July 18, 1986|By PATRICK GOLDSTEIN, Special to the News/Sun-Sentinel
You probably haven`t heard of Brock Walsh. He has helped write and produce hits for the Pointer Sisters (Automatic) as well as songs for James Ingram and Melissa Manchester (and he`s busy now writing a couple of tunes for the debut album by Moonlighting`s Bruce Willis).
But if you watched ABC-TV during the closing ceremonies of Liberty Weekend, you heard Walsh`s new song, We Belong Together. In fact, more people probably heard the airy ballad than anything by Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Peter Gabriel or any of the current chart toppers.
Franklin
And if you watch television the rest of the summer, you`re going to keep hearing the song, or at least excerpts from it, so much that you may want to throw your old Wham! records at the TV set. Because We Belong Together is the new ABC-TV fall theme song -- sans the usual clumsy tie-ins to whatever ``wacky`` comedies might populate the network`s schedule of shows.
Performed by Aretha Franklin and Leon Russell, it played in its entirety (three minutes) Liberty Weekend, accompanying film footage of ABC-TV stars with their friends and families. Excerpts from the song, ranging from four to 60 seconds, will also air throughout the summer.
``Listen, it`s great to reach an enormous audience,`` Walsh said. ``But it was also a real challenge to write. The whole idea was to create a mood that conveyed a sense of anticipation and relief. We wanted to capture the notion of a reunion, of regaining something that you`d missed.``
Walsh admitted that he`s being paid handsomely for his labors (``It`s the equivalent of the money you`d make from having a hit record``), but said his favorite part of the whole project was rubbing elbows in the studio with Aretha Franklin. ``Frankly, I just sat back in awe for a while,`` he said. ``I`ve been a fan of hers since I was 8 years old.``
Walsh acknowledged there was ``more work`` involved with Russell, explaining diplomatically that ``we had to find a middle ground between what he did instinctively and what I wanted from his performance.``
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Dylan
You always can expect the unexpected from Bob Dylan -- who else could put out a new album featuring collaborations with both Sam Shepard and Carole Bayer Sager?
The new record is Knocked Out Loaded. It includes Brownsville Girl, an 11- minute Dylan-Shepard epic; Under Your Spell, co-written by Sager and Dylan; Got to Get My Mind Made Up, a joint effort by Dylan and Tom Petty; They Killed Him, a Kris Kristofferson ballad; Ramble, a Dylan rewrite of an old Junior Parker song; and Maybe Someday, a Dylan original.