New
York-by-way-of-Boston
group the Apple Pie Motherhood Band were among the earlier
psychedelic/heavy rock acts signed by Atlantic Records. Their
self-titled late-'60s debut LP (also reissued on CD by Collectors'
Choice Music) mixed hard rock jamming and shorter, more
pop-folk-rock-influenced songs to, as keyboardist Jef Labes puts it,
produce a sound "like the energy of an East Coast version of what was
up in San Francisco at that time." Those qualities were also found in
their second and final album, Apple
Pie, though with a pronounced tilt toward a heavier hard
rock/R&B direction. In part that was due to a changeover in
personnel that saw one member of the lineup from the first LP leave,
and three new musicians join the group.
The Apple Pie
Motherhood
Band had already gone through a couple of personnel changes by the time
their first album was finished. Original lead singer Anne Tanzey, who
sang lead on their first 45, departed before the LP, and replacement
Marilyn Lundquist only lasted a little while, the guys in the band
ultimately handling the album's lead vocals themselves. Before Apple Pie, rhythm guitarist Joe
Castagno left, as he "basically wasn't very well suited to the road,"
lead guitarist Ted Demos explains. "He didn't like it a bit. He just
decided that he wasn't cut out for that kind of lifestyle at all."
Fortifying the lineup would be new singer Bruce Paine, along with
guitarist Michael Sorafine and harmonica player Adam Myers. Producing
was Tom Dowd, engineer on countless Atlantic Records sessions dating
back to its origins as an R&B/blues label, and recently starting to
assume more duties in the production chair.
"I came in when they had heard about me
playing in the basket houses in Greenwich Village, and they were
looking for a singer," says Paine today. "They came down to the Cafe
Wha? one night and saw me, and we met later. They basically said, 'Hey,
you want to sing rock and roll?' I had been playing folk music up to
that point, and it sounded like a good idea to me. I had just finished
going round and round with RCA Records. Initially I had signed with RCA
for a solo album, and the producer I was working with went independent.
They wouldn't let me use him as an independent; they were giving me
some old guy that was orchestrating stuff. So I was like, 'Okay, I want
out of here.' They came at the right time with the right offer, and it
was an instant love affair. Michael was pretty much doing the same
thing I was doing, playing music around the Village. We had a whole
crew of people that just hung out, and the band was kind of like, 'Come
on along, why don't you join the band for a while? We're going on
tour.' Michael had some really strong songs he had been writing, and
they just said, 'Hey look, c'mon in. Let's make it two lead singers up
front, and we like your material.'"
Adds Bruce, "Now Adam was a trip. We met Adam in
Chicago when we were playing a place called Rush. Ted grabbed me one
night after the show and says, 'Hey man, you gotta come meet this guy.
There's this harp player I met the other night in a dryer.' I said,
'What do you mean, in a dryer?' He said, 'Yeah, he was tumble-drying
himself and playing the harp.' And I said, 'Okay, I gotta check this
out.' So there's some old railroad tracks back up behind Rush Street
[where] we went looking for him. For some reason, Ted knew where to
find him. And I heard this wailing
harp coming down the tracks, just couldn't believe how good it was. So
there's Adam. Adam I think took too much acid. He was out there from
day one, from the moment I met him. We'd slap him on the back, 'play
Adam,' slap him on the back, 'stop Adam,' and that was his
participation. He did one tour with us and hung out in Vermont while we
put together the second album, and of course he's all over it."
Though Jef Labes had written more of the band's
original material than anyone else on the first album, he penned just
one track on Apple Pie,
"Super Music Man." Sorafine wrote two songs, "Orangutang" and
"Grandmother Hooker," and co-wrote another, "He Turned You On," with a
friend from outside the band, Don Henny. Other than Demos's "Gypsy,"
the rest of the record was devoted to R&B covers, including Willie
Dixon's classic "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (originally
popularized by Muddy Waters), Chuck Berry's "Brown Eyed Handsome Man,"
and the Temptations' "Get Ready." As Labes observes, "By the time we
added vocal power with our new personnel, they brought with them lots
of tunes, especially Michael, who years later and at the time, was a
well-liked collaborator of mine. Consequently my contribution was much
less on the second album, which was a strange series of sessions, and
undoubtedly a misuse of the talents of Tom Dowd, the legend."
"He was tearing his hair out," says Paine about
Dowd. "We were a bunch of acid freaks loaded to the gills trying to lay
down tracks, and Tom was in the booth trying to make sense of it. I
think at the same time, he was producing Aretha [Franklin] and Cream,
and of course Cream was their own bundle of fun and games too. So by
the time he got to us at nighttime, he was pretty stressed. It was
amazing that the album got done. We were even more amazed that it got
released. And when they released it, I think Tom left the mixing to one
of his assistants, 'cause the mix wasn't anything close to what we had
hoped or thought it would be."
"I wasn't really happy with the mix," concurs Demos.
"But there were some things on it that reflected what I wanted to do at
the time. I liked 'Gypsy' a lot, even though it never came together the
way I wanted it to, for one reason or another. I brought in the violin
player, who I'd been introduced to by this crazy friend of mine, who
was a player from the New York Philharmonic. That was my sort of rude
awakening that classical musicians don't necessarily improvise all that
well. The results were kind of sketchy, but I liked that tune a lot; I
was pretty happy with that."
Remarks Paine, "I liked 'Get Ready' a lot. The one
thing I'm totally displeased about is we recorded 'Hello Stranger,' the
old Barbara Lewis number [a #3 hit in 1963]. I heard it once on the
radio. Never got a copy of it, never heard it since. They've lost it in
the archives, and it was probably one of the best vocals I did in those
days. I never got to hear the damn thing past one short clip on the
radio."
The Apple Pie Motherhood Band, however, would not be
together for long after Apple Pie
came out, in part because of problems surrounding its release. "By the
time this album was ready for release, [manager Marvin] Lagunoff had
gone to war with us for moving to Vermont, settling on a farm, and
booking our own dates at local colleges," says Labes. "Therefore, under
his direction, the company held back shipment of the second Apple Pie
album." In addition, Jef reveals, "Meanwhile, Ahmed Ertegun at Atlantic
had the idea to do an album with a trio of amazing rock
guitarists. He chose for this project Eric Clapton, Mike
Bloomfield, and Ted Demos. Unfortunately for Ted, this idea got lost
along the way."
Paine thinks the band must have broken up by the
summer of 1969, considering his memory of the following incident: "I
was walking down Bleecker Street [in Greenwich Village], and I saw a
Volkswagen van with California plates on it. I walked up to the guy and
asked him when he was heading to California. He said, 'Well, I'm going
to San Francisco in an hour.' And I said, 'Wait a minute, I gotta go
back to my hotel. Can I ride with you?' I think by June, I was in the
San Francisco production of Hair."
Demos and Paine are still playing music together
today, and even living in the same neighborhood, Paine working on a
book titled Rock'n'roll Chronicles,
aka Almost Conscious. Drummer Jack Bruno has toured and recorded
extensively with Tina Turner and Joe Cocker, and Labes went on to play
on several albums by Van Morrison in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as
some of Bonnie Raitt's 1970s LPs. As for the Apple Pie Motherhood
Band's legacy, Labes summarizes it this way: "We did in many ways
embody the spirit and feeling of the movement for change of that period
of drug enhancement, sexual freedom, and the politics of peace." --
Richie Unterberger
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