Night People at Amoeba Music

Just recently heard that you can find Night People stocked at Amoeba Music on Sunset Boulevard. The iconic music and record store is located between Ivar and Cahuenga in Hollywood. It’s a fantastic place and not far from many other places on Sunset Boulevard where the story takes place: the Hullabaloo Afterhours, where we played with many of the most popular acts of the early 1960s; Gazzari’s Nightclub; where I had a crisis of faith about our music, just one week before we opened at Caesars Palace; the Sunset Las Brea Travelodge where it crosses Sunset – we had to sneak most of the guys in Stark Naked and the Car Thieves in at night we were so broke, the Red Velvet club where we switched clubs with Ike and Tina Turner so we would be close to the studio, and Producer’s Workshop where we recorded most of our records.

Quick reminder, the concluding volume of Things We Lost in the Night, Enchanted, Book 2, will be available for early review soon. Sign up for the mail list if you’d like your review copy. Also not from Gower Street, where City Recorders, my recording studio used to be.

Larry Dunlap produces for Easy Street Productions 1981

A view from the control room into the main studio.I recently found some masters produced by Easy Street Productions from my old recording studio, City Recorders. It was located in the basement of the Sunset Gower Studios near the corner of Sunset and Gower in Hollywood. These were from my last music producing sessions in 1981.

There is life after memoir, and though I didn’t have a clue what that afterlife would be when I left the band to manage it in 1971, ten years later I owned a studio, a production company along with a personal management company. But I was sick to death of the music industry and was getting ready to make a big leap into a new business offering computer games over cable television after these recordings.

These last three tracks are instrumental only; I was never happy with the vocals and decided I’d rather leave them off. These tracks remind me of the great a sound we could get out of the joint and how talented some of the people I got to work with back then were. The credit for these sessions go to Neil Diamond’s fantastic musicians, and arranger, our inhouse rhythm section, and mainly to Wizard (Richard Hart) our chief sound engineer, and Mark Evans, who was second engineer for these sessions, drummer, and my inestimable studio manager. You can HEAR THEM HERE, if you would like.

Finding time to produce was difficult because there was such a need to keep the rooms booked to pay the lease and the staff, and occasionally to find a few bucks for me. And producing was the main reason I got into the studio business, but like a drug you want better and better equipment and it costs more and more and you need more and more customers…