The Musical Box

Ray Manzarek

During the lifespan of The Doors, Ray Manzarek managed the impossible. He fashioned an instrumental voice that stood out in a band fronted by one of the most outrageous singers of his day. Such was the duality that made Doors music so compelling.

Jim Morrison may have been the rock star, the one who fascinated and confounded as the band’s focial point. But Manzarek was its musical conscience. Designing keyboard melodies that owed as much to classical and jazz as they did to pop, he often anchored Doors songs with a groove that would hold fast as Morrison raged.

On any number of Doors hits, it was Manzarek you heard first. Soul Kitchen, When the Music’s Over, Strange Days, Touch Me, Light My Fire and, most profoundly, Riders on the Storm, all began with a keyboard prologue that pinpointed a mood and motive before Morrison sang a note. And on two of the band’s wildest works – Crystal Ship and Unknown Soldier – Manzarek and Morrison began in unison, engaging in a quiet but pronounced musical communion.

Many forget that The Doors went on to cut two albums after Morrison’s death – 1971’s Other Voices and 1972’s Full Circle. While paling understandably in contrast to the Doors’ heyday records, both are still worth seeking in second hand stores out for keyboard colors that remain distinctive even without Morrison’s dark poetics.  

A few post-Doors delights peppered Manzarek’s later career. As a producer, he was at the helm for Los Angeles, the 1980 debut album by the vanguard punk band X. And during the mid ‘80s, the keyboardist struck up a curious alliance with Brit pop stylists Echo and the Bunnymen. Together they cut a highly faithful cover of the Doors’ People are Strange, which was buried on the soundtrack to The Lost Boys, and a fun, Doors-like original, Bedbugs and Ballyhoo.

Is there one essential Doors album to commemorate Manzarek with? Let’s sign off with two. Try any of the band’s many anthology sets, but augment your pick with 1971’s L.A. Woman, Morrison’s swansong album. It remains an alternately sleek, serene and deliriously earthy monument to a rock troupe riding out the final tide of a majestic storm.

George Jones

George Jones was the first nationally established country artist I ever wrote about. We’re going back to the early ’80s here, a time when Jones, Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard played Rupp Arena on a near-annual basis.

For Jones, who died this morning, this was the second heyday of a storied career, an era that directly followed the mammoth hit status of He Stopped Loving Her Today. That song was over the top, a sweeping orchestral account with the sentimental force of a hurricane. But Jones let that extraordinary voice underplay the whole thing. He rode the song’s story line of emotional devastation the way you and I drive to the grocery. Maybe it was because the route was so familiar to him. But that didn’t mean his singing couldn’t flip on a dime when a tricky passage emerged. Jones could color a phrase, a verse – shoot, even a word – with a controlled blast of genuine rural desperation at a moment’s notice. It was the kind of combative, intuitive device that, once detonated, left you thinking. ‘Where in the world did that come from?’

Of course, Jones was regularly the master of his own reckless destiny. That he lived to be 81 after all the drugs, drink and divorce – not to mention the car wrecks, both real and metaphorical – is something of a country miracle.

So volatile was his offstage life that one never knew whether he was capable of tracking his onstage obligations. When I began writing about him, the nickname ‘No Show’ Jones was serious business. I never covered a show he didn’t make, but I heard all kinds of stories. I remember one reporter in Richmond being so astounded that Jones didn’t bail on a regional show that his review bore the headline “No Show Jones Shows Up.”

Jones’ prime performance years in Lexington became true occasions. The greatest probably came in 1987 when he headlined a Rupp concert but championed the then-rookie show opener, Randy Travis, as the heir apparent to the country traditionalist crown. Three years later, the two shared another Rupp bill, only with Travis as headliner.

Jones last strode onto a Rupp stage two years ago, when he made a surprise appearance at a Kenny Chesney show. He looked and sounded frail – severely so. The spirit was luminous, of course. But it was clear that the end of the touring road was at hand. He retired in 2012. Now he’s gone.

