I loved this direction we were heading in, and I couldn’t wait to create more new songs. But then Harvey Mason said, “You know, ‘Watermelon Man’ has been around for ten years now. What if we did a new arrangement of it for this record?” I just about flipped out. Right away my brain started racing with ideas of how we could update the sound of that song.
“I have a few ideas,” Harvey told me. “In fact, I just thought of one in the shower the other day!” He suggested adding a stop-time element to the arrangement, which was a nice way to funk it up. And then Bill Summers, who had a doctorate in ethnomusicology with an emphasis on African music, had another suggestion. He had studied a form of African Pygmy music called Hindewhu, and he wanted to incorporate elements of that style into the song.
I had actually heard Hindewhu on a record put out by the Folkways label, and I really liked it. “Let’s do it,” I said to Bill, and he got to work. He poured water into a beer bottle, and then he made a pattern by singing a note, then blowing across the bottle mouth to produce another note, then singing another note. It was such a cool pattern, and I also loved the fact that it didn’t sound exactly like the Folkways record but was Bill’s own creative twist. And then he took it a step further, overdubbing countermelodies against that pattern, also with the beer bottle. That became the intro for the new version of “Watermelon Man.”
As we worked out the songs for our new record we were turning into a new kind of band: a jazz-funk fusion band. I hadn’t intended to go down that road at all, but that’s where the music was leading us. And it was exciting, because even though jazz-rock had appeared on the scene, there weren’t really any instrumental jazz-funk bands, so this was a new niche. Our songs sounded different from anything else I was hearing out there, but we didn’t know how audiences would react to them. So we decided to find out.
Normally a band will make a record and then play in clubs and concerts to support it. But I decided to do the opposite. We spent a few weeks playing our new songs in clubs all over the San Francisco Bay Area—the Haight, Mill Valley, Berkeley—to see how people responded. We played in dance clubs and more intimate venues, for all kinds of crowds, and everybody just flipped out! People were dancing, laughing, and having fun, just completely letting loose as we played. It was a party, and people loved the groove.
Playing live helped us figure out what was working and what wasn’t, so we were able to refine the songs before recording them. But equally important, those shows created a buzz, where people were talking about our funky new sound and getting excited about the record before we’d even made it. By the time we headed into the studio, we knew where we wanted to go. Now we just needed to figure out what to call the record.
I was still chanting for hours each day, with all the zeal of a new convert, and I began focusing on the question What should the title of the record be?
I wanted something primitive and earthy but with an intellectual component—a smart title that would get people thinking. Crossings and Sextant both incorporated African imagery on their covers, and I definitely wanted the jungle in the title. And—oh, yes—it wouldn’t be bad if the title had a sexual meaning, too. This was the ’70s, after all, and we were a band of young guys. This was a lot to ask for a title, but as I was chanting, it suddenly hit me: Head Hunters. As soon as that phrase popped into my mind, I started laughing. It was the perfect title, with the perfect triple entendre—the jungle, the intellectual, and the sex.
We recorded the main sessions of “Chameleon” at Wally Heider Studios, and I used one of Pat Gleeson’s synthesizers to play that funky bass line. A lot of people assumed that Paul Jackson was playing it, but he was actually playing the rhythm guitar accompaniment, far up the neck of his bass. I wanted to do something different, to surprise people.
After we recorded the piece, I started to think that the bass line I’d laid down wasn’t punchy enough, so I decided to rerecord it, programming the Minimoog so the notes were shorter. The next day I took the tape to David Rubinson, but when he played that new bass line as an overdub, he forgot to turn off the original track. “Hold on, David,” I told him. “Both tracks are playing.” We didn’t need both those bass lines . . . but they actually sounded kind of cool together.
Normally it’s impossible to have stereo bass, because the lower the frequency, the more difficulty the ear has in perceiving direction. That’s why you can put subwoofers in any part of the room: Your ear can’t tell where low-frequency sounds are coming from. It’s only when pitch gets higher that your ear starts to perceive directionality more clearly. Consequently, nobody ever records stereo bass.
But listening to those two tracks, I got an idea. “Hey, David, since those bass lines weren’t recorded together, they won’t be exactly the same sound,” I said. “Could that function like stereo bass?”
“Theoretically,” he said. “Let’s try it.”
So we put one bass line on the left side and one on the right—and just like that, we had stereo bass! We decided to use both on the record, but they weren’t quite in sync, so I had to go back to Different Fur and fix the timing. They still weren’t perfectly in sync, but it was better that way, because if they had been, they would have canceled each other out.
When we were done, I thought we had a beautiful record, but as usual, David had a hard time convincing the studio executives at Columbia that we had a product they could sell.
Here’s how David remembers it:
When I turned in the Head Hunters album, it was met with very little enthusiasm by the record company. The only person who liked it was the college-outreach guy. The R&B side didn’t want anything to do with it. The white jazz guys didn’t want anything to do with it. It was fascinating! The music industry doesn’t know what to do with those who don’t fit into a particular slot.
But Herbie was in tune with the people, and so the people found it.
