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Back in the 80's
Mick Wright worked as a radio broadcaster in England.
Here
he recounts his visit to Philadelphia to interview legendary
singer Dionne Warwick.
DIONNE
WARWICK
I suppose it
started around the
summer of 1982. We wanted to get in early this year and try
and arrange our 'Christmas Special' well in advance. Most
radio stations did .... and still do .... run a special over
Christmas, generally with a middle-of-the-road artist who
would appeal to a broad range of listeners. Hopefully, they
would not be outrageous or loud enough to make you choke on
your Turkey or Nut Cutlets. Well we decided to cast the net
and see what we could come up with and I was charged with the
task of contacting record companies to see who was available.
This rumbled on for quite a while because even the record
companies weren't used to requests this early. Most of them
had their Christmas record release schedules roughly in place,
but wouldn't arrange the actual promotion until nearer the
time and it was difficult to get any concrete commitment out
of anyone. Then we learned that Dionne Warwick was releasing
an album called 'Heartbreaker' produced by Barry Gibb of the
Bee Gees. Perfect! There was one slight snag. I was in England
- Dionne was in America.
The story that follows
is true, as are all the other stories in my book. Quite
honestly, I couldn't write fiction as good if I tried. The
radio station and the record company agreed to split the cost
of the flight and yours truly was to be despatched to
Philadelphia, tape-recorder in hand, to meet the great lady.
Fair enough. One slight problem. In casting around (as they
would) for the cheapest- possible way of getting me there,
they chose World Airlines. Unfortunately, World Airlines did
not operate flights to Philadelphia. The nearest they went was
Baltimore. Okay, so we go to Baltimore and catch the train.
(Amtrak) The flight was due to leave Gatwick mid- morning and
I was doing the late-show the night before. This meant
finishing 'on-air' at 2a.m. and then catching a coach to
Gatwick at 4a.m. I stood on the coach park at Falkland Street
in Wolverhampton for two bloody hours waiting for that damned
coach, having been told that it would be there for about an
hour prior to departure, on what turned out to be the coldest
night of the year so far .... and there wasn't even a
tea-stall open. But I daren't miss it, the timing was too
tight and I was scared I might fall asleep.
It eventually pulled-in
at about five-to-four and I think I was the only passenger
.... to start with, anyway. We then proceeded to go all points
North South East and West picking up passengers. First stop
.... Coach Station, Digbeth, Birmingham. Here about twenty
people got on, mostly West Indian and bound for Jamaica, and
they decided to make a party of it. They had ghetto-blasters
that were blasting as ghetto-blasters do whilst I was
knackered and wanted only to go to sleep. No way. It took
about three hours for the coach to reach London's Victoria
Coach Station and then we drove on to Gatwick Airport. I
boarded the flight without further delay and went blissfully
to sleep, listening to a preview copy of the album in my
headphones.
We landed at Baltimore
without further incident and me and my luggage made our way to
the Amtrak station. That's when the problems started. There
were people everywhere, the place was in utter chaos and the
trains were running hours late. Why? Because tomorrow was
Thanksgiving Day .... that's why. Oh my God. Nobody had
realised it. After all, it is not a holiday in England. By the
time I got to Philadelphia's Holiday Inn on Market Street I
was hours late .... and I do mean hours. I crawled into
reception where I was immediately handed a note. The interview
was off.
I went to my room,
slumped on the bed and lifted the telephone receiver. It was
early evening now, Philadelphia time, and I had been
travelling for something like nineteen hours. I telephoned
London, London telephoned New York, New York telephoned Los
Angeles. Los Angeles telephoned me .... and so it went on.
Crazy time. In the end, I got fed up with waiting for return
calls through half a dozen time zones and went to the Schubert
Theatre to see Dionne's manager myself. I reminded him that
this whole interview had been set-up by the record company and
that I had flown from England especially to do it. No good.
