Episode 13 – Cliff Eberhardt

Over 10 albums and a career spanning nearly 5 decades, Cliff Eberhardt has established himself as one of acoustic music's best-known voices. Growing up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, he and his brothers sang together and their parents played instruments. Cliff and his brother Geoff toured as an acoustic duo for a few years, until Cliff turned twenty-one and moved to Carbondale, Illinois. There he found space to develop his own voice within a vibrant and supportive music scene that included Shawn Colvin. In 1978, Cliff moved to New York City. Because the clubs were great (the Bitter End, the Speakeasy, Kenny's Castaway, Folk City) and the company amazing (John Gorka, Suzanne Vega, Lucy Kaplansky, Julie Gold, Steve Forbert, Christine Lavin, and Shawn Colvin), New York was an ideal musician's boot camp.

Cliff worked steadily on his music throughout the 80's, doing solo gigs and studio work, and playing guitar on the road with Richie Havens, Melanie and others. Singing advertising jingles for products like Coke, Miller Beer and Chevrolet ("The Heartbeat of America" campaign) allowed him to devote more time to his songwriting.

In 1990, Windham Hill released Cliff's first album, The Long Road (1990), featuring a duet with Richie Havens, to great critical acclaim.  After two more records on Windham Hill, he released 12 Songs of Good and Evil (1997) on Red House Records, which stemmed from a chance meeting with Red House founder Bob Feldman at John Gorka's wedding. Cliff recorded two more albums before his critically acclaimed The High Above and the Down Below. He continued to record, releasing  500 Miles: The Blue Rock Sessions (2009), Shrew Songs (2012) and The Heal (2019)

Long one of the most respected songwriters on the club scene, his peers often mine his catalog for themselves. Cliff's song "Memphis" was included on Cry Cry Cry, an album of collaborative covers by the "folk supergroup" of the same name (comprised of Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell). Other performers who have recorded his songs include Richie Havens, Shawn Colvin, Russ Taff, David Broza/Maura O'Connell and Buffy Sainte Marie. A collection of his songs has been published in The Cliff Eberhardt Songbook (Cherry Lane Publishing).

Cliff is well-known as a songwriting teacher, both at songwriting camps and in private lessons. He also produces, arranges and advises on other artist's recordings. He tours constantly, and we were fortunate enough to snag him en route for an Acoustic Northeast sit-down.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Welcome to another edition of Acoustic Northeast, bringing you the singers, songwriters, and acoustic music scene of the Northeast United States. Yes, and here we talk about the music scene. We talk about topics that affect the artists. We talk about songwriting with songwriters, and they play for you right here, live in our studio in beautiful and historic Brewster, New York. I'm co-host Dave Goldenberg.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

And I am co-host George Malice. And we are brought to you by, believe it or not, we have sponsors. We're brought to you by HearattThere.com, where you can go to their website and post your gigs if you're an artist, or you could go there to find out who's playing where in the tri-state area, and that means New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Also, Hudson Hardy folk Hudson Harding Folk Radio Promoters and also WBXO Internet Radio. You can listen to our show wherever you get your podcast, wherever you are now, and please subscribe. Also, we're on YouTube and acousticnortheast.com. We post the song performances of our guests on YouTube. Also, listen to our Acoustic Northeast Spotify playlist where many of our past and future um songwriters are. And today in studio, we have uh great singer-songwriter that so many of you will know. Cliff Eberhart. Cliff, welcome to the show, buddy. Thank you. We appreciate you making the trip down here.

SPEAKER_05 1:42

I had no choice. No, I'm really happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

We we appreciate it. So um, why don't you kick us off with a tune and give everybody an idea who don't know you who you are with your first song.

SPEAKER_04 2:16

I left my passport back in customs. I left my hat upon a rack. I left my phone in my hotel room, and it's never coming back. Kitty sentimental All the things I left behind. She was beautiful as morning. She was sharper than a knife. She vowed she would be faithful, though we were never mad in wife. She always stood beside me. She never was unkind. Someone else is making love. All the things I left behind. I totally left the cause. But lately it occurs to me, maybe I'm the thing that's lost. I left my past in my subconscious. When we forget, we soon regret. I left my heart in San Francisco. Just like all the rest. Now, did you look before you left? I wish there was a sign. Now I'm making my apologies to all the things I left behind. Without a second look, all the things we left behind.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

That's Cliff Everhart, everybody. The things I left behind. You know, we want to talk about songwriting. I want to ask you about that song in particular, how that started out.

SPEAKER_05 4:50

It started out that I was doing the Honor Winner's Night Tour, which is me and Patty Larkin, Lucy Kaplansky, and John Gorka. And John and I travel together in a car. The girls don't want anything to do with us. And um, that's a joke. Something about 14-year-old humor, I understand.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

It's it's very much appreciated here.

SPEAKER_05 5:10

Yeah. So we played in Chicago and we're driving to um Madison for the next show. And I realized about two hours after that I left my iPad in my hotel room. And it's a pain in the ass to get these things back, you know. And then the next night we're in Madison, we're driving to um Minneapolis, and I realized two hours of the trip that I left all my shirts behind in the closet. And then we're I'm flying home from Minneapolis and I realized I left my writing book. So I started um just a little song for John called You know, The Stuff I Left Behind. I don't think that was the original.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Was that the original title? No, no, I can't say it over there. Yeah, you can. It's a podcast. You say whatever the hell you want.

SPEAKER_05 5:54

The original title was The Shit I Left Behind. But when the the you know how it is when you're writing a song that I was just working it out to play for him, you know, like over the phone or something. And another verse tapped me on the back and said, That's not what this song is gonna be about. And that's why I wrote the verse about it. Now someone else is making love to the things I left behind. Yeah. Kind of smacks the audience in the face a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Yeah, I love the I love the um the verse about um San Francisco and the things you left behind. That's very cool too. Yeah. So that basically you were just screwing around with it in the car or whatever when you were No, I was at home. Oh, you were home. Okay. After I got home.

SPEAKER_05 6:36

Because I just started, you know, I I left my passport back in customs and I left my hat up on the rack, you know, I left my phone in my hotel when it's never coming back. But then the whole thing about she was this beautiful as morning, and like it takes a sharp right turn there, you know. She's sharper than a knife.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

How is it difficult for you writing lyrics or do they come to you very easily?

SPEAKER_05 6:59

I do the mu generally, unless I'm writing for plays, which is a completely different thing.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Yeah, we want to talk about that later too.

SPEAKER_05 7:05

Um I d I pick up the guitar as soon as I have any idea of a lyric. So I think the guitar it will take me to a lyric sometimes. You know, like I could play a certain chord that I'm thinking of playing next. I go, oh, the lyric would sound better with this chord, you know. So they write each other.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

And so you don't well well, in that song in particular, you you had an idea of what you wanted to do, but you're saying that sometimes you'll just have a lyric or something and you'll sit down, and then the song will emerge based upon what you're doing with a song progression, and the lyric will follow.

SPEAKER_05 7:42

Right. Very cool. And um like there's songs that I've written bridges on the guitar, and I come up with a little bit of music before I write the lyric, and it propels the lyric to go to a different place.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

You you teach songwriting a lot, and I know you're you're a student, a student of songwriting in a way too. Um, a lot of people who listen to this are songwriters or are aspiring songwriters. What are the most important lessons that your students learn from you when you teach them about songwriting?

SPEAKER_05 8:16

Well, I always say that I show, I don't tell. I show them my whole course is kind of based on craftsmanship. Um, that a lot of singer-songwriters forget about, like beginnings, endings, solos. You know, they they're just so lyrical based. And I also teach melody because you know, as I say, would you put the Mona Lisa in a cardboard frame? You know, they frame the they write their melody to fit their lyrics, and it should be you know the same.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

They should they should be equally as important. Yeah, folk-riven folk music tends to be lyric-driven, and a lot of as a result, a lot of the songs just follow the same three or four chords, and it's the next moment is predictable. What's the role of predictability and surprise in in songwriting? Total.

SPEAKER_05 9:06

It's really important. Um you know, you can have uh like I'd say 85% of my students or 95% all write in mid-tempo because they're scared to write a ballot, and they all use G, E minor, A minor, D, you know. And my job is to show, like, you know what, you can go here with this and see the lift of the melody there. I don't work on lyrics because people get really angry if you criticize their lyrics. They don't want them changed. No.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

What about both structure, like the arc of a song and the length of a song? As a as a open uh mic house mic house many times over the years, I've listened to people play their original songs, and I would think if they would cut a third of it out, it would be a much better song.

SPEAKER_05 9:54

Yeah. Well, I time my students the first time I meet with them when I'm in in a camp, and the average song is seven minutes long.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Oh no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_05 10:03

And like when I was on record labels, if you had over three and a half minutes, the song didn't make it on the album. And you you you all know who Townsman Z is. Well, I was at Curvo one year and he was one of the judges of the song contests. And he came up to me and he says, You know, he talks slow. He said, You know, Cliff, if they wouldn't repeat the first verse at the end of the song for apparently no reason, and then do five choruses to end it, we could get out of here a week early. That is one thing people people this is another thing. Don't fall in love with your song.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

You know, we were talking about melody a little bit, and so you, from what I understand, grew up listening to a lot of show tunes and Beatles. So, I mean, there's great melody in all of those. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 10:57

And Tin Pan Alley stuff, you know. Okay. Um, but most of the Tim Pan Alley writers wrote for musicals too, you know, Cole Porter and and Irving Berlin and those guys. Um yeah, I my dad played guitar and he had Weaver's records and Joe Baez's records and stuff. And I that didn't interest me half as much. I just, you know. I remember he took me to a Pete Seeger concert in Philly at the Academy of Music when I was really young. I was like seven, I think. And I turned to dad and I said, Did you pay for these tickets? You know, did it cost you money? He went, Yeah, why? I said, because we have to sing every damn song with him. I thought we should be getting paid.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

So wow. Is there something like early on in your in your youth or whatever? Not that you're old now, um, that was a uh a point where you said, Wow, that's incredible. I want to be able to do something like that.

SPEAKER_05 12:00

I have an exact moment. I was seven. I'd already I learned to play the ukulele when I was five, so I was already playing and performing. And I was listening to a Kingston Trio record, and Hoit Axton's song Green Back Dollar was on it, and I kept playing, I liked it so much, and I figured out I dissected the song to figure out why I like that song, and it was the buildup to the chorus, and I went, That is so cool. Because you don't hear that on normal records where there's a you know an eight-bar break of just playing guitar louder and louder and louder. And I said to my dad, There's names next to every song. What's that? He goes, Well, those are the fellas that wrote them, and you know, they get paid for that. And I turned him right there and I said, I'm gonna be a songwriter. And the next day he bought me a toy dentist kit.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

But you you pursued your dream like um like Bob Dylan. You you left home early, and you know, I have in my head the romantic notion of somebody holding a guitar and a backpack and hitchhiking on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I did. Well, what would why did you do that and what was it like?

SPEAKER_05 13:14

Well, my home life was miserable. So at 16, my parents were moving to New York, and I wasn't gonna move with them to New York, so I was like, I'm out of here. And that was it? Yeah, well, I mean, I had jobs until I didn't, you know, until I sang jingles.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

So um Can you touch base on one of the jobs that you had where um I think you're working at a publishing place?

SPEAKER_05 13:40

Yeah, that wasn't a job. That was that was an internship. I volunteered. Oh, okay. At a publishing house in New York for Atlantic Records.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

For Atlantic Okay.

SPEAKER_05 13:47

Cotillion Publishing. And it was run by this woman named Helen Miller, who was a Broadway writer. And she was she was tough. And she would do stuff like she came in one day, I was at my desk, and she dumped a box of Roy Orbison tapes on my desk, and she said, You don't know how to end a song. He knows how to end a song. And it never occurred to me that songs needed endings. Because most folk songs, you know, that's the end of the song, you have to four choruses. And then one time she took she took my lyrics, she goes, Give me a lyrics, and she went in her office and she had one of those long-arm paper cutters. Oh, yeah, and she cut the first word off of every verse, and I felt like she had cut my heart out, you know. And I went home and I was so mad. And I started looking at my songs. I went, she's right. Because I'll give you a real quick example. I have a song called That Kind of Love. And the original lyric was there's no sailboat out on a deep blue sea, and it became no sailboat, no deep blue sea. I don't need any explanation of the next part of the sentence.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

You're getting you're getting to it quicker.

