Bay-Area band The Rubinoos have come to embody that increasingly elusive idea of true “Power-Pop” because of their lifelong identity as a vocal group. Those who stray too far from that vocal foundation rarely convey the energy of the term, but as their recent album, From Home, Produced and co-written by Chuck Prophet, shows, they still build upon those firm foundations. Their penchant for recording with a live sound on their first two albums (and on their most recent album, too) means that their archival recording, The CBS Tapes, which was tracked as a rehearsal, conveys much of the same energy as their more familiar work. Those tapes will be released by Yep Roc on June 25th. Both The CBS Tapes and their first album also capture a lot of the exuberance, or depending on how you look at it, the brattiness, of their actual live performances around 1976, when the Tapes were recorded.
On the lead up to their second batch of recordings for their first album, the band was recorded performing the 11 songs on The CBS Tapes as a form of warm-up, and the songs range from stage staples to more random influences and interests of theirs. The Tapes came up in conversation with Chuck Prophet, who, upon hearing them, strongly suggested that they release them, and their label Yep Roc agreed. When I chatted briefly with Chuck Prophet about his decades-long fandom for The Rubinoos, he explained that he first saw the band perform in his high school gymnasium around the age of 15 and, to him, they formed part of a self-contained scene around Jonathan Richman that also contained the seeds of a proto-Punk movement. It was their virtuosity, but also their range of sound, that impressed him, even veering into “funny music”. “When you hear, ‘Rock ‘n Roll is dead and we don’t care!’”, Prophet commented, “It’s kind of like ‘Okie from Muskogee’ and you can’t really tell if they are serious. Which is kind of genius. It’s irony, but it’s pretty advanced.”
Prophet wasn’t quite up on everything that was going into The Rubinoos’ musical “Cuisinart”, from Doo-wop, to Motown, to The Beach Boys, but it was impossible not to be “turned on” to a great deal of new music just by listening to them. Hearing them now is still just as powerful an experience for Prophet, like in the studio on From Home. He explains: “When I worked on their record last year, when they all stood around one microphone and sang together, it was impossible to feel cynical. It’s really the only thing left that really tickles my monkey bone. When the four of them sang in tune, with the quality of their voices, it was incredible.”
I also spoke with Jon Rubin at length about The CBS Tapes, where all this “brattiness” expressed in plenty of profanity on the recordings came from, and how they wound up with such a broad appreciation of musical genres, broad enough to get them booed offstage upon occasion.
Hannah Means-Shannon: How did you come across this recording again? Was it something you’ve always been aware of and considered for release?
Jon Rubin: Tommy [Dunbar] came across a cassette of this that had been lying around for a long time. It wasn’t something we’ve paid a great deal of attention to. But we were kind of going through our archives and played it for Chuck Prophet, who produced our last album for Yep Roc, From Home. And he just loved it, and said, “This is fantastic. We gotta do something with this.” He had us give it to the guys at Yep Roc and they were into it. That’s how it kind of fell together, serendipitously. It wasn’t something we had been thinking of for a release anytime in the last 45 years! It’s an interesting snapshot for the band’s career. I’ve been kind of surprised by peoples’ reactions. They really react to the energy that’s going on in that recording. It’s not pristine by any stretch of the imagination but it definitely has a lot of exuberance, that’s for sure.
HMS: I totally agree with you. I’m kind of historically minded, too, so this is really exciting to me. Having primary material from that time period that has been preserved is awesome. The sound quality is great, too!
JR: I was pretty surprised. For the integrity of the project, we kept it a “live to 2-track”, and that’s what’s been released. It very possibly could have been mixed to cassette while it was going down. The engineer, Glenn Kolotkin, could have been doing it on the fly. A lot of stuff isn’t perfect, but sonically, we were actually getting sounds for recording our first album. That’s part of what was going on there in the set-up for recording. But it was in a professional studio with a really excellent engineer. We’d only been in the studio two or three times in our career at that point. We’d done “Gorilla” for Beserkley Chartbusters, and for the album, we’d done one batch of recordings. This was right before our second batch of recordings for the first album, the day before. We did knock the record out quickly after that.
HMS: Thanks for explaining that, since I was wondering what the relationship was between this session and recording your debut album. You were all incredibly young on this recording. Were you still in high school?
JR: We had probably just finished. We were definitely teenagers. We were green, and obnoxious little punks! [Laughs] But we were pretty excited to be in that situation and there was a lot of naïve enthusiasm for doing it. We were in a studio where a lot of great records had been made, and we were working with Santana’s engineer, and Santana was a band that, obviously, we really liked at the time. There was a lot to be excited about. We’d also been preparing pretty hard to get ready to make the record, so on that day, we really let loose. It got much more regimented the next day, but on that day, it was very much, “Do whatever you want! Go, go, go!” But we were pretty bratty and foul-mouthed.
HMS: I wanted to ask you about this, since you’ve mentioned the brattiness a couple of times. Apparently, the band was censured for behavior on stage on at least one occasion, as well. But you’ve also stated that you think it was part of the identity or tone of the band to be that way. Where do you think that came from?
JR: There was stuff we loved, growing up musically, starting with the 50s Rock ‘n Roll, and into the 60’s Pop, and 60’s Soul. But the other things we really liked was 60s Garage music. There wasn’t really Punk at the time, but there was Iggy and the Stooges, and The Sonics. We were really into that stuff. The other thing we were really into at the time was Frank Zappa, particularly his first few albums. We listened to them religiously. I think his sensibility and his sense of humor really infected us. I think his album, We’re Only In It For The Money, is his Sgt. Pepper, or his Pet Sounds. And I don’t say that because the cover parodies Sgt. Pepper. I say that because, musically, it’s the third pillar of a concept album trilogy.
The composing on that is incredible, but the attitude and the humor on it is a totally different thing than the humor on Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds. It’s very grating, and caustic, and rude. We loved that stuff and it definitely informed our stage performance. It’s going too far to say that we “antagonized” the audience, because that’s actually farther than we wanted to go, but we wanted to make them react. We started playing “Sugar, Sugar” because we thought it was terrible and funny, but as we played it, we started analyzing it and realizing how well-written it was. But we also knew our audience would be appalled if we played it in the early to mid 70s to a hippie or Rock audience. We would try a lot of stuff on stage that was probably antithetical to what a lot of people wanted to see at that time. It was somewhat because we were obnoxious, somewhat because that’s what we liked, somewhat because we wanted to get the audience to react.
The biggest example of that was when we opened a show for ‘Starship at Winterland in San Francisco in 1975, I think. We played “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat”, which actually didn’t get much of a reaction because the audience didn’t know it. Then we did, “Sugar, Sugar”, which everyone knew, and Jonathan Richman came up onstage and danced The Archie. It was one of the first venues to have a big screen over the stage, and they were projecting Jonathan up there. The audience started booing. We were young and there were six thousand people booing us. Then we did, “Memphis Soul Stew” into “The Pepsi Generation” as our closer, and they went berserk. They were pelting the stage with anything they could get their hands on. Honestly, I think all of us were shocked at the hostility level, it was so high. The next day, that’s what was written about in the paper. When I got backstage, I was kind of shellshocked. I thought we’d get a little pushback, but nothing that heavy. But Grace Slick was backstage. She came up to me and gave me a hug and said, “Don’t worry about it! Fuck those people! You guys did great!” She was super nice and it made me love Grace Slick forever.
HMS: I’m so glad that she did that. My natural reaction to hearing this is to think what a downer it must have been. It must have been hard to handle as a young person. As you said, you were aware that you were pushing against the current of the time, but who would be ready for that?
JR: Oh, we definitely were not. People were hurling stuff, hard. [Laughs] And Bill Graham saying, “You guys will never play for me again!” But, actually, the next day, we got a record offer from ABC-Dunhill [Records]. Some guy had seen us and thought, “There’s something going on there.” We kind of had a Punk attitude, though it wasn’t called that at the time. We loved bands like that. The Ramones were just about to break.
HMS: I heard there was a lot of genre mixing going on around this time in the Bay Area, including proto-Punk stuff taking shape.
JR: Punk was still pretty much unheard of there. The Dictators and The Ramones were in New York. But the song, “I Want Her So Bad” on The CBS Tapes, was written by Tommy for a band that he and I started, kind of to do what would become Punk stuff. When we started out, the band was called Alfred Cooper, and I was playing drums, and Tommy was playing guitar, and two of our friends also played bass and guitar. We recorded a session at our friend Dan’s house on his 4-track. That was our incredible recording experience in 1974. The band rapidly changed its name to The Psycotic Pineapple. And that was, most assuredly, a proto-Punk band, both very proto and very Punk.
Tommy wrote that song in about five minutes, and the lyrics were stream of consciousness. He’d shout the lyrics and we’d try to answer him if we could hear what he was saying. Eventually, Rubinoos duties became all that we could handle, so Tommy and I were replaced in that band by a couple of friends. They went on to make an album later that decade which I highly recommend listening to. It has a lot of good songs. It was released in 1979 or 1980 but it was recorded around 1977. We did play gigs with that band, and the response was, “What the hell is this?”
HMS: I was going to ask you if you got equally hostile reactions there!
JR: I don’t remember anything overtly hostile, but I do remember people wondering, “What is this music?” It was really crude, and really loud, and really obnoxious. It led right up to the fact that we hit London during the peak on Punk during our first European tour. That was a blast for us since I had been down there the day that Sex Pistols came out on import. I loved that stuff. Of course, I listen to it now, and it sounds like a Pop record.
HMS: Things have gotten so much heavier since then. Your musical tastes are clearly so eclectic and always have been. It seems like you found a very similar mentality with the other guys in the band. Was that weird at all? Or did everyone wade around in genres back then?
JR: I think Berkeley is a place where you get exposed to a lot of stuff. Everyone comes through Berkeley to play, which is interesting. It was a small town, but a college town, so you’d get Devo, and all kinds of oddball choices. But also, there was college radio, which was freeform. The deejays would program their own shows. You’d get Jimi Hendrix and Gabor Szabo on the same set in an FM playlist, which was crazy. The other thing I should mention is that Berkeley was a really big R&B scene. That’s something that we always loved growing up, particularly the Pop side, like Stax and Motown. We loved the Motown arrangements, and certainly that was a big influence on us. There was also a whole Rock and Psychedelic scene, so all of that poured into our tastes. The way that we started our band was going through Tommy’s older sister’s 45 collection, and listening to 50’s stuff, like The Coasters, The Drifters, The Everly Brothers, and Little Richard. I’ve always been a pretty big novelty song fan. I think novelty music made me want to play even more because I enjoyed it so much. The first record I ever owned as a kid was “Purple People Eater”. I played that so much that one day I came home from school and I couldn’t find my record. I asked my mom where it was and she said, “I don’t know.”
So there was all that stuff, but then also hanging around with other musicians, all older than us, meant that they would play us a lot of different stuff. We were just very lucky in that respect. That led to the eclectic taste in music, and Tommy and I really shared that. Don [Spindt’s] tastes leaned more toward English Rock than ours did, probably. Though, of course, we loved The Beatles and The Who. We all listened to the same stuff a lot. We’d go over to our friends’ houses, those who had big record collections, and make cassettes. That would be our listening material. Now, it’s so easy to find stuff, but back then there was no oldies radio and there were no oldies reissues. If you wanted something, you had to find someone who had it. I look at that as my alternate education.
HMS: If we had gone to a Rubinoos concert the week before The CBS Tapes were made, would these have been the songs that we heard from you in 1976?
JR: Some of that stuff we never played live, but some of it, absolutely. We were still in a fairly formative stage in terms of our live show at that point, too, trying out material, and honing it down, too. If you want to hear a live set that’s very representative, which would have been the culmination of that period, there’s a live album done in 1978 at the Hammersmith Odeon that’s well-recorded. I’m very proud of it, actually, we played well that night. It is a lot more refined, obviously, than the CBS Tapes, though they give you a good idea of where we were heading.
HMS: How different was the “live” recording process on The CBS Tapes to the way in which you recorded your first album?
JR: The first two albums were both recorded fairly live, and by that I mean that we all played together when we were doing the tracking. I don’t even think we used a click track on anything back then. There’s a lot of tempo variation that’s not significant, but is noticeable, in the songs. It’s a very good process for us. We rehearse like crazy, get very comfortable with the material, go in, and play it live. I’d usually do work vocals while they were recording, so you could hear the song and the changes. The biggest difference between those records and the ones we did later was the amount of rehearsing. Before our first album, we’d been rehearsing probably five days a week for a year. And whenever we could, we’d be gigging on the weekends. I think it really helped with us being able to record those records quickly, efficiently, and with our “feel”.
