Kasim Sulton Solo Acoustic Tour 2001

Kasim Sulton Solo Acoustic Tour 2001

Radio Broadcast - Wednesday 1st August

WORT Radio

On Wednesday 1st August, Kasim Sulton was interviewed via telephone by Casey Fox on his radio programme called Guilty Pleasures on WORT 89.9FM at 9.00pm in the Madison, WI area. Click here to view their website.

Casey Fox began with an introduction / bio followed by Alone and Set Me Free from albums
Casey	I think we've got Kasim on the line here. (Dial tone then small switching of phone line problem.) I'll be right with you. (Background music fades back in.) Kasim you there?
Kasim	Yes, I am
Casey	Ahh, there he is
Kasim	Yes!
Casey	Kasim Sulton, the people of Madison are now in tune to your voice
Kasim	Great! Hi everyone, how ya doin'?
Casey	Alright
Kasim	Good! Casey, how ya been?
Casey	Oh great. It's great to have you on, I'm so thrilled you're coming to such a small, intimate setting at Ken's Bar here on Sunday 12th
Kasim	Yeah, I'm lookin', really really lookin' forward to it. From what I understand they have a Utopia night there every so often
Casey	Yeah, well it so happens one of the guys who works there [Jeff Gauss] is a MASSIVE Utopia and Todd Rundgren fan and Kasim Sulton fan. As a matter of fact, he plays I think audio and video of Todd's and Utopia's and some of your stuff almost weekly or it's a regular thing [for the record, it's the first Tuesday of each month]
Kasim	That's really great, I mean you can't really ask for more than that, can you?
Casey	I don't think so
Kasim	No, I don't think so. You could ask for more but it doesn't necessarily mean you'd get it!
Casey	Absolutely!
Kasim	(laughs) Yeah!
Casey	Now, I just found out you were born in Brooklyn, New York?
Kasim	Yeah I was. I was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York
Casey	Amazing...and Staten Island after that?
Kasim	I moved to Staten Island before they built the Verrazano Bridge. I think it was 1961 or 62
Casey	The Verrazano Narrows Bridge?
Kasim	Yeah, the longest suspension bridge in the world... or it was for the longest time. It's like a 2-1/2 mile suspension bridge and, before they built the bridge, the only way you could get to Staten Island was by ferry. Either you took a ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island or Brooklyn to Staten Island
Casey	Which was a nickel then, right?
Kasim	Yeah, it was a nickle each way
Casey	For many years it was only a nickle I remember
Kasim	It had to be like 25 or 30 years, then they raised it to a quarter for a while and now there's only one ferry - the Manhattan Ferry and it's free!
Casey	Oh my gosh, they brought the price way down then. 100% off! How can you do any better than that?
Kasim	You can't! It's a nice little 23 minute boat ride and I've taken it more times than I care to remember
Casey	(laughs) What prompted you in the last couple years to come out and do a solo acoustic tour?
Kasim	What happened was I had a break in my schedule, normally I'm inundated with work and there's always something going on. The summer of last year I had some time on my hands and I thought long and hard about what I was gonna do with all this extra time and I had been working on a solo cd for a while - whenever I had a spare minute I'd put some time in on it, and I had more time than I had in the previous 5 or 6 years so I thought it would be really, really nice to get out and do some coffee houses... like a real intimate setting, just an acoustic guitar and myself. I managed to put it together with the help of some friends and the first few gigs back in April went so well that I decided I wanted to do more of them so put some more gigs together and I'm comin' to Madison in a couple weeks
Casey	And we're so lucky. We get more than our share of great musicians here in town and this is another one of those cases. I saw a playlist or two of some of your gigs and I see your doin' a bit of Utopia stuff and even a little bit of Beatles stuff
Kasim	Yeah well you gotta. When you're doin' this kinda thing that I'm doin' you gotta temper the solo material with really, really familiar stuff. I could play Utopia songs for an hour and a half and everybody might be happy but it's always nice to throw in something by another artist - just to break it up a little bit...and who doesn't like The Beatles? And every single one of their songs works on acoustic guitar and that's the mark of a great song - to be able to play it like that and have it come across without any bells or whistles, it's just an acoustic guitar and voice
Casey	Great. I saw you with Utopia in 79 and 80 at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago
Kasim	Oh god, I remember those shows!
Casey	(laughs) It was the same time of year, two years in a row
Kasim	Was it in the winter?
Casey	Late winter / early spring, I believe
Kasim	I remember one winter getting stuck in Chicago for 4 days during a really bad snow storm, mighta been 78 and the rest of the band didn't make it - Todd, Roger and Willie never got on the plane, I was the only one who actually made the flight it took me 11 hours to get from Kennedy to Chicago
Casey	You could've driven
Kasim	Yeah, and on top of it they closed the airport for 3-1/2 days - nothing in the city moved
Casey	Did you do a solo show then?
Kasim	I did a solo show in my hotel room ( laughs ). It was a nightmare, for 3-1/2 days I had no clothes, there was nothing open in the city
Casey	Did you have your bass?
Kasim	Nope, didn't have anything with me - good thing the television worked
Casey	What was the song you all used to play where you would switch instruments?
Kasim	I think that was a Willie tune - we did it so that Willie could get out from behind the drums and sing lead on a song so ... it varied over the years. One year I think it was Jealousy, and another year it might have been You Make Me Crazy, and I know we used to do You Cried Wolf. I know Todd used to insist on playing drums on You Cried Wolf
Casey	(laughs)
Kasim	Which was a nightmare anyway (laughs)
Casey	I just remember going with a friend, as they're known he was a Todd freak, and he was like "oh, it's this song where they all switch instruments" (laughs)
Kasim	It was a lot of fun
Casey	So you would get off bass and go to what?
Kasim	Normally go to guitar, I'd play lead, I'd become Todd in the band. I'd stop being Kasim and become Todd for a second
Casey	(laughs) When Utopia did Deface The Music it was a loving tribute to The Beatles. Did people say you were the McCartney of the band?
Kasim	Yeah, absolutely we got that. The only bad thing about that record was its timing because it was released the January after John Lennon was assassinated. It wasn't met with open arms as people were still reeling from the shock of losing John.
Casey	And you were in production long before that?
Kasim	Yeah, we had started that record back in the summer
Casey	So it was just terrible timing unfortunately?
Kasim	Yeah, it really was
Casey	It's a wonderful album...and it's one of the great, not a parody but ...
Kasim	Homage?
Casey	Yeah, sure
Kasim	I think that's a probably a good word to describe it
Casey	Certainly The Ruttles are more of a parody or comedy version of it but this a real musical attempt to get under the skin of The Beatles songwriters, not just John and Paul but George too...it's a great effort to approximate The Beatles sound in a way that's not copying it
Kasim	Not only were the songs crafted like that but we actually went into that record with the idea that we are not going to do any overdubs, all those tracks are live and there's hardly any overdubs whatsoever. The only thing we did overdub were whatever solos and the vocals but other than that it was really a barebones production work on that and Todd really wanted to get as much live performance on the record as we possibly could as a band to make it even more like a Beatle record
Casey	I'm speaking with Kasim Sulton of Utopia and of his own ....individual live solo acoustic performance that he's doing here on the 12th at Ken's Bar and Grill here in Madison
Say Yeah is played
Casey	That's Kasim Sulton / Utopia from the album Utopia doing Say Yeah. Kasim, you still there?
Kasim	I sure am not going anywhere!
Casey	How did you guys not blow your voices out every night when performing this stuff? It's such high-powered vocals.
Kasim>/b>	The beauty of the band was that everyone could sing. In a lot of other bands you've one main lead singer and maybe someone who can pick the slack up for one or two songs. Todd and I shared the brunt of the lead vocal work so you never really sang more than 2 or 3 songs in a row and then you had a little break - and those breaks were the key to being able to perform 2,3,4 nights in a row - rarely did we do a lot of 4 nights in a row but we did a lot of 3 nighters. It wasn't as hard on the voice as it might seem, although there were certainly times where it's like dude, I can't sing tonight you gotta help me out, you gotta cover my ass...oops, excuse me
Casey	You could take each other's songs once in a while?
Kasim	Yeah as a matter of fact on more than one occassion, if Todd was havin' a problem with a string or was distracted by something goin' on on the stage or forgot the words which sometimes happened I'd more often than not jump in and save him...and he would do the same for me as well
Casey	It's great to have that support
Kasim	It was a great, great band
Casey	Absolutly! Now tell me about the new album - you 've got an EP out, is that right?
Kasim	I have a CD sampler that I'm sending around as kind of a little teaser of what's to come after that
Casey	That's what were gonna feature next week here on the show .....
Kasim	Oh, great!
Casey	...Leading up to Sunday
Kasim	I'm about halfway through recording the record, since I'm doing it all by myself it takes a lot longer than it would if I had a band and stuff like that. I'm overly critical and a perfectionist. For me to let go of something, to say ok it's done I can move onto the next thing, it takes a lot and it winds up hurting me more than helping me. I just have to really put my nose to the grindstone and get it finished and I'm hoping to be done before Christmas time. It's gonna be all my own stuff, some co-writes and some strictly written by me. I'm really proud of it so far - if it continues the way I think it's going, then it should be really interesting
Casey	We're very psyched for it and we'll play the sampler next week and then of course when we get the cd, we'll play the whole thing
Kasim	Great!
Casey	I saw you last year with Todd and a drummer...
Kasim	A guy named Trey Sabatelli
Casey	And that was Todd's Power Trio. I saw you on Letterman doin' a song for that. How did you like that tour, playing just the three of you?
Kasim	I have to tell you I was particularily a little concerned because all the songs that we were doin...not too many of them were written to be played by one guitar player and no keyboard player. Like a lot of the stuff we were doin, which was old Todd stuff and some Utopia stuff, that was all written with keyboards and a second guitar in mind so to perform them like we did with just the Power Trio ,it was, I was a little hesitant that it was gonna work but Todd really, I'm not tryin to pump Todd up or blow smoke or anything like that, but Todd really really rose to the occassion and covered all the bases as far as what the keyboards or second guitar might play plus do the solos. He really shined on that tour in his guitar playing and his ability to make it not sound like just a 3 piece band and I think he did a wonderful job
Casey	Well that's, gee, that's his reputation. He's known as a Wiz
Kasim	Yeah, and from what I understand he steals the show on the Walk Down Abbey Road Tour
Casey	I wish I could have seen that. What were they doing? Was it the whole side two of Abbey Road?
Kasim	I really can't say as I didn't see the show but I know that considering the luminaries that they have on the tour which is John Entwhistle, Ann Wilson, Alan Parsons, and I know I'm gonna leave someone out so I'll shut up right now!
Casey	It's a bunch of all stars and they were here at Summerfest in Milwaukee last month
Kasim	So they each do a handful of songs of their own and then they do a bunch of Beatles songs. I don't know which ones they do but I'd imagine they're Abbey Road tunes.
Casey	Which ones have you done on this tour?
Kasim	I do my own version of Across The Universe and I've been known to pull one or two other Beatles songs out of my hat if the mood strikes. Across The Universe is probably my favorite Beatles song
Casey	Are you diggin' the intimacies of these small shows?
Kasim	I gotta tell you it's a thrill to be that close to an audience, like you can play in front of 150,000 people and it's so different than playing in front of 30 or 40 or 50 people. It's much more nerve-racking playing in front of a small crowd than it is playing to a large arena or stadium crowd, there's no kind of 1 on 1 give and take with the audience, the larger the crowd is, so with the smaller intimate crowds it's like I almost know everyone in the audience so it's really... It's a lot of fun
Casey	We're looking forward to it. It's gonna be this coming August 12th, a week from Sunday and we're speaking with Kasim Sulton of Utopia and he's touring solo. It's your first acoustic solo tour?
Kasim	Yeah, first acoustic solo tour
Casey	But you toured solo...uhh-electrically somehow?
Kasim	Yeah, well I had an album out in 1980 on EMI records, my first solo record
Casey	How many solo albums have you had all through?
Kasim	Two
Casey	You were saying about the first one?
Kasim	The first was in 1980 and another in 1986 with a buddy of mine by the name of Thommy Price and we did a bunch of gigs around the country with that
Casey	How did you tour solo for the first album....with just an electric guitar?
Kasim	No, no I had a full band, I had two guitar players, keyboards, drums, background singers - the whole kittenkabooodle
Casey	The full....?
Kasim	It was a mess! A total mess! (both laugh)
Casey	You mean coordinating everyone?
Kasim	Just putting up with everyone. When you're in a band like Utopia everybody's an equal member and that's great because no one person has more of a say, supposedly, than another one, but when it's your own band and you're the boss, it's like people come to you whining and crying and moaning about every goddamn little thing that you could possibly imagine and you just want to strangle some people because it's like "Dude...get a life already and leave me alone"!
Casey	So, on the solo acoustic tour!
Kasim	I have nobody to complain to but myself - I just have to babysit myself which is a handfull!
Casey	Well, great! We are really looking forward to it and appreciate you calling us and giving us a chance to talk to you on the air here tonight
Kasim	It was my pleasure!
Casey	Alright, once again Sunday, August 12th here at Ken's Bar and Grill on the near east side of Madison, WI. Thanks again Kasim
Kasim	Thank you, Casey
Casey	Kasim Sulton, and let's go out with something from the great Deface The Music album with Kasim, I belive, on high harmony
Kasim	There you go! See you guys later!
Casey	We'll see you Sunday the 12th
Kasim	Alright, bye!
Casey	Thanks again, Kasim!
I Just Want To Touch You and The Very Last Time are played

