BILLY relates how he ended up in America and met his producer, Spencer Proffer.....
In 1974, the first ever international song competition was held in Albany, New York. I received a call from Helen Reddy, who was phoning live from the Johnny Carson Show in Los Angeles, telling me I'd won one of the categories. They flew me over. The event turned out to be a three day performance at the Albany Bowl.
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| Billy with his curly long hair |
The Eagles were there, Ray Charles, Richie Havens, Loggins & Messina, the Pointer Sisters, Jose Feliciano, Helen Reddy and about a dozen other major acts, all staying in the same hoteI. It was a hell of an introductlon to the US Music business. After that trip, I realised, I wanted to go overseas. I'd had a career as a child in Brisbane, then with the Aztecs in Sydney, then the Melbourne years, a national TY show, gold and platinum records. I've always thrived on change, and learned a long time ago that the secret of longevity was to reinvent yourself creatively over and over.
So, by 1976, I'd done everything I could with the Aztecs, and in September that year I left Australia for the US with my wife Lynn and four year old daughter Rusty. I went for a year and stayed for twenty-five.
After the first year, I had a publishing deal with Arista. My green card application contained recommendations from Olivia Newton-John and Barry Gibb. So I was in. Then I met the guy who really helped change the course or my life and my future. His name was Spencer Proffer: a record producer, the youngest guy to pass the California bar exam, the head of United Artist Records at twenty-something and producer of 'Acid Queen' for Tina Turner amongst other things. A great writer and the perfect ear for what I was trying to say.
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| Record Store Display |
Within a month of meeting the Proff, we wrote the song 'Children of the Sun'. That one song led into the 'Children of the Sun' album and we spent a year recording it at Spencer's Pasha Studios in Los Angeles. The record took off big-time in late 1979, and I was away. I can never thank the Proff enough, as well as his longtime engineer, Emmy-Award winner and great guy Laurence 'Larry' Brown.
All things considered, the early 1980s were a very successfull period in my life in the USA, but musically I'm stiIl not really sure what the 80s was all about. After the extraordinary originality and happenings of the '6Os and early '70s, the '80s was a let down. Yacuous and pretentious. Didn't move to the next step. For the most part, popular music and culture seemed to exist for the sake of itself and business.
After starting the '8Os in the US with a hit album 'Children of the Sun', and playing shows all over the States, I recorded three more albums. The first, 21st Century Man, was a sequel of sorts to Children of the Sun. Then came
Stimulation and
East of Eden's Gate. As a whole, other than parts of Children of the Sun, I wasn't crazy about any of my US albums. I was definitely chasing or being encouraged to chase the success and groundswell that 'Children of the Sun' had created.. Regardless, tracks from all the albums reached the top ten in many US states and in Canada. The 21st Century Man and Stimulation LP's reached the top forty and the Children of the Sun LP was number one in over forty US states and Canada.
During this period I had the great pleasure of playing with some of America's finest, such as bass legend Leland 'Lee' Sklar (James Taylor, Jackson Browne), who recorded the Children of the Sun and 21st Century Man albums. Touring with the trio with Lee and Aztec maniac drummer Gil 'Rats' Matthews was killer. I also played and recorded with the legendary musicians Jim Keltener, Russ Kunkel, Abraham Laboriel and Jimmy Johnson, had a band with Jimmy and Joe Walsh for about five minutes and also recorded with Earl Slick; Jim Capaldi, Rick Marotta, Buzzy Feiten, Carmine Appice, Bob Glaub, Kai Winding, Neil Bogart and many others.
But the music scene had changed.. Video and make-up strangled the radio star. So much of the new '8Os music was as diabolical shite, and so was what I was doing. I hated the new music and had no connection to it or the audiences that followed it. Nor they to me.
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| Gil Matthews, Billy and Lee Sklar |
SPENCER PROFFER - Billy's US record producer and manager
I loved Billy. I made four albums with him. He was very dear to me. We really clicked - artistically, culturally, intellectually and spirituary. Our relationship wasn't just a gig where I was his producer; we were real partners in a quest for artistic excellence and vision.
