Neal Casal left this world way too soon. Sadly, that’s common for musicians of his brilliance. What makes Casal’s passing in 2019 even sadder is he was at a career apex at the time. He’d long overcome the struggles of a rising guitarist and was one of the most sought out collaborators in the music industry. His reach was far and wide. Willie Nelson to Widespread Panic. Circles Around the Sun to the Cardinals. Casal’s long career flourished.
To understand Casal’s reach, look at the roster of musicians who participated in 2021’s 41-song tribute album Highway Butterfly: The Songs of Neal Casal. Billy Strings, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Dave Schools, and on and on. While he may not have been a household name, Casal was the musician’s musician. An accolade he’d choose over the spotlight every time.
After his passing, Casal’s family and friends started the Neal Casal Music Foundation. Like his music, the foundation’s efforts are also far and wide. They provide health care, mental assistance, and other forms of aid to musicians. They also collect, donate and distribute instruments to the next generation of musicians.
The Neal Casal Music Foundation’s latest release No One Above You (The Early Years 1991-1998) literally goes back to the beginning of Casal’s career. The13-song album is made up of Casal’s earliest demos. Beginning well before his acclaimed 1995 debut Fade Away Diamond Time, these are some of the first songs he ever wrote and recorded.
Casal’s long time friend/manager Gary Waldman along with engineer Jim Scott and former Cardinal’s bandmate Jon Graboff went through a rigorous process to bring this music to life. Literally having to “bake” old analog tapes to convert them to digital. Graboff enlisted the help of Casal’s friends Alex Koford, Angie McKenna, John Ginty, Dan Fadel and others to finish and clean up the demos making them ready for release.
The results are astonishing. No One Above You is as good as Fade Away Diamond Time, Rain, Wind and Speed, and several of Casal’s earliest releases. Not taking anything away from the albums that started Casal’s storied career. No One Above You is that good. It shoots straight to the heart of any longtime Casal fan. His earliest tunes are pure, raw, and full of the potential that would make a new listener an instant fan.
People who immediately associate Casal with the jam filled CATS, Phil and Friends, or Chris Robinson Brotherhood will not recognize the stripped down, americana infused tunes. The combination of Casal and McKenna’s vocals throughout are hauntingly great. You can only shake your head when you think of the amount of music the world has missed out on since Casal’s passing.
The release also includes a book of photographs from Casal’s former wife Christy Coleman providing a visual insight into his life during those earliest years of his career.
Slide&Banjo’s Marty Halpern caught up with Waldman for a detailed look at the foundation’s latest release and Casal’s life. Waldman shares tales of his earliest days with Casal through the career highs he had reached at the time of his death.
S&B- Hey Gary. It’s great to talk to you. Congratulations on your latest project. This album is wonderful. Can you begin by discussing your relationship with Neal and your efforts to keep his memory going?
Waldman- After Neal passed away, my main concern was to carry on his musical legacy and make sure people knew who he was. I’ve been Neal’s manager and friend for over 30 years. He was a bit of a cult figure. He became well known as the guitarist with the CRB and Phil Lesh & Friends, Circles Around the Sun, Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. Before all of that, he released many solo albums and had a solo career. That started in 1991 and like a lot of cult artists, he released quite a few albums that came and went without a lot of attention to them. They are beautiful albums and have aged well. I just thought I have to put some effort into getting people to hear these early albums.
S&B- You’ve continually worked to keep Neal’s memory alive beginning almost immediately after his death.
Waldman- About a month after he passed, we did a tribute concert with a bunch of different artists. Sort of a Neal biography of people from early in his life right up to the CRB. The concert was at the Capitol Theater, and we had a couple thousand people. We raised a lot of money for MusiCares charity. They’re an organization that helps musicians struggling with health, mental health, and financial issues. After that, I started thinking about an album of artists covering Neal songs. Long story short, that turned into a 41-song tribute album called Highway Butterfly we released in 2021. It was a wide range of artists covering Neal songs.
S&B- When did this latest project start to churn in your brain?
Waldman- After Highway Butterfly, I knew we had all this archival stuff of Neal demos and things that weren’t on any of his solo albums. We just started figuring out, ok what songs would make a great compilation album of Neal’s early years? That’s what this album is. Most of the songs are from 1991-93. A couple go up to 1998. All Neal solo songs. Some have been taken back to the studio and fixed up a little bit because a lot of them were demos that Neal never finished. So, we finished them up with people who played with Neal, and I think it’s turned out great.
