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What We Listened to this Week: Leon Bridges

Leon Bridges might say he’s from Fort Worth, Texas, but one listen to his debut album Coming Home and you’d swear Bridges was a product of Memphis and Stax Records. Coming Home, his debut album for Columbia Records, is made up of ten timeless songs that feature an authenticity that can be hard to find in the soul revival that’s taken place over the last few years. Sitting somewhere in between Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, Bridges has seen his music take flight over the past year, selling out shows across the United States minutes after tickets go on sale. One can only hope a Memphis date is in the near future. Check out two songs from his debut album below, plus a pretty cool Sam Cooke cover. 

What We Listened to this Week: Leon Bridges

What We Listened to this Week: Leon Bridges (2)

What We Listened to this Week: Leon Bridges (3)

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (October 15, 2014)

While going through an old box of stuff, I came across a program I had saved from the Fillmore East dated December 19, 1969. The Byrds were headlining that night, supported by Keith Emerson & the Nice and the San Francisco horn band the Sons of Champlin. As an added attraction, the immortal Dion DiMucci appeared to perform his latest hit, “Abraham, Martin, and John.”

That collectible brought back a lot of memories, most of them bad. When I was 20, I dropped out of college and moved to New York City. I was chasing the flimsiest of music offers from someone I barely knew. A high-school acquaintance had graduated from Yale as a poetry major and gotten a job in an apprentice program for Columbia Records. He had shown some of his work to the legendary talent scout and record producer John Hammond Sr., who encouraged him to find a collaborator to help transform his poetry into songs. I suppose I was the only musician he knew.

When “Tom” called, he mentioned the names of several friends we shared in common and asked me to come to New York with the understanding that I would eventually have a chance to audition for CBS. He said I could live rent-free in his apartment and only needed to contribute my share of grocery money. After calling a few people and asking if this guy was for real, I packed my guitar and a suitcase and flew to Manhattan.  As soon as I arrived, the problems began. I took a cab to the address I was given only to find a short-order grill there. The cabbie informed me that my friend lived above the restaurant. When I lugged my gear up four flights and found the apartment, the couch I was promised was already occupied by one of Tom’s college buddies who was waiting for renovations to be completed on his place. I was asked if I minded sleeping on the floor for a little while. No sooner had I caught my breath than Tom sat cross-legged on the floor and asked if he could play my guitar. Nobody played my guitar.

After I had reluctantly handed it over, I realized that he had no musical ability whatsoever. He was the kind of guy who had to look at his left hand when he changed chords, and his poetry consisted mainly of abstractions that only he understood. I thought briefly of returning to the airport and booking the first flight out, but I’d already told my friends I was going and didn’t want it to appear that I had turned tail and run. I knew that if anything was to be accomplished, we would have to start from scratch. While I was lying on the floor using my leather jacket as a pillow, I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into.

Tom and I grew to dislike each other so much that I would deliver a melody to his cubicle in the morning, and he would write poems to fit during the workday. The problem was, his lyrics were mainly about some phantom girlfriend that I never saw and nothing else in the known world to which I could relate. Our hostility grew so bitter that he asked me to leave. I had never been kicked out of anywhere. I found a single room in a decaying brownstone on W. 82nd Street. It had a single sink that looked like it had been clogged since the Prohibition and a bathroom down the hall shared by 10 other tenants. My rent was $11 a week, and I still had to call home for financial help. The street was a magnet for hookers, junkies, and transients, but since I wore a frayed pea-coat from Navy surplus and a battered wide-brimmed fedora, I blended right in. After several tortuous months, we finally came up with a number of songs sufficient for an audition.

I stood with my guitar beside the desk of John Hammond. Just the knowledge that he had discovered Bob Dylan would have been intimidating enough, but since my dad was a fan of swing music, I also knew that Hammond had discovered Billie Holiday and put together the Benny Goodman Band. Now he was sitting a foot away, staring up at me. I began to play an up-tempo song featuring some of Tom’s metaphorical lyrics, but I couldn’t look him in the eye. When I had finished, Hammond proclaimed with a big smile on his face, “My, we have a singer here.”

He was impressed that I had once recorded for Sun Records and arranged a full demo session in the CBS Studios. I arrived early on the appointed day only to find a Vegas-like lounge singer in the studio while his slick manager was addressing Hammond as “Baby” in the control room. After apologizing for the delay, Hammond told me to go ahead and set up. I put my chord charts and lyric sheets on a music stand and went down the hallway to ease my severe cotton-mouth with a drink of water. When I returned, the lounge singer was gone, but so was all my music. Hammond sent the engineer racing after the pair, but when the out-of-breath engineer reappeared and told us he had shouted at the pair from the street but they jumped into a cab and sped off. They had stolen all of my notes.

