So we file into this large-sized room that is filled with journalists and photographers. Seems like a good opportunity to promote things, but, of course, the first question from an Italian journalist in Italian has “Miles” in it all over the place. A fluke or a challenge? Who knows, but the other three guys look at each other like “should we or shouldn’t we?” and then Jaco takes the lead, as I recall, and initiates the band walking out of the press conference. Seemed premature to me at the time, but I now realize that this was, on some level, exactly what everyone wanted — press and band alike.
One year before this, I’m reading the contents of a five-page article that has just hit the newsstands; Musician magazine has printed a diatribe against the band, mere months after it was proclaimed in those same pages that we were the “best live band around.” But the writer covering 1979’s Montreux Jazz Festival has a bone to pick with the band and he airs it with extreme prejudice. I’m shocked and amazed to read this piece, as the writer avers things that are simply not true: misrepresentations about the band and crew and our concert performance there — saying, in essence, that while Montreux is an iconic locale for nature and jazz to commingle each idyllic summer, these arrogant bastards blew into town and spoiled the entire experience for everyone.
I remember this writer because he was scheduled to interview Wayne at Montreux, and that was set up and ready to go, but for some reason he kept calling Wayne at various hotels, awakening him during the touring leading up to Montreux, and Wayne kept complaining about the incessant phone calls to our road manager. That would be Mr. Condliffe of Led Zeppelin (and Mel Lewis) fame. So when this writer appeared backstage at Montreux and Wayne realized who he was and said, “Hey, this is the same guy who’s been calling me up for the last two weeks,” it didn’t take long for said writer to be unceremoniously hustled out of the backstage area and treated as persona non grata for the rest of the night.
Meanwhile, Joe did not want the Festival to videotape that evening’s performance because he had been having so much bad luck with his synthesizers and the electricity in France. (It turns out the electricity in Switzerland was just fine, but Joe didn’t want to chance it.) So there was a big to-do about the band being able to use the Festival’s lighting system if we were not going to allow the Festival to videotape us. Too bad, because it was a terrific set and it should have been documented. In any event, our crew created a clever work-around, but that got represented in the article that we had somehow sabotaged the Festival’s lighting, damaging equipment that did not belong to us, etc. Simply not true. The writer also claimed that, yes the band played brilliantly, but people didn't know what to make of it, and as proof he mentioned that when he asked trumpeter Randy Brecker what he thought of the WR concert, Brecker had merely shrugged. I knew that Randy had shrugged because he missed all but part of the encore; I saw him later that night, and he complained to me that he had gotten the start time of the show wrong. And so on.
I’m reading this to Joe over the telephone, all five pages, and he occasionally interjects something like, “Wow, did he really say that?” or, “Wow, he really said that, huh? Go on.” When I finish reading the article I expect him to explode in rage at the other end of the phone line. Nothing. So I ask, “Well, what do you think of that?” “What do I think of that?” he roared back. “I think that is one of the greatest write-ups this band has ever gotten!”
“Huh?”
“Let me ask you something: how many pages in that article?”
I answer, “Five.”
“And how many musicians were at Montreux?”
“Uh, let’s see, the article mentions around five hundred…”
“And who is he talking about for four of those five pages?”
“Weather Report.”
“That’s right. You’re too young to understand this yet, but we just got a Marlon Brando review, man. Marlon Brando don’t ever get no good reviews, and he’s a bad motherfucker.”
28. Living in California
Weather Report was definitely a door opener. Shortly after joining the band, I moved to Los Angeles from my temporary digs in Wewoka, Oklahoma (where my just-divorced Mom had moved in order to live close to her sister and niece. My parents wound up remarrying each other again a few years later!). By that time, I had already appeared on three recordings, thanks to Jaco and/or Wayne. When Joni Mitchell called Jaco to collaborate on the Charles Mingus project she had been working on and wrestling with, having recorded and re-recorded the same tunes with a number of different bands, Jaco insisted that I be the drummer. His insistence was good enough to get me on the album. I also played on Michel Colombier’s eponymous album as well as on a Jon Lucien recording (my drum tracks did not make it to album release). With my relocating to L.A., renting a small house in Encino, I was all set to begin life as both a member of Weather Report and life apart from the band as a free-lance musician.
Joni Mitchell’s Mingus album is memorable for many reasons, first and foremost because of Joni. She recounts our first meeting in a book, describing how Joe and Jaco were athletically tossing a Frisbee inside the confines of an S.I.R. rehearsal studio and that, when the high-velocity Frisbee would be directed at me, I would shrink away in fear so as not to possibly jam a finger (much like my basketball/gym class in high school) — mea culpa for being a wuss, but now might be a good opportunity to explain that during my Little League tryout I got hit in the forehead by a line drive and have forever since been ball-shy. But Frisbee-shy though I was, Joni took a chance on me drumming-wise. And I was, of course, a huge fan not only of Hejira but also of her earliest works, notably Blue, and feeling grateful for all of the lonely nights that music got me through.
Longtime producer and engineer Henry Lewy was at the helm in A&M Studio D. Add Jaco to this and I was in heaven. Wayne came in on the second day to play with us and to overdub on what we did on day one. We recorded everything in two afternoons. The pianist at the first day’s session was British arranger Jeremy Lubbock. After we cut the first tune, “Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat,” Jaco came over to me and said, “Who is this guy? I’m going to call Herbie and see if he’s in town.” So Jaco ran off to the telephone and called Herbie Hancock and essentially invited him to the session to take over. I seem to recall that Jaco got Joni’s blessings before or during this whole process; it all happened very quickly. The take with Jeremy was good, and of course it was awkward when he found out that Herbie was on his way, but by then it was too late. So he left and Herbie entered and promptly replaced the piano on “Pork Pie” with Jaco smiling like crazy in the control room. We were all smiling and now all in on the conspiracy — no regrets and full steam ahead. We cut the rest of the album in fairly short order, a considerable achievement if not hasty, as the Mingus compositions are not the easiest songs to wrap one’s head around — these were the longest song forms I’d ever encountered, and I’m still not sure that I was up to the task. My contribution, if any, was to be a good anchor for Jaco.
I also came up, unwittingly, with the rhythmic solution for the blues tune “Dry Cleaner From Des Moines,” which was not enjoying much success in its previously recorded bebop form. Sitting at the drums between takes of another song, I started playing around with a beat that I first heard on a Gabor Szabo album that Bernard “Pretty” Purdie played drums on (an oddity titled Jazz Raga; the tune was “Walking On Nails”), but I was using brushes instead of sticks, as Purdie had done. So I was just sitting there, amusing myself by playing and experimenting with this, when Henry Lewy came running out of the control room and yelled, “Keep playing that same beat!” Then he ran to get Jaco and we cut the basic track to “Dry Cleaner” in fairly short order — first take, as Jaco preferred — and the thorny question of how to record that blues was solved. Jaco wrote the horn chart and recorded it later at Tom Scott’s Crimson Sound studio in Santa Monica (former home to the Beach Boys’ studio, with lots of “hippie wiring” still extant by the time we were in there, according to engineer Han
k Cicalo). That triplet ending? Jaco played it, as he had done for the intro, and just gave me a wink to cue me for the end.
However the album is judged artistically, I feel that it showed remarkable bravery on Joni’s part to put her imprimatur on this music in the midst or arc of her pop album career. Joni has great artistic integrity. The album also marked an interesting point in the use of electric instruments to play jazz, the Mingus collaboration putting a spotlight on the musical sensibility and aesthetic choices made with electric bass and piano — and the success or failure of that — and put a spotlight on the whole jazz-meets-pop thing that still resonates today. It’s not the easiest album to listen to, but I give Joni high marks for it. As far as I know, it began her musical relationship with Herbie Hancock and was also the starting point for the tour the following summer that would result in the Shadows and Light video.
