Gary James' Interview With Songwriter
Marc Blatte



He's both a songwriter and a music producer who has written songs for people like The Four Tops, Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers and Marie Osmond to name just a few. His music and lyrics have also been part of commercials for Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, The United States Army and Range Rover. Recently he teamed up with Trans-Siberian Orchestra singer Joe Cerisano as The Distant Thunder. Their debut album was released on November 18th, 2022, one week after Bruce Springsteen released his covers album, which featured his song, "When She Was My Girl". That song was originally written for The Four Tops and was a Top 40 hit, peaking at number eleven on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, number ten on the Cashbox chart, and reaching number one on the R&B chart in 1981. The gentleman we are talking about is Mr. Marc Blatte.

Q - Marc, I believe a lot of people would like to know the answer to the most basic question, how do you become a songwriter? Do you wake up one day and say to yourself, "I keep hearing this melody in my head. I keep hearing these lyrics in my head." How did that whole process start for you?

A - I think it was when I was ten. My grandfather took me to see The Music Man on Broadway. I was just enthralled. I thought I would like to be writing music. At that time I was playing the clarinet and I grew up in a very musical community. Everybody played an instrument. I thought, "Wow! This would be great!" Then I started writing little songs, nothing big. Then my next door neighbor introduced me to Bob Dylan, the album that has the "Gates Of Eden" on it. At that same time, there was this convergence. "Turn, Turn, Turn" was a hit. I was just like, "Oh, my gosh," and I started writing songs. If I can do this it would just be amazing. So, those were my influences. Dylan was a huge influence. I would just stay home and listen to records all the time, and then I played in a band. I was writing songs then. When I was 17 I wanted to see if they were any good, really. I lived about an hour from New York City and I'd take the train into New York City with a bunch of dimes. I'd go to the Yellow Pages. I'd go to Grand Central Station and I would go into a phone booth and look up music publishers, with all these dimes and tapes kind of in a briefcase and I would call people up and ask if they would listen to my songs, and they invariably did.

Q - Now, that's impressive!

A - And every single one of 'em, once it got to the one minute point on each song, they turned it off and said, "Man, this sucks." (laughs)

Q - And I was expecting something different, but okay.

A - And so, it was like it just happened. It was almost like magic because everybody stopped the tape at the same time, at the one minute point. Each time I would say, "Okay, can you play me something that you like," 'cause I didn't want to come to New York and have people say my songs suck and not learn from it. So, they used to play me songs they really liked and I'd say, "I'll be back in six months." Six months later I would come back and they would go, "Well, the song still sucks, but there's these three seconds that work pretty well." And by the time I was 25 everybody was like, "Oh, sounds like a hit." That's when Clive Davis offered me a publishing deal. (laughs) It was kind of seven years of really rejection and learning. Then by the time I was 25 I had a pretty good sense of what worked for the gatekeepers.

Q - Right.

A - That's the hardest thing, to get through the gatekeepers. So, I was very fortunate. I think at that point I had been rejected so much and had a sense of what might be viable for what they were looking for that I was able to come up with stuff like that. At that time I was writing with a guy named Larry Gottlieb. I met him at a party. He had written something for a very successful R&B group. He was may age and we were talking. So, we got together and started writing. Larry had become an extremely well-known writer. We wrote "Hands Across America" together. We wrote "When She Was My Girl" together. Then we moved to Nashville, my wife and I. My wife is a music producer and owned one of the largest music for advertising companies in the world in New York City in the '80s. We were watching The Country Music Awards and a song came on and I said to her, Oh, my God, this is a great song." It's called "Believe Me Baby (I lied)" "I'm gonna call Larry and see what he's doing in Nashville." So, I called Larry and said, "I just heard this great song and thought of you, 'Believe Me Baby (I Lied)'." He said, "I wrote it." (laughs) It's just fortunate. It's kind of like Jaggar and Richards and McCartney. But, I met Larry and it just clicked. He is so, so talented and we just had a great run.

