Over Easy:Where Do Songs Come From?

I’ve thought a lot about this. And I’ve been able to ask some of the greatest songwriters of the rock era how they find inspiration.

The original spark can be many things, from an overheard snippet of conversation to the rhythm created by the sound of car wheels on a bridge, which was the inspiration for “Jive Talkin’” by The Bee Gees!

“Everything was a song,” Curtis Mayfield, writer of classics like “People Get Ready”, said. “Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love ...If you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.”

For me, those eagerly sought-after gems have arrived randomly, at times inconveniently, on a Greyhound bus, on the treadmill, in the ocean, in the shower, at a business lunch, and while working with other writers on a completely different song. I’ve gotten ideas for songs from the newspaper, from the title of a movie I’ve never seen and from a sign on an abandoned restaurant. Novelist Henry James said “a writer is someone on whom nothing is lost”.

We’re in the midst of a Beatle extravaganza, starting with the remix of the album “Let it Be”, and continuing with the 240 page “Get Back” book chronicling those famous 1969 sessions, and culminating in the Peter Jackson 3 part Beatles doc coming in November. For me, possibly the most fascinating event in all of this is the publication of “The Lyrics”, Paul McCartney’s “self-portrait in 154 songs”.

When I interviewed Sir Paul in London in 1989, I was expected to ask about his upcoming world tour, and then - current album, “Flowers in the Dirt”, but that was all preamble to what really interested me - the sources of some of the greatest songs in pop music history, including “Let it Be”, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Hey Jude”. McCartney did not disappoint, animatedly sharing details of his writing approach. He told the story of a car ride to John Lennon’s house for a writing session, during which the driver, in casual conversation, mentioned that he’d been working “8 days a week”. McCartney mimed scribbling down the title to the song that they’d write that day. He told me that finding a ‘real’ name, like Eleanor Rigby, was critical to the writing of that song’s lyrics. His story about the actual events behind the writing of “Let it Be” and the reference to his mother, whose name was Mary, was illuminating.

If there’s one skill that the successful creator develops, it’s the ability to recognize a good idea when it hits your radar. It’s knowing the difference between the good ones like bubble wrap and karaoke and dodgy ones like fuzzy toilet seat covers and the band name ‘Test Icicles’.

Along with recognition, you need the discipline to get it down. I was sent unexpectedly to L.A. from London, hours after the McCartney interview, to talk with Neil Young about his new album, “Freedom”. Neil had some very clear thoughts about finding and using your best ideas.

“It’s different every time. Sometimes I don’t have an instrument; I just have a piece of paper and I write the whole thing in my head … there are so many ways to write a song. Don’t ignore yourself. If you’re walking down the street and you’re a songwriter and you start hearing the song, don’t wait. Cause you’ll forget it and it’ll never be like it was.”

McCartney said much the same thing.

“There isn’t a way to do it. There’s no formula, so I’m always trying to learn how to do it. Every time it tends to be a different way… normally it’ll be somebody says something, like Ringo, ‘Oh, that was a hard day’s night.’”

Many artists rely on ritual to jumpstart their creative process. Your own personal voodoo. A famous French writer kept a drawer full of rotten apples and the smell would drive him to his writing desk. Flaubert wrote on his lover’s back in bed. Paul Simon bounces a ball off the studio wall until “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” arrives and Steven Spielberg drives the freeways, occupying his left brain and freeing up the right brain to come up with E.T.

There is a mystifying aspect to songwriting and many writers are superstitious or secretive about their technique. When I asked Elvis Costello to deconstruct a song, he said it was like taking a child’s toy apart. Jann Arden said, “I don’t even know what the hell I’m writing about half the time. It’s a mysterious process that I don’t care to understand cause I think that would take the fun out of it. I don’t want to know why the presents are under the tree when it’s Christmastime and I’m 6 years old.”

Songwriters talk about being a vessel for the song, suggesting that the universe will give you songs as long as you’re ready to receive them. It’s like the difference between weight lifting and yoga - instead of trying to squeeze out the idea, you allow it to happen. As Neil said,

“If you made it up yourself, it’s probably not very good anyway. Let it come through you and when it does, pick up on it, instead of going ‘that was cool I’ll have to remember that’.”

Keith Richards woke up in a Florida hotel room and recorded the riff to “Satisfaction” and went right back to sleep, forgetting all about it.

Not to get all mystical on you, but for me the song often starts out as a phantom presence, something I’m not sure I saw, but my eyes search for it in the dark. It’s a whisper where I can almost make out the words. And once you’re visited by the muse, in whatever form it assumes for you, it’s time to roll up your sleeves. I love what painter Chuck Close said.

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

While we’re engaged in the grunt work of composition, we honour the gift of the happy accident. When the Traveling Wilburys sat together for the first time in Bob Dylan’s backyard, no one had an idea to begin with, so while Dylan, Orbison, Petty and Lynne scratched their heads, George Harrison spotted a packing crate with the instruction “Handle With Care”, and presto, a song was started.

You might not use the term ‘happy accident’ in this case, but it was a unique type of musical serendipity, if we are to believe this story. In his book ‘Musicophilia’, Oliver Sacks talks about the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who was hit by shrapnel during the siege of Leningrad. Years later, an X-Ray showed a metal fragment in the auditory part of his brain. Dimi said ‘Leave it!’, because every time he tilted his head to one side, he could hear a new melody and when he levelled it, the music stopped.

“War! What is it good for?” Violin concertos!

Over Easy:Time To Move On

My daughter and I went to see The War on Drugs at the Greek Theater in October 2017 two weeks after Tom Petty died. In an understated tribute, the band played “Time to Move On“ from Petty‘s “Wildflowers“ album. We’d seen one of the last Tom Petty shows at the Hollywood Bowl and it reminded me how his songs reveal layers through time. On this occasion, “Time to Move On” could have been about moving on from this world.

I’m moving, in the terrestrial way, so of course I started with a playlist (link below). It features Hank Snow, Janis Joplin, Ry Cooder, Carole King along with Tom Petty, so you know it’s good.

It’s been said that the stress of moving is right up there with death of a loved one. I’m not sure about that, but it is truly awful. I’m moving and I didn’t have to do it. I chose to turn my life inside out, inhale years of dust devils, and embrace bubble wrap. On the upside, I located the missing J from my Scrabble game. I’m better prepared than I used to be, but Marie Kondo still winces when she hears my name.

When you mention to someone that you’re moving, they get that look like they’re recalling a bad experience with seafood. It’s not that much fun. And for some reason, people persist in regarding it as an event, like something that’s done in a day, rather than the tortuous saga that it is. Like grief, there are stages of moving. It starts with the best of intentions – “I am purging! This will be so good! Like a juice cleanse with furniture!” But it’s not long before those ideas are revealed to be the shallow workings of a deluded mind. We the moving travel through many of the same stations, starting with “I don’t remember buying this!”, which morphs into “who’s shit is this anyway?” So many cheese knives. It’s not long before you land at the “perfectly good“ stage because it applies to so many things – the corkscrew that looks like a Modigliani, the shoe trees, the Moody Blues biography.

Why? Why move? My home wasn’t being torn down. It remains untouched by quakes, fires and infestation as far as I know. No, I just needed a change. Most people would be satisfied with pink highlights or a romantic holiday in Uruguay, but no, I had to move.

It’s not like I have a shortage of experience in this most heinous of acts. When I was a kid, I went to seven different schools, which, as you can imagine, involved moving. It was the same routine every time – my father would swivel sideways in his chair at the dining room table over dessert, saying with barely contained excitement that he had something to tell us. We were moving across town, across the country. It didn’t matter – we had no say, no power and my mother suffered in silence alongside us. How many times was I the dumb new kid at yet another school? I remember staring through the wet leaves plastered against the windshield, my dad listening to CFRB with their funereal playlist as we made our way towards the latest in a string of new educational opportunities. Nausea. Dread. That moment when they escort you from the gym to your homeroom where everyone is talking about what they did in the summer and all the cool seats are taken and as you’re being introduced to the class, they look at you like you possess all the charm of a lima bean fart.

So, as you can see, I bring a lifetime of unwanted experience to moving. But just when I think I’m getting good at it, the hair on my arm gets stuck in the packing tape and I think about getting up and walking out, leaving everything I’ve ever known behind.

When I think about moving, I think of my dad. Maybe because he was involved in the best move I’ve ever done and the worst. And even the latter turned out well. I was 15, and we were living in Toronto. I had friends. Girls and music were figuring prominently. That sick feeling welled up quickly when my dad swiveled in his chair at the dining room table, and I thought I heard the words “Moving to Winnipeg.“ A stony silence doesn’t do it justice. More like the wailing of 1000 tortured souls. Maybe because I was the oldest, and the one most deeply affected by this startling turn of events, my dad knew he needed me in his corner. That hyping the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn in Sarnia wasn’t going to cut it. Not this time. So to bribe me into accepting relocation to the ‘Peg, my dad gave me my first guitar. It was an arch top F-hole Silvertone from Simpsons. And it was the best thing I had ever seen. And while the rest of them frolicked in the pool at the Holiday Inn in Sarnia oblivious to the dark fate that awaited them on the other side of the Manitoba border, I sat in the hotel room literally playing my guitar until my fingers bled. No lie, no exaggeration. Our last stop upon leaving Toronto had been my aunt and uncle’s place. My cousin John, who got a guitar earlier that year, showed me how to play “Can’t Buy Me Love“ and “The House of the Rising Sun“. That was more than enough.