As country singers go, George Jones flat-out wrote the book. Generations tried to replicate his style. None came even remotely close. Maybe the intensities of the firestorms that became everyday life for Jones scared them off. Everyone wanted to be the Possum, it seemed. But no one was up to walking in his shoes.  

Richie Havens

We bid adieu tonight to Richie Havens: folk stylist, soul renegade, singer, environmentalist, generational inspiration and all-around peace warrior. He died of a heart attack Monday morning at age 72.

For more than four decades, the Brooklyn-born guitarist was a gentle but demonstrative pop music voice, an artist who found common rhythmic threads in the sounds of folk, blues and pop and weaved them into an intensely rhythmic acoustic sound all his own. He was an occasional songwriter, and his most visible radio hits were interpretative tunes. But these weren’t mere pop covers. They were complete transformations. In his hands, George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun went from a euphoric reverie to a more pensive meditation.

But no revision resonated more profoundly than Freedom, the chanted, whittled-down version of the blues spiritual Motherless Child. Initially improvised, Freedom was the lasting highlight of Havens’ opening set at Woodstock in 1969. It has since become viewed as one of the landmark festival’s most defining moments.

Havens went on to record great solo albums, including Stonehenge and Alarm Clock, and toured continually. By the time he made it to Lexington in April 1993 as the second presentation in the Troubadour Concert Series, there was a more relaxed, sage tone to his performance. He wore the passing years just as proudly as he did the role of ambassador of the Woodstock generation.

“Woodstock was very much a part of the future in a way,” Havens told me in an interview before the 1993 concert. “It was a time where like-minded people of all ages came together to set numbers down in the public’s eye and in the eyes of the world. No one expected it to turn out the way it did – especially the people performing there. That was the magic of it.”

Peter Banks.

Imagine being the founding member of a struggling band, enduring all the requisite hardships – the lousy gigs, the lousy lodging, the lousy modes of transport and the miles-beyond lousy pay – that go with establishing your music.

Imagine having your fill but still sticking with it, only to have your band give you the boot. To make matters worse, within a year after your dismissal, your band hits big.

That was the early career trajectory of Peter Banks, the original guitarist for the veteran prog rock band Yes. He died earlier this month of heart failure at age 65.

Peter Banks’ post-Yes career was full of quiet triumphs, like his band Flash, which cut several strong prog-ish songs in the early ’70s but never sustained the innovation for an entire album. The 1973 solo recording Two Side of Peter Banks, an appealing guitar summit, stands as the best of his solo material, although 1994’s all-instrumental Instinct was an underdog work that, despite its reliance on synthesizers and drum machines, was full of spirited Jeff Beck-style playing.

But his albums with Yes – 1969’s Yes and 1970’s Time and a Word, as well as a 1997 collection of BBC recordings from the early years that Banks compiled titled Something’s Coming – remain compelling. Yes was essentially a pop group at the time full of psychedelic hopefulness, tackling everything from the Beatles to Bernstein while creating such early delights as Dear Father, Survival and a very involving cover of The Byrds’ I See You.

Banks’ replacement in Yes, Steve Howe, came up with the more textured guitar sound that became identifiable with the band’s later, star-making music. The rumor mill remained ripe over the years with tales of how little regard the two guitarists had for each other. Banks essentially made it official in the liner notes to Something’s Coming.

“My successor, Steve Howe, may delude himself with the myth that Yes started and ended with his involvement,” Banks wrote, stating further that the music he cut with the band in its early years was filled with “the enthusiasm, indulgence, stubbornness and, above all, general youthful playfuless that made Yes fit into the Y section of the music reference books.”

Alvin Lee

Perhaps the saddest thing about the unexpected passing yesterday of Alvin Lee at age 68 was the fact it took his death to jolt many of us, myself included, into remembering how great he was.

