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A Conversation with Charles Neville: Yellow Moon Rising |
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Tuesday, 31 January 2006 08:18 |
Yellow Moon Rising
A Conversation with Charles Neville
By John Sinclair
Wavelength: So, Yellow Moon looks like it's taking off! Can this really be paydirt for the Neville Brothers at last?
Charles Neville: Yeah, if it keeps on like it's started out--it looks like it's doing great. The single's in the Billboard charts with a bullet, the album's in the Top 20 in the Gavin Report, and Hits magazine reports it at #4 in retail action, so that means it's selling. And the A&M people have been coming to all the gigs, and in New York they were telling me that it's sold over 100,000 copies in the first couple of weeks.
It must be nice being back with A&M and having them be a little more committed this time. How's the response been on your current east coast tour?
Oh, it's been real good, man, like New York--well, everywhere we've played really, the response to the new music "live" has really been good. And the response to "Sister Rosa" is just amazing. It's mostly white kids, and when we do the tune, Cyril gives a little information about--well, as soon as he says the name, "'Sister Rosa,' we're dedicating this to an American hero, Rosa Parks," he gets a big cheer, and we can see them all singing along with it. That's really good, because we're hoping this gets exposed to a wider audience and that the message of the songs is going to be heard and understood by the young people.
You know Rosa Parks lives in Detroit now--she works for Congressman John Conyers, and we've even got a street named after her: Rosa Parks Boulevard, that used to be l2th Street, where the riots started here in 1967. We ought to hook up something special with her and the Neville Brothers the next time you come to Detroit.
We're gonna be there sometime in June or July--we're touring with Jimmy Buffett, and I think we've got two dates in Detroit with him. Incidentally, I saw an ad that says that there's going to be a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg called The Long Walk Home, about the Birmingham bus boycott, and Whoopi Goldberg is gonna play Rosa Parks.
The Neville Brothers have worked with several producers for several different record companies over the past 12 years, but to me this is the best treatment of Neville music since Allen Toussaint did "Hercules" with Aaron for Mercury Records, and the Wild Tchoupitoulas album on Island Records. How did you like working with Daniel Lanois?
I really loved it. It was really good to work with him, and really, a lot of the credit for the excellence of the content of the album is due to him being able to combine his expertise and his magic with what we were doing.
One of the amazing things about listening to the album, it's really a cohesive thing. It wasn't conceived like that, it wasn't planned, like, we're gonna do these songs because they string together into this. It was like a bunch of different songs from the different brothers--you know, Aaron, Art, myself and Cyril--that are from different directions.
So it seemed like it might just be a collection of, you know, stuff that features each person. But what Daniel was able to do was to give each song something that made them all fit together, musically as well as theme-wise. It definitely was a spiritual connection.
It's really coherent, and it's so soulful, too--it's got such depth of feeling in it. It always seemed in the past that they were trying to push you guys more into a rock-type mold, but this is just right down on the ground--it's so refreshing.
Yeah, exactly. The difference is, this is a recording in which we were given freer choice in the material. With this one we were asked, "what do you want to do?" That made all the difference in the world.
I understand that the recording set-up Daniel Lanois had there in New Orleans was pretty warm too.
Oh yeah, it was. We got this house on St. Charles and General Taylor, next door to the Columns Hotel, and it was a five-storey house, an apartment building really, but we found out from the landlord that the guy who built the house had five daughters, and the name of the house was the Emlah Court--E. M, L, A, H--and in that word EMLAH, each letter was the initial of one of the daughters' names....
Yeah, like Emily, Margaret, Lillian, Audrey and Harriet.... [Laughter]
...So I guess each of them had a floor in the house. Each floor was this big, beautiful 10-room apartment with three bathrooms and a big beautiful kitchen and hardwood floors and all that--you know, like really nice uptown New Orleans.
So the second floor was set up as a studio, where on one side we had two big rooms joined together by one of those big New Orleans arch doors. We set up all the equipment there so that we could play just like we're playing on stage. And when we first did it, we set up the stuff there, and Daniel just experimented with placement of microphones, placement of baffles, to get a recording sound and the room sound.
