Barry Flast
Interviews, News, Music and Videos
Welcome to the world of Barry Flast and The Twin Phoenix Production Co.. Since this is my official bio page, I would like to take a minute to tell you my story if you are interest-ed.
It is my hope that you will enjoy my adventure as much as I have and that somehow I will have made a contribution to that enjoyment.
I was born on June 2, 1950, just a few days before the start of the Korean War (it almost feels like déjà vu all over again, don’t it?).
My performing skills were evident from a very early age (maybe2 or 3) when my father, who had worked for a time for Decca Records, took his going away present, a Rek-O-Kut machine and began to make home recordings of me singing baby songs followed by campfire songs followed by Broadway show tunes until the age of 8 when I started piano lessons.
He then recorded my performing such classic fare as “The Blue Danube”. I should have thanked him because I developed a comfortable attitude toward hearing myself played back that most folks have all sorts of trouble with when they hear themselves for the first time.
My love of performing continued on thru grade school when I sang in three Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, “Pirates of Penzance”, “H.M.S.Pinafore” and “The Mikado”.
The operas were directed by none other than Michael Pressman, a junior at the time, who went on to an illustrious career as a Hollywood movie director (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc) and TV producer / director (Law and Order, etc).
I also appeared In “The Threepenny Opera” at my summer camp, Hampshire Lodge, when I was 17.
Needless to say, I thought I was bound for Broadway and made the decision to attend Boston University as an acting major in their art school in the fall of 1967, but all the while that I was thinking about being an actor in musicals, I had a double life, one that was born on the night of Feb.9, 1964.
Most music fans of my age know that date very well, because it spawned many thousands of would-be rock and roll stars, as all the 13 thru 17 year-olds were glued to their TV sets to watch The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show on their first night in America.
It would be putting it mildly to call that moment an epiphany, but I did go right out and buy a cheap acoustic guitar and some beatle sheet music and teach myself how to play it.
I finally got to put my new-found pop star desire into action by forming my first junior high school rock band, The Hubcaps, with my Stuyvesant Village friends Curtis Juliber, Mark Litke, and Johnny Caruso. Johnny went on to a career in music backing up Gilda Radner in one of her projects, and is now a highly successful music editor for tv and films in Hollywood.After The Hubcaps, I had quite a few bands thru high school; there was The Executioners,The Imposters, The Hi Five, The Living End, The Long Island Sounds, and The Sixth Avenue Express (which featured a very young Eric Bibb as it’s lead singer ! ).
So by the time I left for college I was well into the rock band thing, but had no inkling that I would give up my aspirations for the theater very shortly after I arrived in Boston.
The allure of the rock and roll life style pervaded my everyday college life to the point that after a band I was working with called Tom Swift and his Electric Band became the “house” band at a nightclub called The Psychedelic Supermarket.
I began to envision my dropping out of school to devote my full energies towards this world of rock and roll.
It was a heady time (from the fall of 1967 till the spring of 1969), with my band opening shows for all the great rock bands of the late sixties that would stop in Boston on their tours.
For a short while in 1968 my band (which by the way featured Billy Squier on guitar) shared the bill with Grateful Dead, Cream, Moody Blues, Procul Harum, Blood Sweat and Tears, Big Brother and The Holding Co., and many others.
My first taste of the generosity of English rock stars came the night we opened for Procul Harum. My keyboard at the time was the standard fare for the late 60′s, a Hohner PIANET.
It was my misfortune to have the PIANET die on me 10 min before we were to hit the stage. Up jumps Matthew Fisher (organ player for Procul Harum) with his tool kit and proceeds to fix my keyboard. The gig turned out great due to his act of kindness.
After finally giving in to my need to divorce myself from college life, I came back to NYC and went right to work at a recording studio uptown called Fine Recorders.
As we stood there on the street catching up he mentioned that he was working for a fellow named Albert Grossman as a songwriter, and that he had a recording session coming up and would I be interested in singing on his session.
Well, that was the next epiphanal moment of my life in the music business; from there it was a simple matter of singing on his session, meeting his boss at the Grossman co., a man named Sam Gordon and hitting it off in a big way.
Sam hired me as his office assistant and right hand man (and as it turned out, his close confidante, and even songwriting partner as it was Sam’s idea for the song “One Night Stand” that was soon to be recorded by Janis Joplin, another Grossman client).
Although it took a circuitous route, the song has finally come to the public consciousness, thanks to the inclusion of the Joplin recording as used in the sound track of the hugely popular HBO series “Entourage”.
I then spent the next three years working as a session pianist for dozens of recording projects in and around the New York recording studio scene.
Some were spectacular like the Paul Stookey albums I played on, and Poco, Eddie Mottau, Chad Mitchell, Murray McLauchlan, Luke Gibson, Elizabeth, Tufano and Giamarrese and others.
Some were train wrecks, like the band I had with Rick James (although at the time he was Rick Matthews, while I was living for a brief time in Toronto) but I’ll skip the gory details of that story.
(One brief footnote to the Rick James fiasco was that Rick and I co-wrote a song called “Mr.Jones” which eventually found a life in the live show by my band Spellbound as we gigged throughout the west coast in the summer and fall of 1978 !)
“Mr. Jones” was not the only highlight in my songwriting career. I co-wrote “Hey Sad Sack” with Paul Stookey which was featured on his first solo album “Paul And” as well as the B-Side of the single “Sebastian”.
Chad Mitchell recorded a couple of my songs, “The Light That Shines” (which Paul Stookey also covered) and “Coming Down Slowly”. We also recorded a song that Chad and I co-wrote called “Ship Of State”.
