Carla Olson | Interview | New Album, ‘Have Harmony, Will Travel 3’

The legendary singer/songwriter Carla Olson recently released the third in her series of “duet” albums ‘Have Harmony, Will Travel 3’ via BFD Records/The Orchard.

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The latest album follows ‘Night Comes Falling,’ her 2022 collaboration with Stephen McCarthy of The Long Ryders and like the two previous volumes of ‘Have Harmony, Will Travel,’ features an impressive guest list of some of Carla’s talented friends. The new album includes appearances by Texas guitar heroes Eric Johnson, Jake Andrews and Gary Myrick along with guitarists Craig Ross (Broken Homes, Lenny Kravitz), Todd Wolfe (Sheryl Crow), Laurence Juber (Paul McCartney and Wings), Jonathan Lea (Tall Poppy Syndrome, Dave Davies) and legendary harmonica player Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson). Guest vocalists include B.J. Thomas, Allan Clarke (The Hollies), Harvey Shield (The Mighty Echoes), Robert Rex Waller Jr. and Shawn Barton Vach. Closing the album are three (previously unreleased) live tracks recorded with Gene Clark (The Byrds).

“Always follow your heart in your music”

Thank you for taking your time. You have a brand new single out, it’s a version of the classic Rolling Stones number, ‘Street Fighting Man’. Was there any particular reason why you decided to cover this track? Do you remember the time when you originally heard it?

Carla Olson: ‘Street Fighting Man’ has always been my favorite Rolling Stones song, especially the live versions that included Mick Taylor. I probably heard it at one of my friend’s houses in 1968, where we would get together and listen to records when they would come out. I love the sound of the guitar intro, how big it sounded when in actuality it was an acoustic guitar through a small speaker. I love the wild card chord that comes after the second chorus then back into the solo. I also really loved all the different instruments that come in to keep your interest, like the sitar and the tamboura.

You have a fantastic lineup of musicians around you including Jake Andrews on lead guitar and Jonathan Lea (Tall Poppy Syndrome, Dave Davies) on electric sitar and guitar. Would love to hear how you first got in touch with them.

I met Jake Andrews in LA in 1995 when he came to perform at B.B. Kings Blues Club. He is what I would call “the real deal.” He learned to play guitar from his guitar playing father John “Toad” Andrews who was in Tracy Nelson’s band Mother Earth in the late sixties in Austin. I produced his second album in 2002, recorded at Willie Nelson’s studio in Pedernales, Texas. Jonathan Lea is from Los Angeles and part of the music scene where my band shared several bills with his band The Jigsaw Seen. He also recorded on my second ‘Have Harmony, Will Travel’ album in 2020, a song with Peter Noone called’ ‘Goodbye My Love’.

Your latest album is coming out as we speak. How much time and effort went into making ‘Have Harmony, Will Travel 3’ and where it was recorded?

Most of the album was recorded in Los Angeles at three different studios. Some of the solos such as Mickey Raphael’s harmonica and Eric Johnson’s guitar solos were recorded during the pandemic and then sent through the wires.

Can you share some further words about the writing, recording and production process for the album.

Some of the songs I chose were childhood favorites like The Who’s ‘I Can See For Miles’ (from 1967) and ‘Face To Face’ by a band from Texas called Zakary Thaks (also from 1967), others are more contemporary like L.A. band Broken Homes’ ‘In Another Land’ (from 1986) and Hazeldine’s ‘Stronger’ (from 1997.) Two songs were co-written and one sung with The Hollies founding member Allan Clarke.

And that’s not all, you had some truly remarkable guest vocalists on it including Gene Clark, B.J. Thomas, Allan Clarke, Harvey Shield (The Mighty Echoes,) Robert Rex Waller Jr. (I See Hawks In L.A.) and Shawn Barton Vach. Closing the album are three previously unreleased live tracks recorded with Gene Clark. Tell us how all that came together?

We had the album mastered and artwork completed when we received an email from Rob Bleetstein who said he had a recording of Gene Clark and I performing at the Nashville Summer Lights Festival in 1987 and offered to send it to us. We decided to include a trio of the songs on the album and thought it would be something Gene’s fans would enjoy.

How did you originally meet Gene Clark?

The first time I met Gene Clark was 1984 at a club in West Los Angeles where he was playing with his band The Firebyrds. The band was made up of former Byrds drummer Michael Clarke, Matt Andes, Michael Hardwick and Peter Oliva. At the end of the show the audience coaxed an encore out of them and they launched into ‘I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better’.

