Auden, who would provide introductions for McGrath when he moved in the early ’50s to New York City, where he fell in with a lively crowd that included the writer Frank O’Hara and the pop art godfather Larry Rivers. He also developed an unlikely friendship with the English poet W.H. In between stints as a merchant seaman, McGrath drifted out to California, corresponding and visiting with Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles and Henry Miller in Big Sur. Transforming from dishwasher to aesthete, as a young man McGrath evinced the qualities that would carry him through life: a disarming sense of humor and an uncanny ability to befriend the cultured, the famous and the wealthy. Largely self-educated, McGrath found solace devouring literature, poetry and philosophy, and came to see himself as a Proustian character. It’s almost like being at a party at Earl’s house: You don’t know who you’re going to meet.” “He’s really the muse of the whole thing. “I wanted the record to capture Earl’s spirit,” Hagan said. Moving musically and geographically through the 1970s, from California country-rock to New York post-punk, “Earl’s Closet” is a fittingly eclectic sampler that places the hillbilly soul of Delbert & Glen alongside the surrealist warbling of the Warhol “superstar” Ultra Violet. Its 22 tracks feature material collected by McGrath during his years as an Atlantic Records executive, where he operated his own imprint, Clean, before he later ran the Rolling Stones’ label.
#Funny sticky notes archive#
This week, “ Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980 ” will be released by the reissue label Light in the Attic. I thought, This is a real treasure trove - wouldn’t it be great if people could hear this stuff?”Īfter purchasing the roughly 200 tapes from the McGrath estate, Hagan spent several years researching and compiling the material, along with a co-producer, Pat Thomas. “It was like peeking through a keyhole in time.
He also found rare and unreleased recordings from Hall & Oates, the New York Dolls’ David Johansen, Terry Allen and the Jim Carroll Band. “I instantly broke into a cold sweat,” Hagan said in a phone interview.
#Funny sticky notes movie#
“Little known outside a rarefied ’70s jet set of rock ’n’ rollers, movie stars, socialites and European dilettantes,” Hagan would write, “his name was once a secret handshake.” Hagan had been researching “Sticky Fingers,” his biography of the Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, when he stumbled upon McGrath. They were about to be sold blind to a record wholesaler when the journalist Joe Hagan stepped in. His papers, containing correspondence with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Stephen Spender, were donated to the New York Public Library’s archives.īut the boxes stored at the top of McGrath’s large walk-in closet - filled with old reels of recordings - were largely overlooked.
His art collection, including prized works given to him by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Ed Moses, was sent to auction at Christie’s. Afterward, the contents of his Midtown Manhattan apartment were carefully cataloged and valued. An outsize character, Earl McGrath had variously worked as a record company head, film executive, screenwriter and art dealer before he died in early 2016 at age 84.
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