THE PROG INTERVIEW
Whether as a member of fusion legends Return To Forever or as a solo star in his own right, Al Di
Meola is a music legend. Here, he tells us his epic story.
We were bringing rock together with elements of jazz and classical
and that’s exactly what fusion meant at the time. Prior to us, there was really no such thing as a solid term like fusion because everything was either rock, pop or jazz.
The Prog Interview is just that: every month, we’re going to get inside the minds of some of the biggest names in music. This issue, it’s guitar genius Al Di Meola, whose blistering speed lit a fire under Return To Forever in the early days of fusion. Five decades into his career, Di Meola says he’s finally happy making music.
Al Di Meola was still a student at Berklee College of Music when he was invited to join Chick Corea’s seminal fusion group Return To Forever, alongside Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. The three albums the band recorded featuring Di Meola’s prodigious guitar playing – Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery and Romantic Warrior – broke into the charts and made the players stars.
In his early 20s, Di Meola launched his solo career with 1976’s Land Of The Midnight
Sun. Over the decades since, the guitarist has demonstrated his versatility and intimidating virtuosity, whatever style he’s been playing. There’s the energetic fusion of 1977’s gold certified Elegant Gypsy; in 1980 he swapped lightningfast flamenco licks with John McLaughlin and Paco De Lucia; and the new millennium has seen him exploring the music of Argentinian tango composer Astor Piazzolla. In 2013 he celebrated his childhood heroes on All Your Life (A Tribute To The Beatles), recorded at Abbey Road. “I truly felt like this five-year-old kid going to Disney World for the first time,” he says.
His latest album, Opus, proves that whether he’s holding an electric guitar or an acoustic, he remains one of the instrument’s most dazzling and inventive masters.
You’ve said that Opus was the first album you’ve made while happy. Is that true?
There are a lot of life conflicts and there’s always chaos and things of that nature. For a very long time, music was a retreat from all these other parts of life that are not as enjoyable as music. But this time, my personal life was really great thanks to my recent marriage to a German girl, and we had a baby together.
It’s a whole different experience completely than what I had experienced before.
I never thought
I could write music in the company of my family. I always thought I had to be isolated and almost miserable in order to create. There are a lot of comedians that come from misery and hardship and that’s why they’re so great, but in my field it was just a turnaround of events that led me to this very peaceful time in my life.
For some reason, the end result of the record made it sound different to me. I love my other records, but I think this one has a special quality, and it might be due to the fact that things are better in life.
You embraced the stereotype of the tortured artist?
In some ways yes. I hated being tortured, I didn’t like feeling tortured, but after a while I started to think, “Well, I guess this is the only way you can make records or even perform shows.” It’s the way it is – you’re just living in a depressive state and it’s just the norm. I did think that maybe I wouldn’t be able, now that I’m happier, to produce on the same level or get to that inspiring place. But it’s not true.
How did you record Opus?
It was really a solo record: I did all the parts. There are a few
pieces where I have guests here and there but primarily, on 90 per cent of the record, I play all the parts: the bass, all the percussion, and all the overdubbed sounds.
I think that the hardest parts are the written arpeggios, which is the middle stave when I’m writing out music, and playing those parts is usually very difficult for somebody to get just right as an accompanist. The time to find someone, pay someone and then to teach them is enormous, so I eliminated the enormous and I did it myself because I can do it the best and I wouldn’t have the hassle of having to take the time.
When you’re doing it this way, you might get things closer to perfect; when you’re playing with other musicians, on the other hand, it might not be perfect, but if they’re playing on a certain level, amazing things could happen. They could bring something to the table, some magic that spins off what you’ve written, which is what happens when we play live.
I’d love to have a live version of some of these songs after we’ve toured it for a while, but I really wasn’t in a position at that point in time when I made Opus to go on the road with all this new music and then go in the studio.
I really had that block of time to write and record, which is different than the record I did years ago, Pursuit Of Radical Rhapsody [2011]. We toured
Pursuit Of Radical Rhapsody for a whole year, then we went into the studio, and that has its advantages too. When you hear [The Beatles’] Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour, they never went on the road to play those songs, but when you listen to it, you don’t think, “Oh man, this would have been way better if they had toured it first.” It sounds freaking great. That’s the bottom line: how does it sound?
Is it a challenge to find musicians at your level for touring?
Yes, it’s a real challenge. The problem sometimes is you might find a great, great musician but they can’t improvise or they can’t feel the syncopation of the rhythm at all. Zero. They can read whatever is there, but they can’t go outside of the music that’s written because they don’t have that in their training or in their feel. To find somebody that has great technique, great execution, great feel and then is able to adapt to never losing the time when you syncopate the rhythm, that’s everything. That’s what I look for, somebody who has both abilities of reading the music, having the schooling, but also having the street sensibility.
