Jack Douglas

Come for the Aerosmith stories, stay for the John Lennon ones. Legendary music producer Jack Douglas tells of his reform school past, freighter trip to Liverpool and penetrating the studio scene. Fascinating.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left That's Podcast.
My guest today is legendary producer and rock and tour
Jack Douglas. Whenever I hear that legendary, I feel like
Bigfoot or the lock Ness Monster. Well, the point is,
you know, no one's going to be legendary anymore because
no one reaches as many people. I guess that's true.

(00:26):
You know, I've been in New York for a while,
back in New York working and and um, and we've
had some very interesting dinners like the dinner you attended ago.
You know, that mix of mafio so actors and musicians.
You were really missed. I was. I was tempted to
call you up and say, Bob, well, next time definitely

(00:48):
ring me. It sounds good. Well, you know, the last
time we went, Jeff Emrick was there, who's now past
and that is very sad. Yes, And of course what's
his role av on the TV show? H He told
me some really crazy story And of course Richard Lewis

(01:09):
the only funny thing about Richard Lewis is I always
thought it was an act. But that's who he really is.
He really is that exactly. It's perfect and you guys
you have had uh, you know, a kerfuffle exactly at Terry. Yeah,
we want Yeah, it was great and he was like,
so I said, I said, you know, Bob is going
to be there, and he got really paranoid, and you know,

(01:31):
he went into his complete character. I don't know. I mean,
isn't he mad at me? I What am I gonna
say to him? Me? It was great? Well at end
we that night at Ago we had a long discussion. Anyway,
you're just in from Vegas. You were involved in the
Erroo Smith residency and in addition, your son is playing
with Erro Smith. Okay, what do you tell us more

(01:52):
about that? Um? I mean, what's I don't know what
to say about. Well, this is a live show. People
tend to think of you as a record producers, So
what was your role? Don't know. All I did was
go up to Boston and do the last two days
of rehearsal with the band so and talk the m
d uh into not us right into not using click

(02:16):
tracks on the songs that there's no click that you
know can identify the groove that they sustained on some
of those old songs. It's like you know, same old
song and Dancer Mama Can or back in the Saddle
that they The whole idea of those songs is that
they're gonna move. They're gonna move up in the chorus

(02:38):
and then they're gonna go back down and sinking for
the verse. You can't put a click on them. And
when he tried to, it was very uncomfortable and the
band sounded kind of, you know, like look like they
were laboring through the songs. So I got that done. Um,
because Stephen will, I mean, he'll great people, but he

(03:00):
won't get anything done because of that. So he might
be attacking the empty but he won't be You want
to get it done. You're the negotiator. I'm a politician. Yes,
that's nature of being a record producer. So and my
son my son, but quite by accident, when we were
up at Johnny Depp studio doing Joe's solo album, my

(03:25):
son stopped in to see me and and Joseph, doesn't
your son play like a lot of percussion and stuff.
But he's actually he's actually a jazz drummer. He's been
nominated twice for Grammys with the Wayne Wallace Quintet Jazz
quintet and and he also is a Latin percussionist and
a world music guy. So um I said, yeah, yes,

(03:49):
So he played on Joe's album. And then I said
to Joe, you know he he is one of the
only young white men who actually play at Santa Ria.
Um when they when they bring someone into Santoia, they had, well,
why don't you tell my audience what that is. Santoria
is an Afro Cuban form of Catholicism with which combines

(04:10):
Catholicism and voodoo and um and it is in Haiti.
And so um my son studied with some of those
drummers they play. They play these amazing drums, and he
learned to play him and he got into the whole scene,
though he's not a member of Santoria, got into the

(04:31):
whole scene up in the Bay Area, and then he
was invited to play. And in order to do that,
you have to learn hundreds of chance, these chants that
go with so you chant as you're playing drums. And
I told Joe, I said, you know, you know, it's
all these really odd sounding chance and Joe was like,
he's got to do one on the record. And so

(04:53):
Joe Perry's last solo record starts with my son chanting
at the beginning of it, and then Joe called me up.
He said, listen, we want to expand the band for Vegas.
Maybe a horn, maybe some strings. Of course, we have
a keyboard player, having another background singer, and we'd like percussionist.
Do you think uh Colin would do it? And and

(05:16):
I couldn't reach Colin. He was in Ethiopia. He was
gigging in Ethiopia. But when he got back he said,
it sounds like a good change. Okay. Traditionally the drummer
in the band is the business person. Would you put
your son in that category? Yes, he is the go
to guy. He he holds it all together in these

(05:38):
jazz groups and world music groups. But Um, but he
was very uncomfortable with the situation. And Arrowsmith and that
he felt guilty because all he had to do was play.
I don't have to do anything else to show up
and play, which is cool. So and the rehearsals, um
rehearsals were really good. Up and balls to and um

(06:01):
and now the band is They moved to Vegas and
they rehearsed in a facility outside of the theater. H
and it went pretty Actually, they rehearsed more for this
show than they ever did for any live gig they
ever did, because when they sometimes they don't even rehearse.
I mean, after almost fifty years, what do you need
to rehearse? So um, there was more rehearsal for this

(06:25):
than ever and um, and so the first show was
slightly fucked up because there was just I think they
were overrehearsed, and Stephen was more thinking about, you know,
what could go wrong with all this production and the
and the you should see it really definitely. I saw
some of the clips online. The clip of season of

(06:46):
Wither with Joe playing the guitar and the two in
the cheers definitely made my body vibrate. Yeah, I know
it's it is really good. The production is so amazing.
And there's a film in the beginning of it, which
is the history of Aerosmith, which goes on a little
bit too long, so I don't think you'll ever see
that whole film again, which runs a little over forty minutes.

(07:09):
I think people were complaining too much film, not enough music,
but it's very good. The productionist out of this world.
That's th h X sound so that's like seventeen points
of sound and things are just swirling around you and
the lights are in credits Vegas. Baby, Okay, let's go
a couple of Aerosmith questions. You know. Legendarily, uh, you know,

(07:34):
Mick and Keith of the Stones are the glimmer twins
and Joe and Stephen are the toxic twins. Now, it's
certainly been proven, especially in light of Keith Richard's book,
that they don't completely get along. Now since you're in
the belly of the beast, do Joe and Stephen get along?
Not really? You know, I've often thought about what keeps

(07:55):
a band together? Um for fifty years, because how many
of your left that are still the actual original players.
That's the only one I can think. Okay, so you
know what keeps them together? They're all having the back
of their heads that one day they're going to get Stephen,
but they never do. They're all like, one day, I'm
just gonna get them. Well I didn't get them today,

(08:17):
I'll get them tomorrow. And this has gone. So I
mean they're a family, u uh, you know, slightly dysfunctional
family and um, and they're all still there's still some
humility and and gratefulness that you know, these are working

(08:42):
class class guys. Um. Not the greatest musicians, certainly, Uh,
Brad is a really good musician. The rest of them
are okay musicians. But it's that whole story where you
take okay people with a lot of character and you
put them together and they make a special noise together

(09:05):
that they don't make if you take one of them
out of it. It's just, um, you know, they're amateurs
and they just make a really cool noise together. Stephen
is exceptional. He's he's brilliant. Well, the funny thing about
Stephen is he can be that guy completely off Mike spontaneously.

(09:28):
He can like spout lyrics you know that he's making up.
You can't believe that he can continue to do it
just when you run into him. Yeah, it really is.
He's brilliant. He's one of the few rock stars who
live up to the building. I mean, I've met many
legendary people, and this always comes up because people tend
to be disappointed, said, but not Steven Tyler. Oh no,
and he's and he's uh and open and two strangers first,

(09:52):
I think firstly, I'm not sure which came first, whether
that somebody told them, keep your fan base. Always been
good to your fans and they will stick with you,
or whether it was just his natural thing where he
just loves people. I mean, he loves being with people.
The only people he doesn't really love being with are

(10:13):
the ones that, oh yeah, that's hilarious. So you know,
look at the it's it's a great thing and you
can't expect guys to be together. Okay, So the first
Aerosmith album you did was the second Get Your win Rings. Okay,
the first album, which I certainly bought after hearing dream On,

(10:34):
had dream On and Walking the Dog, but it was uneven.
I will say, how did you get the gig to
do Get Your Wings? Well, um, two, it came at
me two ways. The first way was through liber Crebs.
There were managers, right, because that was Aerosmith was the
baby band. The their hot band at the time was

(10:57):
the New York Dolls. And I had engineered that first
album really working with Todd Rundgren. Well, yeah, and Todd
really didn't care for the band very much. And so
um Todd was he didn't show up all that. That's
what the legend is. Yeah, he didn't show up all
the time, So I mean there's a you know, there

(11:18):
was a moment when he said something to David about, yeah,
that's gonna sound great when you put some harmony on it.
It was a live vocal. David said, harmony, you accused
of me having melody, so he wasn't. I don't know
if it was a great match, but any it worked,

(11:39):
but we were left alone quite often, and um, and
we got the record and Todd came in and we
mixed it in three days maybe but the faders up basically,
but um, and of course I got an engineering crowd
on it. But Crup said to me, look, we knew,

(12:00):
you know, you were kind of holding some of that
together because they were tended to be pretty nuts, especially
Johnny Thunders. So uh so their prize for me was Aerosmith.
At the same time, Colombia had asked Ezerin to produce

(12:21):
the next album, and Ezin listened to the first album
and he wasn't really interested in the band and so um,
but he and I had a partnership at the time
at Nimbus. We were doing a lot of stuff together
and he said, why don't you just ask Jack Douglas,
and in doing that he made the call to me,

(12:43):
not not Krebs. He made the call, but they were
already into it. But he made the call to me
and got himself an executive producer and a chunk of
dough out of it, which he still gets, which is
God bless him right now. That album was a quantumly
forward from the first album, and that is my favorite album.
And I still talked to Crabs, who always brings up

(13:05):
because he knows my favorite song off that album is
Lord of the Thighs, and he says, well, you know,
you know, you couldn't have that today in the me
Too era. It's really kind of funny. I suppose I
suppose you could. I mean, I don't hear rap records
changing their lyrics all that much. You'll hear a lot

(13:26):
of That's an excellent point, But to what degree were
you the shaper of the material or other things? I'll
get your wigs. You know, that's the one album where
they came in with a good amount of material and
we weren't in the pre production period for two or
three months, so they had some material for it because

(13:48):
they hadn't started that hardcore touring where they couldn't write
any right so um I came in with material and
with and pretty much with lyrics and UM and you
know you probably noticused that that cat. This cat has
been led out of the bag a long time ago.
That I use different guitar players for the solos. For
the big solos, it was you know, Steve Hunter and

(14:12):
Dick Wagner, one guy who were Evan's guys when Yeah,
and and with Alice as well of course, so so I,
you know, having engineered Alice records and UM, I had
a good relationship with both those guys. So I made
a deal with them. I said, look, these guys are

(14:32):
very sensitive about being players. You can't ever have your
name on the record. You can't ever Please don't talk
about it. You'll be paid well. And after you play
the solos, you have to teach them line by line
how to play them themselves, so when they go on
there old So basically the band is getting great players

(14:54):
for a number of songs, not all of them, and
they're also getting free guitar lessons. So, uh, to what
degree did use did those guys play on the subsequent records?
I never had to use them again. When they put
the guys on the right course, yes. And when they
came off the road touring, um that record they were

(15:18):
they had been playing those solos that you know, they
learned how to finger and I mean Brad was already
pretty good, but believe me, they were amateur and um
and and they wanted to make that step up. And
I know that Joe was you know, Joe was what
I'm not going to play on my own records, said
not everything, but you know, train kept a Roland was

(15:39):
like their thing. You know, It's like, but um, I
think the only person I let play that played poorly
on a record was Patti Smith on Radio Ethiopia. Because
I knew that it being just whatever was going to
be played was gonna work. It's like I once told Yoko,

(16:00):
I don't care if you get in the piano and
play it or you sit at the school, It'll all work,
will make it work. But this what Stephen had in
mind for this record was that big leap. And so
when I said to Stephen, we're going to use these
two players, he was like, absolutely, it's great. Okay, I know,
but from my audience, tell us, you know, let's go
to the back story. Where are you from? Originally from

(16:22):
the Bronx, New York. And your parents did Your father
did what for a living? He worked in a freight yard.
He um, he was a brakeman, and which meant that everything,
not only everything in our apartment had fallen off a
freight car, but everything in the neighborhood. Like if I

(16:45):
went down the street, they had the same radio as
we did, because my father would have a carton of
them somewhere. And this was, you know, the way it
worked in New York. My father once told me, excuse me,
he was reading a new Space bern. He looked up
at me and he said, he said, John, do you
know how much money passes through the city every day?

(17:07):
If money is important to you? And I said, I
don't know. He said, some trillion dollars in retail, in
Wall Street and everything else. He said, I want you
to imagine it as a great river running through New
York City. All you have to do is stick your
hand in it, let enough build up, pull it in,

(17:27):
and you're on your way. That was his philosophy. And
now were you the only child? I was the only child? Yes,
And I lived in a and I lived in a
a tenement building that was in the in the East
Bronx that was filled with nothing but family who looked
or acted or was it there were nothing like me whatsoever?

(17:51):
That was the odd ball. And in school and the
neighborhood did you fit in? Were you an odd ball there?
I went to Catholic school. Uh, she's strange to think that.
Even from first grade we took a subway. Yeah, I agree.
The first day of first grade, I just walked out
of the house. Yeah that's it, you know, and walked

(18:12):
to walk to the subway. At subway passed, it went
two stops, got off and and no one. It just
didn't matter. And then I would walk home if the
weather was nice. But no, I wasn't an odd ball
um in school until I got to high school. Then
I was really an oddball. And what caused that? I

(18:33):
think I was bored with school? So I was, you know,
I was. I wasn't too um. A lot of bad
things organized a a group of young men who could
who would rob pet stores. We would uh, we would
actually drop through the roofs. We and it wasn't like

(18:55):
we were going to steal money. We were liberty, liberty,
liberating the animals. So we would take an order for
an animal. Say, say someone wanted, uh, some rare fish,
and we would write down the name of it, be
in Latin, whatever, and then we would find a store
in New York that had an aquarium with rare fish

(19:16):
and we would go to the oh, is that a
laplos galypus, And then it's very interesting for you. Then
the guy I would say yeah. The next day it
was gone cats dogs, and we knew how to separate,
you know, hamsters from kitty cats, and that's what we
did that for a while. And then I got into um,
I got into heaving, into stealing cars and um, and

(19:41):
it got busted quite often. And then back then, when
you got busted, you took a beating because it was
too much paperwork to put you in the system. So
you would take a beating from the police who loved
to beat you with phone books because the left no
left no marks. Yeah, it was pretty brutal, but at

(20:02):
least they were like, I deserve it. I've been bad
and so um. And so finally I stole a school
bus and uh, and this time I was really in trouble,
and um, the judge said, you know, listen, this we
see way too often and you're always in the lock up.

(20:24):
My grades were still good. UM, and my parents got
a lawyer, and the lawyer said that you've got to
plead insanity that you can't help you Steve. If it
has wheels, you have to take it. I mean, who
would take up school bus? And so I did, and
I did UM, and I got ninety days in a
state and nuthouse and UM and that changed my life

(20:48):
because people I met in there that were very When
I finally worked my way up to other people who
were avoiding raps, I met a guy who was UM,
who was in was avoiding a attempted murder rap and
he was very interesting. He was in the theater, he
was in the film business, and he had some friends

(21:09):
that were that were amazing at Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton,
and I started hanging out with those people and they
changed my life. And in New York at the Beresford
where they were, and and not only did that nuthhouse
change my life, but when I got drafted and I

(21:29):
finally got to the shrink, which is at the end
of when you're doing your thing at Center Street there
and the last person you see is the shrink. The
shrink said to me, so, John, um, could you kill?
And I said, well, I think I could. I could kill.
I could kill in self defense. And he kind of
smiled and he wrote something in his book and then

(21:50):
I said, and that's why I would kill my commanding officer.
And he said to me, have you to have any
mental problems? And I said, I'm sir fied. And so
having done that ninety days in a nuthhouse, in a
state nunhouse, which was not nice for a good bit
of time. It was violent and terrible, it saved It

(22:13):
saved my career and which you know had been criminal,
and it saved my life because I would have gone
to Vietnam and probably been blown up or shot. Okay,
now we've talked that's my back story. We've talked before

(22:35):
about this legendary trip to England. Why don't you tell
my audience. So at some point, Um, I was doing
theater and and because of my friends, and I was
playing guitar but folk guitar, and I was playing in
the village and I'm doing the whole coffee thing. But anyway,

(22:57):
the Beatles sixty three I heard it and it just
changed everything I was like because music and rock music
in sixty three was awful. You had Fabian and Frankie
Avalon and what happened to where Chuck Berry go? Where
did all these good people going? It's like the fifties
were cool, then suddenly it was awful. So I talked,

(23:22):
I've started a rock band, and with my friend Eddie Lionetti,
and we played around and finally by at night and
we were emulating all English rock bands and and I
said to him, why don't we go to Liverpool because
that's where it's happening. This is summer of so um

(23:43):
we got we got jobs in this uh factory that
sand blasted used airplane parts. I was always like eight sandpaper.
It was terrible, but it was cool when we made
enough money. Hardly anything but the trip I had planned
for us was a tramp steamer and it was a
hundred and twelve dollars to Liverpool. You didn't know what

(24:05):
stops you were going to make on the way because
the tramp scheme, wherever they can get pulled in anyway,
they we get on this ship in late November. Um,
we crossed the North Atlantic. That the worst I mean,
people told me, are you out of your mind? What
did I know, across the North Atlantic, so what fort

(24:27):
your foot seas? You know you're covered in ice if
you walk outside. It's just it's terribly We went to
all these different countries. It took forever to get to Liverpool.
We finally uh after I think we docked in Aberdeen
and then we went down the Irish Sea and I
heard Pirate radio for the first time Radio Caroline, and
there was one other one Luxembourg. Now that was in Luxembourg,

(24:50):
but there were two Pirate chips. Anyway, it was fantastic
to hear this at a little transistor radio. We had
her guitars. I had a nineteen fift less Paul Black
Custom with a stock Bigsby. Fantastic thing. My friend had
a mos right, we had little champions. I was just
yeah and so um. We frequently had to play for

(25:14):
a very drunken crew that because we're the only passengers
and it seemed like if we didn't play, we would
be walking the plank or something really bad. So anyway,
we get there and immigration comes on board and we're
young and we're very naive. So what are you two
doing here because we're the only pastors. Uh, well, we've

(25:35):
come here to play. Uh huh, okay play? So you
have worked per maths? No, no we don't. Do you
have a visa? No you have a return trip ticket? No, no,
none of that. So they said, well you cannot land
you or now when this ship leaves, see you're on it.
Which point my friend Eddie said, did you realize that

(25:56):
the rest of our lives we're just gonna go? And
so um so I um, I said, don't worry about it.
I got us into this mess and I'll get us
out of it somehow. So that night I escaped from
the ship, which was I actually put on the disguise.
I got a semen's big coat and a cat and

(26:17):
I put some black from a pencil over like I
had a beard, like I needed to shave. I didn't
need any of that because as I walked down, I'm
looking to the left and right, looking for the police
or somebody to be guarding me. And I saw from
another ship these two semen walking down the dock and

(26:37):
they just walked out of gate. Obviously they're going to
go get drunk snow terrors. There's no you didn't have
to worry. There was a science admigration that was a
shack way far away. So I just walked out and
got on a bus the central Liverpool had a few
pounds sterling and got off in the middle of the
city and there was a record store for place I went,

(27:01):
and that week they released Rubber Soul, and I went
right into a listening booth to listen to the record,
and I was just astonished. It's of course, it's an
amazing revolutionary record. Yeah, and so at this point I'm like,
I have to stay here. This is like, you know,

(27:22):
this is where it is happening. Look what this would
never happen in America, that this kind of music would
be made, and so um. I walked out of the
record store and across the street was a newspaper office,
a big one, the Liverpool Echo, which is the biggest
newspaper in Liverpool. And I went in there and I
told the receptionist I thought these almis like sensational stuff.

(27:45):
I'm going to try this. I said, I'm an American musician.
I'm being held captive on a ship in the port,
which she looked at me like really, what you're standing
in front of me, And I said, why I escaped
from the ship. So she said wait here, and she
went and got an editor and I told the whole
story to the editor. He said, I liked this, he said,
but I'm gonna drive you back to the ship to

(28:08):
make sure you get on it. If you get on
that ship, we'll have all the newspapers in England. And
there's a good story. American musicians come on. So I
went back with my Rubber Soul album and walked back
onto the ship. My friend Eddie was pretty surprised to
surprised to see me with this album, and we listened

(28:29):
to it all night and I told him it was
going to be okay. And the next day they were.
They woke us up in the morning and then the
ship was full of newspapers and we were on the
front page uh later that day in the in the
afternoon or evening edition, we were on the front page
of the Liverpool EC. On the next day we were
all over even the mirror in England, big pictures of

(28:51):
us on the front page of the Liverpool papers and
the the radio. The a newspaper had some kind of
affiliation with the television station. And what they did was
they hired these girls. These girls marched up and down
in front of the ship with placards that said free
the Yanks, and we go to the front of the

(29:13):
ship and wave to them. We have our guitars on.
We had long hair and they'd scream was of a setup.
But and then that was televised, and then Immigration came
on board the day before the ship was supposed to leave,
when they said, how we can't figure out how you
did this, but you like our phones are ringing off

(29:34):
the hook, these poor two Americans. We have to let
you go. We're giving you a sixty day student visa.
Have fun, stay out of trouble. Send the guitars back,
you can't bring them in, which we did. We sent
the guitarist back, but the newspaper had it they had
a better idea. Follow the adventures of the Yanks as

(29:55):
they get into another band, and so we did. And
about three weeks later, uh, we're after a gig. We
were sitting at a little cafe and this guy came
up and said, aren't you the two Yanks? And we
said yea. He said, my friends parked around the corner.
You want to say, what's an autograph? No problem. We
walked around the corner with Immigration. They said, you motherfucker's

(30:20):
you're not kidding, you're making fools of us. You know
in the papers say handcuffed us, put us in the car,
took us to a train right away, chained us to
the seats. Train went from There was no hearing, there
was nothing. We were out, We were trouble. Train went
from Liverpool to London. In London, they changed trains, shackled again.

(30:42):
That train went to Southampton and they threw us on
the first ship back to New York that day, which
was the s S United States largest ship and fastest
and fastest. So three days we're back in New York.
Probably been sending back clippings of like, you know, we
were a big deal. We were the only American musicians

(31:03):
from locally New York guys that had been to Liverpool
had actually hung out in the Cavern Club and made
the scene. So when we got back we were able
to get in pretty much any band we wanted to.
So first band I joined was the Angels, my boyfriend
and and and then I just played in a series

(31:25):
of bands that I ended up on the road, which
Barry being his bass player, just a series of bands
always had labels, were always signed to labels. At one
point I was signed to two labels under two different names.
Was signed to Bell Records and to Columbia and um,
we're signed. We did a deal with Epic Swamp Seeds,

(31:45):
on and on and on, UM and um. By the
time I know, this is a long story, Okay. So
my friend was in a band called the Soul Survivors
that sprush act. Yeah, so he was in at a
Philly and so we both came back to New York

(32:08):
and he was finished with the Soulservirus and I was
pretty much finished with wherever I was working with. And
he said, this is ninete. He said, have you heard
this band led Zeppelin? I said, yeah, I love them.
They weren't big yet. The record had just come out
until led Zeppelin too. Yeah. It was a little bit
of an underground so we were very aware of them.

(32:28):
They and we said, basically, they're just doing blues, but
like you know, like really heavy blues. So why don't
we do that, but we'll do it in New York style.
We'll put a Hammond organ in a band. So we did.
We added a Hammond organ and we were doing kind
of blues based, very heavy. I had two sons two
thousand amps. Shes like four fifteen and like four. You know,

(32:52):
it's just and he had a capital, a couple of
Marshall stacks that he'd used while he was in the Soulservirs.
So and we we we set up shop at set
up shop at a club that was across the street
from Palace Staates Amusement Park. And the deal was they
let us rehearse there anytime we wanted, and but at

(33:13):
night we had to give them Wednesday Thursday Friday or Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday and Saturday nights for free. Otherwise the place was ours.
So we rehearsed there and we worked up an act.
And and about two weeks into this thing, the Isay brothers,
who lived in Tea Neck not very far away, they

(33:33):
rolled into this club and they saw us after the
gig and they said, listen, we just started a labeled
te Neck Records. We're just coming off this huge success.
Was it not for the love of money? No? No,
the big one anyway, that was on buddha Um. So

(33:55):
they were coming off a giant success and they had
now had their own label and wanted to fill the
label with more than just R and B. They wanted
to have a rock act and would we be the
rock act, and um, we said yes, and they signed
us and they put us in A and R Studios,
Phil Ramon, beautiful incredible studio with an engineer, a black engineer,

(34:19):
their engineer, Tony May, who was incredibly talented. Um, and
in in like a week we cut ten tracks because
it was very basic and it was very ambient. The
room was big and so if you it just rang,
the rooms was singing and and so you know, after

(34:41):
two weeks we were done. Very basic. Eddie sang lead,
I sang harmony. The name of the album was Privileged
still available by the way. Then the name of the
band was your Privilege and oh it's your thing, that's
to what's want to do? Yeah, that was their huge,

(35:02):
huge so um so now the Ice brothers are in
there and they're listening to this very basic, empty sounding
record in there, like you know, maybe if they told
us come back in ten days after the mix, and
they said, maybe if we put some congas on it,
you know, why don't we put our girls singers on.

(35:23):
There's only two guys girls singers. How about if horns on?
This could be a single, fat horns. Yeah, and while
we're at it, the ballad needs strings. And so they
loaded the thing up and when we you know time,
it was passing. We were wondering what the hell is
going on? So we finally went in and um and

(35:46):
we sat down for a playback, and we thought they
put up the wrong record and so um, the big
ambient sound was gone and was filled with its kind
of an R and B rock. Then maybe be cool
now I don't know, I don't know, uh, but anyway, Um,
being the politician said the eddie said to me, you

(36:06):
have to say something. This isn't good, like all wrong,
and so um, I said, I started identifying the players
that because I could tell that Jimmy Maillen on congo
And finally, uh, um, Kelly Easley said, there do we
have a problem And I said, well, remember when you

(36:27):
signed us? He said, you wanted that rock, big rock band,
you know that for your label. Well that's not it.
You know you had it and he said, yea, how
much all that cost? But we didn't ask for that,
and uh and he stood up and he said and
he said, well fuck you, and he got up in

(36:47):
the Kelly and Rudolph and I can't remember the other
guys that they got up and they started to walk out.
Rudolph was the oldest guy, and he was also the
more serious and he ran the business of icy pros.
And he came back in the room and he looked
at me and he said, you know like it, you
mix it? And I knew nothing whatsoever about being on

(37:09):
that side of the I played plenty of sessions, but
I know much about it. So with the engineers, I
told the engineer, I said, the rough mixes that you
made were perfect. Whyn't we put those out? He said
there were seven and a half we gotta go. So
two days I had to mix it with him, and basically, um,
I would just be a terror if I did anything

(37:32):
on the board. So I just kind of cheered him
on and it was done, and the group came in
and congratulated me. But the experience of doing that was
so amazing that I quit the band and I said, really,
you know, this is the first time I've had control
over anything, and and uh, it feels good, and so

(37:54):
I'll do whatever promotional tour you want to do, but
after that, I'm going into the studios. And so I
went to record Plant that Tony told me. He said,
down the street they're building a rebuilding and building new
rooms to this record plant. You might go down there,
and he said a lot of guys have left A
and R to go down there. Of course, Race Ofcale

(38:15):
and Shelley As had already left. So I went down
there and I got it. I walked in and this guy,
Paul Prestopino, it was kind of famous maintenance man and musician,
was sitting at the receptionist desk and I walked in
and I said, I'm looking for a job. He's sitting
there in cover rolls and he said, uh, we need
a janitor and I said, I'm your man. And I

(38:36):
was in Now. Um, that was in sixty nine and
the first gigs that I was kind of working on
where they were recording woodstock and mixing it. So I
got to bring the tapes into the rooms where the
guys were fixing up there individual tracks from and I
was like, wow, this is this is amazing. These vocalis

(39:00):
people are here, Jimmy Andndricks is here for good. He's incredible.
So I, you know, I I was very aggressive and
working my way up and got to cut cutting people's demos.
I cut the Billie Joel's demos when Alreadie RiPP was
paying for the you probably know, so I was the

(39:21):
guy cutting his demos. You know, I always thought this
guy is kind of cool. It's kind of kind of
but it already would be like, yeah, let's get it
all the way in there. You know, already was amazing.
He's still year ago. Yeah, yeah, he's great. That's old
school man. So I would cut those demos. I cut
Patty of the Bells demos and U and I actually

(39:44):
had a chance to work with the who on Who's Next,
which was amazing. Uh. But one of the things that
I could really do well was hit it. I mean
I would get calls to go on these big Ford
commercial roles and airline commercials and and when you know

(40:05):
they needed to do splices and edits for TV or
this and that, I would get the gig and I
would go in this editing room and do all their editing.
Of course, this is when you're using razor blades. Yeah.
I had a good, really good ear for editing, and
I knew a few tricks that Jamisina had taught me.
And so um next thing, I know, I look on

(40:26):
this schedule board, and um, John Lennon is coming into
the studio. I nearly pated my pants just looking at
the schedule, like, oh my god, I can't believe this
because he was coming into to imagine and continue imagine. Actually, um,
and so I got this gig my part. I'm now

(40:47):
I'm on it. I see my name on there. Well,
you're like the second engineer. I'm the editor, and I'm
doing editing and trans and transferring so that they can
so that they can do overdubs on uff that they
already have but needs some of it needs to be edited.
There's all these handwritten notes, there's mostly by John. And

(41:07):
I'm in a room doing transferring and editing, and about
a week into the end, they're often another whole place,
you know, overdubbing, retracking everything. And one day John walked
into the room that I was in and um, he said,
he said, okay, if I sit in here. It's looking

(41:30):
for a place to escape phil and so I said sure, Sure,
I said, I'm the guy. Yeah, I said, I'm the
guy that's editing your transferring. And he said, oh it's
very good, thank you. Thinking he sat down. I can
only see his feet because he was on a couch
below the console, at his feet up on the window,
and obviously with a cigarette smoke. And finally, after for

(41:55):
just a few minutes, I got the nerves to speak
up and I said, I've been to Liverpool. And he
looked at me and he said he got up. It
caught his attention. He looked at me. He said really,
he said, it's a dirty, terrible place. Everyone there wants
to be here. Um. In fact, he said, we just
moved here. Why on and why would you want to

(42:17):
go to Liverpool? And where are you from? I said,
I'm born and raised here in New York City. I
don't get that. I said, well, I was a musician
and I wanted to go and just you know, immerse
myself in the mersey and just you know, understand how
you guys were doing. But it was basically American music,

(42:38):
everyone there but doing something special to it, and I
really wanted to know what it was, and I wanted
to learn to do it. Oh. I said, okay, So
how did that work out for you? I said, good?
In bad, bad, I get supported, but good. I made
a lot of noise before I did, And he looked
at me and he said, are you one of those
crazy Yanks We're all over the newspaper. Is that you?

(43:03):
I said, yeah, that's me. He said, there we re
release an album. Should be just us on the front
page of the fucking home newspaper. But no, there's these
too crazy yanks on the front page. Young Americans band,
I mean, he said, I can't. But then he was
like excited, So I can't believe of all the places
I come in, I run into you. We were laughing

(43:24):
about you so much. And by the way, you still
have that less Paul which he was in the picture
of course. Yeah. And I said no, no, so long gone.
And he said, this is just amazing. He said, Yoko
is not gonna believe. This is so cool. So he
was excited about meeting me, and he said what are
you you know, what are you doing? I said, well,

(43:44):
like I said, I'm editing and transferring. He said, come down.
You should be working with us on the on the album.
So I said okay, So he said, come on down.
We went down to the studio and I walked in
the room with the nemrois. Kelly gave me a look
that you normally I would never want to get that
look like, what the funk are you doing in this room?

(44:07):
And and I said, I'm with him, you know, I
I don't know, and so um he said, I have
a seat. He said, uh, he said, broy, can we
get Jack working on this record? And this was early,
this a weekend and I worked on the rest of
the record and you know my pictures on that inner sleeve,

(44:27):
and um, and it started a relationship him. I mean.
One of the things was I lived in the village.
He did too, and he asked me if if I
knew any restaurants that they could go to on their
way back to Bank Street, and I did. I knew
people along places you get them in a back door.
So I would leave and jump in the limit with

(44:51):
and then and and take them into a restaurant in
the back. And then I became a regular thing. And
then he asked me from my phone number, which I
gave him any called me up and he said, you
want to go to a party? Said listen, So I
have to go to this party. It was the usual
radicals down there, you know, And he said, just watch
my back. I don't know these people. And I said, sure,

(45:13):
I'll be happy to go to him. I went on
to the party with him, UM, which turned into quite
a scene. They were all screaming off the peg and
he was very anti violence and so UM it turned
into quite a scene there and we got out. UM.
But it became we became friends and UM. And then

(45:38):
he said, listen, we want to work with Yoko on
her stuff. And I just did that series of Yoko records,
some of which he would kind of produce hang out
with me, and some you would just stop by. But
and then we just became a very good friends Yoko.
And so when he um, I mean when he went

(45:59):
to Kellifornia. Um, by this time I was producing and
I was producing Alice Cooper Muscle of Love. And I
told him myself, I'm going I'm gonna be producing Muscle Love.
He said to me, what are you doing it? I said,
wherever Warner Brothers tells me. Because no, no, no no, he says,
the other producer. You tell them where you want to produce.
That that's how it works, he said, produce it in California.

(46:23):
He said, firstly, you'll be close to Warners, and I'm
going to be there and you can come hang out
and have a place in belly Air. So I so
I did. I booked Sunset Sound and uh, and we
went out there and every night was I drove the
getaway car. Late after the sessions. I would look up

(46:44):
with them the original Hollywood Vampires. Alice was part of
it too, and um, then he disappeared. He was finished,
and he came back. He you know, they had a
bad shawn h I ran into him once at a
across the street from the nine Street. Why there was

(47:05):
a health food store and my wife and I were
having luncheon there and he walked in with John. He
had been giving him swimming lessons and he was so
surprised to see me and he and he sat down
with us. Um, you can imagine my wife John Lynton
suddenly sits down with you and and and he said,

(47:26):
look at here's my he I said to He asked
me where I was living, and I was living four
blocks from him, and he said, well, here's my phone number.
This is a personal private number. He said, call me
and just come down. Well, come down to the Dakota
and just hang out. And I didn't for a year.
I didn't because in my head I was like his

(47:48):
house husband and that you know, he he's not interested
in this bullshit anymore that I do. And so um
A year later, I got that phone call and uh,
which was very funny because it was it was it
was the phone. It was the most mysterious phone call
you could ever get. It was I don't even know

(48:10):
who may have been Fred Seaman, I always asked. I
never found out exactly who made that phone call, but
it was if you want to do something really cool.
And that phone rang forever and I was on the
street listening to it ring, and it didn't stop, and I,
you know, slowly made my way into the brown stone
we had and picked up the phone and it was,
if you want to do something that's very exciting, and

(48:33):
I did want to do something exciting at that time.
They said, you will go to them to thirty thirty
fourth Street Pier where the seaplanes land, and at noon
a seaplane will land and you'll get in it. Could
you resist that? I know, not at all? So I did.

(48:56):
It wasn't yeah, well I didn't know who it was.
Really no, I didn't know what it was. I had
no idea what it was. Not not the slightest so
I went to It was just that, you know, And
so I went to the pier, and sure enough a
seaplane landed and I got in it and it took
off and it went over to the glen cove over

(49:16):
there where the mansion was pulled up right onto the beach,
and Uh and Toshi, well I know his name was
Toshi then, but Toshi was Uh. Yoko's house servant came
in and greeted me and said, come, come, come and
into the house. And Yoko was there, would open arms,

(49:37):
come in, she said. And I was then, you know,
quite surprised. And she said, John wants to do a record,
to come back record. He wants to go back into
the studio make a record, but no one can know
about it, not a soul, no one, not your wife.
By the way, I did tell her, and she swore

(49:58):
that she would never but she that if anyone finds
out that we're going to make this record, we stopped
making the record, simple as that. So she said, Johnson Bermuda,
he's going to call you, um and he wants to
talk to you about it. And so the phone rang
shortly afterwards, and she said, yes, he's here and I

(50:21):
and he said it's Hi John, I mean hi Jackets John.
You know I want to do something. I want to
make a record. Yoko has an envelope. She's going to
give it to you now. I want you to listen.
There's two toissettes in there with potential material. I'm not
sure if it's any good at all. I don't think
it's that good to tell you the truth, um, but

(50:42):
you listen to it. If you think there's anything that
we can do with this material, Um, then I'll call
you tomorrow. Make sure Yoko has my phone number and
give her a time. Okay. So I get the envelope
and I'm ready to leave in Yokos is weight right?
She said, I'm so on this record. Okay, So I

(51:03):
have to. Now I've got a start a stack of
tapes from Yoko like this this high. You know, all
these tapes that she made demos, and a little envelope
from back on the seaplane. Get off and take a
cab back to my house. I listened to John Stuff

(51:24):
right away, and um and Yoko's later in the day.
But John Stuff two cassettes. They were wonderful, they were narrated,
they were um. Most of the most of it it was, oh,
this one's not for me, this one's for ringo and
at the end of it, he'd say, that was definitely
for Richard Starkey, and it was like, here's the same

(51:45):
old piece of ship. He was just every song was narrated,
which was wonderful and fun. And when he called me
up the next day, I said to him, I don't
think I can beat it. So what do you mean?
I said, you should just put it out, you should
just master these cassettes, because there's something you know. They

(52:07):
were made on a boombox. He sang into a boom
box and played guitar, and then he took another boom box,
played it off of that boom box and doubled the vocal.
And that's how primitive it was. And somebody I think
was banging pants and pick pots and pants for drums

(52:27):
and that was it. And it was wonderful, and so
he took He said, so you like it? I said,
I love it. I mean it's beautiful. He said, okay,
then we'll make the record, and and then I went
through and of course we made two records. It was
like making four records, two artists and two two albums

(52:51):
really because Milk and Honey. But I rehearsed the band
the first thing I did was I charted the songs,
did actual art arts for them. So you know how
to read music, yes, and you learn that where my
theory classes in high school. High school. Yeah, and so
um and I played, you know, of course, So I

(53:14):
charted the music and I brought the charts to First
of all, John said to me, I want a band
that is my contemporaries. So if I say to them,
let's you know, let's do some some Buddy Holly or
Everly Brothers, they'll join right in. There will be no
yeah that. So I put together. He didn't tell me

(53:37):
who to get. I put together a band of contemporaries,
which was Andy Newmark, you, McCracken, Tony Levin. Uh that
that ilk of New York Player, which is also what
he wanted in New York sounding. And he didn't want
it to be a hard rock album. And he told
me that. He said, Look, I know I listened to

(53:58):
what he produced. That's not what we're doing. And you know,
and and I got and I got slammed by the
critics for making him soft. Um, but that's what he wanted.
He said, I'm forty years old. Well, he was going
to be forty years old. Least, I'm not doing it.
I'm not a beatle anymore, and I'm not doing that.
I'm doing a record that is a guy that lived

(54:19):
through the sixties, has made it into the forties and
has a family, and hello, I'm I made it? How
are you? Did you make it? That was his whole thing. Um.
So I would rehearse the band, but they didn't know
whose record was. They would just read the music and
I'd sing the songs just to be clear. Did you
have Beautiful Boy? And watching didn't have? Starting Over? Had

(54:42):
all the other songs I rehearsed, and all of Yoko songs.
This is intense rehearsals for weeks. I'd record the rehearsals.
They didn't know who, had no idea who who they were,
whose record they're making, And then I'd run back to
the Dakota and uh play the tape for him and

(55:03):
work with him on the arrangements. Now, to work with
John on the arrangements was very interesting because she went
to the Dakota. You went upstairs to the to his
apartment on the seventh floor, their apartment, she had another
place down on the first floor, and you jump in
bed with him and that's where he worked, sat cross

(55:25):
legged in in this big bedroom, in a giant bed.
The bed was surrounded by various instruments, tape machines, TV monitors.
The wall behind him was guitars and other instruments that
were hand drums. The bed was was a virtual studio,

(55:46):
and so you jumped in bed with him, and he
put the cassette in and he'd listened to a particular
song and then he would make comments to me about
what I'd want to you'd want to change on it,
and then i'd make notes. The next day I'd go
back And that's the pros every day. UM and then UM.
The last day of rehearsal, the day before going into

(56:07):
the studio, I said, John said, let's do a dry
rehearsal at the Dakota in the apartment so they don't
walk into the studio and shipped themselves and they see
who it is. So I said, okay, So I told
the band dry rehearsal today. UM, We're gonna meet on
the corner of seventy in Central Park West. Suspicions confirmed

(56:30):
for a few of them, and particularly you mccracking and
Tony Leven. They said this material is too good to
be anything but here, and you know, being across the
street from the Dakota, it was then obvious. So we
went up and we rehearsed, and um, everybody got along.
It was great. We had a great time rehearsing all
the songs dry, just going through the arrangements kind of

(56:54):
and knowing that the next day we're going into the studio.
Now at the at the door of his apartment, he
had a Fender Rhodes piano and a cassette recorder sitting
on top of it, so that when he came into
the apartment if he had had something in his head,
he could sit down right away and get it recorded.
Or if he was leaving, before he left, if he

(57:16):
had something, he would sit down do it. And so
we were leaving, almost everyone had left. It was Tony
Levin was going out the door, you mccrack and followed
by me John wishing us a good night, see us
in the morning, and he goes, wait, wait, he said, um,
I have this one more song. You don't have it.
It's kind of a Roy Orbison feeling thing. And he

(57:39):
sat down and he played starting over at the piano,
and I said, why don't we just it's I had
heard single in my head immediately, and I said, why
don't we just, you know, rehearse that in the studio
and record it, make it the first song we do
this way, everybody gets into the field and and that's

(58:00):
what we did. And the studio didn't know. Eddie Germano
at Hit Factory didn't know whose record we were making
either until we got there. And then you know, when
you when you tell people that, if you tell anyone
and the word gets out that we're making this record,
the record stops. Then they don't tell because they were

(58:24):
serious the record. The record would have stopped, and no
one wanted it to stop. And it went on that.
It was secret for a long time until until the
vocals on watching the wheels and he listened back to
you know, after I comped a vocal. Uh, he listened
back to the vocal and he just shouted out, mother,

(58:46):
tell them we have a record, And that was what's
that kind of stretched a long story out. No, No,

(59:06):
those are things people are dying to hear. I didn't
want to interrupt you. Uh, we'll leave out the faithful
event and go back to the beginning. So you're working
at A and our studios and how do you end
up being? You know? Was the next step hooking up
with Ezra uh No. I started working. I was parting

(59:29):
our record plan studios, and he brought in uh schools
out and on schools out. I assisted, And during that
whole period I was working my way up. So by
the time I got to um billion Dollar Babies, he
I was engineering and and he and I just hit

(59:51):
it off. First of all, I had First of all,
he thought I was a producer. You know, he's he's
uh he's one of the prime Mary people who made
me make that change. I was very comfortable. I was.
I was successfully engineering out and I was young, and
I was making you make fiftent of the take at

(01:00:11):
the studio on everything, you sell the tape, everything. So
I was doing quite well. And I knew that to
produce I would have to take a loss right away.
But Andy but he talked me into it and he
had me open out of town. That was but to
go to Canada and produce some Canadian acts at nimbus Um.

(01:00:35):
The thing was that I had landed immigrant status in Canada,
so because one of the bands that I played in
was Canadian. In fact, it was a pretty successful band
up there, which was called the Liverpool Set. They were
they were there were two English guys, a Scottish guy

(01:00:56):
and Latvian and a Canadian and me and um. I
was the only person that had ever been to Liverpool.
And it was called of course that was the e
and and so we toured all over Canada. At one
point going across the border, the the immigration guy said

(01:01:17):
to me, why don't you just instead of going through
all this hassle, you go through Uh. Everybody else in
the band was a landed immigrant. Why don't you just
get landed immigrant status? And I did so that was
very convenient for because it could we could have can
Con Canadian content. And and in fact I still uh
do go up to Canada. And for example, there's a

(01:01:40):
was I haven't been up in a while, but in
the in the mid like two thousand ten, around that period,
there was a very popular band called the Trus hit
after hit up in Canada Columbia, and I was producing
them um and continuing that can Con which is means
they have to play certain percentage of Canadian records. There's

(01:02:02):
all these qualifying rules. So I was a Canadian producer
as far as they were concerned. Um, so that worked great.
And I went up there and I made There was
a group called It's not the Crowbar that you think of.
It was an earlier crowbar also on Columbia. Yeah, okay,
so I produced that record and it went like platinum

(01:02:23):
in Canada, was never released in the US. And it
was pretty good. And he said, okay, you're ready. So
you're going to produce the next Alice album, which was
a Muscle of Love with Jack Richardson. And you know
it wasn't Jack's cup of Tea anyway, so it was
your baby. Yeah, so that's how that worked out. But um,

(01:02:47):
he thought, I he thought because of what I had
done with the dolls for example, you know, it was
a different raw was changing. It was like you had
the old school producers like like Phil and a few
other people, Phil Specter, who basically their production job was
like a movie producer. You hire all the right people,
you put them in the room, you stare the pot,

(01:03:07):
and you get a product. Now, there were producers who
were musicians, they were engineers, and so they had a
much greater knowledge of what was going on, and so
they were they were they were easing out the old
school guys. I think that made for a lot of pills,
paranoia and craziness. You felt lost at at some point,

(01:03:32):
especially in California. But um and so I was one
of those guys. Now there's another generation that. I mean,
I don't feel exactly moved out yet, but certainly I'm
not in my basement on a computer making hit records.
And that's where it's at. You know, we're in my bedroom,
we're on a plane. Um and I, um, you know,

(01:03:58):
I totally respect that. Let's go back. Okay, So you
do the dolls, you do Muscle of Love, you do
get your wings. That was before a Muscle of Love.
Then Alice Cooper disintegrates. What happens after that? Uh, I'm
not sure what what order? You know? Then there was

(01:04:18):
Patty I had produced which which album Radio Ethiopia. But
before that, I had produced a record, uh Bob Dylan
and I produced Alan Ginsburg and that and the real
I think the reason I did that is because I
went I read a thing in Rolling Stone where they

(01:04:42):
called me heavy metal Maven and uh, you know, we
didn't talk about this, but before, while I was a janitor,
I was also a client. I was doing the music
which I I was writing the music for a television

(01:05:03):
series that was the the after school ABC after School
special specials. It was called over seven and um and
I was writing all the music for that show. So
I was not just a yeah no, no, I was
not just a rock guy. I understood music and for

(01:05:26):
you know what it's worth. Um and so I didn't
want to be heavy metal maven um. So the chance
I got to do this, Alan Ginsburg my jumped at
and and that led to Patty and then um and

(01:05:47):
I think maybe Cheap Trick came after that, or another
Arosmith album, probably another Arosmith album, or Rick derring Darrell.
I was getting loaded up. I was going from one
to the other, the other Rick Derry injured by the way,
um funny thing. I love Rick Derringer. And after I

(01:06:08):
did that first Cheap Trick album, and we all know,
I found them in a bowling alley. So everybody knows
that story, we'll tell for those people who don't. I
was visiting a relative in Wauka Shaw, Wisconsin who said
to me, you've got to see this band. Now. I
was aware of Cheap Trek because they were, you know,
they had a reputation, but the fact that they were
playing in the bowling Alley lounge in the town where

(01:06:30):
I'd come to see my friend relative. He took me
to the to see this band and I was knocked out.
I couldn't believe how good they were. It was more
like a carnival act than it was so body um
and I called up uh Tom Wrman, and I said,
if you don't sign them in a week, I'm bringing

(01:06:52):
them to our c a. They're phenomenon. And Tom came
to Wisconsin and saw the band and signed them quick
was done with Ken had a man he was managing,
and it was all done quickly. And that record I
think was the last time they really were allowed to

(01:07:12):
make political statements, because that's all that record is. It's
about I don't know if you feel really familiar with it. Well,
the best track on that is me and d Cello. Well, yeah,
that and that's not political. But I mean, certainly, you know,
um Daddy should have stayed in high school. He's a whore.
All those songs that are all very socio political songs,

(01:07:34):
and that's where the band was, and that's why Epic
decided to market it to college and nowhere else. So
now I wanted Now there was the second album calling.
I was called to do the second album. I'm doing
draw the line, which is you know, uh, dependent on

(01:07:54):
when the dealer can get to So it's taking forever
to do this record, and I can't I can't leave.
So I wanted Rick Derringer to produce the route of
the album. I said, he's the perfect guy to produce
the next record. But Tom Werman, who you know, he
loved them dearly and he was ahead of A and

(01:08:15):
R for the label, so they really never had it.
They didn't bandit, never saying it UM, and he wasn't
willing to give him up, and he softened the band up.
But um with good results in color brilliant album. Yeah,
with good results. But then they got to do the
Buddhaicon album, which was harder. I did the bootun album right,

(01:08:39):
and then the album after with taking Me Back that Yeah,
that was they got a little harder, but their career
got screwed up because they had to hesitate for the
success of the Yeah. Yeah, okay, so you're working, when
does it slow down? Slows down? In the eighties, UM

(01:09:02):
first of all. After John died, I was devastated, and
so I tried to just like I wanted to exit
the whole scene. And and I started using drugs. And
then I decided to take a real vacation. I got
myself an apartment on the Lower East Side while I

(01:09:23):
had a house, and we go down there for weeks
and just shoot dope and get really destroyed. And and
I stayed like that, and I'm you know, and basically
every time I would stick my head out to listen
to the music that was going on, I was glad
I was where I was, because it seemed to me

(01:09:44):
that I don't want to be presumped, to us be presumps. Okay,
it seemed to me that they took that they took
the worst parts of Arrowsmith and and turn that into
kind of movement that had a lot of hair. And
what they lost the production was always kind of good.

