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NIGHT & DAY yanickIn the summer of 1987, my mother decided to move to Florida, and Derek Burch helped me move her. Before we left, we holed up in Hidden Lake to re-record some tunes I’d been working on. Post-Bonita, my confidence in my own singing and my own value as an artist was shaky at best, but I’d felt there was enough growth to warrant an update on my demo. Derek, the good friend, the generous-to-a-fault and loyal pal, happily gave up a long weekend (to the chagrin of his wife) and, like two frat brothers, we spent a glorious weekend recording Ecco and South Road. We traded off engineering tasks, which was a great relief to me. Typically I have to run the board and perform at the same time, which meant every take took three times as long as it would if I had an engineer. That weekend was the only time I actually had an engineer, and things came together very quickly. Later I recruited Bonita to flesh out the backgrounds, and she graciously volunteered. Oddly, she couldn’t get the close harmony on Ecco: do you really know what you’re lookin’ for? Every time you hear that line in the song, that’s all me, dubbing myself over about six times. The rest is me and Bonita. Ecco was a woman I met at a skating rink whom I started giving rides home to at night. I’m sure I wanted to date her, and I originally wrote the song Ecco as a means to impress her. In retrospect, this actually never worked. The women I was meeting were much too stupid and possessed far too little intuition, discernment or sophistication to appreciate the significance of the effort of my gesture. They acted like this (someone writing songs for them) happened to them every day. And I doubt any of them had any real appreciation of the craft that went into the music. The majority of those songs, which took me upwards of 30 hours to produce, were never listened to. Ecco turned things around on me and treated me like a geeky schoolboy, even setting up the DJ to ridicule the song and myself. Maybe I had it coming for being such a poor judge of character. Ecco was stupid, shallow and truly ghetto and I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking. Years later, my mother called me in a panic looking for my sister, who suffering from a substance abuse problem. I went door to door looking for her, going from one crack house to another until I finally found her, late one night, huddled in a basement. I looked at her and offered my hand, saying, “You don’t have to live like this. You can walk out of here with me right now.” She opted to stay. I wrote her off: these were lessons she’d have to learn on her own. I re-fit Ecco into a plea, a love song, to my sister. South Road was a nasty strip of burnt out stores in South Jamaica where people typically went to score and shoot up. My sister didn’t actually live on South Road, but I have no doubt she’d been there. If You Only Knew, my great pledge of love to the inexplicable Nancy, got a facelift here. With the new 1204 board and better reverb units and, thanks to my work with Bonita, better singing on my part, the revised version is perhaps the best singing and playing I’ve done on this compilation. She Likes To Fool Around was originally written as a gag record for my then girlfriend Rachelle. A biting poke in the ribs at someone who, essentially, wanted a pretty shallow relationship with me- a man whose passions ruled his life most of the time. After a particularly stupid incident involving her sister, we parted company, and the song went from being a private pun between us to a mean-spirited indictment of her value system (or lack thereof). Here I perfected The Prince Scream, and there’s some pretty good playing here if you consider the fact I had no sequencers or samplers. Show Me was actually recorded, I think, in 1986 but I kept it, as is, here on the ‘87 demo because of its honesty. It is the most honest piece of music I’ve ever done, my final, heartbreaking plea to the incredibly stupid Nancy, to whom I am forever grateful for her caution and opacity. I loved her dearly and we’d be miserably married or bitterly divorced by now. I recorded this and drove the hour and a half to her house in the rain to leave this in her mailbox. I stupidly thought the emotional edge of the song would melt her accountant’s heart and move us closer than the arm’s length she’d kept me at since summer camp. Nancy ignored the song, like all the others, and, thankfully, this marked the beginning of my maturation process. I loved Nancy, but Nancy was an onion. A woman made of stone, to not be moved by this song. These five tunes, from my demo Pandora’s Box, got me some attention from a couple of record labels, culminating with a meeting at the short-lived Motown label Apollo Theater Records. Sitting in the offices, listening to these coke freaks pitch ideas and try and force a severely unlikely paring between myself and some other coked-out producer, something died inside. My desire, my entire appetite for the music business, vanished. I think I walked out of there agreeing to some follow-up meeting, but never showed up and never returned their calls. I never wanted to be a star in the first place. I just wanted to make a living playing my songs and ministering to people. And I wasn’t willing to play the game, to kiss enough backside and smile at these egregiously vituperative jackals grinning at me across the desk. I also had a sudden fear of becoming Michael Jackson, and not ever being able to go to the 7-Eleven again. I considered starting a local label and doing my own local distribution, like Larry Norman, a Christian rock artist (some say the originator of the art form), and my role model. I tossed Pandora’s Box on the big stack of tapes and went on with my life.
