Keyboard, November 1992

T Lavitz
Scaling New Heights With The Dregs
By Robert L. Doerschuk

Strange as it seems, a full ten years have passed since the Dixie Dregs played their last tour - strange, because their searing licks and white-hot virtuosity smolder in our memory like ashes from yesterday's blaze. In this past decade, we've seen fusion, that once incendiary blend of jazz chops and rock intensity, melt into a limpid puddle of soggy bop clichés and sleepwalking grooves. Gone are the glory days of Mahavishnu Orchestra, of Jaco-vintage Weather Report, of Return To Forever.

Gone, but not forgotten by folks like Steve Morse, Allen Sloan, Andy West, Rod Morgenstein, and T Lavitz, returned now from their musical wanderings and joined together again as the revived Dixie Dregs. Judging from their reunion effort, a stunning live set titled Bring 'Em Back Alive [Capricorn, dist. By Warner Bros.], they've lost none of the heat generated on their now classic albums of the late '70s - What If, Free Fall, and Night of the Living Dregs. Overall, the band leans more toward rock than jazz; the grooves pound rather than swing, the solos explode rather than evolve. Morse, undeniably the band's centerpiece, lights most of the fireworks with his screaming guitar breaks, but in trading fours with him and grabbing his own moments in the spotlight, Lavitz more than keeps up. In fact, his solos - compressed , often thrilling – give hope to keyboardists of the rock persuasion that they may yet escape from the swamps of pads and sequences.

"You know, it's funny," Lavitz reminisced over a meat-free lunch one smoggy L.A. day last August. "When we stopped playing together back in '83, a lot of people thought it was because our popularity must have been waning, since we only played instrumental music. In fact, it was getting stronger. To be honest, I never wanted it to end, but maybe splitting up was the right move. We've gotten more airplay with Bring 'Em Back Alive than we ever got before."

That may be because the power of the Dregs live offers an especially potent contrast to the sequenced, quantized, and homogenized product that dominates today's pop charts. Every note on the album is played live; rather than pieced together edited "improvisations," every soloist takes his cue from interplay with the rest of the band in high-energy jams. The results spill across musical categories as Morse, Lavitz, and company play jazz substitutions, country twangs, bonehead garage riffs - whatever it takes to light the match and burn.

"Man, I've always loved rock and roll licks," Lavitz insists. "Back when I was a kid, Led Zeppelin was it for me. They were the greatest. But, around when Return To Forever came out with Light as a Feather, and I was totally submerged in Coltrane and bebop, I actually began thinking, 'Led Zeppelin isn't that great.' I started looking down my nose at them. I'm almost embarrassed to say it, because now those old Zeppelin records sound incredible. Nothing, nothing, compares with that kind of music. Bands like that didn't play fast or superimpose harmonies over changes, but that's okay. You can listen to a guy burn over one chord or through a I-IV-V; even if he stays inside the changes and play straight ahead, he can sound good. I mean, I've studied jazz for a long time, and I love that; the beauty of voice-leading through a melody is great. But to cap that off with a nice rock or country touch is cool too."

The Dregs reunion was facilitated by Phil Walden, whose production work with Otis Reading, the Allman Brothers, and other acts made him a legend in Southern rock circles. After signing Widespread Panic to his newly revived Capricorn label, Walden told the band's keyboardist, one T Lavitz, of his interest in bringing the Dregs back together. The rest of the band quickly agreed, especially when Walden offered a multiple-album deal kicked off by a live "greatest hits" collection. It took no time for them to lock up, though this time with a slightly harder rhythmic emphasis, thanks to drummer Morgenstein's snare-whacking stint with Winger.

From the start, Lavitz was committed to the ideal of real-time playing with the Dregs, though he had recently explored sequencing in putting his own solo act together to open on a Steve Morse tour. Armed with an Ensoniq EPS-M hooked to a 70Mb hard drive, he assembled a half-hour set, spiced nightly with his own live solos. "It was tough," he admits. "Because of all the sounds that are now readily available, the tendency is to over-sequence. But when you're opening for somebody like Steve, your audience is going to be very knowledgeable, compared to a dance or rap audience. So even though most of them knew who I was from the Dregs, I had to prove myself. I didn't want people to see this one little guy up there with a few keyboards and say, 'Is he just pushing a start button and standing there?' So I programmed some cymbals, a few backbeats and percussion things, not full kits all the time, some chordal parts, some bass lines coming and going - just sketches. I used two keyboards, with the right hand doing solos with lead patches on the upper one. At first, it was scary, like, 'What's everybody staring at?' But now, it's fun."

With the Dregs, though, it's back to basics. Lavitz plays a streamlined setup on their current tour - a Hammond B-3 and Leslie, which he terms "irreplaceable," a Korg SG-1 digital piano, and an Ensoniq SD-1, with a modest rack, which includes Korg, Peavey, and Ensoniq modules, offstage. Simple, but powerful enough to tap into the energies that drove the Dregs and the fusion pioneers who preceded them.

"Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Return To Forever, and the Dregs all had as much personality as, say, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Duane Allman a decade earlier - guitar players who were all doing rock, but they didn't sound anything alike. The bands I hear doing fusion-type stuff nowadays sound so watered-down; a lot of that stuff is almost like Muzak. With some instrumental stations, you have to listen for a few minutes to see if it's easy-listening or jazz. Maybe that's starting to change. The top five acts on the Billboard charts can be anything from the Chili Peppers to the Black crowes to some rap people. So many things are happening at once. That's why I think the time may be more ripe than ever for the Dixie Dregs."