Boston Globe Magazine: Equal Billing

Boston.com / Boston Globe Magazine

Dec 5 1999

Equal Billing

By Ted Drozdowski

"I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to do on the instrument," Gabrels says, "and in music in general."

The water of Elizabeth Bay was serene, its azure surface rippling with mirror-ball flashes of sunlight. Reeves Gabrels leaned on the railing of an elegant condominium's balcony, daydreaming as he gazed at the yachts and sailboats below. "I was thinking, if only my father, who died when I was 15, could see this," he says now. "Here I am in Sydney, Australia, in this amazing place, in a condo owned by David Bowie, and we're about to do our second album together."

He turned toward Bowie to speak. "You know ... " he began.

"I know exactly what you're thinking," the rock star replied in a heartbeat. "I think the same thing. Probably less frequently than you, after all this time, but you don't even have to say it. I should be a shipping clerk in Brixton. I'm still amazed."

Ten years later, Gabrels remains astonished at the course his life has taken since he was plucked from the Boston club scene in 1988 and deposited on the rock 'n' roll fast track. "Imagine me playing a country gig in Worcester to a room full of shriveled old truckers smoking Kools and drinking screwdrivers," Gabrels says. "Then, two months later, Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger are walking past me on the beach at Mustique. I was thrown into another world."

Since then, Gabrels has been Bowie's lieutenant, co-writing and touring with him as a partner in the late-'80s band Tin Machine, then playing a vital role in the star's late-'90s creative rebirth. Together they've written 52 songs and toured the world - stage by stage, concert by concert - five times. For Gabrels, it's been a trip to fantasyland.

But for the past few months he's been decidedly earthbound. On the August day when we meet, in the near-darkness of his studio apartment and musical mad-scientist's workshop in lower Manhattan, Gabrels, who is 43, is dazed and groggy after an all-night mixing session. Among the dust and T-shirts on the floor are strewn little metal boxes with switches and dials bearing such names as Super-Fuzz and Seek-Wah. They're the tin soldiers in Gabrels's battle against sonic banality. The general, a fat Macintosh computer, dominates the room as it has dominated Gabrels's life in recent weeks. He's been using it to put the finishing touches on Bowie's new album, Hours, and his own two upcoming solo CDs. He's worked entire days without sleep to meet deadlines.

And this comes on top of three years of ceaseless labor. In that time, he endured a year-long concert tour and wrote and recorded two albums with Bowie. While he was on the road, Gabrels created the soundtrack for The Farmer's Wife, the acclaimed 1998 documentary shown on PBS's Frontline, using portable recording gear in a chain of hotel rooms. He has also played on CDs for rappers Public Enemy, English popsters the Cure, vocalist Seal, the Rolling Stones, and others. So Gabrels has hardly seen his wife, Sara, or their Beacon Hill home since 1996.

"I'm absolutely burnt," he concedes. "I'm toast."

At least he's well buttered. Before he started working with Bowie, Gabrels lived the way most musicians do: He struggled to pay bills and supplemented his career by playing weddings and working day jobs. "My banner year was $8,000 in 1987," he says. "I was working all the time, plus giving guitar lessons."

Gabrels made his first million from his work with Tin Machine, which split profits equally among its four members. "But I never got into this for the money," he says. "Let's just say I can buy all the books and CDs I want, and I can afford to help my friends if they get sick and can't work for a while, because most musicians haven't got any insurance."

Sought-after players like Gabrels are not quite stars, yet they travel in the world of musical celebrity and leave their indelible mark upon it. How they get there is often, as Gabrels puts it, "dumb luck" - an important factor in pop-music history. Dumb luck was with composer W.C. Handy when he chanced upon an itinerant slide-guitarist in 1903 at a Mississippi Delta railroad station and was inspired by the mournful playing to become the "Father of the Blues." It was with Elvis Presley the day he stumbled into Memphis Recording Service to make a record for his mama's birthday. And it was with one of Gabrels's idols, guitarist Adrian Belew, the night Frank Zappa discovered him in a Nashville hotel's bar band.

But luck, at least in the music business, rarely visits the talentless or the unprepared. "In a sense, everything I learned, everything I did in Boston, all my experiences led up to where I am," says Gabrels. "But the other half of it is, how do you get struck by lightning?" He ponders his good fortune for a moment, then laughs: "You go to the golf course, stand under a tree in a bucket of water, and hold up an umbrella."

The good luck began with a prod from his father when Reeves was just a boy, growing up on Staten Island. "I spent so much time reading books that my father started bringing me Marvel comics," Gabrels says. "He encouraged me to play guitar. I think he was worried that I wasn't having enough fun."

Like most American kids, Gabrels also spent hours in front of the TV. But unlike most, he watched for years with a six-string on his lap, running and rerunning through every note on its neck until picking became like breathing. As a teenager, he developed a musical appetite that would set him apart. To crack the code of influential guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Leslie West, Neil Young, Jeff Beck, Al DiMeola, and Alan Holdsworth, he played along with their recordings. Most musicians will follow their instincts or education and devote themselves to a single genre: rock, blues, R&B, jazz, country. Gabrels devoured them all. "I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to do on the instrument, and in music in general," he says. "Some musicians will hear something they don't understand, shrug, and say, `I'll never get that,"' Gabrels says. "Whenever I heard some exciting new technique, I'd say, `I've gotta get that!' I'd break it down into components until I did."

While his father, C. Winston Gabrels, labored on the tugboats around New York, his mother, Claire, worked as a typist at home. Often, the click of her keystrokes mixed with the dizzy, richly orchestrated soundtrack of the Warner Bros. cartoons that young Reeves watched inveterately. The music that tagged the antics of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck was composed by orchestral wildman Carl Stalling. "Between Stalling, my father listening to country and blues, and my mom's typing while she listened to whatever was on the radio ... those things melded together and added up to my musical point of view."

Nonetheless, it was art - an interest inspired by comic books and cartoons - that Gabrels decided to pursue. "I went to art school to be practical, which shows the beauty of how naive you can be at 17: `I really want to be a musician, but I'm going to art school to have something to fall back on."'

He went to New York's Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts for nearly four years. But he quit in 1978 and headed north to Boston, to the Berklee College of Music. "I left art school because the communication was too slow. The guitar's immediate. I'm gonna sit and worry over a painting and then maybe two months from now hang it on a wall? That's worse than making albums."

He moved into a rooming house on St. Botolph Street in the South End. "I figured I could live off the money from my summer job if I spent $25 a week. The room was $18, so I had $7 for food and entertainment. I can remember talking my way into Mike's Pub [the now defunct jazz showcase], where they had a one-drink minimum. I'd pay the buck admission and they'd let me slide on the drink. So I got to see Mike Stern, Mick Goodrick, a bunch of guitar players. It was formative stuff, really, just being around that many musicians. Some mornings, I'd get up, make some coffee, smoke some pot, and play guitar for six hours. Other days, I'd go to school." At Berklee, he learned to read and write music. By the time Gabrels dropped out in 1981, he had built a steely foundation of technique and theory. Gabrels played unknown in local bands from 1978 to 1983, when he joined the Dark. Led by its songwriters, vocalist Jace Wilson and bassist Matt Gruenberg, the Dark had an album out on a national label. They were musically demanding. They were also notorious weirdos who blended sharply ironic lyrics and blues, jazz, and pop with lost-in-space improvisations onstage. "The Dark had auditioned something like 70 guitarists before me," Gabrels says, chuckling. Nonetheless, he got the gig. He also got the girl: Through his association with the Dark, he met Sara Terry, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor Radio Network. "Sara was a friend of the band's and one of the people who actually got to cast a vote on who got to play guitar," he says.