When Billy first came to America, I met him at a party put on by Mickey Shapiro, Fleetwood Mac's attorney. I was a kid in my twenties and Billy was only a couple of years older. We talked guitars, we talked rock, we talked music. We really, really hit it off, because Billy was a pure musician, a real artiste, and I'm a fan of real music and I had a pretty decent history of producing rock'n'roll (for artists including Heart, Cheap Trick and Tina Turner).
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| Billy with producer Spencer Proffer |
At the time, somewhere around 1977, Billy was talking to Alan Parsons about possibly working with him. He was searching for a kindred spirit to collaborate with. We started hanging out and got together one night and saw the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both of us had this predilection for outer space. I was reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and Bill had a great knowledge of extraterrestrial fantasies. The movie ended when aliens had made contact with Earth, but no one knew what happened next. We went back to my house, picked up a couple of guitars, had a bottle of wine, had some cognac, got a little looped, and wrote this song that took the last scene from Close Encounters to the next level. The song was called 'Children of the Sun'.
We created this fictional race of friendly aliens from another galaxy who were watching Earth self-destruct. They make contact to see what the Earthlings want to do, and give us the option to leave because the world is blowing up. By the end of the song, everyone has left. We decided there could be a journey to this new fictional planet, where Earthlings would intermingle with people from this new planet and start a whole new race. That was the genesis of the 'Children of the Sun' album. We wrote that song and it turned out to be an epic. I thought it was so cool, and I owned my own recording studio called Pasha, at the time. We said, 'Let's put unit together and record this as a work.'
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| Left to Right- Billy Thorpe, Laurence 'Larry' Brown, Spencer Proffer |
We loved The Dark Side of the Moon and the Alan Parsons Project, so we thought we could take those sorts of sensibilities and make a real hard-rock version. Through various social connections, Billy and I hooked up with Lee Sklar, who was playing bass at the time with Crosby, Stills & Nash; and Alvin Taylor, who was George Harrison's drummer and had just come off the road with Eric Burdon.
We got together one afternoon in my studio and said, 'Let's just jam,' and everyone hit it off like you wouldn't believe. That became the rhythm section for the Billy Thorpe band. We cut 'Children Of the Sun' as a seven minute epic and it turned out really, really tripped out and unique. We decided to build an album around it. We spent eleven months synching up two 24-track machines and we made this album with Alvin and Lee, which Billy brilliantly planned and wrote.
Our hope at the time was pretty ambitious: to ultimately turn it into a live concert play that could be enacted with visuals on stage and, you know, maybe one day when we grew up, we could take something this tripped-out to Broadway. There was even talk at the time with a guy who was running NBC television about turning Children of the Sun into a four-hour miniseries for television. What we ultimately wound up doing was developing a computer-animated laser choreography of the album. I was friendly with the guys who started the whole laser light show technology here in Los Angeles, so Billy and I thought, 'How cool would it be to make this an audiovisual experience for kids by creating a laser light version of the album and bringing the characters to life with computer-animated images, showing it in planetariums?'
And that's what we did. We had the Children of the Sun album played in planetariums across North America. We cross-promoted the shows with the album: people who wanted to buy the record would get a buck off on the laser show, people who saw the laser show would be driven to retail. This was thirty-plus years ago, before it was cool to do this kind of thing. It was very successful at the time.
After a lot of prodding, the Children of the Sun album got to number one on rock radio across America. lt took an awful long time for it to catch on, it was so ambitious, but for any station that had the balls to play it, it went to number one on request because of Billy's unique voice, his guitar-playing ability, and I had made a pretty unique record of it too. Unfortunately, when that album got to number one, Capricorn Records, the label distributing the record, went bankrupt. We stalled in the trajectory of taking the album beyond 500,000 units. It was a moment in time. We had the laser show happening, we had Billy out on tour selling out 5,000 seat venues - we really felt we were on our way to one of the biggest records of the decade.
We were never able to take it to its logical conclusion but boy, did we have a lot of love in the music and media community. We didn't make a ton of money but we got tremendous press, tremendous accolades.
I put Children of the Sun in my personal top three albums that I have produced, but every single record I made with Billy, every song I cut with him, every song I co-wrote with him, I can still get off listening to them today. I think so fondly, so reverentially and respectfully of Billy. He was a pure artiste and I had nothing but love and respect for him because of that.
