Richard Soutar is a brilliant folk rock artist that got lost by obscurity and time, but thanks to the recent reissues found its way on the turntable again.

Raised in Connecticut he soon started playing with bands. In 1976 he self-released a DIY gem of a record called ‘Lavender Daydreams,’ followed by ‘Episodes’ in 1979. Void Records reissued both albums and are going to release his latest release called ‘Satori Circus’. Richard Soutar’s third album on Void is made up of more recent material. Musically and lyrically a master stroke by Soutar. This is a good rockin’ album in the vein of so-called “outlaw rock” on some tracks.

Richard Soutar is one of the first artists on the east coast to write, record, press and publish his own albums back in the 70s, he has continued to write and record since that time. For Soutar the lyrics are as important as the music and he writes a lot about social and psychological dilemmas of being on the planet.

“Learning perfect nonattachment”

Where and when did you grow up? Was music a big part of your family life? Did the local music scene influence you or inspire you to play music?

Richard Soutar: I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, a New York City bedroom community for executives. Learning an instrument was traditional in our family and everybody was expected to find one suitable for lessons, but I constantly wanted to try different ones and could never settle on one. There was never a music scene, but my father liked expensive stereo equipment and always had the latest and best. He played classical, jazz, pop, and musicals every night. When we came home from school and my parents were still at work we would put on show tunes, turn up the volume and dance and sing to them for hours. At school one of my favorite classes was music and I loved singing in the choir. We learned a lot of traditional songs and I would get up early and go to my neighbor’s swing set and sing songs all morning. I would stop till I finished everyone I knew. I didn’t like the church songs though.

On Sundays I dreaded standing in the pews at church with a choir book and trying to follow along. I didn’t like the melodies and the feeling. The singing was stiff, formal, and nobody really seemed to want to be singing. It was as if it was a burden and embarrassment for them to be participating and it sounded half-hearted. A reserved Protestant effort that tried to walk the line between maintaining proper “appearances” and cutting loose. It never made the cut though. You had to be playful to do a song justice in my mind and they had lost the thread in the sincerity of adult pursuits. Like most kids I learned to duck out and use my donation at the local candy store. We sang the songs we loved dancing all the way on the sunny sidewalk leading to the candyman’s stand. A more meaningful, genuine, and fun Sunday service.

When did you begin playing music? What was your first instrument? Who were your major influences?

There was an upright piano in the entry hall to the house and me, my two sisters and I took lessons. I learned the usual chopsticks and affiliated repertoire by ear from my older sister and around six years of age and was constantly banging around on it. I also liked to play the player rolls endlessly, which we had a closet full, and it had everything from ragtime to classical. My father was impressed with what I was doing playing by ear and sent me off to lessons around seven years of age. I learned to play and read from the classic Thompson books. A Professional concert pianist moved into the upstairs apartment we rented out and began giving me lessons around 10 years of age. I never practiced enough though and he didn’t have much faith in my ability. It was too much like school work, tedious and unrelated to the music I liked. It’s kind of hard to satisfy the expectations of someone who played at Carnegie Hall.

The written music I was learning felt dumb to me and the lyrics seemed even dumber. The melodies were terrible. I was getting into my older brother’s The Kingston Trio albums and played them all until they were full of skips, which earned me death threats from my brother. I knew all the songs to the Broadway Musicals of the time: My Fair Lady, Carousel, Oklahoma, The Sound of Music, Wildcat et cetera and my father took me down to Broadway to see them. I got to skip school and see it all live and it was the most amazing thing to me as a child. It was sheer magic. To hear Julie Andrews sing the whole musical of The Sound of Music live with a live orchestra to this day is one of the great experiences of my childhood.

I started listening to the folk songs that were starting to become popular like Tom Dooley, Big John and even some Elvis Presley. But the first group of musicians I fell in love with was Peter, Paul and Mary. By twelve I was tuned in to Cousin Brucie and NYC AM pop music and had my favorites but it was the albums of Peter, Paul and Mary that I bought and played endlessly. I had already failed to apply myself to clarinet lessons, completely failed accordion practice, and was still musically frustrated. They wouldn’t teach me the songs I love or simple chord theory so I could figure them out. Just advanced dumb Thompson. It was like learning to play the typewriter.

And then my good friend John showed up with a guitar and played ‘Sloop John B’. And I remembered the cowboy who came to the front door playing Christmas Carols with a guitar and harmonica. Long before Bob Dylan ever did. I was entranced by the sound because I never saw anyone else play a guitar live and they weren’t available at school. It was a mysterious and unattainable instrument. Suddenly here, there in front of me was John playing and singing and it looked better than the swing thing. I was stunned. In an instant I knew I had to have one. It was the answer I had been looking for all this time. He revealed to me the mystery of the guitar chord and inducted me into the brotherhood of the guitar. One sitting and I was the master of the ‘Sloop John B’, kinda.

I ran home and ceaselessly begged, whined, and beseeched my Mother for a guitar. She was very sceptical because it was not a proper instrument and feared it was just another passing fancy. But just to shut me up and get me out of her hair she took me to the music store and got me the cheapest one they had- it cost $25. I was in hock and had to work it off. I went home with a songbook with chords, not Thompson notes and staff stuff, and I set out to learn every single song. One thing only slowed me down, the guitar was a cheese cutter in disguise. The sore and bleeding fingers from extra heavy duty steel strings sitting half an inch off the fretboard seemed impossible to endure. Never-the-less I persisted. I was obsessed.

At first my parents were pleasantly surprised. “He’s sticking to it!” And then they were concerned. “He’s spending an awful amount of time on it.” And then worried, “He’s not doing his homework and just sits around listening to music and playing his guitar.” And that’s what I did from fourteen on. Like every kid in school whose brain was hijacked by folk and pop I sat in my room at every chance and learned chords and picking techniques on the guitar. The real breakthrough and revelation was Travis picking, which I learned from a Peter, Paul and Mary Songbook. That made it possible to understand and copy Paul Simon songs and Donovan off the record. I was slowly achieving mastery of the beloved folk style.

Was there a certain moment in your life when you knew this was it and you want to become a musician?

The mystery of folk and ragtime guitar was giving way to a sense of confidence in my skill and then the Ed Sullivan thing happened. I came into the living room and was instant and completely transfixed by what I saw. Like hundreds of thousands of teenagers across the country, I fell into the TV set. The Beatles changed everything and for a lot of us young musicians it was like crack cocaine. Couldn’t get enough. Every song, every lyric, every guitar part was solid gold and perfect. Like David Crosby said, “I went to see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and I knew what I wanted to do.” Only he managed to do it. The rest of us played in bars and lounges.

What are some of the most important players that influenced your own style and what in particular did they employ in their playing that you liked?

When I quit college to become a professional musician I had been listening to Cream, Led Zeppelin. I saw Cream in concert and was deeply impressed with their virtuosity and their sound. I wanted to be able to do what Clapton did, but less heavy metal. Both Clapton and Page had a wonderful intuitive sense of composition that I admired beyond their obvious mastery. But at the same time The Moody Blues had a theme near and dear to my heart that was more existential and spiritual in the psychedelic sense. The Jefferson Airplane had a metaphysical direction too. I like that these groups weren’t just writing love songs because I felt they were tapping into something authentically sacred. I liked the sound of the guitar in them as well. Justin Hayward’s guitar playing is almost symphonic and yet heavy metal at the same time. LSD was a sacred experience for me and their music spoke to me the most when I was tripping. I was heavy into Allen Watts and reading everything I could get my hands on at the college bookstore on Zen and eastern psychology. My daily diet was guitar practice, meditation, reading, and jamming. Some of my heaviest experiences came to me after extended periods of meditation. A wanted to make music that reflected that experience.

Eric Clapton said if you want to learn to play like me lock yourself in a room for two years with B.B. King records. So when I dropped out, I did. But I added Mike Bloomfield to the mix. I ended up more influenced in guitar style by Bloomfield. After that I studied Clapton. After that I did what I wanted. It was their skill and technique I was after and not their specific sound. I wanted my own band sound and my own guitar sound. I started my own band and played basic rock and roll and lead guitar every night to my heart’s content in search of it and it eventually led to recording.

I still loved folk rock and when Crosby, Stills, Nash came out it was just the ticket. I spent a lot of time analyzing it. I didn’t realize at the time how much of the instrumentation was Stills alone. But I took it apart and put it back together so many times it almost obsessed me as much as The Beatles arrangements. It was very close to the sound that I wanted, but too narrow. In the end it was George Martin and The Beatles that had the most influence, in addition to the freedom to experiment not fenced in by a commercial sound and the tyranny of star making machinery and the popular song. Like a lot of musicians I still endlessly analyze the arraignments of The Beatles’s work .

Were you in any bands early on? If so, what were their names, did you record anything? Did you do some gigs?

I was invited by my friend John Martine in high school to play in a group, Brand X, and I didn’t hesitate. That’s where I met Mike Vail and Jim Johnston, who later did the theme and all the music for WWE wrestling. I remember buying my first Fender Stereo. It was like buying your first car only better. It was the initiation to Rock and Roll. To this day I think Brand X were some of the most talented songwriters and musicians I ever played with. We played originals, Beatles, and a little bit of top 40s. Played parties, churches, wedding receptions and did alright for a high school band.

We broke up to go to college, but later I wrote, recorded, and played in groups separately with them. John later sang lead in my band Revolver and went on to form “Now” and played the New York scene like The Bitter End in the village and CBGB’s et cetera. His vocal skill was amazing and John Hammond thought so too, wrote him references, but he didn’t sign him. Mike did a lot of groups and studios experimenting with me. Sadly, Mike and John would not even speak after Brand X.

Mike and I played in a guerrilla band and we would show up at large psychedelic parties and play with a regular set of musicians, sometimes all night jams trading out instruments and players. We often made up songs on the spot and tried to make them seem like part of our playlist. We had friendly contests to see who could come up with the best one. Often people didn’t know the difference. Eventually I bought some recording equipment and a Moog synthesizer and set up a studio in a garage apartment and did a lot of experimental recording. I invited every musician I met to come down and join the sessions.

