Strange Things Happen: A life with The Police, polo and pygmies

Every other day I head downtown to the San Diego School of Performing Arts for piano time and composition classes. The music department takes up the bottom half of the stately old building. The music students are the usual nonsporty stick-insect types, but compared to the theater and ballet geeks, we are like raging bulls in the basement.

In the piano rooms I’m conjuring music that has gone way beyond what I can actually play with my hands. In fact my intelligent designer omitted to give me the gift of pianitude. I did get the genes for stringed instruments and mallets (guitars and drums), which I find naturally easy to play, but my fingers just don’t do keyboards. No matter how many hours, years, or decades I spend composing on the keyboard, my hands just can’t find their cunning.

I can find the notes that my head dictates and check them against one another to build harmony, but I can’t play them in rhythm. I can play the rhythm of the notes I want but can’t find the pitches fast enough. I can play my music with good rhythm and wrong notes or with correct pitches and no rhythm.

At least back home in London, my dad’s Beocord open reel recorder allowed me to record two parallel tracks of guitar. On the left track I could record the rhythm chords, and then on the right track I could record an accompanying tune. Then came the trance of listening to my music while my hands lay idle. There is no greater glow of narcissistic validation than receiving my own art. I slay myself—always have and hope I always will.

Here in California I’m a college kid tangled up and yearning for the mysterious golden girls, but that glow of validation is dim. I can strum on my guitar, but there is bigger stuff raging around in my head. I’m not even a professional musician yet, but I’m already dreaming up concept albums. In the piano rooms I can try to work things out on paper, but I can’t love my music by looking at it on the page. I just have to sing it in my head and let it go by.

In class I’m kind of the runt of the litter, again. Almost all of the other composition students are pianists from the other side of the universe. In fact, music study has always been of music that has never attracted me. Music classes cured me of Mozart, and my father cured me of jazz—meaning that I’m immune to the charms of both. The music that I do listen to doesn’t exist here in music school.

Dr. Mary K. Phillips is at the piano playing our homework. All of us geeks are twitching as she points out the mistakes of voicing and spelling. The assignment was to write sixteen bars of fourpart harmonic composition observing the rules of figured bass. As a practical matter I have always found that the rules could only be applied as a retrofit. The music comes out of my brain and lands in the material world—and then I can figure out what rules apply. So my sixteen bars derive from some larger opus of the piano room that have been retrofitted with the rules of Dr. Phillips’s class.

The focus of the group is the mechanics of harmony. The other student pieces sound like they are supposed to sound, like pale Mozart, and no one seems to mind that they are meaningless sequences of chords. The point is to grasp the laws of harmonic movement.

When she gets to my piece she plays it down like a breeze, and I’m basking in the beauty of hearing it for the first time as a listener, without having to limp through playing it myself. But I know that she will crush me with the inevitable technical errors. When she reaches the end the room is unusually silent. She turns to me and says:

“Stewart, you have parallel fifths in measures three, seven, and eleven, but more important, this is actual music. You have a voice.”

Well, that may seem like faint praise, but it puffed me right up. Some part of the feverish grandiose exultation that I get from my own music is actually discernible to a dispassionate ear! Some part of the voodoo actually works.

She was right about those sixteen bars that I wrote for her homework assignment. They stuck in my head and eventually even reached my fingers. I could play that string of expertly voiced chords together with a scrap of lyric, and a few years later record it with The Police. The song was called “Does Everyone Stare the Way I Do?” I imagine the royalties from just that one song—flagged by Dr. Mary K. Phillips—must have paid off all my years of music education.

1985

NIEBAUM RANCH, NAPA VALLEY

Francis leans back heavily and speaks calmly to the producer. The dark screening room is lit by a film frame frozen on the screen.

“Yeah…couple places, we need strings.”

Damn. This had been going really well. As we screened the scenes that I had scored, Francis Coppola had been rumbling with approval. The director and the other postproduction chiefs had been chuckling and nodding sagely over the callow charm of my first attempt at film music. The lack of finesse suited Francis’s sense of atmosphere for this film. Since I had no idea how movies had been scored since the dawn of film I had had to invent the wheel for myself. The important thing was that Francis was able to infuse me with the mood that he needed in each scene. With my bare hands, on guitar, marimba, bass, banjo, and kazoo, I could make that mood.

From the start Francis has been talking about using rhythm as a dramatic device in this film, Rumble Fish. With the classic film High Noon as a template, he wants to build a sense of impending, implacable doom. The story is of a countdown. Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Diane Lane, and Tom Waits all have an appointment with fate in reel twelve of the movie. Francis wants the audience to sweat every second of the journey to that place.

