 |
Though it’s been 19 years between solo albums,
Kasim Sulton has kept busy as a session musician.
|
With a couple of asterisks for quibbling exceptions, Kasim Sulton can certainly claim a share of the lead for longest-stretch-between-solo-albums honors. The former bassist for Todd Rundgren's Utopia released his first solo album in 1982, at just over the midpoint in his Utopian career. Other than a side project album with Tommy Price from Joan Jett's Blackhearts in 1986 and a collection of home demos Sulton insists was never meant as an album that came out as The Basement Tapes in 1993 through the Utopia fan club (and again last year on guitarist Earl Slick's Slickmusic label), once Sulton's new solo album comes out late summer/early fall, 19 years will have fallen off the studio calendar.
Don't mistake that monumental gulf for reticence or laziness over his own work. Sulton is one of the most in-demand players in the business, and a quick perusal of his schedule over the span of time between his solo projects shows an almost pathological need to work. Providing bass and vocals for an impossible number of clients over the past two decades, it's amazing that Sulton has an outside life at all, let alone time to write and record an album's worth of his own tunes.
"It was just way past time for me to do this again," says Sulton from his L.A. hotel room on his current tour. "A couple of spots over the years I'd decided that it was time for me to do a solo show here or there, but I'm really determined to make it happen this time."
Part of making it happen for Sulton is getting his latest solo album out of the studio and into the stores. With about half of the album completed, Sulton plans to get back to work right after he wraps up this tour. But as it happens, the tour is as important to the evolution of the album as the work in the studio.
"This is a great venue to try out this stuff," says Sulton. "It's something that works really well for me, to have the songs done and perform them in front of an audience before I do them anywhere else."
Sulton's current tour is a solo acoustic gig, which reflects the production of his solo album, where he is self-producing and playing every instrument. His last band was a collection of friends, which turned out to be slightly less satisfactory than anticipated, so this stretch will feature Sulton alone.
"Right now, this solo project is me and me alone," he says with a laugh. "You can't get anymore me."
A cursory glance at Sulton's partial discography reveals the reason for the dearth of solo material over the years. In addition to continuing projects with Rundgren (including occasional tours and studio work), Sulton has worked on every Meat Loaf album, was a member of Joan Jett's Blackhearts for a spell, and has appeared on albums for artists as diverse as Johnny Hates Jazz and Patti Smith. Sulton's reputation as a quality hired gun has served him in good stead over the years, but it has also effectively prevented his solo work from advancing apace.
"It's just really difficult to say that I'm going to devote six months to my own material," says Sulton. "Whenever I have two seconds, I'm working on my own stuff, no matter what project I'm working on. I have a little recording studio at home, and I do a lot of work there. I find it cathartic and necessary for me. Like when I was working with Joan Jett, it was an OK thing for me to be doing, but it was painful, because it wasn't the genre of music that I am used to playing. That's a perfect example of me having to do that and then every second I had I was playing and working on my own stuff, which made it a lot more tolerable for me."
There haven't been many points like that in Sulton's long career. The native New Yorker began playing guitar at age 9, and after only a few formal lessons, taught himself guitar, bass and piano. After a few high school band experiences, he was tapped to play bass with singer/ writer/scenester Cherry Vanilla, who was doing publicity for David Bowie at the time. Sulton's association with Vanilla led to a string of chance meetings and finally an offer to play bass with Todd Rundgren in the streamlined version of Utopia assembled in 1977.
Sulton's association with Rundgren was even more beneficial, as he tended to use Utopia for handy session work on anything that he was producing. That's how Sulton wound up playing bass and singing on one of the most popular albums of the 20th century: Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell. He also appeared on albums by Shaun Cassidy, Rick Derringer and Meat Loaf mastermind Jim Steinman.
Sulton took some time off from Utopia to complete his first solo album, entitled Kasim, in 1982, just five years after joining Utopia. In 1986, Rundgren disbanded Utopia and Sulton hooked up with Joan Jett, which in turn led him to form a band with Tommy Price, a fellow Blackheart, which released one decent Pop album on Columbia in 1986. Although nothing more ever came of Price/Sulton, he insists his intentions were to carry it through to its natural conclusion.
"It's like anything, you just never know," says Sulton. "You never know what's going to come of it until it's done and out there and it either fails miserably or becomes a raging success. In this case, it was the former. We went into it with the idea that we were going to do the first record and if we had any luck at all, we'd do another one. There was a bunch of problems with that project. Our production company didn't know what to do with us."
After Price/Sulton failed to click, Sulton merely resumed the session career he had begun, and the work never stopped. His method for accruing studio work is simple and effective.
"Usually I make a couple of phone calls and let certain people know that I'm around and available," says Sulton with an uneasy laugh. "Then I sit back and pray for the phone to ring. It's really difficult, and it gets more difficult as the years pass, because the music changes and the people at the record companies change. Your friends who were there a year or two ago aren't there anymore. So I call management companies and producers and people who have been fans of mine over the years and let them know I'm available."
One odd bullet point on Sulton's résumé is session work on Celine Dion's Falling Into You album in 1996. That job came along courtesy of Meat Loaf writer/composer Jim Steinman.
"After the first Meat Loaf album that I did way back, I became very good friends with Jim Steinman," says Sulton. "Whenever he works on a project, I'm his go-to guy for a couple of things: bass playing and background vocals. He was approached to produce a couple of tracks for Celine, and so Jim goes into his little secret vault and picks out a song that he's already done and says, 'I want her to do this one.' That song, 'It's All Coming Back to Me Now,' had been recorded on one of his albums in the early '80s. We had the song pretty much done, but we tried to do a better version of it, and it wound up not happening, so he used the older version, and we did some backgrounds on it and changed some things here and there. That's how that happened."
Perhaps the greatest aspect of Sulton's session work is the ability to watch a variety of artists and musicians and producers in the studio doing precisely what he does himself when he finally gets back home to his own set-up. He looks at every studio experience as an opportunity to learn and grow.
"Everything is a learning experience," says Sulton. "I pick up things here and there from people on a daily basis. You almost can't help but have that openness and attitude about what you're doing. As long as you're willing to learn and to try new things, that's the best way to do it. You have to have an open mind about how you approach your craft and how you utilize your talent."
KASIM SULTON performs a solo acoustic set on Thursday at the York Street Café.
