Our CD, Rocktasia, is promoted as being a concept album about life in the age of free love. Gary Gladstone, a recording studio owner and writer of the song Paradise told us that after a couple listenings from start to finish he came to realize the CD is a concept album. It hadn’t occurred to me until then but I agree with him. When we first planned to record I told fellow Tooners and the record’s co-writer, Greg Piper, that it wouldn’t be a good idea to chase styles and try to do a CD of music that’s popular right now as by the time we’re done recording whatever style is in style now will surely be passé. We might as well make the record we always wanted to make when we first used to sit up on a hill high above the new home construction in Calabasas, drink Strawberry wine and talk about what kind of an album we’d make if we could ever get our band together. As far as subject matter, we might as well record whatever songs we feel are personally important to us rather than try and produce “hits” as musical tastes change so quickly we’re never going to be able to anticipate the next trend. So we ended up with a song about our high school friendships as we met in high school, the breakup of our first loves, songs about our wives, a song about the military draft which was an ominous cloud over our teenage selves, a song about my brother, a song about Greg’s brother-in-law and a couple of tunes that reflected our shared interest in metaphysics.
In our previous band, Womanizer, the theme was of course, women, but also we only wanted to record songs that had a story that could be easily illustrated. We were from the start a multimedia act and illustrated our song lyrics in PaperCuts Magazine and animated them in music videos. We were in style an “underground comix” band. Sex and comic book violence were our main themes as they made the most colorful stories.
Currently I have two more concept albums written. One is about being a middle-aged man who has spent his life chasing the Rock & Roll Dream only to one day wake up to realize that his part-time “day” job, taken just to pay the rent until the band “makes it”, is in fact his career. It asks the question, “What do you do when you’ve become too old to succeed in the Music Business?” My answer in the story comes when the main character, along with all his fellow employees and even his supervisor who always told him if he worked as hard at his job as he did on his music he’d at least be more successful in an occupation in which he had no real interest anyway, are all laid off due to a rotten economy. While everyone else is in a panic having seen their lifelong careers suddenly vanish along with their life savings and retirements, our hero just refocuses on the one thing that preoccupied him throughout his life. At the end of the story everyone is down at the local tavern trying to drown their sorrows while he’s the one up on the stage trying happily to cheer them all up. Yes, another autobiographical concept.
No comments:
Post a Comment