That appealed to me. I had always wanted to start a really cool franchise where people in the business could hang out no matter what town they were in. Of course, it wasn’t just a club I had in mind. More like a club/bar/restaurant/hotel/casino. I can’t help it, I just think small.
I have offered to design something like this for my friends at the Hard Rock for the last twenty years or so. No takers yet. People who design hotels should come to people like me, who have spent their whole lives living in them.
As it turned out, the Basie people would end up using my name for fundraising and then not giving me the club after all. But I didn’t know that yet when they invited me to an investor lunch.
The investor they were courting had said he would invest if I came to the meeting. So I came, and he did.
We got to talking, and he asked what I was doing. I told him I had just recorded an album for the first time in twenty-five years.
“Hot damn,” he said. “You have to take it on the road!”
“Nice thought,” I said. “But there’s no plan to do that right now. It’s a big sound. Five horns, three girl singers. It’s too expensive a proposition.”
“That’s alright,” he said. “I’ve been around long enough to know that greatness usually costs.”
Indeed!
Could I have finally stumbled upon the patron of my dreams?
Ms. Destiny was visiting again, and since I wasn’t confident about getting a new TV show, I started seriously considering going back on the road.
But could I get my head back into being a real onstage front man after all these years?
Oh man. That was gonna take a minute.
thirty-two
Soulfire
(2017–2018)
I leave you with this. My father was a proud ex-Marine Goldwater Republican. He wouldn’t recognize the party now. I paraphrase Barry Goldwater as a tribute to my late father. “Extremism in defense of the environment is no vice, and moderation in pursuit of stopping pollution is no virtue.” Lead us into a green future, reach for greatness, nothing less, and make sure you have some fun along the way. Life should never be boring. Congratulations, go get ’em.
—RUTGERS COMMENCEMENT SPEECH CLOSING REMARKS, MAY 14, 2017
… And with that I became a doctor!
It made my Jewish mother so proud!
Oh wait, I was Catholic turned Baptist turned Rock and Roll Pagan. But she would’ve been proud anyway.
No, it ain’t that kind. Not a sawbones. Just an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. Still nice. I think it was the mysterious Susan McCue’s idea. She pops up in my life every ten years or so and does a good thing, then disappears back into the camouflage of behind-the-scene politics in DC.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a Soulfire Tour was looming, but instead of rising to the occasion, I was having a nervous breakdown. I was in the worst shape of my life. I had been going steadily downhill since my friend and trainer Clay Burwell had moved to South Carolina. I went on YouTube and watched a concert video to remind me of my 1987 self. It was depressing on two levels. I sure wasn’t that guy anymore. And how could that band have not broken through?
There was only one way I was getting on that stage. I had to convince myself I was merely a presenter. An MC. More like the Big Band leaders of the ’40s. Over time, I talked myself into it, and out we went for a tour that would take us around the States, to Europe, to Australia.
The shows went well, but I was disappointed with how meaningless I had become in the marketplace. We barely averaged a thousand people a night, if that.
It never ceases to amaze me how my many lives don’t cross over. The E Street Band sells out three stadium shows in Dublin, which is 180,000 people. But when my band comes to town, about a thousand people show up. They are great, wildly enthusiastic, but, you know? I fully realize it’s a different thing, but wouldn’t you think I would get 1 percent of the E Street audience? One fucking percent!
Or take Lilyhammer. We drew an audience of one million people a week out of a Norwegian population of five million. I probably could have been elected mayor of Oslo. But when I played there with my band—my very, very, very good band, by the way—I got the same thousand people. Maybe.
That’s a tenth of 1 percent.
So I had to adapt to that disappointment very quickly and accept it as just another part of my lifetime of penance, which I attributed to the big mistake of my life, my very public career suicide from which there was no redemption or salvation.
Most fascinating was the realization that we were playing to entire audiences who were there strictly out of curiosity. A few fans came because of my older solo records, E Street, or TV, but most of them didn’t recognize one single song.
I had to cling to something, so I proudly held the Frank Barsalona flag high as I became the only artist in modern history with a touring party of thirty-five and absolutely no hits.
Now I can’t see your face to see if your expression is one of pity or wonderment, but, believe it or not, there were some advantages.
For starters, I never disappointed anyone in the audience by not playing their favorite song!
(Buying that?)
Not having to do anything was liberating.
(How about that?)
The only trick is that I had to win the audience over every single song, or they would split.
I took pride in the fact that we did just that. No one left a Disciples show early or unsatisfied. And there were bright spots. Our German audiences were as enthusiastic as ever. The only explanation I can come up with is that we were still getting dividends from the Rockpalast broadcasts all those years ago, which were created by my lifelong friend Peter Rüchel.
I began a new Disciples tradition by having a band dinner after every show to solidify our esprit de corps. Everybody got along great anyway, so it was a good way to wind down the evening. Andrew, our wardrobe person, doubled as our social organizer, party planner, and minister of fun. He tried to book the restaurant of the hotel we were staying in, so people could just stumble from the table into an elevator.
Tom Petty died just as the tour was starting, which hit me harder than I would have expected. Tom had worked with Jimmy Iovine in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and Bruce and I had gone to see him perform at the Bottom Line, but I don’t think Tom and I had spoken more than three sentences to each other our whole lives. Still, we were the same age and had the same influences, so there was an unspoken connection between us, and we did each other favors whenever possible. He gave me a song for Lilyhammer, for instance.
Tom died the day after the Las Vegas massacre, so his passing was barely mentioned in the news. That bothered me so much that I decided to open my show with one of his songs just to keep him alive a few more months.
During the same tour, we did tributes to Greg Allman and Malcolm Young.
These days, every tour seems to have way too many tributes.
Somewhere in that period, the Kennedy Center Spring Gala called for me to participate in a tribute to John Lennon. I wasn’t sure what I could contribute, and I was about to turn it down when Maureen suggested I do a Rock arrangement of “Working Class Hero.”
As soon as she said it, an idea hit me right away. That’s how these things usually work. My brain takes everything it knows on the subject and throws it against the wall that instant. Sometimes I get a Rothko, sometimes a Renoir, and sometimes a kindergarten finger painting.
I got a Pissarro with this one.
When Lennon recorded “Working Class Hero,” he was at the peak of escaping from his past, shedding everything he was and did. So out went melody and chord changes and arrangement and production and emotion. He wanted things stark. Primal. A complete focus on the lyrics and no distractions.
I decided to see what would happen when the arrangement and production were added back in, but without changing his melody or emotional intention.
When I got down to DC, the gig immediately became a su
ccess when I found that I was sharing a dressing room with Taj Mahal! One of my heroes and favorite artists and somebody I’d always wanted to meet.
We bonded over our always-with-us mutual friend Steve Popovich, who Taj had worked with at Columbia Records. I told him he should do the Notodden Blues Festival in Norway. He was a ball and still texts me now and then.
At the Hall of Fame that year, I finally got to introduce the Rock Hall Jukebox. I had proposed the idea years before as a way of acknowledging important singles, especially if the Artists who’d recorded them were unlikely to make the cut. “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, was the ultimate example. Every up-and-coming high school and bar band played it to death (Dave Marsh wrote one of the greatest and most important Rock books with that title), and it reigned as the Garage Rock Anthem until it was usurped by Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” written for his group Them. The Shadows of Knight beat them to the hit in America, but neither group was likely to make it into the Hall.
I thought the jukebox idea had been forgotten, but out of nowhere this year the executive committee finally decided to do it. I inducted the first class of songs in 2018, which included “Louie Louie,” of course, along with “Rocket 88,” “Rumble,” “The Twist,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and “Born to Be Wild.” The next year, they added “Maybe,” “Tequila,” “Money,” “Twist and Shout,” “Leader of the Pack,” and “Gloria.”
Some people wanted to limit the jukebox to artists who would never be inducted, but I had to keep hope alive for Link Wray (who is a lot more than a one-hit wonder), Procol Harum (who along with the J. Geils Band and Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio are frankly embarrassing omissions as of this writing), the Shangri-Las, and Them. And of course the Isley Brothers were already in.
And Bruce inducted me into the New Jersey Hall of Fame (didn’t know there was one) in a class that included the Four Seasons, Debbie Harry (not Blondie? Does the whole band have to be from Jersey?), Steve Forbes, journalist Anna Quindlen, astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly, and the Cake Boss—Buddy Valastro.
Now there’s a dinner party.
Once the miraculous sponsorship money for the Soulfire Tour ran out, I figured that my artistic rebirth was over, and I refocused on my TeachRock.org curriculum.
We had achieved the hundred-lesson goal I had set as a benchmark for announcing the program, but even with Scholastic Magazines, PBS, and HBO as partners, we weren’t gaining traction.
I called a foundation meeting. After some not so-great-ideas came and went, our board chairman, David Roth, spoke. He had seen the short sponsored tour. “This show is a living embodiment of the TeachRock curriculum. Why don’t we use the tour as a way of publicizing it and registering teachers?”
Good idea.
We put aside five hundred tickets per show to give to teachers for free, ran a workshop between the soundcheck and the show, and registered thirty thousand teachers. The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation sponsored the tour. The extra-nice surprise was how great an audience the teachers were. Totally wild.
Our curriculum must have been getting around, because I was being asked to speak at a lot of education-related events. I gave the keynote address at the New Jersey School Boards Association summit in Atlantic City the day after we played the new Hard Rock Casino.
The casino was Donald Trump’s old place, which Jimmy Allen had bought for the Seminole Tribe for practically nothing. It was so shoddily constructed, like everything Trump built, that whoever bought it knew they’d only be able to keep the shell.
Not an easy thing to do by the way, losing money with a casino. That takes a special talent.
And speaking of Indians, Chris Columbus called (too soon?). He was doing a Christmas movie called The Christmas Chronicles. Kurt Russell was playing Santa, and even though the original script didn’t have a song, Chris wanted to put one in.
Not only that, he wanted the Disciples to be in the movie! In the story, Santa ends up in jail, and in a scene like something in an old Elvis movie, Santa breaks into a song, and the other prisoners, us, become his band.