Well, I don’t know much about drama, but rhythm is a thing of mine. With the help of two teenage Coppolas, Roman and Gian-Carlo, ferreting through the sound effect libraries, I was able to start a collection of rhythms created by machinery, animals, and people. Pile drivers, barking dogs, typewriters, and car crashes all have rhythm if you look closely.

At the Long Branch Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I have recordings of these sounds on magnetic tape. If I cut the tape with a razor at the beginning and end of, say, a burst of dog barking, then I can join the two ends of the strip of tape and create a loop. Threading this loop onto the tape machine is easy enough, but we have to set up tape spools on mic stands around the room to keep the tape untangled as we play the loop and record the repeating pattern of dog barking onto a second tape recorder. One day, a decade or so in the future, someone will invent computers.

The latest breakthrough in audio recording today is technology that can synchronize and dependently lock two tape machines. This enables us to build up a web of sound effect rhythms. By tweaking the speed of the playback machine I can synchronize each new layer of repeating noise to groove in some way with the collection on the recorder.

For every reel of the movie—of which there are twelve—I have a tapestry of rhythmatized and synchronized sounds. On each of eight tracks there is a groove. On track four, for instance, there is a pile driver pounding incessantly. On track six there is a billiard ball break looped to create a strange rhythm. This can be used as a subliminal effect in the pool hall scene. Or to presage the scene, or to refer back to the scene later in the movie. Richard Beggs, who is the overall soundmeister of the movie, is in on the plot. Every scene of the film has a rhythm chugging somewhere in the soundscape. The clock is ticking.

Upon these rhythms I build the music with guitar, drums, banjo, bass, marimba, and piano. There is a scene in which Matt pays an evening visit to his girlfriend, Diane, at her parents’ house. He is met on the front porch by the young Sophia Coppola, who plays the precocious kid sister.

The scene needs to carry the underlying tension of impending, implacable doom but also to lighten up for a minute to play some romance. In the background, the train whistle blows at almost imperceptibly regular intervals. Closer, there is a broken fan that we can feel vibrating. Over these vaguely sinister rhythms a tinkling progression of chords on a toy piano is all it takes to combine with Matt’s yearning performance to create a wave of poignancy.

I have no idea how you are supposed to score a movie, so I just made this whole scheme up as a theory of a practical solution to an artistic problem. It turns out that my method is so far from how you’re supposed to do it that no one has ever done it like this—which makes me the Che Guevara of film scoring.

So far, so good. I don’t even realize yet how rare it is to have a director who will give anyone this much rope. This is the Francis method—find people with the right instincts and turn them loose with the tools.

Now he wants some conventional orchestral score to leaven the rather astringent high-concept layers that I have produced. Violins, oboes, that sort of thing. Some premonition of a career in Hollywood alerts me to a door opening. Strings?

I had already chased off competition from other musicians, arrangers, and composers that Francis had gathered in Tulsa during the shoot. This suddenly looks like a new opportunity for an interloper. Some fool of a studio hack can come on board and sweeten all of my cool stuff! The director wants instruments that I can’t play myself!

In a split second I’m an orchestral arranger.

“Strings?…Sure, yeah, lemme rustle up some strings and nice orchestra stuff in a couple of places,” says I.

2000

YEARS LATER AT PARAMOUNT STUDIO M

Behind me in the huge control room is the director, his producer, and a couple of studio bosses. In front of me is the seventy-channel mixing console nursed by a five- or six-man recording crew.

Through the glass in front of us we can see the orchestra. There are video monitors everywhere that show us the movie, the recording status, and each other. The score is on my desk in front of me. Jeff Seitz, my man from Juilliard and collaborator of two decades, runs the recording crew while I run the band, and the director behind me runs the executives.

The conductor is on the podium, facing the slickest orchestral talent that money can buy. In his headset he can hear dialogue, metronome click, and me:

“Let’s go to 1m6, measure 25. We’ll drop you in at bar 27. Tacit, please, brass until 32. And you can take them down one dynamic, say…mezzo forte until 36. Everybody play ink at 36. Show me when you’re ready.”

Through the twenty or thirty microphones we can hear the rustling of scores as the sixty players turn to the spot. Pete on the podium conveys the instruction for the horns, trumpets, trombones,

and tuba to not play for the specified six measures and to play slightly less loudly when they do enter. Rustle, Rustle.

He raises his baton. The room stills.

“Roll tape.”

The chatter behind me stops, and the scene is playing on everyone’s screens. At exactly seven minutes, eighteen seconds, and twelve frames into the reel a bright yellow streamer appears on the screen and a loud clicking indicates the tempo of the incoming music. After four clicks the band strikes up—although we can’t yet hear it. We’re listening to music that we recorded on the last pass, as the orchestra plays along in parallel. At measure 27 the recordist hits his red button, and seamlessly we are now hearing the new recording of the current performance.

All this is in response to the client behind me, who wants his favorite line of dialogue to be more clearly audible through the din of sound effects and thrilling music. This is an easy one; all I have to do is carve off some of the orchestra to clear audio space for the dialogue. The mood of the scene is playing well so I don’t have to rewrite the music and put new charts on the stands.

But it does happen sometimes, that a hitherto undisclosed producer will show up at the orchestra date with a brand-new perspective on the scene. This is the last high-octane, thousands-of-dollars-per-minute event of the film production, so distant functionaries whom I’ve never before met will arrive for one last piss on the tree.

“Wait a minute!” such a producer might say. “This scene is supposed to be happy-sad! I’m only hearing sad!”

By the time we get to the hyperexpensive scoring stage the relative happy and sad have been fully calibrated to the satisfaction of the director and more immediate producers. But now this guy wants more happy in this scene. That’s when you have to put the orchestra on a fifteen-minute break, sprint over to the keyboard, and start figuring.

With modern software it’s not too hard to immediately print up new parts to put on the stands. The tricky part is manipulating the emotional message of the chords, melodies, rhythms, and timbres. The film composer has to work very decisively and quickly to hit the precise emotional spot. Composing for full orchestra on the fly separates the men from the boys. I’ve had to learn how to do it with the clock ticking. It’s been the formal part of my music education—and I’ve been paid for all of it!

CHAPTER 5 CURVED AIR

1975

My first pro rock band.

Dear Sirs,

I recently had the exquisite joy of experiencing a Curved Air concert and was most impressed by the exceptional talent of their new drummer…

Dear Sounds,

Curved Air are BRILLYANT!

What’s the drummer’s name?

To whom it may concern,

Wow! Me and some mates went to see Curved Air at the…Incredible…especially the drummer…

I’m writing all of these letters to music magazines myself, using different handwriting, styles, spellings, and stationery. After playing a show we usually pull over on the edge of town to gas up for the drive back home to London, so while Darryl pumps gas into

our Ford Zodiac, I find a letterbox and slip another piece of skulduggery into the system.

I have no faith that the crown of fame and fortune will be justly placed upon my deserving brow. For some reason I’m desperate, even though I’m only twenty-three. I’m in too much of a hurry to wait for the apples to drop, so I must shake the tree. In a strange kind of way I’m more proud of plunder grabbed than honor bestowed.

We’re having a great time in Curved Air. I’m in a big pro band now—as a member of the band. I’ve had many other jobs in show business—roadie, tour manager, journalist, promoter, radio disc jockey—but now I’m back on this side of the line. I’m the product, not the producer.

When big brother Miles got to London and started building bands, I latched on to any of his projects that had a free seat in the van. I carried amps for Wishbone Ash. I drove for Renaissance, did lights for Cat Iron, and tour managed Joan Armatrading.

In college my drumming had actually lapsed in favor of composing and publishing. I started a little magazine in Berkeley called College Event. Actually it was more of a tip sheet than a magazine. I published letters by college concert promoters, who were students like me. I pooled their experiences with the industry professionals and artists—and then sold advertising to the same industry people. It was kind of a journalistic protection racket—a concept that Miles had dreamed up and perfected in England.

But those drums just came back and got me. I was about to finish up college in California when Miles called from London with an opportunity to get in a band with Darryl Way, the virtuoso violinist of the long disbanded Curved Air. Even though my drum fervor had faded a bit, I jumped on the next flight to London and immediately sparked a connection with Darryl. He was looking for players with passion at a time when everyone else was looking for plush. He had kept enough of a reputation going that we could form a group called Stark Naked & the Car Thieves (a name borrowed from Ian’s Vietnam tour) and start playing shows.

Just as we were about to get serious, maybe three or four shows into our push, Darryl and each of the other members of Curved Air got tax bills that had been bequeathed them by previous insect people. Since all of the Curvians were in the same predicament, they were able to patch up their differences and reunite for a tour to pay the bill. It did put our new band on hold for about a month, but at least I was able to cross back over the line and weasel my way into the Curved Air tour as tour manager. I’m the only guy I know (OK, except Henry Padovani) who could ever work both sides of the camera.

THE FIRST SHOW OF the tour is a college gig in Reading. After dropping the band off in their dressing room I go up to the stage to check the crew. They are in the usual first show panic. For its day, this is a high-tech band, with banked synthesizers and special effects gadgets. The stage is a tangle of gear and wires. I let each of the roadies unload his tale of woe and then let them get on with it. Classic roadies—they bitch…and then just do it. I’m just a kid, but I’ve done the job of every man on this crew.

At least the promoter is happy. Massed college kids are straining at the doors, and the show is going to be packed.

