Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 16:37:53
-0500
From: Carey Mann <cmann@soundvisioninc.com>
Subject: Re: interview questions
To: davidmor@voyager.net
Hi, David.
Sorry it took me so long to respond. I e-mailed it home
intending to work on it there, but what with one thing and
another it's waited for a slow day at work.
I'll edit my responses into your list of questions, below.
----- Original Message -----
From: <davidmor@voyager.net>
To: <cmann@soundvisioninc.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2001 2:20 PM
Subject: interview questions> Hi Carey,
Thanks so much for agreeing to participate. As
I plan on this
project being the "final word" on the Ill Wind, I'd like to
talk with
all of the members and collect as much information as possible with
all viewpoints being represented. Your assistance goes a long way
towards realising that goal, and it is greatly appreciated.
Well, here goes. Please take as much time as needed in
answering. After I receive your responses I will be in contact again
with some follow-up questions. Thanks again.
1. Tell me about your background; i.e.
where you were raised, notable
childhood experiences, etc.
I was born, and lived up through junior high school, in a bedroom suburb
just west of Cleveland, Ohio named Lakewood. My mother made me take
piano lessons (for classical music) from about age 8 to 13, but I disliked
the lessons and the practicing. Still, I came away knowing music notation
and some music theory. I sang in all the choirs throughout public school,
and I sang in the choir of the Presbyterian church my family attended
for a year or so while I was in high school. I played piano in the school
orchestra but I was the third-best pianist so I wound up playing, for
example, triangle while the better players played the piano parts.
My family moved to Forest Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
the summer before my first year of high school. That summer I also bought
my first guitar, a used -- and actually kicked-in and glued back together
-- Vega acoustic. Now that I didn't have to take unwanted lessons any
more, I started to enjoy playing the guitar, and the piano, too. I started
to play in a Dixieland/dance band with my high-school friends, playing
piano, but we never had any real gigs, although we had a "paying"
gig once playing for some political gathering and got stiffed for the
$50 we were supposed to get. I began to hang around one of the better
music stores in Pittsburgh, Volkweins I think it was, quite a trip from
my house, because I wanted to buy a real electric guitar. I remember
loving the smell of the Gibsons. It seems like I hung around playing
the one I liked for months on end but probably it wasn't as long as
it seemed. Finally my parents let me take my paper-route money and buy
a Gibson ES-345TD. I had that guitar for a lotta years and eventually
traded it for a Fender Twin Reverb amp. That was after I had figured
out that all Gibsons have the same problem near the nut: if you fret
the G string one fret up (G#) and press down, the high Gibson frets
guarantee that the G# will be out of tune -- too sharp. Of course, you
need that string on that fret for every beginning guitar player's favorite
chord, E major, so it's a real problem. But I loved the guitar when
I bought it. I bought an Eico kit for the kind of amplifier you usually
play a record player or tuner through and soldered it together, and
my father made me a speaker cabinet with one, 12-inch speaker, and that's
what I used -- I even wound up playing some genuine dance gigs when
I got to college (below) with the same setup, even though it didn't
have any of the standard guitar-type tone controls or equalization,
so essentially no treble ever came out of the setup.
My family was always the last on the block to get new appliances. Finally
we got a record player that would play 45's instead of only 78's. My
brother (Bob, 2-1/2 years younger than I was) and I started to buy pop
records, like Robin Luke's Susie Darlin', Buddy Holly's That'll Be the
Day and Peggy Sue, Barrett Strong's Money, and Ooh Poo Pah Doo, and
we moved up to 33 RPM LP's like Here's Little Richard and The Everly
Brothers. Up until this time, I had been around music a lot but this
was the first music that I really wanted to have, to hear over and over.
I moved away from home to Boston (MA) for college and joined the jazz
band there. Although I went to an engineering school and most of the
guys in the band (it was all guys) were what would today be called nerds,
there were a couple of really good musicians in the band -- one piano
player, Mike Hughes, from around New York City, and an alto (saxophone)
player, Bill Edwards, from California. Both those guys had studied and
played with real, honest-to-goodness jazz musicians and they were miles
ahead of the rest of us. They played music instead of playing notes,
if you know what I mean. The band's bass player, Stu something, was
also an excellent musician, although classically trained. The best thing
of all was that soon after I joined the jazz band, the band's manager
Bill Purvis wangled out of the school money to pay Herb Pomeroy, a well-known
Boston jazz trumpet- player, musician, arranger, etc. who also taught
at Berklee School of Music in Boston -- one of the better-known schools
of (non-classical) music, I think. Herb was of course miles ahead of
even the students who were miles ahead of me in the band. He would bring
arrangements from Berklee that he taught from there, and even student
arrangers from Berklee that brought their arrangement assignments from
school and tried them out on us. We played some charts from Herb's current
albums -- at the time he had just released an album with a moderately
big band, maybe 12 or so. I played (electric) guitar in the jazz band
and took some gigs at frat and dorm parties with Hughes, Edwards, Stu
and the band's drummer, whose name I don't remember. With the connections
through the jazz band, I learned how to buy a fake book (which was fairly
arcane at that time) and played from that on gigs. I always had a good
ear. Being in the jazz band taught me what I know about extended chords.
