by Paul Zollo
This is how crazy we were in those days. By now it’s one or two in the morning. And I called [The Heartbreakers] and had them all come back. They had all gone home. I called them, and they came back at two-thirty or three in the morning, and we cut the song. The version you now know. So that could never happen now. [Laughs]
That wouldn’t happen now?
No. But that’s how passionate we were. We were passionate kids.
That descending riff Mike plays really ties together the whole song.
It does. It’s kind of a really perfect little record, isn’t it? I hear it sometimes on oldie stations, and it really stands up. It really holds up over the years. [Note that TP often refers to a single as a “record.”]
It has a great drumbeat, too.
Yeah, that was a drumbeat that I got wrong. There’s a Beatle song called “All I’ve Got To Do.” Which has a great drum beat. [Sings drumbeat.] So I was thinking that would be the drumbeat. Though I think I kind of translated it wrong, cause it’s not really that beat at all. So that’s what Stan did with it. And he really played a great track there. Ron [Blair], too. It was a really good little track. Maybe because we played it all night, and we really explored it. So it really had to be a feel. You had to get into a certain groove with that song. And we cut it live, with all of us playing.
Was that typical, that you would come up with a drumbeat and give it to Stan?
Sometimes. Because I wrote the song and I had a really good picture of how the rhythm should go. So I said, ‘The beat’s gonna be like this. I hear the kick and the snare like this.’
And he was cool with that?
Yeah, he was cool with that. I don’t think that is that unusual. And he would often expand on that, and find other things I hadn’t thought of.
Did that title come to you right away during that break?
Just flowed out of me. [Laughs] It just happened. Pretty much, top to bottom, it just happened. Grace Jones did that song, and I wrote her another verse. She has three verses on her version. Because they were recording it and phoned and said, ‘The song is so short. Is there any chance of getting another verse?’ And I can’t remember what it is, but I did sit down and write another verse. And she did a pretty good version of it. I’ve heard a few covers of that. Suzy Quatro. Remember her? She did it. I’ve heard different people do it, and I never really liked their versions much. But I liked the Grace Jones one.
The song “Hometown Blues,” which is also a very short song, was cut at Leon Russell’s house, with Duck Dunn on bass, Randall Marsh on drums, and Charlie Sousa on sax.
Yeah, that was the dying days of Mudcrutch. Mudcrutch’s last hurrah. And that’s why there’s a couple of them on the record. And the record didn’t really take shape until Duck Dunn played his bass line. That was the last throws of me being a solo artist, was how that track started.
I did bring The Heartbreakers in, and they overdubbed to the track. But the basic track was Randall Marsh, Mudcrutch’s drummer, and Duck Dunn playing the bass. And Charlie Sousa, in the last few minutes of Mudcrutch, we brought him in to be the bass player. And he didn’t know how to play the sax, but he was playing it. And it got this really authentic kind of Stax sax sound.
It was on a tape at Leon’s house that someone already used. So I erased that tape and recorded over that. [Laughs] And I actually engineered the basic track. Because there was nobody around.
And Duck Dunn had ancient strings on his bass.
Yeah, I don’t think he ever changed his strings.
There’s “The Wild One, Forever,” which is in D major, and has that great building melody over that riff of the D going to the D suspended.
One of my wife’s favorites. Dana loves that song. She says, ‘Why don’t you ever play that song?’ But there’s so many songs. I can’t play every one that everybody wants us to play.
I think we did play it at The Fillmore during that long run. [The band did play the song at The Fillmore on January 31, 1997.] Yeah, that was another one written during a break in the studio, perhaps the same night that “Breakdown” was written. I wrote two songs in that long break. And Ron played a cello on that. He doesn’t play the cello. But he just fashioned out enough that he could play the chorus part. So if you listen closely, you’ll hear the cello.
I think with that chorus, we were trying to make it sound like The Rascals, to have a chorus like The Rascals would have.