After a while, I wanted a professional band playing paid gigs and recording. A girl I dated introduced me to her brother’s friends who were looking to form a band and we formed Revolver. Revolver was a regular bar band that played rock n roll standards in lounges and bars in Westchester and Fairfield county. We played for several years and did a few studio cuts but I left the band and once again set up a small 4 track recording studio and spent a couple of years writing and recording with all the musicians I had made connections with. Eventually it led to the ‘Lavender Daydreams’ project.

In 1976 you self-released ‘Lavender Daydreams’. What’s the story behind it? How many copies did you order? Did you send them to any radio stations or sell them at concerts?

I wanted to record an album with the songs I had written and some of the songs I wrote and co-wrote from all the studio sessions. Most of the musicians I met thought you had to wait for a record company to record you but we had done our own for so long and with pretty good quality for the era. We already had recorded many of the songs over the years so we basically knew how we wanted them to sound, only better. I had sent them around to various record companies as demo tapes. One of Frank Sinatra’s publishers, Tommy Valando, had heard a couple tunes that he thought were promising but he wanted me to change some of the lyrics. I didn’t want to change them just for commercial reasons and said no thanks but it led me to believe I was doing something right.

I had saved up enough money for about fifteen hours of studio time. The only time I ever saved any money at an early point in my life. I had the songs and musicians and I thought why not produce my own album. I thought my friends in graphic arts could do a limited run on a piece and sell the copies, so why couldn’t musicians do the same. That way they would increase in value over the years, At the very least become collector’s items (last I saw they were selling for $500 a piece and originally sold for 20$). So I called around Manhattan looking for an 8-track studio that would give me off peak hour rates. I found Simon Andrews and he had just set up Right Track Studio and quoted me a good rate.

I herded all the cats together and held rehearsals until everything was smooth. Then we went down and in twelve hours banged the thing out. It went like clockwork. Then we spent another session doing the final mix and overdubs. I think he had a Scully 8-track 1”, which was state of the art back then, and we mixed onto a Crown 2”.

I found someone who pressed vanity records in Westchester who worked with a hot pressing plant on Long Island contracted him to press 200 copies. I happened to see the work of a young artist that I liked and commissioned him to do the cover based on a work he had already done. The seagulls are on the cover because we already had them on the first home recording that John did of ‘Lavender Daydreams’. Greg Walker, who now draws Beetle Bailey, did the album layout for me.

I sold out pretty quick. Word got out and everyone who heard it wanted a copy. One copy we took to the Briarcliff College FM station which was a really popular station in Westchester and talked to the disk Jockey that we all really loved. She agreed to play it for a while. She liked the song ‘Lord and Master’ and said it sounded like The Jefferson Airplane. That was a huge compliment. But we never promoted it more. We were musicians and not promoters. We had no idea how to promote it.

The purpose of ‘Lavender Daydreams’ was not to do commercial art, but what we thought was good art, good music and fun.

“‘Lavander Daydreams’ comes from my meditation experiences”

Would you share your insight on the albums’ tracks?

The songs ‘Lord and Master,’ ‘Here We Are,’ ‘Sunny Days,’ and several others were inspired by experiences I had on psychedelics. ‘Lavander Daydreams’ comes from my meditation experiences. ‘Electra’ is about a girl I fell in love with while tripping. A Place in the Sun I wrote because I was tired of my day job and I just wanted a career doing music.

‘Lord and Master’ is about experiencing sat-chit-ananda or existence being bliss. It was about living for a moment with the direct experience of the perfection and beauty of being. I had that experience tripping often and I managed to carry it back into everyday life finally. I realized my purpose in life I was always looking for was in experiencing the extraordinary perfection in front of me every moment and engaging it in play and fun.

Music was the highest expression of that to me and a song about it is a perfect act – because just talking about it can sound trite, but expressing it in music was doing it and being it. The ‘Lord and Master’ is the love we experience when we connect and it is reflected in our relationships, especially when musicians play together. When we believe in the mind chatter in our head we suffer, samsara, and music is a way of momentarily liberating ourselves from. Music is like a divine drug – which is what I am singing about in ‘Episode’ in the song ‘I Can’t Believe Your Mine’. That’s why we are so drawn to it.

The original ‘Lord and Master’ was done in the studio with Mike on lead, me on bass, and an incredible drummer, Jeff Dire who played in my later band Harvest. It was done heavy like Cream. I like that version the best. They weren’t available and so we toned it down. The lead is a variation of the original lead that Mike did that I thought was divinely inspired. The drums sounded like Thor in a fury. But Brain did it justice on drums and my lead is close to Mike’s and it worked. It came out on the album as a nice mix of heavy and light. Like The Beatles when they tried to get a heavy metal sound.

