DAVE EDMUNDS

DAVE EDMUNDS

John Mendelssohn

You’re giddy with delight at the prospect of meeting and chatting with Dave Edmunds, Wales’s most notable contribution to rock ’n’ roll, for he’s produced some records you’ve liked, and you thought his version of Elvis Costello’s “Girls Talk” was definitive, and his cover of Dion’s “The Wanderer” from his new live / Hear You Rockin’ LP is in heavy rotation on MTV, and you adored his version of Elvis Costello’s “Girls Talk,” and his shyly grinning likeness is plastered all over millions of teenaged girls’ bedroom walls, and you dare imagine that some of his sexual

charisma will rub off on you. And he’s said to be The Nicest Guy in Show Business.

Guess again. You’ve arrived at his hotel in San Francisco’s Japantown 90 seconds late. His tour manager informs you that, being beside himself with hunger after a foodless travel day, the Welsh wizard dashed across the “road” (the British don’t like to say “street”) a few minutes before to pick up a sandwich, but will be right back. Forty-five minutes pass. Your wife and daughter return to pick you up, only to discover that the interview hasn’t begun yet. You can forget getting to your favorite Thai restaurant at anywhere near the time for which you’ve reserved a table. Your wife and daughter cry inconsolably.

It turns out that, confronted by the massed delicacies of Japantown, the Welsh wizard decided against a mere sandwich, and opted to enjoy a lovely sitdown dinner, presumably complete with green tea ice cream, while you sat there in the lobby of his hotel cooling your heels, gnashing your chompers, marinating in your own juices, and thinking about how no one had ever kept you waiting so long before—neither Jagger nor Townshend, Bowie, Ferry, Donner, Blitzen, nor Secretary of Defense Weinberger.

When he finally does materialize, Edmunds offers neither explanation nor apology, but he does have an ingratiating smile, a twinkle in his eyes, and you are A Professional. So instead of trying to pull his lungs out through his nostrils, you ask him if he can picture modern teens finding modern rock as thrilling as he, in his own teens, found early rock ’n’ roll.

“Definitely not,” he replies in a resonant baritone rumble that bears no relation whatever to the piercing tenor in which he sings. “It was the birth of a new music then, wasn’t it? Things were being discovered—different ways of writing songs and recording and presenting one’s self. They were a pretty heavy bunch, the guys who started it all—Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers. There’s nobody like that now. It’s too diluted—everyone’s doing it. In a way I suppose Sting is as big a star as there is, but he still hasn’t had the impact of an Elvis Presley or a Chuck Berry. Nowhere like.”

In the last three and a half years, he’s been on the road only 10 days, and those in Japan, a small country in which raw fish is considered a delicacy. But while you easily understand how he might have missed the rapturous screams of the voluptuous halter-topped nymphets who swarm by the thousands to his every performance, it occurs to you that he must be losing a fortune being away from the studio, where, in the wake of the Fab Thunderbirds’ recent success, he must command top dollar. “After doing three or four albums in a row,” he explains, “you start thinking about what it was like on the road. So you go out again. But then halfway through the tour, you think, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I should be back in the studio!’ ”

The Man, The Legend, the Sushi-Eater

Not that he likes to stay in there for long—he claims rarely to take over five weeks, a relative blink of an eye, to record an album. “I don’t think you get inspired performances by bashing away at the same thing over and over again,” he reveals. “Mutt Lange has been working God-knows-how-long—two years or some-

thing ridiculous—on the Def Leppard album. I would definitely go a bit loopy working that long on an album. The best stuff is usually done straightaway. I’m going to go back to doing it that way as much as I can.

“I’m not saying that you can just go in and set everyone up and put the mikes up and bang. It takes work. The Everly Brothers spent two days on ‘Wake Up Little Susie,’ and Bill Haley spent a lot of time getting the sound on his records.”

He explains why he’s particularly proud of his work with the Stray Cats. “It would have been very easy to have it sounding like a demo. All you’ve got is a guitar, an upright bass, one drum and a cymbal, but there’s not that much you can put on in the way of modern effects—if you have a harmonized guitar or a gated reverb thing on the snare, it wouldn’t ring true—so it was a very fine line to walk. But I felt quite confident I could walk it.

“The logical thing to do would have been to dampen Slim Jim’s snare to get rid of all the buzzes and rattles and make it sound nice. But you do that and put echo on it and it just sounds like nothing. In fact, I left all those rattles and all the overtones, the ringing and all that and had three different echoes going. There was a plate and a spun delay that went c//f-d it-d it-d itdit and then another slower one, I believe, and an EQ’d EMT plate. The overtones and rattles on the drum were actually firing these effects! It became one great big lovely crash off-beat thing and basically held the sound of the Stray Cats together

and kept it sounding full and big like a record.”

When you ask him how much he gets for his services as a producer these days, he suddenly becomes very interested in the TV and mumbles, “That’s not my department really. My manager handles that.”

You ask him what he can do in his mid-40s that he couldn’t do in his 20s and 30s, and vice versa. “A lot of people,” he replies, a little obliquely, “think your best stuff is done before you’re 23. Buddy Holly did all his stuff before 22. But I don’t think I fit into that so much because I do a bit of everything. I don’t do one thing. I’m not a guitarist. I’m not a singer. I do record production. I’ve done a movie score. I’ve done TV specials—well, at least one, the Carl Perkins thing. I’ve been in a couple of films. I’m still not quite sure what it is I’m good at, to tell you the truth.

“You do stupid things when you’re young without realizing how stupid they are, and sometimes they come out great. But as you get older you know too much to do them. If you could just go ahead, it might be great. The first hit record I ever had [a power trio adaptation of Khachaturian’s], ‘Sabre Dance,’ was totally stupid. I would never do it now! It was ludicrous, a trio of young kids with limited talent trying to do this complicated classical piece! It isn’t the sort of thing you’d do in your 40s.”

Surely, you suggest, he must occasionally find himself playing something a little less nimbly than he’s accustomed to being able to, much as an aging pitcher might notice fastballs that a couple of seasons before would have been grounded feebly back to the mound being hammered into the upper deck. “If that does happen one night,” he concedes, a little annoyedly, “I think, ‘Well, fuck it, tonight it wasn’t happening.’ A good gig is great. But sometimes they happen anc sometimes they don’t, and you can’t put your finger on why. I’m not so serious about rock ’n’ roll, or even life at all. I don’t get into the intricacies of my guitar style. I basically don’t give a shit!

“In the studio, I take other people’s records a lot more seriously than my own. That can be strange because sometimes you can see an artist trying too hard. People who’ve been recording a long time are much easier to work with. Status Quo (the grotty English boogie-cum-metal foursome that’s been around for 25 years) are just a dream—they know their limitations, they know what they do, they know what they’re good at. That’s much easier to deal with. Somebody like (recent protege) K. D. Lang (as in Vancouver’s K. D. Lang & The Reclines) is very, very serious about it, incredibly dedicated. I mean, she’d be in tears in the studio! Sometimes it’s tricky, having to say, ‘Hang on, let’s not get carried away here.’ ”

After 19 years of superstardom and having earned countless dollars, the inconsiderate little Welsh so-and-so tells you what keeps him rocking and roiling when many others of his age have begun to betray the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease and been consigned to convalescent hospitals. “Earning lots of money is great,” he acknowledges, “and a lot of people like fame as well. But for me, the greatest joy is working with great guys, really good musicians who know what they’re doing. That’s the buzz of it.” ®