I’ve
got to say, I’ve been nervous and excited about interviewing you because I’ve
been listening to your album and I’m not quite sure what to expect.
Well, okay.
[Laughs] I’m going to ask you, first of
all, who is Buddy Goode as a man and as a musician?
Well, I guess the musician
maketh the man, that’s what I like to say. You know, all those years of toil behind a guitar and piano
writing songs and everything has made me the man I am, because it makes me
think about my life in great detail. I still remember all the things that I did
as a child, all the things I did as an adolescent when I started being affected
with the opposite sex.
[Laughs].
And, of course, in my later
years, that I’m in now – my mid to late years, you know, same thing, you know –
so all those times all come together and they make the man that’s Buddy Goode.
So
there is no man without the music.
Is that what you’re saying?
There’s no man without the
music but I tell you what, I’m going to use that and I’m going to use that on
my posters. There’s no man without
the music. I love it [laughs].
[Laughs]
it’s just all music. Your DNA is
semi-quavers and crotchets and all sorts of things.
You know, you don’t even have
to interview me. You can write it
yourself. [Laughs] You’re expressing what I’m thinking.
[Laughs] Well, look, you’re clearly a
man of the world, Buddy. You’re
working in Australia but you’re from North America. So given that you are a man of the world, what on earth made
you choose country music?
What do – you know what, I’ve
always said – I said this to Rod Stewart once, you know, “After making all
those great pop records, why did you go and do all those standard ballad, swing
records?” And he looked at me and he said, “I’m sorry? Who are you?” I’ll never
forget that moment. It made me think about my past and why I chose country
music and my thing, you know? My
daddy, my daddy Buddy Senior, he loved all the great performers like Johnny
Cash, Waylon Jennings and, of course, everybody loves Willie and he loved
Willie so much and so I guess that’s where I get it from. The old 45s we used
to have, there was an artist – the most famous artist to come out of
Pennsylvania state where I was raised was a guy called Chuck Newton. And Chuck
Newton – not many people know who Chuck Newton was but he had – one of his
great songs was – I remember growing up with it, I’ll never forget – it was
called ‘Take A Break from Under the Car, Dad, your Son’s Come Home with the
Jack’.
[Laughs].
One of my favourite songs I
ever heard. And Chuck Newton, that was his name. You might want to look him up. He was my inspiration.
Is
he a relative of Wayne Newton?
[Laughs] No, but he sang
really high pitched, too. He was
kind of like the country choir boy.
Because
I can see that there could be a double act in Vegas but perhaps Chuck has now
left this world, I don’t know.
No, I think he’s still – I
think he’s about 108, he just turned 108.
So
you said that you were raised in Pennsylvania. Your accent now sounds a little
more Deep South, so has there been some movement in the Buddy Goode world from
the north of the United States to the south?
There’s been plenty of
movement downstairs for sure. There’s always been. And I must admit that –
yeah, I know I – to be honest with you, it’s really hard to do a Pennsylvanian
accent [laughs]. Ever since I was a young kid, I could never quite speak the
way all my relatives spoke. For some reason, I came out talking like this. I
guess it’s all those years singin’ and listenin’ to all those great people that
come from down south.
Well,
that’s absolutely true. I mean, if
your life is dedicated to Willie, that’s going to happen.
There’s plenty of stuff
downstairs, Willie, plenty of stuff.
God, I’m choking on something.
[Laughs]
So when you set out to make an album, Buddy – I’m sensing that with your albums
there are certain themes that come to the fore. So I’m just wondering how hard it is to settle on a theme
for an album.
The themes? It just comes natural, you know? I don’t really set out with any
specific things in mind. I must
admit though, I remember talking to Meat Loaf once many years ago when he just
brought out the Bat Out of Hell record
and I said something similar to him.
I said, “Where do you get these ideas, these great ideas?” And he told me his mentor, Jim
Steinman, who wrote all those great songs for that record, came up with the
whole concept, the whole thing, you know?
