Strange Things Happen
A Life with the Police, Polo,
and Pygmies
Stewart Copeland

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

PART I STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN

CHAPTER 1 A LETTER TO A CHILDHOOD FRIEND 2009

CHAPTER 2 WARDROBE

CHAPTER 3 LEBANON 1957-67

CHAPTER 4 MUSIC

CHAPTER 5 CURVED AIR 1975

CHAPTER 6 TAGGING LONDON 1977

CHAPTER 7 KLARK KENT 1978

CHAPTER 8 A QUICK HISTORY OF THE POLICE 1976-78

CHAPTER 9 POLICE RULE 1979-84

PART II LEARNING TO BE NORMAL

CHAPTER 10 CONGO

CHAPTER 11 HORSES

CHAPTER 12 OPERA HOLY BLOOD, CRESCENT MOON

CHAPTER 13 BAKE-OFF IN FORT WORTH 1990

CHAPTER 14 HORSE OPERA 1992

PART III STILL NOT NORMAL

CHAPTER 15 OYSTERHEAD

CHAPTER 16 HALL OF FAME

CHAPTER 17 LA NOTTE DELLA TARANTA

CHAPTER 18 INCUBUS THE HYBRID

CHAPTER 19 DANCING WITH THE (POLL)STARS

CHAPTER 20 SCORING WITH ANJELICA

CHAPTER 21 FOO FLYING WITH THE FLY FOOS

CHAPTER 22 GIZMO

CHAPTER 23 JUDGE HARD PLACE AND THE BBC (NICE VERSION) 2006

CHAPTER 24 THE GRATEFUL DAD 2007

CHAPTER 25 SUNDANCE

PART IV ABNORMAL AGAIN EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT; NOTHING HAS CHANGED

CHAPTER 26 LOCK UP YOUR MOTHERS: WE’RE BACK

CHAPTER 27 WILL THIS FLY? 2007

CHAPTER 28 EBERHARD SETS US FREE 1978

CHAPTER 29 A MIGHTY WIND IN THE MAGIC STINGDOM

CHAPTER 30 THE DISASTER GIG

CHAPTER 31 ANGRY IN EDMONTON

CHAPTER 32 CONQUERING HEROES INSIDE THE EXPLOSION

CHAPTER 33 MALIBU

CHAPTER 34 HOW BIG IS MY AMP!

CHAPTER 35 AFTERSHOW RITUAL

CHAPTER 36 TUBA IN TURIN

CHAPTER 37 FOUR BEERS AND THE PRESIDENT

CHAPTER 38 RAGING KUMBAYA

CHAPTER 39 SLAV ON A SLAB

CHAPTER 40 BURNING THE GOLDEN GOOSE 1984

CHAPTER 41 SINGAPORE SHOWDOWN

CHAPTER 42 TOAST IN THE MACHINE

CHAPTER 43 ELVIS IS LEAVING THE BUILDING

AFTERWORD THE GREEN FLAG 2009

APPENDIX

STEWART COPELAND’S RAP SHEET

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART I STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN

CHAPTER 1 A LETTER TO A CHILDHOOD FRIEND
2009

Dear Iskandar,

A lot has happened since we broke that branch off of old Abu Tannous’s olive tree, behind the Tarazi Palace. Do you remember our little town in the Lebanese hills overlooking Beirut? That was back in 1965. The Russians had just made it into outer space and I was playing in my first band. I wonder what you and your mom are up to now.

We parted rather suddenly when my dad evacuated us after his CIA cover was blown. Do you remember that English kid, Harry Philby? Well, his dad’s cover was blown, too—as a double agent for Russia!

So we got pulled out of the American Community School in Beirut, and I was packed off to boarding school in England. Out in the misty wilds of Somerset, at Millfield School, I kept on blasting on the drums whenever I could. It was difficult because of the noise they made. Wherever I could find a cellar or an attic, or a distant outbuilding I would drag in my four big heavy cases, unpack my kit, and blaze away like fury. It never lasted. Someone was always annoyed by my art, and I would be cast out again.

But I got pretty good at it. By the time I left college, I could get into a semifamous group, and pretty soon I could break out with a little band of my own. We were called The Police and ended up playing huge stadiums. Our songs were glued to the charts. It was a blast! We struggled for two years, surged for four years, and then just sat there at the top of the world for another two years before walking away.

So now I’ve got a real job, a real family, and a real life! I write and record the music you hear in Hollywood movies. I have seven kids! No idea how that happened. Life is pretty settled now, but I keep having these strange adventures. Odd opportunities are attracted to celebrity, even when it’s much faded.

As I write this Lebanon is rebuilding. Again! Last time I checked, the old palace was still standing. But that was one war ago. If you get a chance, could you check it out for me? You’re probably a banker in Dubai by now.

