{"id":12907,"date":"2019-06-20T13:08:18","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T18:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/?p=12907"},"modified":"2025-10-23T08:55:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T13:55:45","slug":"bonnie-hayes-from-sex-pistols-epiphany-to-nick-of-time-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/bonnie-hayes-from-sex-pistols-epiphany-to-nick-of-time-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Songwriter Bonnie Hayes on Sexism, Drugs, and Rock &#8216;n&#8217; Roll"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"subhed\" style=\"text-transform:none!important;font-variant-caps:normal;letter-spacing:normal;word-spacing:normal;\">\n  <span style=\"text-transform:none!important;font-variant-caps:normal;letter-spacing:normal;word-spacing:normal;\">\n    How Bonnie Hayes Went from a Sex Pistols Epiphany to <em>Nick of Time<\/em> Success\n  <\/span>\n<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none;\" title=\"Libsyn Player\" src=\"\/\/html5-player.libsyn.com\/embed\/episode\/id\/10225685\/height\/90\/theme\/custom\/thumbnail\/yes\/direction\/forward\/render-playlist\/no\/custom-color\/87A93A\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"90\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Bonnie Hayes is best known as a songwriter, having contributed tracks to Bonnie Raitt\u2019s <em>Nick of Time<\/em>, which won the Grammy for album of the year 30 years ago. But there were a lot of twists and turns that brought her there, from her youth in the San Francisco scene in the 1970s\u2014her brother Chris played guitar with Huey Lewis and the News and her brother Kevin played drums with the Robert Cray Band\u2014to escaping a cult-like commune to see the Sex Pistols on the first show of their 1978 American tour. And her career has taken several turns since, from playing as a touring keyboardist for Billy Idol to becoming the chair of the Berklee College of Music Songwriting department. This interview touches upon all of the above, as well as her frustration with sexism in the music industry (learn why she thinks the photo above is ridiculous), and the emotional rigors of touring. Her Berklee Online course, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/courses\/arranging-for-songwriters-instrumentation-and-production-in-songwriting\/?campaign_id=7010Z000001ZkQgQAK&amp;pid=&amp;utm_source=takenote&amp;utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_campaign=bol-gen-takenote-link-from-article\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Arranging for Songwriters: Instrumentation and Production in Songwriting<\/a><\/em>, which she co-authored with Sara Brindell, is live now.<\/p>\n<p><b>Bonnie Hayes: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My dad was a doctor, but also in the military. So we moved around a lot, and they were also Catholic, and they had seven kids in 10 years. So we would move, and we would not have any friends at our new schools, so we kind of formed a tribal mentality and approach to the world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Where are you in the birth order?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m first. I\u2019m the eldest and there are four boys and three girls. Four of us are professional musicians, and the other three are in the medical field.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Oh, funny.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes. It is because my dad was a doctor, but he was also a music nut. So he bought records and would play them. We took piano lessons from the time that I was four and I took them throughout, not very avidly I have to say, but I did take them through my whole young life. We had the French horn player from the Washington DC Symphony come and teach all the kids half hour lessons. He knows it\u2019s going to be like . . .<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Just the Hayes kids?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes. Just the Hayes because there we were. So we were getting this musical education. We also took French lessons. My parents were really into education. My dad was a music lover, and after dinner when most families would go and watch television, my dad would make us gather around the piano, and he\u2019d play piano and we would sing. We sang a lot of corny folk songs, \u201cBig Rock Candy Mountain,\u201d and \u201cThe Fox.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[SINGING] <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fox went out on a chilly night. Pray for the moon.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Also Tom Lehrer songs. My dad was really sarcastic and really intellectual, and it kind of conferred this complexity, Because it wasn\u2019t just these simple songs. This music was sort of making fun of certain things that were going on in the world, and types of mental formations. It really formed our worldview, this Tom Lehrer stuff. We were very into it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What is he best known for?<br \/><\/b>He writes these sarcastic songs like in the \u201960s. He made a bunch of records. He set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of a song from <em>Pirates of Penzance<\/em>. So this kind of complex sort of pirating of music, with these very demented kind of lyrical ideas. There was one in the record that we were really into called the \u201cOld Dope Peddler,\u201d which was about a guy in a neighborhood, and it was in this kind of:<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[SINGING] <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here\u2019s the cure for all your troubles. Here\u2019s an end to all distress. Is the old dope peddler, with his powdered happiness.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This whole thing about a dope seller. You can see that\u2019s really dark in this very sunshiny, pretty, flowery kind of melody. So, we were exposed to a lot of different kinds of music. We\u2019d listen to classical, and Broadway, and pop, like the Mamas &amp; the Papas, and Brasil \u201966, and all of that kind of stuff.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Were you playing together?<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So what happened was my parents did eventually get divorced. I was 15 when they got divorced. My mom did an amazing thing. She moved us out of the small town where we lived to San Francisco, and so the tribe moved and again, we were the shadows in the hall at our high schools or middle schools. We were just not in the culture of where we were so we formed into this tight tribe and we started taking lessons at this school called Blue Bear in San Francisco which is still there. We learned really quickly how to improvise. We started writing songs. We played jazz. I learned jazz harmony. We started writing jazz tunes. We formed a band, our band with two other of the high school bands, started playing these shows. We would rent a hall and do shows. I mean it was wild what we did, and that was when me, and Chris, and Kevin got really good. We got really good. We played a lot of gigs. We were really known as players, and so Chris especially got plucked out of that band pretty quickly by Dave Liebman and Pee Wee Ellis, Martin Fierro. So he started to play with Van Morrison when he was still in high school. He was super duper introverted, and practiced all the time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What was your reaction when he was practicing all the time? Were you like why is he practicing that much?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We practiced all the time too. I practiced piano constantly. The only thing I had was a piano, so it was loud. So I couldn\u2019t do it as much as Chris did it. Chris is 10 times the player I am. Right. Sorry, but he is. But I have a better grasp of harmony. We both have really sick ears, and so does my brother Kevin who was the drummer for Robert Cray for 20 years, and still he\u2019s been a professional musician with all these different people all his life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Was your mom also a musical influence?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My mom was not. I mean she could sing but she didn\u2019t sing. She wasn\u2019t into it the way my dad was. She was into us being creative, in a way that I rarely see. I feel like parents often get invested in their kids being successful. She wasn\u2019t invested in us being successful. She was invested in us being expressive and creative, and following our own star. Wherever it went, and by the way she set up a studio. She bought us all professional quality gear. We had a studio in our basement where we were able to practice every day. She fought with the cops when the neighbors would send him over and go, \u201cThey\u2019re allowed to play until 10.\u201d I guess it was 10 o\u2019clock until 10 o\u2019clock. \u201cIt\u2019s nine o\u2019clock. They\u2019re going to play for another hour.\u201d So she was really on our side.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Do you think she saw the fact that you and your siblings didn\u2019t feel like you\u2019re fitting in at the school and that this was your only outlet?