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After some miscues, Yanick and I began dating, I think, in January of 1989. Hollis Stone’s slow and cancerous death began in March of 1989 when I began working on Yanick’s demo. This work is the best my little demo studio ever got. The strongest writing and best playing from real musicians and singers Yanick and I recruited to up our game in the studio. I am extremely proud of this work, though much of it may sound awfully 1989. Considering we had very little to work with— a 4-track Tascam 246 PortaStudio and a few effects processors— this stuff is a minor miracle. I gave Yanick my very best. I gave her absolutely everything and every creative impulse I knew. As immodest as this sounds, this is great writing. And, for 4-track cassette, this is phenomenal production. And to hell with whatever moron was bad-talking this stuff. Yanick and I worked very hard on this and had, for the most part, a great time doing it. It was a great time of life, and the work crackles with energy and enthusiasm. This stuff was the crowning and final achievement of Hollis Stone's career, and I'm quite satisfied with that legacy. I've included most of this work on this page, in largely unedited segments. Yanick was the kindest human being I’d ever met. Generous to a fault and possessed of an almost ethereal grace and innocence. Anointed. The rarest of rarities, an intelligent and sophisticated woman who still possessed a childlike innocence and sense of wonder. Possibly the most noble soul I have ever known. She drew me out of my darkness. I rant on a bit about her in these liner notes, but I'm ranting about Yanick the musician, not Yanick the person, the woman or the wife. This was a person who routinely ran herself ragged giving and doing things for others. She was annoyingly kind and generous and she was the most warm and loving woman I have ever known. In fact, I could truly find fault with her only in the studio, where her ambition, drive, singularity of focus and strength of will made me want to choke her (and her me) on many occasions. But, this was a person who put up with me for five years, who taught me what real love was, and who shaped my life forever. Paradoxically, she was the least generous musician I’ve ever known. More selfish than even William. Nothing existed for her outside of her own music. All of my energy, drive, passion, thought, hope, dreams and prayers became focused on her, and she returned, musically, none of it. I wasn’t permitted even to sing around the house, and any musical interest I had outside of her never-ending project was soundly and icily ignored. She was the love of my life. My great love, my muse, my Yoko Ono. She was the death of Hollis Stone, and I loved her more than anything or anyone I have ever known.
I wanted to impress her. We’d only started dating, and I promised her I was going to “Make that happen for you.” “That” was pop stardom. I’d given up on the idea of being a pop star, but she very much wanted that for herself, and I dedicated myself to giving her whatever she wanted. I wrote largely about us, about who we were. Having known her since high school, having seen her through many train wreck relationships, I’d hoped this time things would be different for her, and for us. This Time grew out of that idea, and that song became her signature. I wanted a big sound, the best and crowning achievement of my little 4-track history. By then I’d truly mastered my little recording studio and knew I could get a good sound out of the gear. I was king of my particular donut shop. Donut Emperor. I wanted players, real players, not just me. I was hanging around with a colorful guy named Johnmark Brown who was working on and off with a bassist named Derek Jackson. I called Glen Alexander, but he was touring and unavailable. I think he passed on Gregg Sullivan’s number, and Gregg signed on as my new guitarist. Johnmark recruited a couple of his singers, the amazing Bridget Shorter (that soaring first soprano on Reflex) and Rita Hurt, to sing with Yanick and myself. Johnmark and I arranged the vocals and, if you listen closely, you’ll hear some wonderfully understated harmonies. It was ambitious. There were no sequencers. The piano sound really sucked. It was a really, really good song. Yanick, however, was not quite ready to sing it. We recorded several takes over the next four years, before arriving at a truly inspired one in early 1993. The version included here is, I believe, an earlier take. I no longer have the masters of the final version. On the heels of This Time, I wanted to do something much simpler. This yielded Yanick’s other signature song, Feels Like Forever, a melancholy, half-hearted “love” ballad that, to me, summed up her tentative, conflicted passion for me. Nothing on Yanick’s project sounded happy or cheerful. It was all this hollow ringing of a