I played a Gibson SG at the time and I preferred the pure natural feedback of my Fender Princeton amp turn up to 10. I liked the sound of my Gibson Stereo the best but the feedback was too much at high volume in bars, so I used a solid body. The humbuckers were also quieter for recording. Richie Shmo, the bass player from Revolver, was playing a Fender Precision. David was playing Ludwigs. He smiled the whole time and played effortlessly, like liquid gold I thought. That’s why I asked him. Brian Armstrong from Revolver played most of the drums and I don’t why he is not listed on the credits. A strapping steely Irish lad who you wanted at your back when the night got late and the patrons turned mean. He played relentlessly like a machine and lived on Beer and pills as far as I could tell. Brian played Ludwigs too. The acoustic was my trusty Ibanez which I wrote most of my songs on. I walked into Sam Ash downtown, money no object, and played every guitar they had and I walked out with that one. Not a Gibson Hummingbird or a Martin could measure up- I was surprised myself. It’s still my main guitar.

Revolver playing a concert in the park in Greenwich, Connecticut

This is a common theme in my songs. Celebrating those everyday moments, as Graham Nash does in his songs. Or finding your way out of the bad moments through an insight. Every time we find a way back home we overcome Maya and learn a new aspect of wisdom. In a way, ‘A Place In The Sun’ is the opening theme because it represents the dilemma and the determination to overcome it. The light and the sun are classic symbols of illumination and represent Satori. If you listen to my songs from that perspective they take on a whole new meaning, the deeper level. Life is like that.

‘Falling Angels’ was written about crashing on acid. About when we have to squeeze back into our everyday self and the feeling of “Now that the doors of perception have been blown off their hinges what am I going to do about it.” It was like the personal fiction has been outed and you better shape up. The bells tolling are for you. You feel naked, vulnerable, reborn, offered a second chance and Anubis is standing there brandishing his scale. And that slides right into ‘A Stranger’ where you begin reflecting on it. There you are, crashing, beer in hand, a stranger to yourself. You think back to all the fairy tales you were brought up on, the American Civil Religion, The Church, The Meritocracy, your Day Job, Madison Avenue, and it’s crashing down with you, burning wreckage all about and it’s all an illusion. A tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. And nothing is the answer that Deep Thought missed and nothing is all you have when you crash and the smoke from your cigarettes and your brain clears. You start making promises to yourself like it’s New Year’s Day.

‘Pavement Pioneer’ was a total collaboration between John and I. We truly wrote every word and note together. It was based on all our experience hitching rides around the country. John had been hitching up to Boston a lot, to see a girl I think, based on his other songs, and we thought everybody hitchin these days. They’re all looking for something new and they’re being picked up by people driving in search of tomorrow and we thought they’re on the New Age frontier. You know, pioneers.

‘Soaring’ is inspired by lying on our back in the field by the long island sound on spring afternoon tripping on ‘Windowpane’. Mike and I were staring up at the sky and the clouds turned into angels singing and it felt like we were soaring up there free. ‘Soaring’ was trying to capture the rapture. And when we finally stood up there were balloons in the air and cannons booming and boats waving flags and it felt like everyone was having a celebration and a homecoming. And we continued on our walk and all our friends were high and laughing in the field and they felt it too and we realized-it was spring. We headed back to crash with beers and guitars and soothe our souls with song.

‘Old Time’ was truly inspired by John Sebastian and ‘Daydream’ which I absolutely love. He was such an amazing songwriter. Ironically a victim of too much acid. It’s a showtune you could’ve heard in Oklahoma. All my parents’ friends loved it. Some of my friends sang and recorded it themselves. They liked it so much. It seemed to have universal appeal. We spend so much time together saying “Hey, do you remember that time we … “. It’s a universal experience. In fact I could have probably been a commercial hit if I had pushed it. But I was busy chasing the next song.

John and I wrote ‘Take Me Darlin’ in my home studio as an exercise in pop. Nothing more. It almost makes fun of itself. It was a Lennon and McCartney effort. It was just to show we could do pop. You can almost hear The 5th Dimension Singing if you listen carefully.

In ‘Lavendar Daydreams’ the fields of the Unicorn are the samskara of the unconscious and the sea of Brahma. Sri Ramakrishna said of his spiritual Journey “a salt doll went to measure the ocean” and that’s what happened to me on my journey with psychedelics. When you let go of the horrors and beauties you enter the ocean of bliss and finally have peace. As a child I experienced that deep peace and harmony playing on the beach, like so many other people have, and we are always building castles in the sand on the edge of infinity, the beach of Brahma. A jam session is just that and when it ends it dissolves into nothing- too bad, but then you create something new. Like kids in the sandbox.

When you trip your attachments take you on a wild ride through heaven and hell and you can treat the experience like a roller coaster ride. Eventually you descend into the hell of Bardo and the endless iterations of seeking a way out. Like a bad dream only worse – a bummer, dark shadows dancing on the back of your eye. But if you let go of everything suddenly, you experience the divine light – that’s what the Acid Test is to me. Learning perfect nonattachment. Every trip after that is purely blissful.

