Robyn Hitchcock – A wrinkle in time
“At the very end of the night, we’re walking back upstairs to load out the last of our gear, and Dave says, ‘Wasn’t that great to meet Robyn Hitchcock?’ And I started screaming: ‘That was Robyn Hitchcock?’ I was beside myself, because I was such a big fan. And I had been talking to him, and didn’t know it was him!”
The other thing Welch didn’t realize was that Rawlings had slipped Hitchcock Gillian’s cell phone number. A few months later, the duo were back in the U.S., on the road and driving down the highway, when her phone rang. This in itself was exceptional. “My cell is never on,” says Welch. “It’s only on when there’s a call scheduled to come in. Until very recently, I didn’t even know the number.” But she was waiting to hear word on a very pregnant friend. “So just to see if it has any battery power, I turn the phone on…and the minute I do, it rings.”
It was Robyn. His webmaster had forwarded him a newspaper clipping about the winner of a Miss Ohio beauty pageant — as in Welch’s song, “Look At Miss Ohio”, the lead track from her 2003 release Soul Journey. Compounding the coincidence was the beauty queen’s name: Robyn Hancock. (Published reports have claimed the last name was actually Hitchcock, but further research indicates otherwise.) This, Michele insisted to her husband, was a cosmic cue to ring up Welch. After listening to Hitchcock compliment her and Rawlings again on their London show (“because the English have such wonderful manners”), Gillian confessed her failure to recognize him that evening. “And he says, ‘You mean this is the first time we’ve actually spoken as ourselves?'” It was, she admitted.
After some friendly chat, Hitchcock revealed an ulterior motive for contacting the two: Would they sing backing vocals on his next record? A quick consultation of everyone’s calendars revealed this might prove tricky. “He was explaining his scheduling,” Welch continues, “and at one point, he said he had a time block that was no good for him, ‘because I’m in this movie. Well, of course, we’re all in a movie…but I’m in another movie.'” She laughs at the recollection.
“That’s when we asked him, ‘Why don’t you just come to Nashville?’ Which is how us singing on a couple songs turned into Robyn coming to our studio for three or four days, and, at the end of that, having 75 minutes of recorded music.”
IN JANUARY, 2004, Hitchcock was in New York, finishing work on his “other movie”: Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate, starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. (Hitchcock plays the small role of double agent Laurent Tokar.) When his on-set duties concluded earlier than expected, he found himself with a first-class, round-trip ticket to any domestic destination, and a week’s free time on his hands. He called Nashville to ask Welch and Rawlings if he could come sooner and stay longer. Thus, Spooked was hatched.
On his first night in Nashville, after a sushi dinner (Hitchcock’s current diet prohibits wheat, chocolate, and dairy), the trio retired to Woodland Studio at 10 p.m. and commenced to get to know each other better by jamming for five uninterrupted hours. The session zigzagged between other people’s songs — “Candy Says”, “Bang A Gong”, most of The Basement Tapes — and new Hitchcock originals, setting a template for the days that followed.
“Because Robyn is such a spontaneous performer, we couldn’t really learn how to play with him on his songs, because then he would have sung the good [take]” on the initial unrecorded run-through, Rawlings explains. “So we kept playing covers, we’d play anything [to warm up], and then we’d take a stab at one of his.”
The sessions were intense but informal. According to Hitchcock, “Nobody wore headphones, there were no count-ins, and the tape always seemed to be running when we needed it.” Welch excused herself occasionally to fetch dinner (even going so far as to bake one of her specialties, stewed apricot pie, for their guest), but Rawlings and Hitchcock rarely came up for air. “There wasn’t enough time to do what we wanted to,” says Rawlings, “so we just had to work as fast and as hard as we could. I would wake up, pick up Robyn around 1 p.m., go to the studio…then drop Robyn at his hotel at 3 or 4 in the morning, and wake up to pick him up the next day.”
Four months later, Robyn returned to Nashville for a second round of recordings with Rawlings and Welch, armed with yet another batch of originals. This equally brief yet demanding stretch proved to be a little more rock-oriented than the earlier experiments. “The demon drums came out,” recalls Hitchcock, although percussion is audible on only a few cuts. (This is also when Spampinato dropped in.) Later, when he was back in London, Hitchcock overdubbed a couple parts: an electric sitar on the open-armed “Everybody Needs Love” and a backward guitar for “Full Moon In My Soul”.
“It says ‘Produced by Dave Rawlings,’ but it was all of us coming up with [the arrangements],” Hitchcock observes. “It was like being on one of their records, but with me doing the lead vocals, which was really quite eerie.”
Did he make any effort to customize his own singing style to accommodate theirs? Nope. “I sang like I normally sing. You can tell which tracks are first takes, because the vocals are very relaxed. For instance, ‘English Girl’ and ‘Demons And Fiends’ are both first takes.”
Although he and Hitchcock had never worked together before, Rawlings felt they already shared a musical language, a hunch that the communal covers confirmed. (Only one of these, Dylan’s “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven Before They Close The Door”, made it onto Spooked.) “Robyn and I like a lot of the same ’60s music,” Rawlings acknowledges, “so in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he was a current voice that I could relate to.