Almost Famous: How unsung singer Scott Wilk made the greatest lost album of the '80s

Has nothing changed in 30 years?

Record companies remain ruthless -- they're just not doing all the dictating anymore. We're still living in a musically-material world: iTunes creates our playlists, American Idol commands our tastes and a satellite controls our dials. None of this existed at the turn of the '80s. It was, as rock 'n' roll photographer Richard Schoenberg puts it, "the last time music would not be sold on television."
It was sold on the radio, where disc jockeys spun singles -- songs sold as seven-inch vinyl discs in glossy paper sleeves. Some even offered an extra cut on the B-side. MTV would showcase these singles in a new way in 1981, a year that marked the end of a little-known rock band that came awfully close to going big.

You've likely never heard of Scott Wilk + The Walls; even Google can't tell you much. One might find the Chicago band's lone album bookended by Wilderness Road and John Buck Wilkin records within the stacks of a secondhand vinyl shop. During the summer of 1980, copies of Scott Wilk + The Walls were displayed side by side in store windows to form an abstract puzzle. Its simple artistic design, created by Wilk's high school friend, smacked of a new decade.
The Walls would appear and vanish within a year's time. Without a hit single or a solid tour, a phone call from Hawaii would serve as strike three for the new wave quartet.

"We need to hear from you today," a voice barked into Mark Wolfe's answering machine.

It was Warner Brothers Records on the line. Executives there had a new rule: no second album without first hearing the band's new demos. The first release, Scott Wilk + The Walls, never charted. It barely sold.
The story of what was said during that phone call between Warner Brothers and Wilk's manager isn't clear -- Wolfe adamantly refuses to acknowledge the conversation. Whether or not Wolfe lost his temper (as some claim happened) doesn't change the fact that Scott Wilk had, by the end of that call, lost his record contract. What's worse, Wilk had the new songs ready for Warner's review -- an album's worth -- but suddenly found himself stuck in Los Angeles without the record deal that brought him there. It was early 1981, and Scott Wilk + The Walls were done.

Building The Walls

By 1971 one could easily gauge the American attitude toward the Vietnam war by observing what was happening in Chicago. Take that morning in January, when more than 200 men in the city failed to show for Selective Service induction. Northern Illinois was quickly surpassing the rest of the nation in draft evasion cases that month.

One Friday, not far from Northwestern University, F.B.I. agents arrested a 22-year-old musician manager. He was immediately arraigned on charges of draft evasion before a federal judge. Mark Wolfe posted the $1,000 bail himself, but couldn't escape a mention in the next day's Chicago Tribune blotter.

Three hundred miles east in an Ohio college town, a music student was working on a song with Noel Paul Stookey, known to millions as middleman Paul of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Scott Wilk -- tall, lanky and bespectacled -- had spent most of his 18 years making music. Born in November 1952 to his piano-playing mother, Wilk would pick up the clarinet at age six; by 11 he'd write his first song.
"He had an innate connection with what music is and could be," remembers Highland Park High School friend Thom Glabman.
"Scott also had the drive necessary to function and succeed in the commercial world of music," an Oberlin professor recalls. That, Wilk would discover, would take time. Almost a decade of writing and recording jingles in a Chicago studio passed. Wilk wanted more. He could write, he could sing, he could play most instruments. He needed only a band.



In 1979 Wilk recruited three guys he knew from the studio: Roger Ciszon, a guitarist with a blues bent; bassist Bob Lizik, the group's funkiest and, at almost 30, oldest member; and Tom Scheckel, whose tight, groove-oriented drumming provided the perfect backbeat for what would become Scott Wilk + The Walls. Wilk, the frontman on keyboards and vocals, rehearsed his band and prepped them for a trip to Los Angeles -- they were lined up to audition for dozens of record labels, courtesy of Wilk's new manager. The man's name was Mark Wolfe.

"We did showcase after showcase," remembers Bruce Gaitsch, who joined Scott Wilk + The Walls during the band's first auditions in West Hollywood. "No label guy showed any interest. They were all stone-faced after our short set."
"It was intimidating," says guitarist Roger Ciszon of the band's first days in California. "But we had the energy and we pulled it off."
The late '70s had thrown electronic experimentation into the punk rock mix; something called new wave music was washing away rock's current political brashness with the sounds of synthesizers. Bands like Devo and Talking Heads were creating something more complex, more cerebral. All Music Guide simplifies the distinction: "Where post-punk was arty, difficult, and challenging, new wave was pop music, pure and simple." Bands exhibiting the style were fast approaching dime-a-dozen status by 1979.

