Even though there are computer programs that allow you to record in the comfort of your own garage, and access to music-making assistance and tricks, nothing will ever change when it comes to the musicians’ side of recording music, one of the truly hard things in life to do. There is always this very important question: Is there a project at hand? Big question. THE question.
Making an album (recording a collection of songs) is example of “a project”. So, who’s project is it? And, why? Just feel the need to do it? Is there pressure on? Are there enough good songs here? Who’s the band? Where are you doing this? Is someone helping with vision of the thing (a “producer”)? Will you know when it’s done? What shall be the order of the songs? These are all great questions, and many are never posed, let alone answered.
And I can answer them here, at least how it went down for me. I had applied to medical school and was rejected, and they’d said since I’d never worked at a hospital, how do you know this is a profession you would want to do? So I quit my cool job as a waiter at a great restaurant and went to work full-time as an orderly. I took a biology class and signed up for “group piano”. I was 21. I bought a piano, then a little baby grand, and learned what music was all about. But how do you write songs? I mean, that’s the challenge, the biggest of all, and you’ve got to learn to sing, which is another real hard thing. I’d written lines and poetry, but I never could see how they turn into a song, even though I’d learned a bunch of them. But then finally, one night in my basement I read in a Billy Joel songbook that he wrote music first and then figured out the words later> POW! That’s it! I had it backward.
I literally turned around and wrote “Hey Baby”, in several minutes. Words and all. When I played it for my friends they thought they’d heard it before. Finally, I was onto it. On the same night I wrote most of an important tune “The Face of Someone Else”, one we refer to as “the Man in the Tune Song”. I was just taking music phrases from songs I’d learned and constructed my own progression, and out they came. And they all sounded unique, which surprised me because I was afraid I would write songs that sounded like something out there, but that never has been the case. But to be able to write songs that I like, I still can’t believe it.
After 2 or 3 years had passed, the songs were starting to amass to enough for a recording, say 10, and I began to think the unthinkable: can I make an album? I was 36, and it’s not like you can think, at that age, that you could be a rock star or something. But you can never give up on trying to do something that is hard and worthwhile and all that. But in fact there just might have been a project at hand. So one night I was working in the ER and this girl who was a family practice resident overheard me talking one night and said, “You ought to call my husband! He’s a musician and he can help you record an album.” It turns out another guy, an obstetrician on staff she’d met, had just built a studio in his basement and she introduced him to her husband, who was Greg Lee. We were to be the studio’s first project, and Greg Lee would produce it. It was our first album, the one with the dudes on the cover, This Elite Band. And judging by people’s reaction to it then and now, it was a great success.
So here’s an OB guy, a mediocre musician, with a real fine studio, just loving the idea of recording local musicians, which he did for cheap. With state of the art equipment. It’s among the reasons music is so fun to try to do, beautiful people everywhere. Turns out Greg was a real fine dude, with a lot of knowledge, and he produced and engineered the recording.
Starting at the beginning, you’ve got to have great players to make a great recording, and that’s all there is to it. I was very fortunate in that we had my brother Buzz, who was a great and recordable drummer, and he was a seasoned 43 at the time. We had our bass player Bruce, who told me he was playing gigs in jump suits at Holiday Inns when I was sh–ing yellow, and Raif, a career musician guitarist, all the same age, and bout 7 years older than me. And Greg would do much of the piano and engineered the recording. It took about 3 weeks.
What follows is a brief narrative of where the songs came from, both musically and lyrically, and a few points about them. The descriptions of chord ideas may be confusing to some, but they are common movements found in songs covering the many genres, like tinker toys or legos, pieces to make a something out of. So here we go.
This was the first song I ever wrote. I closed that Billy Joel songbook, where he pointed out that he wrote music and put lyrics to it later, and turned around and banged out “Hey Baby”. It’s mainly a song in “E major”, and there are a lot of cool songs in this key for some reason. Anyway, I had always liked Jackson Brown’s song on the live album (Runnin’ on Empty) called “Rosie”, about the roadie who had the drummer swipe his babe from him, and “Rosie” is the guy’s palm, a chicken reference. Simple construction, with verse, pre-chorus, chorus. Pretty straightforward. I just grabbed a rhythm, and that was the set of movements I felt established a journey from the tonic, to the usual chords of the key, the A majors and the B majors. The F# minor and G# minor. These are standard rock song pieces.
