I didn’t know anything about conducting, but I stepped in front of the musicians and tried to guide them through the piece. When we finished, I knew we had it! But would Michael agree? We really didn’t have time to try anything else, but there was no guarantee that he’d feel the same way I did. I walked into the booth to listen to the take, and Michael came in, too. As the engineer played it back I looked over to see Michael’s response—and he had tears in his eyes.
That was such an amazing moment for me. I had done it! I had finished the music, and the director loved it. I had worked so hard over the past six weeks, it just felt as if a mountain had been lifted from my shoulders. I went home feeling relieved and happy, but even I didn’t realize how emotionally overwrought I had become until I went into the bathroom and suddenly burst into tears. I had been completely dry-eyed when Michael was in the sound booth crying, but now that I was home and knew it was over, I was crying, too. Tears of joy.
Now that Head Hunters was a big commercial success, Columbia couldn’t wait for us to put out our next album. In the summer of 1974 we started recording the record that became Thrust, using the same lineup as on Head Hunters except for one change: We brought on the Oakland Stroke drummer Mike Clark permanently, replacing Harvey Mason.
I always tried to do something new on each album, and for Thrust I wanted to create a song that showcased the drummer. On most jazz and funk songs the horns or piano carry the melody, and it’s easy to construct a song around an improvised solo. But could a song be constructed around the drums? I decided to take it on as a challenge, a puzzle I needed to figure out.
I started thinking about how rhythm might be the main feature of a song. I considered the various parts of a drum kit, but there had to be a way to go beyond that. Suddenly it hit me that there was one kind of rhythm that takes center stage: tap dancing.
Tap dancing uses a device called stop time, which is essentially a way of alternating accented beats with silence, changing up the rhythm of a song. I knew I could simply write a song that incorporated stop time, but then, in the spirit of Miles, I thought, Why not make it harder? What if I took an existing song, something slow and melodic, and turned it into an up-tempo, stop-time showcase for drums?
Now I was excited. I knew the perfect song to rewrite, a ballad I’d done for The Spook Who Sat by the Door. I completely reconstructed it, using rhythmic phrases based not just on straight-up 4/4 time but with five beats or three beats or seven beats interspersed. To make it even more challenging, I worked in something we called displacement, where we would take a phrase or musical element that would naturally fall in one place and move it slightly forward or backward in the song.
I decided to name the tune “Actual Proof”—the Buddhist concept of a concrete example of the practice working in your life. It’s a cornerstone of Nichiren Buddhist belief, the visible evidence that it’s working and a motivation to continue practicing. I had started incorporating some elements of Buddhism into my album covers, and this would be another one.
The complex rhythms of “Actual Proof” were a challenge to the listener, but they were a challenge to the musicians, too. One time when we were in the studio, I heard Paul Jackson working something out on his bass. A couple of minutes later I said, “Okay, let’s do ‘Actual Proof.’” The engineers started recording, but when I counted off, Paul jumped in with a completely different bass line from the one we’d been playing on the road.
“Whoa! Whoa!” I said. “Paul, what was that? It messes with the arrangement. You know we have to keep the same bass line—we can’t just keep changing it up like that.”
“Yeah, man, I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
But then I laughed, because that bass line he’d played was slick! I said, “Listen, that bass line was so bad, let’s do it! It’s better than the one we’ve been doing.” The only thing was, it was so convoluted, I wasn’t sure where the first beat came in, so I wasn’t sure how to count it. “Okay, Paul—where is one?” I asked.
When Paul explained it to me, it was not where I had thought at all. I said, “No way! Are you kidding me?” And he said, “I’m not kidding!” And he counted it for me.
It took me a while, but I figured out a whole different pattern underneath Paul’s bass. And that’s what we ended up recording. It was a killer bass line, but that’s how Paul was; he could come up with things nobody else could. To this day musicians who want to play “Actual Proof” will ask me how the rhythm works. When I tell them, they say, “No way! No way!”—just as I did. No matter how many new electric instruments we brought in, the coolest part of any song was always seeing the human brain create patterns and rhythms nobody had ever heard before.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
One morning about a year after Thrust came out, the doorbell rang at our house on Doheny. I was still in my pajamas, but I went to see who it was. When I opened the door, a young guy was standing there.
“Hi, Herbie,” he said. “It’s Bryan Bell.”
I had no idea who Bryan Bell was or why he was standing at my door. He started talking about sound mixing and guitars and synthesizers, but I still couldn’t figure out what this was about. Then he pointed at my AC Cobra, which was sitting in the driveway, and asked about it. I said, “Oh, yeah. That’s my car, but it’s not running right now.”
“Do you have any tools?” he said. “I can fix cars.” I brought him a toolbox, he popped the hood and fiddled around for a few minutes, and suddenly the car was fixed. I didn’t know what he’d done, but this kid obviously knew his mechanics. I said, “Well, let’s take it out for a ride, then.” So we got in the car, and I opened it up on Sunset Boulevard, racing at about eighty miles an hour toward Beverly Hills, and as Bryan and I talked, he reminded me that we had met about six months earlier.
