Good morning, all!
A composer friend from The Drama Book Shop, Thom Heinrichs, and I in Spring 1980 went to a one-day showing of THE FIRST NUDIE MUSICAL at the old Thalia revival house at 95th and Broadway. We saw the 7:00 showing, and at 11 I went back to catch the final showing. The next day at the Book Shop I told everyone that it was one of the funniest films I'd ever seen and that I wanted to work with the director. I bought the album and played it to death. One day I was raving about the movie in the shop and a very sweet customer named Lila told me she had gone to college with BK and I learned what I could from her. She was a neat lady and I haven't seen her in about 30 years now.
In 1990, I was ingloriously sacked from a big project i was working on and for two years I worked very little, mostly surviving on the Book Shop income and the monthly salary from the Gay Men's Chorus as staff arranger with occasional jobs from the Cole Porte Trust and Kurt Weill Foundation and playing suicide every month: if I could take care of the bills and not go to the roof to jump, then I was hanging in there. In 1991 or thereabouts FANFARE magazine published an interview with BK about Bay Cities, and I thought, what can you lose? and called Bay Cities. By a fluke, the phone was answered by Mr Kimmel, so he couldn't not respond to a message to call an unknown schlub in Manhattan, and we talked, at the most, for 15 minutes, the gist of it being that I should send him a demo and maybe at some point something might happen. After I'd thought I would never hear from him and the suicide game continued monthly, i got a phone call one day about an abum with Liz Callaway and Frank Loesser. I said yes, met with Liz and found a new wonderful friend and Bay Cities folded. The project was off.
This was good for two reasons: BK went to Varese Sarabande and Liz lost the awful man who was going to be musical director and arranger. Her second choice at the time of our first meeting was an old friend of mine, Alex Rybeck, and that began another great collaboration that continues.
So, BK dumped on me the news that not only would we be be recording Liz but in the following week we would do a recording of Sondheim's incidental music and little known songs. I remember very little about the pre-Sondheim rehearsal/auditions/scoring now but I still remember the rehearsals with Liz and Alex to discuss thoughts and opinions on what to do with the great Frank Loesser and BK's first appearance at a rehearsal to give his input on what had been going on in these sessions. I remember digging through old NYCGMC Carnegie Hall programs for names of musicians to record and how wonderful most of them were. we lost early a kvetching violinist and, during Liz's sessions I had to replace a mediocre trombone but we got a great one in return, and that band became the core of the New York players for all future albums. I remember giving BK names and numbers of friends in Manhattan - Jason and Rebecca Luker are two of them from New Amsterdam Theatre Co, The Men's Chorus, and John McGlinn - and I can't tell you how many people I met through BK in the Vareses and Fynsworth years who became friends as well.
So, we recorded Liz and Sondheim and I was exhausted from doing two albums back to back. My being sacked in 1990 had left me vulnerable and insecure about my work because after I was sacked, the word put out was that I was delivering unsatisfactory goods. I spent the two weeks of sessions thinking, i'm being fired today. On the last day of recording the UNSUNG SONDHEIM, BK on his his way out to pack up and return to Los Angeles, stopped to remind me about my trip to LA to mix the recordings and his last words were something to the effect of "be sure to sign up for frequent flyer mileage." And I thought, I'm not being fired. I love this man.
