Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (26 page)

In the studio, under Brian’s direction, we recorded his harmony parts for “Adios” with five separate tracks of unison singing on each of the three parts, fifteen vocal tracks in all. He didn’t seem concerned if some of the tracks veered slightly out of tune, but took advantage of the slight “chorused” effect it created when he came back into the control room to mix the harmony tracks into the creamy vocal smoothness instantly recognizable as the Beach Boys.

Brian was making up the harmonies as he went along, but sometimes, when he was having difficulty figuring out a complicated section, he would scold himself and say that he needed to work for a time at the piano. However, when he sat down at the piano, he never played any part of “Adios,” but instead would play a boogie-woogie song, very loud, in a different key. After a few minutes of this, he would go back to the microphone and sing the parts perfectly, without a trace of hesitation.

While working with Nelson, I had gotten spoiled by the huge acoustic resonance of the orchestra and wanted more of it. Peter, whose mother had been an oboe professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London, shared my enthusiasm. For years, the trend in recording had been to record in small, dead rooms and add electronic embellishment in the form of echo and equalization. I wanted to make a record that included a lot of natural ambient room sound, and, beginning with the album
Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind
, I found it in the huge scoring stage at Skywalker Sound, in Northern California, where I was living. The space, which was created for recording orchestral
scores for film, really roared. Like other favorite studios where I had recorded, most notably Studio A at Capitol, it had its own distinctive sonic footprint. The room itself was an additional member of the band. I wanted a big choir for two of the songs, so I enlisted the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, under the direction of Terrance Kelly. Their primary contribution was on the title track, “Cry Like a Rainstorm,” George Massenburg’s engineering indulging our shared passion for true high fidelity sound. It is amazing to me that, since the invention of iPods, almost no one listens to music in that format anymore. Instead of a dedicated space to hear music with big stereo speakers, sharing what one hears with others in the room, we are listening on cheesy laptop speakers or in the isolated spaces created by tiny earbuds. It makes me sad.

There was one other thing on my list: I wanted to sing with Aaron Neville.

In Los Angeles, word would spread fast whenever the Neville Brothers came to play. The musician phone tree would start humming. I would get a call from bassist Bob Glaub or guitarist Waddy Wachtel, guys who had played in my various bands. We would cancel whatever plans we had and go hear Aaron, Art, Charles, and Cyril Neville play music that has only one point of origin, and that is New Orleans. We would wait for Aaron to sing his first big hit, “Tell It Like It Is,” and scream our guts out cheering. A standout for me was his searing interpretation of the haunting ballad “Arianne,” which could leave me in a state of near paralysis.

The countertenor register where Aaron sings, and the five-beat West African rhythms that support him, are rooted deeply in the sophisticated eighteenth-century culture of the New Orleans
Creoles. Children of wealthier families were often sent to Paris to be educated, and musical alliances were formed with French opera. The tenors of French Baroque opera sang their high notes in the falsetto register or with softly floating “head tones” instead of blasting high Cs from their chests like Italian tenors were doing by the late nineteenth century. Their styles of melismatic vocal embellishment were regional and guarded jealously. The Creoles were French-speaking and Catholic. In modern culture, their five-beat West African rhythms and falsetto high notes stand in stark contrast to the Protestant, belted styles of rhythm and blues, which places the accent on two and four (the backbeat) in a four-beat measure. (To understand five-beat, think of the famous Bo Diddley beat and clap one, two-three, one-two.) A case can be made that Aaron’s singing style bears a closer relationship to French Baroque opera composer Jean-Philippe Rameau than it does to Wilson Pickett.

Too shy to navigate backstage politics and wangle an introduction to the Nevilles, I had never met them. In 1984 I went to New Orleans with Nelson Riddle to sing at the World’s Fair. The night of the show, the word came from our Louisiana-born sax player, Plas Johnson, that the Nevilles were playing a late show at one of the World’s Fair venues that night. When my show was finished, I hurried out of my costume and put on a cotton dress that would be comfortable in the sticky New Orleans humidity. We crammed the whole band and some of the road crew into a couple of cars and rushed over to where the Nevilles were playing. I had never seen them work to a hometown crowd, and they were steaming.

Toward the end of the set, Aaron announced that I was in the audience and said that he wanted to dedicate the next song to me. As he began to sing, I realized it was “Arianne”! I was mesmerized. After he finished the song, he invited me to come up and
sing with them. This is something I never do, unless I am well acquainted with whomever is performing and have had a chance to rehearse, but after hearing Aaron sing “Arianne,” I wasn’t about to refuse him. I didn’t have any idea what I would do once I got up there. Aaron leaned over and said they were going to sing some doo-wop. Being a soprano, I was relieved. I jumped on a falsetto high part above Aaron and held on for the ride.

The next morning, I woke up in my bed at the Royal Orleans Hotel and remembered the thrill of singing with Aaron the night before. I thought our voices sounded good together, and it might be a cool idea to record with him. Then a darker thought crowded in.
Of course
I thought it sounded good.
Anyone
sounds good when singing with Aaron Neville. I continued my tour and bent my thoughts to more attainable dreams.

A few months later, I was surprised to hear that Aaron’s manager had called to invite me to sing with him at a concert to benefit an organization called New Orleans Artists Against Hunger and Homelessness. Aaron had teamed with legendary New Orleans composer and record producer Allen Toussaint, plus Sister Jane Remson, a charming, brilliant, and resourceful Catholic nun, to found the organization to bolster the state’s hopelessly inadequate facilities to aid the homeless. Whatever lingering resentments I harbored about my early school experiences with the nuns at Saints Peter and Paul were swept aside by Sister Jane’s blazing charm and efficient, compassionate approach to problem solving. She, along with Sister Helen Prejean, also of New Orleans, are part of a small and determined group of Catholic nuns who, in spite of the benighted and regressive attitude of the church hierarchy and its best efforts to impede them, continue to do excellent work among the less fortunate. They are my heroes.

I flew to New Orleans without much of a plan about what
I would sing when I got there. Aaron and I had both attended Catholic school and had known Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” since childhood. My brother Peter had sung it as the featured soloist in concerts all over the country when he toured with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. Aaron told me that the song had come into his mind when he was experiencing a great crisis, and he felt it had saved him. He now included it in his shows. Since we both knew the melody and all the Latin words, we decided to sing it together. Aaron remembers asking me to sign a photograph to him, and I wrote, “To Aaron, I’ll sing with you anytime, anyplace, in any key.” We began to discuss the idea of recording together.

I found four songs for us to sing. Two of them, “Don’t Know Much,” and “All My Life,” became Grammy-winning hits. Aaron was nervous at the Grammy ceremony and nearly forgot his most important priority, which was to thank his beloved wife, Joel. Those affairs are often fraught with nerves and other uncomfortable feelings. It is lovely to have one’s work acknowledged, but prizes have seldom mattered to me, as I generally feel that I know whether I have done well or not—and as often as not, come up short in my estimation of my performance. In that case, no prize will soothe the sting of thinking I should have done better.

The first time I won a Grammy, in 1975, I didn’t expect it and had not prepared anything to say. After awkwardly mumbling a thank-you to Peter Asher and having my picture taken by members of the press, I went in search of the ladies’ room. Jazz singer Sarah Vaughan was scheduled to perform at the Grammys that year, and I wanted to see her. Time was getting short, so I started running for the door of the ladies’ room just as someone else was hurrying out. I smashed my face into the opening door at full speed and spent the rest of the evening sitting
in the audience with a goose egg swelling on my cheekbone. For me, winning a prize means that my name is announced, I get real nervous, and then I get hit in the face.

Aaron asked me and George Massenburg to produce an album for him. He wanted very much for it to include the “Ave Maria,” which had such a personal meaning for him. I suggested arranging it with a boys’ choir, as that had been the way I heard my brother sing it as a child. We recorded at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I inserted myself as an extra boy soprano, harmonizing with Aaron toward the end of the song. People often comment that Aaron sings like an angel. In that setting, he was the mightiest of archangels.

Photo by Robert Blakeman.

With my daughter.

20

Living the Dream

B
ETWEEN THE AGES OF
forty and fifty, I had a fully matured voice with a vocal toolbox that was as diverse as it was ever going to be, and I did some of my best singing. I recorded two more Grammy-winning albums, among others. They were
Frenesí
(1992), which was all in Spanish, and
Dedicated to the One I Love
(1996), a record I made for soothing my small children to sleep. I also recorded
Trio II
(1999) with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, and
Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions
(1999), an album of duets with Emmylou.

One of my favorite projects during that time was the recorded version of Randy Newman’s musical
Faust
, based on the classic German legend. Eventually performed on the stage, it had a recording cast with Don Henley as Henry Faust; James Taylor as God; Elton John as Rick, an archangel; Randy as the Devil; Bonnie Raitt as Martha, a good-time girl; and me as Margaret, the ingénue who is destroyed by Faust.

Randy’s songs can be bleak. Not to seem a hard man, he will insert a shard of comfort so meager it seems Dickensian. His songs are superbly crafted, with a musical tension that results from this combination of hope and utter despair. In his orchestrations, he might comment on the narrative being carried by the singer, using the instruments to deliver the jabs. Singing in the midst of one of his arrangements can feel like taking part in a boisterous discussion, with people of unevenly matched intelligence, sensibility, and insight ranting and squabbling. He spares
himself least of all, and during recording sessions, he will make the orchestra weak from laughter, often with jokes about the inadequacies of his conducting. Whatever these inadequacies may be, he manages to get the job done, and beautifully.

After I turned fifty, my voice began to change, as older voices will. I recrafted my singing style and looked for new ways to tell a story with the voice I had. My final solo recording, 2004’s
Hummin’ to Myself
, was a collection of standard songs recorded with a small jazz ensemble that included cello and violin. Eugene Drucker, the violinist in the Emerson String Quartet, came to play on Alan Broadbent’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” which had been written for piano, violin, cello, and double bass. Drucker is a player of dazzling ability, and when he took his violin from the case and began to play, the sound boiling out of his instrument stunned us all. “What was the make of the violin he played?” we wanted to know. It was a Stradivarius, made in Cremona, Italy, in 1686. Of course, it takes a player of Drucker’s ability to get the Stradivarius to sing so beautifully. Sitting next to Drucker, playing the cello, was his wife, Roberta Cooper, who plays with the Westchester Philharmonic and is another superb musician. Her cello, also from Cremona, was crafted by the famous luthier Francesco Ruggieri and is a year older than the Stradivarius. I imagined that the two instruments had met before during their long and perilous journeys through the centuries, and wondered if, in the care of this wonderfully talented couple, they felt like old friends reunited.