Coming up with a title took longer than composing the song, but they wound up taking the key word from each verse, (“Show” “Need” “Love”), and calling it “ Sho’ Need Love.” The whole song was done in layers with everything, including Placco’s hauntingly inept guitar break and Joey’s multitracked vocals, thought of on the spot. They had a lot of fun putting tons of echo on the piano and manipulating the tape speed to get bizarre effects. The studio has a weird sounding rinky-tink piano, and Keith and Joey composed a song for it in about five minutes. Despite Donn’s clunky drumming and Placco’s stunningly bad guitar playing, the group chose to move on rather than redo anything, so there was time for a third song. (It was a pretty run down studio.) The Dickens came prepared with two virtually identical songs from their concerts : “ Don’t Talk About My Music” and “ Pollution Revolution.” As I recall, both were performed live, with minimal overdubs. We had three hours in the studio and most of the time was taken up by the engineer, Michael, setting up the microphones and trying to get the tape recorders to run. Sax player Keith Spring generally played bass (though on “Sho’ Need Love,” which he and Joey composed on the spot, he overdubbed most of the instruments.) Trombonist Donn Adams – who’d always wanted to play drums and sing at the same time (like Ringo Starr and Donn’s #1 idol at the time, Karen Carpenter) – played drums and sang. Joey, a superb bass player, played keyboards for the Dickens. Placco, who before joining the Dickens had never done anything more with a guitar than carry one, was the Dickens’ lead guitarist. Nicholas for the Dickens), Keith and Donn of the Whole Wheat Horns, and NRBQ roadie, Don Placco. The day of the Dickens session, the four guys who showed up were Joey Spampinato (who still called himself Jody St. And I thought the Dickens record would be a lot of fun to do. I really believed in The Children of God and I was disappointed when their A&M single went nowhere. I looked at this as an opportunity to record a group I’d recorded in the past for A&M ( The Children of God), and, of course, the Dickens. They had a lot of unbooked time and as long as Scepter got first refusal rights to the record, I could record anyone I wanted. One weekend Earl dragged me upstate to see a Dickens/NRBQ concert and it was amazing! With half the audience screaming, cheering and laughing, and the other half booing, the Dickens performed the loudest, funniest set I’d ever seen, ending with the group fighting one another on stage, with the instrument-clash becoming part of the music!Ī few weeks later I was doing a radio commercial in the Scepter studio when the engineer, Michael Wright, mentioned that if I ever had anybody I wanted to record, I was welcome to do so at Scepter. Dickens soap! Dickens perfume! Dickens gas stations! (“Pump up at Dickens.”) Sure, there were Beatles wigs and pencil cases and such. Earl became the pseudo manager of the pseudo group, and he had big plans, including selling Dickens franchises (since you didn’t have to know how to play an instrument to be in the Dickens, anyone could be a member, and every town could have their very own, officially licensed Dickens.) Earl’s ideas went way beyond conventional licensed merchandise. That meant Terry could not be a member…he could play anything! But all the other guys, the Whole Wheat Horns ( Donn Adams and Keith Spring) and various NRBQ roadies would all take turns as the Dickens, playing music as loud as they could, as long as they could, until they were literally booed off the stage.Įarl Carter, the Columbia Records copywriter who worked on NRBQ became a big fan of the group and used to travel upstate on weekends to see the NRBQ perform, and he would come back to the office with Dickens stories that would keep me in stitches. In order to play in the Dickens, you had to play an instrument that you weren’t very good at playing. Born out of fun and frustration, the Dickens were the group that NRBQ could never be…loud, dumb, lousy musicians…exactly the type of group that was becoming successful at the time ( Grand Funk Railroad was a particular inspiration). Most weekends they didn’t even have gigs, so to keep in practice, they would perform free concerts in a big field in upstate New York, in or around Saugerties where most of them lived. NRBQ had recorded two albums for Columbia with no great success. In 1970 I was working as an advertising copywriter for Columbia Records in New York and doing some free-lance production of radio commercials for various other record labels, Scepter among them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |