– Jimmy, how did it happen that a guy who went to study to London School of Economics ended up being an arranger and a record producer? I understand how musicians can do that, but working with orchestras takes a classical background.
Well, when I finished at the LSE, I was perfectly equipped for life in the nineteenth century, and the problem was, I always wanted to be a musician, but my parents wouldn’t let me. They stopped my music lessons when I was thirteen or fourteen, because they felt that I was spending too much time on that, and they wanted me to have a steady job when I grew up. Only I never grew up, and I kind of ended up doing what I wanted to do. As for classical background, no, I don’t have it. You just have to be good at copying other people’s ideas. (Laughs.) I mean, I studied – I learned theory, and there were classical music lessons – and I got fascinated by orchestral music as well, so I collected a lot of miniature scores of my favorite composers, mainly the Russians, like Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev: I loved Russian music, I was obsessed, I still am, to a certain extent. And my big love now is writing, composing. I just finished a new full-length stage musical. My partner in Texas writes the stories, I write the music, and we write the lyrics together. It’s a really good combination.
– Your recording credits mention keyboards – piano, celesta, organ – but also flute and violin. So how many instruments do you play?
Well, I started as a pianist, but when I was playing in rock ‘n’ roll bands, which I did for many years, I played the Hammond organ – that’s a different technique from playing piano: it’s really a separate instrument, although you need the same things to play it – but when I was a kid, I learned how to play the flute and I played it in my school orchestra. Later on, I learned how to play saxophone, and I also play some guitar and bass guitar.
– So you were all ready to start as a musician, especially one from Liverpool. There must have been a thriving music scene when Mersey Beat broke out.
There was always a music scene, only I had left by the time I was in my teen years, because my parents had moved to a town just outside London. But I used to go back and visit, because my grandmother lived there, and I’ve always retained my love for Liverpool. Wonderful, wonderful town!
– But ROBERT HIRST AND THE BIG TASTE, the first band you played with, weren’t from London!
They were based in Nottingham, so I worked with them for less than a year before I came back to London and Elton [John] – whom I had met, and we vaguely knew each other – got me the job of playing for Long John Baldry. I had been working with ELMER GANTRY’S VELVET OPERA earlier, though, and I’d met Baldry a few times because we used to play the same clubs. So when I returned, Elton, who was called Reggie Dwight at the time and who had just left BLUESOLOGY, Baldry’s backing band, told me that he was looking for a piano player. I went and auditioned, and I got the job, which was great because BLUESOLOGY were known as musicians’ musicians, and if you played for BLUESOLOGY you were considered a pretty good player. I didn’t think I was going to get the job, and I was surprised when I did get it.
– So THE BIG TASTE came after VELVET OPERA? Wasn’t that band’s name THE FIVE PROUD WALKERS?
It was the same band, Richard Hudson and Colin Forster in it. Dave Terry, who became the lead singer when our original lead singer left, wanted to change the name, and that’s what we became: VELVET OPERA. But Dave didn’t like me very much, and I don’t think he really was into keyboard players anyway, and he didn’t like Hammond organs. I had an A100, which was basically the same as a B3 but came in a slightly different case and with a Lesley 122. Big, heavy things. Nobody liked carrying them around either, so I’m sure it was part of the reason they wanted to get rid of me. (Laughs.) There are digital clones of Hammonds now, so you don’t have to haul the weight, but nothing sounds like a B3, nothing! It has a special magic, because it’s not an electronic organ – it’s an electromagnetic mechanical organ that develops the sounds by these spinning wheels, and so that’s a completely different sound from the transistor way of making tones that are in all the other organs – and instead of having all these preset sounds, you have drawbars on a Hammond that give you an almost infinite set of combinations, although most people only use a few of those.
– Were you still with the band when they toured with PINK FLOYD?
No, I wasn’t. I was already out of the band by then.
– It was around that time that you started working with Billy Gaff, right?
We lived together for a while, we shared the same flat, so he offered his services as manager.
– And co-writer too? There is a song called “Such A Lovely Way” by Virginia Vee that’s credited to the two of you.
I don’t think he was really that invested in writing, it wasn’t really his thing. He wanted to be a songwriter and then found he couldn’t. He was more a businessman.
– And you became part of this management team?
I didn’t do any managing as such, but I did the accounting when we’d set up the company. But there is a very strong link between music and mathematics, and a lot of musicians are good at math, even if they don’t know that. It’s all about right brain and left brain – that’s what makes music such a powerful artistic form. You have to learn symbolism and methodology, and things that are very mathematical, in order to create the artistry. I just ordered from Amazon a book by Béla Bartók, one of my favorite composers of all time: even though his inspiration was East European folk music, the way he adapted it was very precise and methodical, and that’s probably why I like his music so much. A lot of his pieces are just so fucking wild and exciting!
As for management, I had good relationships with artists and I brought them to Billy. I used to hang out at a club called “The Speakeasy” where I met the drummer of SMALL FACES, Kenny Jones. We became friends, and Kenny played some sessions for me as a session musician, because when Steve Marriott had left, the other three SMALL FACES [Jones, Ronnie Lane and Ian McLagan] were under contract to Immediate Records, and Tony Calder, who owned the label, wouldn’t let them out of it; they were also under management contract to Don Arden, and he was being difficult too. Around that time, I used to go to parties over at Ronnie Wood’s basement flat in Cromwell Road, in London, where every so often all these musicians, including the guys from SMALL FACES, would get together and just jam. Ronnie wasn’t doing much then, so he started playing with them, and then Rod [Stewart], who was no longer with Jeff Beck, joined in as well, but they couldn’t do anything officially. So I remember sitting down, chatting with Kenny about it, when he said, “We’re stuck. What are we going to do?” and I said, “Why don’t you talk to my friend Billy Gaff? I bet he can do something for you!” I introduced him to Billy, who wasn’t managing anyone at the time, because he had been the manager of THE HERD with Peter Frampton – in fact, it was Billy who discovered Peter – but the band had broken up, so he was looking for something to do, and, being a fiery Irishman, he set the guys from SMALL FACES free.
I was also friends with a guy called Ian Samwell – we used to call him the house hippie, because he was a bit of a hippie – who had got a job as an A&R man for Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers never had much of a presence in London, but they decided to change that, and they employed Ian, who had called me in to do production and arrangements for a lovely band called FERRIS WHEEL, with two lead singers, Mike Snow and Linda Lewis. Linda and I were friends for years and years after that. Then, when Billy got THE SMALL FACES out of their contract, Ronnie and Rod decided to make their connection permanent and formed with the other three a new band, FACES – because, obviously, Wood and Stewart weren’t as small – but there was another contract issue: Rod Stewart was signed to Mercury Records in Chicago, and Mercury was headed up by a good guy called Irwin Steinberg who agreed to let Rod record with FACES for whatever they wanted to do, providing he also fulfilled his obligations to Mercury Records for his solo work. So I introduced Billy to Ian Samwell, who introduced Stewart and FACES to Warner Brothers, and they got a deal for the band with the Warners. It turned out to be a great deal for Irwin Steinberg, a very astute guy, because Warner Brothers did all the promotion of all the tour support for FACES, but all the big success record-wise went on the solo work that Rod did for Mercury, so they got these huge hits and hardly put any money in it at all.
I got on well with Irwin Steinberg. I had an artist called Andy Bown, and Andy knew Billy because, when Billy managed THE HERD, Andy Bown was the keyboard player. I loved Andy’s writing and he sang very well. He also was a very fine bass player, and I’d used him on some sessions, so he decided to let me produce him, and we started cutting an album. But Billy and I didn’t have any money – this was before Rod and FACES became wildly successful – and what we would do is try and pre-sell the American record distribution rights to whoever we were producing. The advance would give us the funds we needed to make the album – in those days, it was usually somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000, a lot – and have a little bit of money left over for the artist. I remember talking to Steinberg about Bown and asking whether he would be interested in having the American rights. These messages would go backwards and forwards by telex, and when I got a message back from Steinberg, he was interested in Bown, but he asked me to send him some of Andy’s poetry first: Irwin wanted to know if Andy could write. Irwin was not a musician, he was an accountant by training, and it was the first time any record executive had ever been interested in lyrics. I was quite astounded, but very impressed. So I sent it to him, and he loved it so much that he signed the contract on the spot and sent us the money. We recorded Andy Bown, but I don’t think Steinberg’s investment in Bown ever paid off.
– So you introduced Andy to STATUS QUO?
I think he’d met STATUS QUO before that, because one of the partners in Gaff Management was the manager of STATUS QUO. It was like a little family, everybody got to know each other, and Andy was part of it.
– You recorded with QUO right before Andy joined them. How did that happen?
I never recorded with STATUS QUO, did I?
– You played piano on “Roadhouse Blues” on the “Piledriver” album.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. I forgot a lot of this stuff I’ve done, I’m sorry. (Laughs.)
– How did you move from all that to being an orchestrator?
I played with Baldry and then I left, because John stopped touring for a while, so I had to go and find some other things to do. I worked with some other bands briefly as a backing musician, and then somebody asked Billy Gaff, “We need to do a string arrangement for the song called ‘I Lied To Auntie May’ by THE NEAT CHANGE [a band with future YES guitarist Peter Banks, – DME]. They want to put it out as a single, but they want to have strings on it. Does Jimmy write?” and Billy said, “Oh, yeah, he could do it!” He told me, “You’ve got this job!” – and I’d never done an arrangement for a band before! (Laughs.) It took me forever to write it, because it was all new to me, but it was a successful single, and then I started getting calls from people who wanted arrangements done. I went and worked for a guy called Gibson Kemp who had been in one of Brian Epstein’s bands – they were called PADDY, KLAUS AND GIBSON and they were around the same time as THE BEATLES – he came from Liverpool as well, but he had since moved to Hamburg and married a woman called Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe’s girlfriend. Anyway, Gibson had a job as an executive producer for Polydor and Deutsche Grammophon, and since he’d heard some arrangements I’d done and like them, he would import me over to Hamburg to work on projects with him. I did that for quite a few years. We had projects in Hungary, with a girl singer named Sarolta [Zalatnay], and then he had the Number One act in Czechoslovakia with a little band called THE GOLDEN KIDS, so I had visits to Prague, working with them. One of the guys in THE GOLDEN KIDS [Václav Neckář] actually had a starring part in a very famous film about the Nazi occupation, called “Closely Watched Trains” – a great movie.
