Bread, one of the biggest bands of the 1970s, is back. Singer-songwriter David Gates talks to Larry Schwartz about hits that never stale.
ON THE first leg of a reunion tour with Bread, singer-songwriter David Gates routinely met people named for one of the band’s biggest hits. “I can’t tell you how many kids are named Aubrey,” he laughs. “At least 50,000. Every concert, people come up to me and say, ‘I named my kid Aubrey’.
I met a girl the other day. Six feet tall. Beautiful blonde girl. ‘Hi, I’m Aubrey’. I never expected that…”
Others told him they had played his songs at their weddings. And other celebrations. “This gal in her 30s came up to me and said, ‘We used to play your songs at our pity parties’.” Pity parties? She told him these were held by high-school girls commiserating at their failure to find a Mr Right.
“I’m not sure that I’m proud of that,” Gates says.
Though we’re indoors, he sports a broad-brimmed cowboy hat with boots and jeans. A guitar is engraved on his silver belt buckle. He munches room-service sandwiches as though famished. In Melbourne to publicise a tour that’s ostensibly to mark the 25th anniversary (or thereabouts) of
the band’s 1970 hit, Make It With You, as well as a new compilation CD, Gates hardly comes across as a pop veteran.
Then again, this polite, greying father of four – “a doctor and three lawyers” – is probably just what you might have expected of an older incarnation of the co-founder of a pop band that enjoyed 10 top-10 hits with such titles as If, Baby I’m-A-Want-You, Everything I Own, Guitar Man, Sweet
Surrender and, yes, Aubrey.
Twenty-three years after he surprised fellow musicians by calling it quits, Bread albums continue to sell and Gates, whose solo projects have included the theme tune for the Neil Simon movie Goodbye Girl, is surprised at some aspects of the enduring affection. Not the least the pity parties
and all those Aubreys.
Gates found fame and fortune after powering a battered Cadillac from middle America to Los Angeles with $200 in his pocket and a wife and kids in tow. He spluttered into the celebrated 1960s counterculture, happily out of sync with the times.
He had short hair, no beads, didn’t smoke marijuana. “You gotta understand. If you grow up in a mid-western family, with pretty good values and morals – pretty straight people – you carry that with you. You can’t take the Oklahoma out of the boy…”
Today he lives on a ranch in northern California, prosperous from decades-old albums that continue to sell in their millions. At 55, he speaks with a soft, measured drawl. This current visit is his first to Australia. In what is being hailed as the band’s first major international tour, Gates, co-
founder James Griffin, drummer Mike Botts and guitarist Larry Knechtel are also playing in New Zealand, South-East Asia, Japan, South Africa, Europe, Canada and the Middle East.
The word “bread” was slang for money during the band’s heyday, though its members claim they had the “staff of life” in mind when settling on a name back in 1968. Gates is adamant it is the music and not the money that has brought them back together from separate careers.
“It’s not a highly lucrative trip like you might expect,” he says. “The Eagles, of course, were getting a million a night… We’re playing 2000-seat halls; this is really about the music. Getting up and playing in front of people we’ve never been able to play for before.”
Bread disbanded in 1973 and though it reformed briefly four years later, it has been a long while between performances. Gates says it’s “just like riding a bicycle; those songs come back so fast”.
The shows are a mix of old hits, solo songs and at least three new songs. Technological advances, notably with the use of a pickup to amplify sound from the bridge of the guitar, have made it easier to play live acoustic music, he says.
He was born in Tulsa, hometown of contemporary JJ Cale. His father was a piano teacher in charge of music in schools in a 250,000-strong community that he says was “a tremendous melting pot of country, rhythm’n’blues and rock’n’roll”.
He was raised on the classical music favored by his parents, a sister’s Frank Sinatra and Patty Page records, and big-band albums belonging to his brothers. “You know, I had all these influences from all these people older than I am. And then rock’n’roll comes along and I get rid of my violin
and start playing guitar…”
In L.A. his early music training paid off. He quickly found work arranging, writing and producing for others. At one stage, he was charging $7 to transcribe music from a tape so that untrained musicians could copyright their songs.
Gates did work for the likes of Buck Owens, Bobby Darin and Rod McKuen. He wrote and produced the Murmaids hit, Popsicles And Icicles, and was the unlikely choice of producer for Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, which resulted in a version of an old blues song, Diddy Wah Diddy.
“I got a call from a record company and they told me they had this band and they needed a little direction in the studio,” he recalls. “Would I go in and produce four sides? They had two songs of their own. Then I wrote another one for them and suggested they resurrect the old song. They’d
never heard it…”
Over the years, he’s taken pleasure in hearing versions of his songs by artists as diverse as Gladys Knight (Part Time Love), Jack Jones (If), and even Boy George (Everything I Own).
In the late ’60s Gates enjoyed a personal success in the industry, but soon wearied of writing for other people, worrying if a song suited a particular style or range. He wanted to write something he could sing. The band Bread came together
A first album failed to make an impact but Make It With You took it to No. 1. Bread was the straight counterpart to the hipper Crosby, Stills and Nash. Gates saw such a parallel between their approaches that his band signed with Elektra rather than Atlantic because the latter had CSN in its
stable.
Did he ever feel constrained by the image? “For what reason? We wouldn’t be who we are if we’d done all that stuff,” Gates says. “We’d just be part of the crowd.”
The Sunday Age, 03rd of November 1996
Larry Schwartz Writer 