Tech Talk

Tech Talk

THOMAS DOLBY: Baby, You Can Eat His Car!

It isn’t hard to picture Thomas Dolby as a young lad growing up in his native England, hovering intently over a kiddie chemistry set and patiently mixing stuff in hopes that something might combust. The 29-year-old keyboardist was just a face in the prowd when a pack of new wave synth-brats invaded our shores a few years back, but his 1983 debut EP and subsequent album, The Golden Age Of Wireless, quickly distinguished Dolby from his fellow somber Brits as—gasp!— an Englishman with a sense of humor, a notion that was reinforced by the mad scientist image he cultivated for the cover of Wireless and the video for his loopy dance hit “She Blinded Me With Science.”

Yet for all of their contrived silliness, Dolby’s records hinted at a subtler side of his talent that was further explored on the sophisticated 1984 follow-up The Flat Earth. In addition to the obligatory footshaker “Hyperactive,” songs like “Screen Kiss” and the seductive title cut proved Dolby to be an innovative, diverse keyboardist and songwriter. The accompanying tour was equally ambitious, with two massive circular video screens that showed vidclips in sync with Dolby’s performance. But as the musiciari side of Dolby began to grow weary of the pop personality side, the artist began to turn his attention to other interests.

“I kjnd of felt at that point that to get on a conveyor belt—making albums, doing tours and talking about it, then making anotheir one—was a bit oppressive to me,” the soft-spoken singer remembers. “Not from record companies or anything, but just from an internal feeling of, ‘I musn’t blow this chance.’ I just felt that I could have more fun doing other projects.”

Fans who wondered whether Dolby had fallen off the face of the globe (or cube, if you adhere to T.D.’s beliefs) in the four years that elapsed between the release of The Flat Earth and the brandspanking-new Aliens Ate My Buick need only have looked as far as their local moviehouses to discover what he’d been up to. A trio of soundtrack projects, including the forgettable low-budget flick Fever Pitch, the forgettable big-budget flop Howard The Duck and the twisted Ken Russell vision Gothic kept him pretty busy.

“I want to make films one day,” Dolby says. ‘‘My appetite was whetted by doing videos. It seemed like a good stepping stone would be to do soundtracks. I enjoy doing them, because you can be imaginitive in a different way from making a record. When you sit down to write a pop song, there’s got to be that snare bit going and a hook and that stuff, whereas when you watch a piece of film you can do anything. It can be a solo flute, it can be an orchestra.. .it gave me a license to experiment with different arrangements, different textures. I suppose it gave me a little bit of insight into how films are made.”

Howard The Duck may not seem like a prime starting point for a hopeful filmmaker, but Dolby found the experience rewarding. ‘‘Mainly the reason I did Howard The Duck was that they wanted me to train four actresses to be a rock ’n’ roll band and to work on their choreography, their stage sets and so on, so that was an invitation to get involved right at the beginning of the production. I actually got what I wanted out of the experience, even though the film ended up not too great. And then Gothic came out with one of the most musical directors there is. (Russell) makes his stuff really loud, and in a couple of instances he actually re-edited the film to fit the music!”

During the same period, Dolby also produced records by other artists, including Joni Mitchell’s Dog Eat Dog and Two Wheels Good by England’s Prefab Sprout. But after relocating from gloomy London to show-biz-happy Los Angeles early in 1987, the keyboardist felt the itch to record and perform again. “I wanted to get out of Britain,” he says. “I was very depressed there, and I was in the mood to write a sort of funny, noisy music. If you go to someone who’s depressed and tell them a joke they just sort of moan, so it wasn’t the right setting to do what I wanted to do.”

For Aliens Ate My Buick, Dolby handpicked a group of Unknown musicians through a local newspaper ad. Dubbed The Lost Toy People, guitarist Larry jTreadwell, bassist Terry Jackson, drummer David Owens, vocalist/percusSionist Laura Creamer and keyboardist Mike Kapitan helped determine the direction the album would take, and the result is a strong collection of get-down-get-funky grodves that bear more resemblance to Prince than any English import. In short, it’s Dolby’s most American album to date.

“Yeah, definitely,” he agrees. “I think my first two albums were very hard to place geographically. There’s a lot of stuff on this album that sounds almost like a journal—an Englishman in America, Tommy Goes Hollywood.

“I wrote all of the songs around the band,” he continues. “As soon as I picked them, I told my agent tb book some gigs six weeks away. At that point I had very little material written at all. The first thing we ^worked on were the grooves; we wpuld just jam around, and I would gradually sing and play more over the top. Later on, we would take those shreds and knit them together with some kind of pattern.”

