In 1968 we lived in a ranch house in Delaware, with a soybean field behind us and Delaware Park racetrack about four miles away. From the street it looked like an ordinary middle-class American house. Inside were my three brothers, my sister and me, five children born within six years of one another. You didn't have to invite anybody over to have a crowd.
We had a record player with a ridiculous little coloured-light display. When the music played, the lights flashed, and for a while the room became a sort of nightclub run by children. Nobody was old enough to get in, naturally. That didn't trouble the management.
Music was everywhere outside that house, too. America was in the middle of a spectacular upheaval. The Summer of Love had been the year before. There were protests, hippies, Vietnam on the television, and terrible news mixed in with astonishing news. In July 1969, men walked on the Moon. I was more concerned with whether a DJ would play the song I wanted before dinner.
The radio was our connection to the records. If I loved a song, I turned the dial from station to station until I found somebody playing it. I might hear only the last chorus and have to begin the hunt again. You couldn't pull up a track whenever you liked. You had to wait, listen, and be ready when the first notes finally arrived.
My brothers and I studied the charts in the newspaper. We underlined the records we wanted before my mother went to Woolworths. We weren't asking her to bring home any old music. We'd heard the song on the radio, knew exactly how it went, and were burning to possess the thing.
Every so often she returned with the wrong record. There were people making cover versions of hits and dressing them up to look like the originals. To a mother trying to buy the right 45, the label could be a trap. She'd bring home the song we asked for, except that somebody else was singing it. The tune was right. Everything else was wrong. We could tell in seconds.
I don't think we were particularly kind to the records themselves. Five children handled a 45 as though it were indestructible. They were played, piled up, passed around, left out of their paper sleeves, and occasionally thrown about. With favourites we made some effort to keep the jackets intact. Our devotion to the music didn't always extend to the vinyl.
There was no internet. We didn't have fanzines giving us biographies and photographs. Once in a while an artist turned up on a television variety show, and that felt like a visit from another planet. Usually the people making our favourite records were voices on the radio. The closest we got to them was a sleeve, if we were lucky enough to have one with a picture.
I stared at those covers. What did these people look like when they weren't posing? How did they make that sound? Where did they go after the record ended? You could know every note of a single and know almost nothing about the person singing it. The mystery made the records even better.
Think of the music that was coming at us. The Four Tops had ‘Bernadette’; Aretha Franklin had ‘Respect’; the Box Tops had ‘The Letter.’ There was the Beatles' ‘Hey Jude,’ Mama Cass singing ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me,’ Sly and the Family Stone's ‘Everyday People,’ and the Jackson 5 with ‘I Want You Back.’ By 1970, Simon & Garfunkel had given us ‘Bridge over Troubled Water,’ and Stevie Wonder had ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours.’ I wasn't studying a golden age. I was living in it.
I loved the Four Tops, especially Levi Stubbs, who could make almost any line sound urgent. Mama Cass had a voice I could listen to all day. I was mad about Sly and the Family Stone. Nobody told me that these people belonged in different categories. They all belonged in the same room, provided somebody put the record on.
One of the first singles I bought was R. B. Greaves's ‘Take a Letter, Maria,’ from 1969. I wore that record out. The opening, the horns, the way it moved—I wanted the whole thing again as soon as it finished. I couldn't have explained why. I didn't have to. I had the needle and the record was still on the turntable.
We lived in the ranch house for about another five years. Then we moved to an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in Newark, Delaware. It was a different house and a different sort of place. I took the records with me, or at least the habit of disappearing into them. Music had become somewhere I could go, regardless of the address.
By 1974, when I was fourteen, I was listening to albums as well as singles. The three-minute pop record could make my day; now I wanted records that would take up the evening. Joni Mitchell's ‘Court and Spark’ appeared in 1974. Then 1975 brought Led Zeppelin's ‘Physical Graffiti’ and Pink Floyd's ‘Wish You Were Here.’ In 1976 there was Stevie Wonder's ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ and the Eagles' ‘Hotel California.’ In 1977 came Fleetwood Mac's ‘Rumours,’ Pink Floyd's ‘Animals,’ and Crosby, Stills & Nash's ‘CSN.’ By 1978 there was Springsteen's ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ and the Rolling Stones' ‘Some Girls.’ Imagine being fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and having all of that arriving around you.
I didn't know what a producer did. I wasn't learning the publishing business or making notes about hooks. I was just a kid listening with everything I had. I began to hear that the same song could be transformed by a particular voice, a few bars of rhythm, or a sound you couldn't quite name. The fake Woolworths singles had taught me that much: the record itself was the thing.
On my father's side, both my grandparents played piano. My grandmother had played professionally in an orchestra, and she was probably the better pianist. My grandfather was another kind of player. He played ragtime, bebop and Irish songs, and he sang. She had the technique; he filled the house with music.
I got my first guitar around 1978, a Yamaha acoustic. Later I bought a Sigma, a Korean-made guitar modelled on the Martins. It was wonderful. I was beginning to discover what happened when I tried making the music myself.
One day in 1980, I was fooling around on my grandfather's piano when he came into the room. He listened for a moment. Then he said, ‘Hey, you've got the music in you.’ I don't think anyone has ever paid me a greater musical compliment.
Unfortunately, I neglected to write the song. Years later, New Radicals had a hit with ‘You Get What You Give,’ which includes ‘You've got the music in you.’ I had the line in 1980. I just hadn't written anything to go with it.
In 1984, KPCW in Park City, Utah, gave me a two-hour afternoon radio show. It was the town’s local FM station. I filled my slot with industrial noise. Two hours of it.
I had grown up chasing songs from station to station. Now I was the one choosing what came out of the radio, and for two hours my taste was somebody else’s problem. I don’t know what the listeners thought. I had been given a microphone, and I used it.
By the time Claes Cornelius brought me to Mega in June 1992, I had spent most of my life listening—and a little of it deciding what other people should hear. Within months I would be flying around Europe with masters, arguing over bass lines, working on record sleeves and trying to get somebody to play a song. Some of my paintings would end up inside the albums people bought. None of that had been imaginable from the floor of our little home nightclub.