Do you remember the first album you bought?
Maybe the better question is, do you even remember record albums?
Music has always been a big part of my life. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in the family living room, listening to music on the big Zenith stereo console - basically a piece of furniture that oriented the entire room. My mother loved music, and one of the first LP (long playing) albums I remember was her recording of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The first album I remember buying for myself was Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the one with the song “Spinning Wheel.” I tended to go for those bands that were more than guitar, bass, keyboard and drums. I liked horn sections, maybe a by-product of listening to so much Gershwin when I was younger, or the Big Band music my father listened to on the radio in his truck.
Listening to an album back then was an event in itself. You gently placed the vinyl record on the turntable, set the needle on the first groove, then sat on the floor in front of the speakers and studied the album cover and what were called liner notes while listening to the music.
Liner notes were writing found on the back or inside cover of the album or, later, the sleeve that protected the vinyl record. They might include a message from the band, something about how the record came to be, and then usually a list of each song including who played on each recording. There would always be studio musicians who weren’t part of the formal band, but who played specific parts of the recording, and if you studied enough liner notes, as I did, you began to see certain musicians who played on multiple recordings, whose names became as familiar to me after a while as the actual band members.
That’s where I learned to look for musicians like Steve Lukather, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, Dick Dale, Dave Sanborn, Richard Tee, Leon Russell, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Wynton Marsalis – those are just some of the many names that, after a time, I felt I could recognize their style regardless of the record. Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band played on a ton of records that were not Springsteen.
Muscle Shoals, as Lynyrd Skynyrd sang, had the “Swampers,” a bunch of white, Alabama-bred country musicians who played country, rock, R&B, soul – anything and everything. They were on something like 75 gold and platinum hits and brought musicians from all over the world to record in this studio on north Alabama.
More than a few went on to have successful careers as headliners. Grover Washington Jr. – I developed an affinity for jazz – was one of those great stories. He was scheduled to back up saxophonist Hank Crawford on a studio recording session, but for some reason Crawford didn’t make it and the producers had Washington Jr. step up and take the spotlight. Washington went on to be a star in jazz and R&B in the 1970s-1990s.
In the late 1970s, a friend and I went to see Rickie Lee Jones at this club in Buckhead (Atlanta, Ga.). Jones was popular at the time with her song “Chuck E.’s in Love.” But when we got there, we realized David Sanborn was playing in her band, and we were more excited to see him than Rickie Lee. We were big Sanborn fans, who was so distinctive you could pick up his saxophone style on any number of records, until he became so copied that a generation of saxophonists were sounding like Sanborn derivatives.
The Rickie Lee Jones concert demonstrated that you might buy the tickets for the headliner but the people in the supporting roles, the backing musicians, were as important to the quality of the song as the lead.
I thought of this the other day when reading the Apostle Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 12, “For just as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body …” and “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you.’ Nor can the head say to the feet, ‘I do not need you.’ On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” He goes on with this idea, saying “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”
In a sense, being a Christian is like being in a band. There are many parts to the music – vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, horns – and depending on the song, their individual part may be big or small. I remember a percussionist with Spyro Gyra who played a number of instruments, from conga to triangle, and was fun to watch because of the way he seemed to scramble from one instrument to the next within the context of a single song. You wouldn’t pay to see him front a band, but his contribution to the music (as well as the live show) was undeniable.
I really like this analogy in the context of jazz, or at least of a live performance, where no song is played exactly the same way twice. Everyone knows the melody and the rhythm, but there is usually space for a featured musician to add notes or runs or riffs that weren’t written into the original score. One person may have the featured instrument, playing what he’s led to play, but the rest are basically staying within the music as written, holding everything together
Jazz is one way I resolve the theological issue of predestination vs. free will or foreknowledge. In live jazz – the best way to hear it – everyone is playing the same song and knows how it starts, where it’s going, how it’s going to end. But along the way, individual musicians have freedom to experiment, to try different notes that hopefully contribute to the overall sound. But still, that individual freedom is curtailed somewhat within the limits of the song they are playing. The overall song is predestination; the individual experimentation is free will. God wrote the music, so He knows where it’s going and how it’s going to end, even as He takes great delight in the individual talents displayed within the structure of the song.
A casual listener may not realize how important the bass player is, or what the percussionist adds to a song (“More cowbell” as the famous Saturday Night Live skit goes), and at times certain individuals may not be playing at all, sitting back while other musicians take over.
To Paul’s point, in the church we all have a part to play. Some are more obvious than others. Sometimes, as in music, the part we play might change. If it’s your turn to solo, you do so; but at the same time, if it’s your turn to rest – a very important part of any musical score – you have to do that as well, because if you decided to just jump in and play whenever you wanted, the whole song would be ruined.
We won’t all be Dave Sanborn, adding something so distinctive everyone notices even when we’re supposed to be in the background. We can’t all have our picture on the cover of the album. That doesn’t make us any less important, because certainly the person that wrote the music, that envisioned the total sound, appreciates how important each part is to – in the case of music – winning that Grammy.
But, as Paul writes, “God has placed the parts … every one of them, just as He wanted them to be, so there are many parts, but one body.” (I Corinthians 12:12).
So, learn your music. Hone your craft. Know that even if you never get to be the headliner, the producer – God – knows the part He has written just for you and applauds every note you hit that adds to the heavenly sound of His music.
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