Strange and beautiful as Cynthia’s and my long-distance friendship was, we were making it up as we went along. It was extraordinary that we managed to pull it off, our bond, our whatever it was, for so long. It’s impossible to gauge just how much denial factored into our growing physical attraction. Cynthia had this saying: “It’s always harder to go back than move forward.” We knew that if we acted on our attraction, we would surely be doomed to take it all the way.
How did it happen? What did it feel like? Where were we? What did we say afterwards? Does it really matter? In the end, like someone after a trauma, I could barely remember how we crossed the line into a physical relationship. And though that event itself wasn’t traumatic, the way everything unravelled afterwards—slowly at first, one deception at a time, until it finally ended in one horrific bang—most definitely was. But it’s always harder to go back than move forward.
The start of my romantic relationship with Cynthia coincided with a series of sweeping changes in my life. My album finished, I returned to work with the Ontario government, where I found myself working the night shift tracking licence plate numbers, often as a means of catching suspected criminals for the Ontario Provincial Police. Saturday and Sunday nights I usually had a high school concert lined up.
I was on the move every second, vaguely aware that all this non-stop activity was somehow connected to, indeed set in motion by, Cynthia. It seemed that by becoming intimate with her I’d achieved the impossible. Accordingly, all other previously insuperable life challenges—record deals, hit singles, international fame, even Dad’s admiration and respect—were not only possible but inevitable.
Matt, however, feeling the weight of his parents’ un-recouped investment in my album, did not share my optimism.
“We’ve blown my parents’ life savings, and what do we have to show for it? A bunch of form rejection letters from just about every record company out there.”
“Be patient, Matt. There are still lots of companies out there we haven’t approached. Once this record hits radio—”
“It can’t get to radio without a record company releasing it first. And all the labels think you’re too soft and mushy. No one wants some teenage Frank Sinatra these days. I told you we needed more electric guitar and up-tempo songs.”
Four months had passed since we’d completed the recording of my album. Since then, a day hadn’t gone by without Matt making me feel as if I’d burned through his family’s money to support my dope addiction. Making things worse was the fact that I kept finding agents who promised the McCauleys they’d land us that magic record deal. But after thousands of dollars of expenses, these same agents came back armed with rejection slips and invoices. Columbia Records already had too many singer-songwriters; A&M thought the singer-songwriter thing had run its course and they were looking for the next Supertramp; Arista was cutting back on its roster.
Fed up with agents and their big bills and promises of that dream contract right around the corner, Matt and I decided to dispense with the deal brokers and talk to record companies directly. Though we steeled ourselves for more rejection, the labels turned out to be surprisingly complimentary, curious as to why we’d chosen to make such a “different-sounding” record.
But flattery was a far cry from a record company slotting me into its well-oiled marketing, promotion and distribution network. Most labels we talked to had this to say: “What you’re offering is a luxury item. Your kind of music is very expensive to promote and produce.” Sure, Elton John was big, but the Brits had more eclectic tastes, whereas Canada liked more straight-out, balls-to-the-wall rock ‘n’ roll. Along with my quaintly luxurious sound, it appeared that my “look” was also working against me. More than a few execs confessed, “We played your album to all our secretaries and asked them what they thought you might look like. They loved your songs and imagined you as a blond, blue-eyed, California surfer type. Your look is, ah, well, let me guess, are you Turkish, maybe, or Greek?”
I’d gotten to the point where I joked about dying my hair, bleaching my skin and posing in leather with an electric guitar. Matt was more direct about his disillusionment: “I don’t think I can sit through many more meetings where A&R guys are trying to tell us that our record is too good to be released. Most of them are so deaf they can’t even hear that their speakers are out of phase.”
Ten meetings over two weeks had covered every label worth approaching save one. Expecting one final rejection, Matt and I met with Ross Reynolds, president of GRT Records, at the time Canada’s most respected and successful independent record label. We were surprised Ross had even agreed to meet with us, since one of our former agents had wined and dined him in a bid to sell our album, only to come back empty-handed. When Matt mentioned Ross’s earlier rejection, thanking him for agreeing to give our album a second listen, Ross shook his head.
