Music Journalism Archives - Page 6 of 8

Peter Tork: Don’t step on my Shoe Suede Blues

Don’t hold your breath waiting for another Monkees reunion. Although the prefab four toured to great success in the ’80s and ’90s, Peter Tork says things are a bit dicier these days.

“I don’t think about doing it again much,” Tork offers by phone from his home in California. “If the occasion arose, I would have to look at the offer.”

Tork and his band Shoe Suede Blues will perform Sunday at the Stuart ArtsFest.

All four original Monkees — Tork, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and even longtime holdout Michael Nesmith — played together on a 1997 tour of England.

“When Michael did do the shows with us, it was exciting,” says the 62-year-old Tork. “It was great to work on the road with those guys – particularly as time wore on, they got to be funnier and funnier, and easier to work with.”

Nesmith had previously refused to indulge in Monkees nostalgia – he’d always been the Monkee most offended by their “manufactured” past and the attendant rock-media scorn – and the other three had worked without him for years.

The British tour was a commercial and critical smash. However, when promoters started clamoring for a U.S. jaunt, Nesmith balked.

“I don’t know how he came to be this way,” Tork says, “but the poor boy basically can’t work with anybody else. He has learned over the years to allow other people into his orbit, which only means that he is now in control of a larger crew than he ever had before.

“He didn’t want to work with the Monkees anymore. The reason he didn’t come back to America with us was that when he joined the operation, he made sure it was his way or the highway. But even that wasn’t enough for him. I don’t think he had enough control.”

The Monkees’ legacy is a spotty one. Hired in 1966 to portray four “American Beatles” in an NBC sitcom, the four had never met before; their music was an afterthought and performed by studio musicians. For their early hits — the chart-topping “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m a Believer” among them — they didn’t play any music, just mimed to their pre-recorded vocals on the TV show.

Musicians both, Nesmith and Tork bristled at the heavy-handed “music supervision” of Don Kirshner, who chose the songs they’d record, and when it came out in the press that the Monkees weren’t a “real” band, they got mad.

When the records started to sell in the millions, and the power was theirs, they had Kirshner fired.

Hindsight reveals that many Monkees recordings rank with some of the greatest ’60s pop music. The Beach Boys, after all, used studio pros on “Pet Sounds,” and nobody came after Brian Wilson with an ax to grind.

From “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You” to the landmark albums Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd. (both recorded by the Monkees themselves, augmented by studio players) there are some great records in the canon.

“I would have liked to see (the music) produced a bit more heavily,” Tork says, “but part of the TV producers’ brief was ‘Don’t scare the parents.’ They tried to walk a very fine line, and I think they did a pretty good job of it. I’d like to have seen the whole thing go on a little longer, but them’s the breaks.”

Indeed, Tork was the first to break camp, in 1968, after the cancellation of the TV show and the Monkees’ disastrously received movie Head.

“You know the expression ‘received wisdom’?” he says. “The received wisdom on it (the band) was that it was a lower-value effort because it was structured and cast as characters in a TV show.

“It was highly structured as a project — and the received wisdom was that that was a lower value than what seemed to be spontaneous projects, which meant the Beatles. They were spontaneous; we were structured.

“I didn’t know then what I know now — that all great careers have a really nasty lull in the middle. I wish I had, then I might have stuck with it longer, and it might have come back.”

Tork, whose new band plays a lot of heavy blues, along with rock ‘n’ roll classics and a smattering of Monkees hits, has very definite thoughts on the Monkees’ catalogue.

“The best Monkees music ever generated was ‘Riu Chiu,’ an a capella song in medieval Spanish that we did on the Christmas episode,” he says. “It shows up on a couple of the Missing Links CDs.

“It’s an astounding piece of music. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just amazing. We sang it live to camera.

“I love ‘Goin’ Down,’ which we did spontaneously in the studio. I think ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ is the best single we put out. And I thought ‘Words’ was a very, very good piece of pop music. And we did it justice.”

(For the record, Tork – who didn’t do a lot of lead singing in the group – plays piano on “Daydream Believer” and banjo on “You Told Me,” among many other great songs, and took the co-lead vocal on “Shades of Grey” and “Words.”)

A recurring role in the ’90s sitcom Boy Meets World (as Topanga’s hippie dad) almost led to a rekindling of his acting career, but Tork says he thought better of it.

“The truth is that I got off as an actor maybe once or twice in acting class,” he says. “I get off as a musician every time I’m up there.

“When the rewards are greater and the price is way lower . . . let’s see, a lot of trouble and a few rewards, or not as much trouble and a lot of rewards . . . let me think here . . . gosh. I can’t figure it out.”

WHERE ARE THE MONKEES NOW?

Davy Jones, 58, owns a home in Indiantown where he trains thoroughbred horses. Jones won’t be able to join Peter Tork onstage this weekend: He’s in England, on tour. April 16-19, he’ll perform at the International Flower and Garden Fest at Epcot Center. See Davy Jones.net.

Micky Dolenz, 59, is appearing on Broadway as Zoser in the Elton John/Tim Rice musical “Aida.” See Micky Dolenz.com.

Michael Nesmith, 63, maintains a cult following for his quirky recordings and concert performances. A pioneer in music videos, he is credited with inventing the concept that led to MTV. See Video Ranch.com.

@2004 Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers

The Everly Sisters: Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt

It took more than 25 years, two divergent careers and plenty of false starts, near-misses and might-have-beens, but Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris have finally made an album together. Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions is the kind of eclectic statement only two supremely talented – and supremely confident – artists could make.

It’s also the work of two very good friends.

“I don’t know if Linda enjoys making records on her own so much, and it’s a shame because she’s probably got the most beautiful voice, bar none, of any singer in the 20th century,” said Harris. “Her and Maria Callas.”

In a separate interview, Ronstadt had equally kind words for her partner. “When Gram Parsons died I thought, ‘Gee, I wish she didn’t miss Gram so much. I’d like to ride off into the sunset and be a duet with Emmy.’ I wanted us to be The Everly Sisters.

“But her career really heated up, and so did mine. But I would’ve been happy to do it then.”

The two met in 1973. Ronstadt was just beginning her ascendancy to the top of the pop-star mountain; Harris was ex-Burrito Brother Gram Parsons’ duet partner and still two years away from her big solo breakthrough with Pieces of the Sky.

They have sung on each other’s projects over the years, then tried and failed and finally succeeded in making the Trio album with Dolly Parton, which was an enormous hit in 1987.

Meanwhile, Ronstadt recorded albums of pop standards and Mexican folk songs and all but abandoned the country/pop style that brought her to prominence in the ‘70s.

“I admire her so much for her fearlessness,” Harris said. “Wanting to do what she wants to do without worrying about whether it’s going to be commercially successful or not. I’ve always honored that. I think it’s really important.”

Harris herself consistently explored new avenues of folk, bluegrass and country, culminating in the sparse, spooky, genre-defying Wrecking Ball album with producer Daniel Lanois. “I think we shared that,” Harris continued, “but I tend to kind of plough around more the same area. I’ve never done anything as drastic as Linda has.”

Talk about a duo project heated up in 1998 when Ronstadt contributed to Return of the Grievous Angel, a Parsons tribute anthology executive-produced by Harris.

Western Wall, perhaps understandably, has no stylistic borders. Ronstadt loved the fact that each track on Wrecking Ball created a different atmosphere and couldn’t wait to use the same approach.

“Plus,” she said, “Emmy’s just a great song-finder. She stays up late, and she hangs out with writers, and she plays her guitar…she brings it home and turns it into her own thing.”

The new album brings together diverse material from writers including Patty Scialfa (“Valerie”), Leonard Cohen (“Sisters of Mercy”), Rosanne Cash (“Western Wall”), Andy Prieboy (“Loving The Highway Man”), and Sinead O’Connor (“This is To Mother You”).

They decided to cut Jackson Browne’s “For A Dancer” after hearing the author sing it at a memorial concert for the late Nicolette Larson in February. Larson had recorded with both Ronstadt and Harris and was a close friend.

Song selection was easy, Harris said. “We just had to fall in love. You have to just be at the point where you can’t stand the idea of not recording a song. You just want it. You almost lust after it. We had a list of about 30 songs, then we just kept whittling down, whittling down and got down to 14 songs, of which we were about to record 13.”

Producer Glyn Johns brought in “He Was Mine,” penned by Harris’ ex-husband Paul Kennerley, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Across the Border.” Harris herself wrote three of the album’s best songs: “Raise The Dead” (she plays electric guitar on the track, too), “All I Left Behind” (cowritten with Kate and Anna McGarrigle) and “Sweet Spot,” on which she collaborated with Jill Cunniff of Luscious Jackson.

“She brought every single one,” said Ronstadt. “I don’t think I chose one. Not because I wasn’t trying, but because Emmy came with so many songs that were so good – including the three that she wrote, that I would’ve been heartbroken if we’d had to leave any of them off.

Harris contended that all of the songs, from David Olney’s brittle World War I ballad “1917” to Patty Griffin’s ghostly reverb-y “Falling Down” (which would have fit in nicely on Wrecking Ball), are small parts of a bigger picture. “I believe that there’s a poetic thread that holds them together,” she explained. “I think they all deal with very deep issues about life and love and longing and loss.

“For me, an album has to be a string of pearls, but they’re all slightly different. They’re not perfectly matched pearls. They’re not cultured pearls; they’ve all been in the oyster.”

Johns, of course, had produced the Eagles in their early days, after they’d resigned as Ronstadt’s backup band to strike out on their own. Harris had only worked with him once, on Kennerly’s The Legend of Jesse James in 1980.

Ronstadt: “There are different kinds of producers. Some producers work in a way where they carry out your whim. I’ve always worked with producers that basically carried out my whim. For better or for worse. And I have to say I don’t think I’ve made records that are quite as good as Glyn can make at his best.

“With Glyn, it’s his picture and you’re a crayon. That’s fine too. That’s a different way of working. It requires one person or another to butt out. So that was me, because Emmy was really tied into the tracks ’cause she was playing on them. And Emmy understood the songs really well. She sang lead on a lot of ’em.”

Harris said she’s surprised when Western Wall is compared to Wrecking Ball. “There’s not two people more on the other end of the spectrum than Daniel and Glyn. I will say this: Dan doesn’t use any reverb or anything on my vocal, but there’s effects on the other instruments so it sounds like there is. And it is true that Glyn doesn’t believe in using a lot of reverb or anything like that. He really goes for the dry, organic sound.”

The new album was recorded in the dining room and library of the Arizona Inn, not far from where Ronstadt lives with her two small children. Built in the 1920s, the historic building had a vibe that the two women loved; Eleanor Roosevelt had been a frequent guest in the ’40s, and not much has changed. Ronstadt continued her long-standing tradition of finding something good to read during the lulls in the recording process (in this case, it was Rebecca West’s war-crimes journal, The New Meaning of Treason).

Ronstadt contracted bronchitis just as Western Wall was getting underway; it turned into laryngitis, and in the end all her vocals were cut later, after Harris had done her own lead work. For a while, Ronstadt said, laughing, “I’d sing and everybody would say, ‘That’ll be fine, dear. Why don’t you go make a salad or something? We’ll finish up here.’”

Her laryngitis, she believes, might have been a blessing in disguise. “Emmy was completely hypnotized into the track. That’s what it takes. I was worried about getting my kids to school and wondering whether to fix them meat loaf or tuna casserole for dinner.”

When she got her pipes back, it wasn’t hard work to match Harris on the tapes. “I know what her voice does,” Ronstadt said. “I know her voice so well at this point, while I can’t do what she does, I can ride along on the upper deck of the bus there, and I know where she’s gonna turn.”

The recording process was much more pleasant than it had been for Trio II, done in 1994 but just released last year. That had started out as a Ronstadt/Harris project, but once Parton came aboard to add some guest harmonies, the Trio was properly rolling again.

“I thought to myself, any chance we have to get the Trio together, we should always take advantage of that because it’s such a beautiful sound,” said Ronstadt. “And it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard before.”

But Parton cancelled one session after another, often at the last moment, and just before Trio II was nearing the finish line she announced that she wouldn’t be able to tour or do any promotion for the record.

An intense argument followed, after which Ronstadt replaced all of Parton’s vocals with those of other singers. The doctored tracks appeared on Ronstadt’s Feels Like Home album; Parton subsequently lambasted her singing partners in a ladies’ magazine. In a 1995 interview with the author, Ronstadt said of Parton: “I can’t work with her…she was very unkind and uncharitable to both me and Emmy, and I think she owes us both an apology.”

And that’s exactly what Parton did. “She wrote us each a letter and said that she was sorry for the way things had happened,” said Ronstadt, “and that it would be nice for the record to have a chance as it was originally intended. We settled our differences, and that’s that.”

Harris is more circumspect on the matter. “Life is too short for that,” she said. “And ultimately, when it comes down to it, we’re all really fond of each other. There were just some misunderstandings that got out of hand.

“I think everybody regrets that, because we really are fond of each other, and we love the music that we make. I’m so glad that the Trio II record came out. But more importantly, I’m glad that we all got into a room and spoke our minds. We all cleared the air, and we got back to where we can be friends. That’s the most important thing, because these are two of the most extraordinary women. The three of us share something very special.”

The success of the restored Trio II in 1998 was a pleasant surprise for Harris, whose contribution to the project put her one step closer to the termination of her contract with Elektra/Asylum (Western Wall closes the door for good).

“I had done Wrecking Ball, and I was out on the road for almost two straight years and actually was having a pretty great time,” she explained. “It kind of lit a fire under me. But then I decided to take some time off to do some writing for my next solo record, so I left the record company, I left my management, and I let the band go.”

A live album, Spyboy, was released last year on the independent label Eminent.

