Rick Shlosser

Anyone who listened to mainstream American radio in the ‘70s and ‘80s could probably sing most of the lyrics of the following tunes at karaoke night without needing a teleprompter: “Wild Night” (Van Morrison), “Tonight’s the Night” (Rod Stewart), “Lotta Love” (Nicolette Larson), “Déjà Vu” (Dionne Warwick), “Endless Love” (Lionel Richie and Diana Ross), “9 to 5” (Dolly Parton), “Queen of Hearts” (Juice Newton) and “Through the Years” (Kenny Rogers). Each is an iconic piece of 20th-century pop, of course, and they have something in common that helped turn them into classics: Rick Shlosser, the New England native who played drums on every track.

Along with fellow kitmen Jim Keltner, Steve Gadd, Gary Mallaber and Rick Marotta, Shlosser is among the foremost studio cats of his generation, a percussive chameleon who’s provided rhythmic force, flair, subtlety and snap to hundreds of recordings by a multigenred assortment of artists, including dozens with household-name status. His extraordinary ability to adapt his style to fit any sort of song – from rock, jazz, blues and R&B to folk, funk, country and Latin – established him a first-call hired gun among musicians and producers over 50 years ago and he’s contributed his sensational chops to sessions with artists as diverse as Barbara Streisand, Link Wray, Etta James, Lee Ritenour, Art Garfunkel and Cher in addition to those noted above and a laundry list of others.

MUSICAL BEGINNINGS

Shlosser was born on December 7, 1946 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and his family moved to nearby Springfield when he was about six months old. Though neither of his parents played an instrument, both “loved music and were great dancers,” he says, which led to him falling in love with tap dancing and taking lessons at the Billy Syner Tap Studios in downtown Springfield from around age five to age 13. “I guess this was the start of my preoccupation with and love of rhythm,” he said in May 2024. His musical training started several years before, however, since he started taking trumpet and drum lessons at around age 10, when he was in fifth grade.

After accidentally sliding down some ice left him without his two front teeth about a year later, Shlosser stopped playing the trumpet but stuck with the drums. Before he began taking lessons, he drummed along with records using a pair of child-sized sticks that he’d received as a gift. “I’d sit in our living room next to our Victrola with the sticks that came with a toy, paper-headed drum set my grandmother gave me for Christmas, playing along with Gene Krupa’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ and other songs my parents liked,” he says. He got his first snare drum when he was in seventh grade and practiced while using a tall floor lamp as a cymbal until his father bought him his first kit the following year (Ludwigs in white pearl, he still recalls). He did first jam sessions with his friend Roger Auby, a guitarist, and they performed occasionally at frat parties on the Springfield College campus.

While going to Springfield’s Classical Senior High School from 1960 to 1964, Shlosser played in the school orchestra and marching band and took lessons from Bill McCoullough and Joe Sefcik, the latter of whom was jazz legend Joe Morello‘s former instructor (when Morello was growing up in Springfield). Outside of school hours, he formed a 10-piece R&B group that included five white musicians and five Black singer-dancers; interracial acts were extremely rare in the Springfield area at the time, making them teenage trailblazers of a sort on a sociocultural level. Called The Del Ardens and The Regals at various points, they covered the hits of the day, particularly ones by Black artists on Motown and Atlantic.

BERKLEE, BUTTER, ANDY PRATT, FIRST STUDIO EXPERIENCE

After graduation, Shlosser enrolled at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, where he majored in chemistry and biology – trying to “fulfill my dad’s desire for me to be a doctor,” he says – and played weekend gigs with fellow students. After deciding that music was his future, not medicine, he transferred to Berklee College of Music in Boston after his sophomore year, majoring in drums and leaving one semester shy of finishing the four-year program. “I was somewhat of an outcast there because I wasn’t that interested in jazz but I loved the blues and R&B,” he says. “I learned how to read music at Berklee, though, and that made it possible for me to become a studio musician.”

In 1968, Shlosser, singer-songwriter-pianist-guitarist-bassist Andy Pratt and vocalist-guitarist Jim Thomson formed the power trio Butter, which covered Cream, Hendrix, The Who and Motown material at popular venues including The Boston Tea Party. His first studio experience was in 1969 for Pratt’s debut disc Records Are Like Life, which was recorded on an eight-track in Pratt’s home studio just outside Boston and released by Polydor in 1970. Three years later, he played on Pratt’s self-titled LP for Columbia (including on “Avenging Annie,” which hit #78 in the Billboard Hot 100) and he joined Pratt again on his 1977 LP Shiver in the Night.

Though Butter became popular in the Boston area in early 1968, Pratt’s total disinterest in touring prompted Shlosser to start seeking other options and he joined a nine-piece R&B band that performed seven nights a week (along with  Saturday and Sunday matinees) in Boston’s infamous red-light district, “the Combat Zone” (now the Theatre District). The gig was grueling, he says, but the pay was excellent for a 22-year-old drummer: $180/week (about $1,600/week in 2024).

RIG, EDGAR WINTERS, MOVE SAN FRANCISCO, LAMB

Later in 1968 and into 1969, he toured with blues-rock group Rig before spending roughly five months with Edgar Winter’s group White Trash in mid-1970, living with his bandmates in a farm house in Clinton Corners, New York (about 75 miles north of New York City). He moved to San Francisco in late 1970 after Rig’s tour manager, Mark Specter, landed him an audition with Lamb, a rock-jazz-folk-gospel outfit that’s best known for their appearance in the 1972 concert film Fillmore: The Last Days.

Shlosser played on Lamb’s final album, Bring Out the Sun, which Warner Bros. released in 1971, and he wound up staying on the West Coast for the next 45 years. “My move to California was an easy one to make since most of the members of Rig had moved to the San Francisco area and I never liked cold winters,” he says, noting that there wasn’t a strong studio scene in Boston so he had no reason to return to the city.

VAN MORRISON

In early 1971, 24-year-old Shlosser got the biggest break of his early career when he landed a gig with an infinitely more famous Warner Bros. artist, Van Morrison, for his fifth studio album, Tupelo Honey, recorded in San Franciso and released in October that year. He credits Lamb’s pianist, Tom Salisbury, for introducing him to Morrison because Salisbury told him he was auditioning drummers and gave him Morrison’s direct phone number so he could contact him. Besides laying down tracks in the studio, Shlosser was part of Morrison’s band for multiple shows before the LP hit the shelves.

He appears on five of Tupelo Honey’s nine songs; jazz great Connie Kay plays on the other four, including the title track. He also contributed to some tracks on Morrison’s 1972 album Saint Dominic’s Preview, including the fan favorite “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile),” and his 1973 LP Hard Nose the Highway. Asked what he remembers most about his time with the notoriously demanding Morrison, who was a bona fide living legend by the time he and Shlosser met, he said it was rewarding but more than a little stressful. “Van was not an easy boss,” he said. “I believe he fired me three times during the two years we worked together.”

BOZ SCAGGS, LINK WRAY, MOVE TO LA, JACK MACK & THE HEART ATTACK

Between 1973 and 1975, Shlosser was part of Boz Scaggs’ touring band and played various sessions around San Francisco, including one with Link Wray in which they recorded a remake of “Rumble,” his classic instrumental from 1958. Other projects included Pamela Polland’s self-titled album for Columbia that included a guest appearance by fellow Springfield native Taj Mahal.

In 1976, he moved to Los Angeles since “the session scene in San Francisco was fizzling out,” he says. Shortly after arrival, he befriended some members of ‘60s pop quartet The Robbs, who’d opened Cherokee Studios in the LA suburb of Chatsworth in 1972, and that connection sent his career into orbit. Over the next several decades, Shlosser played in hundreds of sessions at Cherokee and other studios, including LPs in the  ‘70s by Dusty Springfield, Leo Sayer, Ronnie Hawkins, Maria Muldaur, The Hues Corporation, Stephen Bishop, The Bellamy Brothers and The Manhattan Transfer.

In addition to his studio work, he co-formed the 11-piece soul/R&B group Jack Mack & The Heart Attack in 1979 with two bandmates from his Combat Zone days, drummer Jack Mack (aka Claude Pepper) and guitarist Andrew Kastner. After playing on their first album, 1982’s Cardiac Party, Shlosser left to begin a three-year stint with James Taylor’s band; he appears on Taylor’s 1985 LP That’s Why I’m Here. While it’s been widely reported that he was a member of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the ‘70s, he wasn’t (though he played on their 1980 disc Make a Little Magic).

1980S, 1990S, 2000S

In the early 1980s, as the US economy began recovering from its ‘70s malaise and album sales took off as a result, Shlosser found himself in the right place at the right time with the right skills and he was as busy as any session player’s ever been. Demonstrating the kind of flexibility that only the most seasoned pros can provide, he appeared on albums by artists including Steve Cropper, Eric Carmen, Burton Cummings, Livingston Taylor, Little Feat, Tanya Tucker, Linda Ronstadt, John Mellencamp, Maynard Ferguson, George Benson, Janis Ian, Patrick Simmons and Barry Manilow.

Among his 1990s projects were playing on records by Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Joe ‘Bean” Esposito, surf-pop pioneer Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean), guitarist-songwriter Marty Joe Kupersmith (of Jay & The Americans) and jazz pianist David Frankel. In the early 2000s, he recorded with blues guitarist Scott Ellison and vocalist Jennifer Rae Getz, among others, and between 2009 and 2014 he played on four of electronic progressive-pop group Depresleys’ LPs.

MOVE TO MEXICO, CAREER REFLECTIONS

In 2006, Shlosser moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lives to this day. “The studio scene I knew was over and I felt a bit like a dinosaur,” he says about why he left LA after 40 years. “It got a bit depressing in LA seeing all the great studios I’d worked in closing their doors and selling their equipment.” He toured with Van Morrison for parts of 2008 and 2009, was co-owner of a studio with the late jazz guitarist Ken Basman until 2016 and is now officially retired.

As for especially memorable moments in his career, Shlosser cites working with Ringo Starr on Harry Nilsson’s 1980 album Flash Harry, appearing at the Rock in Rio festival in 1985 with James Taylor before some 350,000 people and backing Taylor at New York City’s Central Park in June 1982 at an anti-nuclear-weapons rally that drew an estimated one million. He also notes the sessions he did with Johnny Mathis, since he used to dance to his songs when he was in junior high.

“Hearing his voice in my headphones while we were recording was a really memorable experience, but I could say exactly the same thing about many other artists,” he says. “It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience to get to record with so many great singers and musicians, some of whom I never ever expected to even meet, never mind work with. I wish the recording scene had lasted longer, but if one can expect anything in life, it’s that things will change.”

(by D.S. Monahan)