“The McCauleys didn’t pick up your option. Do you know what that means?” Bernie Solomon, my entertainment lawyer, was asking me a question that he was clearly dying to answer himself. He was sitting sandwiched between the two other Bernies in my life, Fiedler and Finkelstein.
“Bingo. You’re free,” Solomon declared, like some Supreme Court judge summarily dismissing all charges. “Now you can make direct record deals with labels without the McCauleys scooping half your royalties. You can set up your own publishing company so that you own your songs and don’t have to give away such a huge chunk of your songwriting income.”
“Why wouldn’t the McCauleys pick up my option when I owe them one last album?” I asked. At this point, 20th Century Records was funding all my recording costs, leaving the McCauleys with the enviable job of raking in the considerable publishing and recording royalties that this fifth and final album in their contract would generate.
“It’s simple,” Fiedler explained. “The McCauleys forgot to renew your contract. This proves what I’ve been trying to tell you over and over again. They’re incompetent.”
“Their forgetting to pick up your option speaks to the core issue here,” said Finkelstein, the brightest and most volatile Bernie. “It shows they’re in way over their heads with you. Constantly messing up and late on your royalty statements, begging us to help get money owed them and you from the record and publishing companies. We’re sick of doing their job. We’ve been carrying them for too long.”
Solomon, knowing that Finkelstein couldn’t talk about the McCauleys for more than a minute before losing his temper, took over. “The McCauleys buried themselves here. They’re the ones who didn’t renew your option—it’s not like you tried to find a way out. They handed it to you on a silver platter.”
Finkelstein’s bloodshot eyes bore down on me as he coolly summarized the last five years of my career: after four years of remarkable success, I was now, in 1979, caught in a freefall, in danger of losing all the momentum I’d taken such pains to build. Russ Regan, the man who’d signed and championed me at 20th Century Records, had parted ways with the label and then, a month into the release of my long-awaited follow-up single to “Sometimes When We Touch” (my self-penned “All I See Is Your Face,” the lead song to my fourth and upcoming album), 20th Century had fired all its radio promo guys. After bulleting to number forty-one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart (and selling a few hundred thousand 45s over that month), “All I See Is Your Face” had quickly nosedived. Although the song hit the top of the U.S. adult contemporary charts (known as the middle-of-the-road or MOR charts in the seventies), generating plenty of airplay dollars and an ASCAP award for one of the most-played songs of the year, it did little to alter the perception of many in the music industry that my career was finished. Finkelstein wrapped up his doom-and-gloom scenario accordingly: “The only chance you have to save your career is to ditch the McCauleys and buy your way out of 20th Century Records—which may mean close to a million—and sign with a huge major, hoping their advance will cover your cash buyout.”
“A million?” I echoed. That I could be bought and sold for a fixed amount of money bothered me even more than the amount of money in question.
Solomon smiled and opened up a box of expensive cigars, offering them around like Belgian chocolates. Then he said, “Danny, this will be the wisest investment of your life. 20th Century is a sinking vessel. If the Beatles signed with them and released a comeback album, 20th would find a way to fuck it up.”
Finkelstein mashed his unlit cigar into a flattened mess in an oversized ashtray before saying, “As it is now, Dan, no major label with the heft of a Columbia or Warner Brothers Records is gonna touch you if you’re still signed to the McCauleys’ production label. Too many people in the mix. Too many fingers in the pie, diluting the profits. And without a major label behind you, you’re history.”
As I shifted uncomfortably in Solomon’s thousand-dollar leather chair, Fiedler leaned over and slapped my back. “Danny, my buddy, the McCauleys have made a ton of dough off you. Their great-grandchildren will continue to be cashing your royalty cheques long after you’re dead and buried. But once your contract expires with us, a year from now, we’ll never see another dime from you. Even though we’re the ones who’ve worked night and day to break your career wide open.”
