Anyone Who Had a Heart (26 page)

Chapter

27

What the World Needs Now

I
n 2010, I went to Italy to play a huge outdoor concert in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo about four or five days before Christmas. It was so cold there that I had to walk out onstage wearing thermal underwear, a ski jacket, and a ski hat. I was also wearing a pair of Sue Main’s gloves, which were cut much tighter than mine so I could feel the piano keys.

Three months before I did the show, I had been having some issues with my back and had seen a doctor who told me I had a collapsed vertebra. He injected some kind of cement into the vertebra and said it was okay for me to go to Italy. After the show was over, we flew out of Milan as fast as we could to beat a snowstorm, stayed in a hotel at Heathrow Airport in London, and then got on a plane to L.A. It started to snow like crazy and they had to de-ice the plane, so we were in our seats for about four and a half hours before we ever left the gate.

It was the trip from hell and I hadn’t been feeling that great to begin with. When I got back to Los Angeles, I was supposed to fly to Aspen to join my family for the Christmas holidays, but the pain in my back just kept getting worse. On Christmas night, my son Cristopher had dinner with me. I wasn’t walking right and I wasn’t feeling right so I said, “Hey, Cris, I know you’re going to Hawaii tomorrow but I’d really feel more secure if you were here with me tonight. Stay in Oliver’s room and leave your cell phone on in case I need you.”

I went to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning, I put my feet down and suddenly I was on the floor. My legs weren’t working. The sheets were damp and I realized that what I was feeling in the bed was not perspiration. It was urine. I couldn’t walk and I had also lost control of my urinary function.

I called Cris and he got in touch with Sue Main. She called my internist, who said they should get me to the nearest hospital, which was St. John’s. When I got there, they didn’t really know what the problem was. A therapist told me he thought I’d had a stroke and so they wanted to put me in rehab, which would have been the worst possible thing for me to have done.

I was there for five or six days, and after they discharged me, I went to UCLA Medical Center, where the doctor said, “Did they ever do a CT scan of your spine?” I told him they hadn’t. After they did the scan the doctor looked at it and said, “You didn’t have a stroke. You’ve suffered a compressed fracture of the vertebrae and it’s impinging on your spine. You need to go into surgery right away.” It was New Year’s Eve and I was in surgery for seven hours. I remember Jane and Raleigh walking alongside the gurney as they wheeled me in for the operation.

What they think happened was that when I was coming out of my pool one day, a piece of the cement that had been injected into my back slipped out of place. At UCLA, they inserted a plate in the upper quadrant of my back so the top vertebra would be bolted securely in place. After I came out of the surgery, I was afraid to even put my foot down on the floor but I remember them touching my feet with feathers and I could feel it so that was a good sign.

I spent two weeks in the hospital at UCLA and then three weeks in the rehab unit. They actually had to kick me out of there, because I had gotten so used to working with the therapists that I didn’t want to leave. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I could take the therapists home with me because they didn’t work at UCLA every day. Once I got home, the rehab continued and a nurse slept in my room for months because I still couldn’t get out of bed by myself.

I also had to wear a full-body plastic brace that wrapped around my chest and stomach from my armpits to the top of my butt. I could take it off only when I went to sleep. I started doing physical therapy six days a week with three different therapists who would take me to the beach and to Will Rogers Park to walk so I could relearn how to put my left foot in front of my right.

I spent the rest of the year just trying to get better. I wasn’t writing any music and I decided I wasn’t going to do any more concerts, because I really thought I was done. I had always worked out before I was hurt and even when I was on tour I would always make sure the hotel had a gym. I guess I was equally obsessive about the therapy, because I somehow managed to come back from the surgery stronger and in better shape than I had been before. I went back on tour in Europe in 2011 and did some shows in Australia in the spring of 2012.

My current routine is that I work with a trainer in the pool three days a week for an hour a day. When I’m alone in the pool, I use an Aqua Jogger, which lets me run without hitting the bottom. I also have a small gym at my house with a treadmill, a recumbent bike, an elliptical trainer, and weights, and I work out with another trainer there doing weights three days a week.

A long time ago Neil Simon told me, “You know, athletes peak at a certain time but as long as we’re alive and creative, we can still write. That doesn’t go away.” That’s his theory but maybe it does go away. What I do know is that you can’t stay put. If somebody asked me now to sit down and write a song like “Don’t Make Me Over,” I couldn’t do it, because I don’t live in that ballpark anymore. It’s not a language I still speak. Having said that, I do feel really proud of the work I’ve done over the past ten years.

In 2003, Mo Ostin, who was the head of DreamWorks Records, called me with the idea of taking my standard repertoire and reinventing some of my trademark songs by doing them with Ron Isley, the former lead singer of the Isley Brothers. DreamWorks had a lot of money at the time and Ronnie would come to my house in a white stretch limo so we could work together. Then we went into the studio to cut an album called
Here I Am
.

Ronnie is a great, great singer but when he told me he wanted to do “Raindrops,” I thought the idea was ridiculous until I played the opening chord for him. He sang one bar and I thought, “Oh, I see where I can go with this. I can make a very soulful, totally very different kind of interpretation of the song with him.” At this stage of my life, I find it hard to write yet another arrangement of “The Look of Love” or “Make It Easy on Yourself” or “A House Is Not a Home,” but Ronnie wound up singing all these songs so beautifully on
Here I Am
.

We went to cut the album in Capitol Studios, which has always been a very magical place for me. Vic Damone’s managers took me there for the first time when I was just starting out so I could watch Sinatra record. I didn’t get to meet him then but it was great just to see him work, and to this day there is no place in L.A. that sounds as good to me.