Best wishes,

Stewart

CHAPTER 2 WARDROBE
SUMMER, LATE 1980s

One fine morning, I step out of the shower, peer into my wardrobe, and realize that my life is over. I’m looking at an exotic collection of leather pants, hostile shirts, and pointy shoes. Problem is, I’m a forty-something father of four, and I’m feeling kind of mellow. I’m not angry about anything, and as a tax-paying, property-owning, investment-holding lotus-eater, I am in disagreement with what my clothes are saying to the world. The thrill has gone from frightening the natives. I care not that the world be unruffled by my passage through it.

So what do I wear? What have I got in my closet that doesn’t say “FUCK YOU! I’M GOING TO BURN DOWN YOUR WORLD!” For so long, I have had to be worthy of the stares and furtive glances that follow rock stars. It would be unprofessional of me to walk out of my hotel room looking like I’d be safe with children. But now what?

All my life I have lived in self-imposed exile from the normal world. My arty friends and I feel like we are the only humans in a world of robots. A business suit is like the carapace of an insect. Conformity is surrender. Even long hair is a cop-out. Mine has had all color peroxided out of it—heaven forbid that I should be mistaken for a nice hippie.

But I have discovered that some humans are merely disguised as robots. Under cover of conformity strange personalities can emerge. I have started to experiment with other uniforms and disguises. My main circle of friends is the polo set of Gloucestershire. It’s only natural that my first attempt at a new mufti would start here. They wear the same clothes that I used to wear in boarding school. Problem is, my career was fueled by a desire to burn down my old school. I get even stranger looks than usual when I show up at the club bar in a blazer, with handkerchief in the pocket. Out on the street, the usual double take is followed by a look of confusion.

The fact is that my dream of lapsing into the countryside in my post-rock star years is not panning out. The flashbulb-popping, tabloid-screaming, chart-topping, crowd-roaring express train of fame may have blazed off over the horizon, but strange adventures still befall me. From dancing the Ndele Banga with the Kamba of Tsavo to elbowing royalty on the polo fields of Cirencester, to sweaty jam sessions in Havana clip joints and black-tie curtain calls at my opera premieres, stuff still keeps on happening to me. Only now that I’m off the train, I can play with these things as they go by.

Here follows a collection of strange tales about the things that can happen as I walk in the constant company of a distantly remembered mythical being. Twenty years ago there was this kid with my face up there on the screen, the whole world got a pretty good look at him, and he still hovers just over my shoulder. He’s mostly invisible after all these years, unseen by passersby, but in some settings, everyone can see him. In fact they see him and not me. And the strangest things happen.

CHAPTER 3 LEBANON
1957-67

Life and times of a diplo-brat in Beirut:Cowboys and Injuns in the Crusader castles.

Pete Karnif is looking for us. My bass player buddy Greg and I are skulking in the shadows, but it’s time for us to get up there and do it. I’m shaking with fear because I’m twelve years old and I’m about to start getting what I wished for.

There isn’t any stage, just some Selmer amps and my drums in a corner of the ballroom at the American Embassy Beach Club in Beirut, Lebanon.

All of the American, British, French, and other European expatriate kids are crammed into the room. In enclaves like this they have re-created an approximation of the teenage life that they should be living back home. They’re dancing the Twist and the Mashed Potato and the Frug, whatever that is. My brother, Miles, should know. Even though the cool Mediterranean air breezes across the beach into the open room, the atmosphere is hot hot. These Western kids are desperate to be Western. They don’t want to miss any of the teen boom that is happening back in the First World. Ian is lurking

somewhere nearby. He got me into this and is getting a huge kick from it.

At my tender age I don’t have any idea what it means, but I can feel the buzz. Michele Savage is here. And Connie Ridgeway and Colleen Bisharat. All of the yearned-for fifteen-year-old women—so far above my lowly prepubescent but ardent station—are gyrating to Fats Domino right in front of the gear. I push past them to my drums. Pete is plugging in, and his amp is squawking. The hubbub of voices in the room immediately hushes, and all eyes are on us.

Actually, since I’m sitting down at the drums all I can see is the first row of kids, who look like grown-ups to me. Pete counts us in…

“One, two—”

I never hear him finish the count. I have already embarked on the headlong joyride that is my life of drumming. Whatever we rehearsed is gone from my head, but the motor has started. I’m on a pulse and the band is ragged but connected. The kids are dancing to “It’s My Life” and I’m driving it. It’s My Groove. Somewhere in the years ahead I’ll learn how to be exulted and collaborative at the same time. For now though, there is only one thing on the planet, and that is Janet McRoberts dancing in front of me. Her eyes are wide with astonishment. The big girls are moving with seductive intent, and Janet is moving with me. She’s being moved by me.

It was just yesterday that I got my first inkling of what music was going to do to my life. At the shawerma stand on the beach I overheard two of the big girls talking about The Nomads.

“I heard they’ve got a new drummer—you’ll never guess who…”

“Yeah I heard, it’s Ian’s kid brother!”

“Oh I can’t wait to see him—is he as groovy as Ian?”