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, I mean, we were so engaged with music. The community at Blue Bear, the school where we started going, was this really powerful community of people who identified really as outsiders. At the time, you have to remember, now you have the cheerleader who also is a lead singer in a band. At the time, musicians were not a part of mainstream culture, and being a star, it didn\u2019t even exist. It didn\u2019t even occur to you that you could do that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What year are we talking?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We\u2019re talking 1970. I mean, 1970 is when we moved to San Francisco, so I learned everything in the years from between 1970 . . . by 1972, I graduated from high school and was a professional musician.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What was your first foray into the professional?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, it\u2019s probably playing with that band, that high school band.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What was it called?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was called Sweetmeat. The other two bands were Sass and Subconscious Power, so it\u2019s the S bands and we basically play . . .\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What is Sweetmeat?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was some weird thing. My brothers, we were smoking a lot of dope and we thought things were funny that I now I\u2019m like, what was funny about that? But there was this whole thing about limpets, if I tried to explain it, but if you get stoned, and think for a while, you\u2019ll laugh. So it was just this silly inside joke stuff that we were super into because we were weirdos.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Was your mom okay with that part of the culture or was she oblivious<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. I mean, she didn\u2019t know we smoked dope. Like I think she did, but basically, after we moved up there, for the first year it was like we had a two flat building in San Francisco, and mom and the younger kids lived downstairs, and the four older kids lived upstairs, so there was a kitchen up there and a living room. So we\u2019d basically just seceded from the union and hung out up there and smoked dope.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Culturally, I can\u2019t think of a place or time, 1970 San Francisco that\u2019s like more apropo for that activity.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Incredible engagement with the larger culture, even if the culture at our high schools was still, it is really rigid, classic academic. I mean, I was such a wastrel. I would bring a bottle of orange juice and dump it out in the parking lot, and fill half of it with vodka with my girlfriends and we go to the gym, and go have to run around. We were terrible kids and very headstrong, and doing what we wanted but we were obsessed with music, obsessive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>It seems like you were driven. What did you call yourself, a wastrel? But I mean, it seems you were more driven than that.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We were driven by the idea of a life that wasn\u2019t in that rigid box, that school and that everybody\u2019s parents were in this box of thinking that was, you grow up, you get married, you get a job, you have kids, and we were like no. And it was very innate to us, the way my dad thought is really original deal breaker thinker, and he had a lot of trouble in his life because of that, because he was always outside the box. My mom was really supportive of whatever it was that we wanted to do, and she saw us finding something that was meaningful and supported it, she wasn\u2019t judging us for smoking dope. I mean, she knew about it but pretended like she didn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So how involved in the culture at large in San Francisco did you get? I mean, was that still happening and was that still accessible?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, the Haight Street culture was starting to go down the tubes at that point.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Because culturally, heroin had been introduced?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A lot of that and there were a lot of people who were using heroin and meth, and psychedelics. The psychedelics were super strong and you never knew what was going to happen. So a lot of people were having mental, there was a lot of degeneration in the scene, but we were still young and we were more engaged in musician culture than we were in stoner culture. We just smoked dope in our bedrooms after school and before dinners, and then we would go on to have these wild conversations at dinner because the other great thing about smoking pot was that it just set your mind. I think it had a lot to do with us engaging in this idea of a future that wasn\u2019t dad says you have to get married, dad says you have to go to medical school, which was what he wanted me to do, and I was like \u201cHell, if I\u2019m going to medical school.\u201d So just able to envision another future.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah. So you get out of high school and you start working in the music industry, and the S bands.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The S bands were no more. Well Sweetmeat continued for a while. So I left my mom\u2019s house when I was 17, I moved in with my boyfriend, who was a drummer, and I was in two bands that played like weddings and there was a frat party band that played like,<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[SINGING] <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Splish-splash, I was taking a bath . . .<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So it was this thing where you had to just learn seven million of these corny \u201950s songs, and then another thing we had to learn was the stuff you play at weddings like \u201cBlue Spanish Eyes\u201d and oh, we have a Polish wedding, we have to play polka, we had to play beer barrel polka for 20 minutes while they dance around. So just that workman musicianship, where it\u2019s just like get in there and you play for four hours, and you get your money. Then during the week, I was teaching piano and workshops, which were like running bands, so I was right away starting to get that bandleader experience and harmony, and theory because I had just eaten the world as far as understanding harmony. And I was playing jazz gigs during the week because I really liked jazz at that point, I wanted to be a jazz piano player.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Then there\u2019s a long period of time before your name starts popping up on records and were you continuing on this rigorous course until then?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Of workman living? So yeah. I mean, I obviously went through a bunch of different bands, and I was teaching more and more. At a certain point, I went to college for a year and a half, and I got a call for a gig that was a seven night a week gig in Four Corners or Farmington, New Mexico, with a buddy of mine who had been in Sweetmeat, was playing on. This guy, Keith Allen, who\u2019s since passed away and was in my band for awhile, called us. So we went out there and we took this gig, and we played country swing. Another one of those absorptive, where I play country swing, five 45-minute sets a night, with no charts. So it\u2019s just the ear thing where it was like okay red sails at sunset, a one, and I would be like you know what I mean? It was like no idea what was going to happen. So I did that for a while, then that gig fell apart, and then Keith and I went on the road as a duo for a while around there, and then I connected with this gay bartender and we drove out to New York City. So I lived in New York City because I wanted to be a jazz piano player, so I started trying to be a jazz piano player in New York City, to very little effect.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What year is this, like \u201976?\u00a0<br \/><\/b>I want to say \u201976, yeah. I lived there for a couple of years. After about a year, I got a touring gig with my first real experience where I was touring with this artist named Nick Jamison who was a producer. He produced a Bonnie Raitt record actually. <em>Green Light<\/em>. He\u2019s a producer for Foghat. Remember that band?<\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So he had made a record. God, really brainy interesting cool record. I\u2019d met him at a class that I taught at the Family Life Music School. I went on tour with them and we were opening for Bob Seger.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>He was huge at that time.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He was huge. It was a big tour. We also opened for Muddy Waters and James Cotton, all these blues people. It was very interesting who they paired you with.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Were they label mates or just on the same management roster?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Management was Tony Dimitriades who was a huge manager. He manages like Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. Tony managed Nick because he managed Foghat. So we were getting the royal treatment. I mean, it was definitely a great tour. I got paid really well and I just played keyboards on this stuff. I started thinking about what was going on. I was noticing that Bob Seger could take a year off, that I couldn\u2019t take a year off because every time that I was going to make money, I had to be playing a gig. That for the rest of my life in order to make a living, I was going to have to be playing a gig.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Well, during those years between high school and then this six or seven years, did you always know that this was your career or was it just, yeah.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oh, I was hell bent. There was no way that I had mischosen my career. This happens to a lot of young people at Berklee where they come in and they\u2019re like this is my career. It\u2019s so funny because I remember I had a teacher at the time, he looked at me and said, I was in there trying to become a great jazz piano player. He said, you\u2019re a writer. I said, \u201cYou just put me in that box because I\u2019m a girl.\u201d He goes, \u201cNo ma\u2019am, you are a writer and you\u2019re not a player.\u201d I was like, \u201cYes, I am a player. I\u2019ll show you.\u201d I was practicing all the time. I was quite good but I wasn\u2019t that good. I wasn\u2019t no Herbie Hancock.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So how did they know you\u2019re a writer, just by your mannerisms or the way that you\u2019re writing?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The way that I approach music. I\u2019m able to analyze, I\u2019m able to hear really specific voicings, remember long strings of patterns. I mean, that goes with being a player too. But it\u2019s the analytical element that often isn\u2019t there for players and they\u2019re approaching things often on a combination of intellect but also a great deal of intuition and fine motor response that\u2019s outside of the mental decision.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Had you even started writing at that point?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No, I had not written anything. I didn\u2019t sing, I was like, \u201cNo, I\u2019m not singing.\u201d So I started singing though on the tour because I was asked to sing harmonies. I\u2019m great at singing harmonies because we had sung when we were kids. We would figure out harmonies to things all the time. It\u2019s natural.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Do you think there\u2019s something, I always thought that there was something to siblings singing together and it\u2019s . . .<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0\u00a0<br \/><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Magic juice. Yes. It\u2019s magic juicy yum yum. I mean, it\u2019s funny because I often think the way the Beatles sang together reminds me of the way Chris and I can sing together and it is just nailed, and my sister too. So anyway, I\u2019m out on the road and I\u2019m noticing that Bob Seger has a different life, and I actually talked to him about it. He said, \u201cYou get royalties when you write songs and you have hit records. When you write the songs, you get money that comes in your mailbox forever.\u201d He was buying dinner for his crew and our crew and everybody in both bands, and I was just like, \u201cHow is he doing this?\u201d It was like, I mean first of all, I had no idea the scale of the kind of money they were making. So I was making my little $1,000 a week feeling really rich.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Well that\u2019s interesting that he was that accessible that the keyboardist from the opening band could just have a conversation with the headliners.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Because he was taking us all out to dinner. Also, there were very few girls. So one of the weird things about that is that\u2019s one of those situations where being a girl actually came in quite handy, which is that people would notice you, they would go, \u201cHey, how you doing?\u201d Because it was freaking weird being out there with all the guys, and that was my life for a long time, was all men all the time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Did they treat you fairly?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oh, yeah. They were cool. I mean, my buddy who hired me for the band Nick was an angel. An angel and he still is a freaking of an angel, one of the best people I\u2019ve ever known. So Tony was great and Bob was great. Yeah, what are you going to say? The guys were really cool.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So he plants this idea in your head, the royalty checks coming in your mailbox while you\u2019re taking a year off. <\/b><b><br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. Then that band, we went to cut another record, and we went down to Atlanta. Okay. So it turned out that Nick got really involved with the Guru Maharaj Ji. So without being known, I was in this. I got pulled into this weird cultish scene which I was not into. I\u2019m like, \u201cI am not that.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Did you have your radar on?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oh man, as soon as I got there, I was like \u201cWhat is this?\u201d So basically, I hung out there hoping that the record would materialize for a couple of months. While I was there, one night I was at one of these meetings that they would have with this community, where they would basically just talk about how great Guru Maharaj Ji was for hours upon hours and I was like whatever. I went downstairs and the freaking Sex Pistols are playing their first show in the United States. At a bowling alley in Atlanta, Georgia. They let me in free because I was a chick, I guess. I walked in, there weren\u2019t that many people there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Had you even heard of them at that moment.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No, but I saw them and I was like, \u201cOh, you don\u2019t have to be good to play rock \u2019n\u2019 roll.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>I have goosebumps. The story is great.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. I mean, I was like, \u201cWait, I can do that. I\u2019m a better singer than he is and I know I can write better songs than that.\u201d I mean, because by the way, I freaking love the Sex Pistols, like when I listened to that first record and I\u2019m just like, \u201cOh my God, this is so dope.\u201d But at the time, I was a jazz snob, and I was like, \u201cI can do that.\u201d So when all of this was over and I finally left Atlanta.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So I need to know a little bit more. You just ventured out because you didn\u2019t want to go to this meeting, and just pure coincidence right there.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pure coincidence walking.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Oh, I guess there\u2019s a band playing, I\u2019ll go watch.\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>There\u2019s a band playing, I go in, and here\u2019s the Sex Pistols which were just like so different from the scene. I had just been in and also the big \u201970s classic rock scene that I was touring in. This was new. It was dirty, ugly, messed up people playing dirty ugly raw music about really ugly, dirty things. I was like, in love.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>They weren\u2019t even well received on that tour, right?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No, they were hated. I don\u2019t know what happened. It made me see that you don\u2019t have to be good to write songs or to have a band. I was thinking that there was some division between me and everybody else that I wasn\u2019t that good, as good as Neil Young, who I loved, or Stevie Wonder, that I could never be that good. In seeing the Sex Pistols I was like, \u201cWell, if they can do it, I can do it. I\u2019m better than them.\u201d Little did I know it was going to be such a hard road to write songs. Writing songs is hard especially when you\u2019re thinking that you\u2019re smarter than everyone else which I most assuredly was.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah, I bet. So what was the first song that you wrote and was it immediately after that gig and was it a punk rock song?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No. So all of that went away. I went back to New York for a couple of months and then I decided I was so intent on writing songs and I decided to return to San Francisco. So I basically got a driveaway car and drove back to San Francisco with another guy who was returning so we drove together.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>The record with Nick never materialized?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They did make it but I didn\u2019t. I was like, \u201cDudes, I can\u2019t hang with this.\u201d I mean, I was getting supported while I was there, but it just felt very dead end. It was like we were out in the suburbs of Atlanta and it was just really not what I wanted to be doing. I was pretty driven I guess. I didn\u2019t have visions of being a successful rock star. It was more just like I wanted to play music for reals, and I didn\u2019t want to be out in the suburbs pretending to play music while I listened to a bunch of people yammer about this guru. I just was not into it. Or talk about their meditation that day. Now, I\u2019d probably be interested in it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So you make your way back to San Francisco?