Concrete Rubber Band Jan Long, Duncan Long, Bobby Rhodes (Circa 1974)

Risen Savior American Artists 1969
Some of the most "out-there" psychedelic sounds can be found on this Kansas trio's mega-rare-bear custom lp. One of the first Christian groups to tinker with synthesizers and be experimental at the same time. 'Wicked' for example opens side two with a bizarre amalgam of what sounds like synthesized bubbling lava pits, frequency oscillations, distorted sci-fi vocals, shortwave static patterns - this is Christian psychedelia at its most underground and extreme, with all the earmarks of a bad drug trip which given the song's dark subject matter works just fine. Likewise 'What Shall We Do' opens with a lengthy outpouring of some of the most vicious distorted fuzz guitar ever, relaxing into a spooky dream-like ballad, then climaxing with a trying saucer effect that sounds straight outta Dark Side Of The Moon. 'Christian' opens with a Bach fugue before laying in its steady rock beat punctuated with subterranean wah-wah guitar and a wild heavily-modulated synth lead. There are several fine moody garage tracks here as well that are difficult to describe but are highly listenable and quite creative. Dense echoey homemade feel to the whole project. A monster for sure with under 500 made. Duncan Long, the main man behind the synths, guitars, and songwriting is now a published science-fiction author. KS

A Short History of the Concrete Rubber Band
By Duncan Long

The Concrete Rubber Band was a small, Kansas-based "Jesus Band" that performed from the late 1960s to early 1970s. Of course we didn't know we were a Jesus Band back then because that term hadn't yet been coined (or, at least, we never heard it). And being out in the sticks we were really totally unaware of other groups that performed Christian music, outside of a couple of other bands that we often rubbed shoulders with when performing at coffee houses and such.

I'm not sure exactly what sparked the start of the band. My mom, Lois Long, was an accomplished piano player and my dad, Paul Fred Long, played guitar, so we just grew up with the idea that folks would gather round and play instruments and sing from time to time. So perhaps it just seemed natural to us that with rock bands springing up all over the place in the 1960s, we could do likewise, finally putting our hours of piano lessons to (at least to our teenager eyes) good use.

My sister Jan ("Jan Long" then.... she's now married and is "Jan Pauls"), Bobby Rhodes (who would become our drummer), and I all attended Alden High School and went to the same church (in Alden, KS) so we all knew each other, given that the whole town of Alden had only 300 some people at that time and the high school had a total of forty-some students.

Jan and I started working toward creating the band in 1968, with some college kids and personnel changing pretty regularly at first, coming from Sterling College (which was 7 miles from Alden) supplying the musicians for the most part. Most if not all these guys and gals were talented, yet we never quite "jelled" into a band. Eventually Jan and I heard that Bobby Rhodes, a guy that had gone to our high school, was playing drums and we decided, well, why not try him out.

Now Bobby was a quiet guy and it was hard to imagine that he would do well as a drummer. But the moment he hit the trap set and started cooking along, it just worked. So within just a few measures it seemed like the band came together. From then on we had a trio that stayed pretty much in place (we did have another guy sing briefly with us when I had some throat troubles, and briefly I had a girl friend who performed with us, but neither performed with us for all that long).

Over the years the band practiced in my folk's living room and you could hear us halfway across town in the summer when the windows were open (keeping in mind that the town is only 5 blocks wide - ha). Looking back at it I have to wonder how my folks kept their sanity with all the instruments piled up in the room and all the racket we made during practice, but they never voiced any concern and in fact were always encouraging us to do the best at what we were interested in (and also financing some of the early purchases of equipment).

We have been asked a lot about the name, Concrete Rubber Band. Some people have come up with some very bizarre explanations of what the name represented, with a few even getting some deep theological meanings to it. But none of these were founded on fact (even though they sounded impressive). It is important to remember that this was the time where you had bands with names like "Iron Butterfly," "Jefferson Airplane" and such. The key thing was that names didn’t mean much but were weird enough that you would remember them.

We started out thinking "Rubber Band" would be memorable since that was already a household word and sort of played on the idea of the group being a band. But we also figured someone would also think of that and they might become famous at which point we’d be seen as copycats. So we added "Concrete" to the name, since that was not something normally put together with a flexible material like rubber. And so the Concrete Rubber Band was born.

After Jan left for law school in 1974 Bob and I briefly tried to keep going with me working just the keyboards while he drummed, but that was not too great. A year later I left Alden to get my Master's Degree in music and the band came to an end.

