David Luther

Fate has a funny way of handing out favors, and sax player David Luther was desperate for one to come his way.
Luther, 27, is one Traverse City’s most versatile and talented musicians, but his hopes of making it in New York City were dimming last summer. Gigs had fallen through, and he was burning through his savings. He was rethinking his ambitions and his life. Maybe he’d apply to grad school. Most likely, he’d need to get a day job.
But in mid-September, the music director for Meat Loaf called and asked him to audition in two days.
“I said, ‘Excuse me? With who?’ That was Tuesday. By Thursday, I was auditioning, and on Friday, I got the call. I’d gotten it. That was the 180 moment,” Luther recalls.
“I knew it would be an experience to play with Meat. His music is melodramatic and it makes no apologies. It’s over the top, unapologetic rock’n’roll.”
Since then, Luther has traveled to London to play at Royal Albert Hall and taped a show in Hollywood in early December for Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve. In October, Meat Loaf played the Today show to promote the band’s new album, Bat Out of Hell III.
“For the Today show, we had a 5:30 a.m. lobby call, and this is not a time when musicians are friendly. We were standing out there at 38 degrees at 6 in the morning, doing a sound check, and I thought, ‘Everything just feels wrong. Why do I have this horn in my mouth?’”
But the morning “warmed” up to 45 degrees. Meat Loaf drove up in what looked like a batmobile, and blew away the crowd. The camera caught a shot of Luther wailing away on the sax. Success, at last.

EARLY LIFE
On his phone message, Luther speaks with a deep baritone voice and invites you to leave a “nice” message. You think, man, if this guy doesn’t make it on sax, he could definitely swing it as a talk show host. As it turns out, he could also swing a career as a physicist, a mathematician and an architect.  He was an excellent academic student, said Rick Luther, his father and a database manager for Cherry Central.
That’s what made David’s choice of music a little difficult for Rick and his wife to swallow. They always supported their son’s love of music, but didn’t want him living without a net -- steady money and health benefits.
The Luthers, who live in a tidy home in a west side Traverse City subdivision, often played classical music and jazz for David and his younger sister.
Both kids took piano lessons from the age of four. David loved the music, but admitted he cut corners when it came to practicing.
In elementary school, he became obsessed with country music and asked his parents for a violin. But then he was disappointed that it meant playing in the orchestra.
Around sixth grade, he saw a friend from church play the saxophone. He was “the superstar of the district.”
“I thought, I want to do that. A month later, I was taking lessons, unbeknownst to the orchestra director. By seventh grade, I was playing in the band.”
And by eighth grade, Luther was emerging as the new superstar.
“I first saw him when he was playing in the eighth grade jazz band, and he was blowing the place away,” said Larry Avery, who owned Dill’s Old Towne Saloon. “He was a phenomenal improvisational sax player at a very young age, an age most kids don’t even think about improvising.”
SAX & PIANO
Luther shelved the violin and put all his efforts into playing jazz on sax and piano. (For Meat Loaf, he sings and plays the keyboard and sax.)
Luther said that he had a lot of things going for him: great teachers such as Laurie Sears and band directors Lynn Hansen and John Campbell.
“I had the best band direction you could get in this country. I mean, you can’t argue with that.”
Hansen said she still has a picture of Luther and his horn buddies hanging up in her office. “…There was no stopping him. He’s just so energetic; people are drawn to him.”
Luther said he learned how to truly perform at Dill’s Old Towne Saloon. The restaurant/bar closed in 1999, but in its glory days, singers
and musicians waited on tables and performed on stage.
“David washed dishes that first summer, and it was an absolute heinous job,” Avery said. “At the end of the shift, he would play with the Golden Garter Revue in his dirty, filthy white apron. One of the times we were standing in the back of Dill’s, it was cool out there, and David said to me, ‘Yeah, this dishing is hard work. It’s eight hours of dishes for five minutes of sax.’ I said, ‘David, that sounds like married life.’”

