Back to Feb 2014 Show

Paul Wagner Interview Show
The Script / Transcript

********

note: transcribing an interview is tedious work and I got side tracked by other projects (new websites) and never polished it, but much of it is here, so better posting the rough form than nothing.....

Paul Wagner - Need Your Gentle Love (1973)

This is JD Doyle and you are listening to Queer Music Heritage, and that was a little bit of a song from an album that definitely has a place in our history. In the early 70s, 1973 in particular, openly gay singers were beginning to record songs with openly gay lyrics, and that artist was one of them. He's Paul Wagner and he along with just a handful of others, like Steven Grossman, Chris Robison and Michael Cohen, among the male singers, were some of the pioneers. I have been wanting to interview him for many years, but didn't know how to contact him, when then last month out of the blue he emailed me. I immediately requested an interview, and I am delighted to share it with you.

Paul, welcome to Queer Music Heritage.

Paul: Thank you. I'm honored to be here.

JD: Your solo album was released in 1973 and that it contains lyrically gay material and was one of the first to do so is what delights me that we can do this interview. But before we talk about that I know you had some recordings before that album and want to touch on that a little.

You had a single on the Scepter label, "In My Dreams Tonight" and "Seasons." Could you talk about that 45?

PW: Sure, I was signed to Scepter Records. Stan Greenburg heard my material, and Stan just really, really liked that song. He signed me up and we went into the studio. It was my first time ever in a recording facility of any kind, and we recorded it with a full band and with a full string section and keyboards and the whole deal, and they just wanted something for the b-side, and so I went and did an acoustic version of the song "Seasons." And it got released, and that was the beginning. I sang slightly flat on certain notes on "In My Dreams Tonight," but it really is a delight pop recording. I'm still proud of it.

Paul Wagner - In My Dreams Tonight (1972)

JD: And how did it do:

PW: It went absolutely nowhere. The publisher of the song reported to me that it was being played on a college radio station, and I went there to thank them, with some more copies of the single and they'd never heard of it. Yes, and that was the beginning of my having a youthful slow tantrum and leaving Scepter Records.

JD: Well, slightly in their defense, judging from the 45s charting around your 45, and people like BJ Thomas and Beverly Bremers, I figured yours was released around August of 1972, and the label then was on a definite decline.Their string of hits with the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick, BJ Thomas had pretty much run its course...

PW: That's right, they were desperate.

JD: They were probably scrambling to market material they already had by those artists and just try to keep going.

PW: Yes, and I was young and impatient and didn't understand the business, and did not understand that often single after single comes out, and people simple aren't interested, or that 17 other things are released that same week, and they get all the attention. I had no idea of any of that. I just felt that I had been misled, and not knowing anything about the business I was a fool, and I left Scepter Records. Not before though next recording two albums with my musical partner, my musical performing partner Mark Robinson.

And we did two acoustic guitars, he on nylon string and me on steel string, and two voices and recorded two entire albums of either original material, some of Mark's and some of mine, or public domain material, things that had been out long enough that there were no extant copyright claims on them, like the old traditional song that Burl Ives did, called "The Fox" (sings) "oh the fox went down on a chilly night"...that one, and we did two albums of that stuff for a food company. I believe it was Sara Lee, although I'm not sure, who was going to use them as promotional products, free giveaways if people bought enough. For some reason that whole campaign fell apart. Those albums ended up in closets and under beds as well.

JD: I tracked them down.

PW: Have you gotten them yet?

JD: I've got them.

PW: Wow, wow.

JD: Do you have favorite tracks on them? By the way, they were called "Folk Songs for the Family" and "Alphabet Soup."

PW: That's right, and "Alphabet Soup" was Mark's song. That was an original song, I seem to remember.

JD: That was a good song, too. I liked it.

PW: Okay, you've listened to them. Again I only have a copy of one of them and don't even know what's on the other.

JD: "Whoopi-Ti-Yi-Yo" is also I think pretty good.

PW: That was my father's favorite song. (sings) "whoopi-ti-yi-yo, get along little doggies, it's your misfortune and none of my own." I still love that song, and my dad was a lovely person; couldn't wait to record that for him.

