25 March 2008
ELYSE
06. Band Of Thieves
07. Sweet, Pounding Rhythm
13. Houses
Cash Box review
Tetragrammaton single
1522
Cash Box review
CHER:
‘CHASTITY ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK’
Atco single 45-6684
Atco single 45-6684
Cash Box item Cash Box article
Billboard article
Variety review
Billboard ad
Billboard ad Newsweek Her fellow Canadian, Elyse Weinberg, a McGill University dropout born and raised in Montreal, could hardly be further away from Joni musically. In her first album, 'Elyse' (on Tetragrammaton Records), she paints a bleak picture of life. Such songs as 'Band Of Thieves' and 'Here In My Heart' suggest that people have lost their way. They are, in 'Simple-Minded Harlequin' or 'Meet Me At The Station,' betrayed or betrayers -- or both. The landscape she sees about her in such songs as 'Iron works' is one of rotten cities and foul countryside. And death in a half a dozen songs seems at least no less fearful and lonely than life.
Variety 30 July 1969:
Billboard review
High Fidelity October 1969:
‘Greasepaint Smile,’
City Of The Angels
Unreleased (?) Elyse compositions:
The Woman That You Are
02/16/2001
CARESSED WITH SUCCESS
Call it a comeback
In 1969, Northwest singer/songwriter Elyse Weinberg released a self-titled album that attracted a small audience for its low-key blend of blues, folk and psychedelia. Weinberg then quickly faded into obscurity. More than 30 years later, a Georgia band called Elf Power found her record in a thrift store and bought it on the basis of its groovy cover. The band members were so blown away when they heard it that they tracked Weinberg down at her home in Ashland and asked if they could re-release it.
The "Elyse Weinberg" CD release show, at which she will dust off a live set that hasn't been performed much in the past three decades, should be a genuine case of the past coming back to life.
9 p.m. Thursday, Medicine Hat Gallery, 1834 N.E. Alberta St.; the Places and Hutch Harris open; cover charge. Toronto Star
POSSIBLY THE most obscure Neil Young track ever recorded has been reissued after
a chance discovery in Missoula, Mont.The recording is a heartfelt, penetrating
guitar lead originally laid down for a friend's vinyl LP in 1970, just before
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young shot to fame.
Now the track has resurfaced on a CD called Elyse. The title refers to
Elyse Weinberg, a gifted if largely unheralded Toronto folk singer who lived
communally with Young in an apartment above a Yorkville coffeehouse in the
mid-1960s.
She moved to California in 1968, two years after Young. She stayed first at
Young's place, then moved in with Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Papas.
Later, Weinberg invited Young to record the guitar lead for her song, "Houses."
"I remember we sat in the production room itself, right next to the console,"
she says by phone now from her home in Ashland, Ore. "I was sitting next to him,
with my arm around him as he played. He said something like, 'Sit next to me,'
so I did. I guess he just felt comfortable that way."
The closeness of that moment still comes through. Young's playing is strong,
distinctive and warm, qualities that could equally be said of the album as a
whole.
With its mix of pastoral folk-rock and urban psychedelia, Elyse conjures up
an era of collective sharing and musical adventurism that the latest CSN&Y
reunion tour is also bound to recall when it arrives at the Air Canada Centre
for concerts Tuesday and Wednesday.
The CD reissue has even revived Weinberg's performing career. After an
absence of more than 20 years, she took the stage last November in Portland,
Ore., backed by a U.S. punk band, Elf Power - her rediscoverers and foremost
champions. "It's just short of miraculous that somebody would find the record
and then care enough to do what they did," she says. "I've started doing little
concerts for this and that, and I'm plotting another album."
The story of Elyse and the forgotten Young track begins in the late summer of
1965.
Young, at 19, was in a bad way. After developing as a guitarist with a series
of rock bands in Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, he had returned to his native Toronto
to make a push with his latest group, the Squires. After five months of constant
rehearsal, however, the band had not landed a single gig.
With no money and no obvious prospects, Young disbanded the Squires and
offered himself as a solo acoustic act in the flourishing Yorkville coffeehouse
district. There he met a circle of folk singers and moved in with four of them,
at an apartment above the Night Owl coffeehouse at 102 Avenue Rd.
