Michael Fonfara, Lou Reed & The Everyman Band
Alejandro Morales, New Radicals, the shadow of Phil Spector, paid subscriptions
Reading about the recent passing of Michael Fonfara made me revisit the records Lou Reed made with Fonfara and with Reed's backing band from 1974-1980. This became a transnational period for Reed, and he found musical support with a group of talented musicians who came from outside the rock and roll galaxy.
How I became familiar with keyboard player Michael Fonfara is through his association with Lou Reed from 1974 through 1980, a period when Reed produced both excellent and mediocre work largely due to his addiction to amphetamines and alcohol. Fonfara's career existed before he worked with Reed and it continued afterward, but a lot of his most visible work was done during his years with Reed's band.
Fonfara was first hired by Reed to work on the sessions for his 1974 album Sally Can't Dance, the follow-up to the live album Rock & Roll Animal. Reed initially pitched the album as an R&B album, putting himself in the role of a sarcastic, white James Brown. Fonfara, already Reed's de facto musical director, understood what Reed wanted, and he was able to deliver it largely because he and the other musicians in the band (along with bassist Prakash John, drummer Pentti Glan, and guitarist Danny Weis) were previously in the group Blackstone together. Blackstone (originally The Black Stone Rangers) was a pretty straightforward blues-influenced rock outfit that fell apart after a year and one album.
"It was up to us to more or less take these lyrics and put them with songs that were more like R & B than the rock-and-roll style he had been doing,” Fonfara told Reed biographer Anthony DeCurtis. When Fonfara brought in a horn section of crack studio aces and background singers, he remembers that "Lou was pretty gung ho about it. We were doing the job that he wanted us to do.” (DeCurtis, Anthony. Lou Reed (p. 200). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.)
Fonfara doesn't appear on the original eight tracks that comprise Coney Island Baby, but drummer Michael Suchorsky and bassist Bruce Yaw, who would become part of Reed's touring band following the album's release made their first appearances. Fonfara played on sessions for some of the albums that appear on Coney Island Baby in January of 1975, playing on the song "Downtown Dirt," which didn't appear on the album, and different versions of three album tracks: "Crazy Feeling," "She's My Best Friend," and "Coney Island Baby." These tracks were released as bonus tracks on the album's 30th anniversary deluxe edition.
The band remained intact for Reed's first album on the Arista label, Rock & Roll Heart, with Fonfara, Suchorsky, and Yaw being joined by saxophonist Marty Fogel. This band also supported Reed on the tour for Rock & Roll Heart and played on Reed's production project for Nelson Slater, who was a friend of Reed's from his Syracuse days. Victor Bockis mentions the record in his Reed biography, Transformer:
After finishing [Rock and Roll Heart], however, Lou managed to muster the energy to produce an album, called Wild Angel, for a friend of Lou’s at Syracuse, Nelson Slater. “That was one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Reed commented. “RCA released it to about three people, I think. So no one very much noticed it. I think we sold six copies.”
But the rock press did notice the freer, jazzier vibe of Reed's latest band, and went out of their way to pan it. Speaking of a John Rockwell review of a show from the Rock & Roll Heart tour, Anthony DeCurtis writes:
While Rockwell complimented the band’s technical skills (“as fluent an ensemble as Mr. Reed has had”), he took issue with the music as a “rather faceless, jazzish idiom” that lacked “a true rock aura.” It’s telling that as punk was beginning to strip rock down to its absolute basics, Reed began to reexplore his youthful fascination with jazz and toured with the most elaborate staging of his career. (DeCurtis, Anthony. Lou Reed (p. 250). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.)
In 1977 Reed recorded Street Hassle, a rough-edged album that combined live concert tape with studio recordings, all processed through binaural recording. In binaural recording, two microphones are placed in the studio or venue in an attempt to mimic the stereophonic sound of hearing the performance live. The album also made use of live performances recorded in Germany from which the audience is completely removed from the mix (except brief flashes at the end of some songs, left on purpose) and these tracks were further enhanced in the studio.
