Founded in 1968 on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio, The Same As Last Week was a popular cover band with an adventurous playlist of dance tunes. So how has it happened that after 54 years they have released their first album? Where did they find those recordings? How had they been preserved, surviving over more than half a century?
The Same As Last Week included the following members:
Eric Blecher, bass guitar
Jeff Bloom, guitar & backup vocals
Les Bloom, alto sax & flute
Lee Branst, lead vocals
John Bogo, drums
Dave Featheringham, lead vocals
Bill Jaros, organ & piano
Mike Kaplan, vibraphone
* Mike Bevis, organ [through February 1969]
** Neil Hecht, drums [from October 1969 on]
With their diverse musical backgrounds and uncommon instrumentation, they added unique flavors to an eclectic repertoire of Motown oldies, hits of the day, and future classics.
Playing around Greater Cleveland, Northeast Ohio, and the Midwest, the band entertained devoted followers at frat parties, college dances, popular local bars, a summer lake resort, and a 400-seat lounge attached to a bowling alley.
Following the band’s tour in the summer of 1969, their first gig back in Cleveland was at an outdoor fraternity party. Someone brought along a stereo ¼” reel-to-reel tape recorder. The microphone setup was not ideal: one track came out of the sound system; the other was a microphone suspended over the instruments. The tape ran out, but a couple of sets were captured for posterity. Then the tape was forgotten.
After the founding members graduated in June 1970, the band broke up. Members moved on to further musical ventures, advanced degrees, and the military. They ultimately enjoyed long careers in engineering, business, finance, education, home building, and medicine.
Les rediscovered a copy of the old tape in 2008, and he digitized the recording. By 2011 Les had shared those tracks on his personal website, but the quality was not very good. The members of the band sporadically reconnected virtually for a brief time and relived many memories.
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, though, there was a push to get back in touch more regularly. While the recordings were fine to share with close family and friends, they were not really up to professional standards. Les and Mike attempted to improve the sound quality, but the results were not satisfying. The project was pushed to a back burner.
Now fast forward to August, 2023. At some point Jeff had made the acquaintance of a highly skilled Ukrainian audio engineer, Oleg “Yorshoff” Yershov, who had been working as a consultant for Jeff’s firm Synchro Arts. Jeff shared The Same As Last Week recording with him. Wanting a distraction from the Russian artillery and missiles, Oleg wholeheartedly took it upon himself to apply his skills to those earlier tracks. Oleg spent more than 200 hours on the project while also improving his skills and testing out approaches for revitalizing aged recordings. He did a fantastic job separating the audio into stems, applying lots of magic to resurrect those vintage recordings. Oleg captured the band’s energy and made the tape recording sound better than it ever had.
Oleg got a digital copy of the songs and started to work. He isolated (to a limited degree) the instruments and vocals, meticulously added a depth and richness to the bass and drums, boosted or ducked guitar, organ, sax, flute and vibraphone parts where necessary, patched missing or destroyed audio with “audio bandages”, and created a more contemporary sound space with modern record-like dynamics.
Now we, in our mid-70’s, are all happy to have these tracks put together into an “album” which is simply one live gig at an outdoor frat party in 1969 with some great songs of that era for people to dance to.
Despite the remaining rough edges, we hope people find our live music as surprisingly toe-tapping and uplifting as we do. And, as everyone knows, sharing meaningful memories with others is the most satisfying thing you can do with them.
So these 14 tracks that have been thoroughly resurrected. Individual songs have been edited to provide cleaner intros and endings, fading in or out as appropriate. Extraneous background noise has been eliminated. The former crude recording now sounds like it was made in a professional studio.
Thus, 54 years later, a new album of a non-professional recording of a live performance has been released, thanks in part to the application of state-of-the-art technology. However, none of this collaboration would have been possible without the unwavering efforts of an amazing audio engineer, himself younger than the band members by a generation or two.
Our album,?“The Same As Last Week (Live in Cleveland 1969)”, is now available wherever fine music is streamed or downloaded.
