by Paul Zollo
And so, there’s “Billy The Kid.” We did it down, and we’re tremendously excited at the end of this. And then we’d go, ‘Well, wow, this is going to be great.’ And then we spent all night playing it, and it never got as good as that very first pass through. So we wound up using the one with the noise on the front of it. And then we got used to that sound on the beginning of it, so we left it on.
“I Don’t Wanna Fight” is a song written by Mike Campbell alone, without any help from you?
You know what I wrote? I wrote “I’m a lover lover lover.”
That’s the best part.
I put that bit in. [Laughs]
That’s the punch line to the whole song. It makes it work.
I thought so. But he had really done the whole song, so I didn’t think it was fair to take credit for it. But I did help with that one line.
I also love “Rhino Skin,” which is both a funny and a sad song.
Dark, yeah. It’s dismal and humorous at the same time. There were some people in the group that thought the ‘elephant’s balls’ line was offensive.
To elephants?
[Laughs] I don’t know. I didn’t find it offensive at all. Rick [Rubin] couldn’t stand it. He wanted me to take it out. I couldn’t take it out. I tried taking it out and it didn’t sound good to me. So I just said I was gonna have it in. I’m gonna have it in because that’s the way I sing it, it sounds right to me, and I don’t think it’s offensive or anything. And he couldn’t tell me why he felt it was offensive. Actually, I think the whole group, at one point, on one evening, everybody said, ‘You ought to change that line. It cheapens the song.’ And I got kind of intimidated by it. But in the end I’m glad I left it there.
I agree. Because it sounds like something a guy might say to another guy after having had a few drinks in a bar.
That’s what I thought. “You need elephant balls if you don’t want to crawl…” I just thought it was a conversational line. I’m glad you got it that way.
And the title, “Rhino Skin” is such a perfect way of expressing that need to develop a thick skin.
Well, you do sometimes need it these days. [Laughs]
In “One More Day, One More Night” you wrote, “God I’ve had to fight/To keep my line of sight on what’s real.” Can you keep some perspective, being within the music industry, on the meaning and impact an album can have to some guy who is far outside of the system?
I hope I do. I mean I know what they meant to me and still do. I know how a record to me is so important, you can’t even weigh up the value, because you’re being inspired by something. I hope it’s still like that. I hope people still get albums and get inspired by them. I know they do. Because too many people tell me about it.
I make them for me. And if I get off on them, I feel that somebody else will feel the same way.
anthology: through the years. 2000
Anthology was a compendium of your previous work, and it also included two bonus tracks: “Waiting For Tonight” and “Surrender.” Did you record “Waiting For Tonight” around the same time you recorded the song, “Travelin’,” which ended up on Playback?
No. It was near that same session. It was probably me and Mike picking up the ball after The Heartbreakers were called off. We had the studio time, so the two of us did “Waiting For Tonight.” But it wasn’t The Heartbreakers, it was me and Mike. And The Bangles.
The Bangles part on that is great.
Yeah, They were great on it.
That could have been a single.
Should have been. Got a lot of airplay. If we had done a video, I think it would have pushed it over the top. But there was a feeling that we had overextended ourselves. We had so much product out that they thought it was overkill. Because we had had a lot of product out in a row for a couple years straight.
That’s one of my favorites. That we ever did.
Great harmonies.
Yeah, great. I sometimes wonder if we could play that live, because I really like that song.
You never have?
No, we never have, because we don’t have The Bangles. But if we could figure out a way around that, to arrange it right, I think we could play it. But I’d love to play it. I like that song.
I read that when The Bangles were in the studio, you had all four talking at once, and it was rather chaotic.
[Laughs] Well, having girls there was kind of different for us. [Laughs] I think a lot of people saw The Bangles as disposable pop music. But I kind of like disposable pop music. And I thought they had a real good sound. In a way like the Mamas & the Papas had a certain sound, they had a certain sound. And I was really excited to work with them. I was really glad. And those arrangements came from what they just naturally sang. I just put the track on and let them sing. And they put their heads together and came up with these nice parts.
Yeah, it’s a nice counterpoint to the melody.
Yeah. It’s great when you have an experiment like that in your head and it actually works. You can do that and it won’t work, sometimes. Sometimes you’ll have this brilliant casting in your head and it won’t work at all. But that was an instance where it actually worked. It worked really well.
There are some great lines in that song. I love the opening: “I went walking down the boulevard, past the skateboards and the beggars…” Sounds like Venice Beach.
It might have been Venice Beach.
Was that one ever in the running for Full Moon Fever?
It came in the very last days of Full Moon Fever, and Jeff wasn’t there. It was while he was in England. We did that and we did a track called “Alright For Now,” the lullaby track. So it was really going to be between one or the other, and we chose the other one because we really didn’t have a song like that. And by the time we got onto the next record, I’d already written a bunch of new songs.
Like many of your songs, it shuns you don’t need a lot of chords. The chord progression repeats, and then the melody will rise and shift above the repeated chords. “Waiting For Tonight” is in F# minor, and has such a good feel.
Yeah. I learned that from listening to Buddy Holly. He could take the simplest chord structure, where it really never moved, and find these incredible melodies. I really think Buddy, from what I’ve read and from what I’ve listened to, really got hooked on this song, “Love Is Strange,” by Mickey & Sylvia. You listen to that song, you can really hear the influence it had on Buddy Holly. I think it had a huge influence on him. Because he wrote every derivation of “Love Is Strange” that you could write. He turned those chords inside out, around, backwards. And his melodies are kind of in that same range. He did a lot with just those basic chords.
Sometimes you can play two chords. And, if you’re patient, you’ll find a melody that will work over those chords—verse and chorus. If you arrange the record right, you can make it entertaining. “Free Fallin’” is three chords the entire song. It’s not because we don’t know any more chords, it’s because that was all that was needed. You have to sometimes watch yourself that you don’t do more than is needed.
You’re good at that. You said to me once that if a chord doesn’t sound like it fits into a song, it’s probably not meant to be in the song.
Probably not.
It’s not the chord progression that will impress people about a song, it’s the song itself—the words and the melody.
Yeah, it always makes me laugh when I read that my music is simple. Because if you think it’s simple, try to do it. It’s not simple. There’s a lot of nuance. And light and shade. It’s not a simple thing. It’s sometimes much harder to do, really. But I’ve got this thing where if you wrote a bridge, and it’s not as good as the verse or the chorus, it really shouldn’t be there. And the verse has got to be as good as the chorus. If you look at it in a modular way, you want all those sections to be equal. So that’s a pretty handy tool, if you’re writing, and you have a middle-eight, and you’re only using it to get from one place to the other
, and it’s not doing anything else, you might as well throw it out.
I think your songs seem to be simpler than they are.
They’re not simple. I was in a music store recently, and a guy was trying to impress me and he was playing all our licks. Saying, ‘Hey, look at this!’ And he had every one wrong. He had the right root of the chord. But we use a lot of variations of chords. For example, I use a lot of variations of G. I don’t play, necessarily, a straight G. There’s a lot of variations on those chords. And this guy was playing everything straight. So he thought it was right, but it wasn’t. [Laughs]
Also, the bass line can move against those chords, and it creates chords just by the way it’s moving across the chords. So the records have an awful lot of nuance in them. And the more you listen, the more you’ll hear it. And that works on a subliminal level. You may be asking yourself why you’re recording something, ‘Well, is this something somebody is even going to hear, that you’re putting into the song, the arrangement?’ But these little things all add up on a subliminal level and they just equal, ‘Hey, I like that.’ But that’s kind of the fun of doing it.
It’s true that your songs will often work in a modular sense, in that your verses have strong melodies of their own, and then will often build up momentum and just explode into the chorus.
Yeah. Different people do it different ways. When I wrote songs with Roy Orbison, he had a completely different way of doing it, which was really unique, and really fascinating to me. He didn’t really care about things being modular at all. He might not ever return to where he started. He was all about melody. And you just move the chords to follow the singing. So they were like small operas. It fascinated me that he might never return to that first verse, if you listen to some of those songs. [Laughs] So everybody has their own way of doing it.
When you were writing with Dylan, was he writing in a modular way?
Yeah, I think so. I think he likes to put down a pretty basic chord pattern, often almost a descending or an ascending scale. And then put his melody around that. But the few things we wrote were very simple.
Another song that didn’t make it onto one of your albums, but is on Anthology, is “Surrender.”
Yeah. That’s a really, really old song.
Written in 1977.
Right. We opened all our shows in ‘77 with “Surrender.” It was always the first song. Like Bugs said, ‘We recorded it on the next six albums.’ [Laughs] We recorded it and recorded it, and never got a version of it we liked. We tried on every album. And when they were putting out the Anthology album, they, again, wanted another new track. So then I thought that would be a good thing to do, because it would fit into the Anthology theme, and maybe we could do it now. And we took a shot at it, and it came out pretty well. Howie’s amazing on that, those high harmonies. ‘Cause we did it in the same key that we wrote it in when we were really young. [Laughs] Singing really high. So. yeah, that came out really good.
That’s in E major—do you think that’s the best guitar key?
Oh, there are many of them. Sometimes getting into the flat keys on guitar can be tricky, but we use capos. You can do about anything on guitar. [A capo is an accessory that changes the location of the “head” of the guitar to any place on the neck. That way, one can change keys without changing fingerings. The capo also “brightens” the sound of the guitar.]
Do you use capos while you’re writing?
Sometimes, to make the guitar sound a little different, and see what happens. Do you ever use different tunings on guitar?
We have. We’ve used the drop-D from time to time, where the E string goes down to D. And I know we’ve used open A on “Shadow Of A Doubt.” Mike used them quite a bit. I might be playing in a straight tuning and he might be in an open tuning. On “Blue Sunday” everything was tuned down a step. My guitar was tuned down a whole step.
Why?
[Laughs] I think it just sounded good.
the last dj. 2002
Your next album, The Last DJ, has the song “Joe,” which is a biting indictment of a record-company CEO.
