The Lama Workshop

WINDWORDS

As the goldrush for the lost treasures of yesteryear continues, the odd, excellent title still pops up that has managed to elude excavators until now. One such recent discovery is the WINDWORDS album from Ohio. Released as a local Cleveland pressing in 1979, the "Shootin' The Breeze" LP has garnered plenty of positive feedback in the third millennium, but not much has been known until now. Despite the full band sound, Windwords was just a duo, both on record and stage. I recently connected with songwriter/guitarist/vocalist Dave Arberman, who sheds some light on this little-known band.

Q: Were you in any other bands prior to Windwords?
DAVE ARBERMAN: I started playing in bands when I was 13. I have an archive of recordings going back to that time, but after Windwords was when I did most of my polished stuff. I have a couple self-produced albums which are all solo efforts. I attempted to write for Nashville for 5 years, but I didn't live there, and breaking in is very difficult when you're not there to pound the pavement daily. I did some radio jingle work in Cleveland, played in some other bands, but didn't really record much with other bands except as a guest musician.

Q: What was the line-up for Windwords?
A: I don't know if you realize that Windwords was a duo, just Doug McWilliams and myself, as far as live performances were concerned. We played all these places that normally hired full bands, which always was a source of pride for me. We played our asses off. At our peak, we were booked almost a year in advance, and we were playing 5-6 nights a week. We would book for a week at a time on a couple resort islands in Lake Erie, reachable only by boat or ferry. Sometimes we also did middle-of-the-day shows at universities and city parks. We added regional morning TV shows and radio spots to our work load, too, when we could. The album was all us, as you see in the credits.

Q: I understand you were popular around Cleveland at the time?
A: We did very well together. We were considered the premier duo in our area at that time. We played about 300 different bars, clubs, colleges, restaurants, yacht clubs, fairs and benefits, did regional TV and radio, sold records, baseball hats and t-shirts with our logo. We were written up in independent reviews, local newspapers and entertainment rags, and in general were quite successful. The album helped fuel all of that. We wanted to have a product that showed we were serious. At that time, it was really very rare to have an album, compared to today. It was expensive, and couldn't be done at home for the most part, so it represented a substantial outlay of money and committment.

Q: What was it like working as a duo?
A: Doug Mcwilliams is 5 years younger than I am. He put himself thru Oberlin College in Ohio with the proceeds from the band. We really don't speak much - we're very different people, I guess, and never had all that much in common. Except when we played, we seemed to go into another plane of existence, put everything aside, and go for it. There was definitely a magical ESP-thing there, it was amazing sometimes. I think that's what you hear on the album that makes it stand out.

Q: In what ways did you differ as people?
A: I remember shows we did, times where we'd end the night, and while we were packing up, I'd tell Doug what an awful show we'd had - because I felt the sound wasn't right, or our monitors were giving us problems, or the acoustics of the room were terrible. Doug would look at me with surprise and tell me what a great show we'd had, 'cause the audience was riveted, and the response was enthusiastic. I'd be so tied up with the mechanics, I wouldn't see those things about the performance that made it a standout, and Doug wouldn't be bothered by the technical things. He had a great ear, and he'd know they were there, but he could put them aside more easily than I could. That's where we worked really well together. I'd tweak the tech stuff to perfection, while Doug would hold that audience to him. You need to able to do both things well, and few people, even if they have all the necessary skills to do both, can do both in realtime. So we played off of each other.

Q: What artists would you say influenced your music at the time?
A: Influences musically around the time we made the album would have been: For me, Neil Young, Beatles (of course), Fleetwoood Mac, Eagles. I also love blues - Climax Blues Band is a fave, to name one. Did you ever hear Dave Mason's "Alone Together" album? Huge influence on my guitar work. Bob Seger was another favorite. For Doug, He loved Grateful Dead - our live renditions of many a Dead song were audience favorites. For us both, James Taylor to Zeppelin - I think we drew from a lot of things. We really influenced each other, also, which adds complexity to the mix...

Q: There is a religious theme to many songs on the LP. Did you regard Windwords as a Christian outfit?
A: We didn't, in fact, define ourselves formally as a Christian band, just a folk-rock-blues acoustic/electric duo. Doug was the more Christian, or "philosophically-oriented" writer, in that he explored questions and issues of religion, environment, peace, personal relationships and other areas of the human spirit in his music. He still does. Doug's always been a really articulate thinker about the things he believes in, and he's always used music as an expressive outlet for those issues. His influences are felt all over our material. My style was more moody or dramatic, lyrically. I like escapism (Take Me Away), introspective thinking (Clouds Againt The Sky), and just blues for the fun of it. We had audience favorites that I penned, such as "Pukin' On The Train", which, as you can tell from the title, doesn't exactly evoke that sensitive or religious side you see on the album... Somewhere, I have a copy of our 2nd album, a live, cassette-only release taped at a restauant. This is maybe a more accurate depiction of Windwords as a performing duo.

Q: How important were the religious themes for Windwords' music?
A: While religion and/or Christianity were perhaps an underlying force in the writing of much of our music at the time (especially for Doug), the album was created primarily as a marketing tool, as capitalistic as that sounds. It wasn't done for financial gain, really.

Dave Arberman and Doug Mcwilliams at the "Coventry
Street Fair", Cleveland circa 1980.

