Old Broadway - The Rivits:

Soon after Stonechaser’s release, my long association with Island Records ended.

Until, that is, Pete Wood and I decided to have some fun…

We need to backtrack a bit however... When CB eventually pulled the plug on the sessions for the Stonechaser album, (I 'd returned to Regent Sound with a new shaker device that I'd rushed to Manny's music store to get). Joel took me out back to his office and told me that Chris had decided to cancel the album.

I was pretty devastated!

Yes, I suppose things had not gone smoothly and I was in the process of recording some of the songs for the second time (having decided that some of them were too over-produced for my liking). I wanted something less conceived in the studio and more, er, organic, but despite all the faffing about, I don't think I / we ever achieved that aim for the album.

So, at that point, that was it really it!. What would I do now?

Having been involved with aspects of my last two albums' sleeve designs, I figured that I pretty much liked the idea of being a freelance graphic designer - so, I threw myself into that idea - and enrolled in a night-school class that taught typography, fundamental layout and design and, after a couple of months, I was lucky enough to land a job with a small agency that specialised in promotional work for several major book publishers.

I had a great teacher (Lincoln) and I learned to take pride in the work I was doing.

Meanwhile, I still had my recording equipment set-up at home and, I suppose now that music had become my hobby and not my career - truth be told, I started to really enjoy making music again for my own, and my family's entertainment as opposed to trying to meet a contractual obligations that I no longer really had any true feeling for.

Pete and Maggie Wood had become our best friends in New York. Together, we searched out the best curry houses; the riding schools and the shops where a proper sausage and jars of Marmite and Marmalade could be found.

Pete and I would slap on our tracksuits and run the six miles around Central Park every day and then park ourselves in front of the Teac 4 track and ramble on... And, that - in a fairly long nutshell - is how The Rivits came to be.

Prior to hooking up with Jess in New York during 1980, Peter had already cemented himself an enviable reputation as one of the top go-to session keyboard players, a reputation forged over many years amongst which were almost as many sessions as there were days on the road.

He'd co-founded Quiver - who, after gaining critical success and an enviable live reputation, became part of the imaginatively entitled enclave known better as The Sutherland Brothers & Quiver - really a set-up manufactured by Island to allow the bros Sutherland to better tread the boards and follow up their one minor hit, The Pie as well as Sailing (not a hit for SB&Q) but a song that Rod Stewart had turned into sheer publishing gold for Gavin Sutherland - it is, incidentally, Rod the Mod's biggest ever-selling UK single.

Pete also formed (sic) Natural Gas - the band which included Jerry Shirley who, himself, would go on to co-found Humble Pie. He also played on three albums by Jonathan Kelly and one by Billy Lawrie (Lulu's brother) that featured many of the musicians from Stone The Crows; with Al Stewart (on Past Present & Future, Modern Times, Year Of The Cat as well as Time Passages), Curved Air's Midnight Wire plus records by Tom Paxton, Joan Armatrading, Ian Matthews, String Driven Thing, Wishbone Ash and Michael Chapman.

At that time, Pete's main claim to fame - if the above wasn't enough - was co-penning Al Stewart's multi-platinum selling single, The Year Of The Cat; a record that pretty much definied bedsitter images for a million students and more around the world.

Steve Dwire had been working with a band called The Pin-Ups. "Our keyboard player was Peter Wood; the Pin-Ups were ten years out of their time, out-doing the B52s way before the B52s came about".

"And, after a month or two, Peter said ‘I’ve got this friend and we’re going to cut a couple of tracks and we’d love to have you play bass on it. And, if you know any drummers, feel free to bring ‘em along and... we’ll see how it works out’."

"I knew Doane (Perry), we’d played a lot together, and, I said to him – 'look, I don’t know too much about this, I don’t even know who this guy is but… do you want to come along?’"

Doane's musical life began with him playing piano from the age of the age of 7; he then - and in no particular order - discovered The Beatles who, in his own words "came along and changed everything. I discovered the possibility, however unlikely that might have been, of young girls chasing me down the street if I took up the drums. So it began".

