In the fall of ‘76, my second album, Hold On, was released internationally. My earlier concerns about running into a “sophomore slump” proved to be ill-founded; within a few months the record’s sales exceeded that of my first album, soaring past gold status in Canada (over fifty thousand units) as well as steadily building up a solid fan base for me around the world.
The quick success of Hold On meant that I was now selling out two-to-three-thousand-seat concert halls across Canada—the same venues I’d played less than a year before as an opening act. Between my performing income and my record and publishing royalties, I was making more money that I could possibly spend, even if I’d had the time to spend it. Because I’d recently incorporated, the cheques weren’t even written in my name, making the money seem all the more unreal. “Out of Control” (the name of my company, after a line from my first hit), the royalty statement would say, with enough zeroes following the first number that I had to read it over a few times to determine the amount.
There was little doubt that Dad’s conflicted attitude about money had rubbed off on me. In the following letter he wrote to his father in 1957, I can almost picture him twitching with pride as he talks about his raise, all the while trying his best to sound nonchalant:
I shall be making well over $6,000 (annually) starting Jan 1, and though I do not consider myself wealthy, I do feel it is enough to support my family adequately … our needs and tastes are simple. We are not great entertainers, liquor buyers, or fashion plates. We [realize] credit buying is a necessary economic evil in our society—we treat it as such and buy through it sparingly. I think that there is little doubt that Donna and I are both committed socialists.
Reminding his parents in a letter written six years later that his attitude about frivolous spending hadn’t changed, Dad complained that he took Mom’s father, George Bender, “out to dinner at a rather high class place—flaming desserts and all that—and ended up with a $37.50 dollar dinner and wine bill … No damn meal is worth that much.”
By the age of six, I’d taken to modelling Dad’s miserly ways, inspiring Mom, in a 1960 letter to Grandma May, to write: “Dobbie received the five dollars on his birthday and decided to save it in his piggy bank … he gets a small allowance now—5 cents a week—which has made him very money conscious. He hordes it like a little miser, then finally decides to buy something—like a popsicle! So he’ll hang on to the $5 for a good long time.”
At twenty-two, still very much the miserly son of a self-proclaimed socialist, I tried to ameliorate any traces of guilt by spending extravagantly on everyone but myself. Five-star dining, colour TVs (Dad believed it wasn’t déclassé to own a colour TV if you received it as a present), boom boxes the size of a small planet, jewellery, impulsive cash handouts—all my generosity bought me a new sense of power. The financial arrangement my managers had set up provided me with the comforting illusion that whatever I was spending, or making, had no real bearing on me. Every penny I earned flowed through them. After they took their twenty-five percent gross commission, they paid all my bills and gave me spending money in the way that a parent might dole out a weekly allowance to a ten-year-old.
“An artist shouldn’t be distracted by such common tasks as writing cheques, balancing bank accounts and reading over Visa statements,” they’d explain. Sounded good to me—especially the “artist” part. That my managers and I shared the same accountant and lawyer made eminent sense according to their logic, since no one but music-business insiders could properly grasp the arcane intricacies of such dramatic cash flow and the related need for tax shelters.
The early years of pop music stardom follow a cookie-cutter pattern: each rising star, while believing he or she is undergoing a highly unique and individual process, is living through a set sequence of events so similarly ordered and graphed as to be largely interchangeable with the next star’s career. More to the point, in pop music, any window of opportunity is extremely narrow and the resulting success is usually fleeting. This means you have no choice but to squeeze out every drop of fame before it runs dry, taking on the workload and pressure of a dozen people. In my case, that meant hitting two hundred markets a year, performing and media touring, all the while coaxing enough songs out of my addled brain to meet my recording and music publishing commitments. Saying no to any work opportunity wasn’t an option. If my managers told me to do something—fly to Saskatoon on a moment’s notice to do a highly publicized benefit concert, tape for ten consecutive sixteen-hour days at CTV over Christmas for some middle-of-the-road music special, perform two weeks at L.A.’s prestigious Troubadour while absorbing a loss of several thousand dollars in expenses—I obeyed. Believing that at any moment my inexplicable success could be stolen from me, that one reckless “no” might topple everything I’d worked so long and hard for, I frequently pushed myself until my voice gave out. My body was telling me something that I was otherwise incapable of admitting: there’s only so much you can do before everything starts to break down.
