60sgaragebands.com (60s): How did you first get interested in music?
Larry McClurg (LM): My sister taught me to sing at an early age. When I was 17 I decided to be a professional singer. I would close the door to my room and sing along with records and learned to chord the guitar. My mother encouraged me and through her friends I got to sing with Chuck Burch and The Velvetones with Miss Bonnie B, Chuck's wife. The Moose Club, Elk's Club, and Son's of Italy Hall were the sort of venues (I performed at). I never got paid but I got some real experience before live crowds. A more complete story is at http://mysite.verizon.net/jhurray/Larrys%20Page/larry.htm.
60s: Was Glass Menagerie your first band?
(LM): No, we had all been in other bands before. Norris (sax) and John (bass) started Glass Menagerie with Tom Warfield (guitar), who named the band, along with Tony Senator (keyboard and vocals) and Harry Fuller (drums). Harry and Tony went into the service. Jim Straub (drums) and I (vocals) were asked to join. Tom got married right before the tour and didn’t go, so John asked Jack Bond (keyboard) to come along. Norris switched to bass and John switched to lead guitar. We played covers of Young Rascals, Paul Butterfield, Music Machine, Love, Seeds, Jefferson Airplane (and other San Francisco groups), Rolling Stones, Beatles, Cream, Donovan, Yardbirds, Animals (and other British Invasion groups), plus a few originals by Fisher.
60s: Was the final line-up of The Glass Menagerie in essence the same band that became The Mind Garage?
LM: John Fisher and Jim Straub went their separate ways. That left Jack, Norris and myself. We returned to Morgantown. The Menagerie was gone but it wasn't over. We agreed to go on together wherever the road would take us. Each of us had a feeling that nothing could stop us. We had a destiny and were going to make it against all odds. The urge to succeed was so strong that nothing could convince us otherwise. It was almost fanatical. In a few weeks Norris and Jack started looking for replacements and sitting in with other bands. Bands are always forming and breaking up. What happened next is not 100% clear to any of us. Norris says it went something like this: They found a band just starting. Pete was on rhythm guitar, Marla was the singer, Ted Smith was the drummer and John Vaughan was on guitar too. John taught guitar privately. Ted was a music major at the university. One day we all got together. Marla was a good singer, but more along the lines of Judy Collins, or Joan Baez as I remember. I was a rocker. We all practiced together once, maybe twice, and that’s when Norris says we sort of took over their band. I get the image of buccaneers raiding treasure from another ship. I'm not sure how we took over, or if Marla and Pete just dropped out because they didn't like the way the band was going but in another week or two it was John, Ted, myself, Norris and Jack.
60s: Did The Glass Menagerie ever record?
LM: The Menagerie made several reel-to-reel recordings of practice, and also of a few live performances. John Fisher's dad had them for many years but when he passed away no one could find them.
60s: How did The Mind Garage get its name?
(LM): John Fisher got a job with The Shadows of Knight and left the band. Straub took off on his own. Norris, Jack and I returned to Morgantown, West Virginia, where we met John Vaughan (guitar) and Ted Smith (drums). John introduced us to the campus minister Rev Michael Paine, and his wife Tori. It was Tori who named the band.
60s: Did The Mind Garage write many original songs?
(LM): At first we continued playing the popular hits of the San Francisco scene along with songs by The Beatles, Stones and Cream - and now Hendrix. In a few months we were writing our own material and eventually our show was 90% original and 10% covers.
60s: Where did the band typically play?
(LM): There was a lot of competition in a small college town. The Bonnevilles and other pop bands had the jobs with the fraternities and clubs sewed up. Luckily some hip friends of the Paine’s had just opened a new club called Mother Witherspoon’s, and we became regulars there. After that we became popular with the college students and could compete with the soul and pop bands. Then Witherspoon closed. I don’t think any other bands ever played there. If they did I am unaware of it. Mother’s opened when The Garage was formed and closed by coincidence when we left. It’s almost like the club was created especially for us.
60s: What was the West Virginia music scene like during the Glass Menagerie/Mind Garage days?
LM: The music in West Virginia was typical. We were exposed to national acts. West Virginia University in Morgantown was located within twelve hours drive of half the population of the U.S. Big groups came to town like The Kingston Trio, Shirelles, Crystals, Simon and Garfunkel, Association, Youngbloods, Pete Seger, Righteous Brothers, Velvet Underground, and more. Folk music and Top 40 with the British invasion were popular, too. There was one church sponsored coffee house, The Last Resort, where local entertainers could play. Dance music was big. Regional bands like The Royals from Fairmont, or The Esquires from Charleston, played the dance clubs. Pittsburgh bands came to town, too. Fraternities were big employers of bands. The local bands played dance music, and covered pre-Motown and soul music like Wilson Pickett. They had no real original show of their own. The Mind Garage didn't play dance music. We were probably the only local band to play original rock music and psychedelic covers, so we had no competition in that sense. That was one reason why some kids loved us - and why some hated us. We were entertaining the town in a new way. People couldn't dance to our music, so they had to watch and listen. We had a visual show with theatrics, a different kind of hair and clothing.
60s: How popular locally did The Mind Garage become?
(LM): To clarify, we were hated by some as much as others loved us. But we were popular enough that word spread to Pittsburgh 60 miles to the north. A young guy from there, named Cossie came to see us at the Olympia. It was the largest club in town, and had become our regular venue. Cossie wanted to be our manager. We mulled it over and said yes. It was through Cossie’s efforts that we were signed to RCA. Cossie is a smooth talker and was responsible for getting the band signed with RCA. He was very good at convincing people to go along with him.
60s: Did you record on any labels other than RCA?
(LM): We started Morning Glori Music in 1967 and recorded an original, “Asphalt Mother,” and a cover, “Reach Out,” as a 45 RPM. That was a local hit. The recording itself was done at Bell Sound on Long Island. “Reach Out” was actually the A-side but the B-side, “Asphalt Mother,” is the one that became a collector’s item. We also recorded some demos at Glen Campbell Studios in Pittsburgh in 1968. In a nutshell they were lost or forgotten for 37 years. Then in 2005 they reappeared and were turned into an Early Years CD by a friend, Rick Ravenscroft. The Early Years CD is available on our website www.mindgarage.com.
60s: Why do you think “Asphalt Mother” has become a collector’s item?
(LM): Erik Lindgren of Arf Arf Records got a hold of a copy of our 45 and put it on a comp CD in 1999 called a A Lethal Dose of Hard Psych. It started getting some airplay. We didn’t know anything about it until a few years later when Norris was searching the Internet and found it on a few stations’ play lists. Erik actually did us a favor by cleaning up the song beautifully and getting it on the radio. You can’t hear any vinyl noise at all. Arf Arf Records summed it up better than I can: "This ode to heaviness is Mind Garage's premier effort from 1968 and also their finest hour. RCA was never able to capture the magic that this over the top track 'mutha' has. The lyrics tell it all. 'I'll tear your pretty clothes off...I'll make you sweat, I'll make you scream...Come on girl let's get on it.'" But why do I personally think it became a collector's item? I haven't a clue!
60s: Where did you record for RCA?
(LM): The first time was in 1969 in the old RCA Studio A on 25th Street in New York. That’s where Elvis recorded. They told us that in the days before studio echo effects Elvis would stand under the stairway in the hall to get echo on his recordings. The cops had to stand guard to keep the screaming fans away. The studio had been closed a long time when RCA refurbished it in 1969 for The Guess Who. I think we were the only other group to use the studio before it was closed down again. We also recorded in RCA Studio B in Chicago. That’s where the studio musicians recorded bubble gum music for the cartoon character group The Archies. We recorded our second album in RCA’s Nashville Sound Studio on Music Row in December 1969. Chet Atkins was in charge then. He loaned us his Martin guitar. You can hear it on the Again album if you listen closely.
60s: What are recollections of Chet Atkins?
LM: He had the biggest hands I have ever seen. It must have been easy for him to stretch those fingers across the fret board where others had to strain. He was also a nice guy, very professional and easy going; a real person. He didn't have the "I'm a big star" attitude. But in fact he was a big star, and lending Jack his expensive Martin guitar was an incredibly unselfish act from my point of view. He didn't know us, and we probably appeared to him to be a bunch of long hair, raggedy hippies playing that awful music. For all he knew Jack could have scratched the guitar, or damaged it somehow, but he graciously said, “Here, use mine,” when Jack mentioned that our guitar player had not made it to the session, and we didn't have a guitar with us.
60s: Did the fact that The Mind Garage recorded in the same studio as Elvis have any effect on the band later recording a cover of "Jailhouse Rock"?
LM: No effect at all. We didn't know where we were going to record before we got there. But the unexpected notice left us a little short of material. We had never played “Jailhouse Rock” or “Lucille” in concert or even practiced it before. It's just something all of us knew from growing up where we did. The engineers at the Nashville studio were in fact the same engineers who had recorded Elvis, and were going out to record him live in Las Vegas the next week. They kidded us that they were going to tell Elvis that we had done the worst version anybody had ever done with his song. You have probably seen the show or heard the recording of the Elvis show they did in Las Vegas the next week. Elvis was the #1 entertainer in the world then. I was hoping they would keep their word and tell him, and he might take notice of the band out of curiosity. If they did tell him, Elvis never had any response.
60s: Did the band make any TV appearances?
(LM): In April of 1969 we were on ABC series Directions, New Images of Living – The Changing Sounds of Music that turned its attention to music in the church. We assisted in a Mass at St. Mark’s in the Bowery Episcopal Church. We had already played the Mass in that church several times that year. Then in August of 1969 we appeared on NBC’s Huntley Brinkley Report (“Goodnight Chet”, “Goodnight David”). The NBC News crew was on hand to film a lunchtime concert at Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street and Broadway. We played there as part of Trinity’s summer program of diversified entertainment. Woodstock was a week or so later. We were invited to play there but turned it down.
60s: Why did you turn it down?
(LM): We didn’t know it was going to be Woodstock as the world knows it today. After the Trinity concert Cossie told me we could play at a festival in upstate New York. He didn’t have all the details when I asked who was going to play besides us; he just said some big groups. We already had a gig booked in Ohio so we said we would go ahead and play there. Once in Ohio we learned that Woodstock was turning into the biggest rock concert in history. Get in line to kick my butt for possibly the worst career decision on record. Hindsight is so perfect but reality needs glasses.
60s: Would you classify Mind Garage as a Christian Rock band?
(LM): I wouldn’t say that exactly. When the Garage started in 1967 there was no such thing as Christian Rock. At the suggestion of Reverand Paine, we took rock and roll into the church. We played the Mass (also called the Electric Liturgy) locally and in churches on the east coast from Washington to New York the entire year of 1968 up until we stopped playing all together in 1970. And as early as July 1968 The New York paper Village Voice labeled Mind Garage “theo-rock”. I think that was the beginning of the Christian Rock genre.
60s: What are your thoughts on The Electric Prunes' Mass In F Minor album? Were you aware at the time of the LP?
LM: I have been asked that question before. I love the Electric Prunes’ song “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” but I had never heard of the Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor when we wrote the Electric Liturgy. By the time we had recorded the Liturgy in Nashville, December 1969, I knew of the Prunes’ Mass but still had not heard it. To this day I have never heard the album. I’ve read about it lately. It came out in January 1968, was sung in Latin and uses Gregorian Chants. If I remember correctly we really couldn’t have known about in 1967 when an excited Reverend Paine said he had met Reverend Malcolm Boyd, who wrote “Are You Running With Me Jesus.” That’s when he suggested through John to all of us that we should write rock music for the Episcopal High Mass. Some detective work might give the exact date Reverend Paine met Malcolm Boyd, but it’s hard to pinpoint an exact day almost 40 years ago from memory alone. I know we had completed the Liturgy and were playing it live in church almost from the beginning of 1968. If anyone in the band, or Reverend Paine had heard the Prunes’ Mass no one mentioned it to me. My own contributions were original, and I assume the other guy’s contributions are also original. Reverend Paine's reason was to attract the young people who might not otherwise ever visit a church. He explained to us and from the pulpit, the church is too far away from real life, "you shouldn't leave your humanity at the door" when you enter church.
There is another group and a song that will always be linked to the Liturgy though it’s not on the recorded version. The song is “Get Together” by The Youngbloods. John and Norris arrived at the Olympia where we were practicing and said, “Let’s put this in the Mass.” I didn’t know the song. They told me the words and hummed the tune. It became one of our most well liked songs in the Mass, probably because our version was totally original. It worked out better than I had ever heard it. One day in 1969 at the RCA Studio A in New York we were warming up with the song and some executives came in. They listened as we rehearsed and one of them said with surprise, “Hey. We own that song.” Within six months the song was a chart buster. They pushed it. It is not often that the same group on the same label releases a previously released song again several years later and it becomes a smash hit. We never met The Youngbloods, and I doubt if they knew what part The Mind Garage played in the second release of “Get Together”. But that Thanksgiving we were in San Francisco and we heard they had received $200,000 in royalties (probably not true; just a trade magazine story) from RCA. After that they left RCA. I’m guessing they felt they had not been supported enough before. When I told this story to Les Peterson, a friend, he commented, “That’s interesting about The Youngbloods’ song. That explains why it charted two different times. It first charted in 1967 and only went to #62. It was re-released with a different B-side and different number, but the same version in 1969 and that is when it made it big.”
60s: What year and why did the band break up?
(LM): We never actually broke up. There was no announcement, no fight. We sort of dissolved gradually and when the contract from RCA came nobody signed it. Sounds crazy, illogical, I know, to walk away when you have the world on a string, but that’s how it happened. We went to San Francisco to play, but Cossie wasn’t able to send the equipment for some reason. John liked it out there and stayed while the rest of us came back to West Virginia. We were unaware that RCA had scheduled a recording session for us in Nashville while we were in California. We had always been headstrong and nothing ever stopped us, so we went to the studio without John. We recorded the Again album. It is probably the only album ever recorded in Nashville without a lead guitar player. John stayed in California, where he still is today, and we continued to play some important shows without him. We had a gig with Paul Butterfield, fresh from Woodstock, whose songs we had covered years earlier, and then we went on to the Fillmore East, and then played again with Iron Butterfly. But during this we all started drifting apart. Norris or Jack would disappear for weeks, and then I would, or Ted would too. Pretty soon, we were in different towns. Norris says we never broke up; somebody just forgot to call another practice! I think that says it best.
60s: What happened to Cossie?
(LM): I haven’t seen him for 36 years. I was told he came by to pick up the equipment that we abandoned in the house we had in Charleston in 1970. I can almost hear Cossie saying, “What the F? Where are those guys!” I have talked to him three times on the phone, once in 1972, once in 1997, and recently in 2005. He didn’t even mention that later he had become one of the youngest top record executives in the country. In 1971, at 26, he became RCA’s national album promotion manager and became the head of the entire promotion department in 1974 heading a staff of 100. I found out by reading a newspaper clipping someone gave me. He was close friends with John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, and is responsible for bringing David Bowie and Kansas, as well as many more, to RCA. Unfortunately by 1974 Cossie didn’t know where The Garage was, and I felt would never be in another group. Too bad, but that’s life. Success did not go to Cossie’s head. Today he is retired from the music business and lives in Pittsburgh with the same wife and in the same house they had in 1967 when we first met. Talk about roots.
60s: What about today? What keeps you busy?
(LM): Today I work in the floral industry and have since 1982. But I never stopped writing lyrics. Until 2005 I felt The Mind Garage was a dead issue. I couldn’t believe it when I heard rumors of “Asphalt Mother” on the radio. Then I looked on eBay and people were buying and selling Mind Garage records. I was amazed. I had no idea anyone even remembered the group; even I didn’t know where the guys were. I lost track of everyone for 25 years. Norris and I started communicating with each other again every few years about 10 years ago. It’s the same thing with Jack. I had not seen or heard from John since 1970 until Norris gave me his contact info in 2005. I have not seen Ted since 1972 when I somehow ran into him in Detroit. But this year, 2006, we are all in regular contact.
60s: There is currently a book being written about The Mind Garage. Are you able to divulge any more information at this time?
LM: David Niall Wilson has tentatively titled the book Mind Garage - A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Woodstock by David Niall Wilson. It's a biographical novel, or pseudo-historical account, about The Mind Garage’s career and the music scene in Morgantown, West Virginia from 1967 to 1970.
David already has twelve published novels to his name including a Star Trek Voyager Trilogy. Somewhere he found the Mind Garage’s second album and was selling it on eBay. I bid and won. When he was packing it up to ship, he noticed the name on the album and the name of the person he was shipping to were the same. He said he flipped out, and wrote me to ask if I was the indeed the singer. I admitted it and we struck up a correspondence. I asked if he had ever written a biography before or ever wanted to and without hesitation he said, “I will now". David sums it up: "These guys had (and I believe still have) that magic spark that super groups carry around with them. Most of them burned it so brightly it eventually became a cinder, leaving them to replay old songs in tired new versions and play oldies shows – Mind Garage didn’t do that, and never will. I think they have nurtured the flame, and I believe when they get back together (soon) and get some new music recorded, you’ll all agree...I have the feeling I’m meeting them in the middle of something, not after the fact, or near the end. I think the story has a ways to go…" He tells more about how we met and what/why he is writing at http://deep-bluze.livejournal.com/2006/03/06/ and as he predicted, we did get back together and have just finished a new CD with 21st Century Mind Garage sound.
60s: What about the reunion.
(LM): It was originally a 40th reunion Mass or Electric Liturgy. That was the only thing we all agreed on that was worth them coming back to reform the band for. But when the reality sank in, that we were going to play together again, the idea of a festival of garage bands for June 2007 sprang up. We call it Goodstock. You can find it at http://www.goodstock2007.com/goodstock/gsinfo.html. We have an FM and Internet radio show now (www.rocket88.8m.com), and details are also on our website.
60s: How do you best summarize your experiences with The Mind Garage?
(LM): Those were the best days of my life, of course. We didn’t even realize how far reaching our music was back then. Can you believe we were never told that The Mind Garage records were pressed and sold all over the world? We assumed it was only in the USA. Do I even have to tell you we never saw a fraction of the money made from our music? But we are as much a part of rock and roll history in places like England, Germany, France, Greece, Australia, New Zealand to name a few, as we are in the USA. An obscure garage band came out of the coalfields of West Virginia and entertained the world for a few years. We made history and helped establish a new genre of music. Who could ask for anything more?
