There are few lovelier places to be in the month of April than central Georgia. Explosions of flowering dogwood dot the verdant forests and fields, newly freshened with spring rains. The deep red clay soil seems to throb underfoot, perhaps with good reason. For a time, this whole area was a hotbed of American history, now only dimly recalled by an occasional marble monument. Less than seven miles from here, in an anticlimactic little battle called Jonesboro, the fate of Atlanta was sealed 124 years ago, and along these same roads Sherman's "bummers" began the fulfillment of his promise to make Georgia howl. The huge cotton plantations have long since been broken up into small farms, one of which is distinguished by a battered old truck parked on a small rise of ground near the road; the truck says "Dixie Dregs" and it too is an historical monument of sorts, to the late Twiggs Lyndon, road manager and guru to the Dregs. The truck and a small plane out with the horses in the back 20 are the only clues that this is the farm of Steve Morse.

Although the events taking place here can't compete with the dissolution of the Confederacy, they're nonetheless making a kind of history: It's the first time since New Year's Eve 1982 that the Dixie Dregs have played together. Next to the house trailer, in a cinder block outbuilding that houses Morse's 24 track studio, he, Rod Morgenstein, T Lavitz and Andy West are recording again. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Morse broke up the Dregs five-and-a-half years ago and spawned a checkered series of solo careers, and all four have approached this reunion with some skittishness, but by all accounts things are going better than well. For the fanatical hosts of long-suffering Dregs loyalists, this is cause for wild jubilation, and it's hard to blame them.

The Dixie Dregs, later abbreviated to the Dregs, were the American spearhead of the Second Fusion Generation, coming in the shadow of the twin pillars of Mahavishnu and Chick. While the CTI-disco-saxoid East Coast fusion and funkified synthoid West Coast fusion camps were noodling about aimlessly, the Dixie Dregs appeared in 1977 as a burst of fresh energy. Clearly Southern-inflected, seeming like hyper-chops younger cousins of their Capricorn label-mates the Allman Brothers and fortified with full shots of Zeppelin and Yes, the Dregs reminded everyone that rock ‘n’ roll was an important but-neglected part of the fusion equation. Despite their high musicianship, the six albums they recorded were tightly focused efforts in which instrumental ability served carefully crafted compositions–virtually all written by Steve Morse. True unsung heroes, the Dregs never recorded a tune with vocals until their final LP, and paid the price in record sales even after they signed with big-timer Arista. But a cult of committed followers maintained steady support, especially of live performances. Legal problems with their manager, which the band has signed an agreement not to publicly discuss, made even this modest activity unprofitable and undoubtedly played a role in the Dregs' 1983 demise.

Of the solo fragments, Morse has had the best luck. But despite a promising debut LP, artistic differences with his label, Elektra/Musician, frustrated him. In part as a reaction, he joined the reformed band Kansas two years ago as a hired gun and has increased his writing contributions to the band as well as toured with them. He is now contracted to Kansas' label, MCA, and has a third solo LP awaiting release. T Lavitz has done a number of projects as a bandleader, two with a bevy of West Coast fusion stars under the moniker Players, but these rarely add up to the sum of their parts. Rod Morgenstein, who joined Morse's power trio, has more recently been working with a heavy metal band named Sahara, which has a new album. Andy West, after a couple of unsuccessful solo projects, has turned to computers for musical excitement and now works nine-to-five as a product specialist for WaveFrame, a maker of mega-bucks digital work-stations. Of the two Dregs violin players, Allen Sloane is now in medical school, and Mark O'Connor, who joined the band shortly before its demise, has become a studio superstar.

No, life after the Dregs hasn't been bitter exile, but it's been an intensely compromised life for everyone, especially Morse. A measurable loss of power has assaulted the individual members of the Dregs in the '80s, just as it has most musicians in the record industry. In this fertile Georgia spring of 1988, the Dregs are suddenly and happily reminded of how much power they once held, and are wondering whether any of it can be permanently recovered.

Rod Morgenstein frowns over a sheet of paper and reads the typed words again, this time aloud: 'With music becoming more and more the same, it's good to find an instrument that lets you be yourself. Every Premier set seems to have its own personality. I really like that.“ He looks up encouragingly. "It's for my Premier drums ad. What do you think?"

