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Updated: Apr 21, 2023



We started recording this song as a whim in 2009.

Dennis and I had been working on another tune ... had some time left over at Sam Reid’s studio.

So I asked him if he would mind if we did something else before he had to leave.

He said sure ... what would you like to do ... I replied Walkin’ The Dog ... in what key, he asked.

I said A and counted it in ... in two three four ... and we recorded the song, vocals and bass only.

We left a space in the middle for a solo, I was thinking of making my debut on kazoo at the time.

And that is the only time in this whole adventure that any two of us were in the studio at the same time ... when Dennis and I recorded the tune together ... everybody else came one at a time.

So here it is ... the first step on our musical journey ...

Listened to our initial recording at home a few times ... really enjoyed it.

And found myself singing an under harmony part to my lead vocal as I listened.

Next time I was at Chalet Studio I asked David Chester if I could add the under harmony.

Sounds simple enough and it is ... David played back the original track while I sang my part with headphones on so you can hear the original recording and the new part you are singing too.

That happens all the time in a recording studio ... it’s called overdubbing.

To make it sound good you have to match the under harmony as closely as you can to the lead.

And that can be a bit tricky ... nailing the timing down for the new part exactly.

You are after all singing to yourself but it can still be a bit challenging getting it just right.

But it came together well ... and so now here is that next step in the process ...

I had been working on a project for a while called Duets And The Whole Nine Yards.

That would include a duet with each member of our band and then tunes by the whole band.

With regard to that concept, I had come to think that Walkin’ The Dog was my Dennis duet.

I was talking to Dennis on the phone a few months later ... catching up with him.

When he said to me that he had to keep practicing every day to keep his lip in shape.

Asked why a bass player would need to keep his lip in shape ... he replied that he played trumpet.

News to me! ... I have known Dennis since we played in a band together in the late sixties.

I told him I never knew he played the trumpet at all! ... and when did he start doing that?

He said that he just played trumpet as a hobby and had been doing that for many years.

His brother is a professional saxophone player apparently ... so he thought he would try trumpet.

When we hung up a notion occurred to me so I phoned him back and asked him if he would be willing to come out of the closet with his horn and play on a song ... he asked which one?

I replied Walkin’ The Dog ... he then inquired what key it was in again ... I told him A.

He said that puts me in the key of B which has sharps all over and is a difficult key for trumpet.

I don’t know why, but some instruments ... like sax and trumpet ... are not made in the same key as most instruments like pianos are ... the key of C ... so you have to transpose for them.

Dennis went on to say that he would love to sit in on trumpet but the key was too difficult.

When I got off the phone with him I had another thought so I called David Chester.

David is the keyboard player in our band and he owns the studio where we record most often.

I asked Dave if he could transpose our whole recording up a semitone without having it sound like The Chipmunks ... he replied that he knew it could be done but he had never done it before.

I then asked if he would like to give that a try and he said yes he would be willing to do that.

So one day soon thereafter I went over to the studio, Dave got out all his manuals, went to work.

And after an hour or two he had accomplished our task & had transposed the whole track to Bb.

So I called Dennis back and told him what we had done ... he said that was great and that he would play trumpet on the song now, because C was a much easier key for him to play in.

A little while later Dennis came to the studio with his horn and overdubbed two parts he created.

And in so doing he made his courageous public debut on trumpet ... and here it is ...

Recording in a studio is a very different experience than playing live ... not the same thing at all!

Many people think that you just walk into a studio, plug in your gear and ... in two three four ... You then just play the song the way you would at a live gig, pack up your gear and go home.

But that is not the case at all ... playing in the studio is indeed a very different kettle of fish.

And it requires a different set of skills and a very different mindset than live performance.

When you are playing live you feed off the audience and often it inspires you to play even better.

In the studio there is no audience, so it feels somewhat like you are playing in a vacuum of sorts.

Many musicians and singers experience something called red light fever ... a type of anxiety that sets in when you start to record and the red light goes on ... some folks freeze up.

When you play live and you make a mistake or go out of key for a moment or something like that, most people in the audience don’t even notice ... it’s the whole show they remember.

But when you record, down inside yourself you realize that listeners will be able to hear every single little thing you did and it weighs on some people in a way that live playing never does.

Of course the more you work in a studio the less such things are a problem for most folks.

And the evolution of digital recording has made a huge difference in that regard as well.

Back in the days of analog, we recorded onto tape ... the only way to edit anything was with a razor blade ... techs in studios actually did that and some of them learned to do it amazingly well.

However, with digital recording you can edit anything, like a surgeon in the operating room.

You can cut an “s” off the end of a word, cut and paste phrases with ease and even tune stuff.

So in that sense, modern technology has “taken the pressure off” when the red light goes on.

Because if you don’t get what you want you can just do it over again and paste it in place.

Once you understand and realize that, you can relax much more easily and perform better.

I am very proud to say that we do very little editing when our band is recording.

Often what you are hearing is sheer performance with no edits at all with these guys.

That was the case completely for the whole band with our recent recording of Morning Hymn.

What you hear on that recording is exactly what we played and I sang in one of the takes.

In this day and age of digital editing and the manipulation of what you are hearing, that is rare!


The next musician to play on Walkin’ The Dog was our drummer ... Al Cross.

To be honest it is ass backwards to bring the drummer in so late in the game.

The drummer of course sets the time which is critical but in this case we were fortunate.

Dennis Pendrith is a consummate professional bassist who must have a metronome implanted.

Because when we first recorded together his timing was spot on throughout the entire tune.

Less experienced players would likely have sped up or slowed down a little as the song went on.

But not Dennis ... critical ... because any variation in the time would be problematic for Al.

However in any endeavour Murphy’s Law seem to come into play at some point and it did here.

When you record a drummer there are over a dozen mics on the drum kit ... one for every single drum and cymbal he is playing ... there is often a mic inside the bass drum ... and room mics.

The recording engineer that day was new to the studio, installed the room mics upside down!

So when we were listening to the track later the drums did not sound right at all.

As a result we sent the drum track down to our mixing engineer Josh Bowman in Toronto.

The mixing engineer plays a critical role at the end of this process when he goes over and massages every single sound we recorded making sure it sounds as good as it possibly can.

He then balances all those sounds with each other to create the mix you finally get to hear.

On this occasion we asked Josh if he could “fix” the problem we were hearing and he did.

It’s still Al playing every whack on the drums etc but he was able to correct the sound problem.

Which was great because setting up to record the drums again is a costly proposition!

In the studio there is constantly a meter running ... time is money ... literally!


Al Cross is a world class master drummer ... he knows what to play and even more importantly what not to play to make a song work well ... and you can hear that in his performance here.

His playing on this track is very simple and straightforward ... as it needed to be for this tune.

You can listen to the master at work here ...


The last member of our band that came in to the studio to join our musical adventure was our guitarist, Graham Young, who was in a rather bad frame of mind on that particular day.

This was a young man who thought about and played guitar 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If he wasn’t playing guitar he was going to the music store to buy strings, or listening to records, or jamming with his friends, or going out to play gigs or going out to hear other people play gigs.

Guitar was the main focus of his life ... and then along came the pandemic and it was all gone!

We all identify ourselves to a great degree by what it is we do and suddenly the universe had pulled the rug out from under his feet ... as it had for all young musicians ... and that had hit hard.


To understand other aspects of our session that day some other background is required as well.

Graham and I have an understanding that he will play his Fender Telecaster in the studio.

Unless he approaches me with some rationale as to why he wishes to play a different guitar.

The reason for that understanding is that we have had circumstances in which he recorded some stuff with his Telecaster one day but when I later asked him to come back another day to do some overdubbing on that track he showed up with a different guitar ... which did not match up with his Tele at all ... so we had to throw everything he did on that session in the garbage.

In the studio, time is money and his return session on that occasion was a waste of both!

So, in order to keep things consistent, we have this understanding with which he fully agrees.

Aside from that I must admit I am a bit of a Telecaster junkie myself anyway ... it has been an iconic guitar in country, rock, blues and r’n b for a great many years, especially in Toronto.

It was the guitar played by a great many young guitarists from my era in the sixties because Robbie Robertson played a Telecaster with Levon And The Hawks back in the day, so all the young bucks in the city who idolized Robbie ... Domenic Troiano, Bobby Star etc ... all played a Tele.

Graham won The Sleepwalk Guitar Festival in Toronto when he was 15 years old ... he took the prize money from that award, went out bought himself a Telecaster and has picked it ever since.

While, like many other guitarists he loves to fool around with other guitars and explore them, that Telecaster is like part of his body ... he has a deep intuitive understanding of that guitar.