In fact, it was very much like an old Elvis movie, because Chris decided to use Leiber and Stoller’s “Santa Claus Is Back in Town,” one of Presley’s hits.
Chris asked me if I knew any Elvis impersonators who could sing the song that I would produce.
“Not for nothin’,” I said, “but haven’t I heard Kurt Russell sing before? Didn’t he play Elvis in a movie?”
“Well,” Chris said, “I asked him. Kurt says he’s not a singer. He doesn’t have any confidence in his voice.”
“Do me a favor,” I suggested. “Have Kurt sing along with the record, just a verse or so. Record it on your phone and send it to me.”
He did. It was great. I called back and told him to put Kurt on the line. “Kurt,” I said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is—you can sing. The bad news is—you can sing. So now you’ve got to take a trip to NYC!”
I was in the middle of an album, so Kurt and Chris came down. After a long conversation, with Kurt stalling as long as he could, we did it. After the first take, I looked at Chris. Chris looked at me. “Chris,” I said. “I’m a picky motherfucker. I was ready to go all night. I have absolutely nothing to say. That was fucking perfect.”
“I thought so too,” he said. “But I just thought maybe I was willing it into existence!”
We spent the next hour or two adding little moments I knew would make the scene jump, figuring out Kurt’s improvs and Santa magic, like commanding instruments to appear and disappear. It was a completely surreal fantasy scene, so we could do anything we thought of. And who on earth is better at magic tricks than Chris Columbus?
The movie was the first Netflix flick not to have a theatrical run. Everyone thought Ted had finally gone too far, until it premiered on Thanksgiving and every family with a kid under fifteen tuned in, giving the movie the equivalent of a $200 million opening day. Kurt was spectacular as the first working-class Santa. And kids started recognizing Maureen on the street just for playing the tambourine in the jail scene.
Within a few months, it was time for the sequel. This time Chris wanted an original song. I held my mind back from jumping into composition mode until I read the script. It was amazing. Man, I thought, if people loved the first one, wait till they get a load of this. I had a song in mind within fifteen minutes.
The song was a duet between Santa and a lady in an airport. “Who do you think we should use for the lady?” Chris asked.
“I’ll give you three guesses,” I said.
He only needed one. “Darlene was the first name I brought up,” he said. “They said I can’t use her because she’s in some other Christmas movie this year.”
“What? Who the fuck would have the balls to question anything you say?” I was truly flabbergasted (and I don’t use that word every day!). “If you wanted to use Moms Mabley, the only comment should be ‘Good thinking, Chris!’”
“I’d love to use Darlene; you know that.”
“Look,” I said, “I know you’re one of the nicest guys in the world, that you respect everybody, but I am not and do not. With your permission, I’m going to use her anyway. Don’t tell them who it is. Just tell them if they can find somebody that sounds as good as the mysterious lady I recorded, I’ll happily replace her.”
Chris went along with it. I had her open up the song with a vocal riff that I knew no one could do except her. Her and Ronnie Isley in 1960, that is—it was a fun little tribute to the “Now wait a minute” Ronnie had improvised in the middle of “Shout!” It had nothing to do with the song, just a way of Darlene’s character getting everyone’s attention in the scene.
When Kurt came in, he laughed. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “You know I don’t love my voice to begin with, and now you got me doing a duet with the world’s greatest female singer! You’re a real pal, Stevie!”
“Don’t worry about a thing!” I confidently pretended.
Everything went fine. Darlene and Kurt did their usual fantastic jobs. The studio accepted the song. Then I got a call from Chris, who had just hung up with the film company’s lawyers. He didn’t get depressed often, but I could tell he was upset. “They flagged the opening riff,” he said. “They say we have to change it.”
Oh, come on, man! Do the fun police ever fucking sleep?
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“Fuck them. We ain’t changing shit! Give me a couple of days.”
I called Ronnie Isley. He couldn’t believe it either, but he didn’t want to deal with it, so I strategized with his wife. She was very nice and very understanding, and after a muffled, hand-over-the-receiver conversation, she told me that while they had no problem with it, the publisher was the one who needed to make the call.
Lance Freed helped me find him. “Listen, my friend,” I said. “This ain’t a negotiation. The ‘Shout’ riff has absolutely nothing to do with the song I wrote. I can lose it in an instant. It’s just a little tribute to the Isleys, who we love, and a reminder of a classic song that might find its way to a new audience. And I cannot believe I have to get permission for a sixty-year-old improvisation in the first place!”
He was cool. He gave us permission, and that was that. There are some good guys out there.
Crisis averted.
But the licensing of songs to TV shows and movies is a larger problem that must be seriously reconsidered.
The acquisition of existing songs to accompany scenes in film and TV falls to the music supervisor. That had been one of my many jobs on Lilyhammer. During the three seasons of the show, licenses got more and more expensive.
I knew things had gotten out of control when I asked for one of my favorite Doo-Wop songs, “Don’t Ask Me to Be Lonely” by the Dubs, and they came back with a $30,000 price tag! Are you fucking kidding me? Nobody but me and Marty Scorsese even remember this song!
That’s the modern reality of publishing. There’s no regard for the quality of the project or for whether an association with the TV show or movie will be good for the song.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 38