Note
- December 24, 2006:
Charlie Sporck passed
away on December 22, of various health problems. As I write this,
his drums are still in the studio, waiting for him to come back
and start playing - last week we were halfway through a song and
he was writing the lyrics when he started to not feel well. Little
did I know that it was so serious. Hopefully I can finish that
last song for him, and I will leave this page up as a tribute
to Charlie.
This page was originally
created by Charlie and I so we could get some outside feedback
- we were blasting through song demos at quite a pace and had
no objectivity ourselves during that time. It's almost as if Charlie
knew he didn't have that much time, and wanted to leave as much
behind as possible.
He would have loved
to know that people were still listening to his songs after he
was gone, so please do!
Rest
in Peace, my friend.
(Charlie named
our project "No Smokin'" because I wouldn't let him
smoke in my studio -
he'd stand outside in the heat or the rain taking his ciggie breaks
while I worked on
the other side of the door. I'd hear him shout from outside "Yeah,
that's outta sight" or
"I liked the take you did just before this one better"
- I'm gonna miss that!)
The
original web page starts below
No
Smokin'
Hello, evaluators! So,
what's the deal with all of this, you ask? Well, here's the background:
This all started in 1973, when the
Soul band Ice-O-Matic was formed by drummer Charlie Sporck and
guitarist Ed Dodds. They almost hit the big time in the mid 70s
with a regional hit or two, opening for groups such as the Ohio
Players and other big soul/funk acts of the time, finally disbanding
in the mid 1980s.
Ice-O-Matic was one of the stable
of clients of Astral
Sounds Recording when I became a co-owner in 1984. There were
several reels of unfinished material when the group called it
quits in 1986, which sat in Charlie's garage for the next 18 years!
In early 2004, Charlie came across
the tapes and searched me out, asking if there was a way to still
play them (these were heavy 2 inch wide tapes, 16 tracks, the
professional format of a few decades back!) I referred him to
Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, where they have the old machines
they could transfer from, and put the individual tracks into Pro
Tools format so we could see what was on them.
I started remixing the songs, but
we found a few problems along the way: Back in those days, we
weren't using click tracks that often, so the tempos would drift
a bit, making editing a bit harder. To Charlie's (and the band's)
credit, they didn't drift very much at all - fractions of a tick
- but still would be much easier to move parts around if cut to
a click track.
Some tracks were unfinished or had
damage to some channels (when analog tape gets old, sometimes
little pieces flake off) so we started to add stuff to some of
the old recordings. We brought in Austin Willacy (of House Jacks
fame, for you A Cappellaheads) to fill in some of the vocals (the
original band is scattered to the winds), and I did a lot of vocal
work myself, in addition to electric bass, guitar, and keyboards.
Some of these unfinished tracks needed
so much "fixing" that we basically just re-recorded
the whole track, which was a lot of fun for me after producing
nearly 100% A Cappella for the last few years! The finished tracks
by Ice-O-Matic were quite good, though - they were a great band!
This led to Charlie getting the writing
bug again, but as a drummer with no melodic instrumental or singing
experience, in the past he wrote with his old guitarist, Ed. Since
I was there to stand in for Ed, I took this co-writing job on,
trying to stay in the 70s Soul vein these other songs were started
in, but we drifted away from that occasionally as well. Now we've
got about 50 tracks recorded in various states, from rough demos
to more finished works, as well as a bunch of original Ice-O-Matic
tracks and re-made versions of other Ice-O-Matic songs from the
70s and 80s.
And songs we wrote last week.
Charlie, being of a certain era (and
myself as well, being a bit old school but still 12 years younger
than Charlie) isn't so interested in being cutting edge or commercial
as much as just making strong CD. My thought is to embrace the
possibly "dated" feel of some of the stuff as a nod
to influences, not try to update it too much, and see how it comes
out. Or maybe you have other suggestions I might not be seeing...
........................................
Charlie at his drum set .......................................................................................................Charlie and Bill in the control room, January
2005
Anyway, there is a mishmash of stuff,
some of it really cool, some of it a "nice try", and
other stuff in between. I won't put the totally unusable stuff
up here, but maybe some that have a "glimmer of something"
that we might not see (kind of like the guy who convinced Elton
John and his record label to release "Benny and the Jets",
though the band and label thought it would be a flop!)
There are over 50 songs here, so
I don't expect many of you to go through them with a fine-toothed
comb, but if you find stuff that you like or don't like, have
any ideas on an album order of about 12 songs, etc, let me know
at bill@dyz.com
So, then - on to the songs... Click Here to get to the song links