With the popularity of Yacht Rock, Firefall has seen a resurgence, however, the band is so much more than a few radio hits. The band is about to release a new record called Friends & Family which features covers from bands that the original lineup either played in or toured with. Founding guitarist Jock Bartley recently took some time to talk about the rich, unique history of this band.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Jock Bartley –
On the origin of the Friends & Family record – About a year and a half ago when Mark Andes was still in the band, our manager and our record label said, “Some of the original members of Firefall played in a lot of other famous bands”. Mark was a big part of that, The Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Spirit, JoJo Gunn, Dan Fogelberg, Heart, in my case, Graham Parsons, Lynn suggested that we do an album of their material. As soon as he said that, I went, “That’s a great idea, but let’s expand that a little bit”. In 1976, when Firefall’s first record came out and went gold really fast and we started touring with everybody. I said, “In 76, we toured with The Band with Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, the Doobie Brothers, Fleetwood Mac during the White Album before Rumors, Loggins and Messina, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, on and on and on. Let’s include a song from some of those bands too”. He said, “That’s great”.
What’s interesting is as soon as that concept came up, I knew that picking the songs, we had to do that very carefully because some of the songs were off limits in my mind. For instance, Lynn said, when he heard we toured with The Band on their last tour before they went out and made the movie, The Last Waltz, and broke up, he said, “The Band, oh, that’s great. You can do “Up On Cripple Creek” “. And I went, “No frigging way. Levon Helm is really the only guy that should ever sing that song”. When we were trying to pick the Heart song, Mark Andes was in Heart for a long time, and we toured with Heart for years in the seventies. Somebody suggested, “Hey, let’s do ‘Barracuda’ “. I went. “Nah, “Barracuda” is not one that we can do”. So I knew that each one of those songs we picked, we needed to be careful. The main thing we needed to do was have our version, honor the original, be respectful of the original. Also what this album is, is honoring that time in music, the late sixties and the seventies in American music, which will really never be duplicated again. Back then in the sixties and seventies, record labels didn’t have their hands on your throat and the songs you did, and how you sounded, and when you made an album. They were pretty much hands off and you turned it in and they put it out, and that really led to bands like the Eagles and Dan Fogelberg and Firefall and Little River Band and Little Feet.
When you think about some of the great American bands like Steely Dan, they were like nobody else, but they were fantastic. That’s when record labels pretty much kind of let the bands do what they did. Then in the eighties, it got like, “No, we want you to do this song”, or, “You should sound like this”. It all tried to get a lot more commercial and record labels kind of took over and bands and songs and writers kind of suffered. It was really pretty amazing because when that concept for Friends & Family came up, I knew that we had some of the very, very best songs of the late sixties and seventies to choose from, and Firefall always had great songs.
On Firefall’s history with The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, and others- Our original band, which was Rick Roberts from the Flying Burrito Brothers, he also played with Stephen Stills. Mark Andes from Heart, I’m sorry, Spirit to start with Jojo Gunn, later Heart, Dan Fogelberg, Mark has played with everybody. He’s since retired and quit the band. Michael Clarke was our drummer who was the drummer for The Byrds, the king of four/four, and myself. I replaced Tommy Bolin in Zephyr, and I was in Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris in The Fallen Angels, which was interesting because I wasn’t a country picker at all, but I was better than the guy they had, and I got hired, and suddenly, I was playing with them and stuff.
So Firefall was kind of not a superstar band, but we had some named guys. Now the key to Firefall was, and I’ll just tell you a story. So, I met Rick Roberts. Well, this leads me into a whole nother deal. The intertwining nature of a lot of those bands and musical members and girlfriends and boyfriends that were Southern California. Everybody knows about when Stephen Stills, Jim McGuinn, and Richie Fury came from New York and moved to California. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell moved from Canada. Bernie Leadon and a little bit later, Don Felder moved from Florida. Gram Parsons came from Florida. Don Henley from Texas and Glenn Fry from the Detroit area moved out to L. A. When you think about how many bands was Bernie Leadon in? Oh, I can think of five or six probably, but it was amazing.
So when I met Rick Roberts in New York City, Rick, when he was in the Burrito Brothers about a year earlier. In the Burrito Brothers, he replaced Gram Parsons in the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Chris Hillman and Rick were the Burrito Brothers for a while. When they played in Washington DC, Rick heard about this fantastic female vocalist. He went down and took a cab to hear Emmylou Harris play as a folk singer and basically discovered her. He called Chris in the hotel and said, “Chris, you gotta, you gotta get down here and hear this gal. She’s amazing”. Chris was already in bed after their show and said, “How dare you call me? I’m not going to come down there”. Rick said, “No, Chris, you gotta come down here”. So Chris Hillman gets dressed, took a cab down, and saw Emmylou Harris, they basically discovered her and a few days or weeks later, Chris Hillman called his old buddy Gram Parsons in L.A. and said, “I think we found the gal you’re looking for to be your your female singer”.
