" Danny Kortchmar: Shaping the Sound of a Generation."

Published Nov 29, 2024, 8:00 AM

Join @thebuzzknight for this episode with the iconic guitarist, session musician, producer and songwriter Danny Kortchmar. His work with artists such as Carole King, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley and many others is the soundtrack of a generation. Danny is also part of "The Immediate Family" the supergroup of session players which is also the title of a documentary of the same name.

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Taking a Walk.

I'm doing sessions where you just get called and you go down there. You just go out, listen careful to the song, maybe more than once, and think about what the song is about and how you can help, how I can come up with something that's gonna help the record of the song, the singer, the producer, the other cats like that.

Welcome to the Taking and Walk podcast with your host Buzz Night. Buzz talks with musicians who continue to make their mark on music history. Today, Buzz speaks with the man effectually known as Cooch. Danny Kurtzmar is a titan of the music industry known for being the secret weapon on some of the most iconic songs in rock history. As a session guitarist, Danny's distinctive playing can be heard on countless hit records by artists like Don Henley, Jackson Brown, Carol King, James Taylor, and a slew of others. Danny is also part of the Immediate Family, the session supergroup made up by some of the best players ever, and he's prominently featured in the documentary of the same name, Welcome Danny Kortchmar on Taking a Walk with Buzz Night.

Well, Danny Thanks for being on taking a walk. It's an honor to get to talk to you.

Thanks very much, Thanks for having me.

So who taught you the art of collaboration which you are so amazing with.

Well, that's just something that came naturally to me. I've always loved collaborating the idea of music. Music is a collaboration unless you spend the rest of your life sitting in a room by yourself, you know, whenever you play with anybody, it's a collaboration. And I'm in trade road. I just it was not something I worked towards or made a decision about. It's just something that came naturally to me.

And as you sort of evolved in your career, are there particular producers that you worked with that you can say made a great impact and taught you further the art of creating and collaborating.

Yeah, you bet. The first person I was in the studio with seriously was Carol King, and she told me a tremendous amount about you know, how to play songs, and she would just give me very terse, simple directions. Play that same thing he played there, played over here, lay out for this tree bars coming again here, play a solo there, very simple, basic stuff that you would tell me. The other producers I work with us was the great Peter Asher, from whom I learned a tremendous amount. Peter's a dear, dear friend of mine and I've know him for pretty much my whole life, and working with him was like definitely an education in itself. And also lou Abler, the great lou Abler. It was a brilliant producer, and I learned a tremendous amount for him from him again about playing simple parts to fit in and what he said was that the simple, the simpler, your part more basically, your part of the lowry can be turned up in the mix. I went, oh, okay, because I want to be obviously wanted to be turned up in the mix. So an important lesson.

So what were the bands that you started out with, the King Bees and the Flying Machine.

What were those experiences like?

Well, I aways, I always was. I always wanted to be in a band, E was you know, since the Beatles Like everyone else, I wanted to be in a rock and roll band. So as soon as I graduated high school, I started looking around for guys and we started the King Bees, the King Bees played all over here. This is like mid sixties, so we played all over New York City and up and down the East coast, and uh, it was an elevant experience. And the next band, when that band broke up because we just ran out of gas, ran out of work. I was getting frustrating. And the next band was with my childhood friend James Taylor, which was the Flying Machine, and we had a great time together. I knew he was great and I was. You know, he hitchhart down from Massachusetts to flop on my couch and in New York City and we started a band. That band was the Flying Machine.

Remember the days of hitch hiking.

My god, you just flashed upon that and it was so commonplace, right, wasn't it?

Everyone did it and now no one does it now.

Did you have your sights set on the West Coast at that time or how did that come to happen?