Wilson and Gruenberg took Terry to see Gabrels play as a second step in their audition process. "I was astounded at the kind of player Reeves was," she recalls. "He had a language of his own and an ability to articulate it. But one of the things that strike anybody who meets Reeves is his humanity. I sensed that in him the night we met."

They were married in September 1985 and moved into an apartment on St. Stephen's Street in the Back Bay. "Sara has been at the apex of many important things that have happened in my life," Gabrels says, "including working with David."

Gabrels's first musical lightning strike had hit the year before at Darkworld, a second-floor walk-up over a storefront on Mt. Auburn Street in Watertown that he shared with his bandmates in the Dark before he and Sara were married. And this jolt came not from the skies but from a humming refrigerator.

The spacious communal apartment remains - albeit under new leaseholders - a typical rock musicians' pad, thick with literal and aesthetic grunge. "When I moved in, your general Darkworld denizen was overbookread," Gabrels recounts. "The original renters were musicians who went to Harvard, so it had an intellectually overqualified character."

To this day, amplifiers serve as impromptu coffee tables. Guitars and books rest on the couches like throw pillows. Occasionally, the same chemical spray used to clean up particularly grisly murder scenes has been employed to strip away the layers of beer and coffee stains that decorate the linoleum floor of the kitchen, the designated practice room for some 20 years.

Gabrels was standing on that linoleum one day in 1984 as the Dark were rehearsing their brooding art rock. He was waiting for drummer Clark Goodpastor to count off a tune. His Fender Stratocaster was strapped across his chest, and a modest pig pile of guitar effects devices - those tin soldiers again - stood by at attention.

"I had a harmonizer, my distortion pedal, and a chorus, and I was ready to play when the refrigerator switched on and the hum of its motor came through my guitar's pickups." The electromagnetic whir was amplified into "a choir of voices. That was the beginning of my learning how to create synthesizerlike textures on guitar. By the time of the first Tin Machine album, I'd discovered that I could hold a vibrator over the pickups, dial all of the original guitar signal out, and use a pitch shifter to give me thirds and sevenths in the right keys." The result sounds like anything from a gently humming flying saucer to a horde of angry wasps - in tune.

Lightning struck again when Gabrels saw Adrian Belew play with David Byrne's post-punk rock band Talking Heads at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Boston. "Not only was Adrian getting apparently infinitely sustainable feedback from his guitar, but when he changed the angle at which he held the guitar toward his amplifier, it changed pitch. He was in complete control, and this was in the days before guitar synthesizers. I was, like, `How is he doing that?'

"I remember sitting at home looking at my Strat that night. I had thought that music worked on a two-dimensional axis: harmony and melody. Suddenly there was a third dimension: sound." That is, sound as texture, color, or comment on the music, rather than as part of a tune or chord changes. For most guitarists, this simply means the peal of feedback. For rare players like Gabrels and Belew it can be anything: a mock-hurricane's roar, gull-like cries, an otherworldly dialogue of kinetic blips and snorts. Their sonic palettes are nearly limitless.

Sara Gabrels was hit by the next lightning bolt. In mid-1987, she was asked to conduct publicity for David Bowie's tour. "A friend had worked in David's New York office for several years, so I got a call saying, `Our publicist didn't work out so we put your name in the ring,"' she says. "I had done some writing about music and interviewed Peter Gabriel on human rights issues. But I'd never done anything along those lines." However, Sara had just completed a grueling Monitor Radio series on the exploitation of children in the Third World and was due 10 weeks' vacation - enough to cover the tour.

"The first thing I thought was, `You should be calling Reeves to play guitar with David. You shouldn't be calling me to do his press.' Then I thought, `Maybe I'll get to tell David Bowie about Reeves Gabrels.' It seemed out of the clear blue sky, but it seemed logical."

Gabrels met David in the bowels of Anaheim Stadium that August. He'd flown out to spend time with Sara on Bowie's tour. As she dealt with the demands of the press before the concert, Gabrels waited on a couch in the concrete and Astroturf backstage area, watching TV.

