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Published on: 11/5/2004
Last Visited: 4/7/2006
Berkeley high students Todd Anderson, Michael Friedman and Bob Shumaker had been heavily into modern jazz until that fateful summer of '64 when the British Invasion rolled like a tsunami over the American landscape.
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I tracked down Anderson, a jazz musician now living in New York, and Shumaker, a well respected Bay Area recording engineer, to fill in the blanks left by this fabled Bay Area teen combo.
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Right, Todd and Michael and I had all played jazz.
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I don't think anybody's interviewed the band's lead singer, Todd Anderson.
Tell me something about him. Todd was the brains of the outfit, he did the vast majority of the songwriting and was, by far, the best musician in the group-and Chip was the soul of the band.Todd was a reed player at heart but he played keyboards reasonably well too, so he became the singer and the band's songwriter.
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Todd was getting frustrated and I wasn't a particularly good drummer.He was forcing me to get better or move on.That was the wrong approach for "I'll Be In." Bones was making a Lou Adler kind of layered sound, all this overdubbing.I remember he wanted Chip to overdub chords on every backbeat, Chip had no idea what I was playing.He had no clue what anybody was playing.The Bones Howe version rounded off all the edges, and that was all we had going for us.The B-side was more a folk-rock kind of thing and we kept the Bone Howe version of that one.The band only lasted about six months from the summer of '65.By January of '66 it was just about gone.
TODD ANDERSON interview: