Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music (12 page)

Logistically, this didn’t pose a problem. We knew that the horns would be on 90 percent of the songs (they were, after all, the major component of Chicago’s sound), so we’d sketch out the rhythm parts knowing exactly what spaces we needed to leave for the brass. After the bass, guitar, drums, keyboards, and vocals were recorded they’d come to the studio and lay in the horn parts.

We made other accommodations, too.

Most of the band members didn’t like to record early in the day. Robert Lamm enjoyed rising with the sun to play tennis, and I often joined him. The others were content sleeping in.

Peter Cetera and I were happy to hit the studio at ten in the morning. Like many singers, Peter didn’t like anyone else around when he recorded his vocals (it can easily encourage criticism and tension), so he and I would spend hours working on his tracks before the late-afternoon sessions with the rest of the band.

With Chicago singer, songwriter, and keyboardist Robert Lamm
Phil Ramone Collection

It’s my experience that when you work with groups—large or small—the collective personnel is “the artist.” One or two members
may emerge as de facto leaders (as Robert Lamm and Peter Cetera did with Chicago), but relations become thorny when a producer shows favoritism—especially if each of the artists is a successful performer in his or her own right. In those instances I’m mindful of each person’s stature as an individual, yet aware that my charge is to bring them together as a group.

Paul Simon once came to me and said, “Artie, James Taylor, and I would like to do the Sam Cooke song ‘(What a) Wonderful World.’” The lineup was stellar, but with three distinctive artists such as Paul, Art, and James the budget could easily get out of hand, so I had to lay some ground rules.

I got them together and said, “Here’s the deal: You’ve all got equal rights. The three of you have to sing on the initial track, and then you can each have one day to fix your guitar part or your vocal. You’ll all have a say on the final mix, but when your ‘fix-it’ day is done, it’s done. The fourth and fifth days are mine.”

Cutting the record didn’t take nearly as long as it otherwise might have, because I’d made my expectation of the trio
as a group
clear from the start.

I had worked individually with Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and James Taylor before, which gave me valuable insight into their personalities and how they worked in the studio. But we
still
met prior to rehearsals.

Every record I make presents unique obstacles. Even if an artist and I have the routine down to a science, there’s still a lot of planning to do before the sessions get under way. While an established relationship makes things easier, I’ve got to treat everyone as a new artist, even if it’s just psychologically.

There are two places in the world where I love to be, and one of them is the recording studio.

Next to the artist and the music, the studio is the most prominent star in the recording process. It’s the engineer’s and producer’s tool: a powerful instrument used to manipulate air, vibrations, and sound. The studio is where music and friendships are born.

My love affair with the recording arts began in the late 1950s, when I walked into J.A.C. Recording on West Fifty-eighth Street in New York to make a demonstration record.

Until that moment, I was tussling with some serious issues.

I wasn’t happy studying and playing classical music, and I ached to let my violin wander into the jazz and pop worlds I was flirting with on radio, stage, and television. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to continue playing the violin at all. It was rather halfheartedly that I asked a friend (pianist, arranger, and composer Ralph Burns of the
Woody Herman band) to score two songs for my first demo: “It Had To Be You,” and “Summertime.”

The hour or so I spent cutting the tunes helped answer my questions and changed the course of my life. I was mesmerized by the deftness with which J.A.C. owner Charlie Leighton recorded my session, and when I expressed an interest in the process of recording, he invited me to become a trainee. Charlie’s ramshackle apartment–turned–demo studio was the ideal place to start my career on the
other
side of the glass.

As an apprentice, I was expected to do everything: run tape recorders, hang microphones, balance the sound, and cut acetate discs. Leighton’s philosophy was that an engineer should understand the principle behind what they were doing before they did it. “The most expensive microphone in the world isn’t worth a damn if you don’t know where to put it, or why it needs to go there,” Charlie said. You needed to know the limitations of the final product before you put a microphone in front of an artist. How much bass could be cut into the grooves of a record? What would lend presence to a vocal?

