RECORDING
ANECDOTES
Near the end of our first tour of England we developed friendships with
a number of other musicians represented by our agent, Borrow-Hunter Agencies
of Middlesbrough. Bass player, Mick Sandbrook generously offered to drive
us, along with all our equipment, down to London. Traynor amps of Canada
had supplied us with most of our gear and it had to be returned to Wing
Music in Bromley, Kent. On our return to Canada we immediately started
planning a second tour of England for the following summer.Throughout the
coming year we kept up correspondence with Mick and he lined up session
muscians and studio time at Impulse Studios ~ Walls End, Newcastle-On-Tyne.
As we had done on Album No. 6, we planned No. 7 to be a double concept
package: Side One: Sue-On - The Newcastle Sessions which featured
some of Sue-On's favourite solos and Side Two: Road Songs: On Tour In
England for which I wrote songs inspired by our experiences on the
road, both in North America and in England.
Side One saw a
return to medleys. We put together a "Rose" and a "Hawaiian" medley, and
she did fairly driving versions of Silver Threads & Golden Needles
and Please, Release Me, Neil Diamond's Song Sung Blue, and
the gospel great, Why Me, Lord? We were pleasantly surprised when
Why
Me, Lord? went on to receive a nice bit of airplay in the UK and Germany.
Side Two featured
seven more originals - two of them written by Al Jones who had organized
and accompanied us on our first UK tour. Sue-On had recorded the
ballad, While You're Away, the year before in London's Gooseberry
Studios. Boogie Woogie Band had come out of the Free Spirit sessions
we had done the year before.
Outlaw Ramblin' Band narrates the events of the first tour:
the rather scary decision to leave the Canadian prairies to embark on a
30-night tour of English clubs, our first flight in a 747, the hectic confusion
of Heathrow Airport, the crazy London traffic, the long commute to Northern
England in a packed Commer van, the challenge of playing for packed Workingman
Clubs every night (adapting to going on after a warmup variety act and
house band intro, playing a show set, getting off stage while the audience
indulged in Bingo, and then going on for a dance set, and shutting the
whole thing down by 11 o'clock), working with musicians we had heard about
and admired for so long, exploring dressing rooms that the Beatles had
used a few years before, playing up the novelty of our American accents
and country-based music, being typical tourists through the day, and suddenly
adapting to Canada again after being immersed in British culture for almost
seven weeks.
One Night Stand is a sort of wistful reflection on our many
years of performing one-night shows for just about every venue imaginable.
This duet opened many doors for us as it became a Top Ten hit on many stations
and we performed it on network television, the national Big Country Awards
Show, the Opry North Show and shows in various Concert Halls. It was also
instrumental in our receiving the Manitoba Entertainers of the Year Award,
which led to media coverage on the CBC National, newspapers, magazines
and TV/Radio interviews.
Swamp Romp is a bit of a screamer but its main theme is that
we were open to all musical genres and gigs. Over the years we have performed
just about every type of music for all kinds of functions: military bases,
TV/Radio, fairs and rodeos, outdoor festivals, arena shows and dances,
auditoriums, barn dances, high school proms, hoedowns, film soundtracks,
commercials, churches, weddings, socials, Indian pow-wows, folk festivals...
we love 'em all.
Montana shares the experiences we had while performing on
grandstand shows in US state and county fairs. All of our tours have been
summer tours, taken during our summer break from teaching high school.
Our backgrounds as geography majors and high school teachers always influenced
our appreciation of the geography and local colour of the places we toured.
This fascination is quite evident in this song.
Good Time Jamboree is a novelty song about our stage
exploits and the experience of performing 30 years worth
of one-nighters. It was recorded during our Newcastle sessions in
England. This studio, like so many of the places we played in England,
was inaccessible in the extreme. We had to pull our gear up many flights
of stairs and through a seemingly endless number of doors because the facility
was situated on the upper level of a large bingo hall complex. After surviving
this ordeal which anyone in his right mind would have left to roadies,
I returned to re-park our Ford Transit van only to find that the meter
maid had decorated it with a parking ticket - to add
infuriation to fatigue.
Impulse Studios were located above a bingo hall in Newcastle. Their
main claim to fame was that the famous Chieftains had done some recording
there. Our bass-playing friend, Mick Sandbrook, had lined up musicians
for the session and it we were quite excited about working with a synth
player for the first time. In 1977, synth players were still a bit of a
rarity - the instruments were costly, not too versatile, and somewhat hard
to master as preset sounds were not yet common. John
Ashcroft's work on the Arp Odyssey Synth and his "string machine" really
fattened and sweetened our sound. We spent much of our time on the
session trying to convey to him the arrangements and sound effects we heard
in our heads but had no way of writing out.
As usual we put in long hours and did the entire
album in two days. We did the final mix far into the night, a job Sue-On
has little interest in, so luckily our friends Keith and Margaret Jones
from Spennymoor showed up and offered to take Sue-On to a gambling casino.
She did quite well in her gambling debut and even won about 30 pounds.
Keith is Alan Jones' brother and we've since enjoyed many get-togethers
with them on both sides of the Atlantic.
