It's not easy staying on top in the rock organ jungle, but Cavaliere doesn't need a string of credits to establish his credibility. These days he's writing songs, mixing synths with his trademark Hammond, and reflecting on the changes the music business has gone through.

Now that you're back in the recording game, how does the music business today compare to what you remember about the '60s?

It's like night and day. These days, the word "business" has a capital B. The environment that they create for you to make music these days is not very musical. I'm not saying this about my specific situation, but, for example, there's a young group around here [Nashville] that recently came up with a deal with a major label - Geffen. They have a major producer, they're going into a major L.A. studio. But they're scared to death. I asked them, 'Why the long faces?" "Well, you know, if we don't get a hit, we're gone." Oh, man! In the old days, you had an opportunity to fail. The people who signed you would say, "I think this act has some talent. Let's develop them." I don't see that too much anymore.

Many of the most famous groups of the '60s didn't have any hit singles.

But now they're pretty jaded. If you sell 300,000 albums, that's not bad, but it doesn't mean anything to these people sometimes. It's like, 'Whaddya mean? That's a failure!" That's the mentality. It's the same thing with the live part of it, although that's changing. If you go to see a show nowadays, there's a tremendous amount of backup stuff. I understand that a lot of enhancement goes on backstage. This means that audiences are used to hearing reproductions of the artist's album that are pretty damn close to the original. But it's not really live. That's the weight that guys have on their backs and carry to their work today.

Perhaps there was more of a risk to live performance in the days of the Rascals.

"Risk" is the right word, both live and in recording. So I told this band, "Are you kidding me? When I started making records, man, it was the best friggin' fun I'd ever had." But to these guys, it's a hassle. They don't like the studio, they don't like the producer. It's just one big headache after another. These groups today don't even play live! They showcase. They don't even get paid. They're just looking for that record deal. Whereas the Rascals were working musicians. Often we'd have to go into a hostile environment and win that crowd over. You had to earn your money in those days. That's why, when you get a hit record, it kind of jades you. You think, "At least I know they like us, so we don't have to work as hard to get over. We'll just play the hit." But we didn't have any hits, so we needed to work. Kids today have a nice world. I mean, a year or two in between records? That's not bad. And they've got more money than we ever dreamed of. They just somehow don't have the spontaneity.

Do you think that musicians today are less capable of separating the musical side of their work from the business side than '60s-vintage artists were?

Absolutely. No doubt about it. Money is a major part of the motivation. I heard an interview with Billy Joel the other night, and he said, 'Anybody who tells you that they didn't get into this business for the women is full of baloney." Well, I'll tell you something: Let's try that interview with a younger artist. I don't think you'll hear the same thing. They realize that mega-bucks are available, and that's what they're after.

To be fair, there are plenty of people doing techno and other underground styles who never expect to make any kind of a living from their music.

Right. I'm talking about mainstream guys. It's the same with the jazz guys. I went to a seminar at Berklee one time, where they had me mediate between professors from two opposing schools, jazz and rock. Here I am at the end of the table, and it was like a war zone. They didn't appreciate one another, and I was amazed. I said, 'First of all, anybody who has the chops to even consider playing what Herbie Hancock and those cats play, they're not gonna stop with the I-IV-V chords. They're going to go on whether you offer the courses or not. On the other hand, there's not many guys who can go from here [points toward imaginary rock contingency] and there [indicates jazz mob on opposite side of room]. They can go as listeners, but you gotta be serious to jump to that kind of stuff. But as far as I'm concerned, there should never be a conflict. Each thing has its place. Unfortunately, the major dollars are made in only one of those places, which is what causes the problem. You could probably go back to the beginnings of music, when the first person started to glorify the Divine in music and somebody immediately said, "You know, we can sell that."

In other words, the jazz people at Berklee objected more to the success of their rock counterparts than to their music itself.

Yeah. They felt that to get mired in that money thing would negate what they're doing. They know that the majority of the people who play jazz aren't making money, so they feel that that's not what the school is about. In fact, they're both doing the same thing; they're just catering to different Students. That's why I don't like guys my age who say, 'Man, these kids don't know what they're doing." Hey, that's what's happening, take it or leave it. When you look at the talent that some of these people are bringing to their work, oi! Guys who come out of these schools have knowledge from the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s in their hands. Whoa! There are some serious players out there.

