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Brett Garsed Interview Part Two: The American Years
In Part One of our epic trawl through the career of Australian virtuoso rock fusion guitarist Brett Garsed, we looked at his early years and his breakthrough touring and recording with John Farnham. Now Brett takes us through his American years which all started due to Brett scoring the gig with Ricky Nelsons son's melodic rock band par excellence Nelson.
Before Brett made the move stateside he’d already made some inroads to the US market as a result of Brett’s demo tape gaining a rave review in Mike Varney’s celebrated ‘Spotlight’ column.
Leaving Oz
I gather you were close to securing a deal in the states prior to relocating - what happened here?
After my review appeared in Spotlight, Maurizio DiMiele, a mate in the UK sent some of my stuff over to Mark Varney, who was trying to get Legato Records happening. At that time, Mark had just signed Frank Gambale, and was looking for other artists so Maurizio sent him one of my tapes. Mark got in touch with me around ‘88/’89, but we never quite crunched the numbers. Mark was used to knocking albums out for about 5000 
bucks, but I could never quite get his budget to work while I was in Australia.
As it turned out, a year or two later when I was over in the States with Nelson we hooked up, and in 1990 he got me to play on the ‘Centrifugal Funk’ album. (Ed Note: a much rated guitaristic orgy featuring Shawn Lane, Frank Gambale and Brett trading solos off some cod Funk tracks. I first heard this with my good mate Mark Powell back in 91 and the general consensus from us and was that Brett really came out the best: sinuous, technically mystifying and supremely melodic lines that oozed class).
In 1988 I imagine you were riding high with the success of John’s mega selling album ‘Whispering Jack’. At that time you had what was one of the most desired gigs for an
Aussie guitarist: so what were the reasons why you started to look for a move?
Well, the way I always explain it is this: I’d be looking at John and thinking "This is all his career - if he stops working, I stop working. So I wasn’t really in control of my ‘destiny’ and I thought that I shouldn’t just rely on always working for him. Also, he might consider it an honourable thing if I didn’t rely exclusively on him for my employment - you know I didn’t want to sponge off the guys success: I wanted to get on with my own life and do something for myself. It was NOT an easy decision to make!