Steve Morse Remembers The Early Days Of The Dregs

...

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,