projects update 1
Gomelsky
From time to time I want to write about the projects that got me here (writing a blog) in the first place. Currently there are three active projects mainly in the research phase. Two are non-fiction history projects requiring lots of research. It's fun. Probably too much fun. I always find excuses to do more research and less writing.
I do have experience with a project like this that I actually completed. It was about my family tree on my father's side. I knew they were from Wales, but no one in the family seemed to know where in Wales. I wanted to find out. It was the mid 1990's and there was no such thing as Ancestry dot com. The internet was a thing, but the general public barely knew it existed. I knew of course, and had been using it for many years as a programmer. Email and Usenet were the main tools of the day, and as primitive as that might seem now, they were very useful. But I had to rely on many more sources in the so-called real world. Sometimes this would mean traveling great distances to visit places and meet people that could help me find answers. It all became an adventure, and after about 7 years of this I got my answers and found my family in Wales. I didn't write a book about it, but I did create a web page and filled it with descriptions, photos, documents, and loads of family tree data. I still occasionally get contacted by someone who has stumbled upon it and has a question similar to the one I asked when I started.
Looking back on that project is very satisfying for me. I had a specific question and simply pursued it until I got an answer. Like my current projects, that one had no deadlines, nor did I have any idea what form it might ultimately take. This time around however, my questions are not so specific. And because of that I have a slight fear that I won't know when I'm done. But only slight. For now, let me tell you about some of the fun I'm having with the Gomelsky project.
My first jolt of excitement came when I learned who this guy Gomelsky was. This was just a few years ago. How was it possible that this person whose name and influence was all over my record collection had escaped my attention for decades? This WTF moment came as I read about how a late 70's album, that I consider a huge turning point in my musical enlightenment, how that album was recorded. I scratched the surface a bit more and there was this producer’s name ... Giorgio Gomelsky. And then a little more, and more records from my collection were stamped with his production credit, many of them not only classics, but hugely influential on other artists. Artists so diverse that these albums connected genres I had no idea were connected in any way -- from the very beginnings of psychedelic rock, through free jazz and right up to and including no wave. This was the musical road map that I had followed most of my adult life and I had just discovered one of the makers of that map. I quickly dashed off an email of my find to several music aficionado friends and only one of them thought he might have crossed paths with Gomelsky once, and even he was not aware of his history. The rest had never heard of him.
It wasn't long before I attended a couple of shows featuring artists that had worked with Gomelsky and knew him fairly well. After their shows I asked them about him and both confirmed his significance. So, I asked, where can I find his biography (having found none online). Surely there was some massive tome written years ago detailing this important persons life. No, they said. He had talked about doing one but it never happened. He died just a couple of years prior. I found a nice celebration of his life on YouTube, and many brief obits in major news sources, but no real biography. I should write it, they said.
After rejecting this notion out-of-hand, it didn't take long for the idea to start gnawing at me. I couldn't stop researching him anyway, so why not try to document it. A couple of months went by, and bingo ... there it is, on Amazon no less. A memoir about Gomelsky. Written in French. And only in French. I don't know who the author is, but I find his email address and write to him. To my surprise I get a response within hours. He sounds suspicious. Who am I and what could I possibly want from him? I didn't realize I was trying to contact a New Yorker and maybe I came on too strong as a naive blabber-mouth from California. Still, we established a dialogue and a few months more would go by before we would meet in person.
Thank gawd, I thought to myself. Someone else has already written this book and now I don't have to. And this someone else was way more qualified than me, having been a close personal friend of Gomelsky for many years. I stopped doing my research, but then the research kept finding me. On two separate occasions while browsing through used record bins, an album would practically leap out of the bin in my hands screaming LOOK AT WHO PRODUCED ME. The first time this happened was when my wife and I met friends for lunch on a lovely weekend afternoon. As we strolled down the small business district I notice a used record shop across the street. I subtly steered our stroll to that side of the street, and conveniently my wife and friends got distracted into a shop nearby, so I ducked into the record store to have a quick look. Not wanting to lose my companions, I positioned myself at the bins near a window so I could see them walk by. I suddenly found myself staring at an album by John McLaughlin. A very old album. His first solo record. I flip it over and there it was. Gomelsky. He produced this. I could hardly believe my eyes. I didn't remember reading anything about this one. I bought the album, obviously, and as soon as I got home the research resumed.
The next occasion was a few months later at a large record swap event. By this point I've at least attempted to look up all the records that Gomelsky worked on. It's a long list. I have a bad memory, but I get a lot of help from the vinyl gods. At a much smaller record swap event prior to this big one I found one of his major works with The Yardbirds and was quite pleased, but that album is not so rare. Here, at this much larger event, there was a chance for something else. What that might be, I did not know, and my friend and I had already been there for awhile and browsed most of the bins. We were getting ready to leave when a band started performing. This was a great record swap. It had live music and beer. Anyway, we stopped to watch the band a bit, and I poked through one last bin, and then it happened again. This record leaped into my hands screaming ... well, you know. The album is called Definitely What! by Brian Auger and The Trinity, and it's a late 60's beautiful gate-fold album. I'm not really familiar with this music, so it was a joy to take home and listen to. And research.
Not long after this I found myself heading to NY to visit friends and family. I let the author of the memoir know what days I would be in NYC and maybe we could meet. He told me to contact him when I got there. I was staying with a friend in Brooklyn and would only be there for 3 days, and we were going to pack a lot in to those days. I contacted the author and we picked a day and time that worked for us. Great. We would meet. He told me to meet him at the appointed time under the statue at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. OK. This was starting to take on the elements of a spy novel. I would meet my informant in a public place where he would secretly pass me the information on the elusive Mr. Gomelsky.
Ahhh NYC in August. If the heat doesn’t kill you the humidity will. I didn’t have much trouble navigating my way through the subway system to get to the meeting place, although I couldn’t say the same thing about finding my way back … at rush hour … getting on the wrong train … running back to street level to get on the right platform … which was packed shoulder to shoulder … did I mention the heat? As I stood on that packed platform wondering if this was really the train I wanted, I was literally drenched in sweat from head to toe. Some sympathetic and puzzled strangers near me asked, “is it raining?”. Anyway, let’s just say that getting back to Brooklyn and trying to meet up with my friend in the neighborhood of the club we were going to later that night (he doesn’t have a cell phone) was another adventure. Everything in NYC is a fucking adventure.
So, back at Columbus Circle I finally meet the author in person and we hit it off very well immediately. He starts guiding me into Central Park as we begin to talk. We only have couple of hours and I didn’t want to be distracted by taking a lot of notes, although I did jot a few things down. I figured this would be the first of many meetings and I should just take in as much of this as I can. Eventually we found a bench in the shade. We’re in Strawberry Fields. In the background of our conversation is a musician or two playing John Lennon songs with tourists hovering around them taking pictures, some singing along. We had a wonderful conversation, much of it about what this immediate area was like decades ago when Gomelsky and the author enjoyed each others company. By the end, Gomelsky the producer had become more Gomelsky the man in my mind. I promised to help the author find an English publisher for his book, which I did, but unfortunately nothing came of it. He gave me an English translation of his book for my efforts which I am very happy to have and will no doubt refer to often. His book is about the man and his friendship. My “book/thing” will be about the recordings.
And so the adventure continues. Even this pandemic we now find ourselves in has provided me with at least one. Thanks to Covid-19 I was able to take a tour of the two Crawdaddy Clubs in the Richmond District of London where Gomelsky got his start booking “R & B” shows featuring the unknown house bands The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds. These tours are run by a local expert who knows many of the musicians that played these clubs in the Swinging 60’s of London. The pandemic forced him to move his physical tour bus online. I was so excited to talk to him that I took 3 of his tours and met other people from London and all over the world in the process.
And now for the update. I recently finished reading a half a dozen books on Jimmy Page. Each had about 12 pages of material related to Gomelsky. I also just received a great looking book written by two other members of The Yardbirds. One is Chris Dreja who was interviewed for an entire chapter in one of the Page books. I found his insight unique and I hope to get more of it. I’m now waiting for two books on Jeff Beck to arrive from the library. I love the library. So I will soon be writing my own insights into The Yardbird recordings based on this and other material. And speaking of Material, I’ve already written part of a chapter on that band almost a year ago after talking to a couple of members of the band. My goal for this year is to shift the ratio of research and writing work to the writing end of the spectrum. Maybe you can help me do that.
I hope I’ve made you curious about Gomelsky. Maybe curious enough to follow me on this adventure? The other two projects I’m working on include a history of my local live music tavern, which will also be a history of taverns on the San Mateo County coastline, AND an online museum/archive documenting the improvised music scene in the 1990’s SF Bay Area when I booked a weekly live music series. You can look forward to those stories in future project updates.
Thank you Rick for telling the story, and for including the link to my book. Very generous of you, and much appreciated by me. Bien cordialement. Francis.