by Steve Dorff
Andy came over to the house one Saturday and we sipped tea and listened. He loved “Every Time I See Maureen” but asked me if I would change the title from “Maureen” to “Laureen,” the name of his current girlfriend.
That was his only request? Done!
Andy picked three other songs for us to do, and we set the session for the following week. We tracked at A&M Studio B with some great players: Bill Cuomo, George Doering, Ed Green, and Joe Chemay. Joe put together a great Beach Boys–sounding vocal group to emulate that type of Brian Wilson harmony to back Andy.
Andy wanted to redo all of his lead vocals once I had the track completely finished. He had to go to New York and told me he would sing when he returned from his trip. I overdubbed some strings and put together a nice comp mix for him to hear while he was in New York.
Andy called me after hearing the finished tracks and told me he was going to stay in New York longer than he had originally planned, and could I fly in to New York and do his vocals there? Of course I would, especially since Columbia Records would be footing the bill and putting me up in a suite at the Plaza Hotel.
I arrived in New York and got to meet the famous Laureen at dinner with Andy. She was very pretty and very young . . . another story for another day! Andy sang his heart out the next day at a beautiful Sony-owned recording studio that was converted from a church. The sound was awesome. We ended up finishing three of the four songs that day.
Andy Williams was a legendary performer. I was so proud to get to work with him and have him sing a few of my songs. “Every Time I See Laureen” was included on his soundtrack to Oliver’s Story. It was also released as a single, but it never really cracked the charts. It didn’t matter. What mattered to me was getting the opportunity to work and become friends with him. He would later introduce me to the Osmonds, who would also go on to record a few songs of mine.
Annabelle’s Wish
One of my favorite projects came at the perfect time. I was asked to a meeting about an animated Christmas movie that was being developed by the Ralph Edwards Production Company, about a baby calf who desperately wants to be one of Santa’s reindeer.
I had never done an animated movie before, and there were unique challenges that came along with the project. Since there were no “live actors” in the film, much of the orchestral score had to be written to character storyboards, as opposed to film. It was a musical, and several songs that moved the plot forward had to be written, too, as well as the score.
My experience in writing for musicals with John Bettis made him the perfect choice to write the lyrics for the project. Randy Travis was the story’s narrator. I had known and worked with Randy before, too, so John and I cowrote a few of the songs with him as well.
Because of non-union budget constraints, I recorded the score in Salt Lake City, Utah, with members of the Salt Lake City Symphony Orchestra. It was a fun couple of days. I took my engineer, Rick Riccio, with me, as well as Larry Herbstritt, who did the orchestrations.
Rick and I decided to try to fit in a couple of hours of skiing at Deer Valley while we were there. Halfway down the mountain, we got caught in a pretty nasty squall storm that came out of nowhere. Rick’s face looked like the Abominable Snowman’s. My nose felt like it was not a part of my face but completely frozen off. It was all we could do to get down the mountain without killing ourselves and back to the hotel to get ready for the second day of sessions.
I was pretty amazed at the sound we got at the studio, an old church converted into a full-blown, state-of-the-art recording facility.
The orchestra, which was comprised of 75 percent women, was exceptional. While it’s not unusual to have many wonderful women playing in the orchestra, it’s not too often there is a full-blown brass section comprised of women. It was really fun, and they played great.
With Randy Travis, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, Nanci Griffith, Kevin Sharp, Jerry Van Dyke, and Cloris Leachman singing the songs, the soundtrack album turned out to be fantastic. John and I wrote a beautiful lullaby called “Tiny Dreamer (Callie’s Song),” sung by Nanci Griffith, which we dedicated to my one-year-old daughter, Callie. To this day, nineteen years later, Callie still always looks at the closing credits to make sure her name is listed in the song titles.
Both of my daughters, Callie and Kaitlyn, still have their Annabelle’s Wish Christmas stockings, which they hang every year, and I love that they, as well as my boys, will be able to watch and share this holiday movie with their families for the rest of their lives.
For me, that was the greatest Christmas gift I could ever ask for.
Vintage Jukebox: My ’53 Seeburg
In 1979, I received a rather large check in the mail from BMI.
Up to this point, I had gotten many quarterly checks from BMI for amounts generally in the $50–125 range. I was always happy and excited to get that extra mailbox money.
When this particular check came, however, I opened up the envelope and did a double take. There were far too many zeros in it. There had been a mistake.
“I think BMI screwed up,” I said to Nancy as I showed it to her. “This is way too much for just the first quarter of earnings, don’t ya think?”
Nancy’s dad saw the check and immediately exclaimed, “I get checks like that all the time in the mail. It’s a scam, no one ever wins.”
Obviously she thought it was a Reader’s Digest check or something.
I knew it had been a particularly good quarter. Every Which Way but Loose—both the film and the Eddie Rabbitt record—had been enormous hits. The single was the all-time highest first week entry in Billboard history, debuting at eighteen. Still, I had no idea how good of a quarter it actually was.
Suffice it to say, we were happy to learn that BMI had not screwed up, and that those zeros were in fact real. I immediately called Milton in Mobile to see if he had gotten an identical amount. He had, and he was still peeling himself off the ceiling.
One of my longtime dreams was to have an antique jukebox in my house that had nothing but my songs on it. It was a pretty tall order indeed, but first I had to have the jukebox. It was a purchase I could only legitimately make with the rare occasional “fuck you” money. And, all of a sudden, I was flush with a few thousand extra “fuck you” dollars.
I knew exactly where I was going to spend my surplus. There was a store in Van Nuys I had always wanted to go to but had never dared to step foot in. It was called Jukebox City.
As soon as the check cleared, I headed over. It was a cool store, owned by a guy who found and restored these beautiful machines into mint condition.
I was a kid in a candy store!
As I was looking around the showroom, I saw the one that had my name on it: a vintage 1953 Seeburg, the first model they made to play 45s. It was exactly like the one used on the opening credits of the TV show Happy Days. It was in mint condition, with color wheels and improved speakers.
They wanted $2,500 for it, and I bought it on the spot.
It took me about six years, but eventually I was able to fill it with fifty 45 rpm singles that I had written. Of the one hundred songs total on the jukebox, I had written eighty of them. Now, in full disclosure, some of them were B-sides, some were lousy versions of mediocre songs, but I had fulfilled one of my dreams!
Fats Domino
There’s only one Fats Domino, and what a hoot it was to get to arrange a song for this legendary performer.
“Whisky Heaven” was a song that Fats was set to record for the film Any Which Way You Can. Fats had insisted on using his band for the recording, so I was asked to fly to Las Vegas, where Fats was performing, to record the track. Fortunately, we found a fairly good studio there, and along with a few great players who I brought with me from L.A. as insurance, we set out to prerecord the song that Fats would sing in the movie, on camera.
Having bee
n told that Fats had a great five-piece horn section, I wrote out a fairly simple brass arrangement for them that we could record there as well. To say that his band was a bit ragged by “session player standards” would be an understatement. Fats was a beautiful soul, and his band were all really great guys, and excited for the chance to be on the record. The only slight problem was that they were terribly out of tune with each other.
Luckily, we were able to get a track done thanks to the ringers I had brought along from L.A. The horn section was a different story. I passed out the parts that I had written for the two trumpets, trombone, and tenor and baritone sax. They all looked at me like I was crazy. One of them had his music upside-down on his music stand, but he didn’t realize it.
None of them read music.
For the next two hours we cobbled together a brass overdub, mostly three or four bars at a time, as we improvised parts that I had to sing to them. Miraculously, we got it done enough so I could head back to L.A. and try to figure out how to make it all work as a finished product without Clint Eastwood killing me.
Long story short, after returning to L.A. I overdubbed almost all new parts over the existing parts, salvaging what I could, and replacing the out-of-tune stuff. Fats’s vocal was great, and the finished product was pure Fats Domino.
The upside-down trombone part still makes me laugh.
31
Hold
An interesting concept in the music-publishing world is the “hold.”
This is when a recording artist or producer likes one of your songs, has the intention of recording it, and wants to take it off the market so that no other artist or producer will have access to it.
It is equally exhilarating and frustrating.
For a songwriter, there’s nothing quite like getting that phone call that informs you that an artist has put one of your songs on hold—or, even better, that they are actually recording one of them. I guess, for me, about the highest honor I can be paid is when a great recording artist, or anyone, for that matter, chooses something I’ve written above the thousands of other songs that get submitted for any project.
It goes without saying that getting a song recorded, especially by a top-tier recording artist, is almost a miracle in itself. Having a hit single . . . maybe the odds are equal to be getting hit by lightning. My collaborator Eric Kaz and I said once in a bout of frustration, “Let’s face it, we songwriters live miracle to miracle.” We looked at each other, and of course a day later wrote a song called “Miracle to Miracle.”
I’ve had songs of mine put on hold for various periods of time, ranging from twenty-four hours to two weeks. Who the artist or producer is will often be the deciding factor as to how long one should honor that hold. Once you grant someone a firm hold on a song, you’ve essentially made the decision to not show that particular song to anyone else. If the person who has requested the hold ends up not recording the song, then you’ve wasted valuable time, and have missed other potential opportunities for getting that song recorded by someone else. It can be a tricky situation, as I have found it to be on several occasions. For one thing, it is unfair for a writer to put a song on ice for any period of time without any compensation.
In one instance, I had a brand new song cowritten with Eric Kaz called “Hypnotize the Moon.” Eric and I were excited about the demo we had just done and were anxious to start the process of getting it out there. We were getting quite a bit of great feedback from people who were hearing it.
Then came THE call.
A respected producer called me from Nashville and said he had heard the song, and would love to record it with hit country artist Ty Herndon. He thought it would be a smash for him, and he just needed a few days to get it to his artist, who was on the road performing. He asked if he could put a hold on the song until he had the chance to play it for Ty.