As the inventive, intensive frontman for Ten Years After during its heyday from 1966 through 1974, Lee was a gleeful anomaly among British guitarslingers. He could play the blues with the best of them and out-boogie all of them. But when the right song hit, he could sail into beautifully uncharted waters – areas that blended blues, psychedelia and even prog.

The band’s masterful 1971 hit, I’d Love to Change the World, stands as the most obvious and lasting example. But there are bits of such stylistic meshing on all of their albums, from the stellar string of Deram releases in the late ‘60s (highlighted by 1970’s splendid Cricklewood Green) to a quartet of underappreciated ‘70s recordings on Columbia (culminating in 1974’s prog-inspired Positive Vibrations).

To casual fans, the defining moment of Lee’s tenure with Ten Years After was its extended boogie rampage version of I’m Going Home at Woodstock in 1969. It certainly matched the other exhilarating highpoints in the festival’s documentary film. But Lee regularly expressed frustration in interviews at how audiences seemed to feel the Woodstock performance staked out his band’s stylistic limits. Happily, the success of I’d Love to Change the World broadened that view.

I have to sheepishly admit I’ve haven’t listened to Ten Years After in, well, several years. But last night I spend a few enjoyable hours with the band’s early albums – like 1968’s Undead, a concert record that boasted an insane version of the Woody Herman swing classic Woodchopper’s Ball, and 1970’s Watt, with the lean and beautifully despondent Lee original Think About the Times.

Sure, there were more prominent guitar heroes back in the day. But 45 years after Ten Years After was unleashed unto the pop world, the playing of Alvin Lee still sounds as potent and enlightened as ever.  

Mike Auldridge.

All the holiday pageantry surrounding the arrival of 2013 tended to overshadow the under-the-radar exits of several under-appreciated musical ambassadors during the final days of 2012.

Among them was Ray Collins, co-founder of the Mothers of Invention with Frank Zappa. Collins was the principal vocalist on the band’s first two albums. He died Christmas Eve. Obituaries listed his age only as “middle 70s.”

Then on Dec. 26, we lost Fontella Bass, the St. Louis pop-soul diva behind the huge 1965 hit Rescue Me. By the ’70s, Bass turned to jazz by recording with her husband, the great trumpeter Lester Bowie, and his band, the groundbreaking Art Ensemble of Chicago. She embraced gospel in the ’90s and even moonlighted with the British electronica ensemble Cinematic Orchestra in 2002. Bass was 72.

But the loss that probably hit home the hardest was the Dec. 29 passing of Mike Auldridge.

Anyone with a serious love for bluegrass music likely grew up or grew old listening to the clean and surprisingly progressive musicianship that Auldridge conjured from the dobro. Josh Graves can be credited for forging a lasting place for the slide-played resonator guitar in bluegrass, and certainly Jerry Douglas can be viewed as the instrument’s foremost innovator today. But between the two was Auldridge.

Although he was well versed in pre-bluegrass country styles, Auldridge is best known for the genre-busting music he produced with The Seldom Scene, which he co-founded in 1971. Auldridge cut a few fine but hard-to-find solo albums and branched out in the latter part of his career to collaborate with Lyle Lovett and the contemporary string band Chesapeake. But to appreciate the full technical scope of his playing, and his ability to use it within a more folk-informed repertoire, check out any of the first five Seldom Scene albums, culminating with the outstanding 1975 concert recording Live at the Cellar Door.

Auldridge was 73.

Ravi Shankar.

The one and only time I interviewed Ravi Shankar, I felt myself more than a little tongue-tied, trying to put into words a personal reaction to the Indian classical music that he had spent a lifetime bringing to the world. I attempted, however amateurishly, to describe the impact of hearing the meditative solace of ages-old ragas he has recorded over the decades blossom into a firestorm of improvisational intensity.

When I was done, Shankar paused, much like a professor might when an eager but grossly naïve student had blurted out so banal an explanation of his life’s work.

“I see,” Shankar said. “And this is how this music seems to you?”

It was the kind of reply that quickly made one feel, despite the appreciative intent, a little out of his depth.

“Well, to tell you the truth, this is how it should be. The music should never be concocted or forced. It should always be spontaneous.”

Shankar was an artist of tremendous patience and kindness. I got to witness that firsthand. All you needed was one of the scores of recordings he cut through the years to realize that. But Shankar, who died yesterday at the age of 92, was more. He was more than a master sitar player and improviser. He was, especially to American ears, a gatekeeper to a musical culture that many of us knew little or nothing about.

Sure, it took a connection to the psychedelic music fashioned in America during the late ’60s and, especially, a well-documented friendship with Beatle George Harrison to help unlock those doors. But once unbolted, the grace and contemplative beauty of Indian classical music became part of a world lexicon. No single artist before or since has raised awareness of Indian music and, perhaps, culture to a global level.

“Once in a while a musician comes along who takes a tradition of a country and moves it to the next level up,” said the acclaimed Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain ahead of a performance Shankar gave at the Singletary Center for the Arts in October 1995. “This is what Ravi Shankar has done.”

Ed Cassidy of Spirit.

Like father, like stepson. That hardly seems like the expected personnel fabric for an innovative rock ’n’ roll band. Yet that was what drove one of the most underappreciated West Coast acts to emerge out of the psychedelic ’60s. The band was Spirit, responsible for such exquisite radio hits as I’ve Got a Line on You, Nature’s Way and one of the decade’s most artfully funky singles, Mr. Skin.

Spirit roared out of California with four consecutive albums between 1967 and 1970, each more adventuresome than its predecessor. By the time the last one, The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, hit the charts, Spirit was borrowing from jazz, psychedelia, funk and crystalline guitar grooves for its exuberant pop sound.

On each recording, guitarist/vocalist Randy California and his drummer/stepfather Ed Cassidy remained at the helm. Perhaps that explains the title of Spirit’s second album, 1968’s The Family That Plays Together.

Spirit’s other key members – most notably co-vocalist Jay Ferguson – bolted from the band after Sardonicus. But for much of the next three decades, California and Cassidy kept Spirit’s music alive on the road, playing mostly as a trio, with a revolving lineup of bass players.

The Spirit saga came to a very sad end in 1997, when California drowned off the coast of Hawaii while, ironically, rescuing his son from drowning.

Yesterday, Cassidy left us. He was 89. Tall. Shaved head. Clad from head to toe in black. That was Cassidy. Reared in jazz (his pre-Spirit days were spent performing with such titans as Gerry Mulligan), the drummer was said to have been a strong influence of many of the day’s most esteemed rock percussionists – in particular, Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham.

For me, Ed Cassidy’s Spirit music comes down to two songs. The first is a gorgeously orchestrated and sublimely cool instrumental called Ice (from the band’s overlooked third album, Clear). The other is the tune that took Cassidy’s nickname for its title – Mr. Skin.

Need an introduction or a quick refresher in the music of Spirit? Then track down Mr. Skin and turn the volume way, way up. The song’s drive, groove and joy will light up any day. And for that, we can thank rock music’s mightiest but least-heralded father-stepson team and the unending spirit they found in playing together.

Dave Brubeck

Dave Brubeck was one of those artists you simply assumed would be around forever.

He was already in the history books for redefining the presence, popularity and very structure of jazz as far back as the ’50s. But he didn’t leave us after that. When his landmark quartet with Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello dissolved in 1967 after a storied 17-year run and a string of 19 studio albums with Columbia Records, he formed a new artistic partnership with sax giant Gerry Mulligan. After that came a generation-bending group with his sons, orchestral collaborations and compositional projects that ran from concertos and cantatas to oratorios and ballets. Then came new quartets, new solo piano settings and touring groups that teamed the pianist with friends new and old. The next thing you knew, Brubeck was 90 and going strong.

