Dr. John Starling slides back into action

"They suggested I take the heat and put my name up front, so I grudgingly agreed to do that," Starling jokes.

The decision was made as a group, the same way all of their decisions are made. "This group that we have, it's not a boss man band. It's what I call a Three Musketeers band like Seldom Scene was, everybody's got an opinion," laughs Starling, referring to the band the three used to call home. "It's not John Starling telling everyone what to do, it's mostly everyone telling me what to do."

The three principle members of Carolina Star - Starling, Auldridge and Gray - have played together off and on since 1971. After completing medical school and a stint in Vietnam as a surgeon, Starling moved to Washington D.C. for his residency where he met Auldridge and Ben Eldridge. They began playing music in the basement as a boys' night out activity. John Duffey, who had left the Country Gentlemen and returned to his day job as a luthier, soon joined the parties. Soon, Duffey called another former Country Gentlemen, Gray, to join on bass, and Seldom Scene was born.

"John just said he had two rules for the band," Starling recalls. "One, no big deals because he didn't want to get involved in trying to make a million bucks. He just wanted to have fun playing music. He said we weren't going to do 'Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's Arms' over and over. That's the other rule."

"So, the band sort of started on that note, and everyone kept their day job, and we worked just one night a week in a club in Washington. John didn't like to practice very much. So, it took us about two or three years, and we finally got fairly good, but the main thing was we just had fun."

The band had a successful run until 1977, when Starling made the decision to leave the band. "I finally decided I needed to go ahead and do what I was originally trying to do, which was practice medicine," he says. "Although you never really retire from music, I just kind of left the band and actually moved to Montgomery, Ala."

"But you never really stop, you're always thinking about music. It's great therapy in the long run."

After a two solo albums and a collaboration with Carl Jackson, Starling returned to Seldom Scene in 1993. "They lost their lead singer. He left the band, and they had to have a lead singer. So, they just wanted to know if I'd fill in until they could find one," he says. "So, I did, and I stayed with the band long enough that we recorded another record, but I began to realize that it was taking too much time away from my medical practice."

In 1994, Starling left the group for a second time. This time it wasn't only his medical practice pulling him away. "My son was 14; I decided to spend a little time trying to raise him," he laughs.

Starling continued to be involved with music on a more local and regional level during his time out of the spotlight. "When I was down in Alabama, I got together with Claire Lynch, and we got together a little band and went around and played some," he says. "Except we started to have a hard time finding venues, and I began to realize that more people live in the Metropolitan Washington area than in the whole state of Alabama. And I began to realize how priceless it was, even though we didn't want to make a big deal out of it, to have a one night a week club job in a big metropolitan area the same night every week. You don't have to look in the paper to see if they are going to be there."

In addition to that he did some studio work with his old friend George Massenburg. "I did work with him on the two Trio records," he says. "We sort of did co-producing collaboration on that, and that was a lot of fun."

The friendship with Massenburg goes back to the early days of Seldom Scene when he was the engineer on the albums "Act III" and "Old Train." Massenburg then did work for Lowell George and Earth, Wind and Fire before moving to Los Angeles to become, as Starling says, "a big audio star out there."

His friendship with Massenburg acted as one of the catalysts for the new project - "just being able to work with George Massenburg again, because you know that even if you sound bad, he'll make you sound good without using Autotune," he chuckles.

Massenburg's encouragement was only one factor among many that prodded Starling into action. "It was a number of things. George Massenburg suggested I do it; (Emmylou Harris) always said why don't you make another record?" he says.

"And the thought of getting Mike and Tom back together again. Actually, we had tried to talk Ben into coming down there, but we never could work out the logistics and his schedule to get it done, so we figured if Ben Eldridge couldn't play banjo on it there wouldn't be any banjo on it; it's a banjo-less record. Plus the fact that I was retiring from practicing medicine and looking for a little musical outlet, we just felt the timing was right to do it."