by Paul Zollo
“Woman In Love (It’s Not Me)” is great.
Yeah, that was one of Mike’s. Those were his chords. And again it was where I wrote the tune and the words, but he had the chords. But we didn’t use his arrangement. As I remember it, we kind of hammered it out in the studio. And we used Duck Dunn playing that great, great bass part. Because his bass line was so good, we just went, ‘Let’s just sing over the bass line.’ And that’s really the verse. There’s not much more playing but a bass.
Why did you use Duck Dunn?
Because he’s just so damn good. [Laughs] I think maybe Ron had left. He left during that album. So I knew Duck. And he’d always been one of my musical heroes. I’m such a fan of Stax, and those records out of Memphis. And Booker T. and the MGs, I still just fall apart when I hear them. That’s my ultimate drummer, Al Jackson. And Duck Dunn on bass. And he’s a lovely guy, and he was nice enough to come play with us on that. He’s a great bass player. His bass line was so good, that we just had Stanley keeping time very quietly, and nothing else. And that kind of made the song. Then the chorus falls down, and it’s this big, huge thing.
That’s another one that we started doing live again. That we didn’t do for a decade or more. We started doing it in the last tour, and it really goes over big.
That bass line moves around the vocal and leaves the space for the singing, he was really basing it on your phrasing.
He played brilliantly. We did it live, and he’s playing to me singing and vice versa. So it was really something. It was a lot of fun to do it.
Years later, Nirvana came out with many songs that have a similar pattern—a soft verse with a chorus that just explodes. Which is exactly what you do in “A Woman In Love,” among other songs.
Yeah. It’s been done. It’s a good trick. It’s a good thing when you can make that work. It can really, move you. In a show a lot of times, it’s very effective to just suddenly bring a roar to a whisper. And it always moves the audience.
And it takes a great band to do it right.
[Laughs] I think so, yeah. Doing it wrong could be really awkward. [Laughs] “Something Big” is a great use of a title. “He put up with it for a little while, he was working on something big.”
Yeah, that’s like a little short story.
Was that fun to write?
Yeah. It was tremendous fun. Cause it was kind of a little movie. And it was one of my first attempts at making characters. So I got into it, and it was fun. “Speedball and the night clerk.”
You played electric piano on that one, with Benmont on organ. And it’s all based on your groove on the piano.
Yeah, I wrote it on piano, so I wound up doing that on the session, and played the electric piano. Which can happen, from time to time. If I wrote it on piano, I’ll often play the piano and Benmont will play the organ. I played it that way because the only way I knew it was on piano. I played it on a Wurlitzer electric.
Dylan said it was one of his favorite songs that you’ve written.
Yeah, he did tell me that. He also told me he liked “The Last DJ” a lot.
On “A Thing About You,” Mike said he loved the interplay of your two guitars.
That’s typical of us, how we would play live. How we would listen to each other, and fill in each other’s gaps. That’s just an instinctual thing we have from playing so long together. We’re really lucky to have Mike, because that’s a real precious thing, when you get two people who can play together and create a sound. And we always make a certain sound when we play together.
It reminds me of the Stones, the interplay of two electric guitars.
Yeah, it’s kind of like that. But I’m more of a rhythm player. I don’t play much lead. They let me play a bit. But I’m more concentrating on the rhythm guitar.
Which is kind of a lost art these days. I don’t really see a lot of people really working on playing the rhythm guitar. I really want to be good at playing the rhythm guitar. So we don’t really weave lines that much. It’s a chordal thing, and a voicing of chords. If I use a certain voicing, and he uses a certain voicing, it makes a sound. Like maybe he’s gonna play a barre chord and I’m gonna play an open chord. It’s just a natural thing that we do that creates this certain noise.
Is it just natural, or do you work it out?
We don’t really work it out. We just do it. And sometimes if I’ve got the solo, Mike will just say, ‘You should do it. You’ve got the gist of it.’
