zelig of texas?
I'm sitting here practicing Keith Whitley's late-1980s hit song, "I'm No Stranger To The Rain," and getting curious about its provenance. One and a half Wikiseconds later comes the answer: Sonny Curtis. What else did he write? The Everlys' "Walk Right Back," Bobby Goldsboro's "The Straight Life," "I Fought The Law," Andy Williams's "A Fool Never Learns," and -- sit down -- the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme, "Love Is All Around," which he also sang. As a kid in Lubbock he played with Buddy Holly.
That's a whole lot of good spread over a whole lot of ground. That's some wild-ass talent.
If you don't share these things the moment you learn them, you carry them like blood-defiling dreams.
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My favorite example of this is Chip Taylor. He started out as a 50s rocker named Wes Voight (he's Jon Voight's brother... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL_Px3zGDUI ), but he quit music and became a professional golfer. He got injured and had to quit golf and then went back to music, penning mega-hits likes of "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" and a bunch of others, presumably making a fortune off of them. Then he quit music in the mid-70s to become, naturally, a professional gambler of horse racing and blackjack. He was very successful at both, even getting himself banned from all the casinos in Atlantic City because he won too much. Now he's making music again, though I doubt he needs the money.
I recently found out about Graham Gouldman. While a teenager, he wrote "Bus Stop" and "Look Through Any Window" for the Hollies and "For Your Love" and "Heart Full of Soul" for the Yardbirds. Later he wrote half of the hits for 10CC like "Things We Do for Love" and "I'm Not in Love".
Graham Gouldman even produced a Ramones album - Pleasant Dreams. Done in Stockport, just up the road from me, apparently.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWhjEXHbdGs
Does Al Kooper count, having written "This Diamond Ring" among his gazillion other contributions to rock, or the fact that you (OK, I) know what he looks like disqualify him?