Dave Edmunds - Biography
Though he has had his share of hits over the course of his long career – the best known of them being his 1970 cover of Smiley Lewis’ New Orleans standard “I Hear You Knockin’” – Dave Edmunds has been persistently underrated and overlooked by the critics. Possibly it is because he is a decidedly blue-collar musician and a roots-rock classicist (and not, emphatically, a revivalist) and not an innovator, he has received less than his due from scribes, for whom image and innovation usually take precedence.
Especially during a remarkable run of highly entertaining, forcefully recorded albums released (mostly by Led Zeppelin’s label Swan Song) during the 1970s, Welshman Edmunds attacked bedrock American styles – old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, soul, blues, and country – with vigor, verve, and rich humor. He may not have written the book on this music, but he rewrote and reinterpreted it with formidable energy. There was never a musty whiff of the museum in Edmunds’ records; their vitality was uniquely contemporary.
Few rock performers can do as many things as brilliantly as Edmunds. Singer, guitarist, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, he is virtually the compleat musician. Many of his finest numbers are the work of one man, though he was also a member for some years of the magnificent band Rockpile.
He was born April 15, 1943, in Cardiff, Wales. He became aware of the American music that would become the source of his style listening to broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg. He fell under the spell of Les Paul, and took Chet Atkins as his first key influence as a young guitarist; the impact of Duane Eddy’s instrumental hits can also be perceived in his twangy sound. Like many players of his generation in the U.K., he had an epiphany watching Frank Tashlin’s comedy The Girl Can’t Help, which featured performances by Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and other major U.S. rock ‘n’ roll stars.
He formed his first band, The Raiders, in his late teens, around the time he bought his first Gibson ES-355, the hollow-body ax that has been his instrument of choice ever since. After a frustrating stab at musical fortune-hunting in London, he returned to Wales in 1967 and formed a trio; initially tagged with the unfortunate moniker The Human Beans by their label EMI, the group was quickly renamed Love Sculpture.
The band recorded at Rockfield, a humble studio in a barn loft on a dairy farm owned by brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward in Monmouth, Wales. This would be the seat of Edmunds’ studio operation for years to come. Love Sculpture recorded two albums (released without much impression in the U.S. by Motown’s rock subsidiary Rare Earth), and Edmunds acquired a rep as a flash guitarist with the group, thanks to frenetic classical interpretations (spurred by the guitarist’s admiration of The Nice) like “Sabre Dance” and “Farandole.”
Love Sculpture dissolved in 1969 after a miscalculated North American tour that included drummer Terry Williams, soon an important collaborator, on drums. Edmunds spent a good portion of the next two years literally woodshedding at Rockfield, to which he was given practically unlimited access. While Love Sculpture had largely essayed blues and psychedelia, Edmunds now indulged his love for stateside rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, and R&B.
Acting as his own producer, he recorded much of his debut solo album Rockpile (1970), by himself, with an occasional helping hand from Williams and others. (Edmunds purloined the name of the LP from a club in Toronto he spied on Love Sculpture’s final tour.) Almost entirely comprising covers of songs by American writers ranging from Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry to Neil Young and Bob Dylan, Rockpile also contained an exuberant rendition of “I Hear You Knockin’” that became a top five hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Edmunds began to diversify himself as a producer-for-hire and musical director in the early ‘70s. He helmed the music for English pop star David Essex’s film vehicle Stardust in 1974, appearing onscreen as guitarist in the prophetically named fictitious band The Stray Cats. His sympathetic work with the San Francisco rock band The Flamin’ Groovies culminated in their classic Shake Some Action (1976).
Possibly attempting to test the limits of Rockfield’s capabilities, Edmunds repaired to the studio during this period and set about replicating the extravagances of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” productions. His sophomore album Subtle As a Flying Mallet (1975) was an agile demonstration of his board expertise, and included such widescreen tracks as the top five U.K. singles “Born to Be With You” (later cut by Dion with Spector producing) and The Ronettes’ “Baby I Love You,” plus The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron.”
A chance conversation in the studio with Led Zeppelin’s lead singer Robert Plant brought Edmunds a contract with the heavy metal band’s newly minted custom imprint. His first Swan Song album Get It (1977) reunited him with a simpatico musician: Nick Lowe, the lanky, droll bassist for Brinsley Schwarz, the English pub-rock band who backed Edmunds on some of Subtle As a Flying Mallet. Edmunds, Lowe, Terry Williams, and members of Graham Parker’s band The Rumour served up an engaging repertoire that included Lowe’s “I Knew the Bride,” the Edmunds/Lowe collaboration “Here Comes the Weekend,” and taut covers of Bob Seger’s “Get Out of Denver” and Jim Ford’s “Juju Man.”
The lineup of the band that became known as Rockpile was completed with the addition of Scottish guitarist Billy Bremner on Tracks On Wax 4 (1978). Edmunds, Lowe, Bremner, and Williams, who commenced touring under the collective Rockpile name in 1977, would appear on all of Edmunds’ solo albums through 1981, as well as Lowe’s solo albums Jesus of Cool (a/k/a Pure Pop For Now People, 1978) and Labour of Lust (1979) and the lone Rockpile album Seconds of Pleasure (1980).
The association bore fruit again on Tracks with spry tunes like the Lowe-Edmunds collaborations “Never Been in Love,” “Deborah,” “What Looks Best On You,” and on Lowe’s “Heart of the City.” Repeat When Necessary (1979) returned to an all-covers mode, but it would be difficult to quarrel with performances as lively as the renditions of Elvis Costello’s “Girls Talk,” Graham Parker’s “Crawling From the Wreckage, and Hank DeVito’s “Queen of Hearts.”
Rockpile’s lone album under the group name was issued in 1980. The band’s signing to Columbia Records was presented as a fait accompli by manager Jake Riviera, and Edmunds chafed at putting his solo career on the back burner. By the time the last Edmunds solo release featuring the four members, Twangin’ (1981), was issued, Rockpile was history. Still, despite the acrimony that preceded its release, the collection included such strong numbers as covers of George Jones’ “The Race is On” (on which Edmunds was backed by the American rockabilly trio The Stray Cats, with whom he established a strong relationship as producer) and John Fogerty’s “Almost Saturday Night.”
Now crawling from the wreckage himself, Edmunds signed to Arista Records, and produced the hit-and-miss DE7 (1982), which ranged through material by Bruce Springsteen (“From Small Things, Big Things Come”), NRBQ (“Me and the Boys”), and lesser lights.
Though Edmunds was an unquestionably accomplished producer of his own material, he opted to employ the technically savvy modernist Jeff Lynne of The Electric Light Orchestra on his next two albums. While Informa’tion (1983) and Riff Raff (1984) are jarringly at odds with his earlier work (and, ironically, now sound more dated than Edmunds’ own decidedly retro productions), the synthesizer-heavy records made an impression in the contemporary charts, with the former LP’s “Slipping Away” denting the U.S. top 40. In 1985, he appeared onscreen in the teen gross-out comedy Porky’s Revenge, which spawned the single “High School Nights.”
After a long lay-off, he returned with Capitol album Closer to the Flame (1990). Here the guitarist, who had covered The Four Tops’ “Something About You” on his second Lynne-produced album, stepped somewhat more definitively into a soul bag: On the title cut and elsewhere, his down-home R&B grooves were driven by the punch Memphis Horns and Uptown Horns. Not surprisingly, his touring band of the period found him paired with another esteemed guitarist, Steve Cropper of Stax Records’ Booker T. & The MG’s.
Sadly, for the last two decades, Edmunds has been relatively invisible on records and on the road. He released the quickly forgotten Plugged In (1994) on Rhino; like that album, his next one, the mixed bag Musical Fantasies (1999), included another version of “Sabre Dance,” perhaps indicating that he had run out of ideas in the studio. Since 2000, he has issued three live albums. He was most visible at the turn of the millennium as a member of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.