Fred Wesley

Two passages from Hit Me, Fred:

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“When you were in the midst of one of those horror rehearsals or recording sessions or self-proclaiming conversations with James Brown, you felt pain, excruciating fatigue, and intense boredom, which led to supressed anger and hate. I wonder to this day why nobody ever bolted, telling him to his face how ridiculous those rehearsals were and just walking out. And to my knowledge, nobody ever did. I came close many times, but there was always some reason – economic, political, or psychological – that I didn’t. Sometimes, oddly, I think that I simply didn’t want to risk hurting his feelings. He was so definite in the way he spoke to you that you got the feeling that he really believed the ridiculous stuff he was saying and you didn’t want to embarrass him. Also, the few times I did challenge what he had said, he got so loud and so much farther away from reality that I gave up, because I knew he would never admit to seeing my point. It was like being held hostage by real, strong, loud, unbeatable ignorance.”

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“Everything was going along fine, until one day I went into the office and Ernie was doing a union contract for an album by a new artist named Prince. There was nothing strange about doing a contract for a band that we did not actually play with. We did a lot of work documenting and legalizing projects for bands that did their own producing, arranging, and recording and paid themselves however they saw fit. But even self-contained bands had to file union contracts to properly document the project and make it legal. The odd thing about this particular contract was that all the instruments were played by the same person: Prince. We kind of chuckled at the time, not knowing that this particular contract marked the beginning of the end of the recording business as we knew it. Every instrument that was not a synthesizer was also played by Prince. Synthesized horns, synthesized strings, and percussion. The real bad thing about the album was that it was very funky and sounded very good.

I went from making a comfortable living doing horn and string arrangements and other odd assignments to scuffling, trying to make it on just the odd assignments. Horns and strings became obsolete in less than one year. Everyone who ever thought that they could do music was piecing together decent albums by using synthesized sounds for almost all the instruments. Not only strings and horns, but drums, bass, and a plethora of keyboard sounds. Guitar players were the only real musicians who still got calls to do sessions. And there was a marked decrease in guitar calls, because many of the producers were themselves guitar players and jumped at the chance to do their own drums, bass, keyboards, horns and strings. Like Prince, most of the new producers were also singers. Music that would formerly have required a large studio, a competent engineer, a small army of great musicians, and lots of money was now being produced in people’s bedrooms by would-be musicians who worked at the post office during the day. That was the real hurting part of the whole situation: most of these new producers didn’t really have a musical background. What they had was a love for music and the ability to read and understand the manual. As the price of synthesizers and sequencers went down, more and more people with less and less real musical knowledge or talent became geniuses in the music business. The situation left us real musicians floundering around, trying to convince record-company executives and ourselves that this was just a passing fad and that the public would demand real music again soon.

Deep down in our old-school hearts, we knew that this was it. I personally remember when my father used to tell me that bebop was just a passing fad, that big band was the perennial jazz music, and that swing would last forever. I remember when my peers and I thought that rock and roll was just a little crazy thing that would fade out with Little Richard’s make-up. I had no idea that forty years later I would still be hearing “wop bop a loo bop ba lop bam boom.” History has dictated that trends move forward, never backward, although present-day music, with its sampled and rare grooves and ‘70s and ‘80s nostalgia, would somewhat dispute that theory.”

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