The tone of Dad’s letters to his parents grew more muted as he approached his fiftieth birthday. In a letter written in the summer of 1973, he referred to a couple of major life events—his stepping down from the OHRC and the release of my RCA single—in an almost dismissive manner. But even at his most taciturn, his concerns about my future came through.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m busily preparing to establish my own small consulting firm—Daniel G. Hill Ltd.
I’ll be president and Donna secretary-treasurer. I’m starting a new life style that should be most interesting. I’ll send you the clippings, notices, etc. about my resignation from the Commission. I really felt it was time for a change. Please note the enclosed clippings about Danny. The record sales have tapered off and reality is beginning to sink in!! However he has the odd engagement in local coffee houses. His closest friends in the music world are all in university. Hope he’ll see the light one day.
I was seeing the light all right. Just not the one Dad hoped I might see. Dad’s observation that my record sales were tapering off suggests that at some point my record was actually selling. It didn’t sell. It bombed. As for Dad’s equally disingenuous comment that my close friends in music were all in university, my best friend, Matt McCauley, did not go to university.
At the beginning of June, I celebrated turning nineteen by moving out (this time of my own volition), subletting an apartment in the pleasant Toronto borough of East York. The day I left home, Dad marked my departure by ripping all the pictures and posters off my bedroom wall, cleaning out my mounds of stuff and turning the room into his office.
“Your father wanted to wipe out any evidence of your existence,” Mom told me when she phoned to recommend that I come by and pick up my memorabilia before it was tossed out with the garbage.
When I expressed surprise she said, “I don’t think you understand just how hurt he is by your decision to do nothing with your life except music.”
“And what about you, Mom?”
“I admire your guts, Danny. I really do. But what’s going to happen to you now? Your RCA single never got played on radio.”
“Still, RCA didn’t drop me. What do you think that means?”
“How should I know, Danny?”
“Bayers messed up the production of my single. The quality of the recording was so bad radio did me a favour by not playing it.”
“If you say so, Danny.”
Sounded like I wasn’t fooling Mom any more than myself. The single’s A-side, “Peter Pan” (the title says it all), possessed nothing in the way of memorable chorus, containing such unfortunate lyrics as, “Peter Pan would trade his wings for the mixed-up joy love can bring.” Motown greats Holland-Dozier-Holland could have thrown all their production wizardry at my song and it still would have bombed. For a kid fresh out of high school, I fell into my RCA contract displaying flashes of promise as a songwriter, but by professional standards my songs were pretty average.
But I learned fast. Being exposed to a higher level of songwriting talent is like playing tennis with a superior opponent. You get better. And tougher. During my honeymoon period with RCA I ran into a select group of artists who had either written, recorded or produced an international hit record.
Other than being five or ten years my senior, these guys appeared no different from me. They grew up banging out songs in their parents’ basements while the cool kids were picking up girls and playing sports. They came from small towns, with no connections, and had parents who, like mine, were less than thrilled with their career choice. And somehow, thanks to talent, cockiness, hard work and thick skin, it had paid off for them. I took that to mean one thing: if I kept my eye on the ball, some day I would be one of those ordinary guys with a hit record.
And I was no fool, playing up the “RCA recording artist” schtick for all it was worth while never letting on that I’d released a single that stiffed. (The one advantage to being a rookie artist with a failed first single was that no one outside RCA knew about it.) My self-promotion paid off, landing me more and better-paying gigs. Matt’s dad hired me to perform once a week at Seneca College, where he taught music. A sixty-dollar fee for playing for thirty minutes at the college cafeteria during lunchtime took care of my monthly food bills. The Ontario civil service paid me even more to sing twice a month during people’s coffee breaks on the main floor by the elevators. And there were always plenty of club owners willing to hand out one to two hundred dollars for a five-night, three-set-per-night stint at their bar.
Throughout the summer, my infrequent phone conversations with Dad went something like this.
“Look at it this way, Dad, approaching a club owner for work as a kid with a major record deal is like applying for a teaching job with a PhD.”
“Dream on, son!”
“Okay, let me give you a hypothetical—if two guys with equal talent were vying for a gig to sing and play original songs in a club and one guy had a PhD in music theory and the other guy had an international record deal, who do you think would get the gig?”
“If you’re asking me, son, a third guy would pop up with a PhD in music and a record deal, leaving you playing for quarters on a street corner and the other guy teaching music in a respectable school for a good living.”
I stopped phoning home. It was beginning to feel as though Dad was the last holdout in a crowd of ardent supporters.
Towards the end of the summer, I was invited to a small record company party to honour José Feliciano, an RCA artist, who was in Toronto performing. To the horror of everyone but Feliciano, I yanked out my guitar and assaulted him with a couple of my songs.
“Man, you sing with a lot of soul for a white teenager,” Feliciano responded, in that habitually serious but joking manner of his that I found difficult to read. Most of his wisecracks that evening centred on his being blind, leaving me unsure as to whether he already knew that I was half-Black or not.
Leaving nothing to assumption I said, a little forcefully, “I’m not white, my skin’s easily as brown as yours. And I’m almost twenty.”
“Oh, well, then you’re not that good after all.”
Taking Feliciano’s teasing as a challenge, I risked playing one final song, figuring he might relate to it. The hook, “Lord don’t let this crazy world make a jukebox out of me, let the songs keep flowing strong and naturally,” made him interrupt me before I could get to the second verse.
“Tell me the chords,” Feliciano demanded. “I want to start performing this song!”
“Here, it’s easy,” I said, showing him how my fingers chorded the progressions on the neck of my guitar, forgetting in my excitement that he was blind.
“Whoaaa! Who do you think I am, Stevie Wonder?” he laughed, causing everyone else at the party to break out in applause. Before the end of the evening, he’d given me his address and phone number, insisting that I send him every song I’d ever written, as he was looking for material for his upcoming album.
It didn’t take long for everyone in Toronto’s gossipy music business to hear about this. Impressed as much by my chutzpah as my talent, Dr. McCauley, then the music director at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre, slipped Harry Belafonte one of my demo tapes. Belafonte promptly flew the McCauleys and me to Manhattan for a meeting.
Meeting Belafonte was as strange as it was memorable. I’d sung along with his records since my parents played me “Day-O” on my little turntable in Newmarket. As I came into the office prepared to meet my childhood hero, my newest song came blasting from his stereo. There was the man himself, singing along to my words with such volume that it felt as though our voices were joined in some intergenerational duet.
“You make me want to be a father…” Belafonte crooned back at me once this new song of mine, clearly his favourite, had looped off his tape recorder. He’d taken my sentimental opening line and breathed a whole new life into it, his voice having all the more impact now that it wasn’t in lockstep with mine.
“How does a nineteen-year-old kid write a love song that romantic?” Belafonte asked.
How could I act nonchalant when I was grinning so hard that my jaw ached?
“This is a hit song, Danny,” Belafonte continued. “My secretaries love it. My daughter loves it. But it’s a young man’s song, and I’m forty-six. Anyway, this next one on your tape is almost as good, and not quite so youthful-sounding.”
And off he went, threading another tape of mine onto his recorder and then belting out my next song.
“I could definitely use you as one of my songwriters. I’m about to do some more musical theatre and need a ton of new material.”
Several hours later the McCauleys and I were stepping off a plane back in Toronto, trying to make sense out of what had just happened.
“This is the situation,” Matt explained as we drove into the city. “Both Feliciano and Belafonte are a lot more impressed with your writing ability than your singing.”
“Or maybe they just want to have first dibs on my songs. Because if I release them first, Feliciano or Belafonte won’t be the ones introducing them to the public.”
“Possibly,” Dr. McCauley, who was a great deal less opinionated than Matt, conceded. All too often he deferred to Matt’s observations as though Matt were the father and he the child.
“Don’t get too conceited,” Matt said. “Dad played your songs to Tony Bennett and he didn’t think they were all that hot.”
“Yeah, and every label in England passed on the Beatles before they finally got signed.”
“Right, Danny, and you think you’re as good as Lennon and McCartney put together,” Matt chided.
“The two of you are missing the point,” Dr. McCauley said. “Getting signed isn’t your problem. Getting unsigned is.”
“Leave RCA,” Matt said. “They don’t know the first thing about how to produce your songs. Let me produce your album. My parents and I have already talked about this—you can sign with us, and we’ll sell the record to the highest bidder. What do you have to lose? You’ve already wasted a year at RCA and all you’ve got to show for it is a single that stiffed.”
“Because the production was so terrible,” Dr. McCauley added, backing Matt’s claim that I didn’t have a chance without his son’s production help.
I didn’t answer them right away. I needed time to take it all in: the round trip to New York City, Belafonte singing my songs, the McCauleys suggesting I break with RCA and sign with them. It was all coming at me so fast.