That stuff had precious little place in the Ill Wind, or any other rock
band I was ever in, for that matter. In fact, in most bands I was ever
in, I was the only guy that could read music at all.
I stayed at the same school for graduate school and met Ken Frankel
in the school woodshop. I think I was making a case for some musical
instrument and I forget what he was making. We started to play together.
I think it was around then that I bought my first electric bass guitar
-- a very, very cheap one. It didn't sound or look all that good but
it played more or less in tune. For a while Stu played bass and I think
I played guitar but Stu's heart wasn't in rock and roll and I would
up playing bass. Ken was writing songs and one of them was Ill Wind.
Since then I have realized it was a horrible name but we named the band
after that song -- in an attempt to be bad boys, a la the Rolling Stones,
I think, or something like that. Richard Zvonar was also at the same
college (then called Richard Griggs). I don't remember how we found
Dave Kinsman to play drums, maybe by an ad in the paper and auditions.
Judy Bradbury was Ken's girlfriend, and she sang with us. Incidentally,
about this time, I borrowed an acoustic bass (viol) and played a few
folk-club gigs with Ken and Judy. I never was any good of an acoustic-bass
player. I didn't play it long enough for my hands to get strong enough.
At the end of the night I would be barely able to fret a string. Lucky
for me, folk groups play stuff that uses a lot of open strings on a
bass viol.
2. What is your earliest
musical memory?
My mom played Tubby the Tuba records and a Peter and the Wolf (78 rpm's)
with a man reading the story interspersed with the music. She also had
one or two Beethoven on 5-lb. sets of 78's. My mother told me my father
played America the Beautiful on the piano the morning after the first
night they stayed in the first house they bought together after getting
married. My mother and her 4 sisters all played piano and some of them
the violin. My father's two brothers and sister also had music lessons
but didn't keep on playing through life.
3. Who/what were some of your early musical favorites?
4. What do you remember about your first public performance?
I don't remember my first
public performance. I'm certain I was terribly nervous. The Ill Wind
early on tried to get gigs an places we were dumb to know were completely
inappropriate. We went downtown in our hippy-type clothes and auditioned
at places in Boston's then-so-called Combat Zone, clubs that from working
around Boston later on I now know were mob-connected. Of course we flunked
all the auditions. Maybe the first paying Ill Wind gig, or at least
the first one outside the college environment, was at some tiny dive
on Tremont street. An agent, Duke something, got us the gig. I got Duke's
phone number and he gave us $40-a-night jobs over the phone, and we
mailed him money -- say $10 a night. I never met him.
5. What was high school like for you? Were you at odds with your
surrounding environment and were you in danger of being drafted?
I went to high school before
h.s. kids were being drafted -- 1957 to 1960. I was a nerd (I wouldn't
have said so then but it's real clear now) with a shirt pocket pocket-protector
full of mechanical pencils, etc., etc. I loved the school part and did
well but was painfully maladept socially. The bright kids hung out together
when they weren't doing homework and people like cheerleaders had little
or nothing to do with us. My high school was very small -- 400 students
total.
6. Tell me about your studies and experiences at MIT. Was a full-time
music career a goal at this time?
I thoroughly enjoyed studying
mathematics, the pure kind, except for Function Theory which I got a
C in (that's flunking in grad school) and had to repeat. But by the
end (4-1/2 years) that world got to seem more and more unreal to me
and after I graduated I had no desire to remain in it. I didn't really
think about a life's work until I finished graduate school. I then got
a part-time computer-programming job at Harvard, at the School of Government,
for Karl Deutsch, producing FORTRAN programs on 3-foot-long decks of
punched cards for the IBM 360-65 at Harvard, and submitting the jobs
to run overnight. When I wasn't working, I was trying to become a musician.
7. What was your general attitude towards drugs during this period?
8. What was the genesis of the band? Who did you meet first and how
did things evolve?
9. How did the group's name come about?
10. What were the individual band members like as people? Was there a
dominant personality in the band?
Ken Frankel, and then with
his younger brother Tom who came out to Boston from California, I think
tended to dominate more than us others did, although I wouldn't say
that any of us really ran the show. Ken was very type A. Tom was, you
would say, California-laid-back. I always thought that of us all, Richard
had the most even keel. I had more in common with Ken in some ways than
the others, at least in terms of life experience, because when we met
he was also in graduate school at MIT (he was in Biology), which implies
that he had had more of a studious life (like me) than the other band
members.
Tom had written a bunch
of songs even before he came east, and played them on the guitar. My
recollection is that I had to kind of talk him into having the band
play them -- he didn't think we'd want to. I still like the songs he
wrote. He was very modest about them.
11. What were some of the early gigs like? What gear was used?
What
was the general reaction of the audience when you played live?
In that early gig on Tremont
street, we had for a P.A. system some little amp and a couple of ElectroVoice
horn speakers, the kind that look a bit like solid bushel baskets but're
made out of sheet metal. They were horrible. Right through Ill Wind's
records, as I remember I almost always had rinky-dink partly-home-made
speakers, and I always thought I was under-amplified and probably near-inaudible.
