Someone recently sent me an e-mail and asked about a demo tape I recorded in the '80's. While this isn't strictly speaking a Runaways' story, I thought I'd make the tale of how the demo came to be this week's story as it's rather a long one and I know people are curious.
Disclaimer -- It's a really bad demo tape. Trust me. I used to listen to demo tapes for a living. Actually, now that I think about it, compared to most demos from that era, it's pretty good. But in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty bad. So don't even think about it, okay? You're not getting a copy.
This story begins in Los Angeles one early morining in 1978. I had left my job doing promotion for Ariola Records some 4 or 5 months earlier, and was still looking for another promo gig. I was in the middle of an interview with the head of promotion for ABC records, when his phone rang, in spite of the fact that he'd asked his assistant to hold his calls. He picked up the phone, and listened for a minute or so. Then he hung up the phone, reached into his drawer, pulled out a couple of airline tickets, slid them across the desk to me and said "Want to go to Atlanta?" At my look of confusion, he told me that he was supposed to go to Atlanta after interviewing me to see Tom Petty, who recorded for ABC, open for the Kinks, but that ABC had just been sold and so, did I want his tickets? I figured what the hell -- Tom Petty had opened for the Runaways before and the Kinks had the same road manager, Tony Gibbons, that we had had on our British tour, so I'd go and somehow manage to get in to the show. So I borrowed the guy's phone and called up Ariola Records' Atlanta promotion guy, who I'd worked with when I was at Ariola, and asked him if he wanted to go the show. He said he did, so I arranged for him to pick me up at the Atlanta airport, then I tracked down Tony in Atlanta and got us passes and tickets. I went straight to the airport from my interview.
The Kinks/Tom Petty show was great, and since there was a big radio convention going on in Atlanta, we got invited to a big party at the hotel after the show. At the party, I ran into Tom Petty and asked him to tell me when he was drunk so that I could ask him a favor. Tom is the nicest guy in the world -- about an hour later he came up to me and said he was drunk and what could he do for me? I told him I wanted him to write me a song to do as a solo performer, and he said he was into it and I should find him later to work out a time to get together. Right about then, however, I realized that I hadn't bothered to make arrangements to stay overnight in Atlanta, and my flight out wasn't until about noon the next day. So I tracked down Tony, and he said Ray Davies had an extra bed in his room and would put me up for the night. Talk about a surreal day! I went into ABC at 9:00 A.M. looking for a job and by midnight was in Atlanta crashing in Ray Davies' room -- and you can wipe your dirty minds clean, there's nothing nasty in this story. But Ray wanted to go to sleep right away so I had to leave before I could track Tom Petty down and talk to him about a song. I came back to L.A. the next day and forgot about it.
A few months later, I got a call from my friend Hernando (see Story of the Week for June 2, 2000) who said that he had received a call from a friend of his, a music publisher named Danny, and that there was a guy named Gary at Skyhill Publishing who wanted me to call him. I called Gary, and it turned out that Skyhill published the Tom Petty song catalogue, and that Tom Petty had gone into Gary's office, told him I was looking for a song, and asked him to track me down and play me the catalogue. Like I said -- Tom Petty is the nicest guy in the world, and he went out of his way to try to accommodate my request. I went in and met with Gary, who played me all the songs that Tom Petty had recorded as demos, but had never recorded for an album. I didn't find anything I thought was right for me, but Gary was so impressed with my take on the songs that he offered me a job, which I accepted.
My official title at Skyhill Publishing and Tarka Music (for you music publishing geeks, the first was the BMI-affiliated company, the second was ASCAP-affiliated) was "professional manager." What that meant was that I was supposed to find recording artists to cover the songs in our catalogues. As Skyhill/Tarka had the catalogues for Tom Petty, Leon Russell, Dwight Twilley and Phoebe Snow, among others, I thought that sounded like a pretty cool job. I also had to listen to demo tapes, go out to clubs and look for new acts to sign, and transcribe lyrics for lyric sheets. But mostly, I was supposed to get our songs covered and that turned out to be harder than it sounds. I would camp outside the offices of record company execs and when their secretaries walked away from their desks I would go over and pick up their recording studio schedules and see which acts were recording in what studios. Then I would drive over with a bunch of song demos and try to foist them off on the producer. One day, I took a tape to Leo Sayer's producer, David Courtney, who turned out to be very cool and actually invited me to stay for the recording. The engineer, Dave Leonard, was also very cool and spent some time showing what he was doing on the sound board. I found it so interesting that I called him up a few weeks later and asked him if he would teach me how to run the board. He agreed, and I went in for a lesson.
I wouldn't say I was hopeless as a sound engineer, but I wasn't very good either. It wasn't Dave's fault -- he's a grammy winning producer who has worked on records for Toto, Hall and Oates and Prince -- but I just couldn't get the hang of it. My lesson gave me an opportunity to get to know Dave a little better, though, and when I finally got around to wanting to record a solo demo, I asked Dave to engineer it. Dave agreed, and even managed to get me free studio time at a 24-track studio where he was working. In the early '80's, this was a really big deal, as virtually no one had home studios and 24-track rooms rented out for hundreds of dollars an hour. Free studio time meant, however, recording at 3:00 in the morning, or whenever the last band had gone home. That wasn't so bad, but it also meant that you had to find musicians who could be available at the last minute and weren't working. And, of course, I needed a producer.
In the early '80's my sister was good friends with Dana Strum, a bass player who would go on to play with Ozzy and with Slaughter. At the time he was in a band called Modern Design, and he and the guys in his band offered to help me out. I had written a song, inspired by my trip to France the year before, called I Can't Talk to French Boys, and I wanted to do a danceable cover of Tommy Roe's Dizzy, which had been a top 40 hit when I was a little girl (an audio clip of Tommy Roe's original version can be heard by clicking here and then clicking on Dizzy). Dave managed to come up with some 3:00 A.M. studio time for me during the middle of the week, and my biggest worry was the drums -- studio set up for the remaining instruments is really quick, but it takes a long time to set up a drum kit and each drum and cymbal has to be individually miked and given its own track. It takes up a lot of time and a lot of tracks, and then you have to mix the drums down to free up the tracks for the other instruments and vocals. So Dana decided we should use a drum machine.
Dana Strum
Linn drum machines had just come out and it was really expensive to rent them, but Dana managed to finagle one. The plan was to meet at my Mom's house earlier in the evening and program the two songs with Modern Design's drummer, but Dana didn't show up until about midnight and so we only had a couple of hours to program two complete songs, and none of us had ever used a drum machine before. Somehow, we managed to get things done, but there are a couple of places where Dana and the drummer went way overboard with the fills and it was too late for me to get them all out. Miraculously, every musician but the keyboard player showed up. I was disappointed by not having a keyboard player, as I really wanted a Kim Wilde Kids in America type synthesizer riff, but we managed to record a couple of good tracks with just guitar, bass (Dana played) and drum machine. We even had time for me to record the vocals, lead and backing, for French Boys, although I was never really happy with the way Dana recorded the lead vocal. There was a trick a lot of bands used in the '80's for vocals, which was to slow down the track and sing in the resulting lower key. This was good for high notes a singer was having trouble hitting, or to give the vocal more "punch" which is why Dana wanted to use it. When the track is sped back up, the vocal is compressed. In my case, I thought it made me sound like Minnie Mouse but once it was done there wasn't time to redo it. In fact there wasn't time to do the vocals for Dizzy, so Dave found me some additional studio time for the following week and I went in with Dave to record the vocals for Dizzy and to mix both tracks.
The recording of the Dizzy vocals was really strange. The basketball playoffs were on and Dave really wanted to watch them, so he set up a mike for me in the control room and showed me how to punch my own vocals in and out. I recorded the lead and backing vocals in a studio all by myself! When the game ended, Dave and I sat down to mix the two tracks starting with French Boys. There are very few set rules in making albums, but one fundamental rule is that you start every mix from scratch, that is, when you finish mixing a song, you reset all the controls to zero and start all over. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work when you're stealing studio time, and since we had put the instruments and vocals on the same tracks for both songs, we were able to mix Dizzy at pretty much the same levels. It probably would have worked well had it not been the middle of the night and had we not spent so much time working on the previous song. While it isn't a bad mix, it's hard to hear the backing vocals and it could have been a lot better. But, nevertheless, I still ended up with two professionally engineered 24 track songs and I was pretty happy.
Of course, demo tapes usually have at least 3 or 4 songs.
I needed more studio time and felt like I couldn't impose on Dave or Dana again. So a friend put me in touch with Jim Saad, who had a 16-track studio in Atwater. Jim was a great guy who helped me out with the rest of my tracks. For the remainder of the songs, I used an assorted group of talented musician friends -- Mark Anthony on bass, Roger Romeo (from Legs Diamond) on guitar, and Bobbyzio Moore (the brother of Freddy Moore, Demi Moore's ex-husband, who in one of those great coincidences ended up starring in the movie Parasite, an early Alien knock-off, with Demi Moore and Cherie Currie) on sax. Again, I managed to get ahold of a drum machine so we could avoid a timely drum set up. And once again, the keyboard player I'd recruited didn't show up for the sessions. Fortunately (?) Roger had a synthesizer in his car and we used it on some of the tracks. We recorded three songs -- You're a Distraction, a pop reggae number about an unrequited attraction to a co-worker, Where Do Rich Boys Go on Saturday Night?, a pop rockabilly song, and a ballad, Number Two Girl. These 3 songs, plus I Can't Talk to French Boys and Dizzy, made it onto my final demo tape, which sparked a lot of record company and publisher interest, but ultimately no deal. An A&R guy from Columbia records offered to get me studio time at the Record Plant to remix French Boys and Dizzy, but between dropping the masters off at the Record Plant and actually getting into the studio, the exec got fired, supposedly for putting too much of his artists' recording budgets up his nose. And no one at the Record Plant could ever figure out what name he'd had the masters stored under. The masters are still missing to this day, and it's unlikely they'll ever be found as the Record Plant no longer exists at its original location.
Legs Diamond, with Roger Romeo, second from right
In addition to the 5 songs that made it onto my "official" demo tape, I recorded a few other demos for fun. The first was a live rehearsal tape with the guys who'd recorded the 16 track songs with me. I don't remember all the songs we did on it, but two of them were Pretty, Young and Stupid and Rise to the Occasion, a suggestive funk number whose words were inspired by the success of Prince in the early '80's -- I figured I could write dirty lyrics as easily as Prince, but I'd never managed to write any music to go with it. The guys started a really cool funk jam while I was in the bathroom, and when I came out I started singing my lyrics over it and we ended up with a totally awesome live recording of it. Unfortunately, the only copy of that tape got lost years ago.
While I was working at Skyhill/Tarka, I had made friends with Noah Shark and Max, the record producers who did Tom Petty's first album and had a studio next door. I turned them on to Freddy Moore's band, The Kats, a great L.A. band who became local favorites with songs like Lost My T.V. Guide. I also introduced The Kats to a woman named Daphna Edwards, who had just started her own record label, and she ended up signing them to do an album with Noah and Max. While they were in the studio recording their album, Get Modern, Freddy wrote a song for me called Can't Stand Dancing, which had a very Elvis Costello kind of feel to it, and Noah and Max produced it with the Kats playing on it. I think I have a two-track mix of that song somewhere, although I haven't heard it in years.
Freddy and Demi Moore
Get Modern album cover
Plastic Facts album cover
Freddy Moore is 2d from left,
Bobbyzio Moore is on right
DVD cover of Parasite
Finally, I recorded two songs on Mark Anthony's home studio. The first song was a fluffy, Beatles-esque pop tune I'd written that was called I Saw Him Today. To make it even more Beatles-y, Mark had his upstairs neighbor, who had starred in the touring company of Beatlemania, play all the instruments. The resulting demo sounds like a female version of the Beatles, down to the Nowhere Man style harmonies. Unfortunately, there are no existing tapes of this song either. The only demo I still have from the Mark Anthony sessions is the last song I ever recorded, Strike One to the Heart, which only contains a so-called scratch vocal, recorded along with the instruments while I had the flu, for the sole purpose of setting the tempo. The vocal was always supposed to be redone, but Mark ended up selling his equipment and it never got finished. Like all the demos I recorded, it's really obvious it was done in the '80's. If you ever find a copy, please burn it!
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