Bill Janovitz (Buffalo Tom) and Jesse Lauter Talk Leon Russell

Leon Russell had the kind of music career that you’d think could never be forgotten, scoring huge hits in the early 1970s, collaborating with the likes of Bob Dylan and George Harrison, and generally feeling ubiquitous in the rock world. But even though he’s been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and has been touted by just about every major star of the era, Russell’s name isn’t really known to casual listeners anymore. Hoping to change that are Bill Janovitz and Jesse Lauter, who wrote the definitive book and made the definitive documentary, respectively, about Russell, who died in 2016. Janovitz’s book, epically titled Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History, is a New York Times bestseller that covers the entire breadth of Russell’s life, and Lauter’s documentary, titled Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen, uses a reunion concert as its centerpiece. Both of these guys have a lot of great things to say about this undersung part of rock history. 
—Josh Modell, Talkhouse Executive Editor 

Bill Janovitz: This is my third book. My first was almost completely point of view, I had a couple of interviews. The second, on the Stones, had a few more interviews, but with this one I was still nervous getting into being an interviewer. I’m used to being more interviewed as a musician. Part of me getting over that was that one of the first interviews I did for this book was with Elton John, and it doesn’t really get any bigger than that. But I got very quickly into the subject at hand, and then it became a real addiction. I couldn’t wait to start getting to the next person, and the next. I accrued like 130 interviews for this thing. I can see why somebody like Terry Gross loves her job.

Jesse Lauter: She’s the North Star when it comes to this stuff.

Bill: It goes back to what you were saying about being a listener. Nothing irks me more than when somebody’s asking me questions but not listening to what I’m saying. Having a conversation is really what it’s about.

Jesse: I think there’s probably an allegory within the Leon Russell story as well. We look at his life in three periods: successful, not successful, and then the end. And I think the successful period is when he’s doing his best listening. He’s supporting Los Angeles sessions as a sideman. He’s collaborating as an equal with all the greatest musicians of the period in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, coming at them with wonderful ideas. And then it’s just clear at some point he’s just kind of shutting down. That’s how I see the narrative that you’ve outlined so brilliantly. As someone who regarded himself as a Leon nerd before reading your book, I learned so much.

Bill: Thank you. 

Jesse: So Elton was your first big interview for the book?

Bill: The first giant one, yeah.

Jesse: For my film, my first off-site interview was with Leon. I went back to that interview and, dod damn, I wish I was better. I know I gave you that tape for the book, and it was funny to read the book and something would seem so familiar. I’m glad that worked out.

Bill: Like you noted in the film, he had certain canned things that would get a laugh, as humans do. 

Jesse: I felt like he was a very honest person. Maybe not super honest with himself about certain major things, but he was not afraid to be his authentic self. You talk a lot about the con man elements of Leon and the carny elements, the showman. You see photos and videos of young Leon, and I think about the person I got to meet and work with in my film — it was one of the greatest honors of my life to interact with him — but it does feel like two different people, you know what I mean?

Bill: If not more. People say about Mick Jagger, he’s a great few guys. With Leon, his personality almost mirrors the three acts you outlined. I’d argue that he had three acts and sort of a denouement fourth act where he throws everything back into the ditch. It’s just who he was by the time you got to know him. One of the great revelations in the book was also getting access to these emails with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, between him and Tommy LiPuma, one of which he almost had this eureka moment where he’s watching this documentary about autism and people with Asperger’s, and saying, “That’s me. That explains everything.” Or at least it was a keystone moment for him. I think that explains a lot about how he came across to people in certain situations. He might’ve been somewhere on the spectrum. He certainly had a hard time reading social cues. I didn’t get to meet him and I’m sort of jealous that you did, so did that come across by that time? 

Jesse: My perspective is that he was an old sweet guy. Mad Dogs & Englishmen was a very foundational experience in Leon’s career. This reunion that took place in 2015, when Leon signed on to do it, it made it possible. Joe Cocker was the lead singer, but you could actually have an effective reunion without Joe, but you could not have it without Leon. Which made the reunion work, which makes my film work. But my sense of how he felt about it… As he says in the film, it’s like going to a high school reunion and making up for all the ones he didn’t go to. My sense was that even though he was very nice and generous to a lot of people, we also talked to people who did not have that positive experience with him. That said, he’s in a room with several ex-girlfriends including Rita Coolidge, who clearly he still had some lingering resentments toward, plus people he did business with, but especially on the first day of rehearsal I thought he was in really great spirits, second day maybe less so, and on the third you could tell he was really tired.

