A Conversation with Michael McDonald – HuffPost 8.30.10

Mike Ragogna: I have followed your career from early on and I admire your recent Motown revisits.

Michael McDonald: Oh, thanks. It was a lot of fun, those records. There was hardly any work, actually.

MR: You sounded pretty natural on them, like these songs were old friends.

MM: I think it was one of the reasons I even allowed myself the luxury of thinking I could be the person who could do this in terms of when Motown asked me. I remember thinking, “God, why are they asking me to do this?” At the same time, I wanted so badly to do it and I wouldn’t allow myself to say no. I just said yes and figured out how to deal with all of my second guesses later.

One of the reasons why I kind of convinced myself to jump in with both feet was the fact that I had sung those songs for so many years in clubs growing up, and back then, the deal was trying to sound like the record and the artist. So, I had developed a semi-style of my own of just picking up certain phrasing aspects and certain aspects of the singer on the record. That served me well in clubs growing up, and it probably had a lot to do with me developing my own style of singing. It’s an amalgam of all of those people. For that reason, because I have done these songs for so many years, I thought maybe I could pull this stuff off. It was more of a selfish endeavor than anything because it was a great deal of fun for us.

MR: It seems that for major artists that write their own material, they’re supposed to keep covers to a minimum because of the pre-conceived notion that covers won’t be as good as the original recording nor as good as an artist’s own material.

MM: Well, there was plenty of that going around. (laughs) We kept a lot of the original keys because our paranoia was that these things still get so much radio play and certain radio stations play the oldies so people hear these records probably as much or more than they did back in the day when they were hits. So, you don’t want to be that guy who comes on after they have heard Marvin Gaye sing “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” in the original key and have it two steps down. We tried to keep things in the original key as much as we could. That was a little daunting at my age anyway. These guys were in their twenties when they originally sang them.

MR: You’ve still got that billion-dollar voice, and it sounded like you handled the vocals with ease.

MM: You’re nice to say that. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but we had some pretty funny moments and actually had a good laugh once in a while over me struggling on some of these things. It’s funny, your voice is so malleable after a couple of tries and can sound horrible and somehow, your brain puts it all together and you figure out how to get up into that key.

MR: Tell us about the tour.

MM: Yeah. It’s really a fun tour.

MR: And you’ve got a fun name for it.

MM: Yeah, it’s called “Dukes Of September Rhythm Review.” We are just having fun and kind of approaching it that way.

MR: Who are the Dukes?

MM: It’s with Donald Fagen, Boz Scaggs, and myself as a singular band. We kind of take the stage together and become part of the band. It really harkens back to what we all grew up doing, playing in bands and playing a lot of the songs that we are doing. We are certainly doing a few of our own thing, but a lot of the material is some great old songs that everybody knows that are still fairly obscure yet are still good songs. When you hear them, hopefully, you’ll think, “Gosh, I haven’t heard that song in years,” but you know it and remember it.

MR: Some of your early credits include Steely Dan and Doobie Brother records, of course. So, these are friendships that go way back.

MM: Yes. You know 20 or 30 years at least. Boz and I go way back too and shared a lot of common friends in the ’70s like Jeff Porcaro who is a common friend. Although I didn’t know Boz as well back then, I still have a fond memory of sitting in Jeff’s apartment in our twenties. He was playing me the rough mixes of Boz’s Silk Degrees record, and I was playing him some rough tapes of some things I was working on at the time for the Taking It to the Streets record. We were both just kind of sitting around on a Saturday morning with nothing better to do than to listen to music that we were working on, kind of sharing our experiences. It’s a fond memory for me.

MR: You’re one of the lucky ones who got to work with Jeff.

MM: I love Jeff. He was one of the greatest people I have ever met.

MR: You know everybody says that, and even to this day, people seem to be grieving.

MM: At Jeff’s funeral, you would have thought it was a Mafia Don or the Pope or something, there were so many people. It wasn’t because he was a great drummer, it was because each and every one of those people knew and loved him a lot. He was just a great, great guy.

MR: On this tour, you’ll all be performing songs from your three solo careers. Will you also play Doobie Brothers material?

MM: I will do a couple of things from the Doobie Brothers and one thing from my solo career, and Boz is doing something from Silk Degrees and subsequent records. Donald is doing mostly stuff from his solo career and, of course, we are doing a Steely Dan song or two.

MR: I interviewed Carly Simon for The Huffington Post not too long ago and we talked about “You Belong To Me.”

MM: That was a funny and great experience. We worked together on a couple of tracks with the Doobies on a solo album that Carly had done.

MR: Were those on her Another Passenger record?

MM: Yes, I believe so.

MR: The Ted Templeman connection, he produced that album as well as your biggest Doobies records.

MM: And she had done “It Keeps You Runnin” and another track from the Doobies, and asked us to play on them. We had a great time. I jumped at the chance to write with Carly and what I wound up doing was sending this chord progression and a rough of the melody, and I just kind of mumbled over the chord progression of this song and I sent it to her thinking it may be something she would be interested in writing on. It wasn’t a couple of weeks later that I got this cassette back from her. I don’t even think she sang on it, I think it was with a hand written copy of the lyrics and wish I had it today.

MR: Check eBay.

MM: (Laughs) Don’t know what happened to it. You know, I loved the lyrics and thought they were great, so I went into the studio and cut it and it ended up on our next record. It wasn’t a huge hit for us, but it was a song that everybody seemed to like that were friends of ours, and I certainly was proud of it because it seemed to be something different for me and for the band. Then, about a few years later, she came out with it and had this top five hit and I remember, at that time, that we had never spoken this entire time. I called her on the phone and we kind of laughed about that and we said, “You know we should probably write more often and not speak to each other either as it seems to bring us good luck.” It just seemed so funny that here, she had this big hit record with the song that we both wrote together without having ever spoken to each other through the entire process. So, it was an uncanny situation.

MR: Her son Ben Taylor told me that the song was a reaction to James Taylor’s “You Make It Easy,” this real bluesy pop number. Apparently, “You Belong To Me”‘s lyrics were a reaction to James’ song about temptation.

MM: Oh, wow that’s great.

MR: You are also the co-writer of Van Halen’s “I’ll Wait.” Is there a story behind that?

MM: Not really other than it involved Ted Templeman who put me together with David Lee Roth. The track was cut and they were kind of stymied on the lyric on this one, so Ted had recommended that they work with me. I got together with David in Ted’s office, and I had put some ideas down. David had sent me the track and so I went over them with him and he seemed to like them. He may have made some changes at that point, I’m not sure.

Van Halen went and cut the song, and it’s probably one of the more lucrative things I have ever done in my entire career because, as the Doobies, we did great with records. But Van Halen was the inception of mega-platinum record sales. We were platinum-selling artists, but to us, that was a huge deal to go platinum. Then these young bands came along and went quadruple-platinum which was unheard of at that point.

MR: You were on so many hit records and actually gave them their “sound” by lending them yours. For instance, you were a very memorable voice on Christopher Cross’ debut.

MM: Funny story behind that. Christopher was in the studio next to us recording when I was recording with the Doobies, and he literally just walked in and introduced himself. We got to talking and were hanging out in between whatever we were working on, and his producer Michael Omartian said, “Would you consider coming over and throwing down this one vocal line…one line…you don’t have to harmonize or anything. You just have to hear this one kind of response.” I said sure and it was “Ride Like The Wind,” just to show you how sometimes it’s funny how those things happen.

MR: You’ve recorded many duets, some of your best known being with James Ingram and Kenny Loggins. But it seems your best loved duet is with Patti LaBelle on “On My Own.”

MM: Yes. The Burt Bacharach and Carol Sager song. Again, for me, it was a thrill. At this point in my career, I am convinced that the best things that happen, happen almost totally by accident. You could plan a lot of this stuff, but in my experience, the duets that were planned and anticipated as a big deal, usually never were. With Patty, it was just an afterthought.

MR: What happened?

MM: There were these two tracks and Patti had just sung on one entirely. For some reason, at the last minute, Burt was thinking, “Why, this might just make a great duet.” I might have been like the second or third guy they called for all I know. I just happened to be available and have always been a huge fan of Burt’s and a good friend of Carol’s. I had written with Carol, and I also was a huge fan of hers.

I grew up on Burt Bacharach, and he was one of the big guys along with Ray Charles. Certain artists were just really huge in my youth, and more than anything, just the thought of singing on a Burt Bacharach record for me was a thrill. It was funny, I had played that song for a lot of people, and I didn’t really know how to categorize it. I was curious what people would think, if they thought it was a good performance because we had sung it separately from each other. It wasn’t really a song that we sang; I sang the song to her voice on tape. The biggest reaction from most people was, “It’s nice, it’s okay.”

My wife and I were at a play and this woman came up to me. She was a secretary to one of the big promotion guys at MCA, and this record was on MCA at the time. She goes, “You know, all of us girls at the office have been playing that record every day a hundred times. We love that record. I just wanted you to know that.” And I said, “Oh, thanks very much, that’s very sweet of you to say that.” I turned to my wife and I said, “Mark my words. That records going to be a hit.” (laughs)

MR: Yeah, in the day, they used to refer those singles as being “secretary hits.”

MM: Absolutely. I mean, if I were a record mogul, the people I would be the most concerned with as far as knowing how my records are going to do in advance would be the girls on the floor in the promotion department. Outside where the desks are, they play music all day long and they’re always playing. At Warners, it was always my experience when walking down the hallways, whatever the girls were playing on the stereo in their communal area, that was going to be the next big record from the label, and it never failed. If anybody should get paid six figures a year, it should be them.

MR: You’ve lived in Nashville for a while now. What has the Nashville experience been like for you?

MM: Living in Nashville for me has been a great, great experience. Nashville has always had a place in my heart from the time I was much younger. We used to drive there a few summers in a row when I was about 14 and was in a band, and we were on the road and would make the rounds of music. We got a lot of really good advice. We were never signing material or anything, we were just a Top 40 band looking to make a record. Many times, some of the guys were really gracious to take us in and do a demo with us. But we didn’t have any original material, so we would end up singing some Top 40 song on tape just to get the experience of recording. It was always very wonderful. It had such a great vibe.

As a town, Nashville is such an historic place for music, not just for country music, but for pop music as well. And it has so much to offer artistically. It’s such a Mecca for American music like Austin, Chicago, St. Louis, and New York. But it’s got its own unique thing. So, to be a part of that community has meant a lot, and to be recognized as one of the musicians from Nashville is kind of an old dream come true since I’ve always had a lot of respect for that city and the artists who came from there who I knew of. Some of the records made there and the music written there are some of the best stuff that has lasted all these years.

Transcribed by Erika Richards