The Soul of It All

by Michael Bolton

  RECORD DEAL NO. 1: DOA

  After they treated our second record like an ugly stepchild, Epic’s silence was deafening. We felt like orphans who’d been adopted by Daddy Warbucks only to be tossed back out onto the street. Joy went from playing a big-time venue, the Electric Circus in Greenwich Village, to doing sets for our hometown friends at the auditorium of the New Haven Jewish Community Center. The latter venue also provided the stage for my one and only venture as a stand-up comedian.

  Once again, Marc Friedland was my co-conspirator.

  One of our favorite pastimes was to create various comedy routines. Neither of us can remember exactly what inspired this particular event, but when we smoked pot, Marc and I were convinced we were the world’s funniest people. In fact we were—to each other. So I guess we decided to share our high-larity with the rest of the world, or at least those within driving distance of the New Haven Jewish Community Center.

  Marc recalls that our audience consisted of fewer than a dozen people, and it’s likely half of them were relatives, members of the center’s custodial crew, or friends. We decided it would be funny to share our impressions of Jack Abramowitz, a Friedland family friend with a distinctive style of speech and a penchant for cigars. I’d never actually met the guy, so my impression was actually my imitation of Marc and Ribs imitating him. They said Jack often bragged about his son Alan, and we made fun of that. We also told a long story involving red and green tomatoes that we thought was extremely funny.

  The audience did not concur. Thus ended my one and only foray into stand-up comedy. Since then I’ve come to know many professional comedians, including my friend the late Rodney Dangerfield. I did a cameo in his 1997 movie Meet Wally Sparks, and after I demonstrated my impersonation of him Rodney said, “You do me better than I do me.”

  NOT MY LUCKIEST OF TIMES

  I woke up in my Joy House bedroom in a daze one day in August of ’69. Usually there was live or recorded music blaring, but on that day there was nothing but silence. I was home alone. I grabbed the phone and called around, but I couldn’t find my bandmates, my brother, or any other friends or girlfriends.

  I discovered that while I was sleeping like Rip van Winkle, everyone I knew had headed to a dairy farm 130 miles away in upstate New York. It seemed that the rest of the world had decided to have a party—a three-day music festival—and I’d missed the memo. Later, some friends claimed they called and tried to wake me but couldn’t, and so I became forever known as the guy who was too stoned for Woodstock.

  If I could have dragged myself out of bed, I might have been hanging out with Orrin and other friends when the Woodstock documentary cameras caught them dancing at the front of the stage for the legendary Carlos Santana performance of “Soul Sacrifice.” You can see them clearly in the film. (Hint: Orrin is not the bare-ass-naked guy dancing with a live sheep the size of a Labrador in his arms.)

  Apparently, this wasn’t exactly my time. Soon after I missed out on the experience of Woodstock, I met a girl I really liked. I was pursuing her, but it turned out she was more into another guy. On top of that, within a year of our signing with Epic, I received a “Dear Michael” letter. Some Harvard law grad probably put the wording together—“You are free to sign with other labels”—but it sounded to me like a teenager lamely trying to dump her boyfriend without hurting his feelings by announcing: “You are now free to date other girls!”

  I was confused, disappointed, and discouraged. Yet I was determined to get back into the recording studio. We’d been so close twice. I wasn’t about to give up. After all, I was Bullet Bolotin’s boy. So I kept driving toward my goal, but I had to build a new band to do it. After Epic gave Joy the kiss-off, Marc and Ribs decided that the music business was too crazy for them. They moved to Los Angeles and opened Nature’s Door, a twenty-four-hour vegetarian restaurant named after a song I’d written. I could never blame another artist for throwing in the towel and saying “enough” because a career in music is so unpredictable. I would face many more tough years myself.

  While they were dishing up tofu and brown rice in West Hollywood, I put together a new band in New Haven. I rounded up a few other musician friends—Fred Bova (lead guitar), Hilly Michaels (drums), and Glenn Selwitz (bass guitar)—and we went to work learning new songs I’d written. Since money was tighter than ever, we recorded a new demo on a reel-to-reel tape recorder set up in my apartment. We put three songs on the demo: “I Work for Freedom,” “The Fire Keeps Burnin’,” and “Running Away from the Night Time.”

  We had the demo ready for prime time in May 1971, and by then the Friedland brothers were back. Nature’s Door had closed, which freed up Marc to rejoin the band and set loose Ribs to once again serve as my manager and pitchman. I sent Ribs the new demo and either he really liked it or just needed something to do because he was out of work; either way, he offered to take the new Joy demo around to record companies and music publishers in Los Angeles and Hollywood. Thanks to Ribs and his persistence, we landed a production deal with Dimension Music, run by Michael Z. Gordon and Steven Lewis. This deal allowed Dimension to place the album with a major label.

  RECORD DEAL NO. 2

  Dimension Music helped us secure a recording contract—for an album, not just a single—with Pentagram Records. Pentagram was a low-budget record company based in L.A. One of the owners was a great recording engineer and mixer named Al Schmitt, whom I would work with many times over the years. We were extremely excited and equally nervous about this new record deal. We didn’t want to blow it this time. I was determined, and fully committed to writing, recording, and delivering the most compelling music possible.

  We decided to work on this new record in Southern California. Ribs and Marc were living in Venice, and my mother had moved out to L.A. to finally devote herself to writing songs while also working as a secretary at Universal Studios, where she typed television show scripts and saved us copies to read so we’d all know ahead of time what was happening on our favorite shows. She enjoyed meeting the actors and actresses. One of her favorites was the smooth-talking charmer Telly Savalas, star of Kojak, whom I would hear more about nearly twenty years later when I began dating his stepdaughter.

  When the band and I moved out to California in 1971, I was in my first serious relationship. I had met Maureen, an Irish girl who would become my wife four years later, while she was working at Cutler’s Record Shop. Like many record stores of that time, Cutler’s also had a “head shop” section that featured rolling papers, pipes, Day-Glo posters, black lights, and all the other essential hippie accoutrements. Maureen worked there and she was everyone’s sweetheart—a warm, kind, and friendly soul who was fun to be around. Marc and Ribs and all the guys in my bands loved her.

  I never had to work at getting girls. I was the lead singer in a rock band and girls were throwing themselves at me, but I was never interested in dating them for more than a couple of weeks. With Maureen it was different. When she and I started “going steady,” and I embarked upon my first real relationship—which would become one of the most important relationships of my entire life—I had a lot to learn.

  Perhaps seeing my mom and dad split gave me a sense of insecurity or fear of abandonment. I was a teenager, in the midst of new love, and for those reasons I was holding on tight.

  CRAZY KIDS

  I rode out to California aboard Marc’s converted school bus, dubbed “Oogy Ahhgy,” in the summer of ’71. Nobody seems to know where they came up with that name, but it might have been the noise the six of us made while trying to push-start the damned thing, which weighed more than a loaded garbage truck. We often had to push it more than fifty feet to get the thing started. Aside from that, this was the smoothest cross-country trip we’d had. There were actual bunks aboard the bus, which was all done up with an interior that resembled a Peter Max poster.

  Maureen and I eventually settled into an apartment in Van Nuys. It had hot and cold running water, air-conditioning, and a third occupant:
Marc Friedland, who slept in the second bedroom and helped us cover the rent while working on new songs with me. Shortly after he settled in with us, Marc found his first-ever serious girlfriend. She was a nice Jewish girl named Wendy Abdul. Marc was twenty; Wendy was seventeen and still lived with her parents and sister in Van Nuys. She couldn’t go out much because both of her parents worked and she had to take care of her little sister, who was only nine years old.

  The little sister’s name was Paula, and she was a cute little thing. Maureen and I often went to Wendy’s with Marc to hang out. Paula, the adorable, nine-year-old Brownie, was always dancing and singing around the house, bugging me to play the guitar or play board games with her. I enjoyed teasing her and I would call her a “little brat.”

