The Music of Tommy Page

I met Tommy Page back in 1990, when I was only 17. As the editor of my high school newspaper in suburban Cincinnati at that time, I possessed a youthful fearlessness and a love for pop music that convinced me it would be totally fine to call up music labels in New York and request to interview their artists on summer concert tours. To my surprise, it always worked. I went to a fairly large high school of about 1,500 students, the perfect audience of middle American teenagers to whom those record labels wanted to sell cassette tapes, concert tickets, and merchandise. I was curious enough about the careers of pop musicians to have scored interviews with acts like New Kids on the Block, Sweet Sensation, and Tiffany, something that might not happen as easily for a Midwestern high school student today.

My meeting with Tommy Page was a little more tense than my other interviews had been. Clearly, we were both gay, which made us slightly nervous I think, sitting alone together in a backstage room of Timberwolf amphitheater at Kings Island amusement park in 1990. After our interview was done, some radio guys from Q102, the big pop music station in Cincinnati, came in to record some on-air spots with Tommy. While the sound engineers were setting up the microphones, Tommy was just having fun with us, gossiping about stuff like Mariah Carey’s then-secret relationship with her boss, the label head of Columbia Records; this was just after Carey’s first single, “Vision of Love,” had been a huge radio hit. It all made such a lasting impression on me that I can vividly recall every detail in that backstage room to this day: the fluorescent lights, the faux-wood paneling, the gentle rasp in Tommy’s voice when he spoke, and the way his jet-black bangs fell to either side of his face.

A little less than a year ago now, on a cold Saturday morning in early March, I was stunned when I heard from a writer at Billboard magazine that Tommy Page had died from an apparent suicide the night before, alone at his country home in Pennsylvania. The former Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto, who’d been a close friend of Tommy’s when they were younger, broke the story online right after I found out. Following a string of albums and hit singles back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Tommy had forged a successful career as a music industry executive, and he’d also started a family with his husband Charlie, with whom he was raising three children. By coincidence, I would be in New York that next week on the day of Tommy’s funeral, so I took the hour-long bus ride from Port Authority down to his hometown of Caldwell, New Jersey, to attend the service that Wednesday morning.

It was heavy to carry my young memories from so long ago into the Presbyterian church there. Several women my age who were sitting together in the row in front of me, and who had known Tommy since childhood, cried throughout the entire service. The whole congregation wept when one of Tommy’s young sons spoke about his dad from the pulpit. Then one of Tommy’s brothers played a beautiful version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” which he said had been one of Tommy’s favorite songs. Most of the congregation quietly sang along. I think it came as a relief to us, in a time of grief and confusion, to share in the love of something simple like a pop song together.

Tommy released seven albums during the height of his recording career, with several songs that climbed up the pop and dance charts and enjoyed good runs there. By the mid-‘90s, his core audience had shifted from America to Asia, where he continued to perform annually to dedicated, appreciative audiences. Listening back through his discography over this past week, I was impressed by how diverse the styles of his albums are, ranging from Latin/freestyle club cuts to appealing pop ballads to some semi-classical numbers later in his oeuvre. My favorite of Tommy’s songs, 1990’s “I Break Down” (co-produced by Joe Mardin, son of legendary producer Arif Mardin), was re-recorded by Tommy in a gorgeous orchestral version in 2015; that new rendition was featured on his eighth and final album, a self-released compilation of songs hand-selected from his own catalog and simply titled My Favorites.

When Tommy Page’s eponymous debut album was released in 1988, I was working at Camelot Records in Northgate Mall, across the street from where I grew up in Cincinnati. I remember opening of a box of deliveries from Sire Records, Tommy’s label (and Madonna’s, too), then seeing Tommy’s Elvis-inspired cover photo starting up at me from a cassette near the top of the box. “Who’s that?” I thought. He had quietly arrived on the pop music scene with minimal fanfare, though that album did spawn his first radio hit, the ballad “A Shoulder to Cry On.” I was more drawn to the dance tracks on that album, like “A Zillion Kisses” and the endlessly fun, openly sexual “Turning Me On,” which are among the most club-ready songs that Tommy recorded. There’s also a pulsating number that he wrote and arranged with Grammy-nominated songwriter Shelly Peiken, “Love Takes Over,” as well as a catchy ode to non-conformity called “Hard to Be Normal.”

Tommy’s sophomore effort, Paintings in My Mind from 1990, would be his biggest commercial success, in part because of the involvement of New Kids on the Block, who were riding high on the wave of the boyband craze at the time. They shared credit for two songs on the album with Tommy: the bouncy “Turn on the Radio” and the heartfelt “I’ll Be Your Everything,” Tommy’s Billboard #1 single, the lyrics of which now poignantly sound like they could have been written for Tommy’s young daughter, Ruby. Tommy also sang the album’s duet “Don’t Give Up on Love” with Latin/freestyle artist Safire (aka Wilma Cosme), with whom he later formed a dance music partnership called Cosmic Page.

