|
Autoamerican 2001 Liner Notes CD Booklet
EAT TO THE BEAT had done its job. We were secure... for the moment.
Radio liked the music, the audience was buying it, Debbie's face was everywhere, and the band was working.
 I had left them to resolve their internal and external conflicts, and went back to my life. Hopefully they would use this time to invent their next musical adventure. We all needed time, but we didn't get much.
It was the fall of 1980 and the band was coming to L.A. to record. I knew this was the right thing to do and felt sure that a dose of L.A. would bend the music. They all loved L.A. anyway. They just didn't like to admit it. It's a New York thing.
The band was down to five members. I was told that Frankie would come when he was needed.
They all came up with ideas. Great ideas.
We would have an orchestra, a jazz great or two, some horn sections, a cover of a great reggae song, and - as Chris put it - "a rap." I wasn't too sure what he meant, but it sounded good and it was his idea so it must be good.
It was a bad time for me and I needed to bury myself in a record. The next few months would leave a musical brand on my life. In fact, AUTOAMERICAN would leave its mark on all of us.
This was a hard record to rehearse. Without Frankie I found myself playing guitar with Chris. It was fun, but since neither of us was exactly Jimi Hendrix, it was loose. Debbie
played me a recording of a song called The Tide Is High. "That's one Number One on the record," I told her. All we had to do was catch the vibe. The song gave me chills. Chris kept talking about this "rap" thing but never really played me anything. He promised it would be there when we got to the studio. Along with a few other ideas. It was becoming apparent that much of this album would have to happen in the studio, and so we abandoned rehearsals and went to work.
The orchestra stuff was amazing. Chris had written some music he called Europa, and we worked tirelessly with our arranger, Jimmie Haskell, and about thirty or forty musicians. It sounded wonderful.
Tracks seemed to go down rather quickly. The distractions were left in New York and all we had to do was work, eat and sleep. Everyone appeared to be pretty happy for a change, although Clem had reservations about the direction we were going. No one listened to him.
The Tide Is High was one of the most enjoyable recording sessions - top to bottom - I have ever experienced. The more we did to it, the more it sounded like the Number One I had promised them.
The track felt perfect. The percussion players added the next dimension. Debbie's vocal was magic, and the strings and horns put it over the top. I asked them to play it without reading or running through their parts. They thought I had lost it, but they did it. The result was loose and added a wonderful atmosphere to the overall picture. It was ready.
Time to find out what this "rap" thing was. Chris and Debbie had told me the title: Rapture. No lyrics yet, and only a sketchy vocal line, but we started putting the track together. With all of us in the studio and the control room in the hands of some trustworthy engineers, we began playing. Piece by piece, Rapture was taking shape. Debbie and Chris had the verses and choruses written, and I was told that a large hole after the second verse would contain the rap and a guitar solo - a guitar solo that Frankie would be flown in to record. OK. Tom Scott came in and wrote the horn parts with us and then played them all. Awesome.
The time came to do the rap. I asked Debbie to go do it and she asked for five minutes. They hadn't written it yet. So they stood there in front of me and - in five minutes - wrote it. I was bewildered by the artistic flow of those five minutes. They were so perfect together. They were so good at this. She recorded it in the first take or two and there it was - Rapture. The guitar solo went on and we had our hit nicely wrapped. It felt really good to be doing something that different and that cool. California had made this record different. Blondie had made this record cool.
We kept the distractions out of the studio for the most part. The album cover was worked on endlessly but that was artistic stuff.
My father died halfway through the record, so the group lost me for a week or so. We still never lost a step. I came back and on we went.
One night we heard that John Lennon had been shot.
It seemed that everything they threw at us just bounced off this time. We were due for a break after the last record, and we got it. The group left for New York - happy - and I stayed in L.A. to mix.
 The business was changing when AUTOAMERICAN was released. No longer would THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL or AMERICAN BANDSTAND be the place for a group to find its television audience. There was a thing called MTV waiting to happen. It now seems ironic that Blondie missed that exposure. But then, perhaps we would not have made this record the same way if we were thinking of how it would look instead of how it felt.
We had our two Number One singles.
Mike Chapman
May 2001
|
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;){kind=link}