BOOKS
BOOKS
Shadowman: LeonRussell at the A&M Studio, LA, December 18, 1969
JIMMcCRARY/REDFERNS
THE great songwriter, pianist and producer Leon Russell changed the shape of popular music in 1970, when the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour he devised for Joe Cocker provided the blueprint for Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. But as Russell acolyte Bruce Hornsby recounts, by 1993 – for many reasons, some of them self-inflicted – his career was becalmed. Hornsby visited Russell at his farm in Sideview, Tennessee, where he found two huge barns stuffed with detritus, including two or three buses in some disrepair, old mixing boards from the 1960s; a gold record here, a platinum disc there, a trophy, some old posters. “Residue,” Russell explained, “from the fast lane.”
Leon Russell is a wild tale, rendered in great detail by Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz, reaching beyond rock anecdote to produce an empathetic portrait of a man of singular talent. Russell’s presence at several significant junctures of rock history is remarkable. Born with what was then called “spastic paralysis” in his right hand (from cerebral palsy) he nevertheless became a great piano player, capable as a teenager of filling in for Jerry Lee Lewis on tour when The Killer was incapacitated.