Gary James' Interview With Songwriter
John De Nicola



He's worked with a variety of artists over the years, including Eddie Money, John Waite, Corey Hart, Paul Young and Annie Hastam. But's it's his songwriting for the film Dirty Dancing that really brought him to the top of the music business. Along with Frankie Previte and Don Markowitz, he helped write the song "(I've Had) The Time Of My Life". That song went to number one on Billboard's Hot 100 single list. The album would go to sell over 32 million records, one of the biggest selling albums in music history. For his part, he would go on to win both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award, along with Franke Previte and Don Markowitz, for that song. The gentleman we are talking about is Mr. John De Nicola. We spoke with John De Nicola about his life in music.

Q - John, you initially started out as a musician, a bass player. But then you started concentrating more on songwriting and production. Does that mean that you liked the behind the scenes work more than being onstage?

A - That's a great question. I started writing 'cause I was writing in original bands that were trying to get record deals. So, somebody had to write songs. So, I started writing. Obviously you can't get signed as an original band if you don't have any songs. Then I guess when I got lucky with the Dirty Dancing songs, I got thrown into the writers thing, the writers pool. First of all, I think there are only so many songs in a person. I guess some people more than others. I'd write for awhile and then I'd be like, "I need some kind of diversion," so I started to work with other artists. While you're writing in a modern context of writing, and I'm talking about the last twenty to thirty years, you can't just sit down at a piano or an acoustic guitar, and expect to get a song across to an A&R guy. Those days were over back then. So you had to produce a track that would convince them that this is the right song for their artist. So you'd get into the artist's head, what you'd think the artist's music production would sound like. It was twofold. I found myself constantly producing my own tracks to try and get a song sold. I'm on the musical side of things, less than on the lyrical side of things. That was something I enjoyed doing. I enjoy the engineering side, the mixing side, the recording side, the producing side. So it was kind of a natural occurrence. I don't know if I answered the question, but that's how it happened. Sometimes you write a bunch of songs and then you went a break with that so you go into somebody else's head, working with an artist that you're not writing with. You're just producing a track and producing music. Then you're sort of reinvigorated to write a song after that.

Q - You say that A&R people weren't so concerned about the bones of a song and more about the finished product.

A - Where'd I say that?

Q - In an interview you gave, or maybe a in your Bio. When I read that I thought, "What does that mean for a demo tape?" If an A&R guy is looking for an elaborate production, why do a demo tape?

A - I don't remember saying that, but A&R guys, as we touched on in the first question, that latter years of A&R guys, maybe they partly listened to a demo and decided they liked the band, but then they wanted to put their stamp on it. So they'd hire the right producer. They'd think this producer will elevate this band to where we need to get them. I don't really want to disparage A&R guys, but they would always go with what was out there already so that they just copy it. If there was a hot-handed producer, they'd just throw another artist at them and do that same thing as is evidenced by our music today. Pop music today is so homogenized. You could put anybody's vocal on anybody's track and still maybe have a hit. I know I'm sounding like an old-school schmo. Maybe it's just the way my ears are now. It sounds homogenized. It sounds all the same. Where are The Beatles? Where is Jimi Hendrix? Where is James Taylor? To me, it's evolved into hearing melodies. I don't want to dig myself in deep, but the melodies are very repetitive. The same melody over a different chord change. It's like the less information, the better. It gets down to Tic Tok. Fifteen seconds. It used to be an A&R guy could hear a song in it's bare bones, but that slowly melted away. When the pressure from the record label to put out hits turned into that, I think A&R guys just said, "Well, we know this worked. Let's do this again."

Q - And don't forget, in the days of The Beatles they worked their way up from the clubs to theatres and stadiums to hit records. There was an apprenticeship program more or less in place. Today, you go on American Idol and sing in front of forty million people. If you're Carrie Underwood, you get a career.

A - Yes, but out of the myriads of people on those shows, there's a handful that were able to turn it into a career.

Q - I've seen people with great voices and a great look who have been voted off American Idol. I don't understand that.

A - They put people on who have great voices, which is wonderful, but the question is do they have anything to say? Do they have a point of view, or are they just a great voice? Are they going to be spoon fed songs by somebody, or do they write? Can they put across something that would interest people and separate them from being a great voice to a great artist?

