The Crow’s Nest bar, with its panoramic view of sunsets over the Caribbean Sea, was the place to be at happy hour during Delbert McClinton’s Sandy Beaches Cruise in January. On stage leading a different band just about every evening was a certified journeyman of hot boogie, classic R&B, swinging jazz, and the blues. Red Young, living up to his surname at 76, commanded a big vintage Hammond Organ, playing bass lines with his feet, swirling up an ocean of tremolo turbulence, calling out tunes, cajoling the band, and singing his heart out. When I first heard him - and heard of him to be honest - on the 2024 cruise, I determined that this year I’d meet him and listen to his story.
That’s what Episode 310 of The String is about - Red Young’s unique and remarkable journey through a music career. He’s played small clubs, dance halls, arenas, cruise ships it would seem, in just about every popular genre, out of Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, Nashville, Massachusetts, Austin, and on the road around the world. He’s worked with Freddy Fender, Kinky Friedman, Dolly Parton, Sonny & Cher, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Armatrading, Eric Burdon of the Animals, Marcia Ball, Janiva Magness, and of course Delbert McClinton himself, who he’s known for about 60 years. More recently, some of Red’s Americana-leaning collaborations include the Black Pumas, Uncle Lucius, and the Waybacks, who’ve worked with him to put on the beloved classic album cover session on the hillside stage at Merlefest in NC.
He got started on the piano when he was, you know, young.
“I did my first classical concert when I was nine. It was like heavy Chopin stuff,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is cool, but I'm playing music that was written 200 years ago. I want to play my own music,’” The first taste of that path came from a striding piano player in a trio at the Elks Club, a regular family outing. That guy taught Red the first concepts that would help him play ragtime, blues, swing, and jazz. Soon Red discovered he had perfect pitch and he applied that to transcribing solos off records by the likes of Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck. This is what we call a strong foundation. This interview is a rapid fire set of stories about what he built on top of it. A sampling:
He got his first touring job at age 18 with an elder Dixieland musician still riding along on a hit record from the 1920s. Red traveled by car all over the country, including his first trip to New York, where they settled in for a club residency. “Across the street from the hotel was a place called Jim and Andy's, where all the jazz musicians hung out. There were two phone booths in there and a recording studio nearby. They would call the phone booth to say, okay, they need a trombone player for a session. Anybody here take the call? And Jim would charge people to tell and tell their wives they weren't there! But I met Gerry Mulligan. I met Paul Gonsalvez. All these jazz guys.”
Cut to the mid 1970s when Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Jessie Colter were collectivized as The Outlaws on Nashville’s first million-selling album. They put together a package tour with Tompall Glaser of the Glaser Brothers, and Red got the piano gig with him. “It was four bands, five buses. We were doing 25,000 people a night,” Young says. “We played Red Rocks, you know? We played the Hollywood Bowl. The concerts were typically four or five hours long. And when we hit the West Coast, Hell’s Angels were the security guards, so they'd show up and say, ‘well, you guys want women or drugs or liquor or what?’ We said,"Yeah!”
The first thing anybody told me about Red Young was that he’d had a role in Linda Rondstad’s world during the time in the 1980s that she made a trilogy of classic pop albums with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. When it came time to tour, Ronstadt could see that the ballad-heavy repertoire needed more upbeat material to keep audiences engaged, but from the same time period. And that’s when she caught Red Young live in LA playing as an act he’d worked up with two women who sang snapping, harmony-forward 1940s pop in the manner of the Andrews Sisters.
“She came into this club and heard us singing and thought this could work,” Young recounts. “She wanted to add one singer to it. So there's three girl singers, Linda, and myself. So I arranged the five of us. We came out in the middle (of the big band show). We started off with “Hey Daddy.” Then we did “Mister Sandman,” “I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo”. And then the last one was “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”. And soon Red had arranged more parts for a horn section to back them up. It’s kind of what he does.
Our conversation comes full circle to Red’s deal on the Delbert Cruise, where he gets more accumulated stage time than about any other act, given five happy hours and five nights of 12:30 am piano bar sets that go to all hours. But what I loved most was his horn section shows, made of all the side musicians hanging out on board, because half the bands bring them. They love playing Red’s charts.
“The horn band that I do on the cruise, that's an outgrowth of one that I started in Austin when Antones reopened in 2016,” he says. And that band can be heard on Red’s most recent album Live In Austin. “Before the electric guitars took over, the blues was piano, bass, drums, and a small horn section. It was like Count Basie or Ray Charles, you know, that small band stuff. The small band that I use on the boat is very powerful. It's three saxes and two trumpets, but you can make it sound like a big band.”
I can vouch for that, and you’ll hear several examples of Red making a lot out of a little in this fascinating, funny hour of time with a musician who’s done it all with a smile.
Watch Red Young lead his Hot Horns at a recent show at Antone's in Austin, TX, where he's had a long-term residency.
