Showing posts with label Steve Cropper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve Cropper. Show all posts

Bobby Whitlock: Lord of the Rings

Guitarist/keyboardist for Derek & the Dominos, George Harrison puts 'Mountain Ring' up for auction 
By Peter Lindblad

Bobby Whitlock with wife CoCo Carmel
Black diamonds, it seems, are Bobby Whitlock's best friend these days, at least as far as his jewelry art is concerned.

Practically raised at Stax Records, the Memphis native played alongside soul legends Booker T. & the MGs and Sam & Dave, before joining Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, contributing keyboards to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album and forming Derek and The Dominos with Eric Clapton. But, Whitlock has other artistic interests outside of music.

Much of his attention these days is centered on his ability to create stunning jewelry, including an incredible new piece called the "Mountain Ring," which is being auctioned off right now. The auction began on Saturday, Oct. 11, and will conclude Nov. 29 at 11:59 p.m. Bids are to be submitted by e-mail to: whitlockmountain@gmail.com.

For auction rules, go to http://backstageauctions.blogspot.com/2014/10/auction-for-bobby-whitlocks-mountain.html

"You know, it’s not so much the selling of it, as it is making my art available," said Whitlock. "This is the first interview I’ve ever done that has to do with my art, other than my musical art. And it’s really all one and the same. Art is art, just like love is love."

Bobby Whitlock's 'Mountain Ring'
As a teenager, growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Whitlock would go through stones and picture making "those big rings, those big, chunky things, and I always like that they symbolized something. I never knew that it’d be something, an art form, that I would express myself at any point."

That is until his wife CoCo Carmel came along.

"My wife and I, have been together 14 years, and the first thing I did was have something made for her, just ‘cause I wanted something unique and it was an earring," explained Whitlock. "And I had this idea that I’d make it for her, and I don’t know … it just seemed like I had a knack for it. And that piece won an award."

Other pieces followed, as Whitlock designed one ring and then another, without ever thinking he'd sell them. He enjoys the entire process, from finding the right stone through the casting of the wax. It was a trip overseas, however, that gave him the idea for the Mountain Ring.

"When CoCo and I went back and forth to Geneva, Switzerland, to perform for 5,000 Japanese people at a symposium they were having, I was really taken by the grandeur of the mountains and the cliffs," said Whitlock. "After going there three times, ‘cause we stayed each time quite a while, you get to know the place, and even when we were shopping ... when I came back and started  fooling around, I came up with the idea of the mountain range, but I didn’t know exactly how it was going to be, because it’s hard to make a mountain range. You don’t just put a stone on top of it (laughs)."

A trip to Geneva, Switzerland, inspired
Bobby Whitlock to create the
"Mountain Ring"
For the piece, Whitlock chose his old favorite, black diamonds, " ... which no one uses on the other end of the spectrum, and they’re beautiful," added Whitlock, who goes through a process of creating the design and drawing it out, then picking the stones, carving the wax, and then casting the gold through the lost wax process.

Making the Mountain Ring even more special, Whitlock used the very last bit of "rose gold" in his possession that was made by a friend, Danny Abbott, who used to render copper into 24-karat gold by "putting a little piece of penny into it," related Whitlock. "He’s no longer around ... and he was an alchemist and an incredible jeweler. That was his thing. He was frustrated because he wanted to be a rock star, you know. Everybody wants to be a rock star, but his gift … now he could play guitar, but his real true gift was incredible art."

That little touch helps make the "Mountain Ring" special. Some of it he used for CoCo's jewelry.

According to Whitlock, a number of people had a hand in making the "Mountain Ring."

"Charles Kirkpatrick owns the Midas manufacturing here in Austin, and there were different artists casting in that, and among them was a girl named Rima," said Whitlock. "She was one of the artists who was designing. And there were several other people … actually, in the making of the Mountain Ring;there were seven people involved in the piling of the wax, and that was one that worked and then we did another one where another artist got involved, and so I just started out with like a rough draft of just something I do, and the next thing you know I presented it to – in this case for the Mountain Ring – to Rima and we bounced around some different ideas and she said, 'Well, how about this, you know? It’s pretty incredible. She’s off doing her own thing here in Austin as well, so it’s never really the same person, except my stone setter Aaron. He’s a big guy, about 6-foot-3, a big man, and it always seemed interesting, setting a stone … that’s most important part of the whole thing, because the whole thing is built around the stone."

The 'Mountain Ring' has an
ounce of gold and an
ounce of black diamonds
As for Kirkpatrick, Whitlock said, "His thing is, he loves stones. He’s a stone man, and it was six months in finding the star sapphire that’s in the Mountain Ring. It was six months of going through stones and him going to different gem dealers and stuff to find the right stone. So the piece is built around the stone. So if the stone breaks or something compromises the stone, the piece is gone, because you’re not going to get another stone that’s just exactly that size. And everything changes, you know."

At his wife's suggestion, Whitlock is finally letting the public see his work, and he added that reaction so far to the Mountain Ring has been incredible.

"There’s over an ounce of gold in the thing, and over a karat of black diamonds – over a karat and a half or so of black diamonds, I can’t remember what the number is," said Whitlock. "It’s either 48 or 49 diamonds all throughout, and it’s absolutely a beautiful piece. I’m real proud of it. And I never thought about letting anybody see it in a public way, just people near me or in my circle … I don’t know, but it’s okay. We started now. We started Bobby Whitlock Jewelry, and it’s funny how it’s opening the door for something. Everything I do is a one-off anyway, and I may do some commissioned things down the line. What I’m going to do is just turn this “Mountain Ring” into something else, you know, for someone else, and just make that available … I don’t know, it’s just opening the door for maybe a jewelry store. There’s always a song in everything, my life is a song and just like that, the doors open for something like a jewelry store."

We'll have more with Bobby Whitlock in the coming days and weeks as he talked to us about his time in Derek and the Dominos, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends and, of course, his work on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.

Finding Joe Grushecky 'Somewhere East of Eden'

By Peter Lindblad


Joe Grushecky released Somewhere East of Eden
in fall 2013
Blue-collar through and through, just like his home city of Pittsburgh, Joe Grushecky is concerned about the soul-crushing struggles of the common man, just like his mentor, Bruce Springsteen.

A teacher who works and lives in the rougher part of the Steel City, Grushecky writes about people he encounters every day, whether they be kids from the wrong side of the tracks ("Who Cares About Those Kids") or Iraq war veterans trying to cope with regular life Stateside and the nightmarish memories of battle.

Grushecky lives to tell their stories, from the point of view of a man who is no stranger to hard-luck stories and a greying observer of the human condition in all its tattered and flawed beauty.

Somewhere East of Eden, released in October, is Grushecky's latest solo album, and it's a gritty, tuneful mix of raucous R&B and blues-flavored rock that brings a lunchpail to work. Recorded in Weirton, West Virginia, at longtime co-producer Rick Witkowski's Studio L, Somewhere East of Eden is Grushecky's 17th solo effort. Out on the Schoolhouse Records label and distributed by Warner Bros. Records Nashville, it boasts rowdy blues bashers like "I Can Hear the Devil Knocking" and "John the Revelator," but when Grushecky turns soulful on "Save the Last Dance for Me," there's not a dry eye in the place.

A true rock 'n' roll veteran with plenty of recordings to his credit, Grushecky was once a member of of the Iron City Houserockers, before going solo and getting the chance to work with The Boss. Springsteen not only produced Grushecky's 1995 solo album American Babylon, but he also co-wrote a couple of songs, contributed guitar on the record and even served a touring guitarist with the band.

Outside of music, Grushecky is known for his charitable endeavors, having served as an executive board member of the Light of Day Foundation, an organization that helped raise over a million dollars worldwide to fight Parkinson;s Disease at the 40+ Annual Light of Day Concerts in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Grushecky talked about his new record and his career in an e-mail interview recently.

What is the significance of the title Somewhere East of Eden and how does it relate to the Iraq War veteran who is the subject of the song? 
Joe Grushecky: I got the basic idea from an article I read about a returning vet. A lot of the details were verbatim from the article. “East of Eden” is one of my all time favorite books. The Garden of Eden was said to be in the Fertile Crescent of Iraq. As I read the veteran’s story he struck me that he was returning home from Somewhere East of Eden. That thought and phrase inspired me to write the song.

How would you describe the music for the "Somewhere East of Eden" LP? It seems to have a blue-collar quality to it.
JG: I’ve been tagged blue-collar my whole career. I think it stems from the fact that I write about the life around me which is distinctly from a working man’s point of view. I get up 4:30 every day and go to work! The music is my take on all the stuff I’ve listened to all these years.

This is your 17th solo album, and you decided to seek aid from fans to make it. Is it inspiring to you to see such tangible support from people who admire your work, and do you think this is the way many music artists are going to fund their projects in the future?
JG: It is the only way guys like me can reach a greater audience. I really enjoyed the process after being somewhat skeptical at first. We would not be doing this interview if not for the pledge drive enabling me to get a good publicist.

You were going to embark on recording an acoustic album of old R&B and soul stuff. What's the status of that project and how did it spark the creation of the new record? 
JG: I love learning and singing, so I was just going about my business recording old songs that I always loved. I did not have a coherent group of songs that fit together until I wrote  “Somewhere East Of Eden.” I used a solo stripped-down approach on “John the Revelator” and “Save The Last Dance For Me.” Playing those great old songs inspired me to write good ones of my own.

How does the Pittsburgh area and the lives of its people affect your writing? A lot of this record seems to highlight the struggles of ordinary people in your community.
JG: Well, I write about what I know. I am in the community working everyday in an economically disadvantaged area. It was easy to weave the fabric of that into these songs. I have always written about Pittsburgh. It is a unique city with a lot of character. Everything about it, including the music, was rough and tumble when I was growing up and a lot of that rubbed off on me.

Joe Grushecky playing live
For those who don't know about the Iron City Houserockers, what is the band's story and what happened to it?
JG: We started out in my basement and got signed by Steve Popovich to Cleveland International Records. He was a legendary record guy. We did four albums to great critical acclaim. We worked with great producers, including Steve Cropper, Mick Ronson, Ian Hunter, and Steve Van Zandt. We were the pride of Pittsburgh and a killer live band. We never had anything resembling a major radio song. We lasted until guys started to bail out to pursue other careers besides music.

How long have you and your producer, Rick Witkowski, been working together and why does the creative relationship you have together work so well?
JG: Rick and I are great friends, and we have different strengths that complement each other. He likes the Beatles and pop. I like the Stones and blues.

Bruce Springsteen produced your 1995 album, American Babylon, and even co-wrote a couple of songs and played on the record. What do you recall about the experience and what is he like to work with? Was it a transformative period for you?
JG: Bruce helped us at a critical time. We were pretty much dead in the water as far as our recording careers were going. I will always be grateful to him. He is one of the all-time bests. He is an extremely proficient musician. He can play anything and play it well. It was like playing baseball with Roberto Clemente. 

How have you changed or developed as an artist since American Babylon?
JG: I like to think I keep getting better. Sometimes I think I’m just starting to get the knack of it.

You work as a teacher and play on the weekends from the sound of it. Do the two interests impact each other in some ways?
JG: It is two completely different worlds! The teaching has allowed me to pursue my music by providing me with health benefits and a steady income. I have always worked in very poor schools so I’m not getting rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I never really had to play anything I didn’t want to.

What are your hopes for Somewhere East of Eden

JG: I hope as many people as possible listen to it.

Odd Couple: Cavaliere and Cropper take to the air with ‘Midnight Flyer’

Worlds apart in the 1960s, geographically speaking and perhaps musically, as well, Felix Cavaliere, of the British Invasion-influenced, East Coast R&B gang The Rascals, and Steve Cropper, the quintessential Southern soul guitarist who powered the Stax label house band Booker T. & the MGs, would, occasionally, pass each other like strangers in the night.


“You know, we used to know each other in the past from the Atlantic (Records) family,” explains Cavaliere. “We used to cross paths once in a while in the studio. Matter of fact, Booker T. did cut ‘Groovin’’ – they cut an instrumental version of ‘Groovin’’ and had a hit with that.”

A sunny, summery ode to carefree Sundays spent loving the one you’re with and gazing upon nature’s wonders, with bird sounds flitting about the instrumentation, the organic “Groovin’” was a massive #1 hit for The Rascals in 1967 and proof of the band’s increasing sophistication with regard to pop arrangements and songwriting. They were the kings of blue-eyed soul.

Meanwhile, down South, Cropper was creating that signature guitar style of his, one so fluid and expressive that it seemed the very embodiment of hot, humid Dixie soul. No ordinary sideman, Cropper’s skill as an arranger, writer, player and producer gave Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” a certain glow and introspective depth, while pumping heated blood through the huffing, puffing circulatory system of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.”

“I think what’s unique about his playing is, he’s got sort of a style that he’s developed from listening to people like Curtis Mayfield and a lot of the blues guys, but it’s not any of those, it’s his own,” says Cavaliere.
From afar, the two artists shared a mutual admiration for each other’s work. But, working together? That seemed a far-fetched notion in the late ‘60s, back when Cropper’s Southern cooking was still simmering in Booker T. & the MGs’ soul kitchen, and Cavaliere and the Rascals were branching out into psychedelia and jazz. Years went by, and both bands dissolved, leaving Cavaliere and Cropper as free agents. And Cavaliere, along with his New York accent, would, shockingly, wind up moving to Tennessee, home to Cropper.

“We just started writing together, and it kind of jelled and we had a good time, and he got us a [record] deal,” says Cavaliere, explaining how the partnership that’s resulted in not one, but now two albums, that latest being Midnight Flyer, on Stax, came to fruition. “It was a total surprise to both of us. It kind of went on from there, and we went on to do the second one, which was just a lot of fun. And the reason that it works so well is because we both have kind of similar musical kind of identities, you know.”

Although, being from places that couldn’t be more different, Cavaliere and Cropper have their own approaches when it comes to lyrics and music. “He, being from the South, has these kinds of little idioms that really go well with music, and they come out in the words,” says Cavaliere. “They just have that kind of Southern charm to them that I think people like. On the other hand, I come from a more jazz background, more of an R&B/jazz type world; he’s like more of straight-on blues world. So, the mixture of the two, I think it works because, as I say, both of those formats are kind of cool.”

The marriage works, at least in part because of Cavaliere and Cropper’s interest in exploring diverse musical styles. From the high-stepping funk workouts of “Move The House” and “Do It Like This” to the seductive grooves of “Sexy Lady” and the sweaty soul faceoff between Cavaliere and his daughter Aria on “I Can’t Stand It,” Midnight Flyer is a multi-dimensional effort from two old dogs who’ve been teaching others tricks for a long, long time. And yet, there’s still something about Midnight Flyer that harkens back to the good old days for both.

“He gets a kick out of my chord changes, and the grooves that come out,” says Cavaliere, “because he relates it to like ‘Groovin’’ and the same with his stuff. You know, there’s kind of like a Wilson Pickett feeling in some of these songs.”

It’d be easy for Cavaliere and Cropper to fall back into familiar working patterns, but on Midnight Flyer, they took inspiration from advanced technology. But they did draw some lines in the sand.
“Well, you know, we tried something different this time, a little bit more modern,” relates Cavaliere. “And you know, whenever two older guys do modern stuff you’ve got to really be careful. I used Apple products called Logic, and we set up in a studio. It is so much fun to write in the studio because you’re getting like immediately great sound, and we found these loops to write to and kind of just composed on the spot live to those loops. You know, drum patterns, and it just, you know, brought a different type of inspiration to the project. And then, of course, we went back and did the traditional bass, drums, of course guitars, keys. But it started from kind of like the more modern, computer type of thing.”

As for Aria, the young singer didn’t back down being the in the company of legends. Her dad wouldn’t have had it any other way.  “I wanna tell you, she kind of freaked me out a little because I know she’s good, and she came totally prepared and just like belted it out, man,” laughs Cavaliere. “Everybody was just like that old Pioneer speaker commercial, you know, they were just kind of blasted against the wall. She kicked it. It’s a thrill, you know. I can’t describe how good you feel when somebody really comes to a job and does well like that. You know, she looked at it like a job. I mean, I told her, I said this is for real. You’ve got to be prepared when you come in the room. Nobody’s going to sit around and teach you anything. And she did great. She did … I took her on the road with me for a while, although I’m not really encouraging this type of life for anybody. It’s very difficult. She loves it.”

So far, as it relates to their partnership, so do Cavaliere and Cropper, two artists intent on letting the world know they still have something to say.

-Peter Lindblad

The Rascals: Summer of ‘65

What a summer it was for The Rascals in 1965. Sunny days spent in The Hamptons, living near the ocean and playing The Barge at night, packing the house with a red-hot, straightjacket-tight R&B sound draped in the Union Jack of British Invasion-style rock ‘n’ roll.

For four young New Yorkers what could be better than escaping the sweltering city heat for a few months of breezy fun and performing in a carefree atmosphere, full of smiling, dancing patrons who were just there to party?

“When you came into The Barge, from the moment you entered there, we had you,” recalls Felix Cavaliere, an original founding member of The Rascals who wrote many of the band’s best-known hits.
Having a secret weapon like Adrian Barber, sound man for, of all people, The Beatles going back to their Star Club days, manning the board helped The Rascals turn heads. Working his magic, Barber added sonic richness to The Rascals’ live sound.

“We sequestered him in the United States,” remembers Cavaliere, who is still making music 45 years later, having just released his second collaboration with Booker T. & the MGs guitarist Steve Cropper, Midnight Fever. “He became an engineer, and he became a producer, but he also was way ahead of his time in kind of like refining the acoustical sound of a club. In those days, that was not really done.”

As Cavaliere recalls, referring to other clubs where The Rascals plied their trade, “Everything else was a basketball court; [the sound] bounced all over the place.” With Barber corralling the stray, ping-ponging emissions from their amps and sonically surrounding crowds who came to watch them, The Rascals took no prisoners.

“The sound system was all around the room, and there was no way you were going to escape the sound from the stage, and it was just wonderful,” says Cavaliere of The Rascals’ shows at The Barge, a floating night club on Long Island. “I mean, people really just lost their balance, man. It was so cool because obviously there was drinking and a lot of extra-curriculars going on, and we were on the water. We were literally on the bay. There were people that would walk over the side thinking it was the exit (laughs). Yeah, it was a little bit of San Francisco and California that came to the East Coast.”

A little bit of Hollywood also blew in that summer, according to Cavaliere. “It was so much fun, and they were all luminaries there, because it was in the Hamptons. You know, Betty Davis used to come every Sunday. It was just magic, it was so much fun. And it was a summer that I’ll never forget because we lived right across the street on a beach, the kind that many people would just dream of being on, never mind living on. Pretty cool … pretty cool for a bunch of young guys, it was a lot of fun.”

More than that, it was the year The Rascals went viral. Formed in 1964 close to New York City in the Garfield, N.J., hometown of members Eddie Brigati (vocals) and Dino Danelli (drums), The Rascals came together when Cavaliere, Brigati and guitarist Gene Cornish left Joey Dee and the Starliters. Danelli, a teen jazz prodigy who had toured with jazz legend Lionel Hampton and played with Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati before The Rascals, joined later. For Cavaliere, the move from the Starliters had been a long time coming, circumstances being what they were.

“Well, frankly, the only reason that I was with Joey Dee was because I was unable to do anything on my own until my status with the United States government was settled as far as the draft,” explains Cavaliere. “I really could not do anything or start anything until that was kind of left behind me, so to speak, and so I took that job. I was in college. I left college knowing full well I was going to get drafted … I always knew what I wanted to do. So, I mean, that wasn’t the problem and I certainly didn’t want to be a sideman for anybody. I wanted to be a leader, and I had some ideas, but I had to be patient and I had to wait. And that’s exactly what happened. When I was refused as far as military duty was concerned, I was able to go out and start the band. And unfortunately, or fortunately, all of the other guys had to go through that very same process before we could really get our feet on the ground and start marching.”

Ah, but first, they needed a name, and it was funny man Soupy Sales who gave it to them.
“Yeah, great story,” says Cavaliere. “Well, real quick, we wanted to get known, so he had a big hit record. You know, ‘The Mouse,’ and he was one of our favorite guys, as far as being on television, and we made an appointment with him at WNEW television station, and he saw us. We said, ‘Look, you’ve got a hit record. You need a band.’ And everything he said made us hysterical. We laughed, ‘cause we loved him. And he says, ‘Well, what do you call yourselves?’ And, ah … we had a couple of names, he says, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll call you …’ but we couldn’t print it (laughs). So, we actually did a mini-tour with him, and he gave us the name The Rascals. He said, ‘This is not really what I call you guys, but this is the best I could come up with.’ We got it from him, you know. Great man.”

Then, it was time for basic training, with early rehearsals conducted in a place familiar to Cavaliere.
“What I remember is so vivid in my mind, because the first time we rehearsed was at my family home, which was right directly across the street from a high school,” says Cavaliere. “And what I remember was a crowd of kids outside, who were listening to us jam. And I kind of knew we had something pretty good, because, you know, they were there. And it was the first time, so that was a good sign to me, a good omen.”
With fortune smiling upon them, The Rascals took their set of well-drilled cover songs to the club scene, debuting at the Choo Choo Club in Garfield. Thinking back, Cavaliere’s memories of that first show are a little fuzzy.

