KEVIN McCORRY, HOST: I’m Kevin McCorry and this is ‘Jukebox Journey.’
[MUSIC: “And We Danced” by The Hooters]
KM: This week: It’s the art of looking backwards, with Eric Bazilian of The Hooters.
[MUSIC SWELL]
KM: Eric Bazilian was born in University City in the mid 1950s into a musical family.
ERIC BAZILIAN: “ My mom was a classical pianist. She went to Curtis, and I would sit next to her when she played Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. And then I had an uncle who was into folk music….and he taught me my first guitar chords.”
[MUSIC: “El Preso Numero Nueve” by Joan Baez]
EB: “I performed on the Gene London Show. I was barely 10, and I played guitar and sang “El Preso Numero Nueve” in Spanish. Nobody told me that was, like, a hard thing for a 10-year-old to do.”
[MUSIC SWELL]
KM: Soon after, The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.
EB: “And, like, every boy in my generation said, ‘I’m gonna do that.’”
KM: Bazilian devoted himself to music in high school, but still managed to get the grades to get into the University of Pennsylvania, and that’s where he met songwriting partner Rob Hyman. Their first band was called “Baby Grand.”
EB: ”Kind of a Steely Dan and Yes on steroids. And we decided that it was time for us to get our audience dancing.”
KM: The reboot became The Hooters.
EB: “We’re gonna play simple songs with melodies that people can sing along with and lyrics they can relate to.’ And the first song we wrote that survives to this day was ‘All You Zombies.’”
[MUSIC: “All You Zombies” by The Hooters]
EB: “January 1980 we wrote that song in a warehouse in Manayunk. That was the first time I’d ever had the feeling that I had touched on something infinite.”
KM: The breakthrough came after a live performance at the Emerald City club in Cherry Hill that was broadcast live on WMMR.
EB: “If you could just shrink wrap the ’80s, I think it would be Emerald City…You’re seeing a lot of people with, you know, spiky hair…. and the clothes….the shoulder pads, all that stuff.”
KM: “And did you go with that shift?”
EB: “Eventually, reluctantly, yeah. And I guess it worked at the time, but it’s hard to look at those pictures.”
KM: When I asked Bazilian to pick a couple of Philly songs that defined the era for him, the first was this original version of the Cyndi Lauper hit, written by Philly’s Robert Hazard.
[MUSIC: “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” by Robert Hazard from 1979]
KM: Bazilian was part of the team that helped rework the song to fit Cyndi’s sound.
EB: “Cyndi hated the song. ‘I will never sing that song,’ she said. ‘It’s demeaning to women.’ We tried a bunch of different things. We tried a reggae version. We tried a ska version. I think we even tried a ballad version of it, and she was just hanging tough. And then one day, we all came in, and we were talking about “Come On Eileen.”
[MUSIC: “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners]
EB: “And they’re laughing and I’m going: ‘I got an idea.’ So, picked up my guitar, my ’57 stratocaster, and started playing that guitar riff.”
[MUSIC: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper]
EB: “And by the end of the day, she’s saying, ‘I always wanted to sing that song. It’s so empowering to women.’”
[MUSIC SWELL]
KM: Bazilian also called out the band The As.
[MUSIC: “After Last Night” by The As]
EB: ”The first thing I hear is they got robbed. That song should have been an international smash….I’m a guitar player first and foremost, and just seeing Rick, the tones he got and the attitude he had, and that kinda flipped a little switch in me ’cause I realized, ‘oh yeah, attitude.’ You know, I’m a nice guy, but there’s an edge in there somewhere.
KM: “And so that kind of little internal competition amongst the Philly scene. And that maybe pushed you guys to be a little better the next day.”
EB: “Yeah, I think so. I think so. And it was, you know, it was a very friendly competition, you know. There was no exclusivity. Just ’cause, you know, we got a gig didn’t mean someone else wasn’t gonna get a gig ’cause you had clubs everywhere. Empire Rock Room in Northeast Philly, played there a bunch. We’d play three or four nights a week in the area. Actually, at one point, we were doing five nights a week at Vernon’s. It was a bar in Levittown. The audience was really interesting ’cause, you know, we’re doing ska and reggae, which nobody knew about, right, especially in Levittown. And somehow, the Jamaican community in West Philly got wind of it, and they’d come up to our shows in Levittown. So you’d have tattooed bikers dancing next to dreadlocked Rastas.
KM: “Wow. Cool. Power of music.”
KM: Bazilian’s latest track, out this year, is called “Better Times.”
[MUSIC SWELL: “Better Times” by Eric Bazilian]
EB: “That’s a guy, and it could be a guy from now, you know, on one side of the fence or the other. It could be a guy from a thousand years ago who was convinced to make a choice. He made the choice, and he realizes it didn’t pay off. ‘I ain’t getting what I was promised.’ And, you know, that’s sort of the climax of the song where he, you know, he realizes it didn’t go the way he hoped it would go.”
KM: “How do you relate to that personally?”
EB: “I’ve been really lucky. A lot of things haven’t gone the way I’d hoped they would go. All in all, I couldn’t be more satisfied with, with the cards that I’ve been dealt. But yeah, the band could’ve been bigger. Yeah, my, my solo records, of which there have been a number, you know, could’ve gotten some attention. Um, you know, this could’ve happened, that could’ve happened. The work I did with Santana could have…There’s a lot of that. But, you know, again, this was a character that I sort of stumbled on and inhabited, and I learned a lot from it. I’m still learning from it because there’s a whole body of work to come from that.”
KM: ”What do you think about the, I guess, the act of looking back? Is it helpful? Is it hurtful?”
EB: “It’s both, you know? It’s mostly helpful. I mean, there’s some stuff that I wish I could hit Command+Z on. I’m sure there is for all of us.”
KM: “I guess you can, you learn insights about who you were and how you evolved, but also you can get kinda wallowed down in it.”
EV: “Yeah, I try not to. I do sometimes. We all do. And I, you know, I hope that I’ve learned from some of those things. I think I have.”
[MUSIC SWELL: “Better Times” by Eric Bazilian]
KM: I’m Kevin McCorry and this has been a Jukebox Journey on WHYY.
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