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Jackson Browne and the Section Honored at NAMM's Annual TEC Awards
Jackson Browne accepts the Les Paul Award onstage at the 33rd Annual TEC
Awards during NAMM Show 2018 at the Hilton Anaheim on Jan. 27, 2018
Held each year at the NAMM trade show in Anaheim, Calif., the TEC
Awards honor technical excellence and creativity in the fields of
recording and live music production. So it was fitting that at the 33rd
annual TEC Awards, held at the Anaheim Hilton on Saturday, Jan. 27, both
of the evening’s lifetime achievement awards were handed out in part to
honor an album that was one of the most innovative experiments in
recording attempted up to that time: Jackson Browne’s 1977 masterpiece Running on Empty.
Made entirely while on tour, Running on Empty
was a concept album about the lives of touring musicians that mixed
live performances with tracks recorded on tour buses and in hotel rooms.
To make the album, Browne enlisted a group of ace session musicians,
the Section, with whom he had frequently worked in the studio but never
before brought on tour. The result became the bestselling album of
Browne’s career and a new high-water mark for audio quality in live
recordings.
The TEC Awards honored Browne with the Les Paul Innovation Award, and
also inducted the Section into the TEC Awards Hall of Fame. At the
conclusion of the awards, all four members of the Section — guitarist
Danny Kortchmar, bassist Leland Sklar, drummer Russ Kunkel and
keyboardist Craig Doerge — joined Browne onstage for a rare reunion
performance, delivering rousing versions of “Rock Me on the Water” and Running on Empty’s classic title track, which featured support from one of the song’s original backing vocalists, Rosemary Butler.
In
accepting his award, a visibly moved Browne protested that “I’m the
furthest thing from a technical person” and later told those in
attendance, “I’m indebted to you all who make the gear that I don’t even
know how to turn on, but that I could not do anything that I do
without.” He dedicated his award to Running on Empty’s lead recording engineer, Greg Ladanyi, who passed away in 2009.
“I
had this idea that if I could just record every show — record
everything, even what happened backstage, even the conversations that
happened on the bus, that I could make something really memorable about
what it was like to be a touring musician,” Browne said of making Running on Empty.
Earlier
in the day at NAMM, all four members of the Section participated in a
panel discussion, led by author and photographer David “Mr. Bonzai”
Goggin, about the making of Running on Empty. The 45-minute
conversation was filled with humorous stories and revealing insights
about what it was like to record on the road in the days before digital
technology.
The Section were famous in the ‘70s for their work
with a host of singer-songwriters, including Browne, James Taylor, Linda
Ronstadt, Warren Zevon and Crosby & Nash, as well as their own
instrumental rock albums. A Rolling Stone article dubbed them
the “Knights of Soft Rock” — though when Goggin used this moniker in his
introduction, Sklar waved it off with a lewd gesture that got a big
laugh from those in attendance.
Even for a group of such
close-knit, seasoned musicians, working with Browne and his longtime
fiddle and lap steel player, David Lindley, Running on Empty
was a challenge to make. “We were flying by the seat of our pants on
this thing,” Sklar said. “Nobody quite knew what we were getting into.”
For
some songs, Sklar recalled “going into hotel rooms and taking the bed
apart and standing the box spring and mattress up against the wall. I
remember I had a little Univox bass amp and put it under the desk.
Jackson would sing in the bathroom. So we really utilized the room and
just made it into a little studio. It was like guerrilla recording.”
One
song, “Nothing But Time,” was recorded on the band’s tour bus, with “a
small cardboard box that I taped to the floor” serving as a kick drum,
Kunkel recalled. Famously, you can hear the bus’s engine in the
background on the track, but as Kortchmar explained, this was more than
just a happy accident: “To show you how nuts Jackson is, he actually
took the bus back out after we finished cutting the track. He said, ‘We
need more bus sounds!’ So he sent the bus back out, with Ladanyi, and
recorded two hours of just bus.”
Five of Running on Empty’s
10 tracks were brand-new songs or covers recorded in concert, and
often, the versions heard on the album had been worked up in rehearsals
or sound checks just hours before the band took the stage. Kunkel
recalled that the title track, in particular, didn’t come together until
the night before it was recorded. “When we recorded it that day, it was
fresh. We were listening [to each other] to play it right. It has a
real innocence about it.”
This also meant that, to the trained ear, Running on Empty was filled with mistakes. Speaking to Billboard
before the panel, Doerge noted that when he was re-listening to the
record before rehearsals for their TEC Awards performance, “I heard a
couple of things on ‘You Love the Thunder,’ our live version, that would
automatically be fixed today because everybody’s so used to perfecting
everything. We realized a lot of the magic is in the ability to just let
it be live.”
At the panel, Kortchmar gave an impassioned plea for
the value of live, raw performances that haven’t been scrubbed clean by
Pro Tools and other audio production technology. “You never hear
mistakes anymore,” he said, “and that’s what’s missing in music. And we
all know it. Let’s face it. There’s nothing like the sound of a band in a
room where they play together.”
That, the Section members all agreed, was what made Running on Empty
so special. “It’s one of the absolute purist live albums you’ve ever
gonna hear,” said Sklar. “So many bands release live albums and the only
thing live is the audience response. They’ve gone back to the studio
and replaced everything and fine-tweaked it all. That was all forfeited
for vibe and feel and energy. It’s really an honest record.”
Later
that evening at the TEC Awards, after a heartfelt induction speech by
guitarist Steve Lukather, the four members of the Section took the stage
to accept their TEC Awards Hall of Fame honors. “It’s been such a
fabulous run with these maniacs,” said Sklar. “We’ve had such a great
life together and the thing that’s so special is it’s not over —
everyone’s still working their butts off.”
An hour later, as if to
prove the point, the Section joined their old bandleader Browne onstage
to wrap up the night with an electrifying performance, their first
since appearing together to honor James Taylor at the Kennedy Center
Honors in 2016.
“It just is,” Doerge said of the chemistry the
Section musicians still feel together after all these years. “That
happened from the very jump.”
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