As if underscoring our current mental state, we record in three separate rooms: Stewart up in the dining room of the house with miles of cable and earphones, Sting in the control room, and me alone in the actual studio. All this is for what the engineer calls perfect separation, and with this album we get it, although not quite in the way intended-a weird symbol of where and what we've become.
In the long hours of the studio there is a tendency to fall into a group mind that is kindergarten in level. One of its manifestations is a nasty habit called "taking someone to the party." Some poor soul will fall asleep from the sheer grueling effort of it all, and during naptime he will be covered in old cigarette butts, matchsticks, chocolate wrappers, and other bits of garbage. Tam Fairgrieve, my roadie, manages to pass out on the couch in front of the monitors after dinner one night and descends into a snoring sleep. We are all sniggering away at him and keep yelling his name, but like Rip Van Winkle, he does not wake up. We begin turning the music up louder and louder, to no avail, and as a last resort shove a microphone under his face and run it through the speakers, cranking it up and adding reverb, bass, treble, and phasing effects until we are beside ourselves with this jape and the very wall of the room is quaking. Finally, when we think the building is going to blow apart with the sonic bomb we have built, Tam wakes ttp with a startled grunt and a bug-eyed stare to ask what the fuck is going on, which puts us all on the floor. We have recorded the whole thing and eventually use the snoring to signify the Loch Ness monster on "Synchronicity II."
A few nights later we are sitting around, listening to a track we have recorded earlier in the day. I start fiddling around with a piece of silver paper from a chocolate bar. I begin sticking it in my left ear, scratching away at something and pushing it farther and farther into the canal until suddenly I can't feel the paper in my fingers anymore and realize it has disappeared right into my ear. I don't panic at first but try to work it out. No luck. I become a little bit frightened and ask Danny and Tam if they can see anything. They can see it but can't get it. This is now an interesting event, more interesting than the track we have been listening to. I lie on the floor with my left ear pointing upward; everyone crowds around, excitedly suggesting various methods to retrieve the foreign object, including my standing on my head, banging me on the side of the head, pinching my nostrils together and blowing hard, jumping up and down, and administering the Heimlich maneuver, which almost makes me throw up. Then Tam bends a guitar string into a viciouslooking hook and tries to fish it out. Nothing works and I am starting to freak out, as it is beginning to feel very large inside my head.
Someone remembers that the island has an ear, throat, and nose medicaltraining facility, and by a stroke of synchronicity there is an American specialist on the island. Phone calls are quickly made and I am bundled into a jeep and rushed across the island to the medical staff bungalows. Luckily, he is in and is just about to retire for the night but grasps the situation instantly, tells me to lie on the bed, and opens a little leather bag full of long silver tweezers. Picking his device like a connoisseur, he leans over me and with a deft twist removes the invader to a small round of applause and a huge sigh of relief from me. "Aah, Cadbury's," he says.
After lobster, mango chicken, and chocolate cake one night, I wander over to the bookshelf sagging under the weight of the usual vacation island fodderthrillers, murder mysteries, holidays in Tuscany, etc.-and I pull out a book on the flora and fauna of the Caribbean and start studying it. Looking at the exotic watercolors returns me to my childhood-plants, birds, the natural world-and a wave of nostalgia passes through me. It seems like so long ago-how did I get so far from it? I decide to learn the names of the indigenous species, become one with this island habitat, ground in the earth.
But being cooped up in the studio tends to bring out perversity, and we continue playing tricks on one another, trying to fuck each other up. Sometimes these antics work and add more edge to the playing. But one afternoon in the torpor of the Caribbean heat, the ionized air of the studio, and the effects of simple boredom, we reach a point where we are paralyzed, unable to move forward. It is a moment of deep tension when we hate being together and are right on the edge of breaking up. Pain fills the room and we look at one another and would like to be anywhere else but here. Making this album has become the supreme ordeal. We need a mentor, someone to slash the Gordian knot, point the way forward, save the sinking ship. And then like a ray of light, it comes to me. The owner of the studio is on the island, the producer of the Beatles, George Martin-what about him? Suddenly it seems like a great idea, a way out of the black funk with the ultimate producer. It's either that, or this, our fifth album, is going to die halfway through-and then what? I get assigned the task of chatting him up. He lives in a beautiful old house a couple of miles away across the island, and I decide to walk there and compose my request on the way.