Now, what’s interesting about this intermeshing stuff? So when Rick Roberts was in the Flying Burrito Brothers, he wrote the song “Colorado”, and we did it on our Friends and Family album. Linda Ronstadt covered that song and had a huge hit with “Colorado”. So with Gram Parsons and Emmylou and the Fallen Angels, they wanted they wanted James Burton, who played all over the GP album, to play Telecaster on their tour. Of course, James Burton was Elvis’s guitar player and Elvis said, “You’re not going out with anybody else, you’re my guitar player.” So they went, “Okay. Oh, Clarence White. Oh, I love Clarence White. What a player. He’s fantastic”. But he was in The Byrds then with Roger McGuinn. Now, Clarence wasn’t available. So they rehearsed in LA as the Fallen Angels without a guitar player for about a month and hired a guy kind of sight unseen at the last minute and they got on the bus and came to Boulder, Colorado, where their first gig was. I remember the manager of the club they played in said, “You better get your ass down here. You might get a gig”. I went, “Who with?” “Gram Parsons”. “Gram, who?” “You know, The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers?” “Oh, right.”
I go down and I hear them play and the next night they asked me to sit in with them. The interesting story with that was they figured out that they needed a good rhythm guitar player. They needed a good rock guitar player to play solos, but mostly they needed a country picker like James Burton. When the dust settled and I sat in with them and they had a meeting after that gig, they said, “Well, Jock is two out of the three of those, not a country picker, and the guy we got now is zero out of three. Two out of three wins every time”. So I got hired that night. The next morning, at 9:00 AM, went on the bus and went down to play our first gig in Austin, Texas at the world-famous Armadillo Headquarters. And Neil Flanz, the late great steel player, and I tried to keep dropping the needle in the bus that’s bouncing around for me to try to learn James Burton’s licks, which, I was pretty unsuccessful at.
But the thing is that our next gig in Houston, Texas. We’re playing on stage on our last night of that gig, and onto the stage walks Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young, both of whom knew Gram from L.A.and they sat in with us. It was the first time Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt ever met or sang together. Neil said, “Hey, I’m having a big party in my hotel suite. Come on over”. So after our gig, three bands, Neil Young’s band, Linda Ronstadt’s band, and Gram Parsons’ band all go over to Neil’s hotel suite and Gram Parsons, like he was want to do, as soon as we got there and the drinking started and the smoking started and we’re carousing in the hotel suite. Gram grabs Neil’s guitar, starts playing 20 or 25 country songs and the most amazing thing was when Emmylou and Linda Ronstadt sat face to face really close to each other and blended their voices together for the very first time, singing to Gram and all his country songs and all of us watching, I mean, it was obviously incredibly magical. But we knew then that it was historic. Linda Ronstadt, Neil, and Emmylou Harris singing together for the first time. To be a fly in the wall at that, that thing was just so amazing.
It just goes to show, the bands, the Eagles and Poco and Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds and all those bands from Colorado. A lot of people don’t realize that after a lot of those people who invented folk rock like The Bryds or invented country rock like The Buffalo Springfield kind of touched into that and The Byrds when Gram joined and they made “Sweetheart of the Rodeo “album, which was a commercial failure after all of their big rock and roll hits, and along with Rick Nelson and Mike Nesmith from the Monkees, and Poco, and Gram Parsons, they invented country rock.
