Seven Windows:

In 1981 we were living in Manhattan - on the upper East Side to be more precise.

With the Island deal over, and after having attended night school to learn about such things, I was fortunate enough to land a job working as a typographer and paste-up artist in a small agency.

By now, I had pretty much given up my career as a musician but... I did still have a 4Track Teac tape recorder, a Wurlitzer piano, my acoustic guitar and something called a Wasp (it was a sort of synthesiser) and, after a hard day at work, I would partake of a jazz Woodbine and record a load of ambient doodlings.

After a while, I gave a cassette of said doodlings to Steve Dwire (who'd been part of The Rivits).

He and his business partner Michael MacDonald (not the Doobie! a recording engineer) liked the stuff and set about recording the toons late at night (graveyard shift) in the studio where Michael worked.

Steve Dwire - "After The Rivits ended, Jess and I spent a bit of time together and became friends, we’d smoke a little weed and just, basically, hang out. And, round about then, I started working at this studio called Skyline which was on 37th and 5th; a really brilliant room, one of the best sounding rooms I’ve ever heard."

"One of the engineers there was a guy called A.T. (for Arthur Thomas) Michael MacDonald. This was just session work and, one day, I complimented him on his sounds – he was (still is) a really good engineer."

"And, so we became friends too and I said, ‘I don’t know if you’re interested in doing any kind of spec work and, I know that spec-work means that you don’t expect to be paid but, there’s this fellow I just did a record with and, all I can tell you is he’s one of the best singers I’ve ever heard in my life’."

Michael MacDonald - "I was a staff engineer at Skyline; at that time one of the up and coming studios in New York City and Steve I met because he brought in a couple of projects and he was looking for an engineer to do these demos – but it wasn’t Jess."

"And I said, 'look, I don’t do demos, I make masters.' So, he could have dismissed me right away. But, we did those two projects and, they were kinda nondescript… and, at the end of those, we spent time together and hung out… we had very similar sensibilities about the artists we liked and… he said, 'look, there’s this singer I’ve worked with who is really, really amazing and, I think that maybe we should do… something. I dunno what but I think that he’s really amazing'..."

"And I’m saying, 'OK, that sounds interesting'. But, in the back of my mind, I was thinking, I’ve worked with some amazing singers – at that time I was working with Pat Benatar and Maria Maldaur and people like that so… I knew what really good singing was… and, frankly, I didn’t think that whoever he had in mind was anywhere near that calibre."

"Anyway, we went up to his apartment on the Upper East Side and met Jess and he was quite disarming; very open and friendly but really quiet with this unassuming manner. He didn’t tell me anything about his background like the heavy hitting that he had done; he was just this really modest guy. He played us a few little cassette demos and stuff that he was working on and a lot of it was instrumental music as well as a few pieces with vocals."

"Right away it struck me that this was really thematic, like movie music – very visual… even tho' it was kinda crude… and, I’m hearing the singing on the tapes and its very kind of quiet singing. It really intrigued me, drew me in. Working in the studio, I could get a Saturday night meaning, some free time for us. I 'borrowed' a roll of two inch tape, put it up and Steve then came down and we started working on this instrumental right away and it was called Steppes."

Steve Dwire - "Jess had some of his musical doodlings… stuff he'd conjured up late at night; he had this WASP synth, a bohemian-like-toy really - which didn't even have keys per-se... they were stenciled or painted on to the front of it. In any event, while it made some horrendous sounds, it also made some absolutely brilliant sounds."

Michael MacDonald - "This $99 Wasp synth of Jess' was really like a cheese-box but it had a phenomenal bass sound and that was the very first piece of music… he played a couple little parts… it had this little melody… a little motif… and so we played around with that a little bit and it was nice, a really moody piece. Just about two minutes long, instrumental. So, that was fine so we said, lets do some more next weekend."

"And", recalls Steve, "the first vocal track that Jess'd played to me that he’d been playing around with was Light Brown Colour. So, we put down a click-track; some basic chords and I did some bass parts."

