by Richard Marx
So, one morning soon after, the Grammy nominations were announced, and I was nominated. For Best Rock Vocal Performance. I wasn’t even nominated for Best New Artist. While I was thrilled to be nominated in the rock category for “Don’t Mean Nothing” (I was nominated against Bob Seger, Sting, Tina Turner, and Bruce Springsteen, who won), I was puzzled, as were my label and manager. Well, my label and I were puzzled. My manager, Allen, was livid. After some irate phone calls, he got the story from someone at the academy who awards the Grammys. “There’s no question Richard was the most successful new artist of the year, and the stellar quality of his work speaks for itself. He was simply disqualified for Best New Artist because he released a record two years ago. So this album and its singles are not eligible.”
What? What the fuck are they talking about?
Oooohhhhhhh.
* * *
In 1986, I was a few months away from meeting Bruce Lundvall and getting signed to EMI. I was writing songs for various artists but mostly making my living as a background singer and would occasionally sing demos for songwriters and producers. One day I received a call from Pat Leonard, who had co-produced the Madonna record I had sung on the year prior.
“I’ve been hired to score the new Tom Hanks movie and write songs for the soundtrack,” Pat said. “I’ve got a song I need a young male voice on to pitch to the movie people. Are you free to sing the demo tomorrow?”
I arrived at the studio the next day and Pat taught me the song quickly. It was a very “movie-soundtrack”-ish, up-tempo pop-rock tune called “Burning of the Heart,” and I loved singing it because it had me using most of my vocal range. Pat was thrilled with my vocal on the demo and said, “Shit, man. Too bad you can’t sing it in the movie. But the soundtrack is on Arista and [then–Arista president] Clive Davis has some new young male singer he’s putting on the soundtrack.” I was just happy to make my $250 session fee. I thanked Pat for calling me and went home.
About a week later Pat called and said, “We recut that song with the guy on Arista, but when the movie execs heard it they said, ‘What is this? This isn’t what we heard last week.’ ”
Pat had sold them on the song by playing my demo version, and now they were disappointed in this new one. Even the film’s director, the late Garry Marshall of Pretty Woman fame called Clive Davis and said, “This song is featured very prominently in a key scene in the film and I don’t like this new guy’s voice. I like the demo, and that’s what I want in the film.” So some lawyer from Arista contacted me, and I made a deal to be the artist on that one song on their soundtrack. I was not signed to Arista. It was a one-off.
The film Nothing in Common starred Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason as father and son. It was mildly successful, but the soundtrack (which featured Christopher Cross and Carly Simon, among others) was anything but. No hit singles and no album sales. My track on the album wasn’t ever released as a single, and the whole project came and went very quickly.
* * *
Cut to 1988 and Grammy nominations time. We thought I was a shoo-in for a Best New Artist nod, and apparently, the Grammy voting committee was about to make that a reality. Until they received a call from Clive Davis, I was told by several people in the know. Clive was still angry because a similar situation had occurred with his artist, Whitney Houston, a year or two prior. She was disqualified for Best New Artist for having sung a duet on a Teddy Pendergrass album. “You can’t nominate Richard Marx,” Clive said. “He sang on an Arista soundtrack. Technically, his debut album isn’t his first release.”
And the committee had to agree.
Well, not really. They didn’t have to agree. They could have said, “You know, this is ridiculous. We need to rethink this category’s requirements. We’re basically penalizing artists who’ve had massive breakouts if they recorded something years ago that no one ever heard.” But instead, they walked the “committee line,” and that was that.
Someone told me that in addition to others, Gladys Knight voiced her displeasure at my disqualification, just as she had when it happened to Whitney. That criticism led the committee to change the parameters the following year, and at the time, the written changes were titled “The Richard Marx Amendment.”
19 “RIGHT HERE WAITING” (BARBRA, PART II)
Having your first album spawn four, big hit singles sounds like a dream to anyone, but I have to say, the pressure that comes with that is not something one would gladly invite into their creative life.
The label had me touring incessantly and doing all the crazy shit one has to do to desperately try to not let the train slow down. I couldn’t keep track of the cities and towns I was in unless I’d glance at my hotel room key or ask the driver where we were on my way back from the show. It got so bad that more than I’d like to admit I called an audience by the name of a different town. Big mistake. A little like moaning the wrong name to the woman you’re making love to. Not. Cool. I finally started writing the name of the town where I was performing on the set list at my feet onstage every night. Since that first whirlwind tour, and making that mistake a couple times, I’ve never made it again, I’m proud to say, because I eye that set list a few times throughout the show. The point is that I was in the midst of a career tornado that had only just begun.
One day before a sound check in some town, my manager called me.
“Barbra Streisand’s office called and Barbra wants to speak to you.”
“Wow. Really? Did they say what it was about?” I asked.
“Nope, just asked that you call.”
I called the number and Barbra’s longtime manager, Marty Erlichman, answered.
He said that Barbra was a fan of my records and songwriting and was about to start a new project and would like to meet with me about writing something for her.
I was due back in LA in about two weeks, so we set up a meeting at Lion Share Studios, a studio in which I’d recorded many times. As I drove to the meeting I couldn’t help but be a bit nervous. While I was always more a rock and roll fan, I knew a bunch of Barbra’s records by heart, and was always profoundly impressed by career longevity. In 1988, she was still an icon and she still is today.
I walked down the long mirrored hallway of Lion Share into Studio C and there she sat, with an assistant who immediately left us alone to talk. I decided not to mention that we had met a few years before, in that very same studio, as there was no way she’d have remembered. She was beautiful, wearing a long, black sweater. Her hair was just the right amount of perfectly messy. And I distinctly remember how great she smelled. It wasn’t particularly “perfume-y” but rather Barbra’s own intoxicating scent. To put it simply, she was sexy. Very sexy. Her demeanor put me quickly at ease, and we just sat and talked as if we’d known each other for years.
We talked about some of the songs she’d recorded, and I mentioned one that was very obscure and never a hit single called “Lullaby for Myself,” written by Rupert Holmes (who had a massive hit himself in 1979 with “Escape [The Pina Colada Song]”).
She said, “Oh, yeah! I love that one, too. I liked that whole album.” She was referring to the album Superman, which came out when I was fourteen years old.
I said, “Yes, great album. But, and I hope this doesn’t embarrass you, the only thing better than the music was the back cover. That back cover helped me through puberty.”
She stared at me for a second as I realized I had just really fucking overshared with a complete stranger, but then she reared back in her chair laughing.
“Oh my god! Really? That’s so sweet!”
We still talk about that exchange over dinner sometimes.
“Look,” I said, “one thing I know about you, Barbra, is that I need some direction from you because I know you’re very specific about what you want.”
She smiled and said, “The truth is I’m never really sure what I want. But I’m very specific about what I don’t want. I don’t want to sing songs from the perspective of a woman who has b
een victimized. I don’t want to sing weak songs. I want to sing and write from a place of strength. And pride.”
I wanted nothing more than to come up with the perfect song for her, but I was headed back on the road the next day for a slew of more concerts. Then I thought about this little song I’d written only a few weeks prior. I felt it was a really good song but way too personal for me to record on my next album.
* * *
Right around this time, I couldn’t see Cynthia because she was away in Africa making a film, and I was on the road doing a tour. I had made arrangements with my agent and manager to give me two weeks off in the middle of Cynthia’s three-month shoot. She was filming in Johannesburg, and I planned to fly there to be with her.
This was during the peak of apartheid when many Americans, particularly celebrities, were trying to bring as much press attention, and inspire as much outrage about it, as possible. The South African government was equally combative and often made entry into the country anywhere from difficult to impossible. Two days before my scheduled flight, the South African government, assuming that I was on my way to protest apartheid, denied my visa, forbidding me entry.
Now not only was I not going to see my girlfriend for three solid months (a lifetime in the early days of a relationship before cell phones or the internet), but I had two weeks off the road with nothing to do. I didn’t greet this development with a sense of joy. It never dawned on me that I could use a vacation back then. I was just totally bummed. And when I get sad or depressed, the best thing for me to do is to make music.
I called my friend, Bruce Gaitsch, with whom I’d cowritten “Don’t Mean Nothing,” and said, “I’m coming over, and we need to write the angriest rock song ever. I’m bummed and pissed off and I need to purge.”
Within half an hour of arriving at Bruce’s garage studio, which he named Frantic, we had almost finished this blistering tune of angst surrounded by huge arena-rock guitar riffs. I called it “Arrow Through My Heart.”
We were finishing lyrics when Bruce’s phone rang and he stepped into his house to take the call. I walked over to the electronic keyboard he had set up and started to play a piano melody. Before I was even aware of what I was doing, the whole melody practically wrote itself. I was sure it had to be someone else’s existing song. It was too memorable.
Then, very atypical of my writing process—where the music comes fast but the lyrics need a decent gestation period, thought, and plenty of time to reveal themselves—words I wanted to say to Cynthia in the moment came flooding from my lips. I guess I missed her so terribly that this whole song just fell out of me in a heap of angst and loneliness.
Bruce popped his head into the garage and said, “Dude! What the fuck is that? That’s gorgeous.”
We recorded a quick piano-vocal demo within about twenty minutes, and the song was fully born. I had no intention of including it on an actual album, as it felt much too personal. Almost like publishing a love letter in the newspaper.
Weeks later, after my meeting with Barbra Streisand, I thought it might be a great song for her. I sent it to her house via messenger. The very next day she left me a voicemail, which I have kept to this day.
“Hi Richard, it’s Barbra. I got your song and I think it’s an interesting melody. But, I need you to rewrite the lyrics because I’m not going to be ‘Right Here Waiting’ for anybody.”
* * *
It would take many years before Barbra did, in fact, record one of my songs. (The first was the 1998 duet with Vince Gill, “If You Ever Leave Me.”) Her turning down of “Right Here Waiting” didn’t make me rewrite the lyrics for her, because the song was written from such a personal place, it would’ve felt wrong.
