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Finding Laura Nyro

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One of the most enigmatic and evocative and emotionally intense songwriters ever to hit the Top 40, Laura Nyro’s career survived numerous dips and bends. Known for her late ‘60s smashes, “Wedding Bell Blues” (The 5th Dimension), “Stoned Soul Picnic” (the 5th Dimension), “Sweet Blindness” (the 5th Dimension), “And When I Die” (Peter, Paul & Mary, Blood, Sweat & Tears), “Eli’s Coming” (Three Dog Night), and “Stoney End” (Barbra Streisand), she dropped out of sight at the turn of the decade after releasing Gonna Take a Miracle with Labelle, an album length tribute to the r&b songs she grew singing on New York City subways and rooftops, harmonizing under the moon of love. Quite a departure from the stark and melancholy epics that populated her previous albums, like “Been on a Train” and “The Confession.”

Writing out of personal experience, Laura always stood at the front lines in the battle between the sexes, an emotional firestorm, who moved halfway around the world from the naive bliss of “Wedding Bell Blues.” After her mellow return to action in the late ‘70s, with Nested, Smile, and the live Season of Light, she dropped out again. Five years later Mother’s Spiritual marked a kind of emotional rebirth, a series of songs to and for her newborn son.

Around the release of that album, in 1984, I spoke with Laura, who gave few interviews. But after reading my piece on John Lee Hooker, she agreed to talk to me on the phone about her life as it applied to songwriting, portions of which appeared in USA Today. I had the pleasure of meeting her in person backstage at a Newport Folk Festival just a few years before she died in 1997. “I think that I searched,” she said in a smoky voice conjuring candles and incense, “and I think I traveled far to find something that was very close. People who are going to find their own convictions will all have to go through a certain amount of obstacles. I don’t think I’m different from other people who are searching….to be happy, really. And I’m kind of happy now.”

“When I was very young I remember sitting at a piano and hearing the notes and the chords ring out in the air and I knew there was something special in that sound, some kind of freedom. As a kid I listened to the 50’s songs of urban romance: ”The Wind” by the Diablos, “Oh What a Night” by the Dells, “Happy Happy Birthday Baby” by the Tune Weavers. The first two 45s I bought were “Bye Bye Love” by the Everly Brothers and “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes. A year or two later my favorite songs were by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions. By the age of 15 I was seriously listening to John Coltrane and jazz singers like Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Nina Simone. I remember one spring afternoon at (the High School of) Music & Art. The weather was lovely and me and my friends were sitting outside looking at a newspaper picture of the Beatles arriving in America. We were listening to ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and I felt this thunderbolt in my heart.

“I have a love for simple basic song structure, although sometimes you’d never know it. It’s a musical starting point and you could stay with it or take it to the ends of the earth, because as beautiful as simplicity is, it can become a tradition that stands in the way of exploration. I started off in music with simplicity and then moved into abstraction and some uncharted waters with the exploration of it. Some people would say went off the deep end. I wanted to learn more and I took freedoms with the principles of composition. I used these dark chord structures, suspended chords, advanced dissonances (advanced for rick and roll), rhythms leading to other rhythms within the same song. My jazz background put certain inflections into my songwriting and singing. Throw in all the poetry I’d read since I was a kid and just being a woman, and that’s what made my songs complex and emotionally rich.

“I don’t think you should categorize yourself as an artist. You should allow yourself to grow. Growth is the nature of the creative process. You have to accept it, respect it, and move on. The thing that’s important to me is to express life as I see it. That’s my priority. There’ve been many changes over the years as I saw life differently from age 18 and age 25. You have to remember, I was still a teenager when I made my first record and the world around me started changing at the speed of lightning just because I’d written some provocative songs. The ‘60s started spinning into a whirlwind and outside of some recognition for my music I felt like I was living inside a hurricane. My rhythm of life was more of a free spirited one and then it changed. I kind of felt like I was losing the rhythm of my youth. So many things were happening at the same time. This is how I experienced it. So I started slowly moving out of that scene so I could experience other things in life without a bunch of people breathing down my neck. When I turned 30 my love songs changed from romantic notions to a deeper taste of life. My mother died right before I wrote the songs for Nested. My child was born right before I wrote Mother’s Spiritual.

“The last few years have been so musically abundant that I felt like the Goddess of Creativity. But who knows? Next year I may only write one song, because that kind of songwriting is cyclical, seasonal; it’s the culmination of a deeper experience. It’s like nature, it takes time to seed and then it blooms. Mother’s Spiritual was a wonderful idea that flew through my head in a minute and then took years to manifest because the relationships and responsibilities that were inspiring the music were also pulling me away from it in terms of time. Since I was recording while I was writing it actually took me two and a half years to complete the 14 songs. Most of the songs I wrote a night. I would just wake up in the middle of the night. I had a young baby and that’s when I found the space to write. I didn’t work with a tape recorder. I would write my ideas down. I have love songs written upside down on matchbook covers. I’d write on my hand if there was no paper. Sometimes I might hear a particular instrument, like when I wrote ‘Melody in the Sky’ I heard gypsy violins.

“Once I’m writing I’m very disciplined. I’m there for the music. When I’m writing music there’s a certain magic from the music underlying life. It’s like you’re living at a deeper current. It’s a very complete feeling. You’re taking care of everyday things, but you’re living at the edge of a song.”

 

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THE BLEECKER STREET TAPES: OUTTAKES–ESSRA, FRANK & LOU

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Although they were an integral part of my Greenwich Village experience in the mid-to-late sixties, these three characters were deemed not “folkie” enough to be included in my new book, THE BLEECKER STREET TAPES: ECHOES OF GREENWICH VILLAGE (out now from Trouser Press Books)

“Canters!” the three teenage girls called out to the man with the long black hair, Fu Manchu moustache, and goatee. “Ben Franks!”

Frank Zappa, in Greenwich Village for a summer job at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street, with his freaky ensemble, the Mothers of Invention, stopped in his tracks when he heard the names of his favorite L.A. hangouts. This trio of teenyboppers were obviously aliens from back home. So, Zappa proceeded to escort them into the Garrick to see the show that night for free. It was 1967 and the Village was in the midst of a love-in, influenced in part by Zappa’s compelling translation of the L.A. Experience, opening on the Lower East Side at the Balloon Farm, later exported to the Garrick, in the West.

Two of the girls were from Los Angeles, while the third was from Philadelphia. She was nineteen; her name was then Sandy Hurvitz. Within two weeks she’d be a Mother.

“When I went to hear the Mothers, Jeremy Steig was opening that night,” Essra Mohawk told me. “It was the only concert I ever saw on acid, and I ended up being in both bands.”