On this particular day however, Graham pulled out his homemade guitar and started playing it in our session instead, which I decided to just ignore and let him play whatever he wanted.

Frankly I was just very happy that he had come to the studio at all that day so I let that go.

He played several passes at the song ... we can and do tend to keep everything we record for later ... however as Graham was playing Dave and I kept looking at each other with some dismay.

We were not hearing anything in particular that we would want to keep or use on the recording.

After he had played 5 or 6 takes ... and we were getting nowhere ... I finally asked Graham if he would get his Telecaster and take a run at the song with that ... to which he objected at first.

He said that he hadn’t played that guitar in weeks ... but I asked him if he would do that as a personal favour to me, if for no other reason ... which he then reluctantly agreed to do.

He is a real sweetheart and a great guy to work with in music anywhere! ... studio or live.

So he went and got his Tele, tuned it up a little, plugged it into his amp, pulled out his slide and played exactly what you are going to hear in just a moment ... there is not one edit in it at all!

It was an amazing and stunning performance that immediately blew Dave and I away ... thrilling!

If you listen closely you will hear Graham’s mastery of something guitarists call intonation ... his ability to manipulate and alter the tone of his guitar while he is in the motion of playing it.

This aspect of his playing is particularly evident and apparent throughout his solo and is something that he constantly does on his Telecaster that is almost instinctive in nature.

There is something else that is truly wonderful that needs to be considered and understood here.

Not one note of what Graham is playing here is predetermined ... he makes it all up in real time.

If he were to have played the song again for us, it would have sounded entirely different.

If I were to ask him, what are you going to play this time he would laugh, tell me he had no idea.

Until he starts to play and then it just happens ... one of the great joys of making music with him!

Whereas, by comparison, Alex Lifeson from Rush knows every single note his is going to play at a gig when he gets up in the morning, including all his solos, not one note of that is improvised.

Which frankly flies in the face of what rock music and its forebears ... jazz, blues ... are all about.

Graham’s guitar performance is indeed the cherry on our musical sundae ... and here it is ...

The final act in this play is to send what we have done to our mixing engineer Josh Bowman.

Josh goes over the whole recording with a fine tooth comb massaging and making every single aspect of the soundscape we have sent him sound as good as it possibly can, balancing out all the instruments against each other, placing them to the left or to the right side of what you hear.

He is an absolute master of this part of the process and he does a wonderful job for us.

Josh is originally from B. C. and worked on the Bryan Adams Team of engineers out there.

So here is the end of the road in terms of this musical adventure ... the final mix by Josh.

If you compare it with the previous recording shared above you will notice the difference.

Thank you for taking the time to read about our musical adventure ... the tale behind this tune.

It’s Earth Day ... the most important day on my calendar.


A day we set aside to celebrate our lovely little planet each year.


Considering our conduct and the impact we have had on the Earth there is not much to celebrate.


And that is indeed a shame because that would not be the case if we understood our place here.


It came to my attention when I was writing the song Sweet Mother Earth, that the metaphor I was using at the time ... as if the Earth was our mother ... is not a metaphor at all ... it is reality.


At the time I was also taking in several documentaries about the evolution of life.


The Earth according to the best information we have gathered so far is approx 4.5 billion years old ... and from what we know, life bloomed on this planet approx 3.5 billion years ago.


This data is not just idle speculation, it is based on factual information collected by scientists.


And they have gathered an abundant amount of info about when life started ... as simple single celled organisms ... that then gradually over a very long time evolved into more complex beings.


Science has over time collected all sorts of artifacts to illustrate this process ... fossils, remains.


How life started and why ... if there is a why ... is and may remain a mystery.

But the fact that this is what happened and how is indisputable in my less than humble opinion.


That being the case it occurred to me that The Earth is indeed our mother and with some help from the Sun ... our father ... our planet is the mother of all living things upon it.


If we could only think about our planet in those terms ... in the way we think about our human mothers ... it might go a long way to inspire us to behave in a much more considerate way here.


While I consider myself a spiritual person, I do not adhere to a formal religion of any kind.


But the one set of religious and spiritual ideas that resonates with me are those of the indigenous peoples of North America who saw the Earth as their mother and to whom they had obligations.


They understood that they were part of the community of life all around them, that it was incumbent upon them to show respect for the dignity, integrity of all living & non living things.


They gave thanks to all the animals they hunted for giving up their lives so they could live.


They regarded things like lakes as living beings ... they had a point as any canoeist will tell you. Every lake has its own ambience, its own character and its own set of living beings within it.


They understood clearly that were were only part of this system and not in dominion over it.


In my view we have a lot to learn from their vision, their understanding of the nature of reality.


In honour of this important day we are sharing a song with you that we have never shared before.


I wrote this song ... Who Knows ... with my dearly departed brother in music Larry Leishman.


Larry was a very funky blues guitarist but on this occasion his guitar never came out of the case.


He had bought himself a new Apple computer, discovered the program Garage Band on it and he came across all sorts of samples taken of real instruments so he started experimenting with them.


A while later he sent me a track of the outcome of his adventures which was a series of clips he had put together ... seemed he was also very funky using technology as well ... it was great.


But it was a collection of phrases, kind of connected but not something you would call a song.


However many of the sections of music he had created really appealed to me and I was listening to his track of phrases one night very late when I was working on other stuff on my computer.


At that time a melody to certain parts of what he had done started to occur to me but there was no way I could sing them to what he had sent ... but I was wailing away anyway at 2 AM or so.


Then one line of lyric fell down from the sky ... Who knows, somebody tell me, how will we look them in the eye. Who knows, next generation, what will be our alibi ... we don’t have one!


So I called a former student of mine who became one of the best recording engineers in the country ... Scott Campbell ... and asked him to help me create something I could sing to.


I gave him “the recipe” for the song which he then cut and pasted together seamlessly.

Then I took that, went to Chalet Studio where we always record and recorded the vocals.


The lyric for this song were inspired by the “final lecture” by Dr. David Suzuki ... who is still on television every week so I guess it wasn’t that final after all ... in which he stated that he felt that the message he had been trying to deliver for many years had fallen on deaf ears about which he was very disappointed and understandably somewhat disillusioned ... how could he not be!


He also said that he was always searching for ways to bring his message home to people.


The main theme in Who Knows is intended to get folks to understand that what we (they) are doing to this planet will have a profound impact on the world we are leaving for our kids.


Surely that would be a message that would resonate with a great many parents I thought.


As another line from the song goes ... We tell them that we love them, care for them in every way. While they are watching their world crumble, what are we gonna say? Who knows ...


So we decided to send the song to Dr. Suzuki as a gift to be used in any way he saw fit.

Eventually got a lovely e mail from him directly thanking us for taking the time to do that.


This recording of Who Knows is not at the same level of professional production as the collection of our material on Spotify or iTunes but I think it says what we wanted to say.

Every time I listen to it I get a big smile on my face and warmth in my heart and it brings back many fond memories Larry and all the fun we had making music together over the years.


I do hope you enjoy the song and that you will give some thought to the message here.

We are consuming this planet at a horrific pace, there are far too many of us on it and we are in the process of leaving our children and their children a terrible mess to deal with.


We must learn to show far more respect and consideration for our Sweet Mother Earth.

And darn quick! ... have a meaningful, transformational Earth Day.


Let’s all pull together, turn things around and do better for Sweet Mother Earth.


Bob




TITLE: Howlin’ For My Darlin’


DATE: Summer 2008


LOCATION: Chalet Studios


MUSICIANS:


Drums … Al Cross

Bass … Dennis Pendrith

Hammond B3… David Chester

Guitar … Larry Leishman

Trumpet … Andy Gravitis

Trombone … Jim Beck

Vocals … Bob Burrows



SONGWRITER: Chester Burnett


RECORDING PERSONNEL:


Recording Engineer: Scott Campbell

Mixing Engineer: Scott Campbell

Producer: Bob Burrows


GRAPHIC ARTIST: Stuart Blower


NOTES:

This recording was made during a jam session at Chalet Studio in the summer of 2008 … the first time our band, Burrows And Company ever played together.

We had planned to play a benefit for my ailing food company at the time.

But when that didn’t work out I decided to get together anyway … and record.

So on a lovely warm summer evening we all got together at Chalet Studio to play.

Friend and former student of mine Scott Campbell agreed to engineer the session.

We had a great time together that evening … and the rest is history as they say.

We have been horsing around in the recording studio together ever since!

We have played a few live gigs but, for the most part, this has been a studio band.

The horns were recorded a couple of years later to complete the work.

The song was written by Howlin’ Wolf aka Chester Burnett … an old r’n b favourite of mine … first heard the tune performed by J. Smith And The Majestics.

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