A good record producer is like a good editor. He or she maintains originality of the voice. The producer becomes an advocate for the artist’s material. The producer has vision.
Joe Henry fits this bill.
A few years ago Henry told me how he investigated Sam Cooke’s “Night Beat” as a template for his “I Believe In My Soul” compilation with soul singers Ann Peebles, Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint, Mavis Staples and Billy Preston (who played on 1963's "Night Beat"). Henry did not set out to imitate Cooke’s intimate, stripped down affair, but he wanted to study the prominent vocals..........
.....Henry heard how the band responded to the words and phrasing. That dicated the arrangements. Henry's willingness to take chances is what makes his sound come alive. He generally gives his band songs in their most skeletal form so the material grows in a process of mutual discovery.
Henry’s non-judgemental sense of adventure found him a new audience in 2007 with music inspired by the soundtrack of the hit 2007 film “Knocked Up.” The collaboration with Loudon Wainwright III can be heard in the offshoot “Strange Weirdos,” released last summer.
“(Film director) Judd Apatow gave us that rare combination of specific direction and an incredible amount of freedom,” Henry told me last week. “You don’t usually wind up with both those things, sometimes you don’t wind up with either of those things in a film. It was very gratifying and a great opportunity to work with Loudon. I’ve been a fan since I was a teenager.”
On Henry’s latest CD “Civilians” he grouped all 12 original songs together to create a unified body just as if he were making a film. This could be icongruous in an era of downloading and sharing single tunes. “I still imagine how a record works as a complete piece,” Henry explained. “If I was a filmmaker, I would still make a complete movie even if someone was going to rent the DVD and go right to ‘scene selection.’ It still helps me control the arc of the overall piece. It doesn’t change at all if some people won’t honor that when they listen to a record. You cook a meal with an idea how the whole thing works even if someone is only picking up the salad.”
Pseudo Beach Boy Van Dyke Parks and instrumentalist Bill Frisell guest on “Civilians.” Parks also played accordion and piano on “Strange Weirdos.” “I was at Van Dyke’s 64th birthday party three days before the ('Civilians') sessions began,” Henry said. “Bill had flown into town early to attend the same party. It was a great group of people. Eric Idle was there. At one point Van Dyke walked up with a mint julep or whatever in his hand and said, ‘I hear Bill is going to be at your house recording.’ I said ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘How would I get myself invited into that madness?’ And I said, ‘You just did’.” I just thought at whatever point he materialized, we would know what to do.”
While working at Warner Brothers Parks produced the first records of Ry Cooder and Randy Newman. Parks arranged the strings on Henry’s second record (“Murder of Crows”) in 1989. “We barely met at the time,” Henry said. “The producer (drummer Anton Fier) I had at the time completely ailenated Van Dyke and didn’t use the score he wrote. I was horrified by the way he was treated. He is one in a million and I feel myself incredibly lucky to be associated with him.”
After Henry gets off the road touring to support “Civilians” he will embark on working on a contemporary New Orleans jazz record with Allen Toussaint. “It will be a record unlike anything he’s done before,” Henry said. “There will be some progresive interesting players who will take some old material in a new light. I’m real excited.” Oh yeah, good editors get real excited too.
I'm down with the tradition at the Davenport Hotel and Tower in downtown Spokane, Wash.
Opened in 1914, the Davenport was America’s first hotel with air conditioning. It was also the first hotel with housekeeping carts---designed by owner Louis Davenport.
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were guests at the Davenport. Der Bingle launched his career as a drummer across the street from the hotel at the newly restored neo-Classical Bing Crosby Theater. Steroid free slugger Babe Ruth was a guest. Authors Zane Grey and Dashiell Hammet wrote scenes while staying in “the house of comfort” as the Davenport was promoted. I always thought “The House of Comfort” was a Bourbon Street “spa.” Here's a hot photo gallery which is part of the hotel's website:
http://www.thedavenporthotel.com/index.php?act=/gallery.
Check it out. And enjoy these other tidbits......
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Once a bastion for railroads and timber, Spokane has reinvented itself as a community for higher education, software design and as a medical service locale for the region. But Jeanna Hofmeister, vice-president and director of destination marketing, Spokane Regional Convention & Visitors Bureau told me that in 2004 Spokane spent more money on historic preservation than the rest of the state combined.
Spokane is the largest city (225,000 pop.) on a straight line between Seattle and Minneapolis. Denver is considered too far south for Spokanites. That's cute. When Spokane hosted Expo ‘74, it became the first city to host an environmentally themed world’s fair.
Today the Davenport has 283 rooms, or 122 fewer than when it debuted. Spokane was all aglow when the Davenport opened in 1914. I picked up a reproduction copy of the Aug. 30, 1914 Spokesman-Review in the hotel gift shop. The newspaper celebrated the arrival of “The New Two Million Dollar Hostelry of Spokane” pointing out the hotel had “20 clocks in as many public rooms facing you.” I only spent one night at the Davenport, but I quickly sensed that Mr. Davenport wasn’t such a modest fellow. He insisted that coins be washed and bills be pressed through housekeeping before being given in change.
