The new album by the Back Street Kids
STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS
Here’s my rundown of the 14 tracks on “Wicked Ways,” the new album by the Back Street Kids, a South Jersey cellar band named after a Black Sabbath song. BSK was formed in 1976 by high school buddies Tim “Burly” Kaercher (guitar), Brian Voger (bass), David “Fro” Sendrow (drums) and myself under my band name Elder Voger (vocals/guitar). The songs are originals except for the Rolling Stones‘ “Paint It Back.” Listen to the album (produced, mixed and mastered by Brian) for free HERE, or by clicking on the individual YouTube videos that follow. Kindly forgive my unexpurgated self-aggrandizing in the following song-by-song musings. We just finished this thing after eight years of recording, so it’s the endorphin rush talking.
“Wicked Ways”
The opening song on the album was likewise our opening song when we played three shows at the Galaxy in 1988 and ’89. The legendary Somerdale, NJ, night club helped launch hometown heroes Cinderella, Britny Fox and Heaven’s Edge to touring, recording and MTV stardom.
If “Wicked Ways,” the song, sounds to you like a ripoff of Deep Purple‘s “Perfect Strangers” album, you win a Wishnik. We were a four-piece without keyboards, so we played it hard and metallic. Later in life, it was our good fortune to be joined by Savage keyboardist Ron Tortu, a.k.a. “the Maestro.” A Hammond master, Ron finally made “Wicked Ways” sound as it was meant to. That’s Ron doin’ all that crazy virtuosity on our 2024 version of the track.
Lyrically, the song is based on “My Wicked, Wicked Ways,” the memoir of screen idol Errol Flynn, which was posthumously published in 1959. The lyric “The press corp railed / while the Zaca sailed” refers to Flynn being hounded by the press, legitimate and otherwise, and escaping to his beloved yacht, the Zaca. “Me and Mad Jack / you know we’d throw a few back,” refers to Flynn’s boozy escapades with another Hollywood hellraiser, John Barrymore.
“Mad Love”
“Mad Love” is named after a 1935 Peter Lorre movie. The narrator of the song is not sleeping with the young woman he addresses; he believes he is looking out for her, warning that her behavior of late can only lead to heartbreak. Sample: “He had to meet ya, you looked so damn sweet / There was no way you could stay on your feet.”
Me and Fro always did that interplay thing on the prelude — plaintive guitar accented with delicate cymbals. Me ‘n’ Karch had fun doing those Wishbone Ash-style doubled riffs. We really bent some of those notes. Brian’s bass climb midway through Verse 3 always reminded me of a particular Greg Lake moment from “Court of the Crimson King.” I played the solo, which you may notice is double-tracked. That’s because I don’t share Karch’s gift for improvisation. For me, the double-tracking is a crutch, really.
“There’s a Storm a Comin’”
“Storm” is the simple little rocker that could. I kept thinking we should strike it from the setlist, but Brian and Karch would always come to its defense.
My father was just starting to exhibit symptoms of the health woes that would eventually take him. Verse 2 talks about that: “Well, he checked himself in / and they checked him out / They said nothing was wrong / but he still had his doubts.”
The quadruple-tracked “ooh” vocals at the finish were added for this new version. They’re inspired by the somewhat goofy falsetto adopted by Mick Jagger on songs like “Emotional Rescue,” “Ain’t No Use in Cryin’” and “Undercover of the Night.”
A guest player is keyboardist David Radolovic, who came in and threw on that sweet piano. Thus, “Storm” became a whole ‘nuther song.
“When I’m With Her”
Onstage, I called this one “the love song in our set, real romantic sh*t.” I always assumed it was. But when I started rehearsing “When I’m With Her” again more than 30 years later, I realized that this guy who is extolling his newfound love is really just comparing her to his previous girlfriend who dumped him. So I tweaked a Verse 3 lyric to now say, “She’s got my heart, no one can compare / so why do I think of you when I’m with her?” I prevailed upon the boys to emphasize each syllable with me.
This was our Mott the Hoople tribute, though it never truly sounded like Mott. This new recording comes a little closer thanks to the piano riff stolen from Mott’s “All the Way From Memphis” (originally played on guitar), not to mention Radolovic’s sublime accompaniment. Talk about guest musicians who wind up “joining” the band.
