‘First Collection’ is a fantastic ambient-folk album that was originally released in 1984.

The record got sadly buried in time, but was well-known to collectors. The masterminds behind the project were Jon Iverson, a multi-instrumentalist from Palo Alto and his college friend, mandolinist Tom Walters. They shared a love for singer/songwriter fare and gigged around campus playing covers of Neil Young, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Loggins and Messina in the late ’70s.
‘First Collection’ was recorded during the Spring of 1984 in a small garage that had been converted to a one-room apartment in the seaside community of Los Osos, California. With an instrumentation of 12-string guitar, piano, mandolin, analog synthesizers, and sampler, the duo has recorded nine bright, weightless, and diverse compositions where electronic experiments mix with ethnic rhythms, sweeping through inspired folk reminiscent of the work of William Ackerman, John Fahey, Master Wilburn Burchette, and Robbie Basho, to homemade pastoral space folk exuding sophisticated, pale, lunar sonic moods that somehow might remind of the work of Roedelius from the early 80s.

Equipment used for tracking included a rented 1/2″ 8-track Otari MX5050 analog tape machine and assorted mics. With only a few thousand albums pressed, ‘First Collection’ disappeared from the market. Infinite Fog remixed and remastered ‘First Collection’ from the original 1/2″ tapes.

“There may be some “new” music from us on the horizon”

Did you get excited when Infinite Fog reached out about reissuing your collaborative work with Thomas Walters?

Jon Iverson: I had already picked up a couple of the Infinite Fog reissues and was familiar with their catalog, so it was great to hear from them and get the ball rolling. I wasn’t really thinking about doing this kind of release, but the stars aligned and here it is. They take their time and create a high-quality edition. ‘First Collection’ looks and sounds fantastic, so kudos to them and their attention to detail. We started discussions before COVID, which slowed things down a bit and the vinyl shortage and then Nik from the label had to relocate due to Russia invading Ukraine, so it has been a bit of a challenge to get everything in place for them.

‘First Collection’ is an extremely rare record and I’m very happy a wider audience will be able to hear this masterpiece. How did you two get to know each other?

Thanks – yes rare because the original release was fairly modest and received almost no promotion. Luckily we weren’t counting on it to support us!

Tom Walters and I met in the dormitories at college – Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, California – in early 1977 where we found that we had similar tastes in music and then spent many nights just jamming on acoustic guitars and singing with friends. I had a Teac 4-track tape machine and would record anyone who was interested and ended up with hours of recordings jamming to Grateful Dead or CSNY tunes like ‘Wooden Ships’. Tom was playing mostly acoustic guitar at this point, but he also has a wonderful voice and could do spot-on Paul Simon covers. There were about a dozen talented musicians we would jam with and would play at small venues on campus and around town in different combinations. We were supposed to be studying but it was hard to resist playing every chance we’d get.

“My roommate around 1978-1979 was Al Yankovic”

Would you like to talk about your background a bit? Where did you grow up? What was the scene like in your teenage years?

I grew up in Palo Alto California in the sixties and seventies and there were musicians and bands everywhere! I was just a kid during the Haight-Ashbury heyday, but remember seeing the older kids in the neighborhood start to grow their hair long and form bands. One of those local bands in Palo Alto was of course the Grateful Dead.

My parents started me on Classical Guitar lessons when I was around six, and they set me up with private tutoring at a place called Dana Morgan Music in Palo Alto in the early sixties. Turns out Jerry Garcia was teaching there at the time and he later met Bob Weir at the shop’s back door. There were band posters on the walls and the shop was run by future Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s father.

Not surprising that with those musicians all around and the Beatles exploding on the radio that I quickly demanded an electric guitar and started learning those styles as well.

I still have my small classical acoustic guitar from that period and one of the highlights I remember was seeing Andres Segovia play in San Francisco around 1966 and after the performance meeting him backstage (I was 7 or 8 at this point). I was too shy to speak out loud with all the people around him, so they put me on his lap and I whispered in his ear how much I liked his playing and then he whispered back “thank you.” I can remember this like it was yesterday and still have a program from that performance that he signed for me.

My roommate around 1978-1979 was Al Yankovic (Weird Al) and we recorded a lot of stuff in our apartment including Al’s first appearance on an LP, a song called ‘Take Me Down’ that Tom also plays on. Al and I formed an act and performed as a duo around town – “Weird Al & Jumpin’ Jon” – there are recordings of at least two of our shows from that period. It was during that time that we developed ‘My Bologna’ together as well as a complete set of parodies of the songs of the day: Bad Company, Peter Frampton, The Rolling Stones et cetera. Al and I also auditioned for The Gong Show, a crazy television show based out of LA. There are of course plenty of more stories.

What influenced you the most to become a musician? Was there a certain moment when it clicked and you knew you will be doing this for the rest of your life?

This will sound like a cliche, but having a transistor radio as a kid that I could put under my pillow at night was an inspiration. Every new pop song triggered such feelings of happiness in my brain that I couldn’t resist wanting more. My music teachers kept pushing me forward so I would imagine it was more a gradual and constant development instead of a special moment. As if it was always there and always will be.

What about Thomas Walters? Where did he grow up?

Tom grew up in Newport Beach California, south of Los Angeles.

You’re multi-instrumentalist, while Walters is a mandolinist, on what instrument are you the most comfortable with?

Any string instrument followed by percussion and keyboards. I also played trumpet for ten years in various bands and orchestras while going through school, but only pull the horn out for fun now and then. There was a period where I was collecting instruments from all over the world, so every room in the house is full of stuff to play or bang on. Tom is also a decent acoustic guitar player, but shifted his focus to mandolin in the late 70s. David Grisman and Andy Statman were big influences for him.

Did any of you have any bands back when you were really young?

Not officially, but Dana Morgan Music would arrange for us kids to play in groups on Saturdays. So when I was about seven I’d be banging along with a bunch of other youngsters playing Beatle tunes. After that I spent a lot of time playing guitar along with records and then trumpet in band class and the California Youth Symphony in Palo Alto. Summers were spent at band camp, where we would have to play a concert at the end of the two weeks.

Tell us about Palo Alto and how you gigged around campus playing 70s covers in the style of Neil Young and the likes…

As a kid you have no idea, but now with hindsight one can appreciate what a great place the Bay Area was musically in the 60s/70s. Most of my playing through high school was pretty low key, though on weekends we would sometimes go up to Golden Gate Park and play our folky Neil Young tunes with the hat out to get some money for more records.

In high school I also had a modest job that paid enough to buy two or three records each week. Every Friday I would take the bus to a shop called Underground Records in downtown San Jose to see what had just come in. For several years everything in my wallet was measured in terms of how many records it could buy, and I eventually ended up with a huge collection. But this also motivated me to learn how to make records on my own.

Where was ‘First Collection’ recorded?

Los Osos, California – a small seaside community in the sand dunes half-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was living in a small converted garage that was basically turned into a recording studio with a futon on the floor for sleeping and thousands of vinyl records lining the walls. We painted the outside front wall like a jungle scene as an homage to the French painter Henri Rousseau. The landlord was not happy.

Steve Card is also mentioned on the record, together with producer Guthrie Thomas.

Guthrie was a cowboy-like character that had recorded several of his own country albums and would come through the area and perform. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but he heard some of our music and a deal was struck. Guthrie had started a small label called Eagle Records in the spirit of Windham Hill and was looking for similar artists. There were quite a few limited-run releases on Eagle, ranging from solo piano to pure electronic.

I’m sure other musicians will relate to this, but I was not thrilled that Guthrie listed himself as “Producer” when the album came out. He wasn’t present or involved in any of the recording/mixing. But he owned the label so what can you do. I made sure to correct this for the Infinite Fog release.

Steve Card was a local musician who would jam with us, so it seemed natural to incorporate some of his drumming on the songs we had played together. When recording ‘Naningo,’ I had created the electronic tracks and a guide percussion part for him to play to, but he couldn’t find the downbeat at first. It’s been edited out, but on the original track you can hear Steve at the beginning shouting “where’s the one?” which then became the working title of the song for a while. He of course eventually found the “one.”

<a href="https://infinitefog.bandcamp.com/album/first-collection">First Collection by Iverson and Walters</a>

What kind of equipment did you have? Please tell us what the production was like?

In high school I had a job at a Harley Davidson parts warehouse in the Bay Area and saved enough to buy a Teac 2340 4-track reel to reel. The salesman also set me up with a decent Sony mic and stand and a few cables. Some of the tracks for ‘First Collection’ started on this machine.

I went through several guitars until finally scoring a slightly used Takamine F-360 that was a direct copy of a Martin D-28 down to the logo on the headstock (which Takamine was used for). Jerry Garcia famously played one of these for several years and I still have my guitar which was used on ‘First Collection’ along with a Takamine 12-string from the same period. Funny thing is, now that I can afford a Martin, I haven’t found one I like as well as these “lawsuit era” Takemines! [See here!]

For ‘First Collection,’ one of my pals had just scored an Otari MX5050 8-track recorder and another engineer pal had several decent mics including a couple Shure SM81s that I used along with my Sony for most of the guitar and mandolin recording. I had an Alpha Syntauri digital synth running on an Apple II computer and a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5. I had also just purchased one of the first computer-based samplers called the Decillionix DX-1 which was a custom sound card that plugged into the Apple II. The poor-man’s version of the Emu Emulator which had just come out. Many of the sampled sequences are from that.

The synths were plugged directly into the Otari and I had built a rudimentary mixer so we could monitor along the way. Mixing was done at a local studio called Sutton Sound in Atascadero that had excellent gear, but more importantly the owner had great ears.

The garage/studio was essentially one big room so the acoustic instruments were recorded in the middle with the equipment all around. I like to think the vinyl records lining the walls contributed to the sound.

Keep in mind, home recording at this point was barely an industry and there was no internet to research how to do things, so if you didn’t have a recording budget, this was a seat-of-the-pants process. All very DIY. Everybody helped each other trying to figure out how to get a decent sound on tape.

Did you sell the records at gigs?

I don’t think we did! We only played a few times locally as Iverson & Walters before careers and family took over.

When did you first hear about Fahey, Basho, Ackerman…

All of these artists and others came to our attention in the late 70s. I had a DJ shift at the local FM rock station (KZOZ in San Luis Obispo) and remember the day someone dropped the first William Ackerman album ‘The Search for the Turtle’s Navel’ off at the station. It wasn’t exactly rock and roll and sported a homemade looking album cover, but it was an ear-opener.

“I had a pretty extensive electronic/prog/experimental album collection”

The album has a wonderful atmosphere… were you familiar with some German bands from the 70s like Popol Vuh or Cluster?

Oh yeah, I had a pretty extensive electronic/prog/experimental album collection at this point and had worked at several radio stations by the time ‘First Collection’ was released. Starting around 1980 and for twenty years after I had a regular Tuesday night slot on the local NPR affiliate KCBX where I played this stuff exclusively. The local record store would alert me to the latest imports which I would buy and then quickly put on the air. Robert Schroder’s ‘Harmonic Ascendant,’ Führs & Fröhling’s ‘Ammerland,’ Tri Atma ‘Instead of Drugs’ or anything on Sky Records for example.

‘First Collection’ was now remixed and remastered, were you involved in the process?

Yes, I had stored the original 1/2″ 8-track tapes and had them transferred in San Francisco to individual 24/96 wav files. These were imported into Reaper (excellent DAW worth more praise) and then massaged into the final mixes at my home studio that were then mastered at the same time. I had a clear idea how I wanted the music to sound, so worked to that end in Reaper and then supplied those final masters to Infinite Fog. I believe they may have done some minor tweaking for vinyl at that point.

