Nimbus is a band formed in the late 70’s by 4 friends living in Michigan. They decided to record an album gathering compositions from a few band members. That gave birth to “Children of the Earth”, an AOR / Jazz / Soul album sought-after by many collectors around the world, and recently reissued by Providenciales Records for the first release of their catalogue. Fully remastered and available on LP and digitally !
Thank you Bill for accepting our interview.
How did you all meet, and how did you come up with the idea of building up a band ?
We were all in college together at the same time, in a small state school in Michigan. We all studied music. As is often the case colleges had orchestras, marching bands and jazz bands. Pat and I marched in the marching band and also played in the jazz band with Mark and Greg …
We found our way to each other during our freshman year … we were all 18 years old. Playing in the jazz band together we found out we all had similar interests in music, and so we started jamming. Randomly at first then more regularly.
Did you perform a lot at that time ? If so, on what occasions ?
We found our first gig at a local bar called Tom’s Foolery. I am pretty sure we were in there one night drinking and just asked Tom the owner if we could come in and play some night. He agreed and then we started coming every week.
The live shows became a hit, attracting a lot of our friends and then just all kinds of people. We just started morphing the songs into something unrecognizable. As the band got more comfortable just improvising on songs, Mark started to get ideas, as did I, about types of songs that we could “make our own”.
Since the roots were in jazz and jazz fusion … our own sound become sort of a mash up of those genres … we started to experiment with some of Marks compositions at this time – and they sounded a lot like more popular music with words! So we needed a better PA to hear the words and we kept getting better every gig. Nimbus was never going to be a wedding band – ever. Nimbus was always going to be a hybrid creative outfit … we stuck to it … by our 3rd year together we had several original songs – so we needed to record them.
How did you produce and distribute the first album ?
Mark found a producer / studio owner – who agreed to let us come in for free. It was in an old barn about 30 minutes from our town in a rural part of the state. We’d drive out, record for hours on end, go back home, go to classes, do it all again until we had a lot of material to work with. Mark found us a place who would press 1,000 copies and also print a card board cover for the records. We ordered them after I completed the artwork. Final mastering was done at the pressing plant pretty much out of our control. Overall it came out great. We figured we would sell records at our shows – we also sold them on consignment to record stores around the area or in places we were playing.
What was your reaction when people contacted you in the recent years about this album ?
For me it was pure joy to think that all these years later the album had found fans from all over the world. With only 1,000 original copies I never would have thought they would show up in places far far away and that a whole new generation of fans would discover the band. Having the opportunity to get the vinyl redone is amazing and awesome and wonderful … sometimes record collectors would track us down and ask us for information about the record and the band. We didn’t have much notoriety during the time we played together which was only 4 years … so to have people reaching out now and liking the album and the music is really something special.
Any special anecdote about a/some track(s) from the album ? Does any track have a special meaning ?
I think my song Free Yourself summed up what every graduating college senior was probably feeling at the time, and for me it blended some elements of a lot of the music I liked back then: jazz, disco, fusion, rock. Another song I think really shows the diverse nature of the band is Anna Smile: it’s a snappy jazzy but approachable little pop song. Lastly the title track for us: Children of the Earth and the tagged on It’s Enough to Know ballad were highlights for us all. When we held our listening party at the studio for friends, we all just sat back and really enjoyed the final mix.
You guys did Children of the Earth in 1979, did you work on another project afterwards ?
We did have more music written and we wanted to record it. We also wanted to add a guitarist into the band, our friend and roommate Chris Bailey who was a fabulous musician learned all the tunes. We got back into the original studio and did several tracks … unfortunately Pat was super busy with his final school work that Mark ended up playing drums on a few tracks. We had the 2 inch masters with rough mixes down but that is as far as we got. Shortly afterward we all moved to the Detroit area to try and keep it going, those tapes sat around, never got really mastered well, and today all that I have our copies of copies. The second album would have been amazing had we done it right but the band broke up before we could make that happen.
In the meantime Nimbus found a manager to help them release their second album, in contract with Warner Music, but that never happened: the manager was a drug dealer and was busted at the time the album was supposed to be released.
How did you meet this manager ?
Quirky connection, I never really knew. Mark found him through some other music connections.
Was it the reason why you somehow split up ?
Well the band had run its course it seems. Greg Pat and I moved into a house together for a year in Detroit … I kept playing with all kinds of people. We were broke and needed to work. The band seemed to be taking a back seat for all of us. Mark was married and living with his first wife somewhere nearby. We would get together and play (our basement at the house was set up to practice – but after a few gigs in the area we called it quits and everyone just decided to move on and get a real job. It wasn’t acrimonious or anything, we all liked each other, we just felt that the band had peaked). We knew it was a good band, we played some great gigs, we recorded some awesome stuff, but after we had one brush with fame (a Warner Brothers record rep) that fizzled, we all figured that was that.
Yet here we are … going on 40 years later and I’m reliving my past. I still play a lot of music … I don’t think I will ever stop making music. Pat and I played together for 6 years recently in a band and that was a blast for both of us. The way the internet has brought fans of Nimbus to our doorsteps again is simply amazing and wonderful.
That the art lives on, and it shows up in places all over the globe … in Italy, Denmark, Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo and Brooklyn there are people listening to the original Children of the Earth album and wondering what happened to the band.
I can’t thank you enough for your support and desire to bring the Nimbus album back to life! That means a lot to me … and I’m sure to others as well.