12-21-05: And he did! Thx. Correct titles now inserted....
| I Feel Like Letting Go | Mighty Love |
| New Mama/Turn Back | Song Remains the Same |
This band provided a lot of good memories from the summer of 1976 in Fenton, Michigan. Larry Rathburn was coming off a successful local band, Skyhook, as singer/bass player and had a wealth of original music. Always a guitarist and songwriter, Larry engaged Lex Morris, Bill Bondy, and I, along with local guitarists Mark Morris and Joe Cunningham to record 10 of his original songs at Forrest Green Studios. Interested in putting a band together to perform his stuff, Larry assembled Lex, Bill, and I along with Holly guitarist Keith Beelby and Fenton vocalist/keyboardist Greg Papineau to form the True Blue Eddy Band. We learned lots of Larry's material, along with a few of Greg and Keith's. To that we added a number of unique cover songs from the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Genesis, etc. The result was a great mix of tunes, with nice crowds most every night all summer long.
| I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder
back then. One night I brought it into the Cedar Mill to record the
night. I got a pretty good recording by combining a sound board feed
with a live mic. In the interest of making the music
"portable", I borrowed my friends 8-track recorder and made
copies of the tape. Here are a couple of originals from Larry
Rathburn. I have them marked "untitled" because, for the
life of me, I can't remember the names of these songs (Larry, maybe you
can help me out!)
12-21-05: And he did! Thx. Correct titles now inserted....
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If you've listened to these first
three songs, you may be wondering why with a reel-to-reel recorder the
sound quality isn't too good. Well, back then, I wasn't smart enough
to save the original tape. After making 8-track copies, I reused the
reel to record some now forgotten album (unfortunately, not a good
move!). All that was left were a couple 8-track copies. Keith
gave one to a couple of friends and the other bounced between Bill and
I. Here are a couple of more tunes from Larry where I remember the
titles!
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| Like I said, one 8-track bounced
between Bill and I. I think at some point Bill had a Caddy with an
8-track player and he took the tape. Well the tape disappeared over
the years. In the meantime, I lost track of my reel-to-reel copies
of the Forrest Green sessions (we had another one later where we
rerecorded "Trust Me" as well as a few new ones, including
"Nine Big Reasons" by Greg). When I asked Larry, he no
longer had copies either. Check out more Cedar Mill versions
of our original tunes by Greg Papineau and Keith Beelby...
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A year or so ago, Bill discovered
he still had the long lost 8-track tape and sent it back to me.
Unfortunately, I no longer had a player. I found a used one for 20
bucks at a used record store in Dearborn. I brought it home and
hooked it up to my computer to transfer the tunes to mp3 files. It
was sounding great when BONK!... the tape broke! Luckily, I was able
to return the player and get my money back, and discovered a wonderful
company called "Kate's Track Shack" (click
here to see their website) who was able to repair the tape and
transfer the songs to CDs. The result is this web page and the
availability of these long lost recordings. I hope you enjoy
them! Here are some of our covers...
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By the way, Larry now goes by the name of Joe Rathburn and continues to be a successful artist in the San Diego, CA area. He has several excellent CDs available and you can check out his website at www.joerathburn.com. I've got all of his CDs and they are well worth checking out. Who knows, maybe he'll resurrect one of these old favorites on a future CD???.... And special thanks to Bob Lamb for providing the photos!