There’s a limited amount of information on the web and I only found that you did another album in 1999 called ‘Alternesia’. Please tell us about it.

I spent some time in Indonesia, Bali in particular, and absorbed Gamelan first hand. I would hang out in a village and become part of the local orchestra learning the various instruments and recording the sessions so I could go back later and practice. Many of the players would be young and would eagerly trade lessons for the Frank Zappa tapes I had brought. Eventually a crate was shipped back to the US stuffed full of everything I could afford including some large Gongs and a Ugal and I proceeded to hammer away on them until ‘Alternesia’ was created. I’m remixing those 16-track tapes right now and hope to release an updated version in the next year or so. So maybe we’ll have more to talk about then!

How did you get in touch with MA Recordings?

MA’s Todd Garfinkle was a regular at the high-end audio exhibits at CES in Las Vegas and I met him there in the late ’90s (I’ve been in the high-end home audio business since the late 80s). I let him know what I was working on and he eventually put it out.

Are there any other records you released or were part of? What about Walters?

I’ve recorded hours of music at home but only released what you’ve seen available. Tom has been busy and released music under his own name. Over the years we’ve kept in touch and I’ve recorded albums for several of his groups, some of which were released locally.

Tom and I actually recorded a second Iverson & Walters album around 1986-87 which was mixed but never released for various reasons. The 2″ 16 track tapes were transferred to Reaper last year and I’ve just about finished remixing them into an album. So there may be some “new” music from us on the horizon, probably to be called ‘Second Collection’. We were quite ambitious with the second album and I think it stands up quite well.

Then there’s a compilation ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’.

‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ is a collection of solo electronic and acoustic pieces, some of which appeared on ‘First Collection’. Brandon Hocura from the Seance Center label in Canada had approached me several years ago but didn’t want to put out all of ‘First Collection’ as a reissue. He was only interested in the electronic works from the album that I had recorded solo. I sent him a bunch of other solo recordings from the period that weren’t on ‘First Collection’ and he picked a few and we struck a deal.

<a href="https://joniverson.bandcamp.com/album/many-worlds-interpretation">Many Worlds Interpretation by Jon Iverson</a>

Then a year or so later Infinite Fog contacted me about putting out ‘First Collection,’ but because ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ was about to be released, Brandon asked if they could wait until the following year to put it out. We all agreed and then fate intervened and Seance Center missed their release deadline by about a year due to COVID and the backlog at the pressing plants. In the meantime Infinite Fog was getting things ready and also missed their deadline, so as fate would have it, both albums came out within a month of each other late last year which is what we were trying to avoid!

Looking back, which songs are you most proud of? Where and when was your most memorable gig?

That would be Naningo which appears on both ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ and ‘First Collection’. I had written a program on the Apple II to randomly scan through the sounds that would create the electronic pulse for the song. I had built a joystick and programmed it to trigger different parameters of the Alpha Syntauri synth hooked up to the Apple. So as the program was evolving, I would “steer” it with the joystick.

As far as gigs go, the performances as a duo with Weird Al at the Darkroom Bar in San Luis Obispo were probably the most memorable. Nobody knew what to expect and it was a lot of fun. It set the blueprint for Al’s parody music. One other gig that stands out was playing percussion with another drummer at Esalen in Big Sur.

What currently occupies your life? Are you two still in touch?

Yes we’ve been good friends this whole time. The last time Tom and I met for a meal was literally the week before COVID lockdown in California. But we’ve been in touch during and since and will probably be spending some time finalizing the second album.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Yes, modern music from Central and South America and Mexico is my current obsession. Artists like Chancha Via Circuito, Nicola Cruz, Barrio Lindo, El Buho, Kaleema, Rodrigo Gallardo and many others. Most of these can be found on Bandcamp. Probably no surprise that what attracts me is the combination of percussion with electronica.

Older favorites include anything by Steve Tibbetts, Terje Rypdal, Jon Hassell, Mercan Dede or Sussan Deyhim.