When I first heard of the Concrete Rubber Band, I was
intrigued. A three-piece early 1970s teenage band--two of the members siblings--from rural Kansas, proclaiming their love for Jesus with a unique mix of rock and classical music? Right up my alley.
Named in allegiance with the acid-rock bands of the day, the
CRB had songs, skills, and some fine equipment, but no outside help and little ability
to effectively reproduce their sound.
The review in the wonderful Acid Archives called the band’s album, Risen Savior, the "only album of its kind in the world.” Its
heartfelt songs, springing from committed young people, are haunting.
The music has grandeur and grunge, sass and peaceful
acceptance, beauty and ugliness. Guitars thrash away, but don’t quite sound
like guitars. Layers of analog synthesizers make holy and unholy sounds. A
brother and sister harmonize, but their vocals whip in and out, sometimes
sounding like frightened skylarks trying to escape a haunted house.
Like many other bands of the time, the trio decided in 1974
to have a local company press up the results of their recordings onto an LP (in
a run of 500) and sell them at gigs. Most copies have long since disappeared,
having been thrown out or lost. Spares are hoarded by collectors, rarely
turning up for sale.
These kids were real, their music unfettered by anyone else, but also without sophisticated methods of recording their music. The album suffers sonically from this, but the limitations of the band’s technology also gives Risen Savior a sound of its own.
Day jobs and relationships meant that CRB’s time came to an
end. Singer/keyboardist Jan Long went to graduate school; she currently serves
as a state representative (!) in Kansas. Drummer Bobby Rhodes moved west. Duncan
Long, guitarist, keyboardist, singer, and songwriter, continues to play
electronic music and spent a period working for ARP Synthesizers, but is best known
as a superb graphic artist.
His music—unknown at the time—could have been lost to the
world it not for music freaks and record collectors. Many performers whose work
had no chance to enter the commercial marketplace were truly talented, and the best examples of what is now called "private-press" music belong square inside the pantheon of popular music.
Risen Savior soon developed a reputation in
the rock underground from collectors of obscure 1960s and 1970s rock, both secular and those devoted to the harder side of the era’s Christian music—which was then called “Jesus Rock.”
Here is Risen Savior's second song, “What Shall We Do?” (It's not the LP's title track, despite the labeling on the video.) it as
much as any on the album, captures the group’s facets: the hard rock drive,
familial harmonies, biting but hopeful lyrics, startling tempo changes, and
billowing, bubbly, overpowering synthesizer fills.
Sometime in the 1990s, a fanatical record collector burned a
copy of the now-sought Risen Savior,
had it pressed onto CDs, and released it (without Long’s permission) on a label
called Radioactive. Soon after, the small Hidden Vision Records label worked
with Long on an expanded, authorized CD issue. The new product included two
extra songs from the album’s original sessions and improved sound—the result of
using the actual master recording tapes rather than a dub from an old album.
Hidden Vision was eventually forced to shut down because of
losses incurred fighting bootleggers such as Radioactive. In 2007, Long worked
on another re-release of the album, this one with the GTR label, and provided twelve previously unreleased extra
songs. (GTR has an excellent catalog, re-releasing artists ranging from American
pop star Gene Pitney and Canadian hard rockers It’s All Meat to experimental British
saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith.)
Having heard them, I wanted to know more about the Concrete Rubber Band. What drove
them? How did it feel to be in the band? How did they write and record and play?
What was their contemporary reception?
So I contacted Duncan Long, who
graciously agreed to answer my questions and share his recollections. I thank him for his music and his time.
Q: What are some of your early musical memories?
My folks were both
pretty good musicians. So I grew up in a house where music was performed. My
mom played the piano and my dad guitar – and a little mandolin, banjo, and
violin.
Q: What got you into playing music?
I was sort of late
into playing music, starting as a young child with piano lessons but dropping
out. Later in junior high I wanted to play piano so my folks got me started on
lessons again. But I think [that] starting at that late a date sort of left me
without some of the innate skills that seem to develop with a child learns at
instrument at an earlier age. In high school I took up the trombone in the
school band and taught myself to play mandolin. Later in college I picked up
the bass guitar and electric guitar. I guess I just was drawn to music.
Q. Did you grow up a Christian? If not, when did you begin your
path?
My whole family was
converted at a revival meeting when I was in seventh grade. That made quite a
change for all of us and we were sort of all at the same level of Christian
maturity for the coming years. A unique experience, I think.
Q. Who were the musicians you admired as a young man? When CRB
began, what music of the time were you attempting to emulate or extend on?
J. S. Bach and
Beethoven were always favorites of mine, and I suspect there’s a lot of
classical music behind all our music, at least to some extent. On the pop side,
the Electric Prunes, 50 Foot Hose, Jefferson Airplane, the Beatles, and Jimi
Hendrix were big influences. But it’s sort of an odd thing because none of us
listened to the radio much or had that many LPs. We just sort of made our own
music to fill the void.
Q. Without sounding disrespectful...how in the world did you
learn about an obscure band like 50 Foot Hose while living in a small Midwestern
town in the early 1970s? How did you buy/consume music in those days?
Although I didn't
listen to much radio, there was a station down in Oklahoma that broadcast all
sorts of weird rock music late in the night. I happened to tune in one night
and heard them…and remembered the unique name. Later when shopping in a record
store in Wichita (probably in 1971) I found their albums being sold at a
discount (a dollar an LP, as I recall). So I bought one and fell in love with
most of the songs.
I think most of our music came from large stores (Willey's was one) that had small book and record departments. Oddly enough I can't remember actually buying most of the records I owned, or where we bought them. Sort of strange how many holes there are in our memories. I suppose had I used drugs, I might have some truly massive gaps :o
I think most of our music came from large stores (Willey's was one) that had small book and record departments. Oddly enough I can't remember actually buying most of the records I owned, or where we bought them. Sort of strange how many holes there are in our memories. I suppose had I used drugs, I might have some truly massive gaps :o
Q. Did you find any difficulty in being a Christian and making
rock music?
Making the rock music
was easy. Getting anyone to listen to it was hard. We were unaware of the
“Jesus Music” movement, being out in the sticks of Kansas. Churches were very
conservative and not too interested in having rock music in their sanctuaries,
so we were sort of the Lone Ranger of bands. Churches just weren’t into guitars
and drums in church the way they are now. So we didn’t really get to perform in
a lot of places other than for a few youth groups and a couple of churches
wanting to have some sort of special service to reach out to their youth. There
was very, very little money in it and we often played for free. It was a labor
of love for the most part.
Q. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, did you listen to rock
music of the day? Christian music? The classics?
By the early 1970s we
were listening to a variety of music, but our style was pretty “set,” so I
don’t think you could see much influence between what we listened to and what
we performed.
Q. Were you or your bandmates involved in the pastimes of the
day (politics, drugs, promiscuity, school protest), or did you live very much a
quiet small-town life?
Our town had a
population of 200-some, so long hair and loud music were already an amazingly rebellious thing in the eyes of our peers.
There was a lot of alcohol abuse in our tiny burg (Alden, Kansas), but the
three of us in our band were pretty straight-laced.
My sister and I went
to Sterling College (Sterling, KS), which was a Presbyterian School, so it was
pretty straight-laced as well, though there was some drug abuse there (the
mid-1960s; many drugs were still legal at that point). But none of us ever got
mixed up with the drug scene or such. I think perhaps our early conversion to
Christianity spared us from a lot of the trips a lot of young folks fell into
during that period.
Q. Some of the lyrics on Risen
Savior seem to address the real-life concerns of teenagers. Did you feel it
was important to do so?
I think it was more of
a need to express our own feelings rather than make some big statement for the
masses. Again, the fact that we were playing for small audiences and not that
often sort of made it less about sending
a message than about expressing a
message.
Q. When you decided to record an album, was there any thought
toward trying somehow to get it on an established label?
I’m not sure we ever
even sent any demo tapes anywhere; I don’t think we did, or at least can’t
remember ever doing so. I was a music major at Sterling College, and at the
Music Educators convention [I] noticed that school bands were getting their own
records pressed by vanity press labels for a very small investment. This of
course struck me as a way to create a record without much of the expense while
keeping full control over our music and our sound. So it just seemed like a
“quick fix” for getting an LP of our music out there.
Sadly, we made the
master tapes before we really hit our stride; had we made them a year or two
later, the sound would have been much more refined and polished. I have always
regretted that our best sound isn’t there for people to hear, but that’s just
how it is.
I am not sure how many
records were pressed, but I’m guessing maybe 500. We each put up the money and
then divided the money from the records. When the band dissolved, we divided
the remaining records between us. I gave most of mine away to the students in
the school where I taught.
Q. With the sounds you created on Risen Savior, did you ever feel that you were really going “far
out”?
Well, it was certainly
perceived as far out by some listeners of the time. But basically we just made
the music the way we wanted to hear it without any eye toward making it weird
for weirdness’ sake.
Q. What was the division of labor between you and your sister
you in terms of playing keyboards?