By the way, that was supposed to be Weather Report on that tour. Jaco had helped to set everything up, and Joni and her management agreed to have Weather Report open the concerts with a set, to be followed by our backing her on the Mingus and other material. Well, as I begin planning for this great news I get a telephone call from Joe Zawinul.
“The Joni Mitchell tour thing is not happening. I told Jaco that he can do it because of his long association with her, but I don't want Wayne or you to do it.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I just told her we ain’t no fucking L.A. Express.” [click]
Thanks, Joe.
photo: Peter Erskine
So WR tours Europe that summer but not the USA, save for concert appearances at the Berkeley Jazz Festival and the first-ever Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. While Jaco is on tour with Joni and a terrific band consisting of Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny, and Lyle Mays with Don Alias on drums, I am getting to know my girlfriend Debbie Sabusawa very well, and we spend a wonderful summer together in L.A. I’ve done my first television-show recording session up in the ancient TTG Studio near Sunset and Highland in Hollywood. My high school harpist-friend Katie Kirkpatrick has recommended me for the date to composer Mark Snow (who would go on to fame with his theme and music for The X Files TV program) for an episode of the show Family.
I don’t have a cartage company to haul my drums around town just yet, so I show up early and schlep my kit into the studio. Hey, this is the same place they recorded Frank Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy and the Basie Straight Ahead album! I set up my drums and somewhat nervously await the recording session to begin. The commercial recording process and world are still new for me, and working with a click track (metronome in the headphones) is still a big fight for me, as I’ve done so much “live” playing versus recording work at this point. The rest of the small orchestra shows up and we begin, my drums in a small but open booth, and we’re all wearing those old-fashioned Bakelite headphones like ham radio operators used to wear. When I hear my first “bumper” cue — that short piece of music that ends a scene and prepares the viewer for the TV commercial to follow — I laugh in appreciation and recognition. But I manage to miscount on one of the cues and play an isolated snare drum hit a beat early (on the “and” of beat 2 instead of the “and” of beat 3 of the bar). Snow does not hear it, but he asks the ensemble, “Everyone okay? Any mistakes or shall we move on?” I think that this mistake, minor though it may be, might cause a problem later on, and so I begin to raise my hand in guilty but helpful acknowledgement. From out of nowhere, a bass fiddle bow reaches into my drum booth and catches my upraised arm, pushing it downward with surprisingly great force. I look over to the direction from whence it has come and see that it is attached to the arm of bassist Buell Neidlinger, who is silently shaking his head “No” from side to side. I desist, we move on, and Buell is now happy.
We take a break at that point and I introduce myself to Buell. He asks me, “How is that bass player of yours? The one in that band?” (He was never willing to say Jaco’s name out loud for some reason.) I laugh and say that Jaco’s fine. Buell then asks me if I would like to join HIS band. I was a fan of Buell’s work with Frank Zappa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and knew a bit about his history with Cecil Taylor’s band in the ’50s. And so I say, “Sure, I’d love to play in your band,” but this news will come as a surprise to the band’s current drummer, John Bergamo, famed instructor at CalArts, where Buell is also teaching.
A gig is in the works, and pretty soon I find myself in a recital hall at CalArts along with Buell, saxophonist Marty Krystall, harmonica player Peter Ivers, and pianist Don Preston, another musician whose work I admired with Frank Zappa. Since this is avant-garde music, everyone is acting pretty aloof and ultra-hip. Okay, I can hang with that. Preston is the most aloof, competing with Ivers for aloofness points. He’s so cool that he brings a BEER into the gig and places it at the top of the keyboard range so he can reach it easily for refreshment. We’re playing some free, beboppy swing, trippy music, and everyone is being pretty darn cool, but all of a sudden I notice a very un-cool franticism in the movements of Don Preston at the keyboard. He tears off his shirt and is desperately daubing at the keys of this once magnificent Bösendorfer piano; he has knocked over and spilled the contents of his Pilsner Urquell bottle directly into the keyboard action of the piano, and a small moment of jazz history is made: no jazz recitals will take place on that piano or in that concert hall for years to come as a result of this debacle. But I would go on to play for a few more years with these guys; I always enjoyed their free and iconoclastic ways.
