Bio

David Plenn

by Chris Morris

If you said that singer-songwriter-guitarist David Plenn’s self-titled debut solo album took a lifetime to make, you would not be wrong.

Produced by Plenn and Lloyd Moffitt and comprising 10 beautifully crafted, emotionally affecting original songs, David Plenn finds the veteran Southern California performer backed by a group of longtime colleagues who rank among the region’s best-known players: legendary singer-songwriter-arranger Van Dyke Parks (architect of the Beach Boys’ Smile), drummer Jay Bellerose (Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Aimee Mann, etc.), bassists Jenny Condos (Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks, etc.) and James “Hutch” Hutchinson (Willie Nelson, B.B King, Linda Ronstadt, etc.). Several other contributors — Moffitt, vocalists Tara Austin and Llory McDonald, bassist David Jenkins, drummer David Goodstein — backed the late singer-songwriter Jerry Riopelle during Plenn’s decades-long association with the musician.

The album is the soulful culmination of a musical career that began in the late ‘60s, when 16-year-old Plenn was in the band Thumper, which was signed to a deal at Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss’ Hollywood-based label A&M Records.

“I was in high school.” Plenn recalls. “I didn’t even drive. The guys would pick me up and drive me to A&M. We were the kids on the lot. Occasionally we’d get bumped from rehearsing on the sound stage because the Flying Burrito Brothers decided they wanted to rehearse. They’d pull rank on us, because we were just the young punks on the lot. But we spent a lot of time recording and rehearsing there.  I’d see Herb Alpert walking around, or Randy Newman. I took it all for granted. It was a wild time.”

Thumper disbanded after cutting a handful of singles for A&M, but Plenn went on to a professional relationship with the group’s producer, Jerry Riopelle, that endured for for more than four decades.

“I was about 19,” he remembers. “Jerry said, Ive got a solo deal with Capitol Records. Would you like to play lead guitar for me?My first gig with him was at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, opening up for the Kinks and Fanny. I wasn’t your typical studio musician, so it was kind of a big leap for him to choose me as his guitarist.”

But Riopelle liked what he heard, and, flashing a guitar style influenced by such formidable stylists as Lowell George and Duane Allman, Plenn supported the older musician in the studio and on the road through the ‘70s and ‘80s. Early in that run, the guitarist discovered that his boss had an enormous and adulatory following in a large out-of-town market.

“The very first time we appeared in Phoenix, Arizona, ” Plenn says, “we were opening for David Bromberg. We started playing the intro to one of Jerry’s songs, and people started applauding. The show was in the round, and we started looking around, wondering if somebody had walked in. We were baffled. By the time we were through the set, it was obvious that they knew all these songs, and they were there to hear us. It was mind-blowing. It turned out that the program director at KDKB, which all the kids listened to, had a religious experience with Jerry’s Saving Grace album and told the staff to play every cut. I’d go to restaurants and hear his songs. I’d go to a party and hear a band playing one of his songs.  Nobody even knew his name in L.A. There he was a celebrity.”

When Jerry Riopelle died in 2018 at the age of 77, after settling in Scottsdale, the Arizona Republic called him “Phoenix’s Elvis.”

On his own, Plenn developed a career as a professional songwriter. His “Easy Driver” was a 1978 chart entry for Kenny Loggins, while “The Forecast (Calls for Pain)” — produced by another important musical mentor, writer-producer Dennis Walker — appeared on Robert Cray’s 1990 album “Midnight Stroll.” His tunes were heard on such hit TV shows as Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place and Touched By an Angel.

However, life has a way of changing one’s plans, and fatherhood altered David Plenn’s course.

He says, “My dad was a great musician and not a great parent, and really an awful husband. I wanted to be a really good dad — I wanted to be the opposite. When our son was born, I wanted to be there for him. I didn’t want to be away on the road. I just wanted to be here in town. I wanted to go to all the PTA meetings and do all that stuff.

“My wife and I would pour the margaritas every weekend and say, ‘What about if we did this?’ She worked at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History at the time, and she ran their retail, and she said, ‘What about a toy store?’ I said, ‘A toy store? Rock ’n’ roll? I can’t….’ She said, ‘I have this name — the Dinosaur Farm.’ I instantly loved that name, and I used to love dinosaurs, so I said, ‘Oh, I can do the Dinosaur Farm!’ And music kind of disappeared for over 10 years. Id play very little, and then Riopelle would get a gig and Id get my fingers back in shape.”

The Plenn’s South Pasadena-based shop became one of the best-known and most-loved toy stores in the world, garnering coverage in USA Today, Forbes, and Buzzfeed. But songwriting still exerted a pull on Plenn, and he began to bring his new work to Wine and Song, a singer-songwriter evening mounted by Brad Colerick at Blue Guitar in South Pasadena.

“I thought, I should really do this, and I really need get over thinking I’m too old to do this,” he says. “I have no delusions about getting in a van or starting a new career, or asking Billie Eilish for an opening slot. But the beauty of it is, I don’t have to pay my bills with it anymore. I can just write what I want.”

The songs that Plenn ended up recording for his debut album were mainly new, with a couple of important exceptions: “I wrote ‘Follow Your Dreams’ for my son when he was a little baby, as I literally tried to put him to sleep. He plays saxophone on it now, as a 30-year-old. I had written ‘Under the Overpass’ in the ‘80s. A friend of mine said, ‘You ought to listen to that song again — I never forgot that song.’ That one is the oldest. It was actually about a girl who was having a rough time of it underneath the Forest Lawn underpass — the underpasses weren’t populated by thousands of people as they are now.”

The songs on David Plenn are adult compositions that confront some of the sadder and messier things in life. Some are dramatic, short story-like vignettes — “What Used to Be,” “C’mon Yvonne,” “Same Planet/Different Worlds,” “Memorial Day.” Others, like “Things We Leave Behind,” inspired by his father’s wayward history, and “Tucson,” a travelogue-styled memorial for Riopelle’s late Arizona road manager Big Bob Ladd, are deeply personal. The writer says much of the feeling in the work was informed by the deaths of his mother and Riopelle, and by his own diagnosis with cancer (now in remission).

“It’s obvious I’m not a teenager,” Plenn says. “For me, a lot of the album is about mortality, the realization that we’re not going to be here forever. We all know that, but we don’t really pay that much attention to it. Thinking about why I picked those tunes, that was just my mood when I was selecting them. It was very unconscious.”

As with many another recent album, the making of David Plenn was impacted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: Plenn’s first session for the record with Condos and Bellarose was postponed after California governor Gavin Newsom instituted a statewide lockdown in early 2020. Co-producer Moffitt ended up recording the album piecemeal using the Apple Logic system, with the instrumentalists playing to a click track and flying in their parts.

The work ended up so seamless that even an experienced studio hand like Van Dyke Parks thought it was cut face-to-face. Plenn says with a laugh, “Van Dyke heard the first track, ‘What Used to Be,’ and he said, ‘Man, that groove is so good. Could you guys all see each other while you were cutting it?’ I said, ‘Not only were we not in the same room, we weren’t even in the same year.’ The bass and congas went on two years before the drums did.”

Speaking of his objectives for his music, Plenn says, “As opposed to obscure songs, I like songs where you don’t have to work to know what I’m talking about. It has to be interesting, and it’s got to go somewhere, and it has to connect. For me, that’s the deal.”

With David Plenn, the mission has been accomplished.