For former all-pro defensive lineman Mike Reid, being on the line as composer of a new musical has been “infinitely more difficult” than being on the line in an NFL playoff game.
The 6-foot-3, 230-pound Reid, who played for the Cincinnati Bengals in the early 1970s and looks powerful enough to bench-press a piano, wrote the music for “The Ballad of Little Jo,” Steppenwolf Theatre’s current production and the first musical ever to be presented at the theater.
“The attraction of sports,” said Reid, “is that it’s black and white and there are these little morality police running around in striped shirts, telling you when you’ve made a mistake. You step out of that and into [the theater], and it’s a vast expanse of shades of gray where somebody may say, `That’s the best show I’ve ever seen,’ and somebody else two rows down says, `That was the worst show I’ve ever seen.'”
During a dazzlingly diverse career that has stretched from the gridiron to the Grammys, the 53-year-old composer has been unaccustomed to hearing the word “worst.” In Nashville, where he has lived and worked for 20 years, he has written tunes recorded by a fleet of famous singers, including Nancy Wilson, Anita Baker, Willie Nelson, Kenny Rogers, Bette Midler, Wynonna Judd and Bonnie Raitt (whose rendition of his “I Can’t Make You Love Me” has sold more than 6 million copies).
In Steppenwolf’s “The Ballad of Little Jo,” many of Reid’s songs, with lyrics by Sarah Schlesinger, are sung by another major vocal talent, Broadway veteran Judy Kuhn (“Les Miserables,” “Chess,” “She Loves Me”), who plays Jo. Reid, who still has plenty of adrenaline left from his days in the NFL trenches, said Kuhn’s “immaculate intonation” calms him down: “When she opens her mouth and the sound comes out, it induces in me a relaxation response.”
Inspired by director Maggie Greenwald’s 1993 movie, “The Ballad of Little Jo,” which was based on a real life, Steppenwolf’s musical is the story of a woman in the late 1800s who has a baby out of wedlock. She is sent away by her family to the American West, where she disguises herself as a man for several years until one day, she sheds her masculine clothing and rediscovers what Reid calls her “elemental self. That is a touching thing.”
Reid said he became involved with “Little Jo” about four years ago while working on another musical project. “The artistic director of Opera Memphis, Michael Ching, who was a mentor of mine and a seriously wonderful classical composer, had asked me if I would be interested in writing an opera. I said, `Well, hell, I’m ready to go because I have no idea how to do this.'”
The librettist Reid found to work with on that piece, about the pressures of fame in American sports, was Schlesinger, a talented New York lyricist. (Their one-act opera, “Different Fields,” premiered at the New Victory Theatre in New York in 1996.)
Coincidentally, Schlesinger was beginning to develop a musical piece based on the “Little Jo” movie. Reid signed on to work with her and together they spent seven weeks in New York in impresario Hal Prince’s Musical Theatre Program, shaping “Little Jo,” still in its infancy, into a 45-minute piece.
Later, Steppenwolf ensemble member Tina Landau read their finished, full-length version and heard three of the “Little Jo” songs.
“The songs were `Everything That Touched Her,’ `Listen to the Rain’ and `Unbuttoning the Buttons,'” Landau said, “and I thought, these are three of the greatest ballads I’ve ever heard. I remember I was listening in my car, and I was driving and crying.” Landau was determined to direct the show.
“I find the `Little Jo’ score so transporting and emotional,” added Landau, who directed the Goodman’s “Floyd Collins” last year and will direct a revival of “Bells Are Ringing” this spring on Broadway. “Where another composer might work from the head, Mike works from the heart and soul.”
Reid has an uncanny knack for writing musical “hooks”–melodic lines that stick in your head — but he can’t explain how he does it. “Nothing comes easily for me. It comes a measure at a time and it’s very slow,” he said.
“I have to write an awful lot of bad, unusable stuff to get to the good stuff,” said the composer, who works in a studio across the yard from his home in Nashville, where he lives with his wife and two teenage children.
Reid recalled growing up “in a blue-collar house” in Altoona, Pa., where he “played sports with a pack of friends 12 months a year,” but he also played piano.
“I actually asked to take lessons” at age 6, said the songwriter. “My grandmother, who lived next door, had an old hand-carved upright piano on her sun porch, and my earliest memory of life is banging on those keys.”
As a teen he was moved by church hymns and by the pop tunes of the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. “I was thrilled by that music,” he said. But he also remembers “riding my bike across town to a buddy’s house, and having him play for me a recording of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. That floored me.”
He won a scholarship to Penn State, where he was captain of the football team and a two-time All-America who graduated as a music major. A first-round draft pick of the Bengals in 1970, he signed for $22,000. “I thought I was set for life,” he said.
In the off-season, he began to perform, appearing with symphony orchestras in Dallas, Cincinnati and San Antonio. “I played a thunderous piano piece by Liszt and a few things I had written,” he recalled. “I think I was sort of a novelty.”
After leaving the Bengals — with fingers intact for the keyboard — he went “on the road, playing little coffeehouses up and down the southeast coast,” and managed to snag a songwriting job in Nashville for $100 a week. He called his early tunes “pretty hopelessly romantic,” but added, “everything is on its way to becoming something else and that includes yourself as a writer.”
The roots of his “Little Jo” music can be found, in part, he said, in the American music he loves: Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” “Billy the Kid,” and “Rodeo,” plus folk tunes and spirituals.
He has steeped himself in 20th Century music: “I love the music of the times in which I live,” he said. A huge fan of composers Samuel Barber and Walter Piston, he added he “worships at the altar” of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Sweeney Todd,” and Benjamin Britten’s operas, “Peter Grimes” and “Billy Budd.”
He calls Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” “the quintessential American opera,” adding that “the academicians in the music business are resistant to that [notion], I think, because it has songs in it. It seems they think that if you succumb to melody, that you’ve made some sort of vulgar choice,” he said, singing the opening bars of “Summertime.”
Reid has ceased to be apologetic about his own straightforward melodies. “I came into [theatrical composing] as a songwriter and I used to hang my head and be reticent about that. But I think one of the crown jewels of American music is a beautifully direct, simple country song that speaks to us all.”
Startlingly modest for a man who has had considerable success in the ego-drenched fields of professional sports and popular music, Reid said he shuns the label “artist. I am distrustful of that word.” He added he views the audience as “fellow travelers,” and hopes they will leave the theater with melodies he’s written playing in their heads.
Reid is currently working with Schlesinger on the score for a musical adaptation of “Shane,” slated to be produced on Broadway.
Even though it has been more difficult than pro football, his music has been “infinitely” more satisfying than pro ball, he said: “I knew that I was just passing through my athletic life, that I wasn’t going to stop there. My life began the day I quit football.”