Q: How did the idea of making an album come about ?
A: When we first formed the band and tried to find paying jobs, we wanted to distinguish ourselves from all the other "wanna-be" musicians on the Cleveland music scene. We asked an old established folk musician from Cleveland (Al Leatherwood) what he would do to stand out from the crowd. He said, "make an album", and so we did. At that time, having an album was a rarity, and it provided an essential vehicle to get jobs, local radio play, etc. The record didn't even provide our listeners with an accurate portrayal of our live sound - and we were careful to explain that to buyers of the album. Rather, it added a side to Windwords you couldn't see in a live show, and so expanded our versatility. We had other musicians after us all the time to form a "full band" with bass and drums. We attempted it, also, but kept reverting to the basic duo. Performing as a duo was very challenging musically, because we needed to provide the musical and visual excitement of a full band somehow, without all the chrome, flash and movement.

Q: What are your memories of the album?
A: What the Windwords album had was a sense of "adventure". We did it on a very slim budget, experimented in the studio and wrote as we went in many cases. I remember trying to play a drum track, and I couldn't get the kick drum beat right. So I played the drums without the kick drum, and then added a seperate track of kick drum only, on hands and knees operating the kick drum pedal. It was that kind of thing that made the process interesting and unique. Our engineer, George Sipl, was the keyboard player for Eric Carmen during the time he wrote hits such as "All By Myself". He was inspirational to have around us, because he got into the spirit of what we were doing, and he was a big factor in our finished sound, also.

Q: Where does the title "Shootin' The Breeze" come from?
A: The title of the album, if I recall correctly, came about from ongoing discussion about what the title should be. The "Breeze" was really kind of a play on words relating to the "Wind" in Windwords - itself derived from "Wind" and "Words", the band's name was an attempt to show the duality in ourselves. "Words that took you on a journey" was maybe the underlying idea, like "Led Zeppelin" was a duality for a band that was heavy, yet soared at the same time. So "Shootin" The Breeze" was sort of synonomous with "Putting Forth The Music Into The World". That was the idea, and we were young and thought of ourselves as deep thinkers. It's ironic that Doug's biggest dissatisfaction with our band, at the end, was that he felt we weren't being listened to. He was right. The gigs which became our primary bread and butter were the type of shows where we were the vehicle for beer sales in the clubs we played. This was fun for a while, but didn't provide the "concert" atmosphere we both really loved, where our audience actually listened to our words and our message and the nuances of the music. I remember playing more than one show on a resort island on Lake Erie, where I had to tape up all my fingers because they were bleeding from playing in summer heat for 6 hours a day. The audience there wanted it LOUDER and FASTER and ABLE TO DANCE TO IT. (All that lead guitar you hear on the album? That's me playing lead and bending notes on an acoustic guitar. Try that 5 nights a week for 4-6 hours a night. I had "Schwarzenegger" fingers, literally. I could crush rock). We had over-popularized ourselves into this kind of setting, which was not our primary thing, but which paid really well and provided big ego-gratification for us.

Q: Fans of local 1960s-1970s music have been hunting down every privately released LP for decades, yet Windwords remained obscure until recently...
A: That's really interesting - our invisibility, as you say, may be due to the invisible cover. We had no budget for a fancier cover, so we went "demo simple" and spent our wad on the recording (which also was low budget). We were in a really good studio, but recorded in the "junk" studio, an old, old recorder, mixing board and other ancient equipment that kept having breakdown issues, noise problems and other weirdisms. I was on familiar territory. I started recording when I was about 6 years old, and throughout my youth I accumulated old, garbage-picked recording equipment and got it to work somehow. I was part singer-songwriter, part technician and part mechanic. Now that I have state of the art, all digital stuff, and lots of engineering experience, I'm not nearly as creative...

Q: What kind of distribution did you have?
A: There were 1000 LPs pressed, all in a single run. About 200 were given as promos for radio stations, giveaways, friends, and the rest were sold at concerts in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the East coast (Boston, primarily). We also made a 45 ["A Quiet Place" / "Love Revolution"; both non-LP] - one side was live at a bar in Cleveland, the other side was a studio recording with guest singer Lisa Sharp, (sister of Todd Sharp, lead guitarist for Rod Stewart, Hall and Oates, etc). The master tapes are still in existence, and I've thought about trying to remaster the album just for yucks, but the tapes suffer from "peeling emulsion" problems, which can sometimes be fixed by baking the tapes in a convection oven. In the meantime, I've done a "poor man's" remaster from the original test pressing.

Q: Were you satisfied with the way the Windwords LP turned out?
A: I think we felt good about the album upon completion. It was a difficult thing to do. Most people don't relize how hard making an album can be, mentally and creatively, physically, too. Each 4 minute song takes hours to do, building it track by track, trying to capture a particular sound or feel, then the mixdown. So I think we were very proud of it, and we had favorite riffs and phrases that we worked very hard to get right, and enjoyed listening to on the final product. We were alo proud of the fact that we even had an album. I was the audio freak for the most part. Doug was the consummate performer. We taught each other as we went, on stage and on the album, and that's what we had - two different perspectives, which kept us interested in what we were doing.

Q: After Windwords, have you been involved in any other music projects?

A: I go by the name Mann Wolf musically now, by the way. You can find a review of a recent self-release or two online with a bit of searching. There's a website called "Muses Muse" - they're done a couple reviews on Mann Wolf stuff if you're interested... Doug's always been active in political and ecological issues. When we disbanded, he formed another band and got a 30 visa to go to Russia to perform there, kind of promoting word peace, no nukes, etc. Doug's now an attorney, father of 2 boys, and his passion is fighting for ecological issues and the planet in general. He still performs occassionally with a local band he's been dabbling with since the Windwords days, primarily they do benefits and local fairs, just to play around. They're called Northern Lights, and they made an album around 1982-3, if I recall correctly. I talked to Doug last summer, and we actually discussed doing a reunion show in Cleveland sometime this year. If that happens, I'll definitely have a live tape of the show...I believe that connection will still be there and evident musically after 20 years.