As my eighteenth birthday approached, I couldn’t believe that I still wasn’t famous. I was running out of time. Matt, a couple months older than me and similarly anxious to kick up his career a notch, generously opened his recording studio to me. But since it was his studio, I was going to have to accept his criticisms. By the end of each session I was ready to clobber him with my guitar, as he took great pleasure in telling me my sense of time sucked, my fingers made too much squeaking noise across my fretboard and I sang with a vibrato so wide you could drive a tractor-trailer through it.
“Don’t act like such a little prima donna,” Matt said, when I complained. “You’re lucky I’m not charging you for all my studio time and musical feedback.”
Once the sessions wrapped and I’d mailed out my demo tape to every record company I could find in the Toronto phone directory, I tried to put the experience behind me. I’d been performing to small audiences for years, not bothering to worry about the technical details of rhythm and residual guitar string noise. I wasn’t sure if Matt’s constant harping was legitimate criticism or just his way of showboating.
But since a great deal of our time was spent arguing the sting of our mutual insults faded quickly. When two weeks passed without any callbacks from record companies, Matt and I, determined as ever, began plotting future studio dates.
“How about the first week in July?” Matt suggested.
“As long as it’s in the evening. I’m working full-time at the civil service now.”
“Must be nice to have a dad with connections.”
“Oh, and like the fortune you make scoring TV shows isn’t because of your dad?”
“Hey, my dad’s connections are helping you even more than me. Who do you think duplicated all your demo tapes without charge?”
“Thanks, Matt, for the hundred and twenty-third time.” I hung up the phone and started to pack a lunch for work. When the phone rang again, I assumed it was Matt, bent on extracting another thank you from me.
“Yeah, what now?”
“Hello?”
“Hello?”
“I have Tim Bayers on the phone for a Mr. Danny Hill. Please hold while I get him on the line.”
As Muzac flooded my phone line and the minutes ticked by, I started to suspect that this was another one of Matt’s dumb pranks.
“Mr. Hill. Tim Bayers here. My congratulations.” Short of Matt somehow recording the strongest Brooklyn accent ever uttered and looping it back to me through some knob on his synthesizer, the voice on the line was legit. “The demo tape you sent me. It’s killer. Where did you learn chord changes like that? How old are you?”
“Ah, I just turned eighteen.”
Bayers. It took a second for the name to register. He was one of the several A&R reps I’d sent my demos to. I’d recently read in the newspaper that he’d been shipped from New York’s RCA headquarters to the Toronto branch, where he’d be in charge of discovering and developing new Canadian talent.
“You sound a shitload older than eighteen on those songs you sent me. Who wrote those songs?”
“Me.”
“Who’d you write them with?”
“Me.”
“And it’s really you playing guitar and singing? Even all the background vocals?”
“Yup.”
“When can you get down here so I can see what you look like? And don’t forget your guitar.”
The RCA offices and recording studio were located on Mutual Street, in the heart of downtown Toronto. Gold and platinum records covered every inch of the walls, the whoomphhh of a bass boomed out of the open door of a recording studio, a couple of what I took to be tittering secretaries flocked around a recently signed singer—he looked all of twenty—as his doppelganger swayed from the ceiling in the form of a cardboard cutout. The singer was falsettoing through his scales in a manner resembling the warm-ups my high school choir practised before some big concert. But nothing else about this place reminded me of any high school I’d ever seen. Bouncing the top of my oversized guitar case against my chest, I nervously started arpeggiating finger rhythms in the air.
“Looks like you’ve got something lethal in there,” a leather-mini-skirted secretary with knee-high boots said as she strolled by me and seated herself behind a receptionist’s desk the size of a small yacht.
“I beg your pardon, are you talking to me?” I asked. She was part-chewing, part-sucking on a long piece of red licorice, which made it hard for me to stop staring. The singer, along with his rapturous followers, vanished into the studio. In an instant the place changed from Alice in Wonderland meets the Playboy Mansion into some forbidding clinical office policed by a knockout receptionist who appeared to be teething.
