by Paul Zollo
“The Dark Of The Sun”?
Now that’s one, if I had the chance, I would play that song. We’ve never played it [live]. It got lost in the shuffle of that album. There were so many songs on it. I thought it was a good little song. I haven’t heard it in years, but I bet I would like it if I heard it.
I think you would enjoy the entire album. You should have Dana put it on in the car.
[Laughs] Last time I heard that album, I checked into a hotel somewhere. Might have been Santa Barbara. We were on one of our getaways. And the room had a CD set-up and then they have a few CDs which are standard with the room. Montovani, or Johnny Mathis. And then there was me, and it was Into The Great Wide Open. And I put it on, and listened to it. That was the last time I heard that album.
Did you enjoy it?
Yeah. I remember enjoying “The Dark Of The Sun.” And I think, for the most part, I enjoyed it. I always get pretty critical. But I was pleasantly surprised.
“The Dark Of The Sun” has some great words: “I saw you sail across the river/underneath Orion’s sword/in your eyes there was a freedom/I had never known before…”
Constellations. Orion is one of the few I can easily pick out when I look up there. That was another song that came from a staring-at-the-sky kind of thing.
The song “All Or Nothin’” has a compelling melody.
It was Mike’s thing. It was mostly Mike’s track. And I don’t think we made many changes to it.
That also has a great slide opening.
He’s so good on the slide guitar. George [Harrison] just thought that Mike was right up there with the best of them on the slide. He told me time and again. He said, ‘There’s Ry Cooder, and then there’s Mike Campbell…’ He really loved his slide playing. And it’s a different kind of instrument. It’s kind of not within the notes. It’s more like a voice. It’s all about vibrato, and how you ring the note out of the guitar with this piece of metal. Or glass. Something I’ve never really tried to do.
It’s not easy.
No, it’s not easy. It’s an acquired thing. You have to work at it. But it’s very natural to him. He has a perfect vibrato, and a perfect pitch. It’s really about pitch. It’s a lot like singing. You’ve got to come right up to the note, and sustain it. But he’s just a marvelous player. Somebody I’ve known my entire life, and I still marvel at his playing. I’ve really known him longer than I haven’t. And I still marvel at his work.
You could almost take Mike for granted, because anything you asked him to do, he did it. And more. I don’t remember ever throwing anything his way that he couldn’t do. He could do it and do it better than you thought. He will give you back your idea better than you had it in the first place. That’s a great musician. Benmont is quite the same way. It doesn’t seem there’s anything he can’t do.
I was going to say he’s kind of the same way. If you give him an idea, he’ll give it back to you better than your idea was. So they make me look good. But we do count on each other. And it’s very much a collaboration between the three of us. It’s probably the biggest part of the records we make, is those three of us, the collaboration we make in tone, in texture, and in melody. That’s what creates that sound.
You said that you wished “All Or Nothin’” got radio play instead of “Out In The Cold.”
Yeah, I think it might have been a better song. Time plays tricks on you, though. I went around for years thinking “Out In The Cold” wasn’t that good. “Out In The Cold” got a lot of radio play. And I was kind of irritated with it. I thought they were going after it because it had the big beat. But the last time we played, we rehearsed that song and played it and I was really fond of it.
But it has been frustrating to you sometimes that certain songs which could definitely have been hits don’t get that chance to be singles.
Well, in that case we had two singles that got a lot of play: “Learning To Fly” and “Into The Great Wide Open.” And “Out In The Cold” got a lot of FM play. I think I wanted people to hear the versatility on the album. There was a lot of different kinds of music, and I thought, ‘Oh, they’ve gone over it.’ But that’s really a small point. It wasn’t something that wrecked my world or anything. How much can you get played off an album? There are some albums where they almost played everything off the album, and then some albums where they only played one. But truthfully, you’ve got to be thankful if they play any of it.
You wrote “Out In The Cold” with Jeff Lynne. But you said you were never completely happy with that one.
I think I struggled with that one. I struggled with the lyrics quite a bit. It was one of those things where you struggle, and you always wonder if you got everything out of it that you could. Thinking back, when I played it recently in rehearsal, I was pleasantly surprised by the lyrics and I liked them. I liked to sing them.
It’s got some nice counterpoint harmonies on it.
Yeah, that was all Jeff’s idea. That is his arrangement. He started that song and then brought it to me. Which was unusual. He came in and said he had an idea. It went through a lot of changes from where he brought it in, like from major to minor. But he kicked it off. It was his basic idea. It wound up being a good rock ‘n’ roll song. It’s nothing earthshaking, but it’s a good rock ‘n’ roll song.
Again, Mike’s playing on that one is great.
Yeah, well he’s always good. He really stepped out on that one. I remember the things he played in the stops. There were some stops where he really wowed us all. Shezam! How did he do that?
It must be fun in the studio when he’s playing such great stuff.
Hell yeah. I feel really lucky to be involved with somebody like that. [Pause] It’s quite a band. And he plays no small part in it. He’s really good.
One of my favorite songs on the album is “All The Wrong Reasons.” The music is beautiful, and it’s got a great lyric.
