Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii Exhibit

July 23, 2017 Folkrox 2 Comments

As rock music becomes more entrenched as part of not just popular culture but mainstream history, major exhibitions devoted to iconic artists are becoming more common. Recent years have seen touring exhibitions devoted to the Rolling Stones and David Bowie, and a big one on Pink Floyd is at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum until October 1. I won’t be able to make that unless something unexpected develops. But I did, to my surprise, see a much smaller but worthwhile exhibit on Pink Floyd’s October 1971 performances for the Live at Pompeii movie when I visited Pompeii for the first time in early July.

Poster for the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii movie, early 1970s.

The Live at Pompeii movie is not a universal favorite among rock and film critics, some of whom find it (and the cutaways to brief interviews and scenes of the band in the recording studio) on the pompous side. Pomp is certainly appropriate for a movie made in a site that starts with the letters “Pomp,” though, and you have to admire the chutzpah of a group (and director, Adrian Maben) who somehow commandeered the amphitheater of the legendary excavated city for a concert documentary.

Of most significance, it captures the Floyd performing a good cross-section of material from the late 1960s and early 1970s in an impressively exotic, haunting setting. What’s more, they opted not for the usual concert doc with cuts to rabidly enthusiastic fans, but for a show without an audience — or so they thought (more on that later in this post).

Being a big Pink Floyd fan, I headed straight for the amphitheater to begin my five-hour Pompeii visit. Like many such locales that take on a legendary aura when you see them in memorable movies or pictures, it’s rather more ordinary when you view it in person:

The Pompeii amphitheater where Pink Floyd played in October 1971, as it appears today.

It’s also kind of hard to imagine a concert with an actual audience being staged there now, at least in the traditional amphitheater way, as much of the seating is gone or overgrown:

So that would have been that, except to my surprise, there was a substantial exhibit on Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii performances in the underground passages near the entrance. I hadn’t heard about this at all in the media, and it’s still hard to find out much about it online. I did learn that this was first staged in Pompeii’s town hall during most of July 2015, and then moved to the amphitheater when Floyd guitarist David Gilmour played two shows there in July 2016. I still can’t determine how long the exhibition will run.

Although there weren’t huge numbers of people at the exhibit, the underground space is small enough — maybe a few dozen meters to either sides of the entrance, with just a few feet between the two walls of material — that it’s not always easy to comfortably view and see everything, even when there are just a few dozen people. Also, some of the displays — such as some of the ones showing scenes from the Live at Pompeii movie or playing Pink Floyd recordings — will be familiar to serious Floyd fans. However, there were some off-the-beaten track items and info, which I’ll focus on in this post.

There are quite a few photos, some taken by French cameraman Jacques Boumendil. There are also some stills from Chit Chat with Oysters, a recently rediscovered December 1971 16mm Maben film of the Floyd doing overdubs for the soundtrack at the Europasonar studio in Paris.

Still from Chit Chat with Oysters, finding David Gilmour in a particularly merry mood.

Here’s one of the vintage ads for the film. One of the tests for how rare an image is these days is whether you can find it online or not, and this one passes, as even a search with Google Images fails to unearth it:

Asked what he was thinking as the filming was taking place, drummer Nick Mason supplied these comments for one of the displays:

“Well, I think, we were unaware of just what a good idea it was. I mean, I’d love for any of us to be able to take credit for it, but it was very much an idea that had been sprung by Adrian Maben, who’s the director of the film. That combination of the venue, which was romantic in its own right, and the fact that it was outdoors with the wind blowing and empty meant that we were completely free to re-shoot things. It gave it a live feel without actually having to go through the process of curtailing the show because we had a real audience to please. I thought it was a fantastically successful formula that unfortunately owed nothing to the band’s [laugh[ creativity.”

Nick Mason performing at Pompeii, photographed by Jacques Boumendil.

As it turns out, however, there was an audience — though a very small and unseen one. As Maben explains in one of the displays:

“Live at Pompeii was conceived as an anti-Woodstock film. The amphitheater was supposed to be completely empty except for a handful of technicians, roadies and the French Italian camera crew. But when I returned to Pompeii in 1999 for the [DVD director’s cut] I met a group of adult men in their mid-[forties]. They told me that as teenagers they had skipped school and gate-crashed the amphitheater to watch the Pink Floyd concert. They remained hidden near the open windows on the upper floor of the amphitheater.

“They called themselves ‘ragazzi degli scavi’ because they often visited the archeological site to play in the ruins. I was amazed because I had never seen them or sensed their presence. In 1971, I was convinced that we were alone.”

Teenagers who gate-crashed the Pompeii concert, back then (top) and in recent years (bottom).

As an aside, even though this happened more than 45 years ago, it’s hard to imagine a time when you could gate-crash a concert filming by a major band in this fashion. Pink Floyd weren’t nearly as big as they’d be when 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon became one of the all-time best-selling albums, but they were already pretty big — more so in Europe than in the US. Now that Pompeii welcomes two-and-a-half million paying visitors a year, it’s also hard to imagine a time when you could just slither in and play in the ruins.

But rock wasn’t nearly as big a business back then as it is now, and I guess Pompeii wasn’t either. As another part of the exhibit notes, “Pink Floyd and the film crew stayed in the large Gran Rosario Hotel for four nights during the filming of Live at Pompeii because it was conveniently close to the amphitheater entrance. In the ‘40s and ‘50s this hotel was very popular but in 1971 it was completely empty. We were the only guests.”

The Gran Rosario Hotel, as it appeared when Pink Floyd and film crew stayed there in 1971.

I also enjoyed reading some memories from script girl Marie-Noelle Zurstrassen, who recalls:

“I see myself in the hall of the hotel telling the French cameramen Jacques Boumendil and Claude Agostini that they should pack their bags to catch a plane back to Paris. We had more or less finished the shoot and were leaving [Maben] behind as a hostage because there was no money left to pay the bills!…

“After a clash with the Floyd about their daily expenses, I told them that I was not going to pay their daily cannabis and other substances because it was not my responsibility. But I think they were joking, it was probably just for fun.

“Above all I remember the magic night shoot of ‘One of These Days I’m Going to Cut You into Little Pieces’ with the drummer Nick Mason who was by far the most approachable of the four members of the band. I often dream at night, even now 45 years later, about the Floyd and the music they played in the amphitheater. Especially ‘Echoes’ and ‘One of These Days’…The moon was shining, the ruins were mysterious and there was that strange slow dance of the 35mm cameras that took place during the circular tracking shots.

“It was a sort of fairy tale that fascinated me. I even forgot to look at my stopwatch when I was timing the shots. I kept telling myself that they shouldn’t improvise too much because we were running out of film and that would be the end of the shoot because we couldn’t reload the 35mm Mitchell cameras.”

Script girl Marie-Noelle Zurstrassen on the set with director Adrian Maben, photographed by Jacques Boumendil.

Of course, this exhibit isn’t the only reason to visit Pompeii, even if you’re more interested in Pink Floyd than the town that was buried under a volcanic eruption almost two thousand years ago:

Elsewhere in Pompeii, taken the day of my visit.

The last day of my nearly month-long visit to Italy (actually mostly spent in Sicily), I stumbled across another Pink Floyd event of which I was unaware. In the amphitheater of the ruins of Ostia Antica near Rome, a tribute concert was being staged to their 1970 album Atom Heart Mother. As the poster below notes, this would include the kind of orchestral and choral arrangements featured on the original LP (though no actual musicians from Pink Floyd were involved).

Pink Floyd did play Atom Heart Mother material in concert with a choir and orchestra. On their recent mammoth Early Years 1965-1972 box set, you can see a 21-minute version of “Atom Heart Mother” itself that they performed with the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and the John Alldis Choir, filmed in London’s Hyde Park on July 18, 1970. Twenty-first-century technology no doubt makes this sort of combo easier to pull off onstage, though it arrived decades too late for Pink Floyd to take advantage of it in their prime.

I was flying home the day of the concert, so I couldn’t stay around for the performance. I did get these shots of technicians setting up for the big event in Ostia Antica’s Teatro Romano that morning:

Beatles, Music

Sgt. Pepper Deluxe Box: Off the Beaten Tracks

June 17, 2017 Folkrox 4 Comments

What do you say about an album that, back in the year in was issued, would have topped many best-of lists, but has become so over-familiar that even a six-disc expanded version isn’t as exciting as it could be? The six-disc deluxe box of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a big step in the right direction in the packaging of the Beatles’ catalog, which until this 50^th anniversary edition had not taken the obvious step of expanding their classic albums in reissued formats. This one has the stereo and mono versions, plenty of outtakes, the classic cuts from the “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” single (originally intended to be used on Sgt. Pepper), and the audio on Blu-ray/DVD discs if that rings your chimes. But the extras aren’t as exciting as they are on some other box set editions of classic vintage LPs, and the fans most interested in the bells and whistles probably already have a good deal of this in their collection, sometimes many times over.