“So, do you just walk into random offices and stare at people with those Charles Manson eyes, or are you here to see someone?”
“I have an appointment to see Tim Bayers.”
“Oh no! You’re that guy!”
“Pardon?”
“The guy whose tape Bayers has been playing non-stop. I love you. Can you autograph my body? Anywhere you like …”
In the ninety seconds it took her to walk me to Bayers’s office, Shirley handed me her phone number, written on RCA stationery.
“There he is, the boy genius behind the demo tape!”
Bayers leapt up from behind his desk and greeted me with a long, cologne-strangling hug. As he stepped back to look me over, the first thing I noticed was his hair. His Elvis pompadour seemed at odds with his roly-poly lumberjack body. Because he slouched as if he’d strained his back, he looked older than twenty-eight, or, as he would later put it, “Twenty-five American.”
“Listen to this!” Bayers said, and with a crisp snap of his fingers, he began singing: “Let your mind paint watercolours, shades of love, shades of time and if our blues should run together…”
“Mr. Bayers, I wrote that back when I was fifteen. I’ve improved a lot—”
“Hey, stop that! Bayers Rule Number One: NO EXCUSES! Makes you look weak.”
“Sorry, I—”
“Bayers Rule Number Two: DON’T APOLOGIZE!”
Anxious that whatever I said would likely trigger a booming correction, I spent the rest of our meeting shrugging and nodding. Bayers didn’t talk so much as yell and, just like a song that’s played so loud that the volume obliterates the words, I had trouble deciphering what he was saying. His wardrobe looked like a garish billboard advertisement for RCA’s prize acts; a Ricky Nelson T-shirt bulged at the waist over his Glen Campbell belt buckle, which held up his tight sequined bell-bottoms that flared over polished brown cowboy boots. His phone rang constantly, each new series of rings causing him to startle in his chair as if he’d received an electric shock. After barking to his secretary to hold all calls he pointed at my guitar case.
“‘Nuff talk,” he said, implying that I’d been doing all the yapping. “Time to sing for your supper.”
I played three songs while he paced back and forth on his white shag carpet. Every now and then he’d thwack out manic rhythms with his fingertips using his thighs as a drum surface.
“You wanna know what I think?” he asked, once I was finished.
Like I have a choice, I thought.
“Brilliant, lame, bullshit. That’s how your three songs hit me. But the most important thing is you’ve got it in you—not just the raw talent, but the smarts to lead with your best song. You knew your last song sucked, didn’t you? It’s bullshit because it lacked authenticity. Stick to writing about what you know. Don’t write songs about Vietnam unless you’ve been there.”
I didn’t know what to say, as I’d considered my last song to be my best.
“Don’t look so fucking depressed. Songwriting is like being a designated hitter for the major leagues. Don’t be afraid to strike out going for the home run. If you’re one for three, you’re a superstar.”
Bayers’s iron-clad pronouncements were a lot easier to stomach when they weren’t focused on me or my songs. His occasional manner of referring to himself in the third person gave his profession a suspect quality, as though being shipped across the border to discover Canadian talent was akin to a secret mission behind the Iron Curtain. The reality was that his new job was a result of a change in Canada’s broadcasting law. The government had recently implemented Canadian content regulations for radio and TV stations. This meant Canadian stations had to play a certain quota of records performed, written or produced by Canadians. Bayers’s job was to find artists in Canada to fill this new quota. According to Bayers, I was the answer to his prayers. I made the mistake of telling him I was flattered.
“Bayers Rule Number Three: leave your modesty bullshit at the door! You know you’re fucking brilliant, or you wouldn’t have mailed me your tape.”
When I left the RCA building I called my supervisor at the civil service and announced my resignation. Now that I was months away from being a superstar, I didn’t have time to waste working nine to five.
Bayers moved fast, producing an exclusive five-year recording and publishing contract for me to sign within a month.
“Got something for you to look at, Dad,” I announced, handing him my contract and trying to hold back a self-satisfied smile.
The contract definitely had his attention, but he frowned as he flipped the pages.
