Wheedle’s Groove

TOBY LAING

To my left we have Robert Nesbitt, originally from KYAC and various other institutions.

[applause]

ROBERT NESBITT

Thank you.

TOBY LAING

And to his left we have got Tony Gable, who is a musician from the Seattle scene and he worked around the world as a bassist in their time. And we are lucky to have these guys here today, so…

ROBERT NESBITT

Thank you for having us here.

[applause]

TOBY LAING

I don’t know, because you guys are close to the source, so it is hard to kind of have the same perspective as I might have coming from New Zealand and kind of just putting in that Wheedle’s Groove CD, and wondering, “What is this?” Wondering what it was and just getting to hear this really incredible underground soul music, which I’d never heard before. And I like to go around and try to check out as much rare stuff as I can, and I mean, to hear that stuff - that blew me away. I don’t know how it is for you guys, if it’s something you just take for granted or if it’s something that you see as a special time?

ROBERT NESBITT

I know for me, as a kid growing up, back in western New York, I lived in a neighborhood that was full of music. I come from a family very much entrenched in music, music was all around me. My heritage is based upon music, from gospel to blues to jazz to whatever. So I was always a part of that, that was driven through me, that was always a part of me, always in me. As a kid growing up, I listened to just about everything. My mother listened to all types of music, from classical to gospel to the Dorsey Brothers on radio. I listened to Frank Sinatra, and as a kid who grew up in the ’70s, we watched this movement, the genesis of rock & roll, which came about from gospel, of course, from jazz, to intermingling with pop music as well.

So coming up in the mid-’50s these things were starting to happen, the Chuck Berrys, the James Browns, the Elvis Presleys. So all of this music was part of my early coming up. Being that I lived in New York and I’d spent a lot of time in Detroit, Michigan, I would always travel to Detroit, which is the home of Motown. So, in the late ’50s and early ’60s this was just blowing up, just a big, huge expansion of music, something new that America had never heard of before, to something that was going to pretty much explode internationally.

So that takes you through the late ’60s into the ’70s here. I wasn’t the only person that felt that way. There were artists here in Seattle who had those same types of feelings about music and a desire to be a part of that. What happened with that is that we - I would say most of the artists - felt that they wanted to be a part of that, so what they did was, through their God-given creative talents, created some music. Something that was pleasing to them, something that they felt that people around them wanted to hear.

TOBY LAING

So, for you, Tony, coming up as a musician in Seattle, because you weren’t always from Seattle…

TONY GABLE

No.

TOBY LAING

Where were you are originally from?

TONY GABLE

I’m originally from San Antonio, Texas, but I’m an Air Force brat, so we moved about every four years and I actually kind of grew up in Great Falls, Montana. Not exactly a home for a soul station. So I didn’t really get to hear a lot of soul music other than Motown and stuff like that. Actually, my influences at that time were the British Invasion: The Beatles, Dave Clark Five, that’s all I listened to. The Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, stuff like that.

And then, when we moved back to Texas, my cousins were like [raises hands in shock], “Oh my God! What’s with the bell-bottoms? [audience laughs] The polka dot shirt, the hip-huggers, the granny glasses?” They just warned me, we were going to get in a fight every day, because I went to a half black and half Chicano - you know, Latino school, so they said, “We’re going to get fighting every day, you have got to get out of those clothes and put on some Converse, some sharkskin pants,” and so I totally got immersed into…

ROBERT NESBITT

Sharkskin suits.

TONY GABLE

[laughs] Yeah, into soul music, so kind of from this area totally over to that. And when we moved up here to the Northwest, I decided that I didn’t want to move again every four years – so, I went to Western to be a fine arts teacher. I actually have a degree in graphic design, and by the way, a lot of people met at art school: U2 [in Robert Nesbitt’s direction], you know, Talking Heads.

ROBERT NESBITT

Mick Jagger was an artist.

TONY GABLE

Yeah. And so I met musicians, and, you know, they were cool. You know, as an art major you really were not cool. And I would be in my room painting oil paintings and all the musicians were partying, getting free beer, a lot of great-looking women, free popcorn [audience laughs]. So I said, “Hey, I want to be in the band.”

They said, “You don’t play an instrument.”

“Oh.”

Then I saw the movie Woodstock and saw Santana and that just blew me away. I was like, “I don’t know what this guys are beating, but I think they are called congas or something, bongos, I’m just going to teach myself how to play,” because again, there is not a heavy Latino community in Bellingham. So I just started listening to the records. My mother had Mongo - besides Bobby “Blue” Bland, she also had Mongo Santamaría. So I listened to that, you know, James Brown had some congas, a lot of Motown - actually, as I started to playing, I started noticing percussion more. So if you listen to a lot of the old Motown hits, the guy, his name was Eddie “Bongo” Brown, he would be playing bongos, and they had great percussionists, tambourines, all kind of stuff.

So I really got into it, talked myself into the band by doing the posters and designing the outfits, and they let me in the band, and then we moved to Seattle in ’71, and about that time, that’s when I met Bobby, Robert Nesbitt, he was a DJ at KYAC. We started up our friendship, and we have just been hanging ever since. The times changes, the music changes, but the friendship has been there the whole time.

ROBERT NESBITT

Say, I wanted to be a musician, coming up, I was in junior high school. In high school I played bass, but I played it so poorly. It kind of reminds me of a lot of managers of baseball. Baseball managers usually were not great, they weren’t great position players but they knew the game very well. I was not a good musician, but I enjoyed music so much, I said, “What is the best thing for me to do if I enjoy music so much? Hey! You know what I’ll do? I play records on the radio!”

So I was 16 years old, living in Buffalo in New York, and I got my first job on radio. Then, in ’72 I moved to Seattle. [to Tony Gable] I think I met you a week after I got here. Tony was playing a gig at this place called The Norselander, remember that gig?

TONY GABLE

Oh, God.

ROBERT NESBITT

That was back thirty-something years ago, but we have been friends ever since.

TONY GABLE

But when we moved here, obviously [Jimi] Hendrix was a big influence, and the first name of our band was called Funk Experience. And my first gig was with a group called… We opened for a group called the Chambers Brothers, I don’t know if you guys are probably too young to remember “Time Has Come Today?” So that was my first gig, and I was like, “Wow, this is cool.” And when you start playing you think, “We’re going to have a hit record next year, we’re going to be huge, touring all over the world.”

ROBERT NESBITT

Of course.

TONY GABLE

That didn’t happen for another 15 years, another 20 years [everybody chuckles]. But luckily my mum was always supportiv. When I told her that I was going to quit college to go play music and bongos, she really wasn’t too keen on that. “But as long as you don’t move home and don’t go to jail, then it’s cool with me.”

ROBERT NESBITT

See, because you are not always going to be 20. That’s it. You are not figured about being 30 or 25 or having mortgages or anything, you just want to play music.

TONY GABLE

Yeah, and we just played at that time in Seattle. I was in a group called Cold, Bold & Together before we moved here. A lot of groups had horns, so it would be more like Tower Of Power, not really a lot of background singers, it was a horn group with a lead singer - whereas we were kind of the opposite. We had a very small rhythm section and, at first, no keyboards, but we sang a lot - kind of like Bloodstone, I don’t know if anybody remembers that group.

So we sang a lot, and that was what made us stand out from some of the other bands, of course we used to do the Funky Chicken and the Penguin and danced when we played and…

TOBY LAING

This is something that I kind of try to get a handle on, but it seems like there were a lot of bands in Seattle at that time playing party music, soulful party music.

TONY GABLE

Well, a lot of them are on Wheedle’s Groove.

ROBERT NESBITT

I would say at one time there were probably 20 working bands, bands that worked every week. And there were venues where all of these bands could find work from Canada, from Vancouver down to Tacoma. So there was never a lack of places for bands to play, plus the radio station was so key in supporting those bands. Every band had a record, everybody had a record and it was incumbent upon us, and me specifically as the program director and the music director of that radio station, to support those bands.

And also this music was really good music. It just blew us away that this music was actually coming out of Seattle. Everything else on our playlist was coming from Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, those different sounds we were so immersed in that we didn’t realise that we were developing a Seattle sound. There was a Seattle sound.

TOBY LAING

So everybody at the radio station was feeling the same way?

ROBERT NESBITT

Absolutely.

TOBY LAING

It was like something you had to get behind?

ROBERT NESBITT

Absolutely.

TONY GABLE

Well, we kept thinking that, “OK, San Francisco was exploding, so you keep going up north - well, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, we were next.” And a lot of that did happen later with the garage, grunge and rock that did happen, but in that soul era there was just so much music and so many different kind of bands. Pure vocalists, horn bands, funk bands, and there were a lot of rock groups playing around too. We kind of were on different sides of the town. There was not necessarily a set of railroad tracks, but we kind of played certain clubs and then they played different kind of clubs, and then occasionally we came together and played.

There was a group called Ballin’ Jack that was on Columbia, so… Hendrix was huge, of course, and a lot of groups from California like War, for example, would come up here, a lot of people came up here to gig in Portland and in Seattle. A lot of those groups are represented on Wheedle’s Groove. There was a group called Acapulco Gold. I mean, just tons of great bands. But we did play every day of the week. I mean, we didn’t make any money, but we did play a lot.

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah.

