My Pen Was Wide Awake

Classic and timeless rock and roll with a fresh and rejuvenating edge. This is precisely the territory that The Dangers call home, and this truly comes alive on their most recent album, the impeccable My Pen Was Wide Awake. This rootsy blend breathes new life into the band throughout their seventeenth album, giving the songs an enduring and travelling basis, evolving and growing, roaming along vast highways of sound. It is invigorating for the band, having been performing their unique cocktail of alternative bliss since the late 1970s, delivering yet another strong statement full of vitality and vigour. And as the excitement surrounding My Pen Was Wide Awake continues to gradually build, founding member Chris LeRoy took a brief respite to chat with Aldora Britain Records about his artistic adventures so far. We discussed formative musical memories from his adolescence, the beginnings and early days of The Dangers, a selection of their recorded output to date, and much, much more. That exclusive conversation is published here in full for the first time.

Aldora Britain Records: Hello Chris, how are you? I am excited to be talking with such a fantastic band from over in California. It is amazing how music can bring us together. Let’s start off by travelling back in time. What are some of your earliest musical memories and what was it that first pushed you towards pursuing this passion of yours?

Chris LeRoy: At around eleven years old I used to ride my Stingray bike past the National Guard Armory in Colton, California. There were local dances there with local usually Mexican American bands. I loved the sound of those 1960s cover bands who could play Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ with a sax, Vox organ, and drummer. Those high school age kids standing outside in the dark scared me but I dug the music and knew I belonged inside.

Aldora Britain Records: And now, let’s take a leap forward to the present day and a brilliant project of yours out of Redlands. The beginnings of The Dangers must have been an exciting, invigorating time. How did it all come to be? How did you first meet each other and what was the initial spark that brought you together on this creative, musical level?

Chris LeRoy: The Dangers have been around since 1978. My childhood friend Bob Kjorvestad formed the band, and we added Johnny Hickman, later from Cracker. We practiced in a meat locker and played house parties and small clubs, especially The Barn, a college club in Riverside, California. We saw that folks danced just as much to our originals, so our path was set. Johnny and I have been songwriting partners for many years, but mostly The Dangers have been my songwriting journey.

Aldora Britain Records: You are fresh from releasing a superb record in the form of My Pen Was Wide Awake. This was also my introduction to your music, so it already holds a special place in my record collection. What are your memories from writing, recording and releasing these songs, and how would you say you grew and evolved as artists throughout this process?

Chris LeRoy: This is The Dangers’ seventeenth album. We recorded some cover songs prior to starting this album. The energy that the bandmembers drew from the cover recordings continued with the recording of My Pen Was Wide Awake. Typically, I send demos out to the band, most are fully recorded by myself in Logic. There are songs that the band recorded based on the demos and the other half build from my demos to full tracks. Like our 2017 Land of Opportunity album, these evolved as personal and political songs, sometimes the lines blur. All said, the band responded to my new songs with a unifying focus that lead one of our strongest recordings.

Aldora Britain Records: I am definitely drawn in by your dynamic songcraft and composition. How do you approach this part of your creative process? Is it collaborative or more individual? Are you drawn to specific themes or topics? Perhaps coming from more of a personal, observational, or even fictional perspective or point of view?

Chris LeRoy: Individual for sure. I start with a thread of a melody or unusual set of chords and take a leap. Lyrics come soaring out spontaneously, and then I work backwards to find the story, occasionally personal, many times based on novels or poems that strike me. For example, ‘My Pen Was Wide Awake’ comes from a quiet poem by Allen Ginsberg. He is in his father’s car coming down into New York City and notes all movement and images floating by. I took that story and moved it to Los Angeles where a father abandons his wife and takes his son into a new life. I treated the whole album this way, grabbing key lines from Ginsberg and Hank Williams’ lost notebooks and driving off into new narratives. This was my process for the new album.

A side note, on our 2012 album Embrace the Light Outside, I wrote a song based in the Iris Murdoch novel The Bell. In my version of The Bell, I condensed the whole story into three verses. About a year later I posted it and received a nice compliment from a curator at The Iris Murdoch Research Centre in Britain, noting how well I captured the spirit of the novel in so few lines. Cool.

Aldora Britain Records: Let’s get more specific with this now. I would like to focus on two recent favourites, ‘The Angel’ and ‘Way Down’. For each, what is the story behind the song, and can you remember the moment it came to be? Did anything in particular inspire them and what do they mean to you as the writer and performer of each?

Chris LeRoy: ‘Angel’, I have written a few songs based on the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, where the angel chooses to become human again and where that leads. In my story the angel appears at the end of each day, and leaps, dejected, from the Golden Gate Bridge, only to return in a new human form who jumps from the same spot the following evening. The observer tries to talk the angel out of this suicide cycle. So, in the arrangement I followed Dylan’s ‘Isis’ and performed it influenced by his staccato phrasing. It is one of my album faves from the album as the story is both quirky and mysterious.

