Eleven years ago, as I was battling Stage IV throat cancer, I took on a project that would end up being one of the most rewarding of my life. As I lay there trying to ward off the effects of twenty or so bouts of high-dosage radiation, I decided to put together a list of my 300 favorite pop singles from the decade of the 1960’s – the ten-year stretch of time that had helped shape who I am as a man – and then write a brief essay about each 45 and why that little record still mattered to me after all these years.
I called this year-long retrospective of one man's salad days my very own "Desert Island Jukebox."
Enter my younger sister, Dee.
Song #158 on this imaginary jukebox of mine was an original penned and sung by the Association, a bouncy and almost achingly beautiful little ballad called Everything that Touches You. Dee, who at that point was going through a hard time for reasons that, frankly, escape me, read what I’d written and played the song, clicking on the video I’d embedded. She’d never really heard Everything... before, but something about it touched her and filled her with a sense of hope – while easing, if only by degree, the emotional pain she’d been hauling around inside her.
Because she’d been so supportive of me as I was writing this tome of a book I’d been working on, I felt I wanted to do something nice in return. So, I figured I’d write an essay about the song, while providing a handful of sausage-making anecdotes about its genesis.
It was a Saturday afternoon, I remember, and I had found his number using this handy-dandy little app I’d discovered researching my book. Terry Kirkman, Association co-founder, and singer and composer of Everything That Touches You, answered after three rings.
We barely had time to say hello, much less exchange pleasantries. Instead, breathlessly, he gently barked in a highly distracted voice, “I’m sorry. We’re in the middle of a plumbing problem here. Can I call you back?”
That was it, or so I thought. I mean, after all, the guy never even asked for my name or number.
So much, I figured, for writing an essay on what I still contend is one of the most underrated little love songs to hit the charts in the latter half of the 20th century.
Yet, about three hours later, sure enough, my phone rang. “Is this Michael?” the voice asked. I immediately tried to explain that ever since I was a kid – considering I’d been born Michael Charles III – people had always just used my initials, "M.C." But that little kernel of information didn’t seem to take. To the guy on the other end of the line, my name was Michael, and it would remain Michael for as long as we’d know each other.
“This is Terry Kirkman,” he said. “Sorry about before. What can I do for you?”
Considering that this essay is now less a nod to my sister than it is a tribute to one of the most underappreciated pop artists of my Wonder years, the first thing I hope you’ll bear in mind is that Terry actually called me back – and did so some three hours later, his plumbing problems, apparently, now deep in his rear view mirror.
I thanked him and told him about the reason for my reaching out, at the same time asking him if he wouldn’t mind sharing with me a story or two about the writing of Everything that Touches You. I explained about my sister and how much the song had meant to her at a time she really needed something to hold onto. Told Terry, too, how, as a way of easing her pain, she’d regularly play it in bed at night before nodding off to sleep.
That’s when, in a moment that I realized later would define him as a person, Terry asked, “How’s she doing now?” before adding a short time later, “Tell your sister I’m glad my song helped her, OK?”
That first conversation of ours lasted almost two hours, and we talked about everything under the sun – except, it would seem, music. Every time I’d ask him something about the Association, a song he’d written, or maybe an album his band had recorded, he’d demur and try to change the subject.
Terry, you see, had left the music industry decades prior. Following declining interest in the band he’d help form, and following a period of increased dependence on drugs and alcohol on his part, he retreated from the music scene almost entirely.
By the time we first talked, he’d gotten sober, he’d gotten divorced, he’d remarried, and he’d become fully dedicated to his new life as a counselor for fellow substance abusers. And, by most all accounts, he’d become really, really good at the last of those things.
But, still, he’d rarely talk about music and would simply hem and haw whenever the subject came up.
Finally, during that very first conversation, and out of a desperation that just seemed to well up inside me, I said something that came out as raw and unvarnished as an untreated 2x4. “Terry,” I said, “no offense, but f*uck you. Seriously, f*ck you. Look, I know you’ve done a lot of good for a lot of people in your new life. But you’re an idiot if you try to pretend your old one never happened. You sang on three of the most requested and played recordings of the 20th century, one of which you wrote. Do you know how many people our age fell in love to Cherish, danced their first dance to Cherish, and maybe even sang Cherish to the other one on his or her deathbed? I mean, do you have any idea how many artists out there would kill to have had that kind of impact on the world? Like I said, Terry, f*ck you and that bullshit, woe-is-me act of yours.”
