Strange things happen: a life with the Police, polo, and pygmies

by Stewart Copeland

  All over the Middle East there are layers of discarded military hardware from every age, from axe heads to tank turrets. Pretty much everyone of note has washed over this land, which leaves the current natives as the most variously flavored population in the Western Hemisphere. They are the true descendants of Abraham, Moses, Nebuchadnezzar, Ramses I–XI, Cyrus, Alexander, Constantine, Jesus, Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, and Yasser Arafat.

  Tyre Castle with Spy Daddy and Gene Trone

  As a WASP I’m a little humbled by this ancestry. All we’ve got is King Arthur, Julius Caesar, and Norman.

  CHAPTER 4

  MUSIC

  DECEMBER 1968

  WELLS CATHEDRAL

  In darkest Somerset, Millfield School celebrates Christmas in the huge stone church. I learn to serve the gift.

  A

  thousand voices echo up the stone arches that frame the ancient stained glass windows. Floodlit from the outside, these twelfth-century images of obscure piety combine with the soaring hymns to sear the art receptors in my adolescent brain. There is nothing more beautiful than music. All of the magnificent architecture that towers overhead is just a vessel for the sound that sweeps through me. In fact the sound forgives the overall creepiness of the church experience. All afternoon while I set up my drums amid the school orchestra and wait for the Christmas service to begin, that guilt of alienation creeps around me, pervading the cold damp air. Few places are chillier than an English church without its congregation. The cold stone statues are impassive, but they know that I am apostate.

  Now it’s evening, and the cathedral is warmed by the bodies of the students, teachers, and parents. The giant candles are lit, golden flames reflecting off the brass and glass. Flowers are everywhere. To still my autistic tip-tapping on the drums, Mr. Fox has banished me to the furthest corner of our arm of the cross. We are set up in the south wing, the choir is in the north wing, and the folks are in the stem. All of the religious stuff is happening around the corner in the head of the cross. The mumbling prayers and the shuffling of the congregation from kneeling to sitting to standing are prelude to the rustling of the hymnbooks. The singing starts off ragged but builds and swells as the magic takes hold. Breathing and singing together, the thousand souls become one mighty sound.

  Second drum set

  And did the Countenance Divine

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here

  Among these dark Satanic Mills?

  I doubt it, based on what I know of Levantine cities. This bit of Blake is the least daft of the hymns and carols that are sung. Most of the lyrics are mumbo jumbo. It’s the music combined with ritual that thrills the air.

  In the final cadenzas of each song the school choir kicks in for the descant, providing a silvery lining to the bellowing flock. The angels are dancing in a shimmering cascade above our heads as a shattering glory of voices lifts the roof.

  Mr. F. raises his eyebrow to give me the nod; finally, it’s my moment to join the ceremony. The previous hymn has echoed off into silence and the enraptured congregants are creaking in their pews, waiting in the candlelight. They are eager to be touched by the next wave of the shaman’s wand.

  I’m so ready.

  Tum

  Tadada

  Tum, Tum

  Bumpumpum…

  Tum

  Dadada

  Tum, Tum

  Bumpumpum…

  The tom-tom reverberates with a sonorous boom. Up until now drums have been about assertion and empowerment but this is new. Into my young quavering hand has been placed the rudder of this sacred ship. I can only be a servant of the powerful emotional force that has been created in this ancient stone shrine. All of us are joined at this moment by the momentum of our shared ritual, and I am the beating heart. I am nothing, no one. Just the beating heart of a larger body, enveloped by the soul of the faithful. A synapse closes in the mind of the enraptured protoshaman.

  Next morning, when my head clears, it seems obvious that music isn’t just a tool or weapon, it’s what my life is for. It’s powerful juju, and I want to own it as much as it owns me.

  The gatehouse lodge to the old Millfield estate is where Mr. Fox rules the music kingdom. In an annex to this quaint little house are the piano rooms, where the music geeks pore over their finger exercises and ear training. This is where the seed planted by my sister, Lennie, back at Tarazi starts to grow. Lennie taught me the connection between the music on the page and the keys on the piano. My good fortune is that my position in the school orchestra means I can schedule piano time, even though my instrument is drums—which unfortunately won’t fit into the tiny piano rooms. The school, faithful to my father’s wish, has fixed me up a drum tutor in the nearby town, but I can already play my paradiddles better than he can, so this “practice” time is my own.

  I can even skive off stables duties by skulking here in music world. I can faintly hear Mozart stammering through the thinly soundproofed walls, but in my slot, I’m hammering two-finger ostinatos of unknown origin.

  Bring me my bow of burning gold;

  Bring me my arrows of desire:

  Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!

  Bring me my chariot of fire!

  I’M LEARNING MORE THAN I ever intended to about drums.

  My London tutor, the venerable Max Abrams, has never shown me his paradiddles. He exhausts my brain with endless reading and coordination exercises. He’s off drinking tea somewhere no doubt while I plod through Glenn Miller charts, learning to recognize rhythmic patterns expressed as dots on a staff. My father is grumpy about the Glenn Miller. Although he played in the Glenn Miller Army band during the war, he considers it to be a blot on his musical résumé. My dad would have preferred Stan Kenton or Woody Herman. I couldn’t care less, they all lacked raging guitar.

  Breathing in the stale air of the London Underground, I’m staring blankly at my shoes. The coordination exercises are the most exhausting part of the tuition. Learning to uncouple the hands so as to free them for independent activity is the goal, but uncoupling my brain is the result. As I stagger home I’m aware that my “gift” is making heavy demands.

  Still, after a lethargic dinner I’m soon down in the basement blazing away on my own drumming agenda. There is no discipline or inducement involved; it’s an unquenchable urge.

  1973

  COLLEGE

  It turns out that life can be lived in almost constant sunshine. The surfers of Southern California can hardly imagine any other kind of life. Everybody here in Ocean Beach is so laid-back that I feel like I’m stuck in permanent fast-motion. I’m not used to this relentless ease. Don’t these people realize there is Cold and War and Want in the world? I have been “American” all my life, but this is effectively the first time that I’ve actually been here. My daddy took us off to Egypt when I was two months old. From out there in the world people are watching America, but America is not watching them. So it turns out that I’m kind of a foreigner here, too. I’m getting used to being the guy in differently shaped jeans.

  Every other day I head downtown to the San Diego School of Performing Arts for piano time and composition classes. The music department takes up the bottom half of the stately old building. The music students are the usual nonsporty stick-insect types, but compared to the theater and ballet geeks, we are like raging bulls in the basement.

  In the piano rooms I’m conjuring music that has gone way beyond what I can actually play with my hands. In fact my intelligent designer omitted to give me the gift of pianitude. I did get the genes for stringed instruments and mallets (guitars and drums), which I find naturally easy to play, but my fingers just don’t do keyboards. No matter how many hours, years, or decades I spend composing on the keyboard, my hands just can’t find their cunning.

  I can find the notes that my head dictates and check them against one another to build harmony, but I can’t play them in rhythm. I can play the rhythm of the notes I want
but can’t find the pitches fast enough. I can play my music with good rhythm and wrong notes or with correct pitches and no rhythm.

  At least back home in London, my dad’s Beocord open reel recorder allowed me to record two parallel tracks of guitar. On the left track I could record the rhythm chords, and then on the right track I could record an accompanying tune. Then came the trance of listening to my music while my hands lay idle. There is no greater glow of narcissistic validation than receiving my own art. I slay myself—always have and hope I always will.

  Here in California I’m a college kid tangled up and yearning for the mysterious golden girls, but that glow of validation is dim. I can strum on my guitar, but there is bigger stuff raging around in my head. I’m not even a professional musician yet, but I’m already dreaming up concept albums. In the piano rooms I can try to work things out on paper, but I can’t love my music by looking at it on the page. I just have to sing it in my head and let it go by.

  In class I’m kind of the runt of the litter, again. Almost all of the other composition students are pianists from the other side of the universe. In fact, music study has always been of music that has never attracted me. Music classes cured me of Mozart, and my father cured me of jazz—meaning that I’m immune to the charms of both. The music that I do listen to doesn’t exist here in music school.

  Dr. Mary K. Phillips is at the piano playing our homework. All of us geeks are twitching as she points out the mistakes of voicing and spelling. The assignment was to write sixteen bars of four-part harmonic composition observing the rules of figured bass. As a practical matter I have always found that the rules could only be applied as a retrofit. The music comes out of my brain and lands in the material world—and then I can figure out what rules apply. So my sixteen bars derive from some larger opus of the piano room that have been retrofitted with the rules of Dr. Phillips’s class.

  The focus of the group is the mechanics of harmony. The other student pieces sound like they are supposed to sound, like pale Mozart, and no one seems to mind that they are meaningless sequences of chords. The point is to grasp the laws of harmonic movement.

  When she gets to my piece she plays it down like a breeze, and I’m basking in the beauty of hearing it for the first time as a listener, without having to limp through playing it myself. But I know that she will crush me with the inevitable technical errors. When she reaches the end the room is unusually silent. She turns to me and says:

  “Stewart, you have parallel fifths in measures three, seven, and eleven, but more important, this is actual music. You have a voice.”

  Well, that may seem like faint praise, but it puffed me right up. Some part of the feverish grandiose exultation that I get from my own music is actually discernible to a dispassionate ear! Some part of the voodoo actually works.

  She was right about those sixteen bars that I wrote for her homework assignment. They stuck in my head and eventually even reached my fingers. I could play that string of expertly voiced chords together with a scrap of lyric, and a few years later record it with The Police. The song was called “Does Everyone Stare the Way I Do?” I imagine the royalties from just that one song—flagged by Dr. Mary K. Phillips—must have paid off all my years of music education.

  1985

  NIEBAUM RANCH, NAPA VALLEY

  Francis leans back heavily and speaks calmly to the producer. The dark screening room is lit by a film frame frozen on the screen.

  “Yeah…couple places, we need strings.”