And then there were the occasions when back-to-back contrasting gigs proved to be more psychologically discombobulating than physically taxing. Nothing scrambled my ego more than selling out Toronto’s Massey Hall only to fly to Boston the following night for a week of opening for singer-songwriter Ronee Blakley, in a tiny coffeehouse called Passims. (As well as being an esteemed and quirky singer-songwriter, Blakley was a successful actress who had starred in Robert Altman’s classic Nashville.)
What planet have I landed on? I’d wonder, staring out from my tiny stage into a hostile crowd of highly vocal lesbians. “You make me wanna be a father …” I’d croon, expecting, as only a cocksure twenty-two-year-old with a couple of gold records under his belt could, that my voice would convert these women into swooning Doris Days. But instead I’d be welcomed by hisses—and “Get off the stage, loser” or “Shut the fuck up, dickwad.”
I found the occasional nightmare gig easy to laugh off, since my career remained on a steady upswing. Tomorrow meant another city, another adventure, leaving yesterday to be moulded into another “road story.” Sure, I worked my ass off, but I also managed to have a hell of a lot of fun.
The most fun I had was phoning Dad from the road and breathlessly informing him of my latest cheque, or gold record, or sold-out concert. If some high-rolling performers could never buy enough crap, I could never tire of strutting and preening for my dad. I felt compelled to win him over anew every day. Interestingly, Dad’s studied and cynical analysis of North American society, with all its class stratifications, consumerist brainwashing and racist underpinnings, didn’t extend to pop music success—at least not to his son’s pop music success. And I loved that about him. Dad honestly believed, as I did, that I’d continue to earn huge whacks of money and bang out hit records indefinitely. Dad’s fixed musical point of reference was sustainable geniuses like Basie, Ellington and Ella, from a different, less confectionary and disposable era, unlike typical current hit-and-run pop acts like the Bay City Rollers or David Cassidy. While my career was flying, Dad never spoke of his former, decade-long dismissal of my musical dreams. Nor did I. Now was the time for me to play the big wheel and for him to respond in kind—advising me of my corresponding financial and moral commitments to the family. Not that I needed any convincing. I’d offer him five grand if he lost twenty pounds and hand the cash over to him once he did (though he gained it back quickly); fly his sister Doris and her husband into Toronto to surprise him and Mom on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary (along with whisking my brother from an Algonquin canoe camp by private plane); donate countless thousands to the organizations he believed in, like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; and stage costly benefit concerts for whatever left-wing cause or minority group he felt most deserving.
I leaned on Dad for support once the local music critics started nipping at my heels. He, of all people, knew what it felt like to be burned by the press. “Don’t worry, Danny,” he’d say when I’d complain about some reviewer describing my songs as “callow,” “most people don’t even know what ‘callow’ means.”
But more than Dad’s new enthusiasm over my recent success, it was his naïveté, his total lack of understanding of this new world I’d become a part of, that I found most reassuring. To my boast that I’d sold out two shows a night for two weeks straight at New York’s Bitter End, or gossiped with Elton John who’d shown up to say hi between a couple of my musical sets at the University of Guelph, Dad’s response would always be something like: “And your album’s sold out at the Don Mills Plaza. I promised the people working at the record store there that you’d drop off an autographed poster for them.” Elton, Margaret and Pierre—that kind of craven name-dropping was lost on Dad. I may as well been talking about touring on Mars. Don Mills, however, was something tangible, something real and immediate.
In the spring of 1977 I was in Los Angeles meeting with my label, 20th Century Records, and my publishing company, ATV Music, before recording my third album. At the time, the U.S. president of ATV Music was Sam Trust. Closing in on forty, Sam had a severity about him, his thick eyebrows perpetually set in a half-scowl as he walked by you, his face buried in some royalty printout. He’d signed me through the McCauleys (since they published my music) in 1976, paying healthy cash advances to administer my songs internationally. One Friday morning in early April, a few days before I was scheduled to return to Toronto to start cutting my new record, Sam summoned me into his office.
“Dan, I’ve just signed Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil to a publishing deal. Along with Gerry Goffin and Carole King, they’re one of the most successful songwriting teams in the history of American pop music.”
This was why I’d had to get out of bed so early, to hear Sam talk about other songwriters?
“Let me be straight with you. You’re an incredible lyricist. And Barry writes better melodies than anyone. I’d like the two of you to try writing together.”
I agreed, but Sam could tell I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic with his suggestion. Up to that point, all the songs I’d recorded I’d written on my own. From where I sat, I didn’t need to write with anyone. But as I glanced over the endless list of hit songs Barry Mann had co-written—”You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “On Broadway,” “Kicks,” “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration”—I knew, if nothing else, it would be worthwhile meeting him.
“Barry loves your voice,” Sam added. “And your song ‘Hold On,’ which is getting lots of airplay on the soft rock station here, is one of his favourites right now.”
The next day I met Barry at the ATV offices on Sunset and Vine. ATV was situated on one of the top floors of what was then referred to as the Motown Building or the Black Tower. Motown Records, along with dozens of other record labels, publishing companies and various music business enterprises, had offices there. Many times I’d ride the elevator standing next to Michael Jackson’s dad, who’d be cussing the National Enquirer or Herald for inventing something about his son, his flagrant fury reminding me of my dad fuming about being slammed in the Globe and Mail. On my way to meet Barry Mann, I ran into my old nemesis from my RCA days, Tim Bayers, who was then working Bing Crosby’s movie song catalogue. Bayers was all smiles now, aware of all I’d accomplished in the last few years. I extricated myself from Bayers’s torrent of compliments and escaped into the ATV Music offices, where I found Barry Mann waiting for me in a tiny music room stashed at the back of a long hallway.
After the obligatory “You’re great,” “No, you’re great” compliments, Barry got down to business. As he puffed through three packs of cigarettes, he rattled off dozens of criss-crossing musical ideas intended for me to write lyrics to, seemingly on the fly. I had no idea people wrote like this, hurled together in blind-date fashion, mixing words and music into a finished song like mad chemists. I still clung to the notion that songwriting could only come from a pure, inspired place—sexual torment had always worked for me. Feeling as if I’d stepped into the wrong party, I told Barry I wasn’t experienced at writing on the spot and, by way of excusing myself, handed him a lyric that I spotted lying on the bottom of my guitar case.
“I’m not sure if it’s any good. I never wrote any music to it,” I lied, afraid that if he knew it had once been an entire song he might think I was giving him one of my castoffs and take offence. “If you can do something with it, great. But don’t feel any obligation if you hate it.”
Then I wandered into the reception area to call a cab. By the time I was off the phone, Barry was standing in front of me, smiling. “I think I got something for the chorus,” he said, almost apologetically. I followed him into the hovel-like piano room and stood just behind him as he sang, plangently, his new melody and chords to “Sometimes When We Touch.”
I was so used to my original music that Barry’s melody sounded overly ornate, like something Barry Manilow would come up with. (In fact, Manilow recorded “Sometimes” and released it as a single in 1997.) “Yeah, Barry. That sounds really, ah, nice,” was my stammered attempt at diplomacy. Barry, disheartened, nonetheless told me he’d finish writing the music to my verses and bridge and get back to me.
The next day, Barry tracked me down by phone at the posh Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I was breakfasting with my managers and the president of my U.S. label. “Phone call for you, Mr. Hill,” announced one of the perfectly attired waiters, approaching me (in my jeans and ratty lumberjack shirt) as though I were a visiting dignitary. He fussily handed me over to another, white-haired, septuagenarian waiter, who escorted me to their plush private phone room. Surely, this is someone’s idea of a practical joke, I thought.
“You gotta hear this, Dan,” Barry said. Then his finished music flowed out of the Polo Lounge’s candy-floss-pink guest phone. The song was starting to grow on me. “I’ve doubled up the chorus,” Barry told me, as I hemmed and hawed on the other end of the phone, nervous that any comment I offered about his music might sound unworthy of all his effort. “So you need to add three lyric phrases to go along with the second half of the chorus.”