  On Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2011, that same cute kid, now grown up, talked about those days and noted that she was often frustrated because I refused to pay much attention to her. She said I was more interested in practicing guitar and rehearsing with my band members, who lived in her building. She also said that I was nice enough to sing her to sleep.

  Paula told Jimmy that one day when I was babysitting her with Marc, she was jumping on the couch and somehow managed to get a pencil jammed into her leg. She claimed I showed complete disinterest but finally drove her to the hospital, but honestly, I only vaguely recall the incident. My story is that she poked herself with the pencil so we’d take her out for ice cream by way of the emergency room. Unfortunately, we lost touch with each other when things between Marc and Wendy didn’t work out after a couple of years.

  In the 1980s I heard that Paula was making a name for herself as a choreographer for the Laker Girls cheerleaders and for music videos by members of the Jackson family. My songwriting career took off around the same time, and I decided to track down Paula when I was preparing to do a music video for the first album featuring my own pop songs.

  “Paula, this is Michael Bolton,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to recognize my voice at first and she thought someone was playing a prank on her. Then she thought a minute and said: “It is not!”

  “Who else would call you a little brat?” I replied.

  “Oh my God, it is you!”

  We later met for dinner with her sister and talked about old times. I also convinced Paula to work out the basic choreography for my “Wait on Love” music video, co-written and produced by Jonathan Cain of the band Journey. If you’ve seen that video, you might not be able to recognize the young bass player because of his high-rise flattop haircut, but it is Randy Jackson, who would work with Paula on another stage many years later. (Randy and I had fun working together and have long talked about putting together another rock band and going on tour—we might just do it one of these days.)

  I still see Paula from time to time in my travels. We had a great time at the 2012 White Nights Festival in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which brings together performers from around the world. We visited a children’s hospital together, and then, during a talent contest at the festival, we laughed our asses off talking about old times and how crazy our lives have been since we first met. I love catching up with her. Even though she has become a very successful entertainer on so many levels, she’s still the sweet, down-to-earth, unpretentious, and cool person I’ve known for so long—and is no longer a little brat at all.

  JOY 2.0

  When Marc moved in with Maureen and me in the late summer of 1971, we focused on writing songs for our Pentagram album. Then we began rehearsing with a new, expanded version of our band. Our practice studio was aboard Marc’s Oogy Ahhgy school bus, which he kept parked at the apartment complex on Coldwater Canyon managed by my mother and her boyfriend, Bill Segal. It was good to have them as landlords since we were often—make that always—behind on our rent. Joy 2.0 included Michael Hillman (aka Hilly Michaels) on drums and percussion, Glenn Selwitz on bass guitar, Marc Friedland on piano and organ, and my brother, Orrin, who was back from one of his exotic adventures, sharing lead and backing vocals with me as well as some guitar. We recorded ten songs.

  RECORD DEAL NO. 2: PENTAGRAM BECOMES PENTA-GONE

  We worked to perfect the recordings. I drove everyone, including myself, relentlessly. My hunger to make it in music was ferocious. I often carried around this intense feeling that I had to perform at the highest level of my abilities, and I demanded the same of the others in my band. One of the inner messages that played over and over in my head was, You never know if you’ll get another chance. You have to seize this opportunity because it might be your last.

  In this instance, as in many others, I was adamant that we do all we could to make this album a hit. To my consternation, it was another miss. As soon as we emerged from the recording studio with our songs ready for the album, we were informed that Pentagram had gone out of business, which seemed to happen a lot to record companies I signed with in those days.

  My bandmates were as despondent as I was at this setback. We did have one brief glimmer of hope when the guys at Dimension set us up to write and record songs for the sound track of a low-budget scary movie. They could give us only a $500 advance to split seven ways, and they could pay for only four songs. They had to pay our musicians union dues, and they couldn’t afford to do that and finance an entire album at the same time. We recorded these songs: “Running Away from the Nighttime,” which I wrote and sang lead vocals on; “Where Do We Go from Here,” with words and music by Michael Z. Gordon of Dimension; “Our Town,” with words and music by Larry Quinn; and an instrumental called “Cowboy’s Theme,” of undetermined origins.

