David Spradley (ne Lee Seung Chang) wrote the music of "Atomic Dog", perhaps one of the most timeless songs ever. His notes on the recording:
“I did the (first) session on January 25th, 1982. I put down the very first track...(using) the Man in the Box [which] was our nickname for a drum machine that would essentially be our click track, ’cause it was more fun to play to some kind of beat than to just a metronome. I told the engineer, Mike Iacopelli, ‘Let’s lay six minutes of this down on the 2" tapes, ’cause back then we used tape. You’d get 24 tracks. We listened to it and said, ‘Yeah, it sounds good,’ and Ted (Currier) says, ‘Hey, why don’t you try putting the tape up?’ I said, ‘Are you crazy, man? Then it’ll be backwards.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah yeah. That’s the thing, man, backwards is the thing.’ And, as soon as we did it, we knew. We knew we had something special.”Shider sang co-lead and arranged the vocals. “Back then I was just the guy that played the keyboards, that did the tracks in the studio and I was very shy,” Spradley said. “But this particular song, Garry says, ‘Come on up, Dave, and sing this with us.’ And I got up there and felt it so much, he said, ‘Hey, man. You hogging the mic, man. You need to back up a little bit…I’m trying to get a blend here.’ On the final recordings, he was exactly correct. I am too loud. But I think Garry, being the genius he was, he could feel my angst in the song so well [and] he wanted that. His vocal arrangement on the song is a masterpiece.”
Spradley also created the song’s two keyboard basslines, an “A-bassline” and “beat bassline,” using Prophet 5 and Minimoog synthesizers. He recalls that Clinton arrived at the studio later, sometime around midnight. “Ted (Currier) told George (earlier) to write lyrics about an atomic dog. And George is a genius. ‘Why must I feel like that?/Why must I chase the cat?/Life on all fours/ When you’re out there walkin’ the street/Makes you compete/Nothin’ but the dog in me.’ Those are universal lines.”
“When (George) got there, he was not, let’s say, sober. He was stoned...We all did that,” Spradley says. “He started going off (with his lyrics), and Garry and I are looking at each other going, ‘We’ll just let him go.’ He’s singing, even though he was talking. But I think what he was doing was recompiling all those lyrical ideas that he’d been digesting in his mind. We got two nice tracks out of him. Two complete takes.”
Various sessions and overdubs were added later. Drum takes from Dennis Chambers and Gary “Mudbone” Cooper were both utilized. Drummer Ron Wright played a percussion part created by Spradley on the Minimoog. Vocalists added their parts, under Shider’s perfectionist eye. They included Jessica Cleaves, Lige Curry, Ray Davis, Mallia Franklin, Shirley Hayden, Sheila Horne, Jeannette McGruder and more. “One of the most exciting sessions was the panting and Mallia is the one that started that,” Spradley said. “She started panting and Garry said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ And we all started panting. We got so dry mouthed it was crazy. Stop the tape. Nobody had any moisture left! That was fun. And we also laid some claps on that night because we always did live hand claps, which is [recording engineer] Jim Vitti’s signature sound.”
“I think Bernie (Worrell, keyboardist) probably did the last overdub on the track,” Spradley adds. “He did the beautiful synthesizer part that sort of leads in. I play my little line, he plays his little line and then we both go off into it. It’s beautiful.”
The final mix was completed at United Sound by Jim Vitti, in a mixing session that, he tells me, he did solo “from 6 PM to 4 AM.” “Atomic Dog,” Vitti says, “resurrected George’s career" and with that, the P-Funk empire was reborn.
― imperial frfr (Steve Shasta), Sunday, 17 August 2025 21:30 (five days ago)