25 or 6 to 4

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on Vince Neil's take on "25 or 6 to 4," and if you grew up with the brass-band original rattling the dash of a Chevelle, this one is going to make you sit up a little straighter. Neil cut it as a Japanese bonus track on his 1995 solo album Carved in Stone, Warner Bros. catalog WPCR-239, clocking in around four minutes and thirty-six seconds. It never rode the American pressing. Collectors who hunted the obi-strip edition got two extras the rest of the world missed: an Iggy Pop cover, "Lust for Life," and this Chicago cover parked at the end of the disc. The band behind him was the same crew that made the rest of that record, Brent Woods on guitar out of Wildside, Robbie Crane on bass before he settled in with Ratt, and Vikki Foxx on the drums, the Enuff Z'Nuff hitter. The Dust Brothers shared the production chair with Neil himself. Folks who own both versions of the record still brag about it. One listener who grabbed the Japanese copy called the guitar work unbelievable, and the comments that have piled up around the track over the years tend to land in the same place: it is not a carbon copy, and that is the point.

The song Neil is covering belongs to Robert Lamm of Chicago, written for the band's second album and sent out as a single in June 1970. It climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100. Lamm has told the story plain enough that the mystery ought to be dead, and yet the title still fools people. He was up in a rented place in the Hollywood Hills, the band working off-nights as house band at the Whisky a Go Go down on the Strip, and he could not sleep. There was a piano in the back room and a grandmother clock on the wall he could barely read. The hands sat somewhere around twenty-five or twenty-six minutes before four. He jotted down exactly what he was doing, sitting up, searching for something to say, waiting on the break of day, looking out over the lights on the tall buildings. Trombonist James Pankow later put it in one line: it is a song about writing a song. Lamm figured he would swap the placeholder lines out. He never did. Because of that odd phrasing, listeners spent years insisting it was a drug code or somebody's name in cipher. It was a clock.

Lamm built the riff on a twelve-string that was missing its two low E strings, ten strings doing the work of twelve, and the band first ran through it at the Whisky. Peter Cetera sang the lead, and the session has its own hard story. On May 20, 1969, Cetera got jumped at a Dodger Stadium ballgame and had his jaw wired shut. Producer James William Guercio and trumpet man Lee Loughnane have both recalled that Cetera tracked the vocal with that wire still in. Terry Kath's guitar solo is the part guitar players still argue over, that long descending run that feels like the whole city tilting. Neil's version trades the horns for a harder backline and lets Woods stretch the solo into something with a little wah on the tail. It is the same chord climb, just wearing leather instead of a sport coat.

That is a long way from where Vincent Neil Wharton started. He was born February 8, 1961, in Hollywood, to Shirley Ortiz and Clois "Odie" Wharton, Mexican ancestry on his mother's side and Native American ancestry on his father's. The family moved around the Los Angeles basin, through Inglewood and Watts, before settling in Glendora. He went to Sunflower Intermediate and then Royal Oak High School in Covina, which is where he met a drummer named Tommy Lee. School was never the main event. He played basketball, baseball, football, and he surfed and wrestled, but by fourteen or fifteen he was singing in buddy bands and school shows. Rock Candy, a club band working the Hollywood circuit, took him on when he was about seventeen. He has said he cared more about the music and the life around it than about class, and the school eventually expelled him over fighting and drugs. For a stretch he was sleeping in Tommy Lee's van after things got too hot at home.

The Crüe came together without him at first. On January 17, 1981, Lee and bassist Nikki Sixx started rehearsing with guitarist Greg Leon. Leon stepped out. Mick Mars caught Neil with Rock Candy in a Hollywood club and told the other two to go get him. Lee already knew the voice from high school and figured the look would fit. Neil turned them down. He liked where he was. Then the rest of Rock Candy started drifting into side projects, and the second time Lee asked, Neil said yes. He joined on April 1, 1981, barely twenty years old, and the classic four was set: Neil, Sixx, Lee, Mars. They cut Too Fast for Love that same year and sold it out of the trunk. Shout at the Devil in 1983 blew the doors open, and the run that followed, Theatre of Pain, Girls, Girls, Girls, and the chart-topping Dr. Feelgood, turned them into the band your parents warned you about and your friends would not shut up about. He married Beth Lynn that first year with the band, and their daughter Elizabeth came along in 1983.

The split in February 1992 is still told two ways. The band put out a statement saying his racing hobby had become the priority. Neil went on Dennis Miller's show and said the meeting blindsided him. They had been rehearsing a follow-up to Dr. Feelgood and, in his telling, the songs were leaning blues. He was not a blues singer, and he thought a blues record would lose the people who had stuck with them. He said he would have stayed if they had let him. Warner Bros. gave him a solo deal, partly because he did not want to share Elektra with the guys who had just shown him the door. The first calling card was "You're Invited (But Your Friend Can't Come)," cut for the Encino Man soundtrack with Jack Blades and Tommy Shaw. Exposed arrived in 1993. Carved in Stone followed on September 12, 1995, a harder, stranger record than the debut, and the Japanese edition is where "25 or 6 to 4" lives. After the tour he walked back into Mötley Crüe in January 1997. The cover sits in a funny spot in that timeline, a Sunset Strip singer taking a swing at a song written a few blocks up the hill from the Whisky, by a band that had worked that same room in 1969.

You can chase the man himself through the pages he actually keeps. His Facebook home is Vince Neil, the Instagram feed is @thevinceneil, and the X account, the one that has been posting since 2010 under the line about rocking the world one city at a time, is Vince Neil on X. Fans comparing set lists and old solo cuts gather in the Facebook group All In The Name Of...Vince. The Japanese track listing, bonus cuts and all, is written up on the Carved in Stone page and on the Discogs entry for the Japanese CD. Spin it loud, Zoo Freaks, and if the brass-band version is still the one in your head, let this one argue with it for four and a half minutes. The Crew will be right here on THE ZOO when the next deep cut comes up.