Leon Russell: The Master of Space & Time Returns

Leon Russell is driving to his home in Nashville, following an afternoon of recording new songs at a friend’s studio, when he starts talking about Bob Dylan. Russell is describing a session on which he played bass “for that rec­ord about the boxer” — Dylan’s 1975 single “Hurricane.” 

“We did a take — just running it down, I thought,” Russell says, navi­gating the rush-hour traffic in large black sunglasses surrounded by a snow-white mass of hair and beard. “I said, ‘Are you going to do the real thing now?’ Bob said, ‘Why? We’re just going to make the same mis­takes.'” Russell laughs — a deep, dry rasp, like someone shaking a bag of gravel.

It’s like that all day, in the car, over lunch and at home in his living room — Russell casually telling stories that zigzag over his half-centu­ry of rock & roll adventure and star time as a songwriter, arranger and produc­er: doing sessions for Dylan, George Har­rison and Frank Sinatra; singing back­up on Ricky Nelson records and playing piano on Beach Boys and Phil Spector hits in the Sixties; writing songs that became standards for Joe Cocker (“Delta Lady”) and George Benson (“This Masquerade”); and cutting solo projects with Eric Clap­ton and members of the Rolling Stones as sidemen.

For a long spell, in the Sixties and Sev­enties, Russell seemed to be everywhere at once with a rambunctious fusion of country grit, big-band soul and Pentecos­tal-church ecstasy, making every singer and player around him sound sharp and funky. He first shot to fame in the cred­its on other people’s records, most notably as the leader of the mighty R&B orches­tra on Cocker’s legendary 1.970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. On the subsequent live album, Russell appeared on the sleeve as a wiry ringmaster with a top hat and a long mane of silver-gray hair, billed as the “Master of Space and Time.” Russell was soon a big name in his own right, with a superstar-packed debut, 1970’s Leon Russell, and a Top Five hit, 1972’s Carney.

He disappeared as abruptly as he ar­rived: falling out of favor in the Eighties, making records in obscurity. That has changed just as suddenly. Russell has re­leased one of his best albums, The Union, a collaboration with Elton John on which they recapture the roots and dynamics of their classic early-Seventies records.

“There are some people who are born to be leaders of musicians — and he is,” says John, who became an ardent Russell fan after hearing his gospel-charged piano on Delaney and Bonnie’s 1969 LP Accept No Substitute. John says that when he saw the 1971 film of the Mad Dogs tour, “It was Leon I was watching. He had the feel for that music. Joe was an amazing singer. But you could tell it was Leon’s band.”

“He was the straw boss of the out­fit,” confirms Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, who was one of the nearly two dozen members in the Mad Dogs band, pulled together by Russell in four days after Cocker’s previous group bailed on him on the eve of the tour. “Leon had very defi­nite ideas about music and telling people what to play.”

Russell describes himself and his gifts more modestly. “I was a jobber, like an air-conditioning installer,” he says over a steak sandwich in a Nashville restaurant, in the same rubbery, pitted drawl that dis­tinguishes his improbably poignant sing­ing. “You need air conditioning? You call this guy. People called me to do what I did.” Russell recalls that after he wrote the horn charts for “Live With Me” on the Stones’ 1969 album, Let It Bleed, “Mick Jagger said, ‘That sounds like ‘Harlem Shuffle'” — the 1963 R&B single by Bob and Earl. “I said, ‘I thought that’s what you guys did.’

“I was playing with George Harrison one time, and George loves takes,” Rus­sell says with a gruff chuckle. “This song was up to Take 160. I said, ‘George, do you want me to play the same thing or 160 dif­ferent things?’ It drove me crazy, because in general, I’m ready to play my part.”

Many of Russell’s best stories are 30 and 40 years old. By the late Seventies, he was exhausted by studio deadlines and the road. “I quit for two years,” Rus­sell says. But while he was gone, the stars moved on to other collaborators, and Rus­sell’s brand of Americana went out of fashion, shoved aside by punk and hip-hop. When he came back, Russell was playing in bars instead of arenas, as if his renown had suddenly evaporated.

“I haven’t gone there with him, but I think there were bad business deals,” John suggests. “If he’d had proper management, that never would have happened.” By the time John called Russell last year, insist­ing they record together, Russell had been without a major-label deal for nearly two decades and was selling his records over the Internet. Still, John claims he saw the old Russell — the one he first met in 1970, when the two did some U.S. con­certs together — come alive during the ses­sions for The Union: “He came to the fore, because he was making a record of the cal­iber that he should have been all along.”

The lean hipster-Jesus look Russell had when he made the cover of Rolling Stone in the fall of 1.970 has given way to a portly figure with Santa Claus hair who walks slowly, with a cane. “My feet are giving out on me,” he says. “But I have a wheelchair that folds out on my tour bus. I’ve also got this little tricycle, so if I want to go someplace, I get those out.” Mar­ried to his second wife, Janet, since 1979, Russell has six children and a house full of small, excitable dogs belonging to two of his daughters. A couple of times dur­ing our interview there, he gets up from his chair and shouts through a door at the dogs to calm down. “At one point, we had 16,” Russell says, shaking his head and laughing. “It drives me crazy.”

In January, shortly after he and John started work on The Union, Russell un­derwent brain surgery to correct a spi­nal-fluid leak. Three weeks later, he was in the studio with John and the album’s producer, T Bone Burnett. “You could see the music starting to wire him back up,” Burnett says of Russell. “Every day he got stronger and more involved.”