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Date Posted: 02:00:31 05/12/03 Mon
Author: E.S. Anderson
Author Host/IP: 24-197-185-109.dul.mn.charter.com / 24.197.185.109
Subject: THE FAST LANE: Oct. 1992 Musician article by Matt Resnicoff

_THE FAST LANE_
"Shawn Lane, Memphis' Multi-Instrumental Savant, Goes Public" by Matt Resnicoff

THE RECORD STORE CLERK APPROACHED Shawn Lane in the video department, squatting in front of a rack full of foreign movies. She must have recognized him from the cover of a local free magazine found at every bus stop and convenience store check-out counter in Memphis; he was wearing the same grey trousers as in the photo, and his smooth hair dangled in a ponytail down the back of that same blue striped shirt. The store had sold its four copies of his CD Powers of Ten, released that day, and he leaned back and smiled like a Buddha, thanking her for the information. "They obviously put it it the rock section," he joked, and not three seconds later was busy hiding a boxed set of Maurizio Pollini piano concertos so he could come back and buy it when he had cash.

Lane foraged through the bins in search of something he liked, or didn't already have, and he didn't appear satisfied. He was polite about it, but lingering over stacks and stacks of discs on display, he couldn't hide his bewilderment with the MTV culture, with the press' critical laxity ("Just pass 'em the lyric sheet and have them review that"). His biggest gripe was fear of the unfamiliar. "Someone issues a failed experiment, and that spoils it in the critics' minds for all the people that are doing it well. Joni Mitchell was critically hailed, and then she put out Shadows and Light and Hejira and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter; the critics are like, 'Yes, those albums were horrible, and now she's back to what she was doing before, before she tried to get complex.' Those are the best things she did, I think. Or Genesis -- Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme, there's some brilliant music on there. Now, for every example of a fusion that yields bad result, like . . . I don't know, I hate to name names, but that new Stanley Clarke that was all old live things from the '70s? That was ridiculous, it just goes on and on, a bunch of mindless jamming. Quite a few fusion albums at that time didn't have subtlety of timbre or composition, but just because that happened doesn't mean all this other very sensitive and creative music didn't.

"But it's funny -- when people do something new, like Allan Holdsworth or Scott Henderson, that's somehow . . . inferior in a lot of critics' minds to, say, what Wynton Marsalis is doing. But why? If anything, Wynton is so derivative of a certain era and style. And these other people are trying to create some sound picture that has never been heard. Why is it turned around to where any time you do something traditional -- safe rock or pop or jazz -- it's fine and wonderful, but when you smear boundaries it's considered wrong? I don't understand that."

In contemporary western culture, those boundaries are rigid; in American record stores, they may as well be laced with barbed wire. Shawn knew this; he had it all figured. "The whole problem is categorization. As soon as you put it in a box, it smothers; it's either gonna have to be let out to go forward or die. And the critics, the people that think of themselves as being progressive and on top of things, are the ones killing it tje most, because anytime somebody tries to open the box, well then, they're the worst enemy, you know. Some bad rock-funk-jazz fusions . . . that's the tip of the iceberg. You could have an interesting fusion of Bulgarian music and pop music, or Indian music and jazz, like McLaughline, or classical and pop and jazz, like maybe in my case. We need some other term that doesn't have this sour connotation."

The young man with all the big ideas is without doubt the most interesting spectacle in suburban Memphis, and even more certainly the only Liszt scholar to ever play on a record by Robert Duvall, or Johnny Cash, or rapper D.C. Talk. The music on Powers of Ten, like the music he listens to -- everything from the Gone with the Wind soundtrack to Phineas Newborn -- is the product of a virtuoso who hasn't quite figured out what he wants to play, or even what instrument he wants to play it on. And that's the whole idea. He passed up the lead guitar spot with Alice Cooper and UFO; he hopes to perform his piano concertina with full orchestra; he eats sushi with a fork.

Lane talks like a Southerner, and one feature of the dialect is that most of his sentences end in an upward inflection that suggests inquiry; most things he says are rhetorical questions aimed at deflating the status quo. "And that brings up another thing people overlook, especially in Memphis -- that behind every good pop or mainstream person, there's usually some people that are left of center bringing a spark to it. Like Sting with his jazz musicians in the background. Narada Michael Walden produces the mainstream people, and he played some insane drums with Jeff Beck on 'Led Boots.' Where you don't have somebody slightly progressive or bent, it's usually gonna be real bland crap."

Shawn got back in his car, got on the freeway, and got so excited about Tchaikovsky and Chomsky that he lost his way on a route he traces twice a week. With a copy of W magazine tucked under his arm, he glided through the aisles of the biggest bookstore in town, a converted movie house set up with velour ropes and marquee. A three-volume biography of Franz Liszt called out to him and as he spoke about the composer, he picked up a dictionary containing thousands of classical themes written on staves, alphabetically listed in an appendix to lead the user to the corresponding melody. He put it down and said he had them all in his brain already.

"If it's marble, or if it's notes and sounds or pictures and words -- it's all manipulation. A sculptor wants to make a statue but somebody says, 'Yeah, but it has to be like this and this and this . . .' He says, 'Well, why do you need me?' And it's gotten that way in music, because if you know the drums are gonna go boom-bap boom-bap, the chords are I-IV-V and mabye a VI-VII thrown in, and the melody has to be harmonically consonant within that, what's left for the artist? You have to start with a clean piece of marble, wthout assumptions."

He shrugged, and got quiet as he drove past the cemetery. When he arrived home, his grandmother gave him his phone messages, one from the musicians' union about a check. He clenched his fists triumphantly. Were he to get paid by the session for his work on Powers of Ten -- where some songs contain nearly 100 of his own multi-instrumental parts -- Shawn Lane could retire at 29.


IT SMELLS GOOD in Memphis after the rain, even the concrete-tainted mist enveloping the roof of the Peabody Hotel. The view takes in the entire area, north and western suburbs, out to the Mississippi River, which hems in the city tightly to its east; nearer still runs Beale Street, a cove of tiny blues clubs, the Orpheum Theater, where a much younger Shawn saw a concert by the progressive rock group U.K. and had hs preconceptions about music ravaged beyond recognition.

Beale Street has changed quite a bit in the intervening years, and so has Lane: He lost and regained a wife, gained a bit of weight, read about 80,000 books and, in locations similar to and including the white raised gazebo behind him on the Peabody roof, probably played more Stones and Hendrix numbers than the Stones or Hendrix ever did. Shawn didn't find this completely satisfying, especially after discovering what a guitar could do that night at the Orpheum, and there it began. Once his old band, the Willys, broadcast a concert featuring his recasting of "All Along the Watchtower," that version of the song became a weekly request in Memphis for five years running. Every famous rock guitarist staying at the Peabody during that time couldn't quite believe what they heard pouring over the sides of the building.

Now, friends commuute to spend time with him; one buddy, his car loaded with tapes of a 14-year old Shawn playing with Black Oak Arkansas, travels from Little Rock and back in the dead of night just to pore over Lane's record library and listen through the studio door while the maestro practices.

They gathered in his living room as Shawn previewed some rare Art Tatum and Ted Greene albums, and finally goaded him into showing the video bootlegs of his local gigs. He disappeared into his room and the stories began flying, one about how Billy Gibbons watched Shawn play in a bar and just fell out of his chair -- Shawn pretended not to hear about it again as he returned with the tapes. Footage from 1987 contained intricate fusion covers: He had recorded bass and keyboards on a backup tape and played guitar over them while a drummer worked to a click track in headphones. Shouts came from his couch requesting the classics, and out they came, each familiar tune wrenched apart by inhuman guitar solos that seemed to alternately repel and impress Shawn. "'That's over Lucille,'" he grinned, turning from the screen. The tapes are constant close-ups, nostril-hair angles, and at the end of a version of "Purple Haze," a bobbing Lane released such a cadenza that everyone in the room just sat looking at him in disbelief. The friend lobbying to see this tape had appeared in a new-talent column in Guitar Player magazine, where he made the mistake of mentioning his guitar teacher. Reams of correspondence came in from guitarists around the country -- wanting to know what Shawn was like.