Harris admitted Wrecking Ball, a bold and daring musical project, will be a hard act to follow. “It is what it is,” she said. “Either I’ve got to retire, or I’ve got to make another record. I did two years on the road, and the gift at the end of that was Spyboy. Which was a lovely surprise, because I only recorded those shows in order to get a version of ‘The Maker,’ with a thought to put it on my next studio record. Because I didn’t want to try and go in and do a studio version of that song – I didn’t want to compete with Daniel’s (Lanois) version, which I think is one of the greatest things ever recorded – and we’d already done it live. I think it’s hard to put that lion back in the cage, if you know what I mean.

“And I think it’s OK to put a few live tracks on an album. I did that on Elite Hotel.”

For her next studio album, “My plan is to write at least half the record,” Harris explained. “And so that, at least, is going to set it apart from at least half of anything I’ve done. Ever since Ballad of Sally Rose, that’s my plan, and beyond that I’m not really worried about it. That’s gonna be enough work. And if I can do that, then I’ll feel pretty confident going in.”

Harris said people ask her all the time, “When’s your next record coming out?” They started asking when the ink on Wrecking Ball was still wet. “In the meantime,” she said, laughing, “all these other projects came up – Willie Nelson’s Teatro, Trio II, the Gram tribute, Linda, Spyboy. What is that, five records? So I figure I’ve deflected the ‘When is your next record coming out?’ I probably won’t get around to going in the studio till next year.

“Everybody is not Steve Earle. He goes out on the road and writes an entire album while he’s out on the road touring his last record. I wish I was Steve Earle, but I’m not.”

Ronstadt is anxious to get out of her own contract with Elektra/Asylum. She intends to make a Christmas album using 18th century glass instruments; she’s also overseeing a glass album for Sony Classical. E/A will issue a boxed set of her classic material in October, and if the singer has her way, that will be the last people hear of the “old” Linda Ronstadt.

Ask her why and boy, does she have an answer ready.

“I did a record every year, for about 30 years,” she said. “I made about 30 records, and I think that’s quite enough. I think people have enough records out there of mine. Enough to gag anyone.

“I really don’t mean to work, particularly. I basically consider myself retired as of about four years ago. I just never announced it because why bother, you know?

“What that means is that only an incredible sale on good linens, or a chance to sing with Emmy, will get me to set foot off my property. My idea of a great week is if I don’t leave my property for 10 days or so. But I live right in the middle of town, so it’s not that hard. I just love to stay home.”

Ronstadt and Harris have a six-week Western Wall tour planned; they’ll also appear on the nighttime chat shows and tape an Austin City Limits.

“I think the reason we’re able to do this record and actually do a tour together is because I’ve retired, because my schedule is cleared,” Ronstadt explained. “I’m not accepting things.”

Ronstadt, a single mother, said she is committed to making sure her children grow up with what she feels are the right influences. There is no television in their Tucson home (she refers to it as the “electronic dictator”), and she reads poetry to the youngsters every night at bedtime. In fact, her 1996 Dedicated To The One I Love – which used lots of glass instruments – was an album of lullabies.

“I always meant to be a singer, not a star,” she said. “When it came up, I had no control over it. You can’t order yourself up as a star. You can’t make it happen any more than you can prevent it from happening. And I find that the cult of celebrity that this country is just completely addicted to is just the saddest thing. It just makes me sorry for people.

“We have created a whole nation of borderline personalities that don’t know who they are and can only live through something that’s projected onto the cathode ray tube.

For the record, Ronstadt said she considers her most meaningful music to be the trio of romantic ballad albums she made with Nelson Riddle in the ‘80s, and Frenesi, her third all-Spanish recording.

There’ll be no more “When Will I Be Loved” and “Blue Bayou” from this veteran of the rock ‘n’ roll wars.

“I’m 53 years old and I’m sick of it,” she said. “I’ve just had enough of it. I hate to travel, and I hate the culture, you know? I hate it all. I don’t have a computer. I smile every day without these things.

“I’m not interested in pop music. I’m not even very interested in recorded music. I’m really interested in the kind of music that happens in my living room. I’m really sad that this culture delegates dance, music and art to professionals all the time and that it can’t be validated unless it goes on television. To me, it’s the equivalent of telling a florist they can’t sell their flowers unless they dip them in kerosene before they sell ’em.”

Ronstadt will be re-creating Western Wall in America’s auditoriums through the middle of October. “If I have to go on the road,” she said, “I might as well go hear Emmy sing every night. That’s the compensation.”

@1999 by Bill DeYoung

In defense of early Wings

For years, John Young and I would spend hours, literally hours at a stretch, talking about Paul McCartney’s recording career as a solo artist. Just making each other laugh. Because some of McCartney’s output – particularly in the Wings era – was sublime in its badness, its weakness, its very lameness in composition and execution. There are so many genuinely awful songs in that canon – roughly 1971 through ’79 – that making fun of them was like shooting fish in a barrel.

The great ones, of course, were beyond reproach.

The thing was, John and I absolutely loved all of it. That was always the galvanizing thing about McCartney – you could hate the music but still love the music. As many times as we dissed “Mumbo” and “I Am Your Singer” and “Big Barn Bed” and “I Lie Around,” John knew, as I did, that those songs were in our bloodstreams, knocking around with all the other music that we both held dear.

We didn’t have the exact same taste in music, John and I, and we didn’t always agree. That’s the nature of friendship, right? But when it came to solo McCartney, making fun of “Bip Bop” or “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” or “Morse Moose and the Grey Goose” was like taking the piss out of an eccentric old uncle. We loved the guy, but he sure could be weird sometimes.

All this to say that I’m really looking forward to the forthcoming reissues of Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, the first two Wings albums. Because as much as there are some real clinkers in there – among the treasures – they’re our clinkers. I grew up on those tunes, and these days I’d much rather revisit them than John Lennon’s angry political songs, or his self-pity songs, or George Harrison’s dreary sermonizing.

Love those guys too, of course, but I think early Wings has held up better than Imagine or Living in the Material World.

Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway will always make me think of John Young, to whom I have not spoken in over four years, because we bonded over them, long before we even knew each other.

Dragonfly, you’ve been away too long,

The White Album in context

People who remember when vinyl records were the only option often complain about how streaming or downloading music denies the listener the total experience – no graphics, no photos, no lyrics, no nothing. The same people said that about CDs, too, and now that CDs are on the way out, we seem to be left with downloads and streaming. And reissued vinyl, I suppose, but to me reissuing vintage albums seems like putting the cart after the horse. As it were. The point of this eludes me. And they’re so bloody expensive.

Coming in Nov. 9 – on CD and vinyl and download – is the 50th anniversary reissue of The Beatles, the 93-minute magnum opus everyone has always referred to as The White Album.

All you hipsters, allow me to put The Beatles in context. The year 1968 had been a difficult one for the Fabs. Their journey to India in the spring, to study transcendental meditation, had ended badly. On his return, John Lennon immediately hooked up with Yoko Ono, and the press – notably Britain’s famous Fleet Street – had a field day.

They hated her. The slant-eyed jokes and insulting editorial cartoons were vicious. Our John left his sweet blonde Liverpool wife for this? Understand that England saw the Beatles as public property, and divorce, and a very public affair with a married Japanese “artist,” were not in the least acceptable.

