> | The BOB COWSILL Interview
> October 2, 1999 with Kevin Crossett from
> Photo courtesy of Lynne Margosian

> In the late '60s and early '70s, you couldn't turn the radio on without hearing the Cowsills. Songs like "The Rain, the Park and Other Things," "We Can Fly," "Hair," and many other Cowsill's tunes made the world a happier place to be in. Now, almost 30 years later, it's time to put a smile back on your face, with the Cowsill's self-released CD, "Global."

> The current band line-up is Bob Cowsill, Paul Cowsill, John Cowsill, Susan Cowsill, and Robby Scharf, and they deliver eleven new songs that don't just take you back . . . they bring you forward. "Global" is a great new power-pop CD, with spotlights shining on Susan Cowsill's vocals, and Bob Cowsill's clean and well-voiced guitar playing.

> "Global" is by far the best Cowsill's album ever, and ironically, the least heard to date. Bob Cowsill talks with us about the decision to release "Global" on their own label, Robin Records.

> "Global" can be purchased on-line through a secure server at:
> http://robinrecords.com/order.html
> Click to Order!

> The BOB COWSILL Interview

> Q: Bob, thanks for joining us! I'm curious how, after more than two decades, the Cowsills came to release a new album.

> BOB: When we were trying to get signed and get anyone’s attention in the earlier part of this decade, it was apparent that the road was going to be a difficult one. There are so many reasons, other than the music, to not sign a band. What were they going to do with the Cowsills? They didn’t know. We were more complex and challenging than your typical ‘60s band because we weren’t an oldies group, and we weren’t really that old, and yet we weren’t really that young either. So we presented a particular challenge to these labels and that challenge was something they couldn’t absorb. There was too much riding on the decision. If you sign the Cowsills, it’s a gamble. If you gamble and lose, you’re out of a job. How do you market this group? What’s the demographics of the target audience? Who is the target audience? They didn’t know.

> What we finally realized was it wasn’t going to happen that way, and ultimately we decided we were going to have to make the record on our own. We had the songs written, and we had been performing many of them live, and we were ready. Now the next decision was . . . are we going to go in and make another demo tape, or are we going to go in and make the final record. We decided it was now or never, and to put it briefly, we went out and found $250,000.00 dollars, everyone quit their jobs for four months, we booked studio time at Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park, California daily for those four months, and went to work. We found a top rate engineer who had worked the "Boys of Summer" album with Don Henley which represented, soundwise, the direction we wanted to head in, and we started in June and ended in October. It was the greatest time of my life artistically.

> Q: It sounds like having total control as an artist in the studio was a very positive recording experience, something that many musicians don't ever get to enjoy. But, wasn't it one of those things where, as soon as the recording was done, your work was really just starting?

> BOB: At the end of the sessions, we realized that our goal was met in that we had made the record. We recorded 15 songs (counting “Christmastime”) and we were really pleased with the outcome. No complaints there. If nothing else happened, I personally was satisfied that this piece of work, whether it was heard by anyone or not, was the best I could do and that I had finally, after recording on and off for nearly 30 years, had gotten it right the whole step of the way. This was my opinion, and I was comfortable with it. Yet the fact remained that we still didn’t have a label and no way to release it, and in actuality, that didn’t bother any of us. There was this satisfaction that we had finally nailed it in the studio, and none of us for a long time (3-4 years) really cared whether it was ever released.

> Q: So, when you finished recording "Global," the project just stopped there?

> BOB: For a number of years, this thing sat in the vault at Rumbo Recorders, and we just figured that we weren’t going to do anything with it and just went back to living our lives. I think it was during these years that someone had called us and told us they were putting together some compilation CD of pop songs by bands that aren’t signed to a label. So almost as an afterthought, we gave them “Is It Any Wonder?” and it went on that "Yellow Pills" CD, you may or may not have heard of.

> Anyway, it was my brother-in-law, Jim Ferr, who kept on me during this time about how this stuff was better than the stuff being played on the radio and he’d go on and on about that. Eventually one day he came up to me and said “It looks like we’re going to have to do this ourselves” and I’m going “What’s that mean” and he starts talking about the Internet, and we’re gonna start an Internet based record company and we’re gonna call it Robin Records, and we’re gonna name the record “Global”, and he shows me this schematic drawing he did showing our four faces inside the earth, and he basically comes up with this whole approach to getting this music out. Initially I was like “No way man, just don’t even think it” because I was just plain tired of the pursuit and just didn’t feel like starting that whole thing up again, and getting everybody’s hopes up, and all that goes along with that. The record was done, which was the basis of my satisfaction, so I just wasn’t into it. But he kept on me about it, until I finally gave in and said, "okay let’s do it" and we did, and that’s how we came to release this new record. It took almost two years from that decision point to put together the website, the CD, the artwork - all of it took a lot of time to organize.

