Circus Underwater

A conversation with Circus Underwater's Richard Sales.

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

In 2023, Soundway Records reissued Circus Underwater’s 1984 self-titled masterpiece. Remastered and extended to a double LP, the deluxe version they released includes six unreleased tracks unearthed from the original 1/4” tapes and presented with an insert, including never-before-seen photos and the fascinating story behind the music.

Featuring cover artwork created by the Grateful Dead collaborator David Lundquist, the album encapsulates a unique moment in time. Echoing the story of a mid-twentieth century generation who lived for, Richard Sales and the late Jay Yarnall embarked on a journey of experimentation, which began in the beatnik suburbs of Washington, D.C. and travelled to the heart of hippie San Francisco. The result was an opus that fearlessly blurs genre boundaries while embracing diverse influences. Elements of prog, rock, ambient and wave music culminated in an odyssey that seamlessly bridged the gap between the spaced-out creativity of the 1970s and the modern electronic music of today.

At the time, Circus Underwater was released through Glass Wing, a recording studio, artist co-op and label that Sales established in Hyattsville, Maryland, to record and release his music - as well as supporting singular talents like the American writer, arranger, composer and harpist Jeff Majors in their endeavours. In a sprawling, spiritually charged conversation, Sales discussed all this and more with me.

Before we start, I want to acknowledge the significance of your friendship with your Circus Underwater collaborator, Jay Yarnall. It’s very unique to have that sort of connection with someone.

It was incredible. At the time, we knew it was a lucky thing.

Can we talk about the recording facility you ran in Hyattsville, Maryland?

Glass Wing Studios. I had a friend I did music with before I got into recording. His name was Jim Smith. He’s Paul Reed Smith’s brother. He said, “I want to give you a subscription to a recording studio magazine. What would be the name of your studio?” Out of the blue, I came up with Glass Wing. At the time, I’d been raising birds and had a bird named Black Wing. I thought that wouldn’t fly, so I went with Glass Wing.

Nowadays, there’s a big venture capital group called Glass Wing. There’s also a big group in Australia that does humanitarian stuff called Glass Wing. There’s also a store in Seattle called Glass Wing. I wrote all of them and said, “Hey man, I used to trademark that name, but I let it lapse, and you jumped right on it!” Early on, I called my band Glass Wing. When we started the studio, it seemed like the right name. People liked it. I think I started getting equipment for the studio in 1982.

It’s interesting. It seems like it expanded from a studio into an artist co-op and record label fairly naturally.

When I started the studio, I had a friend who ran a big arts magazine in Washington, D.C., at the time. I made a deal with him. I needed advertising. He needed someone to deliver the papers. So I got free advertising. I had a friend who was a good graphic designer, and my adverts listed all the equipment. We had the Roland Jupiter 8, as used by Michael Jackson. Linndrum, as used by everyone. It was a huge hit with the Black community because they knew what they needed to use to make their records sound right. I was right in there. Right in their wheelhouse.

It sounds like Glass Wing is a story in itself. You had Jeff Majors in there.

Oh yeah. That was the cooperative thing. I started recording guys and became really good friends with some of them. We worked together a lot. I played synths on some of Jeff Majors's records. He said, “I want to put out a record.” I said, “I've got this thing. We should do a co-op.” So all you do is put the name Glass Wing on your record, and it looks like you're in a big record company. That's how that all came about. I didn't pay to press any of the releases, but they paid me to record them.

In the early eighties, you had all these musicians who'd been through wild times in the sixties and seventies and were looking to heal. In a sense, new age and ambient music became a big part of that. Does any of this have any resonance with you?

Oh yeah. I talked a bit about the spirit in what I wrote, right? It's been a big thing for Joanne, Jay, and me since the get-go. We went through shitloads of spiritual groups in those days. We did Kundalini Yoga. We did the Holy Order of Mans. We did Silver Mind Control. We were all up in that shit. It's been a big part of who we are.

I toured with Shree Maa, a famous Indian guru. You might have heard of Bhagavan Das, featured in Ram Dass's book Be Here Now. He was the guy who went to Ram Dass and said, Be Here Now. I produced his record, which was on Glass Wing, too. It was a big hit in the yoga circle. Sharon Gannon, who ran a big yoga studio in New York City, played it, and my record, which you haven't heard, The Soul Is Greater Than The Hum Of Its Parts. She had it on constant rotation. She had students like Sting and Madonna. It did well.

