I came across an advertisement in a Boston music journal about the new MIDI technology that was becoming available for guitar after some years of success via keyboard instruments. MIDI means Musician Instrument Digital Interface. With the proper equipment you can play a note on your fingerboard, run it through a synthesizer (or several synthesizers) and have it come out sounding like almost anything: violins, horns, pianos, bells, human voices, percussion instruments, Star Wars weapons, etc. What's more, you can program musical lines and entire ensemble parts and wind up sounding like an enormous orchestra if that's what you want and can afford. And with the even more recent technology of sampling, you can use sounds taken from authentic instruments such as Stradivarius violins and ancient Irish harps, as well as environmental effects like rainstorms and creaky old sailing ships. I decided to sign up for a course to learn about all this, particularly since the ad emphasized that the instructor had twenty years' experience in music.

This teacher, Kevin Garant, was discovered to be 23 years old, having displayed a considerable interest in music early in life. He advised me as to equipment and techniques and I then sallied forth into the world of concerts and saloons with my new gadgets and concepts. The audiences hated it. The people who turned out were expecting to get some kind of Kingston Trio retread; what's more I couldn't get any of the musical elements under control. My voice sounded tight and my guitar playing was full of mistakes and the synthesizers wouldn't behave at all, producing weird shrieks and glitches more often than not. This was not a comfortable time in my life and I was very thankful that I'd been studying powerful mental and emotional disciplines in the years just preceding this experience.

I'll make a long story more bearable by telling you that eighteen months later I was able to solve these technical problems just in time to record my album properly. The truth was that the only guitars available in the early days of MIDI were designed with rock & roll-width fret-boards, and you couldn't get pickups to fit classical-width necks. My big spidery fingers just wouldn't get in there; thus my playing was a constant embarrassment to me, and of course I was too stubborn to give up and return to the acoustic guitar as recommended by 100% of my friends. (I thought I could bulldoze through by practicing four hours a day. ) Also, in the thirty-eight years since I began public singing, the center of my vocal range had lowered by a whole tone, which meant that in order to use simple chords for guitar accompaniment I'd either have to drop the tuning two steps, making things sound muddy, or capo up to the tenth fret most of the time, which leaves very little room to maneuver. So I took my problems to probably the best guitar maker in America: Phil Petillo of Ocean, New Jersey, who works on the instruments used by Springsteen, McCartney, Harrison, et cetera et cetera. I came away with a guitar having a classical-width fingerboard that is also two frets longer than usual. And, these days you can get a MIDI pickup from Roland that fits the classical setup.

Back to the main thread of our story: MIDI teacher Kevin Garant suggested that we could make a record which would be inexpensive (although labor intensive) that would sound big and interesting. Because the MIDI musical information is digital, you can put it together right in your living room using affordable synthesizers and computers. When everything is just the way you want it, you take it into a high-priced studio and run it through fancy sound-processing gear and wind up with a perfectly clean Compact Disc recorded digitally for about one-tenth the price that they charge the superstars. Additionally, Kevin has a good friend, Amanda Capezuto, who can play absolutely anything in any style on a synthesizer, and via multi-type recording would be able to assemble whatever orchestra or band we might desire for each piece of music. Kevin's strong suit is that of sound design: he can blend samples from several different instruments to create waveforms you've never heard before but would swear are just perfect for expressing the dramatic and emotional context of your song.

Why these young geniuses wanted to work with me on this project is that I had the arrangements already written out, complete with harmony and bass counter-point. The material itself is worthy: powerful folk melodies and lyrics certainly up to the standards of the original Kingston repertoire, mixed in with a number of things I'd written (not guaranteed to be world wide hits but which had nonetheless held my interest for several years). With all the basic structures tried, and true, there would still be plenty of room on a 24-track recorder to improvise and add character to the music; in other words, give it that spark of life missing from so much of today's high-tech bubblegum. Here was the chance to honor the music by combining the power of modern electronics with the majesty of classical theoretical technique. Kevin and Amanda, experienced rock & rollers, would make sure that the rhythm would kick ass, and we could all be as funny as rubber chicken when the need arose.

So in February of 1987 we got started in Kevin's living room on Boylston Street in Boston. We first laid down all the rhythm tracks with a drum machine, then the bass lines, either typed in on an Apple Macintosh computer via Performer software, or entered live through a Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer direct to disc into a Roland MC-500. Then I would sit on the couch and sing and play my guitar for Amanda while she made up some hot piano or horn lines. I would tell her the movie of the situation, such as: "It's a Sunday in June, 1922 — Corpus Christi, Texas. Everybody's having hangover brunch in the hotel ballroorn. The barometer is dropping rapidly and the potted palms are really swaying. The piano player is halfway through a Gaspacho & Tequilla and a cigar, and in spite of the early hour a number of Latin lovers have begun dancing in dead earnest."

That was the way we approached each piece of music: as a separate movie with appropriate time and place, cast of characters, technical equipment and production crew. We were totally immersed in the requirements of the individual situation, the modern synthesizers give you the flexibility of this approach. The keyboard can turn into thousands of different instruments, but of course the player has to interpret them convincingly. In order to sound like a live trumpeter you have to breathe and phrase like someone pushing air through a horn. There are psychological considerations as well — Louis Armstrong on New Year's Eve in New Orleans does not substitute for the bugle boy sounding general quarters aboard Admiral Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar. We had to agree on the initial conditions — from that standpoint we were masters of our own fate; however, once those first few cards were dealt we had to follow each form without ego and let the music tell us what to do and where to go.

We continued in this way from February through September of '87, putting in three or four hours a session, three or four times a week, mostly in Kevin's apartment, which had one outstanding feature: when you opened his refrigerator you would find its sole contents were the takeout menus from four Chinese restaurants! Halfway through this period we moved our whole operation downstairs in the same building to the studios of the Boston Film and Video Foundation, a very obviously non-profit organization, where we could transfer our digital programs onto a modestly-sized audio tape to get a rough idea of what everything might sound like, meanwhile adding my guitar and vocal parts. We found that we had far more going on than the available recording equipment could handle. It was time for an infusion of cash, but we knew of no record company which would offer any support whatever for such an idiosyncratic project. Off to Honolulu I went to trade some solid real estate for my artistic magnetic signals on a reel of half-inch tape. Met any fools recently?

The opportunity to resume work came in February '88. By this time Kevin had moved to New York City and was designing custom sounds for Sting and Hall & Oates. He obtained access to a 24 track digital recorder and a Synclavier system as well as a Solid State Logic computerized mixing console — all this in one room at the Transcom Digital Studios on Broadway, where they do the audio work for the Muppets TV show. Our engineer, Peter Millius. had worked on the DOUBLE FANTASY album with Yoko and John Lennon. For a couple of months we transferred all our Boston effort onto the larger tape format and transformed our instrumental sounds into unique creations. The Synclavier lets you choose from samples of 64 gourmet bass drums, for instance. You listen to them all and pick your six favorites: one has that immediate smack as if you were standing right next to it; another booms through the city square like the March of Time; another gives you a long ringing tone; some have beautiful overtones which you can tune to the precise key of your musical piece; still others produce vibrations in definite parts of your anatomy. When you've selected the sounds you want, you can blend them all together to make a super bass drum that never before existed. Kevin's specialty is creating complex sounds: ones that start off like a drum,

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