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Post by markus on Jun 24, 2016 14:46:27 GMT
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Post by duckbarman on Jun 24, 2016 19:26:12 GMT
I thought that the saddest part of that audio was the occasional bout of coughing that interrupts it...
:-(
I don't think Allen was too impressed with the interviewer (with some reason) but one thing of interest to me was Allen saying they got $120K from Elektra. When a friend of mine put that figure (well he said $100K) to Albert recently, Albert said:
"No way. Absolutely not. We got 4 or maybe 5 thousand dollars in total. (more must have been coughed up for the California trip).
No way would Elektra have given us that huge sum. Why would they? When we did OYFOOYK we got our biggest advance, $75k, and a lot of that went to Jack Douglas because he was considered to be the best mixer.
It's true that Elektra thought we would be huge, and if we'd been given Rothchild and Botnick we could have been amazing, but we didn't think that. We thought if we were lucky we'd be like the next Autosalvage (obscure NYC psych band from 68).
And the money was only for new equipment (purchased as you know at Sam Ash with Eric no doubt taking a commission). I bought a new kit but I didn't like it. My drum sound on those demos was horrible.
When we did the Stalk Forest sessions I reverted to my old high school kit and I kept on using that for several years."
So the mystery of that massive Elektra advance rumbles on...
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Post by Buck on Jun 28, 2016 18:38:32 GMT
That's not accurate, Ralph, to my recollection Elektra gave us between cash and studio costs, around $75k in 1968 dollars. They basically supported us during the 2 year period before letting us go.
As for Columbia, our advances were never less than 100k, and by the time we did Agents, we were getting $250k per album to record it. We weren't pocketing that, it went for the costs. We didn't recoup our advances 'till many years later. We did get song publishing money, but it just went into the pot that paid our expenses and salaries, we never saw it as a discrete item.
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Post by duckbarman on Jun 28, 2016 19:15:37 GMT
That's not accurate, Ralph, to my recollection Elektra gave us between cash and studio costs, around $75k in 1968 dollars. They basically supported us during the 2 year period before letting us go. Thanks for that info... In that case, that makes it even more weird - with all that up-front money - that they didn't release that SFG album in an effort to recoup the outlay, at least... They were set to release it - the 11 July 1970 issue of Billboard contained an article highlighting 15 albums that Elektra had announced at their annual sales convention that they were getting ready to put out in the next couple of months (around September) and the SFG one was one of those (together with Funhouse etc). We've all heard the story about Sandy trying to delay the release until after Summer (because apparently "nobody buys records in Summer") by withholding track running orders etc, and that's supposed to have annoyed Elektra so much they shelved the entire project... That's never seemed realistic to me - for a start, it was scheduled to be released in September anyway - that's definitely "after Summer" (at least where I live' it is), and in a logical world, Elektra would have just said to the band, "we've waited long enough for you to decide, so we're going to decide the running order and the cover" etc... It just seems that there must have been more to the story - for them to say, "OK, well if you can't decide the running order, we'll just forget the whole thing then and we'll forget about all the cash we've already invested in you..." That's never made sense to me. When Albert said it was only $5K, then that made the whole thing slightly comprehensible - but from Allen's interview and from what you've said, I'm back to scratching my head over the whole affair... And that SFG album was - is - bloody good... I'm stumped... |
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Post by Buck on Jul 7, 2016 3:21:35 GMT
That's not accurate, Ralph, to my recollection Elektra gave us between cash and studio costs, around $75k in 1968 dollars. They basically supported us during the 2 year period before letting us go. Thanks for that info... In that case, that makes it even more weird - with all that up-front money - that they didn't release that SFG album in an effort to recoup the outlay, at least... They were set to release it - the 11 July 1970 issue of Billboard contained an article highlighting 15 albums that Elektra had announced at their annual sales convention that they were getting ready to put out in the next couple of months (around September) and the SFG one was one of those (together with Funhouse etc). We've all heard the story about Sandy trying to delay the release until after Summer (because apparently "nobody buys records in Summer") by withholding track running orders etc, and that's supposed to have annoyed Elektra so much they shelved the entire project... That's never seemed realistic to me - for a start, it was scheduled to be released in September anyway - that's definitely "after Summer" (at least where I live' it is), and in a logical world, Elektra would have just said to the band, "we've waited long enough for you to decide, so we're going to decide the running order and the cover" etc... It just seems that there must have been more to the story - for them to say, "OK, well if you can't decide the running order, we'll just forget the whole thing then and we'll forget about all the cash we've already invested in you..." That's never made sense to me. When Albert said it was only $5K, then that made the whole thing slightly comprehensible - but from Allen's interview and from what you've said, I'm back to scratching my head over the whole affair... And that SFG album was - is - bloody good... I'm stumped... I or the band were not privy to the reasons Elektra dropped us. There were some symptoms, Andrew Winters insulted the art director of Elektra who was Jac Holzman's brother in law or something, Les Braunstein failed to deliver record quality vocals on the original recordings, they agreed to more recording with Eric Bloom on vocals, we did the second round in LA, then they brought in another producer to maybe do something else and Andrew Winters didn't appear because he decided to take a day job, I guess they thought we weren't serious at that time. Of course we did persevere and emerge as BOC, but I wonder how it would have gone had the SWU or SFG gone the distance. It was almost three years later when the first BOC record came out. |
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Post by warrior21 on Jul 7, 2016 3:42:51 GMT
The St. Cecelia record was such a great release. So wonderful to hear the SFG material in that quality. Here's to hoping that other lost gems find their way to our stereos before too long.
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Post by duckbarman on Jul 7, 2016 10:51:09 GMT
> but I wonder how it would have gone had the SWU or SFG gone the distance
I'm convinced that had either or both of those records been released at that time on that label, and with at least two rock critics singing your praises in the music press, the world could well have been your... erm... oyster...
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