Soon after, I was recording my second album, Repeat Offender, and was diligent about filling the album with up-tempo rock songs that would also serve my live show. I decided that aside from the mid-tempo anthem “Children of the Night,” which I’d written about a homeless shelter, I wanted only one ballad, and had already recorded a song I’d written with my dear friend Fee Waybill called “No Sleepless Nights.” It was a huge power ballad that got a great reaction from people wandering in and out of the studio sessions. But the simple piano demo I’d recorded of “Right Here Waiting” had been played for a number of people, and the reaction to that song was on another level.
I decided I would spend a full day recording it and then see which ballad got the best reception from the ears I allowed to hear it. The track was recorded in a matter of a few hours at Lion Share Studios on a November day in 1988. Just keyboards and Spanish guitar. No drums. No power. No fanfare. I walked out to the microphone to sing the vocal and placed the typewritten lyrics on the music stand, put on the headphones that were hanging on a hook to the side of the stand, and heard the track come through into my ears. My mouth opened and out came, “Oceans apart… day after day… and I slowly go insane…”
Not really needing to refer to the lyrics, I sang the whole song down top to bottom with my eyes closed, and as the last chord rang, I looked through the glass into the control room where my engineer and coproducer David Cole, the studio’s assistant engineer Peter Doell, and Fee were sitting, listening. Fee had just dropped by the studio to say hi and asked what we were doing. I told him about the simple ballad I was attempting to record. He hadn’t heard it and was already depositing mental royalty checks in his head from our “No Sleepless Nights” that he was sure would be the ballad on my new album.
There was a long silence as David and Peter just stared at me with a look that said, “We just witnessed something really fucking magical happen.” The silence was broken by Fee, who stood up, pressed the talk-back button, and loudly said, “Goddamn it! My fucking song is off the record!”
He was right. “Right Here Waiting” became the ballad on the new album, and the biggest song of my life.
20 “ANGELIA”
Historically, the act of making a new album has always been a deliberate and intentioned decision. Back in the heyday, that decision was often made for me by the standards of the music industry. Back in the 1980s, to go more than two years without releasing a new album was considered anathema. You were risking your fan base forgetting about you and moving on to other artists, and more concerning, you had your record label constantly up your ass for new product. It was the era of “album-tour-album-tour,” a treadmill on which you either stayed or got thrown off.
I would come back from a yearlong tour, exhausted and wanting to just hang out with family and friends and watch NYPD Blue, and ten minutes after hanging the clothes from my suitcase back into my closet, my label would be asking, “So, when can we expect some new tracks?” They wanted to strike while the iron was hot and breed more profit ASAP, and the fans wanted new earworms. The pressure to feed the beast was not inconsequential, and the only thing that could sate the hunger was new songs.
I’ve heard many artists say they are unable to write songs while on the road. That the mind-set of being a touring performer handcuffs the mind-set of the songwriter. I have never experienced this. I released my first album in the summer of 1987 and started touring immediately, not stopping for fifteen months. I knew that, unlike my first, my second album would not only be highly anticipated but also scrutinized in a way none of my work had been before—by my label, the critics, and the fans. That’s a lot of pressure for any artist, let alone someone in their midtwenties still newly navigating life and career.
There’s a term, the “sophomore jinx,” that’s been applied to authors, film directors, and screenwriters, but mainly it’s a potential albatross around the necks of young singers and songwriters. The idea being that you had your whole life to create your debut but only a limited time to come up with the goods a second time. Many creative people cave to this pressure and end up being “one-hit wonders.”
I was aware of these pitfalls early on, and I knew that as tiring and mentally draining as touring can be, I needed to be writing my second album while on
the road. It never really became a challenge for me. I would be so amped up after a show that I couldn’t sleep for hours, and I wasn’t into partying, so I would head back to my hotel room or into the back lounge of my tour bus and write songs. It also helped that although I did occasionally collaborate, I mostly wrote songs by myself. I would often work on songs well into the early hours of daylight and then sleep until sound-check time. It was a vampire-esque existence, but I was determined to have better songs ready for my second album than had been on my debut.
When I look at the track listing for Repeat Offender, almost every title evokes a memory of me writing it in some town on the road.
The opening track, “Nothin’ You Can Do About It,” was written on a jog through the campus of the University of Colorado a few hours before my show in Denver. This was well before cell phones, so I’d always carry a small handheld cassette recorder with me everywhere I went. I remember coming up with the entire melody and the opening lines, “Have you heard the news? I’m doin’ what I said I would.” Those lines came from my subconscious and inspired the rest of the song to be a huge “fuck you” to all the people who had told me I’d never make it in the music business, including one person in particular who knows who he is.
“Children of the Night” was written in the guest room of a friend’s house in Nashville at 3:00 a.m. after an outdoor show at the city’s Riverfront for what local police estimated to be 100,000 people.
* * *
I wrote “Real World” in the first few weeks of my first tour while being driven the sixty miles from my home in Los Feliz to Riverside, where I opened for the Fabulous Thunderbirds. My band and I had been playing forty-five-minute sets consisting mostly of songs from my debut album, but also a couple cover songs like “Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin and “Stay with Me” by the Faces. I very much wanted to have only my original songs in my show, and that meant coming up with new material while touring. I also wanted another fun, up-tempo rocker in the set, and that’s how “Real World” was born.