Sometime in 2003 Paul had a conversation with Bud Snyder, who had run sound for the ABB for years.  After the ABB he began working with indie bands, but especially Dickey Betts.  On a bright summer day, Bud had the following to say about new projects, and older projects that he was especially proud of. 

Paul: The first thing that I’m interested in, and everybody is interested in, is your health, so how are you feeling these days?

Bud:   My health is probably the best it’s been in about 5 years.  I’m off all my medications.  My doctor was totally amazed at how clear my lungs are.  For a while there I was on an extreme amount of medication.  Trying to quit smoking.

Paul: I assume that being off the road and getting off the weird hours and weird food must help a lot also.

Bud: Yeah, well, to be honest with you, out on the road we get spoiled to death.  Probably some of the best diets you can get because you got caterers taking care of you [chuckling].  But, uh, no,  for me it’s amazing.  I like to work on the actual physical aspect of producing music.  The machinery and stuff.  I’m more of a production guy and so now I’m back here dealing with the recording studio.  I don’t know if you’re aware of the fact that I recently purchased 50% interest in Suite A, a recording studio where Dickey did The Collectors.

Paul: I see that you’re association with Suite A has been going on for a lot of years.  Has that been a loose type of thing?  Have you been an independent sort of contractor that’s come in and now it’s a more formal relationship?

Bud: Well, what originally happened with Dickey’s Let’s Get Together album, we actually built the studio out at a friend’s house.  It was…we brought in Row One Recordings, which is a great company.  I think if you look at the credits on the album I call them a studio in a suitcase.   And it was a Neve V1 Series console.  It was very elaborate system that we set up and literally built a studio out of Bob Price’s house which was is actually a very large, sophisticated garage that’s made to store vintage cars in.  I guess you can say it was about a 20-car garage.  And we did that album that way and it was very large budget.  We turned the house’s living room into a recording studio and when Dickey got ready to do the Collectors thing it was going to be a simple little acoustic album which originally thought at the most there would be 2 or 3 instruments on each song.  When you listen to the album you can see that blew way out of proportion.

And, basically when we recorded here we were putting bands…we were setting up drums in the living room, putting guitar amps in the dining room, sometimes in the shower of the second bathroom putting horn sections back in the back bedroom and using our whole house as a recording studio. And that slowly was getting very old, especially as far as my wife and my kids were concerned.  And for me, too.  It’s hard to move around your house when there’s a whole rock and roll band setup in it.

So anyways, its really a loose federation and its actually turning into quite a large family and it’s no doubt it was started based around Dickey Betts and now its evolved into Danny Toler, Schleigho,  FunkyOxahedrons which you hear me refer to all the time as FunkyO, another band called Strange Ways.  It involves management, production, marketing and promotion, distribution.  You know, we’re going about it very slowly and seeing what becomes of the whole things.

Paul: It sounds like the people involved have that family thing going, too, that these are people you’ve worked with before and you just sort of got together and formalized a relationship that had been going on.  Sort of the same way that the artists are sort of connected by family it seems that your production company, what it is that you’re assembling is connected in that same way.

Bud: Yeah, and that’s definitely the truth.  There are a lot of local people that maybe on a national level people aren’t familiar with, but who have been assisting me in my work and with different artists on and on for years.   Everybody involved has been doing what they are presently doing for 10 years or longer.  And that’s what we’re trying to do.  I just wanted to fight against corporations and in a way, we are beginning to incorporate ourselves but we’re doing it more with verbal agreements. 

Paul: And it sounds like your model is exactly right on.  I mean, there’s always been that thing of ‘well I have to work within the system’ but there’s a way to work within the system but to do it in a way that everyone can feel good about.

Bud: And that’s the thing.  If we can make that succeed, more businesses will be run like that.  I think when you look at how SFX and Clear Channel have come into control of the music industry, we’ve seen the major labels when there was maybe 20, 30 major labels in this country, we’ve slowly seen those disappear to where there’s maybe 4 major labels in the United States.