Casey Fox began with an introduction / bio followed by Alone and Set Me Free from albums
Casey I think we've got Kasim on the line here. (Dial tone then small switching of phone line problem.) I'll be right with you. (Background music fades back in.) Kasim you there?

Kasim Yes, I am
Casey Ahh, there he is

Kasim Yes!

Casey Kasim Sulton, the people of Madison are now in tune to your voice

Kasim Great! Hi everyone, how ya doin'?

Casey Alright

Kasim Good! Casey, how ya been?

Casey Oh great. It's great to have you on, I'm so thrilled you're coming to such a small, intimate setting at Ken's Bar here on Sunday 12th

Kasim Yeah, I'm lookin', really really lookin' forward to it. From what I understand they have a Utopia night there every so often

Casey Yeah, well it so happens one of the guys who works there [Jeff Gauss] is a MASSIVE Utopia and Todd Rundgren fan and Kasim Sulton fan. As a matter of fact, he plays I think audio and video of Todd's and Utopia's and some of your stuff almost weekly or it's a regular thing [for the record, it's the first Tuesday of each month]

Kasim That's really great, I mean you can't really ask for more than that, can you?

Casey I don't think so

Kasim No, I don't think so. You could ask for more but it doesn't necessarily mean you'd get it!

Casey Absolutely!

Kasim (laughs) Yeah!

Casey Now, I just found out you were born in Brooklyn, New York?

Kasim Yeah I was. I was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York

Casey Amazing...and Staten Island after that?

Kasim I moved to Staten Island before they built the Verrazano Bridge. I think it was 1961 or 62

Casey The Verrazano Narrows Bridge?

