Rock & Roll Child At 50!
Thanks to artificial intelligence, a demo recording that my brother Anthony and I wrote and recorded fifty years ago in 1976, has come to life in the most amazing way. Based on my experience resurrecting the song, I really think AI should stand for “Assisted Intelligence” because there was nothing artificial in this process that led to this great track and accompanying music video….you can hear the 2026 remake on the YouTube video below and the back story with the original 1976 demo a little further down.
This is the Pixar animated version of Rock & Roll Child
Punk Vs Disco 1976
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1976, my younger brother Anthony and I [13 and 17 years old at the time] were still sharing a bedroom at our home in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn on Bay 20th Street. The Disco craze was starting to explode and would only get bigger in the next few years with the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977 [whose opening scene of John Travolta strutting down 86th Street was just two blocks from our house.] The Ramones had just released their self titled debut album that April and between the CBGB punk rock scene and the emerging UK punk movement with the Clash, the Jam and the Sex Pistol’s, suddenly, Disco had some serious completion for the hearts and minds of people our age. I personally never took to Disco, although I love it now, and I think it was more about the disco scene [especially in Brooklyn] than the music that drove the anti-disco movement.
Anthony and I grew up in a house that was filled with a wide variety of music thanks to our parent’s impressive collection of popular Italian music, and by popular I mean songs that were largely known in Italy, not here in America. We were also fortunate to have two older brothers [Johnny and Joey] who were born in Italy but
came to America in 1958 when they were just kids. Thanks to their coming of age during during the fast changing rock and roll scene in the early sixties, our EJ Korvette’s Magnavox stereo console was stacked with albums by the Beatles, the Supremes and the most popular singles of the day. Although we were surrounded by all of this great music, we didn’t really have music that we could call our own, you know, something that emerged right before our eyes [ears!] That changed in the mid seventies when artists like Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, whose songs seemed full of angst and energy, became important figures in this new musical movement and an inspiration to me as a songwriter [a term I am using VERY loosely for that time.]
My brother Anthony always has had this innate musical talent which as I look back, I regret not tapping into more. Even at the age of thirteen, he could not only play guitar really well but could quickly put together the chords for just about any song you could throw his way. In the case of Rock & Roll Child, I had a lyric that was my very amateur attempt at writing a story song that invoked the spirit of punk rock and painted a picture of this growing “death to disco” movement that was prevalent among the punk rock scene. The song barely had a melody until Anthony figured out a way to break down the nonsense I was singing into a pretty incredible arrangement [which also included what I think is the perfect musical bridge.] Anthony, also came up with some nice harmonies which were all captured on a D-C60 TDK cassette tape for posterity. Listen out for the part where our little Radio Shack guitar amp suddenly goes out at the thirty second mark and I have to give it a whack to start up again! It’s incredible that this tape has even survived after three major moves over a period of fifty years.
Thanks to the recent AI revolution, I had the opportunity bring that fifty year old demo to life in the most amazing way. I had been playing around with a new AI music service called Suno who bill themselves mainly as a generative AI music app. Now if you use Suno in the generative mode, it truly is ‘artificial’ because all you are doing is telling Suno to create a lyric with minor guidance and a music style and it will generate a pretty impressive music track with vocal. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as a creator, there’s very little pride in creative ownership for any kind of music made that way. But Suno also has a little known feature that will create an exact cover version of your own demo, using your melody and your lyrics in any arrangement you want. So I uploaded our little demo from 1976 and instructed Suno to give us a classic rock meets punk arrangement, not to change any lyric or melody and we were pretty blown away by the results. Suno perfectly captured the music, the lyric and most importantly, Anthony’s driving guitar which propelled the entire song. The song came out so good that it warranted its own music video.
There’s no shortage of AI video creation services out there but I was looking for something special and different that didn’t scream AI. When I hit on the idea to create a cartoon music video for the song, it lead me to the Agent Opus app which, while it can be hit or miss on the results, is a close as you can get to a turn key process. I opted to create a narrative music video [as opposed to a lip-synch] and mapped out a story that had Anthony and I playing the song, in our bed room, while dressed in our St Finbar catholic school uniform and then performing it as teenagers at the 2001 Odyssey Disco [yes the one from Saturday Night Fever.] I cast our mother Mary to play herself and my wife Debbie as the girlfriend who ditched me for a disco loving guy. I uploaded the Suno version of the song to Agent Opus, and after about a dozen different versions which had some crazy AI hallucinations, I was able to edit together several different visual versions from the best parts.
The 50th Anniversary edition is available to stream on all platforms including Spotify and Apple Music. These days, if you're creating a music video for social platforms, you need to have have vertical and horizontal versions, depending on where you watch it so with that, here are the music videos for Rock & Roll Child!
We hope you enjoy our fifty year old slice of classic rock!
Comments