Omaha Rainbow : Issue 24

O'BSESSIONS WITH JOHN STEWART

To explain the title of this one - "Dream Babies Go Hollywood" - you will have to explain the title of the last one - "Bombs Away Dream Babies" - so that those who don't know the story behind that one will get the plot.

I see...it's an easy matter, due to the fact that "BADB" cannot be explained, then "DBGH" the answer is found within the explanation of the first!

"BADB" came from Dave Guard's everyday vernacular.  Dave is a very colourful conversationalist, to say the least, and his goodbyes are something to be recorded forever.  "BADB" is one of the ways Dave Guard says goodbye, along with "Strangle the falcons," "See you in a trance," "Presidential my fuhrer," things like this.  "BADB" seemed to sum up what the last album was, being this was all or nothing, and those who delve into the record business and make music for a living are really dream babies, and people who listen to records are really dreambabies.  People who are the great unknown faces who dare to dream.  It's all of us whoever listened, put our ear to a Victrola or a stereo or a car radio and had their lives changed - or saw a movie and lost themselves in it.  It's those people who dare to dream.

So when "BADB" did alright in America and some other countries, one of the first things people ask you or say is, "My God, will he go Hollywood?  Alright, he had a hit record, is he going to go Hollywood?"  The answer to that is "Yes!"  I had to go and tell them, "Yes, don't worry, have no fear, I have gone Hollywood all the way.  Every tacky thing that a human being can do,I am doing at this moment!''

Well done!  Class!  The first song on the album is actually a Hollywood song - 'Hollywood Dreams.'

It started off as a song called 'New Orleans' and it was the pay off line, "NewOrleans, she believes she could find the sky." It was about a girl dreaming about going to New Orleans.  I don't know why, it just came out that way, and the more I played the song I realised, why should anyone wish to go to New Orleans, especially a young girl looking for the sky?  Since the album turned out to be "DBGH" it was obvious Hollywood was where she wanted to follow the band, that's where the band goes.  She's one of those dream babies looking for "it."

Has it got the Hollywood treatment, the song?

Excellent question...the Hollywood treatment?

Whatever the Hollywood treatment is...

I tell you what.  I went to Disneyland with Buffy.  They have a Disneyland Parade there every night that is incredible, with lights and Mickey Mouse and dwarves and misshapen people of every description...

These are all on the song?

No, I tried to get them but too much money.  But they have music that plays throughout that is really magical and very Disney sounding.  I wanted this record to sound really Disney and very...happy is a word, but it's more than happy.  It's euphoric, and yet not with a lot of strings and a Jimmy Page kind of arrangement, but with guitars.  I worked really hard on this song to get it and actually never did find the one guitar that I wanted to do what was wanted - what I wanted to have on this song.

Hearing just that song alone, you can hear that the album is going to be rather different from the last one.  The sound of it. Tougher, raunchier and rockier.  Yes?  You agree?

I did, I wanted to take this album further than I took the last album.  It would have been an easy matter to go in and make another "BADB" in six weeks, crank it out, and I just couldn't do it.  I heard this sound in my head as I was finishing "BADB" and this was the album I would have made, had I to do "BADB" again at that point.  Not that I don't like "BADB," I really do, but this is what I wanted to do at the end of that album and it sort of grew from there.  A lot of people had hoped I'd go in - a few key people - and do part two, and I just couldn't do that.  I wanted to take it a step further and it evolved really slowly because it's really twenty years of playing music put into one album.  There's a bit of folk - a lot of folk - and rock and cajun and people who have influenced me that I've been fans of.  There's a bit of their music in it, just all in a great mulligan stew that turned out to be this album.

Was the process actually any different?  I mean, the actual making of it?  Was it not just that the sound is different, but the actual process of making this album, did you do it any differently?

No, not really.  I started out with bass and drums and guitar and did a work vocal and added everything from there.  And on this album I had - I didn't have to, but I did - something that I've always wanted to do.  I played all the guitars on the record. I didn't have Lindsey Buckingham this time.

All the guitars?  Howmany guitars on the next track - 'Wind on the River' - for instance?

There are seven guitars on there.  I don't think there is a track with less than five.

So you produced this yourself, the complications, I can't even begin to think about it.  You're doing seven guitars, you're singing the song, writing the songs of course, then producing it as well.  Then going round to the control room and listening to what you just did.

