Discography: N

	PBS 105: THE NUNS - The Nuns (BLP 4010)(LP)
The Nuns album was Robbie Fields' first breakthrough as a studio producer. The Nuns were the first established group to enlist Robbie's aid. In late 1977, the group was huge in San Francisco, selling out 2 shows a night at the Mabuhay Gardens. Courted by major labels, they spent months in the studio doing demos for CBS (now Sony); the group soon broke up having released only the rawest material, poorly recorded. 2 of The Nuns, the 2 Jeff's came to Los Angeles and worked with Robbie on their new group 391 who appeared on the ill fated Siren l.p. (PBS 103). But impressed with Robbie's ability to actually get things done, they persuaded ex-Nun Jennifer Miro to re-unite just to record this album. Fields persuaded the studio owner to advance 5 days of recording time. The group knew their material inside and out and recorded the album in just 20 hours in May 1980, despite Robbie firing the ambitious engineer Glenn Feit after the drum tracks were already laid down. Robbie called in David Hines who had worked just one session previously with him and Hines not only held things together in the booth but mixed the album in just 6 hours one Saturday morning to allow Robbie to skip town and pursuing creditors and fly off to London . Arriving in London, Fields found the Top of The Pops TV show to be on strike and the music industry paralyzed. Within 3 months, Fields had decided to call it quits and settle in England as a turf correspondent. He returned to Los Angeles in August 1980 and quickly licensed The Nuns album to Bomp but kept the cassette rights (PBC 105). Within days, however, Fields discovered that that summer punk rock had taken over the Orange County, California beaches. There was an incredible demand for 1979's Beach Blvd. album and Fields was back in business, based upon Bomp's assumption of a large pressing plant bill. Later, when money began rolling in from renewed record sales and the pressing bill remained unpaid, Fields was to take back the rights to The Nuns album. But by that time, in early 1981, the Nuns were already passe and the O.C. scene was in full throttle.
	The image shown is of a detail from the (in)famous poster for the band designed by then Nuns manager Edwin Heaven in 1977 with l-r Alejandro Escovedo, Jennifer Miro (nee Anderson) and Jeff Olener. Despite having co-written most of the band's material and remaining a close friend of Jeff Olener, Alejandro was not interested in re-uniting for the recording of the album.
Bassist Mike Varney had gone his separate way, too, and had already been replaced in the group by Jennifer's then boyfriend Pat Ryan. Ryan was to play all the guitar parts in the studio. Escovedo's role was acknowledged in the credits, without Posh Boy's realizing that he was infringing on Escovedo's rights; Escovedo never took action and moved to Austin, Texas, and made a lateral move from New York-style punk-rock to Tejano country-rock. Varney became hugely successful for a while in the 80's as a heavy metal guru.
The group's greatest chart success came in the early 90's in Sweden when their "lost" song No Solution written by Olener and Escovedo went to #2 in the Swedish charts as recorded by the Swedish group SATOR. An obscure song, the song was never recorded by The Nuns in the studio; it was played in concert and a concert tape was subsequently bootlegged in a deluxe vinyl edition by unknown Italians. From that album, SATOR became enamored with the song. As recently as December 1997, Miro and Olener had set aside their perennial squabbles to play a show at New York City's Don Hill's club.


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