Long View Staff, 1973-90

The first (new) person on the premises at Long View was Gil Markle's girlfriend and former student, Nancy Wilcox, who persuaded Gil to buy the place — the old Stoddard place as it was known — from a family named Orlomoski. The Orlomoskies had tired of country life, and were ready to return to suburban Rhode Island.

Gil was the second new person on the premises, which from the very beginning seemed to him to be a fine place to move his tape recorders and microphones and the Baldwin Baby Grand piano and the other bits and pieces which he had accumulated in nearby Paxton, Massachusetts for the purpose of making magnetic tape. Gil was very fond of magnetic tape as a recording medium. He was also interested philosophically in the notion of reality simulation, having taught some courses at Clark University which teased around the edges of this subject. He would talk to his friends about building a reality simulator in the countryside. The name for it was right there on top of the barn door — Long View Farm. Long View Farm, the reality simulator.

The first two adherents to this scheme were Geoff Myers and John Farrell — two friends of Gils who were then living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They thought that building a reality simulator in the countryside would be a fine thing to do. Talented artists in their own right, they left P-town and came to North Brookfield with their belongings, and a cat. They immediately fell to the task of pulling down plaster walls and taking up the linoleum and rendering the large house and barn nothing but the beams which held it together. It was within this structure of hundred-year-old beams that the "old Stoddard place" would be re-created, this time with wires in the walls, and with rock 'n' roll musicians in the bedrooms.

The second two adherents to the scheme were Kent Huff and Kathy Holden, who came by one day on the advice of Kent's brother — a show-biz attorney in New York City. Kent's brother said there was a new recording studio being built in the Brookfields, and that Kent — an aspiring musician — should check it out. He did, in the company of the incredibly talented and hardworking helpmate Kathy Holden, who would shortly become Mrs. Huff, shortly thereafter the day-to-day manager of the recording studio, and next, the mother of Robert McCartney (yes, McCartney) Huff. Kent and Kathy were for years the spiritual backbone of the Long View community.

Geoff and John and Kent and Kathy were assisted in the years to follow by scores — hundreds — of further adherents to the scheme. More of these people came to work at Long View than can easily be remembered, or identified in the interest of an informed posterity. There were hundreds of them. They can remember, all of them, the days when Long View Farm — the place they helped build — came to be known as "the rock 'n' roll capital of the world."