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Ever
heard "Swingtown" or "Serenade"
by The Steve Miller Band? If you haven't recently,
pull out your copy of The Steve Miller Band's multi-platinum
Greatest Hits LP or else turn on the
classic rock station and you're bound to hear them.
Those two massive hits, from Fly Like an
Eagle and Book of Dreams respectively,
were CO-written by a Dallas-raised songwriter by the
name of Chris McCarty, also known as Christopher B.
Chris has worked off and on as a songwriter with Steve
Miller for many years, and although his songs with
Steve have been few, most of them have been hits.
In
addition to the above-mentioned songs, Chris also
wrote three tracks on Miller's 1993 comeback
album Wide River, including the title
track, and a minor hit called "Bongo Bongo"
on the overlooked but critically-appreciated Steve
Miller album Italian X-Rays (1984).
Chris has also written songs for numerous movie soundtracks
and even hosts on the pilot of a proposed TV variety
show called "The New Beat". It is only recently
that Christopher B has decided to work as a performer,
and this week he is introducing himself to the public
at The Curtain Club as The Christopher B Band. His
repertoire includes spectacular versions of his famous
Steve Miller collaborations, which are fascinating
to hear not only as alternate takes on those famous
songs but also as versions that are closer to the
original intention of the songs before they made their
way through numerous channels and were transformed
into the versions that we know today.
Chris is a person who does not like to stay in one
place for long, as he has lived and traveled all over
the country. When we met Chris at the Stoneleigh Hotel
in Turtle Creek he immediately began discussing a
new musical project he’s been working on in Austin,
which all started when he met an Austin-based singer/guitarist
named Carolyn Wonderland.
CB: I went down some months ago to put a new band
together. In the course of being down there I heard
about a girl named Carloyn Wonderland. I wanted to
see her at Antone’s, but just missed her. On
another one of my trips I was going through New Mexico
and made my way up through
Colorado and eventually landed in Denver. In downtown
Denver there’s a blues bar, and I saw that she
was playing. I checked it out that night and she was
just great. She’s a young girl in her mid-20’s
who plays guitar and sings. She plays every bit as
good as Bonnie Raitt plays, sings every bit as good
as Bonnie Raitt sings, and when she wails she can
wail as good as Janis Joplin. I ended up talking to
her a while after the gig and then on the phone numerous
times.
When
I was back in Austin a couple of months ago she was
at the Saxton Pub, where she plays quite a bit, and
she was hosting an independent CD release party, which
I attended. The next
day she invited me to a gospel brunch on Sixth Street.
There’s a black lady who owns a club downtown
and she puts on this brunch and invites a lot of black
rhythm and blues gospel acts to come in and play for
it. There were some other people sitting in and playing
including a cat by the name of Papa Malley, who used
to be in a well-known reggae act called the Killer
Bees, Gerth Morlex, who produces and plays bass for
Lucinda Williams, Carolyn Wonderland, and an assortment
of other people.
The
next day I invited them all back to the hotel I was
staying at called the San Jose Hotel,
which is a really cool renovated hotel across the
street from the Continental Club in Commerce, and
we jammed there all day. The music was so good that
I thought, “Maybe we should be recording some
of this.” Last week I went back and we’ve
been recording some of these songs, and we got some
really cool stuff down. I’m calling it “The
Sessions from the San Jose Hotel Room 50”. These
particular musicians involved have to be the best
of the best in the Austin Scene. It’s just something
that I went with my instincts on and it seems to be
turning out really well.
DM: Let’s jump all the
way back to the late 1960’s/early 70’s when
you first met Steve Miller.
CB: I was 17 or 18. I grew up here in Dallas, although
I never met Steve, who was also grew up here. He was
older than I was so I never knew him, although I did
know his younger
brother Jim. I was out on the West Coast on a road
trip. Having just dropped out of college, I was picking
jobs as a DJ for underground FM music stations and
as an actor. And then I was invited to a big party
in Marin County, just above the Golden Gate bridge
in San Francisco; it was Steve Miller’s party.
It
was an impressive party with lot of cool people, rock
stars—I was fairly awed by the whole scene, having
never been to a big rock star’s party before.
