WEEKS OR MONTHS OF HARD WORK IN THE RECORDING STUDIO ARE GENerally required to complete an album.
But, every so often a best-selling album is completed in less time. Lee Michaels’ third album for A & M Records, simply titled Lee Michaels, was completed in six hours and forty-five minutes. The album consisted solely of Lee on organ and vocals and his drummer, Frosty.
Lee’s latest album, Barrel, has one additional musician, guitarist Drake Levin (formerly with Paul Revere and the Raiders).
When Michaels first signed with A & M, he was working with guitar, bass, drums, and organ. “That group, that sound of months ago, was not me,” he says. “We were playing my tunes, but I was strangely absent.
“Close friends would come to my house and I would play my tunes on the piano. They’d tell me, ‘Wow, that’s so much better than all those guitars and things on your album. It’s just too bad people can’t hear you.’”
Lee tried to remedy the situation by concentrating more on the piano, but knowing the limitations of the instrument, he decided to switch to the organ.
“I had all these amplifiers around which companies had given me for promotional purposes,” says Michaels. “So, I hooked them up to my organ, and the effect was interesting, if not a little startling.
“I began jamming with a bunch of people over at A & M, and it started sounding real for the first time in months. I realized then that for two years I had been sidetracked in my music. I realized that what I had been playing and singing in the beginning wasn’t me. Guitars? Guitars weren’t Lee Michaels.”
Lee, a native Californian, started his first group in the fourth grade. He describes it as “a kid with a drum, and my buddy and I who played accordions. We played at this theater in Northern California between showings of Mexican movies. We got a buck apiece for this action.”
Lee went to college in Fresno, where he majored in music but “but soon quit because I was drugged with the music department. It was like taking band in primary school all over again.”
After finishing his academic pursuits, Michaels joined a band called the Sentinels and went to Canada with them.
“In Canada, everybody in the group got draft notices except me and the drummer, John Barbata,” says Lee. “John joined a group called Joel Scott Hill and I split for San Francisco where I began working pizza parlors playing organ.
“John eventually looked me up and asked me to join Hill. I did and was with them for nine months. Then John split and joined the Turtles.”
It was while watching a performance of the Jefferson Airplane in San Jose that Lee decided to quit Hill and form his own group. “The Airplane freaked me out so much with their originality,” Lee says.
Lee signed with A & M as an individual artist and now has four LP’s to his credit: Carnival of Life, Recital, Lee Michaels, and Barrel.