The late Alan O'Day called his one moment of singing stardom a "nocturnal novelette."
Sometimes, the best songs come from the least likeliest places. And in this case, "Undercover Angel" came to O'Day in a dream.
Then again, good songwriters also find the avenues to craft a good song. And by 1977, O'Day had already been a well-known songwriter.
Born on October 3, 1940, in Hollywood, Calif., O'Day grew up with parents who each worked two jobs. Both worked at the area newspaper, The Pasadena Star-News, his dad a photographer, mom a news writer with his mother working as a school teacher and dad doing publicity for the Pam Springs Chamber of Commerce.
By the time he was 6, O'Day was developing melodies on his toy xylophone and at 11, was singing songs to his classmates on ukelele. He formed his own group, The Shoves, when he was 15. But while that band allowed him to perform 1950s songs by artists such as Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, O'Day began working in another group called The Renés, a group that played Latin and Mexican music, but allowed O'Day to write songs for them.
He would also be a part of two other groups, The Archs, then later on, Alan & Bob & Denny. On November 14, 1965, the latter act made it to the stage on The Ed Sullivan Show performing behind actress/singer/comedienne Virginia O'Brien.
Meanwhile, O'Brien wanted to get his foot through the door in Hollywood as a songwriter. He attended a class taught by an accomplished songwriter, Al Kasha, at UCLA teaching the finer points of writing songs. Kasha brought a lot of credibility to the course considering he worked in New York's famous Brill Building and worked alongside fellow stars in the making such as Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Hal David, Burt Bacharach and Neil Diamond. Kasha would also write the Peppermint Rainbow's "Will You Be Staying After Sunday?" and in 1972, wrote "The Morning After" from The Poseidon Adventure and won an Oscar along with co-writer Joel Hirschhorn
Honing those skills, O'Day got his foot in the door with E.H. Morris Music in 1969. Two years later, he took his talents to Warner Brothers Music, where that year, he scored his first Top 40 success as a songwriter when Bobby Sherman took "The Drum" to No. 29 that spring. By 1973, O'Day was ready to take on a singing career and recorded the album, "Caress Me Pretty Music." However, with little name recognition, the album did not sell well and O'Day soon returned to songwriting.
In 1974, he had the biggest year of his career. He wrote three big Top 40 hits. There was Cher's "Train Of Thought," which peaked at No. 27. The breakthrough hit for O'Day, though, was the song that brought Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield back together again as the Righteous Brothers, "Rock And Roll Heaven," a solemn tribute to rock and roll stars who had passed on, some way too soon. That climbed to No. 3 in the summer of '74.
That wasn't all, though. He wrote "Angie Baby," a tale of a troubled teenaged girl who lives out her own fantasies each night in her room listening to the songs on the radio. That tune climbed the chart and hit No. 1 for Helen Reddy on December 28, 1974, the last chart of the year (though AT40 was counting down the 100 biggest songs of the year that week).
In a blog he did called "Marathon Man?" O'Day admitted that he could bang out a song for another artist without thinking twice.
"When I receive an assignment from someone else to 'Have this done by Thursday,' it gets done and done professionally," he wrote.
While he continued to write songs for others, he was wondering what kind of a second chance he might have as an artist himself. In 1976, O'Day got a second chance when Warner Brothers formed a record label for only songwriters, Pacific Records. Seizing the opportunity put in front of him, O'Day began working on the album that would be titled "Appetizers." As O'Day kept writing songs, he would check them off working with veteran producers Steve Barri and Michael Omartian, then go into the studio and record them, one at a time.
He also admitted in that same blog that he's his own toughest customer.
"When I am the one giving the assignment, I don't fare as well," he wrote. "I know deep inside that I am happiest when I'm moving in a direction rather than aimlessly flailing around. But I have trouble setting goals and gaining momentum on my writing when so many other tasks are yelling, 'Do me!' each hour, each day."
So seeking to get some sort of rest, O'Day went to bed one night not believing what he was seeing in his head. In his "dream," he is lonely lying in his bed when an angel comes down from nowhere, lays down next to him and the two make love, encouraged by her to give her a try. But by the end, she has to leave him and he is sad, but she gives him the words that stand out in the dream.
"Go find the right one, love her and then ... when you look into her eyes, you'll see me again."
O'Day wrote the song and recorded it the same day with Omartian and Barri in February 1977. The rest of the album would be done by that March, but both producers and singer-songwriter were in agreement – the first single from the album had to be "Undercover Angel." Released on Pacific Records, "Undercover Angel" debuted on the Hot 100 at an unappealing No. 98 on April 2, 1977. But it grew in popularity as the weeks past – it went from No. 98 to No. 88 to No. 78 to No. 67 to No. 54 and eventually landed in the Top 40 at No. 40 on May 7, 1977. It took a nice leap its first week in the Top 40 to No. 28, then followed that up with a leap to No. 18. A week later, it was at No. 14, then No. 11. Then on June 11, 1977, "Undercover Angel" entered the Top 10 at No. 8.
"Undercover Angel" was far from undercover at this point and would leap to No. 6. After that, it entered the Top 5 at No. 3, moved to No. 2, then on the week of July 9, 1977, "Undercover Angel" became the No. 1 song in America. It would spend just one week at the top, but would become the third "fantasy" song of the rock era to hit the top, as Casey Kasem would point out, after O'Day's first No. 1 hit for Reddy, "Angie Baby" and the next No. 1 in the country, Elton John's remake of the Beatles' smash, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," in January 1975."Undercover Angel" would eventually earn O'Day a gold record, selling 1 million copies of the single. But O'Day could never have a proper follow-up. He would hit the chart only once more with "Started Out Dancing, Ended Up Making Love" in 1978. It peaked at No. 73.
Overseas, though, O'Day would have success. His own song, "Skinny Girls" went to No. 11 in Australia in 1980. Then in the 2000 decade, he co-wrote a pair of Top 20 hits in Japan for Tatsuro Yamashita, "Love Can Go The Distance" hit No. 18 in 2000 and in 2008, Yamashita went to No. 4 in his native country with "Angel Of The Light."
In between in 1983, O'Day met singer-songwriter Janis Liebhart. The pair would co-write a song that would be taken for the animated Saturday morning show Jim Henson's Muppet Babies. Within the next eight years, the pair wrote over a hundred songs for the show and earned an Emmy Award for their work. After that show, the pair teamed up to do another children-based show for National Geographic called Really Wild Animals. It was a project they not only produced, but got to sing on as well.
After that was over, O'Day moved to Nashville to write some more and also be a musical and creative consultant. In 2012, O'Day wrote and performed the title song from the movie You Don't Say, which starred Julia Chereson, Gary Gow and Rob Frankel.
But in November 2012, O'Day was having headaches and went to his doctor. Turns out he would be diagnosed with brain cancer. For the next six months, O'Day continued to tour small clubs and write. On May 17, 2013, O'Day lost his battle to cancer at the age of 72.
In another blog interview he did titled "Some Thoughts About My Life & Maybe Yours," O'Day wrote, "This brings me to an important lesson I've learned: The joy of creating is in the process, not just in the result. If you love the process of what you do, it is its own reward; and anything else is just icing on the cake of life! It's the trip, not the destination."
And with that one Top 40 hit – and No. 1 hit, no less – O'Day took us on a trip that we won't ever forget, filled mostly in a nighttime story.
A "nocturnal novelette."
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