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I make my way back to San Francisco. My mom has since moved to Sacramento but she left the house and my brothers. My brother Kevin had colonized the house with a bunch of dude musicians like the Corelli brothers and Ray Scott, who\u2019s a jazz guitar player. It was all men and I moved in and they\u2019re like, \u201cWe don\u2019t have a bedroom for you,\u201d and I\u2019m like, \u201cI can live here too.\u201d I moved into the front room and I basically started trying to write songs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Meanwhile, Chris is playing with Huey Lewis at this point, right?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. I think he was playing with Huey but it was called something else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>It was Clover?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chris wasn\u2019t in Clover but I don\u2019t remember how they connected, and Chris wasn\u2019t living where we were living so I wasn\u2019t really in his world. But he was definitely going the same way I was going which is rock. We had been jazzers and we decided to go for the rock.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Had Kevin met Robert at this point?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No. Kevin was still doing jazz and he was basically doing a lot of local work going out with John and with Michelle Hendrix, John\u2019s daughter, in these little jazz tour things. We knew all the jazz musicians and now I\u2019m even more aware of because I turned into a punk, because I want to write punk. I want to write punky music because I was really into the attitude of it. So I discovered my friend Steve Savage who had been my boyfriend and I broke up with him and he was also really into the punk scene in San Francisco.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>He\u2019s got a great name for punk rock from the start.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He\u2019s got this big giant Afro and he was really skinny and another total wastrel and he was basically trying to write songs but we can only write lyrics. So after a bunch of really hard starts where I couldn\u2019t write anything. It took a long time. Steve started sending me lyrics and I started.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What was the problem? Was it that you knew too much?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I was too in my head. I made everything super fancy. It just was shitty. It didn\u2019t have any emotion. It was too brainy. It just wasn\u2019t good. It didn\u2019t feel like anything. So Steve started sending me lyrics and I wrote a bunch of songs with Steve and those songs started to get a little bit of attention. We made a demo and that demo started getting around and Chris played on the demo. Chris was a monster player and he brought that incredible ability to playing rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, it was some fierce stuff. It was really, really good sauce and people were freaking out about the songs because they were very weird but they weren\u2019t punk. They were punky-intellectual songs. So we started getting hit up by producers and we started a band, Steve Savage and this guy Mark Pollard who was a graphic artist who I taught how to play bass. I go, \u201cPlay this one four times, and then that one four,\u201d literally, and Chris and me were in this band called the Punts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Okay. This is pre-Wild Combo.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pre-Wild Combo. Mark left the band, drama, with some person, I don\u2019t even remember all the personal stuff. But through all this, Steve left the band. We got Kevin joined the band, Chris left the band to be in Huey\u2019s band. So that was this huge thing. This huge thing with me and Chris.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>There was a brief time where there were three Hayes siblings in the band?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No. Kevin came in after. What happened was, it was so funny because Kevin was a jazzmo and Kevin came to see the Punts with Steve Savage and he ended up like pogoing all night and caught the punk bug and joined the band. It was great. It was so funny. Their songs were really fun. I was writing better and better songs. It occurred to me like I was writing these angry songs and I was like, \u201cPeople don\u2019t like angry songs.\u201d So I started writing songs that were more stories and they had catchy choruses and I think a combination of like the Go-Go\u2019s but like probably smarter and more musical than the Go-Go\u2019s.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Was the design always going to be used singing and playing?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I had no intention of singing but I couldn\u2019t find another singer, and finally, they were like, \u201cYou have to do it.\u201d And I couldn\u2019t sing it all. I had to get hammered drunk for about two years to do a gig. I was really shy of it and I didn\u2019t feel like I was good and I wasn\u2019t good, but I\u2019ll tell you what, it made me good. Right around that time when I started, I was playing with the bands and I got Kevin and I got Hank Maninger and I got this guy Paul Davis. They were all really good players and they were playing my songs and it sounded like too musician-y. So I bought a TEAC four-track cassette recorder and I made demos where I would program the drums on the Roland 808. Programmed the drumbeat, play the bass on my organ bass, I would take my clavinet and plug it through a guitar amp and turn it up to 10 and record myself playing guitar parts on the clavinet and then overdub myself playing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>That sounds awesome.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They were great sounding demos. I don\u2019t have one of them. I don\u2019t know what happened to it. Then I would record my voice and I hated the sound of my voice so much that I would triple it. Jimi Hendrix used to do this too. I would triple my voice and I would triple all the background vocals, and I would sing them over and over and over until I got the new tune.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>That\u2019s a lot of bouncing. I remember four tracks and bouncing was not easy.\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>Heavy bouncing, a lot of deterioration. So I will have two tracks and then I would do vocals and I would bounce them out and then bounce them in and then bounce them out and bounce them in and bounce them out. I\u2019d have another cassette that we\u2019d have to, it was wild. Anyway, I did really elaborate demos and I would take them in and play for the guys, I\u2019d go, \u201cPlay it just like this,\u201d and they will go, \u201cOkay. Is that all you want?\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cYeah, except louder.\u201d So I learned how to sing in tune from doing that and I also started producing. I was basically, \u201cHow do I make this sound good? \u201cWas the beginning of my career as a producer because. I was a super early adopter on the computers too.<\/p>\n<p><b>So what time in the timeline, so we\u2019re about like 1980 maybe?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>So which comes first, somebody covering one of your songs or are you producing or everything at once?\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>We made this demo with \u201cShelly\u2019s Boyfriend,\u201d \u201cGirls Like Me.\u201d The song called \u201cRochambeau,\u201d and another song, and Steve Savage, who is now my manager, took it down to LA, and played it around.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><b>So wait, he goes from boyfriend, to bandmate, to manager?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Correct.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>That\u2019s awesome.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He\u2019s a very flexible person. So am I as you can see. He went down and there was a guy at A&amp;M at that time, David Anderle, who loved us, and David Kirshenbaum, was running the A&amp;R department, and he hated us. Guys don\u2019t like smart girls. It\u2019s definitely not at the time it was like, she\u2019s not hot, she\u2019s not sexy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Was there pressure to be sexy or dress sexy or anything?<br \/><\/b>That happened later. When there was a little bit of money that got made. So I was at that time, not into this. I wouldn\u2019t write songs about love, and I was chunky, and I was just really still pretty pissed off. So Anderle couldn\u2019t sign us because Kirshenbaum wouldn\u2019t let him but he got me. He took me into Lance Freed\u2019s, who ran Rondor and they gave me a publishing deal. So they signed me to a publishing deal. So that was my first foray into major labels.<\/p>\n<p><b>Meanwhile, was the band like, what happened to our label deal?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The band didn\u2019t care. Nobody cared. We were having fun. We basically made this single of \u201cShelly\u2019s Boyfriend,\u201d that we went around and took to college radio stations in the Bay Area, and it started getting played, and we started selling out shows, right and left. We showed up a week after KOSS started playing this single. We played a free show at San Francisco State and 800 people showed up. And that bled the whole country. College radio started playing and there\u2019s jocks here like, \u201cAre you the one who did \u2019Shelly\u2019s Boyfriend?\u2019\u201d They still remember it. So we have this national success and that was when Slash Records signed us. We got signed to Slash.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Were you Wild Combo by this point?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, they made us change our name.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>How come?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They made us change our name because they said, nobody knew what \u201cpunts\u201d meant. Slash had their heads up their butts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>History has been kind to them, I feel.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They signed us because they thought we were going to be their big hit act because we were just poppy enough. Because they had all these bands like Fear, that we\u2019re never going to get ever.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>The Germs?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Over them. The Blasters were. But The Blasters again, they can get on the radio, and neither did X.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Was the first Violent Femmes album Slash too?<br \/><\/b>Yes. None of those bands, they were all college radio bands, they were indie bands. So Slash was making, and that was why for the cover of that record was like super clean cut with balloons.Then the back was after the party. People were passed out into the table, and it was called <em>Good, Clean, Fun<\/em>. So it was this whole thing was this sort of folk wholesome marketing approach to this band that they thought was going to be their sell out band. But we were completely not welcomed by the Los Angeles community and Warner Brothers did not pick up our record. Again, I\u2019m going to just put that right back. The records that got picked up by Warner Brothers were records with dudes in them. Once again, I\u2019m going to say that has something to do with me as a lead singer. The culture at the time that shortly thereafter The Go-Go\u2019s record, made it. Then if that had happened before my record, we would have gone to be picked up by Warner\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Warner\u2019s was stodgy and you had a guy making all these critical decisions on his gut. There was virtually no marketing, no kind of tracking of success, it was very loosey-goosey, and the guys that ran labels had a lot of power. So basically, we were on Slash, they didn\u2019t put out our second record, and they dropped us when we didn\u2019t materialize into their big sell out success that they wanted. We went back up and we were still really popular in the Bay Area. We had gone on a nationwide tour so we were. But we basically just went back, and for several years we played live all the time, all over that region, and sometimes in LA, and basically made. I supported a band. Steve was doing other stuff with the band and the crew. I had a three man crew, and we had the whole thing, it was like a unit, and we all lived on the money that we made from playing live with that band. So we had a great time. That was my 20s. After we got dropped from Slash, I was like, whatever with you guys, and I just put out another record, an indie record. I borrowed money, paid it back when in the black. I was an indie.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Did you produce the first one?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No, Steve produced the record. Remember, girls didn\u2019t produce records.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>No. I know, it\u2019s just disappointing.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was so disappointing because I was so. I mean I should have and would have. Again, my own mental inability to see past what was being presented to me as my options, boxed me in. I would say that\u2019s one of the biggest things that I have to say to people is, you think that something is impossible. It\u2019s hard because at the same time, you want to be looking at what are my skills and what am I good at. But people channel you into where they want you to go and sometimes to really get outside of the box of what you think is possible and really address . . . Look at what other people are doing and I should have looked at what men were doing and go, why can\u2019t I do that? I did that with jazz piano, which was like, there were no girls playing jazz piano, Joanne Brackeen was the only one. So everybody else, then Patrice Rushen was coming up. She and I are about the same age, but no women were playing jazz. I remember, I was able to think outside of the box on that but not on the producer thing, and I couldn\u2019t tell you why. I feel like I was already starting to accept the shit that the major labels were dishing out to me. You tell me I\u2019m not hot. I guess I\u2019m not hot. It\u2019s like this weird acceptance of this version of reality that they were living in, and that was actually not the version of the reality that came to pass.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Right.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They were from the old reality.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yes. What would you have done differently in the way that you think now if you had those thoughts in your 20s? What would you\u2019ve done, and said to them?<br \/><\/b>Well, the thing is, it never even occurred to me to produce that record, and Steve wanted to produce it. But what I would have done is, I would have gone to Slash, to Mark Trilling and Bob Biggs, who granted, we\u2019re both newbies. But they had signed some great acts and I would have gone and said, \u201cPlease advocate for us.\u201d Because they also kept us off the <em>Valley Girl<\/em> soundtrack, because they wanted to make more money for our contribution than the rest of the artists that were on the soundtrack.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><b>Modern English \u201cI Melt With You\u201d is on that.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes, it\u2019s a great. It would have been an amazing opportunity for us and it would have. Again, business-wise, I didn\u2019t think to go, \u201cWhat are you doing? Do you not understand what you\u2019re doing? You told me that you were going to help me get over and you are instead ruining my freaking career,\u201d which he did single-handedly. So anyway, we went through playing and then I met Bob Brown, who was Huey Lewis\u2019 Manager, and Huey Lewis in the meantime had this enormous record. I was in-between publishing deals. I got dropped from Rondor. Universal at that point, and Bob and I were hanging out because I\u2019m good friends with Huey, and all those guys, and it was a family thing, Bob\u2019s family basically.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He was like, \u201cHey, I want to offer you a publishing deal.\u201d So he offered me a pub deal and I took it because it\u2019s like money that was coming in and they get me to draw. I started writing and actually in-between there. Let me think about this for a second. When was the Cher cover? I\u2019m trying to remember the timeline of this. It\u2019s a little bit confusing. I worked with Miles Copeland for a little while. I was between publishing deals and I started working with this guy Rick Stevens who put me in some sessions and stuff and then Miles Copeland. So that was when I went to the castle. I went to the first ever castle in France for Miles. I wrote that Adam Ant song with Adam for that,\u00a0 \u201cWonderful.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Right. He did that in the 90s though, right?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, I\u2019m actually thinking. I think that was later. I know what happened. Bob signed me. He also got me a deal with Chrysalis. So I made one last artist record. I was like, this is a make or break. Wrote a bunch of songs. He got Stewart Levine to produce it. He was married to Jolie Jones who\u2019s Quincy Jones\u2019 daughter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Okay.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We got this really big advance on the record. I\u2019m not a fan of the record. I don\u2019t think the songs are good because I was trying to fit in to what they were telling me and that was the sexy one where I have my midriff showing and they made me dress like a tart. I was quite pretty at that point. I lost all my chunky fat and probably due to the excessive amount of drinking I was doing, but I basically . . .<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Well, I do have to ask you because we\u2019re in that time period: was blow a factor?