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| Quite possibly wishing he was elsewhere. |
Hold on. Putting on my sailing cap…though something about it doesn't feel right...
The Hit
There’s a better than fair chance that even the people who know 1980’s “Steal Away” think somebody besides Robbie Dupree recorded it. God knows someone else did. When he heard it, a music writer for the Los Angeles Times named John D’Agostino ripped it as a “blatant, wimpy rip-off of the Michael McDonald/Kenny Loggins’ composition ‘What a Fool Believes’”; the Washington Post flagged similarities in Dupree’s vocal style and the backing keyboards. McDonald didn’t give a shit, apparently, but his publisher flirted with a lawsuit for theft.
If you toggle back and forth between “Steal Away” and “What a Fool Believes” over and over again - as I’m sure D’Agostino and McDonald publishers did - yeah, the similarities in the backing keyboards come through. But the vocals?
Once you expand to the song as a whole - i.e., include the thicker (better) bass on “What a Fool Believes,” or the way the musical elements in “Steal Away” play together, while McDonald’s tune has more contrasts and oppositions - you get what the critics heard, basically, all the way down the “wimpy,” but Dupree’s slipped in some nice touches - e.g., the big, twanging strings that dominate the bridges, the way the song fades in as if you’re waking up to it. You don't have to love it, but give it credit for having a different mood.
The song came out of nowhere - and it took a minor miracle for it to go anywhere further than Dupree’s head - but he did not.
The Rest of the Story
As just about anything you read or hear about Robbie Dupree points out, you’d think he was from anywhere but Brooklyn. Born Robert Dupuis in 1946, he grew up and went to school much like anyone else - i.e., he didn’t have any immediate household influences - but he loved music, especially soul/R&B artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye and played from an early age. When he made the decision to take a swing as a working musician, Dupree moved north to Woodstock, New York - which, as he regularly points out, was not the sight of the famous/infamous 1969 rock festival. In a 2018 retrospective on PopMatters, Dupree recalled his Woodstock:
“When I came here the streets were full of dreamers who were trying to live out their dreams. Now, in order to live here, you have to have already accomplished your dream. You can’t come here and live in a band house and play local gigs. That’s what I did when I came up here from Manhattan.”
It was a city of 5,000, but home to five recording studios. Bearsville Records, the label run by Albert Grossman, where Todd Rundgren worked as a producer, and so on, had the biggest name - likely due to Grossman's connection with Bob Dylan (and many others). More famous names mingled on Woodstock’s streets and played its venues - e.g., The Band, Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, Orleans, Bonnie Raitt, etc. Dupree toiled on the fringes of that scene for years (roughly 1973-77), spending most of his time trying to get a band together. He has some successes - e.g., a song he wrote in 1975 called, "When You're Down" won the American Songwriting Festival Award, and he played with Nile Rodgers, then (possibly) in a band called New World Rising,and with Chic in his future. On a fairly recent episode of a podcast called A Bunch of Malarkey (you're looking for Season 2, Episode 20), Dupree remembers a time of living cheap, scrounging for gigs and bumping into one wall after another. When Mercury Records finally took notice at the end of it all, Dupree couldn’t bring himself to sign on. From the podcast (and he followed this up with “Bands can’t be democracies” shortly thereafter):
“Bands take to beating on each other when they don’t have any money. Gigs are hard to find, and I think the good of it was out of it by the time the deal came along.”
Looking for the next thing, Dupree reached out to a connection in California (he’d helped his kid brother back in New York), said goodbye to that last, unnamed band, left them some songs and moved to Venice Beach with $40 in his back pocket. Once out there, he got into the studio (per PopMatters with a band from the Midwest called Crackin’) and recorded some demos in between shifts as a host at a local restaurant. His “sort of” manager from that time "sort of" moved that demo around, but nobody picked it up. Disillusioned, 32-years-old and with, as he put it 15 years and 1,000 shows in the business, Dupree figured his time had run out, so back he went to New York, where he started loading moving trucks in Long Island and trying to figure out what to do with himself. And then came a late night phone call:
“He had a friend who worked at Elektra who just happened to stop by his house as he was on his way to England for his father’s funeral. They were just sitting around, playing music and talking. My producer’s brother played this guy the cassette.”
Said “producer’s brother” might have been Dupree’s former drummer, but “the cassette” was the five-song demo they’d failed to sell during the LA sojourn. The Elektra executive, George Steele, loved it and immediately offered deal. Knowing the business as he did, Dupree passed on the ("really low") contract they offered, but did give them “Steal Away” and one other song, with a clause that gave them 90 days to come back for a full album if the song did well. It did. It broke into the Top 10 well under the wire (it peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100, No. 5 on the Adult Contemporary charts), so Elektra came calling again and with a bigger payout. And then came making the album.
On the Friday before the Monday when Dupree and the people he worked had to deliver the album, an engineer named Gary Brandt listened as hard as he could for a second hit, but he couldn’t hear one. Someone made the decision call in a songwriter named Stephen Greyer, who had a song to pitch. When he arrived late that same night, he played two-thirds of “Hot Rod Hearts” for the room, Dupree wanted to pass (“Let’s just fuck it, turn the record in on Monday and we’ll all be happy.”), but, when the producers went along, he bought in and the cut the final recording over the weekend. “Hot Rod Hearts” became the second charting single on his eponymous debut album, topping out at No 15.
Both singles made Dupree a hot property. He did a lot of TV, including American Bandstand (fun li'l interview, btw), did interviews and so on, but Dupree resisted touring. For one, he’d done plenty of it before (see above), but he also didn’t feel like he had enough material for a full-set. With his track record for padding, he stuck to the studio and worked on more material. All that work eventually took the shape of his follow-up album, Street Corner Heroes. The label went with a song called “Brooklyn Girls” for the lead single and they set about promoting it. Things continued as they had during Dupree’s short run at the top, “Brooklyn Girls” even reached No. 54 on Billboard…and then another wave of the payola scandal arrived.
Broadly, “payola” refers to the practice whereby labels paid radio stations - DJs first, then the program directors - to play certain preferred songs, only without closing payments. [Ed. - At least back then, the question, “good GOD, why this song again?” had an answer.] It’s not clear whether or how much Dupree benefited from payola, and it doesn't strike me as important; what was clear was that “independent promotion” completely collapsed at the same time Street Corner Heroes went off into the world.
And, as all that happened, another wee ripple hit the music industry: MTV went on the air. Dupree saw MTV as a “rock counter-culture station,” a place where he didn't fit, and for multiple reasons, not liking the medium among them. On a deeper level, though, he never cared for the celebrity life. The writing, the recording, playing live, he enjoys all that, but as he told A Bunch of Malarkey, “I felt like a tourist when that part of my career was in play.” With his options dried up, Dupree walked away a second time. Or third, depending on how you read his departure from Woodstock.
The Hit
There’s a better than fair chance that even the people who know 1980’s “Steal Away” think somebody besides Robbie Dupree recorded it. God knows someone else did. When he heard it, a music writer for the Los Angeles Times named John D’Agostino ripped it as a “blatant, wimpy rip-off of the Michael McDonald/Kenny Loggins’ composition ‘What a Fool Believes’”; the Washington Post flagged similarities in Dupree’s vocal style and the backing keyboards. McDonald didn’t give a shit, apparently, but his publisher flirted with a lawsuit for theft.
If you toggle back and forth between “Steal Away” and “What a Fool Believes” over and over again - as I’m sure D’Agostino and McDonald publishers did - yeah, the similarities in the backing keyboards come through. But the vocals?
Once you expand to the song as a whole - i.e., include the thicker (better) bass on “What a Fool Believes,” or the way the musical elements in “Steal Away” play together, while McDonald’s tune has more contrasts and oppositions - you get what the critics heard, basically, all the way down the “wimpy,” but Dupree’s slipped in some nice touches - e.g., the big, twanging strings that dominate the bridges, the way the song fades in as if you’re waking up to it. You don't have to love it, but give it credit for having a different mood.
The song came out of nowhere - and it took a minor miracle for it to go anywhere further than Dupree’s head - but he did not.
The Rest of the Story
As just about anything you read or hear about Robbie Dupree points out, you’d think he was from anywhere but Brooklyn. Born Robert Dupuis in 1946, he grew up and went to school much like anyone else - i.e., he didn’t have any immediate household influences - but he loved music, especially soul/R&B artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye and played from an early age. When he made the decision to take a swing as a working musician, Dupree moved north to Woodstock, New York - which, as he regularly points out, was not the sight of the famous/infamous 1969 rock festival. In a 2018 retrospective on PopMatters, Dupree recalled his Woodstock:
“When I came here the streets were full of dreamers who were trying to live out their dreams. Now, in order to live here, you have to have already accomplished your dream. You can’t come here and live in a band house and play local gigs. That’s what I did when I came up here from Manhattan.”
It was a city of 5,000, but home to five recording studios. Bearsville Records, the label run by Albert Grossman, where Todd Rundgren worked as a producer, and so on, had the biggest name - likely due to Grossman's connection with Bob Dylan (and many others). More famous names mingled on Woodstock’s streets and played its venues - e.g., The Band, Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, Orleans, Bonnie Raitt, etc. Dupree toiled on the fringes of that scene for years (roughly 1973-77), spending most of his time trying to get a band together. He has some successes - e.g., a song he wrote in 1975 called, "When You're Down" won the American Songwriting Festival Award, and he played with Nile Rodgers, then (possibly) in a band called New World Rising,and with Chic in his future. On a fairly recent episode of a podcast called A Bunch of Malarkey (you're looking for Season 2, Episode 20), Dupree remembers a time of living cheap, scrounging for gigs and bumping into one wall after another. When Mercury Records finally took notice at the end of it all, Dupree couldn’t bring himself to sign on. From the podcast (and he followed this up with “Bands can’t be democracies” shortly thereafter):
“Bands take to beating on each other when they don’t have any money. Gigs are hard to find, and I think the good of it was out of it by the time the deal came along.”
Looking for the next thing, Dupree reached out to a connection in California (he’d helped his kid brother back in New York), said goodbye to that last, unnamed band, left them some songs and moved to Venice Beach with $40 in his back pocket. Once out there, he got into the studio (per PopMatters with a band from the Midwest called Crackin’) and recorded some demos in between shifts as a host at a local restaurant. His “sort of” manager from that time "sort of" moved that demo around, but nobody picked it up. Disillusioned, 32-years-old and with, as he put it 15 years and 1,000 shows in the business, Dupree figured his time had run out, so back he went to New York, where he started loading moving trucks in Long Island and trying to figure out what to do with himself. And then came a late night phone call:
“He had a friend who worked at Elektra who just happened to stop by his house as he was on his way to England for his father’s funeral. They were just sitting around, playing music and talking. My producer’s brother played this guy the cassette.”
Said “producer’s brother” might have been Dupree’s former drummer, but “the cassette” was the five-song demo they’d failed to sell during the LA sojourn. The Elektra executive, George Steele, loved it and immediately offered deal. Knowing the business as he did, Dupree passed on the ("really low") contract they offered, but did give them “Steal Away” and one other song, with a clause that gave them 90 days to come back for a full album if the song did well. It did. It broke into the Top 10 well under the wire (it peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100, No. 5 on the Adult Contemporary charts), so Elektra came calling again and with a bigger payout. And then came making the album.
On the Friday before the Monday when Dupree and the people he worked had to deliver the album, an engineer named Gary Brandt listened as hard as he could for a second hit, but he couldn’t hear one. Someone made the decision call in a songwriter named Stephen Greyer, who had a song to pitch. When he arrived late that same night, he played two-thirds of “Hot Rod Hearts” for the room, Dupree wanted to pass (“Let’s just fuck it, turn the record in on Monday and we’ll all be happy.”), but, when the producers went along, he bought in and the cut the final recording over the weekend. “Hot Rod Hearts” became the second charting single on his eponymous debut album, topping out at No 15.
Both singles made Dupree a hot property. He did a lot of TV, including American Bandstand (fun li'l interview, btw), did interviews and so on, but Dupree resisted touring. For one, he’d done plenty of it before (see above), but he also didn’t feel like he had enough material for a full-set. With his track record for padding, he stuck to the studio and worked on more material. All that work eventually took the shape of his follow-up album, Street Corner Heroes. The label went with a song called “Brooklyn Girls” for the lead single and they set about promoting it. Things continued as they had during Dupree’s short run at the top, “Brooklyn Girls” even reached No. 54 on Billboard…and then another wave of the payola scandal arrived.
