Catching a rising star

“We thought next of having a desk chair, something with wheels. But then I thought that would be kind of lame."

By CARL HOFFMAN
Doing it on his terms: Itamar Haluts (photo credit: GAYA SA’ADON)
Doing it on his terms: Itamar Haluts
(photo credit: GAYA SA’ADON)
You have probably never heard of Itamar Haluts, but will very likely be hearing a lot about him in the not too distant future. Although very much a “blue-and-white” Israeli, Haluts recently released his first album, in English, featuring hard-driving rock ’n’ roll songs written during a one-year post-army sojourn in New Zealand, working in orchards, picking apples.
Haluts played most of the instruments, recorded the tunes in his father’s Rosh Ha’ayin studio. He also did all the mixing and over-recording, mastered the album online in conjunction with Abbey Road Studio, has made two music videos from the album so far, and is planning on touring Israel with a band during the next few months.
When told by this baby-boom-generation reporter that some of his guitar riffs sound like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, he replies that he hasn’t listened much to the former and has never heard of the latter.
Haluts, 26, was born and raised in Rosh Ha’ayin and seems to have had a more or less conventional Israeli childhood. He went through the school system, joined the Scouts but quit after a while – “I thought it was a waste of time,” he says – played basketball, and watched TV.
What was perhaps not so conventional was being the son of musician Navon Haluts and starting to play the piano at the age of seven. “That started everything, I guess. I played classical piano when I was seven. I didn’t like it. When I was a bit older, though, I was thankful for the piano and the lessons.
“I didn’t start playing guitar until I was around 15 and a half, which I was told is very late to start learning an instrument. But I learned very fast, I think because I learned the piano before. But for me it was rock ’n’ roll from the start. I began playing the guitar, because I’d heard the Beatles and wanted to play their songs.”
Despite his motivation and developing skill on the guitar, it was a while before he began to perform after a somewhat modest start. “In high school I was a music major,” Haluts recalls. “I did performances there, which was good preparation for later. You know, when you play in your room every day for three hours, you just want to show someone what you do all day. So my first performance was when I was 16. I played “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream and “Money” by Pink Floyd.
His influences, interestingly enough, seem to come more from the era of Cream and Pink Floyd than the music most young people are listening to today. Having established that he is not much into the Grateful Dead and is unfamiliar with Jefferson Airplane, I ask Haluts who he thinks his major influences have been.
He thinks for a moment and replies, “Well, it was the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Cream, that kind of stuff. I got into Simon and Garfunkel when I was in the army. I wrote most of this album in New Zealand and when I was working there in the orchard I listened to a lot of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Crosby Stills and Nash. I think Paul Simon really influenced me in this album.”
“This album” is called Alexandra-Clyde, named after two places in New Zealand where he lived and worked. “In this album,” Haluts says, “I play most of the instruments myself. In a couple of the tracks, I play all of the instruments.” We can, in fact, hear him playing lead, rhythm and bass guitar, along with drums and an organ.
“I’m not that great at any of them. But I just had a vision of how each song should sound, and I just didn’t think that anyone would want to do that stuff. I didn’t think I could manage to put my vision in somebody else’s mind. So I thought, okay, I’ll just do it myself.”
Haluts explains that he had a “vision” of how everything on the album should sound and insisted that everything conform to that vision. The result of this was that he did almost everything himself. “I’m a control freak, very difficult to work with, I guess.”
Haluts and some friends have already produced a music video of the eponymous song of the album, “Alexandra-Clyde.” In that video, now showing on YouTube, his Facebook page, and on his website, Haluts sings while riding through an open, outdoor landscape in a tacky vinyl easy chair.
“Originally we wanted to do a couch thing, with three seats, and keep the camera at the same distance while just changing the scenery. This song is really moving, you can’t just sit there. You want it to move.
“We thought next of having a desk chair, something with wheels. But then I thought that would be kind of lame. Then I went to work on a Friday, and I saw that armchair just sort of lying in the street, and I thought, ‘That’s it!’ I took it three floors up to my place and had some friends help me make the wheels.”
The chair, with Haluts sitting and singing in it, is pulled by the camera car on level and uphill stretches and actually slides freestyle downhill. Haluts admits that the video required many, many takes.
“Imagine how many times I fell, and imagine how many times I just bumped into the camera car. At the very end you can see me fall. I couldn’t walk right after that. It was that hard.”
Haluts says he spent almost four years producing the album, and now that it is done and “out there” he feels relieved. But that doesn’t mean that he’s taking a break. “I’m already planning the next album. I’m trying to get better. If you want to get better at what you do, you have to do it all the time.”
As far as money is concerned, however, the record business is not what it used to be, what with the Internet and uncontrolled downloads. Says Haluts, “You don’t make money off your recordings.
It’s really nice when someone buys my album. I get a little bit of money. And when you do things independently, you get most of the money out of your sales. But it still doesn’t pay the bills. But I’m still a young artist.
“A lot of my friends do things like wedding gigs. You can actually make a living out of things like this. You can make good money out of this. But I do music because I love it. I’m not going to be rich from it. But what I can do is enjoy what I do, doing the real thing. If you’re playing and you don’t like what you do, why bother? “I’d rather do this on my terms. When you’re passionate about it, people hear it. It’s like when you start a business, you invest money. I invest time. I’m sure it will pay off after a while.” Meanwhile, Haluts continues to work his day job at a Tel Aviv café.
I conclude my encounter by asking him what else he might do if an evil genie cast a spell in which he could no longer make music. He stares at me quietly for seems like an eternity before saying, “I’ve never thought about this. I really don’t know.”