Hello, welcome to the show.

This is the get you some Productions podcast, a music related podcast.

We cover everything in the music industry from the first note to the last fan, everything in between.

So as long as we keep it positive, we really don't shy away from any music related subjects.

And today I have Terence Boylan on the show.

Terence is a musician from the 60s, let's say, who had some albums in the 60s I think you were compared to.

And I'd listen to your record.

Lisa listened to the Elias Buna record and to me actually was.

Sort of.

Reminiscent of a lot of the psychedelic electric folk stuff from the late 60s.

I think the Blues project was mentioned and I.

And I'm familiar with the Blues project.

Similar stuff to that.

Is the.

Is the Alias Buna record the only one you listen to?

Because next two are much more representative.

The next three actually.

Oh, so yeah, the next one after that was.

So I actually was a little tough finding them.

So what I'd like to do is have save some links to them and then I can share the links to.

Which one do you think is the most representative?

Oh, the first two.

Asylum Records.

When signed me, I was in the middle of a. I was working.

Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

I'll explain that.

But yeah, so like I was saying before we started the show, this is.

Well, actually the way we know each other is we both are associated with Bard College.

We both went there.

You were on the board for a long time and several other boards, you're telling me.

And so we have a relation to the school, my partner and I, who can't make it today.

We've become sort of unofficial archivists for Bard College.

Lots of bard related folks come on the show and my job is to actually just let people tell their story in as much detail as we can because we just want to get it on, we just want to get it on tape.

So.

So why don't you start with.

I did.

So I read there are a couple of bios out there of you and I think they.

They said that you started.

You wrote your first song at 11 years old.

Something like that.

Do you mind telling us your.

What we like to call the superhero one of those story.

Yeah, it's one of those quirks.

It all started with a ukulele that I fished out of the trash when I was about 10 and it only had three strings, but I learned everything that you can play on a three string ukulele and I couldn't wait to get the fourth string.

But when you're nine or ten, you know, it seems like a huge deal.

Finally my brother got me one.

And that was a little baffling because I was so good on the three string ukulele.

But I was already writing songs, making up little ditties.

And when I was, you know what, this is an extravagance.

$12 came in.

I had to wash a lot of dishes.

But when I got this, the action was so high that I kept going back to the ukulele.

But finally somebody showed me how to fix the bridge was set wrong.

And suddenly the whole world just opened up.

I could play this without my fingers bleeding.

It sounded big.

And I was taking the little ditties that I was writing on the ukulele and moving them over to the guitar.

And they sounded cool.

And of course I immediately put together a band.

I got two kids in my high school to junior high to play along with ourselves, the preteens, because we were all 12.

And one of their fathers was one of the people involved in the Buffalo Bob radio show.

Which was.

By that point it was nationwide, so it was syndicated.

It was a big deal.

So he auditioned us and he.

And he took us on and I played the.

One of the first songs that I wrote called Playing Hard to Get.

And we did that show.

And suddenly it was amazing.

We were sort of famous.

I mean, the kids in school and stuff were saying, wow, I heard you on the radio, man.

That was a huge deal.

So I got started young.

We.

I started singing at all the coffee houses in Buffalo.

And it was a great music scene.

Buffalo and Toronto and.

And Thunder Bay all had very popular sort of famous clubs.

The Limelight, the Lower Level, Zuni, Bell, Book and Candle.

And people like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and stuff were doing this circuit in.

In Buffalo.

Hackett and Raven were.

Were big.

Couple of luminaries came to town.

The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary.

And they would hang out with the.

With the scene.

Because Buffalo was a.

Was starting to be a thriving music scene.

So I got more famous, actually quite young than a lot, you know, did.

Because I was headlining at folk clubs when I was 14 or 15.

And when I 16, I went to the Newport Folk Festival and there was a concert called the New New Folks Concert for songwriters and Peter Seeger, Pete Seeger and Theodore Bickel were the judges of whether you got on or not.

So I auditioned two songs and they put me on the New Folks concert right before Dylan.

Wow.

And I had met Dylan when I was 16 because we ran away to New York to meet him.

And I kept hanging out at the Gaslight until I did.

And he took me to Israel Young's Folklore center, which was right next to the Gaslight and the.

And the Dougal street and here's some.

So he took a guitar off the wall and he handed it to me and I played him two songs and he said, hey, it's not bad, man.

Then he took the guitar away from me and sang me a song that he had was half finished called Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.

And he, he.

He then played another half of a love song that he was writing.

This is really early.

Dylan's first album had.

Had just come out, right.

The reason I had it was my brother worked in a record store and he ordered the wrong record and the Dylan record showed up.

So I opened it.

We bought it for 299 or whatever.

I took it home and started singing all the songs on it because I loved it.

I thought it was great.

So meeting.

Meeting him was complete thrill.

And I told him a little about.

He invited me to.

To go with him to meet some friends.

And then I remet him at the Newport Folk Festival.

Whereupon when I was done with my set, he said, good going.

Can I borrow your guitar and your capo because my mine won't stay in tune or something.

So I thought, all right, this is two huge things.

He's heard me sing my song and now he's played my guitar.

This is the greatest.

You still have that guitar?

Oh yeah, absolutely.

That's amazing.

And you know, I also had the harmonica.

So.

So if, you know, a little backup if he needed that for any representative for Bard college.

So I listened very carefully to what he was saying.

In case the.

In case the headmaster came in and saw me ducking into the library.

He'd say, what are you doing here?

I'd say, I'm listening about colleges.

So we're still.

We are still having a few.

A few little spotty spots with the Internet connection.

Okay, where.

So where did they go wrong?

At the.

Just when you finished about the harmonica.

So I think you're getting into how you got into Bard.

Here's what I'm going to do.

Hang on.

Okay?

Yeah, sure.

Don't go away.

I'm here.

That's why that problem will.

All right.

There won't be any more trouble.

That was Star I just over here.

So we'll be fine from now on.

Okay.

I can't see you anymore.

I don't know how you.

Dylan played my guitar, which was a huge thrill.

Right.

And he heard me sing a song.

And then back to high school where I cut out of chemistry class.

I was always skipping classes to do crazy things.

And I saw the headmaster coming down the hall straight toward me.

