Billy Vera Part III: The Songs

One might expect that from someone who is an accomplished singer and a songwriter like Billy Vera is, that he might have some earth shattering secrets to share with others, as to why he his voice has held up so well over the years. Not so.

“My voice is in better shape, the more that I sing. I don’t do vocal exercises and sometimes my voice gets tired by the end of a long set or if we do two sets, I have trouble having the power that I know that I should have. I have never done anything special and I have always felt that if you worry about your voice, it is going to show. (He laughs) I just drink a Pepsi and go for it,” he says.

So, that sort of blows that theory a bit, however, there is no denying that Billy Vera’s songs are his legacy and in today’s third and final segment of our interview with another of America’s music icons, he talks about his songs. Before you can fully appreciate Billy Vera’s songs you have to understand the musical influences that inform his music.

“When I was coming up, how hip you were, was determined by how Black you danced, how Black you played, how Black you dressed, how black you sounded and sang. The next generation after me, which was the boomer generation and I was born two years before the first boomer. The boomer generation and how hip they were, was determined by how British their influences were. That is just more generational. Most of us who grew up in my time and the people before me, grew up digging the sounds of Black R&B, black jazz and even Black pop or a Nancy Wilson and people like that. That was just mainly my style. I also listened to the Sinatras of the world. I dug him. Not that I would try to copy him. In the beginning you always (copy people a little), even the great Ray Charles copied people. I can go record by record and say that he got this piano lick from this guy and he started singing this way, because he was listening to that. Over time, our own style eventually evolves Mick Jagger was trying to be Don Covay or Muddy Waters and he couldn’t be, so what came out was a unique Rolling Stones sound. Everybody tries to do it, Sinatra came out trying to be Bing Crosby and then his own thing came along eventually,” says Vera.

Although, Billy Vera is not fond of autobiographical songs, one of the prettiest songs that he has written is “Hopeless Romantic,” which is drawn from his own life. “I was still recovering from a breakup and a girl who broke my heart back in New York. I was still holding onto the hope that would work again and that I would get her back. That came about in an unusual way.  I was living in someone’s house and she was sleeping in her room across the hall, so I couldn’t play an instrument and I wrote that song without a piano or a guitar. It was a statement that people are f** up, people don’t stay together anymore, but even in times like these, I still have the hope that people can love each other forever, even in days like these. That is the basic message of that song.”

When you have a song with a title like “Let You Get Away,” you might assume that it is also drawn from the songwriter’s own life, however, that is not the case with this particular song. From the early to the mid eighties Billy Vera’s songwriting began to take a little different direction and “Let You Get Away,” was part of that process.

“I was on a roll about that time and I hadn’t written for awhile and then I wrote a song called “Moonglows.” I was saying to myself, I am not a kid anymore. It is stupid for a forty year old guy to be still writing songs from an immature, adolescent point of view.  I would see a lot of artists trying to stay hip and trying to stay young, so they could appeal to young audiences. I thought it looked ridiculous if you tried to do that, so I thought; how do I start writing things that are more grownup songs? I thought, I could look back to things that happened in my past and sort of muse on that. This song “Moonglows,” which was later recorded by Lou Rawls was the first of that batch of songs and then “Let You Get Away,” was the third or fourth in that whole group of songs. There was this scene in an Orson Welles movie where Joseph Cotton talks about a girl he once saw, when he was on a ferry and the two ferries (passed). He saw her on the other boat. He said, ‘A day hasn’t gone by, when I haven’t thought of her, in the last twenty years,’ or whatever it was.  That always struck me as a mood, and I tried to make the music (for “Let You Get Away”) sound that way. It is a nostalgic way of something that happened in the past or of someone who was there in the past,” explains Vera.

Then there was the song that made Billy Vera a household name, “At This Moment.”

“The song had its genesis when I was still living in New York and I was still in that period of struggle in the seventies and living at my mother’s house when I was thirty-three years old (he laughs). How pitiful is that?  I had just met this girl and I usually don’t write autobiographical songs, even though the songs that I brought up today have some autobiography in them. My feeling is that autobiography is for amateurs. Professional songwriters invent stories or they take a piece of an autobiography, a piece from a book that you read and a piece from a movie and then just stir it up in a pot and come up with something. This girl that I had begun to date, told me about breaking up with this boyfriend and she described it so well and she described his reaction to her dumping him so well that I wrote the first two-thirds of the song from what I perceived to be his point of view. Then I couldn’t get any further and nine or ten months later she dumped me and I knew how the song ended. That is when I wrote that last verse. That is unusual for me, because I usually write a whole song in about three hours. I figure if I cannot keep interested enough in it to finish it, it is probably not good enough. That is not how a lot of people write, but that is how I write,” he says. 

“The song had its genesis when I was still living in New York and I was still in that period of struggle in the seventies and living at my mother’s house when I was thirty-three years old (he laughs). How pitiful is that?  I had just met this girl and I usually don’t write autobiographical songs, even though the songs that I brought up today have some autobiography in them. My feeling is that autobiography is for amateurs. Professional songwriters invent stories or they take a piece of an autobiography, a piece from a book that you read and a piece from a movie and then just stir it up in a pot and come up with something. This girl that I had begun to date, told me about breaking up with this boyfriend and she described it so well and she described his reaction to her dumping him so well that I wrote the first two-thirds of the song from what I perceived to be his point of view. Then I couldn’t get any further and nine or ten months later she dumped me and I knew how the song ended. That is when I wrote that last verse. That is unusual for me, because I usually write a whole song in about three hours. I figure if I cannot keep interested enough in it to finish it, it is probably not good enough. That is not how a lot of people write, but that is how I write,” he says.

Perhaps the song “At This Moment,” strikes a chord with so many people, because the words are everything that Billy Vera tries to avoid in his songwriting, they are deeply personal.

“I was pretty f** up over this girl. Never before or since, have I gone down that low over a girl. I lost thirty pounds. I didn’t think of it as ‘This is going to be the song that is going to make my life.’  I made a little demo of it, back in New York. Not long after that my former manager from my early hit record days was living out here (California) in LA. He said, ‘I’m broke again, and I need to make a deal for some artist and you are the best of what is left.’ It was his way of saying there are no good artists left and you are the only good one that I know. He said to send him a tape of some of my songs, so I sent him a tape of three or four songs and that was one of them. His girlfriend heard “At This Moment,” and she flipped out. He took the tape to a couple of places and he got turned down and finally he took it to Warner Bros. and Eddie Silvers. When Eddie heard “At This Moment,” he flipped out. It got me the songwriting job that got me to move to LA. When I got to LA and he (Eddie) brought me in before his entire staff and he had me sing “At This Moment.” I looked around and he was crying in front of his whole staff.  I still didn’t get it that it was this great song. I thought some of the others were better. We started doing it in the club and people liked it. It became the follow up single to “I Can Take Care of Myself,” when we made our album on Alfa (Records). It went to eighty something on the charts and then the company started to falter and their head of promotion who was very good left and the record didn’t do anything higher than that.,” he says.

“For five years I was without a record deal and I was making my living scraping by with a few club dates and I was working as an actor. I started doing some TV shows, movies and stuff like that and I was kind of getting by. Then one day I got this phone call and (the guy) said are you the same Billy Vera that has the band and I said ya’. He said thank God, we didn’t know who your agent was or how to get hold of you. We came to see you at the club the other night and you sang this song that we want to use on our television show, called Family Ties.  I said, oh, call up Warner Bros. get a license for it and good luck.  By that time people had used my songs on a few TV shows and you make a few hundred bucks and that’s nice. Then they ran the episode where Michael J. Fox meets the girl and I got a bag full of mail. That had never happened. I said wow!  I said, I guess this song has something. One day I was having lunch with Richard Foos who had a label called Rhino Records, which was not in the contemporary music business. They put out old records, reissues and oldies. I said Richard how many records do you need to break even on an album. He said we have a low overhead, so we could probably break even on 2,000 copies. I said, if I guarantee you two thousand sales, I could sell them in the clubs if I need to, over a year or two. I asked him if he would put out a compilation of the music that I did for Alfa. He said yes and he did it basically as a favor to me. Then I told him about the TV show. By the time we got the record out, we missed the reruns. As luck would have it, the following season they ran an episode where the girl breaks up with Michael J. Fox and they used my song again. This time the story of the song, boy loses girl, is the story of the episode, boy loses girl. This time America, put two and two together and they went crazy. NBC called me up and said we have had more letters, phone calls and telegrams for a song than we have ever had in the history of the network. With no promotion from Rhino, because they weren’t in that business, people started calling radio stations for the song. It first took off in Hawaii and Kansas City for whatever reason. It was really that rare thing of a grassroots hit and so Rhino, to their credit hired some promotion guy and he had me come in every day and call up radio stations to do little interviews with them and to say, Hi this is Billy Vera from Billy Vera and the Beaters and I listen to KRAP. That helped and there was no payola, because Rhino didn’t even know from payola. The record really just happened by itself. It was the combination of people hearing it on the number two show in the country, relating to it and relating to the boy loses girl aspect of the show and of the song and bing, bang boom, next thing that you know it is the number one record in the country and my life changed,” Vera recalls.  

It was time for reflection, “I was now forty-two years old, bald and not exactly rock star material (he laughs) and I come on American Bandstand. My two dreams as a kid were to play the Apollo and to be on American Bandstand. I played the Apollo at twenty-three and at forty-two I was on American Bandstand (he laughs again). Little girls were screaming for this old forty-two year old guy. I am not just off the bus, so I knew the likelihood of me having a continuing career at that age and in a music business that is geared towards teeny boppers was slender. I’m not stupid. You follow it up the best that you can. I tried to get Rhino to put out “Hopeless Romantic,” or an edited version of “Here Comes The Dawn,” for a follow-up, based on what I knew of the record business, which is, if the public tells you that they like you singing sad ballads, give them another one. Rhino (instead) put out “I Can Take Care Of Myself,” which was an up-tempo hit, five years earlier. People aren’t going to connect that with the guy who sang “At This Moment,” and they didn’t. To top it off, radio gave me the first one, but they were not going to give me the second one and they had their hand out. Rhino wasn’t going to do payola. It had everything going against it.”

On the strength of his success with “At This Moment,” and with the help of an old friend Michael Cuscuna and on the strength of a recommendation from Bruce Lundvall, Billy Vera would eventually produce three records for Lou Rawls on the Blue Note Records label.

While Billy Vera may be more identified with the song “At This Moment,” by music fans worldwide, those inside the music business also know him as a good songwriter who over the years wrote several hit songs, recorded by music legends. That does not happen unless you are tremendously gifted.   Return to Our Front Page

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