I got started in the business when I was about 16 and I started, my friend Lenny Waronker’s father started Liberty Records. And Lenny was interested in the record business to some degree and in songs. He was familiar with Carole King and everything Alden Music. I was studying music at the time, theory, you know, and piano. And he said why don’t you try and write some songs, so I did. And he took them around and started getting published, and that’s how I started.

Seventeen, I was at UCLA, so I was studying in school, but also private lessons, yeah. Piano and, I’d given up piano, I think. Private lessons, anyway. And just studying theory and counterpoint privately with George Trimley later. And later Bill Kettering, conducting.

I always knew I wasn’t going to be a player. I mean they’re few and far between, people who can earn their living playing the piano. The technique required, talent required and the discipline required, I mean I never had the discipline to practice the amount that would have been necessary to be a classical player.

And I always thought I’d be a film composer. That was in my family. Three of my uncles were film composers, so it looked like a possible business. Looked difficult, and it is. But that’s where I never thought of any occupation particularly. And so, writing the songs was, I knew that it would be creative work I’d be doing rather than concertizing in any way. So it didn’t seem that odd to me.

Though I never, to this day, feel a great deal of confidence that just because I’ve produced something in the past, I’ll produce something tomorrow or, you know, when I go in there to write. For some odd reason, of which I’m tired of even contemplating, I don’t have that kind of belief when I open that studio door that something greats going to come out of there. And it wouldn’t hurt if I had it. You know, I mean it’s like faith. It would be nice.

In interviews, I would say things like, you know, I don’t think I can do this, I don’t think I can do that. And they sort of, people don’t believe that you actually feel that way. They think it’s like a, you know, a 4th grader showing you a painting and saying, oh, this isn’t any good. Geez, this is terrible. But, you know, you want the person to say, oh, that’s great.

Maybe I’m a little better than I was. And maybe I was better when I was seventeen, eighteen. I think I wrote more. It was bad often, but I, I believe I wrote more in my seventeenth year than in my thirty-seventh or forty-seventh. Except for movies, which where you’re forced to work. I have no idea why that malady plagues me a little bit. But it does.

[End of Audio]