Sandy was rechristened Uncle Meat once she became a part of Frank Zappa’s bizarre musical operation. “One of Frank’s jokes was that he liked to use opposites to call people,” she told me. “Like Suzie Creamcheese, another of his characters, was a real bitch. You try to be nice to her, she’d go ‘Who are you talking to?’ So, she had this attitude and he called her something soft—Suzie Creamcheese. I was real nice and sweet, so he called me Uncle Meat. After a couple of months of it I said, ‘Hey, I really don’t want to be Uncle Meat,’ and Frank said, ‘I’m sorry, but I must insist you are.’ And I said, ‘Well, excuse me. Here I thought you were Frank Zappa, the wonderful musician, and now I find out you’re God and you’re going to tell me who I am.’ So, a few days went by and he said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to be Uncle Meat. If you don’t want to make money out of the name, I will.’ I said, ‘Thank you and more power to ya.’ And so, he came out with an album and called it Uncle Meat just to prove a point to me.”

Abundantly long-haired and freaked-out, Uncle Meat’s three-song cameo in the Mothers of Invention concerts that summer was, to me, the high point of the show. Though her songs were frankly incoherent (her main theme was entitled “Arch Godliness and Purpleful Magic”), I saw her as the ultimate merger of all that was wonderful in the reigning female types of the age, possessing the street-wise angst and funky sex appeal of Maria Muldaur, the verbal dexterity of Joni Mitchell, the troubled urban soul and ethereal innocence of Laura Nyro. Though her voice was closer to Etta James than pseudo-Joan Baez, in all other ways she represented the essential candy-store evangelist of the mid to late sixties, who lugged guitar cases twice their size down to Washington Square Park to sing their wrenching rhymes in voices about six decades too old for their bodies—a mystical cross between Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and the classic Janet Margolin character Lisa, from David & Lisa, who talked in rhymes and had soul-deep, scared little faraway eyes and a sad smile that could break your heart.

Sandy left the band after six months as an auxiliary Mother. By that time her Village dues were paid in full. “I opened for everybody at the Café Au Go Go, next door to the Garrick. I did three sets a night there, three sets a night with the Mothers, and three sets with Jeremy Steig & the Satyrs—nine sets a night, for fifty dollars a week.” Her first album, on Verve records, done under the auspices of Frank Zappa, was actually an unfinished demo tape. It came out in 1968, attracting relatively little attention, except for a phone call it prompted from an admirer.

“I was living with my girlfriend on West Fourth Street in the Village,” she related, “and one day a voice on the other end of the phone says, ‘My name is Laura Nyro, and we heard you need help. David Geffen is my agent and he helped me and I’m sure he could help you.’ And I was a flower child, and my thought was, ‘Isn’t that nice, these strangers want to help me’—not knowing that these things don’t happen.”

Briefly, Sandy became part of Laura’s entourage, an artist-in-waiting. And wait she did. While recording what would be her second album in California, she met and six weeks later married her record producer, Barry Feinstein, aka Frazier Mohawk. Thus, Essra Mohawk was born. The couple took a house nestled among the elite of sixties rock in Laurel Canyon. Paul Rothschild, who was producing Janis Joplin’s first solo album, Pearl, lived across the street. “He was looking for material, and my stuff was perfect for her,” Essra said. “But we were a little tardy in getting the tape to them, and, I’ll tell you, she died before I finished making that tape.”

“I don’t remember those years,” Essra said when I met her at her mother’s house in Philadelphia. “There are a lot of things I don’t remember. Little by little I’m starting to remember. With some of the stuff I’m starting to remember why I forgot.”

Zappa himself wasn’t overly impressed by the revolution in manners and mores taking place on the streets of Greenwich Village. “There wasn’t too much going on in the Village that interested me,” he said when I interviewed him in 1974 at the Golden Gate Motel, overlooking scenic Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. “The people who came to see us at the Garrick mostly had short hair; they came from middle-class white Jewish environments, mostly suburban. They came to see our show because we were something weird that was on that street and we were a sort of specialized recreational facility.”

As a charter member of that stereotypical group, I silently took offense at this portrait. But Zappa wasn’t partial to the hijinks going on in San Francisco either.  “I was up to San Francisco once or twice, but I wasn’t interested or influenced by the scene there,” he said. “Basically, I thought what was happening in San Francisco in that early stage was … well, I’ll tell you what I saw when I went there. Whereas in L.A. you had people freaking out; that is, making their own clothes, dressing however they wanted to dress, wearing their hair out; that is, being as weird as they wanted to be in public and everybody going in separate directions – I got to San Francisco and found everybody dressed up in 1890s garb, all pretty specific codified dress. It was like an extension of high school, where one type of shoe is the ‘in’ shoe. It was in the same sort of vein, but it was the costume of the 1890s. It was cute, but it wasn’t as evolved as what was going on in L.A.   

         “At the time I was living in a part of town called Echo Park, which was a Mexican, Japanese, Filipino, Black neighborhood and I lived in a grubby little two-room place on the side of a hill, 1819 Bellevue Avenue. In that house, I wrote ‘Brain Police,’ ‘Oh No, I Don’t Believe It,’ ‘Hungry Freaks,’ ‘Bowtie Daddy,’ and five or six others. A lot of the songs off the first album [Freak Out] had already been written for two or three years before the album came out. And a lot of songs wouldn’t come out until the third or fourth album. About fifty percent of the songs were concerned with the events of 1965 At that time, in the kiddie community I was hanging out in, they were all getting into acid very heavily and you had people seeing God in colors and flaking out all over the place. You had plenty of that and meanwhile there was all that racial tension building up in Watts.

“The reason people were shocked by our music in those days was that they hadn’t seen or heard anything that came close to what we were doing.  Basically, what people want to hear in a song is I love you, you love me; I’m o.k. you’re o.k.; the leaves turn brown, they fell off the trees; the wind was blowing, it got cold, it rained, it stopped raining; you went away, my heart broke, you came back and my heart was okay. I think basically that is deep down what everybody wants to hear – it’s been proven by numbers. So, you start to think about the performer’s role as an entertainer, and that the audience is paying money to come there and see you do something that will basically gratify them. And I have a conflict where I believe that people are entitled to get off as much as they can, and I think entertainers ought to do just that; however, I don’t merely want to go out there and bullshit my way through a show. I want some substance too, so I have to mix it up a little bit and do some of the things that people wish to have done before their very eyes on stage, and at the same time keep myself from going crazy by writing down some of the things I want to hear.”

 Fellow iconoclast Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, had a similarly negative view of the prevailing ethos not only of the Village, but also of San Francisco.

“When we went to Frisco,” he told me in 1974, “Bill Graham was doing his Fillmore, and he had a light show, right? So, we walked in and we saw a slide of the Buddha and we said, ‘That’s gotta go!’ He hated us, said we were the lowest trash ever to hit Frisco. Ralph Gleason, the dean of American reviewers, wrote in a review—I’ll never forget it—he said the whole love thing going on in San Francisco has been partially sabotaged by the influx of this trash from New York, representing everything they had cured. Let’s say we were a little bit sarcastic about the love thing, which we were right about, because look what happened. We knew that in the first place. They thought acid was going to solve everything. You take acid and you’ll solve the problems of the universe. And we just said, ‘Bullshit, you people are fucked. That’s not the way it is and you’re kidding yourselves.’ And they hated us.”

