It’s a big dream for a lot of guys in, both, Europe and America to play guitar and have people listening…and get money out it. I’ve always wanted to do that since I was very young, maybe 7 or 8. I started becoming interested in guitar. I was a big Monkees and Beatles fan, and Chet Atkins. A lot of the popular TV shows involved guitar players. There was a country guy, glenn Campbell, I really liked watching his show. My parents had pretty nice collection of records. My mother still has most of it.

Yeah, my mother plays the piano and sings. My father, before he died, played a little banjo, but he wasn’t really professional at it…and he was a pretty good singer. We were brought up in a church that…they don’t believe in having musical instruments, it’s just all acapella. So, that’s where I learned to sing. By the time I was 7 or 8 years old, I was already getting in front of the mass and leading songs. I really didn’t have a choir, so the whole congregation sang in the church I went to. My mother still sings for weddings and she’s in a little quartet, but she plays the piano as well. I got my first guitar when I was about 9 and played all through high school and graduated and…I never really put it down, never really put the guitar down, there was always one over in the corner. But I really didn’t get serious about it till maybe 10, 12 years ago. I’d been in some rock bands and I never could quite find the right place for me in that kind of music…and of course I might do country.

Well, that’s the problem. They force-feed you that stuff, you just get tired of it, and the kind of country they’re playing on the radio… A lot of it started in Texas. I’m a big fan of country music. The kind of country they’re playing now on the radio is not even close to the good stuff, the old stuff, I’ve listened to. My grandfather was a  Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys fan. They were from Texas. Hank Williams wasn’t, but he wore a cowboy hat. I think he was from Mississippi or Louisiana maybe. I grew up around it and…the places where they play country are really bad. It’s hard to get started in the country scene because they’re what they call "rough bars". They had a lot of fights and I really didn’t want to get into that. At the time, I really didn’t like country, but I’ve learned to come back to it, got over it and learned to appreciate it and then…I tried the rock. I played bass in an alternative band for a year or so.

I was probably 20, 22 when I got my first band. Before, I had acoustic guitars and I played just for my own entertainment. My sister and I would sing, close harmonies and we’d sing just in the room, not for any performing. The 1^st rock band I was in, we had a singer and I didn’t sing and play at the same time. I did a little bit, but not extensively, and I was the guitar player while the singer left, and we needed a singer, couldn’t find one, so guess what, I’d do a little singing. That’s how I got started singing in front of bands. Then I started a blues band , called Terraplane Blues, 10 years ago, the old Robert Johnson song, and that went for a while, it was really hard getting started, but after that band broke up I went ahead and I started using my own name, because I was going to… You know, the worst thing you can do in this business is change the band name and I have used the Holland K. Smith band ever since.

Anson Funderburgh ! In the early 80’s I met up with a guy. He was a blues fanatic and he had an extensive collection of the stuff, and I was new to it all. I knew about B.B. King and Freddie King, but…part of being a blues musician is developing knowledge of who’s who, and what they sound like, because each guitarplayer in gonna be different. Now I can hear just a few notes from a guitarplayer and I know who it is, Albert Collins or B.B. King, and I had that friend of mine who had an extensive collection and he started turning me on doing it. At the time The T-Birds were just coming up and he had an album from them, one of their new albums, and I heard it and I thought it was the coolest thing and then, not too long after that, I went and saw Anson Funderburgh And The Rockets, and from then on I was in. I think it’s right when they first picked up Sam Myers and I was just completely enamoured by that whole thing and I decided :"That’s what I wanna do !" So, I’ve been trying to do it ever since. That was…late 80’s. I had a job. I’m a carpenter by trade, built houses and everything and I ended up working for the school system repairing things the kids tore up. I was there for about five years and I decided, …I got divorced along that same time and I decided I must take a decision here. Stay with the school system or make an end to it. That was early 90’s. I could make a career out of it. It would be very unwise not to stay with the system because you make more money if you stay with them, the government thing, but I decided I wanted out, I didn’t like it and…it was killing me. I was trying to play at night and work during the day. That wasn’t fair to my employer and so I decided to go ahead and make the break. That’s about the time my ex-wife decided to make the break with me and that was really difficult.

Yeah, a little of everything. She’s a hairdresser. She still does my hair, we’re very good friends. And I divorced before about three years and before two years I met a wonderful, wonderful girl. That was ’97 that I met Andrea. We were very much in love and we were close to being married and…she was killed last October in a car-accident, involved with a drunk driver. I’ve been having a deal with that. It’s very tough, but I’ve got some ideas for songs. Guess what they’re gonna be about.

Well, I try to. That’s the work part, making a song come together. I’m still learning, it’s always a learning-process, reading books on "how to do it", but…I had some moderate local success with song-writing and decided I could come up with a formula and write them. I haven’t been doing any writing lately, but I’ve got some ideas. I carry a little tape-recorder around with me and when I have an idea I just…and I’ll eventually go back and go through all that and come up with some songs, just ideas. Right now I have  a CD that’s been recorded in a venue in Fort Worth, and it’ll be a good 10 to 12 songs, just nothing but live-performances. And I’ve got some brand new songs for the new studio CD, I’ve got ideas for that. Hopefully in the summer I’ll be recording for that. I’ve got to work it out with Anson, schedule it with my producer. Anson is my producer, he produced both my first and second CD’s. I’ll get him to help me, but he’s really busy. It might be good though because his wife is pregnant. I think in July she’s gonna be due, so he’ll be around the house a lot and that way I can call on him to help me, when he’s got some time, spend a few hours in the studio.

I’m a big Albert Collins fan. I was not lucky enough to meet the guy. My roommate is a limo driver for all the blues-guys when they come to town and he was good friends with Albert. I’ve talked extensively with Debbie Davies and I feel like I know him, because he was one of the first guitarplayers that I really thought :" Wow !" When Albert plays a guitar there’s no mistaking who the hell that is. I mean, he has his own sound and that’s it. My roommate has told me a lot about him.

There’s a lot of it. He played with no pick. He used a Telecaster. He pulls on the strings to make some ‘pop’, but he had several different styles and he played in a strange key. But if I can get the right tone… I play a Telecaster but I didn’t bring it with me to Europe. I really admire his style. You can really tell who he is when you hear him. I’m a big Johnny Guitar Watson fan as well. He was kind of the same weight. Just a way different tone than Collins or Guitar Slim, which he did by turning the volume up and pulling on the strings likely. You can get a complete different sound out of the guitar, it’s amazing. I think ‘tone’ is everything. You’ll see quite often during my performance I’m reaching around on each song adjusting the amplifier for a different sound. It’s really important for me to get the right sound out of a guitar.

Yeah, I brought it from the States. That guitar actually was a gift from a very close friend and a big fan of mine. He bought me that guitar a few months back. It’s an Epiphone, Zephyr Blues Deluxe, Zephyr is like the wind, and it’s very similar to an ES-5 Gibson, that’s the one T-Bone Walker got that great sound out of. And I get the same sound out of that guitar. That guitar is very versatile. When I play in the States, I usually have 3 to 5 guitars sitting there, different ones, a Strat, Tele, couple of hollow-bodies, it’s because I like different tones. With a three-piece band it’s very important to change it constantly. Changing makes it interesting. I don’t play a 2 hour set with the same guitar. I like to change it up, keep it interesting.

Apart from Albert Collins, are there any other great examples ?

Oh yeah ! Freddie King, B.B. King, Johnny Guitar Watson, Guitar Slim. And there’s more modern guys, and there’s Anson. He’s cool. He knows what ‘not’ to play. It’s so cool. He’s the coolest cat and he’s really like that in real life. He doesn’t get excited about anything. He’s the most easy person to be around. He has a great sense of humour. We had a lot of fun when we recorded the CD. He knows just where to put placement and tone. Placement and tone are everything in his music and, boy, he’s a very good master at it.

Well, yeah, believe me, I can play coolest like he plays. But I don’t wanna do it too much. I don’t wanna become a clone. We have some younger musicians in the ‘metroplex’ where I live and they don’t know any better. So they’ll come out and show up with a Stevie Ray Vaughan hat, a SRV strap, a SRV guitar. It’s like trying to paint like Van Gogh. You can’t do it. I mean, you can, but it’s still a copy. So, try to be original. I try to take it all, everybody, and you can hear Albert and B.B. King in Anson’s style. Take it all, put it in a big pot, stir, and that’s Holland K. Smith.

Well, time will tell. You take some things from different guys, but it remains their style. When you look at SRV, he was the same way. When you listen to him, a lot of people say he’s a Buddy Guy, a Freddie King. I also hear Roy Buchanan in his playing, a lot, a lot, and het developed a style, it’s like whiskey or wine, it comes with age.

