The first album to which I can remember binge-listening was my sister’s copy of Carole King’s Tapestry. That would have been around 1971, when I was sixteen. Once I’d turned eighteen, my friends and I could hit the local Long Island bars and listen to live music, and the guy we followed most often was an uber-talented alumnus of our Levittown high school named John Melnick. Mel played both guitar and accordion (you read that right), and his cover repertoire was heavily slanted toward Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, and other singer-songwriters of that era. (To this day, I can’t hear Simon’s “The Boxer” on the radio without thinking of Mel.)
Since he was also a football, basketball, and baseball teammate of my older brother, I got to hang with Mel on occasion at his converted garage/studio and, though he might not remember this, he first taught me to play the guitar – a skill that remains more aspirational than practicable these many decades later. It’s emblematic of Fate’s vagaries that Mel never quite hit the big time as a performer, while his contemporary from neighboring Hicksville, a guy named Billy Joel, somehow did. (Maybe that accordion had something to do with it.)
College sent me to Los Angeles, in 1974, then home to a more robust music scene, and since a dorm pal ran our on-campus concert series, I got to enjoy many a day-night doubleheader in which headline acts would play USC’s grassy quad at lunch, then clubs like the Roxy, the Troubadour, or the Palomino that evening with us, comp tickets in hand, gracing a front-row table. Joan Jett, Dickey Betts, J.D. Souther, Chris Hillman, Jerry Jeff Walker, Gene Clark, Roger McGuinn . . . the list goes on, and those acts laid the foundation of a musical taste edifice that stands, largely unaltered, to this day.
Fast-forward a few decades. I’m now a recovering L.A. trial lawyer and a mid-list crime novelist living in southwestern Colorado when, one day in 2020, I receive an email from out of my past. It’s John Melnick, and he’s wondering if I’ve ever considered writing song lyrics?
To be clear, I’d followed Mel’s career from afar – the Berkeley School of Music, keyboard virtuosity, concerts, cruise ships, piano bars – both as a fan and as a family friend, so the outreach was less startling than . . . intriguing. And to be honest, enormously flattering. “No,” I replied, “but for you, Mel, I’d be more than happy to give it a shot.”
And so The Song Studio was born – a co-writing collaboration that to date has generated at least three dozen songs at varying stages of completion, in genres ranging from rock to pop, jazz to country. (And yes, we have a Facebook page you can visit.) Together, Mel and I penned a tune called “Country Song” for a honky-tonk bar scene in a TV pilot I’d written, and that became our first public release, in 2023, featuring vocals by Marilyn Kroeker. We followed that with a jazz-inflected pop number called “A Song To Take Me Home” with vocals by Kelsey Pinter. You can hear these, and other cuts I’ve co-written, including a few with the wonderful Curt Mangan, by visiting my YouTube channel: @ChuckGreavesSongwriter.
I hope you enjoy them. And to take you out, as they say, here’s a link to one of my very favorites: