Glitterhouse

The group originated in Great Neck, a distinctly upper-middle-class/upper-class enclave outside the New York City line, in Nassau County. Formed at a Long Island party in 1965, the band that would later become The Glitterhouse featured Mike Gayle,an African-American singer, guitarist, and composer. Hank Aberle, harmonica, guitar, violin. Ala
n Lax, vocals,& bass. Then added Mark ‘Moogy’ Klingman. They ended up jamming together, liked what they heard, and formed an outfit called the "Justice League", with Tommy Weiner on drums -- they initially rehearsed in the Greenwich Village apartment that Gayle shared with his roommate, then-aspiring photographer Bob Gruen. But their real base of operations was Great Neck, where all of their families came from and this afforded them lots of basement space in which to practice.

They were reasonably successful, and in 1966 -- with Gary Reems as their drummer -- they were signed to Epic Records, for which they cut their first single, "Rumpelstiltskin" b/w "Ode to an Unknown Girl"; strangely enough, that platter wasn't credited to the Justice League but, at the insistence of their manager, came out as the work of the "Pop Art" (it was 1966, after all, and they were trying to stay ahead of a musical wave that was breaking in all kinds of unexpected directions) -- a little later, they added keyboard player Moogy Klingman to the lineup, but not too long after that Gayle quit, and for the group's second record, in early 1967, they were called the "Dave Heenan Set," after their new lead singer. And then the group more or less disbanded. What basically happened was that Aberle, Lax, Klingman, and Gayle got back together in the second half of the year, adding a friend of Klingman's, drummer Joel O'Brien to their lineup. And "the Glitterhouse" was born.

This group's sound, in keeping with the times and their name, did indeed glitter in bright, poppy psychedelic colors, interweaving equal elements of folk, pop, blues, soul, and jazz into a kind of spacy mix that hippies could dig. Today baby boomers still groove to the psychedelic sounds of old Glitterhouse lp's.
They also had a lean, roots rock element to their sound, similar to the "Band". Ideally, a group like that might have been tailor-made for a label like Elektra Records -- which was even based in New York, and had already started signing up outfits like Love and the Doors (and would soon be recording U.K. progressive bands like Methuselah and Renaissance) -- but somehow they never did get Elektra's attention, despite being based very close to home.

But their music was enough, to attract the attention of Bob Crewe, the renowned East Coast producer, whose work had helped put the Four Seasons, after years of struggling, on the international map, and had done great things for Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels as well. He heard them at the party and approached them, and the result was a contract with Crewe as producer and manager. All five were placed on a salary ($100 a week each, which was decent money in 1968, for musicians in their late teens and early twenties still trying to achieve success), to keep them fed and housed, and essentially paid not to play in public, as Crewe worked out how he would record them and present them, as a fully formed band, when the moment was right. They had a room at his studio to rehearse in, enough pay to keep them all happy, and eventually not one, but two recording projects emanated from their efforts with Crewe.

In 1968, they recorded their underrated pop-psychedelic debut album, “Color Blind". The release of that

LP, produced by Bob Crewe for his Dynavoice label, together with the recording of vocals for three songs that were placed on the soundtrack of the camp Roger Vadim-directed science fiction parody Barbarella, for which they sang on several tracks, but didn't play, leaving that to Crewe's select studio musicians. But amid the publicity surrounding the movie's star, Vadim's then wife Jane Fonda, and her various states of undress in the film, relatively little notice was paid to the music -- the soundtrack album never sold in the numbers anticipated, and languished in dollar bins and cut-out lots for many years after its release, and did the group little good.

The less visible, Color Blind, the official Glitterhouse debut LP on Crewe's Dynovoice label, which was released and disappeared without a trace in 1968. The single "Tinkerbell's Mind" charted briefly in New York, but was otherwise similarly neglected.
Crewe canceled their salaries soon after and essentially cut them loose from his operation. They'd lost almost a year from their association with him, and felt they had little to show for it, apart from being a year older. Crewe had effectively kept them under wraps, so they'd hardly been seen or talked about until the abortive album and single release. Additionally, the album was really as much Crewe's sound as their own, reflecting his own re-arrangements of their music and sound in many instances often in what they regarded as predictable, already hackneyed takes on psychedelic sound; often done on the fly, in the middle of the sessions, there'd been little time to discuss, develop, or evolve his ideas into something of their own, and now -- because of the collapse of their deal -- this was the way their sound was represented on the only album to carry their name.

in the course of that year, Gayle became interested in pursuing other sounds, in different contexts, and the result was the breakup of the band. O'Brien rejoined James Taylor and passed through Jo Mama, through which he became part of Carole King's backing band, and spent some time as a session drummer before moving to Woodstock, and becoming an artist, struggling at various times with heroin addiction before succumbing to liver cancer in 2007. Lax left the music business, while Aberle became a producer, and Klingman, after entering the orbit of Todd Rundgren, went on to a decades-long career in music, and even reunited most of the Glitterhouse members for a short time in 1974. And a 2002 reunion of the original members yielded a remake of their album and their Barbarella sides, all of them sounding far better and a good deal fresher than such re-enactments normally yield.

With strong songwriting, stellar instrumentation and skilled if sometimes over-the-top production, the output of The Glitterhouse remains a compelling slice of late-60’s Lovin’ Spoonful/Strawberry Alarm Clock-style musical happiness, and the 2002 release of The Glitterhouse: The Almost Complete Recordings 1966-1974 brings 23 tracks from the band, many of them previously unreleased demos, to a wider audience than they enjoyed during their productive heyday.

Now

Hank Aberle has been working as an audio post engineer in New York since 1969 and has his own company, Aberle Sound.

Joel "Bishop" O'Brien died on Sept. 16th, 2004. The last 10 years of Joel's life, he became a collage artist. He has had many show where his work was sold. Moogy Klingman has a tribute page for his friend HERE, with lots of information about Joel and lots of pictures. Check it out, man.

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The Glitterhouse Links
Find out more about "The Glitterhouse" here.
♪♫ MoogyMusic.com/Glitterhouse ♪♫ The Fringe/Gitterhouse ♪♫
♪♫ Moogy Klingman's Official web site ♪♫
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Glitterhouse Discography
Studio albums

NOTE : Some or all of these original albums may have been reissued on CDs. The reissued CDs usually contain bonus tracks.

The BBR&R discography section uses information from various sources, including the band's own web site (if they have a web site). Other sources include, Discogs, Answers.com, Wikipedia & sometimes other sites.
Even with all these sources an accurate discography for many bands is hard to put together. We try hard, but the accuracy of this discography section is not guaranteed, sorry man.

*mouse-over album title to view album details

Released 1968
Color Blind -released in 1968