How I wrote a song that
Leonard Nimoy recorded
a year before I was born
This story begins with me engaging in that most bored of pursuits : searching my own name on Google. On this particular search, I ran across this entry a few pages in...
Huh? What kind of horrible mistake could this possibly be...and why? I click the link and get this :
Track 14, Eh? What could it be?
Suddenly, I knew exactly how this great miscarriage of songwriting credit had taken place. It was a simple problem of grammar!
In 1968, (1 year before I was born) the "Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy" album was released. It featured, among other treats, Mr. Spock's take on the Tim Hardin standard "If I WERE a Carpenter"
In 1989, I released my "Hi Honey...Drop Dead" cassette, which contained my original song "If I WAS a Carpenter", a silly little song full of bad puns and a backhanded tribute to Karen Carpenter, which went like this :
Oh, if I had a hammer
I'd make those fuckers pay
And if I had a Mastercard
I'd use it every day
And if I had a Visa
I'd leave this country right away
And if I was a Carpenter
I'd slowly waste away....
(etc..)
I had purposly called the song "If I WAS a Carpenter" as a play on words against Hardin's "If I WERE a Carpenter".
Flash forward to 1993. I was still living in Mitchell, SD. A very boring little town of about 14,000. I was very bored most of the time, and when I wasn't writing or recording music, I was usually performing various other "pretend promotional" tasks for my music.
In 1993 I decided I was going to register all of my songs with BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.), the organization responsible for paying artists royalties for radio play of their music. I knew that no radio stations were or would ever be playing my music, but I figured WHAT THE FUCK? Putting ©1993 Russ Stedman (BMI) on all my tapes looked real official and bitchen.
So, let's take a trip to the online BMI archive :
Searching for "If I WERE a Carpenter" yeilds this:
Searching for "If I WAS a Carpenter"...
You get...
So. Whoever threw together this...
...cheesey little compilation of music performed (badly) by former Star Trek actors...well, they just got the grammar wrong, and now I have this :
...which of course I ran straight to eBay and picked up a copy of. How could I resist? There I am...right next to Lennon/McCartney for flip sake!
In closing, I would like to mention that I have never been a Star Trek fan, to the point of never even having seen a full episode at any time in my life. My only exposure to it was going to see the "Wrath Of Kahn" movie, at which I slipped on the freshly mopped theater floor on the way in and bashed the hell out of my knee.
P.S. : You can download the entire "Hi Honey, Drop Dead" album here. If you want to hear "Spaced Out", you're on your own.