That doesn’t mean I don’t care about Beatles material that hasn’t been available before. With The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, I wrote a whole book on that subject. But as I noted in that book, 1967 might have been the least interesting year of the Beatles’ career (if we focus on their core 1962-69 era) in terms of material that was unissued at the time. No longer touring, they were focusing on studio recording, and in those recordings, building up tracks layer by layer. That means the different versions of songs they recorded for the LP—which form the bulk of the three dozen or so extra cuts on the box (counts vary according to whether you might consider a “2017 mix” previously unreleased)—aren’t all that different from the album versions we’ve heard all these years. Sometimes you essentially just get the backing track or elements of a track, which is interesting, but not so much that you’re likely to enjoy them over and over.

Whatever edition of Sgt. Pepper was issued (the 50^th anniversary CDs also came in two-CD format with less bonus tracks), media coverage focused on the stereo remix by Giles Martin, George Martin’s son. I seem to be one of the critics least excited by ballyhoed remixes; it’s good, but it’s not that stupendously different from the original, and the original always sounded pretty good in the first place. The 1992 TV documentary on the DVD/Blu-Ray discs (The Making of Sgt. Pepper), featuring interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and George Martin (who brings up separate elements of some tracks at the mixing board) is good, but long available on bootleg. The 144-page hardback book might be the best reason to buy the box, as it hasn’t been available before and can’t be easily bootlegged, and is pretty well done, even if the details on some tracks (like the bonus ones on the mono CD) could have been better. And for all its size, the box is missing a few bootlegged or known-to-exist items—the avant-garde “Carnival of Light” outtake, John Lennon’s home demo of “Good Morning Good Morning,” and Lennon’s home recordings of “Strawberry Fields Forever” (not to mention “Only a Northern Song,” recorded during the sessions, but not released until Yellow Submarine)—that would have made the box more definitive, if more expensive.

You can probably tell I don’t feel like the $150 or so this box cost (prices vary according to where you buy it and the shipping, if that’s involved) quite justified the price tag. But don’t get me wrong – the quality even on the oft-circulated stuff is better than the bootlegs; a few of the previously uncirculated tracks (like the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” where Lennon has a mechanical vocal, changing to a more rapid and natural phrasing at McCartney’s suggestion) are pretty interesting, if not phenomenal; and the overall packaging is of a commendably high standard, even if there are a few questionable decisions and omissions. Hopefully there will also be a deluxe box for The White Album’s 50^th anniversary, especially as there are much more, and much more interesting, extras to choose from (especially if you count the couple dozen or so demos they did at George Harrison’s home shortly before the sessions started). And then maybe they’ll finally go back to all of their albums to construct deluxe editions.

In the bulk of this post, I’m not going to focus on a track-by-track rundown. (Brief commercial interruption: I describe each “bonus track” on the deluxe box that wasn’t released back in 1967 in the updated ebook version of my book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film.) Nor will I detail the merits of the Giles Martin remix; there’s been enough of that on Facebook, NPR, and classic rock magazines. Instead, here are a few more obscure aspects of the reissue that fanatics might find interesting.

What’s been added: Besides the many bonus tracks, the deluxe edition has also added “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” It wasn’t well known at the time—though it’s pretty well known now, even if you’re not a Beatles obsessive—that both of these tracks were recorded early in the Sgt. Pepper sessions, and originally intended for the album. But pressure from Brian Epstein and EMI resulted in both songs getting issued in February 1967 on a single, in part because they were desperate to get a Beatles record on the market, as none had appeared for—gasp—six months! That’s nothing today, but that was the longest gap of their career up to that point, and hunger to quell rumors the Beatles were breaking up (as they’d taken the drastic step of retiring from live concerts) also played a part.

Wrote George Martin in his book With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (written with William Pearson): “It was the biggest mistake of my professional life.”

Let’s look at the full context of that remark, from the same book:

“Realizing how desperate Brian was feeling, I decided to give him a super-strong combination, a double-punch that could not fail, an unbeatable linking of two all-time great songs: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane.’ These songs would, I told him, make a fantastic double-A-sided disc—better even than our other double-A-sided triumphs, ‘Day Tripper’/‘We Can Work It Out,’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’/‘Yellow Submarine.’

“It was the biggest mistake of my professional life.

“Releasing either song coupled with ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ would have been by far the better decision, but at the time I couldn’t see it.”

A few observations here:

It’s hard to see where “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” would have fit onto Sgt. Pepper, even though each of them were better as individual songs than any on the LP, except possibly for “A Day in the Life.” Maybe that’s because we’re so familiar with the thirteen songs that did make it onto LP, and the exact sequence of those songs, that it’s now hard to imagine the album any other way.

I guess “Strawberry Fields” could have ended side one and “Penny Lane” started side two, though the heart-stopping sudden climax of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” is hard to beat for a side-ender, especially in the days when you had to get up and actually flip the record. But that would have compromised the sound quality of the vinyl LP, in the days when even 45 minutes of music was pushing it. And then, which two songs do you take off? They’re all important to establishing the record’s mood, even lesser ones like “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

Speaking of which, I think it would have been a disaster to put “When I’m Sixty-Four” on a B-side, as it was clearly inferior to either “Strawberry Fields” or “Penny Lane.” More importantly, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” were a better pairing than any Beatles 45 boasted—and perhaps any 45 by anyone boasted. They were both about Liverpool childhood, in very different ways; they coupled one of John Lennon’s best songs (“Strawberry Fields”) with one of Paul McCartney’s best (“Penny Lane”); and the single had a distinctive picture sleeve.

This wouldn’t have been possible with “When I’m Sixty-Four.” And if you can only choose “Strawberry Fields” or “Penny Lane” for the LP, how can you possibly make a good choice of one over another? And if you can’t use “When I’m Sixty-Four” for the LP, doesn’t that throw off Sgt. Pepper’s balance, as one of its virtues was encompassing so many styles, for which “When I’m Sixty-Four” represented vaudeville?

No one I’ve come across—and just about everyone I know is familiar with Sgt. Pepper—has ever complained about missing “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Penny Lane” on the album. George Martin’s about the only one I’ve heard express regrets. Along the same lines, George Martin was vocal, quite a few times, about wishing the Beatles would boiled down The White Album from two LPs to a much stronger disc. But very few other people would agree with him on that. And even if they do, no one would agree on which half of the songs to discard.

George Martin’s book about producing the Sgt. Pepper album.

Maybe if it had been the CD era and sound quality on a longer album had not been an issue, putting “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” on Sgt. Pepper would have been the right call. All things considered, however, back in 1967, it was the right call. And now that it’s the CD era and there are big expensive expanded box set editions of classic albums, it’s the right call to add the tracks, separated from the main thirteen songs so that it doesn’t change the sequence of the core LP.

Before this 50th anniversary release, by the way, I saw some comments on social media about what a bad idea it would be to add “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” Maybe those comments grew out of fears those songs would be inserted into and change the album’s main running order, which I agree would have been a mistake. So it’s worth emphasizing that they are separate from the core LP (as they are on the more modest two-CD deluxe edition).

If their very presence anywhere is considered bothersome, that seems as ridiculous as the complaint I once heard from someone who disliked any bonus tracks on CD reissues of albums, finding them distracting and injurious to the integrity of the original LP. If you really do find CDs with bonus tracks a ripoff—a concept about as sensible as complaining that free health care is too expensive—you can, of course, simply not play the extra cuts, or better yet, not buy these reissues.

What’s missing: Can there be much missing from a six-disc deluxe edition, with several dozen bonus tracks, some of which haven’t even been bootlegged? Yes, if we’re looking at the time frame between mid-September 1966 (when Lennon made his first informal composing tapes of “Strawberry Fields”) and when the album was finished on April 21, 1967. That’s even if you don’t count their 1966 Christmas fan club disc or home recordings (most by John) that were obviously too chaotic and lo-fi to merit serious consideration. Here are the most notable absentees:

“Strawberry Fields Forever” home tapes: John Lennon made quite a few tapes of “Strawberry Fields” in the two months before the Beatles started working on it at the studio in November 1966, some at home, and some (the earliest) in Spain, where he was filming his role in How I Won the War. It’s true it’s pretty repetitious to hear all of these (plus the various different recordings the Beatles made of the song in the studio before finalizing the track) all at once. But it’s historically fascinating, especially as it evolved from a much simpler near-folk song in its earliest solo acoustic versions. And they do circulate unofficially, on CDs such as the one below:

“Carnival of Light”: One of the most discussed Beatles studio outtakes that has never circulated, this wasn’t ever intended for Sgt. Pepper, but recorded on January 5 for use at a multimedia event of the same name at London’s Roundhouse on January 28 and February 4. From its description in Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, it sounds heavily avant-garde, and perhaps tuneless. Hints have been dropped for years that it would find release. But its non-appearance on this deluxe box seems to indicate it might never appear—and that it might just not be very good and listenable.

