The Bob Normal Archives
click here to jump to 12/10/05 update 12/28/05 1973 Battle of the Bands 01/14/06 - Perky Quinby 12/2/07 - 1972 Battle of the Bands
The Bob Normal Society's archivist/historian has finally decided to digitize the massive collection of recordings dating back to the 60's. You may ask..."But I thought Bob Normal began in the early 70's! What's all this other stuff?" The answer - well, it's just stuff....and not always good stuff. Sometimes there may be some relevance, sometimes it just sounds ok.
I began recording at an early age - real early, like 7. And I still have all the tapes - but there is probably little interest in the recording of my brother going to the bathroom...so...These first two recordings are the first that I did on my TEAC 3340, which was my first true multitrack recorder. Ellie Friedman was a friend of mine (and Bob's) who played guitar and wrote some songs. This was recorded in the fall of 1971.
The Loves Still Growing - a song by Buzzy Linhart that appeared on Carly Simon's first album. I played guitar and Ellie did all the vocals.
Child's Play - an original song by Ellie, who did all the tracks. In the taped rehearsals, I am also playing guitar but it's not on the final mix.
I used a Beyer ribbon mic on the vocals and an AKG 202E1 on the guitar.
Now we skip ahead many years, to the Bob Normal Band....we played a few concerts at Temple University's Ambler campus (where Janine and I attended). For our third show, we joined up with Julie Gold (who went on to write 'From a Distance', won a Grammy, and became famous). Julie opened for us with Bob and I playing along on 4 or 5 of her songs (and there is a tape of this). In order to promote the show, we wrote and recorded 6 promos to be played on Temple's radio station.......here they are...
Bob Normal Radio Promos - the Chipmunk version, the Boris Karloff version, the Restaurant scene, the Jungle scene, the Robot Factory, and the Western scene. These were recorded after practice one night, no script but we added many tracks of background noise and some music.
This next recording was Bob Normal's third try at the Ambler Campus Talent show. We received a bad review at our first try and then got into a big disagreement with the campus paper/radio station. We followed this up with Bob Normal's Second Chance, at which time our disagreements created a flurry of letter writing to the campus paper. We even got interviewed on the radio station and used that as a good opportunity to trash the paper. Which brings us to Bob Normal's Last Chance. This was recorded by the radio station (probably on cassette) and they did a fairly mediocre job at it. It sounds like one mic was in front of a PA speaker and the other was placed in the audience area - not exactly the best in stereo. The speed on their recorder was even off resulting in an 'off pitch' tape that we floated around for awhile. This version has been pitch corrected (as close as possible) with some EQ adjustments but still it is only ok. So why put this up first? I am still 'breaking in' the Sony 377 recorder ( which dates to around 1970) and I don't want to pull out the best tapes only to have them trashed by the machine.
Another rarity....the Bob Normal Band featuring Jolene. Towards the end of the band, we auditioned to back a singer who had the Bicentennial gig at Valley Forge Park. This is the first of two songs - we recorded a stereo mix outside in my parent's backyard. This never went anywhere and Jolene had front page coverage during the big Valley Forge celebration.
The second tune with Jolene - I can't remember what it is called but I guess this is close...
Gigging with the soon to be famous.....this is (probably) the only recording of Julie Gold (very pre-"From A Distance" fame) with Bob (drums) and Jay (bass). Recorded live at Temple University in 1975, it suffers greatly from a very poor PA system - the vocals did not fair too well - but the instruments sound decent (because they avoided the PA altogether). Julie went off to New York while we encountered Apples and Jolene.
Next up are three of the earliest multi-tracked songs that I could find. The first (and limited to a merciful 33 second excerpt from the original 4 minutes) was recorded by Jack Franklin and myself. Jack and I never had a band but we actually recorded a lot of songs, most much better than this. This one dates from 1969 (10th grade) and was recorded on a cassette deck. I recorded the first pass, rewound the tape, pulled the tape out of the cassette and bypassed the erase head using a few pencils as tape guides. Then we recorded 3 more passes using the same technique. We listened to the previous tracks through speakers that were turned fairly low. Not exactly quality but it was a start.
I'm Gonna - Jack and Jay battle for guitar supremacy. Jack's Hagstrom and my Strat (only a few months old at this point) into a Clark Fuzz box through my Heathkit guitar amp.
This multitracking experiment was followed by another multitracking experiment. I moved away from cassettes and used two stereo decks (mine and Bob's). Bob and I recorded drums and guitar on one of the decks (the guitar ran straight into the recorder - that helps it to sound really bad), then we played back what we recorded into the second deck while adding one or two new tracks. We then played this back to the original deck, again recording two more tracks. The second of the two following songs probably had 4 passes. A big problem with this technique was that the first recorded tracks tended to disappear as we went on, so usually the drums and rhythm guitar would slide way into the background. We never named the first song, which was the 3rd of 6 songs we recorded with this system. These date from 1973, the first done in Feb and the last in November. Here are numbers 3 and 5.
not titled - cool bongos and even some piano. Some guitar played on the only guitar I ever got rid of - Red Gretsch semi hollow body. This guitar was played on the 73 Battle of the Bands rehearsal tape but did not actually make it to the real show (these two tapes on the way).
Guido's March (version 3) - yes, we did play trumpets at the end. I'm not sure how the reverb got there.