I start out toward his house with the burning white ellipse of sun on my unprotected scalp. Through squinty eyes and the afternoon haze, I can just make out the outline of his place, the house of hope. I pass by passion fruit, banana trees, lime trees, bougainvillea and oleander, my head swimming with hazy thoughts: the transformation of adverse conditions into the path of awakening; pain being a component of happiness; Kate and Layla, England, George Martin, the Beatles. I can't believe I'm doing this-the first time I heard "She Loves You" would I have ever thought that I would end up hoofing it across a tropical island under the beating sun to get the producer of the Fab Four? This is like Jesus-yeah, I'm like Jesus on the road to Calvary-or is it Paul on the road to Damascus? Regard all phenomena as dreams ... hibiscus ... bamboo ... royal palm ... guava ... ginger on the road to nowhere ... maybe a miracle will happen ... pelican ... parrot ... parakeet ... this is the fucking end, I knew this would happen sooner or later, but this is it, this is fucking "it" . . . those bastards ... unless Georgie boy pulls it out of the hat, we're, like, sitting on a volcano ... actually we are sitting on a volcano, ha-ha ... the volcano that will destroy this island ... if only he knew that I was coming to him now, but maybe he does know ... Michael Henchard ... The Mayor of Casterbridge ... Lyme Regis ... this is a tragedy ... no, a fuckup ... two parakeets, flamingo flower ...
Part of me realizes that this is a moment to let go, pull back, take the long view. Thich Nhat Hanh says, "What will it matter three hundred years from now?" I hope that the next half hour goes well.
Feeling knackered and with a mild case of sunstroke, I arrive at Olveston House and rattle the mosquito screen on the front door. The maid comes out. "Yaa?" she asks. I raise my sunglasses and croak, "Is George Martin here?" "Mzzr. Martin, dere's a man f'you," she yells out. George appears in the gloom of the hallway like a pale white ghost. "Hey, come on in," he says. "Cup of tea?" We go out to the back of the house and sit on the veranda, and over tea he asks me if we are enjoying the studio and how we are getting on. I take a deep breath and tell him that the studio is fine, very nice actually, but that in fact we are going through a period of internal friction-basically we are at one another's throats. Can he help, would he like to take over, guide us through the process, do some of the old Martin magic? We could be a great team. "Hmmmm," says George, "I'm sorry to hear that you are having a bad time of it, but why don't you just try and sort it out yourselves. I'm sure you can do it." And he gives me some sage advice about carrying on and pulling through this tough stretch: "It's typical group stuff-seen it all before. We're English-'nother cup of Darjeeling?"
I feel reassured by his strength and experience, wonder if he has been a naval commander. Suddenly he appears to me as Obi Wan Kenobi. Yeahwe can get past this. We chat for a while longer. I thank him and, with my jaw pushing forward, start marching back toward the studio. I imagine that I hear Sir George calling out behind me, "May the force be with you."
By the time I get back, it was if he has waved his wand across the valley, the air seems to have cleared-maybe we had to go all the way down before we could come up agai
n. We glide back together with a crisp new courtesy toward one another and continue on toward the completion of the album.
The linchpin of Synchronicity is a song called "Every Breath You Take." When Sting first plays us his demo, it sounds not unlike the group Yes with a huge rolling synthesizer part. It needs work, needs the stripped-down guitar and drums treatment, but it has something. More obvious than some of Sting's material, it has a classic pop song chord sequence with a dramatic C section but it needs clarity. This song is the one that gets the most argument. Sting and Stewart go on endlessly about the drums and bass-how they should underpin the vocal-but after a couple of weeks we get a track down with just bass and drums and a token vocal to give us some perspective.
Feeling slightly numb, we sit on the couch at a creative standstill. Sting leans over and says, "Go on, go in there, make it your own." This is either a beautiful example of trust between partners or is tantamount to being told to jump off a cliff, prove you're a man, or walk the gangplank. But there she is, a nice naked track, waiting to be ruined or trimmed with gold by yours truly. "Right," I say, "right," and heave my bum up off the deep plush and toward the direction of the big room. In the engulfing loneliness of the empty studio I am hyperaware that everyone is watching and listening. This will be the naked truth.
I pick up my Strat and stare out across the gloom. It's a simple chord sequence and shoudn't prove a problem, depending on one's imagination, inspiration, and context. What are the criteria? It should sound like the Police-big, brutal barre chords won't do, too vulgar; it has to be something that says Police but doesn't get in the way of the vocals; it should exist as music in its own right, universal but with just a hint of irony, be recognized the world over, possibly be picked up by a rapper as the guitar lick to hang a thirty-million-copy song on in eleven years or so. "Yeah, okay," "roll it," I say. The track rolls and I play a sequence of intervals that outline the chords and add a nifty little extension to each one that makes it sound like the Police, root, fifth, second, third, up and down through each chord. It is clean, succinct, immediately identifiable; it has just enough of the signature sound of el Policia. I play it straight through in one take. There is a brief silence, and then everyone in the control room stands up and cheers. It is an emotional and triumphant moment, and it will take us to number one in America.
With this lick I realize a dream that maybe I have cherished since first picking up the guitar as a teenager-to at least once in my life make something that would go around the world, create a lick that guitarists everywhere would play, be number one in America, be heard at weddings, bar mitzvahs, births, funerals, be adapted into the repertoire of brass bands in the north of England, and make my mum and dad proud. Do you ever really get beyond them? Maybe not and maybe this is where the story should fade out, with me standing there, grinning like an idiot, feeling like a hero and just happy to have pleased.
"Every Breath You Take" will go to number one on the Billboard charts and stay there for eight weeks. I will be asked, "How did you come up with that? Where does it come from?" as if one sits down and works out a formula for these things. My poker-faced answer is usually along the lines of "God spoke through me, I'm merely the vessel." But in fact as a guitarist, with the bloody thing hardly ever out of your hands, the fingers build their own memory and I think that you go along with pockets of information, things that you tend to play or go to when you pick up the instrument, and then they slowly morph into another set of responses. During the summer I had been playing through the forty-four Bartok violin duets, thinking I might do some of them with Fripp. They are well suited to the guitar and with their intervallic structures and modal ambience are not a thousand miles from the Police guitar sound, hence the ability to immediately lay the fitting part to "Every Breath." It was already there, even if by way of Eastern Europe.
Laying down the guitar part for "Every Breath You Take" clears the air and increases the chances that we have a hit album. Whether it will reach number one is not a certainty, but we all hope for it. From Montserrat we return once again to Le Studio in Canada to mix the album. Generally we let Hugh Padgham prepare the mixes to a point, and then we come into the control room to fine-tune the mix ourselves. But I receive a nasty shock when sitting down to hear the mix of "Every Breath." The thick creamy Strat sound I had in Montserrat has been reduced to a thin over-reverbed whine. I become extremely upset and tell Hugh to go back immediately to the rough mix from Montserrat, check the sound, and get it back. Luckily, we still have the rough mixes. It takes a couple of days, but we get the guitar sounding almost as good as the rough mix. But to my mind, it is not quite the same. The track is almost stillborn, but it has a future to fulfill.
After the heat and light of the Caribbean, the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Quebec are brutal, but we have to finish the work. Tension continues to run high among us, as if our time is already up. We have made the album and are committed to touring behind it, but a fatalistic air seems to hang over us. We are not talking about the years to come, the rosy future, the path ahead, the next album; instead, we are separating like oil and water, even though Synchronicity will bring us our biggest success yet. I realize that Sting thinks that he doesn't need either Stewart or me and that he can go on alone, but this well-worn path is nothing new. We don't talk about it, but along with abrasive ego clashes, there is the desire not to be confronted, not to be challenged, have it all your own way; what makes us will eventually destroys us.
We struggle on through the mixing and end the sessions with a ridiculous scene in which we toss a coin to see which tracks will go onto the album. Will Stewart and I get our songs on? Is it fair to let the whole album be only Sting's songs? Miles valiantly tries to hold some sort of democracy together so some of us don't go away feeling pissed off and alienated. What will the final sequence be? I finally solve that one by suggesting that maybe we put all the softer songs on one side and the up-tempo stuff on the other. Sting likes this idea, and thus it is ordained.
