CREEM SHOWCASE

CREEM SHOWCASE

PATRICK O'HEARN: SOUNDS FOR A NEW AGE

Dan Hedges

You can't really dance to it. You can't sing along. You can probably romance to it. But slap it on the deck just as the party’s shifting into overdrive? Welcome to the year of living dangerously.

Patrick O’Hearn has scored his ticket to the Big Time by playing snappy bass with L.A.’s Missing Persons. But when it came to putting together Ancient Dreams (his first solo album for Private Music, former Tangerine Dream kingpin Peter Baumann’s new label), three years of honing his pop chops seemed to go out the window.

If you insist on a category, call it New Age music. Sparse, mysterious keyboards, with an atmosphere best described as nocturnal— in other words, the kind of stuff your Uncle Larry and the crew down at the muffler shop would probably call “weird.”

“That sort of music has been a strong side of my makeup for a few years now,” O’Hearn explains in Los Angeles. “I just never had a chance to express it until Private Music came into being. The closest I got was with some friends of mine. We made an album back in ’79 called Group 87. It was the early seeds of some of what I’m doing on Ancient Dreams, though it was a little more commercial. Unfortunately, the most interesting stuff never got recorded back then because everybody said ‘Oh, it’ll never fly. It won’t work. It’s too brooding. It’s too dark.’”

Although he has a roomful of four-track demos at home, he admits that Ancient Dreams was “pretty much spontaneously recorded. It wasn’t material that was in the archives collecting dust. It was Action Art in the studio.” ~

Minimal too—which, when you’re trying to be your own one-man band, must be a trick-to pull off without going overboard. As he says, “My solo stuff doesn't reflect any great amount of 19th century classical influence. It’s not my cup of tea. Heavy orchestration. Building a lead for a certain number of bars, then bringing in the chorus, then taking it to a bridge, and transposing it up to a major third to bedazzle an audience into thinking ‘Wow, this guy’s really studied composition. Watch out, he’ll probably be scoring Love Boat next season.”'

In the same breath, though, he admits he’d like to give film score writing a shot. “I’m trying to work on a couple of interesting TV commercials—if there is such a thing. I’ve submitted a demo for what could eventually be a national spot. It was the first time I’d worked with that sort of thing. You never realize how fast time can go by until you’ve got to state a theme, develop it, and complete it within 30 seconds ”

In contrast, Ancient Dreams is languid. Rambling. No hooks. No choruses. Just ambience—which is pretty much the watchword for New Age music in general. While the genre has been around for a while now, the past few years have seen it attracting an audience of potentially platinum proportions. Pianist George Winston, for example, has become the Pink Floyd/Dark Side of the Moon of Windham Hill Records, with an album that’s been in the charts for three full years. “Peter Baumann and I were talking about this,” O’Hearn says. “It’s possible that the post-war baby boomers, who make up a tremendous segment of the population, are now interested in listening to music other than that in the contemporary hit radio format. They’re more selective because they’ve gotten older. More interested in hearing something off beat.

“Everyone who hears Ancient Dreams seems to enjoy it. All kinds of characters from different areas of music. It seems to be getting around. As far as negative feedback from rock fans? My association with Missing Persons has never been that dominant. The key figures in that band are Dale and Terry Bozzio. I’ve remained in a shadowy corner. I contribute to the combo, we go out and play, but I’ve never been in the spotlight.”

There’s no electric bass on O’Hearn’s album. “It just didn’t seem to be necessary, so it’s pretty much all keyboards. In the eyes of anyone currently involved in the arms race of keyboard electronic instruments, I probably have a very archaic setup. Predominantly, I used the PPG Wave 2.2. That’s my favorite instrument. It’s capable of making such a huge variety of sounds.

“I also used an old Oberheim modular system that I built with the original Oberheim synthesizer—the old white face SEM modules with noise generators built into them. That’s where a lot of the big percussion sounds come from. I also used the ARP 2600 and a Roland MC-4 microcomposer. There was a little bit of Roland TR-808 and some Linn Drum. We also brought in a Synclavier system— though I must admit that $150,000 for a full system is quite a bit.”