The 1973 Battle of the Bands
This was the biggest setup we yet attempted. Modeled after Pink Floyd, I designed a surround sound system that could be controlled by myself onstage. The setup consisted of drums through two amps, one in front of the stage, the other with a speaker cabinet in the rear center of the auditorium. The rear amp also had a tape delay that Bob could control while he played. The bass ran through a single amp and also had a tape delay. The guitar ran through three heads - one for stage with two cabinets, one for auditorium front with two cabinets and one for auditorium rear with two cabinets. I could switch through any combination of heads, turning on the outer amps when needed. In addition, we ran two stereo tape decks (the very ones used to record Guido's March) that were manually synced and ran a 4 track effects program. Each channel was powered by an amp and speaker, placed in each corner of the auditorium. With careful timing, we set up the tape to start a sound (bells, birds, ect) at one corner of the room and slowly rotate around the entire place. The neatest effect was a flying saucer sound that completely surrounded the auditorium while rotating. The tape machines were run by 'Phil', who also rented a truck so we could get all this stuff there. All the equipment was rented at Shupps Music Store, in Jenkintown. Everything was Traynor tube amps. We rented everything the guy owned which also meant that any of the other bands were left without equipment to rent, after all, it was called 'Battle' of the Bands, not friendly band gathering. We bought hundreds of feet of lamp cord to wire all the speakers up and I put together a custom foot switching unit for amp control. Did I mention that this was loud? Well, this was loud - the loudest I have ever played. Aside from all that, we needed some songs to play for our 20 minutes. With effects sequences, this brought the music down to around 15 minutes, maybe less. We also had no vocalist so that meant lots of jamming. We chose the instrumental part from Money, the Pink Floyd album that had just come out, one original, and the Floyd song 'One of these Days'. Phil handled the vocal on Days (the one line).
The following is the first rehearsal (of two) for the show, before we added 'Days'. The third song in this recording was just a jam where I was messing around with my Gretsch with an added Condor guitar synthesizer. That was a weird thing that never really worked and this was the only time I used it. The second rehearsal was with all the sound effect tapes, so I was unable to record that. The actual show was recorded on cassette because that was the only thing we had left to record on.
This is the first rehearsal, in my basement, with just a few of the amps going. Robby Stewart was the bass player with this band, officially called 'Sisak's Blues Band' after a teacher at Upper Dublin High School.
Rehearsal for the 1973 Battle of the Bands
Following is the actual Battle of the Bands. We were pretty close to the rehearsal on the first two songs. The live recording has about 4 minutes of setup before we actually start to play - it officially begins with the sound of the ocean that envelopes the auditorium.
1973 Battle of the Bands - the official recording.
Next up is from a tape labeled.... 'Reject Jams from the Club'....the club being my parents living room. Shortly after getting my TEAC 3340 four track, Bob and I went 'upstairs' and recorded the following (and added a ton of reverb, to help simulate that 'cave' feeling). Most notable are the last two tunes that feature vocals by Bob, basically shouting in the background. Along with the 4 track, I also picked up a Sound City 120 full stack (8x12s and 120 watts) and a Big Muff Pi fuzz pedal. To the best of my recollection, we cranked it up and made it up as we went along. The bass track was overdubbed on the first two selections. The vocals and some clapping were also overdubbed, probably at the same time as the bass. The tape was labeled appropriately as these were quickly removed from the expensive 4 track tapes, mixed down and forgotten, leaving room for another round of classics. From 1973 or so.....
On the same tape are two Drum/guitar jams. The first seems to be without a guitar mic, as the guitar eventually fades away leaving just the drums - it's also in mono. The second is a deluxe stereo track but the guitar seems to be plugged directly into the recorder, once again making it sound as bad as possible. There is also a short section where it sounds like we experimented with overdubbing a second drum track - most likely the first and last time we tried this technique. Re-experience the 70s and have fun jamming along.
Perky Quinby was a classmate of Bob and myself (Perky was Bob's first grade girlfriend) during High School. We actually never played any music with Perky during that time although we had a few jams with her brother who I think played flute (those were the days of Jethro Tull) and knew some other local musicians. I recorded two reels of Perky's original songs somewhere along the way and later she asked if I could record another demo of herself and her friend. Over two days we recorded the following material, the first day was the solo stuff. On day two another high school buddy - Derek McKinney along with myself and Gavin Gervis joined in on the remaining songs. I played lead on two tunes and Derek played lead on the next to the last song. He also played bass on another tune - it may have been on the bass I rented when I was recording some other stuff. These were all recorded in my bedroom with one round of overdubs. I used a Beyer ribbon mic on the vocals. The master tape from this session appears to be missing so this copy is from the mixdown. I recently received a call from a rare vinyl dealer who wanted to know if I had any additional copies of the album "The Street and the Sea" - I said I had no idea what he was talking about. He then read the credits and apparently Gavin had some of these songs released in 1975 along with some others recorded in LA as a gift for Perky's family.
Finally found! Almost as rare as the 1971 Battle that was mostly erased. Bob and Jay and friends rock out the Upper Dublin High School in grand fashion. Joining us for this one-off gig was Big Dave and our sometime bassist Tommy Downey. It's a mono cassette recording and sounds every bit of it. I think our 'recording engineer' Chuck Olner was waving the mic around during the course of the set, in fact, we played an encore that he didn't record. We start off with Speed King, a Deep Purple tune from 'In Rock'. Next is Stairway to Heaven - this was about 3 months after the release of the Led Zep IV album and nobody even knew what the song was. We scrambled to figure it out off the album and Big Dave had to read the words using the album liner during the gig. I don't think it was a total disaster but again, hardly anyone in the crowd even knew the song (Led Zep III bummed everyone out so IV was a slow to be accepted recording). Johnny B Goode follows, probably due to the Johnny Winter version that was all the rage at the time. Love Like A Man, a Ten Years After song, was next and I think it probably came off the best. Ending the set was Summertime Blues, our tribute to the Who version. All in all, a good representation of what it was like to be in a band in 12th grade.
Some pics from 72....more gig pics to be found.
