I was in New Orleans working on a record with Allen Toussaint and Randall Bramlett.

The guy I shared a room with at The Howard Johnson had pneumonia and when I came back to New York I felt like I just wanted to be in bed. I had never felt like this before.

They wanted to put me in a hospital but I had a gig that night with Steve (Gadd) and Richard Tee, Cornell (Dupree) and Eric (Gale), Gordon Edwards. I had the gig and I didn’t want to miss the gig. That was a night where I was just playing by instinct. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, I just wanted to get through the gig and play the right notes and go home. That was the night where everyone was coming up to me saying, “you’re playing your ass off. Oh my god, I’ve never heard you play so good!”

That happened subsequently a bunch of times, where you’re so sick you’re not thinking about technique, you’re not thinking about performance, you’re not thinking about somebody in the audience or what’s going to happen after the gig or the next gig. All you’re doing is concentrating on surviving.