One of the first things I learned at J.A.C. was the secret to cutting a good disc.

Cutting a disc at the original A&R Studio, circa 1961
Phil Ramone Collection

Condensing sound waves into the squiggly grooves of an acetate disc was an art unto itself. The width and depth of a groove was
determined by the dynamics of the music. You had to be careful to make the record loud enough so it wouldn’t skip, but aggressive enough in terms of equalization and compression to give your demo an attention-getting sound.

The competition to make your demos stand out was unbelievable: Every songwriter and salesman wanted theirs to be louder, brighter, and hotter than the next guy’s. If you became known for making the kind of demo that had an edge, word spread and you were suddenly in demand.

What was it that helped set a demo apart?

Echo.

Without echo, recordings sound tight, lifeless, and dull.

Listen to the classic sides that Elvis Presley cut at Sun and RCA Victor in the mid-1950s: The reverb is what lends a haunting, glossy overtone to records such as “That’s Alright,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “All Shook Up,” and “My Baby Left Me.” Drenching a vocal or guitar part with echo was a fairly new trick at the time, and the lonesomeness imparted by the reverb helped sear Elvis’s ersatz R&B sound into the public consciousness.

Because few recording rooms had enough natural reverb, echo chambers made of cement or wood became acceptable substitutes.

To create the echo, speakers and microphones were placed inside the chamber. The music being performed in the studio (“dry,” i.e., untreated with echo) was routed to the speaker inside the chamber, and when it bounced off of the reflective surfaces it added a “halo” or “wetness” to the music. The microphone picked up that highly reverberant sound and sent it back to the mixing board, where the engineer could add as little or as much as needed to the dry mix coming from the studio.

The fraction of a second it took for the dry, untreated sound to loop from the board, into the chamber, and back again created a
slight delay. The size of the chamber and the way the walls were treated affected the quality of the echo produced.

A studio’s echo became its signature, and I quickly learned that much of what you do in the studio is a mixture of echoes, reverbs, and slaps (a single, strong echo heard bouncing off a hard surface). The more imaginative you were with those effects, the more successful your studio became.

In the days before digital reverb and delay, we had to improvise for echo. Charlie Leighton didn’t have the room to install a real echo chamber, and I remember Bill Schwartau slathering a small room at J.A.C. with varnish for weeks. It was improvised, but the effect gave us a nice edge around the voice and piano.

A lot of my knowledge about recording came from listening to records, and one of my favorites at the time was a Columbia album called
Delirium in Hi-Fi
by Elsa Popping and her Pixieland Band. It’s still one of the greatest examples of how echo and other effects can be used creatively.

Elsa Popping wasn’t a real woman, or even a bandleader. The name was a pseudonym used by French composer André Popp for his phantasmagorical technical excursions: jolly, whimsical flights of fancy in which engineer Pierre Fatosme used multiple tape machines to record each instrumental and vocal part deliberately out of synch. This created a surreal pastiche of echo, speed, and slap effects.

Popp and Fatosme’s psychedelic sounds were years ahead of the LSD movement, and I spent months analyzing
Delirium in Hi-Fi
trying to figure out exactly how they did it.

Every engineer dreams of opening a studio—a place they can call their own. In late 1958, Jack Arnold (a partner in J.A.C. Recording) got tired of me saying, “I would love to have a big recording studio,” and found a space for me in the Mogull Film Building at 112 West Forty-eighth Street.

I remember the elation I felt the first time I stepped into the forty-eight-by-thirty-eight-foot room that had once been a small insert stage used to shoot commercials. There was very little soundproofing, no air-conditioning, and a creaky old elevator. Despite its quirks, the place was charming and I thought Jack and I could make the place work.

We named the studio A&R Recording, for Arnold and Ramone. I asked a friend who was a calligrapher to design a logo that would be so over-the-top it would be unforgettable, and the florid script “A&R” she came up with became our visual calling card. Then we had the back wall of the studio painted with big clown-style triangular checks. If anyone spotted that wall on a jazz album cover, they would know the record had been made at A&R.

