In rock music, stage left is a curious position. On the one hand, they are the person who stands to the side of the main attraction, the foundation that allows them to fly but rarely offers them a chance in the spotlight. On the other, they have the accolade of playing on some of rock’s most revered recordings, and alongside some true giants.
Earl Slick knows this better than most. The legendary guitarist has played alongside David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carl Perkins. Keith Richards features in one of his songs, while Mick Jagger, Robert Smith, and George Harrison have all crossed paths with the New Yorker. The list goes on.
Slick’s is a unique tale, which he and lauded rock journalist Jeff Slate have compiled for a new autobiography, the elegantly titled ‘Guitar’. Ruthlessly edited, the book reveals a small slice of some of the tales Slick can tell across his 50-year music career. Recently, CLASH caught up with the virtuoso to discuss that career, the book, and his experiences working with some of rock music’s most innovative characters.
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After earning his stripes as a guitarist on the New York scene in the early 1970s, Slick was brought in during Bowie’s ‘Diamond Dogs’ tour in 1974. Infamously, the tour completely changed midway through, as Bowie eschewed the theatrical elements of the show to embrace a more soulful sound, which would culminate in ‘Young Americans‘. “It was weird,” Slick explains, somewhat understatedly. “Because we had a lot of success with the ‘Diamond Dogs’ show in the States, the big set and all that stuff. Then we took a break, and when we came back it was a whole other thing. It was pretty much a new band and the direction was new. I wasn’t very fond of it. I can do change, I get that but… it was a strange one.”
“The weird thing about the Philly Dogs (tour, as it became known) is that we were the opening act!” Slick explains, laughing at the memory. “The band was the opening act. We would do about 30 minutes with background singers all taking turns taking lead, and then David would come out and we would do the regular set. We had Luther Vandross, Robin Clark, and Ava Cherry in the band, who were all wonderful singers. We would do covers and O’Jay songs. It was weird!”
Although Bowie was at his lowest (or highest) ebb in terms of his drug use, the gigs were lauded and captured for posterity on the ‘David Live’ album, with Slick’s solo on ‘Moonage Daydream’ a particular highlight, a fact lost on the guitarist until the last few years. “It’s only been recently, over the last two years, that I became aware of that,” he asserts. “Journalists and fans mention that all the time, but I never thought of it like that. I didn’t try and copy what Mick (Ronson) did on the record because I was lousy at that. I also knew that a guitarist of Mick’s calibre, and the amount he contributed to David’s music – which I think to this day people don’t realise how much – was as important to the success of Ziggy as David was.”
Slick is notably quick to pay deference to his predecessor in Bowie’s band: “Mick’s signature was amazing, so one of the things I was nervous about when I got the gig was, I’d never been in a sideman situation. ‘Am I expected to do what Mick does and get that sound?’ David said no, I like what you do, just do what you do. Which was a godsend because I’m really lousy at verbatim copying things. I’m terrible at it. The other thing was, if I’m doing Mick Ronson note for note, the fans are going to hate me. If I do it good, it ain’t Mick. David made the call on that one, especially for me. As young as I was at the time, I had an awareness of things. I was worried about fans and the press, I thought they would eat me up because I wasn’t Mick. But it didn’t happen.”
David Bowie is revered for many things but his proficiency on guitar is lesser known. As a guitarist, it’s interesting to hear Slick’s take on it. “With somebody like David, he’s a rare bird. He’s not a guitarist really, y’know? When you’ve got somebody with a brain like his, he’ll do things a guitarist would never Dom and that was what was brilliant about it. There’s a solo he did on ‘Sweet Thing’, there’s no way in hell a regular guitar player would go at it like that, and that was why he was brilliant. He could take that instrument and make it do things without really being an accomplished guitar player, which an accomplished guitar player wouldn’t do. He used to do the same thing with the sax. If he had to make a living playing sax he’d have been shit out of luck, but that’s what made him so special.”
After ‘Young Americans’, Slick was recruited for studio work on Bowie’s next effort, ‘Station To Station‘. Despite their immense drug intake, it was a halcyon time for the guitarist. “Funnily enough, I remember a lot of that record better than I remember some of the other stuff,” he explains. “Considering how fucked up we were I don’t know how, but my memory is there for it!”
