Earl Slick

I haven’t heard anybody talk about it. Our tour manager is an absolute sports freak. He’s a Brit so he usually watches the soccer [laughs].

I think he actually knows American sports pretty well because he was watching baseball and I got a feeling he’s into it.

I actually think he likes American football as well.

I think it’s more like a third or fourth chance. It’s a weird life, man. It’s up, it’s down, it changes. It’s a really funny thing because I decided in the mid-90’s to just get out because it wasn’t fun. Things had just gotten kind of strange.

I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. The things I was doing just weren’t going anywhere and I absolutely think I lost direction of what I started doing this for in the first place.

I was doing everything; I was doing some of my stuff, working with some other people. Sometimes the tail wags the dog. That’s kind of what ended up happening. When you do something for awhile all of a sudden you’re just mindlessly going in a direction and before you realize it you’ve just kind of been on automatic pilot.

It’s possible.

A mid-career crisis. I’ll give you that much

It wasn’t coming as much and what was coming I wasn’t very happy with. What I was creating on my own I wasn’t very happy with. It was just that I’ve been doing it a long time so I think I just burned out and lost direction.

No it wasn’t that long. It was the end of 1994 until somewhere around 1998 when I started to get my feet wet a little bit. Then by 2000 I was back in.

You know, for a year I put all my instruments in storage and then I pulled a few guitars out and I just played for myself. I still wasn’t all that inspired. It was a bizarre thing that I never really thought would happen but in hindsight it was actually the best thing because it gave me a chance to really get away.

Oh yeah.

Within the industry I’m well known.

There’s pockets of fans that’ll know me and not everybody will. It depends on what kind of stuff they listen to.

The album Zig Zag was not even supposed to happen because I never did make another hit record after I started working with David [Bowie]. I started to get re-inspired so I just started writing for no reason and I was really digging it. Then as time went on I started compiling a lot of stuff and really liking it. So the next thing was that I just called up Mark Plati who ended up producing the record and said, “You know Mark, why don’t we put together some studio time and go cut some tracks. I think I want to make a record.” Then it kind of went from there.

Zig Zag is a place. It’s a place up in the foothills of Mount Hood outside of Portland in Oregon. I lived there for awhile. It’s a really beautiful forest and it was a place I used to like to go to because my sanity is nature especially forests. One of the first tracks that I wrote was this instrumental when I came back from there one day. The music started getting in my head in the car on the way back, I wrote the thing in about two hours and then I named it Zig Zag.

No, none.

That was the idea. I had this music and we got to the point where we were talking about doing vocals. But David actually volunteered to do something on the record. I never realized we were going to end up doing an actual full-blown song. Then I gave him stuff to listen to and he wrote those lyrics and the funny thing is, especially the lyrics on “Believe” and “Isn't It Evening” those two songs and Zig Zag actually very much describe where I was at and things that I’ve actually experienced. It’s bizarre because I never talked to any of these guys about that stuff [laughs]. The music must have just reflected some kind of a feeling that caused them to write those lyrics

Right, but the thing was that the lyrics were so like if I were to write lyrics myself.

I gave up on it a long time ago. I’ve got some songs I wrote lyrics to on some of my older albums but I never was very happy with myself as a lyricist. I should concentrate on what I can do best and I don’t try to do things I can’t do very well. Because I could spend a lot of time trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally to me or I could develop the things that do come naturally to me.

It wasn’t. What ended up happening was that as we started recording some stuff things just fell into place. I never asked David or Robert or Joe Elliot to do their tracks.

With David I was on the phone with Mark Plati and David overhead the conversation. Then he called me and “So you’re going to go into the studio with Mark. That’s really good news. I’m real happy about that. So I guess you’re not interested in me coming in and maybe doing something, like background vocals or keyboards.” It sounded like a good idea to me. With Robert it was Mark Plati again. We went in and redid a Cure song called The Forest. My version is on the new Cure Box Set. When Mark went over to London to mix it with Robert Smith, he brought over some of the stuff that we were recording and he played it for Robert. Robert got excited and wanted to get involved.

I’ve never done an album that’s fallen into place like that. I think one of the lessons I learned on my time off was do what you do and everything else will fall into place. You got to be patient, I had to learn that.

It sucks. I don’t like when I have to force anything whether it’s writing a song or putting together anything in this business. I don’t like forcing things. It’s a funny thing because the best stuff that ever happened to me in this business fell on me.

Right off with the David Bowie situation in 1974 I had a very dear friend named Michael Kamen.

Yes actually Michael passed away about in November.

Michael took me under his wing when I was like 19 years old and helped me out producing my band. Then when he went on the road he took me out because he had a rock band before he became a composer. It was band called the “New York Rock and Roll Ensemble” and he took me out as a guitar player. Bowie had mentioned to him he was looking for a guitar player and Michael suggested that I do it. At the time my focus was on the band and trying to go out and get a deal.

I think the name of the band might have been “Scandal” before the other “Scandal” but I honestly couldn’t tell you. There was a singer named Bo Jack. Then we had another guitarist named Jimmy Mac who also sang lead, they used to split the leads.

The John Lennon thing was another weird situation where my manager just got a phone call one day from Jack Douglas. Douglas said, “We’re going in the studio with John Lennon and he wants Earl Slick to play on the album.”

