My life today seems pretty quiet to me, although you might not think a quiet life is playing 150 concerts a year on the road, touring Europe with the band, starring in a movie, cutting a few record albums, and hugging Dolly Parton on national television.
But I feel I am gathering my strength to do something, though I don’t know exactly what.
It ain’t at all unusual for a guy to start thinking about becoming a hermit when he hits his middle fifties, when he’s been hard at work for thirty-five or forty years. He starts to yearn for a little solitude so he can ponder the question of what it has all been about and what it is going to be as he rounds the turn and heads down the home stretch. Geronimo’s great-grandson lives outside Tucson in an adobe house with a wire fence around it and a sign that says GERONIMO III LIVES HERE BUT KEEP OUT! Sometimes I think I’d like to live like Geronimo III. But that is not what I am going to do.
I’ve been hanging out in Abbott a lot with my old friends from childhood. It is important to me to maintain those feelings and sounds and smells that I grew up on.
But two things keep drawing me back to Austin when I come in off the road. One is golf. The other is my recording studio. Don’t ask me which is more important. Let me just say that when we’re making a record we go into the studio at “golf-thirty.” In other words, we play golf until it is too dark to see the ball, and thirty minutes later we start hitting licks in the studio.
My studio, I have to admit, is one of the best in the country. The great producer Chips Moman came over from Nashville and designed it for me in 1981. He brought with him a kid named Larry Greenhill, who is a genius at putting electrical things together. Larry installed every mile of wire in the studio. He runs it for me now. Bobby Arnold is our studio sound technician. Bobby sees sound as colors—red at the high cycles on down to blue at the low cycles—and he thinks of making a record as painting with sound.
When I make a rough cut of a record, I take a tape of it with me in my golf cart and listen to it all day while I keep trying to learn how to play this confounding game. I then give the rough cut back to Larry and Bobby with suggestions for changes in the sound. At our forty-eight-track control board with its state-of-the-art digital equipment, they can take a song recorded in a big dance hall and make it sound like it was cut on a tile floor. Larry and Bobby go into the control room and turn out all the lights, get it totally black in there except for the glow from the board and the meters. They’ll listen and mix all night in the darkness. Then they take the tape to Larry’s house and listen to it on a sound system like an average person might have. They go listen to the tape in Bobby’s car. Finally they put it in their Walkman sets and stroll around the pool listening to it. They go back in the studio and turn off the lights and mix it some more to get the sound exactly right.
The next day I ask them to do it again.
This isn’t as uneventful as it sounds. There’s always something going on. Not long ago the heavy metal band Aerosmith dropped in to cut a record with me, which is kind of a bizarre collaboration. Ray Charles, who, as you know, is blind, came in to record “Seven Spanish Angels” and astonished us by picking up a computer chip and explaining exactly what it was used for just by feeling it. Ray runs his own board at home, does his own soldering, even drives his car around his farm.
When Julio Iglesias came to the studio to sing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” with me, he brought five limos and a considerable entourage that included video cameras. The word had got out and thirty or forty people from around the hill came to see Julio. Julio smiled, and the ladies clutched their hearts. Julio told them, “I am a professional love-aire,” and a couple of them fainted.
Meanwhile in the control room Larry and Bobby had been working all day with nothing to eat. Julio’s manager came in and the boys noticed he was carrying a can of Planters peanuts. They couldn’t speak Spanish, but the manager got it across to them that one of his major duties was to have a can of Planters peanuts always ready for Julio. He took out one can of the several in his briefcase and gave it to Larry and Bobby, who ate the peanuts for lunch.
Later in the afternoon, Lana brought in a can of peanuts that when you opened it a rubber snake popped out. Larry and Bobby coiled the spring-snake into their empty Planters can. They sealed the lid back on. Then they sneaked the Planters can back into Julio’s manager’s briefcase.
He was still carrying the briefcase at Julio’s side when we all hugged and waved adios and they got into their limos and the parade went off down the hill, heading toward Julio’s private jet.
We got a chuckle out of thinking that somewhere in midair Julio nudged his manager, who reached into his briefcase and opened a fresh can of Planters peanuts.
At one end of the studio is a kitchen where somebody is always cooking big pots of pasta or chili for whoever drops in. Past the kitchen is a big room with a card table and folding chairs. Most everything we do on the hill, we use the verb “play.” We play music, play golf, play pool, play poker, play chess, play dominoes. Everybody likes the sound of the word “play.” It helps keep us smooth and calm.
Along one wall of the big room is a long bench where Larry and Bobby fix the equipment. It is covered with tools and meters and the necessities of the trade. When the movie Songwriter was being shot, there were a lot of scenes around the studio. They built a wall and made the studio look different. The set decorator walked into the big room with Bobby and peered carefully all around.
“I want to see what a real studio sound technician’s workshop really looks like,” she said.
“Well, this is it,” Bobby said.
The set decorator shook her head.
“No. No, this is not at all what it would really look like.”
They rebuilt the workbench and changed everything. But it’s back as messy as ever today.
We don’t operate like most studios. Our records aren’t cut by the clock, like they are in the big commercial studios. When I’m doing an album at my studio, I pick ten songs and then record only those ten songs, some of them on the first take. I don’t believe in recording forty songs to pick out ten. I also don’t believe in overproducing. Some producers will keep saying, “Do it again,” until they have gone past the freshness and the peak of the performance. You can chew the juice out of the music if you push it too far.
I can’t even conceive of how some of the famous bands can stay in a studio for an entire year and spend two million dollars to cut one album. I think that practice came along about the same time drugs did. If you have plenty of money, time, and drugs, there’s a tendency to kick back and say, “We’ll cut this sucker all year until we get it right.” But if you go in there with a handful of musicians and a good singer, chances are you’ll get it right on the first take. I learned to record in a commercial studio atmosphere in Nashville, with musicians working three eight-hour shifts a day, and you had to cut your tunes and get out of the studio to make way for the next bunch. I don’t stick to the clock any more, but I like to get the music done while it is ripe.
We cut the Red Headed Stranger album at Autumn Sound in Garland, Texas, in three days for $20,000 with Phil York as the engineer. I mean mixed and fixed and ready to release in three days.
We’d go in the studio about dark and stay until three or four in the morning. The first night we laid all the tracks. The second night we overdubbed and fixed the parts where I blew a line. The third day we mixed it. And not long afterward we had a gorilla of a hit and we became famous and lived happily ever after.
In one way we were very lucky with the Red Headed Stranger album, because usually the record company big shots will look at the budget before they listen to the music. If they see you only spent $20,000 on your album, you probably get dumped. They’ll put out your record, but they won’t promote it. The big shots are worried about how to sell the $2,000,000 albums and save their jobs. No telling how many really fine albums went into the garbage just because they were made too cheaply. There’s no way a lot of record company people can make money off a $20,000 album. But if they’ve got a couple million, they can spend half of it on studio time and the rest on musicians and a well-placed number of dollar bills in different guys’ pockets, and everybody gets fat off somebody’s album.
That doesn’t mean the album has ten good songs on it.
I can say the same thing about the movie business.
When I’m out on the hill in Austin, I keep office hours that you might call irregular.
Sometimes I sprawl on the grass under a tree near the practice area beside the seventh tee and have meetings with people who show up from everywhere with propositions they don’t see how I can pass up.
If it’s cold or raining, or if I need a telephone handy, I go to my office in the clubhouse. It’s down a walk beside the golf shop. Jody Fischer, my assistant, has an office upstairs where she and Lana put out the Pedernales Poo-Poo newspaper, among their many activities, some of which I don’t even want to know about. Jody keeps me checked out on messages and news, as much as she can, but it ain’t that easy a job.
Across the road and up the hill to the south, my Western town has come back to life again and is full of people. My town is playing the part of Fort Smith in the nine-hour CBS movie of Lonesome Dove, from Larry McMurtry’s wonderful book.
Today the wind was blowing forty miles an hour from the north, so we only played about thirty holes of golf, all wrapped up in parkas and gloves like a bunch of dogsled racers.
Then I came in here to my office and settled into my wooden armchair behind my mogul-sized desk and put my hands behind my head and leaned back, shifting a little to ease that pain above my right hip, and stared for a long time out the plate-glass window, looking across the pool and the trees and a long blue piece of Lake Travis in the distance. I could see all the way north to where the hills were turning a chilly green-purple color as the norther blew in and smoke started coming out of chimneys of houses on the hills.
I am drawing a picture in my mind of something that is coming. I can hear Mark and Jim and Joel yelling, “Oh, my God—send for more bandages! Willie is dreaming again!”
The fact is, my dreams are still dreaming me.