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| Receipt. |
The Hit
When he described the bones of his bigger hit, Walter Egan recalls having something very specific in mind: “a '50s throwback that was consciously in my mind. I was trying to write a song that had the Stroll beat, which is the snare hits every other one, that kind of 6/8 feel” - and you’ll definitely hear that (assuming you already haven’t). He hated his first pass at the lyrics, though, so he parked that part of the creative process and waited for inspiration. He found the first part while working with one of the producers on his first album, and the second while driving up the 101. As he recalled to a site called The College Crowd Digs Me in 2016:
“We had been doing recording sessions for Fundamental Roll...a song on there called ‘Tunnel O' Love.’ And Stevie was singing her wailing, banshee, background vocals. This was at Sound City. The now famous Sound City. And that was the night I just went...'oh my God, how am I so lucky?' Ya know, all the superlatives you could think of about someone falling for Stevie. In my young youth, at the time, it was just another girl who was very talented.”
His second muse was “one of those completely customized Continentals with the lights under it and the diamond window. We used to call it a Pimpmobile in those days.” He titled the song “Magnet and Steel” and, yes, the “Stevie” in that recollection was Stevie Nicks, who co-produced Egan’s debut album, Fundamental Roll, and who shows up all over it. He borrowed his second album’s title, Not Shy, from the vanity plate on that Continental and the phrase “with you I’m not shy” repeats throughout the song. Stevie Nicks wasn’t alone of the backing vocals for that track - Lindsey Buckingham, the other co-producer on his debut album (it’s a funny story), and a woman he’d worked with for years named Annie McLoone (or McLoon, depending on the interview) - but Buckingham put a lot of late-70s polish on the 50s chassis.
“Magnet and Steel” dropped around the same time as Fleetwood Mac’s notorious masterpiece, Rumours, and, as Egan told Classic Bands, “all of a sudden there was my record with Stevie's voice all over it and Lindsey's very precise production and playing on some of it, and so it was noticed because of that.” All that happened in late winter/early spring 1977 - Rumours was released in February 1977 - which pumped “Magnet and Steel” to No. 8 on the Billboard (No. 18 on the Easy Listening charts). Egan felt like he had a strong follow-up with a nostalgia-tinged “medium-rock” number called “Hot Summer Nights” - a song with a story of its own - and he recalls having a conversation with CBS Records’ Walter Yetknikoff, who assured him they’d push him just like they pushed Billy Joel, Springsteen, Les Dudek, and Boz Scaggs, all of whom Yetniknoff told him took four albums to break through. Egan would wait until the hot summer nights gave way to the long, cold nights of October…
The Rest of the Story
Reading his history, it seems like there was never a time when Walter Egan didn’t have either a band he was trying to get somewhere or some helpful connection to help with introductions. He was born in Queens, New York in 1948 and into a family normal enough that he barely mentions it. He picked up his first guitar by age 15 and set to learning how to play from a Kingston Trio songbook that came with pictures of the chords, and had his first band, a surf rock outfit called the Malibooz, so spelled with an eye to making people think either Malibu, California or “booze” instead of trying to sort out what a “Mali-bus” was. Egan comes off as a guy who takes permission when it’s given and, when a drunk guy at an early show begged the band to play and sing “Louie, Louie,” the whole thing went well enough to prompt an epiphany:
“It was kind of a moment of truth for me that I realized in Rock 'n' Roll it's pretty much as much attitude as it is certitude as far as whether you get the lyrics right. It's really how you present them and how you stand onstage that seems to have an effect on people.”
With that little lift under their wings, the Malibooz bulked up their repertoire with British invasion influences and shopped some demos, but only got some notes (“First, where'd you make this? In a toilet?”) and advice and light encouragement (“Well, get rid of your lead singer and come back with your next record”) from a partner of Phil Spector’s named Danny Davis. When Egan went to Georgetown University (as a sculpture major) somewhere around 1970, he continued working with another member of the Malibooz, John Vanbetti, and took on McLoon as another collaborator. Once in Washington D.C., they formed a band they called Sageworth’, which mostly played a folky sound. That band would bubble just under the surface for the first half of the 1970s, but Egan couldn’t stop making connections for as long as he played with them. They played regular gigs at a D.C. venue called The Cellar Door - the same spot that Fat City/Starland Vocal Band used as a launching pad - and that’s where they made the connection that looks to have mattered most.
