I was sitting in the office of Barry Keane, RCA’s new A&R man now that Bayers was back in the States. In the thirteen months that I’d been signed to RCA, I’d come to really like Barry; he’d grown up in Scarborough, just a few miles from my Don Mills stomping grounds. One of those nauseating types who happened to be extremely gifted in many areas, Barry exuded a quiet confidence, rarely talking about himself or his considerable range of abilities. Regrettably, my exposure to Barry’s talents came the hard way: through being blanked by him in a one-on-one basketball game or attempting, and failing, to follow his complex drum patterns during one of our “casual” music jams. (Having turned down an offer to try out for a professional baseball team, Barry eventually went on to perform and record with Gordon Lightfoot.) Now, as our first official A&R meeting kicked off, I was discovering that Barry possessed yet another aptitude that most musicians lacked: a shrewd grasp of business.
“I’ve reviewed all the paperwork and budgeting with the president here, and we’ve agreed to go ahead and produce an album with you,” Barry announced, the stack of demo tapes and finished masters crowding his desk making it clear he had little time for chit-chat. “Considering you have no track record—let’s pretend your single never happened—the fact that I’ve been given eighteen thousand dollars to make your record should tell you that everyone here believes strongly in your potential. Along with this big budget we have free, unlimited studio time, since RCA is the only label in Canada equipped with its own in-house studio.”
Although not the jump-up-and-down, “that’s the greatest mother-fucking song I’ve ever heard” type, Barry’s confidence in my writing and singing was pretty apparent. I was being offered something that, frankly, any of the countless thousands of singer-songwriters trying to be heard in Canada would have died for. This was all the more incredible considering the sorry fate of my RCA single. (Unlike today, in the 1970s record companies were willing to stick with artists they had faith in through several failures, partly because it was less costly to nurture a “baby artist” back then.) So why did I find myself hesitating? Desperate to stay in Barry’s good books, I prevaricated and told him I was more than willing to go ahead with the album. I figured it would buy me some time while I took RCA’s offer to the McCauleys, curious as to what they’d come back with.
Flattering as it was to have options, my indecisiveness left my career in a kind of limbo, forcing me to return to my government day job while chasing down various paying gigs in the evening. Had I sold a few songs to Belafonte or Feliciano I could have avoided the nine-to-five grind, but I wasn’t prepared to do that. As a cocky teenager, I likened selling off my precious songs to chopping off one of my arms for cash. And without my best songs to draw from, once I got down to the business of recording my first album how could I hope to compete on the pop charts? But hubris didn’t pay the bills, and all my so-called potential and growing recording options still weren’t resulting in any money. Paradoxically, my biggest problem with my forty-hour workweek was that I didn’t find it a problem. I liked my day job. Too much. And I was afraid that might take the edge off my hunger to succeed as a musician.
“You’ve got it made in the shade here,” Lloyd, my on-and-off boss over the last two years at the Ontario civil service, clucked. I was leaving work early for yet another audition. “Your old man’s a big wheel in government; you couldn’t get fired from this place if you sat on your ass and played guitar all day.”
“But my dad doesn’t even work in government anymore.”
“Doesn’t matter. If not for your dad pulling strings to get you in here, you wouldn’t have made it through the first week without getting tossed. Us regular stiffs in the mailroom take bets every morning on how many personal phone calls you’ll be getting that day or whether you’re gonna bother making it into work before 10:00 a.m.”
Lloyd had recently emigrated from Jamaica and, despite his tough talk, got as much a kick out of me as I did out of him. He claimed to be sleeping with half the women in the building, and whether or not this was true, his tales of conquest were highly educational. In turn, he lapped up my music-business stories, always offering enthusiastic, if misplaced, advice such as, “Get a fucking gun and shoot that sonofabitch Bayers!” He’d seen me quit (whenever I thought I was finally pulling in enough money gigging to say goodbye to straight work) half a dozen times, only to come back on bended knee once the gigs got short and the bills got tall. And he always took me back after a lecture, delivered in an Island accent that cracked me up: “Wait for a sign from God. He’ll let you know when you can quit this job for good.”
“What kind of sign might that be, Lloyd?”
“When every woman in this building wants to fuck you, instead of me.”
Spoiled as I may have been at the civil service, my life had become jam-packed. A typical day would have me leaving my job at 5:00 p.m., scrambling to make it on time for my three-hour solo stint—5:30 till 8:30—at a gay bar called the Carriage House on Jarvis Street, and then dashing to a coffeehouse gig in Yorkville from 9:00 till 1:00, collapsing onto the filthy mattress in my closet-sized bedroom sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. with several cheques folded into my wallet and close to one hundred dollars in tips bulging out of my pockets. When I wasn’t performing after work, I’d go straight home to my guitar and start writing songs. Dad’s constant warning, “Son, if you’re not careful, you’re gonna live out the rest of your life toiling away at the civil service making a buck eighty-nine an hour,” was all the motivation I needed to keep composing, performing and demoing. Knowing that with either RCA or the McCauleys I’d be soon recording my first album, I’d nod off to sleep still writing, my dreams awash with unfinished lyrics and herky-jerky melodies, startle myself awake, jot something else down and then nod off again. The following morning on the subway, the words and music from the night before would spin round and round, chasing me out of Wellesley station and into the elevator that led me down to the second basement of the Mowat Block.
A morning of sorting through intra-governmental mail would be followed by an afternoon of making deliveries to the dozens of ministry departments. As I made my rounds through the complex of interconnected government buildings I’d run into enough budding singers, actors, authors and comedians to power a lifetime of variety shows. Most of these creative types had started working for the government in their late teens. But after five, ten, twenty years they were still there, still talking about an upcoming audition, showing me their latest publicity photos or bragging about a friend of a distant cousin who knew someone in New York who was “seriously connected.” Recently, Chatelaine magazine had picked me out as one of Canada’s next generation of singing stars, mentioning Belafonte’s and Feliciano’s interest in my work. If that was true, what was I doing trapped in this fractious double life, running halfway across town to score Jamaican patties for Lloyd during lunch hour? Would I be showing this wrinkled and faded Chatelaine clipping to fellow workers half my age twenty years from now, while they regarded me as some pathetic relic?
Between straight work and music work, switching residences as casually as changing clothes, and spending what little free time I had flying to Newfoundland to visit Cynthia, I managed to avoid, for as long as possible, dealing with the decision of my life: RCA versus the McCauleys. But I couldn’t stall any longer.
“Other than the Guess Who, and they’re dinosaurs now, and one fluke hit single by the Stampeders, RCA’s track record at breaking new artists has been disastrous,” Matt argued, as he and his parents sat with me in their Don Mills living room. Mrs. McCauley served tea and cookies as Dr. McCauley concurred, “You and Matthew are a great combination. Your songwriting and singing style is perfect for orchestration. You can hear it in your chord progressions.”
“Your best songs have always been your ballads,” Mrs. McCauley cut in. “RCA’s strong suit is rock music—they don’t know what to do with you. What makes you think RCA is capable of producing an album of yours any better than the hatchet job they did on your first single?”
Now the three of them were talking at once, with Matt’s voice cutting through the din: “Look Danny, what RCA Canada is best at is distributing all the hits that their U.S. parent company gives them. The advantage to making an independent album with us is that we control the master. When it’s finished we can lease the rights to different territories rather than being stuck with the same label worldwide.”
Lease, distribution, royalty flow, ownership of masters—it reminded me of all the boring stuff I could never quite concentrate on in high school. Wasn’t becoming a musician supposed to free me from all this?
“Just give me a bit more time to think about what you’re saying,” I said.
“Danny, if no one ever hears your songs, what good is your talent?” Matt asked as I got up to leave. “Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Dylan—they all had records out by the time they were twenty-one. You’re going to be twenty soon. And so am I. That’s old in this business. I can’t wait around for you much longer.”
With the help of one of my parents’ lawyer friends, I found a legal loophole in my RCA deal (something to do with RCA failing to release a certain number of singles within the contracted time frame) that enabled me to get out of my obligations. Because Barry Keane was as soft-spoken as Bayers had been abrasive, his disappointment was palpable.
“I don’t want to talk to you about this, Danny, except to say that you’ve strung me and RCA along for months. I’m going to hang up now, before I say something I regret!”
I was developing an unfortunate habit of misleading people, while secretly weighing, cross-referencing and cataloguing any and all career options. Over the years, my calculating approach would become second nature, my way of navigating through the ever-challenging record world.
