The Soul of It All

by Michael Bolton

  The reconstituted KISS band was focused on recapturing the popularity and fan base they’d enjoyed earlier in their history. The new album was designed to trigger a comeback, so they were looking for at least one major hit song to crack the Top 40. They’d lined up one of the great rock producers, Bob Ezrin, who had worked on most of their biggest hits as well as those of Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper. Having a proven genius like Bob aboard was comforting, because there is nothing worse than creating a great song only to see it lose its soul due to inept production.

  Bruce and I arranged for Paul to come to my room for a writing session. Paul and the other members of the original KISS were known for their wild antics onstage and off, but people in the business knew them to be very savvy, which explained the band’s longevity. Paul is a great rock singer with a powerful set of pipes, excellent range, and a keen sense of melody, which is rare in a genre where singers often avoid it altogether to maintain an edge. He also impressed me with his business smarts and his sense of humor as we got to know each other. Paul is one of the funniest people I know. KISS was as much an entertainment empire as it was a rock band, and both Paul and Gene Simmons had been major forces in expanding their opportunities.

  We talked about our careers and the direction Paul wanted to take KISS with the new album. We discovered that we shared the same twisted humor and shared “commitment issues” when it came to relationships. After a little “get to know you” banter, we settled down to write with a “give me hits or give me death” focus. As I recall, Paul offered an appealing melody for the verse to begin and it was quickly obvious that he understood the importance of thematic chords and vocal phrases. I came up with the opening melody of the chorus.

  Neither of us was writing from an inspiration or personal experience, so we just followed the flow of the music and the melody as we worked out a song that we named “Forever.” We completed it after one more session, as I recall. Paul and I both contributed lyrics and melody to the song that became KISS’s biggest hit since “Beth.” Our song appeared on the 1989 album Hot in the Shade and was released as a single in early 1990. It peaked at No. 8 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and became KISS’s first Top 40 single since 1979. The song was boosted by a music video that hit No. 1 on MTV’s Most Requested Videos. The MTV play drove a big boost in their concert ticket sales, too.

  I think we accomplished our mission quite well. Shortly after the release of the single, I saw KISS perform at the New Haven Coliseum in front of about ten thousand people. When they played “Forever,” the fans in the darkened arena held lighters in the air, which gave me a great sense of satisfaction. After the show, I visited with Bruce, Paul, and the rest of the band and they seemed to be enjoying the fruits of a successful album and tour. I told them I hoped they’d be playing “Forever” forever.

  I’m very fond of that song, and I believe in its message.

  STEEL BARS AND DYLAN

  In the fall of 1990, I found myself back at the Sunset Marquis, my emotions swirling, feeling more confident about my career, but distressed that just as I was better situated to support and care for my family I felt like I was losing them, and that my marriage was not going to be saved. At the same time, if I slowed down in my work, I feared sliding back financially and staring at more eviction notices.

  I don’t think you ever get the trauma of those darkest moments out of your system. And I don’t want to. The struggle is a part of who you are, and what you find out you’re made of. Still, I wouldn’t wish it upon someone else, but if you do have to go through it, that’s your journey.

  My very intense focus is what prevented me from fully savoring the moments of victory. An artist puts his or her emotions on the canvas. I continued channeling my emotions into my work, booking myself in nonstop writing sessions, while also recording in the studio, touring as my own records took off, and doing interviews and photo shoots every spare moment. As a songwriter I was jumping between sessions with the most creative minds of the era, including Diane Warren, Desmond Child, Doug James, and the husband-and-wife team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (“On Broadway,” “Somewhere Out There,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”). To have access to that level of talent, let alone to enjoy solid working relationships and mutual respect with these people, was something I never took for granted. Then some practical joker called and said Bob Dylan was interested in having a songwriting session with me.

  Very funny. Bob Dylan wants to write songs with me? Next he’ll be inviting me to become a Traveling Wilbury.

  “Who is this, really?”

  She gave her name again—Suzanne Mann—and said she worked with Dylan.

  “Seriously, he’d like to work with you, and if you want to work with him, you’ll have to come up here to his place in Malibu,” she said.

  My friends are category 4 pranksters. This sort of punking was not beyond Diane Warren, for sure. So I was still waiting for the punch line, but I played along.

  “When would Bob like me to be there?”

  “He’ll be at this address in two days and he would love to get together,” she said. “Do you have a pen?”

  She gave the address that I knew to be Dylan’s Malibu compound, home to his Shangri-La studio, where he recorded with Eric Clapton, the Band, and the Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup he’d formed a couple of years earlier with George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison.

  After Dylan’s rep said good-bye and hung up, I walked around my hotel room in a daze for a good ten minutes. I tried to get my head around what had just happened while my stomach did a break-dance in my belly. I had been told that Bob, who hadn’t collaborated all that much in the past on his songs, was not one to spend weeks working with a new co-writer. “He’s so busy with solo projects and the Traveling Wilburys tour that if he doesn’t hear something he loves right away, you may never hear from him again—as in never,” a friend said.

