They call Howard Leese a lucky man: he has had a brilliant career, playing guitar for Heart from 1975 to 1997; he has played with Paul Rodgers in Bad Company and Rodgers’ solo band for over a decade; he released a great solo album in 2009; has his own signature guitar at PRS; got to see The Doors performing live on the Strip; is currently a member of the new Vegas show Raiding The Rock Vault; and last week was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame with Heart. How much more can one man be blessed with in a career?
Apparently, Leese has no plans to slow down any time soon. Coming up he has a summer tour planned with Bad Company to celebrate the legendary band’s 40th anniversary, he’ll continue to play in RTRV for it’s entire year’s run (barring the few months he takes leave to join Bad Company) and he was about to go play KISS mini-golf with his family and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott when he called in early for our interview. “I want to keep you off-balance,” he joked. For someone who, along with his former band Heart, has sold more than forty million records, had twenty top 40 singles, seven top 10 albums and four Grammy nominations, Leese is very down-to-earth and genuinely loves his chosen path of music; although his frustration with the current state of the music business and the dying art of musicianship is boldly apparent. Leese spoke with me about his thoughts on the above, how he became intertwined with Heart and Paul Rodgers and how his new adventure in RTRV is a wonderful musical history lesson for everyone – all while he prepares for his game of competition. “I can multi-task,” he laughs.
Let’s talk about this big new production in Las Vegas that you’re involved with called Raiding The Rock Vault.
Well, it’s an interesting show. It’s a live rock & roll show with a five-piece band and three singers. We have a guest singer every few weeks. The first few weeks we had Bobby Kimball from Toto. Right now we have Joe Lynn Turner from Deep Purple and Rainbow. And what it is, is a show about the history of classic rock. The background story starts in 1948 and shows the roots of rock & roll. We start playing music circa 1965 with The Who’s “My Generation.” And we play songs from every year and it shows the growth of the music and how the music affects society and how the world changed as the music changed. So we’re doing music from 1965 to 1989, when John Payne, who wrote the show, says the music died. It’s classic rock and we do everything from The Doors and Hendrix in the 60’s to Zeppelin to all the way up to Def Leppard and Journey and some of the bigger bands of the 80’s. So as the music goes through the years, there are some actors in the show and they change too. They’re hippies in the sixties and by the 80’s they are grown up, and it shows how society at large changes as the music changes, how the music impacted society. So it’s kind of cool, a little bit of a music history lesson/rock & roll concert. But 90% of it is just us playing live, with little interludes in between.
How did you become involved in this?
One of the singers is Robin McAuley. He’s an Irish gentleman who sang in Survivor for about five years and the McAuley-Schenker Group, so he’s like a heavy metal singer. And he and I have worked together now and then with the Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp gigs and we work real well together. So when he was asked to do the show, John Payne, the guy who wrote the show and is also the bass player, he was asking Robin, “Who should we get on guitar?” and Robin suggested me. John goes, “You know him?” And he goes, “Yeah, I just worked with him a few weeks ago.” So they called me up and I had some free time this year so I signed on for the preview show in LA and that show was a big hit. And now we’re here in Vegas for a year. I still have to drop out and do a big Bad Company tour this summer – Bad Company, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Doobie Brothers.
How did they go about picking the songs?
Yeah, that was a tricky thing. And one of the things about the show is we’re going to be changing the songs as it goes along, pulling songs out and putting other songs in. There are so many great songs. But we looked for the songs that exemplified each year. We looked at, what was the greatest song that had the most impact each year and it just sort of goes in chronological order. So one of the parameters was what year the song was done and then also how important was the artist, how does the song fit our band, cause we have a certain style, and we wanted this to stay true to how we see ourselves as players. So you add all that together. There’re thirty-five songs in the show. We do a couple of medleys with bits of songs, and a lot of full-length songs. We try to do the songs as safely to the original recording as we can. So it was tricky to choose but that was part of the fun of it. And every time we have a guest, we’ll do a couple of his songs. So we’re always learning new songs depending on who the guest is. Right now we’re doing some Deep Purple and Rainbow cause we have Joe Lynn Turner.
What is it like working with Joe Lynn Turner again? He sang on your solo album Secret Weapon.
Yes, he did. Joe and I go way back and we’re pretty good friends. We were friends long before we worked together. But he’s great, such a great singer, and it’s a pleasure to work with someone of that caliber. And I’m known for working with the best singers in the world – Ann Wilson and Paul Rodgers – so working with Joe is another top rate class talent that I have the pleasure and honor of performing with. It’s great for me, I love it.
You’re not really a covers artist. You were in Heart and then you did Paul’s material. But with this, you are playing songs from many different bands. Are you able to put any of your personality and your spin on some of these songs?
Oh absolutely. When I do “Smoke On The Water” with Joe, I play my own solo; “Stone Cold” we’re doing as well. I play my own solos, absolutely. On some of the stuff, I do it exactly like the record, like “Hotel California,” you’re not really going to change that solo. It’s one of the greatest solos of all time. But it was fun for me cause as you noticed, I’ve never been in a cover band. I’ve been in bands doing original material. So for me it’s kind of fun because I get to go back and step in the shoes of guys like Don Felder and Jimi Hendrix and people like that. You’ve heard these songs a million times but until you actually figure out how to play it, you really don’t know it. So it’s been a voyage of exploration and I’m learning some cool stuff that other people have done. One of the songs that is interesting is The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” I did learn that solo when I was fifteen. I used to see The Doors in LA, I grew up in LA, and I used to see them. So that was such a big hit, I naturally learned that guitar solo. So for this show I just had to remember it, cause it was quite a while ago. So it’s kind of fun to go back and figure this stuff out and play it properly. People really like that we do some of the stuff just exactly perfect.
