From the Greenhouse

The Zoo Crew has "From the Greenhouse" on the turntable, and if you have never heard Crack the Sky, settle in. This is the title cut from the 1989 album of the same name, written and produced by John Palumbo, and it is one of those records that still sounds like it was beamed in from somewhere between Pink Floyd and a steel-town garage. The Zoo Freaks know the drill. Over at THE ZOO we play the deep cuts, the album tracks, and the stories that never made the tight playlists. This one earns the needle drop.

Palumbo did not set out to make a Crack the Sky record. He told a Baltimore City Paper writer in 1995 that he started Greenhouse as a solo album. The songs kept leaning toward the old band, so he called guitarist Rick Witkowski and said he had a deal and the tracks were sounding like they ought to be Crack the Sky. Witkowski came in on lead guitar. Keyboardist Vince DePaul, who had been around the earlier records, came back. Drummer Joey D'Amico, one of the founding members, sang backup. Palumbo handled vocals, guitar, bass, and drums himself, and he produced the whole thing for Grudge Records. Recorded and mixed at The Mainframe, mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk. That is a serious name on the tape boxes for a band most of the country had already filed under "cult."

Palumbo later called it the most fun he had making a record since White Music. He was home with his wife every night. Time was not a problem. Money was not a problem. No record-company people hanging over the console. Manager Ron Gregory would stop by every couple of weeks, hear about five minutes, get bored, and ask if he could leave. That is the kind of session a songwriter dreams about, and it shows. The album runs about forty-two minutes, eight songs, all of them Palumbo's. "Under Red Skies," "Big Money," "The Frozen Rain," "Monkeyboy," "All the Things We Do," "Lost in America," and the long closer "Can I Play for You (Ian's Song)." The printed times on the CD do not quite match the tracks, which is a small Crack the Sky kind of joke.

The record is a concept piece about environmental ruin, and it started life with a science-fiction spine. A 1993 conversation with Palumbo, arranged by Gregory, filled in the picture for a fanzine writer who had been living with the album. The story opens on a limited nuclear bombardment of the United States. The title song drops you into the chaos. Standing room only at LAX. The singer trades a ticket for cigarettes. He will not believe it until they disappear. Warriors are gone. Somebody is watching the sky for rain. The chorus comes back from the people left inside: we should all shine from the violet blue, and now we are calling you, from the greenhouse. Those lines return at the end of the record, the way a good novel circles back to the first page. One listener wrote it up as the musical version of a science-fiction novel, each song standing in for a chapter, with sound bites and effects doing the work a narrator would do in a book. That is a fair read. Palumbo had already written about nuclear fear on earlier material. Here he stretched it into a whole album.

The press heard the Floyd in it and said so. The Ottawa Citizen wrote that Crack the Sky only relaxed its borrowing from Pink Floyd long enough to copy a few hooks and harmonies from the Beatles. The Buffalo News called the set snappy and sleek, with echoes of Roger Waters and, now and then, Peter Gabriel. People magazine reviewed it and split the difference. None of that bothered the hometown crowd. Baltimore station 98 Rock threw the release party at Record Theatre. DJ Sarah Fleischer remembered the place packed, the kind of turnout you would expect for the Rolling Stones. They knew it would be busy. They did not know it would be that busy. The title song got the airplay, and the album scraped onto the Billboard chart at 186. For a band that had been famous mostly in Baltimore, that counted as a win.

"Can I Play for You (Ian's Song)" is the family tell. By the middle of the nineties Palumbo was living outside Philadelphia, coaching his son Ian's baseball team and bragging that the kid could already throw a pitch in the mid-fifties. Ian was about ten then. The Greenhouse closer had his name on it. A white Stratocaster sat in the boy's room. Palumbo had a framed photo of John Lennon in the hall and a psychology practice paying the mortgage. He had gone back to the degree he walked away from in the early seventies, picked up a doctorate during a quiet stretch, and still could not quite leave the songs alone.

The band itself started in a Weirton, West Virginia music shop. Witkowski was about twenty, working the floor, when a stranger in a long coat and an Afro picked up a bass and played the line from Grand Funk's "I'm Your Captain." Witkowski walked over. The stranger was Palumbo, back from a stretch at Marshall University, where he had been a psychology major and had started writing instead of learning other people's songs. He had a black-and-white composition notebook full of lyrics. Around Weirton, everybody played covers. Witkowski had never met a guy who wrote. They bonded on the Beatles and on the weirder progressive stuff, and they decided to try something.

They went to New York on a favor, auditioned on acoustic guitars in an empty CashWest office for Terry Minogue, nephew of Terry Cashman, the Jim Croce producer. Minogue later said they played some of the most beautiful music he had ever heard. CashWest told them to go home and put a band together, because the songs were too complicated for two people. They started as a ten-piece under the name Words, lost the players who got tired of the rehearsals, and settled on Palumbo, Witkowski, Joey D'Amico, bassist Joe Macre, and guitarist Jim Griffiths. The name Crack the Sky came on a drive back from a demo session, through the Poconos in a mail truck with no radio. Storms kept finding them on that road. Lightning flashed in front of the windshield and Witkowski blurted the name. He has said it felt like the name was handed to them.

Lifesong Records, CashWest's new label, put out the 1975 debut. Rolling Stone called it the debut album of the year. The New York Times noticed. Distribution did not. Records landed in Baltimore by accident, right when the radio was playing them, and the city adopted the band. They opened for Zappa, ELO, Rush, Kansas, Supertramp, and got thrown off a few bills for being too good. Palumbo left for a solo run, came back, left again. Greenhouse was the late-eighties reunion that sounded like the old band with a darker story to tell. They never really quit after that. A lineup with most of the original players is still out there, and the official shop still sells the Greenhouse download.

If you want the band in their own words, the official site is Crack the Sky, and the discography page still lists From the Greenhouse right where 1989 belongs. The official book of the fifty-year story lives at All Things Crack. They keep a page at Facebook, photos at Instagram, and posts at X. Fans gather in the Crack the Sky Official Fan Club group. Spin it again if you want. The greenhouse is still calling.