Corey Feldman “Celebrates Nu-Mix of “Feeling Funky”, Hope for the Homeless, The Summer of Love” and an NFT Extravaganza”
Celebrated actor, producer and recording superstar Corey Feldman has joyously released the nu-mix of “Feeling Funky” via CosmicWire/Blazar for his 5.0 Birthday jubilation…..
Although many recognize Feldman for his movies including: “Stand By Me”, “The Goonies”, The Lost Boys”, “License to Drive”, “Dream a Little Dream”, and television appearances on hit shows like “The Bad News Bears”, “How to Eat Like a Child”, “Cheers”, “The Two Coreys”, and an endless barrage of both, Corey has been recording music for over 25 years.
Corey’s music is a colorful texture of electro pop and fire-works, a culmination of 30 years of doing music that is exciting enough to thrill the collective effervescence and make them stand up and cheer. While being conceptual, meaningful, and captivating, it’s also fun, orgasmic, and convincing.
I spoke to Corey about “how it all began”, his plans for “The Summer of Love”, and his digital art and memorabilia and brand new NFT store, via Cosmic Wire, a holistic media empire and record label masterminded by Jerad Finck, also known as Blazar. Corey Feldman is most definitely the man with Kaleidoscope eyes who is looking to make the planet a better place…..
Cosmic Wire “specializes in protecting and monetizing the world’s most valuable IP, traversing the now trillion-dollar blockchain industry since its 300% market increase from 2019-2020. Understanding the potential of NFTs to enable artists to sell and own their work directly, Cosmic Wire is focused on fair agreements, direct rewards, and downstream residuals and payments via their proprietary Licensing and Publishing model.”
As well as being an actor, recording artist and producer, you are also an advocate most recently regarding homeless children?
It’s really bad. Homelessness is at an all-time high, there are encampments everywhere. You can’t just walk down the street because you have to go around homeless encampments….it’s unreal. It’s been this way since Trump became President and God-willing we will get out the other side. We’re trying to do something to make a difference. We’re trying to plan a benefit concert for homeless children to raise money for food and shelter and all of that kind of stuff. That’s one of our big plans we have for the future which is in the works for later this year. Basically were calling it “The Summer of Love Celebration” and we are celebrating 50 years of entertainment both in film and music. So, for the music side what I wanted to do his ban together all of the different artists that have all appeared on my albums throughout the years, because I have been very fortunate to have worked with this great list of amazing artists. We are trying to get everybody together on one stage for one night, kind of like Ringo does. We bring them all up and let them do their own songs and if we do it in a big venue we can raise a ton of money and make everyone bring a can of food, maybe a blanket or something, and give as much money to the homeless as possible. So that’s the big picture concept.
So Happy Birthday and congratulations on the release of your remix “Feeling Funky.”
Ah…the remix….
Honestly, I of course knew you as an actor but it wasn’t until recently that I found out you were also a sensational recording artist…
Really, that’s crazy…well it’s been a slow burn. I became an overnight rock star after 30 years. It’s definitely a unique story. Nobody else could ever say that they waited until they turn 50 to get their first record deal. Literally that’s pretty much what it is as I have done the music by myself, I published music by myself, created my own record label, and pushed all of these records out. We achieved our first top 40 billboard hit, and then our first Top 20 hit all with my own independent label. Then Jerad Finck comes along and says, “do you want some help?” Well…there’s an idea. So, it’s invigorating and refreshing to have a team of people help me. The plans laid out before Jerad came along to put it in this box set and to do a new album and we’d already done the lion’s share of the work. It’s such a massive project because we started with taking my old 2-inch master tapes from 1993 which were the original album, and basically cleaning up the old tape. It’s quite a process to try and clean 30-year old tapes, inch by inch and chemically treat them, doing all that stuff before we could even burn them and then you had to burn them in the oven. You have to bake them and get all of the magnets to connect and then you get one shot to run them through a digital transfer. So, all of that was actually done by Don Dokken of all people. That was kind of a crazy story in itself. I don’t know if you are aware of who he but Don Dokken is a legendary rock star of the 80s. When I was a kid and going to school all of the kids had bumper stickers on their cars that said “Rockin with Dokken.” So he’s a rock ‘n’ roll legacy kind of guy who is kind of like a heavy metal, Rock Star dude and he and I became friends. I told him that I had all these tapes and I didn’t know what to do with them and he said “man you bake them in the oven before it’s too late, but it’s a very expensive and timely process.” So that’s where it all started. Once we started digging into the tapes what we found was that there was all this other material that had never been released. Once we started down that road, I started reaching out to all the other contacts to see if they happen to have saved any of the old recordings we did. Through it all we manage to accumulate 50 songs.
