One afternoon in the early nineties, singer-pianist Bruce Hornsby was visiting his friend and hero Leon Russell at the latter’s home near Nashville. The house had a three-car garage and the doors “were wide open,” Hornsby recalls, with “things strewn all over: old mixing boards, awards tossed in a box, gold records, all this detritus. I said, ‘Leon, what is all this?’” Hornsby affects Russell’s slow, gritty drawl. “He said, ‘Residue from the fast lane.’
“That line said it all,” Hornsby says. Russell – who died on November 13th at 74 in Nashville after years of ill health, including a heart attack in July – “grew up in an era where pop stardom was an ephemeral notion. If you achieved it, it didn’t last long. Maybe he thought his four-…
