Gary James' Interview With Songwriter
Desmond Child



He's written some of the biggest songs for the biggest "names" in both Rock and Pop. We're talking "I Was Made For Lovin' You" by KISS, "You Give Love A Band Name" and "Livin' On A Prayer" for Bon Jovi, "Dude Looks like A Lady" for Aerosmith, "I Hate Myself For Loving You" for Joan Jett, "How Can We Be Lovers" for Michael Bolton and "Livin' la Vida Loca" for Ricky Martin. All in all, his name appears on more than eight Billboard Top 40 singles spanning six decades, selling over 500 million records worldwide, with downloads, YouTube views and streaming plays in the billions. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 2008 and serves on its Board Of Directors as well as the board of ASCAP. In 2018 he received ASCAP's prestigious Founders Award, celebrating forty years as a proud member of ASCAP. In 2012 he co-founded the Latin Songwriters Hall Of Fame, where he serves as Chairman Emeritus. In 2022 he was inducted into the Latin Songwriters Hall Of Fame and "Livin' la Vida Loca" was inducted into the National Archives of the Library Of Congress for its cultural significance to America. In 2023, "Livin' On A Prayer" and "You Give Love A Bad Name" were both certified to have reached one billion streams on Spotify. His autobiography is titled Livin' On A Prayer: Big Songs, Big Life (Radius Book Group). The songwriter we are referring to is Mr. Desmond Child.

Q - What I've noticed about the songs you've written is that no two songs sound alike. Now, how do you do that? Do you write with the idea in mind of what the singer will sound like when he or she is singing your song?

A - Well, my creative process, not when I'm writing for my group, Desmond Child And Rouge or myself, but, when I'm going into a writing session with an artist, and usually they come to me, when the record company says, "You need to find a hit." They're not usually happy about that because they think the song they wrote with their girlfriend was the "hit", (laughs) 'cause it was about their love. What happens is, I very quickly feel sympathy for them and get them to tell me their secrets, their story, and I'm always jotting down notes, like things they say. And it is out of the things they say, there might be a little thread like a bird picks up a little thread that makes a nest from that first little threat, that's how I build the songs. I learned my craft from my mentor, Bob Crewe, who wrote a lot of songs with Bob Gaudio for The Four Seasons, and he wrote "Lady Marmalade" with Kenny Nolan. Huge, long career. He told me, "The lyrics are the script to the movie and the music is the score, like the scoring that goes behind." So, you have the script and then at the end you put the score usually. That's how it works. So, he always says, "You don't open your mouth to speak without something to say, so why should you open your mouth to sing without something to say?" So, to him the lyrics are number one. And then, everything flows out of it because the lyrics will kind of tell you the mood of what the songs needs to feel like and then usually artists are sort of working in their styles. So, you try to put it into the style genre that the artist has been successful in. But then you add your flourishes, like I've been known to add a lot of strange modulations, sometimes down, sometimes up, sometimes sideways. That's how I kind of make it happen. Once an artist is inspired, then they don't leave the room to talk to their manager on the phone. They stay and they become more contributive and that's how I've managed to get songs on records. When I would write songs and just pitch them in a situation, it would be a lot of competition with the producer and all the connected people that are trying to get songs onto a record. But when the artist is writing songs from scratch, you're customizing for them, you're building it onto them like a custom suit. They feel really connected. It feels more like confessional and then it's more credible. When the audience knows their story they say, oh, he's singing that about this lover of his that you know the story behind. They broke up that's why he wrote that song. The fans are really all inside, especially these days with social media, the everyday goings on. Stars used to be untouchable. All you saw was their image. But now they wake up in their pajamas and they go online and say, "Hey, let's have breakfast together!" They're munching granola in your face. (laughs) And so, a lot of the magic is gone, but in any case, if that artist is singing something they believe in because they've gone through it, it makes it a lot easier to stay on the record. It's much more believable when the audience hears it because then they can say, "Oh, yeah. He's telling it like it is.

Q - In today's music business, the way Bob Crewe described to you how to write a song no longer exists. It seems to be the same phrase repeated over and over again.

A - Well, the reason for that is with the advent of drum machines and then later on, the drum machine or the loop, and then the chords don't change. So, they find all kinds of clever ways of not having to change chords. Sometimes they sing softer for the verse and then all of a sudden they really punch it out for the chorus, so you feel like you went somewhere and you didn't go anywhere because you're still on the same two chords. So, music became very linear. One of the strong influences of Urban music is of course Rap, and for Rap if you have the good grove you don't have to change chords because you're doing everything with the way that you're rapping. And, it's sort of trancey. That has sort of leaked into all areas of the music production game. Songs don't change feel. They don't slow down. They don't have the kind of breathing and all the people I grew up listening to had, like Laura Niro and Joni Mitchell. You couldn't put a drum machine on those things. A drum machine would break. (laughs) And so that's one of the things. Even if I'm working on things that are kind of built on drum beats and things like that, I'm usually like changing the tempo. When we get to the chorus I snap it up a little bit faster. I also changed chords because lifting into the chorus makes it pay off. If worse comes to worst you just modulate the chords, even if it's the same two chords. At least you went somewhere harmonically and you went somewhere different in the singer's voice where they have to sing higher, let's say, and puts more angst or emotion into it when they have to strain harder to sing it.

Q - Does songwriting come easy to you? Is it a labor of love? It almost seems like a God-given gift. If it wasn't, then everybody could do what you're doing.

A - Well, it's like a confluence of elements. Like for me, my mother was a songwriter. My great-grandfather was a poet, and so I grew up in a home where everybody did something. Even my grandmother, being Cuban, would pick up the maracas and she'd be dancing around. That wasn't different. It was like everybody writes songs. Everybody writes poems. It's not special. It's like that's how humans express themselves. Then later, when I was going to school, I realized other people's parents don't do that and these kids can't carry a tune. What's going on here? And so, I got lucky because maybe it was in my DNA and also in a culture like the Latin culture, the Cuban culture, the music never stops. It never stops unless the band leader takes a break. (laughs) There's radio on all the time. Something is going on. Somebody is playing a record. Something was always moving. To this day I can't stand silence. So, I come to my dinner table. My sons are there and they're looking at their phones and my husband is at the other end of the table. I say, "What's with you people? It's like it's deadly silent here. Put on some music!" And so it's, "Okay. Whatever." And then they put something on. But, I can't live without music.

Q - You told Music Business Worldwide that producer jobs are given to A&R guy's best friends. That being the case, does that mean that good records or bad records would have been great records if the job had gone to a talented performer?

A - Well, I'm saying in general. Not saying that the people who produced the records weren't talented. I was talking about it more in terms of giving opportunities to women or giving opportunities to LBGQT Plus One community. I can't keep track of all the letters and numbers. If you're, let's say, head of a record company, sometimes you choose A&R guys that you went to college with or the sons of. And usually their heterosexual. They may be great, but you choose the people you're comfortable going out drinking with. And so, it's a Boys Club. And it's always been and it still is in many ways. In that case, women got edged out because women let's say are not engineers. Now there's many more of course. The glass ceiling sort of cracked. But for many years you never walked into a studio and saw women there unless it was kind of an intern or assistant. But, you never see them at the helm. The A&R guys would pick producers they're comfortable with because they were their pals and they hung out and they all had symmetrical families with wives and kids the same age, and it goes on and on and on. So, LBG producers, talented or not, weren't really let's say a comfort zone for them. I never knew anything about football, to the constant ridicule of Jon Bon Jovi, who is like the biggest football fan ever. He took me to some big game and I didn't know what was going on. I went out into the hallway on a pay phone. There weren't even cell phones at the time. But, my manager came after me, "What are you doing?" This is like the most important game. I was like, "I don't know what's going on." He said, "C'mon. Come with me." It's like one of those things. They're always making fun of me for that. It's been like thirty years and they're still poking fun at me. By the way, the revenge was my sons who are the Godsons of Jon Bon Jovi, are the biggest jocks in the entire world. They know every game, every team, the members of the team, what they got paid to join it, what team they came from and what the statistics are for football, basketball, hockey, soccer. Now they're into gold. They're all about gold. What I'm trying to say is there was always a glass ceiling that I was happy to conquer. Hetro bands, even though they were the ones with the teased hair and the eyeliner and the lipstick and the nail polish and the silky shirts with the torn jeans and the big platform shoes, they were the ones that were the He-men. They were the Hetro guys, right? So, when I was brought up, "Why don't you have Desmond Child produce you?" Maybe not. I always say they didn't necessarily want a gay man dick-slapping them in the studio into submission. So, what I was always getting was solo artists. I was offered Cher and especially androgynous people, Alice Cooper, Joan Jett, Ricky Martin, even Meatloaf. I was always producing that until Rock died and they were so desperate for a "hit" I was able to pressure them into producing records. And I haven't really produced that many entire albums with bands, honestly. I've usually just been producing singles for solo artists that had multiple producers.

