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S'POP: So, you're a young kid from
Yonkers … whereabouts is Yonkers?
CHIP TAYLOR: Yonkers is just outside of New York City
- it's about 45 minutes outside the city, adjacent to it.
We were towards the southern part of Yonkers, a kinda lower-middle
class area where we grew up. It was a good area - good buddies,
good families around us. Nice memories, but a little tougher
than the area where we ended up moving to when I was 11 or
so. Yonkers was great!
Were you a musical family?
No.
What made you want to become a singer?
I always liked music in the house. I gravitated towards
it more than the rest of the family. My dad was a golf professional;
he was a man of the arts in his spare time - he played Bing
Crosby music, he loved Al Jolson, the Inkspots, things like
that. And he loved movies - we went to a lot of movies when
we were kids, whenever we could. My hardcore turn towards
music was when my dad and mom babysat me at a musical, My
Wild Irish Rose. I think I was about seven or eight. They
didn't have a babysitter, I didn't want to go to the show,
but when I went I was just mesmerised by the music, and I
remember going back in the car that night, I didn't want to
talk, I just wanted to keep the physical feeling I felt when
I heard the music sitting in the fourth row. So I felt, that
night, that something changed in me. I remember thinking to
myself, "I want to do this for the rest of my life."
Then it became country music a few years later. My dad and
mom used to let me stay up and listen to the radio. The local
stations I didn't like, so once in a while, late at night,
I could get stations I did like, like Wheeling, West Virginia,
every once in a while.
How far away was that?
I don't know. Usually when the weather was bad I could
pick it up. That was when I heard country music, and that
became really a thing for me. And, in and amongst - I had
a country music band in high school - I was listening a lot
to doo wop groups and the race records from down south - Hank
Ballard & the Midnighters, things like that. This was
just before the Moondog Show came to New York, so I was really
hungry for that stuff - the blues, any blues things I could
get. So, Southern blues and country music were really important
to me at the time, and it's that hybrid that I brought into
my writing that made me different than most of the writers
in New York.
Most of the writers in the Brill Building area - which were
three buildings: 1650 Broadway, which is where I was; 1619
Broadway, which was the Brill Building; and down one block,
on the East Side, was Screen Gems Music, where Carole King
and Gerry Goffin did their writing. So it was three buildings
that used the large term "Brill Building" - it wasn't
the Building, it was that area. All those writers were more
sophisticated than me. All those writers could write music,
but I couldn't. I didn't have anyone to write music. So I
was more of a blues/country guy in New York when all hell
was breaking loose and we were taking over the business. My
stuff sounded more like Memphis than it did New York. It was
all good times, we were all friends. I've great memories of
all those people.
How did you end up on King Records?
Well, it was just before I made it as a writer. I was
in high school and I did these demos of some songs I had just
written for my country band. They were kind of rockabilly
things. [I was] 16, 15 maybe. We sent them around to all the
record labels - Dot Records, I forget what others. We just
sent them in a package, a professional package. We got a professional
"thank-you-but-no-thank-you" back from all of them.
My lead guitar player at the time, Greg Gwardyak - he's the
guy who taught me how to play guitar actually - he loved my
songs. I was less sure. I was a little more shy about them
than Greg. He had a passion about the music we were making.
He went door to door of the record companies in New York,
anybody he could find. One day he called me up, he said "I'm
sitting at King Records, Chip, talking to Henry Glover. He
says we're just what he wants, and he loves our band."
And that was it, I couldn't believe it. Here's the guy that
signed James Brown, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, an
all-black label - he wanted us. So, we signed there, and that
was a great time, but it wasn't a lucrative time. There was
no money involved. The records were released and they really
didn't do anything. And the records were augmented. I think
it's a lesson. Henry loved the sound of our demos - it was
a real garage-sounding thing. I had a different name then,
I was Wes Voight & the Town And Country Brothers. When
it finally came down to the recording session - Syd Nathan,
the head man from Cincinnati, his daughter really liked my
pictures - Syd thought that I could be his big white hope.
He called Henry and said, "Henry, don't spare anything
with this kid, get the best musicians you can with them."