> Q: Since the years that the band recorded on the old MGM label, had there been attempts before this for another major release?

> BOB: Prior to “Global” there was one serious attempt at a major label release. In the late 70's Paul, John, Susan and myself worked with a producer named Chuck Plotkin. Chuck was associated with Elektra-Asylum and was from the Jackson Browne-Andrew Gold-Linda Rondstadt clan, and it was sort of assumed that the Cowsills were going to sign with Elektra-Asylum after we finished our record.

> What I didn’t realize was I was really just heading into what I would call “Songwriting 101" and Chuck more or less became my tutor in the art of songwriting. In fact, it took probably 4 or 5 efforts before he finally said to me “now that’s a song” (something called “You Lied”). We spent probably a year with Chuck, and we eventually had written enough songs to go into the studio and record. We worked at a place called Clover down in Hollywood. We recorded 15 or 16 songs (maybe more) of which 10 were sequenced and taken to the Mastering Lab and it just seemed a release and signing was imminent. The album was called “The Cocaine Drain Album.” We recorded most of it at Clover and some at a studio out in the valley, owned by Emmit Rhodes who was a solo artist that I personally admired. To make a long story short, the whole project fell through, Chuck signed on with Bruce Springsteen and became one of his career producers, and “The Cocaine Drain Album” is still sitting in the vault and never released. This was the closest we ever came to having a major release.

> Q: Most of the songs on "Global" were written by you and your wife, Mary Jo. Were these tunes always intended to be a Cowsills project?

> BOB: What really triggered the “Global” sessions happened way before stepping into Rumbo that June. I had written “Some Good Years." Susan, Paul, John and I hadn’t seen each other artistically in years, and I was friends with a guy named Cecil Duke who was a recording engineer (I worked with his wife). Cecil and I got to talking and the two of us decided to go into the studio and record “Some Good Years." It was actually pretty painstaking in that we could only get in some studio time here and there, wherever Cecil could find it. It was really just Mary Jo and I working at this point in time, and I started laying down the basic tracks and slowly building the song over the course of a year's time. That’s why on “Global” you’ll see that on a few songs I play more than my share of instruments, because I was working alone at that point. So really, I just had this song, this demo of “Some Good Years” but everyone who heard it liked it and thought it was a great song.

> Q: The liner notes on "Global" don't specify who's singing lead vocal on the songs, even though there's a full disclosure of who plays what instrument tracks. Any particular reason for that?

> BOB: Just being sensitive to Paul who sang lead on two songs meant to be on “Global” but out of the 15 we recorded we only chose 11 for this CD. Paul’s two, “Freefall” and “Shine” and another by me, “Maybe It’s You” didn’t make the final cut. So I did note that “What About Love?” was John’s only lead vocal on “Global” and that he and Paul would do more on “Global II” (not that there’s going to be a “Global II” - maybe that could be “The Cocaine Drain Album” I don’t know) and it’s obvious when it’s Susan and the rest are me, so I guess I didn’t want to get into that ‘lead vocal-Bob,' ‘lead vocal-Bob’ thing. I guess it didn’t seem necessary to me at the time.

> Q: Had The Cowsills been performing at all, either before or during the "Global" recording sessions?

> BOB: Around, maybe 1991, we (me, Paul, John and Susan) were contacted by Dick Clark to see if we would be interested in hopping on a bus that summer with the Grass Roots and Turtles and taking part in one of his successful oldies tours. This was an important time because by saying yes, we did believe we would be labeling ourselves an “oldies band” but the money was so good that we did, in fact, say yes.

> A meeting was arranged at Dick’s office in Burbank, and Billboard Magazine was there to photograph and document the occasion, and it seemed that after decades of having never heard from us, The Cowsills would finally surface and start having some fun. This was our take at the time anyway. At the meeting with Dick Clark, the contracts were produced and the signing was staged and photographed, but the funny thing was that no one could find a pen that worked, and I remember we had to get going somewhere and couldn’t stay any longer so we just “staged” the signing, and told Dick Clark we would return the next day and really sign it. Well, from that meeting we went out, the four of us, to a restaurant and asked ourselves do we really want to go out and leave our families and play three songs a night on one of these tours. The real draw was the money . . . but weighed against that was the idea that we may be creating artistic suicide. It was there that I sort of offered up the fact that I had been writing and that I had this song, “Some Good Years” and we sort of voted that we would take the more difficult path of eventually going into the studio and recording a whole new record.