T Lavitz isn't going to pass up this action: "You mean you're saying that with music becoming more the same you're just conforming to one style of music? I thought you're known as a versatile drummer who can play different styles.... "

Morgenstein is perplexed: "Well...'With music sounding more and more the same...."'

"He doesn't mean his music is sounding the same," someone pipes up helpfully. Morgenstein is grateful for the aid. "No, mine is the only music that doesn't sound more and more the same...," he says, none too convincingly.

Lavitz dives in for the kill: "Then why do you need a kit to differentiate you? You should be able to sound different on anything, Rod. You're saying because I sound so different, I want to go with something that sounds the same, so all Premier kits sound the same. That'd be like me saying I need a DX7, and I'm probably the only keyboard player in the world who doesn't use one. It's all backwards."

Morgenstein is hopelessly confused now. He puts down the endorsement. It's a tough job being straight man in the Dixie Dregs, but someone's got to do it. Especially when T Lavitz is in the room. All week T's been dishing out a steady–some would say relentless–stream of one-liners, sight gags and heckling moves, and the other Dregs have been hopelessly infected. It's also a tough job being "musicians’ musicians, " or, as T calls it, "the darlings of NAMM." In the musical cosmos, the community of players and instrument makers alone has unquestioningly sustained the Dregs in exile. Of course, the darker side of "NAMM darlings" is "NAMM whores."

"Endorsements are so easy to turn into watered down, dismissible, sell-out crap that it's almost never worth it," says Steve Morse. "I like to dodge endorsements whenever possible. But we happen to know three people involved with Ensoniq who we like and trust and can work with. That very rarely happens."

"Wait!" All eyes turn to Morgenstein, who raises his sheet of paper in triumph: "With music becoming more and more the same, it's good to.... "

Ensoniq is indeed underwriting this recorded reunion, in hopes of gaining pro acceptance of their SQ-80 synth and EPS sampler, which by agreement will be extensively used on the two-song CD. After much discussion, the band has decided to do a remake of Night of the Living Dregs "Leprechaun Promenade," and What If's opening rave-up "Take It Off the Top" (a tribute to booking agent commissions). The two performances differ markedly. The first tune, based on an Irish jig, has been extended far beyond its original form with literally dozens of new sections. The main melody of "Leprechaun Promenade," not among Morse's top-shelf compositions, gets a tad repetitive in spots, but the new parts Iead lines and the arrangement easily the most complex the Dregs have ever recorded, one longs to hear Morse go out for a long bomb and play some nasty loud guitar. Mercifully, he does exactly that on the second number, which despite being slowed down–considerably slowed down, bordering on the sacrilegious–is a triumph of raunch heroism. Forget all those homilies about team play, it's a Michael Jordan or a Larry Bird who fills those seats, and when the Dregs give Morse the ball, he scores every damn time.

"Instrumental music right now to a lot of people is either New Age or heavy speed-freak guitarists with bass and drums," says Morse of the project, "and I wanted to keep it away from either of those two extremes. I also wanted to come into this without too many preconceived ideas, just clear my head and not try to arrange everything and tell everybody what to play. I basically wanted to have a band dynamic, see the band personality emerge. And it did, real quickly."

Andy West is not present at the time of this writer's visit, but he adds his two cents in a follow-up phone interview: "We really didn't have any concrete ideas. We just came up with some musical figures on the spot and then extrapolated. One thing led to another in terms of mood. For instance, on 'Take It Off the Top,' there was a bass solo section that sounded sort of gratuitous to me, to stick with a lot of sixteenth notes in there, and it sounded neater to have a guitar solo over some of the section and then have violin and keyboard trades at the end."

Actually, Lavitz probably came in with more than his share of trepidation; he had waited until a few days before to do his homework and discovered the batteries in his cassette player were too low, and new ones unavailable. He learned the song in the wrong key, had a moment of panic when he and Morse seemed on different planets, and then discovered his errant transposition with great relief. After that rocky beginning, and after the hectic logistical details were managed, all parties agreed something special instantly happened: "We cried," mugs Lavitz. "It really was a neat thing," Morgenstein says. "It was," adds Morse. "Instantly the music came out. And it was good."

"The neatest thing was that everyone picked up their instruments and had done their homework and remembered the tunes," says Rod. "That was a partial fear." Morse's eyes flash: "That would've pissed me off if everyone had come and said, 'Duh, what songs?"'

