A Conversation with Leon Russell – HuffPost 3.31.14

Mike Ragogna: Hey Leon, Life Journey, your latest album, was recorded with Tommy LiPuma, Al Schmitt, Elton John…you have an awful lot of friends rooting for you. Do you feel the love?

LR: Well yeah, it was nice. Elton was primarily responsible, he wanted me to do an album of my own. So yeah, it was great, I had a lot of help.

MR: Life Journey…how did it come about and how did it get so lush?

LR: Well you’ve given me the benefit of the doubt that I know what I’m doing, but that’s not exactly the case. Tommy and I had a lot of conversations before we made the record and I just happened to mention one day that when I was always playing my piano part, I was always imagining an ensemble when I played that sounded like Count Basie and had lines in between and so forth. So he showed up with one of Count Basie’s writers and bass players and we went from there. The idea is a life journey occurred somewhat in the middle of the recording.

MR: The concept is sort of like a statement on what made you and where you are now in your life and music, right?

LR: There’s kind of an explanation of it in the liner notes. They basically say there’s some things that I’ve done in my life and some things that I’ve always wanted to do, so that’s what it is.

MR: Some of these songs sound like they were made for Leon Russell, for instance, “Georgia On My Mind.” What an easy fit this material is. When you listened back to these songs did you feel like, “Hey, maybe I should’ve recorded these earlier on?”

LR: I definitely wouldn’t have recorded while Ray Charles was alive. He had the definitive version of “Georgia,” but I was doing that on my show, actually, unlike many of the others which I did for the first time when I was making the demos for the writer to write the arrangments.

MR: And then you have what could be a slight nod to one of your own hits, “The Masquerade,” with “The Masquerade Is Over,” no?

LR: Well, not really. I used to go to jazz jam sessions in Tulsa that started at one or two o’clock in the morning and went to two or three in the afternoon the next day while we were jazz players that played Leon McAuliffe’s hillbilly band were out there playing at those jam sessions. That’s where I learned “The Masquerade Is over.” I’ll tell you what it is, I’d never sung that song. I’d played it for a bunch of different singers, but I never sang it until I made the demos for this record. I don’t think that one has anything to do with the other, it’s just a consequence of having this thing learned.

MR: At this point in your life you’re turning seventy two soon, there’s got to be some relfection on a lot of your sign posts and mile markers. How do you feel about your career and what you’ve contributed to music? What are your thoughts?

LR: I’m happy to have a job. What can I say? Sometimes one misses the sign posts as you’re going down the road. They aren’t as obvious as they become when you get to the end of the road, so to speak.

MR: Do you ever think about the days when you were doing the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour–you know, out on the road with Joe Cocker and Rita Coolidge?

LR: Yeah, I think about that occasionally, that was quite an event and I enjoyed doing it a lot, but the first rock ‘n’ roll shows that I saw were big variety shows with twenty and twenty five-piece bands and fifteen or twenty acts who would come out and do one or two songs each. I’ve seen shows that had Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino so that was exciting times for me. I was just trying to capture that a little bit. At modern rock ‘n’ roll shows you’d never see that.

MR: And that’s why you touched on something a lot of people appreciated, it’s an iconic album of the era.

LR: I guess so…I don’t know, it got kind of mixed reviews when we did it. But isn’t that always the case?

MR: Yeah, and I think over the years, it’s stood the test of time. For anybody who’s an afficionado of classic rock, that’s a classic album.

LR: We had the movie to go off of, that helped a bit.

MR: I’ve interviewed Rita Coolidge over the years and every time, your name comes up with such a fondness for both those days and you. And you did write “Delta Lady” about Rita.

LR: Yeah, I wrote that for her, and also the song “Superstar,” I didn’t write that for her, but I wrote it because of her. She was the first person I ever heard use that word. She was talking about Dionne Warwick recording an album in Memphis down there were she lived and she said it was such a great pleasure to see a “superstar.” That was the first time I ever heard that word, and I was kind of fascinated by it. It wasn’t in common usage at the time.

MR: Yeah. If there was a hip moment in the Carpenters’ career, you supplied it with “Superstar.” You helped mold history a little bit there too.

