Meeting Max Schubel of Opus One
Opus One was a small, independent record label founded in 1966 with a focus on contemporary classical music, a focus that by its very nature would present challenges. At its peak in the late ’70s, the label’s catalog approached 200 LP titles, and Opus One continued into the digital age the following decade with about 20 releases on CD.
A surprise connected to the label was its business address in the hinterland hamlet of Greenville, Maine. Maine’s perceived remoteness gives it a special, almost mythical quality. Doing something out of the ordinary here activates a process that spreads the word organically.
In the ’80s I opened a small retail store in Maine that I still run by myself, buying and selling records; mostly used, some new. The people I’ve met, music people — some befriended, others deliberately avoided — have been a bottomless source of interest and inspiration.
In my constant search for stock for my store, records on the Opus One label have been occasional finds. Most are recognizable at a glance, their distinctive cover art characterized by wild graphics in lurid, contrasting colors, often making liberal use of fluorescent ink intended to be viewed under a blacklight.
All this from Greenville, a tiny town at the southern end of Moosehead Lake. Moosehead is the biggest lake in Maine, at the southern edge of the vast and largely trackless North Maine Woods. Moosehead has dozens of small islands and about 400 miles of ragged shoreline. Its remoteness gives Greenville the feel of a frontier town, a jumping-off point for territory unknown. Single-engine float planes, transport to and from tiny remote lakes further into the hinterlands, are a common sight at the town dock.
Greenville is about a three-hour drive from my store, and on a summer morning in the late ’90s I was about halfway there, responding to a record call for which I’d allowed a couple of hours, but that only took about 20 minutes. The rest of the day was a blank slate and the weather was perfect. My curiosity about Opus One had been growing, so I decided to head for Greenville to see what the stars had in store for me.
In those now far-off days before phones morphed into powerful pocket computers, “just look it up” wasn’t an option. My plan was to roll into town cold.
I knew the Opus One titles were all out of print and, except for used copies, had been unavailable for years. The label was likely out of business, and the Greenville address on the record covers may have never represented more than a post office box.
But if you don’t roll the dice, nothing happens, and my business model (if I dare use that term) is based on the premise of a wild goose chase. Using my trusty Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, I threaded my way over back roads.
Maybe someone at the post office would have been around long enough to at least have heard of the outfit. The lone clerk, with a knowing look and a bit of a shrug, informed me that postal regulations wouldn’t allow her to divulge the address of said postal customer, but those same regulations allowed her to give me a contact name: Max Schubel.
And she handed me a phone book.
I couldn’t get a signal on my little Nokia, but there was a pay phone in the restaurant on the corner. I always try to keep my expectations in check, but as I made the call, I imagined the stars aligning. Visions of the entire Opus One catalog standing side by side — a sight I’d never seen — were hard to suppress.
As a practical matter, with a few outstanding exceptions, the striking Opus One cover art was more interesting than its repertoire. But as curiosity can easily outweigh practicality, I just had to know the story.
Mr. Schubel answered the phone, and after my brief introduction, he instructed me to meet him at the town dock. He lived on a little island out in the lake and said he’d be around with his boat to collect me in 15 minutes. As I waited, a fast-brewing summer rainstorm was boiling over the mountains just beyond the other side of the lake, towering slate clouds shading the peaks the color of blue steel.
An open aluminum rowboat with a medium-size outboard motor at full throttle came careening in, and with an expertly executed swerve, bumped hard and stopped, sidelong, against the dock. A wild wind was kicking up and there was no introduction. Just, “Jump in.” I did, and we immediately lurched out into the gathering storm. We bumped over choppy water at top speed, parallel to a dark curtain of downpour coming across the lake from our left. It hit us in seconds, the rain pelting horizontally, soaking our clothes on our left side while the right remained dry. Amid the competing roars of wind, rain and motor, all we could do was smile with a friendly nod that said, Here we are…
The ride took about 10 minutes, by which time we were thoroughly soaked. The island, a rocky outcropping left by the last Ice Age, had a tiny dock attached to an almost flat patch of sand the size of a short driveway. Everything beyond was steep and rocky, covered in scrubby shrubs and a thick, tangled groundcover.
The rain was still falling in sheets as we jumped out of the boat, my man in the lead. Keeping up with him wasn’t easy as we scrambled up a rough stone stairway with, here and there, a step cut directly into the living rock. Some steps weren’t much more than toeholds, and in places the pitch approached vertical. Add the slippery groundcover encroaching everywhere and it was rough and slow going, but we were in no hurry.
