Larry Schwartz
He started out on a baritone ukelele and graduated to guitar. By his teens, he had won the annual Topanga Canyon Banjo and Fiddle contest five times.
David Lindley remembers being daunted by the some of the competitors. “I got scared a lot of times. I just figured out what would get the judges. Actually, it was sneaky. I knew what they would like. So I played to them.”
He’s been a few steps ahead of the rest ever since. To call him a multi-instrumentalist is an understatement. He seems to have mastered just about every stringed instrument you can think of. And then some.
Many a musician would be grateful to play just one instrument with some of the skill he brings to guitar, mandolin, lap slide, violin, fiddle, dobro, bouzouki, dulcimer, zither and more.
“God, it starts with 12-string guitar,” he says of his latest album, Twango Bango Deluxe, “which is kind of normal. And it goes downhill from there.
“So we have seven-string Hawaiian guitar, which has a bass string on the bottom. There’s different Hawaiian guitars in different tunings. There’s a bouzouki and then there’s Turkish saws, which I’ve been playing for years and years. That’s more or less it.”
Twango, recorded with percussionist and drummer Wally Ingram, is a delightful, acoustic live album packaged in garish pink.
Lindley laughs to hear it referred to as “Big Pink”. “You get Star Trek down there?” he asks. “You get Deep Space Nine? God, it’s all polyester. Those are polyester colors. They can only be synthesised. It’s not a natural color. It’s Pepto-Bismol, the kind of stuff you take when your stomach is
upset.”
The cover (like the above comment) little prepares you for the sometimes bluesy, sometimes languid acoustic music, aptly described in liner notes as “an aural gem”.
Among the 12 songs is an appeal for remuneration for a legendary rhythm’ n’blues player. Pay Bo Diddley? “Oh, he’s never been paid royalties and songwriting stuff for a lot of his songs,” Lindley explains. “Somebody signed him up and had him sign away his songs. I forgot how much he
got paid for it. It was a scandalous thing. Really horrible.”
Although he’s not in a similar predicament, Lindley does suffer from the sideman’s curse: many who know his distinctive sound are not familiar with the player himself.
He was raised in southern California and is known for his longstanding collaboration with Jackson Browne and work with Ry Cooder, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon and Rod Stewart; he also graced a track on Jimmy Barnes’s 1997 album, Freight Train Heart.
Lindley’s late 1960s band, Kaleidoscope, has been hailed as “the first world music rock band”. It tried to accommodate the eclectic tastes of players: one loved Balkan music, another Turkish, yet another American country. “Each one brought their own thing to the band and we worked things
out,” says Lindley, who has collaborated extensively in recent years with the Jordanian-born percussionist Hani Naser. “It was like school. In that band, I learned more stuff than I did in a long time.”
Lindley started working with Browne in the early 1970s and, though he’d form his own band, El Rayo-X, a decade on, has remained close to the West Coast singer-songwriter with whom he recently toured Europe and Japan; later this year, they’ll be touring with Bonnie Raitt and Bruce
Hornsby.
El Rayo-X, now defunct, mixed roots, world and reggae music; Lindley is to release a live album from the band’s concerts.
It was through Browne that he first encountered Ingram; they were playing together and Lindley was impressed by his range, from reggae to second-line New Orleans drumming.
On a previous visit to Australia, Lindley toured with Ry Cooder, with whom he has undertaken several world tours and played on Bop Til You Drop and The Long Riders soundtrack.
“Ry is really busy now. He’s going back and forth to Cuba and recording all these musicians and then going to Vietnam and playing with this guy over there who’s an incredible guitar player. And doing movie things.
“I really haven’t had a chance to get together and play with him for a while. But I have talked to him on the phone. He seems real happy. The happiest I ever heard him was when he came back from Cuba. Called me up and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this stuff. This stuff is just the best. These
guys were so good, I was playing my guitar and I heard them play and I just put my guitar back in my case and said, You need anybody to go for coffee?’ “
“Fun not work!” says a note on Twango Bango Deluxe. The album cover recalls the artwork for releases by El Rayo-X – how does it reflect the music? “Well, it’s pretty accurate. A lot of that stuff, the tone of the instruments, especially the slides, the Hawaiian guitars, have that kind of T-Model
Ford … kind of thing. Used polyester. Disco clothes. Not disco music but those kind of tones on the slide guitar remind me of those kind of colors. Kind of bilious green. Especially that pink. That’s one of my favorite colors.
“There’s an El Rayo-X tradition. Processed blue is the first one.
Orange is the second and then that particular pink is the third. The fourth one is all of them put together. Then from then on I never figured out where to go …”
The Sunday Age 28th of March 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer