Leland Sklar
Whoever you are…
…wherever you live…
…however old you are…
…whatever instrument you play (including none at all)…
…and whatever your preferred musical genres (including none at all)…
…you’ve heard this artist play an incalculable number of times. In. Calculable.
It’s quite possible you’ve never seen him before, though, as of this moment, he’ll very likely never be unrecognizable to you again. He has acknowledged (in a heartwarming story here) that he looks like Santa Clause, although if I were to look to mythical likenesses I’d be wondering if Gandalf and Dumbledore had conspired to sire a love child (rap that, yo).
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought little but misery (and popular stupidity – that’s a whole other blog), absent a few golden nuggets. The stepping out of Leland Sklar onto the social media stage is one such rare blessing, though.
Every night without fail, Lee faithfully posts a short video to his YouTube channel to anyone at all who cares to watch. And as of this writing, over 121,000 viewers care to watch. That’s a big-league following for anyone who is neither famous for just being famous nor rich to the point of boredom. Add to that, he’s a bass player who doesn’t have his own discography, doesn’t sing or front a band, doesn’t write his own songs (with any intended exposure, anyway), and has spent most of his professional life in a recording studio.
But his body of work is absolutely unbelievable. Like, seriously, it just cannot be believed. A successful musician with a prosperous career may have recorded 20-30 studio albums in a lifetime of work. The most prolific may have over 50. If you’re a successful studio musician, of course, you’re numbers are higher: you might have over a hundred credits, and if you’re the tool in everyone’s bag, that number might hit multiple hundreds. But everything has its limits, certainly, and you’ll likely find a chicken with teeth before you uncover a studio denizen with, say, a thousand album credits. It’s just not done.
Over 2,600.
Stare at that number for a few seconds. That’s how many albums Leland Sklar has played on.
Now let’s do some figgerin’. If you start as a studio musician at age 20 – which is unusual, and work steadily for fifty years without a break until you’re 70 – which is unheard of in any era of anything, and average, average, one album project a week, a week, every week for that entire geological epoch – which is completely impossible… you still won’t have reached that number because that will only give you 2,600, and Lee has more than that now (okay, fine, he just turned 73, so I’m cheating).
I don’t have any science or stats on this, but he may well be the single most recorded musician in history. His Wikipedia entry only includes a selected discography (not even half of his credits) and it’ll take the average millennial about eight minutes to scroll and skimread it. The names are dizzying, from obscure and current to legendary and paleozoic, across every genre on 78’s, vinyl LP’s, CD’s, mp3’s and streams. One lazy Saturday I listened to a local classic rock station for three solid hours and counted (and verified) 7 of the 24 songs aired having Lee on bass. Totally random sampling, my hand to God.
I guess what I’m trying to get across here is that with that body of work, Lee owes the world the square root of nothing. If all he had ever done is compose a million bass lines and underpin all the great music of our time… Dayenu.
Lee started the YouTube channel at the beginning of the pandemic quarantine, just to maintain contact with music lovers in the absence of touring (which he has also done a ton of, if you can imagine). And he did it in the style and spirit of the earliest adopters who just wanted a garish forum for their truly confessional culture. Not for Lee, the varnish: he uses the mic and camera built into the laptop, and never edits or re-takes his posts. That is, unless YouTube takes it down for a copyright violation – he often plays bass along with the very recording he did, and apparently the copyright collectives don’t like that. In trying three times to post a Phil Collins song that he recorded in the studio, he lost his shit on the one that finally squeaked through (“Idiots!!!”). Apparently, he also gets into lukewarm water with Twitter and Facebook, spending an average of, as he puts it, “150 days a year in the hole” for some content violation or other. I haven’t checked.
The music is certainly the centrepiece of his eminently consumeable 10-20 minute posts. In most segments, he’ll play his bass along with a song from his vast discog, or he’ll simply play a recording on the laptop and bob his head and comment on certain passages, the OEM webcam fixed on his hirsute visage.
But the real gold is the stories: as pedestrian as what he did in the garden that morning or what his basset hounds are up to, to some heartrending stories about a family he befriended or a long-lost colleague, to some chucklehut bits about the quirkier side of road and studio life. One installment was from his kitchen on how he makes his daily smoothies (they look quite gross, sorry). And the avuncular manner of this natural raconteur turns every single word out of his mouth to pure gold.
This is an incredibly generous thing for Lee to do. I’m betting he’s helped a lot of people (at least 121,000 at the moment) get through some scary, lonely times.
I don’t know the man, but I love him.