Henry liked the sound of what he heard, [but] he tried to
augment it a little bit. What it meant was my boys came to
the session, but they didn't play, and I always felt bad about
that. The players we did get were magnificent players: Mickey
"Guitar" Baker, from Mickey & Sylvia; Panama
Francis; I forget the bass player. They were nice guys. We
cut two or three sessions with them, and nothing really happened.
And then there was the question of whether the DJs could pronounce
my name correctly, and should we change the name? And at some
point, just as I was doing my last things for King Records,
they changed my name to Chip Taylor, and I think the first
record actually we put out was right after that, because we
decided not to go ahead. We had an offer from Warner Brothers
Records as well, and Warner Brothers sounded like it was a
better place for me, and I had no obligation anymore to stay
with King Records. I think they still wanted me but we shifted
to Warner Brothers, and had my first chart hit with me as
I am on Warner Brothers. That was a nice little record too,
with Stanley Applebaum producing it with strings, on a song
I really liked a lot. That song was at the time I just started
to get to know Burt Bacharach. I used to take my wife at the
time, Joan, down to a place called Chuck's Composite, where
Burt would play every night, or a few nights a week. We'd
go there to watch him play. I'm a really unsophisticated player,
but he loved the little flavour of me as I am. I was using
the suspension (sings an example) and he started writing a
lot of songs that were based similarly around that song (sings:
"Dearest, darling" from '24 Hours From Tulsa'). He wrote about
four or five songs that were around that simple thing I used
to do with the little suspension. I was very flattered. He
was a friend. Even though I had the hit record, on some areas
on the East Coast, it wasn't any moneymaking time for me.
It was still "How am I going to survive to stay in this business?"
And that's when I decided I was going to really make an effort
to write for other people, and see if I could survive the
business that way.
Greg Gwardyak, he changed his name too, to Greg Richards,
and he wrote 'She Cried' with Ted Daryll.
Yes, Greg Richards. The story with that is, we were all
buddies. We had this band together - Greg Gwardyak and Teddy
Meister, who changed his name to Ted Daryll. We played in
high school, bars, Irish bars mostly. They were great buddies.
They had made a deal early on that whatever they did they
would do together. So 'She Cried' was the product of their
friendship, bringing them to the point that they were both
on that song. But Ted Meister wrote the song. Greg's name
was on it for all the camaraderie they had in the past years.
It was mostly a Ted song. If it wasn't for Greg Richards,
Greg Gwardyak, I would never have been here, sitting talking
to you - him walking the streets. He had a big heart. He wasn't
a great, great guitar player, but he had a lot of soul. So,
those demos that we did had Greg's stamp on them and they
were really nice demos. I have found a few of them. I'm trying
to find more. Before Greg passed away, he played with Tammy
Wynette. He wasn't a great player, but he had soul. He was
terrific. I owe a lot to Greg.
So you turned your attention to writing songs for other
people. Were you freelance or did you get signed by a publisher?
I was freelancing. One of the first things I did, I wrote
a song that I needed a gut-string guitar player on. I didn't
know who the players were, so I asked some people in town
that I'd met, and they said, "There's a guy you should
talk to, Al Gorgoni. He's a very good guitar player, he can
play folk-ish kind of things, gut-string and classical guitar."
So I got hold of Al, and we've been friends ever since. He
played on my first demo, a thing called 'Springtime'. I loved
his playing and it was wonderful to do that demo with him.
You sold your song before you'd made a demo of it. You walked
into a publisher's office and you played it for him. They
said yes or no, and if they liked it, they gave you a $25
or $30 advance, and you tried for a couple of weeks to survive.
That was one of the songs, so Al played on that.
Did that get recorded?
It ended up being recorded by the Browns, my favourite
group. That's the first one I remember Al playing on. Before
that I published things with a couple of other companies.
