Behind the Shroud of a Detroit Rock ’n’ Roll Mystery: Part 2
The Career of Phantom Keyboardist Russ Klatt: A ninth in a series of interviews with Detroit’s lost rockers
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Thank you for reading this second and final part of an extended, worldwide exclusive, first time interview with keyboardist Russ Klatt and his tales behind the 1974 “Jim Morrison solo album,” The Divine Comedy, by Phantom. If you missed Part 1, you can read it, here.
R.D Francis: From what I’ve read in various Detroit tomes and from those I’ve spoken with about Punch, as well as those associated with Seger’s bands, have said: Punch was a fair and honorable businessman, as well as a generous guy when it came to taking care of his artists. Now, buying them Jags and Mercedes? That I don’t see. But why didn’t Ted just roll with it? It seems, to me, that Punch was really helping Ted — in spite of their mutual dislike. And I certainly do not see Punch as a “manipulator” of others.
Russ Klatt: Punch is the kind of guy of that, uh. Well, I had the opportunity, and never took it, to audition and play keys for Bob, thirty some years ago, before Phantom. I knew Punch; I’d stick my head in the door of his shitty little office in downtown Birmingham, which he’s still got, just an old, little house. But I’d stick my head in and ask Punch if anyone was looking for a Hammond player, so my name was in front of him a little bit . . . when I started doing those art shows with Weschler, Punch always came out to those shows. Anyway, I heard that Seger was looking for a keyboard player. So I talk to Jim Bruzzese, you know, the owner of Pampa Studios, who recorded all of Bob’s early albums. I tell him excitely, “Jim, I got this chance to audition for Bob.” Jim tells me “don’t take it, don’t even think about it.”
R.D: Really, on that big of a gig?
R.K: I told him, “Are you crazy? It’s the best opportunity I’ve ever had.” Jim tells me, “You’ll practice six days a week. Seger’s going to pay you $150 a week — and that’s it.” Seger hadn’t been able to really have a nationwide hit and Jim just started, really downing Bob. There was a lot of that going on during the early parts of Seger, as you know; he just couldn’t “break out” nationally. I just wanted to do the audition, so I could say, “Yeah, I’ve auditioned for Bob.” I never did it. Later on, I found out that Punch paid the band a salary every week — and he invested their money for them. I think that was the best thing a manager, especially back in the day when everyone was getting screwed, could do. I thought it was the coolest thing anybody could do.
R.D: That’s the story I’ve gotten from quite a few people. Ron Course (drummer with White Heat, featuring Johnny Heaton, previously of Tantrum, which ended up opening Bob Seger’s Seven tour) relayed, basically, the same story: Punch took care of his people under the Hideout umbrella. Never a bad word.
R.K: Well, I think Punch learned his investing savvy from his dad. His dad had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, one really rich guy. So, his dad, and Punch, is part of this until this day — and Tom Weschler told me this because, as you know, Tom knows Punch so well: Our Eastern Market, here in Detroit, is where all the fruits, meats, and vegetables are, downtown. Punch’s dad owns where the railways come in to unload this stuff for out-of-state produce and things. Tom would kid me, if I was eating an apple, “Ah, take a bit out of it, Punch is getting some of that.” Everything that came through, into the Eastern Market, had to go through this, uh, warehouse where all the trains came in, and his dad controlled all of it. And when Punch’s dad died, he got all of it. Punch didn’t have to leave his house and he’d make millions of dollars a year. But Punch loved music.
R.D: And he got into club management.
R.K: Right. He owned a couple of clubs around town and made sure he’d feature all the good guys around here, like Bob, and Third Power and Ted Nugent and everybody around town. Punch was a good guy and he knew that these musicians could screw up so fast, so he started investments for them. I had so much respect in the world for Punch because of that, his looking out for musicians. Instead of these other guys ripping everybody off, Punch was trying to substantiate their personal wealth. That’s so commendable to me.
R.D: I agree. I’ve yet to hear a sour word about Punch Andrews. In speaking with Jerry Zubal, who, as you know, was in Tea with Gary Gawinek; Tea, of course, eventually became 1776 and released their lone album, nationally. The Doobies got the hit, with a cover of “Jesus Is Just Alright,” and 1776, did not.