And I knew, I think I had been given a warning.

No more cuts or you're out.

So I ducked into the library and there was a representative from Bard College there telling the seniors all about Bard.

So I said, I've got to pay strict attention to this in case this headmaster comes in, yanks me out and asks me what I'm doing.

So I could tell him I'm listening to colleges and I, I'm really liking about Bard.

That was the only.

I'd never heard of it.

It was my introduction to Bard and I decided that day, that sounds like it's for me.

Can you imagine the twist of faith that is cutting?

It's highly unlikely cutting class to find your college.

Anyway, when I arrived at Bard, I was in heaven.

I had my guitar and met other musicians and we, we formed little bands here and there, just trying stuff out.

And we auditioned for the Night Owl in the Village for field period.

And then the following summer we got the job.

The, The Loving Spoonful was the headliner.

They needed an opener.

Oh, they had an opener.

Tim Harden, I don't know if you remember him.

And then they had the Blues Project and they had Richie Havens.

Oh, wow.

And it was.

And so they alternated openers two weeks at a time.

And we got, we got a two week slot opening for the Spoonful and then for Steve Stills, had a band that had no name.

Everyone just called it Steve Stills Band.

But it was, it was a bunch of pickup musicians, a really good bass player who then had to go to Cleveland for some reason.

So I had to fill in on bass with him for a while.

And that was a real learning experience because Steve Stills used to do just stuff that he decided at the time.

There were no rehearsals.

You didn't learn songs or anything.

You just, you just got out, you got your act together and played and one night, improvise.

He would improvise songs.

He would say, we're gonna do this, it's in G and.

Or this is, this is a standard 12 bar blues in E. But I bend it a little, so it's 14 bars and that's it.

But he liked to rehearse, but there just wasn't time.

Like, for example, Van Morrison came to town and Gloria was just becoming.

And he didn't have any band.

So he asked Steve Stills's band to play.

And the bass player was still gone.

So I sat in on that.

I mean, how hard is it to play Gloria, right?

You know, boom, boom.

So that was a.

That was a steam bath of.

Of an experience working with all those musicians.

And then we got off my band, the Gingerman, got offered a contract, but the head of the company turned it down.

But I went back to them to try to get it, and they signed me as a solo artist because I was the one writing the songs anyway.

So they said, all right, well, we'll.

So I got a recording contract with mgm, which my parents had to sign because I. I don't think.

I think I was just 18 and I needed some musicians so that my two friends at Bard, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan, were excited about the idea of going into a real recording studio.

They'd never been in one.

So we rehearsed six songs and went in and recorded all of them in one day.

By the way, here's a jazz note.

I asked around Jerry Ragavoy, who owned the studio Astronaut for a really good drummer, and he said, yeah, Herb Lavelle.

And Herb Lavelle.

I didn't know it had played on all of Walter and Donald's favorite jazz albums.

He was a drumming God.

So when, when they walked into the studio, came over to me and they said, is that Herb labelle?

And I said, yeah.

And I went, oh, my God.

And he's going to play our stuff, you know.

Yeah.

They were like, oh, my God, this is so fabulous.

So anyway, we cut that album.

Which album was that?

We cut the first six songs, changed a couple of them around.

We added a steely dance song, one of the first ones, which was called Stone Pony, and they had just written that, and they'd written two other songs, Bus Drivers A Fruitcake and Trans Texas Airlines, which were utre Steely Dan songs in their infancy.

And so we got to mixing that album and the engineer at the studio left that studio.

So I went to Region Sound to mix it.

But it's a whole different thing.

When you've been listening to a record in one studio and you get into another one, it all sounds different.

It sounds either thinner or bassier or you have to redo it.

But we only had two days to mix the whole album because the budgets then were much smaller.

So I mixed it.

The one you heard, Alias Buna, was a disaster.

I mean, you know, the whole record should have been remixed because it actually sounded really great.

But I was a terrible engineer.

And the other engineer that was Mixing was unfamiliar with material, right.

And how it sounded.

So we brought up all the faders and there were bass parts and guitar parts that were orphans that were supposed to be pulled down.

And we had to scramble to get everything to sound even coherent.

And then I turned in the record hoping they would say to me, you need to go remix this because it sounds terrible.

But they didn't.

They put it out and because there was a Dylan song on there that I rewrote, they.

It got some attention, got some.

Got some nice reviews.

Walter and Walter and Donald were a little embarrassed by it, I think.

Although they.

The musicianship, I thought for 18 year old kids, first time in the studio, I thought it was pretty good.

I did too.

So I moved to LA after I graduated and I started working with Linda Ronstadt as my brother was her producer and manager.

Linda was ready to quit the record biz.

I remember one night at the Whiskey, somebody threw a on the rocks glass at her.

It missed her head by an inch.

She could feel it go by her ear.

And she said, that's it.

I've had it.

I'm gonna Tucson, I'm gonna work in my father's hardware store.

I've had it with the record business.

My brother said, if you stick around, I'll get.

I'll put together a backup band for you that will be killer and you'll enjoy singing again.

And he put the band together.

The band that he put together was the Eagles.

Started with.

It started with Henley and Fry, who were hanging out at the Troubadour and so was I and we were all singing at the Troubadour.

Glenn Fry was in a band called Long Branch Penny Whistle and we became friends.

The other guy on the was John David Souther, who just died recently.

God, they're all dropping.

And so I started singing around town again and writing songs.

And then I went to Walter and Donald, I said, listen, if I get another contract, will you play on my record?

Because they were.

They already had two hits out.

They had.

At that point they had Do It Again and they were up to Ricky, don't lose that number.

Wow.

So they were on the second, they were on the third album, I think.

And they said, sure, absolutely.

And they said, it's another chance to redeem ourselves as real.

And because my brother had put the Eagles together, I got them to sing on the record.

And so I went to Geffen and he said, yeah, yeah, I. I called you.

It was another enormous coincidence.

He said, I had Chuck Plotkin call you.

What happened?

And then you just showed up and I said, no, I was going by Asylum and I decided to cold call you.

And he said, oh, we were going to sign you because we heard you at the club the other night.

So I went, oh my God.

