The Best Songwriter You’ve Never Heard of Drives South to Chattanooga. Don’t Make Him Say ‘Damn This Town’


By Bill Ramsey | Nov. 10, 2011
The Pulse | Chattanooga’s Weekly Alternative

Every two years or so, John Hiatt makes a record that gives music critics and DJs at those few radio stations worth listening to in America something to agree on. Which is to repeat, this time in the words of WUTC-FM’s Richard Winham, “John Hiatt is the best songwriter you’ve never heard of, but you’ve almost certainly heard his songs.” It’s sadly true, but after 40 years, Hiatt has long made peace with this bit of cruel irony.



Hiatt, as he will tell you, tells me, tells anyone, really, doesn’t write songs for anyone else. Never has, never will. John Hiatt writes John Hiatt songs—tough, gritty roadhouse-ready rock and roll and poignant “this-is-what-I’ve-learned-about-love” relationship songs that give you pause and make you think out loud, “Damn, where has this guy been all this time?”

Turns out, he’s been around for a long, long time, and those same songs have caught the ears of others who’ve done with them what he has not—with few exceptions—been able to do: turn John Hiatt songs into hit records.

The short list: Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris—hell, even Ronnie Milsap—have covered Hiatt songs and made more than a few hits of them. “Thing Called Love” helped Bonnie Raitt come back from cutout-bin obscurity in the 1980s. “Angel Eyes” dovetailed into perfect harmony with Jeff Healey’s too-short career. Clapton and King built an entire double-platinum album out of Hiatt’s Riding With The King in 2000.

Hiatt shrugs it off, enjoys the royalties and keeps on writing, playing and hitting the road with various versions of the bands who record his music—20 albums’ worth now (if you count live discs and compilations)—that stretches back to 1974’s Hanging Around The Observatory and is now bookended by his latest, Dirty Jeans & Mudslide Hymns.

At 59, Hiatt’s never had a Top 40 hit of his own, but that fact neither haunts him nor deters him. At 21, he wrote “Sure As I’m Sittin’ Here,” a No. 16 charting hit for Three Dog Night that earned him a record deal with Epic and he’s never looked back. The idea that he’d write hit songs has likely occurred to Hiatt many times. At one point he very likely relished the idea, maybe still would. But these days a hit song doesn’t enter Hiatt’s consciousness very often. He is flattered that so many artists, some of them personal heroes he grew up listening to, have covered his songs, but says he was never comfortable writing for anyone but himself.

“I don’t write for other people, never have,” he tells me during a phone conversation. He was speaking from his longtime Nashville home, during a break from his recent tour, before making the short trip to Track 29 for his first Chattanooga performance since he can remember. “I love what I do and I just have a real passion for it. I love writing and recording—hell, I don’t know how to do anything else.”

That’s not exactly true—he’d probably be racing on the Indy circuit (and has) in another career—but modern American music would be much worse off were it not for Hiatt, and songwriting would be devoid of one of its finest craftsman. After years bouncing around record labels where he was variously (and futilely) categorized as new wave, country or blues, Hiatt found his own successful niche with the release of Bring the Family. This 1987 record marked the beginning of a rich, remarkable and uncompromisingly excellent period of songwriting and recording featuring his own flinty, whiskey-and-cigarette-aged vocals.

“I had not had success out of the box,” Hiatt says of his early efforts. “Success gains you freedom at record labels, so they keep intervening. [Bring The Family] was the first record we got to make on our own, independently. I was so screwed up, learning to live without drugs and alcohol, I didn’t know what to do. The producer said, ‘You can just sing in the shower and we’ll release it.’ ”

Sobriety unleashed something. Hiatt released seven albums on three labels prior to Bring The Family. Each had their moments, as Hiatt gathered critical momentum and a solid fan base, thanks to relentless touring in the U.S. and overseas. But mainstream success eluded him. His influences—Elvis (Presley and Costello), Dylan, the blues and country—produced erratic, often critically acclaimed records, but each failed commercially. Nuggets from these years ensconced him as songwriter to the stars. A young Rosanne Cash latched on to “The Way We Make A Broken Heart,” dueting with Hiatt on the song in 1983. The song went unreleased until Cash re-recorded it and took it to No. 1 on the country charts in 1987—the same year Hiatt released Bring The Family.

That seminal record, recorded with a supergroup that included Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and drummer Jim Keltner (who would together briefly form a side project dubbed Little Village), touched a nerve. Independence—from alcohol, drugs, record labels—marked a turning point for Hiatt, reflected in a song he says he would not mind being remembered for, “Have A Little Faith In Me.” Again, a string of other artists—Joe Cocker, Delbert McClinton, Jewel, Jon Bon Jovi—nabbed the song for their own, but Hiatt’s own voice rose above them all.

Nine successive albums all broke the Billboard 200, including Slow Turning, the follow-up album to Bring The Family that included such hits as “Paper Thin,” “Tennessee Plates” and “Angel Eyes.” But it was Bonnie Raitt’s version of “Thing Called Love” from her 1989 album, Nick of Time, which reached No. 11 that year and helped re-boot Raitt’s own floundering career, that earned him the most acclaim as a songwriter. More records, countless tours and another label (A&M) followed that success.

Not much has changed in the intervening years, Hiatt insists, besides the ability to record and release records on his own. “That certainly helps,” he says of his indie status, “being able to make records that I want to make when I want.” His latest is the ninth since departing A&M after Perfectly Good Guitar.

Hiatt now writes and records his own records in his Franklin studio and leases them to New West Records, with whom he’s had a fruitful relationship since 2003’s Beneath This Gruff Exterior. His prodigious output—more than 700 songs and counting—he says, is simply a matter of occupation, and, he has joked, aging. “I’m running out of time,” he’s said on more than once occasion.

These days, Hiatt consistently releases noteworthy albums that have earned him the sort of high praise—if not multimillions—that those who have recorded his songs are more often associated with. It is not unusual to see the terms “national treasure” and “icon” tagged to his name, though he blanches at such sobriquets.

His music is neither influenced nor tied to moments in time, although you’d get that sense from his most recent album covers, which reflect a “Grapes of Wrath” grit and weariness that echo the nation’s economic plight. Hiatt is not a “message” songsmith in the mold of his fellow Indianan, John Mellencamp. Instead, he deals in the politics of life, family—the joy, the pain and day-to-day moments that underscore his best love songs—and, occasionally, the reckless abandon of his youth.

“All my songs are message songs,” he says, turning my question around. “I’m talking to the people—that is political. Causes and such is not something I deal in. It’s not my thing. There are other people much more knowledgeable than me in that arena.”

Politics may not appeal to Hiatt, but the ravages of disaster, natural and otherwise, pockmark his songs. Dirty Jeans is filled with references to monumentous events from the past few years. From floods and blizzards to remembrance of 9/11, Hiatt brings an emotional resonance—felt if not explicitly expressed—to his songs that form boundaries.

Speaking recently to another interviewer (Hiatt does lots of interviews) he reflects upon the events of recent years, connecting his lyrics to the everyman assessment of life he’s become known for. Not the really big stuff; just the stuff of daily life we all muddle through and can connect to and relate with.

“The 2010 flood in Nashville tore up some of our place and thousands of people lost their homes,” he told one reporter. “It didn’t get much national attention because there weren’t enough lootings—not enough bad news. Then, we did a winter tour and every city we went to got hit by a blizzard. The songs that came out of that were about the impermanence of things—the constant shifts of people and things.”

Even after 25 years of marriage, Hiatt still regards his love affair with similar impermanence, as if it will flutter away with the prevailing winds. His love songs—“relationship” songs, really—chart his comfort levels, affirm his core beliefs and celebrate small tendernesses—but the songs don’t get any easier, he says. “Love songs are still the hardest songs to write because they can become corny so quickly.”

