At the beginning of my career I dabbled in song writing. After several years of limited success I chose to buy groceries over the need to express my rhyming ability and turned to TV writing, vowing never to write songs again, but then came The Cow Pies.
The Cow Pies “Totally Twisted Country” is my latest musical endeavor (2011). It's a comedy country and western CD that I wrote with my son Joey and it turned out great. Some of the titles are real attention grabbers — “Will My New Boobs Go To Heaven”, “Red Neck Blues”, and the all around crowd pleaser, “The Fart Song”. Go to TheCowPies.com to hear samples and watch our music video.
Here are some of the highlights of my early music writing career.
"The Girl of my Best Friend" written with Beverly Ross. (1960) Recorded by Elvis Presley in his ELVIS IS BACK album. It was a top ten song in England when Presley released it as a single. Although many vocalists have covered it, my favorite was Bryan Ferry in his TAXI album in the late 90's.
"To Love Someone" written with Norman Blagman (1961) Recorded by Ral Donner. This made it to number ten on the charts. I never got paid a penny for the record. Coincidentally the label it was released on was called GONE. And it is.
"It'll Never Be Over For Me" written with Norman Blagman sometime in the early 60's and not too long ago covered by Los Lobos. My son, a big fan of the group, was very impressed and for a few days actually thought I was cool.
MAD Twists Rock'N'Roll written with Norman Blagman. This album was originally made for RCA but then later sold to MAD Magazine when RCA came to their senses. It included such great classics as "Please Betty Jane When Are You Going to Shave Your Legs?" as well as "She Got a Nose Job." I thought the album was great. My mother stopped taking my calls.
Fink Along With MAD. This follow up included "It's a Gas" which was a series of musical riffs and belching. Believe it or not still gets played on the Howard Stern show. "Loving a Siamese Twin" was also on that album.
Both albums were released in the 60's. A big record company wanted to re-release the albums but no one could find the original tracks. Not too long ago some of these songs were re-recorded by Rhino records with new arrangements for some sort of MAD tribute album. I didn't care for the new versions very much. They seem to have lost the original intent – to make people laugh.
Anyway, it was endeavors like this that brought my music career to an abrupt but necessary end.