Benmont likes that song. He brings that song up to me a lot, saying why don’t we do that one.
I remember writing that one. I was inspired. There was a family we knew through one of the kids. And they were a very wealthy family with all the trimmings. The big cars and the big house. And then suddenly the economy started failing and all their money went. They had to pack up and go. And I think that was the germ of the idea. “The big old house went up for sale/they were on their way by morning.” Cause they were gone overnight. Gone. From the top of the world to gone.
It was the Gulf War period, Bush, Sr. was president. I felt that a lot of things were going on for the wrong reasons. It was a pretty grand thought, but I just thought that America itself was becoming kind of a cheap place to live, morally speaking. The value system was changing. The culture was becoming celebrity-driven and empty.
It’s still like that in a lot of ways. But there was a change, and you felt it. Things that wouldn’t have been tolerated suddenly were almost celebrated. So that was really the inspiration behind a lot of that album. “The rocks might melt and the sea may burn,” was from seeing oil fires on the ocean. So it was a reflection of those times. There was a war, and there was a bad feeling in my gut in a way. I wanted to make a positive album, but I also wanted to reflect those changes. It was the end of the decade. And I wanted to try to make some comment on that, on where we’re going. We’re going into the great wide open.
We spoke about memorable melodies, tunes you can sing along to, and “All The Wrong Reasons” definitely has that. It’s a wonderful melody.
There’s a lot of melody in that tune. It’s a lot like “Free Fallin’” in a way. The chord pattern is just this simple three chord thing that repeats over and over. The tune is nothing like it. But I remember Mike playing a Bouzouki, the Greek instrument, on that opening riff. [Sings riff.] The lick at the beginning is on guitar as well as Bouzouki, and it made this real neat timbre. That’s the kind of thing he’ll do—he’ll pick up some odd instrument and incorporate it into the thing he’s doing. So, yeah, that’s a good record. And
if Benmont ever gets his way, we’ll play it live.
You should listen to him.
[Laughs] I cracked up when reading Bob Dylan’s book. There’s a bit in there about Benmont pestering him to play certain songs. [Laughs] God bless him. Benmont keeps the vigil. He keeps us honest.
“Too Good To Be True”?
I like that song. I don’t know if people know it, but that was another, in our last gig, where we were purposely looking for the odd things to do, and that one came out, and we played it for a bit. And I really like it. It’s kind of modal sounding. It’s all around these one or two chords that kind of repeat a lot. I just like the imagery of the girl, and things she was thinking. And I think it’s an uplifting thing, in the end. At the end of the song she’s sitting in traffic, and she thinks, “You don’t know what it means to be free/it’s too good to be true.” I was lucky with that one. [Laughs] That came out good. I liked it.
It has a false ending on a cool chord, which I can’t even figure out. And then it picks up again, and has a really nice solo.
Yeah, that’s one of my mystery chords, of which Jeff says, ‘I didn’t even know that chord existed.’ [Laughs] And if I was a good musician, I probably wouldn’t have used it. But I just hit things, and if it sounds good, I use it. I use a lot of variations on chords on the guitar. I’ve got my own way of doing it and playing it and voicing the chords. Which is very important, if you’re going to do our stuff. People play my songs, but they don’t get the voicings of the chords right. And the voicings are what it’s all about.
I think I just hit that chord. And it’s probably not a proper chord, but it made the right sound. Somebody could probably sit down and go, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s a diminished 11th or something,’ but it just made the right sound, so I kept it in. If it makes the right noise, that’s what I’m looking for. I honestly don’t know the names of all those chords. I don’t know exactly what a ninth is. I’m learning it, and I’m getting better at it. I know 7ths and 6ths. But once I get into 11ths or diminished chords, I don’t know the names. I know where my fingers should go to make the right sound, and I go with that.
The same on the keyboard. Sometimes I make these accidental chords that were just a mistake in the first place, but it sounded so good, I put it in. That’s the fun thing about music: Wherever your hands drop, you’re gonna create something. Sometimes there are really happy accidents. I’m sure that’s what that chord was, just a happy accident.
Can Benmont figure out what those chords are?
Oh yeah. There’s nothing he couldn’t figure out.
You wrote “You And I Will Meet Again” alone, which is a song about faith. And it has some beautiful imagery: “A red-winged hawk is circling/The blacktop stretches out for days…”
Yeah. In Encino we lived on this wooded hill. There were a lot of big oak trees. To be in the middle of L.A., it was kind of a rural setting. You’d see these hawks all the time. I’d actually watch them dive, and come back up. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where the reference to the hawks came from. You find yourself drawing on things that you never would have expected. Like a simple thing like watching a hawk circle. Later on it enters your mind, and you use it as a metaphor.
That’s a lot of the fun of writing songs, or being a writer at all, is that you’ve got the luxury of grabbing anything around you. It’s all floating around, and your job is to get as much of it in your net as you can. So when someone says, ‘I’m blocked up, and I can’t write,’ the truth is that if you take a deep breath and look around, there’s probably something really close that you could write about. It’s just having the confidence, sometimes, to go after it.
