Steve Hunt (Allan Holdsworth, Stanley Clarke) - 'Connections' Episode 001

From Allan Holdsworth Information Center

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO2k8aGGIPA

Here is the cleaned-up and formatted transcript of the conversation between **Evan Marien (EM)** and **Steve Hunt (SH)** on the premiere episode of *Connections*:

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    • EM:** Dude. Man, I mean, your studio here is... you got a lot of outboard gear, a lot of keyboards, vintage... you got a Magicstomp, you got a Magicstomp!
    • SH:** Yeah, you got a DX7—the original DX7 that I used on the road with Allan!
    • EM:** No way!
    • SH:** That's it. And the Oberheim Expander I got in 1992—that one went on the road with us with Allan, too.
    • EM:** Does it still work?
    • SH:** It still works, yeah. I've had it repaired a couple of times.

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      1. Joining Allan Holdsworth's Band & The SynthAxe
    • EM:** Talking about the road with Allan, was he bringing the SynthAxe on the road with you guys?
    • SH:** Yeah, at the beginning part, yeah. Because the reason I started playing with Allan is because of the SynthAxe.
    • EM:** Oh, really?
    • SH:** When I was touring with Stanley Clarke, Allan was opening up for us on this big European tour. And so when they... this was around the time—I think he did *Atavachron*—he just started playing the SynthAxe during that time. I remember, like, a year before, I was in LA and I went to see Allan play. He was opening up for Chick [Corea]; it was a big tour he did around 1986 or something. And I went to see him play, and he was playing the SynthAxe. But when he went to solo on the SynthAxe, I heard synth chords behind his solo, like... and I couldn't figure out where these synth chords were coming from. Like, that's an amazing machine where he can solo and play chords at the same time! I had no idea.

In 1987, when I did that tour with Stanley and Allan was on the tour, he was doing the same thing. And I found out where the synth chords came from: it was a cassette. On one track they recorded a click track with a tambourine, and on the other track he did the chords. The tambourine went through Chad [Wackerman]’s monitor, and Chad hated that through the monitor, right? Because this is like—not in-ears, no, he didn't have in-ears, this was back in the '80s, you know? So they were doing "Looking Glass," "Non-Brewed Condiment," all these things with SynthAxe, and they had to pre-record it. Chad had to map out the whole tune, and then when the solo would come in, Allan would put down chords so when they played live, the chords would come in. And like, they knew how many choruses it would be; it would kind of lock everybody into that grid. And they hated that. They hated it with a passion, like they couldn't add an extra chorus, or if for whatever reason they got off... they just hated it.

And so that's how I got the gig! Because they hated a cassette player, they're like, "Hey, it's time to get a keyboard." It's like, "Hey, Steve's got his stuff set up, you know, for Stanley. Do you want to play instead of the cassette player?" I'm like, "Yeah, I'll do it!"

    • EM:** I never knew that. That's enough to replace the cassette player! That's incredible.

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      1. Holdsworth's Unique Harmony & Charts
    • SH:** We know, like, his system... no, he's got his own system. Of course, he did understand, like, C minor 7 and that kind of thing, but when he was... when you looked at his charts, he had those, like, Egyptian script or something! It's like, "What is this?"
    • EM:** You know?
    • SH:** He goes, "Oh," and he'd say, "Oh, it's just a bunch of X's and circles." He goes, "I'm not smart like you educated guys"—because he knew I went to Berklee, he used to kid me about that. But most of the time, though, like, he would just come over to my keyboards with a guitar, and he's like, "Oh, these are the chords to this," and he'd play a voicing. And then I'd figure out what the voicing was, then I'd write down, like, a little cheat sheet.
    • EM:** I did see your cheat sheets on those gigs, because I got to, in real time, watch you and Allan—like, you would kind of be like, "What are you playing there?" And he'd say, "It's like this," and you'd go, "Okay, cool," and then write down your...
    • SH:** Write down, like, a little thing, yeah. I kind of just learned by just listening, and then coming up with my own idea of, like, the way he thought about chords and stuff. And he was always jealous! He goes, "Man, you guys with all the fingers, man, you can put all those extra notes in," because he couldn't do it. That's what he loved about the synth, right? He could get all these extra notes, and he could tune it in fifths so he'd get these big stretches. So he was a little jealous of keyboard players, like, "I can't put all those extra notes in there, you know." And so I think he liked the way I voiced his chords for some reason; I understood his harmony and his chords better than... I couldn't like a standard...

Back then, I didn't know how to play over changes. I didn't understand this language of, like, 2-5-1—what do I do? Because my dad's a bebop sax player, oh really? Back in his day, like in the '40s, he wanted to be like Charlie Parker and play sax. So I grew up in that kind of world with him. Of course, I was a kid, I didn't like it, you know? I was into Jimi Hendrix and Cream, and then I got into Yes and Rick Wakeman. My dad was trying to teach me standards; he's like, "Oh, you need to listen to this." I'm like, "This is old fogey, Dad, man, I don't need that stuff, you know, nobody plays this stuff." And these guys weren't playing standards, they were just playing fusion stuff, modal things, synth stuff, big arrangements. So I wasn't really doing standards. But I went to Berklee, and eventually I had to go learn that stuff anyway. That's kind of how I started.

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      1. Joining Stanley Clarke & The Jazz Explosion
    • SH:** I was on an album called *If This Bass Could Only Talk* [by Stanley Clarke]. Around '85–'86, I started playing with this really cool group. I was a musical director for a tour called *The Jazz Explosion*. This guy in New York started this whole thing; he tapped into me and said, "Hey, you want to be the musical director? I want to get all these artists together." I said, "Yeah, I'll do it." And I got Jimmy Earl to play bass for us, and there was a drummer in New York—a trio—and all these artists just came on with us and played. The artists had to use the trio, but they would do their 30-minute set. So Freddie Hubbard was on it, Stanley Turrentine was on it, and then Stanley Clarke came on the show.

From one of the tours—these tours would happen like every few months, and we'd go to all the cities—Stanley came on, but he was doing solo bass at the time. So we didn't play with him; he just got up on stage, he did, like, just his brown base—the electric Alembic—and he just did a set by himself. It was awesome, I was like in heaven, you know, and I got to meet him. And then one of the shows he said, "Hey, why don't you guys come up at the end? We'll jam." I said, "Okay!" So we got up and jammed on "School Days" or something. He didn't have a band at the time, so he asked me and Jimmy [Earl] to come on the road with him, and then he got Jerry Brown to join us. That's when I started playing with Stanley—that's how I got Stanley's gig, just like that. I never auditioned for anything. It's a good thing, I think—if I auditioned for something, I'd never get the gig.

    • EM:** That's how I find myself as well: you just kind of find your way, and people look at you and go, "Oh, I like what you do." Look, there were plenty of other great keyboard players, way better than me, you know, that could have done Allan's gig. But I just happened to have a few things that he liked, and then I joined in and did the best I could, you know.

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      1. Live in Tokyo & *Live in Japan*
    • EM:** One of my favorite albums of all time is the live album...
    • SH:** Oh, *Live in Japan*. I mean, I listened to that so much. That was recorded at a club in Tokyo called The Pit Inn. It was kind of like the, I don't know, Village Vanguard kind of vibe or something. It was just a small little club. His manager at the time was a Japanese guy who lived in the states, so he started getting Allan to play there right when I joined the band in '87. And we played there every year for like ten years—every year we played there in April and May. And then we went to other parts of Tokyo; it was a really great little thing.

But I guess it was 1990 that somebody offered to do a live recording of Allan there, because I'm not sure if he had any live records out. And I don't think he liked having live records out, because he liked to have control over his solos, arrangements, and production, right? So in 1990 we actually did a live recording, and it was amazing. There was a studio way up on the top of this building, and they had feeds down into the club, which was in the basement. They came in and set everything up, everything was mic'd, and we recorded like five nights in a row. They played there five nights, and I think that was Jimmy [Johnson]’s last tour with us, because after that he became James Taylor's bass player.

Having a live record with Allan at that time, I was really excited about it. I was like, "Wow, this is so cool, you know," and the fact that we played five nights in a row and recorded all the nights, I'm like, "Okay, there's something we can find where we sounded good," you know? But what happened was, I remember we were listening to the rough mixes together, like in Allan's hotel room, and he just listened to it and he goes, "Well, this will never see the light of day." That's what he does—when he gets an emotion about a certain moment, then it gets fixed in, and so whatever it is, he didn't like it. I think mostly he's not too keen about his own playing at the moment, of course the rest of us are like, "It's past perfection, it's like godly, you know, he is who he is," you know. So it didn't come out.

And then it wasn't until the 2000s when I heard it, and I was out of the band by that time. I just heard this rumor that a live record was coming out with me on it. I said, "I don't think it's me on it, it must be somebody else." And they said, "No, a live record is coming out with you on it." And then I talked to Allan, I'm like, "Is there a live record coming out?" He goes, "Oh, I didn't tell you, but we're mixing the Tokyo Pit Inn record." I'm like, "Oh, wow!"

    • EM:** Yeah, like, how did you feel about that?
    • SH:** I was terrified, because I hadn't heard it in 15 years, and I didn't have any choice in picking my stuff, you know? I mean, I trusted Allan, but I'm like, "What did I play back then? I was a kid and I was like, you know, I'll play better now, let's redo it!"
    • EM:** Why do you think Allan finally came back around to it?
    • SH:** Well, we used to do these things called "Zones." If you see *Zones* on there, we played this one gig, and then the crowd went nuts, and we went and played an encore. Then we played another encore, and then they wanted us back and we had to play a third encore, and we had no more tunes! No more tunes! So Allan's like, "Well, let's just improvise something, you know," like, "Okay." So Gary [Husband] would noodle and I would play something, and then it kind of turned into a thing we did after that—like we'd always do a "Zone." And it's funny, people would say, "Hey, what album is that tune on, 'The Zone'?" and we're like, "That's not an album."

So we did a bunch of zones during that week, and I think the story is Gary wanted to ask Allan if he could use some of them—Gary was going to start putting out some things. And since it wasn't coming out, Gary said, "Hey, can I use some of the zones we did?" You know, and they pulled them back out, and Allan's like... you know how it is with musicians, you give it time, you're like, "Oh, I didn't play so bad," you know, probably listening back going, "Oh, that sounds awesome, yeah, we played pretty good actually back then."

If you just listen to his albums, you don't really capture what Allan's about. You have to see him live, you have to hear the live stuff, because he just goes for it! And like that version of "Non-Brewed Condiment," there's not really that much out there in terms of him playing it on a normal guitar, not the SynthAxe, and that version on that album... I mean, it's unbelievable, crazy.

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      1. Touring Life & Gary Husband's Speedo
    • SH:** But we've been on the road for six weeks, and we played six nights out of the week, back then. I didn't think about it, we just set up and we play. But we knew—and Jimmy mentions it—something special would happen every night, you know, just... and we knew that whoever's going to be in the audience that night, something they're going to hear something incredible, you know. But every night we just did a new thing, and we just played. But now I think about it, I'm like, "I can't believe every night we did that!" We all tried to do new things or different things. The way I describe it is I just get a fresh slate, a blank slate, and then we're going to start. Especially with Gary—every night he would do something different anyway. Him and Jimmy... when I think of chemistry between bass and drums and communication, Jimmy is literally there at every moment, supporting it and leading it—leading it sometimes! And then Gary is just a force of nature, man.
    • EM:** Is that the tour where he had a Speedo on?
    • SH:** Oh, yeah, it could have been! He started doing that because... there's photos, there's video, it's all out there. He had socks, tennis shoes, and a Speedo, because he's just ripping! I mean, at least he had a decent physique, like he could do it, you know? You wouldn't want to see me or Skúli in a Speedo, so we didn't do that. But the reason he did that is because, you know, we've been on the road for six weeks and the drummer just like... they're just always working, it's just sweating. It just happened one night. We didn't know—we came out of the dressing room, and then we got on stage, and then Gary comes out and he's in a Speedo, no shirt, just socks and a Speedo!

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      1. Skúli Sverrisson & Bass Players
    • EM:** Skúli—he is highly influential to all my bass heroes, you know, like Matthew Garrison, who I studied with.
    • SH:** I was just talking to somebody about Skúli the other day, because I saw Skúli here in Boston in the '80s. He came to school at Berklee in the '80s. I didn't know him at the time, but I remember seeing him at different clubs in Boston, and he was this Nordic guy with this white Fender bass or Yamaha bass, I think it was, and long blonde hair, just ripping the bass like I'd never seen before, you know? Just this incredible... all kinds of stuff that I never saw bass players do, you know?

And then when Allan needed a bass player, Allan said, "Hey, do you know anybody?" I said, "I saw this guy in Boston once, I don't know who it is, I didn't know his name, and I said, 'Let me see if I can find him, and I think you would dig him, you know.'" So I asked around, I said, "Who was that guy in Boston, that Nordic-looking guy?" you know, and he goes, "Oh, Skúli is from Iceland." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, where is he?" And they said, "Oh, he's in New York now." So I looked him up, and I called him, and I said, "Hey, Allan's looking for a bass player, would you want to come audition and do it? I don't know if you know the music or if you like it or anything." He goes, "Oh, I'm a huge fan, I know all that stuff." He flew out to LA and we played with Chad the first thing, and then Allan loved him from the beginning, like, "This is great!"

But you know, I was thinking about Skúli then: he was one of the first guys that were doing this kind of bass playing, yeah. Because Stanley and Jaco didn't play like that, right? They had their kind of thing. But then there was Jeff Berlin, he had this kind of thing, yep. And then there was Patitucci, right, and he had this thing. But then... I can't think of it, like Skúli was part of that group. And I started thinking about that recently, like, he was one of the beginning guys of this kind of style. There was like this melodic-minor modal thing to his playing. If you listen to Skúli's solo on *Low Hat* [from *Wardenclyffe Tower*], you can hear all that stuff going on—it's just incredible.

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      1. Recording *Wardenclyffe Tower*
    • SH:** The way that album was recorded—the whole thing, and all the tracks that I'm on—me and Allan played all our stuff first with a drum machine. I think what it was is... the album before that was *Secrets*, which was my first album I was on, with "Joshua" and the two tunes. And there's a track on there, I think it's Chad's tune. The way they recorded that is Chad put down some kind of drum machine, and then there was some kind of synth chords, and then Allan played all his stuff over that. And then they went to the studio and they put bass and drums over it, and that's Allan's solo on that—it's just ridiculous! But he liked that concept for some reason. He goes, "Oh, this is..." And so *Wardenclyffe Tower* was done like that.
    • EM:** Wow.
    • SH:** So he had all his tunes, and I did "Dog Lettuce" on that album, too. So everything was like done with just guitars and synths, and I did my solos on stuff, and then he took it in the studio and had the bass player and drummer play over that. That was done like that, so it was a really weird album because I didn't hear any bass. There was no bass notes when I did my chords or I did my solos. And so on that tune I remember I just had, like, Allan's voicings, which have no bass. I know that Jimmy [Johnson] would come up with his own roots. I was a little fearful, because what if... exactly! I mean, you play a different root, it changes the whole scale, right?

You know, one of my favorite stories to tell some of my students from that time—I think we did two days of rehearsals. That first day, I came in with a bunch of, like, questions about roots. So I was like, "Oh, I'll just ask Allan, you know, I'm like, 'Allan, what do you think? Is it F sharp or is it, you know, B or something?'" And I remember him just turning around and he goes, "Well, it's this... and then you can play anything you want underneath it." I'm like, "Well, you pick the root, you know!" And so it was always hard making out charts and thinking about, like, "Okay, what scale am I going to do?" because especially for that, there was no bass, you know? So all I had to go by was the voicing, and then I had to go, "Okay, it looks like this kind of chord, and then I'm going to play this scale over it," and then I'm thinking, "What if Jimmy picks a different root, you know? What changes the foundation?"

    • EM:** Sometimes that could be cool, too, you get like...
    • SH:** Yeah, what's that scale you're playing? I'm like, "I don't know!"

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      1. Finances & Gear on Tour
    • SH:** We didn't make very much money with those tours or that gig. Sometimes not any at all—you can talk to my wife about that! Like, "How much did you make on that tour?" I'm like, "Eh, the gigs were smoking, that's all you need to know, man, the gigs were just killing, you know."
    • EM:** And how much?
    • SH:** "I lost $1,000, but yeah, but man, you should have heard when we played The Bottom Line, it was just killing!"

The one thing he did demand, though—because he'd been on the road for 20 years before that—is that we had a road crew, and we had our own hotel rooms individually. No matter how much money we would lose, we all had... because I heard these stories, like the whole band rooming into one room. We always had a road guy and then a sound guy that would help with the road stuff. So on the gigs that we did together, it was... oh, it was Gordy! Gordy was... was Gordy helping out on any of those tours you guys did? He was from the East Coast. Gordy, and Eddie, and then Paul that helped us out. And we had, my good friend Mike Whites did a tour with us sometimes. I had to ship my stuff to LA, oh my god, freight and stuff, and everything was... these things were in heavy-duty cases. And then I had a heavy-duty case full of cables!

