Live at RCA
E.J. Gold & Friends
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I'll tell you the story of what happened with the
recording at RCA.
First of all, I had been recording at RCA for a number of years. I started there with Harry, as you know, then I went to a lot of sessions as a
photographer. Bob Segarini & the Family Tree, then thee was the Airplane and there were others.
In 1971, we moved up to Crestline. In 1972, the UCLA group came up -- about 25 people. Between them they expressed the wish to become a work rock
group. In other words, a rock group with the intention of disseminating the ideas in the form of rock music. I did not determine whether this
was a legitimate or illegitimate request. I didn't care. It didn't matter to me whether they wanted to be rock musicians or wanted to be
workers in the Work, expressing it through rock. It didn't matter.
So we went down to Los Angeles and we went to Murray Stein's across the street. When I was
working with the AF of M, local 47 Musicians Union I was getting work there. Right across the street
was M.K. Stein.
M.K. Stein was this great place where you can buy incredible instruments and the owner was very
friendly to people who were coming our of Union headquarters. He worked with all the musicians
and was very fair. I picked up a great German double bass from him and a bouzouki. And we
picked up the congas, and a wonderful goombah. They're still with me.
Then we picked up all kinds of percussion things. We bought a $10 tam -- tambourine -- and took the
head off the thing and it became good, and it was the cheapest tambourine in the store, but it had
the greatest pitch, tremendous timbre and pitch. So we assembled all these things.
We had a piano that Jeff Green had brought up from his bookstore down in Los Angeles on Hollywood
Boulevard. He brought the whole bookstore up and part of the thing was a piano. So we put the
piano downstairs and we used that to compose "Epitaph", and then later on we brought it into
the recording studio and we used it in the recording studio downstairs in Red House. And
that's where all this took place.
We set up a recording studio downstairs. I shouldn't say recording studio, it really was a
rehearsal studio downstairs in Red House. Basically, I told people, "Lock yourselves in here
for a month and just work out as many hours a day as you can. don't do anything else. There's
nothing else you may do. We'll bring food, we'll slip it under the door. You can take an hour in
the yard if you don't actually talk to the other prisoners."
So they locked themselves in this room. They didn't lock themselves in literally, but they did
spend all their waking hours, all their daytime hours and nighttime hours doing this. Out of 24
hours, they were able to spend 18 or 20 together in the studio. And they rehearsed. Now keep in
mind not one of these people played any instruments when they started out, so they had to
learn how to play bass, and piano, and they used an electric bass downstairs and I had the acoustic
bass upstairs and that was my instrument. I used that. And that was a bowed bass primarily for some
of the things that we were doing at that time, so that's why I needed to reserve that.
So they clamored and clattered and hooped and hollered and whooped and banged and binged and
bonged in every direction downstairs. You could hear this muffled wabum babump, wabum babump,
wabum baaabump. It was then that I knew that their sense of time was occult, very very occult.
Oz Fritz described their tempo as loose. I would say that it is more like on vacation. It was kind
of like driving with Joyce Kenyon. it's one of those things that reminds you that you have to
spend for $5 or $10 in an amusement park to get the same ride. you know, you go forward and back,
forward and back, you lurch forward, zoom, and then screech, the brake goes on with this, there's
just no acceleration, and then suddenly acceleration again, and no acceleration. And it's
kind of like having an alternating current whiplash going through you at any given moment.
And that's kid of what the time was, the tempo of this group was. So don't expect anything better
than the kid of tempo that we had to work with and we had to suffer through. Now, here's the good
part.
After a month, I called Al Schmidt. Al had been
at RCA as an A&R man for quite some time. I knew
him a long, long time. I said, "Look, I need to
come to L.A. and we need to get some studio time.
Can you recommend a studio?" He says, "Oh hell,
come here. It's $75 an hour, but you can get the
overdub, mix down time, and all that for nothing.
I'll give you that in a small studio."
So, it worked out to the same as I would spend at
Goldstar or anyplace else. So I said, "Yeah,
sure, that's great." Wally Heider would have cost
me $15,000 a minute. It was just brand new and
nobody went into Wally Heider unless they had a
gold album that they knew they were going to cut.
So, we went into RCA, which I wanted to do anyway
because I knew the people there, and Al's brother,
Richie Schmidt, was our producer and he also was
working the board.
There was Dick Bogert whom I knew from Harry's
sessions and from Bob Segarini sessions and from
the Jefferson Airplane sessions, so I knew these
guys very, very well. I knew the mic man, I knew
the transport deck engineer, and I knew the
equipment.
I knew the capabilities of the equipment and how
much we could put in there, and so forth. And the
fact is these guys were back from the four-track
days, so I knew that Richie could pull stuff in
and just pile it in there with no tracks at all,
and here we had eight tracks to work with.
Oh my God, this was an amazing number of tracks at
that time. Now it's five million tracks because
it's all digital and it doesn't seem to matter.
It does. It gets kind of junky and piled up and
starts to get, what we call, busy when you put too
much down. Well, most of what you'll hear,
there's too much put down in the first place, but
let me tell you the circumstances under which it
was put down and you'll understand why it happened
this way.
The group gathered up their instruments at the end
of this month and Richie Schmidt was going to be
their producer. They knew only that they were
going down to Los Angeles to some studio. In
fact, I think that they knew they were going to
RCA. Ken and Toni Paulson, Mary Ritter, Wayne
Ritter, I believe, and Ron Matthies were at this
session. Ken and Toni did most of the photography
of the session.
So we showed up with these newbie musicians who
had never played instruments before in their lives
and suddenly they had taught themselves to play
piano, bass, guitar and sing, they taught
themselves to presumably do everything. The only
thing I didn't ask them to do was to write songs,
so I wrote out a number of lyrics and I said,
"Here, use these."
Excepting the fact that they couldn't come up with
lyrics right away, however, I had assumed that
they were going to, at some point, substitute
their own songs before the end of the month. They
didn't so that, as it turned out. So they had to
use the songs that I wrote. So these are songs
that I wrote.
I'll tell you the story briefly because it's worth
telling. We showed up at 7 o'clock in the morning
and everybody was supposed to be there. Of
course, the engineers were there, they were being
paid to be there and it's their job and they know
to be there, so they were.
And Ron Matthies and I showed up and hung out in
the studio for about 10 minutes, and finally
realized that the group was not here yet. So we
told Richie to go ahead and roll the tape and we'd
just do something. So we sat at the piano and we
started playing two-hand piano and, four-hand
piano. Cut our fingers to bleeding hell and at
the end of this tremendous piece, Richie said,
"Ready to roll." It happens to every musician.
It happened in this particular case.
Now, by the way, both of these RCA sessions, in
fact, 3 RCA sessions occurred within a couple of
days of each other. They al occurred in January
of 1972. So, I'll get back to the story of what
happened. Well, we went through the whole
session, Ron and I, went through the whole
session, and finally when we were just mixing
down, the group arrived.
Now, the very first session that we'll go back
to...here we are, back in the flashback alert.
We're moving back now a few days to the very first
session at RCA -- January 11, 1972, and Richie
Schmidt is waiting. These guys come in and they
set up. Now, I don't know if you can imagine
this, but these are newbie musicians, they have
never been in the studio before and they've barely
played instruments before and they're setting up.
So, there's an awful lot to do.
So 2 hours was taken with Richie explaining where
to sit, how to use the cans -- that means the
headphones -- where to put the amplifier, where to
so-and-so, and not to crank everything up because
it doesn't have to be cranked up. You've got a
microphone right there. It's no big deal. You
can write out what it's going to be, 2 inches out
from...you don't have to get out to the audience
300 feet away or 3000 feet away.
So everybody had to kind of tone down, and the
drummer, who was supposed to be coming in from the
Hesby Street group never showed up, so we had no
drums. The base player was going to have to
provide all of the beat. So, I quickly ran around
the corner to Wallich's Music City to rent a drum
kit and that was where, I met a high school
student named Bob Bachtold who was visiting
Hollywood. He was a drummer so he joined us and
that was the first time we played together.
So somehow, some way or another, we got through
with our impromptu drummer, but then we couldn't
find anybody to do lyrics, to do the vocals for
Wizards, so I ended up doing the vocals for
Wizards as well. It was supposed to have
been Ange and Party Abel doing the lyrics, we hear
them in other things.
Now, I'll tell you this wild story. At the very
end of this thing, we started to sit down to just
plain jam. We were going to do about a 10 minute
jam, something like that. Just take up the rest
of the record. These people, you can't imagine
what it was like to jam with these people. I
mean, they had no concept whatever of tempo, no
idea where they were going to go, and no idea of
how to build a bridge, and then go from verse to
verse to bridge, and so forth. They had no idea
how to build these things -- A-B-B-A. The name of
that group, of course, the concept of how you
construct musical compositions.
Anyway, they began to play, and as they started to
set up for this jam, in walked X and Y, I will
call them for their safety sake. These were part
of the horn section from a very, very famous New
Orleans group. Let's leave it at that. Then, in
walked a piano player and he was from another very
well-known group up in San Francisco, and then
another guy walks in and he is a bass player, and
he's a friend of mine from previous RCA sessions,
and so forth. These guys, said, "Well, we'll just
sit in for a little while."
Just as we're sitting there talking, a union guy
walks in the door. And he says, "You guys are not
playing on this session, are you?" "No, we're
just sitting here. We're only friends." The
union guy walked back out again and at this point,
one of the guys was posted at the door to give us
warning if he came back. "You know what the union
guy looks like?" "Yes, I do." "Fine, stand at
the door. If he comes back in, you give us at
least one minute's warning, and we're dead."
We're just sitting around and we're just talking.
Cause they would have been in serious trouble, not
only with the union, but also with their labels
because these were very, very big guys and very,
very major labels. So they're all sitting around
playing and, of course, they're playing with the
newbie musicians. And you can hear the newbie
musicians kind of going twang, twang, twang with
these horribly, horrendously out of tune
instruments, horrendously out of time, and so
forth. And through all of this, Richie is in the
control room hysterical with laughter watching
this whole thing go on. And we played in a circle
without baffles totally live. So what you're
hearing is a complete live performance. There's
no second take, there's no overdubs and there's
lots of mistakes. So enjoy it as an archive
recording, RCA live 1972, January 1972. We'll
turn the clock back now.
Songs include:
- 1. Don't Be Rash (11:48)
- 2. Wino (2:43)
- 3. Fishin' With My Best Friend's Pole (2:19)
- 4. Wizzards (2:00)
- 5. Laughing Cosmos (4:05)
- 6. Approaching Amore (4:14)
- 7. No Stone Unturned (7:50)
- 8. A Peace of Music (13:57)
- 9. Dissolving Radiation (1:36)
- 10. Don't Be Rash [Jaw Harp Version] (8:10)
© 1998
Cloister Recordings. All rights reserved.
All songs © 1972 E.J. Gold (BMI)
Published by Union Label Music
Produced by E.J. Gold and Richie Schmidt
Recorded live at RCA Studios, L.A., CA
Engineered by Al Schmidt
Mixed by Richie Schmidt
Remastered for CD by Oz Fritz
CD-M178
$16.97
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