Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE MARCH 6, 2003
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO MARCH 6, 2003
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE MARCH 13, 2003
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO MARCH 13, 2003
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE MARCH 13, 2003
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE MARCH 27, 2003
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO MARCH 27, 2003
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE APRIL 3, 2003
- 1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO APRIL 3, 2003
- 1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE APRIL 3, 2003
- 1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE APRIL 10, 2003
- 1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO APRIL 10, 2003
- 1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE APRIL 10, 2003
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE MARCH 6, 2003
- CLINE
- Today is March 6, 2003. I’m in the home of Larry Bunker, up here in this
beautiful hill overlooking Griffith Park and parts of Hollywood and
downtown Los Angeles. The way I can start is to say good morning.
- BUNKER
- Good morning.
- CLINE
- Thank you very much for agreeing to do this interview. As always, we
start at the beginning in these oral histories. I want to just start out
by asking you, first of all, where you were born.
- BUNKER
- In Long Beach, California. The family lived in Compton at the time, but
my mom elected to go to a hospital in Long Beach. I was raised in
Compton until, oh, the age of four, four and a half, five, probably. We
moved up into adjacent downtown Los Angeles and kind of moved into
Hollywood, bounced around a little bit here and there. Went to a couple of schools in the Hollywood area, and then went to
grammar school at Van Ness Avenue [Elementary] School, which I drive by
all the time. Even to this day, it’s still standing there. Van Ness,
just south of Melrose [Avenue]. Was there in the fourth grade. We moved to what is now called South Central L.A., Forty-seventh Street
between Vermont [Avenue] and Normandie [Avenue], in 1937, because I had
my ninth birthday there.
- CLINE
- Before you go any further, when were you born, exactly?
- BUNKER
- 1928. November 1928. November 4th.
- CLINE
- And who were your parents?
- BUNKER
- My father was a man named Frank Sumner Bunker. My mom was Clara
Josephine Bunker. Dad was twenty years older than my mother, so he was
almost like a grandfather to me, so far as our relationship. He was an
essentially self-taught man, brilliant. Had had an erratic childhood.
Had been raised by his grandparents up in the Central Valley in
California. He’d been born in San Francisco, but his grandparents had a
ranch in Stockton, someplace like that. I don’t know that much about his childhood and his early background. I do
know that his grandparents provided for his education. He was all set to
go to Stanford University, and had never managed money before, had never
had any kind of adult responsibilities, because they’d been almost like
farmers. He went for his first year at Stanford and then he came home on
summer vacation, he said, “Well, I’ll need some more money,” and they
said, “The money you got was it. That was it. That was what we had
provided for your education.” So he bounced around. He did a variety of things. Had a penchant for
engineering, had a gift for mathematics. I remember one time my older
brother was taking trigonometry in high school, and Dad was helping him
with some of the problems, and he didn’t have to refer to the trig
books. Now, if you can believe that. Sines, cosines, and tangents, and
all of that stuff, he had committed to memory. It was amazing.
- CLINE
- I’m a total math dunce, so I can’t comprehend that at all.
- BUNKER
- Yes. I mean, numbers to five decimal places, you know. [Snaps fingers]
Just had them. But I don’t know how involved you want to get. His story was very
interesting. He bounced around in a variety of areas, learned how to
cook, made a living as a cook for a while. Ended up in the merchant
marine and was on merchant ships all over the place. He ended up in the
South China Sea doing maintenance work on the ship and was down in the
engine room, and there was some kind of a terrible accident, and he got
caught up between drive shafts and bulkheads and things, and was damn
near killed; broken leg, broken arms; compressed fractures of the skull,
eyeball hanging out by an optic nerve, all of that stuff. At that time, apparently, whenever this was, maybe in the teens or the
twenties, they couldn’t take him off the ship, embargoed in the South
China Sea. All they could do is like patch him together as best they
could with whatever rudimentary medical care they had, and wait until
the ship sailed back to San Francisco. They put him in Letterman General Hospital up there, and had to break all
of the bones that had been broken. You know, they just went through
unbelievable shit. But he survived that. Met my mom. My mom’s people were from Ohio, and she had been in Long
Beach, going to Normal School. She was studying to be a teacher. And
they met and married, and here I am. [laughs]
- CLINE
- Do you know how they met?
- BUNKER
- No, I don’t, not really.
- CLINE
- They met down here, though.
- BUNKER
- Oh yes. By that time he was living, I believe, in southern California.
- CLINE
- You mentioned your older brother. You had a sibling?
- BUNKER
- Yes. He’s six years older [George Bunker]. He lives up in Clearfield,
Utah, which is outside of the other city that is not Salt Lake City.
- CLINE
- Provo?
- BUNKER
- No. It’s a little further north.
- CLINE
- I’m blanking.
- BUNKER
- Yes, me too. The one amazing thing about my dad that I’ve always
remembered was that he was enormously interested in aeronautical
engineering, and I remember before the P-38 fighter plane was developed,
that he made a model for my brother. It was a wingspan about like that
[gestures], that could have been a prototype for the P-38. That kind of
airplane did not exist, and he came up with something like that. The war was starting to happen. Mobilization was going on, of industry in
southern California, and there were people that were in the shipbuilding
industry that were also involved in aircraft manufacture, that wanted my
dad to be part of these companies. He’d been working as a draftsman;
he’d been working as a patent developer and designer in developing
machines to do a variety of things, and they wanted him in their
industry. He could not, because his birth records had been destroyed in
the San Francisco earthquake, so he could not actually prove his
American citizenship, even though we are eleventh-generation in this
country from England. I mean, I’ve got books to attest to that. But they
said, “The rules are the rules. I know you need him and you need his
brains and his expertise, but we can’t allow it.” So he just ended up— Actually, he died just within a month of Pearl
Harbor, just a month or two after my thirteenth birthday. But he never
got to participate in all of that, even though he had talent that was
sorely needed, an intuitive kind of talent that would not mean anything
today. I mean, fifty years later the engineering, the technology that
exists today, you know, everything he knew he had pretty much taught
himself, with no education. Just one of those kind of guys.
- CLINE
- Wow. Amazing. And other siblings?
- BUNKER
- No, just the brother.
- CLINE
- So he was obviously considerably older, probably a lot older than any of
your other friends’ parents.
- BUNKER
- Oh yes, yes. Actually, you know, I mean, in retrospect, he was a
Victorian, because he’d been born in Victorian times, still before the
turn of the century, before 1900. I never can remember when his birthday
was. It was shortly after the Civil War.
- CLINE
- Interesting.
- BUNKER
- But I mean, he was a Victorian and had Victorian attitudes, and I mean,
it was, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and you don’t talk back and you do what
you’re told, you know. I was raised under that. That’s okay.
- CLINE
- So you are now living in the Los Angeles area. You’re a young person;
you’re going to elementary school. You mentioned Van Ness Elementary
School. What was the neighborhood like? Can you describe it?
- BUNKER
- Well, let me see. The Hollywood neighborhood, we lived in some kind of a
court. We managed to get out of there. I believe they bought a house on
Windsor Avenue, which is just a couple of blocks south of the Paramount
[Pictures] lot. We lived there for about a year. It was a nice
neighborhood. I was already starting to fool around with music. I wanted to play the
drums. I could have possibly had some kind of attention deficit
disorder, although who ever heard of that? Because I would always drive
the teachers crazy, drumming on the table, go up to the blackboard to do
a problem and be tapping with the chalk. Finally, one teacher called my
mom and said, “You’ve got to get this kid a drum. Get him something.
He’s driving us crazy,” you know. It was unconscious on my part; I
wasn’t even aware of doing it.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- So I got a pair of drumsticks, and somebody came to the school once a
week and said, “Hold the sticks this way,” and I seemed to somehow have
a knowledge of rhythmic notation. I seemed to know what those things
meant. At a later time I ended up being able to read music, and never
did study music. The note relationships, the intervallic relationships
somehow worked for me, you know.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- Some kind of intuitive thing.
- CLINE
- [laughs] Bizarre. Amazing.
- BUNKER
- So, by the age of seven I was banging on drumsticks and things. Didn’t
have a drum.
- CLINE
- Was there music in your growing-up in the house?
- BUNKER
- Yes. My older brother was a fan of the music of the day, and the music
of the day was Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw and Jimmy Lunceford and
Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Kay Kayser, and stupid stuff but good
stuff, and that was what played on the radio, and there were disc
jockeys that played that all day long. We had a wind-up Victrola, but mostly it was listening to music on the
radio, and there was, for me and for my tastes, developing tastes, music
that entranced me. In retrospect, I’ve heard radio broadcasts of that
era of the hit songs and the nonsense in the pop doggerel, you know, and
I thought, Jesus Christ, I thought that was good. I thought that was
hip. But I did when I was eight and nine and ten years old, you know.
- CLINE
- Of course.
- BUNKER
- You learn, hopefully. So that all went along. We moved down to south of
USC [University of Southern California], into a bigger house. Pop was
commuting, with no freeways, down to Compton or Long Beach every day. The Depression was really on, you know, ’39, ’40, ’41, in through there.
We were operating a rooming house. We had this big three-bedroom house
with a variety of other rooms and so forth, my brother, there was a
family of four of us, and we squeezed ourselves into the smallest spaces
that we could, and rented out the bedrooms. Pop would make that trek, come home, groceries would have been bought,
and then he’d set about cooking. At one point we had eleven people
living in the house and thirteen people eating there. And I was the
dishwasher. [laughs]
- CLINE
- Lucky you.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Did your brother also play any instruments or just listen to the music?
- BUNKER
- He just listened to music. He was an avid fan; he always has been and
remains so today. He did not seem to have the kind of coordination that
enabled him to try to play the piano. He could not play a C-scale with
both hands simultaneously, you know. I mean, he knew how the fingering
went and how this fingering went, but to combine the two was just kind
of beyond him. He had great mechanical ability, inherited that aspect of
my dad, but just never was able to bring off any kind of musical thing.
But it wasn’t important to him.
- CLINE
- What was your relationship with your brother like?
- BUNKER
- Hideous until I got to be about thirteen. [mutual laughter] We fought,
we fought, we fought. But, I mean, I had an old man that pushed me
around and told me what to do, and I wasn’t going to take any shit from
him pushing me around and telling me what to do, so we fought a lot. But
it wasn’t until he was in the service and getting ready to go to the
South Pacific, that we kind of reconciled all that. He was home on leave
and took me to the Hollywood Palladium to see Benny Goodman’s band, and
that was a big turning point for us.
- CLINE
- Before we get to that, what can you say about your mother and her
background, and your relationship with her?
- BUNKER
- She tended to be a little bit passive. She didn’t work. She had enough
to do, trying to look after us and look after the house. She didn’t
drive, which for some reason she had been frightened of that when she
was a young woman, and just had to depend on other people, you know. My
brother did quite a bit of that. My dad did that until he passed away.
My brother did it, and then he went in the service. I finally was able
to talk her into getting some kind of car. She was a good, kind, gentle soul. She tended to be passive with the old
man. I mean, he was a very dominating figure. He was big, a big guy, you
know, weighed 230, [2]40 pounds, about six-two or six-three.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- And he had contracted a skin disorder at one point, probably in the
twenties or thirties, that’s called Erysiphales, and it creates terrible
rashes, and only on the face.
- CLINE
- Oh, wow.
- BUNKER
- Nowhere else on his body. But shaving became such a pain for him, that
he finally just grew a full-face beard. So he had the Hiram Walker kind
of whiskers, you know, and his bald head. Mom was very supportive. This
whole thing of my wanting to get into music and trying to practice and
trying to do stuff, she totally supported that.
- CLINE
- What about Dad?
- BUNKER
- He had no objections to it. I mean, you know, he was busting his ass and
killing himself, really, to keep us with a roof over our heads, and talk
of going to college, talk of career this and career options, those were
concepts that didn’t exist sixty years ago, you know. If they did, they
didn’t in my family. Mom had had some college, but it was mostly along the lines of training
to be a teacher, and she went to what was called Normal School. In fact,
she did end up going for a while down at City College.
- CLINE
- Which used to be the old Normal School before it was the original UCLA
campus. [Telephone rings.]
- CLINE
- Let’s pause for a moment. [tape recorder off]
- CLINE
- All right. We’re back. We’re talking about the Normal School.
- BUNKER
- Let me see. Let me see. You know, from the ninth birthday on, until
thirteen, when my dad passed away, was just day-in, day-out drudgery,
going to school, coming home, being around, available. I didn’t get to
play a lot, and I kind of resented it, but the folks really made me
understand that we all had work to do, you know. It was tough times. I became a roller skating fanatic. I became very good at it. I never was
good at ice skating, but a roller rink opened up in the neighborhood and
I became very good at that, and spent a lot of time there. Continued on playing around with trying to figure out some kind of thing
with the drums. We didn’t have money for that. I mean, I had cardboard
boxes and apple boxes and pie pans nailed together on a thing like a
hi-hat, you know, some kind of— And a lot of times I set that stuff out
in the back yard, and the Victrola was out there, and I’d wind that up
and play “Not So Quiet, Please” with Buddy Rich and Tommy Dorsey’s band,
you know, just all kind of stuff like that.
- CLINE
- Wow. Was there any music in your school, any kind of a program or
anything like that?
- BUNKER
- In the grammar school that I ended up going to when we moved into that
house down on Normandie Avenue—that school is still there too—they did
have some kind of little music program, and I was enrolled in that. I had a very interesting teacher, whose name was Mrs. Freese. I mean, you
know, what did we have, two or three violin players, maybe a clarinet
player. I don’t know if anybody played a brass instrument. I can’t
remember. But we used to have this music that we would play, and I was
the only percussionist. So I started making up the parts to play with
this music that I was hearing. I had a written part, but I didn’t have
anything like a score, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to figure
that out. But improvisation was what I wanted to do, and she encouraged
it.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- She said, “That’s just fine. That sounds good. Go ahead and do whatever
it is you want to do.” And she’d conduct these dozen kids and so forth,
and we might have been playing some kind of little Mozart thing or a
little Haydn thing or “Fingal’s Cave,” you know. Who knows? And without
having heard that music at all, I just improvised the stuff. But I always remembered that one time she had a meeting with my mother
and she said, “Do something with this kid.” She said, “He’s got more
talent in his little finger than I’ve got in my whole body.”
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- “So, encourage that and do something.” And she did. So Mom was very
supportive of that. Pop had no objections to it. George was probably
either doing a paper route or trying to get a car running, or maybe
trying to get laid, you know. [laughs] I mean, he could have cared less.
When there’s a six-year difference and, like, you’re nine, ten, eleven,
and your brother’s a teenager, you know, it can be difficult. And I
didn’t make it easy. So we ran this boardinghouse, and Mom worked just doing everything she
could, you know, around the house to do that. After Pop died, then she
had to get out and get a job, and ended up at some kind of state fire
marshal’s office, some kind of clerical work, you know.
- CLINE
- What was your mom’s name?
- BUNKER
- Clara. Clara J.
- CLINE
- And I wanted to ask one question before we get away too far from your
father. This incredibly traumatic accident that he experienced and with
all the medical attention that he had to wait to receive, and had all
his bones rebroken and all that, did he have lingering effects of this
physically that he had to contend with?
- BUNKER
- He did limp a little bit. One of the legs had been shortened. Compound
fractures, you know, the bones were all coming through the lower leg,
because that had been caught up between this propeller shaft and a
bulkhead, and then as the boat rocked, the propeller shaft was doing
this [indicates rocking back and forth], and it just kind of mashed the
bone. He had a lingering condition that may have been in the optic lobe of his
brain, because he’d had this compressed fracture. He had limited vision
in the eye that had come out, and he could not tolerate watching motion
pictures. He loved the movies, but couldn’t watch them because his brain
would register each frame. The fact that thirty frames a second doubled
with the cloverleaf of a projecting machine makes it so that your retina
retains an image, and that makes everything smooth. That smoothes it all
out. He had lost that ability, so to him, he saw every frame going by,
and it’s like they jiggled down this way. He’d put up with it for about
half an hour and then he’d have to go out in the lobby and have a
cigarette. He couldn’t stand it, you know.
- CLINE
- Amazing.
- BUNKER
- Outside of that, though, he functioned. He functioned very well. He was
a raconteur, used to love to sit up at the dining table and hold court
with all the roomers, the guys that lived in the house.
- CLINE
- So how did his death affect you?
- BUNKER
- It didn’t hit me hard at first. It didn’t really hit me until we
actually went to the funeral, and then apparently I just went berserk.
You know, I suddenly realized that I had lost this guy. We were never
close. It was difficult for him to express feelings and emotions, and I
guess because of the Victorian background, that whole thing, you know. I never had any feeling of rivalry between my brother and myself, as far
as his affections were concerned. I don’t know that he— I remember being
horrified one time when the old man was a little bit juiced and they
ended up in the back yard having a fist fight. George was maybe
seventeen, eighteen years old at that point, and they had a fight about
something. I don’t remember if George knocked him down or if Pop knocked
George down, you know. Mom was out there screaming and hollering and
trying to get in the middle of it. That’s the only time I ever saw
anything like that. He would mete out punishment, but I’ve always felt that he was an
inordinately fair man. If there were constraints on my behavior or if I
did something that I wasn’t supposed to do, I’d get the shit kicked out
of me, but he always made sure— You know, he said, “We’ve never talked
about this before. That is something that you’re not supposed to do. Do
you understand?” “Yes, I do.” “Don’t tell me you understand if you don’t, only if you understand.” “Yes, I do.” “And you know you’re never to do that again,” whatever it was. And then if I proceeded to do it again, I’d get the shit beat out of me.
But not for the first time. If I really didn’t know that that was not
acceptable behavior, you know, he’d say, “Okay. That’s once.” [mutual
laughter] But I used to get razor straps and belts and switches and
stuff. That was the way people raised kids at that time, and, you know,
there was no idea of, like, “You hit me one more time and I’ll take your
ass to court,” which can happen today. I’ve had friends have their
teenage sons say that to them, you know.
- CLINE
- So you’re thirteen and now he’s gone.
- BUNKER
- Now he’s gone.
- CLINE
- And Mom’s got to work.
- BUNKER
- And Mom’s looking for a job, and I’m just getting into Manual Arts High
School. Now, I could back up. The grammar school thing happened. I went
from grammar school to Foshay [Junior High School], which is now the
Foshay Learning Center, but it was just a regular junior high school. I became enamored of the saxophone. So I rented a saxophone from the
music department at the school, and took the thing home. There was a
fingering chart, and it was either an alto or maybe even a C-melody, for
that matter. I don’t think it was a tenor. So I fooled around with that
for about a week, and then I went back to school and the teacher put me
in the band. I was playing saxophone in the band, and I was playing
drums in like what they had, some kind of little symphony orchestra. Prior to this time, at a theater raffle at a neighborhood theater, I had
put a ticket stub in the glass bowl, and a couple of weeks later
somebody knocked on the door and they said, “We had this raffle at the
theater and you have won an accordion.” “Well, shoot. I’ll take it.”
Well, the hitch is, you have to sign up for lessons at twenty-five cents
a pop, or fifteen cents a pop, whatever it was. So I went ahead and did
that, and, I mean, I was playing “Over the Waves” and little stupid
things, you know, but reading this music and learning the buttons and
learning what a major and a minor and a seventh and a diminished was,
and all of that. That quickly wore off; I was not interested in the
accordion for much longer. We had a piano. It was like a May Company upright. It had been a player
piano at one time and then all the player mechanism had been removed
from it. My mom had been besotted with music. She came from a very
strict family, and she was the oldest. Once she got home from school,
there were too many responsibilities for her to have time to fritter her
time away playing music, so there was no music.
- CLINE
- I see.
- BUNKER
- And when she and Pop married, she said, “We’re going to raise a family,
but before we do, I’m going to make you a deal. We’re going to have a
piano in the house, so that if the kids want to study music, they’ll be
able to.” He said, “A deal.” So that was the way it was. So there was always a piano, and I started fooling around with the piano
by the age of six or seven, listening to records, listening to the music
that was on the radio, figuring out how to play an Earl “Fatha” Hines
piano solo.
- CLINE
- Really.
- BUNKER
- And at a later time, Nat [King] Cole, and just trying to figure out how
do you do that, you know. By the time my voice started to change, when I
was in junior high school, I sang in a choir. There was quite a bit of
music. There was a choir and the band and the little orchestra. I don’t
remember how much time a week was devoted to that, but it was there. And
at home I’d take care of my chores, do my stuff, maybe do a little
homework, and practice. Everything was self-taught. I taught myself to play the saxophone; I
taught myself to play the drums; I taught myself to play the piano, not
well, because piano was always kind of a hobby with me, and it’s been
that way to this day.
- CLINE
- Although you played the vibraphone, which obviously there was a little
help there from the piano, I would assume.
- BUNKER
- Oh yes, absolutely. But I mean, that didn’t come till I was twenty,
twenty-one years old, and it was just applying two different techniques
to another instrument, you know, hand-eye coordination and the knowledge
of how to improvise and what chord changes were, because by that time I
knew that stuff, you know.
- CLINE
- I think we can imagine what kind of music you were playing in the school
orchestra or singing in the choir, but what were you playing in the band
where you were playing saxophone?
- BUNKER
- Again, it was almost like a football band; it was marches and stuff like
that. There was no such thing as sophisticated as the kind of programs
they have, band programs that they have now. That didn’t come into being
until long after I was out of school and out of the army, really. That
started down in Denton, Texas, with those guys. Up to that time, in high
school we had some kind of little dance band and we played Spud Murphy
stocks, who is still alive and well in Hollywood.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And it was terrible. It was just terrible. [mutual laughter] I don’t
really remember what the band played in junior high school. I didn’t
continue on playing the saxophone when I got to high school, for some
reason. There was music. I was in a choir for a while, or the Glee Club,
and took orchestra. It was so dreadful that I couldn’t stand it. And I had a harmony teacher, Mrs. Snow. I guess by this time the fact
that my dad was gone and my discipline figure was gone, you know, Mom
didn’t come down on me hard. She let me have kind of free rein, I think.
She let me go through a little bit of a wild period. I didn’t get wild,
but just being able to say no to somebody, you know. So I said no to the
teacher. She wanted me to do the exercises a certain way, in a
prescribed manner, and I thought I knew better, so I would do these
exercises in my own way, all very Stan Kenton oriented. Hideous,
hideous, now that I think back. And she said, “That’s very interesting,
but that’s not what I asked you to do. F.” And she just kept giving me
failing grades, you know. But she was also a social studies teacher, and
she failed me in one of my social studies classes because I didn’t turn
in the homework. I said, “I know the material. I passed the test.” “Once
again, you didn’t do what I told you to do. F.” So I went back and redid whatever the eleventh grade social studies was,
from the teacher that was reputedly the toughest one in school, and did
absolutely everything she said, and got As. And then I went back to Mrs.
Snow, threw the report card on the desk, and I said, “There,” you know,
“cunt.” [laughs]
- CLINE
- Ouch. Whoa.
- BUNKER
- But the distaste that I had from the way that some of the coursework was
being taught, and the fact that the orchestra was so bad, I finally
dropped out of music and changed my major to science. “Just get me out
of here.” I had no inkling of going to college. I had no desire to go to
college. I wanted to play, and my whole focus was aimed at that. I was
already a member of the union. The war had been on. I was fourteen years
old when I joined the union and was starting to work some casuals
around, you know, hotels down by MacArthur Park, and taking the
streetcar, taking a set of drums on the streetcar. That stuff, you know.
- CLINE
- How did you get your drums?
- BUNKER
- That was a set of drums that my brother bought for me. He came back from
the service and he showed up at the house with a bass drum and a hi-hat
stand and a couple of cymbals. And I had a snare drum and I had copped a
field drum from the high school band and turned it into a tom, a floor
tom. So, you know, here was this polyglot weird hybrid. I didn’t have a real set of drums until after I got out of high school,
and at that point, that was when I was going into the service and my mom
took a loan on an insurance policy and we bought a used set of
Slingerlands, Radio King Slingerlands, from some guy in the union. The
union at that time was still down on Georgia Street, downtown in the
meatcutters [union] building.
- CLINE
- What year would this be about, then?
- BUNKER
- ’45, ’46.
- CLINE
- So there were still two unions in L.A. at that point.
- BUNKER
- Yes. I was totally even unaware of that. Interestingly, the school that
I went to, Manual Arts, at that time the student body was probably about
a third black, a third white, and a third whatever else was left over,
the Asian kids. There was a big Asian population at that time, and all
the Japanese kids had come back from the concentration camps. I was
mortified when that happened. I went to school one day at Foshay and all
my Japanese friends were gone, just vanished. There were a few Korean
kids and a few Chinese kids, but the vast majority of the Asian
population at the school at that time was Japanese, and they had just
been pulled out by the roots and sent away. I couldn’t understand it. Getting back to my mother, when it came time for me to go to junior high
school, the dividing line between John Muir Junior High School and
Foshay was like right down the middle of our street. My best friend at
the time was a kid who was from Missouri. His father was a plumber. His
mother was a redneck. He was supposed to go to Foshay, and they said,
“Absolutely not. He’s not going to go to school with them niggers,”
blah, blah, blah, “and have to drink out of the same drinking fountain,”
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, I was heartbroken, because he
was my best friend. And I said, “But I just want you to go to Foshay.” I talked to my mom about it. I said, “What should we do? What should I
do? Should I try to go to Muir? Because I want to go where Jimmy goes.”
And he was kind of the alpha male between the two of us, the dominant
person in the friendship. She said, “Well, I’ll leave that up to you. What do you think? What do
you think would be best?” I said, “The way they talk about the colored guys, that’s not right, is
it?” She said, “No, it’s not.” And I said, “I kind of feel like I ought to go where I’m supposed to go.” She said, “I think that’s your decision to make.” She said, “I’d be very
proud of you if you did the right thing.” But that was her. Probably any
sense of fair play, social justice, and all that, that I ever required I
got from her, because that’s the way she was. [Cries] That’s amazing. I
haven’t thought of her in quite a while. But in that house where we lived, there had been kind of an invisible
line around Figueroa [Street], Hoover [Street], south of Santa Barbara
[Avenue], which is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. Manual Arts is
around Forty-Third Street on Vermont Avenue. There were no blacks living
west of Hoover, certainly Vermont, not further than that, but gradually
the boundaries were changing. The unseen, unenforceable, but,
nevertheless, real boundaries were altering, and people were moving.
People were moving west. The [Second World] War was over, or about to be over. In ’51, ’52, ’53, I
had come back, had been in the service, I’d been married, I had split up
from that lady, and had moved back into the old rooming house. Somebody
came to the house one day, asked to speak to my mom, and I called her.
This guy was from some kind of neighborhood committee, and he said, “I
just wanted to remind you that when you look at your title deed, to
observe the CC and Rs [Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions] that are
in the title deed, which has to do with—,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- CLINE
- Housing covenants.
- BUNKER
- Yes. And she looked at him and she said, “Sir, you’re trespassing on my
property. Get off my property.” I was thrilled. I was thrilled, because
by this time most of my friends were black and musicians. A woman that I
was going with was black. I’ve been heavily invested in that all my
life. In fact, my current wife of twenty years, twenty-three years, that
lady over there, as is our daughter.
- CLINE
- Let’s take a moment. I’m going to turn the tape over before it runs out.
- BUNKER
- Okay.
- CLINE
- Thanks.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO MARCH 6, 2003
- CLINE
- Okay. We’re back. You were talking about your neighborhood when you
lived south of USC [University of Southern California], what you called
the rooming house, and you were talking about the housing covenants a
bit and the way the neighborhoods were divided up racially, which
started to change as the housing covenants started to be abolished. Of
course, back then the West Side was Western Avenue, and things were
moving closer in that direction; the African American population was
moving over toward Western.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Before that started to happen, of course, you were mixing with different
races at schools at Foshay and later at Manual Arts, but how would you
describe the neighborhood that you were living in down there?
- BUNKER
- The particular neighborhood that I was in was lily-white, lily-white at
that time, during the school years. I think it gradually started to
change because when I came back from the service in 1951, I lived in
that house with my mother and other itinerant musicians. It became a
musicians’ rooming house. God almighty, the guys that went through
there. Victor Feldman lived there for a while; Rolf Ericson lived there
for a while; Walter Benton lived there for a while. I don’t remember
whatever happened to him, but I had gone to high school with Walter. He
was a tenor player. Somebody told me once, I think, that when Max Roach
and Clifford Brown were looking for a tenor player, they auditioned
Walter and Harold Land, and Harold Land got the gig. But Walter was
apparently that good. I lost contact with him. He didn’t manifest that
kind of ability when he was sixteen, seventeen years old, but then who
does, you know. I’m sure I didn’t either.
- CLINE
- And speaking of which didn’t you tell me, when we did our pre-interview,
that one of your classmates at Foshay was Eric Dolphy?
- BUNKER
- Yes, yes.
- CLINE
- How was he sounding at that point?
- BUNKER
- He was just a clarinet player. I don’t know how interested he was in
jazz. I think he played in the band, and so he just read music, you
know. We didn’t have any kind of a swingband in junior high school, so
it was just whatever that band music was at that time. But he went on
to, I think either Poly [Los Angeles Polytechnic High School] or Dorsey
[High School], and I went to Manual. We lived in different areas. In high school there may have been an occasional black friend that came
by the house. The house was really kind of funny at that point; a whole
side of the house had been rented out to a family, an Indonesian family.
They had a three-bedroom home with a dining room and a living room and
kitchen and the whole thing, and Mom and I had just kind of squeezed
into a back portion. My brother had built a kitchen for her and a back
room, and we were there.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- The Indonesian family were— I forget when the whole Sukarno thing
happened and when the Indonesians threw the Dutch out, but these were
people that were essentially Dutch and Indonesian, a mixture, and Mom
had gotten involved with them. She was a Methodist and she’d gotten
involved with them through the church. So there were these various people, but we hardly had any contact with
them, you know. They had their own thing that they did. The guy worked
in a bank, but he was like a Dutch Indonesian and was made persona non
grata, so he took his family out of there and immigrated to the States. But there were the occasional— You know, later on, from ’51 until 1960,
when I got married the second time, I lived in that house, so now at
this point there was a set of drums and a vibraphone in the living room,
as well as the piano, and some kind of a record player, and music going
on and on and on and on forever, you know. We had two or three drummers
living there, and a saxophone player and trumpet players, piano players,
and guys in and out, you know. But my mother was amazing. I remember once her walking into—We had just
gotten some new record. I can’t remember; I’ll just have to make up. I
can’t remember who it was. But she came wandering into the living room
and she was standing there, listening and listening, and a bunch of us
were sitting around, hanging out on the couch and everything. She said,
“Is that that new Sonny Rollins album?” And the guys all fell down. They
said, “Whose mother knows about Sonny Rollins?” She nailed it. Somehow
she knew what that was, you know.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- But, I mean, she was responsible for me going to a Jazz at the
Philharmonic concert at the old Philharmonic Auditorium, getting me in
down there; going to Billy Berg’s in Hollywood to see [Charlie] “Bird”
[Parker] when I was still in high school, because I couldn’t have gone
in there by myself. I could have faked it; I looked mature for my age,
and deep voice. But we took the streetcar and got up there, you know.
She took me around to places like that and saw to it that I was able to
pursue this thing as much as I could, you know, as limited as the means
were, as limited as the money was, the whole thing. Amazing.
- CLINE
- What did the neighbors think of all this that was going on in your
lily-white neighborhood?
- BUNKER
- Oh, god, they were threatening to call the police. I had to sign
agreements with the people that I wouldn’t play at this time or that
time or the other time, and, “Isn’t there someplace you can move that
shit to the other side of the house?” You know. I was accused of driving
some member of the family to death one time, you know. Nice neighbors.
- CLINE
- Wow. You obviously had African Americans coming around in the
neighborhood then. How did that go over? Not to mention having
Indonesians living there.
- BUNKER
- It wasn’t a lot of it. It wasn’t a lot of it. That was probably still
the high school days. Then later when people were coming over, I didn’t
give a shit. Mom said, “Whatever,” you know. “Your friends are your
friends. Your friends are my friends.” Times were changing, finally. Not
much, but they were changing. I still remember the shock of my life when I was in the service in 1947,
ending up down in Virginia at basic training, and finally getting a pass
and going on leave, and seeing the “white” and “colored” drinking
fountains and restrooms and stuff. At least we didn’t have that out
here, you know. That did not exist. But it sure existed there, and I
just said, “Jesus Christ almighty. They’re still fighting the Civil
War.”
- CLINE
- Wow. I’m leading up to the service portion here, but I wanted to ask
you, too, since you went to Manual Arts and said you reached a point
where you wanted to just do science, why science?
- BUNKER
- I think I’d had enough coursework that would fit into that program
already, without having to make anything up. I had some language and I
had English and social studies, and a couple of times I had tried to
take some kind of shop. I ended up taking home economics because I just
didn’t want to be in the body shop or deal with the jocks, you know. I
got pressed into a little bit of athletics that I really didn’t have any
heart for. I was big for my age, so I was forced to play football, and I
hated it. I had no eyes, just no desire to be involved in that, and I
didn’t want to be in the football band. I mean, really a loner. Really a
fucking lone wolf. Didn’t make friends well. Had a few friends, but not
many.
- CLINE
- Were most of them also musically inclined?
- BUNKER
- One guy was. One guy was a trumpet player. And every time I tried to
play football, I’d get stepped on the hands, and every time he tried to
play football, he’d get kicked in the mouth. You know. [laughs]
- CLINE
- Right. [laughs] Note to self: abandon this pursuit immediately. Yes. So
you were fairly alienated in high school.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Not to the degree that kids are today. I mean, I read stories and
hear things, and hear the stuff that goes on in the schools, and you
think, Jesus Christ, how do you survive being a teenager these days? I
wasn’t traumatized like that. Some of it probably was my own doing. You
know, I was ill at ease, kind of awkward, kind of gawky, and interested
in music and obsessed with music, and that at a time when you were
really suspect in that kind of culture if you were interested in music.
That somehow made you a little swishy, a little gay, maybe. Who knows.
“You don’t want to play football; you don’t want to run track; you don’t
want to be a basketball player; you don’t want to punch people out after
school.” “No, I’m not interested in that.” “Well, then you must be a faggot.” I mean, that was not ever said, but
that was such an attitude. And it wasn’t until I just said, “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.
I’ll do what I have to do.” In fact, Mrs. Snow, the teacher that flunked me in my harmony stuff, said
that with the coursework that I was taking at that time, and the singing
voice that I had developed, she said, “If you do what you need to do to
meet college requirements, I could get you a scholarship to ‘SC to study
voice.” And I said, “I have no interest in that.”
- CLINE
- You must have been a bass. [laughs]
- BUNKER
- Yes. But I said, “I have absolutely no interest in that, and I could
care less.” And it wasn’t until much, much later that I ever entertained
any thoughts about higher education, possibly going to a conservatory.
But even at the time that I thought about that, I said I’d never heard
of a percussion major, and I don’t know that they existed until into the
fifties. Certainly the jazz programs didn’t exist.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So, you know, it’s up to me to teach myself to do what I’m going to do,
which was what I hoped to do.
- CLINE
- So you went into the military.
- BUNKER
- Yes. The draft was still on. This was 1946. I had just graduated from
high school. I was seventeen. They were going to continue drafting, and
the GI Bill was going off in September or October of that year. I tried
to find some kind of a day gig. I was sweeping floors in a factory,
loading boxcars with sacks of flour, and totally equipped, you know, for
life at large. Couldn’t get any kind of work, even though I was a member
of the union. Couldn’t find any kind of work as a musician. I approached my mom and I said, “They’re going to keep drafting people,”
and you don’t know how long it’s for. It’s for an indeterminate period.
You can join the army and get your commitment done in a year and a half
and get some GI Bill. I said, “Why don’t I just go ahead and do that,
and get that shit out of the way.” She said, “You think that’s something you want to do?” I said, “Yeah, because I’m just standing around, waiting for the phone to
ring, and it’s not ringing. I’m not making any money and I’m not having
a good time. I could get some kind of benefit out of it; maybe I could
get to play with some people,” because I wasn’t even playing with
anybody. So she had to sign up to allow me to do that, because I was under age.
You could sign up at eighteen, but I was not eighteen yet. So she
agreed; she thought it was a good idea. So I did that. Went in the army. Ended up back in Camp Lee, Virginia, which became Fort
Lee. Took basic there. Went to military band school, and then they were
starting about six other band schools within the army, within the
continental thing. I thought about going to Fort Dix, because they were
opening a school there. I said I’d be near New York; that would be interesting. But they were also opening one in
Monterey [California], and I had experienced a little bit of winter
weather in Virginia, and I said, “I don’t know whether I want to go to
New York or not. How badly do I want that?” I said, “I’m young enough.
Let me go out to California. I’ll be closer to Mom. I can get home on
the weekends from time to time and get this stuff done with.” Went into the band at Ford Ord, California, and ended up doing what the
band does. We also had a training program and it was part of the cadre
for that training program. There was also a big band that was active up
there, seventeen-piece band, with charts by Pete Rugolo and Bill Russo
and a whole bunch of other people, and a fabulous Soldiers’ Club that
sat out on the beach, on the sand dunes, that had been built by Joe
Stillwell when he had been commandant of that base. I was playing drums
in the jazz band and playing piano with a whole bunch of combos, you
know, Officers’ Club, Non-Com [non-commissioned officers] Club, this,
that, and the other. So I was finally getting to play music, and I was
playing drums and piano. [interruption]
- BUNKER
- And so all of that passed very uneventfully. Started trying to do a
little writing, because I’d become enamored of that, and had captive
people, people that clearly had nothing else to do. They had to be
around until five o’clock, you know. So, just part of the continuing
self-education process.
- CLINE
- So you weren’t playing saxophone anymore?
- BUNKER
- No, no.
- CLINE
- You gave that up pretty quickly?
- BUNKER
- Yes. But it’s an interesting thing, the fingering keyboard for the
saxophone keyboard became so ingrained, just from the little that I did
it, that many times, to this day, if I’m trying to figure out a melodic
line, I can visualize most easily that way, rather than visualizing the
piano keyboard or the vibraphone keyboard, and I’ll go [demonstrates],
no, no, no, and something about that musculature will knock it into
place.
- CLINE
- Interesting.
- BUNKER
- And that was having never developed any kind of chops, really, any kind
of skill.
- CLINE
- Do you suppose it’s in some way connected, especially melodically, to
the fact that you’re using your breath and you’re hearing a sound that’s
more vocal in that way? It’s connecting in a different way than just the
mechanics of pushing your fingers down.
- BUNKER
- Yes. The instruments that I do play all don’t give you a tactile
feedback. The piano does a little bit. The vibe hardly does. And so many
other instruments. I mean, you watch people. I’ve watched trumpet
players, you know, [mimics horn fingering].
- CLINE
- Right. Moving their fingers.
- BUNKER
- They’re thinking of something and trying to nail something down. They’ll
do that. It’s kinesthetic, I guess.
- CLINE
- Interesting.
- BUNKER
- So, for me it’s like whatever works.
- CLINE
- I wanted to ask you, when you were growing up and your mother was
encouraging you musically, you said that you were going to thinks like
jazz concerts and jazz clubs. You mentioned Billy Berg’s. Do you
remember some of the venues that you went to? For example, did you ever
go down to Central Avenue, go into any of those places?
- BUNKER
- I did go down there. I’m trying to remember if I was still in high
school. I think I was. I remember I had a bicycle. I rode my bike down
there. Now, at some point I had a car, but there always seemed to be
problems with it. It was some kind of an old Model A [Ford] that I’d
talked my mom into buying, so that I’d be able to take her places. But I did go on Central Avenue on a few occasions, and I don’t remember
which particular clubs they were. I know that I got into my best suit
and had a little moustache going, was trying to look a lot older than
sixteen, and talking my way into bars. But it could have been the Club
Alabam, could have been— A lot of those names have drifted way back into
the past. I found that I was hardly ever over there once I came back in ’51, but in
’51 when I came back from the service and from living up in the Salinas
and Monterey area, I started to work. Howard Rumsey hired me to play
drums at the Lighthouse, and I was hanging with Hampton Hawes and Sonny
Criss and Teddy Edwards and those guys, and they were hiring me to— Most
of the time Larance Marable was their drummer, but they were hiring me
to play vibes. So I was kind of moving around in those circles as a
vibraphone player and working as a drummer.
- CLINE
- What was your impression of Central Avenue when you went down there as a
teenager?
- BUNKER
- Tacky, you know, just funky. I did not seem to have any fear of any kind
of consequence of that, I guess just because of the people, the black
people that I had known and associated with, kids that I’d grown up with
at school and later made friends with, that there was anything to be
feared. When I got into Foshay, there had been a lot of rumbles between
gangs of kids, and after school I’d see— I remember seeing some guys get
stomped on, from the time of the zoot suit [riots] shit that was going
on downtown with the Mexican kids, and I said, “Jesus Christ, get me out
of here. Let me just get past this mob and get home,” you know. But,
overall, Central Avenue, I didn’t seem to have any fear of personal
safety, anything like that. It didn’t seem to enter into the equation,
you know.
- CLINE
- Do you have any impressions of the music that you heard? Do you remember
any of that?
- BUNKER
- Not that much. I mean, there might be people like Slim Gaillard and like
that, you know. I remember mostly it was up in Hollywood if I heard any
music that was happening. I remember seeing Art Tatum once at some club
on Hollywood Boulevard. No recollection of what the name of the place
was. But along around where Musso & Frank’s is now, where a couple of
those streets are, music was happening around. There was a big supper
club down on Figueroa near Manchester [Avenue], and actually I think
Ella [Fitzgerald] worked there, and I’m trying to remember if Nat Cole
even worked there before all of that explosion happened with him.