S&B- Not only is there the earliest music of Neal’s career, but the book of photos also showcases his life at the time.
Waldman- That’s right. It was made by Christy Coleman and called No One Above You, (Christy Coleman + Neal Casal – A Love Story in Photographs). It’s an amazing time capsule of 1990’s Polaroids and photographs. Christy was an amazing makeup artist herself. She worked in fashion with a lot of major celebrities and musicians. She and Neal were an amazing couple for eight years and they traveled the world and took photographs. Neal kept all his Polaroids. Everything was incredibly organized. Christy spent a couple years going through everything, flashing back to her life with Neal and put together a beautiful photo book that is a visual companion piece to the record of his demos.
S&B- How much work was needed to be done to these tracks to finalize them and get them ready for release?
Waldman- Not a lot. The first job was to transfer those tapes to digital so we could work on them. The original tracks were recorded back in the old days on a 16-track analog tape. Those tapes have been sitting around for 30 years. Recording tape as it gets older becomes fragile. Some of them need to be baked, which is a process that kind of just pulls them back together again. Then we went to Jim Scott’s studio in California. He produced a few of Neal’s early albums. He also produced the last CATS album. I brought along John Graboff who was Neal’s great friend and bandmate in the Cardinals. His task was to play a little bit of guitar and pedal steel stuff. Help us get some of these songs to the finish line.
S&B- Are the songs true to the form Neal originally envisioned?
Waldman- Most of them were in good condition. Some of them just needed a little something. For example, there’s a song called Quiet Desperation. It was a cover song of Native American activist Floyd Red Crow Westerman. Neal loved that song and in 1992 he made an acoustic version of it. Nothing ever happened with it. It was a beautiful demo that didn’t find its place onto an album. I had always imagined what would this song sound like with drums on it. So, I called up Alex Koford who was good friends with Neal the last years of his life. He came in and we put the song up and he played along with it twice. We were like, oh my God, we just turned it into a Neal band song. It was amazing. Alex put a few backing vocals on there. Graboff added a little guitar and that’s what we did for a few of the songs. A couple of songs are untouched. A couple got a better mix. Anything you asked Alex to play on, he just made it better. It’s great.
S&B- I’ve always thought Alex and Neal’s voices were similar, so his contributions fit perfectly into the release. I’ve got to say, this album really reached out a grabbed me. There’s something special to it that makes it more than a compilation album. Neal’s vocals with Angie McKenna elicits some deep emotion. Can you talk about her relationship with Neal in the early days?
Waldman- Angie was a great friend of ours in the early 90’s. She lived up the street from us. Some mutual friends said Angie is a great singer. Neal was looking for his Emmylou Harris at the time. Someone who can sing harmony and Angie came in and was just so great. She became our sister and our friend for life. She sang on so many Neal records. So many songs. There were a few times where Neal would get somebody else to come in and sing. He’d always be like, I think I got to get Angie back. It’s just their voices blended beautifully and because they just loved each other as friends they sang great together. She’s still one of my good friends and it was amazing to hear her again.
S&B- As simple as the album is, there’s something deeper that jumps out of it every time I listen. It’s literally the starting point of what we know ends up in an incredible career. It’s a different Neal than almost everyone remembers.
Waldman- I think the songs on No One Above You were the roadmap for Neal’s sound on those early records. Particularly Indian Summer, Silver Dollar, After All This Time, and The Search For Silver Lake. Those were the road maps pointing to what Neal’s solo albums would sound like. We didn’t have the amazing studio, or the musicians we had on Fade Away Diamond Time, but we knew the sound we were looking for early on. I’m proud to hear these records and it makes me very happy to hear you say how great you think the record is.
S&B- I sincerely do. It’s different because you know how the story ends. You can only marvel at how different Neal was in the early days you’ve captured. You are the perfect person to ask. What was Neal like back then? Getting things rolling wasn’t always a bed of roses.
Waldman- It was beautiful time because we had this dream together of Neal becoming a great solo artist. I just looked at it as this is my mission as soon as Neal started writing solo songs. I just believed in him 100%. Anytime we had a new demo, I tried to bring it to labels. When we made the first batch of demos in ‘91, Neal had just started writing some solo songs. I was like, these are great. Let’s go into a studio. At the time I was working for a heavy metal record label. I was young, only a few years older than Neal, but rounded up a little cash and we found a local studio in North Jersey. A guy named Greg Mormon had a home studio. Greg became our partner when we first went in there to record these early songs. It was all about hope and dreams and happiness. We were so excited to hear Neal’s solo songs. He was so good at that point. He was 23. He was just finding his voice. His voice as a guitarist, a songwriter and as a singer. You hear the threads of who he would become in this early stuff, but he was also quite complete at the time.
S&B- Really? You could tell from the beginning?
Waldman- He had a great idea of how he would phrase songs. How he would construct the melodies. None of it was just off the cuff. He played these songs at his house, and he worked out how he was gonna sing them. How he was gonna phrase every word. When we started recording, Neal knew what he wanted it to sound like and had a clear vision. I was there as a sounding board to him. He’d ask, what do you think of that snare drum sound? I’d go listen to it in my car. Then, we would work together on what we thought was good or what needed work. It was just so much fun.
S&B- Is there anything you can specifically point to which really got Neal’s career going?
Waldman- After we made the first batch, which included Indian Summer Silver Dollar, and a couple the others, I sent a cassette to a guy named Jim Cardillo, who worked at Warner Chappell publishing. He was a friend of mine who also came out of the heavy metal industry. He became a publisher looking for songwriters and artists to sign to Warner. He heard the first few songs and called me up and freaked out. Who is this guy? I gotta come meet him. So, he flew out a week or two later and met Neal. Neal played a couple songs for him, and he signed him to a publishing deal. That was a big deal back in those days because they would give you an advance, so you had some money to live on.
S&B- The industry was completely different back then.
Waldman- They’d give you a budget to record some more demos. Most importantly, they would shop your music to record labels, or they would get you on showcases. We worked with Jim for quite a few years. It took us a couple years to find a record deal. Those were great years because we were always doing something. Neal and Christy had met, and Neal was so prolific from ’92-’94. He wrote all those songs that are on the first three records. He’d come over and hand me a demo. After he left, I’d listen to it in my car and just be like, Wow! He was getting so good. He was writing songs so quickly that a lot of the songs on No One Above You got surpassed.
S&B- It’s incredible to think a musician’s first songs can become obsolete before anyone has heard them.
Waldman- Those are the first batch of songs he’d written, and with most songwriters they feel like their newest songs are their best ones. Neal was writing so much new material, he would say I don’t want to do that one anymore. Silver Dollar and Indian Summer you hear now as classics. Neal was past those. They weren’t even in consideration to be on his first record. He’d written a whole new batch of songs that he was personally more connected with. We would make recordings, and drive and listen to them. He would play shows. It was a great, fun time. The waiting it took to get a record deal was frustrating. We thought it would be so easy and so fast like the publishing deal. It took time. You have to fly to L.A., play a showcase, go out to lunch with this guy. It took time, but was also a fun and beautiful time.
S&B- I’ve never thought about it from the musician’s perspective. To know this incredible music has been lying dormant for so long is head scratching.
Waldman- It’s like I said, the first batch that he wrote were pretty great and classic right off the bat. He wrote those in ‘91. By ‘93 and ‘94, those felt old to him. He had new songs and felt he’d become a better songwriter, better arranger, and better singer. He didn’t cast those songs off. He didn’t hate those songs. I remember we discussed Indian Summer. I was like, we’re not gonna put that on the first album? It’s such a classic song. Neal didn’t want to do it. If Neal popped up next to me right now, he’d be like, no dude, don’t put those songs out. I don’t want anybody to hear them.
S&B- (laughs) That’s where the friendship aspect of it comes into play. While you certainly know Neal’s reaction, you also know what needs to be put out there. Even if that might not have been his wish.
Waldman- Exactly. He doesn’t get a vote.
S&B- Was there anything else that didn’t make the cut or wasn’t technically ready to be released?
Waldman- Yeah, there are more. Maybe six to ten that are pretty complete. They haven’t aged as well. Some of them, the lyrics are a little youthful. Some, we just didn’t have a definitive recording of. Some that didn’t make the grade this time, might come out down the road on another archives album.
Coming up in part two, with tales from Casal’s earliest days, Waldman continues his insight into No One Above You. He also looks years ahead explaining how Casal became the “go to” guy for a wide range of musicians. How Casal paid it forward helping several young and talented proteges find their footing. As his friend and confidant since the beginning, Waldman also offers a deep and personal insight into Casal’s mental health struggles at the same time his career was at its highest point. Stay tuned.
No One Above You (The Early Years 1991-1998)
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