Billy Vera

Billy Vera is living proof that the cream does rise to the top. The veteran singer/songwriter was propelled into the spotlight with the success of his hit ballad, “At This Moment” on the independent Rhino Records label. This year is shaping up to be a great one for Vera. He signed with Capitol Records and his label debut, “Retronuewavo,” is due out this spring. He’s currently appearing with Willie Nelson in HBO’s Baja Oklahoma.

Though Vera’s name may be new to many music fans, the artist has been in the business for more than 25 years and has weathered many storms on the way to his current success. A native of Riverside, CA, Vera’s family relocated to New York where his Dad became an announcer for NBC and his Mom performed as one of the Ray Charles Singers.

“When I was 12 or 13 I decided I wanted to be a rock ‘n roll singer,” he said. “So I got a guitar and started writing songs.”

One of those early tunes, “Mean Old World,” was recorded by Rick Nelson. It was the first song Vera had ever taken to a publisher.

“They did it five weeks in a row on the Ozzie and Harriet Show and I was on my way,” Vera recalls. “I thought ‘what an easy business. Just write a song and bring it down to somebody and the next thing you know you’ve got a record’.”

It didn’t take Vera long to learn the music business wasn’t as easy an endeavor as he had originally thought, but he continued to write and perform. He became a staff writer with April-Blackwood Music where Tony Orlando was a song plugger and other staff writers such as Chip Taylor were turning out hits like “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning.”

Vera credits Taylor with teaching him a lot about the craft of songwriting.

“Chip had been around a little bit more and he taught me how to really write and craft a song,” Vera recalls. “One day I brought him in a song to see if I could make a demo and it sounded like something out of the top ten, and Chip said don’t ever write songs like that. He said you might have a hit with a song like that but 20 years from now nobody is going to be singing that song. He said try to write a song that’s fresh and different and unique.

“And my biggest gripe today about the songs I get pitched,” Vera continues, “is that you can predict exactly where the melody and the chords and even the words are going to. And the public doesn’t buy songs like that, but these are the songs you get from publishers. So the thing I always try to do, and God knows I’m not the most successful songwriter in the world, but I always try to make it sound a little different.”

That philosophy helped Vera and Taylor get several cuts back then including a tune recorded by Barbara Lewis called “Make Me Belong to You” which was covered nearly 50 times in several countries.

Soon after he inked his own recording deal with Atlantic Records and released two duets with Judy Clay, “Storybook Children” and “Country Girl-City Man,” which fared well on the charts. Next he released a Bobby Goldsboro tune, “With Pen in Hand.”

“We had a nice little run on Atlantic,” Vera recalls. “Then toward the end of the 60’s the business changed a lot. A lot of he artists were writing their own records, so it became a hard time for songwriters. Even great writers like (Gerry) Goffin and (Carole) King stopped getting records. It used to be that singers were singers and songwriters were songwriters. But there wasn’t much of a place for songwriters at that time.

“Also the style of music changed. There I was a blue-eyed soul singer in a world of psychodelia. I couldn’t fit in. I couldn’t change to go with every little thing so I had a dry spell of about ten years. Real dry. The only thing that happened was that people kept cutting “Storybook Children” and “Make Me Belong To You” every once in awhile. Occasionally I’d get a record deal but nothing really happened until the Dolly Parton record.”

That record was a tune Vera wrote called “I’ve Really Got the Feeling” which Parton took to the top of the charts in 1979. The success of that song led to a publishing deal with Warner Brothers with the stipulation that Vera move to Los Angeles.

After moving to L.A. Vera formed a group called the Beaters that became one of the hottest groups on that city’s music scene. They signed with Alpha Records and released two albums. Their first single, “I Can Take Care of Myself,” went top 40. The second single, “At This Moment” died at 79.

But you just can’t keep a good song down. Though the Japanese-based Alpha Records closed its American offices after the release of Vera’s second LP, five years later Rhino (best known for their reissues of rock classics) licensed the masters and released a compilation of the two Alpha LPs. The album, By Request: Billy Vera and the Beaters contained “At This Moment.” The song was used on two episodes of NBC’s hit sitcom Family Ties.

“The second time it played NBC got 9,000 calls, which they claim is the most in the history of the network for a song,” Vera claims proudly. “Then people started calling up radio stations and the next thing you know it’s number one. And on top of that, the album went gold. Usually when a song becomes a big hit off a television show, that’s it. The single becomes a hit and the album flops. But for some reason there was good word of mouth on this album and so the album went gold.”

Vera says he started writing “At This Moment” in 1977.

“I wrote about the first 2/3 of it one day and I usually write one song in one day. And if it can’t keep my interest in one day I figure it’s no good. But this one I just put it aside. For some reason I just couldn’t come up with an ending for it. A girl I had just started dating told me about breaking up with her boyfriend and she was very articulate about it so I wrote it from his point of view. But I couldn’t finish it. So about a year later when we broke up I knew what the ending should be.”

Vera said the tune was recorded by Rita Coolidge, Lynn Anderson and Katie Sagal.

“I just knew he song would someday be a hit when the right version came out at the right time,” Vera said. His faith and perseverance paid off.

Is there a moral to his story?

“The moral is that nobody knows,” Vera said. “You know all these people are supposed to have golden ears, but nobody knows. I’ve had two really big songs and a big person in this business told, not me, but other people, that both of them stunk, that they’d never make it. But both of them went to number one.”

Vera says there are very few people around today with really good ears, people who can hear a hit even in its rawest form.

“I prefer to listen to piano/voice demos, but I think those days are gone,” he laments. “I hate to say it, but there’s not many people who can hear hit songs like that anymore, they need to hear a master. It’s a pity cause the old timers like Jerry Wexler and those guys could hear a hit song. I’ve been in the room when they’ve gotten terrible cassettes with out of tune guitars and one guy who could hardly sing and they could hear a hit through that. That’s what you used to call a song man. There aren’t many of them left.

“So unfortunately these days songwriters have to go to the expense of making good demos. And a lot of people don’t write songs, they write records, where the bass line and the guitar licks and the shoo bops are all part of the song. That’s one of the reasons you don’t get a lot of covers. Twenty years ago if I had a song like “At This Moment” I would have 100 covers in the next three months. You would have had Ray Conniff and Mitch Miller and Mantovani and Perry Como’s versions. Everybody would have recorded the song on their album and you might have had five or six singles out competing with each other. That was a great time for songwriters. But now it doesn’t work that way. People want songs that nobody has recorded yet. In one sense I think that’s hurt the income of songwriters because when you had songs done by different artists they played on different radio stations.”

Of the different trends he’s observed in the business, Vera says the pendulum seems to be swinging back in favor of songwriters in one area. There are now a lot of singers who don’t write and are looking for good songs. He says George Benson’s manager told him “That back in the good ole days you’d be sitting in your dressing room and some rock and roller would come in and say ‘anybody got any good dope?’ and they had that certain look on their face. Now they come in and ask if anybody’s got any songs.

“A lot of people don’t write,” Vera says. “You know I think Bette Midler told him that story because she’s a songwriter persay. And people like that need songs, like Linda Ronstadt. It’s coming around again where there are some people that just sing. So they’re desperate for songs, because most people that write songs now are artists and they keep the best songs to themselves. So if you have a song for somebody it ought to be easier than it was. We just went through a bad ten year period where we had everybody writing their own or the disco period where the producers were writing the songs.”

As to what advice he has for aspiring songwriters, Vera says, “I’m gonna tell them what I was told. All songs are like short stories. They should have a beginning, a middle and an end lyrically. And don’t just try to copy the top ten. Try to write songs that you could hear people singing 20 years from now. Write a song with words and melody and try to make it sound fresh. Listen and be honest with yourself. If it makes you yawn or sounds like something you’ve heard a million times, throw it away, change that part. Try to find a chord that couldn’t be the one to follow normally there. Try to find another way of saying something than the average. Down with mediocrity is our motto for today.

“But most of all, if you really believe in something, no matter how many people tell you it stinks, keep trying.”