There’s the song “Makin’ Some Noise” which you wrote with Mike and Jeff. And it has a nice riff.
Yeah, that’s Mike’s riff. Most of that was Mike’s. I wrote the tune and the words, and Jeff may have come up with the verse pattern. That was something Mike brought in, and we thought it was really great, and we put our heads together and wrote it. And I really love that one. It’s a great song to perform. It’s really a lot of fun. He used some kind of odd tuning to play those notes. I think his guitar is tuned lower than it normally would be to get that riff out.
It was inspired—when I was writing, I was in this canyon. And in canyons you can hear the other side really well. You can pick up a conversation that’s going on over on the other side really well, sometimes. I was playing my guitar, and then suddenly I heard another guy playing his guitar on the other side of the canyon. And in my mind I thought it would be really funny if we could play something together. So I incorporated that into the last verse.
“Built To Last” written with Jeff, has a cool groove, like an old Motown beat.
Yeah, that was another one that I struggled with a little bit. That was one I wrote at the studio. And I didn’t really know where to take it. And it went through a few versions before it wound up with that beat. But I think it was the only one that I wrote while the album was going on. And it was the very last thing we did. That was the end of it. Because I remember when we got it done, there was this sigh of relief. I don’t know if I really like that one.
Is it true that you were annoyed because the Grateful Dead had a song with the same title?
Yeah. That happens sometimes. You look up, and you think you’ve come up with something, and you realize somebody else has done it first. You try not to let it bug you. What bugs you the most is when you write something and then realize it’s somebody else’s song. That’ll happen to me two times a month. I’ll be working with something and then realize I’m channeling this melody from somewhere else, and then I have to abandon the idea. But there’s only so many words and so many notes, so sometimes you do cross somebody else’s territory. [Laughs]
Have you found that as the years have gone by, you’re better at knowing when you’re using somebody else’s melody?
Yeah. And when that happens, I just have to throw it away.
Throw it away or change it?
Well, I just usually pitch it. And start over. Because if I change a note or two, it’s still going to be in my head that it’s that other song. So I think every song-writer must have that problem from time to time. You play something and you realize it’s Beethoven, or The Beatles. I have this theory that in open tuning Keith Richards got everything you can do. [Laughs] He got there first and he got everything there was to get.
He uses that unique five-string tuning.
He’s so good. You don’t really hear him mentioned as a songwriter much, but God, he’s a good songwriter. He’s really, really a great, great writer. He’s a great player and everything. But, it’s like I said, if you get an open-tuned guitar, you’ll find that everywhere you go, he’s been there first.
It’s interesting with Jagger and Richards as opposed to you and Mike, that they will write everything together, whereas you write most of your songs alone, and only some with Mike.
It was just the way our relationship built itself. I was always the writer. And when we started out, Mike didn’t write that much. And then he’d come in with the odd thing, and I’d say, ‘Okay.’ But the way he would present it to me would always be on a tape. So I just got into the practice of doing that.
We have tried writing together in the same room, but we didn’t like it. It kind of hung me up. I can’t go all over the map with someone sitting there like that. [Laughs] And with his stuff, I might really go all over the map before I find what’s going to work. Like we mentioned, a lot of times what he thought was going to be a verse ends up to be a chorus. And if we’re in the same room, that’s gonna be brought up. And it’s better if nothing is brought up for me when I’m working with his stuff, and that’s just the way it evolved. So we stuck to that way. Though there’s always gonna be a meeting of the minds when it’s done. I’ve got to play it to him, and at that point we’re gonna discuss what’s good or bad about it. And it always makes me happy if he likes what I did.
Is he ge
nerally happy with what you’ve done?
Yeah. He’s usually happy about it.
How do you present it to him?
Whatever way. I might make a little demo of it, or I might play it on guitar. It just depends. Sometimes if I’ve changed chords, I can’t really sing over his track, so I’ll just learn it on guitar or piano and play it for him.
Does he comment on the lyrical content that you bring to his songs?
Yeah. More and more. As time has gone on, more and more. He’ll single out things that he likes. But he goes along with the same theory that I do, which is that I’ve got to sing it. So it’s good that I write the words. Because I just can’t sing other people’s words. It’s really hard for me to believe it and get behind it as much. If I wrote it, then I know what character to get into to sing it. So he lets me have my way with words.
greatest hits. 1993
One song the fans love is “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” You included it on 1993’s Greatest Hits album but you actually wrote part of the song several years before.
That was one I wrote during the Full Moon Fever sessions. I wrote all but the chorus. I just had the loop going around and around and really had most of the words and everything. And I played the tape for Rick [Rubin] and he liked it a lot and suggested I write a chorus. So I tried to finish it up while I was making Wildflowers, and there were maybe five years between the writing of the verses and the chorus.
Is Mary Jane a marijuana reference?
I don’t think I was writing about pot. I think it was just a girl’s name. I can’t imagine that I’d write a song about pot. I don’t think there’s enough there to write about. [Laughs]
wildflowers. 1994
Next comes Wildflowers in 1994. The title song, “Wildflowers,” is such a gentle, acoustic number, and such a sweet opening song for the album.