“Hold onto your horses there, son,” he finally said, shoving the contract into his pocket.
“Hey, give that back. That’s my contract!”
“This isn’t a contract, it’s a jail sentence. I’m going to send it to my lawyer to look over,” Dad said. “There’s even a morality clause in here, of all things.”
I went ahead and signed the contract without legal advice. So what if it was one-sided? There were thousands of kids my age writing and singing songs, thinking they were the next James Taylor. How many of them had major record deals?
As my A&R man, Bayers hired himself as my producer. Then he hooked me up with John Stockfish, Gordon Lightfoot’s bass player, and a few more key Toronto musicians, leaving me to rehearse a handful of my songs that Bayers deemed potential hits. Stockfish treated me like a son, playing me dozens of Lightfoot’s work tapes, showing me how much rewriting and re-recording Canada’s best-known songwriter put himself through before he deemed his work ready for public consumption. I responded by spending every waking hour writing, then rewriting, song after song. Bayers, impressed by my hard work, rewarded me with my first paying recording session at the beginning of September. I joined the Toronto branch of the musician’s union; de rigueur for anyone earning money as a studio musician.
The recording session went smoothly. Bayers was pretty passive compared to Matt, leaving the arranging up to me and the musicians, interrupting the takes from time to time to say, “Amazing, fucking amazing!”
“You mean that’s the perfect take?” I’d yelp.
“My burger and fries, they taste awesome. Now, one more take, guys, only try picking up the tempo. And Danny, back off from the mic when you hit those high notes. Or I’ll end up charging you for a busted compressor.”
I pretended to know what a compressor was. With Bayers, it was always better not to ask questions. Which was why I hadn’t asked why he’d arranged for this recording session to go down in the middle of the night. Once we finished recording, as the first hint of light started diffusing through the dark and abandoned offices, Bayers asked me to join him for a breath of fresh air on Mutual Street.
“The musician’s union showed up at a session here just last week. That’s why I booked this recording for the middle of the night. Less chance of them showing up and killing the studio vibe.”
“Oh, I was wondering—”
“Thanks to the fuckin’ union here I was forced to file tonight’s recording as two officially contracted sessions. But my production budget’s tighter than Pat Boone’s ass. So, once your union rate cheque arrives in the mail, just hand it over to me.”
“You mean the entire cheque? I’m supposed to give it back to you?”
“You got it. This is how to get around the fucking union. Otherwise the studio gets closed down and nobody makes records.”
Something about Bayers’s union scenario didn’t quite add up. But I knew he wasn’t someone to be messed with. I promised him I’d hand back the cheque. What did I care about the money? I just wanted to be on the radio.
“If you kick back your cheque you betray everything we’ve raised you to believe in,” Dad yelled. What was I thinking, telling them about this? Mom interrupted Dad to say that if I rolled over on this, I was striking a blow against workers everywhere. Outnumbered and out-moralized, I promised my parents I’d keep the cheque. Then I prayed for a mail strike.
“Has that cheque come in yet?” Bayers asked me at the end of the week. We were listening to the rough mixes of my two tracks. I was wishing the songs would play forever, sensing that this might be the last time Bayers and I would be sitting together, listening to my music. I nodded.
“Well, hand it over.”
He started to approach me. I backed away from him, not wanting to be within striking distance.
“I can’t do that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t give you the cheque.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? We’ve already gone through this.”
“Sorry, but I—”
“Don’t fuckin’ ‘sorry—but’ me. You gave me your word. Now you’re telling me you were lying? Just give me the fuckin’ cheque. Now.”
Bayers abruptly wheeled around and hit stop on his big reel-to-reel recorder, cutting off my song. The thin dark tape buckled slightly, made a small bong sound like it might break and then evened out.
“Really, Tim, I want to. It’s just—”
I’d spent all week trying to memorize my parents’ union lecture so I could bravely throw it back in Bayers’s face. But now I was drawing a blank. As Bayers’s hollering increased, Shirley, the receptionist, poked her head through the doorway. God, I couldn’t just stand there, wilting.