It's very hard to stay objective.  In fact, you can't stay objective, which is the toughest part of doing all that.  I found that doing demos of the songs before I did the album was in one respect really good, because I could see which way I wanted to go, and in the other way it was like writing the book before you write the book.  It really took the edge off of doing the songs.  Some of the things that turned me on when I did the demos no longer turned me on when I did the album because I'd already done them.  I had to go back and redo some of the things from the demos because they really were right and I'd just gotten bored with them.  Went back and put on what was on the demo because it really, after a few months listening, was the right thing to put on.

'Gold' had "...people out there turning music into gold."  This one's got one of those lines as well.  Not the same line, but "...down by the river taking all I could give her."  A great line.

Yeah, teenage...these songs are all fantasies.  It's my fantasy life put into music and for three, four months I have the luxury of indulging in my fantasies.  The music I hear in my head goes onto the tape.  The lyrics of the fantasy go onto the tape.  It's really a great indulgence to go through.  That's one of the dangers of doing this - of singing the song, of writing the song, of producing the song, playing all the guitars - that reviewers might say it's really self-indulgent.  It is, it's completely self-indulgent!  Because there's no-one in there but me.

It should be self-indulgent to make a record.  You've got to do exactly what you want to do, which is being self-indulgent. You can't go in there and do what someone else wants to do and be honest, can you?  You've got to make honest records. You can tella dishonest record...

In aminute!

...where someone's just gone in there and done what they think someone else is going to want to hear.

And this town is full of great guitar players that I could have gotten in a minute to play on the album, and it was just not something that I wanted to hear.  They would come in with a great, terrific, burning lick on the song that would really not be in tune with the sound I was going for, and very few can do that.  So that's why I played all the guitars.  Not that they are great guitar parts but they all are part of the illusion.  There's nothing to distract you from that illusion so in that way even the guitars are part of the picture.

You've tried some unusual, different things on some of these songs.  Which song would best demonstrate you doing something really different?

I think 'The Raven' and 'Love Has Tied MyWings.'  On 'The Raven' it was one of the songs I wrote really hearing the whole record as I wrote it and there's no drums on the record.  Steve Ross, who was my guitar player for a while, happened to be in that night and we ran in some conga.  He played the kick drum on the conga and I played the other conga.  Then I stacked acoustic guitars left and right on it, playing the rhythm, and then put other electric guitars without amps over the top of it.  Then I played a guitar case with drumsticks for the rest of it and doubled the vocal.  Wendy Waldman and Linda Ronstadt came in and did a really good vocal on it, really tuned in to what I wanted.  I've never heard a record like that one.

A lot of things were incredibly hard to do because they were so damn simple.  I had some really good people like Russ Kunkel on drums, and a couple of times Russ was just absolutely going crazy.  They sounded so simple to do that it was really hard to do them because the concentration had to be so on to play the same pattern.  One night he came in, I had Russ playing lumber out in the studio.  We had lumber set up on chairs, and I heard a sort of whimpering sound.  I said, "Russ, what's the matter?"  He said, "My lumber's moving."  "That's alright, that's the risk of playing lumber!"  He was playing straight fours on this lumber and the lumber was sliding off the chair.

There was one song, 'Hollywood Dreams,' I had to cut the song four tirnes before I could get it with three different drummers.  No-one could play it, and it's just straight 2/4.  It was the most difficult album I've ever done because it was so simple.  It had to be simple - it had to be incredibly simple - and I found out doing it that those are the hardest records to do.

You mentioned Linda Ronstadt just now.  I heard... this song, 'Nightman,' did you write that for her?

Yeah, I did.  I hadn't seen Linda in about seven years and when Russ was doing the album he was also doing Linda Ronstadt's album.  He said, "You oughta come down.  Linda would like to see you and hear what she's doing."  When I went down to the studio Linda said, "Gee, I really was excited about your hit, 'Gold.'  I didn't know it was you when I heard it on the radio.  I called Wendy Waldman and said, 'There's this great record on the radio, we've gotta write a song like it.'"  I said, "Well, it's just the old minor shuffle.  Would you like one?"  She said, "Yeah, would you write one for me?"

At that time she was doing a lot of new wave kind of songs that she heard from a guy named Mark Goldenberg.  A good songwriter, he's with a group called The Cretones.  She had gone to The Roxy and seen them there and had really been knocked out.  It had given her new inspiration for her own music, and it gave her new energy that she was really wanting to have.  So I wrote a song about a girl who goes down, in this case, to The Troubadour and sees this band called The Nightman.  She heard the song and said, "John, I love it, I think it's a hit, but I don't want to do it.  But you should do it, it's great."  The demo I made for it is the song on the album and I just beefed it up a bit.  I played it for Al Coury.  I said, "Al, I wrote this song for Linda and I don't know if I should do it."  He said, "If you don't do it I'll break both your arms."

A track that might be a good single on hearing the album once as I have is 'Wheels of Thunder.'

Another strange tale of how a song evolves.

A nice fantasy song...driving cars.

A song about your first car, yeah.  It was written for a TV show in America called "Roller Girls" that a friend of mine was involved with.  He said, "They're looking for a song. You wanna write one?"  I said, "Sure," so I wrote the song and submitted it to the producer.  Luckily, 'he didn't want the song. The show came on the air, it lasted about four weeks, vanished from the face of the earth.  But I had this song about rollergirls and I didn't particularly want to sing about roller girls.  It kicked around for about a year and it finally just evolved into a song about having your first car which is, in America, and I imagine, around the world, a really important thing, getting that first bit of freedom.

But essentiallyAmerican - it's a very American dream to have that first car.

Yeah, and it was a song that was omitted from "BADB" because I didn't quite have it together at that point of what I really wanted to do with it.  I held onto it and think it turned out one of the better things the album.  Wendy Waldman and Nicolette Larson sang background, Joey Carbone on keyboard, Russ Kunkell on drums and Chris Whelan, my main man, on bass.

A real rock 'n' roll song.

Yeah!  It's the most rock song I've done and we worked hard on it with the tom overdubs and getting the bass part just right and making sure the vocal had all the youth I could muster at that time.  Staggering into the studio...one thing I don't believe I did (and thank God this tape won't be played in America, because Al Coury would kill me), the normal way you do a record when you're producing a singer is you do the basic track and you go in and do the lead vocal.  You do it on several tracks and you pick the best one - maybe selections from several tracks - and once you have the lead vocal you go and put on the guitars and keyboards and background vocals.

I saved the lead vocals for the last two weeks!  I just hadn't worked vocals for three months, and at this point I was so exhausted I could barely drag myself in the studio.  So I would go in when I'd had some sleep and vocalise in the car.  I stayed at a hotel for two weeks just so I could be near the studio and I wouldn't have to make that drive, and put the vocals on.  That's one thing I'll never do again.  I'll do the lead vocal,immediately after doing the track.  It got scary at times.

Are there any other 'old' songs.  Not old, old songs, but songs that you've had buzzing around, or you've been playing around with for a time, that have turned up on this album?

No, that's the only one, all the rest are,brand new.  Written between "BADB" and now.

The song that we're coming to now, 'Odin,' which I heard you do in London last year and this is, again, another single.  I mean, I keep hearing singles on this album, but this sounds like one for sure.

Oh, God, I hope you're right!

Any stories?  There must be stories to tell about this?

The story to tell is there is no story.  I wrote it in the garage the way I like to write, with headphones on, a microphone and a guitar, through this little mixing board I have, so I'm just surrounded by sound.  I just started playing this riff that I've written at least five songs over the last ten years on, and probably more before that with the Trio.  Just an Am/G/F, very moody kind of riff, and started playing it and the words started coming.

Where did they come from?

I have no idea!

Come on, you must have read something about whales?

No, I've never.

Come on, you must have seen something on the TV?

Oh, I'm sure I have.  It's all registered, but not with any recall.  I mean, nothing that I can say "Moby Dick" or "The Old Man and the Sea" or anything like that.

So it's not that you're incredibly conservationist minded?  You're not concerned about the plight of the whale?

I am concerned, but I'm not a militant about it.

You didn't write it thinking, 'Well, we'll do a song for The Greenpeace Movement'?

No, not at all, not ever.

But they could well take it?

I hope they do.  I would like it if they did.  It's a movie song.

It really builds up.  It's the way it builds up from the beginning, and you keep piling these things in.

Guitar after guitar!

Piling more in and it builds and builds.  Wow!  Very dramatic.