“Okay,” I said, like a student promising his English teacher that he’d fill in the gaps of a half-written essay. I had no idea what had just transpired. My original music to “Sometimes” had been funereal, making it impossible for a listener to wade through my turgid chord changes and actually hear—and, more importantly, feel—the lyrics. But Barry’s gripping verse melody, offset by the light, ingeniously singsongy release of his chorus, gave these same words a kind of soaring majesty that made them instantly (and to some ears, excruciatingly) memorable.
“Before we got together to write, I studied your first two albums,” Barry explained, when I dropped by his newly purchased Beverly Hills mansion the next day to record a work tape of our new song.
In effect, Barry was telling me that he’d done his homework on me. His assignment had been to analyze my range and what melodies and series of notes brought out my vocal personality to its best advantage. What I thought had taken Barry a few minutes to write had really taken him hours of preparation. Those hours of preparation had further benefited from twenty years of writing and rewriting scores upon scores of hits (and at least ten times as many misses), learning through the process how to refine and improve his natural gift. And here I’d always thought genius was a genetic fluke, a secret switch turned on in your brain at birth that made you mysteriously and effortlessly superior.
In a most unexpected way, Dad’s constant warning that I would need higher education to succeed in life proved to be absolutely true. But neither he nor I could have known that my advanced studies would come from collaborating with songwriters whose abilities were far more developed than mine. Had it not been for Barry Mann, and the impact of our first collaboration, I would never have been embraced by and informally schooled by a world of elite songwriters, artists and producers. But that came later. In the immediate future, my first collaboration with Barry would become my first international hit single, and it would be all I could do to ride the wave, barely holding on as it swept me around the world.
From strictly a pop star point of view, 1977 and 1978 represent the zenith of my career. They also happened to be the darkest, saddest years of my life. If the sudden explosion of my career was in fact the culmination of ten years of steadily writing songs, singing and practising guitar every day, and performing in front of anyone who would listen, then the flip side was also true; the stunning evisceration of my personal life that appeared to take place over one terrible night was really the result of a decade of separating sex and romantic love without understanding where that would lead me.
In the fall of 1977, I showed up at my parents’ front door in the middle of the night, my face swollen and covered with tears. When Dad answered the door, bleary-eyed from being awakened, wearing his red-and-blue checked bathrobe, I declared that I was moving back in with them.
“Don’t worry,” I began, a picture of false courage. “You’ll hardly know I’m here. I’ll be on the road touring for the next year.”
“Tell me what happened, son.”
“Cynthia and I just broke up.”
As Mom tread cautiously down the stairs, Dad led us into the kitchen. For the next couple of hours I spilled the unseemly details. It had all started, or more precisely, ended, six hours earlier. I’d just finished playing Cynthia a new song I’d written, where the narrator had discovered that his lover had been unfaithful. When the song ended, Cynthia looked as though she’d been ambushed.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh nothing … really … I just meant that—”
Cynthia, assuming that my latest song meant that I’d somehow caught on to her affair, had just blown her secret. She stumbled badly through a few flailing minutes of reflexive denial, but it was an obvious stall, a chance for her to buy some time before our dialogue reached the inevitable “How could you, and for how long, and how many times?” stage.
“It only happened once. When you were performing in White-horse. We went up north to his cottage for the weekend. Afterwards I swore to him that this could never happen again.”
“Oh, that’s reassuring.”
“He told me that you’ve probably had hundreds of women on the road. That there isn’t a singer alive who’d be able to walk away from all the temptation out there. Danny, you can tell me. Whatever you’ve done, it’s only natural.”
“Tell you what? Just like you to try to turn this back on me.”
“Don’t yell. You’re starting to scare me.”
What did she expect? For me to throw her and her new lover—Jesus, I’d introduced them—a party of congratulations?
“Danny, it’s your turn now to talk. You don’t have to lie anymore.”
Did she think that we could casually swap our stories of unfaithfulness, cancel out our wrongs and start over with a clean slate? No way I was going to make it that easy for her.
“C’mon, Danny. It’s not like you to clam up like this. You’re the one who always taught me to open up, to not hold back.”
Cynthia’s voice trailed off, giving way to what appeared to be a sympathetic smile. I was dimly aware of being somewhere else. Lost, in a totally unfamiliar state: shaking, hurting, beyond angry, all I wanted was to strike out.
“What?”
