The Rolling Stones’ musical director Chuck Leavell: ‘Mick Jagger must be from another planet’

The former Allman Brothers pianist and honorary Rolling Stone talks to Kevin E G Perry about inadvertently giving ‘Top Gear’ its theme tune, celebrating 40 years with the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band, and the ‘big loss’ of Charlie Watts

Chuck Leavell: ‘I’ll play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ any day of the week, baby, and twice on Sunday.’ (Press)

Even if you don’t know Chuck Leavell by name, you’ve almost certainly heard him play. You might know his piano work from the Allman Brothers Band’s thrilling 1973 instrumental “Jessica”, which achieved hummable ubiquity across the UK as the theme tune from Top Gear. Then there’s his session playing for bands such as Train, who put Leavell front and centre on their huge 2001 hit “Drops of Jupiter”. Alternatively, if you’re one of the countless millions who’ve caught The Rolling Stones live at any point since Leavell started touring with them in 1982, you’ll have noticed his unruffled presence anchoring the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band from behind the keys. The 70-year-old with a cherubic face and snowy white beard from Birmingham, Alabama, credits his half-century of success to his ability to lend a touch of Southern rock authenticity to any song he graces. “My hands,” says a grinning Leavell, raising them up as if to play a riff on an invisible piano, “have a Southern accent”.

He’s speaking over video call from a hotel room in Amsterdam, the day after the Stones continued their 60th-anniversary celebrations in front of a local crowd of 53,000. The show had been postponed from June after frontman Mick Jagger tested positive for Covid, but he made a full recovery in time for the band’s massive appearances in London’s Hyde Park. “Mick’s back in perfect form. He’s a madman running around. He must be from another planet, is all we can figure,” says Leavell with palpable awe. “Most of us felt like it was between [the second Hyde Park gig] and Milan as the two best shows of the tour so far, but all the shows have been very consistent.”

He says it with a note of pride in his voice. When it comes to the Stones, consistency is Leavell’s department. Ever since the Steel Wheels tour in 1989, Leavell has been meticulously taking notes of exactly how the Stones do what they do each night on stage. “I did handwritten chord charts for every song,” he explains. “And I would make note of the tempo. If we needed to bump the tempo up, or if it felt good to slow it down a little bit.”

Rolling with the Stones: Leavell, Ronnie Wood and Mick Jagger onstage in Nashville in 2015 (Getty)

In what is perhaps an example of the essential yin-yang pull at the heart of the Stones, in the early days Leavell found that Jagger tended to want the tunes played faster, while guitarist Keith Richards was perpetually trying to ease things down a notch. “I think somehow, through all this time, we’ve found the balance of the right tempo!” says Leavell, whose encyclopaedic notebooks have become the band’s bible. “They’ve given me the moniker of musical director, which I scoff at,” he says. “Because Mick and Keith are the musical directors of the Rolling Stones.”

Over the past four decades, Leavell has been afforded the perfect vantage point to observe the miraculous, sometimes fractious, Jagger-Richards partnership. In that time the pair have sniped, squabbled and publicly made fun of each other’s genitalia, yet somehow they’re still together.  What’s their secret? “First of all, it’s the songs,” says Leavell, reverentially. “Some of the greatest songs ever written in rock’n’roll. People ask me: ‘Don’t you ever get tired of playing ‘Can’t Always Get What You Want’? Hell no! I’ll play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ any day of the week, baby, and twice on Sunday.”

Beyond the music, Leavell says, Jagger and Richards have reached their diamond anniversary the same way any couple does: sticking it out. “Yeah, they’ve been through turbulent times and they’ve had their differences,” says Leavell, “But it’s like a good marriage, man. I’ve been married 49 years. Have we had bumps along the road? Hell yeah, but the more we stuck it out the stronger our relationship became. I think it’s the same with Mick and Keith.”

In a band of notorious hellraisers, Leavell’s half-century of steady marriage and his easygoing manner sets him apart, but he cops to having enjoyed his share of wild nights. “Look, every band I’ve been in and artist I’ve worked with, pretty much at some point in their careers have experimented with this, that and the other, and, you know, guilty!” says Leavell, putting his hands up. “I’ve tried just about everything, but enough to know that, for me, the important thing was being able to play music.”

Leavell with Ronnie Wood, Lisa Fischer, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Darryl Jones after the Stones played Brixton Academy in 1995 (Shutterstock)

Times have certainly changed since the debauched Stones tours of the Seventies. These days the band are what Leavell calls a “big organisation”, with hundreds of road crew, and the drugs backstage come with a prescription. “We have a team of doctors that come and go, swapping in and out,” explains Leavell. “We have a Covid compliance officer. We have nurses. We have several rapid PCR testing machines, and we’re all tested at least three times a week.”

Leavell always dreamed of being part of a “big organisation” like the Stones. When he was 13, growing up in Tuscaloosa, Leavell went with his sister to see Ray Charles. He was never quite the same again. “It just absolutely blew me away,” says Leavell wistfully. “It was the Raelettes and the whole presentation. Billy Preston was playing organ, and Fathead Newman [on saxophone]. I left there thinking: ‘Wow, if I could ever be in a band that would move people like that just moved me, then that’s what I’d like to pursue.’ It was life changing.”

By then Leavell had already been learning piano for over half his life. His mother, Frances, was a keen player who would keep him occupied by sitting him at the keys. “She’d say: ‘Hey, Chuck, what do you think it would sound like if there was a big storm outside?’” recalls Leavell. “So I’d rumble in the low end and do some lightning strikes. Then she’d ask: ‘What do you think it would sound like if you hit a home run?’ She instilled in me the idea of thinking about music in terms of feelings and emotions rather than just chords and melodies.”