Q - You sold your song catalog to Polygram, now Universal Music, and you regret it. You had top lawyers advising you and what, they didn't give you the right advice?

A - That's not being accurate. I was at a low point. We had moved to Florida after the Northridge earthquake and I couldn't see for the overhead. I was trying to rebuild my studio, I really was running out of money. And so at that time we didn't have the kind of collection that we have now, especially the PROs and the publishers. So, it was very hard to make ends meet and I had the opportunity to sell. And my father, who grew up in the Depression and World War Two and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, he saw things differently. He was all about the money. He was like, "Grab the money. Just grab it and write hew 'hits'" My manager was also very encouraging of it and unfortunately the lawyers I was with really weren't experts on copyright. They didn't understand. They said, "Oh, you'll get all your songs back in thirty-five years." And it's like, "Oh, I'm still young and if I get 'em all back, then I guess it's worth it, taking the money now and seeing what I can do to build up my business." But, what I didn't know was you don't get them back globally. You only get them back in the U.S. and the only country that gives back your copyrights is Canada, twenty-five years after your death. And so, my songs were global "hits." I didn't sell my writer's share of publishing or performance royalties. So, I have my entire catalog at ASCAP. That's the only reason we keep going, because I didn't sell that. When you sell something, at that time there was Capitol Gains, which has been lowered to 28%. Then with the management commission and the lawyer fees, you're really only getting three fourths of the money when it all comes down to it. It's not like you're getting a certain amount and then you're saying I get that amount and you get to put it in your pocket, and you don't. I just couldn't hold out any longer, but I also didn't have to sell all of my rights. I didn't know that. I could withhold. I didn't know what I could do. The only thing I was smart enough to do was to hold out for my ASCAP royalties. But now in another six years my so called catalog comes back to me, U.S. only, my entire catalog, all the big songs. But, I'll always be admint by Universal globally and they actually own it and I would get a piece of that. I didn't understand the business licensing, where a lot of the money is made. License for movies. License for commercials. I didn't realize the potential for all that. And also, I was sort of being talked into the idea of Aerosmith is on their album of compilation. Bon Jovi is on their second, and Michael Bolton is on his first compilation, so the power of the songs is just going to diminish. Every year they're going to be worth less. So, like my father said, "Grab the money now!" The irony is my songs are now making more than ever because they became evergreens. The bands that I worked with continued performing and continued promoting those songs. Now, in the rest of the world the people in many countries that know my songs can sing along with them. So, the songs are the stars. They're more popular than the people who sang them. So, that's the great thing about music. Music is eternal, not us.

Q - Nobody ever thought that a Rock group would last for decades.

A - Right.

Q - I'm surprised you're with ASCAP and not BMI.

A - Well, my mother was with BMI. I don't know how I ended up at ACSAP. I think it had something to do with my first managers that had a connection there. I landed there. I don't know why or how, but I signed up in 1978 and so I've been there forty years plus. They've taken care of me. They've been amazing to me. And, I'm on the Board of ASCAP. I'm on the Board of the ASCAP Foundation. I just feel like home there. I love Paul Williams. I love Elizabeth Matthews, the CEO, and just everybody there. It's like a special home, a special family. I'm so grateful that I had the sense at that time not to sell those rights.

Q - The song "I Was Made For Lovin' You" really helped revitalize the career of KISS. How long did it take you to write that song? What was your contribution to that song? The melody, The lyrics?

A - I sat down with Paul at a piano during his lunch break at SIR in Manhattan in New York City. They were all set up to rehears for their next tour and it was just a small set-up. They were just learning songs. They took a lunch break and I went in. Paul was waiting for me and there was a canvas over this long, nine foot Grand Piano off to the side because they had no use for a piano. I sat down and I had a little start, which was "Tonight I'm gonna give it all to you in the darkness. It's something I'm gonna do." And then we just took it from there. I just had that little snippet. And then, "I Was Made For You Girl. You Were Made For Me." And when Paul got to the studio he took off with the real hook and he did that with Vini Poncia, the producer who doesn't get as much credit as he should. I wasn't there, so I don't know what he contributed or didn't. But he got his name on the song and we had the song split in thirds. I just spent like a hour with him and the next thing I knew it was one of the biggest songs in the world. That was wonderful because he had come to see my group, Desmond Child And Rouge at Tracks. We were getting ready to go in and he stuck his head behind the curtain and said, "Hey, I'm Paul Stanley of KISS." We never knew what he looked like because we never saw his face. They were still wearing makeup. He said, "I just want to let you know George Harrison of The Beatles is at that front table." It's like, "What?" So, I peaked around the corner and sure enough, there were those big old white teeth. Wow! He was there. So, we went out there and killed it. Afterwards Paul came back to talk to us and said, "You and I should try writing a song together." I said, "Okay." We were in the midst of making our first album with Capitol Records in 1978. I said, "Why don't you write with me for our record and I'll write a song with you for your record?" And then he looked at me like cross-eyed and said, "You don't know Gene Simmons. You've got to be kidding." We wrote a song called "The Flight" along with David Landau, who was Jon Landau's brother. He was our guitarist, and the song was called "The Flight" and then I went to that session and we wrote "I Was Made For Lovin' You". I think I got the better part of the bargain.

Q - When Desmond Child And Rouge got signed to Capitol Records, you'd been playing the club scene for how long?

A - Well, I graduated from college in 1976. I got to New York in 1975. I was already playing little, solo gigs and I got a gig at the Ballroom in Soho. The musical director there was Marsha Malamet at the time. Later on she became a very well-known songwriter. I had a girlfriend, when I still had girl friends, and she and I lived together, Maria Vidal. She's an artist in her own right and songwriter. Our friends Diane Grasselli and Myriam Valle; we would get together and we would sing harmony together. So, I said, "In the middle of my show, why don't we learn a few songs that I wrote myself." We never did covers. In the middle of the show, they were all dressed up and standing at the bar like they were hookers, with a lot of makeup and feathers in their hair. All of a sudden they were making all this noise. I said, "Hey, this is my show. What's going on? Do you think you could sing better than me?" They went, "Yeah." And then they came up on the stage and knocked everybody out with the three-part harmony thing and that was the beginning of Desmond Child And Rouge. That was the beginning of 1976. I graduated that year and just for another year we climbed and climbed and got our deal at Capitol Records, discovered by Richard Landis, the producer. He was an A&R guy there on the West Coast, but he was in New York and we made two albums that both came out the same year, 1979. We toured the country and then the girls of Rouge went on Broadway with Gilda Radner, Live From New York, which was made into a movie called Gilda Live by Mike Nichols, and then we went on Saturday Night Live, the Christmas show. By that point, things were unraveling for me because I realized I was more gay than I was bi. Maria and I were an institution really. We had started the group. We were the group leaders. Then it was impossible to keep the group together. We stayed close. She's one of the Godmothers of our sons. We still have Desmond Child And Rouge. We reformed not that long ago. We started doing shows here and there. We started again in 1997 for Laura Nyro's tribute concert at the Beacon Theatre. Then we kept doing little gigs here and there. So now we're like making music in earnest and we have an Instagram site, Desmond Child And Rouge. You go there and it's a time machine. You'll never see a picture of us beyond 1979. It's really cute. Our website is the same way. We live in sort f an netherworld of New York City in the '70s. And we love it, even though we're making new music. We just had a single come out called "Unpredictable", cause we love singing together. At that time it was very hard. We all had people talking in our ear saying, "What do you need them for?" I had hopes that Jon Landau, who I met through David, our guitarist, his brother, he was the producer and manager of Bruce Springsteen. He started mentoring me. I would come there every few weeks and he would play me stuff he's doing with Bruce. I got to look over the wall of the other side. I had hoped that he was going to manage me and then I didn't need Rouge, but he got too busy. He's managed very few other people. Bruce is like a world unto itself, right? That's when I met Bob Crewe, and he took me under his wing for two years. That was like going to graduate school in songwriting. Then I joined this cult, which was a mind control cult, for four years and that's when I wrote my biggest songs because I had no distractions. In that cult you couldn't have a partner. We were just living for the cult leader. I was working four days a week in New York and three days a week I was in Upstate New York at the commune, digging in the dirt, planting trees. It was one of those things where my own solo career just went down the tubes. I snapped out of it after going to Russia on a program called Music Speaks Louder Than Words. There were forty-eight of us, including Michael Bolton, Diane Warren, Holly Knight, Tom Kelly, Billy Steinberg, Brenda Russell, Stephen Bray, Cyndi Lauper. So many people were on that tour. We went to Moscow and Leningrad. We were writing with Russian writers. It was right when Glasnost was happening. I saw a whole country that was living how I was living in the commune. It was like we were living for the good of the world and we had no individual worth. I snapped out of it. I came back and left. It was good that I did. My life completely changed and I was finally able to heal myself from the brain damage of everything. So, the '80s were so much. Too much. But in spite of that I was able to create really some of my greatest works.