By the time his third album was released a year later, 1991’s From the Heart found Tommy Page reaching for a more mature sound. The record’s lead single, “Whenever You Close Your Eyes,” written by Michael Bolton and Diane Warren, with its soaring chorus and rousing gospel-choir backdrop, raised the bar for the next chapter of Tommy’s recording career. Songs such as the upbeat “Under the Rainbow” and a moving version of Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” proved that he was capable of sustaining a more refined form of drama on his records, suggesting in a carefully considered way that he (and his audience) had moved past teenage years and into adulthood.

Tommy’s next few albums were released in markets throughout Asia. A Friend to Rely On from 1992 opens with an awesome cover of Nik Kershaw’s mid-‘80s hit “Wouldn’t It Be Good,” while 1994’s Time contains excellent, pensively danceable tracks like “Places in My Heart” and “If I Had a Wish.” Loving You from 1996, titled after a number from Stephen Sondheim’s 1994 musical Passion, includes some of Tommy’s accomplished renditions of songs by other artists, like Cyndi Lauper’s “That’s What I Think” and John Waite’s “Missing You,” as well as another superb track written by Diane Warren, “I Keep Hoping.” A smart handful of cover songs also appears on Tommy’s self-released album Ten til Midnight from 2000: a hardcore house version of Breakfast Club’s 1987 hit “Right on Track,” which sounds like the kind of dance track that Tommy always wanted to record, Ari Gold's wonderful "Dance to the Beat of My Heart," and a sensitive rendering of Nikki’s popular 1990 single “Notice Me.”

The final post and photograph on Tommy Page’s Twitter timeline in January of 2017 indicates that he was working on new songs, something that’s heartbreaking to consider now, of course. I’ve thought of Tommy and his music often throughout the past year, and even so, it took me nearly twelve months to feel enough clarity about his tragic death to be able to write this post. I’m fortunate that I had a chance to meet him years ago, and I can find some comfort in knowing that his music will last.

Ferron, Driver (EarthBeat! Records, 1994)

Very few records in my CD collection feel like they contain the entire life of the artist. Canadian singer/songwriter and lesbian icon Ferron’s 1994 album Driver is one of those records, and it’s also among the best. I’m surprised when I realize that it came out nearly 23 years ago now. It’s one of just a handful of CDs that I’ve returned to on a frequent basis since its release, and in a way it feels as if it never quite leaves my consciousness. The twelve tracks on Driver, the same number of hours on the clock and months in a year, seem to have been written and recorded to trace the passage of time itself, meaning that they’ve also been ingrained into the passage of time for me since they were first put out into the world.

I vividly remember hearing Ferron perform at a concert in Provincetown about 15 years ago now. The venue was the sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, a beautiful old New England church that’s right in the center of town. I was feeling a little bit sleepy that evening, so after the lights went down at the start of the show, I decided to go all the way to the back of the venue and stretch out alone in one of the pews there. I already knew the songs from Driver very well, so whenever she played one of those songs, I allowed myself to semi-doze as my mind floated along on Ferron’s guitar and gently rough-hewn voice (accompanied by the impeccable musicianship of her touring partner, Shelley Jennings), though it felt less like I was dozing and more like I was traveling.

Fittingly, Driver is about the necessary tension between traveling and settling down, between solitude and companionship. Relationships are at the center of the album, including the relationship between the singer and herself, between the singer and her own history. The album’s first track, “Breakpoint,” opens through quietly atmospheric instrumentation and a line that’s both a warning and a seduction: “Let’s turn the outside way down low and play with fire.” No matter how tight the bond is when two people meet and fall in love (“To fall from a plane would make more sense, but who is so logical,” Ferron jokes), every relationship takes place across a kind of fault line, “your storm and my storm dissolving at breakpoint.”

And it’s at the breakpoint between people that Driver really departs on its second track, “Girl on a Road,” long known as Ferron’s most autobiographical song. She ran away from home at fifteen, with only a shopping bag of possessions: “I said goodbye to no one and in that way faced my truth.” In addition to hinting at an early understanding of her gender and sexuality, her truth is mainly an artistic one. “I wanted to turn beautiful and serve Eternity,” she sings, “and never follow money or love with greasy hands, or move the earth and waters just to make it fit my plans.” The song is clearly written not just as a memory, but also as an inspiration for all girls who left home at a young age, something that I’ve always related to as a young gay man who did the same.

