The Oxpetals – The Oxpetals (1970)

Artist: The Oxpetals
Title: The Oxpetals
Year: 1970
Format: LP
Label: Mercury

The Oxpetals consisted of Benjamin Herndon (vocals-guitar), Steven Pague (guitar-vocals), Guy Phillips (bass), Robert Webber (keyboards) and Daniel “Ace” Allison (drums).

Laid-back with pleasing harmonies, this is uplifting soft rock that incorporates boogie, folk and country influences. Likely to be labeled “hippie-rock” but that’s not to denigrate it, (Shyney)

Track Listing

1. Don’t Cry Mother
2. I Still Remember
3. Doin’ It
4. What Can You Say
5. The Lazy Station
6. March 22
7. Declaration Of Oneness
8. Down From The Mountain
9. Silent Partner
10. Stephanie
11. You Can’t Hide From The Rude Owl
12. Glory To The Skies
    

The Deadly Nightshade – The Deadly Nightshade (1975)

Artist: The Deadly Nightshade
Title: The Deadly Nightshade
Year: 1975
Format: LP
Label: Phantom

On our first album, The Deadly Nightshade, released in 1975, the producer was Felix Cavaliere, who had been the keyboard player and creative leader of The Rascals. They’d been one of our favorite groups from the days of their energetic, passionate first album (before the mellow later hits), when they were still called The Young Rascals, and Felix’s trademark was dramatic slides up and down his Hammond B3 organ, with his elbow.

We were thrilled at the prospect of having Felix’s elbow on our album. And we also felt that as a producer, he’d understand our own live energy, and be able to translate that into an exciting recording.

Felix did play on the album. But he was past his elbow days and Hammond B3 melodrama, into more tasteful Fender Rhodes jazzy/Latinesque stylings. (Think “Groovin’” rather than “Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore”.)

The Deadly Nightshade had not, very deliberately, progressed beyond melodrama. Still, we felt that Felix could capture our kamikaze live sound and spirit in the studio. Unfortunately, however, between Phantom/RCA and us– pulling in opposite directions and with very different concepts of what The Deadly Nightshade’s recordings should be– he was in an impossible position.

We did try to compromise on the issues. It was clearly a given, for instance, that there would be many studio musicians playing on our album, and some—drums replacing my tap boots stomping on the backbeat or downbeat; real horns supplementing or replacing our kazoos; keyboards added in places—seemed reasonable ideas.

But since a big part of what The Deadly Nightshade was about was inspiring other women to play in bands, and proving women could cut it, we wanted as many of the studio musicians as possible, preferably all of them, to be female.
It was a simple concept that no one got, and it caused constant conflict. With the hottest studio guys in town eager to work with

Felix, and RCA happy to pay for them, it seemed incomprehensible to them that we wanted to hire lesser known women.
Since the players we found were both excellent and appropriate for our musical style, we found it equally incomprehensible that they persisted in acting like we were prioritizing gender over musicianship.

As it worked out, we used everybody on some song or other. But the grrrls were generally relegated to the songs that the powers that be considered lightweight. The boyz seemed mainly interested in impressing each other. Nobody was happy.
The most astonishing war story came out of a weekend when we went up to Massachusetts to do a couple of gigs. In the cats’ absence, the mice came out to play. On one country song we’d recorded earlier, the jazz drummer Susan Evans had played. We loved the tracks.

Susan had gotten a hard-hitting, rowdy bar band feel that few jazz drummers can manage. But our production team decided that one of the album’s engineers, a guy who had drummed for the Blues Magoos six or seven years before (but hadn’t played since), could do better. So he played over Susan’s tracks, erasing them.

His drumming was out of sync in roughly a zillion places, naturally; laying rhythm tracks after the fact is difficult even for players who aren’t rusty. So imagine our delight when we got back from our road trip. We ended up using the single scratch track onto which the guys had mixed all of Susan’s tracks. Actually, even with the customary individual EQing of each drum rendered impossible, she sounds damned good.

All in all The Deadly Nightshade finished up the album feeling like The Dead Nightshade. The songs are our originals/our choices. The vocals are all ours. And we are playing on all the cuts, buried under there somewhere. [PRB]

Track Listing

1. High Flying Woman
2. Nose Job
3. Something Blue
4. Losin’ At Love
5. Dance, Mr. Big, Dance
6. Keep On The Sunnyside
7. Sweet, Sweet Music Shuffle
8. I Sent My Soul To The Laundromat
9. Someone Down In Nashville
10. Blue Mountain Hornpipe
11. Onions

The Deadly Nightshade – F&W (1976)

Artist: The Deadly Nightshade
Title: F&W
Year: 1976
Format: LP
Label: Phantom

The title of the second album, F&W, stands for “Funky & Western”. It’s a play on “C&W”, Country & Western… a side of The Deadly Nightshade that Phantom/RCA definitely wanted to downplay on the second album.

It seemed (and still does seem) strange, since RCA had a huge country music division in Nashville. I guess the key word is “division”. The way the mainstream music industry then divided up music was that artists were either one thing or another.

Our cross-genre identity, where we wrote (or picked, in the case of covers) songs in several styles—limiting ourselves only by what we/audiences liked, and by whether or not each song’s style was a good fit for us so we played it well– worked great for us. But it didn’t work at all for the mainstream marketing machine, because an album like that didn’t fit the pre-categorized bins at Sam Goody.

And when it came down to a choice between our crunchy country/bluegrass side and our rock/power pop side, Phantom/RCA wanted the latter. The reason, as it was explained to us, is that country music was a sort of cult music with minimal crossover possibilities. An album perceived as country wouldn’t get played on rock radio or sell to rock/pop buyers, whereas a rock/pop album could cross over to the country charts.i.e. Phantom/RCA essentially saw rock/pop sort of like  “O positive” blood, the universal donor for everyone. Country was more like A blood—a big category, but one with no way out.

How set in stone was this perception? Well, during a later tour that The Deadly Nightshade opened for Billy Joel, to support “F&W”, we did a gig at the Nashville Civic Center. The thousands of people were definitely there to see Billy, not us.
It was the sort of classic situation where the most an unknown opening act can hope for is that the main act’s loyal fans will sit on their hands, rather than throw rotten tomatoes. But our set went so well that we got an encore, lit matches, even some pretty wild dancing in front of the stage– the whole thing.

Now RCA’s Nashville marketing guys had been very skeptical about The Deadly Nightshade before the concert. In fact when we first hit town, they’d taken us out to lunch at a female strip club, to see if they could gross us out. But immediately after the concert, they called RCA’s national office in NY and said they wanted to put more money into promoting The Deadly Nightshade as a C&W act. Note: that was their own money, not the NY office’s money.

RCA said no. i.e. it was pretty clear that if they couldn’t market us as a rock/pop act, they didn’t want us at all.
Frankly, The Deadly Nightshade’s success was not based on trying to fit ourselves into some pre-existing category. We did badly at that. Rather, our success had been based on taking the pulse of the times, then making up our own new category that fit what people seemed to want/need/love—and fit our own strong points, of course. So we still hoped to sneak out a weird fusion album. But we realized that, for marketing purposes, we needed to label the weird fusion.

So “Funky & Western” was our soundbite for a made-up musical style (and an album) that encompasses both a fiddle/washboard song and a cover of the old Motown hit “Dancing in the Streets”. We hoped that the word play– “funky” almost rhymes with “country” (close enough for a rap artist, anyway)—would make the soundbite sound familiar enough to make the weird mix of styles understandable.

To be honest, the inclusion of the disco song (”Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”) made the album as a whole a bit hard to understand even for us. But we had to include “Mary Hartman” because it was a semi-hit. And it was our own idea to do the song, so we can’t pin that bit of accidental commerciality on the record company. It’s all explained below.

Anyway, the second album was released late, about a year and a half after the first album, mainly because we and RCA/Phantom had a hard time settling on a producer.

The first one we agreed on was Richard Greene, Seatrain’s violin player, who we’d long idolized. We also loved that Richard seemed to favor our most eclectic newly-written songs, particularly one washboard number (called “I Know What I Like”) that we mainly wrote to give me a chance to sing as low as possible; the result was much like Kermit the Frog, had he been a baritone-type bullfrog rather than a tenor.

But after several months, it seemed like Richard had too many Seatrain commitments. Phantom/RCA wasn’t as pleased as we were with choices like the frog song, anyway.

Next was Paul Rothschild, who’d produced The Doors and was then starting to work with Bonnie Raitt (another of our idols, and, btw, as wonderful a person as she is a singer and bottleneck guitar player). Paul signed on, and was supposed to do our album after he completed Bonnie’s “Home Plate”. We were psyched. But ‘Home Plate” ran very late, and after another several months, Phantom/RCA got terminally antsy.

Then came a series of other possibilities, including one fellow who insisted on having studio hotshots play for us. (The explanation that particularly endeared him to us: “They’ll sound just like you, only better.”) We and our label finally agreed on Joel Diamond and Charlie Calello.

Joel, who was the name producer, showed up at the studio sometimes, to be Joel Diamond. But otherwise, I don’t think we registered much. (His discography includes two albums, both called “The Deadly Nightshade”; one is on Atlantic, one’s on his own record company Silver Blue. We never recorded for either company.) Charlie, who was primarily an arranger– much of it for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, for whom he’d also played bass briefly– did the actual producing work.

The studio experience was initially much more positive than the first album. For one thing, though Phantom did insist on instrumentally supplementing the three of us with studio players, Charlie found us three regular players—drummer Allan Schwartzberg, pianist Jon Stroll, and extra electric rhythm guitar player Lance Quinn—who played with us on every cut, rather than album one’s rotating superstar cast of thousands.

Obviously they were not women. We didn’t feel up to fighting that fight again. But they were nice guys, who, before playing, actually listened to the three of us play each song through once, to try to get our feel, instead of jumping in after the second bar and taking the song over.
So laying down the basic tracks went unbelievably fast. We nailed them all (except for one late add, a cover of “Dancing In the Streets’) in two days.

Unfortunately, that encouraged the record company to change our release date from October to September. Admittedly, September is a much better sales month, because of the new school season. So it made marketing sense. But to make the deadline, we’d have to complete the whole rest of the album—one more basic track, all instrumental overdubs, all vocals, mixing, and mastering—in ten days. The two-day basics made a 12-day album seem feasible.

We did make the deadline. But it was, in my opinion, at the expense of many vocals. The harmony parts are as good or better than on the first album. But in terms of vocal quality, our signature blend doesn’t sound as distinctive, or as carefully done, as on the first album.

The difference: On the second album, if someone’s voice was slightly out of tune or scraggly, instead of singing till we got it right, we used a time-saving trick of Charlie’s: We not only doubled and then tripled ourselves, but often also doubled each other’s parts. (I.e. if Anne’s part sometimes sounds like Anne plus Helen and me, it probably is.) When such tripled tracks are blended together, imperfections smooth right out, so the trick works. Still, it is just a trick, not getting it right.

By the twelfth night, everyone was pretty happy, but so exhausted that all those who had lives, including Anne, went home early. Our engineer Kevin stayed with Helen and me to re-mix the previously recorded disco semi-hit “Mary Hartman”, in order to make it sound marginally more like the rest of the album. We finished at 3:00 a.m. and drove out to the 24-hour Clairmont Diner (now, sadly, defunct) in New Jersey.

“Hey, do you know who these women are?” a totally giddy Kevin enthused to our waitress. “They’re two-thirds of The Deadly Nightshade, and they just finished an album. ”The waitress looked us up and down and said, “That’s nothing. Frankie Valli comes here all the time.”   [PRB]

Track Listing

1. Comin’ Thru
2. Show Me The Way Back Home
3. I’m Feelin’ Fine
4. One Day At A Time
5. Murphy’s Bar
6. Little Old Lady From Pasadena
7. Dancing In The Streets
8. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
9. No Chicken Today
10. Johnny The Rock And Roll Star
11. Ain’t I A Women