Right after I was signed to Warner Brothers I was signed to
MGM for a couple of records. They were bad records, but during
that period of time I wrote this song, 'He Sits At My Table',
which I really liked, and Willie Nelson recorded it. That
was one of the first things. I thought, "Holy Christ,
if I can get one of my heroes to record my songs!" That
was really big time for me. That got me to thinking I should
really do more of this. It was not a good recording, I must
say. It was the perfect song for Willie, but it was one of
these productions where they did some silly thing on it to
try to trick it up. The song sold itself, and they put a high
soprano voice on it, just singing over the top of the second
verse. It sounded silly to me. I think it's been released
on packages.
That was the start. Then this one guy I was publishing with
- I don't remember the name of the song, his name was Gerry
Teifer - he had a little company. Gerry had this little connection
in Nashville, and he was the one that got one of my songs
- maybe 'Springtime' - to Chet Atkins, who was producing records
for RCA at the time. One day Jerry showed me a note from Chet
saying, "I'm cutting that song you sent me. I have no idea
who Chip Taylor is. It's hard for me to believe he's from
New York, but wherever he's from I want to hear every song
he writes." And that was the start for me. Pretty much every
song I sent down there, he recorded with someone. He was the
head of A&R. Then, the next thing was, that little publisher
got took over as the head of CBS's publishing company, April
Blackwood Music, and I became one of the first staff writers.
And that was the first time somebody said to me, when they
had the contract in front of me, "Well, how many songs shall
we fill in here, that you have to give us a year?" I said,
"You tell me." I could have given them hundreds. They said,
"Ah, let's make it easy. Give us ten songs a year. That's
your obligation."
What were you thinking? One a week?
They were just saying we're going to put you in a position
where there's no pressure on you. They didn't want ten songs
a year, they wanted a lot more, and they knew they were going
to get a lot more, but they didn't want any pressure on me.
They just wanted everything I'd write.
Were you writing songs you consciously thought of as country
songs, or that could be recorded as country songs? I tend
to regard most of your compositions from this period as R&B
songs.
In the beginning, when I was first signed, they were country.
And then, because I had R&B influences, there were some
R&B things that were floating in there, but the majority
of my successful ones were country. The combination of my
race records background and the country would lead me to this
Memphis thing that was kind of R&B. Even the rock things,
like 'Angel Of The Morning', 'Wild Thing' and 'Anyway That
You Want Me', had a Memphis sound to them. Nobody would really
guess that those songs were written by a New Yorker.
Here's a good R&B one that you wrote with Jerry Ragovoy,
'I Can't Wait Until I See My Baby's Face' by Baby Washington
on Sue Records.
Juggy Murray was right upstairs in 1650 Broadway. We were
on the first floor in April Blackwood Music, and Juggy Murray
had his label upstairs. He was a hustling kind of guy. Everybody
knew everybody. The relationship with him was a nice one.
[Jerry Ragovoy] had done some work with Ted Daryll - a demo
of 'She Cried', originally with Ted singing - and I had got
to know Jerry then. He asked if I'd try to write some things
with him, and this was one of the first things we wrote together.
It was a little different writing with Jerry - he was a keyboard
guy, I wrote on guitar by myself, I hardly wrote with anybody
else. I wrote a little bit with Al Gorgoni, he played guitar
as well. It was fun writing with Jerry - he was this funny
kind of writer.
Did you demo that song?
No. The way we did things with Jerry, we didn't really
do demos. Jerry could write music and do arrangements. He
had a reel-to-reel tape recorder in his office, so our demo
would be made in his office. I'd go in and play and he'd have
the microphones there, and once we got the song down he'd
record it right there. He'd have an idea that he was going
to be producing, because he was producing Garnet Mimms, or
whoever he was producing, he'd have an idea for them. So he
wouldn't need to give them a demo, he'd just play it for them.
Lorraine Ellison would come by and ask for a song …
Did you generally attend the sessions?
No. Sometimes I did.
'I Can't Wait Until I See My Baby's Face' is a big record
over here. They love it on the Northern Soul scene.
Do they play Baby Washington or do they play the other
one?
Pat Thomas, the jazz singer? They play Baby Washington.
They also play Dusty (Springfield)?
They do. There's another one by Baby Washington, 'Run My
Heart', co-written with Wes Farrell. You wrote a few songs
with him.