I thought “The Wild One, Forever” was somewhat Springsteen-inspired.
No, because I hadn’t really heard Springsteen much in those days.
Was he an inspiration later?
No. I don’t think any of my contemporaries ever influenced my work. I’ve always been more interested in music that came before. I think very little of my music would have been influenced by anyone after, say, 1974. [Laughs]
Not that I don’t like them; I think Bruce is a great songwriter. And he’s a friend. But he probably doesn’t listen to me either. I have never really soaked that up. I listen to it, and I appreciate it, but I think my influences come from somewhere further back.
I know he does listen to you—he liked “Straight Into Darkness,” among others.
Yeah, we’re friendly. We’ve been friends for many years. We don’t see a lot of each other, but we’ve been friends for a long time. I think he’s a really good writer. But I kind of feel the things that influenced me came before. And when I hear the guys that were coming up the same time as me, I think they were probably influenced by things before as well.
I certainly wasn’t influenced by anything from the Eighties. I hardly ever even heard the Eighties. It’s like Ben said, ‘We completely missed the music of the Eighties, because we were so immersed in what we were doing, we weren’t listening to anything else.’ I missed all that. I wasn’t tuned in to that stuff. I was more into what I was doing, and our music is all influenced by music from the Fifties and the Sixties, and some of the Seventies.
That could be one of the reasons your songs have such a timeless quality about them. Even your early songs still work and don’t sound dated.
We go to a lot of trouble to make sure it has a kind of timelessness to it. Even the way we make the records. We don’t use a real gimmicky instrument. Like there was this synthesizer called the [Yamaha] DX-7 in the Eighties. Everybody put these DX-7s on their records. [Laughs] These kind of bell sounds that I thought were terrible. And I hear them now, and it really does say that time period to me. I wouldn’t have used an instrument like that. I try to make it sound like no particular time.
There’s the song “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Mike said he saw Kiss and realized if you put the words “rock ‘n’ roll” into a song, it would make it work.
I never knew he said that. I liked the phrase “rock ‘n’ roll” and I was kind of afraid it was dying out at the time. I used it in a couple of songs around those days. That song’s really naïve; it’s something I couldn’t sing now. It’s a kid singing that song. “Your mama don’t like it when you run around with me… You don’t dig school…” But that was our first hit record. It was a hit in England. So we often played it on television when we were over there. That was our big hit. [Laughs] It was like a Chuck Berry kind of thing, just a good rocking song.
“Strangered In The Night”?
I remember writing that one. Again, right in the dying days of my solo career. I started that song with Jim Gordon playing the drums. From Derek and the Dominoes and a million records. And one of the greatest drummers ever, I think. Now in jail for killing his mother. [In the late-1970s, Gordon began suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia and believed he heard voices. In 1983, he killed his mother and was charged with second-degree murder. A year later he was sentenced to life in prison.] But he was a really great drummer. He played the basic track on that. There were actually two sets of drums; he overdubbed himself. I’ve never seen that done in my life. He did the track and said, ‘Let me have another track’ and he over
dubbed that and he played exactly a carbon copy and doubled the drum sound.
That was the first session I brought The Heartbreakers down to. They were watching that go down, and they did the next song, and I overdubbed them onto [“Strangered In The Night”]. And that’s when I stopped being a solo artist.
Was that the right move to make?
Definitely. [Laughs]
“Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)”?
That was The Heartbreakers. We recorded that out at the old Warner’s studio on the Warner’s lot. Denny Cordell. We moved [to a different studio] for that record because Denny liked that studio at Warner’s. It was very strict. The engineers took a break every three hours. It was like really union, and the engineer was a really older guy, and not a rock ‘n’ roller. And Cordell was frustrated with that. That was the only track we did there. We didn’t stay there long, because it was just too grown up.
“Mystery Man”?
I remember the session, which was at A&M Studio. We went in there for one night and we cut “Mystery Man.” We cut it live, the vocal and everything.
