Robyn Hitchcock – A wrinkle in time
But because Hitchcock’s hair had gone from dark brown to silver since Rawlings’ college days, when he was a fervent fan, his guest’s identity didn’t click immediately. “I walked straight toward him, and had taken maybe a step-and-a-half when I realized who he was,” Rawlings recalls. “And I said, ‘Oh, it’s you!'” They immediately struck up a conversation. “It took me a minute, while we were talking, to adjust to the fact that I was meeting Robyn Hitchcock.”
Again. He was meeting Robyn Hitchcock again. In truth, as Rawlings revealed that evening, their paths had crossed before.
IN 1989, Hitchcock was at the pinnacle of his American success. Songs such as the homoerotic reverie “Ted, Woody And Junior” from Element Of Light, his 1986 album with the Egyptians (bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor), were staples on college radio. For a spell it seemed that each week’s broadcast of MTV’s 120 Minutes featured a new Hitchcock promo clip, such as the moody, black-and-white footage of a floating fedora illustrating “Raymond Chandler Evening”.
The impact of the latter outlet, Robyn admits, was completely lost on him at the time. “When we made our first videos, in the mid-to-late ’80s, we were making them for effectively $300 or $400, and they were being shown on MTV, without us even asking,” he marvels.
As his profile grew, Hitchcock signed to A&M Records and, with the Egyptians, released his 1988 major-label debut, Globe Of Frogs. Despite having more money at his disposal, he continued filming videos as if he were on an indie. “We made the one for ‘Balloon Man’ in Super 8,” he says. “We just cut up some avocados, got a couple of lights, and then sat in my kitchen in the Isle of Wight for a couple days making the slices go up and down.” His product manager at A&M pitched a tizzy fit — “He said, ‘I gave Robyn $10,000 and he just gave me a film of some fruit!’ He didn’t realize it was avant garde fruit” — but MTV put “Balloon Man” into regular rotation, making Globe Of Frogs his highest-charting U.S. album to date, hitting #111 on the Billboard 200.
Did A&M ever have Hitchcock convinced he could be as big as R.E.M. (for whom he opened in 1989, on the Green tour)? Yes and no. “There is a collective hypnosis that works within record companies,” he says. “I never had a proper manager, so I was involved in lots of these bull sessions with [label] people.” If they kept repeating that his next disc was going to sell a half-million units, he began to believe them. A little. “And when they only sold a tenth of that, I was disappointed, but I wasn’t fundamentally surprised.”
“We never sold records,” he reiterates. “Our biggest-selling record, which was either Perspex Island or Globe Of Frogs, sold something like 80,000 records. Everybody loved us, but, very wisely, they didn’t necessarily buy us.”
Gillian and Dave did. “I discovered him in the summer of 1986,” Welch remembers. Her initiation began with a copy of 1981’s Black Snake Diamond Role, Hitchcock’s first post-Soft Boys album. She followed his solo career closely “for the next couple albums,” through his heyday. “Then I got sort of whipped into my bluegrass frenzy, and lost touch with what he was doing for a while.”
Rawlings’ introduction to Hitchcock’s music is a little hazier. “I met a kid when I was at college who had a lot of Robyn Hitchcock records,” he says. A handmade cassette with Black Snake on one side and Invisible Hitchcock (1986) on the flip was soon supplemented with store-bought copies of Element Of Light, Globe Of Frogs, and 1989’s Queen Elvis. Rawlings was drawn to Hitchcock’s eccentric, clever wordplay, as well as Robyn’s audible affinity for many of Rawlings’ own favorite ’60s artists, including Dylan and the Beatles.
One afternoon, while heading back to campus at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, Rawlings came across a line of people waiting to get into the local Tower Records. “I asked someone what was up, and they said, ‘Robyn Hitchcock is signing his new record.'” Rawlings dashed back to his dorm room, grabbed a guitar, then returned and queued up, hoping to get his instrument autographed.
When Rawlings recounted this ships-in-the-night tale to Hitchcock years later, it put a happy face on what had been an otherwise very weird afternoon. “They’d given Robyn a million pens — colored pens, gold and silver ink pens, and he’s making crazy signatures on everything,” remembers Rawlings. Not everyone was as taken with Robyn’s creative approach to this rather routine chore as young Dave. A mother and daughter combo were distraught when the artist embellished one’s album with an elaborate “Robyn,” and the other’s with an equally dazzling “Hitchcock.” “Later, the mother came back up and demanded that he ‘do them right!'”
Worse yet, the giddy Hitchcock, while down in the store manager’s office, signed a Peter Gabriel poster…with the moniker “Bryan Ferry.” This gesture, too, went over poorly. “After thanking me for spending two hours signing posters in his store, he then threw the thing at my feet and said, ‘You can keep this: It’s worthless,'” Hitchcock reflects. (Rawlings, who stuck around after getting his axe autographed, also remembers the enraged man vowing, in front of Hitchcock, never to sell his records again.) “It was this terribly traumatic experience for him,” Rawlings summarizes.
Today, Hitchcock chooses to view it otherwise. “Good karma stemmed from all this, because fourteen years later, Rawlings bounded up to me in London and reintroduced himself.”
IN 2003, Gillian Welch had never met Robyn Hitchcock, although she’d seen him perform — before she met Rawlings — while growing up in California. Nor did she meet him the night her creative partner spent the better part of an hour chewing his ear off. At least, not that she realized. “Dave had hit the party about five minutes before me,” she explains. When she entered, she found him in a circle of people, “talking to this tall, handsome, white-haired gentleman.” Having already missed the introductions, she listened and chatted politely for a few minutes, then excused herself to greet some other guests.