Paul Wagner & Mark Robinson - Whoopi-Ti-Yi-Yo (1972)

So, it doesn't appear there was much time between being on Scepter to your album on Trilogy.

PW: No, what actually happened was, as I was considering leaving Scepter, because in my naivete and youthful fury, I was so, how can I say it, I was so rebellious that when a friend of mine named Andrea Funer, who later ended up being the editor of Red Book magazine, suggested that she knew a producer named Warren Schatz who might do better for me than they were doing at Scepter Records.
I actually invited Warren into the studio.

And I remember one of the people at Scepter saying to me, ah, so you invite other producers from outside into the studio, which also, again, being as completely unfamiliar with the music industry as I was, I had no idea was a major discourtesy.
Yeah.
So we parted pretty soon afterwards, and Warren said, well, good, you're free now.
Let's record an album. And we did.
Well, Warren Shatz has a bit of fame himself.
He was a prominent producer in the 70s and actually still is a prominent producer.

I did not know that.

His work in the late 70s was very different.
He had some disco hits for people like Vicki Sue Robinson, you know, Turn the Beat Around.
Oh, yeah.
And Evelyn Champagne King, Shame.
Oh, my goodness.
I've got to get in touch with Warren and thank him.
So you asked me via email, you asked me why it was that the Advocate only reviewed the To Be a Man album in 1974.
Well, the reason for that is that within days of the time that we finished recording, Warren was suddenly hired to be the chief, the head of a large division of Warner Brothers Publishing named Sunbury Dunbar Music.
And he was just buried in that. And so we had these either hundreds or thousands of albums.
I said to him, what are we going to do with all these albums, Warren?
and you were going to promote this nationally and internationally.

And he said, I can't. I'll just give them to you.
And so I began learning how to promote.
I had no idea at all.
And so even though the album was recorded and released in 1973, there was no promotion of it for months while I learned what I was doing, and then while my managers learned what they were doing.
So it's got a delayed promotion.
Yes. Yes. Yes.

I want to back up a step, though.
This is one of the very first albums to have openly gay material.
And one thing, how did the people at the label react to that?
And did anyone try to talk you out of recording songs with gay lyrics?

No.

Well, at least no one in the music industry attempted to.
Warren was the label.
He was at Trilogy Records, was Warren Shatz.
Right.
And Warren really, really liked the idea.

Did you have friends that advised you against it?

And by that time, J.D., I believe that I was so out that I had pretty much chased away all the friends who would advise me not to do it.
All right.

Let's get back to some music.
I like to put some music between a bunch of words.
Let's get to one of the songs on the album.

As I said earlier your album was one of the very first to contain openly gay material. How did the people at the label react to that? Did anyone try to talk you out of recording song with gay lyrics?

PW: Warren Schatz was the producer of the album. He was a prominent producer in the 70s, and actually, still is a prominent producer and his work in the late 70's was quite different from your album, he put out disco recordings for such artists as Vicki Sue Robinson, Frankie Valli, Evelyn Champagne King and others.

How did you get connected with him and what was working with him like?

Let's get to one of the songs from the album, tell me about "As a Friend."

PW: I don't remember who I wrote it for. It was a general experience. Living in New Jersey, in a suburb, I had a lot of longtime friends who I was deeply in love with. And I wanted to have physical relationships with them, and they loved the hell out of me, but they didn't want to have physical relationships with me. So that was kind of a, the character who I'm singing to in that song is kind of a composite of a number of gentlemen over a number of years.

Paul Wagner - As a Friend (1973) 3:06 OL

W4 6:16
One of the things we emailed about and I'm delighted to have the chance to ask you about was the music scene in New York City when you started. You had been performing in clubs for a while, what kind of clubs were these?

PW: Mostly they were coffeehouses. I began as a coffeehouse artist at the age of, I believe, 19, when my girlfriend at the time, who was active in lots of various Presbyterian-oriented church matters and other churches, suddenly showed up at my apartment and said, The act tonight is sick. Are you willing to go up and do a set? And I said, sure. And I played in a small church coffeehouse in New Jersey. This was before I did Openly Gay Lyrics. And people really liked it, and they began booking me every four to six weeks. That led to a number of other coffeehouse gigs. And then I met Mark Robinson, and he joined me, and we would play coffeehouses. So by the time that the firehouse came along, I had a certain amount of experience performing in relatively small rooms for relatively friendly people.