Q - You say the music industry has lost a million jobs. What kind of jobs are you talking about?

A - Well, that's something I had heard when we were in Washington, D.C. trying to fight for a raise in our streaming rates. What happened was a lot of record stores closed. You could just order things online. And venues were closing. So, a lot of people couldn't make a living from 'live' performing anymore. They had to go and become other things. It was like a whole revolution that happened between 'live' performing and people started liking one song and not the whole album. They'd just download the one song, the song they liked. They didn't wait for a whole album. Now, it's like play lists. Packaging went from albums to CDs and then it went into no packaging. Even 'live' performing, only the very biggest stars could make a living at it. And so, we lost a lot of jobs that way. When I got to Nashville, there were five thousand people signed in 1991. They were with independents and big labels. A few years and the people who had contracts were three hundred people. So, it went from five thousand to three hundred because the big publishing companies weren't interested in developing talent from scratch. They're looking for people that got on Reba's record and they signed them.

Q - The early 1990s were all about Country music. I recall Garth Brooks telling Barbara Walters there were better singers and songwriters in Nashville than himself. The follow-up question from Barbara Walters should have been, "Then why were you signed?" But that question was never asked.

A - Yeah. It's called star power.

Q - Somebody saw something in Garth Brooks in those early days.

A - People have the "it" factor. You can't quantify it any particular way. That's why, thank God, there aren't that many stars. Otherwise, everybody would be a star. My point is, we did lose a lot of jobs. Venues closed. Then studios. My God, L.A. was full of studios. Then it came down to Record Plant, which closed. There's so few left. Capitol was big for big orchestral sessions. But because of miniaturization and computers, people didn't have to spend to go to a studio. They just learned how to program themselves and how to record themselves at home, and so this home studio business really killed a lot of stuff. And musicians were not needed anymore because people would sample strings. They didn't have to order a $20,000 session anymore. They just bought the sounds for almost nothing, put them in the songs and it sounded just as good. That's why I'm saying from the early '90s on we lost a lot of jobs. And also remember the revolution that happened when we went from Hard Rock to Grunge Rock. Big Rock bands had to have big trucks to bring in their shows. Those guys would show up in some flannel shirt that didn't get washed. They'd just do their show and kids were just as happy. They were not spending money on pyro and all the flashy things that had been developed on the '80s.

Q - Grunge didn't last all that long. Maybe a couple of years at best.

A - Well, it evolved into Active Rock. All those Seattle groups turned into Foo Fighters. What is Active Rock today is Buckcherry, Daughtry, Scott Stapp. There's always new bands and new things that are popping up. But I think the real creative action is happening in Pop, especially with female artists. Look at Billie Eilsh and Olivia Rodrigo. I mean, they're just brilliant. There are so many others that are happening. I love it all. They're a combination of acoustic instruments and programmed elements and they're being really clever on how they're putting it together. Music is always evolving.

Q - "Livin' On A Prayer" received 392 million plays on Pandora. You made $6,000. How is that situation going to be fixed?