“I was the one who introduced you to Sam Trust and got you signed to ATV Music,” Solomon said, forgetting that he’d already told me this dozens of times. “Then Sam teamed you up with Barry Mann and now you have a song you can retire on.”
But without the McCauleys financing and producing my first album, ATV Music would have never heard my music in the first place, let alone signed me and introduced me to Barry Mann. I knew better than to mention this, as it would have been akin to dropping a lit match into a vat of gasoline. The meeting finally ended with Fiedler, the Bernie I felt closest to, getting in the last word: “Young Danny, what’s the financial incentive for us to continue working with you if you don’t walk away from the McCauleys?”
When it came to musical decisions, which lyric over which chord progression, which song to select as that crucial first single, I never hesitated. Business choices were another matter. Feeling as though my brain were being squeezed with a clamp, I’d make a decision, change my mind, get flustered, shift positions once more and continue in this manic fashion until all my options circled around in my head, leaving me all the more indecisive. Five years earlier, when I’d been forced to choose between the McCauleys and RCA, I’d hemmed and hawed for several months, even though I understood in my heart that the McCauleys were clearly the only choice. Now I had to make a far more difficult decision within the next twenty-four hours, one in which there was no hard and fast correct option.
Much as I wished otherwise, the McCauleys were not some faceless corporation like RCA, where a contract loophole could be exploited with cool objectivity. And the more I tried to examine every point of view and agenda, starting with the McCauleys’ perspective, and then the Bernies’ (collectively and individually), the more I could see that everyone had legitimate frustrations and grievances.
Nothing got under my managers’ skin more than the McCauleys owning my copyrights. I was the only act the Bernies had signed that hadn’t given up his publishing, or at least part of it, to them. This drove them crazy. But though they were loath to admit it now, I’d actually approached the Bernies for management in 1973, before I’d signed with the McCauleys—and they’d turned me down. It wasn’t until eighteen months later, when I was all over Canadian radio with “You Make Me Want to Be” (a song the Bernies had heard back in ‘73, in demo form), signed to GRT Records and published by the McCauleys that they’d offered to manage me.
Connections are a funny thing: too slippery to pin down to just one contact here or critical business decision there. Countless elements and people have to coalesce in order to hatch a hugely successful pop music career. As I traced out on a piece of paper who was responsible for my steps up the career ladder, I realized just how complicated and multifaceted the star machinery process was: (1) a family-financed record led to (2) a Canadian record deal, resulting in (3) a Canadian hit single, which brought in (4) high-powered management, who set up touring and media exposure and created the buzz for (5) a dream U.S. record deal, which opened the door to (6) a huge publishing deal, which produced (7) a mega-hit song, a song so big that it threatened to become a standard.
And before I could say “jackpot” I’d become the latest pop star. And before everyone in my circle could say “royalties,” anybody connected to me, whether tangential or indispensable, came out of the woodwork to claim sole credit for my “sudden success” and demand financial compensation.
From 1975 to 1979, as my records and publishing continued to generate greater and greater income, the angrier the Bernies became at the McCauleys—and, consequently, the more paranoid and resentful the McCauleys became of the Bernies. Naturally, if the McCauleys were out of the picture, the Bernies’ commissions from my royalties would increase. Better still, from their point of view, it might allow them access to my publishing. And if the Bernies were out of the picture, I might be more open and malleable to any future recording contracts the McCauleys might offer me, as well as being more susceptible to their influence on everything to do with my career.
Throughout the seventies, as my career had soared, I’d formed an unhealthy dependence on the Bernies. And now that I was in the midst of my first career setback, my dependence had turned to clinginess. Much as I’d fought hard to resist my father’s dominance, I found standing up to the Bernies extremely difficult. Always going out of my way to avoid confrontation, I’d spent most of my life getting whatever I wanted in a roundabout, undercover manner. But it was difficult to be sneaky with the Bernies, since everything in my life, be it money, bills, mail, phone records, transportation arrangements, even my driver’s licence renewal, was handled by them. As a teenager, I was able to stand up to my father because if I didn’t, my music career would have never seen the light of day. But I saw my situation with the Bernies as being the exact opposite, meaning that I was afraid if I stood up to them they might lose interest in my career.