Q - And just as important is you have to have someone who believes in you. Where are the Brian Epsteins, the Colonel Tom Parkers, the Albert Grossmans?

A - Yeah. They might be out there, but where do they go with it? With major labels you have to have a bunch of hits, I mean people listening to your track somewhere on YouTube or TikTok. You have to have millions of those before a label is even gonna look at you. Gone are the days when an A&R guy brings a band or an artist to a label and they sign 'em and the label develops that artist and does a few albums and lets it grow. Now it's like, "How many views has this artist had on YouTube? Two million? Okay, we can sign that person because they already did the work." So, they got lucky. A lot of times it's lucky on the internet. Obviously you have to have talent. That's always the case, and you have to have something people want, but then you have to find yourself in the right situation.

Q - Do you ever know when a song you've written will catch on with the public?

A - I don't know if that's knowable. I think a lot of writers would say all their songs could be a hit, or most of their songs. You certainly know when you have something that you think could do that, but again, it all depends on the situation the song finds itself in. "The Time Of My Life", before the movie, the movie company gave a date the movie was going to be out in theatres and they pushed it back a month, but the record label had already put it into motion. "The Time Of My Life" was on the Adult Contemporary Chart and made it to number 29 and was fading out. Then once the movie came out, they re-released it and it took off. There's a song we're still talking about thirty-five years later that almost slipped by. So, it really depends on where the song finds itself. I have many songs that I think could be, should be, would have been hits, but weren't.

Q - Speaking of "The Time Of My Life", there were three writers on that song. What was your contribution on that song? Was it the lyrics or the melody?

A - Donny Markowitz and Franke Previte and I; Donny Markowitz and I went to his studio. We had been working together and I called him 'cause it was a dance tune. He had a drum machine. And we were working together anyway. The music that you hear if you took the vocal off, is what Donny and I put together. Then Frankie came along and he actually got the phone call from Dirty Dancing's Jimmy Ienner. We were writing together for Frankie And The Knockouts. He was trying to get a new record deal. So I was working with him, writing songs. And I also happened to be working with Donny Markowitz. So he got the call from Donny and described what it needed to be like. So, as I said, the music that you hear, take the vocals off would be what Donny and I contributed to the song and then Frankie kind of what they call "top lined" it. So he had the track and he just started singing to that track. So, we fleshed it out. A top line person comes along, listens to the track, gets a vibe from the track and then you take it from there. And that's what Frankie did.

Q - You were in a cover band before you wrote an original song. Did you sit down one day and say, "I'm going to write an original song."?

A - It's kind of hard to remember. (laughs) The first band you're speaking of was a really great cover band, a band called Sweetback, a seven piece band with two horns. We played the Long Island circuit basically, although we got the tri-state area too. It morphed into different things. Before Disco there was Barry White, Soul, danceable Soul, R&B music. We were doing all that. We had a great singer, Tim Lawless, who could do Barry White and then turn around and do Ronald Isley. So it was pretty soulful. Then we started covering Steely Dan, more of a Rock oriented thing. Actually, our saxophone player went on to Billy Joel's band, Rich Cannata. We used to play at this club on Long Island called Tuey's. Somebody there who managed Foghat, and I guess he had a lot to do with Todd Rundgren, told us to start writing some songs and so we did a little bit. That didn't gel. After that I started getting into original bands. And again, original bands need songs, so that's what prompted me to start writing music. One day I just said, "I got to write some songs." I guess it was in me to do it 'cause I remember early on to start composing in the studio, more or less. I got an idea going and started recording tracks and building tracks for songs.

Q - Your group, Flight, was signed to Motown Records. Flight was a Jazz Fusion group.

A - Yeah.

Q - I don't believe Mowtown was known for signing Jazz Fusion groups. What kind of promotion did they give that group?

A - Not much. They had a guy, Lee Young, who was actually Lester Young's brother, the great sax player. We played for Columbia (Records). We played for a bunch of labels. Motown was the one that offered us a deal. I think Lee had a job there. We were kind of an interesting band. I don't love the way the recording sounded. I listen to it now and my son's friends really like it. I think sonically, if it sounded better, I'd like it.

