It’s better to tell these stories with the tunes playing, so hit play…

A lot of the music that happens in my life comes from down at our amateur mechanic shop at the Recycling Center in Heber City, Utah. This is where we spend a lot of our time working on old Toyota Land Cruisers and other misc vehicles. We do all sorts of interesting work: major modifications, engine swaps, modernization of old vehicles, and other crazy fabrication. We’re down there for hours and hours upon a time and usually the music is very loud and the music is sort of our essence and the soul of our time and essence down there. We have a pretty sick old stereo, interestingly the same old stereo I’ve had all the way since high school and some parts (the receiver) since middle school. It is an old school 400 watt JVC from the early days of compact disks, back when their players were called “DADs” or “digital audio devices.” I bought it from my friend Sam Spiegel for $25 in I think 8th or 9th grade, who is now a famous DJ and music producer in L.A. I’m sure he’d be psyched to know I still have it and am using it and the direct role this receiver has had in my life. Through out the night we basically just turn it up and last night we found ourselves listening to the album you hopefully just hit play on (above) – “Secrets” – the famous old album by Herbie Hancock from about 1974, so I thought I would post it for your enjoyment in its entirety…

This is the album that followed the Head Hunters’ famous self titled album with “Chameleon.” My best interpretation of it is Herbie Hancock and his group really progressed heavily from the Head Hunters album. Herbie also had a lot of new, neat interesting toys that were coming out at the time and was getting really good at using them. For example he started using a machine/synthesizer called an “Arp Odyssey” and a few others. Yes the name is an accurate representation of it’s sound.

“Secrets,” to me, is a way-more advanced read than “Head Hunters.” Simple and tuned down, a little more poppy and generally catchy-er. But it also wasn’t “new” and “out there” like Head Hunters so this is why Head Hunters was always their best selling album, whereas I remember the first time I bought “Secrets” (its been purchased several times, LOL) I remember it in the discount bin for $8 in Tower Records at the bottom of Central Park in New York. Here is the album cover…

Herbie Hancock Secrets

I think this picture says a lot about Herbie and sort of the era there. If you look at photos of Herbie these days you’ll see he is pretty sharp and clean cut. And that really about-describes Herbie and the mantra of this site spells out, the old school jazz and bebop movement was largely dead with the rising shortly-lived popularity of avant-garde jazz music and the increasing popularity of increasingly complicated rock music, such as the progressive rock band Yes, and even the Beatles. For many Americans, it wasn’t too odd by then, I figure (though I wouldn’t have been born until 6 years later) to see Yes and the My Favorite Things album occupying the same milk crate.

So the interesting thing is that this is probably when it really mattered to Herbie, he had a good past that he could ride out, but so did his competition like Miles Davis Guitar Player John Mclaughlin who beat him to the punch with this killer album (earlier post on this site). Herbie really had no idea what the outcome would be and what his future would be, he had no idea he would go on to basically always have and audience and put out God-knows how many Grammy-winning albums.

Down at the shop I was going to say that our environment is sort of “young” and I realized that I’ve been really clinging onto my “twenties” possibly as a method that I believe I “still appeal to young people,” college kids etc. I was right about to write that “we’re all a bunch of 20-somethings” but I realized that as of last November I turned 30 and in fact none of us are 20-something now.

It’s also funny for me to think of myself as the youngest guy in the shop as well. The good news is we’re all at least pretty “mentally” young. Bill is a pretty hardcore adventurer. His facebook profile picture is a bumper sticker that reads “My vacation is your worst nightmare.” Right on Bill!

Scotty and I, I feel like, are tremendously close these days mostly revolving around life at the shop. He has this absolutely bitchen’ old 4WD ‘77 Dodge Van that he bought for $500 that he is sooping up to be a sweet lean mean shaggin’ machine in true 70’s style (and bare min it has a bar and tons of shag carpeting to be installed), he even has a plexi-glass mirror for the ceiling. He’s been doing tons of bondo and fiberglass (and minimal rust work as its just too far gone) to make it a fun-ass vehicle to drive till its death, put a month of work into, and get a good 5-10 years of ever-rotting enjoyment until it finally dies. His goals this year are bare min, the Desert Rocks Music Festival (in Moab Utah in just over a month away – gulp!) and Burning Man. How sick is that.

Scotty Ray's Mean, Bitchen '77 4WD Dodge Van

The story of the shop is pretty neat. I was fresh out of college in about 2002 and took on my first attempt at doing something “crazy!” with a vehicle: restoring an old ‘71 Toyota Land Cruiser from the ground up. Previously I’d never attempted anything remotely similar. I was doing it in the basement garage of a hour I was sharing with a bunch of guys and I managed to kill the furnace from all of the airborne dust that came from removing literally pounds and pounds of bondo-dust from the 30-year-old vehicle. So after that of course, I needed to move operations…

Shortly after my neighbor revealed had an extra bay in a shop he owned down in neighboring Heber City, so I ended up down there. A couple years later I became good friends with a new transplant to here in Park City Utah from Kentucky named Damon Leake and maybe a year later we ended up sharing the shop. One year after that I was recycling one day and I met Dirk Spangenberg, the owner of Curb It Recycling, and we ended up moving into his larger shop on the rear side of his facility. One after that our friends Scott Ray (also from Kentucky originally, one of Damon’s good friends from home who is just awesome) and our friend Bill Hartlieb who I met through the world of biodiesel have also moved in.

We have a pretty good environment where its a lot of fun and we do a hell of a job pooling tools and resources and really with I think all of ours only complaint being a lack of cleanliness and too much clutter unfortunately..

We’ve done some pretty neat things. At least two full diesel engine conversions, some WVO conversions, several major rust removal projects, a full motorcycle restoration, countless suspensions installed, fabrication of potato guns and bicycles, and absolutely huge amounts of fabrication in general – definitely a fun place to be… I’m liking it so much these days that perhaps sometime in the future will be to create a site for the shop for the 4 of us where we constantly update all the fun stuff we’re doing…

This all leads me to last night where Scotty, who’s really into the Jam Band scene and all the bands from there (and I’m sort of into a lot of those guys too), are listening to the album you’re listening to right now. Except it was really really loud and on our amazing sound system. This era of Herbie Hancock was probably cranked in thousands and pot-smoke-filled vans, just like the one he was working on, through the 70s and everyone knows who Herbie Hancock is but I find not a lot of people have listened to his tunes… I think we were both likening it to a lot of the music we’re going to see down in a month and a half at Desert Rocks, but I described it to him as “real early – 1973. You have to imaging a room full of the darkest soul brothas just getting down and funky. Listen to the congas!” I did point out that there was a white guy with an afro in the band though. Mike something-aruther, who was the drummer… Cool, funky stuff… Scotty was down….

If you’re done with the tunes and want to get a visual of it all. I believe I’ve posted this earlier on this blog but here is a good 17 minute (you can skip through it of course) video of Herbie playing “Chameleon” from his famous Head Hunters album which was the one that lead to this album. I hope you enjoyed this…

Cheers,
Andre

Herbie Hancock – Chameleon Live 1974 from Andre Shoumatoff on Vimeo.