The Reluctant Keyboardist

While Rundgren did most of the orchestral arrangements, the elaborate string lines in the mournful "1,000 Umbrellas" are Gregory's handiwork. "Originally, all Andy had was an acoustic guitar and his voice," he explains. "It was a rather doomy, miserable little thing with all those descending chromatic chords, and I thought, `Oh dear, how can l cheer this miserable song up?'"

A Roland MSQ-100 sequencer became the sketch pad for the arrangement when Gregory began tinkering with a string patch on his JX. "That sequencer saved my artistic bacon, I have to say that," he laughs. "It's a wonderful device. I'm a born-again composer, almost, thanks to these little machines. I just kept running the parts by Andy for his response and then updated my program according to what we decided upon, and eventually we got the thing finished. Then I sat down and manually wrote out all the individual parts."

"Oranges & Lemons" sessions

Although no other sequencing entered into the production, Skylarking's basic tracks were cut using Rundgren's LinnDrum. Real drums, performed by the Tubes' Prairie Prince, were added later in San Francisco. "It was only then that the album started coming to life," Gregory reports. "Before that, it was sounding very stiff and lifeless." The drums breathed so much life into "Earn Enough For Us" that the song was re-cut live with the drummer. "I'd love to do more songs like that," he says with enthusiasm, "because that's really what it's all about -- getting a good groove going as a group."