To me, “Steppin’ Stone” is the prototypical “garage band” (two words, lower-case) song. If you were ever in a rock & roll band and didn’t play this at least once, I question your sensibilities. It’s been recorded by Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Monkees, the Sex Pistols, and many others.
The song, written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, is mostly comprised of a simple progression of four major chords. The Monkees’ version, which my version attempts to emulate, checks a lot of boxes that make a little ’60s rocker a classic: A driving rhythm consisting of drums, bass, and an electric guitar pounding out those fat majors; some perfectly placed accents of tambourine and hand claps; defiant and self-empowering lyrics (sung flawlessly by Micky Dolenz, the only band member to appear on the original); a nice set of harmonies during the chorus; a double-time fade; and a groovy and instantly recognizable organ riff courtesy of a Vox Continental. Boyce and Hart not only wrote it, but they also sang backup and provided some of the musical accompaniment on the Monkees’ version.
Once again, for my recording, I tapped out the drum tracks in GarageBand. I added live tambourine and hand claps, then layered on the bass, a couple of guitar tracks, the organ tracks, then the backing and lead vocals. My version is unintentionally a bit slower than the version I was trying to cover.
I completed the backing tracks shortly after I finished recording “Fire”, but I was really unhappy with how it was coming together. It wasn’t until after I learned a bit more about mixing and mastering on the iPad that I figured out the main problems and was able to address them. The vocals are a bit out of my range in a few spots, but I’m not displeased with the results overall.
The keyboard I own is a Roland RD-88 (check out my Gear page). It has 88 weighted keys, meaning they are meant to emulate the feel of real piano keys striking actual piano strings, which of course they are not. This is great if you are a piano player and are used to that feel and are trying to play a piano piece on an electric keyboard. This is not great if you are trying to reproduce an organ part. Keys on a real organ are not weighted, thus allowing one to do things physically with an organ keyboard that one cannot (easily) do on a piano keyboard, like squabbling. None of those things were needed for this track. I just wanted to use the word “squabbling.” Interestingly, to date, I have used my Roland RD-88 more for organ tracks than piano tracks.
The RD-88 has several sound banks (piano, brass, strings, etc.) and many unique organ sounds. All of the preset sounds were assigned names by someone with a sense of humor. Each name is meant to provide a hint as to what sound the preset attempts to emulate, but I guess Roland was forbidden from using actual song titles. For this recording, I used the organ preset named “96 Years”, which is clearly a reference to the song “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians, which famously features — you guessed it — a Vox Continental. “96 Beers” would have been funnier.
Back in the ’80s, my band, The Figs, which I will write more about someday, performed this song at every gig we had during our 3-year run, despite not having a keyboard player. Sometimes I would sing lead, sometimes the lead vocals were handled by our bass player, Joe. Our arrangement differed from the Monkees’ version in that we played it much faster, we included a third verse that was a repeat the first, and we skipped the double-time section at the end.
One last note on that fade-out section. I always thought the backing vocals were repeating “Not your steppin’ stone, not your steppin’ stone”, but when I listened more closely prior to recording my version, they sounded more like “Step, step, steppin’ stone; step, step, steppin’ stone.” The lead vocals over that are clearly repeating “Not your steppin’ stone” and “I’m not your steppin’ stone”, and maybe that’s what makes it hard (for me) to discern the backing vocals. I went with “Step, step …”. Discuss.