It
was the dog days of summer, 1985 and I had still not heard a word from Maria. I
needed closure but didn’t how to contact her, all I knew was she had a new
boyfriend by the name of Rudiger Koch in Berlin. I had found this out from
Suzanne when I called in July for updates on her whereabouts. She didn’t have
much else to say to me. The only positive thing I could do to occupy my time
was to play and try to write music. I had already written five or seven songs
(two of which I had written in Germany in one day) and thought it might be a
good idea to put them down on tape. Yes, tape! I had a Fostex Portastudio four
track cassette recorder that I had to bang on to get it to go into playback
with sounding distorted. It drove me crazy but it was the only thing I had at
the time. I still had my blonde Gibson J-200, the one I bounced the check for
at West LA Music at the encouragement of one BJ Taylor who said he would cover
the check when his money came in from Philadelphia, which of course never did.
My parents covered the check but I eventually paid back at least half of the
debt. The songs were: Where does the Time
Go, Voices in my Dreams, Don’t Take Your Love Away, Immigration Blues, Heavy,
I’m Not a Loser and Say Hello to Loneliness. I put down rough versions of
these tunes and did some preliminary mixes.
My
sister, Susan had worked with Bobby Columby, the drummer from Blood, Sweat and Tears and was now the
president of Columbia Records. She said she would give him a call and see if he
would give the songs a listen. I wasn’t holding my breath but Bobby was also my
friend, Scott Columby’s uncle, so I figured it might help with getting my
project a fair and unbiased evaluation. After a few weeks of checking in with
his secretary and leaving messages, he called me at my home. “So what did you
think of my tape? I asked with reserved enthusiasm.
“Well,
I have to tell to...there is absolutely nothing I like about it at all.”
“What!”
“I
hate everything about it. The lyrics, the melody and the arrangements.”
“Come
on Mr. Columby, I know the lyrics are good . You do realize I recorded these on
a cheap home recorder and the arrangements are just basic. I plan on fleshing
them out when I get into the studio. That’s why I presented them to you in that
form, since you are a musician and could see through the haze of the
sketchiness—see the potential there. I thought you might give me some studio
time to cut them properly.”
“I
wouldn’t waste my time. There, now you have my thoughts. Good luck. By the way,
I know a young woman who could help you with your melodies and lyrics. Her name
is Sarah Moon. I’ll have my secretary give you her number. Goodbye.”
He
hung up the phone with my jaw still resting on my collar bone. Well, at least
he didn’t mince his words, but a little subtlety would have been nice, I
thought. How could he be so blatantly cruel, but in his mind I guess it’s like
that Nick Lowe song, It’s Cruel to be
Kind. The thing is, I didn’t agree with his evaluation in the least. I
thought they were damned good songs. True, the arrangements could have been
more thought out, but they had that raw quality that is more popular now and
not so much in the mid eighties. People were used to hearing loud canon-like
snare drums and eerie keyboards wafting in and out of the chord structures.
Songs like Howard Jones’ Things Can Only
Get Better, and The Pet Shop Boys’ West
End Girls were topping the charts and they weren’t exactly my cup of java.
In fact, I was so far away from that style of music it was like my songs were
recorded on Pluto, which is not even considered a planet anymore, and those
songs were cut on Mercury, (the planet not the record label). I still thought
of myself as a singer/songwriter in the mold of Bob Dylan, Jim Croce and Cat
Stevens (the old Cat). Now even Cat Stevens was recording these lush,
overproduced records to which I couldn’t even relate. I knew there were other
artists out there like me either making a decent living or waiting in the wings
for the right time to explode. This was before Kurt Cobain and grunge rock,
before Roots Rock came into the forefront and way before the sixties style
resurgence. I only hoped I didn’t get too old waiting it out before my time
would cycle again.
Sarah
Moon was a tall wisp of a woman. Her long blonde hair covered an angular face
with high cheekbones—she reminded me of an albino Cherokee Indian. She was
living with an executive from Capitol named Ray, Jay or Trey, I can’t quite
recall. She wanted to get away from him faster than a flying squirrel on the
hunt for golden chestnuts. She told me he was abusing her physically and
verbally and not promoting her career as a singer and songwriter. In other
words he was a chauvinistic pig. She would come over to my apartment on Camrose
and we would sit there staring at each other trying to come up with something
to write about. I suggested a theme about rebuilding one’s life from the bottom
up. We came up with a title called Putting
My Heart Back Together and she sang the demo in her best white Diana Ross
style. It was not what I was used to writing, but it wasn’t bad. She told me
she had a Wurlitzer spinet piano in storage and if I would arrange to have it
moved, I could have it—free. It was January 28, 1986. I remember that date
because as I was sitting in the back of the pickup truck belonging to a friend
I can’t recall and playing Jerry Lee Lewis riffs on the Hollywood Freeway in
rush hour traffic. When I got home I turned on the television and saw news
coverage of the tragic shuttle exploding in space. It was the Challenger (mission
STS-51-L) broke apart 73 seconds into its flight. I still have the piano here in my living in Thompson Station,
Tennessee and I will never forget the horrible circumstance of the explosion colored
with the extreme kindness and generosity of Sarah Moon. If you’re out there
Sarah, hit me up for a comment and let me know your still out there doing your
unique thing.
Backtracking a little to December 1985, I had seen Richard
Sandford, our old drummer from Silverspoon and Chas’ brother in a few A.A.
meetings in the previous months. I had also seen my friend, Doug Fieger and
Mikel Japp. It seemed like everyone was trying to get sober now and I knew it
wouldn’t be long for me to jump on that bandwagon. I was still in and out of
sobriety slipping back into alcohol when I would think about Maria. On December
8, 1985, five years after John Lennon’s murder, I got an extremely sad call
from Chas. He told me Richard was dead from an apparent overdose of alcohol and
drugs. He was only 29 years old. Chas was planning on going to Aspen for a
Christmas ski trip and planned on sharing a house with Bob Seger. He decided to
cancel the trip. I told him getting away from L.A. would be the best thing in
the world for him and I offered to help him drive and keep an eye on him. Not
only would I be helping a friend deal with his loss but I would have a needed
vacation as well—I hadn’t been skiing since my family went to Lake Placid, New
York in 1962. Seger had backed out of the trip because he wanted to spend
Christmas with a school teacher he had met back home in Detroit, so it was just
going to be the two of us for a week in Aspen over Christmas and New Years. We
packed up all our winter belongings in Chas’ black Chevy Blazer including
Richard’s skis which I was going to use. I felt a little strange borrowing a
pair of skis from the recently departed but I also tried to think of it as a
tribute to him and a celebration of his life—keeping the dream alive, so to
speak. On the way east, there was an unexpected, spiritual encounter at a
Burger King in Grand Junction, Colorado.
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