I didn’t know what to expect when I went in to record my first album. I had been in the recording studio a couple of times but didn’t have a lot of experience. What surprised me at first was the fact that I was brought in once the musical tracks had, for the most part, already been created. It wasn’t like I was working in a band situation. Everything basically had already been done by talented studio musicians by the time I walked in, and I just had to sing the songs in the proper key. Well, that was a bit of an issue. I wasn’t a singer. But Michael Lloyd was good at coaching me and helping me at least get through enough takes so that there would be something usable once they got down to editing. Of course, it wasn’t like my voice was going to be front and center. Through the magic of production, it was doubled, tripled—even quadrupled—and processed to the point where it barely sounded like me at all.
It was me singing on the records, but not just me alone, doubled or not. There was a well-known and very accomplished background singer named Jim Haas whom Michael had brought in to sing on the sessions. The thing was, his voice was very prominent. He was a strong singer, and at times I felt like we were in there making his record as opposed to mine. Right away that made me feel kind of funny. What’s it going to be, me singing on a record or not? Granted, these were not songs I had any real interest in recording. For the most part they were cover tunes, including “The Wanderer,” “California Girls,” “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Runaround Sue,” “Surfin’ USA,” and even the old Nat King Cole standard “That’s All.” What the hell? I was sixteen years old, and those were the songs that I would be singing? The Scottis obviously were pulling a page from the playbook of “once a hit, always a hit,” and no chances were being taken. These old standards, plus the dominance of Jim Haas’s singing, set me on the course of believing I wasn’t a real singer. I understood that nobody on the outside would ever notice that my voice wasn’t at all prominent. They would assume, naturally, that if my face was on the album cover, I was the singer. But watching Jim Haas dominate the sessions, I knew the truth. This was not really my record. Maybe that wasn’t even the point. It was about my look, not my sound. And that’s not what I wanted. What exactly had I bargained for here?
After the record was done and mastered, we shot a couple of music videos, including one for “Surfin’ USA” out on the beach in Oxnard on the way to Santa Barbara. I remember saying to them at one point back then, “Imagine a TV channel where all they did was play music videos. People my age would love that.” The answer? “Shut up, kid. We’ll do the thinking.” A year or so later, “Hello, MTV.”
The album did well. There were four singles: “Surfin’ USA,” which made it to number two in Australia and to the top twenty in America; “Runaround Sue,” which made it to number thirteen on the US charts; “Put Your Head on My Shoulder;” and “The Wanderer.” All four singles were cover songs of former hits from another era. I was simply doing a note-for-note remix, and the Scotties were right; I guess a hit was a hit was a hit. The Scotti brothers told me they had loved these songs when they were my age. I wasn’t that familiar with these songs, nor did I even like them, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was selling records. And I was doing that. The album went gold in a number of countries, and I remember the very first ceremony when I was presented with my first gold record. I was staring closely at it, and something seemed strange. I examined the actual record very closely, and it had more songs in the grooves than were actually listed on the label. I asked my manager about it, and he said, “Oh, they don’t actually use your record when they make a gold one. They just take whatever’s lying around.” Nothing was real, it seemed.