Stories to Tell Page 4

  Yeah jambo jumbo

  Way to parti’ O we goin’

  Oh jambali

  Tom bo li de say de moi ya

  Yeah jambo jumbo

  Lionel taught the three of us singing backing vocals the proper pronunciation as we learned the melody that accompanied it, and just as it would take some time to learn to sing in any other language, this was no different. We must have done thirty-five takes before we finally got “the one.” As we took a break, I asked Lionel what the lyrics’ literal translation was. He said, “Well, jambo is Swahili for ‘hello.’ ” I said, “Okay. What about the rest of it?” Lionel leaned closer to me and said, “The rest, my man… is pure gibberish. I just made that shit up.”

  5 “CRAZY”

  Soon after my work with him, Lionel recommended me to Kenny Rogers as a background singer for his album What About Me? It was 1983 and Kenny was one of the best-selling artists around. He was coming off a string of massively successful country and pop records including “The Gambler,” “Coward of the County,” and “Through the Years,” and was in the midst of recording a new album. He needed a few guys to sing background on a song called “The Night Goes On.” The session was easy. We knocked out the vocal parts quickly, thanks to our studio experience and Kenny having a keen ear and certainty about what he wanted. As they were setting up the next song, I sat inside the control room on a couch in front of the huge engineering console. I had only met Kenny that day. His large frame and iconic silver hair and beard were impossible not to notice. He was nice but all business, very focused on getting things done and not wasting time.

  As I sat there, I overheard Kenny say to an associate, “We still need a couple songs for this album. One of them needs to be a really simple ballad that anyone can relate to.” Kenny had recently had a massive hit with Lionel Richie’s song “Lady,” and he’s smart enough to know that when people really love something, try to give them more of it.

  I heard Kenny’s conversation and thought, I’m coming back here tomorrow for a second day of background vocals. I need to write that song he’s looking for. So, I went home to my little apartment in Encino, a second-floor unit that even after a year had only a bed, a single chair, a kitchen table, and a Yamaha keyboard in it, and wrote a song called “Crazy.”

  The melody began coming to me in my car, where melodies very often do, on the drive home. I pretended to hear Kenny’s voice singing the melody I was creating, and knowing the lyrical subject matter he was after, I focused on phrases that were both romantic and strong. “There’s no doubt in my mind, we can make this love go on forever.”

  The chorus came the way most of my others do. I sing the melody with gibberish words, over and over, trying different vowel sounds until my ears know that, for example, a long e sound on a particular note will sound more pleasing than any other. As I sang the chorus melody, my gibberish constantly sang a long a and the next thing I knew I was singing “Craaaaaaazy.” From there it’s a matter of filling in the blanks, telling the story.

  I was still pretty new to LA and hadn’t made enough money to buy any real recording equipment, so when it came to pitching songs to someone, my only choices were to sing and play it into a handheld cassette machine (which sounded like shit) or sit right in front of them and play and sing the song live. I recorded a decent, hiss-filled version of “Crazy” into my cassette recorder and went to sleep.

  The next day, I walked into the studio for my second day of background work, trying to figure out how to finesse telling Kenny Rogers that I, a completely unknown and unproven nineteen-year-old songwriter, had written the song he needed for his album. Now, please hear me when I say that what I was about to do is a really awesome way to get fired. I was hired as a background singer, and I walk in carrying an original song to pitch… so not cool. And I knew that even then, but I was brave enough (or stupid enough) to go for it.

  Kenny arrived about ten minutes after me, so I had that time to sit in the control room and get a really good sweat going in my armpits and down my back. I’m pretty sure the producers of the film Broadcast News took a cue from my flop sweat that day when thinking of how to make Albert Brooks look as nervous as possible as a news anchor.

  I looked around the room at Kenny, the engineer, the assistant engineer, the coproducer, and back at Kenny, scanning them for a sign of when I could approach the living legend standing before me, but probably looking like I had either a ticking bomb in my backpack or a steaming dump in my pants. A small sliver of wisdom came over me and told me not to go up to him until after I had sung my parts on whatever songs they needed me on that day. That way, I’d at least have done my work and have to be paid, even if they later launched me out of the building and onto my face.

