In 1977 Clive Davis Chose to Not Release This David Forman Album

Jim Keltner said, "This guy should have been a massive star. His voice is incredible." Aaron Neville said "He's got it, he's always had it"

In a rational world--or even one with the cutthroat conventions of the 1970s record business -- New York singer-songwriter David Forman's newly released album, Who You Been Talking To (High Moon) would have been the second album of an illustrious or at least influential career that might have spanned a dozen or more releases. Think Willie Nile, or Steve Forbert.

 After all, his self-titled 1976 debut for Arista Records was one of the most critically praised of its time. I was a fan, and profiled him near the beginning of my 20 year run at the then powerhouse (550,000-650,000) Long Island newspaper Newsday. I interviewed the important people involved in Forman's career, and they were high-profile men: among them were manager Sid Bernstein, who still had influence, having brought the Beatles to tour America; Arista founder Clive Davis, and his A&R director, Bob Feiden.

 Clive Davis told me in the feature: "I don't worry about his immediate commercial appeal. This isn't a commercially endowed proect," acknowledging that the sparely arranged album, the piano-based, moody, stylistically distinctive, brainy R&B of the debut album might not sell well, even produced by hitmaker Joel Dorn. But, Davis continued, "My basic instinct is to look for quality--an audience will gravitate to him."

 We never found out. When he handed in his second album, in 1977, Davis decided he did not want to release it. As recounted in the High Moon album's extensive essay booklet written by Joe Hagan, author of the Jann Wenner biography "Sticky Fingers," Forman was in Davis' waiting room overhearing the label chief telling his staff he did not want to release the album. Davis did not hear a single. But Arista was offering what he thought was a sweetener: They would return the album to Forman, no strings attached. He could approach any other label with it, at no cost. Which was unusual in those days, and might still be: No wrangling lawyers, no blood-sucking demand for return of any advance money, as far as I understand it. The album could have been shopped to another label, any label. Surely, there may have been takers?

 Who You Been Talking To is not a lost masterpiece. But it is certainly good enough, intriguing lyrically, soulful musically, to have been released by some label 50 years ago.

 Here the story becomes mysterious, and requires insights into the psychology of an individual, sensitive artist, that is way above my pay grade. But there are others, including Laura Nyro, who chose to disappear from the recording industry despite her successes.

 "Not everybody likes dealing with the music business, certain aspects of the music business," Nyro once told me in an interview. "Some talented people can't cut it in the music business, because it's not appealing to them, and nurturing to them. I find it very natural and healthy to not always be dealing with the music business." And that's after Nyro had made millions selling her songwriting catalog, though she was never a big seller on her own.

 There were so many well-connected people involved in what has now been finally released as Who You Been Talking To, nearly 50 years after its recording. Jack Nitzsche, who produced, arranged, and played Fender Rhodes and percussion, was still an A-list producer who could have gotten Forman's second album a listen at any executive suite in the business. The backing on bass, and guitarists including Ry Cooder, David Lindley, and Fred Tackett, were six-string superstars.

 The secret sauce in the musical mix was New Orleans musician Earl Turbinton, whose bass clarinet, deployed just often enough, gives the arrangements a distinctive, even eccentric sound. Forman had found common cause with Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers through some chance encounters, enhancing the singer's natural inclination towards a New Orleans state of mind, especially on a song like "Thirty Dollars," which would have been a natural Dr. John cover. In fact, I was listening recently to the first Neville Brothers album for Capitol in 1978. It was also produced by Nitzsche, and the songs were really so-so until I flipped it over and heard their version of Forman's "If It Takes All Night," from Arista debut. It is easily the best song and performance on that first Neville Brothers album.

 Fifty years of hindsight doesn't do anyone any good, but I guess that's my gig here. So I'll say, why didn't Nitzsche take the Forman album he produced to Capitol? Or Mercury, or Atlantic's Atco? Elektra, Asylum, Paramount, if it was still around? Perhaps Nitzsche, a close associate, arranger, and player with the Rolling Stones from 1964 into the early 1970s, was already lost in a haze of mental illness and substance abuse.

 And where was manager Sid Bernstein, who rode his Beatles-affiliated fame well past its fresh date? Bernstein was a kind and gentle man, but not a great manager: By the 1970s, he had lost most of his clout.

 Forman was a shy guy in a lot of ways, and like many, or any, sensitive artists, he needed a team pushing him. To lift him up when he got a bite from the black dog of depression and its long-clawed companion, anxiety, scratching at him? Forman decided not to pursue other outlets for the album. That's why this is not a reissue: It's a first issue.

 But I understand the fragility, and also, some of the anger that must have gone down when Davis severed ties with an artist he had called "brilliant" a year earlier. Forman's ambitions were stoked by his songwriting partner, David Levine. The two met when Forman, from a working class Orthodox Jewish family, moved from Brooklyn's East New York to rising middle class Forest Hills, Queens, in 11th grade. (Forest Hills spawned both the Ramones and Steely Dan's Walter Becker.)