Not really? I mean I love New York City, you know. Bishup was born in New York and felt very at home there. But things were not going well. It was a dead end for me in New York. Let me see, the Flying Machine broke broke up. I spent some time three or four months with the Fugs. I don't know if you're familiar with the Fugs or not, but Ed Sanders, yeah, I was a FuG yet I was a FuG side man, so I spent time with them, but to me, there were more of a kind of performance, artistic performance endeavor rather than a strictly musical endeavor. So after that, there was a band called Clear Light that came through New York and they had just fired or their dar player had quit. So I went down an audition for them and got the gig and they they were in LA band. So at that point I brought a guess in New York. New York was closed to me in pretty much up a closed situation. The guys that were doing the jingles, they were the same guys. The guys who were playing on albums were the same guys that were very difficult, if not impossible, to break into that scene. And also I didn't want to play jingles. I wanted to play rock and roll, you know. So moving on to LA turned out to be fortuitous, and it turned out to be a great move for me.

And who were the first people that you SYNCD up with when you moved to.

La Well, I moved out there with my buddy Charlie Larki who was well at the same time as Charlie, and he was going out with Carol, living with Carol at the time, so they both moved shortly after I moved out there. They both moved to Laurel Canyon, and which is where I was living. And uh, you know, I started going walking down to her place every day and jamming with aeron Charlie pretty much every day. So that was one great experience that I had. And I started running into musicians and jamming with guys all the time in Los Angeles. Said it was it was great. It was a wide open scene in Los Angeles at that time.

Now, how did the collaboration come to happen that became the section? I was a big fan of that. That was a you know, precursor super group to immediate family. Really, so how did that happen?

Well, I wouldn't. I don't know if we were a I thought we were a supergroup, but we were.

We did, We did.

Well great, I'll take it. We were the backup band where James Taylor's backup band. James had just started his career and was on the road a lot, and Carol was the original piano player in that band, but she didn't want to tour. She she went to stay home. She had two daughter, young daughters, and she was not a road person really, So we hired or James hired Craig Derry to come play keyboards. So we get up there and we were on tour with James back in. James up and after soundcheck, James did a very quick soundcheck. He went up and checked the microphone, checked the monitors and then left the stage and so we were still on there. We just we just started jamming on stage before they let the crowd in, and that was really the birth of the section. We started playing together and playing together and jamming, having fun, and Peter Astra one time played us a board cassette, you know, a cassette from the front of house board of us jamming and said, you know, this is pretty good. You guys ought to think about doing something with this. So at that point we said maybe we should. James gave us the name this section, and probably due to Peter's help, we got a little deal at Warner Brothers and made our first album, started gigging as the section well it was.

An awesome sound. We were big fans of it.

I was in college then actually in Dayton, Ohio, and we just we.

Wore out the grooves of the section. We loved it.

Oh so, so how did you first meet Linda Ronstep Well, everyone knew everyone in California, especially everyone that Peter Asher produced, and so I knew I knew, you know. I met her several times, and I knew all the people in her band. And like I said, everybody knew everybody. This is Los Angeles in the seventies, late sixties through the seventies, and it was a very beautiful community in which everyone shared songs and shared ideas and listened to records and hung out together. So I knew Linda. At this point, I guess Way had left. Watti was a guitar player for a long time on the road, and he left the band. They needed a guitar player to tour, and Peter called me up says, this on would be interested in playing with Linda, And then Linda's been on the road. I said, absolutely definitely, I'm there, and so I was thrilled to be able to play with Linda, one of the greatest singers I ever heard of in all life.

And the studio experience with Linda must have been equally fantastic, right.

Well, all experience as well. The musical experiences with Linda were fantastic because she was so brilliant. She was just great. She get up there in the studio, she would sing live. We would all play live, and she would sing live, not like now where everything's overdo and piecemeal. It's all done at the same time. The take was the one she sounded the best on. She sounded great on all of them, but we were expected to play really good stuff on every take, and we did. By that time, all of us, Russ, Lee and myself had gotten very good at coming up with parts and playing on records and coming up with good stuff for singers and producer right away. So we jumped in there. I can't remember who all I was in the bad but everybody was great. Kenny Edwards, Andrew gold Russ on drums, Billy Payne was on key, the great Billy Payne. So as I've fallen off a log, you know, we just we would just hit it and it was easy and it was fun and it was a joy.

