Pipe Dreams

Inception:

The 5/4 cello riff sprang to life some months after the (West-Coast) Providence band recorded the Ever Sense the Dawn album (summer, 1972, Hollywood). My memory of the song’s Dorian-mode inception is hazy, but I think it soon involved my dear brother Tom and his viola. As for words, Jim Cockey – composer of Longing for Home – interrupted his practicing of a Bach violin partita to help set up a projector for his slides in a large furnace closet in the Bay Area band house, where I launched my second rite-of-passage narrative in lyric form, riding an imaginary camel this time, instead of scrabbling up a risky hill beneath circling salivating buzzards (the real scene that begins our GallopAway CD: San Juan Chickens). With the furnace quietly roaring nearby, I played and stared at the green of the Grand Teton Mountains of Wyoming (where Jim had attended climbing school and taken pictures) while I visualized a polar opposite location: a harsh Middle Eastern desert. About a year and a half later, the band performed the song as a comical prototype at breakneck speed in our last little tour. And in 1974 it was recorded as a video in Boise with costumes (hilarious on us) and color-key enabled scene simulations, as well as improvised bazaar (market) sound effects near the end by Barth Bishop and Bob Barriatua, a thirst quenching water reference in the dream section by Shari Rhodes on piano, and Suzanne Janes singing angelic soprano.

About three years later in Eugene, Oregon, the song was bumping along at a pace not quite so frantic, with Suzanne and me in the folk band, Prince Gabriel’s Fleet (named after our bright little son), along with the Leishman sisters, Diana and Gina, Greg “Ahimsa” Stout on tablas and Don Lax on violin. It was recorded at the 1978 Oregon Country Fair.

A few more years, and we find Frances and me in mutual discovery, to the tune of that darned five-four camel in the Art Room where we worked. Soon a new violin solo burst forth, and a few long-ossified lyrics began to change as we performed it as a duo, eventually recording it in Portland, Oregon, in 1983, around the time of our third wedding anniversary. 12 years after that, when the still-flawed song had fallen out of our repertoire, Frances and her friend Stephanie Littlewolf, both with some clear-eyed Native American blood in their veins, propelled it in a new direction with their suggestions: Stephanie urging “cut” for any lyrics that did not work, and Frances giving it a heart line: the mysterious girl with violet eyes.

Twelve more years would pass before the lurching rewrites warranted a new recording, this time in San Jose, California, 2007. The charismatic Danny “Zoot Suit” Valdez narrated the story, friendly and funny as the day is long. Tom (viola) and Andy (guitar) from the old Providence band arrived. New tablas (Salar Nader), and new winds (clarinet and zurna) by Hafez Modirzadeh. We had the right ingredients, but the session failed to gel. There were countless problems in otherwise good takes. My cello and Frances’s violin did not escape the jinx. Only Hafez on his clarinet did. Editing and mixing for weeks and months after the session turned into a nightmare, a major disappointment. I gave up and mothballed the song. I tried to hate it. We moved on to other musical projects. Years passed.

Then late one night when I was too sleepy to heed the risk of working on such a complex computer project, I opened a forgotten editing session with all four recordings of the song, each in its own track, plus many tracks of scattered clips, wondering again if I could re-chop it up and assemble it into something new. All the takes were at different tempos, levels and sound qualities, completely unsynchronized. Luckily I forgot to mute any tracks and simply hit Play. What a noise! I quickly hit Stop and sat for a moment in the silent studio while the cacophony echoed in my mind. But something interesting was going on. With the volume of each track reduced, I hit Play again. It was like an audio hall of mirrors 35 years deep. I revisited moments of hope and success as well as moments of gloom, spanning more than half my life, all at the same time. Different lyrics, different musical treatments, clashing mismatches of song sections and completely different staggered fade-outs. I sat in wonder and realized that some of this chaos must survive into the final mix, a fitting underscore to the delirious stresses of the fictional vision quest, metaphorical story of my life, including the tortuous songwriting and production of the damn song. It must not come out too clean!

The remaining eight and a half years of intermittent work until final mixing and mastering in 2018 were far from simple, but there was a clear heading; Frances and I knew when it was at long last finished. Overlaid and stretched to synch or not synch, the simultaneous vibrations from 44 years (counting the mix itself) provide a worm-hole’s glimpse into the multiverses that this musical adventure has threaded.  [Tim]