I think Ken, and then with money lent by Ken, Richard, had Fender Twin
Reverb's. We gradually improved the P.A. situation and, again, with
Ken's money Ken and Tom bought a rather nice custom pair of speakers
and heavy-duty tripod stands that raised them say 5' off the floor.
Even the biggest gig we ever played, we never had fancy equipment. Ken,
of course, had this Gibson double-neck 6 and 12-string, which stood
out visually. Richard got, on one band trip to N.Y., a purple Gibson
which he kept in really nice shape. My brother rebuild a rather old
Fender bass and gave it to me, and put frets on it again -- when he
got it they had been filed off. I was, I believe, the first Boston bass-player
to use James Howe strings, like the Who's Entwhistle used. When there
weren't any in the U.S., I called up the maker in England and, unless
nostalgia is inflating my contribution, got them to send some. At that
time, their factory they said had had a fire and that was why I couldn't
find any. Those are round-wound and have a lot more treble than the
flat-wound ones people mostly used then.
The very first few gigs
in the crummy bars there was no reaction at all. And any way I was too
nervous to notice anything about the audience. Working at colleges was
always a much easier audience than in bars, and I think overall we did
college-type stuff most of the time -- weekend or 1-night gigs. Dave
had belonged to CYO and got us some work with CYO's around the area.
Frat parties, everyone drank a lot and you know there'd be wall-to-wall
dancing whether the band was at its best or not. The reaction that sticks
with me the strongest of all is that once -- and only once, to my memory
-- after the Ill Wind's record was released, we played in some club
in New Hampshire and the lead-off band played a cover of one of our
songs -- maybe Little Man, I don't remember.
12. Tell me about regular gigging - where and how often did you
play?
I think at our best we worked say three out of four weekends a month.
If you got to a month where you worked every weekend, you really felt
like you'd got somewhere -- were making a success of it.
13. Who were some of the bands you played with/opened for? What so-
called legendary characters did you come across?
I'm sure you'll get the
same one story from us all -- far and away the most awesome (in the
sense of 1970) gig we ever had. We opened for the Who, one gig only,
two or maybe three nights, two shows a night if I remember correctly.
We met everybody but Keith Moon, who put his fist through a glass window
the day they arrived and had to have it bandaged up. I talked to Pete
Townsend, along with the other band members, for some little time --
an actual, musician-to-musician conversation.
He was so nice to us. I
mean, here he was, internationally famous and maybe even rich, etc.,
and we were hardly known around Boston, and he took the time to have
a conversation with a few of us. He was replacing the nut on one or
more Fender Stratocaster's, which were his standard guitar to destroy.
He said you could always get ones that would play pretty well for fairly
cheap, but the plastic nuts on older, cheaper ones would often be worn
down and he couldn't put on a good show with a guitar that wouldn't
play right. That gig was at a major, downtown Boston theater in the
theater district. It was quite something, watching the Who's performances
from the wings. I remember wondering how on earth they all got their
enthusiasm up night after night and threw themselves into the performance,
something I was never good at if I didn't feel like playing. Roger Daltrey
was also pleasant to us.
Then another time we opened in a high school in New Hampshire for Moby
Grape (remember them?). They had basically nothing to do with us --
I don't know if I even met a single member of the band. They were in
the middle of their publicity barrage, with the eight singles released
from their first album all at once (!). Of course it made you feel good
to be on the same stage as such famous people.
Oh yes, and I think we played backup for Chuck Berry one time when he
did a show at the MIT student center. During the show he made fun of
me looking like Jesus Christ (I had long, album-cover hair then and
the beard) which pissed me off. Or at least I thought he was making
fun of me. I came away with very bad feelings about him. But it could
have just been me being socially maladept and maybe he was just playing
around for the audience.
14. Describe a typical set - what songs were played?
15. Of the groupand musicians on the scene at the time, which were the
ones that you felt especially connected to?
16. Did your own political sensibility affect the band and its music
in any way?
No. Despite long hair and
beard, I was never a hippy. I had a Harley hog and a motorcycle jacket
but I wasn't really a biker either. I didn't do that much hanging out
with other Boston musicians at that time.
17. How did the deal with Tom Wilson and ABC come about?
All I can say is I assume
Ken and Tom somehow made the connection and I'm pretty sure Tom helped
talk him into auditioning us in Boston.
18. Can you look back on the lp and describe the recording of
some of
the songs? How do you feel about the record when you listen to it
now?
19. What about the non-lp tracks? Where and how were they recorded?
20. Can you tell me about the trip to California and the subsequent
bust upon returning?
21. How did your relationship with the band come to an end?
22. What were your activites following your break with the band?
23. What is life like today? What music do you listen to now?
That's it for now. Best wishes in the new year and I look
forward to hearing back from you.....David
I'm not nearly done but
it's the end of the day and I think I'll send this off to you rather
than risk getting lazy or my computer crashing. I'll save your query
and this reply and maybe beef it up some more when I get another non-crisis
day at work. I'm curious about what you think of all this, and how you
got started.
I haven't been real careful about proof-reading so I apologize.
Carey
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