Since 1977 Mr. Walt Aldridge, has worked as a producer, a writer, an artist, an engineer, a session singer and played on hundreds of albums in a variety of genres that have touched the world. Billboard named Walt one of the top 10 Country songwriters of the year twice. He was a singer, guitarist and producer for the country-rock group the Shooters, and co-wrote all their Top 40 singles. His latest venture has been producing country band Heartland's debut record. He also co-wrote the Number One Hit, "I Loved Her First" with TAXI member Elliot Park—one of my favorite songs of all time. Welcome, Walt. Let's hear some of Walt's songs.
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Steve Seskin |
This next young man is Steve Seskin, and he's a successful songwriter, to say the least, who has written seven #1 songs for artists including Tim McGraw, Mark Wills, Neal McCoy, John Michael, Ricochet, and Kenny Chesney. He is also a successful performer, recording artist and active keynote speaker at just about every conference on the planet Earth. Mr. Steve Seskin.
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I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Mr. David Pack. He's a first-time Rally guy this year. David is a Grammy Award winner, a founding member of the group Ambrosia. His collective works as a performer and producer have sold over 40 million units worldwide. He's a Grammy-winning producer for Winona, Phil Collins, Aretha Franklin, and Kenny Loggins. I've got to tell you, his resume is about two pages long, just too long to do here. Suffice it to say, this guy is working his butt off. Mr. David Pack!
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And this enthusiastic gentleman is Narada Michael Walden, an American producer, drummer, singer, and songwriter whose musical career spans three decades, including several gold, platinum and multi-platinum awards. His #1 hits have included several collaborations with artists like Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, Starship, Lisa Fisher, and Al Jarreau. He was awarded Producer of the Year in 1987, named one of the top 10 producers with the most #1 hits by Billboard magazine. We're pleased to have him here. Narada Michael Walden!
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I've got to tell ya, you guys have seen a lot of Brian Howes this week. And I found out this morning that Brian heard one of our members, Casey Desmond, last night and has asked her to stay in town past the Rally to talk about possibilities on his record label on Interscope. [applause] Yet another Rally deal, hopefully, in the works.
Brian is an award-winning songwriter, Grammy-nominated producer, record label executive and publisher. Right now, his co-write with David Cook, is the first single from David record and it's burning up the charts. Rev Theory, the first signing on Brian's joint venture with Interscope and Van Howes Records, is making waves and starting to break. He also produced Hinder's multi-platinum-selling debut Extreme Behavior, as well as their highly anticipated sophomore release. It's just about to hit stores. Go buy a copy of that sucker. Mr. Brian Howes!
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| Brian Howes | |
It's funny, I've actually been friends with four out of five of these guys for a number of years, and I still just stand in awe of what you guys do. I've got sweaty palms. Sweatier than when I golfed with Walt last time and he kicked my ass. Man, this guy is a long ball hitter.
So, it all begins with a song. There is no artist; there is no record business; there is no radio without you. How do you guys do it? Let's go down the line. Let's start with Walt. How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a songwriter and you wrote your first kind of real song?
Walt: College age, I think. I mean, all I wanted to be was a guitar player, and I saw it as a way to get into a studio to get to play my demos. I was around 18, 20—something like that—when I got serious about...
Not 1820s, 18 to 20.
Walt: 18 or 20. No, it was actually 1840. [laughter]
I think there's a coin with your picture on it… How about you, Steve?
Steve: About the same. Probably 17 or so. I was singing from the time I was a little kid. But when I first thought of writing was during the whole era of the singer/songwriter. I grew up in New York and listened to Paul Simon and James Taylor. Then the Beatles came, of course, and I was just hooked. I think through the singer/songwriter-age of Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, Crosby, Still & Nash, and Paul Simon, I kind of realized that you could use music to affect people. That was my first foray into it, trying to write songs that meant something to people.
David, how about you?
David: Probably around 12- or 13-years-old. Actually, we used to watch Grand Ole Opry on television. My mother was from Oklahoma. I loved the Chet Atkins and Joe Maphis guitar-pickers. Then I heard Roy Orbison on the radio, the Everly Brothers, and that incredible sound of Nashville at that time. And then, of course, the Beatles hit, so I started experimenting with songwriting probably around 12 or 13. I actually recorded my first demo of my first song that I had written at around age 13. I was in a band called the Parliament. I think we got our name from a pack of cigarettes, Parliament cigarettes.
