GIL SCOTT -HERON & BRIAN JACKSON - 1980
1980 was as much about an ending as it was about a beginning.  See below:
To those of us living in 1979, it felt like 1980 was the 21st century.  With 1984, the Orwellian doomsdate, right around the corner, we were concerned.  It didn’t feel like ’69 felt going into 1970.  Even though the Vietnam War was years away, many of us still saw a glimmer of hope in the seventies.  But now there really wasn’t, as Gil laments in the song “1980,” “even no way back to ’75, much less 1969.”  Notwithstanding, in 1979, some of us still believed that we could stock up on a little extra humanity before the Individual Rights shop went out of business.  We began to prepare for ‘life’ within the new structure that was so brazenly being put into place, while somehow holding on to, as Stevie Wonder once said, “the good things in the past.”
As in the song “Late Last Night,” I had “been out on the road one day too long.”  Gil and I and the Midnight Band had been touring extensively, and I was ready to regroup and write some more tunes.  Nowadays, I can turn on my laptop, plug my lightweight keyboard into a USB port, fire up my audio program and record drums, bass, keyboards and even vocals, right in my hotel room, with my neighbors being none the wiser.  But this was the seventies.  Whatever ideas I had swirling around in the road-riddled mess that was my brain during the wee hours, only my home answering machine would know. The rest would have to wait until I could ‘upload’ it to a tape recorder once I got back.
I was in Oakland at the time, enjoying what I thought would be a 6-month hiatus, when about 3 months into our agreed-upon break, I got a call from a frazzled Gil: He had been in the studio and had run into a roadblock.  This was to be our last album for Arista records under the initial contract period.  Maybe it was pressure from the company, or perhaps the desire for a fresh approach, but for whatever reason, Gil had decided to go it alone in Malcolm Cecil’s T.O.N.T.O. studio in Santa Monica, California, with only Malcolm to assist (Gil and Malcolm did subsequently team up to do albums after 1980).   Even though they were meant as blueprints – done with a drum machine to keep time, thankfully – the tracks were less than inspiring.
For the ten years that Gil and I worked together, I was always in charge of putting the bands together, and when it was time to go into the studio, I made sure all of the arrangements were studio-ready, making adjustments as needed.  I loved being in the studio.   I stayed abreast of all of the latest technology, and studied and picked the brain of every engineer and producer that I came across.  When I heard the roughs Gil had recorded on just an electric piano with vocals outlining the melodies, I realized then and there that my hiatus was about to turn into a hiatal hernia.
The lyrics were, of course, brilliant.  “Alien,” “Shah Mot,” “Willing,” “Push Come to Shove,” “Shut Um Down,” “1980” – were as strong and as focused as always.  But the electric piano tracks all sounded the same; they were all the same tempo – a little on the slow side (after all, this was the beginning of the Disco era), and, while some of the chord progressions were quite clever, Gil’s performance of them left much to be desired.  While a proficient enough piano player, it wasn’t his job to create voicings, flesh out chords, and experiment with sounds, invent catchy bass lines, or chart horn and vocal arrangements if necessary.  That’s what I was there for.
Had I been present when he started to record I would have said, “Hey man, this tune is at the same tempo as the other three; shouldn’t we change it,” or other such production observations.  Gil found out the hard way - it’s not easy to produce yourself.   He had spent a lot of time with very little to show for it.  The budget was getting tighter every day.  How would we fix it?
What you hear on 1980 is the answer to that question.  I brought in the best session players in LA.  I brought in the best background vocalists in town, The Waters (It was The Waters whose sweet voices can be heard on “Angel Dust”).  Harvey Mason laid down the fat drum tracks – except when the budget was really getting tight, and we had already called him in to do all of the other tracks – I jumped on the drums myself to do Shut Um Down.  Midnight Band bassist Robbie Gordon (who wasn’t listed) and guitarist Ed Brady were called to add dimension to tunes like “Push Come to Shove”, “1980” and “Willing.”  Marlo Henderson was enlisted again, as on Bridges, to add sweet acoustic guitar licks to “Alien,” that, to my mind, made the song what it was. On the other tracks I laid down the bass on T.O.N.T.O. (an acronym for “The Original New Timbral Orchestra”), Malcolm Cecil’s roomful of synthesizers, that he had put together, mad scientist-style, to create the sounds behind Stevie Wonder, The Isleys, Weather Report and Billy Preston, to name a few.  During post-production Gil called fellow Lincoln University alumnus and close friend of ours, Carl Cornwell, to blow a wicked tenor sax solo on “1980.”  Later Carl also filled the Music Director chair in my absence.
Gil had written the songs for 1980 during the time we were on ‘break,’ but we still were one tune short.  I had been working on a piece while I was in Oakland.  It needed lyrics.  As was our custom, before he wrote a word, he asked me, “What’s it about?”
“It’s about turning corners, a new page,” I replied.  He knew what I meant.  It was over.  We had gone to the end of the line as musical partners.  It was time to go our separate ways.  Corners was the last song we ever wrote together, and therefore fittingly, the last song on the album.
1980 was as much about a beginning as it was about an ending.  See above.

Brian Jackson