The Fab Faux aren’t your local bar’s Beatles cover band. Late Show With David Letterman bassist Will Lee along with Conan bandleader Jimmy Vivino, Rich Pagano, Frank Agnello and
Jack Petruzzelli give life to the music The Beatles never got a chance to bring to the stage.
Albums like Revolver, Abbey Road and more are carefully composed and arranged through the use of horn sections, background vocalists, and any other necessities the material may call for, giving the seasoned Beatles fan an authentic glimpse into what could have been for The Fab Four.
On October 26, The Fab Faux will take the stage at New York’s Beacon Theatre to celebrate George Harrison’s 70th birthday, where they will draw from Harrison’s Beatles repertoire as well as his solo endeavors. We sat down with bassist Will Lee to talk all things Beatles, Harrison and the upcoming soiree at the Beacon. You can catch The Fab Faux at the Beacon this Saturday as well as at The Chicago Theatre on November 9 and New Brunswick’s State Theatre on November 23.
Let’s talk about The Beatles. Tell me about your history with them growing up as a fan and you’re introduction to their music
To say that I was a fan is quite an understatement. I was a kid growing up in Huntsville, TX at the time. It got to a point where my girlfriend said to me, “Alright, is it me or The Beatles?” I guess you could see what choice I made there. I’m still with The Beatles and she’s long gone. It was a choice I’m really happy about making because when The Beatles hit the Ed Sullivan Theater and the Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 1964, that was a life-altering moment for many people.
It was the thing that sparked my career and made me decide, “Alright those drums that have been collecting dust in my bedroom that I never knew what to do with, now I know exactly what I’m going to do with those.” I’m going to get chicks with those. From that day on, I never stopped playing. Of course, I had already heard The Beatles’ music, but the reaction, you do this, the chicks go nuts and you move on. I thought that was the most romantic notion I had ever arrived at or seen happen.
That was it. The Beatles have been a thread through all my studio sessions, live gigs, every bit of music I had done after that was what would The Beatles do here? That kind of informed me. It would seem obvious that a guy like me would have a Beatles band, but it never occurred to me ever, in my entire career. I had seen Beatles bands and thought that’s not something I would want to do—pretend to be The Beatles—that’s corny. I never entertained the idea, until I met the drummer in our band Rich Pagano. We were doing a Hiram Bullock, small tour around Europe and I heard something in his playing and I was like, “how into Ringo are you?” And he was like, “I’m way into it.” Plus his singing voice sounded a lot like John Lennon to me.
How did the idea for The Fab Faux end up coming to life?
The idea came about with the thought—how much fun would it be to bring Beatles records to the stage with this guy Jimmy Vivino and a couple of others guys? I know it wouldn’t work as a four-piece because there were too many textures on those great Beatles records. Double vocals, percussion parts, keyboard parts. That was kind of a mistake that the lookalike bands have been making all those years. Trying to look like The Beatles when they only had four guys. They weren’t going to become a track act. They had to stick to their early stuff, and not do that great of a job recreating the records themselves, more of the live stuff.
When Rich said yes I started badgering Jimmy Vivino about this, I somehow managed to talk him into it after multiple tries. Jimmy Vivino is the bandleader for Conan and he’s been a bandleader countless times in the New York area. I’ve known him forever and I’ve known him to be a guy who knows about the details. He’s a historian and an archivist in the same way that Paul Schaeffer is. He knows all the stuff. I thought that would be a no-brainer to ask him to be in the band. Beyond that, I didn’t really know who the other two were, but I knew it had to be a five-piece. So then we went on a search for the other two guys, and it’s been the same guys since 1998.
You mentioned the other lookalike bands make the mistake of only having four members. Was it your knowledge of the catalog that made you want five guys and a fuller sound?
It was kind of a “guys night out bowling idea” at first. We never knew we were going to expand into doing all the songs that had horn sections and strings at the beginning. We knew the bare minimum would had to be the five guys so we could pull off more songs than Beatle bands were expected to do.
You guys stick to material that The Beatles didn’t get a chance to play live. That’s your draw?
That’s what we’re known for. We hit on just about everything, but that’s the stuff we’re specializing at. Take for example an album like Magical Mystery Tour. This band is totally made for that because of all the weird things that happen on all that album. All the different varieties of big productions stuff. We have all the goods to bring that to the stage. As diverse as The White Album as well. Down to one guy playing “Blackbird” versus the textures of something like “Revolution (9).” That’s what we’re known for as well. It’s crazy.
The Beatles never played some of these songs live, so you had nothing to go off of in rehearsals. When you brought them to the stage, did you learn anything new about the material?
I think the first thing that any Beatle band learns in the beginning is how you thought you knew the song. But in the process of trying to play it and learn it well enough to make it presentable, you do the best version you can in the beginning. Then you go back and listen and at that point, you’re able to peel back the next layer of the onion that these records are, and hear the stuff you didn’t hear before. You then go and perform it with new information and then go back and listen, and hear new stuff. This keeps going on and on. We’ve been doing this since 1998 and we’re still discovering new stuff.
We’ve been digging deep into this stuff for all that time and since that’s happened a lot of bootleg stuff has been released where you can just go to YouTube and hear isolated tracks. We used to do all sorts of trickery to figure out, assume and sometimes understands what these songs were made of.
In the words of [Sgt. Pepper producer] George Martin, when I was able to ask him once—was Sgt. Pepper really done on four tracks? He boiled it down to an answer which was, “Well in the end it really ends up on two anyway, doesn’t it?”
I was really intrigued by how you get all this information to sound so good by constantly reducing tracks down to 2, 3 and then finally 4. With the fact that it is just two tracks you have there is a lot of mysterious sounds that you don’t know what they’re made out of.
The technology back then was not even a thousandth of what it is now. It’s amazing they were able to do what they did
Yeah, well that’s why the later stuff is now able to be heard on YouTube as isolate tracks because they were using more multiple tracks in later years of recording. In the beginning it was just a mush of sound. For the main bassist, or actually all five guys play bass in the band, we switch around instruments sometimes. That bass part is so elusive on the early songs, on “Hard Days Night” it’s almost impossible to hear what the bass part is on that song. It will probably never be easy to be heard unless they come up with some new technology to isolate it better. Now, it’s like “plaid” notes, there is no single sounding bass part on there, it’s like [hums bass line]. You can cover your mouth and make the sound just as easy as the record sounds.
They have to be up there as far as great studio bands. It’s a shame they didn’t get to flush out some of this stuff on stage
It’s unfair because of the timing of it all. It’s like a disease that someone died of and they found the cure last week. They gave us all this great information. Maybe they didn’t want to play it live. For them the thrill of them playing live ended already as The Beatles. Maybe it wasn’t a thing they needed to do. Of course now McCartney goes out now and does a lot of that stuff.
Let’s talk about George Harrison, since he’s the man of the hour at the upcoming Beacon Theatre show. You played with George at one of his last shows, right?
In fact it was his last show. The function of the show was he was trying to get attention and get actually seats in Parliament for the Natural Law Party, which is a group of meditation people. They wanted representation in the government, which is pretty cool. George, the original “let’s do a concert for the benefit of something” guy was able to really think this way. He put together this concert in London at the Royal Albert Hall which was made up of people that had just done the “Live in Japan” album and tour—Eric Clapton’s band, with the addition of some other cats to fill in the blanks.
Eric’s bass player Nathan East couldn’t make it at the time, so George gave me a call and it was augmented by my Matt Campbell on guitar and Gary Moore on guitar for that concert. The rest was the Clapton band at the time.
When George Harrison calls you and then you hang up the phone, you’re like a kid in a candy store, right?
