February 1996

Steve has worked with great songwriters all of his professional life. He co-produced (with Peter Asher) "Don't Know Much" recorded by Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville, and he co-wrote "Hold On" with his management client and co-writer, Jamie Walters of Beverly Hills 90210 fame. He is a publisher of "Always On My Mind" and "Suspicious Minds" and he is supervising the sequel to the Brady Bunch movie.

I met Tyrell in his tastefully appointed Hollywood offices. I could have stayed a week; Tyrell's first-hand accounts of three and a half decades of music business lore are fascinating.

ST: It all starts with a song, in my experience. I've worked with a lot of really great, legendary songwriters. My first job was with Scepter Records when I was eighteen and moved to New York. I was hired as a staff producer to work with the Shirelles. I don't know how an eighteen year old kid from Texas whose roots were R & B bar bands ended up in New York. I workd for Florence Greenberg, a housewife who started a record company in the late fifties with girls who sang in her daughter's high school, the Shirelles. She really had some classic records that she was responsible for (such as) "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", "Louie Louie", and then of course she met these two songwriters: Burt Bacharach and Hal David. They had an artist, Dionne Warwick. I was lucky enough to be in on those early days. I was like the kid on the team, and I wasn't afraid to talk to anyone. We had a lot of fun.

DK: What were the Warwick sessions like?

ST: We would get the session together every eighteen months or so. We'd say "let's do 'Alfie' with Dionne", and Burt and Hal would do it, because it was their song, and it was one less song they'd have to write for the album. The sessions would be about three hours with an hour overtime. We'd have a full orchestra with Burt out there conducting. We'd usually get four songs done in four hours. Phil Ramone would make a mono mix and a stereo mix at the same time! A lot of times, that's what we'd go with. We'd decide what the single would be and master it. I was head of A & R and promotion.

DK: You had to promote the record too?

ST: I'd get on the plane and go to Chicago to get it on the radio. That was my first real part of history, you know, working with Bacharach and David. It seemed like we could do no wrong there, for a while. I thought that's the way it was. I think Dionne really was an incredible instrument in the Bacharach/David success. Her voice did something to those melodies and those words that just made it come to life in a way that no one else could. That was a beautiful time in the history for a kid from Texas.

I grew up playing and singing in clubs in Texas in the early 60's. Our hero in those days was Bobby Blue Bland. He played there and people would go crazy. He had this big band and they would just kill. And another kind of R & B that started happening in the 60's, that made me move to New York. That was Ben E. King, and Chuck Jackson and Jerry Butler to a degree. When Lieber and Stoller started putting the strings on R & B, I was killed, man. I had to get out of Texas! I had to go where the strings were! "Stand By Me" changed my life. I mean, you can see what a great record it was and great song and great production and great everything when 25 years later it just held up like they recorded it (yesterday). It was a hit all over again exactly the same way.

DK: You're really relaxed vocally. Did you really not know you were going to cutting the final vocals on Father of the Bride II ?

ST: I thought they'd get Tony Bennett or somebody famous to do it. But Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers, they have been really supportive as well as Steve Martin, Marty Short, and that whole crew, they were sent to make me sing! Charles and Nancy, and Steve told me "If you don't make an album man, you're crazy!" So I've really gotten some incredible support from those people.

DK: Do you like those kind of tunes?

ST: That's the first kind of music I ever heard in my life. That was my parents' music. It's a part of American history in a time that will never be again. It reflects a kind of romanticism and elegance that the country had in the 30's and 40's. The war was going on, and it had a certain kind of passion and a certain kind of class. People everywhere kind of dressed up and were romantic, smoked a cigarette and had a drink. (laughter) Now you're in Alcoholics Anonymous! People want to act like that music is not commercial, but it may be the most commercial music in the world.

DK: Because it keeps coming back.

ST: We did "The Way You Look Tonight." They asked me to produce the songs for the wedding reception scene. They wanted the band at the reception of the first movie to play "The Way You Look Tonight" and "My Girl." I told the director "No band plays those two songs. You either got a 'My Girl' kind of band or you have a 'The Way You Look Tonight' kind of band". And he said "MY band will play those two songs!" and I said, "Oh, that's right! You're the director and I'm an employee!" So Bob Mann and I got together and Bob did these arrangements and I produced these versions and I didn't know who they'd get to sing them, because I thought whoever they got to sing them would have to be in the movie, and I didn't know who they were going to cast, or whether it would be an actor, or what.

So I put my vocal on as a reference, and I went over to the set to play it. Mainly they were concerned with "The Way You Look Tonight," that was the big moment he was going for in the movie where Steve Martin walks in and sees his daughter dancing with her new husband for the first time. And he's trying to get to her, and she looks beautiful, and he loved the lyric. So, I'm out in the car and I've got "The Way You Look Tonight" cranked up and I'm playing it loud for Charles, trying to make it sound good (chuckles). About halfway through the first verse, or second verse or so, Nancy comes out of the set and goes, "Who's that singing?" I said, "Oh, well, that's just me, don't worry!" She says, "I LOVE that! I love it." She just went crazy. She played it for Steve, and everyone just really dug it.

So they wanted me to be in the movie, and they even gave me a line to say! And when we were shooting it was what I was trying to get to. It was the biggest day of the reception, and the reception was the biggest day in the movie. So we're all there, you know, 500 extras ranging from 14 to 70 years old. We're doing "The Way You Look Tonight" (fingers snapping to an imaginary beat) all day long from all different angles, and people are flipping over this! They're coming up to me, kids 20 years old, 25 years old, and they're coming up to me saying "God, that's a great song. Did you write that song? I love that song!" And I'm thinking if I wrote this song, I'd be in the Bahamas! On my yacht! But we saw what a great reaction the song was getting, so we thought that we'd put it over the end of the movie too, and let me produce it with Ray Charles. So on the temp track when they were previewing the movie, they put the version from the reception over the end as well. Now, when they preview the movie, they usually say something like this is not the real music, so no one really comments. They got the same kind of reaction (as at the filming): who's that guy singing, I love that song, so they ended up letting me sing it with an 80-piece orchestra also at the end of Father of the Bride. The story just goes on and on.

DK: You do so many things. You promote records, you produce records, you write records. I have a quote from you from the L.A. Times. You said, "Sooner or later someone is going to do some decent music on television and they're going to clean up!" Has that happened yet?

ST: I don't think it has, really. I've been a little lucky with that with "How Do You Talk to an Angel." I saw early on in my career how you can mix the medias together. That's how Barry Mann and I went into business and made Tyrell/Mann. "Raindrops (Keep Falling On My Head)" was another opportunity. BJ Thomas was a guy who I had brought to Scepter. He was a friend from Texas and I always thought he was the best singer down there. We'd done "Hooked on a Feeling" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and BJ was a little bit cold then. Burt Bacharach had gotten this job working on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He gave BJ a chance to sing "Raindrops." It turned out to be the biggest record of I think the whole decade! It won them their first Academy Award, Burt and Hal.

Now, I'm a little bored with movie music and soundtrack albums. It seems like every soundtrack album has twelve alternative bands on it, just about, not every one. It used to be that a director didn't want to put something foreign on his movie just to capitalize, make money. Like to me, the great movie songs, are like the one Will Jennings wrote... "Up Where We Belong." You watch that movie, and throughout it you're hearing that theme. All of a sudden it pays off and puts you in another place. To me, it gives you dimension in the movie. I hate the songs that are put on there to tell you what you just saw like you're so stupid you don't know what you just experienced, or they're put on there just to have a hit.

I want to say something real quick about Alan Silvestri. He's one of the few film composers that really knows how to write a melody that gets at your heart. There's a lot of great technical people that know how to orchestrate and make you jump out of your seat. But there's not a lot of guys that really can write a melody like a songwriter can. The themes he wrote for Father of the Bride and Forrest Gump are incredible. I can always tell one of Alan's scores. They're always the simplest, most beautiful things.

DK: So, when you supervise films, are you looking for pre-existing music, or ...

ST: I like music just created for the film. But, you know, there's no rules. It depends. Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite movies and soundtracks of the year. That's the other extreme. I really like that Bryan Adams song from...

DK: Don Juan de Marco?

ST: Yeah, right, man great. It really captured the movie and it was a hit!

I love Randy Newman's songs that he did for Toy Story, I think those are great. I remember when Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were hired to do An American Tail. I heard "Somewhere Out There" for the very first time in this room. I heard Barry playing around on it. Barry was so happy that he didn't have to write a hit. He viewed that job as a fun job, a cartoon where he didn't have the pressure of someone telling him to change the second verse, it's gonna be sung by these little mice who live happily ever after. I heard that melody, and I said to Barry, "That is a hit!" They recorded it with the mice, you do it a year before you ever see anything, the animation came back and we all forgot about it for awhile. I told Bert Berman who at the time was the head of music for Universal, "that is a hit." He asked me what I meant, and I told him that I heard it a certain way in my head. If he gave me a demo budget, I'll go down to the studio and make you a demo. But it has to be put over the end titles, and it has to be reprised in the movie. It has to come back at the end with a contemporary artist. That was kind of hard to do, because the movie was already totally finished and James Horner had already scored the end with all his themes. Linda Ronstadt heard it, and she loved the demo. She asked Peter Asher to call me and produce it with them on their record. Peter and I did the record together. Linda let me put drums on it and bass, and we became friends with that, all of us, Peter and Linda and I. She asked me who I thought would be good to sing it with her, and I said, "I think James Ingram's the guy." We made the whole track with Linda and I singing it at the session, and finished it and put the strings on it. I called James and said, "Man, do I have a deal for you. All you have to do is come by and sing this. It'll probably be a No. 1 record." He came by and picked up the track with Linda and I on it. He went over to Quincy Jones' house and played it for Quincy. Quincy called me up about 30 minutes later after he'd heard it and says, "OK, what do we do now? Let's go record it!"

DK: What about television?

ST: I think that television is the next frontier for music, and they just don't know it yet. Hopefully the Friends soundtrack will show them something. Last year Jamie Walters was on Beverly Hills, 90210 and after "How Do You Talk to an Angel," that song went to No. 1. And I think Jamie is going to be a big star. Right now in Europe he's making the front page of the paper and kids are fainting by the thousands. It's a lot of fun. But we made the album, and Aaron Spelling called Jamie and said, "I've got an idea. Why don't you come on Beverly Hills 90210 as a new character?" He said, "Well, I just finished making a new record, and I'm kind of into my music right now." Aaron said, "Well, we'll create a character that sings." I called Danny Goldberg and asked him what he thought of it, and he said, "hey, we've struck the motherlode!" They created this character who slowly began playing his songs on acoustic and then got a band. Anyway, to make a long story short, the record went to No. 4 airplay on the CHR charts for like 35 weeks. It usually got 4,000 plays a week to ninety million people. Beverly Hills 90210's ratings last year were the biggest they've ever been. Every weekend Jamie would go out and do promotion for the show. There was a period only about a year ago that (television) was going to drop all of their theme songs because they were afraid that if a new theme came on it would tell you the show you were watching was over and you'd go change the channel. So it's like really looking at the glass half-empty.

DK: And that's why a lot of the shows start cold now without a theme song the way they did in the 60's and 70's.

ST: Right, but I think that this is a terrible thing for songwriters. I mean, it's a tremendous opportunity for songs. You've got 20 million people watching you every week and why can't you write a good song? The budgets have driven the themes of television way down. They quit paying anyone to do anything, they want all the publishing.

DK: You manage Jamie, too. How did you meet him?

ST: I was hired as the music supervisor on The Heights. It was supposed to be like The Commitments on television. Jamie came over and he picked up this guitar. He played this blues song that he wrote called "So Hot." I mean, he sounded like Bryan Adams and he looked like James Dean! I thought, this is a pretty good deal! I got excited about him immediately, Stephanie (Tyrell, his wife and frequent co-writer) and I both. We called up (Spelling) and said, you should hire this guy! I wrote that song with Stephanie and Barry Coffing, and we made another album that has sold around 900,000 copies or so, and it all came from working on this one little show.

DK: Had you done management before?

ST: Yeah, I used to manage BJ, and Mark James who wrote "Suspicious Minds" and "Hooked on a Feeling."

DK: I knew you were the publisher on those tunes.

ST: Yeah, I have part of the publishing. Mark also went on with Wayne Carson and Johnny Christopher later that year to write "Always On My Mind."

One of the big thrills for me song-wise happened with Jamie's album. The one outside song he wanted to do was Graham Parker's "Release Me." I listened to it and said "I bet when Graham Parker wrote that song he was thinking about Dr. John," who is one of my oldest buddies. So I called up Dr. John and told him about the song and that I thought it was about him and that I would love him to come sing on it. So he came and did these incredible background vocals and we were playing it down in the studio for some press people and one of them said "Isn't that a Graham Parker song?" Turns out this guy used to work for Graham so he sent him a copy and Graham sent me back a note saying how much he dug it, which is a high compliment from Graham Parker. And he told me how he had always envisioned that song with Dr. John. I framed the note and gave it to Jamie for Christmas.

DK: Getting back to your full-cycle; I know you're planning on doing your own album. Are you going to use a big orchestra?

ST: I have a studio and I know how to do it, so I think I can get started without anybody's help and see how it sounds. Of course I won't be putting any orchestras on it with my own money (laughs).

© 1996 Dan Kimpel

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