Richie Furay — Live From the Playroom and The Ominous Approach of Autonomous Agents

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

It’s Legal Toolkit with Jared Correia with extra special guest, Richie Furay. Jared provides an update on AI and legal tech, but seriously, we have Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Richie Furay, because yes, we’re back for an extra special live from the playroom. But first, your host Jared Correia.

Jared Correia:

It’s once again time for the Legal Toolkit podcast where we’re always delivering. And yes, it’s still called the Legal Toolkit podcast, even though I have no idea what a shop vac is, and I feel like if I call and ask for the wrong thing, then I might end up working at a Cinon in Omaha under an assumed name. In case you’re wondering, my assumed name would be Ron Mexico. I’m your host Jared Correia. You’re stuck with me because Neil Young was unavailable. You see, he told me he was going to co-host the show with me, but then he decided to go solo. You know how that goes. I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, a business management consulting service for attorneys and bar associations. Find us [email protected]. Now, before we get to our interview today with pausing for dramatic effect, rock and roll Hall of Famer, Richie Furay, let’s talk about the ominous approach of autonomous agents.

Let’s do it. We’re talking about AI again to so much stuff happening in this space, and I’ll tell you, I just did a presentation for a bar association with my friend Nikki Black, the Rhode Island State Bar, and probably had like a thousand people. And let me say there were many strong opinions on the subject, so I’m going to keep following where the interest lies because there’s been an update of sorts in the AI legal tech world that I want to tell you about. So as it stands right now in doing a bunch of presentations on AI and talking with attorneys about it on a regular basis, it seems like most especially so and small firm attorneys aren’t using AI at all. They’re just talking about it. Or if they’re using AI applications, it’s the generative ai. So that’s where you ask the question and it gives you the answer, right?

So things like chat, DPT from open ai, Google’s, Gemini, Microsoft’s copilot, even Twitter or X has their own AI called Grok, which man, Elon Musk can come up with really terrible brand names. It’s like a special skillset, but don’t also sleep on Claude three by Anthropic, which actually a lot of the lawyers that I talk to who are deep into the AI stuff, they like it better than any of those other tools. But this is kind of the standard. Submit a prompt, ask a question, request an output, yet text, audio, video. Even my mom knows about this. We’re not treading any new ground. If you haven’t used these yet with non-confidential data in your law firm, just to test them out, just do it. It’s long past time. Now, what’s next? You may be asking yourself what comes after generative ai? I think the answer to the question is autonomous agents.

So what are those with generative AI tools, as I mentioned, you’re creating a prompt. So you’re asking the AI to do something for you, and then you iterate with the ai, you reprompt it, you ask it to tweak the results. You’re kind of deeply invested and involved in that process and for that conversation to keep going, for things to continue to be done, you have to drive that process. But let me ask you, what if you could remove yourself from that process? Well, that’s where autonomous agents come in. The way an autonomous agent works in AI is it’s an AI tool that can operate independently, meaning without human intervention to perform complex task sets. Not like all AI tools. They’re built by humans. We certainly love to sow the seeds of our own demise, but with autonomous agents, rather than continuing to prompt and have to reiterate and iterate with the generative AI tool, this is more like winding up a top, pulling the string and letting it spin on its own.

Or maybe a better example is it’s just like telling another human being to do something. So let’s flesh this out a bit. What are the use cases for an autonomous agent? In theory, you could ask an AI tool like this to design, so build and also execute a marketing plan for you. Write blog posts, publish them, gather reports. Book me for podcasts like this one. Actually, don’t do that. Please, for the love of God, don’t stick your autonomous agents on me. Next research and draft a court brief. That’s sort of like a AI junior associate, right? Hold that thought for a second. You could ask an autonomous agent to create and moderate in-office KPIs. Now, nobody’s really talking about this in legal, but one of the really interesting things I think in terms of potential for AI is that these tools are able to build KPIs based on data sets in businesses that humans haven’t thought of yet.

That’s one of my most interesting use cases. We’ll see if anybody does anything with that in the legal space. I’m sure they will. It’s already happening in other spaces. Now, you may think, well, that seems kind of far away. We only just got generative ai, right? Only it ain’t very far away. In fact, it’s happening right now. The most recent news on this is that this company spell Book by Rally, which already has an AI contract drafting suite called Spell Book, they’ve just released something called Spell book Associate. That’s right, not a real human. This is an autonomous agent effectively acting as a junior associate in a law firm. So it’s mimicking the activities that a junior associate would run in a practice. There’s a whole lot to unpack on this topic, which I don’t have time to do in this monologue because I’ll probably return to this, but right now I want to get to the songs and the life of Richie Furay.

