I never set out to be a session musician. I wanted to be the lead guitarist in a famous rock and roll band, like George Harrison of the Beatles. The Beatles were my favorite band. Girls loved them. Their pictures were on album covers. And I heard them every day on WDRC, one of Hartford’s two Top Forty radio stations. My tiny transistor radio was permanently set to 1360 AM, the home of Big D, as the DJs called it. (The “Big D” emanated from an absurdly tiny building in nearby Bloomfield, CT. But from the way the DJs talked about it, you would have thought it was the biggest structure in Hartford.) My brother and I had gotten the radios as Christmas gifts in 1964. This little box with one mono earpiece had changed my life irrevocably once I discovered that I could find WDRC on it. My parents’ radio was permanently set to WTIC, which was snoozeville. WDRC was the station that the cool kids at school listened to, and now I could listen to it too.
Apart from the Ed Sullivan Show, which my parents rarely watched, The Big D was the only evidence I had that the universe outside of my little town was a fascinating, turbulent place. At any given moment, a singer or a band with an accent or a rhythm I had never heard before might become hugely popular. The world of Top 40 Radio was reconfigured weekly based on local record sales. The most exciting part of every week was the Top Ten countdown. As a sports fan, I loved the competition and rooted for my favorite records to stay around as long as possible. If the Beatles had a record out, it invariably ended up at number one. The only questions were how many weeks it would take the song to get there and how long it would stay.
I didn’t know too much about the Beatles. Their hair was quite controversial, they had funny accents, and they were from Liverpool, which was somewhere in England. In the pre-internet world, that was about all one could find out about pop stars.
But whatever the Beatles’ lives were like, they were clearly too busy to work in the insurance industry. Hartford at that time was known as “The Insurance Capital Of The World.” My father worked at the Aetna. My uncle worked at Connecticut General. My mother had worked at the Travelers. Other relatives had worked at the Metropolitan in New York. (My aunt somehow managed to avoid this by becoming a librarian like my grandmother, the other traditional family occupation.) I grew up hearing about life insurance, health insurance, property insurance, casualty insurance, rates, premiums, and actuarial tables. My parents’ nightly discussions about his day at the office filled me with quiet horror. It sounded like school, but longer, more boring, and with a stricter dress code. Nothing any of the other grownups I knew did sounded any better.
Every weekday my father got up early. He made us breakfast. Then he put on one of his two suits (black or dark blue). He left for the office a little before eight, and was invariably home before six-thirty. When he got in, he would kiss my mother, look in on my brother and I, and then talk with my mother in the kitchen about insurance while she cooked.
Was this what life as an adult would be like? I loved my parents. But there had to be something other than this to hope for when I grew up. Although I had no answer, I was definitely asking the question. And The Beatles, at least, had figured out an alternative.
George was my favorite Beatle. He wasn’t the most popular or the cutest, which was encouraging. He didn’t sing lead, which seemed daunting. He didn’t talk to the audience. And he played all the guitar solos, which were my favorite parts of the songs anyway. As far as I was concerned, George had the best deal of anybody in the band. Plus, he had long hair, girls loved him, and his music annoyed my parents. George made playing the guitar look like a very good idea.
But playing the guitar remained just that for me, an idea. I picked up the bass when I was 13 because the band down the street needed a bass player. Then I saw B. B. King on TV and the world changed. My idea had to become a reality. Through a neighbor’s divorce, I miraculously acquired a cheap electric guitar a few weeks later. I already had a bass amp, which would have to do for the time being.
I had a guitar and amp. But I also had a huge identity crisis. I wanted to be B. B. King. I wanted to be Black, wear a brightly colored suit, own a Gibson semi-hollow guitar, and sing and play the blues like no one else. This was a peculiar desire for an eighth grader living in a house in the Hartford suburbs to have, but there it was. I knew what I wanted out of life. And it wasn’t actuarial tables.
Not for the first time, my dreams ran up against an uncomfortable reality. Not only wasn’t I Black, I didn’t even know any Black people. (This would change later, but it was a significant obstacle at the time.)
Even worse, I couldn’t begin to sing the blues. I tried a couple of times when no one was home and the results were devastating. Clearly, I needed to scale down my dream a bit. For a while, I imagined that I would play guitar with B. B. in his band. He was the only guitarist on the TV show I saw. But if I could only meet him, perhaps he would see how much I loved his music and let me play with him when I got good enough.
At the time, there were a number of popular blues-influenced rock bands around. Most of them were British, but they were more my age. Not only was B. B. King Black, but he was obviously much older than the people who were in rock bands. And he’d clearly had been playing the guitar for a long time. Doing what he did seemed impossible, though I was able to figure out some of the notes.
The guys in rock bands couldn’t have been playing all that long. Sounding like them seemed much more attainable. Plus, girls my age liked them. (When I mentioned blues to one of my big crushes at the time, her response was, “Blues? Only old Black people who work in the cotton fields in the South like blues.” This was not the reaction I was looking for.) My dream had to be reconfigured.