So, so suddenly I was on a label that was the hottest label in the country.

I mean, you know, they got Joni Mitchell Onstad and Jackson Brown and Warren Zon and stuff.

So for that album I corrected my earlier mistakes and I got a good studio with two great engineers and I rehearsed the musicians and I got the best.

I got Dean Parks and Jim Gordon from.

At that time he was playing with Leon Russell and Mad Dogs and Englishman.

Dean Parks had played on most of the Steely Dan records.

Jeff Picaro, Ben Benet, Larry Carlton, Chuck Rainey on bass and Bob Glob on bass.

The cream of the cream of the LA musicians are on those second and third albums.

That's why I think it's more representative.

The second one was a self titled, right?

Yeah, Terrence.

And then the third one is called what Susie?

Okay.

And the fourth one was called your Trout is in the Mail.

But my contract was sold to mca and Ron Alexenberg then dropped out of the MCA deal because they, he, they fired him and he moved over to the Bertelsmann Group.

I think.

Don't we have to put a caveat on that?

Because I'm not sure that that's official anyway.

Maybe you could bleep it out or something.

So I went on tour.

I went on a 50 city tour opening for, at various times, Bonnie Raitt, Little Feet, the Kate Brothers.

And then in Houston we all came together for the New Year's concert and it sold out.

So it was me and Bonnie Raitt and Little Feet.

Wow.

And it was the first time I ever played in front of 40,000 people.

I think that's what the Houston Coliseum holds.

And it was standing room only for New Year's and you couldn't hear anything.

And it was a real experience as soon as you came out on stage.

The, the sound of the blowback from the audience, the applause was deafening.

Your ears were ringing for, for the count off.

I don't know how people do that night after night.

They may, they.

I think people like Springsteen and stuff must have gotten a setup where they had partial hearing blocks and partial hearing microphones or something because it's almost impossible to hear the band if they're making a lot of noise in the audience.

And, and you, you, you yell out the count off like with your mouth.

Because Nobody can hear you anyway.

Know about that phenomenon.

And that's wild.

The audience is louder than the band.

It feels that way when you're up there because all the noise of applause and chatter and everything is coming past you and bouncing off the back wall.

A big cavernous echo in a place.

We played Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago.

Chicago was, was easy compared to, to, to Houston.

And then we did smaller clubs, smaller halls, like 500, 600, a thousand.

We did a couple of bars in, in Austin that, that was, those were great gigs.

And Bonnie was loved, you know, because people just got really into her bluesy playing.

She was awesome.

And Little Feet had played on my record.

So Bill Payne and I remember once Lowell George and I went to breakfast in, in the Marriott or whatever.

Lowell George was the head of Little Feet and for breakfast he ordered a bottle of champagne and a carton of Marlboros.

Never seen an.

Or a breakfast order like that before.

So then Asylum sat on my first album for three or four months.

They weren't sure what to do with it because they, they thought they had signed a folk artist.

And this was steely Danish eagle ish rock, you know.

Right.

And two of the promo guys at Asylum said, I hear two hits on this record, let's Get on it, you know, when they put it out, by some miracle.

And I think this is largely due to Bert Stein, who was head of promotion for Warner Brothers, who was promoting the record when they put it out.

Bert, I think, pulled home some favors and it started to catch on.

And within two weeks, Billboard reported that it was the most added album at radio in the country, was number one, number one national breakout.

And the record company was so chagrined they had no records in the stores.

And the Columbia pressing plant, who they borrowed whenever they had an over over order was on strike.

The record plan in Palo Alto or San Francisco.

Yeah, it was outside San Francisco.

Berlin Game, I think.

And they couldn't get any records pressed there.

They couldn't only get a few on the east coast.

So we missed this giant opportunity.

I'm all over the radio in every, even in KLOL and you know, and all the big stations are playing in a heavy rotation and no records in the stores, which is a nightmare for a record company.

Yeah.

And so they came to me and.

They said what song was getting played or what songs.

Well, Shake it and Don't Hang up those dancing Shoes were being treated alternately as Heavy rotation cuts off the album.

And then the company scrambled to release Don't Hang up those Dancing Shoes as a single because Ian Matthews of Matthews Southern Comfort had covered Shake it, and it was number four on the Billboard charts as a single.

So they said, let's take your other hit single and push that.

And you meanwhile, get ready to do another album, and this time we'll be ready.

But as everybody knows, this time isn't always going to be a repeat of last time.

So that was, that was very frustrating.

And so Bruce Lundball of CBS Records came to me and he said, you had everything that an album really needs.

That first album of yours, great songs, heavy radio play, they dropped the ball.

They totally had their pants down.

Leave them.

Come over to Columbia and we will do right by you.

Your next album will promote the hell out of it, because I think you're going to be a star, blah, blah, blah.

So at that time, the, the Born To Run album was climbing the charts.

Springsteen was on Columbia, and to introduce me, Bruce Lonvald took me to the Roxy to see the opening of the Born To Run tour.

And I sat down at the Columbia table and who's there?

Bob Dylan and, and Bonnie Ray.

Oh, she had.

And so we watched the, the Springsteen show together.

And that was, that was kind of cool.

And so I went to Asylum and I said, I've been offered.

They'll buy the contract.

They'll buy it for 250, 000, which was a lot.

And they said, no.

They said, you're.

You got a three album deal here and we know your next album's going to do it.

We're going to be ready to promote it, so stick with us.

And I did, sadly, I should have.

I should have gotten lawyers and gotten out of that and gone to Columbia because they didn't.

David Geffen left Asylum and Joe Smith took over.

Joe didn't sign me.

He didn't know much about me.

He just said, I'm told that, you know, we can expect another great album from you.

And I'm out there trying to write songs and get the album out so that I can capitalize on whatever momentum we had.

And that's when I realized that the, the record business is just a total matter of chances.

I mean, it already was finding a ukulele, meeting Dylan, getting to sing at the Newport Folk Festival, having Geffen sign me, and having all those great players play on it.

It was all a string of chances.

So you can go just as wrong as you can go right, you know, a string of terrible mistakes.

And that's where I sort of said, you know what?

I'M just going to be a songwriter.

I don't have to go on tour.

I'll write songs for movies or soundtracks or whatever, or I'll compose music.

And when Geffen had first signed me, there was a farmhouse near Bard that I loved.

You've passed it many, many times.

It's on River Road.

It's on one of the old estates.

And it.

I always loved it.

And so when he signed me and I saw more zeros than I checked and I'd ever seen, I came back here, got the farmhouse, and decided to sort of retire from the music business and just write.

After shoving songs into a drawer for about 15 years, I dug them all out, revamped my studio to be the latest in pro tools with all the best things.

And I'm in there now recording all that backlog of material.

Get out of here.

That.

That brings us up to the present.

Wow.

Yeah, go ahead.

So I think, I feel like.

So I think you covered in depth the self titled album, but then Susie was like two projects, right.

That were sort of combined.

Exactly.

What was the story there?

Good, you did your homework.

Yeah.

So while I was waiting for the first album to come out and get going, I went into the studio with a bunch of musicians to make a sort of a parody record called Volcano Underpants, which was going to be the most outre out there.

It combined elements of Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello.

And Joe Jackson was a neighbor.

And you remember him.

Are you really going, I like Joe.

Jackson a lot, actually.

And I like that song.

I happen to like that song a lot too.

Right.

And.

And Stepping out was.

Was good too.

He was playing with the same people I. I was playing with the Marauder Brothers over in Woodstock.

And Tony Levin, who was Paul Simon's bass player.

Oh, yeah, Tony Levin.

Yeah, yeah.

Tony Lemon, great bass player.

And see, there was a.

There was starting to be a music scene around Rhinebeck and, and, and around Woodstock and stuff that was.

I mean, there had been in Woodstock because of Dylan and the band, and I knew most of the members of the band, we'd actually work together on a project.

So.

So I started to get some things going here and we made this parody album, the.

Which they then changed the name of from Volcano Underpants to your Trout is in the Mail, which I threw out on the.

The record label said, what's the next rep?

Because we want to start promoting it.

And I said, your trout is in the mail, meaning you get this record when it's ready, you know.

And then along came the song Susie and the promo department said, let's just name it Susie, because I think that would be blah, blah, blah.

And then, then the record company said, could you give us an album more like the first one, which we now know how to market and promote?

And I went in and cut a second album.

And at the last minute it was decided to merge them.

One side would be the sort of punk rock garage band with songs like 50 an Hour on the vinyl Decliner and Shake your Fiorucci.

And which was a complete send up of both Elvis Costello's attitude, you know, and.

And a little.

There was a couple of parodies of some really terrible rock bands that we took off because they were a little bit too direct.

One of them was a wicked parody of My Sharona.

And so they merged that together again, which then became another marketing issue.

Which radio stations are going to play it.

The progressive punk rocks are going to play the out there stuff and the mainstream are going to play their more harmonic singer songwriter stuff.

So that made noise for a little bit of a reason there.

But I was already deep into being in Rhinebeck and just writing songs.

They put that record out.

I did a short tour.

I think we did the east coast and the west coast, and.

And that was it.

The first album sold a little under half a million records.

The second album sold about 260,000, if that.

I don't know whether their reports were accurate, but I wanted to do other things and I wanted to get into a studio that I owned so that I could try out stuff.

And I wanted to find local musicians who were interested in pushing the envelope a little bit from where we had been on both those albums, I wanted to make a third album that was really interesting.

The rule in.

The rule in the recording studio was unless someone's willing to crowbar open the trunk of your car to get this record, we're not putting it out.

And of course, it takes years and years to get an album that could have read we were dreaming, but that was the goal.

So.

So of the commercial release albums that are your projects, those.

Those are the three, right?

No.

In 1967, my brother and I were locked in our New York apartment and he injured his foot and I had a cold and we decided to write some songs together.

And since we were both drama major or acting majors at Bard and theater majors, I said, what if we did little comic skits and then a song and then another little comic skit?

And we took that to mgm because I already had a contract with them.

And they said, well, let's go in and try it out.

So we had our first skits together we called an Apple Tree Theater for a couple of reasons.

But Pete Spargo at mgm, Verve, which was their more jazz hip label, said, we're going to put this on Verve Forecast, which is our forward progressive label at mgm.

And it came out and it was a hit.

Time magazine wrote it out, wrote it up.

John Lennon, in an interview with Disc magazine, said it was his favorite new record.

And I think even George Harrison liked because it had some great guitar players on it and a couple of classical musicians.

First violinist for the New York Philharmonic, the cello player for the New York Philharmonic.

That was my brother's influence, but he was a big.

And it had Larry Coriel on guitar solos.

Nobody, nobody was using Larry Corial on rock music, but he was a great rock player.

Yep.

Didn't Steely Dan use him on a couple of records?

Yeah, yeah.

Larry Coriel or Larry Corell?

Yeah, I think so.

I think so.

They're.

They're Hawkins and Dean Parks and Larry Carlton, you may be thinking of.

Maybe it's Larry Carlton.

He's the one who.

They use Larry Carlton quite a bit.

Yeah, he's the 335 guy.

Right, right, right.

Carlton.

Yeah, yeah, Carlton.

And Chuck Rainey was Walter Worship.

I'm gonna get in a lot of trouble for saying this, but Chuck Rainey was the wrong player for my stuff because I was looking more for a solid rhythm base, kick drum, bass drum foundation to build more open, spacey stuff.

On top of which, if you listen to Steely Dan, listen to Asia.

That's a classic example of where I thought the music was going.

I mean, Asia is a cut.

Asia and Dr. Wu are my favorite Steely Dan songs.

And there's an openness there that invites playing a little.

That's perfect.

Instead of.

Instead of.

I mean, when I hear on the radio, I just start to go, this is approaching noise.

And I can't even hear what the keyboard guy is playing.

And it's just all mess.

But those are gems of musicianship and chord structure of Asia is really cool.

What's the name of the record that you made with your brother?

Apple Tree Theater Playback.

Do you have a.

Do you have a website for your music stuff?

Yeah, it's being revamped right now.

Somebody just went to it and said, this website is so outdated.

It's terenceboylan.com.

Okay.

Because that's one of the things we.

We also like to put the word out in general so that people can.

Before the show comes out.

I have to warn you, I'm the worst.

I get things in the can, but it takes me forever to release things.

Right.

Me too, but once.

But then the positive side of that is that I get plenty of lead time to promote you in general.

So that's also helpful.

But, you know, so that's.

So there's the four records of yours, and then you've been writing.

So you did some.

You wrote for TV or movies or in composition.

Right.

And what kind of stuff was that?

It started with Found Money, when the movie Little darlings with Chrissy McDickell and Tatum O', Neill, I think, came out, and they wanted a song to open the movie, and they used one of mine.

And they pay a lot of money.

If it's the song that's under the credits and it's starting the movie, you get one different rate than if it's used, incidentally, during the movie.

And that was a big surprise to me.

So I started pitching songs I wrote.

I mean, they've used my.

My music in Girls and the Sopranos and going all the way back to the early police shows like Matlock and stuff like that.

They would use it, incidentally.

They used one of my songs in Sopranos in the steam bath.

And because they're in a big argument, you can hardly tell it, but they still pay so well, you know, you would really have to know the song to know that that's what was playing in the steam bath.

But they're yelling at each other, so who cares?

And they're paying me all this money to use a bit of a song.

So I've started focusing on that.

That's a living in itself.

Your songs from your records in those.

Or did you write special songs for them?

I wrote special songs.

If they.

If it was a feature film.

The.

The trick of using hit songs was was they.

They do that.

That falls into place by itself.

So Shake.

It was used in two, two or three movies, I think, and I know that well.

It started back with Midnight Cowboy.

Jerome Hellman, director of Midnight Cowboy, with Dustin Hoffman and John Voight used a song of mine called Bring the Whole Family.

And again, it's hard to find in the movie, but that was like an eye opener, too.

Like, if I could get my music in front of film directors, it's.

It's just more money from the same pipeline because they've already been written and recorded.

But then they started saying, could you write another one Kevin Costner film called American Flyer?

They had me write a song called Roll of the dice, roll of the wheel, which I wrote in one night and turned it in and they said, this is perfect.

I was so proud of that.

I could actually do this.

I can write to order.

Which I often wonder.

Do you ever wonder about when composers like, say, with American President, with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning, right, Brilliant theme, but whether they think they can, under pressure, come up with a theme that the director will like that suits the movie, that they're not embarrassed to have been so schmaltzied.

That's a tall order.

And whenever I hear that, I think, did he tremble as he said, this is.

I think, what should be the theme?

That they'd go, ew, that's really terrible.

That's how I felt.

Every time I pitched them a song, you know they're gonna say, no, no, you missed the whole point.

So when they say we love it, it's like, this is great.

I don't know what your opinion of John Williams is, but of course, he's probably the most famous for writing themes that are so iconic and become, know.

Inseparable from the actual movies.

Right.

So John Barry, which.

What did he do?

Out of Africa?

The Stanley Kubrick film.

He did tests, I think he did.

And then his disciple.

Well, I'm.

I won't say that, because that would be probably insulting to his disciple, but he.

He taught someone who then wrote.

Who then wrote four or five of my favorite movie themes.

And.

And.

And actually, they're all so stealable from that.

They.

You see them recycled.

John Barry gets robbed from all the time.

He'll come out with a movie and then three movies.

I'll say that sounds like a John Barry soundtrack, but it isn't.

But he's copied.

John Williams was obviously copied a lot.

Maybe composers like Tchaikovsky were like the original movie composers because of the, you know, the connection to opera and such and musicals and things like that.

Exactly.

You know, they were robbing from each other too.

I'm sure they were.

I don't know if you know Borodin.

There's the song Stranger in Paradise.

My hand.

I'm a stranger in paradise.

Oh, I know that song.

Yes.

All Lost in a Wonderland, right?

Yeah.

The Russian opera from.

From Borodine is.

The melody goes.

So it's the exact note for note.

So close.

Yeah, it's.

No, it's.

It has to be a ripoff.

Yeah, exactly the same.

Nobody even chose to hide it because I think it was out of the.

It was in the public domain, so they didn't even.

I don't Other than getting credit in the reviews saying they.

They lifted a melody and it was.

It's a famous song.

I don't know what the royalty situation was there, but that was going on all the time.

Proal Haram White, A Shade of Pale.

You know the record, right?

Yes.

That.

That piano part is the.

Yes, I think it's part of the story from the Fugue.

So, yeah, people were.

People were lifting movie music, and I was trying to come up with themes.

I wanted to find a theme that was just perfect for a movie and then submit it, even though I hadn't been asked, and have it be so good that they had to say, I can't get that out of my head.

You know that as Time Goes by was not originally supposed to be in Casablanca, and the director, Michael Cortese, thought the song was a turkey.

So at the end of the movie when he goes to edit, he said, now I got to find another song to replace that, and we'll have to reshoot that scene.

And Ingrid Bergman said, you replaced that song.

You replace me.

Wow.

Brave.

It's.

It's that that pairing is very iconic.

I'm actually one of the few people who is not a fan of the song as Time Goes by, and I'm a huge jazz fan.

There was a totally unrelated, but.

But.

But a tangent.

There's a great show called.

Oh, God.

There was a great show with the female British actress who.

Oh, my Lord, now I'm gonna blank on her name.

Give me a hint.

On the show.

I think it's called as Time Goes by, or at least they use the same song in there.

It's a British sitcom.

Old or new?

Old.

Like 60s, 70s, 80s.

Yeah, probably 70s.

80s.

Judi Dench was in it.

I think it's called as Time Goes By.

I like that show a lot.

Okay, now.

Yeah, but who else besides Judi Dench?

I don't remember the name of the.

She's the famous one in the show.

I don't remember the male.

The male actor.

But it's a British sitcom.

I think it is called as Times Go, as Time Goes By.

And I think the theme song is as Time Goes by, so.

So I told you that our.

Our show is.

We've become sort of de facto archivists for the Bard music department.

So part of it is hearing the stories of folks like you getting it on tape and, you know, memorializing everything and, you know, hopefully getting your story the way you want to tell it.

So feel free to tell me something that you think we missed, but I do have a specific question, because we're a music production podcast.

We're actually into the music production process, songwriting.

So you just talked a little bit about songwriting.

I'm a songwriter as well, so I completely sympathize with what you're describing.

I don't know if anything I've written is good or bad.

I just write because no one does.

Yeah, I learned to just, like, strip away myself, you know, a little enough of the self critique just to put stuff out, but I have no clue if it's good or bad.

Did you ever notice that when you finish a song.

Right.

Coming off of it, you think it's the best and you can't wait to play it for somebody who said, this is the best thing I ever wrote, and I really think it's genius.

And then the confidence and it begins to wane a little, and by the time you actually perform it, you're apologizing for taking up their time, saying, I'm really hate to bother you with this, but would you listen to it?

You know, but at the time when you finish it, you are Mozart and Bach, and you're a genius.

Right.

It drives.

Really?

Yes.

And it's hard to finish a song if you don't finish it before that confidence wanes.

So I try to.

I try to stay with the hotspot, you know, while it's still.

Well, I still have a romance going with a song.

Yeah, get.

Get it on tape in some fashion so that I can hear that initial fairy dust that the guys got on it, you know?

Well, it's.

Well, it's in the birthing process, because if you let it sit around, I'm pulling songs out of.

Out of drawers and shoe boxes and on the backs of receipts in my wallet and stuff that as soon as I see it and I forgot that I wrote it, I say, this is really good.

And then I go back in and I'm almost finished with it, and I say, well, maybe it wasn't as good as I first thought it was, but it's.

That first thing you have to remember is the impression that somebody else who's never heard it is going to have.

After you work on it for four days, naturally it's going to start to feel stale.

I can't tell a songwriter enough.

Stay with it.

Stay with the confidence.

Whatever the confidence you first had was.

Go with it all the way.

Some of the.

The.

The only song I wrote that sold a million copies I wrote in 20 minutes, whereas ice and Snow took me a week to write and I was still writing some of the lines when I went in to do the vocal, and I was still adjusting things.

And I love that song.

But the ones that I dashed off seemed to be, you know, catchier or something or less worked over.

Or maybe.

Maybe it's just that the inspiration was so strong that it just all came out.

Dylan said he doesn't feel like he wrote most of the songs that he's really known for.

More like they wrote themselves through him.

More like they were delivered to him.

They came to him.

He doesn't know from where.

And in one conversation, though, I can tell you Dylan's whole operational motive or operational mechanism was to write a song to another melody and then change melody.

So he would take an already existing song, write another song to it, and then figure out how to change enough so nobody would notice.

He didn't always.

For example, how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man blowing in the wind?

Okay.

A song that he was doing in his set before that was no more Auction Block for Me.

No more, no more.

No more Driving Wheel for me.

Many thousand gone.

Answer my friends.

But it's.

It's.

They're so close.

Same with Don't Think Twice.

Same with Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, which was a melody from Lord Randall, my son.

The melody for Don't Think Twice he actually lifted from Paul Clayton, another folk singer, changed it around a little bit.

There's a number of.

Of melodies that he didn't even bother to change because they were traditional melodies.

And he could just say he arranged and adapted it.

But that actually makes songwriting a lot easier.

Just.

It's already half there.

Write the lyrics to another melody, then work on changing the melody till no one could recognize it.

Try it.

I believe it or not, I have tried it in a sort of way where I tried it with.

Actually, I think.

I think anything that gets you to write the song is okay.

So any trick you want to play on yourself, any game you want to play is fine.

I tried writing Taylor Swift songs by taking all of her lyrics and making.

Writing the opposite of what she said and changing it from major to minor.

I've written a song like that.

Luckily, I have a friend who's also a songwriter.

We co write, and so he'll start a song and I'll steal one of his lines and I'll steal his melody because I'll just credit him as co writer.

And then, you know, but it's.

I don't care.

I mean, I'm.

I'm almost 50 years old.

So whatever gets the job done.

Whatever the job.

Whatever gets the job done is good.

I didn't know the Dylan trick of writing to another melody or even taking someone else's lyrics and writing and writing into it.

Writing another melody or adapting it so that it's not recognizable, and then writing your own lyrics to the melody that you wrote to another song worked just as well, too.

It's all fine with me.

Mine, my inspiration always seemed to be a line would come into my head at the same time as a melody.

And I'd quick write it down and I'd write the chords over it.

So like, I'm on the Taconic Parkway and I singing, did she finally get to you?

And I thought, okay, that's going to be the song.

That's the chorus of the song.

Now I got to build everything around it.

That's on the second album of An Asylum, so the third album.

And when I played it for Paul Harris, you know who Paul Harris is.

Okay, so there's an unsung hero we should know.

And he hung around at Bard quite a bit because he lived with me.

He was with Steve Stills, Manassas, he was with Crosby, Stills and Nash as the piano player.

He followed Steve Stills into his next band, which I think was the Young, Still Young Stills Band.

Did you know that that even existed?

No.

Neil Young and Steve Stills.

The one.

One song they did was Long May Run.

We've Been Through Some Things Together with Bronx of Memory still to Come.

And so they were tinkering with this song and they said, let's just do it as a.

As us and put it out and it was a hit.

Very cool.

Wow.

Ronstadt, who doesn't do any of her old own songs, she wrote part of one, was always looking for songwriters with.

With good stuff.

And she discovered a lot.

I mean, she was early singing Jackson Brown, early singing JD Souther.

She was the first record out on Desperado, I think the Eagle Song.

That's on their second album.

She had a great ear for.

For picking out songs, but she used to come to me and say, will you co write a song with me so that I can finally say I wrote something?

I'll tell you what I want to say, you know, what's in my heart.

And I said, sure.

We worked on a lot of stuff and we have.

We have fragments, but we never finished one.

And, you know, one of us would be off on tour or whatever.

But I admire the way she found songs that stuck in her head and she said, I Have to do that song.

That's how she said it.

She never said I want to.

She said, I have to do that song.

Cool.

I think so for a lot of people who are songwriters, they pick it up at a certain time, probably high school.

But I feel like you.

You were writing when you were really a kid.

And so for any writer getting into that childhood, sort of childish, sort of mind of excitement where you're not in your own way, some people call it like flow state.