SPEAKER_05 15:08

Yeah, and also the space, the space is where people come in. And a lot of young songwriters don't know how to arrest, they don't know where to put a rest. They'll do the the verse, they go right into the chorus, like it's the next chord of the verse. I was like, I don't know where the chorus starts. Space is where the emotions come in. That's my belief.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

You um uh you found yourself in the late 70s in New York, in in Greenwich Village. And when people think of the folk revival, they think of the first folk revival of the 50s and 60s. But even though you think New York that time, you're thinking punk and CBGB's, there was also a folk scene going on and lots of people were emerging. What was that scene like then?

SPEAKER_05 15:53

Well, it was it was it was great because my heroes all were hanging out in the village because there wasn't a lot of work for for the established folk stars. So I was hanging out with Peter Paula Mary and and Richie Havens and um Dave Van Ronck and Odetta on a daily basis. And they all mentored us. And I'll give you a good example. One time I was at an open mic, Folk City, and I played one of those, oh, I've been so mistreated songs, you know. Victim, victim, victim. And Tom Paxton came up to me, he said, Look, kid, I want I don't want you to sing me your diary. I want you to sing me my diary. Wow. And I wrote it down on my arm, and I never wrote the same after that. I got away from it being about me. Because so many songs are journal songs, you know? Right. There's never one story that I put forward in the song. There's never one character. It's not about somebody, it's about my whole experience.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

Do you enjoy inhabiting other characters though? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 16:59

And you know, folk people think that the folk audience thinks that those songs are all autobiographical. And I have a song on one of my albums where I rob a train. And I've had two people come up and say, Did you really rob a train? I go, Indeed I did.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Yeah, you don't want to disappoint them. No. And uh you also had other um, besides playing as a solo singer-songwriter, you you found other ways to expand your world. You were playing with other people. Who were some of the people you played with as a as a side performer?

SPEAKER_05 17:33

Richie Havens, Eric Anderson, Odeta, Dave Van Rock, um Melanie, and one summer of the band.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Yeah, that was that was incredible. I know you've got a great Richie Havens story in you somewhere. I have many. Can we would you mind telling one of them? Is that okay? I'll tell the cab calloway story. Oh, I love that one.

SPEAKER_05 18:00

We had flown to Rome. We were doing a big um festival in Pistoia, Italy. And um we got to Rome late and we drove. I drove, Richie didn't drive. To Pastoria. We got in like four or five in the morning, and and Richie noticed there was a park bench in the clearing in front of the woods, and he said, You want to go sit down on the park bench? And I knew that meant he was gonna smoke some dope, you know, because he always smoked dope. Morning, noon, and night. I never went through customs with that guy. I always lagged way behind. But um, so he's smoking a uh reefer, and the sun's just coming up, and coming up the path into the clearing is this really old African-American man, really old, and he comes through the clearing and it's Cab Callaway. I know. And he comes up to Richie and he goes, Why, yo, Richie Havens. And Richie just looked at me, went, bar out. And that was it. He went back to smoking his joint and Cab took off. So we get to the festival the next day, we're all getting off of the tour bus. And Cab Callaway's on stage and his white tuxedo entails singing Minnie the Moocher. And Richie turns to me and said, Oh my god, I thought he was dead. I said, Wait a minute, Richie, did you think you were communicating with the ghosts of Cab Calloway? Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

That's great. Um, let's let's hit you with another song or hit us with another song. What would you like to play? I'll play one of the first songs I ever wrote.

SPEAKER_05 19:35

And um, I wrote it when I was 16. And I took it to New York and I went to all these publishing houses, and they all said, Um, kid, nobody will ever record that song. Well, it's been recorded by Buffy St. Marie and it's on our greatest hits album. She closes every show with it. It's recorded by Sean Colvin and Lucy Kaplanski. It was recorded by Lucy Kaplanski, it was recorded by the Song Project, and it was recorded by the band Erasure, which is the oddest version of this song. They're a techno band from England. Yeah. But I got a car out of the deal, you know. So I don't listen to when people say no to me.

SPEAKER_04 20:13

You know, sleepless nights, don't bother me at all. Dawn comes, I will worry. Something deep inside me awake. Right beside me. I recall I was very young, and I could not fall asleep. My father sang me songs to make me tired, but memories don't come so easily. So good night, wherever you are sleeping, and I hope if you dream, you dream of me. Good night, wherever you are sleeping, and I hope if you dream, you dream of me. Now I lie awake, it's no fun tossing and turning. I would call you if it were so very late. Telephones won't bring you close to me. I recall the nights we stayed up late, wide awake, but still dreaming. There was nothing on this earth that could make me tired. Memories don't come so easily. So good night. Wherever you are sleeping, and I hope if you dream, you dream of me. Good night.

SPEAKER_03 22:54

And I hope if you dream you dream of me, and I hope if you dream you dream with me.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

That's Cliff Eberhard. That just goes to show you a good song has legs. Good song never gets old.

unknown 23:24

No.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

You know, you talk about Beatles stuff, you talk about show tunes, you talk about you know a good song.

SPEAKER_05 23:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Period.

SPEAKER_05 23:32

You can't kill a good song.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Erasure tried to kill my song. But but you got some money out of that, baby.

SPEAKER_05 23:39

I got a lot.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Yeah. It's crazy, but hey, what the hell? Yeah. I want to talk about because mm you don't just write for yourself, but you've also written for theater. Talk about how that happened and what goes through your head when you're doing that, when you have a subject matter that you have to meld with what's going on in a scene.

SPEAKER_05 24:07

Well I have been commission I was commissioned way before I got a play to do lots of stuff for TV and the movies and commercials. Um I wrote the theme for CBS News in New York. Got a Emmy for it. So you were doing jingle writing? It wasn't a jingle, it was a little song. It was right after 9-11, and they wanted a song saying, We're gonna stay here, and you know, this is New York and it's my home, and I ain't going nowhere. So I was used to that kind of writing, and I kind of like it. It's kind of like a prompt, you know, where you have to stay on subject. But the first play I did was Taming of the Shrew at the Folger Theater in Washington, D.C. And I got that gig. They they decided they were gonna do a version of it in a in a um Western saloon. Shakespeare in a Western saloon, and they decided they wanted a singer-songwriter to be the bar singer in the saloon. So they were listening to records of all of us. And I have a song that I was just playing a snippet of called That Kind of Love. And at one point I have a line where I said, just a Shakespeare drunk. And the producer said, Why not him? Seriously, that's how I got it. So they called me up and they said, Would you be interested? And I said, Sure. I mean, they they hire you for a year to write the music. And then so I went down and I played them some songs, and they were like, You're this is great, but we want you to be in it. I went, That's not gonna happen. Said, we don't need another bad actor. They said, No, you're not gonna have any lines, you're just gonna be the saloon singer. So I said, All right, I'd never done a play in my life. Plus, I got to dress as a cowboy. So I know.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Did you have a holster and everything? No.

SPEAKER_05 26:00

I was at a I was playing at a piano and guitar. I had my own little part of the stage.

SPEAKER_02 26:07

So it's like taming of the shroom meets and get your gun.

SPEAKER_05 26:10

Yeah. Exactly. And there were guns and everything. People shot guns off. And and what they told me, the producer said, Look, you can't mention any lines from this play in your song. You can't write about a specific character, you can hint at one. And it has to wrap up the scene that you're playing the song for. Wow. It was great. I wrote like every day. Eight hours a day. I wrote 42 songs for that play, and they use seven.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

That's amazing. You know, your touchbass, you're talking about jingles and stuff like that. What was what was that like? What did give the audience an idea of uh some of the jingles that you wrote? I didn't write them, I sang them. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 26:57

I sang just a taste of it, diet coke. That was you. And the heartbeat of America is today, Chevrolet. Wow. I did a bunch of them. Yeah, I mean, I was driving a taxi in New York, and this girl approached me, this woman approached me to sing a Quaker Oats commercial. I was like, I'm not gonna sing a commercial. That's you know, that's suck it up to the man. And she said, Well, if it goes on the year, you make between twenty and forty thousand dollars. I went, Where do I go?