I’m not a big Buchanan fan. I haven’t studied him too much. He’s a little too much for me. I know he hung himself in jail, that’s all I know. Died a true bluesman’s death, hung himself in jail.

Drugs, or whatever, I don’t know. I was never a big fan of his. He had some fine licks, he was amazing. But for some reason I’m more enamored with the early B.B. King stuff, all the Freddie King stuff and all the Albert Collins stuff, early and late, all the early Johnny Guitar Watson, Guitar Slim. And then I started crossing-over into the singers like Roy Brown, the guys that didn’t play guitar. I’m still listening extensively Wynonie Harris, I’m a big Wynonie Harris fan. You can hardly find any of his stuff, he just didn’t have the money behind him like Big Joe did.

That’s where I was going with Harris. I developed an ear very young, at a young age. I think that helped me a lot. I was very good at imitating, imitating a bird or a cricket. I did this at school and it drove all my teachers crazy. But I would imitate singers, Elvis, all this, and I just developed it and made it my style. I hesitate to say really one person that I sing like, because, again, it’s a combination of many different singers. It depends on who I’m studying at the time. I’ll put in a tape of Roy Brown and listen to that for a month in my car and it depends on who I’m studying at the time, who I’m gonna sound more like. It’s a kind of period thing. I try to put something in my own singing or even write a song that goes along with that. "Little Boy Blues" on the new CD, …I was listening to a lot of Wynonie Harris during the time I wrote that song and I think it comes out in that song. As a matter of fact, the song "Nighttrain" that I recorded, I didn’t even know that song had words, and I got them from from the Blues Society up in Kansas. Slipped me a tape. I listened to that tape and said :"Wow, that’s an old song that James Brown did !", and man, everybody did that, different beats, different speeds, and it had words and I was so enamored with that tune, and then I thought :"Man, I’m gonna cut that !", because nobody else, that I know of, is. I tried to sing it the best I could like Wynonie Harris because he’s the larger band. But Big Joe too, they had this really cool way of bending their notes as they sang. It’s almost like a saxophone, it’s unbelievable. I can’t imagine what it was like to see these guys live, but that’s some of my influences. Of course I was influenced at a younger age by The Beatles, Lennon and Mc Cartney. These guy were geniuses. "Yesterday" is such a beautiful song, it’s the words, it’s the whole thing, so simple, it’s just very beautiful to me. I Think it was my father’s one of his favourite songs. It has a lot of meaning to me right now. The early stuff is my favourite. The Beatles were into everything. They were into blues…I’ve read…We were riding in the promotor’s van and he had a darn Buck Owens tape, you know, Buck Owens, which I’m a big fan of. It was a stupid American television show a few years back and it had Buck Owens as one of the featured artists all the time on the show and of course the whole family would watch the show. I was reading the Buck Owens liner notes and it said he was really good friends with The Beatles. As a matter of fact, Ringo cut that one song "Act Naturally". It’s a Buck Owens tune. I didn’t realize they were good friends. But The Beatles were in all kinds of stuff. They were playing blues and things, back when they were riding around their mopeds, wearing the black leather jackets and greasing their hair up. They were doing the same thing and searching for their sound in their early days. "Rubber Soul" is one of my all time favourite CD’s, albums.

I was born in Fort Worth. We’ve just had that big tornado. Texas has changed a lot since I was born there. It’s so large. There’s different cultures, different landscapes. You can go and find mountains in Texas, wide open spaces, forests, fields, lakes, streams, the ocean. There’s kind of a joke, an unsaid joke, in Texas. Texas, when they joined the U.S., reserved the right to secede, that means, (re)become it’s own country when they wanted to. I don’t think that’s possible now, but one time…. There’s an advertisement for Texas, a promotional thing, and it says :"Texas is the homeland of country." It’s almost like it’s own country. It takes you 11 hours from Dallas, if you wanna go to California, in the car, before you’re out of Texas, to get to New Mexico. That’s driving speed-limit. Of course, you can go North, and then it takes you about an hour. Texas is very large and...we play all over. Houston, I think, is the biggest city. It’ amazing, spread out everywhere. I don’t know how big it is.

