Dorough’s Inspiration for Lyrics Comes From All Directions

Singer-songwriter-pianist Bob Dorough can find inspiration for a new set of lyrics just about anywhere--like a laundry list or a parking ticket, two sources that are on his most recent album, “This Is a Recording by Bob Dorough.”

“The lyrics on that album all came from ordinary sources, like an apple pie recipe, a parking ticket and Webster’s Dictionary definition of love,” said Arkansas native Dorough, speaking in a soothing voice that exhibits a subtle yet distinguishable twang.

Dorough, who plays unaccompanied Saturday at the Jazz Bakery in Culver City, said humor writer Dan Greenberg came up with the idea for the album--one of a handful on Dorough’s Laissez Faire Records, a mail-order label. (Catalogues are available by writing Scharf/Dorough Ltd., P.O. Box 667, Stroudsburg, Pa. 18360).

“We call them ‘pop art,’ because that’s what Andy Warhol did, painting soup cans,” Dorough, 68, said in a phone conversation from his home in Mount Bethel, Pa., in the Pocono Mountains.

The album isn’t selling that well, Dorough said, but he doesn’t seem to mind too much. “I’ve sold maybe a couple of hundred,” he said, laughing. “So it’s not going to go gold, not even bronze.”

Dorough hasn’t ever had much luck selling albums. A previous album, “Just About Everything,” recorded in 1966, didn’t do that well either. But it featured a favorite tune of his, “I’ve Got Just About Everything.” Dorough said he wrote that number as a “kind of proposal to my wife,” with whom he lived for 25 years and had one daughter, Aralee, a principal flutist with the Houston Symphony. In 1986, Corine Dorough died of cancer.

Dorough also has been commissioned to do work. In 1962, he concocted two pieces for Miles Davis, including “Blue Xmas” and “Devil May Care,” both of which were arranged by Gil Evans, the trumpeter’s longtime collaborator.

“Columbia, then Miles’ record company, was making a Christmas album, and the way I imagined it, he balked at the idea, then he called me and asked me to write something,” Dorough said. “We were pretty tight at the time, so I tried to get inside his head, and gave it a ‘humbug’ sort of social commentary.”

Backed with snap by Davis’ quintet, Dorough sings lines such as:

When you’re blue at Christmas time,

you see right through all the waste,

all the sham, all the haste,

and plain old bad taste.

Asked if he stayed in touch with Davis up until his death last September, Dorough sounded despondent. “He used to have me over to his house all the time,” he said. “He loved to cook things like chicken and beans and rice for his friends. But then he got so far away with his stardom that we lost track of each other. I regretted not seeing him.”

In 1963, Dorough began a 12-year association with the ABC television program “Schoolhouse Rock,” writing many pieces such as “Three Is the Magic Number,” about addition, and “Conjunction Junction,” about grammar.

Composing music for children was a natural for him. “I’ve always been trying to communicate with children,” he said. “Even before I was a father, I had lots of friends who were having children, so I would get down on the floor with those kids, and playing with them, you learn how to talk to them.”

Although “Schoolhouse Rock” went off the air in the mid-’70s, Dorough still entertains at elementary schools, as he did when the show was being broadcast. “The show is now available on videocassettes, and it’s been a hit with kids. I go to schools such as the Community School of the Arts in Newark,” he said, referring to the New Jersey city, “where I was in May, and I do mostly ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ stuff, getting the kids to sing along.”

One of Dorough’s best lyrics was penned to the original version of Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” recorded by the famed alto saxophonist in 1949. In 1955, after Parker died, Dorough used the jazzman’s solo as a musical road map and wrote words that told the story of Parker’s life. A sample lyric:

All because he never stopped blowin’

when he had the miserable woes.

He seemed to pour ‘em out of his horn,

so that you never could tell what bein’ low down could be,

he knew that blowin’ happy music gonna set him free.

“It’s one of his most beautiful melodies, and I wrote it sort of as an advertisement for him,” he said.

The one song Dorough is best known for, David Wheat and Bill Loughborough’s “Better Than Anything,” he didn’t write. “I sort of made it famous, before Al Jarreau and singing duo Tuck and Patti sang it,” he said. “I literally sing that one every night I perform. It’s a happy song.”

Dorough has lived in New York, Paris and Los Angeles, where he resided from 1959-61. He moved to rural Mount Bethel--”It’s small, pretty much just a wide spot in the road”--because he wasn’t making that much money, and he wanted to raise his daughter in the fresh air.

These days, Dorough says, he’s “doing all right” financially and is hard at work on his new project, an autobiographical musical. “It has a working title: ‘Four of My Nine Lives,’ ” said Dorough, who is holding talks with the Hidden Valley Playhouse in Carmel Valley about a possible debut next year. “I’ve written 10 songs, but I pretty much keep them under wraps, because I want to save them for the big event, when I open.”