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“I’m gonna buy a saxophone.” The tone in my gig buddy’s voice was part “damn the torpedoes” and part “tell Laura I love her”. He knew the risks. This was incendiary stuff for a professional rock musician so he said it discreetly, as Paul Von Mertens from the Pet Sounds Band expertly rearranged the oxygen in the hall.
The sight of a saxophone hero at the lip of the pop stage is a rare thing these days. It’s why Doja Cat exhuming Kenny G caused such a splash at last year’s VMA Awards. It’s how Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey sealed their bold departure from alt-rock expectations on their super album, The Deluge.
This long after Baker Street and Careless Whisper, the sax doesn’t beckon – it dares. Music researchers John Laughter and Steve D. Marshall have documented its popular profile across the decades in stark numbers. A Cornell University study later crunched them to identify two golden ages for the instrument, both long ago.
Most spectacularly, from 1958 to 1962, an average of 55 Top-40 hits a year contained a saxophone solo. This timeframe doesn’t even count the classic rock ‘n’ roll era of Rock Around the Clock, Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally et al, when the rude honk seemed as foundational as guitars and drums.
The lesser golden age, from 1978 to 1982, was still blessed with an average of 27 Top-40 sax solos per year. And this was before MTV started steaming up our windows with Let’s Dance, True, The Heat Is On, Smooth Operator, Danger Zone, Out of Mind, Out of Sight and Never Tear Us Apart.
Then came the long exhale. By 1998 to 2002, the average had fallen to less than one a year, where it more or less remains today. The evidence is clear. Somewhere around grunge o’clock, the saxophone didn’t so much sashay into the sunset as roar off a cliff in a cream linen suit.
Why? Pop used to wield Adolphe Sax’s steampunk contraption like Arthur brandished Excalibur. Remember oiled colossus Tim Cappello pumping his sax like iron in The Lost Boys? Springsteen basking in Clarence Clemons’ mojo on the cover of Born to Run? Bowie only played his sometimes, but he sure knew how to hold one in a promo shot.
This propensity for pulling focus may be part of the problem. It’s “too much of a main character to remain always in a supporting role”, I’m told by one Melbourne saxophonist who requested anonymity to speak freely. He also wonders if its lung-powered timbre might place it too close in the mix to the human voice, “and let’s face it, lead singers are not inclined to stand aside”.
It would explain how the sax has retained its dignity in the jazz scene, where singers tend to know their place further down the pecking order. In the all-about-me world of the modern singer-songwriter, even guitarists have learnt to keep their dirty boots off the monitors.
“The saxophone is perfectly suited to a horn section, the problem is, most sax players aren’t,” my source opines. Ultimately, they’re “frustrated they can’t show everyone how awesome the sax is at taking the lead all of the time”.
In a nostalgic context, that awesomeness remains undeniable. Nobody who leaves an Icehouse show these days soon forgets the one-man cavalry of Hugo Lee, swaggering from the back of the stage to the brink of the pit to raise his horn like a Viking chugging the blood of a freshly slain ram.
In coming months, Colin Hay’s reconstituted Men at Work will honour the legacy of the great Greg Ham with the monster sax riffs of Who Can It Be Now? and Overkill. The Dire Straits Experience, led not by some guitar player but by the band’s former saxophonist, Chris White, will surely find plenty of reasons to moisten the reed.
There’s hope brewing in the present, too. Sax cameos rolled out by Doja Cat and The Weeknd feel more like dalliances than bold-as-brass conviction. But the Viagra Boys, Radio Free Alice, dust and O. are among those clawing back righteous ground. Sydney drums/sax duo Party Dozen has blown minds opening for Amyl and the Sniffers in Europe and North America.
Still, we’re a long way from Baker Street. After decades of tasteful textures and emotional half-light filtered through sad singers’ navel lint, that rip-snorting blast of hot air is exactly the voice pop needs to rediscover: a brash, sweaty beast wearing sunglasses indoors that says, “Stand back sweethearts, I’m taking this one home.”
“The fingering is basically the same as the flute,” my intrepid gig buddy added in my ear that night. Crazy talk, obviously. But once we get the saxophone back in charge, anything might be possible.
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