When Lou Reed arrived in the Village in ’67, the neighborhood had been engaged in a mini-civil war. The Village west of Fifth Avenue had tradition on its side, some notable watering holes, the Vanguard for jazz, and the coffee house scene, with Folk City, the Night Owl, the Café Wha, the Bitter End, the Garrick, the AuGoGo, and the Gaslight. But the East had those marvelous slum apartments, perfect for dropout living, had the Summer of Love in its backyard, rock flow, the Balloon Farm and the legendary Fillmore East. St. Mark’s Place was giving Bleecker Street a run for the hippie dollar. There was more than mecca at stake here, more than a territorial skirmish for possession of those sultry girls in tight dungarees, weekend runaways to decadence. There was a philosophical debate raging too, a war of lifestyles. It was like the difference between folk/rock and heavy metal, between grass and heroin. In the West Village, you still held onto your day job, got stoned every night after work. Acid was a risk worth taking, every once in a while, for the world it revealed. Primary to your lifestyle was control, discipline in your craft. For years, you might plod along, revising.

But once past Fifth Avenue, everyone freaked-out. No one did acid over there because they believed in it, only because it happened to be a good kick at an orgy. Minds were blown and busted routinely out on the edge where hippie genii spewed speed raps into microphones, issued verbatim transcripts as works of art and were rewarded with the keys to the vault as they slouched through the ozone.

So, if you were a Western Yankee, the Rebel Eastsider was an object of envy and ridicule. You longed for a taste of such liberation – to really go psycho for a month or two – but knew the price was way too high – spontaneous art was fine, but let’s see them do that again for posterity. Meanwhile, those on the other side of the divide held the Yankees in the same ambiguous contempt, whining for your Establishment praise and approval, while at the same time calling you gutless or worse, conventional.

With their image of leather lips and contemporary cool –so chic and vague and dispirited—their melancholy songs of addiction and despair, led by Reed scowling in sunglasses, the Velvet Underground started at the Cafe Bizarre, off McDougal Street, a tourist trap, where they didn’t even have hawkers. Then came Andy Warhol and soundtracks at the New Cinematheque. When they opened at the Balloon Farm, a converted dancehall above the Dom, later to be known as the Electric Circus, all the freaks in the neighborhood made the place the number one local hangout. The group did ‘Heroin’, and ‘I’m Waiting for My Man’ – songs of another culture, the new age, written in blood, accompanied by a grinding, atonal backbeat.    

“At one point you seemed to be into describing a certain kind of scene.” I said to Reed, “and making it very real for people who knew about it, but didn’t really know about it.”

“Especially for people who didn’t know about it at all,” Reed chimed in, dropping his cool for a moment.   

“Well, people might have heard of the East Village, but that’s as far as it went.”   

“Yeah, but I brought a little taste of–” Catching himself, he held back. “Ah, maybe that’s pretentious. It’s just I wrote about what I knew about.”

“What would you call it, the Lower East Side experience?”

“It was a show by and for freaks, of which there turned out to be many more than anyone had suspected, who finally had a place to go where they wouldn’t be hassled and where they could have a good time.”

“Did it surprise you that this crowd was out there?”

“Well, you see, Andy had a week at the new Cinematheque when he could put on whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to put on was us. . . with films and stuff. And the people who showed up – everybody just looked at everybody else and said ‘Wow, there are a lot of us.’ So, we knew they were there.”  

His album Berlin was another highlight moment of our conversation. “Berlin needed a lyrical approach that was direct. There could be no mistaking it, no head games. You didn’t have to be high to figure out what was happening, or be super hip or anything. It was to-the-point, whereas some of my other albums and songs had puns or double entendres. In other words, the difference would be, in ‘Heroin’ I wrote ‘It makes me feel like Jesus’ son’. Now if the Berlin guy had said that he’d say ‘I take heroin’. That’s the difference. Like in ‘Heroin’ I say ‘I wish I was born a thousand years ago’. The guy on Berlin would say ‘I don’t dig it here.’ You can go through the whole album and he’s always approaching things that way. He’s consistently saying very short, straight, to-the-point, unmissable things.”

Reed seemed uncommonly proud of the review the album got in Rolling Stone, in which the critic thought the singer should be shot.

Like a freaked-out Zen master, Reed’s words can be misconstrued in several ways, but for much of our interview, he was he guy from Berlin, with a series of short, straight, unmissable replies. The question occurred to me: had the many complex emotions he’d lived through in the sixties, the drugs and suicides, the bad trips which scarred the Andy Warhol crowd, then his belated rise to fame, driven him into a psychological corner? And his response to it, like his songs, were statements of an experience so devastating as to defy expression except by the most primitive of means? Reflecting a life where, after feeling too much for too long, the safest reaction is no reaction at all?

“Do you see this as representing a new approach to things on your part?” I asked. 

Reed shrugged. “On my next album I may go right back to the other way.”

         He perked up when I asked him what writers he admired. “Dorothy Parker,” he said quickly. “If she wrote a song, watch out! That would be something else because she was right on target. I mean, just a little short story about a guy and his wife, where he’s reading the newspaper and she’s setting the table and they’ve got nothing to talk about – that story’s unbelievable, so painful sometimes you just have to put her away or she’ll drive you through the wall.”

I asked him if any songs had ever affected him that way.

“‘Mother’ by John Lennon,” Reed said. “That was a song that had
realism. I mean, that did it to you. That’s about the only one I can think of on that level. When I first heard it, l didn’t even know it was him. I just said ‘Who the fuck is that? I don’t believe that.’ Because the lyrics to that are real. You see, he wasn’t kidding around. He got right down to it, as down as you can get. I like that in a song.”

“Do you think you’ll get further down in your songs?”

“I think I’ve gone as deep as I want to go for my own mental health,” Reed replied. “If I got any deeper I’d wind up disappearing.”

As opposed to Reed, Frank Zappa’s relationship to language was stark and unambiguous. “I’ve always hated poetry quite a bit,” he said. “I really hate it. The whole idea of it just makes me gag. And usually people who produce it – I don’t like to make sociological generalizations, but that’s not something I readily identify with…the suffering and the pumping on the chest with the closed fist, bowing of the head… leaves falling off the trees, the wind coming up and all that shit. I hate it. I don’t like books either. I very seldom read. My wife and I have a joke because she likes to read. I say there’s two things wrong with the world today, one of them is the writers and the other is the readers. The main thing wrong with writers is that they’re dealing with something that is almost obsolete, but they don’t know it yet – which is language. The meanings of words have been corrupted to the point where, from a semanticist’s point of view, how can you convey an accurate piece of information with this language?

“I’m not saying writers should be replaced. I feel sorry for them. They have a problem similar to people who write music. It’s just as hard to write an accurate musical concept down on a piece of paper because of the new techniques on all instruments.  

“I think, ideally, the way it should be is you could use words for amusement purposes only, because the spoken word, the sound of words…strikes me as funny, because of the differences in people’s noise-producing mechanisms. But as far as the information communicated in the words, it would be better if people could communicate telepathically.

“Actually, that’s all a bunch of crap. I’m telling you, folks, I just don’t read very much. I don’t like books too much. I don’t like poetry at all. And that’s it.

“I think by the time I put a lyric down on a piece of paper and go through all the drudgery of setting it to a musical format and rehearsing it and so forth … that they’re all reasonably successful in saying what they were intended to say. There’s plenty more that could be said, but there are obstacles in the way of getting that out to an audience. I think there are lots of things I’d love to be able to express to people in lyrics, but being sort of a rational person I sit down and figure out, do those people really want to know, and is it worth the trouble to write it out, rehearse it, perform it night after night, record it just to express my point of view on a subject when it’s none of my business to inform somebody else about it in the first place.”

“As open as I was when I began,” Essra Mohawk told me in Philadelphia, “by the mid-seventies I’d become a totally conventional young lady.” She’d returned to California in 1973, but an album deal with New York-based Paramount sent her shifting coasts again. When Paramount merged with ABC, Essra’s management took the record to Elektra/Asylum. The ensuing Essra Mohawk, a sensuous war-whoop of anguish and bliss, was regarded warily by an audience who wanted to put such extremes well behind them. Songs like “If I’m Gonna Go Crazy with Someone It Might as Well Be You,” “Back in the Spirit,” and “Magic Pen,” which contained the statement “There will always be more of us …” were a mild shock to the easy-listening sensibilities of 1974, a period dominated by the comfortable blandness of Carole King’s lyrics and Olivia Newton-John’s physique. Even though Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark would appear, filled with fragrant and touching moments, they seemed in the stale and complacent atmosphere like the dying embers of a smoldering torch first kindled in the woods of Monterey.

Essra’s fourth album, Essra, begun on Elektra/Asylum, went over budget and was peddled to Private Stock, which released it in 1976—one more shriek of weird life into the void that was becoming disco, and then silence. Essra moved back to California in 1977, got married again in 1978 and divorced again in 1979.

“I believe in the eighties and I believe in this generation,” she said. “The sixties were just a taste of something yet to come. It was short-lived because the people suddenly had a direction without any practice or chops and the seventies was spent getting their chops together. Now all of these people who were in their twenties are in their thirties and can better and more stably do what they set out to do then.

“I think I’m real fortunate that it didn’t happen for me back then,” said Essra, speaking to me on the phone from Beverly Hills, where she was preparing, as it happened, for her third marriage. “At that point in my life I had no caution and I would ride with the flow. Now I’m older and there are lines I don’t go beyond. I was a fearless teenager then. We were all adolescents forever. Our parents had been through the Depression, therefore they overprotected us, so we were allowed to remain children longer than any other generation in history. So, we didn’t know responsibility. We didn’t know caution. We only knew freedom. What’s wrong with all these people older than us? Don’t they know how to be free? Then we found out, if we lived long enough, that there were things they were hip to that we had better get hip to. So, I personally feel I was saved. I grew up really wanting to give something to this world, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it. So, I’m grateful I didn’t make it then. I’m not bitter at all. I know what I would have done with my success. I would probably be dead.”       

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A Cup of Coffee with Chris Frantz

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MY FAIRFIELD NEIGHBOR CHRIS FRANTZ HAS A BOOK COMING OUT. HERE’S A PIECE ABOUT OUR CHAT IN A DOWNTOWN COFFEE HOUSE.

Chris Frantz, drummer for Talking Heads, wants you to know one thing. “A lot of people thought David Byrne was the goose that laid the golden egg. It wasn’t really like that. He was the egg, but he was not the goose.” The goose was Talking Heads. He clarifies, “We always thought Talking Heads was the mother ship and Tom Tom Club and anything else we did was just a spinoff of that.”

Tom Tom Club was a side project he and his wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, came up with during an indefinite early hiatus, when lead singer David Byrne got a gig scoring the Twyla Tharp dance project, The Catherine Wheel. At first Chris and Tina weren’t interested in having a side project, even when the fourth member of the group, guitarist and keyboard player Jerry Harrison, announced he was doing a solo album. It was actually their accountant who convinced them. He said, ‘Yes, you’re doing well, but you just did this big tour of the world with an eight piece band and you’ve only got about $2,000 in the bank. So you’d better do something.’

“Tina and I looked at each other. Neither of us were singers, at least at that time, and we thought, ‘What kind of solo album could we do?'”

Taking advantage of the early ’80s hip hop/dance era, they concocted the Tom Tom Club, whose first album The Tom Tom Club, produced the massive club hits, “Wordy Rappinghood” and “Genius of Love,” propelling it to instant success.

How much success? “Well, let me tell you this story,” says Frantz. “When the first Tom Tom Club album was raging, we were riding in a cab from 57th Street downtown to Irving Plaza. In the car was Tina, myself, our manager, and David Byrne. I wish our manager had waited until David wasn’t in the cab with us. But he said, ‘Hey, guess what? The Tom Tom Club album went gold today.’ Tina and I were like, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ But David was just sitting there, not making any comment. Talking Heads had not had any gold albums in the United States to that point. I think we had one in New Zealand, of all places. So “Genius of Love” is right up there, in terms of sales, with the best of the Talking Heads.”

Chris Frantz:
Our manager was good friends with Chris Blackwell of Island Records. We already knew Chris because he’d passed on Talking Heads. In fairness to him, he said, “I’m putting all of my power into breaking Bob Marley in America.” Anyway, our manager said to Chris, how about if Chris and Tina come down to Compass Point and make a record down there. Being keen on reggae, he understood the power of a good rhythm section. So he said, “Sure, send them down and they can record a single. And if I like the single, then they can do a whole album.” The first song we recorded was called “Wordy Rappinghood.” We recorded it and mixed it in three days. Chris Blackwell came into the studio and said, “I love it. Get started on a whole record. And in the meantime, I’m going to release this as a single in Europe and Latin America.” It did really well. In quite a few countries it went to #1. So we got to work on an album.

We worked with one of the house engineers at Compass Point, Steven Stanley. At that time, he wasn’t getting a lot of work, but Tina and I liked him, and we thought, “We can work with this kid.” We had worked with him a little bit on Remain in Light when the first engineer, Rhett Davis, a very famous British engineer who came down with our producer, Brian Eno, got mad at Eno and left after three days. So we had Steven come in as sort of an interim engineer while this other guy got himself together to come down. Stevie had recorded all the tracks for “Once in a Lifetime,” so we knew he was a good engineer. And he became coproducer with us. We mentioned to him that we liked Lee Perry. Stevie was totally into that sound, except he was much more precise and had a more international outlook. Like, Stevie wasn’t just thinking about what would be hot in Jamaica, he was thinking about the whole world.

“Genius of Love” was the second song we started. We didn’t finish it until a couple of weeks later. I had the idea for the title and Tina wrote the rest of the lyrics and the melody, except for the last line. I wrote:

He’s a genius of love
He’s got a greater depth of feeling
Yes, he’s the genius of love
He’s so deep

We wrote all the songs for the album in the studio. We had learned to write that way on Remain in Light. It’s a good way of coming up with surprise things. If you just sit down with a piano and a vocal and you make a demo, chances are it’s going to sound like something that came before. Same with a singer/songwriter with a guitar: chances are it’s not going to be a real surprise to your ear. But if you go in with no preconceived ideas, or maybe a slightly preconceived idea, but not a fully formulated idea, then it can just go anywhere.

In the studio I’d play the drum part. It’s played by hand, but it’s a loop part. It doesn’t have any fills or anything, but it does have some tom-toms, so I would record a groove with bass drums, snare, and hi-hat. Then Tina would put down her bass. Then I would add a little tom-tom here and there. And then we added the keyboard part, which was actually two keyboard parts combined. Then Tina worked out the vocals with her two sisters, Laura and Lani, and a little bit of screaming by myself. Then we added Adrian Belew on guitar. We also had a Bahamian guitarist named Monty Brown playing a simple rhythm part. He had recently left T-Connection, a Bahamian funk band that had had a few hits.
Chris and Tina started dating in 1972 after they met at the Rhode Island School of Design. They have been married since 1977.
Lyrically, things would get changed as it went along, but Tina had a good idea of what she wanted it to be about. We also wanted to pay tribute to all these great soul artists that we really enjoyed and appreciated, like Smokey Robinson, James Brown, and Sly and Robbie. “There’s no beginning and there is no end/time isn’t present in the dimension.” I didn’t hear that line coming. Tina came up with that. That stuff in the middle, that’s Tina’s sister, Lani, who invented this language when she was a little kid. It’s gibberish, but it sounds like it might be Hindu or something. People at the time were asking, “What kind of language is that?” Well, it’s this language that Tina’s sister Lani invented as a child.

I would say it probably took two 16-hour days to complete, but once we had the bass and drums, we already knew we had a hit. Usually, you wouldn’t say, “This is a hit,” because you don’t want to jinx it, but I think everybody in the room knew it.

It was the next single in Europe but it didn’t really happen there. It was a hit in the dance clubs but it was not a commercial radio hit. But before the album came out Island pressed 100,000 12″ singles and exported them to the US. We were signed to Island only for the UK, Europe, and parts of Latin America. Actually, we didn’t make the deal in the US until one day after Island had sold 100,000 import singles in the United States. Seymour Stein at Sire, bless his heart, woke up that morning and said, “Whoa! I’d better get on this.” And he then offered us a deal. But originally he wasn’t interested.

First time we played “Genius of Love” live was on the tour that became the movie Stop Making Sense. We had never intended for Tom Tom Club to be a live thing. To us it was just an interim thing while Taking Heads waited for David Byrne to be finished with The Catherine Wheel. But in fact, on that tour some people would say, “I didn’t come here tonight to hear Talking Heads, I came here tonight to hear Tom Tom Club.” That was mostly in the big cities, with people who liked urban music. In New York it would be the Mudd Club and Danceteria and Hurrah. All of those places would play music to dance to, but it could be any kind of genre – it wouldn’t necessarily be disco. It might be new wave from England. It might be something from France or Africa. It wasn’t necessarily your cookie-cutter disco bands. But down at CBGB’s, where Talking Heads started, there was a whole “disco sucks” thing. Those people just disdained anything having to do with dancing. To them it was all disco and it was all bad. They didn’t like rap either, but Debbie Harry and Blondie did. They had a big hit with “Rapture,” and then just weeks later we came out with “Wordy Rappinghood,” which was also a white girl rapping. Neither of us knew that the other was doing it, because we were recording in the Bahamas, and they were recording in New York.

The song came out in ’81. So the checks started rolling in as early as ’82, continuing through ’83. And then there might have been a little dry spell. But the song still sounds fresh even today. It still gets used in movies and on certain TV commercials. Recently, it was in Anchorman 2 and The Wolf of Wall Street at the same time. But it was a pity that we didn’t have time, after the initial thing, to really take Tom Tom Club seriously until after Talking Heads was over. Because with Talking Heads we were touring a lot and when we weren’t doing that we were working on new records. We did do several Tom Tom Club records after that, but they were all kind of squeezed into a certain period of time.

The only comment David ever made was when we went to see the premiere of The Catherine Wheel. Tina and I sat with him in the VIP section with Baryshnikov and all these dance people, and afterwards there was a party at Studio 54. So we went to Studio 54 and what should be playing when we walked in but “Genius of Love”? It sounded so good and you could tell everybody in Studio 54 was really getting off on it. David leaned over and he said, ‘How did you get that hand clap sound?’

That was the only thing he ever said about the record.

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Recalling My Old Neighbor, John Mayer

brucepollock302

We moved to the block in 1985, only a couple of years after I had been hired as the first editor of GUITAR for the Practicing Musician, a publication which would go on to become one of the most popular music magazines of the decade. My neighbor, John Mayer, was then about eight or nine years old. To me he was just another of the regular horde of neighborhood boys who used the tree in our front yard as second base for their stickball games in the summer and the south end zone marker for their football games in the winter. There were at least six of them in the horde, as I recall, including the three Mayer brothers. My two daughters, aged 2 and 7, were definitely charter members of the sidewalk cheering squad that urged those boys on to even more unseemly acts of male bravado on my front lawn. When the older one got old enough, she invited John to a basement boy girl party, where John got claustrophobic and wound up trying to crawl out of the basement window.

It was several years later that I started hearing the sound of an electric guitar wafting out of the window of the house across the street and two houses down. This was just about the time my wife had decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of learning how to play guitar and I had used my influence to get her a discount on a nifty Yamaha FS-310 acoustic. But the speed and fluency displayed by our neighbor (we soon learned it was John) as he deftly mastered the pentatonic scale in less than a week and a half proved too much for her as she earnestly plucked her way through “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for the 90th time. She was his 8th Grade Art teacher, for crying out loud. So she sadly went back to painting portraits.

It seemed like days later, when my older daughter came home to say that John Mayer wanted to know if he could call me to ask for advice about music. Of course, I told her to tell him, heavy metal maven that I was. The difference, I found, between people who were really serious about getting ahead in the arts, and the mere dreamers, was their ability to identify the people who could give them good information, and then go after them, in the process demystifying an otherwise daunting journey.I gave my daughter a Guitar Magazine t-shirt for John, but he never did call.

Nevertheless, when John left the block to attend The Berklee School of Music in Boston, we were impressed but not surprised. We were definitely more surprised come the Spring of 2001, when word came circulating back to the block that a John Mayer was opening for the Dave Matthews Band on his current tour and was soon to have an album out on Columbia Records! This was a leap beyond our ability to grasp. In this fame-drenched world of ours, where the media leads you to believe that every third person is or has a great shot to be famous, if not for fifteen minutes, then at least five, few people realize that just about anyone they’ve heard of is already in the top 1% of all those who struggle daily with making it in the arts. I know. I was one of the perpetrators. In the world of the national magazine, where editors routinely bestow fame in the form of giddy headlines and outsized predictions, everybody is a star; that’s where you start. If you’re in a magazine, on TV, on the radio, or even a rumor on the Internet, fame is a given. But to go from the Berklee School of Music to an opening slot on a Dave Matthews tour would be a defining moment of achievement usually reserved for only the most amazingly brazen of fingerpickers. And John was surely not that brazen. It had to be a different John Mayer.

But then my younger daughter confirmed through her research online that John had put out an independent CD. Good for him—a great first step. I had to tip my cap to my old neighbor, my beat up GUITAR magazine cap, and run out to my local record store to purchase the CD. Not only didn’t they carry it, but I was informed a couple of weeks later by the clerk that they couldn’t even get it. This is a local kid, I ranted. Where else is he going to sell any records? They were a national chain, the ignorant clerk shrugged.

If only John had come to me, I thought, not for advice, but for a blurb. While I was no longer with GUITAR by then, my career as a blurb writer, though it consisted only of two blurbs, was exemplary. Back in 1973, a quote lifted from my review in The New York Times was used to headline an advertisement for another East Coast legend in the making, Bruce Springsteen. Twenty years later, a similarly zingy paragraph of mine helped to launch John Jackson’s book, Big Beat Heat, into an eventual Ralph J. Gleason Award as Rolling Stone Magazine’s Book of the Year.

Oh well, it was a lesson he’d have to learn, and better early than late. In fact, though there was much I could tell John about the heartbreak of not being able to find your latest work in even the local stores, I was sure he’d rather hear it from a peer. In my then soon to be published book, Working Musicians, Brenda Kahn, who had an album out on Columbia in 1992, spoke eloquently on the subject.

“It’s really important to keep fame in perspective,” she said over sandwiches at the Hotel Edison Café. “Fame is like a drug; you can never be famous enough. If you want to get famous, that’s a whole industry networking game. But if you want to be a musician, you get to play music. That’s what you get. You get that experience with the audience. That’s the deal. It took me years and years and years to figure that out.”

Of course, in about another minute and a half, the need for such philosophical advice would become moot. That’s when John Mayer appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, looking a little stiff in front of his band, but yes, it was the same John Mayer of the Fairfield, CT Mayer brothers, of stickball in the summer and football in the winter, and general mayhem all year round.

After that you couldn’t go a day without something else turning up. First it would be a tune buried in the soundtrack of a hip teen show like Felicity or Dawson’s Creek. Then it would be a cut played on WFUV. My daughter started getting Instant Messages from friends all around the country who were listening to John Mayer. Then I ran into a friend of mine in the print music business who said they were bidding on a piece of his publishing. He had an advance copy of the new CD, soon to come out on a subsidiary of Columbia Records! When Mayer’s video started showing up on VH-1 and in the buzz bin at MTV, and Rolling Stone put him in their Hot issue, and Teen People named him ‘Someone to Watch,’ my daughter was heard to proclaim that we had a star on the block.

I looked out the window at the Mayer house, visible through the still bare trees. As yet there were no limos outside, no groupies encamped. But was it only a matter of time?

A few months later his show at the esteemed Irving Plaza sold out quickly, but my daughter, of course, had already purchased her tickets weeks before. Due to some fluke of poor planning, typical of the teenage condition, she wound up having to take her mother as her date. When she was informed that Irving Plaza was a standing room only venue, my wife phoned Mrs. Mayer, to see if she had any pull. “Just a pass a note to John,” she advised her. “He’ll come out and bring you backstage.”

Veteran of many such stage-door imbroglios, I bemoaned their naiveté as the two set off to the show. “He won’t even get the note,” I scoffed.

And yet, not only did they wind up in the V.I.P. Lounge (where there were real couches and a reporter from the Associated Press, as well as a couple of other neighbors), but they sat with the Mayer family, the elderly father, a former principal, the stunned, look-alike younger brother Carl, who probably never forgave me for not giving him a Guitar t-shirt as well. Near tears the whole show, the father was especially nonplussed that the audience knew the lyrics to John’s songs. Otherwise, he was way out in the ether, along with the rest of the family, John included, who stopped by to say hello after the set, his eyes distant, fixed on the immediate itinerary: Philly, Cincinnati, Atlanta, a basketball team on the road to the Final Four. I remember Springsteen like that, when I spoke to him one afternoon in 1973, in the commissary of Columbia Records, flush with the raves for his first album.

“It’s strange, let me tell you, very strange. I don’t know if I dig all this commotion. Lately, you know what I do when I’m not playing—-I sleep, period. I go home and go to sleep, get up and play again. Run to Baltimore to play, run back. This week I’ve got three days off, which is a really big vacation. All I want to do is write some good songs. The main problem is not to lose sight of what is actually going on. All the hype, anyone with any sense just ignores it.”

On the Rosie show, not long after that, Elton John brought Mayer’s name up, out of nowhere, claiming he had “the voice of an angel.” A little while later, Mayer opened for Elvis Costello at the Beacon. Room For Squares went gold. Even my local store had a few copies. Not long after that John caused a near riot when he attempted to visit his old high school.

As famous (infamous) as he’s since become, John has always maintained his outsider’s honesty–something that’s gotten him into trouble in the press more than once. One Halloween not long ago, a neighor of mine found him handing out treats when he brought his daughter to the door. A guitarist himself, he and John talked shop for a half hour while the daughter vainly urged her father to keep moving. Another time, maybe a year later, John was just standing and chatting with friends on our next door neighbor’s lawn. Years ago, before the fame, he and the neighbor used to jam in the neighbor’s living room. A few months ago I got to interview John for the first time, when he was one of the centerpieces at a big music business event, talking about his seemingly magical, seemingly effortless career. He went out of his way to ask about the family. “And I always wanted to tell you how much I appreciated that Guitar t-shirt,” he said.

About fame there is no longer a question. The question has been answered. And yet, though John’s family no longer lives on the block, I’m not certain the block has ever recovered. I heard my two neighbors have been talking about forming a band.

I just hope they don’t divorce their wives and move to Atlanta.

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A Pleasant Afternoon with Keith Richards

brucepollock302

If Keith Richards had been a sounder sleeper,
perhaps his greatest hit would never have
been written. Similarly, if he’d been a just
a regular mortal leafing through that magazine
a couple of years later, perhaps he might have
missed one of his finest titles. But the success
of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” transformed him
from a mere world class guitarist into a true songwriter.