Where does your sense of syncopation spring from?
It’s almost as if I come from Cuba: I have a natural instinct for Latin rhythm. It’s not something you can learn – you’ve either got it from birth or not, and that’s an absolute fact.
There are people who are not from Cuba who have it, like
Steve Gadd, Chick Corea, Herbie [Hancock], the ability to play around the time without the time moving. You can dance around the rhythm and very rarely play a downbeat. I hung out in Latin clubs when I was a kid in New York and it connected with me.
I realised a bit later that I had that gift, let’s say, to be able to do that stuff, because no matter what you do, no matter how hard you train, it’s not something that’s teachable. You either have it in you or you don’t have it at all.
My first yearning was rock and pop music but somewhere in between all of those rock shows that I went to, I ventured out to this club called The Corso in New York City. I would go in there by myself where all these people were dressed in suits and the women were all dressed up to go dancing to the salsa music. I would watch the big bands and I would totally relate to the vibe.
There were bands in the rock world, like Santana, that were scratching the surface. They had percussion sections that exhibited the Latin thing, but the way Carlos played had nothing to do with Latin guitar. He just played rock guitar over a Latin rhythm. That’s different to what I’m talking about.
Did your Latin influences find their fullest expression with John McLaughlin and Paco De Lucia?
Oh yeah. The inspiration that we got off one another in the guitar trio with Paco was magnificent. His growing up learning flamenco and taking it to places it had never been before, of course we were influenced by this guy who was doing something very, very different. I think I benefited the most because I had the most relation with or understanding of the syncopation thing. We understood one another rhythmically so well that John was very lucky when it was his turn to solo because we were providing a rhythm that was just killer.
When you’ve got three players like that, can it become a duel?
It started out as a healthy, happy duel and then the last tour we did together, it became, “I will kill you on the solo!” It was almost like handing us guns. “Oh yeah? You think you can do that?
Watch this, mother!”
The audience got to see us really reaching much further as it went on. John, in particular, wanted to dominate. He was the oldest guy, so he always had this superiority complex thing that was very uncomfortable for Paco and I. But when it came to the playing, sometimes we kicked his ass and he didn’t like it! [Laughs] And sometimes he came up with stuff that was really great, so it was reciprocally an amazing and historic thing that we did.
Jaco [Pastorius] was a friend of mine because he had played on my first solo record prior to him joining Weather Report. I got to hang out with him every night and sit at a bar with Joe Zawinul and hear all these amazing stories while he was drinking. It was really cool.
Was there competition between the pioneering fusion bands?
It was mostly, “We’re going to kick their ass tonight,” but we loved what they were doing. I was a big fan of Weather Report. I was a fan of the first band, but the second or third configuration, not so much. The last configuration with Jaco, everyone on the planet loved that, and that’s when they were touring with us.
In fact, Jaco’s first tour with Weather Report, when Heavy Weather came out, was the same exact week that Elegant Gypsy came out, so Columbia Records put us together on a huge tour. We were on a co-bill for maybe 50 shows and Jaco was a friend of mine because he had played on my first solo record prior to him joining Weather Report. I got to hang out with him every night and sit at a bar with Joe Zawinul and hear all these amazing stories while he was drinking. It was really cool.
Did you consider yourselves fusion musicians or jazz men?
Fusion all the way. We were bringing rock together with elements of jazz and classical and that’s exactly what fusion meant at the time. Prior to us, years before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, there was really no such thing as a solid term like fusion because everything was either rock, pop or jazz. When Bitches Brew came out, it was this giant jam session of all those fusion guys and we never heard anything like that.
When you bought a Miles Davis record you expected something along the lines of what we thought of as jazz, but he was so influenced by rock music. He dressed like a rock musician and he just preferred to never do jazz like the jazz of yesteryear, so he brought in all the very good jazz guys that were young enough and open-minded enough to expand their instruments and play over grooves. In fact, there was very little composition, in my opinion – it was mostly jamming forever.
In those days, we thought those long jams were very cool, but then the guys in those bands like McLaughlin and Chick and Herbie and Keith, they all did their own thing. Keith Jarrett decided to go acoustic solo or acoustic jazz trio. Herbie did the funk fusion band. Chick became the best composer of them all.
Before the electric Return To Forever, John had the first Mahavishnu, which was the most blistering in terms of loud rock meets elements of jazz with killer musicians like Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer, and that really got the attention of all of us. That’s when Chick said, “I’ve got to do my own electric band.” Great things happened. It was a very exciting time.
