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Rob on SPEAK!
I must admit that after I finished touring in support of Sticks & Stones, I was a bit burned out. Everything surrounding the release of that record was pretty brutal. I did one tour where I traveled to every major market in the US to perform in boardrooms for the PolyGram execs at the regional sales branches. That’s another story, but suffice to say that doing a set at 9AM in an office building in front of 30 suits sitting at a conference table isn’t the most inspiring venue. After that I did a tour where I played in virtually every Borders store in the USA. On one leg, I remember playing 2 mini-shows in Chicago and another in Minneapolis plus an in person interview and two phoners in one day! Then I did a tour of commercial dates in the US, and shortly after that I went to Europe. All in all, I did close to 150 consecutive dates between March and December of ’97 alone. I went home and just collapsed. I think I literally slept for about a month. When I woke up I was absolutely toast on the whole solo guitar thing. I just didn’t have another solo piece in me at the time. PolyGram was leaning on me pretty hard to hurry up and get a new record happening, so I headed off to my basement with the trusty 4-track and got to work. By that time I’d made up my mind that I was going to make the record that *I* always wanted to do even if it killed my deal. I think I knew it was going to scare the hell out of PolyGram, and especially Will, but I fired up the drum machine and started to demo the record. I wrote and demoed all of the heavy full band tunes to the best of my ability in the first two weeks. The first tape I sent to the record company had rough sketches of “Wandering Minds”, “Trades”, “Funketude”, “Inside English”, “Lucy”, and a tune called “Catwalk” which never made it to the record. Just as I expected, the record company freaked. One thing I’ve learned in my career (take note, up and comers) is that A&R people have absolutely no vision. If you can’t present them with demos which are 99% what the finished product will be, you only have a 20% shot at them getting what you’re after. Because of the limitations of working with four tracks, it was impossible for me to track anything but the basic drum machine parts and rhythm guitars. The most important thing (I thought) I could do was to present the hugeness of how an acoustic guitar could fit into a band setting. The record company kept saying, “Where’s the melody?” I did everything I could to try and illustrate how I heard it turning out, including humming it, playing melody ideas “live” over the phone with my guitar, playing a kazoo (just kidding!), I mean everything. Finally they just realized that these demos were as good as it was going to get and gave in. Another thing that was working against me at the time was that although nothing was said initially, both Will and I knew that because of the nature of this project, he wasn’t going to be able to (nor did he want to) produce it. Don’t get me wrong, Will is amazing at doing sparse productions and really knows how to pull intimacy out of sessions like that—as good as anyone—but this production was going to be all about working with click tracks, MIDI, sampling, compression and dealing with track counts of 24+ per tune. Since Will had little experience working in that sort of environment, he agreed to step down. I remember being a little worried about our separation and wondering if it was going to change my relationship with Will. While I found out later that he isn’t as likely to be a champion of things he had nothing to do with as much as stuff he had a hand in, I have to say that he was really gracious about letting me go my own way. He basically said, “Look around for a producer and let me know who you come up with.” Before I started looking for producers, I wanted to get a real solid idea of who the other musicians were going to be. I knew I was going to have Michael Manring back to play fretless bass and I knew I wanted the rest of the players (like him) to be the absolute best in the industry. Rod Morgenstein had been my favorite drummer for years. I didn’t know what he was up to or even if he would do it, but on a whim I called Manring and asked if he knew who Rod’s manager was. Much to my surprise, he said his manager was Frank Soloman. Frank used to do artist management and concert promotion way back in the mid-eighties during my metal years in Boston. I called him and we had a great conversation about the old days. He pitched the idea to Rod, I sent him a tape, and Rod called me to say that he loved the stuff and would be really into doing it. In our next conversation, I told him I really wanted an amazing drum sound and would spare no expense to make sure we had a great room with a great engineer. I basically said, “I’ll cut basic guitar tracks to a click and fly anywhere you think is best to do the drums.” Rod replied without hesitation that Kip Winger (his old band mate) gets amazing drum sounds and if he would be into it, we should see if we could record the drums at Kip’s house in Santa Fe. I hadn’t seen Kip since the late eighties when Winger played a show in Honolulu while I was living there. I’d heard his first solo album, This Conversation Seems Like a Dream, and I really loved the production. When I called Kip to ask if we could cut the drums at his house, we ended up having a really long, deep conversation about music. Not to sound too weird, but there’s always