Stories to Tell Page 3

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  Okay, ready for this? Cut to: forty-one years after I sang “I Wanna Be Free” in front of my kindergarten class, I was standing near the baggage claim area of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, airport. While my tour manager waited for our suitcases and band gear to drop down the carousel, I noticed a man waiting for his luggage. It was Davy.

  Here I was, ten feet from him at the Harrisburg airport. He looked easily fifteen years younger than his age; still had a great head of hair and was very fit. I walked over and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Jones? My name is Ri—”

  His eyes widened as he said, “Richard Marx! Hey, man! I’m a fan!”

  I looked at him and said, “Okay… ummm… thank you. But I’m going to need a minute for my head to stop spinning around, and then I have a story to tell you.”

  As we stood there, I had the amazing opportunity to thank him, all those years later, for being exactly the way I had hoped he would be. He smiled and said, “Well, I’m glad your memory of me is a great one.” We then talked about his farm near Harrisburg and how he loved caring for his horses. He showed me the calluses on his hands from tending his farm but also made a point to mention that he still loved performing onstage. “We’ve gotta just keep doing it. Right, man?” he said. I thanked him once again, and we bid each other a fond good-bye and a hope our paths would cross again someday.

  Two years later, I saw in my Google News feed that Davy had died that morning of a massive heart attack. I felt incredibly sad. I certainly didn’t “know” the man, but he’d had an impact on my life, and I felt grateful to have met him those two times, decades in between. I was already quite active on social media by this point and decided I wanted to comment on his passing. I wrote a blog telling the story of meeting him at five, and again all those years later. I also felt I wanted to pay tribute to him musically. So I grabbed an acoustic guitar, turned on the camera on my laptop, and sang “I Wanna Be Free” for the first time since that morning in kindergarten. I had my social media team post the video, along with the blog, that afternoon. A week later, Davy’s family held a memorial service for him, and during the program, they played my video on a huge screen at the church.

  When I think about the events that had to occur to make this a story I can now tell you, I am truly humbled. However, I’m not surprised. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the ability to attract certain people onto my path, people who made a particular impact on me from afar. It would happen again and again throughout my life, as you’ll come to see.

  3 “THE ONE YOU NEED”

  I loved my dad very much, but he wasn’t around a whole lot when I was a kid. His career in the jingle business was on fire, so he devoted most of his time to writing and recording. We would hang out every so often on a random Sunday afternoon, but it was my uncles who became my regular male presences. Not only were they cool as fuck in my eyes, but also younger than my dad and less likely to discipline me or discourage the silly behavior of youth.

  One was my mother’s brother, Don. Quiet, cool, and handsome in a Tom Jones style with thick, bushy sideburns and an always tan physique that could easily grace the cover of Men’s Health magazine, even today at age eighty-one. The other was my aunt Vonda’s husband, Bob Coy. Bob looked a bit like a young Elvis with a black pompadour, but unlike Uncle Don, he was very outgoing and always looking for laughs. Though raised in Ohio, as was Don, Bob had a southern twang which to this day I’m not sure was natural or affected. He was scrappy and got into fights frequently, but at the time he and my aunt had no children and Bob doted on me, as did Don.

  While both uncles loved music, my uncle Bob was passionate about it. He played a little guitar and taught me my first song when I was nine, Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” I still find myself occasionally absentmindedly playing that electric piano riff on acoustic guitar to this day. A nine-to-five labor man, Bob spent a decent amount of his very hard-earned money on music. Particularly eight-track tapes, which were huge in the early 1970s, as most auto manufacturers had installed players into their newest models, enabling music fans to take their favorite albums mobile. (The very idea that this now completely ubiquitous practice began a mere fifty years ago is a serious mindfuck.) Bob had tapes by the bands and artists whom I not only loved but some of whom would be major influences on me: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, and of course, Elvis.

  I had loved and memorized every song Elvis had released since his first album in 1956, but my uncle Bob turned me on to the songs Elvis cut before that, the Sun Records sessions that preceded his releases on RCA. These were mostly blues and old country songs that Elvis reinvented simply by combining rockabilly guitar and his completely unique vocal sound, and it was my introduction to traditional country music.

  I wanted to be Elvis and seduce every beautiful girl I knew. One thing that I think was unique about me as a boy was that I never went through a “girls are gross” stage. Even in grade school, I had crushes on girls and wanted to have girlfriends. I romanticized what I saw on TV and in movies. Interestingly, I was sexually a very late bloomer, having developed huge insecurities about my looks from about seventh grade through high school. It was only after I moved to LA at eighteen and became hyper focused on succeeding in my career that I started to have any luck with women. Even then, I was all about romance. I wasn’t just looking to get laid. I wanted relationships. This explains why my first real girlfriend, whom I started dating at age twenty-one, became my wife of twenty-five years.

  My attraction to the art of romance also informed my songwriting from day one. I wrote songs to get girls’ attention. I wrote songs to try to say to a certain girl what I couldn’t voice verbally. I wrote songs to vent my deep longing for girls I felt either weren’t interested in me at all or had put me in the “friend zone.” Love, and all its incarnations, was and is the deepest well of inspiration for songs, and though I’ve had incredibly happy periods in my life, the songs I like the most (by me or any other writers) are the ones steeped in some melancholy. Unrequited love is in a dead heat with lost love for my favorite basis for a song lyric. Those feelings never fail to offer a path to poetry.

  In my sophomore year of high school, one of my best friends was Lynne Harwich. She and I had gone to school together since kindergarten and she was my first crush, back then! Even at five years old, she was the most beautiful girl in the world to me. I tried everything to get her to “like” me but to no avail. As years passed, we became friends, though I continued to pine for her silently. By our teenage years, I watched boyfriends come and go, and sometimes I would be her shoulder to cry on: 3:00 a.m. phone calls in which I’d remind her how gorgeous and desirable she was and how those guys were dipshits. Lynne became the muse for the first song I ever wrote, called “The One You Need.”

  Here, I’ve been standing here so long

  Waiting for the opening of your eyes

  Hoping that you’d realize

  That I’m the one you need

  It was a simple piano ballad that mimicked the romantic songs of that year, 1979. A mixture of the Commodores’ Lionel Richie and some Barry Manilow but drenched in innocence and honesty. A few days after I wrote it, I nervously asked her to meet me in the choir rehearsal room when I knew no one would be there. There was a grand piano, where I sat and played the song for her. It was like those scenes in Elvis movies where he sings to the girl and she falls madly in love with him. Only thing was: it wasn’t a movie, I didn’t look like Elvis, and while she smiled and told me how “sweet” the song and moment were, she just didn’t “like me” like me. Devastated as I was, I owe Lynne Harwich a tremendous debt of gratitude. She was the reason I became a songwriter.

  From there, it was like gas on a fire. All I wanted to do was write songs. It was 1979 and I was inspired and influenced by everyone from the Bee Gees and the Doobie Brothers to Elton John and Paul Simon. My biggest songwriting influence in high school was probably Billy Joel, with whom I wou
ld become friendly a decade later and even record and perform with onstage.

  My writing was all piano based at that time, and luckily, my parents had a beautiful Steinway grand in our basement. I wrote all my early songs on that piano and still have it today. I would spend hours upon hours teaching myself to play the hits of the day, and slowly I found I preferred to spend that time making up my own songs instead of playing others’. My lyrics were mostly about unrequited love, feeling lonely and being a bit of an outcast. Throughout my long career, I’ve not strayed too far from those concepts. They’re timeless, and I believe just about anyone can relate to them.

  4 “YOU ARE”

  It was a global superstar and personal hero of mine who encouraged an eighteen-year-old me to move to LA and pursue my career. By then, I had written four songs that I’d recorded into decent-sounding demos, and I’d given a cassette tape of them to a high school friend who was now at college in Boston. I’m not going to use his real name here—for reasons I’ll get into a bit later. Let’s call him Noah. Noah was one of my first “fans” and would listen to my demo tape in his dorm, cranking it up just as other students were doing with Blondie and REO Speedwagon records. His dorm mate, it turned out, knew a guy… who knew a guy… who was then working with the group the Commodores, and word got back to me that through this long chain someone would play my songs for the group’s lead singer, Lionel Richie.

  About three weeks later, I was at my parent’s house listening to records when the phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Hey, may I speak to Richard?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Richard… this is Lionel Richie.”

  For at least thirty seconds, I thought someone was fucking with me. I was debating whether it was my friend Josh disguising his voice or some other guy they’d had call me to prank me. But I was a huge fan of Lionel’s and had seen him interviewed on TV and listened to him do radio interviews so I knew his speaking voice, and I was pretty sure it was him.

  He carried on telling me that he’d been handed my cassette of four songs and that he’d listened and thought my songs were strong and that he really liked my voice. He was impressed that at only eighteen I was able to write well-structured songs that were also catchy. He asked me about my plans. I was a senior in high school. Was I going to college? He thought that might not be the best move for me. He suggested I finish high school and move to LA. “You can’t have a real career in the music business if you stay in Chicago. Move to LA and things will start happening for you.” I listened intently and asked him for some advice about what to do, all the while in a bit of a fog, my head spinning that I was actually on the phone with Lionel Richie.

  It’s important for me to mention here as a side note that throughout the years when I’ve recounted this story, I would always say, “I couldn’t fucking believe Lionel Richie called me!” But the truth is, from the moment my friend’s friend of a friend of a friend mentioned the remote possibility of it, I knew Lionel would hear the songs and call me. I just believed it would happen. So the truth of that phone call is that I was blown-away excited but not really surprised at all. I have always had a way of making the things I wanted come to me. Not monetarily, although that has been a by-product. I have willed things to happen with people. It’s why I’ve met, worked with, or become friendly with nearly every musical person who has made a real impact on me.

  I graduated from high school in the late spring of 1981, and a few months later moved to LA. My father went with me to help me find an apartment, and the second day there we stopped by the recording studio where Lionel was making his first solo album. He and I had had a couple of subsequent phone calls and he was kind enough to say, “When you come to LA, give me a call and come by the studio.” Though we had spoken a few times, I was nervous to actually meet him. But he was, and still is, such a warm and welcoming guy that he made my father and me feel right at home. He was in the middle of recording background vocals for a song called “You Are,” and as we sat on the couch in the control room, the conversations between Lionel and his producer James Carmichael made it clear they had been working on background vocals on that particular song for two days already and hadn’t found the right sound. TWO DAYS???? I thought. Coming from the jingle business, both my dad and I were shocked. It highlighted one of the significant differences between recording jingles and recording albums. In the jingle world, there’s an advertising executive, the client, present in the room and watching the clock to make sure budgets are met and no time is wasted. While making albums was very costly, it allowed for a much more relaxed approach to getting work done.

  Lionel and two hired session singers, David Cochrane and Deborah Thomas, were out in the large tracking room huddled around a microphone still trying to find the right blend of voices to fit behind Lionel’s lead vocal. “You are the sun, you are the rain… that makes my life this foolish game.”

  They sang it over and over and over, and when the music would stop, either Lionel or James would say, “It’s just not the sound yet. Try again.” Finally, after another unsatisfying attempt, Lionel looked through the glass separating the large recording studio and the control room at me, sitting on the couch facing out to the singers. He stared at me for a couple of seconds and then pointed his finger and mouthed, “You.”

  I literally did that thing where you get up and look around behind you because you know they can’t mean you. No one was behind me. I turned to Lionel and pointed at my own chest and mouthed, “Me?” He nodded and motioned for me to come out to where he was with the singers.

  “I wanna try something. Richard, you sing the part I was singing. Do you know it?”

  I had listened to them singing these parts for an hour or more and clearly knew every word.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He then told Deborah and David to remain on the notes they’d been singing and walked into the control room. He sat down at the engineering console and pressed the talk-back button, allowing us to hear him, and said, “Okay, I’m going to play the track. Try it with Richard on my note. Go.”

  The music I’d been hearing through the control room speakers now filled my headphones, and I was standing shoulder to shoulder with David and Deborah at the mic. I was very nervous but was also silently reminding myself that singing in a studio behind a microphone was something at eighteen that I’d already done for thirteen years of my life. I grew up in a studio. But there was still plenty of adrenaline. I took a quick glance through the glass at my father sitting there watching and saw on his face a combination of immense pride and complete confidence that his son was going to nail this shit.

  David waved his hand as a cue for us to start and we sang. “You are the sun, you are the rain…” The music stopped, and I turned around to look into the control room at Lionel. He had the biggest smile on his face when he pressed the talk-back and said, “That’s the sound!”

  I was thrilled that he liked the sound because that meant he liked my sound. We finished singing all the background vocals on the song within about twenty minutes. When we were finished and had come into the control room, Lionel said, “Hey, come back tomorrow. I’ve got another song I want to put you on.” He also offered me an invitation that literally changed my professional life. He said, “By the way, man. Just know that if I’m here, you’re welcome here. I may not have anything for you to do, but if you want to come by and hang and watch whatever’s going on, that’s cool.”

  I don’t think I missed a day being in that studio. In fact, in his liner notes on that album, his solo debut, he thanks a few people, including me, who “never missed a day.” It was like going to hit record production school. “You Are” peaked at number 4 on the charts. I also sang on two other tracks from that album, “Serves You Right” and “Wandering Stranger.”

  Lionel had me back to sing on his next few albums. On his second album, Can’t Slow Down, I sang on “Running with the Night” and “The Only One.” On the latter, it’s
just me and Lionel singing all the vocals. It was very late one night when Lionel called me for “The Only One” session. I was home at my apartment in Westwood, California, and Lionel said, “Doctor!” (Lionel calls people that.) “I need you to stop whatever you’re doing and come down to the studio. I need your voice on this track, and we’ve gotta record everything tonight.” When it came to Lionel, there was never any question that I’d drop everything in order to help him out. To this day, I feel a tremendous debt of gratitude to him for believing in the seventeen-year-old me and so graciously inviting me into his world. I jumped in my car and was at Westlake Studio (where many classic records, including Michael Jackson’s Thriller, were made) in twenty minutes. I loved the song we were working on, and at the very end of the last chorus, Lionel had come up with this extra hook to end the song. He taught me the harmony, and we both stood at the microphone singing, “You stole my heart away… you stole my heart away.” Then Lionel said, “Okay, we’ve got that. Now, you sing the melody, and I’ll sing the harmony.” That’s a great trick I’ve used on my own records when I have another singer with me in the booth. Switching parts gives everything more of a group sound.

  I also sang on a third track on Can’t Slow Down: the classic party anthem “All Night Long.” That’s me singing “all niiiight… all niiiiight.” I distinctly remember the day when Lionel played a cassette of the simple keyboard-vocal demo of that song for some of us a day or two before he brought in a band to record it. Anyone with functioning ears knew it was a smash. So catchy and fun. I was thrilled to get to sing vocals on it, and the session was overall quick and easy, except for one bit: the now famous “Swahili” chant.

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