by Daryl Easlea
Vietnam was still an issue, and the fear of the call-up was still prevalent, especially as the draft had turned into a lottery system in 1969, parts of which were broadcast live on US TV. This reactivated a system first used in the Second World War, based on a number-selection structure relating to the potential conscript’s date of birth. To turn something so serious into little more than prime-time TV added to the overall resentment of the war. Having already participated in a major anti-Vietnam demonstration, there was no question about the Mael brothers’ feelings on the war. Avoiding the draft became paramount.
Larry Dupont: “Ron and I were both playing these rather big games trying to keep from being called up. We both went in on the same day for a medical. We were also going to the same free lawyer who advised us on how to not get drafted. I had damaged my stomach having chickenpox when I was 16, and that was enough to get me out. People were doing insane things like jumping up and down on their bare feet to damage them. I even thought about going in for a CAT scan to make it appear that I had a brain tumour.”
Such extreme actions were taken as par for the course at the time, while students were staying in education to avoid the draft. However, both Ron and Russell were now out of college.
Larry Dupont: “Ron was rather down in the dumps because he couldn’t get out [of the draft]. He was getting very good legal advice from a little operation at the bookstore Papa Bach on Santa Monica Boulevard. Ron’s tactic ultimately was to repeatedly keep appealing, which resulted in choking them in their own paperwork. Eventually his file kept moving further and further back in the draw and it got fatter and fatter and fatter. That was how Ron got out.
“I don’t remember if Russell got out because by the time his number came up, the whole thing had quietened down. There was definitely a very palpable cloud hanging over everybody’s heads about what you were going to do if you were actually drafted and had to go.”
With most educated white middle class males performing stunts to evade the call-up, the majority who were drafted were poor, especially in the African-American community. The spectre of Vietnam would be in the background for the first two years of the Seventies, but fortunately, unlike Ron’s old friend Fred Frank from Urban Renewal Project, all the members of Halfnelson avoided having to fight a senseless war.
The Halfnelson regime was simple: practice. Nothing was to get in the way of it. Although Feinstein and Jim Mankey liked to party and had an eye for the ladies, the primary focus was Halfnelson. And there was one golden rule for rehearsals — no jamming.
Jim Mankey: “We never got stoned or anything. Nobody in that band was the slightest bit into that kind of thing. Pretty unusual for the time I must say. Ron and Russell were fine role models for a young man like me. They were incredibly focused.”
Harley Feinstein: “I never knew Ron to have a girlfriend. Russ had various girlfriends, but the brothers were much more intent on building their careers as musicians rather than living the hedonistic lives of rock’n’roll stars.”
The Maels ensured that the new recruits were listening to the right music: “I learned about Syd Barrett from them and The Madcap Laughs was a favourite of mine,” Jim Mankey says. “They told me about Pink Floyd. I heard The Piper At The Gates of Dawn and The Move, although I never really got into them as much as Ron and Russell did. They would introduce me to things they liked because they loved to share their references. It was a useful education for me. They were trying to make me think less about The Doors and more about The Kinks.”
Harley Feinstein: “They were very different to your average guys who would get together and play music. They were not only quirky from a musical point of view, but they struck me as being very intelligent.”
The Maels had an evangelical belief in listening to music that wasn’t prescribed by the West Coast powers that be and, in 1970, it took quite some effort to seek out some of the records the brothers were listening to. It’s amazing because they never became freaks themselves. They were too busy absorbing it all.
The group needed a permanent rehearsal space. “We tried practising at other people’s houses but we were stopped as we were loud and pretty grating,” Harley Feinstein recalls. They eventually found a suitable alternative, located on an anonymous industrial estate in the San Fernando Valley, close to where Cerwin Vega made speakers, through Warren Fleischman, the uncle of a bass player named Neil who had originally auditioned for Halfnelson.
Jim Mankey: “It was a small factory in Hollywood that manufactured beds for dogs. Some crazy band rehearsed upstairs; they had horse in the title and they played George Harrison songs.”
