SH Spotlight We love LOVE! "Forever Changes" Elektra 1967 recording sessions and dates, studios, stories, etc.

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Steve Hoffman, Jun 19, 2013.

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  1. CrimsonPiper

    CrimsonPiper Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    http://www.amazon.com/Forever-Changes-Love/dp/B0015D3YX6
     
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  2. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Leon Russell had a home studio in 1967? Thought it was 1968 that he got his 8-track, etc.
     
  3. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    Hi Mr. Hoffman, just wanted to wrap this up because I found the answer...here's Johnny Echols' quote-

    “Bryan’s singing is just a little out of tune and they didn’t have Auto-Tune software back then to vary the pitch. I tried singing it in that Johnny Mathis voice, but Bryan wanted to sing it. At Bruce’s studio, they only had a four-track machine, so we went over to Western Recorders where they had an eight-track and we switched to that."

    Then Johnny goes back to discussing “Old Man”. So his memory associated that track and Western, and that Western had 8-track by 8-11-67. It’s tough to remember after 50 years! But get this, when you look at the 2-CD disc tray from the 2008 release-your release, there are two recording sheets-one from Western, one from Sunset. The Western recording sheet has the date 8-11-67-it has takes of “The Red Telephone”. On the top of the sheet, the heading has checkboxes for up to ‘four tr.’. The Beach Boys “Smile” was also at Western after the “Something Stupid” session and before “Forever Changes” in the spring of ’67; “Smile” I think was in 4-track too.

    So you were correct about Western having a 4-track in Aug. ’67, and Echols must have misremembered and switched the two. Like you said, that would cancel out the reason to use Western in the first place. Only 2 other possible reasons I can think of; either Sunset happened to be booked for those days or that because Love screwed up the June sessions at Sunset, perhaps someone in the Elektra camp wanted a change of scene for motivational sake-but I’m just guessing here.
     
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  4. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Thank you. I thought I was losing my mind there. Perhaps Elektra had a deal with Western (cut rate booking) or something, don't know, but Western's style was, record on four channels, bounce to one, record on the other three, bounce again, etc. I'm glad they didn't continue there, the album would have sounded like a bad Association album.
     
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  5. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    I do have the book in front of me (Forever Changes by Einarson)-it is a Botnick quote but it doesn't quite sound right to me either. They did 2 vocal overdubs and 1 guitar overdub but Botnick seems uncertain in that part of the quote about exactly how many or which overdubs. Maybe he got confused as well and linked a Leon memory with a Lee memory-it's understandable. But I would think Leon had 4-track not 8-track at his home-all Bruce cared about was the frozen food!:) Botnick did bounce the tracks with overdubs once they got back to Sunset on Sept. 16. There's a mention of this also in the 2001 reissue-notes written by Ben Edmonds but he claims there's no documented proof.

    Yes, could be a deal between Elektra and Western. Love would have thrown out the orchestra if they ended up with the sound of a bad Association album! (Stop Your Motor anyone?)
    Anyway, you're welcome, hope to see you again at some point on the Love album thread-I just realized you changed the title of it to make easier for people to get to-thank you for that.
     
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  6. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Let me just mention one thing. The first Asylum Choir album, that was done at Leon's and it's one inch eight track. Do we know what year that was? 1967 or 1968? That could help in figuring out what was going on....
     
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  7. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    Well the release date was '68 but I thought they first got together in '67. So I'm not sure, might be able to find out. I'm leaning towards that album being recorded after the Love one.
     
  8. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    Here we go-from Leon Russell's website:
    Leon Russell »
    'Leon built a recording studio in his home in 1967 where he and Marc Benno recorded songs which were released on two critically acclaimed records as the 'Asylum Choir'.'
     
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  9. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    8 Track, never 4. That makes sense, but nothing would have been "pre-mixed", there were enough tracks, I'm sure.
     
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  10. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    It's been a few years. Any new information, recording or otherwise?
     
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  11. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    I wanted to add this about Western and when they got their eight-track. Sinatra recorded "That's Life" on the eight track. It malfunctioned and the session had to be bounced to four track while re-recording the strings or something, I forgot.

    That was 1966, wasn't it? So when LOVE showed up, either the cost of the machine was too much for the budget or the machine was booked or whatever. They started on the four-track at Western and went to Sunset Sound for their 8 track, bouncing the 4's to the 8 and carrying on.. At least that's how I reconstruct it..

    I remember reading a rate card at RCA-Victor, Hollywood in the early 1970s when our class visited and even though I didn't keep the card, I remember that the rates were all different. Mono one track was the cheapest, then two-track, even three-track was on the rate card, then four-track, then eight track and even a sixteen which was double the price of the eight.

    It was my feeling that at RCA in 1972, the room was still mainly an eight-track room. If they had a sixteen there was no dedicated room for it.
     
  12. rkt88

    rkt88 The unknown soldier

    Location:
    malibu ca
    that is an awesome retrospective! i remember every studio listed.

    even TTG! even tiny tim sessions with richard perry there lol
     
  13. rkt88

    rkt88 The unknown soldier

    Location:
    malibu ca
    rca rate cards! love it. when hassenger had the stones there 4 track wasn't it in 65? by mid 70's definitely 8 track on the way to 16. but dave and his sound factory went full flying faders ;)
     
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  14. old school

    old school Senior Member

    Does anyone have any information on Tjay Cantrelli? Can’t find anything about him after he left Love after the Da Capo album.
     
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  15. Mr Bass

    Mr Bass Chevelle Ma Belle

    Location:
    Mid Atlantic
    My vague memory is that Tjay passed away sometime in the 1980s. Looking up discographical info doesn't show anything in the 90s or later so that's probably correct. I don't remember any circumstances though.

     
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  16. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Ah, Elise. She's probably a grandma now. Yikes..
     
  17. ranasakawa

    ranasakawa Forum Resident

    Is there a post where you discuss working on Jimi Hendrix Arthur Lee tapes?
    Very interested in this
     
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  18. Maggie

    Maggie like a walking, talking art show

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    He was in a band called Geronimo Black in the 1970s with some Zappa associates. They put out two albums. He actually wrote a lot of their material.

    Apparently his birth name was John Barberis. Post-Love, he was often credited as Contrelli rather than Cantrelli, and the "Tjay" part varied (T.J., TJay, etc.).
     
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  19. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    Hey Mr. Hoffman, well in the Forever Changes boxset Botnick explained that Sunset Sound was booked. From Western, there's a recording sheet photo of "The Red Telephone" and only 4 tracks are listed. They had the drums and bass on one track, lead guitar on the 2nd, guitars on the 3rd, and the 4th is empty. Another photo of a piece of Elektra note paper has some notes for a few songs and above it's written '4 track'.

    Any other info? Well I'm doing a book on the band Love that's almost complete it's called Keep On Shining: A Guide Through The Music Of Love & Arthur Lee. I have a thread started on the forum. The book should be arriving on Amazon for purchase soon. I'm keeping the thread updated in case people are interested. I've done interviews with drummers Michael Stuart-Ware and Justin Polimeni and with help from The Castle fanzine, I have lots of info that didn't make it into previous Love books that were released. It's a mix of song analysis, biographical elements and oral history. It covers all the Love albums plus all the Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean solo albums - even some on Jay Donnellan's (Jay Lewis) band Morning and Tjay Cantrelli/Contrelli's band Geronimo Black and Snoopy Pfisterer's one album. My forum friend @lemonade kid did the graphic design for the covers.

    New Love & Arthur Lee Book -News & Updates
     
    Last edited: Aug 10, 2021
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  20. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Somewhere here, yes. Not sure where.
     
  21. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    @Maggie has it right. He was born John Barberis, he played on Da Capo, and did not really click with the rest of the band due to personality differences and along with Arthur not wanting to bring a 7-piece on the road, Arthur fired him. He wound up with Geronimo Black who had one album in 1972 and broke up soon after. Not much was heard from him through the 70s though he and Michael Stuart received a settlement after suing Arthur for monies not paid. In 1980, a second Geronimo Black album was released but it's not a new album, just left over recordings from when they first got together in the late 60s. By the early 1980s he was playing with The Grandmothers, again made up of some Mothers of Invention alumni similar to Geronimo Black. He left the band and was not on the Grandmothers records that were released in the early 1980s. He had some drug issues in the 1980s and died under some tough circumstances in 1989 - supposedly he was 50 at that point.
    Mr. Hoffman wrote something about it on this thread from 2016 ....

    50 Years of Love & Arthur Lee "Da Capo" "Forever Changes" "Love" & more: Album-By-Album Thread
     
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  22. Maggie

    Maggie like a walking, talking art show

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    Interesting. That would have made him much older than the rest of the band. I can see why they didn't get along.
     
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  23. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    Yeah and he was enigmatic and was already into harder drugs before the other Love members. A couple of quotes -

    From Arthur - “Tjay Cantrelli was playing professionally a little before I was. I remember when Johnny took me out to a place called Cappy’s. It was a club in the Valley, and Tjay had a band that played there. I thought that Tjay was extremely talented and what we needed for the change from folk-rock into more jazz-rock type music.”

    And from Kenny Forssi - “Tjay was a bohemian beatnik. He was a saxophone/flute player. Tjay was even more aloof than we were, he was kind of a mystery man. A lot of times he’d be among the missing. We’d wonder where the heck Tjay was, and he’d be off in some little nightclub playing the flute to some poetry or something. He was a little farther out than we were, but still a lot of fun to be around.”
     
  24. TheDailyBuzzherd

    TheDailyBuzzherd Forum Resident

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    Never been to LA, but of all California recordings,
    “… Between Clark and Hilldale” seems to capture
    LA street life the best. This one stands out.
     
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  25. TheDailyBuzzherd

    TheDailyBuzzherd Forum Resident

    Location:
    Northeast USA

    Ain’t that the truth! Rhino was my musical life blood in The ‘80s.
    While everyone was buying new CDs, I was buying oldies on vinyl.
    Rhino had decent pressings too. The Nice Price releases?
    Not so much. BAD pressings by Columbia and other majors.
     
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