http://www.registerherald.com/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=4&ArticleID=128574
Ryan Peverly
8/3/2010
Two-time Grammy award-winning guitarist Laurence Juber will appear in
concert at Taffy's in Eaton on Wednesday, August 11.
Fusing folk, jazz, pop and classical styles, Juber creates a
multifaceted performance that belies the use of only one instrument.
The former lead guitarist for Paul McCartney's "Wings', Juber has
developed a reputation as a world-class guitar virtuoso solo artist,
composer and arranger, and was voted #1 by Fingerstyle Guitar magazine.
Juber has released 15 critically acclaimed solo albums, including "LJ
Plays The Beatles," one of Acoustic Guitar magazine's' top 10
all-time acoustic albums.
Juber's show at Taffy's will support his new album, "LJ Plays The
Beatles Vol. 2", yet another collection of classic Beatles' tunes in
acoustic format.
In this exclusive, extended interview, Juber talks about the new
album, his days in Wings with Paul McCartney and much more.
--
RP: Let's talk about the new album. You're playing The Beatles again.
Tell me what that experience was like, recording those songs, and how
they sound.
LJ: Well, over the years I just started playing around with more
arrangements of Beatles' songs. My wife, Hope, who produces my
records, was very keen on me doing a follow-up. I found over the
course of the last 10 years my playing has developed. My concept of
how I treat solo guitar has become more nuanced. So approaching these
songs I was able to kind of dig a little deeper than I did the first
time and find really cool and interesting things, not only with the
guitar but with emotional expression and capturing the iconic quality
of the original recordings that you associate with not only the song
itself, but also the sound of the record. Obviously having been in
Wings and worked with Paul as extensively as I did, and having
experience working with George (Harrison) and Ringo as well, makes it
very personal to do Beatles stuff.
But, as an example of that sound I was talking about, with "Penny
Lane", there's this incredible, Bach-style trumpet sound in there,
and the challenge for me was to capture that on the guitar and have
it be satisfying. So there's a great deal of satisfaction that comes
out of sort of conquering the challenge of making these songs work as
solo guitar pieces.
RP: Does that process intimidate you at first?
LJ: Oh, yeah. All these things are intimidating until I figure out
what the road map is. And not just The Beatles, because pretty much
anything is a challenge. It's not so much intimidating, now that I
think about it, because that would imply a reluctance to even get
started. Once I make a commitment to this stuff, I just go for it. It
seems to not only satisfy me, but also satisfy audiences and what
they get to experience as a performance piece and not just putting
the record on and listening to it. What I try to capture with the
recordings is what they'd get if they saw me at a live show.
RP: You obviously have a deep connection to the music of The Beatles,
playing with Paul McCartney in Wings and growing up in London while
Beatlemania was raging in the US, but you also have a connection to
(Beatles producer) George Martin, right?
LJ: Yeah, I started my studio career with him. From about age 13 my
ambition was to be a studio musician, to be a recording guitar
player. I didn't really have a great ambition to be a live performer
as a teenager. I was kind of a shy teenager, and I enjoyed the
process of understanding different musical styles and being able to
sit down and read music and be able to create recorded music with
other musicians. I was definitely motivated by the way music was put
together, and I studied and played all kinds of music. But I was a
huge fan of pop music. In the early days, when I was 11, that was
right at the beginning of Beatlemania, and that became very much a
core part of my musical sensibility.
When I first started doing studio work, after I graduated from London
University, one of the first projects I worked on was an album George
Martin was producing, and that was a valuable experience for me, not
only for the fact he was somewhat of a celebrity in the record
production world for his work with The Beatles, but because it was
very educational. I was pretty wet-behind-the-ears, as far as my
experience as a studio player, so there was some excellent guidance
that came out of it, and a little bit of insight as to how things
would get done when The Beatles were recording. It was really a very
cool thing, because, truly, if there was any fifth Beatle, it was
George Martin, so I valued that experience tremendously.
RP: You've had a decades-long career now, but is there anything from
that first experience, those early studio days, that you've taken
with you? Any lessons you learned that you still apply now?
LJ: Oh, everything. I mean, it's really a continuum in terms of what
I do, because I'm able to draw on experiences that may have been long
forgotten about. I may start working on a particular tune, and there
will be some kind of recollection of having played it in a certain
kind of environment or a life experience that would inform the
emotional subtext of it all. What I try to do, ultimately, is have
the guitar kind of disappear, and what's left is the essence of the
music and my personal interpretation of the music. Obviously having
been in Wings and worked with Paul as extensively as I did, and
having experience working with George (Harrison) and Ringo as well,
makes it very personal to do Beatles stuff.
My background is so much broader than that, though. As a teenager I
played with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra in England, and that
was a big band. Certain experiences I had from there, as far as
musical styles, having played big band music, to be able to take
something like "Penny Lane", which has a certain kind of swing
element to it, I can draw on my experience playing big band jazz, not
that "Penny Lane" is in itself a jazz tune, but there's something
about the way it feels that allows me to reference that particular
style of music. I'm very eclectic in what I do, and because I'm a
musicologist, in the sense that I listen to music and analyze it and
find the stylistic essence of it, I find myself exploring things,
especially with Beatles songs, because their influences were so broad.
One of the tracks on the album is an early John Lennon song,
predominantly John, I mean, because I refer to Beatles songs as
either a John song or a Paul song because you know stylistically it
was either one or the other. But the song, "All I've Got To Do", when
I stripped it down to being an instrumental arrangement, I realized
it was kind of an R&B song, like a proto-Al Green or Smokey Robinson
song. And John was obviously very influenced by Smokey Robinson, but
you don't think of The Beatles as being an R&B band, but in fact
their version of "Baby It's You" is a classic R&B recording and on
par with the original Shirelles version, if not better than it. And
so I kind of look to their influences and seek to connect it with my
own influences. Being able to make those connections allows you to
feel appropriateness and gives me a certain kind of confidence in the
direction I'm taking with the process.
RP: I've heard many different accounts of what it was like during
Beatlemania in America, but what it was like growing up in England
with all that happening?
LJ: Well, I mean, we certainly had a burst of Beatlemania in 1963,
but it didn't have the same impact in England, because The Beatles
were a homegrown band. We didn't have a British Invasion because it
was internal. And so the perception was different. I didn't really
understand till I came to America in the late 70s. Being a member of
Wings at that point really gave me a-it was a bit of a shock. The
Beatle fanbase was way more entrenched in America than they were in England.
RP: Were they not as popular over there?
LJ: They were extremely popular, but there was a lot of competition,
too. Of course, you always had The Beatles-Rolling Stones rivalry.
But they weren't popular in exactly the same way as they were in
America. In America, when they went on the Ed Sullivan Show, it
pretty much was a change in society. You could date the true
emergence of the 60s youth culture to the moment The Beatles debuted
on the Ed Sullivan Show. We didn't have anything quite like that in
England. When they were on the Royal Variety (Performance) in
November of '63, which is the one where John delivers that famous
line about the people in the cheap seats clapping their hands and
everyone else rattling their jewelry, they had already struck.
Beatlemania had already struck, very much along the lines of what you
see in "A Hard Day's Night". That movie was reproducing what they
were actually experiencing the previous year.
It's just different in England. You would have to have been there in
that period to understand how different. Things were very much more
immediate there, it seemed. It was a smaller country and information
traveled very quickly. For example, we had three or four weekly pop
music newspapers, the most prominent being Melody Maker, and there
was one called New Musical Express, and a few others that came out on
Thursday morning. They were like the National Enquirer of pop music.
There was just so much information in them. In America, because of
the size of the country, television had more of an impact, which is
where the Ed Sullivan thing came in.
But we were constantly being exposed to new music, and the way we
were exposed to it-when The Beatles' albums came out there were no
singles on the albums. Their deal with EMI was they would do two
albums a year with 14 tracks each, and every three months they'd put
out a single with an A and B side. When you got the albums in
America, you didn't get that; you got the edited versions of the
albums that very often included the songs that were released as
singles, some of which were never released as singles in the UK.
"Yesterday" was never released as a single in the UK, whereas it was
a No. 1 single in America. Our system didn't work the same way.
And interestingly enough, with Paul, even in Wings days, he wouldn't
put the singles on the album if he could help it. Sometimes there
would be a run-in with the record company, because they would really
insist on things. But he always felt the singles were a separate
entity from the albums, so the marketing machine in England was
different. It was marketed differently, it was more immediate and
accessible, so there was a little less mystery to it.
But as an artist, as an arranger and interpreter of these songs, all
of these things come into play, because at the end of it, it's just
me sitting there with my fingers on the guitar and a song in my heart
and me communicating a song based on my own experience. Because over
the years I've specialized in being a solo, finger-style guitar
player and using a particular approach to the instrument with a
particular technique, it becomes a more unique experience.
RP: You mentioned the "Hard Day's Night" film. I think that's a good
segueway into your work on scores and compositions for film and
television and video games. You worked on a James Bond film, for example.