I wrote the lyrics and was looking for the melody and John saw them, picked them up, put on the tape recorder and made up the melody and did it in one take. It was perfect. John’s original vocal is stunning but he was busy frying other fish when I did the album and I decided to do it myself.

What about ‘Episode’? How many copies did you press?

Mike came to me with a demo he made of ‘Why Must You Hide’ and I loved it. It almost sounded baroque to me with the counter point. I wanted to do a whole album like it without drums and maybe all done with strings like ‘Eleanor Rigby’. I didn’t have the resources so I settled for acoustic guitar, bass, flute, and heavy electric guitar. Wanted something eclectic, old but new. So I invited a few select musicians I had never played with before to come over once a week for rehearsals in my basement. They went on for a year.

Elyse was a classically trained flutist and an actress and singer in local musicals. I loved her voice and her range was perfect for what I had in mind. Mike Tedesco was a guitarist who I jammed with on occasion and was impressed with his style and sound. These were highly disciplined musicians who I had faith could carry out this kind of project. I played acoustic. Richie Shmo on bass.

Elyse had never jammed so that’s the first thing we did to loosen her up. She was afraid she would have to go to the principal’s office if she played an unapproved note. It took a lot of courage for her to just make up a lead in a key with no other guidance. It’s amazing to see someone transition from classical to free form, but she soon took to it like a duck to water. Playin Hookie.

Richie rehearsed with us the whole year, but just before we recorded his father was disabled by cancer and he had to take over the family business. So I had to learn all his parts. Fortunately we recorded some of the rehearsal so that was possible.

We worked out arrangements and polished them like a seal team on a mission. Again, and again and again. We only had a limited window because the studio we booked was fairly expensive. In fact the studio was in Brooklyn this time and it was often a practice place for the group Kiss. Backstreet Studios. Eddie Solen was a seasoned engineer and they had a beautiful board, isolation booth and lots of high quality mics. It was recorded on an 8-track or 16-track Teac with Dolby, I forget which. I think it was mastered on a Scully. He understood the art of compression and equalization. He knew his mics. He knew all the tricks.

I came in the first night and played all the acoustic tracks and vocals and bass. Almost no punch ins. I think it took four hours. Elyse came in the next week and laid down flawlessly the flute parts without any punch-ins. Eddie and I were amazed at her skill. Then, out of the blue, I asked to do some harmonies. Done, perfectly on pitch and one take. Knew all the words too. I was flabbergasted. I had no idea she was that good. I got greedy. I asked her to come up with third parts. Done, one take. I was walking on air.

Mike came in the third week, high as a kite, with his Les Paul and Marshall amp and plugged in to the board – using his amp output. I never saw that one before. I thought it would fry the board. And then he laid down all the solos with only one or two punch-ins. And then spontaneously add the third vocal to ‘Old Friends’. Done.

The next weekend Eddie and I spent eight hours mixing and finished the album. We did 200 copies and I believe Eddie made the arrangements with the pressing plant he had a connection with. Greg took the picture for the album. It was supposed to be conceptually a series of vignettes, psycho-dramas captured in music, so the picture of me intrusively leering out the window was perfect. I had two herniated discs at the time, was in constant intense pain and there was an aspirin bottle and beer at my side all the time, except during my day job. I had spent a year on my back and couldn’t take the boredom anymore, I had to do the album, had to play, had to have a fun project.

I had moved from psychedelics to regular meditation. With a bad back I did a lot of walking meditation that I learned at a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in an effort to heal. My health had put me into full repair mode. Working with a trainer, vegetarian diet, supplements, chiropractors, the full nine yards. Modern healing ceremony. The songs are dealing with the same themes as ‘Lavender Daydreams’ but the next phase of the journey. Struggling with “In the world but not of it.” For me, psychedelics were just cracking the egg, now I had to make an “om” let. It was messy business. It was looking at the events in my life and finding the perfection and beauty and becoming an expert, a master of it. Out of turds come flowers. You can’t polish a turd, but you can grow flowers. What’s the wisdom that comes out of it, the pearl of great worth you take away.

‘Love’s Fool’ was written for a string quartet and was inspired by ‘Eleanor Rigby’. I had even worked out the string parts on my guitar and recorded them. I couldn’t afford to pay an arranger or hire a quartet so I settled for the instruments I had. If you listen carefully to the arrangement you can hear that. It was supposed to be like a mini concerto with words. I was a fan of Bach and I couldn’t get enough of Brandenburg Concerto. I wanted to take folk rock to another level. The song is about that moment when someone has been betrayed by his or her lover and the anguish in the moment. A psycho drama. The music brings the emotion into it and explores the feelings beyond the words. My works are efforts to generate art songs, like Schumann conceived. Lyric on the verge of poetry, and music, working in concert. I think, for me, Sting has achieved it as well. Loves Fool sets the format and tone for the rest of the album

‘Summer Evening’ is finding that you’re never alone and a silent perfect lover exists at the core of your being and feeling it reflected in one simple moment of a summer evening. The astonishment and gratitude you feel when you discover and connect with your essential being. You realize the beauty is not in the world but the world is just reflecting back to you what you send out. The anima or animus in your dreams.

