Interview with Laurence Juber
August 2010
PART 1
LJ: Hi Dr. Dave!
Dr. D: Hi LJ. Thank you for letting me ask you all of these questions, because I am sure that you have answered some of them hundreds of times. Hopefully I’ll manage some new ones too. To start with, it has been 10 years since the original CD LJ Plays The Beatles! which has become a staple of favourite acoustic guitar album lists. So why now to release Volume 2?
LJ: Ten years. That’s kind of a good enough reason, I think. And I was starting to accumulate a bunch of arrangements and it seemed that the time had come around to do it. And Hope has always been the driving force behind me doing these collections.
Dr. D: I notice that once again your wife Hope has produced the Beatles CD. Has she produced all of your solo CD’s?
LJ: She co-produced Winter Guitar and then Mosaic. Since then she has co-produced every one, but specifically on the two Beatles ones she is the sole producer. All the other ones I co-produced with her, but for the Beatles ones I just left them up to her.
Dr. D: That is a pretty impressive string of hits for any producer, and I think that all of us owe Hope a large bouquet of thanks for bringing all of those albums to fruition. What can you tell us about Hope’s role as producer?
LJ: More than anything else it’s driving me to keep from thinking purely guitaristically, but to actually create performances, tell stories, get away from the pure guitaristics of it. Because what I bring to the table is harmonic, melodic, fingerboard information and all the musical aspects of it that works to make these complex arrangements. And what she does is make sure that it has a ‘point of view’.
Dr. D: I think I know what you mean by a point of view. Your arrangements tend to be very close to the originals with a great deal of detail from the originals and yet you add some personal touches that bring out the latent characteristics of the song. Blackbird is the first one that comes to mind. As I said in my review, it would seem to be simple to arrange because it’s just acoustic guitar and voice, but those two parts are virtually impossible to bring together. You not only came up with a great arrangement but you also brought out a bluesy feel that is latent in the song.
LJ: Well what happened with “Blackbird“ was very specific. Blackbird was one that was like “Over the Rainbow” from my World On Six Strings album, where I must have launched into the tune about six different times in order to find the place where it really worked, where it really sat. For me, in terms of how it made sense guitaristically, as well as the emotional expression of it. With “Blackbird” the fundamental problem was: because everyone is so familiar with the accompaniment part in G – which Paul will readily confess is derived from his mis-interpretation of Bach’s E minor Bouree, where you have the moving tenths and stuff like that – so the challenge was to integrate the melody. And I figured out a way to play it in G and to keep the basic structure of it but it just didn’t sing, and the prime directive with all of this stuff is that the melody should sing.
So I fooled around in all kinds of different tunings and different keys, and what really clued me into it was this: In standard tuning the drone string is G, the open G string which is really ringing throughout through every chord change. You never get away from that. So in DADGAD in the key of A, the drone string is now the A of the second string, and everything builds around that drone tonality. But it also allows me to use that string so that the melody starts there. It gives me the room for the moving bass line, and I can still play the tenths. I can still get those musical values in there. With that, the guitaristic side started to make sense. There were also a couple of factors that I really felt were necessary. One was that there is a slightly gospel quality about the way that he wrote it, not necessarily the way that he performs it. And he will confess to it being something of a protest song, in terms of the civil rights movement where his inspiration came from. But there is also kind of this Americana quality about it, and I wanted to be able to get both those ingredients, as far as having the hammer-on kind of texture to it. Where I could take the original texture and make it almost a little more pianistic. the way some of those “slip notes” creep in. You know, piano players can’t bend or do hammer-ons so they have what they call slip notes. [Slip notes are on-the-beat grace notes that resolve into a chord tone.] So thinking maybe a little bit pianistically. And because DADGAD in A is for me the best of the bluesy gospel areas to be in, it all kind of fit together in that stylistic realm.
Dr. D: With so many great songs it must have been hard to pick 15.
LJ: You mean restricted to 15 only! There is at least a Volume 3 floating around as far as tunes I want to do. I wanted to do side 2 of Abbey Road, and more stuff from Revolver, a whole bunch of Sgt. Pepper things, but there is a point where you just have to get the record out. There were certain ones that just spoke to me one way or another. I had the arrangement of “I Feel Fine” floating around for a while. “Penny Lane” was pretty much done new for this CD. “I Am The Walrus” too. For “No Reply” I had an arrangement of it in C but I didn’t like it. It was boring. So I put it in CGDGAD and it still was boring. Then it occurred to me that if I did it in B, I could do some really cool and interesting things with it. That made it more interesting and it just came to life.