VALUE OF LISTENING
On a more serious note, Avery said that David taught his son Justin (a songwriter and musician on the West Coast) the value of listening.
“Everybody said, ‘David you must practice seven hours a day.’ He said, ‘No, I practice one hour a day and listen seven hours a day. I listen to what the other great people are doing. I learn from them. They are my teachers, whether it’s jazz or rock.’ And he taught Justin that. Justin listens all the time.”
Luther left Traverse City to study jazz performance at the University of Michigan and graduated in 2001. For a year he played gigs in Ann Arbor and Detroit. A hired gun, he played whatever was needed—R&B, soul, rock’n’roll, big band tunes, and funk and groove.
He sensed that he was getting too comfortable, and might settle. So he took his savings of $7,000 and went to New York. “The energy of the city just blew me away. I moved out here as much for the city itself as for the music.”

BREAKING IN
Luther had several friends when he first moved to New York in 2002, including a few electronic musicians who were in touch with the downtown dance scene. But he had no solid connections to the kind of gigs he needed. So he decided to show up at jam sessions and see what happened.
“I found out that it was a myth that you go out and play at jam sessions and get called. That sometimes happens, it’s more about hanging out, meeting someone on the friendship level. It’s kind of ironic. If you’re introduced to someone by a mutual friend who respects you as a musician, and your friend says you’re a good musician, that carries more weight than if someone hears you play.”
There was a lot of downtime between gigs, giving Luther time to mull over his career choice. A lot of musicians quit early on, bitter that there’s no fan base for jazz.
“It’s such an easy out, and I’ve thought about this a lot. That view accepts no responsibility for yourself.  You have all these jazz musicians because of the surge in university jazz programs, and it’s really fun to play. You have a lot of creative people out there doing amazing things, but there are others who are just rehashing bebop and thinking it’s still relevant.
“You read Kerouac, there is this one passage in On the Road where they stumble into a club in California and watch Charlie Parker play, and Kerouac writes about Parker with such energy. I realized how exciting it must have been; but you don’t have that kind of reception today. It is not 1955, and dude, if you’re playing music that’s 50 years old and bitching that you can’t pay the rent, it’s your own damn problem.”
Luther said he made up his mind a long time ago to play everything. “I like everything. Why not play everything? I don’t see why that’s impossible.”

THE FIRST BREAK
Luther’s first break came with a connection he made from playing with the Temptations band headed by Dennis Edwards. The horn section leader gave him some names to call, including John Scarpulla, a widely respected musician in the soul-funk side of the world. Luther sent Scarpulla a demo in the spring of 2004. Scarpulla said it sounded good and he’d be in touch, but Luther didn’t hear from him for months.
To stay afloat, Luther fell into a public relations job with Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen to create the master plan for the World Trade Center site. (Libeskind’s wife, Nina, saw Luther’s resume online and was intrigued by his musical background.) It was a job some would kill for, but it was intensely stressful.
“I wasn’t trained for it and not wanting to take any of it home with me, not wanting to be on call on the weekends—everything they wanted me to be. I loved the people and the creative atmosphere, but after a year, I was looking for a way out of there.”
His way out finally came in the spring of 2005, when Scarpulla called and asked Luther if he’d like to sub for Movin’ Out, a Broadway musical starring Billy Joel.
“I said, ‘Yes! Of course I’m interested in subbing.”
He practiced the book for a month and decided if it went well, he’d quit his day job. “The music world is much more informal than the acting or dance world... My audition was to play the show on a Sunday afternoon, sink or swim. The deal I made with myself is if I played the first show, and felt really good and got some later dates, I’d quit my day job.”

TOUCH & GO
And that’s what happened. The Broadway show money was reliable enough, but the show closed last December, and then it became touch and go again.
“I was working my way with wedding bands, and with organist Jimmy McGriff. I played sax with the Julliard orchestra. I had my hands in as many pots as I could.”
One of his chief sources of income was busking in Central Park with a Dixieland band. In addition to money thrown into a guitar case, the band recorded a CD and reproduced it in Harlem for 80 cents apiece. They sold them for $10 apiece.
“On a really good Sunday afternoon in Central Park, we’d do all right,” he said. “I’ll put it this way: Four hours in the park, you’d make as much wearing a tux with a wedding band and slogging through all the b.s.”
Life was good when he was grooving with amazing musicians, but then came a gig painful to remember -- a karaoke show that catered to Russian Jewish events.
“There were these two karaoke singers, and they’d put in a CD and sing along with really bad Euro techno music. There was a drummer, a keyboard player and me, and we’d play along to this horrible music.
“They’d underpay, and it was really loud, and the gig wouldn’t end when they said it would end. I could go on complaining, but basically by the summer’s end, I was burning through my savings. I had this feeling that I was heading for the treetops, but no matter how much altitude I’d get, I was always scraping bottom.”

THE PHONE CALL
That’s when the call came from Meat Loaf’s music director—a bass player that Luther had played with before—and money started to flow. After the phone call, Luther went into solid rehearsal for the next two weeks.
The eight-month world tour (may go longer) starts in February and will hit both coasts, New York City, Canada, Britain, Germany, and Australia where Meat Loaf is extremely popular.
The back-up musicians ride in a different tour bus than Meat Loaf, but Luther said Meat (real name Michael Lee Aday) hangs with the band at times.
“He’s not locked up in his hotel room and confined to a limo. You can talk to the guy—he’s not going to avoid you. It’s not like he considers us the hired help. For example, in Mexico, we were down there in November, and we’re in the top three executive floors. I went up to the lounge to get a cup of coffee and ended up talking to him for 45 minutes.”
They figured out during the conversation that Meat Loaf performed in the musical Hair that his dad saw back in Detroit in 1971.
“He is a funny dude. He’s exactly the kind of person who could pull off ‘Two out of Three Ain’t Bad.’”

PLAYING METAL
Luther’s biggest challenge is learning to play metal—the only music genre he’s never taken on. And it’s the metal songs in Meat Loaf’s most recent album, “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose” that has sparked a ton of complaints from fans.
“Bat Out of Hell One and Bat Out of Hell Two are just really, really strong. One is really coherent and powerful. This third one is produced by Desmond Child, and some of the songs are metal -- and they’re the Desmond Child songs co-written with a lot of others. The other half is Jim Steinman, and he’s the one who wrote all the songs on One and Two, and he has this very unique, epic, unapologetic, rock’n’roll way of writing that’s perfect for Meat. At first glance, the juxtaposition of styles is a little strange, but it’s starting to feel more coherent. There’s something melodramatic and epic about the Desmond Child writing on this, too.”
Luther said he has heard about Meat Loaf’s problems: losing his voice at one point, and making a poor showing on American Idol last year. Yet his strong voice now shows no sign of problems or age.

AGE DIFFERENCES
Speaking of age, the 20 crew and band members of Meat Loaf are mostly middle-aged. Five in the band are married, three have children.
“You you get the impression that some of these guys probably had their day of partying, but it’s not like that anymore. I have a lot of respect for the guys with families. They’re not chasing skirts, they’re calling their wives every day, talking to their kids; they’re serious about it.
You cannot sustain a life by partying like crazy every night. You cannot get to be a 45-year-old married guy who gets called to a gig if you’re f***ing yourself up all the time. Paul, the guitarist, said that when he was with Anthrax, people would come onto them and expect drugs and women and parties, and they’d find guys sipping tea with honey and watching the Simpsons. I’m not saying we never go out and have our drinks. We have our fun, but it’s not insane.”
Professionally, Luther said he is still figuring out how to play metal. “Paul Crooks (former guitarist with Anthrax) has a very impressive resume. I told him, he’s gotta start schooling me. He’s gotta give me a Meat tutorial in metal.”
His future?
“It’s kind of day by day right now. I want to see what kind of legs this grows. These kind of gigs usually lead to other gigs.”
Luther wants to ultimately position himself as the rock’n’roll sax player of choice under the age of 30.
“A lot of younger guys are not taking R&B and soul and rock’n’roll seriously. A lot of them are jazz or nothing. There are a lot of guys who play rock, but they don’t have a solid base—they have a crappy tone, no technique, and no harmonic knowledge.”
Luther is too humble to say it, but he’s got it all.

Editor’s Note: To listen to David Luther play, google his name and go to his MySpace page.

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