LiveDaily contributing writer Don Zulaica caught up with the affable songwriter to talk java, history, and of course, a little about the Schoolhouse.

LiveDaily: "Too Much Coffee Man" is your second Blue Note album. Who did you have a contract with before that?

Bob Dorough: Before Blue Note, I didn't really have a contract with anybody. I started on Bethlehem, and I was under contract, but they folded--wasn't my fault, I always think. [laughs] The rest has been spotty. One was reissued on Inner City, and I made a couple of albums on my own label. But of course, there's nothing like being on a major label. Came down late in my life--I got a call from Blue Note, and I love it.

Are there any favorite songs from the album?

I sort of like the title song, because it's very hard-bluesy. And I also like my new song, "Where Is the Song?", which nobody else seems to like. I was hoping a lot of other singers would get it. Of course, Mr. Bruce Lundvall requested that I repeat "There's Never Been a Day" and "I've Got Just About Everything." And he also liked "Love (Webster's Definition)." I had recorded "There's Never Been A Day" with Art Farmer in Paris, and I'm very enamored of that because it has a verse like a high-class Rogers and Hart song.

How did you first get involved in music?

I started my love of music on the clarinet in the high school band, and then I got drafted before I got very far in college. I didn't know much about jazz, but I took to it right away. One of my high school buddies was in the concert band, and he said, "Let's start a jazz band." And so I tried to improvise, but mostly wrote my own solos out.

You didn't start out on piano?

I always tinkered around with it, picking out harmony and chords. I never had a full piano education. Had a few lessons as a six year-old, and that didn't' take. Then I had violin lessons as a 7-year-old, and I forgot it all until I was 14 and fell in love with the clarinet and band.

After you got drafted, in 1942 you were the army-band saxophonist.

In the army band we were a professional group, playing everything from parades and drills to concerts and jazz dance. So I began to play saxophones and clarinet, whatever was missing in the group, and began to sing and do a lot of arranging. And when we were short a piano player, I could manage to play that too.

And from there you went to North Texas State.

Yeah, I minored in piano, majored in composition, and gave up woodwinds completely. I wanted to sing and write songs. North Texas State was a hotbed of bebop activity, 1946-49. I had a fantastic piano teacher from Yale, a big lady named Margaret Grubb. I used to cheat on
my piano lessons, because you know, I'd be ill-prepared. And I'd come in with a piece of modern piano music that I was curious about. I was studying the modern, you know, serious classical music. Stravinsky, and all the 12-tone music. It's all pretty old hat now.

When did it happen that you really became more interested in composing and writing songs?

I toyed with the idea of being a composer for a while, but my musical education was pretty sketchy. I don't think I ever succeeded in becoming a real composer. I would have had to gone academic to be a composer, where you get a job as a teacher and compose. But I threw myself into the jazz world.

I started writing songs in my first college year. I wrote the varsity show or something like that. Then I was in the army for three years. And I had a pretty good band director who said, "Oh you want to write songs? Study this." And he gave me a big book of Rogers and Hart songs. So after tinkering and studying composition, I pretty much homed in on songwriting more than composition. Although I still now and then scratch out a few notes. But I've had a little luck with the songwriting business. [laughs]

You certainly have. What has it been like seeing the revival of the "Schoolhouse Rock" music? The tribute albums--that's got to be fun, seeing the kids that grew up with it, doing their own versions of the songs.

Yeah, that was really a dynamite denouement of the whole thing. But of course, the first year it went on television, February of 1973, I found out how much the kids liked it at Christmas-time. After I did that, I wondered if the kids were really watching my cartoons. So I volunteered to do assemblies in New York City. I booked it all myself. I'd call up the principal and say, "ABC television, we have a Christmas show for you." They'd say, "Oh, we don't have any money." And I'd say, "That's okay, this is free. All I need is a piano and a microphone." So I'd walk out into an assembly hall and the place would be all abuzz. The teachers would be saying, "We never heard of it, but the kids seem to be excited." So when I would open with my first song, like "Three Is a Magic Number," I could see the kids recognizing my voice, nudging each other. "It's him!" I thought, wow, someday these cats are going to grow up.

And it happened many years later. I'd be singing in a jazz club, and the waitress or the waiter would say, "Hey, your voice sounds so familiar." So it became kind of a tradition to put some of the "Schoolhouse Rock" in at the end of a performance.

Did you meet any of the rock musicians who did the tribute album?

No, I blew a couple of points there. I could have gone to the Blind Melon session, which happened in New York, but I had something that kept me from going. Then the guy [vocalist Shannon Moon] died. I met the drummer of the group, and he sat in with me in L.A. when I did a "Schoolhouse Rock" show.

Whether doing "Schoolhouse Rock" or "I'm Hip," you certainly inject a sense of joy in your live performances. You once said that one of the things people loved jazz for in its heyday was its sense of euphoria, and that you miss that now.

My progenitors were Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Dizzy Gillespie, man! Didn't Diz bring you joy? And he had a dynamite band behind him. That would be my ideal, to have a dynamite band, but to lighten up a little bit. Although I can't blame the musicians getting a little bit in on the third stream. The so-called serious composers were swept up by jazz, and they worked it into what they're doing. I mean, it's okay during the course of an evening to play something more ambitious, but to miss the entertainment value of jazz is certainly wrong for me. So I take the ideal of Fats Waller and Diz, and try to have as much fun as I can.