Dr. D: B major? Not a common key for the guitar.
LJ: I like B major. PCH is in B major/Standard too. It’s a useful key. And as much as I try to do things in standard tuning, it doesn’t always take me where I need to be. Actually the Wooden Horses album is probably the one that has the least DADGAD on it of anything I’ve done since Naked Guitar. But in this case DADGAD or CGDGAD took up all but three. arrangements The only ones in standard tuning are “No Reply”, “When I’m Sixty-Four” – which obviously lends itself to standard – and “You Can’t Do That”. So 3 out of 15 are in standard tuning.
“You Can’t Do That” was a very spontaneous arrangement. It wasn’t one that I laboured over, it was pretty much improvised. “When I’m Sixty-Four” just kind of fell onto the guitar. Even though Paul wrote it on the piano, it could have been a Chet Atkins arrangement in terms of where it sits in standard tuning with ‘cowboy’ C chords. And I think that part of it has to do with the fact that it is driven by the clarinets. If you look at clarinet music on the page, it’s the same written range as the guitar. The lowest written note on a clarinet is an E. But that’s just coincidental, I think.
Dr. D: “All I’ve Got To Do was an inspired choice.
LJ: Well the choice was Hope’s. She really wanted me to do that one. That song is a very cool R&B-style song. It’s John Lennon doing Smokey Robinson. It’s John anticipating Al Green, really. And it just seemed to sit nicely in DADGAD in that F major / D minor realm. And there was a lot of improvisation in that one too. I had the basics worked out, in my head, whereas with some of these tunes I actually put ‘mouse to computer’ to actually have a written page to at least reference. But the tricky thing is that even when I’ve done a written transcription, when I’m recording I’m not doing it from a sight-reading point of view, I’m doing it from a performance point of view. I’ll go back and then have to revise everything I did in the transcription because I’ll change fingerings, some things will be anticipated and some won’t be.... I may have taken out a fiendishly tricky bit because it took too much attention away from the actual performance side of it. But with that particular one, it was very performance-driven. And for that one and “Here, There and Everywhere” I used the Madagascar Rosewood LJ Signature Martin guitar. That guitar sometimes just has the coolest bluesy sound. It has almost an electric sound to it.
Dr. D: Is arranging a Beatles song different from arranging, say, a Harold Arlen song?
LJ: It’s different in the sense that the Beatles records are very iconic, and are very much part of people’s experience of actually listening to the Beatles. They have the record in mind. And this is especially true with the “I Am The Walrus” and “Penny Lane” type of stuff. So there is an element of trying to capture something, whether it’s George Martin’s orchestration or some ingredient in the record that adds that extra level of reminiscence to it. I try to do a little bit of background research and one of the things that surprised me was, I didn’t realize that with Eleanor Rigby for example, what Paul had asked George Martin for was a Vivaldi-style arrangement. What was going on at that time was that Fahrenheit 451 was playing in the movie theatres. And Bernard Hermann’s score for that is very heavy on aggressive cellos. What George Martin did was to borrow this very articulated. percussive kind of attack on the cellos all those [LJ sings the moving cello part right after the first “Ah! Look at all the lonely people.”] all that kind of stuff, and that can be linked to Bernard Hermann’s score for Fahrenheit 451. Which is interesting and also kind of indicative of the eclecticism that was informing the Beatles music in that middle period. I was thinking about this the other day, not in relation to this album but just in relation to the Beatles music in general, and it’s fascinating that they got to the point where keyboards and orchestrated sounds became really an important factor, at the tail end of Revolver going into Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. And then they started to become reinvigorated with the guitar band end of things. So by the time you get to Let It Be, for example, it’s very guitar-driven. Other than Billy Preston’s keyboard parts, and Paul’s piano parts which are still quite rock’n’roll. There’s a lot more of those really cool worked-out counterpoint guitar lines. And then by the time you get to Abbey Road it’s chock-full of that stuff. But then you also get this Moog synthesizer overlay that’s going on. Almost every track has some kind of synth thing going on. So there’s a lot of eclecticism in finding the sounds. And when it comes to something like especially “Eleanor Rigby” there’s no guitar on that record – although when Paul does it now he plays guitar on it, he does a little acoustic rhythm thing with it. So being able to capture those non-guitaristic elements is part of the challenge of doing the arrangements.
