One of the bands we toured with a few times was The Innocence of Virgil Scott. The drummer was Terry Draper. The first time I met Terry was at one of those gigs. A few years later, (early 70?s I think) I answered a newspaper ad. They were looking for a guitar player, and I was looking for a way to earn a living. I was interviewed for the job by John Woloschuck and Terry Draper, and I guess I got the job. But this wasn't Klaatu. The band was very much a vehicle for John Woloschuck to get his songs recorded, and for some unknown reason John decided to name it Mudcow. I played guitar, John played bass, Terry played drums and Jamie Bridgeman was on keyboards.

We rehearsed for months, did a couple of gigs, and recorded a demo of the songs that John had written for the band. We recorded at Sound Canada, I think those tapes still exist, and I remember the songs as some of the worst I've ever experienced. The band was quite terrible. After that band broke up, and the house we rehearsed in was leveled (psychologically that was a good thing!), I went back to work at my Dad's electronics company. I worked for a while in R&D and when they were hiring, they hired John Woloschuck. It was a part time job for both of us, for not much money.

We're getting to the Klaatu part... One day John came in to work, and as we sat soldering circuit boards John told me how he had been going to the Toronto area studios looking for a job as a second engineer. He took along some of his lyrics and home demos to show his background in music. On that day he had visited Terry Brown at Toronto Sound. Terry told John that he wasn't hiring right now, but offered to get John's songs recorded. Terry had the foresight to see where John was going, and at this point John's songs were getting really good. So John had arrived at work with a list of possible band names, and asked me if I'd like to join a band and make a record. I said yes (no kidding) and we looked at the list of names. We are both big fans of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. We picked Klaatu. I'm not sure what the date was, but for me that was the first day Klaatu existed.

Our first attempts in the studio were obviously hampered by the fact that none of us could play drums. Terry Draper didn't join the band for a few months, not until after we had recorded Hanus of Uranus and Sub Rosa Subway. We ended up hiring drummers for those songs. When Terry Draper joined we were finally able to go into the studio, just the four of us- Terry Brown, Terry Draper, John Woluschuck and myself and record a song from beginning to end. Over the next three years we recorded 3:47 EST on weekends and evenings when the studio wasn't booked. It was a fantastic experience in every way.

In my pre Klaatu days I played with many musicians, the Toronto music scene was great. There weren't that many bands, nothing like today and if you could play guitar you could go to any party anywhere, and be welcomed with open ears. I remember taking my transistor radio and a Cry Baby Wah Wah to parties. I'd modified the radio with a guitar jack in the back, and could jam anywhere using batteries. It actually sounded quite good and is the only guitar amp used on Hanus of Uranus. We'd have jam battles all night until the wee hours. It was a great way to get my chops happening. Bloodstone once opened for Steppenwolf at the Ottawa Civic centre with 16,000 screaming fans. The late Fred Coutts, was our lead singer. It was standing room only, the place was packed. At one point in the concert Fred suggested the audience move a little closer. They did, right onto the stage. We finished the song watching security guards toss audience members off the stage. In the papers the next day we stole the headline from Steppenwolf.

We jammed everywhere we went with local musicians. Our one and only record, the single Toronto and I'm Your Man was produced by the lead singer from Nucleus. That was a great Toronto area band, one of my favourites and a big influence. At one time we played in the Toronto "Village" area and were surrounded by the best of Toronto's talent. But for the most part I was too busy to get to know any of them. I used to enjoy taking my Hammond B3 organ and Leslie to the "Global Village" on a Saturday night and jam for all the speed freaks until 6 AM. Musicians would flow in and out all night, and they would almost always be brilliant. Or too drunk to play.