Bill: Did the mood change with Rita arriving?

Jesse: I don’t think anything was coincidence. It was such an intense thing to happen in such a short period of time.

Bill: We’re talking about a relationship from 50-some years ago. I would never hold that grudge. If anything I’d be overly nostalgic about it. I think I have a nostalgia streak in me to a fault.

Jesse: Hopefully you’ve moved on.

Bill: But he didn’t! Like his daughter Coco said, he was glaring at her. “I’m not gonna play when she’s singing!” 

Jesse: We included some of that in the film, but I thought maybe she viewed what happened there a little differently. There’s a cute part in the film where Rita does a wonderful version of “Bird on a Wire” in the rehearsal space, it’s really a highlight of the film. At the end there’s a little awkward moment where she’s looking over at Leon and says, “Leon, I loved you,” struggling to get the mic back in the holster. “But I just can’t get the mic back in the holster.” And the look on Leon’s face, maybe he couldn’t hear her, but he does acknowledge her. I think a lot of what we’re talking about comes back to his psychology. You were talking about him potentially having had autism, and harboring these long-held resentments, and there were other relationships that deteriorated that we see throughout the book. And a lot of what I was fascinated by was his psychology around money, which you spell out in a really detailed way. How much he was getting paid, how much he was spending, and the fact that he was averse to saving money. He probably could’ve been a wealthy man. If he had just had a good financial adviser! Where was that person in ‘72 to tell him just to put one month’s worth of money in a trust. Instead he just spends it on recording studios, drum machines, houses. Was he ever actively in therapy? Was he averse to it? For someone who seemed to care about the human condition, it seems like he was averse to improving himself.

Bill: There were a lot of voices over his life saying the same kinds of things, basically painting this picture of somebody who was bi-polar his whole life, even starting in his childhood where there were likely abandonment issues from his father leaving his mother. I’m wary of playing armchair psychologist, but I don’t think he ever had any kind of therapy. Janet, his wife from about ‘81 until he died, never mentioned anything like that. She talks about his workaholic thing, outrunning the hellhound of depression by continually working. If he wasn’t on the road, he was in the studio. If he didn’t have an engineer to help him in the studio, he’d have a sad, tired day. That was true his whole life. His exes, his friends, people who were closest to him at his career peak talk about how the manic activity would go on for weeks if not months at a time, then it would be completely debilitating. He would just lie in bed for weeks at a time, and those incidents happened through his life.

Jesse: This was the master of creating family bands, so in effect replacing family with musical families. He’d done it throughout his career. He was put into musical families and then would create them. 

Bill: I had always loved gospel music, and that’s what brought me to Leon in the first place. That’s my favorite part of the Stones, too — that Exile thing where it’s not just R&B and blues, but really gospel chords, gospel music. There’s this idea that Leon grew up in the South, which is not quite true, since Tulsa is not quite the South. There’s the idea that he grew up in the Southern church, but that’s not true at all, he was Methodist. But there’s the Church of God In Christ, which produced some of the big names like Billy Preston, and Leon was really into that. 

Jesse: Total sidenote, that festival in Chicago that you mention in the book in 1970 with Funkadelic and Chicago and Leon and MC5 and the Stooges — I’m like, are you fucking kidding me?

Bill: Or the one in Massachusetts with Zappa and BB King!

Jesse: And Donnie Hathaway opening for him, and Little Richard! The other thing with your book is you do a phenomenal job of archiving all these incredible events that happened that he was really at the center of, being one of the biggest touring acts of the ‘70s. I told a friend recently that Leon and Led Zeppelin were like the two highest grossing touring acts of 1971, they were like, “No fucking way.” 

Bill: The reason I came up with this cumbersome subtitle — it’s Leon Russell, the Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History — is that I really wanted it to speak to people like us, that geek out on basically all of this stuff. For this guy to have started with Jerry Lee Lewis as a high school kid in 1959, and to take us all the way up to your movie and a little bit beyond, he was really there for all this stuff. There were few people if any that could serve as a better throughline for all this. The Wrecking Crew just as rock is hitting its big second wave, then the Beatles and Dylan and Elton John and Clapton! All of them were so affected by him.

Jesse: The greatest of the greats loved and adored him, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, etc. When we get to the end with Elton and my film, his impact is just so beyond comprehension, he’s like a deity. His impact, the way he just naturally went about his career, was really quite something else. And he didn’t give  up on playing music. He was touring and he was DIY-ing too.