Richie Furay, not an AI by the way, but for more information about this, there’s a pretty good writeup on Bob Ambrogi loss site’s website recently. And then he also did an interview with the company CEO, Scott Stevenson on his law Next podcast, which you should also listen to, and not to be confused with Scott Stevens, who was defenseman for the New Jersey Devils back in the day. Bob, my neighbor. Effectively, he puts out some good stuff on this on a regular basis. So check that out to get your arms around this. So the upshot is that this isn’t even really the first autonomous agent in the legal space, and it’s definitely not the first autonomous agent that anyone’s built. Neither will it be the last. So watch out for these tools being released across the board moving forward, and I mean, watch out in sort of like two ways, right?

Watch out in the sense that you’ll see news coming on these projects and watch out because the hypothetical technologies that are coming with AI are really staggering. I’ve talked about this before, but I think it pays to reiterate because the autonomous agent thing is only one of the baby steps in this process. So some of the stuff that’s crazy that’s coming down with AI’s Theory of Mind, ai, which would enable home healthcare aids to be made available to people as one pop culture example that’s easy for people to understand, like the novella and the movie Bicentennial Man, bay Max and Big Hero six, the Disney movie. These would be AI that would be able to interact with humans, understand their thoughts and emotions, which AI doesn’t really do right now. You can get a prompt answered by chat GPT, but it doesn’t understand how you’re feeling at that point in time.

And then the super ai, which is AI that understands those things, but then also has its own emotions, need beliefs, systems, which may be opposed to our own. And then we’re talking about the age of Ultron hitting us hard. Hopefully I’ll be dead then. But anyway, hopefully you’re out there pickling red cabbage or some shit because that AI apocalypse is coming up and probably faster than you think, but we’ve got a few good years left, and so let’s spend them listening to some great music. Next up, we talked to Richie Furay, a Buffalo Springfield and Poco, and he’s even going to be playing some of his signature songs for us. You don’t want to miss this. Okay, everybody, let’s get to the meat in the middle of this legal podcasting sandwich. Today’s meat is bison, which is extremely lean though bison in person are not that.

Let me tell you. And I feel like that’s a perfect segue to the Buffalo Springfield. More on that in the moment. Alright, enough with these shenanigans, we got to get to it today because we have maybe our greatest podcast guest ever coming on today. I’m really excited and I’m not prone to hyperbole today on the Legal Toolkit, we’ve got another special episode of Live From the Playroom. Just a reminder, we interview musicians in Evan’s Kids playroom in Colorado. Yes, that’s a real thing. It’s also pun. And today we’ve got Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Richie Furay, who’s a founding member of both Buffalo Springfield and Poco and some other bands you may have heard of. Richie, thanks for coming on the show today.

Richie Furay:

Jared, I’m blessed to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Jared Correia:

I’m so excited to have you. I was telling you before we got started, I like your whole catalog and I want to run through your career a little bit. Cool. And so what I’m going to try to do is give people a sense of what you’ve been up to over the course of your musical career. We’ll talk about what you’re doing now. We’ll talk about a documentary you got coming out.

Richie Furay:

Awesome,

Jared Correia:

Which I’m looking forward to seeing. But let’s start at the beginning. You’ve had a pretty amazing music, Corin. It starts with Buffalo Springfield, which is really one of the seminal American rock bands. It’s got you, Steven Stills, Neil Young, Jim Messina and More. And you guys had this amazing three album run in the late sixties. Everybody probably knows the iconic song for what it’s worth. And then you had a really popular song in Buffalo Springfield called Kind Woman. Remember that? Everybody remember that? I know you’re going to know it if you hear it. So tell me, how did the Buffalo Springfield thing come together? How did you become part of the band and how did the band form?

Richie Furay:

Well, I’d gone back to New York City in 1964 to be a folk singer. Two of my buddies and I, and at one of the little clubs that we played at, first off, Steven Stills was there, we’d gone there earlier on in the spring. And when we went back in the summer, Steven Stills was actually playing in it too. It was a little pass the basket type place where the tourists would come and you’d do three or four sets a night. So I met Steven in New York, and when that group broke up, I went one direction and Steven went out to California and I was working at Pratt and Whitney Aircraft

Jared Correia:

Handing

Richie Furay:

Out tools, NA Tool crib. A friend of mine that lived across the street from me in New York City, we lived on Thompson Street, brought a record up to me and he said, you got to hear this record. You’ve never heard anything like it. And it was the Bird’s first record. It was Graham Parsons that brought the record up to me. So there’s a whole connection.

