Background
This was the first song I recorded for my first album, and was the A side of the first 45 I released. This song was originally a slow ballad designed to melt the heart of any girl sitting next to me on the piano bench while I played and sang it. But, when I started getting the material together for the album I found that I had too many slow ballads, so I decided to speed the song up.
Instrumentation
I asked Alan Sawyer to come up with a 'disco' guitar riff to use for the song (after all it was 1979). I hummed a few example riffs, and he came up with the perfect part. His guitar solo and electric piano solo (a solo duet of sorts), was inspired. Alan was also able to get a really great, explosive drum sound for the recording (which he still brags about to this day), and his drum playing fit the new song style perfectly. I'm especially proud of the bass guitar part I recorded for the song, which also supported the new style of the song. Alan's Trombone part and my Sax parts gave further meaning to the phrase 'point that thing toward New Jersey', which we often laughed about. Alan also laughed about my little flute lick sounding like the Looney Tunes cartoon song (similar maybe?). Since this was the first song done in the studio, Alan and I spent a lot of time on it. There were so many instruments and vocals added that at one point Alan joked that I had put everything in but the kitchen sink. Hence, the credit in the album for Alan playing 'Kitchen Sink.'
Behind the Scenes
The sizzling percussion instrument you hear throughout the song is an Afuchi, and that sound was great - but unexpected. Normally an Afuchi doesn't sound quite that crisp, but after recording it we found that the patch cord for the Afuchi channel had a short which added the noise when the Afuchi signal passed through it (talk about dumb luck). Also, there are a large number of instruments and vocals in this song that were individually recorded. Since the studio at this time had an 8-track recorder, there was a lot of pre-mixing (or 'bouncing') that had to be done. I would 'bounce' the three separate brass tracks onto one track to save two tracks for other things. After many, many, many of these, Alan crowned me the "King of Bouncing."