 On "Who You Been Talking To," Levine is listed prominently on the inner sleeve as "co-lyricist." One song, the intriguingly odd "Little Asia," Forman wrote with Manhattan musician and writer Brian Cullman. But most of the tunes are Forman/Levine compositions, and they may have been too close to each other: the cleverness and allusions are sometimes so deep that the listener feels left out.

 The timing for this record was not good either. Who You Been Talking To is decidedly laid-back, considering the musical firepower Forman is surrounded with. Think about what it was competing against in 1977: Punk rock. Disco. The Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever.And the lush studio sounds of Fleetwood Mac, Boston, and The Eagles. Record companies were not looking to patiently develop quiet genius, not when consolidating radio formats under the rubric "Album Oriented Rock" were resulting not just in million sellers, but 10 million-selling albums.

 Much of the album is a distillation of black-Jewish relationships which date back to the earliest days of recorded sound and motion pictures, embodied by Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer," and certainly to the beginning of rock 'n roll, when Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote "Hound Dog" for Big Mama Thornton, and provided the words and music for Elvis Presley, the Coasters, and the Drifters among many others.

 The title song (Forman gets full composing credit) asks the question, "Who told you that I was a spy for the wonderful Rabbi of Love?" and "Who told you that I was a brother/of the Mystic Knights of the Sea," one of those pop culture references that made so many critic fans for Forman on his first album. The Mystic Knights of the Sea were the fraternal organization on the black TV show, "Amos and Andy."

 The gritty Forman-Levine "Thirty Dollars," one of the best performances on "Who You Been Talking To," has a rough New Orleans roll with a reference to "The Picadilly Jew" among many odd characters. Yet the lyrics are set in the dangerous New Jersey docks on the other side of the Goethals Bridge.

 And there's one more Jewish reference that might have troubled Clive Davis, himself a Brooklyn Jew whose tailored suits and commanding presence tried to gave the impression that he grew up in Mayfair, London. (Behind his back, he was sometimes referred to as "Mr. Steed," the posh spy portrayed in the 1960s British TV series "The Avengers.") One of the few uptempo tunes, "What is So Wonderful," begins with the lines: "There is no tragedy here, It's all in your memory dear..." But who is being addressed? A survivor of the concentration camps? A later verse begins: "Now that the Holocaust is here/You'd be a fool to stay on here..." The ambiguities are a little overwhelming: Is the song reassuring, or is it gaslighting?

 On the plus side is "A-Train Lady," is a retro New York soul ballad. It's lovely, one of the sweetest and smartest Forman-Levine songs, covered back then by Mink DeVille on the 1978 album "Return to Magenta" on Capitol. There's a "girl singer" who closes out the song with Willy DeVille: could it be Forman, using his convincing falsetto? But overall there are probably three ballads too many here to compete in an era of the Big Rock Album.

 Who You Been Talking To was produced by Nitszche and sax player Steve Douglas.  Forman and Levine go right for the feet, and the throat, on "Midnight Mambo," the most uptempo song here. And also, possibly the darkest. It doesn't just allude to the JFK assassination: It's in the narrative itself, in naming names of the most popular (and probably the most accurate) theory, that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone gunman, but somehow got caught up in a plot involving the CIA, encouraging Cuban emigres in Miami, with the involvement of the mob in Chicago (boss: Sam Giancana) and New Orleans. In a verse that begins with "Sam Giancana told Little Joe/You can call me Momo...Little Joe said if you got the dough/I can get to Castro." You could put those words to "Jailhouse Rock" and everyone would dance all night.

 Forman's knowledge of early rock is encyclopedic. He showed he could break through his quietude with an alter ego that led the neo-doo-wop act Little Isidore and the Inquisitors, a mid-1990s group so cool they could steal Sha Na Na's lunch money.

 They released two CDs of outstanding doo-wop. Forman was Little Isidore;  essential sidekick (producer, arranger, guitarist) was Johnny Gale using the pseudonym "Johnny Stompanato." The latter was a famed gangster from the 1950s, bodyguard to mobster Mickey Cohen, and often in the tabloids for his violent romance with movie star Lana Turner. (Turner's daughter stabbed Stompanato to death in 1958 in Beverly Hills.)

 The 1996 CD, by Little Isidore and the Golden Inquisitors, was called Inquisition of Love. The album features a number of originals mixed with doo-wop classics like "Peppermint Stick" by the El-Chords and "Peanuts" by Little Joe and the Flips. But all this "Inquisition" business reminds me of an oddball bit of pride when finding out that Christopher Columbus had numerous Jews on his ships in 1492 when he left Spain for the New World. Of course he did! The year 1492 was also the Inquisition, when Jews were expelled from Spain. And the King and Queen of Spain were convinced Columbus and crew would die when they sailed off the end of the flat earth. Which is kind of what happened to David Forman in 1976, except he made a good living writing advertising jingles, and eventually, came back.