Jared Correia:

Oh, really?

Richie Furay:

Yeah. That’s funny. He lived across the street and he brought the record up. And when I heard that, I said, you know what, even though I told my cousin who got me the job at Pratt and Whitney, I’d be there for the Gold Watch, this was about six weeks later. I said, I got to get ahold of Steven and I got to find out what he’s doing. When I finally got ahold of him, just sent me a note and he said, Hey, come on out to California. I got a band together. All I need is another singer. And I said, let me take care of my business here and I’ll be out there to see you. And so I went out to California and literally my heart sunk because there was no band. It was me and Steven. Not that that was anything bad, but at that time was you were duo.

I was ready to jump into a group at that time and it wasn’t there. But you know what? It was perfect because Steven and I sat in a little room about the playroom right here and across from one another, and we learned to harmonize. We learned to sing in unison. We learned to phrase together singing all of the songs that he had written for the first Buffalo Springfield record. And so there was valuable time. And then of course, the famous story that, I mean, you can’t plan it. You couldn’t have planned it. Steven and I, we didn’t have any money, and we were with a friend of ours, Barry Friedman, who changed his name to Frazier Mohawk. He was a guy that was helping us out at the time, and we were on Sunset Boulevard and we were heading east. I don’t even know where we had been, but in the meantime, Neil Young had come down to Los Angeles looking for Steven, who he had met up in Canada, and he had been there for maybe a month.

And like I said, we weren’t getting out. We weren’t, couldn’t afford to go any place, but there we were as he and Bruce Palmer were on Sunset Boulevard heading to the 4 0 5 to head to San Francisco here. We were coming, going east with Berry free to Steven and and we got stuck in traffic right in front of a restaurant called Ben. And it was like that was the beginning of Buffalo Springfield. Now Neo had taught me, nowadays Clancy can’t even sing in New York. And I taught it to Steven during one of these little sessions that we had in the house, learning how to sing together and phrase together and all that. So when we played that for Neil, he was like, I’m in. So we had everybody but a drummer, and that was how the band got started though.

Jared Correia:

That’s awesome. And that song, I think that song appears on the first album, doesn’t it?

Richie Furay:

Clancy nowadays. Clancy can’t even sing. Yeah, it is on the first album. Yep.

Jared Correia:

Great album. Every Buffalo Springfield album is gray. If you haven’t listened to ’em, listen to ’em. Listen to every song. So when you’re in a band like Buffalo Springfield, are you like, wow, we’re making history now? Or is it more like, I’m just trying to get paid. This is my first real job? I think it’s a

Richie Furay:

Combo of both. I mean, I think we all felt at one point in time when we finally got our drummer, Chris Hillman and David Crosby helped us get the drummer from, he was playing with the Dillards at the time, and his name was Dewey Martin. And when we auditioned Dewey, we had the band and Chris and or David, I don’t know who it was, got us a job at the Whiskey a Gogo. All I can remember, golly, it was just this small, tiny little club and no one was there. And by the time we’d spent six weeks there as the house band playing with love, playing with the doors, playing with the grassroots, there was a double bill, but they were wrapped around the corner going up the street to hear us after that six week card. And I think it was then that, yeah, we figured, you know what? We’re into something here. This is pretty cool at the time, man. I’ll tell you what, we’re just happy to be playing

Jared Correia:

Now. Buffalo Springfield wasn’t around very long, which I mentioned two years to folks. Yeah. And three great albums, like I said. Do you think, I mean, that band has so much talent in it, and I’m going to talk a second about all the bands that spun off of Buffalo Springfield, because it’s a crazy number. Do you think it was inevitable that a band that was going to break up just because of the talent and everybody wanting to do their own thing,

Richie Furay:

Looking back on, I mean, what happened happened? I think if we would’ve had better management, we were one of the first bands to play our own music in the studio. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have, but I think we needed maybe a musical director maybe to help us along with some of that stuff and a producer, but we didn’t have a producer. We were depending upon the guys that were our managers, Charlie Green and Brian Stone, and it was a mistake, basically. And I think that really contributed a lot to why we didn’t last very long. Also, I think Neil really wanted to be a solo artist because in the two year period that we were together, there were nine people in the band. There were the five original members, and then there were four other people that came along. Jimmy Messina being our last bass player.

Jared Correia:

Yeah, I could see that Neil’s been seemingly mostly solo for his career.

