by Paul Allen
Jams are special times for me. There is nothing like really listening to other players as we feel our way forward together to cover a standard tune or to create something out of thin air. Only a small percentage of these musical ideas become fully realized songs, but the joy is in the process. For someone like me, who tilts toward the analytical, jamming taps into my creative, intuitive, more emotional side. (Dave Stewart put me on to a National Institutes of Health study on how jazz improvisation shuts down the brain’s “monitor,” encouraging the flow of new ideas.)
When I’m jamming, my shoulders drop and my mind slows. I’m loose and relaxed. After a good session, I feel physically drained yet wired with nervous energy. I’m refreshed.
ROBBIE ROBERTSON, the songwriter and guitarist who first made history with the Band, is a superb storyteller and music historian. Back in the midsixties, he knew Hendrix in Greenwich Village when they both were young artists. During a visit to Jimi’s hotel, Robbie discovered how Hendrix kept his guitars in tune despite the abuse he dished out. When Jimi strung his instrument, Robbie said, he would massage each string in his hands, pulling it tighter and tighter until it was stretched to the point where it had no more give and couldn’t possibly go out of tune. The process took a full forty minutes. “Jimi Hendrix,” Robbie said, “just oozed music.”
Another time, after a jam in New York’s Meatpacking District, the two of them didn’t emerge until morning. A construction worker outside the club said, “You guys are pretty good. Keep playing, you’re going to be famous one day.”
YOU NEVER KNOW what you’ll talk about the first time you meet someone. Mick Jagger is a history buff and a serious student of different cultures. But when we first met, he asked me, “What do you know about garden design?” He was landscaping his place in France and wanted to do it right.
Jean Pigozzi, the Italian businessman and photographer, invited me to Mick’s fifty-sixth birthday party at his waterfront estate during the Cannes Film Festival. I brought some equipment from my boat—guitars, amplifiers, drum set—and found plenty of coconspirators to jam with, including Jonny Lang (only eighteen at the time) and Ronnie Wood, the Stones’ guitarist. That night gave me a taste of what it’s like to make music with a world-class sideman. Whatever I played, Ronnie instantly added the perfect rhythmic counterpart. It was as though he knew what I would do before my fingers touched the strings.
I kept nudging Mick to join us, but he was reluctant. Later in the evening, I asked Bono for help. And Bono said, “I know what’ll work. I’ll get up and start singing his song really slowly. Then he’ll have to sing.”
We went up together, and I dove into that famous, driving guitar riff as Bono launched into a soulful “Satisfaction” at about half-speed. I saw Jagger looking surprised—What the hell is going on here? By the end of the first verse, he could hold back no longer; he grabbed the microphone and picked up the song in the same slow groove. I was playing “Satisfaction” behind Mick Jagger, an insane proposition for an amateur guitar player. And Bono looked at me and nodded: I told you so.
I take music with me wherever I go. My boats carry a full complement of instruments, and each has a recording studio. My musician friends periodically make use of them—often for fun, on occasion to work on their next albums. Last year, Dave Stewart brought his new world-music supergroup on board: Mick Jagger; A. R. Rahman, the Indian composer and instrumentalist; and Joss Stone, the young English soul singer. (Reggae artist Damian Marley stayed home for the imminent birth of his first child.)
I first met Dave more than fifteen years ago at a dinner in New York, not long after he and Annie Lennox disbanded the Eurythmics, and we hit it off. He’s full of energy and genuinely curious about all sorts of things, including the latest trends in technology. When he’s not on stage, you wouldn’t know he’s a rock star.
Dave visited me in Seattle a few years ago and had his hair bleached blond. Then he came with me while I got a haircut at a place on University Avenue, where he began running his video camera—for Dave, life is a documentary. I was still in the chair when two beefy bikers entered the shop to get their beards trimmed. They had tattoos up and down their arms and across their necks, and Dave asked if he could film them.