This piecemeal philosophy also came in handy when it came time to lay down the actual tracks for Aliens, which was recorded on 32-track digital and 16-track analog. “It’s all sampled, everything,” Dolby confides. “But you don’t hear it because when you say sampling, you think of somebody going ‘bo’ into the mike, and tfiat plays back on the keyboard, whereas my elements in the sequence were not single notes. They were eight bars of drums, and then a two-bar drum fill is a different element, and a bass lick is a different element, too, so it’s like I’m taking much, much larger pieces and using them in sequences. The end result is that you don’t get that sort of sequenced, machine-like quality to it. The main way that I used it was that we’d already played all the songs live, and I wanted to catch the best possible performance. I didn’t want to have that nagging feeling that the version that went on the album was actually only a third-rate performance of the song as far as the band was concerned. What I did was over a period of a couple of weeks, I recorded several takes of each of the songs, all to the same click, and then I compiled the highlights using really long samples.”

On tour, Dolby & The Lost Toy People must rely less on electronics and more on manpower than in the studio, though a raucous L.A.-area show recently proved they were up to the task. “The ‘Flat Earth’ tour was a very ambitious show,” Dolby notes. “It usually came off, but not always. There were a lot of things that could go wrong that were dependent. I kind of swore that when I went out there again, I would just find a band that could really play and do a set that was completely variable in terms of the order of songs, the directions of the songs and the tempos. . the thing about human beings, as opposed to machines, is they respond to atmosphere. If you run a sequence, on some nights it seems too fast and on others too slow, ’cause it’s not really part of the event. It’s just a clock. With this band, there isn’t that sort of perfection/imperfection sort of thing.

“Also, almost all of the rhaterial from this album is groove-based, which means if I want to play an extra four-bar solo or skip a verse or add in sohrie more lyrics or whatever, I’m free tb do that. I like the freedom of not having any sort of restrictions.”

Dolby is also enjoying the freedom of gettirig out from behind the ol’ Roland ahd whooping it up a bit onstage. On his last tour, he split his stage time behind the stationary keyboard and in front of a microphone, but this time out Dolby is 100% frontman, playing a portable Yamaha KX5 or Casio AX1 while Kapitan mans the heavier equipment.

“I have a rack set-up which I kind of put together when I first formed the band,” Dolby says. “It consists of an Akai S900, a Super Jupiter module, and a Roland MKS20 piano module, all going through ah Akai MIDI mixer, and a couple of effects—an SPX-90 (Yamaha’s reverb unit) and an Alesis Midifex. The memories reach program on each of those, including the mixer, that I can call up from the remote keyboard that I have around my heck. In other words, I hit one button on the remote and it says program 99, but in the track it tells the SPX-90 to go to program 48, the mixer to go to program 12. . .as I hit one button, it sends each machine to its particular location complete with the mix, echo returns and everything, and it comes out in stereo.”

Dolby’s come a long way from his earliest musical inclination, “playing percussion on a spoon set in the kitchen” to a Cliff Richard & The Shadows record his older brother happened to be listening fo. ironically, the first instrument the budding musician attempted to tackle was the guitar. “I saved up and bought an acoustic guitar when I was nine,” he recalls. “I had a friend iri school who played Joan Baez and Lepnard Cohen songs. He taught them to me.”

As his musical interests shifted to jazz, he took up piano. “I didn’t like jazz guitar that much,” he laughs. “The side of jazz that I always liked was the compositional side. It was the chords rather than the fingerwork.”

Today, Dolby lists jazz greats Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk among his favorite pianists, as well as more contemporary artists like Brian Eno and Kraftwerk. And while Dolby himself may some day be remembered as one of the more creative studio wizards in this largely ignorable decade of rote technocrats, he insists that his musical abililties leave something to be desired. “I’m very undisciplined,” he explains without guilt. “Probably when I was 15,

I was technically a better keyboard player than I am now. I’m really technically poor now, but I’m imaginative. But I have no pride in my playing ability what^ soever... it’s something I’ve been saving for middle age, to be able to get myself a white Steinway and a nice room overlooking a river and learn to play.”

In the meantime, Dolby promises we won’t have to wait four more years for his next record. “I bame up with the germs of quite a few more songs at the time of this album,” he says. “And also, I feel more secure about myself as a performer and as a public person.” And in an age when keyboard technology has come so far that the instrument can virtually play itself, Dolby still incorporates that muchneeded human element. “I think, ultimately, it’s morq gratifying to be able to play an instrument than to be able to twiddle a knob,” he says with a sly grin. “You just have to take chances with everything and break the rules, and don’t let yourself fall irito a formula.”

Spoken like a true innovator.

Steve Peters