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, because we were so popular. We would play a gig and go to a party. We stayed up all night constantly. I\u2019m one of those people who just like, I\u2019ll do it for a while and then I\u2019m like, this is boring and go home. But the guy in my band, Paul Davis, he\u2019s now deceased, basically couldn\u2019t stop. We would just keep going and going for three days, that stinky weird blow thing. My brother Kevin just was like, no, not doing it, hated it, thought it made everybody stupid. So we had this real cultural sort of thing that started happening and I was like, sure, I\u2019ll party with you all, but then I would just go home. I just don\u2019t care about it and thought it was. It\u2019s interesting for a minute and then I would get bored. So I made this record I didn\u2019t really like. We\u2019ve go on tour with Huey Lewis, we were opening for them, Tower of Power did the charts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>We\u2019ve got the three Hayes again.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, opening for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Huey, right, which was really great. The Cher thing was earlier. I had written a song called, \u201cSome Guys Will Do Anything For Love,\u201d and Franny helped me write the bridge. It was on hold for Cher for the three years. Check this out, this is a great story. In the meantime, everything changed, right? I didn\u2019t release the record, this was before that Chrysalis record came out. When I got the Chrysalis deal, they wanted me to cut that song and I took the song back. We had cut the whole song. They flew me down to LA. I did guide vocals, all the background vocals, I played keyboard on it. Then when they took the song back, dug my name through the mud.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>How bad?<br \/><\/b>I mean, it was a battle. John Kalodner called and screamed obscenities at me. I mean, it was insane because it was going to be the first single, and guess what record it was. <em>If I Could Turn Back Time<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><b>You wrote that?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No, it was the back side, the B-side. But it was going to be the first single of that record.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Oh, man. Yeah. The one with her in the . . . So that\u2019s like \u201987 or \u201988.<br \/><\/b>Eighty-seven, and basically what happened was, it was written in \u201985 or whatever, they had it on-hold, I took it back, to put it on my record, so I have a hit record, which did not happen, and the record died. So Cher did end up releasing the song as on the B-side of <em>If I Could Turn Back Time<\/em>, and that was the first cut that I had, and I made like a hundred grand.<\/p>\n<p><b>Okay. So they didn\u2019t withhold it eventually.<br \/><\/b>No.<\/p>\n<p><b>Okay, I thought.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They couldn\u2019t release it until after. So my record came out and died, and then they didn\u2019t want to have it be her first, her main single because it had already been released. So they put it as the B-side, and it still made me so much money, I was like dang this works. I\u2019m going to do this.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So you\u2019re like 30 at this point.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, basically, right after, and it\u2019s so funny because it\u2019s like the decades of the different career paths. So at 30, I\u2019d had three records that didn\u2019t do it in the market. My band fell apart, my boyfriend Paul was totally addicted to meth, and the band fell apart.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So meth not coke?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He started with coke, but here\u2019s the thing about meth, it lasts five times longer, is way stronger, and costs a tenth as much.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So if you really want to get high, you pretty quickly. If you have any money issues at all and you want to stay high for a long time, you pretty quickly go over to that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So was he still playing in the band too and carrying over to this?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We basically, after the record tanked. I realized that we just needed to do something else. So he was a mess. He was a freaking full on mess. So I couldn\u2019t continue the band without him. I couldn\u2019t replace him. It just felt like beating a dead horse. So I was hanging out, I wasn\u2019t really playing out, but I was writing songs, and I wrote. I was going to make another record, and I wrote \u201cHave a Heart\u201d and \u201cLove Letter.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>This is very emotional stuff that\u2019s happening. Were you putting those emotions into these songs?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cHave a Heart,\u201d it was my goodbye song to Paul.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>It was. Okay.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cLove Letter\u201d was my hello song to my soon-to-be husband. So \u201cHave a Heart\u201d was like, it was basically a real blend, but, \u201chey, shut up, don\u2019t lie to me,\u201d was the thing that you say to any addict who\u2019s coming in with a mouth full of bologna for you every time you see them. How everything\u2019s going to be different and how they\u2019re not using, and you\u2019re just looking at them. Just the biggest liar I ever saw. What we got down to is you choose between me or it. He chose it. It\u2019s love or drugs, and he chose drugs. That to me, that says it all. I mean, I couldn\u2019t write that song. Juliana Hatfield has a song called, \u201cYou Say It\u2019s Me or Drugs,\u201d and you choose drugs. It\u2019s that story. So I was channeling deep stuff like my band, my vision, and my future was gone, and my vision of my love was gone. Then I took the Belinda Carlisle tours, I was in the Belinda Carlisle. We were somewhere and we\u2019d been up all night.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So you were still partying?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, that\u2019s what you do on the road. We were in a bar somewhere, in Ecuador or something, and we watched the Grammys. I saw her winning it. Like I didn\u2019t get it, like I didn\u2019t really know what the Grammys meant. When I got home off the tour. My voicemail was full from the first day after the Grammys.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>That\u2019s amazing.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s like hundreds of phone calls.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Wow.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Basically, now I was like an A-list writer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>So I edited your course, the arranging course, and you included your demo of \u201cHave a Heart.\u201d I was shocked how similar it is.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, when she released that record. It was getting played on the radio, friends were calling me, going, \u2019\u2019Hey, I heard you on the radio,\u2019\u2019 and I was like, \u2019\u2019That\u2019s not me.\u201d Because she copped my vocal delivery style.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Even like the stunted start, but I thought it sounded like an accident.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, I did that. It\u2019s on there, that little synth. It\u2019s on there to give you the first note of the vocal. Which was funny because I left it on the demo because, who cares? But she left it on because she liked it. So it\u2019s cute. But she did such a great job on that, but she also, I mean my demos are very similar. She did speed them both up by about 10 bpm\u2019s which is very smart. So my publishing deal was up. So I was shopping publishers and that\u2019s when I worked for Miles and went to the castle and also worked for Rick Stevenson. So I was just going around writing for different people.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>\u201989, \u201990?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Around \u201990, I signed with Sony.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Okay. So you\u2019re doing that and then the Billy Idol thing comes along, right?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. So I basically was in LA. I moved to LA with my husband and he was working at films and I was just banging around LA, writing in sessions and hating writing in sessions. At this point I made all of my demos, right? So I did those with an Atari computer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Right, because you were saying you were an early adopter.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. So I was super early, I was using MIDI and sequencing stuff and then [inaudible] recording with a Tascam MD 88 and then I got Pro Tools when that came out. I got Cubase and learned that and then I went to Pro Tools. So I was pretty adept at stuff. So I was basically, writing and making demos and I wrote a song right away when I signed with Kathleen called \u201cBottomless.\u201d It was cut by Bette Midler but it was also cut by somebody in South America that basically, had a hit with it in South America. So I was doing good.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>More mailbox money.