Well, I’m not even close to being as groovy as Ian. Never will be. I’m a skinny twelve-year-old, and these girls are fifteen. They are talking about a mythical being. They’re already pouring their young imaginations into the chalice of music idolatry. I badly want to drink undeservedly from that cup. My chest is rising with the idea that the subject of their fancy is nerdy little me.

I’ve got my hand on the snare and my foot on the kick. The noise makes me big. It grows me up, like a shortcut to manhood. Primatologists studying gorillas and orangutans have established the connection between male dominance behavior and noise. Well, here I am, the skinny runt of the litter, but as long as I drive the beat, I’m a hairy-assed silverback motherfucker banging tree trunks. I’m swinging through the trees. My voice is a manly roar.

FAST FORWARD TO 2001

Ian is looking up at the bullet holes that have scratched the otherwise pristine facade of our old home in the hills overlooking Beirut. The city is spread out behind us as we gaze up at the wisteria-clad arches. It’s a beautiful old Levantine building with soaring ceilings, grand stairways, and baronial galleries. Since my

brother and I were last here a half century ago, Lebanon has endured invasion, civil war, occupation, massacre, siege, and pretty much every form of human madness. The neighborhoods where we played have been corroded by warfare, sprayed by automatic rifle fire, plugged by RPGs, or leveled by bombs.

But our old villa Tarazi has just these five bullet holes that we can count. Ian figures that a militia gunman must have stood where he is now standing and just sprayed one blast upward. To get someone’s attention, no doubt.

I’m standing there with a tear in my eye as Ian disappears. In a moment he is hailing us from the front balcony, a giant terrace that wraps around the top of the house. He has climbed up the wisteria vines just outside his old room and sneaked back into the house just like he did when he was a teenager returning from the lam. I’m right up there beside him in a flash. We’re looking out over Beirut, standing right in the spot where my first drums were set forty years ago.

The drums had a faded champagne sparkle finish. Dad had rented them from a store in town, maybe reluctant to buy any more musical instruments. Our home was a graveyard of abandoned music toys. My three older siblings, Miles, Lennie, and Ian, had passed right by our father’s inducements and exhortations to follow him into music; so when I showed interest he was a little wary at first. My mother bought me a snare drum because I wouldn’t leave her alone. It was a white pearl-finished Lefima drum made in Germany, of all places. I’ve never since seen another drum with that brand.

When my rat-tat-tat became a prolonged irritant to the family, my father began to discern the elemental urge that is the signature behavior of a budding musician. I just could not stop. The power of the noise was endlessly thrilling and empowering. When I wasn’t drumming I was air drumming, or worse, I was that kid who drives everyone insane with persistent foot tapping and thigh slapping. It was the nervous twitch from hell.

One day Ian roars up the driveway on his motorcycle with some of his ragged crew. It’s his buddies in the band, who have lost their drummer. On the basis of Ian being the coolest kid in town, his kid brother must be at least worth checking out as a replacement.

Here they are up on the balcony, The Nomads, snarling at me to do something hip on my drums. I start flailing at the drums in the worst possible way, and since they too are just callow youths, they’re impressed by the ferocity and volume. They are the first in a long line of musicians who have no idea what they are in for when they let me into the band. My father made sure that I had every kind of proper musical training and technique, but no one was ever able to teach me when to shut up.

1965

Harry Philby is terrified. The staircase in the old crusader castle has fallen away, but the outer wall, also ruined, provides a jagged few steps up to the next level of the tower. It would be easier to scramble up there if it weren’t for the cardboard crusader shield strapped to one arm and the long plastic sword in the other hand. But the plucky young Englisher makes it, and now it’s my turn. It’s a little easier for me, having watched Harry’s route, so soon we are on the top of the tower, two miniature crusader knights ready for battle.

Down below, in the little bay that the castle protects, our parents are lolling on the boat that my father hired to bring us here. Harry’s dad, Kim Philby, is kind of a boozy old slob, but his American stepmother, stretched out in her bikini sunbathing on the deck, distracts us from our holy war for a minute. We are looking almost vertically straight down at them. Neither of us boys has any inkling of it yet, but both of our fathers are spies, mine for the “Old Glue Factory” (CIA) and his for the Soviet KGB. Right now they are head-to-head by the tiller down below, chuckling about something. One day soon old man Philby is going to escape in the dead of night on a Russian ship.

There are many advantages to Crusaders & Saracens over Cowboys & Indians. For one thing, the helmet, shield, and sword are cooler than a cowboy hat; and the castles provide powerful set dressing. The crusaders were about raw dumb power. They are remembered in these parts for their suicidal courage and their ignorant cruelty. Their mission here is regarded as a quixotic failure. The magnificent stone castles—much heavier and more businesslike than their European counterparts—couldn’t protect them from the wily Saracens. Unlike the natives of North America, the Arab natives were able to evict the colonists. Children like us playing in these relics learn something about the impotence of empire.