Frozen with dread, I somehow managed to record the songs from memory. Ultimately, nothing came of the entire eight-month-long project. Hammond told me that because of a shakeup in the top brass at Columbia, “I no longer know where I’m at in this company.” After I had quietly returned to Tennessee, my former host informed me that Hammond had said, “A lot of people have stuck around a lot longer than he did.” Two years later, Hammond signed Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records. Still and all, I’m the only artist in recorded history to have been produced by both Sam Phillips and John Hammond. It ain’t bragging if it’s true.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Johnny Mathis at the Orpheum

Johnny Mathis is a distinguished guy. He had to make a choice between pursuing a singing career or becoming an Olympic athlete. Mathis is the longest-tenured artist at Columbia Records and the first artist for whom there was a Greatest Hits album. He sang a melodic style of music starting in the mid ’50s and sold millions. His voice remains a staple of the holidays. While the counterculture came and went, Mathis stuck with his true self and is still kicking and crooning. He’s a super nice guy. We talked about music, and he even called my mother, a lifelong fan, to wish her a Merry Christmas. Johnny Mathis will be at the Orpheum on Saturday, December 21st.

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Flyer: You were around some musical greats when you were very young at the Black Hawk Club. What was that like?
Johnny Mathis:
I guess I started going with my older brother Clem and my dad to the Black Hawk when I was about 13. The process for them was to rehearse in the afternoon and do the performance at night. Sometimes they were agreeable to someone as young as myself listening to their rehearsals. I got a chance to meet and to almost become friends with people like Errol Garner [composed “Misty”], Dave Brubeck, of course, who was almost a house musician there. But I also got to meet people like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, singers that I really really admired. Then when I made my first recordings at the age of 19, I started to work some of the same venues that they worked and was able to reconnect with them. And they remembered me. I had a wonderful kind of association with some pretty mature artists at a very early age. It kind of impressed on me how important it was to really and truly concentrate on what my performance in opposed to thinking of it kind of a frivolous way.

Mitch Miller was a polarizing producer, but he had a tremendous influence on your career.
Mitch was very important to me because he had a kind of a childlike quality about what he felt was going to make it as music as far as I was concerned. The music that he chose for us to sing was very simplistic. He insisted on being there and making sure that we sang it the way he wanted it, which was on the beat, never ad-libbed. It was completely different from what I did on my first album, which was produced by George Avakian who was head of jazz [at Columbia]. So Iwas torn between these two people but I was perfectly willing to do whatever they asked. I was 19 years old. I took what they said as gospel. Fortunately Mitch guided me in the right direction. I wasn’t really a jazz singer, but I was signed to the company by George. I was a little bit more comfortable singing something that didn’t require me to improvise.


Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney said some nasty things about him.

They hated him. But I was young. It was awkward.

Miller hated rock-and-roll. He called it “musical baby food.” Do you agree?
I’ve tried everything. Some of it clicked. Some of it didn’t. The rock and roll sound was not really something that I pursued. I would laugh a little bit about it. It didn’t seem referential enough for the music. It seemed like I was making fun of it. So I backed off. Whoever you’re hanging out with or working with has a great effect on what you eventually do. The people that I hung with had a not-very-good feeling about rock-and-roll. Feeling that it was simplistic, and it was. But we were dealing with young people. And young people didn’t want to get serious. That’s what they listened. I stuck with what I was doing. Fortunately, I was with a record company that had good distribution. Rock-and-roll was not a big deal at Columbia. At that time, they were pretty heavy into Broadway shows. Most of their product was aimed at a pretty mature audience.

Your Miller-influenced sound was in contrast to much of what happened in the 1950s and ’60s. But it’s 2014 and you’re still going.
The process of singing is so individualistic. I just liked what my dad sang. He was a good singer; the first I ever heard. I felt comfortable singing songs that had a pretty melody. I had studied from the time I was 13 until 18 with a lady who taught opera. I was very comfortable in that situation. My music was fun. I always knew that I didn’t really know anything about how to sing. I knew how to produce the notes, but I didn’t know how to put them all together into an interesting song. It took me a very long time. I got off on the wrong track on many occasions, as evidenced by the record I did with George Avakian who left me to my own devices. I was all over the place. It wasn’t until I met Mitch Miller,


I listened to your comeback Number One “Too Much Too Little Too Late” from 1978. It took me back to my parents car like I was sitting there.

My producer said he wanted me to do a duet. That was before anyone had considered doing duets in the mainstream at the time. He mentioned Minnie Riperton. Unfortunately she became very ill at the time and eventually passed away. Denise Williams had just come off the road with Stevie Wonder, singing background for him. She’s a very forceful lady. She came right up to the producer and said, “I’m here. Let me sing with him.” That started a wonderful relationship with Denise whom I love very much.

Christmas has had a massive influence on your career.
I come from a large family. The first Christmas album I did was for my mom and my dad, who made Christmas a wonderful time. I keep telling everybody that we weren’t poor, we just didn’t have any money. It was very important that we took advantage of all the free stuff like going to church and singing Christmas songs. I was really ready to do something for my mom and my dad. I’d had a couple of hit records and the record company let me have my own way about the thing. I eventually ran into Percy Faith, who was another artist in residence at Columbia. He agreed to do the album with me, thank God, because it’s so brilliant what he did with a ll the voices and the violins. And that particular album has been iconic in my career.

Do you still play golf?
I used to be pretty good when I was taking lessons. There was a guy on the tour. He tutored me for about five years and I got down to about a 7 or 8 handicap. No more. Those days are over.

Since it it’s Christmas and I have you on the phone, I’m going to ask you a favor. Would you call my mom and wish her a Merry Christmas?
I sure would. What’s her number?