It was a hard song to do.  It was really a tough song to finally get together.  This was another one that Linda, Wendy Waldman and a girl named Sydney Fox sang on.  Every element on the song I really went into and it all had to be targeted toward the end.  The night we did the keyboards I was just screaming at Carbone and he was screaming back at me, "What do you want?" and finally got it, because it had to be this right sound.  We worked with the Prophet Five, which is an incredible synthesizer, to get the right sea chanty kind of sound.  I went in and played his part on the harmonica and then we went in and duplicated the harmonica with the synthesizer, because I couldn't get the intonation of the harmonica right on. So he doubled the harmonica part with the synthesizer, then we took the harmonica off.  There's blood on that track!

That ending...as it ends, it's so hypnotic.  The chorus...

Thank you, that's what I was after, that hypnotic...to take you away.  I think records should just take you away.  My favourite records have always just taken me somewhere.  If a record or amovie doesn't leave me feeling differently after I hear it than before I heard it, then I feel it didn't do its job.

Somebody else interesting, if you read the small print on the back of the album, Phil Everly is on one of these songs.

Oh, yeah, a dream come true.  A friend of mine, Phil Browning, who is a TV producer, is agood friend of Phil's.  I had the song that is really written in the style of The Everly Brothers.  Iwas - still am - one of their biggest fans.  One of the first songs I ever learned to play was 'Dream,' and I wanted to write a song with that feel to it.  I thought, 'Who better to have than Phil Everly to sing the harmony on it?'  Sometimes I scare myself with the things I create.  I wanted Stevie Nicks and Lindsey on "BADB" and they appeared.  I wanted Phil Everly and he appeared.

You called him up?

I called him, yeah.  "Hi, Phil. John Stewart."  He said, "yeah, love your records."  "Love yours, can you come down?"  He said, "Yeah, I've got a cold but I'll be down next week," and he showed up and...the nicest guy.  Absolutely not an inch a star.  Was a pro all the way.  Said, "If there's anything you don't like, if it's a little flat, the phrasing, let me know and I'll do it again."  He would come in and listen.  He was harder on himself than I was and within forty minutes he had it knocked out and was on his way out.  What amazed me, we were playing the song for the first time and he started singing along with it.  I said, "Phil, you've never heard the song.''  He said, "I know, I don't know how I do that."  He knew the song when he heard it the first time.

To hear that voice coming over the speakers was worth the four months in there.  If nothing else, the one day with Phil Everly in there, hearing that golden voice coming out.  My first temptation was just to put tons of Phil Everly on this reoord. I said, "No, I better not do that again.  It got me in a lot of trouble the first time!"  Chris did a beautiful harmony on it.  Phil came in and I called Chris and said, "Chris, Phil came in and just put magic on that tape."  Chris was really good, he understood.  Heard Phil, said, "Yeah, that's it, that's the sound!"

Tell me about this song, 'Monterey.'  It's somebody called Monterey or actually...

The town of Monterey up in Northern California, the Big Sur area.  'Monterey' is a trilogy to 'Odin' without the third song. It's the prelude to 'Odin.'  It sets up the story of the girl whose guy is going out to sea to hunt the whale and who has a very bad feeling about him going.  She just gets the message he should not be going on this trip.  It's a song I wrote in about 15 minutes one night in a hotel in Denver.  It's one of those songs that just came like that.  There it was, done!

Which is the third song of the trilogy, then?

There is none.  It's a dulogy, I guess.  I don't know what you call a trilogy with no third song.  The Amerioan way.

Will there be a third song?

I doubt it, no.  Maybe the whale comes back and joins The Grateful Dead.  I don't know.

When you say...this is obviously the easiest part, right?  These songs, suddenly, there they are.

Some aren't.  Some do.

Well, what on here was a real slog for you?

'Hollywood Dreams.'  When I started changing the lyrics on it, it got difficult.  When I wrote the first one, 'New Orleans,' that came real quick.  Actually, none of them were, to be honest with you, they all came very quickly.

Do you tend to get impatient if something won't come?

Very impatient.  Very!  I can't let it alone.  There are some songs I've had for eight yaars and are not finished yet...and I doubt if they ever will be.  Maybe a fragmant will go into another song or something.  After "BADB," after I saw that there was away to make records people would listen to, songwriting got a lot easier.  It came really freely.  There wasn't all the prejudging of the songs.  They just came and I let 'em come.  Let it be, as Mr McCartny so eloquently let us know a few years ago.

It's something that someone who cannot write a song cannot comprehend where they come from.  You say, "There it was...