And other than obviously her great talents. What else about her, her will and her passion makes her stand out in your opinion?

Well, I think it's her her intelligence, her absolute unfailing ability to pick the right songs for herself. She's the one that chose the song. No one chose them for her. You know, Peter was the producer and put all the parts together, but she chose the material. She knew what she could sing and what she couldn't sing. She knew what key she would sound the best in. So she was very, very proactive in what happened and always involving her music.

So can you talk about your your brothers and family and what they do for you to make you even better as a musician.

How do they challenge you?

Well, these guys are all my best friends in an immediate family. They're all guys that we've all known each other for many many years. Russe and Lee and myself been playing together for more than fifty years in various you know, combinations, So we knew each other really well. Wattie, I guess forty five years and Steve Postel the new guy ten years, you know, ten fifteen years, so we all knew each other really well. We had an instinct about what to plan, what not to play, and how to fit in with each other that you can only get from playing together for many, many years and really knowing each other's style and knowing each other personally.

I love the documentary and what's so great about it is you really do get the sense of the family, the community that you gentlemen are part of. But you know, you're all so amazingly talented. So I urge anybody who has not seen immediate family to go see it or watch it stream. It's it's fantastic. You must be really proud of that.

Well, yeah, I'm very happy with it, and it's great to see. I mean it's like home movies, like watching home movies for me, you know, and it's great. We all felt really thrilled to have our stories told on camera like that, and also having to be done by such a brilliant director as Denny Sadesco, who did such a fantastic job with the Wrecking Crew.

So that was my next question.

Obviously, you must have really, you know, been a student of what the Wrecking Crew was all about.

Right, Oh, you bet, absolutely great, great musicians all that. I got to play a few record dates in the early seventies with some of those fellows, and they were always great, just great, you know, so we all loved them.

Who were some of the guys from the Recon crew that you got to play with.

I just a couple of days with Ari Nektel, who could anything. I mean, you could play guitar, bass, piano, great on all of them. I did one day with Tommy Tedesco, who is the greatest guitar session musician that ever lived, and everyone will agree with me all night on that, the absolute greatest. And I got to play with Leon Russell. We got to play it with Hal Blaine once and Joe Osborne. So I got just a few dates with these guys. They weren't doing that many days. They were slowing down and we were speeding up like the next generation of cats. Now Leland he played with all those guys lots, way more than me. She was doing sessions every day.

I remember talk.

I talked to Denny for Take on a Walk podcast and I asked him the question about his dad listening to his songs on the radio and sort of reflecting on that, and what he.

Said was interesting.

He said, you know, his father was so you know workman, like, you know, go show up, do the work that he really kind of then divorced himself from that music after he did his work. Are you anything like that or do you still sort of reflect and listen to your work, you know, after you've done it.

I don't really go back and listen to my stuff after I've done it. Once this done, I don't have I don't feel compelled to go back and listen to it. So I'm not sure about that. I do know a guy like Denny Tedesco. We get up in the morning, he do a ten to one, two to five, five to two, whatever to eight every day all day long. So he doesn't have the time or the energy to sit and reflect on what he's done because he's working every day every day. Sometimes it's a movie soundtrack, sometimes it's a pop record, sometimes it's Frank Sinatra, sometimes it's the Astronauts, you know, doing surf music. And he did it all and so I don't think Tommy was that reflective of a fellow, but he certainly was a professional, down to toes and always play the right theme whatever the circumstance.

We'll be right back with more of the Taking a Walk Podcast. Welcome back to the Taking a Walk podcast.

So when you're going into a session, how much prep work do you personally do before you show up in that session.

I have to think it's intense preparation.

