Music Journalist Andy Aledort knows how to turn a passion into a writing career. Andy is the longtime senior editor and writer at Guitar Magazine, and is recognized worldwide both as a guitar instructor and as a performer. He’s been on the music scene for 35 years and, in that time, he has interviewed or written about just about everybody. Listen in and read along to The Qwerty podcast as he and I discuss how to do what you love while writing write what you know.
Marion Roach Smith: My guest today is Andy Aledort. He has toured and recorded with the bandmates of the original Jimi Hendrix Band and with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band, and has sold over one million guitar instruction DVDs. He teaches online, as well as privately. He performs all over with his band, the Groove Kings, and he is the co-author, along with Alan Paul, of The New York Times bestselling book, Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Oh, yeah, and we went to grammar school together. Hi, Andy.
Andy: Hi, Marion. Should we talk about Mrs. Fromm now or later?
Marion: Oh, Mrs. Fromm.
Andy: That was our kindergarten teacher.
Marion: Our kindergarten teacher who was so kind, who was so incredibly kind.
Andy: Wasn’t she great? She was fantastic.
Marion: She got me through school. And it’s a great curiosity to me to think about all those people we have traveled along with, all the talent that perhaps emerged from PS 94 and Little Neck, Queens. I love to think about Mrs. Fromm and how maybe sitting under those desks, those under-the-desk drills that we engaged in during the Cuban Missile Crisis …
Andy: “Take cover.” “All clear.”
Marion: … or the talent show that we all participated in, or that dynamic art teacher we all had, and how all that goes into who we become. So let’s start there. I mean, when and where — because I might’ve missed it on the playground — did you pick up your first musical cue to become who you are?
Andy: You didn’t miss it, but my mom, who — Amy, my sister, who’s, as we were saying before we started recording for the show, my sister, Amy Aledort, who you grew up with, and is the same age as you and your oldest sister, Margaret; they’ve stayed in touch over the years, and so they had a friendship — Amy just reminded me that our mothers actually were good friends in the PTA, at the time.
So my mother, Marilyn Aledort, she had been a singer and actress in the ’40s, late ’30s and ’40s. Her big production was “Where’s Charlie?” where Ray Bolger, the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz, was the star. She was in a lot of off-Broadway and community theater productions with Bea Arthur from Maude.
Anyway, we had a piano in the house. She sang. She bought a guitar for me before I was born. In 1955, she bought the guitar, and I was born in ’56. But since we’re talking about kindergarten and that art teacher, I was very, very into art and, starting in kindergarten, started to really exhibit, I guess, some ability in art, so much so that my mother started bringing me for painting lessons and all of this stuff. Art became my whole focus, starting at about five, or six, years old.
But when the Beatles came out shortly thereafter in February of ’64, when we were about eight years old, I fell in love with the Beatles. So the shortest answer is that I started to play guitar in 1967, at 11, but art was my main focus, and didn’t really get serious about the guitar until I was 17. I was already at School of Visual Arts, had started at School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1973 to get a degree in art, which is what I did. I got a bachelor of fine arts.
But so the music thing, sort of right when I was starting college, I was also playing guitar for six or seven hours a day.
Marion: Wow.
Andy: So I was as happy as a clam. I had art all day long and music all day and night.
Marion: Art all the time. Let’s talk about that in terms of how to turn a passion into a writing career. Well, let’s talk about art for a second in the largest sense, because I want to get to how you crafted this just great book on Stevie Ray Vaughan in a minute. But there’s this idea of how we become artists, and you’ve just given us a nice little skim across the biography of your artistic self. You’re a musician and a writer and, apparently, a visual artist, and you’ve interviewed more artists than anyone I know. So you’re the person I’ve kind of been waiting to ask this question.
In your book, you have this great phrase for Stevie Ray Vaughan. You refer to him as “a sheer force of desire.” So, let’s talk about desire for a minute in the life of an artist. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer, and that desire is honed on the obstacles that are set in our path. We don’t really get anywhere from anybody saying yes. I mean, you get a yes for an assignment, but you still have that hard work to produce a piece.
In physics, they call it the strong force, those opposing forces, and I always wonder about the strong forces that act against us that really hone our art. What do you think? What’s the oppositional force to all the encouragement you got, or what really honed this great desire for you, more than anything else, do you think?
Andy: Well, I would have to start with the opposite of that, only because, while you were talking, I was thinking about how your father was a very successful writer, I believe, and I would imagine it was in your DNA, to some degree. Speaking for myself, I felt like music and art was in my DNA from my surroundings, nature versus nurture. But it was just there constantly. There was music. There was beautiful paintings in the house, too. Both my parents … There were Picassos. They weren’t original, but an awareness to all of these things and sort of the importance. This is the beautiful part, and then here’s where the writing part comes in.
For whatever reason, my mother was an English teacher primarily, teaching English as a second language. So the English language was something that both my parents … My father was a month shy of getting his PhD in psychology, and he just got sick of being in college. But avid reader, both of them, and when I was seven, my mom was giving me Great Expectations and Moby Dick to read. She’d say, “Read this.”
Marion: I love her for that. Yeah.
Andy: I would try. I remember trying so hard to read Great Expectations at about seven years old, thinking, “This is impossible.” But I did skip third grade and went from second grade, Mrs. Ruther, who was so wonderful, and then spent one month with Mrs. O’Donnell, who was the meanest teacher in the entire school …
Marion: Yep.
Andy: … and then went straight to Mrs. McDermott, who I had for fourth and fifth grade, who I liked so much I would call her Mom by accident, which was embarrassing, but endearing. She got mad, but she liked it.
But anyway, the reason I skipped … It was ridiculous. I was raising my hand, trying to get her attention. I went, “Mom,” and she just looked at me like, “Oh my God.” Marion, one day I was out sick, and I needed a homework assignment. I knew she lived in Douglaston, so I got the phone book out. This is in fourth grade.
Marion: Oh no. No, no. Fourth grader gets on the phone to his teacher. No, no.
Andy: Yeah, I call her up. “Hi, is this Mrs. McDermott that teaches at PS 94?” “Yes.” “Yeah. Hi, it’s Andy. I’m in your class. What’s the homework assignment?” She goes, “Don’t you have a classmate that you can call?”
Marion: Yeah. Good.
Andy: I went, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t think of that.” But anyway …
Marion: Gorgeous.
Andy: … I skipped third grade, because on a reading test, they told me in second grade that I was reading at fifth grade level. Now, whether I had a lucky day the day I took that test, or, in fact, my reading was advanced, I don’t know.
Marion: Yeah, they skipped a lot of us. They skipped my sister, and they skipped me. Yeah.
Andy: Okay.
Marion: So you don’t think there’s an oppositional force. You think it’s about encouragement, specifically in how to turn a passion into a writing career. You think that it’s about people getting behind you and bringing you along, in terms of success.
Andy: Well, I do think there are oppositional forces, and I can talk about those, too, definitely in art and music. But I can’t deny that I was so encouraged in art, in music, and then it can’t be downplayed that the Beatles were such a force, culturally, that the Brodas, who lived next door to me, and the O’Neills, who lived down the block, and all my friends, starting at seven, eight, nine years old, knowing all the songs on the new Beatle record the day it came out and being able to sing them was this sort of badge of honor.
Marion: Yes.
Andy: So there was a competitive thing about being on top of it. Then we grew up at a time in the ’60s where there was a lot of attention, and this started when I was younger and I started going to summer camp. The people that ran the camp were ex-Peace Corps people. So there was a lot of subliminal … I can’t even talk. Sorry. Subliminal as it may have been, the connection between the Civil Rights Movement and folk music couldn’t be denied. The camp would take us to these folk festivals, where Pete Seeger would play, and there was a camp that Janis Ian’s dad owned that we would go to. She was probably not much older than us.
So there was this real awareness, let’s say, by the time we get to ’67, ’68, of the importance of civil rights and the connection of the youth movement and what we used to call the counterculture and art and music.
Marion: Right. Yeah, music was going to clean up … We were really expressing that we were going to clean up the world’s problems, and we were singing about it. I think it was an extremely strong force of support.
Andy: Yeah. Then I was always interested in film, too. So the films …
Marion: Right.
Andy: … the influence of European cinema on American films in the ’60s … My parents, I guess they couldn’t leave me home alone, so they would take me to … In Manhassett, there was this movie theater that showed all these crazy foreign films, like “Women in Love.”
Marion: Art house film. Yes, absolutely. The art house. Yep, yep, yep.
Andy: So I saw all these crazy movies, like “Morgan and The Knack.” My dad took me to “The Ipcress File” at the Little Neck movie theater, Ian Fleming before Bond movies even came out.
Marion: Right.
Andy: So I don’t know. They just hit me with all this stuff that was fascinating, and I brought up the cultural part of it, because that couldn’t be denied, an awareness to the power of all that in 1968 and ’69.