Don Preston would call me shortly afterwards to make a recording at a small studio in Venice with my first electronic percussion equipment, the Synare pad (I had a few of them, and they can be heard on portions of the Weather Report 8:30 and Night Passage albums) while he played his full kitchen-wall-sized Moog modular synthesizer setup. We did some free-form improvisations. I still have the cassette dub from that afternoon. A few months later I called Don, asking him when I might expect to get paid for that session. “Paid?” he replied. I could only answer with a “Never mind…” Like I said, I enjoyed their free and iconoclastic ways.
Other live playing opportunities included some gigs at the legendary Donte’s, Concerts by the Sea, and Lighthouse jazz clubs. Working with Joe Farrell leads to my getting to record an album with him in the famed Contemporary Records studio (which was really more of a shipping room with small playing area and even smaller engineering booth — but what a sound!). Sonic Text is the name of the album, and I still enjoy listening to it, with George Cables on piano, Tony Dumas on bass, and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. FREDDIE HUBBARD! We get along well during those two days of tracking, and he kindly sympathizes with me when I read a review aloud of a just-released Weather Report album (the Mr. Gone disc) where the writer comments that there are 500 other drummers he’d rather listen to before he has to listen to me. I complain to Freddie that I can’t even think of 500 other drummers (missing the intent of the hyperbole, I suppose), and Freddie says, “Damn — that’s some cold shit. Aww, come on. Don't worry about that, man!”
The next time I would record with Freddie was on the George Cables recording Cables’ Vision with Freddie Hubbard, Ernie Watts, Bobby Hutcherson, and others. We were back in the same studio complex where I had made my first recording with the Kenton band some eight or nine years earlier. I drove my drums to the studio and set them up, and was happy to see Freddie Hubbard, only this time Freddie decided to bust my chops. “Yeah… hey, ROOKIE! Heh, heh, heh, YEAH, alright there, then… ROOKIE!” And so on, like all day, and I figured that I didn't need an entire week of that, so…
The next morning I stopped by a liquor store on my way to the studio and purchased a bottle of really good cognac. As soon as I saw Freddie at the studio, I walked up to him and presented him with the gift-wrapped bottle, saying, “Here, Freddie, this is for you.” He eyed me kind of surprised and suspicious-like, and asked me why I was giving him what was obviously a nice bottle of cognac. I replied, ”Oh, for no special r
eason, man, other than respect for you.” That did the trick and we were buddies from that day until the end.
One of the later times I saw Freddie, he stopped into the Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood to say hello — this would be in the ’90s; I was playing there with Alan Pasqua — and when I asked him how he was doing he replied that he had just come back from a recording session for Cecil Payne, surprised to have gotten the call, however: “Man, I thought that motherfucker was dead!” We laughed, and he was in good spirits. In any event, the Contemporary Records association with founder Les Koenig’s son, John, producing the dates and very kindly including me on these albums (Joe Farrell, George Cables, Joe Henderson), led to my own album. But there’s more session history to discuss first.
29. Recording Session Stories
My very first experience in the recording studio was when I was 17 and a first-year college student. Our group, named Design, was made up of music students from Indiana University and the University of Michigan. Most of us knew each other from high school, and even though we’d only played a few gigs together as a band, we decided to make a recording to see what might happen. This was in early 1972, and it was a combination of rock, funk, and jazz: “fusion,” in other words. We were really excited because the studio had an 8-track tape machine — imagine the possibilities! The result? A pretty cool tape that we could play for college girls that we’d meet over the next few remaining weeks of school — but that’s about all we got from it. Hey, it still sounds pretty good.
No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report Page 10