I’ve had blind dates like that.
And the Crab Louis is on the dinner menu ($18) in honor of Louis Davenport. Davenport was a nationally famous restauranteur who had been offering fresh seafood on his menus going back to the 1890s. He conjured up the salad, made on a bed of lettuce with fresh crab meat (or lobster), hard-boiled egg, sliced tomato and lively pink dressing mayonnaise, ketchup and hot sauce). In proud tones Davenport spokesman and Spokane television personality Tom McArthur said, “For awhile San Francisco claimed they were first (at the St. Francis Hotel or Solari’s restaurant), but our voice was silent for 15 years (1985-2000, when the Davenport was closed). After I showed the San Francisco Convention and Visitor’s Bureau our menu from 1914, that trumped theirs from 1917!”
The fanfare is humble but meaningful at the Davenport.
7:00 p.m. Jan. 14
The Christmas card didn’t arrive this year.
Around every mid-December for the past 10 years I received a Christmas card from Ken Nelson, the legendary Capitol Records producer who recorded Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Gene Vincent, the Louvin Brothers, Tex Ritter and so many others.
Nelson died on Jan. 6, just 13 days shy of his 97th birthday. He passed over of natural causes according to his daughter Claudia. Nelson was one of my country music heroes.
In the fall of 1987 I rented a car in Los Angeles and drove to Nelson’s home in Somis, Calif. Nelson was a forgotten figure in popular music and I wanted to write a story lobbying for his inclusion in the Country Music Hall of Fame. (He was finally inducted in 2001). In 1961 he co-founded the Country Music Association for crissakes! A story like Nelson's is why I got into journalism.
He had fallen into the shadows..............
Every window of Nelson’s spacious five-room house overlooked the Pacific Ocean and Ventura County. It was a home Nelson had promised his bride June when they married in 1945. They lived at densley populated 78th and Yates in Chicago. The windows of their tiny south side apartment faced big brick walls. Nelson told June that someday they would live in a home with a view.
She died in 1984. Nelson missed her.
I told Nelson he should be in the Country Music Hall of Fame. He created the Bakersfield, Ca. sound by bringing Haggard, Owens, Red Simpson, Rose Maddox and others to Capitol Records/Hollywood. “The problem is I never associated with anyone in Nashville,” Nelson replied during a long conversation in his living room. “Of course, today, my generation is gone. No one knows me.”
I tracked down Buck Owens to amplify my case. Even in his late ‘80s, Nelson would drive his car through the southern San Joaquin Valley to visit Owens in Bakersfield, Calif. Owens said, “Ken Nelson was one of the smartest men in the music business. He found artists who wrote their own songs, had their own bands, and knew what they wanted to do. Then he sat back and doodled [on a scratch pad in the studio] and let them do it. There is no doubt that Ken should be in the Country Music Hall of Fame.”
Nelson always respected his artist. Extremely mild mannered, he was still able to shoo songwriters and other outsiders away from the studio. Nelson embraced artistic freedom. “I always figured you hired a person for what THEY could do,” Nelson told me. “Not for what YOU could do.”
Nelson was born in Caledonia, Minn. but reared at the Home of the Friendless, 51st and South Park in Chicago. “It was an oprhan asylum,” Nelson recalled. “Mother took me out of there when I was 8. I think she paid $6 a week for me to be there.” His Chicago roots included a stint as musical director at WJJD-AM.
He was announcer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and coordinated music for “Suppertime Frolic,” a live country music show on WJJD. Featured performers included Bob Atcher, Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers and Rhubarb Red (who was Les Paul). While working in the Chicago music publishing business, Nelson met Lee Gillette. They were part of a popular trio called The Campus Kids. Nelson played banjo in the trio beween 1932 and 1934. The Campus Kids followed radio comedy stars Fibber McGee and Molly on west coast broadcasts. Their programs were recorded by Glen Wallichs, the founder of the Music City record store at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood.
In 1942, Wallichs and songwriters Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva founded Capitol Records.(Gillette went on to produce Capitol vocalists Nat King Cole,Kay Starr and Stan Kenton). Gillette brought Nelson to Capitol, where he took over the emerging country division.
Nelson was also on the cusp of rock n’ roll. Chuck Berry, Louis Jordan, Jerry Lee Lewis (deservedly so) and to some degree Elvis Presley get the ink, but a few years ago Dave Alvin pointed out to me how Nelson’s Bakersfield Sound connected the earliest roots of rock n’ roll. “If you listen to a lot of those Bakersfield records you know where those guys were coming from,” Alvin said backstage at FitzGerald’s roadhouse in Berwyn, Ill.. “They were listening to how the drummer played the light cymbal on something like Ray Charles’ ‘What I’d Say.’ The Bakersfield guys took that same beat and put it into country music. As Buck told me, the West Coast thing was about dancing. The Nashville stuff was not about dancing. Buck’s take was that in the East you had to dance with an appropriate space in between. But once you got to California or Arizona a lot of those morays were gone and you could do the buckle polishing and rock n’ roll dancing. All of that was an extension of rock n’ roll. And those records are cut like rock n’ roll records; bass, drums and two guitars.”