“Well, there are reasons for unions, you know. They’re—”
“Who the fuck have you been talking to? Has your big-time-civil-servant-with-a-fat-pension daddy threatened to cut off your allowance?”
“My parents don’t know anything about this—”
“Shut up! The sound of your whining makes me wanna fuckin’ puke!”
Bayers removed the two reels from his tape recorder and lobbed them into his overstuffed wastebasket.
“Congratulations, you’ve really fucked me. Now get the hell outta here. If I ever see your fuckin’ face again, you better believe it’ll be the last time anyone ever sees your fuckin’ …”
That was the last I heard of Bayers, or anyone else at RCA, for the next six months. I called him but could never get through. No one there, aside from Shirley, would take my calls.
“The best thing you can do is stop calling. And hope that, in time, Bayers cools off,” Shirley advised. “And whatever happened between you and Bayers, don’t be stupid enough to talk about it.”
How could I have blown my one chance at the big time over a union cheque? I could handle failure if my talent didn’t measure up, but this had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with me being stupid. I couldn’t blame this on my parents. What did they know about the record business?
It felt like everything was collapsing. I couldn’t sleep, preferring to stay up through the night writing songs, letters to Bayers (never sent) and letters to Cynthia seeking her advice. I didn’t know that my feelings of worthlessness echoed a letter Dad wrote to his parents when he was my age: “This failure … is the same as disgrace to me … hurt me worse than anything I have ever had to take in my life … .” Dad, seeing me on the verge of breaking down, offered support rather than his usual ridicule, comfort instead of “I told you so.”
At first, I attributed Dad’s gentler nature to the fact that I’d found a new job. Thanks to Brian Maxwell’s contacts, I was hired full-time at the Fitness Institute, a club where high-level executives congregated to network in between squash games. But regular employment did little to shake my depression. I’d read about promising artists who managed to self-destruct just as their once-in-a-lifetime moment beckoned. Was that me, I wondered, while on my hands and knees scrubbing out toilets, washing squash court walls and picking up Kleenexes and candy wrappers from the club’s front lawn. Rosy-faced businessmen with initials embossed on fancy workout bags dodged me like I was some kind of beggar grasping for a chance to shine their Gucci shoes for spare change. I felt as hungover as I looked, but not from drinking. I’d taken to lifting a couple of Mom’s sleeping pills before bedtime. Still unable to sleep, I’d show up for work stumbling about like a stubble-faced zombie.
My shoddy appearance was the least of my problems or, more to the point, the Fitness Institute’s problems with me. I destroyed the Fitness Institute’s garden by uprooting all the perennials, shrank half the laundry with my overzealous drying and left the squash court floors even more marked-up than before I’d started cleaning them because I’d forgotten to remove my leather-soled shoes. My boss, finally coming to his senses, declared, “You’re the most awful worker ever! You’re fired!”
I made it home shortly before dinnertime, hustled to my bedroom and took refuge under the covers, refusing to come down to the kitchen when I heard the table being set. The thought of Dad’s dinnertime lecture—that without a college diploma, my life would be a blur of Fitness Institute hirings and firings—was enough to take away my appetite.
Knock, knock.
“Can I come in, son?” Dad opened the door a crack, removed his glasses and said, “I’ve got something I’d like to tell you.”
“What’s the point, I know what you’re going to say.”
“Son, I never told you about my first job, once I left the army. I was serving the most expensive steaks in Washington to people on a posh outdoor patio. Some big, fat crows damned near clipped my head—you know how I detest birds—in search of an easy meal. I hauled off and threw all the steaks on my fancy, silver platter in the air at those damned birds. One of the steaks fell smack in the middle of a table serving six people. Splat—red wine went flying, staining a woman’s white dress, as glasses smashed onto the patio. That ended my career as a waiter. I couldn’t stand serving people. Made me feel like a slave.”
Whether Dad’s flying platter of steaks confession was the truth, an exaggeration, or an outright fabrication was immaterial; what mattered was that Dad was extending a much-needed measure of Hill solidarity. Moved as I was by Dad’s commiseration, the greatest surprise came the following morning.
“Marty and I would like to manage you, son.”
Marty was a friend of Dad’s who used to sing semi-professionally, claimed to have a few friends still in the music industry and was now a successful businessman. Dad, on the verge of leaving the Ontario Human Rights Commission to open up his own private consulting firm, was going to have a bit more time on his hands. But why, after all his taunts about my musical dreams, was he offering to manage me?
“Your mother and I are concerned about you. You seem to have lost interest in everything. You don’t go out for runs anymore. And Larry and Karen tell me they never hear you play your guitar.” Though he was wise enough to keep this from me at the time, Dad later told me that he feared that I might have to be hospitalized if I didn’t find my bearings soon.
I turned down Dad’s offer. Much as he wanted to save me, you can’t have a rescuer without a willing rescuee, and, as far as the record business was concerned, I was not ready to be rescued. Taking my refusal in stride, Dad appeared to be mulling something else over.
“Son, have you thought about going further up the food chain?”
“What do you mean?”
“The RCA food chain. Bayers isn’t the only person working there. He’s just some mid-level employee that New York shipped to Canada. Probably because they didn’t know what else to do with him.”
Grabbing the phone directory, I started looking up the addresses and phone numbers of the different Toronto RCA branches. The main office was located in Don Mills, not two miles from our house.
“Tell me, Danny, who else have you talked to about this?”
I would have pegged RCA’s Canadian president as the lenient principal of a private prep school rather than the head of a major record label. Where Bayers was all strut and fury, this man came off as serenely composed, listening without interruption as I related my RCA experience, starting with the quick honeymoon signing and ending with the even quicker falling out.
“I know a lot of this is my fault, for promising to give Tim Bayers back my musician’s union cheque.” I wanted to go on, to explain that I could have been kicked out of the union and that I’d still have had to pay taxes on this money had I forked it over, but then I remembered Dad’s advice: Don’t talk too much, just lay out the facts simply and quickly.
“You haven’t answered my question, Danny. Who else have you talked to about this?”
“No one. I mean, who else could I talk to? No one I know’s ever gone through anything like this.”
“Exactly. So then, tell me, if it was up to you, where would you like to go from here?”
“All I want is to finish what I started. The two sides are practically done. Just needs my vocals and a few overdubs. Then it can be released as a single. That was always the plan.”
The president told me to wait in the lobby. “Don’t go anywhere, I’m going to need you back in here in a few minutes.”
I’d barely skimmed through a Billboard magazine by the time he ushered me back into his office.
“Mr. Bayers and I have just spoken,” he said. “We’re heading into Christmas season now, otherwise the two of you would be finishing your single next week. You’re booked to resume recording with Mr. Bayers when the holidays are over. The second week of January.”
The brave pep talks I received from Brian and Cynthia over Christmas were hard to remember once I found myself behind the expensive U 87 microphone preparing to sing my heart out, while Bayers glared at me from the control room. Throughout most of the recording session, he and his recording engineer pretended I wasn’t there. While I laid down my vocal tracks, Bayers kept himself distracted with phone calls. Once I’d finished singing and listened to the finished, unmixed record, I realized that the bass player had made a mistake in the song’s final bar. Bayers refused to have the wrong note corrected.
“Please, Tim. The bass is the root of the chord. It’s like the bottom just fell out of the song.”
“Don’t talk to me about fuckin’ music theory. That’s why you got no soul. You think way too fuckin’ much. Anyway, you should know I can’t afford to fix the bass. Union costs—I have to pay extra for overdubs.”
I offered to pay.
“You’re the fuckin’ expert on unions, so you should know you have to be a signatory to the union to hire a musician. And you’d be smart to save every penny you got, ‘cause your precious little union cheque is all the money you’ll ever make in this business.”
I was past caring, or hurting, or being scared. Bayers had taught me a tough lesson. There comes a point where either you rally your defences and move on, or you stay a patsy forever.