by Steve Dorff
Playing the organ would be the renowned Clare Fischer, a brilliant keyboardist and jazz composer in his own right. As I nervously went out in the studio, Hal Blaine came over and put his arm around me, making me feel like I belonged. He then introduced me to all of the guys in the band.
I saw Clare in the back of the room by himself, and now that I was feeling a bit more confident, I walked over to introduce myself to this jazz legend. As I approached, I stuck my hand out and began to introduce myself as the arranger and conductor of the upcoming session.
Before I could get a word out he looked up and said, “You’re standing on my fucking wires!”
Okay, then . . . nice meeting you too, buddy!
Lenny Roberts, the engineer, was standing nearby, setting a microphone. He looked at me in shock before we both started laughing uncontrollably. We laughed for the next few hours during the session, and for the next fifteen years whenever it came up. Clare truly was a magnificent and tasteful player, and contributed greatly to the sound of any album he played on. I suppose he was just having a rough day with those wires.
It wasn’t long before I was meeting some young writer/artists who heard through the grapevine that I was a “new guy” in town looking for great songs. I was also starting to get some recognition from the studio session players I was working with, and they started to refer some of their music relationships to me.
Snuff told me that if I could find a great act, he would encourage me to start producing on my own as well . . . under the Garrett umbrella, of course. Within the next year, I made a lot of good contacts with A&R people at most of the labels. I was primarily writing and pitching my own songs, but some of the label guys liked my demos and knew I was arranging for Snuff, so the door was opening for me to possibly produce acts that I found or who were already signed and looking for a producer.
My first experiences with mostly new acts were all fun, yet they came with a steep learning curve. Nathanson and Schoenholtz was a great duo I did for Capitol. I produced Richard Mainegra for Columbia, and Gail Davies and Arthur, and Hurley and Gottlieb, were two acts I did at A&M. I was getting acclimated to working with the great session players and feeling comfortable in different studios.
Snuff had recently produced an album for Tanya Tucker, so when Tanya was asked to perform on The Merv Griffin Show in Las Vegas, her manager asked if I would go to Vegas and conduct for her on the show, since I had done a few of the arrangements on the album. Nancy couldn’t go because she was now pregnant with our second son, Andrew, so I invited my longtime best friend, Mark Jerome—yes, he of the famed Queens bar mitzvah band the Four People—to travel up there with me. He had recently moved to Los Angeles from Baltimore, partly to get a change of scenery, and possibly to contemplate a career change.
Neither one of us had ever been to Vegas before, so it was definitely an eye-opening spectacle. From being someone who was intimidated to play the piano in front of six people, I was now performing in front of an audience of 2,500 at Caesar’s Palace. It was a rush.
Afterward, I was standing in the wings of the stage with Mark, watching another act, when I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder. It was none other than Merv Griffin himself. He told me what a nice job I had done out there and asked me what my story was.
I was starstruck. This was the Merv Griffin who starred in my mother’s favorite show on television. Merv and I spoke for a few minutes. I told him I was just in town conducting for Tanya, that I was primarily a songwriter, and that I had recently moved to L.A. from Atlanta. Merv told me he was looking for some original songs for himself, because he wanted to do a new album for MGM, where he had just made a deal.
“Maybe you have something you can play for me that I can sing?” he asked.
“I actually have a few songs that would be great for you,” I quickly responded. I was not about to let this opportunity pass. He told me to call him in a few hours after he was done with his two shows, and he would arrange for me to come up and play for him as he had a piano in his suite at Caesar’s.
At 10 p.m., Merv called.
“Come on up to the Crown Suite.”
Mark and I went up to Merv’s suite, which was as big as some hotels I had stayed at. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. It was a two-story, five-bedroom suite with a white grand piano sitting in the middle of a gigantic parlor. Merv had two young gentlemen working for him, and they offered us food, drinks, and pot. Merv was in a casual sweat suit. Suddenly, this was all starting to feel a bit strange, and I adjusted my wedding ring to make sure everyone could see it clearly.
Merv ushered me over to the piano and played a few things for me. I was surprised at what solid a musician he was. He played beautifully and had a terrific voice. I sat down and played him a new song that Milton and I had recently written called “Whoever You Are, I Love You.”
When I finished, I looked up, and Merv was speechless. After a moment, he said, “My God, I absolutely love that song. Can you play it again?”
I played it again, and he began to sing the second chorus along with me. He sounded fantastic.
Merv smiled and said, “I want you to produce that song for me. I’ll be back in L.A. next week. Call a man named Murray Schwartz who runs my company, and let him know whatever it is you need.”
That was the beginning of a friendship that developed over the next several decades with Merv. When he returned to L.A., we met at his office, and he asked me how I would approach doing an entire album with him. I told him I thought it would be best to do some standards, some present-day covers, and maybe two or three original songs. He loved the idea and told me to prepare a budget and put together a song list. He wanted to move ahead with the project.
Over the next few days I put together a list of songs that ranged from “As Time Goes By” and “The Girl from Ipanema” to the Bee Gees’ “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and my song “Whoever You Are, I Love You.” Merv loved the song ideas and officially asked me to produce the entire album for him. I was beyond excited.
