Guitarist Greg Leisz has backed everyone from Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen to Daft Punk and Roxette. In a new interview, he looks back on his vast list of high-profile credits.
, I go, ‘I forgot about this record and that record… ‘ But for me, it’s the breadth of the stuff that I’m most proud of, not necessarily the number.”
Well, that’s a good question. I have to go back pretty far. I grew up in a family where I didn’t have older brothers or sisters. Music wasn’t brought to me through older siblings or really through any older kids. Fortunately, my mother was musical, even though she sang more opera. And when she was young, she actually sang in a Broadway musical and light opera in the mid-Forties, during the war. My first musical experiences were hearing her sing around the house.
I went to college and took stuff that kept me out of the draft. I didn’t study music because I didn’t think that was a career option for me. I also didn’t have parents that thought it was a good idea. I basically was just playing music with my friends. And then I started working with some musicians that were playing in some of the folk clubs in Southern California. And then it became, “Wow, I can make a little money.” But I had all sorts of different day jobs the whole time.
The same thing happened when I heard pedal steel on records that I listened to. I was drawn, even before pedal steel, to traditional slide-guitar music. In the late Sixties when a lot of people were listening to harder rock, Led Zeppelin and things, I was listening to Jimmie Rodgers, old country music like Hank Williams, bluegrass music, and I was learning how to play that music, and I was learning with other musicians that were kind of turned on to that.
It sort of became an avenue to make a living by expanding my vocabulary as a guitar player. “Maybe we can have that guy in the band. We already have a guitar player.” I could see it as a smart thing to do.That band was really the brainchild of this guy named Richard Stekol, who was one third of the songwriting triumvirate of that band. He basically put the band together since he was the only person that knew everyone that ended up in it. He met Jules Shear. He met Jack Tempchin.
Well, in those 10 years, I spent a lot of time playing in clubs, basically. That pretty much sums it up. I went through a little bit of soul searching. I wasn’t expecting that band to break up. It wasn’t the first band that wasn’t successful that I was in, but it was the band that had the most attention focused on it, quite a bit in a very short time.
Victoria had already gotten a deal and made a record in New York. She made one record before that, at least. What I remember is that was right around the time she was diagnosed with MS. Maybe it was after. I think that happened when she was on tour with Neil Young. That was the case with Joni Mitchell. I asked her if she had any ideas for the song when we started. I wanted to know where she wanted me to play. She set me straight and said, “I’m not going to tell you anything. I’m not going to try and edit what you do.”
This was her second record and she wanted to make a bunch of changes. She was unhappy with her producer and had lost her guitar player because I think it was her boyfriend and they had broken up. She decided she wanted to take over the production of the record herself. I don’t think Warner Bros. was particularly happy, but they allowed her to do it. To make a long story short, I knew her engineer and he asked me to come play on the record.
And so she goes through this whole process where she has these hits and she makes another record and it didn’t do well, and the label immediately stopped supporting her. But I love that record. I really liked working with her. I worked on a bunch of stuff with her, including a bunch of stuff that was never released when she got dropped from Warner Bros.That’s one of my favorite Lucinda Williams songs.
I actually went to the same high school as Jackson. I didn’t know him then. He was already famous before he graduated because of the Nico thing. And now he’s one of my best friends. I’ve come full circle with him. It’s wild. I wish I had been his best friend in high school. But I was playing in garage bands and he was doing folk music. I was doing “Gloria” or something.
It wasn’t from the manager or a business person. I swear to God, I said to myself, “I don’t know who this is texting me.” I think I had to think for five or 10 minutes. And then I went, “Holy shit.” I texted back to see if it was real. Sure enough, he was serious. He decided he wanted to have that instrument in that particular band for that tour.
But when we got to the song “My Woman Got a Black Cat Bone,” he featured me in the song the whole way. At first he said, “I’ll play a solo in the middle, and then you play a solo, and I’ll play a solo.” Eventually he said, “I just want you you to play all the solos.” It was amazing for me because I got to be featured. He’d even introduce me in the set.
I found out the day before the Super Bowl. Ron called me and said, “I just want you to know I used your pedal steel in this Jeep commercial. And it came out really good.” I said, “Oh great.” And I had to go, “How do you deal with that?” But that’s another story. Getting paid for anything is always a pain in the neck.I know. It’s huge. That was a really interesting thing too. They were referencing a lot of what they thought of as Seventies music, and using it.
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