valuable lesson about trying to figure out people. That alleged there's no such thing as a bad audience, only a bad performer- type thing. You have to find some way to get through. I remember one night where I hadn't played 20 seconds and I was getting a few hand gestures from the front row. I'm playing "Livin' Large" and wondering what do I do with these guys, so I jumped off the stage and started playing in their face. They laughed and we high five'd each other and for the rest of the show they were into it. You just have to figure out what the audience wants. That's any entertainer's job.

SV: That's how you work it onstage. How does that play into recording? Do you even think about that when you are in the studio?
EG: I think you have to. There's always the balance of wondering am I trying to do something new and creative, or am I going too far? There are a bundle of insecurities that go with that but at some point you have to trust the instinct and hope that the people will like it. Maybe they won't like it on the first take, but maybe they'll like it on the second or third listen.

SV: In your liner notes there is a great story about you expressing those insecurities and Paul Brown replies that you are both too paranoid to let that happen. How did you manage to keep the balance between bringing the seventies influences in and making a CD that sounds very contemporary?
EG: I think part of it even came down to the order of the songs. I wrote this album in order. The first song I wrote was "Get ‘Em Goin' " and the last song I wrote was "Ballerina Girl." If I had started with "Straight Up" then flipped the order around, put the last four songs first and the first four songs at the end, I think there would be more of a retro effect. The way the album starts off and then eases you into that direction makes more sense. You might not have been ready for the Love Unlimited Orchestra sound on the second song, but by the end it sounds right.

SV: Tell me about the little interludes between the songs. They're a lot of fun and definitely not your typical smooth jazz CD type content.
EG: I love them too. I've always loved those kind of things. I'll always remember the chatter at the front of "Sweet Home Alabama" and I remember that the bands back then left that stuff on.

SV: Was that Ray Parker Jr. on that lowdown sounding guitar riff on "Cant Stop the Funk?"
EG: That's the tail end of the song "Straight Up." I edited out about two minutes at the end of that song. After we had been playing about eight or nine minutes the drums ended but Ray wouldn't stop. He kept playing. You could hear the guys yelling at him "You go boy! You can't stop the funk!" You could not stop him. He was up dancing around, headphones falling off his head. It was amazing. It was the most memorable moment of making this record.

SV: What about the little "Take You Higher" thing?
EG: That came out of “Just Feels Right“. We had done this double time thing and the song just went crazy. These are so many moments where you can hear how much fun everybody is having. You can't listen to that and say they were forcing it, they really having fun and I think that stuff translates through the music. These guys were old friends. Just watching their professionalism and how they took a song and talked about how they were going to interpret it. How they listened to each other and never played on top of each other. I so felt not worthy!

SV: You are worthy, you are worthy! (laugh) How did it feel to have these people that you grew up listening to working that way and having that good a time with songs you wrote?
EG : I remember when we did the session to add the string arrangements. Here was this orchestra in front of me playing on "Just Feels Right." We had it pumped up on the studio sound system and I turned around to my manager and said "I am the luckiest guy in the world. I have a song that I wrote and I have these musicians play on this thing and turn it into this. I'm the luckiest guy in the world!”

SV: That comes out in the grooves of the CD. There's a warmth and a sense of fun here that you don't get every day.
EG: Once again, it's human beings interacting. “Just Feels Right” has probably about 30 musicians and four or five engineers that touched that song. There are about 35 people and not one machine in sight. “12:08 am” is another one. You won't find a machine on that song . You just can't duplicate this interaction, all the unpredictable and random things that come into play on a machine. You can't sit in front of a computer and program the stuff. I did that with the demos and tried to make it as live sounding as possible to show what I was going for, but you just can't do it. It sounded like a bad karaoke machine. That being said, there are two songs on the album that are straight up programmed drums but the rest is live. "Chillaxin' “ and "Just My Imagination" just didn‘t feel the same when we tried those live, so there was a method for staying with the machines from a creative standpoint.

SV: Why did you decide to go with the lack of technology, the analog tape recording and equipment from that era?
EG: There are two sides to using analog tape instead of computers (digital). One is the sound: analog tape will keep things like notes trailing off or the sound of the breath releasing when you're playing a note. Analog reproduces that stuff perfectly where digital sometimes will chop those things off. It just sounds so much more lifelike and has so much more warmth. The other thing is working linear. If you want to play the sax in that chorus, you have to actually play the sax in that chorus, you can't take it from another verse or chorus and lay it in. You have to play it where it belongs. That goes into the performance side of it.

SV: And factors in the musicians interacting.
EG: Right. With digital if you get it right once you can just copy it and paste it. That was something we did not want to do on this project because it's the little random idiosyncrasies, mistakes and things you didn't intend to do that can end up being the most brilliant things.

SV: One thing that is really refreshing about Just Feels Right was to put it on and not have every song have an intro that is a computerized drum loop.
EG: I've been as guilty as anyone of that but personally I've heard it enough times. I don't need to make a recording that sounds like that at this point in time. Of course next year I might be all over it again, but my mood at this moment was to do something different.

SV: You have been really proactive as far as getting out there and taking risks throughout your career. When Warner Bros. was about to phase out their jazz department, you took it into your own hands to get ready to move on. When you were waiting for Paul Brown to be available to work on the tracks you had for your first CD, you didn't just let them sit, you put them up on MP3.com and became probably the only smooth jazz artist to make a name for themselves off independent internet distribution.
EG: I think I've been blessed. Every time I've had a disappointment and things don't go necessarily the way that I want them to, instead of getting angry I look at it and know I'm supposed to learn something from it and get something out of it. That has happened with every sort of negative situation. Something good has come out of it. I think that out of adversity there comes this stretching on the creative side. It's been that way from the beginning. I tried to get a deal 10 years ago. Looking back, I know that if they had signed me back then, I wouldn't have been ready. I would have put out something weak, gotten rejected, and nobody would have been willing to touch me again. I can always find something good to come out of the bad situation.

SV: When you recorded that first batch of songs in the late 90s you didn't have a prospective label deal. What gave you the faith and the guts to get out of the safety zone of being a sideman and go out there and do that?
EG: I think I came to the conclusion that if I don't invest 100% of my time and energy and money, if I didn't believe in myself enough to do that, then there was no way I was going to find a label. If I wasn't committed myself why would a label be? That was my rationale. It could have gone the other way. I could have spent that time and money and come up with nothing. That's why I feel like I have been very blessed and very lucky.

SV: So you had these songs done, and you basically became probably the only grassroots marketing/word of mouth buzz success story in smooth jazz. With this music marketing is top down, not from the grassroots but you were the exception with the sales and visibility you got on MP3.com prior to the CD being released.
EG: Right now in the music business what is up is down and what is down is up. Especially with the internet changing how people get to hear and buy music. Nobody can predict what is going on or what's going to work and that's one of the reasons some of the labels are having trouble. My intention was to hopefully get those songs done, get signed by an independent label, and at least get some attention so that once they went under, I could get signed by a major. Instead, I got signed by a major right off the bat and they went under, so then I get signed by an independent. It flipped itself. One thing I am blessed with is a great manager and when I get all whacked out, he calms me down and makes things rational. There are things you can control and there are things you can't control. You can control the quality of your music and how well you play your instrument, but you can't control this other stuff. When we saw the writing on the wall with the Warner Bros. Jazz Department, we had a backup plan and were signed with Narada in about six weeks. Again, talk about being blessed and being lucky!

SV: Do you think its all being blessed and being lucky or do you think it is about being prepared, too?
EG: Again we were being very realistic. I think to have looked at the situation that was developing at Warner Bros. and thinking everything was going to be OK would have been sticking your head in the sand. The timing and luck came that I was one guy looking for a label, where if I had waited I would have been one of a lot of guys looking for a deal. Even with the label change, there was only 15 months between the two CDs. That's amazing. I've seen people go three years with a label change, even five years or more than that.

SV: While all that was going on didn't you and your family move to Europe?
EG: I did Livin' Large right before I went to Europe. I was going to be doing the Italian tour with Eros Ramazotti and I knew I wanted to live in Italy, so we decided we would sell our house and move to Italy for a while, then come back and figure out where we wanted to live. So I sold my house in May, had a #1 single in June, was off Warner Bros. in July, signed to Narada in August, and during those four or five months Paul and I were making the Livin' Large album . It was a whirlwind. It was absolutely out of this world! Then in September of that year we moved to Italy. It was a crazy time and we had the best outlook on it; we were just gonna have fun. We just threw caution to the wind and said “Let's live life, let's live large.” And that's what we did.

SV: It seems like your family, your wife and kids and your parents and in-laws have been very supportive of you on all these adventures and leaps of faith.
EG: Everybody has. Without family I have nothing! There's no point in getting to point A and losing the family somewhere in between. Again, you have to look at yourself and say it's another day we got through and we kept the faith and everything's good. You can't be afraid. I quoted something in the liner notes that really stuck with me. I probably repeat to myself 10 times a day. “Fear and creativity cannot live in the same room.” It's become a little mantra I have to tell myself. We are so afraid of stuff happening, that we are afraid to live. A little fear can be good because it helps you think things through and be responsible but not to the point where you are just consumed by it. You just have to get out of the fear and get out there and try something. With this record I was fortunate with Narada. They could have easily said we aren't going to give you x-amount of dollars to go out and make a record that is different from what you've been doing that works so well. But they didn't have any fear either. You can't go out there with the fear that if you take a chance and it isn't well received, it will all be over. If it doesn't work, I'll try again or I'll try something else. But to go in and be afraid, I think that's a worse failure than trying to do something a little different and having it not work. That's not a failure. Being a failure is being afraid to do it.

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