The blessing in all this is there were bands like Government Mule, phish, String Cheese Incident, .moe….moe being the example of a band that was signed to Epic and signed to Sony and finally had enough sense to say ‘hey, we don’t need these people.  In fact, they’re not helping us at all, they’re hindering us”…and have been doing their own structuring.  Dickey, in his efforts, he came out and has been fighting the good battle where he stayed independent of the major labels of major management, all that corporate stuff.   And he said, you know, I want to make music, I want to make it for the fans, I want to enjoy what I’m doing and I want to have control over what I’m doing and I think, you know, he’s definitely been a leader in that in this area, down here in the South, and I think it’s a great thing.

Paul: Yeah, I was listening to it the other day and I was wondering if a release like The Collectors would have ever seen the light of day on a major label whereas Dickey doing it his way has just put that out and it’s just a fabulous piece of music and it definitely needed to be out there.

Bud:   Really true as that is, it’s a project that I’m really proud to have been a part of and that is what he’s doing and still right now he’s resisting major labels who wants to come in and grab it and he’s saying no, I want to sell it from my shows, I want to sell it on the internet.  He’s not opposed to it going into the record shops and stuff, but he doesn’t want a major label in control of that.

Paul: I think that so much of that has shifted to the internet.  You have internet radio stations that can basically play whatever it is that they want to play, and they don’t have to worry about demographics, and they don’t have to worry about ratings and stuff like that.  I think the most exciting radio these days is happening on the internet.

Bud:   I think you can see it with bands that are the next generation of those bands.  They don’t give a shit about the corporate company.  Dave Matthews is a great example of how he has kept control of his music and he used the corporations to get where he wanted to get but at the same time Dave Matthews has got a great record label that are open to a lot of young artists.

Paul: Right.  And I mean there needs to be another outlet, too, because I think there’s a huge distrust of the whole thing and what I’m getting at here is sort of the situation with the RIAA where on the one hand you have the RIAA basically suing everybody and trying to shut down all kinds of avenues for music distribution all in the name of getting royalties to artists and stuff.  On the other hand, you hear about artists that say they’re not collecting the money.  I’m specifically thinking of something I read on Pete Townshend’s website where he was talking about the RIAA and about how he has to pay royalty every time he plays Won’t Get Fooled Again, but he isn’t seeing any of that money.

Bud:   Yeah, exactly.  Yeah, I think another great example that’s been going on and there hasn’t been a lot of attention to and I give them a lot of credit is the metal bands and the hip hop bands.  You know, they’ve said the hell with all of this.  We’ll sell our records on the street corner.  We’ll sell them out of the trunks of our cars.  We’ll sell them at our shows and they’re making livings, you know.  And it’s allowing a lot of creativity from a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity, and I think the internet is one of the main reasons that this is possible.

I’ve come to understand it as simply a new millennium of version of urban music.  This is a way for youth today to express their anger and to discuss with society especially in the urban sense and to me it’s a new form of the blues.  These people are telling a story and its like B.B. King said, the blues is nothing but a good man feeling bad and I think that’s true with a lot of these hip hop artists.  These are people that are frustrated, have a lot of anger, they don’t fit in the mainstream of what’s expected from them.  You know, a lot of them lived in depressed areas, a lot of their music wasn’t accepted in the mainstream and they don’t care.  They make their records, they sell them in clothing stores, like I said they sell them out of the trunks of their cars.

Paul: And it’s funny that you come from that standpoint because I was talking to someone a couple of weeks ago and I had exactly that same sort of conversation.  They were turning up their nose at hip hop, it doesn’t have any melody, and the words are terrible, and I said, you know, that’s exactly the same thing that people said about the blues in the 30’s and 40’s.  I mean when Muddy Waters strapped on an electric guitar, he was met with the same sort of derision that scratching was met with in the 90’s.  It just strikes me as the next in a progression.  Things have gotten more explicit, but I mean even if you go back to the Robert Johnson stuff, his is extremely violent.  I mean 32-20 is as violent as anything I’ve heard in hiphop.  Similarly he may sing about drinking malted milk, well you know what he’s really talking about drinking so what’s the difference between that and talking about malt liquor these days.  I think that the way that its cloaked has been changed, but the message is the same.

