GARY BAKER - BMHOF CLASS OF 2018
Gary Baker grew up on a dairy farm in Niagara County, but now you can find him just about anyplace there’s a radio.
That’s what happens when you co-write one of the biggest hits of the rock ’n’ roll era. Baker is the co-writer of “I Swear,” a No. 1 pop hit for All-4-One in 1994. It was also a No. 1 country hit for John Michael Montgomery earlier that year.
For Baker, it was a little bit of overnight success — after 20-plus years of working for it.Not that Baker hadn’t had success before. But it was nothing like “I Swear,” which — as performed by All-4-One — was recently ranked No. 98 among all records of the past 60 years by Billboard Magazine. It has sold over 20 million copies.
It was years in the making. Baker said that the song came out of a writing session with Frank Myers, his collaborator at the time. Another writer they had been working with knocked off work at noon and went home. “People don't realize it, but songwriters in Nashville and Muscle Shoals, where I live, we go to work,” Baker said. “We get up and we go write songs. Back in those days, you’d write two songs in a day. That’s how you did it.”
“So I went with Frank to get a burger and then go back to the Fame studio, where I was writing at the time, and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got something on that idea you gave me about six weeks ago.’ I didn’t even know what he was talking about. “
He said, yeah, that ‘I Swear’ thing. So we went upstairs and in two hours we wrote it. That simple … but then it took five years to cut it. But, hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
But thanks to that song, and others, Baker has his own studio today, Noiseblock. It’s a state-of-the-art recording studio, production facility and publishing company, in Florence, Ala. His clients have included Percy Sledge, Collin Raye, Brett Eldridge, Mac McAnally and a host of other country performers.
He recently finished recording a new album with the Backstreet Boys, a project that took 16 months. He’s proud to say it was done live in the studio.
It’s been a long trip from Ransomville, although Baker is quick to point out that his home in Alabama isn’t all that different from where he grew up in Niagara County.
“They’re extremely similarly. Just the accents are different,” he said. “I’m actually more of a city person here than I was in Ransomville, even though the area in Alabama is really small.”
He loves his hometown enough that he’s returned to Niagara County almost every year for about 15 years for a music event called “Summer of ’69.” He missed the 2018 event, but insists he’ll be back for the 2019 event.
“I’ve actually written songs about it,” he said. “Two of them got cut by Lonestar — about going home. There’s something about going back to that part of the world.”
Baker started playing in bands during high school, graduating from Lewiston-Porter in 1970. After early bands like County Orphanage and the Invaders, he played with Michael Spriggs (a Buffalo Music Hall of Famer, former member of the Rogues and Nashville guitar star) and Glen Tate in Grace Rush.
After that, he went to Houston and eventually ended up playing with LeBlanc & Carr as they scored a chart hit (No. 13 on Billboard’s pop singles chart) with the soft pop song “Falling” in 1977. From there, it was the band Boatz, which flirted with the pop charts with “It Was Only the Radio” in 1979.
During the 1980s, Baker found chart success with the country pop band The Shooters. Based out of Muscle Shoals, Ala., they hit the country charts multiple times.
Along the way, he also worked with Western New Yorkers he had played with back in the day, including Michael Spriggs, Mike Caputi, Pete Holguin, Richie Pidanick, Ralph Parker and especially Steve Nathan. Baker also started working extensively with Marie Osmond in the 1980s as well as with her brother, Donnie. He said he considers Marie Osmond like a sister and still works with both of them, cutting tracks for their recordings at his studio. In fact, he co-wrote Donny & Marie’s signature song from the current decade, “It’s a Beautiful Life.”
He often calls on Spriggs and Nathan for session work and even named his first son Shane Michael in Spriggs’ honor. He has also played with most of the major sidemen in Muscle Shoals, a town known for its recording studios and successes by stars such as Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones. He started out doing session work on bass and backup vocals before he switched to songwriting.
Baker and his wife and family have become major contributors to their Alabama community and and particularly in raising money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals through their Baker Family Foundation.
These days, while Baker is producing several major recording artists, he is spending more time writing as well. His list of hit records is substantial. He recalls the first one to hit. He had been saving it for a record he was going to put out. He had a deal with RCA, but the album never came out.
“My producer Josh Leo was also producing Alabama at the time and and this was gonna be the one that could could have made me as a solo artist,” Baker said. “He (Leo) asked me, ‘do you want to compete with all those guys out there or do I want to make an ‘X’ amount of money and have Alabama cut it?’ … I said, ‘let's make ‘X’ amount of money and it turned out to be my first No. 1 record.”
That was “Once Upon a Lifetime,” a hit for Alabama in 1993.
One of Baker’s other hits was “I’m Already There,” a No. 1 country song for Lonestar that became an anthem for soldiers going overseas. It remained at No. 1 for seven weeks and was nominated for a Grammy for “Song of the Year.”
He also has had successes recorded by the Backstreet Boys, Alabama, Reba McEntire, 98 Degrees (who he also produced), Restless Heart, Billy Gilman, Joe Thomas, Jessica Simpson and Leann Rimes.
Written by: Elmer Ploetz