I want to hear about the Firehouse, tell people what that was and about that experience.

PW: Okay, so along comes the firehouse. And it was run by the GAA, the Gay Activist Alliance, who was a group that came out of an ongoing group that came out of the Gay Liberation Front, which was the temporary group that had a lot to do with, I wouldn't say organized, but really took the energy of the Stonewall riots and brought it forward. And the Gay Activist Alliance was this ongoing and very active group who rented a facility that was or had been a firehouse on Worcester Street down below the village in New York City
.
I simply auditioned, they liked it, and they booked me. Now, the way the entertainment went at the firehouse was that they were open for extensive entertainment two nights a week, and those were Fridays and Saturdays. on Friday there was live entertainment followed by a dance still about one in the morning or two in the morning and then on Saturdays I believe there was just a dance now the ruling queen of the firehouse on Friday nights was this lovely woman named Mary I've never known her last name she would sit there at the piano and in this wonderfully warm and lyrical voice she would play the songs, as she would announce every week, and then Mary would establish the tone for the evening, and then the other acts would come up.

And usually they were in order of increasing outrageousness. Mary would start by setting a mellow and friendly tone and get everybody coming in from the raucous streets of New York, calm down. And then, for example, I would come up, or Steve Grossman would come up. And then we'd do a half an hour, 45-minute set, and then it would usually finish with somebody really outrageous. For example, once upon a time, Mary supported me, and I opened for Holly Woodlawn. And Holly Woodlawn got up and said, oh my God, my agent just called me at 4 o'clock this afternoon. And I said to him, I can't do this tonight. My beard is out of air. and sent the audience into such raucous laughter that people fell out of chairs.

So that's the way the scene was. And there were very few of us openly gay male artists. There were also lesbian duos and trios, but most of it was Mary, followed by drag acts, comedians, that kind of thing. It was a real transition period. And those of us who, male and female, and transgendered, who did openly gay lyrics, we were very far and few between.

Was there a gay singer/songwriter community?

PW: No. I mean, if there was one, J.D., I didn't know about it. We were less like a scene of people gathering at the Chelsea Hotel like Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan did. And we were more like little groundhogs sticking our heads up and looking around to see if it was safe 50 miles from each other. We really didn't know each other.

Who had you heard of as far as gay artists at that time?

PW: None. Really? None. It was after I began doing it that somebody asked me, have you heard Steve Grossman? And I said no. And I flew into the firehouse the next Friday night. I think I even skipped a gig to hear the Steve Grossman everyone was talking about, and he was just absolutely superb. And we talked a bit afterwards. He kind of kept to himself and wasn't all that social. He kind of looked down as he shook hands with people and was barky and shy at the same time. And I never heard of Chris Robison until way after. Matter of fact, the first time I ever heard Chris Robison was when he and I both played one of the early gay pride rallies after a march in New York City. He did a short set. Then I did my set. And then Barry Manilow did a set.

Really?

PW: And then Bette Midler did a set. Yes. Yes. Matter of fact, after I did Meadows of Peace, which I finished my set with, one of my proudest moments, Bette Midler stepped toward me as I went off stage and said, that was a beautiful song. And you have a beautiful voice, honey. Wonderful. It was wonderful. Meadows of Peace was one of the most popular songs from the album. And people actually sang along at the end.

Here's the song, "Meadows of Peace"

Paul Wagner - Meadows of Peace (1973) 3:56 OL

W5 2:10

What was the reaction to the album? And I want to break that down, how did the gay public react and what was the reaction in general?

PW: The public in general didn't react because I didn't, nor did the managers I was with for a short while afterwards. They didn't... They didn't hear it. That's right. They didn't hear it. Now, eventually, I got a manager named Daryl Henlein, a wonderful man. He was very big in the dance scene, and he was very involved with After Dark magazine and the Soho Weekly News. And he pushed it and myself to more straight audiences, and they tended to react very well. That was toward the very end of the cycle of doing anything with the album. As far as gay people, some liked it and some didn't.

So did the album get you, for example, more gigs at gay venues?

PW: Yes, it did. It did. I ended up playing at Reno Sweeney's, which was a fairly, it was mixed, but a fairly gay-oriented venue, and at Brothers and Sisters, which was a club that attempted to bring openly gay acts, along with what it had specialized in for years, which was Broadway Divas, and mix us together.

After we hear another song I want to talk about how the press reacted to the album. But first, at the opening of the show I teased my listeners with a bit of the song "Need Your Gentle Love." tell us about the song and then we'll hear all of it.

PW: People really like that song in general. Even the most insulting of the reviews that I got, the person said it was pleasant. I believe pleasant but harmless. Faint praise. Right, right. Backhanded compliment. Yes, yes. I loved singing that song, and I think that audiences reacted really well to it as a result.

Paul Wagner - Need Your Gentle Love (1973) 3:47

W6 4:08
I've seen several press clippings and reviews of the album and I was a bit surprised how very positive they were, being that album is openly gay. Yes, these were likely liberal magazines, but still, it was 1973 and 1974. I'll pull out some quotes:

In July of 1973 in Variety it said "here's a program of gay-oriented folk music, an honest, sincere program by this talented songwriter performer. In keeping with changes in attitude by many homosexuals these days, these tunes are serious, mostly of love and attempts for love."

In October of 1973 "After Dark" magazine said "Wagner's debut disc does include songs that deal with that special nature of homosexual love...however he does not propagandize and his creations are both melodic and pleasing."

And I've got one more, from the notorious Screw Magazine. They show a poster for the album that says "You Don't Have to be gay to love 'to be a man'"...that apparently amused them as they said that's what got them to mention the album, though they did have it in a section they called "Pansy Platters."

So how did you market it?

PW: I took out an ad in the advocate a quarter page ad i believe and i don't have any copies of those ads but i kept that ad running for three months four months six months yeah i ran it for a number of months

JD: okay well all the the quotes i i already read were from the, I guess, straight press, if you want to call it that. In the gay press, I found a couple from The Advocate. One was quite long and positive, and a couple weeks later, Christopher Stone, one of their main reviewers, got a hold of it and just hated it.

PW: Yes, yes, that was devastating to a new recording artist who was used to getting positive press. That was just very upsetting, yes. It's also interesting they ran two articles in the same month. This was big stuff at the time because, again, there were very few of us, and this was a very major change. Right. I mean, you might notice that in one of the reviews you just read, I believe it's a variety review, it says in tune with the recent changes in attitude among many homosexuals, I believe it said, the same thing that the people at the firehouse noticed. the professionals who'd been around for a long time in the music reporting press noticed this sudden new energy and how quickly things were changing.

Because J.D., for decades, gay entertainment had been slightly off-colored comedians and drag shows. That's what it had been, punctuated by divas singing songs about men and to men, through which gay men heard their own emotions expressed. Well, the lesbians didn't really get started any sooner either. No, no, it all happened at once. It was a shocking change. And the people who got it, like the people who worked for Variety magazine, they went, ah, something new.

This is big. I want to get back to some music. What song from the album got the most reaction?

PW: But I Love You, like need your gentle love it's upbeat it's fun to listen to it has a what i think is a pleasing melody a little bit of cleverness in the lyrics and people just reacted to it well every venue that i ever played it in gay straight or mixed people really liked that song

Paul Wagner - But I Love You / To Be a Man (1973) 2:23, 2:28

PW QMH ID

You also heard the title track for Paul Wagner's album, "To Be a Man."

W7 1:44
This is kind of a trivia question that probably only I would think to ask, but there are two different album covers, one is more brown in color, with a different photo, which came first and why was there a second one?

Any idea how many copies of the album were sold?

PW: None. No idea or no copies? No. Quite a few copies were sold. Well, there was a first pressing. Again, I don't remember the scale of the pressing, but GMF Enterprises put a second cover on the album. They said, this first one is ugly as hell, and we need to replace this, and this is not what you look like anymore, which was true. I looked far different a couple years later after I'd begun to have success. And the second one, just for reference, the second one is the more brown cover? Yes, the more orangey one, yes.
Yeah. That was one of my questions. And I was going to say I would probably be the only one to think to ask that question. Yeah, they were the ones who said we would be glad to represent this album for you and we'd be glad to represent you, But we really need a cover in which you don't look like a stoner who's incapable of speech. And so they promptly replaced the cover. They did a second pressing, but I know that all of them sold. So all of both pressings sold.

Talk about the song "I Don't Know"

Paul Wagner - I Don't Know (1973) 4:07 OL

W8 0:42
In our emails another of the songs that you said you particularly liked was "And Now"

PW: I really like it musically. I don't particularly like it lyrically. In retrospect, it has a kind of grandiosity that I don't really favor in lyrics. I've come to like lyrics that are far more conversational. But I thought that Warren did a superb job in adding an entire string section to it with violins and violas and cellos. And I really like the way the chords move. I'd like to rewrite the lyrics to it sometime.

You can do that. Ha ha ha ha.

Paul Wagner - And Now (1973) 3:15 fade up at 0:25, down at 2:12, leaving 1:35

That was a bit of the song "And Now."

W9 2:37
For my next question I want to jump temporarily to 1982 and a song you did that I wouldn't have known about before you told me, as it was under a different name. it was released as by Kim Dorell and it was a political commentary.

PW: Right, right. Oh, yes. What happened was that I became fascinated with the whole thing that came out of punk. When the singer-songwriter era ended, there was the mid-70s, which I found kind of musically dull. And then all of a sudden, two things came forward. One was disco, which was just fantastic. Loved that Mideastern thump, thump, thump. And then there was punk.

And punk began to ripen into a style called, which is still called techno punk, which was very, very tight, very musically tight. And I just love those beats. and meanwhile rap music was starting to come along and i'd always like the intensity of spoken word verses it just gave songwriters a lot of opportunity to actually say things and so i put together this thing out of all those influences it just kind of came out of me and i went into a recording studio with the band Dow Chemical, T-A-O, Chemical, who I later ended up managing and just decided to take on a stage name. I released it as a cassette single, and it was one of the first cassette singles that was ever released.

What was the name of the song? Microman.

And you wrote me that it went to a different producer and you didn't really like the result. It was picked up by a record company, and they turned it into a 12-inch single. And they were very much in the dance market. So they removed a lot of the musical ornamentation and special effects that I had really labored at great length to put onto the single and turned it into more of a stripped-down dance single. I think the lyric still stands out, but the whole production has never been exactly the most pleasing thing in the world to me.

Kim Dorell - Micro-Man (1982) 5:17...can fade at 2:06

Trivia: the new producer, Sandy Stone, was the same engineer forced off the Olivia Records label in the early 1970's, as Stone was a transsexual and that did not set well with fans of the women-only label

Well, I have the 12" dance single and I agree with Paul. I prefer his original cassette single version, and thank him for sharing it with me. We have time for about half of it.

Kim Dorell - Micro-Man (1981)

W10 0:18

PW: And then on the B-side of that cassette single was an acapella version of the Beatles' You Won't See Me. There was 16 of my own voices doing that song. That sounds interesting. It was really cool. It was really nice.

Kim Dorell - You Won't See Me (1981)

Okay, we've been talking about the 70s and 80s, could you talk for just a moment about what have you been doing musically since then?

W12-thanking me 0:33
Any question I should ask that I didn't ask?

PW: I really want to thank you. I mean, if you want to put this on air, you're welcome to. I really want to thank you for this work you are doing. It is really, you know.... Chris Robison wrote to you that it had been a personal inspiration to him. It's been a personal inspiration to me as we;;. It is just so valuable on so many levels to so many people. And, J.D., I can't thank you enough. I really can't thank you enough for this.

This is JD Doyle for Queer Music Heritage and I want to thank Paul Wagner for the interview and I love that he shed some light on the New York City Firehouse scene. I've got one more song to ask him about.

W11 0:36
I've been saving for last the song that's my favorite on the album, and my listeners already know that I would pick one that's very out. It's called "The One," could you tell me about it.

PW: I wrote that in kind of a romantic dream. I was just free associating about what I wanted from an ideal lover and pictured myself approaching that person and just telling them, And you could be the one. And the song formed itself within minutes.

Paul Wagner - The One (1973) 3:40 OL

This is Paul Wagner and you are listening to QMH
..........................................................................................................