When they got a look at the full-frontal cover for John and Yoko’s experimental album Two Virgins, the press really released the hounds on the Beatles. This was some freaky shit, man.

Into this atmosphere came the Paul McCartney-penned “Hey Jude,” such a wonderful, exhilarating and unexpectedly happy single, with John’s ferocious “Revolution” on the B-side. This record was impossible to ignore, Yoko or no Yoko, and it not only became the soundtrack for the fall of 1968, it became the best-selling single the group ever had.

Nobody could have predicted what would come next.

Albums had pictures on them. Happy-go-lucky photos of the Fab Four (in the early days), smart and arty-looking designs (Rubber Soul and Revolver) and multi-colored pastiches (during the band’s psychedelic period).

The Beatles appeared on November 22, almost exactly five years to the day after “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

This album jacket was all white. No pictures, no printing. The title, The Beatles, was embossed on the cover in awkward block letters, and each cover was individually numbered, like a lithograph. When you were a kid, and you knew nothing about art, you didn’t understand any of it. In those days, after all the media attention given Two Virgins, we were sure the record company had whitewashed another naked album cover.

The song titles were not revealed until you tossed the shrink wrap and opened the cover up. And there were those four individual black and white photos, simple as block prints. Inside there was a big folded poster with a bunch of tiny photos spread out, collage style.

It was an ugly poster. It’s still an ugly poster. The lyrics were printed on the back. It was all very mysterious.

The four photos were included, too, as full color 8x10s. You’ve seen them here and there over the years, reprinted everywhere.

So The Beatles, as you played the two records, had no visual reference points. Like you would put on Sgt. Pepper and marvel at all the weird stuff photographed on the front cover, or wonder what all those dumb cartoons were about inside Magical Mystery Tour.

The music, from the first note to the last, was sublime. It was all over the place. It was different. It was great to hear John still at the top of his game, and not crashed in some opium den with his freaky girlfriend. He contributed “Julia,” a love song to Yoko. And the bitter “Sexy Sadie,” a dig at his Indian guru. And “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” And “Dear Prudence.” And “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” which made zero sense to us, but was one of the most joyous, exhilarating songs on the record.

The music is sharp, pointed, and occasionally angry. The snarling electric guitars had never been better recorded. The drums pounded and resounded.

McCartney is both whimsical and fierce (see the bookends “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Martha My Dear,” “Blackbird” and “Helter Skelter”) and even George Harrison is on fire, turning in four fine songs. None of them, I remember being glad to discover, were dreary like his ’67 dirge “Blue Jay Way.” There was no filtered Indian pseudo-mysticism on display.

The whole point seemed to be, LISTEN TO IT and don’t focus on what we look like, or whether we look happy (they weren’t, as we all found out later, but so great were the Beatles that they could turn their bitterness towards one another into cool creative music). There was absolutely NOTHING predictable about this album.

Each record label had a bright green apple on one side, a sliced apple on the other. That was different, too.

These days, I still don’t think the White Album songs belong on compilations next to “Penny Lane” or “Yellow Submarine.” It is its own experience.

The Beatles seemed to think so too, as “Hey Jude/Revolution” – remember, THE BIGGEST SINGLE THEY EVER HAD – was not included on the album. Instead, they put 30 more songs on it. And none of the LP tracks were issued as singles.

I can’t explain what it meant to be a 10-year-old kid, staring at that blank cover and listening to “Revolution 9” for the first time. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me, and I didn’t know why. There were no smiling Beatles looking back, reassuring me that the world was still OK.

@2014 and 2018

Seals & Crofts & Roe & Wade

On the heels of two million-selling albums, Summer Breeze and Diamond Girl, Jim Seals and Dash Crofts found themselves at a crossroads. They’d managed to work many of the key tenets of the Baha’i faith into their lyrics, and after every concert they returned to the stage, house lights up, and held informal “fireside chats” about their religion with whomever felt like sticking around.

That seemed to be enough. Proselytizing was and is a no-no for Baha’is, but Seals and Crofts had found a safe middle ground, where they could express their beliefs, and still have hit records.

In 1973, however, when Roe vs. Wade was handed down, the singing/songwriting duo decided to put their mouth where their money was. And it cost them. The landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States went against everything they believed in.

Lana Day Bogan, wife of the duo’s recording engineer and longtime crony Joe Bogan, had seen a television documentary on abortion and was moved to write a poem, from the point of view of the fetus. Seals, at Lana’s suggestion, put it to music.

Oh, little baby, if you only knew.
Just what your momma was planning to do …

This was the proudly pro-life “Unborn Child,” Seals and Crofts’ follow–up to the sweet and singable pop hits “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” and “Diamond Girl.” The album, also called Unborn Child, appeared in February 1974.

Crofts: “Warner Brothers warned us against it. They said, ‘This is a highly controversial subject, we advise that you don’t do this.’ And we said, ‘But you’re in the business to make money; we’re doing it to save lives. We don’t care about the money.”

Both Seals and Crofts insist the song’s message was, simply “don’t take life too lightly,” to stop and think before going through with an abortion. But the critics tore the record to pieces, and Seals and Crofts with it. The public did not respond at the cash registers: Although the album made it to No. 14 on the Billboard chart, the single stalled at No. 66.

“It was a double–edged sword,” Crofts says of the Unborn Child controversy. “It hurt us in one way, and helped us in another. It turns over fans, is what it does. If you’re against something, you lose those fans. But if you’re for it, you gain some fans. And that’s kind of what happened.” “I don’t know whether people knew what was in there or not,” Seals recalls, “but some of the pro–abortionists called up the radio stations and demanded equal time. Well, that killed the airplay on it. What we had done is we had taken a single issue. Before, we were dealing with the general concept of things.

“I think everybody in the world, regardless of whether they’ve previously been a racist, or an atheist or whatever, can accept, without getting too upset, the fact that mankind is one family. We’re all here on one dot and we need each other. It’s obvious. But when you pull it down and start taking the different really hot issues, if a person is not looking at the overview that you are, then they’re not gonna connect the parts together. They just see one thing.”

This one thing got Seals and Crofts concerts picketed all across the country. “I think we got more good results out of it than bad,” says Crofts, “because a lot of people called us and said, ‘We’re naming our children after you, because you helped us decide to save their lives with that song.’ That was very fulfilling to us.”

“I thought either it would be very much accepted, on the strength of the song itself, or that it would be the biggest bomb that we ever had,” Seals explains. “But it was incidental by that point, because the music was gone. I was out of gas already.”

Unborn Child hurt Seals and Crofts’ reputation: They had crossed that thin line, that sacrosanct divider that separated their music from their religious beliefs. They toured for much of 1974 with the issue hanging over their heads.

The following year saw the release (in quick succession) of I’ll Play For You and a greatest hits package. The former steered way clear of lyrical controversy, while the latter pointedly did not include the track “Unborn Child.” In 1976, Seals and Crofts scored their last (and, ironically, biggest) hit with the atypical “Get Closer.”

They’d struggle along for another few years, hitless, before giving it all up in the early ‘80s. “Unborn Child” was, for Seals and Crofts, the beginning of the end.