The best move was from California to Paris with my wife and daughter. We decided we needed an adventure, and traded in the redwood fence with the blushing bougainvillea, the darting lizards, the millions of Monarchs, the hiss of sprinklers, and the scent of the jasmine at dusk for an explosion of cheese, the ancient stone streets, daily walks through the market , the chestnut trees at the Luxembourg Gardens, and always the river running through the day. The night we left the canyon was garbage night, fortuitously, because the movers left behind 23 large bags of trash in a house that in a matter of hours would no longer be ours. My dad took the wheel and we careened down the canyon stopping at every house that had space in their garbage can, arousing considerable suspicion from my now former neighbours, as we laughed giddily through 23 bags of garbage.

If you’re moving, hang in there and if you’re moving to Paris keep the cheese knives.

“It’s time to get going, time to move on.”

Here's the link to the "Time to Move On" Spotify playlist.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nb8CudpZT7895kEypiJdi...

Over Easy:Laura Nyro

This was the first music that brought me to tears.

The Beatles awakened the rock ‘n’ roll spirit in me and Bob Dylan revealed the power of language, but it was Laura Nyro who showed me the well of emotion that lived in a song.

When I first started listening to music, really listening to it, often one of the main attractions of an artist was that I had no idea where the music came from, what their sources were, how they learned to play that way. The best example of that was when I discovered Laura Nyro.

She could create a world in a song, one that followed only its own rules. I knew that, as moved as I was, I couldn’t copy her songwriting style, but I remember wanting my songs to come from a mysterious place, for them to be these tiny musical miracles like the ones Laura Nyro created. I think all I succeeded in doing was, as the expression goes, ‘muddying the waters so they appear deep’.

An 8 LP vinyl reissue arrived last month and I’ve rediscovered some of those first feelings in listening again to her music. If the name doesn’t register, her songs might– from “Wedding Bell Blues” by the 5th Dimension to “Eli’s Comin’” by 3 Dog Night, and “Stoney End” by Barbra Streisand. The first song she wrote, at 17, “And when I Die”, was a hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears. She had songs recorded by Chet Baker, the Supremes, Carmen McRae and The Staple Singers.

I found out that she had learned her sense of harmony as a teenager while singing with the Puerto Rican boys in the NY subway, relishing the reverb in those cavernous spaces. You can hear those roots on the “Gonna Take a Miracle” album of soul and R&B classics that she did with Labelle.

There is no other songwriter I know whose work traverses the emotional distance from pure joy to deepest sorrow, from “Stoned Soul Picnic” to “Poverty Train”.

I first saw Laura Nyro at Massey Hall on November 17, 1969 and years later, at one of her last shows in the 150 seat backroom at McCabes Guitar Shop. Those songs are timeless, and the rapture she created singing them was undiminished.

When asked to name great performer/songwriters who have largely been ignored, Elton John cited Nyro. He said she was “the first person for whom there are no rules”. He also addressed Nyro’s influence on his 1970 song “Burn Down the Mission“, from “Tumbleweed Connection”, in particular. “I idolized her,” he said, “The soul, the passion, just the out-and- out audacity of… her rhythmic and melody changes.”

I can’t say that Laura Nyro hasn’t been recognized. Bette Midler’s speech, inducting her into the R&R Hall of Fame was, as you would expect, funny and incredibly touching. Nyro was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010, but I think her importance is underappreciated.

Perhaps the only singer songwriter who she might be considered alongside, Joni Mitchell, said this, “Laura Nyro you can lump me in with, because Laura exerted an influence on me. I looked to her and took some direction from her. On account of her I started playing piano again. Hers was a hybrid of black pop singers, Motown singers and Broadway musicals.”

Both artists fiercely guarded their independence in the studio. Joni continues,

“It used to be embarrassing to myself and to Laura Nyro in particular to play with technical musicians in the early days. It would embarrass us that we were lacking in a knowledgeable way and that we would give instructions to players in terms of metaphors, either colour descriptions or painterly descriptions.”

Laura notoriously bent the talents of the players and producers to her will. Charlie Calello, who produced “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession” tells this story.

“I got a call from the legal department when they found out I had spent $28,000 and I still wasn’t finished,” says Calello. “The head of business affairs said, ‘You’re over budget. What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘We’re not making music, we’re making art.’ And he said to me, ‘We don’t make art here. We make money.’” Callelo collected his pink slip.

If you’re a Nyrophyte maybe start with “Eli and the 13th Confession”. From that album, the song “Emmie” is the one that overwhelmed a young songwriter, and as I listened again half a century later, it had the same beautiful, devastating effect.

Over Easy:For Your Reconsideration

Part of growing up addicted to music was deciding who was cool and who was lame. And we were tougher than any singing competition judge, tougher and unflinching in our dismissal of an act that didn’t measure up. Artists were quickly assigned their places on the status map, and it was virtually impossible to get reassigned to a more desirable location. That first single better kick ass, right?

In the singer songwriter era, authenticity was everything. That and good hair. I knew early on that while James Taylor and Jackson Browne were cool, somehow singers like Glen Campbell and John Denver were forever relegated to MOR status with their variety TV shows and songs like “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”. It took a long time before I listened to Glen’s touching version of Jackson’s “These Days”. Or heard James Taylor covering “Wichita Lineman”. At some point, I broke down and admitted that John Denver's “Leavin’ On a Jet Plane” was a beautiful song.

I was embarrassed that my parents had given me the first Monkees album for Christmas, because played alongside The Animals or The Kinks or, of course, The Beatles, the Monkees were, let’s face it, lame. Or were they? Yes, they had the problem of their origin story-They were auditioned and put together for a sitcom about a band. I found out much later that the producers originally planned to use the Lovin’ Spoonful as the band, but contractual obligations prevented that alternative history from unfolding. And I loved The Lovin’ Spoonful! But once the Monkees had songs like “Pleasant Valley Sunday”, a quirky Carole King song, and then “Daydream Believer”, which is a certifiable great song, well, what was I to do? Then, just as I was coming to terms with all of this, it came out that Michael Nesmith had been the father of music television. (It’s a long story, you can look it up).

This didn’t however alter my distrust of the boy band, put together as a moneymaking enterprise, and when The Backstreet Boys, assembled not formed, planned to record one of my songs, I thought “Oh, ok.” I happily stewed in my snobbery. Then I heard their version of the song. They sang the daylights out of it, and despite all the creamy harmonies, brought out emotional aspects of the song that genuinely moved me. Clearly, I had to recalibrate.

I’d dealt with this cognitive dissonance before. I can’t say that I thought Hilary Duff was an artist for the ages, but she was cute and The Lizzy McGuire Show got a lot of play at our place, and when Hilary recorded a song of mine called “I Can’t Wait” as her first single, my esteem grew considerably in the eyes of my then 7-year-old daughter and her friends. And when I found out from my co-writer that Hilary had battled back against resistance from the overlords at Disney, adamant that she was recording this song, I admired her pugnacious 15-year-old self on a whole new level.

Coolness is a funny thing. You can’t buy it, but you can lose it. It’s hard to maintain and can be squandered on awards shows during an ill-considered duet. Rare is the artist like Leonard Cohen, who starts out cool and remarkably gets cooler through the years. Of course, some bands are too cool for their own good. The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, The Stooges are all bands that are referred to by rock critics as “seminal” but that and coolness won’t keep the lights on.

I consulted my friend and manager, Jeff Rogers, who knows about stuff before almost anyone else does and can point you in the right direction if you want to know where the true north of cool is. He has instincts like Cayce Pollard, the coolhunter in William Gibson’s brilliant “Pattern Recognition”, so I asked him if he’d ever had to reconsider someone who had been marginalized by the tastemakers among us. He said, “Absolutely! For example, I thought of the Psychic Hotline when I thought of Dionne Warwick,” I blanched over the phone. “Then recently, I saw a doc about her and saw her as the groundbreaking artist and activist that she is.” I breathed a little easier, and the next 10 minutes of the call were taken up with singing “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Don’t Make me Over”. I confessed that, as much as I loved Bacharach and David songs, it took me some years to appreciate the genius of the lyrics to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”.

Jeff then told me the ultimate tale of reconsideration. He got a call to ask if he would manage the winner of the first Canadian Idol season. He said no but was persuaded to attend the show, during which he went through a conversion and decided that he would take on the task. Watching the finalists, he saw both “sincerely trying their hardest to do the thing they love most.” And even though they weren’t the cool, alternative artists that he was used to working with, “Their innocence was their only crime.” He cried during the finale.

