It’s an oddity for sure, with its mixture of funk, rock guitar
and cosmic lyrics. It still sounds good
today though. Last year I heard one of the tracks played over the PA at a large
festival, so I figure there must be a few people out there who think the same
way.
Mike Shrieve was already a big name from Santana |
How did this cosmic funk prog band come to be?
When Mike Shrieve left Santana in 1975, he was keen to develop a band project and so got together with guitarist Pat Thrall and jazz keyboard player Todd Cochran, also known as Bayete.
Shrieve met Thrall when he collaborated with Steve Winwood and the Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta on the ‘Go’ albums. Bayete, an established jazz player, had the songwriting skills and it was his influence that would prove to be the greatest in terms of the band’s direction. The fourth member of the band was bassist Doni Harvey.
They were signed by Island Records and moved from San
Francisco to London, recording at Olympic Studios in Barnes with engineer Keith
Harwood. The result was a collection of
songs high on melody and set to a background of synthesiser swirls, wild guitar
solos and with Shrieve’s dramatic flourishes propelling the whole thing. The balance of the rock and funk elements was
pitched just right, making the album accessible and appealing, potentially, to
a wide audience.
The problems came when they tried to reproduce it live. The band played in Europe and the US in 1976,
but by all accounts they struggled to capture the magic of the album. Since much of its dynamic was due to
the layered synth lines and the various effects applied to the guitar and
drums, it’s easy to see how they might have found it hard to reproduce.
Expectations had been high though; the record was good and the
album artwork had been expensive to produce, so Island were looking to recoup.
But the single only just scraped into the top 100 and the album failed to
capture a wide enough audience. The
band, minus Shrieve, moved back to the US. Bayete and Thrall recruited a new
rhythm section and recorded a second album, Visitors, which lacked the panache
of the first album. Shrieve was the big name in the band and without his
distinctive style, there was even less interest in the second album. Automatic
Man disbanded in 1978.
Mike Shrieve said: “I put a lot into Automatic Man. We had
great players, Pat Thrall on guitar, Bayete, a genius on
keyboards, David Rice on bass at first, then Doni Harvey. We rehearsed every
single day at my house in San Francisco. I bought instruments for everybody, my
girlfriend at the time, Maria Ysmael, cooked wonderful dinners every single
night.
"We moved to London to do the record, which we were really excited about. We just couldn’t seem to get it together live, though. We had a falling out and the rest of the band moved to LA and made another record without me, and that was that.”
"We moved to London to do the record, which we were really excited about. We just couldn’t seem to get it together live, though. We had a falling out and the rest of the band moved to LA and made another record without me, and that was that.”
Todd Cochran's career continued to thrive as he wrote and performed with Aretha
Franklin and Peter Gabriel. Pat Thrall went on to work in the fusion field with
musicians including Narada Michael Walden and Alphonso Johnson. He joined the
Pat Travers Band and later worked with Glenn Hughes.
Doni Harvey continued to play sessions and for a time was a member of the fusion band Nova. I saw Nova play a support slot at the Hammersmith Odeon around 1978. Harvey obviously modelled himself on Jimi (the spelling of his name is a giveaway – and see back cover photo of Automatic Man) and on this night he was pulling all the Jimi shapes and moves. It was remarkable but also faintly ridiculous.
In 2004, a remastered version of Automatic Man was released
by Lemon. Tom Karr of Progressive World gave the disc a five star rating in his
review: "People have a strong desire to categorise things, to put them in boxes. In the sense of Automatic Man fitting into a pre-conceived sub-genre
of progressive rock, then no, they are not a prog band. But they are much, much
more than any label given them could describe. They
could just as well be described as a hard rocking funk band. No group I can think of so defies categorisation as
does Automatic Man."
I’ll stick with Cosmic Funk Prog.
I’ll stick with Cosmic Funk Prog.
brilliant brilliaNT BAND saw them in 1976 in London....
ReplyDeleteGreat review.
ReplyDeleteVery underestimated band zich a pity.
ReplyDelete