“Can’t Stop Bein’ Your Fool”
While we were cooking up our Galaxy set, Karch asked if I could put together a song on the slow-and-dramatic side with room for a solo that could be a showcase for his playing style. From that conversation came “Can’t Stop Bein’ Your Fool.” One inspiration was another slow blues, “Since I’ve Been Lovin’ You” by Led Zeppelin. There’s also a bridge with a chord progression borrowed from a Yes song that I love, love, love, “Hold On” (from 1983’s “90125”). I used it, with slightly different metering, beneath the verses. The “Maestro” returned to wrap “Can’t Stop Bein’ Your Fool” in his Hammond swirls.
The lyrics for “Can’t Stop Bein’ Your Fool” were actually recycled from an earlier original, “Little Girl,” a straight-up blues in E. The “Little Girl” lyrics just fit the newer song’s metering, so I reused them. Pure laziness. Both songs are about an old flame who I can still picture when I sing them — for artistic purposes only, of course.
“Valley of the Dolls”
Here’s a song from the summer of ’78, at the time we rented the cellar of a big-ticket kiddie school. (If you’re a big-ticket kiddie school, don’t ever rent your basement out to long-haired scumbags.) My springboard was “If Six Was Nine” by Jimi Hendrix, which I recalled from the “Easy Rider” soundtrack.
Once again, I was partying too much and beating myself up about it. The lyrics have almost an “ABC Afternoon Special” naivete. I rewrote some of them — they were just too stupid to repeat 40 years hence — but a lot of ’em I kept as is, chalking it up to the song’s extreme Seventies-ness and the fact that I was 20.
Fro worked real hard on this song back in ’78, and his drums drive this fresh revisiting. All of that cowbell is from the heart. Brian encouraged me to use the wah-wah, and Karch to use talkbox, which made it Seventies out the ***.
“Commandments of Love”
In 1990, following our three-show Galaxy run, we plotted our triumphant return to the storied night club. We were gonna keep the best songs from our original set, and add some new ones. I recall that we cooked up a heavy metal arrangement of Tchaikovsky‘s “Swan Lake,” if you can imagine such a thing, as a prelude to “Wicked Ways.” But the only new song we worked on was titled “Commandments of Love.”
My musical inspiration was “Bad Attitude” from “House of Blue Light” (1987), Deep Purple’s followup to the “Perfect Strangers” album. To me, “Bad Attitude” held so much promise. (Alas, I didn’t put House of Blue Light” up there with “Perfect Strangers,” but “Bad Attitude” was “Perfect Strangers”-worthy.) The lyrics and melody of “Commandments” are pure Ian Gillan emulation — in my imagination, anyway. I can’t sing like him, of course, but that’s what was in my head and in my heart.
Sadly, that second Galaxy run never came to pass. By then, we were young husbands and fathers making our way in the world. Life’s responsibilities precluded our again jumping onto that stage. “Commandments of Love” would have been forgotten — I mean gone forever — if Brian hadn’t recorded a rough rehearsal of it in 1990. The cassette tape sat in a box for years. Brian found it; we played it; and it all came back. So “Commandments” is truly a case of “back from the grave.”
Lyrically, “Commandments” is an indictment of the wedding ritual. I pictured the narrator as a wedding photographer played by Gillan: “O holy day, a ritual feast / drink and dance, and carve the best / roll the garter along her thigh / a few more drinks, you won’t care why.”
It was a bit more work bringing along a song that was never finalized, never “road tested,” back in the day. I think we pulled it off. Brian recorded several solos by Karch. On a whim, he played back two of them simultaneously. Wonder of wonders, they sounded fantastic together. It’s as if Karch planned it that way. I also love his “answer” riffs at the end — so burnt and spare, they almost sound like Ace Frehley. They just make me smile.
“Crashland”
Another of our sleepers. It starts off like a straight rocker. Then we go into a Pete Townshend-ish, power chord kind of thing. Lyrically, “Crashland” is about a guy who’s been smoking a bit too much pot, and is starting to grow paranoid (“I can hear you all laughin’ / just waitin’ for me to fall”).
