Maggie Roche, a member of the Roches folksinging group, is 63 years old today. For Christmas 1964, 13-year-old Maggie was given a guitar, and the family (also including a third sister, Suzzy, and a brother, David) learned to play folk songs by watching Laura Weber on public television. As teenagers in the late 60s, Maggie & Terre formed a duo and got their first break when they were signed to Marilyn Lipsius Coffee House Circuit, an agency that booked acts at colleges. In 1971, Maggie boldly introduced herself to her songwriting idol, Paul Simon, which led to the duo becoming his protégés and singing backup vocals on Was a Sunny Day on his second solo album, There Goes Rhymin Simon (1973). They spent two years performing on the college circuit, ending up in San Francisco and falling in with the remnants of the counter culture movement, people whose interests would later be dubbed new age. They eventually hitchhiked to Louisiana with a friend involved with the martial arts, staying at what they have described as a Kung Fu temple in Hammond. Returning to the East Coast, they were signed to a production company by Simon, which in turn led to a contract with Simons label, Columbia Records. Their debut album, Seductive Reasoning (1975), contained one track produced by Simon, If You Empty Out All Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change, and the rest produced by either David Hood and Jimmy Johnson of the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section (which played on the album) or by Paul Samwell-Smith, a former member of the Yardbirds. The albums songs, written by Maggie, chronicled the sisters recent cross-country adventures. The album was positively reviewed, but it did not sell. The sisters abandoned music and went back to Louisiana for a time, working as waitresses while they, as Terre later put it, sought to discover the key to a harmonious existence. They returned to New York City in 1976 and, during the holiday season, sang Christmas carols for fun on street corners along with their younger sister, Suzzy. They had enough fun that they began to rehearse seriously as a trio. By this time, Maggie and Terre were working as bartenders at the famed Greenwich Village club Folk City, and soon the trio, calling themselves the Roches, were on-stage there. With the addition of the more outgoing and overtly comical Suzzy, and with all three sisters writing songs, the Roches were a distinctly different act from Maggie and Terre Roche, but they caught on and in 1979. They released the first of what would be ten albums that tended to follow the pattern of Seductive Reasoning, earning critical kudos but negligible sales. Here the Roches perform “Hallelujah Chorus” in 1982 at the Improv.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 04:57:58 +0000
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