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DownTown Blog – Fly

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With the release of the 21st Century RnR album, I felt like I had made peace with the end of an era. The songs represented the best of the work I did with my engineer of 20 years, Ben Elliott. It was time to move on and I was ready to do it. The release of the 21st Century album was timed with going into the studio to record new material in a new studio with a new engineer.

For 20 years I had recorded at Ben’s Showplace Studios in Dover, NJ. The studio was gone with Ben so I had to find a new place to record. Change was in the air. I sold my house of 40+ years during the Covid Pandemic and had moved 80 miles south down the GSP. A year after Ben’s death I closed on my new house and realized I was only a half hour from Shorefire Studios in Long Branch, NJ where I had recorded the On E Street sessions with Garry Tallent and Max Weinberg. 

Shorefire Entrance

Garry was a co-owner of the studio then and I hadn’t been back since he sold his interest in it. A guy named Joe DeMaio had bought the studio. I didn’t know Joe, but as it would turn out, we had many things in common, including being guitar players. What was amazing was how we had managed to never meet before I walked into the studio in January of 2022. My fellow compatriots in the enterprise were 2 old friends–Steve Holley and Paul Page. It had been a while since we had played and recorded together.

Paul, Robert & Steve

What I didn’t know was that Steve had been working with Joe at Shorefire for 20 years! As is usually the case, we picked up as if we had just seen each other yesterday. Covid had surely changed everything but some things never change, and as far as I was concerned, that was definitely a good thing. 🙂

I found out very quickly just how fast and on target Joe DeMaio is as an engineer. Setup was a breeze and Joe had the sound of the drums down with very minimal sound checks. We were recording from the word go. That was something I was not used to. But Joe knew the sound of his room. Having briefly talked beforehand, Joe told me he had set Steve’s drums up like Ringo’s kit and that was no exaggeration because they sounded great! Also, Joe had replaced the original MCI board with a classic Helios console, one of the last to be made. This was the console used in all those classic 60s and 70s recordings in the UK. It had THE sound!!

Joe DeMaio at the Helios console

I was originally planning to work on 5 songs but we ended up recording10 tracks. One of the songs had different versions. I was not a real fan of a song called Fly. I mean, I liked it but it wasn’t exciting me in its original form. What was exciting me was doing a different version of it ala Buddy Holly. Paul was very much for doing it but Steve was a bit reticent about it. He thought it was a great song and was afraid I would release the Buddy Holly version instead. However, he finally agreed to record a BH version, setting up his drums like Jerry Allison, the drummer for The Crickets.

Now you’re probably thinking, Buddy Holly?? Yes Buddy Holly. In fact, the original title of Fly was Buddy Holly. That was before I had any lyrics. For some reason, I kept hearing Buddy Holly influences in the music on the demo. So much so, that I wanted to record a version that was based on Buddy’s Peggy Sue. And we did! I still have some work left on it before I can mix it, but this track will be released someday! 🙂

Robert on the Breedlove

It was the original version of Fly that we cut that would take me by surprise. I knew exactly what acoustic guitars I was going to record on it, including the 12-string Rickenbacker. What I didn’t know was that the 12-string Ric would be recorded through an early 60s white Vox AC30 with the Blue Celestion Alnico speakers…a Beatles geek orgasm if there ever was one! The Ric sounded amazing through it! The song took on a whole new character for me after that. There’s a bit of a laid-back Tom Petty feel to it that works really well. Recording the vocals was a breeze and it would be the 1st song I ever had Steve Holley sing harmony on.

The day before he came down to record vocals, Steve had lost one of his oldest friends. He seemed to be in a sad place but I think having him come down to record vocals helped to lighten his load a bit. He had some ideas for the harmonies that made me rethink the parts of the song. One was in the main refrain which acts like a bridge in the song. I had recorded a high harmony on the demo but Steve didn’t hear it that way. He heard a lower harmony for it and I was glad he did because I wasn’t sure about the harmony on the demo.

