Side Gig 11 Spelunking With Brad Elliott

Any faithful reader of this essay series will remember that I traveled extensively with author, editor and car enthusiast, Brad Elliott. Barnstormin’ Brad had presented the idea of a big, lavishly illustrated book to Marvel at just the time when big egos wanted a coffee table to point to during fiscal meetings with collateral debt obligation specialists. Brad pitched this crazy idea and Lo! It came to be. He and I criss-crossed the country during the early photographic survey of the “Marvel coffee table book.”

You will know Marvel’s first such effort as Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics. How it came to be written by noted comic historian and writer Les Daniels and not Brad is one of those long, tedious stories that I try so hard to not include here. It’s also been the subject of litigation that I was left out of and I see no need to try to fit myself back into…

Here, for convenient reference:

ISBN: 0810938219

ISBN13: 9780810938212

Brad was a big, soft-spoken Texan who was most famous –at that point—for being one of the leading authorities on The Beach Boys. In fact, he wrote the book:

ISBN-10: 190092479X

ISBN-10: 190092479X

I always try to include the ISBN’s in case anyone is interested in some of the oddities I have mentioned. Feel free to get any of the above! I think you can get a copy off of Brad’s own website.

So why Brad? And why now? Well I scanned up a pile of pictures from that adventure and there is one that stands out. Well, I took a hatful of pics on that trip but some of them defy easy explanation… yeah, I know–! I said not ‘long and tedious’ – so just imagine how I’ll be going on about the rest of them…

Working in comics has gifted me with a lot of strange and unbelievable stories. Most of the time, the limits of my believability is my own creaky and leaky memory. But I do have some images to help.

Brad and I were in Los Angeles which, for some reason is the city I have spent the most amount of time in after New York. We were interviewing Stan. But Brad had a second agenda that took us to this remarkable place:

The iconic Capitol Records Building! I believe this shot was taken after we had completed our business, thus the dusky evening. I remember at the time being upset that this modest, nay run down side-street was where legendary cowboy sidekick Gabby Hayes had his Hollywood Star… sic transit strike, right?

Brad had all kinds of plans, one of them was to “drop in” on a recording session of Brian Wilson’s… possibly get a final, last autograph of Mr. Wilson’s for Brad’s own copy of his book. Alas, that was not to happen, I admit though that I was quite atwitter at the prospect. But the second plan that day was to enter the Cap Records building and meet up with Andy Paley. We were met in the glittering lobby by Mr. Paley and he escorted us through the circular corridor just inside the outer wall. We strode past small, cluttered sound recording areas which we could see through window walls. Remarkable.

Andy and his brother, Jonathan, were a decade earlier “power pop” group. Their album, The Paley Brothers, was one of those pretty nice collections of AM-radio toe-tappers:

Check out Tell Me Tonight from that album if you want a nice drop-in to check them out.

Like a lot of groups, even brotherly ones (ahem, Mr. Wilson!), they break up. Mr. Paley had done a lot of things since but that day, back in 1988, he was a producer. Just what that is, I don’t know. But he was in the Capitol Records Building, doing producer-like things and that was good enough for me!

Brad and he were researching chums and this was one of those, next-time-you’re-in-LA-give-me-a-call-and-we’ll-go-look-for-those-missing-tapes, sort of adventures!

“Missing tapes” indeed. Apparently an important Beach Boys Master Tape was gone. Well, gone from where it was supposed to be. The chances were very strong that it was merely mis-filed.

A “Master” is the tape that is made during the recording sessions of that album. It’s not that straightforward, of course. Hours of recording time has to be boiled down, sometime edited together, good tracks/bad tracks messed with. But the Master Tape was the last word before it was turned into a record. Or late night TV recording artist collecting tape.

Remember those TV ads wherein you could get a cassette tape of a themed set of songs of greatest hits done by performing artists or groups? Well, the originators of those collections went into the tape vault, swept up whatever tape was needed, dubbed it off and returned it to the floor somewhere.

And that’s where Andy Paley and Brad Elliott came in (sadly, I cannot remember the third fellow who joined us, he did look very “musical” to me… ). Andy escorted us to another building’s basement (which I shall not divulge!) not too far away and allowed us into this magical inner sanctum of music history…

It really was magical. To translate this into comic terms, picture the art storage facility in a 23 Street warehouse on the west side of Manhattan from the 1940-70s, that held a huge fraction of original art from the Golden Age… Same thing.

Alas, like so many long-term storage of cultural treasures, the money and manpower was not always there to preserve and protect said items [I recall a recent New York Times Magazine article on the Universal Music Group music storage facility fire that destroyed the best versions of thousands of classics—interestingly, these collections were made as carefully as the recording medium allowed and it is they that may well be the “last, best version…”]. So when the musical collection producers or engineers would return the various tapes, they were often actually piled on the floor. Or when they really cared, arranged in a cardboard box. Which could further serve as a ready shelf to put more Master Tapes on, etc.

This little wonderland was crammed floor to ceiling with custom built wooden boxes that held tapes of different sizes. The organization of this was invisible to this observer, but that’s all I was. I did not know enough to help in the searching. Mr. Paley and his comrade suggested various shelves to Brad and thus they all looked.

In awe of this environment, I simply looked on. But when these plucky searchers did this (!) I had to say, hold it and say “cheese!”

Front to back: Brad, Andy and unknown. I mean, really, like mountain goats in an alpine rock chimney! Alas, after a solid hour of dedicated searching, they did not turn up the missing Master Tape.

Brad and the guys were sad but they had given it a good shot. Brad and I parted to go root around in record shops (– yeah, Brad really was a collector—to the point of pulling out his Gruenwaldian list of “wants”!). The next day we had to content ourselves with meeting up with Stan, who, while not returned to Marvel Productions in a cardboard box did look tossed into a corner…

This may have been a cuh-razy ‘side gig’ story, but this is about comics, dagnabbit!