I put the string section in Studio B so they could see me conducting from the piano through a window. The first song we did was “Alfie.” I was at the piano, Dean Parks played the intro on a classical guitar, and then Ronnie came in. As he was singing, I was calling out cues and saying stuff like “I’m not hearing enough piano. There’s too much drums in my ear.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but everything I was saying was also being recorded. Ronnie nailed the song on the very first take and they were able to edit out my remarks so we could use the track the way we had cut it that day. Ronnie Isley is one of the great natural singers. He doesn’t have a bunch of ad libs stored in his closet. When Ronnie sings, he is totally free.

There was so much buzz and excitement about
Here I Am
before it was released that I really thought we had something. But the day the album came out, DreamWorks was taken over by Universal. They had artists like Dr. Dre and Eminem and this was just not their kind of music, so the album got no real promotion.

Ronnie and I did do a show together for PBS in Chicago and then we played a couple of showcases in theaters in L.A. and New York. Ronnie was absolutely fearless onstage and did some of the greatest singing I have ever heard in my life. I put him right up there with Luther Vandross as one of the great singers of all time, and I still love what we did together on that album. I don’t know how many copies
Here I Am
has sold over the years but it has become a cult record. I also know Ronnie has never sung that kind of material before or since.

Two years later, I did an album called
At This Time
. Dr. Dre and I had talked about working together and he had given me six or seven drum loops that I wound up using, and Elvis Costello and Rufus Wainwright did some vocals for it as well. The more I got into the album, the more I realized how badly things were going in America and the world and the more angry and frustrated I became. So I decided to get involved in writing some of the lyrics with Tonio K., who was terrific and really easy for me to work with.

I took the heartbreak I felt about what had happened on September 11, 2001, and about all the young men and women who were getting killed in a useless war in Iraq and put it into some of the songs. On “Who Are These People?” one of the verses goes, “Who are these people that keep telling us lies? / And how did these people who get control of our lives? / Who’ll stop the violence because it’s out of control? / Make them stop.” Elvis Costello used the word “fucking” on the last line of the song, and although we had to take it out for the American release, you can hear him sing it if you download the import. I also did a song called “Where Did It Go?” which is about me riding the subway to Times Square on New Year’s Eve back when I was a kid growing up in Forest Hills.

At This Time
won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental album in 2006. As I was coming through the press line after receiving the award, someone asked me why I had chosen to make such a political album at this point in my career. I said, “Because I don’t like being lied to. I don’t like being lied to by a girlfriend, an agent, or my president.” And so when Rahm Emanuel asked me if I would do some fund-raisers for the Obama campaign in 2008, I was happy to say yes.

The reality is that most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like. People may have heard some of their songs but they never get to see them onstage or on television. I’ve been luckier than most because by performing and being on television, I get to make a direct connection with people. Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written, that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.

In 2009, I was given an honorary doctorate of music by the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Paula Cole sang five of my songs. To thank everyone, I took off my cap, robe, and hood and sat down at the piano to perform “Alfie.” After the show was over, this guy I did not know who turned out to be a big fan of my music came up to me and said, “Burt, this will only take a second.” And then he hugged me.

Whenever somebody takes the trouble to tell me how much my music meant to them when they were going through a divorce or having chemotherapy, I think to myself, “Just take that to the bank and store it and remember it.” Because it’s so real, I never take that kind of thing lightly. After she’d had a few drinks, a good-looking woman who was sitting next to me on a plane once said she couldn’t make love unless she put my music on. I thought that was pretty great, too.

When I was younger, I would dismiss that kind of adulation immediately. After getting a standing ovation at the end of a show, I would be back in some hotel room by myself an hour later, turning on the television to watch CNN and ordering room service. So it wasn’t like I was sitting around and wondering, “Where did all the applause go?”

I remember playing the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles during one of my hot periods. We sold out the place five nights in a row and set the house record, which stood until Neil Diamond came in and broke it. I had never even thought about having a limo written into my contract, so I would drive myself to the show and after it was over every night, I would go to Du-par’s and eat a melted cheese sandwich or some scrambled eggs by myself, which was really weird after having played in front of all these people. This was so long ago that no one even knew about egg whites.

What got me onstage in the first place was not that I could sing or tap-dance. It was the music I had written, and there is definitely a healing element to playing that music in public. Two weeks after the twin towers fell in Manhattan, I was booked to play a show in New Jersey. After I checked with the promoter to see if he really wanted to go ahead with the date, I canvassed my band and singers and crew and said, “How do you feel? Do you want to do this?”

They all said they did, and the last five songs we did that night were “Alfie,” “A House Is Not a Home,” “That’s What Friends Are For,” “The Windows of the World,” and “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” Everybody in the band was crying, and so was I. For all of us as well as the people in the audience, it was a kind of real catharsis and a powerful emotional release.

I really don’t think age has anything to do with how long someone can keep on performing. It’s just a number, although I do find myself checking on people like Toots Thielemans, the great harmonica player. He’s ninety and he’s had a stroke but he’s still playing in Antwerp and three nights later he’s in Tokyo. Nobody ever said you have to stop making music at a certain time in your life and I can tell you from experience, doctors don’t know about this, either. They really don’t.

Everyone knows the record business is now dead, but I believe a musical called
Some Lovers
, which I’ve been working on with Steven Sater, who won two Tony Awards for
Spring Awakening
, is going to have a life. The show begins on Christmas Eve as a woman calls the songwriter with whom she used to be in love. Then it goes backward through their lives to look at their romance. There are lots of references to the classic O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi” in the show and although we need to do some rewrites and another workshop, the audience really loved the show when we did it at the Old Globe in San Diego at the end of 2011, which is the most important thing. We’ll get it into another regional theater and then hopefully bring it to Broadway at some point.