NY Gong becomes Material on Temporary Music 1
recorded by Giorgio Gomelsky and Eddy Offord in Woodstock
Thanks to all of you that subscribe, and please pass this on to your friends if you are enjoying it. In this blog entry I have included a video interview with Don Davis who played sax on the recording and live tour that I will tell you about now.
Temporary Music 1 is the first recording released by the band Material. First off, I have to say that this recording is it. This is the thing that launched me on a musical exploration for the last 4 years that has led me to this -- working on a blog about a book about “The Gomelsky Recordings”.
Maybe you know this album, like I did 4 years ago, and maybe it has been in your collection for a few decades like it has been for me. And maybe you haven’t thought about this record much in quite awhile when you find yourself, me that is, reading another music history book about a prog band that you loved back in the 70’s, and out of the blue is a quote from a guy who made that prog band’s best records. And he says something like “...and around 79 I was recording this band called Material in Woodstock…”. Wait. What?
This is what happened to me late one night in 2017. The quote is from Eddy Offord, the genius engineer of the most iconic albums by ELP and YES from the Classic Prog days. (Do we now call it an era?) Those albums were made in the early 70’s at Advision Studios in London. How did Mr. Offord end up in Woodstock NY in 1979 recording this unknown band Material? The answer, as I soon found out in the wee hours of that same night in 2017 frantically researching this topic, is Giorgio Gomelsky.
My next question was … WHO? I had never heard of Giorgio Gomelsky. The more research I did, the more dumbfounded I was to learn that his name is all over my record collection. Here’s a very short incomplete list of bands whose recordings he produced: Yardbirds, Soft Machine, Gong, John McLaughlin, Keith Tippett, Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll, Magma, and of course Material. Oh and let’s not forget he was the first manager of an unknown band called The Rolling Stones.
When you think of the band Material, you think of Bill Laswell. He has been the force, and the bass player, driving this band in its many incarnations over the decades. The origin of this force starts in Detroit, but for this story let’s start in France. This is where Daevid Allen and Gomelsky had been building up the band Gong with a touring network created by Gomelsky. By 1978 that road had started to dry up and Gomelsky went off to New York City in search of new roads to travel. He wasn’t the only European producer looking for talent in NYC. Brian Eno also was there to record with The Talking Heads. He found himself immersed in a local music scene calling itself No Wave, releasing the compilation album No New York near the end of 78.
In NY Gomelsky soon recognized the talent of Bill Laswell and invited him to crash and rehearse at his loft space. By October of 78 he invited some of the European talent he had worked with to come to NY and be part of his day long Zu Manifestival. This teaming-up of the NY and Euro avant-garde led to the forming of a backup band for Daevid Allen called NY Gong. By April of 1979 Gomelsky had arranged a North American tour for this band, to be traveled in a school bus, featuring Bill Laswell on bass, Cliff Cultreri on guitar, Michael Beinhorn on synth, Mark Kramer on keyboards and trombone, Fred Maher and Bill Bacon (who replaced Stu Martin mid-tour) on drums, and Don Davis on sax, among others. Different combinations of these musicians would play in the 3 bands that were on the tour: NY Gong, Mother Gong, and Zu Band. These bands would be joined by like minded local bands in each city of the tour.
NY Gong performing in LA in 1979:
The sax player on this tour was Don Davis. Don and I had a great talk about this tour recently, along with the recording he did with Material in Woodstock for the song “White Man”. Don was living in the Woodstock area at that time. He filled me in on the activity that was going on that led to this recording, as well as telling some stories about life on the road on a school bus with NY Gong.
Woodstock had long been a hotbed for musicians and artists well before the giant festival that made it famous in 1969. In 1971 The Creative Music Studio was founded there by Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso, and Ornette Coleman for the study of contemporary creative music. Musicians from across North America were eager to sign up for a chance to interact with jazz and world music luminaries. From Wikipedia: “Unprecedented in its range and diversity, CMS provided participants with a rare opportunity to interact personally with musical giants of improvisation and musical thought on a daily basis.” By the late 70’s this center of creative music became a major source of talent that would migrate 2 hours south to mingle and play in the rapidly changing NY Downtown Music Scene.
By 1979 there were many music studios in the Woodstock area, including one that would become slightly famous because its owner was Levon Helm, the drummer from The Band. Soon after The Band broke up, Levon built this studio called The Barn to record his own music. He had no trouble recruiting the best of the best to record with him, and he soon formed what he called the RCO All Stars. When they got down to work on their album, the engineer they hired was none other than Eddy Offord. I don’t know how Offord hooked up with Helm or what motivated Offord to move from London to Woodstock other than this golden opportunity. It could be that Offord was burned out on working with the big stars of the London music machine. According to the website Discogs, the last album he worked on in London was with Ginger Baker for the Baker-Gurvitz Army. As we now know, anyone working with Ginger Baker could be pushed over the edge of sanity pretty quickly.
Gomelsky was no doubt eager to get the Zu Band into a recording studio soon after they got back from their NY Gong tour. And he had just the right connection to do it. It turns out that Gomelsky and Eddy Offord worked together many times, starting way back in the mid 1960’s when Offord was a junior engineer at Advision. He was assigned to work on some of the early Yardbird recordings, with Gomelsky producing and pushing the sound of the Yardbirds well past their blues roots into some of the first psychedelic sounds on record. And they would work together many times more, including on John McLaughlin’s first solo album Extrapolation, and the free-jazz recordings of The Spontaneous Music Ensemble.