- CLINE
- He was still playing piano.
- BUNKER
- Yes. I worked in that place for a while as part of a house trio, and
then that expanded when they put in a revue, you know.
- CLINE
- So some of the clubs in Hollywood, you mentioned Billy Berg’s. Do you
remember any of the other clubs from that area?
- BUNKER
- That was still when I was in high school. Transportation was difficult.
Money was difficult. Entrée was difficult. Three years later, I was back
and working.
- CLINE
- What about going to hear Bird at Billy Berg’s? What do you remember
about that?
- BUNKER
- I think I went once, but they used to have it air-feed. They used to
have remotes from their fifteen minutes or half hour on radio.
- CLINE
- Live broadcasts, yes.
- BUNKER
- So that’s when I got to hear those guys, Dizzy [Gillespie], Bird, Ray
Brown, Al Haig, probably Stan Levey, and I don’t remember if Milt
Jackson was with them at that time or not. At that time I only knew what a vibraphone was. I knew who Lionel Hampton
was. I knew who Red Norvo was. Other than that, the vibraphone was a
total blank to me. Being a percussionist was a total blank; I didn’t
know what a percussionist was, really. But I was living in the Salinas
area and married to that first wife, and I got a gig with an organ trio.
We were going to work at this strip joint in Monterey, and the guy whose
name I can’t even remember said to me, “I’ve heard you play the piano.
You’re playing drums for me. You must play the vibes.” I said, “No, I don’t.” He said, “Well, would you like to?” I said, “Shit, I don’t know.” You know. He said, “I’ll tell you what.” We were just starting like a weekend gig.
We were going to work three-day weekends for a while. He said, “I’ve got
an old vibe at home in the garage. Why don’t you take it home and work
on a couple of tunes. It shouldn’t be that hard.” I said, “Okay.” So I went by his house, and he had this old crapola Leedy, Leedy thing
like a tabletop that sat about this high, you know, because they were
built for the pit drummers, so that the guy could play seated behind a
set of drums and you didn’t have to stand up. Like timpani that tilted,
the same situation, still you could pedal. So I took the thing home and
got the cobwebs off of it, figured out how to put it together, and spent
a couple of three days just trying to play some scales on it. I said,
“How the hell do you do that?” Did arpeggios, did studies and so forth,
you know, trying to get used to crossing hands. So went to work that Friday night, put the drums up, put the vibes up, we
played the first set, and the guy said, “Okay, well, have you got a tune
worked out? What do you want to play?” “I don’t have anything worked out. What do you want to play?” And he said, “Oh, is it like that?” [mutual laughter] You know. I said, “Well, you know.” So we played some ballad and I played a couple
of choruses, to rousing applause, and we finished the setup and we got
off the stand. And guys were coming up and saying, “Jesus Christ, Larry.
I didn’t know you played the vibes. How long have you been playing the
vibes?” I said, “About three days.” But that started that.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- If that hadn’t happened, who knows, we wouldn’t be sitting here.
- CLINE
- That’s right.
- BUNKER
- We wouldn’t be sitting here.
- CLINE
- Interesting.
- BUNKER
- Just one thing led to another. But that triggered my interest in Milt
Jackson. When I heard Milt, I said, “Okay, now, that’s the way it’s
supposed to be.” I heard Cal Fjader a little bit when Cal was still the
drummer with the Dave Brubeck Trio in San Francisco, and he was playing
drums and vibes, and they were broadcasting from some radio station up
there in San Francisco. So I used to hear that. I didn’t care for the
way he played. But Milt turned me totally around. He made me want to
play the instrument, and I spent a lot of time finally reaching the
conclusion that I was never going to sound like him, because nobody’s
ever going to sound like him.
- CLINE
- Indeed. So when you came back from the military, you came back to L.A.
Things had changed, the neighborhood was changing, the music scene was
changing.
- BUNKER
- Yep.
- CLINE
- What exactly were the most noticeable and impressive changes that you
found that you were being affected by upon returning?
- BUNKER
- On a totally personal level, just being accepted as a musician. I had
gone over on Central Avenue one time, I think I was home on furlough, I
was the hot shot drummer in Monterey County, you know, as far as all of
that was concerned, because the military band, we were doing broadcasts,
we were doing little runouts and doing concerts here and there, and had
this elaborate book, this custom book of music at a time when people
didn’t have that yet, you know, ’47. ’46, ’47, ’48. And talked my way
onto the bandstand at some jam session on Central Avenue, and we played
about two or three choruses of whatever it was, and they put me off the
bandstand. “Get the fuck lost. Come back when you learn how to play,”
you know. That’ll kind of make you— That’ll sit you up and make you
wonder.
- CLINE
- Makes an impression, yes.
- BUNKER
- So I didn’t try that anymore for a while, but then suddenly when I was
working, some of the same guys that put me off the bandstand, a couple
of years later at the Lighthouse, “I remember that name. I remember he
was one of them that said, ‘Get the fuck lost.’” How much of that might
have been any animosity because I was white or animosity just because I
couldn’t play, I don’t know. I think I played better than that. But anyway, being accepted by the musicians that I respected was probably
the most important thing, and actually starting to make a living.
- CLINE
- Who were some of those musicians?
- BUNKER
- Hampton Hawes; Sonny Criss; Teddy Edwards; a bass player that played
with them a lot, named Roger Alderson. I don’t know what ever happened
to him.
- CLINE
- His name, I don’t believe has come up at all.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Larance Marable, who I just recently reconnected with after God
knows how many, many, many years.
- CLINE
- We did an interview with him for the Central Avenue [Sounds] series.
- BUNKER
- I got to know him some, and then he went through periods of jail time
and not being on the scene, and now he’s been back on the scene for
many, many years. We did an album project together, and he sounded
wonderful. It was like we looked at each other and I said, “Larance?” He
said, “Larry?” And, you know, it was like thirty years or more since
we’d seen each other; just paths had not crossed.
- CLINE
- Wow. Amazing.
- BUNKER
- And gradually there were other musicians. Al Haig had moved out here. He
was living here for a while. A bass player named Harry Babisin was
around, doing a lot of things, making records and having a record
company, or at least a record label, and putting together jam sessions
down in Culver City or Inglewood someplace.
- CLINE
- What was the record label, do you remember?
- BUNKER
- I don’t remember. I think he and Roy Harte had that together. I don’t
know if Roy is around still. I pass by on Santa Monica Boulevard and it
does not look like Drum City is there anymore.
- CLINE
- No, I don’t think it is.
- BUNKER
- It looked like a used car lot.
- CLINE
- So you were starting to play more with some of the people who were
really playing at this point.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And you were playing both drums and vibraphone then?
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- You mentioned Milt Jackson in relation to the vibraphone. When you were
inspired to play the drums and were teaching yourself and going through
all that, who were some of the drummers who you most were influenced by
and wanted to perhaps emulate?
- BUNKER
- Oh, my god, it goes clear back to Chick Webb, because his records were
playing on the radio. Whoever the drummer was with the Jimmie Lunceford
band [Jimmy Crawford]. Was that O’Neal Spencer or was O’Neal Spencer
with Andy Kirk and the Clouds of Joy? I don’t remember. But I mean,
everybody from Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, naturally. Chick Webb, even
before. Jo Jones. I didn’t care for Sonny Greer, and at that time he was
still with Duke’s band.
- CLINE
- Right. And he was certainly a multi percussionist in that band.
- BUNKER
- Yes. But those were the guys, until I was in my middle teens, that
really were the influences on me, made me want to play, and then all of
a sudden, you know—
- CLINE
- Bebop.
- BUNKER
- Bebop happens.
- CLINE
- And you heard some of this live, so let’s return for a moment to Billy
Berg’s. How did that go down with you? What was that experience like?
- BUNKER
- I was enthralled with Dizzy. I couldn’t quite understand Bird, because
he played so out of tune. And then one day it suddenly all kind of
locked into place and I went— You know when you get flashing light bulbs
and shit that happens. And I’ve had a few of those in my life that I’ve
always treasured, just those epiphanies. I don’t know of any better word
for it, when you hate something or you can’t understand it, and suddenly
you blink your eyes and it’s there.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- It all of a sudden just made sense. It all made sense, the ferociousness
of that playing. I got to play with him once, and it was sometime in the
fifties. He was in town and he was appearing at the Five Four Ballroom,
and Billy Berg owned that place, too. I think Larance was playing drums.
It was local rhythm section, and a piano player whom I knew casually,
but I can’t remember his name. Apparently they were playing a tune that
Bird wanted to play, and he didn’t know the changes. He didn’t know the
tune. I heard, “Larry! Larry! Larry!” And I looked up and it was
Marable. He says, “You know this tune, don’t you?” I said, “Yeah.” “Get
up here!” So they shoved the black kid off the piano and put me down
there, you know.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- And change of attitude. I didn’t try to do anything; I just comped. I
mean, Bird didn’t need that, you know. There was no necessity for that,
but I guess they felt that it was necessary, you know. So I did get to
play with him once. It was only that one little thing, and then that was
the end of that. But most of my recollections of the Billy Berg thing were from the
broadcasts, because it seemed like it was every evening during the
period that they were there.
- CLINE
- The tempi, if nothing else, must have been pretty overwhelming, I would
think.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- So now I take it you wanted to be a bebop drummer.
- BUNKER
- Yep. Absolutely.
- CLINE
- And then who became your role models?
- BUNKER
- Max [Roach]. Within a few years, Philly Joe [Jones]. Within a few more
years, Elvin [Jones]. Within a few more years, Tony Williams. All of
those guys, those guys with the dancing magic that they could do.
- CLINE
- Did you listen to Roy Haynes much?
- BUNKER
- Not as much as the other guys. I listened to him some, and I know that I
have drummer friends who say that Roy was the guy; Roy was the man and
it continues to be him to this day. I haven’t heard him in the longest
time. But snap, crackle, and pop.
- CLINE
- Right. Exactly.
- BUNKER
- After being flabbergasted by all that, I said, “Well, nobody will ever
do anything like that again,” and then Tony came along, seventeen years
old, and just tore all that up, tore it up. I never could understand how
he did what he did. I mean, by that time I was so far removed from
bebop, I was a studio musician playing the xylophone and the bongos and
timpani and vibraphone, a little snare drum, you know, other things.
- CLINE
- Right. But returning briefly, now it’s the early fifties. You’re playing
in Los Angeles. You’re a jazz guy. You’re gigging. Where are you
playing?
- BUNKER
- The Lighthouse for a while. I worked there about six months. Then I left
and went on the road with Billy May’s band. I’d always wanted to play
with a big band, and I’d never gotten the chance to. It wasn’t exactly
my kind of music, but I said, “I need the gig.” So there were restaurants that were happening. I remember working. There
was a restaurant in Glendale, where I worked with like a guitar trio,
playing vibes. I think the guitar player was somebody named Goldberg,
and the bass player was a gypsy named Iggy Shivek, who was a notorious
junkie and a drug dealer and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Luckily for
me, I mean, I got into a period of heavy drinking, but I never got into
drugs. I was starting to see friends dropping like flies, and I said, “I
think that the best thing is not to even know what that’s like.”
- CLINE
- Good move.
- BUNKER
- I was working at the Lighthouse with Hampton Hawes, and I had to go to
his parents’ house, so the Reverend Hawes would be there, and collect
him and get him into the car, and then stop for a fix on the way, and on
and on and on and on. And I just said, “That’s not anything that I want
to be connected with.”
- CLINE
- So you saw a lot of that going on at that point?
- BUNKER
- Yes. Worked with Art Pepper for a while out at— Was it called the Surf
Club? It was on Sixth [Street] and St. Andrew’s [Place], and the band
was Hampton, Joe Mondragon, myself, and Art, and Art never got there,
could never get there anywhere near on time. Always came in with some
lame excuse. He was a fucking rat. He was just an unpleasant, ratty kind
of guy. A good player, but— Yes, yes, yes. But places like that. Got to do some jam sessions with Dex [Dexter
Gordon] and Wardell [Gray]. Wardell had finally come off the road from
[Count] Basie’s band. And a place on Eighth Street behind the Ambassador
Hotel. I think it was the Tiffany. I think it was the Tiffany. So,
playing in there. Starting to work a little bit at the Hague. That was
happening. By ’53, I believe, either ’52 or ’53, I joined Gerry Mulligan and the
quartet, and replaced Chico Hamilton.
- CLINE
- Did you know Chico before then?
- BUNKER
- Just very casually, very casually. I’d heard him play. I wasn’t crazy
about the way he played, but Gerry was. That’s what counts.
- CLINE
- Right. Before we go into that, I wanted to ask about the Lighthouse a
little bit. What was your impression of the Lighthouse at the time?
- BUNKER
- The Sundays were backbreaking, because it was twelve hours long.
- CLINE
- Two [o’clock] to two [o’clock], I hear.
- BUNKER
- Yes. [Whistles] Boy. I was working there— I think we were working like a
trio format when “Hamp” [Hampton Hawes] was there. It was Hamp, Howard
Rumsey, and myself, just a trio, maybe Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and
then all of the horn players and everybody would come in on Sunday, and
it’d just be a marathon. But I was getting to play, and hating Howard.
- CLINE
- Not your favorite bassist to play with.
- BUNKER
- No, no. I mean, a super nice guy, as nice as you could be, and the fact
that he’s still around and still doing his things, and actually, don’t
include that in printed thing, because nobody would ever understand
that. Howard was responsible for my career starting in this town. He
gave me a chance to play. I played on a Sunday session, the last set,
after being farted off week after week after week after week, but I’d
been told that’s what you do. You go and you— You know. I played the
last set, and he turned to me and he said, “Don’t go away.” This was in
nineteen early, early ’51. And he said, “You got a Local 47 card?” I
said, “Yeah.” He said, “You want to go to work?” I said, “Yeah.” He
said, “You’re hired.” And he fired Larance Marable just because Larance
would throw drum sticks at him, you know, I mean, just, “Play some time,
motherfucker.” And Howard would be on his springboard, that plywood
thing, and back and forth and doing all that. So, it’s like he fired
Larance for me to take his place, which really surprised me, because I
liked the way Larance played. I said, “Fine,” you know. And that brought
me to the attention of all of the other people that came through there
and the audience that came through there. I mean, I run into people to
this day that say, “I remember seeing you at the Lighthouse.” And that’s
fifty years ago. Fifty years ago. [laughs]
- CLINE
- I’m going to actually stop this tape because it’s about to run out, but
do you feel like you want to go a little bit more, or do you want to
pick up next time with this particular period? Because we can go either
way.
- BUNKER
- We can break it off now and maybe go a little longer the next time.
- CLINE
- Okay. I want to pick up with more about the Lighthouse and more about
your playing with Gerry Mulligan and others in the fifties.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Okay.
- CLINE
- Okay?
- BUNKER
- Sure.
- CLINE
- Thank you very much for today.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE MARCH 13, 2003
- CLINE
- All right. Today is March 13th, 2003, and once again here, Alex Cline
with Larry Bunker, at his home on what appears to be an inordinately
sort of hazy day. You can’t see downtown today, but the sun is popping
out. It’s a nice morning. Good morning.
- BUNKER
- Good morning.
- CLINE
- We’re going to continue from where we left off last time, but as is
traditional with these sorts of processes, I’m going to ask you some
follow-up questions about the material we covered last week. One of the
first things I wanted to ask you about was, you were talking about
pivotal musical experiences you’d had as a youngster, in the audience,
that is. We talked about going to Bill Berg’s and particularly hearing
the live broadcasts from there of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
But you also mentioned that due to the good graces and support of your
mother [Clara Josephine Bunker], you heard, number one, Benny Goodman at
the Hollywood Palladium. Could you talk about what that experience was
like, describe that a little bit?
- BUNKER
- And actually although she was alive and I was living with her at the
time, I was, I guess, I may have been in junior high school, I may have
finally been in high school, I don’t remember the year. No, I would have
been in junior high school, because my brother [George Bunker] took me
to the Palladium. There again, I don’t know that I would have been able
to go in, because of my age. He’s six years older. He had a car and was
driving, and that was the easy way to get there. That was very
interesting. I’d never been to the Palladium. I’d never really been to a
dance hall like that. I only remember two people that were in the band.
Louie Bellson was the drummer, and that was right around the time when
he had won some kind of a drum contest and ended up landing the job with
Benny Goodman, or getting the job with Benny Goodman somehow came out of
that, you know. God, I don’t know how old he was. I don’t know how much
older than me he is. I’m seventy-four. But, you know, he was probably
seventeen, eighteen, maybe nineteen years old at the time. And Peggy Lee
was still in the band, was a singer. Other than that, I don’t have any
idea who any of the players were still during the [Second World] War. It
was a chance to hear one of the great swingbands, live in all their
glory, so I had a really good time. I could have been thirteen, fourteen
years old, I suppose, you know. It just made me want to do that all the
more.
- CLINE
- Some people who saw swingbands back then for the first time describe it
in terms that I think people would reserve for rock bands particularly
during the sixties when there was a certain amount of newness to the
experience for a lot of people, the experience of the power of the
bands, the freight-train-like intensity of it. Was it like that for you?
- BUNKER
- Yes, and in subsequent years, as I got older, any disposable income that
I had went to the Orpheum Theatre downtown, because that’s where the
bands played, and that was just the highlight of the week or the two
weeks, whatever it was. I remember seeing Stan Kenton there. Woody
Herman’s band. But I’d go and see any band. I saw Alvino Rey. It didn’t
matter, you know. Ina Ray Hutton and her Clouds of— Whatever.
[Melodears]. Bobby Sherwood. As long as it was a big band, it didn’t
seem to matter to me. It was that experience, not how good the music
actually was. Some of the bands were amazingly dumb, but that’s as far
as the charts were concerned. They still had good musicians. The
musicians were good. But for me, the thrill was you sit through a movie
and selected short subjects, this, that, and the other, and these
curtains would close, and then the projector would come on, and it would
be a big animated thing that would go, “And now,” and a voice announcing
whatever band it was, and you’d start to hear their theme song, from
behind the curtains. Then layers and layers and layers of curtains would
open, and the bandstand moved forward, and it was heartstopping. It was
just heartstopping. I was just— I said, “Fuck. I’ve got to be part of
that. I have to do that. That’s what I want to do with my life if I can
figure out some way to do it,” you know, to be able to make a living
doing that.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So that was exciting, you know, to hear Woody’s band come out.
- CLINE
- Do you remember any of the musicians with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton
at the time, which bands those would have been?
- BUNKER
- Probably at that time it would have been like Vido Musso, that period
that he was with the band, prior to Shelly [Manne]. Maybe Ralph Collier.
Ralph Collier played drums with that band for a while. Anita [O’Day].
You know, I knew a lot of the guys later, but that was by the fifties,
and the band was receiving a lot more prominence. And, of course, knew
the guys that were in the band, a lot of them who then left the band to
settle here, you know.
- CLINE
- Both bands, both Woody Herman and Stan’s band.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- You also mentioned that you had gone to see the Jazz at the Philharmonic
performance at the old L.A. Philharmonic Auditorium.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Can you describe that experience a bit and tell us who was playing?
- BUNKER
- It may have been Flip Phillips. I think the one concert that I saw, Lee
Young was playing drums. I didn’t care for him particularly. Tommy Todd
may have been a piano player. This was all before the Ray Brown, Oscar
Peterson, Buddy Rich period. Those guys were with Norman [Granz] later.
This would probably still have been in the forties. I was probably still
in high school, maybe just out, maybe in the service and in town on a
furlough or something, you know. I don’t really recall. I went to one or
two of those things. I didn’t care for it that much. I was getting more
into the bebop thing, and some of the players didn’t appeal to me all
that much. But any chance to hear live music, whatever money it took,
how I could afford it, because I wasn’t constantly going and doing those
things; I just didn’t have the money for it, you know. But occasionally.
- CLINE
- Especially when you’re younger, it’s harder.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And, of course, swing music was also dance music. Did you engage in any
dancing during these events?
- BUNKER
- No.
- CLINE
- You just listened?
- BUNKER
- Just listened. Just listened. I never did care about dancing that much,
and a few little dances I ever did play, I was always involved with
schlepping the drums wherever, and then schlepping the drums out, and
trying to make out with a girl seemed to be sort of out of the question,
you know.
- CLINE
- [laughs] Yes, the famous Lester Young story of why he gave up the drums
[story refers to Lester Young abandoning the drums because it made it so
difficult to hook up with women on gigs]. [mutual laughter] Did you know
any of the other Young family members? Lester. You mentioned Lee Young.
- BUNKER
- No, never did. Never did. Never met Lester. I got to hear him with
[Count] Basie’s band when he came out of the service and they were at
the Orpheum Theatre, and old Jo Jones was playing drums. Probably it was
still Charlie Fowlkes playing baritone, that huge, enormous man, you
know. As far as any of the others, Earl Warren was the lead alto player
at that time. I didn’t know any of the trombone or trumpet players, I
don’t think.
- CLINE
- Since occasionally when you’ve mentioned people, and you just mentioned
Lee Young and said you didn’t particularly care for his playing, can you
describe at all what it was that may have particularly interested or
attracted you about drummers when you were formulating your own style
and your own vision of your own playing?
- BUNKER
- Something just made me want to play the drums. I mean, it seemed to be
ingrained in me from so early on, that that’s what I wanted to do. As I
had mentioned, playing the piano and kind of teaching myself things
about harmony and so forth was something that came very naturally and
easily for me, but I never did particularly want to be a piano player.
And that used to amaze people. They’d say, “Jesus. You can play,” blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “Why don’t you want to play the
piano?” I said, “It doesn’t appeal to me. I want to hit those things,”
you know. [laughs]
- CLINE
- What was it about certain drummers you think that appealed to you more
than others?
- BUNKER
- Well, probably the first guy that really captured my interest was Gene
Krupa, and, of course, he was thrust into all that prominence with the
Benny Goodman band, and was the first drummer that that had really
happened to. I guess it had happened, even prior to him, with Chuck
Webb, but it’s like Chick, at that time, had not become like a household
name as Gene became. Gene was thrust into all of that spotlight with
Benny Goodman, and he was very obviously attracted to it, very much the
showman, very much the show-off, you know, spotlights and images cast
upon the back of the bandstand, and all of that. He probably was the
first one that really appealed. Buddy Rich, certainly, just because the
blazing way that he played. He was staggering. I mean, you know, from
the time he was “Baby Traps.” I didn’t hear of him or know anything
about him until he came on the scene with Artie Shaw’s band, but again
it was that same sort of thing was happening. There’s be short subjects
at the movies, with ten- or fifteen-minute two-reel whatever things
those were, and seeing him play, and I went, “Jesus Christ. How do you
do that?” You know. Just trying to figure out how he played so fast.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Never did. I don’t think anybody ever did. But with the whole transition
to the bebop thing, you know, it was fascinating to see Jo Jones,
because I’d heard of him and I heard the records on the radio all those
years, and all of the Kansas City stuff, you know, that very unique way
of playing he had. So, all of that. I said, “That’s what I want to do.
That’s how I want to play.” I don’t believe that I ever had any kind of
honest creative spark for playing the drums; it was all pretty much
imitative. It was all what I drew from other people. You know, some guys
come out of the womb just roaring with whatever that is. I mean, Charlie
Parker. Jesus Christ, you know. You hear some of the early, early
records, the Jay McShann things, and you can hear him trying to
formulate exactly what it is he wants to do, but I mean you can hear the
genesis of it there. And Dizzy. Dizzy, the same way. You can hear Roy
Eldridge in very early, early days, but yet he’s trying to break away
from that. He’s trying to get someplace else from that. [John] Coltrane,
same thing. To me, Dexter Gordon and some of the Texas school of playing
in early “Trane.” I was amazed one time how— I heard a record on the
radio one day, and I said, “Boy, that sure sounds like early ‘Trane.’”
And what it was, was Dexter Gordon trying to play like “Trane,” after
“Dex” had already been an early influence, I’m sure, on Coltrane. So the
cross-pollinization, you know, that would happen.
- CLINE
- Right. This actually is getting right into the territory that I want to
discuss, and one of the things is, you mentioned just a moment ago that
you were more imitative, that that this is evidently how you learned to
play. Can you describe the process by which you actually figured out how
to do what you had to do on the drums? For example, did you have anybody
who you were close with who were showing you anything, or was this
totally on your own, just by watching people?
- BUNKER
- Totally on my own. Totally on my own. I remember one time I had thought
maybe it would be a good idea to take lessons. I had some kind of a
book, a method book, that I had probably gotten in grammar school, you
know, which listed rudiments and little reading exercises, and the kind
of stuff that existed at that time, you know, the Haskell Harr method,
and Gene Krupa had a book which was about that thick [gestures], and
Buddy Rich had a book, and it was all the same material, the same
typography, the same drill, you know, just somebody’s name got pasted on
it. And I went through that stuff, and I said, “Well, that’s not really
going to teach me anything.” But there were no musicians around that I
could meet and got to know. I decided that I should take a lesson, so we
found— My mom, I guess, must have looked up music teachers in the phone
book. Got on the streetcar and went to see this guy, with my little drum
sticks and my book. I have no recollection of how old I was. But met the
man, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, little introductory this, that, and
the other. He took out a piece of music paper and he drew a quarter-note
on the staff, quarter-note with a stem. He said, “Play that for me.” I
said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah. Play it.” [hits his thigh with his hand]
He said, “Take him away. He has no talent.” I said, “Asshole. Given the
information that you’ve given me, it didn’t say roll; it didn’t give a
tempo; it didn’t say anything. It was a quarter-note.”
- CLINE
- Didn’t even say it if was a long or a short phrase.
- BUNKER
- It was just a quarter-note. It could have been a sixty-fourth-note. Some
guys like to write like that, you know, for the xylophone, because
that’s about how long the notes last, depending on the tempo. So, you
know, I looked at my mom and she looked at me, and she said, “Let’s get
out of here.” You know.
- CLINE
- [laughs] What was he looking for?
- BUNKER
- I have no idea.
- CLINE
- He just didn’t want to teach you.
- BUNKER
- You know. But I guess I was still accustomed to the authority of my
father and not questioning adults, so I didn’t really question him. I
just made up my mind that he was a total asshole. I didn’t tell him
that, you know. So that was pretty much the extent of my musical
training.
- CLINE
- [laughs] And what about something that has recently had somewhat of a
resurgence of interest, that was a real necessary art at the time, and
something that I think a lot of young drummers struggle with, which is
the brushes. Did you learn the brushes the same way?
- BUNKER
- Yes. I’ve been complimented very highly on that aspect of my playing by
a lot of people, but any finesse that really came about from that was a
lot of practicing at home. This was, by now, as an adult, I never cared—
I only played the brushes out of necessity when I was playing with bands
or in a group. I had a friend— And this is going into the fifties, when
my mom made that house into a rooming house for musicians. She got that
whole other side of the house back from other people. I had a friend,
who’s no longer living, named Gene Gammage. Gene was a drummer. He was
from, I think, Atlanta. Gene was one of those incredibly natural kind of
players. His only claim to fame was that he played for a short time, was
one of the first drummers that worked with Oscar Peterson, and then
lived in New York, worked around, bartended, worked at Bradley’s, worked
at a few other places, accompanied singers. But he’d been a magician
when he was a kid, prestidigitation, cards, I mean really card lunatic,
could do stuff. And he had that kind of coordination, that kind of
kinesthetic skill. He got hooked on the drums; he started playing the
drums. In six months’ time, he had ferocious chops, ferocious, all
totally self-taught. He gave up being a magician; he wanted to be a
drummer. So he lived in my mom’s house and, like I say, we had set of
drums and, at this point, a vibraphone as well as a piano in the living
room. And we used to practice playing the brushes. He could play fast as
a son of a bitch, and it was like, “How fast can you play?” Well, this
preceded tape recorders. This was at a time when you bought 45s, 45-inch
EPs, and put them up on the Girard turntable and set the speed to 78. So
you could get blazing tempos, you know. Blazing tempos. Sounded funny as
hell. But we sat there and we practiced on magazines or on telephone
books and so forth, and had cutting contests with each other, and just—
It was weightlifting, really, to develop those kind of chops, you know.
But all of that was a result of those kinds of things and the kind of
thing you do when you’re a kid. If you’re lucky enough that you’re doing
some work and you don’t have a day gig, then you spend your days
practicing. And that’s what I was doing.
- CLINE
- Did you also develop with something that I think now is considered a
challenge for people, although, of course, it was what was happening
then, how you develop the swing feel, is this something that came
naturally to you?
- BUNKER
- It came natural. Came naturally. That’s the way the music was played,
you know, and every drummer, you became aware of how differently the guy
sounded on record, because there was the most minute dissection of a
record, you know. I mean, getting to a certain place and listening to
something and practically wearing the record out, you know. There was
kind of a seminal recording that Count Basie’s band made in early
fifties, called “Queer Street,” and an amazing chart. I don’t know who
wrote that arrangement. The style of writing was totally different than
anything his band had ever played, and totally different than anything
anybody’s band was playing. There’s a two-bar drum fill on there that
was played by Shadow Wilson, that is one of the classic drum breaks of
all time. Absolute classic drum break. And where it came from, I have no
idea. But I wore that record out, learning to play that, you know.
- CLINE
- Wow. And you mentioned that your brother was able to assist in getting
you an actual set of drums after your sort of what you called polyglot
kit.
- BUNKER
- Pots and pans and stuff, yes.
- CLINE
- What was that drum set, your first drum set?
- BUNKER
- I had a snare drum that had been bought at a local music store. I think
it was later than the very first drum that I ever had. It was probably a
twenty-two-inch, maybe a twenty-four-inch single-tension bass drum,
white paint on it. The small tomtom to go up on the bass drum was a
wartime Ludwig or a Slingerland, which had wooden lugs. They had metal
inserts in there for the tension rods to go into, but the lugs were
actually like rosewood.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- The floor tom was a field drum that I stole from my high school, and
took the snares off, and had some kind of a fold-up tripod stand for it,
and my big right cymbal was a thirteen-inch Zildjian.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- And got some hi-hats someplace. So that was the drum kit. But, I mean,
he presented most of that to me when he came back from the service. He’d
been in the South Pacific, in the Airborne Engineers, jumping out of
airplanes.
- CLINE
- And this actually— Since you mention that, this is one of my questions.
You were separated from your brother; he was in the Pacific theater, I
take it.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Can you describe what that was like for you and your family, having him
in that sort of really, I’d imagine, frightening situation?
- BUNKER
- Scared. Scared all the time. Worried, you know. I had lost my dad, and I
had grown up enough to somehow establish some kind of relationship with
my older brother, and then I was suddenly scared of losing him. Mom had
gotten a job, and I was going to high school and trying to figure out my
life, you know.
- CLINE
- Did you think that the war might continue and you might get drafted and
see action?
- BUNKER
- I don’t know that it was a big concern. It wasn’t until I was about
seventeen when I actually did enlist in the service, and then the war
was over. Hiroshima had happened. War in the Pacific war concluded. War
in Europe had wound down. So that the prospects were getting back to
some kind of normalcy, you know. The economy was booming because of the
wartime thing, and the Depression was, to all extents and purposes, over
with.
- CLINE
- You were between wars.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- You lucked out.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Boy, did I.
- CLINE
- And also you had just mentioned a moment ago that you had a vibraphone
in the house at this point as well. What was your first vibraphone?
- BUNKER
- One that I still have. It was a Musser. I was living in the Monterey Bay
[California] area at the time. I was married, had had a son, and that
was falling into the toilet. I think I’d mentioned before the experience
of working with this organ trio.
- CLINE
- Yes, and getting the little Leedy vibe.
- BUNKER
- Yes, the little Leedy vibe. I knew that it had become time for me to get
the hell out of there. I was separated from the lady, and ended up
working with like a cocktail lounge quartet—piano, bass, drums, tenor—at
some hotel in Monterey, and the guy found out that I could play the
vibes a little bit. I needed to get a vibraphone, so I went to a music
store in Monterey, and here was this big black and gold lovely- looking
thing, you know. It was a Musser, Century 75. I still have that thing
down in the warehouse. It’s very beat, but it was a good instrument. So
that was the first vibe, and with that, then I set about trying to teach
myself how to play that.
- CLINE
- Right. And how did you do that? You mentioned, before, you had to work
on arpeggios and learning to cross hands and all those complications,
basically learning how to aim. [Bunker laughs.] Was that just another—
- BUNKER
- That was pretty much it.
- CLINE
- Practice.
- BUNKER
- A lot of practicing. I came to understand that you were expected to be
able to play four-mallet chords.
- CLINE
- Right. That was getting there. [laughs]
- BUNKER
- I couldn’t quite figure that out, so when I first started, it was three
mallets, one on the left and two on the right, but at least make some
kind of chord sounds. And somebody showed me how to hold the sticks; I
don’t remember who.
- CLINE
- Wow. So, at the time that you were beginning to play more, you’d
returned from Monterey. You were back in L.A. in the early fifties.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- You were playing now jazz gigs on both drum set and vibraphone.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Was there one that you were being hired to play more than the other?
What was the percentage like?
- BUNKER
- I think it was primarily drums. I think it was more drums than the
vibes, but the vibes did figure into it, and it just kind of depended on
what came up, what was available, you know. People seemed to like the
way I played the drums. There were gigs that came about where they
wanted me to do both. That posed a transportation problem, but at least
by this time I had a car that I was old enough to drive, and had a
license and could afford it, you know.
- CLINE
- And before I forget about it, since you mentioned seeing Benny Goodman’s
band with Louis Bellson earlier, I wanted to ask you, first off, since
you mentioned the influence of Gene Krupa, were you disappointed not to
be seeing Gene Krupa?
- BUNKER
- Oh, by this time Gene probably had his own band and had been away from
Benny. I’m sure I had seen him at the Orpheum Theatre.
- CLINE
- You had already seen him then.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And was Louie using two bass drums at that point?
- BUNKER
- I think so. It seems to me that he was. That was pretty much his early
trademark.
- CLINE
- Right. Interesting. And what was your reaction?
- BUNKER
- Fierce chops, you know, just all of that amazing finger control thing
that he apparently got from Murray Spivak.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I’ll tell you in confidence that I’ve never been a big fan of Louie’s.
To me, Louie has essentially played the same drum solo for fifty years,
and there again, it’s absolutely blazing, blazing chops, and for me
emotionally what it boils down to is, so what?
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I’ve never heard that spark of greatness in him. A fabulous technician,
nice, nice man, but so what.
- CLINE
- And also when you were learning to play the drum set, you were also
imposing the transition on yourself by moving from the swingband style
into the bebop style. Is this just another situation where imitation was
the way you dealt with this?
- BUNKER
- Yes. Absolutely.
- CLINE
- Was there anything you can say about the adjustments that you had to
make from the swing style to the bebop style?
- BUNKER
- By this time, here and there was a smattering of books. Oh, Christ, what
is the guy’s name who pioneered all of those books and exercises in
independence coordination?
- CLINE
- Jim Chapin?
- BUNKER
- Yes. So, you know, Jimmy Chapin had a book out [Advanced Techniques for
the Modern Drummer]. So I bought the book and I said, “Uh-huh. I see.”
But spent a lot of time trying to learn how to play the bass drum, snare
drum, licks, while you were keeping the time going, because you didn’t
do that when you were playing swingband drums, you know. It was another
thing. Either playing lead-ins or fills or little— You know. And it was
just a lot of time spent trying to figure that stuff out, you know. And
actually, when I was in the service, that was all starting, because by
now it was 1947, late ’46, all of ’47, early ’48, that I was in the
service, and so when I didn’t have anything to do, I had decided that I
was going to correct my grip. I never did try to play matched grip. That
started in England, you know, and nobody was doing that here. But there
was still a dearth of exercise material, so I just wrote exercises for
myself and said, “What if I did this? What if I did that? What if I—.”
You know. I was trying to get a lot of the rudiments together, because
I’d never really practiced the rudiments. And I said, “I understand what
you’re supposed to know how to do those and what their names are,” you
know. And started making up exercises out of that stuff, but displacing
things, or changing the sticking, or changing, if you were going to play
a double paradiddle, put the diddle on the down beat or on the second
and third eighth-note or the third and fourth eighth-note, and get used
to trying to stick things that way. I’d seen exercises like that in a
George [Lawrence] Stone book [Accents and Rebounds]. I’d gotten the
Stone book and I said, “Well, this is just child’s play,” until I tried
to do the exercises exactly the way he said to do them, you know, play
so many iterations of this and move to this line, and you step on your
dick. [Cline laughs.] You just couldn’t make the transition. And just
spent an inordinate amount of time that way, because I said, you know,
you’ve got to have the independence, you’ve got to have the
coordination. Started working on things of “What if I did this instead
of that?” Or, “What if I played [sings eighth-notes with accents on the
upbeats] instead of [sings eighth-notes with accents on the downbeats]?”
You know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And worked on that kind of stuff. But again, it was just really teaching
myself how to do it, you know. [tape recorder off]
- CLINE
- Okay. We’re back. I wanted to ask you that since you were somewhat
unique in playing melodic instruments and the drums, in fact,
simultaneously, so to speak, is there anything about your knowledge of
melodic instruments that you think affected the way you thought about
playing the drums or heard the drums?
- BUNKER
- I would certainly think so. I know that I’ve never done any teaching. On
a few rare occasions, I did maybe a little coaching with people, and
found out that I didn’t feel suited to it and didn’t particularly— It
wasn’t anything I was interested in doing. I didn’t need to do it for
the money, you know. A lot of people teach because that’s how they make
their living. But I would have people say things like, “Well, how is it
you always know where you are?” You know. I guess they think that you
have to be playing a melody instrument or something related to a rhythm
instrument or something, to have that sense of where you are if you’re
playing song-form things. I said that’s just always been totally
natural. I’ve always, always had that sense of where it is. I mean, I
can remember that from being very, very, very young. I’ve never been one
to play extended drum solos free-form; that doesn’t appeal to me. Again,
Louie Bellson can do that so much better than I can, you know. And
always because of playing jazz, anytime that I would play a solo, in my
mind it was the form of whatever the song was, and that’s not hard,
because most tunes are twenty-two bars long, you know, in AABA form or
ABA or whatever, or blues. But I remember when I was playing with Clare
Fischer, Clare played a lot of material of his own. And we had a
rehearsal and there was this tune that he had written, and I kind of
knew it, but I hadn’t really committed it to memory yet and I hadn’t
really thought about the form. So we’re rehearsing and I’m playing, and
I’m playing along and playing along, and finally suddenly I just stopped
and I said, “Wait a minute. When we get to the bridge, how long is the
bridge?” Because it was an odd form. It was an odd number of bars in the
piece, and it may have even been one of the things that we did in
something other than 4/4, like it was in 7/[4] or 5/[4]. And I said, “I
can’t play, because I don’t know where I am in the piece.” And he felt
that was one of the most amazing things that anybody had ever said to
him, and he said, for a drummer to say that, you know. But I mean, I
really couldn’t play, because I didn’t know where I was in the song. So
that has always been of primary importance to me. I know that as I
developed as a vibraphone player I would find myself breathing in the
phrases that I would play, as if I were blowing a horn, and I don’t know
how that came to me, to do something to do, but I found that it went
better. The cohesiveness of a line worked better for me if I thought in
those terms, in actually breathing, even though there’s no connection,
you know, between the steam table, as I call it. [mutual laughter]
- CLINE
- Right. I’m going to turn the tape over so that we don’t lose any of your
thoughts due to negligence.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO MARCH 13, 2003
- CLINE
- Okay. Everything appears to be back in working order. Do you think your
awareness of playing actual melodies affected the actual material that
you played particularly in solos on the drums?
- BUNKER
- I’m sorry. Ask me that again.
- CLINE
- I guess there’s another way of asking it. Would you consider your
approach as a soloist on the drum set to be influenced in any way by
your melodic knowledge? Would it be a melodic style, for example?
- BUNKER
- Yes, yes, I think so. I think so.
- CLINE
- Was this something that you also gravitated to in other drummers that
influenced you, perhaps, a melodic sort of approach? Or do you think it
was something fairly unique to the way you were hearing the drums?
- BUNKER
- Well, it’s a hard one to answer. Soloistically— Jesus. I don’t know. I
know that it has affected me, thinking melodically. I’m sure that sort
of thing has affected other drummers. I don’t know whether— The guys who
I used to listen to the solos, particularly, a lot were Philly Joe
[Jones], although he was very drumistic, very rudiment oriented. You
could hear that he spent a lot of time doing that sort of thing. Shelly
[Manne] was an amazing drummer in that respect, and Shelly was another
guy, I think— He started playing when he was a teenager and was working
in six months. He was working after he had been playing the drums for
six months’ time, and then went in the Coast Guard. I remember once
saying to Jerry Goldsmith something about Shelly, because Jerry used him
until he [Shelly] died, and Jerry loved his playing. I said something to
him; I guess what it boiled down to was that Shelly really could barely
play the drums. And Jerry said, “What in the hell are you talking
about?” I said, “Well, hear me out.” I mean, his chops were so bad in so
many ways, and yet he made more music with the drum set than virtually
anybody I’d ever heard. I said, “You can’t listen to him for chops. You
have to listen for the music that he makes with the drums.” And to me,
that was really true. He was amazing that way.
- CLINE
- Definitely. A lot of drummers talk about a main influence on them in
terms of hearing soloing in a more melodic sort of way was Max Roach.