LJ: Yeah, I played on the score for "The Spy Who Loved Me", which was
actually pre-Wings. Let's clarify that, though. I do compose. In
fact, I did a score for NBC Dateline, which (aired on Sunday, July
18) about migrant farmworkers in Texas and is a very compelling
story. But over the years I've scored various different kinds of
projects, though. I did the music for "A Very Brady Christmas", but
that was over 20 years ago. In reality, the big name stuff I've done
I did as a studio player-"Good Will Hunting", "Dirty Dancing",
"Pocahontas". All three of those were either nominated for or won
Academy Awards, and, in fact, the biggest selling album I ever played
on was "Dirty Dancing". That album outsold the Wings stuff by many
millions. So, composing is certainly part of my workflow. Being a
studio musician is an ongoing part of my workflow.
TV shows are certainly part of that, too. I've played on "Home
Improvement", "Roseanne", and currently I'm playing on "The Secret
Life of the American Teenager", where I'm actually playing electric
guitar. For 11 years I played on "7th Heaven", where the acoustic
guitar was almost like a character at times; it was a very prominent
counterpoint to what was going on on the screen. And even though I'm
not being hired as a composer, my understanding of that process tends
to make the synergy between what I'm doing and what the composer is
doing flow in a very effortless fashion, because I can offer more
unique and interpretative approaches to what a particular composer wants.
For example, let's say (film composer) Danny Elfman. When we were
working on "Good Will Hunting", he had an idea of what he wanted to
hear and I would say, If I can do it in this tuning I can articulate
it like this, and he'd say, Yeah, that's exactly what I want. That
kind of collaboration is a very satisfying thing to do. The James
Bond thing was kind of a treat, to get back to that, because it's
what inspired me to play in the first place, all that twangy, James
Bond kind of guitar.
And also, as a composer, my wife, Hope, and I have written a great
deal of music for the stage, too. We wrote music for "Gilligan's
Island: The Musical", which continues to be in production. I've
composed a little bit of music for the new "Starcraft II" video game,
too, and I composed a lot of music for "Diablo III". There's times
when, because I have relationships with producers of all kinds of
music, if they want a composer who specializes in guitar-driven stuff
they can call me, which was specifically the case with "Diablo III",
because the original score was very iconic and guitar-driven, and I
was able to write an hour's worth of music for 12-string guitar and
orchestra, which was a very cool thing.
And occasionally I play with video games live, performing video game
music with an orchestra live. Nowadays, we're not talking "Super
Mario" stuff; we're talking big, cinematic orchestration, and what
we're talking about here is big screens where you get to see all
these cinematic scenes from the games with the music played live over
top of it. It's very familiar to the players of the games, because
they get to hear the music over and over again, but they don't
necessarily pay attention to the detail of it. It's a revelation to
the video game crowd, because a lot of them may have never seen an
orchestra live before, so getting up and performing at something like
the Blizzard Entertainment Convention, which I was able to do, is a cool thing.
That's where the realm of being a studio musician, a live performer
and a composer converge, in that environment. It's a different
experience, because most of my performances are me playing solo, but
this kind of brings into play not only the kind of showmanship I
learned from being on stage with Paul McCartney, but also the guitar
virtuosity that over the years inspired me and that I've tried to emulate.
RP: I'm sure you get asked about your days playing with Paul and
Wings ad nauseam, but I've gotta know, personally, what that
experience was like. I mean, he handpicked you to be in the band, right?
LJ: Yeah, and it was a remarkable experience, because here I was
working with one of the great pop artists of all-time, a great
songwriter, a great performer, a great record producer. I feel like I
got my Masters in music from McCartney University. It was not only
inspirational, but also educational. From a career point of view, it
was a great launching pad, because it gave me a profile that, as a
studio player in London, I would have only got from people reading
record sleeves. I still get emails from people wanting to know about
this or that album I played on in 1976, and I have to go back and
find it. You know, what was that exactly? Sometimes I didn't even
know what I was playing on. Alan Parsons Project, for example. I
didn't even know I played on their first album until 20 years later
when I read it in a magazine.
But with Paul it was all right there, and I learned a lot about the
mechanics of what Joni Mitchell calls the star-making machinery
behind the popular song. I learned a lot about that, the marketing
aspect, how to sell a record, and also a lot about the music
publishing business and where the real money is and how you make your
money as a musician and performer. So it was really an amazing thing
that I got to be in the studio or on stage on a daily basis with a
Beatle, and Paul McCartney in particular, who's such an amazing
artist. It was a great inspiration to me to understand how the
process worked creatively, to see Paul sit down at the piano and
develop an idea into a song, or pick up the guitar and start
something with a particular chord because he said he saw that chord
in a Picasso painting. Where he would draw his inspiration and how he
would articulate that inspiration-you can't learn that kind of thing
in college. You can only learn that by sitting at the feet of the
masters, and I got to do that, not actually sit at his feet, but
stand next to him on stage and sit next to him in the studio.
