From Rumblefish to Gridlock'd is yet another milestone in Stewart Copeland’s illustrious career. As founder/drummer of The Police, Copeland helped redefine the direction of contemporary music. His percussive flavor introduced a new-found articulate fury to playing drums and his lightning-fast polyrhythms, laced over brutal simplicity, forged his name onto the A-list of drummers worldwide. Amidst his success with The Police, Copeland was breaking the mold of being ‘just the drummer.’
His list of ‘additional accomplishments’ now reads a mile long. As a composer, performer and producer, Copeland has five Grammy Awards, a Cable Ace Award, and over twenty-seven film scores including Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumblefish and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Talk Radio. More recently he’s diversified his compositional skills to score for such films as Vondie Curtis Hall's Gridlock’d, The Leopard Son, Four Days In September, and Good Burger. His TV credits include "Afterburn," "The Equalizer," and "Babylon 5." As if that weren’t enough, Copeland has somehow made time to score and compose for the San Francisco Ballet and Italy’s Trento Ballet.
From Rumblefish to Gridlock'd contains excerpts from Copeland’s filmography from 1984 to 1997. The tracks within are a breath of fresh air at every turn, spanning the many facets of his skill. Copeland displays his ability to capture playful melodies, thunderous rhythms and the most delicate of harmonies brilliantly. His work has constantly taken brave new attempts at blending music’s primal roots with it’s evolutionary future, synergizing the simple dynamic of beating a log with the sterility of digital technology. Copeland’s deep rooted understanding of not just beat and melody, but the pulse behind the music, invokes a varied yet distinguishable signature of timelessness to his compositions.
Mr. Copeland spared some time recently to share some insights on his uniquely varied career and this business of music.
[Kemp] When was the first time you knew music was truly your direction?
[Copeland] It's hard for me to remember, because there was always music in the house. My dad was an ex-musician. He played with The Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller, various people... He was actually really good, then the war came along and he got into intelligence and went on from there. He regretted a life not in music, so as his kids appeared, one by one he'd thrust instruments into their hands and they didn't stick. When I came along, there were all these instruments around the house. I remember my first drum, an Italian snare drum. My dad came home from one of his trips to Egypt and heard me playing on it. He wasn't so much impressed by how good I was at it, but the fact that I was always doing it. He recognized this as a musician-like tendency and immediately enrolled me in drum lessons at the age of god-knows-what.
[Kemp] What prompted your departure from Curved Air and founding of The Police?
[Copeland] During the last stages of Curved Air, when we had just done England too many times. We were doing really well but we had already played Newcastle three months ago and we're back. We began to realize that this is the coming to an end. Just then this noise started coming out of the Roxy Club and Soho, this wild new sound, this anarchic attitude towards music—"I don't care if I can play my instrument, it's the spirit that counts."
[Kemp] Did that seem like the right direction at the time?
[Copeland] I did have a rebellious attitude. So the punk thing, with the noises they were making, made a lot of sense to me. I went down to these clubs and saw the thrash of it. Now this is what it's all about! The band comes on. The audience goes nuts. There's bodies hurling across the stage. It's like "Wow! This is happening. This is life!" The bands would collect their money at the end of the night and go home with it. There's no record company. There's no nothing. Of course the clarifying crystallizing thought was, "Shit, I can do this," so I invented a group called The Police and looked around for some guys to play in it.
[Kemp] And the rest is history. What inspired From Rumblefish to Gridlock'd?
[Copeland] It started out with my film agent asking me for a collection of all the best stuff just so they can make a CD sampler and they would put it together. I started looking at all my stuff. When I started shortening tracks to fit them on the disc, I realized that actually all this material sounds better this way. A film score works with picture. Take away the picture and you've got this kind of ambient wash. Now, instead of stretching the material, I was trying to squeeze it down to within a certain amount of time and space. Having done all that I got into designing the cover, because I'm a PhotoShop fanatic, you know. At the end I had this album which actually strikes me as better than any of the other albums I've made. Browsing through a bookstore I came across a book on musicians and the Internet. I thought, "Cool! Why don't I release this record my goddamn self?" When you release a record with a record company, you sign a contract for three years. Anything you do has to be through them. They own the master. They pay you money up front. You get 12%, 18%, even 22%, if you're big. Which is, let's average that out to say $1.00 a record. Whereas if I release it myself on the Internet, [I could] just make it available on a site. Making $10 a record (by selling it directly myself) means I only need to sell 1/10 of the number (that a record company would need to sell) just to cover the costs of doing it. That's really the whole thing of it. I have a strong feeling that there's people out there who will respond to the weird shit that I do. Since I enjoy making it, it’s sort of a communication with someone.
[Kemp] What's some of the new material that you're listening to?
[Copeland] P.J. Harvey. I mean, like everybody else, I've got my Prodigy cranked to maximum volume. Portishead. I thought the Fugees were a really important group.
[Kemp] How so?
[Copeland] Because I can identify with the Fugees. They did sort of what The Police did, which was take elements from a certain place and popularize them. I've always been a big fan of rap. Those rhythm tracks, and the music behind them are really cool—Public Enemy, NWA, all those guys. The Fugees, however, came along and used that and put songs with it.
[Kemp] How deeply were you influenced by reggae?
[Copeland] I was a reggae DJ at KALX at UC Berkeley. As the guy who had been to England, I was considered English, even though I'm American, goddamit. I was born in Virginia. So I was in charge of the English stuff that came in and reggae kind of got lumped in with that. That's where I heard my first Bob Marley album. I always loved "Dozen Decker and the Israelites," which to this day is one of the songs I remember hearing on the radio back in '68 or whenever and thinking, "Shit, this is completely different. This changes everything." So I've always been deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into reggae. In the punk clubs, they were raging with The Clash, but in between raging they needed something to break the tempo. There was no form of slow punk music so they played reggae, because reggae music was music of struggle. That's why reggae fit right in to the punk scene.
[Kemp] Lately sampling someone else’s music to create new music has become a digital art form in itself. Have you considered creating a marketable library of your own distinctive works?
[Copeland] I'm more interested in writing music and in my winter years I'll do things like that—write a book, give lessons, and ...a CD-ROM. Creatively, it's not that exciting. I'm already in a few rap tunes, in fact I'm number one for the twelfth week with Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You." The album came in at number one and it's "Every Breath You Take," sampled.
[Kemp] What's been your favorite score so far?
[Copeland] It sounds like a cliché, but it's usually my most recent score, which right now is Good Burger. I enjoyed the hell out of Good Burger and I still got those tunes jingling around my head. It was just cheerful and it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the effervescence of it. If you asked me a few weeks before that, it would have been, Four Days in September, or Gridlock’d was a big favorite of mine. I really enjoyed Gridlock’d. The director [Vondie Curtis Hall] is an extremely cool guy.
[Kemp] What about the chicken and the egg syndrome. When a movie is coming up, do you sometimes have little tidbits of music that’s just waiting for the perfect spot?
[Copeland] When I first started film composing, I would have ideas, like (with) RumbleFish and I'd use those ideas. Before I saw the movie, we were recording a Police album, and with the frustration of the Police recording environment, all this other stuff was squirting out of my ears sideways. With "The Equalizer," I got to do a show a week. I very soon used up every lick that I had stored in my cupboard and had to come up with something new this time. That's like boot camp of film composing. I discovered that it's much easier to write a piece of music for this scene specifically with this emotion, than it is to adapt something.
[Kemp] There are a lot of individuals who will always see you as a drummer first and foremost. Do you ever plan on joining a band again just for the fun of it?
[Copeland] You know, I've got to leave that to the kids who are just burning with desire and who just live to get out on tour every night, nine months of the year. That's not me. Stan [Clark] and I will probably work again. We'll do things like his Rights of String tour, where we do three days of rehearsal, then go out and we play the European jazz festivals. Jazz is the easiest form of music to play. Just get up there and make it up as you go along and that's jazz. It's the music that has less threat to me than Winnie the Pooh. Stan and I have friendly discussions about this all the time. I'm just saying this to pull the chain of jazz musicians. I have material that will fit this kind of thing. We'll find a great guitarist. In fact, I'll let you know...who that guitarist is. Incredibly talented, genius, the most important guitarist living, complete. I'll leave you to ponder that. Then we'll go out and we'll do a summer festival. I love the gigs. That's why jazz, after all the bad-mouthing, is going to save my ass. I really do enjoy it. I enjoy tennis. I enjoy golf. I enjoy surfing. I'm not very good at any of those things. What I am good at is playing drums. And I enjoy the hell out of it.
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