I Wrote That One, Too . . . Read online

  Most kids have imaginary friends; I just had a huge orchestra playing 24/7 in my head. Just about every aspect of my daily life became connected to this orchestra that was always on call. Whether it was a snowball fight with friends, a home run in a Little League game, or the simple slapping of the windshield wipers in my mother’s car on a rainy day, I was always accompanying these visions and sounds of my everyday life with my imaginary orchestra. I literally was underscoring everything I did.

  My head was filled with musical onomatopoeias.

  Everything was part of my orchestra: the thwack of a ball, the rustle of the leaves, the whisper of the wind. As my friends guzzled soda, my parents clinked glasses, my sister’s heels click-clacked. It was symphonic.

  When I would ask my mom or my friends, “How did you hear that?” I would get a strange look or expression that undoubtedly meant, “Are you nuts?” I guess I just assumed that, like seeing colors, smelling, tasting, and touching, everybody musicalized their every step like I did.

  But my orchestra stayed with me, and I knew that one day I would hopefully be able to actualize the everyday sounds into symphonies.

  Jump to 1985 and I am in London, scoring the movie Rustler’s Rhapsody and standing in front of ninety pieces, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The entire London Symphony was staring at me, and all of a sudden I thought, “How the fuck did I get here and how in the world am I going to pull this off?”

  And then a brief panic attack took place, and I wondered what I was supposed to do next. I took a deep breath and thought about Burt Bacharach, Leonard Bernstein, Peter Matz, Don Sebesky, Herb Bernstein—all the people I had ever seen conduct on television . . . and this time it was me.

  I took another deep breath and raised the baton. I heard the first chord that all ninety of these musicians were playing at once, and it almost blew me off the podium. Tears streamed down my face, and I wondered if I was in a dream or if this was really happening.

  That feeling has happened to me repeatedly over the course of the last forty years.

  Manifesting dreams became a reality for me. I truly never really believed that someone could just become something because they simply wanted to be. Yet, in many respects, that actually did happen for me.

  I manifested a dream I had when I was six years old watching Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic on a black-and-white TV and said, “This is what I want to do and this is what I’m gonna do, I just don’t know how I’m quite going to do it.”

  I’ve been kicked out of every music class I’ve ever sat in. My piano teacher told my mother I was hopeless . . . and yet, here I was conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

  It just doesn’t get any better than that.

  On a side note: I also watched Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hit 535-foot home runs out of Yankee Stadium, and I wanted to manifest that dream, too . . . but it wasn’t in the cards.

  4

  Melissa Manchester Sang My First Demo

  Most musicians start in a bad junior-high-school band. I was no exception.

  In junior high, my friends and I were determined to be the next Beatles. It was a great idea, except we had a bit of an issue . . . no one knew how to play an instrument, except for me and Herbie Goldberg.

  And Herbie Goldberg had a basement where we could practice.

  We were all pimply prepubescent thirteen-year-olds, and what we lacked in talent we made up for in determination. Herbie had been taking drum lessons and was pretty good; my best friend Mark Jerome quickly learned guitar; and I taught Steve McDevitt everything I knew about the bass, which wasn’t much. By the time we were all on the same page, playing songs with three or four chords, we were sounding pretty good and having some fun. I was desperate to get a Vox Continental organ, like Mike Smith of the Dave Clark 5, but instead my Dad bought me a weird little keyboard that sounded like crap. It came in a small case with four long legs that had to be screwed in before I could stand it up. It was all he could afford—plus he didn’t really think our band would amount to anything in the first place.

  But I had lofty aspirations.

  Mark and I wrote a few songs, which in retrospect were pretty awful, but we were ambitious, and we rehearsed every chance we could in Herbie’s basement. Our biggest dilemma was what to call ourselves. We spent weeks trying to brainstorm the perfect name. Finally, Mark came up with the genius idea of calling us the Four People. We loved it.