The same band, with the addition of bassist Ellard 'Moose' Boles, worked together on the series of Bottom Line performances that became Lou Reed Live: Take No Prisoners and on the album The Bells. Reed dropped the live album in Fonfara's lap, leaving the musical director the task of selecting and splicing together the performances to be used. When Reed returned from his vacation, he reportedly didn't like what Fonfara had done and made him redo the album.
The Bells was an ambitious album that was the closest Reed came to embracing the NYC jazz loft aesthetic of his backing band. Marty Fogel knew Don Cherry and introduced Reed to the renowned free jazz trumpet player during a chance encounter at an airport while on the 1976 tour. Reed invited Cherry to sit in on a live show, and the trumpet player agreed. As DeCurtis describes it:
In the shows the two men played together, Cherry pushed the jazz element in Reed’s sound to the edge, dramatizing Reed’s fondness for the out jazz Cherry had with Ornette Coleman—the sort of music Reed used to love to play on his radio show in college. The band, too, lifted off with Cherry on board. (DeCurtis, Anthony. Lou Reed (pp. 249-250). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.)
Cherry also contributed to The Bells, an album on which Reed utilized the NYC jazz loft aesthetic of his band to great effect. The opener, "Stupid Man" (one of three tracks Reed co-wrote with Nils Lofgren) features Reed's agitated vocal over a sound that is highlighted by the combination of Cherry's trumpet and Fogel's delicate soprano saxophone. Even the goofy "Disco Mystic" works up some sparks courtesy of Fogel's honking tenor sax and some synth work by Fonfara. Reed wrote some great songs for The Bells, including "City Lights" and "Families" and the band goes out on the limb with him, supporting his impulses on the nine-minute title track, a glorious meeting of free jazz and poetry. The Bells is one of Lou Reed's best albums and it marked a creative peak of the. the period during which these musicians had worked with Reed to create something that, while transitional in Reed's career, was musically very potent. But while critics found some things to like about the record, it had no commercial potential whatsoever, and it spelled the end of Reed's once-promising relationship with Arista.
But Reed owned the label one more album, and rather than satisfying his contractual obligation viciously, as he had when he handed RCA Metal Machine Music, he and Fonfara sought to record an actual album of new songs. The resulting album, Growing Up In Public, saw Fonfara elevated to the position of co-writer and co-producer with Reed. But the writing was on the wall. Reed married Sylvia Morales right after he finished recording Growing Up In Public and went into rehab, moved to a house in New Jersey, and entered a new phase in his career, and that meant a new band. Reed informed Fonfara that he was disbanding the group pursuant to his period of rehab. When he reconvened for The Blue Mask, Reed had a new, rock-oriented band with a sound that would propel him through the creation of a success that had eluded him.
Fonfara continued to work as a session musician and play with the Canadian blues band Downchild. In 1982 the quartet of Suchorsky, Fogel, and Yaw joined guitarist David Torn and recorded their debut album Everyman Band for ECM records. The record makes clear that the rapport these musicians shared on various Lou Reed projects was part of a deeper musical conversation that took place outside the realm of rock music. Though the Everyman Band albums are sometimes characterized as jazz fusion, they are fusion only in the vaguest sense of the word. Because Torn's electric guitar playing is outside the normal jazz realm, sounding much more like something you'd expect to hear on a King Crimson record it's easy to buy the band's frenetic work on their debut album as more of a progressive rock thing, If you were familiar with the music of Ornette Coleman you might find some kinship between this group and his Prime Time band.
The group's second and final album Early Warning is perhaps the more accessible album, incorporating more textures than the frenetic first LP, with selections that are by turns ambient, heavy, free, and bluesy. Everyman Band toured Europe and was well received there, but in the U.S. they went unnoticed or received poor reviews. Neither an October 1982 performance at The Bottom Line nor an appearance two years later with Don Cherry at Tramps was reviewed well by Jon Pareles in the New York Times.
Both records are worth hunting down if you have any interest in 1980s NYC jazz that was outside the Young Lions' attempt, led by Wynton Marsalis, to write free jazz and electric jazz fusion out of the history of the music. In 1989 Marty Fogel released an album titled Many Bobbing Heads, At Last. The album featured David Torn on guitar, with a new rhythm section of Dean Johnson (b) and Michael Shrieve (d) and built on the music of Early Warning, adding in doses of reggae, rock, and Afrobeat with Fogel's trademark tenor sound that is, at times, reminiscent of the robust playing of Sonny Rollins.