In his room he pulled down Don Pullen's Evidence of Things Unseen to underscore a point about technique, spun and walked over to a case of Keith Jarrett albums behind the door. "Jarrett's God; he's in the top five musicians in this century, an absolute, absolute genius," he said, running his fingers down the cabinet, his hand stopping on a box of tapes containing the outtakes from his album. He played back a techno piece peppered with avant-garde harmonies, then sat down and began improvising a blinding classical piano étude which somehow segued into 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" and skittered into atonality. Talking about guitar heroism doesn't chafe him or occupy him; he's just as taken with Bergman's directing or Art Tatum's hands.

"They reminded me of Vladimir Horowitz," he said, "whose fingers also had a flat profile. Their styles weren't similar at all, but they were considered the top in their fields; Tatum was the greatest jazz pianist of all time. With Horowitz you couldn't quite say that. He was an extremist -- he could get louder or softer than anybody, you know? But when it came to interpretive music like Beethoven, he didn't do so well. The other thing is, Rachmaninoff and Horowitz would go see Tatum and were amazed, and that's the foremost classical wizards of the day. Gershwin would have done anything for Tatum, and was in the position to help, so he wouldn't have to play in smoky clubs where people talked over his music. But Gershwin died before he could do anything."

Tatum got the same criticism which today afflicts Oscar Peterson, and perhaps McLaughlin and Lane: prodigious with chops, parsimonious with poignant ideas. ". . . More straitjackets," Shawn continued. "Even though Peterson was playin' similar in the '60s, he was communicating at a high level then and a high level now. What made me feel better about that whole scene is the Lexicon of Musical Invective, a book of nothing but the criticisms heaped at every great composer. There's pages on Mozart. And Tchaikovsky was critically despised, which may have led to his killing himself by drinking unboiled water during a cholera epidemic. It gets confused: A work by Scriabin that sells eight records might be one of the ost sensuous pieces of art in the world. To judge something by how many peopleit appeals to, that's a sticky issue.

"People have criticized my music, saying, 'This isn't rock, or jazz, or classical, or this and that,' and it's strange, because they're criticizing me for what I'm trying to do. If it was pure jazz, then for me it might be a failure."

THE FIRST SNAPSHOT of Shawn with his siter's abandoned guitar was taken when he was four. He leafed through an old photo album to find the funniest pictures. "That's when I was gigging around town when I was 11 years old, playin' with other guys that were like 17."

The bell bottoms made him raise his eybrows. "Probably about '75. That was Black Oak Arkansas, I was 14, so that was about '78. That guitar's an old Les Paul Special, a '58; the management stole it from me when I quit the band. I was really mad. This one here was at the Warehouse, where ZZ Top recorded Fandango, in New Orleans. The biggest gig we played was Mexico City in 1979, in front of 80,000 people, I think it was. That was when [frontman] Jim Dandy was into Christian rock -- we had a keyboard player into John McLaughlin, the bass player and drummer were into progressive stuff, and we did songs where Dandy would sing Christian lyrics in this gutbucket country voice, and the music on top was like Return To Forever! It didn't really work, but we learned a lot."

In the next photo he comes eye-to-shoulder against another guitarist grimacing behind matted long hair. "That's Ted Nugent. And Ted, he's this guitarslinger, a jammer, and likes to blow people away. This was his hometown, Detroit, and he got up -- he was just gonna blow me away, you know, he started whatever licks he always played" -- Shawn started smiling -- "and I was this little kid, and I just . . . just greased him, man." Laughter. "In his hometown. And then afterwards I was kinda like, 'Hey, Ted,' and he was, 'Rrr, get away!'" What did young Shawn play? "Just wild stuff, just" -- he stretched apart and wiggled the fingers of his left hand.

The Shawn in the photos is svelte, flaxen, posing. Clearly, he went through the guitar-hero phase when he was a child; he's since become an artist. After Black Oak -- and the Holdsworth epiphany at the Orpheum -- Shawn started recording at home, at first in a four-track setup, later producing multitrack demos which got him his record deal. He made off with a great home studio, though space requires him to keep amps in the closet even when he records. His tone is smooth and thick, and when he held the guitar high his hand expanded to cover huge intervals.

"I don't want to sound pompous, but pretty much anything anybody plays, I could figure out real quickly. Now, Holdsworth's voicings are hard to get by ear sometimes, but one guy whose phrasings I never can quite lay a finger on is McLaughlin, because there's so many combinations of rhythms and notes. And Kazuhito Yamashita's solo guitar transcriptions of works like Dvorak's ninth, Stravinsky's 'Firebird Suite' -- whhhew! But just about anybody else I can tell you what they're doing right away. That doesn't mean I'm not amazed by their ideas. I hear Henderson or Metheny and go, 'God, how did they think of that?' It's brilliant how they thought of it.

"But Hendrix's note-shaping, where he's bending one a quarter-tone and another a whole step, then playing a note and not having vibrato, another with fast vibrato and the next slow . . . ultimately, that is harder to play than something 'technical.' Blind Willie Johnson's 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,' all of the little rhythmic and timbral inflections? I've never heard anybody come close on a technical level. A composition by XTC can be unbelievably technical, because of the genius of this chord put to the next, going to this other modulation. I love everything from the simple to the obscenely complex, like Conlon Nancarrow -- he has an army of player pianos hydraulically hotrodded to play music that goes by at 300 notes per second. But it's all music and it all expresses something."

The surprise is that as a composer, Shawn leans toward simple ideas executed craftily, at times explosively, and he made a point of explaining that his phrasing concepts are actually high-speed extrapolations of the rhythmic groupings inherent in Charlie Parker solos. "People are familair with the Savoy or Dial recordings," he said. "But the bootleg of September 27, 1949, the first bebop concert at Carnegie Hall, is a totally different impression of Bird. In my case, I would search out those albums because I love 'em regardless of if I played, just like I search out records by the people that took lessons from Liszt. Liszt died one year before the advent of recordings in 1886. All the great pianists of the golden age of piano, from 187something to 1940, were Liszt pupils or people that took from Liszt pupils. That style doesn't exist anymore, with few exceptions, like Cyprien Katsaris and György Cziffra. So if you really are interested in msuic you have to go to great pains to find the recordings. And when you hear these people it's a revelation, 'cause it's gone, it's a lost art."

The title track of Powers of Ten, a complex, mutating suite, draws from a wide palette; even the more concise tunes push barriers. "'Rules of the Game' doesn't have a traditional form where there's a theme and something else and the theme comes back. It's a journey; it starts with a rock feeling and goes into this classical feel orchestrated with a lot of instruments playing lines in counterpoint over the guitar. And it ends with a totally other theme. But from the first note to the last chord, it goes through such a variety of musics. My music might relate to Jarrett in his piano improvisations: He'll go through gospel to barrelhouse to something 12-tone, but they aren't jarring transitions. By the time you're at the end of the journey, you're not conscious of how the changes occur."

None of the motor habits picked up through working on any one instrument have crossed over between Shawn's playing. On guitar his strong hand is the left, on piano it's the right. "I don't relate the instruments at all, from a technical standpoint," he said. "But that's because I don't relate any instruments I play. I'm not like, 'Okay, now I've got to do drums on my guitar album' -- no. I'm the drumer, I don't even think about guitar anymore. And I become the keyboard player when I'm playing keyboards; I totally split off. I think melody, timbre and rhythms, and how they're achieved on whatever instrument is separate. You have to start somewhere, and may not have anything to play against except something that exists in your head. 'Paris' started with bass; I put it down thinking of other instruments. It's no different -- you run through a song once as the drummer, then as the keyboard player. Sometimes I'd run through on drums and play off of something in my head that I knew I'd play later on keyboards, then I'd play keyboards, and then redo a few bars of drums. It's not like I have to do one take on each instrument and let it lie. I'll go back and cause interreaction after the fact."

Shawn punched at his computer and a readout to his right displayed "SHAWN KIT"; his keyboard became a drum trigger and he demonstrated how he recorded all the drums for his record, tapping full parts with two and three fingers. "It's possible to do things like that to where there's no way to tell it's not live. And see, I know how to play keyboards, drums, bass and guitar, so I become those players when I do those parts. On 'Powers of Ten,' where I'm playing oboe, trumpet and strings, I become those players too. I'm using a sampled sound, but the trick is to know how you're using it. If you're not playing an oboe sample like an oboist, it's not going to sound like an oboe. That comes from listening."

THE GUITAR IS no longer a mystery to Lane, and he rarely practices. He spends most of his time at the piano, composing, singing. The mystery is how he does it all, and why he's been doing it for audiences of 15 people at a time -- after Powers of Ten, he's a mystery no more. He could turn his guitar into a moneymaker effortlessly, but has mixed feelings about session work. "It's mostly to play some kind of hot lead. The funny thing is, I get in and play something I think is hot, but it's too hot, so I have to keep doing it to scale it down. Certain people locally hesitate to use me for a pop session because, 'Well, he's gonna play too fast." Or 'Because he plays fast he can't play tastefully.' And by the same token, when I send a pop song to somebody like [speed-lick Svengali producer] Mike Varney it's like, 'You're not playing fast enough!' So I've always been caught in the middle. And a lot of sessions can be a drag; they expect you to come in with the icing and save the cake, and you can't because the foundation isn't good. I don't like being in that situation that much. It's a challenge if it's subtle music or calls for something unusual. If it's gonna be real stock, well then, why have me? You can get any number of people to do that."

Shawn's read about himself in magazines before, in interviews with gushing rock stars who'd visited the Peabody; sitting in his small studio, he'd put down the articles and return to work. "You try not to dwell on that," he laughed. "It can be depressing, but you make sacrifices to do what you want to do. I don't consider playing commercial music selling out, because I enjoy it, and I'd probably would have played with some successful pop or rock band, but just being here in Memphis I never got a call. So I've just tried to get better and better and concentrate on things I like in music, and try to keep positive. I don't know. It's hard. If I did want to do complex things, it's hard to find people that can play it, and even then something's lost by the time you explain something to somebody. I'm not saying that what I'm doing is the ultimate concept, but it's an alternative I enjoy.

"It's all a trade-off in that . . . it's time. It really comes down to time. You don't know how much time anybody's got left. You might be hit by a car or just drop dead any minuts, so what's more important to you? To spend all this time doing something you don't like at all, but have a couple nice cars and a nice house, or would you rather live in maybe a less nice house and drive a less nice car, but spend your time doing what you enjoy?" He laughed, turned away and started playing "Bennie and the Jets."

LANE OF THE LAND
Shawn has used the same Holmes amp for 20 years, and records it through two 6x10 Acoustic and two 4x10 Holmes cabs. He also loves Gjika-Walker Class A rackmount amps; a small pedalboard contains Westbury tube-powered overdive pedals and Boss DD-3 delays. A MacIntosh is the brain of the system, and sits atop a Korg SG10 sampling grand. His synths and sample players are an Oberheim Matrix 1000, two Proteus 1 XR modules, a Roland R8M for drums, a Kurzwell 1000PX+ expander and a Korg EXM1 upgraded for T series sounds. Also on hand are an Aphex exciter, a Boss CE-3000 chorus, a DOD R908 delay, Yamaha REV5, REV7 and SPX90IIs, a Roland SRV2000 reverb and a Rane PE 15 parmetric EQ and SM26 mixer. He mikes amps with Shure SM57s and 58s. Powers of Ten was tracked on a Fostex E-16 through an upgraded Soundcraft Delta console, with JBL and big Acoustate monitors. Guitars? An old Roland, Charvels and a Fender Strat, strung with DR and D'Addario .009s.

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