“I remember after ‘Satisfaction’ got to number
one–bang bang at the door. Where’s the follow
up?” he recalled. “I mean every twelve weeks
you had to have another one ready. The minute
you put out a single, you had to start working
your butt off on the next one, and the bigger
the hit, the more pressure there was on the
follow-up. But it was an incredibly good school
for songwriting in that you couldn’t piss around
for months and months agonizing about the
deeper meaning of this or that. No matter what
you were doing, like touring and recording, you
had to make damn sure you didn’t let up on the
writing. It made you want to search around and
listen for ideas. It made you very aware of what
was going on around you, because you were
looking for a song. It might come in a coffee
shop, or it might come on the street, or in a
cab. You get a heightened awareness. You listen
to what people say. You might hear a phrase at
a bus stop. Instead of accepting life, you start
to observe it. You become an outsider rather
than a participant. You’re listening for it every
moment, and anything could be a song; and if
you don’t have one you’re up the creek without
a paddle. For instance, with ‘Ruby Tuesday’ I
saw this picture in some fashion magazine that a
chick had lying around her apartment. It was this
great ad for jewelry-rubies. Also, it happened to
be Tuesday. So she became Ruby Tuesday. I was
just lucky it wasn’t Thursday, I guess.”

As the ‘60s turned the corner and Bob Dylan
and The Beatles led the way from Tin Pan
Alley fluff into something harder and heavier,
Richards and his lead singer collaborator
also needed to up the ante. “I’d say Lennon
definitely felt a strong urge not so much to
compete with Dylan,” Keith surmised, “but Bob
did spur him to realize he could dig deeper.
Mick and I felt that, too, although maybe we
didn’t feel it as strongly as John. The differences
between John and Paul were always greater
than between Mick and myself.” Keith cited
“Symphony for the Devil” as the Stones’ most
Dylanesque song. But his description revealed
how Richards influenced Jagger just as much
as Dylan did. “Mick wrote it almost as a Dylan
song; but it ended up a rock ‘n’ roll Samba.”

“Sympathy for the Devil,” was just one of
a number of songs the pair wrote, including
“Mother’s Little Helper,” “19th Nervous
Breakdown,” “Stray Cat Blues,” “Gimme
Shelter,” and “Street Fighting Man” that gave
the band a much darker reputation than their
immediate peers. To some extent Keith said this
was a media creation. “You use every available
tool in the kit. You get a general feel for what
people want to hear from you and when you’re
good at providing it and they like it–oh, you
want more? Here’s more. And I’d just come up
with a line or a song and lean on it, push it, go
for it. Nobody writes a song or makes a record
to put it in a back drawer.”

Eventually the songwriter returned to his
roots as a guitarist. “To me, songs come
out of being a musician. Playing. I cannot write
to poetry, rhymed couplets, and things like that.
I can write a song out of a chord sequence, a
riff, and eventually come up with lyrics to fit
onto it. But the other way around – no way. I
don’t write songs as a diary. None of them are
autobiographical, but in some sense they’re
a reaction to certain emotions. Some of the
happiest ditties I’ve written come out because
you’re feeling exactly the opposite and you write
to counteract that feeling. I was feeling
anything but happy when I wrote ‘Happy.’
I wrote ‘Happy’ to make sure there was a
feeling like that.

“The important thing to me is to sit
down with an instrument. You might
spend three or four hours going through
the Buddy Holly songbook and then out
of nowhere there’ll be a little crash, and
there it goes. All it takes is a split second.
It might be an accident – a mistake that
sets you off. It’s a matter of sitting down
and playing more than with any definite
intention to write. All you’ve got to do
is be receptive and recognize it when it
happens, because it can come from the
weirdest angles. Rarely do I write a song
totally by myself. Even if I actually do
write it by myself, I always like to have
someone around playing along with me
going, yeah, yeah. I’m a band man – a
group man. I can’t sit there alone in a
room and say, it’s songwriting time –
ding, ding, ding! I work best when the sun
goes down. I’ve eaten, had a few drinks,
and I’ve got some good buddies around. I
love sitting around with an acoustic guitar
and whacking out songs with friends and
family. Somehow they never sound as
good as they do that first night on the
living room couch.”

Keith works differently with Ronnie
Wood than he does with Jagger. “When
Ron and I sit down together to play we’re
two guitarists. Whereas with Mick and
I there’s maybe more of an idea in our
heads that what we’re after is a song at
the end of what we’re doing. When Mick
comes in with a song, usually he’s got it
worked out pretty much. He may need
a bridge to be written, or a different
beat, or to turn it around a little bit. Over
our whole period, maybe 50% of the
time he writes the lyrics and I write the
melody. But that’s a far, far too simplistic
explanation. We write in every conceivable
combination of ways. It’s really an
incredibly elastic arrangement – especially
when you’re writing with a partner for
a band, a specific unit, rather than just
writing a song to see who you could sell
it to. Some songs hang out for years before we
feel happy with them and resurrect them and
finish them off. Others, in two takes they’ve
come and gone and you’ve got to relearn it off
your own record to play it later. Lots of times
you think you’ve written four different songs
and you take them to the studio and you realize
they’re just variations on one song.

“When we’re doing an album I come in with a
handful of riffs and some songs. One or two will
be fairly well-defined. Others, it would be – this
could be dynamite for the Stones, but I have
to wait until we all get together in the studio to
find out. I can’t take it any farther by myself as
a song, or a structure, or an idea until I’ve got
their input. If there’s no kiss of life, if everybody
walks off to the toilet, then you know you’ve
got to drop that one and go on to something
else. But when you just sort of pick up your
guitar when the studio is virtually empty, people
are telling jokes in the back room or playing
dominoes, and then within two or three minutes
they drift back, pick up their instruments, and
begin whacking away, you know they’re into it.”

From his years dedicated to the craft, Keith
has come to view the songwriting experience
as somewhat metaphysical, though he’d be the
last to put it that way. “I never care if I have
anything down on tape, or if the tape runs out
and the song disappears, ’cause they all come
back eventually. I’ve written songs and lost
them and found them ten years later. Once it’s
there, it’s there. It’s just a matter of how long
it takes before it comes back out again. I find
the more I play, the more I’m into it, the songs
pour out. I don’t have a problem with being
non-prolific. That’s all psychosomatic. Music
isn’t something to think about – at least initially.
Eventually it’s got to cover the spectrum, but
especially with rock ‘n’ roll, first it has to touch
you somewhere else. It could be the groin; it
could be the heart; it could be the guts; it could
be the toes. It’ll get to the brain eventually. The
last thing I’m thinking about is the brain.”

Behind the Songs

The Story Behind “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus

brucepollock302

HERE’S MY RECENT INTERVIEW WITH STEPHAN MOCCIO, CO-WRITER OF THE MILEY CYRUS HIT, “WRECKING BALL.”

The thing that every songwriter dreams of is what is known in the trade as “a window of opportunity.” That period of time when it seems like every song you write is cut, every cut you deliver is a single, and every single released under your name soars effortlessly up the charts. It’s when all the previously closed doors slide open, the phone rings off the hook (or buzzes off your belt or in the folds of your briefcase) and every executive assistant knows your name. The lucky ones find that “window” for a few months, maybe once or twice in a lifetime. As co-writer of Celine Dion’s “Your Day Has Come” in 2002, the Miley Cyrus mega-smash “Wrecking Ball” in 2013, and the monstrous hit for The Weeknd from Fifty Shades of Gray, “Earned It,” in 2014, Canadian-born composer Steven Moccio’s “window of opportunity” has lasted more than ten years.

Not that his last two credits haven’t opened it another mile wider. “The phone is ringing off the hook,” Moccio agreed. “I mean the president of music at Universal Pictures took a meeting with me. I would say a big part of the meeting was because I was the cowriter on ‘Wrecking Ball.’ So he was interested to see what I could do for Fifty Shades of Gray, because he was a fan of that song. And ‘Earned It’ has been played more times on radio than ‘Wrecking Ball’ ever was. At one point I think we had 36,000 spins a week in the US alone. Now, with the success of ‘Earned It,’ often I’m getting asked to write big movie songs or end credits for films. I’ve gotten to know all heads at all the major studios and that’s been an extraordinary thing. I spent the last eight months co-producing The Weeknd’s album and that album is #1 around the world. I’m working on three movies now. The only one I can talk about is the new Julia Roberts film, The Secret in Their Eyes, in which I cowrote a song with this girl Maty Noyes. I’m consumed with producing Maty’s album right now because I really believe the music that we’re creating together is special and I hope people are going to react to it.

I never got into music to make money. That’s probably the best lesson my parents taught me: do what you love and the money will follow. At one point, I was broke. But I knew come hell or high water that one day people would hear my melodies; I knew they were that good. Part of the reason for my success in music is because I’m a hard worker, I’m disciplined. I don’t take it for granted. I love music. I’m always trying to write a greater song than my last song. And whether that’s the case or not it doesn’t matter. It’s my goal every time. That’s what keeps me honest.”

That being said, his association with the notorious 50 Shades of Gray and the probably even more notorious Miley Cyrus has not escaped his attention. “It’s kind of ironic,” he admits. “Because I’m a guy who fundamentally just composes beautiful songs and beautiful music. I’m really a classical writer.”

Stephan Moccio:
Sacha, MoZella and myself did the entire song in one day. I remember it was September 24th, 2012. We came together as three writers unknown to each other, put together by our publishing companies basically to write a song for Beyoncé. That’s what got us in the room. But you just can’t force that stuff. When we started writing the song we thought maybe this is not for Beyoncé. None of the regular studios were available, so Sacha’s manager ended up finding us a Montessori school, with a white piano. It was just the most unique situation in terms of where to write a song. I guess, a great song could be written anywhere, if it’s meant to be.

When you’re in a situation like that, the first thing you do is say hello to people and chat, but within 5 or 10 minutes of meeting each other, things became highly charged. MoZella was extremely emotional that day. She was very frail because she had broken off her wedding during that week. She almost didn’t end up making the session. “Wrecking Ball” in every way is about MoZella’s toxic relationship and then the courage to say, “I can’t go through with this.” So here we are, Sacha and I holding this girl together who was just very emotional, trying to comfort her.

I don’t write lyrics, but I remember we all wanted a strong metaphor as a title and we were just throwing out words. And I remember kind of shyly putting up my hand and saying, “What about ‘Wrecking Ball’?” And Sacha went, “Yeah, ‘Wrecking Ball,’ that sounds good.” And MoZella kind of ran with that. It’s when she got the line, “I came in like a wrecking ball.” It was real collaborative. Sacha is a great pianist so he started off on keyboards and then for some reason he surrendered the piano to me for the rest of the session. MoZella worked with lyrics and melodies while I was at the piano. We demoed it the following day and in a couple of hours we had this beautiful piano vocal demo.

At one point in the writing session MoZella said, “I know Miley Cyrus well enough, do you mind if I play it for her?” Of course, Sacha and I are, “Sure not a problem, it would be great.” And then MoZella a few weeks later ended up playing it for Miley Cyrus. I don’t know all the details, but I know MoZella wanted to play it for Miley on a Sunday, because she said, “If I’m going to get Miley’s attention, the best way to get Miley’s attention is on a Sunday.” I respect that. There is a psychology sometimes about playing a song for an artist at the right time. If you play it at the wrong time, it can be the best song in the world, but it won’t be heard because the artist is not receptive to it. But Miley was really excited about it.

I don’t know Miley at all, so I don’t like to say things on her behalf. However, we all know that she was in a relationship with Liam [Hemsworth] at the time and it was clearly public. So she obviously related to the lyric. Miley thought that Luke, being Dr. Luke, should be the producer. And he ran with it, along with his partner, Henry Walters [Cirkut]. They produced the song, so that’s when their names came on it as writers.They didn’t change the song at all, but they did produce it brilliantly. I mean, if you were to hear the demo, the demo is almost verbatim to the sonics of the song they did. The arrangement was exactly the same key, same tempo, everything.

We wrote it on September 24th and her vocal was already recorded by December. Within that 8-10 week period everyone was telling us how amazing the song was, how amazing it sounded. I didn’t really get a chance to hear it until it was released, except once over the phone. Meanwhile, the record company kept on saying, “‘Wrecking Ball’ is such a big, big record and we think it’s going to be the next single.” And lo and behold, she dropped it by surprise when she did her controversial performance at the MVAs in August, 2013. That night it went to the world and became the #1 single on iTunes.

It’s one of those global songs that you always wish you were a part. Luckily, I’ve been a part of a few of those now. But then when it happens, you try not to pay too much attention to it, because you can drive yourself mental. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say we weren’t calling people just checking to see the amount of spins it got on radio, because that also dictates chart position. I did kind of check in on that every few days.

But it’s incredible, when you have a song like “Wrecking Ball” that becomes a social movement. Clearly, the video had a lot to do with it, as well. It was a controversial video. I know everyone has an opinion about it, love it or loathe it. We live in that kind of age, where it affects, for better for worse, the experience of the song. The visual’s such a big part and sometimes who’s featured on the song is a big part. There’s a lot of contributing factors that affect whether a song is going to be heard by the masses. Sadly, as much as I want to believe it, it’s not just about the fact that the song’s a great song. I mean, there are a lot of great songs that we don’t hear, because they just haven’t been given that platform.

And “Wrecking Ball,” in my humble opinion, is a great song. If you hear it stripped down to vocal and piano it’s a classical piece of music in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of classical influence in it. And when you hear the chordal structure, it’s completely there. The sentiment couldn’t be more genuine, because we have MoZella, who’s pouring her heart and soul out, she’s crying half the day. I believe we genuinely wrote a great song with blood, sweat, and tears. We worked for it. However, we were also given the platform that only an artist like Miley could give us, with everything that was going on in her life at the same time just hitting. It all hit at the right time.