Randy Dever covers “Into the Night”

Heh. “Into the Night” proved to be more complicated than I had originally bargained for. Here’s what came out. Decisions were made. Things were recorded, then stopped working on it.

I used Audacity this time. 

Sound sources are a micro-cassette dictaphone, my P-bass, Samplers: Elektron Digitakt (drums, loops) and Yamaha SU700 (effects, radio blerps), Synths: Sequential Rev2 and Korg Poly61. 

The story goes that Benny was defending the honor of his 16-year-old neighbor girl (in a school uniform, no less) against ogling and lewd suggestions from his business partner when he spoke the opening line “she’s only 16 years old. Leave her alone…”. He claims that he was helping out a desperate family who lived in his building by paying the kids (a lot) to do errands for him. The husband and father left them for a young chorus dancer girl. If all this is true, the song landed in a very different place than all that, lyrically. I suspect he wrote some creepy lyrics, the song blew up and Benny had to answer for it in interviews. So, they cooked up the story to endear people to Benny and make him look benevolent and contrast him with his creepy partner and a deadbeat homewrecker. They “flipped the script”. Parts of the story are probably partially true though. My 2 cents. Benny Mardones died of Parkinson’s June 29, 2020 at the age of 73.

-Randy Dever