When Andras Jones, best known as Rick Johnson from A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, performed his “cinematic theme song” Dramarama’s “Anything Anything” at Joe Bob Briggs’ Drive-In Jamboree last October, it set me on a deep dive into the song’s history with the Nightmare franchise.
I know Andras from the convention circuit where he and his co-stars are favorites of the Nightmare fans. About a year ago, I filmed him singing The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have To Do Is Dream” with Ronee Blakeley (from the original A Nightmare On Elm Street).
Jones is currently promoting his new album Recognize, De-escalate & De-code and, for the first time, performing his music at conventions, where he has spent the last several decades meeting and signing photos for Nightmare fans.
As fans of the Nightmare series know, the music is an important character in the films and “Anything Anything” which appears twice in key scenes in The Dream Master is one of the most popular.
Andras says he always has people coming up to him and telling him how much they love that song, which led him to become friends with John Easdale, who wrote it.
“The song is about my first marriage,” says songwriter and lead singer of Dramarama John Easdale. “We were teenagers and we moved downstairs below the rest of the band. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t last long after a fight and visit from her father.”
And that tumultuous relationship is reflected in the story – “I got wasted, she got mad/ Called me names, then, she called her dad/He got crazy and I did too/Wondered what I did to you.”
“Anything, Anything” was released by New Rose Records in France and appeared on their very first album, Cinéma Vérité. A DJ in Los Angeles came across the song, and it quickly took off in the states.
“The phones lit up and the radio station quickly added it to their regular rotation,” recalls Easdale. So much so that it prompted the band to move from New Jersey to California. If your song is going to pop off, there’s no better place than LA.
During this time, Nightmare 4 was in production and director Renny Harlin knew he wanted it in the movie, so he called the band to ask for the green light. “He told me he had a workprint of the movie with the song already made up and wanted us to come see it,” Easdale said.
Harlin’s goal was for the song to further the story and signify the passing of power from Rick to his sister, Alice. Easdale was thrilled as he had already been a lifelong horror fan. “Dracula, Godzilla, The Exorcist – Anything in that genre I ate up with a fork and spoon,” jokes Easdale.
While Easdale has always loved horror, Jones has been a performing songwriter since before The Dream Master, but he never thought his music was something the Nightmare fans would be into.
“I don’t have any tattoos or piercings and my music has more in common with Elvis Costello than Dokken, but ‘Anything Anything’ is actually not that far from what I do musically so covering it, and making it my own, actually feels really organic. I was a little worried John wouldn’t approve.”
“I was fascinated and really flattered by Andras’ reworking of ‘our’ song,” said Easdale. “His acoustic performance strips the song down and really gets to the core of the song’s emotion in a very different way which I thought was extremely powerful.”
Look for Andras’s new album Recognize, De-escalate & De-code, which will be available everywhere on April 19, 2024 and if you see him playing songs at a convention, maybe request “Anything Anything”. In the meantime, here’s the video for his latest single “Olympia’s Secret.”