posted 11/21/2007 11:55:36 AM

Sir Lord Baltimore - Kingdom Come

by Martin Popoff

Achieving mythic status o’er the years, Sir Lord Baltimore’s debut album Kingdom Come is well deserving of it, this hastily assembled band of wild brothers unwittingly coming up with some of the earliest heavy metal ever. If we were to namecheck everybody we’re supposed to, one would still tilt to the British, as 1970 gave us two Black Sabbath albums, Uriah Heep’s debut and Deep Purple’s seminal In Rock. Over on these shores, the wobbly stuff had come along and predated – Stooges, MC5, Blue Cheer – and then one had more of a cogent comparative in Mountain.

Still, one would have to give the nod to Sir Lord Baltimore – drummer and lead singer John Garner, guitarist Louis Dambra, and bassist Gary Justin – as the first “most pronounced and deliberate” hard rock America had to offer. The American stipulation is necessary: Kingdom Come doesn’t touch In Rock, Heep’s debut, or Paranoid, although put it up against Sabbath’s first, and, well… we’ve got a fight on our hands.

Like many things out of New York however, Sir Lord Baltimore was a bit of a business proposition and an assembly. Mountain was like that too, as was the Blue Oyster Cult and Cactus. Or more accurately, both Mountain and Cactus were a bit considered, a combination of overtly and covertly designed as units rocked up around Cream and Led Zeppelin. The BOC? Well, famously, Columbia wanted “their own Black Sabbath,” and so management and band, with a smug level of New Yorker self-awareness, conspired to convert their San Francisco psych outfit into something a little more devious.

And Sir Lord Baltimore? “I used to always buy the Village Voice back then,” begins John Garner, “and I saw an ad in the newspaper that said, “Heavy band needed to record album.”

And so the strange, all-too-fast tale of Sir Lord Baltimore begins. “Mike Appel, back in ‘69, discovered us,” continues John. “Before that, I had met Louis through school, I told him let’s jam, and then I saw Gary at school as well, at another school, playing the bass, in the school auditorium in a band called the Mama’s Boys (laughs). Anyway, I got us all together and we went down and rehearsed a few riffs down in my basement. So after I saw this ad, we just put together some drum beats and a bunch of riffs, some bass lines, some crazy vocal lines, you know, loud, ranting singing, and we went down there and met Mike Appel. Mike Appel loved us, even though the songs weren’t actually written or fixed. We fixed them together later - Louis, Gary, Mike, me and Jim. So yes, Mike wanted to produce us. We went to a studio out in West Orange, New Jersey called Vantone Studios; he had gotten us heavyweight manager Dee Anthony, and from there, we spent a lot of time in the studio making the first album. The whole thing happened in maybe a little less than a year.”

One of the legends that has grown up around Sir Lord Baltimore is that they weren’t that great a live act. There’s friggin’ good reason for that traveled barb. The band, unfortunately received its maximum amount of exposure at the point of least experience.

“We went straight from the studio to Carnegie Hall, which is kind of crazy. We should’ve had some warm-up gigs somewhere (laughs). And then after that it was the Fillmore East with Black Sabbath. You know, the first one was opening for Free. So we were like, wow! I guess we survived that. Of course, nobody I know was taking videos of us or whatever. And there’s an ongoing rumour that we were thrown off the stage at the Fillmore East, which is not true. What is true was that just before the gig, Louis went outside to buy something from the store or whatever, and they wouldn’t let him back in. They didn’t know that he had to go play. And they wouldn’t let him back in, so Louis said, ‘I’ll get you fired,’ this and that, and of course it was the manager Kip Cohen, and that stupid rumour got passed around.”

