Phantom Of The Paradise: An Interview With Paul Williams
(drawing by Julian Lawrence)
Phantom Of The Paradise is the most Glam Rock movie ever made, one hundred and a buncha percent! First off, it’s a Brian DePalma film, so you’ve got split screen eccentrically crafted film-making perfection with a top-notch nuanced and rocking soundtrack by Paul Williams who stars as the pure evil villain Swan, Spectorian svengali nods and rock eating itself alive. Rocky Horror is a great and culturally important Midnite Movie (if you are a naysayer from it being ‘too popular’ wahhhhh then imagine doing The Time Warp for the first time, it’s fun!) but viewed outside of a toast throwing group environment the faults and troubled pacing become easy to spot. Ok ok Rocky Horror was way more progressive in its identity politics as Phantom has the character of Beef as a Jobriath mockery painfully mincing and lisping… That aside, Phantom is far superior. Oh sure, you have actual Glam acts doing movies, shouldn’t those be the most Glam movies ever? No one wants to talk about Gary Glitter’s movie Remember Me This Way (we didn’t remember him that way) (also: it’s not very good) for obvious reasons, Slade In Flame is a helluva movie but have you seen it? Bleak realism! Rain washed the pixie dust right off. Ditto Stardust with David Essex. There were a couple of movies with Mud in them (Side By Side and Never Too Young Too Rock) but they were so shoddily thrown together, I think that they both took place in a traveling roadside fish and chips trailer.
Stop a second. This Is Canadian Glam. What on earth does any of this have to do with Canada? Where is the Canada in all this? Upon release Phantom Of The Paradise made a major splash in Winnipeg, Manitoba! This movie may have legendary classic status today but upon release it flopped most everywhere except Winnipeg where it ran for 62 weeks straight. WINNIPEG!!!! Why? This could be pure speculation but Winnipeg is quietly odd. For insight, see the utter no budget wildness of Winnipeg television. I highly recommend artist Daniel Barrow’s Winnipeg Babysitter, the only way that it may be found is by trudging to your local video art outpost. This compilation of cable access television features Pollock and Pollock Gossip Club, a sibling chat show unparalleled and unhinged. Oh here:
Pollock and Pollock have quite the history, they deserve their own documentary, these siblings even recorded a totally screaming freak rock belter single from 1972 that Supreme Echo, the label behind all those Twitch reissues (see my earlier post on them), has let loose again upon the world:
http://supremeecho.bigcartel.com/product/stumpwater-ronnie-natalie-turn-me-on-woman-6-times-7-45-1972
A companion to Winnipeg Babysitter is Matthew Rankin and Walter Forsberg’s Kubasa In A Glass which documents local Winnipeg television of the 70s and 80s, again, being video art this is not easy to find, you will have to walk into a video art outlet like Video In in Vancouver, Paved in Saskatoon, or go to the hometown source of Video Pool in Winnipeg. Kubasa In A Glass has so much including incredible outtakes of pranks being played on Mayor Bob Swarts of Funtown (the albums from the show were documented in my previous K-Tel post) by the crew…
Maybe it all makes sense that Phantom Of the Paradise had line-ups down the block in the Winnipeg cinemas. In fact, there is a website and even a documentary being made all about this Winnipeg phenomenon:
http://www.phantomoftheparadise.ca/why.html
This gives me the perfect opportunity to re-post an interview from 2006 that I did with Paul Williams discussing many aspects of his career including Winnipeg, variety shows, Muppets, Smokey and the Bandit, a cut un-filmed scene from Phantom featuring the song “The Hell Of It” –which my band July Fourth Toilet (co-founded by former Winnipeger Julian Lawrence) did recreate live with Paul Williams watching scant feet away at The Big Smash Film Festival (fest creator and programming genius Kier-La Janisse –go get her book House Of Psychotic Women now!!!-thought the worst when she saw his head in his hands, thankfully he was simply laughing too much) (that festival was actually one of the biggest changes in my life as I had gotten sober, whoah) (Phantom is so Winnipeg that when Marty Ballentyne, a former Winnipeger -as well as member of First Nations hard rock band Breach Of Trust- heard that we were doing the tribute, he contacted us via a video store and became part of the band!)
Paul Williams was incredibly gracious with his time and as one of the all-time talk show vets incredibly easy to interview…
Williams: Ha ha, you’ve found him, ha ha ha.
Dayton: I have some songs that I’d like to show you….
(laughter then composure)
Dayton: I am a fan and I am a fan of some of the people you have collaborated with. For example, Biff Rose…
Williams: Biff was one of my first collaborations ever. The first person I found I could write words to somebody else’s music. We wrote a song called “Fill Your Heart” which was the B Side to “Tip-Toe Through The Tulips” for Tiny Tim. The great moment was finding that it had been recorded by David Bowie. It was the first song that David ever recorded that he didn’t write.
Dayton: So Tiny Tim’s version came before Bowie’s.
Williams: I think David told me that he got it off of Tiny’s record.
Dayton: I love that Tiny Tim album.
Williams: It was a great album, wasn’t it?
Dayton: And you’d worked with Richard Perry, the producer of “God Bless Tiny Tim” with your group The Holy Mackerel, right?
Williams: That was actually after. I’d met Richard through Tiny. They were looking for songs for Tiny. The head of publishing at A & M played some songs for Richard and he liked “Fill Your Heart” very much. He was kind of fascinated by my writing and my voice. He said to me, “How’d you like to record?” The idea terrified me so I said, “Let me put a group together.” I basically put The Holy Mackerel together to record for Reprise. I think the group broke up before the album had been released. They picked me up as a solo artist and that was kind of the beginnings of stuff for me. An out of work actor finds a home in music. Once again ‘no’ is a gift in my life. If I don’t get something that I think that I have to have I usually get something that is better that I really need.
Dayton: So Tiny Tim sort of kick started it?
Paul Williams: My first two recordings were released the same day. One of them was “Fill Your Heart” by Tiny Tim and the other one was “It’s Hard To Say Goodbye” by Claudine Longet. I remember thinking, “Tiny Tim and Claudine Longet. What kind of a writer are you?” These opposite ends of the spectrum of recording styles. I still ask myself that question every now and then.
Dayton: The lyrics have a late 60’s vibe but it also sounds like another Tiny Tim number from the 20’s.
Paul Williams: Thank you- I think. If ever there was a song written by two hippies “Fill Your Heart” is a song written by two hippies and that would probably be a fair and accurate description of Biff Rose and I then and probably on some level now of me, I’m not sure what Biff Rose is like these days.
Dayton: He’s got his own website and he seems to march to the beat of his own drum.
Paul Williams: He’s a unique individual Biff is.
Dayton: His albums have been reissued recently.
Paul Williams: Do you know his song “Molly’s Letter”? That is up at the top of my ‘wish I wrote’ list. It’s one of the most stunningly beautiful pieces of music, it’s like literature, it’s beyond just a pop song, it’s amazing short story and so touching. “Son in Moon” would be another one that I just go, “Oh my God!”, just a wonderful, wonderful song.
Dayton: I’d like to ask you for some stories about Tiny Tim.
Paul Williams: I remember Tiny buying cases of baby food. He was living on baby food, like vanilla pudding. Richard said he would open up and smell one jar of baby food, decide it wasn’t good, that it was contaminated, and throw the entire case out. I could never get him to call me Paul, it was always, “Ohhhh, Mr. Williams!”
Dayton: Your song “We’ve Only Just Begun” was originally a bank jingle.
Paul Williams: It had all the romantic beginnings of a bank commercial. Roger Nichols and I were approached by Crocker Bank to show a young couple getting married, riding off into the sunset, it was gonna say “You’ve got a long way to go, we’d like to help you get there, The Crocker Bank.” They didn’t want a sales pitch, they wanted a pretty little love song over this wedding scene. In a sense it was like a little video. Roger and I wrote the first two verses for the commercial and finished it as a song because that’s what we did. We thought it might be an album cut or something, it certainly wasn’t going to be a hit record. The number one album, I think, in the country at that time was “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” so “We’ve Only Just Begun” was not going to be a hit. Then an angel sang it and changed our lives.
Dayton: You collaborated with The Carpenters for quite a while.
Paul Williams: They cut a bunch of our songs. We wrote from about ’67 to maybe ’73 or so.
Dayton: How did you feel about the heavy rock?
Paul Williams: I love all kinds of music. One of the great things about “Phantom Of The Paradise” is it allowed me to satirize a bunch of different styles of music that I really loved that I wasn’t associated with. I was a huge Beach Boys fan so “Carburetors” was a natural. The stuff I was writing with Roger was very Middle Of the Road, we were getting the Jack Jones cuts.
My favourite bands at that time were The Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, of course The Beatles, the original Delaney and Bonnie and Friends was I thought the best rock ‘n’ roll band I ever heard in my life, I was a big Leon Russell fan. I was 27 when I first started writing songs. When Phantom came along it was a great opportunity to combine two loves: my love of film and my love of music.
Dayton: You also satirized yourself with the song “Faust” by turning it into “Carburetors.”
Paul Williams: Absolutely. At one point Brian De Palma had talked about me playing the character of Winslow and becoming The Phantom, this creepy little guy in the rafters of the theatre. I never thought I would be frightening as The Phantom. I also didn’t want people to see me playing somebody whose music was stolen. I was more comfortable playing the thief, stealing my own music, so nobody would think I had a hidden agenda against the music business.
Dayton: I see all the different characters in Phantom as being molded on certain people. I see Winslow as being Randy Newman-ish.
Paul Williams: I’m not sure what he (De Palma) had in mind. I know he always said that for the Swan character it was Phil Spector. There was a definite similarity.
Dayton: Would you have known if Spector had seen the movie?
Paul Williams: I don’t have a clue. I met him during the A & M years just to say hello.
Dayton: I also see Beef as being like Jobriath.
Paul Williams: In a way we kind of invented the whole glam rock thing.
Dayton: To me it is the greatest glam rock musical of all time. It’s an amazing marriage of your music and De Palma’s film making.
Paul Williams: It’s a high point for me. There aren’t very many times in your career when you really feel that you’re given a great creative freedom to just roll but also something just as archetypally juicy as Phantom was. Writing songs around a story that is essentially about the devil, all the Faustian themes, there was a wealth of material to write about. Also the music business that takes itself sometimes so seriously was really ripe for a good poking.
Dayton: It’s so darkly funny and larger than life. Were you listening to any glam rock? Glam rock would often satirize and pastiche musical genres.
Paul Williams: No, I don’t think that I even knew that what I was creating was glam rock. It was just kick ass rock ‘n’ roll and heavy guitar work. I tried to take it as far away from Winslow’s delicate presentation of the tunes. When I listen “Life At Last” or “Somebody Super Like You” I’m really proud of it, it’s a pretty good rock ‘n’ roll record.
Dayton (with the knowledge that The Rolling Stones -Goats Head Soup era- were originally asked to do the soundtrack): And I don’t think The Rolling Stones would have done it as well as that, so…
Paul Williams: Robert, you’re in my will!
Dayton: Well, the songs had to be diverse with different characters and voices to work with.
Paul Williams: I often used improvisational actors. Archie Hahn was a writer for The Groundlings. I used Archie in Phantom Of The Paradise then turned right around a couple of years later and used him as the voice for Bugsy Malone. He was really a flexible actor who could do a lot of different things. Jeffrey Comanor was one of The Juicy Fruits, he was a crazy songwriter buddy of mine for A & M Records. He had a great album called “A Legend In His Own Room, A Rumor In His Own Time.”
Dayton: I was wondering about some of those names on the soundtrack. Craig Doerge I recognized as having played in the group Rosebud.
Paul Williams: Craig was a member of The Section, which was James Taylor’s back up band. In the 60’s it was The Wrecking Crew, the heir apparent to the Wrecking Crew was The Section. Craig’s never forgiven me because I gave him a lyric that he wrote a melody to and we went out and had a hit record with it for Bobby Sherman. He said, “I’ve got a hit record …with Bobby Sherman.” He wasn’t a big Bobby Sherman fan I don’t think.
Dayton: Was he part of the ultra hip Laurel Canyon scene?
Paul Williams: He was exactly that. Joni Mitchell, JD Souther, Jackson Brown. If you look at my “Life Goes On” album alot of those names are in there singing background on my album. I was around those guys but I was also writing for anybody and everybody and with anybody and everybody.
Dayton: So, you really wouldn’t say no? What was your criteria for working with a singer?
Paul Williams: I wouldn’t work with a singer. I’d work with somebody else and I’d write a song and then the publishing company- I’d write a song that was just perfect for a kick ass rock ‘n’ roll group and the publishing company would send it to The Harmonicats and they’d record it! The interesting thing about the time of my career as a songwriter, as a contract writer at A & M records, is I was writing so much material that it was being sent to everybody. It was kind of like throwing it up against the wall and it’d stick where it would stick. But it was also the time where I caught the back end of some amazing careers. So all of a sudden I’ve got stuff being cut by Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley and David Bowie. You’re looking at a career for me as a songwriter that got hot during the third act of some amazing careers that began back in the 40’s but also some amazing careers that were just getting started. Consequently I can write a song like “Rainbow Connection” that Kermit The Frog sings in 1979 and in 2005 Willie Nelson sings it. It’s a great accident of the ages that I was born when I was and started writing when I did that I caught so many amazing careers.
Dayton: With “Rainbow Connection” I read in your bio that you said it was the greatest song you’ve ever written.
Paul Williams: I don’t think I said it was the greatest. I might have said that it was my favourite. I think there’s an element of hope and I think there’s an appreciation of mystery in the song. I romanticized my collaboration with the Henson clan. Jim Henson was an amazing man. I’ve had some unpleasant collaborative experiences in film and otherwise but I’d have to say the best ones that have offered the most creative freedom with people that would play at their music and their movies, that had great focus and great drive but never got that fever to control you. We literally sat down with Jerry Juhl, Jim Henson, myself, and Kenny Ascher and a bunch of guys in a room. It was kind of like, “What’re we gonna write about for The Muppet Movie? What’re we gonna do? Why don’t we do a road movie? Okay. Like how they all get together. We’ll start in the swamp. Who comes along? How about an agent in a row boat. Wow! What a great idea! Dom Deluise.” And that’s how it played out. It was just such fun. I love Gonzo. Gonzo’s my favourite Muppet. I think he’s a landlocked bird. I think in a lot of ways, we as people are these weird little birds that are longing to go back to the sky on some level. There’s a scene in the movie as we were writing it where they break down in the desert. I said to Jim, “They’re sitting around a campfire, there’s all these amazing stars in the heavens. Why don’t we have Gonzo sing about this longing to go back.” And Jim took it literally, “Why don’t we let him experience flight during the earlier part of the film?” And he wrote this entire fairground scene just so that Gonzo could buy a bunch of helium balloons for Camilla, his chicken girlfriend, he buys too many and he goes floating off into space. They shoot the balloons one at a time to bring him back to earth safely but he loved it while everybody’s so scared for him. So in that scene he’s looking at the heavens and he’s singing about “I’m going to go back there someday” with a philosophical overtone about life, when life ends do we go back there some day? The amazing thing is when Jim died they sang “I’m Going to Go Back there Someday” at his funeral. It was like full circle. I don’t know. It’s just really special to me. “Rainbow Connection” and “I’m Going To Go Back There Some day” are both favourites. I have other kinds of songs that are favourites.
Dayton: I didn’t know The Muppet Movie was written around the songs.
Paul Williams: The first thing Jim Henson and I did together was an HBO special called Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas.
Dayton: Now from that special there’s the dark sounds of The River Bottom Nightmare Band…
Paul Williams: Once again a chance to play some kick ass rock ‘n’ roll.
Dayton: Now do you think a song like “The Hell Of It” from Phantom would be too mean spirited for even bad Muppets like The River Bottom Nightmare Band?
Paul Williams: Well, I’m not sure. I’ve been writing a bit with this group called The Scissor Sisters and they are a band I would not have any difficulty showing that song to and saying, “You know what? You should cut this.” Do you know the story of that song in the movie? It was for a scene that got cut.
Dayton: It is one sour sour nasty song. And it closes the whole movie!
Paul Williams (quoting his lyrics): “Good for nothing, bad in bed, nobody likes you, you’re better off dead, good bye…” I’ll tell you what it was originally written for. After Beef was killed there was supposed to be a funeral scene where you see this snowy graveyard with a casket over the open grave and these people around in a circle singing about Beef. While they’re singing the song “The Hell Of It” you follow through all these microphones and cables back into a hearse. In the hearse was Swan recording the funeral live on the Death label.
Dayton: I can just picture the De Palma tracking shot.
Paul Williams: What I wanted to do was a very kind of Fellini-esque thing of everybody in a big circle, “Dun dun dun dun da dun, dun dun dun dun dun da dun…” Very circus-y. And a little girl, whose mother is a stage mother who brought her, she runs in as they’re lowering the casket into the grave, she jumps on it and begins tap dancing to audition for Swan. I don’t know if we ran out of money or if we tried to find a snowy graveyard and couldn’t find one…It was Brian’s idea to just grab the song and cut to the end credits before that.
(well he did perform it on The Brady Bunch Hour….)
Dayton: What were the working methods with you and De Palma?
Paul Williams: Originally it was Phantom Of The Fillmore and he wanted to use Sha Na Na as the group in the opening. We just started working. As we wrote the whole Faustian theme really developed more and more throughout the whole piece. To me the heart of the movie is in one great line: “An assassination live on coast to coast television…that’s entertainment!” There’s the whole thing where these kids have seen so much theatrical violence in the show with The Undead that when they see someone murdered onstage they think it’s part of the show. They cannot tell the difference between what is entertainment and what is real. It’s 1973 when we’re shooting this, so it’s from the 60’s where people are eating their TV dinners watching the war news from Vietnam. We’ve begun to slide into that place where the dividing line between reality and entertainment and fantasy has begun to diminish. It’s a fairly accurate prophecy of where we are today. As Brian points out on the French DVD with all the reality shows people are literally living their lives on camera as Swan was.
Dayton: It’s so crazy seeing people talk about the most shameful things they’ve done on camera, or that they’ll snitch on a family member just to be on TV.
Paul Williams: Tomorrow I’ll be sixteen years sober. It’s my sober birthday. When I was newly sober I went to U.C.L.A. and I got my certificate as a drug and alcohol counselor. I got very active and remain very active in recovery. I remember flying back to New York because Geraldo wanted to do a thing on heroin use and recovery. He asked me if I’d come in and share in my story, not that I’m a heroin addict, I’m an alcoholic and a recovering cocaine addict. But for me to come back because I’m a counselor and he thought it’d be good television and that I could share some of my experience, strength, and hope and that we could help reduce the stigma of the disease a little bit. I went back and the next thing I know while we’re shooting the show they’re doing a remote to somebody in rehab, I won’t say whose name it was, it was a famous son of an actor. When they cut to the commercial I went over to Geraldo and said, “You can’t do this. This is somebody who’s trying to save their life right now.” We never cut back to that person in rehab. It’s amazing that that’s where we’re going, as you say, the most horrific personal inside material as far as the networks or as far as the production people are concerned, that’s good television.
