We’re posting this in honor of the 50th anniversary of my first hearing this song when Jerry Strull and I were roommates in 1975. (Neal Warner)
I was only a few months out of college when I got an apartment with a friend from high school and future fellow Tooner, Jerry Strull. One day Jerry was going through a box of old cassettes and he played me some tapes of his high school band, Busters & The Penetrators (subtle), playing at a high school dance. They were very professional sounding and his guitar solos were incredible. I don’t think I had ever heard him play before this time. Then he played me a tape that actually kind of changed my life. It was a tape of him playing with the drummer from my old band in high school and also future Tooner, Pat Meehan, and a kid I had known from my high school Art class, David Nigel Lloyd.
When I first met Dave I asked him if he sang or played guitar as he was the first person I’d ever met with a bonafide English accent. I would LOVE to have been in a band with a singer with an English accent. David said he did sing and played acoustic guitar a little but only English folk music. Not rock and roll.
But now here I was, years later, listening to a tape recorded not too long after high school of Dave singing and playing Classic Rock! And his original song titled Back To The Bronze Age had the kind of ancient Celtic vibe similar to bands like Jethro Tull and Procol Harum. I absolutely loved it and made a copy by recording Jerry’s copy using my cassette recorder recording directly off his speakers. A crappy copy of an amateurish original recording but the song was the song and the performances were actually very good. Especially Jerry’s solo.
Years after this I bump into David Lloyd at Topanga Plaza where he was selling stereos. He told me that he and Pat had just recorded a Punk/Newwave single that was being pressed. I immediately offered (insisted) on drawing cover art for the record and that I would help him and Pat put together a live band so we could play the emerging Punk/Newwave club scene. A new opportunity after years of the Disco Era. The short-lived live band was called Wild Oscare and changed to BLaM after I left to start Womanizer.
One day Dave sent me a fairly nice recording of Back To The Bronze Age recorded on a four track machine without Jerry’s participation. I had been living with the legend of this tune in my head for decades at this point so I asked Dave permission to “remix” his song. He sent me the original four track which I had digitized and then Greg Piper (from The Tooners) and I got Jerry to record a new solo inspired by his original recording, I added some acoustic guitars, Greg replaced the original bass tracks then we went a little nuts with an orchestration reminiscent of Game Of Thrones or Lord Of The Rings themes.
David Nigel Lloyd is a bit of a minimalist and didn’t really appreciate my production and he had also incorporated Back To The Bronze Age into his rock opera The Assassin Of Venus. Be that as it may, here is my interpretation of David Nigel Lloyd’s song Back To The Bronze Age performed by DNL on guitar and lead vocals, Patrick Meehan on drums, Jerry Strull on lead guitar, Neal Warner on acoustic guitars and Greg Piper on bass guitar, back-up vocals and virtually everything else.
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