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BURTON CUMMINGS (1976):
"Blossom" (demo) - I originally heard it done by Georgie Fame, one of my favourite singers from England. I don't think he wrote it. I don't even know where the song came from, because BMI asked me who's the writer and I said, 'I couldn't tell ya.' They had to do a search on their computer.
"I'm Scared" (demo) - It ended up being a pretty big hit record for me. Before I ever had signed with CBS, I had written that song. I wrote that song when I was still in The Guess Who, actually. Then, when I left The Guess Who, there was this tiny little studio in Winnipeg, on the third floor of an old Victorian house. It was called Road Studios and I would spend every night there, from one in the morning 'til eight in the morning, for weeks and weeks, after I left The Guess Who because I didn't know where my future was going and I hadn't signed a deal yet. And out of those sessions came that version of 'I'm Scared.' It's just piano, bass and drums. It's very naked. But there's a certain innocence to it that I really like, almost more than the finished record, 'cause the finished record had a big 20-voice choir and 30 strings and we used about 46 tracks. This is just a little 8-track piano, bass, drums and vocals thing.
MY OWN WAY TO ROCK (1977):
"Lay It On The Line" (live) and "Charlemagne" (live) - They were supposed to be part of a live album, which got scrapped eventually because some of the drumming was not up to snuff. You can fix everything, except drums. You can't fix drums because drums are the foundation of every cut, so that was supposed to be a double four-sided vinyl album and it never surfaced. But those are culled from different sessions, some in Hamilton, some in Los Angeles, and some in Detroit. There's still a pile of stuff from those sessions that have never came out. I have about 30 live tracks, and we were going through some of those and the two that they picked sounded pretty decent, so we decided to put those on My Own Way To Rock. Those two fit well with the feel of My Own Way To Rock, whereas the first album was more syrupy and softer. My Own Way To Rock was a bit more kick-ass album, so they actually fit better on there.
DREAM OF A CHILD (1978):
"Sweet Nothin's" - I had always loved the Brenda Lee song. Unfortunately, the version that's here is not quite as finished as it should be. We were going to have a wailing sax solo and some guitars along with the sax and we never got around to doing that in the original sessions, and that was way back in the '70s. But the vocal was pretty good and the feel was pretty good. It's an old Brenda Lee song from 1959 or 1960. (Ed. note: It was 1960.) I remember seeing her do it on the Ed Sullivan Show when she was about 12 or 13, this tiny little girl with this big voice, sort of like Alannah Myles, a real screamer, this girl. And so I liked the vocal. It's kind of a funky version. It's just a little bit bare. But it's not bad.
"Wild Child" - That was a song I wrote during the big disco era of the late-'70s, when most of the music was just horrendous, I thought personally. It was all just tripe. And yet, for some reason, I wrote that in that era, and it's kind of like a dance tune, but not really. But we heard it again and the vocal was pretty good. It's about this young, would-be groupie girl who goes to a concert and tries to impress the singer and then he flies off and that's the end of that. It's very innocent and naive, but that was a whole other era on Earth, on this planet (laughs). I'm not trying to make these things the hippest of the hip. I just want them to be an honest representation of a certain era in my life and a certain era in music. That's the reason we picked that one.
WOMAN LOVE (1980):
"Vocals On The Boat" - It actually was a flip side of a single at one time, which I liked very much. That's my favourite of all the bonus tracks. It was perfectly finished. I wouldn't have changed anything.
"Daddy's On The Road" - Here again, it's not quite as complete as it should be, but the groove is cool. The music track is almost like The Doors. It's Wurlitzer piano on vibrato and a really vibrato-laced guitar. It's just about a rock 'n' roll family that travels. My friend Ian Gardiner and I wrote that one time, and that would have been on the Heart album, but for some reason, we ran out of room. CDs hadn't come along yet, where you could put 76 minutes on one CD. You were really limited to about 28, 29 minutes on one side of a vinyl album, so we squashed as much as we could and couldn't put everything that we'd recorded on. So those two are probably the two best bonus tracks, "Daddy's On The Road" and "Vocals On The Boat".