“Take this any way you want, guys, but that agent you’re talking about never played me your record. He’s never tried to pitch me anyone’s record. We’ve said hello at one or two industry functions, but that’s it.”
I did my best to ignore Matt’s scornful stares. Okay, so I blew a ton of his parents’ money on an agent who seemed to have invented record company meetings and expenses, but on the positive side, that meant a handful of U.S. labels that had supposedly rejected my record hadn’t actually heard it.
“I think you have one potential hit single in here,” Ross said, after glancing through the notes he’d written beside my song titles on the tape box. “Although I don’t hear a lot of other obvious hits among these songs.”
“Well, I have a few new songs I could tack on to this record that are really commercial,” I said.
“Who’s gonna pay for the recording, Santa Claus?” Matt hissed, beneath his breath.
“We can always discuss the option of adding some new songs if your first single takes off. These days, everyone holds back on their album release till a month or two after their single’s been shipped to radio.”
“So you’re offering us a record deal?” Matt asked, the surprise in his voice making me want to smack him.
“What I’m offering is to buy rights to a first single. With the contractual understanding that GRT Records has first rights to lease and release your album if your single’s a hit.”
Everyone in the Canadian music business knew that GRT wasn’t simply another northern branch of a U.S. multinational, and that Ross Reynolds had a reputation for standing by his Canadian acts, turning an unusually high percentage of them into household names. And if first impressions counted for anything, Yale-educated Reynolds was smart without acting arrogant, optimistic without being hyperbolic, quick to emphasize that overnight successes usually disappeared the following morning. He took great pains to point out that sustained discipline was what separated the stars from the chumps.
“Are you willing to put everything else in your life second to your career? Not for the next month, or the next year, but for the next twenty-five years?”
My answer, an unqualified yes, felt like an understatement. Hard as it was to imagine where I’d be next week, let alone next year or the year after, one thing was beyond imagining: a life that did not completely revolve around music. Such an existence seemed like no life at all.
Matt and I signed with GRT Records in April of 1975. GRT scarcely waited for the ink to dry on our contract before shipping my single out to Canadian radio in early May. I was still a month shy of twenty-one, and everything—my career, my life, my entire identity, even (if Matt was to be believed) the McCauleys’ financial security—now hinged on the fate of one song, my make-or-break first single, “You Make Me Want to Be (A Father).”
It was the perfect choice, perhaps too much so, as my go-for-broke opening line, after impressing Belafonte the year before, had also made an impact on one of Nashville’s most powerful country record producers. My fellow guitar player on the recording of “You Make Me Want to Be,” Don Potter, had returned to Nashville in the fall of ‘74 and raved to Tammy Wynette’s record producer, Billy Sherrill, about a killer song he’d played on. When Potter sang Sherrill the opening line, Sherrill said, “That’s one of the best damned titles I’ve ever heard,” and proceeded to write “You Make Me Want to Be a Mother,” an instant country hit for Tammy Wynette. (There’s no copyright on a song title.) By the time my song was released, I was accused of nicking the title from Tammy Wynette. (Ms. Wynette more than paid me back ten years later, when she scored a top-five country hit with a song I’d co-written.)
Despite my indignation at being accused of plagiarism, my single immediately started receiving heavy radio airplay throughout the country. That point demarcated my life: before my voice hit radio and after my voice hit radio. In the seventies, a pop singer’s career lived and died based on Top 40 airplay. TV appearances and coast-to-coast rave reviews could give your career a boost, but nothing compared to the galvanic whoosh, the one hit song and you’re off to the races propulsion, delivered by radio play.
Within weeks of my song sweeping the radio, I signed with one of Canada’s most powerful management teams: Finkelstein/Fiedler. The McCauleys had done their job, financing and producing my album and then procuring a record deal, and were now, in effect, passing the baton to the next team up my career ladder. It was up to my new managers to help put a face, an image, on to what, at this point, was little more than a new voice on Canadian radio. Procuring tour dates, finding the right media exposure and securing international record deals; this second stage of my career was every bit as crucial as the five or so years Matt and I had spent learning the craft of record making.
I could have searched the world over and still not have uncovered two more unlikely relay partners than the McCauleys and Finkelstein/Fiedler. The McCauleys, still smarting from the agents I’d introduced them to, regarded my new managers, both named Bernie, as necessary evils at best. It was a culture clash so monumental that it would have been amusing had I not been caught in the middle. The Bernies’ every second word was “fuck,” Finkelstein was wildly unkempt—the remnants of his last tomato-and-egg sandwich were frequently lodged in his caveman beard—and Fiedler was an unapologetic Lothario. Finkelstein, brilliant as he was formally uneducated, worked tirelessly for his beloved acts, Cockburn and McLauchlan, regarding every other up-and-coming singer as the sworn enemy. Anyone caught singing along with, say, Springsteen’s “Born to Run” was treated as a defector, and quite possibly a spy working for the other side.
Fiedler, who owned the legendary Riverboat coffeehouse in Yorkville and had booked the likes of Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne before they became superstars, saw the music business as one extended riotous party, frequently travelling for weeks at a time with his high-rolling friends: everyone from Jack Nicholson to Gordon Lightfoot and music-biz heavy hitter David Geffen.
These two Bernies had been power figures in the Canadian singer-songwriter scene for years, and I was as flattered as I was star-struck to be managed by them, willing, sometimes against my better judgment, to defer to their advice. The Bernies’ clout, along with the growing momentum of my single, led me to tour across Canada and the United States as an opening act to established pop stars (Gino Vanelli, Maria Muldaur and Murray McLauchlan, to name a few). Finding myself the subject of tons of positive media attention, I took everything that was written about me too seriously, not understanding at the time that if you unblinkingly accept the media’s praise you are bound, ultimately, to absorb their scorn.
I couldn’t have been happier. After all, I’d plotted and schemed my entire life for this, and now I was living it with gusto: energetically bopping from photo shoot to interview, to tour bus, to recording studio, to penning out new lyrics on airplane stationery, to three hours of shuteye. Then repeat. Little wonder that pop music is a young person’s game; its numbing pace would do in all but a few adults over thirty. All the while I believed I was emotionally mature and intellectually shrewd enough to handle this new and exciting world that was laying itself before me. But I wasn’t.
“So, what else is going on in your life, son?”
I was talking to my parents in their bedroom. There was something instantly reassuring about seeing them in bed, snuggled under the covers. I’d just finished bragging to them about the deal I’d signed stateside with 20th Century Records and the impressive promotion and marketing campaign it was launching to gear up for my record’s release in America.
“Your mother and I would like to know what you’re doing to stay balanced. Are you reading any new books to expand your mind, like your brother and sister?”
“Dan, kindly don’t drag me into this,” Mom said, picking up a magazine from the nightstand.
I wanted to say something quasi-pithy about balanced lives being a luxury lost to people with demanding careers, but really, that would have been exactly the kind of defensive outburst Dad would have expected from me.
Now that he could no longer take me to task over my career choice, he was bent on uncovering a new potential weakness: my career obsession. Fine, I thought, but where, pray tell, have I picked up the curse of this tunnel vision?
I headed downstairs. In my wake I could hear Mom slowly getting out of bed, and Dad weakly objecting to her abandoning him. “No one’s preventing you from getting up and joining me,” Mom answered.
“Would you like me to fix you something, Danny? I’ve picked all these raspberries from our garden,” she asked, minutes later.
“No thanks. You know me—a visit home can’t be complete without me rummaging around in your fridge.”
Mom was about to say something but was distracted by the sound of Dad’s snoring.
“Christ, that’s loud. Sounds like Dad’s cutting my hair with a lawn mower.”
“You’ve got to hand it to your father. Even when he’s sleeping he manages to dominate the conversation.”
I walked into the foyer and picked up my car keys. “Here, Danny.”
Mom handed me a small container of fresh raspberries, and I could see a reddish-pink stain of raspberry juice tainting the tips of her fingers. Dad had stopped snoring, leaving the low hum of the fridge motor the only sound in the house.
As I opened the front door to leave, I gave Mom a few posters advertising my new album.
“Maybe you and Dad can think of them as my university diploma substitutes,” I said.
“Don’t tell him I told you this,” Mom said, “but in the morning, the first thing your father does is turn the clock radio to the rock station, hoping he’ll catch your song.”
There’s a delicious delay between the time that the media and your record label align to spring you on an unsuspecting public, and the public’s eventual response. I felt like a pebble in a slingshot with the sling stretched back taut, to the breaking point, just before its release. In the seventies, thanks in part to recent Canadian Radio-Television Commission regulations, it was a lot easier than the public realized to become an “overnight celebrity.” Canada was starved for its own celebrities, even if, once a homegrown star was established, the media and public couldn’t quite decide whether to love or hate its latest, fresh-faced hero. When my mug was suddenly plastered on the cover of Canadian magazines, when I could be seen regularly performing on television, when my voice was saturating Canadian radio, I believed it had everything to do with my undisputed genius as a singer-songwriter. I didn’t understand that celebrity was mysteriously unequal parts timing, serious marketing dollars, good luck, cultural mood and, above all, that certain je ne sais quoi.
What I did understand was that an entirely different set of rules—and frequently no rules at all—applied to so-called celebrities. At the beginning, I quite enjoyed the spectacle of well-adjusted adults abandoning every vestige of civil behaviour upon spotting a “famous person”; the WASP reserve vanished, giving way to staring, pointing and animated whispering. Damned if now that I finally had some money, I found it almost impossible to spend it. Store clerks started giving me merchandise for free. Bartenders and waiters refused to take my brand-new credit card, instead offering me more food and free drinks. Where were these generous souls when I was broke? Cops, who used to regard my long, bushy hippie hair and hard-to-pin-down racial origins as a surefire indicator of lawlessness, would now stop me for speeding, amble over to my car and then, upon recognizing my face, reach in and shake my hand. Then they’d tear my ticket in half and bashfully ask me to autograph it.
On my twenty-first birthday, in between sets at the Riverboat, the McCauleys gave me a thousand-dollar advance on my royalties. I’d never seen a cheque that big. My parents gave me twenty-one silver dollars. Those shiny silver coins felt like the gift of a lifetime. I kept rolling them around in my hands that night as I lay wide awake in bed, as if to convince myself that they were real, that any of it—this new and alluring stardom, the concerts, the radio airplay, the outpouring of female attention—was real. Twenty-one silver dollars. It was the type of gift a kid might receive. With all that was happening, it felt comforting to be still regarded as a child by my parents.
“Take care of my boy, now. Keep him safe and out of trouble,” Dad warned my new managers.
“Of course, Dr. Hill,” they said.
What kind of trouble was Dad referring to?
“You’re on your way, son,” Dad told me a few months later, solemnity creeping into his tone. I’d just brought him ten advance copies of my first album. I already had a second single, “Growing Up (In the Shadow of the USA),” moving up the charts, and GRT was gearing to get my album out the next week, while my voice was still dominating the airwaves. Dad and I were sitting on the front porch, his favourite spot when the weather turned warm. The streetlights turned on, reminding me of earlier years when streetlights meant curfew time.
“Danny, now that you’re making money, I expect you to contribute to your brother’s and sister’s college educations.” College education. Nothing like those two words to bring me crashing back to the present. After all the years of Dad predicting I was never going to make a dime in music, now he was casting me in the role of financial provider, at twenty-one, with two songs on the radio. I took this to mean that, in some fashion, he was finally blessing me with his approval. That was all that mattered. I had no idea that my newfound money-making skills would ultimately open up an entire new realm of conflict between Dad and me.