Gary James' Interview With Songwriter
Dennis Lambert



Dennis Lambert, along with songwriting partner Brian Potter, have written and produced some of the most famous songs you ever heard. We're talking "We Built This City" and "Sara" for Jefferson Starship, "It Only Takes A Minute" for Tavares, "Country Boy (You Got Your Feet In L.A.)" for Glen Campbell, "Ain't No Woman (Like The One I've Got)" for The Four Tops, "Two Divided By Love" for The Grass Roots, "Don't Pull Your Love" for Hamilton, Joe Frank And Reynolds, and "One Tin Soldier" for The Original Caste. They produced "Rock And Roll Heaven" for The Righteous Brothers.

Dennis Lambert spoke with us about the craft of songwriting.

Q - Dennis, as I understand it, Warner Brothers Pictures and Steve Carrell are working or were working on a film about your life. How is that coming along?

A - What happened is that we had given Warner Brothers an option to create a feature film. It was based on a documentary film that was done about me when I made a particular trip over to the Philippines to perform. We took a film crew because we just didn't know what we would be expecting to see, what it would be like. They were creating quite a lot of hype for me to finally come over there and perform. So, I went over. It was many years ago at this point. It was an amazing experience. It was just completely life altering because over in the Philippines I'm actually well-known, like a really well-known singer/songwriter. I'd not been there ever when I finally went. So, the tour was quite amazing. So many special things happened. As a result, a documentary film was made and released and it played in all the film festivals for a couple of years. Then Warner Brothers actually asked us if they could option the right to make a feature film based on the documentary. We said okay. We negotiated a deal and they were developing it for Steve Carrell, but unfortunately the scripts that were written were not very good and at the end of the period, the option period, we took the rights back. It's currently with another film studio. It's with Imagine Entertainment, which is Ron Howard's and Brian Grazer's company, and they now have an option to create a feature film based on the documentaries. We don't have anybody totally committed to it yet, but there is a very good screenplay that has since been written that Imagine optioned and paid for. So that's all great, and it happened to be written by my son, who is a screenwriter and a director. So they hired him and I think rightly so because he was the one who directed and produced the documentary.

Q - When did you know you could write a song? And what did you compose it on? Guitar? Piano?

A - I started on piano. I was self-taught. But I was a child performer so I had a lot of music in my head and I was kind of able to conduct business, so to speak, with bands when I would perform. I was able to say, "This is in the key of F and we do it at this tempo," and give them some sense of where we were going. So, I had lots of music in my head, but I wasn't really a trained musician. So, over the course of several years I taught myself to play 'cause I really wanted to write. I started to knock out my first few songs when I was a teenager, like about 14 or 15. I wrote a couple of songs and got busier and got more into it, got signed to a record contract as a singer, which was an opportunity for me to really focus on something I could record and maybe have some success with.

Q - That record label you signed with was Capitol Records?

A - Yes. My first record deal was with Capitol through a production company which was owned by the famous singing group from the '60s and early '70s, The Tokens. They had a couple of big hits like "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and a few others. I forget what the other hits were. They were a producing team and they had had quite a bit of success with other artists as producers and sometimes even songwriters, and they signed me. They had a relationship with Capitol. So, that's how I made my first few records for that label.

Q - What song did you write for Freddie And The Dreamers?

A - I wrote "Do The Freddie".

Q - That was one of their hit records.

A - Yeah. (#18 in 1965)

Q - Now, where does an idea like that come from?

A - Well, I was working at the time for Mercury Records in New York. I was very young. I was only 17, but they hired me because I was running around with all my songs making a lot of noise and people were noticing. So, Mercury offered me an opportunity to be an in-house songwriter/producer and I took them up on it. One of the first things they came to me with, to get involved with, was Freddie And The Dreamers. They said, "We just signed them. They had a major hit, but they're not on that same label anymore." So, they got signed to Mercury and asked me to write a song for them. This would be their first song after "I'm Telling You Now", which was their first number one. So, that's how it came to pass. It was the beginning of a lot of success for me that brought a certain degree of notoriety to me having written a hit song.

Q - Who came up with that dance, "The Freddie"? Was that built around the song you wrote, or was he doing that dance before?

A - When we saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time they did "Do The Freddie". But when they did their first appearance on Ed Sullivan, we watched it and Mercury had some kinescopes for us to see from England. Kinescopes were early forms of videos. They showed us a couple of their performances on shows in England like Top Of The Pops. It was very obvious that they had this crazy little dance that they did. We just decided to call it "The Freddie" because they wanted anther record and we felt, "Why not? The guy is becoming very well-known for this crazy little dance that he does." So, we just wrote the song and everybody loved it and the next thing it was released and it was a hit.

Q - Were you also an A&R guy at Mercury?

A - Yes.

Q - Besides working with Freddie And The Dreamers, who else did you work with at Mercury?

A - I worked with a new female artist by the name of Lorraine Ellison, who I signed to the label. She had a bit of success, certainly in the beginning. I wrote a song for her that was a hit called "I Dig You Baby". (#22 on Billboard's R&B chart in 1965) It was then covered a couple of years later by another artist on Mercury, Jerry Butler. And he had a hit with it as well. (#8 on Billboard's R&B chart in 1966) His hit was even bigger than Lorraine's. Then I worked with Jerry Lee Lewis. I did a single with him that I also wrote called "This Must Be The Place", and then a host of other things that came along. I wrote a song for Lesley Gore because at the time Quincy Jones was also new to Mercury as well. He was one of the A&R people.

Q - What song did you write for Lesley Gore?

A - It wasn't a hit song, but it was on a album of hers. It was called "Just Another Fool". That was kind of it. I wasn't there long. I was at Mercury for about a year and a half in total. I left because I had an opportunity to join a couple of guys that I really admired and felt very close to. Of course I admired Quincy and Shelby Singleton at Mercury, but this came along and it was a unique opportunity where I could work with Don Costa and Teddy Randazzo in their little company. They had a record company called TCP. They had Little Anthony signed and they were having tremendous success with songs like "Goin' Out Of My Head" and "Hurt So Bad". They wanted me to join them and I was very excited by that prospect. And I did. So, for a few years I was with Don and Teddy in New York. <

Q - When you would sit down with your songwriting partner, Brian Potter, who would come up with the lyrics? And who would come up with the melody? Or was it a combination?

A - Well, generally it was a combination because we were the kinds of writers who sat in a room together, which was not uncommon in that era. Not that we did a hundred percent of the work together, although I would say many times we did. Brian Potter and I had a schedule where we would work on songwriting every single day from ten o'clock (AM) to about six (PM). If we weren't producing something we were writing, working on something. The process was constant and always evolving. It would depend on what the motivation or the inspiration was, on how the song got started. We often liked to look for a good title that got us excited, something that was a figure of speech or a phrase or an idiomatic expression or a term of speech that people would commonly use. We felt if we could come up with a great idea for the song, the underlining idea, we would then have a basis on which to go forward. So that's generally what we tried to do. We'd just kick around ideas and thoughts about songs and out of that sometimes came titles, but occasionally. Brian was not a musician who played in our songwriting collaboration, although he was a drummer by his early involvement in bands in England and a songwriter as well. So, I was at the piano and he was sort of next to me and we would just throw ideas around. I'd play things and he'd react. Sometimes his endorsement or excitement would get me excited. That was the way lots of our songs evolved.

Q - You had to keep your ears open all the time, didn't you?

A - Yeah. That's very perceptive. Songwriters are always listening to what people are saying and waiting for some little gem of a phrase to pop out of someone's mouth. You think, "Wow! That's a great title," or "That's a great idea for a song," and you run with that. That's how I think great songs are born. The idea is to distil and out of that idea may come a title.

Q - What song did you write for Little River Band?