The pianist finally took leave of us yesterday, one day shy of his 92nd birthday. But his legacy and inspiration remain with us as a veritable monument of jazz integrity.

I first saw Brubeck in 1978. He and his sons performed at Memorial Hall for the debut concert in the University of Kentucky’s Spotlight Jazz Series, which would run strong for the 25 years until a lack of student interest killed it off. How disheartening, considering one of the key demographics Brubeck won over at the dawn of the ’50s was collegiate audiences.

The biographers will always cite Brubeck’s polytonality and the adventurous time signatures his works embraced as the leading components of his legacy. I didn’t care (or, more properly, had no appreciation) for any of that initially. When I first heard Unsquare Dance as a kid, I clapped along with the quirky rhythm, sensing none of the music’s daring spirit but all of its outward joy.

That, to me, was the key to Brubeck’s artistic charm. For all of the craftiness within his compositions, for all of the mathematical intricacy of their construction, the music was never less that completely accessible.

The last time I saw Brubeck was in January 1996 for a dead-of-winter performance at the Opera House that reteamed the pianist with his Mulligan-era bassist, Jack Six. The concert, held only two days after Mulligan’s death, shifted from light, Debussy-like fancy to rhythmic blues to rustic swing. Through it all, the smiles the pianist exchanged with his bandmates were positively childlike.

So what Brubeck album do we recommend as a parting shot? Well, the landmark 1959 recording Time Out is the most obvious choice, and any number of his quartet works for Columbia (1961’s Time Further Out, 1962’s Countdown: Time in Outer Space and 1964’s Jazz Impressions of New York) make for fine also-rans.

But allow me to recommend my favorite Brubeck record, the 1995 CD edition of Live at the Berlin Philharmonie, which more than doubles the playing time of the recording’s original 1972 vinyl pressing. It not only captures the Brubeck/Mulligan alliance at its zenith, it offers perhaps the finest recorded variety of the pianist’s library of performance moods. The music it contains is intricate yet inviting, pensive yet playful and as soulful and loose as it is studied.

Put this one on, and you can’t help but smile. And you can count that as one of the finer entries in Brubeck’s massive book of career accomplishments.

jon lord.

At the core of Deep Purple sat the keyboard work of Jon Lord. Caught somewhere between the prog-rock melee of the early ‘70s, the blues music he was infatuated with and, when given enough latitude, some classical playfulness, Lord’s playing always possessed a human yet scholarly quality.

Sure, when we think of Deep Purple today and the ‘70s hits that defined the band – Highway Star, Space Truckin’ and, of course, Smoke of the Water, our ears usually tune to the guitar hooks of Ritchie Blackmore. But Lord was always in the engine room, fleshing out the scalding melodies to the band’s more ambitious hits (1973’s Woman from Tokyo comes to mind). And he was continually in sync with Deep Purple’s three guitar warriors – Blackmore, the late Tommy Bolin and present day Purple fretman Steve Moore, who Lord played behind until his retirement from the group in 2002. He could solo like a madman on Hammond organ in the old days, but the keyboard/guitar communion he instigated within the band was one of the keys to its artistic drive.

Lord died earlier today from a pulmonary embolism suffered following extended treatment for pancreatic cancer. He was 71.

It would easy to recommend Deep Purple classics like 1972’s Machine Head, 1973’s Who Do We Think We Are or the over-the-top 1973 live album Made in Japan for proper insights to Lord’s gift of keyboard gab. But to really dig into the full extent of his compositional and well as instrumental ingenuity, try tracking down the import pressing of his three movement Gemini Suite that teamed Deep Purple with the orchestral support of the Light Music Society cut during a performance from September 1970.

Yes, the classical/rock hybrid work is a dated indulgence. But it also presents a brilliant and often underappreciated rock journeyman defying all sense of stylistic convention. And what better legacy can you hope for than that?