But, claims Garner, the band progressed steadily as a live act. “You know what? I’m going to tell you the absolute truth. Like I say, our first gig was Carnegie Hall. I was still 18. I was 19 in February, but we played Carnegie Hall in January, so you might say I was more 19 than 18. But anyway, I was fine, but the guys were really nervous. Louis’ leg wouldn’t stop shaking, so what he did was, he got on his knees and played a few solos that way. Gary was running across the stage without any thought of how long his bass cord was, and he pulled it out twice. But that’s normal, to expect from 19, 20-year-olds, when their first gig is Carnegie Hall, opening up for Free. I mean, come on, the excitement alone is going to make you run amok a bit.”

“But other than that, we were fine, we did great. When we played the Fillmore, we were straight ahead, everything was cool, we were getting better and better. I’m going to say something really negative about Sabbath, and I hope you don’t mind. We were on a tour with Black Sabbath. Now, we were friendly, Ozzy was a heck of a nice guy, Bill Ward was wonderful, the other two guys, kind of stuck up, you know. But we had played the Virginia Dome, and I believe it holds approximately 5000 plus people. Now, our manager, for some reason didn’t give us our own PA, and in our contracts there was a rider stipulating that whoever was the promoter had to supply us with a PA. Big mistake. That’s a big mistake. You always go with your own PA. You can’t depend on people. Anyway, he had made a deal with Black Sabbath’s manager that we could use their PA at these gigs that we were on together. So, we play the Virginia Dome, and of course we open up for them, because they were out, what… a year, half a year before us, and had some partial success already.”

“So we’re opening up the show, everything’s great, 5000 people are screaming, getting into it, loving us, boom. The lights go out, power goes out, everything goes out. OK, power comes back on. We start again. People are getting into it, really grooving to us, really loving us. Everything is going great. Boom, lights, power, out, again. That happened three times. Now, I’m 19, and I’m into love, peace, and happiness, man. I can’t believe somebody could be so devious and deceptive to pull the plug on a group. Call me naïve, and I was, but I never thought in a million years, that people could be so mean and do something so treacherous. It never dawned on me, because I never thought in a negative way. I just thought it happened, what are you going to do, man? I had no idea someone was pulling the plug. But in retrospect, I’m thinking about it, and looking at these guys, and you know, Black Sabbath… I don’t want to take anything away from them; they sound really excellent. But quite honestly, their musical content in each song just wasn’t as jam-packed as a Sir Lord Baltimore song. I think they saw us as a threat, and just pulled the plug on us. And I’d bet my new set of drums on it. And I never thought of it, until later on, until I got a little bit wiser, less naïve, and I had seen the wiles of the world and how people screw each other to get ahead.”

But before all that butt-shakin’ and stoner-rockin’, a legend had to be created, which came with that first record, Kingdom Come, by a band oddly monikered Sir Lord Baltimore. From whence that name?

“Mike Appel was watching this movie called Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and it had Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who actually were being tracked by somebody, an Indian tracker, and the Indian tracker’s name was Sir Lord Baltimore. So he thought it was cool. And actually, the two actors, on a mountainside actually say Sir Lord Baltimore.”

“We had nothing to do with that,” says Garner on another mysterious piece of the puzzle, the first album’s “ghost ship” cover painting. “That was done by Dee Anthony’s people. It’s pretty cool though, right? We liked it too. The second cover… man I don’t know. We wrote a song called Chicago Lives. We don’t know why. You’re just blowing a bone, and you say to yourself, ‘Oh yeah, Chicago lives. Cool.’ So that cover is actually embroidery of a Chicago thing, a Chicago emblem embroidery. I don’t know whose idea that was.”

Kingdom Come was presented as a gatefold sleeve package, with that washed-out grey/green painting continuing onto the back. The back cover lacks song titles, but offers this quote: “I hear sirens calling me/I fell prey into the wind/Sail on crimson majesty/Turn, turn wheel of fortune, spin…/Come my Kingdom come.”

Drop the needle of side one, track one, and you’re confronted with a catchy and innovative bass guitar intro. John then joins in spiritedly, and then Louis crashes through. It’s almost like a jam, but then the three get down to business with a kerrang of chords, Garner then icing the cake with his wild, interesting, soulful vocals. Indeed, stoner rock is born, all red-hot and jammy, nods to Hendrix and Cream, but so much crunchier of riff.

