[charlene]

The Comeback

On a stifling summer day in 1990, I made the long drive from my recording studio in Malibu to Glendale, in the San Fernando Valley. I pulled up in front of a drab building that looked about as impressive as a sheet-metal shop, parked on the street, and approached the unprepossessing entrance. It must have been about ninety degrees out, but it was nice and cool indoors. I signed in at the security desk and took the stairs to the second floor, where an older guy was waiting for me. "You the fella that's here about the Nat King Cole recordings?" he asked.

"That would be me," I said.

He turned and made his way down the corridor, and I followed him through a door and into a huge, musty vault that was stacked with ancient tapes. Most of them were in identical metal cases, piled eight and ten deep in places, and I could make out a number of familiar names on some of the fraying labels: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Perry Como...

We went deeper into the vault. The place looked like that endless government warehouse in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark itself -- safe inside a sturdy wooden crate -- is wheeled to its final resting place among tens of thousands of similar crates.

"Let me think," the old man said, shuffling along and mumbling to himself. "I'm pretty sure I know where it is." He slowed suddenly and I almost bumped into him. "Should be right in this here area somewhere," he said, craning his neck, and I thought he was going to tip over backward. "Yup. There it is."

It was on the second shelf from the top. He reached up and grabbed it and blew the dust off the case, and for a moment a cloud hung in the air between us. He then turned abruptly and I followed him back outside, to the end of the corridor and into a tiny, airless room. He transferred the recording onto a twenty-four-track tape and gave me the copy. I signed for it and thanked him and found my way back into the blazing sunlight, and I climbed into my car for the long return drive to the studio.

I wasn't in a great mood, and I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic about the work that lay ahead. For some time now, I'd been in a bit of a slump, and absolutely nothing was clicking. In previous years, it felt like every single time I wrote a song or produced a song I had a chance at a home run, but that wasn't happening anymore. I wasn't in the Top 40 at the time, and life in the music business is measured by your position on the charts. It was grim. No matter what I did, I couldn't pop the charts. I'd lost my edge, my hunger -- whatever the hell you call it.

And it's strange, because over the years, every time I made an album, there was always a point where I would think, This one's no good. This one's not going to happen. And I was wrong, of course. Most of my albums had done very well, and some of them had done spectacularly -- there were five Grammys sitting on my piano -- but where was Number Six? My "sound" had stopped working. I began to wonder whether my career was in the shitter.

Instead of trying to figure out what was wrong, however, to try to fix it, I ran away. I was taking stuff not because it had merit but to keep myself busy, and I was keeping busy because I was trying not to think about the problem. I should have probably gone into therapy, but I didn't want to dig too deep for fear of what I'd find.

This next job seemed unpromising in the extreme: Natalie Cole wanted to sing some classic recordings by her late father, Nat King Cole, to create a string of old standards. But for whom? Did anyone still care about that stuff ? The more I thought about it, however, the more it seemed that it might be a good thing for me. This wasn't the type of stuff the radio stations were ever going to play, and at the end of the day that's precisely why I took the job: Because I didn'tfeel any real pressure to succeed. I hadn't been near the Billboard charts in almost two years, and at that point I think I was afraid to even aim for them.

In simple terms, doing Natalie's album was more of the same: I was still running away.

To further complicate matters, I was one of three producers on the project. The others were Tommy LiPuma, an industry veteran, and Andre Fischer, Natalie's then-husband. Some weeks earlier, before I made that drive to Glendale, the three of us met for lunch at Duâ??par's, a Hollywood restaurant, to divvy up the songs. There were twenty-one of them, and Tommy had written their names on separate scraps of paper, and we went through them one at a time -- three kids picking straws. When I saw "Mona Lisa," a song I'd always liked, I snagged it, and when I came across "Unforgettable," Nat King Cole's 1961 classic, I reached for that, too.

"I love that song," I said. "I'll take it."

At that point, I didn't know that Natalie intended to create a duet with her late father. (She only told me about this later, and when she did I thought it was an absolutely brilliant idea.) And in fact, I was kind of surprised that Andre hadn't taken "Unforgettable" for himself. As far as I was concerned, it was the only track on the entire retro album that had half a chance of getting any attention, and surely he'd had the inside scoop on that one.

part 2 - next post..