Well, the band Messina left for what was supposed to be a career as an independent producer was called Poco, which he’d started with former Buffalo Springfield member Richie Furay and was also co-founded by a former Springfield sideman named Rusty Young, who played pedal steel guitar among many other instruments. Now, Young is the one who’s “sitting in’,” as the pair’s concert at the Lobero is being dubbed. “I do have to take Kenny’s part,” Young joked over the phone from his home last week. “I’m growing a beard, so I can look right when I sing ‘House at Pooh Corner’.” All kidding aside, Young will share the stage with Messina for the whole show, as the two have remained friends and colleagues throughout the four-plus decades intervening. “We’ll do ‘Kind Woman,’ which was the song where we first met,” Young said, “and ‘You Better Think Twice’, which was Jimmy’s big song in Poco that was on American Bandstand. We’ve got songs from Buffalo Springfield – ‘A Child’s Claim to Fame’ – and we’ll do things like ‘Your Mama Don’t Dance’, because I played on a number of the Loggins & Messina albums in the ‘70s.” Then there’s “Crazy Love”, the monster Poco hit penned by Young long after Messina had moved on, not to mention Rusty’s “Neil Young is Not My Brother”, which he wrote to explain exactly that. “We’re just two guys playing together and still having fun after all these years, which totally translates to the stage,” explained Young, who spends a good bit of his time scoring soundtracks for children’s DVDs for Scholastic and has also been working on his autobiography for almost a decade. “There’s no pressure at all, so it’s just a good time for us and the audience.” Q. You’ve played pedal steel guitar since you were a kid, right? A. Yeah, it always felt special for me. I excelled from an early age. But I did also learn to play banjo, mandolin, dobro and guitar. And when The Beatles hit, I was just like everyone else and wanted to be in rock ‘n’ roll bands, but I’d play steel like it was rock ‘n’ roll. When I was 22, I got the call to go to Los Angeles to play on the Buffalo Springfield Last Time Around record, after Richie Furay wanted steel for “Kind Woman”. That’s when I met Jimmy, who was engineering and producing. Buffalo Springfield was breaking up, and the three of us got along great and loved country music. The notion of doing something with rock ‘n’ roll roots but with country instruments as the color was an idea that made sense. That’s how we put Poco together. 10 – 17 September 2015
And 45 years later, it’s still going on, even though you said the band was retired for good a couple of years ago. I was going to retire completely. I tried to. So far, it hasn’t worked out. Right when we were finishing up what was supposed to be the last Poco gigs, I got an offer to record a solo record, which I had never done over all those years. Everybody else I knew had made many of them. I knew it would be a lot of work, but I always wanted to do it. So I started playing again. So we’re doing a few Poco shows, very few. Just ones that are fun in places I like to go. No more touring. It might be six or eight shows this year. It keeps me active musically and makes it easier for me to focus on it. You were the one guy who never left Poco, the last original member. What kept you going so long? I never really thought about moving on. We always just moved forward. Randy (Meisner) left for The Eagles. Then Jimmy, and Richie went off to do their things. Then Timothy (B. Schmidt, who had replaced Meisner in Poco) went to the Eagles, too. But it didn’t bother me. It was like a tree that’s being pruned – it just got stronger. The guys who have been in the band – all of them – are incredible musicians. They were all great players and great songwriters, and it’s no different now. The quality has always been really, really high. That’s why it lasted so long. And your big hit single “Crazy Love” helped, too. Yeah, it’s ironic, because I wasn’t really a songwriter, but I’m the only one who ever had the number one. If that hadn’t happened, Poco would have faded away a long time ago. It’s ironic. But it kept it going. It was one of those songs that every songwriter hopes for. It took about half an hour to write. The chorus just came to me when I was messing around working on my house. It just bounded into my head, the whole chorus. I thought it wasn’t finished because it just had those “oohs” and “aahs.” When I played it for the rest of the band, I told them that I’d find the words but they said, “Don’t you dare!” Anyway, I’ve been trying to do that again ever since. The band was there at the founding of country-rock as a genre, but somehow didn’t quite get the respect of, say, Buffalo Springfield or Burrito Brothers, nor the huge commercial success of The Eagles, at least not right away or in that sustained way. Do you feel like Poco got its due? It’s been a great run. I think we did achieve what we wanted to. There was that whole thing about us being too country for rock and vice-versa. But I don’t subscribe. The Eagles
Santa Barbara welcomes Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and USC Thornton Symphony conductor Carl St. Clair (photo by Marco Borggreve)
made it doing the same thing. But they just had a big hit single on AM radio. We were an FM hit, because our songs were 18 minutes long, because Richie Furay – who was a great writer and singer – didn’t write catchy two-minute songs. So we never had that big hit until “Crazy Love”. But it was what we chose to do. It’s where our band fell. And it was fun. We do have the Poconuts, who are our hard-core fans who stand by us and love us to death. A lot of other bands from our era envy that. We have a following that’s been with us for generations, and they always show up to the shows. We had enough success. I have everything I want – no big house in Aspen like Don Henley, but I have no complaints.