Wouldn't budge. He was very pleasant about it .... sympathetic
even .... but he still wouldn't budge. It was Dionne's
decision .... and that was that. (It turned out that she had
been mis-quoted in an article in one of the New York
newspapers in an article written by a 'friend' and was
seething. She had cancelled all further interviews at a
stroke.) I watched her show that night at the invitation of
her manager and it was absolutely brilliant. She was
celebrating twenty years in showbusiness that very night and
received a tribute from the Mayor of Philadelphia which
clearly touched her emotionally. Well I don't know to this day
what pressure was brought to bear .... but I eventually got a
telephone call to say that she had agreed to do the interview
.... albeit a day later and backstage instead of at the hotel.
Finally, I went to sleep.
I spent all the next
day wandering around the City Of Brotherly Love and very
pretty it is too. Home of the Pilgrim Fathers, Liberty Bell
and all that. Trouble was, being Thanksgiving Day, most places
were shut. I remember sitting in about the only restaurant I
could find that was open and spending hours drinking endless
cups of coffee from the bottomless coffee-pot just to pass the
time. So much so in fact that I apologised to the waitress who
probably thought I was a hobo. Eventually the night came and I
took a cab to the theatre. Dionne was great. Smashing in fact.
Very down to Earth. When I entered the dressing-room she was
kneeling on the floor fiddling with the T.V.set and with a
Marlboro Light hanging from her lips. She introduced me to the
great soul-singer, Jerry Butler, who was her support act and
was about to go on stage, and we quickly got down to business.
It was at that exact moment that Jerry's band opened up. The
first twenty minutes of the interview are accompanied by the
sound of that band in the background .... and it's always the
low frequencies that carry. I think they come through the
floor joists. Drums and bass. Boom-boom-boom. Then somebody
walked into the room with a takeaway meal, rustled the bag and
crushed the empty cartons. All captured brilliantly on tape
for posterity. It was bedlam and as I write this I'm not sure
whether to laugh about it or cry. The interview itself was
really interesting .... what you can hear of it. We traced
Dionne's career from her early days as a session singer and
demo artist for Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard (Bacharach's
writing partner before Hal David) right through to the new
album 'Heartbreaker' and we had a few laughs along the way.
Dionne deserves to be the superstar that she is. A
highly-intelligent, honest and articulate lady with that
incredible voice and a track record that speaks for itself.
There's one lovely bit towards the beginning of the tape where
I asked her about how she coped with the pressures of sudden
stardom after the success of 'Don't Make Me Over', her first
American hit.
'There must have been a
lot of pressure to do interviews', I said.
'Yup', she
replies. 'Still is', and she laughs.
That's about
as close as I ever got to finding out how they persuaded her
to change her mind.
We talked our way
through her career in sequence and she kept telling me how
much she had hated some of her most successful songs on first
hearing. She wasn't keen on 'Do You Know The Way To San
Jose'.
'I thought it was a really silly
song. Obviously Hal David had a great affinity for San Jose as
I believe he was stationed there during his time time in the
Navy and he loved the place and he wrote a song about it ....
and I just thought it was .... really .... I mean? Whoa-
whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa? But there it was. I
just giggled all the way to the bank, what can I tell you?'
It won her a Grammy
Award. She had to be persuaded hard to record 'Heartbreaker'
and didn't think 'All The Love In The World' should have been
released as a single. Massive success. In fact it had become a
standing joke that if Dionne didn't like it .... it was
probably a smash. I also asked her specifically about the last
track on the Heartbreaker album, all the other songs on the
record having been written by Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. The
song in question was 'Our Day Will Come' which had been a
smash hit for Ruby and The Romantics back in the 60's. To my
utter astonishment, it transpired that Dionne had actually
recorded the original demo of the song for songwriter Bob
Hilliard .... and she had told him at the time how much she
liked it.
'It was written during that
period of time when I met Bacharach and David. Bob Hilliard
wrote the song also and he said: 'I've got a good little song
here and there's a new group called 'Ruby and the Romantics'
and will you do the demonstration record?' I said: 'Of course.
I'd love to. And I did. And I told him then that it was a
really pretty song. In fact I played my demo along with the
recording that I've done of it now and it's so close ... I
mean .... even the clarity of my voice ... I sound like a
three year old singing again, you know? I love the song. I
think it's an absolute classic.'
Funny old world. She
talked about Burt Bacharach and Hal David and how, since
'Don't Make Me Over' they had written every song especially
for her. And great songs they were too. 'Walk On By', 'San
Jose', You'll Never Get To Heaven', Message To Michael'. Loads
of them. I asked her how she would describe Burt Bacharach.
'In my opinion, of course .... you
know there are tons of people who know him .... but I really
don't think anyone knows him any better than I do from a
working point of view as well as a camaraderie point of view.
He's a very very tense and hyper type of personality. Very,
very talented .... that goes without saying .... very musical.
Has a little boy quality about him that endears him to the
opposite sex .. which is great for him, you know? He was ....
he was a friend, you know? Hal David was more the stabilising
force for the trio and he was kind of the Father image. A very
stable person, the one who thought things out and the one who
really got the things done for us. A very, very human person
as you can almost read into the lyrics that he writes if you
listen to what he's saying. You can kind of almost pinpoint
what kind of a man he really was. And he was also a friend
too. When you have two people who are that tuned-in to what
you're about, and feel that you're qualified and you have the
ability to interpret what they're trying to say in the
melodies that they're trying to write, it's a magical kind of
association at that point. For almost fourteen years we were
the triangle marriage that worked, as far as the music
industry was concerned. I think that because of our
relationship for as long as we had it .... it established all
three of us in a world of music that was primarily rock and
groups and other kinds of music as opposed to what we were
doing. I think that was also the reason for our success ....
that we were so totally different from what was happening. So
I think it was vitally important for me to have a
collaberation such as that ... and I feel very fortunate that
it was Bacharach and David.'
We finished the
interview and I went out front to watch the show again ....
and a great show it was too. Dionne with a full orchestra in
front of a predominantly black audience was dynamite. She did
a seventeen minute medley of her hits that was without doubt
the best feature of its type that I've ever heard. Perhaps it
was the sheer brilliance of that concert that made me forget
where I was for a moment because I then did what was probably
one of the most stupid things of my life. I decided to walk
back to the hotel instead of taking a cab. I reckoned that I
knew the geography of Philadelphia pretty well .... having
been walking around it all day .... but things look different
at night. So there I am, strolling through downtown
Philadelphia at eleven o'clock at night, totally lost and with
a professional portable tape-recorder swinging from my
shoulder. Mugging target or what? Well I admit that I started
to get nervous. I had those all-important reels of tape in my
bag and suddenly realised what a damned stupid thing I'd done.
I approached a couple of police officers who were standing on
one of the street corners to ask for directions .... and both
immediately reached for their night-sticks. Spotting my very
best English accent, one of them said: 'Tourist, huh? You
crazy or somethin?'
Well I got back safely
to the hotel and checked-out the following morning. But I was
so angry with the way things had gone that I thought: 'Sod the
train. I'll fly to Baltimore instead .... and we'll argue
about the cost of it afterwards.' The only flight available
left Philadelphia early in the morning, landing in Baltimore
at about 9a.m. By now, of course, I was a day over schedule
and would have to re-arrange the flight back to England. Guess
what? The only flight available from Baltimore to London was
not until the evening .... so I would have to spend a whole
unwanted day in the city. I dumped everything in left-luggage
at the airport and walked my feet off .... trying to kill
time. It turned out, unknown to me, that Baltimore is the
seafood capital of the U.S.A. I went in and out of noisy
fish-markets, fascinated by the range of fish on offer from
all over the world, and had Oysters with Tabasco sauce which
the residents downed like hot-dogs. Snacks. Straight out of
the ice, slit the shell in half, and down it goes. Lovely.
Back in England, the
interview was edited, the music added, and it was broadcast on
sixteen radio stations in the UK over Christmas 1982. Later I
would get to interview Dionne again. This time in London and
once again the timing was immaculate .... but that's another
story.
Backstage at the
Schubert Theatre, Philadelphia November 1982.
© Mick Wright/Backstage
Records Ltd
Reproduced by
permission.
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Useful links:- http://www.dionnewarwick.com/
www2.netdoor.com/~lmorgan/misc.html
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