I recall playing a high school gig with Bloodstone in Oakville on a Saturday night, then driving to Toronto to play for the Vagabond clubhouse starting at 1 AM. I made the trip to Toronto lying face up on top of the Hammond B3 organ in the back of a van, so that my face was only a few inches from the van roof. It was the only room available! I shudder to think what would have happened had they rolled the van. Nucleus had just packed up having done the clubhouse gig from 5 PM Saturday afternoon. The police had just left. They raided and confiscated all the beer. In minutes it had been replaced. They fed us beer and uppers and we played until 6 AM or so. At some point I remember looking over to see the bass player's fingers were bleeding.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The Beatles imitated Carl Perkins in the early days. I think Terry Draper and I were less influenced by the Beatles than John, but also big fans. My songs in Klaatu tend to sound much less "Beatlish" than John's as in Little Neutrino or True Life Hero. But the thing that is inescapable was the process of multi track recording and the way we were looking at music sprang completely from listening to the Beatles. We would build a song a bit at a time. Little Neutrino started with a bed track of Terry Draper beating a bass drum along to a metronome. Then I would add a guitar. By the time we finished the track we had put in months of overdubbing and making changes until we had this piece of music that none of us could have ever played.

The songs on the first album represent three years of work and hundreds of session of overdubbing and experimenting. We never considered ourselves in the same class as The Beatles, but always strived to record music that would expand the limits of what could be done in the studio, much as they did. The Beatles were the first to really take advantage of multi tracking, and we really had a lot of fun going down the same path. We talked about recording for the "hippie on acid listening in the headphones".

One evening at Toronto Sound, we were working on Little Neutrino. I heard the bell ring for the back door and opened it. Standing there was this guy who looked a lot like Mick Jagger, only really short. He asked to come in and see the studio, and I was about to tell him that the studio is booked and ask him to come back tomorrow. Steve Vaughn, one of the studio engineers rescued me by stepping in and inviting the real Mick Jagger to please come in. Mick stood at the back of the control room for some time while we recorded. Terry Draper was out in the studio doing mallet cymbal rolls while Terry Brown and I were adjusting things madly. The 2 inch multi-track tape was on the machine backwards and I was changing the pitch with the vari-speed control while Terry Draper played. The sound in the studio monitors did not resemble any music know to mankind, and was even worse than current day Hip Hop. Well, maybe not that bad. To this day I wonder what Mick thought, and if he ever wondered what our music actually sounded like. I'll never know.

Klaatu was never released in Britain because EMI didn't like The Beatles reference and decided to pass. My guess is that other than a few seconds of Calling Occupants... Paul still hasn't heard it. I met him many times over the next few years, and he showed up to jam a few times in Studio 5. Unfortunately for me I was always working on something else, and missed most of the jamming. I did supply him with some sound effects for a Rupert the Bear movie he was doing with George Martin. I also learned that Studio 5 used to be Paul's smokin' room back when he recorded in Studio 2 at AIR. And the black eye? Well, he claimed he bumped into something while playing with his kids.

Around the time we finished the 3rd album Terry Draper and I got together with a few friends and started the band we called "Funn". We very much wanted to see if we could improve our playing skills and find a way to push Klaatu onto the stage. John wasn't too enthusiastic about performing on stage, but we hoped he would come around if he saw us having a good time. The band played nothing but hits from the 60?s with The Beatles, The Turtles and The Stones all part of the repertoire. With songs that good it's hard to go wrong. Usually the audiences went nuts. We did have a lot of "Funn" but it also became a job after a few years. Still Funn helped Terry Draper and I prepare for the cross Canada tour, and was a great experience.

By now the tour was booked and selling well, so he grumbled some more and left. The first night of the tour, when we came on stage the audience went bananas. They had all come to see us, not a Prism fan to be seen in 100 mile radius. When we left the stage after several encores Bruce Allen was there. Terry Draper said "What do you think Bruce?". He nodded and stormed away. When Prism started to play the hall emptied.

That happened to some degree at every stop of the tour culminating in Toronto at the Danforth Music Hall not far from where I grew up. A large part of the audience were friends. Again when we finished playing, the hall emptied leaving Prism to play for a dozen people or so. They broke up shortly after that. Interestingly, when we rehearsed for the cross Canada tour, there was a bar downstairs from the rehearsal hall where one day I met a stripper who did her act using several Klaatu songs as backing, including Anus of Uranus.

For me the thing about Hope is that John was really hot, he wrote a very focused album that holds together as a concept album, or as a collection of separate songs. Personally, I enjoyed recording the first album, and the third album a great deal more. I think John did not enjoy recording the third album as much, he felt we were heading in the wrong direction.