TOBY LAING

Do you mind if I just play a song off Wheedle’s Groove, maybe a Cold, Bold & Together track, just to give the people an idea of the sound we’re talking about?

TONY GABLE

Too bad that they can’t see the photo because I designed the outfit, so we had this huge bell-bottoms. I mean, two people could stand there under my bell-bottoms.

ROBERT NESBITT

They were spacesuits, actually big spacesuits.

TONY GABLE

[points towards CD decks] Oh, this is going to be modern! Oh, you got the Wheedle’s Groove CD.

TOBY LAING

So, just imagine those spacesuits at this point.

TONY GABLE

Big ’fros, we used to…

(music: Cold, Bold & Together - “(Stop) Losing Your Chances”)

TONY GABLE

A few comments. If you know about producing, you don’t want a band to produce a song. Because we would be mixing, “I can’t hear the bass enough.” Bass is up. “I don’t hear my congas.” Congas were up. “I don’t hear my voice.” So nothing really changes, the mix is just all in your face [audience laughs].

So after these recordings, then we started getting producers to help us. Yeah, pretty funny. And, by the way, that’s one of the first recordings that Kenny Gorelick is on, you just know him as Kenny G.

TOBY LAING

He was ripping it up there, I heard that, it sounded great. So you had horns at this point, that’s something you added to the band?

TONY GABLE

Well, we had to add horns because we were singers, but most of the bands in Seattle had horns, so we said, “OK, let’s get some horns.” And then somebody brought this kid from Franklin, Kenny, and I said, “Ah, I don’t want him in the band, he’s kind of geeky.” You know, we just called him the poodle. Instead of an afro, he had all this big curly hair.

Plus most of the bands we were kind of looking up like to, like Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool & The Gang, all these groups we got to open for later, so that was nice. Ohio Players - they didn’t have any black people in them, I mean any white people in them. So it was like, “Wait a minute.” But then we started to think about what War does, and so does Sly & The Family Stone, so then we kind of changed our way of thinking. You know, this is early ’70s, so we were right at the height of black power, and so we were like, “No, I don’t want to integrate.”

So actually through music is where I learned a lot of different things about diversity. Like, the first time we went over to our keyboard player, Philip Woo, who is actually the keyboard player in Maze - I don’t know if you have ever heard of Frankie Beverly and Maze – I saw this hundred-pound bag of rice, and I was like, “You guys do need rice!” I didn’t know - and they didn’t know what I was talking about with chitlins and greens, you know? And I didn’t know anything about yiddish things or, you know…

So it was great for all the groups in Seattle, just getting to know each other in the band and meeting other band members. It was a very healthy and strong competition. Because one night, on Tuesday you’d go to see a band like Family Affair, what are they doing? You check them out and then you go home and practice. And then you break out your new stuff. And at first, most of the groups in Seattle were playing covers. So, as soon as Earth, Wind & Fire’s album came out (snaps), you got it, and learned it, and be the first band on the scene that played the Earth, Wind & Fire song, or the Dramatics, or Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, who we actually got to open for. We had a lot of opportunities, and a lot of that has to do with Robert and the radio station, and promoters thinking, “Hey, we have some pretty good groups here, so we’re going to allow them to open,” and so…

ROBERT NESBITT

It was just an opportunity for the local artists to play, to have your name on the billboard with a major act. Tony’s band, Cold, Bold & Together, played with just about everybody, every time somebody would come. Who had you guys played with? You played with Kool & The Gang, you played with Earth, Wind & Fire, played with Bobby Womack.

TONY GABLE

What’s with the Funky Chicken, what’s his name?

ROBERT NESBITT

Rufus Thomas.

TONY GABLE

We had backed up Rufus Thomas.

ROBERT NESBITT

And back in the ’70s Seattle was the type of town, as I mentioned before, where there were so many different venues, and it was a seven-night-a-week town. Right now, Seattle is a one-night-every-two-weeks town, where you really have to look for something to happen here. And there used to be a time when I know working at the radio station, somebody would be at the Trojan… Isaac Hayes would be at the Trojan Horse, Donny Hathaway would be playing at the Paramount, B.B. King would be at the Heritage House, and we had to juggle who we were going to interview that day. Because conceivably we would have - and I remember, this happened - one time, B.B. King was going to come at three o’clock in the afternoon to do an interview, but at the same time we had Isaac Hayes scheduled. You know, that was just a great problem to have, but you don’t have that in Seattle.

But getting back to what’s happening about the quote-unquote [air quotes] local bands. They had an opportunity to show their talents on a major stage. When the artist that they opened for went away, they always talked about these guys, and plus it just made me feel good.

TONY GABLE

And you learned from actually playing with the people you looked up to.

ROBERT NESBITT

Right.

TONY GABLE

That they were also having difficulties. The time we played with Kool & The Gang. Even though they had hit records, we were playing at a small club. Seven nights we opened for them and they really weren’t doing that well. We were like, “Wait a minute. We’re trying to get to where you are, and you’re saying it’s kind of tough?”

ROBERT NESBITT

Everybody thought just because you had a record deal you had money. That wasn’t the case.

TONY GABLE

Yeah, it took crossing over in getting on the pop charts for a lot of these major artists to start making some dough. I remember when Earth, Wind & Fire was pushing their own equipment, just like we were. We were like, “Where’s your roadies?”

But again, we kind of stopped playing covers all the time because everybody was starting to find their own voice, their own perspective. So groups like Cooking Bag and Family Affair, Black And White Affair, Broham, everybody started to say, “OK, it’s great we’re playing all these other people’s songs, but are they going to remember us?”

So everybody started doing originals. And sometimes we just played jazz. One time we got fired. We were supposed to be playing a Bee Gees song. That’s when I had a first tenor [points to throat] and falsetto, but…

ROBERT NESBITT

“Lonely days, lonely nights, where would I be without my woman?” [Tony Gable chuckles]

TONY GABLE

So, the club owner wanted us to play a Bee Gees song, because that was the thing. This is just in the transition from original heavy R&B music to disco, which we were like, “Ah man, do we have to…? You know, the Bee Gees are cool, but do we have to play them? [sings] ‘Hi, hi, hi, hi, staying alive,’ you know? Better than that, though [audience chuckles].” And so the bass player started playing “Red Clay” off CTI [sings the bassline].

ROBERT NESBITT

Freddie Hubbard.

TONY GABLE

And we just broke into a jazz song. We got fired. They just said, “No, no, only dance music, only disco.” Well, so we - I can’t speak for everybody, but most of the groups just started doing their own things and making their own records, and sold them out of the back of their car. And these guys [points at Robert Nesbitt] would help us by playing our music on the radio, and we’d be driving down the street and that was such a cool feeling to hear your song on the radio. “Hey, this is Robert Nesbitt; hey, this is Cold, Bold & Together.”

And then people didn’t believe us. We used to drive an old Buick Deuce and a Quarter, and we’d roll down the windows: “That’s us! That’s us! That’s us!” “Oh yeah, right, you guys with the big hats and the ‘fros?” We never combed our hair, by the way. When we’d take off our hats, we’d have these big ’fros sticking out here [everybody laughs].

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh, God. Oh, man.

TONY GABLE

That’s another story. But a lot of competition, but a lot of support, and then when Robert got into owning a night club Downtown… Downtown was a cool thing. “Downtown, we’re playing Downtown.” The Golden Crown. There were a lot of other opportunities and not only just for the local and regional acts, but also these guys were bringing everybody in.

ROBERT NESBITT

One of the other things when you are talking about these bands, especially some of the bands that are on the Wheedle’s Groove record. When one band had a record, immediately the other bands came out with a record. So the pressure and the onus were on us at the radio station to play that record, and play that record a lot. Robbie Hill is one of the great stories. Robbie Hill of Family Affair – you guys are going to be around this Friday to see him perform – Robbie Hill had a… it was like The Sopranos, he had his own little cartel quarter, he had people on the phone calling the radio station.

Because the way that we judged a good record was going to be number one was by sales and requests. So sales were never going to be - we never saw sales zoom, you know, we never saw them in the triple digits, a hundred records coming out of the store - but we usually used requests. Robbie Hill would have his mother, his aunt, his cousin, his everybody calling three and four times an hour, using different disguises of their voice just to get the request in, so we can tabulate the request and bring the record to number one. But there was always this competition between the artists. The good part for me was that we - well, my partners and I, we had a nightclub. So we were playing the records on the radio, and also we could book the bands in the club. So it worked very well for us, you know [audience chuckles]? And also, we paid the bands quite well.

TONY GABLE

Yeah, yeah, we did. Except for all those stairs. Moving a B3, you guys know what a B3 is?

[audience chuckles]

ROBERT NESBITT

It is a big difference. Nowadays, what do you need to perform? Nothing, you just put everything in a bag.

TONY GABLE

You just bring in a controller and a G4 PowerBook, and you can just plug in, and get all your pads and…

ROBERT NESBITT

But all these bands were, every band was different.

TONY GABLE

Different outfits, everybody had their own.

ROBERT NESBITT

Different type of music, different outfits.

TOBY LAING

And this was like a friendly rivalry?

ROBERT NESBITT

It was, everybody was supported…

TOBY LAING

It seems like.

ROBERT NESBITT

Everybody enjoyed each other.

TONY GABLE

But it was competition.

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah, it was.

TONY GABLE

You wanted to be the best, you wanted to be number one. But you’d go see another band and say, “Wow, did you hear that arrangement?”

ROBERT NESBITT

And you would hear the same story, not only in Seattle, but you would hear the same story with bands in Atlanta, New York, Chicago. That’s how it was.

TONY GABLE

There was a group from Portland.

ROBERT NESBITT

But we were very myopic about it, because we were right here in Seattle and that was the only thing we cared about. We look back at it now, we say that, “Boy, wouldn’t it have been great if we would have gotten our records distributed, some of these records distributed around the country?” That wasn’t to be back in those days.

TONY GABLE

The logical thinking was, if you were so great, and you had such great original tunes, you would be (air quotes) discovered. So we kept waiting for, you know, Quincy Jones to be sitting there going to a club: [whispers] “Quincy Jones is here! OK, fork up the ’fro, you know, shine your shoes and stuff.” We just thought that was the way it was going to happen. Some of the realities that you had to leave in order to get [discovered] - well, you know, Hendrix left, went to England. But you had to go to LA, or New York or meet somebody. A couple of groups did finally meet Quincy Jones and had some opportunities as well. But we just kept making records. I think we made four singles, and we just kept recording and kept recording again.

And then later, as you get a little bit older, then you realise, we gotta get an agent, or we gotta get someone that will connect us to some… There was a group that did take that advice, and they moved to Los Angeles, the group called Pleasure, and they did move from Portland down there, and then they got a big, a real record deal, with a whole album – because most of our records were 45s. Did anyone ever make an album? I don’t think so. Everybody just had 45s, we had enough material for an album [Robert Nesbitt holds up an record sleeve]. Oh, there it is.

ROBERT NESBITT

This is Pleasure. Look at that artwork, wow.

[audience chuckles]

TOBY LAING

The thing about these 45s is I've heard that lately they've been changing hands for large sums of money and they have become very rare items. You know, collectors are after them.

ROBERT NESBITT & TONY GABLE

Pat, pat…

TOBY LAING

I also heard a Cold, Bold & Together 7" was going for a couple of thousand dollars or something. I heard that, I read that.

TONY GABLE

I got a few left.

TOBY LAING

Hey, wow, you know?

[laughter]

TONY GABLE

If I knew that they were selling for that - I will have to dig some out. I didn’t know that. When my kids hear me singing, they are like, “Dad, is that you?” And they see me, I was like major less, this was in the starving artist days. So when they look at these photos, they are like, “Who’s that? Who is this guy who is looking like, you know, Kareem?” You know, because I was the tallest person, and skinny with these big ‘fros. We sang high. Well, 20, 30 years later, you hear my voice now, it’s… and I don’t even smoke cigarettes.

ROBERT NESBITT

What about [turns to interviewer], back to that question, maybe they might be interested in the recording process, how did that happen? How did you guys get together, where did you go?

TONY GABLE

Well, we went to Kaye-Smith. I mean, the first time we recorded, they were building a recording studio, and we were at a college and they said, “Hey, do you guys want to test this out?” No walls, no baffles, nothing. The cords were just running across, we tripped over the cords. We tracked it, they gave us a tape, we turned it into a 45. So, if you had any…

ROBERT NESBITT

Was it four-track?

TONY GABLE

That was “Dedication (To Our Wonderful, Beautiful Black Sisters),” a single that we…

ROBERT NESBITT

You recorded it four-track or…

TONY GABLE

I think it was, like, one-and-a-half-track, the way this studio was.

ROBERT NESBITT

How long did it take for you to record that?

Tony Gable

Well there were no overdubs. That's the other thing. When we were recording back in the day, you just went in and played, because you'd been playing these songs so much, you just went into the studio and they tracked it, and then maybe overdub later, maybe a solo, or something like that, or some vocals. No everything was live, and the group sounded like they did in person because that was it, the real deal. Then synthesizers started coming in after the B3 and the Rhodes, I mean the hallmark or the standard was a Rhodes, or Wurlitzer, and a B3, and giant amps. That's what it was.

TOBY LAING

So, something I think that everyone can take from this is supporting your community, actually getting and helping your fellow musicians. I think around the world it seems a lot of scenes seem to be quite separated and try to just push their own music and look after themselves, but it seems like this is an example of the radio station helping out the scene, the individual bands helping out the scene, and the people had an identity from being in these bands, you know? It seems like these bands did a lot together, not just playing music. They were together a lot travelling, working on the road, and in some cases even living in the same house, I don’t know if that’s true.

TONY GABLE

Oh yeah, yeah, many of us had band houses, they were notorious. I think perhaps the Seattle police visited a few, uh [smiles], in those days. In college it was the kegger days, but in band days it was a little bit different, but everybody – well, I keep saying everybody, but I mean CBT, we just call us CBT – we didn’t have day gigs, we were musicians, that was it. And many times in our experience, the lights were turned off, we didn’t pay the light bill, we’d play all week for two hundred dollars. Not two hundred dollars each, two hundred dollars total.

And we used to have this little thing where, when we got paid, everybody wanted to go to the store for shopping. That was the only way you got what you wanted to eat [smiles]. Because we didn’t split up the money, it was a real commune. If the bass player needed an amp, we just took the money and bought the bass player an amp. There wasn’t, like, now the guitar player has 50 guitars. It was very communal and that’s the way we just stuck together. And people kind of aligned us with, well, “Were you guys kind of like a gang?” No, we were a band. But you protected your crew, and everybody’s band had their own crew and stuff. We did a lot of things for the community.

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah.

TONY GABLE

We played the Black Community Festival, got to meet Melvin Van Peebles.

ROBERT NESBITT

And another thing is that a lot of these bands were excluded from the (air quotes) mainstream, that was one of the things too. Because of where we were socially at that time, that era, you weren’t going to get invited by the promoter who worked with KJR to come and play a gig over in West Seattle, that was not going to be happen.

So if you were a soul band, you were pretty much going to play a soul club, you would play soul festivals, and that was it, then. Forget about it. No matter how great a song Cold, Bold & Together puts out - and Cold, Bold & Together had a song, which is not on Wheedle’s Groove, which is called “Our Love Song Turned Sad” - a great song, it’s a ballad. I listen to it every day, it is a great song. That record never made it to quote-unquote – [to the audience] excuse me, no more air quotes, folks, I promise, no more, OK? [audience chuckles] – it never made it to pop radio, Top 40 radio. But it was a big record here in Seattle. It actually got played down in Portland, and I think that it sold well up in Canada. But everything was fractionalised, everything was just broken down to just that one area, it really didn’t get the support from the pop audience.

TONY GABLE

And it was rare to have that opportunity to play in different clubs. I remember one time, going to a club way in the North End, and they thought we were moving their equipment. So they kept saying, “When is the band going to get here?”

“We don’t have roadies, what are you talking about? We are the band.”

“There must be a mistake. You guys can’t play here.”

ROBERT NESBITT

I mean, that’s how it was then.

TONY GABLE

I said, “What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry, but we just… You can’t play.” I said, “Oh, OK, let me get this right. You didn’t see the promo picture, did you?”

“No. Ah, someone did book this.” I said, “OK, alright. If you don’t want us to play, give us the check, and we’ll put our equipment back in the van and go someplace else.” And that’s what happened. They would not let us play. And this used to happen sometimes, some of the booking agents would just send you to gigs. We would play a gig in Aberdeen, which is kind of like being in the middle of Kansas. So here is this all-black band playing Kool & The Gang, Parliament, [deep voice] “Tear The Roof Off The Sucker.” And it was like, “We’re not getting out of here, we’re gonna get killed!” It was just like The Blues Brothers, there was that fence up and stuff.

ROBERT NESBITT

[chuckles] Chicken wire.

TONY GABLE

It was like, whoa. And so fortunately, TC and Jamar, they were twin brothers, played guitar and bass, they were very musical. So we basically just played this one country riff for two hours, and everybody just took solos about 50 times around. (shouts) “How y’all doing?” You know, we just kind of changed the semantics a little bit. Forget about getting paid, we just wanted to be able to get back in the van and get out of there, but actually we had a great time. You know, the people liked us, we had a good time, we threw in a couple of soul songs there that we thought they had heard of before, and it turned out okay.

ROBERT NESBITT

But then there are other bands, if you look at some of the other bands on Wheedle’s Groove. There were clubs, like the Golden Crown, which was our club, that played Cold, Bold & Together, Robbie Hill’s Family Affair, Black And White Affair, Hot Ice, they would play there, but then there were guys like Overton Berry.

TONY GABLE

Right.

ROBERT NESBITT

He would not play in the Golden Crown, he would play more, what would you call it… (turns to Tony Gable)

TONY GABLE

Well, he is more sophisticated, more of a jazz trio.

ROBERT NESBITT

Right, more of a trio, black tie type of affair, so he played the Trojan Horse.

TONY GABLE

Right, right.

ROBERT NESBITT

The different types of clubs at that time in Seattle were: The Golden Crown, Soul Street, the Gallery, New Chinatown, District Tavern were your funk clubs. Heritage House also played people like Arthur Prysock and those guys. But the more upscale clubs, such as the Trojan Horse and the Double Tree, [asks Tony Gable] was it called?

TONY GABLE

Double Tree.

ROBERT NESBITT

They played some of the more upscale type of artists, like Overton Berry.

TONY GABLE

In terms of rock groups who were playing at that time, during the same period, a group with two sisters were doing pretty well, they were coming up the ranks. They were called Heart. And so there was a lot of other music going on as well and it was getting some great airplay. They were getting some good deals and stopped for whatever reason. I don’t know, if it’s just that people didn’t know about the soul scene in Seattle. Because when you think about Seattle, if I’m in other parts of the country and say, “I live in Washington,” they automatically think I’m talking about DC. “No, no, the other one,” you know, with the log cabins and Lois & Clark, remember that? But that’s just the way it was. It’s just unfortunate that a lot of people did not get to participate outside of some of the audiences in our community.

Toby Laing

Did you actually experience it as it changed? As the scene changed from this period and maybe DJs started to maybe command all the salaries. What actually happened there with the thing with the live music and how ...

Tony Gable

I'll say this, our keyboard player, his son is a DJ. He's gigging more than we are. It's amazing. I don't know about the DJ scene.

Toby Laing

How did it go down with the scene, where bands are working seven days a week. I mean, over time that starts to change.

Robert Nesbitt

Yeah, that happened with us at our club. You're talking about from the '70s where there were bands playing all the time, to the time where pretty much the ...

Tony Gable

Disco.

Robert Nesbitt

Disco took over.

Tony Gable

Killed us.

Robert Nesbitt

Yeah it was just marketing. It was just the market. I know our club, the Golden Crown, which was right across the street over on Fourth Ave. We saw a way to make money by playing recorded music, which broke my heart, and of course it broke the heart of the bands that we played every week.

Tony Gable

Yes it did.

Robert Nesbitt

So I said, OK, we're going to pay this band $900 a week, or we're going to pay a DJ, this was back in '77, we're going to pay him $200 a night. It was just, mathematics.

Tony Gable

The club owners would also make a comment, “Well, we don't have to deal with your attitudes, the zig zag paper, or any of that stuff. All we have to do is get a DJ, we don't have to worry about load-ins, feeding you, fights, groupies, none of that stuff.” It was a huge change, and musicians either started doing something else, maybe some people actually get day jobs, or moved in different areas of music. I wanted to be more involved in jazz, so people became producers, writers, other things. I don't know what it is like on the scene as far as racism or prejudice, but I'm sure it has improved. Seattle is a very diverse place but racism in the northwest is not like it used to be where it's definitely in your face. If a guy is riding on a white horse, he's got a cone on his head and a sheet, clearly he doesn't like you. Whereas here, in certain areas, not only here in the northwest but, sometimes prejudice is hidden. So it's, “Hi, how ya doin’, great to see ya,” but [cuts throat]

Robert Nesbitt

Right now it's about money.

Tony Gable

It's a little different. I would prefer knowing exactly where everybody stands rather than having to guess.

TOBY LAING

So I guess, Robert, from your point of view as a club owner, you’ve got to see the way society goes through different cycles, what happens on the street and what happens at night with club culture and whatnot. And you must have seen some changes and some developments in your time.

ROBERT NESBITT

Well, I did. Like I said, I mean, it was almost like it was overnight. This is the late mid-’70s scene from ’75 until ’78. We had our club, we ran our club from ’75 until ’84. The reason why we were no longer there is that they tore it down to build a mall - so we were to stay. I guess it was everything, it was the advent of disco music, it was Saturday Night Fever, it was social, it was economical, it was everything.

Everybody just wanted to change, it was all about the bright lights. We refurbished our club, we put in nice lights and everything and had a great stage, and everybody liked it, and we just had to keep things fresh. It broke our heart, that we couldn’t have the live music because at that club we played everybody from Teddy Pendergrass to Les McCann to Cold, Bold & Together, to Billy Preston. Whoever came through Seattle played that club. But next thing you know people in Vancouver were talking about, “Let’s go down to the Golden Crown, because that’s the jamming disco.” And that was like, man, we were saving a lot of money.

TONY GABLE

Canada was typically always open to everything. I mean, a lot of the soul groups used to go up to Canada, you didn’t have the same types of attitudes, so you could play different places - down in Gastown, in Calgary, you could play other places and stuff. I just wanted to mention, recently one of the best male R&B singers passed away, Sam Smith. This guy was… As a solo singer, there was no one bigger than him. And hopefully, when Wheedle’s Groove 2 comes out, they can get some tracks with him. I mean, he was like a combination of Luther Vandross, Al Green, just incredible. So it was a lot of - I’m saying “was”, still is a tremendous amount of talent. Now, a lot of it is DJs and rap and hip-hop, but Seattle still has a great scene. It’s just that R&B era kind of passed. But again, people went into other things. We kind of moved into fusion - as Miles Davis was shifting into Bitches Brew and getting more electric, we were experimenting with that. Some of those groups who had come to the Golden Crown - so I would go down and see Bill Summers, the Headhunters and this was all the shift. So we just started changing from playing a Kool & The Gang song to playing something original, and that’s how we got a lot of the groups now. Kenny G and a lot of people, Jeff Lorber came out and that music became popular. Grover Washington - Mister Magic was selling tons of records, unbelievable. I remember the first night, we went to go see George Benson and we were expecting to hear “White Rabbit” and some of his old great stuff…

ROBERT NESBITT

And he sang, he sang.

TONY GABLE

…And he says, “I’m going to sing.” "What? You are a guitar player, you don’t sing.” He sang, and that same year he made “This Masquerade” and I think he has done okay [laughing].

ROBERT NESBITT

One of the things that amazes me - as I said, I got my first job in radio, back in Buffalo, New York, back in the late ’60s, I was 16 years old - to now, what these people are doing today just amazes me. What’s happened technically, from the ways we used to make commercials at a radio station where we had to splice tape together and it would take us an hour-and-a-half to make a 30-second commercial. Now, with the new technology…

TONY GABLE

ProTools.

ROBERT NESBITT

…And the geniuses that you guys are out there [gestures to audience], you guys are my heroes. Because we are talking about something that happened a generation ago. From the things that we did 25 years ago to what you have access to now. I don’t know anything about what you do, so now I become the student again, and that’s just amazing. As I walk around here, and I see all this stuff, I’m like, “Where am I?” This is like Star Trek, Twilight Zone to me [audience laughs / applause].

So you guys are some strong people, I’m really proud of you, and thank you for teaching me. And I will [holds his hand up] be holding my hand up asking for help.

TONY GABLE

See, I know the graphic design side of the Macs but not the music side. Our guitar player Glenn Lorbiecki has a studio, and he gets on there, and we’ll go to do a session. Sometimes I do radio commercials and stuff and I just play one pass - “OK, thanks, Tony.” [looks at his watch] What are you talking about? There’s two or three more minutes, I gotta play the chords again.” “No, we got it.”

I did a session with Microsoft, same thing. “We need this timbale part.” [imitates timbale] “Pababap, OK.” I’m waiting for the rest of the song. “We got it, thank you. We’ll take care of it in ProTools.” Or sing one pass around on the chorus, do it in ProTools [shrugs his shoulders].

That’s cool, but as far as musicianship, it’s better if you can actually sing all the parts. And I won’t mention the artist’s name, but she is a judge on a television show…

ROBERT NESBITT

Paula?

TONY GABLE

Oh, I didn’t say that. But there is a difference between Aretha Franklin and some of the artists you could - I’m not going to say the blonde lady’s name that just had a kid or anything [audience chuckles] - but you should be able to sing a whole song, from a musician’s standpoint. Rather than, when the technology starts to change, you’d sing a phrase, and then go back and grab a couple of sentences, and next thing you know…

Now it’s all digital. But before you had have a whole truckful of two-inch tape of one song, that people were editing and splicing with the razorblade, and cutting and splicing, to get a seamless part. If you are playing jazz, you are going to be playing that live anyway. Some of the pop stuff, I don’t know. But that’s just me. But the technology is cool. I mean, because you can edit so much faster, and you can try different ideas and just lay it down and do some overdubs - “OK, that’s a groove,” and go on to the next thing. So, that would have been nice, like you were talking about effects - we used to sing a Dramatics song called “In The Rain.” We had a Shure Vocal Master, which was the standard back in the early days. We used to lift it up and drop it to make thunder. The reverb chamber would go [imitates thunder] and then we started singing the song. “Oh, that must be the [air quotes] special effects for this particular song.” So it would be whatever you could do. Now you got the synthesizers and everything.

ROBERT NESBITT

I don’t know if you guys realize how much power you have in how you use this monster called technology. How much power you have to influence everybody in the world. OK, say for instance, if I had a microphone and a radio station, I’m able to talk to, in a quarter hour, maybe on a lucky day, 20,000 people. But you do the technology, the internet, mass communication…

TONY GABLE

Podcasting.

ROBERT NESBITT

Podcasting, blogging. Being that you guys are those geniuses, you just have so much opportunity to do so much good, that we wish that we could have done just from the bandstand. That’s what I think. We had small radio stations, we had a bandstand, we were out there spreading goodwill. That’s what we were doing. But now, by using this monster - this great, gargantuan, mighty Joe Young of a monster of technology - you are able to do these things. And it still just blows me away when I just realize how much you have at your disposal.

