BMI Bash Hails Those Who Write the Songs

The Scene: Broadcast Music Inc.’s annual Pop Awards dinner at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Tuesday night. The event is frankly not unlike any ordinary business banquet, except that the tuxedoed men generally have hair trailing down their backs. BMI collects royalties for songwriters and music publishers and hands out awards to songwriters and publishers based on radio and television air play for the previous year.

Triumph: Acceptance speeches are verboten. When about 70 awards are presented in less than an hour, winners smile, collect their prizes and rush back to their seats.

Main Viewpoint: Singers and performers are in plentiful supply, but those precious few people with the ability to write songs are touched by a higher power.

Who Was There: Every other seat seemed to be occupied by the music attorneys who cut the winners’ deals, plus the ultra-photogenic David Foster and Linda Thompson (writers of “Voices That Care”); Wilson Phillips’ Carnie and Wendy Wilson; the Righteous Brothers’ Bobby Hatfield; Barbara Orbison, picking up several awards for her late husband, Roy; Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (“You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”); Will Jennings (“Tears in Heaven”); Karyn White (“Romantic”) and her husband, Terry Lewis; Don Von Tres (“Achy Breaky Heart”), and Calvin Lewis and Andrew J. Wright, who wrote BMI’s winner as Most Performed Song, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Warner Music Group was named Publisher of the Year.

No Shows: Songwriters of the Year Michael Bolton (who was on tour, but his spirit was there via video) and Mariah Carey (who didn’t send a video). She’s “getting ready for her wedding,” said BMI president and CEO Frances W. Preston.

Quoted: “Every limo driver I’ve had for the last two years thinks he can write a song,” said Michael Green, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Overheard: A business type courting a songwriter--”Here, my honey. That’s the number for home. That’s office. That’s fax. And that’s the back, back, back line.” (That’s an unlisted home number for the phone in the bathroom, the business type explained.)

Fashion Statement: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis in an embroidered Chinese coat, woman’s Amish-style bonnet and black cotton pants. Kiedis swore these “were the last pants Bruce Lee wore before he died. There’s a service that gets stuff like that.”