I understand his dilemma and why his instinctive reaction was to say “no”, without having seen the show or met the competitors. Idol shows are the perfect example of the “legitimacy conundrum“. They are transparently constructed to elicit a certain response from the audience, from the heroic repertoire to the histrionic performances to the quaint back stories of the competitors and the gauntlet of approval that the judges represent.

It’s the opposite of a scruffy bunch of dropouts who live in a burned out building and shoplift to stay fed, all the while working on a collection of songs that might change the world. But even those bands can surprise you, throwing you a curve by casually mentioning the Monkees as a prime influence, as they play you their cover version of “Daydream Believer”.

That’s me in the shower singing “Rhinestone Cowboy”. C’mon, everybody now!

Over Easy:Meet The Beatle

I was excited to hear the 50th anniversary edition of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”. The remixes of The Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper”, “The White Album”, and “Abbey Road” had been revelatory. I thought for sure the infamous Phil Spector ‘wall of reverb’ would finally be torn down, revealing the phenomenal collection of songs that made up the original 1970 release with the clarity they deserve. So when I sat down to listen, with the phone on mute, and a glass of wine at hand, it was far from the experience I expected. The songs sounded as good as ever and Harrison’s vocals had greater presence but the 50 year old production was still grandiose in the way it had always been. I’d figured like McCartney’s “Let it Be Naked” remixes that there’d be a dramatic overhaul of the sonic approach. “All Things Must Pass” had been a statement, a moment of musical liberation for the songwriter whose work had been underappreciated within the world’s most famous band, but who had contributed arguably the best songs on their last album, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something”. (Let the dispute begin!) Listen to the beautifully understated version of “Isn’t It a Pity” on the outtakes disc and consider that George had unsuccessfully presented the song for possible inclusion on albums from “Revolver” onwards. As for the remixes, George’s son Dhani and remix engineer Paul Hicks had to grapple with tough questions in working on this epic recording and as I continued listening, I better understood the choices they made.

But all of this took me back to March 28, 1988 when George Harrison walked into MuchMusic for a live interview, one that had been set up and cancelled without explanation a few weeks earlier, and which we were strictly forbidden from telling our viewers about in advance.

For the first time in its existence, the MuchMusic studio was quiet. It was packed with people who’d drifted down to witness this in person rather than on a monitor in their offices. The air felt different. As technical director Sylvie Marcoux said, “when George walked in, the studio was like a church’.

George was reserved at times, wickedly funny at others, but always an ideal interview subject, one who listened closely to the questions and answered them with candour. Before starting he grabbed a quick ciggie, as he did throughout his visit. He talked about making the video for “When We Was Fab” with Godley and Crème.

“I said, just go home and smoke something and listen to this and come up with an idea.”

This was in contrast to the short pieces The Beatles used to make for songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Rain” when they’d “just go in a field and do it. It wasn’t ‘how to spend $200,000.00 on three and a half minutes of rubbish’.”

When I mentioned “Magical Mystery Tour” as an example of easy spending, he replied,

“That was just a couple of 16 mil cameras and a bunch of loonies on a bus.”

My most nervous moment came as George went down an extended rabbit hole on Beatles’ tech, fascinating for me, but perhaps not for 99% of our viewers. He talked about a tambourine on the Beatles cd that he’d never heard before and which sounded like “an old garbage can lid. I don’t know where that came from.”

He brought up the making of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which he credited to being on “Rubber Soul”, as opposed to “Revolver”. I did not correct him.

“We all made little abstract sounds on our home tape machines. There was a bit in the 60’s when we all bought Stockhausen (German experimental composer) records and went avant garde… avant garde a clue.”

I got us back on safer ground by asking about the recent Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame event, when The Beatles were inducted, but which Paul McCartney skipped.

“It was ‘get the lads here, give them a pat on the back and give them a medal’. It’s a shame he (Paul) missed it because he contributed so much to it.”

Harrison named James Brown’s version of “Something” as his favourite cover of one of his songs. “It was a ‘B’ side, so I sent him a postcard saying they should make it the ‘A’ side. It’s a killer!”

I still love the quaintness of George sending James Brown a postcard.

The mention of “Something” gave me an entrée to ask about a car commercial using the song, and brought a direct response.

“Somebody conned me into it by giving me lots of money. I regret doing it because I always hated hearing “California Girls” selling peanuts.”

Cue my most famous 30 seconds on the web (about 2.5 million YouTube views). I asked George what he thought of Paul’s versions of Beatle songs on “Give My Regards to Broad Street”. George said he’d heard it once, but “didn’t notice that they were new versions.” Laughter in the studio followed. I wondered if he had heard that McCartney was considering covering some other songs including some by John Lennon like “Beautiful Boy” and “Imagine”. George looked genuinely surprised.

“Paul?”

“Yes”

“Well maybe cause he ran out of good ones of his own.”

More laughter in the room as your nonplussed host said,

“Well now we’ve got that on record.”

To which George replied,

“It’s true.”

The most memorable quote from George was this one.

“You don’t have to be in the public eye to exist.”

And the best moment for me came after the interview was over and we’d gone to video, when George said,

“We got into stuff there which I never dreamed of. It’s good cause it makes it different to all the other stuff I’ve been talking about.”

And the postscript, delivered as he surveyed the chaos that was MuchMusic,

“This is a very casual program.”

Over Easy:Favourite Opening Line

Do you have a favourite opening line from a song?

How about “Please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste.”

Or “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.”

I love “Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir.”

You probably remember the effect these brilliant opening lines had when you first heard them. It’s that all important first impression in song. The first two are from The Stones and Dylan, and the last one is from the master, Leonard Cohen, the same man responsible for this Chagall-like image,

“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” the opening to “Dance Me to the End of Love.”

And “They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom,” from “First we Take Manhattan.”

I’ve never heard his thoughts on the subject, but I’m sure Cohen wrote those lines, aware of their boldness and the effect he was looking for. As did the woman who wrote,

“Love came to my door with a sleeping roll/And a madman’s soul”

“The wind is in from Africa/Last night I couldn’t sleep”

From Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark” and “Carey”, respectively.

A great opener can be a scene-setter like Kristofferson’s “Me & Bobby McGee”.

“Busted flat in Baton Rouge waitin’ for a train/And I’s feelin’ near as faded as my jeans”

This set the stage for a beautiful, timeless narrative as well as announcing the arrival of a formidable songwriting talent. And it could have been on page 1 of a Larry McMurtry novel.

“I hitched a ride with a vending machine repair man/He says he’s been down this road more than twice.”

It’s mere co-incidence that, by including Sheryl Crow’s “Every Day is a Winding Road”, I’ve offered up a pair of hitch-hiking stories. Or maybe that’s just a perfect invitation to adventure.

They may seem matter-of-fact, but I love the opening lines of “Alfie” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. “What’s it all about Alfie/Is it just for the moment we live?“ Maybe it’s because it’s an unanswerable question that haunts you through the movie and through the song. They could be the opening lines to a long, late night, end-of-the-bar type of conversation between old friends or people who’d just met. Maybe I particularly admire these wistful words because I know that David had to fit them into Bacharach’s unique piece of music and that it became their favourite song. I also love Hal David’s candour about the process. He said, “Alfie. It’s not a name that spells any romance whatsoever. It sounded almost like a British musical kind of song. It took me a while to find my way into the song, which was the opening line: “What’s it all about?” And, suddenly, I had a sense of where I should go.” (from NPR “Fresh Air” 2012)

Another minimalist gem is the opening of “Just My Imagination”, lyrics by Barrett Strong, who also wrote “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”, “War”, and “Papa was a Rolling Stone”.

“Each day through my window I watch her as she passes by

And I say to myself you’re such a lucky guy”

But something isn’t right here, and we know that he’s not a ‘lucky guy’, and we’re definitely going to stay to see how the story unfolds.

Sometimes a simple declaration can stop the listener cold.

“It’s Britney, bitch.”

Or like this from Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ The Times”.

“In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name.”

And if you were wondering if anyone has used the term “interventionist god” in a song,

“I don’t believe in an interventionist god / but I know darling that you do.”

The answer is yes, Nick Cave in “Into My Arms”.

Some images, once heard, are not easily forgotten, like this one from Warren Zevon, a virtuoso of the absurd.

“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand/Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain”

Of course, this is from the man who wrote the song “Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead”.

This opener from The Clash’s ‘Death or Glory” sounds like it’s ripped from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel.

“Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world/Ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl”

Which is the feeling I was going for in writing the opening lines of Amanda Marshall’s song, “Beautiful Goodbye” when I wrote,

“I’m fed up with my destiny/This place of no return

Think I’ll take another day/And slowly watch it burn”

Of course, there should be a caveat that these opening lines are one thing on the page but another when a melody and a particular voice take them up. For me, an example of the perfect marriage of those three elements is “Ode to Billy Joe” by Bobbie Gentry.

“It was the third of June/Another sleepy, dusty, Delta day”

Tell me more.

I made a Spotify playlist to accompany this week’s blog. You’ll find the songs mentioned here along with many more with memorable opening lines. I took the liberty of including one of my own songs!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6J6dk2wkP7XEP34cuR7I6j...

Over Easy:”Schreeeeee”

When I’m asked if I come from a musical family, I always pause. I think the right answer is “sort of”. Whether it was Sinatra, Rachmaninoff piano concertos or her Majesty’s Royal Dragoon Guards pipe and drum band, something was always playing on that hulking blonde piece of furniture in the living room. This was before the British Invasion take-over of the hi-fi.

My dad had musical aspirations to be sure. First, there was his flirtation with the gutbucket. For the uninitiated, a gutbucket, also known as a washboard bass, is a single-stringed bass played with an overturned metal tub, a broom handle and a piece of clothesline. I can see the hardware store trip that produced the parts, and remember the countless other visits when my dad would be rooting around through barrels of plumbing parts and spare doorknobs and marveling at the multitude of basin wrenches available while I saw my Saturday morning road hockey game being played without me.

A quick sidebar – The Quarrymen, John Lennon & Paul McCartney’s first band, featured a gut bucket, common at the time in skiffle bands and referred to as a tea chest bass.

My dad loved taking things apart and putting them back together, so it shouldn’t have surprised me years later, when he wanted to know how I go about writing songs. “So, do you study the marketplace to figure out what kind of songs they’re looking for?” I’m sure I stared at him blankly. “So you can write what people want?” Being a salesman, of course he would see it as a commodity. I mean, I wanted people to like my songs, and I really wanted them to be played on the radio, but as far as working up a market analysis before figuring out the chord change back into the second verse, well, no.

As for my dad’s other enthusiasms, he’d gone through an intense poetry writing phase, during the early to mid bicycle shorts period. I’m recalling the chromatic harmonica years with fondness as we get to the ne plus ultra of musical pursuits.

Much of the latter part of my dad’s life was taken up with being Scottish. Like many of his age, he’d pursued an interest in genealogy, a passion that saw entire holidays in Scotland taken up wandering through old churchyards and visiting musty public records offices in search of an undiscovered Angus somebody whose cousin married my dad’s grandfather’s sister. And then it happened – he got a kilt and took up playing the bagpipes.

Family events became a forum for him to kilt up, and blow until he was “fair puckled” (out of breath). We endured hair-raising, ear-twisting, shockingly loud performances that are legendary in my family.

When my ex-wife Robin and I told my dad that we were getting married he was excited because, as he said, “I’ll be piping you in!“, a terrifying concept. I hastened to reply, “Well no, no you won’t.“ and I further explained that there were many things that wouldn’t be happening, including a head table, a first dance, toasts and speeches, and especially no piping in. He got over it, but that wasn’t the last word on the subject.

A couple of years later there was a command performance when my dad came to visit shortly after the birth of our daughter Rachel. He felt qualified to entertain a youthful audience because he’d played the bagpipes for some kindergarten age kids at the school near his place in Las Vegas. He said that they had only two types of responses. They either covered their ears and fled the room or wailed in terror. Our daughter revealed an early resilience that would serve her in the coming years – she fell asleep.

My dad definitely saw the humour in all of this, as he did a couple of years later when we surprised him by showing up for his 75th birthday. There was a big event at his church and I played a video that I made, editing his bagpipes performance together with scenes from disaster movies, like the Poseidon going down and people running screaming from Godzilla. He laughed the loudest.

My 50th birthday party, held outside in cottage country, was the perfect opportunity that he’d been waiting for since the marriage disappointment. The guests looked up from their meals in bewilderment at the first “schreeeeeeeeee” reverberating across the lake, and I spotted my dad through the trees, in full Scottish regalia. I found out later that he’d had a couple of glasses of champagne, unusual for him, on an empty stomach, because apparently, it’s hard to fill the windbag after eating. Just add trifocals and unusually deep stairs and a series of czchpflawhreeeeeee moments followed each treacherous step.

If only he’d been around for “Outlander”.

I regret that I wasn’t more encouraging of his bagpipes playing because he really took joy in it. He was especially proud when he helped to inaugurate the first official Nevada tartan. The last time I saw my dad, he was in the bed where he spent his last few days, and he was bragging to the nurse taking care of him of his son’s accomplishments as a songwriter.

Over Easy:”What Comes First, the Words or the Lyrics?”

“So what comes first, the words or the lyrics?”

Working at MuchMusic meant a steady diet of interviews with artists of all genres, from Mötley Crüe to Enya and Phyllis Diller to Steve Earle, sometimes all in one week. It meant lots of research, which I loved doing, because it made me feel more secure going into the interview. And these were rarely breezy 5 minutes and done sit-downs. We went on; in my case at times, on and on. At first, I gave the interviewees too much slack out of respect and a desire to please; at other times I’d ask smartypants questions hoping to impress a Peter Gabriel.

Eventually, I grew some discipline and directed the flow more efficiently. I found the confidence to ask George Harrison why he allowed “Something” to be used in a car commercial. To Leonard Cohen, I quoted the Montreal concert reviewer, who remarked that he had all the charm of a small-town undertaker. I’m not sure where the chutzpah came from to tell John Waters that I’d convinced a group of friends to go to one of his early films and that I was still working on getting their friendship back! He laughed heartily, which is what I was hoping for.

In Canada we can boast some truly great interviewers - Barbara Frum, Peter Gzowski and Brian Linehan come to mind. For a long time, pop music interviews were pretty tame – canned answers to rote questions about the album, the tour , the new guitar player with at least one testimonial to how much they loved their fans. Yawn.

Sometimes the mold got broken, like when Dick Cavett interviewed Jimi Hendrix. With Letterman came the era of the at-times-antagonistic interviewer, always looking for the laugh first, at least until Cher put him in his place, calling him an “asshole”.

The quality of the exchange was often based on the context – a prime time Oprah interview differed from what Terry Gross at NPR offered. Check out the latter’s duel with Gene Simmons. In Canada, “The New Music” peeled back the veils on the life of the rock star, usually with their collaboration. Much inherited their fearless approach to interviewing, adding a large helping of irreverence as we happily took our subjects to the rooftop, the sub-basement or the street to interact with the fans waiting outside.

Much had a whole other element in their artist interviews, something that can only work if you’re live. It was that giddy randomness of engaging the artist in something wacky with their full complicity. It wasn’t those staged ‘Artist X takes over the show' type of things, although we had lots of those with Weird Al, the Bon Jovi BBQ or Sandra Bernhard sabotaging the rock flash segment.

It was the disrupters who thrived in the setting at 299 Queen Street, the heirs to Don Rickles surprising Sinatra on the Tonight Show, bowing to him, kissing him and making mafia references, while Johnny just sat back and laughed.

Disruptions came from the many visits to the station by Crowded House, who were like a house band with their unplugged jams and loony interview responses. They also did their laundry at Erica’s place. Barenaked Ladies brought that same looseness. When Iggy Pop did an Intimate & Interactive special, at one point he climbed through the window out onto Queen Street, guitar in hand, to mingle with the fans and improvise a song about the city, while the crew scrambled to follow.

Things did go off the rails. Dee Snider of Twisted Sister tackled J.D. Roberts live on air, sending him tumbling over the console where a spike from Snider’s studded belt dug into J.D.’s elbow.

Kim Clarke Champniss had to endure being pelted with grapes by the disrupter-in-chief, Johnny Rotten, during an attempted Sex Pistols interview and Steve Anthony had to survive being threatened by Joey Ramone with scissors at his neck.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers always brought their own brand of chaos when they showed up (mics attached to nipples and a host of profanity for instance) and Duran Duran brilliantly exploited the wide open vibe of Much, on one occasion with water pistols and cake.

For me the kings of disruption were Motörhead, who were scheduled to be my co-hosts on The Power Hour. Philthy Phil and Lemmy arrived, each with their private 26 oz bottle of booze, which they downed steadily. The show deteriorated rapidly over the course of the hour, concluding with my “co-hosts” eating the life-sized poster we were giving away. The single from the album was co-incidentally called “Eat the Rich”.

Over Easy:”It’s Joe DiMaggio”

It’s the dog days of summer and a good time to be a hard-core Jays fan.

I remember the snowy opener in 1977 featuring Anne Murray in a parka with a pair of giant headphones singing the national anthem. We cheered wildly to keep warm. We won the game and I remember as we all exited that concrete monstrosity known as Exhibition Stadium chanting “we’re number one!”. And for that day we were.

I listened to a lot of Tom (Cheek) and Jerry (Howarth) on the radio, and before that Tom and his first broadcast partner, Early Wynn, for whom a detailed commentary might consist of “I tell you Tom, he’s a big fella”. Or if Early was feeling verbose, “I tell you Tom, he’s a tall drink of water.”

I think I’ve been to most of the landmark Jays games. The opener, the day we clinched our first playoff position, the first World Series game on Canadian soil, Joe Carter‘s “Touch ‘em all“ home run and of course the Bautista bat flip game! I was there for the 62nd All-Star game in July 1991, the first in Toronto, when Alannah Myles sang “O Canada”. It was a beautiful version free of melisma (hold the Mariah Careyisms) that was referred to in the paper the next day as her “choirgirl” version of the anthem. I remember standing on the field right in front of the American league All-Star dugout and scanning the faces, and wishing them good luck. Yes, I’m a geek.

In recognition of two of the greatest records in baseball history, the last player to hit 400 and the owner of the 56 game hitting streak, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio together threw out the first pitch. I was absolutely in awe and when we gathered off the field, standing a few feet from two of the greatest to ever put on the uniform, I whispered to Alannah, “Do you know who that is?“, gesturing to the silver-hair man a few feet away. She didn’t and I said quietly, “That’s Joe DiMaggio!”

Her eyes widened, and she whispered to me, “Marilyn Monroe!”.

I said, “Joltin’ Joe!”.

She replied, “Marilyn Monroe!”.

“The Yankee Clipper!!”

And so on.

I think there’s quite a bit of overlap between the lives of entertainers and athletes. The performance aspect, the fan relationship, and the rigours of travel. Geddy Lee is a serious baseball fan, and every time I run into him, all we talk about is baseball. He’s well known for his dedication to the Jays. When I was producing a special on Rush for MuchMusic, we sat down for an extensive interview. We rambled through many topics, including athletes and musicians, about which Geddy had this to say,

“I’ve met a lot of athletes in the last few years, because of my attraction to baseball and their attraction to music. Very similar lives we lead, the kind of concentration, the kind of “live and die” in front of the public, the kind of itinerant lifestyle… the being yanked out of your home life and thrown into a professional life that’s separate but not separate. An athlete can’t hide his mistakes as well as a musician can-I think it’s a more humbling profession.”

I remember when people asked me what it was like doing 4 hours of live television, with no net, no delay, every day. I drew a couple of comparisons. I said it was like improv comedy in that you were expected to mess up and the audience loved watching you figure out how to clean up the mess, live in front of the nation. It also seemed like being a closer in baseball, who has to enter the game in the late innings and try to finish it off. If you got your ass handed to you, as will happen, you had to go home, forget about it and come back for more the next day.

“A humbling profession.”

Over Easy:’We Must Party’

Last weekend I returned to California, strange but familiar as always.

Since I left a couple of months ago, the coral trees and their late spring splendor have bowed out, and the jacarandas electric lavender moment has passed. In their place, there are fires, heat waves and drought and the sun has turned red.

The stratified nature of L.A. life is fully in evidence. On the way to my place from the airport we passed the sidewalk city on nearby San Vicente Blvd., flags hanging limply in view of the Veteran’s Administration building and restless residents gathering on the street outside their tents in the steamy summer heat.

The wages of the pandemic continue to be paid in changes like the shuttering of my favourite local restaurant Pizzicotto, run lovingly for 23 years by Isabella and her sister Luciana. I’ve seen lots of changes, some harder than others to accept. I miss Mr. Wendell who has been gone for a long time - the roadside poet of Brentwood who would pass his poetry through car windows and make a living with love stories and political chronicles of the day. Now there’s a statue to Mr. Wendell on the block he used to command.

One constant, as long as I’ve been coming to California, is Angelyne. Who is Angelyne, you may ask. And truly, even those of us who have followed her over the decades, and see her as a central player in the Billboard landscape, riding high in her pink Corvette, might ask the same question. I think like much of Los Angeles, Angelyne‘s whoever you would like her to be. She’s the missing link between Pia Zadora and Paris Hilton; and like Pia, known for her breakthrough performance in “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”, a series of Sunset Boulevard billboards boosted her career. All three have made albums.

There have been exposés in which we find out Angelyne’s real name and where she actually came from, but I prefer all that to remain the stuff of legend. Like many people in LA, I had an Angelyne moment late one night at the pharmacy when I saw the little pink ghost floating down the nail file aisle. I could hardly wait to tell my friends. I don’t know why.

It should come as no surprise that, as she did in 2003 when Gray Davis was recalled as governor of California, Angelyne is running for governor as Gavin Newsom faces a recall election. 18 years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger put an end to Angelyne‘s electoral fantasies and she finished 29th in the race. But this year who knows?

When asked about what social issues she’d like to tackle, her answer was elegant in its simplicity–“I would love to get everybody a place to live that doesn’t have one.” Her website features T-shirts, cosmetics and meditation cassettes. How can she miss?

Of course if Governor Newsom had skipped that pandemic era dinner with friends at the exclusive Napa eatery, French Laundry, we might not be at this moment. Was it really worth the $310.00 per person tasting menu which includes “All Day Braised Snake River Farms Beef Cheek”? He could have learned from Angelyne, who, if she was going to indulge gastronomically, would probably have chosen somewhere like Pink’s Hot dogs in Hollywood. Many celebrities, and no doubt politicians, have visited Pink’s and one of the menu highlights is JAWS - The BIG one - a Poli-bacon chili cheeseburger, with one grilled Polish dog, hamburger, bacon, lettuce, tomatoes, mayo (add burger and slice of cheese for $2.25) All for $10.95!

Newsom’s campaign slogan is “Roaring back”, a reference to the post pandemic California economy of people’s fantasies. The fantasy girl keeps it simple – “We Must Party” is her slogan.

There’s no choice, really. As she said back in 2003, “We’ve had Gray (as in Davis) and we’ve had Brown (a reference to Jerry). It’s time for blonde and pink.”

Over Easy:The Student Song

I was a broke songwriter. Go figure. My friend Nelson got me a job picking apples on his uncle’s farm near Thornberry, Ontario, and it was exhausting but satisfying work. My coworkers were Jamaican - strong, hard-working and much better apple pickers than I was. The guys were nice to me and were remarkably tolerant of how slow I was but I wasn’t really part of their crew at first. I slept in the guest room at the main house while they were lodged in a refurbished Quonset hut. One day while I was up a tree, I started singing Sam Cooke‘s “Wonderful World“ and the reaction from my fellow pickers was pure exuberance. They clapped and sang along and encouraged repeat performances, always wanting to hear Sam Cooke songs. After that day they invited me to hang out with them after work and we became friends. I attended marathon games of dominoes, raucous physical affairs, as the triumphant player slammed the winning tile down, bouncing the entire table in the air. I remember one night watching the Miss America pageant and it was a full-on viewer participation event with cheering and booing and colourful commentary as well as things being lobbed at the TV. Thank-you Sam Cooke!

Thinking back on this story, it reminded me of the way that music connects us. .

When my daughter Rachel was born, I sang to her every night from a menu of bedtime hits, including songs like “Sweet Baby James“, “My Girl“, “Cheek to Cheek“, and “In My Life“. A favorite of hers was “Wonderful World“, which she referred to as “the student song“, in reference to the “I don’t claim to be an A student“ Bridge. It’s 25 years later and I know those songs are in her DNA and likely will be passed down when she sings to her child.

When Stephen Stohn and I traveled through Europe in 1970 in a Volkswagen van, we stayed in campsites, wrote lots of songs and had a lifetime of random encounters, mostly good. We eventually hit a dead end in the Turkish city of Samsun, located on the Black Sea, when our van seemed to be on its last legs. We nursed it along until the clutch blew out on a lonely stretch of highway between Samsun and Ankara where entire villages were made of mud. We sat by the road until a couple of rescuers stopped and offered to take us to the next town to get help. They knew a few words of German, including miraculously, the German word for clutch. Based on my grade 11 class with Mr. Schultz, I was chosen to go with them to seek out a mechanic.

After a couple of harrowing hours I did return, although I left part of myself on that Turkish backroad. My transportation was the very loosely attached sidecar of an ancient motorcycle, driven at a wildly vibrating heart-stopping speed. I pulled up in a mighty cloud of dust with my rescuer and found my pal Stephen sitting in the back of the van with the doors open to all eternity, playing guitar and singing ”Mr. Spaceman” by The Byrds for one solitary young sheep herder who seemed mesmerized. A quick fix on the clutch got us on the road to Ankara, even if it was second gear all the way. I wonder if the aging shepherd still dines out on the story of the alien invasion that we must have represented. Or does he find himself humming the melody to “Mr. Spaceman”, wondering where it came from?

Since making a new record, I’ve been delighted by the invisible thread that connects me to people who know my music. Here’s Chuck Scott’s Facebook post.

”In July of 1991 I was DP on a doc about Romania 18 months after the fall of communism. We traveled the country in an old school bus designed for tiny kids. After 8 days with little hot water or food we arrived in Bran the home of one of Vlad the Impaler’s castles. As we got off the bus I heard “Black Velvet” blasting from speakers and all these young kids were dancing to the song at a camp next to our lodgings. Every time I hear that song I am right back there. Thanks Mr. Ward for cementing a memory.”

Thanks Chuck!

Over Easy:All Night DJ

My first real job, aside from delivering the Toronto Telegram, was as an all-night DJ at CKPT in Peterborough, home to 5000 watts of hit radio in the Kawarthas. I was hired by Program Director Ken Cassavoy, who took his first in a series of risks on me, a 19 year old kid, fresh from helping found Trent University Radio. I was in my third year at Trent and my first as a broadcaster, learning skills that I would draw on over a decade later hosting an all-night video show called City Limits.

The extent of my responsibilities was to play the hits from midnight till 6:00, run promos and read the news summary at the top of every hour. The latter involved a technique known as ‘rip and read’, where I’d tear the latest news items fresh from the teletype feed in the newsroom, and race back into the control room where “The Boxer” was hopefully still spinning. Once I realized that I could read the news summary without having looked at it beforehand, that became my M.O. Of course, every once in a while the teletype machine would jam, obliterating the content of a news item. This resulted in moments where I’d be reading a story, saying “Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau came out swinging in the House of Commons as he unleashed a scathing attack on…ashglnhui uhh ovyh yhxsasou”, at which point I would pause meaningfully and utter a very conclusive sounding “last night”, hoping that my confident delivery would fake out all seven of my listeners at the all-night carpet cleaning plant.

The sports scores provided an opportunity to add meaningless variety to the results. The Cubs mauled the Reds 5-4 while the Dodgers doubled the count on the cellar dwelling Phils, 8-4. The Twins were humiliated as the Tigers roared to a 4-3 victory while the Pinstripers nudged the Beantowners 6-5. You get the idea.

I was the only person in the station, which was located in the Empress Hotel.

When one of the turntables broke down, the station engineer Albert Dyck, who changed his name to the radio friendly Dick Alberts, would show up and wedge himself into the space between me, live on air, and the turntables on my left. The photo gives you an idea of the limited real estate involved. Dick was a lovely guy, but he smoked relentlessly, and had a vicious case of fridge repairman ass crack as he leaned over to do his repairs, which were of course scheduled for my shift because, hey, who’s listening at 2:30 a.m. anyway? Dick also had this weird habit of standing his cigarette butts on end with the ash resting on the filter, and they would accumulate over the duration of the work, forming a kind of Butthenge around the turntable. While this was going on the real tricky part for me was doing my show with one turntable. After the repairs were completed Dick would hang around and tell me radio stories, which I loved.

My friends used to visit me and bring food, for which I was extremely grateful. However, hijinks were often included. Once, during my recitation of the 21st summary, two of my friends stood on the table in the library which I could see through the control room window, and danced naked throughout the newscast. I did not break up! A professional at work.

On another occasion, someone thought it would be hilarious to light the newscast on fire… while I was reading it. Puerile? Yes. Did I break up? No.

My friend Joey Edwards who hosted the show before mine used to hang out with me and during the album portion of the show between 3 and 5 AM we would record songs and comedy bits for his show on a pair of ancient upright Ampex recorders in glorious 12 track mono. This is where I made my first demos and learned about multi-tracking. We also liked to live dangerously and would drive from the Empress Hotel to the Country Style donut shop at the end of George Street, counting on getting our orders in and getting back to the station before side one of The Rascals “Freedom Suite” finished. It only failed once but it was a heart stopping moment when, as we were driving and contemplating a raised maple vs a walnut crueller, we heard a skip on the record that was playing on the car radio. The hyperventilation had already begun when the record magically fell back into the groove and continued. I think we took a couple of nights off from the Country Style and their irresistible cinnamon twists.

Once, inevitably, I fell asleep during the album portion and woke up drooling with my head on the console, to the sounds of the needle swishing around on the inner grooves of “Chicago Transit Authority” and the persistent ringing of the studio phone. A disgruntled voice demanded to know if I had fallen asleep. I assured him that this was most certainly not the case and thanked him for his call while I flipped the album over.

Despite all of the above, my boss at CKPT, Ken Cassavoy, and I remained friends. In thinking back on those times, I imagine he wasn’t always asleep during my late night follies. Ken went on to teach broadcast at Centennial College in Toronto and during the Much years I used to speak to his class. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for my immaturity in those DJ days and to thank him for having hired me… bcdhaogabnjk… last night.

Over Easy:Karen Carpenter’s Ghost is Unhappy

The A&M studio complex on La Brea Ave just below Sunset Blvd is an historic Hollywood location. It was built by Charlie Chaplin in 1917 and he filmed most of his silent movie classics there - including “City Lights”, “The Goldrush” and “Modern Times”. It’s currently owned by Jim Henson Productions and there’s a statue of Kermit the Frog as The Little Tramp at the gate. For over 30 years, starting in 1966 it was the home of A&M records and was one of the top studios in town. John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Sting, Bryan Adams and many others made albums there. Studio 2 was the favourite studio of Richard and Karen Carpenter. I’d worked there once before when we shot the video for Alannah Myles’ “Our World Our Times” on the old Chaplin soundstage.

A few years before that, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers had been recording in Studio 2 and things just kept going wrong. Nothing major, but enough to derail the process and necessitate a series of calls to studio maintenance. A buzz here, a faulty patch there, funky headphone sound. Death by a thousand cuts. The band didn’t want to abandon the room they were comfortable in but eventually it was beyond nuisance level. And no one had a solution. Then someone suggested consulting a spiritual advisor.

“Karen Carpenter’s ghost is unhappy”, they were informed by the consultant and as a remedy it would be necessary to install a sizeable crystal in one of the studio walls. And the crystal had to be lit 24/7. Done! Tech issues solved. Happy Heartbreakers. Recording resumed.

I found myself working there because Diana Ross asked me to record a gospel choir for the song “Hope is an Open Window “ which Tim Tickner and I wrote with her and were producing for Diana. Since the album was done and time was tight, Diana wanted the choir recorded by Friday. The call came on Wednesday. Our project coordinator booked us into the Crystal Room at A&M.

Fortunately, the session went off without a hitch. The crystal did its job. The choir sang beautifully and Diana loved it. I don’t know if the crystal is still there but somehow I suspect it is. It seems to me it would fit in nicely in Muppet world.

One footnote - The video for “Ghostbusters” was shot there.

This was one of my most joy filled days as a songwriter, seeing the ideas that the song was built on become a glorious reality.

See the link in the comments below for hand held footage from the session. You can see the choir learning their parts and then recording them before adding a clap track. You can also briefly see the crystal behind the choir director.

Over Easy:Cap’n Highliner

When my Covid beard came in white, I was reminded of when my Aunt Betty took to referring to my Uncle Bill as Captain Highliner, when his did the same. To be clear, she didn’t mean the hot new Kenny Rogers type Captain, but the original old salt with the cap and turtleneck. While Bill’s beard looked bohemian, mine was kind of ‘Bad Santa 2’.

My uncle was always the coolest guy in the room. Bill Daniel was an ad man, before there were mad men, and he handled big accounts like Coke, Skidoo and Levis for McCann Erickson. You’d find him in his office with a couple of young writers on the couch, pads on their laps, or at Toronto’s legendary Pilot Tavern strategizing over a 3-martini lunch . In the interest of accuracy, I should say that Bill’s beverage of choice was Johnny Walker.

When I was a kid, I loved going to Bill & Betty’s place. Raucous dinner parties with lots of laughing, singing and imbibing were regular affairs. They drove a VW Beetle and once went on a 3-month trip to Mexico; on another trip they went to England and France by boat, in case you were wondering if Billy “ever went to sea”. You can see how my uncle had life figured out from where I sat – he was a painter, he smoked, listened to jazz, drank scotch before dark and wore corduroy pants to work.

My dad wanted to be cool, but when he got the gold #1 necklace, we winced. When we heard Chuck Mangione and Nana Mouskouri on the living room stereo we headed for the rec room. Meanwhile my uncle, in a cardigan that Dick Cavett would have coveted, was digging Thelonious Monk. It was no contest.

When I was in High School in 1967, Bill took me to Montreal and we went clothes shopping. He let me pick whatever I wanted so I came home with a pair of blue and white checked bellbottoms, a belt the size of the passing lane, and a maroon paisley shirt. The mockery from my classmates was worth it.

Bill loved it when I became a songwriter and realized his own ambitions in that world when a campaign that he wrote turned into a song written with Dr. Music, Doug Riley, and sung by Salome Bey, called “I Like Your Company”. It’s lovely (Here’s the link: https://open.spotify.com/search/%20i%20like%20your%20company )

I miss Bill and Betty, but our families are close now and I realize what a gift it was to have someone I could look up to who made a creative life seem possible. He did that for his granddaughter Britt, aka DJ Blush (check out her Brittpop radio show on Barrelhouse Radio, and he did it for me.

Here’s to the coolest guy in the room.

Over Easy:Play Something You Know

Since releasing a record recently, many people have asked if I’m going to tour, or at the very least do some shows, of course pending our release from the grip of the pandemic. It’s as if they picture me with my gear at the door, awaiting the go ahead like a patio diner jostling for position outside a plastic shrouded cafe on Yonge street.

Not so fast. When I recall my relatively short career as a performing musician, it’s a bittersweet mélange of laughs with fellow players, cases of bone butt if you were assigned the spot in the van between driver and shotgun, audiences who were indifferent at best, and the rich variety of the species

club-owner-nasticulus.

My memory of doing solo gigs is not rosy. Most of the audiences were hostile and my night inevitably was coloured by the unholy triumvirate of insults:

“Play some rock n’ roll”, as I strummed a tender Jackson Browne cover.

“Zeppelin!” or perhaps “Johnny B Goode” during my Joni offering.

Capped, during an Eagles favourite, by that most Zen of all insults, “Play something you know”.

At least that’s what I recall. To be sure I contacted my old friend Kit Johnson (bottom right in the band photo), who shared many a stage with me once I’d graduated to having a band. We recalled fondly the pipeline tour from Hearst to Nipigon, and the undisguised malice that greeted us night after night. And we may have chortled, from a safe, bemused distance, about the many varieties of bar-owner-reptilius that we interacted with. Some were innocent, like the one in Nipigon when our gig fell during the hockey playoffs. His directions were simple, “Do your regular show (a 40-minute set) … just don’t play during the game.” “So, to be clear, you mean play between periods only, which is about 20 minutes?” “No no, do your usual show.” “Ok, got it.” “Just don’t play during the game.” This went on for a while with no real resolution. If this was followed by a visit to our swanky band house for a reefer recess, can you blame us?

Our opening night in Hearst was to a sparse gathering, so it was easy to spot the club owner at his table in the back, and when his note was handed to me partway into our first set, I was confused.

“Play Under the Double Eagle. The owner.” ‘Or else’ was implied.

I knew it wasn't a location he was proposing. “Under the Double Eagle”, Opus 159, is a nineteenth century Austrian march. I was informed by a band mate that it had been adapted by Chet Atkins into a country instrumental that required stunning virtuosity to pull off. In other words, we had a better chance of playing Side 1 of “Tommy” than this little nugget. I think we staved off disaster with an impromptu rendering of “Johnny B Goode”.

Not so innocent was an Okanagan Valley impresario who during our week of entertaining the Kelowna faithful, found that the take didn’t match his calculations one night, so he locked his entire staff in a room, hoping to flush out the guilty party. He seemed remarkably blasé about the discovery that his wife had popped by and scooped a small advance on the household budget before heading out for the night. This was the same mean-spirited maestro who informed me that he was relocating a comedy & striptease act from his other venue to ours and that they would be opening for us. It all fell into place, as I recalled meeting a fellow in the hall outside my room earlier that day. As his kids battled noisily in the room behind him, he stuck out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Billy Baker, I do standup, my wife Jody does exotic.”

Back in the club owner’s office, when I objected to this new arrangement, citing some aspect of our contract , he shoved his chin into my face and said,

“Listen, I’ve got a million dollars in my back pocket and I can shut your show down!”

If you suspect fiction at work here, I’ll cite the great truism, “Ya can’t make this stuff up.”

Or you can ask Kit, who has a prodigious memory. Speaking of which, he offered an important amendment to the unholy triumvirate of insults. Step 2, after “Play some rock n’ roll.” was “Play something good.” Of course, giving way naturally to the insult satori of “Play Something You Know.” Which I highly recommend if you’re planning any kind of career as an entertainer. Just don’t play during the game.

Over Easy:Just Say Baby, Baby

“just say baby baby”

“That boring bugger”, was how Robert Plant referred to his best known song, “Stairway to Heaven“, on a recent episode of my podcast Famous Lost Words. And Plantie is far from the only one to feel this way about his best known and best loved work. In some cases it’s sheer repetition that grinds down the creator, that and the unquenchable thirst that audiences have to hear something that you’ve played far too many times. Bob Dylan avoids this problem to a great extent by one of two tactics - either by not playing the songs people want to hear at all, or playing them and making them virtually unrecognizable. Sometimes this is done to great effect as for example his performance of “Masters of War” at the 1991 Grammy awards during the first Gulf war. I was there and had no idea what song he played.

On other occasions you get the sense that the artist was dragged kicking and screaming into the studio and forced at knife point to deliver the detested words of a lamentable song, leading to some hostage video type performances.

Tina Turner in the biopic “Tina” says of her biggest hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, “It was terrible. It was awful, I was rock ‘n’ roll … This was a pop song.”

By the time the song had revived her career and won a bunch of Grammys, Tina had accommodated herself to it quite graciously.

Frank Sinatra didn’t particularly care for “Strangers in the Night“, a #1 Billboard hit and the title track of his biggest album. “I hated this goddamn song the first time I heard it and I still hate it.” Not much wiggle room there. Of course Ol’ Blue Eyes went on to hate other standards in his catalogue, including “New York New York” and “My Way”, but he reserved a special venom for “Strangers in the Night”. Notoriously he would butcher the lyrics for his own amusement. One of his favourite variations was

“Strangers in the night exchanging glances

Wondering in the night just wear my pants is.”

Crooner comedy.

Now you might expect someone like Chrissie Hynde to look derisively upon the gems in her catalogue and she doesn’t disappoint. On the subject of her first hit “Brass in Pocket”, she says “I’ve never thought it was that great. Is it pop? Motown? Rock? It didn’t seem to know what it was. I remember walking around Oxford Circus hearing it blasting out of peoples’ radios. I was mortified”

So if someone mentions the band REM what’s the first song you think of? The members of the band would probably be happy if you said “Losing My Religion” or “What’s the Frequency Kenneth”, but my guess is “Shiny Happy People“ springs to mind. And that sound we just heard… that was a moan from singer Michael Stipe who describes the song as “a fruity pop song written for children“ They even refused to have it included on their 2003 greatest hits album.

OK, I’m warning you, this is gonna hurt. Neil Young’s opinion of the classic “Heart of Gold” is probably not what you would wish it to be. “This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rough ride but I met more interesting people there.“

I can hardly believe that I am about to mention the song “Cherry Pie” by Warrant for the second time in a few weeks but here you go. Jani Lane of Warrant says “I could shoot myself in the head for writing that song.” Supposedly written in response to a record company request, Lane wrote “Cherry Pie” in 15 minutes, scribbling the lyrics on a pizza box. A slice many wish had never been delivered.

Now, regretting writing “Cherry Pie” is one thing but the greatest rock anthem of all time? Well, regret Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” Robert Plant did. “I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show.“

Sometimes like with Ol’ Blue Eyes, the artist wants nothing to do with the song from the get-go. When I was signed to Warner in the 70s, the head of A&R had a song that he really wanted me to sing, called “Disco Queen”. I’ll give you a moment to imagine my reaction to this idea. Luckily for posterity, I won the pitched battle that followed.

On the other hand, Lamont Dozier of the Motown hit writing team of Holland Dozier & Holland, told me about presenting “Where Did Our Love Go” to the Supremes. They’d written it for the Marvelettes, who were on top of the heap at Motown at the time. They hated it and said no, and went so far as to warn other acts on the label to watch out if the writers brought them this song. Here's what Lamont had to say about the song that launched the Supremes' career.

“Just say baby baby”

Over Easy:Unexpected Performances

(FROM A MANSION IN THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS TO WILLIE DIXON’S LIVING ROOM)

In late 1993, David Foster was hosting a Christmas album release party at the old Peer Mansion, a historic Hollywood home owned by the publishing company started by Ralph Peer almost a century ago, the company that publishes "Deep in the Heart of Texas", “Georgia On My Mind” and "You Are My Sunshine". One of the featured singers on the record was Natalie Cole, who had recently scored a huge hit album with “Unforgettable”, her covers of her father’s songs. I was introduced to her as “the guy who wrote “Black Velvet””. She smiled and said, with a twinkle in her eye, “But did you write that other song?” I paused, uncertain of what she meant, and she proceeded to sing in full voice, about two feet away from me,

“Love is what you want it to be”

It was a brief, but totally surprising performance and left me flabbergasted.

There have been others.

I was in the Oliver Peoples eyewear shop on Sunset Blvd. and Seal was there. Star sightings are fairly common in L.A., but Seal is a particularly striking man who would never pass unnoticed. He added to his presence that day by bursting into song in the shop, for no apparent reason, and we all nonchalantly continued our shopping as if this was an everyday occasion.

Out with a group of friends at Kate Mantalini, a late night restaurant in Beverly Hills, I went upstairs to the restroom.

On entering I noticed a very well-dressed young man standing outside one of the cubicles. We nodded as men do in these situations, when a voice from the cubicle rang out and the occupant adlibbed the most extraordinary R&B licks in a somewhat familiar voice. The young man gave me a small shrug as the performance continued, until the toilet flushed and Stevie Wonder emerged, grinning, in a floor length orange caftan. His assistant led him to the sink and I raced to my table to recount the moment for my friends.

