Phil Lee & The Horse He Rode In On

The Mighty King of Love
Yep. It’s a slow song. It’s on another cd. Right. But it’s different from the ’60s folkie four track version on the first album in that it’s now a ’60s rock version with electric guitars, organs and everything! I think it sets the tone for the whole record. The soulful, heart-rending guitar playing on this one is Jan King, the organ that sounds so danged authentic (because it most certainly is) is by keyboard legend, Barry Goldberg. I’d like to thank Jan for giving me the room to play the super important sounding Glen Campbell style baritone solo on the end. She’s too good to me.

Billy Talbot – Bass
Ralph Molina – Drums
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Barry Goldberg – Keyboards
Jan King – Guitar

Wake Up Crying
It’s been brought to my attention that the intro to Wake Up Crying is very similar to My Generation. That’s probably because it is the intro to My Generation. Like Grant through Richmond, I went through the ’60s grabbing every idea that wasn’t nailed down. It can be considered a tribute to the golden era of pop… or shameless plundering. Whatever. The music works great with the beatnik lyrics. That’s Bill Lloyd on background vox and Richard Bennett on guitar tipping his hat to everyones favourites The Monkees. Ralph and I both get to do solos on this one. Go us!

Billy Talbot – Bass, Vocals
Ralph Molina – Drums, Vocals
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Barry Goldberg – Keyboards
Richard Bennett – Guitar
Bill Lloyd – Background Vocals

Hey Buddy
We needed a hit. I needed to acknowledge the very heroic and in my eyes Godlike Garth Beckington one of the primary architects of Phil Lee. This song answered both those concerns nicely. In 1970 I met Garth Beckington in Carrboro, NC. I was a drummer on my second gig of the day. As a drummer, I fall somewhere between Al Jackson Jr., Keith Moon and the plate spinning guy who was on Ed Sullivan. As I mentioned it was my second gig of the day and I was throwing up and bleeding all over the place (both in between and during the songs) due to my approach and the drugs they were forcing on drummers in those days. When the singer announced I was dying and could possibly use some medical attention, out of the crowd walked what appeared to be an angel carved out of alabaster, wearing a derby hat who said “I have a band-aid. In fact, I have two band-aids.” That my friends was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We never took America by storm, but we made some great music together as well as making a lot of girls happy and then in turn miserable all over the land.

Billy Talbot – Bass, Vocals
Ralph Molina – Drums, Vocals
Phil Lee –  Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Richard Bennett – Guitar, Charango
Bill Lloyd – Background Vocals

No Exit Wound
Tears of A Clown, The Tracks of My Tears… you get it. The old laughing to keep from crying story. This guy is at every gig, having what seems to be one heck of a time…  and maybe he is, but 50 years of looking into people’s eyes from the small stage gives you insight or some ability to make snap judgements on who you really ought not to be fucking with or who might not be all that blinking happy no matter how loud and hardy he’s laughing. There’s that guy and then there’s this guy… The one who plays a lot of gigs, packs up and doesn’t head back to the hotel with a pretty enough, plumpish lady of around forty-five, but goes alone to the Motel 5 to unpack all his stuff in one of those rooms, which is nice enough if you like dead blondes on the floor. To don the Spongebob Squarepants PJs the grandkids gave him. To watch a Matlock rerun or forensic medicine detective show. To take half a Xanax. To question every dumb thing he’d said that night and every song that should’ve been perfect and wasn’t nearly and try to sleep on top of the bed and not between the sheets. Yeeks! Yep,  this is a song about Jeremiah O’Sullivan and me, two of the genuinely happy-go-luckiest fuckers you’re ever going to meet in this or any other lonesome town.

Billy Talbot – Bass, Vocals
Ralph Molina – Drums, Vocals
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Jack Irwin – Keyboards
David West – Slide Guitar

I Don’t Forget Like I Used To
Another one from the heart, written June 26th at the Value Inn in Kenosha, WI, recorded July 31st at Painted Sky Studio, Cambria CA. Well, here you go folks, country music for them that like it like it used to be. Especially if you like your country music to sound like that honky tonk strip joint band from The Seventh Veil on Sunset Blvd and it was, let’s say, 1966… Three chords and the truth (true for me anyway) with a lot of nice bits thrown in. Fats Domino had just died so I thought that little horn part he used a lot would be good on the choruses. That’s me on guitar with Dorian Michaels doubling. Barry’s killer piano part; one take thank you very much! Ralph’s take no prisoners drum part.  The doo-wop outro… Yessir, plenny good stuff! The song is both too low and too high for me to sing so I’m hoping someone who can really sing will hear it and want to cover it. Frankie Laine, Vaughn Monroe, Keith Toby, you know somebody good.

Billy Talbot – Bass, Vocals
Ralph Molina – Drums, Vocals
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals
Barry Goldberg – Keyboards
Dorian Michaels – Guitar

Rebel In My Heart
More of the karmic balancing act… Written by Brendan Earley, legendary founding member and guitarist of the San Francisco Mutants and another one I picked because it sounds like a HIT! And because I really owe Brendan for a song he wrote that I got all the credit and money for. I cringe every time I think about it. Strangely enough, we’re still the best of friends. I plan to cut another one he wrote called Fallen At Your Heels with The Horse. Anyway, the true heroine of this song is Jan King. Her playing always rips my heart out, make me wish a lot of things had worked out differently and honestly wonder why’n the hell more people can’t do it like Jan does it. The song has an epic, anthemic feel to it and a little hook which, Brendan or maybe the aforementioned Garth Beckington invented. Works great on the 12 string and harmonica. Again it’s the core band of me, Ralph, Billy, Barry and Jan.

Billy Talbot – Bass, Vocals
Ralph Molina – Drums, Vocals
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Barry Goldberg – Keyboards
Jan King – Guitar

Party Drawers
From the Dolly and Porter ‘can you run that by me one more time?’ playbook. It’s a funny song, given the fact it doesn’t make much sense. If you zoom out it kind of does. That all these things actually happened gives it credibility and if you don’t believe a word of it go along for the ride. Enjoy the fantastic guitar playing of Richard Bennett, David West and Bill Kirchen; appreciate that Ralph and Billy really can play anything you hand em; thrill to the one and only f-bomb on the record; get your semi-annual erection hearing Molly Pasutti sing it just right (just saying her name gives me palpitations.) Molly nailed it. I was hearing Dolly’s voice and, darn her hide, Molly came in with one of her own, sounding more, to me, like June Carter Cash and it completely worked. Molly’s already a very respectable and well respected singing-songwriting person herself and I can’t wait to see the effect this has on her heretofore, stellar reputation. She doesn’t seem worried.

Billy Talbot – Bass
Ralph Molina – Drums
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals
David West – Guitar
Richard Bennett – Guitar
Bill Kirchen – Guitar

Bad For Me
This is my personal favourite. It’s a personal song anyway but I dig how we played it, as if we were all buying into it and all mad as hell by the end… and heartbroken. Wild and mercurial and nowhere near perfect, it starts out low key and confidential, but because we cut it live and can hear each other and feel the emotion, the song was gradually able to build to a seething, guitar smashing, crescendo. Also, because we hadn’t really talked about how to end it, we just ran out of steam at the end. We could’ve faded it easy, but I’m glad we didn’t. It would have been wrong. It’s this soul-deep empathy that keeps Big Daddy Neil coming back for more. They feel it, like you feel it, they aren’t phoning it in. It’s not about the paycheck.

Billy Talbot – Bass
Ralph Molina – Drums
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Barry Goldberg – Keyboards
Jan King – Guitar

My Man Is Gone
Ralph and I went studio shopping and ended up at Steve Crimmel’s Painted Sky Studio in Cambria, Ca. We set up, Me in my G&L Broadcaster thru a Vox AC 15 in the middle of the room about five feet from Ralph on the vintage Ludwig kit. Everything we did that day is on the track. Rhythm guitar, lead vocal, drums and harp. There’s as much Ralph as me on my vocal track so there’s no fixing that even if we wanted to. At one point I either clutched or dropped a pick, or got tired of playing that one chord and walked it up to D. Voila! Blip, blop, bloop, instant bridge! We tried to beat the demo, couldn’t, so we overdubbed Billy and everything else. Barry was brilliant on the piano as usual. Guitar-wise it was George Bradfute soloing in Nashville, Jan in Chicago, I filled in some cosmic debris at Painted Sky. As for the background vocals (woah-oh-ooh-oh) my original plan was to have a really swanky ’40s style DeCarlo Sisters approach. Molly Pasutti (of Party Drawers fame) handled that. The union of opposites tack, didn’t work. Taryn Engle then sent us a Raylettes version, uhhh nope. Me, Ralph and Billy took a swing, sorry, no dice. We tried it all. Then one day we were listening and for some reason, it sounded really great. Steve finally realized he had left all the vocals un-muted. They were all in. Counting the double ones that was a lot! Problem solved. Everybody made the cut! And it still sounds like we were all in the room together, bashing it out.

Billy Talbot – Bass, Vocals
Ralph Molina – Drums, Vocals
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Barry Goldberg – Keyboards
George Bradfute – Guitar
Jan King – Guitar
Taryn Engle & Molly Pasutti – Background Vocals

All Right Here
Jan King wrote the music, I wrote the words. I was passing through Chicago on tour and she played this song for me on her grand piano. After I’d sufficiently pulled myself together, quit crying and all that, she taught me how to play it on guitar. When the music is right the words come easy (words never had so much musical encouragement) so I got them done pretty fast. They sound right to me anyway… and true. I worked on it for the rest of the tour and by the time I got home, had the basic arrangement that you hear on the record. It’s in drop D tuning and while it lends itself to the Crazy Horse treatment it sounds really good solo on a beat up old resonator.

Recording Note – When you’re making a record there’s a tendency to want to tidy things up. Fix it. It’s possible we have a better version of this, or maybe we could’ve combined three or four takes into one really good one. I suppose I could’ve comped a vocal. Or re-sung it. We might’ve dropped the high-hat tics keeping us all on time in the big holes. Well again, since it’s Crazy Horse, not Tidy Horse we left it the heck alone.

Billy Talbot – Bass
Ralph Molina – Drums
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Jan King – Guitar
George Bradfute – Guitar
Richard Bennett – Shruti Box

Turn To Stone
It’s sad when your special angel is holding all the cards and your whole arsenal consists of being quiet, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles in Turn To Stone. That’s not saying the silent treatment doesn’t work. It does… lots of times. Another familiar mongrel of a song with Etta James, Barry White, a dash of tremolo* and what appears to be the solo from Time Is On My Side going a long way towards making it work. Jake Berger is responsible for that but he was just following orders. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

*indispensable ‘60s guitar effect

Billy Talbot – Bass
Ralph Molina – Drums
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Barry Goldberg – Keyboards
Jake Berger – Guitar
Pete Anderson – Guitar

Sonny George
Sonny George never killed anybody, he was just another friend with a cool, musical sounding name. Like Jemima James. The story, however, is true. You will notice as you try to play along with it that every section, although they should all be the same, is different. You can pretend to be a member of the band and try to imagine what’s coming next, it’s only four chords,  you’ll be fine.

Billy Talbot – Bass
Ralph Molina – Drums
Phil Lee – Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica
Richard Bennett – Guitar
Gurf Morlix – Guitar
Jan King – Guitar
Lory Donatt – Flute