Would you say that that was correct?
- BUNKER
- I think so. I think so.
- CLINE
- I hear that as being different from the way you’re thinking of playing
melodically.
- BUNKER
- Yes. I copped very few licks from Max. I enjoyed his playing. I heard
him a lot. He lived out here for six, eight months, and I got to hear
him quite a bit during that time when he was at the Lighthouse and then
later when he formed the group [the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet]
with Clifford Brown and Harold [Land]. I got to know him slightly; never
did really hang out with him. I got quite a bit of bad black vibe from
him, and I said, “Fine. You think of me however you wish. That’s your
business.”
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- “And if there’s a problem, that’s your problem.” I wouldn’t have a
problem with it, you know. You were asking about influences. I had
mentioned when I was still in high school that I had become an enormous
fan of the Woody Herman band and the old Herd, before the first Herd,
when Dave Tough was still in the band. Dave became ill and declined in
his health. He was replaced by Don Lamond. I used to hear the radio
broadcasts that they did for Wildroot, and I hated the way Don played,
hated the way he played. I said, “Jesus Christ.”
- CLINE
- What about it? Why did you hate it?
- BUNKER
- His drums were very floppy and sloppy-sounding. The snare drum was
really very wide open. This is all before plastic heads; just calf heads
and so forth. This is sometime in the middle forties. I was so
accustomed to the way Davey played, and this guy was nothing like Davey.
Couldn’t figure it out. Then there was a short regrouping, and now
suddenly we had the first Herd, with Stan Getz, Herbie Stewart, Al Cohn,
and Bill Harris, Shorty [Rogers], different trumpet players. And Don
suddenly was tuning his drums very differently, but I still didn’t like
the way he played. I went downtown and saw the band at the Million
Dollar Theatre. They changed venue from the Orpheum to the Million
Dollar. Then I went to a ballroom in [Pacific] Ocean Park. Was it the
Aragon? The Aragon Ballroom? I think that was it, on the pier at
[Pacific] Ocean Park. Of course, the pier’s not even there anymore.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And the band was roaring. In the midst of saying to myself, “I’ve got to
figure out how I can get up to Woody Herman and say, ‘You’ve got to give
me a chance to do that, because this guy cannot play,’” you know, the
arrogance of youth, probably all of seventeen years old at the time, and
right smack in the middle of something, Don played some shit and I went,
“Oh. That’s what he’s doing.” A big light bulb went on and I spun around
180 degrees, 1800 degrees, and he became my hero. He absolutely changed
the way I thought about the drums, the way I played them, the way I even
approached them.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- And I can’t begin to tell you what it was that caused that to happen.
Just something. Suddenly his time feeling clicked in. Suddenly the sound
of the drums clicked in. The shit that he was playing just made all the
sense in the world, and the way he approached playing with that band. It
turned me totally around. Pretty much up to that time, most of the big
band drummers that I liked were— I mean, I’d heard guys with the
swingbands that were around, aside from the locomotive that Buddy Rich
was in any of those bands, and I can’t even remember who any of the
drummers were, you know. Jack Sperling with Les Brown. Dick Shanahan
with Les Brown. You know, dumb bands like Ralph Marteri and Charlie
Spivak and this, that, and the other, the drummer Moe [Maurice] Purtill
with the Glenn Miller band, for chrissake, going back that far. They had
kind of a set formula way of playing. And Don was totally outside of
that. It wasn’t until another couple of years later I’d been hearing
about Tiny Kahn, and I saw Tiny Kahn with Charlie Barnett’s band. I was
up in northern California. I think I saw him in San Francisco, San
Francisco or Oakland. But I’d been hearing about Tiny, and I understood
that he was also an arranger and he was doing studio work in New York. I
heard him with that band and I said, “Okay. Now I get it. Now I get what
they’re talking about.” He was directly responsible for Mel Lewis and
now Jeff Hamilton. Jeff Hamilton is an absolute killer drummer for me.
His time feeling is so gorgeous. His sound is so gorgeous. The feel is
just— You know. But Jeff came out of Mel, and Mel was the son of Tiny
Kahn. There may have been some guys that influenced Tiny, and I’m sure
there were. Maybe some of the black guys, Lunceford and Basie’s band,
and this, that, and the other. Whether that came out of Jo Jones, I
don’t think so. I don’t know where Tiny came from. Anyway, Don was an
enormously influential player for me, and in later years I got to know
him a little bit. We became kind of phone pals. Every couple of years
I’ll call him up. He’s eighty-some-odd years old, still alive and well
down in Florida, still playing.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- He’s had both hips replaced. Last time I talked to him, he sounded kind
of old. His voice was starting to sound like an old man. But I hear he’s
still doing it.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- And he was very appreciative of me. He complimented me highly. He said,
“I’ve been hearing all these years all that shit that you’ve been
doing,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. Nice as he can be. Nice
as he can be. And he and Jeff have apparently an ongoing very long,
long, good relationship.
- CLINE
- You don’t hear much about Don Lamond. And it’s interesting, because, of
course, Dave Tough was Shelly’s big role model.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- The drummer before him. So the lineage continues.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- I added on here to ask you about Don Lamond, because you had mentioned
him. You mentioned the racial thing a moment ago in connection with Max
Roach, and also the Lighthouse, and these are two areas I want to hit
on. While you were playing in L.A., getting cranked up into the regular
jazz scene, you clearly were playing with musicians who were both black
and white, and at that time there were, as we mentioned earlier, two
unions in Los Angeles, the [American Federation of Musicians] Local 47
for the white musicians and the [Local] 767 for the black musicians.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Then in the fifties there was a movement to amalgamate the two unions.
- BUNKER
- Right.
- CLINE
- What are your recollections of that?
- BUNKER
- At the time, I was barely aware of the fact that there was a second
union. I was a member of the union. I had joined the union in the
forties when I was fourteen years old, during the war. But I had not
thought about the idea that there was a second union. The musicians
union was in a building that was down on Georgia Street in downtown Los
Angeles, and it was part of, I think they called it, the meatcutters
union. That’s where I had gone for my audition to give them my little
$20 or whatever it was , and play a paradiddle with the drum sticks, you
know, and the guy said, “You’re in.”
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So at some point in the fifties, there was this movement afoot, and also
to get the union into Hollywood, and I remember that petitions were
circulating. I said, “That’s exactly as it should be. I’ll sign this.’
In fact, one of the people that handed me a petition to sign and he
said, “Here, motherfucker. Sign this,” was Charles Mingus. [mutual
laughter]
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I knew him very, very casually. He was at the time with Red Norvo. He
and Tal Farlow had that trio and were working clubs around town and
restaurants, and I got to know Red a little bit and I got to know Mingus
a little bit. I think probably one of the most meaningful exchanges I
ever had with him, aside from that, was in later years playing in New
York at Birdland, and running into him in the kitchen. I think he was
just there as a guest; he wasn’t playing. But he had gotten to know Art
Pepper, and Art was in and out of the joint and going through his
things, and he said, “Is Art Pepper still alive?” I said, “As far as I
know. The last I heard, he was.” He said, “Is he still doing that shit
to himself? Tell him that I said he can stop doing that now. It’s no
longer hip.” [mutual laughter]
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- That was sometime in the fifties. I don’t remember when it was, whether
I was working with Maynard [Ferguson]’s band at Birdland or whether I
was with Georgie Auld on the road someplace, you know.
- CLINE
- So do you remember anything else about the movement to amalgamate the
unions?
- BUNKER
- No, not really. It’s just that it seemed like, you know, it was, to me,
a stupid idea to have both.
- CLINE
- You weren’t part of any actual movement or you didn’t participate in any
activities?
- BUNKER
- Not really. Just sign some petitions and agreed that it should happen,
you know. The guys I knew, there was hardly ever any talk about going
down on Central Avenue, which I guess there was some building down there
that was probably an old converted house, I imagine, like so many things
were. I knew Sonny [Criss]; I knew Teddy Edwards; I knew Hamp [Hampton
Hawes]. I’m trying to remember if— I don’t know that I ever played with
either Art or Addison Farmer. I knew of them. Occasionally I was playing
with like Gerry [Gerald] Wiggins and guys like that, you know. But that
was up in Hollywood or here and there. The Lighthouse was, mercifully,
pretty much integrated with all of that. I don’t remember there being
that many black people in the audience, but as far as the bandstand was
concerned, that was happening. I remember working out in Glendale—this
was early fifties—and hearing that some black musician that was working
out there got rousted around just because it was after dark and he
wasn’t supposed to be in Glendale after dark. I said, “That’s fucking
insane, you know. That’s insane in this day and age.” It was still going
on, but I guess I was just oblivious to it because most of the guys that
I hung out with at that point were the black guys. These were the people
that I played with and these were the people that were my friends.
- CLINE
- You had mentioned that even when you were younger, you, I think you used
the term “went with” an African American woman.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- How did that go down in the neighborhood, considering how things were
back then?
- BUNKER
- It seemed like it went down okay, because the people that I knew knew
her, and it was a very clandestine relationship. She was married, she
had kids, her husband was a policeman, and so, you know, very low
profile.
- CLINE
- I’m sure.
- BUNKER
- She’s no longer living. She was a little older than me. But as far as
being out socially, that was all very discreet and in the ‘hood, which
was up like around Jefferson and Western [Avenue] and up in that area of
town. That’s where she lived. So nobody really seemed to look askance. I
think that sometimes she felt a draft from people. But, I mean, in
hindsight, when I read about things and going back to the fifties and
realizing how much of that did exist here, certainly, certainly existed
in many other parts of the country, but apparently happened more here
than I was even aware of. I could have just been kind of floating along
in my little musical world and not paying too much attention to societal
situations, you know.
- CLINE
- Did the music scene seem pretty harmonious, as far as that went, among
the musicians?
- BUNKER
- I think so. I think so. Probably the most disharmony came when Ornette
Coleman showed up, just because people suddenly were saying it’s the new
“Bird,” and others were saying, “You’re fucking crazy. That guy can’t
play.” And I was of that opinion. I’d never been a fan of Ornette’s.
I’ve heard a few pieces of music that he’s played that, to me, were kind
of charming, but he never did kill me, you know. It was just this funny
guy with the white plastic alto that came from Texas or Oklahoma,
wherever he was from.
- CLINE
- Texas, yes. Were you familiar with, or did you know or play with any
people who became the members of his band, Don Cherry or Charlie Haden?
- BUNKER
- No. Ed Blackwell was one of his drummers.
- CLINE
- Right. And Billy Higgins.
- BUNKER
- I never did really get to know Billy. I like Billy’s playing. Billy had
that wonderful dancing time. He became very, very well known for that.
But I never really got to know Billy. Heard him mostly on record. I got
to the point where I was not going to clubs and hearing a lot of music;
either the work schedule, being married, and changing tastes. And when I
did go to hear groups, it was mostly whoever the big headline guys in
bands were that were playing in clubs in L.A., you know. Certainly go to
see Miles [Davis] in all of those incarnations. Horace Silver. Art
Blakey. I remember seeing Art Blakey. The first time I ever saw him was,
he was the drummer in Buddy DeFranco’s band. He and Kenny Drew and
Eugene Wright, later of the Dave Brubeck thing, had a band that was
working some strip joint down on Hollywood on Cahuenga Boulevard, you
know. I actually met Art then and got to know him a little bit, hung out
with him, went to see Cinerama with him. We sat there going like [adopts
wide-eyed, open-mouthed facial expression], “God, what is that?” [mutual
laughter] This is Cinerama.
- CLINE
- Right. And I just drove by it on the way here.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Still there. Art Blakey. Did you enjoy his playing?
- BUNKER
- Yes. Just all piss and vinegar, all fire, just [makes ferocious,
growling sound], you know. No chops. No chops at all, but it didn’t
matter. He had that fire, you know.
- CLINE
- To return to the subject of the Lighthouse now, Howard Rumsey got you
the gig at the Lighthouse.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- You said the bands were pretty integrated, as a rule.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- We talked about the brutal schedule on Sundays particularly.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And you mentioned the audience a little bit. How can you describe sort
of the ambiance and what the scene was like at the Lighthouse when it
was really the happening place in the area?
- BUNKER
- By this time, that whole exodus of players had come off of Woody and
Stan’s band and were settling in the [San Fernando] Valley and taking
turns working at the Lighthouse, and the whole Shorty Rogers, Jimmy
Giuffre, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper thing was happening, and the West Coast
cool, which didn’t appeal to me all that much. I played with all of
those guys. I recorded with all of those guys. I really wanted to be
like a New York player, and probably this was where all of the finesse
with the brushes came from, because nobody wanted me to play with
sticks. You don’t play with sticks with these guys; you play brushes.
- CLINE
- Interesting. Yet some of those old Lighthouse records, it’s sort of
pretty high intensity, hard bop performances.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Compared to the reputation that seems to follow it around, it’s kind of
tame.
- BUNKER
- Because by this time, too, ’52 had happened, and I had played with Gerry
Mulligan and Chet [Baker] for about six months. I took Chico
[Hamilton]’s place and then finished out the gig at the Haig, and then
they got busted and jailed and one thing and another, you know.
- CLINE
- I’m going to ask about that in a minute.
- BUNKER
- And I still cannot, to this day, remember the chronology of all that and
how it happened and when it happened, and who went to jail and who
didn’t. I’ve heard conflicting reports about all of that from people,
and they say, “Well, you were there.” I say, “Yeah, and I don’t
remember.” I came in, I made my ninety bucks a week, and did what I was
told, and let it go at that.
- CLINE
- But before we get to Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, more about the
Lighthouse. Can you describe the scene for us a bit, the kind of people
who went there? I know they served Chinese food, things like that. It’s
near the beach, obviously, in Hermosa Beach.
- BUNKER
- It smelled like the beach. [Cline laughs.] No, I mean, you know, there
was always sand on the floor, wet, damp sand underfoot. John Levine was
the owner, kind of a loud, rambunctious guy. He was okay. He was good.
He was good to us. It was a very white crowd.
- CLINE
- Young? Old? Male? Female?
- BUNKER
- Probably twenties to thirties, to even forties, good mix of men and
women. Enthusiastic. They liked the music and they showed it very much.
They were very enthusiastic. There was this seating arrangement that
they had set up, where it was almost like communal tables. How the hell
was it? The bandstand was right in the middle of the room, up against
the west wall, but it wasn’t booths. The bar was on that side, back
door, and the johns were back there. Front door was up this way. But
these— They weren’t tables, but they weren’t booths. It was like these
rows of platforms that you could lean your elbow on, like almost
communal tables. Airplane seating, you know, that kind of went around
this way. I guess they were able to shoehorn a whole bunch of people in
there with the seating that way, rather than having tables that took up
space or booths that did that. There may have been a booth or two, some
booths back along the back wall someplace. And then upstairs was the
band room.
- CLINE
- Which was about as big as a closet, as I recall.
- BUNKER
- Yes, yes. Is it still there?
- CLINE
- It’s still there. It’s the Lighthouse Café. It’s mostly a restaurant
that I guess does have live music, but it’s not a jazz club, really,
since Rudy Onderwyzer sold it, whenever that was, a long time ago.
- BUNKER
- Who sold it?
- CLINE
- Rudy Onderwyzer, the guy who took it over.
- BUNKER
- Did Rudy have that?
- CLINE
- He ran the Lighthouse after the heyday was over. He was booking at
Shelly’s. Yes, he ran the Lighthouse.
- BUNKER
- I didn’t know that. That’s weird.
- CLINE
- He sold it to open a club in Marina del Rey called Hop Singh’s, which
didn’t last too long.
- BUNKER
- I remember Hop Singh’s, because I remember that going on. I played down
there a couple of times. I worked down there with Mike Melvoin and Jim
Hughart, and then played with Bob Florence’s band down there one night,
the only time Bob ever hired me. I was hired and fired right away. But I
think that was after Nick Ceroli had passed. Boy, he could play. He was
a good drummer, good drummer. He sounded fabulous with that band. So
anyway, yes, it was very pleasant down there.
- CLINE
- About how long were you ensconced there?
- BUNKER
- Six or eight months. I’m trying to remember. Did Howard let me go to get
one of the other guys, or did I quit? God, I can’t remember. The end of
’51, early ’52. I may have left to go on the road with Billy May band,
and by that time I don’t remember when Max came in. Stan Levey came in
for a while, and then Shelly.
- CLINE
- Stan Levey replaced Max, I know.
- BUNKER
- And then I guess Shelly must have replaced Stan.
- CLINE
- Yes. So you realized your ambition to play in a big band by taking the
gig with Billy May’s band.
- BUNKER
- Yes, which really was not exactly my cup of tea, with the sweeping
saxophones and all that, but, you know, it was something that I’d really
always wanted to do, so I took that opportunity to do that.
- CLINE
- And then we enter the period where you were playing with Gerry Mulligan.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- We want to talk about that. You remember how you got that gig?
- BUNKER
- It seemed that I had played a jam session or two with him. I had met
him. I certainly knew who he was, because all of the Birth of the Cool
things had come out in the late forties, you know, that whole Miles
tentet idea.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So I knew who he was from his having worked with Claude Thornhill,
sessions and things. I don’t know if I’d heard Chet yet. Probably the
trumpet player that was most known around town was Jack Sheldon. I knew
Jack before I knew Chet. So the group was a smashing success at the
Haig, Bob Whitlock and Chico. Chico had to leave. He had a wife and
kids, and he usually worked for Lena Horne, and it was time for him to
go back out on the road with her and make a living, you know. So I think
Gerry kind of auditioned me, and I got the gig. There wasn’t apparently
a lot of searching for somebody.
- CLINE
- Your style is very different from Chico’s.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Very, very.
- CLINE
- Chico perhaps could be described as a more eccentric player. Any views
on what— Well, did you have any feelings— I mean, did you feel like you
had to fill an expectation on Mulligan’s part?
- BUNKER
- No, no. I’d heard the records. I had the records. I heard the band.
Pianoless quartet, interesting. I just set about playing the way I felt
like playing. Other than telling me, “Not so loud,” you know, and,
“Listen,” that was his whole mantra, was, “We have to listen, listen to
each other,” listen this, listen that, but I pretty much set about
playing the way I felt like playing, and didn’t try to do what Chico
did, you know.
- CLINE
- That wasn’t difficult for you? You didn’t feel any pressure?
- BUNKER
- No, no.
- CLINE
- Before I get more into the Mulligan thing, I wanted to ask you, since
you mentioned all these horn players and now you’ve mentioned the “Not
so loud” factor from Gerry Mulligan, were there any notable musicians
that you played with at the Lighthouse, that you wanted to talk about?
Anybody who, for example, allowed you to play really the way you wanted
to play and weren’t always telling you to play brushes? Or any memorable
people sitting in or anything like that?
- BUNKER
- No, not really. The guys that I played with, it was very early on in the
Lighthouse thing, and there were just the Sunday marathons. When I was
there, it was like Thursday, Friday, Saturday was rhythm section night,
was Hampton Hawes and Howard and myself, and maybe occasionally somebody
would sit in. But that wasn’t happening that much, and the whole
star-studded thing happened when all of the guys came in off of Kenton’s
band and Woody’s band. I’m trying to think of the only other trumpet
player I can remember that was any kind of great shakes, was Stu
Williamson. Stu was around at that point. It was mostly saxophone
players, you know, “Coop” [Bob Cooper], Bud Shank, Art Pepper, whenever
he could get there.
- CLINE
- How much of a sense did you have of Howard Rumsey’s musical directorship
in the way thing s went?
- BUNKER
- Well, he stood on his springboard, this platform, plywood platform that
he liked to stand on, and he just called tunes. Later, when Shorty and
“Giuff” [Jimmy Giuffre] and Coop started to be there, then it was like
they were supplying original material. I guess Howard just would kind of
count things off, you know, sometimes. The other guys seemed to be
almost the titular leaders of the group, you know, and Howard would just
be kind of looking around.
- CLINE
- Did you get a sense that he had a lot of influence in the direction of
how that all evolved over there at the Lighthouse?
- BUNKER
- No, I don’t think so. I think he probably just left that in the hands of
the guys that were doing that, you know.
- CLINE
- Okay. So when did Chet Baker enter the picture now?
- BUNKER
- It was ’52 or ’53, and I can’t remember exactly when it was that I
joined the group. My feeling was that it was maybe late ’52. By that
time I’d already been out on the road with Georgie Auld. We traveled,
just he and I, and picked up the bass players and so forth. I was
playing the drums and vibes with him. I remember we worked in Chicago.
He hired a drummer, a guy he knew there, and I just played vibes, at the
old Blue Note. I think the bass player was Johnny Frigo, who’s still
alive and around and still playing, who was a very capable bass player,
but he was known mostly as a jazz violinist. We worked in St. Paul, and
Lou Levy played piano. Lou married a woman whose family was in the
medical supply business, I think, so he was living in St. Paul and doing
up a lot, you know. Worked in Philadelphia, some place on the North Side
and another place on the South Side. I think that’s where I first heard
Philly Joe, I believe. But this was probably all in ’52, and by late ’52
or early ’53, then I joined the Mulligan group. That just lasted about
six months, but did a few albums. Then after the group disbanded, I did
an album or two with Chet. I never traveled with Chet; I just recorded
with him. His drummer at that time was a fellow named Bob Neel, N-E-E-L,
who apparently just recently passed away. I think he ended up in the
real estate business. Pretty good player. I forget if Carson [Smith]
played with him. That’s when he and Russ Freeman got together. But Chet
was amazing. Chet was absolutely an amazing player. He was a rotten
fucking human being, just really, just an impossible juvenile
delinquent, you know. Because, I mean, I used to see him kick his wife.
He was married to a lovely blonde lady named Charlene, and he’d kick her
ass in a second, you know, physically I mean. We’d take a ten-minute
break that would turn into twenty, thirty minutes, and he’d be out in
the parking lot behind the Haig with somebody [points to his crotch]
taking care of that, you know.
- CLINE
- Servicing him.
- BUNKER
- Just a bad guy, but, god, what a player. What a player, you know. How
that kind of lyricism and beauty can come out of that corrupt a soul, I
don’t know, but there it is. Stan Getz personified.
- CLINE
- Is there anything more you’d like to say about Gerry Mulligan, working
for him, what he was like?
- BUNKER
- I tried to get to know him; he wouldn’t allow it. He just was very
standoffish. I think that he was an extremely bright man. I think that
he was totally aware that he was an extremely bright man, and had, to
me, those kind of conflicts going on. But I made my attempts. I was not
into drugs, and they were, and that puts up— You know, if you don’t
participate, if you’re not part of that little inner cliquey group, then
you’re on the outside. And I chose not to be involved in that. I drank.
I drank, and I ended up drinking excessively for many, many years. I
like to say that I got an entire lifetime’s worth of boozing done in
fifteen years, you know. Did that and then straightened up my act and
went on, because I saw where it was leading. But as far as drugs, scared
to death of them.
- CLINE
- Did you feel pressured by anyone to inbibe?
- BUNKER
- No, not really. I mean, a few times I smoked a little grass, I’d be with
some people, and la, da, da, da, da. But as far as trying anything hard,
I just said, “Not me.” And I never felt pressed, like, “You ain’t hip if
you ain’t doing this,” you know. “Here, have some of this.” That just
didn’t really seem to come about, thankfully.
- CLINE
- Yes. When did the drinking period start?
- BUNKER
- Early fifties, and lasted until about ’67.
- CLINE
- You were able to play, though? You were able to function.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
- CLINE
- Interesting.
- BUNKER
- Functioned quite well behind it.
- CLINE
- Okay. After the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, the Chet Baker experience and
recording with Chet and all that, what did you move on to from there
during the fifties?
- BUNKER
- Was hired by Barney Kessel to play drums on the Bob Crosby television
show. Bob Crosby had had a radio show up to this time, and he switched
over to— He was, I guess, with CBS [Columbia Broadcasting System], but
they switched to the television format. Television City had just been
built on Beverly [Boulevard] and Fairfax [Avenue], and so the show went
in there. The band was Barney was the leader; Arnold Ross was the piano
player; bass player was a fellow named Morty Corb, who was more known as
a Dixieland player, but this was Bob Crosby and his Bobcats. Tenor
player was Eddie Miller; trumpet player was Ray Lynn, whom I had only
known of as having been in Artie Shaw’s band. And that was it. So it was
five-day-a-week, half-hour network television show that actually paid
some real money, and I jumped into that and I said, “Shit, yeah.” What
else am I going to do? That lasted about six months, and then I got a
call from Jimmy Rowles, who had become one of my very favorite piano
players, to go to [Las] Vegas with Peggy Lee. So then I entered into a
period of playing for her and accompanying singers. Went back to Vegas,
at the Sands, with Billy Eckstine, watched him kind of integrate the
Sands Hotel, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes. Las Vegas was a very segregated town.
- BUNKER
- Oh, god. You know, Louis Armstrong had worked up there and rather than
go through coming in the back door and doing all that shit, he went over
on the west side and stayed over there, and stayed back in the kitchen.
Nat [King] Cole was making some inroads. Billy was making some inroads;
at least he got to stay in a penthouse suite at the place, and he
managed to get accommodations for Bobby Tucker, who was his pianist at
the time. Bobby’s barely darker than me, but with Negroid features and
freckles and reddish hair, you know. But he got to stay in a motel that
was probably owned by the Sands, that was next door. He didn’t have to
go over on the west side. So things were changing a little bit. So I
worked up there with “B” [Eckstine]. That was easy. Nice guy, fun, and I
had always enjoyed his band, that big band that he had with Bird and
“Diz” [Dizzy Gillespie]. Christ almighty, out of tune, out of tune like
a bitch, but, boy, it was hot. It was a hot band.
- CLINE
- Okay. Do you want to continue a little bit more?
- BUNKER
- Sure, we can.
- CLINE
- Okay, because I’m going to change tape so we don’t run into a problem.
We’ll take a break.
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE MARCH 13, 2003
- CLINE
- Okay. This is tape number three. It’s March 13th, 2003, continuing the
interview with Larry Bunker. So you’re doing some gigs in [Las] Vegas,
you were working with Billy Eckstine, Peggy Lee, singers, various things
like that, moving through the fifties now. How can you describe Los
Angeles during the fifties at this point?
- BUNKER
- It had to have been extremely different than what it is now. I mean, I
drive by places in Hollywood and I say, “What used to be there,” where
the main branch of the Bank of America is. Can’t remember. [Wallach’s]
Music City was across the street. They tore that down and built a stupid
mall. They’ve torn that down and now they’re putting up something else.
NBC [National Broadcasting Company] was across the street, their
television studios, and the recording studios were where that Great
Western [Bank] is now, which had been Home Savings [and Loan]. All of
that was torn down when they built the NBC Burbank studios. On the
southeast corner was a drive-in. I used to go there and get hamburgers
and french fries and read science fiction during the day, you know, and
then go out and play at night. Just slower, slower. Stop signs still
were wigwags, you know, the big silver thing, and one arm would come out
and say “Stop,” and then the other arm would come out and say “Go.” I
don’t remember when they finally took out the streetcar tracks. They
still had the red car driving on Hollywood Boulevard.
- CLINE
- So we can have buses.
- BUNKER
- The Hollywood Freeway ended out by Universal [Pictures]; that was the
end of it. And it had not become the 101 yet. So if you wanted to go
anyplace beyond Lankershim [Boulevard] in the [San Fernando] Valley, it
was all surface streets. There were a few clubs out in the Valley. Larry
Potter’s Supper Club, whatever that was. I remember doing Monday night
jam sessions out there. A place or two in Burbank, someplace up on
Lankerskim Boulevard. That’s where I used to play with Jack Sheldon. I
don’t remember the name of it. But, you know, by ’53, Gerry [Mulligan]
was over. ’53, the [Bob] Crosby show. ’54, doing Peggy Lee, this, that,
and the other. And by this time I was starting to work in studios.
- CLINE
- Right. This is where I’m heading.
- BUNKER
- Yes, because I had done my first motion picture. I’d done a few record
dates, mostly jazz things, but I actually did my first motion picture
call in ’52.
- CLINE
- That’s pretty early.
- BUNKER
- That’s pretty early.
- CLINE
- Apparently some studio people used to go down and listen at the
Lighthouse, and this is the way some of those guys got into the studios.
How did you get invited to play in a studio call?
- BUNKER
- The very first call was from a man named Phil Coggin. Phil was the
contractor of the staff orchestra at Paramount Pictures. He was an old
Russian viola player who ended up here, ended up in that position, and
they were going to be doing a source music cue that Franz Waxman had
written, that required vibraphone and possibly some improvisation. Now,
they had staff musicians that probably could have done that, and there
were other vibraphone players in town that certainly had been working
and were better known, but apparently Phil’s instructions were to get a
jazz player, because maybe there was some improvisation. And the other
guys didn’t really improvise. So he started checking around and he asked
some people, and somebody said, “Well, I saw this kid down at the Haig
playing with somebody,” you know, on Monday night or a Tuesday night.
Not with Gerry. This was actually before then. So he called me up and he
said, blah, blah, blah, “You can play the vibraphone?” “Yeah.” “You play
that boop beep, or whatever they call it?” [laughs] Nice grandfatherly
old Russian gentleman. And I said, “Yes, I do.” “Well, let me give you
this call.” So he gave me a call for whatever it was, and then he called
back a few hours later and he said, “Well, you must play the drums, too,
don’t you?” I said, “Oh yeah.” “Well, let me give you some more of these
calls.” I ended up with like eleven percussion, doing soundtrack for
this movie, because this was the cinema predecessor to Hogan’s Heroes,
which I also would have done—
- CLINE
- Stalag 17.
- BUNKER
- Yes, Stalag 17 . So I went in there, and the guy in charge of the
percussion section, his name was Bernie Mattenson, nice old guy. He’d
been with like Ted Weems’ orchestra and come up through vaudeville and
played everything. Played drum set. He was a timpani player, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. He was very nice to me. But I think, you know, there
were some other guys that were with other orchestras, and I remember
that Dick Shanahan was on the call, Alvin Stoller may have been on the
call, and a couple of guys that were on staff at Paramount [Pictures].
Anyway, so, you know, he handed me a bass drum beater and said, “Go over
and hit that.” I just kept my eyes open and my mouth shut, you know,
tried not to make any mistakes. So it came time to do this source music,
which was a day or two later, and luckily I’d been there and had this
piece of music that was about four pages long, that was all four-mallet
chords.
- CLINE
- Whoa.
- BUNKER
- Which I was really not that comfortable with yet. And the sixteen bars
of ad lib somewhere in the middle of all of that. So I got a chance to
pretty much woodshed it and memorize it, so I didn’t step all over
myself, you know, when the time came, because I was really in over my
head. I had no business in the world being there, but I was stuck in it
and it came off okay. And the next thing I know, Phil Coggin is calling
me to work. Early, early television was starting, and then starting to
do things at Review, which became Universal, doing shows with Benny
Carter and a guy named Stanley Wilson, who was head of the music
department at Universal, and just little pictures that were going on.
Stuff out in Culver City, you know, My Little Margie , stupid little
half-hour comedic shows, but being thrown in there, thrown in there,
thrown in there. And MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer] doing, all of a sudden,
pictures with Leith Stevens, who did The Wild Ones , the Marlon Brando
thing.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Somewhere along in there I hooked up with Johnny Mandel. He hired me to
do things, and I played vibes for him. I play vibes for him to this day,
fifty years later. When he did I Want To Live, Susan Hayward, some story
of some woman who murdered her husband or something. So that just all
started to happen, you know, plus club work at night, and gradually,
gradually the fifties were kind of rolling to a close. Maynard Ferguson
had been on the staff orchestra at Paramount when he left Stan Kenton.
He married and had adopted a stepdaughter, and he was getting tired of
it. He was getting tired of all of that. He was busy day and night
because everybody said, “We’ve got to have all that. We’ve got to
have—.”
- CLINE
- Those high notes.
- BUNKER
- The altimissimo playing. He put a band together, had charts by Manny
Album and a few Bill Holman things, but he put a smallish band together
and worked at Birdland, made a record, came back out, decided that he
wanted to be a band leader, and he had Mel Lewis. Mel was here by this
time. Mel had come through town with Tex Benecke’s band, which is where
I first met him, he and Buddy Clark, and then he went with Stan Kenton
for a while, and it’s the best that band ever sounded, you know, and
they were doing a lot of Bill Holman charts, and that was the best music
that he’d ever had to play. But Mel had settled here, so Maynard put
this band together that was three trumpets, two trombones, four
saxophones, and a rhythm section. They were working around town, and
they worked at a place on the corner of Hollywood [Boulevard] and
Western [Avenue] that was not Jazz City. Jazz City was on the south side
of the street. This was on the north. There’s a taco stand there now.
It’ll come to me. Mel didn’t want to go on the road. He played with the
band, but he didn’t want to leave town. He was just getting himself
established. He hit on me, “Would you like to work on the band?” And I
said, “I think I’d better do that, because I may not have a chance to do
it again.” You know, the bands were in decline. Woody [Herman] had
worked with a quintet or sextet. [Count] Basie had worked with a sextet.
Stan had shut the band down. You know, the big band thing was virtually
gone. I said, “If I don’t do that pretty soon, the opportunity is going
to be gone.” I said, “I’m not married, living at home with my mother
[Clara Josephine Bunker]. I’ve got no nut; I’ve got a car. Got what
instruments I need.” I was starting to collect percussion equipment
because I saw that handwriting on the wall. So I went out for about six
months with Maynard’s band. We toured the East; worked Birdland a lot;
worked in Philly a lot; worked in beach cities in New Jersey; worked
Boston, summertime. And did that about as long as I could stand to do
it, and then wired my mom, “Take out a loan on my insurance policy so I
can get a new set of tires for my car,” because I was traveling,
handling my own instruments, and driving my own car. We didn’t have a
bus. We didn’t have a band boy.
- CLINE
- Oh, wow.
- BUNKER
- Maynard was about to the point where he could afford to have a band boy,
and instead, he hired Irene Kral, and, boy, was I pissed off. I was
really pissed off. Although she became a friend, a dear friend. She
married one of the trumpet players in the band [Joe Burnett]. So I got a
set of tires and drove back to Los Angeles, and that was the end of my—
Well, almost the end of my road experience. This was, by this time, late
’57. ’58, ’59, ’60 went by without any real incident. There I was really
pretty much establishing myself as a studio player. I was beginning to
think of myself as a studio player. I was working nights. By 1960, the
[Shelly’s] Manne-Hole had opened, and I had become friends with Shelly
[Manne] and I was recording with all of those guys, with Shorty [Rogers]
and Bud [Shank] and doing stuff for— I keep thinking that the name of
the record company is Everest, and I don’t think it is, because Everest
was essentially a classical—
- CLINE
- Yes, a budget classical label.
- BUNKER
- But a guy named Red Clyde came out here and did a ton of recording, was
in the studio every day, you know, and this was at the height of the
whole West Coast thing that was happening, and I was one of those
people. The drummers really were Shelly, Mel, myself, Stan Levey, and
that was pretty much it. And then the other guy was Alvin Stoller and
Irv Cottler and those guys, who were really primarily studio players,
you know. And Alvin didn’t get hired that much for any jazz-oriented
things. He did a lot of Capitol recording for the Capitol artists, and
was a good player. I’d first seen him— He had to take Buddy Rich’s place
with Tommy Dorsey’s band. That was not an easy follow.
- CLINE
- No.
- BUNKER
- But that pretty well, you know, was gigs here and there, here and there,
here and there, but primarily working days and going in that direction.
- CLINE
- How did you like that direction?
- BUNKER
- I liked it. I was learning things all the time. I had taken a gig at a
little club in Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore, with Bobby Short. I
needed a job; I needed to make some money. This very kind of campy
saloon singer, I’d heard him. I said, “Well, is that something you want
to do?” Well, not really, but what the hell, you know. It’ll pay the
rent. So I took the gig with him. I had to audition, and auditioned for
him. He loved the way I played, but he said, “Now, the critical thing
is, do you play conga drums?” I said, “No.” “Well, if you’re going to do
the gig, you’ve got to play the conga drums.” I said, “I don’t want to
play the conga drums.” I said, “I don’t know how to play the conga
drums.” Here we go again.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- He said, “Go down to the drum shop and get some kind of a conga drum and
just make believe that you can do it.” He said, “It’s part of my act. I
have to do that every set. So if you’re going to play for me and you
want the job, you’ve got to do that.” I said, “Okay.” So I went to Drum
City, and, you know, at that time the conga drums were still like a
pickle barrel, and these heads that were nailed on. They didn’t have
tunable hardware; that just was starting to come into being. So I went
and got a conga drum and shucked and jived my way through some of that,
and got interested in Latin music as a result of that, because again,
one of the radio stations that played jazz—and it was probably still an
AM station—had a disc jockey named Lionel “Chico” Sesma. So he was
playing all of this music with “El Rey de Timbal,” and I was hearing
Tito Puente. And all I knew about Latin music up to that point was
Xavier Cugat and some of the Mexican bands, the Mexican swingbands. I’m
trying to think. Andy Russell, who was a singer and had a band. And
there’s another guy that was billed as like the Glenn Miller of Mexico;
I can’t even think of his name now. But that’s all I knew about Latin
music, when I heard those things. All of a sudden I heard Tito Puente
and I said, “Holy Christ. Wait a minute.” Now, right around that time
was probably when I went back east with Maynard’s band, and we were
working at Birdland. And up the street from Birdland was a place I
believe called the Palladium, a second-floor dance hall, and Tito’s band
was playing there. I went up to hear that, and I said, “Holy shit. It’s
a whole other brand-new thing.” Music I did not know about, I’d never
considered before. It was like Count Basie’s band with a Latin rhythm
section.
- CLINE
- [laughs] Right.
- BUNKER
- Really, I mean, that’s kind of how he patterned it, you know, big brass
section and trombones and saxophones and all of that. No conjunto , no
nice polite quintet or anything. To me, the only thing that was really
missing was a kick drum down at the bottom of all that. But when Tito
played the timbales , it was insane. And I saw that band with Potato
[Valdez], Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo, who was a utility percussionist
in the band, and a kind of rotating cadre of guys, and I just went
[whistles], “Good lord, what is this?” And the chicks were insane. Oh,
my god, you know. [laughs] Amazing. Amazing. But that generated my
interest in Latin music, so there I was with Bobby Short, making records
with him and playing this café music, this funny stuff that he still
does. God, how old is he by now?
- CLINE
- I have no idea.
- BUNKER
- Ageless. Nice guy. Nice guy. And never made a pass. [Cline laughs.] You
know.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- I’m sure he knew that I was—
- CLINE
- You weren’t his type.
- BUNKER
- I didn’t bend that way.
- CLINE
- [laughs] Interesting.
- BUNKER
- And didn’t embarrass either of us.
- CLINE
- Did you ever harbor the dream of making it as a jazz musician in New
York?
- BUNKER
- I certainly did. I thought about it and thought about it. I had done the
Perry Como show when I’d gone back there sometime in the fifties with
Peggy [Lee], and we were on some kind of a tour. I had guys ask me,
“You’re Larry Bunker,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “And you play the
vibes and you play the drums, and you’re very good. If you would like to
stay here, I can see to it that you can get a [American Federation of
Musicians union] card.” And I thought about it. But something about New
York just put me off. Don’t know what it was. And I had harbored the
feelings of wanting to be back there and wanting to be the next hot
thing, you know, and I said, “It’s going well in California, and I’m
sleeping in my own bed and not on the road, not really, except for a
minute,” and that began to have an appeal for me, and that balanced, I
think, the need to try to be the next hot thing. I think I also knew in
my own mind that I was not going to be the next hot thing, you know. I
was hearing Elvin Jones.
- CLINE
- Yes, by then.
- BUNKER
- By then. And Tony Williams was about to burst on the scene. I said,
“God, I wish it was within me to be one of those guys, but it’s not.” I
just kind of knew in my own heart where my abilities were and what I was
really capable of doing, and not, and made that choice.
- CLINE
- Before we finish up here, there are a couple of things I wanted to
follow up on that you mentioned earlier. You obviously played a lot at
the Haig. Is there anything about that club that you can share, that you
can describe for us, or anything memorable about it? Characteristics?
- BUNKER
- It was just a funky old craftsman kind of house that, you know, interior
walls had been knocked down and it had been turned into this saloon,
which was licensed, I think, to hold fifty-five or sixty people, and
typical craftsman style, you know, with the big riverstone supports that
held up the roof, and a walkway that went down to the sidewalk. John
Bennett was one of the owners, and he had a partner named Marvin
something. I don’t remember Marvin’s last name. But they actually were
willing to enforce Gerry Mulligan’s dictums that it be quiet, and they
had a cash cow on their hands. They had this hit group. They had
standing room only, lines out the door, down the street, every night,
and if Gerry said, “Be quiet,” they said, “Be quiet.” They would tell
the customers— I had never seen that before. John was a little kind of
nerdy-looking guy, had frizzy brown hair, kind of sucked his teeth and
sniffed a lot, blinked his eyes a lot, but he seemed like a nice guy.
Marv was dashing handsome, beautifully cut suit, starched shirts, kind
of a bald head, very pink, tanned ladies’ man for sure, but I mean, they
really enforced those rules and made sure that we could play and do what
we were there to do, and that was a revelation. Most other clubs, it was
just rowdy time.
- CLINE
- Anything else you wanted to say about it?
- BUNKER
- That was it for the Haig. Other than that, it was nondescript, you know.
- CLINE
- By then most of the jazz is happening in the Hollywood area pretty much?
