Felicia Collins: The Best Gig in Town
When Felicia Collins goes onstage to tape “The Late Show with David Letterman,” she carries her Hamer electric guitar and her 17-inch PowerBook G4 loaded with Logic Pro. And while the seven other musicians (guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and three horns) in the CBS Orchestra place sheet music on their stands, Collins opens her laptop. “That’s my whole studio right there,” says the 13-year veteran of Paul Shaffer’s band. “I take it everywhere — it’s what I use for the show, for club gigs, for recording.”
Collins counts herself blessedly free of the accoutrements — amps, monitors, songbooks — that clutter most musicians’ workspace. “It’s so cool to get rid of all that stuff on stage and just come out with my guitar and my PowerBook,” she says.
When she needs a quick refresher on a song in the band’s enormous list of American rock, pop, and funk, Collins turns to her Mac. “Our entire repertoire is in iTunes,” she explains, “so when Paul calls a title I can click up that song, the sheet music, and the amp settings — instantly and simultaneously. I can even record it in Logic audio.”
Logic Pro feeds her guitar licks directly to the house band’s mixing engineer so they come through crystal clear — without ambient noise or interference from other instruments. “I know I sound better on TV since I’ve been using Logic,” states Collins.
Great Gig
Collins is keenly aware that she landed a dream position. Compared to the late nights of a club player or the itinerant calendar of a touring musician, her steady schedule (the show is taped weekdays at 5:30 p.m.) and hometown digs (the native New Yorker just hops on a cab from her Upper West Side apartment and zips to the Ed Sullivan Theater) make the job a cakewalk. “It’s the best gig I’ve ever had,” she says.
Felicia Collins at the Hammerstein Ballroom, New York.
She paid her dues, of course. When Shaffer invited her to join the new band, just as Letterman was moving his show to CBS, Collins had spent years on the road. She made her maiden tour with the Thompson Twins — and her live debut during the British trio’s performance at Bob Geldof’s 1985 Live Aid benefit concert.
Felicia Collins performing with Joan Osborne at the Families of Freedom benefit for 9/11 in New York, November, 2001.
She later toured with jazz giant Al Jarreau and pop rocker Cyndi Lauper, taking time between travels to record with Nile Rogers, Philippe Saisse, and Jan Pulseford, and do studio work for Chaka Khan, David Sanborn, P-Funk, BB King, Jay Z & Pharrell, and Snoop Dog.
Collins hardly misses her touring days. She still plays club gigs with her band, and she’s recording a new album. But the Letterman show is pure gold. “This gig was tailor-made for me,” she says with her easy grin. “For one thing, I’m not good at anything that requires too much organization. Plus, I’m not good at getting up in the morning. That’s why my cats and dog are trained to not wake up before me with their needs.” Not to mention that she gets to meet celebrities she esteems, like Samuel L. Jackson, and perform with musicians she admires, like Snoop Dogg.
A Million Songs
The challenge of playing in a late-show TV band is entirely different from that of touring. Notes Collins, “For a tour, you rehearse the tunes for a couple of weeks, then you go out, and that’s pretty much how it stays. But on Letterman, it’s something new every day. We have a million songs in our repertoire. Paul might call a song just ’cause he’s in the mood to play it. Or the guest is telling a story like, ‘The first time I went to a Stones concert…,” so we launch into ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’
“But,” continues Collins, “you gotta kick that song out of your brain as soon as you’re done with it. In one week, we played with Jerry Lee Lewis, Tom Russell, Emmylou Harris, and Mark Knopfler. You gotta get Jerry Lee out of your head so you can do the next show. You play it and cast it out, because there’s new stuff all the time. That’s the opposite of what you do on tour.”
With her Mac onstage Collins stays loose for the next tune, no matter how far back in memory it resides. “I keep my PowerBook right in front of me, where my music stand would be,” she notes. “If I need to hear a chord structure, I use iTunes to reference the song real quick. It’s a lifesaver, because I never had an organized songbook — my music just ended up in this huge stack.”