Kasim Yeah, the longest suspension bridge in the world... or it was for the longest time. It's like a 2-1/2 mile suspension bridge and, before they built the bridge, the only way you could get to Staten Island was by ferry. Either you took a ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island or Brooklyn to Staten Island

Casey Which was a nickel then, right?

Kasim Yeah, it was a nickle each way

Casey For many years it was only a nickle I remember

Kasim It had to be like 25 or 30 years, then they raised it to a quarter for a while and now there's only one ferry - the Manhattan Ferry and it's free!

Casey Oh my gosh, they brought the price way down then. 100% off! How can you do any better than that?

Kasim You can't! It's a nice little 23 minute boat ride and I've taken it more times than I care to remember

Casey (laughs) What prompted you in the last couple years to come out and do a solo acoustic tour?

Kasim What happened was I had a break in my schedule, normally I'm inundated with work and there's always something going on. The summer of last year I had some time on my hands and I thought long and hard about what I was gonna do with all this extra time and I had been working on a solo cd for a while - whenever I had a spare minute I'd put some time in on it, and I had more time than I had in the previous 5 or 6 years so I thought it would be really, really nice to get out and do some coffee houses... like a real intimate setting, just an acoustic guitar and myself. I managed to put it together with the help of some friends and the first few gigs back in April went so well that I decided I wanted to do more of them so put some more gigs together and I'm comin' to Madison in a couple weeks

Casey And we're so lucky. We get more than our share of great musicians here in town and this is another one of those cases. I saw a playlist or two of some of your gigs and I see your doin' a bit of Utopia stuff and even a little bit of Beatles stuff

Kasim Yeah well you gotta. When you're doin' this kinda thing that I'm doin' you gotta temper the solo material with really, really familiar stuff. I could play Utopia songs for an hour and a half and everybody might be happy but it's always nice to throw in something by another artist - just to break it up a little bit...and who doesn't like The Beatles? And every single one of their songs works on acoustic guitar and that's the mark of a great song - to be able to play it like that and have it come across without any bells or whistles, it's just an acoustic guitar and voice

Casey Great. I saw you with Utopia in 79 and 80 at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago

Kasim Oh god, I remember those shows!

Casey (laughs) It was the same time of year, two years in a row

Kasim Was it in the winter?

Casey Late winter / early spring, I believe

Kasim I remember one winter getting stuck in Chicago for 4 days during a really bad snow storm, mighta been 78 and the rest of the band didn't make it - Todd, Roger and Willie never got on the plane, I was the only one who actually made the flight it took me 11 hours to get from Kennedy to Chicago

Casey You could've driven

Kasim Yeah, and on top of it they closed the airport for 3-1/2 days - nothing in the city moved

Casey Did you do a solo show then?

Kasim I did a solo show in my hotel room ( laughs ). It was a nightmare, for 3-1/2 days I had no clothes, there was nothing open in the city

Casey Did you have your bass?

Kasim Nope, didn't have anything with me - good thing the television worked

Casey What was the song you all used to play where you would switch instruments?

Kasim I think that was a Willie tune - we did it so that Willie could get out from behind the drums and sing lead on a song so ... it varied over the years. One year I think it was Jealousy, and another year it might have been You Make Me Crazy, and I know we used to do You Cried Wolf. I know Todd used to insist on playing drums on You Cried Wolf

Casey (laughs)

Kasim Which was a nightmare anyway (laughs)

Casey I just remember going with a friend, as they're known he was a Todd freak, and he was like "oh, it's this song where they all switch instruments" (laughs)

Kasim It was a lot of fun

Casey So you would get off bass and go to what?

Kasim Normally go to guitar, I'd play lead, I'd become Todd in the band. I'd stop being Kasim and become Todd for a second

Casey (laughs) When Utopia did Deface The Music it was a loving tribute to The Beatles. Did people say you were the McCartney of the band?

Kasim Yeah, absolutely we got that. The only bad thing about that record was its timing because it was released the January after John Lennon was assassinated. It wasn't met with open arms as people were still reeling from the shock of losing John.