‘Breaking Away’ is that moment when you’re in your car, windows open, wind blowing in your face and you’re heading out of town for a weekend of camping. Just that, the anticipation of connecting with nature.

‘All Too Close’ is about being in and out of the witness state. Our life at times is like a play and many of us are so identified with it we never break out of it. Psychedelics can push you out of the social mindnest.

‘Sunny Faces’ is just about how important friends are and how the memories of them can sustain you. We all need a sangha of like minded friends to make the journey with us and share our insights.

‘Somehow, Somewhere, Someway’ is finding your soulmate, failing to connect, and believing that someday you will. But it’s really about connecting with your animus or anima and becoming authentic. That’s when your art becomes authentic and real art. It provides you with a channel to the muses and they whisper melodies in your dreams, and they become Lucid. We connect with our unconscious and begin an active dialogue with it. Your lucid dreams become your trip and it moves into your life and the magic lives in you and you know it and see it and stalk it. Synchronicity and the symbolic become a real living thing.

“Feathers of a forgotten fight rise up fast in ferocious flight” are the lyrics of John Martine. I made up the melody for them. This time I walked into the room, saw them lying there and the song came out of me in one playing. It was such a compelling lyric I had to do it. I played it for him and he laughed and said well I guess that’s it. He had been waiting for the melody to come to him. It’s about the baggage we all carry from our childhood and how it emerges and confounds your relationships. But in seeing it clearly we come closer to managing it and working with it.

‘Pleasure of Your Presence’ is the same theme as ‘Lord and Master’ but with a different twist because it is the moment that you recognize the divine in another person and you fall in love. You discover you are not alone in your celebration and you can share it through someone else – which is a common theme in my other songs. Once again it was a girl named Karla who should have been named Layla based on what I experienced tripping with her.

‘Flower’ is about struggling with the burden unfulfilling relationships bring and the fear that you might never find the right one. It is purely symbolic but it is also about never finding your mission, your identity, your Hero’s Journey.

‘Why Must You Hide’ was written by Mike but he hadn’t finished the lyrics. I begged him to let me. I desperately wanted to be part of that song. I wanted to commune with his muse. It’s about the futility of hiding your authentic self and the dark struggle it leads to when you don’t.

‘The Girl Next Door’ was another total calibration of John and I. We really wrote it for Jimi Hendrix. It’s about the adolescent passion and the attraction of the girl next door and how that follows you into adult life. The dragon haunts us until we find a way to slay it through engaging in a relationship and she is no longer the mystery.

Void Record reissued your albums and are currently in process of issuing your third album, ‘Satori Circus’. Was the album released at the time?

I approached Brian about putting the album on vinyl and he didn’t know that I had completed it. That was different because all the other albums he had approached me about pressing them under Void. Brian has been a staunch supporter of my music and we have a long relationship, so of course I turned to him with this album. He is very accommodating and easy to work with and Void Records has been around a long time.

“It’s a rebellion against the antiseptic sound of commercial music today”

Tell us about it?

‘Satori Circus’ is my movement into digital. It was very difficult and I struggled with my 8-track digital. It was like working with gloves on for an analogue and tape guy. There were extra steps and a lot of multi-function buttons, but there was economy too. Eight tracks and no tape, but initializing memory cards and all that was like going back to school. I mean a thick manual came with it, but no teacher. The artist now had to become the engineer at the deepest level and know all the electronics and programming terms. It was tedious to learn and execute. It was less like making art and more about constructing the sound. That took a lot of the creative momentum of a project. There was always a technicality that disrupted the creative flow. It detracted from the soul of the music and the flow of creativity. I had no drummer for decades since leaving the band scene and had to rely on a drum machine. Thank God for the Alesis SR-16. It was the best machine there was at the time and looking at the internet I am not alone in my opinion. But it still took the organic feel out of tempo – the qualia. All the old groups that I liked like The Beatles and The Doors changed the tempo all the time a little. In fact everyone did until click tacks got popular.

I think it is important to have variation and little imperfections. Some of my best guitar parts or features of songs are mistakes. In ‘Satori Circus’ for instance, every instrument is slightly out of tune on ‘I Got Lost Today,’ but just enough to make it tired and funky but not too dissonant. It started out as an error and then I worked on that sound. It sounds lost. As a matter of fact there is an abundance of recovery from mistakes in the album and a large part of it is managing mistakes, like my life. A brilliant lead, as Clapton says, is mistakes you build creatively on to produce something that is better than planned. That’s why I have always avoided punch ins.

My vocal on ‘The Answer’ sounds strained and slightly off pitch and I could have redone it and double tracked it but the pathetic and weak sound of the vocal is perfect for that part of the song and it sounds more interesting. There’s a lot of that in this album. It’s a rebellion against the antiseptic sound of commercial music today.

