Conducted on December 10, 2018
Interview with Actor great Dennis Quaid
by Mary Andrews with Partnership of AXS
Dennis Quaid has been in the public eye for many years. Quaid has been immortalized as an actor over the years for his roles in Great Balls of Fire, Tombstone, The Big Easy, The Right Stuff, and many more movies. He has also recently been a spokesperson for Esurance commercials.
However, Quaid has been a singer and songwriter for as long as he has been an actor. He has written many songs that have been used in the soundtracks of his movies dating back to the 80s.
Quaid has renewed his passion for music. He sparked a musical kinship with Jamie James. James is known as a guitar player for Harry Dean Stanton’s band and the front man for the Kingbee’s. Together they formed their own band, The Sharks.
Quaid and his band have been touring and preparing for their first full-length album, Out of the Box. The release date for the album was November 30.
We were able to catch Quaid for a chat regarding the new album and a little bit of everything else.
Mary Andrews: Your publicist mentioned that you are in Chicago filming today. What are you filming?
Dennis Quaid: I was actually here for a big Esurance Christmas party. I came back just to say hello to everybody. I flew in for six hours and now I’m on my way back to get home for my son’s soccer game tomorrow.
You mentioned that you were going to your son’s ball game tomorrow. Is he one of the twins? That was a very bad situation after they were borne.
Back when they were 12 days old and we had a really happy ending to it, thank God. They got overdosed with heparin in the hospital. I think the power of prayer is what saved them really. They are doing just great.
You were in Arizona a couple of months ago, right?
Yes, I was in Tombstone and had a blast. I had never been to Tombstone because the movie was actually shot in New Mexico. I was really amazed at how authentic Tombstone was. We shot Tombstone outside of Santa Fe. They shot Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. In fact, I saw Billy Bob (Thornton) last night. I’m doing his series, Goliath. He’s a really good guy and I don’t have many actor friends.
AXS: He is a really neat guy. He and his band The Boxmasters performed at the Fox Theatre in Tucson.
Yeah, we need to come there ourselves. We played the Helen Theatre in Bozeman, Montana. I love those old places because the acoustics are great. I love the feel of the old theatres or movie palaces as they used to call them.
This is a good segue to talk about your new album. Was it released everywhere on November 30?
Yes, it was. We have a vinyl edition coming out in January. The presses are so booked up that we weren’t able to get it out with the record right now. We will be out on tour in April and this gives us something else to look forward to.
We had an opportunity to give it a listen this morning. It is a rocking album. There is a mixture of new songs and cover songs on the album. It was amazing to hear how close your vocals were to Jim Morrison’s on the Doors’ songs.
Thank you. Yes, we are going to be the oldest guys to make it in rock and roll. That’s our mantra. My guitar player, Jamie, and I had the good fortune to get on stage about a month ago with Robby Krieger and John Densmore and do “Riders In the Storm” with them. That was like a dream come true.
We did about 13 original songs out of a total of 25 tracks total for the album in six months time. We took our time with it. These are the songs we chose for the first record. We are going to go back to the studio next month and start on the second record.
It took a while to get started, but now you are on a roll.
We’ve recorded live shows before to have something to sell at gigs, but we wanted to make a real record. I was playing golf with my friend, T Bone Burnett, and he helped me arrange for us to be in Studio D, the big room at Village Recording and loaned his engineer, Mike Piersante.
Basically, we cut the album in a bedroom and cut it live. We went into the studio for over-dubs on singing and other stuff.
One song on the album is “On My Way to Heaven.” Is that an original composition?
Yes, that is an original. I wrote it for my mom 25 years ago. I never finished it at the time. I was doing that movie I Can Only Imagine a couple of years ago. It was a movie about a father and son that his son wrote for his father. I finally found the (inspiration for) the bridge 25 years later to my song. So, we put it on the record.
There is another song called “Walk With the Angels.”
That came out of nowhere. I guess it was just rooted in Texas rock and roll. I like songs about joy. That sort of inspires me.
You started playing guitar at the age of 12. How did that come about?
I grew up in Texas during the time of Hank Williams and Elvis of course. My third cousin is Gene Autry. My dad played piano. Music was all around. My grandfather bought me a $12 guitar from Western Auto. I tried to learn “Light My Fire” on it. Western Auto wasn’t famous for their guitars. I got a book of cords and got to where I could change them. I spent a lot of time in my room as a teenager. It was all about girls, basically, you know.
Did you actually get to know Gene Autry?
I met him after I was out in L.A. I met him at the premiere of Wyatt Earp. I got free Angels’ tickets. He was just a great guy. If you really look at it, he was probably the most successful entertainer if you put it into today’s dollars and just what he did. Nobody had ever done that before. He was a movie cowboy. He wrote these great songs. He was on television. He owned a baseball team. He was an inspiration.
