Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  And this was not a onetime thing. Jenny had routed our tour in the craziest way possible, as if she’d thrown darts at a map of Europe. I mean, we drove from Paris to the north of France, and then back down to the south of France, and then all the way up to Denmark. None of it made any sense. We spent untold hours in the car and van, racing along autobahns and mountain roads just trying to make it to our gigs.

  Adding to the absurdity was the fact that Pan Am lost Bennie’s suitcase on the way over, so he had only the clothes on his back. Pan Am kept saying they’d find his luggage and get it to him, so Bennie didn’t buy any new clothes but just kept washing the ones he had on in hotel sinks all across Europe. We all did our laundry in the sink, but of course we were never in hotels long enough for anything to dry properly, so our clothes started smelling musty. Which was great fun, of course, when we were all cooped up together for hours in the car.

  On a lot of those tour dates we were booked to play opposite Wayne Shorter’s new band, Weather Report, so they had the same kind of schedule we did. But after about a week they couldn’t take it! Wayne and his band flew back home rather than racing all over Europe like we did. I can’t blame them, because that schedule tested all of our stamina and patience. But in a strange way it brought us closer, too. Spending that much time together, in those kinds of stressful circumstances, either bonds people together or breaks them apart. Fortunately it bonded Mwandishi together.

  Bennie remembers one funny incident from that summer:

  On one of those impossible drives, we played a gig in the south of France and then had to drive all the way up to Denmark. And when we got there, we were under the gun to set up and play. Herbie hooked up his electric piano, and everybody was just totally exhausted—especially Herbie, because he had driven the car. I would drive the van, because our roadie and soundman needed to sleep. We were the ninjas of the jazz world!

  We got to the gig in Denmark, and Herbie was playing this long obbligato, an improvised intro to either “Maiden Voyage” or “Toys.” And he’s playing, and I’m sitting on a chair backstage, looking at him, and I know his expressions by now. And Herbie was asleep! There was no movement of his eyes. He was sound asleep. This went on for a while, and then he woke himself up—jarred himself awake. But he had kept on playing the whole time. He used to be totally sleep-deprived, because he would stay up for hours, days on end.

  We did everything we could to save money on that trip, because we had seven guys to pay—the sextet, plus our soundman, Fundi—and I knew the tour was actually costing me money rather than making any. I was still getting residuals from “Watermelon Man” and the jingles I’d written, so the tour was worth it to me. But we cut corners every way we could, sometimes sleeping in people’s houses or even in an empty room at whatever club we were playing.

  I did make one big purchase, though. I bought us a brand-new $10,000 Miazzi Hollywood sound system, because I wanted Mwandishi to have high-quality sound everywhere we played, rather than just making do with whatever system each club happened to have. And this was the best, coolest portable system I had ever seen. It even had a joystick, which was new technology in the ’70s, for moving sound in a four-speaker surround setting.

  I was really excited about the system, but the guys thought I was crazy, because now, in addition to all our suitcases and instruments, we’d have to lug a mixer, four big speakers, and other components all over Europe. Most of the time we had a rental van, but we traveled to some gigs by train—and those European trains did not stop for long at each station. As soon as the train started slowing down at our destination, we’d all start throwing our luggage out the windows to the platform, so we’d have our hands free to carry instruments and the sound system in the two minutes the train was stopped. We had to scramble like mad, but miraculously we never lost anything.

  Sometimes after we’d spent hours traveling to a club, the management tried not to pay us. For one gig in Italy the manager said he’d pay us after we played, which wasn’t standard. I was afraid we’d get stiffed, so we refused to play until we got our money—and then the manager took our instruments and locked them in a room. “You’re not getting them back until you promise to go out there and play,” he told us. We just sat in the hotel, pissed off, feeling like hostages. I don’t even remember how that particular episode got resolved, but that was the one time I was happy to pack up our stuff and get back on the road.

  Even when we made it to gigs, got paid, and actually played, we sometimes met with hostile audiences. Like the owners of the London House, some people were apparently expecting to hear mellow versions of “Speak Like a Child” and “Dolphin Dance.” European audiences knew me from my days in the Miles Davis Quintet, and they wanted to hear more controlled jazz than what the Mwandishi band was playing. So we’d be up on the stage, really into the music, creating this wild sonic river, and we’d hear people start to boo.

  They’d get really upset, as if we had personally betrayed them, but I just told the guys, “Keep playing.” People were entitled to their feelings, and I was convinced that the only way to win them was to show them the artistry of where we were now. I’d had similar feelings back when I played with Eric Dolphy’s band, because people booed it, too. But even back then, playing in someone else’s band, I’d thought I should stand up for what I believed in, as far as music was concerned. That turned out to be a precursor for my experience in Mwandishi.

  The funniest part of that tour came at the end, a kind of coda to the craziness. Our final gig was in Paris, and we were scheduled to appear on a TV show to promote it. Bennie still hadn’t received his suitcase from Pan Am, so I called the airline and said, “Listen, you’ve been promising to send this bag for weeks. We’re going on television tomorrow, and we’re going to tell everybody in France how inept you are.” I was really irritated on Bennie’s behalf, and as the leader of the group I felt obligated to do something.

  Just like that, the suitcase appeared! Pan Am delivered it to Bennie’s hotel room, and when he opened it up and saw all the beautiful, hip clothes he’d bought for the tour, he nearly cried. But at that final gig he had a fresh outfit to wear, so at least we were able to finish in style.

  That European tour brought us all together, but it also sharpened a difficult dynamic in the band. We were a sextet, and we shared everything. Onstage, every man was as valuable as every other man. But at the same time I was the one responsible for bringing in enough money to pay everybody and for making sure we got to gigs and fulfilled our obligations. I knew the guys weren’t making as much money as they wanted—and not as much as they were worth, honestly. But I was already losing money, and I couldn’t afford to pay them any more out of my own pocket.

  Unlike the other band members, I was married and now had a young child. I was also older than everybody except for Julian. It was only natural that tension started to develop—was the sextet an equal collective, or were the guys hired sidemen for me? Money was a factor in this equation, but it definitely wasn’t the only one. This question went to the heart of what Mwandishi was and who we all were to each other.

  One incident a few months before our European tour perfectly illustrates that tension. On the morning of February 9, 1971, Gigi, two-year-old Jessica, our dog, Schnuckel, and I were asleep in a hotel in Hermosa Beach, California. The band had been playing a gig at the nearby Lighthouse jazz club, and although my family didn’t usually travel with us, they had come this time for obvious reasons—who wouldn’t want to leave freezing New York for sunny southern California in February?

  Schnuckel suddenly started barking, and a few seconds later the whole room began to shake. It was so violent and unexpected that I couldn’t figure out what was happening. How could solid walls sway like that? It was as if they had become butter. I managed to jump out of bed and run to the window, where I could see the sidewalk and pier bucking and swaying. I couldn’t speak, but my mind was screaming, We’ve g
ot to get out of here!

  The earthquake lasted ten or twelve seconds, but it felt like a whole lot longer. As soon as it stopped I started throwing our stuff into suitcases and packing up to get the hell back to New York. We managed to find a car to the airport, and when we arrived there, I called Buster and said, “Listen, we’ve booked a flight home. I’m getting Gigi and Jessica out of here.” The whole region was a mess of buckled roads and collapsed buildings. The earthquake was a 6.6 on the Richter scale, and it had killed dozens of people and injured hundreds more.

  “Well, hold on,” Buster said. “What about us?” Of all the guys in the band, Buster was the one who was most willing to speak his mind and butt heads with me. We were both Aries, and we could sometimes go at it, and right at this moment he felt I was abandoning the band. To me, there was no question that my first obligation was to my family. But like all the other guys, Buster was single, so he didn’t have the same frame of reference I did.

  “It’s every man for himself!” I told him.

  “Man, you can’t just leave your band!” he said.

  “I’m not your daddy!” I said, exasperated. “You guys can take care of yourselves.” Buster wasn’t too happy with me—I don’t think any of the guys were. But to be fair, everybody was pretty freaked out at having just been through a major earthquake, so I didn’t think any more about it, though in retrospect it was probably indicative of a larger underlying tension within the band.

  In early 1972, as we started recording Mwandishi’s next album, David Rubinson said to me, “You know, in rock music they’ve been using this new instrument called a synthesizer. You might want to give that a try.”

  I had heard of synthesizers, but I didn’t know much about them. I wasn’t a big rock and roll fan, so I hadn’t kept up with what was happening in that genre. But David knew. Groups like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Byrds had started incorporating Moog synthesizer sounds, adding a new, psychedelic layer to their songs. Synthesizers were mostly used as background, but David saw early on that they would fit well within the kind of music Mwandishi was making.

  The band was already using devices like the fuzz-wah pedal and the Echoplex, which created a tape echo for electronic instruments, and I had been playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano both onstage and on recordings. I was always hooking up various gadgets to the electric piano, sometimes right before a show. Once, when we were in Boston, I got together with a couple of engineers from MIT, who told me, “Just hook up this box to your piano—it will change the shape of the sound wave!” I loved exploring new sounds.

  It was actually very difficult to hook things up to the Rhodes, which is probably why so few bands did it. I had to remove its top to attach the cables, wah-wah pedal, and Echoplex, so the thing looked a little bit like a Frankenstein piano. I didn’t mind—who cares what an instrument looks like, as long as it creates the sound you want? But one person who did mind was its inventor, Harold Rhodes.

  I had met Harold back when I was with Miles, and at some point he came to see the band play at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. When he walked up to the bandstand and saw all those wires sticking out of its chopped-off top, he said, “Herbie! What have you done to my piano? You’ve cannibalized it!”

  I laughed and said, “Well, I wanted to create some effects, and this was the only way to do it.” He still looked horrified, so I said, “You know, you might want to think about making future pianos with inputs and outputs, to make this easier.” I probably wasn’t the only piano player to have suggested this to Harold, because sure enough, future versions of the Rhodes were designed with jacks, so you could attach different components easily.

  Synthesizers took the complexity to a new level altogether. For one thing, the synthesizers of 1972 were nothing like the ones we have today. They weren’t digital, so they weren’t programmable, meaning you couldn’t save anything. And they were really huge, taking up entire walls of studios. They took forever to set up and weren’t really portable. But you could create sounds with them that you couldn’t create with other instruments, so David thought it would be interesting to lay some synthesizer music over one of the tracks on our new album.

  The band was recording at Pacific Recording Studios in San Mateo, and David, who lived in San Francisco, told me, “I know a local guy who plays synthesizers. Let’s give him a call.” That was how I met Patrick Gleeson.

  Pat was an unusual candidate to play on an Mwandishi record. He was a white hippie, not a jazz-funk guy, and instead of a music education he had a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century English literature. David told me straight up that Pat didn’t have the musical chops or experience of the other guys in the band, but he’d done a lot of synthesizer programming for various rock bands David had recorded. So we arranged to meet Pat at his studio, Different Fur Trading Company, which was located in a renovated warehouse in the Mission District.

  Pat met us at the door, and as he walked us into the studio I saw racks of electronic components lining the walls. This was some complex equipment, and I didn’t know the first thing about how it all worked. But I couldn’t wait to hear what Pat could do with it.

  Mwandishi had recorded a song called “Quasar” for the new album, so David handed Pat a sixteen-track master of the song. Pat put it on, and I told him, “I was thinking we could lay something down right here, at the beginning.” So he moved over to his huge Moog modular synthesizer and got to work. After a few minutes of plugging and unplugging cords and turning various knobs, he started laying down some sounds over the track.

