I’ve bragged before that my very first touring gig was accompanying, among others, Buster Keaton. But I haven’t often mentioned that my first touring gig after arriving in LA in 1970 was as musical director for a promising young singer named Helen Reddy.
It was the beginning of Helen’s American career. She had come from rugged Australian performing stock, and was fully prepared. We were were doing low-budget touring, to say the least. At the start, Helen, her manager/husband Jeff Wald and I would fly to a destination somewhere, rent a car, toss our stuff in the trunk, and drive to the gig.
One early date was a show in Charlotte, North Carolina, for an auto race weekend. They do that kind of thing in North Carolina. Our work was to begin with an appearance the night before the race. When we arrived at the venue, we discovered that we were to perform at a cocktail party in a hotel ballroom, where the audience would be standing holding their drinks while Helen sang. It pretty much guaranteed a standing ovation, but it still wasn't a promising start.
If Jeff was unhappy about the setting, his annoyance peaked when he learned that Helen was expected to kiss the winner of the race.
I don’t remember how that issue was resolved, although I don’t remember any grease-spattered smooching, so I’ll just move along a bit, Later, the gigs gradually grew a bit silkier, to the point that I was tasked with putting together a touring band. I started with a new-in-town friend Michael Berkowitz, a drummer I knew from Indianapolis, and guitarist Mike Warren, who later went on to do some great gigs with Donna Summer, before seemingly vanishing from the face of the earth. Mike, where are you?
Helen’s recording career had taken off somewhat with her first hit, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a cover of a ballad from Jesus Christ Superstar. We did a bunch of recording, sometimes with me as a designated producer; including a couple of early version of “I Am Woman,” although my unerring commercial taste suggested to me that another song, “Don’t You Mess With a Woman,” might have more commercial potential.
When I first met Helen, she and Jeff were living on Mulholland Drive, and I drove over to their house to rehearse. Helen made panut butter sandwiches. I later wrote for a tribute to Helen at the London Palladium, that I would always be thankful to her for introducing me to Laura Scudder nutty peanut butter. it was clear that she saw her career as more akin to that of Joni Mitchell—an earnest singer/songwriter, in touch with her roots. I didn’t realize she was going to be a big star until, after a showdown, Jeff convinced her to shave under her arms to cinch the deal for her first NBC TV show.
We recorded in Dallas while doing a gig there, in April of 1972. We played the Venetian Room for two weeks, and during that stay, I had occasion to visit the lobby gift shop several times, and was waited on by a young, rather cute girl who flirted with me, in a Texas kind of way, meaning not at all. She somehow convinced me it would be cool to buy a battery-powered toy locomotive. It made a choo-choo sound, its bell rang, and it wandered around until it hit something, which caused to change directions and wander on.. So I bought it, and one night at about 3 a.m., I sent my little train down the hallway of the floor our Muzoids were occupying. At that hour, its sounds seemed much louder, and it seemed to bump into every doorway in the hall. I enjoyed the hell out of it, the others perhaps not so much.
When we played Dallas a couple of years ago with Neil, we stayed at the Fairmont, and I wondered if I might be found out as the choo-choo menace, but it didn’t happen, so I went down to have a look at the Venetian Room. I was surprised to find it looking surprisingly intact, at least as much so as me.
While revisiting the Fairmont, I had nice chat with Tony Bennett. Not the one who famously warbled with Lady Gaga. And not the one who appeared in the Fairmont’s Venetian Room almost a half-century ago.
This Tony Bennett was silver-haired and dark-skinned, and greeted guests when they arrived at the Fairmont. He’d only been at his post for 10 years or so, but before that, he worked at the Adolphus, which was at one time the top hotel in Dallas. “The big bands all played there,” he told me, “Cab Calloway, Basie. We had Sinatra, Tony Bennett...” Wait a minute. I asked if he had met the other Tony Bennett. “Oh yes, I did. He told me his real name was Antonio Benedetto, so I told him he should pay a little royalty to the REAL Tony Bennett for using my name.”
But I digress, I mean, SERIOUSLY, digress.
The reason I started talking about Helen Reddy here is that, as I posted yesterday, the producers of “I Am Woman,” a biopic about Helen’s life, have signed deals which will result in the film being distributed worldwide. I had a look when it opened at the Toronto International Film Festival a few months ago.
I checked it out, and I do NOT appear as a character in the movie, and I suppose we can all be thankful for that.
Still, with the passage of time, I have to admit I’ve come to have a sanguine feeling about the years working with her, and with Jeff, who was so transparent in his behavior, and so forthcoming in his description of his actions, that I could overlook the rough edges that often made him an object of scorn.
My favorite quote from Jeff Wald, which I’m paraphrasing, went something like this:
“I can get a record played on the radio, I can get it seen on television, I can get articles in every magazine, I can get it into every newspaper—but sooner or later, someone, somewhere, actually has to BUY a copy."
Helen has health issues these days, and we haven't spoken in many years, but with the inevitable press that will accompany the film, I'm sure I will relive some moments, and in the current situation, reliving is almost as good as living.