I, of course, said okay. I called Eric to tell him the good news, and we agreed to stop showing the song to anyone else until we heard back from the producer.
A week went by and we heard nothing. I felt like we had a really good song, and I was reluctant to wait too much longer for a confirmation that they were going to record it, but I also knew that schedules of performing artists can often be hectic, and a possible Ty Herndon record was certainly worth waiting a little longer for. I finally heard back and was assured that they were going to go into the studio to begin recording his new album, with our song included on it, within the next month. Ty was excited about the song and eager to record it.
A month passed. Then two. Eventually, I decided to check in and see how the project was going.
Word was that Ty had recorded the song, and, according to the producer, it had come out “Fantastic!” He went one step further to tell me it was likely to be either the first or second single from the record. I couldn’t wait to hear it, and I was getting pretty jazzed at the possibility of having a hit. The release date of the album finally arrived a few months later. I asked my assistant to run over to a record store to pick up the CD. When I got back from a lunch appointment, the CD was on my desk. I immediately undid the wrapper and looked at the back cover to see where “Hypnotize the Moon” was on the track list.
I kept scanning up and down and couldn’t find it.
Was I going blind? I opened the accompanying booklet and looked for our song. There were twelve songs on the CD, and “Hypnotize the Moon” was not one of them. Just a little bit pissed, I called the producer in Nashville and delivered a rather long rant.
“What happened to our song? I thought we were going to have a single. You kept this song on hold for EIGHT MONTHS, and then it didn’t even make the album, after you told me it came out fantastic?”
There was a moment of dead silence. Finally, he spoke.
“We didn’t feel like in the end we really hooked it. We would like to try cutting it again for the next album . . . can we put it on hold?”
Was I going deaf? Did he really just ask to keep the song on hold indefinitely?
“I don’t think so,” I said definitively. “I’m not going to hold this song for another year, only to be disappointed if you fail to hook it again. Thanks but no thanks.”
Never again, I muttered to myself. I truly believe that a hold on a song should be treated like a short-term rental. Put a non-refundable deposit down for a certain amount of time; if you record the song, the fee is returned; if you don’t, like in this particular incident, the writers and publishers keep the deposit for their trouble. Easy as that.
Fortunately for Kaz and me, there was a happy ending to this story. Within a few days I sent the song to a few other producers I had heard were looking for material for upcoming projects. My friend James Stroud, who was producing hit artist Clay Walker, heard the song and played it for Clay; a week later they were in the studio recording “Hypnotize the Moon” for his new album. And boy, did they ever “hook it.”
The song came out as the first single from his new album, Hypnotize the Moon, and went to #1.
As far as honoring holds would go, never again will I let a song be put on hold for an unreasonable period of time, unless I have assurance that the song gets recorded and released.
Lesson learned.
32
My Own Best Publisher
Our songs are our children.
I haven’t gotten to write nearly as many songs with Paul Williams as I would have liked, but the dozen or so that we have written together include some really good ones, with a few “hits waiting to happen.”
Paul, like so many of the classically great lyricists, has a style and language all his own. The depth of what he says in a song, and how he says it, is incomparable and unique to him.
Paul and I were introduced to each other by Chuck Kaye, who was running Irving/Almo Publishing on the A&M lot. Chuck suggested that we try to schedule a writing session because he thought we could do some great thin
gs together. We met for lunch one day at a sushi restaurant in Studio City, and of course, being a huge fan, I had to ask him as many questions about his career as I could possibly think of.
Finally, we got around to talking about the role of a great publisher. I had always admired Chuck as a great publisher—someone who could pick up the phone and get almost anyone to listen to a song he was excited about. I really missed that in my career. While I was at Snuff Garrett’s, I never really had someone who would function in that particular role. I was always the one who, after writing and demoing a new song, would work for days and weeks trying to get the song placed and recorded.
Paul then gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten, and that I guess I instinctively knew all along.
“Steve, we will always be our own best publishers. The writer puts a piece of his heart and soul into every song he writes, and 24/7, he lives and breathes the songs he creates. Our songs are our children!”
A publisher, for the most part, is an agent for many writers and many more songs, and although they may love certain songs more than others, and be dedicated to trying to get them cut, there’s just no way that he or she can possibly feel as emotionally attached over a long period of time.
I took Paul’s advice to heart, and I still continue to pore over my back catalog of songs, knowing that a truly great song has no expiration date.
A great example of that is a song I cowrote with Gary Harju that the late Dottie West recorded called “The Woman in Love with You.” Dottie did a lovely performance of the song on an album that Snuff and I coproduced. It was never released as a single. Some eleven years later, I was home in bed with the flu and could do nothing but lay around listening to songs. Somehow, I ended up revisiting that one, as I had always loved the melody and what the lyric said.
I had the idea to change a few lines and re-demo it for a man to sing. Gary suggested a line change for the man to sing, “Don’t always wear the white hat,” and I immediately thought of George Strait for this “brand new” eleven-year-old song. George heard it, loved it, and we had our third #1 record together.