Interview by Preston Frazier
Bill Champlin’s career stretches from the adventurous Bay Area soul-rock of the Sons of Champlin to his 28 years with Chicago, an extensive solo catalog, and three albums with Champlin/ Williams/Friestedt. Along the way, the two-time Grammy winner has written, sung and recorded with artists including David Foster, Jay Graydon, Steve Lukather, George Benson and countless others.
Champlin joined Slang of Ages Podcast for an expansive conversation centered on his 2008 solo album, No Place Left to Fall. He also shared stories about George Hawkins Jr., Bruce Gaitsch, Mike Finnigan, Lou Rawls and several overlooked gems from his years with Chicago.
⸻
Preston Frazier: Bill, how are you?
Bill Champlin: I’m good. How are you doing?
Preston Frazier: I’m great. It is a pleasure to talk with you. I approach this podcast as a fan, and I’m a huge Bill Champlin fan. I have nearly all your solo albums, your work with Champlin Williams Friestedt and, of course, the music you made with Chicago and the Sons of Champlin.
I want to begin with No Place Left to Fall. What was the process of getting that album produced and released?
Bill Champlin: My friend Mark Eddinger, who played on and co-produced the record, said, “Hey, let’s make an album.” We brought in Jason Corsaro to mix it and decided to release it through DreamMakers Music.
We recorded at The Barber Shop Studios in Hopatcong, New Jersey. The studio was in a former church. Jason was a great East Coast engineer who had worked on Madonna records and many other cool projects. Most of my career had been based on the West Coast, so working with him was a different experience.
I put together a band with Bruce Gaitsch, George Hawkins Jr., and Billy Ward. Billy was a great drummer, and I had played a lot of jam gigs with those guys. Other than Billy, who lived in New York, most of us were living around Franklin, TN, and Nashville at the time.
We rehearsed the old-fashioned way: choose the songs, make some demos, rehearse them, and then record them with a band. At the time, that approach was becoming almost unheard of. Everybody was sending tracks around and assembling albums remotely.
The technology lets you record the bass in one hotel room, the guitar somewhere else, and another instrument in another city. I remember being backstage once when Jason Scheff was recording a bass part. We have the technology, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the right way to make music.
For No Place Left to Fall, we got everybody into the room and made the record together.
Preston Frazier: I’m glad you mentioned the late George Hawkins Jr. He was a wonderful bass player and singer whose credits included Kenny Loggins, John Fogerty, Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie.
Bill Champlin: George had the best groove, and he might have been the funniest human being in the world. We had a ball together, and I still miss him tremendously.
I first knew him as a fan of the Sons of Champlin. Then the Sons were opening for Loggins and Messina in Arizona. I walked down to catch the end of their soundcheck, and there was George onstage playing bass. I didn’t even know he played bass. He had never told me!
He had such a great groove. George, Bruce and I also wrote several songs connected with No Place Left to Fall.
Preston Frazier: Bruce Gaitsch was another important contributor. He is an extraordinary rhythm guitarist, soloist, and songwriter.
Bill Champlin: Bruce is a great musician and a great friend. Chicago used him on a couple of records because he was such a strong studio rhythm player. He was a friend of Robbie Buchanan, Jason Scheff and just about everybody else.
He hasn’t been able to play much in recent years because of medical issues, but he has Pro Tools playlists filled with material he recorded over the years. If he needs something now, he can dig into his archive and find a great performance from 10 years ago.
Preston Frazier: The album opens with “Total Control,” which you wrote with Jay Graydon.
Bill Champlin: I’ve known Jay for years. We share a couple of Grammys. We wrote “After the Love Has Gone” with David Foster and “Turn Your Love Around” with Steve Lukather.
Three guitar players, Luke, Jay and me, writing for George Benson was funny. I’m a guitar player, but I’m not in their league. George is a fantastic guitarist, a great singer and a wonderful guy.
Jay and I developed the musical parts of “Total Control” at his place. Later, I wrote the lyrics. The song is about somebody saying, “Make my career for me.” Well, you have to do that yourself. That’s the condensed version of the story.
I also kept the Hammond solo from the basic session. Usually, you leave space during the basic track and come back later with 20 million tracks available to build the perfect solo. This time, I just played something while we were cutting the basic, and it felt good.
Fifty percent of the reason I kept it was that it worked. The other 50 percent was that I was too lazy to do it again!
Preston Frazier: “Tuggin’ on Your Sleeve” is funky, with great vocals and keyboards.
Bill Champlin: I wrote that with my son Will and Michael Caruso. George, Tamara, and I sang the backgrounds, and it turned out really well.
The electric piano was an old, beat-up Wurlitzer. By the time we finished the album, the Wurlitzer was finished, too. We completed the record and the piano at about the same time.
