Musician
Freelance

Huey Morgan

00:00:02 (PLAYS GUITAR)

00:00:07 My name’s Huey, I play in a band called Fun Loving Criminals, and I do lots of other stuff too. I like to think of myself as an opportunist, which is kind of like a capitalist without a plan. I got a job at the BBC recently doing a radio show. In my life everything’s centred around the guitar. Everything started with this thing. It’s kind of singular I think that a person who can just start off playing a little bit of (PLAYS) can go sell ten million records, and have a job at the BBC, and it’s just – it’s amazing to me that I got this far doing this. Because I’m fairly thick, you know.

00:00:43 Well I mean the first time I got freaked out by the guitar I must have been about 11 years old, and it was one of the school assemblies, this kid comes up and starts playing Jumping Jack Flash on the guitar, and all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and all the hairs on my arms stood up, and I got a woody, and I like wow, what’s this, you know? And ever since then I’ve wanted to play guitar. I was bored with school life, and believe it or not I was – took a test early on and I was apparently gifted. So I would go to these private schools in Manhattan, you get thrown out two weeks later for knocking some kid out. I just didn’t have a real good – good discipline level at that point, you know. I knew that school wasn’t the thing that was going to get me to where I wanted to be. Especially after I’d heard that guy play the guitar. I always used to love music when I was a kid, you know, buying records, putting the headphones on, closing my eyes, and the movies would start, in my head. So it was always something I really liked. And I had a friend Peter Kadachefsky who was living in the same building as me, he was a little older than me, and he was a guitar player. And he said I’m going to show you, you know the blues scale or anything like that, you know, I’ll show you the guitar thing, and you can just take it from there.

00:01:42 (PLAYS GUITAR)

00:01:48 In my formidable years when I was a kid, I grew up I was a little trouble-maker. I think that came from me just being frustrated with not being challenged in school enough, and not really being taken seriously to the point where my opinion, I felt, was valued. Going to like jail when I was a kid really sobered me up. I realised that I wasn’t as big and tough as I thought I was, there were a lot of more bigger and tougher guys there. I realised at that point that I wasn’t cut out to be an arch criminal, you know, I didn’t have it in me to, you know, and everybody wants to – you hear about it nowadays, everybody wants to be a gangster, everybody’s carrying a knife and all that kind of stuff, you know, I just knew in my heart that I wasn’t that kind of person. So I knew that that wasn’t the road for me.

00:02:28 I was definitely given an option, and I chose – I chose to serve my country in the Marine Corps. I’m still very disciplined from being in the Marines, and I’ve drawn a lot of that experience to help me through my everyday life. When I was in the Service I was given an opportunity to read a lot, and I did, and I really kind of educated myself in a lot of ways, and read a lot of books, and realised that there was more to life and the world than I thought there was.

00:02:53 I was lucky enough throughout the years to find a good friend in Fast, who’s still in the Fun Loving Criminals with me, and he’s a great musician, plays like 19 instruments and he and I became flat-mates, and then we decided that we were going to start a band together. As that went by over about a year and a half, people kept talking about us in New York. We had no idea, we didn’t make demo tapes, we didn’t do photos, we didn’t try to get a record deal. And we played this one gig, and some guy came up to us, and handed us a business card and it said President CEO of EMI. And he says – you guys want to make a record? It was fruitful, but I think I would have done it even if we didn’t have a record deal, and we weren’t making money, and we weren’t touring, and stuff like that, it was something I wanted to do anyway.

00:03:30 (PLAYS GUITAR)

00:03:36 This little piece of wood and metal saved my ass. I think without this it would probably have been like, you know, something that had bullets in it, I’d be holding, yeah. I probably would have stayed in the Marines or – or you know done something crazy, you know. As far as regrets go, it’s kinda like the Frank Sinatra song – My Way. And – I heard that song when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and I memorised the lyrics, because something about it was really poignant. And if anybody’s familiar with that song – it’s he did it his way, you know. And regrets, he’s had a few, but not enough to mention.

00:04:09 My plan is no plan, and it’s always been that way. And I think that’s the greatest part about being an opportunist, I guess is what they call it. You know, you’ve got to live life in the moment. You’ve got to enjoy yourself when you can. And when I say enjoy yourself, I mean enjoy yourself. Enjoy being in your own skin, and enjoy the things that you have to offer to other people, you know, that’s the key.

00:04:29 (PLAYS GUITAR)

00:04:36 ENDS