Wow…That’s a lot.
It was quite a collection. Basically, it’s broken down into several discs and one is the original album which only had nine songs. It was a very small album as my first album, and it was loosely thrown together and it wasn’t really well thought out. It was kind of whatever I had available and ready to go when I got an offer from a friend of mine who was a film producer and was going to start his own label. So, the original album “Love Left” was only 1000 copies. When we made those thousand copies back in 1993, I was actually handing them out to people do use as coasters, just to get people to even listen. In the beginning it was a very hard sell but then we did a first tour and the tours were sold out. We did great whenever we did live shows. That was the easy part. But without a record label you can’t get your stuff in the stores, you can’t get your stuff heard on the radio and you can’t get to the charts and you can’t get any of the perks. So it’s very difficult, but I thought “look I’m going to find a way because all that matters to me is making music. “It doesn’t matter what the results are because I’m not in it to make a ton of money and I’m not in it to be a successful business entrepreneur. I’m in it because I love creating music and I love the art form. So I continued with it spending my own money for 30 years and after that first album which was a tremendous flop, other than the fact that it had a couple of songs in the movie soundtracks….. Going back to the beginning when that first album flopped I decided screw this, I’ll make my Pop music for my films and then I’ll go create art. My music is not going to get played on the radio anyway then at least I want to make something cool and artistic. So, with that I created a band which is called “Truth Movement” and the band became my side project where I could do all the artsy stuff and I would write my pop stuff for my solo career.
So we put out an album with that and it created a lot of action because the reviews that came in were really good. I thought at least people were starting to listen. Then we did a tour with that and again it was pretty successful, but the key was this band was a classic rock band that was kind of in a different era because it was a 60s/70s kind of rock sound. I was releasing it in the late 90s. With that it basically became the turning point. The band was mostly influenced by Pink Floyd. It was almost a tribute to Pink Floyd, but we didn’t copy their music, it was all original music. I contacted some of the artists that played with Pink Floyd to see what they thought. I was lucky because they liked it and I was able to bring them on board. I was very fortunate to get Jon Carin who produces and cowrites for Pink Floyd and has been with them for 30 years. He came in and co-wrote and produced several of the songs on the next album. Then we got Scott Page who was their long-time saxophone player. So, Scott and I teamed up about 15 years ago and he started playing shows with “Troop Movement” and then we got artist Storm Thorgerson who did all that classic artwork for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Genesis to do our art. He actually did all our concept art for our last album and which ended up to be the last concept album he ever did. That was first of all the huge honor because he was a legend and he was dying of cancer, but I didn’t know it. He put out his last book about art and included this whole section about “Truth Movement” and how he met me and how the whole thing came about. So, for my next solo album it was a lot easier for people to jump on board.
So, you are a successful actor with a huge career. What spawned your desire to become a rock star?
A lot of people don’t realize this but I started out singing. I started as a singer. People have to think about this logically for a minute….I was three years old and how does a three year old get jobs? They can’t read so they can’t memorize lines. They can’t do the very best delivery of the script because they can’t even read the script. So therefore, the only lines that a child ever does is when their parents literally read it back to them and tell them what to say. The kids aren’t really memorizing this, their parents are reading it back to them. So, when you’re doing auditions you just want to come in and charm the casting people. It was my mother and father who decided that I would get the most jobs if I came in and sang these cute little songs a-cappella. My father was a musician and many times has been mistakenly confused with another guy with the same name. There is a guy named Bob Feldman who wrote or cowrote the song “I Want Candy” who is also in another classic rock band from that era….But my father was in the “Strawberry Alarm Clock” for a brief period of time. My father was a lead singer and bass player of his own band which was a cover band and he performed at all the amusement parks. I would go down and watch him and I would be in the rehearsal rooms when I was like three and four years old crawling around the drum kit with the other kids of the musicians in the band. I was around that all of my life. Then my sister who is seven years old, which would’ve made me four years old got a part on the Mickey Mouse Club as one of the Mouseketeers. She was now singing and dancing on stage and doing these big performances. So, when you’re looking at your sister performing live on stage with thousands of people screaming and you’re watching your dad on stage the thousands of screaming fans I think there is an inevitability that kind of just comes along with it. It’s like OK you’re next.