Bryan had been the soundman for John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, which had opened for some of the Headhunters’ shows on our Northeast tour. I had noticed that the sound quality for McLaughlin’s band was really sharp, so I’d asked to meet the sound guy. Apparently when I was introduced to Bryan, I had told him to look me up if he was ever looking for another gig. So now here he was. He was leaving the Mahavishnu Orchestra, he explained, and he’d come all the way from his home in Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles just to knock on my door.
After we talked for a while, I said to him, “Listen, you want to stay here in my guesthouse a few days? I just converted my garage into a studio, so we can work on some stuff there, see how it goes.” And that was the beginning of a partnership that would last through the next eight years and nearly twenty albums.
Bryan was just twenty-one when we met, but he had an amazing aptitude for electronics. He loved music, and he loved figuring out creative ways to use electronic equipment to enhance it. I already had a great and knowledgeable keyboard tech, Will Alexander, and a soundman, Craig Fruin, so at first Bryan just provided sound equipment. But before long Will started spending more time with another client of his, Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, so Bryan began revamping our band gear, first for recording and then for touring. And that’s where his genius started to shine through. He was able to customize equipment in a way that not only changed how we recorded and performed but also changed the sound of the band.
In the spring of 1976, as we were getting ready to record the album Secrets, Bryan started fiddling, customizing everything to enhance the Headhunters’ particular sound. He replaced the keyboard mixer, got new amps for everybody in the band and new speakers for me, and then configured everything to enhance the stereo sound for when we were onstage. Bryan was always bursting with theories on how to improve our sound, and he was always up for a challenge.
I would say, “Bryan, I want to make the synthesizer do this new thing” or “Can we make these two components communicate with each other?” and he would answer, “Well, that’s never been done before, but let’s see if I can fig
ure it out.”
Bryan was always ordering new parts and gadgets, and when they’d arrive, I’d take the instructions and start reading, but he would just immediately jump in and start messing around. He’d explain how certain components changed the band’s sound, describing the physics behind them. We spoke the same language because of my engineering background, but Bryan took things to a whole new level. He could improvise on equipment the way musicians improvised on their instruments.
Here’s how Bryan described the way we worked:
It was the most simpatico relationship, where together we were able to make something greater than the sum of its parts. Herbie’s a great artist, and I’m a good engineer and a good thinker, but together we did stuff that nobody else could do, and that was very special and rewarding.
Herbie would say, “Hey! Let’s do this!” and I would think, Okay, this will be two years of my life, every spare minute, a hundred hours a week. Because he’s right, this needs to be built, and we should have it first. Herbie always loved to present something that nobody’s heard or seen.
Bryan worked with us on the Secrets album, and he also came with the band on tour in the summer of 1976. We traveled all across Europe, playing jazz festivals at soccer stadiums and bullfighting arenas, and by then he was acting as my keyboard tech and the house mixer, too. It’s unusual to find an engineer who’s good at both studio recordings and live shows, but Bryan could do both. He was just really good at figuring out ways to overcome the limitations of equipment.
But just before we went on that European tour, Bryan and I got a glimpse of the musical future, one that would have far fewer limitations than the analog age we were then living in.
We recorded Secrets in San Francisco, and I arranged for Bryan to stay at the Zen Center while we were there. I had a friend who worked with the center’s abbot, Richard Baker, who was referred to as Baker Roshi—“Roshi” being the word for “Zen master.” The dormitory rooms were full, so Baker Roshi fixed Bryan up in the guesthouse, which was used by California governor Jerry Brown when he came there to meditate.
Bryan was really happy to be at the Zen Center, because he could meditate and chant there, and Baker Roshi’s staff fed him great vegetarian food and even bought clothes for him. Bryan told me it was “like being in the pope’s summer home.” One night Baker Roshi came to Bryan and said, “What are you and Herbie doing tomorrow?” Bryan told him we were recording in the afternoon, but the morning was free. And Baker Roshi said, “Great. Xerox needs you.”
He told Bryan that a friend of his at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) had invented something cool and wanted our help. At this time Xerox PARC was like the center of the universe for technology. Xerox was a huge corporation, with tons of money for R&D, and because the Silicon Valley revolution hadn’t happened yet, there wasn’t a lot of competition from tech start-ups. Xerox PARC had the smartest, most forward-thinking scientists and researchers, and new patents spewed out of them every year like they were coming out of a fire hose.
Baker Roshi explained to Bryan that his scientist friend needed me to come play some piece of new technological equipment. “Are you both U.S. citizens?” he asked. “Do you have your passports? You’ll need them to get in.” Luckily we did have them, since the Headhunters were going abroad on tour as soon as we finished the record. But what was this all about?
Bryan called and told me what was up, and the next morning we made our way to the Xerox PARC building at the Stanford Research Park. The first thing they asked us to do was sign a nondisclosure agreement. This wasn’t too unusual, except for the length of time it covered: We had to promise not to reveal what we were about to see for five full years. I mean, whatever we were about to experience, it was serious business. Bryan and I handed over our passports and signed a bunch of paperwork, and finally we were taken into a small conference room.