I wandered down a hallway and ended up by myself in
a backroom at Steve Miller’s house, and it was
full of incredible classic guitars. Since I was way
down the hallway I figured I could probably pick one
up for a second before anyone would notice. So I picked
one up and sat down on a couch and started playing
for a few minutes. Then all of a sudden I felt a presence
in the room. I looked around, and Steve Miller was
standing in the doorway, staring at me playing his
$75,000 guitar. I knew it was all over, Miller was
going to kick me out of the party, it would be my
last big rock star party. (laughs)
I was beginning to make apologies and put the guitar
back, and he walked over and asked me “What was
that you were playing?” “Well, it was some
music I made up.” “Really?” Then he
went over and got another guitar and sat down with
me and said, “Play it again.” So I started
playing it again and he started playing along with
me. We must have jammed for an hour and a half. I
left that
party in a daze; it was very cool to have jammed with
Steve Miller.
Well,
lo and behold, six months later I was living in LA
and I got a phone call from Steve Miller. I have no
idea how he got it but he had gotten it. He said,
“Hey, some of those songs you were playing I
really liked a lot. I’m working on a new record;
could I fly you back up here to the Bay
Area to work with me on some stuff?” And of course
I said, “Yeah, I could do that.” So I made
it up there, and those sessions have become things
that have been recorded over the years. I first started
with Steve on the <I>Fly Like and Eagle</I>
record, and I’ve written with him more or less
ever since.
DM:
What was it like doing a songwriting session with
Steve Miller?
CB: Well in this case it would usually be some idea
I would bring to the table
or a song I had somewhat completed that I would sing
him and we would begin to play with it, maybe by improving
the melody or the chorus or adding a bridge to it.
There have been other cases where Steve would have
a song and I would come in and work with it either
melodically or lyrically. And then there have been
a few cases where we’d just sit down and start
jamming together. But it hasn’t always been a
case of me sitting down with him. In some cases I’ll
send him a demo of something I’ve got and if
he likes it he’ll go in and tailor it.
DM: What makes your songwriting
attractive to Steve Miller?
CB: Well, Steve has always told me that we think alike
musically. It may be our roots, the combination of
influences, that would include blues, rockabilly,
bluegrass, gospel and the
combination of styles that make up rock and roll.
But I also think we think alike lyrically. I can write
narrative songs like he does but I can also get trippy,
poetic and abstract in a place that he likes to go
to.
DM:
So essentially having Chris McCarty around for Steve
is like having a second Steve around so to speak that
he can bounce these ideas off of, and they come together
because the two of you think alike so much.
CB:
Well, obviously I think there’s enough of a difference
because he wouldn’t bother writing with me if
I didn’t bring something to the table that he
didn’t. But I’m going to bring something
in the ballpark of what he is interested in.
DM:
We looked up what songs you wrote with him at the
beginning. There were only a few songs on Fly
Like and Eagle and Book of Dreams
that you CO-wrote, but those happened to be the big
hits. They were picked as hits and went boom! on the
charts, which says something about that chemistry.
ow were the two of you working together on the Italian
X-rays album, which was a critical success
but not a big commercial hit?
CB:
X-rays was written in the mid-eighties
when New Wave music was happening, so a lot of the
roots rock and rollers were being dismissed at the
time for this so-called “New Wave” of music
that was coming in. I think it’s too bad that
people think they have to get rid of other artists
to make way for new artists; I don’t know why
they can’t mutually all exist.
DM:
I agree.
CB: On that one I had a song I called “Born to
Dance”; and it was a fun little
song about a girl who was born to dance, “Putting
her rouge on, slipping her shoes on, my baby's gettin'
ready to dance; modern jazz and ballet...” And
a funny thing happened in the studio when Steve was
recording it; he started playing with a synthesizer
and said something about “Bongo” and it
made a strange effect so he tried it again. And it
became a cool enough riff to where he re-titled my
song “Bongo Bongo”. I wasn’t too sure
what to think of that after it happened, but it turned
out OK as it was picked for a single. It was a cool
video too, one that ended up on MTV at the time.
DM:
How much was Steve embracing the emerging keyboard
technology of that time,
having the blues/R & B roots and then trying to
make records at a time when the New Wave was trying
to replace that?
CB: I think he did all the right things on that record.
