“At this Moment,” became that rarest of things, an organic grassroots hit with no payola. The next thing you know it (the song) was leaping over the Madonnas and all of the people who were popular at the time.  We wound up at # 1 for two weeks in a row.  Here I was 42 years old, bald, with a number one record and on American Bandstand to screaming teenage girls,” singer, songwriter, producer and actor Billy Vera recalls, “It was pretty thrilling to hear myself on the radio, because I hadn’t heard myself on the radio in quite a few years.

Thank God my mother was still alive. She had terminal cancer at the time, but she was down there in Boca Raton, Florida and she would call up radio stations down there and she would tell them that she was my mother and ask if they would play my song. It was even more special than you think, because these morning disc jockeys are such snotty guys, wise asses and they were making fun of her. She was hip enough to know that they were making fun of her and she didn’t give a shit, as long as they played her little boy’s record. She lived long enough to see me not end up on food stamps.”

The song “At This Moment,” had been in Billy Vera’s collection of songs for a very long time, before it was catapulted to the top of the charts from being featured in two episodes of the television show Family Ties during the 1985-’86 and ’86-’87 seasons, prompting Billy Vera & The Beaters to re-record the song that had barely made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart when it was released by Alfa Records a few years earlier.

How did it all happen? Well Billy Vera had spent the previous five years mostly pursuing and acting career, while his music career was on the decline.

“I had always stayed in the phonebook, because I was afraid I might miss something. This guy calls me up and he says is this the Billy Vera that has the band? I said ya’. He said good, because I have had my secretary looking for you all over town and in every phonebook. I didn’t know who your agent was. I said I don’t have a manager anymore, because I don’t really need one.  He said I produce and I write for a show called Family Ties and we were at the club the other night when we heard you sing this song that I thought would be great for an upcoming episode. I said what is the name of it? He said I don’t know. I figured it had to be “At This Moment,” because nobody ever gets the title of that song right. I hummed a few bars and he said, yes that’s the one, that’s the one. I said Warner Bros. publishes it, contact them and get a license from them and they will let you use the song.  He did and I got a bag full of mail.

I said wow people like this song. I had songs on TV shows before, but I never got mail, so I thought let me see if I can get a record company to let me do a new recording of the song, because obviously people like it. Nobody was interested. By now I was forty or forty-one years old and nobody really wanted me. The guy who owned Rhino Records, the great reissue label, he was a friend of mine, Richard Foos and we would have the occasional lunch when we would argue over mundane things like whose version of “Mustang Sally,” is the best.

I asked Richard how many records do you need to sell to break even for your company? He said we have a low overhead here, so we could probably break even on two or three thousand albums. I told him the story about Family Ties and asked him what if I guarantee you two thousand sales? I could sell them in the clubs if necessary. Would you put out a best of my albums stuff? I had done two albums for Alfa Records. I will pick the songs that the fans like the best and I will put them on one album. He said sure and the only reason that he did it was because he liked me. He told me years later that he thought it would never make any money. He figured he wouldn’t lose that much. He just kind of did it as a favor to a friend, because I wasn’t really doing that well. We arranged for him to license the recordings from the Japanese (Alfa Records) and by the time he got it out we had missed the reruns of the episode. Well as luck would have it they used the song the following season when the girl breaks up with Michael J. Fox’s character.  This time the story of the song, boy loses girl is the same as the story of the episode, boy loses girl. The public responded like crazy. NBC told us they had more phone calls than at any time in the history of the network. Now they were armed with the information, who is the singer, what is the name of the song, where can we get it, what label is it on and all of that?”

Born as William McCord, Vera was the son of Ann Ryan a member of the Ray Charles Singers, who backed up Perry Como and NBC announcer Bill McCord. He adopted the surname Vera when he was sixteen years old, because his first manager feared that people might confuse him with his father. Billy Vera tells us that he knew a girl whose last name was Vera, “and I thought it was a cool name, so I stole it.”

Now both a biography and a documentary film Harlem To Hollywood about Billy Vera’s life and career are in the works. It was at the suggestion of Vera’s soundman / road manager Brad Spurr that the work on a documentary film was begun. Spurr had also been working on some television shows as a soundman and he had become friends with some of the cameramen.