TONY GABLE

But can I…

ROBERT NESBITT

[speaking over Tony Gable] And how much good you’re going to do. I’m sorry, I’m just blown away, I’m sorry.

TONY GABLE

Can I come in on the dark side of this monster? My kids come to me ...

Robert Nesbitt

Oh, that dark side.

Tony Gable

They start saying ... they want to download this, they want to download that. I say, “OK, let me explain something.” By the way, I'm a member of NARAS, Pacific Northwest Chapter of NARAS, you know, the recording academy.

Robert Nesbitt

That's the government ...

Tony Gable

So I'm not real big on downloading. Couple times, people would come to me and say, “Man I love that Camono Island.” I’d say, “Oh that's great you got that off the first album?” “No I downloaded it.” Oh, thank you. My kids wanted to download and their friends were burning and all this stuff. I said, “The next time you ask me for that new bike, or that new pair of Jordan's, I don't have the money for that because your friends are downloading and taking this music from other artists without paying for it.”

I mean if the artist chooses to give you the music, that's fine, or if it's promotional and stuff. I'm not big on... that's why I was happy to see iTunes come out. Part of the problem that happened with this downloading issue is that, the record industry, or the music industry, didn't keep in step with technology. When this technology started to change, and they should have just been right there rather than, you know.

Now it's very difficult to preach to some of the young kids about downloading and, you know, taking stuff off the internet because that's what they grew up with, you know. Oh yeah, “I bought a 100 pack of CDs and I'm gonna party.”

What about the artist? So that's why it's good, iTunes and some of these other ... you know, the problem was, it was technical, there was no vehicle for you to pay, so when they used to burn something, I used to tell them, “OK I want you to put $2.00 in this envelope and send it to the musician.” You know, if you download this I want you to send it not to the manager, or the record company, send it to the writer or the artist. They got tired of doing that, so then, you know I had to buy them iPods and Apple cards, so. Which is cool with me. That's the dark side.

TOBY LAING

Every generation just seems to get creative with whatever they’ve got at their disposal, you know?

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah, that’s just the case.

TOBY LAING

I think you are right about the musicianship element perhaps lacking a little bit nowadays. Not to say that it can’t come back again. But I mean, just the energy of working in a band, that’s something where you are collaborating with a group of people, and they are all bringing energy to the stage, and it’s something that, that type of music on the Wheedle’s Groove CD, it’s just got that energy coming out of the speakers that sounds like a great group effort.

And I’m just interested to know when this band scene kind of started to maybe just change into something else and bands weren’t working so much. People were going off and maybe starting other careers. I’m interested in what you guys got up to after that period, when your club closed and all that.

ROBERT NESBITT

When I left KYAC, it was just such a blur. Because I left KYAC in the mid-’70s, and one of the natural progressions for DJs was to go to work for a record company. So what I did, I went to work for ABC Records, which was a distributor here in Seattle, we had a lot of different labels. Subsequently, from ABC I went to work for Motown Records. I did promotion for Motown. I loved Motown, I hated the label. It was just the most corrupt company I have ever worked for. But I enjoyed the artists, I worked with Stevie Wonder, I worked with Marvin Gaye, I travelled and worked with these guys. I worked for them for about two years.

After that I made a transition and went to work for Chrysalis Records for 19 years. So at Chrysalis, I did promotion and marketing for them for the West Coast. My market was from Alaska down to LA and east to Denver. And the great thing about Chrysalis, which was just a wonderful experience, was that Chrysalis was a real boutique-type label. At Chrysalis you did just about everything. You were A&R, you were promotion, you were marketing, you were tour manager, you were babysitter, you were everything. And, when I went to work for Chrysalis, there were just a couple of artists on that label - Leo Sayer, Jethro Tull, pretty much. But I came in, they signed Blondie, they signed Billy Idol, they signed Huey Lewis, they signed Pat Benatar, they signed Billy Idol - did I say Billy Idol already?

But this was just really a great experience, because it was totally hands-on. So I stayed with them for about 19 years and it was great, I had the best time. I got a chance to travel, I still maintain my relationship with these artists, with Huey and Pat Benatar and what have you. But the other thing that I was doing at the same time, I maintained a relationship with Tony [gestures to Tony Gable]. Tony has been my great friend for over 30 years. Cold, Bold & Together was, when they played my house, the house I still live in, was the band house, and Kenny G, who was always there, the first band member there, and the last one to leave – [to Tony Gable] I think Kenny still has a key to my house, OK? So that’s how tight I have been with these guys.

TONY GABLE

You didn’t mention the fact that Bobby was the first DJ in the United States to play a song by AWB [Average White Band] called “Pick Up The Pieces.”

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh yeah. [pulls out a record] Have to have that.

TONY GABLE

So not only was he breaking acts regionally because KYAC for some reason had a reputation far around the globe, people would start sending songs to KYAC, see if that would be a place to break something.

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah, that was kind of cool, too, that they would do that. No one was really paying attention to any stations, any soul stations on AM. Our AM station was 1460 and you could barely hear it. And then we had an FM station, which was 96.5, and it was a low power station, like 19,000 watts, whatever it was. But what we did, we went out there, really marketed this radio station. We reported to the Gavin Report, we would send our playlist to Billboard, we would let them know what was happening.

We took chances on bands, we played ... we were the first station to play Abandoned Luncheonette by Hall & Oates, that album, and their first single was “She's Gone.” Then of course we played the first album by Average White Band. We were breaking record left and right, we were one of the first R&B stations that played “Benny and the Jets” so it was kind of like a cool thing. Next thing you know, managers and record companies are coming after us and really trying to get us to play records, and we really supported the good music.

Tony Gable

Yeah. With me being a graphic designer, we played in CBT and then things started changing. People were trying to go in different directions and, so I just ... I worked for Boeing, gained 70 pounds there, because it was the first time I ever had a paycheck. As a starving musician or artist, you're not getting a regular check. So it was like, “Whoa.” “Settle down kid you're gonna get another one in two weeks.” I was like, “What?” So you know me and the colonel and Southern Comfort became friends and Kool-Aid and the King and ... few friends of mine.

I just kept doing my graphic design thing and finally I decided to start my own studio and I've had the opportunity to travel around the world and speak in Tokyo and Chicago and around, and design as well as being as a musician. So if I go to Tokyo ... when we were ... when I was on tour with Kenny I would say, “If you want a free ticket to come see Kenny G, I get to come visit your studio.” So that's how I got to meet a lot of famous and well know graphic designers.

If I had a laptop or PowerBook then I would still be on the road, because then I would be on the tour bus, I'd do my work, do my sketches, and the next hotel then I'd FedEx it back to my studio in Seattle. They would comp it up and fax it to the next gig that we'd play, and then I'd look at it and now ... it would just be amazing having the technology. I mean we had a 4-track, a recording Tascam cassette recorder in the back of the tour bus and stuff. Kenny went off to go play sax with Jeff Lorber, the other band members started playing in other groups, writing songs, becoming television producers. We all stayed in media, and you know the creative services, and then when I was doing my studio I left Boeing for creativity because that's what I wanted to do in my heart. Then Kenny called me one day and played me this song ... it's kinda sing songie, I guess I don't know anything because it came #5 in the country, it's called “Songbird.” Because as a percussionist I want things to drive and funk. By the way I'm glad that a lot of groups that we idolized ... I took my nine-year-old son to see Santana a couple weeks ago, so the guy who started it he is bigger than ever. If you would have told me during the period of the CBT era, that this geeky guy playing the sax was gonna sell more records than Grover Washington, Ronnie Laws, Pearl Jam, I would have said “What are you smoking? There's no way.” We should make him sing “Play That Funky Music White Boy” with Wild Cherry. We'd just make him sing it, he couldn't sing that good but he could play the sax. He called one day and said, “Hey I think ‘Songbird’ is going to do okay, do you want to come on tour?” Well to support my design studio at the time, a laser writer cost $5,000. OK. That was kind of expensive so by going on tour with him not only did I get a chance to see a lot of other graphic design studios but get to hear and hang out with musicians. Miles Davis, I mean, Chick Corea, all kind of festivals. You know from playing in a tavern with four people with a Shure Vocal Master to playing at Carnegie Hall, sold out show, with one of my friends that was in the band. That was just extraordinary.

A lot of people in this band went on to play with the Dazz Band, like I said Maze, Ashford & Simpson, so very strong musicianship not only from this group but other groups in Seattle. A lot of the groups' on Wheedle's Groove. People are still gigging, still playing, it's our life, it's our love, being creative and stuff. Kenny's doing okay, he's playing a lot golf. So, that opportunity to travel. Meeting Grover, you know, getting to hang out with these guys being back stage, talking to them, how do they make songs that kind of create ... creative, ah, it was just extraordinary. So it's still continuing to do graphic design and music. The group now that we work with, it's called 206 because most of the writers and musicians are from Seattle. So that's what we continue to do, we've had some success in that as well, so that's what we'll continue to do.

TOBY LAING

You know, to the outsider it looks like, “Ah, there was this amazing music, and it kind of just went away, and then it’s coming back again.” But really it didn’t, it just turned into something else, it just kept on, and a lot of these guys are still playing.

