Manu  So, The Oily Daze: what’s with the title?

Heffley  Whimsy. My play on “the early days.” Remember, this wasn’t conceived for public consumption.

That said, there’s usually something fun for me lurking in such wordplay that redeems it from complete stupidity. When I listen to us playing all those tunes, making our little hip twists and solos on them, I remember my state of mind, and what I considered the state of that Eugene, Oregon jazz scene’s mind circa 1985 or so. I was 37, 38 right around then; I’d been in that town since 1973, when my daughter was born, gigging and playing at jam sessions all along, around school and my day jobs, just to keep doing whatever was possible. I’d developed a cranky outsider’s attitude about the scene by that time.

Eugene is a university town with a strong countercultural streak, and I enjoyed it as such, dove into it as a kind of northern version of Berkeley, where I’d grown up. So it did have a jazz scene, too, which overlapped with an even healthier one in Portland just 100 miles to the north of it. I had hopes of becoming a local regular, even mover and shaker in that scene, of going to college and living there after graduation while my daughter grew up. By the time of The Oily Daze, my hopes were pretty much dashed. I’d come to see the whole milieu as a hopelessly conservative, parochial, chump-change kind of town. Portland too, at least for me. There were fine musicians who would make themselves some fine local lives as players and teachers, but it was clear by then I wouldn’t be one of them.

M  The hippies had grown into yuppies?

H  Well, yeah, that was part of it; the seeds were blossoming into their parents more than into new blooms their potential had suggested. But I myself was the conservative one by the lights of the counterculture then. I was always into jazz, and never that impressed with the whole rock thing; I’ve always kind of looked the same in terms of my hair, dress, and so on; and I wasn’t much into drugs, after an initial few years in the Bay Area experimenting. By the time I got to Eugene, age 25 or so, I was a clean health nut, and more intellectual and edgy in my tastes and style than hippies.

M  So why did you end up staying so long? Why not go somewhere friendlier to your music?

H  I finally did...but I look back on it as similar to a marriage, or a job, that does have some interesting promise, and that you think might turn out okay if you give it this or that kind of chance, and try this or that direction. The main thing for me was that I became, suddenly and unexpectedly, a single father, and Eugene seemed a very good place then to be that. It was a pleasant, humane town—a beautiful place, really, to be poor in, which I was. Also, by the time she was born, I’d established a social network of support for the situation, saw a way for it to work out and eventually improve.

M  Why were you so poor? Dedication to the starving artist life?

H  I don’t think so, although that was always going on in some form. It was just the life I was having, like a lot of other people my age, trying to get by and move up. My parents never had much to give me to get me started, and I kind of pissed the working part of life away until my mid-20s or so; the part of me that was countercultural was a real disdain for all aspects of “the Establishment”—corporate, academic, political, religious, whatever—so my work ethic was always to waste as little time and energy as possible on money-making and to cultivate my writing and music most seriously, and least commercially. So, yeah, maybe I did shoot myself in the foot in that regard when I was first starting out.

But by the time I grew up a bit and out of that, got married and had my daughter, I didn’t have much of a resumé to help me break into things. I ended up learning the trade of housepainting, then getting into community college, then took out student loans to get my Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Oregon, in 1977. But again, nothing ever led to a secure, steady job that paid well, lasted, or went much farther than from paycheck to paycheck. I stayed afloat as a freelance journalist, musician, and housepainter—mainly the latter, and that never more than afloat—throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s in Eugene as my daughter was growing up.

M  What happened to her mother? How did you get custody?