My Friend David Payne

David Payne was one of the first musicians I played with when I moved to Nashville back in 1981. Over the years, we ended up playing in a lot of bands together and collaborating on multiple projects in the studio.

We played together on and off for nearly twenty years in every imaginable dive from all-night biker bars to Holiday Inn Discos.

We started our first recording studio together sometime around 1982. We called it Mattress Studios because the walls were covered with horrendously stained used mattresses that we picked up for next to nothing at a hotel auction. It was really more of a practice room than a studio but you know how musicians like to have their own studio?

Dave got lung cancer in 1997 and I watched him fight it as hard as I'd ever seen anyone fight anything. And, although it ended up taking him, it never beat him.

A big "thank you" goes out to Gilda's Club for the help and support they offered through those years.

Gilda's helped a lot by giving Dave and his friends someplace to go and hang out. It was a place to be with other people going through the same kinds of things that you were.

They did a great job of celebrating "wins" and serving up healthy portions of hope -- something that's in really short supply when you're dealing with cancer.

A Fine Line was the last EP that Psychic Surgery recorded as a group before disbanding permanently in 1989.

Dave and I compiled this anthology of his original material right before he died in April of 1999.

This is collection of some of Dave's favorite stuff from about 1985 through 1990.

The Best of Psychic Surgery Anthology

- orginal artwork by david payne.

A Fine Line