I couldn't leave Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show behind without offering this clip up for your delectation. I've probably linked to it before, but what the hell. Here's one of the world's greatest guitarists with one of the world's greatest TV house bands - the NBC Orchestra - building a heap big new encampment around Cherokee. I'm only a drummer, but friends who play the tuned instruments tell me that this number is a bugger of the first water. They talk of it in terms of a wartime bombing raid ("We only lost eight men on the middle eight of Cherokee last night"). Walking out and taking his seat in the time it takes the band to play its rip-roaring intro (and how classy and nonchalant is that?) Johnny McL begins a little stiffly stating the theme on this one, but once his solo starts, he's away. Would that all musical interludes on chat shows were this gobsmacking.
Watching this I was reminded of the times way back when I have tried to separate JM's guitar from his session work on disc and television recordings - around 42-45 years ago he would be found in the studio bands for various singer's LE TV shows (as not described on JM's website, which presents his career as starting in 1968) - and occasionally making a joke about it at my and others' expense (one of the others I have been in irregular correspondence over the years is "the great Johann Haidenbauer" - and even he is still in the dark about JM's TV hackwork).
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