Interview: Dave Goddess Group Releases 'Last of the West Side Cowboys'

From his home in New York, Dave Goddess speaks in a forthright manner. At times, this writer wonders if the veteran musician and songwriter is not turned off by the line of questioning, words he may well have heard and answered to far too many times.

There will be more on the effort that musicians, authors and artists face in trying to rise above, but the band that bears Goddess' name has a new EP with a name and cover that demands attention, Last of the West Side Cowboys.

"I'm very pleased with it," Goddess says of the outcome. "These things take a while, so I've been working on it the better part of a year. It's five songs I kinda think are raw and personal and tell a story, and sort of come from my own personal experience."

The story behind the title track is a part of New York City history. "I live (on 10th Avenue)," Goddess explains. "Some friends of mine were in town, and they wanted to go on a little tour of the neighborhood. The tour guide told this story: it's about these guys called the West Side Cowboys; they lived in New York and worked here from 1850 to 1941. There was a train that ran right up the center of 10th Avenue, and it used to bring goods from the meatpacking district up to Midtown. And this train was always running over people; children, adults, and they nicknamed the street 'Death Avenue' because of that. Someone got this idea to hire these cowboys to ride horses in front of the trains, waving lanterns and getting the kids off the tracks. So they got these real cowboys; they wore chaps, they wore hats, they looked like cowboys, and they rode right up the center of the street."

"They know exactly the name of the guy that rode the last ride up the street," Goddess continues, "the day he did it, there were newspaper articles written of him, pictures taken of him. His name was George Hayde, so I thought, 'Wow, that's a fantastic story.' It really captured my imagination, thinking about the cowboys riding around New York, so I wrote the song about George Hayde and his last ride up the street.

"The song kind of became about this cowboy and also became about obsolescence," Goddess goes on, "'cause like this guy, it's his last day on the job, he's a cowboy in New York, and what's he gonna do? So I thought that kind of resonates today, people out of work because their jobs go away."

"Roll Over John Lennon" is another song that catches by name, but also first note. "I started taking a look at the world as it was, and as it is now," Goddess recalls, "the kind of music people (were) listening to, looking at politics and how divided it is, and what a weird time it is to be an American. And I started thinking of what would John Lennon think if he saw this. He was always the guy that spoke out and spoke for his generation. It'd be really great to hear his voice now."

Goddess is well traveled, and he's looked well beyond New York for his inspiration. "I always have my receptors out there to see what will interest me," he says. "Living in New York, you're inundated with stuff. I walk around the streets, I keep my ears open, I hear people say stuff, I see things, I write it down. And a lot of it turns into songs; it could be a phrase that's inspiring. I also think travel is very inspiring. I've been to thirty or forty countries; getting out of (the) comfort zone inspires me."

The Allentown, Pennsylvania native found himself wired to music from the beginning. "My uncle was as disc jockey and a songwriter when I was a kid," he says. "I loved R&B music; I loved punk music, the Beatles, Rolling Stones; I guess I loved music so much I just wanted to do it myself. And I saw him writing songs, and I just thought, 'That looks like the most fun thing ever,' and so I picked up a guitar and started banging around on it and before you know it I was writing songs."

The band is comprised of drummer Chris Cummings, bassist Mark Buschi, guitarist Gary Gipson and Tom Brobst on keyboards and sax. Goddess describes his group as, "kind of a rough and tumble rock n' roll band. We play with a lot of feeling; we play a little bit out of control. It's a little raw, and that's the way I like it."

While Goddess has a full recording in his discography, this is the third EP. Goddess admits there are reasons for the shorter projects, and not all of them are positive. "An album takes longer to do," he admits, "and I think these days everybody has such a short attention span. You put out a twelve-song album, eight of the songs aren't gonna get listened to; and you know, you work really hard on them, and you want them all to get some attention."

Goddess then examines the at times frustrating angle, of bringing out new music, and getting lost in what some refer to as "The iPod Shuffle."

"It's sad," he says, "'cause the great albums that we all loved and listened to when we were kids...you put it on, and you listened to it from start to finish, and it would tell a story. The way it is now, people don't listen to them in the order you want them to; it's different, and it's kinda sad, but I think that's just the way it is.

"The great thing about music these days is it's very democratic," Goddess continues, "and anybody can make a record that owns a Mac, but the bad thing is anybody that owns a Mac can make a record. Which means there's a hell of a lot of bad material getting recorded, and you can throw all that stuff up on iTunes and Spotify, and it's this giant clutter. It's not hard to do; anybody can do it, not anybody can do it well. How do you find the good stuff, how do people find you? That's the challenge these days, I think."

Goddess' songs are story songs, and that is fast becoming a lost art. "People these days don't seem to care much about content," Goddess notes. "I hear songs that are popular, I hear what's going on, and I just think that's really vacuous, that's really thin, and I don't get it personally. It's kind of a shame; rock n' roll is like a niche thing, it's like jazz or something. You know, it's sort of off to the side, maybe it's waiting to come back. I don't know who's listening to it now; rock n' roll always strove to be important, to say something, to move people to inspire them, and that's what I try to do, to say something."

That leads Goddess to what makes his music, and what rock should be, something vital. "I try to take people to a place that they really can't get to by themselves. I want to move them; I want to inspire them, I want to lift them up, I want to make them feel good, I want them to think. Rock n' roll should be a blast, and being in a band is a really fun thing. I want our enjoyment of it and our excitement to translate to them. I try to lose myself in it, let it go, and hopefully that spirit will lift others up, that's all I want to do."

http://davegoddessgroup.com

https://www.facebook.com/DaveGoddessGroup/

http://www.thehighline.org/blog/2013/10/17/the-west-side-cowboys-of-death-avenue

Photo credits: Peter Gourniak

Album Cover Courtesy Kalmbach Publishing Co.

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