  Vocals done, Kenny came over to me with an extended hand and said, “Great job, Richard. I’m glad Lionel told me about you. I hope to get you back later when we have more songs to work on.”

  My mouth drier than the Mojave, I said, “Thank you, Mr. Rogers.” And, yeah, even in that second I thought of the children’s TV show. “I know this is probably frowned upon, but, um, I’m actually a songwriter.” Kenny’s eyes narrowed and immediately showed a hint of glazing over. Undeterred, I continued, voice shaking: “I overheard you yesterday saying you were still looking for a simple ballad, and so I wrote a song last night I’d, um, really like you to hear.”

  As he drew a breath to speak, my mind imagined words like “SECURITY!” or “Listen, you Midwestern dipshit” or a variation of a sentence that contained the words “never,” “work,” “town,” and “again.”

  But what Kenny actually said was, “Well, where is it? Do you have a demo?”

  “I just have a cassette I recorded at home.” At this point, I thought I was dead in the water. I figured I’d give him that terrible-sounding recording I made using my cheap Yamaha keyboard in an echo-chamber of a studio apartment in Encino, and he’d either never listen to it or get five seconds in, hear the pops and hisses, and stop it right there. My songwriting career would be over before I could even legally drink.

  To my great relief, Kenny said, “There’s a piano in the next room. Just play it for me.”

  So, knees shaking just as my voice had been, I walked into the next room and sat down. Kenny sat beside me on the bench, and I played and sang a fairly flawless rendition of “Crazy.” Looking back on that three and a half minutes, it was pretty surreal. I was a fan of Kenny’s. Not a crazed fan, but I’d bought several of his records and sang along to him in my car hundreds of times. He was one of the biggest artists of that (or any other) time, and here he was sitting next to a kid new to the business, listening to a song I wrote in hopes he’d record it.

  He started speaking as I held the last D-flat chord. “I like this, Richard. It’s beautiful. But I have a thought. That last line where you say ‘You are the dream that finally came true.’ Could you say ‘For me’ after that?”

  I added two notes of melody at the end and sang “You are the dream that finally came true… for me.”

  Kenny smiled. “Yep. I like it. Maybe we can cut this next week.”

  I smiled and said, “That’d be great” and tried to play it fairly cool. Inside my head it was Mardi Gras. Those were the best words I’d heard since I’d moved to LA. I didn’t have a cell phone, so when I left the studio, I pulled my car over a block away and called from a gas station payphone with my news. They were elated. My father said, “This is just the beginning, Kiddo.”

  The next day I stopped into a well-known clothing store on Melrose Avenue called Fred Segal. In the 1980s it was where all the celebs and rock stars shopped. I used to go in and look around, but their inventory was well out of my budget. That day, after twenty minutes of browsing, I spotted a pair of black jeans that I knew I wanted. They were by Big Star and they were $125. Even now I think that’s a bit crazy for a pair of jeans. But I made a deal with myself that if Kenny did in fact record “Crazy,” I would come back and buy them. And about t
en days later, I was wearing them constantly.

  But the greatest moment that came out of “Crazy” was when we were recording it. Typically, when you write a song for someone, you’re in the studio when they record it in case it needs tweaking or additional work. So, I was in the studio when Kenny was singing his lead vocal, and at one point he took a break, came into the control room, and said, “I’m not sure about the opening of that second verse. The lyrics could be simpler. It needs to say what every woman wants to hear and what every man wishes he could say.” He started questioning some of my words. It was nothing specific that he didn’t like, but he kept asking “What else can you say here?” or “Is that the best rhyme for the line before?”

  Being green and very insecure, I got a bit defensive when I should have had the poise to say, “Let’s pick it apart and see if we can improve it.” Instead, I said, “Kenny, I disagree with you. I think it’s really good the way it is.”

