Smooth Rock Slide - Inside the Rock Slide
A lot of people have inquired about the true meaning behind our single “(Smooth) Rock Slide” in the past months. I don’t normally divulge a song’s inner meaning as I tend to write lyrics metaphorically and each song can contain as little as two meanings or as many as a dozen meanings within the lyrics. But SRS is a little bit different as it is more of a head-on lyrical content type of song.
While the title itself was actually contrived from a rather morbid news headline/article I read sometime last year (with the exception of “Smooth” in the title or subject of the news article), the actual base of the song is all about how I like to stick to my guns and maintain a true rock and roll/blues based musical foundation.
During the early stages of the song, I had the title and riff which I had played around with for about six months. But I could not seem to come up with a decent subject for the lyrics. That is until our drummer (at the time, as he is no longer with Full Caliber) came to me one day and said how he wanted to put some modern cover songs in our set… and then it hit me, there was the perfect subject for this song. So I completely ignored his suggestion as performing modern cover songs is not what Full Caliber is about anyway, and went to work writing Smooth Rock Slide.
And if you listen to the first verse, the whole message is right there to hit you between the eyes, hopefully without any misconceptions at all: “I hold my ground, with all I’ve got, I don’t like modern mixed with my rock” - and the rest is pretty self explanatory.
I recorded the drums and gave a Steve Gadd style performance and the bass line has a rich blues/jazz feel while the rest is rock and roll all the way.
Of course if you want to download the song and hear it for yourself, just click the CD photo above to get it directly from Amazon.com.
Jake-