(01:10:07):
That was, you know, always the same sound on the
gated echo on the snare, and there was a sound
and and but what they lost in that period was
the groove. You know. I think that's why disco was
so popular. It's because they had had to groove. You know,

(01:10:29):
what we were doing the most important thing to us
was that, you know, you're like, yeah, man, it feels good,
it feels good and and and suddenly that was gone
and it was all bomb blast and hair and and
and the worst parts of arrasson you know, the sexual

(01:10:50):
and you were not that that's bad, that's okay. We
all remember the hair bands were wiped out overnight by
the seattle sound. Yeah, because it was uck again. It
was something honest, Um. But anyway, that's that's when it
got slow and um and I ended up Stephen and
Joe said hey, if we could. They had straightened their

(01:11:12):
act out, and they came to me and they said,
you know, every time we get a phone call, we
think we're gonna hear that somebody mentions Jack. We said,
we're gonna hear you're dead. So um, So we went
to this rehab monitor to go to it, and I
did and I never looked back from that day. I
mean it was like, okay, in the rehab days and

(01:11:34):
you come out. I was thinking, that's a short period
of time. It must be hard to come out and function.
If you know what, Fear is a great motivator because
if you've ever used heroin and and and and had withdrawals.
You're just like to feel the freedom of never having
to have withdrawals again, because that's what drives you do

(01:11:56):
continue with the habit, because the withdrawals are so terrible.
So um, I was like, I'm free. Fuck that, you know,
I'm never going back to that. And I don't have to.
And now I had this a lot of counseling, and
they said, don't go to work for two years. I
could afford to go to not go to work for

(01:12:16):
two years. Almost two years to the day, I got
a call from Super Tramp to do this French deal
they had, but still it was Super Tramp and and
I came out here. I went to work at their
studio and Encino and I was back and then Slash

(01:12:41):
and Local Age and Clutch and you know, back to
Arrowsmith again little South of Sanity, and now suddenly I
was working again, and I got back into doing film score.
Let's let's jump to today. What you think about the
music that's popular today? I don't know. I don't listen

(01:13:05):
to it. I really don't. Honestly, isn't it terrible? I
don't listen to music unless it's on by accident. I
don't look for it. I don't. I listened to classical music.
I don't subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music. Um, someone says,

(01:13:29):
here at track, what do you do? I find it
somehow or another, or I have somebody else find it
for me. Um, you know I'm not in touch with
with I have a label now and I've signed the
I've just signed yesterday. I signed. She signed the contract yesterday.

(01:13:52):
I signed it. She's a great artist out of Savannah,
Kelly Cloko. She's wonderful of ours. I'm not going to producer.
I'm gonna have Andrew Dawson producer. Um, it's just, you know,
I can executive produce. But if there's something that is

(01:14:12):
in my wheelhouse, I'll do it. But I'm you know,
I don't pretend to be able to do what but
these other guys are doing that that has passed by me.
But I can have all the fun. And we're building
a studio. It's a beautiful studio. If I want to
continue to do film scores, I can put an orchestra

(01:14:32):
in that studio. So where is it. It's in Guardina
and it's a massive room and a beautiful control room.
When we have over a million dollars of analog, outboard, digital,
the best mixing everything and some having fun doing that
and have I gave. I gave a ringo recently one

(01:14:57):
of the songs that John It wrote that had his
name one in it, right, and I said, it's time
you know, so, um, I said, I said, you know,
he says, you know I produced everything. I said, no,
I'll produce your stuff. I said, but this song needs
an orchestration, and I'll do your orchestration. So he's like, okay,

(01:15:19):
so I'll be happy to do the beautiful orchestration stration
for him. Um, I can produce a rock band, show
me a rock band exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's I'm not
fighting an uphill battle here, I understand. Yeah. And but

(01:15:39):
I'm having the time of my life. Um. You know,
people are asking me to do interesting things all the time. Um,
and and that's that's what I like. Okay, But you
as a producer, you get a royalty. Do you find
that you're getting Paige royalties? Getting what rot these? My

(01:15:59):
word is a phenomenal Okay. So they're both still great,
and you don't think the labels cheating you excessively if
they are, Um, God bless them. Because I'm you know,
I'll let my account in handle that. Some are my
lawyers to handle that someday in the future. But but
right now I haven't no complaints whatsoever. The catalog is

(01:16:22):
good and deep and and um, I don't know who's
doing buying these records, and but they're doing it, but
God bless them. And then, uh, now you've lived on
Johnny Depp's property in his guesthouse. How'd you establish relationship
with Johnny Depp? I had a I had a house
in Fort Laura down eighties, mid eighties before I was

(01:16:49):
totally um on the New River, and it was the
place I go to in the winter UM and I
interested in doing music. I was interested in sitting in
the backyard. And Johnny got in touch with me through
a friend that he because he had a band. He

(01:17:10):
wasn't an actor. He had a band and he was
a big Arrowsmith fan and he was a fan of
almost everything that I've done, and I was one of
his zeroes. So Johnny would come over to the house
and he would hang for days, and my wife would
cook for him, and he was just so what what
year we had approximate four um, And he would just

(01:17:34):
hang out at my house. I never got to produce
his band, but we became really good friends and we
stayed in touch. Ah. He he had just done Nightmare
in Elm Street, so whatever year that was. He's in
the movie for two seconds. He gets killed in the

(01:17:54):
first scene of the movie, but somebody spotted him and
they offered him the twenty one Jump Street. And he
came out here and he made friends with Nick Cage
and a bunch of other people, and and he's just
a super talented guy and not a bad guitar player either.

(01:18:15):
So uh, we were friends from then and then um,
when I came out here to do I mean I
ran into him from time to time. I did a
couple of when he was on the Letterman Show. He
would call me up in sam In Town and we
would go meet and go out to dinner. But when

(01:18:39):
I was doing that Music from Another Dimension, Stephen ran
into him and invited him down to the studio, and
when he saw me, I said, you can hang anytime
you want. So then he told Joe and I had
a couple of houses. Anybody wants to hang out anyway,

(01:19:00):
that's you know. Johnny and I just go way back
and he's he's just like a super generous person and
a sweet guy. No matter what. The press loves to
kill him. But right, you know him on the in
real life. Yeah, I do exactly. Just a couple of
other things. Uh, if you have to pick your favorite

(01:19:22):
record you did, what would that be? Rock? Really? Yeah,
let me tell you why. The thing I like about
any The thing I like about any piece of art,
any piece of art is truth, some bit of truth,
something where it's all coming together. And I don't understand

(01:19:42):
a lot about my My daughter is a big wig
in the art world. She takes me to you know,
art freeze here she came out. I don't understand a
lot of that stuff. I should tries to explain it
to me. There's a lot of art I understand. I
don't understand a to rap music, but I consider it
art um To me, Rocks is art and because of

(01:20:08):
its truth. We created the We created the music in
a in a warehouse at rehearsal. All of it was
ground up. Note by not three months. This is pre production.
As every day that went by in that warehouse, I

(01:20:30):
put a rug somewhere, or coultu or a chair to
change the sound of the room to make it so
that we could work in it. But even the key
of the song was dependent on the sound of the room,
even the lyric was dependent on the field in that room.
Everything was dependent on the room. And so when it

(01:20:53):
came time to record, I said, we're not moving out
of here. Well, we're all a truck in and we'll
record the whole thing right in the room was we're Waltham, Massachusetts. Um.
And so that that album has a truth to it.
It's all it's like an unmanufactured sounding. It just sounds

(01:21:15):
like it's happening. You know, it's not live, but it
all the I mean, the band members are playing live,
but has overdubs. UM. But that's my favorite. Has a
vibe and a feel and a sound. That was also
the biggest up until maybe you know, Toys in the
Attic is far bigger, really bigger than Rocks. Have Toys

(01:21:35):
in the Attics Now, I weighed in about eighteen million,
what's Rocks about fifteen and Boudican is over fifteen. My
catalogs nice okay, And then uh, if you have to
pick a favorite track, you worked on beautiful Boy. That
all that almost needs no explanation Okay. On that note,

(01:21:59):
unless there's a story where you need to tell Okay.
This has been wonderful going into the belly of the
beast with Jack Douglas stories most people are unaware of.
It's been a great conversation. Thanks so much for coming by. Thanks,
I'm always good to see you another dinner soon. Absolutely
looking forward to him