bell. Here, Derek and Gregg finally clicked into a real team. A gorgeous, exhilarating bit of pop structure, with me playing very understated stay-out-of-harm’s-way FM piano pads under Gregg’s breezy guitar parts. I twisted Yanick’s arm into getting her twin sister, Florence, to sing on the track, to recapture some of the lithe resonance from Chapter 1’s Sorry To Say, and I coaxed Yanick into belting out a diva-like oration at the tail end of the song. We had a really stupid fight, lasting several days, over the phrase, “What I’m feeling to myself.” This was a precursor to many, many fights over creative issues. Yanick felt bullied, and she was probably right: as the songwriter, I felt it was important to actually record the song, at least once, the way I wrote it, before making interpretative changes. Over the years, things spun on and on and on with Yanick’s project. It was never really done because she really wasn’t there yet. My songs and my questionable production skills not-withstanding, Yanick was just not yet a very good singer. Not someone a record company was going to sign to a solo artist deal. And, at 27, she was getting old, in terms of that window of opportunity. I loved her madly and I couldn’t tell her that, so I made excuses and re-recorded and re-tried things while she took voice lessons and got increasingly better. So much so that, at the end of the project (and marriage), she was easily one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. Side One of Night & Day was the Night Side: This Time, Feels Like Forever, Summer of '79 (below), Fragile (below). This was Anita Baker country, grown-up music, night club stuff. Side Two was the Day Side, more pop-oriented. More fun. Yanick liked the more mature stuff, and didn't much care for the pop stuff, which she largely regarded as my making her scream all day. The Day Side began with Little Pretty One†, a song about a high school English teacher who crosses the line. This song really almost works, but it needed some tweaking of its early 90's pop sensibility and, earlier in the song, I really ruined the background harmonies. As I recall I was just exhausted and we only had Florence for the day and had to rush things a little. I honestly didn't even hear how cringingly bad the harmonies were until we got the finished tapes back from the plant. The coda still works, though, with Yanick's brassy alto barking over the Rick James snap-groove. Florence led most of the song with a much softer and rounder tone that slowly unveiled the horror of the lyrical content. Yanick's coda was intended to represent the harder person the character evolved into as a result of her high school teacher's violation of trust. Little... was the first song I recorded where I decided to make the kick drum the loudest thing on the track. Times were changing, and suddenly Bruce Sweiden's expertly-balanced mixes of lush Quincy Jones arrangements were being drowned out by Moog bass and very loud 808 kicks. I only had the wimpier 707 drum machine, so I compressed and compressed and fattened the kick as much as I could, and stomped Florence with it for four minutes. This one's a terrific near-miss. Don't Ask Me To Be Noble† was kind of a sequel to This Time, a Luther Vandross-Marcus Miller-Nat Adderly Jr. 80's R&B arrangement (Luther Vandross' Never Too Much) meant to honor my heroes of the time. I tried to play piano like Nat, programmed the 707 like Yogi Horton (whom the trades called "The Human Metronome") and the wonderful Bryon Hankins did a dead-on Marcus Miller take with his buzzy Fender Jazz. I colored the background vocals Vandross dark, centering around Rita Hurt's gorgeous contralto, and then I wrote what I believed were some fun and cynical lyrics, which of course, the twins hated. I wish you were dead... the opening line, was a real battle to get on tape, and the second verse's fun Fu Manchu allegory was nearly scrapped because they thought it was stupid. I wish that Fu Manchu would acupuncture you until you repent... Loved it. The song builds to the Girl Power refrain from This Time, Nevertheless I think of you... Yanick didn't want "Nevertheless" to become a signature, so that was another long discussion. I like the way the song bookends This Time, although this one doesn't really stand up as well and sounds even more dated, despite the fact I wrote this one in late '92, three years after I wrote This Time. A Welcome Home Within Your Heart† was borrowed from my New Witness III project. Originally a song of spiritual repentance, it became more about reconciliation and the permanence of love. These are the original NW3 tracks, which is to say it's all sequenced and I didn't work very hard at it. We brought in Bridget and her niece Sinesta McCoy to sweeten up the backgrounds, and Yanick really shines here as she takes over from Florence in verse 2, probably showing out for sister. Then again, by the time we did this take, Yanick had done several takes before and was really familiar with the song now. She really nails it, here, with a biting and spot-on pop vocal. I wished I'd done more stuff like this, where Yanick's dynamic side can really shine. Okoye's Eyes† begins with Ouidah, an African melody written and performed by Minister Darryl Cherry. A song that sounds so unlike Darryl it's a little, well, jolting to realize he wrote this. Okoye's Eyes was based on a song written by Pierre Hillare that we kind of co-opted and re-wrote into a song about the liberation of Haiti. Here Bryon Hankins' bass really wins the day, meshing off-color Joe Zawinul (Weather Report) inharmonics with a grand, sweeping anthem. This is a bad key for Yanick, but it's a great song. Gregg Sullivan's acoustic and electric guitar work is just wonderful, here, lending just enough grandeur and intimacy and, well, legitimacy to this piece. I told him, "You make us sound almost like we know what we're doing." This song has some of my favorite lyrics:
Sisters lift your voice Night & Day concluded with Minister Darryl Cherry's elegant Just When I Need Him Most, which can be heard at the tail end of Set One of my New Witness III Project. Yanick originally recorded Just When... solo, but we dubbed in Florence for the Night & Day project. The mix on the Florence version was better, so I've included Florence's version here. † taken from analog cassette tape. All other samples are from digital masters.
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I've added a couple of things from Yanick's demo that were not included in the 2000 compilation. I Just Wanted To Be Your Friend was another song Yanick disliked intensely, mainly because I was stupid enough to use Rachelle's name in the chorus. The song had nothing at all to do with Rachelle, I just liked the way the name Raaah-chelle! snapped out on the chorus, but Yanick would have none of it and I ended up having to badger her into recording it, using Noelle instead of Rachelle. Not enough snap. My Love Is True was a lighthearted romp into house music, one I had to bribe and cajole Yanick to attempt. I borrowed a track from Bonita’s project (First True Love). I’m Gonna Fly was based on a poem Yanick’s goddaughter wrote for school, which we later discovered (to our eternal dumfoundedness) was actually written by the great Langston Hughes. For weeks after, Yanick and I would spontaneously stop whatever we were doing, turn to each other, burst out, “LANGSTON HUGHES!” and dissolve into laughter. Show Me, a re-fit of my plea to Nancy, was another song Yanick didn’t want to do. Gregg and I put down the basic track and waited for Derek to get free to come do the bass (he never did, I ended up playing bass on the song). Yanick heard the unfinished track and, with no bass to define the chords, didn’t “get” it. Also, Gregg got a little carried away in the back end of the song, playing right over a section where Yanick should be singing. But I liked it enough that we just recorded it without any singing there, giving Gregg a 90-second solo, a little unheard of for a pop song. This was one of Yanick’s stronger pieces (recorded with my pal Darryl Cherry who lends just enough honesty in his unpolished but truthful performance). I did not include it on her demo because I blew an important early piano riff, and because it really wasn’t recorded very well. But it is some good listening. I’m very proud of this song. Reflex was a song Yanick hated. Originally it was a Patti Austin / Quincy Jones pop-soul thing, and a nice piece of music in its own right. But it wasn’t making the grade, so we dumped it. In early ’93, just for the heck of it, I recorded a new club track and transferred the background vocals over. Then came the week-long struggle with Yanick to get her to record this song. A song she hated the first time around, but one she despised in the new club incarnation. I coerced her into recording it by reminding her, if she wanted to be a singer, she’d often be asked to sing things she didn’t like. She may as well get used to it. Reflex is not a great song, but it is an interesting bit of business to hear Yanick channeling Madonna’s Material Girl, and it certainly gets the toes tapping. My bass riffs could have been better if I’d had someone running the board. I think this was another occasion where I was waiting for Derek but he was off recording other things. This Time (Reprise) is the tail end of that song, the stuff lost in the fade. We played on for almost 3 minutes after the song was over, playing until we ran out of tape. Even though Derek was not there, and added his bass later, it sounds like a band jamming and enjoying the heck out of themselves. Minor note of minor interest, I’m playing Derek’s 5-string bass and he’s improvising funk licks over me. This gave the track more bottom, Derek having his cake and eating it too.