Having a proper rehearsal facility committed Halfnelson to improving, as they gathered at what the group christened the ‘Doggie Bed Factory’.
Harley Feinstein: “There was the factory part, where all the workers from south of the border would knock together these doggie beds, and an unused room that became our studio.” It also became a convenient rendezvous for the drummer’s amorous activities. “I was only 20, living with my parents — I used to meet girls there.”
The group would practise twice a week, and Mike Berns would bring as many people down as possible to see them play. Larry Dupont would frequently attend, making tapes and taking photos.
Harley Feinstein: “We would dress the place. We had a papier mâché boat we put together. We stayed up until 3am out in the middle of the street in this rough neighbourhood, with all these lights. Larry was our in-house recording engineer, photographer and artist — he set up the lights in the street, like a movie set in this industrial estate. Ron and Russ had a lot of respect for Larry’s views. He would give a lot of input for everything — what we should do, where we should play, how we should set up the instruments; and later, what the album covers should look like. Larry played an important role in the group.”
“Something was abundantly clear,” Dupont recalls. “Jim was a great guitarist — a better guitarist than Earle. Earle realised that too, which was what kept Jim as bassist.”
Berns brought a variety of music business types down to view the group including Jack Nitzsche (who heard not a note of music because of a power failure), while around 100 copies of the demo were circulated around LA scenesters in an attempt to convince record company types into believing it was a finished master. Many of the A&R guys, rooted in a peaceful post-Woodstock vibe, as fan and future manager Joseph Fleury noted, “believed Halfnelson to be, on the strength of their music, a bunch of deranged acid heads after one too many sugar cubes.”
Record companies weren’t exactly banging down the door. A copy of the demo was sent to Frank Zappa’s Straight Records and further afield to The Beatles’ Apple label in London. Russ Regan at UNI politely (and presciently) suggested that Halfnelson were “two years ahead of their time”. The group found an ally in LA writer Katherine Orloff, who was quick to show her support and wrote a three-column feature for the British Sounds newspaper in October 1970. Orloff, who went on to become a successful Hollywood publicist for many years, recalls the piece with affection.
Although unclear as to who brought Halfnelson to her attention, Orloff remembers that “they were pitched to me as ‘the band that practises in a doggie bunk bed factory.’ It was too delicious to pass up because I got to go to a doggie bunk bed factory. It was everything it promised to be.” With its faux-gloomy opening paragraph culminating in the line, “How about discovering a group that is a total failure?,” the feature served as a wonderful calling card for the group.*
With such lines as “[they] haven’t made a cent, except once when Earle found a dime under the organ,” it told the tale of the band struggling to survive despite having originality, wit and flair. Orloff compared Halfnelson to The Kinks and The Bonzo Dog Band, while suggesting that musically they were “well, weird. In other words, without consciously trying, their sound and manner is very English. They could be an immensely popular performing band.” Mike Berns called it straight in the article: “This grou
p is going to make it. I’m tired of being called a lunatic.”
Berns would be called a lunatic for a while longer.
Aware of the indifference surrounding Halfnelson, Earle Mankey persuaded the brothers to cut another demo, this time comprising four tracks — ‘Wonder Girl’, ‘Fa La Fa Lee’, ‘High C’ and ‘Slowboat’ — which subsequently become known as Folk Songs From California: an in-joke regarding the Mael brothers’ hatred of the genre.
The demo found its way to musician and producer Todd Rundgren. By coincidence, the Mael brothers were known to Rundgren through his then-girlfriend Miss Christine from Frank Zappa protégés the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), who had also been seeing Russell.
Jim Mankey: “She was very nice… and outrageous, beautiful, frightening. With someone like Christine, if you wanted to measure up in her eyes then you needed to have a very strong fashion sense. She was a colourful figure.”
Rundgren had become something of an alternative celebrity by 1970. He’d made three albums as the leader of Philadelphia pop-psych act Nazz (who had named themselves after ‘The Nazz Are Blue’, a track by Mael favourites The Yardbirds) and was set on a solo career, initially under the name Runt. Like many others on the LA scene, he was bemused upon hearing the demo, but unlike those, he was convinced there was something there. Berns set up another showcase gig and Rundgren asked his friend and engineer Thaddeus James Lowe to join him out in the San Fernando Valley.
