Swan Dive

I was sad to hear that Doug Fieger of the Knack passed away. He wrote some great pop songs, and in “My Sharona,” a bonafide classic.

In 2001, MOJO asked me to track him down for one of their Phone Home features.

Here’s Doug, in his own words:

After the Serious Fun album in 1991, we took some time off. Then a few years later, My Sharona was used in the film Reality Bites. That soundtrack album went on to be a hit and My Sharona became the first single. I think it’s one of ten number one hits that have re-charted. Suddenly we were current again. Around the same time, I worked with Ringo Starr on the Time Takes Time album - me and Burton [Averre] did background vocals on one song, then I did backgrounds with Brian Wilson on another song. Ringo’s become a good buddy. He’s a wonderful guy.

After that we did a couple of surprise shows at The Viper Room. Harold Bronson, who runs Rhino Records, saw us, and said, ‘We have to do a new record together.’ And that was Zoom! which came out in ‘98. I think it’s the best thing we’ve done.

Since then, I’ve continued to build and race vintage cars, my hobby, and I finished my solo album, First Things First, which is available through our site, www.knack.com. And last year, Taco Bell used My Sharona for their My Chalupa TV commercial. They presented an idea to us that we thought was clever and funny. As long as there’s humor involved and as long as we’re not selling death or hate, I have no problem with it. They also paid us very well. Since this is what I do for a living, that’s a good thing.

I just finished producing an album on a band called Mystery Pop, and we’re three quarters of the way through a new Knack album, which we’re recording in my home studio. We’re going to be recording a live album and DVD in the next two months. Then there’ll be a big tour this summer with some other acts from our era called The Rock N’ Roll Funhouse.

Basically now, I’m in a wonderful position. I work at this because I love to do it. I don’t have to do it. It’s something that I really enjoy, and I do it for the fun, and the music that we’re making is the best stuff we’ve ever done.

Whenever I see the usual short list of 70s soul geniuses, I always feel like there’s a name missing. Next to Stevie, Marvin, Sly and Curtis should be . . . Eugene. That’s Eugene Record of the Chi-Lites. Of course you’ve heard hits like “Have You Seen Her?” and “Oh Girl,” but the Chi-Lites’ catalog runs so much deeper than that. Check out “Toby,” “Stoned Out Of My Mind,” “Living In The Footsteps Of Another Man,” “Coldest Days Of My Life,” and on and on. Aside from singing lead, Record wrote, arranged, produced and played most of it. The guy was an R & B force of nature.

I got hip to the Chi-Lites in the late ‘90s. By then, Record had been long gone from the group, while the remaining members were touring casinos and doing oldies revues. Meanwhile, Record was living a quiet life in his native Chicago. He’d made a gospel record on his own label in 1998, but aside from that, he was pretty much retired from the business. That’s where I found him one afternoon in 2003 when I called a number I found on a website for his gospel album. It turned out to be his home. His wife answered, called him to the phone and there I was, on the line with this soul legend. He was warm and personable, and I got the sense that he felt that he’d been passed over a little. Not that he was complaining. At the time we spoke, Beyoncé had a monster hit with “Crazy In Love,” which sampled a Chi-Lites tune called “Are You My Woman?”

Two years later, in 2005, Eugene passed away, after a long battle with cancer.

Here’s an article I wrote about him:

In 1969, when The Chi-Lites scored their first hit with “Give It Away,” it was a well-earned triumph. “That’s the one that took us to The Apollo,” recalls Eugene Record, the vocal group’s lead singer and songwriter. “But it took nine years to get there. From 1960 to 1969. In those nine years, we did a lot of little things that really didn’t mean much at the time. But each thing we did gave us more experience in heading towards the goal we had set for ourselves to get a record. We weren’t even thinking about a hit record, just a record. We had a dream - to hear our record on the radio. At the time, we didn’t care about nothing else except singing and making a record.”

That single-mindedness paid off. After “Give It Away,” Record found his groove as one of R & B’s most original songwriters and producers, turning out a string of sweet soul hits for the group, including “Have You Seen Her,” “Oh Girl,” “A Letter To Myself,” “Let Me Be The Man My Daddy Was,” “Stoned Out Of My Mind” and “The Coldest Days Of My Life.”

