Thank you, Eddie King!

From Rebirth of a band

Back in the good old days, just before Reagan got elected, I did something that should have qualified me for the crazy house.

I was living in Santa Monica, working as a music copyist and orchestrator for a small music production company. I decided to risk what was a tremendous amount of money for me at the time, recording a band that had played exactly one gig--and a greensheet one at that (charity gigs that the union pays for, so called because you signed a green sheet of paper and waited three to six weeks for your money).

I had written, and copied by hand, just a handful of reduced big band charts for ten pieces. For no good reason I decided to call it the New Flamingo Swing Orchestra. Bob Ontiveros, a trumpet player in this enterprise, worked at Valle Music Papers in North Hollywood, came up with some folders someone had ordered and gold stamped with a name, but never picked up. Bob wiped the letters off so you could almost not see them, then applied "New Flamingo Swing Orchestra" in gold leaf over the wiped out lettering of the act who ordered them.

That was our first serious identity thing. Then I had Arthur Mortimer, at the time Lynn Carey’s husband, design us a logo. Somewhere in this process the band got booked at the Playboy Club in Century City. As a matter of fact, this picture was taken by a Playboy photographer on the bluff in Santa Monica.

From Rebirth of a band

We needed a demo, because we were doing things backwards. I knew that the Playboy gig wouldn’t last. Every week felt like our last, although we were getting pretty good crowds.

So I went to see Eddie King at Kingsound Studio in North Hollywood with a proposal. I wanted him to mix a demo on the fly down to 2 tracks. The reasoning was that by doing the recording this way we wouldn’t lose anything when we mixed it transferred it to cassettes (!), and we’d keep the cost of the recording down by having no post-production mixing or mastering. Eddie was more than willing to try, and more importantly, he had the musical chops to pull it off.

If memory serves, in 4 hours we recorded 12 tunes, some short, but 8 full-length big band charts. And the band was sightreading! We’d do a runthrough of a chart and do one or two takes, then move on.

You couldn’t do this with ordinary musicians or with an ordinary engineer.

Kudos, then to Berke McKelvey, Harvey Cohen (R.I.P.), and Charles Oreña (and me) on saxes, Bill Armstrong and Bobby Ontiveros on trumpet, the peerless Steve Johnson on trombone, Dominic Genova on Bass, Milton Nelson on piano, and Paul Yonemura on drums. You guys rose to the occasion.

And Eddie King deserves all the credit for manning his Neve 3 board. (My stepson works for Rupert Neve!) When the date was over, you wiped your brow and went on to a lot of other things, but I don’t know if I ever gave you what was due.

Here’s Eddie today:




And here’s the latest genius to record us, Mike Hersch, tomorrow, at Promiseland Studios:

From Rebirth of a band