BLUE ASH
Around Again
NOT LAME RECORDS

By Kent H. Benjamin

Blue Ash are the great lost band of the '70s -- one of, if not the, best power pop band of all times, playing a passionate '65-'66 inspired version of pop music that predated but exactly foreshadowed a lot of the great punk records in '76-'79. In 1973, Youngstown, Ohio's Blue Ash released an album on Mercury called No More, No Less to great critical acclaim, and sparse record sales. It was, in hindsight, unlike virtually everything else around. Teen-oriented three-minute pop songs, four part harmonies very similar to the Byrds, and a tough guitar/bass/drums sound modeled on The Who. A fantastic lead guitarist in the form of Bill "Cupid" Bartolin, a fine Keith Moon-style drummer in Dave Evans, a melodic McCartney/Ronnie Lane-style bassist in Frank Secich, and lead singer Jim Kendzor, capable of singing a razor line every time. As a live band, they were legendary. Released at the height of prog rock -- the same time as Quadrophenia and Goat's Head Soup, and just before the New York Dolls' debut on Mercury -- NMNL got lost in the shuffle. Rave reviews, few sales, little radio play around the nation. A 2nd album for Playboy Records (Front Page News) in 1976 went largely unheard, and was criticized by original fans for 'selling out' with horns and strings (added, it must be noted, without the band's knowledge). No More, No Less has never been available on CD, but it was for made many critics' lists as the best album of 1973 (it was my #1 of that year).

Around Again is absolutely brilliant. Forty-four splendid, hard-rockin' gems, power pop the way it's meant to be, with tough, loud guitars backing 4-part harmonies over memorable songs. Blue Ash recorded nearly weekly from 1969 until their final demise in 1979, and these tracks were culled from some 219 songs found still in the studios several years back. Included are demo versions of four of the best songs from NMNL. Don't let the word 'demo' frighten you off, however, because Blue Ash was famed as the best live band around, and songs were mostly road-tested before taking them into the studio. The sound quality on this CD is better than that of the original NMNL vinyl album. In fact, a number of tracks on this disc were literally cut live to tape with no overdubs. Compare this side by side with The Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady or the New York Dolls' debut, if you will; Around Again is every bit that good. Compared to the best of the Raspberries or Badfinger, I'd suggest that Blue Ash were perhaps the better band of the three. If you're a fan of timeless pop music, this is an absolutely essential purchase. There hasn't been a vault reissue of lost '70s classics this important since The Great Lost Twilley Album or Sister Lovers. www.blueashmusic.com

We had a chat with Blue Ash founder/songwriter/bassist/backing vocalist Frank Secich at his home in Hermitage, PA (just over the state line from his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio), on July 31, 2004.

Pop Culture Press: How did Blue Ash get signed to Mercury?

Frank Secich: There was this guy named Paul Nelson who did A&R at Mercury, he signed the New York Dolls and a bunch of other people. He used to get piles and piles of tapes in the mail, and we'd sent one to him. And funnily enough, there was this guy from Ohio who was there in his office, and saw our tape, and said 'you've got to check these guys out, Paul.' And he listened to it and loved it, and called us up and signed us. That tape had several of the songs on the new CD, Around Again, including "Abracadabra (Have You Seen Her?)," "Remember A Time," and "It Won't Be Long Now." I asked him once if he actually listened to every one of the tapes that people sent him, and he said "I listen to every single one. I can't be the guy who didn't sign the next Dylan or Beatles or Stones. I won't be the one who passed up a great act." I thought that was so cool. He's up in New York now, working at a video store or something like that, and he ought to be running something like Warner Brothers Records.
PCP: I always wondered how you got signed. Labels weren't signing bands like Blue Ash, they still aren't. I thought it was some kind of fluke.

