After 9 Years, Bishop Is Back--on <i> His </i> Terms

Stephen Bishop has some explaining to do. The expatriate San Diego singer-songwriter’s new album, “Bowling In Paris,” is his first solo release in nine years.

Why the delay?

“That’s a very, very good question,” Bishop said by phone from his Los Angeles home. And he’s got some very, very good answers.

After scoring two hit albums and two hit singles, “Save It for a Rainy Day” and “On and On,” in the late 1970s, Bishop said, “I went through this period where I wanted to do something different, something a little more eclectic than commercial.”

So, when it came time to record his third album, 1980’s “Red Cab to Manhattan,” he did just that. ‘It was a very strange little record,” Bishop recalled. “Unfortunately, it didn’t quite turn out the hits that I thought it would.”

As a result, his record company, Warner Bros., insisted that Bishop work with a producer of its choosing rather than his.

“We spent five months in England doing an album that wasn’t really where I wanted to go,” Bishop said. “I ended up losing interest and didn’t want the record to come out, and it didn’t because it wasn’t that great.

“After that experience, I got very depressed--disillusioned, really--so I got off the label and decided to take a little break.”

It lasted for nine years.

“I kept getting sidetracked--by the sun, by women, by trying things like movie themes and TV shows,” Bishop said. “I guess I just wasn’t real excited about going after another record deal, and at the same time nobody was really begging for me.”

By 1983, Bishop said, he had gone through some tough times. “I realized things were pretty goofed up, and I desperately wanted to make records again.”

He flew to England and spent more than $500,000 of his own money to record new songs. Joining him in the studio were a couple of old buddies, Eric Clapton and Phil Collins.

One of the songs, “Sleeping With Girls,” was released in Asia after being rejected in the United States. The next year, Bishop tried again, flying to the Caribbean island of Montserrat at the invitation of Collins. “One day he just called me up and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come out here, let’s record some songs.’ ”

Bishop did, but the sessions produced only one song, “Hall Light,” on which Collins played drums, Clapton played guitar, and Sting played bass and sang backup.

That experience, however, filled Bishop with new hope, and he began seeking a U.S. record deal. It took five years before he found a company, Atlantic Records, that was willing to sign him on his terms.

“I had been getting offers, but they were not respectful of where I was as an artist,” Bishop said. “One major label that shall remain nameless said they’d sign me, but only if I would guarantee them that Phil Collins would be my producer.

“That was very insulting. I told them to get lost.”

The Atlantic deal was engineered by Doug Morris, company president.

“I had sent him a copy of ‘Sleeping With Girls’ and he really liked the stuff,” Bishop said. “He thought I should be making records again, and he wanted me to be on his label.”

What Morris wanted, Morris got, and Bishop couldn’t be happier with the new album.

“They’re really behind me,” he said. “They’re as excited about the album as I am--which is really weird, considering my last experience with a label was with Warner Brothers, where the amount of attention they give you is just nil.”

“Bowling in Paris” is a departure from earlier works, offering love songs, all right, but hardly the maudlin ballads one might expect.

“A lot of people still associate me with the ‘On and On’ sound, but that was like billions of years ago,” Bishop said. “I’m a new guy. I didn’t sit around in some dark area these last nine years, and then all of a sudden here I am.

“I’ve been influenced by all sorts of different music. I’m not going to start doing a rap on Balboa Avenue with a large radio, but I would like to think of myself as keeping up with what’s happening. Just like my singing and writing in the 1970s was influenced by the British Invasion, Randy Newman, or whoever, my singing and writing today is influenced by a lot of newer stuff I’ve been hearing on the radio, even that guy in the Fine Young Cannibals.”

Bishop, 37, was born in San Diego, at the old Naval Hospital in Balboa Park and spent his first five years in Chula Vista.

After his parents divorced, Bishop, his mother and brother moved to East San Diego, where he attended Andrew Jackson Elementary School. His mother remarried when he was 8, and the family moved to Mission Valley. Two years later, his stepfather bought him a clarinet. Bishop promptly joined the school band.

“Then, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, and we were living in La Mesa, the British Invasion came along--the Beatles, the Animals, the Kinks, everybody else--and I was totally taken away,” Bishop recalled.

“My brother bought me a Rodeo guitar from Unimart, hooked it up to an amplifier he made from a stereo, and, from that point on, I never touched the clarinet again.

“My stepfather, an opera tutor, chastised me on a daily basis for playing this awful rock music, but the more he gave me a hard time, the more I loved it.”

Before long, Bishop was fronting his own rock band and performing at school dances and fraternity parties. But he soon found his real talent as a songwriter, and, by the time he graduated from Crawford High School in 1969, Bishop said, he had written “at least 200 songs.”

That summer, he moved to Los Angeles and landed a job as a staff songwriter at a Hollywood publishing house. “Almost immediately, one of my songs got recorded by a guy named Jerry Cole, on Happy Tiger Records,” Bishop said. “It went to something like number 2,000 with an anchor.

“Still, it was my first recorded song, and I was thrilled. Every couple of days, I would go into this record store on Sunset Boulevard, pull out my record, and just stare at my name.’

In the early 1970s, Bishop continued to write--and attempted to sell--songs. To supplement his meager income, he spent several years on the road, touring with jazz band leader George Shearing and, later, with a Las Vegas-style show band.

By 1974, however, Bishop was determined to make it on his own, so he returned to Hollywood. He performed solo in clubs such as the Troubadour, did a little session work, and wrote more songs.

His big break came a year later, when Art Garfunkel not only included one of Bishop’s songs, “Looking For the Right One,” on his “Breakaway” album, but asked Bishop to sing backup vocals on the album’s first single, a remake of the oldie “I Only Have Eyes For You.”

“Both the album and the single ended up doing really well,” Bishop said. “All of a sudden, I was in the limelight.”

Within a year, Bishop had signed with ABC Records and was cutting his first album, “Careless.” It yielded two hits: “Save It For a Rainy Day” and “On and On.”

For three years, Stephen Bishop was a star.

And now, nine years later, he’s ready for a reprise.

“I’m very happy--very, very happy--with my new album,” Bishop said. “I just heard it the other night on CD for the very first time, and it’s so much punchier than my old albums, so very hitly.

“Hopefully, the public will think so, too.”