- BUNKER
- Yes. How the Haig came into being there I don’t know, but it was on
Kenmore [Avenue], directly across from the Ambassador Hotel. On the
other side of the Ambassador Hotel was either the Peacock Lane or the
Peacock Alley, and whichever one that one was, was what the name of the
other place in Hollywood was, where the taco stand is now, where I
worked with Maynard’s band. It was either the Peacock Lane or the
Peacock Alley. Also playing in there with groups, also a guy named Lenny
Bruce, you know. Lenny was coming on the scene at that time. Anyway, so
Stan Getz would be in town with Bob Brookmeyer, and Bob was turning
people around. And they’d come over and sit in at the Haig, and that’s
where I first heard Pete Jolly. Pete had just come to town from Arizona,
I think he’s from. Howard Roberts was a player that was around at the
time, making some noise. I worked a lot of those kind of gigs with
Barney Kessel, with Conte Candoli. Conte was in town by that time. And I
loved “Count.” He was a bitch. He could really play. Barney wasn’t a lot
of fun, but, you know, he was a big name. He was a big star, and you get
a gig and there it is. But anyway, all of that with the fifties was
coming to a close, and I was back home, off the road, and not playing
for singers anymore, except records.
- CLINE
- You also mentioned Jimmy Rowles. Is there anything you wanted to say
about Jimmy before we finish?
- BUNKER
- One of the most unique musicians that has ever walked the face of the
earth, an absolute original. To me there has never been anybody that
came remotely close to the way he played, and a lot of people didn’t
really understand what he was and what he was doing. An amazing player.
Amazing. I think the only person that I can think of that had been an
influence on him was probably Duke Ellington. I hear smidgens of Duke in
Jimmy’s playing, but as far as his feel, the melodic sense, his harmonic
sense, the sound he could get out of any piano, any piano, I’d hear him
play a C-13 and I’d have to go over and look at his hands to see what he
did, because I said, “How does it sound like that?” And you’d look, and
there was nothing strange going on, no funny doubling or leaving things
out or any of that. He had a very unusual way of playing. His hands, he
had enormous reach this way [between the thumb and the little finger].
And I’ve got a bad finger that got broken a couple of years ago. But
most of the time when piano players play and comp, if they play, you
know, a major seventh, a minor seventh, or an octave, they’ll play the
top note with their thumb. That’s an easy reach. Jimmy’s hands were so
stretched that he played those always with his little finger and his
index finger, so he could play root, fifth, major seventh, tenth, which
he did all the time, which just having that many notes and he’d lay that
in there, and do it in D-flat, where it’s a much further stretch for the
thumb to get to the F-natural, you know, from the D-flat, and he just
had this spidery, crablike thing that he could do at the keyboard. I
loved him. I loved him dearly. Amazing player. I got to play with him
quite a bit, quite a bit.
- CLINE
- Okay. Well, I think that will do it for today. I’d like to pick up with
the beginning of the sixties next time, talk a little bit more about the
studio work, maybe a little more about Shelly Manne and the Manne-Hole,
and the whole West Coast thing, where that went.
- BUNKER
- Yes, and we’ll get into my period with Bill Evans at that time.
- CLINE
- I was going to say, and we’re heading into the Bill Evans period now,
which is obviously key. So, thank you very much for today, and we’ll
continue when we reschedule.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE MARCH 27, 2003
- CLINE
- Okay. Today we now know for sure is March 27th, 2003. This is tape
number four, in the third session with Larry Bunker. I’m Alex Cline.
It’s an exceptionally windy Thursday morning here in Mr. Bunker’s home
on the hill. Good morning.
- BUNKER
- Morning.
- CLINE
- I wanted to follow up with a few items from last time, before we head
into the late fifties and into the sixties. Some of the things I wanted
to ask seem maybe a little bit somewhat trivial, but one of the things I
wanted to ask, we talked a lot about the various swingbands that you
used to regularly go see at the Orpheum Theatre, and we talked a lot
about the whole influence of swingbands on your musical development, and
some of the drummers that you heard and some of the bands. I wanted to
know that since it’s very common for people who are particularly active
listeners during that era to have a preferred band or bands, I wanted to
know if you had a favorite swingband, the one that you really were
influenced by especially.
- BUNKER
- Woody Herman, primarily, and this would be like at the beginning of the
First Herd, you know, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, Pete Candoli, those
people, Davey Tough, and then, of course, Don Lamond, whom we talked
about, replacing Davey, but still with that same band, the same
personnel. Then the formation of I guess what was called the First Herd,
which was the Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, you know, that lineup.
- CLINE
- The “four brothers.”
- BUNKER
- Yes, the “four brothers” thing. That and probably Count Basie. I
listened to [Stan] Kenton a lot. It took me a long time to outgrow that,
because in later years I realized how kind of really pretentious and
overblown all of that was, but it was so different than anything else
that was going on at the time, and to an immature mind, it was easy to
be captivated by that. So those were PX the real, real favorites, but, I
mean, I would listen to anybody. As long as it was fifteen, sixteen guys
playing for dancing, that was where my heart was.
- CLINE
- And we talked a bit about your first drum set, and we talked a bit about
the transition from the swing style to the bebop style. I have to assume
that at some point along the way here you got a different drum set.
- BUNKER
- Oh yes. I had had that drum set that my brother [George Bunker] gave me,
I guess it was when he came back from the South Pacific once the [Second
World] War was over, and he had been furloughed home. I don’t remember
when he came home, but it was before Japan surrendered. He’d been
wounded, not seriously, but enough so that it was time to be rotated
home and all of that. So he came back in ’44, maybe very early ’45, so
that’s when he showed up with a bass drum and a couple of cymbals and a
tomtom, you know. Once I graduated from high school, which was in June
of ’46, I was seventeen years old, and I couldn’t get anything going.
I’d been in a number of the [American Federation of Musicians, Local 47]
union since I was fourteen or fifteen, but there was no work. Sweeping
floors in a factory someplace, and trying to figure out how the hell you
go about meeting other musicians and getting something going. I couldn’t
seem to get anything happening, which is, you know, pounding the
pavements. I guess I may have mentioned that the hostilities were over,
but a declaration of peace had not really happened yet. They were still
drafting people for an indeterminate amount of time, and the GI Bill was
going to go off in September of ’46. I talked to my mom [Clara Josephine
Bunker]. I said, “What do you think? Should I just go on and enlist in
the service and get that done with?” Because if you enlisted, you could
go in for a year and a half. Guaranteed eighteen months. And she agreed
with that. Somewhere along in there I’d seen an ad for a set of
Slingerland drums, Radio Kings, at the union on the bulletin board or
something. Have no recollection of what they cost, but I’m sure it was—
You know, Radio Kings, Gene Krupa model, snare drum, rack tom, floor
tom. It was probably a twenty-four-inch bass drum, and some stands
stuff. I don’t remember if there were any cymbals. It may have even been
a complete set of drums for a couple hundred bucks. So she took a loan
on her insurance policy and got the drums, and went into the service and
took those drums with me. So that was the first real honest-to-God—
That’s a very lengthy answer to a short question.
- CLINE
- It’s okay.
- BUNKER
- But it was that, that got me past the pawn shop stuff that my brother
found for me. Actual matching set of white pearl real honest-to-God
professional drums, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. Which we would now covet as being vintage.
- BUNKER
- Oh yes.
- CLINE
- When you then got involved in playing bebop, did you go to a smaller
bass drum?
- BUNKER
- I waited a little while. I replaced that drum set sometime in the
mid-fifties, and I switched over to Ludwig and got smaller drums, and I
was starting to work. You know, the first work that I was doing, when I
went to the Lighthouse, that was that Radio King set of drums that I
had, and the guys were really looking at the size of the bass drum. “Are
you kidding?” [laughs] Because all of a sudden twenty-twos and even here
and there a twenty was starting to show up, you know. Nobody was really
tuning their bass drums that high. Nobody was really going for like a
Tony Williams or a Jack DeJohnette sound, like a sixteen- or an
eighteen-inch floor tom lying on its side with a pedal attached to it,
you know. That came later, which made sense because it got the drum up
out of the frequency range of the bass, so that you didn’t just muddy
the bass. It was a separate voice, and it was much, much, much higher
than what bass drums were at that time, when they started to be called
kick drums. I still hate that term.
- CLINE
- I despise that term. [mutual laughter] Also, since we were talking about
swingbands, you toured later with Maynard Ferguson’s big band.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- You talked a little bit about the somewhat arduous nature of the touring
experience, but you didn’t go into much detail about some of the people
in the band, and there are a couple of people in particular that I
thought were rather interesting who were in that band. You mentioned
Irene Kral.
- BUNKER
- Yes. When we left town, Joe Maini was the lead alto player, whom I had
played with quite a bit and knew. There’s a tenor player that had been a
friend of Maynard’s, who was an arranger, not highly skilled, but
competent, named Willy Mayden. Anthony Ortega was on the band, “Batman.”
- CLINE
- Right. He’s one of the people I wanted to bring up, because we have an
interview with him in our series.
- BUNKER
- That’ll be great.
- CLINE
- Yes. He’s one of the people that has been really overlooked, I think.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- What was it like working with Batman?
- BUNKER
- [gestures with his hands as though they are a bird in flight, and
whistles eerily]. [mutual laughter] He is sweet as can possibly be. He’s
a nice, nice man. He’s just kind of out there, you know, and I can’t
really elucidate in what way that is, you know. Bob Burgess was on the
band, Bobby Burgess, trombone player. There were two trombones. I don’t
remember who somebody else was. Trumpets were Ed Leddy, who was an
amazing player from Washington, D.C., who ended up giving up music and
going into psychology. I don’t know what that was about. But a brilliant
lead trumpet player. Joe Burnett was second trumpet, and he was the guy
that married Irene Kral, and their daughter is a gifted cellist, works
in town; Jody Burnett. A guy named Tom Slaney; I don’t know where he
came from. They had three trumpets and then, of course, Maynard. Bass
player. We had a couple of bass players. We weren’t blessed with strong
ones. And a piano player’s name escapes me at the moment.
- CLINE
- Was it Bobby Timmons?
- BUNKER
- Bobby came later. Bobby replaced the guy that left town here, because
Maynard took the band essentially from here, and when we got to New
York, Joe Maini couldn’t work with the band because he had been busted
in New York and couldn’t get a police card, and they were still adhering
to that archaism. A guy named Jimmy Ford took Joe’s place and worked
with the band. I guess he was living in New York, and it seemed that he
was from Texas. He was a wild lunatic kind of an off-the-wall player.
Baritone players. A black fellow named Tate Houston. I don’t know
whatever happened to him. He was a good player. So this was ’57. We had
a kind of integrated band. I think the original bass player, whose name
I can’t remember, was from here and was a black guy also. And, you know,
we worked the eastern seaboard. We were in and out of Birdland a lot, so
we were working opposite the Hi-Lo’s, which were still an active touring
group. That’s where I met Clare Fischer, when Clare was with the group,
playing piano with them at Birdland. Worked in Boston; worked in
Atlantic City; up and down, up and down the coast, just, you know, kept
at that for— I mean, we’d worked out way across the country doing
one-nighters, essentially, and I was playing drums and vibes, and
setting up my own drums and vibes.
- CLINE
- Schlepping the whole shebang.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- But I did that for about six months and I said, “I think that’s enough.”
I got to fulfill that wish, you know, to play with an almost big band.
It was one short in each section, so three trumpets, two trombones, four
saxes, and a girl singer.
- CLINE
- And by then you were already doing studio work out here.
- BUNKER
- Oh yes. I’d been doing that since ’52, ’53, you know. In fact, when Mel
Lewis said he did not want to go and would I have eyes to do it, I said,
“I’d better do this because I don’t know if I’m ever going to have a
chance to do it again,” either because of my own economics and the
fragility of the big band business. It was virtually nonexistent.
- CLINE
- You described the initial experience you had playing in the studios and
how you felt like you were actually— I think the words you used were
that you had no business being there. [Bunker laughs.] How did you
adjust over time to more and more studio calls and their demands?
- BUNKER
- Well, it seemed like I kept being thrust into situations that I was kind
of prepared for, not eminently prepared for, but somewhat. There was a
man named Dave Klein, who was the older brother of Manny Klein, who was
a legendary trumpet player in town, who was one of the big contractors.
He was a contractor for Columbia Pictures, which had a staff orchestra
at that time, still, and independent records, contracting for Decca
[Records] and those groups, and Capitol [Records], on and on and on.
Word got around, and, you know, I could play the vibraphone, I could
play the drums and the kind of pop music that was going on at the time,
and he had been a musician. I think he was a violinist. I just got the
distinct feeling that every time I got a call from him it was for
something that was a little more advanced than what I did before. I just
had that feeling. I never talked with him about it. I never became
particularly friendly with him. He was kind of a gruff man and stayed to
himself. But each situation that I was thrust into, it seemed like there
were a little bit more, and it was just like he was kind of finding out,
which is what I think a really good contractor does. It’s not like
you’re suddenly the new hot guy. And you don’t know what he can play,
you don’t know what his abilities are and what the limits of his
abilities are. And there were contractors at that time that were all
musicians or ex-musicians, and had been active in that field and knew
how to evaluate a player’s ability. And I think for their own
reputations and for the reputation of an up-and-coming player, that
that’s what they did, because that’s the way it worked, unlike today.
[mutual laughter] There are many people that have ended up as being
music contractors that had no musical background; either they’re
secretaries or CPAs or maybe failed attorneys or whatever, but backed
into it from that end of the business and have to rely totally on the
judgment of trusted colleagues to tell them who’s good and who’s not.
- CLINE
- Indeed. And I imagine this also involved having to learn, or at least
encounter more and more instruments that were new to you.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Exactly, because I had started acquiring instruments. I know that
the first time I ever played a xylophone was at Decca Records, and it
was like there was a xylophone in the storage room, and instead of it
being on vibes, they wanted it to be on xylophone, and they said, “Well,
you play xylophone, don’t you?” I said, “Oh, yeah, sure.” I didn’t even
own a pair of xylophone sticks, but luckily there were some in the
instrument, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And the balls-out egotism of youth, you know, like you jump off the
building because you can’t get hurt because you’re young. You don’t know
any better.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And I kept jumping off of those buildings in the studio and somehow
landing on my feet, you know, and they’d say, “Oh, god, that’s great.
You can do that. You can do that.” And I’d related earlier the
experience of working with Bobby Short and getting involved in playing
hand percussion and Latin instruments and so forth, and suddenly
becoming enthralled with that.
- CLINE
- Yes. Right.
- BUNKER
- And when I’d worked with Peggy Lee, she always had a conga drummer. I
mean, it was from Jack Costanzo to Chino Pozo, who was a cousin of Chano
Pozo’s, and then she ended up with a wonderful player and a guy, named
Carlos Mejilla, who apparently took his own life over some family kind
of things. But we had worked together with Peggy, and one day he took me
aside and he said, “Okay, you play good enough, you should have some
good instruments,” and then he set me up with the very beginnings of the
people that were here in town that were going to manufacture stuff like
that, Gon Bops and Mariano Bobadilla and those people, and custom-made a
pair of drums for me out of black walnut, and had Bobadilla make the
hardware. It was just the beginnings of the wrench-tuned hardware. And
from that I learned to play the conga drums. I still have those drums,
and a lot of guys really like those drums. It’s possible now, you know,
a lot of people, Toca and a lot of other people, make superb
instruments, but at that time it was almost like you had to get them
custom-made. They just didn’t exist. Pine barrels and some hardware
stuck on there, and that was it, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- So I got a set of bells and I got a marimba someplace, kept watching the
newspaper. I was single, I was living at home with my mother and I was
starting to acquire instruments. Bought a pair of used timpani.
- CLINE
- I was about to ask. What about timpani? How did you get into learning
how to get the pedal thing together?
- BUNKER
- Well, that took awhile, but during all of that fifties, even into the
sixties, probably into the seventies, I didn’t play the timps that much.
I had some drums, and I acquired more and more because I kept seeing
that you had to have a lot, you know. I know that the standard
complement for a symphony orchestra is four drums, maybe five, depending
upon the literature. But I kept working studio calls where most of the
time I did not play timpani, but I was working with other guys that did,
and saw that it was pedal, pedal, pedal. The writers wrote whatever they
felt like writing. They thought that anything was possible. They’d write
you parts that you’d ideally have to play on a KAT, a MIDI [musical
instrumental digital interface] controller, into a sampler, you know,
but that didn’t come along until a lot later. Gradually my interests
changed, and I guess sometime in the eighties I started paying more
attention to the instruments and getting better drums, kind of reworking
things. At the time, I guess it was in the eighties when Alan Ferguson
and Jack Elliott formed what they referred to as “the Orchestra.” It
underwent a lot of metamorphosis. It’s now the Hank [Henry] Mancini
[Institute] Orchestra, or it’s something else. But they called it the
Orchestra, then they called it the New American Orchestra, and then they
renamed it something else, and now I think, after Jack passed away, it’s
into another incarnation. I did a concert out at UCLA last year with
them. But the percussion section was going to be Emil [Richards], Joe
Porcaro, myself, a lady named Judy Chilnick, who had been a friend and
colleague of Jack’s from Hart Conservatory back in, I think, New Haven,
Connecticut [Hartford]. There would have been a rotating stable of
drummers, depending upon who wanted what, you know, whether it was John
Guerin or Harvey Mason or Steve Schaeffer. If you’re going to do a
concert, you have whoever you want, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Because we got all these guys. And Emil just said, “You play timps.”
[mutual laughter] So I started playing timps and started playing in that
context, and it was the first time that I’d really done that much,
because I didn’t play timps that much in the studios. A lot of it was
Lou Singer. At [Twentieth Century[-Fox [Film Corporation] it was a man
named Hal Reese, who was ancient at that time, but could play. He had
been at [Walt] Disney [Productions]; he’d worked on Fantasia . He ended
up at the Fox studios, and he was still on call there even after the
studio orchestra ceased to exist. He waited until he was in his eighties
to retire.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- Very generous man. He always treated me with the utmost respect, didn’t
call me “kid,” and kept kind of pushing me out there. Instead of hogging
the difficult xylophone parts, he gave me the difficult xylophone parts.
So it was almost like a mentoring thing that went on. One or two guys
were paranoid with jealousy if they saw talent that maybe they didn’t
have or couldn’t approximate and they’d step on you some kind of way,
but there was only a couple of guys that were that way. Everybody else
was really warm and wonderful, and ready to give advice, ready to help.
“How do you do that?” You know. And tell you, and give you the right
answer, not the wrong answer. [mutual laughter]
- CLINE
- Did you get many opportunities to play drum set in the way that you had
grown accustomed?
- BUNKER
- Yes, because there was more and more of that happening. Once Shelly
[Manne] came into town, I had a little brief window of opportunity there
as a bridge from the older guys to the younger players. Johnny Mandel
was starting to do films. It wasn’t long before Mancini was coming on
the scene. These kinds of composers that insisted on people from the
dance band world being in the orchestra even added to the studio
orchestras. That was happening. Because the studio orchestras didn’t go
out of existence until 1957, so that after that, then every orchestra
that was called was essentially a freelance orchestra.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- But Mancini insisted on his players. I mean, Lionel Newman wanted to
like salt the orchestra with every single person that had been on staff,
and he’d say, “I’ll tell you what. You can have your string section, but
I’ve got to have my brass. I’ve got to have my woodwinds. I’ve got to
have my trumpets and my French horn players.” And just absolutely
insisted on it, and apparently had enough clout that he was able to
bring that off and tell the head of the music department of a major
studio, you know, ‘If I don’t get that, I’m not doing the film.” So that
pushed a whole lot of the guys from the dance band world into that very
situation, and all of them were capable of doing the work. I mean, I
used to be amazed. I’d say, “Where did these guys learn to play in all
these time signatures and play all of this weird-ass music?” Somewhere
in their background. Because I hadn’t had that kind of training. I was
scuffling with that, you know. But with the kind of training that they’d
all had, with classical, and then you didn’t realize how many of these
guys had gone through Juilliard [School] or Curtis [Institute of Music]
or Peabody [Conservatory] or some other place, you know, and had had
strong classical backgrounds and then went into dance bands.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So they had that to draw on.
- CLINE
- Right. And then when Shelly came to town—
- BUNKER
- When Shelly came to town, I’d had that little brief opportunity, window
of opportunity to establish myself as a drummer. He immediately pretty
much glommed on all the work, and what he wasn’t getting, Mel Lewis got,
you know, because Mel had left Stan Kenton’s band as well. Stan Levey
was around. But I mean, Shelly got the bulk of it. Shelly was the big
name, and the Down Beat and Metronome poll winner, and the strong
personality and strong player, and just immediately created an entire
world of work for himself, you know. So that’s when we became friends,
because I worked with him all the time as a percussionist. I mean, I had
the opportunity to see all of the guys that played and how they played.
I’ve worked with Hal Blaine forever on the beginning rock and roll days,
and Earl Palmer and those guys, and knew who felt good to play with,
knew who didn’t feel good to play with, from my point of view, you know.
Mel Lewis was probably the most amazingly comfortable guy to play with.
Shelly was a different thing, but I mean, there was a musicality to his
playing that was very different in the sound of the drums. He always got
a gorgeous sound out of his drums, and tape loved those drums. The
microphone just captured that, and it went to tape, and you’d listen
back and say, “Why can’t I get that sound? Why can’t I get that sound?”
- CLINE
- Yes. He also became the drummer who sort of personified the whole West
Coast scene here.
- BUNKER
- Exactly.
- CLINE
- And you said that you got to the point where you worked with him a lot,
you got to know him well. What else can you say about Shelly as a
musician and as a person, and how do you assess now, all these years
later, his influence on the music scene here and beyond?
- BUNKER
- He is still talked about today. He is revered today. There’s a cadre of
older guys that got to know him and played with him, and if you go to
lunch with four or five guys of a certain age, somehow or the other his
name will come up, whether it’s the sense of humor, what he played, the
bands that he had, the recordings that he did, you know. He will never
be forgotten. The last time— Well, it’s gone now; they don’t even have
it anymore that I know of, but the last time they rebuilt the scoring
stage out at Universal [Pictures], they redid the drum booth and there
was a plaque on the wall outside, with some musical notes and something,
and the drum booth, the new drum booth, was dedicated to Shelly after he
died. I don’t know if that’s there anymore.
- CLINE
- And he, of course, kept his studio career and his jazz career going.
- BUNKER
- Yes, right to the end.
- CLINE
- And eventually even opened up a club, which we’re going to talk about
shortly. One of the things I wanted to ask, just before we get too far
past this time period, you had mentioned, when we were talking about
people on the scene, last time you had mentioned Ornette Coleman as
somebody who clearly didn’t impress you particularly. I wanted to ask
you if you specifically saw Ornette or his band playing in the area, and
what you remember about that.
- BUNKER
- When he first came to town, I used to see him because he was frequenting
the jam session scene, and he had this white plastic alto saxophone. An
awful lot of people said, “What is that?” I think I saw the band a time
or two. I said, “I don’t need to see them, because I don’t care for
that.” It didn’t appeal to me.
- CLINE
- Do you remember where you saw them, by any chance?
- BUNKER
- Someplace down like in what is now called South Central L.A., down like
in clubs on Figueroa [Street] or Central Avenue or Broadway, down in
there someplace around Manchester [Avenue]. There were some clubs that
were down Florence [Avenue], Manchester, Broadway, Figueroa, down in
that area. There was a club, I can’t remember if it was called the Zebra
Lounge, where I saw [John] Coltrane’s band, and it was down there
someplace. But in the late fifties, early sixties, the only other time
that I think I heard Ornette play was at the Village Vanguard, and it
had to be during the time that I was with Bill [Evans], sometime in the
sixties, and he had started playing the violin. Now, why I ended up
there, I don’t know, because I said, “I’m not going to change my mind
about that music and about the way he plays.” He gets a lot of press.
Leonard Bernstein was in the club and enthralled with all of that. I
said, “Lenny, that’s bullshit.” [laughs] “You’re out club-hopping and
being hip, is what you’re doing.” But Ornette— That wasn’t any kind of
music that particularly appealed to me.
- CLINE
- I just wondered, because you hear these tales of when he used to sit in
with people and get kind of thrown off the bandstand. [Bunker laughs.]
Do you remember if he had his kind of unkempt, sort of overgrown mass of
hair? I guess he had quite a unique look at one point as well; everybody
knew when he came around.
- BUNKER
- It seems like I did see him with Donald Cherry a couple of times. I
don’t remember if the drummer was Ed Blackwell. I know Charlie Haden
played with him a lot, but I don’t know that he played with him in the
earlier days.
- CLINE
- And Bobby Bradford played with him early on, as well. Okay. I just
wanted to get quite clear on that. One of the things that—
- BUNKER
- You know, just to close out that whole period, I don’t remember when it
was, but I did get to play with Ben Webster a few times, and Ben was
very nice and very cool. Did get to play with Oscar Pettiford a few
times. Gerry [Gerald] Wiggins, quite a bit. Gerry’s got to be as old as
salt at this point.
- CLINE
- He’s still playing.
- BUNKER
- And still playing. That, and then the whole exodus of the Woody Herman,
Stan Kenton band people that became the naissance of the West Coast cool
style thing, you know. Played with all those guys.
- CLINE
- Right. And Shelly opened a club, Shelly’s Manne-Hole.
- BUNKER
- 1960.
- CLINE
- Right. And that, of course, became one of the premier venues for jazz
music in the area. What do you remember about Shelly’s Manne-Hole,
particularly in the early days?
- BUNKER
- Being in there all the time, because if you were going to go see Miles
[Davis], Miles was working there, Horace Silver was working there,
[Julian] “Cannonball” [Adderly] was working there. You know, the major
acts now had a place in Los Angeles to go to, where they could come for
a week or ten days or two weeks. So I was in there all the time. And
when he didn’t have major people, then it was a place for the local guys
to play, and that was one of the first places that I remember where
there’d be a different band every night, and then Shelly’s band would
work the weekends.
- CLINE
- That’s right. Yes.
- BUNKER
- And so I was in there frequently as a player, and over a ten-year period
it became almost a home away from home. Funky, funny, silly place, but
it seemed like the acoustics were good, the hamburgers were good, the
prices were fair, and, you know, “Shell” had a good ten-year run with
that joint. A lot of people, when he had to charge an admission for
somebody like Miles, people would piss and moan about all the money that
Shelly was making. Well, all the money was coming in and going to Miles,
you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Because Miles didn’t show up out here without shipping his Ferrari, and
somebody had to pay for that, you know. So it was the customers at the
door. He had a very good contract with Columbia Records at that time,
but, I mean, as best I remember it, he didn’t drive the car out here; he
shipped it out.
- CLINE
- Wow. Fascinating.
- BUNKER
- He did like to live large, and had the means with which to do it.
- CLINE
- Yes. What do you remember about some of the locals who played there? I
know that you played there, and we’re getting up to the Bill Evans story
here, but do you remember—
- BUNKER
- Clare Fischer frequently. Singers sometimes worked there with Irene on
occasion. Ruth Price was very popular there. Shelly liked her. And Irene
was really, truly an amazing singer, truly amazing singer. Paul Horn had
a quintet that worked there frequently, and I worked in there playing
both drums and vibes with him, depending upon the situation. Bud Shank.
Any number of people. Probably Stu Williamson, trumpet player, Claude
[Williamson]’s brother. Worked in there with Zoot on a couple of
occasions. That was toward the later sixties. God, who all? Frank Morgan
was— Well, I don’t know if Frank was around. Frank apparently had been a
bad boy and he did some time, and when that was, when he was off the
scene, because I don’t think I ever played with Frank. I’d known of him
from when he was quite young, but somehow our paths never crossed. I
never happened to play in a group of his. Ralph Peña, played with him
there. A wonderful bass player whose name I’m not thinking of, a white
guy. Albert Stinson. I played in there with him. I don’t remember who
with. He was a bitch, and then he killed himself. Drug OD, wasn’t it?
- CLINE
- I don’t remember now, but, yes, he died young.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Another brilliant talent snuffed out.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- Played in there with Joe Maini a lot. This was certainly after Maynard.
But he was kind of a regular in there. Lunatic, but, boy, could he play.
Goddamn, he could play.
- CLINE
- In this period that we’re talking about here, you got the gig that was
one of the most visible gigs, probably, that you’ve had in terms of the
international jazz world, which is with the great jazz pianist Bill
Evans.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Can you sort of trace the genesis of that particular experience?
- BUNKER
- Bill had exploded on the scene with the Everybody Digs Bill Evans album,
and one of the ones he did with Miles in ’59, I think it was, whether it
was Kind of Blue, Sort of Blue, whichever.
- CLINE
- Kind of Blue, yes.
- BUNKER
- And I was dumbstruck. I mean, I had never paid that kind of attention to
a piano player before. Prior, I had heard Horace Silver a lot, Bobby
Timmns, John Lewis with the MJQ [Modern Jazz Quartet], and
la-da-la-da-la-da, but I mean, this guy, you know— I never was a big fan
of Oscar Peterson’s, and if I would dare say that to a pianist, they
would want to like break my knuckles, because for them Oscar was a god.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- But I said, “He doesn’t touch my heart.”
- CLINE
- Right. A lot of chops.
- BUNKER
- All the chops in the world, but so what. But Bill suddenly just tore my
head off. I found myself listening to nothing but him. I took everything
off the turntable. I was still living at home with my mother, and
listening to that music, listening to that music. He finally came to
L.A. in, I believe, ’62, for the first time. Scotty [Scott LaFaro] was
gone, and it seems me that he showed up by himself. Paul Motian had had
a commitment, and he didn’t come with a bass player. I think he played
with Red Mitchell; I’m not positive. But he came to the Manne-Hole and
Shelly played with him a little bit when he was there. Most of the time
he wasn’t there. So they played as a duo. Chuck Israels had had a
commitment. Chuck was playing with him at the time, but he couldn’t come
out for this gig. He came out toward the end of it. All of this, I’m
hoping it’s accurate. There’s hardly anybody to confirm it with. But I
was in there most nights, listening. One evening I was there and Clare
Fischer was there. Clare knew Chuck Israels, and the story that I’d
heard, or read, was that Clare approached Chuck and said, “See the guy
sitting down at the end of the bar?” A kind of elegantly dressed,
bearded guy, watching intently. And Chuck said, “Yeah.” Clare said, “I
think it would be very interesting if you invited him to sit in with you
guys.” And Chuck said, “Oh, really?” “Yeah.” “Okay.” So they invited me
to sit in, and I played a set with them. I felt like that [holds hand
out to indicate quivering nervousness], and yet I was completely
comfortable, maybe because I’d been listening to him so long and I had
absorbed his way of thinking so much, that it’s almost like I could
anticipate what he was going to play. I knew what he was going to play
as he played it. They invited me to finish out the gig, which was
another couple of weeks, and I antagonized a few people because I had
record dates for most of those nights and I canceled all of them.
- CLINE
- Oh, wow.
- BUNKER
- And the guy said, “You can’t—.” I said, “Listen. I’m sorry. I won’t be
there.” “You can’t cancel without giving the—,” you know. I said, “I’m
going to go to RCA and play this stupid Hawaiian music and not play with
Bill? Shit,” you know. Within a year he came back and invited me to join
the group. We recorded, brought in equipment, recorded there. I was
married at the time, and I spoke to the lady about it. I said, “Jesus,
should I go or not go?” Because now I’m a full-blown studio musician.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Had a mortgage, had a house, on and on. No kids. She was an eminently
practical woman. She said, “I wouldn’t dare suggest to you what you do
with your life and your career. That’s for you to decide, even though
I’m involved.” But she said, “I think, knowing how you feel about him,
that if you didn’t do that, you would hate yourself the rest of your
life.”
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And I said, “I’ll send for you.” [mutual laughter]
- CLINE
- Okay. I’m going to fast-forward this so that we don’t miss anything.
We’ll pause for a moment.
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO MARCH 27, 2003
- CLINE
- Everything appears to be in working order.
- BUNKER
- Okay.
- CLINE
- So on that first experience that you had playing with Bill Evans, when
you sat in and said you felt comfortable, even though maybe a little
adrenalized, well, first off, let me say that— Let me start over. He had
this what was now considered a classic, very famous trio just prior to
this time, with Paul Motian and Scott LaFaro. That era was over. Scott
LaFaro was no longer with us. In some ways, similar to the situation you
had coming in with Gerry Mulligan, you were now going to replace a
drummer who I would have to say was stylistically very different.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And I was also reminded of what you were saying last time, about Shelly
Manne and his technique, or perhaps slight deficiency of technique, in
that Paul is another guy who is certainly not the kind of player you
would say is loaded with chops.
- BUNKER
- No. [laughs]
- CLINE
- Let’s put it that way. And yet really fit into the music and helped
create an identity for that trio that was indelible. Did you deal with
that precedent at all, or did you just, as you did with the Gerry
Mulligan gig, just sit down and play your way?
- BUNKER
- Straight ahead. Went straight ahead. Because I said, “I don’t play the
way he plays and I’m not playing with a bass player that plays the way
Scotty did.”
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Chuck, to me, was an okay player.
- CLINE
- Right. With a very unenviable pair of shoes to step into, yes.
- BUNKER
- Yes. You know, I mean, he really had the hot seat to walk into. And I
was surprised; I would have thought that either Gary Peacock or somebody
like Steve Swallow, who I think were around at that time, and Bill had
heard and Bill had maybe even played with, but maybe he—
- CLINE
- Yes, actually Gary did play with Bill briefly.
- BUNKER
- Yes, but somehow that either didn’t work, as far as chemistry, or they
didn’t want to be involved. Who knows.
- CLINE
- Gary was off into playing more avant-garde stuff at that point.
- BUNKER
- Yes. And Steve.
- CLINE
- Yes, I know. That would be it. [laughs]
- BUNKER
- But anyway, Chuck was an okay player, but he certainly didn’t play like
Scotty, and I didn’t see any reason to try to emulate the way Paul
played. I didn’t play the way he played, and was interested in doing my
own thing.
- CLINE
- How did you like the way Paul played in that group?
- BUNKER
- In that group and with Scotty, that’s the defining sound of the group,
you know. It really kind of defined the way that was. In retrospect, a
lot of the recordings I did, I never did really care for the way I
played with him. A lot of people seemed to think it was truly wonderful,
but I became very critical of my own playing. I liked the way Marty
Morell sounded with him, and Marty was there for many, many years. I
didn’t hear enough of the group with Elliot Zigmund. There was another
guy that was there briefly after I left, two drummers, and then Marty
and Eddie Gomez were there for a lengthy period. I loved the way Joe
LaBarbera played with him.
- CLINE
- I did, too.
- BUNKER
- Joe and—
- CLINE
- Marc Johnson.
- BUNKER
- And Marc Johnson really sounded wonderful with him.
- CLINE
- But in retrospect, you weren’t that happy with your playing?
- BUNKER
- Not really. Not really. I don’t know why.
- CLINE
- Don’t know why?
- BUNKER
- Just— [mutual laughter]
- CLINE
- Well, it’s interesting, because you’re more of a driving player than
Paul, and Bill, of course, had also recorded in a trio earlier with Paul
Chambers and Philly Joe [Jones].
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And I would have to place you somewhere between, say, Paul and Philly
Joe in that regard. Bill even later played with Jack DeJohnette, which
is another hard-driving kind of player. But historically, of course, so
much attention has been placed on those earlier recordings of Paul and
LaFaro, and yet I think that the quality of those recordings from the
period you played with Bill are overlooked, undeservedly, I think. Do
you have any feelings about the music beyond your own playing now, since
you’ve covered that, now that you look back on it and see it in context
of a whole musician’s career?
- BUNKER
- Well, the first things that we did when I joined him were done live.
That’s the Manne-Hole. There were two or three nights and he picked what
he wanted to release from that. Later, after his death, all the rest of
it got released, the stuff that he absolutely did not want released.
- CLINE
- That’s what happens.
- BUNKER
- And that’s the way that cookie goes.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- We did record— I think probably the best thing I did with him was the
Trio ’65, and that was done at Rudy van Gelder’s in New Jersey. The
version of “Nardis” that we did, I’ve been told by guys and drummers,
they said, you know, it’s hellacious and heroic and “Where the hell did
that come from?” and on and on and on. I was very flattered one time
when I first got to be friendly with Jeff Hamilton. He had found a CD of
that in Japan. And I think portable CD players were happening by then,
and so he played it on the plane trip coming back from Japan, and he
said, “Don’t you know that the drum solo in ‘Nardis’ is required
listening and practice with all of my students?”
- CLINE
- Oh, wow. [mutual laughter]
- BUNKER
- And that coming from the guy I consider one of the best jazz drummers
that’s around today. So, you know, that was very flattering. There’s
bootleg stuff from France and from Sweden and all like that, but the
quality is terrible, and those were back in my drinking days, and the
less heard, the better off, you know.
- CLINE
- Of course, a lot has been said or revealed or at least discussed about
Bill Evans not just as a musician, but his various personal problems and
things. What was it like working with and touring with Bill Evans as a
person, as well as a musician?
- BUNKER
- It was painful. It was painful to see what he was doing to himself.
Although, I related one incident to a friend over the weekend, when I
first joined Bill in ’63, I had an Aston-Martin, not the James Bond
version, but an earlier iteration of that car. Great-looking thing,
British racing green, white leather upholstery, chrome muffler sticking
out the back, an aluminum body. You know, this whole thing. That was my
car.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- We were working, and one night Bill pulled me aside and he said, “I have
to make a run downtown. Could you take me down there?” And I went, “Oh,
Christ. What do I do? I don’t want to say no, but I don’t want to say
yes, because I’ve got a hunch what it is.”
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And it wasn’t down the street or around the corner; it was downtown. I
ran him downtown, in fear and trembling, because I said, “We could both
be busted, and there goes the car.” Drove back. It was a lengthy
intermission, because we were working at the Manne-Hole. Drove back,
parked the car, and I finally screwed up the nerve, I said, “Bill,
please don’t ever ask me to do that again.” He said, “You got it.” And
he never did. He never did intrude that aspect of his life into my
personal space, because I drank, but I didn’t do any kind of drugs, and
he would certainly be aware of that. We never did generate any kind of
friendship. I tried to get next to him, spend some time with him, but he
really had a wall up. His daily life, his personal life, it seemed that
it consisted of scoring, and how he did all that and how he managed
that, there are always people around to help you do that, you know, when
you’re traveling and no wheels and really not that much money, you know.
But it always seemed that there were people ready to write a
prescription for something or show up with something, and like that. As
I say, it was painful, but it wasn’t like he inflicted that on me, and I
don’t think on Chuck either. He took care of those needs his own way,
and only occasionally he’d either get some bad stuff or hurt himself. He
apparently loved to shoot himself in the hands, because that’s why his
hands were so grossly enormous-looking, puffy and swollen and all that.
There was one story that had gone around, that he’d hurt himself, he’d
shot himself in the right hand. And he was left-handed. But he was
working at the Vanguard and the hand was useless; he couldn’t move it.
He played the whole gig with his left hand, and a lot of people weren’t
even aware that that had transpired. He somehow was able to pull that
off. But when I finally left in ’65, we had come back from a European
tour, been to London, Ronnie Scott’s, we’d been to the Golden Circe in
Stockholm, we’d done radio broadcasts at Radio Fusion in Paris and
around, and played the Café Au Go-Go in New York, had been there six
weeks, a long gig.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- And worked out way back across the country, Oklahoma City, I think, and
we may have worked at Shelly’s and then we went up to the Trident in
Sausalito, a beautiful club that was right on a pier, right on a wharf
overlooking the ocean. Sailboats would just come up and tie up, and you
could look out the window and eat dinner and listen to the Bill Evans
Trio. He hurt himself again, either in the hand or his hepatitis had
started to kick up, because he had gotten to the point where he needed
ten, twelve hours of bed rest a day. His liver was that far shot.
- CLINE
- Already.
- BUNKER
- I mean, he wasn’t on dialysis, but if he got twelve hours of rest a day,
that worked for him. So he couldn’t show up for work, and the owner
called Jimmy Rowles and flew Jimmy up, and we played a couple of nights.
But then it was like, “You’re fired. The band is fired.” Bill couldn’t
fulfill his obligations. That was at the point where I’d been on the
road with him for about a year and a half, and I just said, “Okay,
that’s enough. I don’t need to do this anymore.” So I packed up the
Aston-Martin and drove back to L.A. I saw him from time to time. I’d go
down and see him on a very limited basis at the Manne-Hole. By this time
he had Eddie Gomez and Andy. No. Marty. Marty Morell. But Bill would
always insist that I sit in, and I didn’t want to. I just didn’t feel— I
said, “I’ve played with him. I’ve said what I’m going to say with him,”
and I didn’t particularly care for Marty’s drums. He made them sound
wonderful, but, you know.
- CLINE
- I know.
- BUNKER
- And you know how that thing is. You of all people know. To keep from
getting pressed into playing, I just stopped going, you know. So it had
been a long, long, long time before I ever saw him again. I don’t recall
that I did. I never saw him play with Marc and Joe. Bought records and
listened to them, but said, “That part of my life is gone, it’s over
with. I did that,” you know.
- CLINE
- And now it’s the mid-sixties. I wanted to catch up with what’s going on
with your family. You went at some point from living at your mom’s to
remarrying?
- BUNKER
- I married. I had been married when I was just in the army. That ended. I
married in 1960, no children, a lady who— That ended in 1972. Nothing
dramatic; just busy working a lot, making money, putting some away.
- CLINE
- Where did you move to when you got married?