I was like any other young guy that was growing up. I didn’t know how big the world really is. Till you try to get out. It’s hard for me to answer that, because it seems completely natural. I had a lot of different influences. I’m basically a city-boy. In Texas you have the city-boys and the country-boys. I’m basically a city-boy, but I had big ties in the country. My grandfather owned a ranch out in the country and we’d periodically go there in the summer. My sister and I would go there and stay. It was about 2 hours from where we lived, where my mother still lives, and we fished and rode horses and cows and rode on the back of the truck. We did the country-life thing and were home again two days later. But that had a lot of influence. I can remember the rhythm-lines and stuff when I’d be riding a horse. I can remember coming up with a little line to go along. What a bird would sound when it whistles. A lot of times I’ve been up there doing nothing, sitting by the stream, by the small lake pond fishing. I’d like to get back to doing that, but I’ve never enough time. The country gets farther, and farther, and farther away. The cities are just growing so big.

When I’m lucky, I play 5 gigs a week. I usually average 3 to 5 a week. I try to. And yeah, it’s crazy.

There’s a lot of things going on in my mind. Sometimes it crosses my mind :"What do I mean to these people ?" But you don’t let yourself go there. I learned over a period of time how to develop confidence in what I’m doing, and just go up and do what you know how to do. I’ve done this a million times and it don’t matter if you’re playing to Asians, Belgians, Americans or Texans. Just do the best you can. Really, I’ve got a lot of things going on in my mind when I’m playing. Some of it is watching the crowd. I draw a certain amount of energy from the crowd. The bigger the crowd, the better I perform, I feel like. If it’s small, ten people out there and they’re all talking and throwing darts and…that really makes me nervous. I feel like I’m not getting their attention, plus, it frustrates me. That’s why I love coming to Europe because we always play good crowds. I really draw from that. In the States I have to work as much as I can, so, I have to move around. Because if you play in one area too long, people stop come seeing you. People don’t follow bands around like they used to. A lot of it because of the drinking-laws now. So, you have to develop an base here, a base there, and…I’ve got a website now (www.hollandksmith.com) which helps with that and I can almost name the bars that I’m going to have a good night on. The internet has become a very valuable tool. I never thought that I would have it, but I have it since October and it’s like…I need it. It’s really cool coming over here. I can talk to my friends and my family home without a cost. People all over the world now look at that website. It’s got my tour-schedule. Everybody knows where I’m gonna be. Most people in the States, and here, if you don’t own a computer, got a friend that’ll be glad to let you look at it and you can hit the print button and print off the schedule. It’s such a great thing. All three band members have a computer, so… otherwise I’d have to call them home to remind them there’s a gig.

No (laughs), no, I can’t afford one of those yet, they’re quite expensive. I’m not that crazy with it, but my promotor has one and he lets me use it occasionally. That’s why I’m sitting here looking at this one. Anson takes his laptop, I think, to the WC. He can e-mail somebody on his cellphone, going down the road, and that’s really something.

Yeah. I tell you what. I love the Belgian people. In a way they’re much cooler than the States, but in a way to say they’re so friendly here. Even when I put on a cap and sunglasses and go walk down the street and get lost and ask somebody for the direction, everybody is so nice. I really like it over here.

Well, ever since the 40’s, when the first jazz musicians came over, I think, it’s always been the dream. I know, before I recorded "Jungle Jane", that was my dream and it’s true. It’s kind of a dream. You know, going to Europe is a big thing. You don’t know what to expect. You start imagining things a lot better than they really are, but still it’s very cool. It’s a lot of work. When I first started doing that, I had no idea what it was going to take to get over here, but I finally did. This is my 3^rd time back and I’m looking forward to next year. I wanna come more often than just once a year. I tend to sell my CD’s quite a bit. I’m having trouble in the States with the distribution.  But eventually I’m gonna get to go on tour like I do here. I’ve got two booking- agents in the States and they give me a 2 or 3 day tour all together. I wanna be able to do a 10 day tour up to Chicago. I’m trying to put one together this summer. Up to Chicago, back down to Tennessee, through Arkansas, Louisiana and back home. But I wanna do more than that. Every month or two we go to Houston for 2 or 3 days. You accept it better when you don’t play at home. And it makes you bigger at home because you’re not around as much. So people are more anxious to see what you get going on.

I don’t know. I’ve heard it is.

No. People think that Austin is the bluescapital of Texas, but it’s not anymore. I think the bluescapital of Texas is the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but people just don’t know it yet. There’s a lot of good talent coming out of that area : Mike Morgan and The Crawl, Jim Suhler, Hash Brown, Henry Qualls.

I like the swing and jump stuff, the upbeat stuff, the stuff that makes you feel good. There’s already enough pain in the world. You don’t have to remind me of it…

Oh, sure !

It’s got to affect me somehow. I’m sure it shows through, but I’m not conscious of it. I don’t wanna…Everybody’s expecting me to come out with a song called "Andrea", but I’m not gonna do that. But it’s gonna affect my thoughts and you’ll see it in a line here, a line over there, just…comparisons.

I feel like…It’s like B.B. King says :"The blues should be called ‘the happies’". Blues is what you listen to when you’re sad, because you wanna get happy, makes you happy, makes you feel better. And there’s some consolation in relating to somebody else your sad problems. You know, make people laugh, make them happy. But it may be time for me to get a little more serious about it. I feel like that if I start saying too much, like that, the people can see inside me and it’s a kind of a strange feeling, and I’m not sure I want that. I’m not sure I want them to see what’s completely inside.

Yeah, in a way…perhaps…

Oh no, you have to have emotion to do it, to sing them. You must. I’m learning how to express my feelings. It’s not easy, it’s so strange. A song is, the way it’s…the prose…the 2 rhyming lines…the structure deal is always a simple thing, but to get to that point is very complicated, to get just that one little simple song, it’s called…, like Anson’s playing : less is more. I paint and draw a little and it’s the same with that. The Japanese masters take a brush, dip it in the paint, do a couple of things with their wrists and suddenly cut the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen on paper, rice paper, just their characters, the way they write letters or words, it’s amazing, and it’s very simple, very…, and you can see…

Yeah, it’s very simple.

Exactly. It’s a kind of ambiguity. It’s there, but you really can’t put your finger on it. It’s like Anson’s playing. That’s not an easy task.

I’m coming back to that. When I was a kid, I was forced to be. So, when I got on my own, I immediately went the other way and tried all, tried it all, you know. Getting older makes you start thinking about…when I lost my dad, when I was 9, I think, I was right there.

Oh, man, it devastated me. I became a very angry person. I was mad at God because I woke up and he (my father) was right there having a heart-attack. I immediately started praying. I prayed my ass off and…he still left. I had a problem with the guy upstairs. When Andrea died, last October, it was like 1969 all over again for me. I still can’t believe it. She was such a …present, she was 27 and she looked like a  model. To have her gone is just… I think I’m over it now and then it all comes back again. It’s made me think about…I refuse to let myself say there is no God. I refuse that. There has to be one. I mean, to me, I don’t want to talk about religion or politics, I’m making a rule out of it, but I’m not…I don’t go to church and I pray occasionally, but I have a spiritual sense, and it’s becoming more defined in the last few months for me, and I’m seeing the end. She was 27, I’ll be 40 in June and I’m seeing the end. It’s made me start think :"Man, maybe I should stop and smell the roses…more." That’s a saying we have in the States. Instead of living fast, you stop and say :"Enjoy life, appreciate it!"

I’m not always on the road. I’m always on the damned phone. That’s what I am. Always. The planning, I think, it’s like the cream on the dessert, it’s the whipped cream. All the stuff that’s underneath that’s the work, that’s what I get paid to do. Making the stinking phonecalls, going to the printer, keeping the internet thing going and constantly calling these alcoholic bar owners trying to get them to commit on dates, juggle the finances…but I love it. It’s really hard work, but there’s another saying in Texas. Anson said this :"You never work harder for you than you." A lot of people in this business think :"My gosh, this guy is playing all the darn  time, what a lucky guy, who’s he having sex with to get all these jobs ?" But it’s not like that at all. It’s just, you constantly have to remind people. It’s extremely hard. So many different things that you have to worry about. I’m bookibg 2 to 3 months in advance and it’s always something with the deal. I’m not a very disciplined person and it’s very hard for me to make myself get up and do certain things that aren’t pleasant, but you have to do it and I seem to work best under pressure!!

Five minutes to stage, Mister Holland !

We let the man do the job he’s getting paid for (never enough !) We have been allowed to glance inside a fine person, a hard-working, honest artist, a comrade who deserves our greatest appreciation and recognition !

…to Nathalie Jean Bervoets