  He looked across the room at me, and with great deliberation he uttered a phrase that remains my mantra to this day.

  “Richard, sometimes you’ve got to give up good to get great.”

  I humbly agreed to have a look at the lyrics, and after an hour or so with no good ideas for tweaks or changes, Kenny said, “Okay. I’m satisfied that we at least tried. It’s a beautiful song with beautiful words. Let’s do it.”

  The song became a number 1 hit on the Billboard Country Singles chart in 1985. It bears both our names as songwriters, despite the fact that Kenny contributed so little to it. He would consistently joke (even on television appearances), “I don’t think I wrote much of that song, but I love getting half the money.” Truth be told, even if it meant giving up half the money the song generated, I was happier to have my name on a song as a writer with Kenny than on my own. What other nineteen-year-old Midwestern transplant was in the songwriting company of Kenny Rogers? It set up so much of my future career as a performer, a songwriter, and, importantly, a collaborator. And even half of a Kenny Rogers song was going to buy some decent groceries (not to mention a bunch of blank cassettes for new song ideas) for a while.

  Kenny recorded two additional songs of mine on the What About Me? album. “Somebody Took My Love,” which I wrote with David Pomeranz (another deeply gifted songwriter who was a huge influence on me in my teenage years), and a song I cowrote with Kenny and David Foster called “What About Me?” which was not only the album’s title track but its first single and would become a Top Fifteen Pop single as well as number 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, giving me my first number 1 song as a writer.

  I remained friendly with Kenny for the rest of his life. He recorded a few more of my songs over the years, and in 2008 we even got to perform together at a charity event in Chicago I hosted for the Ronald McDonald House Charities. We sang “Crazy” as a duet and he joined me on my “Right Here Waiting,” but it was being part of his backup band and playing “The Gambler” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” that was a thrill of a lifetime.

  In 2010, I visited him at his home in Atlanta. He had recently become the father of twin boys, and he joked that even he couldn’t tell them apart. We spent the afternoon catching up and though he complained of some health issues, he was in good spirits. We wandered downstairs to his basement music room, where I started noodling on his electric piano and within a few minutes he was chiming in with melody ideas.

  I said, “Wait—are we writing a song?”

  He said, “Who knows? I’m just singing to what you’re playing. It’s nice. Too bad I just released a new album.”

  We ended up finishing the music before I headed back to the airport to fly home. The next morning, he emailed me a lyrical concept about how it doesn’t matter how much money someone has when it comes to love. Rich people and poor people both, if they’re lucky, get to have love in their lives. Kenny and I started emailing ideas back and forth and a week or so later “When Love Is All You’ve Got” was born.

  I was about to produce an album for a country artist named George Canyon and I played him the song. He flipped over it and asked if he could have it for the album. It ended up as a duet between George and me, and I’m extremely proud of that song.

  Kenny was thrilled with how it came out, and we vowed to write together more often, but his health began to decline and in 2015, he announced his farewell tour. We stayed in regular communication, mostly through email. Kenny always typed in all caps, and I would ask him why he was yelling at me. His emails in the last two years of his life became clear messages that he was in tremendous physical pain and was starting to give up. He’d mention how blessed his life had been but that it was winding down. I’d remind him age is only a number and that I, for one, wanted him to stick around a lot longer. On August 6, 2019, I realized it had been awhile since I’d checked in on him, which I mostly did regularly. I emailed him:

  Just saying hi, my friend.

  How are you doing? Are you getting some relief from any of the pain issues you’ve been dealing with?

  Hope so.

  Let me know how you are.

  Your pal

  Richard

  He quickly responded:

  HEY RICHARD

  YOU ARE THE BEST OF ALL MY OLD FRIENDS TO KEEP UP WITH ME….. I GUESS I’M AS WELL AS TO BE EXPECTED FOR MY AGE…. I’M CONVINCED HAVING PAIN IS PART OF GROWING OLD… BUT I DO LIKE KNOWING THERE’S SOMEONE OUT THERE WHO CARES..

