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Another summer with Johnny

It’s summer, which means that Johnny Hallyday is almost certainly playing some arena or other in the south of France. He’s 72 now, but after recovering from a serious health problem in 2009 he shows no signs of stopping. Rester vivant is the title of his recent album and of his current French tour, which takes him through to next February.

Back in the autumn of 2012 he came to London for the very first time, something not to be missed by a Francophile like me. To add to the authenticity of the event, the 5,000 seats of the Royal Albert Hall were almost entirely occupied by members of the French colonies of South Kensington and Kentish Town, currently numbering several hundreds of thousands. To sing the words of Michel Berger’s “Quelque chose de Tennessee” — possibly the best French pop song of the last 50 years — along with them and Johnny was a very stirring and precious experience.

The latest album was produced in California by none other than Don Was, former member of Was (Not Was) and current president of Blue Note Records. To be frank, it sounds pretty much like everything Johnny has released in the latter stages of his career: the slightly overwrought music of someone in love with the whole mythology of post-war American cultural imperialism, with just enough of a bitter-sweet hint of Gallic chanson to give it a dimension beyond the image of a man in black Levi’s, a motorcycle jacket and a single earring strumming a sunburst Strat with a Lucky Strike wedged in the tuning pegs, looking out over a Malibu sunset, with a chopped gunmetal ’55 Chevy idling in the background.

Don Was and his crew of Hollywood session men do a perfect job: the Hammond B3 is a security blanket, and the guitar and tenor saxophone solos are idiomatic but never overdone. Among those present are Greg Leisz, Dean Parks, Audley Freed and Matt Rollings. The drumming is by Charley Drayton, once a member of Keith Richards’s X-Pensive Winos. The bassist is Laurent Vernerey, a member of Hallyday’s road band.

The material is all new, from sources including the singer Yodelice and the lyricist Isabelle Bernat, whose collaborators include the English songwriters David Ford and Andy Hill. As usual with songs tailor-made for Johnny, they’re about love and life and hope. None of them has yet quite stuck with me in the way that “C’est pas une vie” from 2008’s Ça ne finira jamais did, although “On s’habitue à tout” makes good use of Leisz’s pedal steel and Gabe Witcher’s country fiddle. But I’m happy to give them time while I listen again and imagine I’m on holiday in Provence, drinking a cinquante-et-un and still smoking unfiltered Gitanes.

Late Lee

This is Lee Konitz, the great alto saxophonist, reflected in the window of A-Trane, a small jazz club in Berlin that was packed to the gunwales for his performance last night.

Konitz was born in 1927; it is almost 70 years since, aged 18, he replaced Charlie Ventura in Teddy Powell’s big band. Before he was 21 he had begun his studies with Lennie Tristano and taken a starring role first in the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, playing Gil Evans’s arrangements of bebop tunes, and then in Miles Davis’s nonet, which became known as the Birth of the Cool band. These days he plays less than he did, in the sense that he lets his sidemen — and, on this occasion, a guest singer, Judy Niemack — carry quite a lot of the weight, and much of his own performance is taken up with his own weightless scat-singing, but every note that comes from his saxophone is worth hearing.

A couple of years ago I wrote here about my admiration for his late work. The repertoire doesn’t change: variations on “Stella by Starlight”, “All the Things You Are”, “Out of Nowhere” (in the Tristano variation called “312 E 32nd St”). There was also “Kary’s Trance”, which Konitz wrote in 1957 on the chords of “Play Fiddle Play”. At one point he invited his extremely sensitive and adept accompanists — the pianist Florian Weber, the bassist Jeremy Stratton and the drummer George Schuller, plus Niemack — to create a collective improvisation from scratch, tacitly reminding us that in 1949 he was part of the Tristano group which, with two pieces called “Intuition” and “Digression”, made the first attempts at such a thing.

And then, alone with the rhythm section, he sat and played a version of “Body and Soul” that made an old, tired song sound completely fresh and new, all the accumulated wisdom of his long career poured into a few frail but beautifully shaped phrases.

Eggleston’s Memphis

William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton is a portrait of Memphis, Tennessee in 1973, shot in black and white in bars and on street corners. Best known for his colour-saturated still photographs, such as the one of the blood-red motel-room ceiling used on the cover of Big Star’s second album, Radio City, Eggleston used an early Sony Portapak camera for this project, giving the result a blurred, flaring immediacy.

Restored and re-edited by Eggleston in collaboration with the author Robert Gordon, the 77-minute film was screened last night at the Barbican art gallery in London as part of Doug Aitken’s Station to Station, a 30-day festival of happenings and installations featuring a range of artists from Kenneth Anger to Olafur Eliasson. Aitken invited Jason Pierce — J. Spaceman of the band Spiritualized — to provide a live score, which might seem an odd request since Stranded in Canton already has a soundtrack of its own, including performances by the bluesmen Furry Lewis and Johnny Woods and the pianist Jim Dickinson.

Pierce brought along two fellow members of Spiritualized, the guitarists John Coxon and Tony Foster, a/k/a Doggen, and a drummer, Rupert Clervaux, who has played both with Spiritualized and with Coxon’s project Spring Heel Jack. The three guitarists and the drummer formed an inward-facing circle on a low stage in the middle of the gallery, with the film projected on to one main screen and on to the other three white walls. The audience sat on benches and beanbags, or on the floor, or on the edge of the stage.

Using a pedal, Pierce could control the volume of the film while cueing the band to play against certain sequences, usually those in which an indistinct ranting seemed to be going on. He had prepared a set of instrumental pieces that could have been off-cuts from Exile on Main Street: a variety of after-hours drone-boogies using distorted arpeggios (Pierce), scrubbed chords (Coxon) and moaning slide figures (Doggen). Clervaux paced the music with elegant simplicity, using a reduced kit and, occasionally, a glockenspiel.