Here again, I’m double-tracked on the solo. What I love is how Karch steals the end of the song out from under me. After all my furious string-bending, Karch throws in those quick, economic little riffs that bring the song home. Karch actually didn’t wanna do it; he told my brother it would be stealing my thunder. Brian, who sometimes has to do a little cajoling, a little hand-holding, as the producer, said, “We can always take it off.” From the split-second I heard it, it just made me laugh. It still does. I love it.
“Nurse Ratchett”
Because it’s part devil music, part tongue-in-cheek, we always categorized this one as “Black Sabbath meets Spinal Tap.” Its chief inspiration is the song “Black Sabbath” from the album “Black Sabbath” by the band Black Sabbath, itself named after an Italian horror movie starring Boris Karloff titled “Black Sabbath” directed by Mario Bava. Funnily enough, one lyric reminds me of another Bava film, “Black Sunday”: “Just as the hangman puts the hood on me / searching my eyes for signs of sorrow.”
Performance-wise, we didn’t change a hair on the head of this venomous song. We play it just like we did at the Galaxy. Brian then added some “industrial” noise (the clangs and sirens), and I added some “Omen”-like choir and a keyboard riff Brian named “psycho flute” in ProTools. Otherwise, this track is just as we played it in ’88. I think Fro stole the whole album with this one song.
“The Killer”
Leave it to the Back Street Kids to do a song about Jerry Lee Lewis that has no piano. In ’83, Jerry Lee and Keith Richards played a set on a network TV special that I still think is one of the coolest rock shows ever broadcast. That same year, I made a beeline to see Jerry Lee at ye olde Club Bene in Sayreville, NJ. And seeing was believing.
The melody and arrangement of “The Killer” came first. But what to write about? Jerry Lee Lewis had been on my mind, so I wrote about the Jerry Lee I saw with Keith, and the one I saw at Club Bene, and sifted in some imagined backstage business: “He sits backstage as they warm up / counts his blessings / thanks his lord that he’s alive / he takes a belt and straightens up / checks the mirror / the hour of truth has just arrived.”
“Airborne”
This is the only song co-written by myself and my brother Brian. (Neither of us is dead yet, so it doesn’t have to remain that way.) We actually did it Lennon and McCartney style, by sitting down at a table with our guitars, a pen, and a pad of paper. This was 1976. I don’t remember the nitty-gritty except to say that we wrote it in one session. Brian recalls that he came up with the main riff, and from there we traded ideas. I do know that we were very intentionally trying to create a “progressive rock” song. In those days, prog-rock bands included Yes, ELP, Kansas, King Crimson, Genesis, Nektar, Gentle Giant and Rush. The idea was virtuosity, spaciness, and gear-changing arrangements. This is what us ham-and-eggers attempted with “Airborne,” anyhow.
Then we brought it to Fro, who created fantastic drums for it, smoothing the potentially jolting transitions wrought by fluctuating tempos. The three of us played “Airborne” over and over in the “Scav Room” (Fro’s drum-kit-equipped bedroom), a virtual guarantee that we were in an altered state. We really connected on “Airborne,” especially on that soft part with the plinky notes before the end solo. We played it at a “Bummastock” (a party thrown by the Bummahead) and at the Woodcrest swim club on the Bicentennial: July 4, 1976. (The trapped “audience” hated our guts, and I don’t blame ’em.)
Something wonderful happened while finishing the 2024 version of “Airborne.” Brian had recently attended a Heaven’s Edge gig. After their set, he spoke with Heaven’s Edge guitarist Reggie Wu. Reggie knew about the ongoing “Wicked Ways” recording sessions — Brian had been posting updates on Facebook throughout the project — and he offered to play on a track. Brian thought he was just being cool, but Reggie finally convinced Brian that he would love to contribute. (After all, he hung with Voger and Karch and Fro back in the day.) Most of the tracks were done except for “Airborne,” which was in a little bit of trouble. Hmmm … could Reggie save it?
What Reggie added to “Airborne” was nothing short of miraculous. He really worked it over, and became part of the sometimes complicated song. Besides having a real, live rock star on the track, there’s an underlying “full circle” thing goin’ on. Back in swingin’ Seventies, Reggie lived on Morris Drive in Woodcrest, NJ — the same street as me ‘n’ Brian. There’s a very real possibility that while Brian and I were sitting at that table writing “Airborne,” Reggie was down the street rehearsing with his band. Reggie even recalls that sometimes when he’d be walking down Morris Drive on a weekend night, hear the Back Street Kids rehearsing in the cellar, and he’d stop and listen for a spell. (I can scarcely believe this; we weren’t exactly Led Zeppelin.)
So imagine it: Nearly 50 years later, Reggie winds up playing on “Airborne” — and playing like a maniac, I might add. It’s full circle, I tells ya!
“Paint It Black”
I’m a Stones freak. Always have been. I’m especially fascinated with their Sixties hits, when Brian Jones was still alive and contributing. The Stones changed music as much as the Beatles. Jones’ sitar on “Paint It Black” was, I believe, the first time sitar was used “as” a rock instrument — that is, played forcefully in a contemporary Western fashion (as opposed to “Norwegian Wood,” which interpolated a more traditional sitar motif into a folk-rock song). “Paint It Black” was on the charts for 11 weeks in 1966. As a child, I remember hearing it through the static of tinny AM radios.
When we were cooking up our Galaxy set, we wanted to do one cover to show our roots. But in keeping with the era (not to mention the club), we thought it should be a “metallic” arrangement. I mean, the Back Street Kids weren’t a metal band, so it wouldn’t be straight-up metal. To my ears, our arrangement sounds as if Blue Oyster Cult covered “Paint It Black” during their “Don’t Fear the Reaper” period. At the Galaxy, we played “Paint It Black” second-to-last, just before our farewell barn-stormer “Rock Tonight.” Once again, me and Karch did the Wishbone Ash thing for the solo. Wait’ll ya hear Fro’s double-bass technique on the new recording. His footwork is like death metal. It’s toit.
“Love Me or Leave Me”
Brian and I agree that “Love Me or Leave Me” is the earliest of our songs that we still play. It’s very simple, very direct, and in the very head-scratching key of F-sharp. But we’ve been playing it so long, and kept polishing it over the years. We’d throw in little hitches here and there. We’d go a little soft, a little hard, or throw in some Chuck Berry-by-way-of-Earl Slick riffs. Our spirited playing of the song outstripped its actual merits as a composition.
Brian and I played “Love Me or Leave Me” at another legendary Jersey joint — the late, lamented Brighton Bar in Long Branch. No one in the club that night had ever heard it before, but it still went over. What we always said about “Love Me or Leave Me” is: It’s not what you play, it’s how you play it.
“Rock Tonight”
“This is the one we’d like you to remember us by,” we used to say about “Rock Tonight.” It was the final song of our Galaxy set, and it’s now the final song of our new album. “Rock Tonight” is very Eighties; I would compare it to Cinderella in spirit. I decided not to rewrite some of the dated references. When the protagonist says “I promise, too, that I’ll give you / the world and more / a champagne high, a VCR, and grams galore” — well, let’s just say that this was a long time ago. Another lyric is stolen word-for-word from “All Down the Line” on “Exile on Main Street”: “Won’tcha be mah / little baby / for a while?”
Once again, the great Radolovic puts the crowning touches on our song. His honky-tonk piano makes “Rock Tonight” sound a little bit Stones, a little bit Mott, and a little bit Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Our hope is that it screams “This is our last song of the night.” And that you’ll listen to us again some day.
The pressing
In the “who-even-owns-a-CD-player-anymore?” era, we did a modest pressing of … CDs. Nothing that broke the bank — just north of 110. We just wanted something to hold in our hands, something that existed. It’s shrink-wrapped and everything. If you’re still reading this far down, the CD graphics follow for your edification.
THE COVER
THE INSIDE
THE DISC
THE BACK COVER
VIDEO
Here’s the four of us, then billed as Mad Jack (because the friggin’ Back Street Boys “p*ssified” our name) doin’ Foghat in 2006. Brian’s gonna put up some older footage later on his YouTube channel Vogerland Studios.
Hey, thanks fer listenin’. This is classic post-middle-age, pre-dementia sh*t, ain’t it?