“Oh, God,” says Cavaliere. “I don’t remember too much about that, the first one. Of course, I remember the environment … because the reason it was called Choo Choo Club was because, literally, there was a train right behind the dressing rooms. Oh yeah, every time you got to [a certain part of a] song, where you heard a whistle coming through, it was really funny.”

Club owners, on the other hand, often were not amused when bands, like The Rascals, that they hired to play covers would try to slip a few original songs in their sets. Nor were they lenient when it came to fashion.
“Yeah, absolutely, covers, because the venues demanded it of us,” says Cavaliere. “You know, in those days, it was 21 and over, drinking, suit and tie, and you know, pretty strict. If you did your own song, you had to really, really, really sneak that one in (laughs).”

Likewise, The Rascals rebelled when it came to their outfits, with Danelli coming up with a solution that Cavaliere reluctantly agreed to while the band was booked for the summer to play The Barge. These “choirboy shirts with knickerbockers,” as they’ve been described, were uniforms Cavaliere could have done without.

In good-natured fashion, Cavaliere says, “Well, we could only blame one guy for that, and it’s the drummer. As I said, we had to have ties and jackets, like that, and we were struggling with it, couldn’t stand it. So, Dino said, ‘I know there’s a way we could attract some attention and maybe get rid of these darn ties and jackets,’ and he came up with wearing knickers, kind of like what AC/DC ended up doing. We didn’t have the ties, but the club owners demanded that we put a tie on. You can look cute [they said], but you’ve got to look dressed. So it was kind of a compromise, and I really didn’t care for it at all.”

Trudging onward, The Rascals built momentum while playing at The Barge. Word of their infectious act eventually reached the right people, leading to new management with legendary impresario Sid Bernstein, promoter of The Beatles’ famed Shea Stadium show.

“We met Bernstein during that period of time,” relates Cavaliere. “Interestingly enough, as soon as we met, our salary doubled, ‘cause they went into management and said, ‘Look, you’ve got a nice club here. How about paying the band?’ (laughs)  At The Barge, I’d been running the group out of a business book called ‘This Business of Music.’ I didn’t know anything about the music business.”

Bernstein, introduced to The Rascals by a third-party businessman who’d seen their act and then recommended them to the famed manager, was instrumental in introducing The Rascals to a world beyond The Hamptons.

“Sid was a unique kind of guy,” says Cavaliere. “He could see in the forest a really good acorn that was about to sprout, you know, and he could point that thing out to other people and get them really excited about it. However, on the nuts and bolts end of things, he was not good. He was not good on the ‘let’s not spend more money than we have on the tour of Europe,’ that kind of thing. His expertise was like in spotting it and in nurturing it and kind of like selling it to people, getting them all psyched about it - interesting man, very interesting … he was a visionary.”

Among those growing increasingly excited about The Rascals were the good people at Atlantic Records. Seeing the potential of this white, blue-eyed soul act playing what essentially was black music, Atlantic, a label that was home to mostly African-American artists, signed The Rascals at Bernstein’s behest.

“Well, first of all, [it was] the only label that would allow us – and I say ‘us,’ even though it was my idea to produce ourselves, I really wanted to produce the band; I didn’t want an outsider coming in and changing what I thought was developed already – they were the only label that gave us that opportunity, for want of a better word,” says Cavaliere. “We are and were completely in control of the music. And the fact that three-fourths of my record collection came from that label, and also, that there was really no white acts on the Atlantic label until we got there, it was a thrill, obviously. As a young musician, to be part of that family was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I mean, seriously. They were great, they were all about music, and I know business is business and what was going on down the hall in the finance department … I don’t even care. I’m telling you, as a musical family they left their mark on America and the rest of the world.”
So did The Rascals, although not without having to overcome some obstacles, the first being a change in their name. Soon after signing to Atlantic, the label found out that another group, Borrah Minnevitch’s and Johnny Puleo’s Harmonica Rascals, was going to protest the group’s use of the name The Rascals. To get around this problem, Bernstein rechristened the band as The Young Rascals, which irritated Cavaliere and the rest of the band.

“Hated it,” says Cavaliere. “As I say, it was not our idea. We had nothing to do with it. And that’s … you know, the name of a band is really important to the band. It’s something that management should have consulted us about. There was a lot of resentment, and the choice of names I thought was horrible. You know, the joke I tell about it all the time is that when I first moved away from New York City and went into Connecticut, people used to come into my home and want to know about that little dog, if that black circle around his eye was real (laughs). And that says it all, you know.”

Unable to change their name until 1968 or ditch those hated uniforms until after their first #1, 1966’s “Good Lovin’”, Cavaliere and company put aside their frustrations with those issues and set about recording their self-titled debut LP. They’d had a minor hit in 1965 with “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” which would appear on The Young Rascals album, a high-energy, full-throttle blast of R&B and British Invasion rock highlighted by well-crafted harmony vocals and arrangements that electrified kids all over the country. Filled with covers of tracks like “Mustang Sally” and “In the Midnight Hour,” The Young Rascals really took off when their cover of The Olympics’ “Good Lovin’” charged up the charts all the way to the top.

“Oh man, I couldn’t even believe it,” says Cavaliere, remembering how he felt when he heard “Groovin’” went #1. “Seriously, like who would have ever thought that was going to happen? The only inkling we had, as I said earlier, is … that song was a record that was done by The Olympics, and they did it entirely different. I just recently read a Rolling Stone article that really ticked me off. These young kids, they don’t even know what they’re talking about. But if they listen to the Olympics record, it was a chop shop. It was a Latin groove. We heard that thing on the radio, and like I said earlier, you had to play covers. We showed the guy that it was a cover, even though it was like an obscure record on a black station that I was listening to, and we converted it to, basically, rock. From the first day that we played that song live, people jumped out of their seats and got up and danced. So, you know, you got something here. Now, again, as kids, we didn’t know how to interpret that into sales, but the record company did.”

Working on the production and engineering end of things, Tom Down and Arif Mardin also knew what they were doing, and their wizardry helped The Rascals develop their studio chops.
“Yeah, we had a good band,” says Cavaliere. “And the only thing that was missing was we didn’t have a bass player, which I did at that time on the organ. It’s interesting, ‘cause today, it’s kind of the other way around. But when you transfer yourself or transmit yourself from a live act to a recording act, it’s a major change. It’s kind of like no makeup on a woman, or like having no clothes going out the door. There’s nowhere to hide. You can have a great stage show and a nice show and dancers all around you, which sounds very familiar to today’s world, you have to play and you have to sing. And we didn’t even have things that tuned you up like they do now. We had to actually perform. That’s a whole different ballgame, you know, and we had to learn it. So, we did the best we could, and we had phenomenal teachers. You know, Tom Dowd was the engineer and he had recorded everybody, as I say, in my whole musical collection. The Drifters, you know, like Miles [Davis] and Ray Charles, so we were very fortunate to be brought in the Atlantic kind of idiom, which is, and was, a jazz world in that … you know, you produce it in the studio. You make it happen, and you turn on the recording button. You play it and you do it until it sounds good and then you stop. And that’s a different way of doing it from how we do it now. You can layer, layer, layer, layer, layer … fix, fix, fix. We can take all of the soul out of it. We can take all of the life out of it very easily and get it down so that it’s perfect and nobody cares (laughs).”

Nobody, but nobody, took the life out of The Rascals back in the mid-1960s. With that summer of 1965 serving as a springboard, The Rascals became the foremost practitioners of blue-eyed soul, racking up 18 U.S. hit singles and five gold albums until it all disintegrated in 1972. Still, even with all the recrimination, lawsuits and back-biting that ensued, Cavaliere has fond memories of that wonderful summer of 1965.
“I had that conversation with Paul McCartney a few years back,” says Cavaliere. ‘We were backstage and he said, ‘Do you realize how young we all were then?’ Because we all have kids that age and older … we were in our 20s. We were babies. We didn’t know anything. And I just laugh. I said, ‘You know, I never even thought about it.’ But, again, when that happened, we never even thought about it. Oh, man, are you kidding me? I mean, like I say, look, there’s nothing like being with a group of guys and going out and singing songs, and having people in the audience know the songs and know the words, there’s nothing like that. I mean, that’s what people dream about their whole lives. And it happened to us. What can I say? I mean, I’m just so thrilled that I was there.”

- Peter Lindblad