Twenty-Six
We leave the snow and ice of Quebec, the new album, the tension, ego, and confrontation to follow our own pursuits until we begin touring. I go to New York in January 1983 to live for a few months in the American Stanhope hotel. I negotiate a rate for an extended period in a large, sunny suite at the back of the hotel and, away from the band, settle into a regal existence as I begin work on a book of photography. New York is a powerful drug that insulates you if you want, protects you from the sad jewel of loneliness, fills you with emanations from outside your own room. The metropolis seems like an escape from reality and even a place to find a kind of spiritual sustenance. For as I arrive in and embrace living in Manhattan, that is how I feel about it, a place of renewal and a reward for the rigors of the past few years. Here the chances are endless and as I get caught up in the thrill of publishing my first book, the implausibly huge success of our group, and the forthcoming album, New York feels like a bull's-eye.
My two powder blue rooms become a studio, with amps, guitars, and a sea of black-and-white photographs strewn across the carpet and bedspreads as I try to order and edit several hundred pictures. Within a short time I meet up with Ralph Gibson, a great photographer whose work I have admired for some time. He knocks on the door one day, and after a few moments of introductory chat, he picks up the Stratocaster lying on the bed, begins to play, and also remarks on the music playing through the speakers-Brian Eno's "On Land." Ralph loves music and plays guitar. I play guitar and love photography. We connect and decide that it's time for lunch and that we should produce my book Throb together. Thus starts a groove that will continue on through the next twenty years with an ongoing dialogue of music, photography, and jokes of a dubious nature. Later that afternoon we go down to Ralph's loft in lower Manhattan, where we drink Armagnac and begin laying out my pictures in a thirty-foot strip. The friendship with Ralph takes me deeper into New York life, and I wonder why anyone would want to be anywhere else. This is the world capit
al, the city of final destination.
The heat in my head and the internal engine that races me around the city is a brew of ego powered by the elixir of success and the new feeling that I can do anything, buy anything, have anything. But in the bathroom of Area 51, with a head full of champagne and marching powder, I stare into the mirror with a face that looks numb and strange, and from the small sliver of perception that is not doused in intoxicants, I hear a small, steely voice intoning a warning message. But I step over a body and go back out into the club, grinning like an idiot as I pass by the evening's art piece-a near-naked female suspended by straps in a glass case. Maybe I need the band after all, the discipline and structure of musical performance-I miss the others. As I return to the hissing silence of the bedroom I know that these nights are bullshit, that the only thing that really matters is the work, the music; although I love New York, I am living in it as an authentic fake as I live out the requisite narrative. Maybe I am missing something, the anchor, the balance, the weight that holds you in place while you play out the lunatic side. But, I stupidly console myself, this is rock and roll. Somewhere beneath the surface of this hedonism lies the truth that I am not truly self-destructive, because I love making music-and that is the thing that keeps you one step from the edge. But for a few months and for what seems night after endless night, I almost forget it as I take to the streets of Manhattan at midnight and cruise in a limo with a couple of pals to Area 51, Limelight, the Mudd Club, or Studio 54wherever there's a scene. It becomes a game to see how many girls we can get into a limousine in one night as we pick them up along the way. They practically line up because being in the city now is like being beneath a hot public light, and it seems that everyone knows you and wants to get next to you. Our image is everywhere. I get stopped on the street, accosted in restaurants, yelled at from cabs, and importuned by doormen. I pretend to find it tiresome, but secretly I enjoy it. This fame thing? It's fun-like a dessert slipping down your throat, and with about as much nutritional power. I walk into Charivari and the sales assistants in the groovy emporium all nudge one another, trying to act cool but instead tripping over themselves in the attempt to be the first to offer you a Perrier while bringing out some Japanese designer's trifle for a few thousand dollars. Some innocently ask you your name, as if they don't know who you are, and you answer, "Raskolnikov," or with a thick Madrid accent, "Jesus." Resistance is low, and if you casually ask a beautiful female salesperson what she might be doing tonight, "Oh, nothing" is always the reply. "Dinner?" you murmur....
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 37