Hot Platters: Jerry Hahn Brotherhood (Columbia Records 1970)

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Hot Platters: Jerry Hahn Brotherhood (Columbia Records 1970)

Jerry Hahn Brotherhood

Mike Finnigan: Lead Vocals, Organ, Piano, Harmonica

Jerry Hahn: Guitar, Banjo, Vocals

George Marsh: Drums

Clyde Graves: Bass

Track List

Martha’s Madman

Early Bird Café

One Man Woman

Ramblin’

Dippin’ Snuff’

Time’s Caught Up With You

Thursday Thing

What I Gave Away

Comin’ Down

Captain Bobby Stout

Recorded @ Pacific Sound San Mateo, CA

Producers: Larry Sharp & Joe Gannon Sharp-Gannon Productions

Engineering: David Brown, Willie Greer & Mark Friedman

Mix Engineer: Bruce Morgan

If I had to choose 10 albums to have while on a desert island, this particular Hot Platter would definitely be in the mix. The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood was formed by jazz guitarist Jerry Hahn who had paid his dues working with John Handy, the Fifth Dimension and Gary Burton. By 1970, he wanted to get a band together that would reflect a myriad of musical influences--- jazz, blues, rock, gospel, country etc. One of the best parts of the early 1970's was the great amount of experimentation that was going on among bands in general. A very fertile period indeed. As a matter of fact, one could easily make the claim that this here record was one of the very first true fusion albums to hit the scene. Later came such bands as Return To Forever and Weather Report who received wide acclaim for bringing together elements of jazz and rock but let's face it…However, The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood had been there first.

I'll never forget the first time I heard this album. I was a freshman at The University of Dayton and a fella by the name of Larwrence McCullough (my roommate at the time and currently a fine writer who recently collaborated on a great book with Harold F. Eggers Jr called My Years with Townes Van Zandt) showed up with a copy of the album and said, "Hey, check this out!" I was immediately impressed with the diverse mixture of styles on the album. One minute you'd hear rock then a taste of country and somewhere along the line straight ahead jazz.

The band had several key elements: Hahn's jazz inflected rock guitar, a solid versatile rhythm section of George Marsh (drums) & Clyde Graves (bass) and most importantly, the lead vocals & Hammond B-3 organ of the great Mike Finniganl. Finnegan is still active today backing up such artists as Bonnie Raitt and Crosby, Still & Nash.

Jerry Hahn

The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood was formed by jazz guitarist Jerry Hahn who had paid his dues working with John Handy, the Fifth Dimension and Gary Burton. By 1970, he wanted to get a band together that would reflect a myriad of musical influences--- jazz, blues, rock, gospel, country etc. One of the best parts of the early 1970's was the great amount of experimentation that was going on among bands in general. A very fertile period indeed. As a matter of fact, one could easily make the claim that this here record was one of the very first true fusion albums to hit the scene. Later came such bands as Return To Forever and Weather Report who received wide acclaim for bringing together elements of jazz and rock but let's face it...The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood had been there first.

Mike Finnigan

Mike Finnigan (lead vocals & Hammond B-3 organ) who infuses each song with a healthy amount of good ol' soul, gave the band a tremendous amount of energy.

After his stint in the jazz world with the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, Mike Finnigan joined up with Jerry Wood and formed Finnegan & Wood, a kick-ass band that stormed the West Coast and the Midwest between 1970 and 1975.

Lane Tietgen

Many of the songs on the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood album were written by someone named Lane Tietgen who provided the band with songs that had a lyrical sensibility that would later surface in such great bands as Little Feat and Steely Dan.

Lane Tietgen was the guitarist in a band called Mike Finnigan & The Serfs which is how Mike Finnigan ended up bringing all those great Lane Teitgen songs to the the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.

For many years I was unable to dig up any info on Lane Tietgen but recently discovered that he's still active as a musician and released a new album on ITunes a couple of years ago. For many years I was unable to dig up any info on Lane Tietgen but recently discovered that he's still active as a musician and recently released a new album in 2009. From Wikipedia: A number of Tietgen's songs have been covered by famous musicians, including "Captain Bobby Stout" and "Martha's Madmen" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, "It Can't Make Any Difference to Me" by Dave Mason, and "Red and Black Blues" by Ringo Starr. In 2006 Ice Cube used a melody by Tietgen for his song, "Click, Clack - Get Back!," on the album Laugh Now, Cry Later. Tietgen currently posts on his Views From A Hill blog.

It should be noted that one of Mike Finnegan's more celebrated moments as a backing musician was his work on the Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland track, Rainy Day Dream Away (Rainy Day, Still Dreaming).

