Бывший барабанщик Guns N' Roses Мэтт Сорум посвятил новый альбом школьному учителю, который вдохновил его на карьеру

Matt Sorum turns rock legacy into music for kids Matt Sorum has played for thousands. But on this night, he was playing for one guy: the high school music teacher who, decades earlier, told a 16-year-old drummer he had what it took to become a professional musician. I had a big audience, but I played for him. I was playing for that guy. Sorum hadn't seen his former teacher since his wedding 13 years earlier. Then, suddenly, there he was in the audience, watching the kid he'd encouraged in high school standing onstage all these years later. He's a big, big part of my story,” Sorum says. “Probably the most inspiring moment I ever had in my life, when he told me he thought I could go on and be a professional musician. Of all the kids he ever taught, he thought I had the gift. Sorum was 16 when he heard those words. He graduated high school in 1978, eventually made his way into the Los Angeles club scene and built the kind of career that would have seemed almost impossible to the teenager his teacher was encouraging: The Cult, Guns N' Roses, Velvet Revolver, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a Grammy, stadiums, arenas and some of the most recognizable records in rock. Sorum first broke through with The Cult before joining Guns N' Roses in 1990, replacing Steven Adler behind the kit. He played on the blockbuster Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, along with The Spaghetti Incident?, before later reuniting with Slash and Duff McKagan in Velvet Revolver. That band's debut, Contraband, went to No. 1, while “Slither” earned the group a Grammy for best hard rock performance. Sorum was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Guns N' Roses in 2012. But talking with Sorum now, it's striking how little he treats that career as the culmination of his story. He talks instead about the people who opened doors for him, the lessons he learned along the way and, increasingly, what he can do with whatever influence those years have given him. That is what makes the story of Sound & Vision Live, the new limited-edition double album Sorum produced from an all-star concert honoring Paul Rodgers and Geezer Butler, more interesting than the record itself. The album is the latest expression of something Sorum has been building for years: a way to use the life music gave him to give something back. “I see that in my kids,” he says, thinking about the students served by Adopt the Arts, the music-education foundation he co-founded with actress Jane Lynch. “I'll see a little girl or a little boy, and they can sing, and they got something special.” He is quick to explain that the goal isn't to manufacture the next Guns N' Roses. “I'm not trying to make rock stars out of these kids. I just want them to be ... happy.” The people who opened the doors Sorum's career was not built on a single break. It was a chain of them, with musicians recognizing something in one another and passing opportunities along. One of the most important came from the late Pat Torpey, the Mr. Big drummer who was part of Sorum's Los Angeles circle in the 1980s. In 1988, Sorum says, The Cult went to see Jimmy Page perform with Torpey on drums. When the band later tracked down Torpey about joining them, he had just started Mr. Big and couldn't take the gig. He recommended Sorum instead. He said to The Cult management, ‘Well, I can't do it. I just started a new band called Mr. Big. But I have a guy that I think would be perfect, and his name's Matt Sorum.’ Sorum still sounds genuinely moved when he talks about what that recommendation meant. “So there you go. It was Pat Torpey that got me off to a great start, and I owe a lot to him. God rest his soul. He was a great human being, an amazing drummer.” His own approach to the instrument has always been different from the image of a drummer demanding attention from the center of the stage. I consider myself a band drummer, song guy. I'm not, like, a show-off ... ‘Hey, look at me do my thing.’ I've never really ... I like playing in bands, and I like playing songs. That sensibility helped carry him from the clubs to The Cult and ultimately into Guns N' Roses. But when GNR came calling, Sorum was already in a band that was preparing to make him a full member. The initial offer from Guns N' Roses, he says, was to come in as a sideman. “And I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I already am in a band.’” The deal changed. Sorum became a member of Guns N' Roses and, he says, a percentage shareholder in the group. “I was not a sideman. I was a member of the band.” These days, Sorum's advice to younger musicians is more practical: Being good isn't enough. Be professional. It's a hard life to navigate, being a musician,” he says. “If you can get an offer to be in a great band or artist and go on the road and make a living, great. Be the best you can be, and be a professional, and show up on time, and all that stuff. He did, although he admits life on the road came with another set of rules. “I was very professional, mostly until after the show, when everyone else partied. I partied with them, so ...” Now 18 years sober, Sorum doesn't spend much time second-guessing those years. “You know, you do all that stuff, you live through it. And it gives you a lot of balance.” “I can look at it and go, well, it went down the way it went down because it went down that way to make me.” The lesson that stayed Music already ran through Sorum's family. His grandfather was a music professor at Long Beach State University. But his high school teacher's encouragement arrived at a particularly important moment. “When he said that to me, I was 16 years old. That was it.” Now Sorum finds himself looking for the same spark in children. Since 2012, Adopt the Arts has worked to bring music instruction directly into the public-school day rather than operating as an after-school program. Sorum says the foundation currently works in eight schools. His goal is 50. “Basically, if I could get 50 schools before I leave the planet.” The point isn't to create another generation of celebrities. It's to give children a skill, a creative outlet and a way of participating in something larger than themselves. “It's just really great to see them have the opportunity to have a skill set that is gonna make them a better human being on the planet, and help us as a community. When I say community, we're all in this together.” For Sorum, music is one of the few things capable of creating that common ground. “Kids need music. That's it, bottom line.” “We don't agree on sports. We might not agree on bands, but we agree we all love music.” A room full of legends That brings the story to Palm Springs, where Sorum's two worlds, rock history and music education, collided. The Sound & Vision Awards were created to honor major musicians while raising money for Adopt the Arts. For the inaugural Palm Springs event, Sorum chose Rodgers and Butler, two musicians whose work helped shape the music he grew up with. The logistics of recreating that music were daunting. Nobody, as Sorum puts it, can simply “be” Paul Rodgers or Ozzy Osbourne. So my thing was, how am I gonna find singers that can represent this music in a way that's gonna be new in their own, but still respect the original? Sorum assembled a band that mixed musicians who could reproduce the songs faithfully with players who brought their own personality. Robert DeLeo and Phil X, he says, were the kind of players who would learn the parts note for note. Nuno Bettencourt and Steve Stevens brought more unpredictability. “Nuno's a wild guy. He's up there. Yeah, he's throwing stuff out, you're like, ‘Whoa!’ But ... it makes it colorful.” Sorum compares that quality to playing with Slash. Slash had a style that just brought a lot of ... spark to the music. The singers included Glenn Hughes, Lzzy Hale and Corey Taylor. Then Billy Duffy suggested Charlie Starr of Blackberry Smoke, whose performances became some of Sorum's favorites on the album. “He came, and we just ... I think those are some of ... two of the best recordings on the album.” Then Rodgers walked onto the stage. Paul entered the stage, and the place blew up. The theater held just 650 people, but on the recording the room sounds considerably larger. The show was captured through Pro Tools on a laptop, a setup Sorum marvels would have been almost unthinkable during his Guns N' Roses years, when recording a live concert could mean bringing trucks full of equipment to the venue. When Sorum listened back, he was surprised by how little needed fixing. “But man, when I got them back, I was like, wait a minute, we didn't even make that many mistakes! I mean, we rehearsed once with the singers.” More important, he heard something that couldn't be manufactured. “It felt magical, like, the vibe.” That was when the concert became a record. “We nailed the tempos, everything felt good, so I said, man, I gotta make a record.” Leave the fingerprints on it Sorum could have cleaned up every imperfection and rebuilt anything that didn't sound exactly right. Instead, he decided to preserve the atmosphere of the night. Rock and roll was never intended to be perfect. He left the crowd noise, feedback and rough edges in place. “I didn't want to do that. I left a lot of, kind of, like, feedback and ... crowd, and you could hear, especially in the Paul Rodgers section.” The result is a live album that sounds like a room rather than a laboratory. The musicians weren't called back to recreate their parts, because there was little need. All the guitar ... I couldn't get those people to come back,” Sorum jokes. “People nailed it, man. The project eventually grew into an hour-and-15-minute concert documentary, narrated by Sorum, along with the double-vinyl release. “You don't need the big production,” he says. “It feels right, being raw and more just organic and a vibe.” That approach is consistent with the way he talks about vinyl. Sorum has a collection of about 50,000 titles, but his affection for records goes back to long before Experience Vinyl, the venture he co-founded with Seth Frank. At one point, when he was broke in Hollywood, Sorum had to sell his own collection. One of the saddest parts of my career was when I had to sell my vinyl records for a buck apiece, because I was broke in Hollywood. For Sorum, the appeal of vinyl remains physical and emotional. “People, I feel, still want to have that tangible thing they can hold onto, read the art, like, see who's on the album. You know, you can't do that on Spotify. It doesn't feel the same.” That same philosophy is all over Sound & Vision Live. The album is something to hold, look at and listen to, but it also preserves a night that existed only once. The point of the record Sorum plans to press 2,000 copies of the double album, with proceeds going directly toward Adopt the Arts. He estimates the project could ultimately put close to $200,000 back into the charity. Six figures to get back to the kids, and that's big for us. We can do a lot of work for that kind of money. We can take care of a lot of kids. And the teachers and stuff. The concert honored Rodgers and Butler, but the album has a second purpose: turning the legacy of one generation of musicians into an opportunity for another. Sorum says he became emotional while putting the project together, particularly after Rodgers told him he might not perform much anymore. When Paul Rodgers told me he probably wasn't gonna perform much anymore, or at all, it made me really grateful. He felt the same sense of history around Butler. “A lot of people don't know this. He was the primary lyricist for that band. He wrote all the lyrics for Black Sabbath.” When Butler heard the recording of “War Pigs,” Sorum says, he immediately wanted to share it. “Geezer saw ‘War Pigs,’ and he was like, ‘Can I put it up now?’ And I'm like, ‘Hold on.’” Sorum laughs. “But Geezer loved it, and that's big. If the guy that wrote the song loved it, I'm like, OK, we've done something right here.” The next 35 years Sorum has reached the point where the obvious career goals have already been checked off: Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Grammy. Records that continue to find new generations. “After the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Grammys and all that stuff, I'm like, what am I gonna do now? How am I gonna top this?” His answer wasn't another band. “The only thing I could think of was to do something in the humanity sector, and philanthropic, and that just came.” His reputation as a musician now gives him access to people and institutions that can help him open doors for somebody else. The career that I've had ... it's helped open these doors to help people. He has little patience for those who complain about the state of the world without doing anything about it. “Get off your couch, and off your computer, and your comment section, and start doing something.” It doesn't have to be enormous. If you can't ... change the world, just do something small in your community, whatever it is. For Sorum, the next 35 years, a number he jokes about because he doesn't want to think about it in smaller terms, are about getting into more schools and keeping music in public education. “It's been one of my greatest achievements, and I can't stop.” Sound & Vision Live has given that mission another jolt. “This particular project really energized me.” For all the legends involved, Sorum isn't really looking backward anymore. The record preserves Rodgers and Butler and captures a room full of musicians paying tribute to the music that shaped them. But its larger purpose is forward-looking: Take what one generation gave you and put it in the hands of the next. Sorum knows exactly what that can mean because somebody did it for him. At 16, his high school music teacher looked at him and saw something worth encouraging. Decades later, Sorum looked into a crowd and saw that same man watching him from the audience. For all the stadiums, awards and famous names that filled the years between those two moments, that may be the image that best explains where Matt Sorum is now. “I had a big audience, but I played for him. I was playing for that guy.” When asked whether helping a child pick up an instrument for the first time can really mean as much as walking onto a stage in front of 50,000 people, Sorum doesn't hesitate. “More?” “That's more.” CLICK HERE for more information on the Sound & Vision Awards vinyl release. CLICK HERE for more info on Adopt the Arts Foundation.