The recording of The Nuns I’d really like to see surface again was made in the summer of 1977 at Columbia Records studio in SF (in the SOMA district, on Folsom St. I think – across the street from the original Studio Instrument Rentals shop). The Clash recorded the “Give ‘Em Enough Rope” album there. I’ll have to ask Edwin Heaven, who was their manager at the time, if he knows what happened to those recordings.

The session was set up like a live gig, in the BIG room they had there. Edwin got about 50 people invited so it would have the “live before a studio audience” vibe. A great idea, actually, because The Nuns were always better in front of an audience playing all together than recording tracks separately in a studio – I don’t think any of their studio recordings ever captured their sound (sorry, Robbie, I know you tried.) Studio producers always seemed to be trapped between their raunchy live sound and trying to make them more “pop” and marketable, a la Blondie (who were also pretty raw live, compared to their records.) They always tried to have it both ways and ended up with neither.

But that day, the band essentially ran through their live set while the tape rolled. No stops, no re-takes. The rough playback I heard afterward was pretty good, but I never heard any of it again after that. If I get a response from Edwin I’ll post it here.

And I met a tall, lovely punkette named Magnolia there that day and went home with her… but that’s not a story for public consumption… ;)

More interesting stuff about that gig: I drove there with Alejandro’s girlfriend Bobbie (RIP) though that monster thunderstorm. We got lost several times on the way.

For the first show (the one on the record) there were 20 people there, and that’s counting friends of the band. Hell, I wouldn’t have gone out on a night like that if I didn’t have to! They were booked to play two sets. At the end of the first set, the club *emptied*. There was none, I’m not exaggerating, NO paying customers for the second show. We went to the club manager and said, hey there’s no one here, do we have to play the second show? He insisted we did. So in between shows, both bands sat around a big table and got absolutely shitfaced drunk. (Except Jennifer, who didn’t drink.) Debbie and Clement were fucking plowed, I remember, but we all were. Then both bands went on stage and played sloppy, drunken, horrible sets to an empty club. And laughed about it.

But they first sets were great! Imagine, seeing Blondie and The Nuns in 1977 playing to a crowd of 20 friends.

It was never intended to be a record. I was the band’s sound engineer at the time and all we wanted was a live reference tape. The recordings of ‘Decadent Jew’ and ‘Suicide Child’ were made, contrary to some comments I’ve seen around the Net, not at the Mabuhay but at the Keystone Palo Alto, when The Nuns played with Blondie (so this would have put it around the first week of March 1977.) There was a terrific thunderstorm going on outside and the club only had about 20 people in it.

It was recorded on a Nakamichi 550 portable cassette deck, which at the time was the highest quality cassette recorder on the market. The only microphone was a Sony stereo mic positioned about 10 feet from the front of the stage. Since the crowd was so small and “mosh pits” weren’t seen outside of clubs like the Mab (yet), the mic stand was pretty much undisturbed. So what you’re hearing is as close to the actual, unvarnished live sound of the early Nuns as was ever recorded.

Some months later, Howie Klein came to me, the band having told him that the recording existed, and he wanted The Nuns to premiere his new 415 record label. So he and I went to the production suite at radio station KSAN-FM and produced copies of the two songs on 1/4″ reel-to-reel tape, with the only processing being a bit of EQ. Howie left with those production masters and that was the last involvement I had with the record, although I finagled getting the producer’s credit (even though it said “…and the Nuns” the band had nothing to do with the production) in exchange for letting Howie use the recordings (I got no money for it.)

The “tape malfunction” in ‘Decadent Jew’ was not in the original recording. In fact, I don’t know how it happened, but I suspect it was a matter of bad disc mastering. I have no idea who mastered the disc, but Howie might remember. I’m sure he went with the cheapest he could find.

I had nothing to do with the recording of “My Savage”, it was from a demo tape made (I think) at the studio His Master’s Wheels in SF and recorded by Elliot Mazer. The blending together of the songs was done later, probably at the mastering stage.

I gave the original tape to Alejandro and Jeff, so I don’t know what happened to it after that.

Just wanted to set the record on this record straight!