It's all out there.  You just tune into it.  I don't really write them at all.  I'm just luoky...

It sounds mystical!

It is mystical!  Very mystical!  Very spiritual.  Music, I think, is very spiritual.

To just create something from nothing at all.  Out of the air...

I wouldn't be too sure if it's nothing.  I think it's something that a few hear and it gets decoded in their brain.  All their data goes into it as well and it comes out in the form of a song.

Sounds Scary.

Does get scary at times.

Okay, 'Lady of Fame'?

Yeah, 'Lady of Fame' is a song written during the album.  I needed a song like that.

You were saying this to me earlier. Now you must explain this. You have this running order in your mind, how you want it to sound, especially side one you were saying, so you just wrote this song to fit in with the way you wanted the album to sound?

Yeah, it's hearing the whole album at once.  Hearing the whole thing as one play, one song, one show, one thought, one stream that goes a lot of different ways to be really cornily poetic about it.

So what were you looking for?

That kind of minor drama.  Urgency to open side two.  Urgent...it had to be urgent and mysterious and a bit frantic, a bit, 'I don't have control of this.'  I needed a song that said, 'I'm on the edge.  Something is on the edge here.  Something will either get me or I will get it.'  Just so, when you listen to the album, you don't go, "Oh, well, here we go.  This is real comfortable, isn't it?"

But none of them do that.

That's the point, they shouldn't.  It goes back to something that Andrew Wyeth, who's a great American painter, once said about his painting.  He does very delicate, intricate oil colours and water colours that seem very passive and pastoral.  You look at them and say, "Isn't that nice," but there's a feeling under that, that something very wrong is about to happen. Either very wrong or very important or something out of the ordinary.  The way he said he did that, his first strokes are very violent strokes.  He just throws the paint on the canvas.  No matter how much detail he adds to that, there's always that underlying violence.  I think what I try to do with my records is have that violence, that underlying drone, that one note, that ominous feel under a ballad that seems to be just about, 'Isn't that nice?'  But underneath it there's a feeling of unsettlingness.

I see what you mean, listening to the album, listening to the songs, it isdefinitely there.  They're not...even the slow songs are not just pretty, pretty.

There's life, there's those forces underneath it that keep you on your toes.  I don't know. I'm trying not to editmy words here. It's part of the organic thing that happens on this planet of all these forces going on all at once, no matter where you are, in keeping your course through those forces.  That sounds really serious and weighty for rock 'n' roll and it's not.  What I'm saying is much more important than what it is.

'Lady of Fame' was an idea that had been fermenting in my head for quite a while, having dealt with people who were not dealing with fame, then seeing what it did to them, and getting just a minor drop of that rain on my head, just seeing how people reacted differently to you.  And there are no survivors to fame.  You either get so big that you completely lose your brains- and we know people ourselves we have encountered recently who could not deal with it - or you get it and lose it and become a has been.  There are no survivors.  It gets you one way or the other.  It kills you.

It's very heavy.

I know!  We're talking about a nice little album.  Why is that?  Why does this turn into this catharsis of life?  I'm gonna kill myself!  I don't think Buddy Holly went through this crap!  Why do I get into this?  You do it to me...every time, Scott! Why do you have to ask me deep questions?  Why don't you ask me what colour pants I was wearing?  So that's why I wrote 'Lady of Fame.'  Song's a turkey.  What can I tell you?  (All this paragraph transcribed through a welter of hysterical laughter from both parties - Ed.)

'Love Has Tied My Wings.'  We haven't talked about that one...tell me.

What do you want to know about it? About the recording of it?  How the song was written?

All the stories about these songs.  I want drama, I want romance, I want pathos, I want a happy ending.  Come along, the agonies you've been through.  Every one of these songs must not be just one story, there must be what happened, how it developed, the fights you had...

Another ten minute song.  Actually, I only had the first verse up to the day I recorded the master vocal when I had to write the second right before I had to go in and sing it, because I just did'nt have it.  I kept saying, "It'll come, it'll come," and it didn't come.  The day of reckoning came that I had to finish the song. I work well under pressure, I really do.

Till they start banging at the door?