By not singing a harmony over the lead vocal on that part, it allowed me to keep the focus on the main melody and that was helpful. But in working on the song, it took on a zen-like quality for me that I had never experienced before. The mix was one of the easiest I’ve ever done, which owes a good deal to Joe DeMaio’s engineering. But it also had a very calming effect on me, which was odd. The song somehow transformed into something I really dug and I decided I had to release it as the 1st Single from the sessions! 🙂

Fly was recorded in January and February, mixed in March, and released in May. To date, it’s getting airplay on 100+ stations in 25 countries around the world. I also decided to make it my 1st single release at AAA Radio in the US in over 6 years. That just might be too long a time to be away but I also decided to release the song When The Angels Sing as a AAA Exclusive and part of the Fly single release. Steve also sang harmony on that track, but I’ll save talking about it for another day.

Fly just seems like a song for this point in time. I wrote it during the Covid lockdown and I think it speaks to a lot of people around the world who just want to get out and about again. At the time I wrote it I was just trying to lighten up a bit from some of the more intense songs I was working on. But as I played it for people, their feedback made me look at the song in a totally different way. It’s not easy trying to put complicated ideas in a simple straightforward way, which is what Fly seems to do. It’s one of my favorite tracks now.

All in all, I’m having the time of my life working with Joe D. at Shorefire. I’m a retro-sounding artist that has to deal with “classic rock” comparisons but that’s what you’re going to sound like if you’re trying to compete with recordings made 50-60 years ago. It comes with the territory. In doing so, I don’t sound like anybody else and having the chance to work with a Helios board only enhances the sound. Also, these are much different recordings from any others I’ve done before and a challenge to me as a producer. I could not ask for more! 🙂

DownTown Blog – DownTown Mystic On E Street Deluxe

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After going 4 years between releasing albums, DownTown Mystic has released 3 in the last 3 months! Ok, technically Welcome To Sha-La Land is not a DownTown Mystic album but DownTown Mystic is featured on all the tracks and released the Test Of Time single from it. But the release of the DownTown Mystic: Used Records History 1979-1985 album in November sparked the idea for the release of DownTown Mystic On E Street Deluxe. Going through the archives and listening to the music made back in the 80s and then releasing it was somewhat liberating. All those years of silence would finally be rewarded because of the reaction that the music received from fans and especially from the airplay at Radio.

Living in New Jersey, everyone knows Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band is the biggest thing that ever happened to the state. And that’s pretty BIG when you consider that Frank Sinatra, Tom Cruise and Bon Jovi also come from New Jersey, as well as many others like Jack Nicholson! People like to make fun of the Garden State but just look at those names!! Seriously, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb here. Come on people!! In the 80s Bruce was “The Boss” and about to release the biggest record of his career—Born In The USA. At the time, I happened to be working with his bass player, Garry Tallent.

As previously mentioned in the Used Records History blog post, I had met Garry when I was in The Tupelos, and Garry would record and play a show with us. We re-connected a couple of years after I left The Tupelos and Garry had returned from The River world tour. Garry had bought part ownership in a studio in Long Branch called Shorefire Recording. He was interested in learning to be a studio engineer, and when I asked him why he told me in part because of what he saw had happened with my band when he recorded with us in Washington D.C. That had been a disastrous situation where the engineer had sabotaged our sessions. That’s another long story but I knew what he meant. He said he never wanted that to ever happen to him. So lesson learned! 🙂

Garry & Max
Photo by Danny Clinch

I sent some tapes to Garry and he picked some songs to record. Hard Enough was his pick and when it came time to cut the track he had contacted the E Street Band’s drummer—“Mighty” Max Weinberg to come down and play with us. I thought this was going to be interesting because even before Max had gotten the gig with Bruce, he was already well known in my town. He was a BMOC in high school because of his drumming and when he showed up at the studio while setting up to record Hard Enough, I started throwing out names of people we both went to high school with. Max had graduated the year before me but we knew some of the same people, so we started reminiscing about our alma mater—Columbia High School in Maplewood, NJ.

While mentioning various names of people we had in common, at one point Max stopped and asked me, “Do you remember this girl?”—and was about to say her name, when I looked at him and we both said her name together, which really got Max going, “YES, you remember her??!!” LOL Garry had been slightly paying attention to our conversation, but when Max and I both roared about this girl (who I will not name to save her any embarrassment), he wanted to know all about her. Garry asked us, “Who is this girl? I want to meet her!” Max began to tell Garry about the hottest girl in our HS, and how every red-blooded male in that school would drool over her. I added that she was like a Playboy Centerfold at 17, but looked like 25. The irony was that the song we were about to record was probably written using her, from my subconscious, as the model for the girl in the song! Crazy, right?