  I sat back to listen, and what I heard was so hip and majestic, it was just fantastic. Pat’s synthesizer added a phenomenal new element to the music, but without MIDI and computers it was fiendishly complicated to produce those sounds. Here’s how Pat describes what he did that day:

  I listened to the sonic environment over this short passage and then patched a sound. There was no patch memory then, which meant you had to connect various voltage-controlled audio components together—oscillators with various waveforms, envelope generators, voltage-controlled amplifiers, and various sound modifiers, including frequency and amplitude modulation elements. You adjusted all this stuff until it began to sound like a generalized musical sound.

  After about five to seven minutes of patching, I thought I had something Herbie might like to play with. So I began having my sound engineer cycle back and forth over the passage on tape, fine-tuning the idea.

  “Okay,” I said to Herbie, “that’s the general idea.” He asked for some slight modifications, which I did, and then I asked him how he felt about that.

  He said, “Did you record it?”

  I said, “I was waiting to turn the keyboard over to you.” I thought I was just getting the synth ready for him to play, but he said, “No, that’s fine—just go ahead and record it,” which blew me away.

  Pat was surprised, but I didn’t know anything about synthesizers and he did, so I figured, why shouldn’t he just record them himself? I stayed at his studio for another forty-five minutes, talking through ideas for the rest of the song, and then I said, “I have to leave, but I’ll be back with some more tracks. You just keep on going.” I wanted him to record more overdubs, which he did—many of which made it onto the record, which was ultimately called Crossings.

  Over the next couple of weeks I spent more time with Pat, and he laid down overdubs for another song on Crossings, called “Water Torture.” I asked him a lot of questions about how the equipment worked, and because of my engineering studies at Grinnell I could understand the language. There was no real reason for a piano player to know what resistance and ohms and capacitors were, but I did, so Pat and I were able to talk for hours about how exactly the synthesizers functioned and what kinds of sounds he could draw out of them. The more I learned, the more I wanted synthesizers as a permanent part of Mwandishi’s sound.

  For the moment, though, my ma
in concern was finishing Crossings. I was really happy with the record, which expanded even more on the spaced-out freedom of Mwandishi. We had gotten so free, in fact, that it could be confusing for other musicians who tried to play with us. David Rubinson invited a hot young guitar player named Carlos Santana for one of the tracks, but I had to tell him, “I don’t have anything specific for you to play,” which threw him off a little bit. Santana wasn’t used to that way of making music, so our collaboration didn’t work out that time, though we did make some really cool records together from time to time. He has become a dear friend, and we’re like family now.

  So Crossings wasn’t for everybody. I loved it, and David Rubinson loved it, but he knew that Warner Bros. would be less than thrilled with the direction we’d gone in. David anticipated that the executives would complain once again about marketability, so he decided to pull off a little ruse, to make a point.

  When David walked into his meeting with the marketing executives, he was carrying a reel-to-reel tape. At this type of meeting, this would typically be the master for the new record. David threaded it into a tape machine, and when he pressed PLAY, the room was filled with the sounds of some really out-there jazz fusion. The executives sat quietly, listening.

  After ten minutes or so David pressed PAUSE. “Well, what do you think?” he asked the room.

  It’s great stuff, they all said—but how in the world are we supposed to sell it? Just as with Mwandishi, they were afraid the music fell too much between the cracks to become commercially successful.

  “Well, what you’ve just heard is not actually Herbie’s new record,” David told them. “It’s the B side of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, which is number nine on the charts right now.” That little trick made David’s point perfectly: How could they claim that this type of music wasn’t marketable when Bitches Brew had sold so many copies? There was obviously a market for it, despite the executives’ preconceptions. David then played excerpts from Crossings for them, and they all pledged to work hard to sell it. But David could already sense that this might be the last record Mwandishi made for Warner Bros.