It was crazy, because my brother who’s 13 months younger than me, Rob, has an incredible George Harrison impression. So when I got home and heard the message I just laughed because the message sounded like, “Hello Will, this is George Harrison calling. I’d like to steal you away from that television program for a night to come play with me in London at the Royal Albert Hall and please give me a call and blah blah blah…” I called my brother later that night, and said, “Hey man, great George earlier, that was so funny.” He said, “I didn’t call you.” I said, “You didn’t call me, alright I got to go, I’ll call you back in a little while.”
I listened to the message again and he was calling me from Flyer Park, his house. For real. He flew me over on the Concord and stuff. It was just incredible to go do this one off with George. I learned a lot of material in a short amount of time. We had one rehearsal and we hit it the next day.
That’s wild. My favorite Beatles song is “Something,” (written by George Harrison) but I remember reading a headline calling George “The Forgotten Beatle.” Why do you think that’s the case?
I think its just personalities. It causes people to insert themselves or assert themselves to a certain energy level. George, like John and Paul grew up in the working class environment. Liverpool is really competitive. You can get the feeling from George’s gentle nature that he wasn’t the pushiest person among the group, he wasn’t the control freak of the group. He was a gentle soul, gentle guy. Great sense of humor. Spiritual of course. You could probably get the sense that he was intimidated by those guys. As talented as he was he probably didn’t really know how to put his foot in the door and leave it jammed in there, until somebody said, “Check me out, I got some great songs here.”
While all that was happening he was gently improving his song writing skills as time went on. Maybe that’s part of the reason. He wasn’t that pushy of a guy.
George was known for bringing a sort of wacky instruments into the studio. I think of “Norwegian Wood”….
How long would it have taken for us to hear Indian music if it wasn’t for George?
Good point. I knew what he did on “Norwegian Wood” but to look at the list of sounds he contributed, it’s incredible. At the Beacon, have you started to think about how you’re going to approach recreating those songs?
We know exactly what we’re going to do. We’ve been working on this for months already.
What’s been the biggest challenge so far in rehearsals for the band?
Organizing everything. There are so many people involved. There is a choir of six people. As I’m talking to you, I’m writing song titles on a CD for someone who’s about to pick up his choir book in five minutes. I’m writing “Isn’t It A Pity” and “Got My Mind Set On You.” There are so many layers to this. I think the biggest thing for us is the creative arguments we had about what’s going to be on this show. What are we not going to do. I’d be happy to recreate the show I did with George. The other guys who are younger than me came in and have a different take on it. For example, when The Beatles broke up I wasn’t nearly as receptive to The Beatles solo material as I was to The Beatles material. I used to say, “it’s one fourth as good The Beatles.” That was my take.
Of course, there are some great gems on the solo stuff. We’re doing a lot of All Things Must Pass in this show. We are trying to address a lot of George’s features in The Beatles. A lot of those tunes. Of course we have our normal array of strings, horns and stuff like that. We also have two extra rhythmic sections players to fill in the other blanks. A lot of George’s albums and his “biggies” like “What Is Life,” “My Sweet Lord,” and “Wah, Wah” are huge production numbers. It takes a lot of people to make that sound.
We have our work cut out for us. We’ve been working on it for a really long time. We are just about ready. It’s only a matter days from now.
So you guys are doing “All Things Must Pass.” That will be really cool
Yes, we’ll do that and a lot of songs from that album. And one of the great thrills for us is we’re having Jim Keltner coming in to play with us. He was a Wilbury. We’ll do a little Wilburys. He was a huge part of George’s career and in fact a huge part of a lot of those guys’ careers. All The Beatles love Jim Keltner.
The Wilburys also did a lot with Dylan as well as George, too
Yeah and later with Simon & Garfunkel. We actually just did a gig in LA on Saturday night and he sat in with us. I didn’t know what to expect, but he sat in during “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” We have all those parts covered already, but I was wondering what he was going to do. Is there anything he can possible say musically with all the other textures happening? He was playing some amazing creative stuff. It’s going to thrilling to see what he does with this George show. He’s the man.