  I didn’t know whether that report was true or not, but it reached my core. I sure didn’t want to find out by testing his patience. Feeling like a mere mortal about to be tested by the music gods, I started right in that night, working up fresh song ideas on my acoustic guitar in my hotel room so I’d have plenty of options ready for our meeting. My driving thought was that this was the artist whose songs had provided a good piece of the sound track of my life.

  STALKING DYLAN

  When I was a hippie wannabe roaming the streets of Greenwich Village, Bob Zimmerman was performing at Folk City, Café Wha?, the Gaslight Café, the Commons, and other bars and clubs. At thirteen, I was underage and couldn’t get in officially, but I was known to stand outside, playing my guitar and hoping to attract a few nickels and dimes. Dylan was the first rock poet, the Shakespeare of activist folk pop. It also didn’t escape me that he, like me, was the grandson of Soviet bloc Jewish immigrants; like me, he’d embraced rock ’n’ roll, dropped out of school, and changed his name. (Don’t worry, I won’t push the comparisons any further.)

  I’d been listening to his lyrics and studying his songs ever since the 1965 release of Highway 61 Revisited, always in awe. Just recently I was one of the longtime fans who appreciated the symmetry of Adele, the young superstar with the wondrous voice, making a global hit of Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” just as he turned seventy. What a birthday gift and testimony to his enduring greatness and contemporary relevance.

  So as I was driving along Malibu Beach in late 1990, I grew more and more nervous and excited the closer I came. After I pulled into his driveway and left the car, a fog, or maybe just a low cloud, settled in over the property atop a hill. One of his staff directed me to park near the garage that had become a music landmark after being converted into Dylan’s Shangri-La studio.

  “Bob will be here shortly,” he said.

  Expecting him to be on rock star time, I took my acoustic guitar from its case and began playing, fiddling around nervously, with my head down and eyes closed. Then I sensed someone standing directly over me. I looked up and
it was Dylan.

  I stammered something awkward about being thrilled to be there and a huge fan, and he asked a staffer to get us some coffee. He must have asked me what was going on in my life, or something about my family, because as the coffee arrived and we drank, I mentioned something about going through a divorce. Dylan put his hand on his head and said, “Yeah, that’s draining stuff.”

  I don’t really recall much of that conversation. I’d often sat and studied his lyrics on the liners of his albums in awe and so it was hard to process that I was sitting in his studio writing with him. Finally, after we’d chatted for about fifteen minutes, I blurted out that I’d worked up a few ideas that I thought he might like. I played the chorus chords that became the heart of our song. I didn’t have any specific lyrics written, so I sang syllables and the notes I’d worked on at the hotel. I was lost in the moment, trying to hear the words suggested in the music, and suddenly Bob said, “Steel bars, I like that.”

  I didn’t know if I’d said those words or if he’d just plucked them out of the air, but the image seemed right for a Dylan song and I was excited that the chorus was forming immediately. I sang them and the phrase “wrapped all around me” came to mind.

  Bob added, “I’ve been your prisoner since the day you found me.” We continued like that for about two hours. During an interlude, he started playing drums while I accompanied on guitar. Then he moved to the bass guitar.

  We were looking for verses when he shouted out: “How about, ‘Turn around, you’re in my sleep’?” Again, perfectly “Dylan.”

  “Out-of-body experience” might not capture exactly the sensation that overtook me, but “surreal” definitely applies. There’s a part of me that couldn’t help but repeat over and over again, “Oh my God, this is Bob Dylan, it really is Bob Dylan,” while another part of me was thinking, “Okay, you’re here to work. You’re here to get a song written,” and then the other part of me would come back with, “It’s Bob Dylan. He speaks like Bob Dylan, he looks like Bob Dylan, it is Bob Dylan.” I have a feeling he gets that a lot.

  No matter where we are positioned in the music culture, we are all fans at heart, which may be the reason music is such a healing and bonding force. I may have moved up a couple hundred rungs in the industry by then, but I could still lose it and regress into a totally awed guitar geek in the presence of Bob Dylan.

  It was mind-boggling for me, but Dylan was so laid-back that his mood calmed mine. The process moved swiftly and comfortably as we worked out the lyrics and formed the melodies without any drama.

  But then came a moment I had feared.

  Bob Dylan suggested phrasing that didn’t work for me.

  “How about, ‘It was your resistance; it was my persistence’?”

  I thought: Wow, I wish we could use that, but I think it has too many syllables for this place in the song. How do I tell Dylan his phrase doesn’t fit?

  To my everlasting relief, I didn’t have to give the thumbs-down to the Grand Master of Song.

  “You know, Michael, that’s too much, that’s too much. There’s probably too much going on there,” he said.

  I nodded gratefully, and we moved on. We’d worked five hours. By the time we called it a day we had nearly all the lyrics and about 70 percent of the song written. And I realized this was a moment of truth. Friends had warned me that if Dylan didn’t think the song was going anywhere, I wouldn’t be invited back to complete it. That’s the way Bob rolled. Or didn’t roll.

  I understood, of course. Dylan’s songwriting time was as valuable as Warren Buffett’s investing advice. He couldn’t afford to waste a minute. I was just hoping he was as enthusiastic about finishing the song as I was. I’d already had Soul Provider out and it had sold close to ten million copies, but no success could have diminished the importance of that moment for me. That week I was supposed to write with Diane Warren, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil, but I’d canceled their sessions to work with Bob. They all understood the importance of that decision.