A guy about my age came in to greet us, and he introduced himself as Alan Kay. “I’m sure you’re wondering what this is about,” he said. “We’ve created a personal computer.”
His invention was called the Dynabook, and it was a tablet-size computer, which was completely unheard of then. A couple of other “personal computers” had been released in 1975, including the Altair 8800 and the IBM 5100, which was billed as a “portable computer,” though I’m not sure who actually considered it portable, since it weighed fifty-five pounds.
Alan was trying to perfect certain elements—what we’d now call applications—of the Dynabook. He told us he wanted to show us a few, and that he needed my help for one in particular that had to do with music. He also said that Bryan and I would see all of this separately, because the researchers wanted us each to have our own experience and reactions to it.
Well, I couldn’t wait to see what this “personal computer” looked like, especially if it had a musical application. Alan led me through a labyrinth of hallways and into a dark room with several lighted workstations. He explained what each one did: One was for painting, one for writing, one for animating. And one was for a synthesizer-type application that you could use to play previously recorded sounds.
For this application the scientists had gotten recordings of each instrument in the London Philharmonic playing every note on the scale. The computer used a prototype version of a sampling keyboard, so you could choose which instrument it would play and then play those notes by pressing the keys. That was really cool, but not nearly as cool as what Alan showed me next.
Because it was a computer and had a hard drive, the Dynabook could also record what I’d just played—and then play it back for me. I had never seen anything like that before, and it was immediately obvious how that capability would change how music was made forever. I had never seen digital audio before, only tapes. The idea that this little box could automatically remember and then instantly play back anything I put into it was mind-boggling.
I thought about Pat Gleeson, furiously plugging all those patch cords into the synthesizer to create sounds from scratch. And about having to physically loop tape backward to get the drum sound I wanted for Death Wish. And about all those hours spent in production, when engineers used a razor blade to cut tape and then splice it back together, worrying that the blade might slip a millimeter in the wrong direction. This invention was going to change absolutely everything about how music was created. And I couldn’t tell anyone about it—for five years!
After Bryan and I each gave the researchers our thoughts on the Dynabook, they brought us back together in the conference room. Alan started telling us about how he expected this technology to evolve, and it was like hearing something out of science fiction. He talked about portable devices, running on batteries, using wireless connectivity, with far larger memory than the sixty-four kilobytes of RAM that came with the IBM 5100. And Alan had actually invented the Dynabook as an educational tool for kids, so he was aiming for all this new technology to be simple enough for a four-year-old to use.
What we had just seen was, in a sense, the first iPad. Alan Kay was one of the pioneers of both object-oriented programming and the graphical user interface and went on to work with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple in the 1980s. He really is one of the fathers of modern-day computing, and I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to see some of his inventions in their early stages.
In the spring of 1976 David Rubinson got a call from the founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, George Wein. I had played that festival many times over the years, and George wanted to book the Headhunters for the next one, in June. I was happy to do it, but David had another idea.
“You know,” he said, “maybe it’s time not to be so accessible to promoters. You have a hit record now. We should be a little more exclusive.” Since Head Hunters came out, we’d been playing bigger arenas, not only in the United States but also in Japan and Europe, which have really devoted jazz audiences. We had attained a new level of success, but Da
vid knew George would probably offer us the same fee we’d always gotten to play the festival. David felt that if we agreed to play Newport again, just as we always had, we’d be taken for granted not only by George but by the audience as well.
But David also knew it wasn’t a good idea to just turn down an important jazz impresario like George Wein. So he came up with an idea. “Let’s make a proposal that George will never agree to,” David said. “That way we’re not the ones saying no. He is.”
David knew that George had wanted to feature a tribute to Miles Davis for that year’s festival, but that after some hemming and hawing, Miles had decided he didn’t want to do it. So David called George and said, “Why not do a Herbie Hancock retrospective?” He proposed covering the three major phases of my career: the Miles Davis Quintet, Mwandishi, and the Headhunters.
George was bound to say no to that. He’d never done retrospectives on any jazz artists before, not Duke Ellington or John Coltrane or Charlie Parker or Miles, so why would he agree to do one for me? I was still in my thirties, so my body of work wasn’t nearly as expansive as that of many other artists.
The only problem was, George said yes. He got really excited, especially about the idea of having three separate bands appear at the retrospective. The first would be a reunion of the Miles Davis Quintet, the second would be a reunion of Mwandishi, and the third would be the Headhunters. These three bands were so different, it would be a feat just to get them onstage, with all their different lineups, instrumentation, and styles.
I knew we could get the guys from Mwandishi, and of course the Headhunters were ready to play. But the question was, would Miles agree to participate? I decided to ask him first, before the other guys in the quintet, knowing that if he consented, this reunion would be a truly incredible night of jazz for everybody involved.
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