When the Finnigan & Wood project came to an end, Finnigan pursued a career as a backing musician for such bands as Crosby, Stills & Nash.

While searching the web to find some info about the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, I came across this post from the Cryptical Development blog that was about a gig the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood did at a club called Pepperland which was located in San Rafael, California: “What proved to be a marathon evening of music got underway with a spectacular set by the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, one of the Bay Area’s most amazing, but generally unheralded, musical aggregations of the era. The group, comprising jazz guitarist Hahn, blues-rock keyboardist and vocalist Michael Finnegan, and the superb rhythm section of drummer George Marsh and bassist Mel Graves, had a relatively short lifespan, disbanding soon after the show I attended. Rocking hard, armed with a splendid set of songs mostly penned by non-member Lane Tietgen, this short-lived quartet was very much akin to a Bay Area version of The Band. They did release one fabulous, eponymous album on Columbia, but never achieved the popularity they richly deserved. This was the only time I got to see them, and I believe the group broke up shortly thereafter. I will write much more about this great group at a later date.”

Sadly, this self-titled effort is the only recorded output by The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood. Prior to recording a follow-up album, the band broke up due to management problems. As I write this, The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood album has not seen the light of day due to ongoing legal difficulties and it looks like this record may never see release on compact disc or as a digital download (at least not in our lifetimes).

Here's an article from the NY Times: Verlyn Klinenborg, (August 19, 2006 ) that provides information on what happened to this great band after their album release.

“Caught in the Limbo of Vinyl: The Case of Jerry Hahn Brotherhood

The other day a song popped into my head, just a few up-tempo instrumental phrases — guitar, bass, drums and a Hammond B3 organ. I knew instantly what it was, though I hadn’t heard it in at least 20 years. It was a passing moment from “Martha’s Madman,” the first song on the first side of an LP called “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.” I bought the record when it was released in 1970. I was a freshman at Berkeley.

It would have been easy to see the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood performing that year, though I never did. Its lone record was a sunny mixture of straight-up jazz with a blues spine, a music that wants the latter-day word “fusion,” though that word does so little good. Above all, it was a reminder of the eclecticism of the time. Audiences that would soon diverge found themselves packed in a hall together all night long, like one October weekend at Fillmore West when the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood shared the bill with Van Morrison and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band.

I heard “Martha’s Madman” in my head, and I did what I usually do. I went to the iTunes Music Store. Nothing. Same at Amazon. So I walked down to the barn, where all my old albums are stored, and dug out my vinyl copy of “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood,” which is now sitting on my desk. I no longer have the equipment to play it. Nearly every album in those boxes in the barn was converted to CD long ago — some of them several times over. But not “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.”

We live, of course, in an age of accelerating digital replication. Before long, it seems, every recording of every kind in existence, along with all the outtakes, will have been turned into a CD or a DVD or a digital file for download over the Internet. But some things get left behind.

Digital conversion seems almost effortless, a virtual transcription of the world as we know it. But there is a financial friction to it nonetheless. These days it’s no longer necessary to produce an actual physical CD to sell in record stores. Downloadable files will do — no packaging required — but even making these has its costs.

What it takes to push a work from analog to digital is a marketing opportunity. The death, for instance, of Johnny Cash and a movie based on his life was a wonderful chance, as one industry spokesperson put it, to revisit his inventory, which, as it happens, is partly on Columbia, a company now owned by Sony BMG.

There will probably never be a movie based on the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, no commercial incentive to remaster and rerelease this album. The story of the band is a good one but all too familiar — the inevitable clash between the artistic and business sides of the recording industry. The band fell apart disputing the honesty of its manager.

What’s left is an orphaned vinyl LP. The inner sleeve, a space for record company promotion, says, “If It’s in Recorded Form, You Know It’ll Be Available on Records.” Well, I wish it were available on CD.

I talked to Jerry Hahn the other day. He teaches jazz guitar in Wichita, his hometown. He’ll be 66 in September, with grandkids. He sounds good. ‘You should have heard us,’ he said. He also said that the master tapes of The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood are stored somewhere in New York State. The man who produced the record has retired to Hawaii, where he and his wife own several restaurants. I haven’t been able to track down the manager. I’d like to hear his side of the story.

And as for hearing The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood album, one fan has posted the whole album in MP3 form — ripped from the vinyl — on the Web. I downloaded it the other day. It’s a digitally compressed version of an analog recording that was, according to Hahn, too compressed to begin with.

Even through the compression, you can still hear the brightness of the music. But someone needs to find those master tapes, breathe some air into them, and do this minor masterpiece (and all the outtakes) justice at last. I’d buy a copy, especially if I thought that some of the purchase price might make its way to the artists.”