ROBERT SILVERSTEIN (RS): Hi Mark! Thanks for speaking with me about the upcoming Group 87 CD reissue. Ever since I first heard the album back in 1980, I’ve always admired the Group 87 album. I was always curious about how Group 87 was signed to Columbia Records. Wasn’t a fellow named Bobby Colomby involved with the band in the early days?

MARK ISHAM (MI): Yeah, Bobby Colomby was the drummer in Blood, Sweat & Tears. Remember Blood, Sweat & Tears? He ended up sort of being the main owner of the whole Blood, Sweat & Tears trademark as I understand it, over the years. He became an A&R guy at Epic Records in the late ‘70s. I was growing up in San Francisco, Peter and Patrick were like my best friends, we would jam and play. Terry Bozzio was usually the drummer. These guys playing, how should we say, more commercially acceptable instruments were getting gigs with all the hip guys like Zappa. Peter was in the L.A. Express. What I was doing was writing my own music and making demos and I would usually have them come in and play on them when they were around. I had a guy sort of shopping this music around and he finally got it into Bobby Colomby’s hands. He heard it and said, ‘I love this stuff. I’d like to sign it, but I just finished up my budget for the year here at Epic. Let me take it downstairs to Columbia.’ At that time Epic was more of a small subsidiary within the Columbia group. And he took it down to a guy named Terry Powell and said, ‘Terry, you gotta sign these guys’. And that’s the short story. I mean, Bobby worked with us for a while. He shepherded the project through. Basically we did a showcase for the record label with Bozzio, Patrick, myself and Peter Wolf on keyboards. This was the Peter Wolf that played keyboards with Zappa, and has gone on to become a big record producer. Anyway after the showcase, Columbia said ‘we definitely want you guys’, and they wanted to sign all five of us as The Mark Isham Band. The other four guys said, ‘well we can’t do that. Y’know, we’re working with Zappa, we’re working with Jean-Luc Ponty, we’re working much bigger gigs. We don’t want to sign up under Mark. It’s not a career step for us.’ In fact, Terry (Bozzio) said, ‘Look, I’ll play on the record, but I already know that I’m going to do Missing Persons’. And Peter Wolf said, ‘I need to stay with Zappa.’ But Peter (Maunu) and Patrick (O’Hearn) said, ‘Look, if we go in on this together as a band, an equal partnership band, we’re in. We’re up for it.’ And I decided that that would be acceptable. That would be the best thing. So we made another demo, just the three of us and Columbia signed us. And that’s when Group 87 was official as an equal band between the three of us.

RS: After Bobby Colomby left Columbia didn’t he help get Group 87 another deal with EMI Records America?

MI: Yeah, basically we made the Group 87 album in ‘79, it came out the beginning of ‘80, if I recall correctly. Then in the Spring of ‘80 was when the record industry crashed. It initially happened three months after our record was released. And Columbia, along with most everybody else, did a huge house cleaning and I think every jazz act except Miles and Weather Report was dropped. Even in that time, nobody knew whether we were jazz or instrumental pop or what we were, but we definitely weren’t successful enough to survive that house cleaning. So we got dropped and you’re right. Bobby moved on. Bobby went over to EMI / Capitol and he called me up a couple years later and he said, ‘Look, I don’t have a lot of money, but I’d love to do it again at Capitol.’ And that’s how the second Group 87 record was made.

RS: By the time the second Group 87 album, In Search Of Dada Processing was made, Patrick had left the band.

MI: Yeah, Patrick by that time had joined as a full member of Missing Persons. So basically the second record is Peter and myself. With Peter Van Hooke on drums.

RS: Back then, I thought that the first Group 87 album owed more to European fusion then anything coming out of the U.S. The album was much more sophisticated than anything else being released in the U.S.

MI: That was completely the influence. I mean it was Brian Eno, King Crimson, Terje Rypdal and Palle Mikellborg, those albums he made for ECM. Really the only American band that had any interest for us was Talking Heads, which was mostly produced by Eno. Bowie, the Low album and then of course, Weather Report. You look at Weather Report in those days and they were half European anyway! (laughter)

RS: The Group 87 album was made without the constrictions of saying, ‘well you have to have a hit on here’.

MI: Well, we were naive and did it just the way we wanted to.