Beatle Brunch - Mark Hudson 3

Mark Hudson Interview - Part 3

Here is Part 3 of my interview with Mark. Listen to Beatle Brunch for more, and check out the upcoming issue of “Beatlology Magazine” for the complete text of my talk with Mark Hudson.

When we were at “Standing Stone”, Paul said, “I made these French horn guys play (a long note)”. They were holding a note till they’re next birthday because Paul didn’t know. It was one of those things like the lack of knowledge is what makes brilliance. It’s like Christopher Columbus, the silly Italian (my people), turns left and ends up in America. Go figure. The same thing happens musically. And when your heroes do it, it’s even more incredible to me. It’s like one of the problems with music in this day and age, is that you buy an album and you might like two songs and you hate 8. In this case, there were 10 songs and 9 of them you loved, and maybe it took you a week to love the tenth one. So when I work with a lot of young acts, I always use The Beatles as an example of songwriting. You look at the “White Album”, which is one of Ringo’s favorite albums, and mine, and you see so many different styles played by the same band. How great is that?

And it really followed their albums a lot. Like “Revolver”, to me “I’m Only Sleeping” is probably my favorite Beatles song. I say that with tongue in cheek because as soon as I hear “Here, There and Everywhere” or as soon as I hear “Julia”, I change a lot. But “I’m Only Sleeping” was indicative of how they could take a melody and keep it rock and roll and throw elements of Gerswin in. I mean, they truly were the most musical phenomenon that I think we’ll ever see. And God Bless the young kids and the new guys coming up saying, “Who’s gonna be the next Beatles?”, and I think we’re a along ways away from that and unfortunately, the computer age has set us further away from it because the songwriting element has taken a nap. Now it’s so much about how we make the track, and so little about how we do the song. So I’m a songwriter first. And on “Ringo Rama”, it was Ringo’s idea to really consciously make the songs be great. Because if the songs great, it’s tough to screw them up. And he’d say, ‘You sit down with Lennon and McCartney and George, you know you’re gonna get a good album.” The songwriting, you can’t really start naming when it got bad, because it didn’t.

It was interesting in Ringo Rama, Ringo wanted to have a positive outlook only. So when you start looking at the nature of the songs, he really wanted them to be about peace and love. He wanted the message to be of one standard, and that’s a challenge in this day and age with the war, and 9-11. But the best thing about art is there’s room for everyone.

And I go back to my John Lennon story in my “one question a day”, I was talking about lyrics and I said, “It’s so great, ‘she’s well acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand like a lizard on a window pane’ (“Happiness is a Warm Gun”), that’s just great! It just filled me with…what does it mean?” (doing John:) “Nothing. It means nothing. It felt good coming off me tongue. You make up your own meaning”. And I thought, “wow, that’s cool!” And here comes the killer. He said, “If you want art, buy a painting.” How cool is that? And that actually set the whole wheel for my songwriting career, to have an open forum. I don’t have to step away. It’s free. I can sing about anything. I can write a song about me breakfast if I want to. And that was his attitude. And all this time, I’m thinking, if I’m a songwriter, it better be about love, sex, rock and roll, something political, or my mom. If you want art, go buy a painting. And when you see something, just do it.

The Beatles were so inspiration to me all along, the fact that they still are and here I am, I still wake up and they’re still doing something to me that’s driving me to the next thing. And in a case like “Ringo Rama”, it’s an honor for me to be sitting there with a guy like Eric Clapton, and when you see how effortless it is. I’m always waiting for something deep, like these guys are gonna show up and be tortured and give all this incredible thought. I mean, Eric Clapton showed up with his amp, on “Never Without You”, he played on two songs. And he just showed up and played. Then he said to me, “Is there anything you want?” And once again I get intimidated like I’m telling Eric Clapton what to play. Because to me, Neil Young is Eddie Van Halen, so my solos are pretty frightening. So the fact that Eric Clapton would even ask me, that goes to show you how great of an artist these guys are, because they’ll take a suggestion from anyone. And Dave Gilmour, I mean, this guy’s Pink Floyd, and there he was in all of his Floydum, just, “What do you want?” He did the greatest thing. He actually played a solo on “Missouri Loves Company”, and he did it four times. And Ringo looked at him and said, “Which one do you want to hear?” And he says, “Put ‘em all up.” His whole intention while he was recording, was to use four notes at the same time, so it wasn’t just double tracked, it was quadruple tracked. And Joe, how could you not do it? You hear the beautiful guitar solo in “Missouri Loves Company”, it’s Dave Gilmour, who was obviously thinking this without telling us, while we were recording it. And Ringo and I looked at each other like, “What the?” And that was his intention. And so it’s a constant learning curve for me, and even though I’ve been doing this a long time and I think I know what I’m doing, I don’t have a clue. I watch these guys and I see it truly be one hundred percent emotion.

In fact, on “Ringo Rama”, there’s a limited DVD that comes out, I think it’s the first hundred thousand copies, and then they’re gonna take it off. So any Beatle fan that would love to have that footage, should get it just for that reason alone, because you see it from the ground up. You watch Ringo create drum parts, and you see him there, coming up with parts. And obviously, I was there for it, so when you see him you see me, but if I was The Beatle fan, and I saw that, I’d almost play that more than I’d play the record. And then you see Clapton, and you see Dave Gilmour, and Willie Nelson, and you see the process of how it works. It’s 43 minutes of us creating, and you see the fun. You can only imagine, even seeing Ringo now, how much fun he had making this record, how much it must have been amplified when it was the “other three guys” with him, because he’s a handful, and he’s funny. It wasn’t an act. You see it on the DVD. He gets up, and he starts making fun of people, he’s dancing all the time, and it looks like “A Hard Day’s Night” with crows feet. Everybody’s a little bit older, but the energy surrounding it is the same thing that we know when we loved them all those years ago.

It’s an honor for me. I say to him, “I would work for him forever”, and it’s not to negate when I work with Aerosmith, or Ozzie, or Jars of Clay, but when I work with Ringo, it’s not work. I have trouble letting go of the projects when I work with him because it truly is so much fun. And we just finished the promotion for the record in America and Ringo’s gone back to England, and not to sound fruity, but it makes me sad because I get used to having him around, and faxing me cartoons like he does, or calling me from the treadmill telling me of a song that he’s just invented. After all of the success that they had, you would think that if anyone had the right to be jaded or cynical, it would be a Beatle. And really, it’s like nothing has changed. If there’s something that looks like drumsticks, he’s gonna start playing them. He’s 62 years old and he says, “All I want to do is drum.”

…to be continued. Check www.brunchradio.com for more from Mark Hudson! And meet Joe Johnson and Mark at the “Fest for Beatlesfans” the weekend of August 16th in Chicago.