Laurence Juber is often considered most famous for playing lead guitar in Paul McCartney & Wings from 1978 to 1981, with whom he won a Grammy Award. Juber has since had a distinguished career as a solo fingerstyle guitarist and studio musician.
I'm Laurence Juber, and I play guitar. That's what I do for a living. And I've been a professional guitarist for my whole career. My first serious encounter with death was, I was actually at a recording session in London. Back in the 1970's and got a phone call that my father had just died. Which was a great shock 'cause he was 51 years old. And, I just imagined that we would have many more years together. But, beyond the, the kind of, the macro concept of death, I really like to address more, the creative end of it. The, you know the concept of a kind of creative destruction, a creative death in order to move forward creatively. For me, I think that there's some, some value in being able to let go of things, to rediscover them. So rather than, I think focus on, on the, the ultimate death I think that my focus tends to be more on the creative process and how one can move beyond what would appear to be the death of a project for example. Or, the abandonment. Especially in the creative moment, the abandonment of a particular concept of a perhaps an arrangement or a composition to rediscover something new. And, and certainly I found that when my father passed away that it was not a finality as much as it was kind of a spiritual awakening for me too. So, a difficult topic when it comes to Live and Let Die, which of course is a famous Wings hit. Which Paul McCartney wrote for the James Bond movie. Which of course, the title being a play on live and let live but live and let die instead. That was, I wasn't in the band when it was originally recorded but we did perform it. And that was something that really has, one of those songs that has an enormous resonance with music fans and with other musicians. To the extent that Guns and Roses for example, did a cover of it. In fact I was at the sound check one time, playing my arrangement of Live and Let Die, and a young lad sitting next to the sound man said, "oh nice take on the Guns and Roses song." So you know, from one generation to the next, sometimes the origins can get lost there. I, I actually don't know Guns and Roses except for Matt Sorum, who was the drummer for a long period. Somebody I do a lot of studio work with. But, certainly I think Live and Let Die, at least in terms of the cinematic aspect of it, and the, you know certainly the wealth of death and destruction that accompanies a James Bond movie I think. It reaches a certain kind of interesting perspective on, on that subject.
Last Updated: September 10, 2021