Also, as I said, I knew how to copy great arrangers. I fell in love with the Motown arrangements, and one of the things that were so revolutionary about them was writing for strings. In popular music, strings usually played very legato, smooth background parts, but at Motown string players were almost a part of the rhythm section. The string parts were very rhythmic, and I was fascinated, impressed, amazed by that, so I started copying those ideas, and since people in England had never heard that kind of stuff, I became very successful doing it. I got a lot of work because I took the same approach to string-writing – when it was appropriate, obviously – as H. B. Barnum at Motown did, because I thought the guy was a genius, and I always listened to him as well as the players like James Jamerson on bass and Marvelous Marv [Johnson] on guitar. I was even fascinated by the tambourine playing. They had one guy on the Motown staff who just played tambourine! I didn’t realize what a great skill it was. As an arranger, I would use tambourine on my tracks – I would get percussion players into play, and I tried all different ways of recording it – but it never quite sounded right, and I didn’t really know why. You’d think that you just shake it and hit it, but it’s not: there’s a whole technique with the angle you play it at, whether it’s facing slightly up or slightly down, whether you use two and you bang one against another or hold them in one hand. There’s all these different ways of playing tambourine! And I never knew.
But I was doing a session one evening, where I had Lesley Duncan, who I was married to at the time, Kay Garner and Madeline Bell in for a vocal background, and after we did the backings that I needed to get done, we were sitting, listening to the playback, and I remember saying, “I really need to put a tambourine on this track!” And Madeline said, “I’ll do that for you!” I never thought of her as a tambourine player, and I didn’t even have a tambourine in the IBC Studios where we were recording, but she replied, “Oh, I’ve got a couple in the car!” She obviously she wanted the session fee. (Laughs.) So she ran downstairs from the studio out to the street, came up with a handful of different types of tambourines, while I set up a microphone and everything, ready to do the playback. She started playing, and it was fucking amazing! And I realized why I couldn’t get tambourine to sound like I wanted it to: it was the players. Madeline had a way of playing that was totally different from anyone I’d worked with, because she was – is – American, and she played exactly like they did on American black recordings. I had never heard any English percussionists play like that, so I used her for lots of tambourine work.
– Well, that’s already a producer’s job, rather than an arranger’s.
Being a producer made me a much better arranger! As a producer, I didn’t have to prove I was good because I was arranging for my own productions, and then I discovered that the simpler I was, the more careful and sparse I was in my arranging, the better it sounded, and I learned how to be really economical in the way I use the instruments. And I learned a lot about mixing as an arranger, because a lot of the producers that I was orchestrating and arranging for asked me how would I like it mixed. They asked what would work best in the final mix of my arrangements, and I would suggest things. Those days I didn’t really touch the board – it was only later on that I actually even bothered doing so. In fact, when I had a good engineer, I avoided touching the board, I preferred the engineer to do it, so I could stand back and listen, and move around the room, and walk outside, and come back in.
– So you fall into that category of producers who facilitate the performance rather than dictate something to the performer?
Oh, absolutely. Occasionally I would have a specific idea for a track, but a lot of the times there was just a general direction for the piece to go. I would write out what’s called a master rhythm chart, because I would have rehearsed beforehand with the artist to establish how it all should go and where the breaks should be, how many verses and what key changes should be there, etcetera, and then the same sheet would go out to all the musicians. After a while the idea of doing everything with a full orchestra, all at once, changed, and with the rise of multitrack recording – eight tracks, sixteen tracks and eventually twenty-four tracks – it became more than a norm to record a great rhythm section track first and then add the sweetening on top. So I would give these parts out to the rhythm section and choose people because of their musical tastes and skills, of what they could bring to a session. With orchestras, I used a fixer, or a contractor, for the string and horn players: when I was in England, it would be a guy called David Katz, who also suggested rhythm players for me. He loved young musicians, so I found Chris Spedding through him, because David was a big fan of Chris. Rick Wakeman played for me on some sessions too: not on my productions, so I can’t remember what those sessions were for, but I can remember him because he had such wonderful beautiful long hair and I was very jealous of it! (Laughs.)
There’s a funny story about Chris and Lesley. I forget what album, her second or third, it was, but I remember Lesley going, “I’m not very comfortable with having Spedding on my sessions!” I said, “Why not?” “Because I don’t think he likes me!” she said. “He definitely doesn’t like me!” I said, “No, he’s just very serious when he’s in the studio!” But I told Chris, “Do me a favor: the next session be nice to Lesley, she’s very insecure” – and then they became friends. Chris is a lovely guy, but he would always sit there with his head down and listening, and would never, never smile in the studio. I love Chris, and I love his playing, and his solo work as well as what he did on Lesley’s recordings – it’s just beautiful!
– Who doesn’t love “Motor Bikin'”!
Yeah, I love “Motor Bikin'”! Chris’ big love was rockabilly. But then, I remember once we were recording at “The Marquee” when we were doing Lesley’s fourth album [1975’s “Moon Bathing”], and he said to me, “Hey, you got to see this new band! They’re playing at ‘The 100 Club’!” So after we finished the session, we walked around the corner, up Wardour Street to Oxford Street, where “The 100 Club” was, and there was this band: I’ve got to tell you, I thought it was the worst band I’d ever seen in my life, they were just fucking horrible! But Chris said, “They’re going to be the next big hit!” “Are you fucking kidding, Chris?” And of course, he was right. It was SEX PISTOLS! (Laughs.) He was totally right, and I missed it, I couldn’t see it at all.
– Spedding played with Lesley from the beginning, but there was also Elton on her “Sing Children Sing” album, who had recorded her “Love Song” on his “Tumbleweed Connection”: so how did you all know each other?