Richie Furay:

Yeah, I really think he wanted, and he proved that’s, Hey, that’s what I wanted to do. And I don’t hold that against him or anything. I just wish he would’ve told us in the beginning. But you know what it was you were saying, it sparked all this other music that came out, so there was value to it.

Jared Correia:

I want to talk about that in a second, but do you think there are dudes who want to be in a band and then guys who want to be solo? Is that a thing? Is that a personality type?

Richie Furay:

No, I think that does happen.

Jared Correia:

Yeah.

Richie Furay:

I mean, to be a band, I think you got to set aside half of the ego, right? You can’t be in a band.

Announcer:

Well, I want to be

Richie Furay:

Mean for even me at that time, I wasn’t writing songs in the beginning. I was, but I didn’t get ’em recorded. I mean, Neil and Steven were so prolific, and the songs they wrote were great, but I got to sing some of their songs, Neil’s in particular, on the first couple of albums, and that was where I got my spotlight to do my thing,

Jared Correia:

More spotlight to come. Let’s talk about that. So Buffalo Springfield breaks up, but they spawned so many other bands like Crosby, stills Nash, and Young Crosby, stills Nash, long as a Messina, Neil Young with Crazy Horse, and then Poco, which was your next project.

Richie Furay:

Yeah.

Jared Correia:

So you are in there, Jim Messina’s in there. You’ve also got Randy Meisner and Timothy B. Schmidt, who were later in the Eagles. I have to tell you, poco is one of my favorite bands ever, and I’m not even kidding. It was my number two band on my Spotify rap this last year.

Richie Furay:

Oh my.

Jared Correia:

And the only reason it was number two is because my daughter shares an account with me, and Taylor Swift was number one, but she’s pretty good,

Richie Furay:

I guess. Yeah.

Jared Correia:

So can you talk to me a little bit like Buffalo Springfield is over, how do you decide to form Poco and who are you going to bring along with you for that band?

Richie Furay:

Jimmy was actually an engineer. Jimmy Messina. He was an engineer, and he did some of the work on some of the Buffalo Springfield recordings. And when Jimmy wanted to audition, when we needed another bass player to take Bruce’s place, he had got deported back to Canada. There were three Canadians in the band, so it was really Buffalo Springfield was a Canadian, Canadian heavy band with a couple of Americans in there. But during the time that Jimmy was in the band, we became really good friends, and you could just get a sense that something, it wasn’t going to last much longer.

Jared Correia:

Yeah, it

Richie Furay:

Was like one step forward and two steps back. And I always

Jared Correia:

Said, you were kind of ready to move on. While Buffalo Springfield was still a thing,

Richie Furay:

Pretty much thinking about it, I always said, as long as Steven was in the band, because Steven and I, we had a relationship from New York. I said, as long as Steven is the band, I’ll be in the band. But when he goes, then you know what? Then I’m gone. And when Steven finally decided it was over for him as well, then Jimmy and I just, we put our heads together. Number one, we had to finish the last time around record. Jimmy was contracted by Amad Tigan to get that record together, Ahad Tigan be in the president of Atlantic and Atco,

But we said, let’s start another band. And both of us had this country influence that growing up, I had a country influence, and I think it shows up on a couple songs with a kind woman and a child’s claim to fame. And so we said, that sounds good, and how it started. Then on Kind Woman on the Buffalo Springfield last time around record, he said, let’s put a steel guitar on this record on this song. Love a steel guitar. We had a road manager that said, I know the best steel guitar player in the world. He’s a young guy. He is back in Denver. So sight unseen, we hadn’t heard him play a lick. We brought Rusty out to Los Angeles to play on Kind Woman and Jimmy, and I think when we’re hearing it go down, we’re looking, we’re saying, let’s go for him. And so that was a bonus. And Rusty said, Hey, I got a good drummer I play with back in Denver, and I’ll bet he would be interested in auditioning. And so we brought George, grant them out. And so then we were left with finding a bass player, and I think this same guy that told us about Rusty told us about Randy, either Randy or Tim. I don’t know which one, but I know that we auditioned Timothy and Randy on the same day.

Jared Correia:

Oh, really?

Richie Furay:

Yeah, we did. Oh, that’s funny. And yeah, that’s my recollect. That was 50 years ago, man. So I know I’m not hold you too much. I’m making up the story as I go because it’s more fun that way.

Jared Correia:

Sounds about right.

Richie Furay:

Randy. Randy, he got the nod, and Timothy went back up to Sacramento to play with his band called Glad, and I remember he wrote me a note and I was going through some stuff. Oh, this must’ve been about five, six, maybe 10 years, I don’t know how long ago. It might’ve been 10 years ago. But I found this note that Timothy wrote and he said, man, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to audition. I know you’ll make the right choice, but on and on and on. And I was so glad to frame that and send that to him. I felt that it would probably mean more to him in his archives than to me. Even Timothy and I are great friends today. He’s been such a special and dear friend. But yeah, so Randy got the job, and then Randy, through circumstances left early, right? I mean, during the first record at the end of it, there were some issues that he had. And again, a lot of it is stuff that people have just talked about that none of it’s true. It’s just like people make stuff up that think they know and they don’t know what happened. I can explain to you what happened if you want to have a short view of that. Jimmy was not a Columbia engineer, so he couldn’t touch the board and move the nods and do the mixes.

Jared Correia:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Richie Furay:

So anybody that knows anything about recording, it’s just like making, if you’re a chef, you get too many cooks in the kitchen, man. So

Jimmy and I wanted basically to get the songs to a certain place where we would bring it in, but Randy wanted to be in there and we basically said, let us get it to a certain point, but that wasn’t really good enough for him because what’s he going to be focused on? My base isn’t louder or this or that and the other, whatever. But that’s basically what happened. Jimmy was hamstrung, basically. He couldn’t touch the board and it really made it hard. But anyway, it ended up, then Timothy came in and took his place and we carried on with Paul Cotton when Jimmy left the band. I mean, there were things that we said, we’ll never let happen, but we let happen, and we had to make a couple adjustments along the

Jared Correia:

Way. I think the final product was amazing. And you mentioned Rusty Young could play the heck out of pe, steel guitar.

Richie Furay:

Oh my gosh, man. I mean, he made the difference in Los Angeles. So the Best Bean, just another three guitar band in Los Angeles, he made the difference. And we were pioneering. I mean, Graham was out there at the time doing basically the country rock thing as well, but you can talk to any, I talked to Chris Hillman and Chris would tell you, we weren’t a country rock band. We were a country band. We were playing in every dive in Los Angeles and drunk and this and that and the other. But Jimmy and I had this vision. We wanted to cross country music of the day with rock and roll of the day. It wasn’t really anything new we were doing. If you’re listening to Carl Perkins and Buddy Holing and Gene Vincent and people like that, I mean, we were just picking up what those guys did years ago.

Jared Correia:

I mean, it is a very different sound though, if you stop listening to Buffalo Springfield and start listening to

Richie Furay:

Poco. Yeah,

Jared Correia:

I think you used the right word. I think it was pioneering.

Richie Furay:

Yeah, we were

Jared Correia:

Absolutely, I don’t think anybody was really doing it quite that way at that time. And I think because you guys were around bands like the Eagles could have been super successful. They were. I think you paved the way for bands like that.

Richie Furay:

Well, Glenn Fry Glenn sat in my living room on Laurel 2300 Laurel Canyon Boulevard and listened to us as we were rehearsing. Now, I wish I’d had a more conversation with Glenn because they took it to the limit for sure, but

Jared Correia:

Right. You’re like, don’t take too many

Richie Furay:

Notes here. But it’s an honor. I mean, well, somebody’s got to start it. Somebody’s got to pioneer it, and sometimes they make it, and sometimes that’s what they do. They started the whole genre of music.

Jared Correia:

And like I said, I want people to, one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is because I want people to really listen to this music with fresh ears. I think it is really unique. So we’re technically a legal podcast, which you probably wouldn’t have guessed at this point. I want You’re the

Richie Furay:

Midst of all these attorneys.

Jared Correia:

I wanted to ask you a really quick legal related question. It’s kind of a legal question. So when you wanted to name Poco,

Speaker 4:

My

Jared Correia:

Understanding is that you originally wanted to call it Pogo, but there was a comic strip that had the same name, and so you couldn’t use that. So why did you want to call it Pogo? And then why did you decide to change it to Pogo? Is there a reason or

Richie Furay:

Why it was so hard for us to come up with a name? I don’t know. But it was actually a road manager manager that came with the name Pogo, and we did, we established a following in Los Angeles. We were playing at the Troubadour and people were coming from all over. And so we’re up at Santa Barbara playing an outdoor concert, and all of a sudden this guy in the suit and tie comes and he’s got a stack of papers that are about of an inch thick, and it said, get out of my tree. And basically it was Walt Kelly had sued us and said, we can’t use the name either. Stop using the name or it’s going to be serious stuff. But you know

Jared Correia:

What,

Richie Furay:

Once again, the best thing that happened to Poco was that situation because all we did was take the line off the G, it made it Poco and there it was. And I think I was going to say,

Jared Correia:

Yeah, I thought that might’ve been it.