It really was an amazing experience, and I channel a lot of that into
what I do as a soloist. I want to provide a complete musical
experience. And I chat more between songs than Paul ever does,
because as a solo artist it's just you on stage and you want to
establish a rapport with the audience. I didn't necessarily get all
my stage repartee from Paul, but I did learn a lot about the process from him.
RP: Settle the decades-long argument about which Beatles song or
record is the best.
LJ: I can't answer that. I've tried, believe me, but, to me, there's
no chart of great Beatles songs or albums. Every one of them has a
great quality. People ask me what my favorite song or album is, and I
can't choose. It's like making me choose between my children. I'm
looking at my new album right now, because the record company just
printed it, and I could pick any one of the songs on here and say
it's the best one. Every one of them has an iconic quality to them.
It's like asking someone, What's the best Shakespeare play? You just
can't identify one in particular. You listen to a Beatles record, and
you can't listen to it two times in a row and hear exactly the same
thing. There's always something different to hear. It's in the nature
of art to always present something a little bit different each time.
RP: What do you listen to now that's more modern? What do you draw
inspiration from now that's more modern?
LJ: I draw inspiration from pretty much anything I listen to. Because
I travel a lot, I listen to the radio a lot. I listen to a certain
amount of jazz, to some classical. I enjoy my iPod. I have John
Mayer's latest, Dave Matthews' latest. I'll go bike-riding and listen
to Steely Dan or Aja. But, you know, my default is always going to be
"Abbey Road" or "Sgt. Pepper" or "Revolver" or "Rubber Soul". But
anything that displays a high level of artistry and a high level of
pop sensibility I'll listen to, like The New Pornographers, a nice
mixture of retro, pop, rock, jam band, progressive kind of stuff that
all flows into each other.
(At this point, Juber received word his new album was made available
on iTunes.)
LJ: Wow, my new album is up on iTunes now. You can actually hear
sound bytes on iTunes.
RP: Very cool. You have to be pretty blown away by all these
different mediums now and how you can get your music out there.
LJ: Yeah, I am, actually. The Internet has really revolutionized the
whole process of marketing and promoting yourself. It's really quite
remarkable. The stuff you can find online though, like an mp3, is the
modern equivalent of a cassette. If you grow up with vinyl and take a
first class vinyl pressing and put it next to a cassette you know
there's no comparison. The same thing is true with the whole business
of being in the digital domain. Even CDs are a compromise on an audio
quality level. The analog realm offers up something the digital realm
has a hard time capturing. The hi-res stuff is filling in the space
that's been missing, the space that analog captured so well, but it's
still not of the same quality.
RP: I'd have to agree. Now, as a soloist, you've won a couple
Grammys, you've been named Fingerstyle Guitarist of the Year, you've
worked on these enormous musical projects, but what's it like to get
out there and play places like Taffy's, to play these small, intimate venues?
LJ: Oh, I love putting an acoustic guitar in that kind and size of
environment, because it's an excellent fit. Acoustic guitar doesn't
have to be super loud, but it can be loud enough that it becomes an
immersive experience. And it's much easier to make it immersive for
the audience in a smaller venue than a larger one. I go into a
5,000-seat concert hall and it becomes like a recital. But you go
into a small club and it becomes more immediate and intimate. There's
an intimacy with the audience that makes it compelling. I certainly
have no objection to playing small venues.
When I was a kid and playing folk clubs around London and opening for
people like Al Stewart, I just loved the fact you could be sitting
there with an audience of 100 people with no amplification. It was
all right there, and it was a very real experience, and I like that reality.
RP: I think your style seems very eclectic. How would you characterize it?
LJ: I like to characterize my style as borderline everything. You
have people who say they play blues or jazz, but mine really is
borderline everything. There's elements of jazz, blues, folk, pop,
rock, even a little bit of classical in what I do. I play one guitar,
I use my right-hand fingers, so what you're hearing is all the
music-the bass, the melody, the accompaniment, sometimes even the
drums, so there's elements of percussiveness in what I do.
It's compelling. Audiences are drawn into it. It's not recital style.
When you close your eyes, you could hear three or four musicians
playing. It's entertaining on so many different levels, even though
some people might be too young to recognize some of the more iconic
stuff I play, like The Beatles or (Jimi) Hendrix, but then it might
serve as sort of an introduction to them. But it's really a fun show,
and I certainly encourage people to come out and be entertained,
because I don't think I'll let them down.
.
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