Through this connection, and the timing that brings them together in the NY/Woodstock area, Gomelsky brings this very young, somewhat ragtag but tour hardened group of musicians into the studio of Levon Helm to record with Eddy Offord. It was the first time in a recording studio for most of them.
Inside Levon Helm’s Barn, Eddy Offord assembled his now famous mobile recording studio. This is the same setup he pioneered on the road with Yes in the mid 70’s, and used with many other touring bands including The Police in 1983. Offord loved the live sound of bands and strove to capture that sound in the studio. You might think that the multi-textured and often dense sound of the classic Yes LP’s was arrived at through massive overdubbing. Well you’d be wrong. Sure, there was some overdubbing, but the big sound came from recording the band live in sections, and then splicing the sections together into the completed songs. When Offord created his mobile sound studio he eliminated the control room that you find in almost all recording studios. Offord would be set up in the same room as the musicians. And this was the setting Don Davis found himself in for his contribution to “White Man”. Don would record with Offord on other occasions. In our video interview he talks about this and some of the fun they had together during their down time between takes.
I don’t know how many days or how many tunes were recorded in these Woodstock sessions, but among the songs honed on tour by Zu Band (now named Material), 4 were selected to be put on their first EP Temporary Music 1. For the song called “White Man”, it is more than appropriate that the man dressed in all white on the school bus tour was tapped to perform on it in the studio. Don Davis recalls being egged on by Gomelsky, known by some as the Rock 'n' Roll Rasputin due to his Georgian origins. The burly figure of the producer was hovering closely behind Don, gesticulating wildly trying to get the performance he wanted from the sax player, all while the tape was rolling! Don’s extended sax solo makes the song take flight just as the listener is getting comfortable with the groovy melodic back-beat laid down by Laswell, Maher and Beinhorn — free-jazz meets electro-funk, a formula Laswell would perfect in the coming years.
The members of Material made good use of their time with Mr. Offord. According to some interviews I’ve read, he made engineering these sessions look so easy that some of them thought, “Hell, I can do that no problem!”. Not only would they record, produce and engineer themselves on the next Material and Daevid Allen releases, they would also record other local artists such as Fab Five Freddy. Laswell would play bass on the Byrne/Eno classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but only for one song “America is Waiting”. The song “The Jezebel Spirit” has almost the same bass and rhythm line as the Material song “Heritage” on the EP Temporary Music 2 which was recorded at about the same time. “Heritage” also contains a brief synth line that I’m sure I’ve heard on another Eno album. Both Temp 2 and Ghosts each have a song called “Secret Life”, but these don’t sound anything alike. By 1982 Beinhorn and Laswell were recruited by Eno to work on his ambient album On Land. In 1983 the pair would resurrect the recording career of legend Herbie Hancock by writing and producing his hit record Future Shock.
Eventually this Material band/production team would go their separate ways. Here’s what the members of Material working with Gomelsky and Eddy Offord in 1979 would go on to do in the years to come...
Bill Laswell, according to TapeOp magazine, has produced Ornette Coleman, Santana, John Zorn, George Clinton, Pharoah Sanders, Iggy Pop, Herbie Hancock, Motorhead, Buckethead, William S. Burroughs, Tony Williams, James "Blood" Ulmer, PiL, Praxis, Material, as well as re-workings of Bob Marley and Miles Davis.
Michael Beinhorn produced Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Hole, Violent Femmes and Marilyn Manson, among many others.
Fred Maher became a producer at Elektra Records with credits including Lou Reed, Scritti Politti, Matthew Sweet, Information Society, and many more. But more significant to me, he played drums on one of the most important records in my entire collection “Killing Time” by Massacre with Laswell and Fred Frith.
Cliff Cultreri became an A&R Executive and discovered Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. He worked alongside many other popular recording artists including Megadeth, Metallica, Corrosion of Conformity, Exodus, Death, Dark Angel, Possessed, Venom, Opeth, Slash’s Snakepit, Guns N’ Roses, Gary Moore, Peter Frampton, Warren Haynes & Gov’t Mule, The Cure, My Bloody Valentine, Agnostic Front and others.
As for Eddy Offord, he would record a few well known artists at Levon Helm’s studio including Todd Rundgren and David Sancious. He would also give free studio time to many unknown musicians, according to Don, many of which were from the Creative Music Studio. As far as I can tell, recording the EP Temporary Music 1 would be the last time that Eddy Offord and Giorgio Gomelsky would work together. It might also be the last time that Laswell and Gomelsky did any work together. They seem to have had a falling out around this time, as so often happened with Gomelsky and the artists he worked with.
Soon after recording Temporary Music 1, a reconfigured NY Gong crew would tour France with George Cartwright replacing Don Davis on sax. I’ve been talking to George recently and I’m looking forward to telling you his story on how THAT tour led to the formation of his band Curlew. Until then, thank you for reading. And if you know someone else with a record collection full of Gomelsky recordings, please pass this on!
Special THANKS to Don Davis for sharing his stories with me.
You can find his music here:
Thank you Rick for this excellent, instructive, and enlightened essay.
Martin Bisi contacted me to clarify a couple of things. First, the name NY Gong may not have been used until they recorded the album "About Time" upon returning from the North American tour. They may have just been called Gong during the tour. And second, the "loft" that Gomelsky lived in was a 3 story building with Gomelsky living on the top floor and the lower floors used for rehearsal space, parties, crash pad, etc. There was an S & M club leasing the bottom floor for awhile, and Gomelsky ran his own Zu House club/parties there under various names, one of the last being The Green Door.