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Id been on the road, playing for acts.
Vic Damone was the first, then the Ames Brothers.
So I left to come back to New York to write songs.
There was a man named Jack Wolf, and he was the first person I wrote with.
He introduced me to the Brill Building.
Sid Shaw was one of the early ones.
There were all these writers Id see in the elevator, and artists recording there, like Del Shannon.
I got signed early by Famous Music, by a man named Eddie Wolpin.
Eddie liked to go to the racetrack with me.
Wed go maybe once a month together.
I was drawn to it, and Ive had racehorses ever since.
I got to meet Hal David and Bob Hilliard, two writers with a lot of credibility.
Bob was a kind of lovable guy.
Hal and I initially wrote some very bad songs.
We had an office we worked out of with a piano.
If I was working with Hal, we would meet at the office of Famous Music.
We would never really work into the night.
Hal kept very businesslike hours.
We never finished four or five songs in a day.
Hed do his work on his own, and I always liked that.
Hal and I wrote some very terrible songs early on.
There was a song called Underneath the Overpass, and another called Peggys in the Pantry.
There were a lot of turndowns in that period.
He let us make a demo.
Bob Hilliard was very funny.
He said, Goldie, lie to me!
Just tell me somebody likes it.
No, nobody likes the song.
The breakthrough really was a good demo on Magic Moments and a good demo on Story of My Life.
If you make it a four-bar phrase Ill give you so-and-so to record it.
If you know my music, its not really normalized, its not intentional that way.
If its a three-bar phrase, its okay because it was meant to be a three-bar phrase.
I think it really started to happen for me when I made the first record where I could produce.
It gave me freedom, to do that.
I was getting to know Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
I was closer to Jerry.
We became pretty good friends along the way.
We would hang out in Germantown, up in Yorkville, 86th Street, and drink.
I liked him a lot.
I was amazed watching them work I cant say I didnt learn a lot watching the two of them.
I saw Jerry in the studio and Mike in the control room when they did On Broadway.
They had four or five guitars, percussion players and a string section, all that going on!
And getting it all to work where no one was getting in anybodys way.
They could just get in the studio and nobody was going to overdub.
So we got this background group from New Jersey that came in.
They were all related.
Things grew out of that; Dionne came in to sing for Hal and me.
That was my introduction to her.