A few weeks after the record came out, David called me.
“Hi, Herbie,” he said. “Quick question for you. How many copies of Head Hunters do you think we sold this week?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “A thousand? Two thousand?” I figured sales were probably similar to what they’d been for Crossings and Sextant.
“Nope,” he said. “Seventy-eight thousand.” I sat there for a moment, stunned. And then we both started laughing.
“Just this week?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. I could not in my wildest dreams have imagined selling anywhere near that number of records in a single week.
“You’re going to have a platinum record,” David told me. And I still couldn’t get my head around it.
When I’d first started practicing Buddhism, I had spent hours upon hours chanting to save Mwandishi, unaware that I was shackling myself trying to maintain my personal status quo. But the minute I opened up my heart and mind and soul to going in whatever direction I was led, Head Hunters happened. There was a beautiful life lesson to be learned in that: the power of letting go.
After trying for so long, we were finally breaking through to new audiences, including big numbers at traditionally black colleges and universities. That trend really started in Washington, D.C., thanks to the work of Columbia promo man Vernon Slaughter and a friend from my high school days in Chicago named Alden Lawson, who was working at the Howard University radio station. Those two turned D.C.’s black students on to Head Hunters, and Alden spread the word to other universities, too. He had contacts at most of the black colleges, and he made calls all over the place to make sure everybody knew about this new jazz-funk sound. Black colleges went crazy for our music, and from there it just exploded all over the country.
We started touring to support the record, but I still couldn’t really take in what was happening. We played one East Coast show opposite Santana, in a pretty big arena, and the place was packed, completely sold out. As I was getting ready to walk onstage, I turned to David
and said, “Wow, Santana sure brought them out tonight.”
David looked at me and smiled. “That’s not Santana,” he said. “That’s you.”
I laughed. “You think these people came to see me?”
“Herbie, you have a big hit record now,” he told me. “They’re here to see you.” I just shook my head. It really was like a dream.
We kept on touring, kept on playing, kept on selling records. And because most of the guys in the band were also SGI members, we did a lot of chanting together.
Here’s how Bennie remembers that time:
We played every nook and cranny we could find—we were just out there! It was such an interesting time for us, because we were chanting furiously all the time, going to visit Buddhist community centers, and we had a hit record on the charts. We were just having fun, enjoying it a lot. And so were the audiences.
The music we created was right on the mark, because it resonated with everybody, across the board. The timing was right, and our attitude about the music was right, right on down to the promotion of it. This was an explosion of creativity and innovation in a direction no one had ever gone in before. It was our time.
It was magic, and the original recording reflects that magic. We were able to create an instrumental group palette, a combination of jazz and funk with some very specific rhythmic elements that people could feel.
It did feel like magic, especially when the record kept on selling and selling. Within six months Head Hunters went gold. And it just kept on going, eventually passing Dave Brubeck’s classic Take Five to become the biggest-selling jazz album of all time. Today that top spot is held by Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, which was released back in 1959 and still keeps selling. But for a while, at least, Head Hunters was at the very top—to my surprise, and maybe a lot of other people’s, too.
The band, which was now being called the Headhunters, toured throughout 1974, and it was a completely new experience for me. The audiences were much bigger, and they weren’t necessarily jazz fans. A lot of them didn’t even know my earlier music but just wanted to hear the cuts from Head Hunters. We were a jazz-funk outfit now, and I was stepping out from the piano to play giant synthesizers. We had an electric, funky sound, and unlike the audiences for Mwandishi, these audiences weren’t necessarily looking for something new and challenging every night—they just wanted us to play songs as they’d heard them on the record. Paul Jackson was originally a jazz bassist, so he wanted to improvise, and he would play a different pattern for every gig. I finally had to say to him, “Paul, you have to play the bass line on the record, or people are going to riot.” Neither of us was used to that.
Another big difference was that at Mwandishi shows people sat almost reverentially in the audience. But at Headhunters shows they would dance. Our drummer, Harvey Mason, didn’t come with us on tour, so I hired a guy named Mike Clark to step in. Mike was from Oakland, and he played with this particular kind of beat—the Oakland Stroke, they called it. It’s a jazzy funk beat, and as soon as Mike stepped in, I knew, This is going to be cool. Mike got people up on their feet.
I was really excited to be reaching so many new listeners, but not everybody was enthusiastic. The critics started grumbling that I had turned my back on jazz, or that I was a sellout.
That’s the thing about commercial success: It can instantly change how people see a record or a book or an artwork, because people make assumptions about the artist’s motivation. They assume he’s creating with an eye toward making money, rather than fulfilling an artistic vision. But while it was true that I wanted our music to reach more people, Head Hunters was also a natural next step after the Mwandishi records, especially given the movement toward fusion that was happening with bands like Tony Williams Lifetime and Weather Report.