Every word of it is true. And the truth hurts sometimes. I saw him also as an impresario. What I was trying to say there was something about pre-packaged pop stars. And how they come ready to assemble. And TV shows that make pop stars for you. How it’s gotten so cold that they’re actually just created to fit certain market demands. There’s an element of artist out there that doesn’t really have much to say about anything. They’re just presented as pop stars. I don’t mind that. I think that’s fine. But I wish they weren’t presented as musicians. They’re not. They’re not musicians. And I think the public is short-changed by that.
I think there’s a lot of talent out there that, maybe because they don’t fit a certain marketable slot, they’re just overlooked. I don’t think things were always like that. But marketing has become more important than product, I think. It seems that way to me. And that’s what I was trying to say in that song. I wasn’t trying to sing about any actual living person. I wouldn’t do that. But I just thought it said something about how cold it’s become.
And if I’m perceived as being bitter, so be it. [Laughs] Maybe I am.
The song has the great line, “She gets to be famous/I get to be rich.”
My favorite line in that is, “some angel whore who can learn a guitar lick/hey, that’s what I call music.” [Laughs] And that’s true. It’s before our eyes. I wasn’t trying to be profound. I just thought it was funny. It was humorous. It was entertainment.
And there are so many young girl pop stars now who fit that description.
Yeah. They’re created to fit certain markets. But the truth is, there’s one very popular one that we were on a television show with, and I saw her, and it was so bad that I thought to myself, ‘If this kid was playing Pizza Hut, they’d say, “Look, we’re sorry, but you can’t play here, because we can’t really sell pizza with you playing here.”
It would be like that. [Laughs] ‘We really can’t sell any pizza with you playing out in front of the shop here, you’ve got to go.’ It was so poor, that we were slack-jawed by it. We were open-mouthed, just in amazement, that that’s what’s being passed off as rock music.
It’s insane. It’s Fabian. It’s worse than Fabian. We’ve gone full-circle back to the days of the early Sixties when pop stars were just created, when all the Bobbys were out, and they went from leather jackets to sweaters, and they tried to say that they aspired to be something more than rock. That they weren’t just rock, but they were aspiring to be more. Be real entertainers and actors. And we didn’t learn a lesson from that? That it’s just suddenly swung right back into that. That’s your popular entertainment.
And that’s fine, if people like it, that’s fine. I don’t like it. I just think there are a lot of people who are good—there must be people that are better than that—but because they don’t have the right face or haircut or stylist, they don’t fit this marketing slot that the industry has for them, so they’re overlooked. So we can only hope that that changes or gets better or something comes and just completely knocks it out of the park.
You think that’s a possibility?
It’s always a possibility. I mean, in the Sixties The Beatles came and completely knocked that out of the park. The only other time I’ve seen that happen is when Nirvana came and suddenly all those fake hairspray bands were completely out of work. The next day. It was wheat before the sickle. But Nirvana couldn’t sustain it. It was too much for [Kurt Cobain] and it destroyed him. So I think you need something on that level to come along. Something that’s really pure and honest to become popular. Then you’ll have people who want to imitate honesty. [Laughs]
Because of the content of “The Last DJ,” “Money Becomes King,” and “Joe,” people missed some of the other really special songs on that album, such as “Dreamville.”
“Dreamville” is one of the best songs I ever wrote. That was about innocence. It starts
with you going to a music store to buy guitar strings.
I’m innocent. Before all the corruptions hit me. And how pure it could be. I think that it was missed because of that. I loved that song. I wrote the orchestration with Jon Brion [songwriter, arranger, producer] and did the whole thing.
I love this music, this rock ‘n’ roll. And it’s meant a lot to me. And I do take it personally. It changed my life. It sustained my life. It’s absolutely the embodiment of the American dream. It made things possible for me that could never have been possible. And even if it hadn’t, I loved it in such a way that I really respect it. And I really care about it. I care passionately about it. And people call me bitter. I’m not bitter, I’m just sad. [Laughs] I’m just sad that there’s such a great, wonderful thing, and it’s being denied a whole audience. It’s going to be hard for them to ever discover it.
I don’t care. If it all ends tomorrow, I’m fine. But I just think it’s sad that there’s such a wonderful thing there, this music thing, and integrity in music and in art should be respected. And maybe the struggle has always been there. But I don’t think it’s been there in quite the ratio it’s at now, where it’s nearly buried. So we just have to hope that maybe it will turn around at some point, and there will be another way of looking at it. That the audience will actually demand quality. But I think you can only pick from what you’re offered. And if you don’t offer them anything, they can’t possibly pick it.
And I think it’s cheaper for the record companies to manufacture artists who aren’t going to make any waves, who aren’t going to demand anything—they’re going to completely play the game—than it is to deal with somebody who comes along with a point of view and some integrity. They’re not always easy to deal with. [Laughs]
There’s also “Like A Diamond,” which is a haunting song.
Yeah, I like that song too. It’s such a positive song. I think there’s redemption and hope in that record. And it has a good positive thing to say. But to make that point, I had to show the bad guy [“Joe”]. [Laughs] But unfortunately, that was so sensational, I guess, that that was where the focus went.