[Introspective] An article by Allee Willis (co-author of What Have I Done To Deserve This?)

[Zvonko Nikolich]

 Allee Willis blog on lefsetz.com

Bob Lefsetz is the author of The Lefsetz Letter and runs the
lefsetz.com<http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vbGVmc2V0ei5jb20v>blog,
famous for being beholden to no one and speaking the truth, Lefsetz
addresses the issues that are at the core of the music business:
downloading, copy protection, pricing and the music itself.

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Songwriters

Hi, Bob. I'm Allee Willis. Songs I've written include September, Boogie
Wonderland, Neutron Dance, What Have I Done To Deserve This, the Friends
theme and the Broadway musical, The Color Purple. One of my earliest hits,
Lead Me On by Maxine Nightengale, was co-written with David Lasley, who
Andre Pessis talked about in his email to you. We also wrote the first cover
I ever got, Got You On My Mind, by Bonnie Raitt in 1974. I'm weighing in
because in 1981, after getting hundreds of songs cut in just a couple of
years, I was the first songwriter who tried to unionize writers because of
all that Ellen Shipley wrote about and more. I was also the first pop
songwriter I know of to embrace the Internet in 1991. I started designing a
collaborative social network in 1992 and, much of that time with my then
partner, Mark Cuban, got laughed out of publishing and record company
offices when we suggested they take the Internet and all digital
technologies seriously.

The songwriting union never got off the ground as much because of the
ever-confusing work for hire issue as the fear many songwriters had of being
blackballed. Our mistreatment wasn't the dirty little secret of the music
industry. If it were a secret that at least would have been something. In
reality, it was a non issue, not even a notch in the totem pole of
consciousness.

I've written with and for hundreds of incredible artists and my songs have
been at the top of the Pop, R&B, Jazz, Country, Dance and Alternative
charts. I absolutely love writing songs and composing scores. But with
success came an emptiness from the 1001 ways to screw a songwriter, long
accepted as standard industry practice. This was coupled with a growing
trend that if you were a songwriter who wrote for artists or producers other
than yourself what you had to write to get records was progressively more
homogenized. The dumbing down killed me even more than the screwing.

Other things that made me nuts (and thankfully led to a massive branching
out of my career beyond songwriting): A) Writing up to ten songs for someone
and only seeing one or two make the album despite being told repeatedly
you're the only writer working with them. (Where there's no payment there's
no accountability.) B) Artists and producers sitting on songs for months and
years until they had enough of them that the earliest songs felt old and
they were cast out like a homeless kitten with one leg. C) Giving away
pieces of publishing and songwriting shares just to get cuts lest your spot
be filled by a more de-spirited and desperate songwriter than yourself. D)
Settling for mere songwriting credit when your demo was used as the actual
record - I was literally told by a major female artist that I didn't deserve
credit as a producer or arranger as I was "only the songwriter and that's
what songwriters do". E) Babysitting artists who had absolutely zero
songwriting chops, doing
whatever it took to keep your brain functioning as they deliberated whether
an 'a' or 'the' was better for their already idiotic lyric. I've often said
that unless you were the artist yourself, being a songwriter was like
changing towels in the restroom, only difference being that the restroom
attendant got paid.

Probably because many of my early cuts were with instrumental artists like
Herbie Hancock and Weather Report or male bands like Earth Wind & Fire,
coupled with the fact that to this day I don't know how to read, notate or
play music, it was falsely assumed I was just a lyricist. I was given tons
of tracks to put words to. Oftentimes I would spend 18 hour days putting
words to whole songs only to be told when I handed them in that only the
choruses were going to be sung. Is songwriters' time so less valuable than
anyone else's that they can't be told this when they're given the track?

And then there's movie soundtracks, where songs are sent out as temp tracks
to be copied by other writers. One of the last straws for me was when I
received a copy of my own song, Neutron Dance, already out on a Pointer
Sisters' LP, and told to rip it off for Beverly Hills Cop. After my
co-writer, Danny Sembello, and I stewed for a couple of weeks we decided no
one could rip us off better than ourselves. We wrote a parallel song that
mimicked the lyric - Neutron Dance's "I don't want to take it anymore, I'll
just stay here locked behind the door" became "I can't stay here while I go
nowhere" in the new song. We slightly adjusted the drum track. We never
heard anything after we submitted it - another standard practice after
you're hounded to hand something in. Three weeks before the film was
released we found out that only because Jerry Bruckheimer pulled a tape out
of his wastebasket that his song screener had passed on and checked it to
make sure he could tape over it did he
hear our copy song, Stir It Up, and insist it go into the soundtrack. They
never found a better song than Neutron Dance and that stayed in too. Not
only did I win a Grammy for Best Soundtrack but, in one of my favorite
musical moments, I was named one of the most dangerous subversives living in
the United States by the Communist government when they mistranslated the
song as Neutron Bomb.

