As my father made the difficult transition into retirement, I was trying to come to grips with issues of retirement as well. Had the time come for me to call it quits as a singer? Despite enjoying songwriting more than performing, I had continued to release records for the simple reason that people make more of a fuss over a successful singer than a successful songwriter. To use the movie industry as a parallel, if Tom Hanks is standing next to the writer of When Harry Met Sally at a movie premiere, how many people are going to approach the writer and say, “How did you think up that restaurant orgasm scene with Meg Ryan?” Maybe two. The other 498 are going to be swarming Tom Hanks.
By the mid-eighties, the music industry had become more about business and less about music. The ever-burgeoning importance of image and packaging, something largely overlooked in the seventies (if Joni Mitchell’s name is mentioned you think of her songs; if Madonna is mentioned you think of her cone-shaped bra), started nipping at my heels in the eighties. My new U.S. manager seemed more concerned about my quickly receding hairline than the quality of my songwriting and kept at me to get a hair transplant. I scheduled several appointments, putting down a thousand-dollar deposit each time, only to chicken out at the last second.
Shortly before my “comeback” album was to be released in the summer of ‘87, I was subjected to serious scrutiny by Mary, my annoyingly young, saturnine product manager at Columbia Records in New York City.
“You have a problem,” she told me. “Everyone who hears your new record loves your voice. But they picture a powerful, virile man behind that voice.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” I said.
“Really, Dan, you look more like a college professor than a singer. You’re going to have to hire a trainer and beef up. It’s time you lose that hippie, granola image. As Springsteen’s product manager, I made sure he did a serious weightlifting program before we launched the promotion to Born in the U.S.A. That butt shot on the album cover probably sold more records for us than all his combined radio airplay.”
As a high school kid, I’d embraced pop music as a heroic way of rebelling against convention. What a joke. The music business is rife with more “be cool or die” pressure than the most exclusive high school clique. And the bottom line—make the company a quick profit or get the hell out—is no different from any other profession. Except that the music business, disingenuously, sells itself as a daring, sexy alternative.
Part of the reason I put up with the record industry’s ever-increasing obsession with image over musical substance was that I knew I’d finally recorded an album that contained a straight-down-the-pike, no-brainer smash. Columbia Records had readily acknowledged that the duet I’d recorded with Vonda Shepard, “Can’t We Try,” sounded like a number-one hit. The catch was that Vonda had recently signed to Columbia’s archrival, Warner Bros. Records. The last thing Columbia wanted to do was help Warner Bros. by igniting Vonda’s career, especially since it had passed on signing Vonda months earlier. Columbia had already tried taking Vonda off my record and replacing her vocal with Ronnie Spector, formerly married to Phil Spector, and lead singer of the sixties girl group the Ronettes.
On the day of the recording, I had been instructed to stay away from the studio. “You’re not to go within a mile of where Ronnie’s recording,” Koppelman ordered. “You’ll just intimidate her.”
Two hours later Koppelman tracked me down again: “Get into the studio right now. Ronnie needs direction. You’re the only one who can sing the melody for her.”
I spent all afternoon coaching Ms. Spector through her vocal, praying that she would sing the song either wonderfully or terribly. If her performance landed somewhere in the middle, Columbia was sure to replace Vonda’s vocal with hers, which, I believed, would doom the single’s shot at success. Spector gave the song her best efforts, laying down dozens of takes.
“Try singing it like this,” I’d suggest, changing the song’s melody to better play into Spector’s limited vocal span. “Less air and more tone— think Gladys Knight.”
“Don’t you dare mention another female singer in front of my artist again!” warned Spector’s manager, a woman who wore a black suit and punctuated her threats by blowing thick clouds of cigarillo smoke in my face.
But it was obvious that my multi-octave song was beyond Spector’s range. Once Spector and her manager were gone, I combined the worst of Spector’s vocal takes into one spectacularly out-of-tune “finished” track. Still, I wasn’t confident that Columbia Records, blinded by the meretricious flash of marketing possibilities, would choose Vonda’s recording over Spector’s. Spector had made waves recently with a cameo vocal part on an Eddie Money smash, “Take Me Home Tonight,” which had left the execs drooling over the potential of a Tina Turner–like revival. I would have to wait three sleepless weeks for the suits at Columbia to render their verdict.
It was amid all this turmoil that I got out of bed one night, unable to sleep, and wandered into my living room and turned on the TV. I aimlessly surfed the channels, trying to find something that would take my mind off my career. I settled on David Letterman. He was in the midst of announcing his infamous top-ten list. Tonight it was the worst records of all time. Numbers five through two fell into the novelty category, consisting of over-the-hill actors like Leonard Nimoy massacring folk-rock classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
I had a sinking premonition of what was coming next. There was a drum roll, which echoed the rumbling I felt building in my stomach, followed by Letterman contorting his face into his patented pained expression.
“And here it is,” he groaned, “the number-one worst record of all time: the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, live from Carnegie Hall, singing ‘Sometimes When We Touch.’”