And then, some of the stuff was done right in the control room, which was just across the hall from the big playing room, with all of us just crowded around a couple of mikes to put down our vocals. That was really good. And along with that, okay, Daniel lived on the fifth floor, I think, and his assistants lived on the thlrd and the fourth floors-- and I lived on the first floor! So it was like we were really all very comfortable there.
That's right, you were living on the west coast, weren't you?
I was, but I'm back in New Orleans now. When I had to be in town so long for the record, I figured, well, I might as well give up my house there in Oregon and, you know, settle back here at home.
How'd you happen to go out there?
We played there a few years ago, and man, I met some people there that I had known in some other places, and just looking at the place, it was so beautiful--mountains and waterfalls and hot springs and big beautiful green trees and clean air and clean water.... And it's still, like, I've got friends there so now I don't have to live there, I can go visit.
I know you're happy being back in the Big Easy, but you guys aren't there too much now, are you?
No, because after this tour finishes, we'll be there for JazzFest, and then right after that we leave again. We have to leave the day after JazzFest in order to go to L.A. and do the Arsenio Hall Show, and that's on the way to Japan. I think we'll spend a week in Japan and we'll come back, and then we've got about three weeks off before the Jimmy Buffett tour starts. Then we're on tour for seven fucking weeks.
Yeah you right--you got to hit while the iron's hot!
But then after that I think we'll be off for a little while, we'll be able to--and depending on what happens with the record, too, if the record keeps growing, you know, that'll make a difference.
Now, "Sister Rosa" is the first single off the album, and you've got a video out on that too, shot in New Orleans by Jonathan Demme. What are they gonna follow "Sister Rosa" with?
I'm not sure. What I've heard is that so far they've already serviced "Sister Rosa" to some stations, "Yellow Moon" and "Wake Up" somewhere else, and "Fire and Brimstone"--I heard from people in New York that they had been hearing "Wake Up." I know "Fire and Brimstone" has been serviced to New Orleans, and I don't know if "My Blood" has been done yet.
"My Blood" is gonna be a single, because we're gonna do another video with that one, with Jonathan Demme. That was part of the reason we went to Haiti, because Jonathan heard that song, and he's working with a group called Frere Parent, which is Parent Brothers, from Haiti, and their song, "Con Beat," is kind of like "My Blood" in that it talks about things that are happening, in particular in Haiti, you know--conditions that exist and how things are not like they could be and should be.
So we went over there to do some parts of their video. Before that they came to New Orleans and we recorded with them at SeaSaint--we did some English verses to their song, which was sung in Haitian creole.
So you and Cyril went to Haiti? How long were you there?
We were there about five days. We went on Friday [March 3lst], we did the shooting on Saturday and Sunday, and we were scheduled to leave Monday, but we couldn't get out until Wednesday.
What was the trip to Haiti like for you and Cyril?
It was really fun there--it's so beautiful in Haiti, and part of the shooting we did was up in the mountains, in a little town called Malique. We were up there when the trouble first kicked off down in Port-au-Prince, and nobody up there knew anything about anything.
We couldn't hear the news--they were like, up there in the mountains away from all of that, living a really primitive kind of lifestyle where there was no running water, no electricity, you know--well, some, some houses had electricity, and there was a couple places where there was running water....
Was that, like, Maroon territory?
Yeah, and it was really, really beautiful up there. And when those people did hear that there was something happening, they said, well, you know, the presidents come and go, but our lives don't change, so it was like it wasn't really gonna make that much difference to them who was in power because conditions were gonna pretty much stay the same--that had been their experience.
I know they wigged when they heard the Yellow Moon record, though--especially the way Side 2 jumps off with "Wake Up" and "VooDoo."
Oh yeah, they love it there.
So you had a little trouble getting out, I heard....
Yeah, right. The airport was closed the day we were supposed to leave, Monday--we tried to get to the airport, but they just had the road blocked off. They had closed the airport.
By Tuesday we knew the airport wasn't gonna be open. We heard there was some shooting and fighting at the airport and some of the soldiers had taken over the airport to prevent the officers who had been arrested by the president from being sent out of the country.
But he sent them off by car, and what I heard was that some of the palace soldiers had attacked the soldiers who were out at the airport, and some of them were killed--some of the rebel soldiers were killed. And when they found out that their leader was gone to Santo Domingo, they gave up the airport Tuesday night.
So Wednesday [April 5th], we went to the airport--it had been closed since Sunday--and all of the people who were trying to get out of Haiti were there at the airport. There was a rumor that American Airlines--we had gone there on PanAm, but we had a friend there who had a friend who was vice-president of American Airlines, and he told him there were no flights from America coming in, American Airlines had cancelled everything there, and the only way to get out was to get with an Air France flight scheduled to come in, or an Antilles Airlines flight scheduled to come in. So we got reservations on both of them, just in case, and it seems that the Air France flight was the only one to get in and out.
Man, were you lucky to get out of there!
Yeah, you know, while we were at the airport waitin' for that plane to land--when we first got there, there were soldiers all over carryin' sub-machine guns, but they didn't have their clips in. And at one point the guy who was upstairs talking in the office with the American Airlines people came down and said that the people were all closin' up their offices and splittin', that the airport might close, because there was a rumor that the Leopards--which was this group of soldiers-- were coming back to close down and take over the airport.
And then when we saw all the soldiers who were there jammin' the clips in their guns, we were thinkin', oh shit. We just hoped that, if the Air France plane lands, that it would take off again--that they wouldn't try to hold it there.
So the guy was in contact with the people who were talkin', who were in contact with the tower, and there was all kinds of rumors flyin' around--and then we saw this long, long line of people who were at the American Airlines counter, and we saw all of them leavin', and we thought, oh-oh....
But it turned out that everybody knew that American had cancelled all flights for that day, but there was a flight scheduled to come in the next day, if things remained calm. So they wanted to just stay at the airport, to make sure that they would be there to get on the plane, but the soldiers wouldn't let them stay, so that's why they were leaving.
But by the time we saw that, we didn't know what the hell was going on--we thought, oh shit, the plane hasn't come in yet, maybe they're gonna tell us that we got to leave. Things were getting more and more tense there at the airport--you could see that the soldiers were expecting something to happen--and when the plane finally did land and there were all these people coming in, we thought there'd be nobody on the plane, but there they were.
Then it took them forever to unload the plane and refuel it before they started lettin' us on board, and then finally we did get on board and the plane took off. We heard after we got back to New Orleans, Jonathan Demme's people called to tell us that they had closed the airport again about half an hour or an hour after we left, and that there was more fighting and it had spread more to the city and.... Tt was crazy.
Sounds like you really had "God On Your Side" [Laughter]
Really!
But when you were there, before all this happened at the airport trying to leave Haiti, you were there with a Haitian group shooting a video of their music?
Right. We sang some of their songs, some verses of their songs in English, and when we do the video for "My Blood," they're gonna do some verses of ours in Haitian creole.
We were with Jonathan Demme, who set this up with Frere Parent because he was working on both our projects at the same time. And, there were some CBS camera-people who were filming stuff for a show called West 57th Street. They had been in New Orleans doing stuff with us, and they came there to catch us doing the video--but they caught a lot of the other action that was taking place too, and they were filming everything.
"My Blood," "Wake Up" and the other original material on the Yellow Moon album is really strong. What kind of process produces this material? I see, looking at the composers' credits, that there's quite a bit of collaboration....
Well, a lot of the collaboration mostly occurs in the actual musical arrangements, you know, like putting the music together. Like "Yellow Moon," Aaron wrote the song, and then it evolved. He might say, "We'll do it like this," but if some of what he's heard in his head and just played on the keyboard, if we tried to do that with the whole band, it doesn't quite come out like that.
Or, like, nobody tells me, "Here's the horn part, play it like this." It's more like, we play and I'll come up with something and try something, and by the fifth, sixth, eighth time we play it, it'll evolve into the final version that comes out on the record.
The same with everyone else, like the bass player--we might try different bass parts, and the bass player will come up with the one, and everyone'll say, "Oh, this is it, this locks in just right." So when people contribute something to a tune or an arrangement, we just give them some of the credit, you know, because everybody does contribute to making the tune what it is.
What about Cyril's pieces?
It's kinda the same thing, because a couple of them he wrote--like "Wake Up," we been doing that for a long time.
Right, I've heard you do that before, and then I've heard Cyril do "My Blood" with the Uptown All Stars....
We've been doing that one too for a while, but originally, that one, he had first did it with the Uptown All-Stars. And "Sister Rosa" was written and done with the Uptown All-Stars too.
And like, "Sister Rosa" was written not with the idea of making a record for commercial distribution, but for documenting the information and hoping to present it to schools so that it could be used as a teaching tool.
Because one of the things that prompted him to write it like that was, you know, talking to his kids and their friends and finally realizing that they knew very little about that period of our history--and not only that, but the things that they were really being taught in school, they weren't retaining the information. And realizing that, wow, they listen at these rap songs on the radio, and they can repeat every word.
Yeah, well, having a hit record and a video with it will go a lot farther into their consciousness than trying to ease it into the schools through the curriculum--they don't pay too much attention to that. Now, what about "Voo Doo"? Is that Cyril's tune?
No, that's Aaron--Aaron wrote that one. "Wild Injuns" is Cyril too, but that one was another real collaboration.
That's a great record--you gotta have a single out on that for the jukeboxes to play at Carnival time. And then, that makes me think about how you got the Dirty Dozen Brass Band involved in the album.
Yeah, well, at first it was--when we first started on this project, we were talking to Daniel about having other people involved in it--like we've done on other records, we've had people just for their names, mostly, like Jerry Garcia, we've worked with Jerry before, and the Grateful Dead too, but the record company's interest was mainly for the selling power of having these names on the record.
Yeah, that seems to go with the way they've approached the whole thing in the past, with that kind of bombastic type production and everything.
Right, but with this, you know, this is a much more natural thing--the Dirty Dozen are as much identified with New Orleans as...as red beans and rice. So having them on it was really just a plus all the way around.
Musically, they've got a unique sound that's New Orleans and it's them. And then the combination of them with us is just two elements of the New Orleans sound combining. It's two things that miqht seem to be different--like what they do and what we do might seem to be two different things, but they're not.
And the stuff that they played on the songs--like on "Fire and Brimstone," we didn't have a chart so we couldn't say, "Here's what we want you guys to play on it." We said, "We want the Dirty Dozen sound."
So they came up with a head arrangement, like we used to say way back in the game.
Right. You know, that's one of the things that New Orleans musicians are really the experts at. Like I've played with bands from everywhere and traveled everywhere with bands, but New Orleans is the only place where you can just call up some cats and say, Come make the gig, and they'll come, and they'll make the gig--without any of that "We gotta rehearse two weeks first" or "Send me a tape" or "Where's the charts," you know? The only question they'll ask before you kick off is, "Hey, what key?"
Another thing that's really knocked me out about the record is how they stripped it down instead of pumping it up--that made it so much stronger. The tunes are really hip, and the production really brings each one of them out. And the "covers," loosely speaking--where'd you come up with that Link Wray tune?
Which one is that?
"Fire and Brimstone."
That was one that Daniel brought in. That was the only tune that came from them, and it was--when we heard the demo of it, we said, "Okay, we'll try it, but we don't think it's gonna slide." But then, after we did it, and listened to the tape back of us doing it, then we said, "Yeah, it sounds good now, it's got something to it, but still there's something lacking--let's put the Dirty Dozen on there!" And then once that was done, with the tuba and the horns and all, oh man, it was like, "Oh yeah--now I can hear it!"
That's Art on the vocal there, right?
Yeah, that's Art.
And then the Bob Dylan tunes, especially "Hollis Brown"--I'll bet Bob Dylan's cuttin' his arm off wishing he had made it sound that good. That's a beautiful arrangement.
Yeah, the way those came about was, Daniel just asked us, "Well, is there anything, any tunes that you guys have always really wanted to do," and Aaron said, "Yeah, there's these two tunes from The Times They Are A-Changing, and that was "Hollis Brown" and "God on Our Side." That's another thing about working with Daniel--the tunes are just the stuff that we do, the way that we do them, but somehow it's got a modern feel to it without....
Without a lot of electric machines and stuff--with humans playing. "Hollis Brown," I've heard that for years, but it just comes on so fresh, and then it's right in the pocket. And the slide guitar part is dead on the money, too.
That's our guitar player, Brian Stoltz--Daniel does some of it too, Brian and Daniel both. Brian's playing the slide. Brian Eno did some stuff too--on the "Healing Chant," he did all those effects sounds on there, and on "A Change Is Gonna Come," all those voices on the end-- that's Brian Eno.
"Healing Chant" is a pretty deep piece too, and it was nice to see you get some play as a saxophone soloist this time.
The way that one happened, that was like one of those spontaneous, accidental things in the studio--we were just foolin' around with that groove, which was, originally, a song. And we didn't do the song, but we were playing with the groove and I was just fooling around with the horn, trying to find something, and I thought, Okay, yeah, this feels good, I can do something with this. So I said, "Let's do one," and he said, "Oh no, we already got it!" I said, "Man, you recorded that? I was just tuning up!"
What is the chant on that song?
It's actually an African healing chant that Cyril came up with--it's from a service, like, an African religious service for healing, and that was part of the chant. That was the part that kept being repeated. And it's great, because "Healing Song" really gets good response on the gigs too.
Wow, that's good to hear. It's so nice to see you guys getting over finally, and by being, like, the real Neville Brothers too, natural stylee, with all the spirituality and the politics and just the down- on-the-street-level outlook.
I know you must feel good about it too, after trying everything else, to be able to come out as yourselves with music this powerful, this soulful, and get the kind of response that's starting to happen now all over the country.
Right, and the good thing is that, if this record does really happen, then we'll be able to build on that and keep going in our own direction. Plus, the way the people are responding is really great too--the fans in New Orleans have been with us a long time, and now we're starting to see a lot of them who follow us to different places. We see people from New Orleans in California, when we play in Nashville we see people from New Orleans there, we see people from New Orleans in Miami--we see 'em everywhere.
Maybe you guys are gonna be the Grateful Dead of the 90s!
Well, as a matter of fact, after having played gigs with the Dead, a lot of the Deadheads are calling themselves Neville-heads too now, and they're following us around too.
How do you enjoy working with Bill Graham Management?
lt's really been good. It has really made a difference, I think, and they're really great people over there, especially Morty Wiggins and Cheryl, who are the people that we work directly with, mostly. And then Bill is personally interested too, like he's done stuff for us himself, and he's been a fan.
One way they have really helped our visibility is that they've really gotten us a lot more media coverage, and in terms of being involved in movie soundtracks and having done these major network TV shows. We've done Johnny Carson, David Letterman, David Brenner, The Late Show, Saturday Night Live, and now we're gonna do the Arsenio Hall Show just before we leave for Japan.
Charles, the only other thing I wanted to ask you was on an unrelated issue altogether, but 1 just wondered what was your feeling about the long interview that Kalamu Ya Salaam did with Charmaine [Neville] in a recent Wavelength? I thought it showed a tremendous amount of courage on her part, to just bring everything right down front like that.
I thought it was really good. And I learned stuff from it that I didn't know before, too. People have asked me things about it, like, you know, they thought we had been around together all the years of her life.... But one thing, it really boosted--like, everybody in New Orleans already loved her and respected her, but it boosted the respect a lot, too. I know I was really pleased to read it.
--Detroit
April 10, 1989
(C) 1989, 2006 John Sinclair. Al1 Rights Reserved.
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