Dr. D: I thought what you did on the album was particularly effective. Since there’s no way to get that sound of the bows “biting” into the strings on guitar, it was a great idea to pick up motives from the song to keep the action going.
LJ: There were some other factors at work. One is that the closest I can get to cello tuning on the guitar is CGDGAD. And because there is a lot of oscillation between E minor and C in that song it was natural to do it in that tuning. That way I can get down to that low C. Also, because I have one of Kevin Ryan’s Mission Grand Concert guitars that has a Bosnian spruce top, which of all my guitars is probably the most cello-ish sounding, because it has a little bit of that kind of growl, a little bit of that kind of articulation.
I didn’t realize until after I finished the album that I used, I think, eight guitars on it.
Dr. D: Wow, 8 guitars for 15 songs?
LJ: Just to be able to say: “OK, which guitar suits the tone of the tune?” But ironically it made no difference when we were mastering the record. We didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to try to make each guitar fit together – because sometimes you have to accommodate the fact that different guitars speak differently. But there was just something about the way in which each guitar seemed to be appropriate to the particular tune, just the tone of it. There was very little going on in the way of EQ at all. I didn’t use any equalization in recording and we used I think the barest whisper of EQ just to open up the high end, and maybe add or subtract a tiny bit of low end. But it’s all pretty much the way it went down with a bit of reverb for ambience.
Dr. D: You have composed and arranged music in a very wide variety of styles, from outright pop to sophisticated jazz, and even music that verges on classical. Do you consciously aim for this eclecticism?
LJ: I think I’m naturally eclectic. I think it comes from being raised and educated in England where there was a lot of exposure to a very broad range. And right from the start, when I was a teenager, I would listen to Beethoven, I would listen to Django Reinhardt, and I would listen to the Beatles, and be analytical and just try to figure it out as I was going along. I don’t think the U.S. system quite gives you that breadth. There’s a tendency for people to become much more specialized in the U.S. So part of it is just reflecting my own eclecticism in terms of the broad strokes career-wise. And the fact that I have various interests. I like to play the blues, I like to play jazz, I like to at least kid myself that I can bash my way through some Bach on occasion.
Being an electric guitar player too, and having played in so many different kinds of contexts. Having played with and written for orchestras, played in rock bands, blues bands, folk bands, jug bands, whatever. The two areas that I will shy away from are bluegrass, because I just don’t have any repertoire – but it’s fun to jam with bluegrass players – and flamenco, because I just don’t understand how they count. I had a flamenco guitar lesson one time, I couldn’t find one! And it’s like: “OK, I know when I’m beat.” I’m sure it’s much simpler than they were letting on, because in flamenco everything is so geared to the dancers. And also, because I don’t use fingernails. Playing flamenco on steel strings without nails .... I understand the style well enough to be able to throw in the occasional flourish, but it’s not what I do.
Dr. D: The rasgueados must be tough with no nails.
LJ: The rasgueados are fine. And triplets aren’t bad. It’s really the fact that that technique is very driven by rest stroke. I do a lot of rest strokes but the flamenco guys do it even more. They do some of the really fast scale patterns using rest strokes, and I just don’t articulate that way. And my approach is a little different. I’m more textural than that.
Dr. D: You have a Bachelor’s degree in Music from the University of London, and you often say that you earned your Master’s degree at “Paul McCartney University.” What do you feel that you learned from Sir Paul? Was it a general approach or more specific procedures?
LJ: It was both. Just to watch a master at work is an inspiration. As a studio musician I’d always been on the other side of the glass, always been in the studio and not in the control room. So I never really saw much of the process until I joined Wings. As far as how records are being made from that side. More typically I’d be on the other side and playing my parts, coming up with tones and stuff like that. Very rarely did I get to sit in the control room and do what I was doing. As time went on it became more of that. But I think with Paul it was kind of watching what was going on and learning the whole “less is more” concept, as far as you don’t need to overdo it. It’s all about the song and the performance. And the fact that he is so eclectic, so that he could turn from doing something very folkie to something really rocking in the blink of an eye. And then the whole business of it. What Joni Mitchell calls “the starmaker machinery behind the popular song” [in “Free Man in Paris”]. And the publishing business. The fact that Paul has a very substantial music publishing catalogue. In fact I think he’s the largest independent music publisher in the world. It was all that stuff, all of it. Not to mention the whole Beatles thing.
