I get nervous before every interview, but I had a couple of weeks to really fret over this one. Musician Jeff Slate is set to perform in Silver Bay’s Music in the Park concert series, and the chance to talk with him brought a whole new level of gulp.
Slate and I happen to share what he calls a “side hustle.” We’re both journalists, though from very different vantage points. While my work serves a more local audience, Slate’s bylines appear in places like The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and The Daily Beast.
He’s also co-authored The Authorized Roy Orbison and Guitar, the memoir of Earl Slick (best known for his work with David Bowie and John Lennon) and he’s written liner notes for The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. So… can you see why I was extra nervous?
I decided to start our conversation selfishly—but strategically. If Slate was willing to share some dos and don’ts of interviewing musicians, maybe I could do my best to follow the dos (and don’ts) during our chat.
As it turned out, Slate recommends a conversational approach and advised it helps to be genuinely interested in your subject.
“I come from the Dick Cavett school,” he said. “I interviewed Dick Cavett once, and he said, ‘Oh, you must have watched my show when you were a kid.’”
Instead of a strict list of questions, Slate prefers to come prepared with a deep knowledge of the subject and an outline, or some bullet points, as a guide in case the conversation wanders.
I thanked him for the tips, sneaking a guilty glance at my carefully constructed list of questions and wondering if I could magically conversation-atize them. Fortunately, Slate is a pro at making interviews feel like actual conversations. Most importantly, I’d done what he said mattered most: my homework. I’d been reading his work, listening to his music, and was genuinely curious to get to know him.
In my research I found plenty to be impressed by. Slate has released four solo albums and recorded albums with multiple bands, including The Badge.
As a solo artist, he’s an ASCAP award-winning songwriter whose music has appeared in shows like Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill. He’s contributed to official tributes for artists like Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, and even performed at Duluth’s Dylan Fest in 2023, as well as its virtual version during the pandemic in 2020.
As I dug deeper, I got curious about where it all started. Slate described his childhood in Connecticut as a “lovely existence,” but a move to New York felt inevitable. His older siblings left behind stacks of records when they went off to college, which opened the door to discoveries like The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks, Bob Dylan, and many other artists that served as inspiration throughout his life.
Slate says he was “bit by that bug really early.” He fondly recalls visiting New York City as a kid, where his sister and brother-in-law lived, and taking his first trips to live shows with them.
Recalling some of his earliest musical memories, Slate stated, “As a very young person I’d seen Miles Davis. I saw the Marsalis Brothers when they were teenagers,” he said. “I saw the Clash, The Kinks, The Who, and all these bands that I idolized.”
Slate started playing in a band when he was about 12 or 13, joining a few older kids.
“I started playing and I played all through high school,” he said. “By the end of high school, I was in a band that was professional. We toured around and made a couple records, and we had a real career.”
Founded in the mid-80s, The Mindless Thinkers were rooted in punk/post-punk underground. In the early 90s, after the band broke up, Slate launched a solo career and also released The Townsend Tapes with Pete Townsend of The Who.
The Badge, Slate’s band founded in the late 90s, drew heavily on British Rock traditions, and blended mod revival energy, punk edge, and classic rock melodies together. Their debut album Digital Retro in 1998 was followed by Calling Generation Mojo in 2003. In 2004 and 2005, they released The EP Collection, which consisted of 3 EPs.
When Slate again shifted to a solo career, he didn’t just go solo, he expanded his musical universe. His latest album, The Last Day of Summer (2024), features collaborations with a who’s who of the music world, including Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, Earl Slick, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, Steve Cradock and Ben Gordelier from Paul Weller’s camp, and Jeremy Stacey and Jess Greenfield from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, just to name a few among a host of other top-tier artists.
“The pandemic hit and then we were all stuck at home,” Slate recalled. “I’m here writing, and I don’t know how long we’re going to be here, so I’m going to keep writing. I started sending files around. Everybody was at home doing nothing so pretty much anybody I knew that I wanted to work with was available.”
The album has earned strong critical acclaim. MOJO called it “an album of classy, Greenwich Village scented folk and soul,” Goldmine described it as “an album full of audio gold,” and Shindig! said it “tastes like a lost Tom Petty album from the early ’90s.”
“There are moments in your career where it feels like a pivot point and it did feel artistically like a pivot point,” Slate said. “I’d advanced creatively and lyrically. This was one of those moments. Those songs, people respond to them. I’m very, very proud of that record. I just feel like it’s one of the times in my career where it’s like it’s exactly what I set out to do and it represents that. And that’s a pretty good feeling.”
In addition to performing his original songs in Silver Bay, Slate plans to mark a historic milestone, the 60th anniversary (plus one day) of Bob Dylan’s infamous “going electric” moment at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. Dylan played just three songs with a Fender Stratocaster, but it caused a major stir.
Folk purists reacted with outrage, booing loudly as they saw the use of electric instruments as a sharp betrayal of traditional folk music values.
“When he went electric, there was a punk rock nature to it,” Slate said. “Folk music was speaking to a particular type of person, my brother being one of them, in the early ’60s. A buttoned-up middle-class crowd who were progressive and wanted a better world found community in that music. It certainly spoke to people active in the civil rights movement.”
To Slate, Dylan’s move to electric wasn’t surprising, it felt like a natural, even necessary, progression.
“I think when Bob Dylan came into it, he hadn’t been a folk artist and really wasn’t a folk artist,” he said. “Like any artist I’ve known, he found something that spoke to him that he could replicate, that he could learn his craft from, and build on. Once he had conquered that, not in the world at large but for himself, he started to sort of chafe at the confines of the structures of that.”
To honor that landmark moment, Jeff Slate & Friends will perform the same three songs Dylan played at Newport, along with selections from his career and additional songs fitting the evening’s mood.
The band has been together for around a decade, and Slate reports they are good Friends to have. Slate reported, “All of them have pretty formidable careers in rock and roll.”
Guitar player Mark Bosch was in Ian Hunter’s touring band and also toured with Mott the Hoople. According to Slate, Bosch has a “long history of recording.”
Willie Nile, who serves as the band bassists, is, “a New York poet-songwriter who knows Bob and Bruce Springsteen,” said Slate. “I think they consider him a peer.”
The keyboard player, Charlie Giordano, has played with everybody from George Harrison to Ozzy Osbourne.
“It’s a great band,” said Slate. “We’ve been playing together for a long time. At this point, I can ask them to play pretty much anything. We’ve been doing it so long that I just give them a broad outline, tell them what I want to do, and they just get it.”
He later added, “It’s a luxury to be doing this with the same people who are like-minded and there’s just no drama to it. You’re all working together to make it great.”
Jeff Slate & Friends will be working together to make for two great evenings in Silver Bay, first appearing in Rocky Wall Entertainment’s Silver Bay Music in the Park free live music concert series in City Center Park on July 25th beginning at 7 PM. (See advertisement on page 2 of this week’s Northshore Journal)
The following evening, Jeff Slate & Friends will stick around for a Rocky Wall Benefit House Concert, donating their time and talent to raise funds for future Rocky Wall Entertainment live music events. Tickets and more event information can be found at rockywallentertainment.org/events.
Visit jeffslatehq.com for all things Jeff Slate, including links to his journalistic work. Listen to Slate’s music on Spotify under ‘Jeff Slate’.