Dayton: Phantom is so layered with its’ commentary and it is also very self referential in that it starts with a character writing music about Faust then the whole thing becomes a Faustian bargain. And let’s not forget the well choreographed split screen explosion sequence. That’s why I am very curious about yours and De Palma’s working methods.
Paul Williams: I think that in any picture that is a true musical, and Phantom Of The Paradise is really a musical, the process has to really be collaborative. You don’t write a finished script and say, “Here’s where the songs are going to go.” When I got on board there was a finished script but it was very different from what we wound up with.
Dayton: How much say did you have with the singers? Such as Jessica Harper…
Paul Williams: I was involved in the casting of Jessica. The song that I had everyone sing for the auditioning of Phoenix was, “Long ago and oh so far away, I fell in love with you before the second show…”
Dayton: Was the audition process like it was in the movie with Swan?
Paul Williams: No, darn it. I remember walking up behind Jessica and she was singing to herself and she was wonderful. We went inside for her to sing for Brian and I and she sang out, “Long ago!” in a very different quality. I said, “No no, sing it to yourself again” and Brian just looked at me and went, “Yeah” and she was wonderful.
Dayton: What about Ray Kennedy, the voice of Beef? Who is Ray Kennedy?
Paul Williams: Ray Kennedy is a singer-songwriter. I actually wrote and recorded “Life At Last” before we had this cast and loved Ray’s voice and thought, “That’s it. That’s the perfect voice for Beef.” The one thing I might do a little different, I’ve since apologized to Garrett because when Garrett sings it in the shower scene he sounds pretty good and he definitely could have done it but I was really knocked out by Ray’s voice and that was it, there was nothing discuss.
Dayton: You’re going to Winnipeg at the end of the month, right?
Paul Williams: Yeah, we’re going to do Phantompalooza.
Dayton: Phantom was extremely popular in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Paris, France! What’s the deal?
Paul Williams: Because the cities are so much alike. It’s very bizarre, isn’t it?
Dayton: It ran for 62 weeks straight in Winnipeg!
Paul Williams: And it did the same kind of thing in Paris. And I couldn’t even begin to tell you why.
Dayton: And people have latched on to the movie more now.
Paul Williams: The picture was not a hit in the United States. People thought it was a horror film, they thought it was a concert film. They weren’t sure. But the intensity of the fans for this picture has just been wonderful.
Dayton: I see this movie as being done as a stage show.
Paul Williams: It almost happened then it fell apart. It’s one of those things where I hope one day it will actually happen.
Dayton: So there’s stuff written for a stage show version?
Paul Williams: At one point I wrote some additional material but I think if we did it as a stage show we’d start at letter A again. I’d certainly use all of the stuff that’s in the picture but I’d add to it. I’d love to see that happen.
Dayton: Rocky Horror started out as a stage show. It became a movie in 1975, a year after Phantom. Is there any connection between the two?
Paul Williams: The only connection is that years later Tim Curry and I were both voice over actors on the Batman animated series. He was the voice of The Joker and I was The Penguin. Then he went on to do something else and he was replaced by Mark Hamill as The Joker. So midnite shows would do double features of Phantom and Rocky Horror. When they made a DVD about those people who are addicted to The Rocky Horror show they asked me to narrate it, which I did.
Dayton: Did you have a type of voice in mind when you did the voice of The Penguin?
Paul Williams: I just used me at my most arrogant. “You flying rodent!”
Dayton: Kind of like Swan?
Paul Williams: Swan is The Penguin with better hair.
Dayton: Your first movie role was when you were a kid in The Loved One. Do you have any stories about that?
Paul Williams: It was my very first movie so I was walking around like a kid in a candy store. I followed Jonathan Winters around like a puppy.
Dayton: I have just a few more questions. I won’t keep you too long.
Paul Williams: We’ve been at it at it a little more than an hour. Although, Robert, we are talking about my favourite subject: me.
Dayton: I am in a song and dance duo called Canned Hamm and one of our inspirations, well, I should tell you our names- Big Hamm and Little Hamm, I’m Little Hamm, and we’ve worn matching denim outfits.
Paul Williams: Ahhh perfect. Sounds like there’s a little bit of Smokey And the Bandit in there.
Dayton: Well, when I was about eleven I remember you and Pat McCormick were on a talk show in your Little Enos and Big Enos denim outfits and you were saying that you were going to do those characters a lot more.
Paul Williams: We did. Glen Larson and I wrote an ABC Movie Of the Week called Rooster which was about two insurance investigators and there was a pilot for a series. The movie aired but the pilot never made it on the air. We played those characters in two or three episodes of The Fall Guy and three Smokey And the Bandit movies.
Dayton: How could I ever see Rooster?
Paul Williams: Good luck. If you find it, send it to me. Somewhere in storage I’ve got Rooster.
Dayton: Pat McCormick must have been fun to work with.
Paul Williams: He was an amazing friend, a really really bright guy, and a great character. He was one of a kind.
Dayton: Do you have one story about him?
Paul Williams: Yeah. Our first conscious memory was coming out of a bar together across from NBC. We’d been in the bar all night and I don’t think he’d ever seen me off of a bar stool before. He came towering over me and he looked down at me and he said, “You know what you look like? You look like an aerial photograph of a human being.” Any mind that would think like that you’d just have to love it. So he said, “You know, you’re going to have to help me find my car. I don’t know where I put it.”
I said, “Okay, what kind of a car is it?” He says, “Oh no. That would be cheating.” Just a funny funny guy, really quick mind. I think Burt saw the two of us at the craft service table for The Tonight Show one time and went, “Those guys are funny together.” To make three movies with Jackie Gleason… alot of times I’ve said that those movies were a vacation to make and a job to watch.
Dayton: They’re just movies to get with some people and have a laugh.
Paul Williams: They’re pure Americana.
Dayton: A friend of mine has been looking for years for the Ishtar movie soundtrack and he can’t find it.
Paul Williams: It was never released.
Dayton: But it says at the end of the movie, “Soundtrack available…”
Paul Williams: I know. And at the end of the movie you were supposed to hear fully produced rock ‘n’ roll tracks of those songs with great musicians but Warren as producer and the entire Columbia team has never allowed it to be released because they were overwhelmed by the negative response to the picture. At least that’s how I remember things playing out. Be great to get it out now…I think ‘Chuck and Lyle’ (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman’s characters) deserve their shot…even if it’s twenty years overdue.
Dayton: Those are great songs!
Paul Williams: If somebody loves those songs, if they mention Ishtar, it’s a guarantee that they are a songwriter or a musician because they get it, they get the humour.
Dayton: They are great songs that are supposed to be bad songs but are actually great songs.
Paul Williams: It would be very easy to write obviously bad songs but to write believable bad songs where they actually sound like they actually were trying to be good was the hard part and that’s what I had a great time doing.
Dayton: How much say did you have in The Odd Couple TV episode where you played yourself?
Paul Williams: I did what I was asked to do. The only thing was Garry said, “I want you to write a song at the end that Felix writes for his daughter. Take that note and write a song around that.” They kept changing the end of the story and never got around to writing the note so they gave me the note the morning of the shoot. I wrote that song that morning. One of the great moments of my life was sitting on the foot of my bed one day watching television. My daughter walked in the room, she was seventeen or eighteen at the time, she says, “What are you watching, Dad?” I said, “Oh my God, come here” and she sat with me and we watched that song play and that scene. It was an amazing experience.
Dayton: You were all over TV. Just switch the channel and you’d be there. I don’t know how you did it.
Paul Williams: I became a lot better at showing off than showing up. In a way I think celebrity becomes an addiction in a certain sense. I think my career as a writer was greatly impacted by me running off to do The Gong Show instead of paying attention to the opportunity I’d been given to write. We learn by doing in life so I’ve learned and I’ve changed in a lot of ways and I’m a real grateful man for the life I’ve been given.
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