<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<br \/><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, more mailbox money, but I was hating the sessions. I would go in these sessions with these little girls who had gotten signed and some guitar player who thought he was a songwriter and I would basically have to write the whole song and it was just awful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Right.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was awful. We want a song like \u201cHave a Heart.\u201d Can you write a song like \u201cHave a Heart?\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cNo, I can\u2019t.\u201d Because first of all, she couldn\u2019t sing it and second of all, that song already got written. So it\u2019s like this weird thing where I was trying to like replicate my success by copying myself or I don\u2019t know, it was awful. I really hated it. I hated that co-writing scene in LA. I got a call to audition for that gig and Billy hired me and took me on the road.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Had your paths crossed before that?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>That\u2019s funny. Because he was in the original punk scene.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. Exactly. No, we had never met and I mean, I just got one of those, like what they do in LA for the touring bands, they\u2019ll just call and say, \u201cHey, we need a keyboard player,\u201d and there are these people who know the players. Because I\u2019d been on the Belinda tour. I was in the shortlist of girl keyboard player.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Which tour was it?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was \u201cCradle of Love.\u201d Which is a big hit. So we were on the road for a long time and it was actually really fun. I was 39 at that point. It was like my last rock \u2019n\u2019 roll hurrah.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Was that a very structured tour, I\u2019d imagine, like it\u2019s the type of thing where he finds himself as this career man and he\u2019s got this image and it was their stylists and everything. Just all the videos I\u2019ve seen. It just looks very . . .\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m still really good friends with the makeup person who did our hair and makeup as well as his. We had a workout guy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>What?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We had a chef.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Wow.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We had a wardrobe person, Gwen. Basically, it was like super. We stayed at the Ritz, the Four Seasons. I was making, I don\u2019t even, like $15,000 a month deal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Was that the biggest tour you\u2019d been on?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. By far. Huge audiences. We played Rock in Rio. There were like 90,000 people there. I mean, big, big, big stages.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Did you like the structure of that?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Look, what\u2019s not to like, man? It turns you into a person who doesn\u2019t have to do anything. All you have to do is be able to get on stage and play for like an hour and a half a night and the whole rest of the time, you\u2019re free to be whatever, to do and be whatever. You know what? What do people do? Nothing. They use. They get into stupid affairs with people on the road. All this, they create drama. It was so silly. But it was lovely, too. It was very luxurious. It really gave me a taste for luxury and for that kind of life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah, I just wondered because I\u2019ve been looking for videos and stuff. The movements of the show are the same night after night after night. He comes over to you and sings.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We did have a choreographer too. He did the girls. I didn\u2019t have to do a lot of choreography because it was Donna and Carla. Carla just graduated from Berklee Online.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Right, we did a story on that last year.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. So it was a real awakening for Carla and I too, in the sexism, in the way that women were treated.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>They got worse than what you\u2019d experienced already?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We were treated well, I have to say. Basically we were just \u201cthe girls\u201d but I think the way that women in the audience were treated or fans, it was still pretty rough, girl-wise.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah. Looking back on that now. What could\u2019ve been done?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There wasn\u2019t any way to change that culture. Billy\u2019s super masculine and he had a helper, this guy Art, who was old school like New Yorky kind of guy. Then there was a lot of ego. I don\u2019t know, it\u2019s hard to describe what was going on. But the men were very . . . I mean I was one of the players so I got to be in that club. But I felt, I don\u2019t think you go on the road to try to change the culture. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s what that was about. It\u2019s about I\u2019m going to collect my paycheck and have a good time while I\u2019m doing it, right? I didn\u2019t want to lose the gig to be really frank.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>It strikes me though as the atmosphere, what you\u2019re describing is like the, you hear the Van Halen stories of, \u201cGive that girl, that girl, and that girl backstage passes.\u201d<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Exactly. That did happen. The girls would come and they put them behind this barrier and Art would go out and pick at the map. I mean, that was just what was happening. I mean, it\u2019s not like they were so bad. A lot of people did that. If I\u2019m not going to put it on Billy. But I will say, because somewhat later, I auditioned for Bruce Springsteen\u2019s band that wasn\u2019t the E Street Band.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Oh yeah, the two album <\/b><b><i>Lucky Town<\/i><\/b><b> and . . .\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah. That and it was Roy Bittan, who\u2019s a friend of mine through Gia Ciambotti and I went and auditioned for the band. I got into the band but I actually withdrew from the band because I didn\u2019t have anything to do. Roy could easily play both keyboard parts. There was five Black gospel singers that were covering every possible harmony part. There was a girl playing tambourine who hissed at me whenever I touched hand percussion.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Really?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Everybody owned their part of the stage and their part of the show and I was standing there playing one note. Bruce goes, \u201cThanks for telling me.\u201d And they gave me a couple of weeks in. But Bruce was an angel. I\u2019m going to say there was none of that crap on that band.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>That\u2019s interesting. Was that a difficult gig to turn down?\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>Yeah. But at the time, I\u2019ve got to say, the vibe was not happening for me. I had just been on tour for two and a half years or whatever with his band but the vibe was not . . . I didn\u2019t like this being isolated. I didn\u2019t like not being creative and I didn\u2019t like being isolated with a bunch of people who I really wouldn\u2019t have chosen. There were people on that stage that I disliked. I mean, Sara Lee was on that and I love her and I loved the drummer. I forgot his name but he was the drummer in B-52\u2019s. They were awesome. Yeah.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><b>Are we talking about Billy or Bruce?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With Bruce.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Right. Did Sara Lee play bass for them?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sara? Well, for part of. So it was really fun, but there were other people on that gig that I knew that was not going to be good if I went on tour with them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah, did you just do rehearsals?\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We did a couple of weeks of rehearsal and then I bailed, and he was really sweet. I mean, to me I was like I\u2019m going to save this guy a lot of money and save myself a lot of sturm and drang. It wasn\u2019t like I was not making money so I didn\u2019t really need to go on tour for a million years with a bunch of people I didn\u2019t like and not write songs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>A lot of those people were considering it as their big break, I imagine.\u00a0<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, there was just a lot of competitiveness and bitchiness already. There were a lot of women in that band. Billy\u2019s band, it had a lot of women and I loved them and we all got along. But this band, it was not like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Weird.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It would\u2019ve been around \u201992 because right after that, I got pregnant. Basically, it\u2019s a really good thing that I didn\u2019t do that gig.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Oh my God. Okay. So you were pregnant in the rehearsals and didn\u2019t know?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I don\u2019t even know. I can\u2019t figure out what the timeline of that is, but I essentially came up pregnant almost immediately thereafter. Like in January.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>That would have been horrible.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The thing was happening in, I don\u2019t know, I want to say like September, maybe August. And I was pregnant by February. I\u2019m pretty sure I got pregnant on New Year\u2019s Eve.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Okay. I don\u2019t need to know that.<br \/><\/b>Yeah, but it\u2019s for timeline, so do the math. That would have been a mess and a half. So I had a baby and I was basically just writing. I was living in LA and I have my baby and we were living there and I was writing, just doing sessions and writing for Sony and when she was about two, our house burned down.<\/p>\n<p><b>Oh my, she\u2019s still with us now?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oh yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Okay. I didn\u2019t know if we are going into tragic territory.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No tragedies. Just little tragedies, but the little tragedy was that I realized that I couldn\u2019t stay with my husband and we broke up and I also realized that I couldn\u2019t raise a kid in LA. It\u2019s a long story but it became evident that it wasn\u2019t going to work. Just logistically, it just wasn\u2019t going to work, and plus I just was really down on the whole scene there at that point. When you\u2019re writing for money, it\u2019s really different than when you\u2019re writing for fun. It\u2019s really different. And writing for money is a gift that I don\u2019t have. I need to be engaged and I need to be authentic. I was not feeling it and I had just been on these two bands where I didn\u2019t feel engaged or authentic and I was just basically getting paid and I realized I was destroying myself. I had no heart left. It\u2019s a freaking philosophical awakening. Yeah so this is around, maybe around, because she was born in \u201993 and I moved north in \u201997. So we\u2019re back to San Francisco and I bought a house. My father passed away and left me a bunch of money and I bought a house and separated from my husband and then I was like, \u201cWhat now?\u201d And I wrote a bunch of songs which Sony didn\u2019t like so they dropped me. So now I don\u2019t have a deal, again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>But there\u2019s still mailbox money.\u00a0<br \/><\/b>I have mailbox money. I\u2019m living on that and I had to sell my house in LA for profits. Got some money there and I basically just tried to go to college for a while thinking I was going to be like a psychologist and then I met a guy who was a guitar player and we started playing and we started writing. I started writing songs on guitar. I\u2019d never played guitar and about that same time, we started playing out and I made a record called Love in the Ruins\u00a0that everybody loved and we were really popular locally. It was the same thing as before. We\u2019re really popular locally and I had a studio in my house and I started doing records for people and I was teaching songwriting.\u00a0I started making demos and then I started making records and then I got an external studio. I got this place, Ice House, and I started out, went into business as a producer. I hung out my shingle as a producer and started to say the p word. I had a bunch of gear anyways. I was a pretty big gearhead and I started making records and that was basically something that I could do. I could book a session and work from . . . I drop my kid off at school at first grade. And I\u2019d work until three and go grab her or she\u2019d go to somebody else\u2019s house and I\u2019d work till five and basically, that was our life. She grew up in San Anselmo, California with me producing records.<\/p>\n<p><b>What one are you most proud of from that time?<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I love the Rick Hardin record which just came out. It took him a long time to figure out how to release that record and what to do but it\u2019s really quite a good record.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Great.<br \/><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did the Tommy Castro record for Alligator. So what happened was I was just starting to get label records. Like everything else was all indie. It was like a guy wants to make a record, I\u2019d go, \u201cYour budget is what?\u201d I\u2019m going to be between $15 and $25,000 and I charged them hourly for studio time and just do these. It was just totally work for hire. I didn\u2019t take any back end. I didn\u2019t take writers. I would fix their songs up, I didn\u2019t take writers. I just didn\u2019t want to have to collect from them. I just wanted to get paid. So I was doing great. I was teaching, doing a lot of teaching of songwriting. Right when I was starting to get label records was when my daughter left for college. I decided to get out of there and do something else. I applied at Berklee and got, first, I applied as a faculty. Then when the chair job opened, I was encouraged to apply for that and I did and then I got that job and moved out here. That\u2019s the \u201cwhat happened when\u201d story. I don\u2019t know what the other part of the story is. I think one of the heavy things about what happened to me when I left Los Angeles is I became an amateur again, and amateur is from the root \u201cto love.\u201d You do it for love.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Yeah, amor.\u00a0<br \/><\/b>I found my love of music again from withdrawing. The professional does it for money, the amateur does it for love. They\u2019re not mutually exclusive. But they seemed to be to me at the time. I would say when what you\u2019re doing starts stealing your joy in the thing that you identify yourself as the most profound thing that you\u2019ve ever done in your life, I think you need to make changes and that would be just another testament to how driven I was and what I was driven to do, which was not to be successful in that sense of being rich or whatever, but to be authentic. I think having that as a drive from the very beginning, I wanted to be a jazz piano player. I wanted to be really good. I guess I wanted to be really good at whatever I did.<\/p>\n\n\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/songwriting?campaign_id=7010Z000001ZkQgQAK&amp;pid=&amp;utm_source=takenote&amp;utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_campaign=bol-gen-takenote-link-from-article\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">STUDY SONGWRITING WITH BERKLEE ONLINE<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bonnie Hayes talks songwriting for Bonnie Raitt (and winning a Grammy for it), touring with Bob Seger, playing keys for Billy Idol, and being blown away by the Sex Pistols in 1978, and how all of that led to her coming to teach at Berklee College of Music and Berklee Online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":12909,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9566],"tags":[6348,6315,6337,6353,6313,6332,6306,6339,6342,212,215,6314,6309,219,6304,6303,246,272,6345,6302,6323,6311,6329,6330,6334,6319,6333,6336,6320,657,6317,6307,732,6338,6352,755,6349,6121,6310,6331,6305,6324,6347,6340,966,6316,6350,6312,6213,6346,6343,6321,6328,6322,6325,6351,6308,6327,6301,1493,6318,6344,6341,6229,6335,6326,6255],"class_list":["post-12907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcast","category-songwriting-articles","tag-adam-ant","tag-beer-barrel-polka","tag-belinda-carlisle","tag-bette-middler","tag-billy-idol","tag-blasters","tag-blue-bear","tag-bob-biggs","tag-bob-brown","tag-bob-dylan","tag-bob-seger","tag-bobby-darren","tag-bonnie-hayes","tag-bonnie-raitt","tag-brasil-66","tag-brazil-66","tag-bruce-springsteen","tag-carla-hassett","tag-cher","tag-chris-hayes","tag-clover","tag-dave-liebman","tag-david-anderle","tag-david-kirshenbaum","tag-fear","tag-foghat","tag-germs","tag-go-gos","tag-guru-maharaj-ji","tag-huey-lewis","tag-james-cotton","tag-jazz-harmony","tag-jimi-hendrix","tag-joanne-brackeen","tag-john-colodoner","tag-johnny-rotten","tag-jolee-jones","tag-juliana-hatfield","tag-kevin-hayes","tag-lance-freed","tag-mamas-and-papas","tag-michele-hendricks","tag-miles-copeland","tag-modern-english","tag-muddy-waters","tag-nick-jameson","tag-paul-davis","tag-pee-wee-ellis","tag-quincy-jones","tag-rick-stevens","tag-rondor","tag-sex-pistols","tag-shellys-boyfriend","tag-sid-vicious","tag-steve-savage","tag-stevie-ray-vaughan","tag-sweet-meat","tag-the-punts","tag-tom-lehrer","tag-tom-petty","tag-tony-dimitriades","tag-universal","tag-valley-girl","tag-van-morrison","tag-violent-femmes","tag-wild-combo","tag-x"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.8 (Yoast SEO v25.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Songwriter Bonnie Hayes on Sexism, Drugs, and Rock &#8216;n&#8217; 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