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| Billy's 2nd Tour Group with Linda Ronstadt's Tour Bus |
GIL 'RATS' MATTHEWS - Aztecs' drummer
The difference between Billy and me is that I'm a pessimist and he was a complete optimist. If there was ever anything happening, Billy would be frothing at the mouth about how good it was going to be, how many people were going to be there, how much money there'd be and everything else. And I'd be like, 'I'll believe it when I see it.'
After the Aztecs folded and Billy moved to America, we all went our separate ways. Then I got a call and the lunacy started once again.
It was 1979 and I was playing with Mondo Rock. We had a number-one single in Australia with a song called 'State of the Heart', which I performed on and produced. We were playing a show in the snow up at Mount Buller in Victoria and I heard over the PA system: 'International phone call for Mr Matthews.' And I thought, 'Aw, what the fuck is this?'
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| Warren 'Pig' Morgan & Gil 'Rat' Matthews |
So I answered the phone and it was Billy with complete verbal diarrhoea: 'You've got to get over here, Rats, the album is number one, gonna do a six-month tour, playing with Lee Sklar, gonna tour in a bus with a bathroom and lounge, you've got your own roadie, it's gonna be awesome, get on a plane, the album's number one!'And so on. There was no break between his sentences - they seemed to all run into each other and overlap. I couldn't get a word in.
When I did, I said, 'Billy, I'm up at Mount Buller and I'm happy, I'm enjoying it.' And he just started up again: 'The album's number one, Lee Sklar, six-month tour, huge PA, David Bowie's lighting guy . . .'
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| Lee's Rig For The Album |
I guess I gave in, because I quit Mondo Rock and went to LA. I let him talk me into it, and I've only got Billy to thank for it. When I arrived in LA, Billy picked me up at the airport in the Bricklin - his concept sports car. He gave me the rave: 'Oh, it's got a 351 and the doors are operated by air and it's one of only 150 made.' The first thing that happened was the doors wouldn't go up at the airport, so we had to climb in through the back with my bags. I was just laughing.
He took me to the Century Plaza Towers where Capricorn Records had a private suite and Children of the Sun was a pretty big deal. A band started playing on stage in the convention room, and it was the Blues Brothers.
I went from watching Jo Jo Zep at Bombay Rock in Melbourne one night to watching the Blues Brothers in LA the next. It was the start of the best experience of my life. We did three tours. The second tour was actually with Warren Morgan on organ, me on drums and Billy Kristian, who's a New Zealander, on bass, so it was basically all-Australian.
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| Billy's 2nd Tour Group featuring Warren Morgan & Gil Matthews |
But my fondest memory of that time came during the first tour for the Children of the Sun album, when it was just me, Billy and the legendary Lee Sklar on bass. We were playing this huge show at the Rose Bowl in Dallas, Texas. It was an open-air venue, probably on a scale with the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It was a hot daytime gig, with about 65,000 people. The album was number one in Texas. The line-up for that show included head liners Rush, plus Little River Band. There was actually a bit of a confrontation between Billy and LRB's singer, Glenn Shorrock, because LRB were huge in the States, but because Bill's album was number one in Texas, he wanted LRB to support us. There were words between Billy and Glenn but, from memory, LRB did end up supporting us.
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Lee Sklar and Billy at the
Rose Bowl in Dallas |
'Children of the Sun', if you listen to the record, starts off with about four minutes of sound effects before the first guitar riff comes in. When we did the tours in America, we used to start the show with the sound effects off the record. We'd be sitting in the wings waiting for the sound effects to finish, at which time I'd do a drum intro.
At this time Billy had grown his hair pretty long, similar to the cover of 'Children of the Sun'. He was impeccably dressed, and we had a couple of back-up singers. The show started off. Here were 65,000 people and they were all really revved up for it because the album was number one. So, the sound effects started, I did a couple of drum fills, Billy walked out on stage, the guitar went up in the air for the big massive opening chord, he brought his hand down across the strings and . . . nothing. Nothing came out.
There were roadies running around everywhere and I distinctly remember turning to Lee Sklar and saying, 'Jesus, nothing's changed.' So we had to start the show again. It was just almighty.
It is my intention to post Billy's follow up album "21st Century" in the near future, so stay tuned and 'Keep Rockin'.
[Extracts from Billy Thorpe ' Keep Rockin' - Celabrating an Australian music legend. By Lynn Thorpe & Dino Scatena 2010. p159-171]
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