Taken from I Need to Know: The Lost Music Interviews, St. Petersburg Press.

Lost liners: The Left Banke

Definitive Collection – The Left Banke

Is Line the great lost genius of ’60s pop?

Brown, the baby–faced composer and keyboardist for the Left Banke, wrote and arranged songs of such melodic grace and lyrical sophistication that, in some circles, he’s regarded as something of a Brian Wilson character, lost in his own melancholy and oblivious to everything but the music.

Forget for a moment the shimmering and sad Walk Away Renee, the Left Banke’s sole major hit. Put aside Pretty Ballerina, one of the most achingly beautiful songs to come out of American music’s pre–psychedelic era.

She May Call You Up Tonight is a pop gem that the Raspberries could’ve taken to the top in their heyday.

Barterers and Their Wives sounds like a dreamlike cross between the Byrds and the Monkees. And Desireenot only marries “Eleanor Rigby” with the Association, it has one of the best–utilized horn sections of any record from the era.

But the Left Banke never achieved legendary status. After 1966’s “Walk Away Renee” (#5) and “Pretty Ballerina” (#15), the band continued hitless—and broke up after three years and several serious personnel changes.

Granted it was difficult, in those fast–changing times, for a band that prominently featured harpsichord and chamber strings to get taken seriously by the rock ‘n’ roll public. The band’s slavish attention to sonic detail might have been its undoing.

“Almost too pretty for rock,” summed up journalistic maven Lillian Roxon in her “Rock Encyclopedia.”

The Left Banke was formed in New York City by Brown, vocalist Steve Martin, bassist Tom Finn and drummer George Cameron. Martin, Finn and Cameron were accomplished harmony singers, and with the classically–trained Brown at the piano, worked out offbeat arrangements of Beatles, Zombies and Rolling Stones songs.

Brown’s father, Harry Lookofsy, ran a recording studio and made demos of the fledgling band (joined by guitarist Jeff Whitfield, who’d be replaced down the road by Rick Brand). When the demos failed to attract any label interest, Michael Brown left for California.

In his absence, the other members of the group added vocals to the completed backing track of “Walk Away Renee,” which Brown had written as an unrequited love letter to Finn’s girlfriend (both “Pretty Ballerina” and “She May Call You Up Tonight” were composed for her, too).

“Renee” was sold to Smash Records, which issued it as a Left Banke single in the late summer of ’66. When the record hit, Brown returned to the fold and the band hit the road. Their style was dubbed “Baroque ‘n’ Roll.”

The formula was set: Brown wrote the songs (sometimes in collaboration with the others), arranged them, Martin sang the leads, and Harry Lookofsky produced.

It should have worked wonders for the Left Banke; however, as Brown grew weary of road work, and as the frustrating lack of a followup hit took its toll, the band members settled into a pattern of bickering, breaking up and coming back together in slightly different configurations.

This would continue until November of 1969 when the band, weary of one single after another getting no interest from radio or retailers, called it a day.

Brown went on to greener pastures with the band Stories, and subsequently the Beckies. These recordings, however, prove that the Left Banke was unique and, indeed, visionary. Ahead of its time.

(Written for Rhino Records in 2003).

‘He was freckled like a spotted dolphin’

It’s only right that this tribute to Fred Neil begins and ends with one of his most beloved and personal songs, “The Dolphins.” With few exceptions, Fred Neil preferred the company of dolphins – sleek, sensitive, majestic mammals of the oceans – over people.

The native Floridian was very much like a dolphin himself, enigmatic, mysterious and intractably smarter than he let on. “I met Fred in Coconut Grove during the Flipper years,” recalls Ric O’Barry, who trained the bottlenose dolphins used on the popular 1960s television show. “We became good friends. Diving and sailing buddies.”

They were approximately the same build, with curly reddish-brown hair. “Except,” O’Barry says, “he was freckled like a spotted dolphin.”

Neil had complete access to the animals in O’Barry’s care at the Miami Seaquarium, where the trainer lived on-site. “Fred spent a great deal of time trying to communicate with the Flipper dolphins using his 12-string guitar,” adds O’Barry. “His human/dolphin communication work progressed into dolphin protection; something that he became passionate about.” He would sit for hours at the edge of the lagoon where a dolphin named Kathy lived, strumming his guitar for her.

It was Fred Neil who introduced Stephen Stills to O’Barry in 1970 – the three of them went sailing in Biscayne Bay, and the talk, naturally, turned to dolphins. O’Barry discussed his recent epiphany, that dolphins were sensitive and highly intelligent creatures, and that keeping them captive, as playthings, was inhumane.

Lit up like a roman candle, Neil told his pal the rock ‘n’ roll star about his sonic experiments. “It’s not necessarily the music,” he said, in a conversation recounted in O’Barry’s book Behind the Dolphin Smile. “It’s the tone and the sound of sustained chords. When Kathy heard a chord on the 12-string, she had the gentlest way of putting her snout on the vibrating strings themselves and on the wooden box, feeling it like it was something special. And it is, to them. I’ve worked with them a lot, and they seem to like the D chord best.”

When O’Barry left the Seaquarium to begin his Dolphin Project, it was Stills – already a multimillionaire at 25 – who provided the initial seed money. “Fred didn’t have any money in those days,” O’Barry said. “He didn’t donate money, but he donated much of his time to the Dolphin Project.”

“People idolized Fred Neil,” says John Sebastian, who knew the Floridian troubadour from the early 1960s folk scene in Greenwich Village. “Once you’d heard him, you realized there was no competing with him: ‘There’s no doing this any better than he does it.’”

“His throat gave out those deep sonorous, mellifluous tones,” Eric Andersen explains, “like the kind of tones you hear in the low range of a tenor sax of Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, or in the low-tones of Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby. Fred’s voice actually bore the trademarks of having its own unique intrinsic thing, not found anywhere else on the scene with the possible exception of the amazing Tim Hardin.”

“There were always beautiful women chasing him,” declares Sebastian. “We were growing up in Greenwich Village, and all our cute girls were Italians, and Jewish. And here was this guy whose girlfriends all looked like Yvette Mimieux.” It was said that Fred could “pull waitresses from 40 yards,” Sebastian laughs. “It came down to a kind of Piscean sadness about him that women could not resist. As well as the fact that he sang so well.”

His big baritone voice could reach down so low – often when you least expected it – and hit a note that would rattle your ribcage. His songs brought blues, jazz, rock and roll and the fluid rolls of Indian ragas together.

No, there was no one like him, not even close.

“I always trusted and felt of Freddie as a big brother I never had,” Andersen adds. “Of all the Village people and songwriters, he was my favorite, the real deal. I didn’t see him a lot, but we connected.”

Recalled Sebastian: “Fred had something nobody else in Greenwich Village had, with the possible exception of Odetta: A gospel background. He knew what singing in church was. I think a lot of his vocal signatures, also, came from that rockabilly, early rock ‘n’ roll Southern influence … Odetta would always tease him and say ‘You see all those freckles, Fred? You’re one of us.’”