So it got me thinking I needed my own mentor. I needed somebody, my own musical direction. So I gave Burt Bacharach a call and he
said, “You know, the best thing, Buddy, you can do is just write from the heart”,
you know what I mean? He said,
“Just think about it.” He said –
because I remember him saying to me – he said, “The day I sat down and wrote a
song, you know, ‘What the world needs now is love, sweet love’, I thought to
myself, you know, this is coming straight from the depths of my soul.” So I thought, you know, I can do that,
too. And that’s how I come up with
the song ‘Jimmy Likes Dick’.
[Laughs]
I’m really curious as to why you would choose Burt Bacharach, because I would
have thought that he was not quite in your genre.
He was my neighbour at the
time, so I just leaned over the fence when he was making some barbecue.
I
don’t know if that was during the time when he was married to Carole
Bayer-Sager, because I think they’re now …
The second time he was
married to her, yeah. Yeah. He was married to her twice. No-one knows that. So
the first time they were quite young, and they had three kids and nobody knows
about the kids either. Then they
split up because she was having an affair with what’s his name, the actor, Ryan
O’Neal. And so, anyway, after
that, it was like a love triangle: Carole Bayer‑Sager, Ryan O’Neal and Carly
Simon, so the three of them were in a love triangle. Nobody knows about this. And the song ‘You’re So Vain’ was
actually written about Burt Bacharach.
All
this time I thought it was about Warren Beatty.
Exactly right. Nobody knows that. It’s amazing.
[Laughs].
Anyway. We could talk all day about this kind
of crap [laughs].
Yeah,
yeah, I could as well. But I’m
curious, then, given Pennsylvania, mining country, coal country, I can understand
why you’d want to move to Australia, where it’s a bit warmer and we still have
coal mining but it’s a quite different kind of lifestyle. So what first brought you down under?
Well, it did have a lot to do
with coal, you know? It was
definitely the coal. My great, great
grand-daddy, Buddy Senior – he was a coal miner and he used to drive the
trucks, you know, in and out of the coal – he’d drive a truck into the mine and
then he’d go down there, he’d dig it all out and he’d put it on the truck and
then he’d drive the truck out of there.
He did the whole thing, you know?
So when I was lookin’ for somewhere to come, Keith Urban said, “You’ve
got to move to Australia, Buddy.
You’re going to love it down there.” So I was thinking to myself, well, you know, where am I
going to live if I come down there?
I got a map out and the first place – the first place I found was
Newcastle.
[Laughs].
I thought, Newcastle. That looks like a cool city, you
know? That’s where they dig coal
out of there. So I went to
Newcastle and I didn’t like it so I headed over to the Central Coast, that’s
where I am now [laughs].
So
you’re on the Central Coast now?
There’s no coal there. It’s all about beach. I love the beach. I love swimmin’, I love scuba divin’, I
love paddle boardin’, I love wind surfin’, I love hang glidin’ and I don’t mind
getting the odd melanoma.
[Laughs]
Well, you’ve moved to the right country for that.
Slip, slop, slap’s what they
say here.
I’ve
got to say, though, with the idea of you living on the Central Coast, your hair
looks like it needs a lot of care because it’s a lustrous mane. You also tend to wear the long-sleeved
jumpsuit, which is not exactly beach friendly. So is there a beach side of Buddy that his fans have yet to
see?
Sophie, there certainly
is. Nobody has ever seen me in my
beach attire but I’m not one of those – you know, I’m still livin’ in the 70s,
darlin’. I don’t go for the full
body suit, or wetsuit or, you know, those cover-up shirts with the hat with the
thing floppin’ down over the back of your neck. I’m pretty much in a G-string, lettin’ it all out there
because, you know what, I’ve always thought, you know, when you’re gettin’ a
tan, the last thing you want is your butt cheeks to be white. So if I can’t get that G-string – and
usually I put it on backwards because it fits better – but if I don’t have the G-string,
I just get the Speedo and I’ll crank it, crank it straight up my crack just
like they see on Bondi Rescue. The boys do that. I got it from there. We used to see that on TV over in the
States, you know? You’d watch –
not Baywatch, but we’d see Australian, you know, lifesaving programs, you know,
from the ’70s and they’d be there, you know, with their thing cranked right up
their crack and doing the thing with the rope on top of their head, all that
sort of stuff. It was
fabulous. So I mould myself on a
little bit of David Hasselhoff and a little bit of them.