The spirit of the Rolling Stones at their most dissolute, a kind of  quaalude-deadened sluggishness interrupted by random bursts of menacing craziness, hangs over the whole film — there is even a glimpse of Eggleston’s friend Stanley Booth, the author of the best book about the band — so it was appropriate that the live soundtrack should contain things that sounded like half-remembered versions of the backing tracks from “Love in Vain” and “Wild Horses”. And Pierce devised a brilliant nerve-jangling crescendo to counterpoint the look-away finale, which moves from a competition to bite the heads of live chickens to a concluding episode of terrifyingly casual gunplay.

Not quite concluding, actually. The credits feature stills of the participants, with captions describing their subsequent fates, most of them — such as that of the transvestite “Lady Russell” — unhappy. But this is not a happy film. It’s a jagged, intimate, handheld portrait of a disturbing time in which certain forces set free in society created a sizeable amount of collateral damage. As a work of art, Stranded in Canton resembles a sequence of picaresque doodles: Hogarth on Beale Street. At last night’s screening, however, Pierce found a way of adding a dimension that made it feel much more complete. They should do it again.

* You can find extracts from Stranded in Canton here.

The Wrecking Crew

Roger McGuinn tells a great story in the course of The Wrecking Crew, Denny Tedesco’s film about the Hollywood session musicians behind countless hits of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. He’s recalling the frustration of the other members of the Byrds when they discovered that they’d been replaced for the recording of “Mr Tambourine Man” by a group of session men, including Leon Russell and Hal Blaine. McGuinn himself was permitted to sing and play 12-string guitar on the track, which was completed in a couple of passes. He was the only Byrd on the record. A few months later, now established as one of the world’s biggest groups, the whole band were allowed into the studio to play on “Turn, Turn, Turn”. They needed 77 takes. Enough said.

The film is a loving project, in every sense. The director is the son of the late Tommy Tedesco, whose guitar graced many of those hits (including Jack Nitzsche’s “The Lonely Surfer” and the Sandpipers’ “Guantanamera”), and whose presence gives the work its bookends. But there’s plenty of space for encounters with others, including Blaine, his fellow drummer Earl Palmer, the saxophonist Plas Johnson, the bass-guitarists Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, the trombonist Lou McCreary, the percussionist Julius Wechter, the pianist Don Randi, the guitarists Bill Pitman, Glen Campbell and Al Casey, and many others, including the engineers Stan Ross and Larry Levine, as well as Brian Wilson, Herb Albert, Cher, Jimmy Webb and Lou Adler. The project was started by Denny Tedesco many years ago; several of his interviewees — including Palmer, McCreary, Wechter, Ross, Levine and Casey, as well as his father — have died since he filmed them.

Inevitably, there’s a touch too much boosterism. Hollywood isn’t the only place where the making of the great pop hits of the ’60s was facilitated by great session men. But these certainly were fantastic musicians, most of them jazz-trained but ready to dial down their chops to whatever the producer required, be it Phil Spector or Snuff Garrett. Once or twice you get a hint of less positive feelings about the tasks that were put before them, but there seems to have been a genuine enthusiasm for the imagination Brian Wilson brought with him into the studio — although, of course, Wilson’s sessions at the time of Pet Sounds and Smile tended to go on for weeks at a time, ensuring a steady revenue stream.

Wechter tells a fond story about Alpert, whose first Tijuana Brass session was not registered with the union, enabling him to pay the musicians below the standard rate, which was all he could afford. When “The Lonely Bull” became a massive hit, the first thing the trumpeter did was go round to the union, fill in the forms, and pay the musicians the full scale.

Somebody relates how, at the time of “These Boots Were Made for Walking”, Nancy Sinatra and her father were both appearing at separate Las Vegas venues. Irv Cottler, Frank Sinatra’s veteran drummer, discovered that Blaine, whose bass-drum fills had provided “Boots” with one of its hooks, was being paid $2,500 a week to leave the studio and back up Nancy on stage. He, Cottler, was making $700 a week.

The guys who spent their lives shuttling from Gold Star to Western to Capitol to Radio Recorders got rich in the process, which leads Blaine himself to tell the saddest story. The studio income from a career including 50 No 1 hits and six consecutive records of the year at the Grammy awards (including “Strangers in the Night”, “Up, Up, and Away” and “Mrs Robinson”) had brought him a mansion in Beverly Hills, a motor yacht and and a Rolls-Royce. They were all taken away by a divorce settlement that coincided with the ending of the boom time for session men. Out of music, he left Los Angeles and worked for a while at a menial job somewhere in Arizona. But then in 2000 he and Palmer, his mentor, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and his life in music restarted.

Back in 2011 Blaine gave a great quote about the experience of listening to oldies stations to Marc Myers of the Wall Street Journal. “You hear your youth,” he told Myers. “I hear a day at the office or a divorce.” But that’s just a session man’s humour. The film is full of warmth and remembered pleasure, like the moment Carol Kaye shows us how she came up with the walking bass riff that made Sonny and Cher’s “The Beat Goes On” into a great record rather than just a decent song.

The Wrecking Crew was premiered at the South by Southwest festival in 2008 but a long campaign for Kickstarter funds was required in order to to pay the song licensing fees before it could be allowed out on a proper, if limited, release around the world (I saw it at the Art House cinema in Crouch End, North London). It’s not as polished a cinematic artefact as Standing in the Shadows of Motown or Muscle Shoals, but that’s part of its appeal. As an addition to the historical record, it’s priceless.