The Marc Jonson Interview
I was born on April the nineteenth of nineteen hundred and fifty. The very small hospital was located in Freeport Long Island. The next town over from Freeport was Merrick, which is where I grew up. My father’s family were very prominent in the town of Freeport, for instance my Great Grandfather had a cement business and poured the Freeport sidewalks. However I consider myself Merrick raised all the way. My Dad and his brother were in the Signal Core during WW2 and after the war they smoothly transitioned to the Bell Telephone Company to earn a living. Our family had an old upright piano in the living room of the house. My sister Connie, seven years older than me started piano lessons, but dropped them after a few years. A piano is a beautiful yet interactive piece of furniture and unlike a coffee table or a hutch cabinet, you can engage with it. I began locating chords by myself after watching my sister’s hands. I also discovered that if I pressed the sustain pedal down on and sang into the bottom of the upright, it would reverberate the open strings making my voice trail off. My Uncle Bill was really into electronic gadgets and had a movie camera as well as a tape recorder.
Whenever I was over at my Uncle’s house I asked to fool around with the tape machine. This began at around age seven. Seeing Elvis on TV with my family seriously started me me down the road towards music. Up until then the AM radio had been my fantasy world. Listening to that small all tube radio in my room as I fell off to sleep was everything to me. I became the singers and their songs became mine as I sang them to girls in my day dreams. Come forth grade, I joined the school band in the drum section. I didn’t start playing guitar until the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. I taught myself both piano and guitar. It was the look of each guitar the Beatles played that was so alluring to me. I never was that interested in live concerts. I was more fascinated with records and how they sounded. I knew about tape recording somewhat and to listen to how good professional recordings were attracted me. I would wonder how a certain echo or reverb was obtained on a particular record. What kind of guitar amp was being used. The first live music shows I ever saw were the local groups in Junior High School. I loved how deep the bass guitar sounded and the slap echo some bands used on their voices.
Since I was always running alongside my interest with recording as I learned to master musical instruments, it was inevitable the two would join up together. This happened in my room at home. As soon as the Beatles and The Rolling Stones got popular, my best friend Scott and I started recording on my tape recorder with our other friend Dennis. We covered Beatle songs at first. Dennis and I would sing and play guitars as Scott who wanted to be a drummer, hit large school books with his hands to keep a beat. All this grew over the next few years as my recording equipment improved along with my producing skills. Scott and I formed a band in the eighth grade with three other schoolmates called The Gay Intruders. The name taken form a summer camp basketball team that year. In eleventh grade I ran my body down drinking and staying up late all the time. In the Spring, I came down with pneumonia and couldn’t take my final exams. I was hospitalized for a week. I couldn’t even take the make up exams so I was left back. My interest in High School had deteriorated at this point so I quit school. I drove a cab in Merrick and watched most of my friends go off to college as I stayed home. This is when I decided I had to really focus on what I had started years earlier. Recording music up in my room. Borrowing amps and portable organs, I secured a new TEAC A-1200U tape machine which allowed me to record sound-on-sound.
I could do up to three separate tracks of myself all mixed together in very high quality sound. At this time in 1968-69, I was most influenced by Simon and Garfunkel, The Bee Gees and my old standbys, Beatles and Beach Boys. I gathered up nine good demo recordings made on the TEAC and took the train from Merrick to New York City. I had been going into the city since I was fifteen years old, exploring the midtown music district around 50th and 7th Avenue. I looked for famous recording studios I knew of and even ones I just discovered. Most people who worked at these studios allowed me in with open arms just for a peek. When it came time for me to pitch my own music via my newly produced demo of songs I knew just where to go. 1650 Broadway’s lobby directory boasted a most impressive list of tenants. I took the elevator up to the fifth floor, walked to the left down the hall and knocked on the third door I passed. The office was a small production company. A woman answered… I explained my situation. She said she was busy but as I turned to walk away she changed her mind. After listening to just three songs she picked up the phone and called her friend Elliot Horne head of the Jazz Label at RCA Records. I was sent directly over.
Elliot was warm and greeted me with great interest. He listened to the entire tape of nine songs with his back to me in a swivel chair. At the end he swiveled back around placing the reel-to-reel tape back in it’s box. “Is this really you?” he asked. Yes was my reply. He told me to go home and that I was a genius. I told my folks what I did that afternoon but I don’t think any of us knew what was starting to happen. My parents had plans to attend a retirement diner for a guy in my father’s office at the phone company that night. Sitting at the table was a woman they didn’t know whom they got along with famously. As the night rolled on my Dad mentioned me being a musician and my run in over at RCA. The woman nearly flipped out. She told my Dad that her brother was Rocco Laginestra, the President of RCA Records in New York and she was going to call him in the morning to look out for my tape. My Father never told me any of this until the next evening when he got home from work. Meanwhile Elliot Horne takes my demo tape to Mort Hoffman the Vice President of RCA. Mort takes one look at it and says “who the hell is this guy I’ve been hearing about him all morning from Rocco?” RCA offered me a deal as a staff producer and recording artist. My first assignment was to produce Pure Prairie League’s first album. The woman at 1650 Broadway after finding out what was going on brought a music business lawyer to me. He shopped my tape to Vanguard.