With barely any exceptions, all the Dregs material was written by Steve Morse and arranged under his attentive ear. Says Andy West, "Steve's always had definite ideas when he hears music, and his vision is always so unified, we found it a lot easier to play his songs because anything that anyone else wrote sounded really stuck in–it didn't really fit with the Dregs' sound."

"Steve's writing was the original idea for the band," echoes Lavitz. "Then we'd get together and one by one he would start throwing parts out to people, and the parts would go through their own changes by the individual musician."

So it wasn't like, "Here's the part, play it"? "To an extent it was," smiles Morgenstein, "because if you change a melody it's not the melody anymore, wouldn't you say?"

"Even in classical music, pianists or solo violinists will put their own interpretation into the exact notes," observes Lavitz. "The beauty of this was you could say, 'What if, on the chords, I put in this note or change this?' and the composer was in the room to ask, not dead for 200 years. It was pretty exacting, but I like that because I'm a rare breed of keyboard player that loves to play parts as well as improvise. Maybe that's why I ended up in the band, because I could handle sticking to the same part in the same place night after night, which a lot of jazz players would go out of their minds doing. I guess we were lucky not to have big egos. The ego was kind of a band ego: God, we're good doing this music."

"One of my big things about bands is, you've got to hire the musician you want and the person you want," says Morse. "And if you can ever get those two people to be in one body, then you're going to have a chance. It's so easy to get swept away by someone's playing, but how fast they can play their licks at the moment they audition almost doesn't matter. What matters most is what kind of raw materials you have got: attitude, and the ability and willingness to work. That's hard to find. But to me, I don't care if I have to start at the bottom all over again–if I got those kind of people to work with, it's just a matter of time."

It all began very near here. Steve Morse's family moved to Georgia from Michigan, while Andy West arrived from Cleveland when he was 13. After a stint in Atlanta, West's family moved to Augusta, a small city about 160 miles east of Atlanta on the South Carolina border. "I had hip and cool friends in local bands who played down in Augusta," recalls West, "and when I told one of them I was moving and asked what was happening there, he said, 'It really, really sucks; there's nothing but GIs, except there's this kid down there named Steve Morse who can play just like Jimmy Page.' So I go to my new school, Richmond Military High School, and the first thing I notice is that I have the longest hair in the school and they're all looking at me like, 'You better git yore hayer cut, son.' I was in French class one day and the teacher gives us a big homework assignment, and all of a sudden the guy behind me goes, 'Uh, that's not where it's at!' Like, lingo! Who's this guy? It turned out to be Steve. We just started trying to get bands together. In Augusta, the two of us were definitely aliens."

Morse and West's band became known as Dixie Grit, and developed a formidable following in the area. "At that time, we were sowing some of the seeds of what we later did," reports West, "but it was a lot more experimental. We did a lot of things using tape recorders and weird sounds." When graduation depleted their ranks, West and Morse reportedly looked at each other and said, "Well, I guess we're the dregs," and a name was born. The two pals matriculated to several colleges, Morse winding up at the University of Miami in the mid-'70s along with some of the best and brightest musicians around: "It was ridiculous," says Lavitz. "Listen to who was there while we were: Pat Metheny, Mark Egan, Danny Gottlieb, Hiram Bullock, Will Lee, Narada Michael Walden, Jaco was the bass teacher, even Bruce Hornsby and his band. And us."

One day, Morse made a fateful acquaintance: "I was in a jazz improv class with Steve," Rod Morgenstein remembers, "and he had long, long blond hair and was the only guitarist who played a solid-body Fender. Everyone else had big fat guitars and was being encouraged to play like Wes Montgomery, you know, turn the treble down and wear the guitar higher up. Steve really stuck out from the pack to me. I was playing piano in the class and he didn't really know I was a drummer, but he had a group and the drummer was a surfer and had broken his arm–the guy's name was Bart Yarnold. Steve heard that I played drums and liked my piano playing, so he asked me to sit in, and when Bart got better we had double drums. That band also had Hiram Bullock on bass, Allen Sloane on violin and a guy named Frank Josephs on piano."

With double drums, did the early Dregs do Allman Brothers tunes? "We did," smiles Rod. Morgenstein's abilities with sticks no doubt made life uncomfortable for his co-drummer, who dropped away. "We started doing things that were not his cup of tea, mixed meters, odd times. I was pushing to do Mahavishnu tunes and would transcribe songs in 9/16 time. It wasn't Bart's forte, but Steve was very much into that."