Oh no, I thought. The bikers were bound to take offense at this nosy guy with long yellow hair and a camera, and then all bets would be off. But Dave has such a sweet way about him that the bikers happily explained the origins of each tattoo: “I got this one in Iraq. …”
I used to call Dave “Mr. Permission” because he’s like a pied piper, spurring you to follow your muse. He encouraged me to write the lyrics for Grown Men, the album I produced in 2000. It was the sort of thing I’d dreamed of doing, as I like to say, before getting sidetracked by technology. I dug down and put my deepest feelings into those lyrics, and the results surprised even me. (When I played the cuts for my mom, she said, “But all the songs are so sad. I wanted you to write happy songs.”)
Another time Dave joined Grown Men at a battle of the bands for charity in Las Vegas. After our sound check, I noticed a stack of animal carriers and a bored-looking person standing next to them.
“What are they for?” I asked.
The guy said, “They’re for the armadillo race tonight.”
“The race? What time is that?”
“They’re going off at nine o’clock.”
My band was scheduled for 7:30. Dave took it all in and said dryly, “Paul, this is what my career has come to. I’m opening for an armadillo race.”
PETER GABRIEL IS the kind of person who always asks if you’d like a cup of afternoon tea. He’s a Renaissance man who can speak with equal authority about Senegalese drumbeats and modern art. The tiny hotel he keeps in Sardinia is his oasis of relaxation.
In 2005, the hot news from the Live 8 benefit concerts was the reunion of Pink Floyd, twenty-four years after their last show together. At a lunch with Peter, I talked with the band’s drummer, Nick Mason, and asked him about the experience. I said, “You guys must have had a real lovefest backstage after the concert.”
Nick paused and said, “Actually, Paul, we shook hands. And for Englishmen, that’s a lovefest.”
I first met Nick after Peter remarried and we celebrated on my boat with a jam. We played some Beatles songs and then a Pink Floyd number, and everyone was loose and having a great time. I was enthusing about it afterward with Terry Davison, who said, “Yeah, that drummer played really well on the Pink Floyd tune.”
“You thought so?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “he really seemed to know it.”
And I said, “Terry, he is the drummer for Pink Floyd.”
DAVE WAS WRITING a song with Paul McCartney in the late nineties when he invited me to join him at McCartney’s studio outside London. As I watched them record, it was surreal to hear the ex-Beatle—that unmistakable voice I’d known since grade school—over a studio monitor a few feet away.
When Dave called a break, Paul showed me around the studio, which could have provided the core exhibit for a very good music museum. Here was the Mellotron that the Beatles used for their haunting string sound in “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” There was McCartney’s bass guitar from Shea Stadium in 1966, one of the band’s last live performances. When Paul flipped it over, I saw something taped to its back: a yellowing set list.
Paul said, “I’m supposed to look at some pictures for a Beatles anthology. Would you like to come?” We crossed to a shed lined with photographs of the Beatles from every period of their career. As Paul considered which ones he liked best, he became pensive. Then he said, “Everyone wants to talk about John, John, John. You know, I wrote some songs, too.”
I was taken aback, but I had to say something: “You’ve written some of the most amazing songs ever.” Which was true, but it felt strange trying to cheer up a Beatle who was still trying to compete with a fallen bandmate.
McCartney cast his own shadow,
of course. As Bono once told me, “Every day I wake up with the Beatles.” Bono’s longtime ambition was to lead the biggest band in the world, which he’s pretty much accomplished with U2. But he’s still striving to write songs that stand up to the great Beatles tunes, and it ain’t easy, even for the most talented musicians.
I met Paul again with Dave a few years later at the Abbey Road Studios in London, where the Beatles had so many historic recording sessions. They were working on another song, this one in connection with the “46664” project, which Dave named after Nelson Mandela’s prison number. Paul’s band smoothly cranked through the material. For really good studio musicians, playing is like breathing; those guys polished off four-part harmonies in three takes. I got so caught up in the process that I overcame my reticence and said to Dave, “On that last chorus, where everything builds, it would be great to have some piano.”
Dave said, “Let me ask Paul.” A minute or two later they rolled out a little upright piano that they’d used on many Beatles songs. Paul warmed up with some honky-tonk, and then he said, “OK, let’s roll it.” Just like that, he recorded a piano overdub on the out chorus, and that’s the way “Whole Life” was released.
I’VE LISTENED TO “Purple Haze” literally thousands of times. I still find new things in it, particularly in the rhythms and the guitars’ interplay. (One phenomenal aspect of Hendrix is that the greatest lead guitarist of all time, as ranked by Rolling Stone, was also peerless on rhythm guitar.) It wasn’t until the late 1980s that I found the song’s charts in a French magazine, with Jimi’s solos transcribed note-for-note, exactly what I needed to master the unconventional fingering patterns. Twenty years after I’d started, playing along with a cassette, I finally got through “Purple Haze” at tempo. Though it had been all I could do to keep up, I was euphoric.
Through Dan Aykroyd, my band has been invited to open House of Blues franchises in Las Vegas, Dallas, and New Jersey. As with many musicians, my self-consciousness recedes in performance. When it all clicks, and I can feel the audience with me on my solo, I play that much better. Our band did well enough in Dallas to take an encore, and I damned the torpedoes and went with “Purple Haze.” Over the next three minutes, all those years of listening and absorbing and practicing came together. I’m still not the most technically accomplished guitarist, but I always try to go for a few “killer moments,” as Jimi called them, where I dig in and reach for a note that has some real soul and power to it. With Hendrix, just playing the notes isn’t nearly enough. You have to feel them, too.
That night, I hit everything I went for. The solo built and built, and then I caught my breath and took it in a different direction, and it built again to a great finish. The audience was on their feet and cheering, even singing along with the third chorus. It was probably my best live performance, a more than decent version of an incredibly challenging song.
I knew I’d never play it the way Jimi did, but I was satisfied.
CHAPTER 18
WIRED WORLD
It all began for me in the late 1980s with a small company based south of Seattle: SkyPix, the world’s first direct digital broadcast satellite system. According to its business plan, a one-time customer fee of $699 would buy pay-per-view Hollywood releases with none of the ghosting or snow that plagued analog cable TV reception of the day. Less than two feet in diameter, the SkyPix dish was much smaller and cheaper than the C-Band (known colloquially as BUD, for “big ugly dish”) that I’d been using on Mercer Island. And I was impressed by satellite’s potential. With a signal that could be beamed nationally from day one, SkyPix wouldn’t be burdened by cable’s capital-intensive, dig-a-trench-to-the-home infrastructure.
In 1991, three years before the launch of DirecTV, I took a flier and invested $10 million. A year later, amid an SEC investigation alleging securities fraud, SkyPix collapsed into bankruptcy without selling a single dish. It was a bloodbath, but it opened my eyes to the potential of new digital delivery technologies. If my experience with computers had taught me anything, it was never to underestimate how quickly a new platform could bring a wave of change. How would a fire hose of digital bits, blasted into the home, affect our consumption of video, or data, or music? What were the opportunities?
By November 1992, months before the first graphical Web browser, I was telling BusinessWeek that we were on the cusp of a “Wired World” with vast ramifications. “At some point,” I said, “everybody in the industrialized world will have access to computers, and they’ll all be wired together.” My vision dated back to the earliest days of Microsoft, when I’d talk Bill’s ear off about a connected future in which services and information would be accessible—anytime, anywhere. In my 1977 interview with Microcomputer Interface, I predicted that the personal computer would far outstrip the social impact of the pocket calculator.
… the computer—and I’m talking about the home information retrieval system—I think that’s a much more powerful concept than a machine that just adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides. Definitely. If you take [the computer to] its limit, perhaps you could have groceries delivered, take care of all your bills and, if you’re a programmer, you could do your work at home, never leaving the house. That’s a dramatic change.
As of the early 1990s, social applications were just beginning to take root. Our human drive for connectivity had spurred the recent development of CompuServe and America Online, and it wouldn’t stop there. Like the personal computer, the Wired World fit my criterion for a big idea, the marriage of two powerful elements. On March 31, 1992, I told the New York Times:
If you look down the road, what you see is the pervasiveness of high-bandwidth data communications and completely inexpensive computing power. If you combine those two things, there are many interesting things you can do.
At the time, digital fiber-optic technology and new compression techniques held the promise of lightning-fast, two-way multimedia networks, a global platform for new families of products and applications. High-speed data delivery—the so-called information superhighway—would redefine how we talked and learned and experienced entertainment. The computer would evolve from a tool for work into a medium for content of all sorts.
These developments weren’t speculative, in my view. A high-bandwidth network would be built, and people would use it—I was sure of that. Less easy to foresee was who would do the connecting. Satellite or cable? Telecom or wireless, or something yet unimagined? But regardless of how the delivery system played out, I was determined to be part of it. I invested in more than a hundred Internet, media, and communications companies, expecting some to pan out and some not. It seemed wise to spread out my bets as the Wired World took shape.
I FIRST NOTICED America Online in the late eighties, when there was no Internet consumer presence to speak of. Entrée to the embryonic online network required special software for access to a rudimentary bulletin board system—or, for a friendlier graphical user interface, one of the new network service providers. The genius of America Online (in its pre-acronym days) was its accessible online experience for computer novices. Simple to install, it was the Internet with training wheels: one-stop shopping for proprietary content (news, weather, games, stock quotes), plus embedded links to other companies’ “storefronts” before the dawn of modern Web sites. As the engine for the public’s early embrace of e-mail, America Online also helped introduce chat rooms and instant messaging. A budding powerhouse of interactivity, it was a natural partner for my Wired World, and in 1992 I bought fifty thousand shares. Convinced that the stock market had underestimated the value of connecting tens of millions of users, I began building my position in earnest that summer. Ten months later, I owned 15 percent of the company.
My hope was for America Online to move from a low-bandwidth, dial-up network to the inevitable high-speed future. In the spring of 1993, I traveled to Virginia to meet with CEO and chairman Steve Case and his team. As I laid out my ideas for a broadband network, I could feel the chi
ll in the air. Case and I were oil and water. He was wedded to his dial-up walled garden, even if it meant limiting content to what an analog network could handle, and found my ideas about broadband too far ahead of his game plan. It probably didn’t help that I was still Microsoft’s second biggest stockholder and a member of its board. Though Microsoft had yet to do much of anything online, Case perceived it as his greatest threat.
Actually, he had it backward. I wanted to use my stake in America Online as a hedge against my holdings in Microsoft and other Wired World investments. As I kept snapping up shares, Case’s board adopted a poison-pill threshold, first at 20 percent (which I’d already passed) and then at 25 percent. Once triggered, the provision would dilute my ownership percentage and make it next to impossible to mount a hostile takeover. That was never my intent, since takeovers rarely work in tech companies. But I took the hint that my active collaboration wasn’t welcome.
I held on to my piece of the company until the summer of 1994, when Bert Kolde attended an open house at Bill Gates’s home on Lake Washington. Microsoft had recently targeted the network services business with an initiative called Blackbird, a precursor to the Microsoft Network. Bill approached Bert in a buffet line on the lawn, and the conversation turned to my interest in America Online. Bill said, “Why would Paul want to compete with us? I’m just going to tell Russ Siegelman [the Microsoft Network leader] to keep losing money every year until we have the number-one market share in online. How does it make sense to compete with that?”
When Bert relayed Bill’s remarks to me, they had the intended effect. A year earlier, I’d attended a meeting at Microsoft where Bill had told Case that he was thinking about buying all or part of America Online—or, à la Khrushchev, that he might decide to “bury” the smaller company. Now it sounded like Bill had settled on a burial. I could see Steve Case trapped in a two-front war, besieged on one flank by Microsoft and on the other by the emerging World Wide Web. Suddenly my stake seemed less attractive, especially without any synergy between America Online and my other ventures. I dumped my stock and took a $75 million profit.