Back in 1982 when I’d lost my first major U.S. record deal, I was about to get married, leaving me feeling as though one lifetime dream had been interrupted and replaced by another dream. In 1988, mere months before Columbia dumped me, I’d become a father. Would it always be like this, one without the other? Career or family? At some point, was I going to have to make a choice?
“Don’t do this,” Bev warned. “Don’t start disappearing into yourself. Your son isn’t going to care whether or not you have an American record deal. Your son needs a father.”
Just like Dad, I couldn’t be happy unless everyone viewed me as a supreme success story. That wasn’t the way I wanted my son to live. No one should have to live like that.
“That boy has matinee-idol good looks,” Dad effused upon laying eyes on our baby boy less than twenty-four hours after his birth. “Donna, take a look at how alert he is. He’s a Hill, no doubt about that—he’s gonna be a genius, just like all the other Hill males!”
When our son was born, I decided he’d come to fill the void; I’d lost my career and gained a son. Financially speaking, the timing was pretty good. Because my hit songs were all ballads, their shelf life on adult contemporary radio could easily span decades, which translated into a trust fund–like royalty stream. (Hit rock songs, unless they’re classics, burn on and off rock playlists like a paper fire, thus earning fewer royalties in the long run.) So long as I didn’t spend money like Mike Tyson, I could unofficially retire, spend some much-needed time at home and throw myself into being a full-time dad. At least, that was the plan.
Dad’s enthusiasm for being a grandfather took a hit when he found out his first grandson wasn’t going to be named Daniel Grafton Hill the Fifth. Someone in the media, piqued that I hadn’t returned calls about what we’d named our first child, decided to invent a name: Elvis. The Toronto media jumped on this misinformation, criticizing Bev and me for such a high-profile name choice. My “screw the media, I refuse to let their lies affect me” response was not shared by my wife. Exhausted and emotional from a long labour, the last thing she needed was to be inundated with calls from relatives and friends congratulating her on our one-day-old son, Elvis.
“I never even liked Elvis,” Bev lamented. “We have to come up with a name, right now. How can they lie like this about our baby?”
“All I know is we’re not naming him Daniel Grafton Hill the Fifth.”
“Why not?” Bev asked.
“Let him be his own person,” I answered. “Let’s call him David.”
“How about David Daniel? That way he gets Daniel as his middle name.”
Bev had come up with the perfect compromise.
But Dad didn’t see it that way. To him, the string of Daniel G. Hills had been coldly cut short at four. Thanks to Bev. He wouldn’t accept that David’s name had been my choice. What red-blooded Hill male would dare break the chain of successive Daniel Hills?
Here I was, defying Dad once again, at a time when he would have felt it most acutely. Too proud to show outward concern about his deteriorating health, and—his greatest fear—how Mom would fare once he was gone, he chose instead to fret over seemingly trivial matters, steadily becoming more and more anxious: the house was overheated in the winter and too air-conditioned in the summer (a waste of electricity); Mom called her sister too frequently (expensive long-distance bills); the weeds in the front were getting out of control (a potential sign for robbers that the house might be abandoned) and the squirrels and raccoons were savaging the back garden. Dad was seeing disaster everywhere.
By the same token, retirement appeared to be softening Dad in ways both beautiful and shocking. The slow slide from omnipotence to vulnerability had made him more approachable, more humane, less obstreperous. Twenty years earlier, Dad might have carried the hurt about David’s name for a very long time. But it was as though Dad knew that time was running out. It was too precious to be wasted on bruised feelings.
Whenever Bev and I brought David over to visit, Dad would melt into a cooing, adoring grandpappy, reminding me that his inborn love of babies was one thing that would never change.
“Songwriter or sociologist? Are you going to take after your celebrity dad or your broken-down ol’ grandpappy?” he’d say. “Look at you, wiggling and squirming, constantly in motion. You can’t wait to set the world on fire, can you?”
The warmth, the hint of self-mocking, the pure joy in Dad’s voice meant that he could have been saying anything to his bundled-up grandson and it would have come out sounding like music. Indeed, Dad’s gigantic and now liver-spotted hands, tenderly drawing his tiny, squiggling grandson to his chest, seemed to be the very definition of love.
Watching Dad purr and growl as David yowled in return, drooling and then gumming on his grandpappy’s forearm, I could almost feel at peace. What could possibly be more perfect than this? I stood close to my father, hoping that his natural affection for babies, that get-down-on-your-knees-and-coo, the dancing and mugging, the tossing in the air and catching, all the stuff Dad had loved to do when he was a young father, would now rub off on me. And so it did, slowly at first, improving with time. When I stumbled, or felt as though David could sense that I was acting at being affectionate, I did what I always did when all else failed: I picked up my guitar.
I sang to my son constantly, showing him how my fingers danced across the neck of my guitar. I could tell when he wanted me to pick up the tempo and would kick it up a notch, gawking at the sight of him bopping along happily to my uneven rhythms. Whenever he tired of my strumming and singing he’d lean across the tray of his high chair and jam his little hands into my mouth. “No more singing, Daddy,” he appeared to be saying, “I want all of you now.” As the guitar left my hands, David would fill the space between my arms and chest, gurgling his own songs. Who would have thought that the day would come when I’d prefer the warmth of a ten-month-old’s gyrating body to the cool contours of my Martin D-35?
I tended to speed-write and record on the road and slack off in Toronto, so when I was home I’d spend as much time as possible with David, taking him to my parents, bundling him up in his stroller for long winter walks along the shore of Lake Ontario, or taking my regular turn as duty parent at his playschool. Still, I had to work at being a father. How does anyone adjust to a new bundle of life dropping, as if out of the blue, into your ordered world, turning it into a helter-skelter commotion of feedings, diapers and all-night rocking to soothe three full months worth of colic? Bev and I went through the stuff all parents go through, feeling at the time as though no one else in the world had ever been subjected to such a delirious, frightening and exquisite life change. Like all other parents, we adjusted.
As an artist I was used to everything revolving around me. The time that Bev and I spent together was always at the mercy of my touring and recording schedule, our relationship defined by the vicissitudes of my career. If my singing voice was strained, she understood that I wouldn’t talk to her, or anyone, until I was totally healed—which could take a week—and Bev’s law practice was constantly being interrupted by any number of “career emergencies” of mine that she had to smooth out.
All that changed once David entered our lives. It took a while for me to fully step up, to be a man and admit that my music could no longer come first. My son and my wife came first. But when I finally understood this and began living my life accordingly, I became a better person, a more complete person. I have the birth of my son to thank for that.
“You’re spoiling that boy, Danny. Is he toilet-trained yet?”
“For Christ’s sake, Dad, he’s not even eighteen months old.”
“Don’t baby him, son. Don’t you and Bev go running to him every time he opens his mouth. He’s gotta learn some independence. If you ask me, he was breastfed for too long.”
“He was only breastfed for six months.”
“You didn’t last on your mother’s breast for more than two days and you’ve made out just fine. How about letters and numbers? Can he recognize them? Is he writing anything down yet?”
Grimacing at Dad, I needed every last ounce of willpower to follow my mental script: No, I’m not going to fall into the trap of exaggerating my son’s abilities—”yup, Dad, David’s writing full sentences already”—just to satisfy my ego, or my father’s. Let David be a baby. It’s over so fast.
As David moved into the toddler stage, he appeared to share a lot of my childhood qualities: aloof, often impossible to engage and perpetually lost in his imagination.
“Look at how that toddler buries himself in his projects,” Dad would remark as David lay across our kitchen floor, painting his version of some fantasy animal on acres of construction paper. “For heaven’s sake, Danny, I’ve never seen a kid so small stay on task for so damned long.”
Ah, but with that intense focus came the unavoidable fallout. David, like me as a tot, would connect with someone only if, and when, he felt like it. Once David grew out of that cute, adorable baby stage, Dad’s interactions with him dropped off.
“Why is your father suddenly so uninterested in David?” Bev asked.
“Because David’s not interested in him,” I said.
“Stop making excuses for your father. He’s the adult here.”
“Yeah, and so?”
“So, he should be making the effort to connect with his grandson, not the other way around. Listen, if you don’t talk to your father about this, I will.”
But Dad wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to take lessons from Bev on how to interact with his grandson. Dad wasn’t the kind of guy you could really give lessons to, period.
Despite the regular hiccups and transitions of life the bond between Dad and me remained strong. As the nineties rolled in, we were pretty much in the same place career-wise, despite our thirty-year age difference. We were two professionals who, for different reasons, had already realized a major part of our life callings—something that neither of us could entirely accept. The thought that nothing we might do in the future would ever impact our respective worlds as powerfully as our past accomplishments was too crushing to consider.
“I’ve got a few books left in me. And some important articles I need to write,” Dad would say, the odd time he’d come over to watch a boxing match with me on TV.
“Great, Dad. I’ve just signed a new record deal with Quality Records out of L.A. The only downside is that they insist I wear one of those Hair Club for Men hairpieces.”
“Congratulations, son, you still may have a few years left as a sex symbol. Ha ha ha.”
We were quite the pair, Dad with his dreams of publishing more seminal material on Black history and me always chasing that elusive hit record. The two of us seemed to be becoming more alike, or was I just better recognizing our sometimes disquieting similarities? Unlike my younger but more mature siblings, Dad and I both excelled at teasing people, either through practical jokes or irregular and invasive questions designed to put them on the spot. I’d inherited a touch of Dad’s mean streak, along with his ability to cloak it beneath a warm and humble persona. We wasted little time worrying about whether or not people liked us. Our problem was wanting people’s worship, respect, even adoration, which had nothing to do with being liked per se. Unlike Larry and Karen, we had become increasingly detached from people outside our immediate family, avoiding, as best we could, social events, parties or even small outings with friends. Dad and I had sleepwalked through so many business dinners, conferences and work-related soirées that the mere thought of another cocktail party was enough to put us in a foul mood. Family was the only place where we could relax and interact without feeling as if we had to perform.
After Dad retired, Larry and Karen often joined him and Mom on vacations, something I could never bring myself to do, especially when stories of Dad’s ever-escalating money neuroses made their way back to me.
“Hang on, I changed my mind. Let me pay this in traveller’s cheques,” Dad would say to the peeved cashier when checking out of a hotel—after his Visa card had been processed. Then, as soon as the clerk had stashed away his traveller’s cheques he’d declare, “On second thought, I’ve decided to put this on my American Express.”
“We don’t take American Express,” the clerk would answer, snippily.
“Donna, I’ve decided to pay this bill in cash. I don’t trust those bloomin’ credit card companies.” Dad’s cash was Canadian but the bill would be in American dollars, leading to testy negotiations about the exchange rate. Fifteen minutes later, as the line of impatient hotel guests grew, Dad would be still changing his mind, finally deciding to split the hotel bill evenly between his Visa, his cash and his traveller’s cheques.
Trying as it was to go on vacations with Dad, however, accompanying him to America for family funerals, which started happening with increasing regularity once Dad entered his seventies, represented a whole other level of torture.
“As usual, Dad took over everything,” Larry would report upon his return, “throwing out commands like a drill sergeant to anyone within earshot.”
“That’s precisely why I avoid going to family funerals,” I’d say, my flip manner camouflaging my guilt.
I was always pretending to take things lightly, often slipping back into the guise of family jester. Karen was all kindness and affection. Larry, Mr. Responsible. It would soon take the combination of all three of our roles to buoy Dad’s worsening moods. But even with our collective love, along with Mom’s round-the-clock devotion, Dad’s spells of sadness came and went of their own accord, like some default biological rhythm that resisted all external stimuli.
Dad knew that his body was falling apart. An incremental, year-by-year demise would mean a lot of extra health care. And not the kind of care that would be covered provincially. Whatever his pressing concerns about the future—did he have enough saved to pay his growing medical bills, or to provide a decent quality of life for his wife (and for Karen, should she need assistance) after he was gone?—he tried, as best he could, to conceal them. If not from me, most certainly from Mom. The last thing he wanted was for his wife of over forty years to worry, especially about her own well-being. And so really, when Dad constantly reminded me of my financial responsibilities to my relatives, he was trying to ask me this: would I be there to look after him, and more importantly, take care of Mom when he no longer could?
Because Dad was too proud to talk directly about his financial concerns, he redirected and disguised them. And I was too close to Dad to see it at the time. Knowing that Dad had plenty of money, between his savings and his pensions, to take care of all their needs for a long time caused me to miss what was at the root of Dad’s fear. His self-esteem had plunged, distorting all his other perceptions. No matter how much money Dad had saved, he remained convinced that he didn’t have enough. This man who had lived to control everything now felt out of control. No wonder he was sad.
I’ve always held the superstitious belief that everyone’s born with a finite supply of energy and passion, and the faster we burn it up the less there is to draw on later. No doubt my superstition was reinforced by watching Dad, from the mid-nineties on, slowly fade. Would this also be my fate? In 1996, at age forty-two, I was diagnosed with diabetes—the same age Dad had been when he was diagnosed. The night I was confronted with the reality of my precipitously high blood sugar level (my doctor was astonished that I hadn’t already fallen into a coma), I dreamed I was lying beside Dad in bed. I was cooling his fevered forehead with a damp cloth as he told me, with a proud sense of finality, “Son, we are both doomed to die young.” In my dream, we were eerily indistinguishable and our death sentences represented some badge of honour.
Growing up, I was always the first of my peer group at everything: first to hit puberty, first to know what I wanted to do once I finished high school, first to make a lot of money, first to lose it. It only stood to reason that I would be the first to wither up and disappear. As Dad started his slow, inglorious unravelling, my natural response was to hurl myself into my music, so I wouldn’t have time to consider the unthinkable: that Dad, the strongest man I’d ever known, was dying. That I would soon be without a father.