I have to be honest with you about Wes. He was more of
a businessman than he was anything else, and I liked him.
He was one of those real dark characters in the business.
He was a good guy to get you to do something, to write something.
He'd come down, "We gotta get a song for so-and-so."
He'd be upstairs, just near Juggy Murray's - Wes was on the
tenth floor, we were on the first floor, Juggy was on the
twelfth. Wes worked with Juggy Murray for a while at Sue.
He'd try to get you down there, and I couldn't write with
Wes, there was no inspiration. Wes was really a cerebral guy.
I'd just get in the corner and write something, and because
Wes had inspired the idea to write for this person, his name
is on a bunch of these songs. But I would say, for the most
part, I didn't consider Wes really a writer, even though his
name is on them. He was more of a good character, a Damon
Runyan kind of music business hustler.
A Fixer.
Fixer. He might change one word on the song, and put his
name on. He was a good guy. I liked him.
Well, his name is on quite a few, like 'Hey Child' by Johnny
Thunder. Remember Johnny Thunder?
Vaguely. You'll have to refresh my memory.
He's the guy who did 'Loop De Loop'. That was a bit of
a dumb record, but 'Hey Child' is great. He was on Diamond
Records.
I wish I could remember it, I don't remember it. I think
that was Wes's label, wasn't it?
I always associate Diamond with Teddy Vann.
Yeah, maybe. They were all characters. 1650 Broadway housed
all those guys: Teddy Vann, Wes Farrell. 1650 was a darker
part of the music publishing. Except for April Blackwood,
which was a clean kind of place, the other guys were mostly
all hustlers in the R&B community.
There seems to be some rivalry between
the people that worked at 1650 and the people who worked over
the road at 1619, the Brill Building.
I didn't feel it. 1619 seemed to be more of a Tin Pan Alley
building that had switched now to rock'n'roll. So you had
your more sophisticated guys that were being allowed in that
place of Tin Pan Alley. Leiber & Stoller were perfect
examples. They could make the transition to show tunes, to
their dumbing down rock'n'roll things that they did. But they
had a good feel for that stuff anyway, they were pretty sophisticated
guys.
So 1650 had the younger crowd over there?
It was more colourful. You had a lot of R&B stuff,
real serious R&B stuff going on in that building, and
you had more sophisticated R&B stuff going on in 1619
with Leiber & Stoller, and Jeff Barry, and Cynthia Weil.
Gerry Goffin and Carole King were a block away over at Screen
Gems. You had bunches of writers in all these places. A lot
of them weren't doing very well.
And you were in your early twenties?
Early twenties. And it was great. I loved going in the
morning. I had a life I really loved. I was a gambler at the
time, and a good one, and I would study the horses at night,
and make a decision on them. I used to live in Westchester
with Joanie and the kids, when we got married, when I was
23 or 24. I'd take a train in with the racing form, and pick
my two bets to make for the day, and make my bets at around
10 o'clock in the morning, and then it would be music for
the rest of the day. I had bookies that would take my bets,
and at the end of the day I would go pick up the paper to
see how I did, and head back home. I was very good at it,
so it was mostly very pleasant days. I was a little genius,
for horse racing and any gambling, these were all fun things
for me. I used to have bookies that would drop me all the
time because they were small-time bookies and they couldn't
take the pressure of it. When I had Meyer Lanski handling
my action he didn't care because he was happy. I found out
later, that every time I would make a bet he would bet the
same horses at the racetrack and bet ten times as much as
I would.
Did people see you as a bit of a wonder kid with that.
Did they think that some of the luck would rub off on them?
I had a reputation of being a great handicapper, but I also
had a reputation of being a loner. I didn't want to share
anything like that. My focus to be good was always not to
talk to anybody about anything, just to focus on my science
of it, to study it.
That was just the horses? It didn't extend to the music?
The music, I wanted to be by myself too, most of the time.
I did write with the people you're mentioning. When I went
to April Blackwood, I was taking a draw against my royalties.
