Rusty Anderson has been playing guitar alongside McCartney for the past 22 years, and he also worked on “Walk Like An Egyptian,” “You Get What You Give,” and “Livin…
features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up-close look at life on music’s A list. This edition features guitarist Rusty Anderson.for the past 22 years.
During his downtime, he started seeing concerts all over town. When David Bowie brought his Ziggy Stardust Tour to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in October 1972 — a show that was heavily bootlegged thanks to a radio broadcast — Anderson was in the audience. The following December he saw Genesis play one of their legendary gigs with Peter Gabriel at the Roxy. “My mind was instantly blown at that first Genesis show,” he says.
People are always stunned to learn that “Torn” is a cover. Everyone thinks it was written by Natalie Imbruglia. When Ednaswap collapsed, did you start getting frustrated? You were in all these bands that didn’t quite make it.What do you do? I think the one nice thing is that I played with different artists in the studio and live, and I felt like I could continue to do that. Ednaswap pulled me out of that world. We played a lot of live shows, and had a lot of experiences. You can always look back and go, “That was a good idea” or “That was a bad idea,” but it doesn’t matter. It is what it is.
How do mechanical royalties work in a situation like that? If you play on songs as massive as “Livin’ La Vida Loca” or “You Get What You Give,” but you’re not credited as a writer, how much do you get? I felt this way about “Torn.” I’d see a commercial that just loops the section where I was at the forefront. I created the parts. It’s a strange phenomenon in music. I can imagine the guy that wrote the bass part for “My Girl” feels the same way.It was fantastic. I’d never worked with Elton before. I came into the studio. The thing that was really a trip for me was meeting Bernie . He had all these lyrics he’d written. I think he had 80 sheets of lyrics. They were all printed out.
Paul is friggin’ Paul McCartney. It took me a few days to get used to being around him. Even though he’s very disarming and very warm. He was cool. It was just hard to connect those dots between having him as an almost mythical figure to having him in front of me and conversing with him, and being in the moment.
It was a lot. You can’t really process it at the time. You’d just hang out. I’d worked with Elton already. He came up to me and gave me a big kiss. That was super cool. It made me feel a little bit relaxed and at home. To zoom out to all these years later, it’s still fantastic to still be playing with these guys. It’s very spiritual. It’s almost sexual in a way since when you’re making music together, in a way, it’s very interactive. Everybody is in this sort of state. It’s hard to explain if you’re not a musician. But it’s very therapeutic as a human. I really miss it when I’m not making this incredible music with these guys. That’s why the band has stuck together a long time.
You also want to give it some life, some expression, some slight English to it, and angles that are an expression of yourself as the player. Those things, I sort of did naturally. You have how you want to hear the song, how you want to express the song, how you want it to feel, especially in a live situation. You don’t want to be doing a karaoke of it. That wouldn’t really serve the song.A little bit. We all sort of figured out our parts and what to do. A lot of it fell into place.
It’s amazing. Even to this day, just to see the evolution of George as a player, and his skills, and his influences… Paul came up with a lot of guitar bits too. They sort of helped each other out. It was incredible. Ringo came up accidentally with key lines in lyrics or titles of songs. It’s just the way they worked together.
I would imagine so many people you meet want tickets or they want a selfie with Paul or to backstage or somehow get a message to him through you. It must get exhausting. A song like “Helter Skelter,” he last played in the studio when he made the White Album. Now it’s decades later and you need to figure out how to play it live. Walk me through that.
Then there’s songs like “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” that were never meant to be played live, and never were played live. How do you adapt a song like that? That’s the thing. When you think about how music evolved in the Sixties, so much happened so quickly. It was likeshoved into this little decade. You hear the inventions of all these new things. All of a sudden, the fuzz box becomes a thing. People are using tremolos and Leslies. They’re using all these techniques that didn’t exist before that. The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix are at the forefront of all that.
Then we got on a plane and flew straight to the White House, where every time you come in and out, you show your passport and they write your names down. It’s like going on an airplane every time you leave the building or come in. When you share a mic with Paul for the “love you” coda at the end, you’re completely taking on the John role.
There was still too much bleed, so we put the drums between the outer door and the inner door, creating this little space. Having space between two rooms soundproofs them. Abbey Road is in a residential/business area. That helped. I could now take my guitars and really get the amp to drive and sound great.
That was a really big process. There’s all these YouTube clips about, “Here’s how they did it!” You realize, “Oh, it’s not just one instrument. It’s the bass and acoustic and maybe is that piano in there?” We did some research and sort of figured it out. Then we figured out a way to do it where everyone is playing their special part. Then the sound man has to mix it right. It’s all the things coming together to make it sound like that chord. It’s such a magnificent moment.Exactly.
I met him and I was hanging out and talking to him. I told him I was at that show. I almost had a feeling like he would go, “Oh, wow. You were at that one!! Wow!” But for him, it was just another night. He was putting out all this energy, but it was a job. He was passionate about this job. When you’re a fan, and you just see this moment, it’s an impactful moment. For the artist, how could it be different than just another show unless something really unusual happened?Well, I had been in bands.
We got Probyn Gregory. He played with Brian Wilson. He’s a multi-talent. He came in and brought a flugelhorn. He tried a few other things. It was cool to see the way Paul’s brain works and have that be part of the song. I’ve done some stuff with Bunk Gardner. I was a huge Mothers of Invention fan. He played woodwinds. That’s something I recorded and haven’t released yet. It’s more this experimental, jazzy kind of thing.Rusty Anderson Afternoon was a creation because I started working a lot with my pal Todd , who started off as someone to play the live shows with. Then we started writing together. He started singing more. I felt, “This should be a band.” But I didn’t want to start off with a band name.
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