20 Feet from Stardom

..Love.
Perhaps it is fitting that in 2009 Spector was convicted of the second-degree
murder of actress Lana Clarkson and is serving a prison sentence of nineteen
years to life. There was a dude who surely changed the perception of
popular music but just as surely believed his own publicity citing him as a
genius.
Mick Jagger was baffled as to how ultimately somebody could be happy just singing
‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ but some of the mostly black women
‘background’ singers were clearly very happy doing just that, as
are, no doubt, the famous artists they perform with and help make sound so good.
Nonetheless it’s poignant when somebody with the obvious talent of Merry
Clayton tries to break out and become a solo artist – and then fails significantly
because, well, nobody can quite put their finger on what ingredient it is that
she’s missing.
But missing it she is, and I imagine that it’s quite difficult and possibly
even demeaning to slip back into the slightly out-of-focus background world
where you were once so happily ensconced with your dignity intact after you’ve
tried and failed to crack it as a solo artist.

I was very happy as a young chorister/choir boy to be in the background singing
with all the lads in the cantoris ranks, but my musical ear was too
good and I was marked for church choir stardom by the choir master/organist
Charles Foster Browne (Fossy) very early on in the piece. I rose through the
ranks of pre-pubescent angels at a meteoric place and was singing solos in the
first six months, but perhaps something of the rock & roll rebel was percolating
inside me and I got into trouble for making the decani lads opposite
snicker and giggle during a service by wiggling my ears – first simultaneously
and then one at a time.
Anyway, by the time I left the choir, (rather ignominiously with an inguinal
hernia), I’d had enough of the rigors of church singing and cried off
formal singing of any sort by claiming I didn’t want to damage my vocal
cords while my voice was breaking.
In fact, my voice’s transition was effected without any drama at all,
but life at Christ’s College was demanding enough without any extra-curricular
choral singing and anyway, I’d just begun to cherish my adolescent role
as a natural-born slacker.
Having said that, I’ve since led all the bands I’ve been in apart
from Ross Wilson’s The Party Machine and the Sons of the Vegetal Mother,
but I believe I’ve been a fairly benign dictator and I’ve always
thought of my fellow musicians as my political equals as well as quite often
my musical superiors and entitled to put their view before I get my way.
Still, it’s nice to slip into other bands on occasions as I’ve been
fortunate to be asked to do more than a couple of times by Ross Wilson, for
instance. The very recent foray with Chain was great fun of course, as well
as instructive, especially regarding band dynamics and their Chainy ways of
doing things. Maria was fascinated as to how this merging was actually done,
but when you’re dealing with blokes roundabout your own age who’ve
been in the music business for forty or fifty years, ego is not going to be
a problem for a start.
I was interested to discover that I could still get jittery about playing blues
standards, some of which I’ve been playing for a very large number of
years. How could I get the riff for Crossroads wrong? It happened at
the Gateway Hotel with Chain on Saturday night. The audience is still trying
to work out what was going on.
Chain’s men of steel, Manning, Dubois and Draper ploughed on as though
nothing had happened and even managed some wan, reassuring smiles at the end.
And, of course, most of the audience didn’t really know I’d
stuffed it up so comprehensively.
Maybe those nuances of difference you get when playing with someone other than
your regular team were enough to throw me into a tizz. Or maybe, given Chain’s
low-key dress sense, I’d gone too far by electing to wear my shiny, pink
shirt that night. Come to think of it, Matt did say it deserved its own website.

*Cantoris (Latin: “of
the cantor”) is the side of a church choir occupied by the Cantor. From
the perspective of the congregation facing the altar, which by convention is
regarded as liturgical East, this would be on the left (liturgical North) side.