It’s a beautiful day, I can’t stop myself from smiling. Welcome to a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. Cause it’s a beautiful day.
A breath of fresh air. Beautiful day. Oh, baby, any day that you’re gone away.
It’s a beautiful day. Hi, and welcome to the show. There are certain songs that really do become part of the soundtrack of our lives.
They drift from radios, fill family cars, play at weddings, and somehow stay with us long after the decade that produced them has passed. Few artists captured that feeling quite like today’s guest. During the 70s, Lobo’s gentle voice and heartfelt songs resonated with millions around the world.
He was one of the era’s most beloved singer-songwriters, creating music that spoke about love, relationships, and life’s simple moments with honesty and warmth. But behind the songs like Me and You and A Dog Named Boo and I’d Love You to Want Me is a fascinating story of perseverance, songwriting, and a career that has endured for more than five decades. In this episode, Lobo reflects on his musical journey, the unexpected success of his biggest hits, and the way his songs continue to connect with audiences across generations.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with singer-songwriter Lobo. Baby, I love you the way that I want you. The way that it should be.
Baby, you love me when you want to. The way that I want to. Only let me.
Kent Lavoie, better known as Lobo, thanks so much for joining us today. How are you? I’m just wonderful. Your real name is Roland Kent Lavoie, and you became known as Lobo.
Nobody knew that the songs that you did were done by you. Everybody thought that Lobo was a band at the time. Can you tell us why? Yes, I can.
Well, even to this day, I’ve never done a lot of press. I never did big tours. I never had an agent, except for very brief periods of time.
And it was a desire of mine to not be out front. That was my plan to start with. Write a hit song, you got an annuity, you can have a good life.
That was it. And it just kept expanding. And I was so grateful that I had the name Lobo to hide behind.
Because it afforded me the ability to be Lobo when I’m on stage or doing what I’m doing now. And beside that, I’m out mowing my lawn. Nobody ever believes the way I live.
And it has nothing to do with money or can live a bigger life or whatever. It’s just what I choose to do. But the name Lobo, let me get through that.
Once we decided I was not going to use my name, my producer said, well, you go through some names. And so I wrote a bunch of names on the thing. And I was reading them out.
And I forgot, I can’t remember any of them. But when I said Lobo, he said, what does that mean? I said, well, in Spanish, it means wolf. And he said, well, that’s great because me and your dog named Boo, it looks like a wolf because she was a German shepherd.
And that’s where that came from. I remember to this day, the bright red Georgia clay. We stuck to the tires after the summer rain.
We’ll probably never follow. A woman’s mind told me that’s so. Oh, how I wish we were back on the road.
You and our dog named Boo. Me and you and our dog named Boo. I’ll tell you what, when I started off in bands, the first show we ever played was at the high school talent show.
And we just did instrumentals. We were asked by the teachers of the high school to play a party. And we went in there and we played instrumentals, the first set.
And I had worked up What’d I Say by Ray Charles. And it has a real long intro in it. Anyway, so I’m getting my courage up at this long intro, you know.
And so the first thing you do in that song is tell your baby not to treat me wrong. Come and love your daddy all night long. And Sandy, this was an epiphany in my life.
And because I saw these were young school teachers. They were probably maybe in their 30s. And I was, what, 16, 15.
As soon as I opened my mouth and started singing, I became a different person to these people, to the women in the crowd. And then I did a couple of ballads. I mean, this is the first time I ever sang in my life.
It was an eye-opener. It was amazing. Hey, mama, don’t you treat me wrong.
Come and love your daddy all night long. All right, now. Hey, hey.
All right. See the girl with the diamond ring? She knows how to shake that thing. All right, now, now, now.
Hey, hey. Hey, hey. Tell your mama, tell your pa, I’m going to send you back to Arkansas.
Oh, yes, well, you don’t do right. Don’t do right. What you’re saying to me is that they suddenly became interested in you because you could sing.
I don’t know that they were interested in me. It was that they got that kind of glazed over. You know how you have a song you want to dance to, and they start playing it.
You jump, oh, this is our song. You know, whatever I sang was their song, because back in those days, there weren’t bands. There weren’t people playing with bands.
I was like Elvis walking in. You know, they don’t know. But that’s how it started.
Did you start getting more attention from the girls as a result of that? Well, you know, all of us that play music, successful or not, always start off the same way. First, you try to try to play something. Then you get in a band and you play, and it’s so much fun.
And then all of a sudden, you turn around and there’s girls all around the band. Well, that’s fun. And then, because I was in college at the time, I could play two nights a week.
We made $20 a night. In those days, that was a lot of money. I could live, pay my tuition, and go to college playing two nights a week rather than working at the grocery store all day.
And so that was really an eye-opener for me. You had set out in very early childhood wanting to be a veterinarian. You know, I think it was more my mother told me I wanted to be a veterinarian.
Ah, right. You know, as you get older and you look back on your life, I realized that I really never had goals in my life. I had sort of this one.
And music was, I mean, that was the last thing in my 50-year high school reunion. Never played for these people ever. I don’t do that.
I got up with my guitar and sang three or four songs. And I said to them, I said, you know, I said, back in 1961 when I graduated high school, if you told me that I would play music and that’s all I would do my entire life and be successful at it, you might as well have told me I was going to be an astronaut. You know, it just wasn’t possible, I didn’t think.
Were you like a massive celebrity at this high school reunion? No. I bet you were. Here it is.
If you act like a celebrity, they treat you like a celebrity. And I’ve always said that I was probably not the best person to have been an entertainer because an entertainer wants to walk into a party, stand on the table and sing. I don’t care the biggest entertainers in the world.
Eventually, if there’s an instrument there, they’ll get around and they’ll start playing. I’m the one that comes in late, sits in the back. In those days, drank a lot of beer and left.
And that’s sort of, well, not the beer anymore. That stopped in 1980 because I suddenly decided I wanted to discover what mornings were like. I didn’t know.
I can’t explain to you why, when I walked away from it, I still had active recording contracts with Curb Records, which was about as big as you could get. And I asked to be let out of the contracts for the last two albums because my head was turned around. You know, when you start believing some of the crap that they make up about you, when you start believing that stuff, you’ve got problems.
Or I did. And I just said, whoops, that’s enough. You know, I met my wife, who we’ve been married for 46 years now.
She was all I wanted. I didn’t care about doing anything. I would rather be with her doing nothing than I would be out hooping and doing, you know.
You know, I don’t tell people what I do because they start looking at you like you came from Mars. If I said, well, I’m an attorney and I’ve retired and I’m worth $50 million, they would kind of say, well, that’s nice. But if I said, remember this record? All of a sudden, you’re like, you know, it’s that inexplicable.
Why should you be so enamored with someone who sings for a living or writes music? Luckily for me, like the guys I play golf with in this little community where I have the little house, I’m in North Carolina in the mountains and Florida in the winter, but I’m up here. And they think that what I did was write Me and You and a Dog Named Boo. That’s all they know.
They don’t know that I sang it. If they heard I’d Love You to Want Me, they wouldn’t believe it was me. And that’s the way it’s always been.
You know, I’ve always been like, oh, yeah, you wrote that dog song. Yeah, yeah, that’s me. Let it go.
You know, and it works for me. Put it that way. I remember standing there About fell out of my chair And when you moved your mouth to speak I felt the blood go to my feet Now it took time to know What you tried so not to show Something in my soul just cried I see the one in your blue eyes Baby, I’d love you to want me The way that I want you The way that it should be Baby, you’d love me to want you The way that I want you If you’d only let me If you can’t hack it, if you realize that mentally you can’t do it, you need to get away.
Now, if you need to make a living… I was super fortunate because all of my big hits I wrote, I wrote them by myself. I was a single writer. That’s the end of the story as far as me needing anything for my life.
I mean, 50 years later, it’s still the same. I didn’t have a financial burden on me ever because I don’t live big. It’s my own choosing.
So you still make a substantial living out of the songs that you wrote? More than I can spend. That’s not true. More than I do spend.
Put it that way. And I saved all my money. I have a big retirement account.
On and on and on. It’s funny, though. Well, I don’t want to get into something.
If you ask me what I’m doing now, all of a sudden I can tell you something because it’s something different. What are you doing now? Well, I don’t know if you’re aware of it. Most people are in the business.
But the Internet and YouTube and all of this, there are literally thousands of videos of me singing my songs. The same video, somebody picks it up and puts it on. And you get a commercial before that.
And then you go into the thing. Well, somebody was making money off of every play. And it wasn’t me.
Well, Time Life, which is the division of Warner Brothers, which is where my stuff is. We re-recorded my hits 20 years ago. And we spent a lot of money and a lot of time.
Most people could never tell the difference in the original record. Well, I just am in the process of working. I’m going to Nashville in 10 days to do a bunch of casual videos.
Not the thing where you’re sitting around the room, I show you how to play my song, and you talk about how you wrote it, that sort of thing. Because Time Life wants new film. And for somebody, the last hit record I had was in 1979.
And? They were just thrilled. And we’ve been working the details out. It’s a signed deal.
Great. Still call me Just before you close your eyes to sleep You make me vow to try and stop by sometime But baby, that’s a promise I can’t keep I love you too much to ever start liking you So let’s just let the story kind of end I love you too much to ever start liking you So don’t expect me to be your friend I believe you’ve been listening a lot to songs like Nielsen’s Without You and Mac Davis’ Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me when you got to write that one. Once again, usually I had a lyric idea before I started.
But I decided that Without You by Nielsen’s probably in my top three all-time records. I mean, Nielsen was an absolute… Mariah Carey, my rear end, compared to Nielsen. He was a Beatles’ favourite singer, remember, and I don’t blame him.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Kent, you were working in Tampa in 1970.
That’s when you started writing Me and You and a Dog Named Boo. You had been talking to a New York publisher who said that the songs that were happening at the time were taking on this Me and You Against the World sort of stance, and that’s how you came up with it. Can you share the back story? Yes.
Let me tell you how I even had a contact to get into music. I was playing in a bar. Crowded, crowded Thursday night.
Everybody went on Thursday night. I played this song that a local band had a hit on, and I was up getting a beer, and this guy walked up to me and said, Hi, I’m da-da-da, and he says, I’m Phil Gernhardt. I produce Stay by Maurice Williams.
And he would get people to come out to him and say, you’re right. And he wanted to know about that song, and I told him, no. And then a couple of weeks later, he came in and asked us if we would play for a guy who was going to put up the money to record.
So we get to the recording studio, and this guy had the money. He doesn’t show up. So here’s my band and Phil, who didn’t have 10 cents at the time.
And so the studio owner said, well, if you pay for the tape. So we went in there and made a little local record, which is a huge hit. We go from $60 a night to $300 a night.
That was the eye-opener for me on that part of it is that, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. There’s money you can make in this, too. Now, Phil Gernhardt went on and had all the Snoopy versus the Reds there.
He had Abraham Martin, John, Let Your Love Flow, and, of course, all my stuff. There’s a reason for the sunshine in the sky. There’s a reason so high must be the season when that love light shines all around us.
So let that feeling, feeling through this with your love flow. Just let your love flow with the smallest of dreams and let your love season. After he had Snoopy versus the Red Baron, I started hanging around his office.
And he said to me, listen, he says, you’re an OK singer. He said, but nobody’s going to ever give you a hit song. You’re not that good of the singer.
So you better write it. And it took me about three years. And I took songs down there.
Every five minutes, I took songs down. They sent me to New York a couple of times to cut things. And during that trip, this is fitting to what you asked me.
I met with a publisher. And he’s the one that said the Helen Reddy line, me and you against the world. This is before Helen Reddy wrote that song.
I had that in mind. I went home. And I had the start of the song.
And I had the chorus of how I was going to do it. But I couldn’t rhyme me, you and me. So I changed it to me and you.
So I’m trying to come up with a rhyme. And I’m in a room that has a sliding glass door to the backyard, which is fenced. And all of a sudden, I look.
And there sits my dog named Boo. This is a true story. Everybody thinks I made this up.
And I’m trying to rhyme you, you understand. And all of a sudden, I look. And I said, me and you and a dog named Boo.
And it was the weirdest thing. And everybody that heard that song, Phil Gardner, my producer, he sent it to New York, the label. When I’m in the studio cutting it, every musician, it was picked on the cover of all the major trade magazines.
It was just a hit song for the time. Now it’s just a trite old thing that comes out of the woodwork every now and then. It’s still a great song.
Thank you. It’s held up over time incredibly. But what were you writing about? I mean, once you found the title for it and it was an homage to your dog.
I had the first verse. I remember to this day, the bright red George Dupley and how it stuck to the tires after the summer rain. And then I don’t know if I had the willpower makes the old car go.
A woman’s mind told me that. But I knew I had the part where it went, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. And I had dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
Me and you. And I’m going on and on about everything. And sometimes it’s like we were talking earlier about the mystery of music.
I’ll tell you the real mystery of music is writing music, because the emotions come in your head, then the lyric comes in your head, and the first thing you know, you’re recording this song. And the next thing you know, they’re playing violins on it, and you’re choking up, because you can’t believe that this song that you wrote, you’re in New York, in Jimi Hendrix’s studio, no less, with Brooke for Me and Your Dog Named Boo. Talk about, and Santana’s in the other studio.
We’re in there rocking out, and I’m in there going, me and you and your dog. Surreal, it was surreal. In the village in New York, and here I am, little boy from Florida, you know, in there.
It was funny. We finished at 10 o’clock at night. Santana started at 10 o’clock at night.
I could’ve stayed up all night if I had to. It was weird. ♪ I remember to this day ♪ ♪ The bright red Georgia clay ♪ ♪ How it stuck to the tires after the summer rain ♪ ♪ Will power me that old cargo ♪ ♪ A woman’s mind told me that’s so ♪ ♪ Me and you and a dog, me and you and a dog named boo ♪ It certainly made a big name for Lobo, not for you, but for Lobo, because that’s exactly when you did change it and start calling yourself Lobo, wasn’t it? Yeah, yeah.
Did you tour or you just followed it straight up with the next album? You know, for a one hit, whatever, if you’re not a rock and roll band, you know, little clubs and funky shows. And by the time you pay the band and pay for the truck you’re riding around in, you know, it’s just impossible to do. If I hadn’t written it, that’s the only source of income I’d had.
So I just did it some. And then all of a sudden it was like, this is the first big thing. We got an offer to open for Three Dog Night at the Atlanta Stadium, at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
I mean, it’s a huge venue. And so here we go, and I take my little band with the truck and we put our equipment on. It’s a huge stage.
And we start playing, or we get to play, you know, where the people come and sit down, you know, and I’m singing my funky little songs. And then we get out, we’re half an hour and Three Dog Night comes out there. Just absolutely phenomenal.
Those guys in those days were just, the band, the singers. And I’m sure if anybody could see me from the audience, my mouth was open just going, oh, you know. ♪ Want some whiskey in your water ♪ ♪ Sugar in your tea ♪ ♪ What’s all this crazy question you’re asking me? ♪ ♪ This is the craziest party that could ever be ♪ ♪ Don’t turn on the lights, cause I don’t wanna see ♪ ♪ I’m a toad in a cup ♪ ♪ I’m a toad in a cup ♪ ♪ That ain’t the way that I’m bound down, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Got some air into this room ♪ ♪ I think I’m always choking from the smell of stale perfume ♪ ♪ And that cigarette you’re smoking, I’m scared half to death ♪ ♪ Open up the window, sucker, let me catch my breath ♪ ♪ I’m a toad in a cup ♪ ♪ I’m a toad in a cup ♪ ♪ That ain’t the way to have fun, son ♪ ♪ That ain’t the way to have fun, sugar, son, oh, yeah ♪ I never went to shows like that.
I was always playing in the bar, you know, paying my bill. The worst thing on the tour, though, we got to the Three Rivers Stadium, and the sound equipment, it wasn’t shipped in for some reason or other. So it’s time to go on, and I go up there, and all they have are these little speakers with the monitors, so I start playing, because they made me, and I keep hearing yelling, we can’t hear you, we can’t hear you, and they start booing.
So I do my half hour, go on, and Three Dog Night, magically, the equipment comes in, they set it up. Later on, we’re in the hotel, you know, thinking about how weird that was, and the news comes on and says, well, from Three Rivers Stadium, we had a big show out there, and the opening act was booed off the stage. And I was lying, I said, I’m not designed to do this.