If obscurity was hell, musical purgatory might well have been the front office at Warner Brothers, where bands like Urban Verbs and Code Blue barely got past the receptionist. "A lot of them had no chance of surviving," says Richard Seireeni, the label's former creative director. "It was a crapshoot."
Former A&R representative Felix Chamberlain compares the era to "the running of the bulls at Pamplona. You just get stampeded by the big guys, like Van Halen and Prince.
"But everybody really, really, really liked Scott," adds Chamberlain, who helped sign 26-year-old Wilk to Warner Brothers in September 1979.
"Everybody thought this was going to be the next big, big thing," bassist Bob Lizik says of the band's first meeting with the record company.


Becoming almost famous

Scott Wilk's passion and efforts culminated Monday, 31 March 1980, when he and his band first entered the now-defunct Cherokee Studios. The building at 751 Fairfax Avenue had been home to decades of album recording sessions. It was here where Scott Wilk + The Walls would record their first -- and last -- notes.
On this particular day rock band Toto had just wrapped a session for its Turn Back album, which left Jeff Porcaro's drum kit at Tom Scheckel's disposal.
"Being a fresh 25-year-old kid with my own style to create, I detuned them and started over," he says. "I've often wondered what the tracks might've sounded like had I left Porcaro's tuning on them. Maybe we would've had a hit."

A hit for The Walls wasn't out of reach -- famed producer Michael Omartian, 64, who would go on to make dozens of successful songs, including "We Are The World" and "She Works Hard For The Money," stepped in to help Wilk with the album's sound.
Omartian would take home several Grammy Awards in 1981, including Album of the Year, for his production on Christopher Cross.
"Oddly enough," Omartian says from his Nashville studio, "it was the album that I thought wouldn't do well that turned out to be the big hit. I loved being able to go from Chris's polished sound to the alternative, punk sound of Scott's record."
"He was coming off of his mega success with 'Sailing' at the time, which made me initially skeptical about whether he would get what we were up to," says Wilk. "He turned out to be a fantastic person to have as a co-producer, in that he let me have my head but steered me away from trouble."
Nothing, however, would quite steer Scott Wilk + The Walls toward stardom, though Billboard noted in August 1980 the band "delivered sinuous rock situated somewhere on the plateau flanked by Tom Petty and Elvis Costello."
The comparison to two of rock 'n' roll's leaders was without question the most encouraging press The Walls would realize during their whirlwind year of recording and touring. Wilk's catchy melodies and layered arrangements on songs like "Man In The Mirror" and "Shorting Out" were, at the very least, garnering appreciation from audiences beyond Chicago's FM circles.


I'm feelin' Radioactive
think I'm gonna melt down tonight
Feelin' Radioactive
like uranium dynamite
You really got my Geiger counter clickin'
got a hydrogen heart -- can't you hear it tickin'
I'm Radioactive -- 'cause you're so attractive
Feelin' Radioactive gonna melt down tonight


A European police siren wails over Scheckel's explosive crash cymbal, which jump starts "Radioactive," an up-tempo adventure of a song not far from the approach of The Ramones. Wilk's voice evokes images of Joe Jackson, Ric Ocasek, even a bit of Bowie. A herky-jerky, freewheeling David Byrne angst peppers an Elvis Costello likeness that would draw criticism from the alternative press.
Scott Wilk + The Walls are one hell of a long way from jingle territory here. Their songs stretch across the musical spectrum: Wilk brings a classical touch to Ciszon's hard rock spirit, while Scheckel and Lizik have the jazz and funk areas covered. The group comes together to create a confident, experimental new wave album.
The textured "Victim Of Circumstance" weaves a metallic percussive click through a sardonic song of personal consequence, highlighted by Ciszon's speedy picking on his '62 Gibson Firebird. What sounds like a slight false start on Wilk's keyboards launches "Man In The Mirror" into one of the album's catchiest hooks about an identity crisis. Scheckel's hypnotic toms and hi-hat thunder through tracks like "Danger Becomes Apparent," while Lizik's throbbing bassline underscores a dark depth to the spastic "Shorting Out," which could well be Scott Wilk's "Psycho Killer."

The band's first single, the paranoid "Suspicion," would find an audience on Chicago radio in the summer of 1980, and was added to playlists as far away as Cleveland.

Former WMMS-FM program director John Gorman claims "the song never really caught on. It received three to four spins a day for about three weeks. July is a rough month to establish a new artist," he says.

"This brooding cut might forge its way into Top 40 and AOR playlists," Billboard predicted the following month. Nothing happened. Warner Brothers, in its effort to expose Scott Wilk + The Walls to a national audience, wanted a music video for "Suspicion." There was talk of a television station that would, within a year, broadcast these things around the clock.

