B005S8O7YE EBOK (12 page)

Donnie’s instinct was literally on the money. It didn’t take long for “The Loco-Motion” to reach #1, where it remained for seven weeks. Our catchy little dance tune would subsequently be recorded by a diverse assortment of artists over the next several decades, among them Grand Funk Railroad in the seventies and the Australian entertainer Kylie Minogue in the eighties.

Though “The Loco-Motion” alludes to dance movements, neither Gerry nor I had envisioned an actual dance. Eva had to invent one for personal appearances. Standing beside a locomotive for publicity photographs, with “The Loco-Motion” playing on loudspeakers, Eva moved her body that day in imitation of the arm that drives a locomotive, and a dance was born.

Eva’s success had a downside for us—or, more accurately, for me. With Eva’s career as our babysitter pretty much over, I was once again doing all three of my old jobs: songwriting, child care, and household management. The latter included (and this is only a partial list) cooking, dusting, vacuuming, cleaning the toilet, making beds, endless laundry, endless diapers, grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning, and reconciling our monthly bank statements. When I interviewed potential replacements for Eva, I was very careful to communicate a requirement, second only to the ability to care for our children, that the applicant possess neither a good singing voice nor the desire to become a famous recording artist.

Donnie was so pleased with the success of “The Loco-Motion” that he put Gerry in charge of producing other artists. Soon
Dimension became a strong independent label, and Gerry was recognized as a talented producer with good instincts, a good ear, and the necessary perspective to keep everyone focused on the desired end product. When we wrote a song, Gerry often guided me toward the realization of a concept I didn’t fully understand until later. Though we worked as a team in the studio, he was credited as the sole producer and paid accordingly. At the time, this seemed logical. Production credit was customarily given to the person in the control booth, and Gerry’s contribution was essential. But I arranged and conducted. Sometimes I was a band member. Sometimes I sang background. And I often directed other singers with hand and body movements from a position close by in the studio. We both did what we did because we loved the work. But because I believed sole credit was important to my husband, it never even occurred to me to ask for a coproducer credit on any of the Dimension records.

Clearly I could have benefited from the women’s liberation movement. But women’s lib didn’t fully come into its own until later in the sixties. I had no trouble valuing Gerry, but I didn’t know how to value myself. And yet, as much as I valued Gerry, it would turn out not to be enough.

W
henever I sang on a demo I usually tried to channel the vocal style of the artist for whom the song was intended. That’s what I did on the demo of “It Might as Well Rain Until September,” which Gerry and I had written for Bobby Vee. Even after Bobby recorded it, Donnie liked my demo so much that he released it on Dimension. I was no more interested in promoting the single than I’d been on previous labels, and I was unambiguous in communicating that to Donnie before he released the single. I had two small children at home in New Jersey, and I was unwilling to travel around the country to promote the record. At some point Donnie must have realized that I was more valuable to him at home writing for other artists, because he stopped pushing me to promote the single—with one exception. He wanted me to go to Philadelphia to appear on Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand
.

“
Bandstand
can make or break a record,” he said. “You
gotta
do it.”

With Gerry supporting Donnie’s position, I thought, They’re right. I
gotta
do it.

That all-important appearance on
American Bandstand
consisted
of me lip-synching to the record, shaking Dick Clark’s hand, and hovering anxiously in the background while the
Bandstand
kids rated my single. One of their most frequently heard assessments of a record was “I give it a 99; I like the beat.” Unfortunately, the
Bandstand
kids’ evaluation of my record was 42 out of 100 and included comments such as “You can’t dance to it,” “It’s too sad,” and “I like the lyric, but I don’t like the words.”

Dick Clark had bestowed an inordinate amount of power upon this select cadre of Philadelphia high school students. Their opinions influenced a national audience in judging the creative endeavors of recording artists, producers, and songwriters. A thumbs-up or -down from these kids could begin or end a career. Riding the train back from Philadelphia, I felt terrible about the end of a career I didn’t even want. In rhythm with the clackety wheels, I kept thinking, I’m
never
… gonna do this… again…
never
… do this… again…
never
… do this… again…

I was incredulous when, with no further promotion on my part,
“It Might as Well Rain Until September”
rose to the top 20 in
Billboard
and
Cashbox
.

Donnie was on a roll. His next release was our song “Chains,” by the Cookies. He was confident that it would hit #1, and unlike me, the Cookies were able and willing to promote their single. They went on
Bandstand
and appeared on other radio and television shows with a history of bringing success to a decent song with a good beat that resonated with teenagers. “Chains” was a reasonably decent song with a good beat and a simple lyric. How could it not resonate with teenagers? And how could anyone go wrong with traditional twelve-bar blues? “Chains” featured the Cookies in three-part harmony and the sexy alto voice of Earl-Jean McCree singing solo in the bridge until she was joined by the other Cookies on the last word of the plaintive lyric, “But I can’t break away from all of these chains!” With that they reprised the deceptively
simple words of the refrain that brought us all back to that helpless feeling shared by everyone who’s ever been hopelessly in love:

Chains

My baby’s got me locked up in chains

And they ain’t the kind that you can see-ee

Wo-oh, these chains of lo-o-ove got a-hold on me… yeah!

It’s not difficult to understand Gerry’s metaphor if you’ve ever been so deeply in love that all you can think of is the object of your desire, and even as you wish you could stop being obsessed with that person, you spend every sleeping moment dreaming about the one you love and every waking moment praying that he or she feels the same about you.

I just used an entire paragraph to convey an idea that Gerry was able to get across in three words: “chains of love.” Even when his lyrics involved more frivolous subject matter, Gerry had a gift for tapping into what teenage listeners were feeling. If the arrangement, the beat, and the melody of “The Loco-Motion” sparked everyone’s basic human impulse to dance and have fun, the lyric ignited it.

Not only was “Chains” fun to write, it was even more fun to watch it fly up the charts. I can’t speak objectively about the merits of songs we wrote, but we definitely had a run of good luck in the sixties. The music we were writing resonated with young people from New York to Cambodia. This is not a random geographical reference. A woman who grew up in Phnom Penh told me years later that our music kept her from losing her sanity while Pol Pot was committing genocide in her country.

Gerry’s and my level of success remained consistently high for a long time. Whether on Dimension or another label, rarely did a record that we had written or produced fail. When groups
from the United Kingdom first began appearing on the American charts, Gerry and I were well represented. The Beatles recorded “Chains,” the Hollies had a big hit with a Gerry Goffin–Russ Titelman collaboration titled
“Yes I Will,”
and our demo of
“I’m Into Something Good,”
featuring Earl-Jean McCree’s lead vocal, led to a chart-topping American hit by a British band called Herman’s Hermits.

Each week Gerry eagerly awaited the arrival of
Billboard
and
Cashbox
. It was a heady feeling in 1964 to see a new release of ours show up in the top 10 with a bullet. Rational adults a decade older than we were probably would have had trouble keeping so much success in perspective. At twenty-five and twenty-two, Gerry and I never considered the possibility that our success might not last forever.

M
emories often appear in my mind in the form of snapshots. It’s almost as if I’m looking through a stack of photos, placing each in turn under the pile to keep them in order. The beauty of such images is that they evoke not just the visual but all my senses. My memory snapshots of the Goffin family in West Orange in the early sixties reawaken emotions I thought I had safely tucked away.

• Our Siberian husky, Lika (pronounced LIKE-uh), curled up in the only sunny spot on the floor of the family room. She sits up suddenly with ears alert in response to our doorbell that we had pretentiously and expensively modified to play “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” The ring is out of rhythm, with all the notes incorrectly timed as quarter notes: do do mi mi re re re do.
  
• Gerry shooting pool with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He’s barefoot on the indigo carpet in our damp, cool basement trying to find a place to line up a shot without being crowded by the river rock walls or the dark walnut door leading to our rarely used sauna.
  
