He went on to explain that he had tried to obtain the rights to use “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen for that spot, but they had refused to grant him the license. Thank you, Queen! I thought to myself.
“That’s the song you’ll hear on the rough cut I’m going to send you. That’s the one to beat, but I can only send you the first three minutes. The rest is top secret,” Sly intoned.
Click.
I stared at the music book. The thing looked like it had been caught in a brainstorm. Ideas, both random and dictated, spread from top to bottom and side to side. I recently rediscovered this artifact and it immediately took me back to that day. That pivotal moment.
I looked over at Frankie, he was half grinning, half in shock, and we slapped each other five. This was the chance we had been waiting for.
Frankie was a young, unproven guitar hotshot from the industrial town of Franklin Park, Illinois, and I was already a conquering warrior fighting on the frontlines of rock ’n’ roll for fifteen years, looking for my next victory. As band members and individuals we were ready for what might turn out to be our defining moment. We agreed that Rocky Balboa’s story was a lot like ours: Against the odds, a band on a small label tries to fell the giants, Foreigner, Journey, Kansas, and other melodic rock heavyweights.
First “Eye of the Tiger” scribbles and Stallone’s number.
That afternoon I went out and rented a pro Betamax player—a then state-of-the-art video machine that was about the size of a small refrigerator. I hooked it up on the kitchen counter and waited for FedEx. When the tape arrived at my doorstep the next day I called Frankie to come over quick and we wasted no time loading it in.
Here I was, at the ready, my white Les Paul electric guitar casually slung around my neck waiting for lightning to strike. Suddenly, the kitchen was charged with electricity. The Mohawk-headed Mr. T rose up like the commanding threat he would soon become; his dramatic entrance was contrasted by Stallone resting on his laurels doing Master Charge commercials and enjoying the spoils of his success. This quick-cut film montage was accompanied by “Another One Bites the Dust” by one of our favorite bands, Queen.
I rolled my eyes and wondered out loud how we were going to beat that masterstroke of a song. Queen’s smash hit seemed to work so perfectly. We watched it again, this time with the sound off. That’s when I started playing that now familiar, muted, sixteenth-note figure: digga digga digga digga digga digga digga and then started grabbing chords from thin air; C minor, B flat major, C minor. Then C minor, B flat major, C minor, C over G, A flat. Repeat. The slashes seemed to coincide with the punches being thrown. I even put one slash in an unorthodox beat to match a punch. This irregular beat would become the scourge of drummers for all time! Later in my career, when I’d audition a drummer, if he couldn’t grasp this weird measure I knew he was probably not gonna cut it.
At just the right moment, without saying a word, Frankie and I headed for the piano room at the front of the house. This very cozy, yet inspiring room held my small, but growing guitar collection, which hung on the wall. A beautiful Ibach grand piano took up a good portion of the tiny room. (I still have that piano—it’s lucky.)
Frankie switched to guitar and I dashed over to the piano. I hammered out a chord progression that was actually quite R&B inflected. Frankie held down the fort with the rhythm we had established. Now, we had the groove and some of the chords, but then we hit a wall.
What was this movie about? How does it end? What should be the focus of this song? We called up Sly and begged him to send us a rough cut of the entire movie. He reluctantly agreed to do so but only under the condition that we send it back the very next day, overnight delivery.
The entire Rocky III movie arrived by FedEx the next morning. We sat there spellbound as we watched the dazzling action and humorous yet meaningful dialogue. It was filled with soon-to-be-famous Stallone catchphrases: “Go for it!” “Knock you into tomorrow!” Then we heard it: the Big Hook. Rocky Balboa’s trainer, played by the gravelly voiced actor Burgess Meredith, tells the main character, “Rocky, you’re losing the eye of the tiger.” Bingo. There was our title, the focus of our game-changing smash.
The next day, we reconvened. We sat in the music room wondering where this lyric could start. Frankie broke the ice. He mumbled, “How about, ‘Back on the street, doing time, taking chances’?”
I liked the sound of those words. I thought about the script and Rocky’s quest to stay on top. I countered with, “How about this? ‘Rising up, back on the street, did my time, took my chances.’”
We had our start. From there the lyrics just seemed to flow with the storyline. The next few days as I jogged (an every morning ritual) I sweated out words and phrases.
“So many times, it happens too fast, you trade your passion for glory.” Yeah, great line. I would recite it into my Radio Shack cassette recorder. “Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past; you must fight just to keep them alive.” Yup, that’ll work, too.
When I had the bulk of the lyric and Frankie’s approval, we booked time at Chicago Recording Company (CRC) to record the demo. We rounded up Marc Droubay, our drummer, and Stephan Ellis, on bass, who were both living in a house that my wife, Karen, and I owned at the time. Stephan obviously didn’t understand the magnitude of the project. In fact, I remember how he groused about going down to the studio just to record “some movie music.”
The guys heard the song for the first time as I was pounding it out on the Yamaha grand piano in studio A. We set up the drums in the storage room in back of the studio to get that raw, ambient, John Bonham–style sound. The Led Zeppelin drummer was Marc’s main influence. You could hear it in his attack.
When it was time to record, Frankie sat in the control room next to our engineer, the late Phil Bonanno, to make sure the sounds were going down right. Frankie’s great set of ears always helped us get the most out of an engineer and a studio.
We found a click tempo, which is like a metronome that we would hear in our cans (headphones) to keep our tempo steady. We were concerned because the tendency for most musicians is to rush the tempo. In this song, that outcome would have been deadly.
As soon as we lit into the song I felt the surge of magic. Oh, my God! Marc laid down the groove with four on the floor, the kick drum pounding on every beat and the jackhammer snare that Frankie and Phil had dialed in just right. Steph laid down the steady plod with his amazing pick style, and, on piano, I supplied the expansive chording; my goal was to fill out our song and make it move.
Survivor’s lead singer, Dave Bickler, did not know the song well enough yet to sing a guide vocal so we just kept the melody in our heads as we played. The second take was magic. It felt like history was going down; we were achieving a solidity of sound I had never heard before and rarely since.
Frankie declared it was a “take” and we filed into the control booth for a very loud and powerful playback. The overdubs went quickly the next day. I laid down the sixteenth-note digga-digga-digga muted guitar figure to the bottom using my white Les Paul Custom running through my 1959 Fender Tweed Bassman amp and an Electric Mistress chorus effect—this device mimics the sound of an electric twelve-string—then I meticulously doubled this part, which Frankie panned far left and right in the stereo spread to make it sound huge.
Now it was Frankie’s turn. He did the first