All over the Middle East there are layers of discarded military hardware from every age, from axe heads to tank turrets. Pretty much everyone of note has washed over this land, which leaves the current natives as the most variously flavored population in the Western Hemisphere. They are the true

descendants of Abraham, Moses, Nebuchadnezzar, Ramses I-XI, Cyrus, Alexander, Constantine, Jesus, Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, and Yasser Arafat.

As a WASP I’m a little humbled by this ancestry. All we’ve got is King Arthur, Julius Caesar, and Norman.

CHAPTER 4 MUSIC
DECEMBER 1968
WELLS CATHEDRAL

In darkest Somerset, Millfield School celebratesChristmas in the huge stone church.I learn to serve the gift.

A thousand voices echo up the stone arches that frame the ancient stained glass windows. Floodlit from the outside, these twelfth-century images of obscure piety combine with the soaring hymns to sear the art receptors in my adolescent brain. There is nothing more beautiful than music. All of the magnificent architecture that towers overhead is just a vessel for the sound that sweeps through me.

In fact the sound forgives the overall creepiness of the church experience. All afternoon while I set up my drums amid the school orchestra and wait for the Christmas service to begin, that guilt of alienation creeps around me, pervading the cold damp air. Few places are chillier than an English church without its congregation. The cold stone statues are impassive, but they know that I am apostate.

Now it’s evening, and the cathedral is warmed by the bodies of the students, teachers, and parents. The giant candles are lit,

golden flames reflecting off the brass and glass. Flowers are everywhere. To still my autistic tip-tapping on the drums, Mr. Fox has banished me to the furthest corner of our arm of the cross. We are set up in the south wing, the choir is in the north wing, and the folks are in the stem. All of the religious stuff is happening around the corner in the head of the cross. The mumbling prayers and the shuffling of the congregation from kneeling to sitting to standing are prelude to the rustling of the hymnbooks. The singing starts off ragged but builds and swells as the magic takes hold. Breathing and singing together, the thousand souls become one mighty sound.

And did the Countenance DivineShine forth upon our clouded hills?And was Jerusalem builded hereAmong these dark Satanic Mills?

I doubt it, based on what I know of Levantine cities. This bit of Blake is the least daft of the hymns and carols that are sung. Most of the lyrics are mumbo jumbo. It’s the music combined with ritual that thrills the air.

In the final cadenzas of each song the school choir kicks in for the descant, providing a silvery lining to the bellowing flock. The angels are dancing in a shimmering cascade above our heads as a shattering glory of voices lifts the roof.

Mr. F. raises his eyebrow to give me the nod; finally, it’s my moment to join the ceremony. The previous hymn has echoed off into silence and the enraptured congregants are creaking in their pews, waiting in the candlelight. They are eager to be touched by the next wave of the shaman’s wand.

I’m so ready.

TumTadadaTum, TumBumpumpum…TumDadadaTum, TumBumpumpum…

The tom-tom reverberates with a sonorous boom. Up until now drums have been about assertion and empowerment but this is new. Into my young quavering hand has been placed the rudder of this sacred ship. I can only be a servant of the powerful emotional force that has been created in this ancient stone shrine. All of us are joined at this moment by the momentum of our shared ritual, and I am the beating heart. I am nothing, no one. Just the beating heart of a larger body, enveloped by the soul of the faithful. A synapse closes in the mind of the enraptured protoshaman.

Next morning, when my head clears, it seems obvious that music isn’t just a tool or weapon, it’s what my life is for. It’s powerful juju, and I want to own it as much as it owns me.

The gatehouse lodge to the old Millfield estate is where Mr. Fox rules the music kingdom. In an annex to this quaint little house are the piano rooms, where the music geeks pore over their finger exercises and ear training. This is where the seed planted by my sister, Lennie, back at Tarazi starts to grow. Lennie taught me the connection between the music on the page and the keys on the piano. My good fortune is that my position in the school orchestra means I can schedule piano time, even though my instrument is drums—which unfortunately won’t fit into the tiny piano rooms. The school, faithful to my father’s wish, has fixed me up a drum tutor in the nearby town, but I can already play my paradiddles better than he can, so this “practice” time is my own.

I can even skive off stables duties by skulking here in music world. I can faintly hear Mozart stammering through the thinly soundproofed walls, but in my slot, I’m hammering two-finger ostinatos of unknown origin.

Bring me my bow of burning gold;Bring me my arrows of desire:Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!Bring me my chariot of fire!

I’M LEARNING MORE THAN I ever intended to about drums.

My London tutor, the venerable Max Abrams, has never shown me his paradiddles. He exhausts my brain with endless reading and coordination exercises. He’s off drinking tea somewhere no doubt while I plod through Glenn Miller charts, learning to recognize rhythmic patterns expressed as dots on a staff. My father is grumpy about the Glenn Miller. Although he played in the Glenn Miller Army band during the war, he considers it to be a blot on his musical résumé. My dad would have preferred Stan Kenton or Woody Herman. I couldn’t care less, they all lacked raging guitar.