"I was sitting there trying to keep out of everybody's way, and David just came over and started talking. And he's never stopped." Gabrels chuckles. "We had Fantasy Island on with the sound off, and we were making up our own dialogue. The conversation felt like one I would have with anybody sitting on the couch at Darkworld.

"But art was the real connection. He was more interested in performance artists or the fluxus school, which Yoko Ono came out of. He's not a fan of the surrealists at all, being a dadaist. I tend to be more a fan of the futurists, whose concept was trying to get the idea of speed into painting, to portray the forward motion we'd become capable of."

Gabrels's solos seem to articulate that same sense of cultural momentum, but Bowie wouldn't know that until nearly a year later. "Rather than ruin a nice dinner," Gabrels jokes, "I never mentioned my guitar playing." "We did talk a lot about music," Bowie recalls when I ask him about their meeting. "I kind of got the impression, though, 'cause we talked a lot about art, that he might be a painter."

At the end of the tour, Sara slipped Bowie a tape of Reeves's playing with the Dark and other bands. A few months later, in December 1987, the Gabrelses decided to move to England. Sara had gotten an offer from the Monitor's London bureau, and Reeves, for the first time in his life, was disillusioned with his musical career.

"I used to joke that I wasn't bright enough to get depressed," he says. But as Gabrels entered his 30s, the local-rock cycle of bands forming, struggling, and falling apart, the unsatisfying day jobs, was taking its toll.

"I was thinking maybe it was time to become an adult," he continues. "I thought about improvisers from Sonny Sharrock to John McLaughlin. These guitarists were no spring chickens, and they were playing their asses off. This is what I was interested in, not stardom. I was interested in being a rock-based improviser." In England, Gabrels thought, "it would be more interesting to do the same pile of stuff but have to drive on the other side of the road to get there."

Bowie phoned the Gabrels's London flat in January 1988. "When I heard Reeves's tape, I was absolutely blown away," the 52-year-old rock star says. "It was quite obvious from the way he played that he'd studied most genres but wasn't willing to stay within the confines of any of them. That always appeals to me. Reeves had virtuosity if he needed it, but that wasn't his intention. There were a lot of mad, darker sounds in what he was playing, which I have a strong empathy with."

Soon Gabrels found himself touring with rockers Deaf School and singer-songwriter Nick Lowe, and recording with vocalist Sandy Shaw - all on Bowie's recommendation. "Sara and I were invited to a barbecue by Nick. When we arrived, the hostess asked us to go out back to tell `Pete' how we wanted our burgers. And there's Pete Townshend standing over the hot grill with a spatula."

Bowie invited Gabrels to Switzerland for a weekend to help with music for the Canadian dance troupe La La La Human Steps. Gabrels stayed three weeks. As they grew closer, Bowie expressed discontent with the music he had been making. "I asked him, `Why are you doing stuff you don't like?"' Gabrels recounts. "Maybe that was naive, but it needed to be said, and nobody seemed willing to say it, out of maybe deference or financial concerns. I told him, `Why not do what you want? All you've got to do is take responsibility for the fact that you might not sell as many records.' I've come to understand that one of the things I provide David is a certain lack of bullshit."

They began co-writing the songs that became the foundation of the group Tin Machine. Bowie recruited Hunt and Tony Sales, the sons of comedian Soupy Sales, to play drums and bass. Tin Machine's visceral marriage of Bowie's ironic croon and Gabrels's explosive scrap-metal guitar was scorned by critics and ignored by many Bowie fans for four years and three albums. Their label, EMI, even refused to promote a third Tin Machine CD, which then came out on Victory.

History has been kinder. Over time their 1989 debut, Tin Machine, has become the sixth-best-selling CD in Bowie's estimable catalog, besting his influential '70s classics Heroes and Low. The roaring deluge of alienation in songs like "I Can't Read" and "Heaven's in Here" also foreshadowed rock's grunge era, which began in 1991 with Nirvana's Nevermind and Pearl Jam's 10.