Richie Furay:

That was definitely, it even rhymes with Poco, poco, poco. And so people didn’t have to, well, yeah. Oh, I guess it was maybe Poco.

Jared Correia:

The first Poco record I heard was the Self-titled album, which was actually your second album. And the cover of this album, I remember being Odd. There’s Two Giant Oranges, and then there’s the guys in the band in the Middle. You’ve got two really great songs on that album. Hurry Up and Any Anyway, bye-Bye. Which are great songs. Thank you. I still torture my kids because I make ’em listen to the Nobody’s Fool Suite at the end, which is 20 minutes song, and they’re like, is this ever going to end? I’m like, no. It’s just great. Just keep listening. I want to know, what is your favorite song you wrote for Poco?

Richie Furay:

Wow.

Jared Correia:

If you can choose, I don’t know if this is Choosing Between Your Children or what, because I know the

Richie Furay:

Songwriter. Well, yeah, who’s your favorite kid? Well, hey, they’re all the same, right? They’re all equal with Poco. I think there’s two songs. I think Picking Up the Pieces, which that was the transitional song, and then Good Feeling to Know which was the song that we thought was going to launch us into the next level. We thought we had an am hit. And back in those days, you had to have an am am hit to really move into another genre of playing. Yeah, so those two

Jared Correia:

Songs, those are really good. And if people dunno, picking up the pieces, that’s like the song about how you started the band after Buffalo Springfield broke up, that’s what the song’s about. Good Feeling to Know definitely should have been an am hit. Just so folks know and Richie. So I put together a playlist for all these episodes. I’m putting together some of my favorite songs that people can listen to on Spotify. So after you leave Poco, I think you were with Poco for about five years, right? About five years, yep. You start the Souther Hillman Furay Band with JD Souther, who’s this legendary songwriter. And then Chris Hillman, who you mentioned before, he was the bassist with the Birds, and he was also in the Flying Burrito Brothers Grand Parsons Band and Manassas, which was a Steven Stills project. They had a couple of great albums too. And your first album with that group was Certified Gold, and you had it top 40 hit. So you started three really successful bands. That seems almost unheard. How hard is that to do? You made another transition and it worked.

Richie Furay:

Yeah, well, I think a lot of the help came from Richie ler. Richie was the producer of the first South Hillman puree record. I wanted a keyboard player in Poco near the end, and it was like something that there was conflict. I couldn’t quite get it. And certainly to have Paul Harris come in and play keyboards was really so special for me. But Richie Pod, he was the Am guy, three Dog Night, Steppenwolf, there’s more. But those two are the ones that I really remember. And so we were in heaven thinking, Hey man, we’ve got it now. I mean, Richie is actually the one that came up with the original, the beginning of falling. We couldn’t come up with a hook. And he’s a concert guitar player and he said, Hey guys, I think let me just come out and show you what I got here. And he came out and played this thing and bingo, that was the record. And you said it was a top 40 hit. Top 40 means that you’re getting airplay. You got to be up to top 15 to make sure they’re buying it, and then it becomes a legitimate,

Jared Correia:

Oh, that’s the number. I never knew that. Okay,

Richie Furay:

Interesting. I think it’s about top 15. And then people were actually going to the record store and they’re buying it. So I mean, we had good airplay and we were on our way. So yeah, that was a lot of fun and it was great playing with those guys. I’m still dear friends with Chris. I don’t see JD as much, but I just recorded a record in Nashville back in 2019, and JD came by and oh my gosh, it was just so good to see him. He gave an interview for it. We can talk about that later. It has to do with the documentary that you

Jared Correia:

Mentioned. We will. Okay, so one more question then I’m going to shut out for a little bit. Let Richie Sink and then we’ll talk about the documentary. So there’s another turn in the story because you have yet another transition to make. So during that period, you become a Christian and you start to focus more on your family. You were actually a pastor for a long while.

Richie Furay:

35 years.

Jared Correia:

Yeah, that’s quite a while. And you start producing music that seems like it more directly reflects on your values. So you’ve got this song, I’ve Got a Reason with the Richie Furay band, right? And that’s kind of like, now you’re like a Christian rock pioneer also. So you start like the country rock fusion thing, then you do the Christian Rock thing. How important is that last piece to your legacy? Because I know your faith is really important.

