Once a musical Zelig,
bassist Bedrosian moves to the fore.
by Greg Haymes
Special to the Times Union, Albany, NY
July 19, 1992
"I've always been the perennial sideman, kind of like
a musical Zelig", explains bassist Rick Bedrosian, referring to the
chameleonlike qualities of one of Woody Allen's most memorable film
characters.
"Whether it's a rockabilly band like Jeannie Smith &
the Hurricanes, an Irish band like Hard Times or an art-rock band like
Squareone, I think that I've been able to adapt and fit in well
musically, but I've always been in the background."
Until now.
Bedrosian, who'd been an integral part of so many
popular Capital District bands that he's lost count of them, is finally
stepping out of the background and into the spotlight with the release
of his own brand-new, 10-song compact disc, "Inside My Car".
"I can be really lazy sometimes," he admits of his
nearly 20 year musical career. "Songwriting was something that I
always wanted to do, but I always put it off until tomorrow. It
was so easy for me to get by without songwriting.
"But if you don't write music or sing, then you have
to continually latch on to other people who do. Every band that
I've ever been in, I've been at the mercy of the songwriters, which
isn't necessarily bad. But eventually you just want a little more
control over what you're doing."
With "Inside My Car", which he began recording in the
fall of '90, the Delmar native faced all the control he could handle.
He wrote six of the songs himself, and says, "The four songs that I
didn't write were all written by friends of mine from Nashville."
He sang all of the lead and background vocals, as
well as playing bass, piano, synthesizer, guitar and percussion.
He also produced the album himself, co-mixed it with engineer Ace
Parkhurst and released it on his own label, October Eve Records.
"I've always been into musical production," Bedrosian
says. "In the mid 70s, the first thing that I ever produced was
for a Radio Shack song contest, and it won the $3000 second prize."
Songwriting, however, was a different story.
"I'm just so in awe of great songwriters like John
Hiatt and Marshall Crenshaw," he said. " But then I realized that
everybody's got to start somewhere.
"The only songwriting that I had ever done was about
12 years ago when I wrote the verses to the song "Inside My Car", but I
never did anything with them. Finally, about two years ago, I
wrote the chorus for it. I liked the results and started doing
more and more songwriting."
In addition to the title track, Bedrosian penned the
chugging rocker "Too Much Distance", and a pair of bouncy pop tunes, "So
Easy" and "Faded Blue".
His other two original tunes are dedicated to former
musical associates. "Don't Go Johnny" is a rave-up rockabilly
tribute to local fave Johnny Rabb, while "Leaving Tonight" is a haunting
ballad in memory of the late Byrds co-founder Gene Clark, with whom Bedrosian
played briefly in Nashville in the late 80s.
"Musically, the album features at least one country
song, a few rockabilly tunes and the rest is kind of pop-rock,"
Bedrosian offers. "it might initially seem a bit too wide-ranging,
but those are my favorite kinds of music and I wanted the album to sound
like me."
The album is, in fact, a sort of stylistic summation
of Bedrosian's vast career from the mid-70s country-rock sounds of
Silver Chicken to the stripped-down, pop-rock approach of Tornado Bait,
and several of his past and present bandmates dropped by to play on the
album, including drummer Al Kash and guitarists Todd Nelson and Eddie
Angel.
The release of his solo album won't alter his present
band affiliations. "I know that I'm more of a band guy," Bedrosian
says modestly, and his busy performance schedule currently includes
regular gigs with the ever-popular Newports and the Celtic-country combo
Hard Times, as well as a duo with singer-songwriter Kevin McKrell.
Stepping into the studio on his own, however, was
more difficult than he expected. "I've been in lots of studios as
a session player, and I've done a fair number of recordings with the
bands that I've been in, but doing a solo project like this one was
definitely a strange kind of affair for me," he says.
"You don't have the kind of input and support that
you have in a band, and you're really all on your own. After you
listen to a song for 100 times or so in the studio, it's easy to lose
perspective and begin to question whether or not what you're doing is
any good or not."
|
