Larry Carlton’s sessions with Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell
29 August 2018
As a music aficionado I have a fascination with album credits. It used to be my primary method of making connections between artists, albums and songs I love. When I hear a great piano accompaniment or a drum track, I immediately browse through the liner notes and credits to find out who the musician might be. In the days when record stores enabled impromptu meetings of like-minded music lovers, a favorite topic was the sharing of this knowledge with others and finding more clues from album covers to lead me to the next album. Many albums omitted those credits, especially when the musicians where hired studio professionals. A few exceptions to this in the 1970s are albums by two of my favorite artists, who were unique in providing detailed listings of all musicians who played on their records: Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. And one name kept coming up on both of their album sleeve notes, as I scrutinized the fine print to find out who was the guitar player who played all these magnificent licks and solos. This is my tribute to Larry Carlton’s amazing work on their 1970s albums.
Carlton first played with Steely Dan on the 1975 album Katy Lied. The band became a studio entity at this point, hiring the best session musicians in LA and New York. He played only on one tune, Daddy Don’t Live in that New York City No More. A good performance, but nothing like what he would contribute to the band’s next album, The Royal Scam. No less than four session guitar players were invited to the recording of that album, and Carlton plays on many of the songs.
Don’t Take Me Alive, a song whose lyrics always reminded me of the Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon, released the previous year, is one of Carlton’ finest moments on the album. Two of his best musical assets, the melodic solos and the guitar tone, are on display here. If you were wondering about the long chord that starts the song, Carlton remembers: “There was no chord in front of the beginning of the song, nothing. Just ‘wham’. I don’t know what else we tried, but Donald was the one who finally just said, ‘Why don’t we just put a big chord in front of it?’ It was that simple. I went out into the room where my amp was and stood in front of it and tweaked until there was the right tone and then I did four or five or six of those chords to where everything rang. They adjusted the limiter and everything so it really sat like they wanted it to. But Donald was right.”
Carlton’s finest moment on the album and what many consider his best solo in the band’s catalog, is on the opener, Kid Charlemagne. The song about the rise and fall of a drug dealer, likely inspired by Owsley Stanley III, the underground chemist who single handedly freaked out the city of San Francisco in the 1960s, was a great opener for the band’s darkest album. Carlton is all over this song, with a 50 seconds solo that starts at 2:18, full of twists and turns. He does not let up in the outro either, with more tasteful licks as the song fades out. Donald Fagen: “He’s a real virtuoso. In my opinion he can get around his instrument better than any studio guitarist. He’s also quite a good blues player. He did the solos on ‘Kid Charlemagne.’ The middle solo he did in two takes and we used parts of both. The last solo was straight improvisation.” On an album full of excellent guitar work by other musicians such as Denny Dias, Dean Parks and Elliott Randall, Larry Carlton’s role on this album stands out as the most critical. Walter Becker: “If that is the definitive Steely Dan guitar album, then Larry Carlton is the reason why. He contributed quite a bit to the tunes. There would be lot of volatile people with volatile music styles in the room and, in a lot of cases, it seemed to me that Larry, more than anybody else, was holding things together rhythmically and in other ways.” Carlton recalled the sessions for Kid Charlemagne: “Once we found a tone that we all agreed on, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would say, ‘Yes, that’s cool,’ then really it was just a case of, ‘You want to try one?’ And they would hit the red button and it’d maybe be, ‘How you doing?’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, let’s try it again.’ Then all of a sudden some magic starts happening. Very patient, there were no suggestions of licks or anything like that. I did two hours’ worth of solos that we didn’t keep. Then I played the first half of the intro, which they loved, so they kept that. I punched in for the second half, so it was done in two parts and the solo that fades out in the end was done in one pass.” All in a day’s work.
A few words on Larry Carlton’s celebrated guitar tone are in order. We start with the amp. Remembering that session, he also recalled: “I can’t remember why but I decided to take my little Tweed Deluxe with my 335 and that became my lead sound with Steely Dan.” Making the list of Guitar Player magazine’s top 50 guitar tones of all time, he shaded some light about his technique: “I have the claw thing happening down there on the strings when I play. It lets me know where I’m at, but I’d have better technique if I held my hand free of the strings. I pick hard. In fact, I overplay the instrument. I’ve been squeezing a pick since I was six, and the pressure has curved by index finger. At this point, my hands have molded themselves to fit the guitar.” About that Tweed Deluxe: “That’s the amp that I used for the Steely Dan sessions and I don’t even remember why and how I’d brought the Tweed in, because I didn’t use it on any other sessions, only the Royal Scam, Aja, and Donald’s Nightfly album.”
More... much more, here: https://musicaficionado.blog/2018/08/29/larry-carltons-sessions-with-steely-dan-and-joni-mitchell/
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