Knock Yourself Out

Happy Fry-Day, New York! And the same to all of you in other, equally overheated parts of this country. Let’s be safe out there. 

I should come right out and apologize for the in-absentia stature of this here blog. I’ve kept it updated with links to articles, but not as much original content as I’d like. Partly this is because the ground is pretty well covered these days, what with our town criers and our from-the-vaulters and of course, our insomniac scribes. Partly, too, it’s because I just don’t have the time, what with deadlines and an 8-month-old. (That’s an 8-month-old baby, not an 8-month-old deadline.)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I do have some fodder for a post tangentially related to hotness and Fridays both. Shall we? 

Above, find the new(ish) video to “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” from Katy Perry’s summer-2010 album, Teenage Dream. Obviously it’s a camp homage to the bubblegum teen culture of the ‘80s — or more precisely, the rote depiction of such, in things like music videos — as well as a savvy bit of meme-hoarding. Rebecca Black? A kid from Glee? Check and check. Precariously rehabilitated former teen idols? Check. (I’m sure an effort was made to get Charlie Sheen before the call went out to poor Corey Feldman.) Awkward YouTube ref? You got it. And Sergio, the sexy sax man? We’ll do you one better.

As you may have heard, there’s a saxophone solo in the song, recorded in the studio by one Lenny Pickett of the Saturday Night Live Band. And as you may have noticed, there’s a saxophonist in the video, played by one Kenny G, whose curly locks and oleaginous stage manner laid the groundwork for Sergio. Others have already commented on the switch, expressing bafflement and general ick. 

I’ll leave those sentiments to others — it’s just show business, and Kenny G has proven his willingness to be the punch line before — while I focus this post on a highly personal appreciation of Lenny Pickett, specifically during his tenure in Tower of Power.

Perhaps a refresher is in order. I’ll keep it as short as I can. Tower of Power was a funk band out of Oakland, formed in 1970 and still technically working the circuit today. I use the past tense because the band changed irrevocably when drummer David Garibaldi left in 1974. (His last album in the original incarnation of Tower of Power was Back to Oakland, which was mostly so-so, but featured the classic “Squibb Cakes.” Wow, I just learned what that means.) More changes came in 1975, with the decampment of lead singer Lenny Williams. I won’t get into any more band history except to note that Lenny Pickett stayed well into the ‘80s. (I’m guessing his departure had something to do with his gig at SNL, which began in ’85. Anybody know better?)

  

Back in the early-1990s, during my high school years, Tower of Power was a very important band to me. I was smitten with the first three studio albums: East Bay Grease, Bump City and Tower of Power. Everything after that felt crucially diminished to me. The original spark for my fandom was Garibaldi, and his hard-driving but impeccably graceful funk drumming. But the other musicians in the band fascinated me, too — especially Pickett, and especially on the 1976 album Live and in Living Color.

It’s safe to say that I was obsessed with this album. Like, I played it thousands of times. I formed a high-school funk band for the sole purpose of playing “Down to the Nightclub,” the opening track, at a school assembly. We got the horn arrangements transcribed. I had Garibaldi’s part nailed tight, and sang background vocals while I played it. The lead singer was a senior, a beloved class clown. (Note: When you’re subjecting your school to a painstakingly recreated funk tune older than you are, it helps to have your front man be cool beyond reproach. It also helps to have him mumble the lines “I hope it doesn’t show / while I’m driving down the road / that I had too much to drink.” It may not help to call your band Tower of Babel.)

But back to Pickett. He’s incredible on this record, and never more so than on the finale, a 23-minute-long version of “Knock Yourself Out,” from East Bay Grease. Here’s the track, in toto:

Tower of Power: Knock Yourself Out

The band takes this tune a lot faster than on the LP — maybe too fast, given that it’s supposed to be more indignant than rousing. It’s a kiss-off song, a sort of paleo-precursor to Cee Lo’s “Fuck You.” Opening line: “You got your fox-fur on, you’re walking out the door.” (I always loved that line.) But here, in this version, the song itself is really a formality, a framework for Pickett, whose solo begins at 1:45 and doesn’t wrap up until 10:40 — after a heroic circular-breathing exercise, some of it in dramatic stop-time. 

When I played this solo for my nonmusician friends, and even some fellow players, the stamina of that moment was always what stood out to them. There’s a circus sideshow aspect involved, though I don’t think it cheapens the performance much. (Delicious irony alert: the world record-holder for longest circular-breathing on a saxophone is: Kenny G.) What struck me just as much about this Pickett solo, then and certainly now, is how well-constructed it is, as a series of crescendos and even a series of melodic nubs — “motifs” feels like too highfalutin a word — that carry things forward. It’s a pure funk solo suffused with pure jazz logic. I didn’t know much about Gene Ammons or Arnett Cobb when I was listening to this solo 20 years ago, but you can bet that Pickett did. 

He’s still playing great, from what little I get to hear during the intro and closing credits to Saturday Night Live. But that’s such a fragmentary sample, and the Katy Perry song is even worse: he gets eight bars, and spends the last four of them flogging his trademark altissimo. (Is that last long squeal Auto-Tuned???) Perhaps it’s unfair to blame Pickett for not compressing a complete narrative into so tight a space: Michael Brecker made that look a whole lot easier than it is, and who knows what the producers were insisting on. (“You know, that high note you hit at the end of the show every week. We want that.”) 

Besides, if the end result is that Lenny Pickett is made into a caricature, so what? Everyone else in the video gets the same treatment. Let’s hope he got paid as well as they did.

P.S.-- This is the first installment of Backtracks, a new feature here at The Gig. Basically it will involve me revisiting a piece of music that utterly consumed my attention in my pre-internet teenage years. (There were a handful of these, some worthier than others.) Call it nostalgic solipsism, or a worthwhile experiment, or my version of '90s nostalgia. It will be, at the least, sincere.

Comments

[casino en ligne]

Yes this was a classic...almost everybody in my neighbourhood loved them.

[Yulun Wang]

Wow! Live and In Living Color is one of my favorite albums of all time! I too have probably played it hundreds of times, albeit mostly side one. I still regularly find myself singing "You're Still a Young Man" at the oddest of times. For me, Pickett's squeaking solos get to be a bit much on "Knock Yourself Out" but I certainly loved it the first hundred times around. BTW, Garibaldi was on two more albums after Back to Oakland: In the Slot (okay) and Urban Renewal (pretty damn tasty).