It’s the same thing that happened with this album and this last four years that I’ve been working with Bowie again. We hadn’t talked in nine years. Then all of a sudden I got contacted one day and they said, “David wants you to come back and, and do some work.”

The funny story about the internet is on my time off I put together a site called, “Slick Music Inc.” We were repackaging people’s obscure stuff like demos and unreleased stuff so we put together this little record company on the internet. That’s how David tracked me down because I was pretty invisible at the time and they just did an internet search, found the site and left me a message

The email showed the office name and the phone number. My webmaster goes, “we got this message on here to the webmaster from so and so at this phone number.” I thought, oh that’s weird, that’s Bowie’s office.

Last time we actually did anything together was in the 80’s so it had been a long time. It is different because we’re different.

Yeah, we always got along well but it’s hard to describe. It’s really easy, it’s a lot of fun, we’re having a really good time and it feels more natural than it ever did.

I love Sanctuary.

No the way we came up with that was, I had a friend of mine named Frankie La Rocca who’s worked A & R on a variety of record companies and we had been buddies since forever. He’s real good at this stuff and I said, “I want to go get a deal. Obviously we’re not going to go to the majors so see what you can come up with.” So he came up with a bunch of ideas and we ran through everything and he was really excited more than anything about the “Sanctuary thing”.

First of all, I wasn’t sure if they would be interested in me and if they were interested in me it would be only because I would be playing with David again; which wouldn’t suit me well in the long term.

[Sanctuary Records CEO] Merck Mercuriadis signed me in the label because they don’t even have an A & R department and I sat down and I told him what I was looking to do and how I wanted to do it. We were on the same page and it just felt like the right thing to do.

I want my music out there and I’m not as convinced as everybody else that right now you’re going to go out with a new record, put up a website and do enough business to keep going. I don’t believe it.

I know I’m right.

As much as there always artists versus the corporate thing, you have to realize that this is a business and you have to generate enough business so you can actually do what you love to do which is play music. Unless you’ve got some rich girlfriend that just wants to pay your bills and you can just run around playing for free for the rest of your life [laughs].

It was pretty cool, how could it not be. It was great to work with one of the guys that was instrumental for me even being in the business in the first place, John and the Beatles. The Beatles were a big inspiration but Lennon was the one I gravitated towards when I was a kid. There are certain people that you work with that get it [laughs]. We went in the studio as a band, we were treated like we were a band, he was at the sessions every day and he liked the idea of being in the band.

We went in the studio and said, ”Hey this is the song for today, this is the chords, let’s play it.” We’d play it, run it down a bunch of times and if it felt good we’d record it. Then hang out and get some lunch. I mean it was just like you were just hanging out with your own band.

That’s why I don’t do sessions at all anymore and I never really did a ton of ‘em, because I don’t like the idea of walking in to a situation where you’re hired because you have a particular name or you’re reputation gets you hired. Obviously I worked pretty hard for my reputation and it does serve me well. I got a call from somebody about doing a record earlier this year and I was called because I was with Bowie. These guys were so far off the mark, I ended up not doing it but I mean they couldn’t have picked the more wrong guitar player for the project.

That’s bullshit. At this point I don’t have to do that, I don’t want to do it. What I’m really interested, besides working with David, is doing my own albums, scoring some movies which is something that we’re working on right now.

When I was working with Michael I never thought about doing it myself. Then right before I took a break in ’94, I wrote some stuff and sent it out and I really wasn’t getting any results out of it. But I also didn’t really understand the machinery behind it all. It’s very political and it takes a lot of to get yourself out there with the right people and I didn’t realize that at the time. I had the bug about ten years ago to start doing this and now it looks like it’s going to be falling into place.

No there’s nothing in particular happening right now. I have people working for me right now who are involved and very excited about it so things will pop.

Yeah.

No I’m still on the road with David. We’re in the middle of a huge tour right now.

Not anymore [laughs]. I think maybe the summer.

What I’m going to do for my album is at the end of the year I want to go out and do some dates but there’s no way to do a tour because we’ve been out so long with David that when I get back, what I really want to do is to start writing again

Another Earl Slick album and just writing in general. Then I’ll start weeding through the stuff and figure out what I’ll just save for other things and what I might use for myself.

A lot [laughs]

No I’d say probably about seven or eight bands. But I’m not interested in ever putting together a band for myself again.

My interests have changed. Maybe I’ll put together a band to do gigs.

But as far as saying, I’m going to go find a great singer, I’m going to put a band together. I don’t want to do that. I like the freedom of being able to do my solo thing which leaves me open to work with David, which leaves me open to the movie stuff.

No.

Nope.

Ah, I’m too busy.

Years ago. I’m not twenty-five.

The difference with that whole mind-set these days is today’s my day off right?

I’m going to talk to you and then I’m going to talk to a few other people and then I’m getting picked up by Sanctuary and going down to San Diego to do a radio show. I’m really realizing that one of the things that probably happened before is that my head wasn’t really screwed on straight and I wasn’t keeping an eye on my business

No I didn’t get screwed, but my head wasn’t screwed on straight. If anything I screwed myself by not staying on top of stuff.

Which I think a lot of people in this business get guilty of is getting caught up in the moment and your priorities get a little upside down.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck