Guitar_Player__January_2018

FEATURES
Musical Radicals Revisit
a Long, Strange Road
AS THEY PREPARE TO TOUR AGAIN, STEVE MORSE
REMEMBERS THE EARLY DAYS OF THE DREGS
BY JOE BOSSO
BEFORE HE JOINED DEEP PURPLE IN
1994, guitar virtuoso Steve Morse already had
an impressive career as a solo artist, and as a
member of Kansas.
Before that, however, is when the story really
starts.
Back in the early ’70s, Morse, fresh out of the
University of Miami, put together the progressive
rock-fusion group, the Dixie Dregs. During
the band’s initial run, from 1973 to 1982, they
released seven wildly acclaimed albums that mixed
rock, jazz, classical, country, and bluegrass into a
sound that thrilled discerning music fans while it
confounded radio programmers. Even the band’s
label at the time, Capricorn, didn’t know what to
make of them.
“I think Capricorn took us on as a sort of
interesting art project,” Morse says with a laugh.
“We followed a pretty weird career path in those
days. If something made us laugh, we were prone
to do it. ‘Okay, let’s put this music with that—
nobody has done that before.’ We definitely took
the fork in the road less traveled—which doesn’t
always help when the business people are trying
to sell records.”
During those years, Morse’s wildly idiosyncratic
guitar playing—incorporating everything
from his love of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page
to a fascination with players as disparate as John
McLaughlin, Chet Atkins, and Albert Lee—started
to become the stuff of legend.
“It wasn’t a premeditated plan to put all of
these styles together,” Morse says. “I was just
doing what came naturally to me. But I was,
shall we say, eager. I was young, and I couldn’t
wait to show everybody what I could do. I guess
you could say my playing was more ‘caffeinated’
on the early records. The whole band was a little
impatient in how they played, which might be
what people liked about us.”
Since disbanding, the Dregs (as they became
known in ’81) have reunited on several occasions,
and with Deep Purple about to take a breather, Morse
and three of the group’s original members (drummer
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