And also the relationship between Paul and Linda was very potent, a great example of how you can work with your wife. It helps to have a gazillion dollars, of course, but they didn’t act that way. Linda was a very important influence. I think of her as the glue that held all that stuff together.
Dr. D: So I guess she was kind of a moderating influence between some of the ego-based stuff we male guitar players are often guilty of.
LJ: Sometimes Linda was the one who really kept things rocking too. There was no “Now, now boys, behave yourselves!” It wasn’t like that. [laughs]
Dr. D: You mentioned a jam where either Paul or Linda was on the drums. Could she actually play the drums?
LJ: Occasionally she’d sit down at the drums, yeah.
Dr. D: Would you say that Paul and Linda gave you the model for working with Hope?
LJ: It gave me a context for working with Hope. When we first met, we started writing songs together. We’ve just worked on a lot of projects over the years. So it was very to involve her in the production process. It took a while for me to become comfortable enough in what I was doing to let her in. You know, Solo Flight I did all by myself. And then Naked Guitar and LJ were both co-produced by James Jensen of Solid Air Records. Then I kind of handed Winter Guitar over to James and Hope. Because sometimes I’m just too busy being the player and doing the arranging for really wanting to be responsible for making production choices too. But when Hope came to me and said: “I really think you should do a Beatle album” I was not willing to do it originally. And she said: “Well if you don’t do it for anybody else do it for me.” So I did it for her. I said: “Fine, then you produce.” And it just became part of the process. And since then she’s produced or co-produced every album.
The only one that has kind of an odd credit history was the Altered Reality album, because Artie Traum was the one that brought me into Narada Records. So Artie was entitled to the producer credit on the record, but a great deal of the work was actually done by Hope, and myself, but she ended up getting a co-executive producer type credit. It was all politics at that point. Artie was a lovely guy and very easy to work with. But that album came together so fast. For Altered Reality I was offered a deal in early December and I was done with the record by the end of January. Because we had to get it out. They said: “Can you finish it by Christmas?” [laughs] And it was like: “Wait a minute, we don’t even have a contract yet! I haven’t written it yet!” But usually they don’t get done that quickly. I typically reckon on nine months. It takes that long to make a baby, it takes that long to make an album.
Dr. D: How long did this one take? Was it nine months?
LJ: From the time I really started working on it seriously to the time it was actually delivered, yeah, it was about that. But the recording process was about six weeks.
Dr. D: Did you have the arrangements done before you started? Did you play them in public first?
LJ: Some of them. But some of them changed too.
Dr. D: Will they change now in performance, even after you have recorded them?
LJ: To some extent. I think that they will change in the sense that right now the mode that I am in, because I’m heading towards doing a jazz-blues record, the mode that I am in is that I am not willing to be restricted to exactly what I did on the record. Because I want to allow myself the capability of being spontaneous. And a different kind of spontaneity. I mean there’s always a spontaneity whenever I’m playing something familiar. I’m always playing it fresh each time I do it. Cause if it gets old then I don’t want to do it. I want to leave it alone for a while.
And I think “All I’ve Got To Do” and “You Can’t Do That” in particular are perhaps a little more forward-looking in terms of not being quite so structured and having a little more room for the improvisation.
Dr. D: You have added in some nice bluesy and jazz touches and even a smidgen of Django in your improvisations.
LJ: I actually toyed with the idea of doing the whole of “Michelle” Django style. But there’s a certain expectation with that. There’s a certain kind of romance that you don’t get, unless you stick somewhat to the original. But I allowed myself the liberty of playing it like I did.
Dr. D: You certainly did some very cool things with the second half of “Michelle”. And by serendipity, with Sir Paul just receiving the Gershwin Prize at the White House, “Michelle” is back in the forefront of people’s minds these days.