Richie Furay:

Well, it’s important to me in the fact that I have the freedom to sing about what I wanted or who I wanted to sing about. People listen, a lot of the songs that I write, even in that genre, when I was really specifically, yeah, I’m a pastor of a church, Calvary Chapel, and so everything must be about the Lord. Well, not necessarily, A lot of the love songs I’m writing about are about my wife, but it gave me a freedom. But you know what? When I released, I’ve got a Reason. It was a song or it was an album that, strangely enough, the word or the name of Jesus is not on that record any place. And yet it was too Christian for the secular market and too secular for the Christian market. So I found myself is, you

Jared Correia:

Hit it perfectly.

Richie Furay:

It was almost like the country rock thing. We’re too country for rock and we’re too rock for country. And so it’s like I’m always between a rock and a hard place here with a lot of this stuff. But that whole album really reflected a situation that I was going through. My wife and I had been married for seven years and separated for seven months and it was a struggle. And so that was the transition of us getting back together.

Jared Correia:

That’s really cool. Alright, I’ve asked you a bunch of questions. You’ve been very kind in answered all of them. Now as I promised, I’m going to be quiet. Richie’s going to sing a song. I’m going to let him introduce it, and then we’re going to come back for a few questions and one more song. So Richie, thank you. Have at

Richie Furay:

It. Hey, thanks, Jared. Yeah. My wife and I, like I just mentioned, had separated for seven months after being married for seven years. We’ve been married now for 57 years. Oh, congrat. This is a song. Thank you. That’s

Jared Correia:

Amazing.

Richie Furay:

This is a song that I wrote for her. She would come and she would stand right in front of me at the Whiskey a Gogo, and I got tired of singing Sit down. I think I love you. So I wrote a song about her and for her myself called Kind Woman.

Speaker 4:

I got a good Reason for Love You. It’s an old fashion sign. I kind of get to feeling like, you know when I fell in love the first time I see the All right, remember once before you hear new old folks say Loves and Ageless. Oh, but nowadays, you know the saying depends so much on the kind that you find the in your.

Jared Correia:

All right, everybody. We’re foregoing our normal Rump Roast feature this episode so that we can get more time with the great Richie Furay. Let’s talk with Richie now about his upcoming documentary before he plays this out with a song that should have skyrocketed Poco to the top of the charts. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this documentary you’ve got coming out. It’s called Through It All The Life and Influence of Richie Furay, and everybody can check that out on Richie’s website. We’ll have links on the show. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is going to be about and why you decided that you wanted to produce a film like that now?

Richie Furay:

Well, number one, it was not my idea. It was my manager’s idea. It’s kind of a hard thing right now to talk about because my manager passed away in April.

Jared Correia:

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Richie Furay:

Thank you. It was David Stones’ name and it was his passion. This guy believed in me and my music more than anyone. Then I can’t even tell you anyone else may be wife, but I mean, he had a successful business in South Orange, New Jersey, but he still just loved my music. When I first met David, I thought he was a stalker. It was years ago, and my friend Scott and I were playing these little tiny coffee shops back in the East Coast, and everywhere I went there he was with his family. Finally did a show with my friend Dean Fearing, who is a successful chef down in Texas. And he had this thing called, he had a barbecue, and he would invite these great chefs from all over the country to come and be a part of it. There was David and his wife and his family.

What’s he doing here at this thing? He’s back. And then a good friend of mine from Colorado here who did Humphreys by the Bay in San Diego, promoted concerts out there, called me up and a good friend of mine and brought me out to California to do a concert. There was David and his wife and his family, so I’m sure he’s a stalker. Anyway, we became dear friends, and I miss him dearly to this day, but it was his idea to do this stalker. And he says, your life is so interesting that I think we need to tell the story. So he got together with a friend of his Denny Klein, and we started working on this clear back in probably 20 18, 20 19. And of course, COVID hit and that shut everything down. In the meantime, we’ve gotten Cameron Crow. I was Cameron’s first interview way back in Poco when he was just a 15-year-old kid, and interestingly enough, we had obviously gone separate directions, and he became a great movie producer and this and that and the other. One day on my social media, there was a comment and it said, Cameron Crow and No, no, no, this is not Cameron Crow. So I got behind the scenes, sent a message to him and I said, Hey, if this is you, Cameron, it is so great to see you and hear from you. I’m doing a concert at the Ban Theater with Timothy B. Schmidt in December, and if it’s you, I want you to come. I got a note right back. He said, it’s me and I’m coming. That’s

Jared Correia:

Great,

Richie Furay:

Cameron, he’s a part of it. It’s not like this is something that he is producing. He’s not producing it, but he has done all the voiceover dubs for the sizzle reels, and he’s doing now the voiceovers for the interviews and stuff. And he just did an interview with Steven and Neil and myself in California. This now is about a year old. I mean, these things do drag out, but this is a story. It’s different. It’s not necessarily, I mean, there’s some of my friends that I could not get to do interviews because they felt they had issues with me, but this is the kind of documentary that this isn’t, Hey Pat, this guy on the back, he’s the greatest guy you’ve ever met. And yeah, I want this to be an honest story of who I am and the journey that I’ve made, and this is what they want to do through all of my musical career.