Spirituality is the context around all of it, right?

It's an enormous part of who I am. There's nothing I can say that could overstate how much it's a part of who I am.

Have you ever tried to sell the Circus Underwater record at New Age conventions?

I'm good at creating and producing music but hate promoting it. When we made the record, it got a good review in the Washington Post. I went to the big cool record store, and we put it there. Of course, I forgot they were there. I don't know what he did with the records. I never saw any money, but you know, I'm a musician. That's all I'm good at.

These are offerings, right? You make the records, play the shows, and what happens happens?

Yeah. It's kind of like that, you know, I leave it up to the stars. If it's meant to go, it goes. If it's not, it doesn't. Sometimes it takes a long time.

The best advertisement for good music is good music. You can fake everything else, but you can't fake that.

Yeah, my thing has always been just to put it out there and see what comes. I'm pretty easily pleased, you know, friends say nice things about it. I'm like, okay, that's done. What’s next?

How long do you think the lead-up was to you and Jay making Circus Underwater?

Oh, decades. At first, Jay had no idea of being a musician himself. He'd been a drummer in high school. He was a pretty good drummer, but once he jumped out the window, there were no thoughts of him playing music, really, until not long before Circus Underwater. That was a big turn for him because he'd always been an absolute raging music freak. But once he was paralyzed, he never thought about himself being a part of it. So, he always supported me and lived vicariously through me.

It must have been amazing for him to be able to participate in music again.

It was miraculous. He played the synthesisers and keyboards like they were bongo drums. His fingers would would peck out the notes. We'd had the advent of arpeggiating with synths, so I taught him that. We did a fair bit of that with a Jupiter 8. The technology worked for him.

Do you remember what you guys were listening to or talking about musically when you were making the record?

I was trying to think of the timeline, and I'm unsure. I think a lot of this happened afterwards, but Jay would send me a lot of electronic pop. Leading up to it, I think it was mostly Brian Eno. I can't remember. My memory is fucked up. I'm old, and I partied way too much. Jazz, of course, with Jay, fed into it. And for me, the kind of out there stuff, John Fahey sort of stuff, was feeding into it.

There's a lot of imagination as well, right? Just get into the room with the gear and see what you can do.

When things are good, the gear tells you what to do. I've always believed guitars teach me how to play. Once you hear a Jupiter 8, or a TR-808, or whatever, it just talks to you and tells you what to do. Jay had been a drummer, so he enjoyed programming the 808. He had some good beats. I think it was his beat on 'The Surface Of The Water.'

A lot of multiple discoveries were happening with music technology at the time. An idea would arrive, and suddenly, people worldwide were doing it.

That's right. You have to have your thumb out to catch it when it comes. For me, it's always been about the same thing. Especially with that project, it was all about going with the flow and making it as original as possible so it didn't sound like other stuff. Musicians can bullshit all day long, but I think we don't have as much control as we like to think. With songs, we do, but when you improvise, if you're not wide open, it's gonna suck.

One of the things I've learned over the years is that for so many people, the most significant song of their career, the record that changed everything for them, was this thing that came out of them in about fifteen minutes.

The songs themselves, the great ones, download instantly. You're like, wow, where the fuck did that come from? It's scary because people build careers by rolling the dice. Sometimes, the dice roll your way, and sometimes, they roll to somebody else. You work on your chops. You work on your setup. When it comes, you're ready. For the creative part, it’s luck, I guess. For the business part, I do think there are better business musicians.

I read that you guys were awake for twenty-eight hours during one of the sessions for Circus Underwater.

To drive Maryland from, which is the East Coast of the States to California, it's a three-day drive if you haul ass, right? I'd gotten a bit over two-thirds of the way there. One morning, I woke up and I was like, fuck it. I'm gonna go for it. So I drove for twenty-eight hours. When I got to the door. I was dead tired, right? Twenty-eight hours of driving. Jay said, “Come on, let's go, bring in the equipment. Let's set it up and start recording.” So after driving twenty-eight hours, I was awake for another sixteen hours setting it up and jamming. All that stuff.

So you recorded it at his place?

Yeah. I went to California to record it.

