Robin & Judithe Randall: Mother & Daughter Songwriting Team

 

Robin:

 

Music has always been something I associated with healing and inspiration. When I was little, maybe 3 years old, I developed really bad, allergy provoked, Asthma. I had attacks for years. I seemed to be allergic to everything and after having to get Adrenaline shots to relieve the Asthma spasms, I’d go home and be wired and couldn’t sleep. The only thing that would soothe me and calm me down was listening to the radio. I’d listen to LA’s 93 KHJ and this easy listening station called KLOVE.

 

So from an early age, I associated songs with making me feel better. I think I was about 7 when I started to put together names of artists and bands with their songs. Most of it was TOP 40 music AM radio.

 

My first album was Disney’s Snow White, a RED vinyl disc. (Whatever happened to that?) I fell in love with Frank Churchill’s lovely and whimsical melodies and was an early Disney fan. My first “pop” album, I requested to go down to the record store to buy, was John Denver. My favorite song was the country infused “Take Me Home, Country Roads” from that record. I and my first babysitter, neighbor Linda Sue, would wait and wait till we’d hear that one on KHJ. The other favs were “One Tin Soldier” and “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies whose comic books I collected, long before there was a show called Riverdale!

 

I was a young child in the 60s, and a teen in the 70s. I just discovered the Beatles as they were breaking up. I was a bit too young to be part of Beatle Mania and the Counter Culture. I fell in love with them along with the fledging singer songwriter domination of the 1970s and the AOR bands like Foreigner, Journey, Boston, Queen, Kansas, Heart, Fleetwood Mac, Styx and then harder rock like Zeppelin. Motown was also something I really gravitated to listen to. Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson have very much influenced me, as much as, the Beatles and the Eagles. Elton John, Carole King and Billy Joel’s piano playing inspired me to practice the piano! My girl crush was Linda Ronstadt. I saw her 7 times in concert just as I had the Little River Band, who I absolutely loved!

 

I started taking piano lessons at age 10. My amazing teacher, Guy Holtz, introduced me to Jazz and the American Song Book where I learned about Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin and all about the Tin Pan Alley writers. He also taught me how to read, play and notate music. My other long time teacher, Jerry Grant, both in high school and with lessons after, enlightened me to composition and harmonic concepts that I hold dear in my musical heart to this day. Jack Smalley was the director of Dick Grove’s Songwriting Program, and he taught us all well.

 

The Dick Grove school was the hub for me to meet a great group of songwriters and musicians. I wouldn’t trade those days for anything. My co-writers Steven Cristol, Jeff Law, Mark Chatwin and Claude Gaudette, I met at the school, as well as others, and also incredible studio players and singers that I feel very thankful  to have worked with. DG also introduced me to the stellar Eddie King and his amazing King Sound Studios. When I think of all the songs that came out of there, I have great memories of it, especially when Bruce Hornsby, who also recorded there at the same time, pulled a big prank on me, but that story is for another time.

 

I think I wrote my first song at age 14. I was very involved with my middle school, back then called Junior High, and always doing the school musicals and hanging out in the drama dept. We had a music review and I sang and played “Love Will Keep Us Together” recorded by the Captain & Tennille. Ok, I wasn’t the best singer in the room, but thank you to Mr Crumb, my wonderful teacher who cast me anyway!

 

I was not raised by my mother, Judithe. It’s a long story and this is about the music, so simply put, my mother and me really got to know each other when I was around 12. Her parents, my grandparents Mimi and Al Schwartz raised me since I was 6 weeks old. I would get to occasionally visit my parents and brother Greg, but that’s another story for another time.

 

JUDITHE:

 

My mother Judithe could play amazing classical piano of the most challenging degree, but not many people know this about her. She took lessons as a child. Strictly classical. She was excellent, but rarely played after her teen years. Yet in that “once in a blue moon time”, she would sit down like not one day had passed, few and far between, but a real treat when she did. She only wrote a couple classical music pieces, but that was it. She never wrote a “song” musically. She was the woman with the words after that.

 

Judithe also took a liking to Calligraphy, Astrology, Painting and especially CATS!! Everyone who knew her knew she had 5 or 6, and someone had kittens, then she had 11! Holy Meow!

 

Judithe started her career working for Radio Pioneer, Gordon McLendon, up at his San Francisco station KABL-FM where she worked researching and writing copy for the Program Director. This next led to getting a job with Dick Clark. Judithe had tried her hand at songwriting in her 20s while she was working with Dick Clark’s Company and told me stories of submitting lyrics for Randy Newman and Quincy Jones, but no collaboration came out of it.

 

When I was 15, I asked her if I could write some music to her poetry. She said “yes” and that was the beginning of our 25 year run as collaborators of writing songs together. Throughout the years, we wrote together as a team, frequently with a 3rd writer and would write with other people separately, too. Some great memories and some awesome songs came out of this, but many have never been heard. More songs got written than recorded and released, but I look at it as the journey and not the destination that I learned from and learned a lot of life lessons at the same time.

 

When we first started writing together, much of the time it would start with me composing music to her lyrics or poems that would become lyrics, then I’d think of some bridge melodies and give the music back to her to write lyrics to. It worked both ways.

 

When I started going to Dick Grove School of Music, I was 20. I started writing my own lyrics and being brave enough to show my closet lyrics to my classmates. I always looked up to my mom as a really great lyricist so it took awhile to show her my ideas, but after a couple years of college and going to Songwriting Workshops, I found myself being able to write lyrics and music and feel good about it. I think getting my heart broken really bad when I was 21 opened the flood gates for a lot of lyrics and discussing those ideas with Judithe turned into some of our strongest songs to date. Our frequent collaborator, Jeff Law, used to say to me, “Could you please feel hurt again, soon, so we can get some more strong material!”

 

As time went on, I found myself being a teacher of music as much as I was a writer. I started teaching at  24 years old at Dick Grove where I went to school.

When it closed down in 1992, I went to Musicians Institute where I still teach today.

 

I found myself finding incredible joy and happiness in being a mentor and educator. Bringing new concepts and ideas, explanation and theory was my “Mission To Mars”. I have so enjoyed working with up and coming new artists from MI as well as LACHSA and the Songwriting School of Los Angeles. I feel blessed to be able to work with all these students and spread enlightenment and inspiration, yet pushing the envelope and getting them out of their comfort zone.

In going through the planning of this Anthology, sometimes teary eyed, I have gone down memory lane many times now. In re-listening to all the songs, again after so many years, I have found this new appreciation of the times we had, the creativity we sparked, the incredibly talented people we had the honor of working with, and the friendships that were made all along the way.

 

I see this collection of songs as chapters of my life, and each one is precious to me. I miss my mother Judithe greatly and how she, the liaison of all our musical webs that she wove together, would be so truly inspired by someone she’d meet, hear, speak with and go to the ends of the Earth to spread the word and joy to others about that person. If Judithe believed in you, she made sure everyone knew. She championed talent, she celebrated greatness, she’d be on your side and want nothing more than to see you succeed.

 

Anyone that spent time with Judithe Randall knew between her genius of Poetry, Painting, Calligraphy and Astrology was a definite eccentric side to her as well. Staying up all night she would feed the night creatures of the Hollywood Hills, and calling foreign countries on the phone in the wee hours to make music deals, her wheeling dealing side would come out at 2AM along with a lyric and she’d have to lock herself in a room for 18 hours to finish it, and come out from the room exhausted proclaiming it was “done and I’m ready to pass out now!” Her love of the spirit world and the “what lies beyond” fascination she had, would come out in her paintings and lyrics. I don’t know who she got obsessed with more: Anne Rice or Edgar Cayce. She painted John Lennon and Julian a number of times and won the Beatlefest Art Contest with 3 of them!

 

 

HOLLYRIDGE HOUSE:

 

We used to throw these lavish Hollywoodland Parties, pretty often, and it would be a coming together of the music and business side of the industry. Many people I remember actually got to meet and later worked together as a result of attending a Randall Soiree!

Everyone who’d come to town would come over to meet us at the Hollyridge House, the sprawling Mediterranean, Spanish style home perched up high on a hill in the Bronson Canyon. We’d have our meetings, or share ideas, and have some good conversations. Grandma Mimi offering up her special recipe treats. Many of the songs were written in that living room and although I moved from there in 2009, it will always be so special to me, my muse!

 

LIFE AFTER JUDITHE:

 

As the years have flown by and Judithe is no longer with us, as she passed away April 3rd, 2002, I have somehow found my way without her, as difficult as it was, and made new music with new writers and artists. It’s different now, but to keep the music inside me alive I had to go on. I share the new music and new chapters in this Anthology, as well as, treasure the previous creations when Judithe was here.

 

Judithe and I wrote together quite a lot, and also collaborated with other writers as a team, but we also wrote separately as well. We really had this sort of extended family, or big club, however you’d describe it, but certainly a lot of creativity going on constantly between us. Her working on some projects and me working on others, and then coming together again. I share all this now on this Anthology. So many songs that never saw the light of day will now have their, as Judithe would say, “Moment In The Sun”.