Songwriter for Hire

St. Paul native Dave Frischberg a musical craftsman

by MATT PEIKEN
St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 11, 2002©

Dave Frishberg is destined to leave his mark on the world as a songwriting credit. He's also destined to leave frustrated, not for how music will remember him, but for how he remembers music.

"Music has become a cheap commodity, just gobs and gobs of records thrown at us, and it really doesn't have much value anymore," he says, noting the introduction of electronic instruments as the beginning of the end. "It's saddened me and made me wish sometimes I'd been born 25 years earlier, so I could have enjoyed the golden age."

Paint him as a purist or wave off his grumblings as those of a stubborn relic, but it's impossible to get to either view without first seeing him as anything less than authentic.

Frishberg grew up in St. Paul, leaving town shortly after graduating from Central High School in 1950, and soared as a pianist and songwriter, first in New York City and later in Los Angeles.

Kids all over America grew up humming "I'm Just a Bill," a Frishberg tune that became one of the most enduring ditties from the 1970s educational TV series "Schoolhouse Rock." His best-known songs were turned into hits by others -- Blossom Dearie ("I'm Hip," "My Attorney Bernie"), Rosemary Clooney ("Let's Eat Home") and Diana Krall ("Peel Me a Grape").

While most of his contemporaries modernized their craft as they aged, to keep with popular tastes, Frishberg hasn't wavered in his formula for a good song. He sees himself as the consummate free-lance songwriter -- give him an "assignment," as he calls the commissions that have marked his career, and he'll spin out something simple yet distinctive.

Frishberg, 69, returns to St. Paul as a guest on this weekend's broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" and, early next week, as a solo pianist at the Dakota Bar and Grill.

"I always went for the classic songwriters -- Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Gershwin, Frank Loesser -- I'm just a sucker for that stuff," says Frishberg, who lives in Portland, Ore. His brother still lives in St. Paul. "I just love performing, better than anything, and to my surprise, I really like singing in front of people."

Frishberg is the sort of jack-of-all-trades choked out of today's crowded, competitive and compartmentalized music business.

He emerged in New York as an accompanist for Zoot Sims, Carmen McRae, Gene Krupa, Ben Webster and others. He wrote music for a short-lived television program. His "Van Lingle Mungo" is still played at baseball parks all over the country. He collaborated with composer Johnny Mandel on a number of songs recorded several times over by other artists. For more than a quarter-century, he has made records under his own name and primarily performed alone, seated at a piano.

Many of Frishberg's classics, by his own estimation, were written at the behest of others. He composed "Listen Here," one of his most recorded tunes, for a TV special starring Mary Tyler Moore. He penned "My Attorney Bernie" for a friend, named Tim, who invited him to a party celebrating 25 years in a law firm.

"I played it for guests at that party, then I recorded it," he says. "I never would have written it if not for that."

Cast by historians as a legendary lyricist, Frishberg generates most of his ideas from fragments of music that gather like lint in his pockets, where they might stay for years before he pulls them into a song. Lyrics rarely come before the title.

Frishberg's last studio disc, 1998's "By Himself: Arbors Piano Series No. 3," opens with a tune that could serve as his epitaph -- "I Want to Be a Sideman" -- and features five other Frishberg solo piano offerings mixed among tunes from Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Rodgers & Hart and others. Last year, he made "The Starlit Hour," a live record, with singer Rebecca Kilgore.

"I never wanted to write just to write, and I never want to write about myself. I'm more interested in working the way songwriters used to, at arm's length," he says. "My main motive for writing now is guilt, and shame over not writing more. I guess I'm always waiting around for people to tell me what to write about."