I Heard a Rumour

By Alex Rawls

I Heard a Rumour
June 8, 2006

Bob Andrews has been playing in New Orleans since 1992. He has been the inconspicuous piano player or organ player with Amy and the Hank Sinatras, a late incarnation of Royal Fingerbowl as well as Paula and the Pontiacs, Marva Wright and Timothea. This year at Jazz Fest he played with John Mooney and Jumpin' Johnny Sansone. He just released an album of solo piano tracks titled In New Orleans, and he plays solo Thursdays at Dos Jefes, Fridays and Saturdays at the Marriott on Convention Center Boulevard, and Sunday afternoons at the Columns.

Before 1992, Andrews had another career. In England, he was part of the pioneering pub rock band Brinsley Schwarz with guitarist Schwarz and bassist Nick Lowe. When Brinsley Schwarz broke up, he and Schwarz, along with Martin Belmont from Ducks Deluxe and Steve Goulding and Andrew Bodnar from Bontemps Roulez formed the Rumour and backed Graham Parker through a series of remarkable albums starting with 1976's Howlin' Wind and ending with 1979's Squeezing Out Sparks.

Parker and Elvis Costello were the two brightest lights of the new "angry young man" school of new wave rock, and both bands came from the same pub rock scene. Although much has been written about the importance of the British punk scene, the pub rock bands were injecting classic blues, R&B and country rock with energy and nerve, in many ways paving the way for punk.

The Rumour was an excellent, versatile band capable of almost anything. Parker's first three albums were very much R&B albums, and one of the songs that first brought him to prominence was a cover of Ann Peebles' "Tear Your Playhouse Down." They'd go on to record two albums on their own and back up Jamaican ska hero Desmond Dekker on Stiff Records' Black and Dekker. Though Andrews didn't play on the album, he wrote some songs with Dekker in the early 1980s, and recently reflected on Dekker and his own career at length.

Andrews: I didn't really know [Dekker] that well. I just went to see him, and he was such a gentleman. That's what I always got from him. He was just happy that somebody wanted to do something with him, and he wanted to get his music out, and he still believed in himself. He knew that he was good.

He had one of those things that you can't put your finger on. If you could put your finger on - a mixture of talent, personality, and what we used to miss, that voice.

Rawls: Black and Dekker was the album that introduced my brother and I to Desmond Dekker.

[Note: The album was a collection of Dekker's hits from the 1960s, sped up to tempos more in line with the Specials, the English Beat and Madness.]

Andrews: Dave Robinson [owner of Stiff Records and Andrews' manager] put the Rumour on that one. Both Martin [Belmont] and Andrew [Bodnar] played reggae on tracks, so it was easy.

Rawls: I'd forgotten until I started re-reading press preparing for this how often the Rumour was compared to the Band. Did those comparisons seem weird to you?

Andrews: No, I mean… when I heard Chest Fever in 1969, that to me what like, "Who the heck is this Garth Hudson guy?" I listened to the Band through all these changes. Brinsley grew a beard like Garth Hudson.

We had a farm in the countryside and they actually came to our yard. The Band came in '74 to Wembley. I knew the publicist for Warners that was handling their stuff over in London, and I called him up and said, "I'd love to meet Garth Hudson because he's one of my favorite organ players of all time." And he said, "Well, I'll see what I can do." He called me back and said, "Look, they need somewhere to rehearse. Can they come up to your farm?" The next minute, these limos start to pull up, and they're actually there in the flesh. They played in our barn, so we had like a free concert by the Band. And Garth Hudson played long after they all left … but I digress. The Band was a very important part of the Brinsleys, in an aspect. We went through a lot of phases, and The Band was just part of it.

The Rumour, obviously, when it came out, did tend to play with a rock 'n' roll style like that. There was a mixture because the Rumour also came from Ducks Deluxe, which was much more rock 'n' roll, much more punky kind of pub rock. I've heard live tapes of the Rumour, and, man, it's just unbelievable. We're cutting through like a razor. At one point in the late '70s we played the Palladium in New York and completely blew away Thin Lizzy, who were at the top of the bill, and they were a pretty damn good band. And we just blew them away. We were all good at what we were doing, but we only got that live. They were never able to capture it on an album. It was the same with the Brinsleys.

Rawls: I've rebought a lot of music I used to have on vinyl, and there have been times that records I once loved didn't stand up 20 years later. I found a copy of Howlin' Wind and was relieved at how good it still sounds.

Andrews: Graham is still a talent; the attitude has not changed. He's still the same fellow that he was when…. The trouble with Graham Parker and the Rumour to my mind is that they made too many records, well, Graham did, and toured quite constantly. There wasn't a chance for him to grow. We'd spend three weeks in the studio, and then the next week we'd be flying off to Europe. We toured constantly. I think from the beginning of '76 to the middle of '78, I guess we toured non-stop.

[Between 1976 and 1979, they recorded four studio albums and a live album. Parker's relationship with his label, Mercury Records, grew so toxic that he wrote a song titled "Mercury Poisoning." Squeezing Out Sparks was his first album for Arista and was the start of career of label changes that would be just one of the hallmarks of Parker's career.]

Rawls: Did that come from him?

Andrews: No, I think it came from the management. He was managed by Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera, then Jake went off with Elvis [Costello] and gave more of his attention to him.

When came time to do Squeezing Out Sparks, I think he didn't quite know where he was going. We actually had time to sit down with the songs, and he said, "Is this any good?" I said, "Yeah, it just needs finishing. What you need to do is…." Because to me, the records were always kind of covering him up, and really, what we should have been doing is letting him come out and playing what's needed around him. We ended up doing the record in really a much more minimal way. I didn't play on some of the tracks, even though I was kind of in there going, "oh you play this bit" and "you play this bit."

[The difference is easy to hear and very much a symptom of the moment. No one had any sense that punk and new wave would last, so records were rushed out. Energy and blare were considered a plus, even if it meant the singer was hard to hear in the mix. In some cases, the band obscuring the singer was a plus, but the clearer, cleaner arrangements on Squeezing Out Sparks let people hear how good a singer Parker could be.]

Rawls: It's such a different sound for him, though. The first handful of records sound so much like an R&B band. They sound like a hard R&B band, but an R&B band. And that one sounds less so. Was that just the nature of the songs he was writing, or was that what y'all had in mind?

Andrews: Well I think it was a mixture of things. I'd like to say we were touring pell-mell. We didn't have time to think. We had a tour with Southside Johnny [and the Asbury Jukes, Springsteen compatriots from the Jersey shore], and I guess he had a similar kind of quality to his band, so we went that way for a bit.

I don't think there was any conscious planning until he did Squeezing Out Sparks because I actually don't think we had time to. On the second album, Heat Treatment, that was all Mutt Lange. Mutt Lange took over. He had a completely different way of working through things. He stamped us completely in that way; he saw the band as that sort. Whereas with Squeezing Out Sparks, I think it was much more about the songs, and there's much more of a unique sound to Squeezing Out Sparks. It sounds like it's a record; you're actually making a proper record. It's something distinct from the band playing the live. Whereas the first records were kind of like the band live, but in the studio.

Rawls: You left after Squeezing Out Sparks?

Andrews: It was just monstrously stressful. I mean we did three months in America, and we did Australia and wherever else we went to. And it was frustrating, because we'd go on the road and like, we went to Australia and I had like 12 days off. I was thinking, "What am I doing here? I've got nothing to do. Why am I doing this?" When we went down to Australia, the crowds weren't as big. I thought, "What's the matter with this?" Then Graham said, "The rest of the Rumour don't want to work with you, and it's easier for me to find another keyboard player than it is to find another bass player and a drummer.". So I said okay, but luckily I was already doing a couple of records for Stiff Records anyway. And almost immediately I got a Top Twenty record with a guy from Stiff.

Rawls: Who?

Andrews: Jona Lewie.

[Lewie recorded "You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties," the sort of barely sung, sparsely played song with one catchy keyboard melody that could be a hit in those days.]

I produced that record, and out of that I got 13 years of producing, and I got a lot of satisfaction. I produced a band called Bluebelles for London Records, and they were big hits in England. I think they had three Top 20 hits. I produced the La's "There She Goes."

Rawls: That was a beautiful record.

Andrews: Yeah, that was a Top 50 Billboard record, so I had my share of successes. All because of Jona Lewie. A lot of very eccentric acts walked through the door. Pookie Snackenburger were a street band, but the drummer in it went on to do a Broadway musical.

Producing records, to me, was something I just loved doing. I loved being in the studio, I loved working. It was so satisfying, to actually finally have time to sit down and really help people make some records because, with the Rumour, we made some shocking productions. The records? The songs were great, but the finished article just wasn't good.

Rawls: You know, I have the Brinsley records, but I rarely listen to them. I liked them but…

Andrews: I still do some Brinsley songs when I'm playing. In fact, I'm thinking of doing a couple more.

Rawls: But also, to some degree, it seemed like that was kind of part of the time. It felt like the punk and new wave market could go away at any minute, so people worked fast.

Andrews: It was all built on light work. The Brinsleys did the same thing. We did thousands and thousands of gigs. We played lots and lots of different styles of music, and as fast as anything got to where we were getting good, we changed. By the time pub rock came out, we'd stopped doing it. We'd stopped playing in pubs, because we didn't want that label. But we ended up getting stuck with it anyway. That whole thing, with Ian Dury and Dr. Feelgood and all those groups that came up, that was what punk came out of. The early parts were really kind of rickety, and I have to say the records weren't particularly good. But I liked it, it was exciting. I mean you're in a pub the size of this one [Café Rose Nicaud], and there's a band in the corner, and you're like this [arms pressed tight to his side] in it, and you just cannot get in the door. And it just was the most exciting thing I've ever had. And you played for three hours.

Rawls: I'm trying to get my chronology right? Was Dr. Feelgood contemporary with Brinsley or a little after?

[Dr. Feelgood were a British pub rock blues band, and did as much as anyone to interest me in the blues. The albums with Wilco Johnson on guitar are particularly exciting.]

Andrews: Yeah, that was '73, '74. I wrote a couple of songs with him right around there on one of the records. I played sax on Down By the Jetty. [laughing]

Rawls: Oh really? I hadn't thought about it before but it sounds like there are a lot of similarities between the pub rock scene and the music scene here where bands set up in the corner and play their own songs and covers for the night.

Andrews: We started doing all kinds of stuff. The repertoire that we had in the early '70s was just enormous. We got really into the R&B thing, blues, country - a complete cross-section of stuff, reggae. And you're right. It's just like being here, same type of thing.

Rawls: I was listening to your new album, and you have Willie Dixon's "When the Lights Go Out" on it. I was wondering if that had ever been part of the repertoire in the past.

Andrews: No, but what was part of our repertoire was "Gotta Find a Job" [a Lee Dorsey song written by Allen Toussaint]. The connection with New Orleans is kind of weird, because I've always liked Lee Dorsey, and we had an album with Lee Dorsey, and I did a song called "Wonder Woman" which is a record from '72, I think. I still do it. Elvis [Costello] just did a cover of it on his CD of versions of Allen Toussaint's songs on his record, The River in Reverse.

Also, we met with the Brinsleys and the Meters and Allen Toussaint and Dr. John came over, and we did a tour in '73 and we got to meet Toussaint. So we were backstage talking and I got to talk to him for ages. I just remember talking about stuff. But I saw Allen Toussaint play. I saw the Meters. We'd play their record to death, but when I saw Allen Toussaint play, he did a solo set, and I can still hear him doing it then, I can still see him, and I said, "Holy mackerel." He did his thing where he runs the gamut from these R&B songs into a little jazz, and then he goes into his classical mode, and he just didn't stop for about 25 minutes. How could anyone play like this? I desperately tried to be as good as that, and I never will be. That's why he's my favorite piano player, because that performance sticks in my mind more than anything else. There's so many great piano players in this town, but he sticks in my mind as being lyrical and fluid, and to be able to pull in all those influences into the same style.

Rawls: The thing that always seems to me that sets him apart is that, for all he can do and how tastefully he's doing it.

Andrews: I've had a chance to play with him a couple of times when I've played organ and he's played piano. I did some Michelle Shocked sessions with him, and he played piano and I played organ. He knows exactly when to play. He knows exactly when that piano part should be loud and when it should just be in the back. He's perfect in that way. I guess he hears these arrangements and he knows exactly what to do, and he just does it. And I also saw him practicing, which was kind of a very interesting thing. You get an idea, and I saw him practicing and I was like, "Wow, that's how you do it."

Rawls: What was he doing?

Andrews: I can't explain it to you. I don't play the same thing twice. I make it up as I go along. I don't actually make it up as I go along, but I love spontaneity. But he has these things like, "This goes here no matter what." If people really recognize a song, if they recognize little bit, they sing along. Those are the important bits.

Rawls: The best example I can think of is the drum fill leading into the chorus of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little 16." That drum fill makes that chorus and the song go.

Andrews: That's right, it gives you that little stamp. People need that. People need those things when they come to see somebody that they like the record.

Rawls: It's like understanding what the crucial part of the song is.

Andrews: That to me was always the thing. When I was a producer, well I still am a producer [laughing] - those are the things you look for. You look for a song, a chorus hook, and you look for a way of bringing it in, or you look for something to counter it. And the other important thing is the first 30 seconds. What is the intro? Because that's one of the key things to know, and I spend hours working on intros to make them work. And Toussaint's got that same sensibility.

At the same time, with production, you've also got people like Mutt Lange who puts a complete stamp on it, I mean takes over every part of it, even to the point of suggesting musical ideas, "That's no good, here's a musical idea." I learned a lot from that guy, really a lot. He was a complete workaholic. He never stopped working, worked through Christmas. But I have to give him credit, he's just one of the cleverest producers, I mean he really is. He'd come up with these ideas, and you'd go, "That's no good, that's so awful." And then he'd put it in the track, and you'd go "Ooooh." It'd be like a razor's edge just this side of cornball, but that's what it's all about, those simple ideas. Just a little thing and that's all it takes to make a little bit of magic, to throw a little bit of dust on it.

Rawls: When you were working with Mutt, it was pretty early in his career, I'd imagine.

Andrews: It was pretty early. That was before Huey Lewis and the News.

Rawls: That was before Def Leppard.

Andrews: I think Huey Lewis and the News came next, because I used to know Huey and Sean [Hopper]. Because they were in Clover, which was also another big band for the Brinsleys that we really copied. The Brinsleys thought Clover was like… That was very early kind of country-rock, very early '70s. And we used to do quite a few of their songs. Huey was a harmonica player in the band.

Rawls: They were also the band on Elvis Costello's My Aim is True, right?

Andrews: Part of it. Well, they worked on his record.

Rawls: And it was partially Brinsleys as well?

Andrews: No, we never played…. I mean, Nick did all of the writing. Steve Goulding and Andrew Bodnar from the Rumour played on "Watching the Detectives." In fact, the Rumour did a gig in London, one of our first ever gigs on our own after being with Graham for about a year or so, we did a gig on our own, and Elvis was our support. I've had that quite a bit, because I also did the gig with the Brinsleys in 1970 where Elton John was our support.

Rawls: I read in the liner notes to Squeezing Out Sparks, that Graham said that he was always afraid to bring songs to the band, because he said that if the band didn't like a song, they were just brutal.

Andrews: Which Squeezing Out Sparks album is this? Is this the live one? I don't think I've ever read them. Somebody told me that he was being pretty disparaging about us. And, you know, people say things. I don't know what to say about that.

[Once the recorder was off, we talked more about this, and he says he really doesn't know what Parker was talking about, but he identified with anxiety about bringing songs to the band. In Brinsley Schwarz, he had Nick Lowe bringing in reams of songs that were written on guitar so the band could pick them up quickly, then he would bring in a few songs that were written on piano and have to explain the parts to everybody. The looks on everybody's faces and the air of grumbling made it a difficult process to go through.]

Rawls: That's not your recollection?

Andrews: No. I don't know. I can't remember him being that way, I can't really remember. All I can remember is him coming around my apartment in London, before we made Sparks, and he said, "I've got these two or three songs, and I'm not sure of what to do with them." I said, "They sound fine. You haven't finished them yet, that's what's wrong with them." I think he was going through a little bit of a not-sure-what-he-was-doing period because we stopped touring to get out of the contract with Mercury, basically. It had been kind of a waste of time just touring because they weren't supporting it and you can't do anything without tour support. He's still making records, he's still out there doing stuff. He came down here and I played with him once at Tipitina's.

Rawls: Here in town, I've seen you with Royal Fingerbowl, you played with them for a while.

Andrews: Yeah, I played with them for a while, sort of the last incarnation of them, really. That was a lot of fun, because Alex McMurray is just a real clever songwriter. I love Alex. And you know, having Matt Perrine, the music was so nice, it was adventurous. When I said that I love spontaneity, that was just a fabulous gig for me. I could play my little bits, where you needed to play the right bits, and the rest of it went wherever it went. It was a really great band, but as usual, all good things come to an end. I really enjoyed it. I played with John Mooney, which has been on and off since about '95.

In New Orleans, no one rehearses, and everyone plays roughly in a similar vein, playing similar things. Whether you're playing more kind of traditional New Orleans music, or you're playing funk, or a kind of blusier, jazzier sound - wherever you're going, the songs are still going to be pretty much in the same kind of mode. That, to me, has been a great learning experience because I'd stopped playing piano. I played some organ; but I'd never done playing for three or four hours [of piano] a night. So coming here for me has been a wonderful kind of adventure.

I'm a much better piano player now than I've ever been since I started playing solo, because I never played solo before. I started doing that in '98, '99. I starting doing odd gigs, and it just snowballed from there, really. But I had to completely learn how to do it. Being in bands, like I was saying with Toussaint, playing in bands, you don't play down the bottom end because you're in the way of the bass player, and you play away from the guitar player. In the Rumour, I had to find the spectrum away from two guitarists. I mean, that is really hard work, to find a place where you're in the right thing.

[While explaining this, Andrews holds his hands as if he's playing an imaginary piano, and when he talks about the spectrum away from the guitarists, he's holding his hands together in the center of the imaginary keyboard.]

I'm a good sideman. I know what to do. I know when not to play and when to play. So when it came to playing piano on my own, I had to really relearn it. And that's been the hardest thing I've done in quite a long time. Luckily, I played bass. I know what a bass line does. I'd played bass with records because I had so many bands that were learning and I didn't have the budget to wait for them to do their magic.
I've consciously not bought a book on how to play solo piano, or how to play stride piano. I haven't technically sat down and looked at the thing, but I listened and got my version of it because that, to me, is the way to do it. Even though I'm not from New Orleans, the influence is there, because I've been in this place for years and years and I wanted to get my own version of that.

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