• Willa Mae folding laundry in the family room on our midcentury modern brown-yellow-black-and-white couch while watching her soaps on a big-screen television in the walnut-paneled entertainment center.
  
• Louise in the family room holding my hand on a rainy day as we look through the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard. After identifying some familiar shapes in the patterns formed by the raindrops on the green plastic fence around the pool, we stand quietly together, enveloped in a feeling of peace.
  
• Willa Mae standing, ironing, and listening to soul and gospel music on her favorite radio station, WNJR.
  
• Sherry in her playpen mimicking the phrasing of the singers on WNJR while she explores the array of primary-colored Fisher-Price toys around her.
  
• Louise, Sherry, and me out for a walk on a crisp autumn day. We wave to the Salovich children next door as they clamber excitedly into their mother’s car, then we continue walking toward the Trix-colored forest at the end of our street.
  

Our subdivision had been part of that forest until the developers cut down all the trees. Then homeowners like us who wanted trees had to pay a landscaper to bring new ones in.

• Louise and Sherry on the patio in the summer performing in plays with wildly imaginative plots written by Louise and Sherry and starring the authors.
  
• An exuberant Gerry carrying his radiantly happy wife around our backyard on his shoulders. After he puts me down we share a warm, loving hug.
  
• Sherry flying dangerously down the hill of our driveway on her bicycle to catch the Good Humor man. In addition
  to ice cream I buy some punks that I hope will generate enough smoke to keep insects away. Sherry licks her drippy cone and tries to stay ahead of the melt.
  
• Louise and Sherry bursting through the door of our writing room at a crucial moment in the writing process. Without missing a beat I continue to play our black Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano and say, “Not now! Mommy and Daddy are working!” The girls get the message and withdraw.
  

Working on a song is a situation around which I’ve never had trouble perceiving a clear boundary or conveying it in a way that brooks no interruption or argument.

• Gerry sitting on one of the two sofas in our writing room, scrawling lyrics on a yellow legal pad with a ballpoint pen. The ash grows long on his cigarette as it rests on the edge of a curved red-glass ashtray. The sofas, arranged in an L shape, are upholstered in an ornate black-and-white fabric. Matching drapes, red velvet wallpaper, large lamps with elaborate finials, black end tables, and a red carpet create an atmosphere reminiscent of Al Nevins’s office.
  

My daughters’ word for the décor in the red room was “hideous.” I didn’t take it personally. Gerry and I had delegated such decisions to a professional interior decorator who, with our attention focused on our children and our songwriting, had little difficulty obtaining our cursory approval of her selections. Lady Fortune must have liked the décor of our writing room because so many of the songs we composed in that room were recorded by leading producers with top artists and then flew up the charts.

Gerry and I were able to keep enough hits flowing out of our
Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano to feel confident about being able to pay our mortgage. As our income rose, we employed a professional accountant. Depending on whether he reported good or bad news, Gerry’s reaction was either to buy something extravagant such as a new car, or to say, “We gotta tighten our belts!” For Gerry, that meant cutting back on movies, theater, and lobster dinners at Rod’s Restaurant on Northfield Avenue. For me it meant accommodating Gerry.

On the whole, I thought we were doing well. But Gerry did not enjoy living in the suburbs, an opinion he vigorously documented in a song called “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” Sometimes we stayed in the city for dinner and a movie with Barry and Cynthia. Their Upper East Side apartment was within walking distance of a first-rate selection of movie theaters and restaurants. After the movie the four of us exercised our collective intellect over coffee by analyzing the film we’d just seen, for example,
David and Lisa
,
The Manchurian Candidate
, or
To Kill a Mockingbird.

At the end of the evening, the Manns walked home while Gerry and I retrieved our car from a parking lot, drove west across Manhattan, traversed the Hudson River through the Lincoln Tunnel, then took Route 3 to the Garden State Parkway. Taking the exit for the Oranges, we drove west some more, until finally we arrived home. I say “we drove,” but it was Gerry who drove while I slept. Gerry did not relish the drive for two reasons: he was making it effectively alone, and he would vastly have preferred going home to an apartment in the city.