June 5, 2006
Interviewed by Harvey Cline

We recently caught up with smooth jazz guitarist Joyce Cooling who had just finished her new disc Revolving Door after months of hard work. The disc is her first since 2004 and is certain to be different than her previous releases. A portion of the proceeds will go to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Joyce discussed at length why the project is so dear to her heart and defines what the revolving door means to her. She offers insight as to why we all need to do more and help others who can’t help themselves. We also look at her unique playing style, and get a glimpse of what the new disc has to offer. The following are portions of that interview.

Smooth Views (SV):  Welcome to Smooth Views. I believe this is your first visit with us. Let’s talk a little bit about your new disc, Revolving Door, that’s scheduled to be out later this summer.
Joyce Cooling (JC): This record is so different for me in a lot of different ways. Like you said, it’s called Revolving Door. To me, the main underlying theme is what revolving door means. We are donating part of the proceeds to N.A.M.I (National Alliance on Mental Illness) which is the official organization for mental illness. So that’s how the title Revolving Door came about. I grew up with a brother who suffered, and just realized that the views on it are really archaic and clearly outdated stereotypes about people suffering from mental illness. It’s a “pick up the rug and sweep it under” thing that people are ashamed to deal with it. For physical ailments and other diseases, there are walks, ribbons, research, and programs, as there should be. I have to emphasize “as there should be.” But what color is the mental illness ribbon? It’s still shrouded in shame. People are afraid to come forward with it. Family members are at work, and still able to work because they’re afraid of losing their jobs. People think they’re psychopaths. You know psychopathic is different from schizophrenic. It’s entirely different.  A person with all types of ailments could certainly be psychopathic. It’s its own little niche. You could be depressed and psychopathic. You can be schizophrenic and psychopathic, but that combination is not true. People think that schizophrenia means that you’re psychopathic which is so far from the truth. It’s often incorrect.

Getting back to the title of the song, it’s so close to me and such a big topic.  There’s a lack of research, a lack of knowledge and it’s still shrouded in the dark. A patient feels psychotic and they go into a hospital. There are drugs and they over medicate them. They go in and then they’re back out on the streets in a couple of days. Then they go back in and they’re back out. They’re back and forth in that sense of a revolving door. Within that revolving door there are a lot of mini revolving doors. With medication sometimes is the solution.  Although there’s a lot of archaic medication out there that then causes stress. You take the medication and you get a whole slew of side effects. Then if you don’t take the medication you’re ill, and that’s another story. The medication is not in an advanced state like it is in some other things. “Revolving Door” is a general concept. We’re all stuck in revolving doors, old patterns or habits that you can’t seem to break out of. Everyone can face their frustrations for lost time. It’s a generic thing that happens.  It’s a phenomenon, an entity. But mental illness is dealing with it as a family, as a patient and all of that. I’ve seen my brother go through it, and it’s just one big revolving door after another. And I’m suffering again because it is close to home. I’ve seen what my mom goes through and what other parents go through, where if my brother didn’t have the help he would be one of those guys on the streets literally. He would be one of those guys. And we’ve all seen our cities are full of them. It’s treatable but it’s terrible on the family. It’s brutal on the family. It’s not an easy thing to deal with. It really requires professional help, but yet there is no professional help for it or the help is expensive and only for the wealthy.  The care and the responsibility is also the treatment for mental illness. It’s way out of regular, normal hands. It’s a professional issue and no one wants to deal with it and it’s tough on the family. So NAMI deals with all of that and helps raise awareness. So that’s the whole driving force of Revolving Door.             

SV: Tell me about your weekend at the N.A.M.I. fundraiser at Golden Gate Park.
JC: I’ve always donated, but never on a scale like this and with music. As a sister of a sibling, I didn’t know how to help them. Because I was caught up in the whole growing up with it thing, sometimes I just couldn’t help. So this weekend we had the second annual event.  We had to walk for N.A.M.I. at Golden Gate Park. I realized that I can’t be the hands-on person, but I can help people. I can help through music. Music is what I do. This is how I can do something. It’s a revolving door for me, because I’m frustrated caught wanting to help and not knowing what to do and not able to help and that’s a revolving door. So we went on this walk. This is not about me or what great people we are, but we’re trying to shed some light on what we’re doing. We were sponsored in the walk and we had sponsors that made it a much bigger level. It was really cool, and really emotional. There was one guy on the walk trying to get to the restrooms and there was a line of path and line of grass. I saw him stepping over the line on the path and then back and forth and he couldn’t even get to the restroom. It was emotional. The thing is it’s everywhere! We all know someone or have a family member or friend who has trouble dealing with it, someone with mental illness. That includes depression and drug addiction. I talked to my brother just yesterday and he was in an exceptional frame of mind. Everything that he goes through, I can totally relate to. His is just magnified many times. Everyday all of us can go through it. Sometimes it’s overly perfection and not knowing when to complete a project and continuing to tweak things that you know no one’s ever going to see. You can throw that up as “I’m doing the best job that I can” or it can be a little obsessive. There’s so many different types or cocktails. There’s schizophrenia with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or OCD with bi-polar, or bi-polar with depression. So there’s a wide variety rolled into one. They don’t even know what to call it. It’s really chaotic. There was one other thing, a friend of my mom’s lost his eyesight and it was really sad.  Within a couple of weeks he was set up with a support group. People over there were teaching him Braille and setting him up on a computer, as it should be. I never want to take anything away. No one’s going to show up and help you with mental illness. They don’t even know what to do. There’s no system in place for helping people like there was for this man. That’s correct and that’s great, that’s how it should be. But it’s nothing like that for mental illness.

SV: Is there a web site that our readers can go to for more information? 
JC: Ours is going to be hooked up, and we’re doing a complete web overhaul. And the other is www.NAMI.org. When people come to my concert, they’re not going to be hit with this. This is my cause. You know how people get overridden with causes. “Oh no.  Here comes the cause wave.  She’s going to chew our ear off.”  Not at all. Just by coming to the concert or buying the CD, they’ve done their part. They don’t need to hear that.

SV: There needs to be a start somewhere, and I think you’ve done that.
JC: Hopefully. I have not started that, but jumped on their bandwagon. N.A.M.I. is huge. It’s all volunteers. I would venture to say that most of them are parents and family members. They’re helping professional people deal with it. They’re helping families so that they can be mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters to the patients and not trusting their only soul to caretaker and friend for life. So N.A.M.I. is strapped with that. We have a good time and we shed light on it. Anytime you shed light on something it makes it flower, it makes it blossom. We want it to be fun. There’s so much cool stuff going on in it. Music is uplifting. Boy, talk about a cure for almost anything. Music’s right in there isn’t it?
  
SV: Is there anything else on the new disc you want to tell us about today?
JC: Musically it was great because I did the whole thing. It was freeing musically because all of a sudden it’s time to make a CD now. What am I thinking? Just make the CD now. There’s a lot of different guitars on this one. We did a lot of different things with some of the songs. We tried to paint more pictures. I did a couple of solo guitar things. I went back into my little coffee house days. There’s a song on there called “I Will Always Love You.” It was just voice and guitar. What was interesting was how I came on to the night club. I called up a friend on a straight-ahead jazz station and he had footage of a lot of the clubs of when I used to play. So the actual audience is from the time I used to play even though it wasn’t at my concert.  So those were the actual people at the actual time that I was playing that kind of stuff. It was the real thing from that era. It’s like a tongue-in-cheek thing coming out to the night clubs and your very first gig. Everyone’s talking and eating and there’s this one person or one table that’s with you. Next time may be two or three tables. And you remember those people. Then it grows and grows and grows. Now the audiences that we play for are that “one table” or those two people in the corner. So it was kind of a thank you to the audience. It’s that coffee house jazz style you know with a singer or bass player. There’s another one where we called up a friend of ours, a Brazilian drummer, and told him to “come on and play a little track.” It was kind of like the old days, and I just played nylon guitar.  I borrowed my friend’s guitar, a gorgeous guitar. I’m jealous and want one like it!  So we just played the tracks, and there’s different stuff on it. It was a warm fuzzy feeling for me because it was reaching back with friends and situations coming up in the Bay area. It’s very different.

SV:  Does it have a more warm personal feeling that the previous other discs?
JC: Yeah.

SV: Is there a single that’s coming out right away?
JC: I don’t know yet. I hope! (laughs) I never know.  I hope there is. I hope that they find something that they like. I don’t want people to think it’s so far off. You know it’s so different, but it’s still us. I’m hoping there’s several tracks. This is so new. In fact, this is my first “official” interview.  

SV:  Is there a “Top 10 Reason” to pick this disc up?
JC: There will be. (laughs) I’ve always got top tens waiting in the wings. We have one already about hotels, about traveling and such. Those are my favorite things to do to relax. We have a ball with them. We’ll have a whole page of them. We call them the “Top Ten or So” because we have eleven or twelve or if we have eight we’ll throw them out there. The Top Ten Worst Albums. (laughs) We have a lot of fun making them up.

SV: That’s great, we’re looking forward to seeing the new site.
JC: Me too. Me too.  Believe me, I’ve been ready. This record has taken so long to make that I’ve been tired of the site like everyone else. Even more so.

SV: It’s been up for a while now correct?
JC: Yes, tweaked though. You know it’s modular and our appearance is the same, but tweaked. Yeah, too much of it has been static for too long. I’ll put it that way.

SV: I saw where you hurt your back in December and missed one of the jazz cruises. Are you okay now?
JC: I’m doing great, doing great. It was stupid.  It was my fault. You know being impatient, lifting too much. I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m a peanut. I’m a peanut. I felt something at the time.  And I got something out of the car by myself. And I did it just because I was impatient. Silly. I heard some really funny rumors like “you fell off the stage.” I was cracking up. Hey, I wish it could have been that glamorous, at least tied to music somehow. It wasn’t.
    
SV: Jumping off amps?
JC: (laughs) Yeah, jumping off the amps, jumping into the fireworks display. But now everything’s fine.

SV: Good. Whose cruise did you miss?
JC: It was the All Star Cruise out of Galveston, Texas. It sounded like I missed a ball. What a party.
 
SV: I read where you learned to play guitar by ear. Does that change the way you approach songs as opposed to having formal training?
JC: Of course I don’t know what it’s like to have formal training, so I can’t answer that with certainty. Like everything it’s double-edged.  In some ways it’s good. I really do want to go back and really learn guitar. Really learn and educate myself. Learn certain scales and different harmonies. But that has developed my ear and I know plenty of people with incredible ears and vice versa. Wes Montgomery changed the face of jazz guitar and played by ear. There are other musicians who have also changed the face of guitar who were very well-educated. The way I look at it, why not have all the tools in the tool box. Why not have them all? That would need to be said. It made my ear strong and it was unconventional the way I approach the guitar.  

SV: You have an interesting “scat.”  Has that always been part of your repertoire?
JC: I would first think the melody and then go to the guitar to play.  I’ve learned to sing or scat everything else and then play. Think everything first and then play.

SV: Joyce, is there anything you would like to tell your fans out there?
JC: Yes, they are the thing. They are the thing that makes this all worthwhile.