At one point Terry Draper and I worked for a month in a mobile truck outside his house. We were left alone with state of the art gear, and we were learning as we went. The same truck was used to record most of the bed tracks for the album, we set up the drums and amps in Terry Brown's house. The rain at the beginning of Routine Day is a sprinkler spraying into Terry Brown's pool. We also recorded the strings for a few tracks at the arranger's house, with the truck in the street outside and the string players in the living room. We spent a lot of money, and a lot of time. We had a lot of fun but I never felt we achieved my hope of having a radio friendly record.

I do recall working on the song Mr. Manson in studio two at Sounds Interchange in Toronto when Ozzy Osbourne walked in and sat down on the couch. When the tape stopped he cheered and shouted "Killer song!". Ozzy and a few of his roadies sat on the couch and joked and listened for several days while Terry Draper and I messed with that tune. It never got any radio play, but to this day I wonder if I could get Ozzy to cover it. He was working in studio one, recording what was to be the last Black Sabbath album. Ozzy was sniffing coke, taking sleeping pills to go to sleep at night, and then going to the doctor to complain about heart palpitations! The doctor would just give him more pills. I remember one day heading for the washroom, seeing Ozzy as he was coming out with a strange twisted smile on his face. He'd just totaled the washroom, peed on the walls, and tossed toilet paper everywhere. Water was leaking from a broken tap. I honestly didn't think he'd survive the album, let alone still be alive and recording today.

Then we met Chris Bond who was to produce Endangered Species. I guess there is no need to explain the choice of title. Chris had produced a hit for Hall and Oates, I think it was Rich Girl? For me that meant he just might get the sound I wanted, tougher with a more driving bass and drums. I think Chris hoodwinked us a bit. He arrived with all the Klaatu albums in his briefcase, and seemed to know a lot about the band. He claimed to be a big fan. Then when we actually started recording the album it quickly became apparent to us that Chris had his own ideas of what Klaatu was. I suspect he didn't really know the band at all. He refused to use effects like flange, or most of the suggestions I had. He produced the album as if it was his, and for the most part ignored us completely. The bed tracks were done by studio musicians, who must have been big valium users. The tracks were a bit more radio sounding, but I don't think it helped that we had written some truly average songs. When I finally heard the finished mixes, I was also unhappy with the sound.

Capitol pulled the record after a very short release, and on the day we heard the record had been pulled we also heard one of the songs played on an L.A. radio station. It was surreal. There are some good moments on the album I guess, and I got to play some guitar and sing. It's an odd record since it's only partly Klaatu.

One highlight of the sessions in L.A. was meeting Dolly Parton while we were playing the Dolly Parton pinball game in the studio lounge. At the time she was about 5 feet tall and about 4 feet wide. She greeted us with "How's the game playing boys?". When we left L.A. it was in the middle of a flood, and there were helicopters lifting people out of submerged vehicles along the route to the airport. We flew back in a full sized commercial jet with only two other passengers. It was New Years Eve.

After the tour we still didn't have that hit, although we did get some radio play. But we couldn't go straight back to the same venues and play again, and Capitol wasn't about to spend any more money. We did get a couple of offers to play bigger gigs in the US in L.A. and Boston, I believe. But there was no money to pay for the trips, or the gear and personnel we would need. The band wanted to continue gigging, and I wanted to go back and work at my new studio. So we parted ways, and Klaatu hired a guitarist to take my place and continued on for a short time playing bars and clubs.

I had the very strange experience of watching Klaatu play at the Black Hawk Inn on Younge Street in Toronto and danced to Anus of Uranus with Lisa DalBello. I went back to my studio and recorded a lot of music over the next few years, including a large part of the Been Here Before double CD on Bullseye Records Canada.

ESP studios was host to many Canadian and international stars, including Lisa DalBello, Dan Hill, Alfie Zappacosta, Glass Tiger, Alice Cooper, Strange Advance, Images In vogue, and Rational Youth.

It was certainly the right choice for us, and we walked into AIR studios a few months after moving to London and made a deal to work together almost immediately. We had worked at AIR a few years earlier mixing a Rational Youth album, so we knew the studio manager, and some of the staff. We sat down for a meeting with John Burgess and George Martin, the studio owners and struck a deal. They would supply the space and start-up money. We would supply the talent, and run the studio. Any profits would be split 50/50. We also purchased a Fairlight series 3 computer music system because all of us involved felt that we would need something to attract the high end customers that AIR normally caters to.

For about 4 years John Jones and I worked out of studio 5. It was an amazing experience, we got to hang out with the best in Rock and Roll. I worked with many including Dire Straits, Duran Duran, and was lucky enough to work with George Martin on a few projects. The most significant was a recording of the Dylan Thomas play Under Milk Wood set to music that George had written and arranged. He had never worked directly with synthesizers or samplers before, and he proposed to record the demos for the project in our little studio. I recall picking up some orchestral sounds for our samplers in Toronto at Saved by Technology especially for the project. I needed to have a sound ready for every part of the orchestra, and this was very early days for samplers. George came in to studio 5 for a few days, and brought a keyboard player with him. We would set up a string sound, than an oboe, then a tympani sound working our way through his arrangements. The keyboard player would read Georges sheet music and play each part, and I would capture this with Performer running on a Mac. There was no computer audio multi-tracking at this point, so we did everything in midi, these were just demos. I think everyone was surprised at how good they sounded. George was able to get the gig using the tracks we demoed as examples. And later on he brought a 114 piece London Symphony Orchestra in to perform the music. These were big events with Royalty wandering around, and a lot of very big stars taking part. But the best part for me was that they brought the orchestra back again a few weeks later to redo several tracks. Everyone felt the demos had something that the real performance lacked! Pretty neat.

At AIR I worked with so many people it's hard to remember them all, but a few highlights would be doing music for the movie Lethal Weapon with the late Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton, working with Mark Knopfler on a Mink DeVille album that later turned into the music for the movie The Princess Bride, recording an album with John Ilsley of Dire Straits, and spending an evening with an old friend, Pink Floyd producer Bob Ezrin drinking Scotch and playing with midi music software on the Mac.

Working at AIR was cool, and I learned a huge amount about engineering, music, and the politics of running a studio. Enough to know that I'd much rather be writing and playing the music than recording it. During that time I didn't write or record any of my own music, at least nothing that survives today. We stayed at AIR for about 4 years, when they had to move from Oxford Circus. They decided to move to the west end of London, and this was expected to take at least a year to complete.

We all agreed to part ways, John Jones and I moved south to a little town called Hammerwood. I found myself living in a small rented house in a town of about 13 families with a church on the hill and horses grazing in the fields. The centre of the town is a large man made lake often teeming with ducks and geese. I set up a studio in my basement, and worked there for a few years. During that time John Jones co-produced an album with Duran Duran and I did a lot of engineering and sampling for them. That album was eventually released as the Wedding Album and was a huge hit worldwide. In spite of the hard work I managed to write and record a few demo songs of my own during that time, most of which are on Been Here Before. It was an interesting time, and I really loved living in England. I had a lot of great friends and loved the surroundings of the English countryside.

An odd memory from this time is spending a month staying at Simon Le Bon's mansion in the west end of London while working on a Duran Duran album. Simon and his wife Yasmin had lots of extra rooms, and were kind enough to let me stay in one. The first morning at breakfast, Yasmin was reading the "Sun" newspaper, with her picture on the cover. Simon took off on one of his many motorbikes dressed head to toe in leather looking like an alien. I waited by the sidewalk for a cab from the studio to pick me up and an older gentleman walked past me, turned and came back. He politely asked "Excuse me, but are you Simon Le Bon?" At that moment, I might well have wished I was!

I started working at Saved by Technology, a midi and computer store in Toronto run by a good friend Jim Burgess. I decided to get out of music and learn how to program computers. Oddly this would eventually result in a new album!

I learned a great deal about computers over the next few years. In fact the first program I ever wrote for Windows was an Internet animation program called "SCREAM". It was discovered by a software company in Toronto and they purchased the rights to it, then promptly went out of business. Seems like a recurring theme in my life.

Jim Burgess and I continued to try and sell the software, and at one point Microsoft invited us out to demonstrate it to the company. As it turns out they only wanted to steal whatever they could from my ideas, but it was quite an interesting experience. I have no doubt that SCREAM was ahead of it's time, but it also became clear that selling software is even more difficult than selling music. So I gave SCREAM away on the web for free.