Bud:   Yeah.  I think you see a lot of … I remember in the late 60’s, early 70’s when I had to lie to get my union card and perform in clubs when I was 15, around ’66 and stuff where we would get persecuted.  We would leave gigs and be driving, you know, from Buffalo to West Virginia to Morgantown or different places where we would go in restaurants late at night and because we were long hairs and we were dressed the way that we were dressed, we couldn’t get service in restaurants, we’d get refused, thrown out before we’d even said a word.  We’d just walk into truck stops and people would ask us to leave, or they wouldn’t serve us and if they did serve us they’d burn our food.  I played in a lot of bands that were mixed with whites and blacks, and we couldn’t get rooms in hotels.  And you see the same thing going on with hip hop artists.  I think one of the most phenomenal things is probably the biggest hip hop artist around is a white guy, Eminem.  You know, I don’t know, things have not...things are always changing but they always remain the same.

Paul: Yeah, pretty much.  I didn’t know you played an instrument.  What do you play?

Bud:   I played bass for a number of years.  I played with bands based out of Ohio and we used to travel from Chicago to Buffalo and down to Birmingham.  Play the circuit back in those days.  Never very successful.  In fact, lots of times I just tell people that I just owned a bass and people paid me to show up with it.  And, you know, I have a lot of support for these young guys.  That’s where I really enjoy…that’s where I really feel I have something to add to them because of my experience, thanks basically to my experience with Allman Brothers and a lot of other bands that I worked with over the last 20 years.

Paul: Right, right.  So now are your bands going to be taper friendly?

Bud:   Yes.  Yes, I think that anybody who is in the battle against corporate music in this country has got to recognize the fans.  I think you see with the new bands and the underground stuff that’s going on that these are bands that formed fans, grass roots support, that allows them to make a living and play and if the fans decide they’re a good band then they rise in stature and of course the corporations still try to come in and grab them like they did with Blues Traveler and Dave Matthews, but those bands are more resistant and they play to their fans, they allow their fans to record them.  Government Mule, great example.  Dickey.  A lot of people encourage their fans to come and tape, tape their music, give it away.  They don’t want to see them selling it and profiting from it, but they are willing to deal with the tapers that are honest tapers and they just trade the music.  I think that as long as that’s the way the tapers stay that they will be very taper friendly.  None of the bands that I work with prohibit taping.  Every band that I work with encourages tapers to come.   And, uh, that will hopefully be the rule and if there’s any bands we’re working with that don’t allow that, they’ll definitely hear from us. [laughing].

Paul: Well, there were a couple of things that I also wanted to ask you about.  I said I wasn’t going to dwell too much on the past and I’m not…

Bud: That’s ok, ask me whatever you want.

Paul: OK, well, a couple of your past projects that I ran into. I did a Google internet search on Bud Snyder.  You’d be surprised at what comes up.  I should say that in a different way.  I was surprised at what came up, you probably wouldn’t be.

Bud:   My wife did the same thing actually a week ago and there was something like 26,000 hits on my name.  Of course, once you research them a lot of those are people with the name Snyder which are not really me.  In fact, Pamela, wasn’t I involved in some kind of DNA research or something?  [laughing].  In fact, I found a bunch of records I’d done with Jeff Buckley that I had no idea were released.

Paul: Yeah, that was one of them that I found,  your work with Jeff Buckley [1990’s rock and roller whose father was the sixties singer/songwriter Tim Buckley –Paul]  and I didn’t know that there’s a track on the Vanilla Sky soundtrack that was a Jeff Buckley tune that you actually had something to do with that.

Bud:   Well, you just told me that and I wasn’t…just watched Vanilla Sky, me and Pam a few weeks ago and I heard and I immediately said “that’s Jeff Buckley,” but I had no idea that I was involved with it.  You just told me that.  I didn’t realize that was one of the recordings I was involved in.