But as Head Hunters climbed higher on the charts, some critics really started reacting negatively to it. The tone of this review, by Lee Underwood, was typical of the worst ones:
Mr. Communicate-With-A-Wider-Audience, Herbie Hancock, opened to a full house recently, again pleasing the funkers while disappointing the more cerebrally oriented connoisseurs. At its worst, Hancock’s music is commercial trash; at its best, it is almost as schizoid as Frank Zappa’s offerings.
The notion that I’d gone in a new and different direction because I knew I’d make more money was funny to me. How could I possibly have known our jazz-funk experiment would be that popular? There was no guarantee I’d gain any listeners at all—and there was a real risk that I’d lose part of the audience I already had! The idea that I had some master plan for making a big commercial hit was just not logical.
Over the coming years, as I got even deeper into electronic music, these critics would get even louder. But it didn’t change my course. I had to be true to myself, and this was the music I wanted to pursue. Anybody who ever played with Miles Davis learned that you can’t worry about what the critics think. You have to make the music your heart tells you to make.
A couple of years after Head Hunters came out, an interviewer with Contemporary Keyboard magazine asked me why so many people objected to electric keyboards. Here’s what I said—and it still holds true for any kind of change, or progress, that people naturally resist:
People back in the early 1900s used to say the same thing about the car: Why are you driving around in an electric car when you should be riding a horse? TV, movies, all those things faced that. People are unable to change sometimes. Those very same people might be saying something completely different in five years.
People don’t have to give anything up by having an open attitude. When they have a closed attitude, they aren’t even allowing for the fact that perhaps the technique of playing these electric instruments is going to improve over the years. It’s very difficult to play with nuances on some synthesizers. But that’s not necessarily going to be true tomorrow. I started playing piano when I was seven. Just think what it’s going to be like when you get people starting to play synthesizer when they are seven.
In the meantime, I just kept making the music I felt in my heart and playing those bigger and bigger venues. Pretty soon there would be a whole new wave of electric instruments for me to explore.
In the midst of all the Head Hunters excitement I got a call to do another movie. This one was about a New York City architect, played by Charles Bronson, whose wife is murdered and his daughter raped by a gang of thugs. He goes on a wild vigilante streak, killing muggers and punks all over the city. Called Death Wish, it’s a dark and violent film, a reminder of how dangerous New York was in the 1970s.
The director, Michael Winner, didn’t know my music, but one of the actresses in the movie was a big jazz fan. Over lunch one day he asked her who he should hire to do the score, and she said, “Herbie Hancock.” Then she told him to go out and buy the Head Hunters album. Michael liked what he heard, so I was hired.
I was really deep into synthesizers by now, and I wanted to use them in the movie. Nobody had really done that before, and especially not in combination with orchestral instruments, but I decided to combine those elements to add a new twist to a classic sound.
The rape scene happens early on, and I decided to use the synthesizer to create an ominous undercurrent of sound. The synth drones a low note, and I added orchestral sounds on top of it—the plucking of strings, the sound of a bow against wood. It was more sound effect than music, though it did have melodic overtones. I felt that would match the mood of the scene better than straightforward music.
I experimented in other ways, too. For one scene in the subway I asked the drummer to give me a particular beat, but then in the studio I decided I wanted to play it backward. Today you can just press a button and get that effect, but in 1974 I had to take the tape and physically play it backward through the machine to get that sound. It was time-consuming, but there was something about that reverse beat that felt eerie and foreboding.
&n
bsp; In one famous scene Bronson pours handfuls of quarters into a sock to make a weapon. He starts swinging it around inside his house, getting wilder and more manic—and suddenly the sock smacks into the wall and bursts, spilling the quarters everywhere. It’s a weird scene, and I wanted music that would capture the character’s complex emotions. So I decided to borrow from a piece that I’ve always loved, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The piece I wrote doesn’t have exactly the same chord structure, but it is evocative of Stravinsky, though I’d be surprised if many moviegoers ever made that connection.
I had about six or seven weeks to do the whole score, which isn’t much time to write, orchestrate, and record forty minutes of music. Making it worse was that fact that I’m a terrible procrastinator. When I have a deadline, I often wait to write until it’s almost too late—and then I just pick something in a hurry and start there. That’s pretty much always been the way I work, even though it results in panic toward the end of each project. It also leads to a lot of sleepless nights, as I race to get everything done in a wild rush.
Toward the end of composing for Death Wish I was just completely wiped out. I pulled a couple of all-nighters in a row, but with the deadline just a few days away I still needed to write one of the most important parts: a piece for an emotional scene where Bronson’s character is recalling his murdered wife, Joanna. The piece would be called “Joanna’s Theme,” and Michael Winner was really anxious for me to nail it. I was anxious, too, as this scene was the movie’s emotional core. Michael kept saying, “Do you have anything yet? When are we going to have ‘Joanna’s Theme’?” I don’t know who was more nervous about it, him or me, but between us we were a wreck.
I kept going around and around, trying to figure out a line that would embody the emotion of that scene. And finally, at the last moment, I came up with a melody and a chord structure that sounded haunting and heart-wrenching. I wrote out the parts and then hurried to get into the studio with the orchestra to record it.
Herbie Hancock Page 19