A prickly feelin' creepin' down your spine
A blind alley in the back of your mind
And in the shadows where no light shines
Suspicion
Suspicion

The band shot a sequence on the second floor of a post-production house, an appropriate location which still stands on Chicago's Grand Avenue. Garry Gassel knew Wilk from his jingle-composing days, and assembled a team to shoot and edit what would become the music video. It was beyond low-budget; it had no budget. Gassel's assistants had worked for free, which meant weeks of labor to hammer out the four-minute clip.
The video stalks a nervous Wilk who traverses tight hallways, anxiously jiggles doorknobs and winds up trapped inside a game of Pong. "As dated and stupid as that video looks, it was comparable to videos of that time," Gassel says.
That wouldn't make any difference. By the time Gassel presented his finished product to Warner Brothers, the label had already dropped Scott Wilk + The Walls. "Suspicion" never aired on MTV.

The Costello comparison

"Suspicion" had legs to keep Scott Wilk + The Walls going on a modest tour of clubs and colleges. A hair salon now stands in place of Tuts, on Chicago's West Belmont Avenue, where the band first played in May 1980. Once they released the album in August, The Walls performed for a crowd of 5,000 as the opening act for ChicagoFest headliners Robin Lane & The Chartbusters. Momentum would push The Walls toward the band's biggest gig: opening for The Pretenders, who had topped both the U.S. and U.K. charts with "Brass In Pocket." It was to be short-lived; Scott Wilk + The Walls replaced The English Beat for a single show.


Meanwhile, rock journalists were accusing Wilk of mimicking Elvis Costello's look and sound.
"Scott Wilk needs to branch out," advised Billboard.
Trouser Press writes: "Encountering the line between artistic influence and stylistic plagiarism, Scott Wilk grabbed a copy of Elvis Costello's Armed Forces and blithely pushed ahead."
The late '70s had killed off Presley and birthed an all-new Elvis, this one from England, who rolled in with the new wave tide in 1977. His songs were addictive, melodic and, unlike Wilk's music, overtly political and heard internationally. One could argue similarities exist -- the energetic bridge of Wilk's "Too Many Questions" easily qualifies as Elvis-esque. There are, however, obvious differences between Wilk and Costello's talents: They play different instruments, for starters. And while Costello can write a hit song in his sleep, Wilk can sing much more articulately. The media, however, ignored Wilk's originality, and hastily wrote off Scott Wilk + The Walls as pop poseurs.
"I took it in at a deeper level than I should have let it," Wilk says. "There was no conscious effort to emulate him."
Had Wilk chosen to imitate anyone, it was, by his admission, a quirky American singer-songwriter with a similar appreciation for tongue-in-cheek lyrics and fun melodies.
"Michael Omartian called me the new wave Randy Newman. That's what I was trying to be, I guess," Wilk says of the musician whose success peaked during the '70s. "He completely floors me."
Scott Wilk and Randy Newman share a knack for scoring films; Newman has won several Grammys for his work on movies like the computer-animated Monsters, Inc. Today he's arranging the music for Toy Story 3, due in theatres next summer.


Scott Lawrence Wilk, trim and handsome at 56, sports silver streaks through a dark mane of hair that cascades from high above his round glasses. Contacted by phone the day before Michael Jackson's death, Wilk sounds a bit apprehensive to discuss his fleeting year as a major label musician. It was, after all, half a lifetime ago.
"Perhaps we should just chat on Facebook," he graciously suggests with a trace of nasality in his voice.
He's lived outside Los Angeles since Warner Brothers signed him 30 years ago. His son, a college student, studies broadcast journalism less than an hour from home. Wilk enjoys blogging and social networking when he's not composing music from his home studio, but doesn't communicate much with his old band members back in Chicago. Before those guys could make the move to California in 1981, a phone call from Hawaii -- the conversation manager Mark Wolfe won't discuss -- stopped The Walls in their tracks in Illinois.
"I placed an inordinate amount of trust in him to steer the band, and ended up with a terrible mistake," Wilk says of his former manager, with whom he hasn't spoken in 25 years. "I was way too naive."
Wilk, caught in the crossfire between his manager and record company, had his new material for the follow-up album heard, but it was too late. A shouting match had erupted between Wolfe and Warner Brothers, he says. The contract was gone. Wilk eventually decided against taking his manager to court.
"We worked our balls off," grumbles Roger Ciszon, 54. "We were just left hanging. Though I had been through many band breakups prior, that one hit me rather hard."


...And The Walls came tumbling down

The track that concludes what would be the only album from Scott Wilk + The Walls seems to eerily reflect the band's collision course with Warner Brothers. "Shadow-Box Love," a sultry, dark tale of love gone wrong, almost hints at the morbidity of The Beatles' "A Day In The Life." Both songs gently begin with ironic lyrics and culminate with haunting, powerful piano chords.
"Michael Omartian played the piano solo in one inspired take," remembers Wilk.
Of the more than 100 albums Warner Brothers released in 1980, most have received the compact disc reissue treatment, regardless of their obscurity. Scott Wilk + The Walls appears to be the lone exception. Somewhere along the way, the C.D. revolution neglected this gem.
David McLees, former senior vice president of A&R at Rhino Entertainment, expects the album will remain unavailable.
"C.D. is a dying format," he says. "Unless the record company sees great sales potential, then it won't get to first base. Least likely, there's something great in the vaults that the record company is unaware of and hasn't got around to it."

Why? Sales? Politics? Was new wave old hat? What broke down The Walls?
"It seemed that there was an awful lot of similar music in the marketplace. That is in no way to denigrate the quality of Scott's music, but there was quite a logjam of punk and alternative going on," offers album producer Michael Omartian.
Scott Wilk, determined to "stretch" his style after reading those biting record reviews, by 1983 had cut his hair, lost his glasses, and founded electronic dance group Bone Symphony. The band -- a deliberate departure from the sound of The Walls -- recorded a five-song E.P. for Capitol Records and landed a single on the Revenge of the Nerds soundtrack.
"I just think that pop music was shifting to a different vibe and there was some very exciting music happening that we wanted to be part of," says former bandmate Marc Levinthal.
Wilk would compose the soundtrack for the film Valley Girl, and record with musicians like Harold Faltermeyer and Charlie Sexton. The '90s would find Wilk releasing a concept album under the moniker Swyvel. The sound collage communicates the story of a man's struggle with amnesia following a car crash.

The other Walls -- Lizik, Ciszon and Scheckel -- returned to Chicago following the band's breakup. The unexpected end of Scott Wilk + The Walls would lead its members toward other musical avenues there.
While Roger Ciszon has been in and out of several bands in his hometown of Palatine, you've likely heard the music of drummer Tom Scheckel; he played for President Obama in January, in what was the drummer's second inaugural ball in four years.
"They're like any other corporate gig," he says.
Since 1983 Scheckel, 54, has backed up oldies group favorite The Buckinghams, whose '60s hits include "Kind Of A Drag" and "Don't You Care."
Bob Lizik -- a session bass player in high demand -- would go on to back up artists like Madonna and Billy Joel. Perhaps Lizik's most notable gig was spent with Beach Boys founder and Pet Sounds mastermind Brian Wilson. Lizik agreed to play alongside Wilson for a handful of concerts during his Imagination tour in 1998.
"Brian gave me very specific direction," says Lizik. "Those few tour dates turned into ten years."
Former bandmate Chuck Soumar says, "All I can say about Bob Lizik is that he is the consummate professional. He is the best at what he does."
Lizik, 59, ended up recording several albums with Wilson, and retired from touring last year.

Though the three former Walls live within a short drive of one another in Cook County, Illinois, they rarely see each other. The band left its founder in Hollywood on good terms 30 years ago, but there's never been talk of a reunion.
"I have tremendous respect and affection for those guys. I've never felt more comfortable with anyone in the studio," says Wilk of the band he formed during his days as a budding composer.
His Walls agree. Casual phone calls and occasional spins of the album aside, however, the four men haven't been in the same room since Warner Brothers dropped them in early 1981.

From Oberlin music student to jingle writer to quasi-celebrity, the prolific Scott Wilk scores television shows (remember Duckman?) and international commercials (ever tried Kirin Ichiban® beer?) from his home production studio, Scott Wilk Music, outside Los Angeles.
Says Everett Peck, creator of the mid-'90s animated series Duckman: "What I tried to do with Duckman was match the fantastic writing we had with equally strong visuals and music. Scott understood this and really succeeded beautifully."

Who knew a great lost Warner Brothers album from 1980 would catapult Scott Wilk + The Walls into a musical world where record sales don't determine true success?

Elvis Costello once admitted to a certain musical inspiration during the recording of his debut album, My Aim Is True.
"I hadn't really found my own voice," he writes in the reissue's liner notes. "I certainly learned quite a bit while shamelessly attempting to copy Randy Newman. It was just part of my apprenticeship."

You've never heard of Scott Wilk + The Walls. But you've heard them. You've witnessed their contributions, however subliminal, in film, on the radio, at concerts halfway around the globe. They've somehow always managed to be almost famous.

"It's been said that if someone can talk you out of being a writer, or a songwriter, or an artist of any stripe, well," Scott Wilk pauses to reflect, "you should probably look into what else you can do."