Benefit records are well meant but anonymous and boring to me. If I were to put one together it would have to be one-of-a-kind, a must-have. One morning at around 0330 hours when I am at my best, I came up with the idea to make the record you now have. Like many brilliant ideas had at this hour, they fade with the dawn when sanity and an already daunting itinerary of things that must be done come back on line.
Great idea but I'm too busy I thought. Then I thought about the ages of the WM3, when they went into prison and how old they are now. Mid-teens to mid-twenties. Those were some great years for me. I spent them all over the world. They spent theirs in small rooms with no natural light for something they didn't do. All of a sudden, my schedule opened up and I got busy. I talked to the guys at my label, Sanctuary Records in New York and they were totally into it.
First thing I had to do was to see if I had a band to do this thing with. I called Jim, Jason and Marcus, aka Mother Superior, aka 75% of the Rollins Band, and stated my case. They were on it immediately. Next phone call was to Heidi May. I knew that to pull this off, it was going to take a lot of connections and literally hundreds of phone calls.
That takes a certain kind of patience and tenacity that I don't possess. Heidi's got truckloads of both. She had to do this thing with me. Luckily, she was clear and immediately installed herself at my office and plunged in.
We made a wish list of singers to be on the record. Some were easy to contact. Keith Morris, one phone call, he's in, he's got ideas for other singers, some of them are on this record because he suggested them. Right after that call, our road went from uphill to almost vertical. Some managers don't want their singers on stuff where there's no money for them. Their clients are too busy we were told. We told the managers that the songs were only ninety seconds. Too busy. But these WM3 are fans of the singer and they've been salting away in prison for nearly a decade. Busy, busy busy!
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