Lowe had been the vocalist in legendary West Coast garage punk-psychedelic band The Electric Prunes. “Todd played me a demo of the band doing ‘Roger’,” Lowe recalls. “He asked if I wanted to get involved. The stuff sounded real Tinkertoy with pots and pans crashing but with a spike through it lyrically. I thought they were very interesting. So, this showcase was set up at the ‘Doggie Bed Factory.’ Needless to say I had never been in a ‘Doggie Bed Factory’ before. At least not that I remember.”
All the rehearsals the band had been doing paid off. Rundgren and Lowe were impressed with what they saw and heard. “We rehearsed to be heard,” Jim Mankey says. “Only someone who was a real hard worker and focused could practise as much as we did. When people came to see, it filled us with dread because none of us thought we could really play that well. We rehearsed seemingly forever and then, amazingly enough, the band actually got a record deal, which was quite exciting for a little punk like me.”
Although the majority of the music business could not fathom Halfnelson’s appeal, Rundgren’s persistence paid off. Having the ear of his manager, Albert Grossman, he convinced the latter to sign the band to his new Bearsville label. “Albert trusted Todd as well,” said Lowe, “and Todd liked the band and saw potential.”
Grossman was a music industry legend. Born of Russian Jewish ancestry in Chicago in 1926, he’d given up a career with the Chicago Housing Authority to become involved in managing the nascent folk scene after seeing Bob Gibson perform. He set up a club, the Gate of Horn in Chicago, and soon joined forces with the team behind the Newport Jazz Festival and set up the Newport Folk Festival. Although seen by the folk movement as one who thought in purely commercial terms only, by the Sixties Grossman was overseeing the careers of artists such as John Lee Hooker, Odetta, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, Janis Joplin and Rundgren himself. These, however, were satellites to his main artist, Bob Dylan, whom Grossman managed between 1962 and 1970, having a profound influence on his career. His wife, Sally, even appeared on the sleeve of Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, photographed at the Grossman home in Woodstock.
Grossman opened the Bearsville Recording Studios in upstate New York in 1969, with the label following a year later. Although independent, Bearsville was part of the larger Warner Brothers group of companies. “There was a time when Warners, which distributed Bearsville, was a very ambitiously artistic label,” US rock critic and long-time Sparks champion Ira Robbins says: “In the late Sixties and early Seventies, it was a label that really championed art and despite where it came from and what it would later become, for a long time it was a label that really coddled and supported and promoted art in a wonderful way.”
Halfnelson signed to Bearsville in late 1970. As Robbins points out, “Beefheart and Zappa were through Warner Brothers, so it wasn’t that odd for Halfnelson to be on Warner Brothers. It wasn’t so much that they were a hard band to push, it’s just that they had a very limited audience.”
Now it was a case of identifying that limited audience and selling the band to them. Grossman suggested that Halfnelson needed a better manager as Feinstein recalls. “Around the time we got signed, we were influenced to get a heavier manager, and Mike got cut out — he financed the demo, got us signed and then he was gone.”
Larry Dupont: “They really had no place to go with Mike. Mike did not understand the group. He wasn’t a good manager. One day, it was over.”
In his place came Roy Silver, a manager of the old school and a wise Hollywood business type, who seemed to be sufficiently under the radar for a lot of people to later question his existence. Silver was a straight-talking character who sat behind an enormous desk and who had, among other things, founded the Tetragrammaton record label with his artist Bill Cosby. Silver achieved notoriety for being Bob Dylan’s first manager before signing him away to Albert Grossman in 1962 for the then substantial sum of $10,000, which financed his management company. By the end of the Sixties, Silver, whom Dupont describes as “extreme Hollywood,” had masterminded Cosby’s career, alongside slightly more eccentric turns such as Tiny Tim, as well as releasing John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s controversial Two Virgins album (when Capitol in the US refused to distribute it due to the nude sleeve) and signing Deep Purple for the US.
Jim Mankey: “Silver cultivated an image of being a powerful, intimidating manager. He had a magnificent office and he would bark at us; he intimidated us all — he was good at that. The only other rock act he had at the time was [the all-female rock band] Fanny, who had some popularity in England. We knew they were big because we went to a party with the girls and Mick Jagger came to see them.”
Harley Feinstein: “[Halfnelson] played several gigs that had been arranged by Mike Berns. Our first was at the Lindy Opera House on Wilshire Boulevard. We had to demonstrate a new PA that somebody had developed — so it was full of people that had some business involvement with the guy who had invented it. We blasted our songs through it. Then we played an LA nightclub, Gregar, and there was nobody there — it was literally empty. We played a little coffee house on Stoner Avenue; we played a handful of gigs and nobody came to see them.”
The first show at which people responded enthusiastically to Halfnelson was a gig at Bishop Amat Memorial High School on Fairgrove Avenue in La Puente, East LA, found for them by Jim Mankey. They performed Tomorrow’s ‘My White Bicycle’, one of two Sixties cover versions in their early set (the other being The Equals’ UK hit, ‘Baby Come Back’), and the kids began stomping their feet. Another gig at Reading Civic Auditorium in upstate California got a great response, too.
The stage show was shaping into something wholeheartedly unusual. Ron would wear eyeliner, with his lips and eyes contorting, glowering at his brother’s traditional rock star flouncing. While Jim stood stock still, his brother Earle would, as Joseph Fleury said, “wear glitter suits and attempt to be everyone’s favourite English poof guitarist”.
Halfnelson’s debut album, which drew on some of the demos, was produced by Rundgren at ID Studios, a small independent facility on La Brea Avenue. Thanks to his Electric Prunes pedigree, it would appear James Lowe was the logical choice to engineer.
However, as Lowe admits, “I didn’t go around telling people I had been in the band at that point. I was still ashamed we hadn’t become The Beatles, so I just shut up about it. I don’t think the [guys in Halfnelson] even knew. I had engineered a number of Nazz, Runt and Todd records at that point so I was probably just recommended as Todd’s engineer.”
Even though they wer
e continually playing and rehearsing, the band were obviously novices in the studio.
James Lowe: “They didn’t have any real ‘method’ they brought to the first record. They were very cooperative and were willing to try things and be what a group that is being ‘produced’ should be — willing. Most songs were approached in group force as the band could play this odd material live. ‘High C’ was the first thing we recorded and I jammed some limited drums up there in the headphones and they went for the drama. I remember hearing their demo and thinking we were going to have to do a bunch of overdubs, but we didn’t.”
Rundgren acted as a sounding board, building on the work that Ron, Russell and Earle had done while offering encouragement. “We later realised that not all record producers do that,” Russell said. “A&R people then get involved. There is no reason for A&R people to exist; people that are paid to take what you have and smooth down the rough edges and get rid of any character that may be involved to make it palatable. We were so spoiled working with Todd — we didn’t know what a producer does.”
Rundgren tried to apply some of the blanket harmonies for which he became renowned on the recordings, but was met with band rejection and cries of “slick ballads” from the studio floor.
“Todd encouraged us to be as eccentric as we could be musically and he pushed us to be better,” Ron said in 2003, “but he wasn’t altering what we were doing.”
Jim wasn’t sure if Rundgren — who gained a reputation as an exacting man in the studio — rated him as a player. “Todd was good to me. I don’t think he particularly admired my ability. I got the impression he would’ve been happier if I’d just left and didn’t come back.” However, the producer took the young bass player under his wing. “He would buy me dinner because I couldn’t afford it and maybe occasionally we’d take some psychedelic drugs. He was good to me.”
Harley Feinstein: “It was mind-blowingly stimulating to all of us — the act of recording was fascinating. I loved it. Back then, going to a recording studio and making a record was a huge deal; we felt very lucky, fortunate to have that opportunity — now, everybody records. We were just walking on a cloud, couldn’t believe how lucky we were.”