By Bill Harriman
These
are some heady times for Donny Osmond. The days of being a child
star or a teen idol are ancient history. Instead what we have now is
a 43 year old man who is headlining around the country for the first
time in over a decade. Flushed with the success of his new CD called
"This Is The Moment," any dry spell Donny may have had
during the eighties is also ancient history. Produced and arranged
by the legendary Phil Ramone, "This Is The Moment" is a
collection of contemporary Broadway songs transformed into Donny’s
smooth pop style. The songs come from plays such as
"Rent," "Jekyll & Hyde," "Aida,"
"Saturday Night Fever," "Riverdance On
Broadway," "Seusical," and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
new production "The Beautiful Game." He also sings duets
with Vanessa Williams on a song called "Not While I’m
Around" from "Sweeny Todd" and Rosie O’Donnell on a
song called "You’ve Got A Friend In Me" from "Toy
Story." Donny’s vocals have never sounded better.
This tour will bring Donny Osmond to Connecticut for two shows. On June 21st he’ll be at the Fox Theatre and on June 24th he’ll be at Oakdale. This phone interview took place on the afternoon of Monday May 14th.
BH – So I hear you’re just getting started with this tour.
DO – "Yeah we opened up the night before last in Detroit and it was unbelievable. It was a wild show I guess is the best way to describe it. I gave them pretty much everything, I just didn’t want to concentrate on this album. I even threw in ‘Puppy Love.’ (laughs) So it was just the right amount of new and old."
BH – Are you excited about this tour?
DO – "Very much, I mean it’s been eleven years since I toured."
BH – It must be a totally different feeling for you now.
DO – "Well it is, it’s much more of a satisfying feeling because I’m where I want to be musically. And it’s not like I’m really trying hard to worry about image or anything like that anymore. And it’s a very satisfying situation especially when you got people like Phil Ramone involved who helped produce this live show as well as the album. And a guy by the name of Jeff Calhoun who’s done a lot of directing on Broadway. And so I’ve come up with a hybrid of a theatrical show as well as a concert."
BH – Can you describe the band that’s backing you?
DO – "It’s a full orchestra. I have my five pieces and a full string section and a horn section. I needed to do that in order to musically and sonically reproduce this album. We could do it with machines and stuff if we wanted to but it’s better and it looks good and it feels right to have the full orchestra."
BH – You know there’s been quite the positive buzz about this tour.
DO – "We certainly spent the money on this tour and the effort and the time because I didn’t want to, like I said, just do the new album or just the oldies. As a matter of fact we open up with this film on the second act. It’s my first appearance on the Andy Williams Show when I was five years old and then chronologically it starts building through the next couple of minutes. And I found this footage in my basement I didn’t even know I had of me singing ‘Go Away Little Girl’ at thirteen years old with all the screaming girls and everything. And I come out and I do a duet with myself thirty years later. It’s really effective. Also, not that I use too much multimedia, but there is one more element that I use with Rosie. She makes an appearance because she’s on the album and we do a duet together."
BH – With this record how much work went into just deciding what songs you were going to put on it?
DO – "A lot. We had a hundred and fifty songs on this list that we started with that both of us wanted to do. And it narrowed down quickly actually when we came up with the fact that we wanted to do current Broadway stuff. That narrowed it down quite a bit. Either shows that have left, or are on Broadway, or coming to. And that was a challenge because I wanted to get stuff that nobody else had. I was able to get that with ‘Suessical.’ We got two new songs from the new Dr. Suess play. And a new Andrew Lloyd Webber song from ‘The Beautiful Game.’ I don’t know if you know the story behind that one."
BH – Well I thought it was inevitable that there would be an Andrew Lloyd Webber song included because of your relationship with him. I expected at least one song and I see where you did two of his songs.
DO – "Well the first one, ‘No Matter What,’ comes from ‘Whistle Down The Wind.’ And the reason I wanted to put that on there is because it’s such a simple song, very accessible to a lot of younger kids. Because it was a massive hit with Boy Zone across the world although it didn’t really do much in the states. So that was the reason I did that one. But with ‘Our Kind Of Love,’ I called him up at his castle in Ireland, I said ‘ok I’m going to push our friendship here, I want a song that nobody else has got, one that is uniquely mine.’ The phone went dead for a second and I thought oh boy I really pushed it beyond the limit. (laughs) And he said ‘you know I just finished a show called The Beautiful Game and there’s a song there called Our Kind Of Love, I’m going to send it to you and you’re the first one to get it.’ What an honor! I listened to it and I thought I got to put this on."
BH – I really liked your version of "Season Of Love" a lot. That’s a great song.
DO – "We start the show with that song. You know I heard Stevie Wonder’s version and once I heard that I said yup, we definitely have to put in on. Because here again you don’t want to put stuff on a record that is just all new and not accessible because you got to have something that people can kind of sink their teeth into so to speak. And it’s such a widely known song but I didn’t want to do it like a cast album version, so I kinda copied Stevie’s a little. If you’re going to copy somebody he’s a great person to copy."
