THE MAKING OF "THOSE WERE THE DAYS
Back in my bartending days, and even before then, there was a hangout called The Broadway Central Cafe in South Amboy NJ. It was a nice place to go for a drink or…. In time there was a group of us who hung out there regularly and we dubbed ourselves “The Friends from Hell.” Now, we weren't a rowdy bunch as the name might suggest, but I'd say we were a bit unpredictable. For instance I'd come home from tending bar around 2:30AM to find the “Friends” all sprawled on my lawn waiting for me to get home to continue where we left off at the bar. Or my friend Buddy and I would randomly go over Norm's place one evening and just let ourselves in and grab a couple beers out of the fridge while Norm was asleep (he eventually woke up and went with the flow). You get the idea. As time passed, I got a gig playing with a band, going from weekends to 3-4 nights a week, so I had to give up the bartending job. And in time we all began to move on…getting married, raising a family etc, until the owner of said establishment, Wayne Turback, sold the place. In the ensuing years, I would reflect on the place from time to time, and the song Those Were the Days made popular by Mary Hopkin would come to mind when reminiscing. Similar to my song All the Time I Lost, I laid down a quick track with a lead guitar playing the first melody line so I wouldn't forget about that bittersweet version I had dreamed up in my head. Years later, I went back and gave that melody line I recorded a listen, and decided it was time to finish what I had started.
Btw, Wayne Turback, the owner of the saloon was also an accomplished artist. The photo that accompanies this song was a painting done by Wayne, and hung outside the place. Thankfully a photo of that painting exists as Wayne has since passed, and I was able to make a copy and use it with kind permission from his brother Jeff.
Here's to my Friends from Hell!
THE MAKING OF “ALL THE TIME I LOST”
It was a good decade and a half or so ago, when it occurred to me that there were fewer days ahead of me than there were behind me. While part of me found it to be somewhat troubling, I did find an awkward comfort in it and a nagging need to document those feelings in prose.
I took great pleasure in working, at the time, with my musical partner in crime George Simonovich, composing, recording and feverishly trying to figure out how to work one of those newfangled DAW’s that record digitally as opposed to the ease of analog. There were no YouTube videos to guide you, the instruction booklet could’ve been written in a foreign language, and trying to get tech support on the phone was more miss than hit, but I muddled through. That would be one of the things that gave me the inspiration to put some lyrics down, what with all the wasted time waiting on hold and having my DAW armed to record, but it wouldn’t record for reasons I couldn’t figure out. The words “this doesn’t make sense” were used liberally at that time. Hell, I still use it today what with technology moving faster than I can keep up with at times.
So, I was finally able to get some lyrics down and began coming up with a melody with some interesting chords. When I finally was able to get a decent sounding demo recorded, I sent it out to some 10-12 people in the music biz, who I trusted to give me a meaningful critique of “All the Time I Lost”. What I got back were 10-12 completely different suggestions from changing certain lyrics, change the title, add a bridge, add a guitar solo etc. And so I put all the papers together, along with my chords and lyrics, and put them in a drawer where they sat for almost a decade and a half.
At some point, when I realized that I finally have a lot more free time to myself, I vowed to take that song along with a plethora of others that I had started and never finished, dust them off, give them some well needed updates/changes and bring them to life. With “All the Time”, I took out the pages I had clipped together and went over all the critiques. I found one that made the most sense to me, and let that be my guide.
And so the process has begun…more to come…