Well, in those days the music business was centered in London, and it very small, so a lot of people knew each other, especially people who did recording sessions. If you were in a band, for instance, you got to know the other bands because you all played the same venues – “The Flamingo” and “The Marquee,” “Klooks Kleek” and “Eel Pie”… And a lot of times you played the same material because not everybody was writing their own music, and for a long period of time everyone was using material from American black artists. That’s how I got to meet Elton, and I guess Lesley knew him through her sessions work, because Elton did some sessions as well. And then there were the after-hours clubs, like “The Cromwellian,” “The Revolution” and “The Bag O’Nails.” My favorite, later on, was “The Speakeasy” because I recorded a lot at IBC Studios in Portland Place, and that club was just around the corner from there, plus it had this restaurant in the middle of it, which was actually soundproofed, like a recording studio, but you could see everybody, and you could go and get a decent meal and a glass of wine at one o’clock in the morning. There was a waiter that everybody knew, called Luigi, and he would bring you free drinks, and there would be a lot of people there, including managers like Robert Stigwood and Keith Lambert.
The people who managed musicians in London in the late Sixties – early Seventies were nearly all gay. I knew all of them, of course, for various reasons: Billy Gaff, Kit Lambert, Robert Stigwood, Simon Napier-Bell – we used to call them the gay mafia. And they were great because they loved their artists so much. I heard people say that those managers manipulated artists, but actually it was the other way around because the artists knew that one of the reasons the managers worked with them was that the managers had the hots for them – the artists knew it and played on it. Brian Epstein was the first one of the gay mafia, because he was in love with John Lennon – can’t imagine why; I’d have thought George or Paul would be the one – and THE BEATLES manipulated Brian, there’s no doubt about it. About the only ones who weren’t gay were Peter Grant and Don Arden. That’s an interesting part of the music scene from that time, I haven’t seen it since, and it was just strange looking back on it. It’s an interesting thing to think about how this led to great artistry.
– Why did you leave this bustling London scene for a Nottingham group?
Oh, because I needed a band and they needed an organ player, and Stigwood, who was managing them, recommended me to them. Also, THE BIG TASTE were a Northern soul band, and I loved soul music. So somebody said, “You need to join this band!” and I said, “Okay!” because I’ve always been a very malleable sort of person. I ended up doing it – no idea why.
– You also somehow ended up doing a lot of work with female singers: you mentioned Lesley Duncan and Linda Lewis but there were Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black too, as well as Virginia Vee whom we talked about. You seem to have a very special rapport with them, so what is so special about women’s voices for you to want to be working with them?
I love all voices, but I very much like the sound of women’s singing, especially if it’s contralto or mezzo soprano. But one of the things about women was that they liked working with me, and I think it’s because I treated them like just another musician. I didn’t realize that until Lesley and I got together, and she was very angry and bitter about the way female artists were treated: they were not taken seriously, and of course, most female singers were very attractive, so the male musicians were always trying to put a move on them. They were treated more as objects than as musicians!
Early in my arranging days, I got a call from Dusty Springfield’s recording manager, Johnny Franz, who himself was an arranger: Dusty had wanted me to arrange a few tracks for her, and I was really excited, because it was an honor to be asked to work for her. So I went around to see her at her house in Holland Park, where we routined [her performances] and I went, but then we got to the recording session and there was a mistake on the score – there were a lot of mistakes on my score! – and Dusty noticed it. I think it was the trumpet section, and somebody was playing an F instead of an F-sharp or something like that; I didn’t hear it, but she heard it and pointed out, and the musicians started giggling and basically saying, “What the fuck does Dusty know about music? Just a fucking woman!” But I said, “Oh, you’re right, I’m so sorry, Dusty!” I corrected the mistake, and we went on recording, and I think she liked the fact that I treated her professionally, with deference, that I didn’t have that chauvinistic attitude. I was warned about her: “Don’t work for Dusty, she’s a cunt, she’s really mean” – and she wasn’t, she was a delight, she was lovely! She deserved respect not just like a star, but as a great singer. When I was living in Los Angeles, we did some sessions at Cherokee Studios, and I remember the frustration that I felt with recording her singing, because every take sounded like magic to me, it sounded perfect, but she would find these tiny, tiny, tiny mistakes, so I would end up punching one word in. We had to record that one word or half of it, and then re-record it – it was very difficult, but she was such a perfectionist!
– Cilla’s “Day By Day” album that you worked on was produced by George Martin. Did you learn anything from him?
A little, a little. More than anything, I just loved working with him, because he’s so professional. The one person I learned most from was Tom Dowd, and that was when I was recording Lesley’s last album [1977’s “Maybe It’s Lost”]: I had recorded it, but it didn’t sound right, even though some of the tracks were really nice, and I remember talking to Tom about it – I’d met him when he was producing “Atlantic Crossing” for Rod Stewart – at Cherokee Studios, as I was doing another project there. I told him that I didn’t quite know how to mix this album. “I tell you what,” he said, “if you do the mixing at Criteria Studios, I’ll engineer it for free! You don’t turn down an offer like that! (Laughs.) So I went back to England at some point, picked up all the masters, and took a plane to Miami, where I stayed with my co-writer [Leo Rost], a guy who I was writing a stage musical with and who lived in Boynton Beach, just fifty miles north of Miami, and booked a time at Criteria Studios. I went down there Monday to Friday for two or three weeks – every day, for about six hours – and mixed with Tom Dowd. It was a masterclass in producing and engineering.
