This was the
prelude to my landing in Boston for several years. I got a call
from old friend Rich Mendelson. He and his brother Andy (both
old compatriots from Syracuse and from Andy Pratt days) had recently
purchased Syncro Sound on Newbury Street from The Cars, and Rich
had gotten a call asking him to recommend a string arranger for
the opening song on this record.
I hadn’t done a string arrangement since the Whiz Kid album
for David Werner in 1973, so I was that perfect combination of
terrified and excited. I broke out the old orchestration books,
“crammed for the exam”, and arrived in Boston with
the arrangement in hand. Rich had put together a nice string section
from the staff at Berklee, where he was teaching, and I remember
when I was conducting the arrangement the artist, who was really
just a teen pop singer from Japan, came in and sat on the floor
of the studio. Since we were all wearing headphones, all she could
hear were the strings in the room. But I looked over and noticed
that she was crying, so I figured I had probably done an okay
job.
This was the first of all my recordings to be released on “that
popular new format” (as David Letterman said), the compact
disc.