“That’s how many there’ve been since we’ve been together. Fourteen.”
Cynthia laughed, thinking at first that I was joking. I remember when her smile faded. When it finally hit her that this was no joke. How her face turned hard and cold. Good, now she knew just what it felt like. And that’s when things got ugly. The kind of ugly that I’d never known was possible.
As Cynthia’s accusations bounced off and fed into mine, I was dimly aware that we were effectively dismantling, insult by insult, confession by confession, eight years of our lives. Not only had we lost each other, we’d lost something fundamental within ourselves.
It’s hard to know how long we carried on like this, our name-calling exchanges interrupted by demanding, and recounting, specific details of the most masochistic nature. It was like being in a prolonged car wreck, or waking up after being knocked unconscious; the time spent in that kind of altered state is impossible to calculate once you’ve come to and realized you’re actually still alive.
There was only one question left for me to ask.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
I picked up everything in the living room I could get my hands on—books, framed photographs, records, chairs—and started throwing them at the wall. When there was nothing left to hurl, with my voice screamed out, I emerged from whatever spell had possessed me to see Cynthia crying, cowering, covering her head, in the corner of the room. The living room looked like the scene of a botched robbery, objects scattered and shattered everywhere. That was when I knew it was over. I’d loved Cynthia for eight years. As a teenager, I never dreamed she’d love me. As a young man, I never believed she could fall out of love with me.
I was wrong on both counts.
I stood up from my parents’ kitchen table and helped myself to a glass of water. Dad had barely stirred as he’d listened to me. Mom, aside from clasping Dad’s hand and issuing the odd gasp of disbelief, had remained unnervingly still.
“Well, you can’t accuse me of being boring. Just think, Dad, had I followed your advice and gone to university, how much simpler life would be for me right now.”
“How much simpler life would be for all of us,” Mom corrected.
This was the first time I’d ever opened up to my parents about my personal life. Had part of my intention been to shock them, to expose what I believed was the vilest part of me, in the hope that they would still find it in their hearts to accept me? But they didn’t appear surprised, only sad. Had they somehow known all along that sooner or later I’d be showing up at their front door in the dead of night, broken and crying, assailing them with what I considered to be the worst story of all time? I pointed out to Mom that at least my cheating had been on the road, with strangers. Cynthia’s transgressions had taken place with a person I’d known for ten years. Surely, I rationalized, that was way worse. Mom cleared her throat, released Dad’s hand and said, in a wry tone, “That’s the way it always is, Danny. Couples cheat with someone within their social circle, not total strangers.”
Mom’s slap-in-the-face logic was the last thing I wanted to hear.
“Is there something wrong with me?” I asked, directing my question at Dad, pretty much pleading for his exoneration, as Cynthia’s accusations of “sex freak” gonged in my head.
“No, son, there’s nothing wrong with you,” Dad answered, adding impishly, “At least you weren’t the dog that my old roommate Calvin Jackson was. He’d sleep with anyone—could’ve been as big and ugly as a pickup truck. Wouldn’t have made a damned bit of difference.”
“Dan, really, what does that have to do with anything?” Mom asked, now upset with both of us.
Dad sided with me. What twenty-three-year-old, red-blooded male touring the United States with a “sexy as all get out” hit record would be immune to the sudden clamour of female attention?
“Trust me, son. This is a stage you’ll grow out of.”
“I certainly hope so, Danny, for everybody’s sake,” Mom said.
“Whatever you do,” Dad warned, “don’t apologize, cry and beg forgiveness. It’ll make you look weak. And, anyway, talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” he said, his face tightening. “She’s in no position to take the moral high ground.”
Mom took Cynthia’s side. If I’d spent more time at home and been less obsessed with music, neither she nor I would have been exposed to so much opportunity and temptation. Now it was time for me to show Cynthia that she came first, not my career. The one thing my parents agreed on was that Cynthia and I, given our eight-year history, would probably get through this mess.