So, the music thing started very early on and one of my first real jobs aside from commercials was actually an after school special with Dick Van Dyke. It was a musical called “How to Eat Like A Child.” It was Dick Van Dyke and a bunch of kids and we all had to be triple threats. We had to be able to sing, dance, and act. So that was literally one of my very first jobs. People don’t realize that I got my initial auditions by singing and my first job was a musical, and again being around the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle I think it was only a matter of time until I started actually pursuing it. With that said my mom tried to put me in singing lessons, tap lessons, piano lessons, and I hated it. I didn’t want any part of it. She always told me I was uncoordinated. I couldn’t play sports, so that was it I was done. The interesting thing is that I never got away from the music. My grandmother had a standard piano and I would play it even though I didn’t know what I was playing but I was always making noise. Then at 11 years old I discovered Michael Jackson watching the “Motown 25 Special.” Whatever it was sparked something inside of me, the elegance of the performance, the composition of the way he moved on stage, whatever it was it inspired and transfixed me and had such a profound effect that from that moment on all I could see was myself on stage performing, and singing and dancing.
I literally started to copy his moves in the mirror and thinking that I could sing and dance like that because this was easy. The kids in the playground were watching me and saying hey dude you were really good. Then I would start going to Hollywood parties and they would put on “Billie Jean”, and they would make little circle around me and make me dance. And that was adults all around. They were all clapping and watching me dance like a little monkey. That kind of developed into here I am now at 12 years old at the Rose Bowl doing a charity benefit concert where they brought me out in front of 40,000 people to lip-synch “Billie Jean.” At that point I thought obviously I was meant to do this, but I didn’t think I could make a career out of lip-synching somebody else’s music. Therefore I decided that I was going to have to teach myself how to write and I would have to teach myself how to sing properly and how to dance properly and from that moment on I literally spent probably 10 hours a day, everyday.
I was on a set in my father’s apartment doing fake concerts to nobody. I was writing material, performing and putting on entire stage productions with nobody watching, but with me imagining a whole audience they are cheering and screaming. I did a lot of that. A lot of imagination. Even doing things like karaoke recordings, there was a place in Westwood where all the little kids would go because it was so innovative. They would do little cassette recordings of people doing karaoke. I would go down there with Corey Haim or Ricky Schroeder or whoever my little friends were at the time. All of us would go down to these little recording booths and record demos. I would take all those demos home and then I would play them for my father and asked him what sounded OK, and what works for my voice and what didn’t. Eventually I found one that he thought was pretty cool. Then I had a direction. I literally just thought about myself that way. So anyway, it’s always a fun time, I love music, I love creating it so for this project I decided that when we started I would do the remix and the remaster of the 25th anniversary of my first album because now people know those songs. We have been performing them live for 25 years, so let’s go back and do a remix and a remaster like so many people do. The concept was that maybe we would put two or three new songs on there to make it enticing for people. So, we started with that and kept growing and now we’re up to like 13 or 14 songs, so now we have a whole new album. We decided to throw the album into the box set. Then we have all these unreleased album songs so let’s make that another disc. So now we’re up to four discs in this box set and two DVDs because he started digging through some of the video stuff. Then we have this song that I recorded and produced and did a video of when I was 15 years old. The song is called “Runaway” and we were going to sell it to Nickelodeon. It was about his interview of myself that I wasn’t even aware that I had. It was subliminally pretty shocking because it was a 15-year-old kid writing a song called “Runaway” well he’s forecasting “if I don’t get my life together I’m going to end up on the street doing drugs and being used for sex.” At the time I was living in my dad’s apartment, I was wearing all black and I was already surrounded by these pedophiles that was eventually going to use and abuse me and take advantage of me and destroy my life by giving me drugs. So, it was all right there, and I put it all into the script. And we shot the short film and ironically, I even use the two guys that ended up abusing me as the bad guys in the video.
That’s a little crazy.
