Speechless (Holmes): 
The Rupert Holmes Sessions

My very first time working with Rupert Holmes was on the 1976 Holmes produced album, Big Beat by the British rock group, Sparks. We spent several long days and nights in the studio with Sparks’ brothers Russel and Ron Mael. From that point forward, I worked alongside chief engineer, Bob Clearmountain on almost all of Holmes’ sessions that occurred at Mediasound.

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A Manhattan School of Music dropout who taught himself how to arrange and notate music, Holmes certainly had the chops of any ‘professional’ songwriter and arranger. However, at times he seemed to lean toward the feeling approach of a ‘troubadour’ which one day prompted me to ask if he worked his ideas out before each session. I was stunned when he told me that he didn’t give much thought to a song until it was right there in front of him. One of his production mainstays was to lift guitar riffs, bass lines and/or other elements from past unrelated hit songs and then to disguise those ideas enough to cause the listener to experience a degree of familiarity with the new song he was producing.

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After setting up the Sparks’ song ‘Big Boy’ on the 16-track machine, Holmes invited me to sing the background vocals along with him and the Mael brothers. After a few passes, Holmes was happy with the take but I left the session feeling our gang vocals sounded a bit amateur. Listening to the song today, however, I’ve come to realize that we were actually spot-on—all without any auto-tune.

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One evening Holmes ordered dinner for the crew and I happened to see the name David Goldstein on his credit card. I guess I couldn’t help myself when I suddenly blurted, “Did you steal David Goldstein’s credit card?” Holmes laughed and then explained that he took the name Rupert from a childhood book series entitled Rupert the Rabbit and the surname Holmes from Sherlock Holmes but never bothered to legally change his birth name. At times, he would talk about his dream of writing a Broadway musical based on the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. While I prepared the studio for the next session, Holmes would often diddle around on the Yamaha grand piano working out song fragments that would later become the hit tunes to his Tony Award winning musical, Drood.

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When Rupert Holmes’ Pursuit of Happiness LP was released, Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics, gave the song ‘Speechless’ a big fat ‘C’ in his review, which read: “As a much-covered pop singer-songwriter who narrated well-crafted musical soap operas, Holmes earned neither popular nor critical status. So now he’s pursued fame by moving to an avowed singles label, jettisoning the narrative and steering between Jimmy Webb literacy at his best (‘Less Is More’) and Paul Williams pap at his worst (‘Speechless’). JANTURAN thought ‘Speechless’ deserved a second chance.