In the final year of Morse's U-Miami undergrad stint, West came down to fill the bass chair and the band lurched toward professionalism–sort of. Their first paying job was for watermelons, but they were underpaid: "Some student carnival wanted them to play a campus festival and said, 'We can't pay you, "' recalls Lavitz, also at UM but not at that time a band member. "They said, 'Well, what if you give us each a watermelon?' And the committee said, 'No, we'll give you one and you can split it between the band.' And the band went, 'Okay!' I guess that's when they became professionals."

With the final semester for most of the band winding down, they made a collective decision to throw in their lot together and move back to Augusta, where West's parents had a number of rental properties ("They were sort of slumlords," smiles T). The pianist chair passed steadily from Josephs to David Roystein to Steve Davidowski to Mark Parrish, who had originally been a Dixie Grit member. The chief advantage of Augusta for the fledgling Dixie Dregs was its economy of life: "You know, 40 bucks a week pretty much covered our expenses," says Morgenstein. "There was a club in Augusta called the Whipping Post that let us play there once a month for a week–we'd walk out with $150, $200 per man for only six nights, four sets a night. When I run into younger musicians who have the same dream, I worry about them, because the cost of living steadily increases, but the amount of money the musician at the entry level gets paid is still the same–about a hundred bucks a night for the whole band."

With characteristic single-mindedness, their material was virtually all originals–with an occasional necessary exception: "The Whipping Post was on a circuit where regional acts would come in and do all copy material, and then we'd come in and do this unusual stuff to a mixed crowd that contained a lot of Andy/Steve fanatics from years back," smiles Rod. "And the regular crowd had no idea what we were doing, and just wanted to dance. I remember well into the band's career playing in Charleston at the Citadel, a military academy, and no one cared for us at all. Steve suddenly yells out,"'Tush,"' and breaks right into it. He sung it, too: 'I been up, I been down....' And they all went wild."

While at U-Miami, the band had recorded a limited-run EP called The Great Spectacular. It was later used, as Morgenstein ruefully recalls, to woo major labels: "Andy, Steve and myself went to New York City and took it around to all the record companies we could think of–there were about 27 or 30 back then. We were trying to set off a bidding war, but we were a bit naive. They all sent rejections. They told us, 'Sounds terrible, no commercial potential, get a vocalist, you gotta play disco....' The guy at CTI was very big on disco. And it was so depressing. But that may have helped make our fight that much stronger. We said, 'Yeah, we're gonna do it anyway, we're committed, we're gonna get a record deal, we're gonna do it with no vocals.' We had a grudge.

"Then we played a club in Nashville where a couple of guys from the Allman Brothers heard us, Chuck Leavell and Twiggs Lyndon, who was part of their crew and later became our mentor. They called Phil Walden, who was the president of Capricorn, and said, 'You've got to sign this band.' So they set up a date for us to play in Macon, we played and shook hands and that's how it happened. It was paying dues by sticking to your guns, but it really only took about a year."

Capricorn chose Stewart Levine to produce the Dixie Dregs' debut LP, Free Fall. Levine was best known then for his work with the Jazz Crusaders, and he dressed the Dregs in the same sonic clothes, somewhat to their disappointment. "It didn't have the sound we thought it would originally have," says Morgenstein. "It was our first album, it'd all been for this. When the record arrived from the West Coast, we put it on, waiting to hear our first project. And it was a letdown."

"Let's tone that down a bit," cautions Morse, who mistrusts microphones. "It's just that the producer was going for more of a live jazz sound, while we were imagining more of a massive Mahavishnu rock sound." Capricorn's suggestion for producer of the follow-up LP, What If, was more to their taste: Ken Scott, who produced not only Mahavishnu but Jeff Beck, Queen and Supertramp among others. "Ken was a great producer for us," says Morse, "because he didn't say, 'All right, let's start from the beginning with this song. You have an A chord, right? We'll keep the A....' He just said, 'What's the music? Give me 15 tunes.' We'd play 15 and he'd pick eight. The rest of it was just getting a good sound. He was very intuitive and kept his hands off the music as much as possible."