been a sort of brotherly connection with us. I’ll never forget the moment in that call when the topic of producing came up. I remember him saying, “Who are you going to get to produce this record?” Without a second of hesitation I said, “You can have it, if you want it…” and he said, “OK, yeah, I’d be into that, right on…” almost immediately. Shortly after that, he flew to New York to meet with Will and Dawn Atkinson. They checked out his work, had lunch, negotiated his fee, and the rest, as they say, is history. I rented a great little villa in Santa Fe about 15 miles from Kip’s house and we went to work. My guitar tech and road manager, Marc Perez, joined us about a week later to assist with engineering, change strings, and let me and Kip beat on him emotionally (sorry Marc, did that hurt?). We started by setting up MIDI for tempo and burning click tracks to digital tape. After that, we spent a few days working on arrangements. Kip really wanted to capitalize on the riffs and really pushed me to develop them beyond what I had done on the demos. At times I admit to being a little wimpy about it, but in the end I wound up being really grateful for it. If you asked Kip, he’d probably tell you that my real strength as a composer (if I have any) is the way I develop jamming into tunes. Whereas most writers (him included) usually build a tune from melody and fill in the rest, I tend to go the opposite way (bless him for being able to deal with that at all as a producer!). I always start with riffs and get a really full rhythm structure happening first, then fill the melody in later. He was just awesome at capitalizing on that. I remember playing through sections for him and having him stop me and say, “Come on…you’re copping out…give me a real riff…develop that idea.” It was like he knew what my “I’m tired…fall back to default” riffs were, and he wouldn’t let me do them. After the arranging was done, we went to work tracking rhythm guitars. I cut everything to a click and nothing else. That was kind of a challenge, because I hadn’t worked that way since my electric days. A lot of people don’t realize that these days most records go together piecemeal, and therefore, everyone needs the same time reference, especially when you’re dealing with lots of tracks. Working this way isn’t easy because it isn’t really enough to just play your parts in perfect time. You have to sort of imagine the vibe of time in the sense that a drummer does. The goal isn’t to play perfectly, but to push and pull it ever so slightly to make it human. In other words, if you don’t swing with the click track when you cut your parts alone, you’ll never get that live feel in the final mix and the music will sound like the click—stale and metronomic. In sum, I think we really pulled off that live feel and I’m happy with that. After we got the guitars nailed, the “A Team”—Kip, Manring, Rod, Marc, Robbie, Andy, Alan, Joel, Greta and Chris—followed, one at a time until we had all the basic tracking done. The performances of all these players are so phenomenal that I can’t stand it! They just tore me a new one and I think I left half my ass in Santa Fe. We took another few weeks for mixing and pre-mastering and that was it. We snagged, tagged, and bagged SPEAK! in just under 60 days. Whew! I have to express my true gratitude to Kip Winger before I finish this essay. He made this record happen in so many ways that I can’t list them all, but I will name a few… I think he didn’t fully realize what an enormous undertaking this album was going to be until we got rolling at full steam. He was already deep into his own record, Songs from the Ocean Floor, and he basically had to put it on hold to finish mine to his liking. His work ethic is so far beyond that of anyone I know, I can’t even describe it. Even with the wolf of his own music howling at the door, he never copped out and did anything the easy way to get my record done quicker. He even scrapped about a weeks work when he listened back to some mixes he had done earlier and just couldn’t live with them. He treated every note as if it was his own and I love him for that. Furthermore, he was a great inspiration in terms of capturing emotional performances. Other than the pieces that I had planned to put on the record, there were also a few surprises. “What You’ve Got” started with me playing this slow solo guitar dirge while we were getting ready to quit for the night. He fell in love with it and made me record a rough track of it. He got so inspired that we ended staying until early the next morning. He lit some incense and started improvising these beautiful vocal lines over the track and didn’t stop until they were 24 tracks thick and arranged to a tee. I remember sitting there at about 3AM with nothing but a single candle lit in the whole house, headphones on, with my jaw just completely slack as he belted those harmonies out. I don’t think I have ever been so slain emotionally by music. Oh yeah, and back to that work ethic thing again, the next day he spent 6 hours redoing some of those tracks because they “just weren’t good enough…” Kip also played bass and keyboards on almost every tune and kicked ass. I kind of feel bad in a way for his efforts. This record killed him—just in time for him to kill himself again with his own record! I doubt if he’ll ever produce another record other than his own again. It’s really too bad because he’s so good at it, but I understand why. He just doesn’t know how to approach anything at any speed less