David Lucas

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David Lucas (born David Helfman) is an American rock and roll composer, guitarist, and music arranger.

He has written thousands of commercial jingles, including AT&T's "Reach Out and Touch Someone." He received a Clio Award in 1981 for composing the music to Pepsi's "Catch That Pepsi Spirit." He performed with many young artists, including Blue Yster Cult, as a record producer.

Lucas performed backup vocals and came up with the idea for using a cowbell, parodied by Christopher Walken in the "More cowbell" skit on Saturday Night Live, on the 1976 Blue Cult song "Don't Fear the Reaper."

Lucas was inducted into the Music Hall of Fame in Buffalo in June 2011.

Early years (1940s–1960s)

David Helfman was born in Buffalo, New York, on April 21, 1937. He was performing with his parents in the Buffalo area by the age of four, both on local radio and on television. He briefly attended Bennett High School in Buffalo, where he performed in the choir, and then moved to Miami Beach Senior High School in 1951, graduating in 1955.

Lucas started promoting music at the age of nineteen, selecting artists like young Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Sam Cooke, and The Everly Brothers, as well as encouraging local DJs to perform their own music. He was the best promoter in the northeast United States until being recruited into the United States Army, which led to his transfer to Miami Beach, where he was a social director and performer at the Attache Hotel. He ended up meeting by selling vacuum cleaners during the day and going to night school to learn about mutual funds. While in Miami, he met jazz drummer and bandleader Buddy Rich and joined him on a world tour, following which Lucas moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a songwriter and producer. He performed at the Sahara Hotel, where he was spotted by well-known singer Doris Day, who was impressed and signed Lucas to her record label, Arwin Records, in Las Vegas. Lucas then performed "So Until I See You," a piece by composer Al Lerner that became Jack Paar's The Tonight Show's closing theme.

Lucas then moved to New York City, where he did some odd jobs, including becoming a sound engineer for his cousin, jazz guitarist, and author Don Elliott. He worked with artists including Laura Nyro, Ravi Shankar (produced by Timothy Leary), Tim Rose, Cass Elliot, Janis Ian Smith, Bill Evans, Roger Kellaway, Mel Tormé, and Terry Gibbs. He was part of a quintet formed by Dave Lambert, "Lambert and Co." This quintet, although it never released any albums, was noteworthy because it became the subject of a 15-minute documentary by D. A. Pennebaker (later known for working with Bob Dylan) called Audition at RCA. The scenes in the film were some of Lambert's last photographs after he was killed in an auto accident in 1966.

Lucas began composing his own commercial jingle melodies in the late 1960s, such as Macleans Toothpaste. He eventually retired from his engineering career to Jay Messina and opened his own business, David Lucas Associates, to write jingles full time. Quincy Jones introduced Lucas to Cy Coleman, who later sold him to Coleman's Notable Music Publishing Company.

Lucas continued with other ventures as well as writing jingles. Ahmet Ertegun appointed him as musical director for Tom Sankey's The Golden Screw, the first rock and roll musical, which appeared at the Provincetown Playhouse and received the 1967 Obie Award for Sankey's idea, writing, and performing. Walter Carlos, a young tape dubber from Gotham Studios, a young tape synthesizer, was hired to write music for William Claxton's film Basic Black, which is credited as the first "fashion video" and is on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He made the first recordings of the blues band Raven, enabling them to sign a Columbia Records deal. He wrote the songs "Tell Me a Story" and "Blood" for Stanley Sweetheart's Magic Garden (the first film by actor Don Johnson) and also composed the theme music for the 1970s children's series Jabberwocky, which remained in syndication for decades.

Lucas began a new relationship with Tom McFaul in 1973 and founded their own studio. They called it the Warehouse Recording Studio, and it hosted such artists as Paul McCartney and Charlie Brown, who were based in an old spice warehouse. They employed a dozen people, and Lucas designed and produced thousands of jingles for several national brands, and McFaul created the Meow Mix "Meow" theme for Meow Mix. Lucas wrote "You Can't Beat The Feeling" and "You Looked Out and Touch Someone"; "Pepsi's "You Look Like You" and "You Want To Know"; "You Look Like You"; "You Should't Beat The Feeling"; "Give Your Cold To Contac"; "G.E." We Bring Good Things To Life; "Lipton puts Summer on Ice"; and a Mercury Cougar jingle. Lucas and McFaul were referred to as "Jingle Giants" by New York Magazine in 1979, two out of a handful of jingle writers, saying, "Two out of three major commercial jingles have been written by the elite group."

Lucas produced a four-song demo for the band Stalk-Forrest, which culminated in them being signed by Columbia's Clive Davis as Blue yster Cult.' Lucas produced their first album in his Warehouse studio and then as a music director for their 1976 album Agents of Fortune, which included the song "Don't Fear the Reaper." "Reaper" became a huge hit and is ranked at number 405 on Rolling Stone's list of the top 500 songs of all time. Lucas performed background vocals and came up with the idea of playing the cowbell, which was parodied by Christopher Walken in the Saturday Night Live "More cowbell" comedy sketch on April 8, 2000. Lucas introduced the hit "Godzilla" in 1977.

Lucas sold The Warehouse in 1998, which was later sold to Wyclef Jean. Lucas moved to Miami, where he built a recording and started to write songs and jingles.

Lucas wrote "Inside My Heart," a tribute to autism that was performed by actress Kyra Sedgwick for The Miracle Project of Hollywood in 2010.

Lucas was once a passionate sailor, and now the president of reliantyachts.com, and he was featured in the company's advertisements. Lucas created "Bob's No Problem, Bloody Mary maker" in 1985, after creating a recipe of his grandfather's. In 2010, the brand was launched nationally.

Lucas has four children. In several CBS holiday specials, Lisa Lucas, an award-nominated child actor in the 1970s, appeared "Addie Mills" on television. Jason Lucas, a composer and producer in Nashville, Cristopher Lucas, a producer and performer in Idaho, and David Lucas' youngest daughter Lindsay Lucas is a Boston singer and performer who attended Berklee College of Music. He is also writing a book with co-writer Jayne Critelli, a writer/singer from Lucas/McFaul in the 1980s, and he's been working on a musical.

Lucas spends a considerable amount of time in Portland, Jamaica, sailing and working on environmental causes, such as trying to save Winifred Beach for the local people, according to his website. In the 1990s, he managed the Frenchman's Cove resort for many years. He joined Frank Clark in sustaining "Reach Falls" and continues to promote Portland Parish's revitalization.

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