My seventies recording was turning into the perfect send-up song, enjoying more ridicule as it became further ingrained in popular culture. And indeed, there were times when no one hated that song as much as I did. I could tolerate people slamming it. So many pop stars recorded it (to list them would fill two pages), and so many movies, TV shows and commercials featured it, that, in a sense, it didn’t belong to me any longer. It was bigger than me, bigger than life.
“Bring on the criticism,” Dad would proclaim, “so long as your cheques keep rolling in.” Unlike typical hit songs, my song kept earning more each year. BMI had informed me that it would soon be among the top one hundred most-played pop songs of the last fifty years. No wonder people hated it, they’d heard it too many times; the damned song was like a dripping faucet that couldn’t be turned off. Be my guest, people, hate it all you want, I’d think. What I couldn’t tolerate was people telling me how unbelievable the song was: leaving me to infer that I’d peaked, that everything else in my life would pale in comparison. I promised myself that, whatever else I did or didn’t accomplish, I would record at least one more U.S. hit record before I packed it in.
In a way I have to thank Tina Turner for shaming me into writing and recording my eventual, and long time coming, follow-up U.S. smash, “Can’t We Try.” (Bev contributed to the song’s lyrics.) After taking in Turner’s show at Toronto’s Imperial Room in the early eighties, I was spotted in the audience by the room’s booking agent, Gino Empry, who insisted on dragging me back to the star’s dressing room.
“I heard the song shortly after I broke up with Ike,” Ms. Turner told me, after I thanked her for recording “Sometimes” on her last album. “I woke up to it playing on my hotel clock radio. It was exactly what I was going through at the time. I knew right away I had to record it.” Ms. Turner slathered her face in cold cream as she talked, moaning over the sorry state of her aching muscles and stiff joints, while shivering in a housecoat. It was as though, en route from the stage to the dressing room, she’d gone from being the sexiest woman alive to my great-aunt Mabel.
As she continued talking, I flashed back to the time Barry Mann had first played me Tina Turner’s version of our song. We’d both listened, shell-shocked. Her tough-driving vocal veered into S&M territory: when she sang the bridge—”At times I’d like to break you, and drive you to your knees”—I’d found myself almost covering up, as if the primal power of her voice could have snapped me in two.
“I told everyone I know about your record,” Ms. Turner continued.
“I really appreciate that, Miss Turner.” Never had “appreciate” sounded so underwhelming.
“I went out and bought every record you made the day I heard that song.” She paused to look at me, taking me in with those dark, soulful eyes, like she was trying to find something deeper beneath my skin—some clue that there was more to me than I was choosing to reveal. “You know something, Dan, you really let me down. There was nothing else on any of your records that came close to that song. Why was that?”
There was no trace of condemnation in her voice, only puzzlement, as if she needed me to clear up this mystery of my colossal inconsistency so she could put it behind her. I stood up, shook her hand and backed out of her dressing room, feeling like a bright but underachieving creative writing student.
When “Can’t We Try” was listed as Billboard magazine’s number-one U.S. adult contemporary single of the year in 1987, going on to spend more weeks on the Hot 100 than “Sometimes,” I thought of how Tina Turner had unintentionally embarrassed me into recording at least one more hit song before I called it quits. But there was one person I needed to impress even more than Tina.
“You wrote a classic, son. That song will haunt you till the day you die,” Dad would laugh, referring to “Sometimes” whenever I was about to play him one of my new records. Finally, after a decade of Dad telling me I was pop music’s Roger Maris (who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record one year, only to never again come close to matching this feat), I loped into his house one day in late 1988 grinning triumphantly.
“I’ve got something to show you, Dad,” I huffed, handing him a copy of Billboard magazine. I’d folded it open to the page listing the top-three adult contemporary singles in the United States for 1987. “Can’t We Try” (the Dan/Vonda version) was number one, beating out Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. Dad smiled, shaking his head.
“Trust me, son, ‘Can’t We Try’ is a good song but ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ is your masterpiece.”
I prissily reminded Dad that a week hadn’t gone by over the past four years when I hadn’t had at least one, and usually two, songs on the Billboard AC chart. (My streak had started with Jeffrey Osborne’s “In Your Eyes” in early ‘86 and ended four songs later in late ‘89.)
“Danny, maybe with all those royalties you could think about being a little more generous with your own flesh and blood. And besides, if ‘Can’t We Try’ is as good as ‘Sometimes,’ then how come Vonda refused to sing with you on Johnny Carson?”
Dad, typically, had lasered in on one of my career sore spots. When “Can’t We Try” became a hit, Vonda, caught up in recording her own album (and perhaps feeling the same pressure from Warner Bros. as I’d felt from Columbia about not helping an artist from a rival label), had refused to perform with me. With offers pouring in for me to sing “Can’t We Try” on numerous television shows, I needed to find a female singer. In the summer of 1987, a visibly nervous and timid teenaged girl walked into my house to audition as Vonda’s replacement. Unable to speak a word of English, she looked as though she were ready to skedaddle out of my house with stage fright when I reached out to shake her hand.