The opening came from Will and me jamming. We recorded it near the end of the sessions, and I said, “Let’s put this at the beginning of the song. It’s too cool to lose.”
Will is an amazing musician. He’s a Berklee graduate, a great player and singer—the whole package. If I need something I can’t play, which happens fairly often, I call him and say, “Will, can you come up to the studio for a minute?”
Preston Frazier: The vocal blend of you, Will and Tamara makes it a real family performance.
Bill Champlin: Tamara and I recently recorded a couple of John Lennon songs for some Japanese producers I’ve worked with over the years. We sang the duets live with Paul Jackson Jr., Tom Scott, Tariqh Akoni, Nathan East and Vinnie Colaiuta. That was a serious band.
Everybody was surprised to be recording together in the same room. Musicians have become accustomed to putting down one part at a time simply because the technology makes it possible.
Preston Frazier: You’re also an underrated rhythm guitarist. The part you played on Chicago’s “All the Years” is brilliant.
Bill Champlin: I look up to players like Paul Jackson Jr. and the late David Williams. There are great rhythm players from the Los Angeles scene and another group of great rhythm players from New Orleans.
I used to watch the Neville Brothers. The grooves were always amazing, and I paid attention to that push-and-pull, second-line approach to rhythm guitar. People sometimes tell me I sound like I’m from New Orleans. I’m not, but that’s where I found a particular slant on rhythm playing.
Then you have the Los Angeles approach: plug straight into the board, bypass all the gear, and play clean rhythm guitar. Paul Jackson Jr. is a scientist. He’s a rhythm scientist.
I’m not as good as those guys, but you need people to look up to. On every instrument I play, I study musicians whose work I admire.
Bill Champlin: One singer and organ player I really miss is Mike Finnigan.
When I was about 20, I was living around the San Francisco Bay Area. Nobody is as full of himself as a 20-year-old, and I was about as arrogantly full of myself as I could be.
Somebody suggested that we go hear the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood. They were jazz musicians who had gone electric, and Mike was this singer, pianist, and organist from Kansas.
I arrived at the gig and saw a tractor seat being used as an organ bench. The Leslie cabinet was tied together, and then Mike walked onstage in OshKosh overalls. He was so tall he was always the first guy to get rained on.
Then he started playing organ, and I thought, “Well, there’s a new sheriff in town.” When he began singing, I realized I wasn’t the guy anymore.
A lot of musicians would have tried to stay away from somebody who intimidated them that much. I tried to become his friend immediately. I knew Mike for years, right up until he passed away.
He was one of the finest singers and organ players ever. I once played a gig standing behind him, trying to see his drawbar settings. He covered them with his hands and said, “I see what you’re doing, Champlin. I know what you’re up to.”
Preston Frazier: Another singer I understand you admired is Lou Rawls.
Bill Champlin: Lou was my teacher. He didn’t know it, but I did.
I came home from high school every day and listened to Black and Blue and Tobacco Road. Those albums were my textbooks.
Later, we happened to have the same manager, so we became friends and spent some time together. Jay Graydon eventually produced a Lou Rawls record, and I got to stack backgrounds on it. I remember thinking, “I’m singing on a Lou Rawls album.” That was a bucket-list moment.
Lou had one of the sexiest voices in the world. What a sound. The funny thing was that when he laughed, he had this little squeak. We became pretty good friends.
Preston Frazier: “The Truth” is another Bruce Gaitsch collaboration.
Bill Champlin: Bruce had something he called “kernels.” He would send me a track without a completed song, and I would write over it.
“He Started to Sing” came together the same way. Bruce and his wife, Janey Clewer, created the track, and I wrote the words.
I remember working on the lyrics in the studio, wondering whether they were good or terrible. Tamara came in and told me dinner was ready. I sang her the chorus: “He started to sing of love just to find it.”
She said, “Bill, you just wrote the story of every singer on Earth. That’s why people sing.”
Lyrically, I got lucky. I’ve always believed that songwriting is a craft until it becomes art. If you spend enough time practicing the craft, you occasionally get to witness art happening. At that point, you’re not really doing it. You’re simply the vehicle.
“He Started to Sing” was one of those moments.
Preston Frazier: Let’s jump to “Lover Like That,” which you wrote by yourself.
Bill Champlin: That was one of those songs that simply came along. I liked the changes in the chorus because they were a little different from the norm.
Steve Lukather played the solo. I asked him for something clean, and he said, “Wow, I don’t get much call for that these days.”
He knocked it out, and I think we used the first take. Bruce and I were playing acoustic guitars, so the entire track had a cleaner sound.
Preston Frazier: “Lookin’ for You” has one of those classic Bill Champlin vocal arrangements.
