The first success

The debut album LAKE, brilliantly performed and commercially oriented as it was, had been engineered “out in the country” by Abbey Road soundman Jerry Boys: the famous knob twiddler had served the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Yehudi Menuhin (!) from the other side of his glass partition – any further need for a truly “bad” reputation? Jerry Boys and the Lake boys presented a sound which continues to impress even now, in the new Millenium.

Their LAKE collection hit the charts in 1976 the same way as the Gospel power single “Jesus Came Down” – pole position for a band which was able to move faster than even their media hype suggested – proved by a nationwide German tour with The Sutherland Brothers and Wishbone Ash. The harmony sound of those “Sailing” brothers Iain and Gavin Sutherland was topped as easily as the twin lead-guitars of Ash´s axemen Powell & Wisefield.

The results were the national disc award “Deutscher Schallplattenpreis“ in April 1977, concert appearances with Genesis and gigantic open airs in Nuremburg and Karlsruhe with their role models Santana and Chicago. As far as their rough road anecdotes are concerned, one of those is a real horror nightmare even for our tough Lake warriors: During a US tour in 1977, it turned out that the band not only had a sixth sense in writing vocal harmonies, but also excelled in choosing airplanes. LAKE musicians narrowly escaped the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash, because they had been booked for a radio session in Atlanta, Georgia prior to joining a Lynyrd-led festival.