“When I came back to Toronto, I said, ‘This isn’t music. This is a cultural movement. We have to do this.’ Jack said, ‘If you think this is so fuckin’ good, you do it.’ Then the question became how? How was I supposed to do it? They didn’t want me. They wanted Jack Richardson. It wasn’t that we created a fiction, but what happened was that Jack only accepted the gig if I was going to be on the front line. He didn’t really want to have much to do with these weirdos. I had to go off to Pontiac, Michigan by myself and do the preproduction. That’s a story. A book in itself.”
Ezrin devoted November and December 1970 to working with the band in Michigan, rehearsing ten or twelve hours a day. At first, the Love It to Death sessions seemed futile — akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic — as the band resented Ezrin’s newfound creative control. His enthusiasm soon won out, and the band became tighter. Cooper wrote about the process. It was painfully slow as Ezrin pulled the melody out of the songs and formulated riffs, bridges and hooks. “He ironed the songs out note by note, giving them coloring, personality.
Phil Rizzuto, the official radio announcer for the New York Yankees, provided the blow-by-blow account of Meatloaf’s date with Ellen Foley on the 1978 teen classic “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
“My musical background was far more classical than it was rock—classical and folk—so I brought a different point of view to the thing,” says Ezrin. “Mainly because of my lack of comfort with the medium, I required a certain order that they were never able to achieve. We went from complete uncontrolled lunacy to a slightly more ordered, slightly more classical or folk-based musical style. I mean slightly more than what they had before, and that was all they needed to be righted by ten degrees.”
Most successful from the Love It to Death sessions was a tune Ezrin called “I’m Edgy,” misunderstanding the lyrics the first time Alice sang them. “I’m Eighteen” became Alice Cooper’s first Top Forty single. The success of “I’m Eighteen” led to a record deal with Warner Brothers and one of the most prolific relationships between producer and artist of the seventies. In the next six years, Ezrin and Cooper would pump out a series of theatrical hard-rock records (Killer, School’s Out, Billion Dollar Babies) that served as sound tracks for Cooper’s macabre stage show. Necrophilia, sadomasochism, infanticide — no topic was off limits.
Their final collaboration, 1975’s Welcome to My Nightmare, brought them full circle back to Nimbus Nine Studios. During one session, Alice was working on the ballad “Only Women Bleed.” “He would write lyrics in the studio,” said Ezrin. “It wasn’t that there were no lyrics. It’s just that they weren’t finished. We always had a verse and a chorus of everything. Always. We never went in without knowing what a song was called.”
Once the song was finished, Ezrin put the band through the paces learning the tune. Several hours passed, but the band couldn’t quite get the spirit of the song that Ezrin wanted. Nerves began to fray. Then Ezrin had an idea. “We had a small circus company in Toronto, a little private circus company [called] Puck’s which became Puck’s Farm. It was a real Toronto perennial, a hippie perennial. I hired the circus but didn’t tell anybody. We were in the middle of a take. Suddenly the door bursts open, and in come midgets and acrobats and a juggler and a magician and people blowing whistles. The funny thing was, [the band] were in the middle of playing “Only Women Bleed” which is a pretty intense ballad, and the door bursts open and in comes the circus. The band took one look and broke into a little circus march without losing a beat. It was really great. They just fell into the spirit of it. The circus went to work. “However, Alice was sitting there. He was completely poleaxed, sitting in his chair saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ But they got into the spirit of it. We had a great twenty-minute diversion. It was fabulous — they dropped eggs all over the studio. Everybody laughed, and then they marched right back out again as though nothing had happened. Then I counted it in, and we played the take of ‘Only Women Bleed’ —the one that made it on the album. It all went without any talking. There was no verbal communication, it just sort of happened. It was a magical moment.”
“Only Women Bleed” rose to Number Twelve on the charts in May 1975, but not without a dose of controversy. “It’s funny because at first, people thought, of course, that it was about menstruation,” Cooper later told Headly Gritter, author of Rock ‘N’ Roll Asylum. Many DJs referred to the song as “Only Women” for fear of offending their listeners. Cooper denied this accusation, calling “Only Women Bleed” a “sympathetic song.” “It was kind of a Tennessee Williams kind of way of saying it, you know,” Cooper said, explaining the song’s feminist bent in Gritter’s book. “I thought ‘Only Women Bleed’ would have been something Tennessee Williams would have said. And I like to honor certain writers, dedicating certain things to them. So I wrote that whole song with Tennessee Williams in mind.”
Most critics missed the Williams’s connection, but at least one scribe praised its hastily written feminist lyrics. “Alice’s nose for what the kids want to hear is as discriminating as it is impervious to moral suasion,” wrote Robert Christgau, “so perhaps this means that the more obvious feminist truisms have become conventional wisdom among at least half our adolescents. Encouraging.”
Alice Cooper poses on-stage with a hatchet, flanked by the Billion Dollar Baby Band. In 1975, while on tour promoting “Only Women Bleed,” Cooper tumbled off a stage in Vancouver, breaking six ribs.
Jive Talkin’
The Bee Gees
The early seventies were not kind to the Bee Gees. After a string of Beatlesque pop hits, the trio’s career cooled. Reduced to playing cabaret shows, a low point came at the Yorkshire Variety Club performance in front of an audience more interested in drinking than listening to love songs. Atlantic Records’ refusal to release their LP A Kick in the Head Is Worth Eight in the Pants seemed to be the band’s danse macabre. It took producer Arif Mardin and a chance remark by Barry Gibb’s wife to send them back to the top of the charts.
Mardin brought the Bee Gees (short form for Brothers Gibb) to Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida. Founded in the late 1950s by jazz fanatic Mack Emerman, it became the unofficial recording base of Atlantic Records in the sixties and seventies. With a client base that read like a who’s who of popular music — everyone from Abba to Frank Zappa to Count Basie to Neil Young to the Allman Brothers to Placido Domingo have laid down tracks there — it seemed like a natural place to breathe some life into the Bee Gees’ faltering career. Giving the band room to work, Mardin left them alone in Miami for a week. He advised them to keep their ears to the ground and listen to what was happening at the local discos. Most importantly, he urged them to write some new songs.
Inspired by the dance music they were hearing in the nightclubs of Miami, they would report to Criteria every day to work on new material. Late one afternoon, driving across the Sunny Isles Bridge on their way to the studio, they crossed some railroad tracks. Chunka-chunka-chunka. As the tires rode over the raised tracks, Barry’s wife Linda commented on the noise. “Do you ever listen to the rhythm when we drive across the bridge at night. It’s the same every evening. It’s our drive talking,” she said. Picking up on the rhythm, Barry started to improvise some lyrics. When Robin and Maurice joined in, “Drive Talking” was born.
Refining the song in the studio, “drive” became “jive” (American slang for “bullshit”), and Mardin added fire to the brother’s arrangement. Finger-popping bass and swishing high-hat cymbals jostled with the Brothers’ Gibb pop falsettos, sweetening the song’s disco pulse. The resulting blue-eyed R & B marked a radical change in their sound, moving away from their repertoire of heart-tugging love songs to the slick, radio-friendly sound of 1970s urban dance music. The Bee Gees had reinvented themselves. Now they had to sell “Jive Talkin’.”
Atlantic Records knew radio programmers wouldn’t care a hoot about a new record from the Bee Gees. In an effort to whip up some enthusiasm for the sin
gle, Atlantic released the promotional 45 with a plain white label and no artist information. The ploy worked. Given the chance to hear the tune, without the Bee Gees’ bias, radio loved the song.
“Jive Talkin’ ” became a Goliath hit. Released in May 1975, it attacked the charts with hammer and tongs, reaching Number One in August. It was their first Top Five hit since 1971’s “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” Making an impressive comeback, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb went on to top the charts seven more times in the 1970s.
Rod Stewart recognized that “Do You Think I’m Sexy?” “just pissed everybody off.” Coming off a string of critically lauded rock albums, Stewart jumped on the disco bandwagon and rode it all the way to the top of the charts. It wasn’t until the song was in the can that Stewart realized that he had unwittingly stolen part of the melody from a Brazilian hit called “Taj Mahal” by Jorge Ben. “I put me hands up and said, “Sorry mate,” Stewart told Mojo writer Mick Brown in 1995. “And he was okay. He earned a bit of money out of it. I gave my share of the royalties to UNICEF, I felt so guilty about nicking somebody else’s song.”
Variety Is the Spice of Life: A 1970’s Top Five
Convoy: C.W. McCall/I Write the Songs: Barry Manilow/Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going to?): Diana Rose/Love Roller Coaster: Ohio Players/Saturday Night: Bay City Rollers
In the beginning, there were pop, country and R & B charts. Rarely did they cross over, and all was good. Then came Elvis and rock and roll, and things became muddled. Pop songs hit the R & B charts. Rockabilly appeared on the country charts. Confusion reigned, and a change had to come. In the nineties, niche charts abound — adult-oriented rock, college, dance, new country, urban, alternative. But in the seventies, it was a different scene. Here is the story of one week—the week of January 10, 1976 — that could never be repeated today.
CONVOY; C.W. McCALL — Number One
There is no C.W. McCall. It is a pseudonym for Omaha native and advertising-agency director Bill Fries. While working at the Bozell and Jacobs Agency, he created the character of C.W. McCall, borrowing the name from a one-armed trucker from Missouri. He was fascinated with truckers and installed a CB radio (a simple version of a police radio) in his jeep to learn the big-rig lingo truckers used. Soon he had a handle, “Rubber Ducky,” and an idea. He conceived an ad campaign for the Mertz Baking Company of Iowa featuring a trucker named C.W. McCall who delivered bread to the Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep on A-Truckin’ Café. The spots were very popular, earning him a Cleo Award, the ad business’s highest honor.
The ads were so popular that Fries was approached by Don Sears, president of Sound Recorders, who suggested spinning off a country single from the commercials. Under the assumed name C.W. McCall, the first single, “Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep on A-Truckin’ Café” sold well, reaching Number Forty Five on the country charts. Several more truckin’ tunes followed, but it was a traffic jam that inspired his biggest hit. One night, driving on the interstate in his jeep, he found himself last in line in a string of cars and trucks, all communicating with one another via CB. He imagined a convoy of truckers slowly gaining power until they had an army of one thousand trucks. Using CB lingo, he penned “Convoy” which topped both the country and Hot One Hundred charts in 1976.
CB LINGO
Bears in the air: helicopters
Smokeys: cops
Modulate: talk
Checking out the seat covers: on the lookout for women drivers with short skirts
Keeping my nose between the ditches and Smokey out of my britches: driving safely and obeying the speed limit
I WRITE THE SONGS: BARRY MANILOW — Number Two
Barry Manilow has written many popular songs, but ironically, he didn’t pen his 1976 hit “I Write the Songs.” That tune was composed by Bruce Johnson, a member of the Beach Boys. Written as a tribute to bandmate and songwriting genius Brian Wilson, “I Write the Songs” had been recorded twice before Manilow got hold of it. The Captain and Tennille included it on their debut album but didn’t release it as a single. Later, David Cassidy scored a Top Twenty hit in Britain with the tune. On a visit to London, label head Clive Davis heard Cassidy’s version and decided it would be perfect for Manilow. The Brooklyn, New York-born singer recorded what Johnson declared “the definitive version” of the tune for his 1975 Tryin’ to Get the Feeling LP. Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” entered the charts at Number Forty-Eight, reaching the Top Five nine weeks later.
THEME FROM MAHOGANY (DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING TO?): DIANA ROSS — Number Three
Michael Masser had written several hit songs but had never scored a film. When he was approached by Berry Gordy Jr. to pen the sound track for Diana Ross’s upcoming film about the fashion industry, he was nervous about accepting the job. The silver-tongued Berry talked him into taking on the task, and now he had to figure out how to do it. Masser read a book on film scoring but learned little about the actual mechanics of the job. He developed his own system. Renting a Beta video player, a rare thing in 1975, he played a tape of the completed movie with the sound off. He carefully watched the interaction between costars Ross and Billy Dee Williams, noting the depth of emotion in their expressions. After one run through, he rewound the tape and watched it again, this time recording an improvised piano score in sync to the action. “Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To?)” was written using this unusual emotional approach rather than the cerebral technique used by most film songwriters. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song, Masser’s tune lost out to Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy.”
LOVE ROLLER COASTER: OHIO PLAYERS — Number Four
The Ohio Players liked to keep things spontaneous. From 1968, when they recorded the first of their experimental funk albums, the band never wrote a note of music before they entered the studio. With no preconceived notions of what they were about to record, they preferred to jam and let the music grow organically. The sessions were private (only the band and an engineer were allowed near the studio), and they worked quickly. In an era where most major acts took weeks or months to produce an album, the Ohio Players could pound out a hard-driving funk album in as little as four hours (1971’s Pain). Fire was produced in 1974 in three days, which, for them, was considered quite leisurely. Applying their usual jam technique to the recording of 1975’s Honey, they rapidly laid down funky bed tracks, adding finishing touches, vocals and effects later. The first single from Honey, “Sweet Sticky Thing,” broke into the Top Thirty. But it was the extremely danceable “Love Roller Coaster” that went to the top of the charts. Twenty years later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers resurrected the tune, with a remarkably respectful cover, for the sound track of Beavis and Butthead Do America.
SATURDAY NIGHT: BAY CITY ROLLERS — Number Five
Rounding out the Top Five for the week of January 10, 1976 is the only pure pop song on the list. “Saturday Night” was the Bay City Rollers’ first hit in North America, although they had enjoyed considerable success in Britain. The Scottish quintet weren’t songwriters. Up until 1974, they relied on cover songs like the Gentrys’ “Keep On Dancin’ ” to attract attention. It wasn’t until they teamed up with songwriters for hire Bill Martin and Phil Coulter that they began recording new songs and scoring major hits. Martin and Coulter had their finger on the pulse of the teen market, pumping out tunes like “Remember (Sha La La),” “Shang-A-Lang” and “Summerlove Sensation.” Their greatest teen pop creation, “Saturday Night,” wasn’t originally slated to be released as a single, but after several attempts at hitting the charts in North America failed, they took a chance with it. Making their American television debut on Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell, the tartan-clad Scots played the catchy tune and won the hearts of adolescent girls everywhere. Several weeks later in January 1976, “Saturday Night” hit the top of the charts, staying at Number One for one week.
More, More, More
Andrea True Connection
There is
an old show-business axiom that says all singers want to act, and all actors want to sing. This has been proven time after time, sometimes with disastrous results (remember William Shatner’s A Transformed Man?). Others have been more successful. John Travolta capitalized on his early fame as a television sweat hog to record many albums, scoring several hits. Tired of dominating the pop charts, Whitney Houston took a stab at big-screen fame in 1992’s The Bodyguard and later, The Bishop’s Wife. But rarely has there been a more unlikely actress turned pop star than Andrea True. The Nashville-born True traded in her porn-queen status for a run at the hit parade. “More, More, More,” the disco ode to excess, was a Number Four hit in 1976.
Success came easily for Gregg Diamond. A talented drummer, by his early twenties he had already amassed an impressive résumé, banging the traps for such acts as Sonny & Cher, James Brown and Joey Dee & the Starlighters. Having already made his mark as a sideman, Diamond decided to give up that life, concentrating instead on a career as a songwriter. For months he struggled, running out of money and almost losing his apartment. Rather than resort to playing drums again, he kept writing, working for weeks on one song.
Banging away at a rented piano, he slowly created a tune that he said “reeked of sex.” Without lyrics or a title, he corralled some friends and made a demo. In the coming weeks, Diamond played the instrumental for several friends. Then the break he was waiting for came. Someone who had heard the tape told ex-porn star Andrea True about this great demo he was convinced could be a hit. She was infamous for her performances in the X-rated Every Inch A Lady, Deep Throat II and The Seduction of Lynn Carter. Retired from skin flicks, she was living in Jamaica with her wealthy gynecologist boyfriend, hoping to break into the music biz. True called Diamond, offering him a plane ticket to the West Indies, room and board and studio time in exchange for a crack at the tune. At the very least, Diamond thought, this could be a free vacation.
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 12