Joel Sill’s Journey Through Music and Marine Life
By Evelyn McDonnell
When Joel Sill was a young man, in the early 1970s, he had two checks pinned to his wall. One was for $9,200: his first royalty payment for the first film he ever worked on as a music supervisor, a little biker flick called Easy Rider whose soundtrack — Steppenwolf, the Byrds, Jimi Hendrix — is integral to its legacy.
The second was for a mere $25, but as a payment from Jacques Cousteau’s Living Sea company for a photograph he had taken, Sill treasured it more than the Hollywood loot. Sill began his show business career in the 1960s and is still at it today — his most recent job was finding tunes for the forthcoming Robert Zemeckis film Here. But for a spell in the 1970s, he followed a different path.
“After a few years in the entertainment business — with some success — I became disenchanted with the sincerity of the entertainment business and went back to studying marine biology and became an underwater photographer,” he told Random Lengths in a recent Zoom interview.
Sill’s twin loves of water and sound will come together on Sept. 28 at Blue Hour: Ocean Songs, a fundraiser for and at AltaSea in San Pedro. The producer perhaps best known for the nostalgia-thick soundtrack for Forrest Gump will curate a lineup that includes the LA Choral Lab. He will also be reunited with the Cousteau family; Jacques’ son Phillippe and daughter-in-law Ashlan are on the evening’s host committee.
CRAZY PHIL SPECTOR
Sill received an early lesson in the nefarious side of the music industry when he was a Venice Beach surfer kid and Phil Spector made off with his electric guitar. Joel’s dad, Lester Sill, ran a record company with the then-young producer. Philles was the business partners’ shipped name (Phil + Les) and became home to the Wall of Sound and the girl group era. Spector, aka the teen tycoon, borrowed Joel’s guitar to write a song called Spanish Harlem, a hit for Ben E. King. He took it to New York to cut the record and never gave it back. “Phil, crazy as he was, was worried he could never write another hit without that guitar. So he kept it,” Sill says.
Sill got another instrument, but unlike the guitar that Spector had taken, it was not given to him by the legendary Duane Eddy.
It might seem like the silver-haired, effervescent Sill is name-dropping as he spins these yarns, but he grew up in the 20th-century Babylon of LA, and rock ’n’ roll and Hollywood hotshots are just the people he knows. His father worked with the songwriting team Lieber & Stoller. His “half brother by blood, whole brother by heart” Chuck Kaye, was chairman of Warner Chappell Music. Sill’s own discography and filmography goes on for pages and features such names as Madonna, Los Lobos and Prince. Along with music supervision, he has produced records and was a vice president at Warner Bros Film. Like the title character of Forrest Gump, he seems to have been a presence at famous entertainment moments for multiple decades.
Still, for a fathom of time, he left it all behind for the sea.
“What I found about the ocean was that it was honest, even in the way the creatures would disguise themselves, they were still always honest. I found it much more honest than the business world, and uncovering the ways that the animals lived and how they managed to evolve always fascinated me. So the correlation between the ocean and the entertainment business, I don’t know what the bridge is. It might have been that the ocean world was the release for me to really let go of everything and just be as much a human naturalist as I could. And the entertainment business was trying to help filmmakers create what they were after musically.”
SHARKS AND FILM AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL
Not many people can alternate stories of working with Tom Hanks with tales of photographing tiger sharks. Then again, it’s a very LA combo: sharks and film and rock ’n’ roll. Sill eventually found that as proud as he was of the $25 check, the Easy Rider money paid more bills. “I decided that it was not a financial trajectory that would really work for me, and I went back into the entertainment business.”
Still sometimes he could combine his interests, like sailing with David Gates, singer of the soft rock band Bread. “David had a beautiful motorsailer that was close to 100 feet. It was called Sea Diamond. And David was just as delicate a sailor as he was a musician. He was surgical, almost.”
Sill hears music even when he’s underwater. “There’s a rhythm in the ocean, and it’s always changing, and you can see it in schools of silversides or shoals of tunas. There’s a different rhythm, and the wave patterns are rhythm, and the currents are rhythm. So I probably just pick up on the rhythms that are going on — the tempo in the ocean. I feel it change. Sometimes you can feel when a tiger shark comes in and everything leaves before the tiger shark gets there. That’s a sensation also.”
Knowing Sill’s aquatic interests, a friend introduced him to AltaSea founder Leonard Aube, now deceased. The man who estimates he has logged 3,000 hours diving was taken by Aube’s “vision of what could be, all these elements — science, education, blue economy — and how big this could be, and how meaningful this could be,” Sill says. “I looked at it, and I think the term I came up with was that I felt AltaSea could be, literally, a lifeboat for all of us to save the planet. I know that’s grandiose, but that’s how I saw it.”
Sill ends our conversation with one last tale of a musical and oceanic voyage. In 1976, he traveled to Cuba with Ry Cooder, as well as Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz — giants of jazz — on board. “They did a concert in Havana, and this was the beginning of what became the Buena Vista Social Club,” Sill says casually, referring to the album and film that brought a generation of Cuban musicians to international fame.
Mic drop.
Evelyn McDonnell is the author or editor of eight books, an internationally recognized award-winning journalist, and a professor at Loyola Marymount University. She writes the series Bodies of Water – portraits of lives aquatic – for Random Lengths.
Copyright Evelyn McDonnell 2024