(originally published Nov. 19, 2009)
Here is a story of cave bears and cat food sandwiches and Blind Willie flying through space and how the wild beauty of a voice-like sound pouring out of a stringed instrument can serve as a magic carpet ride going all the world wide.
But it begins with a small child climbing on a stool so he can get his hands on some strings.
David Lindley was in the first grade and he was already plenty strange. He had a thing for strings, that is – since about the age of 3, when he’d crawl under the piano at home and gawk at all the strings inside the instrument, he just wanted to make twangs. The thing is, he was good at it, and he knew it. He took right to his father’s ukulele, quickly progressed to the baritone ukulele, and the autoharp was a snap. He felt pretty much at home on any stringed instrument he came across.
So when he encountered a stand up bass one day at school, he quite naturally figured he could play it.
“I was kind of ninja like, really quiet, watching everything and taking it in,” Lindley said. “I took everything in. I mean, I watched somebody play the upright bass and I looked at it and said, ‘I can play that.’ And the music teacher said, ‘Oh no, dear, you are too small for that.’ I said, ‘Oh no, I can play that. Give me a stool.’ So I go up, and it was twice as big as me, but I could play it. I had really strong hands…bowing was hard, but you could twang it.”
Lindley has been twanging ever since. He probably attained his greatest fame as a multi-instrumentalist playing with Jackson Browne in the 1970s, but he has quietly put together a beautifully strange and wondrous body of work as a solo artist playing everything from ripping reggae to Middle Eastern, African, rambling blues, and greasy country music. He’s also shown an odd penchant – while going most determinedly his own way – for being well ahead of his time. He was reggae before white people played reggae and he forayed to Madagascar and Norway before the term “World Music” was a category. He also left the record industry behind a couple decades before its collapse, cutting his own stringed swath through the world with an arsenal of exotic instruments and records he made and sold on his own.
He tours relentlessly and most often alone and has acquired a near fanatical following who sit on the floor at his gigs as if attending the church of “Mr. Dave,” as he is sometimes known.
In the course of a single set, Lindley is likely to play a Middle Eastern instrumental, an Appalachian dirge, a lilting Calypso-like reggae tune, some dirty rock n’ roll, some astonishingly inventive, philosophical and fucking weird blues, maybe a Celtic air, a and most definitely a Turkish romp or two. He’ll do any of the songs on any of an array of instruments that include a Hawaiian “Weissenborn” lap slide guitar, an oud, a bouzouki, a saz, a 12-string guitar, or maybe just a good old six string. His keening voice is not technically a beautiful instrument, but somehow he also manages to use it to astonishingly lovely effect.
Somehow, it is all of a piece. He’s a one man testament to the uselessness of genres as a truly descriptive tool for music. Lindley, who plays Brixton at the Redondo Beach pier on Saturday night, is pretty simply one of the most unique, wide-ranging, and wildly talented musicians on the planet today. He’s a musical ninja indeed, and he’s coming this way.
“Who is the guy running along the roof at the Holiday Inn?” Lindley asks. “Who is that guy?”
Lindley grew up in San Marino. His father, John, was a lawyer who hated all lawyers but had an affinity for music from all over the world and liked to occasionally pluck a ukulele. It was a musical household where African drum records played alongside classical and blues and, eventually, rock ‘n roll.
Lindley had a bent for art of all sorts and intended to be a painter.
“That is primarily what I was going to do,” he recalled. “Music was just for fun. It always came around again, and I would get obsessed with the banjo or something like that.”
He first drew attention, in fact, with the banjo. He entered the Topanga Banjo Contest as a 20-year-old in the mid 1960s and ended up dueling in the finals with another musician who would later become well-known, Taj Mahal. They each had to play their own version of the folk standard “John Henry.” Taj Mahal, of course, played a lovely Caribbean-touched take of the song, and then Lindley floored the audience with a crazily virtuostic flamenco-tinged take. He won the contest for several years running.
Lindley later headed a group that many critics would later regard as one of the very first in the “world music” so-called genre, Kaleidoscope, which ranged from bluegrass to reggae to jazz to Egyptian music and who was so baffling to the recording industry that they were simply classified as “psychedelic.”
It was the beginning of a career that has defied classification. After Kaleidoscope, he briefly flirted with the idea of going fulltime into classical Turkish classical music. His saz teacher, a Turk, talked him out of it.
“I told him I wanted to learn classical Turkish music, and he says, ‘Oh, there are people in Turkey who would make you cry and they starve and make nothing and it’s very difficult for them. So you play your rock n roll and do that on the side.’” Lindley recalled. “He was right.”
Lindley soon thereafter began playing with a young songwriter and singer named Jackson Browne. Together, they would go from playing little clubs as a duo to major arenas all over the country. Lindley soon became one of the most sought-after sidemen in the music industry. One year, he toured with Browne, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Linda Ronstadt. He had two weeks off the entire year.
“I just went out and played,” he said. “That was the crux of the whole thing, the Zen part of just going out and playing. Where do we play next? It doesn’t matter, I’ll just play, and I got into that and got into different instruments and trying out different sounds and luckily the people I was playing with said go ahead…That was a real good period.”
He cut a solo record in 1981, called El Rayo-X, that was a seriously hot-grooved reggae record. For the next decade, he worked as a session player and made a series of major label records that left him increasingly distrustful of the recording industry. He didn’t fit a genre and was growing tired of the constraints of someone trying to fit him into one. He made several international records with small labels in the early 1990s – including his forays to Madagascar and Northern Europe with fellow multi-instrumentalist Henry Kaiser and work with Jordanian percussionist Hani Nassar – and finally had an epiphany while watching Nigerian guitarist Ali Farke Toure perform.
“It was just Ali Farke Toure and his calabash player and it was the biggest sound, and the calabash doesn’t make a whole bunch of noise,” Lindley said. “It was at this Canadian festival I heard him play and I said, ‘That is huge. Phenomenal strangeness, but small. That happened at a really good time.”
He called it “little big music” and saw his own way forward. So his new business model emerged: low to the ground and decidedly independent. He made his own bootlegs and served no record company masters. He sings about whatever he pleases – his song “Cat Food Sandwiches” is a blues lament on backstage food – and however he wants.
“It makes it a whole lot easier to deal with – you don’t have to call up the A&R department and see if you can put a reggae tune on your CD,” he said. “‘Oh no, we don’t want that, we want to put it in the rock bin.’ ‘Oh no, that Bakersfield country thing you are doing is not a good idea…it will confuse people. They will think you belong in the country bin.’”
Lindley has since toured extensively with another genre defying slide player – Ry Cooder – and has continued to release his own records. It’s an interesting thing, this tribe of slide players who have a way of crossing borders and transcending musical boundaries. In a sense, it began with one of the very first slide guitar players ever recorded, Blind Willie Johnson, whose deep-souled “Dark Was the Night” is at this very moment drifting away from this galaxy aboard the Voyager spacecraft.
“Blind Willie was an exception to everything,” Lindley said. “Blind Willie Johnson was another kind of level, he tapped into some things we don’t really know about. We kind of know they are there and how we get to them is kind of strange, but he was always there, connecting to this stuff. You could hear it – his slide stuff was not complicated, just real simple. What I have found is when you get close to the human voice or some kind of phrasing that a human voice uses, it affects listeners in a different way than if it was Bach, if it was technical or intellectual or anything like that.”
“If you were going to represent the best of the human race to have in outer space, something that communicates in a way that is not intellectual…and if any intelligent being hears that, they will go, that is what those people are about. They must be cool. But wait a minute, all this TV stuff? They sure love vampires, don’t they?”
Ultimately, Lindley’s musical journey is about just this: freedom and soul and crossing boundaries and the unexpected connectedness of everything.
“There is something that goes through all this stuff that is a common thread, and it’s unmistakable,” he said. “It goes through the music you like and it has a certain thing that I don’t know what it is, but it’s there…It’s like a field in the air, universal consciousness, and Chi and all that stuff…When you think about it, we have all kinds of explanations for things that are just explanations so we don’t feel bad. Oh no, evil? You mean a formless power that takes possession of you? Oh no, we better give it horns and a tail and hooves and make him red or you have to deal with a terrifying concept and all this stuff we don’t know about, the cave bear that is going to come by at three in the morning and eat two of your kids. How do you explain that?”
“So there is all of this stuff, just floating out there.”
David Lindley plays Saint Rocke tonight, Jan. 15, with Jodi Seigel opening. Doors open at 6, show at 8 p.m. Ticket info at Saint Rocke.com.