You know, they didn’t say, because of the equipment, malfunction, they just said I was booed off the stage. Aw, that would’ve hurt. And then, one of the big show indoors, 12,000 kids, Chuck, the singer, was so screwed up, he didn’t show up at the show, and they kept making me go out, play another 15 minutes.
And the third time I went out, and they were booing. Finally, I said, listen. I said, you wanna sit here and wait, or you wanna play and we’ll have some fun? And then they were okay.
And then, sure enough, he came in and played, whatever. ♪ It’s been the lover’s question ever since time began ♪ ♪ How to keep good romance from slipping through your hands ♪ ♪ It ain’t no trick to keep it, to hold on to what you got ♪ ♪ The secret to the secret is to love and never stop ♪ ♪ Got to keep holding on, holding on, holding on for dear love ♪ ♪ You better try holding on, holding on, holding on for dear love ♪ ♪ You got to keep holding on, holding on, holding on for dear love ♪ ♪ Holding on, holding on ♪ It was 1972 that you had the follow-up album. And of course that had the terrific hit on it, I’d Love You To Want Me.
I believe you’d been listening to people like Nilsson’s Without You. Yeah, I had the idea for the song and I finally, I put it together and I took it into Phil. And he said, I think this is really something we can use.
And so I rewrote part of it and I can’t tell you what part of it I rewrote. The song was about seeing someone and knowing that they’re looking at you with the same feelings you have for them, but there is a reason that you can’t get together. Now, in my mind, it was a school teacher.
Okay, now, nowadays that’s people going to jail for that over here. But in my time, that was something that would have never happened in a million years. And what it was was about an art teacher I had in the sixth grade, believe it.
A beautiful, and all my high school friends would tell me it was Miss Norton. I looked in Miss Norton’s eyes and she looked at me and we were gonna be a thing when I grew up. The other thought in my mind, because I did write a song about this one time and it was called All the Children Love Sister Mary.
Sister Mary is your middle name. In my psyche, it was also the idea of a nun. A beautiful, not beautiful.
Yes, that’s the word, unreachable. And that’s what it was about. That’s probably the only song I ever wrote that had the mystery in it.
Now, it took time for me to know what you tried so not to show. There’s something in my soul just cry. I see the one in your blue, the way that I want you, that it should be, the love that you want to.
I wanna say that I sat down and wrote that emotionally from top to the bottom, but I didn’t. I had to rewrite it and we rewrote it. And when I recorded it, we did the tracks.
We went to New York, did the strings. We came back to Atlanta, we overdubbed. We went back to New York on this one side and put backgrounds on it.
That’s when we had Ellie Greenwich and Robert John and all these people singing background. And it was a wonderful experience because this thing just grew bigger and bigger and bigger. And Mary Manilow’s producer told my film, my producer one time that I write, you know his song, I write the song that makes the young girls.
They copied our, not the melody. They copied the way we voiced the backgrounds. And if you listen to that now and you hear it, it’s a lot of, ah.
And so that’s always the way we’re talking about Nielsen. Starts off, I can’t believe it. It grew from a little acorn into a tree.
That’s exactly right. And Robert John, of course, sang that terrific song, The Lion Sleeps Tonight. He did that after he left your band.
Bowie had had a regional hit. And I can’t even remember the song. It was him singing high.
What he had, what his big deal was, was Sad Eyes. Sad eyes would be everything. Looks like it’s over, it’s over.
He and a guy named Michael Gately was his best friend. They did all the backgrounds. And they came to Atlanta when we did the next album and did it.
And then Phil wanted to go to LA after we did two wonderful albums. And we have to go to LA and play with all the snotty pickers. And I hated it.
I just absolutely hated it. You actually pitched that song to the Hollies, didn’t you? As a potential follow-up to Long Cool Woman. Right, and the story that I got from my publisher, and once again, I’ve told this story a lot of times, but I’ve never gone to Graham Nash and say, is this true? But I do know that they liked it.
What they didn’t like was the line in the song that everybody loved from Liza Minnelli cut that song and on and on and on. And it’s, and when you moved your mouth to speak, I felt the blood go to my feet. They didn’t like that line, but what, you know, it’s, the blood left my brain.
I was dizzy. But I said, the blood goes to my feet and they didn’t like that. They said, well, it looks like you’re in a car wreck or something, you know.
Well, it was the only time where I said, screw them. I wrote the song. It took me forever to write it.
I recorded it. And they want to put it out as a single on me. Tell them thanks, but no thanks.
And I walked away from it. Good for you. Yeah, it was, well, it changed my life.
Did you know from the outset that there was going to be a smash hit? You know, back in those days, phone calls were the only way you found out anything. And when the label starts getting calls from all over the country, the same day the record goes out, you know that it’s a hit. The same thing with me and You’re A Dog Named Boo.
But I Love You Want Me, especially in Europe and in Germany. I was number one 13 weeks in Germany. You know, that’s a weird deal.
And so, and it’s been recorded by, I don’t know, 50 or 60 people or something. A lot of them are European. It was the song of my career, even though I had other songs that made money.
It was the defining thing. But most people think the defining thing in my career is me and You’re A Dog Named Boo.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. So you had those two massive hits.
As you said, you’ve made lots of other songs that have made good money for you since, but never to the same level as those two. Were you disappointed that you could never reach that level again? Or I guess having had this chat with you now, I could probably answer that and say, no, you were cool with it. I was completely cool with it, but what you’ve got to remember is Don’t Expect Me To Be Your Friend was also a top ten tune in the United States.
And Canada was number one in Canada. And I’ve had several reggae versions, believe it or not. And there’s a guy named John Holt that had a relatively big reggae hit with I’d Love You To Walk.
When I saw you, I fell off my chair And I think it took time for me to know She tries so not to show my soul I see that it should be If you don’t leave But then I had, sure took a long, long time. You know, it was top five in the easy listening and in the 20s, I think. How Can I Tell Her About You was the one the record company blew.
I didn’t realize until I got to Asia how massive that song is all over Asia. What made them go for it so much? I can tell you, I’ll tell you the short story. As I said the other day when I was talking to people, just call me Captain Verbose because you tend to just rattle on, you know, but you can edit it.
OK, the first night I did in Asia, I was in Hong Kong, it was outdoors. 5,000 seater outdoors and there were two or three times that many people hanging off the buildings, looking out of windows. And I’m doing the show and I keep hearing this singing.
They’re singing every song with me. Then there’s yelling a song, they’re just yelling something from all over, from the buildings. And I turned around to the drummer, I said, his name was Thumpy, for drummer, that’s funny.
I said, Thumpy, what are they yelling? And he said, they’re yelling Stoney. I said, Stoney? Stoney was an obscure album song that I’d never played on stage. And I went up to the microphone, dumbly, and said, would you want to hear Stoney? And it was like, if I was going to play Stairway to Heaven, you know, it was like, what? What I should have done, which just picked my guitar, the drummer would have gotten it and then other guys would have filled it and done it.
But I didn’t. I’ve known her since we both were kids I recall silly things we did She would want to ride up on my back To keep from stepping on a crack I didn’t think of it back then But even when she did not win She was happy just to play Stoney liked to live out every day Stoney, happy all the time Stoney, life is summertime The joy you find in living every day Stoney, how I love your simple ways The times when no one understood Seems that Stoney always would We’d walk for hours in the sand She would always try to hold my hand The next night I did it and everybody in Hong Kong was singing this song and I asked later, and they said, Lobo music is campfire music in Hong Kong. Now we’ll think about that for a minute.
And I said, what? They said, we get, we sit in a room and we get in a circle and we play like we have a fire and we sing songs. And my songs are so simple and you could understand every word even though back in those days they didn’t speak English. They could sing the English.
And I’ve heard it time and time again that people learned a lot of English singing my songs because anybody can play them. So I said, oh, and I figured it out. They could hear my voice.
It was easy to play. And then they grew to love these songs. And to this day, if I play Stoney at any place in that part of the country, I draw a crowd, you know, and everybody’s singing.
That’s the funny part. That’s what the people told me. Yeah.
And I believe when you played in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, you played to the largest audience ever to see a pop star perform. I think up to that date, that was scary. I’m sure it might have grown old Like most young things usually do And dangling a line To try and find your mind Oh, for that I can’t blame you Now I’m not questioning Your motives For all the silly things You’ve done Now you’re coming round Putting yourself down Telling me I always was the one It sure took a long time To miss me A long time for you To come around A long time to find What was wrong Sure took a long, long time We went in there, and we were the first, I was the first pop act, because once again, my stuff is so easy, soft, non-controversial.
And so the censorship over there, Indonesia back in the old days was the same way. I had to do a little show for the censors, you know. And they all knew the songs.
But in Ho Chi Minh City, my guy who’s traveled with me for 45 years, Billy Ayres, was in the Vietnam War. I was in the Army Reserve, but they never activated my unit. I walked a thin line for several years.
Billy went and was in the worst parts of it. So when we get to Ho Chi Minh City, and we’re looking at the little round lakes flying in from the borders, you know, it was a real emotional thing for Billy. And so I hung close with him.
And when we played, the people were reserved with real strength. The show was well-received, I guess. Everybody was afraid to clap.
By a lair beside me With your head resting on my arm Your body feels so warm And your hair smells like a Sunday morning I feel you moving closer And I know what you’re gonna say But girl, there’s just no way I’ll ever like what you’ll be saying Don’t tell me goodnight It makes me feel so empty inside And if only I could I wouldn’t sleep at all Don’t tell me goodnight Just let me drift off slowly away And dream Dream Of you What a fabulous career you’ve enjoyed. Even when you didn’t want to be up front and famous, you ended up becoming famous anyway. You couldn’t escape all the accolades and the critical acclaim, could you? The key word, Sandy, you said was endured.
That’s the part. I don’t think I said endured. You said that this long career that you endured.
Oh, I think I said, no, I wouldn’t say you’ve endured the career. I probably said you’ve enjoyed the career. You’re saying you endured the career.
That is the more correct word, and I thought you’d really grabbed underneath me and seen that, that I endured being something I wasn’t. It was a running joke. We’re on the airplane going to Asia because, once again, it was so easy to tour there that I did there.
I would say to Billy, I’d say, Billy, he’s coming. What are you talking about? The hobo’s coming. He’s coming into my body because when I get off the plane, there’s television crews and I go do press and crap and I go do a show and a limousine and all that crap.
Then I get back in the plane and we’re going back to America and I say, Billy, I feel him leaving because when I get back to America, I’m just a weird old guy that gets off the plane. It’s a strange feel. You’re a bit like Clark Kent in Superman, really.
Yeah, except I’m not Superman on the stage. I’m kind of in the same way. You know what? Let me tell you something.
I meant to bring this up. I’m glad I remembered it. I did that tour of Australia in 1973.
I was so unsure of myself as an artist and so sure that people would not enjoy what I really did on record that we did out and most of the show was just playing old rock and roll songs because it’s what I had done in clubs for years. I felt so self-conscious and to this day, I wish I had done a club gig where the people that did remember me came and saw me really sing all the songs with acoustic guitar like I do. In retrospect, I did Australia and New Zealand and it was the same.
This was right when I’d Love You, Want Me was number one in the world. Hector Crawford was the head of the television deal and he’s the one that brought me in and all I remember is his wife saying everything I said to his wife, she’d say, yes. And I’d say, how many did you take? Yes.
And I’m thinking, yeah. Please come back and see us again. We’d love to hear you play and I’m sure you’ve got much more confidence these days.
I would love to do it except I don’t fly anymore. She knows when I’m lonesome And she cries when I’m sad She’s up in the good times She’s down in the bad Whenever I’m discouraged She knows just what to do But girl, she doesn’t know About you and my trouble She makes them all seem right I can make up excuses Not to hold her at night We can talk of tomorrow I’ll tell her things that I want to do But girl, how can I tell her about you How can I tell her about you Girl, please tell me what to do Everything seems wrong Whenever I’m with you So girl, won’t you tell me How to tell her about you How can I tell her I don’t miss her How can I say It’s you I think of Every single night and day Kent Lavoie, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. What a joy it’s been chatting with you you and Lavoie actually talking to the two of you it’s just been wonderful.
And Sandy Yu and your brother Sandy K because I didn’t know you you may have been twins for all I know. You’re very funny Sandy, I enjoyed it. Thank you very much and you know if you ever want me for anything else or to keep in touch to ask like I said you know how to reach me.
I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you Kent and thank you from the bottom of my heart. You’re most welcome. Bye bye.
You’ve been listening to a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye.