Description
Four Track Motorola ’66 Corolla is a compilation album by the American singer and songwriter Larry Norman, independently released on Solid Rock Records in 2005.
Four Track Motorola – ’66 Corolla will surprise, delight and puzzle you. It contains songs no one has ever heard or even written about. It contains the first moment of conception for some songs; being taped as they were being written. It contains demos of other songs. And it also contains finished masters which have never been heard. Some songs are from unreleased People! recordings. Some songs are post-People! Some songs were written for television shows, other artists, Tower of Power horn stacks and blue-eyed soul recordings. A 28 page booklet comes with it. [Note from from the Official Larry Norman website]
In the ’60s Larry Norman’s first forays into music were as part of the band People! where he was one of two vocalists. These recordings were demos, masters and experiments made by the band in the ’60s that Larry recorded onto four-track tape to listen to in his car to help ferment production and writing ideas. Recently he rediscovered them and decided to put them together onto a CD. It’s good to actually get a CD from Larry which features mostly unreleased music to check out. These give an insight into Larry’s musical life in the ’60s, although some of the better tracks here feature the other singers from People! doing the lead vocals. There are shorter bursts of music like «Spirits», «Dancer» and «Rita Rita Sigrid» which all turned up later in his career as finished different songs. A selection of short bits and pieces close the album which are simple songwriting demos. There are curious pieces like «Blow In My Ear», «Clean Lennon» and plenty of west coast ’60s style rock jams that fit perfectly into the time. Favourites have got to be the rockers «Looking Good» and «Think» which open the CD. If you like the People! album ‘I Love You’ then it’s worth digging into these ’60s curios. [Mike Rimmer, Cross Rhythms, September 2005]
In the ’60s, before there were cassette players in cars, there were four-track and eight-track cartridge machines. Thus albums used to be released on both vinyl and cartridge tapes so that people could listen to them in cars. Back in those days Larry Norman had a cartridge player in his car and he would edit his songs on reel to reel tape and have them dubbed onto cartridges to listen to them in the car. Recently he found a collection of those old tapes and was intrigued by what he heard and released some of his earliest recordings onto CD.
The result is ‘Four Track Motorola ’66 Corolla’ which gathers together some of Norman’s earliest recordings. These are solo demos or stuff recorded with his ’60s band People. Larry recalls, “I found out I could get songs put on a four-track in town and then put them into my car. I had an old Corolla. And so that’s what I did. The album is from one of the tapes that I used to listen to. I just thought people might get a kick out of it. And also, I was working on song ideas. So they’d hear bits and pieces of songs and see how I worked. [Excerpt from an interview with Larry Norman by Mike Rimmer, featured in Cross Rhythms, Friday 14th October, 2005]
CD tracklist:
01. Telephone – Think (Written by Lowman Pauling)
02. Looking Good
03. Spirits (This is “Baroquen Spirits”)
04. Sweetheart (Groupie Evasion Strategy #86) (This is “Hey Sweetheart” from “Both Sides of People.”)
05. Blow In My Ear (Alternately titled “Laugh-In” in the linear notes)
06. Clean Lennon
07. Now Is The Time
08. Dancer (This is “She’s A Dancer”)
09. Rita Rita – Sigrid (This is “Sigrid Jane”)
10. Let My Love Go
11. Killing The Dragon (This is from “The Epic”)
12. Hungarian Rhaps #2
13. Idowanna Lose U (This is “I Don’t Want To Lose You”)
14. Child
15. Wake Up To Me
16. All My Dreams
17. Lonely Theme
18. Drive Me
19. Salt Of The Earth
20. Reap What You Sow
21. Best Friend
22. With A Ribbon
Note: Available at Bandcamp: https://larrynorman.bandcamp.com/album/four-track-motorola-66-corolla
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