My shit-box stereo and the case of the missing Bobby Keys sax solo

When I was in college I had to borrow a pot to piss in. Like most all college students, I didn’t have a lot of money.  What money I did have went to the essentials: beer, parties, beer, music, beer and food (in that order). I didn’t have many possessions either. Living in a fraternity house for three years teaches you a thing or two.  One of which is to protect the things you love most; if you don’t, they will get chewed up and spit out in that madcap, 24/7, party carnival environment.

Of my possessions, the one thing everybody knew not to touch, was my music collection. Back then it was much, much smaller than what it has become today (1,500 albums strong: Judd’s Juke Joint). It was cassettes mostly (I graduated uni in ’94); the majority of which were Rolling Stones albums. I also had a few dozen mixes that I had made over the years. I called this gang of mixes the Frankenstein Collection.  I had dug up lost causes and old faves and created some monster mixes that kept parties rollickin’ until many a sun-up.

My room I lived in was small. The closet was almost as big as the room itself. In fact, I chose to stuff my single mattress in the closet and sleep in there. I did this for two reasons: one winter we didn’t have any heat in the house, so we were forced to hunker down in our rooms with space heaters, and two, I wanted everyone to hunker in my room to party…so I need to clear space.

People liked hanging in my room because I never closed the bar and because I had the best tunes. I had a chest of drawers in my room; the top two of which held all of my tapes and what few CDs I had. My stereo was a complete and utter piece of shit. It was a set of scrapheap components consisting of a tuner, tape deck and a cd player.

The tuner had been through the ringer: beer spilled into it, fuses blown, dropped a half a dozen times and it had a big dent in the side for good measure. Near the end of its life, it only played music through the right speaker channel. Back then, the fact that the music was only coming through one channel didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t listening to the music as much as I was just hearing it. I never really thought about the different instruments being played…I just liked the song, the story and the attitude that came out of the speakers.

I remember the night the tuner blew out in the left channel.  We were having a few-hundred beers and listening to Sticky Fingers.  We were right in the middle of “Brown Sugar” when the left channel went dead. At first no one noticed it. When the song made its way to Bobby Keys sax solo…it wasn’t there?!  I stopped the tape and rewound it.  Nope, it was gone. I knew I was drunk…but drunk enough to lose a Bobby Keys sax solo?

After I slapped and shook the tuner, I realised that the left channel went kaput. Short of administering drunken CPR to my stereo, there was nothing I could do to fix it…and I never did.

I didn’t party because I didn’t have the cash to replace the stereo and party because I had stumbled upon a whole new way to listen to the songs I thought I knew so well. When I lost Booby Key’s wailing, cock-sure, sax strut I gained a pulsing, driving Keef Richards rhythm machine. It was always there all along, but I had never really listened to it. Without the sax, the rhythm was isolated and I realised that it was underpinning the song. It was the spine of the song and the sax was the flesh on the bone.

I started to re-listen to all of my music again…through only the right channel. There was so much there that I had missed!

My listening habits were forever changed. There was no turning back…my ears had been opened and tuned to listen to the layers of the songs. The song may be the sum of the parts, but the individual parts have their own stories to tell, too.

Which leads me to one of the most unheralded music documentary series ever: “Classic Albums“. Have you seen any of the documentaries in this series?  If so, you are nodding your head and smiling. If not, here is what it is all about:

Musicians, producers, music biz’ers and the like talk about a particular album. They discuss how they made the album or how they were affected by it. The music, and its production, is dissected by the musicians and/or producers. They sit at the mixing console and play the multitrack recordings and spotlight the individual instrumental and vocal tracks. The insights they give into how the songs and the sounds were made is captivating.

I love this series for the storytelling. There are so many stories that exist within songs; stories about the instruments; stories about the musicians; stories about the studio; stories about the culture; stories about the stories. I am completely transfixed when the producer and musician are sitting at the console and isolating a particular piano part or back-up vocal and talking about how/why it was created. You really start to get a feel for what it was like to be in the studio.

My fave episode focuses on The Band’s, “The Band” album. If you have followed along on this blog you know that Levon Helm is one of my heroes and I have said that if there was one band I could have been in, it would be the The Band…and this album is one of my top five faves of all time. This episode is all killer, no filler. Front and centre are Levon, Robbie and Rick as well as the producer John Simon.  

The beauty of The Band’s music was the juxtaposition of song-simplicity with a rich cache of a multifarious, layered instrumental supporting tracks. This particular album is steeped in integrity. When you watch this episode, nothing expresses this more than watching Levon tell his stories. 

As John Simons says in this episode, “Levon sings in his own voice”.  So true. Levon does not sing in a southern accent, rather he is his southern accent. This integrity, this realness is so very evident in the songs on this album. One of my fave scenes in the episode is when Levon and Simons are sitting at the console picking “Rag Mama Rag” apart.

Look how much fun Levon is having!  You hear a lot of artists say,”oh, I never listen to any of my records”.  Not Levon. The songs are his life, his memories and he doesn’t leave them on a shelf collecting dust. How could you not want to be hanging with Levon in the studio…

At seven minutes into this next clip, Levon and Simons start to pick “Rocking Chair” apart. They are talking about the vocal harmonies, specifically the sweet sound of Richard Manuel’s voice. It is fascinating to watch Levon relive the recording. I want to pop a couple beers and put my cuban heeled boots up on the console and kick back my chair…

The next vid clip finishes up that segment. At one point (0:18 into it), Simons says, “I love this part”.  Levon quickly follows with a, “me too”. How many times have you, I, been sitting with friends talking about a song just like this: “I love this part…listent to that piano…that guitar fill just kills me…”.  

(I love the comment from Levon on “that Chinese ending”)

You really should watch the entire episode on “The Band” album. Click through the vids I have here and you can watch it all…it is broken up into five parts. There are other bow-down episodes I like, too: I like the one on The Dead’s, “American Beauty” (watch Bob Wier cringe when he hears his isolated vocal on Sugar Magnolia), The Who’s “Who’s Next”, Lou Reed’s “Transformer” and John Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band”.  

Check out the Classic Album YouTube Channel