The McCauleys, relieved that I was no longer bound to RCA, relented slightly in pressuring me to sign with them, understanding that getting out of my contract meant that I was, for all intents and purpose, teaming up with them. As a gesture of faith, they gave me a shot at writing the lyrics to a piece of music Dr. McCauley had composed for a big-budget Canadian film titled Between Friends. I nailed the words while slurping down my morning cereal, recorded the vocal for the theme song and was rewarded with five hundred dollars. Because of my ability to write on assignment and sing with confidence under studio pressure (which is entirely different from performing live), I was tossed a few more movie songs. Some I co-wrote, some I simply sang, socking away the studio experience, as well as the dough, for when I would really need it.
For a nineteen-year-old pulsing with creativity, energy and confidence, it was a wonderful time to be a singer-songwriter. Along with Lightfoot’s international success, a new generation of Canadian performers was finding a voice on Canadian radio: Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan, Valdy, as well as behind-the-scenes songwriters and producers like Gene MacLellan (“Snowbird”) and Daniel Lanois. I studied these artists the way my father read up on master sociologists like W.E.B. Du Bois and Thorstein Veblen. Beyond their obvious talent, how did these singers transcend the throngs of almost-made-its? Why did so many of these top-flight Canada-based writers appear to shun love songs? (Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen notwithstanding; I suspected this may have pointed to one of the reasons for their greater international success.) Was it about appearing hip and cool? And, if so, did that make me the lamest of anti-cool?
“I’m sorry I’m not as romantic as my co-headliner,” a singer I was sharing an engagement with at Toronto’s Riverboat said to the audience, implying that this was why I was enjoying a better reception. (The truth was, I’d stacked the audience with dozens of my friends.)
Part of my “problem” was that, unlike most teenage males, I’d always loved romantic songs. Raised on Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan, I later took to so-called mushy soft-rock groups like Bread and the Association, while other boys my age reacted to their requiems for lost love by making armpit farts to announce their disgust.
Now, as I found myself edging out most of the competing local singers, the grumblings of “wimp” were getting louder, and there was nothing I could do but suck it up and move on. Besides, some unexpected perks came along with my growing love-him-or-hate-him reputation. Women were starting to pay attention to me—lots of women. This was certainly not something I’d experienced in high school.
“Better keep up with all your long-distance running, Danny,” advised a sexually rapacious older woman, who appeared to take delight in shocking me out of my Don Mills prudishness.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Your way with a love song tells me you’re right at the beginning of a long and juicy career in fucking.”
Was I shocked more by her crudeness or her harsh insight? Somehow, in the period between scaring Cynthia out of my house with my very first love song and catching the ear of international stars, I’d changed from a Don Mills virgin to a young man being seduced by generous numbers of women.
Distracted (not to mention supremely thankful) as I was by this turn of events, I rationalized any twinges of guilt by reminding myself that this tumbling in and out of women’s beds inspired and informed my songwriting.
“It’s all research, Danny,” my boss, Lloyd, explained.
“I don’t know, Lloyd, that sounds pretty darned cold.”
“It’s the other way around, Danny. That’s what makes it so hot.”
Wonderful as all this lovemaking was, it did come with what I came to call the “sex tax.” This sex tax manifested itself as stress, a constant, subterranean emotional tug that it was all too good to be true. There had to be some kind of catch.
“It concerns me, Danny, that you may be objectifying these women,” Mom said, spotting the hickey that glowed on my neck.
“Ha, ha, ha!” roared Dad, before saying, “Donna, you got it wrong, it’s our son who’s being objectified. Not only are these women gobbling Danny up, they leave their mark. Take another look at that love tattoo over that boy’s Adam’s apple. Golly day, it’s a territorial brand.”
For me to really understand the gist of what Dad was saying, I had to rid myself of all my previous misconceptions about women and sex. First, that women didn’t crave sex as desperately as men; actually, from what I was discovering, they craved it more. Second, that for women, sex and heartfelt emotions were inextricable; actually, the women I kept running into were just fine with recreational sex. It was men (like me) who weren’t fine with women being fine with it. To wit, the first three women I became sexually involved with, I fell hard for. For me at this time, monogamy was automatic and absolute.
“Why would you assume such a thing?” While these three women each had her own way of asking me this, the message amounted to the same thing. For them, monogamy was praised by everyone but practised by no one. Woman Number Two was the one who had blithely predicted that, despite my protests to the contrary, my “career in fucking” was about to begin. A month later she informed me that she was going back to her ex-boyfriend, an Olympic rower. Woman Number One had left me for “Jack the Acrobat” (a bruising hint that my imagination, or rather my bedroom technique, lacked variety). I was starting to feel like Woody Allen’s poorer, less talented brother.
Then came Woman Number Three—my third and most mortifying strike. Any lingering notions I still clung to about sex and emotional attachment being the same were thoroughly shredded by Helena, who, at twenty-two, possessed enough worldly sophistication to make Erica Jong (her heroine) look like the Flying Nun.
Helena also happened to be a competitive athlete (“Donna, Danny’s taken to dating Canada’s entire female Olympic team!” Dad had remarked), which was why, she explained, she felt so natural about her body. “Natural”: how I came to hate that word. For Helena it was a code for being free to do whatever she wanted with whomever she wanted. One day she’d be swooning over the physical perfection of a professional football player she was having her way with, only to replace this “boring jock” a week later with a suave, older professional photographer who “discovered” and took pictures of her. Oh yes, she was cruelly, unfairly beautiful. She knew this about herself and understood that this enabled her to dictate the terms of her relationships.
One night, curious as to Dad’s reaction to this woman, I decided to take Helena to my parents’ house for dinner. What I hadn’t counted on was Helena’s reaction to my father. Later that night as she led me into her bedroom, she launched into an elaborate description of my dad’s perfect looks and how, well, if he wasn’t my dad …
“Helena,” I interrupted, “what are you saying? I mean, he is my dad. And besides, he’s like, fifty.”
“Lose the Don Mills prig-boy act, Danny, it’s getting kinda old,” Helena yawned. “Although I must confess,” she added, “you’re kind of sexy when you’re shocked.”
I left Helena’s flat later that night dizzy and weightless from angry, aggressive and delirious lovemaking, and determined to write a song that would make her realize she was destroying me with her callous, shove-it-in-my-face appetite for other men. I knew I was losing her. My status as a “young, inexperienced novelty fuck” was, as she would put it, “getting old.”
There was something irresistible about her coldness, her spare-no-details stories about her other, better-looking, better-built, better-off men. And it didn’t hurt that the one time she wasn’t cold, or selfish, or superior, or condescending was when we made love.
Barely a week into our affair, Helena had asked me if I loved her. I had understood that anything I might say in response—yes, no, kind of, maybe—Helena would find a way to use against me. Her question provided me with the perfect opening line to a new song: “You ask me if I love you, and I choke on my reply …”
From the moment I met Helena to the day I completed my new song, twenty days passed. When it was finished, I played it to her over the phone.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re way too fucking intense?” Helena asked, before hanging up on me.
The next day she phoned me from the Toronto bus terminal to say goodbye. Her pro-football-playing friend (whose “boring jock” manner suddenly didn’t seem all that bad compared to my teenage angst) had been released from the Toronto Argonauts, and she’d accepted his invitation to spend the summer with him in Texas.
“He’s half Black, like you,” she added.
“I feel better, knowing that.”
Click. Helena’s brisk goodbye was the first of many unintended consequences of “Sometimes When We Touch.” Already, within hours of being written, it had started to change my life: mercifully driving a woman I was powerless to resist hundreds of miles out of reach.
At the time, no one seemed too impressed with my new song. Too heady, too heavy, too wordy, too real—it was always too something-or-other. And so, between brooding over Helena’s abrupt departure and writing at a song-a-day clip, I shelved “Sometimes” and jumped into pre-production for my first full-length record. Two weeks before I was to start recording my album, I flew to St. John’s to spend some time with Cynthia.
Conveniently, I never thought to connect my first three girlfriends’ faithlessness to my deep and growing bond with Cynthia. Because Cynthia and I had remained platonic, I saw no reason to conceal my relationship with her from Helena or anyone else, taking great pains to explain that what Cynthia and I shared transcended traditional romance—blah, blah, blah. Was I really too immature and narcissistic to understand that blathering on in this manner would be enough to send any self-respecting woman running in the opposite direction? I suspect a part of me wanted to drive all other women away. That, even though I could not admit it to myself, I’d always held the hope that one day Cynthia and I would have it all, that rarified love that an increasing number of my songs extolled.
As far as I could tell, Cynthia was confronted with similar relationship problems out east: getting to a certain level of closeness with some “perfect male candidate” (her description never failed to unnerve me) only to have the relationship mysteriously fall apart. “Maybe it’s ‘cause you refuse to sleep with them,” I suggested, trying to trip Cynthia into divulging just what had transpired with her constantly changing “candidates.”
Cynthia pointed out that I was living proof that, “sex or no sex,” we both seemed unable to make a relationship last more than several months. Sly as always, she had an unfair advantage; our tetchy talk was taking place during ninety-second breaks between eight-hundred-metre repeats, leaving me too dizzy to think clearly.
“Well, how far do you actually, ah … you know … take it with these boyfriends of yours?”
“Not too far. Just far enough.”
“Meaning?”
“Oh, Danny, let’s talk about something else. Like that new lyric you sent me. Mom and I both agree it’s the best title you’ve written. But what does it mean? Sometimes when we touch, the honesty’s too much? I have to admit, that girlfriend of yours, well, she sure didn’t seem very nice.”
As Cynthia took off with me in pursuit I tried to convince myself that I was hearing, for the first time, a hint of jealousy in her voice. “Just looking out for your best interests, Danny,” she giggled, reading my thoughts as she leaned into the first turn on the cinder track. I loved the way she could always read my mind. I hated how much I loved that about her.
The two weeks I spent with Cynthia seemed to go by in one long, extended training run. What better way to avoid getting physical than by being physical in every way but “that way”? I watched Cynthia’s wildly curly hair bob off her glistening neck when we ran the neighbourhood streets at midnight, spiking our quarter-mile jogs with fifty-yard dashes, and a part of me wanted to never return to Toronto.
“What have you written this morning?” Cynthia would ask first thing every day, when she brought a pot of coffee down to my guest room.
“Well, I started this song, but …”
“Finish it. You played me the first verse and it’s beautiful. This could be the one, Danny. Your lucky song.”
Cynthia’s belief that I was strong and talented enough to take on the RCAs, the Bayerses and the hyper-talented Matt McCauleys of the world came at just the right time. And, I would discover, she wasn’t just referring to music-business hurdles.
Dad’s voice came through the phone receiver at high volume: “You’ve worn out your welcome with Cynthia’s family. By now they see you as a mooch. Or some charity case. Nothing’s worse than having people feel like they have to take care of you. If they feel sorry for you, they’re never going to respect you.”
Dad’s voice had been so typically loud that Cynthia had been able to make out everything he’d said. My issues with Dad had been the one thing in my life that I’d attempted to play down with Cynthia. But now, feeling outed as the family fuck-up I really was, I could feel myself getting emotional. Leaving Cynthia was bad enough without letting her in on my highly guarded secret: Dad’s disappointment in me.
Cynthia wrapped her arms around my neck and shoulders, something she’d never done before.
“Danny, your dad didn’t mean it. You know how parents are. They know just what to say to make you feel awful. Really, what I think is your dad misses you. He loves you and he’s hurt that you’re not around more. But he’s a man. He’s never going to come right out and tell you that. Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Mom and I were crying last night at the thought of you going home. We wouldn’t be shedding tears over a charity case.”
“I think I’d better get packing,” I said. “My flight takes off in a few hours and I have to organize all these lyrics and chord charts before I lose track of everything.”
Cynthia brushed back my long, matted hair—I’d let it fall over most of my face to cover my gloom—and blew me a kiss as she turned to leave my room. The last thing she said stayed with me on my return flight to Toronto.
“Wait till your father finds out that the McCauleys are going to invest all that money in your first album. I’d love to be there to hear what he has to say about that.”
“This is Matt’s bar mitzvah present,” was all Dad chose to say about the McCauleys’ twenty thousand dollar investment. That the McCauleys were obviously not Jewish gave Dad’s wisecrack even more sting. My professed talents were nothing more than a cute present for Matt to toy with, while I, just an ornament bought for the sole amusement of this rich Don Mills family, continued to waste my life and imperil my future. Incredible, I thought, how Dad could so totally demean not only me, but the entire McCauley family, in one short sentence.
At twenty, I still knew and cared precious little about the business side of the record business. But despite my self-righteous attitude that “artists” should never bother with such lowly concerns such as money, my instincts—about the McCauleys versus RCA, as well as the type of deal I was entering into—were anything but naive. The bottom line was that, all things considered, the McCauleys and I had stumbled onto a reasonably fair (by industry standards at that time) deal. By that I mean I’d been offered a better contract than artists like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, who had, unlike me, signed away all their publishing (which represents half of a songwriter’s prospective royalty stream) to managers and production companies.
The contract I signed with the McCauleys granted them the life of the copyright and a little over twenty-five percent of the potential future income for all of the songs I’d written up to that point as well as any written over the next five years. They would also own, in perpetuity, the masters to all the albums (a minimum of five) that I’d record over the next five years.
In the summer of 1974, Matt and I, along with Fred Mollin—a local musician whose love and command of every facet of pop music was as boundless as it was infectious—recorded the bulk of my first album. To an outsider, it may have seemed foolish to break a recording contract with RCA only to sign a new contract with a family who, in theory, would be approaching record labels for the same kind of deal I’d just walked away from. But after my experience with Bayers, I liked the idea of making a record without any creative or business interference from a major label. Sure, Matt and I had had our disagreements, but we’d grown up together, understood each other and had a fundamental sense of how to play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
It was mesmerizing and humbling to watch Matt conduct a twenty-four-piece orchestra consisting of musicians twice his age. I sat there, staring in disbelief, feeling the goose bumps tingling across my skin as my songs took flight. One track at a time, Matt’s Wagnerian strings sailed over my guitar and vocals, leaving me feeling a combination of elation and envy. I knew his swirling swath of violins, violas and cellos, not exactly a typical sound on most pop records, would give my songs the extra commercial kick—and, dare I say, class—they needed. Still, I feared his ambitious arrangements might upstage my songs, especially at the volume he wanted them featured in the final mixdown. I couldn’t appreciate that this album was his child as much as it was mine. Fred Mollin’s role as de facto referee and studio prankster soon became as valuable as his knowledge of radio and its constantly changing tastes. Once, when Matt and I were lost in a battle over which of us should sing which background vocal, Fred arranged for a friend to barge into the studio perfectly disguised as a Toronto cop, right down to the mirrored aviator sunglasses and forehead-concealing cap, and scare the daylights out of me. (At the time I had some grass hidden in my guitar case.)
“Stop your snivelling,” Fred laughed, when I complained that he’d taken his practical joke too far. “Nothing like a good fright to give your vocals that edge.”
Meanwhile, relieved that I wasn’t going to have to call Dad to bail me out of jail, I forgot about Matt’s and my latest clash. Still shaken, I ran to the bathroom to flush my modest, illegal stash down the toilet. By the time I’d returned Matt had finished his background vocals on two of my songs. Only needing to hear my phrasing once, he could blend his whispery tone seamlessly with mine, catching the rise and fall of my rhythmic tics in three minutes: as long as it took for the song to play back over his headphones. Unwilling to admit that he’d deservedly won the background vocal contest, I played him a song I’d written the night before.
“Great hooky chorus,” Matt allowed, before qualifying: “Sounds perfect for a Salada tea commercial. I wish I could write songs that people could relate to. Problem is you have to think like normal people to write songs normal people like.”
Much as I felt threatened by Matt’s mathematical understanding of harmony, formal composition and original string arranging, it was how his parents treated him—like the second coming of Beethoven—that both amazed and, on occasion, unsettled me. One night Matt dreamed that a certain stock shot up in value, and his father, interpreting this as yet another sign of his son’s mystical, otherworldly vision, invested a fortune. When he subsequently lost it, I couldn’t help but feel a guilty rush of schadenfreude.
Our contrasting relationships with our fathers may have been another reason why Matt and I clicked. While Dad’s denouncing of my musical ambitions gave me focus and drive, Matt’s parents’ blind faith in all he said and did gave us the keys to the recording studio and opened the purse strings for the orchestras, the cream of Toronto session musicians, the photos and press kits—in short, all the prohibitively expensive tools necessary to get the undivided attention of the key music industry insiders.
The McCauley parents, months before the recording of my first album, had quietly approached my parents to offer them an equal partnership in my publishing and record royalties, provided they take on fifty percent of the McCauley investment. That my parents politely rejected their offer was not surprising. Mom later explained it this way: “Your father and I didn’t want to be in the uncomfortable position of having a business investment with a loved one, for fear of how it might taint our relationship.” Two sets of parents (and Matt) managing to keep this from me was nothing short of miraculous, and an act of impressive discipline, given Dad’s garrulous tendencies. Had I known about it at the time I would have been mortified.
The summer and fall of 1974 flew by in a mad and exhilarating rush of eighteen-hour studio days, making it easier for me to forget, for a while anyway, that Dad and I hadn’t spoken in almost six months. But then I started to miss him. A lot. By refusing to go along with Dad’s definition of who I should be, I’d been forced to define myself, set my own goals and stick religiously to them. Our scores of skirmishes had toughened me, leaving me well-equipped for the daily conflicts I was now encountering with Matt, with some bass player over whether his part was too busy or with some Yorkville club owner over a broken contract.
Still, when the following phrase, supported by a lilting major-to-minor chord sequence, came to me as I killed some time during a studio lunch break, I had no idea where it came from. How long had I been filing these thoughts away, somewhere safe, until I was brave enough to face them?
“This is just a song to say, that I’m proud for what they are, and I hope my world can take me half that far. Way back in McCarthy’s day, my parents left the USA …”
Whereas most of my songs were written within a few hours, “McCarthy’s Day,” as I eventually called it, would take eight months. It was something I couldn’t have written without leaving home.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, deliberately casual, once he’d picked up the phone. My newly finished song was my best shot at puncturing our unofficial wall of silence, while still saving face.
“It’s Danny, Donna,” Dad called out.
“I know it’s been some time, Dad, but I got this new song, one that you and Mom might find interesting. It’s pretty different for me. I thought you guys might want to hear it.”
“Hold on, son,” Dad said, handing the phone over to Mom to make the arrangements.
The following evening I sauntered into my parents’ living room, carefully avoiding Dad’s censuring stare and brushing aside Mom’s typical questions: Was I eating enough? Did I make my dentist appointment? Was I planning on going back to work full-time?
I pulled out my guitar, slid it onto my lap, closed my eyes so they couldn’t see how nervous I felt and sang them my new song. Once I’d finished the final lines, I busied myself packing up my guitar, not daring to look at them, embarrassed by the rush of emotion I was feeling.
“That’s a very good song, son. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
I kept fussing with my guitar case, shuffling pages of lyrics around, stuffing capos and guitar strings into its tiny rectangular compartment. When I finally snapped the case shut, stood up and glanced in the direction of Dad’s subdued voice, he was nowhere to be found.
“Can you show me the lyrics, Danny?” Mom asked, as if it would be a huge imposition for me. I handed her two crumpled-up pieces of paper, and she read them out loud—in a voice at once faltering and disbelieving. Still, when she reached the lyrics’ coda, I thought I could pick out the subtlest hint of pride.
Way back in McCarthy’s day, my parents left the U.S.A.
Young, rebellious lovers
They left behind a nation far too proud and powerful to say
That love, oh love transcends all colours
Some Black men turned against my father
Some white men turned against my mother
Each race has its place, they all would say
But with a past so battle worn
And a future begging to be born
They found a life that’s growing still today
And glancing through the years and living through their fears
I hope they can accept my goals, a bit confused, a bit unclear
And all the years behind me now, seem like a book I’ve read
And yet somehow, I still don’t understand the words
And all the Black and all the white, that rest in me
That make me fight, remind me, of all the knowledge left to earn
Still some Black men turn against my father…
And glancing through the years, and living through their fears
I hope they can accept my goals, a bit confused, a bit unclear
This is just a song to say, that I’m proud for what they are
And I hope my world can take me half that far
I didn’t ask Mom why Dad had left, or where he went. It was enough for me that he sat through my performance. And, heartening as it was for Dad to say, That’s a very good song, son, what really melted me was when he said, I didn’t know you had it in you. Coming from Dad, those were powerful words of praise.