Andrew Gold recently appeared on a Dutch radio station in a telephoned interview with the DJ, Hans Schiffers. His “All This And Heaven Too” album had been chosen as the station’s Album Of The Week. The interview was broadcast over several days. This is what we heard…

Segment 1

Yeah, it’s funny you should say this, because I was just writing some new liner notes for “All This And Heaven Too” because, um, all four of my ‘70s albums, er, on Asylum, are being re-released with bonus material and special releases.

So you’re really into the old stuff again now?

Yeah, we’re gonna find a bunch of mixes, you know, er, out-takes and songs that never made it to the albums and things like that, and a bunch of new pictures and a booklet with, er, more liner notes. And I was just thinking very heavily about “All This And Heaven Too” so I’m er… yes it was my favourite album of the four albums.

Why is that then?

Well, part of it was that I had a group- my best time making it of all the albums and also the first time that I had produced something myself, along with my friend, Brock Walsh. And I also, I kind of went through a very nice period. I had just fallen in love and was making a bunch of songs that I liked and I felt my singing was a lot better. So I, er, it was just a good time for me making it and I think it came out really well.

Yeah, because when I read the lyrics of the songs on “All This And Heaven Too”, they sound very powerful but also very simple and I could imagine that you were falling in love or something or whatever happened to love but it’s all very accurate.

Well, you know, I was 27 and I’d had a hit and I’d, you know the song “Never Let Her Slip Away” which was a big hit, was about this girl that I’d just met, er…

From a long distance? Where did she come from then?

She actually came from Los Angeles but she was in this big, um, TV show here called “Saturday Night Live” and her name was Laraine Newman and I’d met her at a party in LA and we really clicked from the beginning. So, um, it was a lot of fun. I was flying to New York all the time and she was flying to LA and, er, you know people like Chevy Chase and John Belushi and Bill Murray were just kind of, and Gilda Radner – all these people were, like, becoming my friends, so it was a lot of fun you know, just being amongst that crowd and um…

That’s how you wrote the song

I wrote the song about, you know, meeting her although it hadn’t been just two weeks before that and I really liked the song a lot and so I was very, very pleased that it became a hit especially in England.

Segment 2

Hans is talking on-air in Dutch to the listeners comparing the handclap backing track of Andrew’s “Never Let Her Slip Away” with “Heartache Tonight” by the Eagles.

What happened with that was… I was in the studio and we had cut the track and Brock and I on this track, um, had this, um, “hitting on the wall and clapping” loop that we had made, overdubbing it a lot of times that went ‘boom-boom clap, boom clap, boom-boom clap” and one night we were doing the background vocals and in walked JD Souther and Timothy Schmitt, who was the most recently added member of the Eagles at the time, and of course JD Souther wrote a lot for the Eagles and they were headed off to go write with Don Henley and Glenn Fry that night. So they came and they sang, and they liked the song and they said “Can we sing our lines? We only have like a half-hour then we’ve got to go but…” and I said “Sure, that will be great”. So they came and sang one line on the song, the part that goes “On a Sunday afternoon” – Timothy and JD. So they left and, er, you know, we went on recording and the rest of the album was finished. Then like a few months later, suddenly I heard “Heartache Tonight” coming out from the new Eagles album, which was “The Long Run” and there was boom clap, boom-boom clap. And I went “Uh-oh, busted!” and I said to Glenn, er, I was at a party and Glenn Fry was there and I said “So, er, er, Heartache Tonight?” and he kinda looks sheepishly at his shoes and went “Yeah, well, you know…”. I mean, and he was all okay and we were all friends and I couldn’t care as my song was a hit too, so what did I care? Besides, I had stolen it from somebody else too

Oh Really? Who had you stolen it from?

Um, Val Garay, who was the engineer on my first two albums and all of the Linda Ronstadt albums, who’s still a good friend of mine, but he wasn’t an engineer on this particular album. But some time before, he’d said that when he was the Four Seasons years ago or was IN the Four Seasons, they used to do this. They used to lean against the wall and use their elbows to hit the wall and then clap. So they’d go sort of elbow boom and then clap boom-boom clap, you know, back and forth. So he was showing me this and we all started doing it, kinda fun and we kinda said it would be great to, to record this you know, and we never did. And then I finally did do that on this song so it really wasn’t my idea so I didn’t feel so bad.

Yeah I can imagine and all the simplicity is brilliant of course

Yes and we were all friends anyway and we all borrowed from each other all the time so…

Segment 3

Hans is talking on-air in Dutch to the listeners about Andrew’s “Thank You For Being A Friend” and its use on the TV series "The Golden Girls"

Well that was a, that was a big hit, “Thank You For Being A Friend”, my version in the ‘70s, you know, sort of my follow up to “Lonely Boy” and, um, it, after that, um, years went by from 1978. Somewhere around 1986, it had done a few things like it was a, a couple of commercials had used the song for their products and then I was in England. This was around the period in ’86 when I was in a band with Graham Gouldman, which was Wax. Anyway around that time, I got a call from my accountant, or my business manager rather, and he said “Listen, we got a call from a TV company that’s producing a new show, er, producing a new show by, or starring the girl who was in this show ‘Maud’ (which was Bea Arthur I guess) and they’re doing a show about, with older women, and a comedy, and they wanbt to use “Thank You For Being A Friend” “ and I said “that sounds great, you know, why don’t you make a good deal” and I didn’t think much about it. And then I, er, um, and I said “Do they want to use my version?” and he said “No they want to record it with a woman singing” and to do it they needed permission, and I said “fine”. So he made whatever deal he did and, um, I was still in England recording the Wax album for another 2, 3 months and then I came back for a while and the show had been released, I mean there it was, on TV for about a month and it was in the Top 10. And not only that, it was such a hit that, um, one could tell even back then that it would play for years. So I always introduce the song when I play it on stage as my business manager’s favourite song, because it definitely did very well for me.

Yes of course because the song is uplifted, the rehearsals, every time they rehearse this series, you hear this song on television every time.

So yes it’s been very good to me, that song, and I thought maybe my next single should be “Thank You For Not Smoking” or…