style="font-size:15px;"> In August, the hottest month of all, I was once again moving house as my lease had expired and I was determined to escape the flight path noise of Brickell Key. I chose a peaceful old plantation-style house on Munroe Drive in Coconut Grove’s private estate known as Camp Biscayne. The house came with a private canal, a derelict boat, and a shared tennis court. But most importantly I would finally be able to sleep! Or so I thought.
Unfortunately, the first night proved me wrong. Next door, I soon discovered, lay a seven-acre estate that led down to the water’s edge and ended in mangrove swamps — the perfect breeding ground for those nasty flying critters known colloquially as “no-see-ums.” The tiny bugs could fly right through mosquito netting and feasted on me for the next year.
Apart from this annoyance, the place was enchanting. My new abode had a long wooden bridge on one side and a spacious upper floor that I really did not need, so I advertised on Craigslist for a tenant and found a lively French girl called Alexandre. She worked as a professional accountant, and in exchange for free board, she looked after my bookkeeping.
It was while living in Camp Biscayne that a documentary film maker, Max Montalvo from Montreal, spent a day interviewing me on camera for the film called El Payo that he was making on the wonderful flamenco teacher, David Phillips, who years ago had enthusiastically arranged “Malagueña” and “Granada” for me. If only David had known the role those arrangements had played in my career — that millions would view me playing “Malagueña” on YouTube, and many millions more would watch me performing these perennial favourites on American and Canadian network television shows, to say nothing of all the listeners to albums and radio shows once I had recorded them. It might seem unbelievable, but there had never been any classical guitar arrangement of these two popular pieces until I commissioned David to make them. Even my own guitar teacher had considered them too “popular” for my repertoire, but that is the nature of the classical guitar world and its purists, who usually eschew anything that sounds remotely popular. Tragically, Toronto’s much loved flamenco teacher died an alcoholic, a condition due in part, I believe, to the psoriasis that ravaged the poor man’s guitar-playing nails. Fingernails are always an obsession with guitarists as they greatly affect the tone we produce when plucking the strings. Breaking a nail can seriously jeopardize a concert. Fortunately, both Srdjan and I had strong fingernails, and we relied heavily on them when playing together.
Over the next while we worked long hours perfecting our duo songs and tweaking the arrangements. By 2007 we had had assembled sixteen beautiful love songs. Our inspiration when we played together was tangible, and we finally felt ready to start recording a CD. But where? I investigated a dozen studios and producers. Miami was very much attuned to the Latin music scene, and I had the overwhelming impression that the dozen producers I interviewed were not that interested in folky English-language love songs. Trying to decide what to do was both frustrating and time-consuming. It was quite different from Toronto, where I had built up a lifetime of contacts in the music business, or even Los Angeles, where I also had developed quite a network.
One evening I attended a lecture at the Miami Recording Academy, where I was a member, and there I encountered Bruce Swedien, Michael Jackson’s legendary recording engineer, the man who had engineered, mixed, and co-produced, along with Quincy Jones, the biggest selling album of all time, Thriller. This man had also just produced a Swedish classical music CD and had won five Grammy Awards! Bruce told me he had just opened a new studio in Ocala, Florida, and would be happy to produce our songs for us. Wow, what incredible good fortune! I thought. I could hardly believe my luck, and soon after our encounter I took a plane up to Ocala to check out his state-of-the-art studio. We made a deal that I thought was extremely reasonable, and a couple of months later an excited Srdjan flew down to Florida to begin recording.
I had booked a photo session in Miami for our album cover, and later that day Srdjan and I drove north to Ocala, which was situated three hours from Miami, smack in the middle of Florida. We were bubbling with excitement that our songs would be produced by such a renowned name in the music business.
Sadly, it was not meant to be.
I realized through this experience what a difference there is between an engineer and a producer. Bruce gave us hardly any guidance, and his occasional phrasing advice was not to our liking as we had both formed definite ideas about how our songs should sound.
Bruce kept pressing buttons and asked us to sing take after take of the same first part to our first song. Srdjan and I gave each other despairing glances, and we shared the sinking feeling that Bruce was not proving to be the producer we had been hoping for. I tried, over a dinner that his wife kindly made for us, to explain some of our musical ideas, and the next day we began again to lay down some more tracks, but after a couple of hours I took Srdjan aside and whispered that I was going to have to pull the plug. It simply wasn’t working, and I was getting more and more frustrated. Srdjan nodded glumly in agreement.
I am sure that Bruce had been an amazing engineer for Michael Jackson, and he was an amiable and experienced man, but for the two of us who needed a producer’s guidance, it was just not the right fit. He accepted our decision and was fair about returning the majority of the money I had fronted. One suggestion he offered, for which I shall always be grateful, was for me to write English lyrics to “Chiri Biri Bela,” a Croatian song he heard us sing while we were warming up our voices.
The day we split with Bruce happened to be July 11, my birthday, so Srdjan and I took a detour to Disney World, saw an IMAX film, and ate ice cream, and I tried to forget what a huge mistake I had just made. Perhaps the producer I was looking for was simply not in Miami.
6
Con Artists, Miami Style
A retired New York businessman and art dealer, whom I met at a Fisher Island art gallery cocktail party, had befriended me. I had become involved in a bizarre real estate tangle while attempting to purchase a penthouse located on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, and my new friend offered his help. The place, filled with erotic art, and owned by a man whom I conjectured to be an elderly bipolar psychopath married to a twenty-something Polish dominatrix, had magnificent 360-degree views from the intercostal waterway to the ocean, and a fanciful rooftop guesthouse with canopied opium bed and all manner of antiques, the majority of which were to be included in the sale price.
As I had no desire to inherit the collection of erotica that filled the condo, my new businessman friend struck a deal with a buddy of his, a Hasidic rabbi, who suggested he could overestimate the value of the art, take it all off my hands, and anonymously sell it through various auctions in order to make a profit to benefit his temple. In return he promised a receipt for a fat charitable donation that I could use as a tax credit. Attending one of his basement schul dinners, I started to feel uneasy with this real estate deal and sensed that I was being drawn into a world I had little experience with.
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I was also becoming frustrated with the singing lessons I had signed up for hoping to strengthen my voice. Mr. New York (my nickname for the businessman who had befriended me) had introduced me to Frank Sinatra’s former manager, Eliot Weisman, a music industry kingpin who encouraged my songwriting but insisted that I take singing lessons with his friend Tony Perez, at the crazy price of five hundred dollars a lesson!
Desperate to sing, I foolishly complied. During the lessons Perez would scream and yell at me, all the while dressed in camouflage gear and acting out an absurd drill sergeant persona. He told me I had to hold my breath longer then scream my lungs out. He added that if I felt like throwing up, the bathroom was right in the next room.
It was a humiliating experience. It brought back memories of the time back in Toronto when Kenneth Mills, the enigmatic, mystical leader of the Star-Scape Singers, had offered me a