SPEAKER_01 27:27

Yeah, really.

SPEAKER_05 27:28

So I never worked a day after that.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

That's beautiful. Is there somebody today? I mean, I know you play on a winter's night with um Lucy Kaplanski and Patty Larkin and John Gorka, and you know their music inside out at this point. But in today's music world, is there somebody that that kind of stands out to you that you've heard recently or within the past, say, five years? No. Really?

SPEAKER_05 27:55

No. The craft is gone. And I I'm trained to hear that craft. You know, I'm trained to no it I think that people appreciate signposts in their song. They want to know when the bridge is coming. They want to know when the next verse is coming, and they certainly want to know when the song is ending. And there's ways to signal people that the song is ending.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

So this is probably one of the things that you teach or try to teach, also, yeah. The craftsmanship.

SPEAKER_05 28:29

And also guitar arrangements. You know, most people just strum through a song, and that's like Chinese water torture to me. You know, break it up. I always say, put on your composer hats and think of the music, not just what you want to say.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

I think it's also harder today because you don't hear as many people anymore. Radio is, let's say, it's for shit right now. Um I hate to say that, but but but it is, you know. Um, it's very difficult to get heard. You had a great breakthrough in in the 90s.

SPEAKER_05 29:04

Yeah, I I got, I mean, ridiculous amount of air play, like on my first record. I had three top ten AC hits. I had a show on Comedy Central once a week. I was on Good Morning America. You know, it's like I was always doing something. I was on many news shows around the country. You know, they'd have the musical guests that's in town.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Right.

SPEAKER_05 29:25

So I had the opportunity where, especially with TV, where people recognize me. They don't anymore. They go like Cliff, what happened? But, you know, I would walk out of my apartment in New York and they'd hear me on the some passing radio in a car. So it was, and that was true for all of us, you know, like Tracy Chapman had Fastcar, and then and then Suzanne had Luca. And then they came down with butterfly nets. And they they signed us all within months of each other. All of us. And then it kind of ended the village scene because we all started playing the bottom line. So the small clubs, nobody would go down there anymore because all the good talent was, or a lot of the good talent was and moved on. And you know, we don't know why we were signed at the time, you know. It's like we were we got lucky. But it gave us I still have a career because of that first record. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

Well, and old old pop stars, they kind of fade away or become caricatures of themselves. But folks, folk singers, thank goodness, keep on keeping on. How have you changed over the years as a writer and performer?

SPEAKER_05 30:37

I think I've gotten to be a better performer. I don't write half as much as I used to, or even a quarter as much, because I was on a label for 30 years, you know, and I uh I had a publishing deal, so they would call you up and go, we need another song, or we need a song for this movie. Or so I had, you know, I was urged to write. And when you have that for 30 years, and then one day the phone stops ringing, you go, Who am I writing for? I've put out 10 albums, you know. Do I really need to write anymore? I still do, but um, I tend to write about things that I want to say instead of a I was always writing universal songs because I wanted to get cuts.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

Sure. But you do do some producing also. Oh, yeah. So tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_05 31:23

Well, when I was young, I lived in Carbodale, Illinois when I was in my 20s, and there was a studio there, and I did a couple demos there, and then I produced a couple demos, and I just I just asked questions from the engineer every two minutes, like, how do you do that? Why do you do that? And then when I started doing jingles, I was in four or five different studios every week. I played in almost every studio in New York, and I just learned by watching them produce the jingles what worked and what didn't work. And what didn't work for me was putting a lot of crap on it. So I tend to be pretty sparse in my productions. But I work I work on the song a lot with the artists, you know. Like I go, there's a difference between a live song and a recorded song. Let's make a record. Right. You can always go back to the way you played it live, and nobody's gonna notice the difference. You know, when I hear a song of mine, come on, I don't play it anything like I did on the record. And nobody notices. You know, they notice the what the air of what's going on in the room.

SPEAKER_02 32:27

Well, let's talk about that. Uh stagecraft is almost as important as song craft for a performer. You've been doing it a long time and you're known for your presence on stage. What are the keys, do you think, to connecting with the audience?

SPEAKER_05 32:43

Being funny helps. Not taking yourself seriously, a little self-deprecation doesn't hurt. And tell a story, if you're gonna tell a story about a song, don't give the song away. You know, like this is about when I was a child and I loved this girl and I couldn't fall asleep, and I don't, you know, you're about to sing the song. So I usually have a lot of times I'll tell a funny story before I play a really sad song and it kind of guts the audience, you know. And be aware of them. They they run the show. Like if there's an audience like last night, they were it was a great audience. I played at the turning point, but they weren't a very raucous or audience. You know, they responded to everything, but it wasn't like going nuts, and that way you subdue the show a little bit. That's the mood they're in that night.

SPEAKER_01 33:37

Yeah. Well, we wanted to really thank you for coming on. Yes, thank you so much. That's it, huh? Make that's it. You want to keep going? You want to tell some more stories?

unknown 33:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

I know you got them, isn't it? Yeah, I got a lot. Traveling does that, you know? Yeah. I I gotta I gotta ask you to do one more story. I know Dave's gonna be like no, go for it. Dave's gonna be like, we're going over a half hour. Oh, I don't give a dick. It doesn't matter. Okay. This is a podcast. I gotta your audience really um would get a kick out of your Dylan's Dylan story. How um I think you know the one on the when he called me? Yeah, when he called you.

SPEAKER_05 34:14

You know, I'm not supposed to tell that story. You're not? No, but I I'll tell it anyway. What the hell with him? Let's do it anyway. Yeah. It was 1987, I think. And Vince Gilson had a show on WNEW called Idiots Delight. And he became a big fan of mine and really pushed me. And so I would park my cab, you know, run up. And um, I was on one night and I played a song I'd written called White Lightning. And it's a duet with Sean Colvin on my first record. And I get home, and at three in the morning the phone rings, and I answer the phone. This guy goes, Hey, is this Cliff? This is Bob Dylan. And I thought it was my ex-roommate Skippy who who would imitate Bob to me. So I, you know, I screamed at him, threw the phone down, and I said, I'm sure there are people that have hung up on Bob Dylan before. He is human, you know, but I don't think anybody has ever called him Skippy before. So he called me back and he goes, No, this is really Bob. He goes, I want to ask you about the song I heard. And he'd written down the last verse, which is pretty weird to have Bob Dylan at three in the morning reciting to you your verse. And he goes, He said, That pulls the song together. Did you did you write that on purpose or did it just come to you? And I said, It just came to me. And he went, Ain't that a bitch? We don't write our own songs. But then I got to hang out with him for six weeks and play. It was really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

Yeah, that's great. Well, on that note, we we need you to take us out with a tune. Okay. I'll just tune from one of the plays. Cool. Sounds good. What are you gonna play?

SPEAKER_05 35:53

Everyone's wounded.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Aren't we all?

SPEAKER_05 35:57

And the playwright called me and said he wanted a big song for the opener. He said, could you play something in the song that makes the audience feel completely uncomfortable? And I said, I'd love to.

SPEAKER_04 36:24

You think you're alone? What's happened to you? You believe you've been blame for things you didn't do. Don't assume you're left out. No one is excluded. Take a good look around. Everyone's wounded. Everyone's limping and writhing in pain. The symptoms are different, but they're really the same. There's no membership here. Now all are included. And the name of this club is everyone's wounded. We all wear master hide the pain. Let me think you're alone. We all feel the same. Take a look at that person in the seat next to you. They may look like they're fine. They're wounded too. Complain all you like, nobody cares. You can't count on your friends. This is a fact that can't be disputed. We're all in the same boat. Everyone's winning. Here's the more lesson for you. Forgive everyone. Forgive yourself too between the give and the take. I have concluded we all make mistakes. Everyone's wounded. Everyone's wounded. Everyone's wounded.