Paul: OK, well, I took a look and it came up the Vanilla Sky soundtrack.  The track is called The Last Goodbye, and it lists you as the engineer or the engineer mixer, live and acoustic from Japan.  I don’t know if it’s actually on the album credits.  That’s what came up, I think it came up on the internet search. 

OK, so I’m going to throw a couple of these other projects at you.  You’re listed as an engineer on the tribute album to Muddy Waters, the Muddy Waters Tribute Band [band composed of former members of Muddy’s bands  Pinetop Perkins, Luther 'Guitar Junior' Johnson, Willie 'Big Eyes' Smith, Calvin 'Fuzz' Jones, Jerry Portnoy, and 'Steady Rollin'' Bob Margolin, that Gregg Allman guests on]

Bud:   I might have been involved in one of the credits that I did with Gregg Allman, So maybe that’s…maybe you know some of this stuff to tell you the truth…and I take responsibility because of my consumption of certain substances, its hard for me to look back in 20 years and remember clearly what did I do on that?  Which I would like to state out now that I am relatively clean and sober and have a much better memory today.

Paul: Good for you.

Bud: And you can print that, too, if you want.

Paul: So what about The Songs of Jimmy Rogers, Waitin’ for a Train.

Bud:   Now that I was very responsible for and at the same time very very grateful to Dickey Betts.  He came to me, told me that Bob Dylan had asked him to pick a song, a Jimmy Rodgers song and go in a studio and record it and send it to him to be on the record.  And that was the first time Dickey came to me and said I would like you to produce, co-produce, I think you’ll notice all my credits are co-produce.  Mainly because that’s a philosophy of mine.  I do function as a lot of people would claim a producer, but I’m much more open when I work with a band and I try to incorporate their ideals and just, you know, structure them better for them and because I think the band in any situation is actually producing themselves, why call yourself a producer when all you’re doing is taking work that other people have produced and just straightened it out more and helping them with it. 

But, in that case Dickey allowed me the opportunity to select the players on that session and he came down to my own studio, Telstar Recording Studio, and I put together what I thought was a brilliant band based completely on Sarasota musicians.  The horn players on that, especially Jerry Jerome who plays the clarinet solo that Dickey trades back and forth on with the guitar…when Dickey walked in and saw these players, he looked at me and he said ‘can these guys even play’ because they are so old.  But these guys were actually some great great jazz greats.

And I was just getting ready to cut their tracks and Dickey had just shown up and he said well I’m going to go over and get some drinks and bring them back, I’ll be back in a minute and he turned and walked out of the control room, I heard the door close and within a matter of moments he was back in the room going Jesus Christ I can’t believe how good these players are.  Jerry Jerome is a fantastic…he’s passed away since that time but when you listen to that playing, this is somebody who played with Dorsey and Goodman and Woody Herman who happened to retire down at this part of the country and I was lucky to find him and ask him to play on that record.  That I actually did co-produce with Dickey, and I think it’s a great, great song.  I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but oh yeah, and on that album there are great performances.  Bono’s on it…

Paul: Yeah, I jotted down a list of some of the people that are on it.  Van Morrison, Larry Mullin Jr., Don Waas, Mary Chapin Carpenter, David Grisman.  What a huge lineup.

Bud:   Yeah, it was the first album that Bob Dylan released on his own label.  It was the project that Dylan took on sort of as an executive producer for his own record company.  And it was a great honor to be on it and work with Dickey and the people that are on that.  Some of the other people, younger people that worked on it, like Pat McDonald who was the drummer on that session has gone on to do a bunch of stuff with the Wooten Brothers, he also is the full time drummer in the Charlie Daniels Band now.  Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff like that.  You know, music always has its own history, depending on how deep you can research it.  Yeah, that was big time fun and another one that a lot of people haven’t heard that I also co-produced with Dickey and Warren was Warren was asked to do a cut on a Guitar World player…they gave a bunch of artists some money and said do some recordings that reflect your roots and I think it came out Guitars Players That Rule the World.  That’s the title of it.  And there’s a cut on it called Willie and Poor Bob and its Dickey and Warren, Ace…oh what’s Ace’s real name, he’s the harp player from the Fillmore album?

