Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest.
Speaker 1: His name is Lawrence Juber, and what can I say?
Speaker 1: He is one of the world's great guitarists, renown on
Speaker 1: his own right. He toured with Paul McCartney and wings Uh.
Speaker 1: He's played on just about everything in the world if
Speaker 1: you like them, the theme to James Bond, The Spy
Speaker 1: Who Loved Me or The Roseanne Show, that's him playing.
Speaker 1: He's been a session player with countless countless albums UM
Speaker 1: and and just as knowledgeable about music as as anyone
Speaker 1: in the world. UM. More than just a guitarist, he's
Speaker 1: a musicologist and a historian of music. He basically sat
Speaker 1: here with a guitar in his lap for ninety minutes
Speaker 1: and illustrated various things throughout our conversation. And if you
Speaker 1: stick around for the podcast extras, you'll hear not only
Speaker 1: play three songs, but demonstrate pieces of UM various other songs.
Speaker 1: I have a buddy who is a guitar aficionado sitting
Speaker 1: in the UM control room listening to the whole conversation,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to be able to get the
Speaker 1: grin off his face for about six months, so, with
Speaker 1: no further ado, my session with l J. Lawrence Juber.
Speaker 1: My extra special guest this week is Lawrence Duber. Born
Speaker 1: and raised in London. He began playing guitar at age thirteen.
Speaker 1: He graduated university where he was immediately picked up as
Speaker 1: a session guitarist with famed producer George Martin. Later, he's
Speaker 1: invited to play with Paul McCartney's band Wings for their
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies tour. He has been a studio musician on
Speaker 1: thousands of sessions, played for numerous television and film soundtracks.
Speaker 1: When you hear this theme to James Bond, The Spy
Speaker 1: Who Loved Me, you're listening to Lawrence's work. Voted Guitarist
Speaker 1: of the Year, Top acoustic players of all time by
Speaker 1: numerous magazines. He has solo album since two and has
Speaker 1: won two Grammys. No lesser guitarist than Pete Townsend has
Speaker 1: called him a master. Lawrence Duber, Welcome back to Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Barry One TV show that you won't be
Speaker 1: hearing my work on any longer is Roseanne? Yes? Was
Speaker 1: that your work on the show? Oh yeah, that's you
Speaker 1: on the original. I played on the original first six
Speaker 1: years of the original, and now then the reboot also,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna guess that those uh royalties are going
Speaker 1: to stop coming in. Well, you don't get a lot
Speaker 1: of royalties from that. There is a musicians Union fund
Speaker 1: that covers secondary markets on television and move so a
Speaker 1: very small percentage of the distributors gross goes into this fund,
Speaker 1: which then gets distributed amongst all the musicians that played
Speaker 1: on it. So I played on, for example, Polka Hunters.
Speaker 1: You know there were you know, hundreds of full orchestra. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like a t piece orchestra and all of
Speaker 1: that stuff. So I'm gonna guess it's a little different
Speaker 1: for let's say, bare Naked Ladies playing the theme song
Speaker 1: to The Big Bang. That's different. I remember having a
Speaker 1: discussion with Danny Alfman because originally when Fox was simply
Speaker 1: syndicated and not a network, and that's when the Simpsons started,
Speaker 1: right that, Danny said that he was shocked when he
Speaker 1: started getting royalties from Saturday morning cartoon shows. I forget
Speaker 1: what it was he'scored, but how much bigger those were
Speaker 1: from the network shows than he was getting from the
Speaker 1: Simpsons and because eventually the Simpsons became you know, a
Speaker 1: full on, full on network. Fox became a network, and
Speaker 1: then you know, that's a wall white thing. But that
Speaker 1: you know, that's as cap and b M I am
Speaker 1: that those royalties come through that. For musicians, there's a
Speaker 1: sag After Fund that was set up recently that's picking
Speaker 1: up stuff from foreign markets and and um other areas.
Speaker 1: And then there is the Secondary Markets Fund, which is
Speaker 1: you know, so if you're a musician, if you're a
Speaker 1: violinist who plays on multiple movie scores, you know, once
Speaker 1: a year you get a reasonable check. I mean it
Speaker 1: all kind of you know, helps oil the wheels of
Speaker 1: being a in the gig economy. So so let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about that. I was gonna discuss some
Speaker 1: of your early history, but we could circle back to that.
Speaker 1: How have things changed in terms of compensation from musicians
Speaker 1: And we should really discuss the possible changes in copyright
Speaker 1: rules since the last time you were here, there were
Speaker 1: a number of big cases decided and you pretty much
Speaker 1: predicted them all dead on Okay, different hats. Um let
Speaker 1: me put on my father hat. My dad had because
Speaker 1: my daughter, Elsie is has become quite successful as a songwriter.
Speaker 1: She has a cut on Beyonce's album She had Shore
Speaker 1: Mendez Mercy that was a hit last year. She wrote that,
Speaker 1: UM a bunch of stuff and she's working with like
Speaker 1: the highest doesn't get much bigger than that. And where
Speaker 1: it affects her is the migration to streaming rather than
Speaker 1: physical sales has had an impact because the writer's share
Speaker 1: coming from the mechanical royalties. You know that nine point
Speaker 1: one cents per track per album or singles, so that's
Speaker 1: sold that, Yeah, because those sales don't happen. The streaming
Speaker 1: revenue is quite different because the royalty structure on streaming
Speaker 1: is actually because of the digital millennium act from the
Speaker 1: that's tilted towards performers rather than the writers. So the performers.
Speaker 1: I get more money from my cover tunes being played
Speaker 1: on Pandora for example, then I do from my my
Speaker 1: own stuff as a as a writer. Um, I don't
Speaker 1: get you know, it's a fractional royalty. Is that is
Speaker 1: that appropriate? Shouldn't we be rewarding the creators of content
Speaker 1: as a as a well, but but from a performer
Speaker 1: is a creator of content? I mean you go back
Speaker 1: to terrestrial radio. And still to this day, performers don't
Speaker 1: get any royalty from terrestrial radio. I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: big bone of contention, UM, whereas they do from streaming UM.
Speaker 1: Whereas on terrestrial the writers get a significant the writers
Speaker 1: and publishers get a significant share, but the performance don't.
Speaker 1: So that was why performers started putting their names on compositions.
Speaker 1: You know, El This didn't write Heartbreak Hotel. He just
Speaker 1: you know, his manager made sure that his name was
Speaker 1: on there. So let's talk about the shrinking of the
Speaker 1: creative spaces as you've described it. Some of the new
Speaker 1: copyright rules that haven't passed legislation in the US yet,
Speaker 1: as well as some of the court cases have really
Speaker 1: hemmed in what creators can do. And going back to
Speaker 1: i'l see my daughter, I mean, she won't listen to
Speaker 1: top forty radio because she doesn't want to be influenced
Speaker 1: by what her peers are currently writing. So she's, you know,
Speaker 1: she's listening to she's listening to old is stuff and
Speaker 1: you know, like legacy stuff, because you have to be
Speaker 1: very careful not to subconsciously reproduce something that's you know,
Speaker 1: currently in in out there is it easy to get
Speaker 1: something stuck in your head and have it just it's
Speaker 1: what it is easy and you don't realize it sometimes
Speaker 1: that stuff is creeping in, well, that Tom Petty case
Speaker 1: with us Sam, but well, but that you know, and
Speaker 1: that's where the creative space shrinks to the extent that
Speaker 1: there are certain formulas, there are certain melodic formulas that
Speaker 1: so give us an example, well, that's an example, the
Speaker 1: Tom Petty one with with Sam Smith that it was.
Speaker 1: You can go to that space very easily without realizing
Speaker 1: that you're stepping on somebody else's copy. Right. That's where
Speaker 1: the legal system kind of is an equalizer with that.
Speaker 1: Where it becomes a problem, and a very very dangerous
Speaker 1: step is when you start talking about groove, when you
Speaker 1: start talking about rhythm, Yeah, because that's it. And there's
Speaker 1: very mystifying stuff about the Bloodlines case because it was
Speaker 1: based on the sheet music and yet the decisions were
Speaker 1: made on the basis of of the groove, which is
Speaker 1: not contained in the sheet right as part of it anyway,
Speaker 1: And it's understandable, but but not in the strict copyright sense.