LJ: Yeah, it’s in everybody’s minds but that was just pure serendipity. For me what was interesting was that that was not my original arrangement. I had originally arranged that tune in A minor, some years ago. But when I revisited it I realized that G major / G minor would be better– because it starts on a G major chord but it’s actually in G minor – it’s tricky, one of Paul’s tricky things – it just kind of lends itself to that key. And you know playing Django type stuff in DADGAD is an interesting challenge, but one that I’m starting to embrace. I’m just right now working on an arrangement of “All The Things You Are” in DADGAD. And I’ve just done “Cry Me A River”, and in fact you heard me do that in Toronto.
Dr. D: That’s right. I love that song. Beautiful arrangement too.
LJ: Yeah, “Cry Me A River.” I finally got to play it for the writer, Arthur Hamilton, who loved it, so I’m happy about that.
And then, working on some other stuff. Perhaps “September Song”, for example, the Kurt Weill song. But try as I might, these things just seem to fall into DADGAD, where the voice that I’m looking for seems to live. But not exclusively. I still have some stuff I’m fooling with in standard tuning. I love to play in standard tuning, it’s not that I don’t want to do that. It’s just that there’s this part of me that’s ‘questing.’ DADGAD is kind of the ‘questing beast’, as it were. It’s this quest to conquer its own reality, and how that reality lends itself to the song. The fact of being able to do “I Am The Walrus” in DADGAD. It’s like: “That makes sense.” It makes perfect sense. I couldn’t do it the way I do it in standard tuning. And I played it for the first time the other day in the BeatleFest in Chicago, and I was not anticipating quite the reaction I got to that. It really seemed to go over well. Because it gets into that big strummy bit at the end, which is a bit of a crowd-pleaser.
On “Please Please Me” I wanted to reproduce where John was originally going with the composition, which was a kind of Roy Orbison-style song. But it didn’t work. Hope said: “It’s not urgent.” It needed a kind of sexual urgency. But I still wanted to keep some of the Orbison thing in, so I took that opening riff and I put it down lower, just to get a little twang in there. And to separate it from the melody, because that riff is the opening of the melody. I needed to put it in a separate octave. It was either that or doing it an octave higher, but that was too much information at the beginning of the tune.
Dr. D: When I first heard it my immediate thought was: “Hey, that’s an octave too low!” but then when the melody started I realized that it really set off the melody from the guitar part. It brings the melody more into focus.
LJ: Yeah, then it makes sense.
That’s pretty much it. Well, for “Drive My Car” to begin with I kept it controlled, because there’s a lot going on with that bass line. In order to be able to articulate the melody I couldn’t be as aggressive with that as I would be with, let’s say with I Saw Her Standing There, where the drive is a little bit different. “Drive My Car” is more of an R&B and Soul groove. That one’s a lot of fun to play.
Overall what was amazing to us was that when we sat down to do the running order, we pretty much did it in the first go. It was just like: “OK, this, this, this, this, then this.” I always try to keep the keys kind of separate, so that you don’t have two tunes that are in the same key back to back, and it just kind of flowed. And when we tried to re-arrange it we just couldn’t. So pretty much that was where it wanted to be.
I’ve been enjoying playing these tunes in concert. “Penny Lane” is, well, not one you want to open the show with. It took me a little while to work in that piccolo trumpet solo.
Dr. D: I love the way that you interweave the trumpet solo with the accompaniment. I have heard arrangements where all accompaniment drops out to play the trumpet part note for note, and others where they lower the trumpet part to keep a bass line going, and both sound wrong – there’s a break in the flow of the song. So I love the way you get both in and keep the feel of the song going.
LJ: Thank you. Again, doing it in DADGAD allowed that to happen because of where it sits. with that high note jumping up to the [17th fret] high G. Thank goodness for strap buttons, because that’s what keeps my hand from going any higher. Also, because you’ve got the two key centres. The way I do it, the verse is in D and then it drops to C for the chorus. Which is pretty unusual and from a pop song point of view a pretty progressive move. But it was the kind of thing that Paul was very willing to do at that particular point in time because he was being a little bit self-consciously artistic in what he was doing, because he was aware of the fact that he had a platform to be artistic. He was able to take advantage of it with those kind of stylistic areas. The cool thing is that now I can do “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields” back to back, which you know were the two sides of the single.
Meanwhile you can find more info on LJ and his recordings in these places:
His web site: www.laurencejuber.com
LJ on Facebook
LJ on Twitter
Some LJ info on Wikipedia