Labor Day Telethon style music: Deborah Silver and The Count Basie Orchestra
‘Basie Rocks!’ includes big band versions of The Beatles, Wings, Police, Bob Seger, Peter Frampton, Steve Miller, Joe Walsh, and Soft Cell hits and more.
GOLDMINE: Welcome to Goldmine and congratulations on your classy and fun new album. In 1976, when my wife Donna and I first began dating, the first concert we went to was Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald in downtown Cleveland, performing a style of music that we would see on Labor Day telethons, and that is what I am reminded of with your album. The Labor Day telethons, hosted by Jerry Lewis, have ended, but you and The Count Basie Orchestra capture that sound I miss each Labor Day Weekend.
DEBORAH SILVER: I love that. I am a member of the Friars Club and went to Jerry Lewis’ 90th birthday celebration where I met him. Those were the days. I know so many people who performed on the telethon, and it means a lot to me personally, because my sister has ALS. What they did for the neurological disease world was so special.
GM: A few years before Donna and I saw Count Basie perform, there was an album called Basie on The Beatles. A couple of Paul McCartney’s compositions were included as a single. “Eleanor Rigby” was given an up-tempo treatment and “Fool on the Hill” featured piano and flute. Now there are a couple more of Paul McCartney’s compositions on your new album with The Count Basie Orchestra, including one which John Lennon did a majority of the writing, “A Hard Day’s Night.”
DS: It is such an honor to be able to do this album with The Count Basie Orchestra and to revisit “A Hard Day’s Night,” which they had done before. This one swings like crazy, and we had so much fun recording it. I performed it with them previously, when I joined them in California on a tour and it brought the house down.
GM: Donna and I saw The Boston Pops perform “A Hard Day’s Night” as their opening number in their concert of Beatles music in Orlando and it was my favorite song that night. In addition to a Beatles song you also took on a Wings song, “Band on the Run,” and I didn’t realize it, until I was listening to your version that this is yet another one of Paul McCartney’s suites, and I hadn’t fully paid attention to the lyrics until hearing your clear enunciation, “If I ever get out of here, thought of giving it all away to a registered charity.” It always sounded like, “to rich for charity” to Donna and me.
DS: Thank you for saying that. It is such a compliment. People have told me, when I have covered songs, that they never really understood the song until they heard me sing it. The way I have studied music, I have learned is that the lyrics come first and what they say. I am an actress, and I feel that I must act out the songs by living them. “Band on the Run” was very interesting for me to do because I never really paid attention to the lyrics either. I remember hearing the song at my elementary school dances and parties when it came out and I liked it. Paying attention to the lyrics now, I thought about being in a place where I would never see anyone again, and got emotional, thinking about the hostages in Gaza. When we were recording the song, I remember looking up at my producer Steve Jordan and saying, ‘I totally understand the song now.’ It was like seeing a movie in my head while I was singing it.
“The way I have studied music, I have learned is that the lyrics come first and what they say. I am an actress, and I feel that I must act out the songs by living them.” – Deborah Silver
GM: In the 1978 film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Peter Frampton gently performed one of Donna’s favorite Beatles songs, “Golden Slumbers,” and that was just a few years after she saw him while she was in college, during his tour which led to Frampton Comes Alive. You include one of those hits from that album.
DS: We have eleven songs on this album, and I chose most of them from listening to what is now called classic rock, from my school days. The first thing I did was look at the lyrics, and there was one song that I knew I had to do, and that was Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” as a torch song. Scotty Barnhart, who is the director of The Count Basie Orchestra said, “I am bringing in John Clayton for this. He is the best arranger for any Count Basie material, and I also want you to know that John wrote the arrangement for Whitney Houston’s hit version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’” John created a wonderful arrangement. I recorded it in the studio live with The Count Basie Orchestra and someone sent it to Peter Frampton. A little while later I received a phone call and heard a British voice asking, “Hello. Is this Deborah Silver with the incredible voice?” I said, “Well, you’re half right. This is Deborah Silver.” I was so honored when he told me that I sang the song the way he heard it in his head when he wrote it. You could have just picked me up off the floor at that point. He continued to thank me, and I said, “No. Thank you for this beautiful treasure of a song.” Peter wanted to add a guitar solo to the recording, which he did and sent it to us. When I heard it, it brought tears to my eyes. He invited me backstage at one of his shows and he couldn’t have been more lovely. I would have never imagined when I was staring at his Frampton Comes Alive album cover during my elementary school years that decades later he would be calling me and thanking me for singing his song.
GM: Donna and I grew up in Northeast, Ohio, less than an hour from where Joe Walsh lived when he was in the James Gang, so we heard a lot of his music on the radio in the ‘70s. When I was in my final semester of business college, “Life’s Been Good” was a hit. When I am not writing about music, I am an accountant in my home office with records on the wall, things he sang about in the song, so this song has always been special to me. Now you have given me a new version to treasure, with a beautiful opening too.
DS: This was one of the first songs that we recorded. It took two years because Steve got the job as the drummer for The Rolling Stones, so everything got pushed back while he was on tour with them. This is another one where I hadn’t paid attention to the lyrics previously. I had to really think hard about them because I don’t, “live in hotels and tear out the walls.”
GM: In 1978, with Donna’s encouragement, I got a job in a big record store where we would play Joe Walsh’s album with “Life’s Been Good” and Bob Seger’s album with “Old Time Rock & Roll.” You and Wycliffe Gordon truly make that song “old time.” The “Alley Cat” piano beginning is very neat.
DS: Steve said, “Let’s do this like a Fats Waller song,” so Scotty Barnhart brought in Herlin Riley from New Orleans on tambourine, washboard, and a 2nd-line snare drum. We twisted it up a bit. I don’t like to record any song the way it’s done before because no one would want to listen to us do it the same way versus listening to the original. There is an annual jazz cruise where I was performing along with renowned Grammy winning jazz vocalists, and Wycliffe was on it as a trombone player. One day he sang, and my mouth dropped. I told him, “We have to do a duet.” That’s how he ended up being on “Old Time Rock & Roll” with me, and his voice makes it perfect for that old time sound.
GM: Speaking about doing songs differently, with The Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” I like your version more. It is jazzy, powerful, and fun.
DS: What a compliment! I open my shows with either that one or “Old Time Rock & Roll.” To me, the feel of “Fly Like an Eagle” is like a big band Frank Sinatra tune. When I sing about children with no shoes on their feet, it tugs at my heart. This has become an anthem of mine. The best thing someone can do is do what they love, take off, and fly like an eagle.
GM: When Soft Cell recorded “Tainted Love” in the early ‘80s, it exposed a lot of people to this composition from Ed Cobb of The Four Preps, which failed to chart in 1964 by Gloria Jones. You took it in yet another direction, giving it the sound of Peggy Lee’s 1958 hit “Fever.”
DS: When we were choosing songs for the album, my son Spencer and I would go on bike rides, and he would hook up his speaker, and say, “Try this one.” He originally wanted me to take Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” in a similar direction, but the lyrics weren’t right for me, and that’s when we decided to put “Tainted Love” in, and it became sexy, with Steve on drums, and John Clayton on bass. On the jazz cruise, I performed it with Kurt Elling, a two-time Grammy jazz vocalist winner, who joined me on the recording. I also performed it in my PBS special at the Analog theater in Nashville. When we were recording the song for the album, I was a bit hoarse, and I wanted to sing it again. Steve said, “No. You sound like Tammy Wynette, and we like her!” I had COVID and didn’t know it, so this is an unexpected positive side effect of COVID.
GM: My daughter Brianna was born in the spring of ’83. That summer, “Every Breath You Take” was a No. 1 hit. When Donna was holding Brianna, the frequent radio lyrics which she would sing along to were, “Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you.”
DS: You are the only person in the whole world who has shared a story with me of singing this to your child, and you aren’t going to believe what I tell you next. When I was in the recording studio, Steve said, “Just give me one more take before we move on.” When I was done, he said, “Oh my gosh! What in the world did you do? It’s perfect. I love it.” I said, “I was thinking of my children when they were babies.” It turned into a lullaby. You and Donna get it! Thank you for such a fun time today, filled with compliments. Believe me, I would love to host a telethon and share these rock songs like they were old big band standards. Thank you again for promoting our album in Goldmine.
Deborah Silver will have a special Basie Rocks! album release event at the Catalina Jazz Club on West Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California on Wednesday, September 17 at 8:30 PM (door/dinner at 7 PM).
facebook.com/events/s/kjazz-881fm-presents-deborah-s (Catalina Sep 17)