R.K: Yeah, that’s right.
R.D: So, Jerry said that while the 1776 album didn’t work out, Punch was very fair about the whole thing. (It was Punch’s idea for the band to do that song, as well as covering Dave Mason’s then, pretty big solo hit, “Only You Know and I Know,” as covers proved to be hit-making in those days.) The same kind words were said by Daniel O’Connell, the bassist from Barooga Bandit, which put out two albums on Capitol. Punch hooked them up with Sammy Hagar, they met the guys from Van Halen, and so on.
R.K: R.D, you are not going to find anybody — and I’ve been in the music business in this area all my life, even though I had my own business in the art world, I was always out there, always playing, always doing something; unfortunately, I never got to a place where I could make big money out of it. Anyway, you will not find anybody — but Ted Pearson — to say anything bad about Punch Andrews. I never heard anybody say a bad word, and Punch has managed a ton of bands around here, you know little-shit bands, as well, and nobody speaks ill of him.
R.D: That’s what is so frustrating to me. Everybody speaks so highly of Punch Andrews and, if Ted just rolled with what is actually, in my opinion, a very smart marketing plan with the whole “Phantom” thing, Ted’s life could have been so much different. I’d go as far as saying the Phantom name was far more marketable than the “Walpurgis” moniker. (For the readers: According to Jerry Hopkins, in the pages of 1992’s The Lizard King, a Los Angeles Radio station — which was KMET 94.7 FM — began airing a “mystery tape” — of “Calm Before the Storm” — in late 1973. This was part of the Hideout/Capitol marketing initiative to ramp up the March 1974 album release; national news networks even picked up on the “Is it Jim” mystery, most famously, the ABC Radio Networks. KEYN/Kansas City 103.7 FM, infamously — and probably other radio stations — aired an hour-long, produced-in-house special (complete with canned phone interviews) in which the station played the album-in-full, then dissected the “mystery” of the recordings.)
R.K: Yeah, so different, so very different. I think one of Ted’s issues was opening for Bob. Ted thought he was a “bigger deal” than Bob [again, because of Punch’s promotional initiative for the Phantom project]. As I told you before, earlier in our conversation: “Ted, nobody knows you!” Bob was big in isolated areas. He did well in L.A., he did well in Denver, southern California he was big in, but he wasn’t a “clean sweep” like he is now, all over the world.
R.D: I’d have to add that I have relatives in Florida and Georgia who remember seeing Bob down there and the shows were huge.
R.K.: God Bless, Bob. He stuck to it. Plus, I never heard anything bad about Bob, either.
R.D: Oh, believe me, I got an earful about how horrible both Bob and Punch were from Ted, well, by then, Arthur. The stories that he told . . . all in conflict with the various Detroit tomes I’ve read over time, especially Dave A. Carson’s stellar music journalism pieces (Grit, Noise and Revolution, in particular).
R.K: I only met Bob a few times, in the studio, as I used to hang around Pampa all the time. The only thing I could say about Bob is that he never seemed really sharp. He could write songs like you couldn’t believe, obviously. He’s a great rock ’n’ roll singer. But when it came to the business stuff, he should thank Punch Andrews, everyday, for holding his hand through everything because I don’t think Bob could have pulled it off without Punch. Punch was his mentor, his savior, his guiding light.
R.D: That takes me back to Tom Weschler’s book, Travelin’ Man. In the pages, there’s an insight from — well, it may have been in the pages of Dave A. Carson’s Detroit rock tome — from Mitch Ryder that, while he didn’t know Punch, he knew that Punch treated Bob “like a son.” And not that I doubted that fact before, but you’ve solidified it: I believe it.
R.K: Yeah, I don’t know what it was between those two: Punch and Bob, when that whole thing got started in the late ’60s, they just hit it off, together. Punch, from what Weschler told me, tried to hold Bob back from some things: Punch didn’t want Bob inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame [in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A], as he thought that would be “bad for ticket sales,” etc. Tom told Punch he was nuts, that it would increase ticket sales. But Punch was insistent; he didn’t want it all to go to Bob’s head. Punch treated Bob as a very strict dad would. “Be in the house when the street lights come on, or I’ll take your guitar away from you!” you know. But look what it did for Bob; too bad it took until he was, you know, in his late 60s, early 70s, to make it like he did.
R.D: I get your point: I remember Bob being big during my high school years, the Against the Wind era, but later on in life, he just exploded into this rock “icon” respected the world over, right alongside Bruce Springsteen. Then “Like a Rock” appeared in that GM/Chevy truck commercial campaign.
R.K: I don’t know, if Bob could have had — and I don’t know if it is because of Punch or not — that success in his 40s, that he experienced, later. But I never heard anybody say, “Yeah, that fucking Seger is a dick.” Nobody ever said that. Now, I was going to play and I was told that, during the time I was involved with Ted in Phantom, Bob was looking for someone to play keyboards on, uh, “Get Out of Denver.” I heard that, again, through Jim Bruzzese, the recording engineer at Pampa. I said, “I know that tune, no problem.” So, I thought everything would be lined up, as, by this point, I knew Punch pretty well. But Bob said, “Nah, nobody knows who Russ is, I want to hear somebody that’s more well known around Detroit.” I was like, “Oh, come, Bob. How’s anyone going to be known around Detroit unless they’re out there?” That’s the only thing, negatively speaking, involving Seger that I was in contact with. And that’s not really that bad or that big of a deal, looking back.
R.D: Okay, now here’s my Seger story about Ted. He told me that he wrote Bob Seger’s 1978 hit, “Hollywood Nights,” and that Bob stole it.
R.K: [After a bout of laughter.] Oh, poor Ted, Bob stole it. Plagiarism? Bob? No way. No way. Ted said that?
R.D: I’ve asked this same question of a couple of people who worked with Ted, one being Joe Memmer, who never heard the story and didn’t see it possible. The other was Chris Marshall, who ended up playing in Pendragon. (For the readers: Chris was in the prog-rock concern, White Bucks, out of Rochester. It was drummer Pep Perrine’s band after he left the Bob Seger System. The band also featured Herman Daldin from Train and Victor Peraino’s Kingdom Come, as well as Jem Targel from Third Power.) Ted told Chris a lot of stories, but never about writing one of Bob’s songs, and Chris helped co-write that first batch of Pendragon tunes on The Lost Album. Chris pointed out, even with the poppy material of Pendragon; the lyrics were still very dark; that Ted could never write lyrics as upbeat and positive as “Hollywood Nights.”
Be sure to read Joe Memmer’s personal tale of working with Arthur Pendragon on the songs that comprised the Phantom: The Lost Album effort recorded in 1977 by the Phantom’s next band, Pendragon, at Fiddlers Music in Detroit.
R.K: Oh, that is the first thing that singles it out, right there: Ted could never write anything that wasn’t . . . that he’d have to have his black velvet cape on to sing. [Both of us, laughing.]
R.D: And don’t forget the cummerbund.
R.K: Oh, yeah. Where he stored his “sword,” you know. He’d wear that shit, that fucking thing, during practice and it was like, “Jesus, it’s not Halloween, take that shit off, Teddy.” So, Ted wrote “Hollywood Nights.” Oh, man.
R.D: That is what he told me. I never got the deeper details, outside of “Seger stole it” and something about the “business dealings” of Hideout and Punch, etc., “being evil” and so forth. As far as I know — and I’ve since spoken to Scott Strawbridge and Mike deMartino, both who worked at Fiddlers Music in Detroit, where Ted’s Pendragon demo sessions from 1977 were cut — there’s no “lost recording,” no evidence that song, exists.
R.K: The way I look at it, the incredible songs that Bob has written over the years, lyrically, he could just write lyrics, all day long. Look at the kudos from musicians like Garth Brooks, and others, showered on Bob. Sue and I, my wife, were watching some sort of tribute to Kenny Rogers the other night [CBS-TV’s Kenny Rogers: All in for the Gambler]. I can’t recall who the two singers were, offhand [Actress Idina Menzel and Charles Kelley of country stars, Lady A], but they did this rendition of Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonight” and I’d never heard anyone sing it, but Bob. The rendition was so beautiful. It was incredible, just incredible. [The Menzel and Kelley version is a cover of Kenny’s ’80s minor hit duet with Sheena Easton.]
R.D: Then there are those Eagles songs.
R.K: Right. So, to think about all the songs Bob has written, along with those, so many Eagles’ tunes he co-wrote with Glenn Frey: Why in the hell would somebody like Ted . . . nothing about that makes any sense, at all. I agree: Ted’s lyrics were dark.
R.D: And that “darkness” continued into Pendragon. As a favor to my friend, Alex Raga, an Italian-based musician and Jim Morrison aficionado, I sat down with the Pendragon tapes, known as the pirated The Lost Album by Phantom, to transcribe the lyrics for Alex to sing. Sure, it got a little poppier, maybe even “Springsteen” by that point, as some have said, in the voice. Lyrically, however, it was the same, dark lyrics picking up from the Walpurgis/Phantom years. I just don’t see “Hollywood Nights” mixed in with those Lost Album tunes, or see it as a “missing tune” of Ted’s catalog.
R.K: Wasn’t that Lost Album, horrible?
R.D: Well, there’s a reason for that “horrible” sound. I did speak to Scott Strawbridge about that “album,” even though he wasn’t involved with it. He was, however, an engineer and producer at Fiddlers where Pendragon recorded those songs. He told me the studio had a “catalog system,” but didn’t abide by it. When the studio went under and another entity purchased the carcass; there was this cabinet full of tapes from over the years; the tapes weren’t cataloged, most were not properly labeled. Scott’s theory was, whomever bought out the studio went through the tapes, saw a couple of familiar names on a box, realized what they had, and that they could piggyback them off the Phantom legend. They just took the unmastered demos and released it (in Italy). Mike deMartino, who actually worked on the board (but did not play keyboards on those tapes, to his recollection) of those Pendragon sessions (at Fiddlers and United Sound), went as far to say that someone was “playing tricks.” In his opinion, outside of the two singles (the first four tracks on The Lost Album), the rest is “not Ted,” and that he could hear the difference.
R.K: Yeah, I heard the album. Ironically, my store was on Woodward Avenue. Right across the street was the store, Speedy Ts. The owner of that store was Keith Abentrod; he was the soundman for Phantom at some point. Anyway, I went in there to get some shirts printed; we got to talking and that’s how we found who each of us were. So here we are, all these years later, with businesses across the street from one another. So, he says to me, “Have you heard The Lost Album.”
R.D: Which, to settle it, for all of those readers who believe it was recorded before The Divine Comedy in L.A., and so on: you’re not on it.
R.K: Right. I told Keith I didn’t know anything about The Lost Album. But, I was, however, told we were going to start working on a “second album,” but I never heard it. So Keith let me borrow it and I recorded it. And, low and behold, it was some of the stuff we worked on for the never-was second album. But the renditions on that demo you’re telling me about are just terrible. I wish you could hear some of the live tapes I have of Phantom’s rehearsals, it was just intense. And to hear these . . . I agree with you, they were “poppy” songs, but my god, Britney Spears could have sung them.
R.D: When you read comments on the web, especially on You Tube, The Divine Comedy has its share of fans, but its detractors, as well. Those detractors say, “Great, now he went from aping Jim Morrison to trying to be Bruce Springsteen.” But back to Scott Strawbridge: He told me bands would R&D songs at Fiddlers (Gene Simmons did a lot of incognito work at the studio), then they’d take the stuff down to United Sound to either master or re-record finished versions. After speaking with me, Scott listened to The Lost Album and said they sounded like “demos” and someone just threw them out there to make a quick buck off the legend.
R.K: I think Scott is spot on.
R.D: I tracked the lineage of those tapes. They first surfaced in Europe in 1989, in Italy.
R.K: Really, that’s interesting.
R.D: Yes. There’s this whole Jim Morrison cult in Italy.
R.K: Now that, I know. It’s huge.
R.D: And there’s this all-Doors radio show in Italy, well, there was; I don’t know if that is still going, but it was like our Beatles Bunch or Sounds of Sinatra, here in the States. So that radio show initiates this interest in the Phantom record. It starts getting airplay and creates a market demand for the album; so this pirated copy of The Divine Comedy appears. Then, the pirated version of the Pendragon demo, The Lost Album, appears in 1989, so as to piggyback off the legend. As I said, earlier, Ted eventually discovered the CD version of the Pendragon demos in 1997, via the Internet, which was in full swing. Needless to say, when Ted discovered Pendragon was pirated, he was very upset.
R.K: I never heard this story about Fiddlers. Now, I know of Fiddlers Music because they were such a respected guitar store in Detroit. Is that the same studio you’re talking about?
R.D: The three-story building on Mack Avenue, with sales, rehearsal and recording studios, and equipment rental floors.
R.K: Okay, that’s the one.
An ad for Fiddlers Music in Detroit, Michigan, from November 1970. The store was founded by ex-members of the band, the Lazy Eggs, Tom Carson, Sam Moceri, and Clem Riccobono. A fourth ex-member of the band, Gary Prague, founded the nearby Cloudborn Recording Studio.
Fiddlers, as shown in the ad, started out as a musical instruments store on the first floor of the building, with an art studio, 1st Art Place East, on the second floor. Eventually, Fiddlers expanded into all three floors of the building, the first floor was the equipment store, the second floor handled sound and lighting, had a luthier studio for stringed instrument building and repair, and lesson rooms. The third floor became a recording studio.
— Store biography courtesy of Mike Delbusso
R.D: Tommy Court, who ended up on the road as the soundman for the Rockets (and devised the Happy Dragon Band project; he has no connection to Phantom), did all of the electronics and the wiring on the studios.
R.K: I’ll be damned. You know, one of the first things I’ve ever heard about, with the popularity of Phantom in Europe, was when some kid in Europe got my phone number or something. So, he calls and goes, “Are you Russ Klatt who played keyboards with Phantom?” He proceeds to tell me he’s part of a fan club over there, and he starts asking me all these questions. “Well, I don’t know about that,” I tell him. “Well, I guess that’s true,” I say to him. Finally, the kid says to me, “I know more about the fucking band that you! I don’t think you were ever in it!” CLUNK — he hung up on me.
R.D: Are you serious? What year was this?
R.K: Oh, it had to be about five years ago. This little shit from Poland, I think it was, is going to tell me I’m not in the band. But that was the first I heard of it. So that inspired me to get online and see how many, not websites, but so many places you could go to find out about the Phantom — but across the pond, not here. I thought, “Oh, my god, what’s going on here?” It even got to the point I ended up putting a Phantom cover band together. I know this guy, here, in town who owns a nice production company. So I called Carey to ask what it would take, you have all these “Mega ’80s Nights” with bands that play all these ’80s songs and dress up like Duran Duran. And he was young enough that he asks, “Who is the band again?” Well, there’s the first problem: it’s only going to be all of these old bastards, like me, who know about it. So we never went with it. But Carey was the booking agent for a really nice, 500-seat club, here, in Detroit. I thought it would be a nice place to break it out, because it’s the band’s hometown, but I never pursued it. Probably glad I didn’t. I’m too old for that now.
R.D: Yeah, it’s hard work. I could never roadie, again, myself. Just doing the yard work — both mowing, then weed eating — kills me; I’m down and out the next day.
R.K: My back is so screwed up, these days, R.D. I’m five-foot six, and I tell people, “I used to be six feet tall, but I played the Hammond B3 with two Leslie speakers and I moved that monster around. It compressed my spine. I couldn’t do it again. Even those last few years that I did I perform again, in my late 50s, but by the time I got my keyboards moved in, and my amps, and everything else . . . now I have to play three sets on top of this? For how much? Fifty dollars? I’d rather stay at home and watch the news on television. It just got to be ridiculous. That’s what so much of us resort to.
R.D: I hear you. It was different when we were young and stupid.
R.K: You know, Bill Blackwell, who was Bob Seger’s tour manager, since forever, ever since Tom Weschler left in 1974; he was always coming into my store, getting framing done. He did a lot of promotional stuff, other than Seger, in town. Bill is just a good guy. So, he’d come in and I’d be having a bad day, not making any sales at the store, and I’d comment that I should have stayed in the music business. He goes, “Shut up. You got a job. Do you know how many guys from back in the day you knew and played with would give anything just to have a job and not have to play some shit-ass bar?” Bill was right: but I still wanted to play.
R.D: Hey, same goes for my roadie days, even more so with my radio days. “Do I really want — or need — to work in this shitty station for that pay?” No thanks.
R.K: Yeah, sounds about right.
R.D: You mentioned playing some “shit-ass bar”: I saw Ted, well Arthur, live, many times. He had a couple of different names that escape me; the one that stuck the longest was Lonewolf. He was playing cracker boxes with postage stamp-sized stages. Just real dumps, real dive bars. No decent club is going to book a band like his, no matter how good — even if he did do originals, which he did not. At the time he was active, the alternative rock scene in South Florida was in full effect, with the likes of Marilyn Manson and the Collapsing Lungs, as well as 7 Mary 3 and Matchbox 20, then known as Tabitha’s Secret, and the Hazies, then known as UROK, making the trek from the north and the east.
R.K: I tell you, the one single-most factor in the demise of Phantom was Mike Bailey. He ruined it. I think Tom Weschler and Gary Gawinek could have straightened Ted’s head out about Punch “spending too much time on Seger” and being so jealous of him. But when Mike Bailey came along and started throwing all the coke at Ted, he became “invincible”; you couldn’t even talk to Ted. Once Mike got in there, we only rehearsed a few times before Mike took Ted out to L.A. to the Whisky to hook up with Manzarek. Jimmy, Harold, and I said to Mike, “What are you trying to do to us? He’s not going to start singing Morrison songs with those guys. They’re not going to lower themselves to that.” Now, someone told me, and I can’t recall who, but I guess Ted did get up on stage with Manzarek and Krieger to do “Break on Through” or something like that [the infamous “Jim Morrison Disappearance Third Anniversary Party” held on July 3, 1974] but the audience threw beer bottles at him. But I don’t know how true that is.
R.D: Well, I’ve heard the “beer bottle” story before, which goes along with the “Beer on the sound board story” from the Pendragon years. Now, the version Ted told me: he joined the Doors.
R.K: . . . Oh, for Christ sakes. Well, he wrote “Hollywood Nights,” so, yeah, “he joined” the Doors.
R.D: Oh, yeah. He bunked down in Manzarek’s Wonderland Avenue while they rehearsed, and everything. Now, there were no “beer bottles,” per Ted’s version. He got up on stage, started singing “Light My Fire,” the crowd went crazy, chanting “Jim” over and over. Ted claimed the agreement with the band was that he would do the show as “Ted Pearson,” not “Jim’s Ghost,” and not as “The Phantom.” [Russ laughs.] When Krieger and Manzarek failed to correct the audience, that “Jim isn’t alive, he’s not back from the dead,” Ted claimed he walked off. At that point, Iggy Pop jumped up and finished the concert. That was the end of the “New Doors.”
R.K: [Laughing.] I think my story with the beer bottles was more exciting.
R.D: I think your story with the beer bottles is more accurate.
R.K: [Both laughing.] I think so, too. Ted told you that? Who told you the “beer bottle” story?
R.D: Well, yours is the second time I’ve heard it. I can’t recall who told me, darn it. It escapes me; my mind these days.
R.K: Now, I recall: Gary Gawinek told me the story. Another “story” Ted told me: At one time, he and Ted Nugent were real tight. He tells me Nugent is playing the Grande and they, Ted and Nugent, both who had hair down to their waists, were on stage, both facing the drummer. They turned around and the audience “freaks out” because they looked just like each other. Just another drug-induced story from Ted, I think.
R.D: I wanted to talk about the band’s history prior to your joining, back to when Phantom was known as Walpurgis. They did a show at the Grande on October 30, 1971, a Halloween Eve show, opening for Joe Cocker with Frost as the undercard. After the show, they ended up at the infamous GarWood Mansion. There, they meet Billy Davis, formerly of Detroit’s Hank Ballard and the Moonlighters; Davis, of course, left the band, and he got Jimi Hendrix the gig as his replacement. Anyway, Billy Davis ends up as the A&R man for Astral Studios in New York, which was owned by a Hendrix friend, Bunny Jones. So, Davis takes Walpurgis to Astral to record an album. Something goes bad with the sessions and the band comes back to Detroit, in pieces. I’ve never been able to verify what went wrong, but after our talk, I think I have a pretty good idea. Is there any truth to that at all, that there’s an unfinished or unreleased album, prior to The Divine Comedy?
R.K: No. This is the first I am hearing this. There’s no other album to my knowledge. The only album I heard of is The Lost Album we spoke of, then, nothing.
R.D: So, what you worked on at Pampa, those were all new recordings, not a retooling of, or trying to “fix,” or salvaging, those Astral sessions?
R.K: No, not at all: it was all new recordings. Everything on The Divine Comedy was recorded at Pampa Recording Studios: all of it. Somewhere, I’ve got photo slides of Ted sitting in the studio doing the “Merlin” poem, to set up that song. So, yeah, everything was done at Pampa for the album. It’s all just too bad, you know. That album could have been so good and so powerful. These people that I’ve talked with over the years that said to me, “Man, we just love this music and what was it like. . . .” Here I am talking to these guys, these fans, some forty years later and I tell them, “It was a good, good band.” No question about it.
R.D: Even more so for a four piece, as you mentioned.
Affectionately remembered as the “Black Sabbath of Bluegrass,” Detroit’s Flat Broke formed in 1975 in Rochester Hills, Michigan. The band also featured Phil Bliss on guitar and vocals (front left), Dave Dymon on banjo, pedal steel, and vocals, and Dave Heins on mandolin, guitar and vocals (standing behind Dymon). The former soundman of Phantom, Keith Abentrod, replaced Billy Dayner on bass in 1978. Most of the band’s recorded output between 1976 to 1979 was cut at Ted Pearson’s Rochester home studio.
— Image courtesy of the Gary Gawinek archives via the Flat Broke ReverbNation website
R.K: Yes. Jimmy’s a solid drummer, but Harold [Breedless] kinda sucked, though. I think a better bass player would have driven it better. All of the piano work was done by Ted, by the way. I only played on the last track of the sessions to lay down the Hammond, which was “Tales from a Wizard,” that’s the only song that has Hammond on it.
R.D: There was a (defunct) blog entry from long ago who mentioned you by name as “his friend.” The poster stated he recalled you bringing the tape home and playing it in the tape deck of a car in a garage at 11 PM at night and how great the song was, and that it was “Welcome to Hell” — even though the actual song you’re on is “Tales from a Wizard.” Now, another blog, maybe the same guy remembering things differently, recalls you bringing the tapes home and cranking it up on the home stereo at 11 PM. He also remembers eventually hearing the song at night, on WABX in Detroit.
R.K: Huh. I’ll be darned. Any tapes I brought home were on reel-to-reel and you can’t play those in the car, obviously. I also have to mention that I sang backup on “Black Magic, White Magic.” That’s it, those two songs. Everything else is Ted — all Ted. Now, as I said, I played the other songs, but only in rehearsals, for the Seger and B.T.O tour that never happened.
R.D: So, now that you’ve told me that Ted did all of the piano on all of the tracks, and that you only overdubbed the Hammond on one song . . . I now begin to wonder if the second bassist — the “W” vs. “Y” credits — isn’t Harold Breedless and one of the Wells brothers, but Harold and Ted, himself. As for yourself: My understanding is that you were not a member of Walpurgis and you didn’t join the band until they hit the studio and the album was almost completed — and its promotion (the L.A radio-leaked single) was in full swing. At that point, Punch changed the name to Phantom, as a quick way to market the group. You came in on the tail end of all that to lay down some Hammond B3, become part of the touring band, and that’s how you started.
R.K: You got it right on the head. That’s exactly how it happened. My head was spinning, it all happened so fast. Here’s a story: I got the gig without playing a note. How does that happen? Well, I was called up to the house in Rochester that we practiced at [on South Boulevard, east of Rochester Road]. I met with Gary Gawinek and Ted. They quizzed me on all sorts of stuff. The biggest thing was: “Are you going to college?” I told them that “I just went my first semester and college and me, we don’t get along.” The next thing was: “Do you have a girlfriend?” “No,” I tell them. “Okay, you’ll do,” they tell me. “Wait, guys, don’t you want to hear me play.” They say, “We’ll show you what we want you to play.” It was the easiest gig I ever got! I guess because my name got around Punch’s offices, like I told you, before.
R.D: So, you hung out at Catley Manor, then.
R.K: I never heard of Catley Manor.