Returning to the seasonal theme, Stephen Bishop came to a Christmas party at our house, and in a quiet moment, picked up one of my guitars, and sang an exquisite version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”.

We were mixing Alannah Myles’ first album at the Atlantic Studios in NYC, when I ran into drummer Steve Ferrone, who had played on some of my earliest recordings, back when he was a member of the Average White Band. He subsequently played with Duran Duran, Eric Clapton, Chaka Khan, and many others, before becoming the drummer in Tom Petty’s band from 1994 to 2017. He said he was working down the hall with Joe Cocker and wondered if we’d like to drop in and have a listen to what they were doing. Yes. Alannah, her producer Dave Tyson and I causally ‘dropped in’, as you will when Joe’s down the hall, and we were welcomed as they were getting ready for a playback. Joe sat in the captain’s chair in the centre of the console and as the rest of us arrayed ourselves around him, I found myself right next to his chair where he relaxed, cold Corona in hand. He signaled the playback and the track blasted out of the speakers, sounding amazing as things often do in a studio. It took me a moment to register that there were no vocals on the track, as Joe began to sing “One Night of Sin”, an Elvis hit as “One Night With You”, in a full-throated performance that was one of the most breathtaking I’ve ever witnessed first-hand.

On a MuchMusic assignment to take a couple of contest winners to L.A. comedy clubs, cameraman Basil Young and I used our days to pursue interviews for a songwriting special I was working on. We were given the extraordinary opportunity of an interview with Willie Dixon at his home in Glendale. If the name isn’t familiar, the songs will be. Willie’s music is one of the cornerstones of American blues and his catalogue includes “Back Door Man”, “Spoonful’, “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and many more including “You Need Love”, a song that Led Zeppelin changed into “Whole Lotta Love”, which resulted in a plagiarism lawsuit settled in Willie’s favour. The interview was amazing, but the unexpected part came at the end, when Willie called his grandson Alex in from playing football on the lawn to accompany him on piano. Here’s the result.

https://www.facebook.com/ChristopherWardMusic/videos/384018689605745

Over Easy:Bonus Bob

Listening to CKY Winnipeg in June of 1965 in my dad's car, I heard a song that changed everything. The blood rushing up the back of my neck, the hairs on my skinny teenage arms at full alert - these were the early warnings of a rock n' roll epiphany. A blast of carnival sloppiness poured out of the speakers and then there was the voice.

Dylan. Who else? The sneering maestro with the all-knowing patter of a carnival barker. That mocking sing-song opening with it's hammering internal rhyme started a slow motion landslide of lyrics, piling up on the listener while letting you know that you're in on the joke. And then, he asks how it feels?

You can say that in a song? Up till then I wanted to be one of the Beatles, but on this day I knew I wanted to write like Dylan. It was the clarion call of creative freedom.

How would it feel to be on the receiving end of this kind of invective? And yet, at the end of it all, six minutes and thirteen seconds of rant n' roll later, the subject is liberated with the chorus's final title line, in all its romantic rambling glory.

Dylan, who started his career imitating Woody Guthrie and rewriting old folk songs, had traveled so far so fast, to the point that "Like A Rolling Stone" sounded like it had no antecedent, and yet, there in the title was that call-out to the musical past of Muddy Waters' "Rollin' Stone", itself a rewrite of a traditional blues song. Having inspired the names of a magazine, the 'World's Greatest Rock n' Roll Band' and this Dylan masterpiece was a lot of cultural weight for one song.

I'm certainly not the only person who was rocked to their foundations by this song. Grail Marcus wrote a book dedicated to it and a collector paid over two million dollars for a rough draft of the lyrics.

Mere weeks after "Like A Rolling Stone" came out, the #1 song was "Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter" by Herman's Hermits, but Dylan's full-throated challenge to the reigning rules of popular music wouldn't go unheard. In particular for one teenage future songwriter in his dad's car on a summer day in Winnipeg.

Happy Birthday Bob!

Over Easy:Yachty By Nature

“Was your music ‘yacht rock’?”, an interviewer recently asked me. Youch! He was referring to my 1978 album “Spark of Desire”, but still, I blanched. Wouldn’t you?

Ok, to begin with, I’ll acknowledge that some very respectable artists, like Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, have been shoehorned into a category of pop music that also includes Bertie Higgins (“Key Largo”) and Looking Glass (“Brandy You’re a Fine Girl”). But let’s face it, the term is inherently disparaging – I picture musicians with too much money and too many chords sipping Pina Coladas on the deck of a pleasure craft as the wind does expensive things to their hair. And the music? Shiny on the surface and soft in the middle like under-cooked sponge cake. Who wants to be called that? It would be like being called a “hair band”! You know, those metal bands who say they really want to be your boyfriend, not just chase you around the pool at the Hyatt on Sunset.

As I ponder these sub-genres of pop it occurs to me that they may have some things in common. As for origin stories, yacht rock was surely begat by the soft rock of the 70s and 80s, and who better to take the heat for a world of suckiness than Bread, a group of mostly rich session guys who named their band after a euphemism for money. And who penned such nonsense as,

“Lately I’m a-praying

that you’ll always be

A-staying beside me”

From the unforgivable “Baby I’m-A Want you”.

Or, perhaps you prefer this nugget from “Make it With You”.

“Have you ever tried

Really reaching out for the other side

I may be climbing on rainbows

But baby, here I go”

I want what he’s smoking.

Is it possible that these two strains of music share something? Sure, hair metal is for people who want to raise the horns salute at a concert with no risk of being splashed by fake blood or witnessing a simulated beheading, but those same glam purveyors with the stuffed tights are selling you sentiments like this one From Cinderella’s “Nobody’s Fool”

“I count the falling tears

They fall before my eyes

Seems like a thousand years

Since we broke the ties”

And then there’s,

“I didn’t know you were looking for

More than I could ever be

Not quite a year since you went away”

But wait, that’s from “Rosanna” by Toto.

Now admittedly, no yacht rocker would sing,

“Swingin’ in the living room, swingin’ in the kitchen

Most folks don’t cause they’re too busy bitchin’

Swingin’ in there cause she wants me to feed her

So I mixed up the batter and she licked the beater”

Whew! Aside from the diabolically clever rhyme scheme , that’s a slice of serious lyricism. Of course, it’s actually a slice of “Cherry Pie” from Warrant. I recently watched the video to see if there were any hidden meanings that I’d missed when this sort of thing occupied a major chunk of MuchMusic’s programming day, back in the 80’s. You know, the kind of secret messages that Taylor Swift plants in her videos. I don’t think there are any.

But the line gets blurred between,

“Though it’s been a while now

I can still feel so much pain

Like a knife that cuts you the wound heals

But the scar, that scar remains”

From “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” from Poison, or Poisson as we used to refer to them in the Much programming committee. How does that stack up against this treacly offering from Paul Davis?

“I sometimes wonder why

All the flowers have to die

I dream about you

And now, summer’s come and gone

And the nights they seems so long

Let me clear, though I may be a bit yachty by nature, that’s not my style any more than hair metal. If you’ve read this far, I feel guilty that I have no convenient conclusion to offer you, except that I’m glad the flowers die, because the garden would get awfully crowded. And if you’re sailing with Christopher Cross and he plays Quiet Riot on his high end Bose system, get out your horns. And be careful when you’re climbing on those rainbows.

Over Easy:Del Close’s Pony

When I was in The Second City Touring Company with brilliant comedic talents like Ron James, @debmcgrathics, Mike Myers, Bruce Pirrie and @cjscottgibson, we had workshops with visiting directors and other comedy luminaries to sharpen our skills for the next gig, where we’d perform through a shitty p.a. in a boomy dining room in Barrie for hungover shoe sales conventioneers. We made ourselves laugh by doing things like whispering through the curtains at our fellow actors, “Get off the stage. Get off the stage now.” True comedy.

For one workshop we were fortunate to work with the legendary Del Close, one of the founders of Second City Chicago. His list of students includes Amy Poehler, Bill Murray, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Gilda Radner, John Candy and John Belushi. During breaks, Del would regale us with tales from his unique life, including one story about his first show biz gig, as a sword swallower. Fascinated, we had to know how you do that most perilous of stage tricks. “By unlearning the gag mechanism,” Del informed us.

After a short pause, one of us inevitably asked how you do that, and Del explained that he tied a bunch of oysters on a string and slowly lowered them down his throat and back up again until he didn’t gag. Presto!

My best memory of Del’s teaching style was that fairly frequently he would critique one of our improvisational attempts with the line, “Where there’s a pile of shit, there’s a pony.” An excellent life lesson, reminding you that something wonderful can come from the worst disaster. Thanks Del.

Addendum – this morning I had to ask my daughter if there’s a poop emoji.