So, when I actually started learning the guitar, Jeff Beck, then in the Yardbirds, was my new role model. He stood off to the side of the stage with his Esquire and his smirk, reeling off continuous streams of brilliance. Then as now, Jeff had a great haircut and an air of offhand mastery that I found really appealing. I sat down with “Jeff’s Boogie” and slowed it down to 16 rpm on my Woolworth’s record player. I figured if I could play “Jeff’s Boogie” I could play just about anything else. And it sounded something like blues, but cheerful and not as deep.
Much to my surprise, with a bit of work the licks fell under my fingers and the guitar started to make sense to me. After two weeks I could play almost all of it. (Though a couple of the overdubs confused me as I didn’t know which part I was supposed to play.) Playing the guitar was clearly something I could do. And I’d figured it out by myself without a teacher or written music. I was hooked.
As a terminally unpopular kid, doing something that other people my age thought was cool was extremely appealing. Plus, I loved it. I loved the sound. I loved the feeling of the strings under my fingers. And I loved the feeling of triumph when I figured out something that I really wanted to learn.
The next step was playing in bands. There were quite a few of them around, though they only played locally. It was unclear how one made the jump from CYO mixers (where the nuns walked around with rulers cut down to seven inches to monitor the distance between dancing couples) to the Ed Sullivan Show, the pinnacle of mainstream show business success at the time. But if you didn’t sing, it was obvious that you had to be in a band of like-minded people your age, at least one of whom could sing a bit.
So, I played in bands. I’d always enjoyed team sports and there were a lot of parallels. Plus, the chances of severe injury were somewhat lower. I played in bands for eight years before someone asked me to play on a recording session, much to my astonishment. The person who asked me was the great reggae singer Horace Andy and the record turned out to be his Seventies classic, “In The Light.”
As an avid reader of record covers, I knew what session musicians were. But it had never occurred to me to become one. I was never a hippie, but I was quite idealistic. I believed that playing only music I truly believed in, in a band with fellow true believers, was the only way to go. Session players, I thought, were hacks. I imagined them as old, bitter guys who hated popular music but were good enough to play it when required. Playing music you hated sounded a lot like working at the Aetna.
I didn’t want to be a hack. But I didn’t want to miss a chance to play the guitar either. So, I said yes.
When I bought a copy of the album, there was my name (albeit misspelled as “Bashford”) in the fine print on the cover, along with the names of all the other musicians. I looked at it for quite a while. My name was on a record. I wasn’t just somebody who played bars and high school dances. My name was on a record. A record with a somewhat oddly designed cover on a small label, but a record nonetheless. There was independent confirmation that I existed, and had played guitar on a record. It wasn’t just a dream any longer.
I assumed that Horace would immediately put a band together consisting of the people who played on the record and we would go out and tour. This was not to be, though it was discussed. Then Clem Paddyfote, a Hartford bandleader, asked me to play on his recording session, even though I was not a member of his group. Not only did Clem put my name, correctly spelled, on the back cover, he took a picture of us and put that on the front cover! I wasn’t that happy with how I played on the record. But I couldn’t complain about being properly credited for it.
Now my name was on two records, with two different sets of musicians. Once was an accident. Twice was something else. I then recorded with a band I was playing with, Billy and the Buttons, and did another recording session for an excellent songwriter and piano player, Bob Genovesi. The recordings weren’t issued at the time, but they sounded like records, not demos. I also did some recording at Trod Nossel, a well-known Connecticut studio, as part of my audition for the Scratch Band, a gig that I didn’t get.
By this time, I was a bit more acclimated to the studio process, and a bit less terrified. As much as I hated hearing my playing, there was something rewarding about hearing it on big speakers. And the thought that the results might be pressed into vinyl and purchased by the less discriminating was very intriguing.
However, I still thought of recording as incidental to gigging as a way of making a living. At the time Connecticut had a truly thriving live music scene; a lot of people I knew were making pretty good money doing nothing else.
So when I went to Jamaica in 1980, much to my astonishment I realized that the musicians I wanted to play with rarely appeared live. I assumed that Sly and Robbie and Lloyd Parks played in bars, and that I would find out what bars they played in and try to sit in. No such luck. Kingston in 1980 was in a state of siege. Live music was almost nonexistent. The guys I wanted to play with were doing recording sessions, not playing in clubs. So I knew I had to start playing sessions too if I wanted to work with them.
The great producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes took a chance on me a month or so after I arrived and hired me for a session with Roots Radics. Within six months I was doing recording sessions regularly. I also had joined the very popular Lloyd Parks and We The People Band, so I was doing live shows as well. Producers and artists came to watch the band, liked what they heard, and started hiring me. So did some of the artists the band backed on stage.
All of a sudden, I had a session career. I learned an incredible amount about music very fast. I made very good money for the time and place. Best of all, I got to play with almost all of my heroes, just as I had dreamed might happen. In the process, I had become one of those people whose name shows up on records a lot. I haven’t stopped doing sessions since. I did two last week.