That's another story.
That would be politically incorrect these days.
David: I remember my mother bringing me one day an article she had clipped out of the newspaper about this young guy named Jimmy Webb. The article was about a young man who had already written three or four classic songs. My mom said, "Maybe this is something you want to read." And I remember thinking, "That's what I want to do. I want to be like that guy." So I remember making a choice early on that songwriting as a genre really spoke to me.
I think everybody in this room wants to be like that guy, collectively... Narada, how 'bout you? When did you first get bitten?
Narada: Well, I come from a place called Kalamazoo, Michigan.
By the way, the home of the Checker Cab Company. I've gotta add that in there.
Narada: That's right. That's where they made Checker taxicabs. Well, what's nice about Kalamazoo is that it's right between Chicago and Detroit, so all the music we heard—be it jazz, be it Curtis Mayfield, be it Johnny Mathis or early Patti Page—everything came through, because there's not much to do there, really. I played drums. Since I was a little kid I always wanted to beat on pots and pans. And I loved Jazz, like Horace Silver and Jimmy Smith as well. So to play along with those records is how I first learned. The records were my teachers. I also loved Nina Simone as a kid... just beautiful things. Then Stevie Wonder hit on the scene and I was very jealous. This young kid had beaten me at being huge with "Fingertips." I went and saw him, and it was electrifying to see Stevie at the age of 12-years-old. It was killer. I thought that because Ray Charles and Stevie were both blind and they were such geniuses, I too should be blind. [laughter] I remember staring at the sun, at the eclipse, but it didn't work. Those were my earliest memories. I also loved Jimi Hendrix when he came on the scene. In my life, it's really a combination of all the music, all the music.
It seems like back in the day that songwriters could pull from so many different genres because they were all on the same radio stations. I feel bad for the kids coming up today because stations are so tightly formatted that basically each station only plays one kind of thing, and you've really got to search to find all those different influences... Brian, how about you?
Brian: It was probably junior high. It was interesting because I was into bands like AC/DC and Van Halen. Then I had another set of friends that were into Fugazi and Operation Ivy and all the punk bands. So I had my rocker friends and my punk friends, and I would have to lie on the weekends and say I was going out with a girl to hang out with a different set of groups. But I liked everything, everything from Hip-Hop music to the Beastie Boys, and then I could put on a Def Leppard record. So I just loved music in general. Good songs were the most important thing. And I loved Rock stars too, whether it be Hip-Hop or Rock or whatever. I just wanted to do that, and it was an easy way to meet girls, so...
Panelist: Oh yeah, that's another reason we all went into this.
I'm trying to think of the most respectful way I can say this. But I know Brian's wife. I've had the pleasure of meeting with her and hanging out with her. His wife is so incredibly beautiful, inside and out. She's one of those women. She's incredibly gorgeous, incredibly sweet, incredibly kind, really smart...
Brian: I don't know why she's with me. She thought she could save me, or something, from the dark side.
Walt, how long did it take you from the time you wrote your first real song until you got your first cut? How many years of pitching did it take you? Walt: I don't know, Michael. I don't know
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| Walt Aldridge |
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what my first real song was. I mean, I was writing songs... I started playing guitar when I was eight, and I was writing songs pretty quickly, because I was too lazy to learn the other ones, you know. So I don't really know what my first real song was. I got my first real song cut while I was in college. I actually got it performed by a country band called the Hagar Twins on the Hee Haw show, if you remember that show. And I think I made tens of dollars from that, but I got a lot of mileage with my credibility—with my street-cred with my friends. Then I went to work at a studio right after that as a runner, doing whatever needed to be done, working my way into engineering, and I began getting songs cut. But I didn't have anything really meaningful until I was 25, when I had my first #1.
Pretty impressive. Another little inside background on one of our panelists here: Walt and his girlfriend Lisa, (who's in the audience and an accomplished songwriter in her own right), and I were having dinner three or four months ago in North Carolina. They recounted the story of their first date -- they went riding down country roads shooting up road signs together. It doesn't get any more romantic than that.
Walt: It's the Country music way. There was alcohol involved, I have to say.
I didn't want to get into the drinkin' and drivin'. But at least you were on dirt roads, where you couldn't hit much other than the road signs I guess... How about you, Steve? How long were you a writer before you got your first cut?