Throughout the fall, I ignored Dad’s advice and followed Mom’s: pleading, sobbing, threatening suicide (Cynthia phoned my manager one night and demanded he go into my hotel room and take away my sleeping pills) and unwittingly doing everything in my power to drive her away. Following a brutal phone conversation with Cynthia after a concert in Moncton, New Brunswick, Bernie Fiedler tracked down Gordon Lightfoot by phone, persuading him to extend me five thousand dollars credit so I could lease his Learjet that night. I had it in my head that my only chance of reconciliation with Cynthia would be to see her immediately. I should have listened to Lightfoot’s immortal advice after he wished me a safe flight: “I’ll lend you the money, Dan, but take it from someone who knows, there ain’t no woman alive worth spending five thousand dollars on.”
Several hours and a thousand miles later, stoned on sleeping pills I’d stolen back from my manager’s toiletries, I dragged myself up the stairs to Cynthia’s apartment. Though I’d officially moved out weeks before, I still had a key. Had I phoned her in advance or banged on the front door, she would never have let me in. After giving Cynthia the fright of her life, I collapsed into a strewn-out mess on the floor, apologizing, promising anything that flooded into my jangled brain: I’d change; I’d never so much as look at another woman again; I’d stop touring—all the crap that people say (and actually believe, at that moment, anyway) when they know they’re on the way out. Cynthia wasn’t buying any of it. It wasn’t until I threatened to throw myself down the stairs that she relented and said she’d take me back. We spent the next forty-eight hours together, scarcely leaving the bedroom. We both knew it was over.
Then I flew back to the Maritimes to resume my tour. Aside from two extremely unexpected and awkward run-ins, I never saw Cynthia again.
That September night in 1977, as I fell apart in my parents’ kitchen, I reached out for their help, their understanding, their forgiveness and their love as though my life depended on it. And quite possibly it did. I look back at that night of awful truth, of confession and counter-confession with Cynthia, as the defining moment, the major turning point in my life.
Trying night after night, month after month to make sense of what had happened to me, to Cynthia, to us, only left me more confused, convinced that nothing in life mattered, because when you boiled it all down, there was no logical pattern or purpose to anything. What did those five years of letters and visits, of shared dreams and longings, followed by two years of living together, mean? What did anything mean?
Of course there are times when you learn things even as you throw up your walls and pretend that nothing’s seeping through. I was learning what my dad had learned, back when he was eighteen and about to be drafted for goofing off at work. That there were consequences.
Not unlike Dad and his first, botched marriage, I pretended that Cynthia and I never really happened. Furthermore, in keeping with the Hill family tradition of certain subjects remaining taboo, it was tacitly understood that no one was to mention Cynthia’s name again. This made recovery easier for me in the short run, while in the long run I remained haunted and torn for many years.
From September 1977 till August 1978, whenever I wasn’t touring I lived with my parents, finding refuge and healing in our old Don Mills home. From a career perspective, those eleven months were the busiest and the most exhilarating I’ve ever experienced. I won three Juno awards, was nominated for a Grammy and received a publishing advance big enough to retire on. I bought a house for $150,000 (where I continue to live to this day) writing out the cheque as casually as if I were buying a new pair of socks. Three days of the week, I toured with Art Garfunkel as his opening act. The other four days I’d perform two-hour shows all over North America. Often the schedules were so wacky—New Orleans one day, where it was ninety-five degrees and humid, Winnipeg the next, where it was thirty below zero—that Fiedler and I would show up at private airports and bribe pilots into flying us from one town to another. I’d complete a show in Chattanooga, Tennessee, fly to New York, swing over to Europe on the Concorde, blitz the media, perform live on shows like Top of the Pops (getting Andy Gibb’s starlet girlfriend’s phone number while poor Andy was on set singing), and then Concorde back to New York and catch a flight to Cleveland, barely in time for my weekend shows with Garfunkel.
One memory, however, stands out more than everything else during those eleven months: returning to my parents’ home for a three-day break and finding a huge square of white bristol board glued to my bedroom door. Written on it in sloppy block letters was “Welcome home Danny, we’re proud of you. Love, Mom and Dad.” The innocence, the simplicity of those words stood in such contrast to all the awards and adulation. I stood in front of my bedroom door and stared at that note for a long time. This was Dad’s work.
I didn’t reach out to Dad for support and advice till I’d hit my twenties. Till I was rich and famous, and badly damaged. But I more than made up for it after that. I’d lost my heart. But I’d gained a father.