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Last week, as I sat in an Echo Park studio re-mastering the Stark Reality master dubs with lover-of-things-funky Dave Cooley, certain phrases punctuated our work. "Amazing!" "So tight!" "Man, were these guys good!" At one point, Dave looked back and laughed the obvious, "Man, how would you explain this music to anyone outside of our circle?" Our circle. Meaning there were "outsiders" who simply wouldn't catch on to the glory of this music? I thought about it for a second or two, and came up with two replies. One - Dave had hit upon the same question I'm sure others had asked, through the years, as they discovered the wonderful music that the Stark Reality recorded. The term "outsiders" had, I'm sure, branded different groups of people in the past thirty years! Two - when I first heard the Stark Reality's AJP-released album, in the home of a New Haven-based hip hop producer when I was still in high school, he had summed it up in one, neat sentence: "I love this one 'cause it's so distorted." Distorted. That might work! Not in the general, ugly sense of the word. Rather, in the artistic sense - as in the way a surrealist's painting distorts his perception of the world. The sounds on their 1970 LP - from Monty Stark's fuzz-toned vibraphone solos, to John Abercrombie's wah-wah fluctuations, to Phil Morrison's slipping and sliding up and down the neck of his bass guitar, to Vinnie Johnson's marching funk - all depart from the sound one might expect to emerge from a late 60s jazz quartet. Monty's rearrangement of famed composer Hoagy Carmichael's children's songs certainly distorted the ideas Carmichael had originally conceived. All for the better, of course. I have the distinct feeling that many who buy this reissue already know about the Stark Reality. That these kind of simplistic summations are wasted. That many of those "outsiders" who don't know the group are going to listen to this music like Peanut Butter Wolf did, as he heard "Junkman's Song" pouring out of my bedroom speakers one afternoon. "Now this is the kind of music that should be reissued!" Right on. I'm going to spare you play-by-play commentary on the group's work. That
kind of academic bullshit always comes across as condescending anyway.
But I'll try to distill some of the history of this most-important project
into a series of vignettes of the folks behind its creation, and release.
A magical journey awaits - and I'm happy you're along for the ride.
HOAGY CARMICHAEL Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1899, Carmichael studied to be a lawyer before settling his heart in the realm where it rightly belonged - music. Like Duke Ellington, Carmichael was a composer and a performer, deeply rooted in jazz. Early influences included a close friend, cornetist Bix Biederbecke. Amongst those he early-influenced included one of Beiderbecke's peers, Louis Armstrong, who recorded Carmichael's "Rockin' Chair" in 1929. A few years later and Carmichael was lauded and loved as one of America's great songsmiths. By 1950, Carmichael had established a strong presence in Hollywood - for his acting talents, as well as his musicianship. He appeared in movies like To Have and Have Not, and Young Man With A Horn, alongside a young Kirk Douglas. But at the same time, the emerging rock n' roll culture heralded a change in popular music. Composers like Carmichael felt displaced. By the 1960s the entertainment industry that Carmichael had thrived within for over thirty years was a different place altogether. Perhaps even foreign. Luckily the composer's youngest son, Hoagy Bix Carmichael, was in tune with what made the kids tick, and he was determined to keep his father's music fresh. In the late 60s, a project would emerge at Boston public television station WGBH that would change the perception of a small number of Carmichael standards forevermore.
HOAGY BIX CARMICHAEL In the late 60s, tired of a stockbroker's existence on Wall Street, Hoagy Bix called WGBH to offer his services as a volunteer. "I said, 'I just can't do this,'" he states in reference to his New York-based profession. "GBH in Boston was the greatest public |
television station in the country. I went up there and got a job for myself." Serving as one of the station's on staff producers, Hoagy Bix discovered a young vibraphonist named Monty Stark, who had just recorded the theme for the Say Brother program with his fledgling band, The Stark Reality. "I heard the jazz in (his music), of course. And they had some rhythms going there that were fabulous - Monty's a master at that," Hoagy Bix now reflects. "Monty has killed me, forever." Soon, Stark was working with Hoagy Bix as the music-man behind a season's worth of one-hour dramas entitled On Being Black. Guest appearances by laureates such as Abby Lincoln, Bill Cosby, Moms Mabley, Alvin Ailey and Morgan Freeman leant prestige to the show. But this isn't to say that Stark produced the show's music under ideal circumstances. "He did (the music) with the Reality - for nothing!" Hoagy Bix exclaims. "We used to do it in people's apartments. And that's how we really got cemented." Thus, when Hoagy Bix conceived of an educational television program that would focus on his father and a series of children's songs he'd composed in the 50s (some of which found release on the 1958 LP Hoagy Carmichael's Havin' A Party on Golden Records), the Stark Reality was called to give the songs a contemporary work out. "I thought, 'Kids are into this rock stuff. I can hire the Lawrence Welk Quartet, but I don't think that's what they want," Hoagy Bix offers about the thought process behind hiring Stark's group. "I think I have a great marriage of a guy who has a great band, and some wonderful songs, and an idea to use the songs to educate kids to the elements of music. It was pretty simple." Delivering Stark's masterpiece to his father, however, was anything but. On May 11th, 1970 - nary ten days after recording the Stark Reality's 15 Carmichael covers - Hoagy Bix rushed them off to his father in Palm Springs, California. "Your music has turned a lot of people on here," he cautiously wrote. "Have a listen and tell me what you think (Sudhalter 324)." The elder Carmichael's reaction, tempered by a few scotch and sodas with Hoagy Bix's brother Randy, is captured in his liner notes on the AJP LP. "Out rolled some of the damnedest music either of us had ever heard. This is children's music!?. I say, 'Stark mad,'" Carmichael wrote. "Monty's voice? somewhere between the filings on the edge of a pie pan, and the singing of a guru during one of his most exalted moments." In other words, Carmichael acknowledged a job well done. "Dad wasn't out there trying to understand what made Jefferson Airplane work. He tempered (the music) with a lack of cutting edge understanding." Hoagy Bix clarifies. "But he heard the musicality, he heard the chops. And he bought into the chops. He liked the way that these kids were playing his children's songs." He liked the Stark Reality enough to bring the group onto the Dick Cavett show to perform their seven-inch single "Junkman's Song." Enough to co-write a composition or two with Stark. Hoagy Bix colors the cross-generational meeting of the minds: "Monty sorta lays back there and those wonderful wheels are going like mad. Dad's got a drink in his hand and Monty's smoking something weird. They were communicating without saying a lot. And, they'd talk a little, and play a little, and do nothing." *Note: Hoagy Bix Carmichael is referred to by his first and middle names to differentiate him from his father, referred to by his surname.
CARL ATKINS "I don't recall how I met Monty, I may have known Phil Morrison first," Atkins states. "When Monty first started, he wanted to have a big band." Atkins was part of the group that recorded Say Brother for WGBH. "Say Brother was one of those shows that was designed to deal with the issues of the black community. 'Cause up to that point the black community had been left out of all the TV stations," Atkins recalls. "GBH was making a big effort to do something." Atkins felt akin to Stark and when Stark scaled the band down, Atkins was asked to join on saxophone. In this early incarnation, the Stark Reality primarily played Stark's all-inclusive compositions, which ran musical genres back, forth and center. Atkins couldn't have been happier, "...Rock, country-western, there was a whole lot of stuff going on in that band. I think we all got off on the fact that it was such an eclectic thing," he offers. "My thing about music - then, as it is now - is that I like to play a whole lot of different kinds. A lot of it was right there."
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