LUTHER VANDROSS: REMEMBERING A SOULFUL FRIEND… Personal Reminiscences By David Nathan © 2005, Soul music.com I can’t say that I was completely surprised or shocked. I dealt with that when I first learned that Luther had a stroke in April 2003 just weeks after we spoke for the last time when I was writing his bio for the “Dance To My Father” album. But nonetheless, it’s just tough realizing that someone who was a part of my life for almost 30 years is gone. Someone of my generation, someone with whom I must have spoken dozens of times ever since we discovered we were neighbors on W. 56th St. in 1976. That was the year we did our very first interview. It was for Britain’s “Blues & Soul” magazine and Luther was just enthralled that he was actually being interviewed for a U.K. publication! Not that he hadn’t had any dealings with us Brits: a few years earlier, he had worked with David Bowie and no doubt that association that opened quite a few doors for him. We were there in publicist Simo Doe’s office at Atlantic Records in the 75 Rockefeller Plaza building, me, Luther, Anthony, Diane, Christine and Theresa – for at the time, the group Luther was a quintet. A year later, it would become a trio and after we discovered we lived in adjoining buildings, one of my fondest memories was seeing the group open for Marvin Gaye at Radio City Music Hall. Quite naturally, being neighbors, we would run into each other a lot. We quickly discovered our mutual love for the divas – especially Aretha and Dionne, my longtime favorites and clearly among Luther’s primary musical influences. As if it were yesterday, I can remember sitting in his living room, listening to old Dionne and Aretha albums, playing cards (gin rummy, which I always always lost!), yes, back then, munching on some Kentucky Fried Chicken! Luther would share with me his dreams of being in the studio with Dionne, Aretha and Diana Ross – and of showing audiences how much he loved to perform by going on the road. I got a chance to see Luther in action in the studio around this time: I fondly recall stopping in at Chic rehearsals at a studio on W. 52nd St., four blocks from where Luther and I lived. My good friend Josh Pridgen (a former member of the group The Reflections and a die-hard Aretha Franklin fan, a passion we clearly shared) worked there in the evenings so I’ d often stop by to chat about music and stop in to see who was around. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were working diligently on perfecting Chic’s ‘sound’ in preparation for hitting the road, circa early ’78. Luther was always in fine form, making jokes, bring humor to the sessions while displaying an amazing ‘ear’ for harmonies that was clearly one of his greatest gifts. Having success with Change (via “The Glow of Love” and “Searchin’) was great but Luther himself was deal-searching, encouraged by Roberta Flack, with whom he had toured as a background singer: no longer with Atlantic’s Cotillion label, he was ready for a solo career and I still recall vividly conversations with him about possible deals that looked like they would materialize with labels like 20th Century (then home to Barry White) but never did. In fact, at one stage around the turn of the ‘70s, I took demos Luther had done with me to the U.K. in hopes of getting him a record deal in Britain. We had talked about the passion and love that us Brits had for soul music and I was hopeful that some foreward-thinking record exec would ‘get’ Luther’s sound. I can recall playing his music to someone I had known for years who worked at now-long-gone Pye Records. Dave McAleer listened intently, loved the production work on what were essentially master recordings posing as demos on songs such as “Bad Boy” and “You Stopped Loving Me” and his verdict at the time was that they were simply ‘too American’ for the U.K. market. Luther was disappointed when I returned without having sealed a deal but he soldiered on regardless, continuing to do jingles and of course, being one of New York’s premier session singers. Finally, a change of management and an introduction to attorney David Franklin via Roberta Flack brought Luther the break he had been seeking. Franklin took Luther’s ‘demos’ to Larkin Arnold, then in charge of black music at CBS who heard the magic; it was hardly surprising since Larkin had been the man who had jump-started the first black music department at Capitol Records, responsible for launching the recording careers of Natalie Cole, Tavares and Maze among others. Luther was over the moon! I remember vividly our conversations and how excited he was at finally landing a deal with Epic Records. Not only that but he was going to be given the opportunity to essentially produce his own album, an unprecedented move for a ‘new’ artist. Larkin recognized Luther’s skills as a producer and writer thus “Never Too Much” became the general public’s first introduction to his talents; while the Change had done well, this would be Luther’s grand entry into the marketplace. And what an entry it was! I can remember Luther’s excitement the night he finished his now-classic recording of “A House Is Not A Home,” the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song that Dionne Warwick had cut in 1964, a song that both Luther and loved. He invited me over to listen to it and I sat there in his apartment on W. 56th Street completely and totally mesmerized. I couldn’t believe what he had done with the song and I specifically recall Luther sharing that there was one particular musical change that had been very challenging. The very first note that followed the song’s bridge (“But it's just a crazy game, when it ends, it ends in tears”) was tough for most singers, dropping as it does into a different key (typical of a Bacharach melody). Luther confided that he inserted the words “Pretty little” before the original “Darling, have a heart” as a way to comfortably ease into the final verse; he confessed that he didn’t know how Dionne had achieved it with her recording, quickly correcting himself as he recalled that she was a trained singer who had studied and could read music, as he himself did. Catching up with Luther on as a regular a basis after “Never Too Much” hit the streets was tough. We stayed neighbors for a few more months and then he moved to a much glitzier apartment on W. 60th St., which he proudly decorated himself, complete with pink walls and matching furniture. We did get the chance to talk professionally for “Blues & Soul” and we stayed in touch personally but less frequently. At one point, when I had started a live-in relationship, Luther invited me and my then-partner to lunch and we talked mostly about love, romance and relationships. It would be a topic that would always enter our conversations literally until the last conversation we had in March 2003 just weeks before his stroke. Without revealing the details of those highly personal conversations out of respect for Luther and our friendship, I can say that Luther was ever on a mission to find his own life partner. He felt that his physical size was a barrier to finding the love of his life and not liking his weight, he struggled to lose it. On occasion, as he publicly acknowledged, it was a battle which he sometimes won and sometimes lost. When Luther would lose any significant amount of weight, he felt sure he would attract love; when it didn’t happen, he would go off his diet and gain the weight again beginning another cycle that would, in his own mind, take him further away from his quest for love. The hardest thing, Luther would often tell me, was standing in front of thousands of people who loved his music, working hard to bring his audiences the best show possible and then coming back to an empty hotel room where he could only find solace with food. I recall one particular conversation in which Luther asked me how I dealt with being single, a subject that would come up with some consistency when we spoke. I told him that while having a partner would be a wonderful addition to my life, I was not on a ‘mission’ to find love, that I was continuing to do the inner work, the tough work of resolving the stuff that had kept me from learning to love myself. I shared with Luther my own personal challenges, coming from a dysfunctional family, dealing with addictions within the family and while I didn’t share it specifically with Luther, I was aware of other childhood events around sexual abuse that had shaped my own development as an adult. I told Luther of my own battles with self-image, with a life-altering surgery (the result of ulcerative colitis) that had its impact on how I felt about myself and how I had read, studied, unashamedly put myself in therapy and done much transformational work through the est training and then Landmark Education courses as well as discovering my own faith and deepening my spirituality, all as part of the healing process that I knew would allow me to change how I felt about myself. Luther listened intently and seemed to understand that I had long ago stopped looking for someone or something outside myself that could make up for the pain of my childhood and that finally, I was beginning the process of learning to love myself and that having a partner would be an addition to my life but not a requirement for my fulfillment or happiness. While our conversations would always touch upon love and relationships, Luther would always always bring humor to whatever chat we had! Not being in the business of gossip, I can’t reveal all that we talked about but, boy, could Luther make me laugh! Of course, music was always heart and center every time we spoke. Way back, I remember playing Luther some demos I had done on an occasion when I was visiting his friend Fonzi Thornton and while the look of his face indicated that he was not exactly ‘taken’ with my vocal attempts, he was polite, nonetheless! After the success of his first album, undoubtedly the most exciting event in Luther’s life was the first chance to produce Aretha. He called me up and was just beside himself that he was finally going to work with one of his musical idols. I can still recall the day he called me, having finished “Jump To It.” As would become a custom from that day till the time he was working on his J Records 2001 debut, Luther and I got together and would take a ride – either in New York, if I was there or in Los Angeles after both he and I made it our home in the mid-‘80s. It was a special treat, riding around with Luther listening to the music he had just finished, commenting on particular songs with Luther clearly proud of whatever he had done in the studio. “Jump To It” was an obvious smash and as we rode around Manhattan’s West Side, Luther must have played it for me a dozen times or more! I loved it and was so thrilled, remembering how he had shared with me years before how producing Aretha had been a lifelong dream. That it became a massive hit just added to the joy and when he finished the album with Aretha, I got a chance to hear that too – and I loved it! Then it was time to move to producing Dionne and Luther was again elated at the chance to work with the woman he acknowledged had been one of his prime inspirations for pursuing a musical career. He shared how he had see her at the long-defunct Brooklyn Fox Theater and hearing her sing “Anyone Who Had A Heart” had literally changed his life. I had my own Dionne story, telling Luther how “Walk On By” had been essentially my introduction to the music of black America and that I too owed my whole life direction to hearing that one song… |
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