But I mean, this label, this local Seattle label Light In The Attic, this guy Matt Sullivan who runs that label – for him he came to the music, even though he is from Seattle, he came to the music by getting a 7" or a little single he didn’t know. He couldn’t believe it was from Seattle, he didn’t know about the music. And these people who are from Seattle, who are thinking, “I’ve discovered the lost music scene,” it’s funny - they weren’t there actually to witness it for themselves, and couldn’t see it just develop into something else. But it’s interesting that this next generation with all the internet and all the computers and whatnot are sort of now discovering it and enjoying it. And the music is actually travelling, it’s travelling around the world. I mean, I heard the CD in Wellington in New Zealand and I know it’s going well all around the world. And I just want to know what you think about that.

ROBERT NESBITT

I think one of the great things about this record is that some of these artists, who’ve fallen on some hard times economically, socially, have been rejuvenated by this. I’m seeing guys like Ronnie Buford - there are quite a few artists here who have really, really been down on their luck. But this is a chance for them to revive a career, they get out there to do the things that they did so well a long time ago. Yeah, they maybe a little long in that, too, but any time you can boost someone’s spirit, anything that would be a catalyst to help boost your spirits, I think it’s a good thing.

And hopefully they’ll make some money, hopefully people will go out and buy this, hopefully you’ll talk about this when you go back home, hopefully you will never forget this. And even maybe there’ll be a part two to this to really get those artists back on their feet again. That’s one of the things that I was really excited about. How I became involved in this, Tony had spoken with Matt, because Matt wanted Tony’s music from Cold, Bold & Together. And Matt at the time was having such a hard time getting in touch with some of these artists because they were like, “Who is this guy, who is this Matt dude?” You know? “Get away from me. Shoo, get away.” So Matt asked me to sit down and talk to him, I really believed in what he was doing, and I just thought it was a no-brainer for these artists who had this music that just sat dormant in their basements somewhere doing nothing - you might as well put it out there and let people get a chance to hear it.

So I acted as an emissary, and I went out and got some of these people to sign on, and next thing you know we got about six or seven of the artists who had not made any commitment to this project, and they came about and there we are.

TONY GABLE

It was a great opportunity. When I spoke to Matt, a lot of us had thought about doing this. But you are so focused on what you are doing, it takes somebody, an outsider, to kind of come in and recognise something that was really great and wonderful, and then put it together. And so that was really cool. I know he has a team of people that he’s worked with at Light In The Attic and stuff, and when he first started talking about it, I was like, [sceptically] “OK, is this really going to happen?”

“No,” he said. “I’m serious, I really want to find these artists and make this happen.” And I saw it as an opportunity to document this era that was really not discovered, and really…

ROBERT NESBITT

No one had told this story. The story had not been recorded. People knew about it, it was here and there, but there was never really a piece [holds up the CD].

TONY GABLE

And you hear about Seattle, Jackson Street, the jazz era that was here. You hear about Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, those guys were just tremendous. We actually had the opportunity to open for Ray Charles and Jamie Foxx in 206 and that was kind of cool, seeing the movie Ray.

So this was a great opportunity to kind of go back and grab this whole era, and then put it out there for people to hear it. Because when people hear it, they are like, “Wow, I don’t remember this.” Well, maybe you were on the other side of the town. Or you didn’t get into the club where we were playing, or you didn’t go here and stuff. It was very vibrant, and everybody that hears a record from that era, they remember such good times. It’s no different than if you put on an old “My Girl” by The Temptations, you start [snaps] - oh yeah, I remember this and that and you just get your groove on. The same thing with this music as well.

Robert Nesbitt

It really makes me feel good and I'm quite surprised, and I don't know why I'm surprised but when I hear you say like, “Wow I just heard this record and I was just blown away.” I used to play these records 80 times a day. I got so sick and tired of hearing them, even though they were great songs. When they went away they were like, fine that's just an old ... but to see a generation later, these songs come back and be relived as they are is, you know, “Wow what attracted you to that?” What did attract you to that? Something that you had not heard or?

Toby Laing

I mean obviously I do a bit of DJing in Wellington, just in bars playing old song music. Stuff that I pick up from the thrift shop for $1, stuff like that. I kind of collect a lot of records, then I start looking at more of the compilations that are coming out. Digging up a bit rarer, you know you don't get a lot of rare records down in New Zealand, but a lot of stuff gets reissued and a lot of compilations start to come out. I started to come across this compilation, and you know, in that way. Yeah, I mean, those songs have an effect on the dancefloor down there.

Tony Gable

Really? Wow.

Robert Nesbitt

That's just amazing.

Tony Gable

That's great.

Robert Nesbitt

Everything that's old is new.

TOBY LAING

Robbie Hill’s Family Affair's “I Just Want To Be (Like Myself),” I first found it on a French compilation, I think, from a few years ago. So that song was definitely coming out somewhere. That song did get to #1 in Seattle, didn’t it, for a little while?

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah, it was.

TOBY LAING

Yeah. And I think, it was in the heat of James Brown and in the heat of the O’Jays and all that, so he’s got a good achievement there. But that was the song that really stuck out for me on that particular French compilation, so it was great to see it on the album there.

ROBERT NESBITT

I think pretty much this is just the tip of the iceberg. I am sure that all these artists - I mean, there are so many other bands that have not been compiled on Wheedle’s Groove.

TONY GABLE

Or anywhere. This is the beginning of revisiting and rediscovering this very viable and vibrant community of musicians and hopefully it will just continue on.

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah, we had spoken with Matt about that, and you could just put so much music on the first release, but there will be more coming out.

TOBY LAING

Well, I want to thank you very much.

ROBERT NESBITT

Are there any questions before we…?

TOBY LAING

Oh, yeah.

TONY GABLE

I mean we are just… soul survivors.

ROBERT NESBITT

We were just, “Blahblahblahblah.”

TONY GABLE

Anybody have any…?

ROBERT NESBITT

Questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I have two questions. The first question was kind of in the comparison between what was going on here versus what was going on in Detroit. And with Motown Records there were a lot of studio players, studio drummers, studio bass players that were playing on all the tracks, but here it wasn’t really like that. You had all the bands quite separately, and the bass player was playing bass for this band and not the other one. How was it? Did the people mix and mingle a bit, or was it really this bit-competitive atmosphere like you said where people were really…

ROBERT NESBITT

I would say that Motown, that’s like the home office. It’s like, Motown’s here, everywhere else was just totally different. [to Tony Gable] The Funk Brothers…

TONY GABLE

Yeah, the Funk Brothers and that movie, I think it was called Behind The Shadows…

ROBERT NESBITT & AUDIENCE MEMBER

Standing In The Shadows Of Motown.

TONY GABLE

Standing In The Shadows, and those were tremendous musicians and they were jazz players, but they were backing all of the tracks for all of these vocal artists. That’s why the Beatles had a big impact on me when I first saw them on Ed Sullivan, despite that my mum wanted them to get a haircut. That was the first time I saw a band playing and singing.

And that was what kind of attracted me to the British Invasion, because most of the groups, the soul groups, there’d be - you know, Otis Redding would be out front, and then there’d be a band. But the band was kind of back here [gestures behind his back] and the single artist or the solo artist was out front.

Whereas with most of the groups in Seattle that happened sometimes, but then there was kind of a change or it was more integrated. And part of it came about because of Sly and Earth, Wind & Fire, where there was more than one vocalist. There were two vocalists or three vocalists, and the band was an integral part, they were not the back-up band. They could be interchanged, people came not only to see the singer with us, or Keith Hooks, or different people in the band, but also for the bass player, it was just part of the personality. So I actually don’t remember any time with us ever recording on somebody else’s tracks.

ROBERT NESBITT

Right, exactly. If you were with Cold, Bold & Together, you were with Cold, Bold & Together.

TONY GABLE

That’s your crew.

ROBERT NESBITT

If you were with Black And White Affair, Manuel Stan did not come and play bass on a Cold, Bold & Together song. It was just…

TONY GABLE

Nah, that’s turf [chuckles].

I mean, it would have probably been okay, but I don’t think we really thought [about it].

ROBERT NESBITT

[shakes head] I never saw that happen.

TONY GABLE

We did gigs together. Like we, CBT, we played for the Free Breakfast Program for the [Black] Panthers, because they were trying to feed kids in the morning to go to school. So there was a lot of community activity playing for people, so there would be times when we were all on the same show, but we were on different teams.

ROBERT NESBITT

It was a turf competition thing. Now, everybody plays on everybody else’s records here and now.

TONY GABLE

Yeah, I’d get Bernadette [Bascom] to come over and help on a song. You see what I mean? I don’t know if that’s because of maturing, and you got a little bit older, but at that time it was like, “Hey, we are on the Raiders, we are on this.” There were no Seahawks in those days, you know? We were on the Raiders.

ROBERT NESBITT

I don’t think there was any performance of sophistication back in that day, you know, because you didn’t see how great that would be for a person like Bernadette Bascom to go and sing background vocals on another artist’s record. Whereas Robbie Hill would say, like, “Oh no, that can’t happen.” Because they just didn’t have that, we just didn’t know how to do that. We didn’t know how to process that.

TONY GABLE

And it was even rare for people to change bands.

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh, yeah.

TONY GABLE

You know, maybe a lead singer might…

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh, that was very rare.

TONY GABLE

But that was just very rare. I mean, you were with that band until you died - and actually that did happen, unfortunately. Or you went to jail (chuckles), you know?

ROBERT NESBITT

And you know, another thing, Seattle was way up here, OK? We were so far away from everybody that it was just hard to… You really didn’t get the influences that, say, if you were a band in the Bay Area. In the Bay Area you may have some bleed over from the influence of LA, OK? In Detroit you may get some influence from Chicago. In Philly there were some New York influences. In Seattle we were just here.

And that’s the thing that really amazes me about how well and how strong the Seattle music scene was. Because there wasn’t a lot of influence, unless someone moved from Kansas City to Seattle or what have you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

OK, thanks. That answers my question. And the second thing, when you played this first track earlier, we were kind of making a joke that everyone in the room was going to be swooping in to see what that first loop is and to load it into their MPC.

And I was wondering if you guys know, I guess you know about kind of the way a lot of people are making music these days. Like digging through the stacks for this one track, for this one bass groove, for this one trumpet line and what your reaction is to that kind of music? How you feel about it, have you heard it, what’s up with that?

TONY GABLE

I think it’s up to the artist. It is funny now, now that we’re grown-ups, we are hearing commercials with the Rolling Stones’ song, or you hear a Chevy commercial and there’s a song that was like an anthem for change in the world and now it’s behind the Kleenex commercial. It’s just different. The commercialization, the global… I think a lot of artists would just say, “OK, don’t forget to send me a cheque.” But some artists may say, “No, this goes with this sound, and it’s not going to be separated.”

But I was glad to see that hip-hop artists and rap artists started paying for stuff, like Hammer.

ROBERT NESBITT

“U Can’t Touch This.”

TONY GABLE

Yeah, I mean, to us that was Rick James.

ROBERT NESBITT

Right.

TONY GABLE

It was like, [quizzically] Hammer? You know, my kids’ll hear a song. “Have you ever heard of this group?” And I’m like [head in hands], “Oh God.” You know? Or like [to Robert Nesbitt] George Lopez’s TV show starts off with a War song.

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh yeah, “Low Rider.”

TONY GABLE

Yeah, “Low Rider.” And the kids are like, “Hey do you like that song?” [scratches forehead] “I played that song five million times.” You know, so it’s just different. But, I don’t know, I would hope that who you are taking or sampling the music from would have some input, because they may not like what you’re going to do to it. And they should have that right to say, “I don’t want that.” And other people are going to say, [shrugs] “Just send me a cheque.” So it just depends on who the artist is. But I’d be open to it.

ROBERT NESBITT

I’m like, as long as it is good and creative, have fun with it.

TONY GABLE

Yeah.

ROBERT NESBITT

You know, come on! [shrugs] Great, you know? If you can come up with something from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and bust that open, do it! So as long as - if you feel good about it, we have respect for the music. Have fun with it.

TONY GABLE

Yeah, there’s a lot of grooves, there’s so much music - not just here, but in Ohio, in the South, Atlanta, there’s all kind of groups that did not make it to the big stage that have tremendous amounts of vaults, of grooves and beats and stuff. So there’s an untapped resource of things that could be combined with modern technology that could be successful.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I guess - I’m sorry, I’m just in the back here - I guess, for us, speaking for people in this room that make hip-hop music or produce using samples, a lot of these people would be effectively taking the open drums at the start of that track we listened to, and looping that up basically, you know what I mean? I think you mentioned Ballin’ Jack earlier on?

ROBERT NESBITT & TONY GABLE

Yeah, right. Ballin’ Jack.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

A group from around here?

TONY GABLE

Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

OK, Ballin’ Jack, two of their records, they’ve got drum breaks on them. And that’s the only one reason I know the name of that group. So I guess, we’re just really interested to see if you guys would be annoyed if we were looping up bits of your records, really.

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh, I don’t see anybody who would be annoyed by that.

TONY GABLE

[shrugging] Again, I think it just depends on the artist. I mean, that song started off with - the drummer was Harry Alexander. He had what we called a funk foot. A lot of great drummers, musicians, we were experimenting as well because the technology with the instrumentation was changing. Everybody wanted to be Hendrix. “How can we get the sound out of this box and stuff?” So I guess it just depends on the artists or something that you are listening to, if you would just indicate your interests, “Hey, I like that beat, could I use that?”

AUDIENCE MEMBER

So it’s a question of asking for permission always? Because traditionally in hip-hop that hasn’t been the case, really. I mean, open drums, in the court of law it doesn’t really constitute music until very recently, you know?

TONY GABLE

See, have you ever heard “Brick House”? OK, that signature at the beginning of “Brick House,” to me that’s a copy of… I mean, I am not an attorney, but [beatboxes a drumroll] I mean, if I hear that, I know that that’s “Brick House,” just like if somebody was singing it. So if I heard that on a hip-hop song, I would hope that you would contact the Commodores, you know [audience member nods and smiles]?

ROBERT NESBITT

Maybe I’m so naive that I’m thinking that hopefully it would be a professional given. I am just hoping that’s what it would be as a respect to the artist or the originator of the music.

TONY GABLE

Right.

TOBY LAING

It’s sort of like what Harvey was saying the other day. If you use a piece of someone else’s music, it is all good until you start making a lot of money off it. And it’s kind of like, you’ve got to make sure that you let them know if it blows up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I mean, because traditionally in hip-hop the whole part of the ethos is really to find the most obscure sample, the most obscure drum break, that no one else has got…

ROBERT NESBITT

Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

…And thus by not clearing it protect that sound, thus a DJ or a producer is then associated with that drum sound forever, and no one else can find where he got it from, so I am just really interested to see what you guys make of all of that.

TONY GABLE

If we were back in the day [Robert laughs], everybody was very protective of whatever they did. I mean, like this drummer - literally, if you tried to take his beat, he’d show up at your house with a shotgun [audience laughs]. So again, like I said, everybody were crews, we had instruments - well, we did have weapons. But it’s different now. Again, Bobby was alluding to the courtesy, I guess it’s courtesy. And I don’t know if that’s proper in hip-hop, but at some point if you start hearing it on the radio and you start seeing it on Billboard - hmm, [scratches chin] you’d probablyhear from somebody’s attorney at one point.

ROBERT NESBITT

It’s an infringement.

TONY GABLE

But it’ll be interesting to see how… I actually had an opportunity this year for the first time. I was in Chicago at a roof party, and there had to be percussion, but there was no percussionist. But there was a DJ. And they were just inviting people to come up and play, and I started playing and said, “This is kind of fun.” Because I get on the dancefloor and [does hand dance] shake my groove thing [audience laughs, Robert Nesbitt grooves]. And then I saw the percussion and I got up there, started playing. “You could play?” “Uh, yeah.” And I just started having fun with the beats and stuff and it was kind of cool, because, hey, I can take a break, get a drink, the beat’s still going on, come back up there, play congas [laughter], you know, I can do it! So it was actually kind of fun.

ROBERT NESBITT

See, this is a conversation that - I’ve never had this conversation. We wouldn’t have this conversation, what, 30 years ago? I don’t remember there being any infringement issues about a long time ago because whatever came out from Cold, Bold & Together was Cold, Bold & Together. Nobody ever came back from Atlanta and said, “Hey, “Love Song Turned Sad,” we’ve got a song that’s just like that.” So, but that’s an interesting question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I guess it’s just kind of like, if you think of how many funk tunes basically rip off the groove from “Cold Sweat”, you know?

ROBERT NESBITT & TONY GABLE

Oh! Oh! Oh!

AUDIENCE MEMBER

How many late ’60s, early ’70s tunes are there?

TONY GABLE

Well, James Brown started getting paid for that. He was getting royalty checks.

ROBERT NESBITT

James Brown, he just, he went after every one of the…

TONY GABLE

Because I used to hear like a hip-hop song or something, and I did say, “That’s James Brown,” but at some point, I guess they had to start…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I mean, even the first time around funk groups would hear James Brown and be like, “We need to make a group that sounds like this,” you know [both agree]? So I am just wondering if this is a modern-day phenomenon of that. And I mean, what made you guys want to make a specific kind of music? Was it hearing someone like James Brown and really wanting to imitate that style?

ROBERT NESBITT

I think it was more genre-related.

TONY GABLE

Yeah, genre-related.

ROBERT NESBITT

It was more genre-related than to sound like somebody else. I think you wanted to find something that was within that ballpark, “Hey, that’s a hit record, that’s a hit sound.” Going back to Motown, you got the Supremes and also you have the Marvelettes, they were both girl groups. They were a little bit different, but they were still pretty much in the same genre, and they were still soulful acts or whatever.

So, if you had Cold, Bold & Together – speaking of Tony’s band – I know what the genesis of this band was from a standpoint of where they wanted to - their parameters, or where they wanted to put themselves into. Because you guys were really a dance-oriented band, a funk and Latin-type thing that still had some overtures to maybe some Kool & The Gang, maybe some Earth, Wind & Fire, but a lot of different things.

TONY GABLE

But at some point as a musician, you do listen to other artists, and you do learn their chops or you try to get to that point because then you kind of mature as an artist. At first you can’t play like that and then, “Oh I can do that.”

But then the next question is, “Now can I think of something just as good?” And then, we weren’t Earth, Wind & Fire, we weren’t Kool & The Gang, so, “Who are we?” And then as artists and musicians you started to kind of look inside, we didn’t wanted to sound like that group over there, so everybody has a very distinct, different sound. Even if we all maybe would share the same instrumentation, the sound was different. And a lot of that was just on purpose. You know, “We don’t want to sound like that.”

Most of the time in a vocal group, in a band, there’ll be a first tenor, the Philip Bailey guy, and then there’d be a baritone, so that kind of structure was there - but what are we going to sing about? What are we going to play music about?

And just listening to this arrangement, I was like, “Oh my God, we didn’t even start the verse for 45 seconds.” That would never happen, and we’d have songs that were ten minutes long. See, that was back in the FM era, album music, when people would just play a song for 15, 20 minutes. Now it’s like [snaps fingers], “OK, where’s the hook? OK, here’s the verse, hit it, come around. OK baby, go to the B-section, come around…” I’m talking about commercial pop music with hits. It’s too much structure.

ROBERT NESBITT

[points to the audience member] Are you a producer?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Uh, can I plead guilty [chuckles]?

ROBERT NESBITT

Sure! OK, so this is what I am saying. I take that you asked that question, I kind of figured that you might be a producer. So what is it what you are looking for? You got an artist, you are going to find out where you are going to take this artist. That’s your job as a producer, right?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Er, not really [chuckles].

ROBERT NESBITT

OK, what is your process?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Nowadays, I mean I guess I’m kind of a thief really, and there is another culprit in this room who works with me, and we take… [Robert laughs]

I mean, it’s going to be pretty hard to explain it to Deodato in a couple of weeks’ time, but basically we take chunks out of people’s music and glue it back together with a lot of post-production and re-editing.

ROBERT NESBITT

Really?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

To get layers upon layers of sound going.

ROBERT NESBITT

We did that…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

It takes a really long time.

ROBERT NESBITT

It would cost us a million dollars to try to do that, because technically we just couldn’t do that, [to Tony Gable] could we? We couldn’t go and take snippets of different things, it would just cost us too much.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

With this particular drum break that we were talking about, if you just gave that first five seconds to everybody in this room, every person would come back to you with something different.

TONY GABLE

That’s cool, yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I mean, it’s not taking that and just looping it for ten minutes and that’s it. Everyone’s going to fuck with it a bit, chop it, move it around. So it’s a bit different. It’s not so much just taking something, it’s like learning a tune to play, and then, like you were saying it, learning some little run from it that’s nice, throwing it into some of your own stuff later on, and then developing it and finding something else that goes with it. It’s the same kind of thing. We take that, twist it, do something else with it and then throw it back, you know what I mean? It’s the same thing, just…

TONY GABLE

Sure, sure.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

It’s the way that we do it, instead of the way that you would have done it initially.

ROBERT NESBITT

So would this be masked pretty much, I mean, you would pretty much take that basic…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah, you might not even recognize it in the end. It might be pitched down, pitched up, chopped, rearranged. It’s just that kind of stuff just has a nice sound. I’d have loved to have a drum kit in my apartment, but I can’t, you know what I mean? So for me that kind of stuff - I’ll play the rest of the stuff in, but I’ll take that and chop it and give myself a nice drum groove to play the rest of my stuff over. So it’s respectful, it’s not so much snatching it and making money off it. It goes back to the people.

TONY GABLE

Well, it’s creativity on a different level. You know, you guys will be doing different things that we would not think of. Not only the technical aspect, but also just the way of thinking. You know, it’s just like arrangements - A-section and B-section, chorus. So it’s going to be like that [for us], while you’re thinking, “Can I take this and put this over here, then loop this? And oh! When it sounds cool at the end, it’s cool.”

ROBERT NESBITT

Would you say that that little section would plant a seed within your head, that you would just totally make hybrids [audience member nods] and you would just totally grow from that, to the point where the originator of those beats wouldn’t be able to tell the difference?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah.

ROBERT NESBITT

Then it’s fair game.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I guess that you can use a sample in a good way and use it in a bad way. Probably what you guys think of as samples is just like taking the main theme from a track and looping it up.

ROBERT NESBITT & TONY GABLE

Oh yeah, yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

And that’s to me just a bad way of using samples.

ROBERT NESBITT

Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

But there are loads of different ways to work with them. So, well, that’s it [chuckles].

TONY GABLE

Well, in relationship to graphic design, I mean, OK, you are taking circles and squares and stuff with different technology and Photoshop and doing this - things are just changing and then you actually create a hybrid or something new, and it exists on its own.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

You do a collage.

TONY GABLE

Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Like with images from magazines or whatever.

TONY GABLE

Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

It’s the same thing but with music. It’s like a collage.

ROBERT NESBITT

Collage, yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Taking things and changing the context and doing something new.

ROBERT NESBITT

Once again, I just think that if you are going to do something that’s so obvious, the acknowledgement aspect of it comes into play, I would say.

TONY GABLE

What I’m hearing them saying is, it wouldn’t be like eight bars straight…

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh yeah, right.

TONY GABLE

…or 16 bars like what Hammer did, clearly that’s Rick James’s song [audience laughs].

ROBERT NESBITT

Well, yeah.

TONY GABLE

You know, this is James Brown screaming for 16 bars, or something like that. There are just a couple of flams here, a hi-hat here, and then you’ve ended up mixing it with something else, and then you put a bassline, I guess, or, I don’t know [throws hands in air]. I have never done that before.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Once again, first of all, before I am a sampling artist, first of all I am a record collector. Why? Because I just love this era, let’s say from ’68 to ’73.

ROBERT NESBITT

Wow.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

And that’s because the recordings that were made in this period with certain engineering, it’s like you used to record on some stuff that is just impossible to find today. So for somebody like me, well, I can’t play any instrument, but if I could, I couldn’t even record with the same warmth you guys had because it’s just not the same thing. So that’s why I somehow turned to sampling because when I sample, I just get that sound I am looking for. It is really warm and friendly and everything. And the reason why I am doing samples is also because to show love to that era and incite people to listen to these records, because to me it’s just the greatest music ever. It’s just the best era.

TONY GABLE

Well, with individual artists, that is going to be happen. I mean, sometimes people think Picasso kind of created and developed that look that he’s famous for. If you ever go to Africa, you will see a lot of that. So influences happen to everybody and that’s just natural. And then hopefully you’ll find your own voice, and then be able to do that.

But everything was warmer because everything was analog. We were dealing with tapes and, by the way, digging out the tapes for this [holds up the Wheedle’s Groove CD] was quite a challenge. [looks up pensively] “OK, is that under the dog’s bed [audience laughs], in the basement, where is that reel at?”

And then I had to take it to a Fast Tracks, and luckily they helped me to get some of the tracks back. Because we made those songs and if you didn’t get a hit record, well, OK, that’s kind of gone, and now I’m a plumber. And then somebody says, “Hey, do you still have this tape?” And luckily we did, most of us did put out records. So we had a lot of 45s left, and then Matt could either clean them up, or if you could find original tracks - but even though we have 2" tapes and stuff, you have to find an analog 24-track recorder. A lot of things are now in digital or ProTools, or the board is about this big [shows a small size] and you got a big 30" [shows a big size] widescreen Mac monitor, and [types in the air] and so on. That was cool.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

One thing I would like to [comment] about what you just said. I’m just quoting the introduction from a friend of mine’s album. It’s actually a sample that I found and some guy is saying, “If you copy from one guy, then it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from several guys, then it’s research.” And I consider my work research.

[Robert and Tony laugh / audience applauds]

ROBERT NESBITT

Amen to that.

TONY GABLE

Well this has been great. Thank you for…

ROBERT NESBITT

Yeah, just amazing.

TONY GABLE

…allowing us to shoot the breeze [applause]. Oh, another question back there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Maybe it is a perfect time for us to take you guys in the studio instead of gathering round, and do some chopping up with a beat [audience chuckles]. Let us show how we work because we’ve been here for a week, normally it’s like these big studio romantics before us taking us to the studio. Maybe it would be nice if we could show you, like, this is how we work, this is a possible way of working. This is maybe a song or a track we will do something with.

ROBERT NESBITT

You have something?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

No, you have something.

ROBERT NESBITT

Oh, we have something?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah, and there is enough talent and creative inspiration over here to make something happen.

TONY GABLE

Well, one thing that changed in Seattle, and I’m sure maybe in other parts of the country, the album recording studios kinda died, kinda went away. These huge studios with double-boards and all that stuff. Everything is smaller and some of the focus is gone from making original music to making commercial music. Like I said, I would come in, and do a 60-second commercial and play four bars [imitates playing] - “Thanks!” “What?” So it’s kind of changed. It might be difficult to find… I mean, Bad Animals is famous. Have you guys have ever heard of Bad Animals? That’s a great studio here. It was actually Kaye-Smith and then it expanded, Heart and some other investors bought it.

ROBERT NESBITT

Everybody recorded there.

TONY GABLE

Everybody recorded there at Kaye-Smith and Bad Animals, and even at Glenn Lorbiecki’s Glenn Sound. They also do commercials, but they still are recording original music and original tracks for albums, and that’s just been a shift in how everything works. And now, even us as a fusion band, you gotta be able to play together - but we still do overdubs, we go in and start overdubbing all over.

TONY GABLE

Thank you very much.

ROBERT NESBITT

Thank you.