Chuck Rainey

And here's something lovely about that recording.

You've got Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard Purdy on drums and Eric Gale on guitar.

Some seriously wonderful musicians behind those two voices.

That's one of the things I love about revisiting these tracks.

But one of my favorite stories I would like to leave you with says it all.

This came from one of the greatest bass players in the world, Chuck Rainey.

A few years after my father passed, I went to interview Chuck who told me this story.

I had never heard it before.

My notes are all over the place.

But it's got all your typical session musician's that were and were not part of the band, Jeff Skunk Baxter, David Page, that was later in Toto, Timothy B. Schmidt, who I think was in Poco at that time, not the Eagles, Chuck Rainey, Jim Gordon, Ernie Watts.

What the hell does pretzel logic mean? They've never said, like so many of their things, they don't really come out and say, right? No real literal explanation, but other than twisted, convoluted logic, hence the pretzel.

But that's really all I have, right? It's a known song, but it's not one of their major hits.

And there's some Toto guys, obviously, that have some association with Steely Dan, with Jeff and Dave Page.

And then I started thinking, did Lukather ever do anything with them? So I looked it up, and I'll get to that in a sec.

But anyway, the rest is Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard Purdy with the Purdy Shuffle on the drums, obviously, and Don Grolnick on keyboards.

Michael McDonald again.

Thank you.

I first met Chuck Rainey when I was about four years old, so Chuck does not remember me.

But I have to say, fast forward to the year 2018, I found myself at the NAMM show.

The NAMM show, if you are not a social person, is a very hectic, stressful situation to be in.

And I found myself walking around and I ran into some friends And after about two hours of being there, I saw Chuck Rainey walking around by himself.

And I thought to myself, don't bother him.

Everybody is talking to him.

And when we came up with the concept for this show, this was Joe's idea.

That leaves the bass and drums, which are just as particular as everything else on this song.

Chuck Rainey, a bass legend and Steely Dan veteran, played bass on "Peg".

Actually, Chuck Rainey played bass on every track on Asia except for one.

And as you'll see, through his bass playing, he adds perhaps the most personality and flair of any single musician on this record.

He starts out simple enough, just ascending half steps till he hits the E. It's such a tasty little figure.

It's full of these spacious chords, stacks of fourths and fifths instead of tighter thirds and seconds, which leaves a lot of room for the rest of the arrangement to come through.

Donned up in blueprint blue

But let's build out the rest of the rhythm section and focus on Murata's drums and Chuck Rainey's bass.

Now, You can argue that Stilly Dan is kind of black because it's R&B, it's jazz.

You have a lot of black players who play with the band, Bernard Purdy, Chuck Rainey, Valerie Simpson, you name it.

But I thought I want to write about a band which is authentically pure black and really is... not what you would equate with Black music.

So that's how I got to the Living Color as the third book.

Yeah.

Um, we got Chuck Rainey, Denny Dias again, th- in, uh, but Dee Parks, Rick Derringer, Elliot Randall, Hugh McCracken, Larry Carlton.

Hugh who? Uh-

[laughs]

So aside from, uh, so we got Larry Carlton again.

So he's becoming a fixture of the band even though he's not in, quote-unquote, the band.

Uh, Chuck Rainey on bass.

Bernard Purdie on drums on many tracks.

[laughs] Hang on.

Chuck Rainey is the bass player.

Um, and he [laughs] he was talking about how like-

Yes