The JOE TANSIN Interview

My last record was The City Beat. And that's just basically a lot of music that I managed to retain the rights for, mostly soundtrack-oriented music. That came out just toward the end of last year. It's doing pretty good right now. I've got a new project of mine that I hope to start late spring, early summer. And I'm not really sure if that's going to be a vocal record. City Beat was an instrumental record. The next one's probably going to be songs. Ray and I at Permanent Press are already starting to talk about it. It's just a matter of direction. We kind of wanted to wait and see how well The City Beat was going to do. Because obviously, if it really, really takes off, we'll want to do another one, along the same lines. So, I'm still undecided. The City Beat is available in most major chain record stores and on the internet through CD Now. It's on the Permanent Wave label.

We were three young guys and we had a pop group, and we were very much into that whole Beatle thing. We got a lot of people interested in us and we didn't have a full line-up. We were minus a bass player and we auditioned quite a few people and eventually we bumped into Joey.

Now Joey didn't think too much of the management that we had at the time. He'd had a lot more experience than us, and been burned by several managers in his past. Basically, he wanted to get rid of the guys that we had, unless they willing to commit to investing a lot of money into the situation. And they felt a little threatened by Joey's presence. They didn't want us to be involved with Joey. These two guys were Arthur Spivak and Joe Meyorello. Arthur Spivak now manages Mark Cohen and he managed Tori Amos a few years ago. I'm not sure if he still does. His company is named Spivak Entertainment and it is doing quite well, from what I understand. Anyway, they weren't willing to cough up the kind of money that Joey needed to be a part of this situation. And he had his suggestions. He wanted us to dump these guys. He was the older and the wiser, so we went along with the picture. We got rid of Joe and Arthur, who had been with us from... who brought us from Chicago to Los Angeles. They put us up. They did a lot for us. It was a situation that I look back on and I kind of regret that they didn't get a fair shake from Kenny, myself, and Robert. If I could do anything to turn back time that would have been one of the things I would have done differently.

At this point there was Joey, Kenny, myself, and Robert. Well, Robert was more and more starting to feel as though he didn't fit into the picture. He was a lead singer. He didn't play guitar. Basically Joey and I both sang. I wrote my own songs, sang them, Joey did the same. The both of us were pretty prolific songwriters, Joey, myself, and Robert. So two-thirds of the evening, Robert would just be standing there doing nothing, shaking a tambourine, and he realized that the kind of group that he really needed was a group that needed a lead singer, ala The Rolling Stones or whatever. And he started going up to San Francisco where some friends of his had a group called Thumbs, and they were being managed by a guy from Chicago called Ken Adamany, who managed Cheap Trick at the time.

Robert eventually kind of distanced himself from us, and I guess seeing the writing on the wall, just one day just said "That's it. I'm going to San Francisco. I think where you guys are heading is some place without me. I don't see myself fitting into this situation. I'm gonna leave and I'm going to go to San Francisco and join this group The Thumbs." Which he did.

So at one point, Joey said, "Listen, I think Tommy would be perfect for this. Why don't we give him a buzz and send him a tape?" So we had cut, I don't know, maybe four, five, six tracks. And we called Tommy up and he said, "Send the tapes." So we sent them over. And he sent us a few. Well, the feeling was kind of mutual, it was a mutual-admiration society. We sent him our stuff. He heard the possibilities and was very, very interested. And the stuff he sent over was... he sent us a piano, vocal of "Sail Away" and "Lost Inside Your Love." I immediately loved both those songs. I thought they were terrific, and to this day, I think "Lost Inside Your Love" and "Sail Away" are probably the two best songs Tommy has ever written. And I'm familiar with just about everything that he's ever done. At that point he came to Los Angeles. And we met Tommy. We didn't have any management at this point, nor was there any money or funding involved.

And Tommy had just left playing with a group called The Dodgers. They recorded a few singles and they were a very Beatles sound-alike group. And Tommy was fed up with them. He didn't want to be in a band that had anything to do with the Beatles in word association, sound association or anything of that nature. He was sick of the whole Apple thing. He sick of the association with The Beatles. He was sick of all the questions. Obviously, he was still very emotional over the death of his best friend, Pete.

He immediately saw Kenny as someone clamoring, and trying to grab onto some instant stardom, because Kenny was so interested in wanting to call the group Badfinger. One of the reasons, as I say, that Tommy and I became close in the beginning was he knew I wasn't interested in that. I didn't care if we called it The Green Giraffe. It wouldn't have made any difference to me nor Tommy. We got along terrific in the beginning. We sort of bonded, you know.

There's a lot that's been said about this John Ryan stuff. That's something that I hope that I can touch upon so I can set the record straight. There's been all kinds of talk on the internet as being such fantastic stuff, and highly-sought-after stuff, and blah-blah-blah. I'll tell you something, I heard those tapes for the first time after twenty years, about a year ago, when I started to talk to John Ryan about maybe doing something with these to put them out. The first batch, which was, I believe, four songs, "Lost Inside You're Love," "Come Down Hard," "Love Is Gonna Come At Last," and "The Winner," those are the first four that we recorded. We had just met each other, and we had just met Tommy, and we only knew him for a couple of weeks and "bingo" we were in the studio, at Sound City in Los Angeles, in Van Nuys, and we were cutting tracks. So, you know, it was rough. I mean, this wasn't a well-rehearsed band. It wasn't band that had been together a couple of years. So we were all new to each other.

So we in and we cut four tracks in four days, five days. John Ryan had a relationship with the owner of Sound City, Joe Gottfreid, who passed away some years back. Sound City is a studio of quite notoriety. Over the years they did alot of the Fleetwood Mac records, all the stuff with Buckingham & Nicks was done there, Cheap Trick, Tom Petty, the list goes on and on and on. A lot of these new groups have been using the studio, too. So it's quite a well-respected recording studio in Los Angeles and has been for a long time. Ryan knew some people there, pulled a few strings, and got us in. He wanted to produce the band very much. We went in. There were five songs in the beginning. Actually, there was a fifth called "Don't Break This Heart Of Mine," which was a song I wrote. I don't have a copy, Joey does. In a recent conversation, Kathie, his wife said, "We were listening to it the other day and it sounds quite good." I think it sounds more like Bruce Springsteen than Badfinger. But we went in and we cut these five tracks and we used the four of them. Those were the four that got us a record deal. John Ryan, by the way, as far as his production is concerned, a lot of people have commented on how wonderful these tracks were. As I say, I've heard them and they are very rough. The only thing that I think they showed was energy, there was an excitement there, and there was promise. But it was very rough around the edges. John Ryan was no record producer.

Nowadays, a lot of is just leave it on the artist themselves. When your record's out, now it's up to your manger and business management to soak some money into the group, as far as promotion is concerned as well. So don't just wait for the record company to do everything. But back in those days, record companies were more inclined to take that responsibility on. It was part of the responsibility, when you signed the group, to put so much money into it, to make sure that you're going to sell some records, which is the whole point.

The next step was shopping the stuff. That took, really, maybe a month, less than a month for Michael to scrape up a deal for us. The contracts took a long time. By the time those things got finalized we had started recording. It was about three or four months. In the meantime, we went to Elektra/Asylum and there was a big controversy over John Ryan producing. Elektra didn't want him to produce the band at all. He was a nobody. And he didn't have a track record. They wanted a big producer for this group. At the time they were very excited about us. We felt loyal to John Ryan because he had introduced us to Rosenfeld, who was responsible for getting the deal. We went to Elektra, and we said, "Look, this guy has been working with us and partially due to him... if it wasn't for John Ryan we probably wouldn't be here." And they said "Okay, fine. Why don't you go into the studio with John and cut some tracks and prove to us that he is the guy." Now we already had a deal at this point in time. And we went back in and we cut three more. "The Dreamer," "Sail Away," and a song that I co-wrote with Tommy, that I never got credit for, called "Hold On." I wrote the chorus to this song. It later wound up on Say No More. These were much better than the first batch, I thought. A little more polished because we'd been together at this point. We'd gotten to know each other. We were more comfortable. We had done some recording together. These tapes were a little more polished.

This second batch of recordings is probably the way I would have liked to have seen Airwaves gone. It wasn't as rough as the first batch of demos. It wasn't as slick as the Airwaves record. It was just a nice compromise between the two. Those recordings I've also heard just recently and I thought they were very good. We brought the tapes into Elektra and after they heard them they said, "No, no cigar. We don't want John Ryan and that's that." I don't think they ever wanted John Ryan. They basically were just humoring us by letting us go in and cut the second batch with him. So we had to give him the "Sorry, John, its business and there's nothing we can do about it." So we let Ryan go and we started to look for a producer. That got very frustrating because we really couldn't find anyone. All the people that we wanted were either busy. Well, they were busy basically, that was it.

At one point we met Roy Thomas-Baker. He was busy with Queen. He said that he probably wouldn't be available for like, two years. I don't know why he met us to begin with. I think he was more interested in talking to us than anything. To me, he was being kind of a smartass and a wiseguy. He had the hottest group in the world at the time and he was a little ego'd out as well. Basically, wasted our time by even meeting us. He told us that he was too busy. Chris Thomas was one of the names that popped up and Chris, I thought, would've been a great producer. I've never met him, but I'm very familiar with the work he's done with lots of people like The Pretenders, INXS, and the Badfinger records, Wish You Were Here, and I know that he was very well-liked by Tommy, and Tommy's wife, Marianne, always spoke very highly of Chris. I don't know why that was never pursued. He would have been a great choice. Paul McCartney, at one point I think, expressed an interest, or his name popped up. I'm not sure if he was contacted. I can't remember, but I think Tommy was against that one. We wound up with Ron Nevison for a little while, who we hired. He sent a few people over to work with us, part of his regime. He had the Hitler-esque approach to producing groups. One of the guys who was part of his team was, I think his name was Richard Wagner. He was a songwriter. And he worked a lot with Alice Cooper. He was a musician. He came down with another guy by the name of Brian-something. Brian was this costa-nostra kind of guy, who basically sat in a chair and yelled at us and gave us orders. That lasted about two weeks. We fired him and we fired Ron Nevison. That left us, once again, producerless, so we were getting real frustrated. And I think that Elektra, at this point, was starting to get frustrated with us.

I know he was quite anxious to come to Los Angeles; have fun. So he brought his wife Marianne and son, Stephen. So he stayed with my wife Cindy, and myself. I had a house just off of Mulholland in the valley here in Sherman Oaks. Tommy lived with us for several months until he got his own place. Joey had a place as well. He had his own house. And Kenny was living in an apartment.

We were willing to tell them to stick their record deal straight up their ass. And David Malloy could follow it. And that was our feeling. We were more interested in making a great record. I was twenty-four, twenty-five years old at the time and a lot more naive. So as soon as David Malloy was written into the picture as record producer, that's when everything soured for me and for Kenny. I think it was the was the beginning of the end for Airwaves as well.

Now the guy who engineered Airwaves, Peter Granet... now my intention was not to come out swinging at people, as far as this interview is concerned, but I decided after the last interview I did, I'm just going to tell the truth and just set the record straight on these things. This is the way I see it and the way I remember it... Now I didn't think much of this guy, Peter Granet, who was the engineer. Going back in time I didn't think that he did a very good job as far as the sound of the drums were concerned. Joey and Tommy didn't really care so much about how the drums sounded. They were more interested in the overall picture. They thought that just focusing on the sound of the drums was just obsessive. It was driving everybody crazy that Kenny would spend hours upon hours being unhappy with the way the engineer was making his drums sound. Kenny's mistake was he did become obsessive about it, and he should have realized, at one point, that there was nothing he could do about it. Joey and Tommy weren't going to be supportive of him, and didn't really care how good or how bad his drums sounded. And this gentleman, Peter Granet, was never going to make his drums sound great. So, instead of doing the smart thing and just going along with it, he chose to do the complete opposite, he just kept whining about it.

After Kenny got fired we had to replace him, so it was the real stupid thing to do... and this is advice for all you wanna-be-rock-stars out there who just get your first recording contract, don't ever fire your drummer in the middle of making a record. It's not a good idea. Or at the beginning of making a record. It upsets a lot of people. Especially the record company. They fired Kenny and I couldn't do anything about it. I realized that. I fought for him as hard as I could. He was my friend. I did think he was the right guy for the job at the time. So here we were drummerless, and at that point Joey and Tom suggested to bring Mike (Gibbins) out. Mike had just left playing with Bonnie Tyler. He was in Wales. Mike was painting, so we had painters, carpet layers, and plumbers. Between all the members of Badfinger we could have actually started our own contracting company. We could have built houses if the Airwaves record would have failed. Or came in and remodeled your house. Anyway, Mike came over and that was a disaster. A really nice guy. I just had the pleasure of talking to him just recently, for the first time in all these years. He was out for a week or two. He was thrown into the middle of a situation. And already it was very tense at that point. Kenny was fired. I was starting to begrudge Joey and Tommy for doing that. I thought it was really foolish to do. I thought, "Listen, if you don't like him, if your going to fire him, fire him when the record is finished. Let's just finish this record." So Mike was kind of flung in the middle of that. And it was hard. It was tough for him. He didn't have any opportunity to rehearse. It was Bingo. "Let's cut some tracks. Were in the studio; the clock's ticking. We're eating up a record budget. We've got staff here to pay for." It was a lot of pressure for Mike, it just didn't work.

ne evening Joey and Tommy... we were mixing and doing some final overdubs at Capitol Studios in Hollywood; there was a Chinese Restaurant next to Capitol Studios and we'd all go there and drink, eat. And one evening Joey and Tommy were there, and they had gotten there a lot earlier than me. I was over at the studio and they were over there getting drunk, and they got really drunk. Joey, I'd never seen Joey that drunk. Joey wasn't really a drinker back then, he was more of a smoker. Tommy liked to drink. They got real emotional with me, even started crying and saying "Look we really want you to be part of this. We know you're unhappy. Stay. Be a part of it. We want you to be a part of it."

This went on for about half and hour, and they walked back into the studio, and I sat there by myself for about ten minutes thinking, "Either I'm gonna walk back into that studio and become part of this situation, finish it up, and 'all-for-one-one-for-all' kind of attitude, or I'm gonna get in my car and leave." And I chose to do the latter. I got in my little MGB with the top down. It was wintertime. It was cold. I aimed my car at the Hollywood Freeway and never looked back. That was it. That was the end for me.

So, I got Joey on the phone. I tried to work it out. I knew that I was up against a tough situation here, trying to get that whole thing together with those people involved. It was destined not to work. So, Ryan had the tapes for nearly a year. He's had them for a year and he hasn't been able to do anything with them. If he would have given them to me, they would have been out in the stores by now. In the meantime, I just decided "The hell with this. I'm gonna deal with Airwaves, the real thing."

Although I was bitter about a lot of things that happened back then, and didn't quite like the way alot of things went for me with this record, listening to it today, twenty years later, I can appreciate it a lot better than I did back then, and I think it's a lot better record than I thought it was twenty years ago. It sounds really damn good now. And definitely it was a turn for the group. It was Badfinger for the new decade. Gearing up towards the eighties. It was a different sound for them, and a departure, but it still has some of that Badfinger sound.

I remember one evening I got fed up with him; over that kind of game in his house. I said, "I'm really fed up with this. I'm tired of being tested by you and all your silly little games of yours." That kind of bothered me. In the beginning it was funny. And it was kind of like hanging with Keith Moon. You'd go to a restaurant and Tommy would get up and start screaming and shouting and singing at the top of his lungs in the restaurant. He used to embarrass his wife, Marianne, all the time. He didn't embarrass me. I just thought, "Fine. You want to make an ass out of yourself. Go ahead, Fine." I'd just sit there and watch. I'd be amused by it. But after awhile it wore thin on me. I got tired of it.

That jokester in him was a terrific thing. I didn't mind the joking. It was the tests that got tiring after awhile. that was the part of it that got a little tiring. When I hear Airwaves now, twenty four years later, it's a little eerie. It reminds me of my friend. I hear that voice and it reminds of my friend. It reminds me of the nights I sat in my kitchen and stayed up with Tommy and we talked about things and we sang together. I had an upright piano in my kitchen in the house and we'd sit there and sing songs until two in the morning, and record little demos on my four track in one of the rooms in the house.

It's kind of eerie, and one of my closest friends, Nicky Hopkins, he played on Airwaves, died about four or five years ago, and I'd just been recently been reacquainted with Nicky. He'd moved back to L.A. and we did a record together for EMI about five years ago, soundtrack record, so now I listen to it and there's two of my friends who aren't here anymore. It's kind of a haunting record for me. Kind of a bittersweet record to listen to. I listen to it now, and honestly I've got to say my favorite song on the whole record is "Sail Away." I remember distinctly... the one thing I remember most about that record is sitting in Capitol Records watching the forty-piece orchestra doing string overdubs on that, they had a room up above the main studio, which was huge. It could hold a forty piece orchestra. It was like a gymnasium; Capitol Studio B. And they had a glass sliding door up above like a little lounge area upstean McAnally ( could overlook the main studio and the orchestra pit. And I remember sitting there watching the cellists and the violins, and listening to the strings, and it was "Sail Away." It's one of the string arrangements I thought was just beautiful. I listen to it now and I think, "Now this should've had strings on it. I wouldn't have stuck them on "The Winner" and a few other things they ended up on, but that song, just sort of sums up the bittersweet memories that I have of Airwaves, and that period, the two years or three years of my life that I was involved with Tom and Joey. I would say that its my favorite song on the record.

I can understand that in a lot of ways it doesn't exactly paint a great picture of Joey, but I don't think a lot of it really came from Dan. I don't think it was Dan really, he basically just interviewed people and he talked to people who were around and these were their words, not his words. So for Joey to be so unbelievably upset with him, I don't know...

I mean I even had this conversation with Joey once and he said something to me just recently like, "If Dan Matovina's involved, I want nothing to do with it." and these were these recordings with John Ryan. And I told him one evening that he doesn't have anything to do with the (Airwaves) deal here, with what we're talking about, but I can't understand why your so pissed off with the guy. I said, "He's done nothing but help your career." And he doesn't see it that way, but it's too bad. In my opinion, (Dan's) done a lot for Badfinger. All power to him.

The liner notes kind of explain the whole recording process of Airwaves. It's just a really nice interesting package. They didn't spare any money in putting it together. Not some cheesy one-page booklet. A really nice eight page booklet. It's going to be a nice representation and the recordings sound great, they really do. I'm really proud of them, and I'm glad its going to be in the stores after all these years.