When you’re playing rhythm, do you generally play the lower root chords?
It depends on what sounds good.
Emmylou Harris recorded a version of the song with the band Southern Pacific. [On the album Southern Pacific—Greatest Hits.]
Yeah. I love Emmylou. Just hearing Emmylou sing one of my songs was a real thrill. And it was kind of cool to hear it in a country setting, because it was such a rock ‘n’ roll song. I was honored that she sang the song.
“Insider” is a cool title. Was that one you had before writing the song?
No. It came as I was writing, if I remember correctly. It just came out of the verse. I wrote that on my own at home. I remember spending a good day on it. And I was just knocked out with it when I got done. And Iovine was really knocked out with it. Extremely excited about it.
Did you tell him it was for Stevie Nicks?
Yeah. He asked for a song. He was going to produce [Stevie’s album, Bella Donna]. He wanted one desperately. I remember bringing it to him, and he said, ‘God, when I asked for a song, I didn’t expect this!’ And I was really attached to it. And it really hurt me when I did the track and the vocals. And I said, [softly] ‘Stevie, I can’t give you this.’ And she said, ‘Well, I can relate to that. I completely understand. I’ll take something else.’
Was there any thought of making “Insider” a single?
No, they always wanted something more upbeat for singles. Very rarely did they put out a ballad for a single. I don’t think ever. “Free Fallin’” was the first time, I think, that I ever had a ballad out for a single. And even then it was the third single from the album. They didn’t want to do it because they didn’t think anyone outside of Southern California would relate to it. And I said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they will.’
And you were right.
Yeah, I was, [Laughs]
Did you have the title of the album Hard Promises before the song, or did it come from the lyrics of “Insider”?
That came from the song. It was a stressful period; I was fighting a battle over the price of the LP.
And yet it showed your fans that you were one guy who cared more about them than making an extra buck per record.
I was young and idealistic. [Laughs]
You’re still idealistic, aren’t you?
Maybe not as much as when I was in my twenties. I try to remain idealistic.
“Nightwatchman,” which you wrote with Mike, is another story song.
That was in the days when it had come to the point of living with security guards. I found that kind of disgusting and amusing at the same time. [Laughs] That I was forced to live with someone guarding the house and the door. This guy used to sit outside of the door in a little cage. Like a little security gate between that and the front door. And he sat in this cage every night. It was cold as hell out there. It was the wintertime and I used to look out the window at him, and I’d feel really bad that there was this guy sitting out there, guarding the door.
I think that was the inspiration for the song. That particular guy would show up right about dark, and go home at dawn. And I was always up all night. So I would wind up going out there and talking with him a lot. [Laughs] Really, he was the only other person awake in the house. So I think he inspired the song.
On “Nightwatchman” you thank Bugs for his “wild dog piano” playing.
I think there’s a piano note in the middle. There’s a break, and a drum thing, right before the lick comes back. And there’s a piano note. I think Bugs hit that note
because no one else could. We were all busy with other things, so we had him hit that note on the piano. He’s always been handy. [Laughs]
There’s a cool, spidery guitar part on that song.
Yeah, that’s Mike. It’s a great track. There’s good bass on that track, too. Ron Blair played a really good bass part.
It’s got some great lines. I like, “Yeah I got a permit to wear this .38/But listen, my life’s worth more than the minimum wage.”
Well, that’s what I used to say to the guy, ‘You know, if somebody comes here, are you gonna shoot them?’ [Laughs] Cause he had a gun. I’d ask him, ‘Would you get into a firefight with somebody here? For what we’re paying you?’ [Laughs]
And he’d say [in a low voice], ‘Well, you know, it’s my job, you know, I take my job seriously.’
I said, ‘Well, you know, I hope you never have to shoot a teenage girl…’ [Laughs] It seemed like overkill to me.
That one has two choruses. The words change in the chorus, which is something you do from time to time.
