Category: Recorded Performances (live and otherwise)
Recordings made by Hunter onstage and in the studio.
10 minutes plus of some of the most intense and original live rock harmonica ever recorded. Live performance with looper by Richard Hunter, 2017. Lee Oskar Natural Minor harmonica into an Audix Fireball V mic into a Digitech iStomp running the Swingshift polyphonic pitch shifter, into a Digitech RP500 running the patch set I used to make my record “The Lucky One”, with a Zoom G3 (in parallel) running a Huntersounds patchset. No overdubs; these sounds were the sounds in the room, recorded live on a Zoom H4. I did a little editing to remove repetitions of the main loops without much of anything else happening. Otherwise this is what I played in the order I played it. Dig.
Working with our friends Nancy and Jim Van der Pyle to put on a community dance party, in February of 1978 I performed at the Woods Hole Community Hall with a band consisting of myself on keys and harmonica, Phil Gentile on guitar and vocals, Bobby Dunlap on electric guitar and vocals, and Harry French on drums and vocals. It was a pretty potent band. Phil Gentile, as you’ll hear on these live recordings of the performance, is such an amazing singer that you really don’t mind much when he starts making up lyrics. He also plays very strong rhythm guitar. Bobby Dunlap rocks like mad on the electric guitar, Harry French does a lot of big drum grooves, and I play keys and harp, both of which I performed on frequently in those days. (Now I mostly just perform on harp, though I’m playing more keys in the studio lately.)
My rig at the time consisted of a Shure 545 pistol-style vocal mic and a Fender Super Reverb with an added transformer to increase power to 45 watts, plus two ElectroVoice SRO 12″ speakers instead of the standard Fender 4×10″ speaker configuration. Contrary to the amp’s name, it had no working reverb. In this particular venue there was more than enough sound bouncing around to make reverb beside the point, but in general I played a pretty bare sound and setup in those days. I used this modified Super Reverb for the Fender Rhodes electric piano as well as the harp. It was a heavy amp, but I never had a problem with the harp being heard with this setup. (It didn’t project quite so well with the electric piano, though.) I used a wooden-cabinet Leslie speaker–a 145 maybe?–for the organ, and the organ itself was a Farfisa Professional that I had owned since 1970, and which was already pretty beat up by that point. (Sounded great, though.)
The original recording medium was chromium dioxide (CRO2) stereo cassette with Dolby B noise reduction, which was about the best you could get in a portable recording device in 1978. I don’t remember how I got the sound into the cassette deck, but I seem to recall that I used a pair of TEAC mics. The sound isn’t ideal, but you can clearly hear what’s being played. Dig.
Hearing this forty years later, I’m struck by how responsive the players in the band were to each other. Lots of bold, spontaneous, wicked grooves in these performances, and it’s remarkable how the entire band locked onto those grooves as they emerged. I’m particularly impressed with the work by Harry French, who I hadn’t played with much before this date, on drums; there’s a lot of push and flow there, lots of arranging, lots of careful grooving with the other instruments, and big big drum hits that fill a lot of space. I’d played with Bobby Dunlap on a few occasions, but I’d never heard him extend his grooves and solos like this before. His guitar work is unlike anyone else’s, combining lead and rhythm playing in one smooth, powerful package.
It Takes a Lot to Laugh
This recording of Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” includes some of Phil’s mind-blowing vocals as well as a lot of hard blowing from the band, including a big harp solo to wrap it all up. In those days musicians stretched out, and a lot of fun it was. Enjoy.
“It Takes a Lot to Laugh…” Gentile, Hunter, Dunlap, and French, recorded live at Woods Hole Community Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, February 18 1978
Come Together
This performance of “Come Together” includes more amazing vocal jams from Phil plus a new, sinister, jazzy groove for the piece, with lotsa piano and VERY hard-rockin’ guitar from Bobby Dunlap.
“Come Together” Gentile, Hunter, Dunlap, and French, recorded live at Woods Hole Community Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, February 18 1978
You Ain’t Goin Nowhere
Another Dylan piece. Oddly, I didn’t play harp on this one, just keys. Wonder why?
“You ain’t Goin Nowhere” Gentile, Hunter, Dunlap, and French, recorded live at Woods Hole Community Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, February 18 1978
Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan, recorded by Richard Hunter
all instruments and vocals by Richard Hunter
I’ve been transferring my cassette tape archives to digital media, and I’m finding stuff I like. It’s amazing to remember that in the 1980s cassette tape (or for stereo masters, VHS tape) was the only practical home recording medium–the only one that was cheap, portable, widely available, offered both stereo and multi-track recording (4 or 8 tracks) and sounded good enough for demos. (In fact, an Ozzy Osbourne record was recorded in its entirety to 4-track cassette tape around then. But you didn’t see 4-track cassette decks in a lot of, or more acccurately any in my experience, pro studios at the time.)
This is one of my first successful home recordings–successful in the sense that it sounds good, has an original sound and approach, and rocks hard. I recorded it in the late 1980s, and the techniques are typical of that era in home recording. Using MIDI to manage electronic drums, bass, and synth, I recorded multiple tracks on a 4-track cassette deck–a Yamaha MT2X–on metal tape running at 2X normal speed with DBX noise reduction, and mastered it to Chrome type running at normal speed with Dolby C noise reduction on a different deck. I used a sync box to record a MIDI sync signal to channel 4 (in order to minimize opportunities for crosstalk from the sync track) for almost every multi-track production I did on that machine.
In those days, it was common to record electronic MIDI instrument tracks right into the final mix if you could manage it in order to keep noise to a minimum. I had a submixer, a Radio Shack 5-in 2-out mixer that was a little noisy, but pretty reliable overall, which I used to combine multiple synths before recording the sounds to tape. I’d generally record vocals and harmonica to 2 of the 4 tracks while syncing live to synth and drumbox, record another track of synth, percussion, etc. to the third channel, then mix down with more synths and drumbox playing live into the mix down to stereo on the Dolby C deck. As you can hear on this recording, it was a little complicated, but it worked. Just keep in mind how nice it is to live in an era when you can have as many tracks as you like and your computer can handle, and the instruments and FX are all in software so you don’t have to fill a room (and empty a bank account) with them.
I played all the instruments on this piece. The synth and bass parts are courtesy of a Casio CZ101, my first and still one of my favorite synthesizers. The auto-wahed electric piano playing arpeggiated power chords is an early analog Roland electric piano module that makes some very potent sounds, even more so when you run it through a Digitech FX25 auto filter, which is what I did here. The harmonicas at this point in time would have been Lee Oskars, and on this piece it’s a standard Richter tuning. I recorded the harmonica with an AKG dynamic vocal mic through a Boss BF2 Flanger into a Digitech Heavy Metal pedal (reverse of the usual order, and it really cuts through with a lot of edge and weight) into an Electro Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man delay, a really wonderful analog delay pedal. The resulting sounds are big and tough and loaded with electronic voodoo vib, and I found it inspiring to play over this track.
Rob Paparozzi told me that he gave a copy of this recording to Bob Dylan; I never heard from Dylan afterward, alas. I was inspired to create this version of the song by Johnny Winter’s utterly amazing version of the song on “Second Winter.” I think this is one of my earliest (artistic–the recording was never released until now) successes in creating a genuine rock harmonica style, and you can hear easily how this recording takes me a step closer to the approach I used on “The Lucky One.” I hope you like it as much as I do.
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