Was it a living room set-up?

Absolutely. It was cool because we didn't make a whole lot of noise. All the synths were DI, and my guitar was DI. I had a line out of my Furman preamp right into the mixer. We could work until late at night, and the neighbours who were 20 feet away had no idea.

Circus Underwater is a nice record to listen to on headphones. Something I noticed is that the record slowly fades away. The beginning has a lot of drum programming and percussive elements, and then it starts slipping into more guitars before it vanishes.

It wasn't on purpose. I think Jay and I sequenced the record together there. After our two weeks, we had the basic stuff mixed and put into sequence. Then we added in 'The Surface Of The Water'.

It's like being in a nightclub, leaving, and slowly making your way home as the sun's coming up.

Cool. I'd never thought of it that way. I guess our logic was to catch them in the beginning, and hopefully, they'll stay on for the whole ride. It was quite an experience. By the time I got there, Jay was mad with excitement, just insane.

I'd driven 28 hours, and it didn't even occur to him to say, “Hey, why don't you come in and have some coffee and let's think about what we're gonna do?” He was like, “Okay, let's go. You're here. Let's go.” He was so excited. We described it as a nervous build-up. He was having nerves to build. Some people have a nervous breakdown, and you know, get all sad and weird. He was having the opposite. I was psyched, too. I was so excited to do it, you know, to work with Jay.

Here's the thing. This was his first album, right? And you put your whole life up until that point into your first album.

He was extremely exhilarated.

It's interesting talking about those synthesisers. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, they sounded like the future. Forty years on, they sound like retrofuturism. The future as we imagined it, you know?

It's crazy what some of those synths are worth now. I sold the Jupiter 8 for $15,000 a few years ago. Now they're $40,000.

Do you have any retrospective thoughts on the album title and the cover artwork?

The title, this is great. We were recording 'The Surface Of The Water'. We were all excellently stoned. At one point, we're doing that "the water, the water will devour you" part. Then it goes "to the surface of the water, water, water, to the surface of the water, water, water," my sister started singing, "The Circus Underwater, water." I think it's on the recording. And we just thought that was perfect. So, somehow, it ended up being the title of the record. There was a band in the UK called Circus Underwater after that.

The artwork was from a guy in the Bay Area, whom Jay knew of, I think, who had done some posters. I think David Lundqvist was his name. We gave him the title, and he ran with it. Originally it was going to be coloured in, you know, it's blue and white on the original cover. But we couldn't afford it, so it stayed like that. It's cool like that.

What's it been like revisiting all of this?

I just wished Jay was alive. He would have been more than absolutely thrilled. It's really exciting because it's kind of like an opportunity to do a little payback with Jay. And to honour him, you know. It feels beautiful to me. You know what I mean? It just feels righteous that the music should get out there. Because I think it's very original. It's full of genuine, raw, emotional spirit. Why not?

There was just this thing happening worldwide with ambient and synthesizer music in the late ‘70s and early’ 80s. And all these people just caught the spirit and made these fascinating records that the world wasn't ready for. Over the last decade, it's turned out that we're ready for the stuff now.

There was a lot of experimental music leading up to Circus Underwater, like Morton Subotnik. I met him, and I went shopping with him. Jay and I had a lot of records of this outside kind of music together. So, all that said, I think for all the musicians at the time who were into this, many of us were into the same kind of stuff.

Morton is still around. I think for a certain type of musician, music is a thing they do for their entire life.

Once you get your passion, you never quit. It's no longer a job. It's something beyond a job. The pursuit of expression is infinite. But the older you get, the more infinite it becomes, you know. If you're motivated by the love of the craft and the art, then I think it's beautiful. So, you know, but if it's ego, the ego is out to destroy us.

One of the things you learn when you get into Buddhism is that the ego is the enemy. People under the thumb of the ego are just suffering full tilt. With music and the art and craft of music, there's no suffering whatsoever. It's all about expressing the wordless. Or if you're writing lyrics, expressing the impossible through poetry. That keeps me going, finding the combination of words that can unlock the human heart and mind to higher dimensions and higher ground. The same is true with music, too, finding those melodies that open minds and open the potential of life for people.