Steve: Well, in 1972 I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area. From '72 to '85 I was writing songs, but really I was a singer/songwriter. I had no notion of getting those songs recorded by anybody else. I wrote songs for me to sing, and I was pretty happy doin' that. It wasn't until 1985, when I did a series of show in the Bay Area with Crystal Gale. You remember Crystal Gale? On the fourth night of the tour she came up to me and looked me in the eye and said, "You oughta go to Nashville." And I was like, "Nashville?" I had never had anything to do with Nashville, but there was something about somebody like that saying that, and I said, "OK, I'll take a trip there and just check it out." It really changed my life in terms of my writing career, because all of a sudden I started co-writing. And I was very drawn to Nashville, just because there's a writing community there. It was the first time I'd ever experienced that. There are tons of players in San Francisco, great artists, but I'd never seen a scene like that, where there are thousands of writers who all eat breakfast at the same three places—because there are only three good places to eat breakfast in Nashville. But, anyway, I just started going there, and it took about four years of kind of learning the ropes and doing a lot of co-writing, which I had never done. Then about four years later, I got my first cut with the country group Alabama, and then really soon after that Waylon Jennings did one of my songs, and it was a single. I've been going there ever since, for 23 years.
David, was Ambrosia your first cut, or did you have any cuts with outside artists before? How long were you a serious writer before you had any success?
David: Ambrosia was really the first. I was a band guy, and we formed the band when I was around 18-years-old. Kind of a metamorphosis happened right around that time when I was introduced to Leonard Bernstein. It's a long story, but before we had a record deal, Ambrosia did a sound check at the Hollywood Bowl. It was basically to demonstrate a new sound system, and there was nobody at the Hollywood Bowl except an English classical recording engineer named Gordon Perry, who knew Leonard Bernstein. He was a classical, Grammy-winning engineer, and he loved Ambrosia. He thought we were going to be a big band and wanted to help us. He said, "I don't invest in cars or homes, but I invest in people." So he put up the money to fly me to Washington, D.C., to the Kennedy Center so that I could attend the one-year anniversary of Bernstein's mass that he wrote for John F. Kennedy to open the Kennedy Center. He took me backstage and introduced me to Leonard Bernstein. Then I spent the evening talking to Bernstein, who said, "You should be in my mass when it comes to the Mark Taper Forum next year in Los Angeles." It was like meeting Mozart, basically. The most celebrated musician in the world I had just met, and it was like being touched by magic. Then I performed in the Bernstein mass the next year, which was 1972. That whole experience changed my life. It changed my worldview; it changed my musical view. Then we got a record deal soon after that, and then we had our first hit single, "Holdin' On to Yesterday," in 1975. That was really my first song, and, of course, the experience of hearing your song on the car radio for the first time is incredibly riveting and jolting. I remember having to pull over to the side of the road and just sit there with my head in disbelief. It's an incredible feeling. And, yeah, that was around 1975. [applause]
How about you, Narada?
Narada: Well, I have a similar experience. Not with Leonard Bernstein, the genius of geniuses, but, in my world, which was kind of Jazz/Rock at the time... I'm a drummer first and foremost. But the band that I really wanted to play with—because I couldn't play with Jimi Hendrix because he had passed
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Narada Michael Walden |
away in 1970—was the next biggest hero to me, John McLaughlin. He had a band called the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and that band to me was really mind-blowing. I went and saw that band, and I was very lucky to be able to join that band when I was about 20 years old. So I went from being a busboy in a restaurant picking up spaghetti dishes, like we all struggled, to working with John McLaughlin. But the way I had to do that was really to embrace John's guru, his spiritual teacher, which is about love and devotion to God. So it was about really being willing to change my life to do something in the music that I really wanted. That changed my life, like what you [David] were saying. That changed my life. Wow. The first thing I was doing was with George Martin, the Beatles' producer, in 1974, making an album called Apocalypse, in London with the London Symphony, then the Mahavishnu Orchestra. That was my first recording experience... from the very top of the mountain. Then Jeff Beck's Wired, and that took off.
Then, in the Pop world—I had moved to San Francisco—I had some disco hits on my own, "I Don't Want Nobody Else to Dance With You" and "I Shoulda Loved Ya," those type of records. Then after that, Atlantic Records wanted me to produce this young girl named Stacy Lattisaw, who was 13-years-old. It starts snowballing. So, if you have one success in the Pop world, all the doors open up quickly. [applause]
Please join us for Part Two next month!
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