On how Firefall came together – It was that Southern California merging of musics. A lot of people don’t know that many of those rock stars moved to the mountains above Boulder, Colorado in about 72, 73. We had Caribou Ranch, the studio up the hill, and Red Rocks was down, down the plains a little bit. Stephen Stills, Chris Hillman, Richie Fury, Joe Walsh, Dan Fogelberg, Carl Wilson from the Beach Boys. They all bought houses above Boulder. And suddenly Boulder kind of became this Mecca for music. Where I lived and Rick Roberts was there and Rick and I started jamming together. When Mark Andes the bass player from Spirit got in our jam session, suddenly it was feeling like a band and not one of Ricky’s solo albums that he was thinking about making. He said to me and, and Mark, he said”, I know this guy in Washington, D. C., Larry Burnett, who sings and writes great songs. You want to hear a song?” We said, “Sure”. This was before cassette tapes were invented. He put a big old reel to reel on and the first song we heard of Larry’s was “Cinderella”. We just went. “Oh, get him out here”. The end of this part of the story is that from our first week of practice of Firefall, we didn’t have a name yet. We weren’t Firefall. We were just a band. We didn’t have any gigs, Michael Clarke was still a month and a half or two months away from joining the band, but I know our first week of rehearsal with Rick Roberts and Larry Burnett, the singer-songwriters, the new band had 20 or 25 original songs to work out from those guys. The amazing thing with that was that the songs were so good that a year and a half later, when we made our first album, a lot of those songs from the first week were “Mexico”, “It Doesn’t Matter”, “Livin’ Ain’t Livin'”, “Cinderella”. So to me, as a guitar player, the most important thing towards the success of a band or an artist or whatever is the song, everything is about the song and a lot of guitar players in the ’70s and ’80s didn’t ever really learn and they take solos and just play countless notes and show off how great they were.
Me, having been a classically and jazz-trained guitar player by the guitar maestro, Johnny Smith in Colorado Springs, who had 14 records out and played with Bing Crosby and Stan Getz and all these guys from the forties and fifties, I learned by sitting across from Johnny Smith for so many years, when I was eight and a half till 14 years old that taste, and playing tastefully, it wasn’t really what you played is what you didn’t play, the spaces you leave. Miles Davis is probably the best example of that. He’d played one note instead of 30 notes and people were going, “Oh”. Everything I do as a lead guitar player in my adult life and into Firefall with all these great songs, everything I played was to further the song and to help the song out, and pretty much the whole band was like that. David Muse on sax and flute and keyboards. He just adds the right part. That’s why our first three Firefall records still sound great today and stand up and the songs and the playing are just so amazing. For me to have that many great songs to play when we go out on the road and play and make good money and tour around is just phenomenal. I know that I’m fortunate and really lucky and it’s pretty humbling because we talked to fans, “My wife and I got married to “Just Remember I Love You” “, or, “I had a really serious illness and your song, whatever, got me through that”. Music is the international language and it means so much to people in their lives that to play a small role in it like Firefall did, and I did is just incredible.
On if the rise of Yacht Rock has helped the band – I even go back further to the mid or late eighties or whatever, when the new radio format was classic rock, because people got tired of hearing disco music, or grunge, or whatever. They longed for the great music of the seventies, classic rock, and now Yacht Rock.
It’s really is pretty amazing. I have seen for a long time because I’m in my seventies now and I’m just still fortunate to still be doing this, but our audience is 50, 60, and 70-year-olds, right? But when we play, I see a lot of people that are in their thirties or their twenties, a couple in their twenties, and they’re singing along with all of our songs. I know that’s because they listened to it when they were a kid with their parents., Yacht Rock is really great. I have to say that I think it’s kind of funny that when you go on Facebook and look at some of the Yacht Rock things, they argue very strenuously about, well, that song’s not Yacht Rock or this one is. It’s really funny. There’s so many kinds of music that Firefall got pigeonholed for a number of years, just because of “You Are The Woman” and “Just Remember I Love You”. AM radio hits to being a soft rock band, but really we’re a rock and roll band that had some really big ballads.
We came out of that Southern California, country rock, folk rock. Byrds and Stephen Stills and Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Eagles kind of thing. We got together in Colorado and people didn’t know what quite to call our sound of music because it wasn’t really country rock, it was similar to maybe the Eagles or the Little River Band or, Manassas or whatever, but we had our own distinctive sound and a lot of people back then called it the Colorado sound, which I’m not a big one for, naming something, because a band can go wherever they kind of want to, but I know where our bread is buttered on and believe me, when we make albums nowadays, we need now, today, we need to sound like Firefall and as band leader, by gosh, I keep a really tight rein on “You Are The Woman” and “Just Remember I Love You”, “Strange Way”, and “Cinderella”, they need to sound like our records as much as we can make them. Because that’s what people are paying money to see. But having said that, we have a lot of freedom, me on “Mexico” or the flute player on “Strange Way” at the end to go new places and experiment and be spontaneous. So, Firefall’s a great deal, and I’m really fortunate that we had so many great songs that people still want to hear.
On their upcoming tour – We’re weekend warriors now we don’t go on long tours like we did in the seventies. We play a lot with other bands, fortunately, like Atlanta Rhythm Section, or Pablo Cruise, or Orleans, or Pure Prairie League, or even REO Speedwagon and America. When you play with three or four other bands on a bill of seventies music and you’re given 40 minutes to play or 45 minutes, I kind of know what 40 minutes we have to play because of the main songs of Firefall, but when we headline, we are definitely going to be playing some of these songs from Friends & Family. I was even thinking that some of them could be our encore song or maybe a little departure in the middle of our set that is yet to be determined, but we are going to be touring a lot this fall and winter weekends, mostly fly in for a gig, fly in for two or three gigs and fly home, but it’s really great.
So our vocalist in the band now, Steve Weinmeister was the lead vocalist in Firefall for like 23 years, and then he left the band for about five years and now he’s back and he’s got a great vocal style and sound and can sing all those Firefall songs. Our new bass player singer who replaced Mark Andes is a fantastic vocalist. I don’t know if I’ve ever had an LA rock star guy in the band that can go and sing like that, sing like a rock star, but John Bisaha, who is also in the band, The Babys, is great. Now, The Babys only work six or seven shows a year. So, he joined into Firefall and he’s all over this record and he sings the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Simple Man”, and he sings the Doobie Brother song, “Long Train Running”. When we tried to pick the Heart song, I already told you, I said, “Barracuda” was off limits and a lot of their songs, I thought, “Nah, that’s, that’s not right to do”. John said, “I could really sing the crap out of “What About Love”.” I went, “Oh, “What About Love”? I’m good friends with Howard Leese who was in the original Heart. For 10 years, he’s been playing with Bad Company and Paul Rogers is one of the greatest singers ever. John knows Howard well from L. A., and I asked Howard Leese if he wanted to play the guitar solo and some power guitars on our song. He said, “Oh, that’d be great. Thanks for asking”. So I emailed him out our track and he got back to me and he said. “Well, you change, you change the chords on the solo a little bit so I can’t play the same solo”. I went,” I don’t want you to play the same solo. This is a new version. You know, you’re a great guitar player, come up with something”. That’s just an example of some guest stars, Howard playing on the Heart song and he played a brilliant solo on the first part record on “What About Love” and he played a great solo, which we built up and I played unison along with him and we built up this thing on his choice of notes that it sounds great.
I also asked my friend John Jorgensen, who’s one of the best guitar players on the planet. If he played 12-string on “Feel A Whole Lot Better” by The Byrds, and it was great having some guest stars, but I know how to make good Firefall records. I’ve been asked in some interviews recently, “Well did you really try to sound like Firefall on these songs because they’re from other bands?” We make our songs and they kind of sound like Firefall, just like the original songs when we were getting ready for our first or second album, we never really had to try to sound like anything. We just, with those players on those songs with those singers, that’s what we sounded like, and I’ve been really lucky in that sense to have this opportunity to carefully select songs by some of the best bands of the 60s and 70s, what a blessing. It was just so much fun. I want everybody to know that we did it with respect. We honored those bands and those songs and the seventies that those songs were part of. This is the seventies, I think, and will never be duplicated again with just the wealth of material and the difference of bands.
On upcoming plans – I have a scoop for you my friend. We are already three or four songs into recording Friends and Family 2. One of the songs I didn’t include on the first Friends and Family was “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star” by the Byrds. I kind of decided I don’t want to have two Byrds songs on this first album. Well, we’ll save it, and once our record label said, “You guys should think about a second number”, I jumped on that one. The only other song that I will tell you that we’re going to be recording, and I’ve started the guitar tracks on it is Stephen Stills’ “Love The One You’re With”. So it’s another process of picking great songs, honoring them, doing them in the right way, and playing them so people will love them. The interesting thing is too, is that you could be in your 40s or 50s now and not really be hip to all the great music of the 70s. So it’s kind of opening up people’s eyes to how good those songs by the original bands were.
The last thing I’ll say is, as a lead guitar player, when I was playing some of these songs like “Can’t You See” by Marshall Tucker, I was, In the back of my head, I was thinking of Toy Caldwell and how he used to play or on “World Turning” by Fleetwood Mac, Lindsay Buckingham, he’s a genius, great guitar player. I wanted to honor Lindsay. Fleetwood Mac, when we got to tour with them during the Rumors tour, they were the biggest band in the world. It was like, “Wow. Why didn’t I take a camera? “I could have taken great pictures from the front of the stage. When we’d play with The Band, I’d be sitting behind the curtain and I’d be 10 feet away from Levon Helm playing and singing. We’re losing so many people now. Robbie Robertson just died. I put it on our liner notes. I wanted to mention all the people that we miss Christine McVie, and Gary Rossington, and David Crosby. When, when the album Friends and Family went to press, Robbie Robertson hadn’t died yet, but it’s just like that music, there will never be that 10 or 12-year period, I think ever again.