Marion: Sure.
Andy: So just to answer your question about oppositional force is that I did put a lot of pressure on myself to try to do well at whatever it was I was doing. When I first tried to go to college at 16, I went to University of Hartford to try to get in the art school there and was turned down, thank God, and was treated pretty poorly. So I would definitely classify that as an oppositional force, because it really made me feel like, “Well, I don’t agree with them,” and it made me want to work harder. So yeah.
Marion: I think that’s an important influence. Yeah, absolutely, and you’ve talked a lot about your parents. I know that there’s a great scene in your life where you’re in the kitchen. You’re in your mother’s kitchen in 1983, and a David Bowie song comes on, “Let’s Dance.” You thought it was Albert King on the record, I think …
Andy: Oh, you’re exactly right. Yeah, that’s in the book. Yeah.
Marion: … “Sheer Blues.” Yeah. “Sheer Blues” over, essentially, a disco track. Who was it, and what did you begin to be as you listened to that piece?
Andy: Well, it was Stevie Ray Vaughan. That was my introduction to some new guitar played named Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the appearance of Stevie Ray Vaughan on that David Bowie track, the first single from that record, which ultimately became the biggest record David Bowie ever had … Guy sold a lot of records. Stevie’s appearance on that track was the world’s introduction to this new guitar player, Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Eric Clapton is quoted in the book saying that he was in his car. The song came on the radio, and as soon as the guitar solo started, he pulled his car over. He thought, “I need to know who this is right now. I don’t want to know who this is, like tomorrow, the next day. I need to know this minute,” and he said he could only think of one other time that ever happened in his life, when he heard Duane Allman playing “The Weight” with Aretha Franklin.
Marion: Right.
Andy: So it’s pretty powerful. Yeah, that was my introduction to Stevie.
Marion: Yeah. You make the point that listening to that in your head, that he and you shared a sort of musical taxonomy, that you heard your own musical influences in his playing.
Andy: Yes.
Marion: We all know that feeling, like when we read somebody’s work and it has a familiarity, or we bite into something and it tastes very, very much like home or something that we would make. Late in the book, you quote Bonnie Raitt as saying that Stevie Ray Vaughan, “synthesized his influences and turned them into something so fiercely personal.” So what happened, in terms of purely biographical terms, for you with him? I mean, did you just say, “That’s where I come from, too, and this is who I’m going to follow”?
I think a lot of people are very nervous about those moments in life, and yet it seemed like it was a really big taxonomical moment for you, where you said, “I’m in. This is my thing, I get this. This is where he ended up listening to all this music. I’ve got to go someplace, too.” Maybe I’m reading more into it than not, but these are moments that frighten some people and awaken others. That’s what it felt like to me, that it awakened something in you.
Andy: Well, just so you understand, Stevie was only a little over a year older than me. He was born in October ’54, and I was born in March of ’56. So it was a year and a few months, and I formed my first band in 1974. So that’s almost ten years before I heard Stevie Ray Vaughan. Already had my guitar and musical influences firmly in place. At the top of the list in 1974 were Jimmy Hendrix and Ornette Coleman, who are kind of diverse, musically speaking. One is the king of rock guitar, and the other is the king of free jazz. Really, all I was listening to at the time was Jimmy Hendrix, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane. I sort of refuse to listen to anything else.
Marion: Not bad.
Andy: Yeah, well, and I put a lot of pressure … You talk about oppositional forces. I put a lot of pressure on myself to try to learn how to play all that stuff and all their music. In the case of Jimmy Hendrix, it was extremely difficult. But I love that challenge, every single day, to try to get better and better and better at playing like Jimmy Hendrix. I mean, there’s plenty of people who do it at least as well, if not better, than I do. But I can tell you that when the guys who played with Jimmy Hendrix, his drummer, Mitch Mitchell and bass player Billy Cox, and when the guys who played with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon, heard my replications of Jimmy Hendrix, they all thought it was Hendrix. They couldn’t believe it was not Jimmy Hendrix.
Marion: Well, you have these DVDs out that teach us how to play. My favorite of them is “The Best of Jimmy Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland.” You teach us how to play “All Along the Watchtower.”
Andy: Yeah.
Marion: Honest to God, if it wasn’t for that song, I don’t think I would’ve gotten through my teenage years.
Andy: Right.
Marion: So you have over a million of these DVDs out in production that teach us how to do this. You’ve got Eric Clapton, BB King, Keith Richards, Jimmy Hendrix. So that’s pretty wonderful. As a guitar player, you learned how to teach us. As a writer, you’ve learned how to teach us.
Andy: Right.
Marion: This is a multi-platform life you’ve got. Right?
Andy: Yeah.
Marion: That’s fascinating.
Andy: The writing thing, to go back to the Stevie Ray Vaughan thing, in 1983, I had already been playing in bars since 1974. So I was firmly established in my own mind and in my life and in my daily practices and everything I did as a guitar player and a musician. So when Stevie came along, I was happy to hear someone like that and interested in him.
So it wasn’t a cataclysmic moment, but I have a line that I like to say, is that Stevie Ray Vaughan made it okay to play “Voodoo Child,” which is a Jimmy Hendrix song. He made it okay to play “Voodoo Child” in a bar, because I had been trying to play Hendrix’s music in bars since 1974. Everybody would say, “The guy died four years ago. We’re tired of that stuff. We don’t want to hear it anymore.”
Of course, I found out later, from becoming friends with Stevie and getting to know him, that he experienced exactly the same thing I did. But once he became famous, people were like, “Yeah, we like that.”
Marion: Yeah.
Andy: So then I could play and can still today play “Voodoo Child” in a bar, more because of Stevie than because of Jimmy. So Stevie did a wonderful thing by turning …
Marion: Stevie did a wonderful thing. Yes.
Andy: He did a wonderful thing …
Marion: Yes.
Andy: … by turning the musical world’s attention back to very powerful music. We talk about it all the time. Of course, that includes all the blues heroes, like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Hubert Sumlin and BB King and Albert King and Freddie King.
Marion: Right.
Andy: But I do want to add that the first thing that happened when I met Stevie … Well, I heard Stevie in ’83. He played My Father’s Place, a club on Long Island, in ’84, and I saw him. He was terrific.
Marion: Yeah, and I want to talk about that for a minute, because I hung out there, too. So, I suspect we were in the same bar at the same time.
Andy: Oh, man. Oh, yeah. You had to go to My Father’s Place.
Marion: Oh my God. That’s the first place I ever snuck in with fake a ID, to see Buzzy Linhart, at 15, was My Father’s Place, and I must’ve seen Buzzy Linhart there a thousand times.
Andy: Yeah.
Marion: Yeah.
Andy: His song, “You’ve Got to Have Friends.” Did you try to sneak in to see Jasper Stone at McDimples? You know what I’m talking about?
Marion: I didn’t sneak in to see Jasper Stone. I went to Buzzy at 15, Aztec Two-Step a thousand times when I was in my early teens. This is the New York City youth that we had. My first club was the Fillmore East at 14 to see Mountain. So, I love that you love Leslie West.
Andy: Oh my God. You’re lucky. I’m friends with Leslie.
Marion: Oh, give him my love.
Andy: You know where he was born? Marion, you know where he was born?
Marion: No, no.
Andy: He was born in Fort Totten.
Marion: No. Right across from where I grew up.
Andy: Yeah.
Marion: That’s too funny. Well, we could do this forever. But let’s talk about the book. You met Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Andy: Okay.
Marion: I know you saw him at My Father’s Place. I loved when I read that, because that was such a formative bar for me, even though I was illegally there. But you write that … This is the kind of book that Stevie deserved, and I loved that line. So let’s give this the context it needs. He was a sharecropper’s son who went on to play with the biggest of the bigs, and his own bands produced a sound that was unlike any other. So what is his place in our musical history, for those people who don’t know his music, and why did he deserve such a book?
Andy: Stevie deserved the book because the first thing is there’s about a hundred books about Jimmy Hendrix, and there was really one book written about Stevie that was at least what could be considered as serious biography. It came out very shortly after he passed, called Caught in the Crossfire, written by Joe Nick Patoski. I believe Bill Crawford was the co-author. None of the principal people, the people in his band, his brother, Stevie’s family, none of those people participated in the writing of that book, with the exception of his uncle. Joe Cook was the only person who participated.
So there were a lot of things that I felt were lacking in that book, and it did come out right after Stevie passed. We didn’t intend, Alan and I, to wait 30 years to write a book about Stevie, but there is an advantage to 30 years of hindsight about someone’s career and their importance and their influence, because musicians like John Mayer, who is someone who’s in his forties now and has been influencing musicians himself for 20 years, Steve Ray Vaughan was his greatest influence.
So we were writing this book from a completely different perspective, where the importance of Stevie as a musician and as a person and his impact, culturally and musically, was much clearer, because we have all this perspective on it. So there was really one book. So that was one reason, one reason that I felt, and Alan and I both felt, Stevie really deserved the book.
But the other is a much simpler reason, is that I got to know Stevie, and he was a wonderful, wonderful person. So for me, personally, it wasn’t like the task of writing a book about someone who’s important historically, for one reason or another, although he happens to be. I was also writing a book about somebody that I knew, who I had felt I’d formed a friendship with, because I interviewed him a lot of times, and we’d sit around and play guitar, other than the very first time, where he played his guitar and I played my guitar and we jammed. Every other time after that, I’d bring my guitar and he would play my guitar.
The last thing he ever said to me, about a month before he died, was he handed me back my guitar, after playing it the entire time we sat and talked. It was me and Stevie and his brother, Jimmy Vaughn, the three of us. He stood up and handed me my guitar. He said, “Well, I still love your guitar.”
Andy: Then, subsequently, after his passing, between 1990 and by the year 2000, those ten years, I’d become very, very close with Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon from Stevie’s band, Double Trouble. I was touring and recording with them. So that played a huge part in my connection to Stevie and Stevie’s life and his world and his friends. Jimmy Vaughan, his older brother, I had met in 1989.
So I had a real visceral connection to Stevie as a person that came from my own experiences with him and then from becoming such close friends with those people around him. That enabled us to write a book like this, to conduct 400 new interviews. This is not an exaggeration, including his family, Stevie’s family members, and Jimmy Vaughan himself, who it took two years to convince him to come onboard even though he knew me. The reason it took so long is because it’s a very emotional thing for him, but I’m so thankful. We are so thankful that he did. I love Jimmy, and his contributions to the book are invaluable.
So that’s why I felt Stevie really deserved this book. He was a wonderful person.
Marion: Yeah.
Andy: He was such a great person, along with being one of the greatest guitar players the world has ever known.
Marion: You create this sort of 360 around him, which I found fascinating, a quote from him, a quote from his brother, from his cousin, his peers, famous rock and rollers. It’s almost like a stereo surround sound. I adored that. I think that’s one of the reasons the book is just so widely and delightedly adored by people, because it’s got this sense that you did … and it could only be through 400 interviews that you did that.
But how do you, as a writer, get out from under your own love of the person? This is a tricky place for people. I was brought up at The New York Times, and we were always told, “Don’t go in with any kind of intent. Don’t assume the person is guilty. Don’t assume that person is whatever.” So, how did you get out of your own way? Was it the reporting that allowed you not just to make it an adoration of somebody who you really admired?
Andy: Well, that’s such a good question, Marion. In 2005, so a number of years before, I mean, I didn’t even think about writing a book about Stevie Ray Vaughan until Alan Paul asked me, which I guess was in 2017. But in 2005, I was hired by Dickey Betts from the Allman Brothers to play with them. The reason I bring that up is when you become close with someone who’s extremely famous, something happens that you’re not necessarily aware of immediately. You become very protective of these people, because they’re famous and they’re constantly being approached and sort of, in your mind, attacked by the outside world.
So I became aware of how protective I became of Dickie, because we were friends. So, thankfully, I already had an awareness to what it is to have too much of myself in the picture. But let’s not forget I started writing interviews with musicians in 1985, and I had a good 35 years of experience of doing that.
So when I started doing that, from the get-go, I knew a good reporter didn’t inject his own personal feelings too much, and when I would read other people’s writing and they did, I hated it.
Marion: Yeah.
Andy: So a writer who never did that, Peter Guralnick, who is one of my favorite, if not my favorite, music historians, who wrote, recently, the wonderful book Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was supposed to be an autobiography co-written by Pete, and then Sam just didn’t want to do it. Pete said, “I’m not going to just let all this stuff sit here,” so he finished it as a biography. But that’s what I just loved about Pete, and a guy I got to meet … This is just sort of incidental, but someone who’s writing I always love was George Vecsey, who wrote for the Times.
Marion: Oh, I love him. I think my father hired him. That’s too funny.
Andy: Did you ever meet George?
Marion: He made him into a sportswriter. Oh, sure. He had been a religion writer, and my dad made him a sports writer, or he had been a sports … I’m trying to remember the order, but yes, I knew George, of course, at The New York Times. Yes. How lovely.
Andy: Oh, I love George. Yeah, well, it turned out we had a mutual friend. So in recent years, last five years, I’ve hung out with George a lot of times. He lives in Port Washington. For those who don’t know, he wrote Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn’s story with Sissy Spacek. Levon Helm was in the film, from the band.