In “I Love That Girl,” he writes of such “corny” affirmations, singing, “And she wakes me with coffee and kisses my head/And starts to explain about something she’s read/I say, ‘Darling, you haven’t heard a word that I’ve said’/And I love that girl.”

You can’t help but find something in common with Hiatt’s scenes from a relationship and I ask him how is wife responds to such valentines. “She likes ‘em for the most part,” he says with a laugh. “She’ll say things like, ‘That’s nice.’”

Unintentionally, it seems, the corniness of Hiatt’s sentiments are the ones the ring most true and he mines the mundane as if these fleeting moments that pass us all by will disappear, unremarked upon. Love, Hiatt, seems to say, is what happens when you’re not paying attention.

Such moments, along with a healthy dose of rock and roll, Indiana-style—hot cars, fast women and nights under the bleachers—and the wicked sense of humor that Hiatt brings to his live show, combine into something he regards as the epitome of his essence. Even for an artist who has lived from eight tracks to digital downloads.

“Nothing beats live,” he says, seeming to anticipate the road shows ahead of him. “You can’t download live and that’s the most exciting part. We’ve got a great little four piece band, it’s rock and roll, the classic setup and we’ve been rocking all over the country—the shows have been a blast.”

John Hiatt’s road goes on forever, it seems. We’re lucky to catch a glimpse.

John Hiatt performs Thursday, Nov. 17, at Track 29.

For former Chattanoogan Gretchen Bonaduce, whose tumultuous marriage to former child star Danny Bonaduce unraveled before millions, “reality” is both a concept and a business

By Bill Ramsey | May 2011

If you have ever dreamed, or at least daydreamed, about becoming a star (and who hasn’t?), there are two direct routes that can hasten your journey: Shamelessly audition repeatedly for any and every reality show and/or marry a current, former or marginal celebrity of any stripe.

Both paths are littered with landmines: The former is a cauldron of indignity, public humiliation and rejection, and you will likely resume your place in obscurity, cursing the competitor who dashed your dreams while you labor in minimum-wage drudgery; the latter, too, is also almost always a labyrinth paved with all manner of torment and abuse, and you will likely end up little more than a footnote, a mere mention in a dark, dusty corner of Wikipedia.

There is, of course, the against-all-odds chance you may find a way to spin your nightmarish experience into a jaw-dropping reality series. You may further extricate yourself from your co-dependent union, inspiring others while rising, Phoenix-like, from the cruel clutches of your (insert celebrity spouse name here) devastating death-spiral to advance your career, realize your dream of fronting a band and take your rightful place among the upper echelon of ex-spouses of Hollywood’s dustbin.

In this case, you would be Gretchen Bonaduce.

Bonaduce, you may recall, is the former wife of child star-turned-radio personality Danny Bonaduce, the wise-cracking middle-child of “The Partridge Family” who managed to extend his 15 minutes of fame long after its discard-by date. She has starred in or been the subject of many reality shows, but it is for her real-life marriage-meltdown to the problematic Partridge that she is most widely known — the strong but long-suffering martyr to the red-headed man-child with a catalog of disorders and self-destructive tendencies rivaled only by Charlie Sheen.

“Breaking Bonaduce” ran for two seasons on VH-1 beginning in 2005 and documented (many say exploited) the couple’s efforts to maintain their increasingly unstable marriage amid her husband’s episodic binging, which by then included several stints in rehab for a crack cocaine habit, a snowballing addiction to alcohol and an infamous encounter with a transvestite prostitute in Phoenix, where the Bonaduces met on a blind date and married the same day, allegedly because Gretchen would not have sex outside of marriage. Despite (or because of) critical backlash, the show was a ratings winner and propelled the Bonaduces into reality TV orbit for two seasons before divorcing in 2007.

Why lay your life bare before the camera, I asked? With candid honesty, Gretchen, now 45, admits the show represented a healthy paycheck during a difficult period. And while she says she and Danny were oblivious to the fact they were documenting the collapse of their marriage, she also cites the show as unexpected gift, an opportunity to make a statement on behalf of co-dependent spouses married to addicts who find the strength to leave them.

“It was very important to me to do something important and real,” she says. “It was not about recreating or setting anything up — neither Danny nor I realized the show was actually capturing the collapse of our marriage. I truly wanted to do something that made a difference, and I know it did. I received so much mail from women who were in the same boat. To make them feel like they were not alone … that turned out to be very important to me.”

These days, Bonaduce fronts the ‘80s throwback cover band Ankhesenamen, or Ankh for short and named for King Tut’s wife (who, ironically, must have suffered some celebrity-spouse angst), and is CEO and star of what could be called Gretchen, Inc., a multi-faceted, one-woman business that includes fronting and promoting her Los Angeles-based band on Facebook (where she has 5,000 “friends”); creating, producing and appearing in reality shows; and raising her two children, Isabella, 16, and Dante, 10, from her marriage to Danny, who has since remarried and hosts a morning radio show in Philadelphia.

Given she is a reality-show staple, it’s interesting that so little is known about Bonaduce’s own backstory — overshadowed by the dim but still glowing wattage of her infamous ex-husband — which includes a time living in Chattanooga. Born Gretchen Hillmer in Waukeegan, Ill., her family moved frequently before her father’s work as a nuclear engineer brought him to TVA’s Sequoiah nuclear plant and Hixson, where a teenage Gretchen attended Hixson High School in the early 1980s.

In an email interview, I found the busy singer, businesswoman and mother something of a paradox. A self-described Christian Republican who supports the troops, God and country, Bonaduce is also a supporter of gay rights and has been photographed in bondage. When not performing with her band, Gretchen reaps the dubious rewards of having been Mrs. Danny Bonaduce on such behind-the-curtain vignettes as “Hollywood Ex-Wives.” She is engaged to marry her drummer, Kevin Starr, and in April was a member of a panel at Reality Rocks, a quasi-fan fest/how-to convention in Los Angeles, alongside such peers as Christopher (Peter Brady) Knight, of “The Brady Bunch,” and Eric Roberts, actor and brother of Julia, and recently an inmate at Dr. Drew Pinsky’s “Celebrity Rehab.”

Possessed of a keen sense of humor and relentlessly optimistic, it’s not difficult to imagine Bonaduce will succeed in any or all her myriad endeavors. While the former Chattanoogan may have never imagined her future would include marrying a dysfunctional, dual-addicted child star, that path, for better and worse, led her on her current journey — one she embraces without a hint of irony.

Your band, Ankhesenamen, appears to be your primary focus at the moment. The makeup and costumes have a punk-meets-new-wave look and feel and the music is 1980s behind-the-Top-40 radar. Tell me about your musical background, experiences and influences.
I have sung my whole life, including in gospel and varsity choirs at Hixson High, and I also joined my first band in Chattanooga. I think we were called Boys Life, but I preferred to call us the World’s Most Unlikely Band. A motley crew of characters, for sure. I have always been an average singer, but what I lack in range I try to make up for with enthusiasm. I started Ankh because I am old [laughs]. I have been singing these songs for 25 years, so I figured the songs would be the easier for me to remember [laughs]. Plus, I just love the ‘80s so much. Incredible music came out of the era. Growing up in Chattanooga, you could sometimes pick up the college radio station in Knoxville, so I listened to bands like Joy Division, U2, The Cult, and The Cure before most people had heard of them. I saw my first concerts at the UTC Arena and I had my own stool at Yesterday’s. I was a fixture there every weekend (even when I was under age with my fake ID). I think the most embarrassing moment in my life was when my dad called them and told them I was in the establishment and that they better throw me out or he would close them down!

Besides the obvious, you’ve got quite a resume as an element, focus or star of reality shows. Are you producing or appearing in any new shows?
I’ve been producing shows since “Breaking Bonaduce.” I was very lucky to have produced two seasons of that show. We declined to do a third season because we thought it would implode our marriage. Now, I wish we would have since it turned out to be inevitable anyway. We brought in “I Know My Kid's the Next Child Star” as an alternative and we produced that as well. After that, I was cast on a show called “Gimme My Reality Show.” I was up against several celebrities to write, produce and edit my own show. America voted and somehow I won! I never thought I would, since I was competing against people from “American Idol” and “Baywatch.” I didn’t realize I had that kind of fan base. I have several shows optioned by production companies right now, which basically means nothing, but I keep plugging away. It’s a numbers game. The more you throw against the wall something is bound to stick.