“It’s okay, this should only take a few minutes. The important thing is how our voices blend,” I said, in a mishmash of words and gestures, already expecting her audition to be a bust. But then she opened her mouth and started singing. Her name was Celine Dion.
The following year I decided to include Celine, still unknown outside Quebec, on a duet called “Wishful Thinking” for my next album. My new executive producer, Don Rubin (Koppelman, having just signed Tracy Chapman, no longer had time for me or my backtalk), nixed the idea, believing the song sounded better as a solo. My only recourse was to sneak Celine into the Right Track Studios in New York City and record her vocals when I was supposed to be mixing. Celine’s shimmering performance turned Rubin and Columbia Records into believers. A few months later I found myself playing the duet for Dad, thrilled by the blend of Celine’s voice with mine.
“That’s a pretty good effort, son.”
“Pretty good effort? That’s all you have to say?”
“Who’s this Celine Dion, anyway? Why does she sing with that French accent? Tell your old man the truth, boy, what happened between you and Vonda? How come she isn’t singing with you anymore?”
“Forget about Vonda, okay, Dad? And I already told you, Celine’s from Quebec. French is her language. Her accent is part of what makes her voice so authentic.”
“Whatever you say, Danny, you’re the music expert. But if you’re asking me, ‘Wishful Thinking’ is an okay song, but it’s no ‘Can’t We Try.’”
“You always do this!”
“Quiet down! Just because you’ve got a few hits under your belt doesn’t entitle you to raise your voice to me.”
“I’m not raising my voice. I’m a singer—I project.”
“Joe Williams. Billy Eckstine. Those are real singers, son. You’re a pop stylist.”
“Listen, Dad, when I played you ‘Can’t We Try’ last year, you said the song was no ‘Sometimes When We Touch.’ That was after you asked me why I didn’t have a Black woman singing with me. Remember? You said Vonda sounded too vanilla. So next year, when I play you a new song, are you going to tell me it’s no ‘Wishful Thinking’? If I have a new singer featured with me, are you going to ask what happened to Celine?”
“If you don’t want my opinion, then don’t bother asking for it. Anyway, what do I know about modern music? I’m just a broken down ol’ sociologist.”
Despite my run of chart-topping songs in the late eighties, my heart simply wasn’t in it anymore. I’d become a human jukebox, saddened that I’d predicted as much during my RCA days when I’d impressed José Feliciano with my lyric, “Lord, don’t let this crazy world make a jukebox out of me.”
Singing and performing, non-stop, for a quarter-century had left me burnt out, wrung out, stressed out. Being signed to Columbia Records out of Manhattan brought me, everyday, face to face with my label mates: Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, George Michael and up-and-comers like Celine Dion and Mariah Carey. Such a stacked roster reminded me that no matter what I achieved, it would never be good enough, commercial enough, whatever enough, to launch me into superstardom. Dad had raised me to believe that I had to be the best. Lower-case stardom—strings of million-selling hit singles without the corresponding Springsteenian album sales—was only second-best. And second-best was failure.
Much as artists love to blame their record label for their commercial frustrations, it wasn’t in my nature to do that. And to Columbia Records’ credit, they spotted my strengths as well as my weaknesses. As a performer I was a product of, and perfect for, the seventies. So perfect, in fact, that I was not suited for any other era. But because I came of age when melody and lyric meant everything, I was perfectly positioned to write songs for other, more charismatic and enduring artists, who may not have shared my gift for words, for memorable titles, for the nuts and bolts of storytelling. Columbia Records, sizing up the situation, started pestering me to write for several of its top artists.
“Neil Diamond’s having a bad dry spell,” my A&R man, Mickey Eichner, would tell me. “He needs songs, badly. Do you have anything that he could sing?” Then the promo guys at Columbia got into the act: Streisand needed a triumphant power ballad (somehow “power” and “ballad” struck me as a contradiction), Michael Jackson was looking for a message song in keeping with his current hit, “Man in the Mirror,” etc.
But I wasn’t yet ready to accept a backstage role in pop music. What had started as my greatest strength twenty years ago was now holding me back. My identity as the singer of my own songs was so ingrained that shifting gears in the way that, say, a pro athlete retiring as a player becomes a coach was anathema to me. This eventually left Columbia Records with no other option than to drop me.
Though I was slow to realize it, Columbia did me a great favour by liberating me from adult contemporary hell. The stylists could dress me up in padded suit jackets, thrust a shiny electric guitar in my arms and teach me faux dance moves to get me through singing one of my lacklustre up-tempo songs on Late Night with Arsenio Hall, or cast Vonda Shepard as a Roger Vadim-ish sexpot in the video for “Can’t We Try,” lying sprawled across a four-poster bed, but the whole exercise was phony. Worse than a clown, I felt like an imposter. If I didn’t believe in what I was projecting, why should anyone else?