“Good Morning Good Morning” home demo: Of the many home tapes John Lennon made in the late 1960s, this is the only one of a Sgt. Pepper song. In fact, it’s the only home recording of a Sgt. Pepper song. It’s just a bit over a minute long, and the chorus hasn’t been worked out, but it’s still interesting, in part because he chuckles after the fragment of the chorus (and the people he sees are “fast” rather than “half” asleep). Maybe home tapes were considered off-limits for a set featuring only EMI recordings, but that didn’t stop some such tracks from getting included in the Anthology series in the mid-1990s.

“Only a Northern Song”: The only real song recorded during the Sgt. Pepper sessions that didn’t make the album, aside from the “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” single. Sometimes people ask me what my least favorite Beatles song is, and while I don’t have many contenders (as I like almost all of their songs), this is among the ones I mention. About thirty years ago I did come across someone who thought it was great, but I’ve never met anyone else who shares that opinion. Actually I’ve heard few opinions voiced about this George Harrison composition whatsoever—it did find a place on the Yellow Submarine album, but many listeners simply don’t remember it well, or at all.

“Only a Northern Song” was rejected for Sgt. Pepper. George Martin seems to have been particularly unenthusiastic, remembering in With a Little Help from My Friends, “I groaned inside when I heard it.” He suggested Harrison try to come up with something better, which the Beatle did with “Within You, Without You”—not only a better song, but an infinitely better fit for the Sgt. Pepper LP.

It’s hard to imagine where “Only a Northern Song” would have fit, had the tune simply been accepted as George’s contribution. It seems like it would have brought the carnival-like mood to a dead stop, with its rather careless half-baked swirl. It wouldn’t be a great fit even for the Sgt. Pepper deluxe box, where I suspect few miss its absence. And unlike the other recordings in this section, you can get it on another official release, Yellow Submarine, in any case.

The title of “Only a Northern Song” was inspired by the name of the Beatles’ publishing company.

So much is said in silence: Many times, I’ve read that there is no silence or no gap between tracks on Sgt. Pepper. This was mentioned in some writing on the LP shortly after it was released, and it’s still often referred to as a feature of the album. Kevin Howlett’s essay on the record’s “Songs and Recording Details” book in the deluxe box, for example, states:

“…the album sounds like a unified work. The elimination of the usual few seconds of silence between tracks helps to create this impression. The songs flow together without a break, like a surreal music hall variety show. Interestingly, the idea not to have ‘rills’ on the record had been considered before Sgt. Pepper. A month ahead of starting work on Revolver, in an interview published in NME, John discussed ideas for the group’s next album. ‘We wanted to have it so that there was no space between the tracks—just continuous. But they wouldn’t wear it [sic].’ The group was eventually allowed to carry out that idea, not only on Sgt. Pepper, but also on subsequent albums.”

I think I was around eight years old (which would have been 1970) when I first read about there being no silence between the tracks in a couple books. Even then, that assertion puzzled me. There are just three instances when there is no silence: when the title track segues into “With a Little Help from My Friends” as they sing “Billy Shears”; when the animal noises in “Good Morning Good Morning” turn into the guitar that starts the reprise of the title track; and when the cheers at the end of the reprise fade and “A Day in the Life” starts.

Otherwise, there’s silence between the tracks. Very short gaps of silence, yes, lasting just a couple seconds or less. But they’re there. The other tracks don’t segue into each other, or slam right against each other, as they do in my favorite album in which this occurs, the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money (which of course was in part a Sgt. Pepper satire). I think the Mothers’ 1967 album Absolutely Free, released at almost the exact same time as Sgt. Pepper, was the first rock LP in which there was truly no silence separating tracks.

For what it’s worth, on my vinyl copy of Sgt. Pepper, you can clearly see thin bands separating all of the tracks (even the ones that blend into each other), as you can on most LPs. Granted, it’s not a first pressing, but I don’t recall seeing other copies of Sgt. Pepper with no thin separating bands. (Update: just after this post went up, Peter Bochan (see comments section) clarified: “I got the first edition Sgt. Pepper shipped over from UK. It didn’t have visible track separations, if you looked at it closely you could see some of the songs ending by way of intensity of the groove patterns. US copy had tracks.”)

This is far from the most controversial issue surrounding the Beatles or even Sgt. Pepper, but I think the continued reference to no silence between the tracks is simply inaccurate. For that matter, although most of side two of Abbey Road is commonly described as a continuous medley starting with “You Never Give Me Your Money” and ending with “The End,” there is in fact a definite, if short, silence between “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and “Golden Slumbers.” I don’t know how these things get entrenched, but once they do, it’s hard to stop them. (Also note some tracks on The White Album fade into each other without silent breaks, like “Back in the USSR” into “Dear Prudence” and “Revolution 9” into “Good Night,” but that’s never referred to as an LP without separating tracks.)

One more silence-related issue to bring up about Sgt. Pepper: the original UK issue had a bit of gibberish in the run-out groove after “A Day in the Life” ended (as well as a high-pitched whistle only dogs could hear), but the North American one didn’t. The book in the deluxe box explains how this might have happened.

As early as April 19, well before Sgt. Pepper’s release, some US radio stations somehow obtained copies of some tracks and began broadcasting them without authorization. Capitol Records wanted to counteract this by issuing the LP as soon as possible, and a cable from EMI indicates the mono tapes were sent on April 21, with the stereo ones hoped to follow the next day. “At this stage, the target release date was 8 May 1967,” Kevin Howlett writes (though it wouldn’t come out until the beginning of June). “The haste to supply Capitol with tapes partly explains why the American version of Sgt. Pepper did not include the material embedded in the run-out groove of the British record.” (Don’t worry, it’s on the 50th anniversary reissues.)

I honestly don’t remember discussing this run-out groove with anyone in my lifetime. My opinion is that on a CD, it’s much more effective to just have the memorable final piano chord of “A Day in the Life” (and the whole album) fade into silence, without anything to follow. And maybe that’s how it should have been on all editions of the LP, too.

ADT on “She’s Leaving Home”: ADT refers to “automatic double-tracking,” a device often used on Beatles recordings to thicken sounds, especially lead vocals. One of the more interesting bonus tracks on the deluxe box is the “first mono mix” of “She’s Leaving Home,” which has four cello notes at the end of each chorus that were edited out of the final version. In addition, the opening notes on the harp, played by Sheila Bromberg, are treated with ADT, giving them a strange artificial effect that was not used on either the mono or stereo versions on the final album.

In 2011, Bromberg was interviewed by BBC One television about playing on the track. The brief segment is interesting, as I don’t recall her discussing this anywhere else. She recalls that Paul McCartney had the musicians (none of the Beatles played on the track) try several different ways of playing the song, and had trouble verbalizing how he wanted Bromberg to change her part, especially as he didn’t write or read music. After all those attempts, it was the first take that ended up being used.

In the segment, the BBC interviewer states, “When Sheila heard the track, she realized they’d used the first take. The sound McCartney had been after, a doubling effect of her playing, had been created by the engineers.” “That’s how they got that sound. That’s what he was after. Yes!” exclaims Bromberg.

It makes a good story, but the “doubling” or ADT effect was not used on either the official stereo or mono versions. You can clearly hear the difference on the intro of the “first mono mix.” As Mark Lewisohn writes in The Beatles Recording Sessions, “As an experiment, ADT was applied to the song’s opening harp passage on [mono] remix one, but the idea was dropped after that.”

So why would Bromberg have thought the track was “doubled”? Is it even possible she was accidentally played the then-unreleased “first mono mix” when interviewed for the program?

Another Beatle myth exploded: The book in the deluxe box set doesn’t have much information that’s different to how the genesis of Sgt. Pepper has usually been reported. Here’s the most important exception:

Almost since the time it was released, it’s generally been accepted that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was edited together from two different takes. These were performed in different keys and different tempos, so it would have been virtually impossible to do this with 1966 technology without sounding awkward. George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick managed to do so, however, by speeding up take 7 and slowing down take 26. Miraculously, the keys and tempos now matched, almost as if by divine miracle. Takes 7 and 26 are both on the deluxe edition.

Or, at least, that’s how it was usually reported, as it is in The Beatles Recording Sessions. However, the book in the Sgt. Pepper box gives a different account. Here, Kevin Howlett writes that “the speed of take 26 was reduced by 11.5 percent and, as John’s voice was lowered by over a tone in pitch, the effect was created of a sleepy slur as he sang. The speed of take seven was not altered.”

Well, isn’t that a cold shower. I’ve told the story about both takes being altered and matched with calm authority at least half a dozen times when I’ve taught a course on the Beatles. Now I can’t tell it anymore. But it does go to show that Beatles mysteries continue to be untangled fifty years after the fact, buried in the deep recesses of EMI’s tape vaults.

The previously unreleased material on the Sgt. Pepper box, along with all of the other recordings the Beatles made that weren’t released while they were active, are written about in detail in my book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film.

Socially Responsible Living

Shareholders Unite: The Financial Choice Act’s Threat to Shareholder Activism

June 13, 2017 Folkrox Leave a comment

To file a shareholder resolution pressuring corporations to be more socially responsible, you need to own just $2,000 of stock in the company. Imagine, however, if you suddenly needed to own $2 billion — or even more. Shareholder activism would nearly grind to a halt. It might even get wiped out altogether.

That’s the scenario we face if the Financial Choice Act of 2017 passes Congress. Section 844(b) would get rid of the $2,000 threshold. Instead, investors would have to hold at least 1% of the issuer’s voting securities over a three-year period.

What does that mean in layperson’s terms? To file a resolution with Apple, for instance, you’d need $7.4 billion worth of stock. Filing with Wells Fargo ($2.7 billion) and AT&T ($2.5 billion) wouldn’t be chump change, either.

The cost of filing resolutions will skyrocket if the Financial Choice Act passes, especially with the megacompanies who need to be pressured the most.

“It’s saying that only billionaires have good ideas,” feels Andy Behar, CEO of As You Sow, which promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy. “All of the work [by] these small shareholders that has actually improved companies over the last seventy years — it’s saying that hasn’t been working, when it actually is incredibly well-working. The win-win scenarios that shareholders have brought to companies…there’s too many to even list. To have that suddenly become excluded would be a disservice.

“It’s really taking away our democratic rights and our rights to the property that we own,” he adds. “There are inherent rights to the property of owning a stock. And we don’t even know that it’s constitutional to take that away.”

Why are organizations like Business Roundtable, a lobbying group of nearly two hundred CEOs, so determined to strip these rights away? “I think they’re frightened,” observes Behar. “In the last few years, proxy access is now allowing shareholders to run board candidates. Last week Occidental Petroleum got a 67% vote on [a resolution calling for] two-degree climate scenario planning”—a landslide in a movement where getting 10-20% of the vote is often considered a major success (more details at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-12/blackrock-to-back-climate-shareholder-proposal-at-occidental). “More and more shareholders are paying attention and voting.

“The people on the board feel threatened. And what they’re threatened by is actually doing their jobs, which is to serve the shareholders in the company, who want the company to go in a different direction. They want the company to become sustainable. Companies are looking at this and going, ‘Oh, the people who we’re supposed to be working for actually care. So let’s throttle back their rights.’”

Shareholder activism is still on the rise in the US. Its position as a global leader in the movement could be crippled if the Financial Choice Act becomes law.

The section of the Financial Choice Act affecting shareholder rights is just a small part of the legislation. It would also roll back provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Senator Elizabeth Warren established would be removed, to cite just one of its alarm bells.

Nonetheless, it was passed by the House Committee on Financial Services in early May by a 34-26 vote along strict party lines. The House isn’t expected to vote on it until after Memorial Day, after which it moves on to the Senate, where activists such as Andy Behar think it’s likely to get debated.

According to Holly Testa, director of shareowner engagement at First Affirmative Financial Network, “Consensus is that this bill has no chance in the Senate, but that it will be broken into pieces to get some of it passed into law.” But even if the changes to shareholder resolution thresholds are removed from the legislation, that doesn’t mean those thresholds are protected. As Testa points out, “If Section 844 is not legislated, proponents at the Securities and Exchange Commission are likely to try to achieve its intentions through the rulemaking process.”

If the bill does reach the Senate, one next step for those opposed to the measure is approaching members of the Senate Banking Committee. First Affirmative is urging affiliated financial advisors, clients, and other contacts who have connections with those senators (listed in the box below) to get in touch to assist with outreach:

As it happens, a few of the minority members (Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Mark Warner) have been among the names tossed around as possible Democratic candidates in the next presidential election. They’ll have a lot of on their plate if they run, but it won’t hurt to make them aware of the issue’s importance now.

What can citizens do to make their voice heard, whether or not they have such connections? Aside from stressing your concerns to representatives in Congress (and especially the Senate), the links below offer some other resources. True, many Effective Assets clients are Bay Area-based and represented by officials likely to already be in opposition to the Financial Choice Act. So it’s important to note that if you do business in one or more Republican states or districts, your voice is likely to be heard on the issue even if you don’t live there.

As You Sow’s Choice Act: Step-By-Step Action Guide (http://www.asyousow.org/about-us/choice-act-step-by-step-action-guide) has specific info, and links to other sites, for using social media, making calls, attending town hall meetings, and joining the Indivisible group to make your feelings known about the implications of the Financial Choice Act.

A good easy first step is signing As You Sow’s petition “Protect Shareholders. Strike the Financial Choice Act 2.0,” at https://www.change.org/p/don-t-eliminate-my-rights-as-a-shareholder-strike-the-financial-choice-act-2-0.

5Calls has a script for callers who want their representatives to “Defend Dodd-Frank Banking Regulations” at https://5calls.org/issue/recIY5BMUytUixNbV.

The Indivisible Explainer on the Financial Choice Act (https://www.indivisibleguide.com/resource/financial-choice-act-hr-10) also has more details on the legislation, as well as sample town hall questions about the act to ask your representatives. Indivisible also has a call script (https://www.indivisibleguide.com/resource/financial-choice-act-hr-10) if you contact their offices by phone.

This letter (http://bit.ly/Financial-CHOICE-Act-Letter) from Newground Social Investment provides more detail on the threat to shareholder ownership and governance rights in the proposed legislation.

Do shareholder resolutions make a difference? Check page 3 of the Newground Social Investment letter for several examples. Shareholder resolutions were instrumental in Starbucks introducing Fair Trade coffee, for example, and DuPont making the largest land conservation gift in history. They’re crucial to making a difference, and it’s crucial to make sure they can be made by many stockholders, not just an elite few.

This post originally appeared on the website of Effective Assets.

Uncategorized

On the Road to the Summer of Love Exhibit

May 23, 2017 Folkrox 2 Comments

This story was first posted on the KQED Arts website. Reproduced courtesy of KQED.

Back in the late ’80s, I found Ralph J. Gleason’s paperback The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound for $3 at San Francisco’s Green Apple Books. I never thought the next copy I’d see would be in a glass case in a Summer of Love exhibit at the California Historical Society — a testament not only to the book’s rarity, but to the sky-high esteem in which the era is now held as it marks its 50th anniversary.

Although more modest in scale than the de Young’s current Summer of Love extravaganza, the California Historical Society’s current exhibition On the Road to the Summer of Love, running through Sept. 10 in downtown San Francisco, offers important context through photos, memorabilia, and audiovisuals. (And at $5, the price is right.) Rooms on the Beats and the Free Speech Movement trace the Bay Area’s proudly rebellious bohemianism back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. The folk revival (check the pictures of a pre-rock Janis Joplin and short-haired Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen), the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the experimental music of the San Francisco Tape Music Center all get their due as vital forces in the city’s simmering volcano.

Death of Money Parade, Haight Street, 1967. — The ‘Death of Money’ parade, Haight Street, 1967. (Photo: Gene Anthony; Collection of the California Historical Society)

Yet the heart of the displays focus on that brief time from around late 1965 to late 1967, when psychedelic rock and the counterculture made San Francisco the place to be. Smack in the middle of those two years, the Grateful Dead played a “Love Pageant Rally” in Golden Gate Park’s panhandle, held on the very day (October 6, 1966) LSD became illegal, as captured in one particularly vivid color shot. As Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner remembers in one of the interviews visitors can hear at audio stations, “It was just Halloween all the time.”

San Francisco Mime Troupe, c. 1966. (Gene Anthony; Collection of the California Historical Society)

Some of the images will be familiar to visitors well-versed in the time and place, whether it’s Joplin at the Monterey Pop Festival or the “Death of Hippie” procession down Haight Street in fall 1967. However, many pictures are uncommon, even some of the ones that are focused on celebrities. For instance, major collectors might not have seen the poster for a pre-Janis Big Brother & the Holding Company benefit show for Berkeley’s Open Theater, or an ad for the “Jefferson Airplane Loves You” fan club (housed at “Jefferson Airport” in Millbrae, $1 entitling members to a “Far-Out” Flight Card, among other goodies). The Free Speech section features not just the expected shot of Joan Baez, but also a couple shots of folkie Barbara Dane, who was probably even further to the left of Baez.

Both the Airplane and Big Brother made big splashes at the Monterey Pop Festival, and photographs of them and others in action at the event make their expected presence. But so do color shots from the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, a much smaller yet almost equally vibrant festival on Mount Tamalpais held the weekend before Monterey. Other artifacts remind us the new dawn was far from universally welcomed, whether it’s a somber Lawrence Ferlinghetti standing in front of a “Banned Books” window display at City Lights in 1958, or an issue of Record, the neighborhood Haight-Ashbury paper, headlined “SUPERVISORS FACE HIPPIE AVALANCHE” nearly a decade later.

If you have ample time on your visit, one screen shows the full-length documentary The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon, spotlighting the Virginia City venue that hosted a lengthy residency by one of San Francisco’s first psychedelic bands, the Charlatans. As a shorter audio soundbite, there’s a five-minute recording of the Grateful Dead jamming with jazz flutist Charles Lloyd on “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” at the January 1967 Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park’s Polo Fields. Paul Kantner’s seven-minute history of the launch of the Airplane is quite entertaining, too, revealing how the band considered naming themselves the Other Side before settling on “Jefferson Airplane, [which] was the name of somebody’s dog.”

For all the great music and charismatic figures around which the Summer of Love revolved, some of the most affecting relics remind us that many of the hundreds of thousands flocking to the Haight were ordinary, sometimes struggling youngsters. One shows a group of anonymous young guys – all with backs turned to the camera – looking over the city from a rooftop, some perhaps to make a big impression on the community, like the longhair on the left with a guitar. Others, perhaps, became some of the runaways who ended up on the streets, relying on free food giveaways by the Diggers to survive. A contact sheet of pedestrian traffic on Haight Street shows a mixture of such street kids and hippies, as well as the odd pair of straight businessmen in suits somehow caught in the sweet madness that this exhibit revives.

‘On the Road to the Summer of Love’ runs through Sept. 10, 2017, at the California Historical Society at 678 Mission Street in San Francisco. For more details about the exhibit and corresponding events, see here.

Music, Velvet Underground

Walter De Maria, Pre-Velvet Underground Renaissance Man

April 24, 2017 Folkrox 1 Comment

One of the rewards of doing research for intensely detailed books is that the deeper you dig, the more there is to find. (There certainly aren’t many financial rewards involved!) Such is the case with untangling the histories of the Velvet Underground’s associates, especially in the years before 1966, when quite a few people from the avant-garde scene influenced the path the band would take. Sometimes it leads you to experimental records and movies you never would have checked out otherwise, and even makes you aware of interesting other projects with little or nothing to do with the Velvets.

One of the more interesting people who was involved, if briefly, with future Velvet Underground members was Walter De Maria. He was the drummer in the Primitives, the group formed by Lou Reed and John Cale with another guy who wouldn’t go on to the Velvets, Tony Conrad. The band was only around for about two or three months in late 1964 and early 1965, and only Reed appears on the sole Primitives single, “The Ostrich”/“Sneaky Pete,” recorded before the other musicians were recruited. But it was in the Primitives that Reed and Cale first worked together, forming the core of the Velvet Underground after Conrad and De Maria drifted away to other pursuits.

The Primitives, late 1964. Left to right: Tony Conrad, Walter De Maria, Lou Reed, and John Cale.

The work of Tony Conrad is fairly well known, at least to many people with an interest in the avant-garde arts. He played in La Monte Young’s group with Cale before and (for a little while) after the Primitives and made quite a few seriously avant-garde recordings, a good number of which were made commercially available. He also made one of the more noted experimental films of the 1960s, 1966’s Flicker, comprised solely of alternating black and white frames.

Walter De Maria’s work outside the Primitives is not so well known, at least to those whose interest in the Velvet Underground is focused on their musical manifestations. He is quite well known as an environmental installation artist, though many who know him for that work are unaware of his relatively slim activity as a musician. In fact, his 1977 piece The Lightning Field is one of the most celebrated examples of “land art,” its 400 stainless steel poles occupying a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer in New Mexico. Other noted, smaller-scale De Maria creations, New York Earth Room (a room filled with 250 cubic yards of earth) and The Broken Kilometer, have been on permanent display in New York City for many years. Some of his visual artwork can be seen, along with some footage of De Maria himself, in the 2015 documentary Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, which is pretty interesting even if your interest in De Maria (and land art itself) is casual.

The poster for the documentary “Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art” features a photo of Walter De Maria.

While De Maria’s musical activities are relatively obscure, they’re more extensive than many people realize. Serious Velvets fans — at least those serious enough to read my book White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day — know that not long after the Primitives, he was drummer in the Insurrections, fronted by fellow avant-gardist Henry Flynt. Flynt had his own fairly close Velvets connection, filling in for John Cale at a few actual Velvet Underground shows in fall 1966.

Later in 1966, Flynt recorded an album’s worth of material as the guitarist and singer in Henry Flynt & the Insurrections. The group’s raw, primitive sound is similar in some respects to the Velvets and the Fugs, but has more of a hillbilly flavor (particularly in the vocals), and is frankly not nearly as impressive as the music being produced by their Lower East Side peers. The recordings weren’t released until 2004, on the Locust Music album I Don’t Wanna.

Walter De Maria plays drums on these 1966 recordings by Henry Flynt & the Insurrections, which weren’t issued until 2004.

That’s about as far as I got on the trail of De Maria’s musical activities for the first edition of White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day, and I didn’t think there was much if anything left to exhume. It turns out, though, that De Maria had released an actual CD of 1960s recordings so obscure — at least, obscure enough to evade my detection — that I wasn’t even aware of it until working on my revised ebook edition in recent months.

At some point in 1964, De Maria recorded a 24-minute instrumental piece, “Cricket Music.” Although the ingenious conceptual composition mixes his drumming and the sounds of crickets, their chirps are hard to detect until about the middle of this lengthy recording, on which De Maria solos in a rather jazzy, repetitious style. Soon, however, the crickets rise in volume until they’re louder than the drums, eventually dominating the soundscape as De Maria continues to plug away in the background, slightly varying his rhythms. By its conclusion, “Cricket Music” is all crickets. The entire track was eventually issued on his 2000 self-pressed CD Drums and Nature, which was reissued in 2016, though you’ll probably have a hard time finding a record store that carries it.

“Cricket Music” and “Ocean Music” were finally officially issued on this 2000 CD.

Drums and Nature also includes his 1968 recording “Ocean Music,” which is rather similar in conception. Starting off with several minutes of the sound of ocean waves, his 20-minute piece “Ocean Music” eventually blends the waves with his jazzy repetitious drumming, until by the end the drums have totally overwhelmed the ocean sounds. It’s thus something of a mirror image of “Cricket Music,” in which the sounds of crickets eventually submerge his drumming.

What’s more, both “Cricket Music” and “Ocean Music” were used in De Maria’s 1969 movie Hard Core, which like his other projects was hardcore avant-garde. The half-hour film’s composed primarily of slow pans over a mountain-shadowed dry, cracked lake bed in the desert. (One source says this was in the Mojave Desert; another says it was in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.) These are periodically interrupted by super-brief shots of two cowboys preparing for a duel, ending with a lengthy shootout. That’s not quite the final sequence, however, as it’s followed by a lingering close-up of an Asian girl’s face, perhaps as an oblique reference to the war in Vietnam.

It’s not so easy to see the film these days, but it can be viewed for a $25 fee in the Film Library and Study Center of the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. Fortunately I live just across the Bay in San Francisco, and so was able to watch it earlier this year.

What’s most interesting to me about Hard Core is not the film — which is largely static — but that it was actually broadcast on television, and indeed made for San Francisco’s public TV station KQED, which aired it in 1969. I admit I don’t watch everything on KQED (still the biggest public TV station in the Bay Area, and indeed one of the most watched such stations in the US), but I have a hard time imagining it would screen something like this these days. Maybe there are some such items I’m missing (perhaps in their periodic broadcast of work by local independent filmmakers), but I don’t recall seeing anything close to as, well, hardcore as Hard Core.

What’s more, Hard Core was not some one-off that found its way onto KQED by a fluke, but part of its experimental Dilexi Series. This is the only installment of the series I’ve yet seen, but it also includes Frank Zappa’s Burnt Weeny Sandwich film and an episode, Music With Balls, featuring a performance by Terry Riley (himself a performer with pretty close Velvet Underground associations, collaborating with John Cale on the Church of Anthrax album shortly after Cale left the Velvets).

The twelve-part Dilexi Series was not solely devoted to music or work by filmmakers who were in, or (like De Maria) somewhat in, the musical world. There was also an episode by Andy Warhol, although his contribution, The Paul Swan Film, was (along with Burnt Weeny Sandwich) one of the two entries that had already been filmed, and wasn’t specifically produced for this series. Other installments were contributed by top photographer Robert Frank (later to direct the legendary unreleased documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 US tour) and the Living Theater’s Julian Beck. Episodes featuring and/or directed by less celebrated artists encompassed dance, found footage, documentary, and satire.

Incidentally, there’s another connection between this series and a top rock band. It was produced by John Coney, and Jim Farber worked on it as a production assistant. In April 1970, Coney and Farber would co-produce an hour-long film of a Pink Floyd concert (performed at the Fillmore in San Francisco, though not in front of an audience) that was subsequently broadcast on KQED. Most, though not all, of that footage is on a DVD/Blu-Ray disc in Pink Floyd’s recent box set The Early Years 1965-1972.

Even considering the Pacific Film Archive allows you to view up to two hours of material (appointment needed in advance) from its library for the $25 fee — something, unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of when I reserved Hard Core for screening — you’d need three sessions, and $75, to see all dozen episodes. The Dilexi Series seems historically important enough to issue on DVD, or even to re-broadcast on KQED, should the station have the rights to do so. My guess is that some or most of the installments, like Hard Core, are not terribly accessible, and in some respects tough going to watch. They’d serve as a reminder, however, of the risks television can take, and the exposure it can give to important talents far outside the mainstream.

The revised and expanded ebook version of “White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day” is now available.

Biking & Hiking in the San Francisco Bay Area

Chimney Rock in Point Reyes National Seashore

March 5, 2017 Folkrox Leave a comment

I’ve been to Point Reyes National Seashore a few times, but it’s so big that there are still a lot of areas I haven’t seen. So when a friend told me about a walk I’d never taken to a place I’d never been, Chimney Rock, we knew how to celebrate Martin Luther King day.

Point Reyes is only about 60-90 minutes from San Francisco depending on where you’re going, but it does take some time and planning to get to Chimney Rock. For one thing, you can’t drive directly to Chimney Rock. You have to park in the big lot at the visitor center near Drakes Beach and take a bus from there. Of course, Drakes Beach makes for a pretty scenic launching point, as you can tell from hiking around the visitor center a bit before you get on the bus:

Drakes Beach.

That’s a zoom lens on the seal below near the visitor center, by the way. Signs warn you not to get too close.

The bus from the visitor center makes two stops. Most people get off at the first one, the Point Reyes Lighthouse. That’s worth seeing, but if you’ve been there and want to spend time in Chimney Rock, as we did, stay on the bus for a few minutes until the second stop. Near the turnaround where the bus lets you off, a very short trail leads to the Elephant Seal Overlook, from which you can see a beach with seal pups:

Most visitors take a look and get on the next bus back to the visitor center. But if you’re at all in reasonable shape, the trail going west to Chimney Rock is only about a mile, and rewarded with views like these:

Those are seal pups on the beach below, as you see in closeup:

Here’s Chimney Rock, which doesn’t look exactly like a chimney, but what the hey:

And take a look at more stunning views on the trail back to the bus turnaround, at which buses arrive often to take you back to the visitor center:

If you’re lucky, you’ll see elk on the hillside as you’re waiting for the bus:

Music

The Record Plant in Sausalito

February 4, 2017 Folkrox Leave a comment

This story was first posted on the KQED Arts website’s new series Into The Mix, which focuses on little-known stories from the Bay Area music scene’s past and present. Reproduced courtesy of KQED.

Hot tubs, water beds, sex, and drugs — all were staples of the Record Plant in Sausalito, home to some of the highest times of any Bay Area studio in the 1970s.

Yet there was no small amount of rock and roll too. The dozens of famous albums partially or fully recorded at the Plant in the ’70s include Sly Stone’s Fresh, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Prince’s debut album For You. The Plant continued its reign as one of the top studios in the Bay Area into the early 21st century, through several ownership changes that, at one point, saw the federal government running the facility.

That wasn’t the sort of atmosphere its founders had in mind when the Record Plant opened in late 1972. After establishing himself as a top recording engineer with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, Gary Kellgren opened successful branches of the Plant in New York and Los Angeles with business partner Chris Stone before the two set their sights on Sausalito. As Raechel Donahue (who coordinated KSAN’s live-in-the-studio concerts from the Plant) puts it, “They invented this idea of having a recording studio that gave everybody a comfortable place to be.”

The Record Plant in Sausalito, as it looked when photographed in November 2016.

“Basically, it was a party atmosphere to record in,” says Jim Gaines, who produced and engineered records by the likes of Santana, Journey and Huey Lewis at the Plant. “They built this studio up here to go for the Bay Area bands. But not only that, bring up people from L.A. that wanted to get out of L.A. They had a hot tub in it, they had a boat at one point in time [to] take people out. The house”— where members of bands like Fleetwood Mac would stay during their Plant sessions — “was part of the package deal. And Kellgren was a party kind of guy.”

Indeed, when Gaines interviewed with Kellgren for a job at the Plant, “I’m shaking hands with this guy in this purple or blue Napoleon outfit. He’s got the hat on and everything. I’m thinking, ‘Do I want to work for this guy? Good lord.’ It was all about a big party for him, as well as working. He seemed to put those two together. That’s why the studio was built.”

Gaines turned down the job in favor of staying at Wally Heider’s studio in downtown San Francisco, adding that “when Heider found out that they were coming into Sausalito, he went out and found a building. He had plans to build a studio in Mill Valley to counteract ‘em.” Notes engineer and producer Stephen Barncard, who, like Gaines, also worked sessions at both Heider’s and the Plant, “Wally had plans for a studio in Mill Valley near Tam Junction. I actually saw the plans. He was gonna get [TV and film production company] Filmways to pay for it, and when the Record Plant went in, it was over. It never happened.”

As just one example of the detail lavished upon the facility, recalls Gaines, “the ceiling in Studio B looked like clouds. They were made out of cut-out plywood in different forms, and covered with velveteen or velvet or something like that; they looked like clouds hanging up there. Kellgren was smart; he wanted his rooms to look different. He knew he wanted to make it artsy.”

Word about the Record Plant got out through its lavish opening party, as well as KSAN broadcasts of live-in-the-studio programs featuring such heavyweights as Bob Marley & the Wailers (part of whose October 1973 performance at the Plant was issued on the Talkin’ Blues CD), Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and Fleetwood Mac.

Part of this archival Bob Marley release features material recorded at the Plant in 1973 for a KSAN broadcast.

“At this time it wasn’t really common to do live broadcasts, especially from a recording studio,” explains Raechel Donahue. “When we were at KSAN, our version of a live broadcast was me and [DJ] Terry McGovern and a 100-foot microphone cord which I would feed out the window to him, so he could interview people on the street. It really was [KSAN manager] Tom [Donahue], Chris Stone, and Gary Kellgren who figured out, ‘Ah, there’s obviously a way to do this if we could only just figure this out.’”

KSAN kicked off its Record Plant broadcasts with a legendary 72-hour marathon. At one point during Kris Kristofferson’s performance, according to Raechel Donahue, “this wackadoodle guy came wandering through the studio singing ‘He’s a peach pit, he’s a pom pom, he’s a pervert, he’s a fool’” — bastardizing the lyric of one of Kristofferson’s most famous songs, “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” — “and then just walked out the other door.”

“Everyone who was anyone was there, and they wandered in and wandered out,” Donahue said. “All I had to do was figure how to coordinate that. But that’s kind of what KSAN was all about, figuring out how to make reality blend into music. It was a crazy thing to do, but it did start the whole Record Plant live thing.”

It wasn’t the only craziness at KSAN broadcasts; Bob Simmons, the announcer for some of them, recalls Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider “wandering around trying to get someone to get in the hot tub with her” during one.

The Plant soon attracted not only stars from L.A. and out of state, but also quite a few from the Bay Area itself. The setting was as vital to its appeal as the studio itself. “Heider’s was downtown in the Tenderloin,” says Gaines. “That’s a whole different concept down there. I mean, just to park your car and get to the studio without being mugged is a feat. The Record Plant, you could just walk out, and you’re only like one door from the water. Then you got some public tennis courts down the streets. When I was working with KBC Band — Marty Balin and [Jack] Casady and Paul Kantner — Marty would go down there and play tennis while we weren’t working.”

The studio’s most famous feature, however, was on the premises, and more notorious for its, shall we say, extracurricular activities. The sunken area known as the Pit was, in Barncard’s words, “partial boudoir and studio. It’s basically for a place to do track-by-track overdubs and vocals, and then make love to your girlfriend between, in breaks over in the side.”

“Sly Stone moved into that back room for a while,” reports Gaines. “They had a little bedroom for him. Just a bed, with little frilly stuff over it. He wanted all of the doorknobs moved up. It’s like he was a kid or something. The doorknob couldn’t be in a regular place, it had to be like a foot higher. I finally changed that. I said, ‘Man, I can’t deal with this.’ There’s a lot more [stories], but I don’t know if I could tell some of ‘em.’”

Part 2

After getting up and running in the early 1970s with some celebrity local musicians and KSAN broadcasts (see part one of this feature), the Record Plant in Sausalito seemed to be thriving in the last half of the decade. Steve Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, and Rick James all used the studio to record hits, and it’s where Prince cut his debut album. Yet there was no small amount of turbulence behind the scenes, culminating in the Plant almost getting shut down in the mid-1980s before reasserting itself as a top recording facility.

For all the glamour passing through its grounds, not everyone was enamored with the sounds. Although Fleetwood Mac did more than 3,000 hours of recording there for Rumours in early 1976, relatively little was used on the final album, which was largely recorded later that year in L.A. studios. Stevie Nicks may have used the privacy of the sunken area dubbed “the Pit” to write “Dreams,” though it was just as famous as a retreat for drug use by musicians and their visitors.

“The Pit was a complete idiotic idea,” says engineer/producer Stephen Barncard. “That’s how hard the studios were fighting to get those kind of clients.” While the drug use it fostered might have helped attract name players, as Barncard points out, it wasn’t always conducive to the best results. At one session he worked with short-lived semi-supergroup KGB (who included Mike Bloomfield, Carmine Appice, and Barry Goldberg), “Keith Richards was in the next room, and he was apparently passing around some kind of green snortable substance. [Producer Jim Price’s] friend who came along had snorted it up, and got really ill. That kind of put a pall over the whole session.”

As an engineer, Barncard is also critical of the space from some technical respects. “Even perfect equipment doesn’t necessarily always guarantee you’re gonna have a better record,” he feels. “I am really a fan of natural acoustics, of natural spaces. The Record Plant did not have natural spaces. It was the most unnatural. It was designed for totally isolated, multi-track recording, where you don’t have leakage between the tracks. Where you can go and punch in and fix things, and you won’t have anything behind there to give away the fact that you punched in there.

“Stevie Wonder, Songs In the Key of Life? That’s the deadest record ever recorded. That’s the Record Plant sound. I didn’t like to record there because I lacked time to make stuff sound decent, but I liked the people, the gear and the location,” Barncard continues. “Many, like [producer/engineer Jim] Gaines, were able to create hit records from there, and that’s all that counts in the end. But they had the gigantic budgets and my experience was a couple of overnight quickies and two weeks with New Riders of the Purple Sage, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. In the end, we’re talking different styles of producing, and it’s all good.”

Artwork for Stevie Wonder's 'Songs in the Key of Life'

Projects continued to roll into the Plant in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the studio’s ownership was in flux, soon threatening its very existence. Co-founder Gary Kellgren, the engineer/producer who was the artistic force behind the operation, drowned in his Hollywood swimming pool in 1977. In the early ’80s the other co-founder, Chris Stone, sold the Plant to a quadriplegic teenage music fan, Laurie Necochea. In 1984, a year before her death, it was sold to Stanley Jacox.

Around that time, the Pit was rejigged for more constructive purposes. “While I was doing the Con Funk Shun record [‘Electric Lady’], John Fogerty calls me,” Gaines said. “He’s coming out of retirement, quote-unquote, and he wants a studio. I had just opened up [the former Pit as] the little C room in the back. He said ‘Jim, I’m just gonna do this record myself. I’m playing all the instruments. Can you engineer it?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m in the middle of a record, I’ll give you my assistant Jeffrey Norman. Just move into the back. We need to open up the room anyway, and you’ll be easy.’

“When we turned it back into a real studio, Centerfield was the first record cut in that little room. There would be days when I had Starship in one room, Huey Lewis in another room, and Fogerty in the other.”

Artwork for John Fogerty's 'Centerfield'

Yet soon after that, Jacox was accused of manufacturing amphetamines in his home and investing some of the proceeds in the Plant — and the studio was actually taken over by the federal government.

“The day the studio was shut down, I had a session with Journey,” remembers Gaines. “I noticed there’s a lot of cars in the parking lot for 9:30. As I’m approaching the door, here comes federal marshals; all kind of police are surrounding me. They said, ‘We’ve just taken possession of the studio, and we need to interview you.’

“They went through the studio, looking for drugs. They thought that was the source of the ‘drug manufacturing,’ quote unquote,” Gaines says. “They didn’t find any drugs. I mean, there might have been a joint or something in one of the road cases, but they were highly disappointed.

“They basically told me, ‘Look, we’re gonna take possession.’ Fortunately, I had Journey in there with all their gear and stuff. I said, ‘Well, you can’t take possession until I get all my band’s gear out of here, and tapes. ‘Cause we’re working on a record, and you cannot have any of this stuff. It doesn’t belong to the studio.’ I called the band up and said, ‘We gotta clear outta here. Everybody come and get stuff.’

“It was shut down for around six months or so, maybe more. At one point, the federal marshals offered me a position to open and run the studio. I said to them, ‘Look, if my clients knew I worked for the federal marshals, you think that they would come in here? Here’s the deal. Take my secretary, make her the studio manager, and I will come in and do some work.’ I actually opened the studio with Santana when that part reopened.”

Gaines was also working with Santana at the studio for the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

“Carlos and one of his main guys had just left to go shopping when that quake hit. I was working with Chester Thompson doing some organ overdubs. We were in studio A; I didn’t think we were gonna get out of there before that damned thing came down. When it hit, you can feel there’s some low-end rumble or something going down. So CT looks at me and says, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, ‘What are you doing?” And we both said, ‘Uh-oh.’

“And we hit flying into that door, man. We’re out on the ground out in the parking lot, and the ground is rolling along. I had a bottle in my car; we sit in the parking lot, found us some cups, and turned the radio on, listening to ‘Bay Bridge collapsing and the freeway collapsing.’ One of the consoles got beat up pretty bad, and twisted a little bit. We was down for about at least three or four days. Phones didn’t work. The only thing that worked was the fax machine, for some reason. We never figured that out.”

Part 3

When Arne Frager took over the Plant in Sausalito in 1988, he wasn’t much interested in sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

“I was really interested in rebuilding the studio into a really great sound emporium for making records,” Frager said.

If hits are what a studio’s judged by, it generated plenty of those over the next decade and a half or so. It held sessions for big albums by Carlos Santana, Metallica, Dave Matthews, John Lee Hooker, and Mariah Carey, as well as for lesser-selling but celebrated artists like the Kronos Quartet.

A doorway to the Plant, as it looked in November 2016.

“It was a party studio throughout the ’70s, until the government seized it in 1985,” says Frager, as the first two parts of this series illustrate. “I had Herbie Herbert, the manager of Journey, tell me he’d never go there, even though he knew I was rebuilding it and was more serious about business. He said, ‘I tried to talk Journey out of going there, and they went there and wasted lots of money just partying. I didn’t like that.’”

So if the partying, if not eliminated, was no longer as much the focus, what was drawing so many acts to the Plant, both from the Bay Area and beyond?

“You would have the ability to step outside and be surrounded by these gorgeous, tall eucalyptus trees, and walk a few steps out to a beautiful dock by the edge of the bay,” remarks producer/engineer Enrique Gonzalez Müller (now also a professor at Boston’s Berklee College of Music), who was on the staff for several years starting in 1999, and continued to work on Plant projects until its 2008 closure. “But at the same time, you didn’t really feel the need to step out of the studio because the vibe was amazing!

“One of the studios that had a lot of use, called the Garden—which used to be Sly Stone’s personal room back in the day—the lounge for that studio was literally outside, in the open air. The lounge was this beautiful little garden that had fish in a pond and a Jacuzzi that you could relax in. It wasn’t really the type of atmosphere that you find in a lot of big studios where you do want to step out for air and escape the pressure of making records. People just relaxed, hung out, and that level of ease and comfort definitely transpired onto the music being captured within those walls.”

Just because Frager was the owner didn’t mean he always got special treatment. When Van Morrison was booked for an album, “the only words he spoke to me in the month he was at the Plant were ‘Hi, I’m Van’” as Arne was waiting to greet Van the Man at the studio’s front door on the first day of the sessions. When Frager went to Studio C to introduce himself to Starship, their manager “blocked the door and said ‘hey, you can’t come in here,’ and locked the door in front of me.” When Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind kept parking his motorcycle in Arne’s space by the front door, according to Frager, Metallica bassist Jason Newsted relieved himself on the vehicle in rebuttal, though by the time Jenkins came out at night hours later, the stink had evaporated.

Such hijinks, however, seemed to take a back seat to more serious work, such as sessions Gonzalez Müller worked on for the Kronos Quartet’s You’ve Stolen My Heart. “Kronos decided that they were going to record and re-create every single element heard in these [vintage] Bollywood scores, which have gigantic orchestral, super-quirky, unconventional instruments,” he recalls. “We needed to do a ton of overdubs. If they wanted to record one melody, they would record it three, six, eight times to create the sound of a larger orchestra. It became this beautiful monster for us engineers. We had to be on top of this massive amount of musical input that then we had to filter, sift through, and condense into something palatable.

“They brought in Asha Bhosle,” the Indian singer on the original recordings of this material, composed by her late husband, R.D. Burman. Then in her early seventies, “Asha had more energy than any of us, and the Kronos Quartet are an energetic bunch. When she started singing, it was an exact photocopy of what you had heard her do in the ’50s. Every single peak and valley of her vibrato seemed to be performed perfectly, deliberately, and assertively.

“Here we were in a laboratory making this beautifully layered, complex Persian rug one little tedious hair at a time. I might be misquoting the year, but to paraphrase, she shared this anecdote: ‘In 1943, I had to do two albums in one day. I remember reading the score as a young singer, and it had instructions for when to ‘duck,’ because the entire orchestra was recorded with one single microphone, live!’ The flutes were behind her, and if she didn’t duck, the microphone couldn’t capture their fragile sound accurately. That was such a profound story for me for how there’s a million ways that you can capture emotionally captivating music.”

While Frager takes great pride in hits like Santana’s Supernatural (where a Polygram executive who signed Carlos came to sessions for a couple weeks just to hang out because he was such a big fan of the guitarist), he’d also sometimes let up-and-coming bands use the facilities. “We did a band on spec, just to help them, called the Monophonics,” who are from San Francisco and are “kind of a funky horn band. They’re out there touring all over the world doing really well. We gave ‘em the time at the Plant just for their first record. No charge.

“I always felt it was a crime to see a studio with a million-dollar investment, or 2 million, sitting there empty. If people approached me, and had a project—sometimes I had an interest in the project—sometimes we just gave ‘em the studio,” though he acknowledges he also did so for “a long list of bands nobody’s ever heard of.” 4 Non Blondes’ 1993 hit “What’s Up” was also cut at the Plant. But as Arne notes, singer-guitarist-songwriter Linda Perry never brought “another dollar’s worth of business into the Plant” after leaving the band for a solo career.

Frager sold the studio in 2008, although it kept running for another month or two. Since then the Plant in Sausalito has ceased operations, though the building’s now being used by Harmonia, “a health and well-being social club” (as its website describes it).

“We started losing money in 2000 because of Napster,” says Frager. “Young people who used to buy records suddenly found out that you could get music for free. I kept it alive for eight more years with my own money. I put [in] over $1 million, thinking ‘this can’t possibly stay this way. These record companies are gonna figure this out.’ I ran out of the ability to use my own personal funds. By the end of 2007, I could no longer afford to keep the doors open. Nobody’s making any records there, and that’s really what that building is for. They’ve been trying to sell it ever since I closed the doors.”

While Frager has moved on to a new chapter in his life and is now “signing and developing unknown artists,” he maintains the Plant Recordings Studios site “because that’s my brand. Above any studio I’ve ever been in that was a major studio, this place kind of had a laid back, relaxed feel. It was very conducive to making records. I always felt there was magic in that building. I still do.”

For Sale sign for the building formerly housing The Record Plant in Sausalito, November 2016.

Music

Rolling Stones Memorabilia

January 11, 2017 Folkrox Leave a comment

Last month in New York, I saw the Rolling Stones’ massive traveling exhibition of memorabilia, instruments, costumes, photos, and whatnot, Exhibitionism. Part of my intention was to write a blogpost about the exhibit, which was partially foiled by a no-photos policy. They do allow cell phone photos, but I don’t have a phone that can take pictures. That’s why the first graphic here is not of something in the exhibit, but of an EP boasting a cover from one of their first photo sessions, which I bought at a record convention back in the early 1980s for $6. “Where else are you gonna see a picture of Keith Richards looking like this?” was the dealer’s pitch.

Note that “Stoned,” the B-side of the Rolling Stones’ second single, is misspelled “Stones” on this EP.

You’re not going to see it at this exhibition. Now even with nine big rooms, such a space isn’t going to be able to show close to everything. Still, another reason this blogpost isn’t exactly an extended Exhibitionism review is that it was just okay, nothing extraordinary. There wasn’t a whole lot to wow the diehard Stones fan/collector. With ticket prices close to $40, it wasn’t nearly as good a value as that EP, even adjusting for inflation.

Of course, it wasn’t a total loss by any means. I liked the re-creation of the squalid 1963 flat in which Richards, Mick Jagger, and Brian Jones lived, as well as some of the vintage instruments. A fact sheet Brian Jones filled out in 1964 reveals he was a fan of Richie Barrett (original writer/singer of “Some Other Guy,” the first song the Beatles were filmed performing) and the New Orleans R&B label Minit. A tape box for tracks from Their Satanic Majesties Request has working titles for some of the songs (“2000 Light Years from Home” is inexplicably called “Toffee Apple,” for instance).

That’s not enough to fill up a solid blogpost. What the displays did do for me, however, was generate some Stones memorabilia I was unfamiliar with when I searched for some of the things I saw at the exhibit online. For instance, one of the neatest instruments you could see was a Vox amplifier Bill Wyman used when he auditioned for the band in late 1962. As the now well known tale goes, they weren’t particularly eager to recruit Wyman. But Bill was, as Roy Carr wrote in The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record, “embraced not only because of his ability, but because he appeared to possess more amplification equipment than the rest of the group put together.”

The amp that made such an impression back in 1962 doesn’t seem so mighty these days:

Retrieving this image, however, called up a couple cool Vox endorsement ads the group posed for early in their career. (A few such ads can be seen in Andy Babiuk and Greg Prevost’s fine book Rolling Stones Gear: All the Stones’ Instruments from Stage to Studio.)

The shot of Brian Jones on the left is obviously from a later era than the earlier one circa mid-late 1963 on the right, when the Stones were still wearing uniform suits of sorts.

I couldn’t find a Satanic Majesties tape box, but the search coughed up one for their 1964 5 X 5 EP. The great instrumental “2120 South Michigan Avenue” is missing “South” in the title. Much more interesting is that it’s subtitled “(And Muddy Came Too).” This might be a source of (almost certainly false) rumors that Muddy Waters, the blues great the Stones did meet when they went to Chess Records at 2120 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, plays on the track. Also check the note “fade at approx 2 mins—between marks,” though on a German LP (and a CD reissue of the US LP on which this appears), the track runs about a minute and a half longer, that instruction getting discarded.

There were some promo posters for Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed that were new to me, and rare, considering not many are online. As this one for Beggars Banquet (spelled Beggar’s Banquet in the copy) shows, this June 1968 photo session at the seventeenth century Swarkstone Hall Pavilion in Derbyshire, England was also the source for the more famous picture that appears on the cover of the Hot Rocks compilation:

You can stay at this (now restored) building, by the way, though it’s expensive, and its website does not volunteer information about whether you can just go there and walk around the grounds for a few minutes.

As long as I was searching (largely unsuccessfully) for the other late-‘60s promo posters, this ad I’d never seen for the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” single turned up;

Looks like Wyman had a rough night. He looks more worn out than Jones in this picture—not an easy thing to do in 1968.

The film section of the exhibit was kind of disappointing, just offering a few clips from a few of their rockumentaries with some commentary. The poster for Gimme Shelter wasn’t at the exhibit, but it’s interesting as it uses an outtake from the session for their famous December Children’s LP cover shot. Brian Jones wasn’t in the Stones, of course, when Gimme Shelter was filmed in late 1969 more than four years later, and one has to guess New York’s Plaza Theatre just used whatever picture they had quickest access to:

The guitar that Keith Richards used for “Sympathy for the Devil” was one of the more interesting instruments on display. I couldn’t find a picture of that online, but the search generated some picture sleeves for European singles that backed “Sympathy for the Devil” with “Prodigal Son,” an odd choice for a 45 even considering it was a B-side. Maybe this version of a song by bluesman Robert Wilkins (read more about how the Stones might have found his recording of it here) was selected by Decca to deny songwriting royalties to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Here’s the Dutch single, which has a really oddball sleeve design:

It turns out that there’s actually a logical reason the Stones are pictured sailing a ship named Veronica. Radio Veronica was a long-lived Dutch pirate radio station that was still broadcasting when this single came out in 1973—hence the lettering “Veronica’s favourite choice” at the bottom.

Should you visit Exhibitionism, take a walk afterward just a couple blocks north on New York’s great High Line park. The elevated walkway features ever-changing public artworks such as these, which I saw on my visit:

At the southern end of the High Line, there’s also the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the foremost art museums in the US. Here’s a view of the neighborhood from one of its outdoor decks:

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