Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (21 page)

After talking to some musician friends who had worked on Wexler’s past productions, I realized why he had acted as he did. Wexler was, in the truest sense, an old-fashioned A&R man. In the earlier days of record making, the A&R man might select the material and musical setting for an artist such as, for instance, Rosemary Clooney. He would say to her, “I have this song, ‘Come On-a My House.’ We’re going to record it in this style with this arranger and these musicians.” Rosemary, a wonderful singer with, I assume, plenty of ideas of her own, had very little to say about it. Artists like Bob Dylan and the Beatles changed all that. They wrote or selected their own material and musical direction, becoming enormously successful in the process. David Geffen’s label, Asylum, was founded on the premise that the artist’s vision would be respected and supported.

Wexler was, in the best sense of the word, a great Monday morning quarterback. He could recognize when something was good after the fact. He could suggest and organize a general musical direction, but musical particulars and engineering decisions were left to specialists upon whom he relied heavily. Perhaps more heavily than he realized.

In my case, hindsight shows that his A&R instincts were correct in thinking that I could have success recording standards from the American songbook, but he couldn’t execute the recording in a way that was satisfactory to me or my record label. I had to tell him the album would not be released. He was hurt and angry, and I felt terrible. I was very disappointed that the project hadn’t been successful, and sorrier still to lose his friendship. He and Renee had been very kind to me while I was living in New York, and I liked them both a great deal. Under the circumstances, there was no way to save the relationship.

Peter Asher and Joe Smith, while concerned about the money lost on the record, were relieved that it was not coming
out, which would have necessitated, in their opinion, throwing good money after bad. They hoped that I would forget about recording selections from the American standard songbook. I didn’t.

Joe Papp and Wilford Leach had decided to make
The Pirates of Penzance
into a motion picture, and Rex Smith, Kevin Kline, Tony Azito, George Rose, and I were asked to continue our roles in the film production. We were going to film in London, so the rest of the cast, which included Angela Lansbury, would be British.

We filmed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, about forty-five minutes outside of London, through the entire winter. Because the days were so short, our schedule landed us inside the studio just before the sun came up and excused us just after it had set. I took a room with a coal fireplace at the beautiful old Connaught Hotel and tried to keep warm, washing my clothes in the bathtub on rare days off.

Pete Hamill came and stayed for a time, bringing me a steady stream of books that he bought from a store in Charing Cross. I read them on the set waiting to be called in front of the camera: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola. They provided a richer and more sophisticated context for the clownish Victorian operetta I was singing. It also gave me this wonderful line from Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your everyday life, like a bourgeois, so you can be violent and original in your work.” I’ve never quite managed to match either end of this equation, but it’s something to shoot for.

One day my father called and told me in a tight, gray voice that my mother, who had been ill for some time, had died. On the following day off, when I was washing my clothes in the
bathtub, I remembered when I was three, following my mother down the little path to the clothesline, and handing her clothespins while she hung out the family wash. It always included the blue calico dress and tiny white pinafore worn by my Raggedy Ann doll.

As we were moving into spring, I set out one morning in the dark for my usual lengthy commute. Missing my mother and still feeling disappointment about my lost opportunity to sing the beautiful songs I had chosen for the ill-fated Wexler album, I was listening to a cassette of my old favorite Sinatra album,
Only the Lonely.
Just as Sinatra was beginning his flawless rendition of “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” the sun, adhering to its new spring schedule, popped its head up over the horizon. The sunlight and the music filled me, a desert dweller stranded in the cold, dark North, with longing and joy. I suddenly became aware that if I didn’t record those songs that I loved, I would spend the rest of my life feeling I had missed an essential experience. I resolved to beg Peter to help me, and, against his better judgment, he agreed.

In his practical hat, Peter managed to convince me that we had better first record an album with the more contemporary music my audience had come to expect from me. I quickly began to gather material for a new record,
Get Closer.
Our regular engineer, Val Garay, wasn’t available, so I suggested to Peter that we try George Massenburg, the engineer I had recorded with in Maryland. Peter had never worked with George before, but he liked the Complex, a new studio that George had recently built in West Los Angeles.

In the industry, George was regarded as one of the great pioneers of computer-automated mixing, and he was the inventor of modern equalization, which he’d developed as a teenager in his garage in Baltimore. He wore a look of quizzical befuddlement
resembling the glassy-eyed stare of a stuffed animal. He didn’t dress like a rock and roller, wearing instead a standard boy’s haircut, crewneck sweaters, and chinos. Handsome and awkward, self-effacing and shy, George was able to run simultaneous functions in his brain, ranging from a volcanic level of creativity to a cosmic snooze. While working with him day after day in front of the enormous recording console he had designed, I sometimes felt I was sitting next to an unattended steam boiler that was overheating and dangerously close to exploding. The atmosphere in his studio reminded me of the Japanese anime classic
Howl’s Moving Castle
, every track on the console a doorway into a different world of its own. What I was able to learn from him fundamentally changed the way I approached singing, recording, and listening.

I made my first digital album,
Mad Love
, in 1980. Because digital recording was a new technology then, Peter and I had not fully explored the broad range of possibilities that it offered. For instance, with analog recording, we had never developed a very sophisticated way to improve my vocal performances. As a result, most of my vocal tracks up until then had stayed exactly as I had sung them while we were recording the basic track. As we often worked on one song for hours, I would have to hold back to save my voice. Also, I was less inclined to take chances, because I was afraid I would be stuck with an idea that hadn’t turned out right. The new technology greatly enhanced the ability to switch among many takes of different vocal approaches and edit together the best bits. We could drop in the most microscopic segments: a breath, a final consonant, a syllable that had wavered out of tune. A brilliant engineer like George, with his ability to hear sound in tremendous detail, knew how to match the pieces so that the edits were invisible and the singing sounded completely natural. This freed me to relax and sing
anything that I wanted without having to worry that I would be stuck with something I didn’t like. It also gave me a way to study the way my voice interfaced with the instrumental track, and I learned to phrase better and refine and develop new vocal textures. In short, what George had presented to me was a way to learn how to sing. We continued to work together for many years, and the learning never stopped. Peter worked beautifully with George, and the three of us became a comfortable team.

16

Nelson Riddle

Photo by Robert Blakeman.

In concert with Nelson Riddle in Santa Barbara.

I
WOKE UP IN
the bedroom of my house on Rockingham Drive thinking, “Today Nelson Riddle is coming to my house, and I am going to sing Irving Berlin’s beautiful song ‘What’ll I Do?’ ” A big smile spread across my face. I sank deeper into the covers and ran through the song in my mind: “What’ll I do? / When you are faaar . . . away . . .” The song unspooled its loveliness in spare poetry and three-quarter time.

I jumped out of bed and hurried to take a bath and dress. I had waited so long for this. I didn’t want to be the cause for any more delays.

I had decided that I would like to make my standards record with an orchestra instead of a horn band. I’d complained to Pete Hamill that I wanted the orchestrations to sound like Nelson Riddle but didn’t know of any arranger who could write like
him. He suggested sensibly, “Why don’t you just call Nelson Riddle?” The idea hadn’t occurred to me. There were several reasons:

a. I didn’t know if he was still alive. (Easy enough to check.)

b. I didn’t know if he knew
I
was alive, or cared.

c. I imagined that he didn’t like music with rock underpinnings and would not be interested in working with a singer from that genre.

When Peter Asher called him, it turned out that Nelson, then sixty, didn’t really know who I was. He asked his daughter, Rosemary, if she thought he should work with me. “Well, Dad, the check won’t bounce,” was her reply. She urged him to consider it. Despite the fact that he had written arrangements for some of the greatest singers in popular music, including Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney, and of course, Sinatra, Nelson’s phone hadn’t been ringing that much in the past several years. The rock-and-roll revolution had swept away most of his employment, and he had been surviving by writing TV music and the occasional film score.

He met us at the Complex, where Peter, George, and I were working on the final mixes for
Get Closer.
I told him how much I admired his work on Sinatra’s
Only the Lonely
and what it had meant to me over the years. We played him our mix of “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” one of the songs on
Get Closer.
I told him that my mother had died very recently, and the song made me think of her, because when I was a little girl, I had always seen her face in the moon. He replied that his mother had died while he was working on
Only the Lonely
, and there was a lot of her in those arrangements. I asked him timidly if he would consider
arranging a few tracks for me on my upcoming standards record. To ask for more seemed presumptuous. Nelson replied that the Beatles had once asked him to write an orchestral arrangement for a track on one of their albums. He had firmly declined, saying that he didn’t do tracks, only albums. I whipped out the list of songs I had chosen. “Could you do all these?” I asked. He said he could.

We raced over to the piano. The first song on the list was “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.” Nelson fished around in his briefcase and produced the original sketch of the orchestration he had done for Sinatra. Of course, it wouldn’t be the right key. We experimented a little and found the one that worked for me. He crossed out Sinatra’s key and wrote in mine. Our work had begun. Nelson took the sketch home to start a new arrangement in the new key. I was floored by the experience.

I told Nelson that I liked a very custom fit for my arrangements and liked to be involved from the beginning. He welcomed the idea. The morning he came to my house, lugging the heavy briefcase, we worked at the piano for a few hours, mostly choosing keys and tempos. I gave him general guidelines, leaving the musical intricacies of the orchestrations up to him. To do more was far beyond my capability. Sometimes I suggested where I wanted a rubato feeling with only strings and woodwinds
here
, bring the rhythm section back in
there
. While we were working out “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” I asked for a modulation to a higher key, to give the arrangement a lift. Nelson surprised me by showing me a way to modulate to a
lower
key, providing an elegant shift of mood.