I was just posting on FB about Ben Bagley, and I wrote this in three separate posts:
Ben suffered terribly, like John Mcglinn, from falling in love with unavailable men, and that unhappiness plagued him. He could be charming, hysterically funny, very perceptive about others, but he was so unhappy about his romantic life. I think Ben's earlier Revisted albums - Rodgers & Hart1, Gershwin, Coward, Berlin, and Kern - were his best cast. Later, when he produced them on his own, he had budget issues, and I heard, but cannot verify, that when he was issuing them on CD, the young singers he used to do extra material to pad the discs were paying him to be on the recordings.
I started buying them in college around 1970. By the time I moved to NYC in 1979. I had every Bagley LP at that time. When I worked at Drama Book Shop, I used to order records from him, and he or his assistant Bruce D. Bossard would deliver them. In 1981 or 82, I lost a film scoring job because I told the producer Sam Irvin that I had no sound studio experience. I decided I had better get some and the only record producer I knew was Ben, who had attended something that included arrangements of mine, probably the New York City Gay Men's Chorus, and he started using me as a copyist for Dennis Deal and Albert Evans. Dennis and Albert started throwing charts to me to orchestrate when they were on a tight deadline. Ben loved my "Joplin-esque" orchestration for "The Bull Frog Patrol" so much that he took one of the orchestra sections and added it to the beginning of the track. You can hear the song slow down just before Andy Anselmo enters with the lyrics. Thank you, dear Ben, for that encouragement!
By the time I finished writing these posts, I was in tears. He was such a good man.
