A dear friend recently posted the cover of my solo album from 1978. Do the math. Wait….I’ll save you time.
I’m a hundred.
That friend is now dead to me.
Seeing my solo album cover sure brought back a flood of good and bad memories.
I found my producer/mentor by mailing him songs out of the blue. He found me a deal on a small label named Lifesong that was run by Terry Cashman and Tommy West. Terry Cashman was the singer who put out al those “We’re talkin’ baseball….” Songs…one for each team in the majors.
They had decided that they had more money than they needed s they signed me. The record company went out of business about a month after my album came out. (“Dropped” as the kids say)
We worked in the big studio on CBS’ Black Rock building on 52nd St in NYC.
We stayed at a Howard Johnsons, just over the bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Right next door to a Mr. Richard Feder.
I wanted to record with my band but my producer didn’t think they were good enough so I had to fire my best friend Dean. I was able to get a few of the guys on the record on one song and Dean made a few bucks by playing some percussion but I felt horrible. We had all come up thru the local hellholes together and we felt like this break was OUR break but it turned out it was only MY break and I was the one who had to tell them.
It sucks to be the King.
Random memories:
One song had an orchestra on it. It was amazingly cool to walk in and see all those grown men sitting with charts in front of them getting ready to play on something I wrote.
Some of the musicians were very famous. People who played with Beatles and stuff but I didn’t know it at the time. I just knew that my producer Harold had a fat Rolodex.
This album contains the worst lyric I ever wrote. Writing and singing it changed me in fundamental ways. The line is in a song called “Cool Night In Paradise,” and the line is:
“The fish in every sea
Follow you and me”
Spoiler alert: They don’t. They could care less.
The album got one review in the Boston Globe and he said that it was a must for all lover of California country rock.
We shot the album cover in Connecticut. A photographer came to town with his dog and we drove around for days trying to find something I could stand in front of and not look so cool that I would not be believable. We finally found a very old funky barn and shot a zillion pictures inside it. Then we shot about three outside in the field. Those were the ones we used. The reviewer missed a golden opportunity. He could have said that I was out standing in my field.
For years I told people that the dog was stuffed.
When we went out and promoted the record in NYC, we played a club and Robin Williams was there and he invited us all out for drinks after the show was over. I got his autograph on a napkin but I lost it in 1986.
I am not totally embarrassed by the album. It was a snapshot of where I was as a songwriter. There is a kernel of a good song in every song. A micro-kernel. A sub-atomic kernel. But it’s there.
I do have to admit that the cover looks like I am out searching for Dora the Explorer.