Breathing in the stale air of the London Underground, I’m staring blankly at my shoes. The coordination exercises are the most exhausting part of the tuition. Learning to uncouple the hands so as to free them for independent activity is the goal, but uncoupling my brain is the result. As I stagger home I’m aware that my “gift” is making heavy demands.

Still, after a lethargic dinner I’m soon down in the basement blazing away on my own drumming agenda. There is no discipline or inducement involved; it’s an unquenchable urge.

1973
COLLEGE

It turns out that life can be lived in almost constant sunshine. The surfers of Southern California can hardly imagine any other kind of life. Everybody here in Ocean Beach is so laid-back that I feel like I’m stuck in permanent fast-motion. I’m not used to this relentless ease. Don’t these people realize there is Cold and War and Want in the world? I have been “American” all my life, but this is effectively the first time that I’ve actually been here. My daddy took us off to Egypt when I was two months old. From out there in the world people are watching America, but America is not watching them. So it turns out that I’m kind of a foreigner here, too. I’m getting used to being the guy in differently shaped jeans.

Every other day I head downtown to the San Diego School of Performing Arts for piano time and composition classes. The music department takes up the bottom half of the stately old building. The music students are the usual nonsporty stick-insect types, but compared to the theater and ballet geeks, we are like raging bulls in the basement.

In the piano rooms I’m conjuring music that has gone way beyond what I can actually play with my hands. In fact my intelligent designer omitted to give me the gift of pianitude. I did get the genes for stringed instruments and mallets (guitars and drums), which I find naturally easy to play, but my fingers just don’t do keyboards. No matter how many hours, years, or decades I spend composing on the keyboard, my hands just can’t find their cunning.

I can find the notes that my head dictates and check them against one another to build harmony, but I can’t play them in rhythm. I can play the rhythm of the notes I want but can’t find the pitches fast enough. I can play my music with good rhythm and wrong notes or with correct pitches and no rhythm.

At least back home in London, my dad’s Beocord open reel recorder allowed me to record two parallel tracks of guitar. On the left track I could record the rhythm chords, and then on the right track I could record an accompanying tune. Then came the trance of listening to my music while my hands lay idle. There is no greater glow of narcissistic validation than receiving my own art. I slay myself—always have and hope I always will.

Here in California I’m a college kid tangled up and yearning for the mysterious golden girls, but that glow of validation is dim. I can strum on my guitar, but there is bigger stuff raging around in my head. I’m not even a professional musician yet, but I’m already dreaming up concept albums. In the piano rooms I can try to work things out on paper, but I can’t love my music by looking at it on the page. I just have to sing it in my head and let it go by.

In class I’m kind of the runt of the litter, again. Almost all of the other composition students are pianists from the other side of the universe. In fact, music study has always been of music that has never attracted me. Music classes cured me of Mozart, and my father cured me of jazz—meaning that I’m immune to the charms of both. The music that I do listen to doesn’t exist here in music school.

Dr. Mary K. Phillips is at the piano playing our homework. All of us geeks are twitching as she points out the mistakes of voicing and spelling. The assignment was to write sixteen bars of fourpart harmonic composition observing the rules of figured bass. As a practical matter I have always found that the rules could only be applied as a retrofit. The music comes out of my brain and lands in the material world—and then I can figure out what rules apply. So my sixteen bars derive from some larger opus of the piano room that have been retrofitted with the rules of Dr. Phillips’s class.

The focus of the group is the mechanics of harmony. The other student pieces sound like they are supposed to sound, like pale Mozart, and no one seems to mind that they are meaningless sequences of chords. The point is to grasp the laws of harmonic movement.

When she gets to my piece she plays it down like a breeze, and I’m basking in the beauty of hearing it for the first time as a listener, without having to limp through playing it myself. But I know that she will crush me with the inevitable technical errors. When she reaches the end the room is unusually silent. She turns to me and says:

“Stewart, you have parallel fifths in measures three, seven, and eleven, but more important, this is actual music. You have a voice.”

Well, that may seem like faint praise, but it puffed me right up. Some part of the feverish grandiose exultation that I get from my own music is actually discernible to a dispassionate ear! Some part of the voodoo actually works.

She was right about those sixteen bars that I wrote for her homework assignment. They stuck in my head and eventually even reached my fingers. I could play that string of expertly voiced chords together with a scrap of lyric, and a few years later record it with The Police. The song was called “Does Everyone Stare the Way I Do?” I imagine the royalties from just that one song—flagged by Dr. Mary K. Phillips—must have paid off all my years of music education.

1985
NIEBAUM RANCH, NAPA VALLEY

Francis leans back heavily and speaks calmly to the producer. The dark screening room is lit by a film frame frozen on the screen.

“Yeah…couple places, we need strings.”

Damn. This had been going really well. As we screened the scenes that I had scored, Francis Coppola had been rumbling with approval. The director and the other postproduction chiefs had been chuckling and nodding sagely over the callow charm of my first attempt at film music. The lack of finesse suited Francis’s sense of atmosphere for this film. Since I had no idea how movies had been scored since the dawn of film I had had to invent the wheel for myself. The important thing was that Francis was able to infuse me with the mood that he needed in each scene. With my bare hands, on guitar, marimba, bass, banjo, and kazoo, I could make that mood.