  THANKS FOR BEING THERE FOR ME..

  KENNY

  The following January I emailed him again and he didn’t respond, which was quite unlike him. Kenny passed away on March 20, 2020, leaving behind a legion of heartbroken fans, including me. I will never forget him.

  6 “GUILTY” (BARBRA, PART I)

  Between 1982 and 1986, I primarily made my living as a background singer. Once I had both Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers on my resumé, word spread quickly about a new young background singer in town, and I began getting steady work.

  I have to admit, by that time I desperately wanted to be making my own records and touring, and I was frustrated that every record label was uninterested in signing me. But looking back, the fact that I had a means of making money—good money—singing on other people’s records and learning about record production, I should have been more grateful. Today, it’s somewhere between difficult to impossible to make a living as a background studio singer. I feel lucky to have been in the middle of its heyday. It was a fun job, and I met all kinds of talented and interesting people. I sang background vocals on records by George Benson, Philip Bailey, Chicago, Olivia Newton-John, Paul Anka, James Ingram, the Payolas, Jon Anderson of Yes, and a host of unknown artists. It was like going to record production school. I worked with some of the biggest producers and artists in the business and learned something from every session. I sang on many hit songs, and my name appears in the credits of quite a few massively successful albums.

  I sang on Whitney Houston’s 1984 debut album, on the track “Hold Me.” It’s a duet with Teddy Pendergrass that was recorded fewer than two years after the tragic auto accident that left Teddy paralyzed. He was just starting to sing again, and his voice was still pretty weak and fragile. His producer, Michael Masser, had hired me the year before to sing harmony vocals on the Peabo Bryson hits “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” (a number 1 duet with Roberta Flack) and “If Ever You’re in My Arms Again” and asked me to double Teddy’s lead vocal to make it sound stronger than it was sounding with just Teddy alone. That required me to adjust the tone of my voice to mimic Teddy’s voice, or at least blend in with it seamlessly.

  Though I never met Whitney while singing on her album, I did run into her at a studio in LA in 1992. She was recording the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, and I was in one of the other studios in the building working on something I don’t remotely recall. I took a quick break and was walking down the hall when we literally almost bumped into each other. She smiled that gorgeous smile and immediately gave me a big hug. “Oh my god, Ric
hard. How is it we’ve never met?” I said, “I don’t know, but I’m thrilled to run into you. Congratulations on everything.”

  We spoke for a few minutes, and then she asked, “You have kids, right?”

  “Yep,” I replied. “Two boys.” (Jesse, my third, wasn’t even a thought yet.)

  She looked around to see if anyone could hear us and said, “I ask you to keep this between you and me but… I’m pregnant! And it’s a girl!” I hugged her and told her it would be the biggest love she’d ever know. I think about the tragedy that would befall both her and her then unborn Bobbi Kristina and recall that conversation now with great sadness. So fucking tragic.

  * * *

  It became clear to me that one reason I was getting so much work was because my vocal range was wide. I could sing really high for a dude, and even higher in my falsetto voice. I could go toe-to-toe with the Bee Gees any fuckin’ day. In fact, one time I actually got to prove it.

  Barbra Streisand was mixing her live album One Voice, and I was next door in another studio singing background vocals on somebody’s record. She popped her head into our studio, looked at me and said, “Hi! Is your name Richard?”

  And I kind of freaked out for a millisecond before saying, “Ummm… yeah.”

  While I was always more a rock and roll fan, I knew a bunch of Barbra’s records by heart. I had crystal clear memories of one album in particular called Superman, but those memories were not just because of the great songs on the album but how ridiculously hot Barbra looked on the cover. It had Barbra in short white shorts, high white socks, sneakers, and a white T-shirt with the Superman logo. The back cover photo was almost the same, but it was of Barbra shot from behind, with just the right amount of derrière peeking out of her shorts. (Insert Beavis and Butt-Head “he-he-he” here.)

  “Someone said you’re a good singer, and that you can mimic voices pretty well,” Barbra said. “True?”