  “So Michael, when do you want to get together and finish this song?” he asked.

  Music to my ears.

  “I’ll be available in a couple days if you can do it then,” he added.

  As Suzanne walked me to my car, she said, “Bob likes you.”

  Now I really felt like a schoolboy on a first date.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “During one of the breaks, he said, ‘Mike’s a nice guy, isn’t he?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m telling you, he’s a real nice guy,’ ” Suzanne said.

  DYLAN-IZED

  In the years leading up to that moment, I’d experienced nearly every form of rejection and humiliation the music business had in its arsenal: People throwing nasty shit in my street-corner tip jar while I sang and played for food. Boos and insults from drunks in bars. Rejected demos. Failed records. Canceled contracts.

  None of that mattered anymore.

  Bob Dylan had invited me back to his studio to finish a song.

  Validation!

  I’d been Dylan-ized. Seriously, no critic in the world could dent that armor. I’d been accepted into the rarest of circles in the music world, and no matter what anyone threw at me for the rest of my career, I would always have that moment when Bob Dylan said, “Come on back and let’s write some more.”

  Not that I didn’t fret for, oh, exactly forty-eight hours that Dylan might duck out, might have just been trying to let me down easily. I didn’t take anything for granted. I called to make sure we were still on, and we were.

  I called only once, but during the interim I did nearly reach for the phone exactly seventy-five times—an hour.

  When I returned to Shangri-La, Bob welcomed me back and we got down to business. We worked another four hours, completing the bridge and the music, everything but some lyric lines. Bob said he had some Wilbury work, but he’d be in touch about the lyrics. I told him I was confident about the music and melodies and the bridge, but I had a lingering sense that two lines we had written didn’t quite work.

  Dylan said he’d think about them and get back to me.

  “Steel Bars” was definitely a song I wanted to record myself, and as quickly as possible. So I told Walter Afanasieff that I had another song to play for him. Upon hearing thirty seconds of the work tape, he said, “Let’s start recording it now,” and literally, we did. We were working at the famed studio known as the Plant in Sausalito, California.

  The one remaining question I had about the song as we prepared to make the recording were the two lines I’d talked about with Bob as we finished up. I thought he’d forgotten about them, but just as we were beginning the session, a staffer handed me a fax. It was from Dylan, who’d written ten alternative lines of lyrics for me, and a change in the bridge with a new line: “Time itself is so obscene.”

  I was blown away—grateful and relieved. When I got home to Connecticut, I showed my oldest daughter, Isa, who was then about fifteen, the fax from Dylan and his lyrics for our song. I wasn’t sure she knew anything about Bob Dylan, but it proved to be one of the few moments in which her dad impressed her—or at least her father’s co-writer impressed her.

  “Dad, do you realize what an honor it is to have written with Bob Dylan?” she said.

  I savored that moment.

  I was proud and impressed to discover that Isa’s range of knowledge of and preferences in music included a lot of Dylan songs. Years later she would ask me if I could get her tickets to the Metropolitan Opera to see Luciano Pavarotti and I did, along with backstage passes (though she didn’t want to bother him by being another person to greet). My daughters have often amazed me with their awareness of and appreciation for diverse kinds of music.

  “Steel Bars” was released as a single from my Time, Love & Tenderness album, and later it was featured on several of my greatest hits and “best of” compilations on CD and DVD. My “Dylan song” has probably been on nearly twenty million records sold around the world. You can be sure
if Bob ever calls again, I’ll be available.

  GOING GAGA

  Working with Bob Dylan had been a dream of mine because of his amazing lyrics and incredible influence on artists and writers around the world. Just a few years ago, I worked with another songwriter and singer who was just beginning to make her mark. I was taking a break from production on my One World One Love album in August of 2008 when my manager and my record company reps called to lobby me. They urged me to schedule a songwriting session with a hot young performer and songwriter who had an exotic real name—Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta—and a very unusual stage name—Lady Gaga.

  I hadn’t heard of Lady Gaga yet, but at that point neither had the rest of the world. That would soon change, of course.

  My manager and the record company folks raved about her, saying she was a little-known singer who had once signed with Def Jam’s L. A. Reid but been dropped. She had then signed another record deal and a publishing deal. After writing successful songs for other artists, Lady Gaga’s singing talent was recognized and she was about to break through as an artist. She’d followed a path similar to my own, though she’d done it much faster.

  I told them to send over some of her songs. One of the first I listened to was “Just Dance.” The first verse and chorus convinced me that this girl was headed for a big launch. After meeting her, I knew she was headed for a big career, too. Fortunately she’d grown up with my music and loved it. It was a pleasure to write with her, and even better to hear her sing her ass off working on variations and different parts of the song we created. Sometimes younger songwriters will come in and want to open the whole big bag of studio tricks, but she was an exception. Gaga hit the notes like a pro as we crafted and revised the song, shaping it as we went, working from 8 p.m. until 6:30 in the morning.