I found the essay on "Fade To Black" to be painfully accurate. I, too, was terribly disasppointed by the "album" into which it was sequenced. The record, as a whole, comes acrsoss as nothing more than a series of short pop songs that- while melodically bubblegum and catchy, really provide the listener with nothing substantive to embrace. And further, really provide the listener with no feeling of connection to the artist. A bad record seems inexcusable in a business as tough as the music industry. For a recording artist to squander the opportunity to reach millions of poeple (Immortal/Epic/Sony) is simply unexplainable, and one cannot help but wonder what the individual responsible for the music, as well as the companies that distributed it, must have been thinking. Here is where I can shed some light on this subject: I wrote and recorded that album (His Boy Elroy) essentially by myself, and wrote the song in question ("Fade To Black") during a very dark time. The point that Summer may find interesting is that even the seemingly meaningless pop ditties were composed and recorded during a terrible and stressful time in my life- a time during which I found my lifelong dreams being chewed up, swallowed, regurgitated, and fed back to me by the machine that I unwittingly yet willingly became a part of.

For years I couldn't understand how it happened, and now, a decade later, time has given me the opportunity to better see the whole picture. At the time, 1992/1993, the airwaves were cluttered with the likes of Stereo MC's, The Farm, Soup Dragons and most notably, EMF and Jesus Jones. The Seattle movement was just beginning but had not yet changed the face of music. I was from Seattle and had been in LA less than a year when a song I wrote, a rip-off of Janes Addiction's Been Caught Stealing fell into the hands of Epic A&R. The idea that someone who grew up 30 miles from Cobain (who at the time was emerging as the leader of the movement,) who had similar medical problems (ulcers, et al,) and who had come from a broken home and lived in the outisde world as a teenager, alone and isolated, AND YET, had found a way to turn those experience into a drastically different kind of music, appealed to A&R. What fueled to idea was that I had the look that all of us who grew up the Northwest had, long blonde hair that hung in my face (not bi-level or mullet, but all one length down below the chin) and donned the flannel shirts and old Levis that were necessary because of the cold, not driven by style. In a sense, I was supposed to be "pop" music's answer to the oncoming movement that would make LA redefine what was marketable. The problem was that I only had the one song (NOT Fade To Black,) and based on that one song Sony/Epic gave me $250,000 to do a record. Not a lot of money by business standards, but enough to interest me and draw me away from my bartending and waiting on tables in Santa Monica.

Interestingly enough, every lyric on HBE was very heartfelt, but the heartfelt undertones were lost in the approach I took in writing and recording the songs. I needed 3 1/2 minute pop songs to satisfy my A&R. I didn't have the guts or the experience to stand up for anything different, and I blame no one but myself for squandering my unique opportunity. But it's important to tell the story because there is nothing more dissatisfying than buying a record and being disappointed-- even if it only cost $3 in a bargain bin. If Summer actually listened to the entire record, her time alone was worth more than the $3.

I struggled for nearly a year to produce this record: recording 12 hours a day, then retreating to my apartment to listen to STP and Sound Garden and, of course, Nirvanna. Then retruning to the studio the next day to try and embrace what I was doing. If one reads the lyric sheets for the album (HBE) the music becomes secondary and one can start to get into the mind of the 24 year old who was trying to do what he thought would help his dreams come true. Even the love songs are shrouded in pain and disillusion, they're just not brought to the music properly, and the lyrics were written by an amateur (me) who really had no business with a major label record deal. It was in the midst of this experience that I wrote Fade To Black (the last song I wrote for the record,) which was not about a person dying, but rather, a person who saw his dream dying right in front of him. In the live shows I did I would introduce the song by saying that it was about a "a friend of mine who had died..." That is exactly what it was about.

The nature of the music industry is that sometimes great artists never get the chance, and sometimes artists who are not ready for the chance get the opportunity before they're ready for it.

Within a month of Kurt Cobain killing himself, I too had a gun in my mouth (a Mossburg 12 gauge shutgun with riot modifications.) I'd lost the only connection to the real expression of my life that I could readily listen to- as I was unable to produce or write anything of the like. The gun had laid under my futon for more than a year and having not been cleaned, had become sticky and rusted and when I pulled the trigger the trigger jammed. A week later a gave it to a friend of mine whose brother-in-law knew how to fix guns and I told him to never give it back to me. He never did. The point is that no one's experience in buying or listening to His Boy Elroy could ever be more dosappointing than my own. As a student of world issues, I am aware that a failed pop music record is quite possibly THE LEAST important matter facing humanity, however, the painful reality of a person experiencing utter and complete failure is, in fact, universal and unfortunatetly, it's relative to that person's unique experience. It's devestating for a country to lose a war, but it's no less devestating to a child when you take his/her toy away. In fact, I think it's harder on the child, because the child does not know any better than to be upset by something so small, however, a country has the means and pride to take up arms again and to reunite. An individual in my situation at the time, had no one to unite with and had found that the only reasonable person to take arms against was himself.

In other words, His Boy Elroy was a silly child who was given a $250,000 gift certificate at Toys R Us and speant it in the bubblegum machine, and then woke up one day and realized how many great toys there were had he (Elroy) bothered to go in and explore the whole store. It's far easier to get a record deal in L.A. then it is to get a second record deal when you've failed miserabley with your first, and thus, my opportunities dwindled away. Funny, it was the experience of writing such a bad record and the painful life experiences that accompied that experience that eventually lead me to writing deep and heartfelt music. The process, however, took so long that due to age my marketability faded. In retrospect, I am glad none of those songs became hits, had they been, I would have forever been branded. As it turns out, I finally have the ability to redefine who I am and what my music should be, and I've found that my anonymous identity and lack of pretense in my writing has made what I create now far better than anything I could have written had that record never been made.

Regards-

Johnny Fly