Eventually, Neil left New York for South Florida for good. Bobby Ingram remembered the first time he laid eyes on him, in a brand-new Grove coffeehouse called Trivia. It was 1964. “He was onstage, wearing a sport coat – which you didn’t do in Florida – and he had his cuffs folded up outside the sport coat sleeves, the way we did in those years. And he was wearing these goddam leprechaun shoes. As I recall, they were green. Them stupid pointy-toed things you see at the renaissance fair. And he was playing rockabilly on an acoustic guitar.”

Everyone, Ingram says, followed him.

“It was all about Fred. Fred was the bait. When people knew Fred Neil was hanging around Coconut Grove, the ones that mattered started coming down. Sam Hood built the Gaslight Café South, and Simon and Garfunkel came. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and on and on.”

Unfortunately, the main attraction didn’t always show up. “Fred was always kinda scared,” notes Ingram. “You had to coax him up onstage, until you got him wound just right, or if he was happy with who he was playing with

Between 1965 and 1971, Neil recorded five albums (one as a duo project with Vince Martin). Subsequently, he never signed another contract. It wasn’t so much that he was skeptical about the music business (although he was); it wasn’t that he had fallen victim to substance abuse (although the stories about his intake were legion).

From all accounts, Fred simply lost interest in music. He didn’t burn out; nor did he fade away. He simply slow-dissolved into the universe. He raised a family in the Grove, and eventually moved to Summerland Key, where he died of skin cancer in 2001.

All these years later, what we have are the songs, some fun and frolicsome, others filled with a beautiful, aquatic sadness, weary and blue. The lyrics are prescient: On “Everybody’s Talkin’” he details the life he longs for (“I’m going where the sun keeps shining through the pouring rain/Going where the weather suits my clothes”). Then there’s “The Other Side of This Life,” “Ba-De-Da” and “The Dolphins,” all of which chronicle the continuous search for something intangible.

Fred Neil went looking for the dolphins in the sea – and he found them. And he found so much more.

Everybody’s Talkin’ – A Tribute to Fred Neil is available Aug. 12 from Y&T Music.

Tracks:

The Dolphins – Eric Andersen
A Little Bit of Rain – Bobby Ingram
Dade County Jail – Jim Wurster & Omine
Ba-De-Da – Arlan Feiles
The Other Side of This Life – Charlie Pickett
Everything Happens – Diane Ward & Jack Shawde
Everybody’s Talkin’ – Keith Sykes
Candyman – Rodney Crowell
Handful of Gimme – Vince Martin
Mississippi Train – Roger Bartlett
Bleecker & MacDougal – Valerie C. Wisecracker
Country Boy – Tim Krekel
I’ve Got a Secret – The 18 Wheelers
The Dolphins – Matthew Sabatella & Diane Ward

Interview: Mike Mills of R.E.M. (2016)

After R.E.M. amicably disbanded in 2011, bassist, composer and all-around utility man Mike Mills started looking for new projects to tackle. He considered doing nothing – “I can goof off with the best of ‘em” – but ultimately opted to pick up a gauntlet laid down by his friend from childhood, acclaimed classical violinist Robert McDuffie.

McDuffie challenged his old pal – a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – to compose a classical concerto for him to play, using rock as its foundation. “I can play Tchaikovsky and Beethoven until my hair falls out,” the violinist told Mills. “I want to do something different.”

Five years later, McDuffie and Mills are touring the country, performing Mills’ “Concerto For Violin, Rock Band and String Orchestra.” The piece, which had its world premiere in Toronto in June, also features the 11-member chamber group Fifth House Ensemble.

Mills, who wrote the music for many of R.E.M.’s most popular songs, will play bass, piano and guitar during the performance. He’ll also conduct the onstage rock band, which includes two additional guitarists and a drummer.

Although he reads music at a rudimentary level – thanks to his Macon, Georgia high school marching band and jazz combo training – Mills isn’t a composer in the classical sense. He came up with the melodies for all six of the movements in his concerto, and devised every nuance of McDuffie’s solos, then collaborated with arranger David Malamud on the actual scoring.

“It was incredibly daunting, and many times I cursed myself for having said yes in the first place,” Mills laughs. “But once it came together, and we started playing it as an ensemble, I realized that it was some pretty good music. And that with the right players, it was going to be great.”

Indeed, the music is deeply dramatic, with numerous lighter, poetic flourishes highlighting, say, a simple string quartet or McDuffie’s soaring solo violin. And many of the melodic motifs are haunting and darkly melancholy, like a fistful of great R.E.M. songs (indeed, the fifth movement uses “Nightswimming,” an R.E.M. hit for which Mills wrote the music, as its central theme).

“I tried to write a good song, period, and then I had to come up with a great melody on top of that,” Mills explains. “Because a concerto is all about melody. It is and it isn’t like writing for R.E.M. Because you’ve got to think – instead of a singer, you’ve got a violin making these melodies happen.”

Although each of the six movements has a name, the 45-minute whole is just “Concerto For Violin, Rock Band and String Orchestra.” Mills acknowledges that it’s “a very bland descriptor,” but insists that’s simply how it’s done in Classical World.

“With a concerto,” he says, “the focus is on the virtuosity of the soloists. So whether it’s written for a singer, a pianist or a violinist, that’s what makes it a concerto. When people name pieces of music in classical, it comes after the fact. Beethoven didn’t call the Moonlight Sonata the Moonlight Sonata. It became that later. At some point it will have a shorthand title, but at this point it does not.”

If all that sounds just a trifle pretentious, or far too clever for rock ‘n’ roll, Mills wants you to know he and McDuffie have taken on this project for a very, very specific reason.

“One thing we’re trying to do is show people that the walls between these genres of music are not quite as high as they think they are,” he explains. “It’s rock ‘n’ roll music, but it’s played by a classical violin and a string section.

“And we’re trying to break down other aspects of classical music, such as: Everyone has to maintain complete silence between movements – there’s no applauding or yelling or anything like that. We’re throwing all that out the window. When Bobby rips off a particularly tasty passage in this thing, people can applaud, go ‘woo-woo’ or whatever they want to do.”

Interview: Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn (2014)

From Louis and Keely to John and Yoko to Derek and Susan, married couples have worked together to give us some of the most interesting and powerful music of the past century.

Enter Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn, banjo innovators both, who wed in 2009 and are the proud parents of baby boy Juno, 10 months old.

Fleck, whose musical skills and restless nature have taken him deep into the jazz, classical and blues realms, started as an fiery, innovative player in the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival in the early ‘80s.

By the end of the decade, he and bassist Victor Wooten had kickstarted Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, and the banjo would never again be seen as something barefoot hillbilly boys plucked aimlessly on Appalachian front porches.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But Fleck, in the intervening years, has almost single-handedly charted spectacular new territories for the instrument.

Washburn was relatively new to the banjo when Fleck signed on to produce an album for her in 2005; she is a stunning vocalist and an ardent student of Chinese music and culture, all of which imbue her music with an otherworldly richness. She and Fleck subsequently recorded and toured, with Casey Dreissen and Ben Solee, as the Sparrow Quartet.

Both have played the Savannah Music Festival separately (in fact, the Sparrow Quartet stopped in once), but their March 30 lunchtime concert will mark the first time Mr. and Mrs. have done the Savannah deal as a twosome.

You’re parents now. How’s that working out?

AW: It’s amazing. We get to have a beautiful little creature that we get to take care of. It’s incredible.

BF: Abby is the Mother of the Year, as far as I can tell. And we’ve been taking him on the road, on these tours, and that’s quite a challenge. But he’s been great. And if we have an early show, he’ll watch the whole show and even take part in it.

The other night, Abby brought him out and she sang the encore holding him, and he pulled the cable out of the microphone and started sucking on it! The audience went wild.

Is this the first time you’ve toured together, as just the two of you?

BF: We’ve been working into it. At first I think we did a benefit for Abby’s grandma, at her church, and it went way better than we’d expected. We just threw a few things together and ended up being really happy with it. But we knew from then on that we would play as a duo, so it would pop up here and there. It’s been on our radar as something we wanted to do some day together. We’re now actually recording a record that’ll be out in the Fall.

AW: This is the first time we’ve taken it seriously … well, we’ve loved to play music together from the beginning, so that’s an obvious connection.

Abby, the last time we spoke, you were telling me that you’d picked up banjo a lot later, and that you were a little intimidated at first playing with the old master. Have you gotten over that— ‘oh, it’s just Bela’?

AW: On one level, it’s a part of our routine. But on another level, the things that come out of him musically night after night are always astonishing. That wouldn’t happen in any other situation, and I see it and I recognize it. And it’s always inspiring.

BF: I think that everybody has different things that they bring to it. I play with a lot of different musicians, and some of them have abilities that I don’t have. And when I play with them I have to deal with that kind of a thing.

For instance, if I go out and play with Chick Corea, as a duet, he’s got abilities that I don’t have. But we meet in the areas where we can meet. And he does his thing, and I do my thing, and we have a great time.

And I think it’s that way with Abby. She has abilities that I don’t have. Even playing abilities—I’ve never been much of a clawhammer player, and she can lay down a groove that I can do almost anything over. And also, her vocals are just so compelling. So I get to be part of music that reaches out to people, and connects with people in a whole different way than the instrumental music that I tend to get involved with. So for me, it’s just a wonderful experience. It’s not like we’re unequal—it’s more like we’re finding different ways to interface.

Does the other person’s creativity change you, depending on the person?

BF: Exactly. That’s the compelling thing for me about playing with a lot of people, because I get to be different. I’m not the same old me. When I play with Abby, I play different. And I play different with her than I play with, for instance, Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas. Or Tony Rice. There are elements to our duo that is traditional, our Abby and Bela duo, I get to play in a more traditional fashion than I do playing with Chick Corea, or the Flecktones and so forth.

But with Abby, it’s even a different subset because she has this old-time element. And also the beautiful aspects.

As an improvising artist, which is a big part of what I try to be, I’m improvising a lot with Abby but I’m responding every day to what it feels like will work well. But yeah, I definitely spark to whatever’s going on around me.

Abby, are you still bringing the Asian influences into your music?

AW: Yeah, in fact Bela and I decided to seek out a new traditional Chinese song, from southeast China, to try and go in a new direction with some of the Chinese repertoire. And it’s exciting; Bela can go anywhere, he can do anything. He’s a fearless explorer. Which is so exciting for me, because I’m game for the journey, but I might not even seek out certain directions that he sees.

BF: We were listening to a lot of difference Chinese stuff and I was like “Abby, we should do one of these even more obscure, totally Chinese things.” The two that we did with the Sparrow Quartet are almost like pop, not pop but like folk songs—they’re very, very well-known simple songs. And this shows her voice off in a completely different way that any of the Chinese-type stuff I’ve heard her sing before. I like that because it’s showing a new corner of what she’s able to do.

AW: Which is a big part of what Bela brings to me musically, new challenges, new ideas. Sometimes it’s scary and frustrating, and sometimes it’s pretty exhilarating. So I grow a lot when I play with Bela.

Tell me about the record you’re making.

BF: For one thing, the studio is in our basement. Wherever we put the mics, that’s the studio. So we have the luxury of going ahead and recording the stuff that we’ve been playing our duo that’s not already recorded. It turns out there was quite a bit there that we had been doing …

AW: Old murder ballads, old Carter Family songs and things like that.

BF: So that accounted for six or seven tunes. Once we got into old tunes of Abby’s that she’d never recorded that we had nice duet versions of. So hey, let’s put that on the table. So basically what we’re doing is recording a pile of stuff. We’ll probably record 16 or 17 songs, and then see what the record is. In there. And this week we’re going to complete three new tunes we’ve been working on. There’s an instrumental that we’ve written together, and a really cool song that Abby wrote.

Bela, is this like going back for you, to Newgrass Revival days, isn’t it? There’s a lot of Americana in this now. Is there an element of “I used to play this stuff a lot”?

BF: Yeah, it’s the stuff that made me want to play in the first place. And that I love, but I petered out of because I was so interested in moving forward I moved out of that world. Not because I didn’t love it, but just because there were new challenges. And so now, I’m coming back to it in a very earthy, natural way—playing with the two banjos.

We both love the banjo, and onstage we have seven banjos onstage that we switch around—baritone banjo, piccolo banjo, cello banjos—a lot of different tunes and a lot of different instruments that we grab and use in different combinations. So doing that, when we do a traditional song, it’s a different traditional song than you’ve heard before. There’s a lot of rippling going on

The nice thing for me is that, on top of that rippling I’m hearing some beautiful singing. And I don’t to hear that normally.

Abby can access a really old sound with her voice, and an old feeling. Ricky Skaggs calls it the Ancient Tones. And I’ve heard Abby get those sounds. And I love it when I hear it.

@2014 Connect Savannah

Art Garfunkel: The Voice (2014)

There are worse ways to spend Valentine’s Day than listening to the most romantic voice of its generation, live in a small room.

Art Garfunkel is in Savannah Feb. 14 and 15, for shows at Dollhouse Productions, which seats 300. From his classic work with Paul Simon in the 1960s, through a solo career that produced some of the most sublime pop music (“All I Know,” “I Only Have Eyes For You,” “Crying in My Sleep,” “What a Wonderful World”), Garfunkel has never stepped outside a tiny circle of excellence.

Simon and Garfunkel had just announced a reunion tour, in early 2010, when Garfunkel inexplicably lost his voice, a gossamer instrument that bonds to Simon’s tenor like morning dew to a robust flower.

The voice just laid down like a bridge over troubled water.

Things are much, much better now, as you’re about to read.

Garfunkel, 72, began our conversation by asking if I’d seen the Grammy Awards, which had aired the previous night (he has eight of them with Simon, and another for his 1998 album Songs From a Parent to a Child).

He was surprised, he said, that the show was so entertaining (although he bailed shortly before it ended), and had high praise for Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.

