It was 1982. After having worked at Tower Records since 1979, I was getting a little restless. Magi was long gone, dissolved and most members were back in Indiana.
I moved myself to Santa Monica in 1980, into a garage converted to an apartment. The
bathroom was in another building. Although it was nine blocks from the Pacific Ocean, the
place had bad vibes. There were fist holes in the walls and lizards and slugs would cling
to the shower walls. I had bizarre neighbors too. A snooty, ill-tempered woman next door,
a strange guy from Queens, and all in all no one to have lunch with.
What that beachhouse in Santa Monica did give me was the solitude with which to write tons
of songs. I was honing my craft then and although a lot of the stuff I was writing was
crap, there were a lot of good songs too.
I was determined to keep making records and start a solo career after Magi's demise,
convinced that what I was doing was good and determined to keep going. A co-worker at
Tower, Sunny Paul, owned a TEAC 4-track setup at his house and graciously let me record
some songs properly for the first time. "Telephone" and "The Grip" on
Points Revisited came from those sessions.
With those demos and some others I'd recorded at another friend's, I passed cassettes of
my songs to anyone I thought wouldn't tape over them. After seemingly endless rejections,
two brothers who worked at Tower had a label and decided to have me record a six song EP
on their label, Pulse. Pulse Records had L.A. punk bands Middle Class and Dead Hippie, but
I think they saw me as their pop cash register.
I met the drummer, Mark Cuff, through Carla Olsen. Carla came into Tower a lot. She worked at Macy-Lipman, up the hill from Tower. We became friends. Carla was in Dylan's "Sweetheart Like You" video. She was in a band called the Textones. I needed a drummer.
The bass player, Johnny Bethesda, was in The Rubber City Rebels. I saw them open for U2 at the Country Club in Reseda. Johnny was a friend of Alan Seymour, a great guy who worked in the tape section of Tower. Alan was in The Adapters, a fun punk band. Alan was the first guy in Hollywood I could talk to about songwriting and performing. I sat in with his band a couple times, playing "Police & Thieves" and "Mustang Sally."
Matt & Mark Humphries were brothers that worked the tape section at Tower. They owned Pulse, a L.A. punk label in the early 80s. Mark & Matt set up the session at Perspective Studios in Sun Valley, CA on September 27, 1983. I was an hour late to the session, realizing I didn't know my way around the vast auto junkyard known as Sun Valley. Driving around the maze of Los Angeles freeways was never relaxing near on-ramps.
We recorded all six songs in 6 hours. After the session I stayed up and went to the BMV to get my license renewed, then ate at Denny's. Thom Wilson, of Offspring fame, was the engineer. We mastered it at Gold Star. Gold Star was old sleazoid-music business L.A. recording studio, echo chambers and all. Me, I kinda liked hearing my voice going through the same walls as Ronnie Spector and The Righteous Brothers. Stan Ross was the engineer. He was the co-owner of Gold Star and produced Sonny & Cher records. During the last overdub session, I heard something resembling Kraftwerk coming from the mastering room. It was Neil Young's upcoming release, "Trans." Years later they tore down Gold Star Studios, just plowed over it, and it's now a parking lot or something.
Although I'm happy the label saw my potential and gave me my first solo release, sad to say they didn't know what to do with the record after it was pressed. Two killing blows to their morale were that Rodney Bingenheimer refused to play it on his show on KROQ, saying it was a folk record, and Bob Say, who worked for Moby Disc, a large distributor in the Valley, refused to carry it. Later Bob & I became friends during my Long Ryder days and I asked him why. He told me he'd asked the label if they would promote it and they said no.
Many lessons to be learned, many more recordings to be made . . .