“He (Brad Spurr) said to me you should have a documentary, you deserve a documentary.  When we talked about it I quickly realized that I needed a director somebody who had done documentaries before.  A friend of mine Alan Sawyer had won some awards. He did a baseball documentary and he had done one on Latin American boxers, (as well as some) other documentaries. I figured he would be the perfect guy. He knows music quite well and we talk music all of the time. I told Brad that we were not really equipped to do this alone and that we needed a real director and so we brought in Alan.

We started talking about who to interview and who would be our ideal people to get. Then we realized that some of the most important people from my career are dead, such as the Jerry Wexler’s of the world. Jerry as you know is the guy who signed me to Atlantic (Records).  There were some people that were left that I had worked with back in those days, Chip Taylor for one, who was my original songwriting mentor and then late in the game I got Nona Hendryx from the Bluebelles and (later named) Labelle.”

Vera’s association with Nona Hendryx goes all the way back to those early days when he was signed to Atlantic Records. He had been writing songs with Chip Taylor and their first hit was “Make Me Belong To You,” recorded by Barbara Lewis (The song peaked at # 28 in July 1966). Taylor and Vera decided to write a song that they imagined as a duet for a couple of Atlantic Record artists and that song eventually became another hit, “Storybook Children,” which rose to # 20 on the American R&B charts.

“By the time we finished the song we (realized it) would be a great duet, and we decided to do a demo and then see if Jerry (Wexler) wanted to hear it. We got some girl from up by where I lived. She was an okay singer and she and I sang the duet demo. We got an appointment with Wexler. He had just gotten back from Muscle Shoals and he had signed Aretha Franklin who made her first record on Atlantic, “I’ve Never Loved A Man (the Way I Love You).” Before he even played our record he said let me play for you what I just did down in Muscle Shoals.  He was so excited about this song and it became her career making song. She had been on Columbia for about five years and they hadn’t managed to do anything with her.  After he played it and we let him know how great it was he said let me hear what you’ve got.

We played our demo of “Storybook Children,” for him and he pounded his fist on the desk and he said, man that’s a smash. I’ll tell you what, get rid of the girl and I’ll record you on Atlantic Records. To me that was a dream come true. Atlantic was my favorite label, Ray Charles, Drifters, Coasters, Bobby Darin and all of these wonderful people were on Atlantic. At the time Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles were on Atlantic. I was friendly with them, because we used to play behind them quite often at one of those out in the woods clubs, but it was a very famous club. On weekends we would have a current hit record act and then we would play two dance sets. We would do two shows and most of the time we would play behind the stars, the hit records acts. Patti LaBelle was an inexpensive act so they would play there quite often. Their music was very difficult and they told me that only two bands on the whole eastern seaboard could play their music properly. There was us and there was a band from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania called The Magnificent Men.  Naturally they liked us.

One of the girls in the group Nona Hendryx had a deeper voice that I thought would blend with mine, so I called her up and I said Nona would you like to make a record with me for Atlantic? She said yes and that she liked my singing. We recorded “Storybook Children.” Then her manager got into the act and he was kind of an older guy who was afraid that if Nona and I had a hit that she would quit the group, so that put the kibosh on that. 

We auditioned about twenty more girls and every one of them sounded like they should be singing Stephen Sondheim songs. They weren’t what we were looking for and we were just about to give up when Wexler called up and he said we just got this girl called Judy Clay. Judy was a cousin of Dionne Warwick and she was the lead singer in the Gospel group The Drinkard Singers, which also had Lee Drinkard (Warwick) the mother of Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick and  the sister of Cissy Drinkard (Houston) (mother of Whitney Houston), who was also in the group.

Judy came into the office where I was a staff songwriter with Chip and she was a rather large woman and about fourteen months pregnant, (plus) she had an attitude the size of Wyoming, but she sang her ass off. After she finished the audition and left they said, wow she sings great. She is the first one that we’ve got that sounds like she would work well with you (Billy), but man can you take that attitude. I said ya’. I recognized that underneath the surface was this scared little girl, with a gruff exterior and I said, I think that I can get along with her. I did and we remained friends. We recorded the song and she was great.