I decided to focus on some music software. I spent a year or more writing a piece of music software I call the DeeSampler. When working at AIR I often had to spend hours tuning and adjusting percussion and drum loops for Hip Hop and dance artists. With the DeeSampler I can do in seconds what used to take hours with a regular sampler. Again, we had a tough sell. I think we actually sold about three copies before our copy protection was cracked and it was available for free all over the Internet. It was around this time that I started talking with Jaimie Vernon who is now the President at Bullseye Records Canada about releasing my large collection of demos on CD.

Jaimie Vernon and Dave Bradley (Dave runs www.klaatu.org) spent many hours collecting and repairing my old demos and the double CD was finally released. All this generated a little bit of money, and that's when the idea of recording some new Dee Long music came up. It was a big leap of faith, after all I started writing software to get away from the music business. All those long hours in the studio take their toll. But I made myself a promise to put all my efforts into my own music, and not get caught in the trap of using my abilities to assist others in making hits.

And now I had a secret weapon! The DeeSampler allows me to replace the drummer in the band, yet still get some human feel in my music. Without it I would not be able to do everything myself, at home in my own studio. With it, I have all the bases covered. My current home studio is small, and not that expensive but it's the best I've ever used and is far more powerful than anything we had at ESP or AIR. The DeeSampler is now free for all to download at my website www.deelong.com.

The new CD is called "Outside" and is based on a story "Outside of Time and Space" that has been with me in concept for many years. You can read the full story on my website. It took me a few years to record, partly because I had to slowly build a studio and system to record it. I've taken that even further lately and begun making my own videos. I use 3D software and a home made green screen, and I must admit I've been having more fun than ever! Not just with music, but now also with video and graphics.

I'm hoping to turn the album into a video DVD with all songs represented, but only "Time Will Tell" as the song says.

Jaimie tells me that the box set will include the early GRT and Daffodil singles (1973-1975), the alternate orchestral mix of Hope, some demos, some live material, as well as alternate versions of many of the album tracks.

I think it may be up to me to try and convince the other lads to include as much as possible. It's been quite some time since I've listened to anything from Klaatu, so it should be interesting to hear some of the old forgotten relics. In fact I haven't heard the original mixes of the Hope album since we took a hacksaw to the first test pressing, and each of us took a piece home. At the time we all felt the album wasn't finished. We had to deliver the album to Capitol anyway, but when 3:47 EST started to sell, Capitol gave us more time. We agreed to finish it to our satisfaction at all costs, and to never let that first version get released. Fast forward to around a year ago, when Jaimie gave Terry Brown the original tapes to master for the box set. I'm told that Terry did a superb job, and that the results are quite brilliant! I really have no idea what to expect. It's just a vague distant memory.

As for the alternate mixes from other albums, I know they have dozens of different versions of Mister Manson many of which are really terrible. I can understand why Terry and John might want to keep some of what we recorded from being released, not all of it was worthy.

In the early days of Klaatu I always felt like we were doing something special. And when The Beatles rumor happened I thought that it was quite silly. I figured we would make it or break it according to how memorable our music was. And on that basis I always thought we would do well, and have a long career. At least for me, that didn't happen it's been a long struggle to this point, and a lot of hard work. And I'm still not rich. I always thought that was how it worked, have a hit record, get rich. Hasn't happened :-) But I wouldn't want to have missed out on the amazing things I've experienced, and Klaatu has been only a small part of that. From sampling fart sounds with Alice Cooper and Bob Ezrin at ESP, to shaking hands with Prince Andrew in the hall at AIR studios, to celebrating a finished album with the members of Dire Straits, to demonstrating my software to Microsoft bigwigs, to making my own whacked out videos at home in my own private studio on the lake, I think I've been very lucky so far.

Had Klaatu gone on to greater heights, those things likely would never have happened. For my next album I'm hoping to write and record the songs and the videos at the same time. Please check out my website, buy my CD, read the story and watch the videos, so I can create some more.

My headstone will probably read: "check out www.deelong.com for more info" And would someone please cancel "American Idol"! Music has suffered enough.