Automatic Man

Band Personnel:
Bayeté: keyboards, synthesizer, vocals
Michael Shrieve: drums, percussion
Pat Thrall: guitar
Doni Harvey: bass, vocals
+ Glenn Symmonds: drums (replaced Shrieve)
+ Jerome Rimson: bass (replaced Harvey)

Formed in San Francisco around prodigious percussionist Michael Shrieve, who at age 20 set fire to the 1969 Woodstock festival with his drumming for Santana, with whom he remained for seven albums. In ’75, Shrieve hooked up with a classical- and jazz-trained pianist-composer named Todd Cochran, who had worked with jazz vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, pianist Herbie Hancock, and saxophonist John Klemmer, and had made two low-profile solo albums for Prestige. Shrieve and Cochran – now calling himself “Bayeté” – pulled in two unknowns from the Bay Area, Pat Thrall (guitar) and Doni Harvey (bass) to form a band mixing funk-style soul with pop-philosophical space rock (or vice-versa). Think Earth Wind & Fire copulating with Utopia.

Island Records founder Chris Blackwell was impressed by the quartet’s rehearsals, signing it to a two-album deal. Automatic Man recorded its eponymous album in London at practically same time as Shrieve (an in-demand drummer) recorded an album with Steve Winwood and Stomu Yamashta in fusion supergroup Go. The lion’s share of the group’s compositions were by Bayeté, with minor help from manager-producer Lou Casabianca. Though not as illustrious as Go, the debut LP by Automatic Man is arguably more intriguing.

Shrieve’s intricate drumming is, no surprise, high in the mix (even if the vocal mix is flat). Thrall, also, lays down muscular axe flurries reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix. But the spotlight is on Bayeté. His cosmic compositions, with titles like “Atlantis Rising Theme (Turning of the Axis)” and “Interstellar Tracking Devices,” pick up where Hendrix left off with “Third Stone From the Sun” and “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” That’s in addition to his sterling piano and synth work. There’s an opiate-dream seductiveness about the record, slightly conceptual, spacy, phantasmic, but also grounded in soul. The key is to ignore the banal lyrics and get washed along by the funky space rock, Shrieve’s complex percussion, and Bayeté’s and Harvey’s semi-stoned vocals. (And stare into the blank, doe eyes of that androgynous alien on the sleeve.)

“My Pearl” is the LP’s most accessible song and was pulled off as a single (see link below). It did moderately well on some of the cooler free-form rock stations in the fall of ’76, just breaking Billboard‘s Top 100. There was a ton of promise here…a multi-racial band of music prodigies making space rock that could fit snugly with either of the Dons: Kirshner (Rock Concert) or Cornelius (Soul Train).

But Shrieve quit the band soon after the debut album for session work with krautrocker Klaus Schulze and hard rocker Pat Travers. Then he formed another crack quartet, Novo Combo. (Their slick new wave song, “Up Periscope,” hit #43 on the charts in 1981.) Harvey followed Shrieve out. Bayeté and Thrall brought in replacements Jerome Rimson (bass) and Glenn Symmonds (drums) and made a second Automatic Man album…same generic space alien on the cover, but with a shocking-pink background. The music? Not bad, but the imaginative cosmic flourishes were abandoned due to “pressures of the industry,” and replaced by standard, disco-oriented R&B. A dismal critical and commercial reception consigned Visitors, then the group itself, to the scrap heap.

***

I thought Automatic Man would be a good chaser to my previous article on Libra, since both bands dabbled in prog and funk (an odd combination), and each managed only two albums. The difference is, while Libra greatly improved on its second outing, Automatic Man regressed (the ubiquitous “sophomore slump”). Still…on its first outing, this band proved not only that the concept of “fusion” wasn’t restricted to an amalgam of rock with jazz or classical, but that an American band was, indeed, capable of making decent progressive rock.

After Automatic Man, Todd “Bayeté” Cochran worked with Peter Gabriel and Carl Palmer and has supported a multitude of music and film endeavors. Thrall joined up with Pat Travers, Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple), and toured with Asia, among other projects. Rimson played bass with Phil Lynott and Van Morrison. Harvey and Symmonds also engaged in session work. (Harvey died in 2011.) Shrieve has played with musicians numbering in the hundreds, rejoined Santana in 2016 for one album, and today is a musical director in Seattle.

(Of note: Glenn Symmonds drummed periodically for the late Eddie Money. In 2015, Money laid off his whole band, and when he later reconstituted his band with his family (without Symmonds), the drummer filed a sordid age and medical disability discrimination suit. In 2019 it was rejected by an appellate court.)

(Thanks to Wikipedia for some of the information here.)

Single:
My Pearl / Wallpaper (1976)

Albums:
Automatic Man (1976)
Visitors (1977)