Between a Heart and a Rock Place (15 page)

On a personal level, it was a more pared-down group. I was blessed to have my brother, Andy, as my personal assistant. Andy and I were so close. Considering how high-maintenance he was as a kid, it was really funny that in the end he worked taking care of things for Spyder and me. Andy was always on a scavenger hunt, more so for Spyder than for me. Spyder was always looking for things that either didn't exist, or if they did exist he couldn't remember the name of the company that made them or where he'd seen them. So every morning Andy would sit down with a pad and paper and say, “What's on the list today?” He also
made sure I did all the phone interviews I had scheduled and kept a timeline for photo shoots and that kind of thing. The best thing about working with Andy was that he had a great sense of humor, a quick, dry wit that just doubled me over with laughter.

I never traveled with hair and makeup people. I did my own hair and makeup from the time we started out. There was a valet who took care of all the stage clothes, a necessity on the road with that many people. Wardrobe was a nonissue. I wore what I wanted to, when I wanted to, end of story. Whatever felt right was what I put on. No one, and I mean no one, interfered with how I looked on the road.

One of the most liberating parts of being on the road was that it was entirely our show, the one place where no one outside the band interfered. Live performance was our domain, and no one dared cross the line. We were in charge of everything: what we wore, what we played, how we presented ourselves to the world. There was no pretense, no artifice, no marketing issues, no one's opinions but ours. We played as we always had, with raw abandon. It was the reason we began and it was the reason we continued.

I've long said that the difference between making a record and playing live is that one is forever and the other is in the moment. When you go in and cut a record, you know that you must try to get the perfect sound. It's an act of self-indulgence. You are able to concentrate on every nuance of the song. You can dissect the tracks, the vocals, the arrangement, in an insulated environment, taking things apart and putting them back together in endless combinations. I loved making records. It was intense but Zenlike when it was done right.

Live performance was the antithesis of that—going for the moment with no rules. It was all about the impermanence of the situation. Perfection could be achieved without being perfect, and it was encouraged. Perfection was about that thing in your head needing to get out. When you achieved that, it was done, and you'd live with it. But every night I went onstage it was a new experience. What happened each night of
the tour depended on the audience. I had no way of knowing what the crowd would be like on any given night. It was the impulsiveness, the chemistry—the potential for spontaneous combustion between you and the fans. There was nothing more seductive than the shared experience between me and an audience. We made records in a vacuum. Live performance was all about the connection.

And the best part about the live performances on the tour for
Get Nervous
was that for the first time in two years we were able to enjoy ourselves. With my breakup from Spyder a thing of the distant past, we were all able to just relax, play, and enjoy life on the road. It was the biggest relief—for everyone. The band and crew practically threw a party. Without the distraction of fighting, we all had renewed enthusiasm, and it showed in our performance. The record was doing well and we were playing to sold-out venues.

There was one date however, when things got a bit scary. We were playing to a packed house at the Lakeland Civic Center in Florida, when I collapsed on stage—out cold. Newman came rushing up from the sound board because he thought I'd been shot. It turned out it was food poisoning, but I was rushed to the hospital and kept there overnight. The audience had a choice to get a refund for their tickets or come back for the make-up show. An astonishing 98 percent of the ticket holders chose to come back, and we made t-shirts for people who presented their ticket stubs from the original concert that said, “Lakeland…You Knock Me Out!”

Food poisoning aside, taking the music from
Get Nervous
on the road was a terrific experience for all of us, especially for Spyder, because he believed it was the best album we'd made so far. He loved the addition of keyboards. Of course, he was a keyboard player himself, but he enjoyed turning that over to someone else so he could concentrate on production. He wanted someone who could play keys as well as he played guitar. For him, the tour was an opportunity to broaden the experience.

He was working on that very thing, expanding the sound, when
out of the blue one day, we got a call from Chrysalis demanding we start work immediately on another album. I couldn't believe that once again they were pushing us to record while we were on the road—especially since feelings were still raw from the cover art on
Get Nervous
. The reality was that they didn't want to lose momentum, and as always this was paramount in their minds. It caused them to make poor decisions with no regard to the musical evolution that was so necessary between records. In the end, they demanded another record, and as always, the contract was their trump card.

Even so, I said, “Fuck you.” I was
not
ready to record again. The time that we'd been able to take before recording
Get Nervous
had played a key role in allowing us to broaden our sound. We'd had time to experiment and try new things, to see where our sound was heading. To rush back into the studio for a full album might jeopardize all that we'd gained and cause us to fall back into safe patterns rather than push ourselves.

We finally decided that the only way we could meet our nine-month deadline was to record a live album. We pushed for this because it satisfied our contractual obligation while giving us a little breathing room. But we didn't want to cut off our nose to spite our face; a record that didn't sell would hurt us as well as the label. So in a compromise, we decided to include two new songs on the album, which would be called
Live from Earth:
“Lipstick Lies” and “Love Is a Battlefield.” This decision would prove to be career and life altering.

We got “Love Is a Battlefield” from our friend Holly Knight. Like me, Holly was a New Yorker who started out in classical music, in her case as a pianist. She made the transition to rock while she was still in high school, and ironically, her band was named Spider. The band signed with Dreamland Records, headed by Mike Chapman at the time. They released two albums in 1980 and '81, and then Holly started writing for Mike's publishing company. The two of them collaborated on “Love Is a Battlefield.”

“Battlefield” was originally written as a ballad, unhurried and
dreamy. But for some reason, Spyder heard it as a rhythmic anthem, up-tempo and high energy with a beat that was not that of a ballad. Spyder had never liked drum machines; he liked live performances, and trying to create that once-in-a-lifetime moment. But when he was getting ready to work on “Battlefield,” he started fooling around with a brand-new drum machine and hearing Bo Diddley in his head. Somehow between the drum machine and Bo Diddley, he came up with an idea for the song. As he described the sound to me, I wasn't sure I understood, but I was intrigued. I was the only one in the band who'd heard the song in any of its incarnations and the only one who knew it was meant to be a very slow piece.

He decided that he wanted the band to experiment on the arrangement, and he called them together at Leeds Rehearsal Studio. Instead of going into the “big room” to rehearse as we normally would, he had them set up in the parking lot. They weren't given any charts, they never heard the demo. He simply gave them random chord changes and the pattern that he'd written on the drum machine. They sat there with curious looks, wondering what he was up to this time.

Everyone in the band was shaking his head. He told them to play the chord changes to the drum loop. They hated that idea!

“Neil, this is nuts! We don't have any idea what we're doing!”

Spyder was in his mad scientist mode. “Never mind. Just play! Just play! Just play!”

Even Peter Coleman was shaking his head. “Okay, I think you're onto something. I'm gonna let you go—but I still think you're nuts.”

They recorded every part out in the parking lot; then Spyder took them inside to listen. “All right. Now you've heard what the track should sound like. Play it like you did in the parking lot, and don't screw it up by thinking.”

It was from that chaos that Spyder made a song that would be sung in front of bedroom mirrors and at karaoke clubs for years to come. Spyder's talent for seeing where music was headed next was remark
able. He had a gift for anticipating trends and he never let anyone stand in the way of that. The product he made sounded unlike anything else out there. It was its own thing—danceable but still rock. The eighties were still young but they were developing their own sound—and that sound wasn't just about hard-driving guitars anymore. Spyder realized this incredibly early on, and he channeled that instinct into “Love Is a Battlefield.” This was where music was headed.

But that was not how Chrysalis saw it. Their reaction wasn't good. They hated
everything
. They didn't like the talking on the front end of the song, the whistling at the end, or the signature drum pattern. To them, the song was far too dance-oriented and not rock-and-roll enough. It moved away from the tried-and-true formula that had been so successful for us. They weren't interested in gambling, especially when it might affect their bottom line. We were a “rock” band. Anything that seemed to deviate from that wasn't acceptable. And Mike Chapman
really
hated it. Though he was usually a forward-thinker, all Chapman could hear was that the song was in no way the one he wrote, and he said we'd ruined it.

As we fought over the song, it became more apparent that these people who in the beginning had been so intimidating in their knowledge of the record business weren't so smart after all. I wasn't sure if it was that they had lost touch with the contemporary music scene, become complacent, or were simply greedy. Whatever it was, they had no idea where music was headed and possessed no vision for how music was changing. In the same way that their confidence in “Heartbreaker” had been tenuous because of disco's popularity, they didn't anticipate the evolution of rock giving rise to something else. It didn't matter to me that they were “lifers”—experienced music industry professionals with an impressive track record. They didn't see where the decade was going. They didn't understand what was happening out there. They had no foresight, no vision. The universe had played its hand, and their time was finished.

Over the period of a few weeks, gradually we began to wear them down. With Peter behind him on everything, Spyder wouldn't back down, because he knew in his heart he was correct. He refused to change one thing. The solid opposition that marked the label's initial reaction gave way and they started warming up to the track. Buzzard was the first to change his mind, and eventually Chrysalis had no choice but to go with it.

It didn't hurt that Bob Giraldi had signed on to direct the video. Bob was fresh from doing the video for Michael Jackson's “Beat It” when he agreed to direct the video for “Battlefield.” Everyone knew that he'd put an original, creative spin on the song that would help give it the push it would need. Once again, we went for a story rather than a performance. This time there were no period costumes, though. It was a streetwise tale of alienated youth. A young woman who fights with her parents flees to the big city, only to fall in with its seedy underbelly.

The video as Bob envisioned it would be choreographed and would also have dialogue. Now, anyone who knows me knows I am completely uncoordinated, with two left feet. The thought of doing a dance routine was intimidating, but I figured if I could pretend to fly an airplane, I could probably pretend I knew how to dance. The choreographer was a guy named Michael Peters who was incredibly talented, and the thought of working with a celebrated choreographer made the whole thing even more appealing. If anyone could make a dancer out of me, I figured it was him.

The video was filmed in New York City and there were two days of dance rehearsals before the shoot. The first day of rehearsals started early. We had a lot of work to do. All the dancers were assembled in the dance studio, looking like characters right out of
A Chorus Line,
beautiful men and women with muscular bodies in skintight outfits, stretching, twirling. As I stood there watching them, I couldn't figure out
what exactly I'd been thinking when I signed on to do this. I was in way over my head.

Throughout the day, we danced. Well,
they
danced. I don't know what you'd call what I was doing, but it wasn't dancing. After about seven hours, Michael Peters sent all the dancers home to rest for tomorrow's rehearsal, but he wasn't quite done with me.

He walked over to me and said, “You've never done anything like this before, have you?”

“No,” I said sheepishly, as though I'd been caught lying about my homework.

“Don't you worry. By tomorrow night you'll be a pro.”

He spent the next five hours breaking down every step, one-on-one, until I got it. The entire time he was sweet and patient, never once making me feel as ridiculous as I probably looked. The next day, while I was not ready for Broadway, I was dancing. That second day, we put in another twelve hours of rehearsal, and I swear even my toenails hurt when we were done. I'd always admired dancers, but I had newfound respect for them after those two days.

With the dance routine as solid as it was ever going to be, we descended into the city for the shoot. We shot all over downtown Manhattan, finding every seamy block that we could. When it came time to film the big dance number, I was more nervous than I'd been in years and flashes of my first performance at Catch were appearing in front of my eyes. I could sing
anything,
anytime, anywhere, but this was a whole new world. It ended up working out well, with everyone being supportive and charitable. The shoot lasted all day, and I was able to convince people that I had some idea of what I was doing.