Chapter 8 - Burbank Studios

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HAVING FINISHED THE audition with Cheryl Ladd at Warner Brothers, BJ now had an “in”, and had wielded his sword of bull and brazenness in the direction of a brand-new recording studio on the lot at Warner Brother's Burbank Studios. We were given the full tour of the studio where engineer extraordinaire, Doc Siegel was at the control room mixing board. I'm not sure how it happened, it’s hard to believe any of this stuff really happened at all, but he finagled his way into getting full use of the studio for his project and his cute little band now known as Silverspoon.

          Miguel Ferrer was a friend of Jon Marr and Stephen, and he ended up playing drums for the Spoon. It was now the summer of 1973, and we were spending a lot of time in the pool house at Miguel's where his mother, Rosemary Clooney and his four siblings lived in the main house. This was a very difficult period in Rosemary's life, and we tried like hell to stay out of her way, which wasn't too hard because she spent most of the time locked away in her bedroom. 

          The pool house was huge with a main living room that had a baby grand piano with a black and white checked linoleum floor. There was a maze of bedrooms in the back where eventually Stephen had moved into …so did BJ.

Now the band consisted of Stephen, Joey, Miguel, and me. There was a huge swimming pool in the backyard, but it was void of water, only old leaves and dirt remained in its place. Miguel had a neighbor named Riyad a distant Egyptian heir to the Farouk family fortune. They had an incredible house a few blocks up with a great pool where the boys and I would lounge and invite a strange assortment of people that BJ, Stephen and company would find at odd places like the Rainbow. BJ remembers an unfortunate incident where Riyid's father had come out by the pool to do some gardening and one of the transients called him a camel jockey or something and it did not go over well at all. We all were asked to leave his premises at once and never to return. What a shame things like that had happened. I am still mortified by that remembrance.

          Life at the Clooney abode was always eventful. In the den was a chair I used to always sit in, the very chair where years earlier the mobster, Russ Colombo was shot and killed. In the living room was a black Steinway grand piano that had once belonged to George Gershwin and his brother Ira, who still lived next door on Roxbury Drive. It was on that very piano where I performed My Final Bow with Joey singing lead vocal. I remember Rosemary saying what a fantastic song it was and how Joey's pitch was right in the middle of the note; coming from her it was a compliment in the highest form. There was some fifteen-year-old kid who was a little chubby named George that used to come by from time to time from Kentucky and would always be outside shooting baskets. That kid was Miguel's cousin, George Clooney. I don’t think he ever uttered more than two words.

          All sorts of young people would stop by the pool house when Silverspoon was rehearsing. There was this skinny blonde-haired kid who sang just like Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin and had a band called Longfellow. They used to watch us for hours and it was fun to perform for these kids. You know that blonde-haired kid's name was Shaun Cassidy. Later he had a manager named Ruth Aarons that wanted to sign us to a management deal until she got wind of the idea that Silverspoon spelled trouble with a capital T and wouldn't touch us with a ten-foot guitar. Are you starting to get the idea that we were our own worst enemy? Shaun did all right though with a hit single Da Do Ron Ron originally recorded by the Ronettes.

          Miguel's father was Jose Ferrer, the famed actor of stage and screen. There were old scripts in the den with titles such as: Man Of La Mancha, Cyrano De Bergerac and others that Mr. Ferrer had starred in. I must admit that I did peruse a few of those scripts. What an honor to be there among such famed memorabilia.

          Silverspoon was now recording for free at the newly built studio in Burbank. The first song we did was a little ditty I wrote called Be My Baby in Between where BJ and Joey sang vocals, and I played an array of electric guitars. After the sessions we would wander around the movie studio lot. One time Miguel was driving his Jeep up and down the stairway of the Lost Horizon set. I don't know how we weren't kicked off the lot for antics like that, but luck seemed to be still on our side, until the fateful day when Stephen was fooling around with the prize Mellotron (an instrument that has prerecorded tapes of strings and horns on spools inside a small keyboard). There was only one of its kind in America and it was being used by the Moody Blues and other prominent bands at the time. There was quite an uproar over using this instrument by the Musicians Union. They claimed that it was taking away jobs from studio musicians with its realistic string and horn sounds (because they were actual recordings of real players). I guess Stephen’s curiosity got the better of him and he had opened the latch where the spools of tape were stored while he was playing a note on the keyboard. The spools of tape went flying out of its case and rolled out of the studio into the control room where Doc Siegel was. He was livid and soon after that our stint at Burbank Studios came to an end.

          Before this tragic event happened, we managed to complete: Be My Baby in Between, Love Be My Life (a song Joey sang his balls off at the end) Going Home (a song by BJ) and Miguel's cousin Rafael Villafane (Raffi) had a couple of Meyer Baba inspired tunes called Baba Is The Lord (on which I played clarinet) and a humorous song, Bliss Train. Raffi also lived in the pool house in one of the other bedrooms. There were days and nights that we spent listening to George Harrison's Living in the Material World and singing and playing our originals. They were good times indeed, but all good things come to an end. A familiar Silverspoon theme.