Were you disappointed when Return To Forever split?
I was really scared about it. I was very disappointed. I knew that Chick was very erratic. You have to compartmentalise the genius musician Chick but then recognise that he’s influenced to a not-good degree with the Scientology crap. He made a lot of very bad decisions based on his belief in Scientology.
You always use the philosophy of L Ron Hubbard to make a decision and he was so caught up and brainwashed with this stuff.
Here’s a band that should have had at least 10 to 15 more Romantic Warriors out there in the marketplace, not one. It should have been 10 to 15 and that would be getting together every three or four years.
Originally when we signed with Columbia, we had an amazing contract. After the first record [for Columbia], he disbanded the band. Then he puts it back together with a big band with Gayle Moran, his wife, singing, and this big brass section and everybody was just wondering what the hell is wrong with Chick. It was the most disturbing thing on the planet.
There were two reunion tours that lasted one month each since then. In 45 years we’ve done maybe two months together, the last one being in 2008. We got back together with a fresh start, maybe going to do another record and tour a lot and then he broke that up as well.
He’s very conflicted and flippant in his enthusiasm about anything. It could be a diet. One day he’s fat and then he just decides he wants to be bone-thin skinny. Then he’ll be fat again. He just goes to extremes.
What’s the saddest thing in the chronicles of Return To Forever is that we never really reached that place that we should have been hailed at. The Eagles, The Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones, they all had internal personal conflicts where they could have said, “F this, I’m not playing with this guy any more, I’ve got enough money, I don’t need this crap.” Well, they all did that, but when reality sets in: “Wait a minute, what are we going to do? The brand is so huge and the fans love us so much, it’s not worth not fulfilling our potential and making a lot of people happy.”
We could have continued with our solo careers exactly the way they’ve been and gotten together every now and then, but you have, unfortunately, a cult religion that has adversely influenced somebody as brilliant as Chick and his management. You look at it now, I want to cry for Lenny and Stanley, who are struggling.
You sued Chick after the last reunion, didn’t you?
The man became extremely greedy and he failed to realise this was The Beatles of fusion getting back together. Not to mention I had a lot to do with bringing him back together with
I always thought I had to be isolated and almost miserable in order to create. There are a lot of comedians that come from misery and hardship and that’s why they’re so great, but in my field it was just a turnaround of events that led me to this very peaceful time in my life.
Stanley – they had a falling out for 20-some years due to the fact that Stanley left Scientology so they weren’t talking.
After we did this very successful reunion tour, he was secretly planning a jazz trio with Stanley and Lenny, which parlayed the success of the Return To Forever tour into some lesser jazz trio tour. They kept it really quiet and then I found out that what was supposed to be a week or two turned into four months. I was perplexed: why would anybody do such a stupid thing when we’ve got this momentum going again? Then Stanley told me, “You know what Chick’s doing to us? He’s keeping all the money from the DVD and the live CD,” which was a substantial amount of money.
That’s when I had to bring a lawyer in because it was absolutely criminal, treating the band members like they were just sideman. That may have been true in 1974, ’75, ’76, of course it was, but not after I’ve sold six million records, I’ve got gold records and have a following around the world. I’ve sold more records than Chick Corea and he had to be reminded in a legal way.
It never went to court. Come on, if it had gone to court I probably would have gotten 10 times the amount of money. I was very happy to settle for what was just mine, what was supposed to be my cut. I wanted to be fair.
Going solo with Land Of The Midnight Sun [1976], were you ever nervous about writing your own music?
I have to compartmentalise again, because there’s so much good and there’s some very weird experiences, all of which will someday be documented in a book, but one of the positive experiences was Chick’s idea for all of us to grow and do our own solo records. I was the one that was like, “Really? Why do you want to do that?”
I wasn’t really thinking in terms of writing or being a composer, but everybody else was very enthusiastic about doing their own record. Then I got an offer from Columbia Records.
The same day Return To Forever signed a multimillion-dollar deal, I signed a deal as a solo artist.
Still living with my parents, I went home and said, “Dad, look at these cheques! I just signed two times to Columbia!”
I was a 20-year-old kid. The first record I wrote music and I wasn’t quite sure of myself, but it became the bestselling debut record for CBS that year. Then the second record is when I started to feel like, “Okay, now I think I’ve got something.” I could see who I am with Elegant Gypsy and that became my biggest record to date.
It’s still my most popular work, but that was 40-something years ago and as a composer, I’ve needed to and wanted to evolve. As I grew, hopefully my writing was growing along with it.