October 19, 2004 - 8:51 a.m.

I got a call from John the other night. After receiving a couple of initial e-mails from him when he first arrived in Lahaina, virtually all communication had ceased during the past six weeks, so it was good to hear from him. He told me that due to a complex situation involving backroom politics, woe, and intrigue, he and his partner Chris Pati had been robbed of the lease to the studio facility by a couple of locals. So he is due back home soon. Personally, I’m not surprised about this development. It didn’t sound as if there was anything going on musically on Maui, so I was wondering how John was going to make a living managing a recording studio there.

John told me an interesting thing, which was that he had visited Walter Becker’s studio on Maui. He had somehow made contact with Becker’s resident engineer, who casually invited him to drop by. It was suffciently remote from Lahaina to require him to rent a car, and finding the place was, he said, “a nightmare.” He had been given rather cryptic directions to look for “three mailboxes with an ‘X’ on one of them,” then make a certain turn and drive up a dirt road through thick underbrush. Eventually he made it to the compound, only to find that Becker wasn’t there that day; he apparently lives at another location on the island. The facility was rather small, consisting of two buildings that had been joined together. They had large plate glass windows looking out onto the beach beyond.

John enjoyed his tour of the studio and its inescapable Steely Dan aura. “It reminded me of Sonic Underground [his old studio in Stony Brook], in a way. There wasn’t a window between the vocal booth and the control room. It was cool to go into the booth where [Donald] Fagen recorded ‘Kamakiriad’, and pick up his DNA from the walls.” According to John, the engineer was affable but whenever the subject got onto Becker and Fagen personally, he wasn’t very forthcoming. He did, however, mention that the studio, while catering only to the most exclusive clients, would be willing to allow John to record there, should he feel like paying the requisite $700 a day!

Basically, John said, he was growing tired of the “bug problem” on Maui. The living room in his apartment had screens on three sides, and he had noticed that something was chewing holes in the screening. Every time he looked, the holes had grown bigger. This fact disturbed him. He was also distressed that there was, surprisingly, no Chinese food available in Lahaina, and of course no pizza.

Something tells me he’s going to be glad to get home.

(Note: Work on my new webpage is proceeding apace. This will most likely be the last blog posted at this address, although the previous entries will remain up here after the new site goes into full operation, probably in the next two to three weeks. The address for the new site is: http://www.nigeylennon.com.)

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