And then we got started …

At the Grammys in 1975, John Lennon, Paul Simon and Andy Williams were bantering at the podium. Then you came out and had a really funny deadpan exchange with Simon. I never forgot it. Was it scripted?

Art Garfunkel: No. The nature of the friendship with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel is jokes, jokes, jokes. Always the inside poke in the ribs, that’s all we ever say. Our knives are sharp when it comes to looking for the inside joke in a flash. So it comes out as if we practiced, but the mind works very fast, when Paul Simon is around, to find the inside, hip joke.

That comes from knowing each other so well?

AG: Yeah, we went to junior high school together. We were always laughing. We’re Lenny Bruce fans. We love Mike Nichols. We love Mel Brooks. These three funny people, but mostly Lenny Bruce, had tuned us. When we first met our manager, Mort Lewis, he had Lenny Bruce’s album signed “From Lenny to Mort.” And that impressed us a lot. So there’s the overlap.

I have to ask you, my friend, how’s the voice?

AG: It’s good. I’m happening again. It’s a thrill to have it back. It’s taken, what, 3 ½ years? The voice is happening.

What happened, exactly?

I did a show in Nicaragua, and I remember they were burning leaves in back of the outdoor show that I was doing. And it was a funny kind of a smell. I came home in late January of 2010. I went to the Palm Restaurant, where they have great lobsters. I was with my son. I gagged on one of the strands of this giant lobster, and it was a near-panic situation. I had to kick up the lobster.

From that point on, after that night, I was experiencing a tightness of the vocal cords and my voice started getting husky. I saw the doctors, and they said “Something in the fine symmetry of your two vocal cords has gone crude.” That’s the closest I can get to an explanation. The truth is, it’s a mystery to me what happened.

The doctor said nothing except scratch your head, and that’ll be $1,200, please.

The body is a mystery. To grope and figure out things about the mystery seems to be, from a doctor’s point of view, hooking up expensive machines, taking pictures, and charging the patient a bloody fortune. That’s what doctors have meant to me.

But you did think at one point it might be gone?

AG: I did think at one point that it might be gone, yeah. I definitely did think it might not happen again. You can’t count on God’s work. Our body and how it works, you can’t count on anything. And I was really having vocal trouble—my speaking was husky. I gave it months of resting and then began to sing, and it wasn’t coming back very easily. I went through a lot of things.

I sing in a way that has to do with fine-ness. If it gets crude, then I’m not Artie Garfunkel any more. Oddly enough, I could sing in the high range. I had my upper notes, which is my stock-in-trade. I could sing in the bass, which I hardly ever use. But the whole midsection, which requires finesse, there’s where you need fine-ness. That was blunted and crude, and there was the heartbreak of it all.

I kept singing, and singing in unison to my iPad. I would sing to Chet Baker and JJ Cale. And I was starting to get there. My unison to these great masters was starting to happen. I would sing to my old albums, in my iPod. I would sing to the Everlys—first Don, the lower voice, and then dear Phil, that great angel in the sky now. And I could get it. I sounded dead-nuts on. And that was promising.

When I took to the stage … first I booked an empty house, so I could have microphone, reverb, speakers and projection, which is the real show business experience … I was quivery. And it wasn’t happening. I kept doing it, and a couple of years went by. I finally started singing to small houses. My wife is a Buddhist; I would sing to her Buddhist meetings, and it was all about facing your obstacle. And I was living example of “Man Meets His Obstacle.” You do your best.

I ended up thinking “You’ve gotta get onstage and act as if you’re ready, even though you’re not ready.” The adrenaline and the fear of doing a show, even when you’re not ready, and throwing yourself into it, helps you get ready.

I’ve never gotten over stage fright. I do a lot of theater, and play a little music, but never got over it. I look at someone like yourself and you look so friggin’ confident up there!

It’s acting. What you just said really touches me. Now you’re my pal. Now you get it, you understand. It’s very unnatural, and very exposed, to say to a house full of people “Hush up and watch what I can do.” It’s all so presumptuous! It’s what fancy people do! It’s not my nature. It’s a pretense to say “I am going to take care of your reality for the next 60 minutes.” And I was back to that early stage of presumption and fear. At my advanced age! My knees were knocking. I was 15 years old again, just a year and a half ago. But you do it anyway. And only with the repetition of dozens of doing that do you settle back into the groove.

I hear you signed a book deal?

AG: They don’t want me to talk about it. I’ve been writing for 30 years. I write these bits. I don’t know how to describe them, they’re one-page, half-page reflections. They’re memoirs of my life, my career, of my wife, my children, family, show business, Paul Simon, my history. I’m entranced by the living experience, if you must know, Bill. And so I write as a philosophically questioning guy. I’ve been doing it for about 30 years, to myself, for myself, thinking well, I like what I’m doing; I think I have my own voice. I don’t know if it translates. I would sometimes read it to people, and some of them work, some of them don’t. I finally got the courage to shop them around with a literary agent. And he came back with great responses: “You are a writer.”

So I’m in the editing phase. But if you must know, the thrill of shaping up this show that I’m bringing to Savannah has completely captured me. I love what’s going on. A new three-part concert has emerged in front of my eyes. And I’m into it.

Do tell.

AG: I read some of these things we’ve been talking about. And I reflect on the song I’m about to sing. And I weave in and out of things I wrote and this now-returned voice. I go back and forth and I go through my repertoire while I show them my prose-poem bits. It has an identity of its own. I don’t know anybody who does this, but it works. I’ll come onstage and I’ll go “Somewhere around the middle of the ’60s, I took a room at the Hampshire House. I remember the carpet, cherry vermillion. The balcony looked up the axis of Central Park, dead center. Twenty-fifth floor. I was new to fame, and to room service.”

I have just one guitar player, Bill. That’s my show. It is what I call severe less-is-more. I’m trying to make every little thing be a big thing. And grow from there. At the end, I’ll do a question-and-answer and finally, finally open up as a guy with a lot of love and a lot of experience, and a lot of accessibility. Ask me what you want to know, folks!

Why do you say finally, after all these years?

AG: Because I’ve been behind Paul Simon all through that famous Simon & Garfunkel career. And during my own solo 20 years I had my four-piece band. I only slowly began to be a talker. That’s why. I don’t know if they know how proud I am of my body of work.

OK, you brought it up, so I have to ask. You were about to tour with Paul when the voice troubles began. Are the two of you thinking about doing it again?

AG: Who knows? If the voice is working again. We’re a hot duo! The world loves us, I love us, so it begs the question why wouldn’t we do it again when the voice is back. But you gotta ask him. It takes two to make a tour.

When you get to this age, are all the old animosities gone?

AG: Animosities, Bill? Something you know?

There’s been hot and cold running water over the years.

AG: We’re different personalities. You see Paul Simon, you see Artie Garfunkel, you see two different kind of guys. My job is to keep the class of Simon & Garfunkel. I don’t want to knock us off the pedestal and bring in the earthiness of two different personalities. We mesh pretty well. I don’t think our story is animosity, I think it’s harmony. Being two different people, we managed an alchemy of fusion in a pretty exciting way, right from childhood on. I think that’s our story.

@2014 Connect Savannah