Six months ago, I settled in to watch some playoffs, of the non-musical kind, when I got a surprising message from a friend, a fellow keyboard player who was himself off on tour. He said he had recommended me to sub for him on a movie session. I had misgivings, but he assured me it would not be difficult or stupid. Still, I had the vague memory that I had never enjoyed movie sessions as much as record dates, but being newly-retired, it was unseemly to be picky.
The next day, I got the call—actually not a call but an email (gone are the days with multicolor answering service phones in every studio), and replied yes. I quickly set about practicing and trying to resuscitate my chops from wherever I’d hidden them. I had a week to get myself ready, and tried to do so.
The session was on a Saturday, at the old studio in the Capitol Records building on Vine St. I spent many hours in there over the years, some idyllic, some tedious. I remember one day and night spent doing some shaky pseudo-disco tunes apparently financed by drug money. It was a marathon session, and the musicians were being paid in cash. At the end, in the wee hours, we all paraded into a side room where a woman sat with a suitcase full of small bills. Each musician left with a wallet full of cash, too thick to be folded over. Those bulging wallets stuck out of the pockets of every pair of jeans in the room, and a skilled and savvy stickup artist could have scored a major payday in the dark parking lot next to the Capitol tower, but none seemed to be on duty on that night.
At Saturday’s session, I was pleased to find a few pals from my studio days. George Doering, whose recording career began about the time I was headed out on the road, was there, playing fine guitar. And Dan Fornero, who put in some time as part of the Horn Dogz on our tour, was present as expected, since he has found a spot on most big dates in recent days.
It was nice to be back in the studio, but I have to confess to feeling a bit of a letdown going from playing great, memorable, instantly recognizable songs to digging into a setlist of compositions with titles like M1B5a. Sometimes your fellow players are in the headphones, other times you have to use Dr. Harold Hill’s think system to imagine what else might be going on in the ensemble. And there was bar-counting, a lot of bar-counting.
I remember the time my wife and I went to a Da Camera Society chamber music concert, and the organizer, Dr. Mary Ann Bonino, invited us to sit with her. That was very kind and delightful, except that we were sitting close enough to the players to have a clear view of the charts, and I found myself involuntarily counting bars of rest. I quickly remembered that bar-counting is the antithesis of music appreciation.
So I found myself counting a seemingly infinite number of bars of rest before playing a group of 16th notes which were living by themselves for reasons apparent to the composer, but sometimes not to me. I think I played everything I was supposed to; but, more likely, I didn’t.
I thought back to a couple of movie dates from the ‘70s that had stuck in my mind. One was at Universal, and my enduring memory is of the school bell which rang to indicate the end of a ten-minute break, lending a factory-like ambiance to the proceedings. I remember a story I was told about fabled guitarist Tommy Tedesco, who was said to have entered a studio for a movie session and told the conductor to wake him up at bar 400.
I had arrived early for that session and fround the studio empty, excapt for a rented Arp 2600 synthesizer, which was new technology then, and totally unfamiliar to me. I sat down and turned it on, but couldn’t figure out how to coax it to make any kind of sound—it had no keys, only patch cords—and I grew increasingly fearful of humiliation, until the contractor arrived, walked in and said, “Oh, you’ll be playing piano today.”
I once did a Phil Spector session where we played a tune which had a four-minute fade. On one take, I made it a point to play a grievously wrong not at a safe moment in the fade, so that I could listen to a playback and make certain that it wasn’t possible for me to do anything which would be noticed. Such was the case, and I was able to relax, safe in the knowledge that I couldn’t possibly destroy anything.
That may not have been the case for the score of this movie which I will finally see at a screening tomorrow. I hope that everything was satisfactory for the team responsible for the music, which I will most likely never see again. If not, I send them my apologies, with some more for Jim Cox, the gentleman keyboardist for whom I was subbing. I sent him a note assuring him that my performance would certainly not make him lose his session work to me when he returns to town.
The movie that we were working on, I note, opes in Los Angeles this week, and we are seeing it Friday night. It’s called Ford V Ferrari, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it. I know I will enjoy seeing it far more than recording the little bit of music on which I appear.
Full disclosure: I have an ailment called Neuropathy, and one of its results is a numbness in the feet which makes it difficult to operate pedals on a piano (and more so on an organ) in a fully professional manner. Most of the charts I was given on this session were written for organ (Insert drum fill). I’m hooping the excellent orchestration will obscure the faulty dynamics coming from the organ, and allow my mind to wander to long-ago movie magic.
The first movie session I did was a little science-fiction film called “Silent Running.” The composer was Peter Schickele, who quickly became a friend. That was a very long time ago, and my feet were better then. I could remember those sessions. Or I could go way way back, to when I owned a theatre in Indiana, the Nashville Nickelodeon, where I played an out-of-tune piano to accompany silent movies. Now THAT was work.