Airwaves

Airwaves arrived from a post office box in Richmond, British Columbia. Silent Stone Productions Ltd. gave its address on the jacket as Box 440-8155 and assigned the record the catalogue number MS-1701, presumably reflecting Mark Stang’s initials. Eleven tracks appear on it, one a Beatles cover and all the others written by Stang. There is no distributor logo, no parent label, and no producer credit beyond Silent Stone Productions itself.

The instrumentation around the keyboards is the striking part. Airwaves is a keyboard writer’s album, with Stang credited on acoustic and electronic keyboards. Around him are electric violin, tenor saxophone, trumpet and dedicated backing vocals as well as a conventional rock rhythm section. Tom Christiansen took lead vocals and bass, Rick Genge covered electric and acoustic guitars, Dave Odeh played drums and percussion, Doug Thordarson brought electric violin and backing vocals, Chris Gilburg added backing vocals, Larry Volen played tenor saxophone and John Korsrud played trumpet. Nine musicians appear on an independently issued album from Richmond.

The horn players came to the record from very different points in Vancouver’s musical history. Korsrud was studying music at the University of British Columbia around the time of Airwaves. He formed the Hard Rubber Orchestra in 1990 and has continued to lead the ensemble through later commissions, tours and recordings. His trumpet on Stang’s record catches him near the beginning of that career. Volen already carried a long Vancouver history. He had been playing saxophone in the city since the early 1960s with the R&B group The Mischiefs and later the Night Train Revue, continuing as a freelance musician through the decades that followed.

The record was mixed at Blue Wave in Vancouver, placing it inside the professional end of the city’s studio economy. Owned by Tom Lavin of the Powder Blues Band, Blue Wave was already a substantial commercial studio by the early 1980s. Period descriptions list a 36-input API console, an MCI 24-track machine, a Yamaha grand, a Fender Rhodes and a Hammond B3. By the middle of the decade the facility had expanded into a two-room operation handling film, television and commercial work by day and music sessions at night. The period equipment list is especially notable for an album built around acoustic and electronic keyboards.

Ken Marshall mixed it. Silent Stone Productions took the production credit, The Studio did the jacket art and photography, and Silent Stone kept the jacket concept for itself. The songwriting split is clean: every title is Stang’s except ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’, the Lennon and McCartney fragment from side two of Abbey Road, which runs just over a minute in the original and stretches to 2:48 here.

The jacket is dated 1988, while a 1989 PROCAN listing shows Airwaves being distributed by Silent Stone Productions from the same Richmond address.

-Robert Williston