It started in high school.
I had already been aware of musical theater. In 5th grade our teacher had put together a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore as sung by 10 year olds. Then she took us to Broadway to see a production.
There it was: in each story, the characters revealed their thoughts and emotions by singing about them. That appealed to me and stayed with me. I soon realized that the songs I was learning in my high school jazz band had lyrics and were from musicals, either on stage or in movies.
So a lot of the songs I write today I imagine as not sung by me but by characters.
In the Sixties folk-rock era, most songs were written in the first-person. But I saw others written as if sung by characters — for instance The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” — (“Virgil Caine is the name and I served on the Danville train…”)
So when Jim Shearwood approached me in the halls of Norwalk High School and asked if I’d find some music for a revue he wanted to put together, I said not only would I find music, I’d WRITE it.
From there it was an easy slide into Princeton and the Triangle Club where we undergrads wrote an original show each year and took it on tour during the Xmas break.
(That was my introduction to being “on the road” and resulted in so much fun, mischief and excess — another story … or quite a few stories, documented in my book, “Truth, Lies & Hearsay: A Memoir Of A Musical Life In And Out Of Rock and Roll”.)
So when I graduated and went through the open door marked “Columbia Records” I still kept the idea of writing a musical in the back of my mind. Producing records was to be and continued to be my “day job”.
I collaborated with a couple of friends on musicals that didn’t get too far: one based on the life of Will Rogers with the actor Warren Robertson, another based on Moliere’s ‘Imaginary Invalid” etc.
One of my pals at work was Ed Kleban. Ed suffered a nervous breakdown, left Columbia and disappeared for a while but he emerged later as the lyricist for “A Chorus Line” (details in the book as well). He urged me to join the BMI Musical Theater Workshop. I resisted because I thought I’d had enough of classrooms but I relented and attended.
Each week we were required to write theater songs and I got better at it.