On a personal level, I had far more in common with the McCauleys than the Bernies. I’d played hockey with Matt, I was the first person he’d phoned when he’d “gone all the way” with his girlfriend (even though I’d hated him for telling me this at the time), he’d been the one who solved my studio stage fright by placing a photo of Cynthia on my music stand when I’d been struggling to sing “You Make Me Wanna Be” with the right passion. Sure, Matt and I sometimes felt as if we hated each other. But only because we’d invested so much—our dreams, our talent, our future—in each other. That my dad was the only other person I was known to sometimes hate as deeply as Matt spoke volumes about the intensity of our relationship.
This is not to suggest that my relationship with the two Bernies was strictly business. Fiedler had been there for me after my bust-up with Cynthia, watching over me like an anxious mother as I threatened to go bonkers under the combined stress of sudden international stardom and a shattered heart. On more than a few nights, he had sat at the foot of my bed as I lay rocking in a tight ball under the hotel bedsheets.
“Danny, my buddy. You’ll get through this. You won’t always feel this bad.”
London. Amsterdam. L.A. Frankfurt. Few and far between were the cities where I didn’t wake him, begging to talk, unable to cope with the pain I was going through alone, in some strange hotel room, in yet another foreign country. Fiedler would always listen.
There was also much to admire about Finkelstein. No one worked harder or fought more fiercely on behalf of his artists. Like Bayers, he blew up if you disagreed with him on anything. But unlike Bayers, he passionately believed in what he was doing and whom he was doing it for. And he backed up his passion with results.
Beyond the hand-holding, I viewed the Bernies as the gatekeepers to my career, the ones in charge of taking me further or at least sustaining my current level of pop stardom. I lived day to day, minute by minute, with the Bernies. That I was as good as married to them left me terrified at the thought of losing them. I’d already lost Cynthia, and that it had been entirely my fault didn’t leave me feeling any less abandoned.
My mom’s brief breakdown during the recording of my second album had touched on one of my great unspoken fears—of never knowing when the most important person in your life might abruptly leave you to fend for yourself. I remained determined to hold on to the one thing in my life that I thought I could depend on. My career.
Had I possessed more maturity and confidence, I would’ve seen Fiedler’s threat of abandoning me for what it was—a big fat bluff, never to be acted on so long as I continued to reel in large amounts of money for everyone.
As for Matt and me, our habitual quarrelling had lately become more biting, as quarrelling invariably does when the stakes are high, and contractual details between production company and artist can be interpreted in as many ways as there are lawyers hired to interpret them. Further complicating matters, Matt had broken up with his long-term girlfriend around the time Cynthia and I had parted ways. Which left Matt and I both overly enthusiastic bachelors, with predictably sordid results: the two of us occasionally locking horns over the same women. Whereas Fred Mollin (or in a real pinch Dr. McCauley) could defuse Matt’s and my creative rivalries, no one could save us from this, the oldest and dumbest rock cliché in the book: who gets the girl. Our mutual resentments hitting an all-time high, Matt and I sometimes carried on like an old married couple; the more we felt bound to each other, the more we resented each other.
Except that now, the theory was, Matt (or rather the McCauleys) and I no longer had to stay bound to each other. I could be free. All that was left for me to do was to give the Bernies the go-ahead to do the dirty work. The next day I phoned the Bernies and gave them permission to inform the McCauleys that their contract with me had expired. And then all hell broke loose.
In retrospect, I understand that my managers were simply doing what managers do: making as much money for their client (and thus for themselves) as possible. I can’t judge them, I can only judge myself. They weren’t the ones severing a relationship with their best friend. Their oldest friend. At twenty-four, I was streetwise enough to have picked out the incongruities and hidden agendas wrapped up in the Bernies’ disaster scenarios and to have looked beyond my hunger for over-the-top success. But the unvarnished truth was that, having sipped at the cup of one worldwide hit single, I was desperately thirsty for more. In my efforts to live up to my father’s exacting standards of “Hill superiority,” I’d forgotten another less ballyhooed but equally valued characteristic of my father’s: loyalty. Not only to one’s family but to one’s friends. It was by no means coincidental that my early twenties marked both the most successful and the most singularly selfish period of my life.
The decision to act on the lapsed option renewal set into motion a series of events that stalled my career and put me on the brink of bankruptcy. Even more disturbing, I’d single-handedly destroyed my two longest and deepest relationships, driving away Cynthia and Matt (along with their respective families) within a span of eighteen months. But whereas Cynthia and I were able to make a chillingly clean break, the same would not be true for Matt and me. No longer creatively “married,” we were now cast in the role of a divorced couple with several demanding children. Our offspring came in the form of the hundreds of my songs that Matt’s family published, and my four internationally released albums to which they owned, in perpetuity, the master rights.
The McCauleys launched a two-million-dollar lawsuit against me for alleged breach of contract, and they also sued the three Bernies. What no one had noticed was that the McCauleys had failed to pick up my contractual option several times. The fact that we’d continued to work together despite these lapses could be interpreted as a precedent and suggest an implied contract between us.
Over the several highly expensive years it took for the McCauley lawsuit to run its course (all the royalties from my songs and recordings were held in escrow until the case was settled), I remained busy. But no matter what I did, no matter how hard I worked, things had a way of backfiring on me.
Following the advice of my managers, I bought myself out of my contract with 20th Century Records for $330,000 U.S. (That the buyout was a third of the original million-dollar estimate was an indication of my eroding market value.) Not long after my buyout 20th Century went under, declaring bankruptcy. That meant I’d just spent big money to get out of a deal I might have been out of for free, had I simply sat tight a while. Due to 20th Century’s demise, hundreds of thousands of dollars of record and publishing (mechanical) royalties owed to me went up in smoke. When GRT, my Canadian record label, declared bankruptcy the following year, it meant another six-figure loss in royalties for me.
My laissez-faire attitude about money meant that, for the time being, I didn’t fret very much about the millions of dollars that had come and gone from my life. Desperate to prove to the world that I still had what it takes, I took it upon myself to finance my next record to the tune of $250,000, planning to sell it to the highest bidder. Unmoored from the two major lifetime ties I’d severed, I reached out even more to my parents. And they were there for me, never questioning the choices I’d made. Nor did they refer, except in passing, to my ongoing lawsuit.
I kept busy writing, demoing and recording new songs in preparation for my future records, as well as work-for-hire songs for the odd Hollywood movie and TV specials, and performing all over the world. With the instruction of my musical collaborator and close friend, John Sheard, I took up the piano, practising several hours a day. Finding it a natural instrument for me, I quickly started writing keyboard-based songs, which gave my songwriting more range and musical depth. Seeing the notes spread out in front of me over eighty-eight keys, rather than bunched up within six strings and their corresponding frets, gave me a keener insight into Barry Mann’s and Michael Masser’s (both keyboardists) melodic mastery, seamless modulations and constantly shifting chord roots. I was back in school, my kind of school.
Self-discipline had always defined me, playing a major role in whatever success I’d managed to cram into my twenty-four years. But since childhood I’d always been aware of the other side of me. The part that thrived on breaking all rules, losing myself to my impulses, the wilder the better.
Now that I was single I found myself less interested in sex for its own sake and more interested in settling down. A month didn’t pass without me picking out some woman hanging around backstage following one of my concerts, or working at a radio station where I was being interviewed, or even slinging drinks in some smoky bar in Timmins, and thinking, She could be the one I could spend the rest of my life with. Most of the time, after as little as ten minutes of conversation, the arrangements were made. A woman I knew virtually nothing about would be flying wherever I was performing, staying in an adjoining hotel room, all expenses taken care of. Although all these fly-ins resulted in one disappointment after another (for the woman as well as me), I must have done this twenty times over two years. I always fooled myself into believing that, through some random encounter, I could capture what I’d come so close to realizing with Cynthia. That all it took was a plane ticket, a fancy hotel room, sex in a Jacuzzi, followed by some meaningful conversation and I’d be happily settled down for the rest of my life.
I was very, very lucky. I shudder now to think of how easily any of those encounters could have gone out of control. I wasn’t only playing with my life, I was upsetting other peoples’ lives, wandering into their worlds like a wrecking ball, turning everything upside down for a silly, juvenile fantasy. There were a few nasty consequences. Late one night, I was returning to my Winnipeg hotel when my touring partner, John Sheard, stopped me in the darkened parking lot.
“Turn around and start walking, Dan,” he warned me.
Earlier that evening, I’d stood up a woman I’d been casually dating. Known for her violent temper (she booked strippers for a living and concealed weapons for the Hells Angels), she’d been waiting for me in the shadows of the parking lot, gun in hand, intent on teaching me a lesson. Only John’s calming words had caused her to reconsider. Nevertheless, John thought it would be prudent to stay clear of the hotel for a while, in case the woman had a change of heart.
“Hey, when you’ve grown up with three sisters, you learn how to diffuse a temper,” was John’s modest reply when I got around to thanking him.
Because I was in the process of coming a little undone, I sometimes found myself drawn to women who appeared similarly broken. Some of these women ended up in jail. Some dead. Two things (beyond luck) saved me from a similar fate—a preternatural survival instinct and family.
It was my twenty-fifth birthday. Mom and Dad had just finished singing “Happy Birthday,” and I’d blown out the twenty-five candles in one quick breath.
“Daggum, boy, all that singing’s given you a lot of lung power.” Dad pulled a candle from the cake and licked off the chocolate.
“Hey, I thought you weren’t eating that stuff anymore.”
“I’m glad I’m not the only one nagging your father about his sweet tooth,” Mom said. “I’m going to let you two fight it out while I go upstairs to finish wrapping your present.”
Once Mom had gone, Dad’s smile faded.
“Son, I hear you got in a bit of hot water during your tour through the Prairies.”
“What did Larry tell you?”
“Just enough. Son, you’re twenty-five now. The same age your mom was when she married me.”
The thought of Mom settling down at twenty-five made me think of just how out of control my life had recently become. After slicing himself a sliver of chocolate cake over my protests, Dad said: “You gotta watch yourself when you’re on the road. There are some nuts out there who’d love nothing more than to bring you down.”
“I know, Dad. Why do I keep getting myself messed up with these crazy women?”
“You’re just swinging to the other extreme. That Cynthia took a lot out of you, son. But that doesn’t mean you can keep running around with women who’ll love you one minute and turn around and shoot you the next.”
“Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you that a little hard work won’t fix. When are you back in the studio?”
“Next week. Roy Halee, Simon and Garfunkel’s producer, gets into Toronto on the weekend and we’ll make our final decisions on which songs I’ll be cutting.”
I wanted to ask Dad how and when he came to realize that he didn’t want to be wild anymore.
I knew I was running from my slow-burning pain over losing Cynthia, from the surreal fear of being sued for two million dollars by my former best friend, from spending close to half a million Canadian dollars to free myself from a bad American record deal. But most of all I was running from myself. How could I have had everything, beyond everything, at twenty-three, yet feel as though suddenly now, at twenty-five, everything was being ripped away from me? I felt so old and used up. I didn’t want to run anymore. But how do you stop? How did Dad stop? Was it meeting Mom? Could it be that simple? Could anything be simple for me? Or would I always have this habit of complicating everything, turning even the smallest occurrence into some twisted, high drama? My life had become my greatest creative expression. The last thing I’d wanted to happen.