"Except for me," cautions Morgenstein. "Ken had a lot to say about my drumming. My concept of playing at the time was immature in that I wanted to play every note imaginable on my instrument, so that when drummers listened to it, they'd be impressed. During the first thing we played for Ken, 'Take It Off the Top,' he stopped us in mid-song and said, 'What are you doing?' And I was offended, although I didn't show it. He said, 'Trust me, you'll see what I'm talking about. The less you play, the harder you can hit your instrument, and the better we can make it sound.' Then he did a comparison. He said, 'Here's your favorite band,' and put on some unreleased Mahavishnu, and then he put on a new Supertramp record he'd just done. And I had to admit the Supertramp drums sounded better than those of Billy Cobham, my idol at the time."

Scott also produced the band's third LP, Night of the Living Dregs, which was the last with Mark Parrish, old Miami schoolmate Lavitz became keyboardist number five. "T practically didn't know what a synthesizer was when he joined the band," notes Morse, "but we could see the guy was a hyper workaholic with a good attitude.” Night of the Living Dregs also marked the first of four consecutive Grammy nominations for best rock instrumental. The band hopefully attended each show, only to remain a bridesmaid: "Please welcome four-time Grammy losers, the Dixie Dregs," Rod grins.

If some parts of the industry were passing on them, the band had caught the ear of Arista president Clive Davis. "He auditioned us at the Bottom Line," smiles Lavitz. "It was a Saturday night and the place was sold out. He was in a white suit, applauding politely from the front row while the rest of the audience was screaming, standing on tables and stuff. We did three encores. I guess he saw potential." Arista signed the Dixie Dregs and in the process lopped off the "Dixie, " hoping to avoid the Southern rock associations which, as T recalls, had hindered airplay: "Lots of DJs used to come up to me and say, 'You guys are incredible! I threw away your first three albums without listening to them, but I'm gonna play'em now!"

The biggest change in the band, though, was that Morse became the producer, a role he had coveted since the outset: "Obviously a seasoned producer has had more experience and knows how to get a sound quicker than you would. On the other hand, though, when you write a piece of music, you already hear it produced in your head. All you've got to know is 'What am I looking for? That's it.' You know when you've got it. So producing yourself allows you to skip one step of communication. But it's an important step."

The sound and format of the next two albums, Dregs of the Earth and Unsung Heroes, changed little, but the band MO changed considerably. "It was really, really hard work," says Morse. "To me, those albums represented a crossing over from being a guy who stood totally in awe of record companies and the whole music-making machine to a guy who said, 'Okay, we can make a record.' Basically we were just let loose."

To Morse the producer, the overdub and the pinpoint punch-in became important tools. The Dregs would record drums first with the whole band playing along for energy, then overdub every other part piece by piece, closely scrutinized by Morse. "Steve's relative pitch is so good," says Lavitz. "I can be playing a solo and without an instrument he can go, 'I think it's C#; right where you hit that, I think we should punch in and try some other ideas. Pick up the improvisation there.' He knows exactly where to punch, right on the second sixteenth note of beat two."

Steve's perfectionism is now well known; do the musicians in a sense play for Steve? Morgenstein replies, "To different degrees, yeah. I mean, you could line 10 people up and play them something and each of them will have a different opinion of what they just heard. One will say it was perfect, another will say, 'Are you kidding, did you hear the run in the second bar? It was totally out of time."' "On the other hand," says Lavitz, "I've listened to my solos that Steve has produced, and I go, 'That's me? That sounds better than me.' But it is me."

It is late in the evening and T Lavitz is laying down an overdub for the fade of "Leprechaun Promenade." It's just a couple of solo keyboard fills that reply to the main theme, each one lasting less than a bar. It's pretty much a piece of detail work that has to be nailed before the band goes ahead to percussion and MIDI guitar overdubs. John Senior, an Ensoniq software designer who's been here all week as de facto executive producer, tweaks an SQ-80 patch while engineer Rick Sandidge starts running back the sections. Lavitz plays a few passes and seems to nail the parts. Morse wants to take a bit of breathiness off the sound. Senior obliges. T makes few more passes. Morse doesn't hear it yet. After a few more attempts, he comes over to the keyboard and begins to have T turn the seven notes inside out, maybe backwards.... Finally, he plays a couple of variations himself, though not for tape.