A&M’s studio was originally Charlie Chaplin’s movie studio. Did you like being there?
I always thought there were good vibes at A&M. I liked the old studios. Jimmy Iovine went in there and tore the studios down and built new ones. And they were pretty terrible, I thought, once they changed them. But I really liked the old ones that were there.
It was kind of an interesting place. You could stroll around—there were a lot of studios in that complex, and you could stick your head in the door, and just hear all kinds of artists. I remember seeing Johnny Mathis do a track there. He was there, wearing a sweater, looking just like an album cover. And I saw the Carpenters do a track there. I saw Donovan.
I always do that when we’re in a studio—go around and visit the other studios and see what’s going on. It’s a good way to gauge what you’re doing. [Laughs] Because if you walk into a place, and you hear, ‘Oh well, we’re way ahead of this,’ or ‘Hey, this is really cooking,’ it will give you a little energy to go back to your session.
“Luna”?
That was the last song done in Tulsa, where we went to Shelter’s studio. It was in a church. When they made the Shelter studio in Hollywood, they took all the gear from the Church Studio, and moved it out here. And me and Stan, for some reason, flew to Tulsa, and they were going to rip the stuff out of the church. And Noah Shark, the Shelter producer, said, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys fly down and we’ll cut a track before we take the gear out. Because no one’s around and we can do it for free.’
So Stan and I, just on a lark, flew to Tulsa. There was a tornado, and we had to land and wait it out. And we had this really bumpy plane ride to Tulsa.
So it was an empty studio. We got there and it was just empty. We got there, just the four of us, Noah and his second engineer Max [Reese], and me and Stan. But there was a Hammond organ and some drums. And I made that song up on the spot, and we cut it with me playing the organ and Stan playing the drums. And then we brought the tape back, and finished it at Shelter Studio in Hollywood. Put the guys on it. But we cut the vocal and the organ and the drums, and we played it live together. So it’s very improvised, especially the ending. You hear all these weird stops and little licks. It’s just us jamming together. And there’s a string sound on there. This kind of a bendy string sound. And the first string machine was an Arp, and there was an old Arp there, and Stan played those strings, bending the tuner on the Arp, bending it up and down. He did this really cool part. So that’s what we came back with. The and the organ and the drums.
And you came up with the words on the spot?
Yeah. I just sat down and wrote them out. And roughed out a chord progression and we cut it.
“American Girl” is on your first album. Do you remember writing it?
I don’t remember exactly. I was living in an apartment where I was right by the freeway. And the cars would go by. In Encino, near Leon’s house. And I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me. That was my ocean. My Malibu. Where I heard the waves crash, but it was just the cars going by. I think that must have inspired the lyric. I know it was in the bicentennial year. When there were a lot of American things going on. Super red, white, and blue things going on. And we actually made the record on the Fourth of July, 1976.
You wrote it on an acoustic guitar?
Yeah. I would have written that on my Gibson Dove, because I wrote everything on that then. It was the only guitar I had.
Did you intend a Bo Diddley beat for it?
Yeah, right. It was supposed to be like Bo Diddley. That was Stan’s version of the Bo Diddley rhythm. It was recorded on one track. The drums are all on one track, which is really unusual. These days, most people put the drums on about ten tracks. With the bass drum on a separate track, and the snare on a separate track. At least to have two. But for some reason, Noah wanted to try this experiment and put them all on one track. So they’re in mono on one track.
We had forgotten that until we did a documentary for the Disney channel years ago. And part of the documentary was to take tapes out of the vault, bring them up on the camera, and listen to them. And Mike and I were really cracked up when we pulled the tape up. Because the drums were on one track! [Laughs]
They sound surprisingly good, considering.
Yeah. They’re damn present. And it’s a wacky-sounding record. I heard it in a shop the other day. I went in to get a cup of coffee and it was on the radio in the shop. I was standing there listening to it, and I felt it was really good production on that record. It sounded good.
People assume there’s 12-string on that record, but there is none.
No. It’s Mike and I on two 6-strings.
There’s the story that the song was based on the suicide of a girl at the University of Florida. Any truth to that?
Urban legend. It’s become a huge urban myth down in Florida. That’s just not at all true. The song has nothing to do with that. But that story really gets around.
I’ll meet students from Gainesville. And they’ll say, ‘Yeah, we party in your old house on Halloween.’ There’s this tradition that they go to my house, whoever’s renting it at the time, and have this big party. But I never lived in a house in Gainesville. I lived in apartments. I lived in my mom’s house, where I know they’re not throwing a party. So that’s also a myth. Someone got a house and said, ‘This is where he lived.’ That tradition has gone on and on. And every time I tell them it’s not true, they go, ‘Aaah…’ [Laughs] I almost am tempted to go ‘Oh great,’ because I don’t want to pop their balloon.
It’s a rich thing about songs; people can bring their own significance to them.
Yeah. And that’s happened with a lot of songs. But really extremely in that song. They’ve really got the whole story. I’ve even seen magazine articles about that story. Is it true or isn’t it true? They could have just called me and found out it wasn’t true. But that song has really been around for a long time now. And I’m very proud of it.
Then there’s that story that McGuinn heard it in his car, and thought it was one of his own songs.
Yeah. He said he thought that it was a Byrds song. I don’t think it sounds anything like the Byrds to me. People ask us if we were trying to sound like the Byrds. We would never have dreamed that we could sound like the Byrds. We would have wished we could sound like the Byrds. But we certainly weren’t thinking that. But McGuinn did record it, very soon after our record came out.
Even in the jangly sound of the guitars, you didn’t have the Byrds in mind?
Yeah, we might have had that. But not on that song. On that song, we certainly weren’t thinking Byrds. I think later on there may have been things like “Listen To Her Heart” or something like that, where we were thinking of getting that 12-string sound. But not on “American Girl.”
you’re gonna get it. 1978
Your second album was You’re Gonna Get It (19
78). You said that you felt it was done hastily, and that you were trying to do something different than the first album.
[You’re Gonna Get It] is a quirky, weird, little record. It’s a very strange almost eccentric record. But I kind of like it now, because it’s so off the wall. It’s kind of an offbeat kind of record. It’s very short. It was done quickly. The first album was breaking almost a year after we had recorded it. And we were tired of playing that first album; we wanted to get some more product out there. So we really quickly did that record. Wrote it and recorded it really quickly. And it did pretty well for us. It had some good songs. It had “I Need To Know” and “Listen To Her Heart.” Which were both pretty popular songs at the time.
I understand you recorded “I Need To Know” very quickly. Two guitars live, recorded in just a few takes.
Probably, yeah. You know the inspiration for that song was Wilson Pickett’s “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Listen to that song and you’ll hear that kind of rhythm. [Sings rhythm.] And that’s where that came from, I’m sure.
You also mentioned “Listen To Her Heart,” which really holds up.
Yeah, it had that kind of Byrds or Searchers kind of riff. A 12-string riff. I think by then we’d gotten Vox Phantom 12-string guitars. And I’m sure that had a lot to do with that sound.
Your record company tried to get you to change the word “cocaine” to “champagne”?
Yeah, that record company, they’re always sticking their nose in there. Of course we didn’t [make the change]. Because it would have made it a different song. I didn’t really see the character as caring about the price of a bottle of champagne. Cocaine was much more expensive.
My ex-wife had gone with Cordell to Ike Turner’s house. And Ike Turner had locked them in the house. [Laughs] And there was a lot of cocaine and drugs around. When they told me this story, I thought it was really funny. I think that had something to do with the cocaine line. The story was related to me, and I think it probably had something to do with that line. I thought it was a pretty funny story.
