Larry Carlton
and Steve Lukather
April 2001

Part 1
Part 2

Larry Carlton
"You can tell that that's two guys who are really having a good time, but they happen to be playing their butts off, too. So there's an honesty to this record that I personally enjoy."

No Substitutions
Favored Nations
2001

Reviewed By
Dave Hughes
Glenn Astarita

By Todd S. Jenkins

In mid-March, Steve Vai’s label Favored Nations released the first collaboration between two giants of American guitar music. During 25 years of friendship, Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton had never played together live until the opportunity finally arose for a three-week tour of Japan in the summer of 2000. For full houses of wildly appreciative fans, the two guitarists performed extended sets in the company of keyboardist Rick Jackson, bassist Chris Kent and drummer Gregg Bissonette. The resulting shows were taped and recently compiled into the new album No Substitutions: Live in Tokyo 2000, featuring five powerful jams that showcase the guitarists’ exemplary musicianship.

Steve Lukather spent many years in the front line of the acclaimed rock band Toto, creating chart hits like “Hold The Line”, “Africa” and “Rosanna”. He has logged countless hours of studio session work since the 70s. “Luke” has graced albums and live performances by Diana Ross, Chet Atkins, Michael Jackson (the blockbuster Thriller), Hall & Oates, Barbara Streisand, Santana, Boz Scaggs, Paul McCartney, Randy Newman, America and many others. He has also released three albums under his name: Lukather (1989), Candyman (1994) and Luke (1997).

Larry Carlton is an undisputed legend of jazz and pop guitar whose resume includes work with Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Herb Alpert, Steely Dan (The Royal Scam), Donald Fagen (The Nightfly), The Crusaders and Linda Ronstadt, in addition to twenty well-crafted albums under his own name. In 1988 Carlton was shot outside Room 335, his studio in Burbank, but resumed his music career the following year after an intensive period of recovery. In 1998 Carlton replaced Lee Ritenour in the popular contemporary jazz quartet Fourplay. All About Jazz fusion editor Todd S. Jenkins spoke with Luke and Carlton about the tour, the new disc and their careers to date. (The two separate interviews have been combined here.)

AAJ: I’ve spent most of the last three days spinning No Substitutions. That is one beautiful album. You guys should be proud, Steve Vai should be proud…

SL: You know it’s so funny that we’re getting such great reactions... I mean, it’s a jam record, we did it off the cuff, no rehearsals. We just went in and had a great time in Japan, and we had so much fun we decided to record. We just did it for ourselves. And then, you know, Steve Vai heard it and wanted to put it out. So Steve and I went in and mixed it and did a couple of edits, no fixes or nothing, what you hear is the way it really was. And I’m real proud of it because I got to play with Larry Carlton!

AAJ: You guys have known each other for about 25 years, and this is the first time you actually got together to play onstage?

SL: Yeah! Well, we did one little thing years ago, but that wasn’t really playing together. We just played a song together in the 80s sometime. But this is playing together. Being with Larry was like going to school every night.

AAJ: How did this tour come together in the first place?

LC: I’ve been doing the Blue Note club in (Fukuoka) Japan for about the last 8 years. I’m fortunate that there’s a large audience there who have followed my career. So after doing 3 or 4 years straight, every year going back and spending a month in Japan, I’ve become really good friends with the club owners. We had been trying to decide what kind of special project I could bring that would be a little bit different. And there’s been talk over the few years about me and Joe Sample doing something, or me and Kirk Whalum doing something. So they called for that two years ago and said, “Let’s do some kind of guitar thing,” and Luke’s name came up. I said, “Yeah! Let’s do that.” And it was as simple as that.

SL: They (the Blue Note) like to have strange combinations of people; well, not necessarily strange, but they like to keep it fresh. Something people would generally fantasize about but would not necessarily happen. So Larry called me on the phone out of nowhere. “Hey, Larry, how’s it goin’, bro?” He’s been one of my heroes for most of my adult life. I always wanted to be like Larry Carlton when I was a kid. He used to let me hang out. Jeff Porcaro introduced us; I went to school with Jeff. He worked with David Foster, Jay Graydon and all these other guys I used to look up to when I was 18 years old. That was right after (Steely Dan’s) The Royal Scam came out and changed my life. You know, I’d been a fan of The Crusaders and Larry’s studio work, but that album in particular… I was like, “I wanna play like that guy!”

