Interview with Maceo Parker
 
  
Maceo: Hi! This is Maceo, and you’re headed to Joe Blue...

Olga: ...Plate Special. The show’s called Joe’s Blue Plate Special.

Maceo: Yeah, I’m reading it upside down.

Olga: Good! That’s really good. Can you read backwards too?

Maceo: No. The best of...

Olga: The unsigned independents.

Maceo: I never would have got signed. No independents. Maybe. Maybe independents, but that’s kind of crazy upside down.

Olga: People that are on it are primarily unsigned and independent bands. So we try and create a support network for musicians out there who are trying to make a career in the music business.

Maceo: That’s really neat. Trying to get there.

Olga: So I’m gonna introduce you. Today’s Doctor Martins interview is with the legendary funk saxophonist in his own right, Maceo Parker. Thank you for being here with us.

Maceo: Well, it’s always a pleasure.

Olga: I wanted to kind of get a little background on you. Now, I know you grew up in a very musical family, and I was curious - what was that like for you?

Maceo: Well, the fact that my parents thought it was important to just have music, music all the time, first of all, it gave us a unity sort of a feeling of family, it helped, you know. Plus, I’m thinking back when I’m trying to answer this, we didn’t know that we were low income, so to speak, because of that happy family feeling that was felt throughout the household because of music, because of singing. And I didn’t learn until, you know, growing up, and you know kids don’t know about those things anyway, that they were struggling to keep the family together financially, you know, doing the odd jobs and what have you. But it worked. It really worked. I mean, I cannot remember a time when it was not fun, and I just attribute this mostly to music. I mean, my mother would probably say, no, no, there was a lot of praying in there, there was a lot of going to church in there, and, you know, the religious end of it, but I heard and can just remember the music stuff. I mean, we sang stuff from the church and religious stuff and school stuff, but we sang. But it was just singing to me, and that’s what sort of gave us a strong kind of a hold on the family unit and all this thing, and I think that was very important.

Olga: Looking back, what is your fondest memory in your childhood? I mean, what is something that just really pops out that just comes in your mind and you think about it and you smile every time and just makes you feel good.

Maceo: Well, always, as far back as I can remember, there was always a piano around, and I can sort of remember too just standing there barely being able to see above the keys, but, as one of the adults or somebody could play would come and play, I’d just be there, you know, eye level to the keys, but then when they finished, I could sort of imitate what I saw them do, and I remember people saying, golly, what is wrong with that child? That child is crazy. You know, how can he just imitate, how can he play that young? I do remember that. Not knowing what I was doing, but I was just remembering the finger was there, the finger was there, that thumb was there, like that, and I’d sit and I’d do it. But I think what really threw me or floored me or really got me really excited again, you know, remembering back, was when I witnessed my first parade, you know, with all the drums and the horns. I mean, it was like, wow. That many horns and stuff. I must have been about six, I guess, five, six, but I do remember taking piano lessons. Then I was at a point where I wasn’t sure about the piano lessons, because, you know, after a while you start getting that male-female thing, you know, the boy-girl thing, and I don’t know, it’s not really, football or baseball, just going with your little piano book under your arm and you’re going to piano lessons, naah, I don’t know. But then when I saw the parade, it may have been a Christmas parade or something, it was like, wow! I can’t wait until I get enough to have a band uniform and march down the street. That’s got to be the most exciting thing in the world. And that was it for me. I just want to do that. I just want to be in a band marching down the street and help keeping that noise that I hear.

Olga: Do you remember your first official gig?

Wendy(?): Did you want be in the front of the parade?

Maceo: No, no, it didn’t matter. That really didn’t matter. Just in there. Because I never heard a sound like that, you know, where all the horns and the drums and it’s legit to do that, you know? Because most of the time, sometimes, you know, when you play or play in a group, oh, turn that noise down, that’s too loud, dah dah dah dah dah. But now here’s a situation where, I mean, loud is it, you know, and I’m still six, seven years old, you know, going through this and saying, wow! this is it. You got band after band after band, you know, I could just forever. That was very, very exciting to me, it really was. But it didn’t matter. Now, I do remember trying to find a piano player. I do remember that. And I’d tug at mom and say, where’s the piano? Where’s the piano? Well, you know, baby, you can’t use piano in this type of a...in a parade. Piano’s too large. Unless it’s mounted on the back of a...yeah, but I want to march. So maybe I can play that thing, and that happened to be the saxophone.

Olga: Do you remember your first official gig?

Maceo: My uncle had a band, my mother’s brother had a band called The Blue Notes. It could have been Bobby Butler and the Blue Notes or something like that. And often we would go, and when I say “we,” it was me, my brothers and cousins, we would go to their practice, to their rehearsals. And then we formed a group called the Junior Blue Notes, which sort of meant, we sort of patterned after them whatever we heard them play, we tried to __________ - no, no, no, it went, no, it went dah dah dah dah dah dah. Okay, yeah, dah dah. What is that called? What’s the name of that? Well, I don’t know. We found out the name later, but I do remember dah dah dah dah dah dah, dah dah dah dah dah dah, and we practiced dah dah dah dah dah dah until we get it, you know. Now we got dah dah dah dah dah dah, and we got dah dah dah dah and dah dah dah dah dah. So we got three songs that we could actually play to a point where when you heard us play ‘em, he’d say, what is, these kids are crazy. So what he’d do, speaking of my uncle, he would take us along with him to his gigs at the nightclubs, you know, with adults, put us in the dressing room. They’d play the first set, to the intermission, then he’d bring us out, we’d play dah dah dah dah dah dah, dah dah dah dah, and dah dah dah, our little three songs, then he’d take us back home. That’s probably the first gigs that we did. But he would do this almost every week, you know, to a point where....and then we just did it and did it and did it, and then year after year, whatever, and pretty soon we got a raise. Now, let me think back. This was like about six or seven years after the parade stuff, so I must have been about 13 or 14.

Olga: Did you ever deal with any sort of stage fright?

Maceo: Not playing the horn. Not playing the music. Anytime I had to say something maybe, you know, because you’d get frightened because you’re uncomfortable in what you’re doing, and playing the music was like, you know, you can do that in your sleep, you know. But then when somebody would say, or maybe some kind of Easter play or something you’ve got to learn and then you’ve got to stand up and just actually say your poem or whatever in front of somebody, that was kind of frightening. You know, that took a minute. You have to really do that, you know, but anything pertaining to music, no. It was kind of like....we realized, again, I’m speaking of my brothers, we realized that, or I did anyway, that we had a gift, something a little extra. I started looking at it like, you know, in elementary school or the first, you know, your first early childhood stuff, where they’re teaching you colors and whatever and then you have your period where you’re outside and then you run, you know, for whatever reason, maybe it’s just exercise or something, but then you notice that, if you can, maybe you can outrun everybody. You know, this person is the fastest, this person is the fastest girl. I mean, you start noticing those things, and then somehow this person’s last all the time, you know. You know, you notice that stuff. But it’s no big deal. It’s just a fact, you know, that this person can outrun this other person. But I was one that could outrun everybody, but again it wasn’t a big deal, but it was just a fact. Well, that was the way I did music. It was just something that I could retain. You know, it wasn’t no big deal. This person just for some reason just couldn’t do it, you know. Right to now I can still remember some of those elementary school songs that we sang, you know, where is it all. And like the graduation stuff from eighth grade, like the school song. Well, anybody can remember the school song, but like, “yellow leaves comes,” first grade song, “floating one by one. Meadowland is brown. Summertime is done.” That’s first grade. And I tell you something else too. Now I can see, you know, like when I’m home, some of my kids, some of my friends from school, and I’ll see them in the supermarket or the drugstore or in the post office, and I sing some of this stuff, and they think I’m crazy. They really do. They think, this guy still remembers the stuff. And just to prove that I remember, ________________, and I sing _________ this song, they look at me really weird. Is this guy crazy? But I just can retain this stuff, and it’s crazy. I’ve been that close to music since day one, I think. And then I also realized that maybe it’s a God gift. It’s a talent, you know. But then when somebody say, that’s how you chose the saxophone, I said yeah. And then sometimes I say, well thank goodness when the parade line came it wasn’t the trombone or the sousaphone tuba thing and all that, you know. But I really wanted to be in that parade, and I thought saxophone was cool.

Olga: Who would you say was the most influential person in your life?

Maceo: In my life? Doesn’t have anything to do with music or anything, just in my life.

Olga: Yeah, in your life.

Maceo: That would be mother I think. Or maybe my parents. But surely my mother. I mean, if I had to....if you said no we just can’t say parents, you just can’t say both of them, then I would, you know, probably my mother. Again, since day one, she’s just instilled, you know, just the love and the respect and all that stuff. Again, if you were interviewing her, she would lean more, and I know she would, toward the religious end of it, you know, how she told us...there was a part in, and I didn’t know this, but there was a part in Roots that Alex Haley did where as a child was born, somebody would take that child outside and hold it up in some kind of ritual or something and say something, and she said she did that kind of stuff with us, you know, saying God, I’m putting my child in your hands and whatever. And I said, come on, ma, you didn’t do that. She said, yeah, yeah, I did. But we felt that. We felt that, you know, growing up. You couldn’t do wrong. As kids, you really do learn right from wrong. It’s just that sometimes you just think you can get away with it, you know, with doing wrong. But you know it’s wrong, but you just feel like, well, just maybe I can get by, you know. But it was a great sense of no, can’t do wrong, ‘cause you cannot displease mom or dad, and that’s what was there, that’s what was important. So I think probably, just like probably everybody else, I think mom was more influential.

Wendy: When you did get in trouble, what happened? Did you ever do wrong?

Maceo: Yeah. I can’t remember...it was something like probably clean the house or something or clean your room or something and we’d be like, ‘cause we were all boys, and we were really slow about that stuff at a certain time until we started getting older. And she’d pull out the old shoe or the strap or whatever she could get her hands on, a newspaper or something and roll it up, and that became it, and sometimes hid between her legs and all that, and we’d run, you’re running in place and she’d just spank us and all that. Yeah, we went through all of that.

Wendy: ________ that did not work. __________ always took my pants down.

Maceo: Yeah, but the discipline was there. It was really there. I can’t remember my father doing that. See, he just, you know, he’d just pass it on to her. Or she just took the initiative. No, no, no, I’ll handle this, you know. We have an adopted sister, but I was a freshman in college then I think. So for a time, I mean all that time, it was just the boys, four boys, and we were crazy. Really crazy.

Olga: That’s a handful. Four boys.

Maceo: Yeah. I mean, almost like steps, you know, like one, and another year and another year like that, and then I think it skipped two years and then another one, like that. So we were really crazy. Noisy. Goodness.

Olga: How do you see yourself as having changed over the years?

Maceo: I haven’t really changed. I’ve been Maceo, whatever that means in years, all my life. The only thing that changed is, you know, you have to change as you get older. You know, you just don’t do, you don’t move around as much. You try to preserve and conserve and all that stuff. But that’s the only change. And that comes hand in hand with just getting older. You know, no more basketball games, no more running the footrace, because I know I’m the fastest anyway. You know, no more of that stuff. I mean, what does it mean, what does it matter...I mean, I went through all of that, though, you know, because I knew I was a really fast runner. Every time I’d see somebody, I’d want to challenge them to a footrace, you know, 40-yard thing or whatever. But no more of that.

Wendy: I thought that was a metaphor. _____________ running. But you’re serious.

Maceo: Yeah, I was the fastest, like during the classes, yeah.

Olga: So you had more than one talent, to use.

Maceo: I don’t know if running fast is a talent. I don’t know. It’s just a trait. I think it’s a trait.

Olga: I think it is. You’ve gotta run fast if you want to make it to the Olympics or compete or something like that.

Maceo: I think it’s just a trait, it’s something you’re born with. Well, talent is kind of like that, though, isn’t it? I mean, sort of.

Wendy: Do you think that great talent, do you think it’s a gift or do you think it’s learned?

Maceo: Well, it could be either/or, but I think it’s more a gift, you know, like something you just happen to born with, I think. I mean, sure, you can teach somebody, somebody could study eight to 12 hours a day and learn how to “dah,” but then you just have those that’s just got it. I have a daughter who, well, she studies a little bit now since she’s in college, but all through high school, everything just came really easy. I mean, really easy, where she’d just look at it, oh, okay. All foreign languages. Same thing. I mean, then I have a son who gotta cram, cram, cram all night just to barely pass, you know. So how do you explain that? You know, same mother, same father, you know, but one is very, very easy, the other one gotta like, I mean, really really study, and that’s just the way it is sometimes.

Olga: Back to growing older, how have you seen yourself, have you kind of evolved spiritually? How did you kind of adapt towards getting older?

Maceo: No, I’ve always been a people person, so to speak. I’ve always, you know that do-unto-others thing. I’ve always had that. I mean, that may have been one of those things that was instilled in me as a youngster, that do-unto-others thing. I thought that was most important for everybody. I mean, how can a person do dah dah dah...I mean, suppose that was reversed, that’s what a do-unto-others thing comes in. You know, how would you feel if dah dah dah did dah dah dah to dah dah dah, you know? So I thought that was important. But, you know, you don’t go around saying it. It’s just something that you feel, you know, that you sort of live. And as I was getting older, again from the youngster thing, you know, you say, golly, you know, you have all these problems and what have you, but if everybody just sort of live by that, just do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, then it would be, you know, all the respect then would be there and all that, but I think by being in music and entertaining, it was a little bit more than that what made me a people person, I think, because I started thinking, in order for somebody to enjoy what I’m playing, they gotta be in that mood, you know. And in order to be in the right mood, you know, things gotta have gone right that particular day, you know, for somebody to say, oh, yeah, first of all, let’s go out and listen to those people on the stage playing whatever it is they’re playing. Then you gotta be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it. So I’m concerned with what goes on in the day with people so they will be okay at night when they hear us play. Again, early age.

Wendy: In like your early 20's, I assume this is true for all of us, you kind of want to change the world. And by the time you’re 30, you realize, okay, that’s not going to happen. But you still hold onto like one thing that you try, that your reason, you know, for...you know what I mean? Like a way to affect people or change something ______________.

Maceo: I just say whenever I can that maybe through music, through concerts, through going to the festivals, the music, that those of us who enjoy chaos, destruction, dah dah dah, can maybe change that particular lifestyle or way of thinking from going to the concerts, from hearing that song that they haven’t heard before, from watching people enjoy themselves and enjoy music. So I’ve always thought that maybe through music, that that can be important and can help change the world a little bit. And sometimes I even say, you know, when you have differences, you know, and here’s a state and all these things and country, whatever it is they feel like they have to fight for, physically fight for, you know, with different armies and all that, before someone says, yeah, yeah, before they get to that point, maybe we have all them come to the concert and then through that music or through being at that festival and shake everything you got and all this different music that we have, you know, wave your hands in the air and all this stuff, just maybe, just through that music or just being at that function, they say, well, maybe we can come up with another way to settle these differences rather than people losing their lives and all that.

Olga: I wanted to ask you too, being on the road as much as you are, over 300 days a year, right?, how do you keep your energy going? How do you stay sane?

