“Every time I went to the audience to ask anybody to sing, they sang their ass off. It was just unbelievable.” – David Foster

Two music icons – David and Don McLean – recently shared with me their memories of performing in the Philippines.

By coincidence, both David, also known as The Hitman who has won 16 Grammy Awards, and Don, whose American Pie will notch its 50^th anniversary next year, talked about having concerts in the Smart Araneta Coliseum.

As composer, record producer, musician and arranger, David has collaborated with the biggest names in the music industry, from Whitney Houston, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, George Harrison to Ringo Starr, among many others.

The man who composed a long list of hits, from Whitney’s I Have Nothing, Andrea Bocelli’s The Prayer, Earth, Wind & Fire’s After the Love Has Gone to Peter Cetera’s You’re the Inspiration, remembered being blown away when he asked audience members – both professional and amateur singers – to join him on the stage in his Araneta Coliseum shows.

“I remember getting the singer from Journey (Arnel Pineda) up one time I was in the Araneta,” said David in our video call. Relaxed in his LA home, David sat in front of his piano, accented with his Grammy bling, on which he occasionally played a few bars (what a treat).

“And then my golden buzzer on Asia’s Got Talent was Gerphil (Flores) who’s an opera singer from the Philippines,” The Hitman added about the classical crossover vocalist.

“I got her up one night there. Every time I went to the audience to ask anybody to sing, they sang their ass off. It was just unbelievable. It was like, ‘Where’d you learn to do that? Are you a professional singer?’ ‘No, I work at the gas station but I like to sing on the weekends.’ ‘Holy cow, this is amazing.’”

The 2007 Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee has always championed Filipino talents, starting with Jake Zyrus, who first went by the name Charice. David is Jake’s godfather and mentor.

“I’ve played there a few times, like maybe three times,” David said of The Big Dome. “It was where Thrilla in Manila was held. I have it on my Instagram. I stood beneath a picture of Muhammad Ali that was in the hallway.”

“As you know, it’s quite a beat up building,” David continued about the landmark arena which opened in Cubao in 1960. “But it’s got a vibe and a warmth that you can’t duplicate. And then you couple that with the fans who just love music so much. This is something that’s unique to Asia and incredibly unique to the Filipinos. And I would add Indonesia in that mix as well for people who just love lyrics and melodies.”

The Golden Globe and Emmy winner, 70, married singer-actress and American Idol alum Katharine McPhee, 36, in June last year. She is his fifth wife. David’s previous marriages were to BJ Hook, Rebecca Dyer, Linda Thompson (with whom he composed I Have Nothing and Grown-up Christmas List) and model Yolanda Hadid.

“Marrying Katharine was a very unexpected thing for both of us,” David said of the American IdolSeason 5 runner-up. “I have said this before and I’ll say it again. In any marriage, there’s a ton of things that can bring you down and ruin your marriage – from geography, finances, stepchildren to infidelity.”

He acknowledged, “There’s a bunch of stuff and certainly, a big age difference is one of them. But if everything else is good, the age difference is something that you can easily navigate and we have, so far, which is great. And she’s very mature. She’s an old soul. I know it sounds cliché but we learn from each other. It’s not just one sided.”

Katharine went to the same LA middle school, Immaculate Heart, with Meghan Markle. So the Fosters are pals with Meghan and Prince Harry, who are settling down into their Hollywood life.

“I always said Sting and Stevie Wonder,” answered David when asked which music talents he’d like to work with. “I got to work with Stevie Wonder. We have an unfinished album of 14 songs that we’ve been working on for a decade. I don’t know if it will ever come out or not. So that was a check on my checklist.”

“I’m friends with Sting. I’ve said it in probably a hundred interviews – he just doesn’t need me. But I just love his music. I love his whole approach to everything that he does. They’re not all great songs that he writes but even the ones that aren’t great, there’s just something about the way he does it that’s so magical for me. So maybe if he hears about this, maybe… It’s 101 times I’ve said it.”

Paging Sting!

In the meantime, the British Columbia native is set to conquer Broadway. “I have three musicals that I’m working on,” he announced. “I don’t like to call them Broadway musicals because they’re not on Broadway yet. But one of the musicals I’m working on is about the iconic cartoon character, Betty Boop. I’ve been working on that for a long time.”

“Another one is from Amy Bloom, who wrote a bestselling novel (Lucky Us) that we’re adapting. We have the whole team assembled. A third one is a catalog musical. Somebody came to me – this young, bright, brilliant guy, Todd Almond. He said, ‘Hey, there’s a story that’s 500 years old. It’s a story of revenge. It’s a famous classic tale and I’ve taken all your music. I’ve gone through all of it. And I’ve come up with a musical based on that story of revenge and your music.’

“This musical is actually the one that’s the furthest along down the road because obviously, the music is already all done. So we’ve had two readings of that. We’re having a reading of the novel musical in November.

“And Betty Boop, we’ve had two readings. The pandemic changed everything. So it tilted everything sideways but I’m going to get there. I don’t want to fail.”

Don McLean

“I remember I came to the Philippines in the early ’70s and had a rapturous reception,” recalled Don, whose American Pie’s 50^th anniversary next year will be celebrated with a documentary, a Broadway show and a children’s book.

The classic tune about “the day the music died” (February 3, 1959, when rock and roll pioneers Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens perished in a plane crash) has the honor of being voted among the top five songs of the 20^th century, preceded only by Over the Rainbow, White Christmas, This Land Is Your Land and Respect, in a poll conducted by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The American Troubadour, also known as The Don, continued talking about his Philippine performances: “I played at, I think it was the Folk Center or something like that (Tanghalang Francisco Balagtas, formerly Folk Arts Theater) for two nights. And then another place as well. I’ve since been back years ago.”

“I went back to the place where Muhammad Ali had Thrilla in Manila,” Don said about his concert, staged by Ovation Productions, at the Araneta Coliseum in 2011. “I played that place. I think we had 10,000 or 12,000 people so I have a lot of wonderful fans in the Philippines.”

Don was calling from his home in Palm Desert, California, “near Palm Springs, so I’m not far from Mexico. I like it here.”

Did you know that the New York native inspired the hit, Killing Me Softly With His Song? Composers Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel adapted their lyrics from a poem written by singer Lori Lieberman after she saw Don in a concert.

I asked Don if he ever imagined that 50 years since writing American Pie, there will be a big golden anniversary fuss. “I didn’t think I’d be around a year after the song came out,” he admitted. “I got a lot of money. I bought myself a little house and I thought, well, that’s that.  Because it’s going to come and go. It’s going to be just a quick thing but it kept going. My records sold and I toured the world.”

Don reportedly still earns thousands of dollars a year in royalties for the long ballad he scribbled way back in 1971.

While we know that American Pie, regarded as a folk-rock cultural milestone, memorializes that tragic plane crash, we’ve always wondered about the other lyrics like, “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry/And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye.”

I seized the chance. “It’s funny to hear that question,” Don replied with a grin. “I’ll just tell you how I did it. I was always in love with Buddy Holly. Listening to some Ritchie Valens also moves me. I remember how much I loved the song Donna and those records so I can imagine the two together because they all were an influence in their music. Songs like Heartbeat and things like that.

“A lot of good guitar playing too so it must have been quite exciting. So I carried this with me for years. I never really heard Buddy’s name mentioned much after like 1960 but I never forgot. So around 1969 I guess or ’70, I was writing songs for another album after the first album I did which was called Tapestry.”

“I sang this thing into the tape recorder a long time ago. I still remember how that music used to make me smile right on through the day the music died and that whole thing came to me in one moment.  I stuck it into the tape recorder and then I thought wow, what is that and what am I going to do with it but I loved it.

“But I didn’t want another slow song so I came up with this crazy chorus.” Crazy, indeed about driving the Chevy to the levee. “I forget exactly how I did that but when I saw the words American and pie together and they knocked me out as a title, I said, that’s it. And when I looked at it, it said so much. Then I thought on it for quite a while and wrote the rest of it in about an hour because I had the notion of where it was going to go. But it took about three months.”

And the rest, as the cliché goes, is pop history.

Does he ever get tired singing American Pie, which used to hold the record of being the longest (8 minutes and 33 seconds) song to reach number 1, and Vincent, his beautiful elegy to Vincent Van Gogh, in concerts?

Don answered, “My job is to please people on stage, please myself. I’ve been in all sorts of altered states on stage. But I would never think of not singing the songs that people pay to come and hear me sing. That would be rude.” – Rappler.com