FS: Nelson listened to the tape, and called us up and wanted to hear some more songs. We were so excited! There were four major labels after us, MGM, Polydor, and something called MetroMedia that I think Merv Griffin owned. We heard from all these labels in the first week after we sent out the Blue Ash demos, which was just nuts! It came down to Polydor or Mercury, and Mercury outbid them, so we went with them. They had acts we liked like Rod Stewart at the time, they were a really big label. It was fun. We never made any more money from them, of course. It doesn't really matter how many copies you sell, whether its thousands or millions. You never see the money because the labels charge you back for everything. They charge you for the four colors on your album, I actually remember seeing that itemized, four colors! It's like the British army in the 1800s, where they charge the soldiers for everything, they bullets, the guns, the uniforms, everything. The only way the soldiers could make money was looking the bodies of dead Frenchmen they'd killed. And that's the way the record companies work, they charge you for everything so they never have to actually pay you any money.

PCP: I understand you guys have reformed recently.

FS: Now the band has two drummers. Our second drummer was my next-door-neighbor, and he used to be the drummer in Dave's band. Now they both share the drum and percussion duties. It's pretty cool.

PCP: Just earlier this year, you could do a Google search and the only thing about Blue Ash that would come up is the chamber of commerce site for the town, now there's quite a lot of info and pictures on your website, www.blueashmusic.com

FS: Since the album came out this week, I've been just inundated with emails and phone calls. It's been just amazing, all the attention we've been getting. It's so much fun!

PCP: The question we all want to know is does Dave Evans still have those red and white candy striped bell bottoms?

FS: Not any more. He used to have a pair of Union Jack pants that I gave him that he wore everywhere, they were his Keith Moon statement. I bought them and they were a little too tight, and he's a little bit smaller than me, so they fit him. I've never seen pictures of the Union Jack pants, though, although I'll bet they'll show up.

PCP: I'm thrilled with how good this new CD sounds. I've had a lot of these songs on cassette for years, and I never had any idea the master reels sounded this good.

FS: I had a tape I got from a bootlegger in Georgia myself. I had to write him a letter, and said, 'look, I don't care if you're bootlegging them or not, you're doing more with them than Mercury is with our album, I was in the band and I just want copies for myself.' And he sent them to me. So when the idea for this album came about, we all went over to Peppermint Studios, and Gary (Rhamy) just had everything. We never retouched or remixed anything, we just transferred them to digital and put them out as they were.

PCP: The only track that had anything wrong with it is the 2nd track, "Day and Night," which has some audible tape damage on it. I would've buried that deeper in the CD myself.

FS: We tried and tried to repair it, but there wasn't much we could do. We used to do that song live a lot, and we figured the old fans would want to hear it. It was the only one we couldn't get a good copy of. The master tape was really damaged, and we wound up taking that song off the bootlegger's tape. Apparently his copy was made years ago before the reel had deteriorated so much, places had just fallen off the tape.

PCP: Living in Memphis, I really wished Blue Ash had played live down there back in the day; did you guys tour much outside the north central part of the country?

FS: We played as far south as Virginia! No, we played as far west as Minnesota, north into Canada, east to New York, and south to Virginia. That's the only area we played in. We played 250-300 dates a year for several years in a row. There were a lot of places to play back then.

PCP: What is the legal status of the 1973 Mercury record, No More, No Less?

FS: The only thing I know is that I called up there and talked to them. Bruce Brodeen (Not Lame) originally wanted to do a reissue of No More, No Less with bonus tracks, but they were so prohibitive about how they wanted to do it, press an unbelievable amount of copies, and have complete artistic control over the project on something they haven't themselves touched in 30 years. They picked up the phono copyright, and they own No More, No Less and that's it after 28 years, and that's why we didn't do it. We'd still like to do it. Apparently they said the costs will come down in the future, and they'll start cutting little labels a break. It's silly for them to sit on it when it could be making them money, even if it's a small amount of money to be made. The only things to have been released from that album were "Abracadabra (Have You Seen Her) which is on Rhino's Poptopia Vol. 1, and "Dusty Old Fairgrounds," which is on the I Shall Be Unreleased, A Tribute to the Songs of Bob Dylan.

PCP: Which is out of print, now....

FS: Those are the only two songs that have ever beeen out on CD, and they did a really good job of remastering them. There are so many Blue Ash recordings out there. We found 219 of them working on this compilation, and there's still more of them out there that we haven't found yet. We recorded at other some places like, in Cleveland, too.

PCP: How did this new CD come about?

FS: Mark Hershberger, who used to write for Audities and stuff like that called me about a year and a half ago, and he was talking about starting his own label, and maybe putting out Blue Ash's No More, No Less, and he didn't know how to go about doing it. We'd been in touch over the years, so he called me and I gave him the information about where to go. I told him about the stuff at Peppermint, too, and actually he was going to do it first. He told Bruce Brodeen at Not Lame about the project, and Bruce said 'why don't you let me do it, I've been trying to get a hold of those guys for years and don't know how to do it. I told Mark that it was his idea first, and he could go ahead and do it. And Mark said he thought we should do it through Bruce. We had this deal at Peppermint where they signed us up for a production deal, and how they paid us was that we recorded for free for two days a month, so there were hundreds of recordings made there over a period of years. So I called Gary up and went over there, and he had this whole box of tapes and we just started listening to it. I just went 'wow!' You know, you don't hear this stuff for 30 years and then you hear it again. There's still 80-100 actual tapes [not songs] that I haven't heard yet.

PCP: After hearing some of those tracks on cassette, I was blown away by how good the master recordings sounded on the CD. It actually sounds better than the Mercury album.

FS: What was really weird was that Mercury, when they pressed records -- if you had any of their vinyl albums at the time, Rod Stewart, BTO, Uriah Heep -- when you listen to the recordings the quality's not really good, they were very thin and tinny sounding. They used cheap vinyl, reprocessed vinyl [some labels melted down old albums, label and all, and used that to make new releases]. Unlike Warner Brothers and Columbia, whose vinyl records sounded good. I always knew that the stuff sounded so much better in the studio than it did when you took the album home. It's not the recording, but the cheapness in the way the vinyl records were made. I always remembered them sounding very good, and when we went in and heard them, it was amazing. Peppermint Studios had two or three really good microphones, the old Telefunken ones with the tubes in them like the Beatles used to use, old German tubing. And he just got great sound out of those. The guy retired recently, he's in his '70s, and Mariah Carey and Jon Bon Jovi just came down here and bought his two microphones for like 20 grand apiece. There's only about 200 of them in the whole world, and they just make your vocals sound so great. The Beatles used them, the Moody Blues.... They're starting to manufacture them again, but they don't sound as good as the ones made in 1959 and 1960.

PCP: Unlike most power pop bands, Blue Ash had a really tough instrumental sound, very similar to what The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Faces, and the Stones sounded like live at the time, not at all like bands played in the '60s, even though you chose to play '60s style 3-minute pop songs using that '70s big rock sound.

FS: Well, you know we were a three piece band with a singer; Jim (Kendzor) didn't play much guitar live, so we all played a lot to make the sound bigger live. So I played a lot of bass, Bill (Bartolin) played a lot of lead guitar, and Dave (Evans) played the Keith Moon-style drums, we did all that to deliberately make the sound 'bigger' live. I've switched to rhythm guitar now, so the sound is actually much better, I think, than it was then, now that we have two guitars live. We have an old friend, Bobby Darden play bass, we have all the original members, plus TWO original drummers. All four original members sing, so we have 4-part harmonies. I thought the hardest thing to get back would be the singing, but a lot of us have quit smoking, so we actually sing better than we used to. I have an extra note in my range now (laughing). We're just nailin' everything, you know?!

PCP: The only thing I've disappointed in is that several of my favorites from the Mercury album aren't on there -- "Wasting My Time," "Let There Be Rock," and "All I Want." And I have to say that the older versions of some of the songs that were on No More, No Less are really, really good!

FS: I think so too. I like "Have You Seen Her," and I actually fought to have that earlier version of "Plain To See" included on the Mercury album back then, I thought it was better than the new recording done for that album, but I was outvoted. "Wasting My Time" and "Let There Be Rock" are two of my favorites, but there's nothing we could do with them, we never made a demo for them, they were written and recorded specifically for NMNL.

PCP: I never saw the 1976 album released on Playboy Records, at least not that I remember. Don't recall knowing it existed. I really love that song "Look At You Now" that's featured on this new CD in it's first take.

FS: It's funny you being from Texas, because that song was just huge on the radio in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma back then. It hit #1 in places like Tyler, and Henderson, and Waco. It was nuts, it was like a regional hit. Playboy gave us an album deal because of that. The album version of that song was done Phil Spector style, really produced with a lot of strings and horns. It was alright, but I preferred the original. You know, I didn't make much of this fact in the liner notes, but a lot of the tracks on Aound Again were recorded live in the studio. "Look at You Now," "There's Only One Thing," "Old-Age Blues," "Just My Luck," "Rosie Brown," all were cut live in the studio with no overdubs at all. Six or seven of those are absolutely live.

PCP: I understand you're working on a new record now?

FS: I'd like to do one. I've written about 20 of the best songs in my life, and a lot of people are talking to us about doing one. Offering free studio time and all. They'll do it on spec and see what happens. I'm in touch with Greg Shaw right now, actually, he's doing a 25th anniversary reissue of Stiv Bator's Disconnected album and I've written the liner notes for it, about 3500 words. Greg was really supportive of me back then, really did a lot for me. I could never pay him back for all that.

PCP: I know a bit of your working with Stiv Bators from reading on your website, but our editor Luke Torn would really like to know more about, he was a fan of that record. You guys played in a band together in high school didn't you?

FS: I met Steve Bator (that's his real name) when I was about 14 or 15 and we were really good friends. I left the Mother Goose Band in 1969 to form Blue Ash with Jim Kendzor, and Steve was my replacement in the Mother Goose Band.

PCP: I know I had some of those post-Dead Boys records that Stiv did, but I never put together that it was you in that band. Maybe it was that I didn't know you without your Blue Ash-era mustache.

FS: A friend of mine up here always teases me, he says 'you've had like two lives, you're a power pop guy and you're punk rock guy. You've had two careers.'

PCP: If you think about it, it's a small step from Blue Ash to working with Stiv, who did a single cover version of "Baby It's Cold Outside," a song by The Choir from the '60s, who later became Raspberries. It's just a faster version of what Raspberries were doing, really.

FS: Absolutely! Jimmy Zero [the guitarist in that band] was a very pop guy.

PCP: And speaking of Raspberries, a lot of your press in 1973-1974 really made of big deal of calling you and Raspberries cross-state rivals, from Youngstown and Cleveland. Was there really a rivalry?

FS: No, we were always friends. Actually, the Eric Carmen book comes out today, and I'm in it. I've got four or five stories in there. We played maybe a half dozen times together with Raspberries. We didn't see each other very much, because both bands were playing all the time. If we weren't actually on the same bill, we didn't see each other. We played in the same places over a 4-state area, but like a week or two apart.

PCP: I love Raspberries, but the difference between Blue Ash and Raspberries to me was that Raspberries were a genius 'copy' band. They could be The Who, they could be The Beatles, they could be Free, they could be the Beach Boys, but they didn't really have a sound of their own, so much. Where Blue Ash to me is more original, I like to compare the sound to The Byrds with the Who's rhythm section.

FS: Yeah, people have made similar comments to me before. The band before Raspberries that I wrote about in Eric Carmen's book was called Cyrus Erie [note: Eric Carmen was in Cyrus Erie, the other three in the Choir, although they'd all played together variously before Raspberries]. Cyrus Erie were incredible! They were better than Raspberries, they were a cover band, they did The Who, Small Faces, and things like that. You could NOT tell the difference, they were that good. They were absolutely amazing. We saw Cyrus Erie up in Cleveland when we were about 16-17, and that's what inspired Jim Kendzor and I to form Blue Ash. We used to go see them every time they played. They'd do "Tin Solder" and you just couldn't believe how good it was. I actually saw them open for The Nazz and they did "Open My Eyes," and just blew them away, they did it better than The Nazz. They had a lot of balls (laughing), when they hit the first riff on that, I was just dying laughing, I couldn't believe they were playing it since they were opening for them.

PCP: I've just seen Ian McLagan's band play free shows here the last two days, he lives in Austin, as did Ronnie Lane.

FS: When I saw the photos we found for this album, I picked the cover photo specifically because it looked like the Small Faces, or the early Who, or the Kinks. We look kinda crazy in that photo, it has a lot of attitude. You ought to tell Ian that he inspired that photograph.

PCP: It's funny that you mention that, because just a few dates ago Mac was on a rant about how much he hated some American bands in the '70s who tried to model themselves on mods, and got it all wrong. They'd have mod clothing, but then have long hair and shag haircuts, which mods didn't have, mod was always a short-haired fashion thing. So I kinda know what Mac would say -- 'Blue Ash's hair's too long, they're wearing the clothes, but the hair's too long. They don't get it.'

FS: That's great (laughing). That's hilarious! But they did inspire us. I was just dying laughing looking at all those old pictures. Sgt. Pepper's coats and that whole thing.

PCP: I was just lamenting earlier this year, over pints with the director of SXSW, that Blue Ash was really the great forgotten band of the '70s. Almost all of your contemporaries, the really great ones anyway, found some level of subsequent fame -- Raspberries, Big Star, The New York Dolls, Badfinger -- all of them are at least cult stars now. But less than a year ago, a Google search for Blue Ash turned up only the town's chamber of commerce site. Blue Ash was just completely forgotten, it seemed. I can't tell you how excited I am to have this new album, the website with all the stories, photos...you know, the album cover and all the outtakes photos from that shoot are the only photos of the band I ever saw back in '73-'74, so there were literally not even photos of the band around.

FS: I know, I know. We're all really excited about it. In fact, the guys are coming over to my house in about an hour and we're rehearsing today. David, our drummer, lives in Florida, and he's coming up Thursday to rehearse. He's the only one who doesn't still live in about a one to one and a half mile radius of each other. We're doing a show in August opening up for Mountain and Vanilla Fudge at a big festival in Youngstown, between 3-5000 people

PCP: Did any of you ever live in Blue Ash, Ohio?

FS: A girl came up to us one time when we were on tour, and showed me her birth certificate. She was born in Blue Ash. That's about 300 miles from here. Actually, how we got our name was this. Jim and I went down to Nashville when we got out of high school, to try to get something together musically down there. We were driving on Interstate 71 to Nashville, and we were trying to think of a name for the band we were going to form. And we couldn't think of anything, we were coming up with all this silly stuff. And so we said that the next sign we see, we're going to call the group that, and that's it. And the next sign we saw was the turnoff to 'Blue Ash.'

PCP: You were one of the first bands to have a logo, too, that's used on both NMNL and Around Again. [We talk about my upcoming book on the Gants, and Frank has a Gants album in his collection, and about Bobbie Gentry, who's also from my hometown, Greenwood, Mississippi.]

FS: Jim and I wrote this song that I mention on the website called "Don't Go To Nashville" about our bad experience down there, and Bobbie Gentry's name is actually mentioned in the lyrics to that song (laughing). "...my baby went to Nashville to be a country singer/she's a dead ringer/for Bobbie Gentry...." That was the lyrics. It was a funny song, we might record that some day. Boy, we're really rambling here. Talk about tangents!!!!

[Thanks to Frank Secich and to Bruce Brodeen.]

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