“Little Stars”
All the world will be in love with night
“Little Stars” came about because of a TV Guide programming blurb I read on an anniversary of the JFK assassination that referenced Bobby Kennedy’s 1964 tribute to his brother at the Atlantic City Democratic National Convention. Kennedy quoted Shakespeare in the speech (listen at 06:35). He read a passage from Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene II. Juliet waits for Romeo to return as night falls, and says:
“Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night”
It stopped me in my tracks.
Immediately, I had a vision of taking photos of the person you love, (keeping one in a locket!) scissoring them out into little stars, and tossing them up into the night sky. I added that idea to the Shakespeare language, and I had the song.
WARNING: Brief music geekage — I had the idea to start the track a capella and hit the initial downbeat with a jangly suspended G chord in the eighth position. The guitar moves to a Cmaj7 and ultimately resolves to C, the song’s key. The bridge modulates to Eb major — a bit unexpected, as a flat third in the key of C is generally played in minor modality. It just sounded right.
Bob Walker and the Boho Zen Project
All of the songs I wrote in this period (1998-2005-ish) were recorded with Bob Walker, an incredible drummer I’ve known since we were kids and he had only a snare drum and a used cowbell (his mom, Laverne, was waiting to see if he stuck with it, I’d guess).
I met him when we were seven or eight years old at cartooning classes offered to kids at the local library in Garfield Heights, Ohio. He introduced himself to me as a drummer. I told him I played guitar. We met up and played horrible cover versions of songs we learned from the radio along with a pianist or two as we didn’t know any other kids playing guitar in our neighborhood.
School intervened, and we lost track of each other for a number of years, until by chance I saw him drumming with a junior high school jazz/rock orchestra. There were two drummers and they sync’ed their moves, twirling sticks in tandem and executing huge windmill moves before bringing their drumsticks crashing down on Zildjian ride cymbals or Rogers snares. The only way he could play any more intensely, I thought in my junior high brain, would be to pound the kit with human femurs. I convinced him that we had to put something together. We wound up in a succession of basement/garage bands throughout the ‘70s, before college, careers and marriages showed us what the real world was all about.
We worked together once again in our 40’s as a self-financed duo recording act under the questionable, and perhaps ponderous, name, “Boho Zen.” The last time we had played together was in 1980 in a power pop 4-piece called PZB (don’t ask. When we did a simulcast live concert at the old Cleveland Agora for the seminal FM radio station, WMMS, one of the deejays promoting our upcoming February 1980 live show said our band name “sounds like some kind of drug.” We’ll leave it at that).
The bands we were in together in our teens and twenties all had names that were frankly godawful. We struggled with what to call this incarnation of our act. Bob suggested we use some combination of “Bo” from “Bob,” and “Ho,” from — well, guess where. I suggested the idea of adding “Zen,” the idea being the music would represent the zen of both of us. And the term “boho” gave it a kind of hippie bohemian connotation. Right? Umm…honestly, no drugs involved here. Really.
How the Project Worked
I’d bring demo tracks recorded on a TASCAM Porta 02 Ministudio 4-track cassette recorder (we both had this unit, and later graduated to a digital Boss BR-8) with a song idea worked through against a click track — usually voice, guitars and bass. Bob would track up songs he had written — usually voice, drums and percussion. The recipient’s charge: Add whatever you want to the song. I’d add guitars and backing vocals to Bob’s songs. He’d add backing vocals and drums to mine.
So even though Bob or I would’ve written the original song by ourselves, by the time we’d both worked on it, the song had evolved considerably. We decided we’d both be credited for writing all the Boho Zen tunes as a result.
In “Little Stars,” like all the song ideas I’d toss out, I gave Bob a demo recording with my double tracked lead vocal, guitars, bass and a metronome click track. Bob would delete the metronome track, record drums and vocals, doing them any way he felt worked. He did a kind of a cool bossa nova drum thing on the verses and added some percussion flourishes to the “so fine” bridge section, along with the “fine, so fine, so fine, so fine” backing vocals (that bridge section has a bit of a nod to the Four Seasons — the “so fine” vocal at the very end is delivered as “so fi-yi-yi-ee-ine.” Think “Big Girls Don’t Cry” — “Big girls don’t cry-yi-yi.”) Bob also added a lovely harmony part to the lyric “with the night” throughout the tune. Done!
60 Watt Rock
Once we had a couple dozen songs written and demo’d, we’d pick through them to decide which 10 or 12 tunes we wanted to re-record in a professional studio. “Little Stars” was one of ten tracks we recorded for a CD we eventually called “60 Watt Rock.”
More on the 60 Watt sessions at Echo House Studios later!
NEXT TIME: A love song of mine, “Wouldn’t It Be?” Here’s a preview:
“Little Stars”
by Fencl/Walker © 2001 It's Yours? Music