- BUNKER
- Up in Laurel Canyon, up off of Wonderland and then Wonderland Park
Avenue, back up into the hills in that area, and lived right across the
street from Clare Fischer and right next door to Conte Candoli, who was
my next-door neighbor. [mutual laughter]
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- Had a little house and this piano [points to piano in the room], and
just, you know, life goes on. Down at the Manne-Hole a lot, doing a lot
of record dates, doing a lot of pictures, and just living that kind of
lifestyle.
- CLINE
- How did your mom fare over the years?
- BUNKER
- She did fine.
- CLINE
- Did she ever remarry or anything?
- BUNKER
- She did, very briefly, when I was still in high school, to some guy. I
didn’t get next to him. I’m trying to remember. It wasn’t like he moved
in with us. She did get married, but I don’t recall the guy being around
that much, you know. I was also going to school and then into the
service. It was probably right around that period. They divorced, and
then she remained single until her death in the nineties. She lived to
be eighty-four, eight-five. But she had the house on Forty-seventh
Street that she and my dad [Frank Sumner Bunker] bought in 1937, stayed
there. After I left, she rented the house to a black family, and
eventually when it really became time for her to leave there, just the
infirmities of age, she sold to them, and I helped her move out to the
[San Fernando] Valley someplace. She ended up in Utah with my brother
[George Bunker]. My brother and his family had moved up there. He’d
apparently never been happy in L.A. He had two daughters, and decided
that it was time to go to Clearfield, Utah, which is outside of Ogden,
the northern part of the state, and that’s where he is now. He’s eighty,
eighty-one. But Mom lived out her days, had little strokes and things.
- CLINE
- And then you’ve mentioned more than a couple of times your drinking, and
this, I guess, was going on through this second marriage and your studio
work and this time with Bill Evans and all that was going on. How did
you eventually give that up, get that under control?
- BUNKER
- 1967, Leigh [Lee?] and I—her name was Leigh—took a vacation to Europe.
I’d been there working, but this time was going to be an absolute
vacation. That’s when I bought my car, which I have. It’s out in the
garage to this day, thirty-five years ago. Ordered it from an American
dealer, took delivery at the factory in Stuttgart, Sindelfingen, and the
idea was to go pick up the car and drive around Europe for a couple of
months. We had the money, you know. Our mortgage wasn’t that big. We’d
been saving money. We didn’t have kids. So there was money in the bank.
Picked up the car and drove to Vienna, and four days after I got the
car, I got into one of those very European intersections and got nailed
by a lady cab driver driving another Mercedes. It was my first
absolutely brand-new car, first one. I’d had cars that were supposed to
have been new before, but the Aston was supposed to have been new, but
it turned out it was very used. The car got torn up, so there went all
of the plans for the driving trip of Europe. I got some cracked ribs.
She was unhurt. But the car had to go in the shop for the remaining two
months of the vacation. So it was train to Rome and then train to Venice
and then Florence, because I had already been to the Hungarian embassy
in Vienna and got a visa, which was still under tight communist control,
because everybody said, “Listen, as long as you’re that close and you’re
driving, you’ve got to go to Budapest,” so that was the plan. Well,
that’s gone. And driving to Rome and driving to Florence, you know, we
were going to drive down into Hungary, and there’s a ferry that you
could take across the Adriatic [Sea] to the Italian peninsula, you know,
and then drive back up through Italy and then drive through the wine
country of France, and then send the car home and fly home. All of that
was shot down. So when I got back from all of that trip, things came to
a head, and I really knew I had to get the boozing under control,
because it was out of control. It hadn’t really been affecting me that
much as far as work was concerned. Now it was starting to, and I just
said, “Okay.” I went to a shrink for, oh, about a year and a half, and
like he said, I don’t know if we’ll ever have an “Aha! That’s why you do
that,” or did that, but the thing was, I did quit. So my attitude that
I’ve maintained for a long time is that I somehow managed to get an
entire lifetime’s worth of boozing done in fifteen years.
- CLINE
- Right. Wow. Well, good for you, that you were able to quit. A different
thing. Also by now, obviously you’re very established in the studios.
The jazz world is changing. The music itself is changing.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- I’m guessing the jazz scene here in town was changing as well. How can
you describe some of the changes that were happening in the sixties by
now, especially from the mid- to the later sixties when things were
really starting to move quickly?
- BUNKER
- The rock and roll thing was happening very heavily. I’m trying to
remember when the so-called jazz fusion movement started to happen.
- CLINE
- That was probably starting around ’70, or ’69, ’70.
- BUNKER
- Yes. But, you know, the Manne-Hole was still going up until 1970, ’71.
Donte’s was going in the Valley, and the Lighthouse was still going on.
I remember going to the Lighthouse once or twice to see some groups, and
I thought, “Jesus Christ, it feels like I’m driving to San Diego,” you
know, just trying to get down there from up here.
- CLINE
- Yes. True.
- BUNKER
- And I ended up not going there anymore. I don’t know when Howard
[Rumsey] started Concerts by the Sea. Was that probably in the eighties?
Late seventies or early eighties.
- CLINE
- It was in the seventies. Rudy Onderwyzer took over the Lighthouse after
Shelly’s closed.
- BUNKER
- Yes. I went to Concerts by the Sea once, and it was to see a kind of
fusion rock and roll jazz band that I can’t remember the name of it now.
But there weren’t that many places in Hollywood. There weren’t that many
places that were around, and it seemed like Donte’s got the bulk of it.
I think Dick Whittinghill’s out in the Valley had a restaurant, and
Jimmy Rowles would occasionally play there. But it didn’t seem like
bands played there, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- It seemed like I was not playing that much jazz. I really kind of walked
away from that. The phone was like not ringing a lot for me to play, and
it could have been that the music for me and for my taste was just kind
of stagnating, you know.
- CLINE
- What about some of the changes that were happening in the music, with
the emergence of so-called free jazz, especially during the tumult of
the late sixties, a lot of the stuff that was happening?
- BUNKER
- I really didn’t care to get into that. I remember there was that whole
jazz in poetry thing that had happened in the fifties, and I got sucked
into that for a couple of minutes. Then I said, “Either tell your story
or play the music, but I’m going to sit here and try to improvise a
background score for you spouting—?” Stupid. For me it was just totally
stupid and nothing I wanted to be involved in.
- CLINE
- Right. You had mentioned some of the really influential drumming
revolutionaries who had come up by now: Elvin Jones, Tony Williams. What
was your feeling about some of the developments as far as the playing of
the music was going at this point?
- BUNKER
- Staggering. Staggering. Elvin was, you know, an absolute revelation. He
was an amazing gorilla sitting down behind a set of drums, with total
independence of every limb. I mean, when I used to see him with
Coltrane, I’d stand behind him, because you could do that at Shelly’s.
The bandstand was set up in such a way that there was a path that went
around behind the stand, and you could stand behind him and watch him
play. And I said, “I don’t believe what I’m seeing.” I’d just stand
there and open my eyes as wide as I could, and saw total independence,
like it was four guys playing. [laughs] Tony was amazing. Amazing, that
sound that he got, that gigantic cymbal, that funny cymbal that he had
at that time, and the shit that he was playing. He put me away. Jack
DeJohnette, to a certain extent, who was probably more like Tony than
anybody else, and followed that same path. He’s a great-ass drummer. And
I can’t really think of anybody that has killed me since then, you know,
with the exception of Jeff Hamilton. I’ve heard the things that he’s
done with the big bands, Bill Holman’s band. And I got to work with him
with Diana Krall at the Universal Amphitheater last year, and to hear
him in that setting, the rhythm section was Diana, John Clayton was
playing bass, Jeff, and guitar player, Gerald Wiggins. Not Gerald
Wiggins. Gerald Wilson.
- CLINE
- Anthony Wilson.
- BUNKER
- Anthony Wilson, who is a good player, good, good player. Do you know
anything about him? Because Gerald is obviously black. Is Anthony an
adopted son or his natural son?
- CLINE
- I believe he’s his natural son, but Gerald’s wife is Mexican, as far as
I know. And I don’t know how the gene pool all kind of fell out there.
- BUNKER
- Yes, because he does not look like he’s descended from a black man.
That’s why I wondered if he could be adopted or what.
- CLINE
- I don’t know the story.
- BUNKER
- But, you know, with the happenstance of what they used to call
mesagination, anything is possible, you know. Look at Halle Berry. If
that’s not an argument for combining races, I don’t know what the hell
is, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. And you got to see in person last week, I guess [referring to
Bunker’s participation in the orchestra at the seventy-fifth Academy
Awards show]. How long did it take for your sort of jazz listening
regularity start to wind down? You were working steadily, and also the
jazz scene was changing as, I suppose, with the ascendency of rock and
roll, it was winding down as well to some degree.
- BUNKER
- Yes, and I tried to learn how to play a little rock and roll. I used to
listen to the radio for some of that, because I figured it was necessary
for me to know how to do that, but I wasn’t really getting called to do
those kinds of calls.
- CLINE
- What was your feeling about the music itself?
- BUNKER
- It’s a paycheck. Paycheck, paycheck. But I mean, I was there when Earl
Palmer came to town from New Orleans, and did a lot of early dates with
him, and then all of that whole period with Hal Blaine, playing with
those guys. Jim Gordon, who may have been a little bit more musical
player, because at least Earl started as a jazz drummer. Hal had a pop
sensibility to him, played with Patti Page and singers, more than in the
jazz idiom. Shelly was around, still. Irv Cottler was still around,
playing mostly with [Frank] Sinatra, doing shows. Alvin Stoller was
still around. Irv and Alvin were still older guys from another
sensibility, from the big band era. I’m trying to think of who some of
the other drummers were. Outside of Earl, Hal, and Jim, there weren’t
that many guys that I played with that were like the rock and roll
drummers at that time. It seemed like that was pretty much it.
- CLINE
- Hal Blaine probably took care of most of the work single-handedly.
- BUNKER
- Yes. What’s his name? John Robinson didn’t come along until later—“J.R.”
- CLINE
- Right. Well, certainly during the seventies and on in there when the pop
music industry got bigger and bigger and you started to see more guys,
you started to see people like Jim Keltner, and you mentioned John
Guerin.
- BUNKER
- Yes. John had an amazing career there during the sixties and seventies,
because he was all over the place. It was like suddenly Hal was out and
John was doing everything. I forgot the— He is one of my favorite
drummers. He always has been. I don’t know why I didn’t think to mention
him. But I mean, he’s one of the few guys that could make sense out of
rock and roll and yet still make sense as a jazz drummer, both in a
small group and with a band that Mike Barone had, that played at Donte’s
every Wednesday night. I was always there every Wednesday, because they
just turned the joint out. The charts were great, the players were
great. Tom Scott was in the band, Pete Christlieb, good brass section,
Alan Broadbent playing a lot of the time, playing piano. I forget who
some of the bass players were, probably [Chuck] Berghofer a lot. And
John just getting it on, just getting it on.
- CLINE
- Let’s see how we’re doing here. You also, just before I forget, I wanted
to follow up on this. At the end of the session last time, you mentioned
that you were playing a gig where on the bill with you was the young
Lenny Bruce. Is there anything that you want to add about that before
we—
- BUNKER
- Just that he was amazing. It was just before he rose to some kind of
prominence and got his picture in Time magazine and everybody started
calling him a “sick comic.” I remember just being absolutely dumbstruck
by his mind and what he had to say. Being in a club and seeing, if he
happened to use the wrong word, some guy wanting to get up and punch him
in the mouth for saying that word in front of his girlfriend or
something, you know, those kinds of things. But taking the potshots that
he did at the police and at religion and organized religion, you know.
What was one of the routines about the guy that was standing back in the
back of the room, it was Jesus Christ. He said, “It’s the guy that’s
glowing.” [mutual laughter]
- CLINE
- Yes. Well, they were different times.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And did you get caught up in any way into all the cultural changes that
were going on in the sixties and in that whole particular scene?
- BUNKER
- I wore a beard. I wore my hair long. I bought white shoes and white
pants. [mutual laughter] Did all of that, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. Well, I think what I’d like to do is call it for now, and we’ll
continue next time with sort of focusing and maybe finishing out your
evolution in the studios here in L.A. and your move away from jazz
altogether into your life today. Okay? Does that seem good to you?
- BUNKER
- That’s fine, yes.
- CLINE
- Okay. Great. Thank you for today.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE APRIL 3, 2003
- CLINE
- Today is April 3rd, 2003. This is Alex Cline interviewing Larry Bunker
once again at his home up on the hill next to Griffith Park. Another
gorgeous day. Good morning.
- BUNKER
- Good morning.
- CLINE
- I wanted to follow up with a few questions that relate to our last
session, before heading on into the sixties, seventies, and beyond, and
your work in the studios here in L.A. One of the things I wanted to ask
you about is relating to your jazz days here in L.A., a couple of things
related to this. I actually own a video [Jazz Scene USA: Shelly Manne
and Shorty Rogers] that has an episode of a TV show that used to be on,
called Jazz Scene USA. It has you playing with Shorty Rogers and his
Giants. And for anyone wanting see you in action back then, it’s a good
document. Your playing, I think, besides being impressive and excellent,
it’s very authoritative and both sensitive and powerful, I think, and
shows a little bit of your— Perhaps the ramifications of your experience
with playing with some big bands, the way you drive the band, set up
figures, play solos pretty aggressively, and with a lot of dynamics. I
wanted to, first off, know if you had any feelings about this, since
this is now— It’s still out there. People can see it. It shows you in
the context of what has become known as the West Coast jazz sort of set,
certainly Shorty Rogers being one of the really major figures, as far as
that goes. Do you have any feelings about those days, that music, that
particular document or anything?
- BUNKER
- I really don’t recall which particular show that is, or was, because
there were a few of them. I think that we did something with some kind
of show that Hugh Hefner hosted for a while.
- CLINE
- Playboy After Dark.
- BUNKER
- Yes. And there is another video that was hosted by an L.A. disc jockey
named Frank Evans. That surfaced not too long ago. I hadn’t seen that.
- CLINE
- I haven’t seen that.
- BUNKER
- I’ve been told that there’s one that’s around in which I was playing
piano, and I don’t even know what group that was, you know.
- CLINE
- Wow. This has Lou Levy and Gary Lefevre and Gary Peacock, and you do an
arrangement of “Greensleeves,” among other things.
- BUNKER
- I was wondering who the bass player was, because I know that Ralph Peña
played with Shorty various times. I think one album we did was with him.
Again, all of this would have been in the sixties, I’m sure.
- CLINE
- Right. This is ’62.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Lou, Gary Lefevre, who I just played with about a year ago, for the
first time probably since then, you know. [mutual laughter] He came up
from San Diego and we did something out in the Valley for a guy that
used to be associated with [radio station] KLON, a disc jockey. He has
some kind of an annual jazz thing out there, for which I got paid—I was
playing vibes—and he stiffed my cartage people. I finally ended up
paying them, you know. You love finding out who you don’t work for.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- If it costs you money out of your pocket, then there’s not too much
point. Anyway, my feelings about that period, they’re mixed. I was
thankful that I was working. I was thankful that I was getting a chance
to play. It wasn’t necessarily quite the kind of music that I wanted to
play. I wanted to play, really, in a much more aggressive New York
style, manner, and ran into a lot of constraints about that, you know. I
was getting told to play with brushes a lot.
- CLINE
- Right. That’s come up, indeed.
- BUNKER
- I remember working at a club—I don’t remember the name of it; it was on
Hollywood Boulevard—I think it was Sardi’s. Hollywood Boulevard just
next to Vine [Street]. With Stan Getz. I got a lot of, “Softer, softer,
less. Brushes. Don’t play.” You know. This was right after he had gotten
out of jail for trying to bust a drugstore for, you know— Something
happened there with him. The group was Paul Moore playing piano, and
might have been Ralph Peña, and myself. But that was my first real
encounter with playing with Stan.
- CLINE
- How was that?
- BUNKER
- It was all right.
- CLINE
- Other than the instructions.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- The limitations.
- BUNKER
- Later on, in ’65 when I went to Japan with him and Gary Burton, he
didn’t give me that much instruction. But on this earlier occasion, you
know, he’d been in the joint. He’d done like three months, six months
with the county something, and let’s say that his social skills were
rusty. But I did see firsthand one of those kind of legendary things
that he was always capable of doing, you know, whether it’s apocryphal
or not, that when he joined Benny Goodman’s band at the age of
seventeen, after about the first four nights he just closed the book;
had the book memorized. And there have always been stories of him that
relate to that. Johnny Mandel came into the club and he had a tune,
32-bar AABA form, just, you know, straight ahead, but nice changes in a
nice melody, and a nice title. It was called “Sterno, Not Pernot.” He
had written the thing out, so Stan had to read it and transpose it.
Music was up on the piano. And Stan played the head through twice, just
eyeballing it, probably the first time for the melody, the next time for
really enabling the changes. Then went ahead and played ten choruses,
sensational. And when it came time to take it out, he didn’t refer to
the music, you know. Now, it was not that complicated a song, but still,
you know, still, to nail it after looking at it two times, and then not
have to refer back to it, you know. I was definitely impressed with
that.
- CLINE
- That is impressive.
- BUNKER
- Yes. But anyway, back to your question about the West Coast thing. You
know, mixed feelings, just because I really wanted to do an Elvin Jones,
you know, and was not allowed to.
- CLINE
- Right. Right. I mean, I wondered about it when I reviewed the video,
because when you get your moments, you come through pretty strong. And I
remembered what you were saying about everyone wanting you to play
brushes and whatnot, and I thought, well, you know, I can see where the
conflict is here. Yes. I know what that’s like.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- One of the things I wanted to ask you about specifically in relation to
this is, the name of Gary Peacock has come up in the past, but here you
are playing with him. What do you remember about Gary back in those
days, when he was just starting out?
- BUNKER
- I had played in a group that Bud Shank had, where I played piano and
vibes, and Scott LaFaro was here, and I did get to play with him in that
context. That was before he went back east. Now, this had to have been
’60, ’61. And then Gary Peacock took Scott’s place with that group, and
we were just working a night here, a night there, you know, a hotel down
in Hollywood, a club in Malibu; around, you know. We weren’t ever— I
don’t remember working on a steady basis anyplace, like a week or ten
days at a time, you know. May have played at the Manne-Hole; places in
the Valley that I don’t even remember, you know. But Gary was a very
interesting player. I didn’t get to know him very well, because I only
saw him when we did those gigs, and they were, you know, not on any kind
of a regular basis. It seemed that— I realized that he would be
certainly a player to watch, and he was a fun player to play with. He
was already into some kind of macrobiotic diet thing, and going through
all kinds of that stuff, you know. He was very intense; very intense
guy. Kept kind of to himself, so I never did really get to know him that
well.
- CLINE
- And this made me wonder, watching him play, and certainly even in the
context of the performance on this video, aside from the issues we just
discussed, relating to your playing, Gary’s soloing gets pretty
adventurous, even in the context of that music.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Well, I think he had come probably under the spell of Scotty and
what Scotty was trying to develop, as did an awful lot of bass players.
I mean, all of a sudden this multiple picking with two or three fingers
at the same time.
- CLINE
- Right. Right.
- BUNKER
- I remember at one point Red Mitchell getting into that, and saying how
hard it was to do, just talking about, you know, coordinating which
fingers are moving here, and moving fingers in a way that you’re not
accustomed to here, you know, in order to get what they were doing, plus
all of that up into the thumb position stuff, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I know of nobody that was doing anything like that before Scotty. And
then after he suddenly showed everybody the way, everybody did it, you
know.
- CLINE
- Right. Drummers and bass players, it’s always the endlessly interesting
interaction, the relationship. Most drummers and bass players have
favorite drummers or bass players that they like to play with, where
there was a great degree of rapport, of comfort, of really hooking up
and having the same kind of groove. Were there bass players that felt
particularly simpatico with?
- BUNKER
- Yes. One of the first ones, early guys that I played with, was Joe
Mondragon, who had been with Woody [Herman]’s band, and then had become
a highly regarded studio player; settled in L.A., lived here, had a
place in Glendale where he could have his horses and be the Indian that
he was, you know. He was Apache. He was born on a reservation, I
believe, and went back to Arizona when he retired from active playing
here. He went back to Arizona, New Mexico, and I think whether he moved
back onto a reservation— I don’t know whether he did that. But anyway,
he was good. He was a very different player. His choice of notes was not
always, you know, the best. A bass player that I enjoyed playing with
very much was Max Bennett. We worked together. We worked together a lot.
We worked with Peggy Lee in the fifties, and he became a very facile
studio player, knew every tune, knew all of the correct changes, never
played a wrong note, you know. Not a particularly inventive soloist,
but, you know, good solid player. Ralph Peña I liked playing with. He
was good. It was tragic; he went to Mexico City for something and was in
an auto accident that I think permanently damaged one of his arms, and
then I forget what he died of. I don’t know if it was— I can’t remember
if it was a result of that accident. But finally, when we get into the
sixties with Marty Budwig and Chuck Berghofer, then they became kind of
the stalwarts, you know, and both of them worked with Shelly [Manne] a
lot. Jimmy Bond was a pretty good player, and he gradually drifted out
of music and into real estate, at which he’s very successful. He’s
probably my age, or almost, by now; full head of white hair, like mine.
That’s probably it; probably it. Ray Brown came to town in the late
sixties, and as revered as he was, he was hard to play with. I mean—
- CLINE
- Was he inflexible, or was he—
- BUNKER
- It’s just that he’d walk right over you. He’d just climb up your back
and go out the front door, you know, and there was no stopping him, no
holding him back. He just, you know, was— That was Ray. But absolutely
magnificent player, you know. And magnetism, the charisma that he had. I
remember one time going to see the Oscar Peterson Trio someplace in
Hollywood. I think it was at this Sardi’s place. And I said, “Okay.
Tonight I’m not going to pay any attention to Ray. I’m going to really
listen to Oscar.” And as absolutely incredibly dynamic a player as Oscar
was and is, I couldn’t keep my ears off of Ray Brown. He’d go
[demonstrates], and jump onto something down on the A-string and just,
you know, take the paint off the walls, and do all that without a
drummer. And there was just no way to not be riveted by what he was
doing, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes. Another thing I wanted to follow up on, since we’re into the
sixties now and we discussed your playing with Bill Evans, I wanted to
kind of go back to that a little bit.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Well, since also you mentioned Shelly, and, of course, Shelly played a
lot with Ray Brown and somehow seemed to make that work.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Shelly also recorded with Bill Evans.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And I wondered what your impressions were of that. We talked a little
bit about Paul Motian. We talked about some of the other drummers who
followed you. Marty Morrell; you enjoyed his playing. What were your
impressions of Shelly’s work with Bill Evans?
- BUNKER
- Shelly was Shelly. He played just the way he plays. You know, it didn’t
seem to matter. I was not aware of any conscious effort on his part to
alter or change the way he plays. He jumped in. And that one album that
he did with Bill was— I think Monty was the bass player, wasn’t he?
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- Because it was probably after Scott died.
- CLINE
- Yes, right.
- BUNKER
- And I guess Bill was just— That was when he was out here, and may have
been by himself; whether Red Mitchell played some with him. You know,
that first time when he came out, I don’t think that he had settled— I
can’t remember now whether he had settled on Chuck Israels as his
replacement for Scott, and whether Chuck was here, or Chuck couldn’t
come out. I may have said something about Chuck had a prior engagement
and Bill just came out by himself, and, of course, that was the time
when I sat in with him, because Shelly played drums when he was
available to, and whether it was Red Mitchell or possibly Monty, because
Red was still in town. That was before he decided that Ronald [W.]
Reagan was not his cup of tea, and he fled to Scandinavia.
- CLINE
- Right. Also I wanted to mention that I went back, and after you
mentioned your feelings about your playing with Bill, you said you
weren’t too happy with it, but that you preferred the Trio ’65 album,
perhaps.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And since I was more familiar with the live Shelly’s recording [Bill
Evans Trio at Shelly’s Manne-Hole], I went back and listened to that,
and was reminded of so many things that you said, including one of the
things that you already brought up this morning, which is I think you
probably play with drumsticks on that album maybe a total of three
minutes or something. It’s a real brushes extravaganza.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And your opening, the opening piece, called “Israel,” which has a lot of
trading with you on the brushes, very, very strong soloing, I think, on
your part, especially with the brushes. And I wondered if, when it came
to that type of approach, particularly brushes playing, if there was
anybody who really influenced your approach, or if this was purely Larry
Bunker.
- BUNKER
- That’s pretty much, pretty much it. I mean, the guys that killed me, the
players that killed me were the really strong guys like, you know, maybe
Philly Joe [Jones], because he did record with brushes, both with Bill
and the stuff with Miles [Davis], and played brushes with Miles and, you
know, Red Garland and Paul Chambers. A lot of times they’d do a trio
set, or a couple three tunes in a set that were just the trio, “Billy
Boy,” on things like that, you know. Philly Joe could just eat you alive
with them.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I don’t know that I’ve ever even heard Elvin play brushes.
- CLINE
- Yes, he does, with very loud brushes.
- BUNKER
- Or Tony [Williams], you know. And those were the guys that I was
listening to at that time, who just were putting me away. So anything
that I developed, it was just out of necessity, because I was told to do
it, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes, I see. Right. But I find it— And I mentioned in an earlier
interview how I sort of placed your playing with Bill as somewhere
between Philly Joe and Paul Motian, and in fact, I mean, even though it
resembles neither of them at times, one of the things I think that’s
particularly interesting is that I don’t know if you can trace it all or
have any comment on, but is the way you’re using your feet; the bass
drum and the hi-hat not in the predictable and sort of typical manner. A
lot of contrapuntal, a lot of real four-way independence going on,
particularly accenting with the hi-hat and the bass drum. Can you
remember what you were thinking about at that point, when you were
playing that set?
- BUNKER
- When I was still coming up, even when I was in the service, and really,
you know, like I had said, being self-taught, I held the sticks wrong. I
didn’t— You know, I didn’t do any of it right. I played not match grip,
because nobody did here—I think I mentioned that before—but conventional
grip, and I’m right-handed. But the lack of literature, the lack of
practice material meant that I just wrote a lot of exercises for myself,
because I knew, you know, I knew that the independence needed to be
there. And I think that Jimmy Chapin had a book [ Advanced Techniques
for the Modern Drummer ] out by that time, and I practiced that stuff. I
practiced out of a George Lawrence Stone book [ Accents and Rebounds ],
when I really found out how hard it was to do it the way he said to do
it, you know, the practice regimen. But I just did a lot of study of
rudiments, finally, and then started sticking my feet into those things,
starting paradiddles or double paradiddles or triple paradiddles
somewhere other than right-left-right, you know. Put the diddle
anywhere, and be able to think about that and control it, and then stick
your feet in, different places. And did a lot of rudimental stuff that
way. I had time in the service, and tried to change my grip around to
where it looked like in the picture in one of the drum books, you know.
Didn’t know anything about finger technique. I’d never heard of Murray
Spivak and all of that, you know. Buddy [Rich] was Buddy, with his
freakishness. And I guess by that time Louie Bellson had studied with
Murray, or whoever— He studied with somebody in New York.
- CLINE
- Because he did study with Murray Spivak.
- BUNKER
- Yes, he did study with Murray.
- CLINE
- But there may have been someone else.
- BUNKER
- And Murray lived out here.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And was a recording engineer. He ended up being the recording engineer
at Twentieth Century-Fox [Film Corporation] Studios for many, many, many
years. I always used to feel a little nervous going in there when I had
to play a drum solo of any kind, a little solo snare drum part, that
Murray’d be up there going, “Uh-uh. How is that?”
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- You know, a renowned teacher and player, and deviser. Henry Adler was
who I was trying to think of, that Louie, I think, studied with, and
first started into that whole finger thing. Got sidetracked. Oh, just—
- CLINE
- The independence thing, the insertion of the feet.
- BUNKER
- Yes. And I was just trying to gain some of that, because, you know, I—
It seemed like guys just were not terribly inventive with that, and I
wanted to incorporate more of that. You know, I used to do a lot of
practicing rudiments, right hand and right foot, right hand and left
foot, left hand and right foot, you know, and use just the basic
rudiments as practice material to do that. And then incorporating these
kind of little exercises and off-the-wall things that I was trying to
figure out how to do, you know. So it all just evolved by itself.
- CLINE
- And yet you maintained what I would have to say is a lot of precision in
what you were doing as well. You’re not the kind of guy who took it so
out you kind of got lost, or were coming out playing, you know, trading
fours and having them come out three and a half, or that kind of thing.
- BUNKER
- Yes. No, I hated that. I hated that. Oh—
- CLINE
- Very precise.
- BUNKER
- And if I accidentally stepped on myself from time to time, you know, at
work, you’d hear me yelling, because, you know, pissed off with myself.
- CLINE
- Yes. And one of the things that I had mentioned that I thought the
recordings you had done with Bill Evans were perhaps unjustly overlooked
because of the natural and deserved attention that recordings with Scott
and Paul got, but I think the rapport that you had with Bill is clearly
evident. You mentioned that you had absorbed a lot of his music before
playing with him, and how you felt that you could really sort of hear
what he was going to play before he played it.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And I think that’s really strongly evident, maybe in a way that’s
clearer than with a lot of the other drummers who played with him, and
yet you weren’t just, you know, playing back what he played. I mean,
it’s clearly a situation where you were responding to what you heard him
play with, you know, a full degree of comfort and confidence.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And even though you were playing brushes virtually all the time, did
things ever open up more? Did you ever get to play more sticks with him,
maybe more in live situations?
- BUNKER
- More in the live situations, and it would depend. It would depend on the
venue, where we were, how deep into his thing he was, and how good the
piano was. I mean, he could make the most atrocious piano sound just
amazing. Usually the pianos were pretty good. We worked in Cincinnati
and the guy had a Steinway B, and a— What’s it? A six-foot-eleven piano
like this one [points at piano in the room] is. This is a B. And it was
just unbelievably bad. The action was atrocious, and it’d hold— It’d
stay in tune for an evening and then go out, you know. It needed
everything. The guy maintained that he had just spent thousands and
thousands and thousands of dollars on this piano, overhauling it in
anticipation of Bill coming, you know, and didn’t have another nickel to
do anything about it, you know. And Bill had to put up with that, and it
was just unbelievably bad, but yet he could still draw his sound out of
that instrument. He could still do whatever the magic was that he had,
you know, the sonority, that ability to hit one key and you could
almost— It was almost like an engineer was turning up a pot. Instead of
it fading, it was getting louder, you know. How you do that, I don’t
know.
- CLINE
- I wondered if spending so much time listening to and then playing with
Bill Evans, and being around the advancements of his harmonic language
and the way he approached the music, had any effect or influence then on
your vibraphone-playing.
- BUNKER
- Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes.
- CLINE
- Can you describe any of that in any way?
- BUNKER
- No, just except to marvel at the ability that he had to construct the
kind of lines that he did, you know. Somehow they seemed preordained.
You know, they just— You start with a germ of a thought, and pretty soon
some kind of internal logic takes over and, you know, there’s
predestination. The line has got to go there. There’s an inevitability,
to me, with his harmonic thinking and with his melodic thinking. Sure,
there were a lot of licks that he devised and perfected over a period of
time. Maybe, you know, even today maybe some people might call them
clichés. But I mean, there is no player that is totally off-the-wall
inventive every bar. That doesn’t exist. Keith Jarrett notwithstanding,
you know, with his hour-and-a-half improvised things.
- CLINE
- Right. The Trio ’65 album is recorded in the legendary Van Gelder
Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Can you describe the experience
and what that was like, if you have any reflections on what it was that
made that particular studio and that engineer so remarkable and
desirable in the jazz realm?
- BUNKER
- Earlier recordings that were done by Rudy [van Gelder]—as I understand
it a lot of the Blue Note [Records] stuff and all of that—were done like
in his living room, in his house itself. And I believe Rudy was an
optician or an optometrist by profession. By the time of Trio ’65, I
don’t know when he built the studio, but he built a separate studio on
his property; cinderblock, maple floors. I believe it was in kind of a—
It was not a rectangular or square building. It may have been five- or
six-sided, penta or— Not hexagonal. What is a six-sided figure?
Sexagonal?
- CLINE
- I guess so.
- BUNKER
- Wood beams for the ceiling, and pitched, a pitched roof that followed
the outlines of this building. And Rudy; my recollection of him was—
I’ll just say he was a putz. You walk into the control room to listen to
a playback, and he didn’t want you to touch anything, I mean not so much
as put your hand on a masonite— Not a masonite surface, but you know,
the plastic stuff.
- CLINE
- Formica?
- BUNKER
- Yes, Formica. It was all black, shiny, patent-leather Formica, and he
didn’t want to see a fingerprint on anything.
- CLINE
- Yes, I heard he was pretty anal.
- BUNKER
- Yes. He’d come right behind you with a white glove and be wiping, you
know. “Don’t stand there. Don’t lean on that. Don’t—.” You know, “Come
on. Fuck off.” Really makes for congeniality. [mutual laughter] So
that’s what that was about. I think Creed Taylor was involved.
- CLINE
- Yes. He produced it.
- BUNKER
- He produced that. I don’t remember anything about him, just that, you
know, that was his function. That was his role. And so we did the stuff
and then we left. That was the end of it.
- CLINE
- Okay. Nothing special about the sound there for you, or anything.
- BUNKER
- I know that the room was very live, because, I mean, there was not a lot
of sound-deadening stuff going on, and very little in the way of
baffles. He probably had some, but he probably had them over against the
wall, and he wanted that cinderblock-wood-wood-floor sound, you know. So
that’s what it was, and I mean, that shows up on the album.
- CLINE
- There’s only one picture that I’ve ever found on any of these older
recordings, where you can really see the studio itself, and the way
things are mic’d and the way people are set up, and that’s in an old
McCoy Tyner Trio record with Roy Haynes and Henry Grimes, and you can
actually see them positioned in the room, what the room looks like, what
the mic’ing looks like.
- BUNKER
- Was it this newer room, or—
- CLINE
- Yes, it’s cinderblock, for sure.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Yes, okay.
- CLINE
- And it’s very interesting to contrast it with the way things wound up
being done not all that many years later, where everything is so
incredibly separated and the sound is very dead—
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- —and just how difficult it is to find, you know, any kind of larger,
live room where people can play music simultaneously these days. And yet
everyone harkens back nostalgically to the way those records sounded,
and how—quote—“natural”—unquote—it sounded, and everything. Do you have
any feelings about that at this time, with hindsight?
- BUNKER
- I don’t remember what kind of mic’ing he did. Chuck was, as far as I
remember, using gut strings. He had switched from steel to gut strings.
Apparently, there was kind of a movement afoot back in New York,
particularly, where bass players were going back to gut. And he
probably— I believe he was. He didn’t have any kind of a pickup, so it
was all totally acoustic. Piano, probably, too, you know; whatever,
Neumanns or— The Neumanns were pretty much the mics to use at that time.
I don’t think Sony had yet come out with some of their top-of-the-line
studio mic’s. Ended up a lot of those being in— The guys out at
Twentieth Century-Fox started using those mic’s when they came out, but
when that was, I don’t really remember.
- CLINE
- Were you using headphones, or not?
- BUNKER
- I don’t think so, no. Did later, in a lot of work in town.
- CLINE
- Sure.
- BUNKER
- But just trying to be able to hear, you know, when you’ve got baffles,
baffles, baffles. But I don’t believe we did. I believe it was totally
acoustic.
- CLINE
- You also mentioned, when you were thinking back to your feelings about
your playing with Bill Evans, and your sort of overall dissatisfaction
with it, one of the things you said is, also, that was in your drinking
days. How much of an effect do you think that has either on just your
perception of it, because that’s attached to your memory of it, or that
it was actually affecting your playing in some way, or your decisions
when playing? What influence did that—
- BUNKER
- I’m sure all of that. I can remember hearing things played back, or
playing things back and I’d say, “That,” you know, “that’s not
acceptable. That’s getting a little behind the beat,” just sloppiness in
the playing, in the execution, and so forth and so on. Probably not
aware of that while it was going on, you know, but being aware of it in
hindsight. You know, I continued— After I had left Bill, I continued on
in that vein until ’67, when it was really starting to affect my musical
judgment, my personal judgment, and all of that. And I said, “It’s time
to stop doing that.” So I did.
- CLINE
- And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about also, particularly
as it relates to your early studio work during the fifties, is if you
experienced or witnessed any marked impact of the [Joseph] McCarthy era
in the particular end of the studio scene that you were working in.
- BUNKER
- I was not that much in the studio scene, but I was very, very aware of
it, in the person of Jerry Fielding. At some point I has started to play
for Jerry. I don’t know how he heard of me or where he heard of me. He
had been doing the Groucho Marx TV show [ You Bet Your Life ] at NBC
[National Broadcasting Company]. He happened to have a couple of black
guys in his band.
- CLINE
- Right. Buddy Collette.
- BUNKER
- Red Callender and Buddy Collette. And NBC was suddenly starting to get
some complaints about that, on American Legion stationery. And the next
thing you knew—and I didn’t really know Jerry at this point, but I heard
about it—he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities
Committee. And my understanding is that he went down there and said,
“I’m not answering shit. You have no authority to ask me the questions
you’re asking me.” They held him in contempt and blacklisted him.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Groucho had said, “I’m behind you 100 percent, but take a leave of
absence.” Well, Jerry packed a bag and went to Las Vegas and worked up
there for a while. He was a conductor in one of the hotels up there. And
as far as I know, he did not go to jail for contempt, but they just—
- CLINE
- Yes, pushed him out of the way.
- BUNKER
- Shoved, and he never did get that show back, as far as I know. But it
was after all of that, when he came back from Vegas and started doing—
Because he’d been doing films, and been doing television, and resumed
that. But that was the closest any of that came to me. You know, I was a
naïve kid. I was not— I was apolitical. And so that was mostly whatever
I heard on the radio—I don’t even think I had a television set yet,
then—and read in the newspaper. It wasn’t until much later that I
actually found out that David Raksin, whose music I loved and played a
lot, and liked very much, turned out to be one of the rats. He spilled
his guts to the committee. Didn’t know it. He’s still around. He’s in
his eighties, almost nineties. He was teaching out at UCLA for the
longest time, film scoring, film composition, etc. Charming, charming
man, but he sure ratted out some people.
- CLINE
- Wow. That’s amazing. Dark days.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And before we leave the period of Shelly’s and all that, a place where
you spent a lot of time, it sounds like, how would you describe the
audience at Shelly’s? What kind of people frequented Shelly’s place?
- BUNKER
- Great, great. Enthusiastic. Whistled, stamped their feet, cheer, you
know.
- CLINE
- Was there a predominant type of person?
- BUNKER
- No, I don’t think so. Just kind of a cross-section, you know, a
cross-section of, you know— There were probably more black people in
there if it was a black band or black artist, but not necessarily. Jazz
fans, people that love jazz. And that cuts across a pretty wide
spectrum.
- CLINE
- Right. Was it, would you say, maybe mostly a younger crowd, or was that
also mixed?
- BUNKER
- Well, it would depend on who was performing, who the performers were,
you know. I mean, if Miles’ band was in there, you got Miles fans, and
if it was [Julian] Cannonball [Adderly]’s band, you got “Cannon’s” fans
in. If Victor Feldman went in there with a trio for several nights,
waiting for the weekend to come up for Shelly’s band, you’d get his
fans, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- But don’t let me neglect Victor. Victor was one of the giants in this
town, and I miss him to this day. He was a marvelous, marvelous human
being, and an insane musician, just incredible.
- CLINE
- And he played vibes.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Yes. Any comments you as a vibist might have on that aspect of his
musicianship?
- BUNKER
- [whistles] He was amazing. That first album that he did when he came to
town and moved in, and was working the Lighthouse, and did an album with
Scott LaFaro and Stan Levey, The Arrival of Victor Feldman. I got that
fairly recently for a young guitar-player friend to listen to, who
didn’t know anything about Victor Feldman, and I said, “The thing is
fifty years old, and it’s as fresh today as it was the day that he did
it.” He influenced me profoundly. He was profoundly influenced by Milt
[Jackson], but he also had his own thing, and I listened to him a lot
and tried to cop what I could. He had too much chops. He could play too
fast. He could do— He could do crazy things, you know, and make it sound
effortless. Brilliant player, brilliant.
- CLINE
- And also an excellent pianist.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Let’s see how we’re doing here. We’ve got a little bit here. While we’re
on the subject of vibraphone, you actually recorded, as a leader,
recordings that I’m completely incapable of finding to hear. But I think
perhaps at least to me, just as an outsider looking at what information
I can come up with about this, it’s rather surprising that you, being a
vibraphonist, have a vibraphonist on your recording [title of album is
Live at the Manne-Hole], Gary Burton, who must have been quite young at
that point.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- What’s the genesis of this idea, and how did that go on?
- BUNKER
- I had heard of Gary. I believe he was working with George Shearing. He
came into the Manne-Hole one night and sat in when I was working there
with Paul Horn, playing vibes, and it was staggering. I said, “It’s not
possible to play the vibraphone that way.”
- CLINE
- He’s already doing the four mallets, chording, and all that.
- BUNKER
- Oh yes. He’d started playing that way. That was the vibraphone technique
for him, in his very early twenties. We became friendly. I believe that
he invited me to participate in a George Shearing session with an
expanded group, like a sextet, a septet, horns and maybe a few strings;
not a lot. And he had done the writing. And it was recorded at Capitol
[studios]. And then we went to Salt Lake City to do, like, workshops and
clinics and performances in Salt Lake City, so we became friends. And I
was so struck by his playing, that I just said, you know, “I want to do
an album. I’ll be the drummer,” and Bob West, who was a bass player that
I had played with, with Clare Fischer around town, and I had heard Mike
Wofford in San Diego, and I called him, and I just said, you know, “I
don’t have any money, but do you guys want to do this? And if I can sell
it, then we make some money.” “Great.” Gary was in town. I think he was
staying at my house.
- CLINE
- Well, he played with Stan Getz around the early sixties, too, right?
- BUNKER
- Yes, but that was about ’65. This was still earlier. This was— Well,
this was right around the time of the [John F.] Kennedy assassination,
which, when was that, ’63?
- CLINE
- ’63, yes.
- BUNKER
- Yes. So I think it was before I played with Bill.
- CLINE
- I see.
- BUNKER
- But I just said, “I want to do that. I’ve got to get this on tape. I’ve
got to get this down.” So we brought in Wally Heider, Wally Heider
equipment, and Bones Howe was the engineer, and into Shelly’s, and we
recorded it. And that was my only— My single solitary only album.
- CLINE
- Right. Hang on and we’ll pursue this on the other side of the tape,
before we lose anything.
- BUNKER
- Okay.
1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO APRIL 3, 2003
- CLINE
- Okay, we’re back. We were talking about your single solitary album,
which was called, by the way—
- BUNKER
- I think it was just Live at the Manne-Hole. I shopped it around; shopped
it around, even during the time when I was, I think, subsequently, later
with Bill. I knew Neshui Ertegun from when he was a jazz fan coming to
the Hague when— You know, he was the older of the brothers and was going
to UCLA. It wasn’t until much later that I met Ahmet [Ertegun], who was
actually the younger brother. But Neshui I had met, you know, in the
fifties. He was already involved with Atlantic [Records], and he just
felt that he would certainly love to do it as a gesture of friendship,
having known me, but there was no market for it. And tried here and
there; tried one thing or another. Gary Burton, by this time, was living
back in New York, and he let me know that somebody had told him that,
like, bootleg copies of it were already appearing in Europe.
- CLINE
- Oh, man. Even back in those days this was going on.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Somehow it had gotten bootlegged, you know, whether— Because all of
this was on tape. It was way, way, way before CDs. But somehow, you
know, it got out there. I finally turned it over to a guy named Jackie
Mills. Jackie Mills was a record producer, entrepreneur, was a drummer,
and his claim to fame was that he had been the drummer with Boyd
Raeburn, the Boyd Raeburn band in the forties. Nice guy, honest, and he
shopped it around. He finally found somebody to put it out and, you
know, I made a nickel. Never even made enough to pay the guys, you know,
because I had paid for the recording and all of that stuff. So it ended
up that way. When it finally got re-released on CD, the original tapes
could not be located, and this whole thing was culled from outtakes that
were left over—
- CLINE
- Oh, really.
- BUNKER
- —that were with an ex-wife in a box in a garage someplace, you know.
- CLINE
- I see.
- BUNKER
- But I mean a Japanese guy approached me and blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, and you know. We went through the whole rigmarole. He did pay me a
little money, and I said, “Yeah, sure. Get it out there, released.”
Because I mean, any market that it had was by this time gone. Totally
gone.
- CLINE
- Yes, sure.
- BUNKER
- So when it was finally released on CD in its altered, truncated,
not-pristine form, was, oh, probably the very early nineties, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes. I have seen that it was released in Japan, but I’ve yet to figure
out how to actually hear this thing. So, haven’t seen it, couldn’t find
it, couldn’t obtain it. But anyway, what was the material on what is now
a CD?
- BUNKER
- Just standards. Mostly standards, a couple of original— A couple, three
originals of Gary’s, and like that. Mike Wofford sounded wonderful. Bob
West was— I haven’t seen him in thirty or forty years. He was always
more interested in being a race driver. He was a kind of— You know,
really, really wanted to do that. He was an okay player, but not
particularly, you know— He had locked in with Clare for some reason.
Clare liked him, and so that’s where I met him and played with him,
mostly. But for some reason I went with him, rather than Monty or
Berghofer; whether Berghofer was around at that point, still like ’63.
- CLINE
- Yes. Well, he came into the first band at Shelly’s in ’60, so I guess he
must have been around.
- BUNKER
- Yes. But—
- CLINE
- Well—
- BUNKER
- Here it is.
- CLINE
- There it is, and I still haven’t heard it. [Bunker laughs.] Now that
we’re moving into the sixties here, and you’re the full-on studio guy,
and the music is— Jazz as a music is changing a lot.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- One of the things that is happening during the sixties is the increasing
dominance of rock music, particularly with the British invasion, the
Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all of that. How did you begin to see the
effects of the encroaching dominance of rock and roll on the jazz scene,
as it were?
- BUNKER
- There started to be— I guess it was probably about that time when the
guys were starting to think in terms of jazz fusion. I remember seeing
Victor Feldman put a band into Donte’s that was interesting. He may
have, by this time, had a Fender Rhodes [electric piano], as well as
playing piano. That seemed to be the only keyboard that was really
happening. The synths [synthesizers] were not really— You know, I mean,
the only synth that you could really get at that time, I think, was a
Moog, and they were probably monophonic devices.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So the Fender Rhodes, you know, was launching into popularity. Miles
used one.
- CLINE
- Yes. Joe Zawinul with Cannonball, yes.
- BUNKER
- And was it Keith Jarrett, I think, that played— It was either Keith
Jarrett or Chick Corea played with Miles.
- CLINE
- Yes, Chick and, well, Zawinul, too. And later Keith Jarrett, absolutely.
And Herbie, Herbie Hancock.
- BUNKER
- Yes, yes. So that was starting to happen. Mike Barone had a big band
that worked once a week at Donte’s; roaring band, good band. John
Guerin— Killer. Killer. And John was one of the first jazz drummers, to
me, that was able to successfully cross over into that. He was
enormously busy, carved out a very, very lucrative career doing that.
Earl Palmer was a jazz drummer from New Orleans, but I really liked
John’s playing better, and I thought of him more as— You know, Earl was
almost, well, he was not a Dixieland drummer. He was just a
straight-ahead New Orleans drummer that then learned how to do the rock
and roll thing, you know. Mike did a lot of charts that capitalized on
that, and he never had anybody that played Fender bass [guitar]. His
bass players were always upright players. Some of them may have used an
amplifier, just to help with that, you know. But he never used a Fender
player, not with that band, and that band was active ’67, ’68, ’69, in
through there. Tom Scott. Tom Scott was launching into that, you know.
Like he’d play exactly the way he played, just on top of like the
equivalent of a rock and roll rhythm section. He wasn’t changing his
style of playing, necessarily. For better or worse, it continued on,
continued on. I didn’t particularly, you know— Except for Mike’s band,
and going to see Victor a few times, I didn’t particularly care for
that. I mean, I ended up playing it enough as a percussionist, you know,
in the studios, you know, on record dates and so forth. I never cared
for the Stones. I thought that the Beatles were interesting. I kind of
talked myself into liking some of that, you know, but that was about the
extent of it. I heard that music a little in Europe, and went to see
their movies, just out of curiosity, you know, but didn’t care for it;
didn’t like it.
- CLINE
- And somehow this also plays into the eventual closing of Shelly’s
Manne-Hole.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- This is something that you mentioned last time off tape, and I wanted
you to describe the experience you had, seeing what I think had to have
been one of the first really full-out what we later would call jazz
fusion—at that time it was called jazz-rock—bands, the Tony Williams
Lifetime.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- You want to describe that?
- BUNKER
- [In an exaggeratedly high voice, demonstrates.] [Cline laughs.] Oh,
Jesus. Tony seemed— He had bigger drums. I’m wondering if he had that
yellow Gretsch set that he later on recorded with up at some studio up
in Utah or Wyoming someplace. Because he’d always had little drums when
he was with Miles. So I guess just that energy that he expended went
into bigger toms and a bigger bass drum, and it just was loud. Was done
with an electric guitar and a Hammond organ. He pretty much broke the
lease for Shelly in that building on Cahuenga [Boulevard]. Wally Heider
had studio spaces in that building, more mixdown and re-record
facilities, rather, although there were small studios in there, because
I recorded in there with the Fifth Dimension, did a couple of albums.
They’d be working at night, and Shelly’d be working at night. And, you
know, these people would come in, and it was almost the equivalent of
knocking on the wall. Like, you know, like, “Jesus Christ, you’ve got to
hold it down. You know, we can’t put that much soundproofing in here.”
It was bleeding, bleeding through and spoiling takes and so forth. And
so I think that Wally was a big enough lessee that he was able to lean
on the building management to not renew Shelly’s lease, and Shelly had
to close down the Manne-Hole. He said, “Because that’s the wave of the
future, that’s the way the bands are going to be,” and whether there was
any kind of antagonism between he and Wally, I don’t know. But I mean,
you know, Wally was a businessman, and trying to operate these studios.
He has his investment in there, and so the Manne-Hole had to move. And
that was the end of the Manne-Hole. He moved to an office building in
Beverly Hills that was, I think, a restaurant [Tetou] during the day,
and then became the Manne-Hole in the evening. And the ambience was all
wrong, and the acoustics were not good, and the parking was terrible,
and it just, you know— I think it lasted six, eight months, and then
Shelly just got together with Rudy [Onderwyzer] and they said, “Time.”
- CLINE
- Right. Right. And it was the wave of the future, so to speak, and one of
the things that started to happen was that the music itself just got
louder.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Do you remember the kinds of changes that took place in order to
accommodate this change in the music, in terms of, say, your instruments
or other instruments?
- BUNKER
- I kept on playing the same set of drums. I didn’t change.
- CLINE
- Was it that Ludwig set?
- BUNKER
- Well, I had a Ludwig set. And then by the time that I had gone with
Bill, I’d traded those in for a Gretsch set, which I still have to this
day. So those were the drums that I used, and that’s my jazz drum set. I
had bought other drums that I used in the studios. I bought a set of
Leedys. In ’67 I was going to do the Jerry Lewis television show, and I
was hired to play drums. So I got some big drums and a bunch of concert
toms, you know, rock toms.
- CLINE
- The post-Hal Blaine set.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Hal had made that de rigueur, or created it, really, you know. So I
had that kind of a set of drums. And I got the Leedys because Shelly had
used Leedys a long time, and his drums always sounded wonderful.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- In fact, he gave me an old set of Leedys when he was getting a new one
once. He just gave them to me. And I still have them. They’re back
buried in storage. I’ve still got calf heads on them.
- CLINE
- Amazing.
- BUNKER
- It was a bronze set, like bronze paint.
- CLINE
- Oh, really.
- BUNKER
- And smaller bass drum, 8” by 12” [rack tom], and I think a 14” by 14”
[floor tom]. I don’t know if I have the snare drum or not. Doesn’t
matter. They were good drums. But in any event, I had the Gretsch drums.
You know, the money drums were the big Leedys, for the television show,
and the television show was such a joke that I ended up quitting after
about six months. It was just— They wouldn’t let us rehearse. We’d
rehearse one time through. There’d be mistakes and wrong notes all over
in the music. They’d do a take, and then that was it, you know, and
recorded in a crappy environment in the NBC studios in Burbank, you
know, in a space that was set up with drapes and gobos and stuff. You
know, the band sounded like shit. The recording sounded like shit. The
music sounded like shit, and after a while, you know. And I’d be a
lunatic about that. And finally I just said, “Nah. Don’t need it. Don’t
need it. Goodbye.”
- CLINE
- So were you starting to see the equipment get heavier and bigger?
- BUNKER
- Yes. That was starting to happen by that time. Yamaha was coming over
here and starting to have little seminars and get-togethers with the
players, and saying, “How is this? Is this nice? Is this a good hi-hat?
Is this a good snare drum stand? Is this a good bass drum pedal?” And
the stuff was, you know— And they pretty well started all that. Pearl
and Tama and all the rest of them were later. But it seemed that Yamaha
was one of the first ones that were starting that. And, you know, you
could park your car on some of the cymbal stands, for Christ’s sake.
- CLINE
- [Laughs] Yes. Yes.
- BUNKER
- Built like hydraulic lifts. I mean, you know. And, of course, stage
presentations and arena shows, and that was starting to happen, so I
guess they felt the need to make that stuff that way, you know.
- CLINE
- Did you feel that drummers, the younger drummers coming up, were all
naturally playing louder than—
- BUNKER
- Oh yes. Yes.
- CLINE
- And the equipment followed suit, drumsticks, cymbals.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Thicker, heavier, louder, cruder.
- CLINE
- How did you feel about these developments?
- BUNKER
- I felt it was awful. Because there are— There are probably some— I mean,
you know, if you look at the Tonight Show or the [Late Night with] David
Letterman show, and see some of those guys in contemporary rock bands, I
mean, they’re like Olympic athletes, as far as the drummers are
concerned. But they’ve got all the finesse of Olympic athletes, you
know. One guy that really impressed me a lot—I mean, it was many, many
years ago—was Neil Peart with Rush. He could play his dick off. He could
really play, and had this—
- CLINE
- Yes, gigantic—
- BUNKER
- —you know, humongous drum set. But, you know, after a while, so what? It
just— It ceased to be musical to me, you know. I think of the young
drummers that are around. Probably the guy— The two guys that impressed
me the most were Vinnie Colaiuta and Dave Weckl, because I went to see
Dave when he was with Chick Corea. The band was Chick Corea, John
Patitucci, and Dave, and they had just done that acoustic album [
Akoustic Band ] and played down at the Palace. And I went with four or
five drummer friends. I went and got tickets and we went down, and it’s
brilliant, brilliant playing. But he’s a jazz musician, you know. And
Vinnie— Vinnie is what Vinnie is. Vinnie is just a freak. [mutual
laughter]
- CLINE
- An aberration.
- BUNKER
- I don’t know what Vinnie is, except that, you know, nobody can do what
he does. He’s just a— You know. But brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I
remember I worked with some of my colleagues recently, and reminded them
of an incident that happened quite a few years ago. Vinnie hadn’t been
around town that long. And we were doing something with James Horner.
This was back when I used to still work for James Horner. [Cline
laughs.] I was his timpani player for a while in the earlier days of his
career. And so we were doing something at RCA, and Vinnie was the
drummer. He’d been hired by— You know; I don’t remember who the
contractor was, but that’s immaterial. How he ended up on the call I
don’t know, because I don’t know whether James knew of him or had heard
of him, or whatever. “Get me a drummer.” Donald Williams was on the
call; John Williams’ youngest brother; Jerry Williams, the middle
brother, both percussionists; a variety of other people. And these were
people that had never heard Vinnie before, that had never worked with
Vinnie before. And Vinnie was in a drum booth, back in the back of the
room. And he is so compulsive, he’s so, such a lunatic, he can’t stop.
He just cannot stop. Whether it’s attention deficit disorder or what,
it’s— You know. So I guess he thinks that he’s in a booth and he can’t
be heard. [mimics the sound of dense, intense, complex drumming] You
know, he’s just doing his thing. And Donald and Jerry were like kind of
looking in the window and going, “Holy Christ. What is that? Who is this
guy?” You know, because they’re both drummers, and good ones. But they
said, “That’s— That’s insane, what he’s doing.” And James is trying to
make corrections in the string section or something, and finally he’s
like, “Wait a minute. Wait. Stop. Who’s doing that? Who is making all
that noise? Jesus Christ, we’re trying to work here.” And I said [raises
his hand], “It was me!” [mutual laughter] I related that a couple of
weeks ago at the Academy Awards, and just— You know. Some of the people
had heard the story in the past, and some of the people hadn’t. I said,
“You can’t let a moment like that go by. You’ve got to—,” you know.
- CLINE
- Oh, man. [mutual laughter] So, how did it wind up then? I mean, did he
just— I don’t imagine he’s like the guy playing on every, you know,
Hollywood soundtrack working these days at all.
- BUNKER
- Oh no, no, no. No, no. No, he has carved a niche for himself where he
plays with people that really want that, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes, right.
- BUNKER
- What, he was with Sting for quite a while, and whether he still works
with him, I don’t know.
- CLINE
- No, he doesn’t. No. But, yes, interesting.
- BUNKER
- I worked an animated cartoon a year or two ago that he was on, and there
were some special, like, I guess, battle sequences or fight sequences or
something. And it was like, you know, written charts, but all of these
spaces blocked out for Vinnie to just do his thing. And that was the
scoring, the underscoring for this dramatic animation that was going on.
- CLINE
- Interesting. So, the music is changing. One of the things I wanted to
mention, too, since I mentioned the video earlier; another item that
I’ve yet been able to find a copy of, and I actually just asked Chuck
Berghofer about it and he doesn’t have a copy of this, is a video that’s
somehow been circulating out there of a set at Donte’s that you’re
playing with Zoot Sims and Roger Kellaway and Chuck.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- So this is 1970, then. You’re still playing jazz gigs. You’re playing at
Donte’s.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Do you remember anything about this, how this came about?
- BUNKER
- I had played with Zoot, in the Manne-Hole days, on a few occasions,
because he would come out by himself. He’s like just the troubadour, and
he’d pick up a local rhythm section, you know. A lot of times it’d be
Lou Levy and a bass player. So we’d done that a couple of times. He was
coming out. He wanted to use Roger [Kellaway], he wanted to use me, and
he wanted to use Chuck. Apparently those were his choices. The piano at
Donte’s was such a dog that Roger didn’t want to take the gig. He said,
“I can’t play that piano.” Whether it was going to be a week or ten
days— I don’t think it was two weeks. But I was living in Beverly Hills
with another wife. I had this piano, which needed work. It has since
been restored. It needed work then, but it was infinitely better than
the piano at Donte’s. And so, was this ’70, ’71, in there someplace?
- CLINE
- I think it said ’70 in the information I was able to find.
- BUNKER
- Yes. That sounds about right, because I left that house and that wife in
1972. And I called Roger and I said, “I want to do the gig, but I don’t
want to do the gig with any other piano player.” And he said, “Well, I
can’t deal with the piano.” I said, “Come over.” I invited him. I said,
“Come over to my house and play my piano, and if it’s acceptable to you,
I’ll have it sent to Donte’s.”
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- He said, “Are you kidding?” I said, “No sir, I am not.” So he came over
and walked into this Spanish monstrosity that I had, north of Sunset
[Boulevard] in Beverly Hills, and played the piano. He sat down and he
played it for five minutes. He said, “If you’re serious, that’ll be just
fine.” So I called the piano movers and had them, you know, call Carey
[Leverett], and Carey said, “Here’s the deal.” And the club piano was
actually a grand. It was a smaller one, and I don’t remember anything
about it except that it was just bad. So the piano movers pulled this
in, took that one, took the legs off, turned it up on its side and got
it over against a wall, and that left enough room for a trio. So that
was that gig. I think I have a tape of that someplace around here.
- CLINE
- I really wanted to see that, and it’s one of those things where, you
know, searching for it on the Internet, I finally found a source that
said, you know, along with all their catalog of jazz videos, that there
it was, listed. And then when you click on it, it says, you know, “Not
found or no longer available.” So I don’t know how I’m ever going to
find that one, but I would love to see that.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Zoot also played and recorded a lot with Jimmy Rowles, who obviously—
Was Jimmy around, and at that point what is he doing?
- BUNKER
- Yes, he was around. Well, now, he had gone back to New York at some
point. He had separated from his wife, whose name I can’t think of now.
Stacy [Rowles] was grown, and he had an older son that played guitar a
little bit. I don’t know whether he ever followed music. So he may have
been back in New York around that time, because he worked at Bradley’s,
which was apparently a famous bar, and place like that, and then
eventually moved back here. Incidentally, I did mention to Gary Foster
about your interest in Jimmy, and it might be certainly worthwhile to
give him a call and maybe get together with him, because, you know, his
knowledge of Jimmy— His knowledge far exceeds that of anybody else that
I could think of, you know, that’s around and active, because they
formed a strong bond, a strong friendship. I mean, every time I see
Gary, somehow Rowles’ name comes up, you know, because I introduced him
to Rowles, and was responsible for Gary playing the first gig with
Jimmy, someplace up in Idaho, when he went up with a— He had a gig and
put together a band for a one- or two-concert thing, you know. Have no
recollection of when that was. Gary would remember. He’d know.
- CLINE
- Okay. Yes, if the budget wills it, I would be happy to check that out.
Speaking of Stacy, do you remember many women jazz players around town
when you were coming up, anyone at all?
- BUNKER
- The one that would come most quickly to mind would be Clora Bryant, a
trumpet player, black trumpet player.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I mean, God, Clora’s got to— seems like I saw her within the last two or
three years. She’s got to be in her late seventies. Whether she still
plays, I don’t know. But she was around and doing session stuff and all
that. The lady trombone player that was—
- CLINE
- Melba Liston?
- BUNKER
- Yes. I don’t remember whether she ever lived out here.
- CLINE
- Yes, she did.
- BUNKER
- She did? I don’t know that I met her. I knew of her and I’d heard of
her. She’d been with Dizzy [Gillespie]’s band. There was a bass
player—boy, I’m probably not going to be able to remember her name; I
met her in the fifties—that played around a bit. You know, a jazz
player, played upright. Vivian? There was a Vivian Guery. Now, was
Vivian Guery a guitar player or a vibe player, with George Shearing?
Odd, I can’t remember. I don’t know. I have no idea. Then at a later
time, Herb Geller’s wife, Lorraine Geller.
- CLINE
- Oh yes.
- BUNKER
- Pretty good piano player; pretty good. And she died tragically. She was
young. I think it was after she passed away that that’s what prompted
Herb to leave and move to Germany, where he lived for thirty-some-odd
years, until he retired from that radio band that he was a member of in
Hamburg or someplace, and has kind of moved back here now. I always
thought it a little strange for a Jewish guy to deliberately move to
Germany, you know. But then, you know, my daughter’s African American,
and she has done the same thing. And you would think, I don’t— We don’t
quite understand it, but that’s how it is, you know.
- CLINE
- Wow. And then, since we’re on the topic, any other later players that
come to mind that you can think of, of note, women who broke into the
scene?
- BUNKER
- Just the ladies that I’ve met that are the studio musicians, and that’s—
- CLINE
- Right. That’s another thing.
- BUNKER
- That’s a whole other thing. And they are, Christ, 35, 40 percent of any
given orchestra; woodwinds, French horn players. There’s some trumpet
players that are around, percussionists, strings galore, all of the harp
players. You don’t see— There are hardly any male harp players, except
for some early, early classical artists that had stuff written for them,
you know; Mario Salzedo and Nicanor [Zabaleta], a Hungarian guy that
everybody studied with; a guy that had been with the L.A. Philharmonic
[Orchestra] forever and ever and ever, Stanley Chalupka. But that’s
about it. All the rest of them have been ladies.
- CLINE
- Always a lot of female flute players, too.
- BUNKER
- Oh, yes, yes. Louise Ditullio is the reigning queen of all of that. She
is an absolutely brilliant, brilliant player, and has been for— You
know, she was one of those people came from a musical family. Her father
and her uncle were cellists, and had a sister that was a pianist. And
she studied piano and decided that she didn’t want to play the piano;
took up the flute, and it seemed like it was within three years she was
a member of the L.A. Philharmonic, in her teens, you know. So, one of
those.
- CLINE
- One of those.
- BUNKER
- And comes from that kind of gene pool, you know; the Italians among us.
- CLINE
- So at what point did you actually pretty much bow out of the jazz gigs?
- BUNKER
- It seemed that I was less interested, less interested. I was getting
called less and less, you know. Shelly was still one of the most
in-demand players here. Mel Lewis had moved back to New York and formed
a band [Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra] with Thad [Jones]. John Guerin
was doing everything in sight, both the jazz things and studio calls,
record dates, and burning the candle at both ends, living, living large.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And loved it, and deserved it, you know. I was getting calls to do that
less and less, and it was okay. So it just— The phone didn’t ring for me
to do that. It rang less and less, and, like I say, I was interested in
other things and doing other things. By the time of the seventies I was
trying to salvage a marriage that was going nowhere, and then walked
away from it, and ended up getting involved with Brandyn, and within a
couple of years of that we bought this house and moved in. And I
inherited her daughter, and just— You know, life goes on. The seventies
kind of went by as a blur; a lot of work, a lot of— You know. The
eighties happened. You know, I would have to get out datebooks to really
remember much about the seventies, as far as what went on, what the
music was like. And life was getting involved in house stuff, on and on.
By the eighties, by ’85, actually, ’84, ’85, I had gone to Europe with
Shorty Rogers and done the George Wein festival tours, about eighteen
days of one-nighters and stuff. Brutal, brutal.
- CLINE
- And this was like a West Coast all-stars kind of thing?
- BUNKER
- Yes, Shorty Rogers and his “midgets,” you know. Band was Shorty, Bud
Shank, Bill Perkins playing baritone, Marty Budwig, Pete Jolly, and
myself. And I’m sure that the only reason I was there was it was about a
year after Shelly passed away. Shelly, I’m sure, would have been
invited, you know, because that would have been the— You know, all of
the people that would have been involved with Shorty all those years
earlier. Didn’t have any fun. Bob Cooper, did I mention that “Coop” was
on it?
- CLINE
- No.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Bud. You know, so it was the four front line: Shorty, Coop, Bud,
and Bill Perkins. And, eh, you know.
- CLINE
- How did it feel to play that music again?
- BUNKER
- Old. It was hard to really get interested in it. And, you know, every
time, every time I tried to do anything the least bit adventurous, Coop
would come to me and complain about the fact that he couldn’t figure out
where I was.
- CLINE
- Oh yes. Right.
- BUNKER
- You know. And I’ve told a few people that, and they said, “Coop? Are you
kidding?” It’s like I’d do— If I crossed a bar line in any kind of a
way, it’d just make him stumble, and he couldn’t figure out where the
hell I was.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- Listen to the bass player. Listen to the changes, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. Or internalize it and keep playing.
- BUNKER
- Yes. And so once again I was being told how to play, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes. Wow. Did you feel in any way that some of these guys had progressed
as players, or had they pretty much stayed the same? Or how did it feel?
- BUNKER
- I think they had pretty much stayed the same. You know, Pete Jolly is a
wonderful player, but he’s absolutely recognizable from the way he was
thirty years ago, thirty-five years ago, when he first came to town;
forty years ago. Marty was good. Perkins, Bill Perkins, surprisingly
enough, even though he was playing, I’m sure, not his favorite horn, was
probably one of the most consistently improving and diversifying players
of all of them. Bud is Bud. Short played his same little solos, you
know. And so I did the tour.
- CLINE
- Did you find that people remembered you, recognized you?
- BUNKER
- Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Although we played in places, in some places
where I had not played when I was over there with Bill; you know,
festivals in small towns in Italy and on the Adriatic coast rather than,
you know, the other one, the western coast, which is, what, in the
Mediterranean, I guess. And we were up in Finland someplace, through
Germany and France, and just all of those things, you know. Guys that
you knew; you’d pass each other on the road. [Harry] “Sweets” Edison was
going that way, and we were coming this way, you know, because that’s
how he was making a living. He’d do George Wein stuff over there and in
Japan, and then just cool it at home the rest of the year, you know, and
do an occasional record date with [Frank] Sinatra or somebody. But by
’85, when that happened, I had gotten interested in the vibe as it was
being explored by Mike Manieri, who had devised, or had had some
engineering students back east concoct for him some sort of a MIDI
[musical instrument digital interface] keyboard, electronic keyboard. He
had one instrument that he ended up, had gotten stolen from the [John
F.] Kennedy [International] Airport, but he did a couple of albums with
it. It was a very interesting sound. It didn’t sound that much like a
vibraphone. It kind of looked like a vibraphone. There were amplified
vibes that were around, but they weren’t very good. One system used
Barcus-Berry pickups, which they had to drill holes in the bar and then
epoxy these pickups into the bar, and they sounded crappy. It seemed
that Musser was trying to develop something using string gauges that
went onto the bar. That didn’t work very well. Deagan had some stuff.
They had little mic’s down in the bottom of the resonators, and they
sounded crappy. And it wasn’t until a drum shop owner, and later
manufacturer, named Ray Ayotte in Canada, in B.C., I believe, in British
Columbia, came out with a pickup system, and I went to the Hollywood
Bowl [Playboy] Jazz Festival, because I wanted to see— Oh, shit, am I
not going to be able to remember his name? Dave Samuels, who was playing
vibes with—
- CLINE
- Was it Spyro Gyra?
- BUNKER
- Yes. Exactly. I had heard that he was using these pickups that you could
put on any vibraphone or marimba, and pick up the sound of the
instrument and then do with it what you wanted.
- CLINE
- Right. Process it.
- BUNKER
- Process it, run it through tape loops, run it through reverbs, and all
of the guitar effects that were starting now to be rack-mounted.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And Manieri did some stuff like that, and I heard Dave Samuels and I
said, “That’s for me. Now.” I play the instrument as loud as you want
to, without swinging for the fences, you know, which is what you always
had to do, and concern yourself with microphones and all that.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I got a set of those, and then had a rack built, the first of a very
expensive hobby. Had my vibe bars, or my vibes set up for that system,
and then tried enlisting interest in it from various composers that I
work for, because all of this, you know, all of that was happening with
the guitar players. The guitar players just were going bananas with all
of that stuff, and now synths were really starting to happen, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes. We were into the digital synthesizer phase at that point.
- BUNKER
- Yes, by ’85. So, everybody that I’d play that setup for, they’d say,
“Jeez, that really sounds loud. That’s lovely, but I don’t need it.”
They just wanted the acoustic vibe. And all of that stuff is sitting out
in my garage, gathering dust.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- But at that point I launched into a serious pursuit of MIDI and
triggers. Emil [Richards] and I had tried to interest some people in
developing some kind of a keyboard, you know, the idea being, I don’t
want to have to be a keyboard player to play a synthesizer. I’d like to
be able to do it from a keyboard that I’m familiar with. Just as it was
finally starting to happen that the Lyricon had happened, and there were
things that were around so a saxophone player could play, you know— Bill
Perkins had been working on that for a long time, but he was an
electrical engineer, and he rigged a saxophone up with— It was the
goddamndest-looking erector set you ever saw, but he could play a synth
or a synth module from it. So that was the idea. We couldn’t interest
anybody. Then a guy named Bill Katowski came along and invented the KAT
[MIDI mallet keyboard], and came up with the way of doing that. And I’m
sure you know what all of that is.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So, you know, Roland was making the drum—
- CLINE
- The drum pad.
- BUNKER
- —the drum pad things.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So I looked at that as possibly a career extender, you know, because
that was becoming so popular and so in demand, and on and on and on and
on and on. It passed its lifespan, I’m sure. Went the way of all of
those things, you know. One or two guys in town that do anything with
that, as far as percussion is concerned. And, you know, that was the end
of that. That’s jumping ahead a bit, but as a partial answer to where
the music was going and all of that, I looked at that almost with
academic interest, and the idea of prolonging the career, although I was
certainly plenty busy at that time. What point was I going to make? I
came to the realization that I really hated the way it sounded and I
hated what it stood for. And by this time, more and more and more of the
studio work was being done by guys in a garage, with a bank of
synthesizers, which now today, I mean, you can’t watch any kind of a
show on television that has live music anymore.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And it just— It turned me off. I ended up with a fifty,
sixty-thousand-dollars system, and I’d take it to the studio, and the
only guys that would call me for that stuff, called me to do that, and
to send everything that I owned. And I’d be the only percussionist. And,
you know, the day was a total rat fuck. Just if you had one electronic
problem— And they couldn’t wait; they didn’t want to wait; they— You
know, on and on and on and on. And one day I remember, you know, it was
no fun at all.
- CLINE
- I think— Hold that story, because I don’t want the tape to run out. I’m
going to stick in another tape.
- BUNKER
- Okay.
1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE APRIL 3, 2003
- CLINE
- This is Alex Cline interviewing Larry Bunker on April 3rd, 2003. This is
tape number six, and we are continuing with Mr. Bunker’s story about his
realization, after amassing loads and loads of electronic gear for his
vibraphone pursuits.
- BUNKER
- You know, I’d had these horrendous days, stress-filled days of trying to
keep everything together, play the acoustic music, play the electronic
music, keep everything running, and one day, I hadn’t used the stuff in
about a year, and I got a call to use it from a guy who was just a moron
about what it was possible to do and what one person was capable of
doing. And I called my cartage people and I said, “Bring the stuff over
to the house and set it up in the garage, because I can’t even remember
how to turn it on.” [Cline laughs.] You know. And I’d turn on a piece of
equipment and I wouldn’t see a screen that I wanted to see, and I’m
going through owner’s manuals and operating instructions that I’d
forgotten, to see, how do I get down four or five levels to that screen?
Almost like a telephone menu, you know. And I just finally said, “It’s
never even going to pay for itself.” And that’s when it was like, “I
hate what it stands for and I hate the way it sounds, and I just don’t
want to be involved in it. So, pass.” So, it’s in deep, deep storage at
the warehouse.
- CLINE
- Yes. So, from the Fender Rhodes [electric piano] to the bass, upright
bass pickup, then amplifier to the heavier sticks, cymbals, and
hardware, everything starts to change. At this point a lot of the local
jazz musicians started to really wonder about the relative health of
jazz as a music, or what jazz was in their minds. Obviously, jazz means
a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And certainly
this was before the whole sort of, you know, Wynton Marsalis phase of
kind of resurrecting the past and developing some sort of a doctrine
about what jazz is. Did you follow any of the developments in jazz music
at this point, or were you really immersed in something else altogether?
- BUNKER
- Pretty much gotten away from it, and most of the players, the younger
players that were coming up, I didn’t particularly care for. I’d buy
their albums, you know. Wynton’s first album I bought. I think I was
more enchanted with the idea of what he was, as an absolutely brilliant
classical player, which to me he is. I don’t know of anybody that is
better as a classical player. But it didn’t take long for the flash of
the jazz to wear off. I seemed to find that there was not much meat on
the bones, to me, and for my taste, as what he chose to play, because he
can play anything, you know. As for some of the other trumpet players, I
was never a terribly big fan of Herbie— Oh, Christ. Freddie Hubbard.
Freddie Hubbard, yes. Some of the other guys that are around now, you
know, I just don’t follow it. I don’t listen to jazz anymore. Even
though I’ve got an electronic, I’ve got a hi-fi rig whereby now I can
get [radio station] KLON in Long Beach well. For a long time I couldn’t.
And before that it was what is now K-Mozart, when they were the jazz
station, when all the guys were—
- CLINE
- Oh yes. KKGO, and before that it was KBCA.
- BUNKER
- KKGO, yes. Yes, right. And I just got to the point where I didn’t care
about it that much. I didn’t care about their rotation. Maybe once in a
while I’d listen. I’d listen when I knew Dick McGarvin was going to be
the disc jockey on KLON, because his taste in music corresponds to mine,
so I like what he chooses to put on the radio. You know. But Chuck
Niles, I, you know— And the other guys, I don’t know. They just— You
know. I really discovered classical music ten, fifteen years ago, and
that’s virtually all I listen to now, and my education continues. You
know, I can get K-Mozart well, and now I can get KUSC with clear
fidelity. For a long time I couldn’t, up here. Just too much multi-path
and all of that, you know. So that’s what I listen to. The occasional
times I hear things that are current jazz, once in a while I’ll hear
something, but most of the time, you know, if I never heard Paquito
D’Rivera again, it’ll be okay with me.
- CLINE
- Did you follow the careers, the later developments of any of your sort
of heroes from when you were playing the music when you were younger,
like Miles [Davis] or any of his sidemen?
- BUNKER
- Yes. Herbie Hancock has occasionally done brilliant things. But it’s
almost like I still want to go back to that original time, to the
fifties and the sixties, and hear those guys in that context, you know,
when they were just burning, burning. Ron Carter is okay. I understand
he can really be an asshole. I’ve never had any dealings with him, but I
mean, you know, wanting to order somebody off the bandstand because he
was white.
- CLINE
- Oh yes?
- BUNKER
- And that kind of thing, you know. We’re still doing that these days?
- CLINE
- This brings up an interesting question, which I had down here to ask,
which is, particularly after the tumult of the sixties, the later
sixties, did you start to notice any changes in racial relations among
the musicians at the time, or in any other way?
- BUNKER
- I don’t think so. I don’t think so. In the circles that I traveled in
and the people I played with, were essentially white; white Jewish,
white Jewish/Italian. It seems like I didn’t play a lot with the black
guys, as I had earlier in the fifties. I think it just was a matter of
geography or where we lived, where the gigs were, how many gigs there
were, you know. It’s like with Harold Land living around town, hardly
ever played— I don’t know that I ever did play with him. There’s a black
tenor player [Ernie Watts], very much influenced by [John] Coltrane, but
he’s probably in his fifties by now, who looks almost Indian. He’s got
straight black hair, reminds me of Horace Silver.
- CLINE
- I’m blanking on who that may be.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Hardly ever played with. There are no black piano players around
that I can think of. There were a couple of guys, but back in the
sixties and seventies, who either left town or moved on, or do other
things.
- CLINE
- A lot of the younger African American musicians kind of crossed over
into the pop world.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- I guess following the progression of the more—what can I say—lucrative
path in certain areas.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Some of the people like Patrice Rushen and some of those people, Ndugu
Chancler and people who came out of Watts, basically. So there was that.
- BUNKER
- Yes. And I recall now that I did do a couple of record dates with her
and with Ndugu. You know, I was percussionist. Just, we were all part of
the cadre. But it didn’t seem like there was any change in
relationships. You know, it’s interesting to me, the fact that my wife
[Brandyn ] is African American, and I adopted her daughter after she
became an adult, at her insistence.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- She chose me to be her father. You know, she said, “Why didn’t you ever
adopt me?” I said, “It never came up.” “Well—,” blah, you know. She had
absolutely no relationship with her natural father. They had split up
when the baby was six months old. But even with that connection, African
Americans are just barely involved in my personal life. That’s just the
way it is, you know. Brandyn essentially functions in the white world.
Most of her friends are white. She certainly has black friends and all
of that, but they’re not an intimate part of our lives. And
interestingly, I very, very seldom— Very seldom do we have conversations
about all of that, black-white relationships, what’s happening, where
it’s going, what it’s going to be like. It’s just that we have other
things that concern us, and that’s— You know, I probably— I’ve got a
book that I just picked up yesterday, because I’m probably more
interested in this stuff than she is.
- CLINE
- Interracial Intimacies.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Written by a black writer [Randall Kennedy] who is a Rhodes
scholar, served under Thurgood Marshall, and he’s a professor at Harvard
Law School. And, you know, I find myself interested in all that, because
to me it’s important. It’s an important area of life. But amazingly,
Brandyn and I really devote very little time, you know, like to being
involved in that. It just doesn’t impinge on us. It’s interesting.
- CLINE
- Yes. You’re people, too. Human beings. You mentioned Paquito D’Rivera a
moment ago, and I wanted to ask you what you did, if anything, to
continue your interest in and pursuit of Latin music that you started
early on.
- BUNKER
- Reached a certain point of proficiency with those instruments; didn’t
necessarily want to continue on further, further, further. The music, to
me, reached a certain point and then kind of leveled off, because I
don’t hear that much of it anymore, and I don’t hear anything that
really turns my head and makes me want to get back into it. I can play
those instruments well enough to do what I do as a percussionist, to
make a living. And that’s as far as I was interested in taking it. You
know, it’s like Arturo Sandoval is an absolutely insane player. And
again, it’s kind of, so what? I’ve played for him. I’ve played with him.
I did an album [Dreams Come True] with him. And Bill Conti hired him to
do several of the Academy Awards shows as a soloist who would just play—
You know, the minute they cut to black for a commercial, sound goes off.
Now they want music. A five-minute commercial, they want five minutes of
music for the house, entertainment. So there’d be big band charts by
Mike Barone and Tom Ranier and various other people, and stuff, and
there’d be lengthy trumpet solos by Arturo. And he’d do all of his
thing, and at the end of it, you know, you just say, “It ain’t Dizzy
[Gillespie]. It ain’t Miles,” you know. [mutual laughter] But whether
that’s being an old fart, you know, at this point in my life, I don’t
know, you know. It’s just, you can’t help but be amazed at his ability,
and yet it’s all marshmallows and whipped cream somehow.
- CLINE
- You mentioned earlier your feelings about hearing Ornette Coleman back
way back when. Did you have any interest in, or did you follow the
developments in the so-called avant-garde in jazz in the later sixties?
No?
- BUNKER
- No.
- CLINE
- People like John Coltrane, whose music went through such a
transformation.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Yes. I remember seeing Archie Shepp once at the [Shelly’s]
Manne-Hole, and finally I just stood up in the audience and shouted,
“Fraud.”
- CLINE
- Oh, god.
- BUNKER
- “Fraud.”
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- I just, you know— It was noise, and not even controlled noise. I mean, I
deal with controlled noise. That’s what I do, you know. But to me it
wasn’t even that. So I never, you know—Don Ellis and his stuff. I knew a
lot of guys that played in those bands, and they loved it and they
learned a lot, you know, and they learned to be comfortable in 13[/8].
- CLINE
- Yes, I played in high school with one of his alums, who led the band
that I played in in high school. I learned to be comfortable in 13[/8]
as well. But that wasn’t your bag? You weren’t into that?
- BUNKER
- Not really. No. Playing in 5[/4] and 7[/4] with Clare Fischer was
challenge enough, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. Other than classical music, is there anything you hear these days
that does grab you, that isn’t just sort of whipped cream and there’s
actually, like, as you said earlier, like, you know, meat on the bones?