But somehow, I had managed to really screw up the sound of the snare drum, and Tom showed me how to fix it. This was before the days of samples, everything was analog, so he got the snare drum, because they had spare instruments over at Criteria, and he put an Auratone, one of those cube speakers that people mix on – I didn’t find Auratones that helpful, but they were useful if you wanted to get a mono mix for AM – and then he sent a signal and placed it face down on the drum. Then he got an AKG 451 mic pointing up towards the snare drum and sent the signal from the drum track into the studio, to the Auratone, which gave a sound that triggered the snares, and he mixed that sound back with the snare drum track. And all of a sudden, I had this lovely snare drum sound. I’m going, “What the fuck?” But it was one of those genius things. Criteria had a miniature AM studio, like an AM broadcast transmitter, so we would do a mix and then we’d go out to the parking lot, sit in Tom Cadillac, where he’d turn the engine and the air conditioning on, and he’d tell the second engineer or the tape operator to play the mix on Criteria’s AM. Tom tuned his radio, and we’d listen and check the mix to see how it sounded on radio. I told him, “We make a lot of compromises to make it sound good on AM, Tom, but I somehow feel that it detracts from the actual sound that you would hear on FM or at home, when you listen on your own on decent speakers.” “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right. but here’s one thing: people listen to it on AM radio and if they like it, when they take it home, they’ve already bought it!” He was a big believer in these things. A great guy. He showed me so many different ways of improving mixes.
– Let me mention another female singer, Sally Oldfield. You recorded a single by THE SALLYANGIE, the duo she had with Mike, in 1969. Remember that one?
Yeah. But it wasn’t Mike; it was just Sally. She’d written this song called “Child Of Allah” which I thought was an absolute, stone-cold hit, so I wanted to record it. Only nobody wanted to release it, and I was really pissed off.
– At that time you were still working with the now-forgotten Virginia Vee. How did you get involved with her?
Her producer, a guy called Claude Ebrard who ran CBS France, had heard my stuff, I got a call from him, and then I had a lot of adventures with Virginia. We did some big song competitions and festivals, including one at Sopot in Poland, and it was crazy. I do remember the hotel there, and the massive, massive bedroom, which I had to share – I don’t know why – with a strange guy who I never talked to once and who was at the far end of that room. I would go in and he would already be asleep, so I had no idea what the fuck he was doing. I mentioned him to somebody, and they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, he’s a KGB man.” “What?” “Yeah, he’s there to spy on you!” What was he going to learn from me? But I think, because I was directing this huge orchestra, he was expecting some important music person, and instead he got a kid with big hair, who weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet! (Laughs.)
There’s another funny story, about my first recording with Virginia Vee. When I went to meet with her, she laid on this beautiful welcome dinner at her home in Paris and she had served champagne. But champagne always made me very sick – it gave me terrible headaches and everything – so, since we were going to have a recording session the next day, with an orchestra, I said, after a while, “I don’t feel well, I got to go and lie down!” She gave me a pill and said, “Okay, we’ll take you back to your hotel, but take this before you go to bed and you’ll feel fine in the morning…” The next morning her husband picked me up back to her house for breakfast, and Virginia asked, “Are you feeling any better? That thing really worked then, didn’t it?” “Oh yeah,” I replied, “I feel much better. But Jesus Christ, it was like a horse pill – I nearly choked trying to swallow it!” “You swallowed it? You’re not supposed to swallow it, you’re supposed to stick it up your ass!” (Laughs.) I didn’t know that the French didn’t take aspirin by mouth! They always use the suppository because it affects the stomach. So I get to the recording studio, and all of a sudden the guys see me in the orchestra and they’re all laughing: they already knew this story.
– Talking about orchestras… Did Elton ever ask you to arrange something for him instead of Paul Buckmaster?
No, no, the only time Elton ever asked me to do something for him was to play the organ on “Crocodile Rock” when he took part in the Royal Command Performance at “The London Palladium” – and I did that. Our dressing room was next to Liberace’s, and we all trooped pot to meet the great man. I loved Liberace, he was such a wild guy! I don’t have many regrets in life, but one of those I do have is that I never went to Vegas to see his show. So we go next door, and he’s all smiles, asking me, “Well, honey, do you like my suit?” I reply, “Yeah, it’s very nice!” And he says, “Look, I press this button, and all these lights come on!” Funny! He would wear all these long furs and everything and he would go to the front of the stage and show his rings to all those old ladies who loved him: “Do you like my rings?” They’d say, “Yes!” And he’d go, “I’m so glad you like them because you paid for them!” (Laughs.)
– So you played on stage with Elton once, but you toured with FACES as a conductor, didn’t you?
It was live orchestra on stage for a tour, but we only did half a dozen songs, all from Rod’s solo albums, like “Tonight’s The Night” and “You Send Me” and a few more pieces. The parts were easy, so we would pick up a string section in each town – eight violins, two violas and two cellos – and I’d go to the venue to do a sound check. We would have clip-on mics and little wires in the string section, and it was always a bit of a mess because there’d always be one or two of these things that didn’t work.
– You not only worked on Rod’s solo records at the time, but also came up with a name for Ronnie Lane’s band?
Lesley and I used to joke about having a band called SLIM CHANCE, so when Ronnie called me in to work on his album ["Anymore For Anymore"] and he didn’t have a name for the band, I said, “You could always call it SLIM CHANCE!” – he liked the name and that’s that was it.
– Long John’s albums “It Ain’t Easy” and “Everything Stops For Tea” were produced by Elton and Rod, but neither of them is known for their producing skills, so was it you, nominally an executive producer, who did the actual job and then became Baldry’s regular producer?
No, no, they were producing as well, and I was there to just hold things together. I made sure that it got completed, that the musicians got paid etcetera, but I basically left the rest to Rod and Elton. They did those two albums but, because Long John liked what I did in the studio, he let me produce his next album, which was “Good To Be Alive”: that was his favorite album of all time – John said that was the best album he ever made. It was one of those wonderful series of sessions where everybody played so beautifully, where the musicians brought their best game with them.
