The Solo Years
By Paul Zollo
Page 2 Continued ...
The Songs
Loves Me Like A Rock
I wrote this song after "Bridge Over Troubled Water" when I started to immerse myself
in gospel. It came directly out of listening to gospel quartets. I definitely wanted to do
something with the Dixie Hummingbirds, who were one of my favorite gospel groups. I
also wanted very much to work with the Swan Silvertones but the Swans had disbanded
by then. I recorded it in New York with me playing guitar and the Dixie Hummingbirds
singing live. And then the bass and the drums were all overdubbed at Muscle Shoals,
Alabama. [The title] probably came from "My Rock" by the Dixie Hummingbirds. The
presidential verse was about Nixon. I thought that was funny. I don't know if people
knew I was joking. There's the general perception that I'm a very serious guy. Well, I am
a very serious guy. I just like to be funny. I think that was always there. A lot of songs
have little jokes in them.
Tenderness
I thought this was a nice idea. About people who are brutally honest, you know? And I
thought the Dixie Hummingbirds were really great on it. This song has an old-fashioned
quality to it. It's a sound that was before my time, musically. That was an early 50's sound.
I only know that stuff from the record, not from my experience. Doo-wop was the secular, urban,
street-corner version of gospel. There was something very real and mysterious
about that music because it was the first time that black culture entered the mainstream of
American [white] culture. Those records have a great vitality to them. They sound very
modern. When people fell in love with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, that's what the best of
the doo-wop sounded like.
Kodachrome®
This song is about the distortion of reality. Because in photographs they used to make
the colors brighter than they were. It started out with a different title. It was "Coming
Home" but I changed it to "Kodachrome" to make it more interesting. We recorded it
in Muscle Shoals. Muscle Shoals had a famous rhythm section. They'd done some Aretha
Franklin and some Staple Singers records. I don't think they'd cut any white acts down
there; I was one of the first. It clicked for me very easily there. I cut a lot of tracks:
"St. Judy's Comet," "Take Me To The Mardi Gras," "Loves Me Like A Rock."
That same rhythm section also played on "Still Crazy." I didn't think that much about
using a brand name but [Kodak] did. They made me. put their copyright symbol on
everything, which started driving me crazy.
Gone At Last
This is a very happy song. It was originally a duet with Bette Midler but it didn't work
out. It was a different track, a Latin-based drum track. The track just didn't happen.
Once I knew it was not going to work out, I thought of Phoebe Snow. She just had
her first album out. Poetry Man. I thought she blew me off the record. I thought she
was great. I don't have a voice that's gospel, certainly not for an uptempo gospel song.
But that track—and Phoebe—really cook. One of the reasons I included it here was for
the [piano] playing of Richard Tee, who is just phenomenal on that track and on
everything he plays.
Take Me To The Mardi Gras
What's memorable about this one is that it was the first time, and the only time,
that I got to record with the Reverend Claude Jeter. He was the lead singer,
the great falsetto voice, of the Swan Silvertones. And the Swans were my
favorite of all the Gospel groups. I wrote the song with his voice in mind. It was
based on what he does. And we went down and recorded it in Muscle Shoals,
Alabama, and overdubbed the Onward Brass Band in Jackson, Mississippi. They
came up from New Orleans. That ending with the Onward Brass Band was kind
of a worked-out improvisation.
St. Judy's Comet
I wrote it as a lullaby for my son Harper. But I don't think it ever helped him to
fall asleep. Babies don't fall asleep to lullabies. They go to sleep when they're ready
to go to sleep. There's no real St. Judy's comet. I took the title from the drummer
for Clifton Chenier whose name was Robert St. Judy. We also recorded this in
Muscle Shoals. There are no drums on this one, just a room sound of percus-
sion—shakers leaking into microphones. I had second thoughts about keeping that
line in about "your famous daddy." I didn't want to sound pretentious. But I
left it in, because it seemed funny.
Something So Right
I thought that this was a nice straight- ahead love song. I wrote the melody first.
I had a complete set of other lyrics. Different title, different subject matter.
The original lyric was not a love song, it was kind of a gospel lyric. I don't know
when I came to the conclusion that it should be a love song. But I felt that this
was not about a third-person experience, it was going to be a personal song.
Quincy Jones did all the orchestration. It's a really tasty bit of writing. I was
working with Phil Ramone and he was introducing me to musicians that he had
worked with such as Quincy as well as the other guys on that: Bobby Scott on
piano and Grady Tate on drums. That was a big session. There's acoustic bass
and electric bass on it, plus vibes, and three guitars.
Still Crazy After All These Years
It's probably the most famous ballad that I wrote after Simon And Garfunkel. The
title came to me when I was stepping into a shower. And I wasn't very happy about
it. I didn't say, "Oh, that's clever, that's a good one, I can use that." It was at the
time an assessment of where I was at in my life. And I wasn't very happy that that
was my assessment. But I soon turned itinto a song and that's what you do with those things. In a way it's amazing that it
appears I originated that. It seems so idiomatic but I don't think there was any "still
crazy after all these years" before that. The title has the kind ofcatchiness that country
music titles have. You get the whole story in the title. People relate to their own lives
immediately just from the title. There are very few other of my titles that are catchy in
that way. This version was recorded live in Dortmund, Germany. And it's true live—
we didn't alter it at all. You can even hear me singing sharp at the end because the
crowd was getting louder and I couldn't hear myself as well. But this version has a great
feeling of air and space to it. You really feel like you're in the arena. And the band is
just incredibly tight. Michael Brecker plays a great energized solo on it. He always
tends to play that original solo, which he created. He's not the kind of player to play the
same solo every night, but in that particular song I think he felt that the solo was so
famous that he should do it. And since he is the creator of that, it seemed right.
