The first three songs I ever wrote were on Connie’s Hits Albums throughout the world. “Too Many Rules”, “It’s Gonna Take Me Some Time” & “V A C A T I O N”. I continue to receive only portions of these royalties, because of piracy.
The third and last song I wrote for the Francis office became a hit top 10 hit on both, Billboard and Cashbox Magazine’s Pop Music Charts. Not only was this song a big hit in the USA but was also a top ten hit on the World Wide Charts as well!
I had noticed a pattern to both Neal Sedaka, a very successful songwriter who wrote many of Connie’s biggest hits including “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and “Where the Boys Are”, the title song from the movie with the very same name. These songs had a country flavor.
These were two situations which were certainly obvious to me.
Finally, I noticed Sedaka’s hit song, “Calendar Girl” was created almost like a cheer, “January … ddddddd” February dddd… etc etc.
Finally, I knew, as a kid in school, that I always thought about the summer as vacation time .. putting these thoughts together, I created the idea of “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N” … like Calendar Girl and the coming School’s temporary summer break, over for the next couple of months!
A happy time, for sure. I was asked by Mr. Franconero to collaborate with a very successful professional songwriter, named, Hank Hunter, who worked alongside Neal Sedaka and was a staff writer for Don Kirshner’s “Aldon Music, Inc.”, where, later in my life, those six years working for Don would be one of my most successful periods of my 21 year musical career.
Hank, who recently passed away, was the first professional songwriter I ever worked with. As I remember, it was disappointment, as he was more of a lyricist and certainly not a composer. As I remember, he added nothing to the words of the song. His lack of lyrics, for which he was hired, cost me a third of my income for the past 50 plus years!
I was given an opportunity to have the A Side (The “promoted” side) when a greedy wealthy songwriter named, Benny Davis, one of the co-writers of the final record, took an acetate to Miami and asked a local DJ to play his song as though as it were Connie’s next single 45 released. MGM received phone calls when the local MGM distributor asked for some stock on the newly released Connie Francis recording of “The Biggest Sin of All”.
Connie was approached by an MGM executive asking how in the world, a recording of the unreleased record got out!!
Connie got so angry, she had MGM change Davis song, from equal heading to BW” or”Backed with” … what a break for me!! This was the good news!
Then came the bad news …… I got a call from Nashville from George Franconero telling me that my song was worked on for almost the entire three hour session. GREAT NEWS! He said it came out terrific and I should be proud that this was going to be on the next Connie Francis single 45. When he played the cut for me, I was totally in HEAVEN!!! What a break!!!
The bad news wasn’t really so terrible, but it did cost one-third of my royalties on this, my most successful song of all 4,000 songs I had written over the years. Mr. Franconero told me that Connie worked much harder on my song because she thought the lyrics were missing a lot of “fun”. So she added her lyrics and felt strongly that she had then earned one-third of the credit for her effort. Now normally the composer gets 50% and the lyricist gets 50%, But in this case, unaware of this, I was happy to get any part of the royalties of a hit song. The actual split should have been 25% Hunter, 25% Francis and 50% Weston (now Knight). But I am okay with that if could only receive the stolen, pirated records which were illegally distributed throughout Asia by China over the past 50 plus years!
I am truly happy that I experienced all of this success through my years, from being a teenager and throughout my early twenties!
Meeting my very first experience with a “Blue Eyed Soul Artist”, Peggy!
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