The song came out and unlike most records that broke out of town, our record broke in New York. We had the secretaries from our publishing company call up all of the black radio stations and say, hey will you play that “Storybook Children,” song. The stations would say we’re not playing that. Oh I must have heard it on the other station. Then they would call up the other station and say the same thing. The record took off and it became # 1 on the black stations in New York and it was # 3 on the Pop stations. It did well around the country and Judy and I got to play the Apollo Theater. I had two goals at that age, I wanted to be on American Bandstand and I wanted to play the Apollo Theater. I was twenty-three,” recalls Vera.

The documentary film also talks about Vera’s experience at the Apollo Theater where he and Judy Clay performed five shows each day, seven days per week and were paid the handsome sum of $2,400 to split between them in the late sixties. He recalls what now seems like a rather humorous conversation and set of directions from the stage manager “Honi” Coles, but at the time was pretty serious business.

““Honi” says, Harlem hasn’t seen you yet, meaning me. They hadn’t seen pictures of us. What I want you to do he says is, Judy you enter from stage right and Billy you enter from stage left, but you wait for her to take three steps out on the stage, before you make your entrance and watch what happens.

These old guys they knew every trick in show business, so you listened to them. I did what he said and you could hear 1,500 people gasp the first time I walked out on the stage. I could hear people going, that’s him? The record was already a hit, but nobody had seen us yet (you can hear in his voice that he is relishing the memory of the moment). Here this little skinny white boy is there with this rather large black lady and who was about five or six years older than me. He had put us on second. The opening act is always a choreographed act, a flashy act that gets people excited and then they put on an unknown or a not very good act second and then better, better, better and then the star.

He wasn’t sure how we would go over, because you had a white guy singing love songs to a black woman at a time when there were race riots going on across the river. I didn’t feel scared or intimidated for one second, but other people were concerned for me.  We went over great and in fact, after the first show he comes up to our dressing room and he says, I am going to change up the show and I am going to put you on right before the star, because ain’t nobody gonna’ follow you two. That became our spot right before the star. We wound up being hugely popular in Harlem and we played there again a couple of months later.

While we were playing there Jerry Wexler called me up in the dressing room. He said I’ve got some news for you; our distribution deal with Stax Records has ended. Judy was signed to Stax and I was signed to Atlantic, so that meant we couldn’t record together any longer. We had recorded an album and we had a follow-up hit single called “Country Girl, City Man,” and the third single had just come out. They stopped promoting it, because why promote an act that is not going to be able to work together anymore,” he says.

Jerry Wexler however, had Billy Vera in the recording studio the morning after his gig ended at the Apollo Theater to record the Bobby Goldsboro song “With Pen In Hand,” which became his first solo hit.

“Luckily, there was one living person that we could find that was on the same bill with us at the Apollo, Mable John, Little Willie John’s sister. In fact, Mable was in our dressing room when she got the word that Willie had died in prison. He was in prison, because he had stabbed somebody in a bar fight. She went on to become one of the Raelettes. She appears on camera in the film. We have a lot of people on camera. We got Mike Stoller, of Leiber and Stoller fame and we have Richard Roundtree, the guy who played Shaft, Nona Hendryx and Dolly Parton.”

As for the connection with Dolly Parton, Vera explains, “I had gone about nine years without a hit. The seventies were abominable career wise for me. The music had changed, the world had changed, the society had changed and the culture had changed. I had gone from being a white guy working within black music and black show business then after Martin Luther King got killed the black power thing came into play and there was really no place for me in that world anymore. I couldn’t really figure out where to fit. My sister (Kathy McCord) for example was up at Woodstock. She was at the Woodstock Festival and she stayed there. That is where most of the white people who were my age and a few years younger were headed in that hippie world and it was culture shock for me. I didn’t understand these hippies. I was used to wearing a mohair suit and playing with black musicians. This whole concept of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan was so alien to me that I just didn’t get it.

Here we have the seventies and I am trying to figure out what do I do and where do I fit in? The idea of a blue-eyed Soul singer was over. I couldn’t be a Disco singer and I couldn’t really be a Heavy Metal guy and I couldn’t be a wimpy Jackson Browne singer-songwriter type. I just didn’t know what to do with myself. I managed to eke out a living playing clubs with a little band that I put together. I played clubs in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York. I worked six or seven nights a week. I moved back to my mother’s house and I kept writing songs and I tried to get somewhere, but again I couldn’t really figure out what to do.