Paul: Thom Doucette.

Bud:   Thom Doucette.  And then Gary Stewart who’s a rather famous country artist.  The 4 of them got together and Dickey and Warren’s concept was what would have happened if Willie McTell and Robert Johnson met each other and had the opportunity to do a record together.  And that’s what, in their opinion, it would have sounded like.  And it’s a song called Willie and Poor Bob.  And I think that’s a fantastic recording.  In fact, we released it.  It’s on The Collectors.

Paul: I was going to say, that sounds real familiar and I was just reaching for my copy of the Collectors here when you mentioned that.

Bud:   Yeah, we decided that that was the kind of stuff that Dickey wanted to portray.  That’s why I like The Collectors.  I mean, that is Dickey’s roots and a tribute to all the people that influenced him.

Paul: And aside from the material on there, which is definitely in that vein, that album just has a real warm sound. Aside from the performances, that was the other thing that struck me immediately was that it was a very inviting, just very warm sort of sitting on the back porch sort of a thing.  Is that what you were going for?

Bud:   Absolutely.  And it was very interesting recording because Dickey came into that whole session with a complete concept for what that album was gonna be.  He didn’t necessarily know who was going to be on it or what he was gonna do, and other than having a few ideas when he walked in, the rest of them sort of formed themselves from the combination of Dickey’s inspiration and there were a lot of players playing on that who had a little background in the different things he was doing, but was an opportunity for them to just grab a hold and hold on and keep up with Dickey and I think its great.  I think the performances that Lenny Ski, the fiddle player did, and Danny Toler.  Those are all things that probably those artists never would have been involved with if it hadn’t been for the inspiration of Dickey Betts.  And I love that album.

Paul: And so many of these things here are different takes of things that Dickey’s done in the past 5 years like Georgia on a Fast Train he played once or twice with the Allman Brothers, but this version is nothing like that.

Bud:   Yeah.

Paul: And certainly the same thing with Seven Turns and Change My Way of Living, which were Allman Brothers staples.

Bud: Yeah.

Paul: Sounds like a completely different song here.  They have a completely different feel here.  I’m having trouble describing it – it just sounds warm to me.  That’s just the way that I put it.  It’s just warm and inviting.

Bud:   Yeah and when we recorded that after we were done, even after everybody had left, I think I played that [Change My Way of Living] and that’s a long song.  I don’t know the exact time on it but I’d say its over 10 minutes.  And even after everybody was gone that night I sat there and fired one up and just listed to it over and over.  It is very hypnotic and, of course, the song itself changed my way of living.  It’s something that all of us, at different times, have been confronted with.

Paul: Oh yeah.

Bud:   I think it’s amazing.  That song has, well I know 3 possibly 4 different ways that song has been presented in live version and studio versions and different things and always been one of my favorites.

Paul: That’s the thing that music should do for you.  I mean, that’s why music exists, is because you want to have some sort of emotional connection and it’s a sort of a shared emotional connection because if a musician puts something out and a listener makes that connection you have a real one to one thing going there.

Bud:   Yeah.  And actually, it is the listener who in the end decides what the song represents more than the artist in a lot of cases.  A song is always personal to the artist who wrote it and conceived it to all the people that perform on it but in the end it’s the fan who decides what it is.

Paul: I know exactly what you’re talking about.  I was going through just a ton of issues in my life when I discovered Seven Turns.  And in fact, I was in the middle of one of those seven turns and that song just hit me like a ton of bricks.  It’s like, how did he know?  I don’t understand.  How did Dickey know that that was going on in my life.  I think that’s what art does.  That’s what the best art does

Bud:   Yeah.  I think that’s one of the reasons when you meet a band every now and then…I’ve had the opportunity to be in the background and listen to a fan discuss things with artists, you know, backstage or if they just happen to meet in a restaurant or whatever and listen to the stories that what that song meant to the fans and how it actually helped them make life choice decisions.  I’ve had the same thing happen to me from music that I’ve listened to and that’s why lots of times I’m scared sometimes to meet artists that have had a song that influenced my life because sometimes when you meet the artist, you’re very disappointed.  So I’ve found it better if I have something that I really appreciated, keep it to myself and maybe not share it with the actual creator because they’ll destroy that concept.  [Laughing]

Paul: [Laughing] Yeah.

Bud:   And vice versa.  I’ve talked to artists that when they actually did explain to me what it was they were accomplishing, it was even far greater than I had imagined

Paul: There are just so many things that you want to say to those people, but you just sort of wind up thanking them for the music because you know you’re not going to be able to do that conversation justice.

Bud:   Yeah.

Paul: And you just wind up thanking them for the music and they thank you for coming out to the show and talking for a little while after that but there are just so many things you want to ask but you don’t want to ask anything.  You know?  It’s just a weird situation.  You either want to have a 2-minute conversation, or a two hour conversation to really do it right.

Alright.   OK, I’m sort of coming to the end here.  There is one other thing that I wanted to ask you about though.  When we talked a couple of weeks ago, you had just basically come off the road and you were still sort of shaking off that road thing, but the one thing you did say that stuck in my mind was you had talked about all the great things that people had been doing for you on the road like fans you had talked to or had interacted with at shows and stuff like that.  I was wondering if you’d like to expand on that a little bit.

Bud:   Well, yeah, I’d absolutely love to.  [I was asked] would it be alright if they posted on the website that I was retiring from touring.  And I said well, yeah, I guess but if you do I don’t want it to be interpreted as some kind of political thing and I want people to realize the main reason I was doing this was for personal health reasons and for my family.  And one of the amazing things that happened for the next month while I was still out there, people who had never talked to me but I had seen for years and years around started coming up to me and started coming up to my wife and sharing how they felt that I had contributed to their lives by my work.  And I was completely overwhelmed by it. 

One couple came up and handed me a book that was some pictures of me in different situations, mixing different bands, and just pages and pages of the stuff on the internet that people were writing which I hadn’t had a chance to read because I’ve been so busy for years I really have not spent much time on the website dealing with Allman Brothers and the bands that I’ve been involved with because I just didn’t have the time so there was this whole book with comments about me from the fans and it completely overwhelmed me.  I never realized how much appreciation the fans had for the stuff that I did.  And it is part of the reason that I am going to be, besides my company being very artist friendly, it is going to be very fan friendly.  And I was completely overwhelmed by it and it was very emotional for me and I’m very thankful for all the support and all the comments that I’m still getting today.  People are still posting stuff that really encouraged me with what I’m doing today and the support of…one of the things is I don’t want people to worry about my health because believe it or not it is remarkably good and its hard to thank people…some of them you don’t even know.  But they seem to be and they knew things about myself that I didn’t think people even thought about and I’m very blessed and very grateful for all their comments.

Paul: Well, hopefully people will see this and they’ll know who they are.

Bud:   Yes.  There’s very many of them. There’s too many of them to name.

Paul: Ok, well, very cool.  I’m sort of at the end here for now.  Is there anything else you want to get out?

Bud:   One thing I do want to say that people will probably see me still out on the road at various times.

Paul: Good!  Good!

Bud:   It may be out there to do live recordings.  It may be there because some of the new bands are going to need my support.  I may actually be out tour managing some of these younger bands or I may actually in situations be out there mixing other bands because I always want to keep my hand in it.  But the difference will be is I won’t take any permanent jobs with any band but I’ll be there with any band that thinks I can help them or if they're in a spot so people aren’t done seeing me yet.

Paul: OK, well, that’s a good thing.  I think that this has been fabulous Bud.  This has been a ton of fun for me.

Bud: Alright, Paul.  Well, like I said this is actually another example with you calling me and stuff and giving me an opportunity to have a voice out there and I’m grateful to you and thankful that you even cared enough to do this.