  Ah, the folly of youth.

  In our minds, we became Queens’ answer to the Beatles. Only, we weren’t asked to play on The Ed Sullivan Show. Our biggest gigs were our classmates’ bar- and bat-mitzvahs, junior-high and high-school battles of the bands, and the 1965 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, which we happened to have actually won. It was in the “Singer Bowl,” and of course first prize was a brand new Singer sewing machine . . . not exactly an ideal prize for teenaged boys. I still don’t remember who actually took it home. I know it wasn’t me.

  Despite our illustrious track record, my father still wouldn’t buy me the Vox Continental organ.

  We continued to get a few random gigs for Fresh Meadows Jews who wanted to entertain at their kids’ apartment parties—without breaking the bank. And it was fun . . . for a while. Eventually, Herbie and McDevitt threw Mark and me out of the band. My band. The band I created.

  I was stunned. I was heartbroken. I was relieved.

  I would become the first in a series of musicians who were kicked out of the bands they started: Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, Steven Adler from Guns N’ Roses, Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols, Dave Mustaine from Metallica, and Steve Dorff from the Four People.

  It was probably for the best. They really only wanted to play covers like “Wipe Out” and make some money. I didn’t want to play covers—I wanted to write my own songs. They were comfortable playing gigs and singing other people’s music. I wasn’t . . . I wanted more. A lot more.

  After being unceremoniously dumped from my band, I tried playing with another one called the Clyde Hartley 5, but my heart just wasn’t into performing. I also hated schlepping instruments around, loading and unloading, and the whole general idea of being in a band. I just wanted to write music. I started to write songs by myself with this dream of making that my future. One evening, I played a few songs of mine for my sister, and she was impressed. Not impressed in the obligatory big sister way, but genuinely impressed.

  There are a lot of advantages to having a much older sister, the first of which is that while I was still a stumbling teenager, Sherry was already heavily entrenched in the workforce. Ever since playing Miss Adelaide in her college production of Guys and Dolls, she too had the music bug, albeit her interest was behind the scenes. She worked at an advertising agency that often worked with Mark Brown Associates, a music house that serviced advertising agencies, mostly dealing with jingles for commercials. Sherry produced television and radio commercials for Wells, Rich, and Green, one of the top advertising agencies in New York City, and she carried some weight with the various music houses that would bid to do the jingles for those commercials.

  She was so impressed with my songs; there was one in particular that she told me she would mention me to a man named Steve Cagan, who was one of the jingle company’s talented young composer/producers.

  Sherry kept her promise, and the following week she boasted to Steve about her prodigal brother. Humored, he told her he wanted to meet me because his teenage sister-in-law was also a prodigy. He explained that she was an incredible singer who simply needed some good material.

  Sherry set up an appointment for me with Steve, and because I didn’t have the means to do any demos—hell, I didn’t even know what a demo was—I played a few songs for him right at the piano in his office. He heard my stuff and genuinely flipped out.

  Steve’s sister-in-law’s name was Melissa Manchester. He recorded a demo of my s
ong “Moving On,” which Melissa sang. It was my first time in a real recording studio. Melissa and I were both kids, barely sixteen years old.

  Amazingly, that would be the first of many times that we would be musically connected throughout our careers.

  It was late in 1979 when I next saw Melissa. Her recording career had broken, big time, with “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” as well as some great hit songs of her own. Steve Buckingham was getting ready to produce an album of hers. He was out in L.A. working, and at lunch one afternoon he asked me if I had anything new that I’d like to play for him. I played him a song that I had recently finished with Larry Herbstritt and Gary Harju called “Fire in the Morning.” Buck loved it, thought it would be good for Melissa, and asked if he could play it for Clive Davis, who was overseeing the project for his label, Arista Records. Both Clive and Melissa agreed with Buck, and they went in to record it.

  Melissa gave a powerful performance of our song. Buck asked me to do the string arrangement, which we recorded in L.A. It was great to reconnect with Melissa after all those years—and actually have a Top 10 record together. On her next album, Melissa would cut another one of my songs, “Any Kind of Fool.”

  Some fifteen years later, Melissa and I would get back together in the studio once again. I was producing a studio cast album for Lunch, a stage musical I had written with John Bettis and Rick Hawkins. Our idea was to record the eleven key songs from the show with some amazing voices from the theater and pop-music worlds. We lined up such stars as Carol Burnett, Faith Prince, Kim Carnes, B. J. Thomas, Davis Gaines, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and a host of others all onboard.

  John and I were trying to decide who could sing a beautiful ballad called “Why Fall At All.” Almost at the same identical moment, we looked at each other and said, “Melissa!”

  I called her, and she graciously accepted our invitation to sing on the project. It is one of my favorite tracks on that album.

  Although we’ve known each other practically all of our lives, Melissa and I have never had the opportunity to write a song together . . . yet. The world of collaboration, and how various people come in and out of your life to share in your musical creations, is a fascinating process. Sometimes it’s a complete crapshoot . . . some relationships work, others do not. Many people whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and have written good songs with, have remained in touch throughout the years. Just as many have moved on to other collaborations, or, in some cases, other endeavors entirely. Finding those few “special creative partners” is one of the most challenging yet most rewarding parts of collaboration.

  5

  Heroes, Collaborators, and Advice

  The question I get asked most often is, “Which comes first, music or lyrics?”

  The answer is that it’s different every time, depending on whom I am working with.

  Ninety percent of my career has been about cowriting. Like most songwriters, I wrote all of my own songs from the time I was twelve years old through my late teens. My lyrics were universally shitty, stupid, and cliché. Like most beginning writers, I tried to rhyme ridiculous subjects. My first song was called “The Family Grocer,” and it was about . . . wait for it . . . the family grocer. It was basically a repetitive clusterfuck of lyrics like these:

  Why, no sir, yes sir, I don’t really know sir

  That’s okay, sir, cuz I’m the family grocer.

  Yes. It was that bad.

  When I started to work at Lowery Music in Atlanta, I was introduced to Milton Brown, a guy with a Southern accent so thick I was absolutely convinced he was a backward hillbilly in overalls. Instead, he was a quiet Jewish man from Mobile, Alabama. We were exclusive as a writing team until I came to California in 1974. That’s when other opportunities opened up and I started working with a number of collaborators.

  I have been extremely fortunate to collaborate with songwriters whom I admire as people as much as I admire their work. There are far too many to mention, but I couldn’t be prouder of the songs I’ve written with Paul Williams, Linda Thompson, Allan Rich, Cynthia Weil, Joe Henry, Gerry Goffin, Christopher Cross, Gloria Sklerov, Maribeth Derry, and George Green. And while I’ve certainly experienced a certain magic that can come from a brand new, first-time collaboration, I am best known from my collaborative work with my “big four”: Milton Brown, Marty Panzer, Eric Kaz, and John Bettis.

  A little introduction to these brilliant masters of words and rhyme . . .

  Like I said, I misjudged Milton Brown from the moment I heard his thick drawl. Growing up in New York City, I myopically envisioned a stereotypical redneck sitting on a tractor with a long piece of hay sticking out from his teeth. Never judge a book by its cover . . . or a voice on the phone, as the case may be.

  The week before I met Milton, I actually asked him on the phone, “You gonna ride the tractor from Mobile to Atlanta?” Yet as I walked into the restaurant that evening to meet him in person for the first time, he was exactly the opposite of what I had envisioned. He was Jewish, educated, polite, and whip-smart. He looked me up and down and said, in his lower-Alabama drawl, “Well, I thought you’d look different.” We have been best friends ever since, and have written hundreds of songs together. He’s undoubtedly the greatest lyricist that nobody’s ever heard of.

  Compared to Milton, Marty Panzer’s songwriting process is a bit unusual, as he likes to write a lyric, type it out, hand it to me in a brown legal-sized envelope, and before he lets me even read it, he prefers to dramatically recite it to me. It is quite an experience to watch Marty recite one of his lyrics. It was a new and unique way for me to be drawn into a lyric. It was not unusual for Marty to spend weeks or months agonizing over a word or a comma, and by the time he would give me a finished lyric, he was certain it was finished. It was a rare occasion when I would dare ask him to maybe change a word or add a phrase, since I was basically musicalizing to a set-in-stone lyric.

  After handing me the lyric to “I Want a Son,” one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written, Marty emphatically announced, “I am not changing a comma.” He rarely had to. His lyrics roll off the tongue; they have a natural rhythm that jumps off the page at me when I read them, and they speak totally from the heart.

  Eric Kaz is a real character. He might have been the lovechild of Woody Allen and Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man. Kaz has a sharp and sarcastic wit, is crazy funny when he’s not trying to be, and is an absolutely brilliant self-contained songwriter. Unlike me, he doesn’t need anyone else to write a song.

  Eric and I met each other in the mid-eighties in Los Angeles. Randy Talmadge, a publisher at Warner Tamerlane Music, introduced us. I think that one of the reasons we became great songwriting partners is because we had similar journeys. We were both raised primarily by our Jewish mothers, he in Brooklyn and me in Queens. We both gravitated to California at roughly the same time. We were both married for an excess of twenty years, and we both lost our ex-wives to cancer. Both of our moms died within a year of each other. Both of our ex-wives died within a year of each other. Our paths were unbelievably similar, and, perhaps because of that, we were likeminded when it came to collaborating.

  Eric is one of my best friends from either side of the piano, and a brilliant songwriter with whom I’ve written some of my favorite songs. One has to know and love Eric to really appreciate his quick wit and the quirky and unexpected truisms that he often comes up with. One day he said to me, out of nowhere, “You know, only about 20 percent of an iceberg is above water. The other 80 percent is hidden below and almost never seen.”

  “And that has something to do with the song we’re writing?”

  “No, not really. But if you count all of the songs in our catalogs that we’ve written, I bet only about 20 percent of them will ever be heard, let alone be recorded or become hits. So, really, a songwriter’s career is like an iceberg.”

  His analogy is a little esoteric, but i
t’s pretty much right on point. It makes me think about all those special songs that are, without question, some of the best things I’ve ever written, and why they might have fallen through the cracks and not have become the successes that some of my other songs have.

  The perpetual optimist, I still have hope that some of them still have a chance to get above the waterline.

  Of my “big four” writing partners, I think I’ve spent more hours in writing rooms, studios, theaters, and hotel meetings with John Bettis than I have with anybody . . . maybe my own kids. I often tease John that he knows more “stuff” about any and every subject known to modern man than anyone I’ve ever met. His genius is unlike that of anyone I’ve ever known. I would have to say there’s definitely a yin and yang aspect to the way we’ve always worked together.

  We have often joked that I’m the eternal optimist who sees the glass three-quarters full, and John sometimes can’t even find the glass.

  Truth be told, I’m too trusting; John questions everything. If I question a line of a lyric, he’ll immediately throw it out. Or, if I don’t understand where he’s coming from—because it might be a little over my head—he’ll give me a sixty-minute dissertation on why the line works coming out of the singer’s mouth.

  While we are writing, he is methodical while I am off to the races.

  I met John right after I left Snuff Garrett to sign a deal with Chuck Kaye over at Warner/Chappell. We had known of each other’s work for years, and we had met a few times casually on the A&M lot through Ed Sulzer. John had written many mega-hits with Richard Carpenter. When Chuck left Irving/Almo to head up Warners, John followed him. One day, Chuck called me and suggested I get together with John to formally meet and possibly write some songs together.