Bill: I just want to tie a few strands that we’re talking about together. There’s the family-band aspect, which as you say is about creating a family of choice. We all have these sorts of friend-families that are sometimes preferable to one’s own family. There’s that, the filing of the void, but there’s also the collaborative aspect. What frustrated me the most in all of this is the idea of what happened to this guy, and why? How does a guy go from one of the greatest bandleaders of all time, one of the greatest catalysts for some of the greatest music ever… How does a guy go from that to being in a ditch in the first place? 

Jesse: I had a thought about this while reading your book. And this changes at the end of his career. I didn’t get a sense from Leon that he cared about his fanbase. I don’t think he felt an appreciation for them and basically he devalued them. There’s nothing specific that he says, I just think it’s how he carried himself in his career. He was so focused on himself. If Leon had just taken a little note from the Grateful Dead, not trying to compromise artistic integrity, but throw your own little festival…

Bill: I think he did care about his audience when he started out quite a lot. I think he played to his audience when he was the preacher on top of the piano, doing his shtick. And that’s where the idea of the carny and televangelist came from, but to characterize it just like that would obscure the amazing music that it was producing. This also ties to the Dead, and one of the reasons you probably never saw him sit in with the Dead is that he hated jamming. He built in moments of improvisation in his shows, but those shows were probably the same set lists every night.

Jesse: It’s the same way Bruce Springsteen does it, where there’s room for solos, but you’re not jamming.

Bill: We’re gonna give you eight bars here, or whatever. But Leon would throw Wayne Perkins stuff to try and keep him on his toes. What I’m saying is that at a certain point I think he got tired of the act. He wanted to go back to being a music director just for Mary [McCreary], but then that relationship fell apart. They were not a natural duet partnership as far as I’m concerned. Some people love that stuff, I find most of it kind of hard to listen to. 

Jesse: I think our tastes in Leon are very similar, but I do put Leon Live as my number one.

Bill: Leon Live is a great version of his songs, but the mix is horrible. I don’t know if I have a single favorite record of his. Mad Dogs & Englishmen isn’t a Leon record, but it is. That’s a desert island disc for me, that’s a top five. In 1979, as he’s divorcing Mary, he’s got this studio, this new wave theater… He was still creating these places where people could create. He was really interested in being a catalyst, but then it all just stops. Once he moves to Tennessee around 1980, he’s got this great collaboration with New Grass Revival which is truly an amazing second wind. But after that he just started making these records on his own because he could. He could overdub. Once he could start doing stuff with a drum machine, he sort of never looked back. He kills his spirit of collaboration and having people in the studio with him. He goes behind this wall of MIDI synths, and I think that mirrored his shutting down psychologically.

Jesse: What’s the one interview you were disappointed you didn’t get?

Bill: From a personal standpoint, I really wanted to talk to Brian Wilson. For the narrative, there’s a number. Not being able to speak to his son, Teddy Jack, or to Mary.

Jesse: That’s who I thought you’d say. My sense is that Mary probably messed him up so much, because I didn’t really know how dragged out and contentious that divorce was. It almost seemed like she was bullying him to a certain extent. Maybe that’s why he abandoned family bands, like he felt like he couldn’t trust anyone.

Bill: He does have his kids in his bands in the ‘90s and 2000s, so he never abandoned the true family band thing. Willie Nelson represented that to him, but I dont’ think Leon had the energy or the will to sustain it. And Mary just really broke him, and he never quite recovered. Even Jan said, “She ruined him.” There’s a lot of dark stuff that people allude to during those years, just mostly emotional and sexual stuff that got a little funky. He had some weird sex hang-ups — not hang-ups, but…

Jesse: And the fact that people talk not only about his health and his weight, there’s definitely something in his DNA that just made him older.

Bill: It was a mixture of his birth injury — he had some stuff with his feet. But the diet, lack of exercise, depression, he wasn’t going to be long for the world.

Jesse: When I was with him at 73, in September of 2015 and February of 2016, you would have thought the man was in his late 80s or early 90s. I know a lot of spry people in their 70s, and you would have thought he was approaching 100. 

Bill: You see videos of him at 50 and he looks 75 already.

Jesse: Something else I was thinking while reading your fabulous book is just general insecurity when it comes to artists interacting with other artists. I didn’t know the anecdote about him meeting Elvis in Vegas for the second time, and Elvis calls him out from the stage, gets the spotlight shone on him, Leon goes to meet him backstage and opens with a stupid line about why Elvis made all those dumb movies. And he said Elvis handled it graciously but it created this depression for him because he’s hanging out with one of his heroes and just doesn’t come with his best foot forward. And you see this all the time with people; he was so hard on himself. I just wish he was more forgiving with himself. I’m sure there are plenty of people who had their interactions with Leon who said the same sort of stupid shit. 

Bill: He was not one to say stupid shit. He was a man of so few words. I think it was just nerves. It set him into a three-day depression, he couldn’t believe he said that. He really started to have an insecurity crisis as he got older. It didn’t occur to me until I was writing this book, but take the Traveling Wilburys: You’ve got Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jim Keltner as an unsung guy, Jeff Lynne, George Harrison. All friends of Leon! All big, close collaborating friends of Leon’s, and I don’t know if they even considered him.

Jesse: Excellent observation. He absolutely should’ve been invited to the Traveling Wilburys. I’d love to find out maybe from Jeff Lynne if they ever had a conversation about it. 

Bill: I asked Jack Wessel, his longtime bass player, if Leon brought it up. He didn’t say he brought it up but you could tell that the discussion had sort of happened. Leon had let it be known that he didn’t want somebody coming back for him, until Elton did. I think he did want it, but he didn’t want to go out hat in hand.

Jesse: There are so many incredible stories in this book. The Wilburys discussion is just an assumption, I guess, but what’s a story that surprised you the most? I’ll quickly tell you mine: Leon passing on “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Could you imagine? That song is perfect for him.

Bill: I don’t know if it is or not. He was doing some schmaltz at the end for sure. Bob Britt who plays with Bob Dylan now told me that story. He said something like the song made his armpits tingle! There were so many surprises in there.

Jesse: As a Dylan fan, I either didn’t know or forgot that Leon played on “George Jackson.” He played bass.

Bill: Yeah, and Dylan had him playing bass at Bangladesh. Greatest piano player in the world. 

Jesse: What inspired you to do this in the first place? Why Leon?

Bill: Thanks for asking! You were one of the first people I reached out to, because you had written an article in Relix.

Jesse: I realize now there’s a lot of things that need to be corrected in that.

Bill: It’s funny, just reading things about Leon, like how he played on “River Deep, Mountain High” by Tina Turner… He’s on all these great things. 

Jesse: Did he actually play on “Strangers in the Night”?

Bill: No.

Jesse: Because Elton says that in the Hall of Fame induction speech, he says, “That’s Leon!” That was bullshit, right?

Bill: Yeah. You can’t really trust the AFM contracts. He wasn’t on that. He was on some lesser Sinatra, though, like “Tell Her You Love Her Each and Every Day.” But what inspired me… I was looking for just this kind of project, and I’m in that same position now. I’m not a ghost writer, I’m not a full-timer. It’s not the most lucrative way to make a living, so I do it on the side, but of course it’s so time-consuming. The Stones book had come out, and all those intervening years was meeting a new agent in New York, great guy, and kicking around ideas. I wasn’t a huge Leon guy at the time. The Leon I loved, I loved deeply. But this project came up via his estate, they told me about the documentary, and the re-release of the “merch” records, and they were doing some other stuff. So it was sort of serendipitous. So Covid happened and my book came out before the rest of the stuff. They were looking for the right author, and this came across my agent’s desk. Bear in mind I had pitched him an idea on just doing a book on Mad Dogs & Englishmen alone. As it stands there are three chapters on that already. That could still be its own book. I remember seeing the tearful acceptance speech at the Hall of Fame. I knew he had started with the Wrecking Crew, and I knew about the Elton John comeback. But I didn’t know how big a rock star he was in ‘72 and ‘73. I saw that whole arc and I thought to myself that I could really write about this era of rock and roll. For me it was a matter of editing it down. It’s still gigantic.

Jesse: But it reads beautifully. We should get to the cautionary tales and lessons, too. But what I appreciated is that there hadn’t been a complete tale told of this all-too-important figure’s life and career. There was a lot that I didn’t know in the book; I learned so much. It’s kind of crazy how often people go straight toward the drugs and alcohol, in their assumptions. If you’d asked me before reading this book, I was ready to find out that he had a meth or heroin addiction, but he didn’t. Maybe he drank a bit, and he talked about his angel dust use in the early ‘70s, which is why I assumed it spiraled. I never asked those questions, I didn’t really care. But if you had asked me what happened to Leon prior to reading your book, I would have said, “probably drugs and alcohol,” but it wasn’t that.

Bill: I kept digging about that, because this brain injury, liquid coming out of his nose during the making of Union… I asked my neuroscientist friend, because I wasn’t sure if people were covering up for Leon’s drug use, and I was thinking cocaine. But he wasn’t that guy, like you said. He did his experimentation in the early ‘70s, but he wasn’t a drinker or coke fiend at all. 

Jesse: I have to admit, I’m jealous that you got Bruce Springsteen to open up to you about the influence of Mad Dogs for your book. It wouldn’t have worked in my film. The only people that I interviewed were people who played or people who actually saw the tour, and Bruce never actually saw the tour, just the film. But kudos to you for getting him on the record. I did ask [Springsteen’s manager] Jon Landau if Bruce would be in the movie and I don’t know what happened. Landau did see the original tour.

Bill: You see him in the gatefold, right?

Jesse: He is! If you get a microscope, that’s Jon. In the movie we found another photo that’s more clear so we used that. We did a little trickery on that. It’s hard to make him out in the vinyl.

Bill: Funny story about the Bruce thing — we talked about being nervous before interviews, and I was pretty nervous about that. I love Bruce Springsteen, but I’m not like a gigantic Springsteen guy. But my wife grew up in New Jersey, and she sort of is that person. She won’t really go see him because she doesn’t want to spoil her memories of him. Anyway, I told her she’d never guess who I had an interview lined up with. So the call’s about to happen and my wife, Laura, showers, dresses, puts on her makeup. Puts on real clothes like she’s going to an office or party, and then just sits outside the closed door. She gets all prepared for Bruce just to listen to the call, just in case he asks to jump on a Zoom! He was great.

Jesse: I wasn’t surprised that he opened up about the influence of Mad Dogs on the E Street Band. I wanted to refer to Rolling Thunder in the movie, but we kind of leaned away in the film from the influence of Mad Dogs on people, because I think it’s implicit in what the film is. I did go to [Bob Dylan’s manager] Jeff Rosen and ask him about including footage of Rolling Thunder Revue or the influence of Mad Dogs on Bob, because we know Bob went to see the Mad Dogs, etc. I think Jeff said something along the lines — and Jeff was unbelievably helpful in the making of my film — that it would be ill-advised to make a connection between Rolling Thunder and Mad Dogs.

Bill: What did you take from that? Like your legs would be broken if you did?

Jesse: Not that! I don’t know. He said it would be a stretch. I don’t really think it is.

Bill: I don’t either. Clearly one happened before the other. I’m not saying that Rolling Thunder wouldn’t have happened without Mad Dogs. The Band were exploring similar stuff; Helm was talking about midnight ramblers.

Jesse: What for you is the cautionary tale of Leon Russell?

Bill: There’s different lessons. There’s being a human being, there’s stuff about families. But on the musician level, the lesson is that just because you can do things on your own doesn’t mean you always should. And just because technology exists doesn’t mean you should eschew other things. The greatest thing in music for me is humans in the room, first. You’re a music producer as well, and we say things like “Don’t worry about the Peluso mic versus the Neumann. It doesn’t’ matter. It’s Etta James singing into a distorted old mic.” It’s the arrangements, it’s the people. Is it Sinatra in a small thing or with Nelson Riddle or Basie? It’s the collaborative aspect. That’s what I love about your film. And Tedeschi and Trucks both talk about this in the book: They both got inspired not just by the hippie ethos, or people looking like they’re having fun on stage. It’s the idea of being a bandleader and collaborating and having people have their moments in the spotlight. I love how Susan talked about these two bandleaders, Derek and Leon, bonding on a level that most people wouldn’t be able to understand. They’re seeing music in all these different parts.

Jesse: I think you hit the nail on the head. And I have to say thank you for including me in the book.

Bill: You and the film were invaluable.

Jesse: The film was obviously one of the last things in his life; I didn’t conduct his last-ever interview, but it was his last filmed interview, I believe. He set the table for all these musicians to create this unbelievably spiritual music. There’s this fairy dust that exists with Mad Dogs that came alive at the reunion.There was clearly a darkness to him, but I think when things were easy and fun, with the spirituality at his core, that’s when Leon was at his best. I think from 1969-1973 you really see an artist who’s well worth investigating, which you’ve done so elegantly. 

Bill: Well not to just pat you on the back, but the film exceeded my expectations. Music docs can often fall into these cliches, and especially with reunions, you worry that it’s going to be cringey or whatever. But it was so beautiful. There’s something so poignant about these older folks looking back at this part of their life, this eight-week tour that they’ll never forget. Even though many of them will have gone on to big careers, it’s an outsized thing in their lives. And they were only in their early and mid-20s. It’s a very emotional film.

Jesse: Thank you. It means a lot to hear that. It was the thrill of a lifetime to make the movie.

(Photo Credit: left, Kelly Davidson; right, Tracy Allison)