Leon Russell

Enigmatic pianist was a master bandleader and song writer who influenced Elton John and more.

- David Fricke

​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.