During a week-long engagement in DC, Linda Ronstadt dropped in at The Cellar Door one night - notably, with Glenn Frey and Don Henley in tow (as members of her touring band) - and they fell to talking and later invited Linda and the Boys to hang out and play at “Sageworth House,” the band house during that time. Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, and a song called “Hearts on Fire” come into the story here - along with the fact(/claim) they first played together in the kitchen of Sageworth House - but the most important hand Egan shook that night belonged to a guy named Chris Darrow, Ronstadt’s tour manager. He offered to produce Sageworth if they could make it to Los Angeles, but “too risky faction” of the band balked and the band moved to Boston “as a compromise”(?), but Egan kept Darrow’s number of vice versa. After Sageworth broke up, Egan decided to take a real shot at a career in music and called Darrow, who offered him a place to stay. And when he arrived, a chance to leave immediately with Darrow on a UK tour “as his companion,” where they opened up for The Mann Band, “who were kind of like the Welsh Grateful Dead.” While on that tour, Egan met another consequential someone, an A&R guy named Andrew Lauter.
The narrative gets crazy messy at this point - e.g., an attempt to pair Egan with Jackson Browne, which didn’t work, a songwriters’ band called The Ghost Writers, which worked a bit better - but, long story short, all that and an open mic at the famous Troubadour in LA led to Egan landing a solo deal and shopping for a producer. When they asked him who he’d like to work with, Egan, a Beach Boys fan since high school, floated Brian Wilson. That didn’t fly, but Egan tells the story of how he landed his first production team better than I can:
“I originally thought, let's get Brian Wilson. Well, he's kind of out of action. Well, how about Todd Rundgren? Well, we might not be able to get him. How about Buckingham-Nicks? Is that a relation to Don Nicks, the Southern rocker? No, no. Listen to this record. And I listened to Buckingham-Nicks and I realized how much that was like Sageworth with Annie McLoone on the east coast where we were, and Buckingham-Nicks on the west coast. From that I was like, ‘Okay, let's meet them.’”
That brings the story to the recording of 1976’s Fundamental Roll (still working out that album cover). As noted above, Stevie Nicks shows up all over that album - you can’t miss her “Finally Find a Girlfriend” and I think that's her on “The Blonde in the Blue T-Bird” (she's definitely in the video), which, for the record, sounds a bit like .38 Special’s “Hold on Loosely” - but what isn’t noted is that, it didn’t do so bad. Critics rated it well enough and the single “Only the Lucky” charted as high as (by Egan’s memory) No. 50 or 51. He had a little buzz, in other words, when Not Shy and “Magnet and Steel” came out.
As seems to happen with every Walter Egan anecdote, about 10 things happened at once at this point - e.g., some mess about Nicks handing him “Sisters of the Moon,” because Fleetwood Mac didn’t want to use it (then; they did record it), only Buckingham (then solo producer) told him to ditch it, and that’s how “Hot Summer Nights” wound up as the closer on Not Shy - but he spent most of the summer of ’77 waiting for CBS to drop “Hot Summer Nights” as a follow-up…before the end of the summer.
Egan still feels like he could have dodged the one-hit wonder label had CBS dropped it timely - “If it had been released as they do release things these days it would be out that summer and been a double play I think for the rest of the year, those two songs.” - but they didn’t. Thanks to the six-album deal he signed, things didn’t totally dry up for Egan, but he never scored another hit - though he did make a video for a single off his 1983 album, Wild Exhibitions, titled “Fool Moon Fire” that looks like a (very) low-budget “Thriller,” and he wondered aloud to The College Crowd Digs Me whether not someone didn’t either pass off the concept or borrow it directly, but with a combination of class and realism about the business that keeps that keeps the stink of sour grapes off the anecdote.
If history didn’t prove Egan right about “Hot Summer Nights,” it gave him barrels of ammo for making the case. The literal summer after Egan hoped he’d get a hit out of it, a guy named Richard Perry turned it into an international hit as the debut single for his band, Night. In the years that followed, bands in France, Sweden, Germany and Japan covered that same song - as he put it to Classic Bands, “Basically all the participants in World War II were taking versions of "Hot Summer Nights” - further spreading the song’s fame. Sure as hell sounds like CBS screwed the pooch…
Between that, “Heart of Fire” and “Magnet and Steel,” it’s hard to believe Walter Egan can’t live off his royalties, but he’s popped up to release material off and on since at least 2000 - and that’s on top of playing in a project called Brooklyn Cowboys in the 1990s (who I’m poking around now), continuing to tour in some capacity, and becoming a father. The latter might have slowed him down because he released a dogpile of material starting in 2014 with Myth America and followed by 2017’s True Songs. He works as a substitute in the place where he lives now, Williamson County, Tennessee (looks like suburban country south of Nashville) - or, as he calls it, “basically crowd control and passing out work sheets and taking attendance” - which gives him a steady gig to return to whenever he decides to pop off to play somewhere. Pamela Des Barres’ backyard for one…and, no, I’m not going to get into that, but that’s a whole damn interview about that. I’m not sure how much money he made out of all that, but Walter Egan stayed busy.
