January 2012
2 posts
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December 2011
3 posts
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November 2011
1 post
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Fred McDowell with Travis Pomposello, 1971,...
September 2011
1 post
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July 2011
2 posts
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January 2011
5 posts
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Down Beat review: "Friends"
Down Beat Magazine review: “Friends” June 5, 1975
Before “fusion” became a dirty jazz word, Down Beat writer Bob Rusch was one of the few who could hear the difference between a commercial extreme and Marc Cohen Copland’s thoroughly original, musical approach.
FRIENDS — Oblivion Records (New Music Distribution) od 3: ⅝ Tune; Black Vibrations; Nursery Rhyme;...
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"...the enigma of enigmas..."
Talk about an ironic compliment!
I’d pretty much forgotten that anyone had ever written anything about Oblivion Records itself, rather than our records. In fact, this Bob Rusch paragraph from a 1975 Down Beat review of Friends might be our only company shout out. In the retrospect of 35 years I couldn’t ask for anything better.
The “indies” for the most part stand out as enigmas...
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Scams and flim flams.
Charles Walker @ WKCR-FM, 1973. Polaroid Big Shot portrait by Fred Seibert.
In retrospect, it’s no surprise to me that Blues from the Apple was Charles Walker’s only album as a leader after 20 years of singles for Danny and Bobby Robinson labels. Charles was a talented musician, but he was an ace huckster. Two stories in particular stand out in my memory.
We had a session planned...
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The making of "Blues from the Apple."
Charles Walker @ WKCR-FM, 1973. When I reflect on all the hard work the musicians put into the recording of Blues from the Apple, it’s sad to realize it didn’t even sell out the initial pressing of 1000 LPs, Oblivion’s poorest selling release. But it’s probably supports the thesis in Dick Pennington’s liner notes that “the New York City blues scene has been so...
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Liner notes, "Blues from the Apple"
Almost everything we know about the personnel on Blues from the Apple comes from the album’s liner notes. Researched as thoroughly as was possible (by Tom Pomposello; Dick Pennington gets the writing credit as a tip of the hat to our departing partner) about a group of almost entirely itinerant musicians, I suppose the scant biographies are an indication of the plight of a blues...
October 2010
1 post
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Tom never gave up the flame.
Mississippi Fred McDowell in Guitar Player November 1977
For almost 30 years after Fred McDowell passed in 1972 Tom Pomposello never gave up the flame, continuing to listen closely to his recordings and reflecting on their conversations together to learn lessons from his master, especially about the guitar. He shares some of them in this detailed article about Fred’s style in the...
September 2010
2 posts
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Bonus "Friends."
Marc Cohen Copland: electronic alto saxphone, tenor saxophone Glen Moore: electric & electricfied acoustic bass Jeff Williams: drums
Recorded May 3, 1972, in Studio 3, WKCR-FM, Ferris Booth Hall, Columbia University, New York for David Reitman’s “Journey to the End of the Night,” by Fred Seibert & Don Zimmerman
Here are the bonus tracks I’ve been promising to...
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Finally.
Johnny Woods’ Mississippi Harmonica, digital MP3 transfers, from the original masters: 1. Long Haired Doney 2. Three O’clock in the Morning
Finally, after several years of only having vinyl to digital transfers of our Johnny Woods single, I’ve been able to locate the original master and make clean digital files for you.
Here’s a bit of the backstory. Tom Pomposello was the...
July 2010
1 post
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The Oblivion recorders.
Recording the music at Oblivion was not exactly a high tech affair, like at many start-up labels. Back in the day, there was nothing like no Garage Band. In fact, until Tom Pomposello’s album, our last, the most tracks we’d ever utilized —the most I’d ever recorded on— totaled exactly two. Even for the early 1970s, when 16 tracks had become the state of the...
January 2010
2 posts
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Sugar Blue came to blow.
