Harry--i hope you have a speedy recovery from your hospital stay.
Lieutenant Dish and Herbie's wife are getting wet, apparently.
Note how Sergio and the guys were right there to dry them off 😀 😛
Even wearing clothes! 🤪
Only the strongest band vocalists and musicians can survive for long touring's daily grind of jet lag and tiredness, boredom, and the sheer repetition of performing the same songs over and over again. Audience appreciation and decent pay can only go so far, and then the average artist gets homesick and wants to get back to the "real world." Huge paydays for superstars overcome the irritations of touring. But for the average artist it's so much different. So, I know where Karen was coming from. Plus, Sergio had a reputation of not being the easiest guy to work for, as Bibi and Janis and Karen can attest to.
The hotel story was from Janis and was in the Carnival CD re-issue liner notes [Rev-Ola; 2004]. Sergio in the 1960s definitely comes off as autocratic, which -- for A&M in the mid/late '60s -- is about a 90o from Herb and a full 180o from Julius.
Janis Hansen on the Carnival album reissue liner notes said this was true for the first iteration of Brasil 66 from 1966-1967. Claudio Slon who joined the group as drummer in 1970 was warned by everyone that "no one can work for Sergio Mendes", and yet he said he had no problems with Sergio and was his drummer for 9 years. So, who knows about future decades when the hits stopped coming. Maybe he mellowed out. And having his future wife Gracinha off and on in his band since 1970-- maybe that was a positive factor to create better vibes in his group. All this is just speculation.
I would agree. Like everyone else in the pop bag, Sergio was trying very hard to stay viable in the ever-changing (and fickle!) '60s and '70s pop market. Like with Herb, the Top-40 hits dried up from 1969 onward. Naturally it's disappointing to no longer seem commercially relevant in the forefront of pop music culture; yet, once the Top-40 pressure is removed (and provided one has a large enough cult), one should be able to settle down a bit and simply go with an increasingly relaxed approach to record making for the album market. Frank Zappa is the best example: he made a 20+ year career out of ballyhooing to all and sundry that his music had "no commercial potential" -- and indeed had no top-40 singles (save one serendipitous novelty hit rather late in his career) so there was never any pressure to cater to top-40 culture -- yet his cult was large enough to sustain his recording career. Like Zappa, Sergio enjoyed a strong international following.
JOv2--You are exactly right--Sergio always had a large following internationally. He had the amazing physical stamina right up to age 81 to keep traveling to Japan and Europe and the USA for concerts galore. Financially, concerts were his bread and butter so to speak. And he never tires of performing his greatest hits from the late '60s over and over again. Come to think of it, in today's era of streaming media all pop artists have to extensively tour to make a living. They can't make a living by just "selling records" as in the "old days."
Claudio Slon would have been right about other musicians used on Righteous Life, as the album jacket credited several non-Brasil 66 musicians for their appearance on the 1970 Stillness album. It said "A special thanks to"--Michael Lang, piano and Mark Stevens, drums and Joe Osborn, bass.--a whole rhythm section. Claudio's solo drumming on "Viramundo" which opened the September 1972 live at the Greek Theater concert album by Brasil 77 was fantastic.