They were paying me $250 in advance a week, but against my
royalties. So if I made royalties, that money would all be
deducted. Almost right away, within a few weeks of being signed,
the boss came over and said, "Look, I've another idea
for you. I want to forget the $250 a week advance. I'll pay
you a little more than that, I'll call you Associate Professional
Manager of the company, and your job will be: whenever there's
somebody you think I should listen to, or somebody I should
sign, you'll let me know." So I brought in Al Gorgoni
and Billy Vera and James Taylor. Al and I had just met James
and the boys. We'd met the boys first, we'd been doing a little
movie. The King Bees were Danny Kortchmar, Joe Bishop and
I forget who else - we got to know them, and Danny kept telling
me about this guy that was coming in from North Carolina that
I would really love. And one day he brought me up a reel-to-reel
tape and I listened to it, and holy shit! I called up Al and
said we've got to stop everything - we've got to work with
this guy. So I brought James in and signed him to April Blackwood,
who were paying the bills.
He was signed as a writer?
Yes, a writer. Al and I produced some things. I tried
to convince this little record company - back in those days
it was a singles record company, you didn't put albums out,
until you got three hits - of a different way to do it with
James. He had come to town and was playing at The Night Owl,
we were in the studio working with him, and I had a meeting
with the company. I said, "Why don't we put an album
out with James? He doesn't have a typical radio voice - treat
him like a jazz artist or a traditional folk artist. Not necessarily
go for a single, and have his records in the stores near where
he plays. And try to develop two or three towns on the East
Coast where we could do it?" James was so excited about
the idea, and I went in, and had a guy tell me, "That's
a good idea, we can do it." And then they had a big meeting,
and they decided not to. And that was a real big disappointment,
to me and to Al and to James.
Is that what spurred you to start your own label, Rainy
Day?
That was when we had our own label. I was just asking
the parent company - Jubilee, Mickey Eichner and the crew
- to do it differently with James, to let us make an album
with him. They would have let us cut as many things as we
wanted to, but they wouldn't put it out as an album, because
back in those days that wasn't the formula. And I was telling
them to break the formula - don't even think about a single,
put the thing out, let it be a vibe thing, that people who
go to his shows will want to buy it, that you sell it in Greenwich
Village, you sell it where his shows are, you go to Washington,
Boston. They thought it was a good idea for a minute, then
they changed their mind. At that point James was needing to
go away for therapy. We were supposed to meet the next year,
we picked a point where we would meet. Around that time I
got a call from him - he was in England with the Beatles,
who offered a deal - and he asked if he could break the contract
with Al and me. He signed a deal with the Beatles - we worked
it out with him. The deal that was supposed to be worked out
was never really worked out - the lawyer from Apple Records
didn't really do what he was supposed to do for Al and I.
Our contract was with James, and we didn't want to sue him,
so we just let it go.
There was a girl named Kathy McCord on Rainy Day.
Kathy McCord is Billy Vera's sister. She was a terrific
singer, a very, very talented girl. I always liked Kathy.
In my shyness - I was writing songs, I started to get together
with Kathy, I hadn't played 'Angel Of The Morning' yet for
Al and Evie [Sands], and I didn't know if they'd like it or
not - I was shy about whether someone would like one of my
songs or not. But I felt less shy with Kathy for some reason,
and I said to her, "If Al and Evie don't want to do this
song, I want you to cut it." So I played it for her first.
She had rehearsed it with me and she sounded really good on
it. And I always felt bad that the next day I had the meeting
with Al and Evie, and I was ready to do it with Kathy, 'cos
I was afraid they were going to say, "I'm not sure."
And if they said that they weren't sure I was going to go
ahead and cut it with Kathy. I played it for them and they
both went nuts for the song. So then I had to call Kathy and
say, "We've got to do something else." She was always
disappointed that it wasn't hers, but that's the way it goes.
Do you remember Jean Thomas? She was on Rainy Day as well.
You wrote and produced 'Don't Make Me' by her on MGM. This
was before Rainy Day, about 1964.
She was a sweet, sweet girl. Jean was a background/session
singer. I don't remember even producing this. She probably
did a demo for me of this song and we made it into a recording.
