DAN ŽIVIH.!?

ALBUM BY ALBUM: DAVID AXELROD

ALBUM BY ALBUM:
David Axelrod was born in Los Angeles in December 1933. An orphan at the age of 14, he left high school before graduation in order to fend for himself. According to an April 1970 Capitol press release, over the next few years ‘Dave dug ditches, drove trucks, took up prize fighting, became a machinist, was a bus boy at the Coconut Grove – all the things that look glamorous listed on a book jacket but are grim to look back on.’ Though he was running with a wild and tough crowd and nursing a heroin habit by the end of his teens, he always sustained his love of music. “The first album I ever bought was an album in the original sense of the word – a heavy card wallet with pictures pasted on the front and back, and four 78s inside,” he remembers. “It was by Nat King Cole, who was my hero.”
     
Aged 19, his life took a decisive turn when he met the jazz pianist Gerald Wiggins. Over the next five years, Wiggins “taught me scales, how to read music in time with a metronome, and much else besides.” Determined to make a living out of music, Axelrod went on to pick up the basics of composition and harmony from the arranger and composer Mauro Bruno, but was largely self-taught. By the late 50s he had started to work in recording studios, and began meeting his heroes. “The biggest thrill I ever got was when I was introduced to Nat King Cole by Lee Gillette in a studio hallway sometime in the mid-50s. I thought I was going to faint. A few years later I went into the Brown Derby, where everyone in the industry met for lunch in those days, and saw Nat having a meeting. I didn’t want to disturb him, so I walked past his table without saying anything, only to hear him say: ‘Now you’re a producer at Capitol, you don’t say hello to old friends anymore?”’ He was joking, of course. What a great guy he was to know.”
After handling promo and sales at small labels such as Tampa, Motif and Specialty, his first production job came with a Gerald Wiggins session. This led to overseeing exotica recordings with Arthur Lyman, earning him his first gold disc. Then, in 1959, having borrowed some money, Axelrod took the bold step of recording an album by West Coast hard bop saxophonist Harold Land at his own expense. Hi Fi bought it from him for $1200, and issued it as The Fox to critical acclaim in March 1960. Thereafter Axelrod worked in-house at Plaza Records, producing cash- in LPs – but small labels didn’t figure in his masterplan for long. “I always wanted to be a producer at Capitol, because it was the only major that was headquartered in Los Angeles rather than New York, and had most of the artists I liked,“ he says. He fulfilled his ambition by becoming a staff producer there in 1964, and immediately began to oversee a stream of successful records by Lou Rawls, David McCallum, Cannonball Adderley and others (as well as many obscurities, some of whom he can’t even recall), often in collaboration with the arranger H.B. Barnum. Asked about his own tastes in those days, he says “I always found time to listen to a lot of records, and of course in the 60s Capitol could get me whatever I wanted. Lalo Schiffrin was and is great, and John Barry was magnificent. He had that sound – the high register – that let you know it was him right away. But I tried hard not to allow myself to be influenced by contemporaries, only classical composers. I always liked Mahler and Ravel, and I adore Beethoven. He was magnificent. And Alban Berg, of course. As far as bands went, I loved the Beatles, of course, and always liked the Who. I wasn’t so keen on the Rolling Stones. I knew Brian Wilson in the 1960s, but I never worked with him. I never attended any Beach Boys sessions, because I find it so hard to keep my mouth shut when someone else is producing!” By 1967 he was itching to develop his own compositional talents, and therefore wrote and arranged Mass In F Minor, blending R&B, jazz and classical music to groundbreaking effect. It created a considerable stir, being described by Time magazine on December 29th 1967 as ‘one of the most venturesome of recent rock recordings, achieving a surprisingly successful blend of pounding rhythms, churchy organ, raucous improvisations and echoes of medieval plainsong’. Axelrod was in his element, and it was followed by Release Of An Oath (another adaptation of religious themes to a rock setting), two ambitious interpretations of works by William Blake, concept albums about ecology and the slave trade, an elliptical Hispanic set, a reworking of Handel’s Messiah, amongst much else. Axelrod discusses these in detail in the following pages. His output was phenomenal, but – as he has noted – “My wife and I weren’t getting along at all, so I’d rather be at Capitol at home. I was always recording.”


