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PHOTO CREDIT: STEVE ROSENFIELD ©
ELVIS COSTELLO
get good sightlines for the audience and you get good monitors you are going to automatically do well but you are going to have to spend that money on a PA,” and so what he did without me knowing it was, he got me “The Band” who started playing doing live radio broadcasts and “The Band” were much too big to play My Father’s Place but that’s really where the helping hand came from. After that everything changed...got bigger and bigger. I was the music producer for the LIR Radio Broadcast Series. I’d emcee the show and having a show week after week on LIR , that I think gave us the recognition, even on a small level.” AK: Who were some early acts? Eppy: there were about 100 people in the place and we were doing a live radio broadcast for LIR now starting in 1973 when Bruce Springsteen played when the radio broadcasts were broadcast from the stage of My Father’s Place — The emcee says, “tonight we have a gentleman from Asbury Park named Bruce Springsteen — big hand for the Bruce Springsteen band,” now before he said that I’m backstage with Bruce. Bruce and I just smoked a joint and he is so nervous about getting on stage and he says to me, “Eppy, radio is a nervous business, “I said Bruce don’t worry about that just sing to that one guy out there, pick out one guy sing to him and forget about the broadcast. ” AK: Wow! What about Billy Joel? Eppy: It was at the Ultrasonic recording studio where we did those radio broadcasts in the 70’s and —Charlie Daniels calls me and
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he has laryngitis — Billy was making his record at Ultrasonic Records called “Greetings from Cold Spring Harbor.” He was in the studio, so I said, “Billy do you mind being the Piano Man tonight- well no one had ever called him that but me and a few other people — after the shows we’d all sit around the piano and Billy would do impressions and tell jokes and he was a pretty good impressionist— so he said, “no, I don’t want to do that,” so I had to bring the program director from the radio station who said to him, “look Billy do us a favor — we will play the shit out of this record when it comes out - just do the broadcast tonight. Do a half hour, tell jokes, sing Beatles songs we don’t care.” I got on the microphone, I was still emceeing the shows and I said, “this guy is one of my favorite song writers the next time you see him probably won’t be at My Father’s Place -it will probably be at the Nassau Coliseum after his record comes out... a big hand for Billy Joel!” AK: Nice! Did Bob Marley ever play My Father’s Place? Eppy: “Bob was getting ready to play the club before he got sick. We were very close and he really taught me a lot of things but when I met him he wasn’t even known.” AK: How did you become friends with Bob Marley? Eppy: “In 1973 I was in a small club on the North Coast of Jamaica called the Roots club. All the acts from Kingston would travel there because of their PA system. I was exposed to reggae music and some of the acts that played