Winter 1974, Saturday afternoon
We were bored. 16 years old. Gary was 17, riding shotgun. I had a 10-year-old Pontiac LeMans and we drove it up and down Brookpark Road. I had just installed a new car stereo with Dolby B and coaxial speakers. I popped a fresh cassette into the dash and turned it up. I looked at Gary. He looked at me. We were looking for something.
I was second chair in the drum section, Gary first. In marching band: snare drum. Symphonic band: timbales. Rock and roll band: as big a drum set as we could assemble. They let us take the percussion instruments home for the whole summer, so we borrowed a truck and took it all: chimes, gongs, marimba, vibraphone, four tympani. Do you know how big a tympani is? John Bonham? Keith Moon? They had nothing on us. Our drum sets were epic. Until we trucked it all back to the high school in the fall.
-It’s around here somewhere.
All the grocery stores closed at 6PM, then we rambled in. It was 2AM when we clocked out from stocking the shelves at Fazio’s, then sparked up and drove around. Five nights a week, that time of morning, the town was ours. I had noticed the sign on one of my nocturnal perambulations earlier that week, and thought it strange that a recording studio would actually be operating in our neighborhood. In Parma. On Brookpark Road. I just couldn’t find it in the light of day.
-Wait. What’s that. Follow me.
I don’t even think we knocked. There was no one at reception anyway. The band was going at it -loud- in the back of the building. Narrow hallways. Gold records on the wall? We didn’t stop to look. We followed the sounds deep into the bowels.
It was a funky white-boy groove, with a complicated syncopated drum pattern. They stopped. We stopped. The guy in charge smiled. They waved us in. We found stools at the back of the control room and sat still. It seemed like the whole band was in there with us. They didn’t speak to us, and we didn’t open our mouths either. Maybe our mouths were hanging agape. Racks and racks of equipment: limiters, compressors, VU meters bouncing wildly. There was no way I could play that drum pattern. Maybe Gary could.
Roll the 2″ tape. The song blasted through the monitors and everyone looked through the glass at the bass player. He looked lonely in the larger studio with his big bass and all those mics. And he looked nervous. Rewind the 2″ tape. The song started again. The bass player was working hard. Wood paneling, dim lights, someone was smoking, not us. The band was laughing. Apparently he kept making the same mistake. Spin the 2″ tape. We were all picking up the groove now. Maybe I could manage that drum part after all. I certainly couldn’t hear any mistakes with the bass. It sounded beautiful, like nothing I’d heard before. Back up the 2″ tape and blast it again. The leader finally spoke up, laughing.
– We can fix it in the mix! It’s just a demo.
What? The leader turned and explained they were rehearsing tracks to take to their actual recording session in Miami in a couple weeks. What? Not New York, or LA? Criteria. Never heard of it. They laughed. Who would spend this much time and money and go into a real recording studio on Brookpark Road with all that blinking equipment and do all this work just to do it all over again a couple weeks later? And it sounded fine. It sounded more than fine. It sounded freaking incredible. Much better than my coaxials.
-We’ll fix it in the mix, man!
I guess we stayed a couple hours, taking it all in. It was seminal, it planted a seed. It was fun. That afternoon made the music real. What we were witnessing was the formation of what could be described as a regional supergroup. The bassist? He was Daniel Pecchio, fresh from playing with Glass Harp. Those funky drums? Tommy Dobeck, coming off his run with Circus, playing a similar syncopated beat as their big hit, Stop, Wait and Listen. Also with us in the control room was guitarist Jonah Koslen, before he formed Breathless and the Heroes.
And the leader? Turns out we sat in on one of the first rehearsals of the Michael Stanley Band, working on Lost in the Funhouse Again, and getting ready to record their debut album, You Break It… You Bought It! at Criteria Studios in Miami, the same place that saw the recording of Layla, Hotel California, and Rumours.
Gary and I never stopped with the music. I still play drums everyday. But I’m still not as solid, not as funky as Tommy Dobeck. Gary quit his computer job, worked his way up as an assistant audio engineer and eventually built his own recording studio in Chicago. He calls it Electric Garyland Studios. And when he heard about Michael’s passing, he remembered this:
– Two inch tape rewinding between takes- engineer in a separate room- lots of mics – re-takes. Wow. Sneaking into that recording session was epiphanal for me.
So if you give a listen to Lost in the Funhouse Again, and you turn it up loud right at the beginning, you’ll hear Michael and Tommy chatting back and forth in the studio:
– Michael, I think…
– Sure, Tom.
– What’s his problem?
– (unintelligible) is a pain in the butt…
– Never get a drummer that wears white shoes…
– Or gold buckles…
– On his hands. Haha…
And yeah. They fixed it in the mix.
— a true story by Thomas Mulready
2 Responses to “Lost in the Funhouse Again”
Mary Breiner
I loved this story so much! We are of the same era. I was a big fan of Circus in those days. I introduced my east coast friends at College if Wooster to my Michael Stanley albums. Those jersey kids had never heard of him before. Really fun story!
Scott Armour
Awesome experience. Awesome memory. Awesome story.