(I copied this in case the link disappears).migdd wrote:Rolling Stone has a long interview with Elvis on the series:
http://www.rollingstone.com/blogs/smoki ... stello.php
Elvis Costello Tells the S.S. About Spectacle, Premiering Tonight!
Tonight's guest is Sir Elton John, who elaborates on his earliest musical influences, does a killer Leon Russell impersonation at the piano, and reveals crazy details about his career, including the fact that not once, ever, have he and Bernie Taupin been in the same room together while writing a song.
We love the show, and future guests on the weekly series include Smokey Robinson, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright, the Police, Bill Clinton, Tony Bennett, She & Him, Jenny Lewis, Jakob Dylan and Herbie Hancock.
Last month, we cruised over to the W Hotel in Manhattan where we had the extreme pleasure of sitting down with Mr. Costello to talk Spectacle.
We wrote a story in the new issue — with that adorable Britney girl on the cover — but if you click more you can check out the whole transcript of our chat with Elvis, in which he elucidates at length about his favorite moments from the series.
Dig it.
How does this happen, you hosting this show?
People have been talking to me about doing something on television since the Eighties, somebody from the BBC spoke to me about doing short programs in the late Eighties, early Nineties, but that didn't come through and that person moved on. Six years ago, I did The Letterman Show, I guest-hosted when he was out, and then that drew in a bunch of conversations, some of them frivolous, some of them serious, and there was one very definite idea to do a show quite similar to this in terms of combining music and performance, but with a more specific musical focus – it was just one kind of music. Anybody can have the idea for a television show, but it doesn't really become a reality until you've got a committed broadcaster. Otherwise, it's just a treatment. I held out for us to have a broadcaster before we even announced it, so that's why it appears to have come out of nowhere. I said, "I don't want to announce it to try and get a broadcaster, but I think with the names we've got with my involvement and Elton [John's] involvement and the people I think we could call, they should trust us that we're going to be able to do this. Otherwise, let's not bother." It doesn't need to be another indifferent program. That's, fortunately, what's happened. We've got three broadcasters committed to it, and there's others in the world that will no doubt follow when they see what it is. We got to make thirteen programs.
Why has it taken so long for someone to do a great show like this?
I don't know that it is a great show, it will be for people to say whether it is or not. I know that I enjoyed the process; it was a lot of work and I had to learn a lot of things. I had to learn to read a TelePrompTer without being totally halting, but I didn't come up reading the weather in Phoenix, Arizona, or something. I'm used to speaking onstage, but not used to reading factual information off a prompter, so I probably got better at it over the series. There's no question that me talking to other artists has a real different result than you asking them the questions, even if you're a musician – they trust that I've been through some common experiences, so they're a little bit more open to my line of inquiry than…that's not because I'm such a good interviewer, I think it's because they see we have common ground in our experiences, and I'm not that determined to uncover some secret or some scandalous thing about them, and I'm not necessarily determined to replay everything in their career. Elton John did manage to reference a lot of interesting things about the very early part of his career, playing as a piano player behind Martha Reeves and a bunch of people, which people sort of know that he did. But I don't think he's talked about it at length that much. The sort of interviews he's done on national television have tended to focus on the magnitude of his success.
People know he was another person before he was Elton, but they don't really know what it was they did. Now I did know what it was that he did, not only that I read it, but because of my background, my dad being on the radio when I was a kid, I knew that these people existed, that backed up the American musicians, and whoever had hits in England, it was probably quite a big deal for a record by Major Lance or somebody to break through. I don't imagine there was a big budget. They were just trying to get the money together to get their stage suits out of the dry cleaners. These weren't big budget tours that these acts were coming out on, so of course, they'd play with the local musicians who could accompany them. When we did the Police episode, people expected us to focus mostly on Sting, but the bit about it that was…Andy Summers doesn't get to talk about how he backed up John Lee Hooker and stuff like that when he was about seventeen. That autograph is the genuine thing – that was from my dad [In the episode, Costello shows an autograph from Summers]. I don't think I got it directly from Andy. My poor dad went to the shows to ask the guest artists for their autograph for his son, and I remember getting Graham Nash to sign his name myself, which is funny now. I saw Graham about a month ago, and met his son, and I tell the story every time I see him. I did meet him when I was ten.
Approaching the episodes, what are you trying to draw out of these musicians?
What you see is what I intended. We edited it towards that. I don't think that…maybe it depends on what you see as the value of people reminiscing in that way. Did you see the Smokey [Robinson] episode? I don't like to make competition between the artists, but for me, it not only was the one I was most emotional about, just being onstage with him, but it was the most surprising, because that was almost right at the beginning of the show, he tells that story about being at the Apollo, which is totally to do with us being at the Apollo – if we didn't have the fortune to have to shift from our first location to our second location. That totally transformed that interview and a couple of the others. The theater itself is such a great place to do anything. Then he tells that amazing story about Ray Charles doing the arrangements, and it was startling to me. Then I said it to somebody afterwards before anyone had a chance to see it, I was relating the story, and a friend of mine said, "Think about what he said to you there – the fortunes of groups are very fragile in the early part of their careers. If Ray hadn't bailed him out that day, maybe there'd be no Smokey. Maybe there's no Motown." You start to unravel it, and it's like the alternative reality. If he doesn't turn up that day, there's no Motown – or no Smokey at Motown. That's pretty big. When he then goes on to talk about all the stuff he was involved in – of course, those have been told many times. But he told them with good heart, I thought.
I love when he talks about the Motown Christmas party.
That was pretty great, talking about Marvin Gaye being a guy who was just coming in with a Nat Cole impersonation at first was pretty fascinating to me. You realize that all those guys who appeared to us in the Sixties, the roots of their music are in the Fifties and even the Forties, because the influence of the music from the Forties was still being felt when they were growing up – jump bands, swing bands. As Smokey said, when he played those R&B shows at the Apollo in the late Fifties and early Sixties, the house band was still a beat band, it wasn't five guys with guitars. So you had to have charts. It's really charming to think they were that innocent about it, they didn't realize that they had to come equipped, they thought it would just be magic out of the air – then there's the other side of it, that generous, delightful story that he tells there, his response to me asking about "Just My Soul Responding." I just don't think anybody really remembers that song in America, it wasn't a hit in America, and it seemed to hit a nerve. What you saw in the finished program is maybe a tenth of the answer. He may have spoken for ten minutes in response to that question, and it's really great stuff. Of course, to keep a balanced program, we can't use it all, unfortunately. That was one of the moments where I wished it was live, because the answer was so extraordinary. I'm thinking, "Maybe there's never been a chance for him to talk about that experience of trying to write against prejudice, trying to use his art to address that and what it meant to him."
In seeing a few of the episodes, one of the most amazing parts was seeing Smokey sing "Tracks of My Tears" for a minute with the piano.
Yeah. It was a tease, but also realize he has to sing that on every show he's ever appeared on, so the fact that he just chose to illustrate that much of it, I was happy to get that. When he told me on the phone that he wanted to do [the Grammy winning song by Norah Jones] "Don't Know Why" I have to confess, I was a little disappointed that he didn't want to do one of his own songs. Then you hear him sing it, and he totally owns it. Totally owns it, and it sounds like he wrote it. At rehearsals, he came in on a different note, he came in on a falsetto note, which actually made everybody in the room lose it, it was such a beautiful sound. The performance on the show is pretty startling, and of course, to sing with him – you have to understand, we'd done the Police show earlier that day, and three days before that, I'd done concerts with the Police. I was fried by the time we got to the Smokey show, and my voice, I could feel it shutting down as we were talking. The more you talk, your voice goes to a different place. Then I've got to sing "You've Really Got A Hold On Me" with him, and he said, "You take the lead, I'll harmonize." Now I'm singing lead onstage at the Apollo with the man who wrote "You've Really Got a Hold On Me." One of the tracks on the first album I ever owned – albeit the Beatles version of it – and now I've got to make a good account of myself. It was pretty thrilling, and also terrifying.
As soon as you thought about him on your show, did you say, "We've got to do that song"?
No, at the beginning of that show, we opened the show with three of his songs that was the longest pre-show segment that we did, we usually just do one song, maybe two. But we actually did three songs, because the songs I was referencing in the interview are not among his most well-known, like "The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game" is maybe relatively well known, but "No More Tearstained Make-Up," nobody knows that song. Even he expressed surprise that I was going to talk about that song. Hence, we played a little bit of "Just My Soul Responding," which is relatively obscure to most people, but I didn't feel I was being willfully perverse in highlighting those songs, because they really are close to my heart and I genuinely am curious to know how, particularly "No More Tearstained Make-Up" connects to "Tears of a Clown" and "Tracks of My Tears," because it is this recurring motif of his, this Pagliacci character. That one, to me, is the big payoff of that line, that's one of his greatest songs, and nobody knows it. So we just did a performance of it at the top of the show, which we excerpted in the final show, like we did with a performance of "From Head to Toe," which I had a minor hit with that in England. It's the only song of his that I've performed regularly. I've done three or four others of his, and another is "You've Really Got a Hold Of Me," so when we said, "What song can we sing together?" The hardest thing is, because he sings so high, he came down from…I do "You've Really Got a Hold On Me" in G, and he sings it in C. I guess his falsetto wouldn't operate lower than A, and I couldn't sing any higher than A unless I was in falsetto, which I couldn't have…I'm not going to sing falsetto vocals next to Smokey. So we agreed on A. There's technical reasons why you choose certain songs.
What's your preparation like for those interviews?
Most of the artists, I know their stuff already upside down, but it's good to go back and have that shock, the reality of that record against your memory of it. Sometimes there will be records I had missed for one reason or another, or some artists I was conversant with than others. I didn't want the show to just be my pals, so there are some people I went to school on more than others in order to do the show.
For instance…
The Police. I just knew their singles, I'd never listened to any of their albums, if I'm being really honest. We were kind of contemporaries, I was busy making my own records when their records were…I wasn't listening to their records for clues, because they'd already had hits. They had the hits with those songs. I listened to other people's records I could steal from. I didn't really know much beyond the singles, so I listened to some other things, some of Andy and Stewart's songs to see what was in those. I hadn't heard Andy's Mingus record, and we ended up doing a Mingus song together, which was fun. There's always this common ground.
And that's one of the joys in watching the show, to see how your career intersects with your guests'.
Sometimes it does, because some of the people, obviously, I do know. I do know Elton, we did a show with Jenny Lewis and Jakob Dylan and She and Him. I hadn't met Matt [M. Ward] and Zooey [Deschanel] before, but obviously we worked with Jenny earlier this year, and I've known Jakob a while. It was great, doing that show like a revue, it all interlinked. Matt plays on Jenny's records, Zooey sings on that record…
So they're all on an episode together?
Yeah, yeah. Matt and Zooey opened the show, Jenny came out to join them, and then they did a song off Jenny's record that Matt plays guitar on, and Jakob and I talked for a while and played together, and we gathered everybody back together. We did the two songs that I'm featured on, "Acid Tongue," and one of the songs from Momofuku that Jenny sings on. Then we closed with "Straight to Hell," with me and Jakob singing it. We'd been talking about Joe Strummer. Everyone assumes the whole of Jakob's influence is his father, and that's silly. He's a young man who listened to records coming out of England in the late Seventies, the Clash being probably his biggest back as a fan, so we talked about Joe Strummer as a songwriter. "Why not sing one of Joe's songs?" People are almost afraid to touch them – why not? It's a great song, it should be sung. We put it together. I had two drummers, so I had [the Like guitarist] Tennessee Thomas play with her dad – it was a pretty good band. I enjoyed it.
You know what, we opened the show, that episode, with "Show Biz Kids" by Steely Dan. It sort of sounded more like Creedence playing it, the way we played it.
It's not easy to cover Steely Dan.
No, it didn't sound very slick, let's put it that way. I thought that would be a funny premise for the opening of the show, because the nickname in the production for that episode was the Show Biz Kids' Show – Jenny Lewis and Zooey are both in the film business. Tennessee Thomas is up there playing with her dad, my dad's a singer. I hope it was a more comfortable experience for Jakob. I made the joke – I listed everybody's connection when he came out. I said, "Jenny's father is a harmonica player, and guess what, your dad is, as well. But if it comes to a contest between the parents, your dad really wins." And that's it out of the way. I had to bring it up. I didn't so much ask him about Bob. I asked him about how people approach him, to give him a chance to speak for himself. It's enormously frustrating, of course, that people come into the room and pretend that…not that they feigned interest in his work, because he's had huge successes, but they try somehow to communicate with his father through him, through the questions that they're asking. Or the balance between the appropriate curiosity that people might have about him being a successful, talented son of a very famous father, just gets out of balance with the respect for the amount of work…he's thoughtful about his work. So I just wanted to talk about that conundrum, and quite literally, would he have ever had a second thought about picking up the acoustic guitar?
It's a beautiful record, and I'm really glad that he's allowing his own voice to come through on that, with the accompaniment that's going to tempt people with a limited amount of imagination to make the comparison, because the record actually deserves to be heard as its own piece – if you didn't know his name and you just happened to hear it, you wouldn't carry all that other information with you, into the listening and enjoyment of the record. It was possible to talk about it without it becoming the big, looming question. I'm aware of it.
So that sounds like a relatively smooth-running episode.
There's bumps, everything takes a while. When you have more artists on there, there's more setup time. The experience of keeping the audience's energy engaged with the proceedings is tougher, because the shows take longer.
I cringed when I saw you had Lou Reed on, who can be a difficult interview.
The main thing that we talked about in advance was that I really knew that if he got a chance to celebrate the music that he loves rather than be solely and wholly defined by the image that comes out of his work with the Velvet Underground and the early solo work. I think that's the key misapprehension about him, is that he dwells permanently in darkness. I think he's a really wonderful artist, and it's much more multifaceted in terms of its subject matter, including expressions of joy. You listen carefully to his records, but people don't want to hear that. They want to hear about the man who wrote "Heroin" or one of these Velvet Underground songs.
Or Berlin.
Berlin is a different matter. We talked about Berlin at the end – in fact, Julian Schnabel joined the conversation. The first part of the conversation, much to everybody's surprise, Lou was telling anecdotes with a sense of humor, he was talking about little Jimmy Scott, he's talking about his friendship with Doc Pomus, but then the conversation becomes more serious, in that the topics of his songs are not juvenile. He wrote Magic + Loss about cancer. That's perhaps not everybody's idea of subject matter, but he did it with integrity in the same way as Julian made a film about this catastrophic event visited on this man, which considers…it's a meditation on loss, but he wrote it against the background of the loss of his own father. When Julian started to talk about Lou's friendship and support at that time, you're into territory you don't see very often on television. He said, "I asked Lou to come round when my father died, and I asked him to hold his hand when it was still warm." He didn't say that to be melodramatic or to be in any way to spook people or anything. He said it because he was trying to get it across, the friendship that lay between them. You don't often get that kind of honesty where people are able to say, "This is the man I called on at the biggest crisis of my life." That was quite a moving thing, and I, again, don't take any credit for that, because the conversation was circling around their shared topics of loss. Inevitably, if you're going to live past thirty, you're going to encounter things in life which you didn't think about writing when you were twenty-two. It's how you do them, really, that matters. As a filmmaker, it's much more common to be able to make a comedy, then something about a terminal disease, then something about outer space or a western. People don't take issue with that. With musicians, they think it somehow means they've somehow changed in their own self when they do those changes. I was quite pleased that they were able to talk about those things and we had the time to do so. That's been the main thing- the time. We tape a long time. The Police one was a rather shorter taping than some of them, because they had a gig the next day. Some of the shows have been two hours of taping, because there's a lot of musical changeups and the stops and starts of a television show. Herbie Hancock, I think, took three hours. But he played for forty-five minutes. He was so generous with his playing – I'd ask him to illustrate things. He was amazing.
Were you nervous talking to Bill Clinton?
I'd met him a few times, so I think the only time I really got nervous was when we were told just before he came into the building, his people, because it was during the campaign for the nomination and he was so involved that his time was extremely limited. I write the script and then we sit around with the producers and executive producers, and we do a script conference, where we boil it down and reorder some of the questions or maybe combine two thoughts. There are two things five questions apart that would work better together to have a flow on a topic. We looked at him and said, "This is four questions too long for the amount of time we'd been told to expect he's going to be here." So we took four questions out, and this curious thing happened, that he speaks slowly, but he speaks with an incredible economy of words, and it isn't until you're really listening to it in the context of something like a live to tape interview that you realize that he's speaking like this, really confidently, that he's taking much less time than the average person takes. That's what he does, he communicates. So at the half an hour mark, we were out of questions. I had no more cards; I had nothing on the TelePrompTer. I'm just lucky I have a good memory, so the last part of the conversation was completely improvised. They tried to type stuff in for me, and I can't look away from him and look at that, particularly because that was only the second show we'd done, so the technical aspects were still kind of elusive to me.
I was surprised to hear the letters N.W.A. come out of his mouth.
I was surprised he kept saying Eric Dolphy.
He knows his shit.
He's not bull-shitting.
Did you try to get Clinton to bust out his sax?
No, he doesn't play anymore.
That conversation must have been eye-opening.
He was really good. Considering when it was, as well, it was during the nomination process, during the campaign for the nomination – his wife was still running for president, running for the nomination to be president, and he took time out to do it. I'm sure in those circumstances, it's a safe place to be to talk about a certain topic like music. We framed him with good humor at the beginning and ended up concluding it with a more meditative number at the end, which actually, I'm very grateful to Pat Metheny for coming in on short notice, because the original closing number was Hank Jones and Charlie Haden doing "Abide With Me." Then there was some ill health in Hank's family, and he wasn't able to do the show at the very last minute. Literally, the eve of the show, he wasn't able to come. So Pat Metheny stepped in with two hours' notice and he played beautifully.
What have been some of the personal highlights for you?
Lots of them, I think…we taped a long episode, which once we looked at the footage, we realized we had shot two episodes, two separate episodes. We started out filming one episode with Rufus Wainwright and Renee Fleming, because of the common ground of the opera. But Rufus' interview was so strong in itself, and he played so beautifully, that we made that an episode of its own, and he appears as a guest in Renee's episode, and she talks about her background, the different aspects of being in a modern, commercial entity like the Metropolitan Opera and the balance between that, and Rufus came out and talked about his Opera, which was being written for the Met, but he took it to Manchester. Then he sang a French song by Berlioz, which…to say it took a lot of guts to stand in front of one of the premier sopranos in the world and sing a classical song, and just killed it. It was amazing. His mother was there, Kate McGarrigle was there, and we ended up doing "In the Pines," but with all of us singing, and with Renee singing, as well, and "The Scarlet Tide." It was killer. The distance between classical songs and some of these folk songs is not that great. Half of them have the same themes – some of those have disappearing children and talking brooks, and they appear in folk songs and they appear in classical songs, as well. It's not so when you think of Renee Fleming as an opera singer, you think she's singing Puccini or something. When she's singing those other kind of classical songs, they're pretty close to folk songs, many of them. Many of them are folk songs. There was more common ground in the subject matter, I think. Rufus was pretty knockout. He's a star. He's always good, but he was really good that night. He was spectacular. They all were.
Tony Bennett.
Tony was great, he came with Bill Charlap and chose all…he didn't choose one single song that you'd choose when you say "Tony Bennett," what's the song you think of?
"I Left My Heart in San Francisco"?
He mentioned it in passing, but he didn't want to do those songs or "The Shadow of Your Smile" or these defining songs. He wanted to talk about songs which allowed him to talk about different songwriters and some different experiences. He sang "I'm Old Fashioned" and a very beautiful version of "The Way You Look Tonight."
I got to finally air that clip of him and me. The Red Parrot, it was this crazy show that somebody at NBC decided to do. "Big bands are coming back, and we're going to get…" Me. I don't know why I got the job. If somebody rings you up and says, "Do you want to sing with Count Basie and Tony Bennett?" Of course you're going to say, "Yeah, I've got to have that experience." Then I get there and I've been doing rock and roll shows for three nights and my voice is shot, and you get there and when you realize you just can't do it…there's the footage to prove it. I'm looking like a deer in the headlights. It was so funny. It's good to be able to play it to set up that conversation and him. He was great.
That's similar to the clip you showed on the Smokey appearance where you tried to dance like the Temptations or whatever. How many of those embarrassing videos are there?
Three, there was three we made in four days. It took cases and cases of red wine to do it.
I was surprised to learn that Elton doesn't write in the same room as Bernie Taupin ever.
Yeah, there were a lot of things that I didn't know. Smokey said at one point, "We didn't record all of those records in Detroit." That was a surprise, I'd never read that anywhere before, and I thought I knew a lot of stuff about Motown, and that was a surprise. When you think about it, it was probably inevitable, because they were on the road, doing what they did. I rode in the back of a car once with Sam Moore, he was coming up to guest with us at the Universal Amphitheater. The record label I used to co-own, Demon Records, put out a compilation of Sam and Dave B-sides, and it had this song that I covered, "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down." I was saying, "Sam, do you think we could learn this and do it in your style and then break into my version of it?" We were playing the record, and he had no memory of any of the tracks that were on that record, because they would come in off the road, just cut some songs at Stax and go back out on the road. So the hits they remembered, because they became part of their repertoire, but the B-sides got forgotten. He was listening to his killer performance, and it was like he was hearing a brand new record.
There's a broad cross-section of guests. How do you come up with these people?
I started the idea with that guitar episode – there were a lot of different people…when I drew the stage plan, and I was putting different people's names on those chairs. There were some people who were always going to be there and some people I didn't know if we could get, there were some people that I really wanted, but they weren't available. If we had fourteen shows to do, we could have done another one. I would have loved to have done Nick Lowe or Lucinda Williams or Emmylou Harris. When I did the Concert for a Land Mine-Free World in the guitar pull style, that was my only other experience, was with Earle, John Prine, Emmy and Nancy Griffiths. So I carried out of that experience that that was a pretty good way to have talk onstage, but not have the in-depth interviews of the other shows, we wanted a different format for that one show, and that way, you can have people as contrasting as Mellencamp and Norah Jones on the same stage. Rose [Rosanne Cash] and Kristofferson have known one another since she was a little girl, because Kris was one of her dad's best friends. So it worked out a pretty good combination. Norah brought this beautiful unpublished Hank Williams lyric, and me and Kris did some Sons of the Pioneers kind of harmonizing with it, which is pretty tough, because she's a great singer. He and I are not those kinds of seamless vocalists. It was fun to do a couple of collaborative numbers, and have a show that flowed more through the songs than through this conversation. Each one we try to plot it out. Of course we have a wish list of people, and there were some very notable artists who gave us the understanding that they would really like to, but it didn't work out, because the window of opportunity was so small. I've been working since April without a break, since March, actually. So we had these four days in April, one in August, and five days in September. The whole series was shot in that time. In some cases, if you're trying to approach Aretha Franklin or somebody, it's difficult to do things, anyway – whether she would want to do the show is one thing, and whether we could get her on the evening if she were agreeable, we might not be able to get the date. There's people who could theorize, having done it, who it would be great to do, but only time will tell. People should enjoy this, and if they enjoy it, maybe we'll make more. If they don't enjoy it, then we won't. There's no need for there to be more redundant stuff.