This one here - 'Who Are You' by Stacey Cane, which you
wrote with Ted Daryll - is a Kama Sutra Production. They were
a bit of a dodgy crowd, weren't they?
Absolutely (laughs).
Where were they based?
They were based in 1650 Broadway. A lot of dodgy characters
through that building! I don't really remember this one, but
I would say that a lot of the troubles in the business were
… these were all good guys, but they were dodgy characters.
They would make some kind of deal with the record company,
through the parent company that would pay the bills, and then
they would make deals with their artists, and this was the
Catch 22. They would get a lot of money from the record company
as an advance to making recordings, and the Kama Sutra [productions]
would be distributed through another big company. They'd pay
a lot of money to them and they'd get big offices, big cars,
big houses in the country, big everything. They'd get a couple
of hundred thousand dollars, and then the artist would record
and the biggest problem they could have is that the artist
had a hit, and they'd have to pay them royalties. They'd have
no money - they'd already spent it on their cars, offices
and everything, so they'd have to find a way not to pay them.
Like 'The Producers'? The central premise: if it's a success,
you're really in trouble.
That's true. That's the way a lot of these production
companies went.
Let's talk about Evie Sands. How did you find Evie?
I didn't really find Evie. I just knew of this young girl,
15-years-old, every once in a while she'd walk into this dodgy
building, 1650 Broadway, and head for the eighth floor mainly,
Teddy Vann's office. I used to see her. I didn't like the
song she was singing, but I heard her voice - "Wow! This
girl can sing!" And she was a really attractive girl
too. I said I'd like to get involved working with this girl.
Then, Al Gorgoni said, "Somebody's put up some money
for me to do some recordings with Evie." So I said I'd
like to get involved with that project and do some writing
with you. So it really came through Al. To me, as a producer
and a writer, you could not have asked for a better situation.
A girl that had a wonderful voice, and for me - with my background
in race records and R&B - a white girl who could sing
like the most magical black girl around. She had this honey
voice that was one of a kind. To me it was like the ultimate
find, just to be working with Evie Sands. How could you ever
not love that, every minute - working with her, rehearsing
with her, producing her. She was a great girl and she loved
the way I wrote, the things that Al and I did together.
Did you do a deal with Leiber & Stoller?
Yes, that was fun. The first deal we did with them wasn't
'I Can't Let Go', it was 'Take Me For A Little While', the
Trade Martin song. I think I was a little nervous to go over
and see them, but we had done the skeleton of the record and
were about ready to put the strings on. We wanted to find
an outlet and thought Blue Cat might be the place for us.
So we went over and had a meeting with them, and got to know
them, and they were great. We played them the track and they
loved it, so we worked on it through them and released 'Take
Me For A Little While' with Evie.
And she started her career off as the biggest hard-luck girl
in the music business. Her record was shipped, the test pressing
was sent around to four or five different places. The record
company was hugely excited about it. George Goldner was the
promotion man - the mafia kind of promotion guy that Leiber
& Stoller had working for them. In Chicago, Jackie Ross was
coming off a big hit record on Chess Records, and they were
at a session when somebody brought the test pressing of Evie's
record in and said, "You've gotta hear this record." And they
played it at Jackie's session, on a Monday night. They stopped
the session and they cut the song. On that Wednesday, they
took a full-page ad out, and our record wasn't coming out
until the following week. I opened up Cash Box and I see this
big thing: The next Jackie Ross number one, 'Take Me For A
Little While'. I said, "What a bad break - somebody used the
same title!" Ours was a Trade Martin song. I said, "What the
heck is that!?" Then I got hold of a copy, and it's the same
song! So we traced it. We found exactly what happened with
the test pressing. And so George Goldner called up Leonard
Chess and finally, as the Jackie Ross record was bulleting
up the charts, they had it stopped. It didn't really help
Evie - Evie's record was played maybe in 5% of the places
that Jackie Ross's was, 'cos Jackie Ross was coming off of
a big record. Where Evie's record was played, it was big,
but you couldn't expect the station to stop playing Jackie
Ross and play Evie's instead. So Evie just lost the game.
The same way she lost with 'Angel Of The Morning' on Cameo.
When we released her version it was the biggest record every
place it was played - it was a number one request record.
I think they had ten thousand copies, they were all sold in
two weeks, and Evie was gonna head for a number one - and
then the company went bankrupt. So, she was the hard-luck
girl there. Merrilee Rush had the hit. Chips Moman and Tommy
Cogbill cut the thing very much like Evie's record. Those
were tough things for Evie. She was Dusty Springfield's favourite
singer.
She's been recording recently.
Somebody told me she's out with another record. We made one
record with her ['Women In Prison']. I was just trying to
fit her into what I was doing, the Americana thing. I wasn't
really trying to do what was best for her, I had no idea how
to exploit it.
It was a little before its time, maybe a year or two, because
Lucinda Williams has really come on since. I think ever since
that album Evie's been on the road. Didn't she join some rock
band?
Yeah, it's a wonderful record. I hear she's doing something
else. She was with our friends from Scotland, the BMX Bandits,
Douglas Stewart. There's the whole connection with Belle &
Sebastian, who are big fans of the stuff that Al and I produced
with Evie back in those days. We did a show with Belle &
Sebastian up in Scotland a few years ago.
Let's move on to Billy Vera - 'Storybook Children'.
He's one of these friends of a friend of a friend. Through
Ted, and somebody else, I got to know Billy and his band -
they were playing around Westchester County and had a very
good reputation. I heard some of the demos that they had done
and, to tell you the truth, I was very jealous - this guy's
got it! He had a song called 'All My Love' that I felt was
terrific. Billy was the real deal. He had that R&B thing
to him, and a pop-ish thing in his writing. I signed him to
April Blackwood Music as a writer and tried to figure a way
to do something and break with him.
I was driving down the highway to work one day - and I usually
don't write like this - and I saw two little kids in the field,
a black kid and a white kid, walking hand in hand across the
field. By the time I hit the city I had this whole thing about
'Storybook Children' - you've got your world and I've got
mine, and it's a shame two grown-up worlds can never be the
same. It was at the time that the race stuff was still fairly
intense. I said to Billy, "Play me those old Joe Cuba
chords that I used to love that you played. I've got an idea
for a song." So he played me this thing. I'm never good
at getting exactly what someone is giving me, because I'm
not sophisticated enough, but somewhere in there, within a
few minutes, we had 'Storybook Children', and I asked Billy
to help me finish it up. But it was almost finished by the
time I got to the city. So we went and recorded it. We were
looking for a girl for it. We had a girl to sing it, but we
weren't thinking she was the right girl. We brought her over
to Jerry Wexler, and played it for him. I said, "I just
need money to put strings on it, and find the right girl."
He said, "I got two or three girls for you to pick from."
Judy Clay was one of them. He got us together with her and,
basically, we made a deal with Atlantic Records for that.
They ran a tight ship over there … We shook hands on
a deal, and walked back to my place of work, and Jerry called
me on the phone and said, "Look. I've decided, I want
to change the deal a little bit." "What do you mean,
Jerry, we shook hands on a little deal. You're gonna put up
$2,500 for the strings. We'll put the strings on it. We're
gonna get Judy Clay, we'll make a hit record. How simple can
this deal be?" He said, "Well, how about you put
up the $2,500 for the strings, and I'll give you another two
points?" I said, "You have to be kidding me, Jerry!"
So that's the way it ended up.
Another two points - would that have been a better thing
or not?
No. It's the same as 'The Producers' thing. You don't get
the money, 'cos by the time you get the hit, you're into making
an album, and then all the money you would have got is in
the album. And then by the time you're ready to pay for the
album, you're into making another album. So you never get
the money. The only people who make the money are the songwriters,
because they get paid, whether it's an advance or not, whether
they paid for the strings or not. For the most part those
artists didn't get paid, and if somebody came in and complained
- one of those artists on Atlantic Records, or the doo-wop
groups - they'd say, "Oh, by the way, we got you a Cadillac."
