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»Dawn Eden interviews Rick Brand

To interview Rick Brand I went to his home in Valley Cottage, New York, an hour from Manhattan. Brand, who now has a psychiatry practice, was trying to get his own blues/garage band, the Spyders, produced when he first heard of the Left Banke.

RICK BRAND: There were 2 New York groups at the time, they were the Rascals & The Lovin' Spoonful, and both of their management companies were very busy or unapproachable. What we would all try to do is find out what producer had $$ that week & we'd try to converge on him. So when I found out that the Left Banke was a New York group that had a hit, I immediately made an appointment to go & see the manager, who was Harry Lookofsky, & to see if he would produce my group. I went up & I played guitar for him, he was really impressed with my guitar playing. So he said, rather than him producing my group now, why don't I join the Left Banke? I turned him down cold. I didn't want to do it. I said, "No, thats fag rock." They had a hit, "Walk Away Renee" at that time, & he said they were going to start touring, & I had no interest whatsoever. About a week later, my groups equipment was stolen out of our rehearsal basement on Prince street & we were broke. We had no way of getting new gear so I went back to the Left Banke & I said "Buy me new equipment & I'll join,"& they did! They made me an equal partner in revenues from the roadshow, & that was fairly generous from their point of view. In terms of recording, I agreed not to participate in any royalties or have any involvement with the first LP except I was going to play on a couple of songs & be paid as a studio musician. So the first LP I signed away my rights to, so I had nothing to do with that.

DAWN EDEN: Did you want more of a creative role in the band?

RICK BRAND: I was very satisfied being guitarist. I loved Mike's writing & I didn't ever want to write a thing. That changed later. When Mike left the group & we were going to record a second LP, I started writing some songs that I thought were pretty good. Our manager, Billy Ottinger thought it was good, other people thought the songs were good & the group didn't want to sing my material! That's when the real political problems happened between us. I felt that a lot of my material was better than a lot of the stuff on the second LP, & all I wanted to do is have the group be as good as possible. I felt we should all share all the writing for the group. I wasn't trying to selfishly capture it, but they made comments about Mike Brown having been in the forefront & having made a big star of himself & then leaving, & they weren't going to give me that opportunity. They resented Mike & I think they transfered some of that resentment to me, some jealousy. That was the point when I thought about leaving the group.

DAWN EDEN: Rick Brand went on to say that he didn't think Harry Lookofsky managed the band very well.

RICK BRAND: There was this one incident when a fan magazine wanted permission to reprint something of the Left Banke, probably "Walk Away Renee." In exchange the magazine offered either to put us on the cover for $50, rather than accept a publicity thing, Lookofsky would take the $50 & pocket it. In addition, he paid the group a very, very tiny percentage of recording royalties, something like one-&-a-quarter percent, to be split among the entire group. The problem was that he was our manager & our producer & our publisher. There's a tremendous conflict of interest, because your manager should be the one who is trying to get you the best deal from you producer & your publisher, & since he has all three of those functions, he was managing all of those functions to his own benefit. That was my impression & the impression of most of the group at the time.

DAWN EDEN: How well did the band duplicate it's recorded sound?

RICK BRAND: In some ways, I don't know if anyone would agree with me, I kind of managed the road show. I organized the group. I was the senior musician, after Mike left the group. Mike & the group had no idea how to perform on-stage. I had been around New York a lot with my other group, I knew how to tune a band, I knew how to get things going on-stage, & I didn't seek to duplicate the recorded sound at all. Most of the recorded sound was based on Mike's keyboard, so, when Mike was in the group the keyboard dominated the sound. The drums & bass were generally very simple & the group could duplicate it. On guitar, I would try to cover violin lines so that the notes were the same, but since I played guitar & not violin, it wasn't really identical. I would seek, to what ever extent I could, to make the road show not duplicate the recordings. I wanted to have a separate, bluesy rock kind of thing, which I think the audiences really liked. They liked the sweet mellowness of our key hit songs, but the when we would start getting too esoteric & stay in that mode for a whole show, I think we'd loose the audience. We would do a blues thing, "Ain't too proud to beg" & the audience would flip out. They loved the way Steve sang, & Steve had a great blues voice, so I would want to really capitalize more on being a really tight rock-blues band & also intersperse it with the mellow sound of the Left Banke.

DAWN EDEN: Live, did the vocals sound anything like they did on record?

RICK BRAND: It varied tremendously, Tom would tend sharp. George would tend flat. When we were on, they were wonderful, Steve rarely missed anything. He was the most on target, wonderful, creative, beautiful voice. I really looked up to Steve's voice & Mike's piano playing. I thought they were tremendous musicians. I never argued with Mike about music.

DAWN EDEN: What was it like when the Left Banke toured with the Beach Boys?

RICK BRAND: The Beach Boys used to walk around singing four & five part harmony to "Pretty Ballerina" & other songs. They were like, goofing us that way, You know, they would come off stage & come up to us and start singing "Pretty Ballerina," one gut would start & another would come in with harmony, & they did it because we didn't have harmony parts worked out for "Pretty Ballerina." They had it all worked out. Steve was the star on these occasions. Everyone knew it, when he sang you sort of shut up & listened to Steve. The Beach Boys are known for their tremendously high range. I think Steve could sing higher. They loved him. Everyone really admired Steve on these huge tours.

DAWN EDEN: (Rick the began to talk about what it was like when the band was on the road)

RICK BRAND: We used to smoke a lot of pot, there was a lot of pot smoking in those days, & it was more than acceptable, in some ways, it almost seemed necessary. I know I did my share, & so did the whole group. We would travel around in a limousine at that time, a limo pulling a U-Haul, & we would really get higher & higher, just smoking pot all day long, basically. My image of us at that time, all though I'm sure it's not exactly accurate, was that our road managers would kind of lift us out of the car & place us on stage & we would play & then go back to the car. The road was not a very glamorous place. We enjoyed each others company, or hated each other but enjoyed fighting, & we spent a lot of time together. But we would go to the greatest places in the world & not see anything, just an audience, a hotel room & the car. Occasionally there would be some interesting guys or groupie-type guys who would come up with interesting drugs & we'd allow them to come to our rooms & talk about the local scene, but basically, we were very aloof from everybody. It's hard to form a connection when you know your about to say goodbye to whoever you meet. There's a desperation about that kind of relationship, you have to make them wonderful quickly & say goodbye, & go through life with someone in 4 hours. There's something about that that really is depressing.

DAWN EDEN: How did Steve Martin relate to others?

RICK BRAND: He was very shy, I think, I never really figured Steve out. He kept very much to himself & I don't think anyone ever really understood him, because I don't think he talked very much about himself. He was always very moody & unpredictable. You know, one day he liked you, then one day he hated you, one day he would participate in group life & the next day he would refuse to even come & rehearse. I think in some ways, there was some tremendous pathology among all of us in the group, myself included, I guess. George & Steve were very escapist in terms of their use of alcohol. There was so much drug use then that I think part of that says something about where we really were in life.