Back onstage the crew is finally ready for a few minutes of sound check before the doors must open. I bring the band up for a panicked run-through of one song. There are still uncontrolled buzzes from the amps and unintended screeches from the PA, so everyone is tense. Sonja Kristina, the singer, is absolutely calm, smoking a cigarette as she surveys the crew’s raging spaghetti fight.

We can’t hold the doors any longer, so I hustle the band off the stage. I have to pry Francis Monkman’s fingers from the keyboards. Some musicians are never finished with their sound check.

It’s much easier to manage a band than to be in a band. There isn’t any of the nervous sweat. I can leave them in the dressing room to stew until showtime while I go see what fires I can put out onstage. The crew are a little calmer now, and the griping is down to a grump. They’re much happier now that the support act crew are setting up and can be lorded over. The room is filling up fast. Whatever noise comes out of the amplifiers, this show is going to start with some momentum.

When I take this news down to the band, their mood brightens and they start to puff up with the mojo. While the other band thumps away over our heads, laconic drummer Florian rat-tat-tats his hand exercises, Phil rattles his bass, and Darryl arpeggiates furiously on his violin while Francis frets mysteriously. Sonja is in another room doing chick singer stuff with her wardrobe and makeup posse.

It’s showtime. The other band has cleared off, our stage is set, and the crew is ready. I go down and give Darryl the nod, and he’s raring to go. He leads the guys up to the wings, rapping on Sonja’s door as he goes by. I head up to shake some payment out of the promoter before the band plays a note. Gigs these days can be shifty.

I was supposed to meet Darryl in the wings before the band went onstage, but before I make it back to the hall he has already started up. He opens the show with some heavy rhythmic scrubbing on his electric violin as an attention grabber, and then the band kicks in for an instrumental romp through some slightly classical, vaguely Verdi riffs.

They do have something here, this band. They immediately have the crowd moving. There are a lot of groups out there these days that are sophisto-classical, but these guys actually rock. And that’s not all.

After blizzards of virtuosity from Francis and Darryl the band cuts down to a low throb. They hold the groove for a minute, and the kids are yelling. I can see why. My own hackles are on end. Sonja Kristina has arrived on the stage. Suddenly there is no band, no stage, no college kids. Just Sonja glinting in the green light. She moves like smoke across the stage, hardly seeming to move at all, but undulating in slow motion. Who cares what the band is doing? As a muso I’ve never bothered with singers, considering them to be musical passengers. How wrong I’ve been! She’s not even singing yet, and she owns everything.

SIX MONTHS LATER SONJA is squeezed into the backseat of the Zodiac between myself and Mick Jacques, and we are chuckling off down the motorway back to London after a show. We’re a happy band and we have just killed another crowd. After the Curved Air tour wrapped up, Francis and Florian went back to their lives, leaving Sonja and Darryl to consider the value of their band brand. It seemed like a no-brainer for Darryl to bring in the Car Thieves and continue as Curved Air with Sonja, Phil, Mick on guitar, and me on drums.

Who could ever expect that Sonja will one day become my first wife and mother of three of my four sons?

Melody Maker reprint: After a rather sudden and mysterious avalanche of readers’ letters, this one was printed in the “Any Questions?” section. My First Ink, and I scammed it myself.

CHAPTER 6 TAGGING LONDON

1977

Fuck!…is that a cop car?”

Paul Mulligan and I are lurking in a cleft in the cityscape, peering up the rainy night street and trying to discern the threat to our endeavor. Stashing our spray cans in our coats we, for the umpteenth time, interrupt our mission and pretend to be normal until we can see that there are no protuberances on the approaching vehicle. We’re still nervous because this is our first crime wave.

We started out with a stencil, but ended up getting more paint on ourselves than the walls. And the logo, THE POLICE, just wasn’t dominating the canvas with enough pride. So we ditched the soggy, dripping cardboard stencil and have been spraying the band name in uneven capitals on suitable walls around London. The word tagging hasn’t yet been invented, but that’s what we’re doing.

The inoffensive car passes on down the street, and we are about to resume our insurrection when a couple of pedestrians come around the corner. Damn. After a reflexive lurch back into the shadows, Paul lights up a smirk.

“Do you think they could give a damn? Fuck ‘em,” he says as he strides out into full lamplight and draws his can. The pedestrians pass by with not a sideward glance. They completely ignore Dalí and Picasso flagrantly spraying on their city walls.

It dawns on us that the shade of night is more of a hindrance than a shield. If we do this in broad daylight, we can see cops from further off. We can certainly see them better than they can see us. Everyone else on the street, whether on foot or in cars seems to be blind to us. We’re invisible! So we get bolder and soon are out at high noon plastering posters and spraying our turf like any male mammals. Paul, eager to invest in show business, lent us £400 to record our first single. We both have high hopes for a return on his gamble.

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