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The end of this chapter, and of this compilation, is a deliberate descent into melancholy, mirroring the downward spiral of my marriage after we wrapped up work on Yanick’s project. There are repeated stabs at the heart here, ending on a tragically prophetic note. I find this set of songs exquisitely painful, difficult to listen to, but creatively some of the better work she and I have done together. Summer Of '79 was the final incarnation of this idea. Based on the structure for the oft-worked-on Summer of’75, I sold the soul of this pivotal moment of my life to Yanick, refitting it to her own experience with a tragically lost love. Yanick and I argued bitterly over, the word “Mister,” used in an Anita Baker-like bark somewhere in the middle of the song. This was not recorded very well, either, and I had buzz problems with Bryon Hankins’ bass (and kind of wished I’d have just played it myself). I used a sequencer here to get the piano playing straightened out, making me sound like a better player than I actually am. Gregg’s amazing acoustic guitar work blends nicely into a drunken, out-of-control rock frenzy in the back, which was meant to resonate with his work on Show Me, but I drowned him in reverb here and, oh well. Summer was also chillingly prophetic of our own relationship, of the emotional death we brought on each other. Fragile, by Sting, was the song playing at a pivotal moment in our doomed relationship. Fragile, by Derek Jackson, was a song he’d written and produced but had no lyrics. Writing about our shaky marriage, Yanick immediately loved the song. We again recruited Florence for the backgrounds, a melancholy, hollow dirge that runs throughout the song, and Gregg improvised some wrenching, sad guitar riffs at the end. Mixing the track, I had the song literally fall to pieces and dissolve, mirroring our marriage. Teaching Her To Say “Hi” is perhaps the most painful moment of the compilation, included here for selfish reasons more than artistic ones. Rummaging through a big box of tapes, I found an old answering machine greeting from happier times. My fly in amber, I thought it made an appropriate lead into the requiem, If I Should Perish. Written in early 1993, I recorded this song while Yanick was away. Perish was my farewell to Yanick. I saw the breakup coming- actually, we both did. It was Hollis Stone’s last official appearance anywhere, and, unlike the repeatedly ignored Don’t You Care About Me? from Chapter 2, Yanick actually listened to this one. When she left me, this was the only tape she took with her, leaving a huge box of her own demos- four years of our lives- sitting in the foyer. I stood there for, like, an hour, looking at that box. Around 100 shrink-wrapped copies of her Night & Day demo; four years working exclusively on her career, losing Hollis Stone somewhere along the way. I now hated being in the studio, and I really didn’t have much to sing about. I’d been silenced for so long, I no longer knew my own voice (whenever I’d sing around the house, Yanick would kind of wander into whatever room I was in and either ask me to quiet down or correct my technique). I’d written so many songs for her, I didn’t have anything to say about myself anymore. I haven’t recorded since. Now, I have to assume it is more a time consideration than a creative block, but part of me is seriously intimidated by the whole process. Technology has marched on and I’d have to spend endless hours learning the new kids’ toys, all the computer wizardry that enables the new generation to do much, much cleaner and much more dazzling things in their basements than I ever did, and to do it in half the time. Christopher J. Priest |
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I’ve included some outtake stuff here, like
Mic
Check to give Yanick some presence. She is the central figure and the
closing chapter of my old life. Gregg Sullivan, a wonderful guitarist I
believe Glen Alexander turned me onto, works with Yanick on the most
inexplicable, most ridiculous song I’ve ever written, I Know You Don’t
Believe. What makes the song ridiculous is the song was written about Yanick, and was a testament to her lack of faith in me and lack of support
for or interest in anything I wanted to do musically. Somehow,
she seemed to have missed the point of the song completely, falling in love with the
melody and simplicity of it, while totally missing the substance.