April 7, 1978 Gusto feature: Stan Szelest

 

Buffalo’s keeper of the Holy Grail of rock ‘n roll.

April 7, 1978 

Buffalo Blues

Stan Szelest – designated hitter

Of the rock piano world 

          They got his name wrong again. This time it’s on the back of the soundtrack album for the new Richard Pryor movie, “Blue Collar.” Bad enough that the music’s mixed so low in the film that you can’t hear the piano, but not this too. Once more, for the record, it’s Stan Szelest. Not Sileste.

          “I’m starting to feel like the designated hitter of music,” Szelest says in the living room of his father’s house on Buffalo’s Far East Side. “When they run out of hotshots, they call me to fill in.”

          For a man who’s played on tour with Jackson Browne, Neil Young and Maria Muldaur, the “Blue Collar” sessions were a case in point. Producer Jack Nitzsche couldn’t get Howlin’ Wolf’s piano player last Thanksgiving, so Szelest was the next choice. Out of what he got for three days of recording blues to the film’s projector click track, he had to pay his own airfare to California.

          “I knew it was for a movie soundtrack when I went out there,” he says, “but I didn’t know which one. With Jesse Ed Davis, Jim Keltner and Ry Cooder there, I knew that whatever it was, it couldn’t be all that bad.”

          Sometimes, though, the pinch hitting plans don’t pan out. Jackson Browne, fearing he couldn’t get The Section to back him New Year’s Eve in the Los Angeles Forum, called Szelest over the holidays to ask him to think about playing the date.

          Szelest went down into the chilly basement of his own home in suburban Woodlawn, set up his Fender Rhodes piano and his record player and went to work on Browne’s tunes, only to have the singer call back the next day to say sorry, he got The Section after all. Where did Szelest spent New Year’s? Playing a gig in the Tonawanda Moose Hall.

          After a year in which he toured Australia with Maria Muldaur, backed Browne in a Save the Whales benefit in Tokyo and recorded an album with country-rock stalwart Lonnie Mack, it was a bit of an anticlimax.

          As a result, Szelest is starting to think about something he’s resisted for years – picking up his wife and four kids and braving the uncertainties of the music business merry-go-round in Los Angeles. Out there, a designated hitter doesn’t have to climb on a DC-10 jetliner just to come off the bench.

          “It’s either that,” he says, “or a day job.”

          This particular evening he’s waiting for a couple phone calls. Maria Muldaur’s band may need a piano player. And Lonnie Mack has proposed a two-week assault on Florida, where the band would fulfill the promise of one of Mack’s songs, “Rock and Roll Like We Used To.”

          Szelest has been playing for 20 years. Now 36, he started the piano jumping after he saw Jerry Lee Lewis on TV’s “American Bandstand” in 1957. His father, an amateur violinist, encouraged him onward.

          “In my car and in this house is where I feel comfortable and where I feel I can rehearse a song,” Szelest says. “This is my roots, man. My father’ll take his hearing aid off and go to sleep. He’s the person who gave me an inkling about music, how to do it right, be honest about it and not to dwell on what you’ve done because the past is the past and the next thing is down the line.”

          The ‘60s saw Szelest leading one of the hottest local bands, Stan and the Ravens, with time out for stints with Toronto rock patriarch Ronnie Hawkins. Hawkins alumni Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson would drop over to the house.

          “‘Sweet Little Rock ‘N Roller’ by Chuck Berry,” he says, popping it onto the record player. “I play this for my daughters all the time and I tell them, this is for you. But they’d rather hear Peter Frampton.”

          Szelest’s brand of rock fell from style in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but the excitement could still snowball unexpectedly around him. A solo piano gig at the former Granny Goodness on Hertel Avenue in 1972 exploded into a full-blown rock band which Ronnie Hawkins hired off to Toronto.

          It was after that Szelest made the contacts that bring him off the sidelines today. Via work on Neil Young’s “Harvest” album, he met bassist Tim Drummond, who has been the key to several recording dates.

          The phone rings. Is it Lonnie Mack? Maria Muldaur? No, it’s Joey Giarrano, bassist with Dolly and the Midnighters, inviting Szelest over to record a couple tunes off his cassette player.

          “Is this machine true?” he asks Giarrano as the tapes roll. Szelest still learns his parts by ear.

          “It’s a little flat.”

          “What key is this?”

          “D flat.”

          Szelest fills his glass, noting that he doesn’t touch liquor when he’s touring. “It’s quicksand,” he says.

          Another phone call takes him to the apartment of drummer and longtime associate Sandy Konikoff for more tapes. The three musicians stand around the phonograph as Konikoff plays short bursts of favorite tunes. Szelest borrows a record to take home and brush up on. Not something new, but a 20-year-old yellow Sun Record from Nashville. That’s why California keeps calling Stan Szelest. He still plays rock ‘n roll like they used to.

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IN THE PHOTO: Undated shot of Stan Szelest, probably from late ‘70s or early ‘80s.

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FOOTNOTE: Stan died from a heart attack on Jan. 20, 1991, in Woodstock, where he was doing a recording session with The Band. Too soon gone, he was just 48. In his obituary in The Buffalo News, his longtime friend and bandmate Ernie Corallo said that The Band’s bassist Rick Danko called him the grandfather of rock ‘n roll. Others, the obit noted, said that he was the greatest rock 'n roll piano player in the world.