Q - When you and Larry were writing together, did he write the lyrics and you write the melody, or vice-versa, or was it a combination? How did that work?

A - It worked kind of simultaneously. J.D. Moore used to write for Billboard and he produced "The Breaks" for Kurtis Blow, the first Platinum Hip-Hop single. He was in a band with Larry. I said, "All I have to do J.D. is just Larry comes up with these ideas and I just have to tell him, "Stop! That was good." (laughs) So, we both did both. And that's a major asset. What I learned from him was feel. The guy is absolutely great at creating instrumental moods. He's also a brilliant lyricist. I wrote this song that Kenny Rogers had a single with and was used for the Chrysler-Plymouth campaign from 1983 to 1986. I brought him what I wrote, which was essentially a finished song. He said, "Well, it needs a bridge." "It needs a bridge. Okay. Let's work on a bridge." I had "Born special. Born blessed. Born different from all the rest." And then he wrote "I wanna live in the land of the free. Teach my children what my daddy taught me. The pride is back. Born in America. I mean, teach my children what my daddy taught me." That's like, "Whoa!" (laughs) He did both and I do both. It's just a great collaboration. I love the guy and I'm still very much in touch with him.

Q - Between the ages of 17 and 25, were you doing anything other than writing songs? How did you pay the bills? Did you work a non-music job?

A - I did three things. I was a superintendent of a tenement building on the lower East side, which I probably couldn't afford to live there now. Back then it was like $169 a month. (laughs) So, I was the super of the building and that paid my rent and gave me a stipend. So, I would do all the super stuff like throw out the garbage, clean the halls, stuff like that in the morning, and then in the afternoon from one to five I would go over to Larry's and we'd write songs. Then at night we'd play in a lounge band. That paid us money. So, we were busy doing all those things at the same time. Also what I would do is I would take an hour out of the day and just call people up, cold call people because as you know, so much about the business is about relationships. So, I tended to establish relationships very early on. I felt that was a big, big part of having success, if we were going to have success. As it turned out, as we wrote together for two years, somebody in Arista Records heard our songs and turned Clive (Davis) on to us and he offered us a publishing deal. So, that was a great affirmation of the progress we made.

Q - That Bruce Springsteen would release an album of cover songs that includes your song / Larry's song, "When She Was My Girl", tells me that those type of songs aren't being written today, or maybe we're just not hearing them. Something's changed.

A - People have told me that and I feel like there's a bigger picture happening. If you think of Hip-Hop as Rock 'n' Roll and you go to weddings and barmitzvahs and you see these young kids, 13, 14 year olds dancing, they're dancing to Hip-Hop tracks. So, that is the equivalent of Jan And Dean, The Cowsills, and Blood, Sweat And Tears. They're tuned into it in the same way at a pivotal point in their lives. So, I tend to see it like that. It's the same, only it's different. Just like Swing bands before Rock 'n' Roll, and whatever it was before that. So, it's a continuum.

Q - You wrote this song, "Read My Lips" for Dottie West. How did you get that song to Dottie?

A - Well, it was originally written for Julio Iglesius and Diana Ross. "Read My Lips" was because Julio didn't speak such good English. I thought, oh, how does he convey his feelings if he can't really speak the language? I said let's call the song "Read My Lips". They obviously didn't go for it, but Larry and I were signed to MCA Music and there was a song plugger there named Mike Millius who was just as tenacious as tenacious could be, and he got it down to various artists and Dottie was the first artist down in Nashvill to do one of our songs and that was it. It's great.

Q - Did you ever meet Dottie West?

A - I never met her. She's like Johnny Cash. I revere here. She's a legend. She's one of the legendary female vocalists of that era. I couldn't believe it when we got that cut. For me, it was really heartwarming.

Q - Was that a single or part of an album?

A - I'm not really sure. The single was done by Marie Osmond and that became a number three record. Larry and I actually got an award for that. We went down to Nashville. We were like fish out of water. A couple of New York guys. (laughs) It got the ASCAP Music Award for Most Performed Song that year in Country music.

Q - Can a New York guy go to Nashville and successfully complete with people who are heavily steeped into the Southern ways? It doesn't seem possible.

A - Larry went down there in the '80s and he did really, really, incredibly well. He wrote with the guy who produced The Kings Of Leon. I had this conversation with Kenny Rogers. He was really one of my mentors. We were talking about great songs. He said there was a point in the '50s when he thought Country and R&B converged. He used Ray Charles as an example of that. Being A.M. people back then, 'cause that's all there really was then, Larry and I were really, really tuned in to that era of music. So, I think that for him to go to Nashville... And he was also a big fan of Country writers. He was just enamored with 'em. So, by the time he went down to Nashville he was fully, fully a student. But, I do think in general, I've heard many stories about guys who go down to Nashville thinking writing Country music is easy and then after a year, nothing is happening. They're just wondering (why). They develop a new appreciation for it, because it is quite complex. It's very complex. All of these guys, I'm looking at the '60s artists, are of a time period. It seems to me what they're doing, is kind of having a dialogue. I'm sure the guys from Blood, Sweat And Tears could have a long talk with the guys from Creedence Clearwater, and just be very knowledgeable about that music. I think the same is true for Hip-Hop today. It's just one of those things. There's a reverence you develop.

Q - Don't forget, those hit singer/songwriters from the '60s were at the right place at the right time with the right stuff, and it happened.

A - Yeah. Well, Joe Cerisano and I have a band called The Distinct Thunder. Essentially what we did is, we went back to like 1970 and we kind of revisited that era. Sometimes in a Renaissance, contemporary painters will look back at a certain period and get their inspiration from that period, like the Neo-Classical painters. In that case, I felt for me to do this record, it was kind of like a statement that this is a Neo-Classical record. In other words, we were inspired by this music that was made in the late '60s, early '70s that was never been replicated. It came and it went. It hasn't been revisited. If you listen to our album, "The Distant Thunder", it sounds modern, but the songs could all have been written by Bob Dylan or Crosby, Stills And Nash or Creedence Clearwater Revival. That kind of music. So, that's really what I've been spending the last few years doing, working on this album "The Distant Thunder", and we just a got a licensing deal with a guy who plays this stuff in movies. He's just really excited because he says there's nothing out there that sounds like it, and he's right because the stuff that sounds like it, you've already heard, (laughs) and they play it here on The Bridge. There's no new artists doing that sort of thing where you take a song from "The Distant Thunder" and put it on a program like The Bridge. It would just be integrated so perfectly because it's so reminiscent of that period. Anyway, it was a great time with those people I grew up with in the time of Mozart and Beethoven. It was like that.

Q - This song of yours, "Life Father, Like Son", how many sons do you think can escape the negative influence of an abusive father early in their life? And were you one of them?

A - I'm not one of them. The reason we wrote the song is Joe is a hillbilly. I mean, like a real hillbilly. He comes from West Virginia. He was in a bar when he was 18 and singing up in Cleveland, and a guy from Columbia Records said, "I really like your voice. Would you come in and meet with the people from Columbia?" So, he's flown to New York. He said, "Marc, I went out to dinner and they had these white cloth things on the table." I said, "You mean napkins, Joe?" And Joes goes, "Oh, yeah. That's it." (laughs) So, that's where he's coming from. Just a very primitive place. His mom called him one day, and his mom was sort of like a hillbilly whisperer. I can't explain it. She was really in touch with the primitive. She would hardly ever talk. She called Joe one day. She goes, "Joe, Little Frankie died today." And that was the extent of the conversation. Then Joe and I talked about who Little Frankie was. He was a drug dealer basically, whose father was a dealer. We talked about that and we wrote the song, "Like Father, Like Son", based on the story of Little Frankie and what Joe knew of him, But there's no escaping that. At one point I say, "Like the markings of a bullet fired from a gun, all those things will stay with you no matter how fast you run." All of us, on some level, have in us embedded the things that were pretty awful and those things are predisposed to remembering. So, it is a metaphor I think for everybody.

Q - You also write commercials.

