McLuhan: An Amazing Musical ‘Anomaly’ in 1971 and Today (Part Two of Two)

Continued from Part One…

The following is the second part of an edited and expanded version of a feature that was originally published in The Tonearm.

How much of the work was composed and arranged before entering the studio?

Before we started working on the original McLuhan material, we were covering Chicago: “Beginnings,” “Make Me Smile,” some of that stuff. And then we started evolving this “anything goes” idea that Dave had. We were four or five months in preparation, taking Dave’s music, developing it, and then probably another six months of performing it. I think we had one or two gigs at University of Illinois, where most of us were going to school, and we played a few fraternity parties. Then we got the Monday night gig at Wise Fools Pub; that went on for about six weeks.

The music on Anomaly is wildly eclectic, heading in very different directions several times – even within a single song. Where did that music come from?

Dave Wright composed most of it, although we developed a lot of it in rehearsal. But he came in with Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message,” and that idea allowed us to do virtually anything in the studio. There were [some] limits because we were doing different styles, but we were combining them in ways that we thought were [valid] because of the theory behind it all. We weren’t looking [to create] something commercial. There’s nothing commercial about Anomaly. And we knew it, too.

“A Brief Message from Your Local Media” is the story of McLuhan: There were the stages of man, when man was all together and interacting. And then print came along; it separated everybody. Then there was the assembly line, then radio, then television. And the thing that propels us now is the media; today it’s that and the Internet.

Did you track live in the studio, or was there a lot of overdubbing?

There was a mixture. We had been playing the material in live performance, but what came out of the studio was different because it utilized different tools. The studio at Brunswick had 16 tracks.

At the time, did you realize that you had created something special in Anomaly?

I remember Dave calling me up afterward. He asked, “Paul, what did you think?” And I said, “Dave, I don’t know if it’ll ever go anywhere, but we really put something together. We really launched something.”

It was a very quick transition from bar mitzvah music over to fraternities and then to Monday nights at Wise Fools Pub and then the studio. It all happened within no more than 14 months or so.

Did you know when you entered the studio that the band was already at its end?

I was so overwhelmed with the opportunity to go down to 1400 Michigan Avenue and climb those stairs into that studio that it might have been in my head that, “I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to stay together.” But we didn’t know what we could do next to keep the group together. We saw [the studio session] as an opportunity to put down what we had developed.

How long did the band hold together after the album was completed?

I don’t believe there were any performances. Not until 50 years later.

What kind of a deal did you have with Brunswick? Was it just a one-off, or was there a contract to deliver X number of albums?

It was a union scale for when we were in the studio, and they owned the rights. [Years later] I reached out to them many times and never heard back; Brunswick had dissolved. But then other companies around the world started pressing unauthorized, pirated copies of our album.

What inspired you to start again, nearly 40 years after the album’s release?

I had gone in a business direction, but I did hang on to my instruments. When I moved to the North Side, Neil happened to be my neighbor. So we stayed in touch. I [searched online] for McLuhan and Anomaly. And there it was; there was all this gossip on it! I contacted Neil and said, “Hey, have you seen this?”

He was doing some music on his own and with some people in Madisonville, Kentucky. He said, “Hey, why don’t you come down?” So I drove down there with [drummer] John Mahoney and Tom Tojza; we played some of the McLuhan [material] at that time.

And then we kept in touch. Maybe two, three years later, we decided, “Let’s see if we can’t recreate Anomaly.” I had been trying to get a hold of Dave Wright. And about a year and a half ago I did; I found him. We’ve been talking, emailing and so forth. But he has some sort of government job and keeps a very low profile.

Neil has been bringing in some of his own material lately, and I’m going to start working on that. But it’s hard for us to get any kind of gigs, so I’m not sure how long we’re going to be able to take it. Our age is a little bit of a factor.

When did McLuhan start performing again?

We started around 2019 or ‘20. During the pandemic, we played a couple times where the guys who didn’t have to play horns would wear masks; we dealt with that. But we’ve been back talking together, rehearsing a little bit and playing for about five or six years now. Between the eight or 10 establishments that have booked us, we’ve done about 35 to 45 shows in Chicago.

I recently watched on YouTube a McLuhan performance from The Hideout, from the Chicago Psych Fest X in 2019. You played the whole album start to finish. I went into it thinking, “Well, this will be interesting, but I can’t imagine that it’s going to sound anything like the album.” But it really does.

Yeah. Now, with the three or four of us still together, I’ve been able to get transcriptions done. So what we do now is a live performance that’s closer to the album than what we did back then.

When you look back at McLuhan and Anomaly, what are the thoughts that stay with you?

We shared and developed ideas regarding the medium being the important thing. There were no boundaries as far as musical styles, and for a short time we were able to develop that for live performance. It was a moment in time that got us to the studio. And then we all went separate ways; I went into business for many years, though I kept my horns going on the side.

But when I look back on my life – I just turned 75 – I don’t care that we never made a dime off of it. What we were leaving behind was really significant in terms of the thought process that went into it. In my life, the one artistic thing I’ll be leaving behind is this album. It’s been heartfelt beauty given to me.

The way it happened in the studio was miraculous, putting us together with an amazing engineer. And it was a great experience. When we left, we knew were all going different ways, but we had left Anomaly behind.