Broadly, “payola” refers to the practice whereby labels paid radio stations - DJs first, then the program directors - to play certain preferred songs, only without closing payments. [Ed. - At least back then, the question, “good GOD, why this song again?” had an answer.] It’s not clear whether or how much Dupree benefited from payola, and it doesn't strike me as important; what was clear was that “independent promotion” completely collapsed at the same time Street Corner Heroes went off into the world.
And, as all that happened, another wee ripple hit the music industry: MTV went on the air. Dupree saw MTV as a “rock counter-culture station,” a place where he didn't fit, and for multiple reasons, not liking the medium among them. On a deeper level, though, he never cared for the celebrity life. The writing, the recording, playing live, he enjoys all that, but as he told A Bunch of Malarkey, “I felt like a tourist when that part of my career was in play.” With his options dried up, Dupree walked away a second time. Or third, depending on how you read his departure from Woodstock.
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| Still going. |
Still, Dupree didn't stop playing for long. Popmatters digs into the details - how he got back into it, how long it took, and who with (people from his old Woodstock days for the most part) - but he’s recorded 10+ studio albums since his “celebrity” days. He put out a single as recently as 2017 - the still adult-contemporary, lightly-despairing “Ordinary Day” (and he can still write) - and he continues to play live, and he has particular soft spot for Yacht Rock Revue (which he likes prefers, because he gets a younger audience there than he does on the nostalgia circuit). “Steal Away” continues to pop up on TV shows - e.g., Orange Is the New Black and Better Call Saul - and one of his other songs, “Girls in Cars,” worked its way into the WWE, where it became the theme for the tag team of Tito Santana and Rick Martel (aka, Strike Force).
To wrap this up (sorry; I found new material with every click), Robbie Dupree has fantastic perspective and a great sense of humor about both his years in the business and the peak in the middle. When VH1 did a show called 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 1980s, he remembers them reaching out to ask if he wanted to participate. Whether out professional pride or just to correct the record, Dupree “kind of bristled a bit” and reminded VH-1’s producers that he’d had two hits. Without missing a beat, the show’s producer came back with “Robbie, there are no shows about two-hit wonders.” In just as little time, Dupree said, “okay, I’ll do it.” And that’s not even my favorite. From Popmatters:
“There are a lot of people who are too serious about themselves. They’re too serious about what they were in 1979. Now they’re pushing 70 and arguing about it. What the fuck do they want? Would they like the term ‘soft rock’ better? It’s not like something special has been replaced. Easy listening? I don’t like that. Yacht rock is fun."
A man at peace...
About the Sampler
I’ll make up for the long history with a short sampler. As most people have figured out by now, Robbie Dupree didn’t put out a lot of famous material and, given the time window, it didn’t have a tremendous variety in sound - though, I did pull in his tribute to doo-wop (another lightly-buried influence), “All Night Long.”
I’ve already linked to nearly half the sampler above, but also included “We Both Tried” and “Thin Line” from his debut (and, if you want a song that sounds like McDonald-era Doobie Brothers, that’s my candidate; wait till it picks up), plus the title track from Street Corner Heroes and the comparatively funky “Saturday Night.” Finally, and by way of honoring his late career, I included two from his second career, the calypso-tinged “This Is Life” (from 1989’s Carried Away) and “Goodbye to LA” (1993’s Walking on Water).
“There are a lot of people who are too serious about themselves. They’re too serious about what they were in 1979. Now they’re pushing 70 and arguing about it. What the fuck do they want? Would they like the term ‘soft rock’ better? It’s not like something special has been replaced. Easy listening? I don’t like that. Yacht rock is fun."
A man at peace...
About the Sampler
I’ll make up for the long history with a short sampler. As most people have figured out by now, Robbie Dupree didn’t put out a lot of famous material and, given the time window, it didn’t have a tremendous variety in sound - though, I did pull in his tribute to doo-wop (another lightly-buried influence), “All Night Long.”
I’ve already linked to nearly half the sampler above, but also included “We Both Tried” and “Thin Line” from his debut (and, if you want a song that sounds like McDonald-era Doobie Brothers, that’s my candidate; wait till it picks up), plus the title track from Street Corner Heroes and the comparatively funky “Saturday Night.” Finally, and by way of honoring his late career, I included two from his second career, the calypso-tinged “This Is Life” (from 1989’s Carried Away) and “Goodbye to LA” (1993’s Walking on Water).
Right, that’s it for this one. I’ve got a couple unknowns ahead…holding on for DEVO at this point, fwiw.
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