From the start Francis has been talking about using rhythm as a dramatic device in this film, Rumble Fish. With the classic film High Noon as a template, he wants to build a sense of impending, implacable doom. The story is of a countdown. Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Diane Lane, and Tom Waits all have an appointment with fate in reel twelve of the movie. Francis wants the audience to sweat every second of the journey to that place.

Well, I don’t know much about drama, but rhythm is a thing of mine. With the help of two teenage Coppolas, Roman and Gian-Carlo, ferreting through the sound effect libraries, I was able to start a collection of rhythms created by machinery, animals, and people. Pile drivers, barking dogs, typewriters, and car crashes all have rhythm if you look closely.

At the Long Branch Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I have recordings of these sounds on magnetic tape. If I cut the tape with a razor at the beginning and end of, say, a burst of dog barking, then I can join the two ends of the strip of tape and create a loop. Threading this loop onto the tape machine is easy enough, but we have to set up tape spools on mic stands around the room to keep the tape untangled as we play the loop and record the repeating pattern of dog barking onto a second tape recorder. One day, a decade or so in the future, someone will invent computers.

The latest breakthrough in audio recording today is technology that can synchronize and dependently lock two tape machines. This enables us to build up a web of sound effect rhythms. By tweaking the speed of the playback machine I can synchronize each new layer of repeating noise to groove in some way with the collection on the recorder.

For every reel of the movie—of which there are twelve—I have a tapestry of rhythmatized and synchronized sounds. On each of eight tracks there is a groove. On track four, for instance, there is a pile driver pounding incessantly. On track six there is a billiard ball break looped to create a strange rhythm. This can be used as a subliminal effect in the pool hall scene. Or to presage the scene, or to refer back to the scene later in the movie. Richard Beggs, who is the overall soundmeister of the movie, is in on the plot. Every scene of the film has a rhythm chugging somewhere in the soundscape. The clock is ticking.

Upon these rhythms I build the music with guitar, drums, banjo, bass, marimba, and piano. There is a scene in which Matt pays an evening visit to his girlfriend, Diane, at her parents’ house. He is met on the front porch by the young Sophia Coppola, who plays the precocious kid sister.

The scene needs to carry the underlying tension of impending, implacable doom but also to lighten up for a minute to play some romance. In the background, the train whistle blows at almost imperceptibly regular intervals. Closer, there is a broken fan that we can feel vibrating. Over these vaguely sinister rhythms a tinkling progression of chords on a toy piano is all it takes to combine with Matt’s yearning performance to create a wave of poignancy.

I have no idea how you are supposed to score a movie, so I just made this whole scheme up as a theory of a practical solution to an artistic problem. It turns out that my method is so far from how you’re supposed to do it that no one has ever done it like this—which makes me the Che Guevara of film scoring.

So far, so good. I don’t even realize yet how rare it is to have a director who will give anyone this much rope. This is the Francis method—find people with the right instincts and turn them loose with the tools.

Now he wants some conventional orchestral score to leaven the rather astringent high-concept layers that I have produced. Violins, oboes, that sort of thing. Some premonition of a career in Hollywood alerts me to a door opening. Strings?

I had already chased off competition from other musicians, arrangers, and composers that Francis had gathered in Tulsa during the shoot. This suddenly looks like a new opportunity for an interloper. Some fool of a studio hack can come on board and sweeten all of my cool stuff! The director wants instruments that I can’t play myself!

In a split second I’m an orchestral arranger.

“Strings?…Sure, yeah, lemme rustle up some strings and nice orchestra stuff in a couple of places,” says I.

2000
YEARS LATER AT PARAMOUNT STUDIO M

Behind me in the huge control room is the director, his producer, and a couple of studio bosses. In front of me is the seventy-channel mixing console nursed by a five- or six-man recording crew.

Through the glass in front of us we can see the orchestra. There are video monitors everywhere that show us the movie, the recording status, and each other. The score is on my desk in front of me. Jeff Seitz, my man from Juilliard and collaborator of two decades, runs the recording crew while I run the band, and the director behind me runs the executives.

The conductor is on the podium, facing the slickest orchestral talent that money can buy. In his headset he can hear dialogue, metronome click, and me:

“Let’s go to 1m6, measure 25. We’ll drop you in at bar 27. Tacit, please, brass until 32. And you can take them down one dynamic, say…mezzo forte until 36. Everybody play ink at 36. Show me when you’re ready.”

Through the twenty or thirty microphones we can hear the rustling of scores as the sixty players turn to the spot. Pete on the podium conveys the instruction for the horns, trumpets, trombones,

and tuba to not play for the specified six measures and to play slightly less loudly when they do enter. Rustle, Rustle.

He raises his baton. The room stills.

“Roll tape.”