Things like that is very important.

I started playing guitar when I was 12, but I didn't start writing until high school.

So playing I play guitar is natural to me.

When in High School.

14, 15, 16.

You know, I don't remember the first.

So the first song I ever wrote was probably after Pearl Jam 10 came out.

So I'd have to.

I could only tell you what time when it was based on the fact that it had to be after that that record came out.

There are those who would say that the mark of a songwriter is that someone else wants to do their song.

So it's almost like saying anybody can write a song, but if you write one good enough or interesting that someone else wants to record it, that's a.

That's the badge of honor.

So when other people do your songs, it's kind of a.

It kicks it up a notch.

Even if you hate the way they did it, which, you know, I've had a couple of mine done where I go, what were they thinking?

You know, that's awesome.

So.

So.

So now you say you're doing some.

A record.

So actually, so we'll probably.

I don't want to take up your whole day.

We've been on, I think for about an hour.

So I'd like to wrap it up.

You said you are doing a record.

Now, all that backlog of stuff.

I'm going to record it all and I'm going to pick.

Well, the paradigm is so changed.

So let's just talk 30 seconds about that.

Yeah.

Oh, I have time if you have time.

I want to be responsible.

Nobody has.

Nobody has a CD player anymore, let alone, you know, and you can't hand somebody a thumb drive because, you know, so everything.

So I'm streaming on YouTube and Spotify and all the main streaming things.

YouTube is amazing.

I haven't been able to stump them in the last couple of months.

They've.

They've caught up that much to.

I mean, ask YouTube for Ursul Hickey.

You never can tell.

Nobody knows that song.

Local Boy makes good in Buffalo.

He Had a hit called Bluebirds over the Mountain that nobody, nobody ever remembers.

But I tried them on that.

Boom, there it was.

I couldn't believe it.

They have all my stuff.

Spotify has everything.

What does the other music have?

Everything.

Yeah, go ahead.

I don't know what the other big streamers is, but that whole paradigm is so changed that when this stuff comes out, a guy came to me named Lorenzo and he said I.

You don't know how to get your music out there.

I guarantee you, if you're not 22 like me, you don't know all the channels.

So when you're ready, when you want to put this stuff out and start being streaming and completely revamp your website, I'm there for you.

So that's where I'm going to deliver it, basically.

Know what this is?

Because you don't really put out records anymore.

You don't put out.

You know, it just goes out into the world on.

On various things.

I think everybody should at least go back.

You know, it's very popular to go back to vinyl.

A lot of people are buying turntables and putting on vinyl.

I think that, that there should be a resurgence of CD players in cars.

My Volvo has the best sound system I've ever heard in a room or anywhere.

It's a 14 speaker Harman Kardon.

I hear things in that system that I didn't.

That I never heard in records, even in my own.

I mean, it's, it's.

It's a phenomenal system.

So if they put CD jukeboxes in all the cars, somewhere in the back next to the spare tire, and you could just dial up on the, you know, C12 or whatever, that would be brilliant because then people would start sharing music again.

You can't share streaming except people in the room.

You can.

You can share it by texting or emailing somebody a link to it.

If you use.

So when I release.

Listening to it on an iPhone.

Yeah.

Which is not optimal.

And also it's not.

Well, some.

Which is not optimal.

Some.

Some services have used lossless audio.

You can actually.

So Apple Music, I think Spotify 2 has lossless versions.

I do.

I come out of a.

Either a Chrome device that has lossless or WAV files coming out of the thing.

And I plug in this, the Sony 8 inch into a full powered.

When I release music, I use a distributor called CD baby.

Huh.

And you just basically load.

They actually walk you through it through.

It's like a fill.

It's an online form and you just fill out Each step all along the way.

I use CD, baby.

Back in the late 90s.

Yeah, yeah.

When they first came out, I.

We did a CD with them.

We did two, actually.

And then I sold through Amazon, you know, do you.

You have the rights to all your music or does.

Do the record company still have that?

I signed a contract that I can release everything that was on Warner Brothers or Rhino, you know, Rhino, right.

Big Rhino.

Yeah, Rhino, right.

I have a lot of stuff on Rhino.

The original Rhino store was in Ulster County.

No, I think.

Was there a store.

Rhino Records.

The record company had a store, and I think there was only one of them.

I. I may be speaking out of term, but there was only one of them.

And I'm fairly certain it was like somewhere on nine.

I heard that too.

Yeah.

And I went there one time, Rhino Records, and I bought a record.

I bought a Herbie Hancock cd.

Yeah, I know what that.

I don't know if that was or.

If it's not the same company with.

The Rhino label, but I. I remember Rhino Records.

Huh?

The store.

So.

At Bard, by the way, here's another.

Definitely worth 30 seconds.

There were.

Besides Walter and Donald and the thing.

Tony McKay was a pretty decent jazz piano player.

Chevy Chase was.

You know, he knew three or four Bill Evans songs, so he thought of himself as a.

As a jazz player.

He was, I think, primarily a drummer.

Walter and Donald.

Jamie Chase, the comedic actor.

Yeah, yeah.

He was.

Also Played music.

Yeah, he was in three bands at bar.

Walter and Donald did a pickup band for.

Because they got hired to play the spring prom at Blythewood.

So they needed a drummer and a bass player.

They got Chevy on drums and another bass player who then had to go to Vermont for some reason.

So I had to fill in.

I seemed to be filling in on base.

And then Chevy had a band called Leather Canary, and then he played in a pickup band at the Magdalene.

You, You.

You missed the Magdalene.

But it was across from the campus just before you cross into Columbia county, you know, near Tivoli or whatever.

That was a night spot.

And all the faculty went there too, and they always had a band.

But then in the.

In the music department, for example, we had Jake Druckmann, famous composer.

No, now we have Joan Tower, but we had.

Jake Druckmann is now at Yale, if he's still among the warm.

And he was a great guy.

He got me through Schoenberg, Hindemith and retrograde inversions.

You know, I mean, that was a tough course without.

Without Jake, I would have never been There we had some early.

We had some jazz writers.

I think one of them is still there, who were also musicians.

There were kids like John Jacobs and Art Carlson.

Had a band called Big noise in the 70s.

That was.

I'd say it was.

They were definitely ahead of their time.

Don Jacobs is an amazing blues player.

So when I got to Bard.

Oh, and by the way, Dylan was living in Woodstock at that time at his manager Albert Grossman's house, Stream Road.

So when you get bored of the Woodstock, you come over to Bard.

You know, I think he was there to pick up girls, but he liked going to Adolph.

But very often they wouldn't get there.

Adolf almost called last call.

So a couple of times when Dylan came over and he said, where else is there to go?

And I'd say, my room, where I have an ice box and beer and wine.

And.

So a couple of times he got just enough to sleep under.

Under my bed.

He didn't like sleeping on top of it, but.

And then he'd wake up in his clothes and be ready to go.

It amazed me that Dylan could.

Could drink one night.

I only had sweet vermouth.

So he drank sweet vermouth on the rocks until 2 in the morning and then wrote that song, if you gotta go, go now or else you gotta stay all night.

He wrote that in Potter, A.

You know, the dorm.

Potter, Right, Potter.

Potter in Stone Row.

Yeah.

That was the room he wrote that song in.

I may have lived in Potter.

Yeah, I lived in Potter.

Everybody lived in Potter at one time or another.

So Dylan was there.

And the guy across the hall from me, Jim Fine, said, all I've got is sweep vermouth.

I said, bring it over.

You know, we got.

So this girl had to leave at 10 because there was a curfew, right?

So she stayed until 12 when she knew the guy at Tewksbury was going to go off duty for a half an hour, right?

Get his lunch hour.

And that's when Dylan wrote, if you got to go, go now or else you got to stay all night.

Because she said, I have to go or else I have to stay here all night.

And he just said, well, there's a song right there.

So how anybody could get mildly loaded on sweet vermouth and wake up the next morning and be ready to go.

He was already smoking a cigarette and playing the guitar.

You know, that's something that I. I need to, you know, come about.

As they say.

I need to get there.

He had endless energy.

Endless.

Why was jiggling all the time.

He Never stopped moving.

If he was talking to you, both his knees were wiggling.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I thought Timothy Chalamet did a few interesting takes on him in that.

I mean, I. I'm not a. I. I didn't know him personally, so I thought it was amazing, the movie.

Except the biggest joke is nobody would ever let Dylan go.

He was the worst motorcycle driver.

He was the worst driver.

Nobody wanted to get in a car with him driving.

Because, first of all, you know, he would put his glasses on and you look through the glasses and they would be absolutely filthy.

And he's like Mr. Magoo, you know?

But in that scene where Chalamet hops on his.

On his motorcycle to drive to Newport, that didn't happen.

Then Susie Rollo jumps on the back of it, you know, like, let's go.

Yeah.

No, that's.

That's a four out of five.

No, and then.

And then other people.

If.

He said.

If Dylan said, I'll drive everybody.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

I gotta cover.

So that's when he came to Adolf.

She either had Bobby Newerth or Victor May Mood as or Dave Boy.

His three.

Three roadies would bring him.

So there was a scene at Bard.

That's.

I'm wrapping it up.

There was a scene at Bard with musicians.

We had a folk club called the Red Balloon, which then became a jazz club.

Combo played there a hundred times.

Jazz trios played there.

Herbie Hancock played there once.

When he came, he played in the old gym.

And the owner, the manager of the Red Balloon, the coffee house on campus, said, would you do a set over at the Red Balloon?

It'll help.

Help us get things going.

That was great.

Blythe Danner, the actress.

Yeah, singer.

And she used to do.

She could be convinced to stand up and do, like, scat.

Singing, improvisation.

She always did like, these are a few of my favorite things.

Was the best version I ever heard of it.

Waltz for Debbie, Bill Evans thing.

She also could.

She could go out there with vocal things that I hadn't heard anybody doing yet.

She was inventing a kind of a style.

She got nodes on her throat.

Great actress, by the way.

I watched her in a lot of plays at Bard.

I did the lights for two of her plays.

You know what happens then.

You see all the rehearsals, all the dress rehearsals and all the performances.

And I watched her evolve a character and develop someone.

To my astonishment, by closing night, it was miles from the first rehearsal and it was brilliant.

Yeah.

Pretty lucky.

I. I love.

I loved Blythe.

She was terrific.

She is terrific.

So to be continued.

You check out greatest music ever.

London based.

Yes.

Look at some of the people he's invited who have said yes.

Yes.

And I will check him.

That's impressive.

Yeah, it is.

I think he's like 24 or 5.

Yeah.

Well, this is a.

This is a plot.

Podcasting is a young man's game.

Yeah.

You're young.

I'm a late comer.

You're a babe in the woods.

Yeah.

So edit out anything I said that's illegal and.

Sure.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So I'll, I'll, I'll be.

I'll promote your stuff and I'll get your name out there and you know, if you ever wanna.

Well, actually, if you want to come back on the show when you're promoting your next record.

Great, then do it because we want to.

And let us know.

Stay in touch.

Keep us on your mailing list if you have one.

Love to.

Okay.

If there's anything going on, I'll send.

You a link to the updated website.

Although you.

Right.

Oh, no, the old One is Terence Boylan.com still up is easy enough to find.

So whenever they put the new one up, it'll be the same.

Your URL, I presume.

Right.

Exactly.

Of course.

So that's the only one people need.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah, so we, we want to know.

I want to know.

New record.

Anything.

Do whatever you're doing, anything musically.

Keep us, you know, in the loop.

Okay.

You live near Bard still.

Oh, okay.

So, okay.

I'm, I'm, I live in Brooklyn but I'm moving upstate, but I'm still going to be somewhat far.

I'm going to be in near Saratoga fairly soon.

So.

Yeah, my niece sort of commutes between Brooklyn and upstate New York and, and likes it.

She's got a job in the city, but now it's, you know, most people are four day work week.

It's kind of.

Yeah.

Country houses get more and more important.

Yeah, Yeah.

I have a country seat, you know.

But yeah, no, it's a pleasure meeting you and I will keep you posted.

Yeah.

Appreciate it.

Thanks for being on the show.

Really loved it.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Terrence.

Okay, bye.

Take care.