Marion: Sure.
Andy: So I did have role models as writers. I might not have had many, but those were two that were powerful.
Marion: Those are good. Those will work.
Andy: They’re good ones.
Marion: But you made an interesting decision. Yeah, you made a really interesting decision that I want to talk about as we start to wind this down, and that is we’ve got this veritable Who’s Who of America. All kinds of people show up in this book. You’ve got Stevie Wonder and Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Brown singing Amazing Grace at Stevie Ray Vaughan’s funeral after he dies in this helicopter crash – after he and his band die in the helicopter crash. You’ve got people, amazing choices of who to leave in and who to leave out.
But you made this decision to include … and you must’ve had some hard decisions here, but you made this decision to include photos of programs, tickets, business cards, venue calendars, postcards, booking receipts, pages from the tour notebook. My favorite thing that you do, though, is in the end of the book, after the epilogue, you put in this list of Stevie’s gear, listing his guitars and where he got them. The amplifiers, the pedals, the picks, the note straps, and the strings are all annotated. How did you know that we would love that? Because I just went facedown in the book when I saw that, and I’m not a guitar collector. It was the personal, “Ah.”
Andy: Well, I’m so glad to hear that you liked that, because there was a little back-and-forth about whether we should include that, whether it was too guitar-head and that people who weren’t guitar players …
Marion: Too guitar-head. Yeah.
Andy: … would just go … Yeah, people who weren’t guitar players would go, “This is all Greek to me. I don’t really care.”
Marion: Oh, no.
Andy: But I can tell you … Oh, I’m so happy to hear that. So whenever it was, it was shortly after Stevie passed, I wrote a lot of different articles about Stevie, and one of them, I had the opportunity to do a really long, two-and-a-half hour interview with Rene Martinez, who was his guitar tech.
Now, Marion, I mean, I am a psycho for details. So, given the opportunity, I asked Rene about every possible screw in Stevie’s guitar, every tube, preamp tube, and we weren’t talking capacitors, but we got pretty down there, to a crazy level of detail. Rene was happy to talk to me about those things.
Marion: Great.
Andy: So for guitar players, and Stevie had talked to me about some of these things himself, which was a lot of fun, like that he had made this decision to replace all the speakers in all of his amps, 34 different amps, with Electro-Voice speakers. In his wording that he used, he said, “Well, I just decided to spray all my amps with the same speakers,” like spray paint …
Marion: Yeah.
Andy: … which is a really bizarre way to say it. Anyway, so that’s how I was able to put that together …
Marion: That’s great.
Andy: ... the details of each guitar, where Stevie got it, the strings, the picks, the pickups, the amps, the pedals, and I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed that as well.
Marion: I loved it. It’s a kind of bibliography, and it’s a kind of annotation. It’s a kind of laying on of hands that brings it ever more close to the reader. So before I let you go, I’ve got to let people know where they can see you. You’re on the road with your band, The Groove Kings.
Andy: Well, when used to be a road. Is there still a road?
Marion: When there used to … I’m hoping, Andy, that there’s still a road after Covid. So we can find you online. But how often do you play out on the road?
Andy: Well, previous to the Black Plague descending upon us, I was playing out a lot, two, three times a week, in all kinds of different configurations. I have my band, which is Andy and the Groove Kings. I have a band called Friends of the Brothers that is comprised of alumni, people who played with someone in the Allman Brothers. So they’re all incredible musicians, and that’s a great band. I’ll play solo gigs and duet gigs. So I play, because I live in Seacliff on Long Island, primarily the tri-state area, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Under normal circumstances, I’m playing two to three nights a week in any one of these incarnations, all over the place. Then we’re going to go out to Colorado and do a 30th anniversary of Stevie’s passing on August 27th, and that’ll be a lot of fun. Alan and I are going out to. So with the release of the book, I started to do some Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute shows, too.
Marion: Great.
Andy: So those might be at the new My Father’s Place, which still exists. It’s My Father’s Place now or a variety of places. So, people, look on my Facebook page, on my website, andy aledort dot com, and they can find all the information about gigs, once we get over this crazy phase we’re in and we can go back to some sense of normalcy.
Marion: Great. Well, thank you, Andy.
Andy: Thank you so much, Marion.
Marion: Oh, you’re welcome. It’s just so great to hear your voice again, and that’s Andy Aledort, my new favorite expert on how to turn a passion into a writing career. His book Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan is available wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go.