It’s strange how things work out. When we first moved to the Bronx, we were friends with a hippie couple who had lived on the Farm, a huge commune outside of Nashville founded by one of the original Haight-Ashbury people. They had a band that played defiantly original music, no covers. And they were quietly aghast at my willingness to play weddings, bar gigs, sessions, or whatever to feed my family.
Although they were too polite to say so directly, they had real questions about my integrity, or lack thereof. I was obviously talented, so why was I doing this? Wasn’t music supposed to reflect your deepest thoughts and feelings? What was I doing playing music, and worse, recording, just for the money?
It wasn’t only hippies who thought this way about session men. As an avid reader of Hit Parader magazine in the late sixties and early seventies, I remember very well the prevailing attitude about using session men on records. It was perceived as inauthentic or plastic. (Remember when your career would have been over if you sold a tune for a car commercial? Ha!) I even convinced myself that the Beatles played all the instruments on “Sergeant Pepper,” and was baffled at the session credits for outside musicians on “Rubber Soul.”
I can understand this prejudice against hired session guns. I do think that musicians should have ideals (like anybody else) and try to live up to them. But this attitude kept a lot of great and historically significant groups of players like the Funk Brothers and the Wrecking Crew, to name just two examples, from getting the credit they deserved.
The older guys in the Maytals suffered from this practice tremendously. They played on probably half of the records cut in Jamaica from 1966 through 1974, when Toots got signed to Island and they started touring with him, which cut down their session work. Jamaica was one of the largest recording centers in the world during this period, so that meant these guys made a lot of records, very few of which had their names on the jackets.
Reggae uses a lot of the same bass lines over and over, and Jackie Jackson, Toots’ bass player, created many of them. The bass line in the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” is a note-for-note copy of one of his lines from a hit instrumental called “Liquidator.” For quite a while the Maytals drum chair was shared by Paul Douglas and Winston Grennan, up to Winston’s death in 2000. Both of these masters played on thousands of records without credit, and Winston in particular was very bitter about it.
I loved Winston (I played in his own band off and on for sixteen years). He was one of the great characters in the history of music, like a cross between Art Blakey and the Tasmanian Devil. In addition to his reggae credentials, he had played with just about everybody you could imagine in 70s jazz and R & B, but could never remember their names. You would have to prompt him. “Yeah, mon, me play wid dis famous jazz trumpeter for a minute. Him call me fe sub a Montreux Jazz troo im drummer did sick. Me cyan remember him name.”
“A Black guy or white guy, Winston?” I don’t generally refer to people by race unless it’s necessary, but I thought this might help him narrow it down.
“American Black mon. (Jamaicans are very careful to differentiate between Caribbean and American Blacks.) Old time bebop mon. Him wicked. Play very fast and high.”
“Did he have a funny-shaped trumpet, like somebody bent it?”
“Yeah, mon. It sound great.”
“Dizzy Gillespie?”
“Yeah, mon! A dat him name! Great musician, mon. Very funny guy and him very fair with the money.”
Now if I had subbed on a Dizzy Gillespie gig at Montreux, you would have to hit me over the head to make me stop talking about it, and I certainly would remember his name! Winston, being Winston, had forgotten.
However, if you asked Winston about any record cut in Jamaica between the time he started recording and the time he came to the US in 1974, he could tell you who played drums on it and where it was recorded. If he had played on it, he could also tell you everybody else who was on the session. He could also tell you if the producer had paid him or not!
One day at sound check he was particularly vocal about the injustices of life and all the records he played on that he didn’t get credit for, and all the younger, more famous reggae drummers who had copied various aspects of his style. All of these complaints were completely justified, but we’d heard them before. Once or twice. Everyone in the Maytals had suffered similar injustices, and we were all used to Winston venting about them occasionally. But for some reason, on this particular day Winston was really getting on Jackie Jackson’s nerves.
Jackie stood at the side of the stage with his arms folded and a pained expression, looking at Winston like a disappointed older brother. I watched him listen silently to Winston’s monologue for several minutes. Finally I edged over to his side of the stage. I said, “Jackie, you played on easily as many records that you didn’t get credit for as Winston did, if not more. How do you feel about it?”
Jackie looked at me for a moment. Jackie is a man of few words, but like the notes in his bass lines, they are extremely well chosen.
“Anderson (as he calls me when he is being formal), If me play pon a session, mi know seh that mi play on de record. De artist knows mi play pon fe him record. And God know seh mi play pon de record. Who else need fe know?” And that was the end of the discussion.
For quite a while record companies, at least most of them, were meticulous about crediting musicians appropriately. But now that recorded music is streamed or downloaded instead of being purchased on CDs or vinyl, the issue of being credited for session work is back with us again. How can you tell who played on a digital download? I guess it’s back to obscurity…or relentlessly taking photos during the session and posting them on social media…I don’t know the answer.
It’s human, I think, to want credit for what you do, particularly if you have a performer’s ego, which I do. But whenever I get discouraged about this state of affairs, I remind myself of Jackie’s wise words and tell myself: “God know seh mi play pon de record. Who else need fe know?”