Have A Good Time
I wrote that for the film "Shampoo" but it never got in. "Still Crazy," also, I tried to
get in. Warren [Beatty] didn't want to use it. I think it would have been good for the
film. I wrote it in this time signature—the verses are in 7/8 and the chorus is in 4/4.
But it's played very smoothly because Steve Gadd smoothed it out and gave it that feel.
I like that song. It has a nice opening line. That was a funny song, too. It was meant to
be funny. Dave Matthews wrote the horn part, which is great. He's a premiere horn
writer; he used to do great brass charts for James Brown. The Phil Woods sax solo at
the end was either a first or a second take. I think he did two takes and they were both
just incredible. He was in and out of the studio in twenty minutes.
Jonah
I always thought this music would have been better for a love song. Well, it is a love
song, in a way, about a love of music. I wrote it for the movie ["One-Trick Pony"]
and I like it quite a lot but I don't know if that's the kind of melody or music that that
character, Jonah Levin, would have made. But I think it's a really good song and I
think it stands up independently. I think the music is interesting harmonically. I was
pleased with the melody. It wraps itself up nicely. It's a Brazilian type of melody. And
it's a nice track with tasty percussion by Ralph McDonald.
How The Heart Approaches What It Yearns
I kind of rediscovered this one recently. It has a nice delicacy to it with Eric Gale
playing nylon-string guitar. It's a wonderful solo. He played it on my nylon-string
guitar; he doesn't ever play nylon string. And it has an evocative lyric. To me, the
lyric on this song does feel like it fits the character of Jonah Levin in the "One-
Trick Pony" movie. But the 10/8 time signature probably doesn't. The
Belvedere Hotel in the opening was opposite A&R Recording Studios on
48th Street in New York.
50 Ways To Leave Your Lover
The big discovery on this song was Steve Gadd's drum part. It's probably what
made it a hit. When Steve used to be in the studio, he used to practice these little
marching-band patterns. It was like a little exercise for him. So I guess that's what it
was. It's tricky; I've watched a lot of drummers try to play that. They never
quite get it. It's very tricky. The song has a real casualness to the verses and a sense
of humor to it, and the choruses are funny and catchy. And everybody seemed
to like that one, young people and old people. The choruses were from a
rhyming game I used to play with my son Harper when he was about four. I think
it came off unusually well as a record. I like the chords.
Slip Slidin' Away
I wrote it very quickly. It took an hour to write the entire song. It was unusual to
have it come so fast, probably the fastest 1 ever wrote anything. I wrote it originally
for "One-Trick Pony" but didn't use it in the film. The Oak Ridge Boys sang on
that. They were a gospel group at the time. They were just beginning to make
the cross-over from pure gospel to country pop. On this they're singing a white
gospel part, the type of sound similar to the Jordanaires on early Elvis Presley
records. I always felt it had one too many verses. It has the man, the woman and
the child. Then it has the "God only knows" verse. If I had the courage, I
would have edited that verse out. If I had found a more interesting way of arriving
at that so that it felt like you were coming back to a place instead of feeling like you
were on a long plateau, it would have been better. I didn't originate that title. It
came from that Little Richard song "Slippin' and Slidin'."
Late In The Evening
The horn part was written by Dave Grusin. It's as famous as the song. Maybe
more famous than the song. And I thought it was a great hom part. It always
sounded like kind of a mariachi thing in the middle of a track that had a "Mystery
Train" kind of groove to it. When 1 first heard it, I said, "It's great! But it's not
what the song's supposed to be." But it was so great that I said, "I guess it is what
the song is going to be."
Hearts And Bones
That's one of my best songs. It took a long time to write it and it's very true. I was begin-
ning to understand about writing on that album. How to do it, when to use ordinary lan-
guage and when to use enriched language. Of course, that's a story song and my story-
songs tend to be a more natural form. for me. It's the companion song to "Graceland," the
preceding song. I don't know where that title came from. I don't remember struggling
over it. The line "the arc of a love affair" is really what the
song is about. And that device in lync writing, repeating a
line that is not the title, shows up all over Graceland. I
learned that lyric trick writing the Hearts And Bones album.
Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War
I wrote all of "Magntte" in my head when I was driving
through Montana. I had the title because it was the caption
of a photograph in a book on Magritte. And I was just
playing with that title in my mind and the melody came to
me. It's one of the only times that I've ever written a
whole melody away from an instrument. It's a story and it's
also a surreal picture, a surrealistic lyric. I consciously came up with the part about "all
their personal belongings" becoming intertwined. But the line in the bridge, il decades glid-
ing by like Indians," just emerged from nowhere while I was running in Central Park.
The Late Great Johnny Ace
I had the idea to do a song called "The Late Great Johnny Ace" for a long time, and I
wrote part of it revolving around those two opening chords, which I liked. And I had
that fragment of a song for a long time when John Lennon was killed. I connected the
final verse about Lennon with the beginning section by writing the bridge. And the
bridge was about the time in my life right before Simon And Garfunkel, in 1964. [The
bridge] was really about JFK, the other late great Johnny Ace. The ending orchestral section is by Philip Glass.
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