Many of you know Rasa from his work with Hilaritas Press, you know of his current band, Starseed. But back in the day, Rasa was a rock musician with a band called Sweet Smoke.
A rare concert tape has emerged of Rasa's old band. Rasa explains (in a social media posting):
"A couple weeks ago I got a link to a video of the band I played with in Europe many years ago. The video, probably recorded on a Super 8 movie camera with notoriously poor sound quality, was cool to see, but the audio quality was atrocious. I gave the audio to Grammy award winning sound engineer Oz Fritz, who is also an expert in the world of Robert Anton Wilson, and he did an amazing job of fixing up the audio. It's still pretty rough, but at least you can make out what the band was playing.
"Enormous thanks to Oz for the enhanced audio, and to my band mates Andy (bass) and Jay (drums) who worked for a couple years to try to find and make a digital copy of this old movie. It seems strange in today's world where everyone has a video camera in their pockets, but we think this is the only known video of the band. There were three albums released by EMI, and one bootleg audio from a concert in Heidelberg circulating online now, but not a lot else recorded, sadly.
"At first Andy and Jay were unsure of where this was, hence Jay's first labeling "somewhere in France." We later figured out that this must have been in a gig we did as a special private party that was held in the 2nd floor banquet room in the Eiffel Tower. That was a trip, taking all our equipment up the Eiffel tower's elevator and setting up with an amazing view of Paris all around us."
In an email, Rasa adds, "I was thrilled to get this video as we didn’t have any video of the band. I was told that Jack Moore, who made this video, who was a contact for the band at EMI, later gave the recorder used in this video to The Rolling Stones to play with. There are a lot of bizarre Jack Moore stories from those days. There are lot of bizarre stories, period, from those days! Just playing in the Eiffel Tower was a trip!"
Tom again: Oz can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Grammy was for Mule Variations by Tom Waits. Oz was the recording engineer and did the mixing for the album,
5 comments:
I really like the progressive rock/jazz music of Sweet Smoke and hope, by some miracle, other live recordings of them might surface in the future.
Tom, the Grammy information is correct, thank-you.
Mule Variations is a fucking landmark album!
If I am not mistaken, among the official Sweet Smoke releases, Rasa (back then Rick Greenberg) only appears on the last album, Sweet Smoke Live (1974), but not on the first two studio albums.
In fact, his name does not even appear in the list of members on the discogs page.
This 'Live' album is available on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S67lUjNXjRg
Rasa might correct me if I am wrong.
Thank-you Lvx15
I did jam with the band several times when they first went to Europe, but only joined the band officially before the last album was produced, so yeah, I'm only on the last album.
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