Among other things, I understand you have a clothing and fragrance line. You’re a businesswoman, a “personality,” front-woman for a band. Tell me about “Gretchen, Inc.” — are you cultivating a brand?
I wish I was a brand. Right now the Gretchen “brand” has very little value. I am not doing the clothing or fragrance for the time being. But I actually had very big plans for branding myself and wanted to get a jump on getting everything arranged in case the brand exploded. So far there’s no explosion. But if it comes I'm ready. I enjoy running and being the focus of my business. But Hollywood is a very young town, so you can’t be the focus forever. As a woman, when you start to age you become less and less relevant in this town. You need a Plan B. I have a Plan C and D as well.

It’s undeniable that your marriage and life with Danny changed the course of your life, for better and worse. You were married hours after your first blind date. You must have known who he was. What were you thinking?
[Laughs] That is the age-old question, isn’t it? I lived in Germany when I was a kid so I was never exposed to the “Partridge Family” much. I knew who he was, of course, but I did not understand the magnitude of that show. When we met, the radio station (where Bonaduce worked) made him go by “Danny Partridge” when he was 30, which could easily explain his drinking problem [laughs]! Honestly, having analyzed that question myself on numerous occasions, I think we were two little lost souls in search of someone else to save them. Thank God he married me and not some crack whore (which he could easily have done). Let’s face it, any reason to marry someone is good as the next. Half of them don’t work out anyway. Eighteen years in Hollywood is like 50 years anywhere else, so I am quite proud of it. But you can’t blame me for getting out. Look what I had to work with — I should have gotten a medal for hanging in for as long as I did!

The emphasis and appeal of such shows as your and others (“Behind the Music,” “True Hollywood Stories,” “Celebrity Rehab”) plays to the public’s appetite for watching celebrities self-destruct. Now, the public is enthralled by Charlie Sheen. When does reality become surreality and how do you reconcile yourself?
I think Charlie Sheen is in a bit of trouble. Charlie, meet Danny. Danny, meet Charlie. Same guy. I recognize his manic mood swings and bi-polar condition very well. Still, I took a wealth of things away from the show and I don’t regret doing it all. I think to make a reality show that made a difference is something very valuable and rare. I doubt “The Bachelor” can say that.

What reality shows does a reality show star watch?
I love the PBS shows — “Manor House,” “1940 House,” “Frontier Families.” I also love “The Colony,” which I believe was on National Geographic.

What were your ambitions growing up Gretchen Hillmer? Did you engage with music/entertainment at an early age, and did you perform at all while you were in high school?
I wasn’t really that focused on the school part of high school, but I sure embraced the party aspect. The one teacher that made such a difference in my life was a Hixson teacher, music and drama teacher Barbara Branch. She changed my life and was an incredible inspiration. I loved music and was in any choir that I could get into. I also loved the drama club, but learned early on that I am not a great actress. I was cast in every play, but always in a minor role. I did not have the confidence, nor did my teachers, in my abilities to pull off a major role. That has changed — I have more confidence in my little finger now then I did as a teenager.

Locals are currently rooting for Lauren Alaina Suddeth, a teen from the area who is competing on “American Idol.” If it existed back “in the day,” is that something you might have auditioned for?
Never! I would never have had the nerve to go out for that. Even now, I would not be able to sing a capella in front of those judges.

Reality shows increasingly dominate prime-time TV — almost everyone and anyone wants or has dreamed of being star. But fame is fleeting and, as you well know, often a rough ride. As someone who has been on that train, so to speak, do you have any advice for would-be reality stars?
Yes — just live your life and don’t worry about what others think. Be a good person, help as much as you can. Use your name for good causes. You owe it to the universe to give back as much as you can.