‘Satori Circus’ is a collection of songs I wrote over the last 15 years and some go back farther. It has social, political, and metaphysical themes. I included songs I had written that are outside of the folk rock sound. There are flavors of blues, jazz, county, and hard rock. It included sounds that aren’t being created anymore but I still love and I feel others might still want to hear. I played with sound effects more.

It was created on a DAW and I went through several of them to find one that was fairly intuitive for someone accustomed to analogue. My hat is off to GarageBand and Beyond for guidance that was aimed at songwriters stuck in analogue. It opened up new possibilities and access to better form intelligent drum machines. It gave me access to better fidelity and endless tracks. But planning out each song starting with the drum track took a lot of patience. In the end it was worth it because it made it possible for me to work with a real live studio drummer through the internet using the DAW. I found a drummer from Nashville on Airgigs that I really loved, Nate Barnes, who was able to do all the drum work on the album. It was like having a community of musicians at my fingertips like I did when I played in bands. I also found Mella Barnes from the UK to do backup vocals and she had the range and skills I needed. All of them are very professional. I also had access to a mellotron and a Hammond B3 and anything else I could think of thanks to GarageBand.

‘What They’ve Done’ is van Morrison and quite simply a protest song and with a jazzy sounding pop tone and understated lead that was like Harrison/Lennon used in ‘Get Back’. About the denial of climate change and written for Al Gore and the corporate interests he was up against and their ignorance and greed. It was also about not enough people doing enough to save themselves from inevitable catastrophe. It was about the crucifixion of the meek, the rest of us who don’t have power – they know not what they do.

‘Complicated’ was inspired by ‘Hotel California’ and has a lot of features in it instrumentally that are similar. It’s about getting into something over your head for attention and it backfiring and not knowing where to take it, like social media- where the theme came from, the meme ‘it’s complicated.

‘Get Connected’ is a gimmick song style popular on the radio in the 60s. It’s about the futility and frustration of trying to feel connected through the computer screen and the Zoom madness of the pandemic. The song was really written 15 years ago with an over the top Elvis vocal but I rewrote it and did a straighter vocal for the album.

‘Sacrifice’ was begun in 1989 when we were in the middle of producing a family and the challenges to a relationship that brings. Your love in a relationship gets turned on the children and develops a deeper, more mature meaning. Now that the children have grown up and left, it deepens even more. You can’t have deep love without sacrifice of self.

‘I Got Lost Today’ was kind of Scotch and Soda by The Kingston Trio but with a little release in it that reminded me of James Taylor, I left out the horns though. It’s about waking up infatuated with someone so much you can’t function. You’re so distracted you don’t know what to do with yourself or where to go and you look at everyone like you’re just lost. You’re literally lost in place, although it could also be space.

‘Gimme Your Love’ is definitely inspired by The Doors and was produced to evoke that sound but the theme is definitely not Doors. It’s a song about surrendering to nonattachment. Give up your addiction to your hopes and dreams and your fears and sit with it, and you find something special in being committed to what is in front of you. Kind of an Old Testament rant with a little Buddha topping.

‘Out of The Blue’ is waking up to your own ego and how you get lost in it. The theme was inspired by an Adyashanti lecture but the insight came out of the blue much later. All the crazy scenes you go through like a madman running in circles and suddenly seeing it clearly because you’re in this very quiet sacred moment that descends unexpectedly on you. Some people call it Grace, others samadhi, others Satori.

‘More Lies Again’ is about gas lighting and what it feels like when someone does it to you. It is at the same time about the recent political climate and epidemic of lies in Washington.

‘Downtown Blues’ was inspired by Mississippi John Hurt who I studied along with B.B. King. Clapton did an album of Robert Johnson, one of his best, that was a tribute and I wanted to do a song in the true spirit of Hurt and Delta Blues. I did it in finger picken blues style originally but it turned into a fully produced song, so I failed. But the spirit of it is still there.

‘I’m Alright’ is inspired by McCartney and was written with him singing it in my head. I would love to hear him do it. It was also about working 24-7 but still being okay because you love the work you are doing and you love the people you are working with.

‘Think Ourselves to Pieces’ came out of insight I had that we are literally complete until we take thought. Our strongest tool cuts us off from the fundamental nature of our being because we abuse it and that abuse comes out of anger and fear. The Tibetan texts call it samsara.

‘Here and Now’ is about being suddenly thunderstruck by Satori and the Light of Insight that follows. Wherever you are, it rains and shines at the same time – when it rains it shines-Lennon. A little bit of Bach in the background with some Sleepers Awake because I think he experienced it too – it’s in his music.

Are you excited to have your music out there after all these years?

I’m unknown and not famous and when someone calls me from halfway around the world and says I really loved your album I know it’s genuine and not because the media or their friends sold them. That moment when that happens means I authentically connected with someone else with my music and that is the highest compliment I can get. Even if it happens only once. It’s worth a million fan mails, which I never wanted. Never really tried for it. I just love music and I have to make it like a bird has to fly. Good or bad it’s for the joy of flying. Still the Rebel in me would like to hear my song ‘No End To Wanting’ (‘Rough Draft’) playing on the radio in Palm Beach or Tod’s Point.

