Zen And The Art of Casino Archery:
Stringman Extrordinaire David Lindley
by Dean “Supersize Me!” Bonzani
8.16.04
Ah, Grasshopper. The string teaches you to be still and singular of mind. When you learn this, you can then play a song about Hitler’s mistress!
Multi-instrumentalist and arrow slinger David Lindley is hitting the road to sing about Eva Braun, web weasels, and man-boobies.
Setting out from his hometown of Claremont, California, Mr. Dave is embarking on a rare solo tour, sans longtime collaborator/percussionist Wally Ingram. Ingram, the “bango” to Mr. Dave’s “twango,” is on indefinite loan to supergroup Stockholm Syndrome, which includes Jerry Joseph of Little Women fame, and Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools.
“I’ll be going it alone for awhile,” Lindley tells fans on his website. “Walking out on a stage by yourself is a real challenge and the music and presentation takes on a more personal character. I’ve done it in the past and it was definitely fun; some different songs and different arrangements.”
Of course, Mr. Dave is never really alone on stage. His performance space is crowded with exotic stringed instruments like the Irish bouzouki, Middle Eastern oud, Turkish saz and chumbus, and gorgeous Kona and Weissenborn Hawiian lap steel guitars, just a tiny sample of a vast collection of instruments Lindley has amassed since the 1960’s.
Obsessed with stringed instruments since he was a child, sitting beneath the keyboard of his concert pianist uncle’s piano while his quartet practiced in Lindley’s southern California home, Lindley would later make regular forays to Bernardo’s Guitar Shop in East L.A., where he and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo would oogle the instruments and raptly listen to amazing players from Mexico. Taking up classical and flamenco guitar, Lindley was soon taking saz lessons, and incorporating Turkish scales and modes into his guitar and banjo playing, which he later used to great effect in what some consider to be the first “world music” band, Kaleidoscope.
His facility with strings lead to his becoming one of Hollywood’s most called-upon session musicians, and over the years, Lindley has lent his talents to recordings by Warren Zevon, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Rod Stewart, Crosby and Nash, and Bob Dylan, among others. He joined Jackson Browne in 1971, staying with him for a decade, before leaving to start his own, heavily reggae-infused meta-party-band, El Rayo-X, which turned out three must-own LP’s, “El Rayo-X,” “Win This Record,” and “Very Greasy.”
Somehow balancing the incredibly loud (nearly as loud as his trademark 1970’s polyester shirt and pants ensembles) reggae-grass rave-up that is El Rayo-X with his ongoing explorations of world music, Lindley set off with guitarist Henry Kaiser in 1991 to record Malagasy music in Madagascar, home of some of the planet’s most beautiful monkeys and lemurs. Meanwhile, he was touring as a duo with Jordanian born percussionist Hani Naser, whom he had met in 1990. Lindley, having discovered the secrets of self-promotion from watching a VH-1 “Behind The Music” episode featuring M.C. Hammer, self-released two live recordings of he and Naser’s performances, “Live In Tokyo Playing Real Good,” and “Live All Over The Place Playing Even Better,” both on Lindley’s Pleemhead Audio label.
The lessons learned from seeing how happy M.C. Hammer had been in the good old days before mega-stardom, selling his CD’s from the trunk of his car and pocketing the hard-earned cash were not lost on Lindley, who currently sells a slew of independent releases on his own label, including a host of discs recorded with beatman-gone-rogue Wally Ingram: “Twango Bango Deluxe,” “Twango Bango II,” “Twang Bango III,” and the soon-to-appear, “David Lindley y Wally Ingram Live!”
Lindley is working on releasing recordings of excellent performances with good friend and longtime collaborator Ry Cooder, with whom Lindley worked on the soundtrack to “Paris, Texas” (which, it should be noted, you must NEVER listen to while driving on the decayed highway between Tucson and San Diego— it is a way-too-creepy accompaniment to the burned-out campers and abandoned gas stations that sit like inhuman carcasses on that god-forsaken road) and “The Long Riders.” Cooder and Lindley, besides sharing an intense love of slide guitar, share a common loathing for bootlegging taper-pirate vermin.