"Tim Palmer, Tin Machine's co-producer, told me that when he was recording overdubs for 10, Pearl Jam was listening to `Heaven's in Here' as they warmed up," Gabrels says. "Basically, we were a couple of years ahead of the times."

Looking Glass Studios in Manhattan is a rarity among urban recording places. It offers sunlight. There's a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the funky intersection at Broadway and Houston. Also of SoHo's delightfully rococo border guard, the Puck Building, which bears a statue of Shakespeare's roguish sprite on its prow.

Gabrels and programmer/multi-instrumentalist Mark Plati were there in 1997, five years after the breakup of Tin Machine. Gabrels was in his element, unleashing his impish inner child on recordings of drums, bass, and guitar the two had accumulated. Using computers like the Macintosh in his Manhattan digs, they were fashioning those sounds into the slinky and jarring loops of rhythm and melody that became the bedrock of Bowie's electronic-rock breakthrough, Earthling, that year.

Gabrels's efforts had begun three months earlier in the clubs and tents of London's underground rave culture. "David turned me on to drums 'n' bass," one of the then-nascent sound's sub-genres, "and I got interested in the sonic possibilities." So Gabrels observed Tricky and other leading DJs to assimilate the music's tics and discover what - besides liberal doses of the drug ecstasy - drove ravers to dance till sunrise.

"I realized that this electronic stuff had the visceralness of the rock music I love," Gabrels says. "I also noticed that rarely did it have more than three elements going on at a time. That and a knowledge of what all the subdivisions of the music, like trance, jungle, and weirdstep, sounded like is what I brought to the studio."

Gabrels and Plati spent so much time at Looking Glass in the digital realm that they played field recordings of old cotton-plantation work songs to keep sight of the humanity they wanted in the grooves. "Mark had to keep reminding me to put guitar on the tracks," recalls Gabrels. He did - knotty, boiling subterranean rivers of guitar that percolate beneath the music's surface until they erupt in whinnying geysers.

A name for this new style was germinating as Bowie's band recorded: electronica. That summer, the English programming ensemble Prodigy beat Gabrels, Plati, and Bowie to the charts with the genre's first hit, "Firestarter." But soon Earthling became the debut electronic album by a contemporary flesh-and-bones rock group.

Earthling was embraced by fans, critics, and even radio, which hadn't granted David Bowie a hit since 1987's "Never Let Me Down." Its blend of organic musicianship and Gabrels's and Plati's computer acrobatics yielded starkly fresh sounds plus the raw emotionalism that's always been the core of Bowie's best work. Remixes of "I'm Afraid of Americans" rippled through dance clubs as "Little Wonder" rode the airwaves. Earthling sold more than a million copies worldwide and restored Bowie's creative stock as a solo artist, which had been ebbing since 1983's Let's Dance, his best-selling album.

"Earthling reinstated some of the highs that David's always been capable of," observes Adrian Belew, who played on Bowie's 1979 Lodger and was music director for his 1990 Sound + Vision Tour. "He has these periods in his career when he's done work that's vastly influential, that really clears the air for David." Belew says Gabrels's role in Bowie's latest renaissance was essential. "Reeves became the perfect foil for David."

With Earthling, Gabrels did more than reinvent Bowie as a dean of electronic rock. His own performance is one of the most staggering distillations of the history of 20th-century guitar playing since Jimi Hendrix. Feedback hangs behind verses like fog over a harbor, its chilling presence dominating even as Bowie's voice slips through like morning sun. Booming power chords give way to solos that dance a jig from blues to heavy metal to braying paroxysms of sound. It's as if a demon had taken hold of his guitar, and Gabrels became that demon onstage. When the Earthling tour made an early stop at Boston's Avalon in late 1997, Gabrels wore a kilt and tunic, a feather boa, and platform boots, with his hair bleached blond and his lips and nails painted black.

"People started throwing S&M magazines onto my side of the stage, assuming I'd changed my lifestyle," he laughs. "To me, that was rock 'n' roll. It made it dangerous and played with all the images - sexuality, stardom. I swear that I could feel people pull back when I came to the front of the stage to take a solo, because there is something scary about a 6-foot, 185-pound man in a kilt and too much makeup playing weird stuff."

It's a cool August night in New York City, but VH-1's studio lights are heating the interior of the seventh-floor theater at 34th Street's Manhattan Center. This is David Bowie's show, a taping of the music network's concert series Storytellers. But Gabrels is feeling the spirit. He loves this room. Tin Machine rehearsed beneath its psychedelic mock-Tudor ceiling for their first tour. Plus, much of the music on Bowie's new Hours belongs to him. So do some of the stories. Bowie and Gabrels have indeed become friends in their long partnership, and they've exchanged confidences - as all friends do - that have twisted their way into the lyrics of some of Hours's reflective songs about loss and the promise of redemption.

Gabrels's contributions to Bowie's music are reflected more accurately on Hours. He gets an overdue credit as co-producer, a role he says he's played unacknowledged on most of Bowie's recordings since Tin Machine. He and Bowie have decided to cement their songwriting partnership, Lennon-McCartney style. They'll share full credit for all of Hours, regardless of who wrote what, except for one cut with lyrics by an Internet contest winner.

All of Gabrels's good fortune - the reward for his hard work and preparation - comes with a balance of personal and creative tension. Three years away from home does not benefit a marriage, so Reeves and Sara have had their trials. "Basically, I got sucked into this life and started acting like an ass for a while," Gabrels admits. "It's only through Sara's kind and understanding nature that things worked out."

With Bowie, the lines between friendship and employment have become blurry and complex. If Gabrels had had his way, they would have made another electronic-rock album before Hours, which is a return to pop balladry. "My feeling is that David should have solidified the point by making another studio album and going back out on tour."

After Earthling, Hours does indeed seem very safe - perhaps an attempt by Bowie to cash in on his reinvigorated reputation. Just before the final version of Hours was shipped to the pressing plant, Gabrels and Bowie were debating which version of the single "Thursday's Child" should be included. Gabrels was pushing for an edgier, more rock-oriented mix that he says is "better than anything else we did." Bowie decided otherwise.

Of course, Bowie is the star of these albums and the member of their creative partnership whose career goes back to playing English pubs in the mid-'60s. He is the famous Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke. He is the lightning strike that raised Gabrels from obscurity, liberated him from day jobs, and put him on the covers of guitar magazines - and even into a video game: Gabrels and Bowie are among the animated characters featured in the game Omikron, slated for pre-Christmas release.

So Reeves Gabrels will not deny that he has done well through his association with David Bowie. On the other hand, listening to Tin Machine's CDs, Gabrels's obscure 1995 solo debut, The Sacred Squall of Now, and Bowie's Outside, Earthling, and Hours, it's also obvious that Gabrels's contributions to a star whose light was dimming should not be underestimated.

The Bowie fans surrounding the Storytellers stage understand. When that star, looking youthful enough to have stepped off a Gap billboard, introduces his band, Reeves Gabrels gets the loudest applause. The guitarist's green sunglasses and precise Vandyke are new, but when Gabrels solos, his moves are from the big-rock textbook. He cleaves resonant chords with cool dispatch from the six-string hanging around his hips. He swings toward his amplifier, drops to one knee, and turns up the volume, hitting sweet feedback that sings like an angel choir. Gabrels finishes with his guitar's neck pointing skyward, notes fading.

It's a peacock show of virtuosity, the stuff that rock-guitar heroes are made of. A moment later, when applause hits the room like a thunderclap, it's as if lightning has struck again.