LR: Well Karen Carpenter was just a singularly amazing singer. There was just not anybody like her. I produced a gospel duet called the O’Neal Twins; they were a couple of twin brothers who were soul singers and they sang gospel songs like The Everly Brothers. I asked them one day who their favorite singer was and they both said together, “Karen Carpenter.” So that’s kind of amazing for me.

MR: And George Benson had a big hit with your song “This Masquerade,” which a lot of people have since recorded.

LR: Actually, Tommy produced that record, too, so I’m quite thankful for him. There was a period in my life where I was trying to write standards. I wasn’t trying to write hit records. Standards are different, slightly, from hit records. The guy that plays the baritone saxophone in Tower Of Power [Stephen Kupka] came up to me one day and he said, “Leon, I’ve written twelve Top Ten records with Tower Of Power and nobody’s ever cut them. How did you get all of those people to print your songs?” and I said, “Well I’m not sure I could explain it to you, since they’re different songs, but a standard is not necessarily a Top Ten record at the start of its life. It just depends on if a hundred people cut it in ten years. Then it’s a standard.”

MR: Some of these things have turned into standards, “Day After Day,” and “This Diamond Ring” among others.

LR: I’m not sure that was a standard.

MR: [laughs] As part of The Wrecking Crew, you could’ve just settled as being a piano player and had an amazing career, but you went solo and had your Shelter Records plus musical workouts with Marc Benno. What made you turn the corner or were you always trying to do that and you finally lucked out?

LR: Well I wasn’t much of a singer, I mostly played piano for real singers when I played in night clubs and piano bars and stuff like that, but I started singing a little bit, I got a call from Denny Cordell, who was cutting Joe Cocker, and he said he had a deal where he just listened to records all the time and picked out people he liked and then he’s have his assistant round them up and he’d put them in the studio and use them to make records. I’d never met him but I got a call one day from somebody at A&M who said he wanted me to come and play on some Joe Cocker Records. I thought it was a good opportunity to produce some songs, so after the session I played those songs for him and we cut them.

MR: So you moved from The Wrecking Crew into the Shelter People.

LR: Yeah, it’s odd, I’d never heard that section referred to as The Wrecking Crew, that was the name of a somewhat mediocre Dean Martin movie which I didn’t play on, although some of those guys did. I never heard the section named that until Hal Blaine’s book. But what was the question?

MR: It’s almost like that Joe Cocker album was the big step to you becoming Leon Russell the solo artist, or at least the duet artist with Marc Benno.

LR: I suppose so. Like I said, I met Denny doing those Cocker sessions, so when I played those songs I had a meeting with him later and I said, “Yeah, I’ve always wanted to have a record company, sing and do all that stuff,” so we formed Shelter behind that conversation.

MR: You had a number one country record with Willie Nelson and you’ve easily slipped from genre to genre, is that because you just see it as making music?

LR: Well some people, for example program directors, are much more aware of genres than people like me. I’m not much on french words anyway. But I just never thought of it that way. When I was playing in the section in LA, they were talking about how Nashville guys are always ready to play. They have a conversation for about five minutes, write a bunch of numbers done, and when they’re ready to record it they’re very fast. I’m very fast myself. One day, I was taking a car back from LA to Tulsa where I was living at the time and I went into a truck stop and there were about a thousand country CDs in there at like three dollars a piece. I’d never been in a country band, and I lived in Tulsa. It wasn’t until I got to California that I got in one. There are actually more hillbillies in California than there is in Oklahoma. But I bought a hundred dollars worth of those songs and listened to them on the way home. I got to thinking, “If those guys are that quick and that ready to play, I’m ready to play.” I just picked out twenty six songs that I knew, not that I’d necessarily ever sung before. Sometimes the first time I sang them was on the session. Sometimes when I’d heard several different versions of them slipping from one track to another is really kind of embarrassing, but that was the origin of that.

MR: When you had a number one record with Willie Nelson did you think, recording country music had kind of paid off?

LR: Not really. I met Willie at a time when my profile was somewhat higher than his. He said to me one day, “You know, we ought to make records. We’d be the biggest thing in country music.” I thought he must have been kidding. I didn’t imagine myself as a country artist, I didn’t know much about it. But later when he was on Columbia, he asked me, “Let’s do this duet album” and so perhaps he was right, I don’t know.