Just about.  Oh, yeah, the door to the studio was locked, as a matter of fact.  We really had fun with this one.  Kunkel came in and he played a thermos and he played his shoe.  I had eight people in the studio walking on a linoleum floor and we miked the floor.  They're walking behind it.  Just did a whole track of that and then we doubled it.  Doubling means you put them on another track.  The engineer at this point is a great guy, Jim Hilton, who I can't say enough about when talking about an album.  I should not pass over Jim Hilton because he is the man who makes sure this gets on tape and who has the patience of Job.  At some time during the last part of the album...at some time it wasn't that he would say no, but if I would do one more guitar I was afraidpack his bag and walk out of the studio.  So I really had to tread carefully around the end because it was just mad at this point... absolutely gone.

Did you have none of the parts written out?

No, I don't write anything out.  It's all trying to communicate to the people what I want.

You made up as you went along? Right, we need another guitar, I think, on this one...

Yeah... I try to hear the missing guitar, and in many cases, like, one song had nine guitars on.  I pulled off four of them because they just weren't needed.  I went overboard.  Jim and I talked about that a lot.  If we take it to the furthest extent, at least we'll know we didn't miss anything.  We can't sit home and go, 'If we only had...'  I did everything that I do that could be done on that song, and then pulled them off.

So there you were with the sixteen marching feet, the thermos rattling...

The shoe and the thermos and the marching people, saying, "I hope no-one from RSO walks in at this point because they'll put me in the truck and send me away."  We'd gotten one track of feet down.  When you're doubling a vocal you want to hear the original vocal you did because you want to get it as close to being on as you can.  Jim said, in all seriousness after they'd marched for the first time, when they were just about to do the second pass he said, "Do they want to hear their old feet?"  At this I went on the floor!  Do they want to hear their old feet?!  I said, "No, they don't have to hear their old feet.  It'll confuse them!"

So it was getting a little crazy at this point, and Kunkel was really into the madness of playing shoes bottles and things.  All there was left was to put on the background and Chris did a really good, solid background part.

I didn't know really what guitars to put on here - I'm giving all my secrets away.  I had this old Country Gentleman electric guitar.  This is a situation again where we miked the guitar real closely - about four mikes wide open - and I played it acoustically with no amp at all and then doubled that guitar.  It was a thing I thought I could do better, so I went in to do it again and it sounded awful.  For some reason, that one day it happened.  You just start sifting around... and it's a very imperfect album.  I hate perfect albums.  I want to see the people doing what they do on that record.  I don't want a slick record.  There's mistakes of the ying-yang on this album.  Guitars out of tune, flood licks...

Four months and you're making mistakes?

Yeah, but keeping the right ones!  That's the trick.  On 'Wind on the River' Wendy Waldman was doing background vocals. Stacking these 'Oooohs' behind Phil Everly.  It was very long passages she was doing, really, like eight or twelve bars, and she'd take a breath in between that you can hear on the record.  Jim said, "We've got to get those breaths out of there."  I said, "Jim, no way.  That's a girl breathing.  You're gonna take that off a record?  People pay money to hear that in the privacy of their own home."  So that's what I like to keep on a record.  I like to make it sound human.  One of my favourite records of all time is 'Night Moves.'  The guitar is out of tune, the time is off, it's real!  It's real, and the movies that I love are real movies.  The early fifties records are real records.  I wanna keep it real.  You might hear the record and go, "Four and a half months and there's these mistakes?" mistakes are there on purpose, they were meant to be left on.

You're just human beings.  They weren't mistakes.  Breathing isn't a mistake.

No, breathing isn't.  Some of the guitar parts were slight mistakes... but I wanted it that way.  There are too many people making perfect records that bore me to tears.  No names mentioned.  They're so perfect they squeak and I wouldn't play 'em ever.  The records that I love have mistakes all over the place.  Just the kind of crazy guy I am!

On every song you think, 'That's the one,' and then you get to the very end of the album and you find 'Moonlight Rider' which is totally different to anything else on the record.  A bizarre sound.

Yeah, the experimental track on the album.

What were you trying to achieve with your experiment?

Panic!

You got it.

Yeah, we did.  The voices are back a little bit, that's really the way I wanted it.  The lyrics go on about fame again and how intangible everything is.  "Like a moonlight rider and a midnight train, it's gone."  That urgency of you've got to hang on to this somehow, even though you know you can't.  Then all of a sudden the song is gone.

It's very short.

It's real short.  There's some strange things on it.  There's three G tuned acoustic guitars playing open tuning, and a banjo, and two electric guitars and two snare drums.  We speeded the track up and...

What's he hitting with the drumsticks?  A train or an aeroplane?  What's he hitting this time?