> Q: The "almost" contract signing must have been a blessing in disguise. It sounds like that must have started the artistic and business juices flowing for all of you. Is that when the whole band moved into the studio?

> BOB: Susan was in a relationship with a guy named Jack Snyder at the time, who worked down at Studio 56, and Jack got us some spec time down there, and it was there that we added John, Paul and Susan to the vocals on “Some Good Years,” and we recorded “She Said To Me” and “Is It Any Wonder?” The experience of recording these three songs at Studio 56 is what ultimately led to the broader decision to really go into the studio on an extended basis and finish this whole thing in a high-budget, professional way. We felt essentially that we had passed our own audition because we hadn’t recorded together for years, and we really didn’t know how it was going to go in the studio. We didn’t have a band really, or a bass player (I ended up playing bass on those three), but we felt we were on to something that was ultimately going to be more satisfying than what the Dick Clark tour would have offered.

> Q: Bob, since you mentioned that you only had three new songs then, it must be that the excitement of a new recording project inspired the remainder of the "Global" songs?

> BOB: It was at this point that the songwriting thing kicked into high gear. I’m really a “batch” type of writer (where you get into a real frame of mind for songwriting and a bunch of songs start coming) and it was only luck that at the same time we were making these decisions, I was in the middle of a batch of songs, and Mary Jo and I definitely knew that we would really be doing this with The Cowsills as opposed to just me being the artist. So although “Some Good Years” was recorded to support my songwriting career (I honestly thought I would be able to get it to the Beach Boys) we really started writing knowing that the Cowsills would be the group in the studio recording what we were coming up with.

> Q: Did any members of the present Cowsills lineup have reservations about recording new material, or was it something that was always going to happen?

> BOB: No one had any reservations about recording new music, especially after the Dick Clark decision. Right then and there it was the most exciting thing to be going through, knowing that we could record new stuff successfully (successfully meaning we could get along in the studio, work together again, work with vocals the way we always wanted to, etc).

> Q: How long was "Global" in the making, from recording, to having a final product?

> BOB: Although we spent over four consecutive months on a daily basis recording “Global” at Rumbo, between the first “Some Good Years” sessions that started it all and the final days at the Mastering Lab with Doug Sax in Hollywood, putting together the artwork and concept and going through the test pressings and building the two websites, it took almost 6 years to finish the project.

> Q: Since "Global" is a self-released CD, what steps are you taking to market it?

> BOB: The focus from the get-go was to concentrate on TV, radio, the press and the Internet to market this and build our case. We realized that we had a good product here, that the reviews were all good and we could prove that we could get on TV, on the radio and the press and the Internet, and that’s what we spent this first year doing. We’ve been on CNN, VH-1, Entertainment Tonight, have done countless radio interviews, etc. It’s a slower process than normal with some quirky turns to it that are specific to the Internet. You can’t get anything on radio via the Internet really . . . and by the nature of how it’s set up, you’re asking people to buy something they’ve never heard (other than the samples on the Robin Records website). Anyone who has ordered “Global” probably did so at this point, not because they heard “Global” but because they heard ABOUT “Global.” You still need to somehow get it to radio and that will be our focus this year.

> Q: Since "Global" was released, has the band toured to support the album, or are there plans to do so?

> BOB: No touring has occurred to support “Global." Number one, it’s too expensive...number two we have complex lives, and if any of us added touring to that mix it would be difficult...number three, we’d rather spend the time and energy pursuing TV and radio where we know we can reach more people.

> Q: There's a picture on The Cowsills site of you playing a Danelectro U2. Is that guitar one of the new reissue models, and is that what you're using to get that great guitar tone on "Global," especially on "Under the Gun," "I Be Low," and "Cross that Line?"

> BOB: The Danelectro is one of the new reissue models John gave me. It’s fun to play, but I didn’t use it on “Global.” I used a Fender Telecaster I’ve had for years, a Gretsch Tennessean, a Rickenbacher electric 12-string and a Guild D-25 brown acoustic guitar. I specifically remember using the Telecaster for the lead guitar parts I played in “Under The Gun” and “Far Away” although I’m sure I used it in other spots also, and I remember specifically using the Gretsch for that kind of chunky sounding rhythm guitar part in “She Said To Me.” I remember that the rhythm guitar part in “Far Away” was the 12-string Rickenbacker which was also used in “What About Love?”

> Q: The Cowsill website www.cowsill.com is quite large, and very full of information. The people that administrate it for you deserve a large round of applause for creation and maintenance. It's also interesting to see how busy the discussion boards are. Since The Cowsills site was first launched, have you been surprised by the amount of traffic and interest that it generates?

> BOB: The website at www.cowsill.com was actually the brainchild of three pretty terrific women: Becky Presley, Vicky Sedgwick and Jo Malone. They had been working on that unbeknownst to any of us for a long time. We more or less added that website to our arsenal with their permission, domained it and paired it with our own Robin Records website.

> The Internet experience for me has been one of wonder. I would have never envisioned the scope of it’s reach. We have sent orders for “Global” to South Korea, Yugoslavia, France, England, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Canada and of course all over the U.S. It’s been an amazing experience and I can’t say enough about it. There are limitations with this new technology (i.e. getting “Global” to radio) but in terms of a playing field that can be managed and used to pursue your goals, the Internet is there and it truly opens your doors to the whole world.

> Q: With all due respect, it's been over twenty-five years since the Cowsills band had a major release! How do you explain the longevity that you've enjoyed in your audience?

> BOB: We were just kids when that whole Cowsill thing hit and so were our fans. Now we’re all just adults with our own kids so in that regard our fans can still bond with us on a somewhat equal level. Also, we’re all still in search of some good music, some good tunes. The '90s have had a lot to offer us in that regard, but the '70s and '80s were a little weak on the supply side. Our generation loves guitars and keyboards and vocals and that great pop sound. We haven’t released anything in many years, because we were never the type of artists that needed to pursue some rebirth with great passion constantly working on it. When we did record, it was really for the sake of the art, not the pursuit of the dream. When we tried to get signed, the few times we stuck our head in that direction and were turned down, it really was no big deal to us...we were happy just to get these songs recorded and presented in the way we felt they needed to be presented. It’s ironic to us that it’s this decade, the 90's, that seems to offer the most opportunity for a recording like “Global” and for a band like The Cowsills.

> Q: I gather from your website www.cowsill.com that you have a regular solo club gig. Can you tell us about that, and how it came to be?

> BOB: Fifteen years ago, Mary Jo and I walked into a pub on Ventura Blvd. after a movie and I thought, gee . . . this might be a fun place to perform for the summer. I had never performed solo, so I thought I could make a little extra money that summer. Well, 15 years later, I’m still there every other Saturday (in the earlier years I’d play three nights a week there). It’s called Pickwicks Pub and it’s a great little room, and we’ve had some amazing nights there, believe me.

> Q: I know that your sister, Susan Cowsill, has worked and recorded with other bands and artists in the last few years, including the Continental Drifters, Psycho Sisters, and Jules Shear. Have you had other recording projects as well?

> BOB: In the late '80s I worked with a guy named Peter Bunch. Peter was an excellent lead guitarist/songwriter and we worked and performed together for 3-4 years. We wrote and recorded probably 16 songs together. We called ourselves Channel Nine, and got some minor attention around town. That was my only time venturing outside the nest, and I really have no interest in doing anything but recording with my family and Robby. I love being in the studio, it’s the best place in the world to be . . . no contest.

> Q: So, Bob . . . where to from here?

> BOB: Where to from here? Well, as John Lennon used to say to his boys . . . "to the uppermost of the toppermost." We need to get “Global” to radio. We’ve built our case, but now we have to take our case to a label and search out and lock up a good distribution deal to reach radio and stores. We realize this is going to take a bigger machine than Robin Records has to offer, but we want to keep Robin Records viable, and just associate with a larger label. We’ve tested the market in this area and can conclude that radio will embrace this piece of work. There are countless examples we can cite. We’ll continue to pursue TV, radio, press, and the Internet, because we want to continue to reach the maximum people, because you just never know if the link you’re looking for is out there. We have a Christmas carol that we recorded (“Christmastime”) and we have to find a way to introduce that to the world. We’re enthusiastic about the initial response to “Global” and because of that, our credibility seems to be intact. So where to from here? To the uppermost of the toppermost.

> Thank you, Bob Cowsill, for joining us! For more information about the Cowsills, past, present and future, click to their website at www.cowsill.com for performances, message boards, history, photos, and much more.

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