He also wrote for and produced other Chicago-based soul acts such as Barbara Acklin (the sublime “Am I The Same Girl?”) and The Lost Generation (“Thin Line Between Love And Hate”). Record has seen his legacy extended over the decades through covers (MC Hammer’s “Have You Seen Her” and Paul Young’s “Oh Girl” both went Top 10 in the ‘90s) and sampling. The most recent example - Beyonce’s number one smash, “Crazy In Love,” was based heavily on a sample from The Chi-Lites’ “Are You My Woman?”

Eugene Record was born December 30, 1940 in Chicago. As a teenager, he fell in love with doo-wop groups like The Clovers, The Flamingos and The Dells. Meanwhile, his older sister, a concert pianist, was filling the house with the strains of Beethoven and Bach. “That music intrigued me, but it didn’t really grab me like R & B,” says Record. “But I was exposed to classical music every single day. When I really started to get into arranging later, a lot of that influence came into my music.”

At about the same time he picked up the guitar, Record started to notice the charms of the opposite sex. “I must have been about twelve and I had a crush on the girl down the street,” he says. “She was a little older than me, and I was a little shy kind of person, so I never really could say anything to her. But she’d pass by my house every day at the same time and I’d sit there in the window and wait. I’d watch her walk by and I’d even wave. She’d wave back, but that was the closest I got. But then I would make up little things that I’d like to say to her, and write them down. Then, as I began to listen to music - The Clovers, The Flamingos, and all those 78s - and listen to the lyrics, it was a lot of the same things that I had written down. I said, ‘Whoa, what’s this? I’m on the right track!’”

What’s striking about this memory is how Record would later make that same type of male - shy, lovelorn, sweet-natured - the emotional center of the Chi-Lites style. “Humility,” he explains, in a word. “We learned to not be afraid of showing humility in our songs. To say those kinds of things a macho dude would be too proud to say. Saying exactly what was in our hearts.”

And nowhere was that humility as beautifully translated as in “Have You Seen Her,” a song co-written with Record’s wife at the time, Barbara Acklin. “All I had for a long time was the ‘doo-doo-doo’ intro melody and the lines ‘Have you seen her? Tell me have you seen her?’ says Record. “But that melody just stuck in my mind. I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I sang it to Barbara Acklin, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s pretty. We should do something with that.’ So we started working on it, and we came up with the song. But then the song was five minutes long, and at the time, nobody was putting out no five-minute long records. So I just kept it in my pile of songs with the rest of them. What really made me decide to release it is when Isaac Hayes came out with Hot Buttered Soul. That was the key. When I heard it, I said, ‘Whoa, this cat’s got a nine-minute song!’”

The half-spoken, half-sung ballad (“The recitation was influenced by Isaac Hayes’s rapping,” Record says) became the blueprint for several follow-up hits, such as “A Letter To Myself” and “The Coldest Days Of My Life.”

Then, in 1974, Record departed from his theme of romantic longing to pen “There Will Never Be Any Peace (Until God Is Seated At The Conference Table),” a song that would foreshadow important changes in his life. “We were on tour down south, and I saw this church marquee with that phrase,” he says. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was time for me to see that. I wrote it down, and that night, Barbara and I started working on the song. Without really understanding why I was doing it, I really felt it, I believed it. When I got saved in 1988, I started looking back and seeing a lot of things that made me do the things I did. The message is still true for me today.”

Today, Record says he is “happy and at peace.” He’s active in the praise and worship program at his church and has started his own gospel label, Evergreen Records (his solo release Let Him In is available at www.lethimin.com). He has a studio in his house and is currently working on a second gospel album. Occasionally, he’ll join his three former bandmates for a Chi-Lites performance (after a split in 1976, the group reformed in the 1981 and has stayed active on the oldies circuit ever since).

Though he’s enjoying a slower pace, Record says his approach to songwriting and recording hasn’t changed. “Even to this day, when I go in the studio, I approach it the same way. I always do a demo, and I work on it and I work on it and fine tune it. I just believe that’s how it should be. I think you should put everything into wherever your talent lies. You should put your total person into it. You’re only going to get out of it what you put in. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to sustain all these years, and I’m able to enjoy the fruits of my labors and I’m still able to write and produce and arrange. I just have a ball. These are some of the best days of my life.”