    • EM:** Did you guys share modules at all, or were you able to copy patches?
    • SH:** Well, he used the Oberheim, and so I would just grab a couple of his patches and a couple of those patches. I think "Non-Brewed" was just a stock patch from the Oberheim, that's great! But there was a few of them that he tweaked. And especially on the... he loved the DX7, and he actually came up with, like, "Pud Wud" was like his own patch. He took another patch and he just kind of worked with it until it had that sound. So he gave me that patch, and I still have it now.
    • EM:** How do you copy... is it actually a cassette? You know that kind of noise...
    • SH:** That's how we would transfer! So you had to put the cassette player in this little patch, and then you had to run... it would copy all the patches, but it would just be that noise stuff. And then you plug it into this thing, and you retransfer the noise back, and then the patches would show up—hopefully, you know, in the right...
    • EM:** Did they ever not show up?
    • SH:** Yeah, sometimes it'd be like a little thing and you just have to redo it, you have to get a better cassette tape.

My setup then was: I had a DX7 for my bottom keyboard, and then I had a Roland JX-10, and then I had my Oberheim—this Oberheim to the left. But I used to use Allan's Matrix-12 also, and then I would have a rack that had, like, a Roland MKS-20 in it, which is like a piano thing—a piano module, which is new back then. I had this really elaborate J.L. Cooper MIDI Matrix thing; it was this... and all of my keyboards went into this matrix, and then I could program that unit to get all the keyboards to, like... oh man, like patches, and it would like... it was elaborate, and tons of MIDI cables back and forth, and everything was in stereo and had a mixer, just... you know?

Nowadays, I just have my Hackintosh, and then everything is built in there, and I just USB plug in a keyboard and it's like I'm good to go!

    • EM:** You brought your Hackintosh, and you had just transferred a lot of the stuff... you had found your patches, or you had your patches, and you had transferred them over into FM8 from Native Instruments?
    • SH:** This goes way back—I was able to do SysEx. If you had a SysEx, it would transfer all your patches. And again, it was like, yeah, it's antiquated, but I found out that program will read SysEx. So I took my DX7 sounds, I copied them on the computer with this program, I found the SysEx, and then I could have FM8 (the Native Instruments) read the SysEx, and it was mostly correct! So like that "Pud Wud" sound was...
    • EM:** And you blew Allan's mind, because you're like, "Allan, check this out, like I have..."
    • SH:** Check it out, like... and on the computer! "Holy shit, man," it's like, "Yeah, it's from the computer, it's the sound!" It was just so cool.

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      1. New Music & Wrap-Up
    • SH:** This new music I'm writing, like for this new record that I'm working on, it's not out yet, but... and you're on it, thank you, man! It's like the way you solo through changes is like... I it's incredible. I don't... I mean, I don't know much about your history, but no, you just... I'm like, how do... like when you played on "First Creation," the solo at the end, you know what Randy Roos told me? He goes—and you may be embarrassed by this, but he goes—he said, "Man, that's the best bass solo..." I said, "On the record?" He goes, "No, the best bass solo ever."
    • EM:** That's really funny! And those changes are hard, man, you just float through that stuff so nice. I mean, I like writing music like that, too, that almost is more emotional movement than like a... than theoretical, like it's like, "No, it's like it just needs... it needs to go here." "Okay, that's where it goes."
    • SH:** On this new... this new record is coming out, which is... what is it called, by the way? Do you have a...
    • EM:** I think it's going to be called *Changes*. There's a tune—one of the tunes was just me with synths, I just improvise these chords and then I solo over it, and it's going to be... and that's the name of the tune is *Changes*, and that may be the title, I don't know. But it's a work in progress, and... you're on a couple of tracks, and so proud to be on it, thank you. Jimmy's on it, and Chad, and Gary, and then Tim's gonna... yeah, Tim's going to do his part, he's just... in fact, I just got him the stems, so he's going to do it. So hopefully it'll be out in a little bit.
    • EM:** It's amazing. Well, man, this has been awesome, man. It's too cool, man. I have a question for you, like... this is your first podcast, right? First one? Okay. Tell me like how you started this, how you wanted to get into this.
    • SH:** I was talking to my wife—yeah, to Danielle. I was having a moment of gratitude where I just realized how many people I've met in all different corners and pockets of musical genres, styles, connections... yes, how amazing it is to have so many different friends in different areas of music. I'm just really cherishing these things a little bit more and more and more. And I'm just like, "Man, I got to sit down and just hang with my friends." So this is episode one!
    • EM:** Episode one! And it's really, really cool to talk with you, come in my studio, and that's the goal: is to come to people, to, you know, be face to face, see where they're at and see what they're doing.
    • SH:** I love it, man. Carry on, as Allan would say.
    • EM:** I will, man, thank you so much.
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