The idea is that once he gets settled at the studio, John and I will be able to collaborate on songwriting via the miracles of e-mail and mp3’s. I’ve been meaning to hook up my Yamaha keyboard to a MIDI program for the past three or four years, and this is a good excuse to get off my duff and do it. If we do get into a songwriting groove, it will be the first time in about three years that we’ve been able to work together as songwriters. Not because we didn’t have ideas to work on, or because of “creative” differences. The reason we had to put our collaboration on the back burner, more or less, was because of John’s former roommates, with whom he shared a house and studio in Stony Brook.
In 2000, Eric and I moved to Long Island from Los Angeles. Eric had been in the trenches as an urban high school teacher for nearly 20 years, and he was thoroughly sick of it. On Long Island, teachers earned more than twice what he could working in L.A., and conditions were far less chaotic and exhausting. He had also spent the best years of his adolescence in Centerport, and so when we visited the area during a visit in 1998 and I immediately fell in love with the place, we both agreed to take a big chance and move back there.
Part of my reason for wanting to move here was to continue my musical friendship with John, who was based in Stony Brook. By 2000 we had already recorded and mixed my “Reinventing the Wheel” CD, and I was dying to do another project. I enjoy collaborating with other people on creative undertakings. Musically, I found the process of recording RTW with John to be an almost dreamlike experience, in which the location, the music itself, and many other subtle components somehow magically coalesced, resulting in an extremely resonant emotional Gestalt (for me, anyway). John had a vast knowledge of digital recording, mixing, producing, and mastering, and as a seasoned (and, I might add, brilliant) songwriter, he was able to make musical suggestions or delicately adjust details as we went along, sometimes in the tracking or overdubbing phase, sometimes during mixing, until the end result was vastly improved. In short, he combined artistic perception and ability with technical know-how...and it all dovetailed neatly with my quirks and peccadilloes. I’d been out of the musical mainstream for more than ten years when we recorded RTW, and it was good to have someone non-judgmental with a huge reservoir of knowledge to draw from -- someone whose influences were uncannily similar to mine.
However, although we had ambitious plans for more composing and recording, we soon ran into a snag. A serious snag. John’s studio was a co-op venture, jointly owned by John and three of his roommates. Somehow, one or more of these roommates got the (entirely erroneous) impression that I was a successful musician or at least independently wealthy. The word came down: if I was in the studio with John, even just throwing ideas around, the meter was running. Unfortunately John had little say in the matter. He was inarguably the most accomplished engineer, composer, and performer in the group, but he also had the fewest rights, probably because he hated confrontations and arguments. At the time I moved to Long Island, he didn’t even have his own room in the house -- he slept on a futon in the vocal booth. Suffice to say, there was a lot of jealousy and bitterness at the studio, and John got the worst of it. It was an absurd situation, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
So we did other things besides recording. We formed the Lennon-Tabacco-Zappa band with Candy Zappa and played in New York City and in Germany. We worked with Ed Palermo’s Big Band -- in fact, John became Ed’s vocalist for a couple of years. We co-hosted a talk show, "The Non-Objective Reality Show," on WUSB, the Stony Brook University FM station. We even sneaked in a recording, of sorts -- the demos for a musical we jointly composed called “The Miseducation of Willie the Hill.” You certainly couldn't accuse us of sitting on our behinds. But there was never a sequel to RTW. Because of the Word from On High, John even seemed queasy about having me as a guest performer on his own recordings. However, there weren’t many of those: not too long after I arrived in New York, his output began to fall off sharply. In a way, my moving to Long Island seemed to usher in the end of an era for John, even though it may not have been the direct catalyst. Basically, he needed a change, and the situation with his roommates drove things to a point of no return.
When John told me he was going to Hawaii, at first I felt pretty bad about it. As a friend, I was going to miss him. After all, he was one reason I’d moved here. Sometimes people and places are inextricably linked. Whether John knows it or not, I will probably always associate Stony Brook, St. James, and Setauket with him in some measure. Even Centerport reminds me of John; he had a studio there before he moved to Stony Brook. It may seem silly to admit that, but several years’ worth of intense experiences and impressions are impossible to eradicate. The past few years of my life have been without question the best. John has played a key role in the events of those years, and (probably without being fully aware of it) has helped me realize some major goals. I’d be totally selfish if I didn’t think of him with appreciation and fondness, and have a warm spot in my heart for the places where these things all came to fruition.
After thinking about it awhile, I realized that if the Hawaiian studio venture works out for John, I won’t be losing a friend as much as I’ll be gaining a studio. For the price of a plane ticket, I can, theoretically, go loll on the beach in Maui and then head to the studio for a relaxed recording session... off the clock, for a change. In Lahaina there are, John claims, no more frustrated Fuhrers laying down the law; part of the deal is that he is the studio manager, has the final word, and can use the facilities for whatever he wants when the studio is dark. If that does turn out to be the case, it will be quite ironic: I moved 3,000 miles to work with John here on Long Island, but in order for our collaboration to continue, he had to move 6,000 miles further away. Ain’t life peculiar?