Besides Weinberg, the tenants included: Ken Koblun, erstwhile bass player for
the Squires and later for Weinberg's band, O.D. Bodkin; Vicky Taylor, an
attraction at the Mousehole among other venues; and Donna Warner, vocalist for
Three's a Crowd, who played at the Penny Farthing and Yorkville's top club, the
Riverboat.
Often, Weinberg says, visitors slept on the living-room floor in sleeping
bags. "We were all really young," she recalls. "People would come and go,
discovering one another. We were discovering life and discovering the scene, and
being the scene without even knowing it."
Out-of-town connections led Weinberg to seek a record deal in New York and
later Los Angeles. By then, Young was living in Topanga Canyon and playing in
his first major band, Buffalo Springfield, which also featured Stephen Stills.
Weinberg arrived in time to attend their final concert at Long Beach, Calif., on
May 5, 1968.
The following year, she released her debut album, Elyse, on Tetragrammaton
Records.
By June, it had risen to No. 31 on the Record World magazine chart,
immediately behind Young's second solo album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
Weinberg began to attract notice. She appeared on the Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson, and was written up in Newsweek. The magazine profiled her with
other such rising female stars as Joni Mitchell, praising Weinberg's "cracked,
mournful delivery" on songs that "often recall medieval ballads."
Three years later, Weinberg released a second album, Grease Paint Smile. A
third album on Asylum Records was never released. "And then I just sort of
drifted away," she says.
Drifted away, that is, until three years ago when a punk band from Georgia,
while touring the western states, unearthed Elyse. "I often find myself
searching through stacks of records at thrift stores and yard sales, always
hoping to come across the Holy Grail," Elf Power lead singer and guitarist
Andrew Rieger recounts on his Web site, www.elfpower.com.
"Over the years, this Holy Grail has eluded me, until one day in 1999, while
on a cross-country trip, I was rummaging through a box of records in a thrift
store in Missoula, Mont., and came across a record cover featuring a beautiful
and strange drawing ...
"The title simply said Elyse, and the price was one dollar."
Rieger's definition of the Holy Grail was "some amazing ... record ... by
some long-forgotten obscure artist."
Back in Georgia, his turntable was broken. It was six months before he heard
the record, but when he did he loved it.
"What really blew me away was the singing," he writes. "Elyse's voice manages
to be very pretty and melodic, while also sounding very desperate and ragged,
quivering and shaking through songs brimming with a sense of impending doom.
Scary and magical stuff."
Rieger resolved to get the album reissued on Orange Twin Records, an Internet
label run by Elf Power's keyboard player, Laura Carter. They doggedly tracked
down Weinberg under the name Cori Bishop, a change she made shortly after
recording Grease Paint Smile.
The master tapes had been destroyed the year before, but Rieger and Carter
found a pristine copy of the Elyse LP on eBay for $20. They made a digital
version, improved the sound and added two tracks from Grease Paint Smile.
One of them was "Houses," with the Neil Young track. It was recorded in San
Francisco in 1970, Weinberg says, just before Young joined David Crosby, Stephen
Stills and Graham Nash to form the supergroup CSN&Y, famed for their vocal
harmonies and the intense guitar playing of Young and Stills.
The final CD included 14 songs. A first edition of 1,000 copies was released.
Then last November, Elf Power invited Weinberg to join them onstage in Portland.
"I go, 'Okay,' but I'm a little alarmed, because I listened to that album,
and I don't sing in those keys any more," Weinberg recalls.
"Fortunately, they picked a couple of ballads, so I practise, and I drive up
there to the club. This is in some real grungy downtown industrial area, and as
I walk in I hear my song coming over the speakers," she says.
"We had agreed that we'd try a sound check, and if it sounds okay, they'll
back me. If not, I'll perform solo. And they played like angels, better than the
album.
"Then my next fear is, I look around and I see 20-something kids with tattoos
and earrings everywhere. I'm thinking, 'They're coming to see Elf Power, this
rock band, and I'm standing up here with my acoustic guitar.'"
In the end, Weinberg says, the show worked. "They got it," she says of the
crowd. "They were coming up afterwards and touching me and going, 'Good set,
man.'"
Elyse has gone into a second edition and is available on the Internet at
www.orangetwin.com. The CD is also available in Toronto at such independent
record stores as Rotate This. The Globe And Mail June 20, 1969 LOU CHRISTIE & THE TAMMYS' LOU CHRISTIE &
LOU CHRISTIE
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