A - I worked with them around 1989, so they were well past their prime. They still were signed at the time to M.C.A. Records, which today would be one of the Universal labels. And they were a great band. I loved Little River Band. I loved everything they recorded earlier in their incarnation and then I had this chance to collaborate with them. So, we didn't have any hits, although it did okay in Australia where they're so popular. We were shooting for success in America and we just couldn't find our way and I don't think it had a lot to do with the records. I think it was really a function of the timing of that band and the state of the music business in 1990. That aside, we made a really good album. It was called "Get Lucky", and it was the last of the original configuration of the band, minus one of the original members who had long, long ago left. But it was still Graham Goble and Glenn Shorrock and all the key players in the band.

Q - You wrote these two songs for (Jefferson) Starship, "We Built This City" and "Sara", right?

A - Right.

Q - I read someplace that Grace Slick didn't really like "We Built This City". Is that true?

A - Well, it's not true from my perspective having brought it to her in the very early, early form it was in. We said, "Listen, this is a song somebody sent us that we like, but we like it with serious reservations." We played it and explained what we liked about it and what we didn't like about it. On the surface there was a lot not to like if you were Grace Slick and the band listening to that song for the first time. It was just a very odd, dark, kind of strange song. We said, "Listen to it. We think the content is so interesting, we think we could ask the guys who who wrote it;" it was originally Martin Page and Bernie Taupin. "Maybe they would make some adjustments to it." So, I called Martin Page, who was a good friend of mine and frequent collaborator on songs, and I asked him if he and Bernie would consider making some adjustments to the song, and he said, "I doubt it, but let me talk to Bernie." He went back to him and Martin said, "Listen, we have a lot of respect for you as a writer and producing Starship. Why don't you take a shot at it? If you create what you like and the group likes it, send it to us and we'll check it out and most likely we'll give you our approval." So I said, "Okay." I sat down with Peter Wolf, my buddy. He was the co-producer of that record as well. We came up with a way to reshape the song and made it a lot more commercial and a lot more accessible and did a quick little demo of it and played it for the group and group said, "Yeah! This is perfect. Great!" We sent that same little demo to Martin Page and Bernie and they had reservations, but because the band was willing to do it and was ready to start recording it, they said okay. (laughs) So that's how it was born, and of course it became a huge hit and we wound up getting a share of it, which we weren't really politicking for. We felt if we had to do this as an accommodation, we will, but they were generous and said, "You guys deserve a share of the song," and that was how it came about. It was a bit unconventional to say the least.

Q - You mentioned Peter Wolf. Is that the same Peter Wolf from J. Geils?

A - No. It's a different Peter Wolf. It's a Peter Wolf from Austria who was a musical arranger, keyboard player, producer, songwriter.

Q - Did you meet everybody who was anybody in the music business? Did you meet Frank Sinatra?

A - I did.

Q - Did you like him?

A - Yeah. It wasn't a very intimate, personal meeting. I was among a group of people, but I met him for the first time at the recording session of the song "My Way". I was invited by the producer, Don Costa, to come to the studio and sit in the control room with him when they were making the record. At the time I had just moved to California and I was actually living with Con Costa in his house. So, at the time until I got my own place and got settled, I was around him the whole week he was working on "My Way", the arrangement, and getting the record ready to be made. The day of the recording I went with him to the studio. I was there the whole day and night and Frank came in at one point with a little entourage and that was my meeting. He spent some time with me, talking to me in the control room, which was amazing. He didn't know who I was, but Don introduced me and Don is a long-time Sinatra fan and collaborator. So, I had that kind of credibility going on for me when Don sort of spoke for me.

Q - Did you meet Elvis?

A - I did not.

Q - Any of The Beatles?

A - Yeah, everyone but George.

Q - Did you meet them when they were part of the group or when they were doing their solo albums?

A - When the group had already had broken up. I met them individually at different times, I would say in the early '70s. That's when those meetings happened for the most part. George, I just never happened to meet.

Q - Were you in the studio with John Lennon?

A - Not in the studio. I was actually at an awards dinner in New York and it was a special night for me and Brian Potter because we were like the Songwriters Of The Year or something like that, or whatever they called that. John Lennon was in the audience. He also won a few awards, but he was like a very special guest. And he came over to my table and said "Hi" after we came back from picking up our awards, which was quite amazing.

© Gary James. All rights reserved.



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