by Steve Dorff
I assumed that because I had such a successful collaboration on Spenser: For Hire it would be a no-brainer that I would be hired to work on the spinoff show, Hawk.
I assumed wrong.
Larry Herbstritt and I were writing between thirty-five and forty minutes of music each week for every episode of Spenser: For Hire. The treadmill was definitely going full throttle. The fun thing about Spenser for me was the great relationship I had with both Robert Urich and Steve Hattman, who became the executive producer for the show’s second season. Steve was a great writer and a big supporter of the music for the show . . . and there was a lot of it.
The character of Hawk, played by Avery Brooks, was a fan favorite. Musically, Larry and I would always try to thematically make something of his scene entrances and exits. We would usually play a somewhat dark, jazzy, heavy bass line–type cue in order to punctuate Hawk’s onscreen presence.
I remember Hattman specifically telling me how much he loved the way we played Hawk musically.
Shortly after Spenser went off the air, after three seasons on ABC, Doug Frank, the president of television music at Warner Bros. Studios, called me and told me of plans to do a spinoff series starring Avery Brooks: A Man Called Hawk.
Steve Hattman was the creator and would be the executive producer of the series for ABC. Again, I guess I just assumed that Larry and I would be asked to do the music. Whoops—not so fast. Although Steve wanted me to do it, Avery Brooks was adamant about having everything to say about the music for his show.
Doug asked if I would take a meeting with Avery for a discussion about the music. I was a huge fan of the character Avery had brought to life. He was Hawk as far as I was concerned. In fact, when we had our meeting at the scoring stage on the Warners lot, I felt as if I was sitting there with the big bad dude with the long silver gun in his vest, not Avery Brooks the actor.
Avery was quiet, and deliberate with his speech, much like the character I had lived with onscreen, a good six hours a day, for the past three years of my life. It was just a little bit intimidating. I told Avery how much I enjoyed doing Spenser: For Hire, and how I would love to continue on doing the music for Hawk.
There was a long pause before he slowly said, in his eloquent, serious, Shakespearean baritone, “There is a universe in which Hawk lives musically, of which I am not sure you understand.”
Hmmmm, I thought. This was getting a bit deep. He went on to explain the jazz fusion and ethereal, unpredictable, sounds he would be wanting to hear every time he, or Hawk, would be on camera.
He couldn’t have been nicer to me, and he complimented me for my work on Spenser: For Hire, but it was pretty clear that he wanted me to “audition” for this show, with a type of music that was definitely not in my comfort zone. Plus, I really wasn’t sure at all what the “Universe of Hawk” that he kept referring to was all about.
To his credit, Avery did invite me to submit some music for him to listen to, but I knew I was not the right person for this project. I told Doug and Steve Hattman that the meeting had gone okay, but I felt like, under the circumstances, I was not the right composer for this show. At lunch with Doug a few months later, he recalled how he went to one of the initial scoring sessions, and how totally differently it was conducted compared to the sessions we always did for Spenser.
Apparently, the sessions were done with a rather small jazz ensemble of some five or six pieces. Very little was written out or scored, and the music was often an extemporaneous jam session. Scoring to picture is as mathematical a process as it is musical, especially when you are trying to hit, or musically punctuate, dramatic sequences or specific events within a scene, because frames of film go by in a millisecond.
Well, each to each his own . . . let’s leave it at that. To be honest, I never got to see the show. The network canceled it rather quickly. I guess I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t understand the “Universe of Hawk.”
From there, the floodgates really opened up for me at nearly every studio. Over the next ten years I would write music for over sixty motion-picture and television projects, including films like Back to the Beach, Pink Cadillac, Babe Ruth, Love Story, and Pure Country; the TV series My Sister Sam; Murphy Brown; Tremors; Alien Nation; Reba; Uncle Buck; Murder, She Wrote; the made-for-TV movies Columbo, Sam McCloud, Kiss Shot, B. L. Stryker; and a slew of others. It was like being on a treadmill that wouldn’t turn off. And I must admit, although crazy busy as it had become, I loved it. It was an entirely new career for me, and it presented all kinds of new challenges as well.
And a great deal of it was about being in the right place at the right time.
That same year, I was hired to do the pilot and theme song for Growing Pains, and Burt Reynolds called me to score an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and an episode of Amazing Stories that he directed for Universal. I was thrilled that he called me without being attached to Snuff. Clint would also call me to work with him on another movie without Snuff attached.
Those calls mean so much more to me now because they represented me being my own guy in their eyes. Maybe I always had been . . . I guess Snuff just didn’t want to me to know it.
15
Ringo Starr
I’ve been asked so many times: What are the greatest experiences I’ve had, and who are the greatest artists I’ve gotten to work with? That’s kind of like asking a parent to name their favorite child. I have four remarkable children who are each exceedingly different and extraordinarily wonderful in their own way.
But I do have a favorite . . . experience, not child.
As a teenager at the beginning of the mid-sixties British Invasion, I used to glue myself to the TV and watch the pop music shows Hullabaloo, Shindig!, and Where the Action Is. I could only dream about the chance of meeting, let alone writing songs for, some of my favorite stars. I look back now and really can’t believe I was so fortunate to get to work with so many of my musical heroes—musicians who inspired me, and whose albums I would rush out to buy as soon as they were released.
Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Paul Revere of the Raiders were just some of the many people I used to admire and subsequently got to write songs for. As a young writer, hearing these artists’ interpretations of what was in my head when I wrote those songs was absolutely mind-blowing for me. Here were the very performers whom I idolized, singing songs that I wrote.
It never ceases to be an absolute thrill.
The truth is, all of the amazing artists who have recorded my songs—including Barbra Streisand, Céline Dion, Dusty Springfield, Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Michael Crawford, Anthony Newley, and so many others—each brings his or her unique style and voice to every project. They are all my favorites. But . . . if I had to pick . . .
I have always been a Beatles freak.
I clearly remember watching the Beatles make their history appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. It influenced thousands of garage bands across the country including, the Four People. I was obsessed with them, so the idea of one day producing one of them was basically inconceivable.
Until it happened.
Getting the chance to produce Ringo Starr has to be right up there with the most surreal experiences of my career. It was spectacular, even though it was not the easiest of sessions. One day, I received a call from Gary Lemel, the president of the music department at Warner Bros. Pictures, asking me if I could come to his office for a quick meeting about a project Warners was doing. Famed director John Hughes had just finished what would be his last film, a sweet movie called Curly Sue. He needed a song for the end credits ASAP, and Gary had suggested to him that John Bettis and I would be a good choice to write the song. Gary gave us a copy of the shooting script, and after reading it, John had a great title idea.
We got together the next day and wro
te “You Never Know,” a breezy, soft-shoe kind of swing-feel tune, with a great lyric that perfectly fit the message of the film, “You never know which way a day is gonna take you.”
I did a quick piano/vocal demo to show Gary the song, and a day later John Hughes gave us the thumbs-up. Hughes was briefly in town from his home base in Chicago doing postproduction on the movie, and he wanted to meet with Gary and me to determine who should sing the song.
We met the next day in Gary’s office on the lot. I was such a fan of John Hughes’s staggering list of blockbuster films, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone, The Breakfast Club, Uncle Buck, and 16 Candles, just to name a few. He was a genius, and I felt so honored to be a small part of his legacy as a filmmaker.
We talked about the song, listened to it a few times together, and then, since I had Harry Nilsson in mind as I was writing it, I threw out his name as who I thought would sound amazing singing it. John and Gary both liked that idea, but John suggested someone even . . . bigger.
John told us he’d envisioned Ringo Starr singing it the entire time he was listening to the demo. He wanted to approach Ringo first. I gulped, and I think my heart skipped several beats. It was highly doubtful that one of the greatest musical stars in history would sing my song. He was untouchable. Except there was nobody that Gary Lemel couldn’t get to, or at least get an answer back from.
Sure enough, Gary called me a day later to tell me that Ringo liked the song and had agreed to sing it for the movie. I was to produce the track that week, as Ringo was only in town for a few days before heading over to Europe.
I truly thought I was dreaming and, this time, my heart almost stopped. Intimidation took on a whole new meaning for me. Scrambling to put this session together so quickly was not easy. Obviously, it was the most important session I had ever done up to this point. My God, this was one of the Beatles!
Miraculously, the band came together perfectly: JR (John Robinson) on drums, Randy Kerber on keys, Dean Parks on guitar, and Joe Chemay on bass. I had Doug Rider engineering the tracking session, which we did in Hollywood at Conway Recording Studios.
We cut the track on a morning session so we could break before lunch. Ringo was not available to be at the tracking session but would arrive at 3 p.m. to meet and start doing vocals. The track came out flawlessly, and we all broke for an hour for lunch.
My excitement level was truly off the charts. I couldn’t even eat lunch, I was so nervous, so I went back to the office for thirty minutes just to clear my head. I wanted to get back to the studio early to plan out how I was going to approach the vocal session and calm my nerves before Ringo arrived.
As I walked up the tree-lined pathway up to Studio A, I saw a guy leaning against the front of the studio. He had a shock of dark hair and an unassuming stance, and was focused on the cigarette that was dangling from his mouth. As I got closer, I thought, “Shit that looks like Ringo.” As I got even closer, I thought, “Shit, that is Ringo.”
My mind was racing and I had to give myself a pep talk to calm down.
“Relax Dorff, calm down, be cool, act like a pro, don’t say anything stupid.”
I got within a few feet of him and started babbling like a seven-year-old fanboy. I shook his hand and said, “I’m sure you hear this all the time, but you’re the reason I got into this business.”
With that unmistakable voice, he smiled and said, “First time today.”
We walked into the studio and I played him the track, which he was extremely happy with. He had a few ideas about how I could fix a couple of things, one of which was the hi-hat. We then went out to the piano, where he asked to go over the song several times. It was pretty clear that he hadn’t really practiced the song much, if at all.