And we have David Geffen, we have Clive Davis people that are talking on this, not only my friends, JD and Chris and people that I’ve worked with. It’s going to be a great story and I’m really, it’s taken, its time to get done. But we did the final, did some work. I had to write a song for the end of it, and we had people out here in Colorado last week where we shot video for the end of it. And also, it’s just going to be the story of my life. David felt that it was a unique enough story that it needed to be told. And so that’s

Jared Correia:

What it is. I would agree. I mean, that sounds really interesting. So it sounds like you’re kind of in postproduction at this point.

Richie Furay:

Yeah, it is. It’s coming down. I forget what they call these things now, where they start to edit the reels or whatever, where they’ve got hours after hours after hours of film and this and that and there. So yeah, it is starting to be edited down now.

Jared Correia:

Okay. So as you said, you’re talking with Cameron Crow, he’s messaging you on social media. Have you seen the movie Almost Famous?

Richie Furay:

Oh yeah, I have. And it’s vaguely, I think has Mind. You know what I’m going to ask you, right? Yeah. We weren’t as successful as the band in the movie, but I think there were some moments that were like, he got, well, I got these notes.

Jared Correia:

So you see Shades of Poco a little bit in the band, in the movie, which is still water, right? It sounds like you do. Right.

Richie Furay:

Still water.

Jared Correia:

I think that’s really cool. I’m looking forward to the documentary, and you’ve been kind enough to be willing to do another song for us to play us out. So what do you have next for us? And then I’ll come back and say my thank yous.

Richie Furay:

Great. Yeah. I think one of the most significant songs in my history was the Transition. I mean, Buffalo Springfield was so important, but then what do we do next? And picking up the pieces became what we did next, and that’s what Jimmy and I wanted to do, crossover the country and the Rock and become friends and hey, we’re just playing music guys. And so that’s what picking up the pieces was all about. We’re going to pick ’em up. We’re going to move on and share some new music for you.

Jared Correia:

I love that song. I really appreciate you spending some time with us, telling us all those stories, playing a couple songs for us. I really appreciate you being on the show here today and hanging out with us in the playroom. Thank you.

Richie Furay:

Thank you, Jared. My pleasure to be here in the playroom, man, it’s wonderful you guys. It’s really been a lot of fun.

Jared Correia:

Thank you.

Richie Furay:

All right, take it away.

Well, there’s just a little bit of magic in the country. Music we’re singing, we’re bringing you back down home where the folks are happy, sitting, picking casually. You will pick up the pieces. Somebody at me, country music company trying to make on a Sunday afternoon picnic lunch yesterday. You still have a place in your heart today. You think cars will all be going home so soon? Well, there’s just a little bit of magic in the country, music. So let’s begin. We’re bringing you back down home where the folks are happy, sitting and casually, you and me will pick up the pieces. We live ahead the time to this day. Who would you sit yourself down to play country music, singing songs? We, Lord, I pray that today will come both of us down and strong on our guitar. I really am like you. Well, there’s just a little bit of magic in the country music thing. So let’s, we’re bringing you back down home where the folks are happy sitting casually. You and me will pick up the,

Jared Correia:

If you want to find out more about Richie Furay and his forthcoming documentary through it all, the life and influence of Richie Furay, visit richie Furay.com. That’s R-I-C-H-I-E-F-U-R-A y.com, richie fre.com. Now, for those of you listening in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Richie and some of my own family members are from, we’ve got a stamping of Richie Furay songs for you and our Spotify playlist for this week. But I’m only pulling from the songs that Richie wrote for that playlist. So I would also suggest that you listen to the Poco collection, the Forgotten Trail, which is a great overview of the early days of the band, right up until Richie left for the first time. Remember, they’re the best country rock fusion band of all time. That’s right. I said it. So they’re kind of important to the history of music. Now, sadly, I’ve run out of time today to talk about Pocos 1989 album Legacy when Richie came back. But I mean, we’ve got to save some content for He Returns to this show. This is Jared Correia reminding you that there’s just a little bit of magic in the country music. There’s singing. So let’s end.

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