Going Down in Flames” is one of my all-time favorite tunes. I was actually guitarist in The Tasters when it was recorded in 1970, and there are actually four of us playing on this tune. T: This is “Gone”, the second cut on this double-CD, recorded live at the University of Texas, on March 19, 1976. It’s probably the one we play most often at our concerts these days. G: It was on my college senior recital. T: I guess the one reason we don’t play it more often, is that it was such a long, difficult song to learn at the time, we were never sure how to interpret it. I mean, the tune is great and so is the harmony, but it’s hard to pull it off. The words and the melody, it was just so intricate. It always took us about nine months to learn it. Anyway, that was part of why it took so long to learn. G: And I have to admit, it took years to figure it out. It took me about 15 years to nail it, although I had the basics down. And you know, I think that that might be the most accurate statement for anyone who’s played with us for any length of time. After I’ve spent a good amount of time with the songs and it’s been in the repertoire for a while, I think I finally get that song. The others, it might take me two or three years to learn the song, but after that, it’s like, there. That song is mine now. I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t have to try so hard to play it. It’s something that is so well-constructed that it’s easy to perform. So, you learn it, and then you really don’t have to worry about it. So, in a way, it’s a relief. T: It’s funny. At the beginning of each year, we decide what songs we want to do this year. And usually, we try to learn it before the next Christmas. That’s how long it takes, so if you start in the beginning of December, you’ll probably be done by July or August. I think this song was one of the first ones to make it into the repertoire. We’re actually playing it this year. And, as with most of the songs on our repertoire, it’s a good song to learn to do because it’s not that hard to play if you already have a little bit of a repertoire. That song—I mean, we’re not playing it tonight. I want to play it because we’re going to break off from “All the Things You Are” for a second. G: I think that it’s just been kind of an interesting experience the last couple of years, to think back and realize that 30 years ago we were just teenagers, you know, guitarists from the suburbs. I mean, it’s amazing to realize that now, I can sit here and play this song and know everything about this song. And, I mean, we’ve played it probably, oh, 20 times since then, but it’s such a great song. I mean, it has such a complicated kind of style to it. So I’m looking forward to playing that. It’s a pretty complex song. T: A little while ago, we were playing with the Sphinx Organization and they said they wanted to do a benefit for music and the library, and I thought, “You know what? Let’s do it here in our own backyard, at Wichita State, at the Fine Arts auditorium.” This was going to be our year for this concert, so we figured we might as well do it at home. And, I went up to the library and I said, “We should do a benefit concert. Can we have the entire student population of Wichita State come out and perform at a concert for you guys?” They said, “Sure, we’d like that.” So I thought, “Okay, well let’s do that.” G: We came up with the concept, and the theme was an all-female group doing a concert in Wichita Falls, Texas. It was probably a good thing that a benefit had come up a couple of days before or I don’t think we could have done it. We didn’t know what to do about it. So, we put the program together and then I went out and asked them if I could use their auditorium. T: We figured out what song we wanted to do, and all that stuff, and so we ended up asking the student body, and they said, “Well, you can do that.” I was kind of taken aback because I didn’t expect it, so I had to say, “Okay. Well, great. I’ll work with the student body and I’ll get back to you.” G: We contacted the Student Center and we explained what we were doing, and they said, “Oh, you can use the auditorium.” We hadn’t even asked them yet! They sent the paperwork down with us and we got up there and rehearsed it. T: So, in the meantime, they had found out about the concert and they asked if they could get in. We were still working on the program, and they said, “Well, there is another student organization called The Sphinx Organization. I guess you know about them. Maybe you could do something with them.” And we were like, “Oh, yeah. Great. Well, sure. I’ll do it with them.” We had no idea what we were going to do, so I called up and asked. And it turned out that they were interested in doing this benefit with us, so then we had a benefit concert. G: We had just gotten back from tour and I had just become more proficient with the bass and with the piano and all that stuff, so I wasn’t really sure what I was doing yet. We were getting used to being on stage, so to speak, so I asked Seth to join us and I guess Seth said that he would play as long as we weren’t making him sing, but other than that, he was fine with it. T: It was a nice thing that we asked him to play, because he got us through that and he knew what we were doing and he was used to it because it’s really difficult to keep in step with a beat when you only have one rhythm. So, it was a real pleasure to have him there, and I had done the same thing with Steve. Steve’s not really my cousin. He’s my best friend, really. He was the bassist, and we were the two rhythm guys. G: It worked out well because he played with a couple of different jazz groups at a high school in California for some time. He could bring his stuff with him, so that was a real good idea. We were really lucky because we were able to work that into what we had. So, it worked out great. T: And then the Student Center got a hold of us and they said they wanted to book it. We didn’t have a date picked out, but they thought that this would be a really good idea and they would love to do this. They were really willing to go for it. So we’ve been doing that ever since. Now it’s just becoming sort of a part of our repertoire. We don’t do it every year, but we always do a holiday concert. We always do a spring concert, or whatever it is. We’re about to do a spring concert, in fact, next year. G: We did two a couple of years ago. It’s a good opportunity for us to get together and remember when we were all living together in New Jersey. And as we were rehearsing it, we were all sitting down, thinking about the beginning of the rehearsal. And I was looking over at Seth and I’m saying, “Gee, we’re not very big,” and he says, “Nah, we don’t need to be. This is a song that will let us play and it’s going to be so big that the instruments will cover the fact that we’re not very big.” And that’s when we started the song, which is pretty amazing. It was really, really great. T: It’s great that we can actually get up there, because we used to have trouble preparing to play this stuff. It took us a long time to figure out that we needed to rehearse this and play this and try to get this down. It took a really long time for us to figure out what we were doing and it took us years to do it. So