Sometimes it you do that, it can give you a really nice build. Even a slight change can really lift things all of a sudden. It’s a good thing. I wish I did it more often, now that you mention it. It’s an old songwriter trick. But it will raise things up. It’s almost like a key change.
Speaking of key changes, that’s not something you do very often, if at all. They can tend to sound pretty corny.
It’s very hard to do and not sound corny. It can be done, but it’s very hard to do and not sound silly. There’s a Buddy Holly song I heard the other day, “True Love Ways” that Peter & Gordon did. And there’s a key change in that, and I thought they did it really clever. They did it as the band stopped, and then sang the punch line, and went up a key. So it worked. But we don’t do that much. Because it’s just like you said, it can sound very corny.
“Kings Road”?
That was a direct result of going to England, and going down to Kings Road in London. We’d always go there every time we went to London, because that was where all the crazy clothes were. You could buy great clothes there. Maybe what Carnaby Street was in the Sixties. This was where all the giant green mohawks were. This was where people paraded, the punks were all out, and that was a fairly new thing then. It was kind of like a carnival. You could walk down the road and just see all kinds of things. Vendors. I remember we used to go buy snakeskin boots, and things that you just didn’t see here. It’s just kind of a light-hearted song.
The song “Letting You Go” has a great melody.
I remember writing that. I wrote it on my Gibson Dove guitar. I was trying to do a Buddy Holly kind of thing. I do remember that lick at the top. That wasn’t on the record. It was a very last-minute afterthought. We’d already mixed the record. So what we did was make a two-track stereo copy of the master. And as we made the copy, we actually recorded the lick onto the two-track copy as it was going down. We’ve never done that again. It was very unusual.
On “Letting You Go” it shows what a large vocal range you have. It goes from very low in your register to very high.
I only realized that recently. Someone was talking about another singer and said they only have two octaves. And I wondered how many I have. And I sat down at the piano and realized I have quite a few. [Goes to piano, and sings four octaves.] I probably have four.
That’s exceptional. Most people have about two.
Yeah, it’s nice to be fifty-four and still be able to do that. I find that it’s a trick. Maybe you can hit the note, but how much tone can you hit it with? So with some keys I notice that I get up high, but I’m losing tone. It all depends on the key the song is in. Each song is a little different.
And you sing those high notes in your chest voice, instead of going into falsetto. Which is not easy to do.
Yeah. I did a lot of harmony singing when I was coming up. I used to sing a lot of high harmonies in the band. In garage groups. And I think that helped me quite a bit. I still do a lot of the harmonies on the records.
How about “The Criminal Kind”? It’s based on a nice guitar riff.
Yeah, that was Mike’s riff. It was a good bit of filler, really. It was okay. Just a little blues.
It’s got intense lyrics on the bridge, “That little girl you used to know/she don’t come around no more/Now she ain’t there to watch the door/She don’t wanna die in no linquor store…” You also have, “They’re calling you a sickness, disease of the mind.”
[Laughs] I forgot that. That’s probably better than I remember it. I think it was inspired by Vietnam veterans, who had been back for quite awhile, but they got no respect at all. And I had been reading this thing about how they had been shoved over to one side. Agent Orange had made them all sick, and the veterans’ hospitals weren’t treating them. I think that inspired that line, and probably a lot of the song. “Dog tags on the mirror, hanging down on a chain.” That was that, Vietnam vets.
I love “You Can Still Change Your Mind.” which you wrote with Mike. It’s a beautiful ballad.
Yeah, really mostly his. He wrote that whole arrangement. I think I might have made a slight adjustment in it to bring the bridge back again. I did write the melody and the words. But it’s really his baby. It’s a great piece of music, and it would have to be laid at his door.
You called it “Mike’s tribute to Brain Wilson.”
I thought it sounded like something that could have been in the Beach Boys’
catalogue somewhere. Very different from what we normally do. But that whole album [Hard Promises], we were trying to find some different ground. We didn’t want to make Damn The Torpedoes again. We were experimenting with different things. And that was one thing he played me that I felt was really different.
“You Can Still Change Your Mind” has Stevie Nicks on it as well, singing with Sharon Ceylani.
They just happened to be there that day. And [Stevie] came over and said, ‘Hey, let me just have one shot on the mike. I’ve got an idea.’ And I guess she and Sharon had been singing it over in the corner of the control booth. And I let her have one pass. [Laughs] And we loved it.
I understand you wanted it to be a single.
That was when I was realizing a ballad couldn’t be a single. And they were probably right, because there’s not a lot of rhythm to it. But I just thought it was so beautiful, it would have sounded great on the radio. But I was probably wrong I don’t know if it’s a single. It doesn’t really have a beat. [Laughs]
You know, a lot of our best work isn’t on the Greatest Hits album. A lot of our singles, which were really successful singles, weren’t the best songs from that album. But you’re just grateful that you have hits. But I don’t know if our best work has always been the single.
I would agree. You have many songs that could have been hits, but weren’t released as singles.
Yeah. When I did it, I always thought the song “You And Me” from The Last DJ was a smash single. And they never released it. But I still think that song could be a hit song. So you never know. You’ve got to deal with that business side a lot. Which can be [Laughs] very disappointing in some ways because they’re looking at it from a whole different place. They’re not looking at it in an artistic way, they’re looking at it as something which fills the bill.
Have you ever purposely written a song to be a single?
I did, when I did “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” with Dave Stewart. We set out to write a hit. ‘Let’s write a hit song. And make a really interesting single.’ And we worked for an entire month on it. And we succeeded. But I haven’t done that very much. I think it would intimidate me a little bit to do that.
Did you ever release a single that didn’t become a hit?
There must be. Not many. They usually found some level of success. “Room At The Top.” I didn’t think it would be a hit. I think they chose the wrong song. It’s pretty down. There was another one—“All Mixed Up,” which didn’t hit at all.
&
nbsp; long after dark. 1982
Long After Dark starts with “A One Story Town.” Is L.A. the one-story town?
Well, no, it could be L.A. or it could be a small town. I thought it was kind of a play on words where you could have a town where you didn’t get above one story. Literally. Or it just had one story! [Laughs] That was what intrigued me about the title. I don’t think it was specifically about L.A.
It has a cool bass line in it, which anchors the whole track.
Yeah. I remember liking that when we did it a lot. Nice organ, too.
“You Got Lucky” was based on a track by Mike. Do you remember writing that?
I know when we recorded it, we made a drum loop, and again, we played to the loop. And that created a certain groove. I think Stanley actually played his drums again, with the loop going. So by pulling it out here and there, it created a certain feel, a certain groove.
Benmont was really angry about the synthesizer. It was one of the only times we’ve used a synthesizer. He didn’t want to do it. We don’t ever really use the synthesizer much. But I don’t see them as taboo. I don’t see anything as taboo. I think if it’s getting the job done, it’s okay with me. But he begrudgingly played it. And I’m glad he did, because it was a hit record. [Laughs]
You’ve said it’s not one of your favorites.
Not really. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s nice. It was a hit single for us. It’s a popular one. It’s not about a lot. It’s just kind of a love song. But it doesn’t have to be about a lot to be good. “Tutti Frutti” is not about a lot, but I like it. So I think it was kind of good—there’s some nice textures in that song. The guitar, and the synthesizer that he’s [Benmont’s] playing.
And the drumming is great.
The drumming is really good, Stan is on that song. You know what that song is? It’s a perfect little single. It’s just a perfect little single. When I hear it on the radio I think, ‘Wow, we really just filled every little space in the right way.’ And the groove is so good. Stanley was really good on that.
The song “Deliver Me” is one you wrote alone. It’s got a beautiful chorus: “Take this heart/set it free. …deliver me.”