Another very old jazz-centric song from the vault. Haven't played it live since the early '70s, right after I wrote it. It's about the loss of my childhood and the breakup of my nuclear family in the unforgiving Florida sun after my father bailed on Albany and bought a bar and marina on the Gulf of Mexico, giving in to a midlife urge to live out his nagging Hemingway fantasy. Fresh out of high school and committed to avoiding college, I helped the family move down to join him in his dissolution and immediately left the nest, subsisting for the summer with some friends and homeless freeloaders in a nasty, bug-infested Clearwater slum apartment before moving back north forever.

Clearwater

Funky R&B; Blues; Blues Rock. While not exactly autobiographical of my current state as an old but still somewhat viable male of the species, this tune retains a message relevant to the lives of all the poor testosterone-afflicted young bucks out there.

In My Prime

A reluctant non-believer's anthem
Recorded by Biff Thuringer at Arabellum Studios. Featuring:
Biff Thuringer on vocals, guitar and synths
Jack Maeby on keys
Bernie Mulleda on guitar
Rick Palley on bass
Peter Booras on drums
Bobby (Rabbi of Soul) Golderman on harmonica
The Singin', Swingin' Pratt Sisters

Please Jesus

A song about the good old days of visiting an X-rated movie theater. Before the Internet made watching porn a “safe, anonymous enterprise,” in which the only things to worry about are … well, the government, the browser’s privacy and security settings, and the sneaky little camera and microphone in your laptop or cell phone, recording what you’re doing there in the dark.

X movies.wav

An ode to a bygone age of fuzak -- of the sort that used to be featured in cheesy spy films. The person who did this is not actually Biff Thuringer. It's yet another alter-ego, the unrepentant, over-the-top New Age Jazz Fusion fabulist Stephon DeBris. Enjoy us as we turn up the delay to unimagined heights. 

Christmas Without Elvis

I wrote this song -- jazz interlude and all -- when I was 18 years old, wandering the northeastern U.S. in a semi-permanent dream state, playing piano in church coffee houses and crappy college dorm parties. It concerns aging, death and the exceedingly remote possibility of an afterlife. Whether it rings true or not remains to be seen, but now that I'm a bit closer to the end, I still hope for the best, and it makes me feel good to shove it out there.  

Live Forever

American Dream

A love song to play to a woman who is on the verge of falling for you. Good luck.

Stay A Little Longer Woman

Something to capture the mood of those of my friends and associates who believe our nation has been captured by the forces of Mordor.

Song of Doom

There are ideas, obsessions and entities that bring out the worst in a man. Some of them are women.

Devil In Me

A young man entering the maw of modern adulthood has few options that don't make his half-formed, unprepared guts twist into pretzels of revulsion and despair. It's no wonder he's prey to the temptation of selling his soul for a taste of power ... and why there's a rising tide of evil in the world.

Devil's Cry

A ditty about an espionage career gone sour.

Vietnam

A song about dealing with the incomprehensible suicide of a loved one..

To Keep On Living

This is what passes for a love song in the mind of Biff Thuringer.

What Did I Do

Something that wouldn't be out of place as a Grand Theft Auto soundtrack. It's how I felt about one very fast and dangerous car in particular.

Automobile

If you find him, let him into your heart.

The Madman

This is how I imagine it must feel to be done wrong. Historically, I'm the one who's been doing most of the wronging, but it's just a song ...

Crawl To Me

Wrote this one as an exercise at the dawn of the Disco era. Finished it as an ironic ditty about a loose cannon hitting on unsuspecting women in a cheesy dance club.


Dance 'Til I Die

Yes, I'm a white man living high on the hog, enjoying the "freedom" to buy cheap gas, genetically modified food, toxic cleaning products and shrink-wrapped electronics, thanks to the machinations of the most powerful nation that ever dominated the planet. But really, when you stop to think about it, THAT's the problem ....

White Man's World

Yes, something like this really happened, a long time ago. Things are better now.

Running Out

Yes, I have a sentimental side. This is one I originally recorded in the 1970s. That version had Tony Lindsay (the guy who sang on Santana's big Grammy-winning records) doing the lead vocal. He may or may not have used it to get the gig. Anyway, I can't sing like that so for this version I got in touch with my inner Henry Mancini and concocted a jazzy group-sing right out of a silly Pink Panther love scene.

Survivors of the Storm

A radically different, Milo Z-ized version of this song was on our 1994 Mercury album, Basic Need to Howl. Tom Jones, still young enough to get away with singing it (unlike me at this late juncture) apparently had designs on the song but was thwarted by its inclusion on the Milo Z record. This version is closer to how I had originally imagined it. Please excuse the guitar craziness. I was in a mood.

I Know You Want Me

At first listen this song seems to be a subversive, semi-atheistic misappropriation of the Gospel genre. In fact, it's a direct, sincere appeal to Jesus to get back here and do something about this festering mess we're in. If he actually exists, is listening and is indeed the son of God, that would be the best-case scenario. If not, no one can say I didn't try. Feel free to pass this tune around and play it often. You never know ...

Please, Jesus (Be Real)

An anthem designed to stir the soul of any red-blooded American angry that our nation has fallen under the control of mobsters who are posing as ideologues in order to manipulate us into letting them suck America dry. Words and music copyright 2013 by Steve Hopkins. Performance by Biff Thuringer.

To America

A jazz fusion ditty I wrote in the early 1970s after a particularly vivid dream. Emerging technology has finally made it possible to record it without having to teach people all the weird parts. The song is somewhat difficult and esoteric and any session musicians able to cut it would be pretty expensive. It's not going to break any popularity records, but I feel it should be out there. Was Jesus a space alien? Am I one, for that matter? Are you? According to this odd little song, anything is possible.

Moonman

I performed this song just once with a live band, in NYC in 1982, when it was apparently way ahead of its time. I should probably start playing it again, as, ironically, my mind has not in the intervening 38 years successfully achieved anything approaching "peace." Maybe I was just saving it for a pandemic ...

Peace Of Mind

Steve Hopkins is a journalist, editor and magazine publisher who has led a double life. Biff Thuringer is his alter-ego, an alias that was created in the 1980s when he was a systems analyst for the state tax department, to help him avoid paying taxes while moonlighting as a singer/musician. During the 1990s Hopkins, temporarily shedding the Biff persona, quit government work and joined the NYC funk band Milo Z, which toured around the U.S. with the Neville Brothers, The Meters, and Al Green. The band got a record deal with Mercury/Polygram and did all right until their guy at the label, Ed Eckstyne, got canned. They were friends with the Spin Doctors, Blues Traveler, Joan Osborne, God Street Wine, and others who had come up out of the Nightingale scene on Second Avenue in the Lower East Side. It was a heady time, rubbing shoulders with movie stars, mobsters and music moguls. 
Success turned out, as most things do, to be a double-edged sword, especially the more popular the band got. As exciting as things were on the surface, it was a strange, lonely and not very rewarding time, when one wasn't onstage beating off the demons. Milo really, really wanted to be the next Michael Jackson and was working hard on his inner diva. Steve wasn't into living in a fantasy bubble, surrounded by sycophants. The road totally sucked and he was relieved when the band broke up. He's been avoiding the road ever since, but is starting to get over it. 
Elsewhere in his career as a sideman, Hopkins played with the late Nick Brignola, according to Downbeat the best baritone sax player ever.He was in a great disco funk band, Natural Essence, with the unbelievable jazz bassist Santi Wilson Debriano. He played with Tony Lindsay, Grammy-winning lead singer for Santana, with renowned Polish jazz violinist Michal Urbaniak, and with doo-wop legends The Jive Five, to crowds of over 200,000.
Hopkins also experienced a very short and very successful (if anonymous) career as a contract dance music producer. In 1995 he was paid $400 to work on a track for the producer working with a Europop group called No Mercy. With a sampled drum track and swatches of samples of the singers that had been recorded in France and linked to the keys of a synthesizer, he had to figure out the changes, construct the song and make up/record keyboard and bass parts. The song was called "Where Do You Go," and turned out to be a huge dance hit in the U.S. and U.K. Some of that feel has been creeping into his music lately, after listening to Nile Rodgers talk about it. 
Most of Steve/Biff's career has been playing solo in clubs, as a singing piano and/or guitar player turning down requests for Billy Joel songs from tables full of nuns and drunk sailors. He's not doing that any more.  Ever. Just so we're clear.  
Biff Thuringer is now in full effect. He's throwing all his shit out on the internet in one yearlong blast, doing things quick and dirty using his iPhone, garageband, the old Korg M1 from the Milo Z days and a Mexican Strat with a crappy digital effects box. Right now he plays all the parts, like Trent Reznor used to. He sings right into the phone. Fuck it. Biff resolutely refuses to choose a genre, but tends to work in jazz, funk, soul, r&b and rock. He'll start a band later, and have big parties in a barn like Levon Helm did, making the world come to him and hand him awards and money. The band is going to have to be really, really good, and everybody's going to have to sing, like in Sly and the Family Stone. That's the dream, anyway.

Biff Thuringer

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