Our instrumentation consisted of a variety of "stuff" at one time or another. Our keyboard collection started with a VOX organ (made in Italy) which kept chugging along without a problem (and is still sitting in my folk’s house, I think). It was augmented by an RMI (Rocky Mountain Instruments) Electric Piano/Harpsichord (which I rewired so the base part could be played on the lower keys). Jan usually played the organ and electric piano (often at the same time), playing the bass so our trio sounded more like a quartet.

I would play either the electric guitar (usually a Fender Mustang, though I also had a Gibson guitar I occasionally played and a Japanese Norma Electric bass which I rarely played with the group) or I would play keyboard (usually ARP synthesizers -- I had an ARP Pro Soloist and an ARP 2600 as well as home-made synthesizer components... toward the end of our time together as a band we also had a string machine -- I can't remember who made that -- to give us a much fuller orchestral sound).

Bobby had a beautiful set of (I think) Slingerland drums with red sparkle finish. It was pretty much the usual trap set, a bass, snare, several cymbals, hi-hat, two side drums and a tom-tom. We armed him with thin sticks so he didn’t out shout our amplifiers. It seemed like we were forever playing on slick floors during live performances and more than once between songs you would see him pulling all the drums together after they had traveled all over the place (I don't know how he kept playing sometimes).

We had an ever changing array of amplifiers including an Ampeg tube amp that strangely had about the best sound of the lot (and continues to be used in my son’s band). At one time that was THE amplifier that we used for keyboard, guitar, and vocals — not too great an arrangement, obviously. Eventually we had a Gibson and assorted Fender amps and a nice Kustom PA system with two column speakers; that thing had a lot of hiss to it, but that was no big deal since we played pretty loud. That PA also had a spring reverb that created a thunderous explosion of noise if we happened to bounce or bump it during performance, something that was easy to do on some of the small stages we found ourselves performing on. Once we were armed with that PA, we were able to do some serious performing.

At one point Bobby had an old Volkswagen van that we sometimes used to carry our equipment in. It had a bad battery (strategically located with the engine in the back of the van, right under where all the musical equipment was stored) and on at least one occasion the battery failed to start the van so we had to hop out and push that heavy vehicle down the road so whoever had the good fortune to be steering it could pop the clutch to get the engine started. We also had a bunch of different cars from time to time that were loaded to the gills with drums, amplifiers, and other stuff. Fortunately we never had any wrecks or the highway patrol would probably have been picking bits of musicians out of the amplifiers and drums.

We also had a "light organ" that we used sometimes. It was basically a (I think this is the name for the electronic device) three varistors set to each control a bank of colored flood lights. The varistors supplied varying amounts of voltage to the lights according to the sound frequencies fed into the machine. There were filters in it for high/medium/low pitches, so one color of lights would flash with higher pitches, another with medium pitches, and the third for lows. The louder the music, the brighter the lights shined. That was pretty slick.

I also rigged up a speaker with a flexible rubber membrane over its front, then glued bits of mirror to the membrane. When we played our music through the speaker and shined a spot on the mirrors, they created some amazing "dancing" patterns of light on the wall behind us. We didn’t use that a lot because it was hard to set up, but on a few performances employed it.

All the visual effects were laughably crude by today's standards, but in the pre-computer days this all seemed like high tech and looked pretty decent as well. When we first started we had some home-made films and other light show slide projectors, but quickly discarded those both because they were so much work to set up and use, and also because the audience seemed to be totally baffled as to what the light show was about -- understandably so since it wasn't really about anything but just looked (we thought) really neat. Again this was embarrassingly crude but seemed "oh, so cool" at the time.

I wrote the music for the songs were performed and my dad often wrote the words. Usually I would write out the notes for the melody and the chords and the vocal parts, bass line, and instrumentation was created "on the fly" by Jan and me with Bobby setting the tempo. I guess we did "lift" a few bits of music here and there. We have some of Bach's music at the beginning of one of the songs (I have always been a big classical music fan) and one song (unfortunately not recorded), Santa Clause Is Dead, started out with the "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" carol (that song, by the way, was about how God was quite different from Santa Claus, in case anyone wonders about the title - ha).

We didn't perform at a lot of places. Our sound was a bit too wild for any church group to sponsor us, and we didn't want to play at dances. So we were had an Acid Rock sound with nowhere to play. But a few brave churches, coffee houses, and youth groups had us play our set of songs. Most of the playing was in Central Kansas though we occasionally ventured into Western and Northern Kansas. Somewhere along the line we made a short run (500, I think) of the LPs which we tried selling in Christian book stores and also at concerts. These records never sold well and I ended up giving most of them away to students when I taught school. We had the world’s most crude studio setup for making the recordings: Our family’s living room.