Because I wanted to get going on my own career, I turned down the RCA offer. The lawyer said better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big one. I was allowed to produce my own first solo record. Ok, I had a bunch a songs everyone liked and got me to where I now was yet something about seeing Vanguard’s studio with the Neve console and it’s very large room gave me ideas to simply write new songs. I was very excited to be where I landed. I wanted to break out and invent Ideas that could be realized through this awesome studio environment. I had two secret weapons with me at this point. Wayne Ashdown and Mark Lew. Wayne, my best friend brilliant musician since third grade and Mark a complete guitar and bass wizard I knew since we were sixteen. These two musicians knew me the best. We had been in groups together yet this was going to be a singular vision. They knew my mind inside out and brought texture and inspired fun to every song we recorded together. Mark’s bass parts on Rainy Dues and Return to the Relief are most amazing. Wayne’s idea to kill the tape machine at the end of Return to the Relief as the strings are climaxing was revolutionary, never done before! Here we were in Vanguard Record’s studio doing what we had been doing in our own houses for years on crappy equipment.
If a harpsichord was left over from one of Vanguard’s classical sessions the night before, we’d get to use it. We were trying to come up with something different then Elton John, James Taylor or Cat Stevens. Something slightly odd began to emerge and I went with it. MARY with it’s “Man in agony’ ending crying out in pain over being thrown into Life’s emotional whirlwinds is the second song on side one. All three of us were tight friends because we shared these emotions from our own families. This wasn’t going to be some happy-go-lucky James Taylor singer songwriter effort. Cat Stevens offered an edgier and more poetic approach and Elton John had those great Paul Buckmaster Arrangements so I kept pushing in an emotional direction with Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and Love Forever Changes by Love as my bookends. I only did one session with John Woram. Oddly enough he had been the head engineer at RCA records when they offered me a deal. We both showed up at Vanguard’s door together. Jeff Zaraya my main audio engineer for YEARS lived on a houseboat on the upper East Side of New York City so he was already an unconventional person. He was a great engineer and easy to work with. I feel for him though having to listen to me for over a year concocting a very un-folky record. He did a wonderful job! RAINY DUES is about what my friend Wayne said to me once. A lifetime is but a vapor. It goes by so fast.
Even as teenagers we knew this deep within our experience. When you know someone from third grade on and are best friends growing up together as if brothers, you notice each other changing. School, school band, Boy Scouts, girls and so on. Rainy Dues is about time moving and learning about mortality effecting how you live. MARY I about Merrick my home town. The fog horn sound off in the distance because Merrick was on the south shore of Long Island at the water. As the dredges worked all night long filling in the swampland with sand in South Merrick to build a new community there, I would fall asleep listening to the clanging and rumbling of their machinery. The person Mary in the song represents those relationships we have with people that don’t last. MOTHER JANE is about a friend and her family that I lost track of for a few years, while I was making YEARS. Then one night, they see my name on a sign in front of a club I was performing in the Village. We all got back together and they became my refuge away from New York City. They had moved into a large house near Woodstock and I hitch hiked there every month to stay with them. My father’s middle name as Majour hence the line “from now on I’ll be a major man” FLY is a song about growing up too. About the possibility of life in life out returning over and over to different forms until reaching a higher plane of existence. A LONG SONG is a long song to begin with. I only wanted two chords in it.
Wayne played one measure on the acoustic guitar and Jeff Zaraya spliced a loop that continuously played through the entire song. I had a girlfriend who dumped me and within days got another guy in her life. It’s a romantic lament set in a Cecil B DeMille film soundtrack. The thunderous tympani pounding heart beats over the chanting at the end as the recorder weaves its flute like song. I am a pirate leaving my true love as I set sail on an unknown ocean. She has many admirers who work hard for her attention and I want nothing to do with them all! AUTOPSY is a song about hypochondria I think. Will they find the cause of our disfunction when we die finally? Well no, actually you find that out yourself if you’re lucky. You must grow up and face some ugly hidden truths about yourself before you can truly find purpose and well being. RETURN TO THE RELIEF is referencing the 12 o’clocksiren in Merrick that sounded each day. It also indicated when a fire had been reported calling for the fire trucks. It’s a song about coming of age like so many of the songs on YEARS. The “Riot of My Life” as seen through this Arthur Lee and Love arrangement. The confusion Wayne and I felt about what was considered a good diet, Doctors in general… the pretense of virtue. That first crossing into our twenties had us questioning everything. It all seemed scary and it was. We intuitively knew life was built on false narratives that people simply believed to be so. That list of things I’d do if…
They are all abstract constructs yet don’t they ring true today. Nothing changes much. I end the song by wailing “Put a little love in your heart” and it all ends with the tape machine being shut off as the string section is providing it’s last chord. Is that the nuclear BOMB going off…Who knows? MUNICH is and will be forever the moment when Jeff Zaraya thought I loosing it. That’s why I got him into being a part of it. I had arranged all the voices prior to Jon Bart’s wonderfully Vampiresque Hammond organ intro which we spliced into the beginning. These voices represented rock and roll culture as heard through a kaleidoscope of interfering elements until the ultimate sound pressure is obtained by a jet crossing the stereo field suddenly. As it trails away we hear Jeff Zaraya speaking in German, some ordinary conversational pleasantries. I wanted it to be in French and in Jeff’s “everyman’s” voice but he only knew German. As this is happening we hear Mark Lew’s multi-tracked guitar piece, itself an hilarious five seconds, fading up and then out again like a cartoon on LSD, which by the way I never took. THE TREDMILL is the end of the record. This one John Woram engineered. We placed two Neumann mics across the room at the Vanguard studio around thirty feet from the piano for what is known as room tone.
I wanted the piano to sound far away as I sang the song. The song reminds me of childhood. The sun on your face and playing in the yard on the first warm day of Spring. How consciousness seems to be so real that we must always be, even after death. I remember being two years old at my Mom’s best friend’s house in Oceanside Long Island. It was June and summer was ripe. I sat in front of the house alone watching butterflies and bees around some flowers. Maybe a car would pass as I took in the different colors and fragrances perhaps for the first time noticing them so intensely. I have never forgotten this moment in my life. There was something else about it which is hard to put my finger on. I knew I was alive and a person. I had walked into New York City by myself and with only a demo reel managed to convince Vanguard to produce my very own solo record. I called up A&M records once afternoon and asked who managed Cat Steven’s. “Barry Krost” the secretary said… and he happens to be at the Sherry Netherland Hotel… I called Barry and met him at his suite. I gave him my unreleased YEARS record. He liked it very much however at the time he was working with Colon Blunstone from The Zombies who’s record that just been released called ONE YEAR. Barry thought it might get confusing working them both at the same time. So I drifted off into the Village while YEARS stayed consistent in the 8th Street record shops. I’d stop in all the time and check if was selling. It was getting airplay on WNEW FM. I just didn’t know where to turn. I playing Folk City with an acoustic guitar. I started going out with Maggie Roche and playing gigs with her and her sister Terre. Robert Gordon heard about me and inquired if I had any cool songs he could record. He wound up recording three, ARE YOU GONNA BE THE ONE, LOVER BOY and TAKE ME BACK. Maggie and Terre, now as The Roches recorded my song LOVE RADIATES AROUND. Other performers in the Village began singing lots of my songs, different ones. Paul Butterfield recorded my song BAD LOVE after hearing it through his engineer who I knew. Dave Edmunds recorded KING OF LOVE as did Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. The Smithereens from New Jersey recorded two songs I helped write. With Pat Dinizio, GROOVY TUESDAY and LONELY PLACE WITHOUT YOU. The songs I was still recording in my small Cornelia Street apartment I gathered together and released as 12 in a Room and Last Night on the Roller Coaster. I put a group together in New York City called The Wild Alligators. It was an old school power pop band. Blue Sky records signed me. MY friend Willie Nile had released his first album on Arista Records and drew the attention of Bob Dylan’s publishing company. Willie brought me into the Dylan company and they began to administrate my Robert Gordon songs. I also wrote out the lyrics to all my songs up to that point in Bob Dylan’s personal office at his desk for copyright. The entire staff were really supportive and helpful for those two years. I quit finally drinking in 1987 and started a slow climb to sobriety.
I put together a band consisting of Richard Lloyd on guitar, Mike Mesaros on bass, Richard X Hayman and his wife Nancy on vocals and Doug Wygal on drums. We only played a few shows. It seemed career focus was difficult for me. Time marched on as it does noting each season as it passed by. Around 2015 I got a message for a young Spanish musician living in Valencia, Spain named Victor. He had recorded my song Suddenly Sunshine with Ken Stringfellow of Posies fame producing. Victor wanted me to produce his next record and then offered the idea of us touring together throughout Spain. I immediately realized what a talent Victor was. He came to the states for a month and we worked on “Young is the New Old.” I went to Spain and toured the entire country. Two years later we did it again this time bringing in Richard Lloyd on our tour. So now Victor and I are making records as a team contributing five or so songs each. I’m in New Jersey and he is in Valencia. We file share and contribute to each others tracks. Victor’s girlfriend Paula Costas is handling all the artwork for our albums and promo. We really click working this way and the rock critics seem to agree. Ramirez Exposure (Victor is a fan of the TV show Northern Exposure) as Victor calls himself and I are working on volume two right now. We plan to tour this Spring and Summer in Europe just the two of us with acoustic guitars, well maybe and electric guitar as well. Hope to see you all then!