Bill Champlin: For that one, we brought in what we called the “spaghetti singers.” Tamara cooked a big pot of spaghetti, and we called every singer we could find. This was Nashville, so we found quite a few.
We stacked several tracks with eight or nine singers. I was one of the background singers, but we ran out of headphones, so I sang by listening to the leakage from the headphones of whoever was standing next to me.
Jason Corsaro took all those backgrounds, made a stereo mix, played it through the speakers into the empty main recording room, and recorded the room. He may have done that more than once. The resulting background track was amazing.
I didn’t stack all those vocals myself, although I stacked many of the other songs on the record.
Preston Frazier: You did sing every part on “Never Let Go.”
Bill Champlin: Yes, that one is all me. I wrote it with Andreas Carlsson, a Swedish songwriter who worked with Max Martin and had hits with artists like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.
When I first met Andreas, he was a busboy at Café Opera. Now he practically owns Sweden!
He visited Los Angeles after we had met in Sweden. He stayed at my house for a week, and we wrote and recorded songs.
I always heard “Never Let Go” as an a cappella piece. Pro Tools allowed me to keep adding vocal tracks until the arrangement was complete.
Preston Frazier: “Angelina” was written with Bruce Gaitsch and George Hawkins Jr.
Bill Champlin: George came in with this funky bass line, and the next thing we knew, we had a song.
We invented a premise about an attractive cocktail waitress whom everybody notices. It was anything but deep or spiritual. It was an R&B fantasy about the cocktail waitress.
I liked it because I sang almost the entire song in falsetto.
Preston Frazier: You’ve had a long and distinguished career.
Bill Champlin: That’s true, a long and distinguished career of not remembering things! Maybe half the reason I come up with cool ideas is that I forget what was supposed to be there and have to invent something else.
Preston Frazier: Has your songwriting process changed over the past 20, 30 or even 50 years?
Bill Champlin: Not that much, except that now you really have to want to write. You need to have something to say, even if the premise or story isn’t your own. It still belongs to somebody.
“Total Control,” for example, was inspired by somebody I knew and his girlfriend. I’m not naming names.
My English teacher used to say, “Somebody is asleep in class. I don’t know who it is, but his initials are Bill Champlin.” I’ve been using that line ever since. If something is good, I keep it.
Preston Frazier: What about “Stone Cold Hollywood”?
Bill Champlin: That’s a cool one. We used players associated with the Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns.
You have to see the Fat City Horns live. They’re breathtaking—and I mean that literally. You have to remind yourself to breathe, or you might pass out. Their singers are great, and the writing and arrangements are top-notch.
Johnny Friday is an incredible drummer. He grooves all night and hits every shot. Jerry Lopez is an amazing musician and bandleader, and Rochon Westmoreland is one of those bass players who can play a lot of notes without losing the groove.
Some musicians overplay and get ahead of the band. Rochon can play all those moves while sitting exactly where the groove lives. When he played with me, he would perform these great bass parts while doubling Tamara’s soprano vocals. His falsetto never quits.
Preston Frazier: Is there anything else about No Place Left to Fall that you want to discuss?
Bill Champlin: “All Along,” the final song, is one of my favorites.
We originally had the verses and a more jazz-oriented chorus, but it wasn’t fitting properly. I was on a flight from El Paso to Chicago, then Nashville, when I came up with the chorus that ended up on the record.
I should have lowered the song by a whole step before recording it, but I still think it’s one of the best love songs I’ve written. It sticks with me.
Preston Frazier: I want to switch gears and discuss some songs that either became singles or should have. One of my favorite Bill Champlin performances with Chicago is “Please Hold On” from Chicago 17. You wrote it with David Foster and Lionel Richie.
Bill Champlin: David and Lionel had studio time and came up with the shuffle and the basic chord changes. This was after Lionel left the Commodores and was beginning his solo career.
Lionel recorded a placeholder vocal to preserve the melody. He played the song for his producer, James Anthony Carmichael, who said it was “too Black.”
James felt Lionel had already achieved a crossover audience and didn’t want to move him back toward a market where half the audience might not follow him.
Lionel returned the song to David, and David said, “I know just the guy.”
He handed it to me. I quickly wrote the lyrics and went in to sing the lead. It was a lighter, more falsetto-oriented performance instead of my usual growly approach.
I remember the band flying to Japan. Our road manager had CDs of the album and said, “I think Foster made a mistake and put somebody else’s song on here. It’s a really cool singer, but I don’t know who it is.”
Nobody recognized me!
I think songs like that helped Chicago 17 expand musically. “You’re the Inspiration” and “Hard Habit to Break” were great songs, but a couple of my tunes brought a different kind of funk to the record.
Preston Frazier: “Please Hold On” is one of the best songs on Chicago 17 and one of Chicago’s strongest vocal performances. It should have been a single.
Bill Champlin: It came close. Management discussed releasing it, but at some point, they felt the album already had enough hits.
Tell that to Def Leppard! Every song on Hysteria seemed to become a single, and they were all great.
Those decisions involve more than the record. Management has to consider how everything connects with touring and the rest of the business. They knew more about those things than I did. I was blind as a bat when it came to those decisions.
Preston Frazier: Another favorite is “Plaid” from Stone of Sisyphus.
Bill Champlin: Peter Wolf produced that record. Peter is an amazing musician. If he’s sitting at the keyboard and telling you what to play, you’re really there to keep him from going too far! He comes from the Joe Zawinul world and has a serious jazz background, but he also wrote and produced some enormous pop records.
Peter said we needed an anti-corporate song. Greg Mathieson and I started the music, and “Plaid” came out of that idea. I brought Robert Lamm in to help with some of the vocals and lyrics because I was beginning to hit the wall.
Greg and I have worked together for years. There is nobody better. He’s a great bebop player and a great R&B player. When Greg builds a track, it grooves. He knows where the center of the music is better than almost anybody.
Anytime I make an album, I try to involve him. On Livin’ for Love, I called Greg and said I needed three things: a 12/8 groove, an R&B groove, and something jazzier. He co-wrote three songs for that record, and all three were stellar.
Preston Frazier: You co-wrote “Already Gone” from Chicago XXX with George Hawkins Jr.
Bill Champlin: George and I were writing at my house. We finished the song and made a strong demo using a drum loop.
When Chicago started looking for material, “Already Gone” was the fourth song on a collection I submitted. I wasn’t really submitting that particular song for Chicago. It simply happened to be at the end.
Jay DeMarcus heard it and said, “We need to do that song.”
“Better,” which I wrote with Chas Sandford, also made the record. That one was considerably jazzier.
On many albums, the other writers provide the meat and potatoes, and I’m the guy who stretches the record in a different direction. I bring in something with an R&B feel or another element that contrasts with the more traditional material.
I’ve performed “Already Gone” at some recent shows, and I have a great time singing it.
Preston Frazier: Another standout is “I Believe” from Chicago 18, which you wrote yourself.
Bill Champlin: I like that song. It might have had a chance as a single if it had received more attention.
David Foster didn’t have any writing involvement in it, so he probably gave it less attention than he would give something like “Hard Habit to Break” or a Steve Kipner song that appeared to have obvious single potential.
If that sounds even slightly derogatory toward David, it should be balanced against the fact that 99 percent of what he has done has been absolutely great. He is one of the most creative people I have ever met. Working with him was a kick in the ass.
I didn’t copy him, but I watched what he did with his hands. I noticed that he frequently played in keys like F-sharp or C-sharp. Then I realized those keys can be very comfortable under the fingers.
I came up as a guitarist, so I lived in E, A, and B. As an organ player, I grew up in C, G, and F. David’s keyboard approach showed me some different possibilities.
Preston Frazier: You’ve had a fantastic solo career, a long run with the Sons of Champlin, three Champlin Williams Friestedt albums and the WunderGround project. What are you working on now?
Bill Champlin: Right now, I’m concentrating on some of Tamara’s music. We revisited two songs, “In My Bag” and “The Big Idea,” and had Alan Hertz play drums on them in Tennessee.
Alan mixed and played drums on much of the other material I’ve recorded, along with Gordon Campbell, who is another of my all-time favorite drummers.
Alan has worked with Scott Henderson and Michael Landau. He’s a great drummer, Pro Tools engineer and mixer, and he always contributes strong musical ideas.
Preston Frazier: I’m looking forward to hearing Tamara’s music. She is a brilliant singer in her own right.
Bill Champlin: Somebody once asked me, “Bill, did you ever record on tape?”
I said, “Are you kidding? I recorded my first album using smoke signals. That’s how far back I go.”
As my friend Carmen Grillo once said, “I’m so old, I fart dust.”
Preston Frazier: You’re still creating, performing and inspiring more people than you probably realize. You’re one of my favorite musicians: a great singer, keyboardist, organist, songwriter and guitarist.
Bill Champlin: Thank you. Whenever I’m around Jay Graydon, Steve Lukather, David Foster and those guys, I feel like I’m looking up at giants.
They’re serious session musicians. Where I did well as a session player was working from head charts and creating arrangements without everything being written out. I don’t read music as well as I wish I did. I should have paid more attention to it when I was younger.
But I found my own way of doing things.
Preston Frazier: Bill, thank you for your time. This has been fantastic.
Bill Champlin: Good talking with you, my friend.
⸻
No Place Left to Fall and remastered Sons of Champlin collections are available through :