Anything?
- BUNKER
- Yes. I’ve— Once in a while, if I happen to skip over to KLON, I might
hear a snippet of something. And then invariably I have to park the car
and wait for them to play five more tunes, and then maybe they’ll say
what it was, you know. I suppose they’ve got to be on the Internet by
this time. I know the classical stations are, and you can get a program
list from them, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- What transpired that day. But it seems that it’s usually not enough to
grab me that strongly, to try to find out.
- CLINE
- Do you ever hear your old recordings when you’re flipping through KLON,
with like Chet [Baker] or Bill [Evans] or any of these people, Gerry
Mulligan?
- BUNKER
- Sometimes. Sometimes. And I understand that that stuff is still on a
lot, because people will tell me, you know. I’ll go to work and they
say, “Jeez, I was coming in this morning,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
“and I heard you on KLON,” and la, and on and on and on. And it’ll be
something with Bill or with Gerry Mulligan or Shorty [Rogers], you know,
and old, old stuff from way, way back. That stuff, some of it’s fifty
years old.
- CLINE
- And how does that make you feel? What do you think?
- BUNKER
- Well, that’s nice. Nice that people enjoyed it, and, you know. I mean,
that’s why you do that, is hope that people will enjoy it. But I’m
interested— It’s interesting to me that they still find that so
interesting, with all of the stuff that’s gone on, you know. But then
it’s like my friend Steve Schaeffer, you know. If it’s sixties Miles,
that’s the golden age. That’s the golden time, and the golden bands, and
with those guys, you know. I mean, Steve still can’t stop talking about
“Philadelphia” [Philly] Joe Jones. He said, “That son of a bitch,”
because as much as he loves Elvin and as much as he loves Tony, I mean,
it’s Joe Jones. And that’s true. Joe was an absolute killer.
- CLINE
- Yes. Well, I actually had a whole bunch of stuff that I still want to
ask you about your studio work, and we’re kind of pushing the time limit
today, of concentration and, you know, human finite mentality here.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- So if you’re up for it, maybe we can schedule one more session and
finish up talking about that in more detail.
- BUNKER
- Okay.
- CLINE
- And I think that this is perhaps, if it feels good to you, a good place
to stop for today.
- BUNKER
- Okay. Yes.
- CLINE
- Thank you very much. It’s been great.
- BUNKER
- Thank you
1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE APRIL 10, 2003
- CLINE
- This is April 10th, 2003. This is Alex Cline, once again interviewing
Larry Bunker at his home on a sunny but hazy day. This is tape number
seven. Good morning, once again.
- BUNKER
- Good morning.
- CLINE
- As usual, I have some follow-up questions from our last session, and I
wanted to point out the listener/reader that you were kind enough to dig
into your archives and find copies of both your recording, as a leader,
at least the second version of it, which was compiled for CD release, a
Japanese release, which is Larry Bunker Quartette, Live at Shelly’s
Manne-Hole, and also the Zoot Sims Quartet video [Live at Donte’s] from
1970, filmed at Donte’s. I have listened and I have viewed, and now I
can actually ask some more informed and intelligent things about those.
So, since it’s the older of the two, let’s start with the Shelly’s
Manne-Hole live recording.
- BUNKER
- Okay.
- CLINE
- I wanted to ask you last time, what inspired you to put together a
quartet with vibraphone and piano? That’s somewhat unusual, other than
the Modern Jazz Quartet.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Just the fact that I had become friends with Gary and we had played
together in a few situations. I don’t really remember if he was still
actively involved with the George Shearing Quintet. I think he was. We
had played together. In that setting I had done an album, the arranging
of which he had done. We did it at Capitol Records, and I was hired, you
know, as percussionist by Gary [Burton]. But I became enthralled with
his playing, and don’t remember when that was. Early sixties. It was
before I was with Bill [Evans], I believe, ’62 or '[‘6]3. As I said, you
know, we played together and I think we worked a weekend or two at the
Manne-Hole, and I was so amazed at what was happening, that I said, “We
should record this.” So it wasn’t just a one-shot thing; I think we
worked maybe two, three, four weekends, possibly. And so it was like,
you know, we hired Wally Heider to bring in sound equipments, mics, and
recording stuff. There was room at the Manne-Hole to accommodate that,
and got Bones Howe, who was a friend also, very, very, well-known and
respected recording engineer in town, to come in and mix the stuff, and
just straight ahead. We played mostly standards, some originals of
Gary’s. I had heard and played with Mike Wofford, who was still living
in San Diego, his home town, at the time, and chose him to be the piano
player. I just said, you know, the interaction between the two was
rather amazing. So that was it, and that’s my sole, solitary album
credit as a leader.
- CLINE
- Did you ever consider doing more work as band leader?
- BUNKER
- No, not particularly.
- CLINE
- No interest?
- BUNKER
- You know, it’s like somebody would say, “Well, do you want to be a
contractor? Would you like to—?” I said, “Paperwork and being on the
phone is absolutely of no interest to me. I like to play. I like to play
music, and like that.” But the administration, the administrative
aspects of it never did appeal to me.
- CLINE
- There’s some real swinging stuff on this CD, of course. Particularly, I
was thinking of pieces like “Stella by Starlight,” you know, “Be My
Love,” some of these tunes that are, you know, really happening, I
think. And it’s really amazing that Gary already has his signature sound
very clearly in place, even at that early stage. Since the CD is made up
of alternate takes and outtakes and things, stuff that wasn’t chosen for
the actual first release on LP, how do you feel about the recording of
what I have to would think then be not primary choices? How does that
feel to you?
- BUNKER
- Well, because the original master tapes were no longer available— I had
no idea. They passed through a variety of hands, and the stuff
eventually got released on some label. You know, it had been shopped
around by Jackie Mills, who was a friend and a record producer and
musician, a drummer, and a lot of time had gone by. So there was really—
I tried to track down the original tapes, but there was really, I think—
Jackie had retired and moved out of state, was living up in Montana or
Idaho or someplace. For the material to be released at all, it was going
to have to come from the alternate takes, and that was only because they
had fallen into my lap. They’d been in a garage at an ex-wife’s place
for— You know, since they were originally done. So it was either release
it that way, or forget it.
- CLINE
- Yes, right.
- BUNKER
- So I thought, well— I listened to it and I said, you know, it’s okay.
It’d been so long since I’d heard the original LP, I couldn’t really
remember, you know, the choices that were made and the reasons for the
choices, because actually, I relied very much on Gary for a lot of that,
because he’d had a lot of experience in producing and overseeing
production of his own albums. He was under contract to RCA [Records] at
the time, had to get RCA’s permission, which was forthcoming. But that
was pretty much, you know, how all of that went down.
- CLINE
- Okay. Another thing I wanted to ask you, which may be the same answer as
the band leader question, particularly as you were at times over the
last couple of sessions expressing a certain amount of frustration with
being told how to play by band leaders, and not maybe always playing
exactly the way you wanted to, or exploring the areas that you felt you
really wanted to explore on your instrument or in the music, had you
ever thought about seizing control of the musical situation for those
kinds of reasons? For example, have you ever thought of composing, going
that direction, so that you could essentially have the say over the
direction of the music?
- BUNKER
- I entertained those thoughts when I was a lot younger. There again,
everything was self-taught. When I got into the service at the age of
nineteen, there was a captive band, with a bunch of guys that were
confined to the base during the day, and had to practice and had to
rehearse, and, you know, had various duties as band members. But we had
a dance band, so I tried to teach myself something about writing there,
and it was, again, the same situation, you know. There may have been
eight bars that were lyrically wonderful and cohesive, and then there’d
be eight bars that was dross. But I did that for a while. I did it for a
while when I came out of the service; kind of gradually lost interest in
it. It was hard work, sitting there picking your brains, bending over a
piano stool, you know, and squiggles on the paper. I didn’t pursue that
in any depth. I didn’t feel a deep commitment to it. So, as far as
seizing the day and having control over my environment, even at that
early stage in the sixties, I was already, you know, looking at the
possibility of a career as a full-fledged studio musician, rather than
as a jazz musician. I was a studio musician who played jazz, is how I
have continued to think of myself. And I got a great deal of
satisfaction out of doing that. As far as abandoning the studio idea and
becoming a band leader, it didn’t mean that much to me. I said, I’m not
going to be the second Elvin Jones. I’m not going to be the second Tony
Williams, you know. It’s not in the cards for me to be that. And so all
of that being dictated to, ceased to have the importance as I got older,
than it did when I was younger, you know.
- CLINE
- And fast-forwarding to your tale of woe about the buildup of MIDI
[Musical Instrument Digital Interface] gear and whatnot, the vibraphone,
the MIDI keyboard, mallet keyboard, and all that electronic stuff, did
the thought ever cross your mind that maybe you could basically take all
that stuff and just do your own music with it, rather than wait for a
composer to write for it, or even get out and somehow perform with it in
some way that you ultimately had control over?
- BUNKER
- I started getting involved in that stuff in ’85, and I finally really
kind of came out of the garage, as it were, with a full-blown system,
including sound modules, sampling modules, you know, a Korg M1
[synthesizer], a particular Yamaha keyboard, and all of that, with the
capability of, you know, functioning as a synth player, the ability to
do that.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I mean, it started with the idea of being able to play a vibraphone
keyboard-related device, so that I didn’t have to be a proficient piano
player, because I never was. But that evolved into also having a
keyboard, because there are a lot of things you could do that way, that
were easier to do than to hit the Mallet KAT, and all of those things. I
played around with that quite a bit, and the technology was such that it
just all ended up sounding like synth things to me, and I was really
aiming and hoping for a more acoustic sound. The technology hadn’t
really gotten quite to that point yet. I did a lot of my own sampling.
The sample libraries that were out at that time were not all that
wonderful. There were a few things, and I used Akai samplers. I didn’t
get into the E-Mus, the Emulators. And what was that early— And
Kurtzweil. Actually, the Kurtzweil sampling keyboards were not that
developed yet, anyway. They were still more synth-based and
oscillator-based. It’s just that the stuff that I did, I wasn’t happy
with the results, you know.
- CLINE
- I see. It wasn’t inspiring you to create music, then.
- BUNKER
- Not really. Not really.
- CLINE
- Okay.
- BUNKER
- Like I may have mentioned once before, I reached a certain point where I
said to myself, “Who am I kidding? I hate the way this sounds, and I
hate what it stands for.”
- CLINE
- What did it stand for, to you?
- BUNKER
- Well, it stood for what it eventually became; putting a lot of musicians
out of work.
- CLINE
- Yes. And we’re going to talk about that later today. Going now to the
video—and this is an interesting document—Zoot Sims, you, Chuck
Berghofer on bass, Roger Kellaway on piano, Live At Donte’s. It’s only
twenty-eight minutes of music, but I think it gives a really distinct
flavor of what the scene was like there. In a way, Donte’s stepped into
the void left by the demise of Shelly’s after a while. It became quite
the hangout for the local jazz musicians.
- BUNKER
- They did overlap, because I was going to Donte’s a lot in the sixties
when the Manne-Hole was active.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- The Manne-Hole was ’60 to ’70, ’71, and so there was overlap, but it was
a much larger venue, and a full-fledged restaurant, in fact. You know, a
lot of people— I’d go there to hear Mike Barone’s band and have dinner,
have a couple of drinks and then have dinner, and then wait till the
guys pulled the walls down, you know, in the last set.
- CLINE
- Well, apparently Donte’s started as—Initially the idea was it was going
to be just more of a piano room, and it expanded its policy over time,
starting in the later sixties, so that during that overlap period that
you had there, and then sort of taking over after the demise of Shelly’s
as sort of the local haunt. Other than what you just described, in terms
of the atmosphere and the clientele, is there any way you can contrast
it with Shelly’s, what was different about it?
- BUNKER
- Mainly that. The acoustics were good. It was a rectangular room, much
larger than Shelly’s. I’ve no recollection of how many people it would
hold, but I’m sure legally, sixty, seventy, eighty, and the Manne-Hole
was not licensed for that size. And the Manne-Hole was a much more oddly
shaped room; kind of beat-up piano, but a bandstand big enough to
accommodate a big band. It seems that it was virtually all local people
that worked there. I don’t recall any of the major traveling bands ever
playing there, as they did at the Manne-Hole. Whether they didn’t have
the money or didn’t want to get involved, or their booking procedures,
however all of that works, I’ve never known and cared. You know, doesn’t
involve me. You want me to work? Call me on the phone and I’ll go where
it is, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Pleasant place to play. Sunny and Bill McKay were kind of the owners,
and Carey Leverett. Carey had been a dancer, and he tended bar a little
of the time. Sunny— I used to know her original Iranian name. She had
come to the United States as an exchange student and studied art at USC
[University of Southern California], and stayed. She might have come—a
beautiful woman—might have come from a prominent family, Iranian family.
Bill’s American as apple pie. And so they ran the place, and it was
comfortable for musicians, comfortable place to play. I used to get into
political arguments—I don’t remember about what—with Sunny, and we’d end
up walking the bar, you know, sometimes at two-thirty in the morning.
But it was fun. It was a nice place.
- CLINE
- You hung out a lot at Shelly’s and heard a lot of music. Did you spend a
lot of time hanging out at Donte’s listening, as well?
- BUNKER
- Not as much. It was a little further from where I lived, and mostly it
was the interest in the Mike Barone big band, because that was a feature
there on Wednesday nights for years; years and years and years. The band
was hot and, you know, there’d be, like, the cheerleading section that
always showed up, all the musicians that loved to come and hear the
band. And so that’s when I went, mostly.
- CLINE
- Did a lot of musicians come to listen there, as well as—
- BUNKER
- Oh, yes. Yes, yes.
- CLINE
- It’s interesting to see on the video, sort of to get a sense of the
ambiance around the time that it was done. For one thing, I think one of
the things that is immediately striking is the shots of the audience
profusely smoking, which, of course, nowadays you would not see.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- But also, of course, just, you know, the styles of the time. I mean, you
know, you have quite the mod look in this video, and Roger Kellaway
looks like one of the Bee Gees, although, of course, there’s Zoot up
there, still with his coat and tie and his hair slicked back.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And it looks to me like you’re playing what must have been the Gretsch
drum set at this point.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Right.
- CLINE
- Although there are some differences, and I don’t know if you’ve ever
noticed this or thought about it, but, say, compared to the video [Jazz
Scene USA: Shelly Manne and Shorty Rogers] of you playing with Shorty
Rogers [and his Giants] in ’62, I was curious about a couple of things.
One is, it looks to me like you’re holding your sticks farther back
toward the end of the stick than you were in the earlier video where
you’re holding it somewhat more towards the center. Were you aware of
that at all?
- BUNKER
- No.
- CLINE
- Oh, okay.
- BUNKER
- Nothing conscious. Just—
- CLINE
- I see. And you’re kind of leaning more into the drum set instead of kind
of, you know, sitting up very erect, the way you were in Shorty’s video.
By 1970, how much jazz gigging were you doing, since you were clearly,
like, the major studio guy by then?
- BUNKER
- Less and less. You know, Shelly was, of course, very active, and got
pretty much the lion’s share of that. John Guerin had become very well
known, rightfully so. He’s one of my favorite drummers. He just kills
me. There’s a pop that he gets that, the time-feel. The whole thing;
he’s the whole package, to me. And so I was getting calls less and less
to do that sort of thing. It may have been also that the— Well, it was
probably later that there was less and less call in the film and
television area for drum-set playing. Now, that may not be true. There
was a lot of demand for drum-set playing in the seventies, mostly for
television, because of the kinds of shows that were being done then, the
police things and detectives.
- CLINE
- I’d say a lot of the Quinn Martin shows and things had lots of drum set
and lots of—
- BUNKER
- Rhythm section.
- CLINE
- Lot of writing, period, actually, back in those days.
- BUNKER
- Yes. But it seemed like John and Shelly, particularly, were the guys
that were doing most of that, and I’d be there in my supportive role.
- CLINE
- And by now, Stan Levey had given up playing in the early seventies. And,
of course, you have guys like Emil Richards obviously working a lot in
those days.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Do you remember who some of the other people were at that point, now
that we’re kind of moving into a period where I think a lot of people
who started as jazz musicians were probably gigging less and working
more in the studios?
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Do you remember who some of those guys would have been by then?
- BUNKER
- Bud Shank was certainly very active, and I don’t remember when Bud
finally decided he wanted to be a nomad and leave. It was quite a few
years, because Bud had a very active and successful career as a studio
musician. Paul Horn had been doing that, a lesser-known jazz player, and
finally moved up to the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know if he lives in
Washington or Vancouver, or British Columbia someplace. Guys like Don
Fagerquist were still active, and he’d been a jazz trumpet player with
the Les Brown band, so that’s where I knew of him from. Dick Nash, who
is a phenomenal trombone player. I’ve known Dick for, I guess, fifty
years now. We were on Billy Mays’ band together in the very early
fifties. Tom Scott was coming on the scene, was young, in his twenties,
but coming on the scene as a player and as a writer. Pete Christlieb,
who is still active today and is still a blazing player. I’m trying to
remember if Toshiko [Akiyoshi]’s band was active around that time, with
Lew Tabackin and Toshiko, and the guys that played in that band. But I
mean, those were all guys that made their living in the studios, and
they’d have a gig once in a while, you know. Charlie Loper, great
trombone player; Peter Donald. I was just trying to think. You know, Stu
Williamson was doing a lot of studio work; Jimmy Rowles, of course. I
remember one of the best things that I ever saw happen— Jimmy played
piano for Hank [Henry] Mancini for a long time. We were doing a Mancini
album at the old RCA studios in Hollywood, where that film institute
[Los Angeles Film School] is now, on Sunset Boulevard. And the
concertmaster, the violin concertmaster for Hank, was a Hungarian who’d
been an American for a long time, but still, he couldn’t say “winged
victory.” It was “vinged wictory,” when he played in the show during the
war; Erno Neufeld, who’s still alive and has musician sons. We started
to play this tune of Hank’s, and there was like a sixteen-bar
introduction for whatever this— It was either a ballad or very slow,
medium tempo, just rhythm section, and Jimmy did his customary magic.
And we were listening to a playback, and Erno was kind of just sitting
there staring off into space, and I went over to the piano and picked up
the music and walked over to Erno and showed it to him. And for the
first sixteen bars, all it was, was just four-four, a key signature, and
some slash marks, and occasional chord symbol. And Erno looked at it and
watched it go by, and looked up at me and he said, “How the fuck do they
do that? How do you guys do that?” You know, which was, I thought, kind
of the response I would get from him, because, you know, he respected
that, even though he was a classically trained musician and came from
Budapest Conservatory, and then got out of there and ended up in
Czechoslovakia before coming to the United States. But he just kind of
shook his head and said, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand,” you know.
It’s always lovely when that happens, you know, when you see somebody
go, “Goddamn,” you know, and appreciate the art of that.
- CLINE
- Yes, yes. Right. Definitely. You mentioned Bud Shank a moment ago, and
you had mentioned in our last session that you played a gig with him
that had Scott LaFaro playing bass on it.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- What was that like?
- BUNKER
- Amazing. The band was, pretty much most of the time was, you know, just
one night here, one night there, one night at a club in Malibu, one
night at a restaurant in Pasadena, you know. But with Scott, Chuck
Flores played drums. I played vibes and just kind of a little
rhythm-section piano; Bud and Scott. Now, that was a strange rhythm
section in that Chuck was certainly an okay player. He was not a
brilliant player, but he was certainly okay, and he had spent some time
with Woody Herman’s band, and was kind of a young hot player around
town. Didn’t have a lot of chops, but had good feel, got a good sound.
And Scott— Those two playing off of each other, and me trying to, you
know, just kind of get in the middle someplace and comp a little bit,
and play that way, you know, it was fun. It was good. Scott was in the
process of turning the bass around, you know. Nobody ever heard anything
like that before. I mean, as great a player as Jimmy Blanton was, and as
great a player as Ray Brown was, and Oscar Pettiford and those guys, Red
Mitchell, who was living here by that time— But still, nobody had taken
the bass in that direction in that way, and revolutionized the way of
playing it, that I knew of, you know. I’d never heard anything like
that. And he was just in his twenties, a young guy.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So it was an interesting time.
- CLINE
- Did you ever play any gigs with him where you were playing drums?
- BUNKER
- No, I don’t believe I ever did. Because it wasn’t too long after that
that he left and went back east, because that was probably in the very
late fifties that we were doing that.
- CLINE
- And another thing I wanted to follow up on, since you told the story of
the Tony Williams Lifetime as essentially leading to the demise of
Shelly’s— You told the story, but you didn’t actually give your
impression or reaction to the music itself. What were your feelings
about it?
- BUNKER
- It was just loud. I mean, Tony was amazing, the fact that he could do
what he was doing, and as loud as he was doing it. And he was backed by
two electronically amplified instruments, the Hammond organ and the
guitar. No, he was just an absolutely amazing player to watch and hear.
I wasn’t crazy about the music. I did end up listening to quite a bit of
fusion music. You know, the other day when I was looking through my old
LPs, I said, “There’s a lot of crossover music in there,” that I was
buying and listening to during that period. And later in the seventies,
particularly, you know, a lot of Chick Corea stuff in his various
manifestations of bands, Return to Forever, all of those things; My
Spanish Heart. There’s good music in a lot of that, but, for sure, it’s
getting into areas of rock and roll combined with jazz, combined with
who the hell knows what.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Some of it I liked. Some of it I just didn’t care for at all, you know.
I think I bought one of Tony’s albums, of the Lifetime. Wasn’t there
something about legs? Something legs?
- CLINE
- Million Dollar Legs. Million Dollar Legs is one of the later ones, the
second Lifetime group. [Tony Williams] New Lifetime, it was called.
- BUNKER
- Yes, I think I bought that album, and I was into it some.
- CLINE
- Yes, by then he was playing, definitely doing the big drums with the big
sticks.
- BUNKER
- Yes, yes. And that was recorded up in the Northwest someplace, in a
ranch studio, probably in Idaho or Montana or someplace.
- CLINE
- Well, he was living in Marin County [California] by that time, I think,
too. When you saw him at Shelly’s, did he sing at all?
- BUNKER
- No.
- CLINE
- Because, you know, the early Lifetime stuff he had some singing on. He’d
actually sing. And that was certainly met with a certain amount of a
controversial response.
- BUNKER
- What flabbergasted me, near the time of his death— And I don’t remember
what that was, what caused his death. He was, what, fifty years old, or
approaching fifty?
- CLINE
- He was in his fifties, yes. He died on the operating table. He went in
for— He was going in for gall bladder surgery, and yes, complications.
- BUNKER
- But to find out that he was gay, I said, “That’s amazing, because jazz
musicians are not gay.” Now we find out that jazz musicians are, you
know; some are.
- CLINE
- Well, Gary Burton, for example.
- BUNKER
- Yes. I mean, Gary came out, and when I heard that I just said, “Boy,
that explains a lot of things.” Just, you know— And I don’t need to
delve into that, but just snippets of Gary’s personality, his attitudes,
his behavior in certain instances. I remember one time, I think we were
in Japan with Stan Getz, and something happened. We had played a
particularly wonderful set, and I got off the bandstand and embraced
him, and he just went rigid, just like, “Don’t do that.” And I thought,
that’s a strange reaction, because it was genuinely heartfelt on my
part, because I’m that way with people. If I’m touched by something that
they do, or by them, it’s a lot of touchy-feely, huggy-kissy with me,
you know. [Cline laughs.] And he just, he just [gasps and stiffens];
whether that was latent feelings of any kind, or just total repression
of any of that, the manifestation of any kind of emotion directed toward
a same-sex person. I don’t know, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes, right.
- BUNKER
- And I don’t know him well enough to ask him that, and it’s not important
to ask him that. It’s something I probably never would, even though I’ve
known him as long I have. But it really surprised me with Tony, because
I said, “Goddamn, those are the biggest balls I’ve ever seen,” you know,
or heard in a player.
- CLINE
- And yet he also married late in his life, which was interesting. And I
don’t know what that was about. But I did meet his wife once, you know,
quite a beautiful woman. It’s very interesting. But jazz is still very
much not only the dominion of the male, but the dominion of the macho
somewhat blatantly heterosexual male.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And you still don’t hear about too many gay jazz musicians coming out. I
mean, and there must be more, but I think it’s probably still very much
the— Or what do you think? Is it the realm of the—
- BUNKER
- I think it is the social— I believe Fred Hersch is.
- CLINE
- Yes, right. He’s come out. Sure.
- BUNKER
- Whom I don’t know, but is a wonderful player.
- CLINE
- Definitely.
- BUNKER
- But just stayed in the closet. Acceptance. Why make waves? Why make
problems? You know. What prompted Gary to come out, I don’t know,
because he was married. I think he was married twice, and has kids. And
so, suddenly, just within the last very few years, where he decided to
go public, and it’s a more open time. It’s a more accepting time.
There’s been so much, you know. There have been athletes that have come
out. Politicians, people that are members of Congress have said, “Okay,”
you know. “I can do this. I can effectively serve my community and
perform my job and do all that, and that has no bearing on it.”
- CLINE
- Yes. Do you think there’s a difference between somebody who’s already
sort of there? They’re established and then they come out, versus
somebody who’s young and still trying to get gigs and get calls, and who
may not feel so secure in that way?
- BUNKER
- I don’t know. I know a lot of gay people, but hardly any of them are
jazz musicians. They’re in other areas of life, and I don’t— I’m just
thinking. Of all of the studio musicians I’ve know, very, very, very
few; a string player, woodwind player. I’m thinking of—I won’t mention
her name—a clarinetist, a wonderful classical clarinetist who’s quite in
demand in the studios, who recently entered into a lesbian relationship
with another colleague. And I thought, “Oh. You mean they’re an item?”
Unlikely, but if they’re an item, so be it. Whatever. And I mean, that’s
their life and it’s their life to live.
- CLINE
- And speaking of women, we talked a little bit about the seemingly few
number of women jazz musicians who were around when you were on the
scene, and certainly relative to the number of women there are playing
in the studios, which is a lot greater. What sense, if any, do you have
right now for how easy or difficult it is for a woman to break into the
jazz world, compared to before?
- BUNKER
- I think it’s easier now; fewer restrictions. Elaine Elias comes to mind.
She’s a wonderful player, from Brazil. There was a woman, JoAnne
Brackeen. She was around. I haven’t heard much about her in the last few
years, but when she first came on the scene and had her first album, I
believe I bought one of hers.
- CLINE
- Well, she’s from here, too.
- BUNKER
- Yes. I don’t recall playing the album a lot. I was more curious than
anything else, just because, you know, there are so few women that show
up in that area.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- Now, there’s a lady; there’s another lady that has come on the scene
just in the last couple, three years. I probably won’t remember who she
recorded with. She lives back east, pianist, and good.
- CLINE
- There are quite a few pianists.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- I don’t know why that is particularly, but a lot of them and a lot of
good ones. Any other instruments come to mind that—
- BUNKER
- Not in the jazz sense, you know. I haven’t really heard— I’m not
familiar with Stacy Rowles’ playing. I know that she’s very well
regarded and very well thought of, and she’s been around and doing that
for a long time. She’s in her middle forties, isn’t she? Forty-six,
seven years old?
- CLINE
- Yes, she must be. She’s close to my age.
- BUNKER
- Saxophone players? You just don’t seem to hear of them. Seemed like some
lady came on the scene back east a few years ago and kind of starburst
and then who knows, you know.
- CLINE
- Jane Ira Bloom?
- BUNKER
- Yes, exactly. Exactly.
- CLINE
- Yes, soprano saxophone player.
- BUNKER
- I haven’t heard anything about her for a while. I haven’t heard of any
trumpet player. I haven’t heard of any trombone player. Haven’t heard of
any bass player. And Terri Lyn Carrington is about the only drummer that
comes to mind, and she can play. She can play.
- CLINE
- And Cindy Blackman is another one.
- BUNKER
- Her I don’t know.
- CLINE
- Very Tony-influenced.
- BUNKER
- Yes. Dick McGarvin is a disc jockey who bounces around from station to
station. He gets fired and then he gets rehired, and then they find time
slots for him, who’s one of my favorites when I listen to KLON or one of
the jazz stations, just because his taste coincides with mine. I
remember years and years ago— He killed me the way he did it. Now, I’d
have to think a second. He played an album. It was like a trio or
quartet album; good players, good material, well recorded. And the drums
were just killer. And so after the tune was over, he called out who it
was, who the leader was, who the players were, and the last player that
he mentioned was the drummer. And he set it up in some kind of a way
whereby he was able to say, you know, he says, “Terri Lyn Carrington.”
Well, “Terry” is masculine or feminine. So when he said, “Terri Lyn
Carrington”, this that and the other, and commented a little bit,
because he’s a drummer, as well, himself, and said something about, you
know, “however she feels about it.” And I went, “What? What I just heard
was a lady drummer?” Because I had not heard that kind of playing from a
female before. You know, there were occasional rock and roll drummers in
girl groups, and the heavy bashing, but I mean, you know, that takes
more endurance than skill, as far as I’m concerned. I said, “That’s
amazing,” that she sounded that good.
- CLINE
- And speaking of drummers, a name that hasn’t come up in our interviews,
I wondered if you had heard around town, who was somewhat of a legend
and, of course, ended up tragically, was Frank Butler.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Do you remember much about Frank?
- BUNKER
- I played with Frank and I heard him play a lot. Now, is he still alive,
or is he—
- CLINE
- No.
- BUNKER
- —no longer?
- CLINE
- No.
- BUNKER
- Did he relapse?
- CLINE
- Oh, yes. It was— Yes.
- BUNKER
- Yes, because he had kind of cleaned up his act and straightened up.
- CLINE
- Yes, he didn’t survive.
- BUNKER
- Wasn’t able to make it stick.
- CLINE
- No, no.
- BUNKER
- Frank was around, certainly, by, I think, the late fifties; certainly
the early sixties, and playing. He played in a group that Curtis Counce
had, bass player. “You get more bounce with Curtis Counce,” which was a
lot of the time Carl Perkins playing piano, who was a phenomenon;
Curtis, Frank, Jack Sheldon, and I’m trying to remember if Harold Land
played with that group. Might have. Worked at the Haig. Worked in the
joints in Hollywood. But I did hear Frank play a lot. Frank was a bitch.
Frank, very unique, dancing time. I guess the closest I can think of to
him would be like a Billy Higgins kind of drummer, whom I hardly ever
heard. I only heard Billy mostly on record, because he made millions of
them.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- But I never did seem to go to see groups that he played with. No
particular reason. But Frank had some trademark things that he did. He’d
get a new pair of drumsticks and then go out on the curb and rub the
heads off, you know. This was before they had plastic heads. And he’d
just file it down to like a pencil point. And played a lot of his drum
solos with his hands. Didn’t have plastic heads; it was still calf, so
there’d be some roughness and texture. And he’d do things rubbing his
fingers across, as well as hitting the drums, patting the drums. And he
had a thing that he could do with his fingernails. Did you ever hear
that or see that?
- CLINE
- Well, I never saw him, so if I heard it I may not have—
- BUNKER
- All of his fingernails came down and kind of bowed over the ends of the
fingers, for some reason.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- On both hands. And he had a way of flicking this with both hands, and
he’d play rolls [mimics the sound of rolls ending in sharp accents]. But
he’d be playing with his hands, and he’d [demonstrates]. He’d do those
kind of things, flams and roughs, really, with the fingers.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- It was just wild, and it was loud. I mean, all of a sudden you’d think
he had picked up the sticks, and he was doing that with his fingernails.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- But he had beautiful time. Drums always sounded good. He borrowed part
of a set of drums from me one time, and I said, “I have a feeling that
I’m not going to get these back.” And I was right. I finally cornered
him and got a pawn ticket from him, you know; the Philly Joe Jones
syndrome.
- CLINE
- Yes, right. Speaking of Philly Joe, although we’re getting to the end of
this tape side here, your tuning on this Live at Shelly’s Manne-Hole
record seemed somewhat reflective of Philly Joe, very highly tuned toms
cranked way up there. Was that a sound you were going for at that time?
- BUNKER
- Yes, a little bit. And they were still calf heads on the drums, and
whatever time of year it was, the heating or the air conditioner or
something, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- But I was conscious of that, and they were smaller drums, eight-[inch]
by twelve-[inch rack tom-tom] and a fourteen-[inch by fourteen inch
floor tom-tom]. Twenty-two-inch bass drum, though; not a twenty. I think
it was a twenty— No, I’m not sure. It may have been a twenty. But I
never seemed to be able to get that drum up as high as I wanted. A lot
of guys could really get a drum up clear out of a string-bass register,
you know, so that it didn’t compromise that.
- CLINE
- Yes. Then you eventually went to an eighteen-[inch bass drum] in order
to do that?
- BUNKER
- I never did bother. I liked the drums, and with the hardware that was
available, it put the tom-tom where it was easy for me to reach. And I
said, if I do that, then I’ve got to drill more holes or get a console
holder or something, you know. I said, it’s fine.
- CLINE
- So you never went to an eighteen?
- BUNKER
- No, I never did.
1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO APRIL 10, 2003
- CLINE
- I was just saying that— I said that Shelly’s video, which was incorrect.
It was a video that also had Shelly on it, the one from Jazz Scene USA
with Shorty, and the one at Donte’s with Zoot. Both looked like
twenty-inch bass drums to me.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Another thing that I wanted to ask you before we get into the studio
thing is, you mentioned in our last session, when we were talking about
sort of the racial makeup of things and that whole scene, that it was
after a while just you and largely white Jewish and Italian guys.
[Bunker laughs.] Why do you suppose that is such a common phenomenon?
Especially here in town, when you look at a lot of the people who were
playing, especially horn players, this amazing profusion of Italians.
Any feelings about that?
- BUNKER
- Well, the Italians among us are numerous, and they come from a gene pool
of musical geniuses. They’re, you know— I mean, it’s all over the United
States. The predominance of them in the studios is amazing. You know,
every time we turn around, there’s somebody of Italian extraction, first
generation, second, third generation, people that came over here, you
know, whose parents came here at the turn of the century or even a
little after. The Jews we don’t even have to talk about. They’re
prodigious; they know music; they have music; they study music; they
achieve. As a part of their culture and their historic background, it
just comes out that way. And the white-bread Caucasians like me kind of
bring up the rear. As far as the jazz musicians are concerned, there are
not— To me, there are not a lot of guys in Los Angeles. I mean, you
know, Oscar Broshear comes to mind; George Bohanon comes to mind; Ernie
Watts; Harold Land, before he passed away; Marshal Royal, before he
passed away, and I didn’t work with him that much in the studios. He was
always involved with the Capp Juggernaut, the [Nat] Pierce-[Frank] Capp
Juggernaut band, and doing things like that; Green, Bill [William]
Green, who was known more as a very capable and competent woodwind
player, and teacher, I think, more than as a jazz player; Jackie Kelso
[also known as Kelson]— I’d hardly ever see him. Of course, I would
usually see him on a record date. You know, Plas Johnson. I worked with
Plas a lot in the rock and roll days, because he was on every rock and
roll record there was that was done in this town.
- CLINE
- Right. Right.
- BUNKER
- They had to have Plas. You know, just like back east they had to have
David Sanborn, or somebody that sounded like him. But Plas kind of set
that standard for what was going on in the sixties and seventies. Now,
interestingly, you know, the Mike Barone big band, I don’t know that he
ever had a black member of the band; I don’t recall. I don’t know why,
whether it was just— He had a lot of Italians, you know, because he is
Italian, and some Jews, and John Guerin, who is probably of French
extraction, from wherever back that was, you know. You’re starting to
see a few more African Americans in the studio scene, but people that
have come up and had the classical training, rather than teach yourself
how to play, which is what mostly has happened with so many of the black
jazz musicians. You know, the whole history of that. Kid wants to play
the trumpet. He gets a trumpet and teaches himself how to play it. Maybe
they had a little money for some lessons, but not that much. And I’m
thinking of people, you know, my age and younger, but that were children
of the depression. We didn’t have any money for music lessons, you know.
We had enough money to get food on the table and that was it. But there
was a wonderful bass player that was a member of the L.A. Philharmonic
many years ago, named Henry Lewis, who ended up married to the wonderful
mezzo-soprano, Marilyn Horne.
- CLINE
- Oh yes.
- BUNKER
- They later divorced but they remain friends. He ended up conducting the
New Jersey Symphony. He was probably the first black guy that was ever
with the L.A. Philharmonic, and he went back to the early or the middle
fifties, late fifties, possibly, maybe early sixties, before the Music
Center [of Los Angeles County], when they were still down at the old
Philharmonic Auditorium, before Zubin [Mehta]. Now there’s a French-horn
player in the orchestra, quite a few in the string section; viola and
violin. I don’t know that there’s any cellists. The philharmonic
orchestras around the country have acquired a preponderance of Asian
players, but they have proved enormously adept at being string players,
and their training methods are such; whether it’s from the Suzuki method
or how that works, I don’t know. But they turn out a lot of amazing
string players. So I work with people, a lot of Chinese and a lot of
Japanese, some Malay people. I think there’s a Filipino violinist with
the [L.A.] Philharmonic. No brass players, other than the one
French-horn player, for some reason. Woodwinds from time to time. Three
flutes will all be females. You know, it comes and goes; it comes and
goes; it comes and goes. But I think more and more, African Americans
that are interested in music are coming from families that are affluent
enough to be able to afford lessons, but also put the kids in an
environment where they hear that kind of music, and that’s what they
grow up interested in, you know. If you’re listening to Brahms and
Schubert and Mozart and Mahler at home, the chances are you’re not going
to gravitate toward Miles [Davis]. You know. You might, but then you
might not.
- CLINE
- Yes, right.
- BUNKER
- It depends. It’s entirely the environment. And I think the environment
for so many, many, many years for so many African American kids was
slanted toward jazz, in the big band era. It’s like for me, that’s what
I grew up in. I didn’t grow up listening to Mahler and Stravinsky; I
grew up listening to Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, you know, and that’s
where my interest in music lay until I was well into advanced adulthood.
- CLINE
- This actually brings up the subject of jazz education, which is now a
big field. There’s a lot of universities just here in the area that have
jazz programs that train jazz musicians, so it’s no longer necessarily
the teach yourself sort of technique that was tried and true for all the
creators and innovators of jazz that are still revered today. Do you
have any opinion about what you know of jazz education now, and how
different it is from how things once were?
- BUNKER
- Well, when I was a kid growing up, it was nonexistent, so far as I knew.
North Texas State [University] hadn’t happened. To have a jazz band even
at the high school level during World War II, you just kind of did it
after school. You put it together. You know, you assigned somebody to
find the music, to get the music. The music teacher, the band teacher or
orchestra teacher usually didn’t have anything to do with it. It was
totally an after-hours project, not for credit, and that’s the way it
was when I went to high school here. Now I know that it’s an enormous
field, and that was all pioneered by North Texas State. And I just saw
something recently; there was a photograph of the L.A. [Los Angeles]
City College jazz band in one of the union [American Federation of
Musicians, Local 47] papers. Now, whether it was the Overture or the
federation paper [The International Musician], I don’t remember, but
there was a whole big picture. A few of the guys’ names I recognized.
Some of them I know today. One guy is a trumpet player that lives down
the street from me, who became a songwriter. I guess that was maybe
started in the fifties. I know that the schools are there, that they are
turning out very proficient players. I’ve hardly ever heard any one of
those guys that killed me as a jazz player. They learn their
improvisation skills in such a way that, you know, a lot of times it
ends up sounding academic. And then you get through with all of that and
you say, “Okay. Now where are you going to work?”
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Because there is no work. There’s no work for those people. The guys
that do the one o’clock lab band and these phenomenal bands, they get
the charts and they get the players and they get the coaching and the
mentoring, and this, that, and the other, and you say, “Yeah. Jesus
Christ, they can just play their ass off.” They can’t even get a gig in
[Las] Vegas as an ensemble player, because that’s all gone the way of
synthesizers and virtual orchestras, and canned and taped, and on and on
and on.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So, I mean it’s great that it’s there, but what purpose it’s serving, I
don’t really know. I don’t really know. I went to one of the
[International Association of] Jazz Educators conventions down in
Anaheim a while back, to play percussion with somebody. I’m trying to
remember who it was. It wasn’t Kim Richmond that had the band. One
evening’s performance. Herb Geller had still not moved back to town, but
he came to the thing and was a featured soloist with whatever this band
was, and I can’t even remember. It was an ad hoc, you know; one of
those. And I heard all these people play, and I listened to all of this,
and there were talks and seminars and things, and I said, “I don’t get
it.” And would you ever want to be interested in doing anything like
that? No. Teaching is not my cup of tea.
- CLINE
- What are the chances, you think, given the situation now, musically and
in terms of the education, for continuing innovation to take place in
jazz music?
- BUNKER
- I haven’t really heard— You know, I haven’t bought a jazz record in a
long time. And who the current hot players are, I really don’t know. I
kind of stopped paying attention once we got to Joshua Redman. I know
there’s some saxophone players that have come up since him, that are—
You’ll read something, you know, or an album review. But I just— I
haven’t listened to most of that music. I haven’t heard anything that
just really makes me want to go run down to Tower Records and buy it,
you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- So, you know, I’m in that whole thing of listening to Benjamin Britten
and John Adams, the classical stuff that has just been putting me away
for the last ten years. That seems to be what gets my juices going, you
know.
- CLINE
- And that also hasn’t inspired you to maybe compose a bit yourself?
- BUNKER
- No, not really. I really feel I don’t have that particular ability, you
know. I mean, my god, if I could write something like [Silvestre]
Revueltas, you know, [whistles]. But what kind of demented nut he had to
have been to come up with some of the stuff that he’s done, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes, yes. You mentioned the directions and potential careers that are
available or not available to young musicians today. Describe for us, in
connection with that, if you will, the situation in the studios now,
which used to be the big sought-after gig for young musicians who were
coming up, here in Los Angeles especially. That was the secure path;
difficult to get into, but certainly lucrative if you could get into it
and if you were good. Where does that stand now, before we go into
looking back at your career there?
- BUNKER
- I’m working less and less. I’m getting called less and less. I can
attribute that to probably a variety of things. It may be that my hair
is a little too white. It may be that some certain people figure fifty
years is enough. It may be that there’s been a decline in skills. I
don’t think so, but then that’s my opinion. But also the nature of the
change in the business. It has changed drastically. Whereas there used
to be many, many, many people who were responsible for hiring
orchestras, there is less and less call for the orchestras. You know,
you read in the paper about Hollywood is producing product, as we call
it, but it does not seem to involve musicians recording background music
for it. More and more of it is being done by synthesizer scores. More
and more of it is going to Seattle and other cities around the country;
Toronto, you know. All of those places you can buy post-production
equipment and you can hire talented people to run the equipment, and
there’s a labor pool of very skilled musicians in those places.
Seattle’s got a first-rate orchestra [Seattle Symphony]. They’re also
scabs; they’re non-union.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And they work for far less money. Since they’re not in the federation,
they don’t demand what we call scale.
- CLINE
- Yes, right.
- BUNKER
- There are no re-use. Their film scores can be reissued on CDs, and they
don’t get a nickel for it. That was their choice.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- But they chose to secede, and so that’s where that is. That’s too bad
because, you know, I don’t know how they’re making a living. The
question was— Oh. When I do work, I am continually seeing new young
people, particularly in the strings, because the conservatories are
cranking out those people. And, you know, there’s depth. They’re very
good. Brass players, I’ve seen— I’ve seen a couple, three trumpet
players come along that are very good; woodwind players. I mean, you’ve
still got Malcolm McNabb, who is an absolutely amazing trumpet player,
who’s been the premier trumpet player in this town for thirty-some-odd
years. But Dave Washburn, who is principal with the L.A. [Los Angeles]
Chamber Orchestra, is newer on the scene. He’s a good player. Guy named
John Clark; John Lewis. [tape recorder off]
- CLINE
- Okay. We’re back on.
- BUNKER
- We’re back on. It seems like those opportunities are there, and for
up-and-coming younger players. Here and there, some of the older
war-horse players like myself are being farmed out. Not farmed out;
that’s not the right expression. But, you know—
- CLINE
- Phased out?
- BUNKER
- Retired or turned out to stud. But the opportunities are there. It’s
more and younger people being available for less and less work. So, how
that bodes for the future of the business, I don’t know. We had kind of
a renaissance that was probably started by John Williams, after the
advent of Star Wars and Jaws and all of the [Steven] Spielberg
blockbuster films that he was involved in, and George Lucas films, that
created or re-created the desire on the part of the producing people to
have huge orchestras. Orchestras were not that large when I was coming
up, you know; fifty, sixty people, maybe; good string section, a
complement of winds, horns. But I mean it’s not at all unusual now to
walk in on a date and there’s eight French horns, an enormous string
section, triple woodwinds. I mean, three bassoons, three flutes, three
clarinets, three double-reed oboe, English horns and so forth, you know;
plenty of trumpets, plenty of trombones, bass trombone, tuba, and a
bunch of percussion. And I think John has been almost single-handedly
responsible for that. He created that sound, and people said, “Okay. It
costs us a lot of money, but it really helps us to make the picture what
we want it to be.” So, they’ve been willing to do that. Sometimes they
go to England to do it, and they send John over there. But subsequently,
a lot of composers, the younger composers and the less well established,
have been able to demand those kind of forces. James Horner, for one,
has been able to do that. James Newton Howard usually will have a
good-sized orchestra. And Jerry Goldsmith, depending upon his needs, can
have huge or not so huge. I just worked on The Matrix Reloaded, which
was the sequel to The Matrix, with Don [Davis]—it’ll come to me in a
minute—Don, Don, Don, Don. Enormous orchestra. It filled up the stage at
Twentieth-Century Fox, and then was going to have a fifty-piece choir on
top of that, added separately, you know, through the magic of tape and
of ProTools and hard drives and all of that. Don Davis, good composer.
Writes hard, hard. Jesus, the music was just endless, endless, endless.
But that gets to a thing, though, which might be a next question on your
part, is to where the jazz musicians fit into this. And they fit into it
less and less frequently. It seems that there has been less and less and
less demand for improvisational skills in this music, in the kind of
stuff that we’re required to do now, you know. It requires, if you’re
lucky, a conservatory background and a lot of practice. But, you know, I
never work with a guitar player anymore; usually only on television.
Dennis Budimir, who is absolutely a brilliant player and friend of mine,
has been for a long, long time, he’s retired, long, ten years before he
wanted to be. Was always working. There was always a need for a guitar
player. Doesn’t seem to be anymore. You know, back in the days of
Mancini and early Johnny Mandel and so forth, there was always Bud, Jack
Sheldon, you know, one, two, three players; a rhythm section,
invariably, and people with a jazz background that could do all the
other stuff, were there. I haven’t done anything with Jack Sheldon,
except a panel discussion at a jazz festival, in years, years.
- CLINE
- So many questions here. One of the things I wanted to ask you about was,
since you now listen to a lot of classical music, and so many of the
film scores of the past, going all the way right through your whole
career, I would have to say, are at times highly influenced, shall we
say, if not imitative of a lot of the great composers. Has this in any
way affected the way you hear classical music now, when you listen to
it?
- BUNKER
- I don’t know that it does. I’m sure that I’ve heard direct references,
direct inferences in some of the scores, to stuff that’s in the
repertoire. But for so long I was so unfamiliar with the repertoire that
I was not aware of that, that kind of influence. And so many of the guys
that I have worked with down through the years, the film composers, tend
not to write in any kind of way that is related to the early romantics,
the Brahmses, Schuberts, the Schumanns, you know, all of that. Even
though they may be very melodic kind of players, there aren’t that many
of the film composers that have been like serial composers and done
really avant-garde stretch kind of things. You know. They like to use
the diatonic scale, and it’s major or minor, and not breaking any big
ground. But so much of the time they’re really, you know, they’re going
more for sonorities, for textures, for a background feeling, to punch up
an image of some kind. I mean, when you get into the really dramatic,
dynamic stuff, you know, the big action movies, chase movies, and
Jurassic Park, that kind of stuff, you know, then it just gets kind of
busy and cacophonous, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. But you’re not sitting down listening to Bartók or Stravinsky or
Britten or somebody, or [Ralph] Vaughn Williams, for example. He became
a favorite not too long ago. And just think, you know, you start
getting, you know, movie images flashing through your mind. Is this—
- BUNKER
- No.
- CLINE
- Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Because I think a lot of younger music
listeners, or just people growing up surrounded by the various culture,
both popular and high, have their early exposure to the sounds of
so-called classical music through movie soundtracks, and I think
sometimes it proves to be a stumbling block to get into that music,
because they associate it with all this other material, these images,
these stories. And that’s kind of a unique and unusual phenomenon. You
mentioned some film composers in your last little discussion. Who were
some of the really—you can repeat some, but maybe some that you hadn’t
mentioned before, of the most memorable composers that you’ve worked
for? [brief interruption]
- BUNKER
- Well, the most memorable— Not the most memorable, but certainly one of
the most memorable was my very first film score.
- CLINE
- Stalag 17.
- BUNKER
- Which was Stalag 17, in 1952, with Franz Waxman. And I was scared to
death. I remember nothing about the music. [mutual laughter] But, now, I
didn’t get to work— I may have worked once with Victor Young. I didn’t
get to work with Max Steiner, but I did get to work with Hugo
Friedhofer, who was orchestrator for a lot of those guys, and a lot of
people, the insiders, say really responsible for the success of some of
the great iconic film composers, you know, of the past. Didn’t get to
work with [Ernest] Korngold. One of the older guys that I did work with—
I worked with Bernard Hermann once, on Taxi Driver, which was his last
film. But, I mean, these were the old-time Europeans, the guys that had
their training in Europe, and thanks to Adolph [Hitler], ended up here.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- But beginning even in the fifties was the influx of the jazz-oriented
score. Johnny Mandel came to mind first, and then Mancini. So I started
working for John in the fifties, playing his music. And I’ll be doing
something with him in a couple of weeks, with Barbra Streisand. So, that
relationship continues, you know.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I’m sure it’s part of a record project, not a film. But I think John and
Mancini had a profound influence on the way a lot of that music was
done, and brought about the introduction of the jazz-oriented player
into the studio, because up to that time there weren’t that many. There
were a few guys that had come up through the dance bands. It would be
Hank and Mandel that was responsible for Shelly, for instance; for
myself; for Joe Maini being on a film call for Johnny Mandel, and his
choice of lead alto player, as opposed to any one of a dozen highly,
highly skilled, highly competent alto saxophone players, you know. But
they weren’t going to give Johnny what Joe could give him.
- CLINE
- Yes, yes.
- BUNKER
- So, you know. And getting bass players like Joe Mondragon and Red
Mitchell and some of those people into position. May have done a few
calls with Joe Comfort, who had been Nat [King] Cole’s bass player,
early, early on. And then it just starts going. I worked as a utility
percussionist for Jerry Goldsmith for thirty-some-odd years. Did get to
work a few times with Al [Alfred] Newman, quite a bit with Lionel
[Newman]; all that out at [Twentieth Century-] Fox [Film Corporation].
And then on up to the Oliver Nelson days out at Universal [Pictures],
when Stanley Wilson brought him in, one of the first of the black
composers, and then Quincy [Jones]. Did pictures out there with “Q.”
Memorable, memorable, memorable. Did a lot of pictures with Lalo
[Schifrin], and all of that jazz influence that, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. And he did a lot of TV during the sixties, too.
- BUNKER
- Yes, sure. Yes. Because I was the original drummer on the original
Mission Impossible, and the one with [Mike] Connors.
- CLINE
- Oh, Mannix.
- BUNKER
- Mannix, yes.
- CLINE
- Right. So were you playing the jazz waltz on the theme on Mannix?
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Cool. [laughs] And then up to the present day. Obviously, you mentioned
some. You mentioned John Williams, James Newton Howard and James Horner.
You mentioned in our earlier session last week that you’re not working
for James Horner anymore.
- BUNKER
- No.
- CLINE
- Do you care to elucidate? You kind of intimated—
- BUNKER
- Fired. [Cline laughs.] Just fired, you know. I worked for him— I did the
first film that he ever did, and worked for him until one day he just
decided he wanted—At this point I’d been playing timpani for him, and
did a lot of films playing timpani. Emil was usually there, Emil and
myself, depending on how large the orchestra was. When we did Glory, I
thought that I did a good job on that. Emil told me that when he saw it
in the theater he said, “That’s the best-looking timpani sound I ever
heard in my life.” I said, “Well, thank you, babe.” But then he’s a
friend, you know. James decided to make a change, and he uses Tom Raney,
who is the timpanist with the Pasadena Symphony and the L.A. Chamber
Orchestra; sensational musician, and it’s his band. He can, you know— He
can do whatever he wants.
- CLINE
- Sure. Are there some memorably awful experiences that you can briefly
describe; memorably negative, in other words?
- BUNKER
- For me personally, it was probably 1960, ’61, and was doing the original
Oceans Eleven with Nelson Riddle, at Warner Bros. And I sailed in there
and walked into a xylophone part that I absolutely could not play. And
in rehearsing the thing, and in fooling around, this, that, and the
other— It was for two players on two different instruments, and it was
really meant to be played, and there was no way to shuck it. And I was
devastated. I said, “I don’t know what to do.” This was back before we
had a guaranteed length of call. They decided to go to dinner and come
back. And I went to the contractor and I said, “There is no way that I’m
going to be able to play that part today.” I said, “If it was next week
and I could take it home, maybe I could woodshed it and get it together,
but,” I said, “not today. So you should get on the phone and call Dale
Anderson.” And he said, “Oh. Well.” Kurt Wolff was his name, German
bookkeeper who ended up the contractor at Warners [Bros. Pictures]. He
said, “That’s very good of you to tell me that,” you know. And he got on
the phone and Dale was available. And I went to dinner and I came back,
because I wanted to see Dale eat that thing alive, which is what he
does. You know, he’s a xylophone virtuoso. And without a hair out of
place, he just whistled right through that thing. Now, that was
devastating to me, because I was touting myself as an all-around mallet
player and keyboard player, and so forth and so on, and totally
unqualified to be there that day.
- CLINE
- Wow.
- BUNKER
- So, you know. But I’ve lucked out. I’ve had that kind of thing happen
very, very, very few times. I’ve been fooling them all these years.
- CLINE
- [laughs] Wow. And you talked a little bit about the evolution of the
studio sort of demand, in terms of live, real human beings performing.
It seems to be almost exclusively dedicated to the realm of the large
Hollywood motion picture soundtrack now. Obviously there was a lot more
TV work at one time, and all along there have been what we term record
dates. How would you describe the percentage of your work over the
years, in terms of film and TV work versus record dates or other studio
work?
- BUNKER
- They were pretty well balanced. Did a lot of records in the early rock
and roll days. Stupid stuff, stupid, but, you know, paid the bills.
- CLINE
- What were you playing, what instrument?
- BUNKER
- Percussion. Tambourine, shakers, conga drums, bongos, things like that.
Occasionally vibes or bells, but mostly like hand percussion.
- CLINE
- And they would have, say, Hal Blaine playing drums?
- BUNKER
- Yes. Or Earl Palmer.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- But pretty well balanced. TV. For a while there, I don’t remember if it
was in the seventies or even in the eighties, Universal was going like
day and night. They had twelve, fourteen, fifteen hours of television
on, you know, a week that they were producing. And all of it was scored
out at the Universal lot in North Hollywood. And that was, in some ways,
not a lot of fun, because the guy that was the contractor for the studio
started looking through the cartage bills for the equipment that was
going in and out of there, you know, fifteen times a week—percussion
sets, drum sets, harps—and sat down with the bean counters, and then he
talked to the guy that was kind of his principal player, Lou Singer, to
say, “What would it cost us to buy all of that equipment and have it
here?” And it probably would have added up to about a year or year and a
half’s worth of cartage bills. And then the rest of it, you know. So Lou
picked out all of this equipment for us to play, and that’s what you
played when you went out there, you know. It took a long time to be able
to get them to break down and let you bring your own drum set. I mean,
Shelly played the house drums for the longest time; worked there three
or four times a week, you know. The instruments were okay, but then it
was Lou’s choice of a snare drum, and Lou’s choice of piatti, and Lou’s
choice of triangles, and Lou’s choice of timpani.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And I never played timps, because he played the timpani. He saw to that.
So, you know, in a way— But that’s the way it is when you’re doing that
kind of work.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- It was okay. A lot of crash-and-burn kind of music I can’t even begin to
remember. You know, Pete Rugolo did a lot of things out there. Quincy
did things. He was doing TV shows as well as theatricals. What’s his—
Oliver. Oliver did Six Million Dollar Man . And, trying to remember.
Benny Golson never did any writing out there. I never saw him as a
player, but he may have done a little. Trombone, trombone, trombone
player— J.J. Johnson did quite a bit out there, of television, because
he came along more and more and more as a writer. Who else? Who else?
Gil Mille. That’s probably a name you never heard of.
- CLINE
- No, I haven’t.
- BUNKER
- Yes. But he was a New Yorker—and I don’t know what he played; I think he
played saxophone—who had some kind of a rep as a composer. Very oddball
kind of writing, but it must have been effective because he did some
shows out there. Paramount [Pictures], Paramount, Paramount. Well, Lalo
was doing a lot of those shows. But invariably, the TV orchestras were
sometimes not a whole lot larger than just an augmented rhythm section;
maybe, you know, couple of woodwinds, couple of French horns, maybe one
trumpet, a few strings.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And you really had to get into the post-Jaws John Williams thing to get
into the larger, larger orchestras. There were some interesting
composers. One guy, Lynn Murray, was brilliant, brilliant composer, and
used to do a lot of National Geographic shows with him. Another
wonderful composer, that just passed away within the last couple of
months, was Walter Scharf, who did all of the Undersea World of Jacques
Cousteau and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He did all kinds of
little silly things, but he was really great; funny, funny man, just
passed away very recently. Yes, for some reason a whole lot of the giant
composers— Miklós Rózsa was one of the guys I was trying to think of
earlier, earlier, when I was talking about, you know, Max Steiner and
all of those people. Yes, Miklós Rózsa; did some kind of a time machine
film with him. He came out of almost virtual retirement and did a few
more films as an old man, but good; good music.
- CLINE
- I’m going to stick in another tape before we lose this.
1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE APRIL 10, 2003
- CLINE
- Okay, we’re back on. It’s Alex Cline interviewing Larry Bunker, April
10th, 2003, tape number eight. You were talking about some of the
composers who were doing TV work. You mentioned Miklós Rózsa. And I
don’t suppose you have any clue as to this, but I’ll ask it anyway. If
we were to quantify the amount of work that you’ve done, numbers of
films, numbers of TV shows, that sort of thing, do you have any idea?
No?
- BUNKER
- I can make a guess that it’s probably—just film scores—it’s probably
about fifteen hundred.
- CLINE
- Man.
- BUNKER
- Records, I have no idea. And TV shows, I have no idea. I mean, if I were
curious enough, I could go back through my workbooks—
- CLINE
- Oh, man.
- BUNKER
- —that go— That I have to 1960; I believe 1960, and just— I mean, I know
guys that have done that. You know, it’s a record date; it was a jingle.
I didn’t start keeping track of the titles of the films that I’ve done
until it turned out that it was a good idea to do it because of a thing
that we did called the special payments, where theatrical releases that
are released to television, you’d get a subsequent payment for that, you
know, based on a lot of factors. You may get a dollar and twenty-five
cents; you may get four hundred dollars, you know. And sometimes I’d
say, “Wait a minute.” You know, “Did I work on that picture, or did I
not work on that picture?” And actually, when I started doing it, it was
at a time when it was very, very busy. And you’d get a call for a time
slot, and you’d be busy, and you’d turn down a film. And then three or
four days later, or maybe a week later, suddenly that conflict would
evaporate, and you’d say, “What did I turn down? And what was the name
of it?” So at least I started writing down what I turned down, you know.
- CLINE
- Oh, interesting. Yes.
- BUNKER
- On the outside chance that maybe you could get back on it. Sometimes if
not that much time had elapsed, you could, you know. And then just
keeping track of what the film titles were. But, I mean, that would take
weeks of work. It doesn’t matter to me that much, you know.
- CLINE
- Right. Sure.
- BUNKER
- To say— You know, some guys like to have their résumé right up to date.
“I’ve done 1385 films and 12,000 record dates, and—,” you know.
- CLINE
- Yes. You mentioned jingles, and this is something that obviously was
more available as work at one time, perhaps, than it is—
- BUNKER
- Yes. I haven’t done a jingle in a couple of years. Once in a while
there’ll be a product, you know, but just depends on who the writer is,
whether it’s for an automobile or a brand of potato chips or what, you
know.
- CLINE
- And as far as record dates go, I mean, you mentioned a lot of these
horrible pop records that you did.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- Any record dates that stand out as being particularly wonderful or
awful?
- BUNKER
- I’ve done a few things with [Barbra] Streisand. I’m not a terribly big
fan of singers, and her. But, you know, I don’t feel so badly about it
that I’m going to say no. Done things with Dave Grusin that I liked very
much. There was a direct-to-disc album that we did many years ago. We
went to [Lincoln] Mayorga when that was— That preceded the CDs. That was
the quality of the time, you know, going direct. Like in the beginnings
of records, you went straight to acetates, you know.
- CLINE
- Cutting straight into a master lacquer, in this case.
- BUNKER
- Yes. And did some things with him. Did films with him. Did records with
him; wonderful, wonderful writer; a great player. Couple of very
pleasurable albums were the ones with Natalie Cole a few years ago, the
tribute to her father [Nat King Cole], with all of the charts by John
Mandel, and some things by Alan Broadbent. Large orchestra and, you
know, I was playing mostly vibes. I’ll never forget that, because I
walked into Ocean Way Studios down on Sunset Boulevard, and was there
kind of early, and getting set up. And most of the rhythm section was in
an isolated part of the studio where glass doors could be closed off, so
the drum set was in there, vibes were in there, the bass was in there,
and I think the piano. But I was in setting up, taking the cover off the
vibes and getting ready, and I heard “Unforgettable” with Nat Cole’s
voice, and a click track. And I knew that, you know, Natalie Cole was
the artist, and I said, “Now, why would there be a click track? What are
they up to?” And so it was a very precisely constructed click track that
followed the rhythm section on the original orchestration. And when I
realized what they were going to do, before I even heard it I got goose
bumps, you know, because Nat was one of my— When I said I don’t care for
singers, I cared for him, and as a musician, too, as a pianist. That was
recorded at Capitol Records, three-track. They hadn’t even gotten to
four-track yet. They were doing stereo. They had two-track machines, and
I guess Ampex or one of them had developed a three-track machine, where
you could record on three tracks, on, I guess, quarter-inch— Whether it
was quarter-[inch] or half-inch tape, I don’t remember. I don’t think
they had what was called the cell-synch capability, being able to
synchronize and record on top. They may have, because they were getting
very close to that. So it was recorded in three-track, and he stood in
an isolation booth that was just gobos that were positioned out in the
studio, with a music stand and a microphone, and the orchestra was
scattered around the rest of the room. It was all done live. But they
had enough isolation of his voice, where they could get rid of the
original orchestra. And so they had put this thing together to allow for
her to join. He sang the song, and then she sang, and then they sang
together.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- Al Schmidt was the engineer, who’s the legendary engineer in this town.
And it was just goosebumpy time. It was really a trip down memory lane.
And Natalie was absolutely marvelous. There were a lot of older players
there, and it turned out that there were an awful lot of guys there that
had recorded with her father. You know, [Harry] “Sweets” [Edison] was on
the thing, I think. What’s his name— Conte Candoli. Some of the woodwind
players, brass players, string players. And when they saw that she was
open to it, everybody was just talking to her about her father. And it
turned out to be a very sentimental reminiscence project, you know,
because she was doing all songs that were associated with him. And then,
of course, the title of the album was that. [tape recorder off]
- CLINE
- All right.
- BUNKER
- That whole experience was very pleasurable. I loved doing The Sandpiper
with John Mandel, for which “The Shadow of Your Smile” came, and an
absolutely gorgeous score, featuring Jack Sheldon on trumpet. It was a
Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor film, which was— The film was pretty
much unforgettable, or forgettable. But the score was sensational.
- CLINE
- Wasn’t Howard Roberts the solo guitarist on it?
- BUNKER
- Could have been, yes. Yes, Howard usually played for John at that time
period.
- CLINE
- If one goes on the Internet, one of the things that Barnes &
Noble has the courtesy to do is, they’ll print out a list of anything in
print that any artist who has anything to do with anything is on, and I
have one for you here. It’s complete with— Some of them have pictures of
the covers, but I don’t know how many pages are here. But this is, you
know, obviously just a fraction of things you’ve appeared on—
- BUNKER
- Really.
- CLINE
- —that are available on CD. Yes. It’s quite long. And just scanning
through it you see, you know, everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Bill
Evans, to Billie Holiday, to Natalie Cole, to the Monkees, to U2 and,
you know.
- BUNKER
- God.
- CLINE
- It’s absolutely, you know— Gil Evans; Woody Herman; Chet Baker; Gerry
Mulligan; Frank Sinatra; Dizzy Gillespie; and Mel Tormé. It’s endless.
And when you look back on the incredible diversity and just quantity,
sheer quantity of music, some of which you’ve candidly said you couldn’t
stand—
- BUNKER
- But I did. [laughs]
- CLINE
- Yes. What stands out for you, in terms of accomplishment? We’ve talked
about your career as a jazz musician. Certainly you’ve contributed to
the music of people like Bill Evans and a lot of the other great jazz
artists. But overall now—because I mean, this is sort of massive in
scope when you look at it—overall, what stands out for you, in terms of
your own contribution to the music?
- BUNKER
- Interesting question. Certainly some of the jazz-related things that you
just mentioned, on the records. Even though the extent of the
contribution is probably not as recognizable or as strong in the
film-score area, I would still think that in some instances that had the
most substance and was the most satisfying, and purely from the
standpoint of remembering how an eighty-, ninety-, hundred-piece
orchestra sounds, and being in the middle of it and being a part of it.
Boy, if that won’t get your dander up, you know. It’s a whole lot
different than being in a rhythm section, sitting in a little funny
studio over on Melrose Avenue someplace, playing with Pete Jolly, you
know. Not to say that that’s not great, but it’s just a very, very
different experience. And so, okay, you’re on a phonograph album in
whatever format. You’re playing the drums, and that’s, you know, one of
three or four or five pieces. Your contribution is upfront and very easy
to recognize. If you’re back in the back of an orchestra, and part of a
five-man percussion section, with a hundred-piece orchestra, it’s like
nobody knows what that’s about except you and your colleagues and the
guys you stand next to, you know. But in a lot of ways that’s even more
satisfying.
- CLINE
- And this would answer my upcoming question, which was, even though you
talked about it in the past, do you have any regrets about giving up the
jazz concert and recording life?
- BUNKER
- No. None. None at all. You know, after I played with Bill, I felt like
I’ve really done that, and I’ve done it about as well as I’m ever going
to be able to do it, with the person with whom I would most like to have
done it. So how do you follow that, you know? How do you follow that? I
think in a brief conversation I had with Joe LaBarbera after Bill had
died, and then he took the gig with Tony Bennett and he played with Tony
for quite a while, and, you know, he said, “How do you top that? How do
you top playing with Bill? You don’t. So then you go on with your life
and you make a living, and you do whatever you need to do.” And he said,
“I have no qualms about playing with Tony.” He said, “Playing with Tony
could be a drag, but,” he said, “it ain’t ever gonna be Bill.” And he
did that, you know.
- CLINE
- Yes, yes. Right.
- BUNKER
- So he had a very realistic and, I think, healthy attitude about what
came next in his career.
- CLINE
- Right. Right. How much of an influence do you think playing film scores
and things had on your current interest in classical music?
- BUNKER
- Quite a bit, I’m sure. I’m quite sure just hearing those kind of
textures and sonorities, and the writing done by some of the people that
are very capable composers, you know, is just— I remember one of my real
epiphanies happened in 1960. I had never really heard Bartók. I had
heard about Bartók when I was a kid in the service. It had become very
hip for the jazz musicians to dig Bartók. All of the guys in the army
band that I was with, that were any kind of musicians at all, talked
about that. I had just kind of gotten used to Stravinsky and heard some
of that music. And a lady that I was married to from ’60 to ’72, who
recently passed away, we became romantically involved, and I was at her
place one night and smoked a little grass, which I was not accustomed
to, and she put on a Bartók string quartet. And I was listening and I
said, “That’s interesting. That’s interesting. That’s really fucking
interesting.” [mutual laughter] And suddenly light bulbs went off. And I
don’t know whether it was something about smoking a little grass that,
you know, the doors of perception, all of that idea. And when the thing
was over I said, “Do you—? You know, is there more of that?” She said,
“Yeah. There are six of them.” “May we?” [Cline laughs.] And she played
all of the Bartók string quartets for me. And it was one of the first
people I knew that had some kind of a decent sound system, had some kind
of J.B. Lansing speakers and an Altec amplifier, and this was all mono,
you know, but a tube amplifier, but at least it had some kind of
fidelity. And I was entranced. Subsequent times discovered his
orchestral works, you know, Bluebeard [The Castle of Duke Bluebeard]
and, of course, the Concerto for Orchestra, and all that kind of stuff.
But I mean, the same kind of light bulb went on for that as I got when I
heard Don Lamond. And suddenly went—bam!—you know. “Now I get it.” And
suddenly, all of that whole Bartók thing just fell into place. I said,
“Jesus Christ almighty.” I think that was the beginning of it. That was
where the interest in classical music started. I had limited
appreciation. I liked that. You know, I didn’t care that much about
Brahms. I didn’t care that much about Schumann and Schubert and all that
stuff. Began to really get an understanding of more contemporary music
when I began to appreciate Wagner, who was really a monster in more ways
than one, anti-Semite that he was. But the influence that he had on
music at his time— And then, of course, crossing into the twentieth
century and getting into Mahler and all of the rest of it. And then
Sibelius and, you know, on and on and on. Hearing that music made me
appreciate the good film composers, and I think the good film composers
made me appreciate that. So there was probably a cross-pollenization
between the two that just all contributed to my education.
- CLINE
- Right. And you’ve mentioned a few composers in our interview today. Who
are some of your real favorites right now?
- BUNKER
- Film?
- CLINE
- No. Just—
- BUNKER
- Generally.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- I mentioned Silvestre Revueltas earlier. Heard a couple of things that
he’s done. I’ve never heard any of those pieces performed live. I’ve
heard recordings or broadcasts. [Esa-Pekka] Salonen likes to play that
music, and the orchestra [Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra] plays it
very well for him.
- CLINE
- Yes.
- BUNKER
- Oh, god. John Adams, some pieces; some things I don’t care for. Philip
Glass I can’t stand. [Benjamin] Britten. I really have developed a thing
for the more contemporaneous British composers, you know, the [Ralph]
Vaughn Williams and Britten, and the other guy. I could never remember
his name. Ralph Vaughn Williams.
- CLINE
- Which period are we talking about here? Elgar or—
- BUNKER
- After Elgar. Twenties, thirties, forties. I think he passed away not too
long ago. It’s funny, Mahler, some of Mahler I like and some Mahler, it
just sounds like he’s rambling, just kind of rambling on and on and on.
Strauss the same way. Some of his stuff is thrilling, and then some of
it gets to be kind of diarrhea of the pencil, you know.
- CLINE
- This is Richard, not Johan?
- BUNKER
- Yes. [mutual laughter] Yes indeed. Richard. He was amazing, though, for
what he did for the timpani, because up to him— Well, he came at the
time when reliable pedal timpani were being developed, and they
overlapped each other. And when he saw what it was possible to do with
the instrument that he loved, he just went nuts. He went nuts with it.
And he’s written some timpani parts that are just [whistles]. You know,
the “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Salomé, at the very end of that
thing. There’s a chromatic thing that comes down from a high A to a D,
chromatic, and, you know, you don’t have that many drums. Depending upon
your complement of drums, you’re going to use two drums or maybe three,
and you’re pedaling, pedaling, pedaling, pedaling. And [sings passage],
and he’s just coming down the scale chromatically, you know. And it’s
sensational when you hear a recording of that done by a guy that really
can fuckin’ play. It’s just hair-raising, you know. I’m sure there’s a
lot of— Well, I never did— I didn’t get into Tan Dun. He’s—
- CLINE
- Oh yes.
- BUNKER
- I’ve not heard that music, although I know he’s done some film scores,
and he’s also been commissioned, and he plays, you know. John Corigliano
is good. I’ve got a couple of his things. I haven’t listened to them for
a while, but, like, young American composer with a lot of chops. Couple
of things I’ve heard by a contemporary English composer, Nicholas Maw,
M-A-W, are very good. I don’t know.
- CLINE
- Well, that’s an interesting selection. So you’re still working; you said
less and less.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- When you were, say, at your peak of studio busyness, about how many
dates would you characteristically do in a week, do you estimate? Or
even in a day.
- BUNKER
- It always depended. But if a double session would be like two three-hour
sessions— At the very busy time, there were still half-hour shows, so
you were getting called to work three-hour or three-and-a-half-hour
calls. And, you know, I would typically maybe do two three-hour calls a
day, plus maybe a record date at night. So it could be as many as— I
mean, I never— I didn’t get into the kind of schedule that Hal Blaine
had. I don’t know what his record for the number of dates that he did in
a week. Anywhere from eight to ten, twelve dates a week, and try to keep
the weekend open, you know. So sometimes it’d be three a day. And if you
did that five days a week, you could do fifteen. It usually— The week
just never filled up quite that way, which was good, because, you know,
you don’t have a life, for gosh sake. You don’t get to go have dinner.
You don’t get to—
- CLINE
- Right. Right.
- BUNKER
- —hang with somebody and hear a concert, hang with your old lady. But in
the busy times it’d be ten, eleven, twelve dates a week, probably. I
can’t even imagine doing that now. God.
- CLINE
- Yes, wow. How did that particular life affect, say, downtime, family
time, recreational time, and how competitive was the scene in terms of
the luxury of not working, let’s say? Could you afford that?
- BUNKER
- Well, you know, I always seemed to have time to go have dinner—I didn’t
have kids—to go hear music, because I spent a lot of time at the
Manne-Hole, and Wednesday nights, you know, most of the time at Donte’s
in that period, that time frame. And I always felt confident enough in
the way my career went, that I could say no to somebody. I mean, I know
guys that would get tickets to a concert, or to the opera, or to a
ballgame, and they’d get a call for a two-hour jingle, and they’d turn
all of that over, because they were afraid to say no to somebody.
- CLINE
- Sure.
- BUNKER
- Like I say, I felt confident enough in what I was able to produce and
give to the business, that I could say no. And if I had tickets to a
concert, I’d say no, because otherwise, you’re never going to go.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- You’re never going to go to the theater. You’re never going to go have a
decent dinner at a decent hour. You’re going to get one more hamburger
at 11:15, you know. I don’t think that, you know, a person can have a
life and not compromise the quality of their life.
- CLINE
- Right. Was there ever a time when you felt any creative or ethical or
philosophical conflict over your choice of career, especially during the
jazz versus studio days, and particularly maybe when you were doing some
of those awful pop record dates during the sixties?
- BUNKER
- Not any real ethical conflicts. I remember Victor Feldman one time, who
was a very liberal-leaning left-thinking kind of guy, and he was called
to do some kind of project, a record date or a film; I don’t remember
what it was. I wasn’t involved, but I heard about it. And it turned out
that it was political anathema to him. He just said, “I can’t be a part
of this, and you have to let me off the call, because I didn’t know what
it was going to be.” Whether it was something to do with the Vietnam War
or something, could have been. But he just said, “I can’t be a part of
that.” And he was ready for whoever the leader or the contractor was, to
take him to the union and file charges against him, because it’s like
you’re at the date and you know, you are beholden to give them a certain
amount of notice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- And he managed to get off the thing and, you know, certainly lost an
account, but he didn’t care about losing the account. It wasn’t anything
that he really wanted anyway. So I’ve never been conflicted that way,
but then I guess I don’t have those kind of political viewpoints, you
know, and hold them that dear. I think I did mention the time when Bill
asked me to come and work with him at the club, and I had a string of
dates that had been booked, and I just got off of them.
- CLINE
- Right.
- BUNKER
- I said, “Screw it. You know, I’m going to play this Hawaiian music for
this stupe, and not play with Bill? I’m sorry. Take me to the union.”
- CLINE
- Yes. Right.
- BUNKER
- It was just, you know, selfishness on my part. I wanted to do that, and
I didn’t want to do that.
- CLINE
- Did a lot of exposure to bad music ever make you just depressed or
bitter?
- BUNKER
- No, no, no. It’ll be over in a minute.
- CLINE
- How does a sense of humor help in this kind of situation?
- BUNKER
- Virtually all the people you’re going to run into have them. Yes, a
bunch of funny people that love to laugh.
- CLINE
- And here you are. You’re still working some. You’ve been doing studio
work for fifty years. What do you want to do now? What’s next for you?
- BUNKER
- Oh, god. I guess keep doing it as long as they’ll have me. And the time
will come when they won’t have me, and then I guess I’ll have to figure
out what to do with my time. But I’ve got reading that I’ve been trying
to catch up on, reading that I’ve never done in my life. I’ve got two
encyclopedias over there and I just had some books up on the piano the
other day, and my wife [Brandyn] said, “Now, what is this research
library that’s going on here?” I said, “I think by what I’m reading in
the paper that it’s time for me to understand what the difference is
between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.” You’ve got a couple of encyclopedias.
There it is, you know. It just depends on how deep you want to plow. And
on and on and on. After most of my adult life reading about quotes from
Alexis de Tocqueville and discovering America, I figured it’s time to
read De Tocqueville. So I found a book in Paris last year and I’m trying
to plow through that, you know, his take on what America is about, as a
young French aristocrat. And it goes on and on and on, you know. I’d
like to continue to live gracefully, and when the time comes, dear God,
please, die gracefully. You know.
- CLINE
- Yes. So, no retirement plans.
- BUNKER
- No, no.
- CLINE
- Okay.
- BUNKER
- I don’t need to worry financially. I am participating in a pension plan
from the union [American Federation of Musicians] that is quite
generous, and with some little moderation, I don’t really need to work
anymore.
- CLINE
- Do you ever get the hankering to pull out the old Gretsch kit or the
Leedy kit, or any of that stuff, and just bang around a little?
- BUNKER
- No, not really. Not really. I really kind of feel that all of that that
I was scheduled to do, I’ve pretty well done.
- CLINE
- Okay. Is there anything you want to add before we pull the curtain on
this?
- BUNKER
- It’s been an amazing fifty years. It’s been an absolutely amazing
fifty-and-counting years, one that I never would have envisioned for
myself, you know, from being a kid, a pre-teenager getting caught up in
music, and hoping I could figure out a way to do it and make a living at
it, not having any idea that that would happen. It’s all been curious
happenstance, blind luck, the luck of the draw; falling into situations
backwards, totally unprepared for them. And to be able to somehow come
up with what was needed just— It’s been amazing; been amazing. And I
lived two blocks down the street from Paramount Pictures when I was
eight years old, never dreaming that some day I would play in there. And
actually, some years later, my first motion picture call would be in
that same place.
- CLINE
- Wow. And you’ve lived in Los Angeles your whole life.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- What do you think of it right now? What are your feelings about L.A. as
a city?
- BUNKER
- Traffic. God, the traffic. The traffic, the traffic, the traffic. I
don’t know that there’s any way it can get better, because people want
to be here, they want to come here, they want to live here. My daughter,
who was almost born and raised here—she was raised here—has chosen to
live in Germany. Her German husband came here and said, “My god, why
would anybody want to live anywhere else?” You know, he was entranced.
But that’s because it was in the middle of the wintertime, and they came
from snow and the Black Forest and Stuttgart. Even Stuttgart is, you
know, it’s probably better than up in the north. At least it’s kind of
South Central Germany.
- CLINE
- Right. [laughs]
- BUNKER
- Did you read the thing in the paper, all of that hoopla about they’re
going to change the name of South Central to—
- CLINE
- Yes, to South Los Angeles.
- BUNKER
- When did they change it to South Central?
- CLINE
- That’s what I was saying. Was that ever an official designation?
- BUNKER
- Not that I know of.
- CLINE
- Not that I know of, either.
- BUNKER
- It just became—
- CLINE
- It started sometime after the Watts riots.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- They started calling it South Central, yes.
- BUNKER
- Because from the time I was nine years old, was in what is now South
Central L.A., on Forty-seventh Street between Vermont [Avenue] and
Normandie [Avenue]. And, you know, that was never referred to as South
Central.
- CLINE
- Well, you know, when [Richard] Riordan was mayor, all these signs went
up around the time of the Democratic [National] Convention, to sort of
tell everybody what the neighborhood they were entering was.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- And I don’t remember seeing a lot of these things so clearly defined
before. So maybe at some point around there, there became some sort of
official designation. But I missed it if it happened.
- BUNKER
- Yes. You drive down Hillhurst [Avenue] until it becomes Virgil [Avenue],
and here and there there’ll be signs up that say, you know, Los Feliz
Village. And you drive that way and it says Franklin Hills. What
Franklin Hills? You know. It’s Franklin Avenue. And now suddenly it’s—
- CLINE
- Yes. Or you go over the hill here to the NoHo Artists District in North
Hollywood, you know. [Bunker laughs.] I don’t know when that happened
either. But, yes, I can’t help you with that one.
- BUNKER
- In fact, in the article in the paper yesterday, the lady that was trying
to foment all of that was referring to her Vermont Square neighborhood.
Well, Vermont Square— I lived across the street from Vermont Square, and
it was just a little square thing where Budlong [Avenue] came down, and
it split and went around, and continued on, and there was a library,
which is still there, and streetcar tracks that went down in behind it.
But so I guess she lives around there, and she got tired of them
referring to it as South Central. [laughs]
- CLINE
- Yes, it has a negative connotation, supposedly.
- BUNKER
- Yes.
- CLINE
- So, anything else?
- BUNKER
- No, I don’t think so. Pretty well covered it.
- CLINE
- You’re still here, you’re still playing, and you’re still working, and I
hope it continues that way for many years.
- BUNKER
- Yes, and healthy, you know. Fell down a year and a half ago and broke my
hip, but all of that worked okay.
- CLINE
- Oh, wow.
- BUNKER
- Had to have the prostate reduced, and that’s all fine. Had knee surgery
about seven years ago. That all worked. You know, so—
- CLINE
- Right. Well, those things’ll make a difference.
- BUNKER
- I don’t take medicines and I don’t take pills, and I don’t seem to need
them. And for that I’m grateful. Just keep on truckin’.
- CLINE
- That’s right. Amen to that. Thank you very much for being willing to sit
down and talk to us about your life.
- BUNKER
- My pleasure.