Mike Varney: guitar international interview 2007

Great interview... here's just a snippet:
Tom: Did he know who you were?

Mike: I don’t think so. I just told him I thought he was great and wanted to help him. At the time, he needed help. So, he said, “I finished a record here. I just need someone to put it out.” And I go, “I’m your guy.” He said, “That’s great.” So I said, “I can book you some gigs and get you hooked up with some clubs and stuff in California if you want to come out here. You can play some gigs and deliver the record to me.”

We had everything ready to go and we agreed on all the terms and stuff. He came out, he played the gigs. At some point, I don’t remember the timeline, he called up and told me that he decided to give the record to somebody else. After all that.

I consider Allan Holdsworth to be the best in that genre at that time, and that was kind of the impetus to get me to start a fusion label. Like, I’m going to start at the top here and work with the best. Since I’d been into Allan at that time since I was 12, which would have been 10 years, I thought starting with him would really be great.
I have tried to sign that guy for the last 25 years. He’s probably agreed to sign with me six or seven times and at the last minute somebody bigger always comes along and offers him a better deal. So, the last time I was going to work with him, he said, “Okay, Mike. I’d really like to do something with you.” I said, “You know, whenever you’re sucking wind and in a lull in your career we have this discussion, and it’s almost like I have to make you an offer and you have to accept it in order to get yourself out of purgatory for something better to come along and blow me out of the water. So, let me hear from you, and I’ll go through the motions – ‘Yes, I want to make a record with you. Yes, we’ll do it.’ Any day now, somebody else will offer you something better because that’s our history.”

He goes, “Oh, mate. It’s not like that. C’mon.” Then two months later, I haven’t heard from him and send the contract to his manager, and he calls back and he’s like, “Mike, these guys came to me with so much money.” And I’m, like, “Okay.” He has a family and kids, so what am I to do? It’s Allan Holdsworth. So, anyway, my brother started Legato Records in the mid ’80s.

Tom: That’s Mark, right?

Mike: Yeah, Mark was the first guy to sign [Frank] Gambale, and then Mark went out and did the Truth In Shredding album with Gambale and Allan Holdsworth, which is legendary among jazz-fusion guitarists. Then he did Centrifugal Funk. My brother and I grew up in the same house, from good parents, and we listened to the same records growing up and had a lot of the same influences and liked the same stuff. I’m sure my brother had a lot to do with shaping my musical taste also, because older brothers impact on their younger brothers. My brother’s six years older than I am.

Anyway, he started Legato and was doing pretty well, and at some point he decided to take a different career path and just folded everything. We recently, in the last couple of years, put out Truth In Shredding and Centrifugal Funk on the Tone Center label, we reissued them. They haven’t sold great, but at least people that were interested were able to get them for less than $200 on eBay, which is what some of them had gotten up to. When my brother kind of tossed it in, I was sitting around wondering if maybe it’s something I should do. I tried to buy Legato from him, but because of all the contracts and all the different relationships and things like that, he decided that it would be more of a hassle to sell it than to let it go. I didn’t want to sit there and read through every one of my brother’s contracts to make sure that every I was dotted and every T was crossed. I ended up just licensing those couple of records.
full interview

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