LESLIE WEST: On Stickball, Gutterballs, Jackie Kennedy, Amos 'n' Andy And Torch Guitar

Leslie and I were having a pleasant discussion over some burgers and chocolate milk in the restaurant of the Springfield, Illinois airport. "I don't like to do interviews regular because everybody knows whatever they wanna know, they could find out sure enough. What I wanted to do was, I wanted to start a stickball league in New York. We used to play stickball for like three or four hundred dollars a game when I was a kid, everybody'd put money in. We'd go to the Bronx, we'd play some team from Brooklyn. If anybody wants to play stickball for money, or for fun, guitars, royalties, for anything, let 'em call Phantom records and we'll start." Would you play journalists? "Journalists know how to play ball? I never seen a journalist play ball with anybody, if you know what I mean...Sure, I'll play anybody, man. I swear to God I'll play anybody for any amount. I'll play oneon-one with anybody for any amount, which is what stickball's about, but the way you do it is you only need two guys on a team, one guy in the field, one guy to pitch, and you can make different teams up."

What's this? Is the king of the molasses-thunder guitar really a closet jock? "It's just somethin' else to do; you get tired of traveling and playing and traveling and playing, so to break it up when you have time off, or you're recording an album and you have some time...like last year Corky and I went out and bought baseball gloves, we bought half a dozen baseball gloves and we just played softball on the road. In " fact we were playing in Knoxville, Tennessee at the Hyatt House, the one with the elevators in the middle, and it's all open, all empty, all the way up the middle, and we're playin' catch on the balcony on about the fourteenth floor, and the softball went over, came down and hit the floor and rebounced up to the third floor and people looked up like 'What the fuck are they???' We couldn't find any grass, we were hoping the hotel was near a field or something.