html>

Page 5...Dale Russell Interview Continued....
music and at night for a few hours it played the rock and roll of the day. So I’d go to bed with my transistor under the pillow and listen to all of that stuff. In those days I was listening to Bobby Vee and Del Shannon, and ultimately I got to work with all these guys. After the Dale Russell Music Ensemble broke up I wound up getting a gig at The Town and Country which was a big club in Winnipeg, bringing in show bands. They would bring in Leslie Gore and Del Shannon, James Darren and Rosemary Clooney, all these kinds of people, and I got to play with them because I was in the house band. Through that I networked and got to know the guys in the Air Force band, like Eddie Phelps and Frank Burke - these are other famous guys, like Reg Kelln, in the Winnipeg scene, and he also did a lot of work in the legit jazz scene between Toronto and Winnipeg. Reg has played with all kinds of people - and they were the real, true jobbers. They could go in at a phone call and do any gig, and I wanted to learn how to do that. I never became what I would call a true jobber, but I got to do some of that. You know, they throw a chart in front of you and you just play and at first I was intimidated but eventually I would just latch on with them and Ron Halldorson was wonderful to me, and he told me - nobody can play what you can play the way you can play it, so just relax and be who you are, and don’t worry about anybody else and what they think of you. And that helped me a great deal; coming from a guy like Ronny, who has played jazz on Lenny’s albums, he plays great guitar, he built a 14 string chromatic tuned steel guitar, can play Buddy Emmons or whatever you want; you know, play great jazz, steel, pedal steel - he’s an amazing musician. Steiss: Now, you’re playing the guitar all the time? DALE: Guitar is enough for me. To me, the guitar is an infinite mystery. Every so often it opens up and takes me in a new direction. You know, you go through these creative stages where for a long time you may stay on a plateau. And I wanted to learn all these different kinds of music, and I would get close to the essence of it or get the influence of it, and I just wanted to get that involved in my musical soul. I didn’t want to try and be the best country player or the best rock player, I just wanted those influences. Anyway, the house band was the next longest gig I had (after the Music Ensemble), then I went on to TV and got involved in country and writing. Dennis T. Olsen and Sherise Lawrence were the two stars of this TV show and I was the guitar player in the band; they brought me up to sing the odd song and through that I wound up getting into writing country music with Dennis, and working on his album and then I eventually put out my own album of country, country MOR kind of stuff. Steiss: Country what? DALE: Middle-of-the-road country. MOR it was called in those days, 1979-80. Then I began to produce other people for a while. And that’s when the disco era hit and the bottom fell out of live music, in ‘82, thereabouts. Kale had reformed The Guess Who by then, and actually in 1980 Kale and I put a band together called MBRK (McKenna, Bernardi, Russell, and Kale) and we pursued that for roughly a year. We recorded an album’s worth of material, and then that band fell apart. That’s when Kale got the call to go back to The Guess Who, because he had to go back and save the band - his name was on the bottom line and they were kind of burning a lot of bridges. So he went back to The Guess Who, asked me if I wanted to go. At that time I didn’t, so he took the album that