She writes the songs

ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT
24
W E D N E S D AY, D E C E M B E R 3 0 , 2 015  T H E J E R U S A L E M P O S T
She writes the songs...
American tunesmith Bonnie Hayes comes to Israel to audition Rimon School of Music students for the Berklee School of Music
R
• By DAVID BRINN
hyming “moon” and “June” in
song lyrics may not be that different
from coupling “yeladim” (children)
and “ketanim” (little ones). The key
to penning a successful song, whether in
English or Hebrew, is to be emotionally
invested, according to storied American
songsmith Bonnie Hayes.
And she should know. The veteran Californian has struck gold with songs for
artists ranging from Bette Midler and Cher
to David Crosby and Bonnie Raitt (she
penned two songs for Raitt’s Grammy-winning album Nick of Time – “Have a Heart”
and “Love Letter.”)
Hayes was in Israel earlier this month
auditioning Israeli music students at the
Rimon School of Music in Hod Hasharon
in her position as chair of the Songwriting
Department at the famed Berklee College
of Music in Boston.
Rimon and Berklee have a longstanding partnership that has expanded into
the songwriting sphere for the first time.
Rimon students who have finished two
years of studies can complete their degree
at the Berklee campus in Boston, and Hayes
was in town to scout for the next Ivry Liders
and Keren Peleses, two luminary Rimon
graduates.
“There’s no objective criterion that
always insures a good song,” Hayes said
in a phone interview during a break from
meeting with the Rimon students and
holding master classes. “I’ve had very vivid
disagreements with people over whether
a song is good or not. Good is not a good
word. For me, a song has to work emotionally and yet also impart an idea. I like being
engaged on both planes.”
Hayes, who joined the Berklee faculty in
2013, comes from a musical family (one
brother, Chris, was lead guitarist for Huey
Lewis and the News and another, Kevin,
was Robert Cray’s drummer for decades).
“I attended one of the first community
music schools in the US – Blue Bear – and
that’s how I found my life,” said Hayes. “I
had taken piano lessons my whole childhood but my dad, who was also a piano
player, wanted me to be a doctor.”
Hayes made her first splash in the music
AMERICAN SONGSMITH Bonnie Hayes seen here with an Israeli music student at the Rimon School of Music in Hod Hasharon. (Courtesy)
business as a performer back in the spiky
new-wave days of the early 1980s, when
two of her songs that she performed with
her Bay Area band The Wild Combo were
featured in the 1983 Nicolas Cage cult classic film Valley Girl.
“When you first find a groove and start
to write songs that people respond to, it’s
one of the most thrilling and powerful
things that can happen to a human being,”
said Hayes. “I remember that period with
a great deal of fondness, and I still like the
music, but maybe not the production. I
think those songs stand the test of time.”
Hayes concentrated on her musicianship,
eventually joining the touring bands of
artists like Belinda Carlisle and Billy Idol.
However, with her success with Raitt and
her rising name as a hit songwriter, the
performing side of the music business grad-
Motorhead frontman,
bassist ‘Lemmy’
dead at 70
• By FIONA ORTIZ
I
an Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister,
the hard-living, hell-raising
frontman of British heavy metal
band Motorhead, has died at age 70
after recently being diagnosed with
an aggressive cancer, the band said
on its Facebook page on Monday.
With his trademark moles framed
by dark muttonchops, the bassist
and vocalist cut an unmistakable
figure on stage as he craned his
neck to the microphone, growling
out hits like “Ace of Spades” with
a throat he said he fed for decades
with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey a day.
“The thing about hangovers
is, you have to stop to get one,”
Lemmy liked to say.
A notorious amphetamine user,
he once claimed to have stayed up
for two weeks non-stop, but the
hard living eventually took its toll
and he struggled with his health in
recent years.
In 2013, the band canceled European summer festival appearances after he reportedly suffered a
hematoma, and he told Rolling
Stone magazine in 2014 he had seriously cut back on his drinking and
smoking.
“We cannot begin to express our
shock and sadness, there aren’t
words,” Motorhead said in its
Facebook posting about Lemmy’s
death. “We will say more in the
coming days, but for now, please...
play Motorhead loud, play Hawkwind loud, play Lemmy’s music
LOUD. Have a drink or few.”
After cutting his teeth in beat
bands in the 1960s, he spent time
as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix before
his first taste of stardom with British space rockers Hawkwind, singing the band’s biggest hit, biker
anthem “Silver Machine,” in 1972.
During his stint in the band,
Lemmy’s pummeling bass lines
became a stock-in-trade and provided the backbone of the ear-splitting Motorhead, which he formed
in 1975 after being thrown out of
IAN ‘LEMMY’ KILMISTER of
Motorhead performs on the
Pyramid stage during the 2015
Glastonbury Festival.
