A Conversation with Steve Forbert – HuffPost 11.18.13
Mike Ragogna: Steve! Let’s find out what’s going on with the seventh son of a seventh son.
Steve Forbert: Okay, fantastic. Well, you know what’s happening. I have this deluxe package of Jackrabbit Slim, it’s a two-CD set. It’s a little confusing because Blue Corn contacted me and wanted to put out the first two albums together, which you know about. I said, “Okay,” and honestly, Mike, we had about a thousand Jackrabbits ready to go. But my manager at the time urged me to let Blue Corn put it out, so I did. We held ours to give them a window to put that one out but now we’re putting up our own Jackrabbit, which has all of the extras and a few live mixes and we have mastered the Palladium show from years ago in its entirety with no edits. So that’s what we’ve added to the Jackrabbit picture, because that was that tour.
MR: Right, the Palladium concert.
SF: Yeah. It’s funny to me because we started out with a lull and did “Romeo’s Tune,” but ever since then, I do “Romeo’s Tune” last. That’s just what it was like back then.
MR: I can understand why when you look at the tracklist on the Palladium double-disc. It’s a significant concert for you in that it was broadcast on a few different stations and you covered most of the classics from your first and second albums. And I remember this concert being broadcast on WNEW. What is the history of this multicast event?
SF: Well, I owe it to WIOQ, Ed Shockey, who’s not with us anymore. He came up from Philly and saw somebody there from WNEW, and it was a real high point. It was kind of a sentimental thing because, as you know, I worked my way up through New York City and Grand Central Station, so it wasn’t like I was a native but it had been where it all happened for me. I’ve got a show at The Iridium and I did a show back at City Winery in July, so New York City is still great. This was really kind of “Okay, you’ve worked all the way up to this.” I didn’t go up to Madison Square Garden or even Carnegie Hall but this was certainly a great thing, it was a high point. I don’t know, you can just kind of tell it from John Simon’s mix and the excitement in the room. We decided to put it out mainly for people that remembered it. I should stress that it’s limited to five hundred copies.
MR: And it sounds like a young, fiesty, on the verge of hit-making Steve Forbert at his most energetic.
SF: That’s right, it was a real rush of energy. The crowd was… I don’t know, some of them were maybe drunk, they were just screaming and yelling. It’s hilarious.
MR: I also like the way you performed your early classic, “The Oil Song,” like it was important information to get out there. You captured a moment of time with a significant subject of the time.
SF: It was in the air so much. Whereas today, I would end the show today with “Romeo’s Tune” at the time I would sing “The Oil Song” pretty near the end. I was still feeling my way out and I don’t think “Romeo’s Tune” was even a hit yet, so there wasn’t any thought of, “Save Romeo’s Tune to the end,” because this was Thanksgiving of ’79. I don’t think “Romeo’s Tune” got on the charts until February of ’80, so this was really right at that point where it took off. Four months later you would never come out and play your hit record second. It was like, “Where are you going to go from there?” but at the time it wasn’t yet a radio hit.
MR: Yeah, but you guys believed that song was so strong, I bet you placed it as your second song to immediately raise enthusiasm for the second album.
SF: Right, that’s what it was, promoting the album.
MR: And I bet you knew “Romeo’s Tune” was a special track all along.
SF: Things have changed so much, but “Romeo’s Tune” was a rough mix when we heard it back in the studio and I just said, “We’ll record it like this on a piece of quarter-inch tape” and then I said, “It’s not going to sound any better.” John Simon said, “Well, we’ve got to mix the record,” and I said, “Be my guest, but I don’t think you’ll beat this.” We couldn’t beat it. That Gene Eichelberger was a really good recording engineer and what he had up for us to hear when we finished performing it, we just ran that onto some tape. These days, you couldn’t think of doing that. Records probably take days to mix. It’s just so funny to me how much it’s changed. The Beatles would take a couple of hours to mix a song in mono and then just leave and say, “Oh, do the stereo, we’ll come in later.” They did those stereo mixes probably about as quick as Geoff Emerick could play them and listen to the landscape and move a few things around. “Stereo is just a boring thing we’ve got to do on Thursday.” Now the records sound so good, they’re all so technically killer, but this does make me nostalgic for that old thing we all know about where things were just so much more organic.
MR: Oh yeah, definitely, and speaking of that, let’s talk about the New Liberty Half Volume One, the demo tracks for your album The Place And The Time.
SF: You know, I put a lot of work into those and so this is just something honestly for the website. I’m not going to say it’s a limited edition, but we won’t be pressing a lot of these. This is sort of another side to that story over several weeks of recording these tunes. It’s so much fun because Steve Allen’s a good friend of mine and Lorne Rall’s a good friend of mine. Just to go in with these two guys and some loops and just see if the song is finished, it’s a good little record. I love listening to Steve Allen’s playing on it.
MR: The CD reads Volume One, is there a Volume Two coming?