A - Right.

Q - Which is a whole other ball game. You have to capture in a very short period of time, a few seconds, what you might have a few minutes in a song. Assuming you have to write a song for a food product, do you have to taste it first?

A - No. Often times you'll write a song based on a title. Commercials are basically reduced songs. So, someone will say, "Can you write a song for Goldfish?" On that particular one I came up with, "I love the fishes 'cause they're so delicious, gone Goldfishin'." The first break I had was working at Look And Company, which is my wife's company. And she had the Chrysler account. They wanted a song written called "The Pride Is Back". I wrote this song and the clients rejected it because they felt it wasn't commercial enough. She literally got on her hands and knees. She had the account and said, "Look, if you use this song as your theme song it will change the way advertising is done," and it did. It was the first advertisement that was a record, a song record. Kenny Rogers sang it. It got Best Music In Advertising. It was a song, but the chorus was 30 seconds long. So, they could just use the chorus in the commercial or the tag line, "The Pride Is Back, Born In America Again". So, it's similar to songwriting. The difference is, and hear's the real advantage, when you're a songwriter you're working with artists, and artists for good reason always second guess themselves. So few of them actually succeed. Three per cent of all artists on labels pay for everything else. So, you're dealing with others who are, "I don't know." Then they're are gate keepers. "Well, those guys had hits before." When you're working in advertising you're only working with madmen, these guys who are just brilliant creators. They are just brilliant and all they're looking for is something that captures the spirit of what they have in mind and they're greatly appreciative. So, you don't have to have a hit with them, you just need to have something that works with what they're trying to convey. It's a lot easier when you're working with creatives because they have a great deal of confidence for good reason. They have millions and millions of dollars they're going to spend at whatever they're promoting. I've done tons and tons of jingles. That was kind of like my day gig, and then in between I would write songs. They're very similar only the process at the time I was writing for advertising seemed a lot more like a business. Less like a free-for-all, which the record business has always struck me as a free-for-all. That's just me. Some people make sense of it. I couldn't ever figure out how to make sense of it. (laughs)

Q - In today's world, we don't have record companies anymore. The artist really has more of a say in everything!

A - This is an interesting thing. Kenny Rogers told me this in 1986, when he was the richest man in Hollywood. He said, "I don't make any money from my records. I only make money from touring." That gave me a really, really good insight into the record business. It basically promotes artists and then it's up to the artist to really make the money by performing live. I think these days the way artists make money is performing live. So they get a little buzz out there and they can play clubs and make quite a bit every night. Our record is on Decca/Warner Bros. They're a great label. They really are in love with music and that's why they do this. The way I think we're going to monetize it is, we're probably not going to tour, is through licensing. Songs will appear in movies and TV shows and will get lots of hits, like the guy representing us has a song in The Munsters TV show and he say the song has over a billion views on whatever it is, Spotify, YouTube, whatever. So, that's pretty substantial. So for us, that is really the way we will be monetizing songs

Q - I've heard other songwriters say the same thing. But, back to Kenny Rogers for a second.

A - Sure.

Q - The reason he didn't make any money on records is, for the most part he didn't write the songs he was singing.

A - He wrote "Love Will Turn You Around". He was somebody who revered writers. He wouldn't put his name on a song if he didn't sing it. A lot of other writer will do that. I think that's a really good point. Look at Felix Cavaliere. What a catalog he has. So, he manages to monetize it more than the other guys in the group and I think that was a source of friction between them.

Q - Lyrics are very important to your songs, are they not?

A - Yes. This is really because of two people, one is Kenny Rogers and the other is Kenny Gamble of Gamble And Huff. I'm sure you're familiar with them. They wrote "Expressway To Your Heart", "Me And Mrs. Jones", "Love Train", "If You Don't Know Me". Just hundreds of songs. Those guys are mentors to me. When "When She Was My Girl" became a hit, and we got nominated for a Grammy, I said to Larry, "There's really only one person I want to meet and his name is Kenny Gamble." At the time he wasn't talking to White people. So, it was a little awkward. I called up his office and said, "I'd like to speak to him," and she said, "Kenny don't speak to nobody." And then I said, "Well, I'm going to call every Tuesday at two o'clock until he talks to me." And six weeks later he talked to me and then I went down to Philly and wrote with him. Both he and Kenny Rogers said the same thing. The first thing, in terms of priority, is the title and the concept. The second thing is the lyric, and the third thing is the music. Both of them were kind of flippant about that. Once you've got a great lyric, anybody can write the song. That really changed the way I approached songs. It turns out this is an interesting lesson from that period. I was writing with a guy named Michael Sackler-Berner, who was in a group called The Slim Kings. He asked if I would write a song with him, and we wrote a song together. We wrote a lyric and then we wrote a song. The song was called "Dirty Minds Think Alike". You gotta understand this guy was not a hit songwriter. He said to me, "I don't like the melody. I'm gonna change it. I'm gonna write it with my band." So, he wrote a different melody and six months later he called and said, "Marc, I gotta tell you something. That song we wrote is gonna be on Nurse Jackie. Then, six months later he calls, "Hey Marc, you know that song we wrote? It's gonna be on Bloodlines. Then he called me again and it's gonna be on another show. I have to tell you, I don't think the music is what sold it. I think people go, "Dirty Minds Think Alike. Wow! Let me listen to the song," and they focus on the lyrics. So, I have to agree with those two guys. If those two guys tell you that, and they've sold so many millions and millions of records and they're both thinking along the same lines, you have to consider that I had already prepped. Most of the music that we wrote is competitive. So, an advertising agency will get this idea for a product and then they'll get to a point where they test it out, the idea out, and then they ask several music houses to compete. So, you can be competing against 20 people. When I wrote "This Is Not Your Father's Oldsmobile" I was competing against 250 people. So, you just never really know. I was working on something before I was lyric-oriented and this changed the way I thought about lyrics, and then Kenny Rogers and Kenny Gamble just brought it home to me. We were working on a Soft And Dry commercial. The advertising agency gives you the lyrics and I wrote the song for the lyrics. I just thought, and I did it with Larry, I just thought this was was great! And then my wife called the creative people and said, "Well, did we win the competition?" They said, "No." She goes, "Why?" The advertising executive said, "Because somebody in another music house wrote 'If you're not a little nervous, you're not alive. Be cool, soft and dry'." After that, I said to myself, I see my role here, more than just writing music to their words, I actually have to take what they give me and take it up to where I give them something that supersedes their expectations lyrically. That was very helpful. For example, "The Pride Is Back" was written when Lee Iacocca had finally come out of bankruptcy and it was really written for him. My clients submitted their ideas to him. It was a direct line. So, when I wrote "The Pride Is Back" I was thinking about Lee Iacocca. The lyric is "They say you can't keep a good man down. Sooner or later he'll come back around. Risin' up on his own two feet. He might've been down but he can't be beat." So, if Lee Iacocca is hearing that, he's going, "That's right. That's me! That's our company." (laughs)

Q - That could've been a song used in Rocky III.

A - I wish it were. I really do think the lyrics are probably first in terms of how people listen to music. I'm not talking about musicians. I always listen to the music first and I hardly concentrate on the words. But, in the long run it's the words, well, the long and short run. If you can come up with great ideas that astound people, then I think you've got a better chance of getting those songs played. "Read My Lips" was a big concept, and so was "When She Was My Girl". I just think there are so many great songs out there. I think of "You Ought To Know", "Sexual Healing", "When Dove Cry" by Prince. Now, I'm looking at Blood, Sweat And Tears' "And When I Die". What an incredible song. It's really amazing. "Turn, Turn, Turn" is amazing. The Monkees. Oh, my God, what great songs! And The Doors' "People Are Strange". There are big concept songs. To me, I think that's what's really critical for me when I'm writing, to have a big concept, if you're lucky enough to have one.



Official Websites:

www.TheDistantThunder.com

www.DekoEntertainment.com

www.MarcBlatte.com

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