"You're half right about my Hendrix influence. Believe it or not, the influence is mainly for sound vibe and creativity...not necesarily for solos and stuff. I love his playing, but he wasn't really one of those guys I tried to play like at any time. I was in to Stevie Ray for a few years when I was a teenager and trying to develop my own style...so there could be some unintentional leftover licks in there. My biggest guitar influence...and I know I don't sound or play much like him, is Eric Clapton. My dad brought me up on the blues from a young age and John Mayall and The Bluesbrakers w/ Eric Clapton is the album that I attribute to my being a guitar player. That was the record that made me hear the guitar and moved me so much that I had to play it!
After that I spent several years diving into Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Freddie King, Johnny Winter, Albert King, Stevie Ray, all the greats. Since then I've moved into psycedelic music heavily and combined the creative emotion from that music with my blues basis and have come up with some weird "cosmic hybrid", as I call it...I guess kind of like Hendrix did. I love players like George Harrison, though I've only gotten into the Beatles in the last year oddly enough. It was because so many fans and reviews kept comparing us to them and I wanted to find out why...well I ended up becoming a huge fanatic! I also love Mick Ronson, Keith Richards, Syd Barrett, Marc Ford and many others. ...Bands like the Pretty Things, Floyd, Radiohead, Black Crowes, The Stones, Kula Shaker, Beatles, Greatful Dead, The Zombies, The Byrds, STP, Soundgarden and of course...many more. The Counting Crowes was the only one you missed...I know they are well respected, but for some reason, they never did it for me. Oh well, maybe I just don't get it yet.
As far as the recording went, Me and Chris (the singer) both played guitar, so some of your references included him. For free I did not use a marshall, though I've had many people as yourself wonder if I did. I actually used my Gibson GA-45. Its an old 60's blues amp w/ a speaker that's a little shot, so it tends to have an amazing breakup with a fat almost uncontrollable tone when turned up with a distortion pedal. We unfortunatly couldn't get a hold of an AC 30, but we did have a couple of small Vox amps that we used built in vibrato features on and a few songs, even used the Danelectro Tuna Melt Vibrato (a great pedal at a great price by the way). My distortion is mainly a Boss Blues Driver with a Tube Screamer and an Electroharmonix Hot Tubes pedal for overdrive to give that unruely sustain. Funnel that through a Line6 Delay (which I still have only scratched the surface of its capabilities) and an old beat up Ibenez Flanger and there you have it. I tend to used my Wah for effect type purposes rather than solos (though you will find it used that way occationally too). Since that recording was fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and we had no pre-production, I don't really recall for the most part what I used from song to song. We borrowed lots of gear for it. That guitar I used on "Free" belongs to Marc Ford who used to play for the Crowes. It had a great sound and feel. Not to mention the fact that it had some cool history I wanted to take into the studio with me. I think he loaned us a tele too. For some songs we went direct through a vintage pre-amp, we took a Carvin head and re-routed it through a Bassman cabinate. There was really just a lot of experimentation going on. It was exciting. Especially since we didn't know how the outcome would be. Chris would sit down and show each of us the songs right before we went in and tracked them so there was lots of cool spontinaity since we weren't even a band until came out of the studio. It was a backwards way of doing it but somehow it worked."
Inspired by Bryans mastery of the stomp box, I fished out my old Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer. When I bought it in something like 1982 it came highly recommended, and many guitar heroes have raved about it since. Unfortunately the one I bought (from Steve Jolly's Holiday Music) was plagued from new by a very intermittant on/off switch. However the other night I took it apart and doused the switch in contact cleaner and it works first hit most of the time now. The result? - well Its a long, long time since I cast this unit aside, but listening to it now, on my own gear and in comparison with the sound Bryan gets on the track 'Dirty' I have to concede that this is a great little Marshall-in-a-box, after all, it had me fooled when listening to 'Dirty'!