– You’re talking about the Ball brothers, Dave and Denny?
Oh, they were lovely, and Sammy Mitchell played some wonderful slide guitar too. We just went in, and everyone knew what to do on each track, so everything was relaxed. I persuaded John that he should do “Gasoline Alley” – I thought it would be good if he did Rod’s song – and when we recorded it, we needed to put some backing vocals on, so I asked Lesley who was a great, great vocal arranger. She didn’t have the greatest backing singer voice, but she always knew how to get the girls to sing the right notes and she always had the best ideas. And her vocal arrangement on “Gasoline Alley” was a fucking masterpiece. Rod heard that we’d cut it and came by IBC Studios to listen, and when we put up the backing vocals he was almost in tears. “Oh, fuck!” he said. “I’ve never heard anything that great. I wish I’d done it like this!” I have a lot of good memories of that album. I’ll spend twenty years not listening to the things I produce, and then I’ll come back to them later on and say, “That was pretty good!” but I didn’t listen to “Good To Be Alive” for a long time.
– There’s a song on that album called “Let’s Go” that was written by a young guitarist Chaz Jankel, the first prominent piece by a future Blockhead. How did you source it?
Chaz was in a band called BYZANTIUM who were also involved in Gaff Management, and I would bump into them, so I told him I was always looking for good songs for John. He submitted this song, I liked it, and we decided to do it. But I was actually more friends with their other guitar player, Nico Ramsden, and I had used him to play guitar for me on sessions.
– About vocals: you worked on the self-titled album by MARBLES, with Graham Bonnet who became a hard rock singer.
A great singer, yeah. It was Robert Stigwood who wanted me to work with them, and so I did, but I’m not sure Graham’s heart was in that album, and I never quite connected with him. I would have liked to work with Graham more, but I think he had other ideas – probably because Stigwood wasn’t the right producer for him.
– There is a compilation album from 1973’s Reading Festival, where you listed as executive producer, and the poster for that festival mentions “Jimmy Horowitz Orchestra”: what was that? You brought your own orchestra to the festival?
Yes, we brought an orchestra there – they all were session players, obviously, – we mic’ed them up and everything, and did some tracks with Tim Hardin, from the album I produced with him, and then Lesley Duncan. It was one of those just beautiful Sunday afternoons when the sun was shining – not very usual for England,
– How often did you have to work live on stage – not as a musician but as a conductor?
Oh, very rarely, very rarely. I enjoyed the writing and I enjoyed playing keyboards, but I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be a conductor, and I don’t think I’m a great conductor. I would conduct recording sessions because I had to.
– And that’s what you did on “Turn Of The Cards” for RENAISSANCE, with the arrangement of “Mother Russia” quoting Rachmaninoff’s “The Bells Of Moscow”?
RENAISSANCE had two tracks they wanted an orchestra on, which we recorded at DeLane Lee Studios, because it was about twenty-five string players, plus all the horns and percussionists. The songs were “Running Hard” and “Mother Russia” that I thought brilliant. I just loved it, but I don’t remember using any Rachmaninoff theme. It turned out to be a a huge radio play hit in New York, though, where WNEW played “Mother Russia” every hour for about three weeks. I briefly became friends with Annie Haslam, but it was a very tough time for me because I was in the middle of breaking up with Lesley and I didn’t want the marriage to end. The strange thing was that I returned to New York to work on my Broadway musical “Marlowe” and I got a call saying, “Would you like to go and see RENAISSANCE at the Academy of Music?” so I went to see them, and they were doing “Mother Russia” with an orchestra conducted by Tony Cox, a guy who married Lesley – he was a nice guy, but seeing him with the band wasn’t very helpful.
– You mentioned the “Marlowe” musical. I heard about it but failed to find any recording.
I have a recording of it which I did in my studio in Los Angeles. It’s a cool two-hour piece that came as a result of working on a project called “Dick Deadeye” and that was done like a BBC radio play: we got a bunch of singers, who were also kind of actors, recorded them and then added the music, sound effects and things like that. It all started with Bill Melendez, the animator for the “Charlie Brown” movies who was friends with Leo Rost, a businessman who liked to write. Leo’s father was a rumrunner during the Prohibition days, and when it became legalized Leo got into the business – in fact, he owned the J&B brand rights on the whole East Coast – but he was always looking for deals with nice tax advantages. So Leo and Bill decided to make a musical movie based on characters and songs from Gilbert and Sullivan, and they decided to do it in London, where at the time was a big push tax-wise to get more movies made and where Bill’s son, Stephen Melendez, also an animator, had started to have success with his own studio.
But since it was a musical, they needed someone to take care of the music, and Leo asked a few people that he knew, mainly in the United States, who should he call on, and then he called me. He said, “I’ve got six lists of producer-arrangers, and though you’re not at the top of any of those, yours is the only name on every list!” I wasn’t sure whether it was a compliment or not, but we made an appointment to discuss it all, so early one morning I got to this nice little boutique hotel in South Kensington where Leo was staying and knocked on the door. He answered and looked at me, all hundred-and-twenty. pounds and big hair, and when I said I was looking for Leo Rost. he told me he didn’t have time to talk: he thought I was a rent boy. (Laughs.) “You’ll have to come back later,” he said. “I’m supposed to meet somebody called Horowitz!” When I told him it was me, he didn’t believe it at first, but then we talked about “Dick Deadeye” and I got the job.
