I love this Polaroid because it perfectly captures the vibe between Eric DuFaure, who signed Personal Effects to Cachalot Records and Dwight Glodell who produced our first ep. We had dinner with Eric and his wife last night, the first time we had seen him them in thirty years. They have been living in Paris and we had a lot of catching up to do.
Eric had just visited Hal Willner in New York and he showed us some photos of Hal and his puppet collection. Howdy Doudy was in there. Eric told us he and Mitt Romney were in the same Harvard MBA class so he has been fielding a lot of inquiries lately from the press looking for salient Mitt stories.
When we first met Eric he was living in a loft on Mercer Street, we recorded tracks at nearby Sorcerer Sound and Cachalot’s office was at 611 Broadway at Houston, a building with lots of characters. Kieth Haring was downstairs, Ed Steinberg, Bob Singerman Management and Peter Leak. Neil Cooper, who founded the cassette only company called Reach Out Records (ROIR) was right next door to Eric.
We picked up right where we left off, so much so we wound up looking at old PE videos and Eric fell in love with “Bring Out The Jazz“, a song he never heard because we recorded it in our basement a few months after we parted ways. On the way out the door he suggested hiring some young kids to lip sync to the song and make a hit.
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“Bring Out the Jazz” was recorded in a basement? I remember working very hard on that track at PCI, so there must be another version? The video I’ve seen uses the master recording from those PCI sessions though. I’ve lost track of the dates, but wasn’t “Don’t Wake Me” a part of the Bring Out the Jazz release too? That track was remarkable at the time we recorded it and it remains so today IMO. The first basement record in my recollection was the red & black cover’d affair. I listened to the long-form mix of “Love Never Thinks” about a month ago. It remains one of my favorite tracks and I’m proud to have been a part of it.
The link to “Bring Out The Jazz” in this post goes to a video that someone, maybe a student from RIT, made to the early version of the song, one that indeed was recorded in our basement. The later version of “Bring Out The Jazz” was bigger and better but it is not the one used in the video. And “Love Never Thinks,” produced by Dwight Glodell was and shall forever remain brilliant!
I played on the original tracks of Love Never Thinks and Don’t Wake Me at PCI before I left and Bernie joined. I never played on Bring Out The Jazz. That was definitely a Bernie-period song.
I agree with Dwight – Don’t Wake Me is an extraordinary track. Very complex with really hypnotic pacing and lyrics. Love Never Thinks is probably one of the weirdest things we ever did. Probably? Definitely.
I remember hours of messing with snare drum sounds as Dwight and Paul obsessed!