If it really depends on who the artist is. When I was working with Peter Asher, he would get us all together and rehearse, for instance, for Linda Ronstabber or a James Taylor record. We would get together, when we rehearse go over all the songs before we go into the studio, so we kind of knew what was coming up and and you know what to do that would be that would help the song. So in that way we were prepared. But in doing sessions where you just get called and you go down there, you just go out, listen carefully to the song, maybe more than once, and think about what the song is about and how you can help, how I can come up with something that's gonna help the record, the song, the singer, the producer, the other cats like that.

I'm going to talk about your work with mister Don Henley, which is pretty amazing. What's it like collaborating with you know, Don Henley?

Well, it was absolutely brilliant for several reasons. One was when I first started working with him, he wanted to make a solo album that sounded nothing like the Eagles. He wanted to go a whole different direction to establish his bona fides as a solo artist. So he called the right guy because country rock was not in my bloodstream and at that time I was more into rhythm and blues, soul music and jazz and you know, so I wasn't a big banjo banjo player type guy. And Don he didn't want any acoustic guitars on the record, he didn't want any backgrounds, you know, anything associated with the Eagles. He wanted to stay away from. So I was the right guy for that. And also the thing about Don is he found unbelievably great singer, a soul singer, and he came up singing rhythm and blues and R and B songs in Texas with bands, and he really could do that stuff. He's also a very very smart fellow and wrote brilliant lyrics, so you don't often see those things together somebody that sounds like a real badass soul singer and can also write very intelligent and meaningful lyrics. So to me, it was a dream come true. I would come up with I'd staid home and come from demos. I would be writing all day long, all the time at home, and once I had something, I played for him and he'd go, well, I could sing to that. We'd start recording it. We go to the studio to start recording it. And while we were recording it, or right after that, he would come back with the song with the melodies and lyrics.

What part of the work, which species particular work with Don are you most proud of?

Well, I'm proud of all of it, you know, I'll throw it with all of it. I'm really thrilled that I got to collaborate with him on songs that that I think really stood the test of time. You know, we did dirty Laundry. No one was doing music like that, no one, not in Southern California anyway. We're the only guys doing stuff like that. And I was very proud of that, very proud of creating a new direction for a guy like Don. That wasn't the same old stuff. It wasn't la country rock, and it was some other stuff. So naturally, I was very proud of that, proud of all the work I do with Henlea.

And then your work with Jackson Brown has to be, you know, just so incredible. You guys were neighbors, is that correct in the early days.

Yeah, we both lived in Laurel Canyon. I used to see him all the time hanging around when he was nineteen or something, you know, and I knew him before I heard his his songs. And one night he played this like late sixties or something. He played a club in Hollywood, and me and some other cats were down here to hear him play. And he was so amazing, you know, Like I said, I was mainly listening to Otis writing and Wilson Pickett things like that. Well, when I heard him sing solo, I wanted, this guy is phenomenal. And he was then he is now. He's one of the great great American songwriters, without a doubt. And his songs are moving and are powerful, and they're about something, and they have significance in pretty much everyone that hears them, everyone in everyone's life.

I would say, were you taken, you know, early on by the fact that you know he was so young, but yet you know, it felt like he was really, you know, you know, older and wiser, even though he was you know a kid at that point.

Well, yes, it was a little daunty, but you know, I grew up with James Taylor. It was the same kind of thing. He started writing songs and you know when he was sixteen and the first song you wrote was really good, you know, very good. And with Jackson was the same thing. So I wasn't that surprised about it. Also, there was everyone else was young but also very smart. You know, everyone around me was strivers and they were young, and they wanted to make something happen, and they wanted to change the nature of pop music. Not that that's what was spoken about, but they wanted to write intelligence songs that really spoke to the human condition, and they succeeded. Guys like Jackson, James Crosby, Stills, Nash Young for sure, Joni. Everyone that was on the set at that time was really striving to create something beautiful.

When you reflect on the state of music, now, what's your opinion of the state of the music business.

Well, we all know that the state of the music business is pretty dire at this point. The period that I was in, all hell was breaking loose and pop music. Gotta remember, everybody was listening to the same stuff. In other words, Crossby Still the Crossby is Still's Nest. That album came out and everywhere you went you heard it. You go to somebody's house, they were playing it. You walk down the street, you'd hear it coming out of people's houses, definitely coming out of your radio. It was also in all the restaurants, so everyone was listening to it. Now, people only listen to what's in there on silo. They only listen to the kind of music that appeals to that, you know, heavy metal and headbangers, that's all they listen to. People that like rap, they only listen to rap. So unfortunately, we don't have the situation where people listen where most people are hearing the same stuff. So it's very vulcanized and not as interesting to me because of that, you know, And obviously it's much more corporate than it ever was. It started to get corporate in the mid seventies and now it is totally corporate.

The impact of radio was significant, don't you think back in that period of time.

Well, as I was saying, yeah, everybody was would you know, listen to the same two or three stations that were all playing you know, great stuff, and so we were all hearing the same kind of stuff. Everybody was listening to the same music. So whether it was I mean you listen to the reader to hear on Marvin Gay tune, then you did hear a Crosby Stills Nash tune, and then he hear a Joney tune, then you hear a Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and then it was it was all mixed in together, and that was a beautiful thing that way. Everybody got exposed to all this variety.

We lost recently the great DJ Jim Ladd. I wanted to ask you if you knew Jim and what your experience was with Jim from his time being a DJ in l a Well.

Jim and Lag was a giant, of course, as we all know, an absolute giant, and he represented everything that was good about popular music and rock radio. Lovely, lovely man, we all loved, a great taste, very influential as a DJ and as a human being, and you will be sorely missed, naturally. Tom Petty wrote that song the Last DJ, That's about Jim Jim Ladd, and I'm glad he was. He was lionized in that song that great song by Tom.

Yeah, Jim was a guy who trailblazed and certainly turned you know, that whole LA music community on to so much great music, and I think, yeah, he was.

He was a giant. So you've worked with so many people in your career.

Is there someone still on your list that you haven't worked with that you you have an itch too?

Well? You know, boy, that's a tough one. I've worked with an awful lot of great, great people. A lot of the people I would I'd like to work with are dead, so it's really hard.

His dad.

I wish I could have played with Muddy Waters, you know, I wish I could have played I played with B to b K a couple of times. But you know, my heroes were blues blues guys. You know, generally speaking, is this you're asking me if there's anyone alive now that I'd like to work with. It's hard for me to say exactly. There are some terrific singerings out there, but there's nobody that lights me up the way the people that the musicians I grew up listening to did.

Uh.

We all love the music that we grew up with and the music that we listened to about and it stays with us. And I'm the same as that. You know, I don't really pay that much attention to modern music, be honest with you. You know, if somebody turns me on, so one of my friends that I trusty is you got to hear this, I'll go listen to it and dig it. Otherwise, what I'm seeing is basically retreads of that which came before. Bruno Mars is terrific. But so you know, I grew up with James Brown and notice reading and you know, so bruhmart nice, you know it's good, but you see, you see what I'm saying, the original I grew up with the originals, and what we're seeing now is basically people copying to sort of do varying degrees of success the original guys that invented soul music at rocket All.

Do you have a favorite guitar or sort of piece of gear that is you've relied on through your career and it still is there by your side?

Well, you know, I mostly played telecasters coming up. My hero was Steve Cropper so and Steve played telecaster. So I played a lot of telecaster, but I also needed some guitars with the Humbuckers. So occasionally I played less Paul because I needed a slightly bigger sound, but it was never like heavy metal type stuff, and it was never hard rock. I played a less Poe when I was backing up Ronstad because I could get good rhythm sounds by turning it down and good lead sounds by tearing it up. I have more flexibility than the telecaster, so I'm kind of kind of a horror when it comes to that. You know, I'll go with the you know face. Your guitar looks butable to me, I'll want to play it. You know, I have a Jaguar right now, Fender Jaguar that I love. I haven't you know, gives some three hundred, yes, three hundred that I love. I've got it. You know. I've got a Paul re Smith that I love. So it's at this point i'm you know, I guess I'm kind of a whore because you know, I'll jump around from guitar to guitar.

Have you ever.

Reverse engineered some of these guitars to get a certain effect that you desire out of it?

Well, everybody mods their guitar, especially back then when I was coming up. Everyone was modding their guitars. That's why it was hard to find say a fifties telecaster that was stock, because everyone had owned one in fifties sixties telecasters would mod them, you know, make my modifications for instance, like putting a humbucker near the neck pickup on a telecaster. Keith Richards was the first guy that did, one of the first guys, and we all did. We all had doumwork, you know, we all did that trick. There's a lot of mods and various things that that I did and that everyone else did. I also I wanted to have an not a phase switch on all my guitars. I love the sound of out a phase guitar because it goes really well with drums. So I use that considerably, depending on the geek.

With all the technology now that's available for creating music, do you.

Think that there's.

I don't know, maybe a loss of the fact that certain imperfections in music can be part of their beauty.

Well, you know, when you go from a situation where you have five guys in a room all playing together at the same time and a singer singing at the same time, to everything done piecemeal and correct it on pro tools. You're gonna have a different animal, you know, you just are. It's it's going to be different. You'll gain some stuff and you'll lose some stuff. What will you gain You'll gain perfection. Everything will be on the clock, it'll be exact. What you lose is that human feel where things move around and they shift a little bit. You know, the idea that a record might speed up a little bit towards the towards the the end of its approaches, you know, the end of it. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it should you know not, you know, not a lot. But with the click track, that's never gonna happen, you know, lock to that click track. And also the way records are being made now everything is louder than if that used to be a joke. Make everything louder than everything else. And now that's what it is. That that is the that's how you have to produce records for them to be heard on the tiny little computer speakers that most people listen to musica.

Well, Danny and closing, I wanted to ask you, as a fan of music, is there one concert experience that really sticks in your head as being one of the greatest concerts as a fan that you ever witnessed.

Oh boy, you know, I've been lucky in that I've seen a lot of great grade music and I have to give you a few examples rather than just one. To start with, James Brown the James Brown Review at the Apollo Theater in New York in the sixties. I also got to see the original John Colt Trane Quartet in New York City in the sixties. Was is like Disneyland for adults that that quartet, the John Coltrane Quartet were playing at that I think the five Spot Downtown became my buddies little kids. We were like, you know, seventy eighteen years so we just walked right in. There was no line outside, there was no We just walked in and sat down, and you know, this is to see one of the greatest musical groups that ever existed. And it was like nothing to get it. To get it. Other than that, you know, I've seen the Rolling Stones fantastic. I've seen the Beatles like fantastic. They could really play. I saw the Beatles at the at Carnegie Hall and they were playing through the house pa which was just for announcements. There was you know, and the crowd was screaming their heads up, but I was close enough, Me and my girlfriend were close enough to hear them. They were great. You could hear in spite of the din of screaming yelling how great they really were. Peter Gayriel showed, you know from the seventies eighties, I guess after he had his album, so he toured and we won't saw that absolutely wonderful and brilliant billion show.

God let me see, man, that's a pretty good list.

Yeah. I got to see Latyon Hopkins at the Village gain in New York City, in Gritish village in one of my absolute heroes. So I was alive at the right time when there was a lot of great music, and I was at the right place in New York because it was every night. There was great music all over the place in various clubs, concert halls everywhere, So I was exposed to a lot of really, really great music. Fortunately for me.

Well, I'm so grateful that you were on taking a walk. I'm so grateful for the music continue to give us and have given us through your fantastic career. And once again, congrats on immediate family as well.

It's a great doc.

Everybody should see it.

Thanks for being on Taking a Walk, Danny.

All right, my pleasure. All the best to you.

Man. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.