The chatter behind me stops, and the scene is playing on everyone’s screens. At exactly seven minutes, eighteen seconds, and twelve frames into the reel a bright yellow streamer appears on the screen and a loud clicking indicates the tempo of the incoming music. After four clicks the band strikes up—although we can’t yet hear it. We’re listening to music that we recorded on the last pass, as the orchestra plays along in parallel. At measure 27 the recordist hits his red button, and seamlessly we are now hearing the new recording of the current performance.

All this is in response to the client behind me, who wants his favorite line of dialogue to be more clearly audible through the din of sound effects and thrilling music. This is an easy one; all I have to do is carve off some of the orchestra to clear audio space for the dialogue. The mood of the scene is playing well so I don’t have to rewrite the music and put new charts on the stands.

But it does happen sometimes, that a hitherto undisclosed producer will show up at the orchestra date with a brand-new perspective on the scene. This is the last high-octane, thousands-of-dollars-per-minute event of the film production, so distant functionaries whom I’ve never before met will arrive for one last piss on the tree.

“Wait a minute!” such a producer might say. “This scene is supposed to be happy-sad! I’m only hearing sad!”

By the time we get to the hyperexpensive scoring stage the relative happy and sad have been fully calibrated to the satisfaction of the director and more immediate producers. But now this guy wants more happy in this scene. That’s when you have to put the orchestra on a fifteen-minute break, sprint over to the keyboard, and start figuring.

With modern software it’s not too hard to immediately print up new parts to put on the stands. The tricky part is manipulating the emotional message of the chords, melodies, rhythms, and timbres. The film composer has to work very decisively and quickly to hit the precise emotional spot. Composing for full orchestra on the fly separates the men from the boys. I’ve had to learn how to do it with the clock ticking. It’s been the formal part of my music education—and I’ve been paid for all of it!

CHAPTER 5 CURVED AIR
1975

My first pro rock band.

Dear Sirs,

I recently had the exquisite joy of experiencing a Curved Air concert and was most impressed by the exceptional talent of their new drummer…

Dear Sounds,

Curved Air are BRILLYANT!

What’s the drummer’s name?

To whom it may concern,

Wow! Me and some mates went to see Curved Air at the…Incredible…especially the drummer…

I’m writing all of these letters to music magazines myself, using different handwriting, styles, spellings, and stationery. After playing a show we usually pull over on the edge of town to gas up for the drive back home to London, so while Darryl pumps gas into

our Ford Zodiac, I find a letterbox and slip another piece of skulduggery into the system.

I have no faith that the crown of fame and fortune will be justly placed upon my deserving brow. For some reason I’m desperate, even though I’m only twenty-three. I’m in too much of a hurry to wait for the apples to drop, so I must shake the tree. In a strange kind of way I’m more proud of plunder grabbed than honor bestowed.

We’re having a great time in Curved Air. I’m in a big pro band now—as a member of the band. I’ve had many other jobs in show business—roadie, tour manager, journalist, promoter, radio disc jockey—but now I’m back on this side of the line. I’m the product, not the producer.

When big brother Miles got to London and started building bands, I latched on to any of his projects that had a free seat in the van. I carried amps for Wishbone Ash. I drove for Renaissance, did lights for Cat Iron, and tour managed Joan Armatrading.

In college my drumming had actually lapsed in favor of composing and publishing. I started a little magazine in Berkeley called College Event. Actually it was more of a tip sheet than a magazine. I published letters by college concert promoters, who were students like me. I pooled their experiences with the industry professionals and artists—and then sold advertising to the same industry people. It was kind of a journalistic protection racket—a concept that Miles had dreamed up and perfected in England.

But those drums just came back and got me. I was about to finish up college in California when Miles called from London with an opportunity to get in a band with Darryl Way, the virtuoso violinist of the long disbanded Curved Air. Even though my drum fervor had faded a bit, I jumped on the next flight to London and immediately sparked a connection with Darryl. He was looking for players with passion at a time when everyone else was looking for plush. He had kept enough of a reputation going that we could form a group called Stark Naked & the Car Thieves (a name borrowed from Ian’s Vietnam tour) and start playing shows.

Just as we were about to get serious, maybe three or four shows into our push, Darryl and each of the other members of Curved Air got tax bills that had been bequeathed them by previous insect people. Since all of the Curvians were in the same predicament, they were able to patch up their differences and reunite for a tour to pay the bill. It did put our new band on hold for about a month, but at least I was able to cross back over the line and weasel my way into the Curved Air tour as tour manager. I’m the only guy I know (OK, except Henry Padovani) who could ever work both sides of the camera.

THE FIRST SHOW OF the tour is a college gig in Reading. After dropping the band off in their dressing room I go up to the stage to check the crew. They are in the usual first show panic. For its day, this is a high-tech band, with banked synthesizers and special effects gadgets. The stage is a tangle of gear and wires. I let each of the roadies unload his tale of woe and then let them get on with it. Classic roadies—they bitch…and then just do it. I’m just a kid, but I’ve done the job of every man on this crew.