At 18, Leavell moved to Macon, Georgia, the home of Capricorn Records, where his future wife Rose Lane White was working as an assistant. Leavell was trying to find work as a piano player, and one of his first gigs was with legendary New Orleans bluesman Dr John, real name Mac Rebenack, who had no qualms about putting aspiring musicians through their paces. After Rebenack told the band they might not be up to his standards, Leavell decided to pay him a visit at the Holiday Inn to get to know him better. “We talked a little while, and then he says: ‘Hey Chuckie, I’ll be right back’,” recalls Leavell. “He goes to the bathroom. I knew he was on methadone, but I didn’t know he was still copping on the streets. Time goes by, and I see this notebook. Curiosity got the best of me and I turned the cover over and on the first page was the name of everybody in our band, and to the side was all these voodoo symbols. I thought: ‘Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?’” As it turned out, the symbols were lucky charms. Reunited years later, Rebenack gave Leavell an envelope full of actual lucky charms. “And boy,” says Leavell with a wide smile, “Have I had good luck ever since!”

It was while playing with Dr John that Leavell caught the ear of Gregg Allman, who invited him to play on his first solo album Laid Back. Eventually, Leavell began jamming with the rest of the Allman Brothers Band, who were still reeling from the tragic death of lead guitarist Duane Allman in a 1971 motorbike accident. To his surprise, the band invited Leavell to join full time.

The Allman Brothers Band’s Gregg Allman with Leavell in 2014 (Getty)

Joining the Allman Brothers catapulted Leavell to the top of the rock stratosphere. The band’s concerts were the stuff of legend, and Leavell was there at Watkins Glen in New York State in July 1973 when 600,000 people turned out to see them on a bill with the Grateful Dead and The Band. The show’s mammoth attendance broke the record set by Woodstock. That August they released Brothers and Sisters, their first album with Leavell and their most commercially successful. It contained timeless classics like “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica”, which featured Leavell prominently and has been synonymous with Top Gear since 1977. “It was so well known in England!” says Leavell happily. “It took a while for me to know that it was on the programme. One of my British friends told me: ‘Hey, man, did you know that song opens every episode?’

I was going to become a tree farmer. My wife said, ‘Well that’s interesting, but the Rolling Stones called you today’

Chuck Leavell

When the Allman Brothers split in 1976, Leavell continued playing with bassist Lamar Williams and drummer Jaimoe for a few years as Sea Level (a pun on the “C Leavell” the pianist had stamped on his tour cases). By 1981, however, Leavell thought his days as a touring musician might be behind him. Rose Lane had inherited land in Georgia, and Leavell told his wife he might focus on building a new career as a tree farmer. Fate had other ideas. “She listened patiently,” remembers Leavell, “And then she said: ‘Well that’s interesting, but the Rolling Stones called you today’.”

Within 36 hours, Leavell was on a plane to Massachusetts to audition. Although former Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan was chosen for that tour, Leavell impressed Jagger and Richards enough that he made a guest appearance when the tour came through Atlanta, and then joined full-time on their 1982 European run. He’s been there ever since, an essential component of a line-up that remained remarkably unchanged until the death of longtime drummer Charlie Watts following a heart procedure in August last year. “It still stings hard, it really does,” says Leavell. “It was just a shock, because everyone figured Charlie would recover, the doctors included. There was never a feeling of: ‘Hey, we’re going to lose Charlie’. It was just: ‘Hey, he’s got to have this thing done and in two to three months he’ll be fine.’ But it didn’t go that way. It’s a big loss all the way around: personally and musically. I think of him every day, and miss him.”

The Tree Man: Leavell in his natural habitat (Press)

Away from the band, Leavell did stick to his plan to grow trees. In 1999, he and Rose Lane were named the National Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year. “We need to really start thinking hard about not blowing this thing up,” says Leavell when asked what his conservation efforts have taught him about the future of the planet. “For me, there’s a personal connection. Where does that piano come from? The thing that’s given me so much joy and a great career. There’s a spiritual connection for me, to wood.”

As Stones backing vocalist Bernard Fowler quips in The Tree Man, a 2020 documentary about Leavell, the pianist isn’t “just good at piano, he’s good for the environment.” He’s become, as Keith Richards once put it, the Stones’ “own Southern Gentleman”. Occasionally he still likes to take centre stage. His 2018 album Chuck Gets Big, recorded live with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, saw him revisit music from throughout his storied life, with Stones, Allman Brothers and Sea Level tracks all in the mix. “I wanted to have a representation of who I am and what I do, and also wanted to make sure that the songs would adapt well to the big band arrangements. We had a lot of fun with that, it was quite a trip.”

Leavell seems happiest, however, when he’s playing his part with the world’s greatest rock’n’rollers. After four decades and hundreds of Stones concerts, can any one show stand out as a highlight? Leavell has his answer ready: Prague, 18 August 1990. The first major cultural event in Czechoslovakia following the country’s Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Václav Havel had just come into power, who was a dissident and amazing human being who the band met with,” recalls Leavell. “There was this amazing feeling of freedom throughout the country, and the city, and we played to 130,000 people.” The piano player’s eyes light up at the memory. “The best part was the posters that read: ‘Tanks are rolling out/Stones are rolling in.’ Fantastic!”

‘Chuck Gets Big’ is available on BMG now. Leavell is currently on tour with The Rolling Stones as part of their 60th-anniversary celebrations