MASS IN F MINOR
(Reprise RLP 6275) 12/67
“This was the idea of my manager, a terrific guy named Lenny Poncher. I got home from a session at 4am one night in 1967, and was woken at 9:30 by my phone ringing. It was Lenny, saying “Can you write a rock mass?” I said “I can write anything!”, hung up and went back to sleep. But I called him back at 12, and before I knew it I was writing the album. The chance to write a Mass doesn’t come around very often! My only insistence was that it had to be sung in Latin. The problem was that I was under contract to Capitol, and the Electric Prunes (whom Lenny also managed) were signed to Reprise. Thankfully, the head of Capitol was an enlightened man named Alan Livingston, and he agreed to let the project go ahead as long as he could then put a record out under my name – and that’s how Song Of Innocence came about. Mass In F Minor was by the Prunes in name only. They weren’t really capable of playing that sort of music to the standard required. It has their bassist and drummer on it, but the players were mainly session guys. They tended to be older, and were very experienced. A lot of them had known me since I was starting out aged 19, and would call me ‘kid’ even when I was in my 50s! I always recorded the rhythm tracks first, then the orchestra, the brass, the reeds and so on. I believe that drums belong high in a mix – I’m not saying that’s the way everyone should do it, it’s just the way I do it. It was recorded in 3 days flat. There was no experimenting in the studio; everything was down, on the score. That’s the way I work. Dave Hassinger is credited as producer, but he was really an engineer, and a very good one. The album caused quite a stir, and by the end of the year it was being featured in Time magazine! By the way, the largest royalty check I ever got was when they used Kyrie Eleison in Easy Rider in 1969. I had no idea – I had a phone call from my publisher at Capitol, saying “You’re going to be in this picture. They’re not using a score, only records. I thought that was really great. The first time it had ever been done. But I haven’t received any royalties for that in years. All good things come to an end, trust me!”

SONG OF INNOCENCE
(Capitol ST 2982) 9/68
“By 1968 my work with David McCallum, Lou Rawls, Cannonball Adderley and others was bringing in 34% of Capitol’s gross. I could have done anything, so I jumped at the chance to interpret William Blake’s work in music. I’ve always felt a huge connection to Blake, both as a poet and a painter, and I’d been living with his work for many years by then. Blake was a trickster – his words often have meanings that aren’t immediately obvious, so I tried to insert similar unexpected twists and turns into my music. Capitol had a huge art library for their designers to drawn inspiration from, so I went down there and borrowed a two-volume set of Blake’s works, and had it next to me as I wrote. The pictures gave me ideas, and if you can’t get ideas from looking at Blake, you need to see a psychiatrist! I go into a trance when I’m writing, and it only took a week to complete. For the guitar parts I used Peter Wyant, from a band I produced called Hardwater. He was perfect because he wasn’t an experienced studio musician, so I knew he wouldn’t be too fancy. The guitar work needed to be simple, because I knew it would be a challenging enough work as it was. When the music was done, I got straight on with my next project, and didn’t think to ask Capitol to use a Blake image on the cover, so they came up with something themselves. The record got some great airplay, but unfortunately, Alan Livingston departed Capitol in the summer of 1968, and it got lost in the period of change that followed. In my view the company never recovered from his departure – he WAS Capitol Records. He believed in leaving producers alone, which is a great philosophy. Anyway, I recently read an article saying that Song Of Innocence changed music, by combining a rock rhythm section with an orchestra. That was pretty flattering. And you know what? I never returned the Blake books! I didn’t mean to keep them, I just forgot to give them back, and I still have them to this day. I guess they can afford a new set!”

RELEASE OF AN OATH
(Reprise RS 6316) 9/68
“This was another of Lenny Poncher’s ideas. He approached everything from a commercial viewpoint – that’s what made him such a great manager, the best I ever had. I wasn’t familiar with Jewish music at all, but I loved the experience. I had a free rein creatively – I always do, or else I wouldn’t do whatever it is in the first place. The album also came out under the Electric Prunes’ name, so people talk about the two Prunes albums as if they’re one entity – but in fact several months separated them, and the writing is completely different. I don’t know if it was ever performed live. If so, I wasn’t there. I wrote it, I produced it, it came out, I went on to the next one, and I didn’t look back. That’s the way it was in those days.”

SONGS OF EXPERIENCE
(Capitol SKAO 338) 10/69
“Even though Song Of Innocence got no marketing push, Capitol were happy for me to make a sequel, partly because Henry Stone (who owned the biggest one-stop in the whole South) told Stan Gortikov, who was President of Capitol by then, that I’m a genius, and should be making more albums. Next thing I know, the head of A&R tells me to make another album. I loved the music on Songs Of Experience, but I hated the cover – they had me wrapped in a giant toilet roll with some girl standing next to me. I thought it looked ridiculous, and it also sank without trace. At that time Capitol’s Vice-President of A&R was a guy named Voyle Gilmore. Those guys were like God back then. I got together with him for lunch in a restaurant sometime in 1971, by when he had left the company. He cheerfully told me that he’d deliberately killed the records that had appeared under my name, by ordering the head of promotion not to push them. Apparently I was more valuable to the label as a producer and arranger of other people’s work, and he didn’t want me getting carried away as an artist. I was furious. I asked him, “Why the hell didn’t you come to me and discuss it?” He just smiled and said “It was all a long time ago.” I thought, ‘Yeah, like, three years!’ And how wrong he was, anyway – my love was producing and arranging, and I never wanted a career only as a solo artist.”

EARTH ROT
(Capitol SKAO 456) 4/70
“Despite doing nothing with my previous records, towards the end of 1969 the sales department at Capitol asked me to write an album on an ecological theme. The environment was becoming a major preoccupation at the time, and they were building a marketing campaign around it. I was happy to oblige – I was passionate about the environment, and loved to go rock-climbing. I even climbed Yosemite around that time. My son Michael was about 19 and wanted to be a writer, so I thought I’d give him a shot, and we worked on it together. I found passages in the Book of Isaiah that I wanted to use, so he adapted those, as well as a Navajo prayer. I wanted to tell a story with that album. For the music I used lots of major and minor seconds, and the singers loved the dissonances because it was so different from what they were used to. Capitol was going to give it a proper push – they owned the biggest chain of record racks in college bookstores nationwide, and intended to promote it heavily in those, but then the Kent State shootings happened in early May. 100 major universities closed for 3 weeks, and that killed the album right there. I don’t tend to listen to my past work nowadays, but I do occasionally go back to Earth Rot. The dissonances pull me back in!”

PRIDE
(Warner Bros. WS 1848) 7/70
“In late 1969 George Harrison sent me a beautiful letter asking if I’d be interested in signing to Apple, so I spoke to him on the phone and explained that I was already under contract to Capitol as a producer. He guaranteed that I could keep my job there whilst recording for them, which was tempting – but I was George Martin’s liaison at Capitol, and he warned me off. He said to me, “Apple is an insane asylum, and I never go there myself.” I took his advice, and instead of signing with them I accepted an offer to make a one-off album for Warners, through a production company set up by my new manager, Joe Sutton. My older son Michael worked on the words again, and we went for a Spanish theme. I don’t remember why. We had a great time making it, but it was also done in three days flat, so I don’t have specific memories of it. I believe in swift sessions, and if you use the best studio musicians you don’t even need to rehearse. It’s tense and stressful, but also exhilarating, especially when the sidemen are your friends. The singer was a very talented guy named Noony Ricket, who handled all three vocal parts, which were overdubbed. Pride was barely released, and there were no reviews at all. Nowadays people talk about it being mysterious, but it was always a mystery! It simply disappeared, probably because Sutton had upset someone high-up at Warner Brothers.”

THE MESSIAH
(RCA LSP 4636) 11/71
“Sometime in the 1960s I got a nice letter sent to me at Capitol from a young guy named Ron Budnik. He wanted a career in the music industry, and wondered if I could give him some advice. I had my secretary schedule an appointment, and we talked. He was knocked out, because no one else he’d written to had replied. By 1971 Ron was working at RCA, and contacted me to ask whether I would be interested in recording the Messiah for them. I said, you bet I would! But I knew from the start it was going to be both different and difficult. I worked out arrangements for the sections I wanted to include, and used the usual session players – Carol Kaye on bass, Mike Deasy on guitar and so on. I thought it was an interesting piece, but when it was released, I was dismayed to see that they had printed my name far bigger and more prominently than Handel’s on the front cover. Oh, God, did I suffer for that! Reviewers had their knives sharpened from the moment they saw it. People forget that once something’s recorded, the artist ceases to have an input. I enjoyed the music, though.”

THE AUCTION
(Decca DL 7-5355) 8/72
“In the spring of 1971 Joe Sutton and I parted ways, and he became Vice-President of A&R at MCA. He knew that I liked to write words as well as music, and that I had an idea to do an album on the theme of slavery. Therefore I signed a deal to record The Auction for them in March 1972. I had grown up around blacks in South Los Angeles – as a kid I hardly had any white friends, and my mentor in the 1950s was Gerald Wiggins, a wonderful pianist. Black music is a point of departure for every kind of pop music – it was always the biggest influence on pop. I was pretty pleased with the album, and Cannonball – who produced it – loved it, but yet again it was poorly promoted and distributed. At one point there were something like 100,000 copies sitting in warehouses, when they should have been in stores. Part of the problem was that Sutton let his ambition get in the way of doing his existing job properly. He was too interested in climbing the ladder. Recently someone told me that a sealed copy of it sold at an auction in Amoeba Records here in L.A. for $150 – pretty ironic. Incidentally, the single they took off that, The Leading Citizen – that was about Richard Nixon.”

HEAVY AXE
(Fantasy F 9456) 7/74
“When things didn’t work out at MCA, I spoke to my old friend Ralph Kaffel, whom I’d known all that time ago when I was working at Hi-Fi in 1957 or so. By 1973 he was President of Fantasy, and asked me to go there. Believe it or not, the equipment at Fantasy was more up- to-date than at Capitol. I loved it – I almost lived there, I was doing so much work. But Heavy Axe was really Cannonball’s album. The sessions were a little tense because he and I had a huge argument (nothing to do with music), then we had to go back into the studio and work. One interesting thing on that album is that there’s no electric bass, but lots of Moog synthesizer played by Rudy Copeland. Cannon produced it and chose the songs. I wasn’t crazy about all of them: I didn’t like the Stevie Wonder song, Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing, and I didn’t really want to do the Carly Simon one, You’re So Vain – but it ended up being named Cover Record Of The Year by Record World, so what do I know? On the other hand, Paint It Black was really fun to do, and my personal favorite track I’ve ever written is on there – My Family. Everything came together with it; it goes through so many changes, then the end is quiet, and Gene Ammons’ tenor solo is a delight – just perfect. It’s one of the only things I’ve ever written that I can’t fault. That doesn’t happen often, believe me.”

SERIOUSLY DEEP
(Polydor PD 6050) 1975
“Things got a little ugly between Ralph and me at Fantasy, but then Jimmy Bowen offered me a deal at Polygram. I’d known him since 1960, and by then he was their West Coast head of A&R. It was a huge job. Seriously Deep was produced by Jimmy and Cannon, but I chose the musicians, including the great drummer Ndugu Chancler, whom I’d known since he was 20. I thought he was great. As you probably realized by now, I take drumming very seriously when I write – people may not know it, but I actually played the drums live in the 50s, as a duo with Gerald Wiggins (he never paid me for those gigs, but I’m not complaining – everyone knows, the drummer gets all the girls!). I was never recorded as a drummer, but I always knew exactly what I wanted from them in the studio. It was the last time I worked with Cannon (who died of a stroke in August 1975), but the album did nothing – Bowen resigned just as it was coming out, and it vanished. We’re great friends to this day, though. He has a great sense of humor, he really does. People don’t know this, they think he’s all businesslike, but trust me, he loves to have fun. And to play golf, seven days a week!”


By the late 70s, Axelrod’s career had slowed down, with personal and drug problems starting to hamper his ability to work effectively. A couple more albums appeared – Strange Ladies (1977) and Marchin’ (1980) – but as the 80s progressed, he found it harder to get his music across. In 1986 his beloved wife Terri was badly injured in a car accident, leading to severe financial hardship. “By the late 1980s things had turned bad,” he states candidly, of a time when he was all but destitute. “But then Jimmy Bowen called from Nashville and asked me to arrange a couple of albums for him. Thereafter my work suddenly started appearing on CD. I was just as startled as anyone else! The turning point was when Josh Davis – DJ Shadow – and James Lavelle asked me to remix Rabbit In The Headlights for their UNKLE project, and my version became a hit. A lot of the impetus came from London – one of my favourite cities in the world. If I was younger man, I’d be living there.” Axelrod’s work began to be sampled widely, by artists including Lauryn Hill, De La Soul, DJ Shadow and Cypress Hill, offering him both a source of income and the respect of a new generation of fans. His renaissance culminated in an ecstatically-received performance of his work (under his baton) at the Royal Festival Hall in London on March 17th 2004, inspiring him to keep writing and recording well into his eighth decade. “After you’ve made a record, you hope it will stay around, but all you can do is hope,” he modestly concludes. “I’m not the Beatles! I don’t even have copies of my records – it’s hard to keep hold of them when you’re busy, with people going in and out the whole time. But I never look back. I don’t think that you gain by looking back. I always try to look forwards.”

Footnote: Despite being demonstrably one of America’s pre-eminent modern composer-arrangers, no institution has ever approached Axelrod with a view to preserving his original scores, all of which are still in his possession.

David Axelrod As told to Richard Morton Jack