Close Enough For A Tour Guide At The Music Circus, I Guess...

 

The South Shore Music Circus

Cohasett, Massachusetts, was the latest tour stop for Lyle Lovett and his Large Band.

The backbone of Lyle's band are the members of what used to be referred to as The Section.

Leland Sklar, the bassist, has been posting videos that he has shot at each of the tour stops; mostly of him walking around the venue and surrounding area, and pointing out things.

Leland Bruce "Lee" Sklar is an American bassist and session musician. He was a member of the Los Angeles-based instrumental group The Section, who served as the de facto house band of Asylum Records and were one of the progenitors of the soft rock sound prevalent on top-40 radio in the 1970s and 1980s.Wikipedia 

Unless you lived under a rock, or are under the age of 20, you have heard Leland's bass lines. 

There have been songs that I have liked mostly because of the bass parts, ("Running On Empty," by Jackson Browne; "It Keeps You Running," by The Doobie Brothers, to name just two...) and, come to find out, those parts, and countless others, were played by Mr. Sklar. 

I guess just about all the hit records produced during my formative years were made the same way. 

An artist would be "discovered" through a demo tape or playing in a bar somewhere, and he would be spirited into a studio, after being signed to a contract; and then the same crew of musicians would do all of the playing, while the "star" would just sing over the tracks they laid down.

If you had a collection of albums by say, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, Karla Bonhoff, Anne Murray, Olivia Newton John, The Association, Jackson Browne, Phil Collins, James Taylor, Diana Ross, Hall & Oates, Clint Black, Reba McIntyre, George Strait, Carol King, Lyle Lovett, or the band Toto, you might be listening to all 20 of your albums, but you would be hearing the same band on each...

It's no wonder that I always got the impression that bands typically sounded pretty lousy in concert, compared to "their" albums. It's the reason I didn't go see a lot of bands that I had the chance to, when they came to Boston. I associated live albums with sloppy playing. And, in a lot of cases, the reality was that the members of a typical band would have to try to learn, to the best of their abilities, to play the stuff that was released under their band's name, which became popular through radio play.

So, Leland Sklar and the rest of The Section are now touring with Lyle Lovett.

It must be surreal hearing the exact same players playing, for the most part, the exact same equipment that you might have heard hundreds of times before on different albums -seeing the drum kit that Linda Ronstadt stood just 12 feet away from, 30 years ago, as she belted out "Blue Bayou," or actually seeing and hearing the cowbell from "Poor, poor pitiful me." Imagine the view that that bass drum had!

The networking becomes even more intricate when, say, Linda Ronstadt would cover a Warren Zevon song -then you would be hearing the same musicians and the same gear on both songs, just different albums...

I'm not sure what I set out to write about here; but it had something to do with the fact that, when Leland walked into a room that's walls were lined with posters commemorating some of the notable acts that had played the South Shore Music Circus, the first poster was one of Johnny Mathis, and the second one, Liberace. Two gay guy's right off the bat. It seems like a sign of the times for there to be an implicit "push" for LGBTQ "awareness," or whatever the hell was the motivation of whoever decided to feature two queers right off the bat, as soon as you walk into the hall of fame...

Somebody Get Me A Doctor

But, the most fascinating part of Leland's video was when he went by the Tony Orlando & Dawn poster, and someone off camera noted that "That was the night his friend killed himself and he (Tony) broke down on stage."

Well, if whoever said that was a tour guide, then he wasn't the most informed one.

I had to Google "Tony Orlando breaks down on stage" and, at least tour guide guy had the right venue. First of all, as per the poster, he and Dawn played six shows, so he didn't really specify "the night" he broke down.

Google led me to July 22nd (the 5th out of 6 shows) as being the night he stopped in the middle of the performance and said "I'm just saying 'Help me,' I'm going to find a doctor," before walking away.

He had started to use cocaine heavily after his friend, Freddy Prinze Sr. committed suicide, but that self inflicted gunshot happened about three weeks before that. Close enough for a tour guide at the Music Circus, I guess...

What kind of surprised me was that Leland hadn't said: "Tony Orlando; I played with him," as he had at the Anne Murray poster, the George Gobel one, and a few others. I say this because Tony's early records were produced by Carol King, who was a frequent member of The Section. Leland must have been busy doing TV show music when Tony was singing his #1 hit song "Candida," over music supplied by the same group that is heard on James Taylor's first album...