“It was the first studio album I did with David where I was let loose to really experiment. It’s the only record I remember that we did some rehearsals for. We did 3-4 days of rehearsals which I thought were going to be songs. They weren’t. They were chunks, bits. I think us playing at rehearsal put into his mind: ‘OK, this bit goes with that bit.’ Then we got to the studio (and) the title track was three different beginnings of other songs. The way his brain worked, he could see, ‘Oh, well that bit goes into that bit,’ and we’d just play them until we could glue the shit together.”
Slick continues: “I would say there was a minimum of four weeks’ intensive work before he did the vocals and all that. It might even have been longer. Even back then, spending 4-8 weeks on a record was considered a long time.”
After falling out with Bowie’s management, it was decided that Slick’s services weren’t required for the accompanying tour, and he didn’t hear from Bowie for seven years. In the meantime, Slick was selected to work on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s comeback album after five years in the wilderness, ‘Double Fantasy’. Slick had previously worked with the former Beatle on ‘Fame,’ the collaborative single with Bowie in the mid-1970s. Not that Slick could remember anything about it, recalling his ‘first’ meeting with Lennon as an avid Beatles fan.
“That was fucking ridiculous, man. I’d been around David; I’d been around a lot of people. I was never a starstruck kid. I was fine until the morning I had to go to the studio. I had the worst case of fucking nerves. I got to the studio early, because usually, with David, he showed up late. I get there real early, and I walk into an empty control room and then I look through the glass into the main studio, and he’s in there, by himself, playing his guitar. Oh fuck! I went in and introduced myself, and he says, ‘It’s good to see you again, blah blah,’ and I just paused and said, ‘We’ve met before?’ We start talking about ‘Fame’ and all that stuff. If it was another guy they might have been really insulted but he thought it was funny. It became a running joke. Every once in a while, after a take or something, he’d say, ‘You remember me yet?’ He took it in his stride, and I think he found it funny.”
“John was great, a really aggressive guitar player,” Slick affirms. “His lead stuff was really cool because it was so basic. Like on ‘Get Back’, it’s John playing that stuff. He could do it! His guitar playing was stellar, really aggressive rock and roll. Him and David were similar in one way: they knew what each guy in that room did. He wanted to get out of me what I did naturally. It fitted his songs.”
Slick is also full of praise for Ono (“Speaking bluntly, the press did a lot of really unnecessary, unwarranted and undeserved damage to that woman”) but is less positive when recalling the initial producer of ‘Milk And Honey’ (the follow-up album, completed after Lennon’s death), one Phil Spector. “Two weeks of fucking hell with that guy. I was so glad when she got rid of him. We ended up retracking everything he did. It was all shit!”
“The vibe was really bad,” he continues. “He spoke to us through the engineer in the third person. If he wanted something, he’d go, ‘Tell the guitar player on the lefthand side to play these notes.’ In the meantime, we couldn’t see in the control room because it was totally blacked out in there. He was walking around the studio with a goddamn Clint Eastwood gun in a holster.”
“It just proved what an asshole he was, because here we are four months after (the assassination of John Lennon), and he’s walking around the studio visibly carrying a firearm. Are you nuts? Well, he was nuts. One day me and Yoko got there at the same time, we were in an elevator together. I didn’t even mention his name, I just said ‘What time is he coming in today?’ She goes, ‘He’s not coming in anymore.’ That was the whole conversation, I didn’t need to know anything else. Good, he’s gone.”
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Two years after completing work on the Lennon/Ono projects, Slick received a phone call from David Bowie’s management, requesting his services for the artist’s upcoming ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour. “When I got called to do that, it was from the booking agency and the management at the time,’ Slick explains. The funny thing about David was, when it came to certain things, and if there was no malice behind a situation, it was fixable. I didn’t even speak to David until I got to Brussels. Ten minutes after I checked in, he’s banging on the door and we went out for coffee. We cleared the air. The funny thing was that we were both being told lies about the other guy from the guys who were involved. It was power play bullshit. We were manipulated. During the course of a coffee, we traded stories and it was like, ‘They got us!’”