A decade later, in fairly infamous songwriting lore, two of the three
producers of Friends, a full year after the song was a hit, demanded
songwriter royalties because they had given me notes. I don't know very many
composers who write for film or tv who don't get notes from producers or
directors. By that point I was full throttle into my interactive career,
building my prototype for willisville, my social network, and spending every
dime on it that I earned from consulting for Microsoft, AOL, Silicon
Graphics, Electronic Arts, Fox, Disney, Warner Bros. and Intel, who
partially funded the prototype build (tho in reality I was stuck adding
music and visuals to an excessively dorky technology they had already
invested in). So I just gave in and watched my share of the Friends theme
plummet because, as I heard it, these producers always wanted to be
composers. To add insult to injury, The Rembrandts never agreed to the song
being released as a single as they resented not writing it
by themselves so despite it being one of the biggest airplay records of the
year singles income was nil.

In 2006, I had songs in three of the Top 10 films of the Year - Babel ,
Happy Feet and Night At The Museum. I didn't know about any of them until I
sat in the theater and heard them. Then it meant spending money to hire
someone to track them down and to see if I'd been paid. Shouldn't the
songwriter, not to mention co-copyright owner, be informed and allowed to
negotiate when their songs are used?

Currently, I have a theme to a hit VH-1 show that's already run one season
and is filming the next right now. The production company still hasn't
submitted cue sheets to BMI for season one and the credits are so small and
run so fast no one can even see my name which, I guess, isn't a real problem
as songwriting credits aren't even listed.

Fate in the theater world is not much better. Depending on the producer,
composers and lyricists have little to no say about the way their music is
arranged or mixed or how their show is promoted. Musicals taker an average
of five years to write so this can be especially heartbreaking.

The blessing of all of this was that very early on I was so unhappy I
started to paint, soon after motorizing my art to my music. This led to art
directing tons of music videos for people like The Cars, Debbie Harry and
Heart. I kept writing songs, still loving the actual act of songwriting, and
also because my publishing deals helped finance each new field I went into.
But music publishers were not great at recognizing the value of multi-media
careers. Brain dead might be a more accurate description. Despite selling
close to 50,000,000 records my advances were numbifyingly low compared to
writers who had much less success. As opposed to thinking a broad artistic
vision might actually enhance the contribution I could make my
multi-medianess was looked at as a threat to the number of songs I could
churn out. The exception to publishers wearing blinders (altho the low
advances still persisted) was Kathleen Carey at Unicity (MCA), who hooked me
up with Pet Shop Boys by selling
their manager some of my art which led to me being hired to do their
portrait. During the sitting Neil Tennant put it together that I was the
same A. Willis on some of his favorite records and we started writing
WHIDTDT that night. And also, Judy Stakee at Warner/ Chappell, who took my
interest in digital technology seriously and introduced me to Mark Cuban in
1992. Despite this, W/C would hear nothing of removing my song quota and
letting me function as their Internet liaison, scoffing at my predictions
that things like CDs and record stores would cease to exist and radio play
would become irrelevant. Anyone who cites Napstar as the official beginning
of the fall of the record industry still has their head in the sand.

These days I'm living my dream, finally singing my own songs for the first
time since my one and only Epic album, Childstar, in 1974, integrating the
songs with my art, videos and online worlds. My first video, It's A Woman
Thang, has close to 1,000,000 views with no promotion at all and was a
winner in the Viral category of the 2008 Webbies. The second one was
featured on YouTube and won four W3 awards. The latest, Hey Jerrie,
featuring me and a 91 year old female drummer on an oxygen tank, was the
twelfth most popular video in the world on YouTube within 48 hours of its
release a few months ago. These days, a least if I get screwed I'm screwing
myself, which is ultimately more satisfying as I can always get a meeting
with the person doing the screwing. I've been toying with business models on
the web for eighteen years. I may not be rich from it yet but I'm rich as an
artist with a larger and larger loyal following which, ultimately, is the
greatest reward of all.

Reinvention was always easier for me than letting my personality and pride
be clubbed out of me like a baby seal. I have a had a blessed life. I have
watched myself go from battered songwriter grabbing at whatever crumbs were
thrown my way to a strong, centered and fearless artist. I'm a better
songwriter now than I ever was. I still have the same old bullshit befall me
as a songwriter but I don't stick around long enough to suffer. It's been a
long, conscious battle but as Celie says in The Color Purple, "I'm Here".
Very much here. I thank the publishers and record industry for doing to us
what Wall St. and the banking industry did for the American people - take
such advantage and pay us so little regard that we're stripped back to
nothing, individuals who now have more chance than ever to do something
spectacular on their own and change the world.

Allee Willis
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