I think Ferron’s Driver has appealed to me for so long because it’s equal parts street smarts and deep wisdom. That potent combination is captured perfectly by a clever turn in “Cactus,” my favorite track on the album: “You’re young one day but youth is rude, and while you watch it walks right past. But hey, then you get your chance to think like me.” Driver is filled with such pinpoint lyrical observations, so precise that comparisons to Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan don’t really do them justice. “There’s a rhythm to the highway to match the rhythm of your fears.” “There’ll always be gorgeous babes around, it’s the nature of towns at midnight.” “And the coldest bed I’ve found does not hold one but it will hold three.” “Still the odds fall sweet in favor to an open heart.” “An open heart is a moving train.”

Openness to diverse musical styles is abundantly evident on Driver, too. Although most of the songs walk a traditional folk line (including the contemplative “Independence Day” and wistful “A Name for It”), jazzy piano interludes find their way into songs like the sexy, playful “Call Me,” a soaring soprano saxophone solo drifts through the midsection and close of “Borderlines,” and Ferron breaks out into true country hoedown mode on the celebratory “Love Loves Me,” complete with accordion, hooting yelps, and choral clapping. The prologue and epilogue of “Sunshine” and “Sunshine’s Lament” also feature classical viola and piano balladry, in order to convey appropriately the heartbreak of those songs.

Driver’s closing track and final destination, “Maya,” is named after Ferron’s daughter and begins with an indelible image: “Last night I dreamed Joni Mitchell cut her hair and changed her named to Gaia.” The song is about keeping house with a lover and raising a child together, while also growing a symbolic garden. The singer poetically reconsiders what has brought her to this place: “It was always worry dolls and love’s back door and haunted halls to the ocean floor, where I’d lick my wounds behind a rust-warped door and try to prove love couldn’t find me.” “Maya” addresses the significance of the album’s title as well. “It seems like I’ve been driving now for a long, long time,” Ferron sings. Then she whispers, “Oh, the dance of it all,” and a swaying melodica carries the song to its fading end.

Andy Bey, The World According to Andy Bey (HighNote Records, 2013)

Last year, the legendary yet under-celebrated jazz performer Andy Bey released his tenth studio album, the phenomenal The World According to Andy Bey, which received a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album.  Bey’s latest release is an intimate solo affair for his voice and piano; it contains four original songs, along with seven fine renditions of some classic and lesser-known standards.  As the album’s individually focused title suggests, Bey’s four-octave baritone takes up as much time and space as it needs throughout these eleven tracks.  His warm vocals are by turns relaxed and impassioned, improvisational yet studied, burnished by time though never, ever tired.

Andy Bey was born in 1939 in Newark, New Jersey.  At age seventeen he formed a jazz trio, Andy and the Bey Sisters, with siblings Geraldine and Salome.  Moderate success throughout the 1960s and 1970s was followed by a fifteen-year hiatus from recording, from 1975 to 1990.  Bey’s career picked up again in the mid-1990s, just when his personal life began to take a darker turn.  Twenty years ago in 1994, he was diagnosed as HIV-positive, and he’s kept a steady regimen of yoga and a vegetarian diet ever since to keep himself healthy.  Bey came out publicly as gay around the time of his diagnosis and has remained quietly outspoken for two decades now.

The four original compositions on The World According to Andy Bey are especially noteworthy, both for their distinctive spirit and their unique lyrical approach.  “Dedicated to Miles,” Bey’s tribute to iconic jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, is a wordless bebop number that features Bey scatting an imitation of Davis’ playing style throughout the song.  The three other self-penned tracks are like sung journal entries that comment on the state of the contemporary world and offer gentle advice on how to survive it.  “The Demons Are After You” suggests that escaping one’s problems is “an individual journey, it will never work for the masses.”  “There’s So Many Ways to Approach the Blues” places emotion over intellect and argues by its end that telling the truth about hardship is the only real way to persevere.  And the brilliant “Being Part of What’s Happening Now” considers our current cultural moment and the importance of remaining in touch with the world around us.

Among the album’s standards are three George and Ira Gershwin tunes, “But Not for Me,” “Love Is Here to Stay,” and “’S Wonderful,” along with Ira Gershwin’s lyrics on a sublime closing rendition of Harold Arlen’s “Dissertation on the State of Bliss.”  Originally subtitled “Love and Learn Blues,” the song is a clever, point-blank assessment of heartache:  “You may have climbed the tree of knowledge / But when you love you really learn.”  Another Harold Arlen song, “The Morning After,” dwells on similar themes, while the album’s opening cut, Richard Rodgers’ and Lorenz Hart’s “It Never Entered My Mind,” contemplates loneliness on the far side of heartbreak’s distant retrospect.

In Tony Cox’s 2004 interview with Bey that aired on National Public Radio, Cox asked Bey about the feeling of melancholy in his music.  Bey replied, “Oh, when you live a certain amount of life, I mean, you try to breathe into a song a concept of what you’re feeling at that moment...it’s always trying to get inside the song with an intimacy in mind.”  On every inspired moment of The World According to Andy Bey, the singer/pianist finds his way inside and fully inhabits each song. The result is a vital new collection of jazz classics.