A lot of it had to do with how he was using as his
keyboard player at the time. Steve has had keyboard
players in his band more times than not over the years,
going back to the very beginning. On the <I>X-rays</I>
album it was Byron Allred, who I think brought a lot
of cool stuff to the table. But Steve didn’t
go too crazy with the keyboards; I think he used it
sparingly throughout that time. And that’s why
his music still sounds fresh all these years later,
because he doesn’t get caught up in all the fads
to where it sounds dated. He knows what he’s
doing in that regard.
DM:
Miller's music is timeless in a way. Even when I listen
to Steely Dan, the music may be timeless but the words,
with their hip seventies lingo, date those records,
whereas Steve writing about a guy and girl running
away together or whatever is something that could
have happened at any time throughout the modern era.
Now writing for Steve isn’t the only thing you’ve
done, as you’ve written for other artists as
well. What are some of the other things you’ve
done over the years, especially ones that you’re
really proud of?
CB: I was hanging out in Nashville in the early nineties
when the big country boom was happening, and co- wrote
a song for Martina McBride called “A Woman Knows”.
Although it didn’t become a hit single, it was
intended to be a hit single. It was Martina’s
first album and she was going to open a show for Garth
Brooks, and it was assumed she’d become a big
star immediately like Trisha Yearwood did a year earlier.
Martina really liked my song as did her producer,
who felt it would be a career record for her. It was
planned to have it be the final big hit of the record
after two or three big hits, but unfortunately I think
they rolled out the wrong ones up front and it stalled
out a little bit. The reason for telling you this
is that she did perform it on the Grand Ole Opry,
so in that sense I’ve made the Grand Ole Opry.
DM: What advice would you have
for someone who is trying to break into songwriting
as a living?
CB:
Well, you have to be a gambler, in the sense that
from day to day, week to week, month to month, year
to year, you don’t know if the cards will fall
your way or not. You have to be
willing to take the good with the bad in that some
people will be dismissive of your material and nothing
happens with it. And it wasn’t necessarily that
it was a bad song, it just wasn’t the right song
at the right time for those people. So you have to
be confident in what you do and keep rolling.
There
have been cases where something didn’t happen
at first but came back to happen. One example with
me goes back to Steve Miller and the song “Wide
River”. Quite a few years ago I
had written that song and given a version of it to
Steve. He worked on it a bit and then cut it, but
never put it on a record because he didn’t feel
it quite happened. I was up in Santa Fe one summer
a few years later doing some songwriting and pulled
that song out again, played with the structure a bit
and sent it back to him. Something clicked with him
because it became the title track to the last original
record he did.
DM: That was a good comeback
record for him, too.
CB: Yeah, that song definitely became a hit; Rolling
Stone called that album a return to the Fly
Like an Eagle type of records he used to make.
Back to songwriting advice, another thing is to hook
up with others in the songwriting community. In Nashville
they have a group called the Nashville Songwriters’
Association International (NSAI) and they have a lot
of affiliate groups all over the country. It’s
not just for Nashville but rather covers songwriters
all over the world. The dues are very minimal, and
they will put you in touch with publications and information
you would want to know about concerning the business
side of songwriting as well of the craft of songwriting.
DM: Why have you made the decision
to be a performer now instead of just a
songwriter?
CB: Well, I have done some performing over the years,
I just never decided to take the time to do just performing.
Steve said, “Well you could come out one the
road with me if you want,” but I just opted not
to because I was also doing some things in the film
and TV world. So the time just felt right. Also my
father passed away recently, so I decided to come
back to Dallas and stay a while. I hooked up with
the musicians who are now in the band. We’ve
been doing gigs at a couple of small bars in North
Dallas to tighten the band up and now we’re going
to introduce the project at The Curtain Club this
Saturday night.
Of
course I don’t want it to just be a Steve Miller
Tribute; I’ll be doing a number of newer originals
that people seem to be enjoying at the tune-up gigs.
Also I’ll be doing a number of others that people
might recognize, including one that was featured in
the movie Project X called “You
Baby You”. I think with the recent tragedies
that this project has come along at the right time,
since people seem to gravitate to things that are
closer to their roots in troubled times. I’m
talking with a management company out east right now
who are convinced that this project could be taken
out on the road, so who knows what will happen? Chris
will be playing at The Curtain Club Saturday, November
24th, with Carolyn Wonderland and Joe Miller opening.
The show begins at 9 pm.
www.saintkristofer.com
- David Gasten,
dallasmusic.com
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