Speaker 1: But but when you go in history, one thing that
Speaker 1: you you really cannot copyright is harmonic sequences because you
Speaker 1: can go back to the Renaissance and find chord sequences
Speaker 1: that are still in use today. An example of that
Speaker 1: being there's a a sequence called the pasi mezzo moderno pasmetzo,
Speaker 1: being a dance move. It's like a step and a
Speaker 1: half and the that sequence is like it's one four
Speaker 1: one five one four one five one. Now that in Elizabethan,
Speaker 1: England became known as the Gregory Walker. Interesting story. Thomas Morley,
Speaker 1: who was a composer, referred to it as such because
Speaker 1: Gregory was was actually a barbershop. It was a slang
Speaker 1: expression for a barbershop. And if you walked into a barbershop,
Speaker 1: there will be instruments hanging on the wall, and you know,
Speaker 1: so you're waiting instead of reading a magazine because they
Speaker 1: didn't have they didn't have the guitar. You well, git
Speaker 1: turn or loot or whatever. And that was the court
Speaker 1: sequence that will be played. So if you walked into
Speaker 1: a Gregory that's what you would hear. It was so common.
Speaker 1: It was like the twelve bar blues of the Renaissance
Speaker 1: era that's still being used. I mean, they're going to
Speaker 1: put me in the movies they're going to make a
Speaker 1: big star out of me. You know, it's that sequence.
Speaker 1: Even I saw her standing there is basically that sequence
Speaker 1: when the Saints go marching in and and there are
Speaker 1: certain sequences that are used. I mean, there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of Australian guys that put together all the songs that
Speaker 1: use one particular sequence that has been on hit records
Speaker 1: for the last fifty years. And and so when you
Speaker 1: start dealing with harmony, then you're really in trouble because
Speaker 1: there's only so many harmonic moves. And it's like trying
Speaker 1: to copyright grammar. It's like saying, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: you wrote a novel and it's full of sentences, therefore
Speaker 1: we own that copyright. That's you don't have the right
Speaker 1: to do that. I mean, it's that basic. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of where it was going with Um with the
Speaker 1: Stairway to Heaven, was that that particular sequence was a
Speaker 1: fairly generic sequence that you could actually track back to
Speaker 1: the early Baroque. We were discussing some of the copyright
Speaker 1: issues that have come up, and you referenced the risk
Speaker 1: when we start copyrighting the equivalent of grammar in music
Speaker 1: and mentioned some of the earlier baroque um chords that
Speaker 1: everybody seems to use kind of hard to copyright. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't copyright that, and the same reason you can't
Speaker 1: copyright groove. It's just it's it's too it's too generic,
Speaker 1: it's too much part of the fabric of music. You know.
Speaker 1: I'm wearing my music college just because I I when
Speaker 1: I went to college, I studied music and musicology. I
Speaker 1: didn't actually study guitar. I didn't do like a conservatory route.
Speaker 1: I was always self taught on guitar. I just really
Speaker 1: wanted to learn music, a music history, and just the
Speaker 1: whole context of it. So, so when you look at
Speaker 1: some of the copyright cases that have been around, how
Speaker 1: often do you see something and say, oh, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: from the fires or is that overstating it? Well, that's
Speaker 1: overstating it a little bit. I mean, most of the
Speaker 1: copyright cases that have gained the copyright cases that have
Speaker 1: gained news recently really are just in that kind of blurredline,
Speaker 1: stairway to Heaven kind of realm. Now, it didn't help
Speaker 1: with with Zeppelin that they have a history of ploining
Speaker 1: other people's compositions and over the years they've had to
Speaker 1: start giving, you know, giving credit to the people that
Speaker 1: they borrowed from. Now you go back to before there
Speaker 1: was copyright, and it was just perfectly common for composers
Speaker 1: to take particular melodic phrases or um I mean, Bark
Speaker 1: would borrow German folk songs or drinking songs all the
Speaker 1: time he was writing a cantata for the Sunday morning service.
Speaker 1: He wanted a melody that the congregation would instantly recognize,
Speaker 1: not have to compose something from from scratch. So a
Speaker 1: drinking song shows up in church, is that what he
Speaker 1: could be? Very much so it could be the peasant cantata,
Speaker 1: you know, that's that's that kind of approach. And there
Speaker 1: are certain generic sequences that were always used because they
Speaker 1: were familiar. In the Baroque era, there was a sequence
Speaker 1: called the Folia. That is, that particular sequence was well
Speaker 1: used all the way through to Beethoven. Rachmaninoff used it.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was just it was a standard sequence
Speaker 1: with its own melody attached. And then you get the
Speaker 1: the what was known as the the Andalusian cadence, which
Speaker 1: is and if you think of the number of tunes,
Speaker 1: like you know, walk Don't Run and Run Away and
Speaker 1: all these songs that use that sequence. There's no copyright
Speaker 1: on that. You's got a very cinematic feel. You could
Speaker 1: see it just before a sword fight or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's got that Spanish thing to it.
Speaker 1: But but I mean I found examples of that going
Speaker 1: back to, you know, the mid fifteen hundreds, I've been
Speaker 1: transcribing loop pieces for I'm doing a folio on the
Speaker 1: evolution of finger style guitar for for how Leonard and
Speaker 1: I've gone back to The earliest piece I have is
Speaker 1: fifteen oh seven. Attempt to play it right now. So
Speaker 1: from learning, how do you get from loot to a
Speaker 1: modern guitar? What are the intervening steps? You're dealing with
Speaker 1: the basic concept of an instrument with a long neck
Speaker 1: and frets and strings. I mean, that's that's a kind
Speaker 1: of generic instrument. It's in organology, which is a study
Speaker 1: of instruments, is that's a long necked loot, even if
Speaker 1: it's not actually like the bowl backed loot of the Renaissance.
Speaker 1: So there are various other instruments that kind of developed
Speaker 1: parallel with it. The earliest guitar you get is the
Speaker 1: earliest illustration is about four five that far back well,
Speaker 1: and they go back earlier, but they're not specifically guitar.
Speaker 1: There gitterns and citterns and similar instruments. But in the Renaissance,
Speaker 1: the loot was the dominant instrument, except in Spain, which
Speaker 1: had the vihuela, which looked like a guitar but was
Speaker 1: actually strung like a loot, and and all you have
Speaker 1: to do change one string and you're in you're in
Speaker 1: lute tuning, whereas you know that's guitar tuning. I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's so you can play those kinds of pieces.
Speaker 1: It evolved from the Renaissance, which was small instrument, almost
Speaker 1: like a ukulele. The Baroque guitar added an extra string,
Speaker 1: so you went from four strings or four courses because
Speaker 1: they were double strategy, to five, and then roundabout sevent
Speaker 1: eighty you get to the six string guitar. So the
Speaker 1: modern guitar really dates from there. But but you can
Speaker 1: track the history of fretted instruments that were played with
Speaker 1: the fingers going back even to the medieval ere. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's there was a john the looter was was on
Speaker 1: the royal roles in England getting four shillings a week
Speaker 1: in like twelve eighty five. I mean it goes back
Speaker 1: that far. The professional looter, the professional from the from
Speaker 1: the royal court. That that's fascinating. So you mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that the space for creators of all types is getting
Speaker 1: hemmed in and shrinking a little bit. How are we
Speaker 1: seeing that manifest itself in minor times. Well, the main
Speaker 1: manifestation of it is the way that sampling has has
Speaker 1: kind of created this collaborative, collective environment for writing it,
Speaker 1: which is why you might see a dozen writers on
Speaker 1: a song, because sometimes the songs are just created in
Speaker 1: a very um fractional way where somebody will write the hook,
Speaker 1: and then somebody else will write the verse, and and
Speaker 1: maybe a producer or two will come up with beats,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, so all those elements are now
Speaker 1: embedded in the copyright. It used to be that it
Speaker 1: was simply melody and lyrics, and that's still what the
Speaker 1: law says. But the convention since hip hop, really the
Speaker 1: convention is that if you contribute to the the actual track,
Speaker 1: that that gives you a writer share. But a lot
Speaker 1: of the people that are doing that aren't musicians. They
Speaker 1: know how to manipulate sounds, but they're not necessarily musical producers, engineers,
Speaker 1: anyone who's well engineers typically don't get part of that,
Speaker 1: but they will be in the Music Modernization Act, they're
Speaker 1: going to create a royalty for producers and for engineers.
Speaker 1: But if it's anything like what the musicians get from
Speaker 1: the sound Exchange side of it. As a session musician,
Speaker 1: there's five is devoted to the background people as opposed
Speaker 1: to to the record label to the performer. But the
Speaker 1: way that that gets tracked is very difficult because sound
Speaker 1: exchange you can only learn it from either the meta
Speaker 1: information that goes in the spreadsheet that's submitted with the recording,
Speaker 1: or they get it from the Musicians Union, from the
Speaker 1: musicians Union contracts, but very few records go through the union.
Speaker 1: You know, the union is much stronger on the TV
Speaker 1: a movie side of things than it is on the
Speaker 1: record side of things. Why do you think that is
Speaker 1: having it's well, it's part of it is the nature
Speaker 1: of the way records are made. And part of it
Speaker 1: is if you're going to put together they're an orchestra
Speaker 1: to play on a movie, you really need to have
Speaker 1: the union involved in that. Because there are scales, there's
Speaker 1: you know, which is why producers have been going to
Speaker 1: Prague and to Budapest and to you know, Seattle to
Speaker 1: do stuff nonunion, because they don't then have to deal
Speaker 1: with the other ramification of it, which is what I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, which is the secondary markets fund, where they
Speaker 1: resent having to give this minute portion to the musicians.
Speaker 1: Even though the teams just get their share and you know,
Speaker 1: the other unions get their share, the musicians have always
Speaker 1: been kind of backled off to the side. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that's fascinating. But but in terms of the creative space,
Speaker 1: I just think that there are certain generic sequences that
Speaker 1: are built into music making, and at some point if
Speaker 1: you start to to make those copyrightable, then you really
Speaker 1: limit what can be done. Let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about some of the unusual tunings that you do that
Speaker 1: allow you to play things that a regular guitar really
Speaker 1: can't play. And during the break you moved over to
Speaker 1: dad gad tuning. What does dad gad do that the
Speaker 1: regular standard guitar tuning doesn't allow. Well, this is dad goad,
Speaker 1: which gives me three D strings and to a strings
Speaker 1: energy string, which means that for one thing. I have
Speaker 1: the kind of sound of octaves that is like a
Speaker 1: twelve almost like a twelve string. And then because there
Speaker 1: are two adjacent scale tones, a G and an A,
Speaker 1: that gives me the opportunity to do these kind of
Speaker 1: cascading patterns, which actually, interestingly enough, it is one of
Speaker 1: the things that's characteristic of baroque guitar because on the
Speaker 1: barroke guitar, like on a ukulele, the bottom two strings
Speaker 1: were often tuned up an octave, so you get this
Speaker 1: kind of cross fingering where where like things can sustain
Speaker 1: so instead of gives it a different kind of texture.
Speaker 1: But I just found that it's great for articulating pop songs. Really,
Speaker 1: you want me to play something I mentioned earlier, I
Speaker 1: mentioned Runaway as being an example of the Andalusian cadence.
Speaker 1: That's that's wonderful. And for people who are just listening
Speaker 1: to this and not viewing it, you're simultaneously playing the melody,
Speaker 1: the vocals, and the background with them all at the
Speaker 1: same time. There's no overdubs. This is live. You just
Speaker 1: basically pulled the guitar out and started playing that. We're
Speaker 1: not we're not running multiple loops around, which is what
Speaker 1: finger style guitar is. It's the reality to play all
Speaker 1: the parts because you're using the sum and you know,
Speaker 1: typically through the three principal right hand fingers, and then
Speaker 1: being in that tuning also gives me the capability of
Speaker 1: of allowing some of the middle the inner parts to
Speaker 1: work more more resonantly than they than they would in
Speaker 1: standard tuning. And that's because you have the three G
Speaker 1: it's part of it, it's part of it. It's just
Speaker 1: it's and it's a suspended tuning, whereas standard tuning is
Speaker 1: actually kind of an E minor tuning, so it kind
Speaker 1: of is more self defining. Whereas with that gadded there's there.
Speaker 1: You don't have a major third in the tuning. That's
Speaker 1: the beauty of standard tuning is it does have that
Speaker 1: third in it, which makes major chords actually flow in
Speaker 1: a very interesting fashion. And you go back again to
Speaker 1: the Baroque and they had a system where they laid
Speaker 1: out all the chords and you could learn how to
Speaker 1: play rhythm guitar strung guitar just by following this what
Speaker 1: they called alphabeto system and you learn the shapes, and
Speaker 1: Dad add it's not really about shapes for me, it's
Speaker 1: it's that's the discovery mechanism used to find the inner
Speaker 1: workings of the song within that tune. You've described it
Speaker 1: as a vertical approach as opposed to a horizontal approach. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the I'm looking at what's happening on every particular
Speaker 1: beat rather than a very like a more linear kind
Speaker 1: of approach. So because I'm trying to developed like a richness,
Speaker 1: bring out the scenarity of the guitar so that it
Speaker 1: doesn't the sound doesn't die, but keeps going, so that
Speaker 1: it has its own internal life. So how does that
Speaker 1: compare with other instruments such as a piano, where you
Speaker 1: pretty much have every note right there in front of
Speaker 1: there you go, you know, it's the the whole spectrum
Speaker 1: is right there in front of you on the piano.
Speaker 1: On the guitar, you have to have kind of a
Speaker 1: virtual piano in your head at least the spectrum that
Speaker 1: you know the spectrum instruments. And this is something that
Speaker 1: I try and encourage music teachers to understand is that
Speaker 1: their guitar players are actually more musically cognizant then than
Speaker 1: the piano players. Maybe because on the guitar you really
Speaker 1: have to understand. If you really want to advance with it,
Speaker 1: you have to understand how the notes relate to each other.
Speaker 1: Whereas on the piano you can pretty much just look
Speaker 1: at the fingering patterns and just follow that. Um. But
Speaker 1: if you want to really do something original on the guitar,
Speaker 1: then it's understanding it's musical capabilities. Um. You said something
Speaker 1: earlier I have to circle back to because it was
Speaker 1: it was so fascinating on streaming. I believe it was.
Speaker 1: When you're doing a cover song, you get paid more
Speaker 1: than the original composition, not It depends on how much
Speaker 1: it gets played. For example, this week, my number one
Speaker 1: play on Pandora is stand by Me. Um, and you
Speaker 1: know usually it's my Christmas music. Yeah, Um, but I
Speaker 1: did a cover of it. In fact, got used in
Speaker 1: a Dabers Diamond commercial some times ago, which was kind
Speaker 1: of a nice license fee for that. So the commercial
Speaker 1: license fees are more well that's yeah, that's a whole
Speaker 1: different piece of business. But but what I mean by
Speaker 1: the fact is that cover tunes tend to get more attention.
Speaker 1: I mean, and also Christmas stuff because that's of the
Speaker 1: entire music market is really that's astonishing, and people listen
Speaker 1: to that stuff all year round too, And I was
Speaker 1: very lucky in so far as my early stuff got
Speaker 1: into the Pandora ecosystem. Now it's much harder to get
Speaker 1: in um, but you know, stuff creeps in. But but
Speaker 1: it's it's only in terms of I mean, the amount
Speaker 1: that one makes for the play as a performer doesn't
Speaker 1: matter whether it's original or a cover tune. And and
Speaker 1: the amount that I make as a writer on the
Speaker 1: original stuff is not of any great consequence compared with
Speaker 1: what I make as a performer. But cover tunes the
Speaker 1: same thing with iTunes. Cover tunes just get more attention
Speaker 1: so they'll capture. And you know that's fascinating because I
Speaker 1: have a pet theory about cover songs, and it's simply
Speaker 1: a note for note. Cover song, especially for something we
Speaker 1: know as well as the Beatles, is pointless because why
Speaker 1: do I need to hear the identical version someone else
Speaker 1: has done. On the other hand, most of the ones
Speaker 1: that are really far out in right field, it doesn't
Speaker 1: even sound like the original song. Maybe Joe Cocker's get
Speaker 1: By with Little Help from My Friend is is the
Speaker 1: the outlier there. But what I've always loved about your
Speaker 1: cover work is it's immediately recognizable as the underlying song,
Speaker 1: but it's such a different version of it that it
Speaker 1: makes it fresh and interesting. So I would imagine your
Speaker 1: cover songs would do really well on on iTunes. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the art of it really is. For me, it's
Speaker 1: it's to take the familiar and do something slightly unfamiliar
Speaker 1: with and that's where you know, using these alter tunings
Speaker 1: and just bringing my sensibility to it on the guitar.
Speaker 1: And there are plenty of tunes that I won't do
Speaker 1: because I don't feel that I can make enough of
Speaker 1: a difference with to justify doing that. So they end up,
Speaker 1: you know, they have to be there has to be
Speaker 1: something special about them, and there's always in the process,
Speaker 1: Like when I was doing Strawberry Fields Forever, and it
Speaker 1: was just the fact that um and just get that scenarity.
Speaker 1: You know, it works espec she You can't do that
Speaker 1: in standards, you but the way that it works on
Speaker 1: the guitar just puts it into its own creative space.
Speaker 1: And that's what I'm looking for as an artist is
Speaker 1: can I make a contribution. Can I do something that
Speaker 1: gives people maybe a different perspective on a familiar company.
Speaker 1: Well that was my experience with as a look. I
Speaker 1: grew up a huge Beatle fan. Heartbroken Outcomes. Wings has
Speaker 1: a handful of fun songs Uncle Uncle, Admiral what is
Speaker 1: it Admiral, Uncle Albert, Admiral Halls and Uncle Albert, and
Speaker 1: then there were a lot of sort of poppy love
Speaker 1: songs that I didn't yeah to say the least. But
Speaker 1: your Um Wings album is very revealing of some lovely
Speaker 1: nuances when one Wing that I completely missed the first
Speaker 1: time I heard them as Paul McCartney. But the under
Speaker 1: your version, the song's really breathe and come to life,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, bringing a musical sensibility to so
Speaker 1: I'm not just simply doing kind of a like a reproduction, right,
Speaker 1: it's not a note for note identical, getting inside basically
Speaker 1: um kind of really trying to rewrite it from from
Speaker 1: the inside out. And there there's a I Forget the
Speaker 1: Borgers novel where there's a character who whose mission is
Speaker 1: to rewrite don Quixote, but not just to copy it,
Speaker 1: but to actually like imagine it from the ground up
Speaker 1: and have it be exact exactly the same. And it's
Speaker 1: it's not quite that because I'm not trying to recreate
Speaker 1: it in that respect, but just to reinterpret it, to
Speaker 1: to do it in a way that brings some fresh
Speaker 1: perspective to you reveal a musicality to some of those songs.
Speaker 1: Is that I think for your original version either doesn't
Speaker 1: emphasize or or you're just not hearing it in the
Speaker 1: rock and roll version. And I think that's an important
Speaker 1: point in terms of the way in which existing copyrights
Speaker 1: can be utilized. You know, when I mean, let's face that,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole copyright, I think the mechanical license
Speaker 1: came out of Graham Phone Records, and Graham Phone Records
Speaker 1: came out of print publishing. I mean they sold records
Speaker 1: in order to sell sheep music, right. Um, But when
Speaker 1: you think about how many different versions of songs existed
Speaker 1: in that time period that you know, somebody would do
Speaker 1: a song and then there would be half a dozen
Speaker 1: covers of it. You know, different artists would do it,
Speaker 1: and it was very common for different artists to do songs.
Speaker 1: And then you get to the beatle area, you get
Speaker 1: to the sixties and rock music, pop music as as
Speaker 1: an art form, which is unique to those artists, and
Speaker 1: and that that went away, that you didn't get three
Speaker 1: different versions of the same song on the charts at
Speaker 1: the same time, you just had that one definitive version. UM.
Speaker 1: And I think that there's there's a very rich heritage
Speaker 1: of music to draw on to re reinvigorate. For example,
Speaker 1: I've always so when you talk about the earlier period, um,
Speaker 1: you're referring to what on this side of the Atlantic
Speaker 1: we call the Great American Songbook, which is everybody from
Speaker 1: La Fitzrael to Frank Sinatra and earlier to early being crosspech.
Speaker 1: I mean you're still you know, mid twenties is still
Speaker 1: in copyright. I mean the early twenties is now you know,
Speaker 1: is now ours? What is it ninety years? I think
Speaker 1: it is. Whatever it is, it's it's now at the
Speaker 1: point where you know some of the Great American song
Speaker 1: But the early Irving Berlin stuff, for example, you know,
Speaker 1: Alexander's Ragtime Band is public domain, and the irony is
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies changed that and then you ended
Speaker 1: up with a lot of those artists doing the Great
Speaker 1: American song Book, whether it's rod it's circled full fall around,
Speaker 1: and so I refer to it as the Great Anglo
Speaker 1: American Songs Book at this point, because when I was
Speaker 1: growing up in the sixties, the thirties was only thirty
Speaker 1: years earlier. You go back thirty years from now and
Speaker 1: you're in what the nineties, um and going back to
Speaker 1: you know what, I guess the Great American Songbook is
Speaker 1: a cannon. Like the classical cannon is a cannon, and
Speaker 1: we have a rock cannon too. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: Layla is part of the rock canon. The Beatles is
Speaker 1: part of the rock cannon. And that it's not that
Speaker 1: means it's not going to go away, and and and
Speaker 1: it's it is a rich vein of reinterpretation. Maybe you're
Speaker 1: a string quartet and you do layla, you know, you can,
Speaker 1: you can cross fertilize those kinds of genres. So do
Speaker 1: you think the music of that era, the sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies and beyond, is going to have the same sort
Speaker 1: of staying power as we've seen in the twenties, thirties, forties.
Speaker 1: I think I think it will. I think it does certainly.
Speaker 1: You know, there's always a certain amount of attrition, and
Speaker 1: there are certain gems that kind of just fell off
Speaker 1: the radar for really, Look, I just discovered Margot Gourian.
Speaker 1: For example, you you look at me quisitely. Margot Gouryan
Speaker 1: was kind of if you could combine Brian Wilson with
Speaker 1: a strud Gilberto in a power pop context. She had
Speaker 1: a very breathy voice. She wrote very kind of psychedelic
Speaker 1: influenced pop songs. Oliver had a hit with Someng of
Speaker 1: her Sunday Morning back in Oh sure, yeah, but that's
Speaker 1: one of her songs. She made one album and then
Speaker 1: quit the business. But I just discovered her music and
Speaker 1: it's it's like very cool. And that's one great thing
Speaker 1: about the streaming environment is how much music you can
Speaker 1: discover and how you can curate your own musical Have
Speaker 1: you have you worked out any Margot songs yet? So
Speaker 1: I'm right now I'm working on a bunch of standards,
Speaker 1: actually my own great American songbook stuff that I'm working on.
Speaker 1: So you'll have you'll have to give us a sample
Speaker 1: before before the morning's over. Well maybe when the next
Speaker 1: when that album comes out, I'll come and give you
Speaker 1: some samples. So so, given given the changes that we've
Speaker 1: seen in music in modern era with hip hop and sampling,
Speaker 1: what does it mean to somebody who earns their living
Speaker 1: playing a live strings instrument. It doesn't go away. I
Speaker 1: mean those things coexist and you know, it'll see my daughter,
Speaker 1: you know, the songwriter. I mean, she's been on plenty
Speaker 1: of sessions where it's guys sitting around with laptops, you know,
Speaker 1: creating beats. But she's right now working with Mark Ronson,
Speaker 1: who's one of the great contemporary guys. And it's very organic.
Speaker 1: You sit down and play drums on, you know, on
Speaker 1: the song. Um. That's that's that combination of the tech
Speaker 1: side of things with the organic side of things. I
Speaker 1: think is is where it's where the vitality is in
Speaker 1: all of it. That there's a lot of talent out there. Um,
Speaker 1: but you just want to make sure that you don't
Speaker 1: have the kind of copyright restrictions that inhibit the creativity.
Speaker 1: You know. It's one thing to listen to a motown
Speaker 1: record to kind of gather the groove of that. It's
Speaker 1: another thing to then get sued because you've taken a
Speaker 1: groove that really is is not a copy writable at
Speaker 1: the time, wasn't a copyrightable entity. Um. So Wall of
Speaker 1: Sound is not copyrightable, or at least has a will.
Speaker 1: The sound is just a lot of reverb, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of reverb on top of reverb, and
Speaker 1: and it's a lot of musicians. I mean on a
Speaker 1: Phil Spector session, you got to the chorus, if you
Speaker 1: needed more piano, you brought in another piano player. You know.
Speaker 1: Now you you know, you know that was when they
Speaker 1: were working on four track. Now you can, you know,
Speaker 1: you can overdub the second piano or whatever. But um,
Speaker 1: but the technology is great. I mean I just did
Speaker 1: a track with Marcy Levy, who's a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: who neighbor, who used to work with Eric Clapton and
Speaker 1: was in a bank called Shakespeare's Sister in England who
Speaker 1: had some big hits there, and she she gave me
Speaker 1: a logic file like an Apple logic file that I
Speaker 1: then transferred like put into pro Tools and then started
Speaker 1: fooling around with and added some guitar and change the arrangement.
Speaker 1: And then we went in the studio on Monday with
Speaker 1: Klem Burke from Blondie playing drums and walked out with
Speaker 1: a record, you know. And so that technology is great
Speaker 1: because it's not as limited as it used to be
Speaker 1: where we were working with tape and now the plugins
Speaker 1: have really evolved to the point where you can get
Speaker 1: a very analog sound out of the digit digital environment.
Speaker 1: Can you stick around a little bit. I have a
Speaker 1: ton more questions and and I'd love to get a
Speaker 1: couple of a couple more songs out of you. We
Speaker 1: have been speaking with Lawrence Juber, guitarist extraordinaire and recording artists.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and come back
Speaker 1: and check out our podcast extras, where we keep the
Speaker 1: tape rolling and continue discussing all things musicology. We love
Speaker 1: your comments, feedback, end suggestions right to us at m
Speaker 1: IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Check out my daily
Speaker 1: column on Bloomberg dot com. You can follow me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Dholts. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Masters
Speaker 1: in Business on Bloomberg Video. Welcome to the podcast, Lawrence.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this. I always enjoy
Speaker 1: when you come into town. And this will broadcast after
Speaker 1: um we've recorded this, but I'm gonna see you tonight
Speaker 1: at the cutting room, which is always a lovely place
Speaker 1: to see. Cool place. Yeah, it's kind of It's a
Speaker 1: nice intimate place. I've seen enough um shows in places
Speaker 1: where you're so far away from the performer and everybody's
Speaker 1: a tiny person and you happen to have a charming
Speaker 1: uh rapport with the audience. Thank you you all, but
Speaker 1: take questions. We went to see Paul Simon of the
Speaker 1: Hollywood Bowl last week. I saw him when he started
Speaker 1: the tour last year in Forest Hills. He put on
Speaker 1: a very interesting show, fun show, fourteen piece band, m
Speaker 1: great right back, he does ringo, was sitting right in
Speaker 1: front of us. Really, I hadn't seen him in a
Speaker 1: long time. Oh, that must have been fun he um.
Speaker 1: Someone described this as pretty much his his last stur
Speaker 1: He said, uh, his voice is going, and he said
Speaker 1: he's this isn't gonna be you know, it didn't sound
Speaker 1: like it. I mean, he was still in great shape.
Speaker 1: I thought any any old Simon and Garfuncle songs did?
Speaker 1: I mean? He did Homework Bound, He did um Sounds
Speaker 1: of Silent opened with America. Yeah. So, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you know the band Aztec two steps. So they
Speaker 1: do a version of the Simon and garf Uncle's songbook
Speaker 1: based on the print book that a DJ named Pete
Speaker 1: for Natale wrote. I was interviewed by him was um,
Speaker 1: he passed away a w N. Yeah, that's right, w
Speaker 1: anyw in New York. And so he created this this
Speaker 1: book about He wrote a book about them, and they
Speaker 1: subsequently adapted it and with with um images and streaming
Speaker 1: video and other stuff, they're basically telling this Simon and
Speaker 1: garf uncle story through their music. It was really quite um,
Speaker 1: quite fascinating. And I through that show, I discovered a
Speaker 1: guy who was one of the and I'm drawing a
Speaker 1: blank on his name, it will come into my mind,
Speaker 1: who was one of the original writers for Saturday Live,
Speaker 1: who has written on Curb Your Enthusiasm and uh and
Speaker 1: and basically tells the story of the Boxer in his
Speaker 1: in a novel. In a book he wrote about someone
Speaker 1: in a college poetry class submitting the Boxer as his
Speaker 1: final exam and it's just utterly and the teacher believes it,
Speaker 1: and it's just utterly a hilarious, hilarious story. So so
Speaker 1: let's get back to music in a way from literature. Um,
Speaker 1: you you do a lot of really interesting things. UM,
Speaker 1: And I was just really curious, what are you working
Speaker 1: on these days? What do you think is is going
Speaker 1: to come out? Next you. You always have a few
Speaker 1: albums in the well. I've got this folio I'm doing
Speaker 1: for how Landed on the evolution of fingerstyle guitar, which
Speaker 1: goes really from the Renaissance through to the early twentieth century.
Speaker 1: I got some ragtime in there, and it goes through
Speaker 1: what we would call classical guitar. And what I'm trying
Speaker 1: to do is bridge the gap between classical and steel string,
Speaker 1: because from my perspective, there is no schism, no real
Speaker 1: schism there. What is the ear of classical and what
Speaker 1: is the ear of steel string? They coexist. Um the
Speaker 1: what we like the players that we look to as
Speaker 1: being kind of like the founding fathers of classical guitar,
Speaker 1: like Giuliani and saw Umkuruly, Carcassie, those like early nineteenth
Speaker 1: century players, we're really just playing fingerstyle guitar. They didn't
Speaker 1: call it classical guitar, and in fact, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's you have to be careful because we have classical
Speaker 1: in the pure generic sense. But when you talk about
Speaker 1: musical eras classical is a very specific period pretty much
Speaker 1: kind of seventeen fifties through eight twenty, you know, and
Speaker 1: Beethoven kind of straddled both classical and Romantic eras. By
Speaker 1: the time you get to the twenties and beyond, you're
Speaker 1: into the Romantic era and the and the classical cannon.
Speaker 1: The whole concept of classical music being something for a
Speaker 1: kind of an elite social group really evolved in the
Speaker 1: eighteen twenties or the early certainly the early nineties had
Speaker 1: What was the change at the end of that, Well,
Speaker 1: look what happened politically, I mean, you have as as
Speaker 1: the monarch is, you know that the impact of the
Speaker 1: monarchers was dissolving, that the civil service became much more
Speaker 1: you know that upper middle class bourgeois became much less
Speaker 1: underneath a monarch, especially well well France. But also you
Speaker 1: know it's specifically, I mean, Vienna was really the hotbed
Speaker 1: of of of musical development in that respect. So you
Speaker 1: go from kind of Hyding to Beethoven to Schubert. You know,
Speaker 1: Schubert was a guitar player, really, yeah, apparently he wrote
Speaker 1: most of his songs on guitar. Dia Belie published them
Speaker 1: on piano because that was the commercial market, but guitar
Speaker 1: was extremely popular. There was guitar mania in Europe in
Speaker 1: the early nineteenth century. But so, but they weren't classical
Speaker 1: guitar players in the stylistic sense. We look at them
Speaker 1: as classical in the genre that we describe as classical,
Speaker 1: but really they were fingerstyle players from my perspective. And
Speaker 1: and what happens by the middle of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: the guitar loses popularity because the piano has become such
Speaker 1: a dominant instrument. But in America, the guitar became very popular.
Speaker 1: Guitar and banjo were extremely popular. Um, and so kind
Speaker 1: of the focus shifts to that, and there were great
Speaker 1: players and a lot of them played Martin guitars too.
Speaker 1: I mean Martin was really kind of the instrument of
Speaker 1: choice of the American what they called parlor music, and
Speaker 1: that's not a derogatory term. Parla music is really light
Speaker 1: classical music and a very specifically kind of middle class
Speaker 1: kind of musical experience. Of course, there was no recorded music,
Speaker 1: so you would play in the parlor. You would play
Speaker 1: the piano if you could afford one, or a guitar
Speaker 1: if you couldn't afford a piano, or sometimes both. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's a continuity about all of this. But my
Speaker 1: argument is you don't have to look at it through
Speaker 1: the Segovia paradigm. Sgia, well, Segovia bought the gravitas to
Speaker 1: the to the promotion of the instrument that allowed it
Speaker 1: to exist in the classical concert hall. But guitar was
Speaker 1: guitar music was played in all kinds of concert environments
Speaker 1: before enduring sago VIA's era, and and in the twentieth
Speaker 1: century in America, you get steel strings came into play
Speaker 1: because gut strings were very unreliable, and nylon really didn't
Speaker 1: get used for guitar strings till the nineteen fourties, um,
Speaker 1: and so, but the stylistic aspect of it tended to
Speaker 1: gravitate much more towards jazz and blues and everything else.
Speaker 1: But but my argument is that if you want to
Speaker 1: understand the music, you don't have to be restricted to
Speaker 1: be playing on a nylon string guitar with you know,
Speaker 1: with your left left leg up on a footstool and
Speaker 1: the guitar in a very specific position that you can
Speaker 1: you can play this music on any guitar. And and
Speaker 1: you know, so like Bach doesn't have to be played
Speaker 1: on a nylon string guitar at all. So I'm kind
Speaker 1: of gearing what I'm doing in that respect with this
Speaker 1: folio to steel string players. So what is a folio?
Speaker 1: How do you? How do you do folio? It's just
Speaker 1: a collection of sheep music. I mean, you know it's
Speaker 1: a book. Are you going to put it out in
Speaker 1: musical version as well? Well? I'm going to do an
Speaker 1: album to go along with it, which is a challenge
Speaker 1: because I have to learn all these Renaissance and Baroque
Speaker 1: loop pieces and some fairly heavy duty kind of classical stuff.
Speaker 1: I have confidence that you'll be able to do that.
Speaker 1: I have confidence as well too. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: I'm also working on a collection of standards American Anglo Americans,
Speaker 1: mostly American. I mean, for example, Jimmy McHugh not familiar,
Speaker 1: not familiar, you know his songs Sure, I can't give
Speaker 1: you anything but love written just down the street, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just in He and Dorothy Fields were walking down
Speaker 1: Fifth Avenue and overheard this is, you know, depths of
Speaker 1: the Depressure actually late twenties. It was like right after
Speaker 1: the stock market crash, and they hear over here a
Speaker 1: young guy talking to his girlfriend looking in the the
Speaker 1: window at Tiffan is saying, I can't give you anything
Speaker 1: but love. Baby. And although there is a theory that
Speaker 1: that fat Swaller had something to do with it musically too,
Speaker 1: and sold them his contribution, the Tiffany story sounds much
Speaker 1: more romantic. It's very romantic. Yeah, um yeah, he wrote
Speaker 1: I'm in the mood for love. He um. He was
Speaker 1: actually wiped out by the stock market crash and was
Speaker 1: walking down the street here in Manhattan and ran into
Speaker 1: George Gershwin, and Gershwin said, can I you know, do
Speaker 1: you need anything? And he said I could use a piano.
Speaker 1: So Gershwin gave him a piano. Well, really, his grandson
Speaker 1: Lee still has in his office in um piano Well
Speaker 1: gersh Well, Jimmy mccugh's piano donated um. And the first
Speaker 1: thing he wrote on that was I'm in the mood
Speaker 1: for love, which you know, put him back on his feet.
Speaker 1: I would say, so so, so who else do you look? Yet?
Speaker 1: As you know the Great So many years ago, I
Speaker 1: got a gift from somebody which was Ella Fitzgerald sings
Speaker 1: the Great American Song and I think it's something like
Speaker 1: sixteen or twenty six c ds, and each c D
Speaker 1: or so is a different song writer, so it's Gershwin. Um,
Speaker 1: and Berlin and Jerome currents and go down the whole
Speaker 1: the whole list. I think Berlin is is two songs,
Speaker 1: two discs, and Gershwin might be for discs, but it's
Speaker 1: just one after another and it's every fantastic. So how
Speaker 1: do you take that enormous collection. It's just great music,
Speaker 1: just favorite songs and stuff that just feels right on
Speaker 1: the guitar um, you know, I like Bernstein, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: you know, it just fits on the guitar sis shortly
Speaker 1: and and and and the original is an E which is,
Speaker 1: you know, a very guitaristic key um. So stuff like that.
Speaker 1: I'm just not sure. I know that there's there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a music book to go along with that too.
Speaker 1: So how how these end up getting released in terms
Speaker 1: of whether it's just going to be a digital release
Speaker 1: or whether it's going to be a c D. C
Speaker 1: Ds are really only useful for show merchandise at this
Speaker 1: point because people don't buy c D s. I'm one
Speaker 1: of the few. I am now old enough that I
Speaker 1: have a big boy audio system that I wish I
Speaker 1: had when I was nineteen, And when a CD that
Speaker 1: i'm particularly and amor with comes out, I pop it
Speaker 1: in and I didn't rather buy it on vinyl though, No,
Speaker 1: because I'm too irresponsible to take care of a record
Speaker 1: in the proper way. The CD, I just feed it
Speaker 1: into the Vinyl sounds so much better if you don't
Speaker 1: have scratches, pops hissing, if you take care of it
Speaker 1: and it's one gram vinyl and you know you keep
Speaker 1: it clean and that listen, vinyl is selling these days.
Speaker 1: I don't have the patients or the storage for it.
Speaker 1: I did an album about ten actually more than ten
Speaker 1: years ago now, um Guitar Noir. There was for a
Speaker 1: I X Records, which was a high resolution DVD audio project.
Speaker 1: So that is a great sounding project. That's an album
Speaker 1: and a song if I remember correct that I wrote
Speaker 1: that song is like the title track for that particular prop.
Speaker 1: It's a few seconds the right and wrong tune. That's
Speaker 1: that's a C G d G a D t UM.
Speaker 1: So that you know that high end audio thing. I
Speaker 1: mean it's in fact, you you go into a like
Speaker 1: an audio file store, and you'll probably see them playing
Speaker 1: it because it gets used. For damn, I want a
Speaker 1: demi award. What the hell's the demi award? What demos
Speaker 1: for Yeah, the consumer electronics people have this Demi Award,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, stuff that's great for demoing expensive equipment.
Speaker 1: That that's really interesting. The my Store of Choices, Park
Speaker 1: Avenue Audio, UM, and I always bring these CDs and
Speaker 1: I'm so excited to use and I put them on
Speaker 1: these hundred thousand analysis systems and they sound terrible. Next
Speaker 1: time you go in the awesome if they have, I'm
Speaker 1: sure they will. Now I have the regular CD of
Speaker 1: Guitar and Noir. Is that something? Now? There's a track
Speaker 1: on um My Wooden Horses CD that I did a
Speaker 1: solo version of it. But the but the real, the
Speaker 1: real version to listen to is the one, the mosaic
Speaker 1: track on that UM actually got license by I think
Speaker 1: it was Pioneer licensed it for the discs that came
Speaker 1: with the in car Super High. Fine, that's quite interesting.
Speaker 1: So I only have you for a finite amount of
Speaker 1: I'm let me get my uh my new I got
Speaker 1: a new phone just for for you today. Isn't that nice? Um? Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna allow myself to log in. What do you
Speaker 1: feel like playing today? Oh? I have no idea. I'm
Speaker 1: in standard tuning, you know, what No, you're in dad, No,
Speaker 1: I'm in standard. You went back let me, I'll do,
Speaker 1: I'll do. I can't give you anything but love because
Speaker 1: I have to be in that mode. You ready, Nope? Um,
Speaker 1: all right, we're recording Cool Cool Boy the Delightful. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put this down now. So here's the question
Speaker 1: that is very much related to the process of turning
Speaker 1: what was once a classical American songbook, really great American
Speaker 1: songbook type of tune into an acoustic guitar piece. Take
Speaker 1: us through how you you go through that transition? Well,
Speaker 1: with that one, it really was just to just make
Speaker 1: it musical and adding to that the notion that I'm
Speaker 1: really pushing myself to improvise mall. So you know, I
Speaker 1: state the same and then I'm improvising, and I'm just
Speaker 1: kind of trying to keep myself on a particular kind
Speaker 1: of track with that. But I mean, there's there's the
Speaker 1: concept we have of of um alternate bass where you
Speaker 1: and this goes back really like to then what they
Speaker 1: call Kentucky thumb picking, like Mel Travis and then Shad
Speaker 1: Atkins Atkins Mel Travis before my this kind of idea
Speaker 1: that so there's always this kind of this is kind
Speaker 1: of like rolling thing going on to create the accompaniments,
Speaker 1: so making that work and keeping a groove going, but
Speaker 1: also looking for kind of voicings. No trammelo bar the
Speaker 1: virtual you're using it with your arm instead of looking
Speaker 1: for that kind of stuff. And it's a standard tuning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm in standard tuning. But what I'm doing there, like
Speaker 1: I'm using open strings. Do you get these kind of
Speaker 1: interesting dissonances? You know, so stuff like that, you know, stand,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of pushing myself to do more in standard tuning,
Speaker 1: to bring into it stuff that I've learned from being
Speaker 1: in auto tuning, you know, just again just trying to
Speaker 1: push the envelope to be to stay on my game.
Speaker 1: What what sort of songs have from that song book
Speaker 1: have you've been looking at um to include in the
Speaker 1: following Let's see right now. And these won't necessarily make
Speaker 1: the final cut, but you know, Limehouse Blues, Um, George
Speaker 1: Sharing's Lullaby of Birdland or um. You know, not a
Speaker 1: standard tuner. No, some of this stuff is in dadad Summertime,
Speaker 1: Foggy Day in London Town, which I'm particularly fond of
Speaker 1: because that was when I was born was foggy day
Speaker 1: in London town. Um and um misty uh, Willow weep
Speaker 1: for me. It's a great song. Yeah. I mean I've
Speaker 1: done you know, in the past, I've done things like
Speaker 1: crimea River and George I love the Julie London version
Speaker 1: of crimea River. Well, yeah, Hamilton's like that he wrote
Speaker 1: the song. Yeah, and Bonnie Castle's playing guitar on that.
Speaker 1: The request has come for do you know Wicked Game
Speaker 1: by Chris Isaac. It's way too late for way too
Speaker 1: late for me, would be like, so you're giving Willow
Speaker 1: a very bluesy flavor. Well, it is a bluesy song,
Speaker 1: is it, because the way you hear it in the
Speaker 1: traditional arrangement isn't quite that bluesy. Yeah, I'm I tend
Speaker 1: to want to make things blues um. Yeah, but like
Speaker 1: I see now, for example, there, I'm in B flat
Speaker 1: right and I'm in Dad Dad at least I would
Speaker 1: be if I was properly in tune, and you don't
Speaker 1: even bother with the the other two. And I've got
Speaker 1: this one stuck on the end of the guitarity. Oh
Speaker 1: there we are, okay, So you get these voice things
Speaker 1: stuff like that. It sounds like it was written for guitar. Well,
Speaker 1: that's why I try and do is make it sound
Speaker 1: natural on the instrument. Actually, so I couldn't. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: playing around thinking somewhat pianistically with that. So do you
Speaker 1: go out and listen to different versions of these songs? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let me make it. It's handy for that. Apple
Speaker 1: music is handy for that. So let me make a
Speaker 1: recommendation for summertime. We may have discussed this previously. There
Speaker 1: is a young woman named Renee Olsted who was an
Speaker 1: actor on a sitcom whose name escapes me at the moment,
Speaker 1: and she does she was like sixteen or seventeen, and
Speaker 1: it's one of those far too mature for her year's version.
Speaker 1: That's like wow, when you get a moment listen to
Speaker 1: that because it just and she adds a little bit
Speaker 1: of a slinky blues vibe to it that you know
Speaker 1: that that isn't in the LA version. Is I mean
Speaker 1: what I'm doing with summertime? Should I be recording this? No?
Speaker 1: I mean I'm just going to give you a little
Speaker 1: example working see this. Actually this is the katana, then
Speaker 1: this is the gaitan wha tuning, right, but summertime. Um,
Speaker 1: that kind of appropriate. That's got a really bluesy flavor,
Speaker 1: much smokier than well, when you hear when you hear
Speaker 1: a a someone really belt it out, it doesn't quite
Speaker 1: have the same smokey vibe. But you know, my reference,
Speaker 1: my kind of cross reference is like early Fleetwood Mac. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm thinking, how would Peter greenplay this? Right?
Speaker 1: You know that kind of and also, um, what else
Speaker 1: have I been? Um? I only have eyes for you. Okay,
Speaker 1: another grade that's in this tuning, hang on, have to
Speaker 1: remember it. See I'm thinking, I'm thinking almost like Revel,
Speaker 1: you get the idea and totally but it's so totally works.
Speaker 1: You know. I think we've talked about Derrick Thompson's book
Speaker 1: last time you were here, How Hits Happen. It's not
Speaker 1: just about music, It's about music, books, architecture, engineering, And
Speaker 1: he's fond of pointing out that if you want to
Speaker 1: sell something different, you have to make it familiar, and
Speaker 1: if you want to sell something familiar, you have to
Speaker 1: make it a little different. And and it's um, I
Speaker 1: pick up a lot of that that the melody is
Speaker 1: totally recognizable, the melody is key, but everything around it
Speaker 1: is totally different. Now what tuning were you in here?
Speaker 1: Hang on? Uh? Now the Jimmy Mcue song. You see
Speaker 1: what I look for? Is that kind of just that
Speaker 1: very musical kind of but also the guitaristic thing how
Speaker 1: everything rings. And then something like this, Well it's dissonant,
Speaker 1: but in a cool way. Uh, hang on, that's it.
Speaker 1: Of course you can't hear. You can't see this on
Speaker 1: the radio. I can, and it's way cool doing two
Speaker 1: hands on the neck, a little little Eddie van Halen
Speaker 1: action on the Yeah, easy on, Easier on electric than
Speaker 1: on the coup, but you can still do it. It's
Speaker 1: just you know, what I like doing is is that
Speaker 1: kind of is doing the two handed thing, but to
Speaker 1: get a rhythmic propulsion to it, it's not the same. No,
Speaker 1: not a lot. That's pretty fascinating. What so when do
Speaker 1: you think, um, the American Standards album is coming out
Speaker 1: next year? Probably really so how long does it take
Speaker 1: to put something like that? Well, it's it's a question of,
Speaker 1: you know, the timing as far as coordinating it, you know,
Speaker 1: and my distributor, because I have my own record label now,
Speaker 1: my distribution needs two months later time on a release.