Maceo: Well, you see, right after college, or right during college, you know, you come to a crossroad as to what it is you want to do, and there’s a choice, a, b, c or d. And I chose this lifestyle, and it’s not like, okay, because you are the whatever, you gotta do this, or because you are the something, you gotta do this, or as a reward for your being the fifth person to walk through the door, you gotta do this, or some kind of punishment, you gotta do this, it’s not that. It’s just, I chose this, I chose this lifestyle, out of the love for it, first of all. And that’s where my energy is fueled, because I just enjoy doing it. It sounds, you know, but I really do enjoy what I do. But, again, it’s just coming to a realization where you know that people sort of like what you do, and you’re giving something. People sort of like your sound, they like your style, and, again, you’re giving something. In fact, before when you said something between 20 and 30 years old, when you really learn that no matter what, there gonna be chaos, there gonna be tragedies, there gonna be death, you know, somebody’s gonna get sick, you know, you gonna have these things in life, and unfortunately, you gonna have those, here’s the state again who’s gonna say, yeah, it’s okay to have the skirmishes and the wars and all that stuff it’s okay. You got weapons manufacturers who say, for some reason, yeah, let’s produce this stuff and let’s find a way to use it so that maybe we can produce more stuff. I mean, you’re gonna have that. But in between that stuff, in between all of that chaos and negative stuff, you know, maybe you can find a little positive reason for, you know, want to listen to music, reason for you want to go out and have fun, yeah, we just won a football game, we just won whatever game, somebody’s graduating, somebody just got married, and so on and so on and so on. So we have reasons to celebrate. That’s where the music comes in. That’s where the entertainment comes in. That’s why I think it’s really, really important to have that particular end of it, that particular art. And maybe not all...that art....I mean, the arts anyway, where people just want to go out where you get the old thing about putting it to the side for a minute or what you do for Monday ‘till Friday or whatever, you know, the job thing, and just to get away from it all, let’s go relax and just enjoy some music. And that’s why it’s important. That’s another fuel that I use that give me the strength and the energy to keep going. But I think the most important one is, people just seem to like it. People seem to like it. I feel that we are giving something to the people. And from coming to the concerts and hearing what we do, maybe that gives them a strength to continue to do what it is they do. So it becomes really important.

Olga: One of the questions we always ask, people that we interview, the artists that we interview, is if you have any advice for struggling musicians out there who want to make a career in music.

Maceo: I think the most important thing to think about is performing. You have to try to find a situation where you can actually do what it is you do, if it’s playing the guitar or singing, the drums or whatever. The more that you do, in other words, that experience counts. You can’t beat the experience. Even if you’re a genius somehow, you know, you still have to be in a situation where you have to play with other people, and you have to sort of live through that or grow through that in order to feel comfortable in doing that. But what I’m really saying is, if you’re in a situation where you can only play for five people, then you play for five people, but do it as much as you can. Or ten people, the number doesn’t matter. I think the most important thing is getting really comfortable in doing what it is that you do, and as you get comfortable, you get better and better and better. And then somebody’s gonna recognize that. Somebody’s gonna hear it. And the situation will somehow fall in place where, you know, you say, but how do you get started? You don’t get started. You’re already started, you know. And then you just keep going and going and going and going. I’m another believer of nothing happens before its time, you know. So just hang in there with it. And a lot of time if you do have love for it, you’re gonna do that anyway, you know. But you can’t get discouraged, oh no, nothing’s gonna happen ____________. You gotta have the love, that love’s gonna keep you from saying it, and just keep there, you know, and so on and so on. And I believe it will happen.

Olga: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We really appreciate it. And if you would be so kind as to give us a station id. You gotta read it upside down, though.

Maceo: No, no.

Olga: Multi-talented.

Maceo: Joe’s Blue Plate Special, oh, I love that. The best of the unsigned independents. Ho ho ho. Okay.