A - Well, that's an old story before the Music Modernization Act. We were getting slivers because whoever set it up sold us down the river. Before, if you sold an actual record and you had a song on a Garth Brooks record that wasn't a single you could still raise a family. But, now whenever it went to whatever it became, people could just not pay anything. Then we had to go through all that we went through to raise our rates and it's still not perfect. It's still not what it could have been. But, it was a very hard time to see your song get hundreds of million of plays and make so little. It's better now. Thank God there's still terrestrial radio. Every year it just goes down a little bit. Stations close and people just go to Clear Channel.

Q - I was watching American Idol when Jon Bon Jovi was giving singing tips the contestant. Ryan Seacrest referred to Jon as a legend. I know that Jon has sold a lot of records. I know he's had quite a few hits. To me the word legend usually refers to someone who's changed something. Frank Sinatra was a legend. Elvis was a legend. The Beatles were a legendary group. But Jon Bon Jovi? Is he a legend? How did he change music?

A - Well, he certainly changed Pop music. Before Bon Jovi people weren't playing Hard Rock on Pop radio. Let's just start there. Then everybody followed suit, Motley Crue, Poison, Whitesnake, Van Halen. It opened the doors. Before that is what they called Corporate Rock, which is Foreigner and Journey. Before that was Alice Cooper and David Bowie and all of that. And of course there was always Blues and Edgar Winter and Johnny Winter. So many great Blues legends that were all playing in the Rock circuits. B.B. King, I remember seeing him many times in big Rock concerts. What happened with Jon Bon Jovi is that every few generations there is somebody that is a true star that becomes the center moving factor of a genre, and he was it. Everybody wanted to be like them. In fact, I got my Aerosmith gigs because of the work I did with Bon Jovi from Jon Kalodner. They reluctantly took me on, but it helped them move in a more Pop direction and it got them on to radio. I wrote "Dude Looks Like A Lady", "Crazy", "What It Takes", "Angel" and other songs that weren't singles. Those were like real game changers for them after they had come out with a record called "Done With Mirrors", that was not successful after they got clean. So, Bon Jovi was really the first of that new thing that came out 'cause he was a real star. Just like in a way, Elvis Presley came out of a sound that was happening with Black music and The Everly Brothers. That kind of fusion. And, he was a star. More so than Jerry Lee Lewis. More of a star than Little Richard. He was just beyond. And Jon Bon Jovi fit that. That's why he's legendary. Not only that, but when Rock died, he kept going and he kept touring all over the world, where Aerosmith didn't tour all over the world. Why? Because they had so many families. They had so many wives. They just weren't that mobile. It was a big thing to move to other countries. They very rarely played out, world tours and all that kind of stuff, but Bon Jovi did, year after year after year, playing huge stadiums. So, he helped define Modern Day Rock Business with merchandise and touring. He headlined the Moscow Peace Festival because of Don McGhee (Jon Bon Jovi's Personal Manager). There' documentaries about it. In another turn of events, that's why Ricky Martin is a legend. When I started working with him we sold thirty million records, where Mark Anthony sold four (million). And J-Lo sold two (million). He came in and all of a sudden there as one star that epitomized the Latin music explosion. And that has to be Ricky Martin. Today we have similar people that just come out of nowhere. Lady Ga Ga. Madonna is a legend. She wrote all of her songs, except for the real early ones. She didn't write "Like A Virgin". I know she is a top line writer. She would get with DJs and programmers and she would sing and write all the lyrics and all the melodies to all of her songs. And they had real concepts. And she changed the course of Pop music. I consider all of those people I mentioned legendary. Think about this: Bon Jovi started forty years ago. This (2024) is the 40th year. How long was Elvis' career? How long was The Beatles' career as a band? Their music has lived on, but they didn't play all that much. How many records did they make? Frank Sinatra had his zone. He made movies just like Elvis did later. But, he changed the way people sang. Tony Bennett, Dean Martin would not have had careers without Frank. Frank was the real thing. He was the real deal that brought an originality that hadn't existed before. People were crooners. When Frank came in he was a communicator. He told stories. He wasn't as concerned how pretty his voice was sounding. He was feeling what he as singing. That's why Jon Bon Jovi is a legend, because he did the same thing and has kept it going until recent times, decade after decade. The question I have for you is, am I a legend yet?

Q - You will be when this interview is posted on ClassicBands.com

A - Alright! (laughs)

Official Website: DesmondChild.com

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