Speaker 1: I always reckon you're gonna at least have three months
Speaker 1: to record, and you know, and I've been working on
Speaker 1: these arrangements for a couple of some of these for
Speaker 1: a couple of years. That was a question, is how
Speaker 1: long does it take it actually come up with the arrangement? Depends?
Speaker 1: I mean when I my Runaway arrangement took me about
Speaker 1: ten minutes. What takes sometimes, what takes longer. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: just take time. I mean like Limehouse Blues, I still
Speaker 1: don't know, but that's even going to make the cut.
Speaker 1: And that's probably been one I'm working on longer than
Speaker 1: anything else. I've done it in standard tuning, in different keys.
Speaker 1: I've done it and dad getting different keys, and it's
Speaker 1: just I'm not yet convinced by it. Um, But it's
Speaker 1: an interesting exercise. You're not yet convinced by the song.
Speaker 1: That's I'm not yet convinced by the arrangement because it
Speaker 1: could be and whether it's swung or whether I don't
Speaker 1: done as a Latin thing or you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: arranging tricks. You you can change the groove for change
Speaker 1: the feel, and it's just I'm not sure with that one.
Speaker 1: But um, and we'll see how it all evolves. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've got some original tunes that I want to get
Speaker 1: recorded to. I wasn't intending that the um the stuff
Speaker 1: with all the renaissance loop music and the ragtime, you know,
Speaker 1: it goes through like Scott Joplin, and I wasn't int
Speaker 1: ending that was going to be kind of a releasable album.
Speaker 1: But as the project evolved, it kind of, well, this
Speaker 1: is kind of an interesting combination of tunes. I wonder,
Speaker 1: you know, so when you're when you're the history of
Speaker 1: of that has to span centuries, but when you're looking
Speaker 1: at something that's only a few decades, I know that
Speaker 1: sounds ridiculous to say that's only a few decades. You
Speaker 1: still have I want to say, hundreds of songs, certainly
Speaker 1: dozens and does. I mean, there's a million of them.
Speaker 1: But it's just what, you know, what I sit down
Speaker 1: and play and it's like, oh, that's kind of cool.
Speaker 1: And then if Hope likes it, my wife because she
Speaker 1: doesn't like it, you know, kind of well then then
Speaker 1: I can't really practice it in front of her, which
Speaker 1: kind of inhibits the process of it. But you know,
Speaker 1: I just came up with an arrangement Great Songs. Funny
Speaker 1: Tony Hatch wrote that on the Corner of Broadway. He
Speaker 1: came up with the hook on the corner of Broadway
Speaker 1: Street on his first trip to New York, not realizing
Speaker 1: that that's not well, Midtown isn't quite as catching. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's a cool song. Does it end up being
Speaker 1: the great Anglo American songbook? I don't know. You know,
Speaker 1: we'll see. Well, it's certainly from that sixties pop era.
Speaker 1: You could release an album a decade if you wanted
Speaker 1: to find stuff. It might be too similar across within
Speaker 1: that each decade. But from a business point of view,
Speaker 1: I mean that, you know, my goal is to just
Speaker 1: kind of put a lot of stuff out there, because
Speaker 1: if it's out there in the streaming environment, then it
Speaker 1: can be revenue creating without necessarily having to be heavily promoted. Um,
Speaker 1: we just did a re release. Hope used to have
Speaker 1: a group UM in the eighties and early nineties called
Speaker 1: the Housewives, which was a comedy rock and roll group,
Speaker 1: and they were ABC had a morning show called The
Speaker 1: Home Show Way Back, and they were regulars on that
Speaker 1: and they got a lot of TV exposs of a
Speaker 1: great name for a and the album's called Get the
Speaker 1: Dirt Yea and its songs like call a Repairman, Um,
Speaker 1: ironing Board, I've been defrosting all day, which has a
Speaker 1: killer harmonica solo from John Mayle, who I wish him
Speaker 1: well because he's in the hospital right now. Um. And
Speaker 1: Maggie Mayle, John's ex wife was was in the band
Speaker 1: and Maggie may and Maggie Mayle okay as in John Mayle,
Speaker 1: but um and by the way, Maggie may is another
Speaker 1: one of those songs that is the Gregory Walker passa
Speaker 1: Mets and Moderno sequence that actually earlier Yeah, um and
Speaker 1: um that just came out, you know, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of like, you know, hoping it's going to get airplay
Speaker 1: on Spotify, Pandora maybe serious on comedy because it's a
Speaker 1: comedy record really um. And then earlier this year I
Speaker 1: put out Standard Time, which is my first album that
Speaker 1: had never been released digitally, which was also some Standards,
Speaker 1: some great American songbook stuff, but out of Paul McCann
Speaker 1: is publishing catalog. He asked me to record stuff out
Speaker 1: of it. So it did Stormy Weather with a forty
Speaker 1: piece orchestra, very cool version of that. In fact, that
Speaker 1: stuff is really hi fi sounding. Um. And it includes
Speaker 1: my first fingerstyle composition which is un called Mazie that
Speaker 1: I actually had like Paul playing bass on because you know,
Speaker 1: we recorded it on a Wing session one day. That's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. So what was the name of that album?
Speaker 1: That's called Standard Time. So that's your first and my
Speaker 1: very first, which is not a finger style guitar record
Speaker 1: except for a couple of pieces that are on their
Speaker 1: mostly released digitally. It's a digital, full digital. It's never
Speaker 1: been released in its entirety except as a bonus CD
Speaker 1: with my book Guitar with Wings, which was not like
Speaker 1: a CD release. Um. And I always kind of like
Speaker 1: never felt truly comfortable with it being on c D
Speaker 1: because it's such high fi quality. It was so well recorded,
Speaker 1: and that was also used for demoing equipment back you know,
Speaker 1: way back that somebody borrowed the tapes from from Abbey
Speaker 1: Road Studios and ended up using them at trade shows
Speaker 1: to demonstrate tape recorders. That's interesting. So I only have
Speaker 1: you for a few more minutes, Why don't we do
Speaker 1: one more? So long? Okay, um, before before some guy
Speaker 1: Mike comes in and kicks us out of here, Let's
Speaker 1: see if I can find um. All right, I got
Speaker 1: this on video, so whenever you want to start, this
Speaker 1: is Catch. The title was inspired by Catcherizing Star, which
Speaker 1: is where I met Hope in April. Go go, I
Speaker 1: love it? So um I okay, so we have we
Speaker 1: have a only a few more minutes left in the
Speaker 1: peanut gallery? Is uh requesting different songs? What did you
Speaker 1: ask for before classical gas? No? I don't get a
Speaker 1: classical gas? Oh how about how about a Beatles song?
Speaker 1: Then we we have to uh by the way that catch,
Speaker 1: I've seen you do several times, and I've noticed that
Speaker 1: you're you're improving a touch in in some of it.
Speaker 1: There was a little bit that uh, it is every
Speaker 1: version of each song a little bit, a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just for season of the Witch. Now we're gonna
Speaker 1: go with the Beatles. Last time it was I saw
Speaker 1: her standing gear and you spoke about it for six months?
Speaker 1: Oh it was? Was it she loves you? It might
Speaker 1: have been she loves you? All right, So let's do
Speaker 1: something different? Well do I standing there? There? You go
Speaker 1: to take co amazing Lawrence, Thank you so much, as
Speaker 1: always every time you hear it, It's always always a delight.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with Lawrence Juber, recording star Grammy
Speaker 1: a warning Um musician, composer, artists. You you go through
Speaker 1: the whole list, Grandpa Wow. If you enjoy this conversation,
Speaker 1: be sure and check up an Inch, show Down an
Speaker 1: Inch on Apple iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, Bloomberg dot com, wherever
Speaker 1: finer podcasts are sold, and you could see any of
Speaker 1: the other two hundred or such conversations we've had previously.
Speaker 1: We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us
Speaker 1: at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would
Speaker 1: be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff
Speaker 1: that helps put these shows together each week. Medina Parwanner
Speaker 1: is our producer, Slash audio engineer. Taylor Taylor Riggs is
Speaker 1: our booker. Michael Batnick is our head of research. I'm
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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. Compte take tempt int