Rainbow Redux: A Lost Classic Returns (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

A portion of this feature appeared previously on The Tonearm.

Tell me about your role in bringing the anniversary concert to release.

Chaim Obrien-Blumenthal: I didn’t actually bring it to the stage; that was the venue, Timucua. With the second album’s anniversary coming up, they had it suggested to Robert. And then they did the first. Now they’ve done all three albums.

When they were planning the Rainbow show, they had a live stream option, so I could watch it from home. And I told friends who were really fans of the album, “You should tune into this.” I watched it and thought, “This is amazing! Not only is he performing an album he has never played on stage, but he’s managed to transcend it into something new.” He re-imagined it in a way, and it became a new album because he’s collaborating with these super-talented musicians: the band Golden Flower, the string quartet, the tabla player, the sitarist, the flautist.

The venue has these paintings on the wall. And if you watch the DVD, you see them; they’re really fascinating. They give it this really interesting element that wasn’t planned. It’s just another reason that the whole setting worked. And that really brought home to me that this needed to be an album. The idea came to me while I was watching the concert. Taking the performance in, I was absolutely mesmerized by what I was witnessing. Afterwards, I pitched the concept of the album to Robert, and very graciously, he was on board.

For first-time listeners who are intrigued, should they listen to the 1968 album before they listen to the concert? Or is that not necessary?

You can’t compare the two, because obviously the musicians on the original [make it a] totally a different thing. I think the live album is a great place to start with, because it’s much more accessible; good luck finding an original copy of the ‘68 album unless you go on Ebay.

The live album manages to transcend time. It doesn’t sound current, but it also doesn’t sound dated in any sense. In reviews of the original album, [there were] people who didn’t get it. There are always jaded reviewers; people are snarky: “Oh, it’s typical highfalutin ‘60s psychedelic.” But that totally falls away with the live album; it sounds so good, and the musicians gel. I say: start with the live album, and then if you want to, track down the original.

The original Rainbow was a synthesis of East and West at a time when a number of artists tried that sort of thing, but not many of them succeeded. What do you think makes Robert Callender’s original Rainbow album special?

I think it’s a combination of Robert’s lyrics – you could say they’re tone poems, poetry set to music – and the musicians he worked with. Most of the guys playing on that album were young, and in many cases they were coming from jazz. As Robert said, they were also studio guys, playing on Aretha Franklin’s records. But they didn’t come in saying, “Let’s copy the stuff that we did on those records.” It was more like, “What do you want to do?”

Robert was working as the programmer for [famed radio DJ] Murray the K, and he got to hear every record that was coming out before it came out. Brian Epstein stopped by Murray the K’s studio and dropped off an advance copy of Sgt. Pepper. [Robert] was also part of the downtown scene, although he’s very modest about it. He talks about going to Ondine’s, hanging out with the Warhol crowd. And that all went in there.

And this is something very interesting about Rainbow: he’s right there at the point where radio is [changing]. And ‘67, ‘68 is right at the beginning of FM, where all of a sudden you could play a whole side of an album. You could do the stuff that would have been impossible a year before. So I look at all those influences: getting exposed to Ravi Shankar early on, getting exposed to these different elements that were in New York City, that kind of zeitgeist of everything happening.

With Rainbow: The Anniversary Concert now out on CD and DVD, what’s next for Robert Callender?

Being that it’s such a great stage show, I’m working on him perhaps touring next year. I want to bring him back to New York City to play, because he has not performed there in many years. And I really want to bring him to Europe, because I feel he has an audience there.

Younger people have more of an interest in different types of sounds, too; there’s more openness. And this has helped him in terms of his records being sampled by DJs. Hip hop heads know his records; DJs know his records. There are more and more younger people getting into psychedelia and progressive rock and jazz fusion. I think he fits into [all that] where it’s not one strict genre; it’s very fluid.

It’s about an arc that we can build on, doing an album every two years or whatever. We can reintroduce him to the audience that he deserves. Robert’s still working on new songs and new projects; he’s always creating. I look at it as a long-term partnership.