In 2000 you released another album, ‘Rough Draft’. What was that about?

For me it is the best album instrumentally and maybe as far as arrangements I ever did and technically the best pop sounding. You can hear it on Spotify or Apple music. I never pressed into vinyl because I was in graduate school with a family when I recorded it and very poor. It was also done on four channel tape with said drum machine and I wasn’t sure I wanted to press it. So I posted it on Apple Music instead.

What happened in the 80s on? Were you still playing?

I wrote and recorded ‘Passage,’ which was mostly me and a guitar, which showcases my technical skill on acoustic, which was pretty formidable back in the day. It’s a minimalist album. I was into the guitar as a mini orchestra and studying classical guitar and listening to Julian Bream albums with despair. Like Caesar despairing at the foot of the bust of Alexander the Great. But I just wanted to steal enough of that fire to get the sound in my head on tape. After practicing four to six hours a day for a couple of years I felt I was ready and recorded it at Ricky Woods Studio in Greenwich, Ct. He did a great job. I did it in spite of two herniated discs I got, compliments of too many hours hunched over my guitar. You could say I was driven. Mychiropractor said “You’ve got this really strange curvature in the spine I’ve never seen before”. I showed how I sat with my guitar, and she said “oh, well that explains it” and told me to play less guitar. Might as well tell a drunk to stay away from booze.

I never played that album to anyone for several years because the lyrics were too intellectual and too close to poetry for the song. A lot of the songs were inspired by Joni Mitchell and her ‘Blue’ album. The melodies are very complex on some of the songs and they don’t always follow conventional structure. Strangely enough, most of the people who have heard my work like that one the best. I knew a therapist who played it for her patients because she felt it was very effective therapy. Another person played it to go to sleep during stressful days. Pretty compelling testimonials. Years later I consider it a successful effort musically.

The rest of the 80’s mostly immersed me in recovering from my back injury, it took four or five years before I could work again, odd jobs and eventually graduate school. At least I didn’t die or end up in rehab from an overdose in a burned out rock band on tour. I saw a lot of people do that and I figure I was lucky.

<a href="https://rikster.bandcamp.com/album/passage">Passage by Richard Soutar</a>

Looking back, what was the highlight of your time playing your music? Which songs are you most proud of? Where and when was your most memorable gig?

I have to say my high school garage band. When you are that age it is so new and you experience it intensely, like your first car or your first steady girl. The first time you got that Gibson or Strat and plugged into your first band amp. The incredible comradery or your bandmates and playing your favorite hits for your peers and the school dances. You become the music you adore and for a minute you’re channeling The Beatles, or The Stones. And then playing your originals and everybody enjoying them. You chase it the rest of your career like your first high. After a while you realize you can never get that back and you reach a new level playing for the pure joy of playing and being in the groove and riding the wave moment to moment.

The songs I’m most proud of change from day to day. I think on the new album it’s ‘What They’ve Done’ and ‘Get Connected’ but I think the lyrics on ‘Out of The Blue’ are best. On ‘Rough Draft’ it’s ‘No End To Wanting’ and ‘Why Do We Fight’. The others are on ‘Passage’ which isn’t released. On ‘Episode’ it’s ‘Sunny Faces’. On ‘Lavender Daydreams’ it’s ‘Lord and Master’ and ‘Old Times’. But the list could change.

My most memorable gig was at a Biker Bar. My wah-wah pedal broke on the open measure of middle eight during a rendition of ‘Heat Wave’. There was this feedback that could make your knees buckle and the volume was insane. It fed back in my 100 watt amp and then through mics of 200 watt sound system and everybody in the seemed to hit the ground with their hands on their ears. I struggled to manage after what seemed an eternity the bartender threw the breaker on the stage power and half the light went off and there was a dead silence. And then they came for us hollering and swearing. We scattered out the back entrances and melted into the night. After a while things calmed down and Davey and I went looking for the rest of the band. We found them in the corner of the parking lot in the dark behind the band van getting high. We didn’t want to go back for the equipment then and so we left and came back the next day before they opened and got what was left of the equipment. There were other nights like when we played Saint Croix in the Bahamas on a tour when the sailors on shore leave would start brawling while we were doing or set. It was amazing how fast the shore police would swoop in and clear the bar and haul of the offenders. As a working band you tend to remember those kinds of nights the most, the rest is all great because you’re playing your heart out.

Is there any unreleased material?

Lots. More than what was released. Some of it I like better. There were two albums I didn’t release, ‘Missing Pieces’ and ‘Passage’ and lots of really experimental stuff. One of my favorites I did with Tom Florcyk called ‘Payin Dues’ I dearly love and his vocals are just amazing. Tom’s band cut an album with a major label and they put it on the shelf and he couldn’t use the material because of the contract. That happened a lot with labels in those days. Eventually I stayed away from the big labels. I have my share of rejection letters though.

Eventually, I plan to put ‘Passage’ on vinyl as it is the most artistic album and has my best acoustic work and most poetic lyrics. At the moment I just have it posted on Bandcamp.