I made this 15 minute video and we were going to sell it to Nickelodeon but I never edited any of the acting scenes so we have a 3 1/2 minute video but it’s only the music part and all the scripted part that came before is gone. So unfortunately nobody will ever see that but what we did find is the original video and the original song which nobody has ever heard and they will both be in the box set along with other recordings like Alfonzo Rivero and I did the demo of one of my first songs, which ended up in the movie of the week called “15 and Getting Straight.” That was probably the second song I ever wrote, and it ended up on an ABC TV special. Then Alfonzo and I recorded a demo which is really great, but I never released it after making this song several times through the years, and it became one of my most popular songs. It’s a beautiful song about making a difference in the world by actually giving a crap about somebody besides themselves. Then we have a lot of performances that I did back in 1989 from a college I played in Idaho where the kids were screaming like Beatlemania. The crazy thing is the fans of my music a lot of them love “Go For It” or they love “You are Free”, but they don’t know that I’ve been around doing this for 30 years. They know that I am an artist now but they have no idea of how it all started.
Totally That’s so crazy don’t you think?
So if I don’t remind them who I am, I guess nobody well. So I guess I have to kind of educate them again of the whole history. So that’s what it’s about. It’s about excavating and digging through all of this really cool stuff and getting it out of the darkness and bringing it into the light. Telling people hey guess what, i’ve been making music for 30 years, and it’s been out there for 30 years. It didn’t just start out of nowhere and it seems to be very popular, we just never made the top 40. So, I think it will be very exciting for fans to see that this guy is actually doing this for a really long time, and that he takes it very seriously.
Now how did you discover NFTs and what are you planning on doing with them and your collection?
And here’s the best part….. Going to this excavation for the box, finding all these videos that people have never seen, rarities, let’s get it out to the public and turn it into art and give it to them…..So while we are digging for all of this…. Questions were raised, what about all this memorabilia? What about these experiences that I had with the greatest artist in the world? And I happen to be a collector. So, I collected all of the stuff from the experiences I had with the guys from Pink Floyd, my experiences with The Beatles, my experiences with Michael Jackson….so much cool stuff. I thought maybe I need like a big auction. I thought maybe I could do a big auction for my 50th birthday? Or I thought maybe I can give it back to the world so they can enjoy it? Or maybe we could raise some money for charity with it? So that was the concept of it. Then Jerad came into my life through Scott Page. The funny thing is when Jerad and I originally met, the meeting was about NFTs Because he wanted to explain to me what an NFT actually was.
Then during our meeting Scott informed him that I also do music. I played him some stuff and he really liked it and wanted to know why more wasn’t happening with it. I explained that I never had a record label behind me so I did it all on my own. Then before you knew it literally, and I’m not even joking, for two or three days straight Jerad was locked in my studio as he’s building Cosmic Wire during the launch of all this crazy stuff. He was dealing with all of these people while he was locked in my studio for three days listening to nothing but every song I recorded. He said if I let him in, he could help me bring my music to the full realization of where I want them to be. And then we can help market it and do things that you’ve never done as a music artist. I told him that I had never had a label in my life and I wasn’t sure how it worked and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to relinquish all that control, because the second you sign with the label you don’t get to do what you want to do. He explained that Cosmic Wire was totally the opposite. It was more of a holistic approach and you are in charge of your own destiny. We will advise you and tell you what we think is best but it’s ultimately your decision. I thought, that’s different I never heard of a label like that before. We hit it off and through that he explained that Cosmic Wire could deal with all of my stuff and memorabilia. He explained that they could take my stuff and digitize it and turn it into its own unique art form that I would be the licenser of. So that is how we got the idea of building my NFT store through Cosmic Wire, doing stuff that nobody’s ever done before. I would be allowing people the opportunity to share this lifetime of experiences with me because up until now you would literally have to come to my house to see any of this stuff. It would be like going to a museum. You’d have to come and visit. But for the first time I’m going to digitize all of these items and put them up as NFTs. Some of them we will actually be selling the actual item and some we won’t be selling the item but we will make an NFT digital version of it so that people can download and purchase. All I can tell you that because it’s “The Summer of a Love” and because we’re doing this kind of anthology of my film and music career separately we’re going to do two big events. There is going to be an interactive showcase or gallery of NFTs and we’re going to do it from this venue and spend the whole day going through a retrospective of my career. We’re going to go through each of the high points of my career starting with “Bad News Bears”, The TV show I did when I was seven and then “Fox and Hound”, and then “Gremlins” and “Goonies”, and “Stand By Me”, and “Dream A Little Dream”, and “Burbs.” Those are the ones we’re going to concentrate on now. We’re going to show film clips, we’re going to do giveaways, we’re going to sell NFTs, correlated around each particular film. With each of those is going to be secret little things hidden within the NFTs. So, it’s all gonna be really cool and fun to come along for this adventure……
Head over to Corey Feldman’s official website for more updates.
