>> Wiggle wiggle.
I myself grew up thinking Miles Davis and John Coltrane were more important than Bob Dylan. Anything that met with Jean Paul Sartre’s standards for existential alienation was good enough for me. I would later learn to appreciate Dylan’s poetry. He strode between the poles of minstrelsy and authenticity, folk and urban; he was a trapeze artist in the middle of the wire and posed on one toe. This became an important source of understanding for me as I continued to make music but at the time I thought, compared to these guys, he’s not a capital ‘M’ Man, figuratively speaking.
With jazz, they didn’t want you to play it, you’d become a junkie as a toll for wreaking beauty out of these stinking, mob-run nightclubs that you were playing in. And the expression that comes out of that sacrifice—whether it's blues or jazz—is the healthy red blood that has run through the corpse of world culture, whether it’s hip hop in Japan or jazz in Scandinavia or Afro-Cuban music.
That’s the long way round of saying that a record like Wheel Me Out has references to this darker world, jazz, acid rock guitar, and this lyric, which I probably shouldn’t try to characterise, but, with all the holes in it still conveys some individual’s unspeakable – almost a Kafka character who knows he’s in trouble but can’t figure out the agency behind it.
Years later Don and I produced a record for Dylan, Under the Red Sky. One of my more glorious anecdotes has to do with when I think I’d earned Dylan’s confidence and he thought I was kind of a wise, if not clever guy. He had his lyrics rolled up in his pants’ pocket—he didn’t bring a briefcase or anything—and he breaks out a grubby pencil and says “hey David gimme a rhyme for this.” I wanted to pull the curtain aside like Bugs Bunny and say “get a load of this, Bob Dylan asking ME for a rhyme.”
Well I wasn’t going to let the moment pass without seeking even more self-aggrandising affection from him. His critics accused him of going through a nursery rhyme phase where he was writing disguised children’s songs that seemed to mean more, and Wiggle Wiggle, the song he was working on then, was definitely full of this doggerel versus deep thinking philosophy: “wiggle like this, wiggle like that, wiggle like a bowl of soup.”
On this occasion he fed me the line:
Wiggle ‘til you’re high
Wiggle ‘til you’re higher
And he wanted the next line. It so happened that at that time, shoot me, I was taking entries from the two volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and typing ten a day by computer. By physically typing I thought I might possibly remember them. I had told Dylan a few weeks prior I’d been doing this and he asked me what kind of words and I said “well there’s this word ‘ignivomous, ’ ‘vigni’ is a root for fire in Latin and ‘vomos’ is like vomit. Indeed an ‘ignivomous beast’ might be one that breaths fire.”
So with the opportunity to seize the moment, he says “hey David give me a rhyme:
Wiggle ‘til you’re high
Wiggle ‘til you’re higher”
And I say, “Bob, it’s obvious: wiggle ‘til you vomit fire.”
And without even – he doesn’t smile because he doesn’t want to encourage you to like, crowd him, he just says “yeah that’ll work” and writes it down. If you look at the lyrics of Wiggle Wiggle, I’m unattributed but proud to have contributed to this house of cards that he built.
A-line.
Apparently novelist Anatole France dabbled in song writing and he wrote this phrase that stuck with me: “rhyme is the street lamp lighting the path to inspiration.” I finally came to understand that what can be cumbersome and hampering when you’re writing something that has to rhyme, can also be the handcuffs that lead you into the most glorious jail.
Once you come up with that brilliant A-line, if an A-answer doesn’t come then you might have to re-think those last couple syllables, whereas once you do come up with that A-line and that glorious A-answer comes back in the affirmative, it seems as though you birthed it whole and you look like a genius. That was the great side of song writing.
Before I started struggling as a writer myself I always thought writers or even composers were being pretentious when they said “I merely held the pen and God moved my hand.” But I believe even as august a personage as Chopin said that, which should make you think there’s something to it. In the last fifteen, twenty years, I’ve probably gotten more spiritual—and I hate to even use that word—but my spirituality comes out of a gap-jawed amazement at the movement of matter.
I don’t see bearded or long-tressed gods or goddesses in the background, I see order emerging out of chaos at these infinitely complex levels. I know somewhere all this order is the miracle of miracles, and when you stand back from the whole, when you start to describe the processes that go into creativity, they are almost tantamount to something out of nothing, spirit into matter, and you better get out of the way, you didn’t invent it, you’re a conduit; the only way to participate is to become a slave to it.
My barber always said…
My barber always said: “I can always take more off, I can’t put it back on.” We started as these Dada minimalists but now they were giving us this broader canvas to fill: an entire album. It was daunting because frankly as I fast discovered while trying to generate some sort of guiding principles as a song writer, if you had something to say, by all means don’t say it straight out. Illusion and misdirection are more important.
Whereas Wheel Me Out and its B-side were made for 400 dollars and we had a hit, we spent two years and a hundred thousand on our next record. Then we fully gave in to our record company in 1988, Phonogram based in London, who were flush with the success and the money flow from Dire Straits and Def Leppard. Their head of A&R takes Was (Not Was), the scruffy dance lads from Detroit, and he buys us a high-priced producer for Walk the Dinosaur and Spy in the House of Love – the very same Paul Staveley O’Duffy who produced hits for Swing out Sister.
And do you know what resulted? I accuse myself as well as Don, I let it happen… I got nothing against those records but they were Brit Soul, as they were called at the time, and had very little to do with the kind of mom ‘n’ pop, low-tech thing we had always, just by virtue of our inability to do anything different, defined as our own. And look what happened, they both became worldwide top ten hits.
Bitch goddess.
The production is exactly what belies all the other pranksterish impulses that led to Walk the Dinosaur. I should have sent royalties to my little boy who, in trying to understand the vicissitudes of time and space, asked me when he was very small—confusing geologic epoch with theme park—“when Dinosaurland comes again, will we still be here on this earth?” I’m sure my eyes wetted up.
I had this notion from my kid’s cartoonish imagination that there could come a time when we’d coexist with dinosaurs and inevitably you’d domesticate your pet and have to take it for a walk at night. While surmising these weird and indecipherable grounds, I suddenly thought, “wait a second, this is a perfect excuse to write a dumb ass dance song like Do the Twist.”
Older versions of Walk the Dinosaur sound like regular, low-tech pretend soul with all the attendant humble joys. Then all of a sudden we had this sound that actually fit not only on the radio but on dance floors across Europe. It’s not so bad when you have a hit record, I can’t really sing the blues. It’s what happens afterward: the expectation that you will now deliver stuff in the spirit of the prior success. Having earned these hits by the will and investment of a major corporation was the first brick being removed from the wall of our artistic integrity, because we agreed: we said “OK whatever.”
In his introduction to A Streetcar Named Desire, which he wrote having experienced the afterglow of success of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, Tennessee Williams describes how he was in this suite up at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and he doesn’t say it explicitly but the party was on, young men coming and going… In the midst of this miasma, this drug and martini-induced haze, there came yet another fancy tray of gleaming room service comestibles, and when he mistook the chocolate sauce for the gravy, he knew the moment had come to leave. He immediately left for Mexico, where he could women crying out in the street from the hovel he inhabited: “flores, flores para los muertos“. Flowers for the dead. He wrote Streetcar in that post-Waldorf Astoria haze, having found this bracing new reality that woke him up again to his voice.
I always thought of the chocolate sauce and the gravy as a metaphor for that moment when you know your legend and your success, which I think he phrased at the time as “the bitch goddess success,” is as poisonous as it is a heady potion.
Paula Abdulisation.
If you learn to speak your own dialect within the strictures of form and technique then you’ve got it all. I remember reading a very surprising critique of Stravinsky’s career which said he was going great guns as an innovator, especially with the debut of Rights of Spring at the Paris Opera House which caused a riot—literally top hats and canes flying—because the audience didn’t get it. This was not music as they had come to expect it. But flash-forward thirty years, Rights of Spring is in the repertoire of every major orchestra in the world and Stravinsky is willing to write works to suit that audience rather than continue to confound them by inventing a new threshold.
They saw this as his moment of artistic decline, where he was now bowing to the audience’s expectations which—even though we’ll never be spoken of in the same sentence as Stravinsky—was the same thing that affected us as musicians. When you have hit records there’s a moment you realise: “oh that’s what they want? Well let’s make more of that.” I think Are You OK? is the enduring symbol of that confusion. How do we both maintain the joy of doing this and make the record company happy by writing some more hits?
You know what it amounted to? At the time we were about to make Are You OK? Don’s wife was the A&R Svengali at Virgin, guiding Paula Abdul’s career, which has become a template since. When you have one of these ciphers as an artist, they’re only what you pump them full of. Paula was a Frankenstein’s monster created by backstage people, just like what Britney Spears has become. It doesn’t matter if it’s Rick Astley or some girl group, the formula is enduring and the artist they slap on at the end is like a walnut veneer slapped on a mahogany cabinet.
While Don’s very wife was doing this, we had our hit records and by the time Are You OK? came along, Don was getting rich, famous and distracted as a world class producer and he didn’t have much time, so we started farming out the production to hired hands. I called it the Paula Abdulisation of Was (Not Was).
I consider Are You OK? a miscreant in the family of children we spawned. Even though our formula had always been danceable, hummable tracks with weird-ass sentiments on top, now the sentiments were still strange but the music was so conventional there was a disjunction. I was embarrassed by some of those tracks, as accomplished as they were. I Feel Better Than James Brown is a weird-ass song and it was danceable, but Don and I sitting in a room trying to come up with a sound, that wouldn’t have been our sound. It was constructed by experts in our absence and we added our stuff on top. It was so polished a mirror I’d expected to see my image in it but I couldn’t.