Tom Slocum, one of Gene’s friends, was sitting in the next booth and asked if he could join us. The next thing I knew he was taking my hand and pulling me along towards the stage. He said, “You can sing with them on this one, you know it right?” Halfway through the guitar solo Gene says “Hi, I’m Gene Clark” to which I replied “Carla, Carla Olson, nice to meet you.”

Would you be able to draw any parallels to ‘Night Comes Falling,’ your 2022 collaboration album with Stephen McCarthy of The Long Ryders?

I have always been a huge Stephen McCarthy fan since the early Long Ryders. When Gene Clark and I started singing together in 1986, Rhino Records’ Gary Stewart offered to release an album of duets which became ‘So Rebellious A Lover’. I asked Stephen to play lap steel on ‘The Drifter’ and dobro on ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)’. He also was enlisted to play on the album that Saul Davis and George Callins (The Textones) produced called ‘True Voices’ in 1990 that included songs by iconic writers performed by singers who were equally iconic.

Tell us about the two previous volumes of ‘Have Harmony, Will Travel’.

When I was a teenager we had an AM radio station KNOW in Austin, Texas that played everything from Herb Alpert to The Zombies. I have great memories of songs on that station that I loved to sing harmony to. So I decided to find singers that I admired and match them up with some of my favorite songs and exchange verses or simply sing harmony with them. The idea was to suggest a song that the artist may not have ever sung or wouldn’t have thought to record themselves. Plans were made to cut each song with the same basic players then add the featured singers and I would sing harmony and backup guitar where needed. I mentioned to my friend Peter Case (Plimsouls) that I was recording a duets album and if he would like to sing a couple of songs that he’d always liked and he said, “I’d love to!” The other participants seemed equally excited about the project and things just fell in line. I was particularly thrilled that Richie Furay (Buffalo Springfield, Poco) wanted to record Gene Clark’s ‘She Don’t Care About Time’! ‘Have Harmony Will Travel 2’ started with the sessions I recorded with Timothy B. Schmidt, Peter Noone, and Brazilian singer Ana Gazzola. The same basic band members added Jonathan Lea on electric twelve-string guitar, and the late Pat Robinson on piano. Seven of the tracks were new recordings and four were recordings from my previous albums with Gene Clark, Percy Sledge and Mick Taylor, Mare Winningham, and I See Hawks In L.A.

You’re originally coming from Austin, Texas. What was it like to grow up? How would you describe your childhood there?

I was very lucky that my parents were both very supportive of my choice to be a musician. I had piano lessons at six and was always encouraged to play music. My father was a classical pianist who could see my desire to entertain rather than follow in his footsteps. My mother had her own interior design company, the only woman decorator in Austin in 1959. I was twelve when my father said I should watch this group on Ed Sullivan, he thought I would like, called The Beatles. I was glued to the black and white and when they were done I told my older brother “ I want to play guitar in a band!”

Did you and your friends have any special hangout places where you would listen to music and so on?

My two girlfriends and I would get together on the weekend and play records on the hi-fi. Mostly The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, The Animals, then later discovered The Kinks were great to dance to. The Rolling Stones in 1965 with the single ‘Satisfaction’ got a lot of play at our weekend dance party. When I was asked if I wanted to redeem some S&H Green Stamps my mother let me pick out a black Kay acoustic guitar. I was surprised how quickly I could pick out the notes to ‘Walk Don’t Run’ by The Ventures. My father said if I took lessons he would upgrade the Kay to a nylon string Goya. As I learned to finger pick and got better it became harder to play the rock songs. I wanted to learn the British Invasion groups like The Yardbirds. So I made a deal with a friend John Staehely to sell the Goya for $125.00 and buy his 1956 Les Paul Junior which was much more fun to play. I found that I could play a 45 rpm on 16 speed and work out the notes of songs like ‘Jeff’s Boogie’ by The Yardbirds. I wasn’t able to buy an amplifier for another year but still managed to get a decent sound out of the borrowed Alamo amplifier from another friend.

“Every musician in Austin was a fan of The Elevators!”

How did you first get introduced to bands like The 13th Floor Elevators or The Zakary Thaks whose garage rock classic ‘Face To Face’ you recently did and it’s a killer!

I went to some shops that sold just 45s and 78s and found The 13th Floor Elevators first records ‘We Sell Soul’ and ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ and also met Roky Erickson’s little brother Donnie who played a mean Gibson 335 in his high school band. Every musician in Austin was a fan of The Elevators!

What about Eric Johnson? Are you familiar with his incredible guitar playing on Mariani, an early band he had when he was extremely young.