‘Way Down’ , when the band recorded a covers album before we embarked on My Pen Was Wide Awake, I tried to write songs that complemented the covers, Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Move, Neil Diamond, The Beatles. ‘Way Down’ started with a descending bass in what initially felt like ‘Dear Prudence.’ However, it quickly went on to Zeppelin and then The Stones, and ultimately to its own space, a kind of anthemic pop tune about a very desperate soul looking for the solace of, darn it, another angel. The performance is big vocally, especially the backing vocals by Ralph Torres and Robert Gonzales. It all goes to find a way out of this way down feeling, and when enter that last churning ending, the angst and the hope fight it out. A lot of my songs are about conjuring emotion.

Aldora Britain Records: Previously, if we step inside the time machine once again, you unveiled Land of Opportunity back in 2021. This is another strong outing from the band. Let’s explore it in more depth. How do you reflect on this set as a whole now, and is there anything that you would edit or change when looking back with the benefit of hindsight?

Chris LeRoy: I am so glad you listened to that album. For me it is at a great example of what we do. There is beautifully varied music, strung on poignant songs that meld political perspective with emotional context. Songs like ‘The Opportunity,’ ‘Walk the Line,’ and ‘Live a Lifetime’ tell stories of fear and resistance without sloganizing. And a song like ‘Last Three Songs’ can carry you emotionally beyond the fray. There’s not much I would change at all. The same could be said for our song, ‘Promiseland,’ on The Dangers’ Promiseland album, and the Pen Was Wide Awake album.

Aldora Britain Records: As you well know by now, I love that Dangers sound and your approach to making and creating music. That rootsy classic rock and roll foundation. Superb! How would you say this style of yours came about, what goes into it for you, and who are some of your biggest influences and inspirations as an artist currently?

Chris LeRoy: As a child of the 60s and with a band who wear their 60s and 70s roots well, I feel what was absorbed from the 50s onward was like the air you breathe. It is a part of you, so you don’t have go back for inspiration. It is in you. Like I mentioned in the first few questions, riding around in my Stingray and taking in that sound and emotion and rebellious spirit, I was destined to write songs, to bang a piano, wield a guitar and, because I have been very lucky, centre a band that still makes compelling music.

Aldora Britain Records: A broad question to finish. There have been a lot of changes in the world in the post-COVID era, both throughout society, with political turmoil and even bloodshed in Ukraine and Palestine, and within the music industry too, AI for example. How would you say these several years have impacted you, both personally and as an artist? How do you think this time has changed the music industry, both for the good and the bad?

Chris LeRoy: As a music maker operating on the fringe, the music industry means little to me. It is no secret that corporations and unfortunately technology are paths for profit, and the arts are not in the equation. In time artists will all work from the fringes. But this is good. At this point, artists should feel free to respond to the world as they see it. Whether political or personal, art is freedom. So, through these changes, through these hard times, free voices may emanate from the fringe. That would be good.

For my part, since the middle of the COVID outbreak, I have produced an online music and arts show called Chris LeRoy’s Lo-Fi Lounge. It has run consecutively for 278 and counting weekly episodes, and features live performances from bands like Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven, The Third Mind, and The Dangers, and The Conditionz. Each show offers poetry and interviews, and it was my way to hold the centre together for fans who were shut in and scared. The process is like producing an EP from the fringe every week. It feeds creativity.

P.S. in closing I remember 1967 at twelve years old, sitting in my front yard in Colton, California, leaning on a tree, listening to my white plastic transistor radio. The music came from everywhere, as mainstream music did in those days, Ray Charles’ ‘Here We Go Again,’ The Who’s ‘Pictures of Lily,’ Procol Harem’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale,’ Four Tops’ ‘Seven Rooms of Gloom,’ Beatles, Stones, Kinks. I said to myself, ‘This is going to be called the Golden Age of Music, I should listen close. ’ All these years later, gifted a lifetime of songwriting, I try in each work to craft something I would have wanted to listen to, something with meaning and emotion, a song worthy of that little plastic box of wonder.

Quickfire Round

AB Records: Favourite artist or band? Chris: Bob Dylan.

AB Records: Favourite album? Chris: John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.

AB Records: First album you bought with your own money? Chris: Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced.

AB Records: Last album you listened to from start to finish? Chris: Neil Young, Talking to the Trees.

AB Records: First gig as an audience member? Chris: Chuck Berry.

AB Records: Loudest gig as an audience member? Chris: Fear.

AB Records: Style icon? Chris: Joe Strummer.

AB Records: Favourite film? Chris: Kurosawa’s Red Beard.

AB Records: Favourite TV show? Chris: The Ernie Kovacs Show.

AB Records: Favourite up and coming artist or band? Chris: The Dangers.