The Quiet Sound Of You And I - Jess Roden solo (2):

The JRB’s final gig came about a month or so after the decision had been made for us to split.

In fact, I think that our very last gig (commitment) was a televised show for the BBC - ‘Sight and Sound, In Concert’ - which was simulcast on Radio One.

(This, of course, was later released as Jess Roden Live At The BBC - with four extra tracks tacked on, taken from studio sessions that the band had completed at the time).

Consequently, I had a little time to think about what I should do next.

Together with Steve Webb and John Cartwright, I continued to write songs. The material we were coming up with was fairly melancholy - which, undoubtedly, had rather a lot to do with the break up of the JRB.

Anyway, CB seemed happy with the direction I was going in and suggested that I go to New York to record with Joel Dorn.

For a month or so, CB let me use his apartment on the 27th floor of the Essex House hotel in mid-town Manhattan (It had fantastic views and especially at night).

Dating from the 1931, the Essex House Hotel is one of New York's Art-Deco acknowledged masterpieces and is located on Central Park South. Its iconic (six-story-high) sign wasn't, however, erected until the following year.

Alledgedly, the hotel was also where the notion of 'Sunbday brunch' was formed; it was certainly an Essex House innovation and originally termed 'A Stroller's Brunch' and designed to attract those who were completing Sunday morning walks in Central Park by offering elaborate fare, starting at noon and lasting until late afternoon. The hotel is, once again, open for business - having recently undergone a two-year $90million transformation.

It’s where, via the television, I became a huge, almost nerdy fan of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners. During my time in NY, I must have watched the famous 39 episodes at least a dozen times each.

I met Joel in his office in the back of Regent Sound studios on 57th Street. We hit it off pretty much instantly - I just loved his dry sense of humour and his obvious passion for all things jazz and blues and, bizarrely, he too was a Honeymooners nut!

He used to do this thing whenever he answered the phone in the studio, he would adopt a falsetto voice and sounding very much like an old biddy, would say ‘Masked Announcer’s Office’ then he’d either slip back into his own ‘radio friendly’ voice if the caller was someone he knew or would continue in the falsetto taking details as if to be The Masked Announcers personal assistant.

He had a few pals who frequently came by the sessions. There was a guy called Kenny who I think had been a member of Jay and The Americans and, a very young graduate, Hal Willner, whose opinion Joel really valued.

Also, Doc Pomus who wrote the Ray Charles classic, Lonely Avenue.

Reality is, Doc Pomus is little known today, except amongst those who regularly mine liner notes for songwriter credits, but... for those willing to take that trouble, its not hard to understand just why he is credited as 'sculpting the birth of rock 'n roll'.

Consider: he authored "Save the Last Dance for Me,'' (in the top twenty-five most covered songs of all time), "Can't Get Used to Losing You" as well as "This Magic Moment," "Sweets for My Sweet", “Teenager in Love” for Dion, as well as over twenty-five songs for Elvis Presley's including "Viva Las Vegas," "Little Sister," and "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame plus hits for the Drifters, the Beach Boys, Big Joe Turner, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, John Hiatt, Roseanne Cash and countless others.

Crippled by polio in his childhood, Pomus - born Jerome Solon Felder on June 27, 1925 in Brooklyn - became interested in singing blues after hearing a Big Joe Turner record as a child. Ultimately teaming up (in the Brill Building) with pianist Mort Schuman, his legacy endures as one of the greatest American songwriters - ever.

Since his death from lung cancer at the age of 64 in New York, Pomus' work has featured in hundreds of films, TV shows and commercials, his songs have sold over 250,000,000 copies and achieved more than 50,000,000 broadcast performances besides reaching the top of every concievable chart around the globe.

"I was never one of those happy cripples who stumbled around smiling and shiny-eyed, trying to get the world to cluck its tongue and shake its head sadly in my direction. They’d never look at me and say, “What a wonderful, courageous fellow.” I was always too fucking mad and didn’t have a chip, but a great big log on my shoulder, daring the world to get in my way or mess with me. I walked slow and straight and never swung my legs fast and awkwardly like the rest of the gimps who got around with braces and crutches. My main thing was to act and look cool - angry, and cool and sharp".

"But, underneath I was a frightened little kid - afraid that my limited physical equipment was not enough to get me any kind of piece of the action out there. I would end up a street beggar hustling quarters, or be just another bed in a cold state institution, or live in a welfare hotel sharing a toilet with some diseased junkie or hooker".

"Most of the time I shut this out with the help of booze, pot, insanity or blindness; or a combination of any or all of it. But once in a while I would lay in a sleazy hotel room with the soiled bedcovers over my head - too scared to move, sometimes for days and nights - sleepless and trembling. And when it got like that I never knew when it would end, or how it would end, or if it would ever end, but it always did".

"Now, thirty or forty years later, it happens less and less, and I’ve found corners of myself and the world that I own more than once in a while. And some mornings when I wake up and look around, I even smile deep and feel like it’s good to be here and to be me. But it sure took a long fucking time".
(Excerpt from Doc Pomus’s uncompleted memoir, February 21, 1984)

Joel introduced me to Leon Pendarvis whom he suggested should arrange the songs for recording. Leon was soft-spoken and appeared to me like a man at ease with all that surrounded him.

He and I worked up the tunes in the apartment and then he scored the charts for the musicians.

He picked all the hot players of the time and I remember being completely awe-struck when they did the first run through of the material. The line up for the basic tracks consisted of drums, bass, percussion, piano and two guitarists.

When all the basic tracks had been cut, strings, brass, background vocals and other embellishments were over-dubbed.

Rob Mounsey added some synthesiser pads and Joel bought in Shirley Scott to add organ, Milt Hinton (vibes), Scott Hamilton and Harold Vick (saxaphones).

It really was quite an experience for me.

I relocated from the Essex House to a rented apartment on the East Side (64th Street). Elaine and Jamie flew out to join me and we lived there for the next three or four months whilst plans were made for the release of The Player Not The Game.

Island Records had not long had offices in New York and at that time, they had a couple of small offices in the back of Carnegie Hall.

It was a hive of activity - there were dance rehearsal studios, music rehearsal studios all sorts of stuff going on. Island had only three employees at the time - Eric DuFour, Sally Griswold and a PR guy called Charlie Comer.

Liverpudlian Comer was one of the earliest Island NY mainstays; indeed - fresh back from the sea as a Merchat Seaman, he coined the phrase 'Mersey Beat' to describe the sound of the Beatles and other bands emanating from his home city. Relocating to Manahattan, he managed a number of clubs in Greenwich Village before switching to PR and being hired by Brian Epstein to look after the Fab Four's 1964 US dates. He later joined Island - described by Blackwell as 'a very special publicist indeed who really had a stroke of genius' before founding his own - bespoke - PR company, variously representing and guiding the likes of Marianne Faithfull, U2, Bob Marley, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Chieftains, The Rolling Stones, John Lennon alongside actors Nicol Williamson, Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris. Charlie died from complications brought about by Diabetes on February 11th, 1999.

That Summer in NYC was a great time. We met up with Pete and Maggie Wood as well as some other expats who now resided in NYC and we also made a lot of new American friends (mainly by meeting people at the pre-school that Jamie attended) all of which convinced us that it would be a good place to live.

We returned home to England and set about selling up.

The following Winter, returning to NY and whilst searching for a more permanent home to rent, I began recording with Stomu Yamash'ta for the ‘Go Too’ project.

To be continued...