Clapton and Sting click on hot single

Like creativity, friendship is a sudden spark, appreciated and protected. Chance provides the opportunity; care preserves the light.

Click! Fump! Click! It was late March of this year, and Eric Clapton was hunched before a lone microphone in a control room of London's SARM Studios West, striking a metal lighter to ignite his umpteenth cigarette as he strummed his new Ramirez acoustic guitar. Time was tight, each nervous tic and probative chord progression assuming a tempoed intensity, as Eric tested various tone sequences for a movie soundtrack-in-progress.

The film score in question was Lethal Weapon 3, and Clapton was brainstorming with composer-arranger Michael Kamen, with whom he'd scored the first two installments of Hollywood's most successful crime-and-comedy adventure series. The release date of the movie was scarcely two months away--and creative pressure had built to the percolation point.

"Eric kept picking out the bluesy chords of the basic 'Lethal Weapon' theme, re-examining the melody line," recalls Kamen, "and in this quick, continuous clicking motion, he'd simultaneously light one cigarette after another with his Zippo. Click! Fump! Click! It was a three-part ritual: the metal lighter case popping open, the flick of ignition, and the shutting of the case. Steve McLaughlin, a mad Scotsman who was co-producing the sessions, decided to sample the Zippo and reshuffle its sequence."

The demo segment combining Clapton's guitar, his cadent lighter, and Kamen's pliant electric piano was added to a compilation of approximately twenty musical cues for the basic screen music. Seeking input for a unifying song, Clapton and Kamen impulsively decided on April 6 to send the cues off to a pal of Eric's. "We wanted a 'buddy song,' " says Kamen, "since the unlikely friendship between Mel Gibson and Danny Glover has always been the basis of the three films' plots."

Soon the package arrived at a farmhouse in Wiltshire, England, where it was immediately opened by the laird--Sting. He'd known Clapton for several years, and their mutual fondness and musical respect had recently deepened in the aftermath of personal losses. Following the tragic death in March 1991 of his four-year-old son, Conor, Eric had found a measure of solace in The Soul Cages (A&M), Sting's album inspired by the passing of his parents. Sting was similarly touched by Tears in Heaven(Reprise), Clapton's eulogistic tribute to his child.

" There's a maturity in Eric's work that we need," says Sting, "and there's an integrity there that just gets better and better. I've always thought he was one of the greatest 'feel' players ever.

"I walked around the property, listening to the cassette of rough ideas, and I especially liked the percussive motif of the lighter sounds and the way the guitar chords moved. So I worked out a melody that would go over the theme's changes, and my pop training told me it also needed an old-fashioned bridge.

"I began to think about the film's characters and how there was a bond between them--but they'd probably be fairly reticent about expressing that bond because of the somewhat macho type of characters they were. Two days later, I came up with a key lyric phrase that said: when everything else fails, at least there's one person that will stand up for you, and 'it's probably me.'

"I carefully phrased the lyrics and wrote out melodies that I thought would be Eric Clapton-like," Sting continues, chuckling. "And Eric came back, saying, 'Well, could you sing it?' "

Kamen had arranged for all hands to converge on Manhattan's BMG Studios that weekend (April 11-13) in an all-out assault on the raw material, so Sting hopped a flight from London to New York, reaching the BMG facilities on Sixth Avenue at 8:30 a.m. to greet his session mates. The core rhythm infantry consisted of Sting on electric bass, Steve Gadd on drums, and Don Alias on additional percussion. Clapton improvised on both electric and acoustic axes. His pensive leads were subtly tinted by Kamen's keyboard interpolations, while David Sanborn wove a wistful sax break over Sting's aptly bashful vocal. The Greater New York Alumni Orchestra was enlisted to lend some string nuances.

Recording stretched into Sunday, its stressful logistics redoubled by the presence of Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner, who shot the proceedings for a companion music video.

"As a rule," says Sting, "songwriting is painful to me; it's a tabula rasa in which I have to deal with who I am and what I think. But in this case, the naturalness of both the song and the video came from us having to get on with the job!"

Kamen concurs. "Even though it was very high pressure, ideas for the track came together fast because friendship and coincidence constantly worked in its favor. Sting's lyrics set the tone: They express a classic sentiment, and the music's mood is evocative of a simpler time.

"It's funny about the effectiveness of the Zippo lighter, too," adds Kamen, "because--by another pure coincidence--throughout the movie the Mel Gibson character is trying to give up smoking."

Moreover, it was exactly sixty summers ago, during a muggy 1932 evening in the depths of the depression, that a former machinery salesman named George Blaisdell stepped out on the terrace of the Pennhill Country Club in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and encountered a tuxedoed friend firing up his cigarette with a bulky twenty-five-cent Austrian lighter. "You're all dressed up," Blaisdell chided his chum. "Why don't you get a lighter that looks decent?!" "Well," the friend demurred, "it works."

On impulse, Blaisdell obtained U.S. distribution rights for the Austrian lighter and redesigned its cumbersome brass casing as a slender brushed-chrome unit that fit in the palm of one's hand. Blaisdell adapted his product's trade name from the "zipper" term coined by B. F. Goodrich in 1923 for its rubber boots' "hookless fasteners." To this day, the patented (number 3,032,695) Zippo carries an unrestricted lifetime guarantee, the company fixing and returning any lighter free in order to satisfy its slogan: "It works."

The Zippo has since become the stuff of fable, the vest-pocket presence of its sturdy case saving the lives of GIs in World War II by deflecting bullets. Ever-dependable Zippos have kindled the rescue fires of mountain climbers and shipwreck survivors, received gratis repairs after being mangled by golf fairway gang mowers, and been recovered from the bellies of fish. And now, during one of the most refined and rhythmically adroit efforts on record by either Sting or Eric Clapton, a Zippo sets the tempo for "It's Probably Me."

"I'm really pleased," says Sting of the new single, which was released June 9 on CD and cassette by A&M Records, with the film soundtrack being issued by Reprise. "Everyone and everything helped, including the Zippo that runs through the whole track. And the song fulfilled exactly what was required of it. The rest is up to chance, but as far as I'm concerned: It works."