MUSIC (DEMOS)

GIVE IT UP (acoustic demo)

GIVE IT UP (DEMO)

A good amount of these demos had demos before they were demos.

This was a song that was no doubt inspired by The Sopranos HBO Series. (Just go watch it. Don’t waste your time even waffling on the fence if you’re gonna watch it. It, like Breaking Bad, is just required reading at this point.) There was a market for this genre of movie/tv series etc. etc., and I met a guy who heard I made music and logos. I went home and made up a song about a guy on his first night with the Family, and what he would think the whole time should he be caught red-handed,
by the Police OR the competition.
The acoustic demo was just found recently, and I am intrigued at how Steven was originally CRYSTAL Steven. Hmmmm….I did not know that….
I can tell I was having fun doing this song. If I stay with the same guitar the whole time on a demo, that means I didn’t want it to get away from me in the (what ….minute and a half?) time it would’ve taken me to get the electric out and fire up an amplifier? OR it could’ve already been about 4am and I just decided to not wake up the neighborhood.

SAD DETAILS ALERT:There is another version of this song. It was recorded at Tim Mayock’s home studio with Tim at the soundboard, brother John on Telecaster, Clark Gregg on bass, and the late Tommy Ardolino on drums. If you’ve read the landing page of this website, you know that this was a landmark moment for me. I was asked if I would like to do a session where Tommy Ardolino, from my favorite live band NRBQ, would play the drums. The answer was of course YES and we set the date. Tim suggested I send a demo and I sent the electric demo of GIVE IT UP. The day arrived and we all showed up and there was Tommy. Quiet and a bit shy, he jumped behind the kit but was dead set about not recording the version I wanted to record. He wanted to speed it up and I just had to go along with it. We recorded it twice the same way and it just never made sense to me as a ‘song’. It’s out there somewhere, I guess, but when I hear it it just makes me sad. Tommy died not long after this session. He drove the bus for a ton of great shows and I still listen to the NRBQ Stone Balloon show all the time.

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