We became really good friends over the years, and at one point Leo was living in In Los Angeles, where he was writing a play about Christopher Marlowe. It had these long soliloquies which I said, when we were sitting and chatting, could be turned into songs. He was fascinated by that idea, but I knew nothing about Marlowe. I always wanted to write lyrics, though, and Lesley was a great teacher, a wonderful, wonderful teacher, and we had written quite a few songs together, so I started taking Leo’s texts and stripping them down to find one or two lines that would be the core of a song. Then I would add lyrics of my own to his words and construct a piece out of it, with music. He loved it, and that’s how we wrote “Marlowe”!
– I heard you’re currently working on a new musical, “Mates”: what is it about?
This musical is finished now. It’s a true story, set in the year 1717, about a young woman who disguises herself as a man and goes to sea as a pirate – apparently, it was a little more common than you would think. Her name was Anne Bonny, and she’s quite famous. Anne marries a privateer who turns out to be a real arsehole, so she leaves her husband the minute she sets eyes on this king of the pirates, Calico Jack Rackham, the first pirate to fly the skull-and-crossbones flag, and goes to sea with him. And while they’re at sea, there’s another pirate on board the ship who has the reputation of being the greatest swordsman of all the pirates – nobody could win a fight with him – by the name of Mark Reed. Well, Mark Reed turned out to be Mary Read who had been married to a tavern owner in Flanders, in Belgium; when he died, she wasn’t allowed to take over the tavern because she was a woman, so she got pissed off about this and decided to go get herself a job as a pirate. But you couldn’t be a pirate and be a woman, and that’s why she dressed up as a man. In the end, they’re all captured and sentenced to hang, but Anne and Mary pleaded “their bellies” – they were both pregnant! And you couldn’t hang a pregnant woman. What happens after that gets murky in history, but it’s pretty certain that Mary died in prison, probably of something like typhus, known then as jail fever – only we take the story as far as Anne getting out of prison.
It all began at Bob Metzger’s Super Bowl party in Los Angeles. I met him when both of us were playing for Don McLean [as captured on 1982’s “Dominion: Recorded Live,” – DME]. A wonderful guitar player, Bob mainly did country music gigs, but he could do anything – it didn’t matter what style it was in, he could find a way to make it work, and he went on to become, later, Leonard Cohen’s music director on his live tours. He would call me sometimes when they needed a piano player or organist, and I had him doing sessions for me in Los Angeles. The big thing about that party was that we made curry – don’t ask me why: I like to cook and so did he – and while I was making tandoori chicken, I was approached by Bob’s friend Don Hale who’d asked him if he’d be interested in working on some theater projects, and he said, “It’s not my kind of thing, but there was a guy here called Jimmy… You should talk to him because he’d be perfect!” Next thing I know, Don makes an appointment, comes to my house, and we start working on a children’s musical to be performed in Port Hueneme. In the meantime, Don’s family are having such a tough time making it in California that they decide to go back to Texas. Don forms the Central Texas Children’s Theater there and gets money to take little one-act musicals into the schools and perform with this little company; he writes the script for a musical, sketches lyrical ideas and flies for a weekend to Los Angeles, where we stay up all night and work. We’d come out with three songs and record the backing tracks on a cassette so he could go back and use these recordings on stage, with singers. But one time he brought over a film script somebody had written about the life of Anne Bonny, and when he asked me if I’d like to write a musical about it, I said, “If we do this, it’s a license to print money!” Don always reminds me about that because we haven’t made a penny off it yet. (Laughs.)
But I couldn’t see how it could fail as long as the work we did was good. It was put on at the theater downtown, we invited people, but all of a sudden, after just three nights, it stopped. Around the same time my second marriage broke up, and I was out of my mind and homeless, and then Don’s wife called me one day and said, “Jimmy, you know that you’ve got to leave California – you’re supposed to be in Texas! I’m sitting here with a ticket. Get on the flight on Friday night, and we’ll meet you at the airport!” So I got a bunch of clothes and suitcases, locked up my studio and got on the plane. That’s how I ended up in Texas. I played on the musical’s release, and there’s a recording, only I’m having trouble getting anyone to listen to it. I know part of it was because of Covid, when everything got disrupted, but it’s just been weird. I’ve sent out must be a hundred copies now of scripts and CD, to agents and other people in the theater business, and most of the time they send it back unopened. I would say, “Listen to it and if it’s crap, just tell me!” – but nobody does. But there is a woman who is taking over the theater project in Trinity University in San Antonio, and she’s interested in it, so we’ll see. It’s probably the best work I’ve ever done, and I think it’s very commercial, very melodic.
– The best work, you say? But what would you call your defining work as producer or arranger – something people can listen to and say, “It sounds like Jimmy Horowitz”?
I think the work I did with Lesley, I’m very proud of it, and some of the work I did with Long John as well.
– What about Tim Hardin?
It was really strange. When we were recording “Earth Mother” – that was Lesley’s second album, so that had got to be around 1972 – Billy Gaff said, “You need to produce Tim Hardin’s album!” I knew his work but I didn’t know anything about drug addiction at the time, and when I met him, he was on the methadone, trying to get clean from heroin. I would be more comfortable around him now but, looking back, I feel very guilty because I wasn’t equipped to deal with Tim. In the old days, we used to call producers recording managers: in a way, an artist is put into your care when they’re recording, and your job is to get them the album they always dreamed of. We recorded “Nine” in England, with English musicians, but at one point, Tim had to go to New York to see his attorneys, “Marshall, Morris and Silfkin” – because he should have been rich, but he’d been really badly ripped off – who were taking care of all his royalties, and Billy wanted me to go with him. That’s where I met Bob Cohen, who was sharing an apartment with Tim; Bob was a wonderful player who would play with John Baldry for many years. Tim was very fragile at the time, and every day I had to go to this drug treatment place in Greenwich Village with him, so he could get his methadone. I had no idea what was going on, I was woefully ill-equipped to be helpful.