Michael again - "And then Jess said, 'I’m ready to do some singing now'. So I said, 'what do you wanna do first'. He said, 'I want to lay the background vocal parts down. There are these little parts…' So I took out my best vocal mic (which I still use today) which is a classic U-47 mic, LA2A Telectronics limiter and set it up to get this vocal thing."

"Jess is sitting there with his cigarette and his ashtray and the lights are down and we play the track and… the first time he opens his mouth I about wet myself. It was like… no, he’s not good… he’s… this is ridiculous. I’m like… this is another whole level of good. And, y’know, I’ve been around the block, I’ve heard great singers but… holy crap, this is really really great. I mean, this was just a background thing. So we double-tracked a couple of those to get the part. And then we said we’d lay down a scratch vocal."

"And, so Jess started singing. And, it was really soulful, really powerful. Steve and I said something like, 'that’s really great but… this isn’t really like the demo. It has a very different feel to it'. It was right ‘cos it was an amazing performance but it wasn’t exactly right."

"So we sat around for a bit and Jess rolled another cigarette while we were sitting there and we asked him, ‘how do you get that sound on your little cassette player?’ he said, 'well, I was singing really quietly, sitting down. I couldn’t let my voice out because I didn’t want to bother the neighbours'.

So, we said, 'there’s a quality in that. And that was what really caught Steve and I. Can we try that? Sit down when you sing. We’ll turn all the lights down, and, lean in to the microphone and pretend like you are in your apartment'. So, then Jess sang the track and, it felt like its someone singing right here, next to you. Very personal, when he sings that track its like he’s not singing for everybody but… for you."

"This is just another whole level of singer, I’m just in heaven here; I can’t believe the good fortune."

"And so", recalls Steve, "just based on that, we started a production company just to have a vehicle to work with on this. We knew enough about the business to know that you have to establish that before someone comes along and rips you off. Jess had a song called Sudden Street… which I was never sure where it came from… but, that was from where we came up with the name for the production company." (Sudden Street, of course, is a song off of Bronco's second album - Ace Of Sunlight).

"And, then we thought, maybe we can get a couple of musicians interested. I was friends with an absolutely brilliant keyboard player called Jack Waldman who was in Robert Palmer’s band; so, I said to him – ‘look, we’re working with this guy, we’ve sussed out a couple tracks but we don’t really know what we’re going to do with it, would you fancy coming down and… just play’. So Jack goes.. ‘well… sure, what the heck’."

"We set up this beautiful baby grand piano, and that wonderful acoustic piano track was the first thing we laid down; and Jack came in and, said, ‘Wow, that’s great, this guy’s fantastic, where did you find him?’"

Michael again. "Steve was fearless about picking up the ‘phone and calling anybody. But, I thought – 'shit, you can’t call Mark Egan…' but, Steve’s thing was 'look, he’s either gonna say yes or no'. And, we had no money. None at all. Y’know, I was nicking tape, we were working these crazy hours."

Steve - "This was all done on the graveyard shift, y’know – after hours in studio down-time …come in a ten or so at night and work through ‘til four or five in the morning. Jess was game, we were all game."

"It was a very freeing time, Jess was out of his Island deal and… that’s when I met Lee Goodall who was a friend of Jess’, an amazing musician, one of these guys who could play ten or twelve instruments and all equally well."

"We asked him to come in and play guitar, and he and Jess had written this song which turned out to be Easy Way. And, we said ‘well… we’d love to record that’. So we did, as an instrumental. Lee not only plays guitar and percussion, he's the co writer and sax player and the sax tracks he played are amazing and soulful."

"Then, we'd be sitting around after listening to these rough mixes and saying, ‘boy – if money was no object, if you could fulfil any musical fantasy you wanted, who would you want to play on this track’. So, someone said, ‘I wouldn’t mind having Elliott Randall’."

Michael - "I was a friend of Elliott's through two recording engineer friends of mine, he lived two blocks away. Knowing him and having worked with him prior to Seven Windows, I knew Elliott was capable of making time stand still. And, it was almost always that first take. So, you couldn’t screw up, everything had to be set and ready, what amp we were going to use, how loud it was going to be – all of those things I had to sort-of second guess it, because if we’d started punching in the things, and thinking that’s not the right solo, it was just going to go down hill."

Steve - "And, everyone that we contacted said the same thing. Everyone. ‘This singer is just beyond belief. I’ll do it, I want to do it, just for the artistic reasons’."

"But, I guess the biggest coup of all was Paul Buckmaster. I knew Paul was friends with this girl that I knew. I mean, it was pretty cheeky, he was really hot at the time, just coming off of all the Elton John stuff but he was and still is, my favourite arranger".

Buckmaster is, of course, one of those names to be found (and often passed over) on the back of album sleeves - most usually under: string arrangements by... but, that simple credit belies his extraordinary capabilities. He, for example, arranged David Bowie's Space Oddity besides playing in a number of unsung yet hugely influential groups - the Third Ear Band, Nucleus and Suntradder. He met, studied under and recorded with Miles Davis and began working with Elton John at the start of the '70's - a working relationship that continues forty years later. In the meantime, he has also arranged music on albums by (for example) The Rolling Stones; the Grateful Dead; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Mott the Hoople; Harry Nilsson; Carly Simon; Shawn Phillips; Stevie Nicks; Carole Bayer Sager; The Darkness; Jamie Cullen; 10,000 Maniacs; Tears For Fears and many, many more. Along the way he's also collected multiple Grammy Awards.

Back to Steve Dwire - "I found out Paul was in New York, working with Miles Davis and, I tracked him down and called, saying, ‘Look, you don’t know me from a hole in the wall but, I’m doing this thing and there is this one track that I can definitely hear your string arrangement on it. But, I’ve gotta tell you, we have no money’."

"So Paul said, ‘Let me hear your track’. So I sent over a cassette. And, he rang me back and said ‘I’m in. The only thing you have to do is put me up for as long as you need me because I’ve got no more hotel room in the City’."

"I was living with my girlfriend of the time down on 22nd and we put Paul up on my couch. Anyhow, the idea of having a full string thing was completely out of our budget but the fellow who owned the studio where we cut The Rivits record was the first person in New York to have a Fairlight – and he said, ‘you can get a pretty decent orchestration-string sound out of it’ but Paul said, ‘I’m kinda wary of any of that but, let me hear what it sounds like’."

Michael MacDonald - "It was one of the very first and, in fact, was the largest Fairlight rig in NYC at the time; it was programed by Ned Liben, who was the owner of Sundragon Studios, where not only The Rivits' album was made but also where Talking Heads recorded".

Bac to Steve Dwire - "So we brought Jack in; Paul had written the charts, and off we went and I just knew it was going to be a no-go with Paul if he couldn’t stand the string sound. So Paul said, ‘let me hear the ‘cellos’ because Paul is a classically trained ‘cellist."

"And, the first comment out of his mouth was ‘they sound like cheap Chinese ‘cellos'."

"And I said, ‘does this mean that you’re not interested in doing it?’ And he replied, saying ‘well, let me hear the other sounds’. He was silent for a bit but eventually he said, ‘you know what, we can get away with this, with enough of the right reverb on… it’ll work’."

"The track that we were working on the night that Paul Buckmaster came down to the studio was called New York City which actually, never made it to the final record. Anyhow, that was the first night that I’d actually met him. Paul came in and he was leaning down and listening intently and, when the first chorus kicked in, he jumped up in excitement and slammed his back into the edge of one of the recording consoles and almost passed out from the pain".

Michael MacDonald - "The shortest session of all that we had with all these great guys was Lou Marini. He played the tenor sax on Light Brown Colour. We’d been struggling, we could simply not find a soloist to play that solo, we tried guitar, all sorts of sax players, we had really famous people and… it was, like, its good but… its not right. It wasn’t that we knew what the notes needed to be, but we knew what the feeling had to be."

"It’s a pretty remarkable track, I think... you see the solo isn’t the peak of that song, there is the chorus, the last string swell and there is a huge crescendo where it comes over you; its like you’re standing on a rock and there is this wave that comes and soaks you. And, that’s very deliberate, that’s not an accident. We needed a solo that would carry us to that point and not peak too early and Lee Goodall played the Alto parts but… the tenor solo didn’t take us where we wanted to go…"

"Lou Marini we didn’t really know but he was the hot Tenor guy in town. So, we got a really phenomenal head-phone mix done, nicely balanced and Lou walked in, took his horn out, warmed up for literally just a few moments, and said, ‘play the track down once.’ We played it, and said ‘here’s your solo section here.’ And he said, 'OK, wind it back'. I put the U-47 mic in front of him and… he played the solo."

"Then he said, 'you want another one?' We said, 'No'. So, he said, ‘well, thank you very much, that was a lot of fun guys’ and… off he went out into the night with his $100. He was in and out the door in like twenty minutes."

"Another remarkable aspect of this record is that it was recorded almost one musician at a time. We overdubbed one part at a time, simple as that. So, it was recorded over… three years probably… don’t forget, this was all done on down time; we were completely winging it. I was begging my bosses for time… like, 2am to 6am and then I had to start a jingle at 10 in the morning. Insane."

"Just when things were going great - we had a body of work, maybe five tracks… thinking… hmmm… this should be coming out as an album because, originally, we thought we’d just have a bit of fun and cut a couple of songs… so, we listened to more of Jess’ demos and they were all brilliant…"

"But… then Jess rang up one day and said, ‘look, I’m sorry lads but… I’m going to be moving back to the UK.’ It didn’t feel – to me – that it was anything he really wanted to do but… its what happened… so Steve says, 'fuck… now what do we do… we’ve lost our singer'."

"So, the second half of the record was done whereby we’d listen to Jess’ original demos and then we’d lay all the stuff down – he was trusting us with his ‘doodlings’, to flesh them out and interpret them and, a few times, we departed from them quite radically. In a sense, they were our inspiration – a bit like… we’d hear a little part and thinkl… now, what if we put that on a Marimba… stuff like that."

Back to Steve - "It kinda fitted… ‘cos, all of a sudden, we had some pretty serious people calling us up, saying ‘I heard from so and so about this project you guys have got going… are you looking for any… xylophone players… mad stuff like that… very spontaneous… it was all about the music and all about the respect for Jess, the integrity of the project as a whole. "

"But", remembers Michael, "we’d lost our singer so Steve said, 'look – we have to go to the UK, we’ll spend a couple of weeks and we’ll cut all the vocals'. Which is exactly what we did – we used Shepperton Studios primarily. Jess had worked out a deal – he knew someone there."

"Actually, we went to England twice. The first time we went, we got a tour of Air Studios, we had four tracks with us… I think it was Paul Buckmaster who took us there. And they, very graciously said, 'have you anything you want to check our monitors on…' so we said, 'can we play this..?' and so they aligned the machine, took our test tones… and they put it up in a studio across the ocean… these people had never heard it before… and, it just sounded fucking phenomenal, just blew everybody away… they looked at us like we weren’t kids anymore – they knew this is some serious recording going on… so, then they treated us very differently."

"You can hear this on Light Brown Colour if you listen really carefully… that was Gary Amos playing drums on that track. Steve and Gary had worked together a lot, he was this big hulking guy, like a metronome, big powerful drums, really solid and a really creative guy and, during the solo, there is a point where Gary is keeping the cymbals together and, during the early rough mixes the beat kinda falters and the cymbals have this sort of hiccup in them but, he catches it and comes back out. And you know, that plagued us for about a year; to us it dropped the feel, dropped the magic."

"So, a year later, Steve and I went in and said, 'we’re going to punch in the drums for the solo section and come back out when it comes back to the chorus'. Now, we didn’t have any other open tracks so this means we’re gonna punch in and match the sounds and match the feeling… a year later. And fix that part. So, we told Gary what we had in mind and he said, ‘yeah, I know what I need to do.’ And, it worked but… punching back out… I blew the punch. So, now the first beat of the chorus is totally… fucked."

"What we’re doing is pretty insane, nobody would do this… and, I can’t believe I’ve blown the punch. But, we had our backs against the wall. So I said, ‘guys, leave me alone, I’ve gotta think about how I’m gonna fix this'."

"So, I took the two inch tape and, the chorus is four beats… and, I cut the two inch tape with a razor-blade, spliced in a big piece of leader tape – blank, nothing, tape… the idea being to play the first measure and then I’m going to punch out on the leader tape and then stick the two pieces of tape back together again. Which – in theory – would make a clean punch out."

"It was really delicate, this is nuts… and… in effect, real studio key-hole surgery… and, essentially, it’s a great track that I’ve just destroyed."

"So… put the pieces of tape back together and all works fine. But, if you go listen… you’ll hear the drum sound change very very slightly at the top of the solo – the first measure of the next chorus but, when it goes to the next measure… fifth beat… you’ll hear the cymbal sound change and… that’s the splice back point. It was insane to do it anyway but, somehow we managed to pull it off."

Steve again - "You have to remember too, this was all pre-ProTools… so, we had none of the gadgets we’re all used to nowadays that, used properly, can make my doorman sound like Sinatra."

"And the record itself, there are some things that are absolutely brilliant – Light Brown Colour, Parachutes – and there is some other stuff that we didn’t really have to time to mix because… once again, we had no money."

"We were just happy to get a release and they said, get the masters to us in a certain amount of time so, there is some stuff on there that I’m incredibly proud of and there’s a few bits that makes me sort of wince because they’re really still rough mixes. And, that was down to time in the studio, money, just… life… and, Jess had moved back to England by then… and, unhappily, we just didn’t have the funds to properly finish it. "

"As a matter of fact," concurs Michael, "there is not a single mix on the entire album that both Steve and I totally and completely signed off on, every single mix has a tiny problem… one of the worst problems for us was – no one knows this… the instrumental Easy Way, at the beginning there is a straight ahead drum machine… and, that was just in there to keep time so we could lay proper drums on top – basically, it’s a click track. So, you have this beautiful floating intro but with this rigid drum machine under it; and that was never ever supposed to be there."

'Nevertheless, we realised however, that we had something really terrific. The only way to do it justice wasn’t by spending a few hours of downtime on it, we really needed a week in a world-class studio to pull it off. We knew the potential was there."

Steve again - "And, you know, because we weren’t making it under the microscope of a label, with people breathing down our necks the entire time, it became a labour of love quite frankly."

"The sleeve..? That was a friend of Michael’s" recalls Steve. "She was living on the West Side at the time, a stunningly beautiful Danish girl, and, we gave her the tapes and she drew up the album cover for us. Again, it was another of those things. She said, ‘I love this music… its so evocative, makes me so dreamy… so sensual and all of this other stuff…’ So, she asked us if she could submit some ideas for a cover."

"And, the name Seven Windows… I think it was the name of a song that Jess had been working on. One that never came to fruition."

Michael MacDonald agrees - "No, the original name wasn’t going to be Seven Windows. The original project was called The Elements. Reflecting, y’know, Earth, Fire, Air, Wind, Carbon, Oxygen and those kind of things and Mark Egan, who became one of the early players – he played fretless bass – working on a solo project which was called The Elements so we thought, crap, we’ve got to change the names. But, actually, I don’t know where the name Seven Windows came from, maybe it was one of Jess' lyrics..?

Steve Dwire - "The marketing moniker that they came out with was ‘New Age Music’ which I’ve always hated as I thought it was just really bland; implying dentist’s office music."

"Seven Windows predated the ambient, chill-out music that became to be so much in vogue. We had no name for what we were doing, we were just trying to make an album that was basically all about feeling."




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