© 2011 Bill Ramsey

Tags: Celebrity Interview, Reality TV, Gretchen Bonaduce, Danny Bonaduce

Fil-Am actress Ali Ewoldt brings passion to role of Maria in national tour of ‘West Side Story’

By Bill Ramsey
Filipino Press | Jan. 1, 2011

Actually, I just interviewed Ali Ewoldt, the actress who plays Maria in the national tour of “West Side Story” (which begins its five-day run at the Civic Theatre in San Diego on Tuesday, Jan. 4). But why quibble — the lyric fits. Chat on the phone with the very pleasant Filipino-American (from, appropriately, Pleasantville, N.Y.), and she’ll make you feel as though you’re already friends.

Caught in the crush that is Los Angeles traffic on a recent Friday before Christmas, Ewoldt was happy to talk (she wasn’t driving, thankfully) about her starring role in the classic musical and her Filipino heritage in our brief but revealing interview.

No stranger to the role, Ewoldt said she’d done smaller-scale productions of the show and then performed for eight months with the international cast. But she has yet to tire of the timeless love story with one of Broadway’s most memorable scores.

“When I got home (from the international tour), a similar team was casting the national tour,” she said. “I actually had my agent beg for the role. It was a long, amazing audition with (playwright) Arthur Laurents, who came in to help out. He walked me through the part. It was kind of intimidating, but very inspiring to work with the man who wrote the show.”

The national tour, which began in October 2010 and continues for a year, is, she said, a “fabulous experience.”

“There’s a little bit of change, more Spanish, to heighten the realism,” said Ewoldt, who added she watched the film version many times as a young girl. “But it carries the same passion and emotion of the original.”

Though she has played many roles in her young career — she’s a Yale graduate who has been singing and dancing since the age of 10 and has appeared in such blockbuster shows as “Les Miserables” — Ewoldt, 29, said she was inspired early on by such Filipino icons as Deedee Magno Hall and Lea Salonga. She’s since worked with both performers. All three have played Jasmine from Disney’s “Aladdin.”

“I was inspired watching Deedee and Lea do what they do,” she said. “To get to work with both of them was mind-blowing.”

Ewoldt, whose mother is Filipino, said she draws a lot of support from the Fil-Am acting community in New York.

“In New York, there’s so many wonderful Fil-Am musical performers. A friend from New York sent some Fil-Am friends to see ‘West Side Story’ here in L.A. There’s an amazing sense of community. It’s a real support system.”

Along with fellow Fil-Am cast member Kevin Santos, a singer and dancer who plays Tio, a member of the Sharks, Ewoldt says she never tires of what she calls the “vast role” of Maria.

“I continue to discover new things,” she said of her character and the show. “It’s such a deep piece on so many levels. I love the magic of live theater, so no show is ever the same.”

Tags: Ali Ewoldt, Celebrities, Broadway, Broadway Musicals, West Side Story, Filipino-Americans, Celebrity Interview

By Bill Ramsey
Filipino Press | Nov. 27, 2010

You’re fine. The weather’s fine. Everything is fine. Then one day it hits you. That song. And the memories come rushing back. And everything is still fine, but not as fine as it was. And then — after the song rotates in your head for days; after you find yourself randomly singing it — it slips away. And you shrug it off. And everything is fine again.

That, in a nutshell, could be called “On and On” Syndrome. Singer-songwriter Stephen Bishop is the melancholy musical chemist responsible.

Anyone over 40 will likely remember the song, a Top 40 hit for Bishop in 1977. With its lazy, tropical rhythm melding effortlessly with Bishop's wispy, lonely voice, “On and On” became a radio staple for years, the musician’s signature song and, along with his other hits — “Save It For a Rainy Day,” “It Might Be You” and “Separate Lives” among them — cast him as the go-to artist for the broken-hearted.

“I write much better when I’m heartbroken and sad or melancholy,” Bishop has said many times. And he hasn’t drifted far from that sentiment in the 35 years since he first penned the song.