I was going to a Catholic school in Austin called Holy Cross and met Eric Johnson in Biology class. I overheard him telling someone that he’d blown up his speaker cabinet and was rehearsing for his first album recording. I offered to loan him my new Acoustic 6 x 10 cabinet and we’ve been close friends ever since! I co-wrote a song on his first major label album called ‘Trail Of Tears’.

On ‘Have Harmony, Will Travel 3,’ I recorded ‘Face To Face’ by Texas band Zakary Thaks because it was a local hit in Austin in 1967. I asked Eric if he would like to play guitar on it. He was very enthusiastic about playing the fuzz tone parts and solos.

What clubs did you go to? To experience the Vulcan Gas Company back in those days must have been amazing.

I was so lucky to live in Austin where we got to see touring acts like Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Big Joe Williams, Mance Lipscomb, Jimmy Reed, Big Mama Thornton, and other blues artists who performed at the Vulcan Gas Company. For a paltry $1.50 a night you could see these acts play at the Vulcan Gas Company every week. Other great shows were Poco, Moby Grape, Johnny Winter, Steve Miller, Freddie King, B.B. King, and Austin’s great local bands like Donnie Erickson’s New Atlantis, Jimmie Vaughn’s band Texas, and Shiva’s Headband were the opening acts.

When you relocated to Los Angeles, California, in 1978 to form The Textones, did you miss Austin?

Not at all, mostly I missed my family and my favorite restaurants, Tex-Mex food and barbecue.

Would love it if you could talk about how The Textones originally got together and what was the overall vision you had with the band.

I hooked up with guitarist Kathy Valentine in 1977 and started the band The Violators with her drummer friend Marilyn Dean and a friend Jesse Sublett on bass who was in another band but was helping us get songs together to start playing gigs. We were doing club shows in Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, little beer joints.

Then we decided to make a move to either New York or Los Angeles. We flipped a coin and tails brought us west to California. Marilyn didn’t stay, Jesse had his band The Skunks in Austin, Kathy and I got settled in West Hollywood, I had a job in the travel industry to put beans and tortillas on the table. Kathy and I found a bass player, Dave Provost, and Mark Cuff who was Emmylou Harris’ first drummer who had come to L.A. the year before we did. We wrote our own songs (‘Kathy’s ‘Vacation,’ my ‘Number One Is To Survive’) and chose some fun covers like ‘Evil Hearted You,’ ‘Lies,’ ‘I Second That Emotion,’ ‘Hanky Panky’ and started trying to get bookings. It was tough to get anything going until we met Saul Davis who thought we had something special and started getting us on some shows with his artist Phil Seymour.

We recorded a three song EP for British label Chiswick in 1980 that included an unreleased Tom Petty song and a single for Faulty Products/IRS. And then Kathy got offered a gig playing bass for the GoGo’s and The Textones became three piece and the rest is history … until we became a quartet and then a quintet. (The Textones recorded a reunion album in 2018 called ‘Old Stone Gang’).

It’s absolutely impossible to cover your discography. Would it be possible for you to choose a few collaborations that still warm your heart?

I would have to say the first Textones album ‘Midnight Mission’ would be dear to my heart. The band had changed rhythm sections to Joe Read, bassist who’d played with Bram Tchaikovsky and drummer Phil Seymour (one half of the Dwight Twilley Band) and added George Callins on guitar and Tom Jr. Morgan on saxophone and keyboards. Barry Goldberg from Electric Flag co-produced the album with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ engineer Brad Gilderman. Ry Cooder played slide guitar on two songs, Don Henley sang harmony on the title track and Bob Dylan gave us an unreleased song ‘Clean Cut Kid,’ as a thank you for my pantomiming Mick Taylor’s guitar parts in his video for ‘A Sweetheart Like You’. Second choice is my 2001 collaboration with Mick Taylor called ‘Ring Of Truth’ that we cut live in the studio and included an eleven-minute cover of The Rolling Stones song ‘Winter’. The 1986 duet album with Gene Clark ‘So Rebellious A Lover’ is also a cherished experience.

What else currently occupies your life? What are some future projects?

I have produced three other albums this past year, a duet album with Stephen McCarthy, a rock instrumental album for Jake Andrews, and an album of great pop and country aka Americana with Robert Rex Waller Jr. I have also found time to write with the recently late Pete Brown, the lyricist for Cream e.g. ‘Sunshine Of Your Love,’ ‘White Room’. A co-written song will be on his posthumous album ‘The Shadow Club’ to be released in January.

Thank you for taking your time. Last word is yours.

Always follow your heart in your music. It won’t let you down. As Gene Clark once told me “Never waste the chance to be poetic!” 

Klemen Breznikar

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Carla Olson Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp / YouTube
BFD Official Website
The Orchard Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / YouTube