“There are a couple of recordings that I’m bringing on the road with me that you can’t get through the website (www.davidlindley.com),” Explains Mr. Dave. “One of them is ‘The Cooder/Lindley Family Live At The Vienna Opera House.’ And that’s me and my daughter, and Ry Cooder and his son. We did a tour of Europe and Japan, and recorded it, and Vienna Opera House seems to be the best. And it was the one that was bootlegged the most, too. By some miracle of science, it got out and became a bootleg. A board tape. It’s pretty amazing. So we decided to do it ourselves.”
At this stage of the game, Lindley’s challenge is to stay one step ahead of what he refers to as “web weasels,” or, as Cooder calls them, the “Morlocks.”
“That’s always been one of the scariest characters in Dr. Who— the Morlocks and the Eloy,” says Lindley. “In this case, the Eloy are my daughter and Ry Cooder’s son. We thought of it more like that— it was a family thing. I’m being bootlegged right and left, all the time. But, when it’s a family thing, it’s different. You get a little protective and a little aggressive, too.”
Mr. Dave finds it hard to sympathize with those who utilize current technologies to pilfer artists’ work. There are many sides to the argument, but there’s no question that piracy costs artists money that’s rightfully, and deservedly, theirs.
“There are people who can’t afford to pay 20 bucks or 10 dollars on a CD, but they can afford the technology to download, and with really good sound quality. It’s like, you go to a restaurant and get a really good dinner, then you go into the kitchen and you want to clean out the refrigerator. (In a Jack Nicholson voice:) ‘Ya got anything else in there? Outta the way! I’m comin’ through! I want more of that rice pudding! And I want it for free. ) It’s a sport, actually. I have run into some of these people— it’s a sport to get away with taping a show, undetected, then get a set list, then get the musicians to sign the set list. There’s two of these guys, ya know, that I’ve run into. I know that’s what that was about, because they’ve got really strange attitude. It’s one of those things where they get off on it. Or else, they’re reeeally dedicated. They’re focused on the goal. I know one guy in particular. You can either take it real seriously, and let it take over your entire musical life, and that’s not good, that’s an unhealthy thing, but there are several downsides to it: there’s a lot of stuff I don’t play live unless it’s recorded— I’ve recorded it. I’ve written a bunch of songs that I haven’t recorded them yet, and I’m not doing them. You do something brand new, and it gets out, and it’s no longer a surprise. You’d like to be able to do it yourself.”
Like an over eager listener jumping in with the punchline to spoil a joke, tape pirates often pre-release fresh material, to the consternation of artists like Lindley and Cooder, who are sometimes unnerved by the proximity of stony-faced techies who lie in wait in the front of audiences, wired with hidden, high-dollar microphones and portable tape decks, remaining perfectly still, so as not to produce ambient noise in their recordings.
“You feel kind of violated. You see these guys sitting there in the front row, and they don’t clap. They don’t clap, they don’t move. There’s a song on one of our CD’s that Ry Cooder wrote the words to that’s called, ‘Tokyo Bootlegger Man.” It’s about a guy in Japan that he noticed. Little red light flashing, ya know? He wrote the whole thing, then faxed it to me, and I wrote kind of a reggae tune— it turned out real good. It’s on ‘Bango III.’ It just nails that whole thing. People in the front row, not clapping. They don’t want to overload the microphone— it’s devastating to a really good microphone to clap near it. Especially digital recordings, it really freaks it out. It’s like a .357 magnum.”
Lindley has learned to let the truly small stuff slide, though. An engaging and generous soul, his mastery of all things stringed is based firmly in a love of the beauty and tone of the instruments that he wields and collects, and a deeply held appreciation for the world’s great musicians and their work. Drawing on influences from sources African, Celtic, Turkish, Asian, Malagasy, and Jamaican, as well as American folk and blues, his is a sound uniquely his own, whether he’s playing banjo or oud, or singing songs about laundromats in his signature nasal twang.
A competitive archer who recently placed 30th in a field of thousands in a Las Vegas archery meet, David Lindley seeks the pause between the notes, the point of stillness before the string leaves the fingers, where the music really lives.
When the Mr. Dave Solo Road Show wheels into town, I’ll be in the front row....clapping very, very loudly.
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David Lindley at The Orpheum Theater, Sunday, Aug. 22nd. Doors open at 7:00 P.M.. Show starts at 8:00 P.M. Tickets are $18. advance, $20. on day of show.
©2004 by Dean Bonzani, All Rights Reserved