Dash Crofts
Blowing through the
Jasmine in My Mind
The Return of Dash Crofts
by Michael Buffalo Smith
January 2001
Dash Crofts, one half of the legendary duo of Seals & Crofts, released his first ever solo effort, Today, on the Nuance/Lightyear label in October, 2000. Crofts is responsible for the memorable soaring tenor vocal styling that has made songs like "Summer Breeze," "Diamond Girl," "Hummingbird," and "We May Never Pass This Way Again" significant pieces in the puzzle of popular American culture and our personal sense memory.
What follows is an intriguing upclose interview with one of popular music's best known voices, and a good Sourthern boy, Dash Crofts.
I hear that you are a Southerner. Is that true?
Yes, it is. I was born in Texas. A lot of people thought we were from England.
I did.
(Laughs) You did?
Yeah. All through high school, your songs were just all over the radio, and I'd tell my friends 'Those guys are from England! I mean, you looked British. Especially Jimmy!
(Laughing) And he dresses like the British too. He found a hat when we were in Iceland or somewhere, or maybe it was Holland. But he picked it up and put it on and said 'That's me. That's what I'm going to wear from now on.' Maybe that's one of the reasons people thought we were from England.
Tell us about some of your early influences, people that made you want to get into playing to begin with.
When I was in Texas, I'd get in my car and take off and just listen to every radio station I could that was not local. And one of them was in Del Rio, Texas. I remember this one guy used to play blues. And I'd listen to people like B.B. King and Muddy Waters, Little Willie John - as a matter of fact I used to go across tracks to the segregated part of the little town I was in and I was the only white guy there. I'd go in and listen to their music.
It was probably the best music out there. Yeah, it was. I learned so much about blues, just being over there by myself. They were really into blues. So it was blues and jazz and classical. My mother listened to classical music so I was introduced to that through her. Of course, there was country music all over the place in Texas. Rock and roll I got into because of Jimmy Seals. Jimmy came through town with a band, and said 'Hey, you wanna go big-time and tour through Texas?' I said, 'Yeah!'
Were you playing drums then?
Yeah. I started out as a drummer.
I was going to ask how you and Jimmy first came together. Wasn't there a guy named Beard involved?
Yeah, Dean Beard. He was a guy from Coleman, Texas. And the day Jimmy came through Cisco, their drummer got sick. So they called me in to substitute, and they liked the way I played better than their old drummer, so they asked me if I wanted to go with them and I did. And that's how we got started with Dean Beard. We were doing some recording around Abilene, Texas with a guy named Slim Willet. He was one of these big, loud mouth kind of managers. His claim to fame was he wrote this song called "Don't Let the Sun Get in Your Eyes, Don't Let the Moon Break Your Heart." It was a big hit. He took credit for writing the thing, but I think he stole it from somebody.
The Champs were forming out in California, the group that recorded "Tequila." They needed a drummer and a sax player, so they called us, and Dean told them they couldn't have us, that we were his musicians. He said 'if you want Jimmy and Dash, you'll have to take me too.' So they hired all three of us. Later on, we had a car accident, and Dean Beard was injured to the point where he couldn't tour anymore, so he left the group. Then later, after the Champs were over, we formed up with some other people, and when that group broke up, the only people left were me and Jimmy. So we went out as a duo! (Laughing)
Was that other band The Dawnbreakers?
Yeah, it was.
Were you guys in The Champs when "Tequila" was recorded?
No. Actually, they had just released the single and it was climbing the charts, but the folks they had hired to make the record were all studio musicians. They couldn't get them together as a group, so they put us together, and we became the group. So we stepped into instantaneous fame. I think we did re-record the song so that it would be legitimate, but I don't know which one of them became the big hit, the first one or the second one, but it was number one for like 48 weeks in New York. We toured with that group for eight years, and we kept telling them we could sing, and they'd say, "Okay, we'll get to you guys." (Laughs)
AMG has you credited as playing with The Blue Caps. Did you ever work with Gene Vincent or his band?
Gene Vincent's guitar player was our guitar player for a while, but I don't think I played on any of Gene's records.
What was the guitar players name?
It was Johnny Meeks.
That's so strange! Johnny Meeks lives about thirty miles from me. 
(Excitedly) Are you kidding?! That's great! You've got to give him my phone number. I haven't talked to Johnny in forty years! I always wondered what happened to him. He was crazy! (Laughs) Johnny traveled with us in the Champs. He knows Jimmy and me, and Glen Campbell- I'm not sure he was with us when Glen was in the group.
There was an album on AMG that credited you on a Blue Caps album though.
It might very well have been one I did. I did so many sessions, including James Taylor. I played mandolin and drums- I don't remember half of them. I was in a world of 'whatever' during that time. But I don't remember doing a Blue Caps record. But I'm not sure.
There was another one that included you as drummer. I'm not sure if it was a tribute album or what, but it also credited Richie Blackmore on guitar!
That could be. Johnny was with us when Gene got killed, and it just destroyed him. If my memory is correct, Johnny was on tour with us when he got word that Gene had been killed in a taxi cab. It was really hard on him. But I'd love to talk to him. That's really exciting! It's amazing to find out about someone like that by accident. I've been looking for other people who played with us too, like
So the first album you and Seals recorded together was the record for Talent associates, right? Did anything ever come out of that?
What came out of it was, we were picking up an underground audience of people who thought they were the only ones that knew who we were. Because of that fact, it got both Warner Brothers and Columbia interested, so they started scouting around and watching us. What happened was, Warner and Columbia kind of got in a little feud over who was going to hire us. That was a great position to be in, so we just kind of laid back and waited for whoever won. So finally, we talked to both Clive Davis and Joe Smith, and we felt closer to Joe Smith. Clive was a real song person and really knows what he's doing, but their policy was the we had to use their producers, and there were certain restrictions, and Clive Davis would kind of be sort of guiding our career and all that. Warner Brothers seemed to give us more freedom to do what we wanted to creatively. Strangely enough, Joe Smith had just come back from Haifa, Israel, which is the international headquarters of the Baha'i faith, and we felt that was interesting because we were both Baha'i, and we kind of took that as a sign too.
That's one of the things I was going to ask you. How did you guys become involved in the Baha'i faith in 1969?
A woman that wanted to manage us was a Baha'i and we asked her and her family what it was all about. She explained that it was a brand new religion that came from the east as all religions do. But this one encompassed all of the other religions. The recognized the validity of Jesus and Moses, of Buddha and Krishna and all of the prophets of God. We thought, well that made sense for the first time. The concept was a oneness of religion, a oneness of mankind and a oneness of God. We thought wow, that makes a lot of sense. We started investigating it, and that was 36 years ago, and I'm still a Baha'i. I started looking for a loophole in there, and I still haven't found it. (Laughs) I had ben searching for so long, and one of my many questions had been, what about the African native who had been worshipping a rock his whole life because he felt it was God. Is he going to go to hell and burn in brimstone and fire forever? The answer I got in the Baha'i faith was that a man is only responsible for what he knows to be true. That made sense to me. And it made sense that all of the prophets of God have not only known of each other, but have spoken of each other. The concept is that God teaches man like we learn in school, first grade, second grade, etc. It's a consecutive, ever moving story with many chapters- a chapter of Christianity, a chapter of Buddhism, a chapter of each religion, and that each prophet comes at a different time to give us the next step or the next lesson. The Baha'i faith is just the next chapter, and others will come. Probably not in the next thousand years, but...this one's here for us to investigate. Jimmy and I got a lot of our ideas from reading about that. We tried not to sound religiony (Laughing), or like a bunch of evangelists in the songs, but we'd drop little pearls of wisdom into them. And it worked. Even to this day they are playing that stuff. We were interested too. That was a period of time when people seemed to be searching for answers of some kind, and we thought the music was a good media for us to speak to the people through. This was during the "message music" era.
I remember those songs made me think during a time - my high school years- when most songs didn't make me think so much. Songs like "Hummingbird." It wasn't preachy, but it had a positive message.
It was sort of a spiritual feeling. The song "Hummingbird" was actually written as an apology to all of the prophets of God that have come and we've sent them out to the desert or crucified them and all that. We used a hummingbird as the symbol because it is unique among all of human creation. Because it can stand still and fly backwards or hover and do things that other birds can't do. I remember somebody came up to me one time and said, "Aren't you guys part of that religion that worships hummingbirds?" (Laughs) I said, "not really."
No, actually, we worship diamond girls.
(Laughing) Right. We worship diamonds and girls!
Seriously, the Baha'i religion sounds quite interesting.
It's a real no-nonsense religion. And it is a religion, not just a philosophy. It was a man who claims to be the latest prophet of God, and he leaves it up to the people to investigate that for themselves.
Going back to 1970, when you got signed to Warner Brothers and did the Down Home album, how did that record do for you guy? Or did you not really break until the Summer Breeze album?
Well. we broke into a different market with the Summer Breeze album. We became a singles as well as an album group. I found out later in the music business, if you don't sell albums as well as singles, you can't draw a crowd at a concert. We were lucky because people started buying our albums long before we had a hit single. The Down Home album did very well for not doing well on the charts. What it did was it established us in the underground with music listeners. So we were drawing crowds and filling concert halls, and then when we had a hit single, it put us into another super category. Then everything broke loose after that, and they labeled us as superstars. But we found out how important albums are, because England Dan and John Ford Coley- Dan is Jimmy's brother- when they started touring, it just befuddled us that they couldn't draw a big crowd, but it was because they had had lots of hit singles, but no hit albums, and hit singles folks don't go to concerts. Which is weird, and we never even realized it until that happened. But when they toured with us, they were exposed to a lot of album crowds, so that helped them a lot. And now Dan is on his own in country music. We tried to get him to go on his own early in his career, but he was so loyal to John his friend, he said "No, John's got to go with me." But they were successful, and now Danny's successful. Danny's my next door neighbor. You can throw a rock and bounce it off of his roof.
Where do you live now?
I'm in middle Tennessee, just outside of Nashville.
Wow, everybody is living in Tennessee!
I know it! I've been here for about five years and I love it. I had been living in Australia.
What was Australia like?
It was fantastic. I love the Australian people, they're such characters, you know? They're real outdoors people. They love to be outdoors. And they wear shorts all year long.
Is it always warm don there?
Well, it gets kind of nippy in the winter, but they still wear shorts.
I really like "The Crocodile Hunter" on TV. Do you ever watch him?
Yeah. (Laughing) And he's a good depiction of what the Australian people are like. They are real characters.
We came to Tennessee because we went out to L.A. where we started from and it was just too intense, and we've got little kids. We thought it might not be a great place to raise kids.
One of my favorite Seals & Crofts tunes wasn't a hit single, it was "Dust On My Saddle" from the Diamond Girl album.
We had fun doing that. Dan Seals sang a third part on it with us. We liked doing it in person because we felt like Marty Robbins.
Pretty good country song for a couple of "British" guys.
(Laughing)Yeah! We have country roots!
After you did the Take it Easy album in 1978, I read that you guys decided to retire from music for a while. Why was that?
We stopped in 1980 because we didn't want to tour anymore. We'd toured for ten years and we thought enough is enough, and we'll just do television and movie themes, just to stay in music. We had a publishing company we were running. We still do to this day. But we couldn't put on the soft pedal. People were just smothering us with things to do. So we both moved out of the country so they couldn't find us. (Laughs) We moved to Mexico at first. We did that just so we wouldn't be so available. After about ten years of that, we decided we would try a little tour through Canada, so we did that. It was very successful, so we decided to do a couple of months here. But it scared us because people got into such a frenzy over it. But we're still writing and recording. Jimmy is more into writing than recording.
What is Jimmy doing now?
He has a home in Costa Rica, but he also has one here, so he comes back and forth. He comes here to help his son and daughter who are in music, and visit his two brothers. We get together and write once in a while. But because he lives so far away, it's only when he's here that we can get together. But who knows, we may hook up again one day. I don't know if we'll tour, but I'm sure we'll be doing some writing and stuff.
Is Today your first solo album?
Yes it is. I just decided that there were songs I like that Jimmy and I had done that were more obscure on the albums, and I wanted to do some of them in a different style. So that's what I did, as a fun project, and it turned out to be a serious thing. People wanted to put it on a label and stuff so they did that.
How did you come to work with Louie Shelton on the project?
Louie was my brother in law at one time. His wife was my first wife's sister. He was our guitar player from the beginning, back in 1966. Later we got him to join in with us to produce the records because he had become a top session player and knew the business and the studio so well. He produced six or seven of our albums, and then he moved to Australia. He's the one who talked me into moving there. He called me and said, "This is the best kept secret in America!" We went over there and recorded in his studio, and I liked it so much that I came back and got my family and moved over there. I moved back here, and Louie moved back here also. He lives in Nashville. So one day we decided to do this album between us, and I think we're going to do a lot more too. It's a lot of fun working with Louie because he is such a good player.
The songs really have his touch.
That's precisely why we did that. He brought back the magic touch that he had with all of our other albums. We tried to get Jimmy in on it, but we never could get ahold of him. We did a song on Louie's album where we both sing on it with him. That's the only one Jimmy and I have sang together on since we quit. My daughter Lua also sang on it with him. She's such a good singer. She's working on an album in L.A. right now. She makes Maria Cary look like an amateur. She's that good, because Maria is great!
I really appreciate your time, Dash. It's great talking to someone who contributed to heavily to the soundtrack of my high school years. Between you guys and Elton John...
There was a story with Elton. He came to see us at the Troubadour when we were just getting started. He came in and hung around backstage with us. So when we hit pretty big time, we were in New York to do a radio interview. They wouldn't play Elton's song, because the program director and Elton's manager were in some kind of a feud. So we said, look, this guy is so good. If you don't play his music, then don't play ours either. We said "we won't do the interview if you don't play Elton's tunes." They started playing them. He may not know it, but we got him started in New York.
Well, Thanks again, and continued success.
Thank you Michael, and keep in touch. Be sure to give Johnny Meeks my number.
Photos borrowed from sealsandcrofts.com
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