For new players, the variety, complexity, and price of the current generation of keyboards often proves hair-raising when it comes time to plunk down your hard-earned money. “Prices seem to be coming down but, yeah, that’s often the case,” O’Hearn says. “I wanted a synthesizer for years. I’d blown all my loot on a 275-yearold Austrian bass fiddle, which certainly set me back. At that time even the ARP 2600 was $3,000. The PPG Wave 2.2 is expensive, but it’s so easy to work with. Somebody with absolutely no knowledge of how these things work can come up to it, tweak a few knobs, and come up with a lovely sound. That’s unlike instruments like the Yamaha DX-7, which is a brain-hemorrhaging operation to program if you really want to get inside and make the most of it.”

Born in Los Angeles, O’Hearn later moved to Oregon with his family. “Both my parents are musicians,” he explains. “My dad’s a tenor sax player. My mother’s a piano player. They had a band, I was the first born, and in order to fill out the rhythm section, they needed either a drummer or a bass player. I felt more comfortable on bass, so I started sitting in with them in nightclubs when I was about nine, working professionally from 9 p.m. until 2 a.m.”

Doesn’t sound strictly legal.

“Well, if it was a club that had a restaurant or a lobby in it, I had to go sit there during breaks. The bartenders were usually very forgiving and would pour me a gin and tonic in a coffee cup. It was strange when I was in junior high, working these clubs until 2 a.m. You come into class, everybody stands up for the Pledge of Allegiance and talks about who’s going steady with who. Meanwhile, the night before, I’d been sitting on the lap of a buxom cocktail waitress.”

Although he served time with a local rock band, jazz held the lead. After high school, he gravitated toward the Bay Area, where he worked with jazz luminaries like Dexter Gordon, Joe Pass, and Charles Lloyd, “pretty much whipping it all out on the acoustic bass, though playing a little electric too.”

While in Los Angeles in 1976, he dropped by the Record Plant one night to visit old friend Terry Bozzio, then drumming for Frank Zappa’s band. “Frank had fired everybody except Terry, and was looking to put together another combo,” O’Hearn recalls. “It was about 3:30 in the morning, and I brought my string bass in from the car. Frank looked up from the mixing desk, looked at the bass, and before any formal introductions said, ‘You actually play that thing?’ I said, ‘Yes I do.’ He called out to one of the engineers, told him to set up a mike, then asked me, ‘You wanna whip something out on that for me?”’

The stint with Zappa’s band segued into Group 87, which in turn segued into Missing Persons. Although O’Hearn’s main band instrument remains the electric bass, he uses a Mini-Moog for the synth bass parts. “It’s such a good instrument. Even though it’s

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not programmable, there’s not a variety of patch changes—at least in the context of Missing Persons—where you have to be furiously tweaking around with to get what you need. This time around, I’ll be filling a bit more of the keyboard chair. That was filled by Chuck Wild, because Chuck has left to pursue other things.”

As for his basses, his current instrumentsof-choice come from Guild. “I’d lost track of the company since about 1971, but they’ve got a new line out,” he explains. “They sent me two Pilot basses—a fretted and a fretless—to try out, and I flipped over them. They’ve started using EMG pickups, which are used by some of the best bass guitar manufacturers like Steinberger and Spector.”

For strings, he alternates between German-made Maxima round wounds, Dean Markleys, and Rotosound Swing Bass long-scale round wounds. Currently, his amps are in a,state of flux. “When we start whipping it out live, I’ve got to get my stage set-up together. At the moment, I’m using a Carvin amp in conjunction with a Crown DC-300. I’m using Guild-Hartke cabinets with four 12” speakers, and I’ve flipped over them too.”

The band’s third album, produced by Bernard Edwards, should be landing in the racks momentarily. “It’s the best thing Missing Persons have ever done, and I can say that in good confidence.”