Tag Archives: Paul Rosano

Napi Browne: Let’s Get Right To It

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Napi Browne was a Connecticut rock band based in New Haven in the mid-to-late 1970s and early ’80s. The band was formed in August 1976, started playing in September, and played its last gig in Westerley, R.I., during the summer of 1980.

The two lead guitarists, Nick Baganasco and Dan Gulino, and the bass player Paul Rosano were together for the life of the band. Four drummers were in the band at various times over the roughly four years: Rich Catalano, George Wilson, Dennis DeMorro and Vic Steffens.

Songs written by Nick, Dan and Paul were recorded in various settings while the band was together, from Bearsville Studios, near Woodstock, N.Y., to Paul Leka’s studio in Bridgeport, and even in Nick’s basement early on in 1977, during which we had a mic in Nick’s oven at one point to record a guitar track.

Let’s Get Right To It (video below) was recorded in Bridgeport with Vic Steffens on drums. The song was chosen as the opening track for WHCN’s Homespun compilation album of Connecticut bands, which was released in 1980.

This tune was pretty much a complete collaboration among the three writers. I can’t remember exactly who came up with the original concept for the song, but I do remember working on it in Nick’s living room at his cottage in East Haven with acoustic and electric guitars with small amps.

I believe it was probably Danny or Nick or perhaps both who had the original musical idea, and I contributed mainly with the melody and lyrics, although it really was one of the few songs on which we equally collaborated. Nick tells me at the start of working the tune up, he sang lead. I don’t remember that. But he says he just wasn’t feeling it, so I gave it a go and felt comfortable with it.

Danny takes the solo, a short but vibrant and compelling statement, and there is three-part guitar harmony, along with three-part vocal harmony, on the choruses. Paul Gabriel was at the studio that night, so the guys asked him if he would sit in so they could record the three-part guitar harmony in one overdub, and he graciously accepted.

We produced this session ourselves and did the first mix on the track, but later brought in Jeff Cannata to tweak the mix a little and he did a nice job of bringing out certain aspects of the track that give it drive, particularly on the build toward the ending.

Here’s the tune with an accompanying video.

Pulse: My Old Boy

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My Old Boy is the B-side of a single from the Pulse album from 1969. The tune is interesting because it’s quite different from anything else on the album.

The album is heavily blues-rock oriented and most of the tracks are in the four-to-five minute range with some longer. But this track, which was written by our drummer Beau Segal and Harvey Thurott, a guitarist and friend who would become a member of the four-piece Pulse in 1970, shows another side of the band and is packed with just about everything you can fit into 2 minutes, 36 seconds.

I always believed the opening track of the album, Too Much Lovin’ was the single to pull from it. The A-side actually turned out to be a track I felt was even less commercial than either of these songs, my own Another Woman.

Beau may have been trying to write a single with My Old Boy. He failed miserably and instead created a whirlwind of a track that never lets up from its infectious opening rhythm guitar riff to the phased (old fashioned phasing) harmony vocals and relentless melody lines in the verses and bridge.

There’s some outstanding guitar playing by Peter Neri, although some of it is, if not buried, sitting in the background, and the arrangement overall is inspired with a lot of tight twists and turns.

I believe we played this tune live but not that often, and I’m pretty sure that live Peter used to alternate lines in the verse on the lead vocal with our singer Carl Donnell because of the breathless melody.

Mastered from vinyl. Listen for the crackles.

Concerts Vol. 8: The Doors

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In the spring of 1968 I was studying at Berklee School of Music in Boston and going back to Connecticut on weekends to rehearse and play out on the club circuit with Pulse.

jim-morrison-live-1-smallI lived on upper Commonwealth Avenue, not far from the dorm I had lived in when I was at Boston University, with two female roommates: Julie and Betty. They had a small two-room apartment. When you entered there was a living room to the right, a bedroom to the left and a small kitchen and bath in the center of the apartment.

Although Love Me Two Times by The Doors was a song I liked and that Pulse had covered in some of its early gigs in the beginning of 1968, I was not really a Doors fan. Our singer, Carl Donnell (Augusto) was though and he convinced us to put the interesting take on a blues shuffle tune in our set.

Carl recently told me how Peter Neri and I came to him with a Cream album and turned him on to the English blues-rock group, but was disheartened when he brought the first Doors album to a rehersal and we were pretty much indifferent to it. That raised a laugh. Continue reading Concerts Vol. 8: The Doors →

Snow day

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It’s started snowing about two hours ago. I would usually be traveling in this stuff, but being inside is one of the great advantages of not having a job.

Believe me, I’ve had my fill of trekking through this type of New England weather. Not that I dislike the weather. The change of seasons is the great allure of this region and as a journalist I really didn’t mind it at all — once I got to where I was going. Being out on the road in this stuff, that’s another thing altogether because of all the factors not in your control i.e. other drivers.

At any rate, this is the first post as you can see. I’ve been a journalist quite a while but a musician even longer, actually about twice as long. And along with other things such as art, film and family, music is what drives me the most.

Today is a good day to be inside and listening to great music. Of late, I’m listening to a variety of things, as always, but in particular an album by Chris Wood called Vulcan, which is quite remarkable since this is his first solo album yet he’s been dead since 1983.

For the uninitiated, Wood was in a group called Traffic, one of the great yet somehow overlooked bands from the late 1960s and early ’70s. You’ve all heard of Steve Winwood I’m sure. If you haven’t, then you should have by now. He was the creative force behind Traffic. But Jim Capaldi, the drummer and fellow songwriting collaborator, was just as integral.

So where does Chris Wood come into this? He played tenor sax and flute and other various things. When I saw Traffic live he played bass, piano and organ as well. Sometimes well, sometimes not so well. But according to his bandmates he was in many ways the most important member. He brought inspiration to the table. Evidently, he directed the boys to different styles of music, and that is the one thing that Traffic gave to the music community and why it was such a great influence on so many artists.

World music as it is called today. Traffic was there. The group mixed R&B, hard rock, jazz, latin, afro, all types of things into a stew that was unique at the time for a band of second-generation bluesers coming out of Great Britain.

The album is fascinating, good not great, but certainly worth a listen. It’s all instrumental and has many of the qualities of Traffic, in fact one of the tracks is actually Traffic live. It’s probably not available at the big shops, possibly a smaller, older record store if there is one of those near you, but more likely you will need to get it online at someplace such as amazon. But you know what? With these import albums, it’s often better and cheaper to buy it from the country of origin, so try amazon.co.uk.

Oh yeah, why did it take so long for a release. Well, Wood never actually finished the album although he worked on it for about five or six years. He was evidently a substance abuser and it took him at an early age. His sister and a fellow named Dan Ropek were key to the tapes being assembled and released. Nice job all around there.

If you want to hear the Chris Wood influence in Traffic, listen to You Can All Join In, which is actually a Dave Mason tune, or 40,000 Headmen, both excellent tracks.

If you do, let me know what you like or dislike about the album and what are your favorite tracks.

Looks like about two inches so far. On the edge of the woods, things are looking nice.