I assume you got to a point where you had to make a decision on which road you were going to take, acting or music?
I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I loved music and I was a songwriter to start out. I knew I wasn’t going to be like a shredder. Jamie in the Sharks is our shredder. Songwriting was kind of a natural thing for me. It was almost like a defense that I could do that maybe the other members of the band weren’t doing.
When I got into the college drama department, there was a great acting teacher there by the name of Cecil Pickett. He was also my brother’s teacher and he taught a bunch of other people who wound up working a lot. It was lucky because I knew what I wanted to do with my life at that point. He showed me a craft that I was really interested in. I also thought music would feed into that. I was lucky enough to be able to write songs for the soundtracks. “Closer To You” was a song I wrote for The Big Easy. I cut that song with The Neville Brothers. Of course, I played Jerry Lee in Great Balls of Fire. I’ve had a pretty lucky life.
A portion of the album seems to have that Jerry Lee Lewis rock flavor. Was that deliberate?
A little bit, yes. There is a song I wrote called “Good Man, Bad Boy” that is on the album. It’s kind of a blues track. There was an old, black blues player by the name of Booker T. Laury. He was in the film and he came and lived with me for about three months. After the movie, he was my teacher and like a second father. I wrote that song for him. The album is kind of a junkyard of American music. Nowadays, they call it Americana music.
We do everything from rock and roll and blues, country, and lounge music.
You cover “Slow Down” on the album. Most people associate it with the Beatles, but it was originally done by Larry Williams.
I really do it from the Beatles too. Jamie and I do the harmonies. We are huge Beatles fans. That’s really where that came from.
Do you have any dreams left to come true?
I have to pinch myself because my life seems to be that most of the time. I’ve had a very lucky life. It’s all about the wonderful feeling of being alive really.
If you weren’t an actor or a musician, what would you be?
Probably, I would be a veterinarian. I worked as an assistant as a teenager one summer in Texas where my father lived. I worked with dogs, cats, horses, and cows. There was an incident when we had to castrate a horse. The farmer didn’t want to sit out there all night with the horse. They didn’t give him enough of the anesthetic that he needed. That put a damper on me for wanting to be a veterinarian. That was pretty harsh. That’s probably what I would have been though.
What inspires your songwriting?
It would be love and my life. You can only write personally. In order to be authentic, you have to write from personal experience. Also, things I see in other people’s lives that I can relate to. I collect true fiction. It’s always about myself, but I may put a story on it. Johnny Cash was a really good storyteller in music. He was a great man. He had a great soul and was an incredible writer.
What music do you have playing in your car right now?
I listen to a lot of Willie’s Roadhouse. I jump between that and ‘hip-hop.’ I think most of the good poets are in ‘hip-hop’ right now. They write from what’s going on in their lives. It becomes universal in that sense if you really listen to it. I really like Calente. My girlfriend is really into Reggaeton music.
Tell me about Reggaeton music.
Reggaeton music comes out of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Columbia, and the Caribbean. It’s influenced by hip-hop and Latin American music. That’s where the real new thing is happening. It always comes from poor kids and their own experience in the same way that Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams did. These poor kids start this new type of music. That’s what’s going on in Reggaeton right now.
If you could only listen to three albums for the next year, what three records would you choose?
The first one would be Waylon Jennings’ Dreaming My Dreams. That’s my favorite album. The album was produced by Jack Clement who was another mentor of mine. Jack was the engineer back at Sun Records. He showed up at my door when I was doing a movie and he just moved in. That album is just ‘it’ for me, what an album. The Beatles’ White Album, I love that. The third album would be Frank Sinatra with the Count Basie Orchestra that he did when he was 50 years old. I think that was at the height of his powers. It has “Witchcraft” and “It Had To Be You.”
Who is your biggest influence?
I don’t whom I could say is my biggest influence. I grew up in Houston and I had a lot of eclectic music in my past. My dad was a big Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin fan. Yeah, Frank Sinatra, I think is the best singer of the 20th Century because of his phrasing. He changed music with that. Willie Nelson was really influenced by Frank Sinatra. I think Waylon called that ‘back phrasing,’ where he waited a beat and a half before he’d slip it in there.
The Beatles were a big influence. Also, Waylon Jennings was a big influence.
You have been very generous with your time and we would love to see you come to Tucson. The Sharks are a killer band.
We would love to come. We did about 50 dates this year and we are planning to do twice as much in 2019. We have been together about 18 years and we really know each other. It’s such a wonderful feeling when we play live.
You’ve done thousands of interviews over the years. If you were interviewing, what would you ask Dennis Quaid?
(Laughing) Why can’t you be on time?