AAJ: (Laughs) So you used to sit around and try to jam on “Kid Charlemagne”?

SL: Yeah! And we’d been friends, but then he moved to Nashville. Obviously we were still friends, but we just didn’t see a lot of each other. And then out of the blue he says, “This is Larry. Do you want to go to Japan?” And I was like, “When do we leave?!” I was honored to be asked, because Larry… what can I say? Genius is all I can say.

AAJ: Nice work if you can get it.

SL: We went off and we did this gig, and the crowd reaction was tremendous. We just had a ball. A great band, Gregg Bissonette, Rick Jackson, Chris Kent. We all just showed up, coming in from all over the place. I think Gregg came in from Australia, I came in from L.A., the other guys came in from Nashville. We met in Fukuoka and said, “So, what do you want to play?” I was real familiar with a lot of Larry’s older stuff. We didn’t want it to be a happy-jazz thing, and we didn’t want it to be a hard rock-and-roll thing. We just sort of went at it without any preconceived notions on a couple of tunes we all knew, and it just sort of developed into its own style. I don’t really know what kind of music it is; kind of like the best of all the music I like. You know, you use the word “fusion” and people wince, I don’t know why. I suppose it is a fusion of sorts.

AAJ: Right, a lot of people view fusion as just sort of a bastard child of smooth jazz or something, no idea of the history or what’s involved.

SL: I don’t think it’s either of those. I mean, fusion is intense. I play in a fun band with Simon Phillips, and all we do is Mahavishnu, Billy Cobham stuff ,the stuff nobody plays anymore, just for fun. I think fusion music is great. It’s difficult to play, and some of it is actually humorous when you listen to it because it’s so over the top. Let’s see how out we can get the notes, and the weirdest time signatures known to man.

You can view it as an exercise as well. As I am a musician, I’m still a humble student. I’m still practicing, I wake up in the morning and go, “I suck, I’ve got to practice.” I keep going back to the music of the day, you know what I mean? Like now, there’s no challenge to contemporary music now. It’s crap for the most part. I don’t mean to sound old and bitter, but I’ve got teenagers. I know what they listen to… For me, I go back to an era where everything was brand new. I think I lucked out being a child of the late 60s and 70s. Everything was still experimental and new. Nowadays if you have a computer, you don’t have to learn how to play. It’s pitiful.

AAJ: And you had the fortune to come up with electric Miles and John McLaughlin.

SL: You know what I’m saying? I got to play with Miles! In fact, believe it or not, Toto did a track with Miles back in 1986, with David Paich and myself. It’s going to be on his Warner Bros. boxed set. At one point Miles asked me to join his band. I was just gob-smacked, but I couldn’t do it because I was on the road with Toto. That was about fifteen years ago. I didn’t think I was good enough to be in Miles’ band anyway, but I was honored to be asked.

It’s one of those kinds of things, you get to play out your fantasies sometimes. One of my fantasies was to play with Larry Carlton, and here I am. Be careful what you wish for; it may come true! He’s such a great guy, such a gentleman, such an effortless musician. Everything he hears he can play. Most guitar players think linearly, one note at a time. Larry thinks in five-part harmony. Some of his shit is so deep, he does things that would be physically impossible for any other musician to play. And he’s groovy just to hang with, too. We’d sit before the show and have a special time, just me and him with a couple of guitars. We’d start playing, and I was basically getting a lesson from Larry. It was pretty groovy. It just doesn’t get much better than Larry Carlton, let me tell you.

I’m really excited about this whole project. Steve Vai is also another one of those genius guys, and just a really great guy. It’s just such a joy to be a part of (his label). I mean, I was signed to Columbia Records for 24 years and I didn’t know anybody there. There was no rapport. All the people I knew from the time we got signed had either quit the business or were dead. It’s nice to be on a record label where you can call up the president of the record company and he’s a friend. And a musician, sharing in the process, instead of “One for you, a hundred for me…” Favored Nations is the best label I’ve ever been on, and I’ve worked for ‘em all.

AAJ: It’s great that Vai has gotten to the point where he can take some creative risks and present to people the kind of music he really wants them to hear.

LC: It’s nice doing business with a friend that you know is an honest friend with only the purest of motives, and that’s the music. And that’s the way we feel about Steve Vai.

SL: He really believes in the music. It’s not about, “I don’t hear a single,” or “What format are we going to?” It’s the antithesis of that, actually. And it’s all about the guitar, really. I think he’s going to have all the cool guitar players on his label. He’s already made a pretty big dent in it, releasing an Eric Johnson record. I mean, that guy’s brilliant.

AAJ: And (bassist) Stuart Hamm, who might as well be a guitar player.

SL: Right, I love Stu. It’s one big, happy family. Everybody knows each other. That’s part of what makes it so comfortable.

AAJ: How did Steve get hold of the Tokyo sessions?

SL: I had a DAT tape of just the rough mixes off the board, when Larry and I said, “Let’s just record it. It’s so much fun, maybe we can put it out sometime.” And it sort of sat around. Then, you know, Steve and I are really good friends, so I said, “Let me lay a couple of these DATs on you and let me know what you think.” He called back real excited and said, “I gotta put this out! Let’s you and me go in and do some edits.” I mean, some of the tracks were 25 minutes long. Believe it or not, we trimmed some of what’s already there!… So we didn’t fix anything, we just did some edits. And what we have is a really cool representation of that event. We’re going back again to do the same type of gig in about a month.

AAJ: Let’s talk about the band. Gregg Bissonette is one of the great session drummers, of course, but I’m less familiar with Rick Jackson and Chris Kent.

LC: Rick Jackson has been performing in my band for about six years now. But he had worked prior to that, and still does, with Kirk Whalum. And I met Chris Kent when I moved to Nashville. He’s one of the up-and-coming session guys here. He had been to Japan once prior to going with me, and that was with Take 6. So he’s of that caliber. He floats around with a lot of great bands.

SL: I brought Gregg with me from L.A. since we’ve been friends for a hundred years, and Larry brought Chris and Rick from his band in Nashville…. Every set was different and fun. It was almost hard to pick which take to use because they were all so cool and all had something to offer. But like I said, we all just showed up and stared at each other, said “Nice to meet you,” then went out and did a set and just ripped. It was kind of like we were going by the seat of our pants. Most of it is improvisation anyway, and it was a matter of learning the heads and figuring out who was going to play what. There wasn’t any rehearsal. We had a little soundcheck, then it was time to do the gig.

AAJ: The way it came together on the disc, it sounds like you ran it down for six months before you hit the road.

LC: By the time we started recording, we already had about 34 shows under our belt because we did two shows a night. So it was very, very tight.

SL: I think we had done a couple of weeks (on the tour) before we recorded it. I’m happiest playing live, I gotta tell you. I love the studio and I love writing and recording stuff, but I’m a live guy. When it’s going down, that’s the way music was intended to be played. It’s become an art form with whole techniques on how to record things, how to layer and produce. But really, the essence of what you want to do is, can you play or not? Can you get out there and create a new thing, you know? And God knows where it comes from. It comes from God, I guess. I can’t stand up there and think that fast. I can’t write my name with my left hand; what the hell am I doing playing a guitar? You just stand up there, and as cheesy as it sounds, it’s a very spiritual experience. When it works, man, and the whole band goes, it’s like you’re all breathing at one time. It’s like the highest of all highs.

AAJ: I remember Rick’s electric piano intro on “It Was Only Yesterday”, that gorgeous thing…

LC: Rick is truly a world-class player. I’m honored to work with him.

SL: Not only is it gorgeous, but dig this, man: every night it was different. I mean, he’d just go off into the ozone. I’d just sit there and laugh. He and Larry have a musical rapport that just doesn’t happen very often. Larry’s got perfect pitch, and these guys would go off for, like, ten minutes on the most beautiful stuff you ever heard. Changing keys every half a bar. It’s like, “How do you do this? How do you even know where you’re going?” Even with a schooled ear, you just shake your head and go, “That’s just brilliant, I’m sorry…” I’m standing on the stage going, “Man, this is a great concert!” And all of a sudden I realize I have to play!

CONTINUE