On the other hand, like many American boys of their time, they had a healthy enthusiasm for baseball, baseball players and Topps bubble gum, the gum that came with baseball cards in each package: Flip ‘em, scale ‘em. Before they were out of high school, Donald had taught himself jazz piano and Walter had become adept at both bass and guitar.Īfter meeting as students at Bard College in upstate New York, they began writing songs together on the piano in the common room of Walter’s dormitory. By then, in addition to jazz music, they had independently become enamoured of Chicago blues, soul music and, to an extent, the vibrant subculture that embraced the British Invasion, Bob Dylan and, as the Coen brothers have put it, the “new freedoms”. All these things, plus, for good or ill, a natural, shared drollery, were already apparent in their music and lyrics. When classmate Terence (Boona) Boylan scored an album contract with Columbia Records, he asked the boys to join his session band at Jerry Ragovoy’s midtown Manhattan studio, the Hit Factory, where they got to work with the legendary drummer Herb Lovelle and listen to the “Ragman” tell funny stories about his life in the music business. In 1968, the duo found cheap digs in pre-gentrification Brooklyn, on President Street in Park Slope, where they sat around on ancient, shabby couches and plotted their assault on the music business. Amazingly, they soon got a gig touring as part of the backup band for early sixties hitmakers Jay and the Americans. The group had a production company, whatever that is, in the famous Brill Building, a once vibrant hive of songwriting talent that had now transitioned into a skeevy, decadent phase. Working with the group on the road and in the studio, the boys got to hear Jay and the fellows tell some even raunchier, funnier stories about the music business and also meet some actual gangsters. One of the Americans, Kenny Vance, managed to place one of their tunes on a Barbara Streisand album that featured songs by the new, groovy generation of writers. Donald and Walter also played sessions for Vance’s Brooklyn crony Gary Katz. By the early seventies, they had worked with many top NYC session pros including drummer Buddy Saltzman, bassist Chuck Rainey, pianists Paul Griffin and Artie Butler, and guitarists Elliot Randall, Dom Troiano, Ricky Zehringer (later Derringer) and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter.
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