Tag Archives: Barry Flast

After Pulse, To The Island

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When Pulse was finally finished, kaput, Beau, Peter and I moved to New York, rechristened as Island. The idea of the group was to have no limits. We played in a variety of styles. Eclectic would be the best way to describe our repertoire.

Pulse Paul Rosano Portrait 6 SmallerIt impressed some and probably put others off a bit, but we did garner interest and enough studio time to record an LP’s worth of tunes.

The first track here, Good Time, is one of the first, if not the first, we recorded at the cavernous Capitol Recording Studios. The tune was written by Beau and I sang lead, one of my first. Peter is on lead guitar and harmony and the track was pretty much recorded live in the studio as we didn’t even go back and put a rhythm track on to back Peter’s incendiary solo.

Pulse Beau Segal Portrait 3 SmallerWe did a lot of acoustic auditions in the offices of managers, promoters, agents and producers in New York and we almost invariably opened up with Good Time and it almost always generated interest in the listeners. An attention-grabber.

It can only be described as power country-rock, a territory we were just delving into.

The second track, Everybody’s Jumpin’, is one of my compositions and was recorded at Blue Rock in Soho with Todd Rundgren engineering as he had on a previously

Paul, top, Beau, middle, and Peter, above. This is how we looked at the time in New York.
Paul, top, Beau, middle, and Peter, above. This is how we looked at the time in New York.

posted track Where Am I Going? This is what I mean by eclectic. The song was inspired by one of my favorite vocalists at the time. I was trying to sing something in a lower register as most everything I did at that point was either high harmonies or leads in a high register. It doesn’t sound anything like the vocalist I had in mind. The music track is totally other than what inspired it.

We always envisioned the background vocals as horn parts, and perhaps we would have added those on a master, but it kind of works this way as well with three-part harmony. Barry Flast, later of Poco, lends a hand on the keys and as you can hear we gave him pretty much free reign.

All set up by Sam Gordon (RIP) the publisher who worked for Albert Grossman and Benet Glotzer. The SoundCloud photo includes Harvey, although he wasn’t with us by this time.