But David wasn’t the only one who had doubts. One day in the studio I played a couple of tracks for Bryan Bell. Bryan and I were coming to the end of our partnership, too, but he was still working with me as we were recording Future Shock.
When Bryan listened to the tracks, he said, “You know, Herbie, your fans might not like this.”
I just shook my head, suddenly feeling very tired. “Bryan,” I said, “I am so over this, I can’t even tell you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Listen, my mother is still mad that I left the symphony!” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “When I stopped playing classical music and went to jazz, I got crap for it. When I left jazz to do space music, I got crap for it. When I left space music to do funk, I got crap for it. And when I left funk to do what I’m doing now, I’m still getting crap for it.
“Everybody else is so concerned about what I’m doing, but I’m not doing it for them,” I told him. “I’m doing this because I have to do this. If the fans come, great! If they don’t come, it doesn’t matter, because I have to do this—because I want to do this.”
Twenty years had passed since I joined Miles Davis’s quintet, and if I had spent my time paying attention to what other people wanted me to do, I would never have explored any other styles of music. Why was it so difficult for people to believe that a musician might want to venture into new music from an artistic standpoint rather than a financial one? I’m not saying I didn’t want my records to sell—of course I did! I wanted my music to reach as many people as possible. But the difference is, I never chose what kind of music to make strictly for the goal of maximizing sales. I made the music my heart led me to make—and some records sold millions of copies, while some sold very few.
When we finished Future Shock, David Rubinson took it to the Columbia marketing executives. By now David was on board with the record, which was fortunate, because he knew he was going into the lion’s den again. He had done this so many times, with so many of my records, and the response had often been the same: confusion and consternation. But was there a chance that this time the New York−based execs might see that this was an exciting new direction for music?
Here’s how David describes the meeting:
Whenever we delivered a new record, I’d go to New York, assemble twenty people, have coffee and sandwiches, and play it loud. But this time the music was too revolutionary, so I played it for six people—the people who ran the marketing for Columbia.
It was on a cassette tape, and the first tune was “Rockit.” It starts with that whicka whicka whiiiiicka of scratching—and as soon as that came on, one guy actually reached over and turned off the tape! “This is going to alienate all of Herbie’s fans,” the guy said. “This is going to kill his career.”
I literally went to his side of the desk, opened the door, and threw him out of the room. I couldn’t take it anymore. Tony Meilandt was sitting there, and the room just erupted—it was bedlam! I said, “Anybody else want to leave?” And then I played them the rest of the tape.
According to David, Columbia came very close to refusing to release Future Shock. They never said that to me, but they definitely didn’t put it high on their priority list for marketing—and in fact, they declined to provide a budget for making a music video, which was becoming a cornerstone of how songs got promoted. MTV had launched in the summer of 1981, and millions of people were tuning in to watch videos of the latest songs. But Columbia told us that if we wanted to make a video, we were on our own.
I had never done a music video before, but Tony Meilandt told me, “We need to make a great one.” He absolutely loved “Rockit,” and he believed it was going to be a big hit.
“Okay,” I said. “So where do we start?” Tony told me about two guys who were making some of the most popular music videos on MTV, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. Godley and Creme were English musicians who’d gotten their start in the rock band 10cc. In 1979, even before MTV, they’d started making music videos, first for their own songs and then for other artists.
“Which ones are theirs?” I asked Tony.
“They made two for the Police,” he told me. “‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’ and ‘Every Breath You Take.’”
“Those are my two favorite videos!” I said. And it was true. I’d only recently started watching MTV after Jessica, who was now thirteen, turned me on to it. I mostly watched it to keep up with what was happening in rock and roll, which was a genre I didn’t follow much otherwise. Music videos were in their infancy, so a lot of them were pretty rudimentary, but I had noticed that the Police were putting out visually sophisticated, really engaging videos.
If Godley and Creme were the guys behind those videos, then they were the guys I wanted. I asked Tony to send them a copy of “Rockit,” and if they were into it, I would pay their fee myself. Fortunately they loved the song—but there was one more conversation we needed to have before I could set them loose to work their magic.
MTV had been on the air for nearly two years by that time, and people had noticed one glaring fact: The channel almost never showed any videos by nonwhite acts. In the year or so I had been watching the channel, the only video I’d seen by a black artist was Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue.” Years later some of MTV’s early executives would say that the reason they didn’t air videos by black artists was that the channel was based on Top 40 radio, which was almost all white acts back then. But whatever the reason, it was clear that, for a black artist, getting on MTV wouldn’t be easy.
So I called Kevin Godley. “Listen,” I said, “you have free rein to do whatever you want on this video. But I have just one request. I don’t want it to look like a ‘black guy’ video. I want it to look like something that could have been made by Duran Duran or the Police.” I knew that if we could get “Rockit” onto MTV, the song would find a whole new audience. And while I was never willing to tailor my music in a certain way just to enhance sales, I honestly didn’t care what the video looked like, as long as it was brilliant. I wanted Godley and Creme to do whatever they needed to do to get it on MTV.
The guys said they understood, and they got to work. A couple of weeks later Godley called me.
“Lol and I just went to this exhibition of kinetic art,” he told me. “And we saw these really cool robotic figures. We thought something like that might be interesting for your video.”
“Great!” I said. “Whatever you think works, you have my approval.” I think they thought I’d want to be more involved, but I didn’t know the first thing about making a music video, so I was happy to leave it entirely up to them. “I’m a musician, so I make the music. You’re the video artist, so you make the video,” I told them. “I trust you guys.”
So they forged ahead, shot a little footage of me, and about a month later Tony Meilandt and I flew to London to see the finished product. We all went into a screening room, the lights dimmed, and up on screen I saw a two-story housing block, then a close-up of bottles of milk on a front step . . . and then the madness started. Crazy dancing robot legs! A giant robot bird! Headless mannequins, interspersed with clips of my hands playing the synthesizer, and camera work that shook back and forth with every whicka whicka whicka of the scratching.
And honestly, as I sat there watching, I had no idea what to think. I’d never seen anything quite like this video, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Meanwhile, Tony, who was sitting beside me, was flipping out. “This is brilliant! This is so fucking brilliant!” he kept saying. I laughed and said, “It is? Are you sure?” I mean, I hoped it was, but I really didn’t know. Something about the video just kind of eluded me.
“Let’s take it to Columbia and show them!” Tony said. So after the screening, we took the video to Columbia Records’ London office. And when we showed it to them, they flipped out, too—there were a lot of young people in the room, and they were g
oing nuts, congratulating us, slapping me on the back. “This is gonna be huge!” one guy said. I just smiled.
I wish I could say that I knew immediately how great that video was. I didn’t dislike it, but I wasn’t really enamored of it. I didn’t know where to put it in my mind—which is, I later realized, probably how some people felt about my more avant-garde music. Everybody was so excited that I felt a little stupid, like I wasn’t getting something. I could only hope that if the video did get picked up by MTV, the response from viewers would be just as rapturous.
I had steeled myself for the possibility that MTV wouldn’t accept it, but when we sent the video over, they aired it right away. I’m not sure if they made that decision because the video was of robots rather than me, or because MTV was now adding videos by Michael Jackson and other black artists into their rotation. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter, because the result was the same. “Rockit” went from light rotation immediately into heavy rotation, and it ultimately became one of the highest-rated music videos of all time.
People still congratulate me on that video, giving me credit for a piece of visual art whose creation I had little to do with. All I did was say yes to Godley and Creme, and to Jim Whiting, the artist who created the robots. This was a trait I’d learned from playing jazz and honed through Buddhism. When I played with Miles Davis, he always trusted us to do what he’d hired us to do, allowing us to tap into our own creative skills. In letting Godley and Creme do the same thing, we all benefited.
When it came time for the tour, I knew I’d have to put together a very different kind of band. We had to figure out how to reproduce the sounds of Future Shock on the road, so Tony and I started fiddling with different onstage configurations.
Like all turntablists then, DST used vinyl LPs for scratching and for playing samples. He needed a lot of different records to make those sounds, and when we recorded in a studio, he could take his time finding what he needed. But playing live was a completely different beast—he didn’t have enough time to find and switch the records on and off the turntables. I was thinking about how to make the process more efficient, and it suddenly occurred to me that instead of having a dozen records with all the different songs DST needed, we could put all those songs and snippets on a single vinyl record.
Tony thought that would work, so we compiled a dozen or so songs onto one tape and then used that to press about twenty-five vinyl copies. We needed those extras so that when copies broke, as vinyl records inevitably do, we’d have enough to get us through the entire tour. Nobody presses just twenty-five copies of a record, of course—so if any of those still survive from that tour, they would be collectors’ items today. I don’t have one, and I have no idea whether any of them still exist.
We had a few other firsts on that tour, too. DST saw that I had various pedals attached to my equipment—a wah-wah pedal, an Echoplex, and an expression pedal for my Clavinet—and he decided it would be cool to attach those to his turntable, too. He used them during the shows to create effects that no other turntablist had. He also got wireless headphones with a little antenna, which was then new technology, so he could hear his turntables wirelessly while in the middle of the band onstage.
We designed the show specifically so we could play the record live, right up to the solos. We had two drummers, one on a regular drum set and one on electronic drums. We also brought in a second keyboard player, Jeff Bova, who was a sound designer for the album. Somehow, without Bryan Bell, who’d just left to work with Carlos Santana, we managed to get this raft of new gear and new players ready, and we took the whole circus on the road to venues across the United States. I hadn’t felt like such a rock star onstage since Head Hunters came out ten years earlier. But the excitement was really only beginning.
In February of 1984 I was invited to play at the Grammy Awards. “Rockit” was nominated for Best R&B Instrumental Performance, and the song had become a smash hit since its release the summer before. Over eight months “Rockit” had become more than just a single; people were calling it the herald of a new musical style, hip-hop. And because of heavy airplay on MTV, it had been able to cross the color barrier, attracting both black and white audiences.
For the Grammys performance we decided to use Jim Whiting’s robots onstage. We had the whole band, with DST at his double turntable and me out front with my clavitar—a combination synthesizer, keyboard, and guitar—and we were surrounded by robots! We had three dancing-legs robots suspended above the stage and a few others in various poses—sitting in an armchair, lying on a bed—all of them doing repetitive mechanical moves, just like in the video. I was rocking out with my clavitar, just jamming, when about halfway through the song . . . four of the robots really came to life.
The four robots, who were actually dancers, got up and moved to center stage—and everybody in the audience jumped to their feet, screaming. The robots started popping and moonwalking, and when two of them began break dancing, it was absolute mayhem. I looked out into the audience and saw Michael Jackson grooving along, in his military jacket with epaulets, and Brooke Shields beside him in a white dress, and their friend Emmanuel Lewis, who was just thirteen then and starring in the sitcom Webster. Everywhere I looked there were musicians and artists and actors dancing and clapping their hands.
I loved every minute of it. Those robots turning human was some seriously hip shit, and when we finished, the crowd gave us a standing ovation for what felt like forever. I won my first Grammy that night, but if I had to choose between the two moments, I’d take that exhilarating performance. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.
Later that year MTV held its first MTV Video Music Awards. “Rockit” was nominated for eight awards and won five, the most by any song that night. (Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was next, with three.) It was another huge night for “Rockit,” whose impact was surpassing anything I could have imagined. Around that same time I heard about a break-dance contest in New York City, where twenty-five groups were competing, using any song they wanted. Well, twenty-four of them chose “Rockit.” So people had to sit through the song twenty-four times! I really love the song, but that’s a show I’m glad to have missed.
Future Shock would go on to become the fourth-best-selling jazz record in history, and the success of “Rockit” marked the beginnings of hip-hop as a mainstream musical style. And the ironic thing is, to this day I still really don’t know much about hip-hop music. I’m happy to have helped open that door, but so much of the credit has to go to Tony Meilandt, Bill Laswell, Michael Beinhorn, Kevin Godley, Lol Creme, Jim Whiting, and DST (now DXT). I just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right people, and I opened myself up to what emerged.
But as fantastic as everything was going, I also had a scare during the “Rockit” period—a warning that maybe I was pushing myself too hard.
One afternoon, as I was walking down a flight of steps at my house, I started to feel strange. My heart was beating like crazy, and I felt dizzy and sick in a way I’d never felt before. I started freaking out, and I called to Gigi, telling her I needed help. I thought maybe I was having a heart attack.
We called a doctor out to the house, and he checked my vital signs. He asked whether there was any reason I might be feeling this way, and I told him the truth. “I might have done too much cocaine,” I said. He told me to lie in bed and try to relax, which of course was impossible in the state I was in. I had overdone it, and now I was really scared, because this had never happened to me before.
In the music scene in L.A. and New York, snorting coke was just about as common as drinking. You could find it set out on people’s coffee tables like an appetizer, and it was freely available in bars and clubs. Most musicians didn’t see cocaine as a big deal—certainly nothing like heroin, which was far more addictive and had destroyed some great musicians’ lives, some of whom died from an overdose or had an early death from its toll
on the body.
I never did a lot of coke, but I did do it occasionally in moderate amounts, mostly for fun but sometimes when I had to stay awake to write music. This particular time I’d done more than usual over the last couple of days because I had a big deadline coming up. For the first time since Death Wish I had gotten a job writing music for a film: Norman Jewison’s A Soldier’s Story.
Just as with The Spook Who Sat by the Door and Death Wish, I didn’t have much time to write the music for A Soldier’s Story. I had procrastinated, and now I was really feeling the pressure to create something great. Quincy Jones had recommended me for this job, and Norman Jewison was one of the most accomplished directors in Hollywood, having directed films like Fiddler on the Roof, . . . And Justice for All, and The Thomas Crown Affair. So I really didn’t want to screw this up.
I spent hours upon hours in my home studio, but the music just wasn’t coming out. It felt like the well had run dry, and I was unbelievably frustrated. As the deadline crept closer I snorted some coke in the wee hours to keep me awake. I didn’t have time to sleep! I had to keep going, keep going . . . but now, walking down that flight of steps, my body was rebelling.
I was supposed to go to the studio to record that day, but there was no way I could do it. After seeing the doctor, I had to call and let the producers know—and of course that’s the last thing movie people want to hear. Time is money, and every day that production activities get postponed is a day that adds to the budget. I couldn’t believe I had gotten myself into this state, but somehow, later that day, I managed to pull myself together enough to get some work done. But I was a mess, and other people on the movie knew it.
When I’d meet with Norman Jewison or the music editor, Else Blangsted, I’m sure they could tell I was wired. I was leaning on coke to keep me awake, but the problem was, simply staying awake wasn’t actually helping me get the work done. When I was doing coke, I wasn’t really myself—I wasn’t whole, so I couldn’t write music. In trying to fix my problem, I was actually perpetuating it.
Herbie Hancock Page 25