I Wrote That One, Too . . .

by Steve Dorff

  One of the songs we were doing with this amazing band in Nashville was giving us a lot of trouble, as it just wasn’t sounding like the original version. Something was obviously very wrong in the chart, and none of us could figure out what the issue was. It took a minute, but the great drummer Paul Leim said he thought the chart might have been written backwards.

  Sure enough, Larry was so tired and bleary-eyed that he had somehow pasted the chord symbols reading not only “right to left” (like Hebrew), but also from “bottom to top.”

  A musical Rubik’s Cube.

  Larry wrote it backward and they played it backward. That had to be a first, and we still have a good laugh whenever that comes up among the guys in the band, who I still see and work with whenever I’m in Nashville.

  Larry Herbstritt is one of the most talented guys I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and calling my friend.

  Sadly, while writing this chapter, I heard we lost Greg Lake to cancer at the way-too-young age of sixty-nine. His voice was unmistakable, and the time we spent together unforgettable.

  26

  Nashville

  I guess I could say Nashville is my home away from home.

  My first ever trip to Nashville, Tennessee, was sometime in 1970. I had a dozen or so songs that I felt could be pitched in the country genre, and because I was signed to Lowery Music as a staff writer, I felt like that would help make it a little easier for me to get in a few doors that normally I wouldn’t be able to.

  I asked Bill if he would send me there for a week, as a kind of fact-finding trip, to see what Music City was all about. Bill agreed to pay for my hotel and, more importantly, to make a few calls on my behalf to some of his key contacts in order for me to make some appointments. I was a bit nervous to go it alone, so I asked my friend, Mark Yarbrough, to make the four-hour drive with me.

  We were on some sort of school break, so off we went to Tennessee.

  Most of the first couple of days there was spent just looking around and marveling about how close all of the music companies were in proximity to each other. The entire music business seemed to be on two or three streets, between 16th and 17th Avenues. I made a ton of calls, and most of them went unreturned, but I did get in to see Roger Sovine at BMI and Buddy Killen at Tree Music. Ray Stevens sat with me and listened to a few songs.

  It was a great learning experience. Nobody really liked anything I had, or at least didn’t think it was “country-sounding.” They were right. I returned to Atlanta feeling like the trip had been productive, as I had learned a little bit of how the town worked, and now knew that if I was ever going to get a song recorded there, it better be a “real deal country-sounding song.” Nashville was a competitive town, and the songwriters there were universally great.

  Back at Lowery’s, I made a conscious effort with Milton to target the country market with some of the songs we were writing. Milton was an expert in that genre, having been a diehard country fan his entire life growing up in Alabama. Because I was from Queens, New York, hadn’t seen a tree until I was fourteen, and couldn’t even spell “country music,” I trusted Milton to show me the way. What it boils down to is that I just try to write a good song with an honest message. I still operate with the belief that a great song can be arranged and recorded in any genre, and many of the hits I’ve had have pretty much proven that.

  When I had made my mind up to leave Lowery Music, I seriously considered making the move to Nashville instead of Los Angeles. It was closer, still in the South, and full of music people, but what ultimately pushed me toward California is that I really wanted to write pop songs, and music for film and television. That had always been my dream. I feared that, by moving to Nashville, I would be limiting myself to the world of country music. So, I took that fateful trip to L.A. and never looked back.

  Little did I know how Nashville’s influence would continue to thread throughout my entire career, even with my move to L.A. For starters, there was no bigger country-music fan on earth than Snuff Garrett. Yes, he was making great pop records, but his Texas roots were steeped in western swing and country classics. He had been a DJ in Texas before moving to L.A., and he had more knowledge of any and every country song than anyone I have ever known.

  I suppose that’s why when the country-flavored film projects of Clint Eastwood came his way. Snuff’s entire slate of production projects began to swing toward the country market. Without realizing or planning it, I had fallen into opportunities from the best of both worlds. With Snuff, I was either arranging or coproducing projects with country megastars like Brenda Lee, Tanya Tucker, Ray Price, Marty Robbins, Dottie West, and Roy Rogers. And with the tremendous record-breaking successes of Every Which Way but Loose and Bronco Billy, it became much easier for me to go to Nashville and get through many doors that were not previously available to me.

  Publishers like Al Gallico and Bob Montgomery were close friends of Snuff’s, and I would routinely visit with them when I was in town. I was also starting to have hits with Anne Murray and Lee Greenwood, while other top country artists like Barbara Fairchild, Ronnie Milsap, and Con Hunley were covering some of my songs. All of the important doors were opening, and a lot of my friends and contemporaries, like Jim Ed Norman, Steve Buckingham, and James Stroud, were now running labels and becoming hot producers.

  I had also produced hit projects on my own, including Con Hunley, and of course the three-time ACM Duo of the Year, David Frizzell and Shelly West. My years with Snuff, and the many successful country projects I was a part of because of him, would become the bridge to my continued and even greater successes on to the Nashville scene, once I left Snuff and moved on to Warner/Chappell and Chuck Kaye.

  At Warners, I had the autonomy to travel to Nashville whenever I needed to. I no longer had to answer to anyone, and I was now doing a lot of cowriting with many top Nashville writers, as well as being in demand for doing string arrangements for artists like Wynona, Reba, Tim McGraw, Clay Walker, Alan Jackson, and Clint Black. Rustler’s Rhapsody was the first major country-flavored film project I did on my own, putting together a great soundtrack with Randy Travis, John Anderson, Gary Morris, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Rex Allen Jr., among others. And then along came the brass ring, Pure Country with George Strait.

  I’ve been asked so many times, “How have you managed to have the success you’ve had in Nashville without actually having lived there?”

  I guess I’ve always considered myself to be an anomaly for Nashville.

  I never lived there, although many people, and surprisingly even friends of mine in L.A., have thought I did. It’s no doubt that the power of film and television exposure helped propel me to some great extent, but I’d also like to think that my songs had that little different spin on the ball that made them special because I did NOT live there. But I have spent a great deal of my career in Nashville, I have some wonderful lifelong friends and associates that I’ve made there, and I still visit almost every other month to do work there. My son Andrew, a very successful songwriter in his own right, made Nashville his permanent home.

  What I can say with certainty is that I have to some degree been a victim of what’s known as a “good ol’ boy” mentality that comes along with the territory. Even going back to the Billy Sherrill/Bob Montgomery days when I was first starting to visit Nashville, I would be told, “You’ve gotta be here every day to truly fit in.” No matter how much success I had, there was always an air of me being sort of a foreigner, or not truly belonging.

  To be considered a resident part of the music community in Nashville, you really should move there. Trust me, I thought seriously about doing just that several times in the eighties and nineties. It made perfect sense, and many of my close friends who have had tremendous careers in Nashville had moved there permanently from L.A. Over the years, Nashville has changed and grown in so many ways, and as the music community has become much more diverse, t
hat feeling of not being totally accepted has dissipated greatly.

  I do have a favorite story that I think perfectly illustrates the prejudice that was sometimes glaring back in the day. One afternoon, we were taking a break from recording some songs from Pure Country at Soundstage. Tavern on the Row was a convenient and popular place to grab a quick lunch. As I walked in to the restaurant with a few musician friends who were on the session, I recognized a well-known songwriter sitting with his publisher, with whom I was also mildly acquainted. As I was passing their table, I nodded a quick hello gesture, and he looked up at me and said, in a rather loud and obnoxious tone, “Yeah, they finally do a movie called Pure Country, and look who they ask to write the songs.”

  I just grinned, bit my tongue to stop myself from telling him to go fuck himself, and kept moving . . . but you get the idea!

  Great songwriters and artists come from everywhere, and Nashville is also filled with creative energy and a great place to write. One perfect collaboration I enjoyed there was with an Aussie of all people, Troy Cassar-Daley. Every once in a while you meet someone for the first time and there is an instant connection, like you have known them for your entire life.

  I got a call from Peter Karpin, who was head of A&R for Sony Australia. He asked me if I would be interested in meeting one of his artists with the idea of possibly doing a project together. Troy Cassar-Daley is a fabulous singer/guitar player/songwriter from Brisbane who has the real deal. He is an exceptional guitar player and has an authentic country style in his singing, like Merle Haggard or Lefty Frizzell. He did not have even a hint of an Australian accent when he sang, which is funny because his speaking accent was so thick. In fact, he has such a thick accent when he speaks it is almost difficult to understand him. Yet when he sings his voice is completely pure.

  We both happened to be in Nashville at the same time, so we met and decided to try to write a few songs together. One of the songs we wrote was called “Little Things,” which would go on to become a big hit for Troy in Australia. It was undoubtedly the catalyst for Troy asking me to produce his entire album. He had always wanted to record an album in America. Peter Karpin signed off on it, gave us a budget, and we made a beautiful album over the course of a month. Half of it was recorded in Los Angeles, the other half in Nashville. It won the Aria award—the Australian Grammy—for Album of the Year.

  Nashville is a melting pot of great musical talent from all over, just as Hollywood and New York are for actors and screenwriters. Certain local organizations, such as the NSAI and the affiliated Songwriters Hall of Fame, might just want to take a longer look at that fact in order to bolster their credibility with the rest of the universe.

  I love Nashville, and I have done some incredible work there that I am very proud of. The musicians I have worked with there are amongst the finest in the world. There are still times I wonder what my career would have looked like if I had moved there from Atlanta way back when.

  As we all get older, I think we all look down that proverbial “road not taken,” but all in all, I’m pretty satisfied with the road I got to take.

  27

  I Just Fall in Love Again . . . and Again . . . and Again

  I’ve often wondered what the correlation is between my being a hopeless romantic and someone who has spent most of his life writing about love. It’s ironic how one of my biggest hits, “I Just Fall in Love Again,” has become a real-life, reoccurring episode of my own life.

  I still often joke to friends that I think I’ve probably written about love all these years a lot better than I’ve actually lived it.

  “I Just Fall in Love Again” was a long time in the making. Larry Herbstritt and I had an awesome melody going—a big sweeping ballad with a nod to some classical chord changes in the chorus. I felt like we had an important song. We had one small problem: the lyrics we had come up with were, in a word, terrible, and after doing a demo on the song, I was unhappy with the way it turned out.

  There was another writer at Snuff’s company, Gloria Sklerov, who had been writing some really beautiful songs. Gloria and I had never written together before, but I really admired her lyrics. Before I gave up on our song altogether, I played it for Gloria to see if she had an idea how to fix it. Gloria loved the melody and agreed that the lyrics were pretty lame. She said she and her partner, the late Harry Lloyd, would love to take a stab at writing a new lyric to our melody.

  It was probably the best save I could have ever hoped for.

  It was late summer of 1975. I had played many songs for Ed Sulzer, who was heading up A&R for Richard and Karen Carpenter on the glorious A&M Records lot. To say I loved the lot would be an understatement. I was obsessed with this lot, which had so much Hollywood history attached to it, first from being the original Charlie Chaplin movie lot and then as the home of A&M Records: Herb Alpert, Burt Bacharach, Paul Williams, and of course, the Carpenters. A songwriter’s dream was to be included on one of their albums.

  I had just finished doing a new piano/vocal demo of the song that Gloria and Harry had magically fixed, and I wanted to pitch it to Eddie first. I made the appointment to see him on the famed lot a few days later, and lo and behold, after one listen, I heard the words that every songwriter wants to hear:

  “I like it. Let me play it for Richard.”

  I don’t think I ate or slept for a few days, and then I got the call: the Carpenters were going to record the song for their new album. I was beside myself with excitement, as this was without question the most important cut of my career by arguably the biggest recording act in the world at that time. I was invited to the live recording session at the A&M soundstage with some seventy-plus members of an orchestra led by the legendary Peter Knight. Peter had arranged the Moody Blues’ classic album Days of Future Past, which was one of my all-time favorite albums. His orchestrations were simply incredible, and I remember trying to fight off the tears that were pouring down my face as Karen Carpenter sang “I Just Fall in Love Again” for the first time.

  Although the Carpenters never released it as a single, I still consider their recording to be maybe the most perfect recording of anything I’ve ever written.

  A few years later, I got a call from the late, great Dusty Springfield. She heard Karen’s recording and told me she was going to put a version of “I Just Fall in Love Again” on her new album. I was thrilled. I couldn’t wait to hear her version. But as classic as Dusty’s performance was, I was again told a single release was doubtful, for whatever reason.

  But I knew the song was great. And I was patient. After all, so far I had had two of the most wonderful female artists on the planet sing it.

  Still, a year or so later, I got a call from my good friend Jim Ed Norman in Toronto. He was in Canada producing another one of my favorite artists, Anne Murray.

  “Steve, we know that Karen and Dusty have already recorded ‘I Just Fall in Love Again,’ but Anne would like to give it a try.” Anne, like me, was a huge fan of Dusty, and she had heard Dusty’s version on her album.

  The third time was the charm.

  Anne’s version went on to become the big hit single that I had always hoped for this song. It was honored with the Juno (Canadian Grammy) Award for Song of the Year, and it stayed at #1 in Billboard for three weeks. It has also had the distinction of being recorded by over fifty artists in innumerable languages all over the world, as well as attaining four-million-broadcast status at BMI.

  Thanks, Gloria and Harry, for the beautiful lyric!

  Back to falling in love.

  In reality, I really do love being in love with one person. The trouble is that, since my marriages, I haven’t found that one special person who is the “girl of my dreams.” I have come very close to that special person a few times since my second divorce, but there always seemed to be something that got in the way of it being the happily ever after that I’ve always written about. Because, at my core, I
am an eternal optimist who still believes in true love. I have, indeed, fallen in love again and again. Even in my sixties, I believe “the one” is still out there. And I will keep writing about her until I find her.

  As far as my past loves, I admittedly keep trying to squeeze all of these fabulous girls into one song, kind of a retrospective, like Jimmy Webb did so perfectly in his song “Name of My Sorrow.” It’d be tough to top that masterpiece, though.

  The truth is, I really have nothing bad to say about the women I was in these relationships with. I have learned a great deal of valuable life lessons, rode the rollercoaster, and took away some amazing experiences which gave me some equally amazing songwriting material. Some of my favorite songs—and what I personally consider to be my best work—came from these romantic rollercoasters of love, heartbreak, pain, joy, disillusion, hopefulness, forgiveness, and regret.

  There was one woman in particular who was the impetus for a lot of these songs. It still upsets me a little when I think about her. It’s pretty tough to have a great relationship when there’s no reciprocity from the person you’re emotionally giving everything of yourself to. I fell for her hard, and I deeply believed we were something special. It took me a while—much longer than I thought it would—to get over that one. I haven’t quite pulled all of the toxic shrapnel out of my back. Some people just don’t come as they advertise themselves to be.

  Oh well, at the end of the day I got a few really great songs out of the deal.

  My collaborators have been invaluable to me during my repeated times of love and loss. Bobby Tomberlin stayed up all night with me writing a song called “If Only.” Milton Brown helped me tremendously with his haunting lyric to “Everything I Touch Turns to Blue.”

  One day at lunch while I was blabbering with Eric Kaz about how I never got closure with this one person, he started scribbling on a napkin. The next day, Kaz emailed me a lyric called “Face-to-Face.”