Well,
you can’t hassle the Hoff, that’s for sure, and there’s a lot to admire about
the Hoff.
I love the Hoff. You know, I must admit, I was good
friends with him up until the time he sang on top of the Berlin Wall when they
were bringing it down. He just
sang out of tune that night. I
lost a lot of respect for him.
[Laughs]
So clearly you’re not an artist then who goes into the studio and has to have
autotune applied – you sing in tune.
No autotune. No, we don’t use autotune in the
studio. We normally use it live. The
thing is, you know, in the studio, it’s just – it’s just a cheap cop-out, it’s
the cheap way out, you know? But
definitely live, yeah, why not?
And I do a lot of dancing and stuff. You know, you see people like Madonna and all those kind of
cats, when they’re doing a lot of dancing and singing, they sing out of tune,
you know, and they get out of breath.
So pretty much, because of all the dancing and stuff that I do with all
my props and stuff and just entertaining the general public, you know, it was a
lot of pressure on me and the last thing I want to do is get bad notes so I pretty
much mime live.
Well,
this actually brings me – this was going to be my last question but I’ll jump
ahead to it, because you’ve raised live performance. And I know that you have a whole lot of dates in Tamworth in
January so I was wondering what your Tamworth audience can expect from the
Buddy Goode live experience?
Well, I’ll be there –
[Laughs].
[Laughs] And it’s going to be
fun. I tell you what, last year I
went to my first show in Tamworth at the Legends Bar and it was so successful
they’ve asked me to do a couple this year, so I can’t wait to go there to
Tamworth and – what was the question again?
What
can they expect from the show – is it going to be you and a guitar or do you
have a band?
A lot of – just colour, all
I’ll say is colour; musical colour, visual colour and maybe a little bit of
skin colour.
Depending
on the colour of your Speedos or your G-string.
Exactly right. And I might just play that live. Who knows what’s going to happen but
it’s going to be fun, it’s especially going to be fun if people turn up.
If
you’re not wearing the G-string or the Speedo on stage, how do you cope in the
Tamworth heat with the jumpsuit?
Well, you know, you just
acclimatise to stuff like that. I
remember once I spent about six months living in Alaska. It’s hard walking around Alaska, you
know, with your Speedos on, too, but you just acclimatise. You can see an English gentleman, a
British gentleman, you know, out here in the Australian sun, you know, and he’s
like, you know, walkin’ down the street, he’s got a red face and he’s
sweatin’. I look at that, every
time I say to them, “You know, you’re a fool. You shouldn’t come down to this hemisphere. You should stay out of it.” But people like me, we’ve learned to
acclimatise like the alligators.
You
mean alligators acclimatise into Australia?
Exactly.
You
mean, they acclimatised and became crocodiles?
Exactly right.
[Laughs]
It sounds like hopefully your performance in Tamworth will have less teeth than
that but perhaps, you know, smoother skin.
Plenty of teeth. I love plenty of teeth. I’m proud of my teeth. I’ve taken great care of my teeth over
the years. You know, I brush at least once a week so I’m proud to say that I
like to display them in all my photos and I like to smile. So I guess when people are looking at
me on stage, they’re going to hear some nice tunes, they’re going to see some
nice action, they’re going to see some nice moves, they’re going to see some
nice clothes but they’re going to see a nice smile.
We
can see your smile on your CD insert because it’s proudly displayed.
That’s right, ma’am.
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