By now, John Hughes, Gary Lemel, and a few other Warner execs had come over to the studio to say hello to Ringo and see how things were going. We were all a bit awed as I sat at the piano and we heard that distinctive voice. The guy who sang “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Yellow Submarine,” and “Act Naturally,” as well as so many other classic hits, was singing a song that I wrote.
Eventually we would clear everybody out so we could get to the task at hand of recording Ringo’s vocal, but before that a funny thing happened. John Hughes, who proclaimed himself the #1 Beatles fan of all time, had a burning question for Ringo. We were all standing around chatting in a circle as John asked, “Is it true that you put a towel over your hi-hat in ‘Taxman’?”
I thought to myself, “What an odd question. Maybe John is a drummer.”
Ringo must have thought it quite odd as well, as he thought for a moment and then replied, “I can’t remember what I did last Thursday, let alone remember what I played in those days.” He laughed and alluded to the era of the Beatles’ well documented, chemically enhanced sessions.
When it was time to finally go into the studio to sing, Ringo asked me to go out first and put a guide vocal on the track so he could sing to me line by line. “That’s how I always did it with Paul,” he said.
The teenage boy inside of me was dying with excitement as I said, without missing a beat, “If it was good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for me.”
For the next two hours we did take after take. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed saying a sentence more than when I pushed down the yellow talkback button to ask him to resing a line or punch in a few words.
“Can we do that again, Ringo?”
Ringo did a great job singing the song. I had gotten everything I needed to do a terrific comp, but before he left, he told me he wanted to overdub the hi-hat to make the track “swing a bit more.”
Watching Ringo play the hat, cigarette dangling out of his mouth, brought back all of the memories I had of watching him play throughout the years as that teenager who was one of the biggest Beatles fans imaginable.
We did an overdubbed orchestra session two days later. Bill Watrous, the fabulous trombone player, was also a world-class whistler, so I asked him to do the whistling on the record that many people still think Ringo actually did.
Curly Sue still runs quite often on cable, and whenever I see it, I am reminded of the experience of a lifetime, having worked with the iconic John Hughes and the even more iconic Ringo Starr.
It definitely dates me, but my fanboy infatuation with Ringo Starr and the Beatles was somewhat akin to 1980s kids across America and their collective infatuation with burgeoning teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron.
16
Growing Pains
The eighties were ripe with Reaganomics and burgeoning yuppies. It was the decade of greed.
I was enjoying the pinnacle of my personal and professional career. I had been Snuff Garrett’s right-hand man, I had scored films for Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, and now I was scoring a string of television shows. I hadn’t fucked up my marriage yet, and I was enjoying enormous personal and professional success. Of course, this would all soon come crashing down, but for the moment, I was living the high life.
Because I had access to the stars who had sung pop hits for me, TV networks turned to me when they wanted to marry recording artists and theme songs. Essentially, this was the precursor for Barenaked Ladies singing the theme song for The Big Bang Theory or the Rembrandts singing the theme song for Friends.
The first song I wrote and then married with a celebrity singer was the theme song from Growing Pains. Of course, most people think that Alan Thicke wrote the song . . . and understandably so, because he was the star of the show. But it was me.
I got a call from my agent to go see a pilot the network was interested in me doing the music for. I went to Warners and met with the three producers: Neil Marlens, Marlens’s wife Carole Black, and Mike Sullivan. The four of us went into a room and watched twenty-two minutes of what I thought was pretty mundane television. Of course, I didn’t watch too many sitcoms, so I wasn’t exactly an expert.<
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It was a family show starring Alan Thicke, Joanna Kerns, and three cute, engaging kids, one of whom would go on to be a teenage heartthrob for girls all around the world . . . Kirk Cameron.
After viewing the pilot episode, the producers and I went to their conference room to discuss the music for the show. What happened next is pretty much classic television by committee. There were several cooks in the kitchen, and everyone had their way of baking the proverbial musical cake. Each of the three producers gave me their musical take, from John Sebastian to Pat Metheny to Latin percussion. Everyone had a personal favorite style.
I listened to it all and was baffled, wondering how they were going to settle on a united decision. So I just kept politely listening and nodding as each producer waxed on lyrically about their chosen type of music. Finally, I said, “These are all good ideas; let me give it a shot.”
To be perfectly honest, I remember leaving the meeting thinking, “This show is probably not going to go anywhere, so it really doesn’t matter what I write.” I went home to meet John Bettis, with whom I had a previously set up writing session that afternoon.
“Change of plans,” I told him. “I got this thing I gotta write called Growing Pains.”
I gave John the thirty-word CliffsNotes version of the sitcom.
There was silence, and finally John said, “‘Growing Pains’ ain’t gonna fly as a song title . . . sounds more like, ‘As Long as We Got Each Other.’”
He nailed it.
We wrote the song in roughly thirty minutes. We only had to write a verse and a chorus. John wrote it like he was writing The Pledge of Allegiance. We cranked it out so we could work on another far more pressing project, an already-started song that we were excited about (as I remember, that song went nowhere).
I called the producers the next morning.
“I spent all night working on this thing,” I told them.