Hard Rain Fallin’ woefully lets on that Kingdom Come’s production is not up to the sparked flyin’ of the band at hand. John opens the track with a frantic beat, but his drums sound thin, tight of snare, lifeless of bass. Still, this is another hard rocking, riffing song, even if it’s a bit trashed.

Louis’ killer tone is the first thing one notices about Lady Of Fire, but then it becomes all about the band’s fireworked three-way chemistry. This one’s frantic and rushed as well, with Garner’s extreme and a little absurd vocal moving the track to an Edgar Broughton Band zone, circa Wasa Wasa.

Asked to differentiate the first album with the second and last (self-titled, 1971), John speaks amusingly about the band’s need for speed. “The main difference between them, was, quite honestly, we knew that the first Sir Lord Baltimore had an adolescent, imperfect genre about it. It was very raw. And we thought our tempos constantly went too fast, and we needed something to stabilize that, right? So we got Joey Dambra, Louis’ brother, who was a much more anchored kind of guitar player. His tempo was more steady. Louis used to like just speed up and speed up into the cosmos. And actually it was a mistake, because we didn’t realize that people loved that first album the way it was. I know I didn’t, but I was listening to groups like Led Zeppelin, and I’m hearing a perfect recording; the tempo is always perfect. And I’m thinking, hey man, that’s how we’ve got to become, more perfect with our tempo and things like that. Not realizing that what we had… that’s what people loved so much about us.”

“It’s part of the wild nature inside of all of us,” laughs Garner, asked about where their pioneering heaviness originated. “We either tap into it or we don’t - we suppress it. But we did not suppress it. Of course, back in those days, peace, love and happiness was the persona of the whole idea of the way of things, and you know, nobody knew how bad drugs were. So we smoked a lot (laughs). So we got a little wild, and we were naturally a little wild, and it came out in our music. I just loved heavy stuff back then. I still do. It gives me a sense… actually it doesn’t give me, but I feel, a sense of power when you hit a bass drum and it feels like somebody punched you in the chest, or if the guitar is grating and sounding really heavy and cool. Of course, back then the technology was a lot different, and you couldn’t sound as heavy as you did today. Critics these days say we sound like an ‘80s or ‘90s group, which is a bunch of bullshit really. Because we started back in 1970! So it’s funny to see how people judge our stuff, especially when they compare it to ‘80s or ‘90s metal, or that I sing a certain way. It makes me laugh, actually, but it’s okay. As long as it’s positive and people enjoy it.”

Side one of Kingdom Come provides a breather however, in a baroque harpsichord ballad called Lake Isle Of Innersfree, which Garner says is “totally Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos (note: non-band member credited in both the writing and production departments). Sir Lord Baltimore had nothing to do with the actual music of it, other than me singing it. It was written by Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos. Mike Appel played a guitar on it and Jim played the harpsichord. When we recorded that, we were getting a lot of opinionated reports about how stiff it sounded, but it’s a cute song. The girls like it (laughs).”

This one puts band and fan squarely into a stone zone. It’s dramatic, beautifully sung by John, dark, mysterious, and a bold dimension-building move by the consortium busy building this legendary record.

Side one closes with Pumped Up, another manic, punked-up hard rocker, Garner raving like a madman while Louis twangs and bends electricity to his choosing. Gary picks his spaces for bass, turning in some cool lines. Despite its off the rails forward mass, Pumped Up is actually written in 9/8 time.

“Honestly, Mike Appel wrote a lot of the lyrics,” says Garner, in a surprising admission for a lead vocalist. “But I came up with quite a few titles. I used to always say ‘pumped up.’ I don’t know if I invented it, but I used to say ‘Wow, that music really pumped me up man.’ Or I met this person and it was so exciting that I got pumped up from what he was telling me. And I said that back in ‘70, and Mike thought it was cool. So we wrote a song called Pumped Up. And also, I used to talk about people whose elevator doesn’t go to the top floor, and I used to call them helium heads. So he liked that too, and he wrote the words to Helium Head. And the other stuff was all inconsequential in that respect, but yes, Mike actually wrote most of those lyrics.”
Side two opens with the record’s imposing and impressive title track, John drumming out complex bass drum rhythms like Corky Laing and singing like something between a Viking and King Arthur o’ertop Louis’ sharp caveman riffs and fuzzy twinned leads.

This one also demonstrates a certain proto-metal charm when it comes to the production and mix. In fact, Kingdom Come was produced by none other than Eddie Kramer. “Good guy, great guy,” begins Garner’s assessment of the Hendrix legend. “He had an English accent, and he was very easy to work with. He had his own style of recording, and he made us sound better. He did some really nice guitar effects in Kingdom Come - there is some backward stuff going on, like he did with Jimi Hendrix. And while we were recording, Jimi Hendrix had called him one night. And we were flabbergasted because Jimi was like great, you know, the best ever. I mean, I listen to a lot of Hendrix even today; it’s still fresh and beautiful. What a sin that he died at 27. But we were hoping to eventually meet him, and we would have, had he not died. But yeah, Eddie was great. He played the cow bell on Helium Head (laughs). And he used to like eating Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies. He was OK, very cool to work with, a very easy, personable guy.”

On the subject of originality, of which this track possesses in spades, Garner says, “I used to buy very few albums, because everything after that was just a copy of something else. And I’m a believer in it not polluting your mind. For instance, we all have autonomic sensory in our heads, recall in other words - you remember something, and I know guys who listen to a lot of records, and think they’re writing an original song, and think it’s original, but they’re really playing a song that their memory m-grams have recorded from listening to somebody else. What I tried to do is I really try not to listen to anybody unless someone who is really original. Because I wouldn’t want to fill my mind with autonomic memory of somebody else’s music. So when I do write an original song, it comes from the roots, of the greatest guys like Hendrix, Cream, Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin. After that, really, who made a real profound foundation-airy… you know what I’m saying?”

Same sort of thing, says John, applied to Dambra, writer of the record’s riffs. “Louis used to listen to what I would listen to. He used to listen to the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck. We used to listen to Jimi Hendrix, of course. But you know, the funny thing about Lou, is that Lou is a totally untouched individual, musically. He was never in a copy band. He never played lounge groups, never did that. So he’s sort of like a guitar-playing virgin, you might say. Untouched by the world. So when he plays, it’s whatever comes out of his heart - that’s it. He’s very special that way. There’s no tainted stuff in Lou. Because he wasn’t the kind of guy to sit down with the record, and go ‘Wow, I’m going to do that riff. I’m going to copy that to a T.’ He was never like that.”

I Got A Woman is next up, and again, there’s a touch of Hendrix in there but a whole lot of originality, from the odd intro, to Garner’s crazy one-and-three beat. As usual with a Sir Lord Baltimore track, there’s a sense of dropped logic with subsequent passages, as if the guys figured this would be their last album, and we better a) get everything in and b) speed up to accomplish point a).

Hell Hound is more of the eardrum-piercing same, Louis almost colourizing over a cool bass pattern from Gary, while John decries, with a howl of pain, woman as hellhound, pretty much in keeping with his assessment on side one of woman as “master heartbreak.”

Says John, asked about his superb, histrionic, inspiring vocal work on the album, “I think the song that came together most accurately was Lady Of Fire. Although, you know, Kingdom Come is pretty cool. The other ones have a jocular tone, Pumped Up, Ain’t Got Hung On You (laughs). The words of that one are quite funny. I think that’s what people liked about it too. They not only dug the sound but they also dug the character. The euphemism I was using when I was singing actually prompted people to enjoy it and make them smile and laugh a little. And it was not my intention. It’s just how we were. We were nutty kinds of guys - we liked to have fun, and that’s that.”

“I created the melody obviously,” says Garner, asked about his method of working with lyricist, Appel, adding, “That’s another little footnote. On the album, it stipulates that Louis Dambra and Mike Appel wrote those songs. Not true. We all wrote them. But the funny thing about it is, we were screwed and gave everything away. We signed everything away without realizing it. We never made any money. Dee Anthony made all the bread. Actually, Dee Anthony is probably not alive right now or very, very ill. Because there is $4000 waiting to be picked up. But only his record company can pick it up. We tried to get it, but they won’t give it to us. And that’s artist’s rights, artist royalties, so… it’s four grand, you know what I mean? We can’t imagine in all those 30 years that went by, how many collections he took of that. But no one’s gotten it, so he’s probably sick or dead. It’s with Polygram, now Universal Group. We tried to get it but they won’t give it to us. It’s disgusting.”

Next up was Helium Head (I Got A Love), again a manic panic of a rocker, John driving this one hard, Louis sounding a bit Pagey. Garner’s voice is rattled and devious, the effect being a sort of rush toward escape, a fleeing of the studio before the bill comes due. Dambra gets some cool effects applied to his hotshot game, and the end result is one of the album’s most explosive and violent tracks, especially toward the end where the guys enter a climactic jam, before all melt away except John and his crazy fast beat.

Last song on the album is Ain’t Got Hung On You which almost gives off the vibe of a band spent, minds blown, able to whip up another raving jam, speaking in tongues, operating on fumes. The guys scratch out a hard, small, raucous song, almost like Captain Beefheart on speed, under-written, all energy.

“We did 29 dates and that was it,” says John, with respect to the rockscrabble bit of touring set up in support of Kingdom Come. “I couldn’t tell you every single one, but we did the eastern seaboard. We did New Jersey, Dover, we went to Virginia, to William and Mary College (note: College of William And Mary, in Williamsport). And then we went to New Orleans, and we played with Mountain at Loyola College. And then we went to Detroit and opened up a show for Fleetwood Mac and J. Geils, which was a really hairy concert. Because Detroit is a crazy scene; people are very boisterous over there. There were three big doors behind the stage, and each one had an armed guard there because people are trying to get in. It was a roomful of about 3000 people, and people were hanging off the balcony - kind of wild but exciting. But we did good; we did real good. It was a lot of fun.”

Did you ever play with MC5 or the Stooges?

“No, the closest I got… there was a club in Brooklyn called Dynamite, and I saw the MC5 play there. They were extremely loud, and actually they were louder than us when we first started. Then Sunn subsidized Louis, and he had two Sunn Coliseums that would just make your ears bleed, you know? I didn’t like them, because they were extremely, extremely powerful. So what we did was, we just used the heads, and hooked up a Marshall cabinet, and it cut down the ohmage, which also cut down the power, and we got a nice marriage going there.”

Asked about Dust or Kiss or other local bands from around that time, Garner recalls, “We knew that Dust was from our area and we knew they were a rival band. But we were a very cocky band back then. I was 19 years old when we recorded that album, and 19 when we started to tour. We had an attitude. We were very cocky, and what I mean by that is that I thought we were the best (laughs). And we kind of acted that way, and we thought that any other bands from the area had no chance. We used to hang out in a club called Nobody’s in the Village in Bleecker Street, and we would see Johnny Thunders in there. New York Dolls used to hang out in there, and honestly, we thought they were ridiculous, all these glam rock groups, we thought, come on, give me a break, I’m not putting no makeup on, get out of here! You wanna be a pretty boy or do you wanna make music?! What’s going on? (laughs).”

And yes, weirdly in Sir Lord Baltimore, the drummer was the lead singer – on every song. “Of course, who else was going to do it?” laughs Garner. “I used to scream like a maniac. The music was primal, and when I was at the Fillmore, I almost blacked out. I’ve got to tell you, and I was so thankful to God that I didn’t (laughs)… I put a scream out that was a little above my body’s ability, but we always gave it all we had. I know I did. Song-wise, I don’t remember the set list, but it was all originals. I liked playing Helium Head and also Pumped Up, where Louis does a little guitar solo in the middle. Those were cool ones to play.”

“No, we didn’t get to that level,” answers Garner, asked if the guys were known for any crazy stage props. “Of course, if we would’ve become a household name, which I firmly believe we were more than able to become, of course we would have ventured into extreme production, and had some sort of crazy on-stage props that would entertain the folks, you know? But of course that would’ve been down the line, and it’s only a dream now. You know, at least I made a mark.”

“When we were out on tour, a lot of people were telling us we were ten years ahead of our time,” sighs John, charting now the demise of the band. “You know, I don’t want to be ten years ahead of my time. I want to be a star and make a lot of money now (laughs). That’s what I want to do. So we thought that was good, and of course Dee Anthony, when he saw that the first album… we sold over 380,000 known copies of that record. And yeah, that wasn’t obviously enough for Dee Anthony, so he was sort of like, putting us off. So now, Dee Anthony gets rid of Mike Appel. Actually, according to Mike, he got ripped off too, except for one check that he got for… I don’t know how much that check was for. That’s personal stuff. But anyway, now Dee Anthony is sort of like shunning us, and not interested in us anymore for some reason. So we get another producer, through him. He’s still acting, but is just not as open to us as he used to be. Because he didn’t make his billions right away or whatever. And now we have a new producer, and we didn’t really need a new producer. We should’ve stayed with Mike Appel. It was none of us that did this. It was Dee Anthony that did it all. We needed Mike. Because Mike was like a fourth member of the band, no two ways about it.”

Sir Lord Baltimore’s second album somewhat holds form to the band’s novel heaviness, but it’s a bit weird, druggy and dour, with a hint of the commercial thrown in just to confuse. “It’s a little more polished,” agrees Garner, “and Joey anchored the band more. We had it in our heads we had to stay within the tempo better. I don’t know, the second album was OK, but the drum sound was like old hat, with formula studio sound recording methods. Not like a John Bonham drum sound - that’s what we really needed. Something big and heavy. It sold substantially less than the first, because Dee Anthony stopped the promo machine. You have to remember, Dee Anthony had Joe Cocker then, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Steve Marriott and The Faces, a few other big names. Very powerful man.”

Ever one to take a deep dish listen to the hard stuff, the esteemed Lester Bangs reviewed the second Sir Lord Baltimore in the pages of Creem, December ‘71, stating that, “Their music not only lives up to their name; it’s better. Simply, Sir Lord Baltimore sound much of the time like a distillation of the din in a sheet metal factory set to the beat of a ballpeen hammer smashing the rubble of a leveled tenement into even smaller rubble - what more could any reasonable man ask? If you think noise is good, if you think things are oft times more interesting without a cumbersome melody in the way, if you nourish notions that the real electronic music is all this flat, crashing, tuneless amped-up guitar clanging that’s thrived these last years, then this is the album for you.”

Bangs continues, “On second thought, their first album, Kingdom Come might be the better buy of the two. I like it better because in general they tend to play faster on it than they do on this one, and I really can’t find anything hereon as crazed as Pumped Up on Number One. Fact, this effort do get just a tad pretentious in the opening stretch which is occupied by the 11-minute Big Production Ambitious Suite, Man From Manhattan, which is subdivided into short sequences and makes it in part but largely flips in toto. Why does every god damn good Crashboom band that comes along get, yes, pumped up indeed, so soon on the set and start thinking in terms of vast rocknroll cantatas and symphonies and sweets? Lotsa short songs keeps the fans content. Think about it guys.”

The diminishment and death of Sir Lord Baltimore was at hand. “Yes, the loss of Dee Anthony, drugs played a big, big part, everybody was going off the deep end,” continues John. “We were living in the fast lane. Drugs were extremely available. I got screwed up with drugs really bad. Drugs of a different nature, but they were just as bad. That’s what happens with drugs, man. They will ruin anything and anybody, if you let it. We were stupid kids. Back in the ‘70s, there was no red flag going up anywhere about drugs, how bad they could screw you up. It was like ‘Eh, don’t worry about it.’ The attitude was, ‘If it becomes a problem, I’ll just stop; no big deal.’ And that’s bullshit, because that stuff is diabolical if you let it keep on. And it can ruin your life, and it ruined our careers. That’s what happened there. And Dee Anthony washed his hands of the situation. He had the juice, and we didn’t have the business sense to continue on our own. We were too young.”

“So yes, after the second album, things went downhill. You know, all the great stuff that was happening wasn’t happening anymore, so we broke up. I went on to join a big 12-piece soul band, and had a great time doing that, and then I had a girlfriend named Olympia, Louis had married. So he married Olympia, and Olympia was a pretty influential kind of girl, and she convinced us to reform Sir Lord Baltimore again, and that’s when Mike Appel, as a manager now, who has Bruce Springsteen, took us under his wing again.”

“Now that’s when the ‘74, ‘75, ‘76 recordings of lost tapes happened. I don’t know if you know the story, but Mike was in litigation with Bruce Springsteen, and there was a lot of bad shit going on with that, and I guess that took up a lot of his time. Then… I was let go. OK? Because I was getting a little higher than the other guys (laughs). So they went on out to California, Laurel Canyon, with Mike Appel, only to find out that it was all in vain. The music changed. They even had a timbale player; I don’t know what the hell they were thinking. To make a long story short, Louis almost got arrested out there, and they thought they found a singer, but something happened where he got hit by a bus or got in a bad car accident, something like that. And it just didn’t pan out.”

And where do these lost tapes reside? John is in ownership of a rough mix and that’s it. Unfortunately, he’s not happy with the sound, having said it had lost “10 db of juice” in the transfer between studios (something to do with DBX-encoding), and that “the drums sound like I was hitting refrigerator boxes.” The original four tracks, were in fact produced by the esteemed Jimmy Iovine at The Record Plant (Iovine won’t return Garner’s hopeful enquiries about maybe something somewhere kickin’ around). But in actuality, Garner is pretty sure the band’s bassist, Gary Justin, ended up with the masters – and Gary claims to have lost them.

John is coming around to the idea of trying to clean those legendary old songs up and release them, but his major reservations is that “Love Slave is pretty graphically about sado-masochism. Louis would have a conniption if I released that. But I’ve become more lenient about it over the years. Louis is a pastor and I have great respect for spirituality myself, but you know, I don’t think Vincent Price is going to hell, do you?”

In terms of any other vintage Sir Lord Baltimore material out there at all, John says he has a number of cassette tapes with jams and pieces of songs on them, and that he’s been meaning to go through those before they deteriorate completely. As well, he recalls that “Sir Lord Baltimore played a charity gig at a big church in New York, and he remembers that somebody – likely just a fan in the crowd – videotaped it. And Carnegie Hall… I remember that Dee Anthony recorded our show there on reel-o-reel but those tapes, or Dee Anthony for that matter, neither have been seen in ages. Plus that was, you know 7 IPS, which deteriorate in just a few years – we’re talking 37 years now.”

Back to those confusing days in the mid-’70s marking the band’s fade, John picks up the story. “At that point Mike just withdrew. That’s when they realized that Sir Lord Baltimore is nothing without John Garner. I mean, I put the band together, I got the band a record deal, I got the guys together, and anytime the guys wanted anything… I didn’t want this position. I didn’t want to be the leader of the band, but I was forced to. Because Gary was comme ci comme ca, Louis was comme ci comme ca, and they would always complain to me about certain things that they wanted from the manager, business stuff, and I would present that to the managers. But now they saw me as, ‘Hey, we don’t need you; we got them,’ that kind of thing. As a matter of fact, Mike Appel told me that I reminded him of Bruce Springsteen, that I want to get this done, I want to get that done, I want to get over here, I want to do this, I want to do that. So the guys allowed him to let me go, and I went to the guys, ‘Listen guys, we’re not a band if I go. It’s over.’ They didn’t think that. And I was dismayed that they didn’t stand by me: if I had such a problem, help me; I’m a friend, right? But hey, that’s more on the personal end of stuff that people don’t really need to know about. But that’s what happened, and now, I released this stuff all on my own. By my lonesome self here at home, I bought a digital recording studio, I tweaked up the CDs that I had, I added vocals here and there, in my living room, (laughs), and I made the CD.”

What John is referring to Sir Lord Baltimore – III: Raw, a self-published CD of six songs from that era, both re-recorded (with Louis, plus bass players Tony Franklin and Sam Powell), and with new lyrics reflective of Garner’s and Dambra’s Christian faith. The roughly 30 minute CD is available at sirlordbaltimore.com.

And what do Sir Lord Baltimore experts think? Well, they decry the fact that Garner has replaced the old “rock ‘n’ roll” lyrics with somewhat religious ones, but on the other hand, are suitably impressed with Garner’s starkly incredible and soulful vocals, as well as the authenticity and adventure of the musical tracks. It seems to be viewed out there as a qualified success, as well as a situation where the original magic and independence of the band shines through.

Adds John, “People wanted to hear from Sir Lord Baltimore, and I put it together and, hey, if you want it, you got it. If you don’t want, then you don’t want it. I felt that we owed it to our friends who really liked the band, and wanted to hear the songs. I get tons of email all the time from people that are so happy that we have something out, that we’re still alive, still going - they’re encouraging letters, wonderful.”

“I’m going to be honest with you, I’m disappointed in both of them,” says Garner, intimating that all is not entirely well in the Sir Lord Baltimore camp. “Gary went on to Wall Street for 27 odd years, and he got married. He doesn’t call up, he doesn’t hang out with the boys. And Louis is a pastor, and he’s very much a pastor. God bless him. I mean, he loves God, and that’s his work out there in LA. He finds homes for the homeless. And I said, ‘Anybody can find homes for the homeless but nobody can play guitar like you can.’ And I said, ‘We can reach a lot of these metalheads who are into destroying themselves with diabolicism.’ I said to him, ‘You know, if you want to do that, let’s go to that.’ And he’s scared, because he’s got pay, he’s got a job, he’s afraid to step out in faith, which is funny to say about a pastor, right? And you know, we’re all getting older. And our health isn’t as great as it used to be. But I still play my ass off, and I sing my ass off, but I don’t hit those high notes as well as I used to, but we’ve got that shit going. I love it. I don’t have as much energy as I used to, but hey man, an hour and a half show? No problem.”

“This is what I’m doing,” says John in closing. “I gave Louis and Gary a chance to be part of this. If they don’t want to be, I’m taking it on the road myself. I have a guitar playing friend from Sweden. They love us in Europe, and in Sweden, especially. And I’ve been asked to play the Swedish Rock Festival, as Mr. Sir Lord Baltimore (laughs) and there’s a guy out there named Janne Stark (note: Overdrive in the ‘80s, Locomotive Breath in the ‘90s and ‘00s). He’s a fabulous guitar player, and he’s coming to visit and we’re going to be jamming a little bit, and he’s going to be the next guitar player for Sir Lord Baltimore, if everything works out with my health and all that. I’m 55 now. I can’t believe it - where did the time go? It’s kind of wild. But hey, I’m still a 19-year-old in my heart (laughs).”

Permalink | Comments (0) | Viewed 708 times Post to del.icio.us | Digg It