Now you mentioned The Doors. Where did you see them?
The Doors used to play like love-ins and things around LA and they were the house band at the Whisky and they used to play six nights a week opening for whoever was the headliner of the week. I used to see The Doors all the time.
Do you get to meet any of the guys back then?
You know, I never knew any of those guys. In fact, it’s funny that they’re still playing. They opened a Paul Rodgers show in LA about three years ago – Ray and Robbie and those guys – but I never got to meet them. I was in high school when they were big so I didn’t have any access to meet them. But I did go see their shows.
What is your first memory of music?
Oh boy, that’s a hard one. Music was always around me. In LA we heard The Beatles but I also heard James Brown and all the R&B stuff. I grew up in a black neighborhood so I used to hear a lot of R&B music. I have a wide variety of influences. And LA in the sixties was full of amazing bands. On a Saturday night there would be The Byrds, the Buffalo Springfield and The Doors and Love, just incredible bands within blocks of each other on the Sunset Strip. All these bands playing in these little clubs. So I got to see some of the real heavyweight players when I was still a teenager. The first guy I ever saw was Dick Dale, who is a dear friend of mine now. Dick Dale, king of the surf guitar. I saw him at a teenage fair and he killed me pretty hard, set me on my path.
So is he the one that made you want to do that too?
Yeah, I went to a show that he did and he came out with his metal flake Stratocaster and he played it really loud and I went, wow, that looks like fun, that looks awesome. I want to do that.
What was your first guitar and how did you get it?
My very first guitar was some neighbors of mine had loaned it to me. I was learning how to play and they loaned me the guitar and then the guitar burned in a fire at my school. I took it to school one day to play it for my class and there was a fire and my guitar burned up and it was bad because it wasn’t my guitar (laughs). But my first good guitar was a Gibson and I still have it. I got it when I was fifteen and I still have that one.
What makes a guitar a great guitar?
Well, two main things: the way it feels, how it feels to play it, how easy it is to play it; and then how it sounds. Sometimes you have a guitar that sounds good but difficult to play and you’ll put up with it cause it sounds so good. But ideally, a guitar that is easy and fun to play and sounds good. I’ve been playing PRS guitars since about 1980 and all my guitars are PRS and they’re a phenomenal instrument.
You were in Heart for over twenty years. What do you remember most about recording that first album with them?
First albums are great because you’re not famous yet. They were just a club band and I was a studio musician who was working in the studio where they were working. They weren’t trying to make a hit album, they were just trying to make an album. They were excited they were actually in a big studio making a real album. No one had any dreams of selling four million copies and it being a big influential record. We just wanted to make a good record. As artists, you want to do good work. No one was thinking about having a hit record at all. There’s a certain innocence to that record which is charming because no one was famous yet. We were just young kids trying to do something good.
You already had some studio experience before that.
Right, I had been a studio musician for a number of years. I was the one who had the studio experience and that’s why they brought me in, because I was fast and I got stuff done quickly. And I helped produce. My partner, Mike Flicker, who produced the first five records, he and I grew up together in LA and played in bands together. So we were like a little production team. We brought them in. They had zero studio experience. But we had a good idea of what we were doing. Even today that record is considered a really good sounding record. And you know, everything back then was analog so it’s pretty clear and clean; no digital anything on there.
Do you miss that?
I still record like I always have. I don’t use computers or anything like that. I still record pretty old-school. I think Pro Tools and all that stuff where people can correct everything and fix everything later is kind of ruining the level of musicianship. That’s why guys like me are still working, cause I can actually play. I don’t have to fix anything (laughs). And when I record, I don’t fix anything. I don’t even punch in. I record whole songs from top to bottom, and if I can’t play it correctly all the way through, I’ll keep doing it till I can. That’s how I improve. I think nowadays it’s too easy to make a record. You use a computer and it’ll generate the music for you. I think a lot of the art of musicianship is being lost because of that.
How did you first hook up with Paul Rodgers?
When Paul moved from England to Vancouver, he found it too expensive to bring his British band over for shows. So he was looking for a more local band and I had a little fun band that I was doing in Seattle, playing a lot of old Free music and various 70’s heavy rock guitar rock, and they just happened to catch us in the club one night and they hired the whole band. So all we had to do was replace our singer with Paul Rodgers, which was easy (laughs) and off we went. And I’ve been with him ever since. I’ve been with him sixteen years now.
I didn’t realize it had been that long.
Yeah, me either. It’s kind of scary (laughs). But he’s the best singer that ever lived.
Is he easy to work with? Or is he more of a perfectionist?
A little bit of both. For me, he is very easy to work with, but the standards are very high and he expects you to show up knowing everything per show. There was no rehearsal. They just send you a set list and say, “I’ll see you on stage.” And I was expected to show up and play the show properly, which I did. So yeah, the standards are high and there’s no fooling around. He is a bit of a perfectionist and I like that. I like guys who care about their music. Forty years later, he still cares about every show. He takes home a tape of every show, makes little notes; very serious about what he does.
And you’re going out with him and Bad Company on a 40th anniversary tour this summer.
We get together in the middle of June so it should be interesting. It’s rare cause Bad Company doesn’t tour that often so everyone come see it.