About the Sampler
He also produced way too much catalog to cover in one week’s time, so I built the Walter Egan sampler around 15 songs, most of which came off his first two albums. On top of the songs already linked to above, I added “Won’t You Say You Will” and “When I Get My Wheels” from Fundamental Roll - both of which sound like 70s rock, if with a tonal dusting of country on the former - liner notes that also apply to the only other song I pulled from Not Shy, “I Wannit.” Tom Petty’s serves as a reasonable comparison, only more…for lack of a better word, stifled. For one, it suffers in comparison to the bolder stuff happening around it - e.g., hard rock, disco, punk, and so on - but you hear material all over his catalog that would (or could) sound better without muffled production. In some ways, it sounds too timid to really grab you.
The largest part of the rest came from the tail-end of Egan’s early period, 1980s The Last Stroll. I think he worked with Tom Petty on that one, which could explain why he picks up the pace on “Baby Let’s Runaway,” but “Y Me? (The Last Stroll)” sounds like an up-tempo echo of “Magnet and Steel,” while his (very cute) homage “Tuesday Weld” flirts with new wave - which makes you wonder if he didn’t put a little work into keeping up…or if he didn’t just embrace new influences.
Maybe that thought carries over to the two songs I picked from Myth America - “Nothing Can Save Us Now” and “Lililovin’” - or maybe that’s closer to what Egan always wanted to play, but for commercial pressures. Who knows? I closed out the sampler with a song he released just this year, “Yesterday, Forever and Today,” which, for what it’s worth, cements the impression that Egan’s a good fit for Tom Petty side of rock.
To offer an opinion, I don’t love it, I don’t hate it, but it’s also unlikely I’ll be graduating any of this to a playlist (“Lililovin’,” "Wannit" and “Tuesday Weld” have the best shot, for what it’s worth). Still, the man can definitely write a song and there’s definitely an audience for what he did and does.
Till the next one…which goes in a very different direction.
When he described the bones of his bigger hit, Walter Egan recalls having something very specific in mind: “a '50s throwback that was consciously in my mind. I was trying to write a song that had the Stroll beat, which is the snare hits every other one, that kind of 6/8 feel” - and you’ll definitely hear that (assuming you already haven’t). He hated his first pass at the lyrics, though, so he parked that part of the creative process and waited for inspiration. He found the first part while working with one of the producers on his first album, and the second while driving up the 101. As he recalled to a site called The College Crowd Digs Me in 2016:
“We had been doing recording sessions for Fundamental Roll...a song on there called ‘Tunnel O' Love.’ And Stevie was singing her wailing, banshee, background vocals. This was at Sound City. The now famous Sound City. And that was the night I just went...'oh my God, how am I so lucky?' Ya know, all the superlatives you could think of about someone falling for Stevie. In my young youth, at the time, it was just another girl who was very talented.”
His second muse was “one of those completely customized Continentals with the lights under it and the diamond window. We used to call it a Pimpmobile in those days.” He titled the song “Magnet and Steel” and, yes, the “Stevie” in that recollection was Stevie Nicks, who co-produced Egan’s debut album, Fundamental Roll, and who shows up all over it. He borrowed his second album’s title, Not Shy, from the vanity plate on that Continental and the phrase “with you I’m not shy” repeats throughout the song. Stevie Nicks wasn’t alone of the backing vocals for that track - Lindsey Buckingham, the other co-producer on his debut album (it’s a funny story), and a woman he’d worked with for years named Annie McLoone (or McLoon, depending on the interview) - but Buckingham put a lot of late-70s polish on the 50s chassis.