Bonus Tracks
The Chicago Reader, a free weekly, runs Steve Krakow's series "The Secret History of Chicago Music," an essential resource for info on musicians, past and present, who have made Chicago music what it is. His latest installment is about Alejandro Morales, who was not only a fixture on Chicago's underground music scene but also a community activist whose recent death leaves a hole in the artistic and cultural identity of his home town. "Willo (Alejandro's brother) says Alex started his first band in the early 90s, when the punk, noise, ska, and grunge scenes were "on fire" in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. "Falta de Juicio, a psychedelic punk-rock band from our hometown, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico," he says. "They played in some of the most popular music venues in Puerto Rico, including Longbranch in Aguadilla and La Tea in Old San Juan. Alex played guitar back then, not drums . . . yet!"
This week we found out that the group New Radicals will reunite to perform their (only) hit single "You Get What You Give" for Joe Biden's Presidential Inaugural tomorrow, 1/20/2021. The 1998 song was a favorite of Biden's deceased son Beau, and the President-elect asked the group to perform it personally. The band was co-founded by Gregg Alexander and Danielle Brisebois, who wrote the songs for the album together. Brisebois was a child actress who played Stephanie on late episodes of All In the Family and on Archie Bunker's Place. Here's Vanity Fair's reportage on the event, a great piece on the song from 2015 by the incomparable Annie Zaleski, and here is the original video for the song:
The death of convicted murderer and legendary record producer Phil Spector has produced the kind of uncomfortable cultural moment that any keen observer always knew that it would. It's perfectly obvious to any reader that Spector was a megalomaniac and an abuser of the very artists with whom he worked, especially the women. In addition, his important production work from the early to mid-sixties has come to sound dated and relies heavily on the work of the artists, musicians, and engineers who performed on the records. Still, he created the sound from what he heard in his head, and he was one of a handful of visionary producers who realized the impact that pop music, created specifically for teenagers, could have. Spector's ability to continue to behave as he dd is an indictment of the white male dominance of American society as well as the intense misogyny of the music industry.
I'm providing a couple of pieces here that speak to Spector's legacy without ignoring the real damage he caused his victims.
The first is from The Chicago Reader (again), a review of the 2010 documentary The Agony & the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, a flawed British documentary that aired on the BBC. J.R. Jones doesn't shy away from discussing some problematic aspects of the film, and in doing so raises the curtain on the fact that Spector is now a convicted murderer and that will always be his primary distinction.
In It's Time to Recognize the Ronettes as Rock and Roll Pioneers Hilarie Ashton argues that the details of vocal style, fashion, grooming, and speech marked the Ronettes as a rock act rather than a more demure pop band. In making her case Ashton removes the focus from Phil and concentrates more on the talent and message of Veronica Webb, Estelle Bennett, and Nedra Talley.
In 2009, as Phil Spector was about to go on trial for a second time (the first ending with a hung jury), I began to research and write what was intended to be a lengthy piece about Spector, his work as a producer, and the violent, misogynistic behavior that had finally landed him in prison. "It’s like the other American Idol" I wrote at the time. "A pool of two hundred candidates in the jury selection phase of music industry legend Phil Spector’s murder trial will be questioned individually in a little over a week, and eventually will be winnowed down to a final twelve who are to hear the case."
The piece remained unfinished for many reasons. Today I am publishing an excerpt from that piece, one that focuses on Spector's dominance of Ronnie and his work following the "River Deep Mountain High" sessions with Tina Turner. It doesn't reproduce the arc of the full piece, which was meant to highlight all the failures through the years to hold Spector accountable for his horrendous actions, but it makes clear that he was toxic and less influential after 1968.
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Leaving you this week with Stevie Wonder live in 2007 performing "Too High," a song that originally appeared on his album Innervisions.
Wishing everyone a hopeful week, and I'll be back next Tuesday with New Music of Note.