Jan handled the electric
piano (an RMI – Rocky Mountain Instruments harpsichord/piano) which I’d rewired
so the keys on the lower end were bass-boosted. We then put the lower half of
the keyboard through a bass amp so we had a bass guitar sound even though it
was actually the electric piano. We also had a Vox electric organ that she
played, sometimes one hand on each keyboard. I generally played electric
guitar, especially when we started performing. But as we added synthesizers (an
ARP 2600 and Pro Soloist) to our band, I alternated between them and the guitar.
Sometimes we put the
ProSoloist atop the electric piano and my sister would play both (I think…I’m a
little unsure, as we tried all sorts of combinations when we practiced and
recorded, some we never used in performance). Toward the end we also had a
string machine for string-like sounds but I don’t think we used it on our LP.
Q. Some songs don’t have drums. Was that a proactive decision?
I did a couple of
tracks on my own on the Risen Savior
LP and those would be the ones without drums. I’m not sure exactly why it was
done that way, looking back. I think part of it was that as I picked up more
skills on the synthesizer, I wanted to hear more of an orchestral sound to the
music, and thus needed to lay down lots of instrumental tracks to do that (the
synthesizer being a single-note instrument at that point).
Also, I think Jan had
headed off to Law School, or at least wasn’t available to do the music at that
point, but I might be wrong about that as time has made memories of “what” and “why”
a little hazy.
Anyway, I had to layer
all the sounds on those tracks by overdubbing, recording one track along with
the next and hoping the balance wasn’t all out of whack, and it was basically a
one-man job. At that point I only had a two-track Akai recorder to work with,
so those multiple layers basically resulted in a mono recording with one extra
track on one side for “full stereo” (ha).
Sadly, our PA had so
much hiss that we had to run our microphones into an Ampeg tube amp for the vocals,
which made our vocals pretty muddy by today’s standards.
Q. When you recorded the Risen
Savior album, did you think that it sounded like anything else around at
the time?
We were pretty much
unaware of what else was going on, especially in Christian music where most of
the stuff was Gospel or such. It wasn’t until years later that we even heard of the Jesus Rock movement.
Q. Were you a “gear-head”? Did you find it easy to learn how to
use tape recorders, mikes, mixing boards, amps, effects, synthesizers, etc.?
Yes, I seemed to take
to it like a duck to water. I was constantly tearing into stuff and rewiring
it, building synthesizer modules, and such, some from scratch and others from
kits. I can remember spending hours with a soldering iron and playing around
with the then-new ICs (Integrated Circuits) that allowed frequency doubling,
square-wave generation, and other weird things when the electrical output from
a keyboard or guitar was pumped through them. Probably the neighbors were glad
when I quit experimenting and went to bed
:o)
Mixing boards were a
luxury we couldn’t afford, so we basically just winged it with on-the-fly
adjustments and care in controlling the volume of our instruments as we
performed.
Q. Was there a reason The Concrete Rubber Band “broke up”?
Mostly we just had to
earn a living and each went our separate ways. There had never been even the
suggestion of a dream that we could earn money with our band’s music. So after
finishing college I found some music teaching jobs nearby and we continued the
music in the evenings and spare time.
But when Jan headed to
law school some distance away (at Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas),
things started to get less and less viable for the band. Bob Rhodes (our
drummer) and I tried to perform places, with me on the keyboards sans guitar.
And for a time we had other people try to play the keyboards. But it just
wasn’t the same and when I got a job some distance away, that was the end of
the band. The proverbial “not with a bang but a whimper” death.
Q. Do you think that the Concrete Rubber Band album has any
parallels in rock music?
I’m sure it does, but
not being all that aware of the musical history of the Jesus Rock bands—or even
rock music in general—I really don’t feel like I’m in a position to comment on
that in any meaningful way. We just sort of did our thing with little regard to
what others were doing and that was basically it.
I suppose that many
other groups did the same thing and, being creatures of our society and the pop
music scene, likely the various “sounds” of many bands were quite similar,
especially given that the electric guitar and various pedals were being fielded
to a large market of players. A guy always hopes that some of what he did was
unique, but sometimes that is a relative thing and best decided by unbiased
reviewers and historians.
I suppose that in the
end we were just another of those little garage bands that sprang up in the 60s
and 70s, made some nice music, and then moved on to other things. I wish we’d
had a few more breaks and could have continued creating music a little longer
since we basically quit just when we were hitting our stride, but that’s sort
of how things are in a society where the arts are a bit of an afterthought—especially
with churches—and people need to earn their livings.
But it was a lot of
fun while it lasted and I have no regrets. I do have a lot of good memories
when it comes to making music in our band.
You can buy the CRB album, and learn a lot more about the group and about Duncan,
here: http://duncanlong.com/MP3-music/concrete-rubber-band.html