  Damn. This had been going really well. As we screened the scenes that I had scored, Francis Coppola had been rumbling with approval. The director and the other postproduction chiefs had been chuckling and nodding sagely over the callow charm of my first attempt at film music. The lack of finesse suited Francis’s sense of atmosphere for this film. Since I had no idea how movies had been scored since the dawn of film I had had to invent the wheel for myself. The important thing was that Francis was able to infuse me with the mood that he needed in each scene. With my bare hands, on guitar, marimba, bass, banjo, and kazoo, I could make that mood.

  From the start Francis has been talking about using rhythm as a dramatic device in this film, Rumble Fish. With the classic film High Noon as a template, he wants to build a sense of impending, implacable doom. The story is of a countdown. Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Diane Lane, and Tom Waits all have an appointment with fate in reel twelve of the movie. Francis wants the audience to sweat every second of the journey to that place.

  Well, I don’t know much about drama, but rhythm is a thing of mine. With the help of two teenage Coppolas, Roman and GianCarlo, ferreting through the sound effect libraries, I was able to start a collection of rhythms created by machinery, animals, and people. Pile drivers, barking dogs, typewriters, and car crashes all have rhythm if you look closely.

  At the Long Branch Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I have recordings of these sounds on magnetic tape. If I cut the tape with a razor at the beginning and end of, say, a burst of dog barking, then I can join the two ends of the strip of tape and create a loop. Threading this loop onto the tape machine is easy enough, but we have to set up tape spools on mic stands around the room to keep the tape untangled as we play the loop and record the repeating pattern of dog barking onto a second tape recorder. One day, a decade or so in the future, someone will invent computers.

  The latest breakthrough in audio recording today is technology that can synchronize and dependently lock two tape machines. This enables us to build up a web of sound effect rhythms. By tweaking the speed of the playback machine I can synchronize each new layer of repeating noise to groove in some way with the collection on the recorder.

  Happiness is a Stratocaster plugged into a Marshall stack.

  Copyright ©1983 Michael Jacobs / MJP

  For every reel of the movie—of which there are twelve—I have a tapestry of rhythmatized and synchronized sounds. On each of eight tracks there is a groove. On track four, for instance, there is a pile driver pounding incessantly. On track six there is a billiard ball break looped to create a strange rhythm. This can be used as a subliminal effect in the pool hall scene. Or to presage the scene, or to refer back to the scene later in the movie. Richard Beggs, who is the overall soundmeister of the movie, is in on the plot. Every scene of the film has a rhythm chugging somewhere in the soundscape. The clock is ticking.

  Upon these rhythms I build the music with guitar, drums, banjo, bass, marimba, and piano. There is a scene in which Matt pays an evening visit to his girlfriend, Diane, at her parents’ house. He is met on the front porch by the young Sophia Coppola, who plays the precocious kid sister.

  The scene needs to carry the underlying tension of impending, implacable doom but also to lighten up for a minute to play some romance. In the background, the train whistle blows at almost imperceptibly regular intervals. Closer, there is a broken fan that we can feel vibrating. Over these vaguely sinister rhythms a tinkling progression of chords on a toy piano is all it takes to combine with Matt’s yearning performance to create a wave of poignancy.

  I have no idea how you are supposed to score a movie, so I just made this whole scheme up as a theory of a practical solution to an artistic problem. It turns out that my method is so far from how you’re supposed to do it that no one has ever done it like this—which makes me the Che Guevara of film scoring.

  So far, so good. I don’t even realize yet how rare it is to have a director who will give anyone this much rope. This is the Francis method—find people with the right instincts and turn them loose with the tools.

  Now he wants some conventional orchestral score to leaven the rather astringent high-concept layers that I have produced. Violins, oboes, that sort of thing. Some premonition of a career in Hollywood alerts me to a door opening. Strings?

  I had already chased off competition from other musicians, arrangers, and composers that Francis had gathered in Tulsa during the shoot. This suddenly looks lik
e a new opportunity for an interloper. Some fool of a studio hack can come on board and sweeten all of my cool stuff! The director wants instruments that I can’t play myself!

  In a split second I’m an orchestral arranger.

  “Strings?…Sure, yeah, lemme rustle up some strings and nice orchestra stuff in a couple of places,” says I.

  2000

  YEARS LATER AT PARAMOUNT STUDIO M

  Behind me in the huge control room is the director, his producer, and a couple of studio bosses. In front of me is the seventy-channel mixing console nursed by a five-or six-man recording crew.

  Through the glass in front of us we can see the orchestra. There are video monitors everywhere that show us the movie, the recording status, and each other. The score is on my desk in front of me. Jeff Seitz, my man from Juilliard and collaborator of two decades, runs the recording crew while I run the band, and the director behind me runs the executives.

  The conductor is on the podium, facing the slickest orchestral talent that money can buy. In his headset he can hear dialogue, metronome click, and me:

  “Let’s go to 1m6, measure 25. We’ll drop you in at bar 27. Tacit, please, brass until 32. And you can take them down one dynamic, say…mezzo forte until 36. Everybody play ink at 36. Show me when you’re ready.”