Oct. 21, 1977 feature: Andy Kulberg of the Blues Project

 

One of the concerts that totally blew my impressionable young mind in the mid-1960s was the Blues Project at Floral Hall on the Chautauqua County Fairgrounds in Dunkirk. Little did I suspect at the time that there was a Buffalo connection.

Oct. 21, 1977

Music as a Craft

          Andy Kulberg, at age 21, was on the front line of a musical revolution. It was 1965 and he was bassist and flute player for the Blues Project, a New York City-based sextet that turned Greenwich Village from the folk revival to rock. Kulberg’s skipping-along instrumental “Flute Thing” brought the electric flute to rock ‘n roll.

          Two years and three albums later, the group was broken up. After introducing thousands of musicians to the new magic, the members of the Blues Project went off to pursue separate visions of it. Some did well – keyboardman Al Kooper founded Blood, Sweat & Tears. And some just kept plugging – like drummer Roy Blumenfeld, who regularly visited the Belle Starr in Colden with a Louisville-based band called Coco Morgan.

          Kulberg, home a couple weeks ago to visit his mother in Amherst, is musical director for singer David Soul, the Hutch of TV’s “Starsky & Hutch.” He plays on Soul’s new hit, “Silver Lady,” and leads the band for Soul’s upcoming appearance on “The Midnight Special.” He also was bandleader for Soul’s sold-out tour of England last spring and the singer’s command performance before Queen Elizabeth.

          Kulberg calls himself “a surviving craftsman” in the music business. After the ups and downs of his rock career with the Blues Project and, later, a folk-rock group called Seatrain, he’s settled into composing and arranging for a living.

          His standing interest is his partnership in an advertising production company in San Francisco, writing musical backdrops to yogurt and wine. His major push in the next months will be arranging the score for an animated film of a children’s musical he wrote called “Almond and the Magic Wheel.” The animation is being done by Ralph Bakshi, who did “Fritz the Cat.”

          He’s also looking for scores to write for TV. He’s done one for “Starsky & Hutch” – an episode called “Harmonica” – and hopes to land half a dozen more. Beyond that, he’ll play a club date a couple times a month with friends from near his home in the San Francisco suburb of Mill Valley or pick up work in recording sessions.

          In his 1962 Amherst High School yearbook, he’s listed as “Mr. Music.” He was there during the Kingston Trio era (“I’m a folkie, basically,” he says) and played in a folk quartet with singer-songwriter Eric Andersen, a classmate.

          At Boston University, he ran into Boston’s booming folk club scene – Bob Dylan and Joan Baez playing the Club 47 – then left for New York City in pursuit of love. He lost the girl, however, and enrolled in music composition classes at NYU, which is where he ran into Roy Blumenfeld one day in the hall.

          “He stops me and says: ‘You play bass?’” Kulberg recounts. “I knew he was in a band and they had a gig at the Gaslight. We went to Danny Kalb’s house. There was him and Artie Traum and Roy and myself. We did some tunes which became the basic Blues Project repertory. I came out saying: ‘This is the most exciting music I’ve heard in my life.’”

          Kulberg earned $50 his first night at the Gaslight. Soon afterward, he quit school.

          “I was really swept up,” he says. “One minute, there I was, walking down the hall in school. Then, almost overnight, I was on stage, making records. We came back from one trip in San Francisco and found that we were very successful.

          “We fired our first manager, who took our equipment with him – see the back of ‘Projections’ – but we just kept going. We’d walk into the Café au Go-Go and there was an expectation, a hush. We realized we were in the middle of an incredible scene.”

          But it didn’t last long. The beginning of the end was a rock show the Blues Project headlined in New York’s RKO 55th Street Theater. Opening were Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Cream and the Who.

          “I think Al watched the Who and Cream and decided they were onto something bigger than the Blues Project,” he declares. “They took what we started and made it into big business.”

          Kulberg picked up the pieces of the distraught band after Kooper’s departure. Traveling to California, Kulberg met fiddler Richard Greene and included him on a final Blues Project album, “Planned Obsolescence.” He and Greene then formed a new folk-rock group, Seatrain.

          “The last Blues Project album was actually the first Seatrain album,” Kulberg says. Seatrain made several albums, one of them with Beatles producer George Martin, and found favor with college students, primarily in the Northeast.

          “Seatrain was avant-garde in a very middle-class way,” Kulberg reflects. “We hoped sensibility would develop around it. It was a personal success for me. It kept me alive in the music business and gave me a lot of credibility.”

          Seatrain lasted five years. Capitol Records dropped them after Greene quit. Kulberg and the others broke up during the energy crisis of 1973-74 when they couldn’t get enough gasoline to drive them to colleges.

          “Darwin’s theory applies far more to the music business,” he says, “than any other.”

          Kulberg’s next attempt to form a band ended when its members ripped a bar apart and burned down some condominiums. Since then, he’s had little interest in leading rock bands on tour. One record company offered him a contract, he says, but withdrew it when he told them not to expect him to go on the road.

          Elliot Mazur, who handles Crosby, Stills & Nash, introduced Kulberg to David Soul when the actor was about to make his first hit, “Don’t Give Up on Me, Baby.” He’d met Soul in 1966, but hadn’t recalled it. Soul was recording “The Covered Man” with a ski mask over his face.

          “I’m a cynic,” Kulberg says, “but I do not feel cynical about David Soul. Not that I initially liked his music, but he’s an amazing catalyst. He embodies all that’s positive about a person. And he works very hard. When I told him I was interested in scoring for TV, he kicked the door open and I kept my foot in long enough to get something.

          “My main interest is in being a composer,” Kulberg says. “With the symphony orchestras dying, movies and TV are the media of the composer now. You learn to compose in frames instead of bars – 24 frames per second.

          “The cue may start at 3 minutes and 4/10ths of a second into a scene,” he explains, “so you take a book or a calculator and you fiddle it around. It’s like sculpture. For a chase scene, I wrote a very Bartok-like string quartet. It was very frightening. What I didn’t know was that they were going to put car squeals on top of it.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Andy Kulberg during his visit to Amherst in 1977. 

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FOOTNOTE: I wound up writing about Andy Kulberg again 25 years later:

          A memorial service for Andy Kulberg, a Buffalo-area native and well-known rock and jazz musician and producer, was held last Saturday in Fairfax, Calif.

          Kulberg, 57, died Jan. 28, 2002, in his home in Fairfax after a long battle with cancer.

          Kulberg scored one of the first underground rock hits in 1966 with his instrumental piece "Flute Thing" for the Blues Project. He later went on to become bandleader and arranger for television actor and singer David Soul.

          Born in Buffalo, he graduated from Amherst High School in 1962.

          He studied at Boston University and New York University, where he met Happy and Artie Traum and Danny Kalb, luminaries of the New York City folk scene. He joined what was then the Danny Kalb Quartet as a bass player in 1965.

          Shortly thereafter, the band turned electric and, as the Blues Project, became New York City's leading electric blues band, as a result of its regular Saturday night shows in the Cafe Au Go Go.

          "Flute Thing," which Kulberg based on a theme borrowed from jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, became one of the band's most popular songs and was a highlight of its performance at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

          "He started playing flute in high school," said his sister, Julie Lewitzky of North Buffalo. "He would play 'Swingin' Shepherd Blues' in our vestibule to get the echo. He wanted to be performing at a young age. I don't think his college career was of much significance. He just wanted to be on stage."

          Following the Monterey Pop Festival, Kulberg and Blues Project drummer Roy Blumenfeld moved to Marin County, Calif., and founded another group called Seatrain. Before it disbanded in 1974, Seatrain recorded four albums, including a 1971 album that was the first to be produced by George Martin after the Beatles broke up.

          In 1976, Kulberg joined with guitarist Chris Michie, a veteran of the Van Morrison band, in a collaboration that involved producing and writing a variety of music for records, film and television.

          In the late 1970s, he also teamed with David Soul, star of the television series "Starsky and Hutch," serving as arranger and bandleader on episodes of the show, producing Soul's albums and leading his band on tour.

          His score for a theatrical production in San Francisco won a Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award in 1983.

          He returned to live performing in the 1990s, playing occasional dates with Kalb and Blumenfeld, including the Monterey Pop Revisited festival last summer. He also played with Blumenfeld and Mark Naftalin, pianist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, in Marin County clubs last year.

          In addition to his sister, survivors include his wife of 21 years, the former Lorie Rory; three sons, Alexei of San Anselmo, Calif., and Zak and Nik, both of Fairfax; his mother, Lenore of Amherst; and two grandsons.