“Magnet and Steel” dropped around the same time as Fleetwood Mac’s notorious masterpiece, Rumours, and, as Egan told Classic Bands, “all of a sudden there was my record with Stevie's voice all over it and Lindsey's very precise production and playing on some of it, and so it was noticed because of that.” All that happened in late winter/early spring 1977 - Rumours was released in February 1977 - which pumped “Magnet and Steel” to No. 8 on the Billboard (No. 18 on the Easy Listening charts). Egan felt like he had a strong follow-up with a nostalgia-tinged “medium-rock” number called “Hot Summer Nights” - a song with a story of its own - and he recalls having a conversation with CBS Records’ Walter Yetknikoff, who assured him they’d push him just like they pushed Billy Joel, Springsteen, Les Dudek, and Boz Scaggs, all of whom Yetniknoff told him took four albums to break through. Egan would wait until the hot summer nights gave way to the long, cold nights of October…
The Rest of the Story
Reading his history, it seems like there was never a time when Walter Egan didn’t have either a band he was trying to get somewhere or some helpful connection to help with introductions. He was born in Queens, New York in 1948 and into a family normal enough that he barely mentions it. He picked up his first guitar by age 15 and set to learning how to play from a Kingston Trio songbook that came with pictures of the chords, and had his first band, a surf rock outfit called the Malibooz, so spelled with an eye to making people think either Malibu, California or “booze” instead of trying to sort out what a “Mali-bus” was. Egan comes off as a guy who takes permission when it’s given and, when a drunk guy at an early show begged the band to play and sing “Louie, Louie,” the whole thing went well enough to prompt an epiphany:
“It was kind of a moment of truth for me that I realized in Rock 'n' Roll it's pretty much as much attitude as it is certitude as far as whether you get the lyrics right. It's really how you present them and how you stand onstage that seems to have an effect on people.”
With that little lift under their wings, the Malibooz bulked up their repertoire with British invasion influences and shopped some demos, but only got some notes (“First, where'd you make this? In a toilet?”) and advice and light encouragement (“Well, get rid of your lead singer and come back with your next record”) from a partner of Phil Spector’s named Danny Davis. When Egan went to Georgetown University (as a sculpture major) somewhere around 1970, he continued working with another member of the Malibooz, John Vanbetti, and took on McLoon as another collaborator. Once in Washington D.C., they formed a band they called Sageworth’, which mostly played a folky sound. That band would bubble just under the surface for the first half of the 1970s, but Egan couldn’t stop making connections for as long as he played with them. They played regular gigs at a D.C. venue called The Cellar Door - the same spot that Fat City/Starland Vocal Band used as a launching pad - and that’s where they made the connection that looks to have mattered most.
During a week-long engagement in DC, Linda Ronstadt dropped in at The Cellar Door one night - notably, with Glenn Frey and Don Henley in tow (as members of her touring band) - and they fell to talking and later invited Linda and the Boys to hang out and play at “Sageworth House,” the band house during that time. Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, and a song called “Hearts on Fire” come into the story here - along with the fact(/claim) they first played together in the kitchen of Sageworth House - but the most important hand Egan shook that night belonged to a guy named Chris Darrow, Ronstadt’s tour manager. He offered to produce Sageworth if they could make it to Los Angeles, but “too risky faction” of the band balked and the band moved to Boston “as a compromise”(?), but Egan kept Darrow’s number of vice versa. After Sageworth broke up, Egan decided to take a real shot at a career in music and called Darrow, who offered him a place to stay. And when he arrived, a chance to leave immediately with Darrow on a UK tour “as his companion,” where they opened up for The Mann Band, “who were kind of like the Welsh Grateful Dead.” While on that tour, Egan met another consequential someone, an A&R guy named Andrew Lauter.
The narrative gets crazy messy at this point - e.g., an attempt to pair Egan with Jackson Browne, which didn’t work, a songwriters’ band called The Ghost Writers, which worked a bit better - but, long story short, all that and an open mic at the famous Troubadour in LA led to Egan landing a solo deal and shopping for a producer. When they asked him who he’d like to work with, Egan, a Beach Boys fan since high school, floated Brian Wilson. That didn’t fly, but Egan tells the story of how he landed his first production team better than I can:
“I originally thought, let's get Brian Wilson. Well, he's kind of out of action. Well, how about Todd Rundgren? Well, we might not be able to get him. How about Buckingham-Nicks? Is that a relation to Don Nicks, the Southern rocker? No, no. Listen to this record. And I listened to Buckingham-Nicks and I realized how much that was like Sageworth with Annie McLoone on the east coast where we were, and Buckingham-Nicks on the west coast. From that I was like, ‘Okay, let's meet them.’”
That brings the story to the recording of 1976’s Fundamental Roll (still working out that album cover). As noted above, Stevie Nicks shows up all over that album - you can’t miss her “Finally Find a Girlfriend” and I think that's her on “The Blonde in the Blue T-Bird” (she's definitely in the video), which, for the record, sounds a bit like .38 Special’s “Hold on Loosely” - but what isn’t noted is that, it didn’t do so bad. Critics rated it well enough and the single “Only the Lucky” charted as high as (by Egan’s memory) No. 50 or 51. He had a little buzz, in other words, when Not Shy and “Magnet and Steel” came out.
As seems to happen with every Walter Egan anecdote, about 10 things happened at once at this point - e.g., some mess about Nicks handing him “Sisters of the Moon,” because Fleetwood Mac didn’t want to use it (then; they did record it), only Buckingham (then solo producer) told him to ditch it, and that’s how “Hot Summer Nights” wound up as the closer on Not Shy - but he spent most of the summer of ’77 waiting for CBS to drop “Hot Summer Nights” as a follow-up…before the end of the summer.
Egan still feels like he could have dodged the one-hit wonder label had CBS dropped it timely - “If it had been released as they do release things these days it would be out that summer and been a double play I think for the rest of the year, those two songs.” - but they didn’t. Thanks to the six-album deal he signed, things didn’t totally dry up for Egan, but he never scored another hit - though he did make a video for a single off his 1983 album, Wild Exhibitions, titled “Fool Moon Fire” that looks like a (very) low-budget “Thriller,” and he wondered aloud to The College Crowd Digs Me whether not someone didn’t either pass off the concept or borrow it directly, but with a combination of class and realism about the business that keeps that keeps the stink of sour grapes off the anecdote.
If history didn’t prove Egan right about “Hot Summer Nights,” it gave him barrels of ammo for making the case. The literal summer after Egan hoped he’d get a hit out of it, a guy named Richard Perry turned it into an international hit as the debut single for his band, Night. In the years that followed, bands in France, Sweden, Germany and Japan covered that same song - as he put it to Classic Bands, “Basically all the participants in World War II were taking versions of "Hot Summer Nights” - further spreading the song’s fame. Sure as hell sounds like CBS screwed the pooch…
Between that, “Heart of Fire” and “Magnet and Steel,” it’s hard to believe Walter Egan can’t live off his royalties, but he’s popped up to release material off and on since at least 2000 - and that’s on top of playing in a project called Brooklyn Cowboys in the 1990s (who I’m poking around now), continuing to tour in some capacity, and becoming a father. The latter might have slowed him down because he released a dogpile of material starting in 2014 with Myth America and followed by 2017’s True Songs. He works as a substitute in the place where he lives now, Williamson County, Tennessee (looks like suburban country south of Nashville) - or, as he calls it, “basically crowd control and passing out work sheets and taking attendance” - which gives him a steady gig to return to whenever he decides to pop off to play somewhere. Pamela Des Barres’ backyard for one…and, no, I’m not going to get into that, but that’s a whole damn interview about that. I’m not sure how much money he made out of all that, but Walter Egan stayed busy.
About the Sampler
He also produced way too much catalog to cover in one week’s time, so I built the Walter Egan sampler around 15 songs, most of which came off his first two albums. On top of the songs already linked to above, I added “Won’t You Say You Will” and “When I Get My Wheels” from Fundamental Roll - both of which sound like 70s rock, if with a tonal dusting of country on the former - liner notes that also apply to the only other song I pulled from Not Shy, “I Wannit.” Tom Petty’s serves as a reasonable comparison, only more…for lack of a better word, stifled. For one, it suffers in comparison to the bolder stuff happening around it - e.g., hard rock, disco, punk, and so on - but you hear material all over his catalog that would (or could) sound better without muffled production. In some ways, it sounds too timid to really grab you.
The largest part of the rest came from the tail-end of Egan’s early period, 1980s The Last Stroll. I think he worked with Tom Petty on that one, which could explain why he picks up the pace on “Baby Let’s Runaway,” but “Y Me? (The Last Stroll)” sounds like an up-tempo echo of “Magnet and Steel,” while his (very cute) homage “Tuesday Weld” flirts with new wave - which makes you wonder if he didn’t put a little work into keeping up…or if he didn’t just embrace new influences.
Maybe that thought carries over to the two songs I picked from Myth America - “Nothing Can Save Us Now” and “Lililovin’” - or maybe that’s closer to what Egan always wanted to play, but for commercial pressures. Who knows? I closed out the sampler with a song he released just this year, “Yesterday, Forever and Today,” which, for what it’s worth, cements the impression that Egan’s a good fit for Tom Petty side of rock.
To offer an opinion, I don’t love it, I don’t hate it, but it’s also unlikely I’ll be graduating any of this to a playlist (“Lililovin’,” "Wannit" and “Tuesday Weld” have the best shot, for what it’s worth). Still, the man can definitely write a song and there’s definitely an audience for what he did and does.
Till the next one…which goes in a very different direction.
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