Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  Except . . . Oh, no! I had completely forgotten that Gigi was planning a big party for me on that day. It was a Sunday, and she had pulled out all the stops, inviting a huge crowd of people to celebrate my forty-first birthday. Quincy Jones was coming, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Billy Dee Williams, and all my family and tons of musicians I’d played with over the years. Gigi had been organizing this event for months, and before Bryan and I left, she’d said, “Have fun, Herbie, but you’d better be back by Sunday.”

  I couldn’t believe it. There was nothing I wanted to do more than watch the first space shuttle launch that day. I didn’t care about celebrating my birthday! But I did care about Gigi, and I knew she’d be hurt if I didn’t come home. More important, I knew she’d be angry, and she might take my head off. So reluctantly I flew back to L.A. on Saturday, so I’d be there for the party.

  On Sunday the twelfth I turned on the TV and watched the launch, and I just felt sick to my stomach. But I also chanted that morning, and I looked for a way to find peace with the fact that I’d missed seeing it in person. This almost worked until I was actually at the party and I made the mistake of telling a few people I’d flown home rather than staying to watch the launch. “What the hell are you doing here?” my friends asked me. “Are you insane?” I felt about two inches tall. As grateful as I was to Gigi for loving me enough to have thrown me a wonderful party, I just couldn’t get over missing that launch.

  The shuttle was scheduled to be in orbit for two days, then land at Edwards Air Force Base in central California. Of course, nobody knew for sure what would actually happen when it reentered the atmosphere and landed, because this was the first time it had ever been tried. The day after the launch Bryan and I were in the recording studio, busy pretending we didn’t mind the fact that we’d missed it, when all of a sudden I said, “Do you think those passes might work to get us in for the landing?” All of a sudden we were like a couple of kids again, hurrying to make plans to get to Edwards on April 14.

  Keith Lofstrom was there for the landing, too, and he invited us to sit in the seats where members of his space club, L5, were sitting. But I walked up to a guard and said, “I’m Herbie Hancock, with Columbia”—Columbia Records, not Columbia TV and radio, but he didn’t know that! Presumably thinking I was a reporter, the guard escorted us right down to the front row. After feeling so disappointed at missing the launch, I was really happy to see the landing, which happened as smooth as silk, right in front of me.

  In late 1981, I noticed something strange going on with my left hand. My pinky finger was swelling up at the joint between my finger and palm, and it hurt whenever I’d hit the keys on the piano. For a while I tried to ignore it, but soon the swelling and pain were bad enough that I had to get it checked out because it was affecting my playing.

  I went to an orthopedic hand specialist named Dr. Charles Lane, who I’d been told was the best in the business. As he poked and prodded my hand, he said, “It looks like you have a tumor in your finger.” Well, that certainly got my attention. I was forty-one at the time, and cancer had been just about the furthest thing from my mind. “It doesn’t act like a malignancy,” Dr. Lane continued. “But we’ll need to remove it surgically anyway, and then I’ll have it examined.”

  Of all the places on a piano player’s body where a tumor might appear, the finger is pretty much the worst option. While it might not be a big deal if you lose a little bit of nerve sensitivity in another part of the body, if you lose it in your fingers it can seriously hinder your playing ability.

  I knew Dr. Lane was a very skilled surgeon, but it would be no easy feat to cut a tumor out of my little finger without damaging the nerves. As he explained to me, nerves also have tiny hairlike extensions that are numerous and difficult to see, and it was inevitable that he’d end up damaging or removing some of them during the process. The worry was that the damage would be extensive enough that the feeling in my finger would be impaired.

  We scheduled the surgery to take place a couple of days later, and I began spending hours chanting in preparation. With the help of two friends, Susie Sempers and Kathy Lucien, I even chanted for ten hours straight in one stretch, with just a five-minute break every hour. Having Susie and Kathy chant with me helped give me strength, and when it came time for the procedure, I felt ready.