We used a cheap reel-to-reel stereo tape recorder that permitted recording a new sound along with a channel from one or the other of the two stereo tracks. This permitted us to lay down a track of instrumental sounds, then add more instrumentals or vocals over that (at the loss of most of the stereo effect, of course). We couldn’t do a lot of this type of overdubbing or things got pretty muddy, but did some of this. Unfortunately we couldn’t use our PA system for this due to the hiss and employed some the Ampeg bass amp for the vocals. Of course this was far from ideal and is one reason you can hardly pick out any of the words in the vocals. I think on one or two tracks I sang with myself (thanks to this tape technique). But most of the performances on our LP were pretty much what we sounded like live — only you probably could understand our lyrics since we sang through the PA (ha).

I drew the cover artwork for the album. We didn't have money to purchase one of the canned pictures that the vanity press record company offered, so we just cobbled together a hippie looking lettering thing with some Christian symbols -- and it all turned out surprisingly well (albeit, a bit off centered on the original album covers). Later that same "logo" that we used on the cover was employed on cheap newsprint flyers we printed up to announce public performances. We'd hit towns where we were to play in a few days ahead of time (or mail the flyers to those hiring us to play at their church or whatever) and plaster them in stores and on telephone poles. Crowds were never large but they were generally pretty decent thanks to that sort of guerrilla advertising.

The Concrete Rubber Band was always a labor of love. I think the most we ever got when playing somewhere was fifty dollars, and often we played for free or for the collection plate that was passed around (keeping in mind that the high school students that generally comprised our audience weren't loaded with spare change). I don’t think we ever sold more than perhaps 20 records. Considering the thousands of dollars we had invested in equipment, that would have meant that had the band stayed together for a three or four decades, we would have finally made enough to pay for the equipment. Another decade or two would have enabled us to pay off the gas burned in traveling. This is not to say we didn’t have a great time and we did also get a chance to meet some very nice people. Too, in the 1960s, and early 1970s, making money was about the last thing on the mind of anyone playing music. We did it because it was fun to do and that was the reward.

Bobby now is married and farming around Alden. Unfortunately I have had little contact with him since leaving there.

Jan became a successful lawyer, working in Legal Aid, as a judge, and currently as a state legislator for Kansas.

I taught school for nine years, four while in the Concrete Rubber Band and then five more after getting my Master's Degree at Kansas State University. Before my last teaching stretch I THOUGHT I had a job lined up with ARP Synthesizers in Boston. I could play both guitar and keyboards, had become very skilled with ARP synthesizers, and the company was coming out with a guitar version of its synthesizer, so after meeting with and talking to an ARP representative, it looked like I would be a virtual shoe-in for the job.

What I didn't know was that the company had apparently sunk way too much money (so I've been told) into their guitar synthesizer and sales of other synthesizers were dropping and the business was cutting back (and would eventually go belly up). So abruptly I was without a job. Fortunately I had learned of a school that was looking for a music teacher and landed that job. The good part to this story is that at that school I also met my wife, so what seemed like a disaster turned into a real blessing for me.

I eventually started writing books and articles (which I often illustrated) and making money at that, so I left my job teaching music at the public school. The odd twist to this is that I started writing to make enough money to start a record studio of my own. But I discovered I was making so much money writing, and enjoying it so much, that I never got around to the music side of the business. Eventually I sold my ARP synthesizers, junked some of the keyboards, and gave away and sold my guitars (however the bass and Mustang went to my son who plays up a storm in his own right and now is creating a band of his own as well).

Today I occasionally write and record music. It is basically a classical electronic style that I suppose falls into the current "Space Ambiance" category. I have to say as an old timer it is a bit disconcerting to see what once was called "electronic music" now completely replaced by "Electronic Music" that is more hip-hop or rock than the classical electronic music of the 1960s and 1970s. But I guess that is "progress" :o) I currently do all of this with "virtual" synthesizers, mixers, and so forth through my Frankenstein of a PC. I have a MIDI keyboard that I sometimes use, but generally write the music directly to the notes via a digital tablet and/or create sonic soundscapes using AudioMulch, CoolEdit, Acid, an N-Track Studio along with possibly hundreds of VST plugins (no, not all at once).

People can find out more about my current music as well as listen to samples at: http://duncanlong.com/MP3-music/index.html (and also see samples of my artwork and writing as well as one of my novels at http://duncanlong.com/ ).

Duncan Long back in '74 with his synthesizers including an Arp Pro Soloist, an ARP 2600 plus three banks of home-brewed synthesizer modules assembled, in part from scratch and other modules from PAiA.

Used with permission of the author