A few months after opening A&R we ran into problems.

With Jack Arnold, circa 1961
Phil Ramone Collection

Jack fell ill, and I was sure we were going to lose the place. There must have been something in God’s master plan; Art Ward, manager of the Honeydreamers, stepped in and helped keep things afloat. Art had the entrepreneurial skills and the requisite
A
in his name. Although we’d started A&R with no money, microphones, or recording equipment, we were optimistic. Bill Schwartau and Don
Frey—two friends I’d met at J.A.C.—helped wire the studio and set everything up. If not for the generosity of all the kind souls who took an interest in its birth, this kid’s dream for A&R Recording would never have become a reality.

I was lucky to have befriended Bill Schwartau and Don Frey.

Bill Schwartau was one of the unsung heroes in our industry, and every recording professional on the East Coast admired him. His ability to hear “through the microphone” was impeccable, and when Bill set up a session, what you heard in the studio matched what you heard in the control room. He used microphones and aural shading to convey subtlety and nuance in the same way a painter uses light and color.

Don Frey had worked at NBC for almost ten years, engineering the sound for live television shows such as
Your Show of Shows
,
The Imogene Coca Show, Omnibus,
and a series of opera programs broadcast from a large studio in Brooklyn. Don was dexterous, and when we started A&R he used his expertise to record jingle dates, commercials, and film scores.

A&R reference disc label featuring the studio’s distinctive script logo, 1969
Phil Ramone Collection

In those days, control rooms were cramped, and the mixing console was pushed right up against the window between the con
trol room and the studio. That meant that anyone who dropped in had to watch the proceedings from behind the engineers. It was Don’s idea to pull the console away from the glass and to put a couch in front of it so that visitors could sit and watch the artists while they performed out in the studio. A&R was one of the first studios in the city to do this.

Don’s affiliation with A&R attracted David Sarser, a violinist with the NBC Symphony, and one of conductor Arturo Toscanini’s technical advisors. David sold Ampex tape recorders and fine European microphones; we bought our tape machines from him, and he loaned us some microphones to get us started.

Our first recorders were two Ampex units: a model 300 (three-track) and 350 (two-track). We made our own mixing board out of two radio consoles and some spare parts. It had sixteen inputs, and we used a bunch of small Altec mixers to subdivide them so we had extra inputs for the strings.

David Sarser told Skitch Henderson—leader of the
Tonight Show
band—about A&R, and one day Skitch came in with Doc Severinsen and the
Tonight Show
musicians to rehearse. That session helped us test out the room for the first time. We used five microphones, and when we opened them up it sounded incredible. I knew that A&R was on the right track the moment I heard that sound. We invited them to come back on weekends to rehearse so I could experiment with setting up the room in different ways.

Then along came two more blessings: Harvey Sampson of Harvey Electronics, and the Bratmans of Carroll Musical Instrument Rentals.

In addition to having the widest variety of audio gear in the city, Harvey was a kind person who took a liking to me. “Why don’t we put some of our equipment in your studio and use it as a showroom?” he suggested. Before long, microphones, preamps, and equalizers began crowding the control room.

Getting oversized instruments in and out of our tiny elevator
was a nightmare. You couldn’t fit a xylophone in it unless you stood it on end, and hauling timpani up the stairs took forever. To reduce the need for constant lugging, Carroll and Beverly Bratman loaned us timpani, xylophones, vibes, bells, and chimes free of charge.

The advertising agencies liked A&R, and the jingle and commercial dates we did helped pay the rent. Our reputation as a jingle house grew through word of mouth, and the big Madison Avenue ad agencies became our best daytime clients.

In time, we began doing more record dates, and when Bell Sound and the Atlantic Records studio on Fifty-sixth Street were overbooked, we received their overflow.

The first major album recorded at A&R, in 1958, was Ray Charles’s
The Genius of Ray Charles
—a killer record, even to this day. Tom Dowd and Bill Schwartau were the engineers, and I was the third assistant, or gofer.