Sugar Blue at WKCR, New York 1974; Photographed by Fred Seibert Small as the New York blues scene was (and it’s way, way smaller in the 21st century), any kind of activity gathered up everyone in the community. So it was when Oblivion started the two years of recording of Charles Walker’s “Blues from the Apple.” Even though the sessions would often feature a quartet or...
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It all started...
Tom Pomposello’s 1971 campaign poster to be the Huntington, New York Receiver of Taxes
The roots of Oblivion (and Tom Pomposello’s musical moniker) were planted in the Huntington, New York, hippie record store Tom started in 1970 with his partner Rob Witter. Kropotkin was set up as an antidote to the suburban appliance stores that sold music to go along with their record players,...
October 2009
1 post
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Liner notes, "Live in New York", 1st edition
These are the liner notes and credits exactly as they appeared on the 1st edition release of “Mississippi Fred McDowell: Live in New York” in the spring of 1972. There’s an afterword by Fred, but in the main they’re written by my partner/producer/bass player Tom Pomposello. Heartfelt and authentic, the piece could only be written by a 23 year old, suburban, young father,...
August 2008
1 post
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Nick was key.
No indie label can survive without the love and support of friends and family. In my case, that first line of sustenance came from my friend Nick Moy. A classical music announcer at WKCR and a couple of years older than me, Nick had a razor sharp intellect, a dry martini wit, and a musical breadth that included everyone from Wolfgang Mozart to Art Blakey to Parliment. He watched at a distance...
June 2008
3 posts
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Big Shots from the Apple.
Oblivion’s efforts at photography were pretty pathetic. I suppose when you’ve got severely limited resources something’s got to go. With one exception, we either used snapshots or pretended we were doing something better when we weren’t. The most unusual results came from the Polaroid Big Shots that Roy Langbord and I had a brief infatuation with in 1974, and ended up...
A blues purist in the here and now.
Bulldogs photograph by iDream_in_Infrared’s Mississippi Fred McDowell & Honest Tom Pomposello > Bulldog Blues [Dance Remix] Tom Pomposello was a blues purist, who didn’t think the blues was pure. He sure believed in the purity of the men and women who made and listened to the blues. And sure, he thought the music performances he loved were pure. He trusted in the function, but...
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Marc Cohen [Copland], electric alto saxophone and...
From the liner notes of Friends: Marc Cohen [Copland] is from Philadelphia home of all good saxophonists. He has played with Chico Hamilton and was with Dreams for a short time. His alto saxophone is modified by an octave divider, two wah-wah pedals, a fuzz-tone, and a tape echo box. His tenor sax is quite ordinary. ….. Friends was completely Marc Cohen’s record. He put together...
May 2008
4 posts
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Fred's fresh, 30 years later.
Mississippi Fred McDowell in Guitar Player
I believe it would be fair to say that befriending and working with Mississippi Fred McDowell was the most important professional experience in my partner Tom’s life. And from the day we broke up the company until the day he died Tom never tired of honoring that relationship. In music, or on the radio, or in the press, or even in his commercial...
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Frank Olinsky and The Blues.
When I was four years old my parents drove up to our new house in one of the bedroom “developments” that were creating the suburbs of the 1950s and standing on a dirt hill in the backyard was the 5 years old Frank Olinsky, and a lifelong friendship began. He was already showing an awesome artistic talent and then, as teenagers, Frank was the neighborhood music freak who introduced me...
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"Blues from the Apple" was the "Living Blues."
Blues from the Big Apple
We were never all that good at “working” the press, but between the two of us, Tom was definitely my better. He was an early, avid subscriber and supporter of “Living Blues,” Jim O’Neal’s and Amy Van Singel’s Chicago magazine homage to all that is contemporary in the blues, and he pushed them relentlessly to embrace his vision...
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An acoustic "John Henry."
John Henry was always one of my favorites from “Live in New York,” so it was great to run into this clip of Fred’s acoustic performance with almost exactly the same arrangement. His exemplary bottleneck playing (some say he was the best slide player ever) is on fine display. Unfortunately it’s undated, but it was sometime in the decade before 1968, when he started...
April 2008
9 posts
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"Dead Blues Guys."
I don’t know exactly what to make of this site, but I’m happy when anyone pays attention to Fred.
On the other hand, Joseph A seems to have the right idea, commemorating Fred in his hometown of Como, Mississippi.
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We had a hit!
A 1977 playlist from WRVR, New York We were pretty clueless when it came to mechanics of the record business, and because we were roots purists, we didn’t really think about hits too much. Oblivion’s first release had done pretty well from our vantage point —we’d sold out the first pressing within a year— and beyond that… who knew? Organizing distribution,...
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Bonnie is a bluesman.
Bonnie Raitt & Freebo I showed up to record Fred McDowell at the Village Gaslight on the afternoon of November 5, 1971, set up the mikes and recorder, and settled in for the first act around 9pm. A young woman with an acoustic guitar and an electric bassist started in, and my mouth dropped. “Who’s she?” I asked my partner, and Fred’s bassist, Tom Pomposello. She was...
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Sort of Joe.
Joe Lee Wilson might just be the greatest ballad singer of his generation, evidenced by the singing on this video and on these two tracks from the fourth Oblivion release. But like the tree falling in the empty forest, mostly no one knows and it’s why, 30 some odd years ago, I wanted us to be among his discoverers. It almost worked, but that’s a story for another time. I’ve...
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The last release.
In late 1998 Tom Pomposello called me to continue his understandable obsession with keeping Live in New York in print (not only was he extremely close to Fred when he passed away in the early 70s, it was Tom’s first released recording as a musician). He was very excited about an arrangement with indie CD label “Live Archive” to release a remixed, remastered, and updated...
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Unauthorized Fred.
Notwithstanding that you can now get all the Oblivion releases for free (including all the credits, liner notes, bonus tracks, and extras), we understand that many people of a, uh, certain age, like to buy CDs. DON’T BUY THESE FRED McDOWELL CDs on Tomato Records or Blue Labor Records. They’re unauthorized, they’re pirated, and besides, HEADS UP, you can get the whole...
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Record labels.
1972, 1st edition LP
1973, 2nd edition LP
1972, 45spm single
1973, LP
1974, LP
1974, LP
1975, LP
Like a lot of other folks in the baby boomer generation, we felt that the actual printed, paper labels affixed to the vinyl albums were part of the mystical magic of the music we loved. So, we tried to put so pizzazz into Oblivion’s.
“Tried” is the...
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Johnny sure has it.
“Mississippi Harmonica” sure isn’t the only place you can hear Johnny Woods’ great harp playing and singing, but this video is the only place I’ve actually seen him perform, dueting with R.L. Burnside in 1984. R.L. picked up the Fred McDowell mantle in a lot of ways (they’re from the same area) so it makes perfect sense he and Johnny teamed up.
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Fred McDowell, 2nd edition.
The second edition liner and inner sleeve of “Live in New York”, 1973 Quickly —within our first year— Oblivion sold out the first pressing of 2000 OD-1’s. But we really hated the job our pressing plant did. The printing stunk, the pressings were worse. And we weren’t all that crazy about the way we’d done a few things ourselves. Even though Tom...
March 2008
28 posts
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Lyrics? On a blues record?
Avoiding Bob Dylan’s lyrics wasn’t too easy for someone my age, but there was no escaping my partner Tom Pomposello. After I questioned the wisdom (and the expense) of printing the inner sleeve of Blues from the Apple Tom patiently explained how the oral history of African-Americans traveled through the lyrics of the blues. He was severely annoyed that since Sgt. Pepper’s,...
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Fred (and Tom) by Valerie.
Mississippi Fred McDowell (Tom Pomposello in the background) at the Village Gaslight, NY, 1971. Photography by Val Wilmer Photographer/writer Valerie Wilmer was one of the British citizens of her generation who explained a philosphy of life through American musicians and their music. It was no accident that one of her best known books, about avant garde jazz, was entitled As Serious As Your...
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A foxy poster.
The photograph in this poster was in one of the first posts on this blog. The poster was for the stillborn CD release of “The Complete Oblivion…” and even though we never released the box set or printed the poster, seeing it again is going to make me frame one up for my office. (You should too, just follow this link and you’ll get a file that’s print worthy.) Jeez,...
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Get "The Complete Oblivion Records." Free.
Get “The Complete Oblivion Records 1971-1975” for free. by just shifting your mouse to the right hand column of this blog and clicking on the record covers. “Free?! 55 tracks —plus outtakes— worth more than $75 for nothing? Really?! How come?” Well, there are a few reasons, some will make some sense to you, some not: 1. We like our catalog, and some 30...
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Lisa Lenovitz designed the logo.
Detail from Lisa Lenovitz’s logo studies Lisa Lenovitz (now Lisa Eaton) graduated from the prestigious Cooper Union, was a key member of Tibor Kalman’s M & Co. in New York, and leads the design team for chef and restauranteur Mario Batali. She is very talented. Lisa and I went to high school together in Huntington, New York, and she was a girlfriend of musicians in my bands,...
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Jazz ain't nothing but soul.
Empire by Jason Mulcahy During the summers of 1970 and 1971 I was part of the small paid staff that kept the student volunteer WKCR on the air. For reasons lost to time in ‘72 I worked at my parents drug store on Long Island and only traveled into New York to produce my two weekly radio shows. Towards the end of July I started hearing the buzz. A singer called Joe Lee Wilson had come into...
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What's "typesetting?"
OK, so I bought a book at a local shop about graphic design to figure out how to make our Oblivion album covers, particularly our maiden release, Live in New York. But the first thing the book mentioned was typography and I had no idea what it was. It seemed like “typesetting” required machines and technology outside my reach (it hadn’t yet occurred to me that someone with...
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Fred McDowell, 1st edition.
Dick Pennington agreed to become our third partner and finance the first release of our independent record company when Tom played him the Fred McDowell tapes I’d recorded at the Village Gaslight. Tom planned the 9 tracks he wanted on the record (Dick and I sure didn’t know enough about the country blues) and he and I went into a 14 hour marathon editing session to put everything in...
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Sam painted the “Friends” cover, Part 4. Liner...
Part (4 of 4) Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
From the back liner:
About the cover artist:
By Peter Frank
Sam Steinberg is the unofficial artist-in-residence at Columbia University and the Brox’s contribution to the Art Brut quasi-movement of Jean Dubuffet. The 70 year old former ice cream vendor (he still sells candy bars) work prolifically in magic-marker-on-cardboard, with occasional forays into...
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Sam painted the "Friends" cover, Part 3.
Part 3 (of 4) [Part 1, Part 2, Part 4]
As far as I know, Friends was the only use of Sam Steinberg’s paintings in a commercial marketplace. I suppose that was reflective of the way many non-Columbia students reacted to the art.
Almost everyone hated the cover.
Marc, our non-Columbia friends, critics, everyone. No one thought it was appropriate for such a serious album. Distributors...
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Sam painted the "Friends" cover, Part 2.
Part 2 (of 3) [Part 1, Part 3, Part 4] Sam Steinberg at Ferris Booth Hall, 1973 (From the back cover of Friends) Once we’d worked out payment I tried to explain to Sam Steinberg what an album cover is and that I needed a square painting from him, rather than his customary rectangles; he understood when I drew a pencil square on his illustration board. When he came back with the...
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Sam Steinberg painted the "Friends" cover, Part 1.
Part 1 (of 4) [Part 2, Part 3, Part 4] The original Sam Steinberg painting for Friends
“Hey mistah, I got paintings here! Or maybe you want a Hoishey bar.” Anyone who was on the Columbia University campus between 1967 and 1982 would hear Sam Steinberg touting his wares every weekday (thanks to Flo Grant for quoting Craig Bunch’s Folk Art article). Sam was a street peddler...