By Paul Freeman [Dec. 2011 Interview]

It should come as no surprise that Charles Fox recently received recognition from the Smithsonian Institution. The award-winning composer is himself an American institution, having penned such pop classics as “Killing Me Softly,” “Ready To Take A Chance Again” and “I Got A Name,” such iconic TV themes as “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley” and “The Love Boat,” and scores for many films.

Fox’s success is the result not only of rare talent, but of dedication to his craft. He grew up in the Bronx. His father played mandolin. Fox attended performing arts high school and went on to study composing in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger. At Columbia University, he studied electronic music.

His career was launched with such jobs as arranging for “The Tonight Show” orchestra, then led by Skitch Henderson. Fox wrote theme songs for a number of Goodson-Todman television shows, like “What’s My Line,” “To Tell The Truth” and “Match Game.”

Fox has written music for such movies as “Foul Play,” “Barbarella,” “Goodbye, Columbus,” ”The Other Side of the Mountain” and “Pufnstuf.”

Fox established himself as the go-to-guy for TV themes, contributing the memorable opening numbers for such shows as “Wonder Woman,” “The Paper Chase” and “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.”

One of his most unforgettable TV tunes was the “Happy Days” theme. The 45 record bearing his name, which was scene in every episode’s opening was enshrined in the Smithsonian Institute several months ago.

Fox, who has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, is currently working on three Broadway projects, as well as a piece honoring the Israeli Olympic athletes who were killed in Munich.

On the eve of his Jan. 12 appearance at Schultz Cultural Arts Hall, Oshman Family Center JCC, Palo Alto, Ca. (www.paloaltojcc.org), we had an opportunity to talk with this remarkable composer.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
Did the process of writing your memoir give you a different perspective on your career?

CHARLES FOX:
You know, it’s an interesting question. Yeah, because, looking back was something I really didn’t do too much. I was too busy working and looking forward. So it was interesting, thinking about the past, the things that were most significant to me, had the greatest impact on me, things that would make the more interesting stories for my book, from my early days in New York.

PCC:
Your father being musical, did that point the way for you?

FOX:
Not really, no. My father played the mandolin, not professionally. But he always carried his mandolin with him and entertained people wherever he went. Because of that, music was part of our house. But I can’t say that that was any reason that led to my being interested in music. I played the piano from an early age. I went to a performing arts high school in New York, called Music and Art. And that opened up the door for me to listen to all kinds of music and become familiar with all kinds of music.

PCC:
Did you feel that music was a choice for you? Or is that something you have to be born to?

FOX:
It wasn’t really so much a matter of a choice. I never gave any thought to doing anything else. It was my path. I can’t say, from an early age, that I knew it. I just didn’t have any interest in anything beyond music, professionally.

PCC:
All the formal training, studying in Paris, at Columbia University, beyond technique, how much can be taught about composing and how much has to be inherent talent?

FOX:
I think it’s a combination of both. First of all, you have to have the need to do it, the desire to do it. You have to want to lock yourself in a room for hours at a time, creating music. Certainly, you need to learn from the past. And you need to learn the structure that music is based on, coming from the past. And I think those who haven’t done that, will probably always feel a need for it. So the musical education is important. But, yes, you cannot teach someone how to basically compose. You can teach them form, teach them the past, teach them structure, development and all the methods that go into developing music. You can certainly learn orchestration, how to write for orchestras. But that basic, inherent need and the ability to write music is something you can’t teach. You can’t teach someone how to put notes together to make a memorable melody.

PCC:
When you start writing on assignment, does that present a whole new set of challenges?

FOX:
It does. For one thing, you always have to work within the confines of what the film is, what the commission is.

Although, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the full complement of the whole orchestra or the full complement of the aural sound system. It just means that, in your mind, you have certain ways that you approach music.

However, when you work for film, clearly, you’re working to a fixed amount of time in a scene. And also, you have to create music that helps to support the story in the individual scenes.

PCC:
Writing music for ‘The Tonight Show,’ what did that involve?

FOX:
That was an early opportunity. Skitch Henderson, who led the ‘Tonight Show’ orchestra, gave me the opportunity to write arrangements for him at the piano. Sometimes he’d perform a piano solo. And then also I got started writing thematic music. That was the start of my writing themes. When the band would go on and off the air, I would do what they call ‘station break material.’

PCC:
From there you went to Goodson-Todman?

FOX:
Well, you know, there have been a lot of different opportunities along the way. I did create some of the themes for the Goodson-Todman television shows, like ‘What’s My Line’ and ‘To Tell The Truth’ and ‘Match Game.’

PCC:
That must have been fun. Did those producers have a distinct idea about what they wanted for the themes?

FOX:
Well, sure. There were very specific designs in what they needed. First of all, an opening theme that would be catchy and tuneful, so that people would remember it. That was always the assignment with television. You had to do something that was catchy, something that would stand out, something that, hopefully, would always sound familiar and yet fresh, something that would have the ring of a friend about it, every time it came on the air, to attract people to watch the show.

But with television game music, it’s a very specific thing, because, other than the theme music, I’m just scoring moments, moments of tension, moments of happiness or euphoria, someone wins a prize, someone loses a prize. So usually they were small bits of musical snippets.

PCC:
For film scores, do you subscribe to that old theory that the best ones are those you don’t notice?

FOX:
No, not at all. That, to me, is a cliché I’ve heard many times over the years, that the best film music is that which you don’t notice. As a composer, I obviously notice all the film music. But that doesn’t mean to say that it should overwhelm the film and take away from its meaning. It should add to it. To me, the music in a film is a character on the screen. It’s no less important than one of the lead actors on the screen. It helps the storytelling process. It has a color and a character and, if it’s done well, it supports the movie and gives it a shape, a contour and, of course, a musical base, as well as themes. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t be aware of it.

Sometimes directors will have the music that they think is working so well predominate and even wipe out the dialogue, because they feel that the music is telling what’s on the character’s mind. The dialogue may be saying it, but sometimes, the emotional context that music brings is more important. Usually, it’s a balance and music supports the key moments that the composer and the director have decided are needed for the film. And then the balance of all that is after the music is finished, and when they mix it all together. But even the balance of it has a consequence. If something too loud, it can overwhelm the scene. That could be hurtful. If it’s too soft, it may not be effective. Sometimes it wants to be loud and predominate the scene. Those are careful decisions made in finishing the film.

PCC:
When you’re writing pop songs, do you have the luxury of waiting for inspiration? Or do you always have the discipline of putting in a certain number of hours at the piano?

FOX:
The latter. I get dressed and I go to work. I work at my piano. That’s where my office is. And I sit at my piano and do a normal day’s work, as anyone else would, except my day is writing music. I don’t ever wait for the inspiration to hit me.

PCC:
And the process, does that change, depending on your collaborator?

FOX:
Collaboration is always different, with different people. Sometimes I may work with a lyricist who gives me a lyric or part of a lyric to start. Or sometimes I may start and give the lyricist a melody or part of a melody. And sometimes we can even start to create it together in a room. That’s my least favorite, because, very often, when you’re sitting in a room with someone else, you’re writing and you come up with something at the piano and your partner says, ‘Oh, I like that.’ And you develop that. ‘Oh, that’s great.’ And before you know it, you’re locked into something you never know if you like [Chuckles].

PCC:
What was the process, writing ‘Killing Me Softly’ with Norman Gimbel?

FOX:
With Norman, 99 percent of the time, he would give me the lyric or a part of the lyric. But we would usually - and this is also an important part of it, especially if it’s written for a particular singer, if it comes from a book, concept, a musical, it has to tell a certain story, or for film, where it has to make a certain subjective point, we talk about what the song should be, what motivates the song. Songs don’t just come out of the air. They have reasons, reasons to be, at least for a motion picture or a television show. In the theatre, specifically, it’s like opera, it’s part of the storytelling process. So you have to start off with the motivation.

‘Killing Me Softly’ really came about, because we had a final song to finish, on an album for this new, young singer [Lori Lieberman]. And Capitol Records was anxious to release this record. Norman had an idea for a song titled ‘Killing Me Softly With His Blues.’ Together, we changed it to ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song.’ It was Norman’s idea. And he went home and wrote a lyric and called me a few hours later with pretty much a completed lyric. And then I worked on it. That song was written really quickly. Overnight, I would say.

PCC:
Lori Lieberman had a great version of that song. The fact that it was the other recording, with Roberta Flack, coming off the huge exposure from ‘Play Misty For Me,’ that became a smash, was that just fate?

FOX:
I’m sure that’s fate. Yeah. We wrote it for Lori Lieberman and it was on her album. And Roberta Flack heard the song on an airplane, an American Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles. If she had flown on United Airlines that day, I might not be in this position. You might not be calling me today.

PCC:
‘I Got A Name’ - was that written for the film?

FOX:
It was written for a film, the same year, 1973. Two very big songs that year. That one was written for a film called ‘The Last American Hero,’ starring Jeff Bridges. And it was meant to personify his character on the screen. And we found this new, young singer coming up the charts. His name was Jim Croce. We heard his record ‘Operator’ on the radio and we said, ‘Gee, this guy sounds great!’ We thought he could be a very good voice to sing this song, that would be good for the song and good for the role in the picture the song would play.

PCC:
Do you often having singers in mind when you’re writing?

FOX:
I very often do. ‘Ready To Take A Chance Again,’ we wrote for Barry Manilow.

PCC:
Is that easier, when you know who’s going to be doing it?

FOX:
It is for me, because I hear that singer in my ear. Actually, if I write a song for particular singers, I’ve done many times, I hear the singer singing. So there’s nuances I can shape, in terms of knowing that person’s voice.

PCC:
In general, with so many love songs written, how do you approach trying to create something different that will resonate with listeners?

FOX:
You always start from the first note, from the first thought, musical thought. Sometimes the first musical thoughts are the best ones, the keepers. sometimes you go through a whole gamut of musical ideas until you maybe come around and settle on the first one. But they do resonate with me as to what’s working and what’s not.

Look, in all music, we have 12 notes. So all of music is based on combinations of those 12 notes. So any composer can sit down and write songs all day long. But the question is more a matter of knowing you’ve moved the feelings and the emotions in what you’re trying to say, and that you’ve constructed a solid melody that, even though some singers may change it, has its own distinctive shape and form. And sometimes it’s just a good song.

The difference is to know when you’ve written something that’s not working well enough. I can improvise songs all day long. But I can also improvise bad songs all day long. [Laughs] I’m not incapable of that. The difference is working until I think I’ve got something special.

PCC:
And you know when you have something special, you don’t try to guess what the public might like?

FOX:
I do know when I’ve found that. You never know what the public is going to reach for. But I do know if I’ve written a good song and I do know if there’s something unique about it. What you don’t know is if the public is ever going to hear it. Even if you write for a well known singer, you don’t know if it’s lost on an album someplace and the public doesn’t hear it. If it’s a single record, maybe it doesn’t get promoted right. So there’s a lot of things that come into play. But it starts with the song. And you just have to know, as a songwriter, when you’ve written something that’s really special, that says what you want to say, of course in conjunction with the lyrics, if there are lyrics. And you keep working on it, honing away. It’s a process, really.

PCC:
So it’s not difficult to know when to stop? You know?

FOX:
I do. I know when I have it. And I’ll tell you how I know when I have it. If I’m at the piano and I have a new song, if I sing it and in the middle of the song, I get bored singing it, I know it’s not ready. If I say, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t wait for this song to be over,’ I know I don’t have a good song. But there are times I write a song and, as soon as I get to the end, I do it again. And sometimes I make little changes each time. A note up, a note down, a phrase here, invert a phrase, change the sequence or something. I keep working it, until it finally settles. And when it settles, I now have a song and I want to keep coming back and doing it. And until then, I’m not satisfied.

PCC:
But do you go in with the idea that there is no perfection, no right or wrong, just choices?

FOX:
Exactly right. I think there’s no right or wrong in any art form.

PCC:
You’ve written so many tremendously popular, truly timeless, iconic TV series themes. Is there something beyond that familiarity and freshness you spoke of that makes a theme song click?

FOX:
You really have to get lucky and be part of a show that becomes timeless. It’s hard for the world to know a timeless song that no one heard [Laughs]. I was lucky. But there again, I’ve done about 50 television themes over the years. You probably may know a handful. But there’s a lot of shows that didn’t work, that the world won’t know.

But the objective is always the same, to identify what the show is about, to give it a musical color, to give it a style and to give it some some sort of thematic and harmonic and orchestration base that make people say, ‘Oh, I like that show,’ that brings you right into what that show’s all about, whether it has words or not.

For example, my very first television theme was ‘Wide World of Sports.’ And I was watching a screen that had skiers flying downhill and cyclers going around in circles, swimmers and whatever. And I had to create a theme that told you this was going to be all about the action of sports. And the heroic aspect of sports, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. That was my stimulus for writing this.

PCC:
And themes like ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Laverne and Shirley,’ are those particularly fun to work on?

FOX:
It’s always fun for me to work on it, It really is. I come to a television show knowing this is going to reach 30, 40, 50 million people a week. Then, if you get lucky, it goes around the world. On one hand, they’re just little television themes, from half-hour or hour shows or whatever, but they have significance. And over the years, people have told me they’ grew up on my theme songs. So many people say they were kids and their parents used to let them stay up and watch ‘Love American Style,’ which was at 10 o’clock. Or they didn’t let them stay up and they had to sneak in. Music resonates with people in different ways. And, of course, television is a grew communicator. Where else do you have tens of millions of people watching at the same moment? And I’m creating music that will be heard on a weekly basis, so you sort of have an obligation to find just the right way to do it. It’s easy to put things together that sound okay, but how do you put something together that’s going to be a significant part of this show, something that people are going to hang on to and remember?

‘Love American Style’ was 1969. I won the Emmy for that, the first year, for the television theme. That’s 40 years ago. You don’t have a perspective on it, when you write it. You just do the best you can do. But you hope to do something that becomes an indelible part of that show. But then you need the show to take off, also.

For example, ‘’Laverne and Shirley’ was a spinoff of ‘Happy Days.’ So was ‘The Ralph and Potsie Show,’ which you’ve never heard of. And so was ‘The Pinky Tuscadero Show.’ Although, ‘The Pinky Tuscadero Show’ did turn into something called ‘Blansky’s Beauties,’ which ran for a year with Nancy Walker.

PCC:
You’ve had these songs that have reached tens of millions. Are you still bothered by some worthy songs that never did find their audience?

FOX:
There are a few like that. I wrote a song for a movie called ‘The Last Married Couple in America,’ which was directed by my good friend Gil Cates. The first picture we did together. He passed away recently. And it was a sweet picture. And Norman Gimbel and I wrote a song called ‘We Could Have It All,’ which Maureen McGovern sang. And she had a single record on it. But the world never found it. Maybe it wasn’t promoted enough. In any case, it didn’t reach an audience. And most people don’t know it. And it’s a song I thought could have taken its place in pop music.

And then a song we wrote for a film called ‘Star Spangled Girl,’ it was a Neil Simon movie, this little song that we wrote called ‘Girl.’ And it was not a hit, sung by Davy Jones, a member of The Monkees. But Davy Jones made an appearance on ‘The Brady Bunch’ and they billed the episode around Davy Jones singing this song. And because of ‘The Brady Bunch,’ which has aired a million times over the years, everybody seems to know the song. Then, when they did ‘The Brady Bunch Movie,’ they also based it around Davy Jones singing the song. So it’s just an interesting thing about songs, how they grow and take hold.

I have two songs in the Philippines, that came out of a silly movie called ‘Zapped,’ that David Pomeranz sang. And those two songs are like anthems in the Philippines. I’ve met dozens of people from the Philippines who knew that song. One of the songs was called, ‘Got To Believe In Magic.’ They made a movie, after the song, in the Philippines, called ‘Got To Believe In Magic,’ with four or five of the biggest Philippine stars. And they each sang that song [Chuckle]. And outside of the Philippines, no one knows that song. It’s kind of odd.

PCC:
The recent honor by the Smithsonian, does that solidify the realization that you’re an important part of American music and pop culture history?

FOX:
It’s a very touching thing for me. When we see the opening of ‘Happy Days,’ a single 45 record drops on the jukebox and the theme starts. Well, we did that before there was a record out. But the producers printed up a record that said, ‘Happy Days, music by Charles Fox, lyric by Norman Gimbel.’ And they gave it to me as a gift in a frame. And it’s been sitting in storage all these years. Well, about six months ago, the Smithsonian inducted it into the Smithsonian. And it’s on permanent display, next to the Fonz’s jacket, in the history of television, in a cabinet next to Archie Bunker’s chair and across from the original Muppets. So that’s pretty touching to me. It’s pretty cool to be represented that way. It’s a nice little ‘50s kind of song, but for a lot of people, it was a significant part of their lives, growing up. I had the same thing when I was young, listening to ‘Davy Crockett’ and things like that.

PCC:
After all you’ve accomplished in this art form, are there still discoveries you’re making about the craft of composing?

FOX:
I’m busy doing different things all the time. I actually have three different Broadway projects I’m working on. One is based on ‘The Turning Point.’ Hal David and I have a musical based on it.

I’ve just been commissioned to write a piece honoring the Israeli Olympic athletes who were killed in Europe. And I’m going to conduct that in Munich this summer with a chorus and orchestra.

PCC:
That will be an emotional event.

FOX:
Two years ago, I was in Poland and I conducted the national opera company in an oratorio that I wrote based on the works of Pope John Paul II. And that was in a documentary film called ‘100 Voices,’ which is very emotional, a number of us revisiting Poland, where my father was from. As a result of that, last year, 2010, the Polish government commissioned me to write a piece honoring the 200th birthday of Chopin. So I conducted that piece with one of the great Polish pianists and Eddie Daniels, one of the great American jazz clarinetists. And we performed at this big concert in Gdansk, Poland, 22,000 people standing in the area where the solidarity movement started.

So I do a lot of different things in music. I’m always seeking new challenges. I took a risk in writing a book. The book was based on letters I wrote home when I was a student in Paris, studying with the extraordinary Nadia Boulanger, who was Aaron Copland’s teacher 40 years before me. We found those letters in shoebox that my mother had put in a drawer. And many years later, a literary agent heard about the letters and called me and asked if he could see them. I said, ‘Why do you want to see my letters? They’re kind of personal.’ He convinced me, saying it sounded interesting, a young man, 40 years ago, writing home an to this family in Bronx, studying in Paris with this extraordinary woman. And I wrote about 200 long letters, about my life and music. So I sent him copies and he called me back and said, ‘There’s a book here, if you’re willing to fill it out, give me the rest of the story, what happened with your life, your life before going to Paris and since.’ He felt it could be an inspiration to young people, kind of a coming of age story.

He said, give me a few pages of an outline and I think I can get a publisher interested. I said, ‘I don’t know how to write an outline. But I’ll write the book.’ So I just sat down and started writing. It took me about two years. I wrote it in longhand on yellow pads. And my assistant put it into the computer and I made changes, myself, on the computer.

So I thrive on challenges. Can I do this? I don’t know, let me see. No one ever told me I can’t do something. No one ever told me, ‘You can’t do. You shouldn’t do.’ And if they did, I wouldn’t believe them.

For the latest updates on this artist, as well as audio and video clips, visit www.charlesfoxmusic.com.