A Tribute Album:

Well now isn’t this the height of revisionist hypocrisy! That we, some 30 years on, sit here creamin’ over Ambrosia, Climax Blues Band, Firefall, Andrew Gold, Little River Band, Rupert Holmes and all manner of 70’s and 80’s musical polyester.

In their heyday, this crowd of artists felt like sonic grave stones wafting from radios everywhere––making me wish I’d been born 11 years earlier so that I could’ve participated in the 60’s pop music revolution as a teenager. But no, it was 1979, and “The Wall” and “More Songs About Buildings and Food” was about as good as things were gonna be for a while.

Looking back, maybe I’d been too hard on “Baby Come Back,” “Steel Away,” “Cool Change,” and dozens more––songs that smelled like car deodorizers, and sounded like Charmin feels. Maybe I should’ve appreciated that these cats were songwriters, in The Beatles tradition, building chords and melodies and words that would weather the storm of time––much better than other genres of music that will regret not holding songcraft as a central tenet.

Maybe the music was great after all. Maybe I just hadn’t liked their clothes.

Well, the revisionist joke’s on you Wisely, cuz you actually look pretty good in those duds.

And plus, you got to admit: Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “So Into You,” the track your dad loved to play in the ’74 Bonneville’s 8-track cassette player, was your favorite. Its swampy, concealed sex-bomb missive, delivered by the baritone stupor of the stoners running the FM. It inserted itself directly into your mind’s ear. You were an 11 year old jostling around in a gargantuan back seat, with out a belt on, learning about adulthood, without anyone ever giving you “the talk”.

The song’s suggestiveness spoke to you, despite that you were still a year from knowing what an orgasm felt like.

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So when Andrew Curry approached me about contributing to his project Drink A Toast To Innocence: A Tribute To Lite Rock, “So Into You” was the ONLY song I wanted to do.

Yes, it’s funk-lite, and indulges in a 70’s gold-top Les Paul guitar solo that lasts longer than the actual song form. But, it’s got a rock and soul edge that many other softy songs or the era missed. And this spells its redemption: S-E-X.

Never did see a photo of the band back when they were popular, but upon doing some YouTube research, I realized, “wow, that should’ve been me singing lead with those guys on Wolfman Jack’s “Midnight Special”.

So, my appreciation of their “voodoo in the vibe” has turned now into mustachioed-worship, something that we baby boom rockers often harbor for guys in cool bands. It’s that weird feeling of, “Hmmmm, do I dig their music, or am I really just kinda gay?”

I digress.

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There was only one direction to take my cover version of the track: steam it up. I couldn’t change the tempo or the song structure, because there’s barely a wisp of a song there to begin messing with. It’s just a groove with a few idiosyncratic changes that create subtle hooks.

So, I took the exact tempo, and the exact arrangement and just put a samba beat under it. Then, in honor of ‘the great liteness,’ and ‘hot jams everywhere,’ and ‘nylon-slacks that scoop your package over to the right’ (well, mine, at least), I played my ass off on a hyper-compressed nylon string guitar.

Well don’t look now, but I think I’d just turned myself on!

By the time drummer Michael Bland and bassist/co-producer John Fields laid out their tantalizing grooves it was obvious that “So Into You” should’ve originally been a male-female duet.

I’d recently sung a virtual duet with the female singer/songwriter Kelly Jones during the sessions for Secret Friend, an Australian pop project. Linus of Hollywood had produced that project and as I overdubbed my vocal he couldn’t stop re-living his amazement over Kelly’s vocal contributions. Indeed, her work is beautiful, notably the duets with Mike Viola on their “Melon” EP.

So I gave her a call because, despite not ever having met her, she seemed like the perfect yearning, wanting vocal co-pilot.

What I didn’t anticipate, is that by the end of our first hour together, she’d be whipping out one moaning orgasmic frenzy after another, filling the Atlanta Rhythm Section’s too-long urtext coda with all manner of “she-steam”. My Audio-Technica 4033a will never hear better, and neither, hopefully, will you.

Listen to the entire double tribute album. My track is so hot and bothered that they had to sequence it last. But you know what they say about delayed gratification.