: This one would be easy with anybody else, what day were you born?

AMM: Allegedly, August 28, 1951, but in reality, we do not know. Some time before that.

: And the reason for this is...

AMM: I was adopted illegally.

: What were your first music related memories?

AMM: My mother singing to me.

: Who were your first music performing artists of influence?

AMM: My Mother. (laughs) I guess, if your looking like for the first rock n roll record I really dug hearing on the radio, it would be Little Star by the Elegants.

: Where was your first public music performance?

AMM: In church.

: Aside from church, where was your first professional performance?

AMM: Tokyo Japan, in 1965. I played in nightclubs, I sang in night clubs. We played other smaller towns around Tokyo as well and we also played the clubs in military bases. Right after that we moved to San Antonio Texas, where I went to high school. I worked in bands all the way through high school.

: How did you first come to perform reggae?

AMM: I had been a professional musician for a number of years when I heard reggae for the first time. I was in Hawaii, I guess it must have been perhaps 1972 or '73, '73 probably. We immediately started to try to figure out how to play it with varying amounts of success.

We got where we could play about three or four of Bob Marley's songs. People really liked it a lot and they liked it so much that sometimes we would have to play them two or three times in the course of an evening. Thats where I first started. I mean, I had heard Desmond Decker and Millie Small before that, but I didn't realize that was anything like reggae or ska. I didn't know what it was, I knew I liked it, I just thought it was weird.

Quick Links

The Stop The Truck Band
Two-Step Music in a Texas Style.

Mau Mau Chaplains
Austin's premier reggae band.

Freddy Powers
Freddy's name appears on many albums with Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Freddy has appeared on Austin City Limits, the Tonight Show, Today Show and TNN. He also created and co-produced The Rogers and Hammerhead Show, a cable ace award nominee.

Cedar Valley Sound (It Shouldn't Hurt To Be A Fan)
Quality Live Sound Support, Professional Event Capture, Complete Studio Services

: Where did you get the band you have now?

AMM: The Mau Mau Chaplains is a conglomeration of really, really great musicians. I have worked with most of them on other projects before, some of us have been playing together for twenty-five years, and the rest are guys we've added on, but on the whole, they're older cats who have a lot of experience and are real professional players and I feel lucky to be able to perform with such wonderful musicians.

: The groups you've been playing with for thirty years, can you name a couple of those?

AMM: The Lotions, Stop The Truck, I-Tex, Those are the three main bands that I've gotten these guys from. Mike Pankratz and I, the drummer, have been together a long, long time, since the end of the Lotions, which I believe was in about '84 or '85, we've been together playing since then. Steve Carter used to actually be a part-time member of the Lotions, so he's an even older partner of mine. Of course, we have worked together as Stop The Truck, and still do. We've been around a while.

: As somebody who has been playing reggae for forty years now, what influenced you to go out and form the Stop The Truck Band, the country western band you have toured the United States and Europe with for so many years?

AMM: I enjoy country music and I like writing country music. I think we write good country songs. Country and reggae are so much alike if you look at traditional country, which is what Stop The Truck plays a lot of, a lot of our own songs are traditional county. If you move a couple of instruments around, it becomes reggae. It's all music and it’s all valid. We sing about the same kind of things with the country songs that we do with the reggae songs. It's just another genre that people love, it brings healing to them and to us at this stage of our lives and our careers, that's what's important to us, and country is a great vehicle to do that.

: What observations can you make as a white southerner performing in a primarily black genre?

AMM: Well, there's a lot of people like me. Every white blues or R&B artist that came from the south is faced with a similar dilemma or dichotomy. I don't know, I kind of forget about it but I am sure that when people come to see us the first time, that's the first thing on their mind. They tell me it is, and then they say as soon as you guys start singing, it all goes away. That's kind of the way I wish it would happen for everybody. As soon as we start singing, or they start singing, it should all go away, and it kind of does. It doesn't solve every problem, but it is certainly one point which we all agree, that singing, and the melody of songs and the words there in are beautiful and they have a lot of meaning and they can bring us together on a primal level.

: What influenced you to write the songs on your latest CD, Strange Tacos?

AMM: Well, the two songs I wrote, on is called Police Haffa Murder and the other one is Forces Of Interdiction. They're both about the police state that exists in the United States - and elsewhere, about the attitude of the police towards people like myself, and by that I mean, people who smoke herb. We just want to be free and sometimes we get profiled and persecuted and kidnapped, and sometimes even murdered by the police. I think if you look in the news you will see what I mean, that is kind of self-explanatory, I don't want to just gloss over that, I don't want to just ignore that. We have to all stand together against those guys when it comes to being like that. You shouldn't use that kind of power in the wrong way. Now, that having been said, the song that Steve wrote is about being in love. So there you go, you've got both sides of it covered.