After a pregnant pause – a speech pattern I’d soon learn was one he embraced with full rigor – he said into the receiver without even a trace of unease, “I like talking to you.”
And, I suppose, that was the beginning of our friendship.
The next few times we spoke, it was me initiating the conversation by calling Terry. But, in time, he’d call me just as often as I called him. And, indeed, we eventually began talking about music.
Terry Kirkman, you see, was at his core an artist. A true, dyed-in-the-wool lover, maker and consumer of art in whatever shape or form he found it. And, no matter where he went in life, and no matter what he did, an artist’s heart could always be found beating deep within him. And while music might have been the art form that would prove to be the man's first love, it wouldn’t by any means be his last.
In fact, one of my favorite conversations with him was not long after he and his wife Heidi had visited, I think, the Norton-Simon Museum in Pasadena, a place he loved. When we spoke a short time later, I remember thinking I’d never heard him so animated about anything. Terry couldn’t stop talking about a piece he’d just seen by Ellsworth Kelly, a noted American minimalist who, in the mid-20th century, often used simple shapes and bright primary colors to explore such complex and, at times, hard-to-define human concepts as truth, beauty and isolation.
The piece was titled Green Angle, which is exactly what it was – a large three-dimensional obtuse angle, painted green and suspended downward from the wall. It completely captivated Terry, who told me he spent almost an hour just staring at it and trying to figure out what it was Kelly was trying to say with it.
Then, he told me, he looked at Green Angle not head-on, but from one side. It was there, he said, that he discovered the artist had left a small portion of his work unpainted. Kelly had left, in other words, a small section of bare wood as part of his larger statement to the world. That’s when Terry’s retelling of the moment found a higher gear. That’s when the pitch in his voice rose markedly and when his vocal energy ratcheted up to a level that, to be honest, I’d never quite heard from him before. He began going on and on about such fuzzy concepts as truth, and beauty, and man’s basic nature.
I frankly don’t remember all Terry said about Green Angle, because I was too busy feeling a sudden pang of sorrow for this gentle and unassuming man who’s dream of making art for the rest of his life – in his case, writing songs and producing pop records – had been so stripped from him while he was still just a kid, and done so by an industry that was, and remains to this day, notoriously heartless, if not soulless – so much so, that Joni Mitchell once cynically referred to it as “the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.”
I could go on about Terry’s passion for art, but instead let me share with you a few of the more eye-opening and salient points he shared with me about his brief music career and his one-time band's glory days:
with its own phrase, such as, “I love you,” “Go to Hell,” “Come back to me,” and “What were we thinking?” When his first label, a tiny entity calling itself Valiant Records, was gobbled up by industry behemoth Warner Bros., Warner wanted a new album from the Association right away and gave Terry and his mates a deadline of something like three months to get it to them. One night in a panic, Terry went home, took all his manila envelopes, and dumped them out on the new dining room table that he and his first wife had just bought. He then began mixing and matching all the various ideas he’d amassed. At one point, a young songwriter he was mentoring at the time came up behind him, looked over one shoulder while eating a ham sandwich, and said as he pointed to one of the scraps, “No. Put that one over there.” Terry did just that. And before you could say "Tin Pan Alley," Everything that Touches You had gone from a few scribbled ideas on a few shards of paper to a fully realized composition, and a song that would ultimately stand the test of time like few others he’d ever write.
Gene Puerling (l) and Clark Burroughs (c) of the Hi-Lo's
It was also at Warner, he told me, that he and his bandmates were first introduced to a guy named Clark Burroughs, who was more than half a generation older than they were. Burroughs, a former child actor, had once served as the lead vocalist and tenor of a 1950’s quartet called the Hi-Lo’s, the brainchild of a Milwaukee boy named Gene Puerling, who'd formed them just as the big band era was riding off into the sunset. Puerling’s idea was to take many of the arrangements of the best of those big bands – in his case, I believe, Stan Kenton’s – and apply all the parts Kenton had written for the brass instruments under his purview to the human voice. The Hi-Lo’s vocal impact was so deep, so profound, and so incredibly lasting on the entirety of pop music that if you lined up all the artists who’ve stood on their shoulders over the years you’d realize that many of the biggest American singing groups of the 60’s – Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, the Mamas and Papas, Jan and Dean, the Fifth Dimension, Spanky and Our Gang, the Grass Roots, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Three Dog Night, and yes, the Association, to name but a few – all shared the same roots, and all traded on a harmonic style that traced directly back to the big band era and the horn arrangements of men like Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, Billy Strayhorn, and, of course, Kenton. The “new” California sound of the 60’s, in other words, was actually just a reimagining of the legendary big band sound of the 40’s – only one not played this time around, but sung.
Terry (l) and the Association on the opening night of the Monterey Pop Festival
The Mama’s and Papa’s producer and manger, Lou Adler, had once asked Terry and the Association to serve as the opening act for a huge outdoor festival that he and John Phillips were planning up in Northern California. He said they were going to call their event the “Monterey International Pop Festival.” Terry had just written a somber and moody, yet wildly evocative anti-war anthem that described a young bullfighter dying alone in the dust and sand, and doing so for reasons he could never fully understand. The song was a perfect metaphor for the growing quagmire in Vietnam and the deaths of so many young American boys in so many far-off and distant jungles. He called it – a song he not only wrote, but a recording on which he sang lead and played the French horn – Requiem for the Masses. Terry implored his bandmates to open their Monterey set with it, but they balked. Their bass player, Brian Cole, who’d in time die of a heroin overdose, had just written a corny Association “music machine” bit that was as much schtick as it was an exercise in creativity, but was something that, in future performances, they'd all eventually use as a segue to Cole's countdown of their Top Ten crowd-pleasing hit, Along Comes Mary. The decision not to play Requiem broke Terry’s heart, though I’m not sure he ever really communicated that to the rest of the band – at least not at the time. Even though the Association would eventually nail their bass player's Devo-like “music machine” opening, and perform the subsequent Along Comes Mary spotlessly, it fell mostly flat in front of the Monterey faithful that day – especially given the crowd's makeup and the fact that at the time kids everywhere, but especially in California, were chin-deep in such things as “flower power,” self-discovery, mind-expansion, the still-burgeoning “Summer of Love," and, yes, Vietnam. The Monterey Pop festival would feature such legendary acts as the Who, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, Moby Grape, Canned Heat, the Jefferson Airplane, the Buffalo Springfield, Simon & Garfunkel and the Grateful Dead. What’s more, it'd be remembered, for then and evermore, as the coming-out party for two of the most revolutionary Black artists of the century, both of whom blew folks away that weekend with their incendiary mix of talent, showmanship, and ferocity: Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding. A few weeks later, Adler called Terry. He said he had some bad news. The Association would not be included in the concert film the promoters had shot and were now in the process of editing, and one that would soon be released theatrically from coast to coast. His band was great, Adler told Terry. But their set just didn’t fit with the mood of the overall festival, the one they were now trying to capture with the finished movie. Just as I’d never heard Terry more animated as he was when he was talking about Green Angle, I’d never again hear him any more somber or any more regretful than when discussing that ill-fated and far-reaching choice his bandmates made that weekend. “I really believe,” he told me later, “that if we’d opened with Requiem, we might have been viewed differently by critics and the audience, and that our career might have gone in an entirely different direction. We had a chance to be something more than just another singles band, but…” His voice tailed off at that point and he never entirely finished whatever it was he had started to tell me. He didn’t have to. I understood exactly what was trying to say.
There were so many other stories Terry shared with me in our handful of conversations over the course of that year and a half – stories that ranged from the likes of John Hartford, Tommy Smothers, Glen Campbell, Mason Williams and the long-since-departed SoCal folk scene to the legendary California artist Ed Ruscha, the jazz icon Peggy Lee, and the former Black Panther and Chicago 7 compatriot/martyr Fred Hampton – but in the interest of time, let me just cut to the chase.
Terry, like so many of us, had at least one issue that dwelt deep inside him, and one that would remain unreconciled for as long as he’d draw breath. That issue – having turned his back on his incredible abilities as a pop tunesmith, if not his slavish love for the painstaking process of crafting a pop record – would haunt him forever.
And please understand, I do not use the word “haunt” loosely – or, for that matter, "forever."
In fact, Heidi and I spoke a few times after Terry’s passing, and she communicated once in no uncertain terms how much having been chewed up and spit out by the music industry had eaten away at her husband’s inner sense of himself. In fact, while she accepts the fact that substance abuse had probably always been a part of Terry’s makeup, even as a kid, it wasn’t until his band was largely dismissed and tossed aside by the very industry that had taken full advantage of its commercial appeal for as long as it behooved them to do so, his substance abuse problem only seemed to tighten its grip on his life.
I hardly knew Terry well. But I did know him some. And from what I could tell, he was affable and outgoing. Likewise, part of him seemed to relish maintaining the gruff and somewhat curmudgeonly veneer that he'd cultivated over the years and could often wear like a comfortable old sweater. But if there was one thing I learned in the brief time we shared, it was this: the Terry Kirkman I spoke with on all those phone calls over all those many months took things to heart, and deep down inside he was a loving, sensitive, and caring man who could bruise as easily as just about anyone I ever knew.
A Terry and Heidi Kirkman selfie
The last time we talked, Terry told me two things that made me realize how much he’d come to view me as a friend. First, he confided in me that he’d just been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, a prognosis that needed no further explanation. “Jesus, Terry,” I said, knowing full well the implications of what he’d just shared, “I am so sorry.”
And secondly, he told me a few moments later about selling his catalog of songs to his agent, along with the understanding that the guy could then flip the publishing rights to Cherish and a number of his fringier hits to anyone who happened to meet his asking price.
It was a sale for not nearly the amount of money he and his agent had originally been discussing with a number of would-be suitors. But, he told me, the clock was now ticking. “I just want to be able to leave Heidi something,” he said. “I just want to be able take care of her.”
He could barely whisper that last part.
Following his death, Terry earned the kind of mentions that, on the surface anyway, were worthy of the depth and breadth of the fingerprints he’d manage to leave all over my generation and the musical heart we shared. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post (not to mention major trade pubs like Variety and Billboard) all gave him nice, fully researched obituaries, complete with headlines and photos. His name and image were featured prominently during the Grammy Awards’ In Memoriam section. And, of course, he popped up in any number of those “Artists We Lost this Year” lists that one regularly stumbled upon as 2023 began to wind down.
As for me, I choose to remember Terry, even now, not for how he spent the final 50 years of his life, but how he lived the first 30 of them. In that brief time, he composed and sang one song (Enter the Young) that would prove to be my own personal gateway drug for a kind of music that would forever speak to the absolute best part of me, the part I’ll always cherish and hold dear.
He wrote one of my favorite songs from my first full decade of musical awareness (Everything that Touches You), a tune that, almost fifty years later, my sister would subsequently use as the light at the end of her own personal tunnel of darkness and despair.
And he wrote one of the true touchstones of our shared generation (Cherish), a modern-day standard that would forever embody the kind of love that, at least for those of us of a certain age, would somehow remain just as pure and innocent as it was timeless.
But the song I choose to remember Terry by today – and the one I want to share with you now – is one he wrote for the movie, Goodbye Columbus, a largely obscure film from the Spring of 1969. The movie was based on Philip Roth’s very first novel. It also featured Ali MacGraw in her first major screen role. The song wasn't great, by any means. Far from it. But it was, in many ways, an almost perfect distillation of the twenty-something year old Terry Kirkman as a songwriter and performer, one that was both emotionally honest and unabashedly direct in its eyes-wide/arms-open sentiment – not unlike, I suppose, its composer.
Christened Brenda’s Theme by the film’s producers (after MacGraw’s character), So Kind to Me was a romantic paean to a most vulnerable time in any young man’s life, when spike-horn, rutting bucks the world over – hopeful, earnest young men facing down the icy cold stare of manhood while trying their best not to blink or appear even remotely uncertain – often found comfort in the warmth and glow of a young and beautiful fellow-traveler.
And to hear Terry sing his own words, especially during So Kind to Me’s gentle, sweet fade-out, is moving in ways I still have trouble articulating. That's when the phrase "You were so kind to me" gets joyously repeated over and over and over. When that happens, it almost feels as though the lead singer is thanking the young woman before him, not so much for her love, or her beauty, or even her companionship. He's thanking her for, of all things, her kindness.
No moment in the history of vinyl managed to scream "Terry Kirkman" any louder.
And to hear him and his mates chanting the constantly repeated refrain of his song's title, again and again, is to hear Terry bravely opening his own heart and sharing the almost childlike mix of innocence and hope that he, somehow, always led with – an innocence that would prove to be both his greatest asset as an artist, and, alas, his biggest vulnerability as a professional maker of music.
Godspeed, Terry. And from the depths of my heart, thank you, not just for the gentle, loving songs you left us, but for the all-too-brief time we found ourselves fortunate enough to call one another friend.