And a word should be said about some of the other musicians…
And my band, the Imposters did a great job. Pete and Davey in particular, they had a couple of different setups there – James Burton coming in for one show, then I put a band together for the Lou show with Larry Campbell and Tony, Jenny…and Steve came in for that show to play piano with Lou, because he knows Lou. Lou's pianist, as well, played on that show. John Leventhal was a very big part of the guitar…we all play instruments, but having John, who's Rosanne's husband, playing a solid part behind us, allowed us to relax and comfortably enjoy performing together. Rosanne, Kris and I wrote a song in April that we'd never played in public, and it's not the combination you'd expect to sing together, but we did. We've written two songs together and recorded them, so we debuted this song that we wrote in April on the show, which was terrific. It sounds most unlikely to hear me, Rosanne Cash and Kristofferson sing in a trio, but it does sort of work.
Was there any pressure to get folks to play their hits?
No. I think in some cases, there's a balance to strike. James Taylor was generous enough to offer to play a well-known song, because he knows that people are curious about it. They know their reputation, to a lot of people, is "that man that did that song," and then there's everything else. But he sang both "Fire and Rain" and "Sweet Baby James" on the show, two of his most famous songs. The conversation around them is maybe a little different than that when he answers questions about songs of that vintage. I asked him specifically about his performance of that song at the Concert for New York, the post 9/11 concert where he went out after the Who and played "Fire and Rain," which was a brave thing to do. That's what happens to somebody that has a song that endures for thirty-five years, is that sometimes the context in which the audience hears it changes the meaning of the song way beyond anything the composer could have expected. In a more lighthearted way, I spoke to him about "Sweet Baby James" in the context of I've always heard it as if he were the Singing Cowboy – that song is very much in the Gene Autry mold, and he has that kind of easygoing vocal style like a Gene Autry. We talked a bit about that, and other things, as well. His new record is a covers record, so we did "Crying in the Rain" together, by Carole King. That was daunting, as well, to sing with him, because he has such a pure voice. I think singing with Herbie Hancock was up there. That was the time when I nearly fell over, because he had been so incredibly generous. Smokey was the most thrilling, to actually sing that song. The only time where I actually got vertigo was in the middle of the solo of "Edith and the Kingpin," because Herbie had been so incredibly generous with talking about Blue Note and Death Wish and he talked about ‘Round Midnight, all these things, and Gershwin's World, which I love, he talked about Gershwin, he played "Embraceable You," he played "Watermelon Man" in the Sixties arrangement straight into the Head Hunters arrangement with acoustic instruments, so it was like a brand new arrangement of it. He tells the whole story of being recruited to be in Miles' group, and he told it with such freshness that it felt like it had just happened, and I think it was because of that, we got in the middle of "Edith and the Kingpin," because we did his arrangement from the Joni record. I was fine while I was singing it, because I've recorded the song. But in the middle of the song, I looked up and I went, "It's Herbie Hancock…he played with Miles!" And I got dizzy for a minute. He's daunting enough, and he had spoken so well about how it was to play…he had a great career. When Miles recruited him, he was a star already. He'd had all these successes and hits. Right at that moment, he gets the best call in music – the most daunting call, is what I mean. And even from singing with him for one evening on one number, you go, "Yeah…" That's setting yourself up, trying not to miss the re-entrance cue. The main thing about it was the generosity – his generosity of time, concentration to go back over some historical things which he must have turned over a number of times, but to bring a freshness, I appreciated that very much.
