|
|
||
|
|
Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner - Two Legendary Guitarists Reunite By Robert E. Martin It is very easy to take greatness for granted, especially when poised in your own backyard. Such is the case with Saginaw musician & songwriter, Dick Wagner, legendary guitarist for such rock 'n roll luminaries as Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, and The Frost, who recently performed to a capacity crowd at Drifter's Rock Palace with the equally legendary and inimitable Steve Hunter. Hunter began his career as guitarist with Mitch Ryder's mid-'70s band Detroit before becoming paired-up with Wagner and enlisted through former Kiss producer Bob Ezrin to form the guitar backbone for Lou Reed, in the process re-inventing many of Reed's greatest songs on the classic live release Rock & Roll Animal. In many ways, the alliance between Hunter & Wagner, which continued after the stint with Reed found the pair recording on Alice Cooper's largest selling album of all time, Billion Dollar Babies, is as significant and as memorable in the lexicon of Rock 'n Roll Greatness as that of Duane Allman & Eric Clapton trading dueling solos on the Layla album. Indeed, the introduction to Reed 's glitter-anthem Sweet Jane on Rock & Roll Animal found the pair exchanging eloquent instrumental phrasing with a seamless & soaring passion that one is hard-pressed to compare. Now, after a 20-year break from performing and playing together, Steve Hunter has flown into Saginaw to spend one week with Dick Wagner jamming in his Downtown studio. The two hope to exchange ideas and sketch song structures for a future recording project - the first time the two have actually written as well as recorded together. Recently we sat down with Hunter & Wagner for a Saturday afternoon lunch at The Junction to trace the arc of development that brought these two luminaries into the international spotlight, and now finds them together in Saginaw poised to regain it. Review: How did you two originally meet? Wagner: Steve & I met in Florida when I was performing at this club in Ft. Lauderdale called The Flying Machine. Steve was on tour with The Chambers Brothers. I was with Ursa Major at the time, and had heard Steve perform with Mitch Ryder, but never met him. Then he came strolling into this biker bar and we played together for a couple hours that night. Review: Did you know back then that you two were meant to play together? Wagner: I had no idea, but it was a beautiful experience. I had an inkling. Review: So how did you two get hooked-up with Lou Reed? Hunter: I'd been in Mitch Ryder's band Detroit and we had a regional Midwest and eastcoast hit with Reed's song Rock & Roll, which was my arrangement. Lou heard that version and contacted me through Bob Ezrin. Dick and I worked together indirectly on Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies as we both did some 'ghost' playing on that album for Glenn Buxton and the original guitarists in Alice's band. Actually, Rick Derringer, Dick and myself did a lot of playing on that album that went uncredited. The first official Cooper album we played on was Welcome to My Nightmare. And then we both did a couple of things on Lou Reed's album Berlin. Review: What was it like working with Lou Reed? I understand he has quite the reputation for being very egotistic. Hunter: I think of Lou as being a little rowdy. He's like this very intellectual guy, but also a bad boy street guy. He has this weird dichotomy that is what makes his music interesting. Lou writes 'street poetry' and there are always a couple of different levels working in his songs. I loved recording Berlin, though, because Dick and I got to work with Jack Bruce and some really great players. Review: Well, for my money, your arrangements of Lou's songs are the best-recorded translations of his material. Wagner: When Steve and I approached arranging Lou's material, we wanted to make it different than The Velvet Underground. The songs had to sound different. And Steve and I are not the type of guitar players to just lay out chords. Hunter: All our arrangements are thought out, but the solos are improvised. We gave ourselves a lot of room to be free. Back in the '70s a lot of two-guitar bands were evolving. Dick and I would play virtually the same amount of time, even in terms of solos. It wasn't an ego thing, but simply musicians working on the concept that solos could be more interesting with two guys playing rather than one. Review: Was Lou Reed difficult to work with? He has a reputation for being very 'controlling'. What happened with that union? Hunter: To be honest, we just enjoyed playing the songs. Wagner: Lou thought Steve and I were getting too much attention in the band. Everywhere we went in Europe and the States, all the reviews talked about was how great Steve and I were, and then they would speak negatively of Lou, saying compared to us he was not a good showman or singer. Lou didn't like that. Review: After you guys departed from Lou was when you blossomed with Alice Cooper Hunter: Yeah, we were with Alice for five or six years. We did Welcome to Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, Lace & Whiskey and Live in Las Vegas. Wow - that sounded like Spinal Tap for a second! Seriously, though, that first tour was fantastic. Review: Do you guys have some anecdotes from those tours that you can share? Hunter: Sure we do, only we can't tell 'em. Wagner: 'Nightmare' was an absolutely great tour. Out of 120 dates we all got along very well and performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe - it was a really pleasant thing. Review: How different do you feel the music business is nowadays? Hunter: Britney Spears wasn't born yet! But mainly, you didn't have MTV or any of that back then. It was all propelled through radio and live shows. Review: Have you seen Cameron Crowe's new film 'Almost Famous'? It chronicles that 'coming-of-age' period back in the early '70s quite well, before money fully entered the scene to corrupt the music entirely, and has a lot of references to Michigan and CREEM Magazine (a definitive, legendary, and now defunct rock 'n roll bible based out of Detroit). Hunter: I lived near CREEM Magazine's world headquarters in