Of all of the strange stories in my lengthy music career, this is one of them.
In the 1980's I was the lead guitarist and occasional vocalist for a band called ASK. We were pretty good after a while. It was me, Kevin Donville (bass and lead vocals), Ed Lee (Keyboards and vocals) and a series of drummers before we finally settled win with Tim "T.J." Klassen. We started off slow but after some rough gigs, including an horrific one where we were the act that followed the famed songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland running through their biggest hits (we sounded nothing like them and the audience was theirs) we built up a reputation in West L.A. as a solid band and had earned the trust of the famed Esther Wong herself.
We played 20 gigs at Madame Wong's during our run.
In 1989 Kevin had to leave the band. The rest of us tried to soldier on for a bit, recruiting my brother to play bass and trying a few other guitarists to take over lead duties while I took over vocals. None of it really worked, but we did have fun with one song. Back in the ASK days we had a hard rocker called "Run To Me" that featured a riff I stole from Don Dokken. I re-worked the song as a ballad and we worked up a pretty good arrangement. Tim and my brother worked up a solid rhythm section part and we all agreed that this was pretty awesome.
The band fizzled out and that's mostly my fault. But one night Tim and I got some beers and watched a VHS tape of U2's "Rattle and Hum", and when they got to "Bullet The Blue Sky" Tim's air-drumming that slamming part and I'm pretending to be The Edge when Tim asks me if I can play that slide guitar part. I could and I can. He said, "wouldn't that be awesome in Run to Me?"
We had one more practice, jut him, me and my brother and it WAS awesome.
I then got sidetracked by the events that led me to record a song called "Favorite Partner", a dance track that was completely played on acoustic instruments. That song took off in the beach town clubs and I suddenly needed a full demo to shop around - because people were starting to ask who I was. I had two other songs ready to go in the same vein as "Favorite Partner" and I asked TJ and Alex (my brother) to come to a session and we'd record "Run to Me" like we had last practiced it, "Rattle and Hum" bits and all.
In those days I practiced and recorded at a placed called Pendragon Studios. None of us lived close to it, but their engineer - a man named Bill Krodell - was a genius.This of course means that we all have to drive there. On the day of the session Alex's car breaks down, and he can't make it. So now I have to play bass.
TJ and I record a reference track - my guitar and his drums, and then I record the bass. I had never tried to play bass on the song before, so I just copied with Alex had done. It's a pretty good bass line, and later he would be very happy that I had kept it. I record the guitars and when it comes time to do the solo I pull out the slide and do the "Bullet the Blue Sky" bit. It's only a few seconds but Bill claps his hands together and says, "Wait until you hear how I mix THAT!"
It gets time to do the vocals and it takes me a few takes to get the lead down. The harmonies were easy though (that had been my part when it was an ASK song). We're listening to a take and getting to the last chorus when TJ, who's been just sitting and listening for the past couple of hours as his part was long finished yells out, "Knock Knock Knockin' on Heaven's Door" in time with the drum part he played.
Of course, we just HAD to incorporate that. Understand, There were about a dozen version of the old Bob Dylan song making the rounds right around then, including the Guns 'N' Roses one, so it was once again part of the zeitgeist. In the space of a few minutes I came up and recorded with a blistering 4-part harmony of those six words, and then returned to the song as I had written it. It was a fun off-the-cuff moment and I love those.
We mixed the tracks and I suddenly had a 4-song demo. A friend of mine did a photo session for the cover. I'm terrible at those and to try to get me to loosen up she had me balance a small rubber shark on my shoulder. The photo that resulted led to not only the cover but the title of the demo, "Hand Feeding the Hungry Shark".
God's Teeth I'm young in that photo.
The demo got circulated around and label interest started up, but they wanted to hear more. They wanted live shows and at this point I really didn't have a band. I was getting club play though and I was selling demos, so I decided to record a full album. The result was the first album I released as Jim Christopher, "My World - Welcome To It", named after a television show I barely remembered from my childhood. It's available to this day:
Thing is, if you listen to track Seven you will NOT hear the Bob Dylan Lyrics. You need to remember that this is 1989-90. The world wasn't then what it is now. I hadn't sampled Dylan. I had essentially just used his words, and I realized I was going to need his permission. So I asked.
It took a bit of doing, but I found his agent and sent him a letter outlining what I was doing, and sent him a copy of the demo. I figured that their publishers would want a cut and I was prepared to give it. Instead I got a letter back stating that if I were to release this version of the song with Dylan's lyrics included that they would sue me into the ground and crap on the smoldering remains.
Well, I'm this 24 year-old broke dude and this is Bob Dylan's battery of lawyers. I wasn't going to win this one, so I went to a studio and rented one of their editing consoles and spliced out most of the last chorus (I'm a VERY good editor - most people don't even realize the cut).
That was that. My little tribute to Bob Dylan was left on the cutting room floor. 20 seconds of the song just gone. End of story.
Except.
Long after I had left Los Angeles and retaken my own name as a recording artist, Dylan gives an interview about all of the covers of his songs done over the years, and how many musicians quote him. Part of the answer he gives is about how he got overly protective of his catalog at one point and wouldn't let anyone use his music without using the whole song. Guess about when this was? He goes on to say in the interview that he doesn't mind people quoting him - that he does it himself.
In essence, he was giving everyone permission to do the very thing his lawyers had told me not to do. I'm not going to go into the story of how I confirmed this, but I did learn that he actually had never even heard my song (Hugh Hefner did, but that's another story). The ultimate response I got? "We're cool."
But I had edited that chorus out of the master for the album. I went back to the original 2 inch tapes I had recorded on and remixed and remastered the song. I let it hang around bandcamp for a little while, but I never really gave any thought to releasing it.
Well, 2020 and 2021 have been such game-changers in my life. After spending years struggling with a new album the floodgates opened up for me as a writer and a recording artist. As many of you know, I've released a ton of material this year, including some of my older tracks that never saw the light of day. It took a while, but it finally got through myu thick skull that I could finally put out in wide release the original version of "Run to Me", complete with The Edge guitar solo and 6 words by Bob Dylan.
It's the opener of "Demolisten", which is mostly a random collection of songs that never saw wide release for one reason or another. Some of this work is seriously unpolished, but I figure if the big artists can release their back-catalog crap so can I. But I'm really proud of "Run to Me".
I played every instrument and sang all the vocals except for the drums, which are played by Tim "TJ" Klassen (who now lives in New York). If you listen very very carefully you can even hear TJ "singing" (screaming, really) as he plays drums, especially on some of the fills.
Every song on this "new" EP has a story behind it, but this one is the one from the very early days of my life as a solo artist. I can tell the other stories if you want. I promise to be less verbose on the others. Their stories are shorter.