Seasoned pro that he is, Slick took to his new challenge with readiness. “Obviously, there were a number of Bowie records made after ‘Station…’ that I wasn’t involved with. I’d say about half the show I already knew but the stuff I didn’t know, I sat with the set. Carlos Alomar spent a lot of time walking me through the new stuff, thank God. We only had three days to do it before the tour started.”
In what was becoming a cyclical process, Slick didn’t collaborate with Bowie again for another 15 years, but during the 1980s he was able to tick off more iconic musicians from his collaborative list, as he explains: “I was in the studio playing guitars on that Mick Jagger/Bowie ‘Dancing In The Streets’ track. Jagger wasn’t there for very long, he did what he had to do, but I got invited to his birthday party at the Palladium in New York. I ran into Keith (Richards) in the bathroom, we were sitting there doing whatever, and asked him if he would play on a track.”
“He jumped right on it. His manager got in touch with our manager, they made arrangements for certain days but Keith wasn’t there. I thought it kinda sucked but people said, ‘Don’t worry about it. He’ll show up, it’s just a case of when.’ I had made plans a year before that to be best man for one of my mates that I grew up with, in the Virgin Islands. I thought, ‘I gotta go.’ I get down there, and the next day I call up and Keith had been and gone, so I missed it. It was funny, but he showed up and did it. His name is on my record” (‘My Mistake’ from the ‘Phantom, Rocker & Slick’ album, with Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker.)
After a spell out of music, Bowie once again contacted Slick and enlisted him for his live band at the turn of the century (including the iconic Glastonbury 2000 performance), a fruitful relationship that ran until Bowie stepped back from the music industry following a health scare. “We had the incident (Bowie had a heart attack onstage) in Prague, which was scary as shit, but they misdiagnosed what was wrong with him. I think they said he had a blocked nerve in his back and it was affecting his diaphragm.”
“We took a few days and came back, and what they didn’t realise was that it was a heart artery problem. We did the Hurricane Festival, the last show, and before the show it was nasty. A typical German rainy mudfest. When I look at the video of that show and see us doing ‘Heroes‘, it’s unbelievable. It’s one of the best performances he ever did, and unbeknownst to us at the time, from there he went to the hospital. We were in Hamburg for a few days, wondering what was going on, and they finally said we were done, everything’s going home.”
As has become legend, when Bowie eventually returned to the studio, it was shrouded in secrecy, but Slick was enlisted during the latter stages of ‘The Next Day‘. “He said, ‘I’ve been making this record, I want you to come in and play on it, you just gotta be quiet about it.’ I went in and overdubbed on probably four or five songs that were already recorded. Then I think we cut another four basics. ‘Valentine’s Day,’ ‘You Will Set The World On Fire’ and maybe one or two others that we did the basics, and overdubbed some solos on other stuff.”
Although his relationship with David Bowie will likely be what Slick is best known for, the roll call of musicians he has worked with is fearsome. Robert Smith sang on ‘Believe’ (“He’s a quirky guy, you know, eccentric. He’s kind of shy when you first meet him. I like that a lot, and he’s a really cool guy,”) while during the pandemic plans were concocted to feature on a Noel Gallagher track, which unfortunately didn’t come to fruition because of the social restrictions at the time. “It was really hard to get what I wanted to get remotely,” says Slick. “With Noel, it felt like we needed to be in the same room. I didn’t feel I could give it my best unless the two of us were in a room together.’ Regardless, he’s a huge fan of the former Oasis songwriter, who contributes the foreword to the book: “What I like about what he does is that he approaches the guitar as a songwriter. When he plays notes that you might want to call solos, you remember them.”
Earl Slick is the personification of a life well lived, yet he’s also perennially busy, with plans afoot for more projects in the second half of 2024 stretching into next year, with ‘Guitar’ being more a semi-colon than a full stop. Looking back on his life to date was “almost like doing therapy,” he asserts.
“As you’re going through old stories and remembering stuff, you see where the mistakes were. You see the things you did that were right, and the things you did were wrong. You also see what some of the things lead to. Some of the bad decisions actually lead to something good happening, and sometimes the other way around. It showed me my growth over the years and what I learned about me and my relationship to the business itself.”
“I got paid to do therapy, that’s how I look at it!”
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Words: Richard Bowes
Photo Credit: DiMarzio