than full, and his plate is usually pretty full with his own stuff. He also had some problems getting the record company to pay him promptly, which just made me sick, but there was nothing I could do about it. Finally, I’ll never forget the excitement we felt when we finally finished and sent the label the master, proud as could be. We’d worked so hard and couldn’t wait for them to hear it. The record company never called to thank him or even comment on this piece of work. Can you imagine? Anyway, we kicked ass and we know it…I guess that’s all that’s really important. So after all this rambling, when, you ask, is SPEAK! coming out? Another long story. Here’s the short version… Shortly after we finished the record, PolyGram was acquired in a corporate takeover by Universal. Universal didn’t want any labels in its group that were not wholly owned subsidiaries. Imaginary Road was a joint venture between Will Ackerman and PolyGram. As a result, Imaginary Road got the axe, and so did I. At that point, I was faced with two major dilemmas. First, I had to find a new label that wanted to release SPEAK!, and second, that label would have to negotiate with Universal to buy the rights to the masters. The business works like this: When you’re signed to a label, the record company pays all the costs of recording an album. This money, along with any other money you take out for yourself is treated as an advance against royalties and is recoupable from record sales. In short, you don’t get royalty checks until you sell enough records to cover the recording costs. In my situation, this is a real big problem because Universal in essence has paid for recording an album that they don’t intend to release. It may sound silly, but they don’t care that there is an X-thousand dollar negative balance on my account with them. They don’t mind having something sitting on a shelf. It’s heavy-duty corporate crap. The more albums they have in their catalog, the better they look to potential investors and stockholders. Equity. Because of this, even if a find a label that wants to release it, Universal may not be willing to sell the rights for a reasonable price. This is because they figure the tax write-off to be worth more than the cash they would get by selling it at a discount. [WEBMASTER’S NOTE: Having just read Rob’s commentary here for the first time as I assemble this page, I can’t contain myself any longer and have to point out that this is precisely the same music industry jive logic that explains why you can’t buy Michael Manring’s first four…count ’em…4…CDs, even though one of them earned him “Bassist of the Year”, and why Windham Hell won’t even sell him the f’n rights for a limited release. In other words, in a truly warped and inverted spin on capitalism, a bunch of label wonks have decided they’d rather NOT have your money! You can’t hear the music, even if you’re willing to pay for it. And these albums would make money, just not enough money for these greedy, fraudulent suits. It almost makes one want to…dare I say it?…put each of these CDs, including SPEAK!, in full, on Napster. And believe me, I’m no fan of Napster either since I have yet to see any real evidence that it does anything but harm independent musicians (I’m not anti-fan, I’m just pro-indie-musician), but dumping these albums online is seeming more and more like a good idea…but you didn’t hear it from me!—M@] Having said all that, here’s what I’ve done so far and my plans for the near future: I just finished shopping the record to all the major labels. I won’t pull any punches…none of them want it and I understand why. The major label biz is filled with horrible crap that fits in a neat little box. SPEAK! isn’t new age, jazz, or rock and they wouldn’t know what to do with it or what good music is if it smacked them in the ass. I’m not surprised, and its OK. To be honest, I doubt I would ever even be interested in being on a major again anyway. They suck and I hate them. ’Nuf said. I’m going to start shopping it to indies this month and it’s going to be a process. I’m 99% sure that a few indies are going to want it, even if for no other reason than simply who played on it. I hate to tell you all that you have to be patient some more, but I’m dealing with this as best I can. Once I find a few that want it, I have to choose one and then fight the battle of my life (again) to try and get it back from the evil giants. In the mean time, Matt and I have worked really hard to make this site a good resource and something more than just the usual garbage you get at a musician’s site. I’m re-releasing my out of print 1994 record, Consistent Variation, completely re-mastered in digital this year. I’m also about half done with my newest record, Music for Film, which is a collection of film score oriented music with lots of guitar (of course) as well as layered voices, native instruments, percussion ensembles and orchestral work. Finally, I just started working on (can you believe it after what I said above?) a new solo guitar oriented record tentatively titled, What I Believe, which I hope to finish by January 2002. In the meantime, please join my mailing list because we’re going to open a “member’s only” MP3 area where I’ll be posting preview tracks from each of these albums soon. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, there are two tunes from SPEAK! available for download in the MP3 area. Hopefully, those will be enough to tide you over until the full record is out. Go get ’em and enjoy! — Rob |