So what was the song to be about? Well, there’s a saying that songs are about two things. Love, and unrequited love. I remember this night in Lexington at a bar back when I was in school there, where I was hitting on this girl that was way over my head, and when it went nowhere I said something like, “You know, you pretty girls, you just don’t know the cool dudes out there when you see them”, like me of course. And she really let me have it, saying something like, “Don’t you give me down the road, Red”, and said it several times, and really unloaded on me. And I was so wrong and so sorry and felt so stupid, and I thought, man, I should’ve stayed at home. So here we are 10 years later, how about this progression in E, and we’ll make it a song. And I wrote it up in one setting, a very good sign for a song, and called it “Should’ve Stayed at Home”. Then when I played it, everyone started referring to it as “Hey Baby”. Several of the tunes I have written have changed names like this.
When we recorded it, it was Buzz, Bruce, and Greg on Piano, and I sung it and it didn’t take long. This was the way we did much of it. Those three, and me singing, knowing it was a scratch. My own Karaoke outfit. The guitar riff at the beginning, the thing that starts the album off so surely, was a freak. They brought in Raif and turned his guitar amp up real high in the drum booth’s door for some reason, and it was real loud, and I remember he was flustered, and promptly laid down the signature lick on the whole album. But I recall it was originally Bruce’s bass lick, so they overlap a little bit. It sure worked.The harmonies on it are poor and were the coolest part of the times we played it live.
Again a Billy Joel quote. He’d met Paul McCartney years ago and told him thanks, that he’d ripped off several chord progression ideas from Beatles songs. And McCartney replied that he’d said the same thing to so and so, which is where he’d gotten them to start with. That they’ve been around forever. It’s real simple. Music is “home”, at the tonic, or whatever the key is written in, like G for example. There are musical journeys from the tonic and back again, using these musical phrases, and that’s all there is to it. You can call this “music theory”, how chords and their accompaniments are strung together to make a “song”. You can learn these “tricks” from songs you like and learn. And there are an infinite number of combinations, and beats, and phrase lengths, and considerations like, is there a middle to this song like a refrain? Are you going to hit a big note in there? Bridges? Breaks? These combinations are “chord progressions”, the essence of song. Which ones you chose will determine if it’s a rock tune, or bluse or jazz or whatever.
(It’s worth a simple instruction on music theory here: In the major scale, you only use seven of the available 12 “pitch classes” on the scale, or the piano. And they are doe, ray, me, fol, la, sol, tee, and another doe, an octave away from the other “doe” in the scale. (And there are several scales.) We name these chords instead, as the 1, the 2,the 3,4,5,6,7, and then you’re back at “1” again. The “4” is called the “subdominant”, a very familiar place for a song to move to, and the “5” is the “dominant”, even more familiar. To follow this discussion at all, some of these basic concepts are worth knowing, and for most people very foreign, and I’m sorry about that.)
I was introduced to one by our guitarist Raiford. It’s the tonic, a diminished chord made a half step up, or the “1 sharp”, then the 2, which is a minor chord, and then the 5, the dominant. Then you go back to the tonic. And this progression is so versatile that versions of many songs and phrases can be sung with them. So I thought, hey, there’s an idea. And in a few minutes banged out what became the title track of the album
See, I’ve always wanted to bail on this medical profession, and sure enough I ended up doing a whole career of it anyway. And I’m Ok with that, and making it as a songwriter, as hard as I was willing to try which was only a little bit hard, it was a pipe dream. But I remember that Cincinnati, my home town (I’m a Northern Kentuckian though), was voted the “most live-able city” by some magazine that year, and I concocted a guy on the river bank, a bum really, with not a care in the world. No one to answer to, and a carefree spirit. How it morphed into a tribute to Buzz, Bruce and Raif and Joe, I don’t know. Hell, The Elite Band, we never rehearsed really, or played out, or were a band for that matter. But we sure jammed in the basement a lot, and to get these guys to go to a studio and record these songs for me, I was very grateful, for sure. And for sure, its number one fan, and for all I knew at the time I was begging and bugging them.
So lyrics like, “That’s the number one city in the lights up the hill”, and the metaphor of hoping to be like that bum, be a musician for a living, where you just did what you wanted and had so much cash that, not a care in the world right? Hey, it hasn’t happened yet, but we could get a spot on a lineup you never know.
To successfully quit a medical career is something a lot of us have dreamed of and not pulled off. Doctoring sure pays the bills and has a lot of incredibly groovy people in it, but it’s a “mountain of sorrow”, for sure. I know, after we recorded This Elite Band, Buzz and Bruce and the producer Greg worked long and hard on a recording of Greg’s tunes, and predicted they’d “be millionaires by summer”, and nope that didn’t fly either. So, that’s that song. One other thing, I was in San Francisco once and grabbed a trolley, and it occurred to me how if you weren’t careful you could be a casualty there, and it reminds one to be careful out there at all times, and hold on tight and be alert.
At the last minute when we were mixing the records, and remember, we didn’t have a long time to work on the project, and it was done in three weeks. You lose spirit the longer a project takes. But this song needed help. And I was outside at the time. But Greg suggested Raif play a lead with an old acrylic stringed classical guitar that belonged to the obstetrician’s wife, and it’d been in its case for years they said. But the “woodle a doop’ is among the record’s coolest work. And it came out of no where at the last minute. It’s like art: add add add, until it looks like something.
To construct this song, I was in G, and came up with three different ways to go to the 4 and 5, C and D. One was down through the D with the F# bass, and E minor, and they all go to the walkdown from C, through G/B bass, A minor, to the 5 again, and back to G. Another, at the song’s “speed up”, G goes through B’s dominant 7th, to E minor, then the walk from C like in the verse. Then for the song’s chorus, G goes through B minor (3 in the scale), to C and D. The big note then starts at the high G, of the tonic, to the E minor, to say “Who’ll care….”
So lyrically, the song is about a favorite theme of mine, that you get yourself into trouble by not being self-aware enough. By trusting people to do things they don’t want to do, especially for you maybe, and all that, we beg for trouble. The metaphor then is that “broken promises” are “dreams someone’s taken away”, it blames you, not the promise breaker. I mean, what’s a promise? Who promised what, and to whom? And do you have any proof of this? So in that way the song is a little confusing, and hey, it is what it is. So singing the last verse, “BP, don’t let no body take them away”, it reiterates that your dreams are your dreams, and not something someone treats you to. There’s no body there but you for that.
And of course, kids, a lot of them grow up bad and with bullshit, and though it’s natural for children to believe in angels, some rarely see anything that looks remotely like one. Perhaps later in their plight, but not too much later, they realize it’s their job to make things happen right.
I remember, the first time I played it in the basement for the dudes I’d gone outside for a minute, and possibly fertilizing the yard, and the moon was big maybe, and I thought about the bridge in the middle, where when we are at the 5 (D major), to drop back to C and start there for this bridge, and the rest was real natural. And right then I had to come up with a line quick, and it became one of my favorites, that “It can seem like no body understands, when you’re there with your face in your hands.”
We’d gone through the song I think a few times, maybe just me and Bruce, and when I came back in I told him about the bridge and he objected. “You can’t just throw something in there like that”. I doubt he’d remember this. The song would not be the same without it.
For years I couldn’t listen to the song, because it’s so corny. But as I listen to it, I think I sold it adequately, something at the time I just couldn’t be so sure of. But it became a popular one and that surprised me. And for years I couldn’t play Greg’s Piano lead-in, but I have fun with it now. And more in this world than ever, people are very focused on their “self’s”, for sure, and maybe realize this. The more comfortable you are with who you are and what you do for your “self”, it usually helps the rest of us, to carry less of you.
The “Old Lonely Road Song” is a deeply personal song for me. It wrote real easy musically. I’d written the above three on the piano, and for this one, I thought I could get an idea from a guitar. Especially then, I could only play G, C, D, E minor, and A minor, all in G, on the guitar, so I envisioned a box, with all these chords at the corners, and that to write this song, my 4th, I could just go around the box, simply rearranging the chord order to make phrases and a chorus. Strumming like that, you see it in the song. I figured mainly that the chorus would need to end on the 5. It was so cool of an idea, I thought, and I remember sitting on the porch one night and figuring it out, and this neighbor of mine walks up. And I barely knew him, and he worked at the hospital, but a real rough guy, and I’m pretty sure he was loaded, and I didn’t want to see him right then, I’ll tell you. And he starts telling me about his kid, a teenager, standing up to him, and how he’d muscled him or something. So I said to him, “Wait a minute, my kid’s crying I think..”, which he wasn’t, and I went in the house for a minute, and came out and said, “Man, I gotta attend to the kid here”, and he left, and I waited, and went outside and decided on which chords where, all real quick, it was great.
So, next, what’s the song about? How about making this one about the gang? The folks at the Fridaynighters and all that. I’d moved away for school and missed a lot of fun, and returning to the Northern Kentucky area meant a lot. And I could hear the Ohio river traffic from my house, the clanging and stuff, and the river boats, especially the occasional Calliope, it was great, so it’s all in the song.
It starts however with a reference to an adolescent freakout of mine, when I discovered that everything goes a while and then, Poof!, it’s over. It is something I took a while to get my head around, and I even got a little nuts over it, for months. OCD maybe? Maybe. I was so freaked out one night, at around 15 I think, and I snuck out and left the house one night during a snowstorm, and had to go and do something to get my mind off it. The coolest thing I could think of was to go to Johnny’s Toy Shop and buy something for my slot car set, big fun for us as kids. It was a long way, 6 or 7 miles. Nuts. So then, Kyle’s lane in Ft. Wright becomes the Old Lonely Road. Don’t underestimate how obsessed and freaked out I was. And that night I think I got over it, that, hey, you’re a little freaked out, but cool it, OK? Everybody know’s it’s just the same”
But there was no “old man”, only “Father Time”, and he “just goes on by”, and there’s no looking back, and we’re all playing by these same rules.
When we recorded it, Greg Lee informed me that I couldn’t sing the song in G very well, and we went down a step to F, which I can’t play much in on the guitar. And it sounds a little morbid in that key, which it is of course. And one more thing, where’s the guitar part? It’s notably missing in each of the instrumental verses. We play this song whenever we play out. In F, which I can play on the piano.
I love this anthem. It has an extremely weird story, which may illustrate where songs come from. Having written these first four I was certain I was onto it. I was clanging one night on my piano at the upper C on the piano, a sweet note on this particular piano. So I thought, let’s build a song from it. And it couldn’t be more simple. Nothing out of the key. And then I returned to the progression in the title track, the 1, 1# diminished, 2 minor, 5- progression and presto, song. Done. And so easy. When it came to putting it to lyrics I thought to myself, man, the Good Lord has been so good to me to let me be able to write songs, after so many years of not knowing how to. Maybe I’ll put him in it! But how? He’s not real poetic. But the tune sounded like an anthem, so I thought up the idea of the country of immigrants, like my grandpa, “braving the ocean’s hungry tide” and blah blah blah. But what about the Good Lord. Hey, rhyme “PRAYer and A-MER-ica, I’ll do that! Chords, song, lyrics, all in one night. Then at that moment I swear a huge lightning bolt went off and rattled the house. And I ran outside and it was totally clear, and there was no more thunder or lightning, or sprinkles. I just assumed it was, you know, The Good Lord winking at me. I even ran upstairs to my wife who was sleeping and woke her up and showed her the goosebumps on my arms. And naturally she rolled over to sleep.
When we recorded it, of course, Greg once again informs me that I cannot sing the song in C, so it went down a step to B flat, which is a much better place. And again at the last minute, my brother Joe, a guitar player, played that very rankled guitar part, which I just love. It’s like, yeah, it’s literally, a “wild, western, fantasy”. And to play here, you’ve got to make it happen, like in song 3. And there’s no place to do it but here, and we need it and need to take care of it, and be it.
I regret getting a little preachy in the second verse, and actually I had written additional lyrics for a third verse. But what can you do? It was just so clear to me at that point in my life how important your nurturers are, and how men especially are important. “Your brothers’ need him to come home too, to save him from those things he do”, I’ll let you figure that out.
Would these have been better?
From giant leaps for all mankind, to the little steps from the chains that bind
We’ll climb the hills before us now, to find happiness the fates allow
We’re there for all the world to see, what it is that life can be
When people live to find their way, in Freedom’s hand, at work and play.
Chorus
Me, I like this other verse.
This is the order these songs were written in. “Fool No More” explores a song in F, with chords like B flat, and C and D minor, all fun chords to play on the piano. And the theme was so familiar: unrequited love. I mean, this is no a real expensive song, but it’s real and that’s all that matters. And hey, if you don’t want to play a fool, then don’t, OK? Just gonna go. Awful. Then Go.
We used to play “She caught the Katy” at Friday Nighters all the time. How about ripping off a few chords from it for a song? The 1-5 relationship is the one. “Now I was standing, in the corner..” 1,5 right. And it went from there, and wrote very quickly. And again it returns to a bar, and man oh man, did I just make eye contact with this girl, or am I imagining it? Probably the latter, but hopeless romantics, they abound, I’m sure.
I like those “love references” though. That “crazy little thing” that hits you now and then. Can you handle it? Is it “running” for you too Wow, and if so, a special feeling. Like, dancing to the rhythm of a beat so strong…and bending over to go cheek to cheek, and breathe the same breath of a love so fine. A young person’s game, for sure, when passion and romance are.. flowin’. Beautiful. And frankly, I can barely listen to it. Still we bang it out from time to time. The bass player gets loose, which is good.
Writing songs? How about one about your own babe? My Woman is this song. Musically it drones in the tonic, then goes to its major seventh, a stopping point leading to more movement, to 4, to 1 again. How about some minors for the prechorus? Then 1, 5, 4 for the chorus. Nothing to it. Man this is fun.
Only thing was, I couldn’t decide on a tempo, if you didn’t notice. Now back, then, I couldn’t always keep the rhythm real perfect, and in a studio this is so essential. But on this one, me Buzz and Bruce played it through just that once, and there are three different tempos. I really think it’s OK in this song. I’ve played it straight, all in the same tempo, and it’s weird for me, so I do it “the way it goes”. Hey, there’s no rule against changing it up, as far as I knew anyway at the time. I didn’t even think about it. But they called it “Red meter” at the time, and this was derisive. From then on in my life I’ve tried to keep moving and in rhythm at all times in all songs, and to stamp out Red meter wherever possible.
There were supposed to be 6 phrases for the chorus to end the song. And we’d agreed on this, but sure enough, Buzz ends it after the 5th one, and I could hear him doing it, and you know, the song will go how the drummer plays it, and it was a good steady recording. So I came up to him afterward, and asked him, What’s up? I thought we were doing 6 of the 1-5-4s at the end, and he laughed and said, “I guess there were only 5.” And that was that. And again, at the last minute Joe played that Fender Stratocaster of Tom’s, the OB guy who owned the joint, very good I thought. I have always told him that he’s a better lead player than he thinks. I mean you’re born to play leads or not. It’s funny, just in these past 5 years or so Joe’s jumped in as a songwriter, and he’s really got it.
When our guitarist Raif told me he thought I was “a country music writer”, this song was to come next, to get on to key changes, and weird chord progressions. And this is a weird musical journey for me. I mean, can a song do that? But alas, they are but journeys from the 1, and back again. The progression does have some sense to it, but it’s an example of something a piano player writes. E flat. B flat major seventh. C minor. Guitarists will usually be thinking, What? It didn’t take long to write it.
But it was a sad song. How about unrequited love? I remember there was this girl I was hoping on, and as usual I was pretty sure I was hoping too high, and guess what, it didn’t happen, so I treated her to this song. Years later I remember her telling us (she is a friend of my wife’s) that she had a date and she opened the door and “there was this little old guy standing there”. That’s hard. But when you’re trying to date as an older person, these are the perils. But there was a little glimpse of sadness in there. And I don’t care how pretty you are, a glimpse of sadness ruins it. I could have made her happy, right? You had me, long ago… yeah, right. But romance is something you feel, not something on paper or that you can construct. A lot of people fall there I think. Just let it down and feel it. Or, despite that “moonlit night, and the stars in your face, and a lover who disappears without a trace”. Next thing you know there’s a little old man at your door.
This was the first song I ever wrote. With “Hey Baby”, that first night, the relationship of A minor, and then these same notes with an F in the bass, makes the F-based chord the F major seventh. It is a very comfortable place to go on the piano, and in many songs. So I utilized it. The other movements in the song, I don’t know why I went there, but the song with the chorus came together more slowly than most of the tunes. And it’s a colorful and cute song. But down-beat somewhat.
I remember how I still wasn’t sure I could sing good enough to do all this. How do you sing? I knew that somehow, you needed to recreate yourself, to assume the role of the song do-er. But be careful, because if you’re too thespian, people will see through that. So if you hope to be in this highly enviable position of singing the song, doing it without sucking somehow is the goal, for sure. So the song becomes a shot at anyone thinking to exploit their position, as the song do-er, being disingenuous some how. But just who is it you deceive? Just what is it you believe? How about good tone and consistent signal generation, and not too much gyrations, or dancing with your hair. And if you’re going to talk to us, don’t preach, don’t drop F bombs, and don’t say anything Gregg Allman wouldn’t say, which was usually nothing other than introducing the band.
On the album, the singing could have sure been better, but by the end of the song, I was better. But I remember, Greg kept saying, “Give it more umph”, and I was just not good. Probably, I wasn’t warmed up or something, but it was a struggle. And early on you can really tell it. But in that first chorus, especially. “I busted out laughing at what I thought was a bad performance, and you can hear that. “Just to be the wuh…”, and then I laughed, and he yells out, “That’s it, that’s it”. I was trying to be the man in the tune, but he was recommending I be someone else. We should have re-done it, but that’s the way it was recorded.
But that song, as my first one, makes that critical point. To be “up in the lights for all the word to see”, is this opportunity to make a moment mean so much. But not for you, the song do-er, it’s for everyone else. And you, well you’re no more than the man in the tune (the original name of the song), and what you do, is you’re hiding behind the face of someone else. You’re the man in the tune, someone different from the you yourself is. According to me anyway.
Postscript
Like the liner notes on the second making of the disc say, even now when I give this album to people the same thing happens. They listen to it again and again. I mean not everybody, but imagine after all this that people would report, “My kid won’t stop listening to it”, and “I put it one when I clean the house”, or, “My sister won’t give it back”, or, “I wore it out, do you have any more?” I was and remain so proud of the effort, and would put it up against anything out there that no one has heard before ,a s a competition.
When we would go on a few years later to make “Songs for The Modern Age”, the spirit was different, the songs were cleaner, but the recording was less popular. I like it much better, but as a band it just was much lees together. It’s hard, it really is. Most musicians are nuts. And this is hard stuff to do, or everybody’d be doing it. I have a similar blurb about the songs and some of the recordings of that second album here on the site.
What’s much more interesting about “Songs For the Modern Age” is that I consider it a major step to the writing of my rock opera, of the same name. Of course this opera is here on the site. The concept features a “kid”, coming of age in this modern age and all its encroachments and intrusions, and tribulations and general wackiness. Other players in the opera are the “cohorts” (friends of similar age and circumstance to the kid), and the counter star, a somewhat older cat, “the muse”, who takes moments to point out to the kid and his cohorts and the audience, “Hey, did you see that? Do you see this?”
So when a young girl (11 I think) who’d just loved the first record didn’t like the second, I told her, if I’m on the right track, I didn’t think you’d like it. Whatever I meant by that, Songs for TMA is much more contentious than the feel-good themes of the first recording.