ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON DEC. 8, 1989
By Steve Newton
“Brand new from K-Tel, it’s the chart-topping, ever popular ****-tones, captured live and in concert with the acclaimed, 65-piece !!!!-orchestra. A once-in-a-lifetime performance! It’s music history in the making!”
Whenever a rock band decides to record an album with an orchestra, you can bet that all the hype is going to be met with a “hold-on-just-a-second” reaction from cynics. “Oh sure, my fave band’s wimping out out with a bunch of strings,” the rockers might say, Or, from the classical types: “Why would a class orchestra like that lower itself to play pop?”
It’s a tricky situation, as Tom Cochrane realized when he and his band, Red Rider, recorded The Symphony Sessions with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
“We kind of expected some people to be negative,” says Cochrane on the line from Toronto last week. “The negatives were that the orchestra could overshadow the band, and people would go, “Oh god, here comes another pompous, over-produced effort with an orchestra.’ ”
Happily for the dedicated Red Rider fans who have enjoyed the band ever since Don’t Fight It appeared 10 years ago, the group’s symphonic outing is far from pompous. In fact, a fine balance was struck between Cochrane’s six-piece band and the symphony’s 56 players. The Symphony Sessions offers a live, greatest hits collection of Red Rider tunes–with some well-placed orchestral bits here and there.
“That’s what we strived for,” says Cochrane of the balance that was achieved. “We walked in knowing that we didn’t have much chance to rehearse this stuff, so we told George Blonheim, the arranger, that we wanted him to paint by numbers, basically.
“A lot of our material is fairly lush and textured as it sits, so I asked him to use that as a blueprint for most of the charts, and then, where he could , to take creative liberties. We rehearsed it one afternoon, and then we walked through it in a dress rehearsal the day of the show, but that was pretty well it.”
A fan of symphonic music himself–with a particular preference for Berlioz and Debussy–Cochrane was aware of one past rock band/symphony pairing that had turned out especially well, as far as he was concerned.
“I was a huge Procol Harum fan,” he says, “and I loved their ‘Conquistador’ recording. I thought it was fabulous. So this had a bit of historical appeal to me–I got to retrace the footsteps of a band that I revered.”
As fate would have it, engineer Biff Dawes, who recorded The Symphony Sessions over two nights at Edmonton’s Jubilee Auditorium, had actually worked on the Procol Harum/Edmonton Symphony Orchestra project 18 years ago. And five members of the current Edmonton Symphony had performed with Procol Harum during those landmark sessions.
But Cochrane still felt a little trepidation when he first met up with the symphony players face to face.
“I knew that there’d be a certain amount of elitism, walking into a room and meeting them, but to a certain extent we had to take control because I believe that 90 percent of the people who were coming to see the show were Red Rider fans. But when we met the orchestra, they were all wonderful people, warm and engaging. I think there was a small percentage that was maybe reactionary against this sort of thing, but as an orchestra they have a history of being fairly progressive and liberal.”
On most of The Symphony Sessions‘ tracks, the orchestra stays in the background, and Cochrane’s ace band–guitarists Ken Greer and Peter Mueller, bassist Ken “Spider” Sinneave, keyboardist John Webster, and drummer Randall Coryell–has plenty of room to shine on Red Rider gems like “Human Race” and ‘”Big League”.
But Cochrane readily points out that the orchestra’s presence wasn’t wasted on the project.
“Especially on tracks like [Leonard Cohen’s] ‘Bird on a Wire’ and “Avenue A’. I think the orchestra came off real well, and the stings are apparent. And ‘Can’t Turn Back’ is unique from the point of view that we go into this reggae section towards the end of the song, which started as this bass solo, and you have the string pad underneath it.
“It’s quite unusual–I don’t think anything like that’s ever been done. So there’s some groundbreaking things in there that are exciting, and that I’m proud of.”
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