Q - You worked with Eddie Money. Did you write with him? Record with him? Do some production work?

A - No. I'll tell you how that happened. I was writing and working with John Waite and we had written a bunch of songs, One of them, I don't know how he heard it, Eddie heard one of the songs John and I wrote and he said, "I really want to do it!" That was the extent of it really. He covered our song. We did a lot of back and forth on the phone, but I never actually was in the studio with him. I worked with John a ton, John Waite.

Q - You say The Beatles' recordings still hold up sonically. What does that mean? I believe "Sgt. Pepper" was done on either a four or eight track machine. It still sounds great.

A - Yeah. All their stuff does. You can go back to the early stuff. It all sounds great. I'm not sure where they started. It might have been two track, or early on four track. Listen to "Revolver". Listen to "Rubber Soul". First of all they had top notch gear. They had a great mixing board. They had a Fairchild Compressor, which has like thirty tubes in it. Maybe that's an exaggeration. It has about twenty-four, something like that, and tube gear and Class A wiring stuff and tape recordings. They just hold up. That analog recording imprints on our minds better than than a digital recording. Our minds are more impressed by something that comes across analog. Tape gives it its own sound too, but analog is the full spectrum of audio, whereas digital recording is small snippets, small samples of each frequency to make it up to fool your ears that you're hearing it all, but you're not. All those Beatle records happen to have just the best gear, a great studio and a great producer.

Q - I was waiting for you to say that.

A - Yeah. When you think of the parts he (George Martin) wrote for all those songs... Which song was it, "I Am The Walrus" maybe, they had a hard time at first and George was like, "What the heck am I supposed to do with that, John?" The chord leads just move in such odd ways, beautiful and odd ways, and the lyric is so off the wall. John said, "C'mon George. You'll be able to do it." "Strawberry Fields" was another one where John said, "C'mom George. You can do it." They recorded it in the key of C and they did another version in the key of A and John said, "Take this part from this one and this part from the other one," and George said, "They're in two different keys." And the answer to that was they slowed the higher key down and sped the lower key up and so they met in the middle, and it's genius. I think it's fifty seconds in where you can hear the second version come in. It's completely different, but you don't notice it. I think the UK is a better place to be for music because they take way more chances than the United States' record labels. They're less about the bottom line of money and more about music. In the '60s labels didn't know yet what they had. In '67, '68 they didn't have a template yet. By the '70s, '72, '73 there was a template. So, labels kind of went after that. From '63 to '68, '69 they were all going on the seat of their pants, including the artists. I work a lot with Peter Lewis of Moby Grape. He'll say, "Back then we were about the music and creating a movement." We were not thinking in terms of how much money we could make. In that whole San Francisco scene I think that was true.

Q - He must tell some great stories!

A - They were one of the first ones there (San Francisco) and they were one of the first ones the label sought. Yeah, he's told me a million stories, like those dance clubs they had back then. He'd say the people were there to experience. It wasn't like the band was up on the stage, like "Oh, my God! There's the band!" The band was there to sort of bring along the experience, which a lot times included Acid, and kind of baby sit the big room of people that were high. Peter would tell me that. It was more about the creative collective consciousness than "Watch us play our songs." I'm talking about the San Francisco ballroom scene basically. The Grateful Dead obviously were doing the same kind of thing.

Q - And Janis Joplin.

A - Yup. Big Brother And The Holding Company. I knew Sam (Andrews - Janis Joplin's guitarist). I played with Moby Grape, once they got the rights to their name back, in New York City in '93, '96, something like that. I'm not sure what year it was. Skip Spence was no longer able to travel. So Sam Andrew from Big Brother And The Holding Company kind of took his place. We had a great friendship. Sam has since passed. I think Janis should never have left Big Brother And The Holding Company. She had the record label in her ear, going, "You gotta go on your own. These guys aren't good enough." They took her into a different place than she would have gone. That second album is just a classic piece of music. Between the psychedelic band and then Janis' voice was perfect. "Cheap Thrills" was the name of the record.

Official Website: John-DeNicola.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed by individuals interviewed for this web site are the sole responsibility of the individual making the comment and / or appearing in interviews and do not necessarily represent the opinions of anyone associated with the website ClassicBands.com.