Needless to say, the good vibes carried over to the session because Max kills on Hard Enough and Garry’s bass line reminds me a bit of the bass line he played on Springsteen’s Ramrod, which is a fave of mine. Like any good classic RnR song, there’s a double meaning that’s sexual in nature. However, I must confess that the double entendre of “it gets hard enough to love her” was more by accident than planned. The only reason I wrote hard enough was that “it gets difficult to love her” didn’t fit or sound right. The whole song is about how difficult this girl makes this guy’s life, but she’s too hot for him to say no to. Garry had a good laugh about me and Max still being able to rave about this girl so many years later. How could this song not be about her? I’m telling you she was hot!! 🙂

We also cut Sometimes Wrong that day, which I picked. The version that appears on the Deluxe album is listed as a “demo”.  This is mainly due to never quite getting the track right. Garry and I would tinker with it over a 2 year period, adding parts and mixing at least 3 different versions. Going back and listening now it’s easy to hear “Mighty” Max and how bombastic he could be live. He’s the highlight on the track. It wasn’t until the Standing Still sessions with Steve Holley and Paul Page that I cut the original version the way I wrote it and it finally worked. I was probably too close to be objective because the “demo” gets rave reviews now from reviewers. But that was the great thing about working with Garry because he would try everything. He had the studio time and it didn’t matter if something worked or didn’t because we were learning as we went.

At the next session we cut And You Know Why and Way to Know. Max had just written his book called The Big Beat where he interviewed great drummers like Ringo, Charlie Watts, Levon Helm and Hal Blaine to name a few. I think he really took to heart what some of these great drummers told him so he could become a better well-rounded drummer. On And You Know Why he put that knowledge to good use. It might just be the least “Mighty” Max you’ll ever hear on a song he plays on, but he’s still solid keeping the groove against Garry’s economical bass line.

The next time I was going to the studio, I stopped at Garry’s to give him a ride and he told me to come in and sit down. He had headphones out by his stereo and told me to put them on. He then put on a record and I heard the Born In The USA album for the first time in its entirety. This was a week before the official release of the album, and as with all things Bruce, I had to swear not to tell anyone that I had heard the record until its release. The album floored me, and I understood why Garry played it for me when we got to the studio.

Up until then, Garry was not interested in using synths but after Born In The USA, it was obvious that synths were now going to be a big part of Bruce’s sound. In the studio waiting for us and already set up with his synths, was Joe Norosavage, who Garry had brought in to play on the tracks we recorded with Max. Joe immediately made a great impression when he came up with a cool lead line for And You Know Why. The rest of the session went just as smoothly and I started up a friendship with Joe, who would work on many of my projects in the coming years. I’m pleased to have been able to unearth the tracks and make them a part of the DownTown Mystic On E Street Deluxe album.

Looking back, the thing that I find really interesting is that at the time, Garry wasn’t doing any recording for himself with the studio. I couldn’t believe it when he finally recorded and put out a solo record a few years back. I never knew he had it in him and when I asked him why now, he said “67”. He had just reached that age and felt if he didn’t do it now, he never would. It just goes to show it’s never too late, even for an “old pro” like Garry Tallent. 🙂

DownTown Blog – DownTown Mystic: Used Records History 1979-1985 Part 2 “A Long Strange Trip”

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What a long strange trip it’s been…or words to that effect. Going back into my musical archives and listening to all the songs I recorded 35-40 years ago brought back memories…both good and bad…but mostly good. The main thing I took away from the experience was how much the music always mattered to me. I left a band that was my life for 10 years to go solo because I wanted to concentrate on writing better songs and getting more into the recording process…and that’s exactly what I did. I stayed true to myself and the music, and that’s not something many people can say.

When putting the album together I decided to arrange the songs chronologically by the year they were recorded, starting with 3 tracks by The Tupelos (1979-80). The only exception was the 1st track Please Be There, which features Garry Tallent from The E Street Band on bass. This song had been on the 45 single with Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little 16 from 1979. We changed the arrangement with Garry. I thought it should be the lead track because it was recorded as part of a Production Deal that was the last highlight for the band.

The Tupelos 1980

Actually, it was that single that attracted Garry to the band at the end of 1979, when he was recording The River with Bruce and The E Street Band. Garry came over to my house in 1980 to jam with the band and agreed to play bass and record with us when we got a deal. We got the deal and Garry came down with us to record in Washington DC and then last played with us on stage at The Fast Lane in Asbury Park. Garry would be our bass player from April to August 1980. There’s no other band that can make that claim outside of Springsteen himself. LOL

https://soundcloud.com/shalaman/sweet-little-sixteen

I left The Tupelos in early 1981 and went to LA, driving cross country with the bass player George (who we met at that Fast Lane show). My publisher hooked us up with Gregg Thomas, a drummer who had worked with Neil Young and Leon Russell and we recorded some songs with him. This was really the 1st time that I got to play with a pro drummer and I learned a lot from it. There’s something that I can only describe as “solid” by the way guys like him, Max Weinberg and Steve Holley all play. It was this same quality that I saw in Tommy Mastro when I heard him play with The Discontent that made me want to get back into recording my songs again.

Robert at Alley Studios 1981 N. Hollywood

 When I got back from LA I knew what I wanted to do and went solo, recording my 1st project in 1982. I would play all the instruments with the exception of bass, enlisting the help of my good friend and fellow Aquarian Monte Farber. Monte has since gone on to become one of the leading New Age authors in the world. Along with his wife, artist Amy Zerner, they’ve created some of the best-selling divination systems ever created. You can hear Monte on the Welcome To Sha-La Land release and his own album, Good Karma.

I chose the 3 best tracks recorded with Monte for this album. Baby Believe Me, Night Time Girl and I Just Want To Love You all feature piano as the main instrument. This was something new for me and helped to add a new dimension to my songs. Night Time Girl was written right after I wrote Brian Jones in 1980 and both were in The Tupelos setlist. I Just Want To Love You was one of the 1st songs I wrote for The Tupelos and it was the last song I recorded with the band. I also recorded it with Gregg Thomas in LA. I clearly had a thing for this song because I couldn’t let it go of it until I had a definitive version that I felt was IT. You’ll notice that I have 1979 & 1982 listed for Sweet Lies. This song was recorded with the band as part of the 1979 Single session and then I went back to it, recording piano and re-mixing it during my solo session in 1982. 30 years later, I borrowed the intro and verse chords to write Read The Signs with Bruce Engler.

The next 2 songs, You Didn’t Know and Same Old Lover are from a 1983 8-tk demo session which would be a very important turning point for me. It’s not these songs alone, but the ones that were also recorded and are missing–the original versions of And You Know Why & Way To Know. These were much different from the versions I recorded with Garry Tallent & Max Weinberg. This was also the 1st time I ever played bass on a recording, thanks to swapping my pedal steel with Garry for one of his bass guitars. I wish I could find those original demos, especially Way To Know. Most likely I sent the reel to reel tape with them on it to Paul Schindler, my music attorney at the time. It was another era.

The remaining 4 songs (1985) were the last recordings I did until starting the DownTown Mystic Project 12 years later. I think you can hear a marked improvement in my writing and recording. I hooked up with Joe Norosavage, a keyboard player I met through Garry Tallent. The 80s and MTV were in full swing, as were synths, sequencers and drum machines. I decided to forego a band to make a state of the art recording. Turn Around and Go gets the full 80s treatment here. Who could have guessed that Fly Like The Wind would be discovered 30 years later and become one of my top sync-licensing tracks!

If you’re wondering why I called the project Used Records it’s because those songs from 1985 would be released in Europe on a cd called Used Records by a German label called Long Island Records in 1995. I was managing bands by this time and was out in LA when I met the label’s owner and all-around nice guy, Sondi. He wasn’t interested in a band I was shopping at the time but then we got to talking about this project I had done with the likes of Garry Tallent and Max Weinberg. This seemed to get Sondi’s attention and we made a deal. I wanted to get my songs on a cd since all my tapes were wearing thin, so this was a win-win! 🙂

Robert & 1976 Les Paul

It’s been strange to go back over songs I wrote and recorded in another century. I still think about getting Nik Cohn’s letter in the mail 3 years ago and just how strange it was to read his words. I look at it now like someone tapping me on the shoulder, trying to get my attention to look at this music. There’s certainly karma at work here. So in a very real sense, this album feels inevitable to me now. As I said at the start of this post, what a long strange trip it’s been. 🙂

Listen to DownTown Mystic: Used Records History 1979-1985