– You’re also credited as an arranger and violin player on “Coming From Reality” by Rodriguez.
I don’t remember much about him, except that he was he seemed very nice, very quiet, and then he became a massive star in South Africa, But I didn’t play violin on his record – I might have played flute on a couple of tracks.
– One of the most uncharacteristic artists for you to produce were STRIDER. What prompted you to work with a hard rock band?
Their manager was friends with Billy, and he needed a producer, so I was told, “Hey, that’s your next job. Go do it!” It was a learning experience for me, a whole brand-new thing: I had to go and see their shows and listen to music that they liked. But I don’t think I was a very good producer for them – they deserved better. Funny thing is, last year I recorded a local metal band called PAIN STORM in my studio here. I previously turned this band down, when they had asked me to produce them, I didn’t think I was right for them, but they came back to me. They spent all this money in recording studios and didn’t have one track to show for it, so I decided I couldn’t do any worse, could I? I agreed to try and record three tracks to see if they liked it. I went to their rehearsals and did the pre-production, and then we spent Friday night just getting drum sounds, cut those tracks on Saturday and did overdubs on Sunday. And they loved it. They absolutely loved what I did! We ended up making the whole CD [“Back From Hell”].
– Was it you who introduced STRIDER’s guitarist Gary Grainger to Rod Stewart so the two of them would start working together?
No, I don’t think so. Not directly. They got to know each other probably around that time because STRIDER also belonged to our management company.
– Later in the Seventies, you worked quite a lot with Steve Harley: on “Hobo With A Grin” as an arranger, on “The Candidate” as a co-producer, and you co-wrote “Freedom’s Prisoner” with him.
I loved working with Steve, and maybe we should have written more songs together. But after we recorded “The Candidate” – which Steve thought was his best album – EMI dropped him, and I felt like I put some kind of a curse on Steve, I felt guilty that maybe I screwed up his career. I felt really bad and I didn’t listen to that album for about twenty years. I just couldn’t! And then I started listening to it again and I realized that there’s some brilliant songs on that album, that it sounds good, and that “Audience With The Man” is a brilliant, brilliant song. Steve was one of the cleverest people I ever worked with – he could quote Goethe in the original German! – and I was just amazed at his intellect. You know, the biggest stars generally, but not always, tend to be quite intelligent. I’m not talking about somebody who gets a few hits, but somebody who creates a long-term following.
– Was John Cougar like that, too, when you played on his self-titled album? He wasn’t a star then, though.
Oh, he became a big star while I was working with him! After Billy and I got Lesley out of her horrible CBS contract, we needed an American record company so we sent her record out to a lot of people, and there was this guy at MCA who loved Lesley’s work. I went to meet with him in Los Angeles and signed a three-album deal for her, and he had an artist called Johnny Cougar on the label who was, again, in a very, very bad management contract and was looking to get out of it. So I introduced him to Billy Gaff, and Billy took over the management and put a lot of money into Mellencamp. I mean, a lot! But Mellencamp was not very nice. He and his wife were at our place in Los Angeles once, the place Billy and I had, and they were arguing: Mellencamp told her, because they had split up by this time, “I couldn’t stand you when you were drinking,” and she turned around to him and said, “Well, John, I couldn’t stand you once I was sober!” I was married at the time to Carol Maruyama whose best friend was a petite blonde called Vicky Granucci; John and Vicky started going out together and eventually got married. So I remember him as a very, very crude person.
– Another atypical album for you to produce was “Love & Other Bruises” by AIR SUPPLY.
I recorded them in Los Angeles at Cherokee Studios, and they were nice to work with. I enjoyed it. They’re soft rock, and their style was big ballads, so it wasn’t totally away from what I normally did.
– That was in the late Seventies, you didn’t have a lot of credits in the Eighties. What were you doing?
When I was Carol, I was getting mentally very sick, and I got very ill around 1982, when I moved to L.A. That’s why, for about twenty years, my workout was very low.
– Are you happy with your life now?
I’m married to Dylan Gregory, we’ve been together for about twenty years. I finally found somebody who loves me for exactly who I am, and that’s what I always wanted, I guess.
– Do you have any ambition left unfulfilled?
Yeah. I want to get this fucking musical on board, because I know it’s good. We’re writing another one and doing some other things. And that’s all I want: to write, produce and do music. It’s been a difficult couple of decades for people like me, because the kind of music we like to do, and we’re good at, has not been very fashionable. But you know, nothing stays the same. I was spoiled because I came into the business at one of the most exciting times: the mid-Sixties through to the end of the Seventies was a wonderful time for music. And at the moment, it’s not that good – it’s hard for good musicians to make a living. You can have a hit record and make about forty-three dollars on Spotify, and there is almost no work for session musicians, except in the movie industry. Music has essentially been corporatized. More so, if you listen to recordings today, they’re not incredibly original anymore, and the sound on them is completely compressed to make it as loud as possible; all of it is quantized – there are no minor variations which give music its live quality – and a lot of stuff is sampled, so everything sounds very uniform, homogeneous and soulless.