For a time it's a fascinating view of how exacting Morse can be as a producer. Then it gets somewhat boring, stretching into an hour now, that same damn melody, most of T's fills apparently fine but not pleasing Morse. Then we enter the torture zone. Again and again, he keeps digging for the fill. Lavitz plays everything dutifully, never losing patience, never taking the rejection of his parts personally. This writer, having witnessed much repetitive, dull studio activity in his career, is driven to the brink of insanity. After 90 minutes of growing horror, I withdraw, destined to hear that passage ringing through my mind for the next 10 days. In the final version, Lavitz's solo fills seem close to the earlier versions, but I wouldn't swear to that. In fact, the whole evening session now seems like a bad dream.

Was this night of the living Dregs an isolated incident? Perhaps in length of time, but not in intensity, say sources close to the band. In particular, Morse is said to use this technique with Lavitz and West, who clearly are not the musical peers of Morse and Morgenstein. This perceived inequality is not reflected in any observable hierarchy, but just as musicianship naturally seeking its own level. One thinks back to dinner with the band at a restaurant earlier that night, watching Morse laughing so hard at a Lavitz line he had to put his head down on the table and was unable to speak for several minutes. Can this be the same person?

Morse drives himself harder than anyone. He does a great many things well, sometimes can't seem to realize there are limits to his time, and is given to extreme solutions. By all accounts, 1987 was a year of intense frustration for him. After putting vocals on his second solo album, Stand Up, reportedly to please his A&R man, a partisan of dance music, Morse joined Kansas. He professes not to regret Stand Up and his Kansas association, but in the middle of last year he abruptly took a job as a pilot for a commuter airline operating out of Macon. This was supposed to be no part time fling for Morse, but a full-scale attempt to get more financial control over his life. In doing so, he was forced to cut his waist-length hair, a great private trauma. It was a symbolic moment, the mythic hero losing the source of his virility and strength, Samson shorn or Christopher Reeve (whom he now resembles) giving up his super powers to marry Lois Lane.

But somewhere in there, a touch of moderation took hold. Morse realized he had something invested in Kansas and that it was foolish to walk away from it. The success of Joe Satriani swung the pendulum back to real guitar albums, and MCA stopped asking him to put saxes on the next Steve Morse Band record. This LP, already finished, is said to be everything Stand Up was not. And now this Dregs project. How could he not replay the mid-period Dregs albums, which his guitar work inexorably dominates, and not be amazed at how strong and intensely creative he was. Whatever the Dregs mean to Morse–the ability to laugh more, especially at himself; the freedom to torture his friends without guilt; the memory of how it felt not to be compromised; or simply a body of material that he should feel tremendously proud of–this spring above all marks the greening of Steve Morse, even if the Dregs never play another note together. He has decided to quit flying commuter jets and return to being a full-time musician.

"For me, nothing's changed about the business. Basically it was, 'Here's your budget, bring us a record. Don't make something horrible.' It's the same thing now," Morse explains. "They make their suggestions and you try and accommodate them. It's not so much that that's different. It's really the radio stations. I wish they'd go back to listening to music and choosing it themselves, but apparently that's asking too much.

"The record company was pressuring us to change our image in certain ways," recalls Morse. "Everyone wanted us to try changing the sound. We did a little, but... " Was this while Industry Standard was being made? "Before, after, during, always...," he sighs wearily. "Like I said, a lot of business things would be too pitiful to even go into."

"Everyone was always saying, 'You guys are great, but we can't do anything 'cause it doesn't have vocals," says West. "So we said, 'Okay, fine. Here.' And then broke up."

The two vocal tunes, sung by Doobie Pat Simmons and Santana-ite Alex Ligertwood, appeared on Industry Standard. The record was done at a converted theater in Atlanta run by engineer Eddie Offord, and remains one of the band's favorites. "The environment was amazing," waxes Morgenstein. "There was no isolation. You just set up onstage and there was so much ambience in the room it felt like a concert, unlike that sterilized, typical studio where you can't hear anything. And all the guys were up onstage with you. I really don't think the power of the live Dregs was ever really recorded. Maybe it's a great out, but I really feel that."

"Yeah, live we were always intense," says Lavitz. "Even if someone was sick or something, it was 'Go, give it all you got.' And I guess in the studio some of the spontaneity was lost by production. It's a give-and-take thing. The studio stuff is clean and it's for history. It's in tune and in time. But there was something cool about the live thing, just...." He growls. "Digging in."

But by the end of 1982, Morse felt that quality ebbing from their live shows. He partly attributes this to overwork: "We never got any breaks. The one time we took two weeks off was a major event. There was never time to readjust–there was nothing but that reality. And what happened to me was that I played three gigs in a row that I didn't enjoy, and I said, 'This is crazy. I could work for a living if I'm not going to enjoy it. Maybe I should. 'That's the simplest way I can put it, and it's a Iot more complex than that."

Sources close to the band say that Lavitz and West in particular were beginning to regard themselves as instrumental stars in their own right and chafed under Morse's direction. There is also talk that the pair got a tad over-involved with recreational drug use, which did not wear well with straight arrows Morse and Morgenstein. Morse alludes to some of all this when he says, "People make assumptions and take things for granted and aren't as hungry. It happens to everybody to a certain extent when people are coming up to you and they come up to everyone, good, bad or indifferent- and telling you that you're great. But sometimes people need jolts of reality–humiliation therapy, I call it. Like when I jam with T, he has an amp I plug into that makes me sound terrible. And every once in a while you have to be stripped down to appreciate the fact that, oh, by the way, you're a little smarter than a dog, but you've got flesh and bones, just like a dog. If you were God, you'd be up there."

On the last day of 1982, the Dregs played their last gig and broke up, still at the height of their musical prowess.

Back on the Morse farm, it's reasonable to ask why four guys from Michigan, Cleveland, New Jersey and Long Island made their musical home in the South. How important was Dixie to the Dixie Dregs? "I think it's less a Southern thing than a rural thing," opines Morse. "I have real strong feelings about the fact that we didn't live in a big city as a chance to retain identity, as opposed to getting identity. And things are just more real here. You want something done, you do it. If you do it shitty, it'll be shitty. If you do it good, it'll be good. It's not like betting on a stock at a computer terminal and suddenly you're $50,000 richer or you've lost your house. You work and you produce results. This is reality.

"One thing about the South, though, is there's a lack of opportunity, which is not always a good thing. But it's not always a bad thing. Take a guy like Twiggs," Morse continues, invoking a personality that's seldom far from his conversation. "Here's a guy who, had he been living in the North, would've gotten just swallowed up by somebody to do some of the millions of things he was capable of doing. But instead he worked for us as a road manager. We lived in that truck! Where up north could you find someone like that who'd be able to say, 'Well, if you guys ever get any money, just give me a piece."'

Twiggs Lyndon was more than the Dregs road manager. He imposed a certain discipline on the band and kept them focused on the present. He lived–and died–on the edge, perishing in 1979 in a parachute jump as the band watched in horror from an upstate New York airport patio restaurant. And perhaps his absence was the real cause of the Dregs' demise. And so the truck that Twiggs built keeps its vigil on the Morse farm, even though it no longer runs. The Dregs have decided to tour this summer, and their catalog has reappeared in many stores, so there may be a groundswell out there, but for most of them, and especially Morse, there are important tasks to get on with in their separate lives. Can the Dregs go home again? Will this CD be the last Dregs recording or the first of a new era in the band? No one knows. And for Morse there is always the question of whether his rural isolation is a hindrance to his career or a source of his power.

Rod Morgenstein laughingly suggests Dregs fans boycott all solo projects and buy thousands of copies of this CD to send a message, and while managers and label execs blanch, that may ultimately be the deciding factor. One thing is certain: Andy West will not be part of the future Dregs, he's not only happy with his WaveFrame gig, but enjoys his new band Zazen, to which "we all contribute in a real spontaneous, equal sort of fashion." Definitely a change from his Dregs experience. West has also undergone the most thorough personal change, having become involved with meditation. Though he enjoyed the reunion, he remains ambiguous: "It wasn't like it was in a sense, 'cause it'll never be like that. Once you lose your naivete, things change. And everyone has made their own Iives for themselves, so reviving the Dregs would require a degree of commitment that's possibly not there."

But regardless of the future, a feeling has been recovered here: "It was just five guys that were deeply committed to something," says Morgenstein, "that didn't care what obstacles they met along the way. It was just something we had to accomplish. And nothing was going to stand in our way. I know that's how I felt."

Transcribed by John D. Smith