At least the promoter is happy. Massed college kids are straining at the doors, and the show is going to be packed.

Back onstage the crew is finally ready for a few minutes of sound check before the doors must open. I bring the band up for a panicked run-through of one song. There are still uncontrolled buzzes from the amps and unintended screeches from the PA, so everyone is tense. Sonja Kristina, the singer, is absolutely calm, smoking a cigarette as she surveys the crew’s raging spaghetti fight.

We can’t hold the doors any longer, so I hustle the band off the stage. I have to pry Francis Monkman’s fingers from the keyboards. Some musicians are never finished with their sound check.

It’s much easier to manage a band than to be in a band. There isn’t any of the nervous sweat. I can leave them in the dressing room to stew until showtime while I go see what fires I can put out onstage. The crew are a little calmer now, and the griping is down to a grump. They’re much happier now that the support act crew are setting up and can be lorded over. The room is filling up fast. Whatever noise comes out of the amplifiers, this show is going to start with some momentum.

When I take this news down to the band, their mood brightens and they start to puff up with the mojo. While the other band thumps away over our heads, laconic drummer Florian rat-tat-tats his hand exercises, Phil rattles his bass, and Darryl arpeggiates furiously on his violin while Francis frets mysteriously. Sonja is in another room doing chick singer stuff with her wardrobe and makeup posse.

It’s showtime. The other band has cleared off, our stage is set, and the crew is ready. I go down and give Darryl the nod, and he’s raring to go. He leads the guys up to the wings, rapping on Sonja’s door as he goes by. I head up to shake some payment out of the promoter before the band plays a note. Gigs these days can be shifty.

I was supposed to meet Darryl in the wings before the band went onstage, but before I make it back to the hall he has already started up. He opens the show with some heavy rhythmic scrubbing on his electric violin as an attention grabber, and then the band kicks in for an instrumental romp through some slightly classical, vaguely Verdi riffs.

They do have something here, this band. They immediately have the crowd moving. There are a lot of groups out there these days that are sophisto-classical, but these guys actually rock. And that’s not all.

After blizzards of virtuosity from Francis and Darryl the band cuts down to a low throb. They hold the groove for a minute, and the kids are yelling. I can see why. My own hackles are on end. Sonja Kristina has arrived on the stage. Suddenly there is no band, no stage, no college kids. Just Sonja glinting in the green light. She moves like smoke across the stage, hardly seeming to move at all, but undulating in slow motion. Who cares what the band is doing? As a muso I’ve never bothered with singers, considering them to be musical passengers. How wrong I’ve been! She’s not even singing yet, and she owns everything.

SIX MONTHS LATER SONJA is squeezed into the backseat of the Zodiac between myself and Mick Jacques, and we are chuckling off down the motorway back to London after a show. We’re a happy band and we have just killed another crowd. After the Curved Air tour wrapped up, Francis and Florian went back to their lives, leaving Sonja and Darryl to consider the value of their band brand. It seemed like a no-brainer for Darryl to bring in the Car Thieves and continue as Curved Air with Sonja, Phil, Mick on guitar, and me on drums.

Who could ever expect that Sonja will one day become my first wife and mother of three of my four sons?

Melody Maker reprint: After a rather sudden and mysterious avalanche of readers’ letters, this one was printed in the “Any Questions?” section. My First Ink, and I scammed it myself.

CHAPTER 6 TAGGING LONDON
1977

Fuck!…is that a cop car?”

Paul Mulligan and I are lurking in a cleft in the cityscape, peering up the rainy night street and trying to discern the threat to our endeavor. Stashing our spray cans in our coats we, for the umpteenth time, interrupt our mission and pretend to be normal until we can see that there are no protuberances on the approaching vehicle. We’re still nervous because this is our first crime wave.

We started out with a stencil, but ended up getting more paint on ourselves than the walls. And the logo, THE POLICE, just wasn’t dominating the canvas with enough pride. So we ditched the soggy, dripping cardboard stencil and have been spraying the band name in uneven capitals on suitable walls around London. The word tagging hasn’t yet been invented, but that’s what we’re doing.

The inoffensive car passes on down the street, and we are about to resume our insurrection when a couple of pedestrians come around the corner. Damn. After a reflexive lurch back into the shadows, Paul lights up a smirk.

“Do you think they could give a damn? Fuck ‘em,” he says as he strides out into full lamplight and draws his can. The pedestrians pass by with not a sideward glance. They completely ignore Dalí and Picasso flagrantly spraying on their city walls.

It dawns on us that the shade of night is more of a hindrance than a shield. If we do this in broad daylight, we can see cops from further off. We can certainly see them better than they can see us. Everyone else on the street, whether on foot or in cars seems to be blind to us. We’re invisible! So we get bolder and soon are out at high noon plastering posters and spraying our turf like any male mammals. Paul, eager to invest in show business, lent us £400 to record our first single. We both have high hopes for a return on his gamble.

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