Shadow Morton, uh, showed up in our offices one day with an acetate of "Remember Walking in the Sand" by this group, uh, called the Shangri-las. And he was their Svengali. He wrote the songs and taught them the songs and produced the sessions, and these were kind of teen soap operas. And uh, he was rather brilliant at it. He was very original. And he got the name Shadow because we would never know where he was. We'd be waiting for him and suddenly discover that he was in the corner of the room. And he would leave just as mysteriously.

He was sort of like the invisible man. You know, the kid was one of the best looking young men I'd seen in maybe 25 or 30 years, and I thought it would be great for him, you know, if he would go to the actor's schools, because he had this, he had this artistic quality, no question about it. But he was, uh, completely uneducated, you know? He didn't really have any formal education. Everything he did was really from gut instinct. And everything he did had that kind of originality about it, you know. And he was a good guy and we both liked him a lot.

"Is That All There Is…when you wrote it as opposed to when Peggy Lee later came along and recorded, is that some reflection of how you were feeling about the record business at that point, was that when Redbird ...?

I think it was a little broader and a little deeper than that.

Name the song.

Oh, yeah. "Is That All There Is" was originally an experiment. Um, actually I started writing that song, the lyrics on the song in 1966, and um, we had broken up the record company and we'd given it to George Goldner. And uh, we just had the publishing company left and Mike, Mike and myself were wondering what to do next as, for some forward motion, and what we were thinking about was really the theater. Because we'd always had one eye on the theater. And I started playing around with some song ideas that were a little bit more complicated than, than, normal stuff, the usual stuff that we had written. And I was working in a way that I, where I thought we could come up with some cabaret type material. And, um, there's, there's a very interesting -- there's a number of stories attached to the song, and I'd like to get the part that's really, kind of confounding with Mike, but I'll let him tell you his part in a minute. I'm making this very short.

It's too late.

It's too late. It's too late to make a long story short is what he means.

Yeah.

So why don't you tell the mysterious part of the writing of the song.

Well, what happened was that Jerry had written this, uh, very provocative vignettes. And I said to him, well, I would like to set that to some music, but I don't think they ought to be sung or rhymed or well obviously, they were already unrhymed, and to have them recited. So I created a, uh, musical background to the vignettes. And at that time, Georgia Brown, uh, who had starred in "Oliver" on Broadway, was going to return to London after many years in the States. And she came up, she said, I would love you guys to give me some material for my return show in London, London Television. And since we had this, we, we played it. And she and uh, her arranger, Peter Metz, fell in love with it, and they said well, but is there a refrain, is there something that comes in between. And we had a refrain and we just performed it, and they fell in love with it. Um, it wasn't a bad refrain, but when they left, Jerry and I looked at each other and said, you know, it doesn't really make any sense. And uh, Jerry said, well, look, I'm going to work on it. And I said, well, okay, I'm going to go home and think about it. And I came back to his apartment the next day. And I said, I got a tune. And he said, well, wait a minute, I got a lyric. I said, well, wait, let me play you the tune. And he said, well, all right, go ahead. And I played him the tune, and as I started to play it, he sang the lyric, and I didn't have to adjust one note and he didn't have to adjust one syllable. It fit absolutely perfectly, and there's only one rhyme in the whole piece. And that's have a ball, if that's all.

And that's where the cadence fell.

Well, since this is about more than the record business, what more about the record business.

Which is what's more than the record business. Oh, I see. Uh, I think, you know, I uh, was at a certain point in my life where I was sort of, I'll, I'll tell you the main thing about, you know, feelings up and down, artists always have all kinds of severe swings, at least I always did. Um, but more than talking about literally was it an expression of my malaise, or my, whatever, melancholy or disappointment or whatever, as it well might be, as also some of the funniest songs you'll ever hear are expressions of the same kind of melancholy, just turned the other way, to deal with it. I mean, all the clowns are really, you know, miserable, depressed, all right. Um, that, that the song was more an expression of an adult attitude. Both of us were sort of tired of playing around in the adolescent, you know, creative ditch, writing simple rock 'n' roll songs. We'd done that for all of our lives, from at least, from 1950 until 1966. And we did a lot of it. And we really were I think longing to create things on our own level. We had become adults, and we wanted to write adult material. And that was the first attempt to write something more complex and more adult than we had.