by Steve Dorff
I had met Mack a few times when he came up to see Snuff at the office to play him some songs. Mack hadn’t really had too much going on for a while. He was living in Palm Springs and was pretty much retired, but he still loved writing songs and couldn’t really sit still—he got the itch to come to Hollywood every few weeks or so to pitch some new ideas to the newest crop of relevant songwriters.
I suppose I was one of those relevant songwriters.
I was already five minutes late for a lunch meeting at Martoni’s with Jim and Bo, and was scrambling to get out the door, when Rhonda, the front desk receptionist, buzzed me and asked if I could take a moment to meet with Mack David, who had dropped by without an appointment. I came out of my office, shook hands with Mack, and politely told him I was running late and really didn’t have time to chat. He told me he just happened to be in the building and was heading back to Palm Springs that afternoon, and had a “hit” lyric he wanted to show me.
Ugh. I knew this would probably take five minutes, but looking at Mack, who was an extremely large man with visible health issues, I agreed, and we walked back to my office.
Mack plopped his 250-plus-pound self on my couch, leaned forward, and excitedly proceeded to recite one of the worst song ideas I had ever heard. He thought it would be a great idea for David Frizzell and Shelly West, a hit duet act I was producing with Snuff. “A-Hup Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Tennessee.” Yes, Tennessee, like the state. Sigh.
As politely as I could, I told Mack it was a terrible idea, and it just wasn’t for me. I started to get up, but he said, “One more, I have one more.”
I was halfway out the door, and I was starting to sweat almost as much as he was . . . and I didn’t have emphysema, like Mack did.
The second idea he had was worse than the first one. It was something about “Polyester Love.”
At this point, I was standing at the door and imploring my unwanted guest to leave.
“Mack, I’ve got to go. I’m running late.”
I was starving and already planning what I was going to eat for lunch.
It took him about a minute to get off of the couch and upright. As I shook his hand, he pulled a crumpled piece of yellow pad paper out of his jacket pocket, and said, “Can I just read you a verse and chorus of something I started this morning?”
Before I could say no, he started to recite a few lines that stopped me in my tracks. I listened to the first verse and chorus, and I asked him to recite it again. I immediately called Rhonda and asked her to call and apologize to Bo and Jim for having to cancel my lunch. Something came up . . . in the way of a great song that Mack and I would write that afternoon called “Hate the Lies, Love the Liar.”
I was stunned that the same guy who just read me “Polyester Love” and “A-Hup” could write such a brilliant lyric as “Hate the Lies.” For that brief moment when Mack obviously got struck with lyrical lightening, he was on the top of his game again.
I think it took all of fifteen minutes for me to write the melody to Mack’s verse and chorus. The challenge was now going to be getting a great second verse out of him before he left the building. With Mack, you never knew when you might see him again.
We sat for a while and brainstormed, but he was empty. He said a lot of things but nothing was profound. It was all so staid and old-fashioned. Nothing worthwhile was coming out. It was completely off point to what he had said so beautifully in the first verse.
“It’s only four lines Mack. Dig deep,” I urged.
Finally, after throwing out hundreds of clichéd lines, causing me to nearly having an anxiety attack, he hooked it. We had a great song, well worth the lunch I ended up missing, and respite from the hour and a half of anxiety.
A few really nice versions of “Hate the Lies” were cut, but it was Ronnie Milsap who recorded the signature version.
Mack and I never wrote another song together, but on that one crazy lunch hour way back when, I lived a fun story that I would tell affectionately for the rest of my life. And I proudly have my name on a great song with the legendary Mack David.
After working for Snuff for a decade, I knew it was time for me to move on. When I thought about my real motivating reason to come to California in the first place, it was to work in the entertainment business. I absolutely loved writing songs, but I felt like there was so much more music in my head than just the three-and-a-half-minute format of a pop, R&B, or country song. I wanted to do professionally what I had been doing in my head my entire life: writing music to visual events.
Thanks to some incredibly talented directors and producers who I would get to meet in some of the oddest ways imaginable, I would get that chance.
Snuff Garrett had certainly been the catalyst for me getting to meet and work with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. These were opportunities that I probably never would have had if I hadn’t been signed exclusively to Snuff. I owe him a great debt of gratitude and thanks. But I also knew not to sell myself short, as my involvement in all of these projects helped make them musically successful, and kept the flow of new projects coming in Snuff’s door. It was an equitable partnership that worked very well for six or seven years.
When I decided to leave Snuff after ten years, it opened up the possibility of me getting representation for the first time. While I was working for him, Snuff would not hear of me having an agent to represent me for film and TV projects. That would have totally usurped his control of how, where, and when I would be able to do anything.
I had many good years with Snuff, but I knew it was time for me to move on. When Warners made me an offer, I wanted to give Snuff right of first refusal to match that offer. Loyalty is a big deal for me, and Garrett Music, for all of its plusses and minuses, had become family to me. After all, Snuff developed me. He gave me my first shot at arranging big orchestras’ greatest musicians. As I unofficially became Leon Russell’s replacement, Snuff’s dependency on me grew.
Now, it is common knowledge that Snuff was not an easy guy to work for. He was extremely demanding and stubborn. There were two ways to do things: Snuff’s way and Snuff’s way.
One has to have a certain kind of personality to work under those conditions. And because Snuff gave me a shot and opened the doors that enabled me to show what I could do, I developed that certain kind of personality. Snuff trusted me with everything and spent less and less time in the studio and more time on his ranch, developing western art businesses, while allowing me to handle the daily mechanics of the music company. . . but only at arm’s length. Every major decision still had to be run by and approved by him.
Eventually, after ten years, I was ready to move on. I called Snuff. He knew exactly why I was calling and had his guard up. He spoke preemptively.
“Steve. I understand Warners offered you a deal. What do you want?”
I took a deep breath. Even after ten years, the man still slightly intimidated me.
“Snuff, I want three things: copublishing; I want to have auspices to write and make deals with whomever I want to without you riding herd; and I want $125k a year.” (I was getting $65,000 a year, and Warners had offered me $125,000.)
Snuff then said, without preamble, “Copublishing is not a problem, and you’ve always written with who you’ve wanted to. But for one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, I think I’ll find the next Steve Dorff.”
BOOM! And that was it: the end of a ten-year relationship.
I was devastated. I felt betrayed and unappreciated. But that’s showbiz, and I sucked up my pride and moved on. On the upside, for the first time in my career I was finally in control of my own creative destiny. And I was excited about the possibilities.
I got representation immediately.
Michael Gorfaine and Sam Schwartz were, without question, the premier agents for film and TV composers. Michael and I had known each other from when he was working at
ASCAP, before he and Sam started the Gorfaine/Schwartz Agency. I met with Michael and Sam, and we agreed that it would be a great place for me to be. I was honored to be represented by them. All of a sudden I was being submitted and exposed to a whole world of film and television projects. I knew then that I had made the right decision for my family and me, and while I appreciated every door that Snuff had opened for me, I never looked back with regret at having left.
Having already scored four films of Clint’s, as well as having worked with Burt Reynolds on several of his projects, I already had a nice list of credits for Mike and Sam to build upon. And build they did. I had been gone from Garrett Music for about a year when I got hired to compose the score for Hugh Wilson’s Rustler’s Rhapsody at Paramount.
Sometimes you get a job in the quirkiest roundabout way.
The director and screenwriter, Hugh Wilson, was looking for a great costume design for the fictitious cowboy star Rex O’Herlihan, who would be played by Tom Berenger in the movie. Rex would change outfits five or six times a day for whatever the activity he was doing at that particular moment. Wayne Finkelman, the costume designer for the film, had gone to Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard to thumb through all of the western-themed albums to get some ideas to show Hugh. One of the albums he found was a Rex Allen Jr. album, with a fabulous picture of Rex on the cover in a stylish full cowboy getup from the sequined pleated shirt, right down to the silver spurs on his boots. The name of the album was The Last of the Silver Screen Cowboy, the title song of which Milton Brown and I had written for Rex in honor of his dad, Rex Allen Sr., as well as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy.
Wayne showed Hugh the album cover back at his office on the Paramount lot, and Hugh screamed, “That’s my Rex’s outfit right there!”
He was excited, and toward the end of the day, with the album cover sitting on his desk, Hugh had a little downtime and started looking at the album more closely. He wanted his Rex to sing in the movie like all singing cowboys did in the B-movie westerns. I suppose he was just a bit curious about the sound of the album, so he played Milton’s and my song and quickly called Steve Bedell, who was head of Paramount’s music department, and told him to track down whoever wrote that song, because he wanted it to be the end title song of his movie.
I had known Steve Bedell from way back when I was with Herb Bernstein in New York City. Steve called me and told me the entire, crazy, unbelievable story that had been unfolding, and asked me to come over to the studio and meet Hugh Wilson.
Hugh and I met and talked about his musical vision for the film, and he asked me to write a few more songs for his lead character to sing in the movie. This was going to be a big project: we would have to do all of the prerecords before shooting and thread the song melodies throughout the orchestral score. Steve suggested to Hugh that they hire me to do the entire project. And to think I got this amazing job simply because a costume designer happened to like a picture on an album cover. Talk about kismet!
I wrote most of the songs for this movie with Milton. One in particular, “Lasso the Moon,” became a hit for Gary Morris, who recorded it for the end titles. I demoed all of the songs that Tom Berenger would be lip-syncing to in Los Angeles. Jon Joyce, a fabulous studio singer with whom I often worked, did all of the prerecords for me. It was then off to London to record the orchestral underscore.
While we were still in London finishing up recording Rustler’s, Mike Gorfaine called me and asked if I would be interested in doing a backdoor pilot movie for Warners’ television division. If they liked the two-hour movie, it would likely turn into a series. It was Spenser: For Hire, starring my close friend Robert Urich.
Sometimes it helps to be friends with big stars.
I had known Robert for several years. When my son Andrew was a baby and we were busting out of the small house we were living in on Kraft Avenue, Nancy was looking for a new home. She was always looking around the neighborhood for a bigger place where we could have more room. She loved a particular street not far from where we were, called Carpenter Avenue. It was a beautiful, tree-lined street with much bigger and nicer and far more expensive houses. One weekend she announced to me that she had found the perfect house on Carpenter that we just had to buy. The fact that it was twice the cost of the house we were in was secondary.
Being a typical artist, and assuming that the job I had just finished was probably going to be my last, and that I would never work again, didn’t help. Luckily, we sold our house for twice what we had paid for it and went out on the proverbial limb and bought the Carpenter Avenue house.
The house directly across the street from us was the killer house in the neighborhood. It was the one house everyone coveted—it was truly gorgeous. The owners had done loads of custom work on it: bay windows, stained-glass doors, converting the garage into a beautiful study and office, huge stone fireplace.
One day I was out on the front lawn, playing ball with my boys, and the ball rolled into the street. I went to get it and was met halfway by actor Robert Urich. He was getting into his car, saw me, and thought he’d say hello to the new across-the-street neighbor. He was a really nice guy, down-to-earth; he loved living in a non-pretentious, homey neighborhood. He invited me over to see his house sometime, after I told him how much I had admired the aesthetic work he had put into it.
We would see each other on the street almost every day, and it wasn’t long before we became friends. We would have each other over for a drink, and even went out for dinner with our wives. Bob loved music and had a really nice singing voice. We would sometimes sit at the piano, and he would ask me to play songs that he could sing.
Bob was a popular actor who went from one hit show to another. When we met, he was just coming off the big hit Vega$, where he starred as Dan Tanna. One afternoon he knocked on my door and asked me what I was doing this coming weekend. I told him I had no particular plans.
“We’re going to Venezuela,” he said. “I’m doing this crazy show down there where they want me to sing. I want you to play for me and I’ll sing one of your songs.”
Two days later, Bob, his wife Heather, his agent Merritt Blake, and I were headed to Caracas. It was an absolutely bizarre weekend. We got off the long plane ride at two in the morning to a crowd of screaming fans throwing their underwear at Bob.
You would have thought the Beatles had landed. Apparently, Vega$ was a huge hit in South America.
The hotel we stayed at was supposedly meant to be a five-star resort. It was more like an old Ramada Inn on the outskirts of Des Moines. We did the Sabado Sensational TV special the next day. It was the equivalent of a six-hour Ed Sullivan show on steroids: singers, dancers, jugglers, magicians, and us. The piano was out of tune but no one seemed to care. Bob had learned a song of mine and Marty Panzer’s called “From Now On.” The crowd went nuts.
I was afraid to drink the water for three days, so I was brushing my teeth with Polar Beer—the Venezuelan beer that was in all of the hotel rooms. I think I stayed tipsy the entire weekend.
I almost got into a fight with some guy I was talking to about the Falkland Island crisis, which was currently ongoing. Venezuela was the only country that was supporting Argentina. I didn’t realize that as I was spouting off about how Great Britain was going to kick Argentina’s ass if they didn’t back off of the Falklands, and some Venezuelan guy at the hotel bar told me he was going to kick my American ass if I didn’t shut my mouth.
So much for a political dialogue in a foreign country.
All in all, it was a fun experience that I was so happy to see come to an end. When we landed in Miami, I got down and kissed the ground, grateful to be back in America. One has no appreciation of how great we have it in the United States until you’ve spent time in an impoverished country.
When Bob was offered the series Spenser: For Hire, he talked to the producer, John Wilder, and recommended me for the show. When I had
gotten the call from Michael Gorfaine while working on Rustler’s in London, it was about setting up a meeting for the same project when I returned. It felt like I had this gig surrounded.
I was already doing the music for Growing Pains and My Sister Sam at Warners, and I was getting ready to do Major Dad over at Universal, as well as a new pilot. I knew I needed help if I was to take on an hour show every week. Larry Herbstritt had been orchestrating for me almost exclusively for years, and he was the logical choice to help me do Spenser: For Hire on a week-to-week basis. This was a big action/adventure, private-eye show with a good twenty-five to thirty-five minutes of fully orchestrated score every week. We would customarily use a thirty-five-piece orchestra for every episode. We would spot music for a coming episode, write all week, record, and then start the process all over again every week for twenty-two episodes.
Bob told me he had to relocate to Boston, where they would be shooting for three years if the show went well. Before he put his house on the market, he asked me if I wanted to buy it. Did I? Absolutely. We moved across the street into our dream house.
It was the easiest move I ever made.
Spenser ran for three seasons and it was a great run. Bob and I remained close and played golf occasionally when he moved back from Boston to a beautiful custom mansion on the Lake Sherwood golf course. It was there, while playing golf one afternoon, that Bob shared with me that he was about to undergo treatment for some cancer that they had found during a routine physical. Tragically, at the age of only fifty-seven, Bob lost his battle with a rare form of sarcoma. He was definitely one of the good guys, and I think of him with a smile often.