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You Tube's algorithm was kind enough to show me this clip of Brian and Joe Thomas at Steve Dahl's radio show (1995, or 1996, they mention the Stars and Stripes sessions).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m3ZiJ07hA

You will hear a snippet of a Brian "demo" for what would end beign the Let Him Run Wild remake on Imagination. Joe Thomas says that they were planning a Brian solo album, and that Brian had recorded this playing "all instruments" and doing all the (background) vocals (and Mike's line at the end of the chorus).

Actually, he's playing all the parts on a sequencer, but I didn't know Brian was so involved in the Imagination arrangements, at least on the earliest stages. It has been said that Brian took care of the vocals and left the instrumental arranging to Thomas.

Has anybody heard the whole "demo" or another ones from this project? (obviously, they are not circulating on the bootleg/P2P/Internet area)

That likely came from a tape recording I made off the radio broadcast. I heard that Brian and Joe were going to be on Steve's [gak!!] show but I was at work, so I put a tape in the deck and set a timer to record it. At one point during the show Steve mentioned how the tape had some other songs on it and Joe and Brian gave him their blessing to play more later on in his show. No idea if Steve actually did follow through on that, as I could never stand that dirtbag so I didn't listen enough.

I seemed to remember that it was supposedly recorded for inclusion on The Wilsons.

Very cool, thanks for taping that back in the day. I certainly remember the days of taping radio shows off the air on Cassette  although I never I knew how to do that with a timer.

Only recently did I learn who Steve Dahl was/is, after reading more about the disco demolition event after watching the Bee Gees documentary. He seems like a real jerk having spearheaded that event, IMHO it probably puts Dahl up there amongst one of the biggest jerks who were songwriting collaborators with BW/BBs.

Thanks to 37!ws for taping that and yes, having watched The Bee Gees' doc, I'll second any negative opinion about Steve Dahl.

I was fortunate enough to have a console with a built-in timer. :)


I don't think anybody faults him for that; it was meant to be harmless fun. I live in Chicago, and that event is frickin' legendary, but what has me concerned is some of the "disco" albums that were submitted for demolition.

Not to derail this thread into a completely different topic, but my understanding Is that the disco demolition event descended into  a lot of homophobic subtext, though I'm not saying that every person involved with it had that on their mind - but it seems like that was a silent underpinning of some of that movement. The recent Bee Gees documentary goes deeper into it. Not going to profess to be an expert on Dahl, but a cursory reading about some of his antics rubbed me the wrong way, that's all.

I happen to be a big fan of disco and I think to bash entire genre of music - and especially to create a giant event to literally destroy records - is really unnecessary and hateful. I can't get into the minds of those who created it to see what their full intent was, but the whole thing has an ew factor for me. That said I do understand that some people simply were sick of oversaturation of a particular genre, but I think this really crossed the line into extraordinary distastefulness.

Very cool about the console with the built-in timer :) that must've been a rare thing at the time.

Brian did work on backing tracks for the Imagination project. There’s a different mix of “You Imagination” — more hard driving and electric — that circulates, without the verse vocals. Brian also plays audible keyboards on at least half of the record.

It seems likely that Brian was very interested in backing tracks at the start of the project and at certain points (Happy Days, for instance). But as the project got shopped around and shaped for the AC market (I recall hearing that Irving Azoff made him recut most of his lead vocals for the album), he did less.

The old-school hack for recording off the radio with a timer was using a VCR and basic AV receiver setup, better if it were hi-fi stereo for FM. You'd tune in your tuner to the station, rout that signal to the VCR (through a receiver or otherwise) as if it were a cassette deck, set your timer on the VCR, keep everything powered on, and you could record between 2-8 hours off the radio. Then transfer it to cassettes later. Real old-school but it solved the issue of timing a radio recording without having a special deck. Ahh the good ol' days.

If you're saying there was an anti-gay element of that event, it's not something I was aware of - I always felt the anti-disco movement had more of a racist underpinning to it. That seemed to be around the time that album oriented FM stations changed from a wide ranging list of performers to a narrow one excluding all black artists. Before that time, artists like Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire and Tower of Power got a lot of play on the album oriented stations. When the disco backlash occured, suddenly those artists were no longer welcome on AOR stations. That format continues today as Classic Rock, and unless your name is Jimi Hendrix, black artists don't get played on those stations.
That was the format MTV was emulating in their early years, and they got called on it when the biggest album in the land was a little record called Thriller - and MTV wouldn't touch those videos.

There were both racist and homophobic underpinnings to it, I should have mentioned both were factors. Again, not saying that was everyone's motive, but I can't think that Dahl was blissfully unaware completely that an event like this empowered racist and homophobic folks. It's pretty mind boggling to think of an entire stadium filled with people specifically to hate on something as general as a genre of music. And with a wide brush, all sorts of disco adjacent music got lumped in and destroyed too at this event.

So yeah, Dahl creeps me out as a result of his connection to that. Was Dahl buddies with Joe Thomas and that's how he wound up writing with Brian?

Well...the entire stadium of people wasn't specifically to hate on disco: it was a double-header baseball game. The Disco Demolition was a publicity stunt, and you would be charged 98 cents admission if you brought a disco album to be blown up. Nicky whatshisname actually explained the whole uproar over disco, and it sounds frighteningly similar to the real reason for the North American Video Game Crash of 1983. (Long story short: in both cases, it was that the market was oversaturated with crappy product.)


I don't know. I'm pretty sure that Steve has known Brian since the late '70s. He was on Steve & Garry's show semi-frequently, actually. They're both fans. (I remember they went crazy over the disc 5 version of "God Only Knows" when the Good Vibrations set came out.)

Interestingly, it is my understanding that this was how the Beach Boys vaults were raided for the Sea of Tunes boots. A VCR was the only available recording device!

That's amazing. I'd still love to hear a full detailed breakdown of how the SOT heist went down. There must be a fascinating story.

VCRs actually had a pretty hi-fidelity audio recording capability - back in the mid-'80s, I recorded at a studio that used a VCR for stereo mixdowns.

During my brief radio career, if we didn't have anybody available to do an overnight, someone would just record a jock's regular shift to a VHS tape (VCR set to EP mode), telling the DJ to not say the time or do any weather reports (just say "fifteen minutes past the hour," etc.). Then whoever would be last out the door the night when someone wouldn't be available to take over would just hit "play" on the VCR and pot it up. Worked surprisingly well!