But how many of these new players are going to cut records like "Good Lovin" or "Light My Fire," or "Like a Rolling Stone" - songs that will be remembered as classics for generations to come?

There's a certain kind of creative juice that you're either given or not given. That doesn't mean that you can't learn to play an instrument. I had a drummer one time who really thought that he could teach anybody to play drums. I'd say, 'What if you don't have any rhythm?' And he'd say, "Well, I'll get around that somehow." The thing is, you could become a drummer, maybe even a pretty good one. But you may not have that spark.

Even though many of the great records of the '60s were sloppy, somehow they had staying power.

Well, music technology is a double-edged sword. When I turn on the radio and hear some oldie, I'll often say, "Man, I never knew that singer was ahead of the beat!" What that really means is, I'll have to lay off the sequencer a while. Yeah, he's ahead of the beat. No question about it. He's not listening to the groove at all. But at least he's got his own groove! Nowadays, that doesn't happen.

So you think that over-reliance on music technology can discourage individuality?

Sure. At one point, I think we got a little too quantized. That's why we're seeing this Seattle stuff. The longer I'm around, the more I see music swinging from left to right, back and forth. For the short period of time when it's in the middle, it's happening. But it's not gonna stop there; it's gonna keep swinging.

How long has it been since you did your last solo album?

Since '80. I did an album for Epic called Only the Lonely Heart Sleeps. It was around the beginning of adult contemporary radio, and they asked me to do it that way. I co-produced it as well as wrote it. It was a real tough time. The difference between making music in the '60s was enormous. I came here in '88, and I decided that the best thing for me was to go completely into being a producer/songwriter. Forget about the artist part and leave that album stuff behind.

Why?

When you have good memories, you don't want to spoil them. I've always used the analogy of having a good piece of earth in the back yard: The soil is ready for whatever you plant. In the old days at Atlantic, we had people like Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd around: Whatever you put into that garden grew into a beautiful flower. I'm not gonna kid myself that the business was a dream, but it was a hell of a lot better than it's become. It was a joy to make records. So I came here to Nashville to get away from how things had become.

Were you playing much synth on Only the Lonely Heart Sleeps?

I was doing some synthesizer, but it was all separate instruments. I was involved way back with ARP. We knew something was coming. Back in those early days, I felt that we keyboard players were getting cheated, because everybody else could make those nice bends. Nowadays I just love all the new stuff. Frustrating as it can be, it's still like a revelation.

Did you play all the synth parts on your new record?

Well, the story of the album is kind of complex. Don [Was, producer] and I had a bit of a clash over the MIDI stuff. His idea was basically to not program. The live feel is more his forte. So when we started the project, he had a pretty decent ensemble, with Jeff Porcaro on drums. That was wonderful. Unfortunately, when Jeff passed, it changed everything. He's on all the live cuts, which are "Stay in Love," "Me for You," and "Youngblood.'

Had you ever played with Jeff?

I'd never met him before. I'm so glad, man, that I got to know him. But after that, Don and I sat down to discuss the situation. I said, "Look, one of the problems I'm having is, when you bring four musicians into a room, you're laying your song open to their interpretation. I really don't want to do that. With the time we've spent programming and sequencing, if you like what we've done, and the people involved with the project like it, why not go with that? Would you give me an opportunity to show you what I've got?" I brought him to Jim Bralower, the drum programmer, and Jeff Bova, who programs keyboards. And he loved what they wanted to do. So I took a bit of a back seat to Jeff [Bova] on this project, because he's pretty serious about these things. He enhanced not only with the tremendous availability of sounds that he has, but in some cases he also changed the parts. I had no problem with that. I use [Mark of the Unicorn] Performer, so I supplied him with my disks, but he ended up using an Akai Linn [MPC60] as his main sequencer. So we had the drums programmed on one Akai Linn, then we had the keyboards on another Akai Linn, speaking to one another. There was a little band feeling in that setup, rather than that kind of blandness you can get from some sequenced projects. They used Performer to edit the keyboard parts, and Opcode Vision to edit the drums. As far as I was concerned, the whole project was about me stepping into the twenty-first century. It's not that it's beyond you; it's a question of, "How much time it's going to take to learn this?" and "Can I get as good as that cat is after all these years?"

How different is that kind of creative energy from what inspired you as a live player in the '60s?

It's the same thing. They're just working off of a machine base that we didn't have. It's just fascinating what these guys can do. For example, I would do a drum track at home. I thought it was pretty decent. But I take it to one of these cats, and it just blossoms.

Was it hard for the Rascals, as a band oriented toward club gigs, to adjust to the discipline of recording?

Of course, in those days, most of the groups had to start live, because we didn't have the situation where you could have a four-track in your home. I mean, we had the only eight-track in existence at Atlantic. Us and Les Paul - that was it. Believe me, guys like John Sebastian and the Lovin' Spoonful were really jealous of us, because we had eight tracks and they had four. But, I tell you, I don't think there was one band that didn't have trouble making the transition from live to the studio. Even in those days, with the Neumanns and the Telefunkens, it was so critical to be on pitch; if you weren't on pitch, everyone knew.

In those days, recording was mainly about translating a performance onto tape. Did that make it more difficult to get into today's approach of using the studio as a starting point for creating a complete work, possibly with no connection to the idea of performance?

No, because the studio has been a place I've always felt comfortable. Even in the old days, there was that quest for perfection. When you make a record, you try to take all of the error out. That's what we tried to do, although we were limited in comparison to what you can do now. I was kind of surprised by some of the things that happened on the new album. One day this fellow came in and started taking notes on a performance I had just done. I noticed he was writing things like, "We'll delay this word a bit." Obviously, he was working with a technology that can move a word I just sang maybe half a beat back. Man, I could see how you could really become a fanatic about that kind of stuff. Somebody has to keep some kind of a balance or you could change the whole damn thing. I have no desire to be that perfect; that takes something out.

How did sampling affect you?

That was the first thing that really stretched out into something I had never experienced before. Don hooked me up with a lot of young writers. Being involved with these guys was a revelation. This one fellow, named Nick Brown, was this huge black English guy, about 22. We sat down and started writing a song. We came up with "Voices Calling," with normal chord changes, the theme, the chorus, stuff like that. Then he said, "All right, have you got something you can do now?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You wanna go work out or go swimming or something?" Rather than be insulted, I said, "Yeah. I'll be back in about two hours.' When I came back, this guy had prepared a track that blew my mind. I bad never been so excited since I stopped using stimulants. How did he do it? He made it all from sampled drums, mixed in two separate patterns.

How did it differ from the kind of rhythm tracks you've done?

I would try to reproduce a live feel. He was mixing and matching things that couldn't necessarily be reproduced live by a human being. That, of course, is the quantum leap I took on this record. All our training was, "Can you play it? If you can't, don't use it." That's why I think that sampling was maybe the biggest revolution.

In other words, the limits of your imagination in the past were set by what you could play. Technical facility is no longer the determining factor.

That's why your chops can suffer over what's going on these days.

So there is a down side as well as an up side to all this.

Well, there's always an up side and a down side. The main point is that today's songwriter has to be a producer too. People aren't willing to listen to a piano/vocal demo anymore. So songwriters have become adept at creating tracks on the spot, with varying degrees of expertise. That was the most fascinating part to this project - seeing some of these guys create these tracks as we were writing them. There's no way you can't learn from that.

Specifically, how did that affect your work?

I went out and bought myself a sampler, the Akai S1000; a lot of the guys use it, so we can trade disks, and I can take them home to reproduce and add to whatever they did. I take a back seat to them in sound creation. Most of these guys are more interested in creating sounds than I am. I would rather create a song, a melody, a lyric. That's why I lean very heavily on these guys for sounds.

The songs on your album do reflect a traditional approach to structure, whereas much of what you hear in contemporary music emphasizes the groove and the sounds more than the composition. Has that approach had any impact on your work?

Yeah, of course. Those rhythms are phenomenal. I did part of my project at Battery Studios in Manhattan, which is owned by Jive Records, and the grooves in those studios were serious. But, not to knock anything that's out there, that's not what I do. I grew up with classical music. I was trained that way on piano. And I had the good fortune to grow up in the same town where Alan Freed started rock and roll. I heard all that stuff from day one, as it flourished into Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and all those great groups. That's why I would rather create a strong melody and as strong a lyric as I could possibly find or come up with than any of the gimmicks. Plus, I knew that if I attempted to cross that barrier, I would be criticized severely for selling out. However, as a starting point, a different kind of groove or sound is great. If you get a new instrument, you've got a new inspiration. That's always been my excuse to buy different instruments, and to subscribe to Keyboard.

Many songwriters insist that a good song has to pass the test of working well on piano, and deny that any particular sound or rhythm inspires compositional ideas.

I'm surprised to hear that. Even if you've got a new effects box, that can trigger something fresh. There's a young guitarist around here who has a very interesting concept of how to use his effects. I told him ' "You should do a whole album based on the kinds of sounds you hear, then maybe let some producer come in to make it a little more normal." I don't want to knock the piano, but that sound does get old. Now, if you're talking about a song you're trying to put into the classic repertoire, if you want Frank Sinatra to consider it, sure, the piano is fine. But that's not what we do. We're talking about writing to get a hit. We have radio to contend with. We have very sophisticated kids out there who have heard everything. We're up against some of the best producers in the world, trying to create something that will attract attention, if nothing else. You may have to get a little far out once in a while and do something they haven't heard before. That's very difficult to do on piano.

Does your album offer things today's listeners haven't heard before?

To a degree, although I had to hold back a little. Don was my barometer on that, because I wanted to stretch out more. But he said, "You've got to remember your roots, because everyone else will." So I said, "Okay. That's cool." I've always felt that the further away you get from technology, the more you start feeling old. Age means absolutely nothing to me, until you start falling behind. I saw that with my father. He was a dentist, and I saw that happen with him and the technology of his profession. If you want to stay current, you can probably run faster than them too. But if you fall backwards, you're losing something.

Your album seems to combine modern sounds and traditional concepts of rhythm and arrangement.

That's what we were trying to do. I wanted to use the modern sounds and technologies without sacrificing what I do. To some degree, Don wanted to do something different, but he allowed me that space. The only problem is that I need something analog in there. Once you start messing with the variables, like offsetting one pitch with another pitch to make it fatter, where is your fundamental tone? The Hammond does that: It sings true. It's a good instrument to accompany vocals. Now, with synths, if you put some sort of a meter on them, I'll bet you could find a lot of different A's, not just 440, especially with guys who mix a lot of sounds to get a fat texture. They'll fool themselves into thinking that they can hear the pitch, but you could pick three or four different tunings to relate to. When I sing, I like to get lost in the track. It never happens as good as when you're singing to the track with headphones on; you'll never hear the music sound that good anywhere else. But sometimes, when I'm singing, I'll drift toward the loudest signal, so I've got to be careful about what that signal is. If it's a Hammond, then I've got no problem.

So even though you wanted a modern sound, you apparently weren't reluctant to bring a Hammond organ into the mix.

I wasn't reluctant at all. I just wanted to make sure that, if it was going to be in a song, there would really be a place for it. I didn't want to just shove it in. I wish I could use a synthesizer to play organ parts, but I can't. It just doesn't sound as good.

You don't seem to be on any kind of vintage keyboard kick.

Well, don't get me wrong. I love the Hammond organ. For example, I think the Hammond has the finest keyboard in the world of organs and synthesizers. But there are things about it that I really dislike. You know, Hammond organs are like guitars: Each one is different. If you want to do something that's got a little bite to it, then turn around and do something sweet, sometimes you've got to jump to a different instrument. Plus they're so big and heavy. How many of them can you bring into a studio? Some sound good with this Leslie, some sound better with that Leslie. Really, it's a pain in the neck, especially in the CD age. I listen to a lot of the old Rascals stuff that's been put out on CD. Man, I can hear my feet on the pedals! It's not a clean digital instrument in any sense of the word. The problem is that very few guys know how to mike it properly. If you get anything less than a mint Leslie and B, you've got all kinds of noise, wind coming from the Leslie.... It's a bear. One of the things I like about the digital world is that we can control those factors. You might say that it sounds sterile, but that reminds me of somebody doing an automobile report: "You know, the new Supra is the greatest thing I've ever seen, but it has no character." Well, to me, "character" means that it breaks. The B-3 certainly has character: It will leave you stranded. But nothing sounds like it, nothing plays like it, nothing feels like it. You've got that balance between your foot on the volume pedal and your hands on the keys and the drawbars, although now I've started playing while standing up, which is insanity. To stand up while playing a B-3 is a joke, because the only way you can get a volume effect is by keeping your hands on the drawbars.

Why are you standing up?

I'm the front man, the so-called leader and singer. Plus, I've got a bass player now, and when I'm sitting down at the Hammond, frankly, I can't not play the bass. My feet and my left hand are all over the place. That's how I learned.

What kind of Hammond do you have?

I've got two of them, a B-3 and a cutdown C-3.

What sort of controller do you use for synth and sample parts?

I've been using the old Yamaha KX76.

Why not the KX88?

I don't like the 88. When I tried a glissando on it, I tore my hands to bits. The 76 has a more synthesizer feel, with plastic keys.

What's in your rack?

Well, if I'm gonna reproduce what's on the album, I'm gonna have to buy some new stuff. I've been using the Korg M1R, the E-mu Proteus. That old DX family never goes away; I've been using the TX modules. It's like, "Don't you have anything else besides that tine sort of sound?" But that's stood the test of time. I also took to the [Roland] D-50 and the [Korg] M1. I like the Kurzweil K2000. I'd like to get into the Korg 01/W. The way the parts are done on the album, they've almost got to be sequenced to work on stage. So we've got to figure out how to divide up the parts. There's gonna have to be another keyboard player.

Are you planning to return to live performance?

I hope so, because I think my album translates very well into being done live. But I don't really know what's going to happen, because I just hooked up with new management. A lot of things are in transition. It's been an especially interesting situation with the label. I've also gotten an offer from Ringo Starr to join his next All-Starr Band, so that's on the table too. But who knows? Fortunately, I've gotten involved with making commercials, in what I consider a hipper than normal way. I have a friend who's a major player with Northwest Airlines. One day I sang in a commercial for him, and I made a comment, which maybe I shouldn't have said: 'You know, you settle for so little, compared to what we're capable of doing." That caught his attention. He said, "I'd like you to come on board and help us change that. Would you be interested?" I said okay, and so far I've worked with Take Six, the Four Tops it's been really interesting.

What do you do in these sessions?

Whatever it calls for. If I'm asked to write, I'll write. If I'm asked to play, I'll play. Basically, I'm like an observer at these sessions - an extension of this man's company. But when I tell the musicians to do something, they do it. I love it [laughs]! Especially that Take Six session; that was happening. It was a 60-second spot. And this Monday I'm playing organ on a spot with B. B. King. What this work does is take my mind off this business I'm in, which is driving me crazy.

How long has that been happening?

Since Woodstock. Woodstock turned it around.

Because it made rock a big-bucks proposition?

Exactly, right on the nose. Since then, I've been looking at this business and asking myself, "Why am I doing this? I could have gone into some wonderful line of work." Woodstock was a real phenomenon. I don't think anybody, in their wildest dreams, thought something like that was going to happen. To us, from the outside looking in, it looked like it was going to be one mess of a gig. Our manager had decided we wouldn't play there. I guess he was trying to protect us. In retrospect, that was a major error. But it was a zoo. And it's happening again.

The 25th anniversary reunion.

That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I got involved with that through a friend of mine who lives up there, and oh, my God! The avarice! They ought to call it the Greed Festival.

So it's not a bunch of idealistic hippies this time around?

Forget about it. Somebody asked me, 'You got any ideas for the Woodstock reunion?" I said, 'I got a great idea. You know what you should do? Why don't you make it into a year-round theme park?" He said, "Man, it'll mean jobs for the community, it'll give young musicians a place to be heard. . . . But when those older cats heard my idea, you'd think I was saying something about their heritage. They want to do a hit-and-run - make a killing and take that bread, just like they did the last time [laughs]! So that's a perfect comparison of now and then. I'm very fortunate to have seen the bright side of the story.

It sounds as if the last thing in the world you would undertake at this point is a Rascals reunion.

That's just because of the way things are. We've had a terrible post-career. Not only am I angry about it, I'm really embarrassed. They've directed a series of lawsuits at me, over the most ridiculous, assinine things in the world.

Ownership of the band name?

That was one of the issues. Another suit was really vicious. it just came down to, 'Hey, you've still got something, and we don't. So we want what you got." I don't even want to go into what it did to me and my family, to my emotions, to our bank account. It's not a pretty story, but I'm trying to maintain my optimistic attitude and not get really pissed off. The problem is, there's something that rock groups lose when it comes to communication. Here we are: four guys who have achieved more success than any of us had ever dreamed about. And now we're totally at odds. Where did we go wrong? Was it ego? Drugs? Jealousy? Whatever the hell I it was, it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. We should be hugging each other in our later years! We don't have to play together, but we should realize that what we did transcends everything else.

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