  The songs were for the little-known 1971 movie called November Children, which was later re-released as Nightmare County and then re-re-released as Nightmare of Death. Good luck trying to find a copy of the movie: like our record, it disappeared almost as soon as it was released. As excited as we were to be involved in making music for a movie, this was, sadly, not our foray into blockbuster film sound tracks.

  BLOOD, SWEAT & BOLOTIN

  After our disappointing Pentagram and moviemaking experiences we were feeling down and out. Yet every time depression threatened to slap me down, something would happen to give me hope.

  In 1972, drummer Bobby Colomby called and asked me if I’d like to discuss joining Blood, Sweat & Tears, the Grammy-winning rock-jazz fusion band formed four years earlier by Bobby and Al Kooper in Greenwich Village. The band had gone through a series of personnel changes. While Al was a noted songwriter, musician, and producer who’d worked with Bob Dylan and Mike Bloomfield, BS&T had their biggest commercial success with his replacement, David Clayton Thomas, a tremendous lead singer.

  After four stellar years with the band, David decided to move on to a solo career, so Bobby asked me to come to his home to discuss joining BS&T. There was still some dissension in the band over whether they wanted to be more of a pop-rock or a jazz-rock fusion group. Bobby and I talked for a few hours at his home, but in the end, nothing came of our discussions. Another near miss racked up. BS&T went through a couple of different lead singers before David Clayton Thomas returned three years later. Bobby now manages Chris Botti, who performed on my GEMS album.

  These were lean days, in more ways than one. My finances were slim and I was slimmer. I’d been a vegetarian since the age of eighteen and that had something to do with my fat-free frame, but there wasn’t much bread on our table, either. Today, my daughters still joke that I’m really a “junk-food vegetarian,” because I tend to graze on Pringles and similar snacks. Back then, in the Lean & Mean Times, my bandmates and I would pile aboard Marc Friedland’s Oogy Ahhgy and go for gorgings at Pizza Hut’s 99-cent “All You Can Eat” lunch buffet. It wasn’t health food, but it was cheap.

  Finally, I had to find a day job—or two—just to pay the rent. Beyond music my credentials were not impressive. Most people my age were just finishing their senior year in high school. I’d skipped every year. Then again, my first real-world nine-to-five job attempts didn’t exactly require a highe
r education. When I was fifteen and basically homeless (I did live on and off with my grandparents), a friend of mine helped me get a job at his father’s Splash car wash near the Westville Amity Shopping Center. My job was to wipe down the cars. I wiped out instead. The boss fired me a few days into the job for lacking the proper drying technique. He said that I rubbed both customers and their cars the wrong way.

  My next non–rock star career move was to work as a waiter in a vegetarian restaurant. I figured the fringe benefits would be better there than at the car wash, but again I lacked certain essential skills. The owner fired me after his family came in for dinner one night and his sister ordered a veggie burger. I was on the sandwich line so I whipped it up superfast. When his sister complained that there seemed to be no actual veggie burger in the veggie burger sandwich, the owner told her to keep biting. She’d nearly finished it before determining that the superfast sandwich artist—me—had neglected one key ingredient. The veggie burger itself.

  In my previous job at another vegetarian restaurant when I was living in L.A., I distinguished myself there by dumping salad dressing all over a customer when I became distracted by a group of models in miniskirts being seated at a nearby table. I wasn’t cut out for the service industry, apparently. Of course, most of the waiters and waitresses in L.A. really are actors and actresses waiting for a break. That may not have been my dream, but I did get to try it on for a bit part.

  OUR BAND IN BLUME

  While we were in L.A., a friend of ours hooked us up with his father, who was a casting director. He tipped us off one day that a movie crew was looking for extras. The pay was thirty dollars a day, so we went for it, which is how Marc, Ribs, Tom Pollard, and yours truly came to be the real stars (at least in our mothers’ minds) of the 1973 movie Blume in Love, which also featured George Segal, Susan Anspach, Marsha Mason, Shelley Winters, and Kris Kristofferson.