DetroitŠ. To answer your question, back then I think I was naïve enough to believe that music could transcend business. But because we were 'inside', it was hard to see the whole big picture. There's nothing wrong with making a good living as a musician, but if it takes over so the art starts falling apart and you're just selling something, you start losing the currency that makes it good valid music. Things weren't out of hand back then, but it was starting to happen. MTV kicked it in the bootie. Then music became fashion and what you looked like became more important than what you produced. Wagner: When you're writing songs, you always feel the music transcends everything. It's never about business when making the albums. We had the luxury of taking as much time as we wanted, but back then we were pretty much a one or two 'take' band. We would lay the basic track and then sweeten it up and embellish it. Review: Can you tell me when things started falling apart with Alice? Hunter: I can't put a finger on when it unraveled. It was sort of a gradual devolution. I wanted to do something else and found myself getting involved with other projects. Five years together doing the same thing in those days was a long time. If you were in something for longer than a year it was a big deal. I think for Alice it was time to branch out, and the same was true for us. After that, I started becoming involved with serious studio and session work. Wagner: I can remember after breaking with Alice in the late '70s. I was hanging around L.A. and got a call from Iggy Pop. He was thinking about putting a new group together with Ray Manzarek from The Doors and asked me to show up for a rehearsal with my guitar. No sooner did I have my guitar out of the case and we're getting ready to start, and I look up, and Iggy has removed every stitch of clothing on his body. He said he wanted to sing naked. At that point, I put my guitar back into the case and just left. Review: What can you tell me about your new project? Wagner: We are at the beginning of a recording a possible instrumental album. We hope to develop some ideas and see where they lead. We have interest from two or three labels in this project, so we'll see how it goes. We do have very high hopes for the project. Amazingly, the Drifter's show is only the second time we've played live together in 21 years. Hunter: What I like about this project is that we don't have a place to start. We did a lot of work on other peoples material, but when it came to our own we never took the time to do an entire project that was all ours. Review: How do our feel your respective sound has evolved over those 20 years? Hunter: For me I like the idea of being a multi-instrumentalist. I started on lap steel guitar and recently was given the opportunity to play that again, along with mandolin & acoustic guitar, on record and tour with Tracy Chapman. I've also changed in the sense my focus is more on the Blues. I've always been a Blues based player, and when Stevie Ray came around, it pumped me up again and put the Blues back in focus. But I'm not jumping on the bandwagon. If anything it made me rediscover the Blues, and I do a lot of that. As a musician it's important to rediscover your roots because you can lose perspective. When Tracy's song Gimme One Reason hit big, it gave me the opportunity to perform the Blues every night. We toured for four years and I accompanied her on Lilith Fair. Wagner: I've always been a Blues based Rock & Roll guitar player and still love that great soaring sound. I listen to a lot of classical music and like to incorporate more ethereal playing into the things I do in the studio. When I play live, its geared more towards the Rock & Roll side blended with trying to be 'tasty' in my old age. Hunter: One good example of how being 'Blues based' opens you up instead of limits you is with Billion Dollar Babies. One of the first things I recorded on that album was Sick Things. I looked at Bob Ezrin and said, 'What am I supposed to play on thisŠa song called Sick Things?' He laughed and told me to just play the Blues. So I laid this Eric Clapton style Blues style over Sick Things and everybody loved it. Just because you put the tag 'Blues' on something doesn't mean it is regarded as that way in the popular mind. I think it goes back to the Old Guys that would emulate their voices when they played guitar. It affords a wonderful expressionism. Review: What do you guy's think about the current music selling big these days? Hunter: Some of the stuff Kid Rock does I love. Wagner: It's hard for me to relate to all of it, though, coming from where we have. People bitch about Marilyn Manson and Kid Rock, but people said the same things about Alice Cooper, too. It's all truly THEATER. And it's all good. Hunter: It's like water and will seek its own level after awhile. You see all these bandwagons coming along, only they don't have the staying power. I think that's good because it helps the music evolve. Nowadays there is an audience for everything, whereas in the '70s the audience was trying to find something new. Back then you had a lot of pretty cool bands, but I think today you have more diversity. Wagner: As you get older you move past sensationalism and get back to the music. It will happen to the kids today, too. They'll go back and listen to Jazz and Blues in their pure forms. Hunter: What I appreciated most about Lilith Fair is that all these incredible, young, and gifted women were out there. Every song I heard from the smallest stage to the largest featured incredible talent. People were listening and saying, "My God, what great music!' The first time I heard Paula Cole and Jewel I couldn't believe the SONGS. This was a renaissance of serious writing. Suzanne Vega opened for us every night with all her brilliant songs, and what cracked me up is that all these girls were using older musicians. I started looking around backstage and would find all these guys my age! So I'm like - Hey, this is really cool! They didn't give a crap about MTV. They wanted seasoned players, all because it was moving back to the song again.
|
|
|
|
Enable frames | |
|
home | out/about | events | personal | store | classified | real estate | forums | archives | contact |
||