“A lot of people thought it was an upbeat song at first,” Bishop said during a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “But I’m just like everybody else. I have a bunch of different dimensions to my personality. Sometimes I’m sad, sometimes I’m in a good mood. It just so happens that when I’m sad, that’s when I write the best.”

Despite its breezy feel and an opening line that suggests Bishop finding solace “Down in Jamaica,” he said he wrote the song not in the tropics but from his then-home in Silver Lake. “I took some poetic license,” he said.

As much as “On and On” has been embedded in the inner jukebox of those who remember it fondly, the song has followed Bishop — who, beyond his chart success, found further renown as a songwriter for other artists and as a genuinely funny (in a subdued, melancholy way, of course) actor and author — ever since. The singer, who turned 59 on Nov. 11, will perform “the song,” along with his other hits when he joins David Pomeranz and Joey Albert for a package concert on Sunday, Dec. 5, at Pala Casino (see What’s Happening for more information).

While the concert is billed as “Flashback! Best Hits of the ’80s,” it stars a trio of stars who have become Filipino favorites, Bishop among them. As it turns out, Bishop is huge in the Philippines.

“I’ve toured there five or six times,” he said. “And I’m going back in February (2011).”

The Pala concert is also something of an homecoming for Bishop. Born in San Diego in 1951, Bishop attended Horace Mann Junior High School (now Mann Middle School) and graduated from Crawford High School (now the Crawford Educational Complex). As a teenager, the singer had several ambitions: He played the clarinet in the school orchestra, considered becoming a history teacher and, typically offbeat, aspired to be president of French's mustard, simply because, he said, “I loved French’s mustard.”

Fortunately, The Beatles changed everything for the young mustard-lover. Bishop traded his clarinet for guitar, joined The Weeds, a local rock band, and set out for stardom in Los Angeles, where he sought a record deal by just “walking around,” he said, before winding up as a staff songwriter for EH Morris Music Publishing for $50 a week. “That wouldn’t happen today,” he said. “These days it’s so hard.”

While laboring at Morris penning songs for such diverse artists as Chaka Khan, Barbra Streisand and the Four Tops, Bishop began compiling the songs that would form his 1977 debut album, “Careless.” Along with "On and On," which climbed to the No. 11 spot on the Billboard charts that year (the album also earned him a Grammy nomination), Bishop scored with “Save It for a Rainy Day.” That same year, “Saturday Night Live” went on the air, with Bishop as the show’s second musical guest with host Art Garfunkel, who discovered Bishop's talent at Morris.

His association with the show’s first breakout star, John Belushi, and his friendship with director John Landis, led Bishop to a sideline career as a bit player in “Animal House” (as the folk singer whose guitar Belushi smashes during a toga party — Bishop still has it; he also sang the movie’s title theme song) and “The Blues Brothers,” to name a few.

Although “Careless” and his second album, “Bish” earned gold records, Bishop’s solo career began to wane by the 1980s. Still, his songs were in demand and Bishop found even greater success as a songwriter, composing such hits as “It Might Be You,” the theme from “Tootsie,” and 13 other films, including the Grammy- and Oscar-nominated “Separate Lives,” from “White Nights,” a smash hit for Phil Collins. His songs have been recorded by Eric Clapton, Barbra Streisand, Art Garfunkel, Steve Perry, Stephanie Mills, Kenny Loggins, Johnny Mathis, Phoebe Snow, David Crosby, The Four Tops, Aswad and Pavarotti.

Fast-forward 25 years and Bishop — with a catalog of a dozen solo albums behind him — is still churning out new material. His newest album is “Yardwork," an acoustic guitar and vocal solo album.

But after all these years, he's still playing “On and On.” The song, he said, has been very good to him and — you can almost see him smiling when he feels like crying — he wouldn’t dream of leaving home without it.

“I'd better do it,” he said with a laugh.

Tags: Stephen Bishop, Pop Culture, Pop Music, Celebrities