Confessions of a Glorified Sideman

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Dave Stew­art, Annie Lennox, Jimmy Z — Stock­holm, 1987

In early 1986, I was sit­ting around the pool of my West Hol­ly­wood apart­ment think­ing of what most pro­fes­sional musi­cians do 99% of the time  — “Fuck, I need a gig, I need money, RENT!!!FOOD!!!”  Ahh… our lovely mantra. It had been about eight months since I’d had a steady gig with Tom Petty & the Heart­break­ers and the Pack up the Plan­ta­tion Tour. A great tour, great guys…. and girls  — but more about that at another time.

Need­less to say the ol’ bank account was look­ing a bit peeked. I’d spent the bet­ter part of my mea­ger tour stash perus­ing a record deal fronting a ten-piece band doing orig­i­nal soul/rock music. I had some of the best musi­cians in the world play­ing the gigs AND rehears­ing for FREE!!!  — nobody rehearses in LA, espe­cially for free. So, being the nat­ural sharp busi­ness­man that I am, I insisted on pay­ing them — some­times $100 bucks a night. It’s not a lot, but you do the math with a ten-piece orches­tra and it’s a won­der I lasted one month let alone eight.

As I lay around the pool brood­ing about the direc­tion of my career and chat­ting with the French girls that lived in the same apart­ment build­ing or were just vis­it­ing – “The French!!!, “ my ex-wife Shelly used to say, “they travel in packs!!” — had an annoy­ing habit of sun­bathing top­less — It was hor­ri­ble — I heard my phone ring­ing in my 2^nd floor apart­ment, right above the pool. Nor­mally, I would jump up and try and answer but this time I said “fuck it”. As the vol­ume on the answer­ing machine was quite loud and close by, I could hear a British accented male leav­ing a mes­sage. I bolted up stairs only to arrive as he was hang­ing up. I replayed the mes­sage. It was Dave Stew­art of Eury­th­mics call­ing from Paris. The mes­sage went some­thing like this in that irrev­er­ent, non­cha­lant style Dave has mas­tered, “’alo, Jimmy. I’m sit­ting in my flat in Paris, and Annie and I were just won­der­ing if you’d like to come over and blow some wind down bits of metal for us. You can call me at….uh…oh I can’t remem­ber my number….oh well…. I’ll get back to you. Later mate.”

Oh, I was so pissed with myself. If I’d have just got off my ass two sec­onds ear­lier , I’d have got­ten  to the phone in time.  Here it was — A MAJOR GIG!!!! PARIS!!!! ANNIE LENNOX!!!! FUCK!!!!!!!! SHIT!!!!!!!  — And I don’t have any way to get a hold of them. Well, at least he called and I fig­ured, hell, he’d call tomor­row. RIGHT. No call the next day. Or the next and the next, until I was a wreck.  I was NOT a pleas­ant per­son to be around. Finally, the moth­er­fucker calls — TEN DAYS LATER!!!!!!  — I was suicidal.

Dave asks if I can bring all the “plumb­ing” (the British seem to have no capac­ity to call a sax­o­phone a sax­o­phone) over to Paris for a cou­ple of weeks.  As it turns out my pass­port was just about to expire. I took care of that and we booked a flight for Paris the next week.

When I arrived at the air­port, I was pleas­antly sur­prised to find that Phil Chen, the leg­endary bass player was fly­ing to Paris for Eury­th­mics, too. Phil played on so many great crit­i­cally acclaimed records such as Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow and he had played with Rod Stew­art for years — he was the bass player on a lit­tle hit called Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.

What a treat!!!!  Phil is a sweet heart of guy and a real gent. And with his Jamaican accent, Jamaican/British silly sense of humor and ency­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of leg­endary Motown bass player,  James Jamer­son , this had the mak­ings of a great adven­ture.  For some unknown rea­son, our flight was routed Los Ange­les to Lon­don with a minor lit­tle lay­over, like an hour or some­thing, and then on to Paris. It doesn’t sound like much, but any extra hours in Lon­don can be bru­tal. So the flights cool — we’re both stoked and catch­ing up on things and the cock­tails are flow­ing — then we land in Lon­don and things started going down­hill fast.

Phil had this bright idea we should get off the plane and stretch our legs. So we did. Of course as we are try­ing to get back on the plane, we learned we had left the secu­rity area we were sup­posed to have stayed in  — and I don’t think our looks helped any. Pic­ture this: a slight Asian man in red con­verse bas­ket­ball shoes who speaks like he is from Jamaica — maybe because HE IS — and me in an old Colombo type trench coat, hair stick­ing up in every direc­tion, two days of stub­ble with my Mexican/Latino looks. I guess our appear­ance screamed drug deal­ers to these security-customs men. When we walked up to secu­rity it was like “yeah, right boys….over here please.” We tried to explain that our flight was just about to depart but can you imagine???…They couldn’t give a shit!! What a surprise!!!

So they take us to this room and make us strip, sit on very cold fold­ing chairs and repeat­edly go through our clothes and, of course, take a look up that place where the sun don’t shine. Oh well, just another charm­ing day at the office.

When they finally fig­ured out we weren’t run­ning the big stash over to Paris on their watch, they let us go. I thought for sure we’d missed our flight but there it was and we just made it on in time.

We finally arrive in Paris around mid­day and con­sid­er­ing that ter­ror­ists were blow­ing up store­fronts and Metro sta­tions that spring, we cleared cus­toms fairly quickly. We looked around for some­one from the Eury­th­mics to pick us up but no such luck. So we sat down and waited…and waited… for four hours. I was livid. I had been play­ing in France for a few years with Rod Stew­art and had many friends and girl­friends I could have hooked up with and hung for a few hours or days but I didn’t because I fig­ured we’d be cov­ered.  Or just get in a cab and go the hotel. But that wasn’t pos­si­ble because we had no info and if we got one they wouldn’t know where to find us  — so we waited.

Finally, this guy walks up and says in a thick Cock­ney accent “oy, you must be the two I been lookin’ for — let’s go”.  I look up to see a liv­ing car­i­ca­ture of the old cir­cus mus­cle man. Shaven head, han­dle bar mous­tache and tat­toos cov­er­ing most of his upper torso. He was a mas­sive spec­i­men. I get up and as I walk by him I remark dryly “ you’re late” and after a few steps he shouts “oy! I don’t do lug­gage or equip­ment.” So I calmly walk back and start push­ing my lug­gage cart which with four sax­o­phones, flutes, har­mon­i­cas and lug­gage was stacked up to my neck, and I said to him “ that’s strike two…one more and you’re out.”  — So he and I got off on the good foot together.

As it turns out this guy is an ex-con who loved to brag about his favorite way of killing peo­ple, which was to grab the intended vic­tim right between the rib cages and push in, and then, as he would del­i­cately put it “ rip their lungs out, mate!” Or how he just did nine­teen months in a British prison for cut­ting a guys fin­ger off with a bro­ken beer bot­tle — Charm­ing, n’est-ce pas?? And he’s telling us all these won­der­ful tid­bits within min­utes of meet­ing him as we are dri­ving into Paris from the air­port!  Which, of course, he was totally use­less at as he pro­ceeded to get lost imme­di­ately.  He then asks if we want to go to the hotel or the stu­dio and I reply “which one do you think you can find?” Need­less to say he wasn’t amused by my humor but I was seri­ous. By then it was around five in the after­noon and Phil and I had been trav­el­ing for what seemed like weeks at the time but in actu­al­ity had only been about twenty two hours and nei­ther of us had bathed or shaved — so of course we say “ the studio.”

The stu­dio, Palais de Con­gres, is located in the heart of Paris at one end of the Champ Ely­sees on the other side of the Arc de Tri­om­phe — land­marks any tourist could find their sleep — and this idiot still got lost and couldn’t remem­ber how to get to the stu­dio. I’ll never for­get walk­ing into the con­trol room of the stu­dio. The speak­ers were blar­ing with what sounded like an AC/DC song with a ballsy gui­tar riff and heavy drums.  I must admit I was a bit sur­prised as Eury­th­mics were very big at the time but were basi­cally known as a techno pop band. I had met Dave before when he had come out for a week on tour with Tom Petty and then after I had done some ses­sions with him pro­duc­ing Fear­gal Sharkey and Ste­vie Nicks.  He had pro­duced and co wrote the hit Don’t Come Around Here No More with Tom Petty.

So Dave and I knew each other but I had never met Annie so we were all intro­duced and I looked like shit and she looked, as always, like a mil­lion bucks. What a force of nature this woman was (and still is). An aura of energy emanated from her that you could actu­ally feel phys­i­cally. She was a gra­cious host and brought me a beer and some tequila. Some of the engi­neers had fash­ioned a hash pipe out of a mini Heineken beer can and I start­ing to feel right at home.

The afore­men­tioned song they were work­ing on turned out to be Mis­sion­ary Man. I later learned it was a cal­cu­lated effort to reach out to Album Ori­ented Rock sta­tions in Amer­ica — and a suc­cess­ful one at that — but at that moment I had no idea how big a part of it all I would even­tu­ally become. Phil Chen imme­di­ately went to work and laid down a bass track on it and it was really start­ing to sound good — it was rockin’.  So Annie jumps up and says, “Ok, Jimmy, you’re up. How about some har­mon­ica.” I jumped up fairly stoned and jet lagged and said, “alright, let’s go” and Annie says “no, no, Jimmy…. I was just kidding…you’re tired and we can do it later” and I can see she’s try­ing to fuck with me and I look her in the eye and say  “Put it up, let’s go”. She says “Ooooooo macho” and that pretty much sealed the deal how our rela­tion­ship would be. Always play­fully needling each other and at other times not so play­fully. It was like High Noon in that con­trol room and we were fac­ing off.

But she was right. By now I WAS jet lagged and with the help of the hash, beer and tequila, I was feel­ing a bit wob­bly, too.  The engi­neers helped me sort out an amp and get me set up to record that was no easy feat with my lim­ited French. I man­aged to get a halfway decent sound out of the amp and we got lev­els and away we went.  Dave’s sage pro­duc­tion advice was we’ll roll the tape and you play — so the tape rolled and I played and played.

Usu­ally in an over­dub sit­u­a­tion the pro­ducer will pick a sec­tion of the song (intro, solo or vamp) and con­cen­trate on that part until he is sat­is­fied and then on to the next sec­tion. In this case I started play­ing on my har­mon­ica from the begin­ning and just kept on jam­ming all the way to end, which was LONG as they hadn’t edited it yet. It must have been at least seven min­utes. It doesn’t sound like a long time but that outro sec­tion seemed like it went on for ever and I was get­ting cot­ton mouth and my chops were start­ing to call in for a break — but some­thing in me just took over and I just wasn’t going to quit until that GODDAMN song was over.

When it was over, I stood there star­ing at all these peo­ple sil­hou­et­ted through the glass in the con­trol room and they just stared at me. And nobody said any­thing. So now I’m think­ing “uh oh….they ain’t dig­gin’ it” and finally Dave says “come on in you’re done.” Now I’m really feel­ing like shit and I walk into the booth and I say “ no good???” and Annie Lennox is stand­ing right next to me and hugs me and says, “that was unbe­liev­able, fuck­ing bril­liant!” WHEW!!!!!

So I kick back and lis­ten. I was pleased but I thought I could improve a cou­ple of parts but Dave would have none of it. I begged to just have one more pass at the solo because I didn’t really know when it was com­ing the first time  — but he was adamant — NO!! And you know some­thing? He was right. A few weeks later I was in the stu­dio and we had some time  — Dave and Annie were off doing some press or some­thing  — so we put up Mis­sion­ary Man and I blew a few solos and they were OK but none could match the orig­i­nal. Some­times you just get it right the first time. Mis­sion­ary Man went on to be a big inter­na­tional hit and we toured the world for three years behind the Revenge album.

© Zavala Music, Inc.