Joe Scarborough: “Again, reclaiming my time, it certainly does, and I remember hearing Sonny Bono talk about this, hearing him over and…”

“Again, reclaiming my time, it certainly does, and I remember hearing Sonny Bono talk about this, hearing him over and over again. He wrote us Dear Colleague letters, he talked about it nonstop. Everybody has this image of Sonny Bono as some guy that just sort of stumbled into 7 or 8 gold records, that he just somehow, in the late 1960s stumbled into 7 gold records and a number 1 and number 2 TV show that he produced. That is not the case. Sonny told me his story, because we were on the Committee on National Security together. He told me his basically hard-luck story about going out to Los Angeles in the late 1950s, about working hard around the clock. I do not know how many people here know who Phil Spector is, but he ran around doing errands for Phil Spector, getting coffee, emptying his garbage can, do everything he could do, writing songs, to get an opportunity to make a little bit of money. What Sonny told me then was, he said, the great thing is now, it is something that is going to help my kids. Sonny did not realize just how pathetic his words were going to be, to help his kids a lot sooner unfortunately than any of Sonny's friends would have liked it to be.”