R.D: That was the nickname of the house in Rochester — if we are speaking of the same Rochester house — that Michael Bailey rented. According to a close friend of Ted’s that I spoke with, Mike’s first roommate was Gary Gawinek, who knew each other since high school. She actually lived there from 1975 with her husband, this is after your tenure with the band, until 1977, when the house was torn down.
R.K: Bailey was hooked up with Gary, that early? I didn’t know that. You know, there are just so many stories of those times. We could go on for hours.
R.D: So true. I have to ask: Is Jim Roland still alive? Not that I would want to reach out and bother him, but I was wondering if he is still with us.
R.K: As far as I know, he is, and in Michigan. Remember that drummer that was a keyboardist I mentioned, Marty Blair, one time with Phantom? He stood up with Jimmy at his wedding. But I don’t know if Jimmy died recently, or anything. You know, Jimmy Roland was a store manager of a K-Mart store [the chain is gone now; it was a major U.S. retail chain from the ’60s into the ‘90s]. Jim quit K-Mart because Ted convinced him we were going on the road. He quit that job: a secure store manager’s gig.
R.D: Did you know Howard or Russ Wells, who were in the band for a time, from its Walpurgis to Phantom transition?
R.K: No, I’ve heard of them, but didn’t know or work with them.
R.D: I spoke to an ex-roadie of Walpurgis, Steve Beringer, who’s a medical doctor these days. Reflecting back on your “easy audition”: Steve got into the band for simply having a van; being a 19-year-old kid out of high school, he jumped at it. Steve worked at a local pancake house with Ted’s girlfriend, Rece, who was a waitress there, and the second guitarist. She extended the invite to Steve.
R.K: That’s wild.
R.D: So, Steve says to me, “Would you like to speak with Rece?” He gave her my contact information and we conversed on email. These days, she’s a church elder. But it’s all in the past and she wants no part of it. But it was nice of her to speak with me. She was shocked to learn that Ted’s music was so loved, and additionally saddened to hear of Ted’s death. In fact, it was her or Steve, who shared a couple of pictures from that time, but not of Ted. I, of course, on their request, promised not to share them.
R.K: Well, that’s understandable, since it was a lot of bullshit, unfortunately. I’m glad you reached out to me, as I really enjoy speaking with you. I don’t know if I gave you information that you didn’t already know. I still think that whole thing is just a big shame because of what could have been.
R.D: So true.
R.K: You know, here’s a good example: I played in a golf outing and took my son to play in it with me; this is going way back. My son was all excited because Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band were supposed to be playing at this golf outing, too. So, we’re getting our clubs out of the trunk and putting our shoes on and there’s Punch, a few cars down, putting his shoes on. I say to my son, John, “Come on, you’re going to meet one of the most important guys in the music business.” So I took him down and we greeted and started talking about our golf game and I say, “I want my son to meet the legendary Punch Andrews.” And Punch was kind and very cordial to my son. So, Punch goes [with his hands], “Do you know your dad came this far from being a rock star?” And I thought, “You know, Punch, you’re probably right. This thing could have been out of control.” If we could have done that Midnight Special gig, I think that just would have blown people away for the type of music we were doing, the intensity of it all. I think it could have been great. It really is too bad.
R.D: Yeah, even more so, with your added insights, much of which I did not know.
R.K: Yeah, maybe we could have put out another album and opened with “Hollywood Nights,” right?
R.D: Yeah, god bless you, Art, rest in peace, brother. But I am beginning to disbelieve that more and more, now.
R.K: Yeah, put it out of your head. Put it out of your head.
R.D: Yeah, that “lost recording,” isn’t. Not anymore. It does not exist.
R.K: No. Not at all. Not at all.
END
R.D Francis is a screenwriter, author, music and film journalist who also writes for B&S About Movies. You can visit with him on Facebook.
You can learn more about the life and career of Arthur Pendragon with the books The Ghost of Jim Morrison, the Phantom of Detroit, and the Fates of Rock ’n’ Roll, along with Tales from a Wizard: The Oral History of Walpurgis. Both are available as eBooks at your favorite eRetailers, as well as Smashwords. Amazon also carries the eBook and softcover versions.
You can enjoy more photos of all of the bands and musicians concerned, on Facebook. You can find the full listing of the nine-part Detroit article series as part of a birthday tribute to Arthur Pendragon, linked below.
