L.A. Beat

Toney Springer, aka Wild T of Wild T and the Spirit knows what people like — Jimi Hendrix and lots of  it.
He was getting tired of the whole Hendrix tribute act he was doing, so much so  that he wrote a song about it, ‘Buried Alive’ from his latest CD ‘Fender Bender,’ but people keep asking him and paying him to do it. He’ll be back in Lethbridge, March 29 at the Slice.
“I’d be Whitney Houston if they paid me  enough to do it,” laughed Springer, repeating  one of his favourite lines from a previous interview he did with L.A. Beat.
“We get a lot of requests for Foxy Lady. A lot of guys drool over the guitar playing, but whenever we play ‘Foxy Lady,’ the girls sigh and say they’re playing that for me,” he continued adding the trio is learning more Hendrix songs for their set.
“We’re gong to give ‘Hey Joe’ a rest though,” he said adding ‘Stone Free’ is one of the new additions to the band’s repertoire.
“We get a lot of requests for Foxy Lady. A lot of guys drool over the guitar playing, but whenever we play ‘Foxy Lady,’ the girls sigh and say they’re playing that for me,” he continued adding the trio is learning more Hendrix songs for their set.
And while he likes  that there is such a demand for Hendrix, it has put work  on hold for a new solo Wild T CD as well as a new Wild T and the Spirit CD.
“That’s pretty much on hold for now,” he said adding he just returned from vacation in his home country of Trinidad.
“We’ve never done a Wild T and the Spirit show over there, but me and some guys got together and played music, not just calypso and reggae. We played some Bob Marley and James Brown, because you can’t go wrong with Marley. But a lot of people there know my music through Facebook and Myspace and the Internet, so I was pleasantly surprised,” Springer enthused.
“But a lot of rock and roll is really new to them. So it’s really taking off,” he said adding the band’s latest effort ‘Fender Bender’ is also taking off, so much so that he didn’t even have a copy of it for himself.
“For three or four months I didn’t even have a copy of my own CD. I even ended up selling my own promotional copy,”  he said.