SF: Well, Volume Two will be the demos for Over With You. Those will be even more fleshed out. Those have real drums and all that stuff, but as you might have guessed, I can’t put those out for a while because Blue Corn wants some length of time without that on the market. But that’s my vision of Volume Two.
MR: What’s going on as far as new material or what’s catching your attention in the news?
SF: Well I do think it’s interesting, what’s in the news as of late. Raising the taxes of the top earners. There’s going to be a lot more talk about that. If you go back to before 1972, it was considerably higher. Let’s face it, fifteen percent on capital gains is kind of like a contradiction of terms, isn’t it? If you have this kind of wealth and you can make it work for you, you just make your informed decisions or play it safe or make your moves. It’s just very ironic that that kind of income should be taxed at a lower rate. How they got that through congress I’ll never know.
MR: The premise, I think, was based on a trickle down theory.
SF: Yeah, well maybe it was pretty good before 1972. We had a pretty different system then. I think there’s going to be a lot of talk about raising the upper tax bracket.
MR: I think it’s a very healthy conversation.
SF: Like I said, lower taxes on capital gains almost seems like a contradiction in terms. Me, I’m writing songs, I’m playing shows, and we’re putting together an English tour for March. I like going to England. It looks like I’m going all the way to Scandinavia, I’m going in the middle of Winter.
MR: You’ll have to learn their traditional methods of keeping warm.
SF: What do you mean? Make love, not war?
MR: [laughs] Well, I was thinking saunas and food, but absolutely, that works too!
SF: [laughs] So that’s what’s really happening. I’m always trying to write songs, Mike, and if it takes a few weeks, that’s fine; I know I’ve said that to you before. But even when I start a simple song now, I think, “Well, this one is not going to take that long, it’s not going to require a lot of scrutiny,” but they invariably do. For as long as I’m able to write songs and sing them, it’s just about making them ones I feel proud to sing again and again. So that’s what’s really going on I suppose. There’s so much happening out there. I’m always trying to deal with the digital revolution. It’s just inestimable. There’s just so many angles to it.
MR: How are you navigating it all these days?
SF: Well, it’s true that a website is a great thing, you can let interested people know so easily what you’re doing and then you can have your little postings every day if you like. I don’t do things every day, but when something comes up… Years ago, I bought a poster at Wal-Mart for like ten dollars. It was before Barack Obama was elected and it was a picture of him with one of his campaign quotes, “There’s not a liberal America and a ocnservative America, there’s the United States Of America.” You probably remember that. I knew at the time that that was not true, but recently, when the government shut down, I put that up on the Facebook because it enriched a point. I was like, “This was the day I was saving that poster for, this is the reason I bought it.” I knew it was so absurd at the time. It made a great campaign slogan but it wasn’t really the case. Then recently, it was like, “Now I’m going to show everyone this poster I’ve saved for six years because this is the time I thought would be out there in the future, when you couldn’t get the sides to agree on anything.”
MR: These guys didn’t even give him a honeymoon. I’d just like the democratic representatives, just once, to take off the kid gloves and put on the boxing gloves. Or make things work behind the scenes, just like Tip O’Neill did.
SF: You said it! Now what else can I tell you about these three CDs… The thing withJackrabbit Slim is it sounds terrific and it’s got all of the extras. That’s the best-known record. It’s just a blast from the past really. I think The Palladium is a good performance; it sounds good and it’s really exciting and especially for those people who came to the shows at that time this is kind of a memory lane thing.
MR: Like I said, I remember that broadcast on WNEW. So on behalf of the New York fans who got to hear it live, I thank you, goodly sir.
SF: Well, you’re welcome.
MR: Steve, come on, come on, let’s talk more.
SF: There might be some more we can talk about, but there you have it. John Simon is still alive; the sax player is not with us anymore; the bass player, Lou Whitney, I think he’s got cancer in a pretty bad way. We’re a long way down the road but we’re still at it, man.
MR: And of course, Nat Weiss, your old label head, passed away. Steve, I’m very happy you’re still at it, it’s always fun to get the latest Forbert release, man. Congratulations on figuring out how to keep the music fresh and the touring always lively.
SF: Mike, I really appreciate it.
Steve Forbert on Nat Weiss
(taken with permission from Steve Forbert’s website: http://www.steveforbert.com)
“Nathan M. Weiss passed away Wednesday night (July 31, 2013) in New York City.
Nat Weiss was indisputably one of the all-time greats of the real music business–a
person whom one would consider themselves very lucky to have known and very lucky
to have worked with. He was the smartest person I’ve ever met and certainly one of the
strongest. I’m eternally grateful to him.
“Nat, along with Coconut Management’s Danny Fields and the late Linda Stein, gave me
my start with Alive On Arrival, which I recorded for his label, Nemperor Records.
For the last couple of years, due to severe knee and then back problems, he wasn’t able
to get out and about, and so has been missed, in that sense, by many people for a while
now. (Mark Lewisohn, renowned Beatle authority, was able to interview him extensively
about a year and a half ago.)
“I know I’ll be missing his friendship and advice a lot from here on out.”
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne