
Saturday Night Special was tracked in two sessions. First, keyboardist Lyman Woodard, guitarist Ron English, and drummer Leonard King laid the foundations on a Teac 4-track tape machine at the Strata Gallery. Woodard played the bass lines on the Hammond organ with his feet and left hand, while complementing or leading with his right. When a Woodard composition favored the sophisticated sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano, English switched to electric bass, his imaginative picking revealing his origins as a guitar player.
The second session came nearly two years later. By then, Strata Gallery had acquired a 16-track mobile recording facility, which they literally backed into the existing space. Furthermore, saxophonist Norma Jean Bell had joined the Lyman Woodard Trio, necessitating a name-change to the Lyman Woodard Organization. Bell’s key contribution to Saturday Night Special is her sultry playing on “Joy Road.” To top the album off, Woodard borrowed a Mellotron, a primitive synthesizer stocked with prerecorded tape loops (famously used by The Beatles on “Strawberry Fields Forever”) to give the illusion that a high-budget string section was present for these scrappy sessions.
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