Enigmatic pianist was a master bandleader and song writer who influenced Elton John and more.
One afternoon in the early nineties, singer pianist Bruce Hornsby was visiting his friend and hero Leon Russell at the latter’s home near Nashville. The house had a three-car garage and the doors “were wide open,” Hornsby recalls, with “things strewn all over: old mixing boards, awards tossed in a box, gold records, all this detritus. I said, ‘Leon, what is all this?’ ” Hornsby affects Russell’s slow, gritty drawl. “He said, ‘Residue from the fast lane.’
“That line said it all,” Hornsby says. Russell – who died on November 13th at 74 in Nashville after years of ill health, including a heart attack in July – “grew up in an era where pop stardom was an ephemeral notion. If you achieved it, it didn’t last long. Maybe he thought his four- or five-year run as a top-drawer touring artist and record seller – as a rock star – was pretty damn good.”
That winning streak actually ran longer: from the mid-Sixties – when the Oklahoma-born Russell emerged as a first-call pianist, arranger and producer in Los Angeles, working on sessions for Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys, Ricky Nelson and the Byrds – until 1977, when jazz guitarist George Benson’s Top 10 cover of Russell’s ballad “This Masquerade” won a Grammy for Record of the Year. In between, Russell applied a unique, instinctive blend of wheat-field country music, down-home rhythm & blues and black Pentecostal church elation to classic early-Seventies records by Bob Dylan, Dave Mason and the Rolling Stones, while cutting his own solo LPs with Eric Clapton and the Stones as his sidemen.
This story is from the January 2017 edition of RollingStone India.
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This story is from the January 2017 edition of RollingStone India.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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