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You must have begun recording the album then too, how did you feel about
being with Elektra and Paul Rothchild taking over as manager and producer?
We were very proud to be on Elektra, with the Doors, Paul Butterfield and Judy Collins.
But we ended up with Paul Rothchild, talk about the fox guarding the hen house!
That’s why I had to go in the end.
You had problems working with him?
He was rather power mad. I remember once I was trying to do an overdub on a song I
had written and he was making me so uptight I couldn’t do it. There were people like
Neil Young in the control room, and all these girls that liked us, and I heard this voice
come over the intercom “you know, there are 10,000 guitar players in this town that
can do this track if you can’t do it” it was just devastating.
Is it correct that you originally recorded some of the album with Robbie but his
parts were later overdubbed by Ralph when he came in after Robbie had
been sacked by Paul Rothchild?
We had to redo some stuff that Robbie had played on because Ralph and Cliff
changed the band a lot just by the nature of Ralph being a keyboard player. Paul was
here and there dissatisfied with some of the stuff and made us do it over. But he was
also trying to select material for us, trying to find songwriters, he didn’t think that what
we had was strong enough. He gradually had more and more to do with the
composition of the album and the direction of the band.
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Doug Hastings also auditioned, unsuccessfully, for the group at this point as a replacement for Robbie, what do you remember about him?
He was a wonderful guitarist with the Daily Flash and a fine, fine player. I really rated him alongside Ron Morgan from the West Coast Pop Art Experimental band and Danny Weiss from Iron Butterfly, under rated players.
Although Robbie wasn’t a part of the group anymore he remained close to you guys, what was the light guitar he invented?
He invented a thing that he could carry around with him that lit up corresponding to where he put his fingers on the neck. He was such a great brother and an amazing fellow he invented a way to contribute even though he wasn’t in the band anymore.
There was a real diversity of material on the album it sounds very eclectic. All the songs have a very individual character, your songs contrast very well with Doug Lubahn’s compositions.
Doug was a damn good songwriter in his own right, Night Sounds Loud and Sand are great tracks and he was just starting out writing then. A wonderful musician, he played bass left-handed and upside down, a wonderful musician who could play and write. I always thought Doug had the best potential of any of us, he didn’t write as much but everything he wrote was very powerful and very unique. We really used to enjoy playing Night Sounds Loud and Sand; sometimes we closed the set with Sand.
Mike Ney’s “A Child’s Smile” always struck me as being a very delicate piece of psychedelia, not what you would really expect from a drummer.
Michael was a sensitive guy and an underrated drummer, he was kinda overshadowed by Dallas he’s a very solid drummer in his own right. When Dallas and Michael were on it was like the heavens opened up. They actually worked on parts, it may not sound like it but they actually worked.. "I’ll do this high hat, you do this tom tom ride," they worked out things to stay out of each others way and to contribute to the overall sound.
The two covers work very well with Cliff’s dramatic delivery, especially Mr Blue.
We completely turned that inside out, Tom Paxton told us he liked what we did with that, he told us in New York that he was quite happy with what we had done with it. We used to get pretty crazy by the time we got to that one when we played live. I never forget one time we played that and I ended up with just one string, the A string. Cliff brought something to it that we wouldn’t otherwise have had. Cliff was amazing, one time we were playing in New York and the power in the club went out and all the amplifiers died. Cliff stood up there, without his microphone, and he started from memory performing stuff from Edgar Allen Poe and he went on with that for about 20 minutes until the power came back. It was riveting, it was spellbinding, and the rest of us were standing there with our thumbs up our ass!
Tell me about the incident at the Steve Paul Scene East club.
We had just finished our set and were walking down the staircase that exited off the stage when we heard a voice over the p a system saying “what’s the matter with you people, didn’t you come here to hear the music? We’re not up here beating our meat! If you don’t want to hear the music get the fuck out of here.” So we’re all looking around saying, “who is that?” We counted noses and realised it was Ralph and he had just joined the band two days earlier in time for the tour. And we’re all cheering “Go ahead Ralphie, tell them off.” He continued haranguing the audience “We’ve got our life in these songs and if all you can do is stand around, look at yourselves in the mirrors clink glasses and talk, get the fuck out of here.” The management came right across the dance floor as we were coming off stage and said “OK, pack up your stuff, you’re fired,” so fired us right off the stage. Word spread in the underground press about this long haired band from California who came in and told everyone to kiss their ass and we got a bit of notoriety from that and actually got a better gig out of it!
I heard Hendrix would sometimes jam with you guys in New York, taking over Doug’s bass.
Yeah that was true, but he kept to himself most of the time. More often I remember jamming with his backing guys, Noel and Mitch; they would often be hanging around.
You found out you were being kicked out of the band after you had sat in on the auditions to replace you.
It broke my heart, I was thinking it was a jam session and I was doing the best I could to support these people and then I found out they were auditioning for my job, it was terrible.
They decided to go with Danny Kortchmar, and it’s rumoured a second album was recorded in mid ’68.
I heard it; it’s actually a pretty good album. It had some good moments on it. I heard an acetate of it at the time. Danny was a great guitar player and a great songwriter. He was little more polished than me, a little more pro.
You then relocated to Berkeley in San Francisco and later moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, what did you get up to there?
The first thing I got into when I left Berkeley wound up playing bass with Gale Garnet and the Gentle Reign. It was a good little band and we played around coffee-houses and rock joints up in Sausalito. She was a great singer and a wonderful person too. She was a great gal, and quite a babe I might add. Then I hooked up with a local original music rock band called Transatlantic Railroad, I replaced the original guitar player, we played around for a couple of years, we would play up and down from Marin to Eureka, parties and that kinda thing. We may have recorded a few live things and studio demos. I kept on working trying to find ways to contribute. I played with another songwriter in Sausalito a guy called Joe Tate, who had been in Salvation, in a band called The Redlegs. We played a lot around San Francisco and Sausalito. That was a good band too, Joe was a fine songwriter.
What was the bluegrass band you played in sometime during the 90’s?
The Homebillies, very aggressive and very frantic bluegrass, I played bass and we had a guy who played drums standing up. The lead instrument was a mandolin. We had a couple of great songwriters and we were a romping stomping kinda band. We did a lot of early bluegrass and Celtic songs too.
What was your “day job” at that time?
I worked in a video retrieval outfit called Video Monitoring services. I was a transcriber.
Thanks for taking the time to chat with me about the old days, you have filled in a lot of gaps in the Clear Light story for me.
Thank you, it's been my pleasure
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