WAIM 192: Doug Gillard

When you're doing the early stuff where you're writing your own songs, what are some of the things that are sort of informing what you're writing and the way that you're writing? What were some of the records that kind of were a big influence at that time?

Um.

we're talking really early if you're talking the first kind of things when I was a kid, that would be television.

That would be like the Archie's the monkeys and Sesame street.

Okay.

I mean, that

makes perfect sense.

Things on PBS, uh, a lot of songs about animals.

Um, and, uh, I mean, this is really right.

I have tapes of this stuff too.

We had a real, a real tape recorder that, um, My folks got to communicate with my sister, who was her husband's station in Germany.

And instead of sending postcards and letters back and forth, they said, why don't we just record audio? I think that might have been my sister's idea or her husband's idea, too.

So they got a really cheap JCPenney reel-to-reel recorder, just one quarter inch mono, I think, thing.

I would have my mom turn it on.

All you had to do is press record and turn this one knob.

And eventually I learned how to do that myself, but yeah, I started recording things and writing for that and like, Hey, I just want to record.

I didn't do anything with them until many, many years later, but.

Yeah.

I realized a couple of years ago that a lot of the stuff that I wound up doing as a kid, like messing around with like, I was pretty fascinated with electronics and I made a pretty early discovery, for example, that you could hook up the VCR to like another player and you could dub stuff onto VHS.

And so I was able to pretty quickly amass this kind of remarkable film collection just by dubbing stuff.

Right.

That's great.

And figured this out at like nine, eight, like earlier.

And, like, then by the time I got to, like, you know, 20 and I'm playing guitar and I'm writing some songs and I'm doing some covers, like, the idea of, like, all of that sort of Radio Shack mentality of patching shit together and kind of stitching it out of something made perfect sense.

And so, like, I think in some respects people are like, oh, I'm not that musical.

When you're doing the early stuff where you're writing your own songs, what are some of the things that are sort of informing what you're writing and the way that you're writing? What were some of the records that kind of were a big influence at that time?

Um.

we're talking really early if you're talking the first kind of things when I was a kid, that would be television.

That would be like the Archie's the monkeys and Sesame street.

Okay.

I mean, that

makes perfect sense.

Things on PBS, uh, a lot of songs about animals.

Um, and, uh, I mean, this is really right.

I have tapes of this stuff too.

We had a real, a real tape recorder that, um, My folks got to communicate with my sister, who was her husband's station in Germany.

And instead of sending postcards and letters back and forth, they said, why don't we just record audio? I think that might have been my sister's idea or her husband's idea, too.

So they got a really cheap JCPenney reel-to-reel recorder, just one quarter inch mono, I think, thing.

I would have my mom turn it on.

All you had to do is press record and turn this one knob.

And eventually I learned how to do that myself, but yeah, I started recording things and writing for that and like, Hey, I just want to record.

I didn't do anything with them until many, many years later, but.

Yeah.

I realized a couple of years ago that a lot of the stuff that I wound up doing as a kid, like messing around with like, I was pretty fascinated with electronics and I made a pretty early discovery, for example, that you could hook up the VCR to like another player and you could dub stuff onto VHS.

And so I was able to pretty quickly amass this kind of remarkable film collection just by dubbing stuff.

Right.

That's great.

And figured this out at like nine, eight, like earlier.

And, like, then by the time I got to, like, you know, 20 and I'm playing guitar and I'm writing some songs and I'm doing some covers, like, the idea of, like, all of that sort of Radio Shack mentality of patching shit together and kind of stitching it out of something made perfect sense.

And so, like, I think in some respects people are like, oh, I'm not that musical.