{"id":330,"date":"2010-11-01T05:04:06","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T10:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=330"},"modified":"2026-06-22T07:51:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T11:51:21","slug":"day-of-the-remains-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2010\/11\/01\/day-of-the-remains-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Day of the Remains, Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1966, an R&B-influenced band \u2013 one that had considerable local following in Boston but was largely unknown outside that region \u2013 got the opportunity of a lifetime: they would be touring with the Beatles<\/strong>. On what would become the Beatles\u2019 final USA tour, The Remains<\/strong> (also known as Barry and the Remains<\/strong>) toured and lived with the Beatles for two weeks. Once the tour was over, the group broke up, and shortly thereafter, their sole album was released.<\/p>\n

For a lesser band, that would have been the end of the story. But thanks to inclusion of a Remains track on the Lenny Kaye<\/strong>-curated Nuggets<\/em> compilation \u2013 and due to the sheer quality of the Remains\u2019 music \u2013 interest in the band bubbled under, never really going away. Decades later the group reunited; the original quartet now performs a handful of select dates each year. New reissues of the band\u2019s slim but essential catalog are available, and both a stage play and motion picture have been put together to chronicle the Remains phenomenon.<\/p>\n

The young band got its start in the Boston area in the early 60s. The Remains tuned in to a British influenced a bit sooner than many of their contemporaries. \u201cI would account for that because of my summer in London and Europe in 1964,\u201d says Remains leader Barry Tashian<\/strong>. \u201cI picked up the flavor of some of the British music I heard over there and must have retained some part of it.\u201d Tashian observes that the Boston music scene in 1964-5 was made up of band that \u201ccontinued to play contemporary American rock n\u2019 roll and pop music.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were middle class blokes,\u201d he says. \u201cYou absorb what you listen to. And we listened to a lot of great 50\u2019s rock, R&B, and blues\/jazz artists. So, we picked up a certain amount of the vernacular and musical motifs from those great recordings. I don\u2019t think we were typical because, from the start, we had a very identifiable sound. Because of the philosophy of listening to each other, we became very tight, very soon after forming. We could jam together free-form and always find ourselves in the end. There was a climax to every Remains performance. At first we thought we were just a jamming unit\u2026but it soon evolved into something stronger, with an intention and ambition that, sooner or later, surmounted our challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group was signed to Epic Records in 1965, and laid down ten tracks. But the album didn\u2019t come out until many months later, and the band felt that the Epic sessions didn\u2019t capture the group\u2019s energy. Frustrated with Epic, the band and its management decided to make some overtures to the Beatles\u2019 U.S. label, Capitol Records. In early 1966, they secured a live-in-the-studio demo session date in New York City.<\/p>\n

The 1966 demo session released as A Session With the Remains<\/em> has a raw, meters-in-the-red ambience that has more in common with the Stooges <\/strong>or the Velvet Underground<\/strong> than with most pop groups of the era. On the session tapes Barry Tashian can clearly be heard imploring his band mates to hurry up, that they only had a limited amount of time. So was the raw vibe intentional or merely a byproduct of a hurried session? \u201cI think,\u201d says Tashian, \u201cthe reason for that sound is that we recorded direct to two-track. No mixing, no overdubbing. That\u2019s just how it went down. The engineer who ran the machines was in the control booth; a friend of ours was manually riding the guitar volume upward during the solo, while it was going down!\u201d<\/p>\n

Tashian explains the whole motivation for the New York sessions: \u201cIt was a kind of a move on our part to see what Capitol thought of us. It was an audition. Because we were really wanting to make it, and we wanted to be as successful as we could. Our energies were all pushing in that direction.\u201d He says that the guys in the band all thought, \u201c\u2019Hey, maybe Epic is not doing as much for you guys as maybe they should be. And maybe Capitol wants you.\u2019 Because originally before we signed with Columbia, Capitol had called a number of times saying, \u2018Listen — Capitol is really interested in you.\u2019\u201d But in late \u201964 nothing had come of that, and the Remains signed with Epic. Yet a year and half later, the band did the audition for Capitol. \u201cAnd what is interesting,\u201d observes Tashian, \u201cis that while it did not produce a deal for us with Capitol, it did produce the only true example of what we sounded like playing live. We were just running our set.\u201d<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s management at the time included John Kurland<\/strong>, later to find (slightly) greater fame with The Nazz<\/strong>, featuring a young Todd Rundgren<\/strong>. \u201cJohn was hired as a publicist by our booking agent (and kind of \u2018loose\u2019 manager) John Stukas<\/strong> with Music Productions. And so John came up to Boston with his buddy, Bob Bonus<\/strong>. John Kurland was a publicist; Ivor Associates was the name of his company. Bonus worked with General Artists Corporation (GAC) booking agency; they put the Beatles tour together, and were working with a lot of English acts. They were the first American company that put tours together for the Stones <\/strong>and the Kinks<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo,\u201d Tashian continues, \u201cthey came up to see us play at a place in Kenmore Square called Where It’s At. And it was just during that time when we were just playing really very strong shows, which we did that night too, and they just witnessed one of the Remains gigs.\u201d Tashian says that nothing definite seemed to result from the visit: \u201cIt was kind of like, \u2018Well, if you come to New York, say \u201chi\u201d\u2019 or something. But I took it farther than that. I decided we had to go to New York, because I had talked with my friend Monty Dunn<\/strong>, a guitarist who had played with Judy Collins<\/strong> and some other folk people. One day Monty just said to me, \u2018If you really wanna make it, you gotta go to New York.\u2019 So,\u201d Tashian laughs, \u201cI said to myself, \u2018hmm…he must be right. He played on Sonny and Cher<\/strong>‘s album!\u2019 I just told our booking agent, John Stukas that we were gonna move to New York, that we wanted to tie up all of our business and make a change. So, when I got to New York I went to John Kurland’s office and said \u2018here we are!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

continued<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on Twitter<\/a> and get notified
\nwhen new features, reviews and essays are published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1966, an R&B-influenced band \u2013 one that had considerable local following in Boston but was largely unknown outside that region \u2013 got the opportunity of a lifetime: they would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[267,1818],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","tag-barry-tashian","tag-remains","cat-41-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19386,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/19386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}