I had to stop climbing when I saw what could only be a stretch of track for a large-scale model train running across one of the steps. When I continued, I saw another track a few steps higher.
The storm passed as abruptly as it had arrived and the sun came out. At least it had been a warm rain.
That crazy climb had done nothing to prepare me for the sight of the house itself, as we all but stumbled in. The walls looked like smooth stucco, painted flamingo pink. Its spacious central room, about 60 feet in diameter, appeared to be perfectly round until I realized the walls slightly undulated. Windows varied in size and were set apart at intervals of no discernible pattern. Evidently cut only for light, not ventilation, they were sealed and shaped like amoebae, all unique.
Round steel pillars, uniformly arrayed, supported a 30-foot-high ceiling and a mezzanine across the room, about 15 feet high, that extended over about a third of the ground floor. This was accessed via a wide stairway with no railing, built along the curve of the wall. The edge of the mezzanine was also rounded in a wavy, irregular line, and likewise had no railing. No doubt intended as an amusing architectural detail, I could only see a menacing threat to life and limb.
As I stared in silence, a little queasy, my host took note. “Yeah,” he casually said, “we had to be really careful with some of the parties we had here in the sixties.”
The model train track I’d seen on the steps outside entered through a hole cut high on the wall, circled the space in a gentle spiral and exited through a hole beneath the first. A switch could be thrown to put the train on a course of continual circumnavigation of the room, as it was doing this day. Max had given up maintaining the tracks outside. The wall bulged inward in places, like huge blisters, creatingshort tunnels for the train to pass through.
Like a little kid, I was enthralled by this. The model engine and cars were the largest I’d ever seen, about eight inches high and a foot and a half long; made in Germany
We did our best to relax in our wet clothes, settling into one of the comfy seating areas scattered around the open room. Max excused himself for a moment and put a record on, drawing my attention to shelves full of them. In Max’s house, records were, of course, the ideal vehicle for us to stretch out and get acquainted.
Our wide-ranging conversation was driven by an eclectic selection of music that in turn drove the musical selection. Between the records and the beer Max had on hand, we were off and running.
Max was also a composer, with a particular interest in the avant-garde, and some of his compositions appeared on his label. At the helm of Opus One, he had also, out of necessity, gained experience as a producer and recording engineer, in addition to engaging all the artists, arranging recording dates and renting studios, executing contracts and, lest we forget, creating the cover art. He must have been a very busy guy.
The music and recording scene he’d loved as a young man in the 1950s was long behind him, but at the time of our friendship, more than a decade beyond his heyday, he was in loose contact with business managers for orchestras in a few former Warsaw Pact countries, where emphasis on classical music training lingered on in the post-Soviet culture. He still liked the action, sending them new compositions as he had them and occasionally engaging the orchestras for performances he would travel to conduct.
Nature took its course with our beer drinking. I was informed there were no functioning facilities in the house and was directed instead to a door under the stairs that led to a balcony on the back side. This narrow balcony, like the train tracks, clung to the wall and followed its curves, similarly supported by struts. It was screened by what appeared to be a dense evergreen hedge that turned out to be the tops of 40-foot fir trees growing straight up from a 30-foot drop. There was, fortunately, a railing.
Max told me he’d bought the outcropping in the early ’50s in its natural state — no dock or dwelling of any kind. A realtor had flown him there aboard a float plane to see it.
Max was in his mid-60s when we met, a small, unassuming man who looked older than he was. The years had not been kind to him. Perhaps he hadn’t been kind to himself. He’d been battling diabetes and its attendant circulation problems. Doctors had recommended he have one or both legs amputated. Max refused, and fought running battles with ugly open wounds on his lower legs. Sometimes he’d try to adjust the badly soiled dressings while we had lunch at the only restaurant in Greenville we thought worthwhile. The food was pretty good, they had a nice deck overlooking the little marina and float planes, and the waitresses were nice to us.
I travel a lot for my business, and whenever I got a call to look at records anywhere near Greenville, I’d call Max to make plans for a visit. If those intervals stretched too long, I’d call and make a special trip.
Our routine was to go to lunch and talk about life, music and records. Not just his own records, or the music he preferred, but any music we could stretch our imaginations into. Ellington said it: “If it sounds good, it is good.” Each of us entered into the conversation with a different affinity for the avant-garde — his for contemporary classical, mine for “out” jazz — and we’d explore where the two might meet.
I doubt there was anyone in Greenville, or in all of sprawling Piscataquis County, who Max could talk to about any of that. The waitresses always seemed happy for us. Neither of us took any of it for granted.
Born in the early ’30s, the nadir of the Depression, Max was raised in Manhattan in relative privilege. He never mentioned why he left New York or how he wound up in Maine, and I never asked. It was none of my business, but I came to know he had burned a lot of bridges.
Max also had a mountain home, presumably of similar eccentricity, somewhere in the Catskills, where he spent the colder half of the year. The habits and preferences of his urbane upbringing must have fallen away early on, but I came to realize he had never entirely reconciled himself to life among the country folk.
In addition to his place on Moosehead, Max kept a small apartment in a senior housing facility in Monson, the next town down the road from Greenville. Monson is where he lived; the lake spot was just for hanging out.
Walking the facility’s hallways, I noticed little handicrafts hung on all the doors — mostly rural and woodland scenes on linen, in needlepoint. Only the door to Max’s unit was blank. Opening it revealed a short hallway and the facing wall, which was covered in taped-up newspaper clippings, going back many years, reporting the trivial lawsuits and protests of Mr. Max Schubel. This was Max’s Hall of Shame.
Some of the clippings regarded incidents in Greenville, others in Ulster County, New York. None of them were anything but a waste of the court’s time. I can’t recall specifics, but it was stuff like Mr. Max Schubel suing the U.S. Postal Service for not salting an icy sidewalk; Max Schubel writing to complain that the grocery store allowed someone to exceed the express-checkout item limit; Mr. M. Schubel (Greenville) causing a disturbance at a restaurant over bits of shell in his egg salad sandwich.
A 12-foot concert grand piano had been shoehorned into his tiny living room by movers whose tape measure must’ve been smoking. With inches to spare on all sides, there was a corner with just enough room for Max to squeeze in at the keyboard.
Max tried a few times to persuade me to take on whatever was left of Opus One, to revive it and keep it going. He claimed to have a lot of Opus One product in storage at his Catskills digs; stock, in quantity, of multiple titles, still new and in the shrinkwrap. It came as no surprise when he told me that place was “on a mountaintop” and best accessed in dry weather, with “the last quarter mile or so” strictly on foot. Also in storage, he said, were the original metal stampers for most of the titles in the catalog. There was some talk of a joint trip sometime, with me driving, to get some of this stuff and bring it to Maine, but nothing ever came of it.
I reeled out some details about Opus One to a couple young guys who I knew would be intrigued and arranged for them, individually, to meet the man. Both had an affinity for, if not Opus One’s entire catalog, at least the concept of the label. Maybe they could team up!
They both met Max and their conversations and good intentions kept the idea of reviving the label alive for awhile. One of them even moved to Greenville and took a job waiting tables at the restaurant where Max and I hung out. I remember him serving us lunch at least once. But Opus One was never revived.
It was never my intention, but I gradually drifted out of the scene. One of the last things I heard from Max was that he was having property disputes with his estranged only child, who’d grown into adulthood.
One evening after closing time at my store, I had to make one last phone call. I thought I knew the number and dialed, but it was Max’s phone number that came to me and I called him by mistake. We hadn’t been in touch for some time and had a nice chat. He mentioned he was getting ready to go to Hungary to do some recording.
I’m Hungarian on my dad’s side. I like the food and the music, and for some years after he died I grew curious to experience the place where he’d grown up. I’d been trying without success to gently nudge my wife into taking that trip. She was patiently waiting for me in the store while Max and I chatted and she knew it was him on the line. When I got off the phone, frustrated, I yelled, “Sumbitch is going to Hungary!”
We went home and, while she made dinner, I secretly beavered away online and made arrangements for the trip to Hungary that we still fondly remember nearly 25 years later.
Max died in Greenville in 2010, at age 77, about five years after I’d last been in touch with him. What happened to whatever remnants of Opus One remained in the Catskills is anyone’s guess. I have a hunch his hideaway in Moosehead Lake has since been reclaimed by nature.
Some say we die twice: the first time when our days here are finished, and the second when our name is mentioned for the last time. Music is a connective tissue. I feel that I touch people’s lives with my vocation, and the people I meet inspire me to stay with it.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Max. A link in a chain. Max Schubel lives on.
Click here for a spread of Opus One covers and capsule reviews by Rogers Parker.
