“So,” Tashian laughs, “I said to myself, ‘Hmm…he must be right. He played on Sonny & Cher’s album!’ I just told John Stukas that we were gonna move to New York, that we wanted to tie up all of our business and make a change. So, when I got to New York I went to John Kurland’s office and said ‘Here we are!’ ”


Kurland was soon instrumental in a line-up change. When drummer Chip Damiani left the group, Kurland found a replacement drummer in N.D. (Norman) Smart. “I think he was 17 years old,” Tashian recalls. “And there was no audition or anything. He just knocked on our door one day.” After The Remains, Smart would go on to play with mime- rockers The Hello People, and Todd Rundgren.


Drummer Chip Damiani (this pic) and the band (above) woo the kids.


the New York sessions: he says that the guys in the band all thought, “Hey, maybe Epic is not doing as much for you guys as maybe they should be. And maybe Capitol wants you.” He continues, “Because originally before we signed with Columbia, Capitol had called a number of times saying, ‘Listen – Capitol is really interested in you.’ ” But in late ’64 nothing had come of that, and The Remains signed with Epic. Yet a year and a half later, the band did the audition for Capitol. “And what is interesting,” observes Tashian, “is that while it did not produce a deal for us with Capitol, it did produce the only true example of what we sounded like playing live. We were just running our set.”


to make some overtures to The Beatles’ US label, Capitol Records. In early ’66, they secured a live-in-the-studio demo session date in New York City.


The ’66 demo session released (in ’96!) as A Session With The Remains has a raw, meters- in-the-red ambience more in common with The Stooges or The Velvet Underground than with most pop groups of the era. On the session tapes Barry Tashian can clearly be heard imploring his band mates to hurry up, that they only had a limited amount of time. So was the raw vibe intentional or merely a by-product of a hurried session? “I think,” says Tashian, “the reason for that sound is that we recorded direct to two-track. No mixing, no overdubbing. That’s just how it went down. The engineer who ran the machines was in the control booth; a friend of ours was manually riding the guitar volume upward during the solo, while it was going down!”


Tashian explains the whole motivation for 44


The band’s management at the time included John Kurland, later to manage The Nazz, featuring a young Todd Rundgren. “John was hired as a publicist by our booking agent John Stukas with Music Productions. And so John came up to Boston with his buddy, Bob Bonus. Bonus worked with General Artists Corporation (GAC) booking agency; they put The Beatles’ tour together, and were working with a lot of English acts. They were the first American company that put tours together for the Stones and The Kinks.”


Tashian continues, “They came up to see us play at a place in Kenmore Square called Where It’s At. And it was just during that time when we were just playing really very strong shows.” Tashian says that nothing definite seemed to result from the visit: “It was kind of like, ‘Well, if you come to New York, say ‘Hi’’ or something. But I took it farther than that. I decided we had to go to New York, because I had talked with my friend Monty Dunn, a guitarist who had played with Judy Collins and some other folk people. One day Monty just said to me, ‘If you really wanna make it, you gotta go to New York.’


Tashian continues, “We told Epic Records that we didn’t like the way our records sounded when we recorded; we wanted a grittier sound. Bob Morgan said, ‘Well, go to Nashville. You know, they know how to get gritty sounds down there!’ So we drove down there in our Econoline van. When we arrived, we poured out of the van, went into the hotel and sat in the lobby for a while. Eventually our producer showed up to help us check into the hotel, because we didn’t know anything about that. And [that producer] turned out to be Billy Sherrill, the legendary producer of Country & Western and more. I mean, he produced Ray Charles!”


Tashian says that the group got their best- sounding sides cut in Nashville. “We cut in a studio that was originally built by Owen Bradley. It was the Quonset Hut, the first studio on Music Row. A lot of great records were made there: Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Johnny Cash.”


Though Tashian wrote several songs for the group, including the immortal ‘Why Do I Cry’, the most well-known Remains tune – included on the original Nuggets compilation —would come from an outside writer. “Before we went to Nashville, Billy Vera came to New York to meet us and to do some other things. While Billy was in New York he took us to his friend Al Gallico, the music publisher. And Al Gallico was given some acetates and demos... just two or three. I still have ’em. And one of them was Billy Vera doing ‘Don’t Look Back’. And it’s really very different from how The Remains would do it. And out of that batch that was the one song we ended up recording much later, back in New York. I think it was one of the last recording sessions we had.”


Surprisingly, Tashian wasn’t even aware of the Nuggets album (released in ’72) when it came out. “I wasn’t paying attention at all,” he says. But he expresses pleasure with the expanded (4-CD) re-release: “They added ‘Why Do I Cry’.” As a songwriter, Tashian actually made some money from royalties when the Nuggets box sold well.


Remains bassist Vern Miller explains how the relatively unknown group ended up on a tour with the biggest band in the world. “Bob Bonus was very involved in the organisation


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