I’ve got more recordings of my granddaughter, Alyssa. But today I’m going to focus on my most successful client, Casey Anderson. Like Einstein, my greatest successes were in the early part of my music producing career, and I never equaled the impact of my earlier work. I have recorded a lot of bands and musicians since those halcyon days with Casey, but never equaled the success of my first experiences. Casey was the most famous and most talented musician I ever recorded. Casey Anderson (born Charles H. Henderson, Chicago) was an Afro-American blues and folk singer, who from 1960 until 1976 recorded ten albums and seven singles on the Elektra, ATCO, Forum Circle, Urania, Superstar, Edge, Amos and Chelsea labels. I met Casey when he was playing at a local club in Longmont in the seventies at the end of his career. I was friends with the son of his bass player and we all became musical entrepreneurs during the seventies. Although Casey began his career as a folk singer, during the time I knew him his musical style was decidedly country with a balladeer focus. I would record Casey’s act and produce cassette tapes that we sold during his shows. I priced the tapes so that, when you added sales tax, the total was exactly $10. I would sell four or five tapes every night when he played, and maybe ten on weekends, so we both made some pretty good money for those days. I didn’t get much sleep back then, but it was worth it to be immersed in the music scene. He was my first client: the first musician or band I recorded that wasn’t me and that I made money. Up until then I had just recorded groups and friends that I played with. I soon upgraded from my trusty Sony TC-200 that I’d used since my first year in the Navy and bought a Teac A2300SD. Using that stereo, quarter-inch reel-to-reel, my trusty Yamaha mixer, and a collection of inexpensive microphones, I started my professional career. I formed “RC Productions” and started building a collection of tapes of Casey’s acts. He was simple to record in those days since it was just him on guitar and banjo and lead vocals with Bill Weinacht, Sr. on bass and rare harmonies. Using four microphones that I mixed live into a stereo image, I then produced cassettes complete with labels printed on my own dot-matrix printer. After several years of success, Casey asked me to do some real studio recording. He had several “albums” planned and I purchased a new Teac A3440 for the job. It was still quarter-inch tape, but it recorded four tracks on fifteen-inch reels and I was moving up in the recording world. Bill, whose day job was a realtor (he sold me my first home), got us a suite of empty offices on the second floor above main street and we built an impromptu recording studio. I created a vocal booth out of mattress pads pinned to the ceiling. We added more musicians and I began expanding my collection of microphones. Today I own nearly one hundred mics ranging from simple Shure SM-57 and SM-58 microphones to top-of-the-line Audio-Technica, Beyer, Nady, Neumann, and even some wonderful cartridge mics made in the old Soviet Union. If you check the picture on the web link with this musical selection, you’ll see Casey in that studio. He was the “producer.” That is, he made the musical decisions and supervised the mix-down and production. I was just the recording engineer. We made two albums, “Casey Anderson: Generals Store” and “Josh White Lovingly Remembered.” Josh was another acquaintance of Casey and Bill, and was more famous than Casey. I never met Josh as he died in the sixties, but the second album was a tribute to his writing. I call these “albums,” but they were only published as cassettes. For this FB post, I’ve chosen one of the selections recorded live in the “Wine Cellar” in Longmont. Casey often did medleys and this is a combination of a couple of Waylon Jennings songs. “Goodhearted Women” was written by Waylon and his buddy Willie Nelson. Casey combines that song with the similar structured “Luckenbach, Texas.” The latter, made famous by Waylon, was written by Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons. So imagine you’re in a smokey bar somewhere on Main Street in Longmont, Colorado. The crowd is noisy and appreciative; they’ve come for a good time and some good music. Casey always provided both. sutros/songs/2377
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 14:21:08 +0000
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