A week later, Merv invited me up to his house in Pebble Beach to get keys and go over the material. The house was spectacular. Overlooking the Pebble Beach golf course and the Pacific Ocean, it was a palace. I flew up from Burbank on his private plane, and he had one of his assistants meet me at the airport for the short drive to his home. Merv and I spent a day going over songs, getting keys, and discussing arrangement ideas and the schedule. Merv was an avid tennis player, and the next morning he asked if we could take a break from working on the songs to go play a doubles match with a couple of his tennis buddies. I told him I played a bit, and after breakfast we made our way over to one of his friends’ nearby castles to play some tennis.
Merv and his friend and I were volleying for a while as we waited for our fourth to show up.
“Ahh, here he comes,” said Merv.
I looked over, and here comes the tall, good-looking guy who ends up being my doubles partner, Clint Eastwood. How ironic that it was Clint who years later would give me the musical opportunity of a lifetime. But for that couple of hours, nothing was talked about except good and bad tennis shots.
Merv was excited to get started on the album immediately. MGM had approved the budget, and two weeks later we began to record the Merv Griffin As Time Goes By album. We cut the basic tracks over three days at Larrabee Sound in Santa Monica, with Lenny Roberts engineering. In spite of his incredibly hectic television-taping schedule, Merv showed up at every session to sing scratch vocals with the band. I was mostly using the musicians that Snuff had introduced me to at his sessions, as I hadn’t really formed any of my own relationships to that point. But it was an amazing first experience to be sitting in the pilot’s chair for a change, working with legends like Hal Blaine, Tommy Tedesco, Mike Melvoin, and Sid Sharp. I even had Al Capps do some of the charts for me.
I’m still incredibly proud of that project. I
t was, in its own way, a rite of passage.
Merv was the first major star artist I had ever produced, and he was extremely happy with the final product. As a gift, he rented a three-bedroom beach house in Carmel for my family and me for the entire month of August. Although I didn’t see him too often, except for the occasional event in passing, Merv and I stayed friends until his death in 2007. He was a wonderful guy and a true talent.
Shortly after I had finished producing Merv’s project at MGM, I got an interesting call from Loren Saifer, the senior VP head of A&R for the Portrait label, a division, then, of Columbia Records. They had just signed an artist from Baltimore whom they were excited about, a singer/songwriter named Tony Sciuto.
Loren asked if I would come over and take a meeting to discuss the possibility of me producing his debut album. I knew the name sounded familiar . . . but I didn’t think there was a chance in hell it could be the same person. Sure enough, though, it was the same Tony Sciuto who I had played with in the Ravens back in Baltimore.
I hadn’t seen Tony in over a decade. It was crazy, but it was no coincidence. It turns out that Tony had mentioned me to Loren; since he was familiar with my work and songs, he wanted to work with me . . . and he thought it would make quite a “meta” story.
It was so great to get to see Tony all grown up, still playing and singing his butt off, with great new songs that he had written with his writing partner, Sammy Egorin. Tony came to L.A. and we agreed to do the album together. It was the most ambitious production I had done up to this point. The songs were laced with elements of rock, jazz, and blues, and all tied together thematically. It was an opportunity for me to write bits of underscore to go between the songs, to tie them seamlessly together. This was something I had always wanted to try.
The album project would be called Island Nights. We worked for the better part of a month tracking and doing vocals at Britannia Studios. Lenny Roberts was the engineer.
Tony was a perfectionist, but in a good way. His demos were impeccable, and I had to figure out a way to make the record sound better than the demos, which wasn’t easy to do. Together, we handpicked great musicians, which started the important transition for me away from the players that Snuff had always insisted on using. New, fresh, and upcoming session superstars like Ed Green, Ronnie Tutt, Bill Cuomo, Steve Lukather, Mike Porcaro, and Tom Scott were just some of the fabulous guys who played on the project.
After months of mixing and remixing with several different engineers, the album was released to great reviews but not so great chart success. It was disappointing because the album was so good.
Japan, however, was a different story. The album was extremely popular over there and is still considered a cult classic. When I was working in Japan last year, all people wanted to ask me were questions about Karen Carpenter and Tony Sciuto’s Island Nights.
Back at Snuff’s, I continued to work around the clock. Snuff had me composing, recording, arranging, and writing. It was mostly drama-free. However, Snuff’s secret claim to fame was that he liked to create drama and suck the wind out of your sails, so at the eleventh hour he could ride in and save the day. Control was something Snuff relished and often used to his advantage in key situations.
One night, Snuff called me at eleven o’clock.
“I need a song and I need it quick.”
Nancy had just given birth to our second son, Andrew, and neither one of us was sleeping well.
“How quick?” I stuttered, trying to wake up.
“Yesterday.”
Snuff had gotten a call from a music supervisor from Warner Bros. The song that had been written for Clint Eastwood’s new movie had fallen through. Clint didn’t like it and needed another song ASAP, due to postproduction deadlines, in order to make the scheduled release date. The movie was a comedy, Every Which Way but Loose. Snuff didn’t know much about the film other than it was about Clint Eastwood bareknuckle fighting for cash and driving around with an orangutan. He told me I should call Milton Brown and whip something up.
I called Milt, who still lived in Mobile, Alabama. It was two in the morning, and Milt picked up on the eighth ring. “Somebody better be dying,” he barked into the phone.
“Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Every which way but loose’?” I asked. “It’s a Southern phrase, right?”
“Yeah, it means I’m gonna kick your ass or love you. Listen, I’ll call you later, I’ve gotta go back to sleep.”
“No . . . get a cup of coffee. We have to write it.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
Milt and I wrote the song over the phone in thirty minutes. We had to. We both needed sleep.
The next day, I went into the office and played it for Snuff. Snuff had me play it for Steve Wax, Eastwood’s record-company executive at Elektra Records, which was going to release the soundtrack album. There was a flurry of phone calls back and forth.
At three in the afternoon, I went to Warners to meet Clint for the first time—well, the second time, if you count the tennis court. I was sufficiently starstruck. Again. Clint was a laid-back icon, wearing a tight T-shirt and grinning at me out of the side of his mouth.
“Let me hear your song, Steve.”
I played him the song.
“Play it again,” he said.
And that was it.
Thanks to Steve Wax, we were able to get Eddie Rabbitt, who was on fire as a country artist at the time, to agree to record it.
A funny thing happened on the way to this becoming my first #1 record. There wasn’t a whole lot of time to do a proper demo with a band. Snuff asked me to run over to Criterion and do a quick piano/vocal demo so we could play it for Eddie, who would be in town over the weekend, playing with his band at the Orange County Fair in Irvine. The idea was to record the song with Eddie while he was in L.A., before he headed back to Nashville, where he lived. I did the demo—which admittedly wasn’t very good—myself, but Snuff and Clint loved the song, approved the demo, and asked me to drive down to Irvine to hand-deliver it to and play it for Eddie.
I was told that Eddie would be expecting me, and would make time to meet with me to discuss the session. Except Rabbitt, never got the memo.
I drove for two hours, trying to find the private tour-bus parking lot, all the while excited for a productive friendly meeting with one of the brightest stars in country music. Finally, after making a few wrong turns, I found the correct parking lot and walked over to a large fancy tour bus. I knocked on the door several times before a man opened the door and said, “Yeah?”
“Um, I’m here to see Eddie Rabbitt.”
“What fer?”
“Uh, I have a demo that I’m supposed to play for him.”
“He’s not lookin’ for any outside songs, he writes all his own.”
I was getting a bit anxious at this point, stammering a bit, and finally I mentioned that it was a song for a movie that Eddie was going to sing in two days, and that I was told to deliver it to him in person.
The guy grabbed the package out of my hand and said, “I’ll give it to Eddie when I see him.”
“Well, I’m supposed to play it for him, we had a meeting scheduled.”
At this point, a member of his band came over from the kitchen area of the bus and said, “Yeah, Eddie will listen to the song when he gets here later.” He then turned to the other guy and said, “Eddie really wanted to write his own song for this movie, and is not happy at all about singing some other guy’s song.”
At this point, I figured they thought I was just a messenger service delivering the package, and it was obvious that Eddie had not been informed about our meeting.
So, I slithered away.
Three days later, I was at RCA Studios in Hollywood, standing on the podium rehearsing with a sixty-piece orchestra, when Eddie Rabbitt walked in with Steve Wax and a few of h
is bandmates. Snuff and Clint were there too, of course, and everybody was happy and excited about the song we were about to record.
Eddie couldn’t have been nicer to me. He told me how much the song had grown on him over the past couple days, and I never mentioned that I was the delivery guy who dropped the tape off for him.
To say that this was an unconventional session would be a monumental understatement. I think we had four guitars, two pianos, and two drummers in the rhythm section, surrounded by strings, French horns, and a host of woodwinds. I thought either Snuff was trying to impress the shit out of Clint and company, or he had lost his mind completely. I had pleaded with him to let me cut the rhythm track first, so we could have no leakage into the orchestra. This would have made Grover, the engineer, very happy when he started mixing. But no . . . Snuff wanted it to be “different”—and different it would be for sure.
Magically, the track turned out to be incredible and “different” indeed. Eddie was singing his heart out in a vocal booth. When we went in to the control room to listen to the playback, everyone was excited.
Then Snuff came over to me and said, “Let’s double it.”
“What? Double what?”
“Double the whole damn orchestra,” he said.
I looked at Grover and thought he was going to have a stroke.
“You mean the strings, right?” I said. “You can’t really double all of those guitars and keyboards and drums . . . it will sound like a train wreck.”
“I said double the whole damn bunch of ’em.”
And we did . . . and, to his credit, somehow Snuff was right.
Milton Brown, who had flown out for the session, said he knew it was a #1 record, as did I. I was walking on air during the playback, I was so happy.
I took a bathroom break and Snuff Garrett sidled up next to me at the urinal. He smiled and said, “Great arrangement.”
“Man, I’m so excited,” I said. “This is a monster track, can you feel it?”