Ruth Brown died recently. In some of the obituaries they
mention her activity in getting restoration for black artists.
One obit refers to Atlantic as "the house that Ruth built".
There was so much energy going on with those artists who
didn't get paid, and so much good efforts for them to promote
their own things, I think the companies should just wash those
things. If these things are selling again, then pay a little
bit of royalties to them.
I read somewhere that Billy did 'Storybook Children' first
with Nona Hendryx?
Yes. That's the one we did first. We brought it to Jerry
Wexler with Nona on it, but we weren't sure it should be Nona.
We weren't convinced we had the right girl. Jerry said right
away, "We've got to find somebody better." So Jerry
was the one who gave us options, and Judy Clay was one of
the options.
It really took off, that record.
It took off on the East Coast. It was a funny thing, we had
two singles with them - Billy and Judy - and they were the
first inter-racial couple, and the first to play the Apollo
Theater. The second release, 'Country Girl - City Man', became
a big southern record, and 'Storybook Children' was a big
East Coast record.
Was 'Country Girl - City Man' a tailor-made follow-up?
I don't know if it was a tailor-made follow-up. It was
a song that Ted Daryll and I wrote and it sounded like a really
good thing for them. I didn't think about hits back then.
I thought about it after the fact, not to sit down to write
a hit.
So you never wrote with particular singers in mind?
Hardly ever. 'I Can Make It With You' I wrote because
somebody asked me if I could write a song for Jackie DeShannon.
So I wrote that thinking about her. Most of the time I asked
my company not to ask me questions like that, or not point
me in those directions, but I must say that whenever they
did it made me feel good.
What strikes me about your songs is most of them are by
female performers. You seem really good at writing songs for
female performers. Not many writers can do that.
David Olney says, "What's wrong with you? You're
always writing for girls, from a girl's point of view? Don't
you have a man's point of view?" One day I made a joke
about it - maybe it's because I like to write songs where
a girl's told me something I want to hear. I put words in
their mouths, and say, "OK, I like to hear that."
Reparata & the Delrons did a couple of your songs -
'Tommy', that was a bit of a hit.
I don't really remember it. I wish you could play these,
I'd have some fun listening to 'em.
We've put most of them on a CD for you, so you can listen
to them later … 'Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)', that's
a great one.
There's an interesting story about this one. Jerry (Ragovoy)
and I had written a song called 'Try', an Otis Redding-ish
kind of ballad. for Garnet Mimms. Then one night Jerry said,
"Can you turn 'Try' into an up-tempo song? I need it
for Lorraine Ellison." He said he needed it by the morning.
That morning - my bookie for some reason was out of town -
I'd planned on going out to the racetrack to bet a horse,
and it was a very important bet to me. I said, "I don't
know if I can do it. What time are you going to be in the
office?" He said, "Around 10 o'clock." So,
I went home that night, I picked up my guitar and I started
singing one of my favourite songs that I've ever written,
and it's never been the big hit that it should have been,
'On My Word'. This song is a story in itself, a total chapter.
I took the groove of 'On My Word', and I started force-feeding
lines from 'Try' into it, until it took its own shape. Then
'On My Word' was out the window, and 'Try' was there. I wrote
it out a little bit more in the morning, wrote out the words,
got in the car, walked down to Jerry's office and I played
it for him. He liked it. He put his tape recorder on, wrote
some notes down, banged on the piano - I had that little horn
section in it that I wrote for it. He said, "Great!"
I said, "OK, see you - I'm off!" And I went out
to the racetrack to bet my horse. Then I heard that Lorraine
had cut it, but I didn't even hear her version of it, because
I was on to something else - some other horses, some other
music. One day I was driving in the car, the DJ said: "The
new Janis Joplin single ..."
You know, I have to get going, I have to get packing my clothes. We'll have to do this in part one and part two, yeah? We have a show tonight in Buckingham. We're supposed to all meet down here in the lobby at 12, and it's after 12 now. Three more shows, then we're off to Europe. Set part two up with Florence for when I'm back in town, or we can do it over the phone. Boys, I'm headin'.
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