  Dr. Lane had explained that this was an outpatient surgery, which meant I’d have just a local anesthesia and be awake the whole time. “Can I watch?” I asked him, half joking. I thought it would be interesting to see the process, but he just smiled and said, “No, Herbie. Because if you flinch at anything, you could lose the finger.” The nurse put up a partition so I couldn’t see what he was doing, and she gave me a sedative, which settled me. The ten hours of chanting made me feel confident and even, oddly, lighthearted, and before I knew it the procedure was over.

  Normally, Dr. Lane would slice the skin down the finger in a straight line right across the middle of the joints—but because he was concerned that the healing process at the joints might make it difficult and painful to bend my finger to play the piano, he decided that day to do it a different way. He cut a zigzag W-like pattern from the top of my palm up through my little finger, the scalpel tracing a path through the edge rather than the center of each joint.

  When the surgery was finished, he told me, “Herbie, I think this is the best of this type of procedure I’ve ever done.” He said he’d taken out the tumor without too much nerve damage and would send it right away for a biopsy. In the meantime, he told me, “Sometime during the week, you should regain feeling in the finger.” The nurse dressed my hand and I went home.

  As he predicted, the tumor turned out to be benign, which was, of course, a huge relief. But a week after the surgery I still had no feeling in my little finger. I decided to give it more time, but at the end of the second week I still couldn’t feel anything. Now I was getting really concerned. I called Dr. Lane and asked him, “When will the feeling come back?” He explained that while normally the feeling would have come back already, we still had every reason to believe it would—though he couldn’t say when that might happen. “It’s not within the realm of science for me to make that prediction,” he said.

  My finger still had the dressing on to protect it, so I really couldn’t do anything but wait and chant. By the end of the third week, when it still had no feeling, I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. I carefully peeled off the dressing and sat down at the piano. I knew my little finger wasn’t working—it wasn’t even moving. I thought, What if it never wakes up? What will it feel like to play with only nine fingers?

  Very gently, I started to play. And then something really strange happened. My ring finger started sliding over to play the notes my little finger would normally play! I wasn’t doing this consciously—my ring finger just naturally compensated by playing the lower notes. It was an amazing thing to witness, but it didn’t change the upsetting fact that my finger still wouldn’t work.

  At that moment I knew I needed to prepare myself for the possibility that I would never play with all ten fingers again. This was a sobering thought, but now I had my Actual Proof that I could do it. I had a gig coming up about a week later, the first since my surgery, so I decided to practice gently and play, even if I only had nine working fingers. I might as well get used to it.

  The gig was an unusual one, a concert organized by the well-known jazz writer Conrad Silvert. Conrad was in his early thirties, but he’d been diagnosed with testicular cancer and knew he had only a short time to live. One of his dreams was to organize a concert featuring some of the greatest jazz players in the world, and because so many players loved and respected Conrad, he was able to book an incredible group. The concert was scheduled for February 22, 1982, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, and the featured musicians included Jaco Pastorius, Tony Williams, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Wynton Marsalis, Pat Metheny, Sonny Rollins, and
Carlos Santana.

  The night before Conrad’s concert, I sat down at the piano for the rehearsal . . . and just then I felt a tiny tingling at the base of my finger. I actually gasped. I wondered whether I was just imagining the feeling, but as I started to play the tingling became stronger. I could finally use my little finger, and by the end of the song the complete feeling was back. I could hardly believe the irony—that my own cancer scare would find its ultimate resolution in playing for a friend who was fighting cancer.

  The concert the next night was amazing, with so many great musicians playing and the hall filled with emotion for Conrad. We played for three and a half hours, and by the end everybody was emotionally and physically spent. Conrad had given us all a rare and special night. He’d fulfilled his dream, and just a few weeks later he died at age thirty-four.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In February of 1982 David Rubinson had a heart attack.

  He was just thirty-nine at the time, and he’d always been healthy, so this came as a real shock. David had been working long days and nights, but he’d always done that without any problems. But now, after bypass surgery, it was clear that he needed to slow down. There was no way he could keep working in the studio the way he’d been doing, so for the first time since 1970 I took on another producer for my next record, Lite Me Up.

  Yet David’s health wasn’t the only reason our producing partnership needed to end. David had done amazing work with me over the years, staying with me every step of the way as my music morphed from spaced-out Mwandishi to funky Headhunters to the throwback sounds of V.S.O.P. Our collaboration had been incredibly fruitful. But as I began to contemplate new directions in the ’80s, our working relationship no longer felt productive.

  One problem was that David lived in San Francisco, while I was in L.A. This was pre−e-mail, pre-Skype, pre-everything except phones and faxes. And even though we had always worked at this distance, it was starting to wear on us. Too often, when we talked, we weren’t communicating as we’d been able to in the past. And this was doubly frustrating now, because although David had always been supportive of changes in my musical direction, now he was questioning where I was going. I was pushing even further into electronic music, writing songs with more of a disco and R&B feel to them, and David had reservations about some of it.

  In some ways, I did, too. I was forty-two now, and I knew better than to think that I had my finger on the pulse of new music. No matter how hip or connected a musician in his forties may feel, the truth is that cool new stuff usually comes from kids—teenagers and twenty-somethings. I didn’t have a lot of people of that age in my circle of friends, so I wanted to find a way to tap into the younger generation’s creativity.

  That’s when I met a guy named Tony Meilandt. Tony was the student concert producer at UC Berkeley, and he ran the Berkeley Jazz Festival. He was in his mid-twenties, very smart, and totally into music—especially jazz. When he moved down to L.A. after college, I knew I wanted to hook up with him. He was the kind of guy who could sniff out new music and new sounds, the people who were off the radar. He was young and hungry, and that was what I needed.

  I hired Tony to co-produce Lite Me Up, and from the get-go he and David Rubinson did not get along. Tony felt that David didn’t want him to get any credit, and David felt that Tony was a bad influence on my music and, to a certain extent, on me personally. This was the early ’80s, and cocaine was rampant in the music scene, but for some reason David thought that Tony was supplying me with coke, or that I had started doing more of it once he’d come around. Neither of those things was true, but David’s perception of the situation only added to the hostility between them.

  For Lite Me Up I collaborated with Heatwave’s Rod Temperton, who wrote most of the songs. I was excited to work with Rod, not only because he’s a great guy but because he was a great songwriter and had written some monster hits for other artists, including “Off the Wall,” “Thriller,” and “Rock with You” for Michael Jackson. We also got the amazing recording engineer George Massenburg to work with us, so I had really high hopes for the album. Somehow, though, it didn’t quite come together. I sang a couple of songs with vocoder, and even one without, but the record just didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped. Rod wrote great material, but I didn’t deliver it very well.

  For my next record I wanted to find a bold and unexpected sound. But what was next on the horizon? I asked Tony to keep his ear to the ground, and I also started poking around myself, talking to younger musicians. One afternoon Tony said to me, “You know, there’s a couple of guys in New York, Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn, who are doing some cutting-edge stuff.” I hadn’t heard of them, but Tony told me they worked as a team, under the name Material. Material had started in 1978 as a band, with Laswell on bass, Beinhorn on synthesizer, Martin Bisi as the engineer, and the fourteen-year-old whiz kid Fred Maher on drums. Now, in the early ’80s, Material was also collaborating with other artists, creating electronic backdrops and funky beats.

  New York had become the epicenter of a new genre of black music. In the city’s streets and playgrounds, especially in the Bronx, people were exploring spoken-word poetry and sharp, percussive beats, combining them in a new musical form called rap. In 1979 the Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight,” introducing this new style to a wider audience. But as a musical genre, rap was still in its infancy.