Now, going back to new-age music. This is interesting. For example, John Fahey. A lot of people consider him the creator of New Age Music. When Will Ackerman decided to start the record company Windham Hill, which broke new-age music, he copied John Fahey's format. He was totally into recreating Fahey's thing, and his first big hit was a guy who had been on John's record company. He was a piano man, George Winston. That was the first really big New Age hit. He got it from John.

So yeah, John Fahey was one of those guys. He was a true artist, crazy as fuck, bats in his belfry, the whole nine yards. Too many drugs. One day, his wife came in, and he was in a bathtub full of turtles. He had that gift. It went on to become what's called New Age music. Because that's the style I started, when I started learning guitar, and you know, I started playing guitar in tunings, that was the music I was making without knowing what it was, right? I wrote about that a bit. So when the ambient and New Age thing came along, I was like, yeah, I know what this is. I've been doing this for a few years.

Did you guys ever perform Circus Underwater live?

After Circus, Jay and I sometimes did duo performances in the Bay Area. He'd be playing synth, and I'd be playing guitar, but it wasn't the Roland guitar synth, so it wasn't that crazy kind of sound you hear all over Circus. It was a lot more mellow, and the guitar was clean. It was just different. Then Jay did some performance art stuff in the Bay Area. I helped him with that, which was pretty fun. We never performed Circus Underwater. What we did was more ambient and New Age, maybe?

So, the album really is a singular moment.

It's all by itself. And it came out of nowhere. And that was it. He tried to do it with other people later, and it just failed miserably. He and I had a very unusual chemistry that few people are as lucky to have. To both of us, we were so extremely important to each other. We weren't gay or anything, but we really loved each other. Our minds hit this plateau and stayed there for a few decades.

How much recollection do you have of the equipment you used to record the album?

We had the Jupiter 8. We had the Korg Lambda, which Brian Eno had used. I think we had a Korg Poly 6 at that time. In the first session, I think we had both the TR-808 and the Linndrum. I had my guitar synth rig, a Roland 304 unit, a couple of echoplexes and this crazy Ibanez box I went through.

What were you recording it all on?

An Otari eight-track. It was big reel-to-reel. I could show it to you. It's in the back room here.

Okay, you've got your mixing desk, eight-track reel-to-reel, and you could listen to everything in headphones.

There were no computers at that point. We got into Mac very soon after that. They're fabulous. They open up so much ability to tweak. I think sometimes that hurts the music because the music becomes so squeezed clean. One of the beauties of Circus is there's a lot of fucking up going on all the time. There are a lot of bad notes, but they are there, and I think that's part of its charm.

What's the connection with Jay Turner playing bass on some tracks?

He was a friend of Jim Smith, the guy I was telling you about, my other close friend, whose brother is a famous guitar maker. He was in Indianapolis. I think he'd worked on some of my songs in the studio. When Jay was coming, for some reason, I said, you know, Jay Turner, come, man, we're gonna do this recording. It'd be great if you could be on it. And I think he added a lot to that song. If you listened to it, he sets the compositional structure of the song, right? Jay didn't change chords much. He'd be happy doing a raga in E-flat for hours and hours and hours straight. Turner did what I did, which was to impose structure on top of that thing that Jay did. Jay Turner is a great bass player. He's a great guitarist, too, but he's a really good bass player. Very, very creative.

If you wind things back to when you were teenagers, did you and Jay ever play music together before he had his fall?

No. Jay was a very, very bright man with an incredibly creative mind. On the drums, he wasn't the best in town. In Junior High, they were sneaking me into bars when I was underage to play keyboards or piano. Jay was too intimidated by that for a long time for us to play together.

Before there were synths, there was no way he could play, you know. He never learned melodic instruments when he was young, which was probably a big mistake. He just played the drums. The paralyzing thing was horrific for Jay, but I also think something like that was bound to happen because, in high school, he was just so insane. Just crazy, you know, wrecking cars and stealing things from friends. Just nutty, nutty stuff. It was bound to happen. Something was bound to happen to him.

I think it's amazing that Jay survived past 19 or 20. He was just so crazy. I remember one night, we were driving drunk. I said, “Jay, let go of the wheel,” and he let go. We're riding down the road, you know, like 100 and whatever miles an hour. So that's just an example of how he was. He was just very Daredevil and insane, just crazy.

Circus Underwater is out now in double LP and digital formats through Soundway Records (buy here)

FIN.