Hollywood Town Brings Harriet Schock’s Life and Music to the Big Screen

The songwriter behind “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady” talks Helen Reddy, the truth beneath a lyric, and the lessons that still keep her learning after 40 years of teaching.

Harriet Schock remembers the applause. She had entered a songwriting contest that required her to sing and play her own material. The experience was terrifying until the audience responded. Then, she says, it was “like a baby shark tasting blood for the first time.”

Schock kept her job as an advertising copywriter while performing wherever she could, sometimes for dinner, sometimes for little or no money. A regular gig at West Hollywood’s Bitter End West and a meeting with publisher Roger Gordon eventually led to her first publishing deal. Her debut album, Hollywood Town, later brought “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady” to Helen Reddy’s attention.

That song began on an airplane as Schock left a relationship, an experience she describes with the timing of someone who understands that heartbreak can also have a punch line. But her work reaches well beyond one familiar recording. Across her albums, film music and four decades of teaching, she has kept returning to the same challenge: finding the truth a song needs to tell.

In this conversation with OohYeah, Schock revisits the hit’s beginnings, the producer’s advice that changed her approach, and the students who continue to make her a better writer. She also discusses Hollywood Town: The Harriet Schock Story, filmmaker Tom Solari’s documentary about her life and music.

The documentary screens Sunday, October 4, 2026, at 11 a.m. at Regal Cinemas in the Sherman Oaks Galleria as part of the Tarzana International Film Festival. Screening details and tickets.

Before “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady” became the song so many people associate with your name, what first drew you to songwriting? Do you remember writing something that made you think, “This is what I’m supposed to do”?

My first inkling that I might be able to do this was when I entered a songwriting contest. We had to sing and play our own songs. It was terrifying, but when I heard the applause, it was like a baby shark tasting blood for the first time. Then when I won the contest, I thought maybe I could do more of this.

So I continued working as an advertising copywriter and played my songs for free, for dinner, for very little money anywhere I could. I finally got a regular gig at the Bitter End West, a gay bar in West Hollywood. Then I met a publisher (Roger Gordon) at an ASCAP meeting, and he asked if I was playing out. That was how I got my first publishing deal (Colgems, later EMI, later Sony).

Take us back to writing “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady.” What started that song, and how close was the first version to the one you eventually recorded?

This song had a Wikipedia page before I did. The writer on there had apparently been to one of my shows because he quoted me as saying, "I wrote this song on an airplane as I was leaving someone for the last time. It was one of the last times I left him for the last time."

So true, that's what started the song. I wrote the first verse on the plane and the title, which was the first line of the chorus. I came home and sat at the piano to write the rest. It was exactly like I recorded it, even the intro. It didn't go through any major changes.

The song appeared on your debut album, Hollywood Town, before Helen Reddy recorded it. What do you remember about hearing her interpretation for the first time? Did she bring out anything you hadn’t heard in your own performance?

When I asked her how she heard it, she said she heard my record on the radio. I loved her voice, so hearing her sing it was a thrill. The label I was on had gone through a difficult time when it was my single. Two top forty stations were poised to play it and the Friday before that happened, the program director quit.

Sometime later, I got a call from Jeff Wald, Helen Reddy's manager and husband, telling me the radio stations started playing my song, which was her album title but not her single. So radio actually forced it out as a single and then a hit.

Helen actually sings songs as they are written. I've had a lot of covers of a lot of my songs, but I'm grateful that this one was sung very faithfully. So I didn't change anything based on her version because she didn't make any appreciable changes when she sang it.

You were building a career as a recording artist when Helen’s recording brought your songwriting wider recognition. How did that success affect the opportunities you received and the direction you wanted to take?

I did make two more albums for Twentieth Century Records, headed up by Russ Regan. That could have been because of Helen's cover, The Partridge Family cover and Manfred Mann's cover from my first album. Not sure how that affected my recording career but I've always been a songwriter first and I think I'm regarded as such. Maybe that's why in the 8 albums I've made, the songs are all written or co-written by me. Other songwriters aren't breaking down my door to get me to sing their songs. LOL!

For someone who knows “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady” but hasn’t explored your albums, which song would you want them to hear next, and what would it tell them about you?

Possibly my favorite song of all the ones I've recorded is "You Are" from my American Romance album and my Live Album. It was the result of something Nik Venet, my producer of 2 albums, said in the studio. He said, "Everybody writes, everybody sings, not everybody tells the truth. And it's the truth that touches people."

So on the event of an argument in a new relationship, I decided to write a song that got to the truth underneath the anger and the make-wrong of the guy. So I wrote "You Are" which was a bit of a breakthrough. In my opinion, songwriting takes courage not just craft.

When you’re writing from personal experience, how do you decide which details belong in the song and which ones matter only to you?

I guess the important details are the ones that help tell the story, without which you would not have the same emotional impact when you sing it. Similarly, the listener won't have it either. Of course, there's truth and there's fact. These are not the same.

What tells you that a melody is expressing what the lyric actually means? Can you share an example of a song where changing the melody changed the emotional impact?

Melody and lyrics are so intertwined for me, I don't think of them as separate entities. Of course they are, but I can't think of a song I rewrote the melody for and it changed the emotional impact. I do know that one song I wrote that you produced ("It Tears at Me") had more emotional impact when it was completed because the strings which were added, albeit all based on my chords, raised it to another level for me. After that, I added violin and flute to my band.

Chord progressions are so vital to emotional impact; I can never understand how someone can write a song and have someone else find the chords for it. How is that possible? That's like sending your child to camp for the rest of his life.

How do you recognize the difference between a song that needs another rewrite and one you’re in danger of overworking?

Occasionally, after I finish a song, I'll survey it by playing it in my musical artists' workshop, which is an acting class for singers that I've been taking for a decade. Before we get to "the performance" part, I want to know exactly what they think it means. Recently I wrote a song that was a metaphor, and therefore written on two levels. I wanted to make sure the literal level was clear so I asked them. They all interpreted the lyric as I hoped everyone would. Then I told them what it was a metaphor for, and you could see they were rolling the movie back in their minds. If it's not completely clear on at least one level, I'll rewrite it, hopefully without overdoing it.

Your film work includes The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking. What does writing for a child’s imagination ask of you, and how do you make those songs connect with adults, too?

I think everyone wants to experience a childhood they didn't have, so that includes most adults since only few of us as children lived alone with a horse and a monkey. So connecting with adults is no problem. I found the kids really liked the repeated words like "no no no no!" and things like that. It's a thrill to hear a child sing my songs they heard coming from the screen.

You’ve also contributed music to several Henry Jaglom films, including Irene in Time and Hollywood Dreams. How did that creative relationship develop, and what have you learned about the way a song can reveal something a scene leaves unsaid?

The first Henry Jaglom film I did the music for was "Going Shopping." I did the underscore and the song. Then there was "Irene in Time," which was written after he heard my song (co-written with Ron Troutman) called "Dancing with My Father." He wrote the film about a father and a daughter. I had 4 other songs in that film, as well as one written FOR the film called "Searching for You."

In "Hollywood Dreams," I just did some underscoring. But later he made "The M Word," which I wrote the end song for, called "Bein' a Girl." M did not stand for marriage. If you know about Henry Jaglom, you know lots of his films are about women's issues. So this particular M stood for menopause. The song was hilarious, if I do say so.

When did teaching become an important part of your life? Was there something you had figured out through your own writing that you felt other songwriters needed to understand?

I've been teaching since 1986. In 1985, when USC called me and asked me to teach songwriting, I said it couldn't be taught, so the next year they called me back, and I decided to do it. I taught there one year and found that not being able to park was a deal breaker. I turned it over to Pat Caddick, who created an entire department and taught there as a rock star (which he actually is as a writer-producer).

But I was hooked on teaching and went on to teach for the Songwriters Guild of America, and lots of songwriting organizations. Now I teach privately on Zoom, and I have students all over the world who inspire me on a daily basis.

You teach a step-by-step songwriting method. Without asking you to give away the whole course, could you walk us through one principle that changes how a student approaches a song?

I was in the studio the night before my first class, and I couldn't figure out how to teach a subject as subjective (pardon the pun) as songwriting.

Over the years, I've refined what I do. But basically, I created a step-by-step method that tricks the student into doing what an experienced professional songwriter does naturally. It isolates the muscles of songwriting and exercises them one week at a time. By the end of the 9 weeks, they have a song and a way of approaching songwriting on future songs. My steps give them a way of writing the very song they want to write with the best tech of getting that exact song at the end of the steps.

Your students come to you with different musical styles and levels of experience. How do you help someone strengthen a song while protecting the qualities that make it unmistakably theirs?

I don't have people coming in with songs that need help. They start with nothing and do the steps. I currently have one student who had never written a song before. Sometimes I forget there's so much to learn. But she followed the steps and ended up with quite a wonderful piece of work. Now she's on the next one.

I also have lyricists who collaborate with composers but often a student will think he/she can't write a lyric or a melody and will want to collaborate. But if they keep an open mind, it's possible they could write the whole song alone.

The one thing I have found, though, is that even though ear training can help a person's ear, if there is no ability at all with melody, it's better to concentrate on lyrics. Wonderful, emotionally impactful lyrics will find a composer.

What problem do you hear most often in songs by experienced writers? Is it different from the problems beginners tend to bring to you?

It may sound strange, but most of my students are already somewhat experienced. They may have studied with me for 2 or 3 albums worth of songs. I do teach beginners and their problems are generally that they haven't listened enough to wonderful songs to pick up patterns and conventions like structure, rhyming, chord progressions or melodic and rhythmic patterns and differences between sections.

Experienced songwriters (like many of my students) generally are battling how to make a song "a small thing." There's a lot to say, but the more experience you have, the simpler you can say it and still have tremendous emotional impact.

Your approach to critiques starts with identifying what works and building on it. Can you give an example of how developing a song’s strongest element helped solve a weakness elsewhere?

I only do song critiques when I'm at a songwriting convention or someplace I have to do that. I feel like an architect trying to fix a house that was built on uneven sand. I created the steps so people wouldn't have these problems with the finished product. But I do try to find what the person did right and encourage more of that.

Can you recall a student breakthrough that has stayed with you, a moment when someone understood something and their writing noticeably changed?

I've been teaching for 40 years, so there have been songs written that are just so good, they make your teeth hurt. I think I remember a character study song that one of my students wrote that was so excellent that he took off after that like a rocket. He still plays the song as one of his most requested ones. But he did a one-man show, and all the songs were that good. It may have been a breakthrough. Or maybe he was just talented, and it was apparent when he wrote that character study song.

After years of teaching, what do you believe can be taught about songwriting, and what does each writer have to discover through living, listening, and doing the work?

There are wonderful books out there on writing and songwriting, and it's good to learn as much as you can. But I teach by having people DO things. You can learn "about" something but until you do it, you don't experience it the same.

You can tell people "Change the rhythm of the melody between verse and chorus" or "raise the pitch of the melody in the chorus" or "put images into your lyrics." But until they actually write a song and use these things, they will never have an epiphany. THEN they can listen to great songs and realize what they're doing.

As a listener/fan, they might never have realized the very lyrical or melodic thing that the writer was doing that made him love the song. Once he starts DOING the songwriting, he will see more of what others do.

Has explaining the craft to other people changed your own writing? Have you ever caught yourself struggling with something you regularly help your students solve?

I'm a much better songwriter now that I teach. This is mostly because I'm solving problems for others 3 times a week, rather than just my own. The "make it better" muscle gets more exercise. Sometimes I'll write something, look at it, and realize I need more variation in rhythm between sections or I need more images in the verses. Stuff like that.

What are you writing, recording, or working toward now that you’re especially eager for people to hear?

I've made 9 albums, including my instrumental piano album. At this point, I have enough for a tenth, but it's hard to convince myself people actually want albums, even digital ones. I'd like people to hear my "Paintings" album, which I did with my band (Andrea Ross-Greene on backup vocals, Kelly DeSarla on Flute, Eden Livingood on violin/viola, Jennifer Richardson on cello, and Joe Lamanno on bass). So that's my answer to the writing-recording part of your question.

As far as what I'm eager for people to hear, it's more what I'd like for them to see. Four years ago, Tom Solari, a filmmaker, came to one of my concerts. He decided more people should experience what he felt he was experiencing. Four years later, after four Indiegogo fundraisers, he made a film called "Hollywood Town - the Harriet Schock Story." It was accepted into the Tarzana Film Festival and is now a finalist. I would love for people to go to the screening on Sunday, the 4th of October at 11 AM in Sherman Oaks at the theater where it's being shown. Here's the link for tickets:

Get Tickets Here

When someone leaves your class and sits down to write without you in the room, what do you most hope they carry with them?

By the time they do it without me in the room, they won't have to carry anything with them. It will be part of how they write. But they might sing it to themselves and ask certain questions I have them answer after every song. My favorite question is "Is there a win or realization on the part of the singer/main character?" and "What did you learn about life writing this song?"

Is there anything we haven’t asked that you’d like to talk about or add to this interview?

Just come to the screening of the documentary, in case you missed that part. Here's the link for tickets:

Get Tickets Here