About Me
KING HARVEST, had major hit DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT and also played with THE BEACH BOYS for a few years.BIOGRAPHY................For the four musicians who would eventually band together to form King Harvest; David Robinson, Eddie Tuleja, Rod Novak and Ronny Altbach - whatever their original plans had been when they applied to the prestigious Cornell University, the college's 53 fraternities and the many other colleges within easy driving range presented an opportunity that pushed them away from their original scholarly goals, to become rock musicians.... In the late 60's they banded together, with a few other friends, in a copy band that was tearing up Ithaca New York in those politically troubled times. In 1969 they dispersed, presumably to "grow up". However, within months these four had regrouped in Paris, France, where they built a reputation as the one and only American touring band, playing clubs and pop festivals.... By this time, the band was performing, for the most part anyway, songs that the various members had written. The musical range went from R&B to gospel to hard rock, and they always tried to keep their music fun. After recording and performing under various names - e.g. E Rodney Jones and the Prairie Dogs, they settled on the title of one of their favorite Band songs,(King Harvest Has Surely Come) and won a rock contest under the name King Harvest. It stuck..... The core of the band remained constant, but drummers came and went. In 1971, their old friend and one of the greatest rock drummers ever, Wells Kelly (Wells later became a founding member of Orleans but passed away in 1984) came to live with Doc, Eddie, Rod and Ronny in the small town of Orgeval, west of Paris, and brought with him new music - various albums like CSN&Y- but also a song his brother Sherman had written and recorded with a short-lived group, Buffalongo (which would later evolve into Orleans). That song was the single "Dancing In The Moonlight."..... Wells didn't stay long in the band, but his gift became the cornerstone of the future of the group. In the spring of 1971, the band signed a recording contract with the French record company Musidisc, and in the fall of 1971, the group recorded Dancing in the Moonlight in a small studio in the 18th district of Paris...... Small means small. Doc had to sing lead out in the stairwell, which was a natural echo chamber (as long as the neighbors didn't come out during the recording), and the peculiar percussion sound they got was the result of using a cleaning brush instead of a more modern percussion instrument..... To prepare for the recording, the group worked with their two producers, Pierre Jaubert, who really had been instrumental in signing the band to Musidisc and keeping the band together over a couple of years by providing recording opportunities and generally acting as the band's best friend, and Jack Robinson, a talented music publisher who came up with the idea of playing the intro to the tune up in the higher octaves, which became the song's signature as it became a hit on AM radio in the United States. Jack was the hands-on producer of and a true believer in the record..... The recording finished, the group, typically in the tradition of rock and roll, broke up. The record was initially released in France by Musidisc, without much success. But Jack and Pierre thought the record would do well internationally and didn't give up on it. Eventually, after shopping the master to every international label from the UK and the US to anyone who would open the door to these two guys from Paris, they found a very small R&B label in NYC...... Under a three year license with Musidisc, the company released the single, and when it started to get airplay- largely as a result of Jack Robinson banging on program directors' doors in the Pacific Northwest- the group came back together - Doc and Eddie from a large sailing boat in the Mediteranean, Rod from a spiritual retreat in Spain where he was rooming with Sherman Kelly, and Ronny from a West Coast classical piano tour he was performing - and along with other musicians who came in and out of the band along the way, settled in upstate NY, close to their college roots, in the little town of Olcott Beach on the shores of Lake Ontario, where the band was offered the basement of the local Methodist Church as their practice room and where King Harvest legends still abound...... King Harvest, including Sherman, toured once, with Jay Leno as the opening act for a few of the venues, but suddenly their record company went out of business..... There was one more shot, in the mid 70s, when Kip Cohen, head of A&R at A&M Records signed King Harvest to an album deal and hooked the band up with legendary songwriter Jeff Barry as producer. By this time, various members of the group were involved in the Beach Boys touring band and in recordings by the Beach Boys, and in fact, it was in the Beach Boys' studio that the King Harvest Album (a collector's item - A&M SP 4540)) was produced, with Carl Wilson and Mike Love singing background along with Peter Cetera of Chicago, and with jazz great Charles Lloyd playing a guest solo on one of the songs...... In the end, the lyric to King Harvest's song "Old Friends" probably best sums up the journey, many years after it all started, - "Old friends, when the story ends, we'll still be good as gold."