Nelson saw rock n’ roll coming. In a fine tribute published onwww.rockabillyhall.com Nelson said that’s why he signed Gene Vincent to Capitol, but the label refused to recognize rock n’ roll or rockabilly.
Nelson never limited himself. After his wife died Nelson and his daughter traveled to China. Russia. Siberia. Mongolia. Hong Kong. Singapore. They were planning a trip to Australia during my visit. A long black piano sat behind Nelson’s sofa. The sheet music on the piano was Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.” At age 87 he was also learning to play the classics. “I always wanted to play the piano when I was a kid,” Nelson said. “I played tenor banjo but we never had a piano. So I said, ‘Before I kick the bucket, I’m going to play piano’.” And he did. And the music of Ken Nelson plays on forever.
12:30 p.m. Jan. 10, 2008----
After our last union meeting I ran into my friend Tony at the Matchbox. I had to go to the Matchbox. Tony told me about his drummer who was stuck for nine hours in last weekend's pile-up on I-90 near Madison, Wis. I'm traveling that same highway this weekend.
In life, you can never have too much music.
Here's my current lounge/piano bar playlist for my road trip.
"Frank Sinatra," Cake
"Baubles, Bangles and Beads," Frank Sinatra...............
...."The Other Side of the Coin," Nick Lowe
"Waiting For The Miracle," Leonard Cohen
"Person to Person," Little Willie John
"I Love a Piano," Irving Berlin as interepreted by the late Orso's piano man Bob Freitag
"Hotel Song," Regina Spektor
"Leavin' Town," Tom Freund
"Big Moon," John Doe
"I'm a Night Owl, Pt. 1," Lowell Fulson
"It's a Wonderful Life," Sparklehorse
"Hang On Sloopy," Don Ho
"Nature Boy,' Bobby Darin
"I Can't Get Started," Sammy Davis, Jr.in what was likely his last television performance in June, 1989 on "Late Night With David Lettterman." Find Sammy smokin' while smoking a cigarette on You Tube.
"Summer Wind," Frank Sinatra
"Milk," Garbage
"Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes," Wayne Newton
"Teach Me Tonight," The DeCastro Sisters.
Of course I'm stretching the convential boundaries of piano bar music.
Can you?
3:10 p.m. Jan. 8, 2008
With apologies to the late--and underrated Dan Fogelberg---it isn't the "Same Old Lang Syne" at Sabatino's restaurant on the northwest side of Chicago.
The Northern Italian restaurant and piano bar was hit by a Jan. 3 fire.
The blaze was contained to the food prep area in the back of the restaurant and damaged the roof of the mid-1980s eatery. Last week I drove by Sabatino's and it looks in good enough shape for a comeback. Sabatino's wasn't my favorite Italian restaurant in Chicago (think LaScarola), but it was my favorite piano bar.
The regulars nestled around the seven seats at the piano seemed to be from Portage Park or Brooklyn, N.Y. The muscular aura worked especially well in the dimly lit mystery of Sabatino's. The piano bar backdrop featured stained glass windows replete with pierced hearts.
I hope Sabatino's don't go changing.
This weekend I'm heading to Minneapolis to hang around Nye's Polanise, another legendary piano bar. What happened to the rest of America's piano bars? Any suggestions? Any "Feelings?"
I once tried to pay a compliment to Vic Damone suggesting he was one of America's last great saloon/piano bar singers.........
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......My premise was that saloon singers are different that lounge singers. Lounge singers are more contemporary. Saloon singers love the classics. "I don't think of myself as a saloon singer," Damone bristled. "If I did, I'd be a drunk. I'd say, 'Let me go drink, I don't give a damm about my health, I don't give a damn about my audience. I'll just go out and sing the blues. I take better care of myself than that."
Lounge singers and piano men have great names.
Some of my favorites that have passed through Chicago include Buddy Charles, Ginger Tam, Dino Marino, Peter Saxe (who plays piano of course) and Hots Michaels from the Chicago Chop House.
Hots was featured in Studs Terkel's "Working." Hots raised championship hogs in the backyard of his Southwest side home, invented a dry milk bubble bath and once made burial vaults for a living. Hots had claimed to have played the first piano bar in the world, when the College Inn Lounge opened in 1952 at the old Sherman House in the Loop. "I wasn't born there, but I died there," Hots told me in 1992.
Hots passed away on Nov, 4, 2006. A touch of piano bar class went with him. Here's hoping Sabatino's can restore some of that.