He was hitting his wife, I think.  She was a good sport though through the whole thing.  A little soldier, she was.  Just straight drums on that one.  There was no trick percussion on that at all, but we did some weird eq to those drums.  It's real fast. Even faster than we did it.  In fact, it's faster than it is on the record.  When we got in to master I got a little chicken and backed it off a bit, because it was real fast!  That's the oldest song on the album.  That was the one that started out the whole album.  In fact, that was supposed to open the album and as it went on it became more obvious it should close the album.  That's one I really wanted Lindsey to play on if he had come around but I had a lot of fun playing it, anyway.

So you've spent four and a half agonising months...try and explain how agonising, because I don't think people as a whole, unless they're very close to the business, understand.  They think you get a bunch of musicians, you've written the songs, you gather round the mike, sing the thing and there it is.  But 4 and a half months... ten songs...

I don't know.  Maybe if you remember final exams, multiply that by a thousand... it's really hard for me to relate it to any other thing I've ever done.  One, my whole career at this point was on the line, I had to follow it up.  I told the record company, "yes, I can do it," not knowing if I could.  Thinking I could do it.  Doing things that I had nowhere to draw from.  I couldn't go find a record and go, 'How did they do that?' because a lot of the things I hadn't heard really on a record before. The more time goes by, the more your objectivity diminishes.  The more fatigue sets in and you can't really trust your own instincts anymore.  One day it sounds terrific and the next day it's the worst thing I've ever heard in my life.  Three weeks before I finished the album some friends were over, they said, "How is it?"  I said, "It's the biggest piece of crap I've ever heard in my life."  They said, "That's what you said on the last album!"  I said, "I did?"  They said, "Yeah."

And I can't relate to anyone, and everyone thinks it's them - I'm mad at them or I have something with them.  I can't talk to anyone.  It's a hideous thing to go through and I put myself through it.  No-one puts me through it, it's all self-imposed.  I don't know if it's necessary.  I think it's just feeling that there's something left in life worth putting yourself to the brink for. Putting yourself to the line of exhaustion.  That I didn't cheat anyone, least of all myself.  I went all the way with it.  And I don't know if it's necessary to do that.  I think I just did that to give it more weight than it really has.  I don't know if...

You're testing yourself.

Testing!  That's it!  Linda said, "Well, John, maybe you should ride rapids in a kayak," which is the same thing.  Is it really necessary?

So how does it feel?  You've done the 4 and a half months and then you're actually holding the record in your hands.  Is that an incredible moment or is it an anticlimax or what?

When you go in to master the record the final day when they're gonna put it on a disc to be pressed, you can do little changes there.  You can make the record sound more the way you want to.  It's the feeling you come to of 'This is it!  I cannot do any more correcting.  That's got to be the way it's going to be for ever on that record.  This is it for this song.'  We were mixing 'Lady of Fame' up to the last night and we were just exhausted, and the bass and drum part were not right.  So I had to call in the drummer at the last minute - the drummer who did the original part - and put on a new kick drum and bass.  To qualify it to Jim Hilton and Chris I said, "I've done too many albums where I said, 'Oh well, to hell with it, no-one will notice.'  That's the one shot that song ever had, ever, to be what it's going to be, and I can't let it go."  Some of the songs didn't come up to what I know they could be, but that's as much as I could do.  That's as close as I could get and maybe they never would.  Maybe that's just a figment of my imagination that they would be.

You go through periods where... I do mixes every day of where I am and come home and play them.  I played 'Lady of Fame' and said, " I really feel I missed it on this one."  Buffy said, "Well, the voices, I think, were better before.  The higher voices were out more."  I said, "Dammit, I knew there was something."  I talked to Al Coury that same day and he said, "John, 'Lady of Fame' I love.  When I heard it before the voices were too high.  I love it now"!  So...everyone hears it differently.

The problem is that at that point when I played the album for you today, you could tell me, "This is the worst thing I've ever heard," or "It's great!" and I would believe either one.  It is agony.  I have no idea what is on that record this close to it. No idea at all!  In another six months I will.  So to play the album to you - you were the first one to hear it apart from Al Coury and Buffy - was absolute agony.  I heard everything wrong with it.  The songs were either too fast or too slow; that guitar should have been out further; there should have been more high end roll on the vocal there.  I hear everything I think should have been done, and assumed you were hearing that, too.  Going, "You should have had more 10k on the cymbals there!" So at this point I don't know.

I like doing it that way, though.  I don't like people taking my albums for granted - producers and people like that - it's another gig for them.  I think when you put that much care into something that people are going to recognise the care.  If they don't, at least you've assumed they would.  Something, in this day and age, has got to be done with care.  A lot of groups spend a lot of money on records because they feel that way, and almost go crazy.  The Eagles spent over a year on their record and a million dollars and got what they wanted because they cared about it.  Fleetwood cared about "Tusk." Whether you like it or not, they cared, and I think that's worth something.

Absolutely, you can tell the ones that didn't.

Can't you?  They just lay there... and Bob Seger hasn't come out with an album in a long time.  I know it's because he really cares.  He wants that album to be as good as it can be.  I'm sure when it comes out it's gonna be terrific and, if it isn't, he went down trying.  It's not because he didn't care.  What was the question?

So what do you do now?

I slept for three days.

There's nothing more you can do.  It is now totally out of your hands.

Yes, sending a child into the world.  There's nothing more I can do...nothing more.

Send this child out that is going to bring a great deal of pleasure to a great number of people.

And watch the critics rip it apart.  I cannot wait.  I can write the reviews now.

But, as we've said before, you've made enough of those albums that they liked...

And as soon as you get any success at all they can't wait to rip you up.  If you're not part of the new wave, to be colloquial about it, then you're not relevant, and if I try to do new wave they say, "Wait a minute, what a dishonest album! Who does he think he's kidding?"  So you can't win.  I do a record the way I want to hear it.  I make a record that if I wanted to go in a record store and buy a record, this is the one I want to go in and buy.  The irony is once you make it I can't listen to it again. I can't play it again, I've heard it so many times, that's it.

Not even after a break of...

I never play my albums at home ever.  I'll play it in the car sometimes, or something like that.  I always play it on the jukebox to hear what it sounds like.  And it's a big kick hearing it on the radio - that's a big thrill - but to sit at home and play it, never.  Never!  I can't remember the last time I played one of my own records at home.  I'll play this one just to sneak up on it to make sure it's still there... is it really on there?

Have you any immediate plans apart from going to bed soon?

I'll go out on the road at the end of the month.  Put a band together for four days I have at the end of the month, and once the album comes out I'll be out on tour... plugging away.

Enjoy doing that, and doing the songs?

Hate it, hate the road.  I love playing if I have a good band and if the sound is good.  If the sound isn't good and if the band isn't working, it's agony to me.  I'd rather have bamboo shoots poked in my fingernails.  To be a real perfectionist - for the want of a better word - on the album and to go out and do a shoddy show to me is just agony.  I want it to be really good and there's so many I've done that have been dreadful.  I'd really love to be in a band again.  If I could play guitar, sing a couple of songs and sing background, sort of meld in with people I really liked...

If it all does go right, is it not an enormous thrill to think you've sat in your garage and written this song, and you go half way round the world and those people know that song?

It's scary.  When I went to England and Germany and people knew 'Gold' - and in England people knew songs I did eleven years ago - it's mind boggling.  It's like trying to think of the deity.  I can't concieve of it.  I don't want to think about it.  I just want to think about going out there and doing it.  It's a great kick to get word from Australia that your record is doing well there.  It was number one in Hong Kong.  HongKong!  Number one inHong Kong?  It's a great kick, it really is.

I don't know, Roger.  If I get in a situation where I go out and play to people who've come to see me rather than opening for Chicagoand Little River Band where people sit through forty minutes of my set and react to 'Gold' because they've heard it on the radio, that's no fun.  If they came to see me, or if there was that acceptance, that would be a real kick because then you have that freedom of the show going its own way.  Because a show is really a two way street there, it's like a blind date. If the girl just sits there and doesn't say a word, you become a dull guy.  If the audience just sits on its hands and goes, 'Oh, yeah... Chicago!!!' you become a dull act.  You just put it in second and go, 'Let's get through this without getting killed.'

I can thinkof nothing worse...

It's the worst.

... than opening for somebody like that, knowing they're waiting for you to get off and get whoever it is on.  That's who we came to see.  Who is this guy?  What a soul destroying thing.

When you're on a tour and you do that night after night for three weeks knowing it will get no better, it's no fun.

Well, after this one they'll be coming to see you.

I hope so, Roger.