Casey And you were in production long before that?

Kasim Yeah, we had started that record back in the summer

Casey So it was just terrible timing unfortunately?

Kasim Yeah, it really was

Casey It's a wonderful album...and it's one of the great, not a parody but ...

Kasim Homage?

Casey Yeah, sure

Kasim I think that's a probably a good word to describe it

Casey Certainly The Ruttles are more of a parody or comedy version of it but this a real musical attempt to get under the skin of The Beatles songwriters, not just John and Paul but George too...it's a great effort to approximate The Beatles sound in a way that's not copying it

Kasim Not only were the songs crafted like that but we actually went into that record with the idea that we are not going to do any overdubs, all those tracks are live and there's hardly any overdubs whatsoever. The only thing we did overdub were whatever solos and the vocals but other than that it was really a barebones production work on that and Todd really wanted to get as much live performance on the record as we possibly could as a band to make it even more like a Beatle record

Casey I'm speaking with Kasim Sulton of Utopia and of his own ....individual live solo acoustic performance that he's doing here on the 12th at Ken's Bar and Grill here in Madison

Say Yeah is played
Casey That's Kasim Sulton / Utopia from the album Utopia doing Say Yeah. Kasim, you still there?

Kasim I sure am not going anywhere!

Casey How did you guys not blow your voices out every night when performing this stuff? It's such high-powered vocals.

Kasim>/b> The beauty of the band was that everyone could sing. In a lot of other bands you've one main lead singer and maybe someone who can pick the slack up for one or two songs. Todd and I shared the brunt of the lead vocal work so you never really sang more than 2 or 3 songs in a row and then you had a little break - and those breaks were the key to being able to perform 2,3,4 nights in a row - rarely did we do a lot of 4 nights in a row but we did a lot of 3 nighters. It wasn't as hard on the voice as it might seem, although there were certainly times where it's like dude, I can't sing tonight you gotta help me out, you gotta cover my ass...oops, excuse me

Casey You could take each other's songs once in a while?

Kasim Yeah as a matter of fact on more than one occassion, if Todd was havin' a problem with a string or was distracted by something goin' on on the stage or forgot the words which sometimes happened I'd more often than not jump in and save him...and he would do the same for me as well

Casey It's great to have that support

Kasim It was a great, great band

Casey Absolutly! Now tell me about the new album - you 've got an EP out, is that right?

Kasim I have a CD sampler that I'm sending around as kind of a little teaser of what's to come after that

Casey That's what were gonna feature next week here on the show .....

Kasim Oh, great!

Casey ...Leading up to Sunday

Kasim I'm about halfway through recording the record, since I'm doing it all by myself it takes a lot longer than it would if I had a band and stuff like that. I'm overly critical and a perfectionist. For me to let go of something, to say ok it's done I can move onto the next thing, it takes a lot and it winds up hurting me more than helping me. I just have to really put my nose to the grindstone and get it finished and I'm hoping to be done before Christmas time. It's gonna be all my own stuff, some co-writes and some strictly written by me. I'm really proud of it so far - if it continues the way I think it's going, then it should be really interesting

Casey We're very psyched for it and we'll play the sampler next week and then of course when we get the cd, we'll play the whole thing

Kasim Great!

Casey I saw you last year with Todd and a drummer...

Kasim A guy named Trey Sabatelli

Casey And that was Todd's Power Trio. I saw you on Letterman doin' a song for that. How did you like that tour, playing just the three of you?

Kasim I have to tell you I was particularily a little concerned because all the songs that we were doin...not too many of them were written to be played by one guitar player and no keyboard player. Like a lot of the stuff we were doin, which was old Todd stuff and some Utopia stuff, that was all written with keyboards and a second guitar in mind so to perform them like we did with just the Power Trio ,it was, I was a little hesitant that it was gonna work but Todd really, I'm not tryin to pump Todd up or blow smoke or anything like that, but Todd really really rose to the occassion and covered all the bases as far as what the keyboards or second guitar might play plus do the solos. He really shined on that tour in his guitar playing and his ability to make it not sound like just a 3 piece band and I think he did a wonderful job

Casey Well that's, gee, that's his reputation. He's known as a Wiz

Kasim Yeah, and from what I understand he steals the show on the Walk Down Abbey Road Tour

Casey I wish I could have seen that. What were they doing? Was it the whole side two of Abbey Road?

Kasim I really can't say as I didn't see the show but I know that considering the luminaries that they have on the tour which is John Entwhistle, Ann Wilson, Alan Parsons, and I know I'm gonna leave someone out so I'll shut up right now!

Casey It's a bunch of all stars and they were here at Summerfest in Milwaukee last month

Kasim So they each do a handful of songs of their own and then they do a bunch of Beatles songs. I don't know which ones they do but I'd imagine they're Abbey Road tunes.

Casey Which ones have you done on this tour?

Kasim I do my own version of Across The Universe and I've been known to pull one or two other Beatles songs out of my hat if the mood strikes. Across The Universe is probably my favorite Beatles song

Casey Are you diggin' the intimacies of these small shows?

Kasim I gotta tell you it's a thrill to be that close to an audience, like you can play in front of 150,000 people and it's so different than playing in front of 30 or 40 or 50 people. It's much more nerve-racking playing in front of a small crowd than it is playing to a large arena or stadium crowd, there's no kind of 1 on 1 give and take with the audience, the larger the crowd is, so with the smaller intimate crowds it's like I almost know everyone in the audience so it's really... It's a lot of fun

Casey We're looking forward to it. It's gonna be this coming August 12th, a week from Sunday and we're speaking with Kasim Sulton of Utopia and he's touring solo. It's your first acoustic solo tour?

Kasim Yeah, first acoustic solo tour

Casey But you toured solo...uhh-electrically somehow?

Kasim Yeah, well I had an album out in 1980 on EMI records, my first solo record

Casey How many solo albums have you had all through?

Kasim Two

Casey You were saying about the first one?

Kasim The first was in 1980 and another in 1986 with a buddy of mine by the name of Thommy Price and we did a bunch of gigs around the country with that

Casey How did you tour solo for the first album....with just an electric guitar?

Kasim No, no I had a full band, I had two guitar players, keyboards, drums, background singers - the whole kittenkabooodle

Casey The full....?

Kasim It was a mess! A total mess! (both laugh)

Casey You mean coordinating everyone?

Kasim Just putting up with everyone. When you're in a band like Utopia everybody's an equal member and that's great because no one person has more of a say, supposedly, than another one, but when it's your own band and you're the boss, it's like people come to you whining and crying and moaning about every goddamn little thing that you could possibly imagine and you just want to strangle some people because it's like "Dude...get a life already and leave me alone"!

Casey So, on the solo acoustic tour!

Kasim I have nobody to complain to but myself - I just have to babysit myself which is a handfull!

Casey Well, great! We are really looking forward to it and appreciate you calling us and giving us a chance to talk to you on the air here tonight

Kasim It was my pleasure!

Casey Alright, once again Sunday, August 12th here at Ken's Bar and Grill on the near east side of Madison, WI. Thanks again Kasim

Kasim Thank you, Casey

Casey Kasim Sulton, and let's go out with something from the great Deface The Music album with Kasim, I belive, on high harmony

Kasim There you go! See you guys later!

Casey We'll see you Sunday the 12th

Kasim Alright, bye!

Casey Thanks again, Kasim!

I Just Want To Touch You and The Very Last Time are played

Many thanks to Casey Fox of WORT for allowing the transcription of this interview and massive thanks to Jeff Gauss (aka The Weavil) for arranging and transcribing the interview so promptly. (Jeff also described Kasim as sounding "VERY happy and was courteous, humorous, and educational" during the interview!)

Kasim Sulton Solo Acoustic Tour 2001