Picture This: Every Rose Has Its Thornton
The Santa Barbara debut of the USC Thornton Symphony wouldn’t normally seem like much of a big deal, even with conductor Carl St. Clair at the helm. After all, we’ve got our own orchestra full of young musicians who performs at the Granada five or six times every summer during the Music Academy of the West season. But this is also the local premiere of a special presentation of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition featuring meticulous film animations and images produced and directed by USC faculty Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, along with a team of 11 animation artists from the school’s famed department. The multimedia show was created for a single performance back in January 2011 (with the New World Symphony and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas) produced for the inaugural concert in Frank Gehry’s New World Center concert hall in Miami Beach, where a giant five-screen space surrounds the audience and the orchestra with 270 degrees of moving images. Now, the project is heading our way in a revised format re-configured and re-edited by Patterson and Reckinger that will condense the original into a
See you in September, see you when the summer’s through. – The Happenings
single, albeit giant digital 4K, screen – but with another remarkable alteration. The multimedia performance will feature new software that allows a human operator to “play” the animated visualizations in sync with a live performance. Scott Winters, who co-founded the company that created the software – will be seated within the orchestra, taking cues from the conductor along with the performing musicians. That’s a huge difference, Winter explained. “For as long as films have been screened in live concerts, conductors have had to use a click track to conduct the film to make the synchronization happen,” he said. “In every case the film wins – it restricts the tempo, and the conductor’s job is to bend to the film. “That’s ridiculous,” said Winters, who has 20 years of conducting experience himself. “All these unbelievably talented musicians are on stage, and they’re being forced to play the music exactly the same way every time. That’s not what live musicians do. We’re supposed to be expressive.” So, Winters commissioned programmers to come up with software that allows the tempo of the film to be adjusted via an iPad, which is controlled by a musician following the conductor’s cues. The original plan was only to enhance his own abilities to be creative while on the podium playing alongside filmed visual images, but the software became much bigger than his original plan. “We’ve reversed what’s in control. Conductors have realized they can control the film any number of ways – they can stretch out a retard a little bit longer to have an image stay up on screen. The projector is now an instrument that’s alive, and the conductor is in charge of the timing.” The possibilities of manipulating fully rendered film are only just now coming to the surface, Winters said. “There’s quite an expressive palette that’s very powerful. Performers can manipulate the film to say different things the same way a violinist can take a concerto and make it their own, even though it’s still the same note.” Although the animations and images are the same, if condensed, from four years ago, even Winters and the co-creators don’t know exactly how the famous 14 movements from “Pictures” will play on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon at the Granada, September 12 and 13. “The animations are absolutely stunning, and when you perform with a live orchestra, the film becomes part of the rhythm section. It doesn’t make any noise, but it’s there visually to match what the orchestra is playing. •MJ It’s very powerful.” MONTECITO JOURNAL
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