Bob Neuwirth recorded my song called “I’m Omar The Mailman”, then during my years with Kingfish, Bob Weir wound up recording my songs “Eyes Of The Night”, and “Padlock Cufflinks”. And of course there was my most famous cover, that being “One Night Stand” recorded by Janis Joplin in March of 1970.
Change was in the wind for me and in October of 1972 at the urging of my friend Chris Stone, owner of the Record Plant studios. Chris and fellow named Nick Gravenites, who I believed wanted me to play piano in his blues band at the time, called “Blue Gravy” so I picked up my life and moved 3000 miles to the San Francisco bay area and began what would be the next phase of my career.
Unfortunately, Nick did not keep his word and after one very weird gig at The Lion’s Share club in San Anselmo, Calif., I was out of work, 3000 miles from home and I began to contemplate what it would be like to start developing my own musical direction. In that spirit, I started a band called Weird Beard and began to play all the small clubs and coffee houses in the Marin county area for small change and passing the hat.
Thankfully that only lasted for a couple of years, and in the summer of 1974 I had the next big event occur in my career. It was a chance invite to travel to Juneau Alaska to replace a pianist who had died tragically in a car accident, in a band called Kingfish.
That association would last until 1991, when the last man standing from the original lineup, Matt Kelly and I finally decided enough was enough and went our separate ways.
But to step back into the timeline, my tenure with that band lasted a very short time in 1974, and I was soon replaced by Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. I went on with my own musical life and wound up starting my next original band, Trouble, with Marcus David on drums, Ralph Carter on bass and John Sheldon on guitar. As the band grew, Marcus was eventually replaced by David Perper, and John was replaced by Micheal O’Neill.
Michael and I had known each other from a couple of bands we had played together in called Heroes and Joe Christmas in 1975.
Joe Christmas was the band I was on tour with in January 1975 when I played a week-long gig in Vail Colorado and met my soon-to-be-wife Mary!
We took the band “Trouble” as far as we could, even hooking up with Bill Graham as a manager, and playing some first rate shows around town, but when the demo we made for Bill never materialized in a recording contract, everyone began to look elsewhere, and that’s when my second tenure with Kingfish began, this time with Michael and David both along for the ride.
Once again my stint was short (three months) but while working on material for their next album, I came up with a song called “Honky Tonk Affair”.
Once they made it clear that they were not going to use it, and I was convinced that the song had all the makings of a huge hit going for it, I demo’d the song, changed the title to “Rumor at the Honky Tonk” and with the help of my new manager, Ron Umile.
I got my first record contract with a brand new label called EMI America; then,with the help of an all new band called Spellbound, I thought I was on my way to stardom.
Obviously fate didn’t exactly have stardom in mind for me, and my “hit” song only reached # 89 on the top 100 charts. Spellbound soon imploded after that, and I formed an entirely new band about a year later called The Choice with my newest discovery, a multi-talented individual named Fred Campbell.
Fred had sort of nurse-maided me thru my divorce from Spellbound, and I felt that we worked so well together that I should hitch my star to him and see where it would take the two of us.
The Choice project mutated into the rebirth of Kingfish when Matt Kelly, fresh from being fired from Bobby and the Midnights,returned from Hawaii and joined our little group.
After months of faceless club gigs I began to tease Matt’s desire for a classier musical endeavor with the idea of re-forming our old band one last time, and eventually the idea took hold. The Choice was put to pasture and the All New Kingfish Review was born, once again with Bob Weir in tow.
I stayed with Kingfish from 1984 to 1991 when at the request of my good friend and Kingfish booking agent, Michael Gaiman.
I put together an acoustic ensemble for a revue Michael was throwing together to pay tribute to the Grateful Dead, a show called Gratefully Yours.
When it looked like Gratefully Yours was only going to be a one time deal, the members of the acoustic show decided to forge ahead as a band and Nelson came up with the name “Dead Ringers” which was quickly adopted as our new name.
The ringers played from 1991 to 1994 with Tom Constanten (Grateful Dead), David LaFlamme (It’s A Beautiful Day), Pete Sears (Jefferson Starship) and Peter Kaukonen all appearing with the band at various times.
I then got a call from Michael Gaiman, once again proving his invaluable friendship by offering me a job as substitute keyboardist in the current lineup of The Jefferson Starship, a lineup that was closer to Jefferson Airplane than the original Starship with Kantner, Balin and Casady all on board this time.
When Tim Gorman finally quit for good at the start of 1995, I assumed the full time gig in the band, but only lasted till that June when I was oh-so-politely given my walking papers after a gig in Springfield, Oregon, which somehow foreshadowed my eventual move there.
After the Starship I found myself playing at the 35th Anniversary of the Summer Of Love concert in San Francisco’s City Hall Plaza with a reunited version of Grace Slick’s first band, The Great Society. Shortly after that I joined Quicksilver Gold and played with them until I moved out of the bay area in 2004.Resurfacing in Eugene, Oregon in a new home and with a new gig, this time as a host for an internet pod cast called Artist Archives for a company called The Network Guide. The Artist Archives show gave me a forum in which I could interview friends I had worked with in my 40 years in the music business, which included Paul Stookey, Chad Mitchell, Richie Furay, Larry Goshorn, Pete Sears, Anna Rizzo, Martin Fierro, Peter Albin, Bill Cutler, Marcus David, Eddie Mottau, Marty Balin, Jerry Corbett, Peter Walsh and a handful of others