BH – Donny, I recently interviewed David Cassidy and I want to ask you the exact same question I asked him. What kind of feedback have you gotten since the VH-1 Behind The Music Segment about you aired?
DO – "With the VH-1 thing, I don’t think anything has helped my career more than that because people have a tendency to realize, you know, he’s not just this little kid we all thought had no problems. You know I have issues to deal with as well. But it reeducated a whole new audience as to who I am. I sat down and talked to the guys from ‘N Sync and they knew all about my life based on Behind The Music. And we compared notes and had the greatest conversation about what they’re experiencing which is the same thing I experienced as a youngster in the seventies."
BH – Changing the subject, Perry Como just passed away. Was he someone close to you and your family?
DO – "I wasn’t very close to him but one of the first shows I did just before the Donny and Marie whole thing happened in the mid-seventies was Perry Como’s Christmas show. He was just the nicest guy, just a legacy of entertainment. But I didn’t know him all that well."
BH – Do you think you would ever do an album of popular American standards. Songs made famous by people like Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole, and Tony Bennett?
DO – "There’s no plans to do anything like that, not even in the back of my mind. But you never want to look too far ahead in the future like I used to do because things change nowadays way too fast because of technology. I used to have ten year plans and things like that but I’ve got the next year earmarked to tour this record, beyond that I really don’t know. I’ve got some ideas. I want to get back to theatre. I’ve had some wonderful offers to do some stuff on Broadway and the West End. But it’s important to me to get this album out and to tour it properly around the world since it’s in international release right now. I’ve got Europe and I keep putting that off probably until January and then I got Australia and Asia. So I can’t really look too far ahead in the future."
BH – Speaking of next January and future plans, the winter Olympics will be coming to your home state of Utah. Have you been invited to perform at the games?
DO – "There are some invitations right now. I don’t know how I can get involved, I’d love to be involved but I want to be involved in the right way. So I don’t know yet but there are a couple of offers right now and we’re just trying to schedule it in."
BH- Donny you have five sons, how does their taste in music differ from yours?
DO – "I’m in to so many different styles, since it’s my business I listen to all kinds of stuff. My oldest son Don is a drummer and he loves Phil Collins. He also likes Peter Gabriel, he likes Seal, Matchbox 20, stuff like that."
BH – Of course there’s a connection between you and Peter Gabriel.
DO – "Yeah, he’s the one that really kind of helped turn it all around."
BH – When you recorded "Soldier Of Love" at his studio?
DO – "You know Peter got all the credit but it was really
Carl Sturkin and Evan Rogers who wrote and produced that thing, but Peter changed the perception of it all."
BH – How did he do that?
DO - "Well just by mere fact that he asked me to come out and record at his studio and kinda took it under his wing as a pet project. People started saying well if Peter is looking at this maybe we should. You know it’s so funny this business of ours. It’s all about image and perception and things like that. It’s not like I changed since I met Peter Gabriel. It’s just that people think ‘well if it’s cool to him it must be cool to me.’ People are sheep. And what’s interesting is that over in portions of Europe I have much more of a male following because of the rock and roll stuff that we released over there in the early seventies. Over at Crazy Horse’s and stuff like that. Cause they never got the Donnie and Marie show. They didn’t really get the early stuff like ‘One Bad Apple’ or ‘Puppy Love’ or anything like that. So it’s all a perception thing. It’s quite interesting. Even now things have started to change. In Detroit there was this guy, and predominately it’s a female audience that comes to my show, let’s call it the way it is. But there were a bunch of guys in the audience and this one guy gets up, he was probably close to 30 years old, because I do this Q & A section in the show where I basically shut the whole show down and just talk to the audience for ten or fifteen minutes. And we do whatever they want to do. He stood up and yelled ‘I LOVE YOU MAN!’ And I thought hmm this is kinda weird. And he started naming the Crazy Horse (in Paris) and all this kind of stuff. And he said ‘YOU’RE A GREAT ROCK AND ROLLER!’ He mentioned the Dweezil Zappa thing, the duet I did with Dweezil Zappa. So he was really in to the music and all, and not just the perception of what I went through in the seventies. It’s really weird man because depending on where you go, you get a different audience."
BH – When you get that kind of positive feedback, are you thinking in the back of your mind where have you guys been all these years?
DO - "Yeah I did years ago and it was before ‘Soldier of Love’ hit. Because there was a real dry spell before the Peter Gabriel era. And it was the strangest thing for me because you’re hot one second and then you’re as cold as can be the next second. And it just doesn’t make any logical sense because they’re out there somewhere, they’re all in their closets. I just had to come up with an excuse for them to come out of their closets so to speak. And now it’s such a great feeling. But even I went through it as a teenager. You go through a period of time where you don’t want to say I was into that because that’s kids stuff. But enough time goes by where you can look back at the past and embrace it and say ‘you know what, I was into that and that’s when I was a little kid but I’m mature enough now to be able to say it’s funny, I did like it.’"
- Bill Harriman