  “If you let those guys do something for your next record, even if it’s just on spec, I bet they’ll come up with something cool,” Tony told me. I thought that was a great idea, so Tony called them up and they said they’d prepare two song ideas for me, things they thought would be hip and new for my record. We agreed that they’d come out to L.A. the following week and show me what they’d been working on.

  In the meantime, I decided to ask my godson, Krishna Booker, what he was listening to. Krishna’s dad, Walter, was a jazz bassist with Cannonball Adderley’s band, and Wayne Shorter was his uncle, so Krishna had grown up around jazz, but I knew he was into other genres of music, too. “Can you make a tape for me?” I asked him. “Just give me some stuff that you think I should be aware of, that younger people are listening to right now.”

  Two days later Krishna brought me a cassette. I couldn’t wait to hear it, so I popped it right into a tape deck in my studio and sat back to listen. I don’t remember everything that was on the tape, but one thing really struck me: a song called “Buffalo Gals” by the English artist Malcolm McLaren, the former manager of the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols. McLaren had collaborated with a pair of DJs who called themselves the World’s Famous Supreme Team, and on the record they created a rhythm by moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable, making a scratching sound with the needle.

  Normally you’d never want to have a needle scratching across a vinyl record, because it just messes your record up. But this was fresh, the idea of creating a rhythm with that sound. Scratching sounded avant-garde, like the kinds of sound we were always seeking out during the Mwandishi days. Just as I had initially heard Buster’s sister chanting as a mesmerizing potential song rhythm, now, ten years later, the scratching on “Buffalo Gals” affected me the same way.

  Right then I knew I wanted to use scratching on my next record. Now I just had to wait and see what Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn were bringing me from New York, and hope that it sounded as innovative as what Malcolm McLaren was doing.

  When Laswell and Beinhorn arrived, we settled into my home studio and I said, “All right, let’s hear it.” Laswell played the tape—and, wouldn’t you know it, the sound of scratching started coming out of my speakers. I clapped my hands and said, “Yes! This is exactly what I want to do!” The guys had recorded an idea for a direction with scratching, drums, and a cool bass line. They’d already laid down the perfect foundation of a new song.

  Laswell played the second idea they’d brought, and although it didn’t have scratchin
g, it was every bit as fresh as the first one. I had a big smile on my face as I listened, and when the tape ended, I looked at Laswell and Beinhorn and said, “Let’s make a record together.”

  We used that first idea as a base for a new song, which we called “Rockit.” I started building other instrumentation around it, and then we brought in the hot young New York turntablist who’d been on Laswell and Beinhorn’s tape, DST, to add more of his scratching. What I didn’t realize was that guys like DST (who later changed his name to DXT, in honor of Malcolm X) had already honed skills far beyond mere scratching. A lot of the sounds on the album that resulted from that collaboration, which we called Future Shock, came from DST and his turntable—not synthesizers, which was what most people thought.

  This was a music revolution! Before Laswell, Beinhorn, and DST, I had been only dimly aware of what was happening in the Bronx. Now I was thrilled beyond words to be in the middle of it, working with guys who had skills I hadn’t even imagined before. This music was exciting and unpredictable, because scratching lets you change direction suddenly, cutting to another sound or groove. It was totally avant-garde but within the popular-music context. Exploring all these new possibilities made me feel more energized than I had in years.

  When we finished the first cut of “Rockit,” Tony and I took it to David Rubinson. We played it for him, and he made a face like he’d eaten a lemon.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “Do you really want to do this? Come on—you’re Herbie Hancock!” My mouth fell open. Here I thought this new direction was the hottest thing going in music, and I was lucky to be on board in its infancy. And David thought it was somehow . . . beneath me? I couldn’t even get my head around that. I was disappointed that David and I were so far apart now on our musical vision, primarily because even though he wasn’t producing my records anymore, he was still my manager—so I was really going to need him to support the new record.