MR: And of course you did the duet album with Elton John. The Union was called the third best album of 2010 by Rolling Stone. That’s pretty impressive.

LR: Yeah, I’m glad that they liked it.

MR: So far, you’ve had an amazing and varied career. When you look at the contribution that you’ve made to music, is there something you’d like to be known for?

LR: Well I don’t really think of myself in the third person. To me, it’s a different point of view. I’m happy to have a job. I play a little, write a little, perform some, it’s not like it’s an engineered, well-manufactured plan or anything. I just do what I do.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

LR: I think probably my main advice to new artists is if you want to be in the music business you, need to be dang serious about it because it’s a rough business. It’s what my uncle told me when I was going intol the music business. He was a great guitar player and a singer. He was a master sergeant in the air force for twenty-five years and ran gun clubs all over the world. When I told him I wanted to be a musician he said, “It’s a rough a business.” So that’s my advice to them.

MR: Was it a rough business for you?

LR: Oh yeah, it was pretty rough. I started playing in night clubs in Oklahoma when I was fourteen. It was a dry state, and there were no liquor laws so consequently there were no laws about minors playing in night clubs, so I had the oppportunity to start early. I went out to California the week I got out of high school, I was seventeen, and found out that they weren’t goign to have any sense of humor about that, they weren’t going to let me play or even go into the night clubs unless I was twenty one, so I had to borrow IDs. The musicians’ union wouldn’t let you play–they called it “home stay”–they didn’t want people coming into California and playing in night clubs, so in order for me to join the California union, I had to not work for a year. I said, “You’ll have to explain what you’re thinking about that.” I had to borrow union cards and borrow IDs and if they had a different guy at the door who didn’t know me and I’d already given my ID back to the person I borrowed it from. It was tough. I caught pneumonia out there and the doctors wouldn’t help me in the hospital because I was a minor and I didn’t have any adults so they wouldn’t treat me in the hospital, but I got over it more or less. But it’s pretty much a warring state out there.

MR: With your challenges over the years, did you ever feel like, “Dude, I’ve had it. This is it.”

LR: Oh just about every other day. Like I said, it’s a rough occupation.

MR: You’re going to be touring for this album, right?

LR: Well I stopped for two years, but I’ve mostly been doing this kind of thing for forty-five years, so the public is more or less aware of me, I’ve been working the whole time and it’s not changed. I play about a hundred and eighty shows a year.

MR: So the tour continues.

LR: Yes, it’s a continuation.

MR: Is there a project that you’re dying to get to? Do you look to the future and say, “I really have to do that,” whatever that is?

LR: Once again, you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt of knowing what I’m doing. I don’t think of it that way. One day, I’ll have an idea. For forty-five years, I’ve always had a studio in my house and usually live-in engineers so if I have an idea, I’ll do it right there and it’ll come out on a record. I’m not able to plan that far ahead, I’m sorry to say.

MR: So everything continues as it is until you just don’t want to do it anymore.

LR: Yeah, I do that all the time. I really write more if I have a reason or a project or something, but about the time when I was doing The Wedding Album, I was getting upset because studios spend a lot of money and then sit there for months and months waiting for inspiration and I thought, “I need to be able to do this on call,” like an accountant, you go to work, you do your job, you go home, eat dinner and go to bed. So I did a little bit of research when I was working on that album, I read a book called How To Write A Popular Song. It really helped me out quite a lot. I could probably write you one right now. That hasn’t always been the case.

MR: All these years later, when you listen to your classic “Tightrope” what are your thoughts?

LR: Well, Edgar Winter said three out of five notes that I sang were out of tune and I said, “Edgar, don’t hold back, tell me what you really think!” I can’t really become too critical. I have to keep going.

MR: But it was fun to have to have such a huge, huge hit at the time, right?

LR: It’s number eleven, it’s the hugest hit that I ever had. I didn’t have a lot of hits, actually. I was being played on what they called at the time, “Underground Radio.” But I never had a song in the top forty pretty much.

MR: By the way, every time I hear one of your signature songs, “Roll Away The Stone,” I still smile a little. And I’m sure there are many other lives that song and so many more of your others have affected, so I’d like to thank you, Leon.

LR: Oh, bless your heart. I appreciate it.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne