April 20, 1974: Another visit with Gold
These two super-talented guys were doing everything right, but the star-making machinery behind them was grinding its gears.
April 20, 1974
There’s Gold in Original Tunes, Clear Voices
DAVID NEHRBOSS AND BOB BRANDON, collectively known as Gold, poke at their afternoon
breakfasts in the 24-hour restaurant they frequent not far from David’s house
in Snyder. They are a studied contrast to their personal manager, Richard (Doc)
D’Amato, who’s talking intently across the table.
“You gotta be a crooked thief to be a promotion man,” he’s
saying while his eggs grow cold. “Everybody I meet asks me how’s the record
doin’ and what can I tell them?”
Object of Doc’s frustration is WGRQ, which won’t put Gold’s
single, “Rain Man,” on its playlist. They said they’d do it, Doc relates, if
the record won the battle of the bands five nights in a row. So it did and they
still won’t play it.
* * *
“THEY’RE SAYING
now they can’t put it on until after the ARB ratings are taken,” Doc continues.
“Meanwhile, what do they put on? ‘The Streak’ by Ray Stevens. ‘The Werewolf.’
‘Teen Angel.’ Those are all records we beat!”
The injustice of it all hits Doc the hardest. He’s the true
believer, has been since he shagged a gig for them in Brinkworth’s
David, who’s 22, and Bob, 24, seem most intent on keeping
their creative spark and individual standards together in this time of waiting.
It’s been like this for two years now, hanging in suspended animation between
struggling and stardom.
And stardom is due. They could probably make it on David’s
voice alone. Clear, high, absolutely beatific, it’s like the angels gave it to
him.
In harmony, his singing grows richer with the flavor of
Bob’s overtones and the mix is no less than perfect. You could rack your mind
for days trying to think of another vocal group with a sound so crystal pure.
As for the waiting, their first single on A&M, released
more than a month ago, is one more case in point. A&M biggies liked the
country-flavored flip-side – “I Lost My Heart to You” – and made that the A
side.
* * *
DOC AND the
producers protested that Gold isn’t really like that. It took a month of radio
station indifference to the country song and enthusiasm for “Rain Man” at WPHD
and several
The problem now is that the big rock stations haven’t yet
picked it up.
“There have been hundreds of requests for the single AND
the album,” Doc says, “and the album won’t be out until next month. Like I said
before, I feel like an animal in a cage rather than the personal manager of a
group that’s gonna be heard all over the country.”
It’s been like that. Take their first trip to the West
Coast in 1972.
In music-saturated
“When Gold went on,” Doc relates, “there were still
tomatoes on stage from the previous group. But by the time they got midway
through their first song, you could’ve heard a pin drop. By the fourth song,
they got a standing ovation.”
Four record companies asked for tapes after that one. A
deal began cooking with Linda Ronstadt’s producer. Then the producer took a
cruise and Bob’s sister was getting married in
Still without a record contract, they rented a house in
* * *
A COUPLE
“They sorta looked to A&M all along,” Doc says. “It’s
an artists’ company rather than a singles company. Another amazing thing was
that they took us on a demo tape. Nobody does that any more. It’s all master
purchase deals.”
Producers David Spinozza and Joe Levine scheduled Gold
into the Hit Factory in
* * *
AT FIRST it
was fun. Cashman & West, Jim Croce’s producers, showed up at one session.
Yoko Ono was at another.
“The first four songs went down easy,” David says. “‘Rain
Man’ was done live and they took like the second take. ‘One More Blessing’ and
‘I Lost My Heart to You’ went real quick. It was very up. We’d be listening to
the playbacks and everybody was dancing in the studio.
“After that, the concept of the album changed so much. We
were writing new songs. And there was so much pressure on us to write a hit.
Gotta have a hit. A&M sent the first four sides back and said we don’t hear
a hit.”
“One night Joey Levine says, ‘Don’t you guys have any more
uptempo songs?’” Doc puts in. “It offended Bobby and David and it offended me.
“But next day David calls me and says we just wrote a new
song, ‘Back on the Borderline.’ It’s very uptempo. There’s a nice flow to it.
That night they recorded it.”
* * *
“WE’VE BEEN
the kind of group that went out and did our thing at our own pace,” David says,
“but once we got to
“They’d say, well, every group goes through this. Bull!
We’re not pushy people, but we realized you’ve got to stick up for what you
believe in.
“Actually, we’re happy with the way it came out. The basis
of Bobby and myself is there in the tunes – the piano and guitar sound.”
When the recording ended in December, Gold took their
battered psyches upstate, Bob to
“There’s been two years straight without getting away from
each other,” Bob says. “We have this need to get off separately and write, then
get back together and exchange ideas. We’ve sorted it all out and got it back
together. We’re on a new road.”
While the record is gathering momentum, Gold is waiting for
the sound system A&M has promised them. Bob has rented a house on
* * *
“I THINK
it’s gonna be a definite change,” David says. “We’re always changing as far as
our writing goes. Since we got back, we’ve been going over some of the old
tunes, getting different ideas, different arrangements.”
“I’m a studio freak,” Bob says. “I consider the studio an
instrument, but it’s hard to get control. We’d like to go into a studio, shut
the door and do everything.”
Doc returns from a phone call. Somebody’s told him “Rain
Man” is Number 15 on a chain record store’s top singles sales list.
“Fifteen,” he says. “Wait’ll I talk to those guys from
WGRQ. We’re doing it. We’re doing it like nobody’s done it in this town.”
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO:
Bob Brandon, left, and David Nehrboss.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: As
noted in the column’s first visit with Gold in January 1971, Bob became ill
shortly after that album was recorded in the Hit Factory and A&M shelved
it. It didn’t get released until after Bob’s death in 2008, when Bob’s sister
and David decided to remaster it and put it out.
A bio accompanying the Gold CD on walmart.com notes that
David went on to perform and record “in the tradition of Gold” with his wife
Sherry Hackett in a group called Sky. In Sky, he goes by the name David Keith,
Keith being his middle name. The band’s page in Facebook notes that Sky moved
to
A 2011
story in Buffalo Business First talks about how Sherry ran the music department
at the
Sky
was greeted with a “welcome back show” at Nietzsche’s in 1996, The Buffalo News
digital archive tells us. The archive also lists David and Sherry giving a talk
on a holistic health-building system called “polarity therapy” at
In
2011, they were doing jingles and other music at Eastco’s California Road
Studios in
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