(Dylan Martinez/Reuters)
Hawkwind following a drug bust
in Canada.
After a bumpy start and lineup
changes, the trio of Lemmy, guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke and drummer
Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor tore
through a string of albums that fed
off the energy of punk rock and laid
the foundations for thrash metal.
Between early 1979 and late
1980, “Overkill,” “Bomber” and
“Ace of Spades” sent the band racing toward the upper reaches of
the British album charts. In 1981,
Motorhead finally hit No. 1 with
its live classic, “No Sleep ‘til Hammersmith.”
The band’s classic line-up broke
up in 1982, and Motorhead would
record 22 studio albums in total.
Former drummer Taylor died
only last month, prompting a typically laconic response from his old
bandmate.
“He was a real character, he was a
real nutcase, and I do admire that
in a person,” Lemmy said. – Reuters
ually took a back seat to the behind-thescenes songwriting side – a development
that Hayes embraced.
“I was tired of being the center of attention, I think it’s for young people,” she said.
“It just doesn’t feel appropriate at a certain point. And it enabled me to have my
daughter and not be on the road running
around so much.”
Hayes released a couple of solo albums last
decade, but began to move into academia
with stints at the Stanford Jazz Workshop,
the REO Songwriting Retreat outside of
Vancouver, B.C., and the ASCAP workshops
in Los Angeles before she joined Berklee.
This month’s trip to Israel – her first
– didn’t involve touring Jerusalem and
swimming in the Dead Sea, but was spent
primarily in the recital halls and studios of
Rimon.
Founded in 1985 by Berklee Israeli graduates Yehuda Eder, Gil Dor and Amikam
Kimelman, Rimon is Israel’s largest independent professional music school for the
advanced study of contemporary music,
featuring more than 500 students and 100
faculty members.
“Berklee has had a collaborative relationship with Rimon since 1993, but this is the
first time the songwriting track has been
involved,” said Eder, Rimon’s president.
“Some of Israel’s best songwriters have come
out of Rimon, and even today we’re producing great ones like Rona Kenan and the
members of Jane Bordeaux, so it was important for me to bring in someone like Bonnie
to provide the songwriting element.”
According to Hayes, the challenges that
non-native English speakers face writing
lyrics in English is not insurmountable
for the Israeli students or Berklee’s other
diverse international students.
“It’s part of an ongoing conversation we
have at Berklee in addressing the needs of
our international students. Yehuda and I
were just talking last night about the cultural subtexts, the rhymes and the lyrical
pattern in English and in Hebrew,” said
Hayes.
Even though she prefers that her students
write exclusively in English, she acknowledged that it puts the foreign students at a
disadvantage.
“It’s difficult for non-native English
speakers to write good song lyrics in
English, and translating is probably one
of the hardest things to do. It’s always
an issue for anybody coming to study at
Berklee from abroad. But we just haven’t
had the capacity to address all the different
languages spoken at Berklee.”
Fortunately, most of the Rimon student
applicants are well versed in English, and
Hayes was duly impressed by the audition
process.
“The songwriters impressed me, particularly in light of the fact that these students
are writing in their second language,” she
said. “The young artists I met take their
music and expression very seriously, and
the auditions revealed a culture of musical rigor that has created some of the best
young players I’ve seen.
“I feel that Berklee’s association with
Rimon brings us many great students who
are able to succeed in this competitive
industry.”
Hayes’ final advice to the students who
aspire to be professional songwriters or performers is to focus more on the artistry and
less on the career building.
“You have to deliver the goods on your
songs to make yourself 100 percent sure
that you’ve written the best song you can.
Sometimes, that involves writing 100 bad
songs for every good verse you write,” she
said, adding a cautionary insight of irony to
a universal art that brings people together
in shared emotion.
“There’s a lot of obsessive-compulsive,
isolated work involved in writing a song
that is going to eventually want to make
strangers who hear it want to be closer
to you.”
Nancy Spielberg soars into Israel
to speak at Birthright Cinema Day
‘I
• By HANNAH BROWN
’ve been to more than 100 cities with
Above and Beyond, it’s been shown at more
than 120 film festivals. I could write a book
about all the responses it has gotten,” said
Nancy Spielberg, interviewed at a Birthright Israel event in Cinema City Glilot on Monday, referring to the documentary she produced about the
American fighter pilots who were instrumental
in creating the Israel Air Force during the War of
Independence. Above and Beyond, which had one
of its first screenings at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2014, has since won over 13 awards at film
festivals all over the world.
Spielberg was excited to be presenting clips
from the film to the approximately 1,000 Birthright participants and to be the guest of honor at
an event that marked the fact that more than half
a million young people have visited Israel on Birthright trips.
Philanthropists and entrepreneurs Dr. Miriam
and Sheldon Adelson, who have given somewhere
in the neighborhood of $160 million to support
Birthright, and Gidi Mark, international CEO of
Birthright Israel, spoke at an evening event.
Billed as Birthright’s Cinema Day, the group
turned the Cinema City lobby into an Israeli job/
education/aliya fair. In addition to Spielberg, Israeli filmmakers Gal Uchovsky, who wrote Walk on
Water and produced The Bubble and Yossi & Jagger, and Talya Lavie, who directed Zero Motivation,
spoke to the attendees.
Spielberg was pleased to be taking part not only
because she feels her film can inspire young American Jews, but because her family has a very personal
connection to Israel. She and her husband, Shimon
Katz, recently built a small apartment building in
the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem,
where they keep an apartment, and her daughter Jessica “Jessy” Katz moved to Israel four years
ago. Jessy Katz was a popular contestant on the
Israeli television show The Voice in the summer of
2014. Spielberg’s husband and both her daughters
accompanied her to this event.
“Jews are really affected by the film. I get thousands of emails, that say things like, ‘I’m a bad Jew
at best, and this film has renewed my pride in being
a Jew.’ I never expected this reaction. I just set out to
capture this incredible story.”
She got the idea of making a film about the mostly US-born pilots who begged, borrowed and stole
to bring planes to Israel and then flew missions
during the War of Independence, when she saw
the obituary for Al Schwimmer. Schwimmer was
an American who is considered the father of the
IAF, and who, after serving as a US flight engineer
in World War II, smuggled 30 surplus planes into
Israel in 1948, and was later indicted and stripped
FILM PRODUCER Nancy Spielberg seen here with Gidi Mark, International CEO of Birthright Israel, at
Cinema City Glilot. (Erez Ozir)
of his US citizenship. Eventually pardoned by president Clinton, he stayed in Israel and founded Israel
Aircraft Industries.
As she began researching the lives of these pilots,
she began to feel “it was a race against time” to
interview them and make the documentary while
they were still alive. Four of her interviewees –
Lou Lenart, Leon Frankel, Coleman Goldstein and
George Lichter – have passed away since she made
the film.
Ben Lichtman, the grandson of one of the pilots,
Gideon Lichtman, is here on a Birthright trip.
He spent Monday touring Hatzor airbase, the IAF
base where his grandfather served, and received an
award.
Speaking to the Birthright group, Spielberg
acknowledged the 500-pound elephant – perhaps
500-pound dinosaur would be more accurate – that
is always in the room at her public appearances: her
brother, Steven.
As she talked about how she came to make Above
and Beyond, she joked, “The difference between
my brother and my film is that I don’t have any
dinosaurs or aliens in my film, but I do have some
real-life Indiana Jones guys. That is really the story
that I want to share with you guys.”
She mentioned that she “died a thousand deaths”
in the movies her brother made when they were
kids, and said that it was difficult to raise money
to finance a film when “Everyone says, ‘Why don’t
you just ask your brother, or Jeffrey Katzenberg, or
David Geffen?’” That she did not ask any of them
for money is a point of pride for Spielberg. She also
emphasized that she identified with the pilots and
their desire to help Israel, recalling that she and her
siblings were called “dirty Jews” by some of their
neighbors when they were growing up in Arizona.
The enthusiastic audience listened and then
watched clips from the film. After the Q&A, the
charming and self-deprecating Spielberg chatted with the Birthright participants, asking them
where they were from and playing Jewish Geography with them.
Spielberg has been busy this year, and not only
with taking Above and Beyond to 120 film festivals.
She produced the television documentary, Mimi
and Dona, about an elderly mother and her autistic
daughter, which The New York Times named one of
the best television programs of the year.
She is currently developing two documentaries,
one to be directed by Roberta Grossman, who also
directed Above and Beyond, about the Oneg Shabbat
archives, a collection of diaries and other writings
hidden by inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and
recovered after the war. Another project, to be
directed by Dani Menkin, is called On the Map, and
it tells the story of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team that defeated the Soviet Red Army team
from Moscow, to win the European Cup Basketball
Championship in 1977.
“I’ve done more things by accident than by intention,” admitted Spielberg, as she recalled how she
had not yet picked a title when a clip she released
on YouTube with the film’s working title, Above and
Beyond, garnered more than a million views. “A
lot of what I’ve done has been min hashamayim
[from the heavens] and I’m so glad to be here and
sharing it with these kids.”