Doane turned pro in 1972 and "I began doing everything I could to gain a wider musical background which ended up being an interesting combination of live and studio work which spanned an unusual cross section of music occurring in New York at that time. Rock, Pop, Jazz, Orchestral, Dance, R&B, Folk, TV and Film scores and every ethnic music imaginable was flourishing at that time in New York".

Doane also attended the Julliard School of Music as well as New York University and Rutgers briefly "certainly getting a more formal education in music didn't hurt. I always enjoyed playing in the ensembles although most of the time I really wasn't playing drum set. I was a section percussionist playing tuned and untuned percussion. But I was able to take a broad range of classes that took in theory, harmony, vocal training, ensemble playing and private lessons. Outside of school, I was always studying on my own, reading, practicing and taking lessons with outside teachers from jazz to orchestral. I am sure all of those experiences helped my drumming tremendously as it gave me a more balanced overall musical perspective as well as the actual experience of playing all of those different kinds of music. Coming from a keyboard background was a real asset. I often found I got much more information from reading a piano chart then a drum part".

Steve Dwire - "We all went in to this little studio on West 20th called Sun Dragon and, I’m pretty sure that the first track we cut was Nail That Turkey Down."

Pete knew Steve Dwire and Steve knew Doane Perry. Together, the four of us tipped up at Sun Dragon in mid-town Manhattan. And, prior to our arrival, Sun Dragon had probably known better days but, thankfully, was within our budget (being not very much at all).

Our engineer was a guy named Tom Duffy who spoke like Tom Waits (on a bad night) and would, occasionally, accidentally erase something quite important (bless you Tom) but, at other times, would magically capture something not intended for the tape.

Steve again - "I remember wearing my headphones while Jess was doing a reference vocal and, y’know… after four lines of singing, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. And, I turned to Doane and said, ‘Man, this guy’s voice is just off the charts’."

"I’d no idea if it was going to be an album or… what, really. Y’see it had just been described to me as ‘we want to do something different here, a record with no lead guitar’. Just using all keyboards, synths, bass and drums. Most of it was cut sort of live, very few overdubs, I don’t remember if all of the vocals were cut live but I think many of them might have been".

We'd pretty much written the tunes and knocked off the recording in less than a month. So now, lets punt it around.

We approached Antilles (a division of Island Records in New York).

And, we presented the band as a 'garage outfit' based in New Jersey that Pete Wood and I had discovered and produced.

Surprisingly, Antilles decided to go for it. In retrospect, I suspect they knew that it was Pete and me and not some undiscovered band from New Jersey.

Anyway, they gave us a budget to find a studio and do final mixes and, when that was done and the record released , packed us off on a tour of the East Coast radio and television stations.

The record did initially have a lot of interest but, as usual, didn 't sell particularly well.

Two cuts were included in the film They Call It An Accident / Ils Appellent ça Un Accident - a quirky (for wont of a better adjective) Euro-art-movie. The soundtrack was also released by Island in France, the US and the UK - featuring a number of otherwise unavailable tracks such as rarities from U2 and Steve Winwood.

And The Rivits? The two tracks were simply credited to Jess Roden / Peter Wood, indicating that the album's soundtrack was compiled prior to the official Rivits' album release.

Nevertheless, The Rivits album was - eventually - released on Island's subsidiary Antilles label in North America and in the UK on Island itself.

However - despite being credited, the entire band didn't actually make it onto the back of the album jacket. Steve Dwire again: 'we all lined up for the photograph and, I'm 6"1', Doane is 6"4' and Jess and Peter... well... they're not so tall. Eventually, the photograph that came out has my head airbrushed onto Jess' body while Doane doesn't feature at all - his place was taken by a nephew of Chris Blackwell's"

"I never really knew what became of the record," remembers Steve, "until this friend of mine called one night and said, 'Steve, there’s this all-hippy’d out bowling alley on University Place and 12th Street that doesn’t even open until midnight and most of the people who go in there to bowl are heroin addicts and alcoholics and punk-rockers and stuff like that but… they have the most amazing music. And, what they played like fifteen, twenty times a night was Future Soon.

Plus, I’d hear reports from the field… like from Doane when he was on tour with Jethro Tull. He told me he was in a hotel room in Berlin one time and he had his radio set to wake him up at a certain time by playing whatever-it-was station. And, he thought that he was dreaming about being in the studio cutting that track… Future Soon… until he realised it was actually his radio in this hotel room in Berlin – and, that’s what woke him up".

From his days turning up to sessions such as for The Rivits, Doane has forged an enviable career - working with (among others): Lou Reed, Bette Midler, Todd Rundgren, Dave Mason, Pat Benatar, Jim Messina, Martha and the Vandellas, Dweezil Zappa, Stan Getz, Fairport Convention, Dionne Warwick, Liza Minelli, Patty Scialfa, Vonda Shepard, Charles Aznavour, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Freda Payne, Jeffrey Osbourne, Diane Warren, Elliot Murphy, Gary U.S.Bonds, Adrian Gurvitz & Gary Brooker. And, a couple of years after the adventure of The Rivits, he joined Jethro Tull during 1984 - and, in fact, is now their third longest serving member.

Following The Rivits' album release the band played a brief series of dates that were prefaced by rehearsal sessions held at Pink Floyd's facility in Long Island City. 'Doane had moved on by this time' remembers Steve Dwire, 'and Gary T. Amos came in to play drums. The rehearsals were hot... I can remember driving back with, I think Pete and Jess, listening to the rehearsal tape and thinking... man, we're cooking'. But, given a lack of 'tour-support' it wasn't just Doane who missed the shows, Steve Dwire didn't travel to the UK either.

That brief series of dates included a sold-out show in London at The Venue - originally the Victoria Picture Palace that had opened in 1911 directly across the street from what is now Victoria Street Tube Station. In 1978 it re- opened as a quasi nightclub-cum-concert auditorium owned by Virgin records. Through its brief , three year life, it played host to the likes of Hall & Oates, Aztec Camera, Cabaret Voltaire, Todd Rundgren, James Brown, Captain Beefheart, The Skids, Altered Images, Buzzcocks and many more besides.

Still , never mind. Chris Blackwell had thought it an extremely interesting concept and so, signed Pete and myself (The Rivits) to Island Records - Yeh - cover blown! and, back in the old routine!

We tipped up in the Bahamas in January 1980. We had a few tunes already devised and, a fairly well defined concept for our new album. (In reality, our idea was probably a pre-cursor for Seven Windows) as we had lots of instrumental passages linking songs - it would be all very ambient, wallpaper maybe but different.

Anyway, our first 'production meeting' with CB threw up a slightly different concept.

CB played us 'One Nation Under a Groove' - yep, Funkadelic, masterpiece! - and, he suggested that we do an album comprising two songs - one each side..

Well , of course, it didn't come-to-pass.

At that time , Grace Jones, The Tom Tom Club, Joe Cocker and Sly & Robbie were all recording at Compass Point Studios. As a result , I got to do quite a bit of work on Grace's 'Nightclubbing ' album.

Returning to New York after a sublime 'family winter ' in the Bahamas I realised that I needed to think long and hard about what I should do next...

Pete moved on too - and became part of Pink Floyd's 'unseen, surrogate band - often referred to as 'The Bleeding Hearts Band' while they performed The Wall concerts - alongside former SB&Q cohort John 'Willie' Wilson, Andy Bown - formerly of The Herd, Peter Frampton's band and nowadays a member of Status Quo - and Snowy White, for a time a member of Thin Lizzy.

In 1984, Pete joined Lou Reed's band - comprising Bob Quine, Fernando Saunders and Fred Maher - making one album New Sensations. The Eighties also saw him complete sessions for: Graham Parker (The Up Escalator); Willie Nile (Places I Have Never Been); Carly Simon (Hello Big Man); Clarence Clemmons (Rescue); Martin Briley (Dangerous Moments), Cyndi Lauper (She's So Unusual, Night To Remember & True Colours); Julian Lennon (Valotte); Rodney Crowell (Street Language, 1986) and Al Stewart (Last Days Of The Century).

He re-joined Roger Water and The Wall Tour, playing on the Live In Berlin doubleCD; Bob Dylan's (The Bootleg Series 1-3) alongside Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, Mick Ronson and Mick Taylor; and also made records with Sophie B. Hawkins, The Roches, The Local Boys (with Andy Fairweather-Low) and Al Stewart's 1993 release (Famous Last Words). Unhappily, in December of that year, Pete died aged just 43.

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