Has it ever been cool to like Billy Joel? For me, being a fan has meant being on the defensive for thirty years, and occasionally, to my shame, hiding my love away.

My mind goes back to the fall of 1978, when 52nd Street was released. I’d just turned sixteen. After school, I was at a friend’s house, listening to albums. Picture the scene: A bedroom lit by red bulbs and black lights, the walls covered with posters - those pyramids from Dark Side Of The Moon, Jethro Tull, ELP, The Dead, and a florescent Captain Zig-Zag. Incense burning from the belly of a little gold-plated Buddha. Sony turntable with the frosted hood. Marantz receiver with the brushed steel knobs. Into this den of prog rock cool, I introduced an interloper.

“Hey, have you heard Billy Joel’s new album?”

I might as well have asked if he’d heard the new Al Hirt record.

But I was at the age where I desperately wanted to be liked, desperately wanted to be cool, and desperately wanted to fit in. So I found myself simultaneously advancing the cause of Billy Joel and backpedaling by saying that he was different than - and probably not as cool as - Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. I stopped short of lying about my ownership of 52nd Street, because I’d gotten it for my birthday a few days before, and I’d been listening to it non-stop. When I played songs like “Honesty” and “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” they moved me to tears. Something I couldn’t say about “Aquatarkus” or “Aqualung.” I remember trying to explain how cool “Rosalinda’s Eyes” was. “It’s a song about this unknown musician who’s really amazing, and he plays in the Spanish part of town, and the only thing that keeps him going is this girl Rosalinda . . .” Secretly, I was already playing out fantasies where I was that musician and I was in love with an imaginary Rosalinda, who coincidentally looked like Linda Ronstadt on the cover of Heart Like A Wheel.

Over the years, I’ve had arguments with Beatlemaniac friends who held that Billy Joel was a pale imitation of McCartney. Well, who can compare to McCartney at his best? But I still hold that Joel has a ton of songs - “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” “Vienna,” “Don’t Ask Me Why,” “Zanzibar” - that can easily stand with the best of any pop music, including The Beatles.

I admit that I kind of lost interest in Joel around the time of “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” And later stuff like “River of Dreams” just didn’t move me. But Turnstiles, The Stranger, 52nd Street, Glass Houses - those are amazing records.

I interviewed Billy Joel years later. It was in New York City at the Stanhope Hotel, near Central Park. He was registered under the name of a famous American author of the early 20th century (I won’t reveal the name, just in case he still uses it for an alias). It was my first major in-person interview. When Billy opened the door to his suite, I had a brief moment of being starstruck. In my head, I heard “Rosalinda’s Eyes.”

After the interview, he invited me and my girlfriend at the time to have lunch with him at a fancy Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. We rode in the back of his private car, while he complained about the afternoon traffic, even yelling out the window at a reckless cabbie. The restaurant was one of those places without a sign. Just a brass plate next to the door. All the waiters hopped to when we entered. “Ah yes, Mr. Joel, so nice to see you again!”

The interview continued over heaping plates of calamari, ziti and stuffed shells. I remember him saying, “You want more wine? C’mon, let’s get another bottle of red.” This was our very own scene from an Italian restaurant. I also recall that we had a dessert with white truffle shavings. When the check came, I glanced at it. Four hundred and fifty-seven dollars. Billy said, “This is on your magazine, right?” My heart stopped for a second, then he said, “Just kidding.”

After lunch, he brought us to the Hit Factory, where he said he was working on a song with a friend. Through the glass in the control room, I could see two grand pianos set up, side by side. And then I realized that the guy sitting at one of the pianos was Elton John. We got to be flies on the wall for about half an hour, listening to these two piano men rehearse a duet they’d written to a Bernie Taupin lyric called “Red, White and Blues.”

Even if I’d never had that unforgettable experience, I would still love Billy Joel.

No more guilt, no more defensiveness. I’m putting on 52nd Street right now.

Oh, one other Joel-related thing. One of my favorite scenes from Freaks & Geeks uses “Rosalinda’s Eyes.” It starts around 5:50 -

Rosalinda’s Eyes