Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music (25 page)

The goal was ambitious, and achieving it required us to do something that wasn’t ordinarily done with theater acoustics: combine reverberation and direct sound.

Our approach was practical, rather than theatrical.

First, we analyzed the acoustics in the Shubert Theater using measuring devices and techniques that had never been used inside of a theater before. The process we used was called Acousti-Voicing.

The testing involved placing a microphone sixteenth row-center, where it picked up high and low frequency noise emitted by the test speakers. The sonic information captured by the microphone allowed us to chart the precise frequency response at each point in the room.

Then, we designed a system that relied on speaker placement to create the illusion that sound was coming at you (the audience member) from the stage. The system incorporated a set of graphic equalizers, twenty-four amplifiers, one hundred and eighty microphones, eighteen Altec speakers, a custom built Langevin broadcast board, and an EMT reverb plate.

A sound engineer manned the mixing board in the rear of the theater; he controlled the reverb and equalization, and fed the audio signal to the speakers scattered throughout the theater.

I designed a customized acoustic orchestra pit with a ceiling and sound baffles between sections of the orchestra—and added a vocal group in the pit. This was the first of its kind.

Any acoustician looking at the system we devised for
Promises, Promises
would have been perplexed, because the equipment employed wasn’t designed for what we were doing. The techniques may have been radical for Broadway, but they worked. Soon, sound
designers and audio technicians from the surrounding theaters came in, and when they heard how the system sounded, began adopting our methods in their own venues.

With ticket prices exceeding a hundred bucks apiece, theater patrons now demand that the sound they hear in the theater equals or bests the quality of the story, songs, and acting.

Today, theater soundboards rival those found in the studio, and each actor—as well as every instrument in the pit—has their own microphone. Where we once hid wired condenser microphones inside of sets and props, wireless mikes are now integrated into the actors’ costumes, hair, and makeup, and are virtually invisible.

While sound historically took a back seat to the visuals in a stage production, sound design has become an integral part of the Broadway experience.

None of what we accomplished with
Promises, Promises
would have worked without the faith that David Merrick, Burt Bacharach, and Hal David had in us. I enjoyed the break that designing multimedia productions and theater sound gave me, and the opportunities it provided for me to prove my theory that no obstacle was too big to overcome.

I’m not ashamed to say that television has been my greatest teacher.

In the mid-1950s, I entered and won on Ted Mack’s
Original Amateur Hour
—the
American Idol
of its day—and became a frequent guest on
Family Hour
, Mack’s Sunday night television program. Back then I was billed as “Phil Ramone—the Velvet Tone.”

Being involved with Ted Mack and his traveling show was invaluable for a kid like me. The old vaudevillians had learned all sorts of tricks, which they generously passed along.

“When you leave the stage, keep one foot outside the curtain so the audience knows that if they applaud enough you’ll come back for an encore,” they would say. Or, “You’re stepping out of the spotlight when you deliver your punch line—don’t do that!”

Whenever I produce a stage or television show, I still tell the performers, “Look directly at the audience, and don’t forget the balcony. The camera will love it.”

Sound has historically been given the short shrift on television
productions. Twenty or thirty years ago the thinking was, “It’s coming from a tiny monophonic speaker. How good does it have to be?”

Those days are over.

Home theater setups with big screens and surround sound have become the focal point of home entertainment, and people want high-quality music programming. Whether they’re watching a sitcom, variety show, music special, or feature film, today’s viewers have high expectations for the audio that accompanies the visual part of a program.

I never took the low road when it came to audio for video. Every television show to which I contributed became a new opportunity to elevate the quality of the sound.

Few artists appreciated my efforts more than Liza Minnelli.

Liza and I met in 1972, when she was preparing to do
Liza with a “Z”
—a legendary television special in which choreographer Bob Fosse had Liza sing and dance live. The show was filmed on 16mm film before an invited audience at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, but it was performed from start to finish with no breaks or editing.

I came into the production because some of Liza’s dancing was strenuous, and Fosse wanted to prerecord several of the songs. He didn’t want it to seem as though she were struggling to sing and dance at the same time, but he was adamant about not wanting it to appear that Liza was lip-synching, either.

I saw immediately how instinctive a performer Liza was, and it gave me an idea. Why not prerecord the songs, and use a combination of the prerecordings and Liza singing live? There were physically demanding moments—when Liza was dancing—where prerecording her vocals would be helpful. But when she wasn’t dancing, she could sing live with ease. The difficulty in executing the plan was in finding a microphone that could be secreted inside Liza’s provocative dress.

As Liza recalls, the weeks leading up to the filming were full of anxiety:

“Halston designed my costumes, and we weren’t sure that the
standards and practices people would allow them to be seen on television. We rehearsed for seven or eight weeks, and Bob Fosse insisted on filming it live. He also insisted that no one—not NBC, or Singer [our sponsor]—would see anything before the night of the performance.

“Somehow, on the day of the show, a lady from the network censorship department got into the theater and saw the
Cabaret
sequence. ‘Stop!’ the censor lady said. ‘You can’t wear those costumes—you’re practically naked.’

“My dress was cut rather low, and there wasn’t a bra within fifty miles. Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb took her into an office, and when they returned I said, ‘Is it all right for me to wear these costumes?’ ‘Yes—the censorship lady said it’s fashion.’

“It was Phil’s idea to use a wireless radio mike, but it required a cable and a transmitter to work. But the microphone, cable, and transmitter box all had to be hidden inside that skimpy red dress! Phil somehow figured out how to use a small transmitter, and how to run the wire up through my stockings and into the transmitter, which was in the small of my back. I kept it on through the whole show, but it was only turned on for the first dance set.”

Bob Fosse was skeptical when I explained my plan to combine lip-synching with live performances. “Liza and I will practice,” I said, “and then we’ll run through the number with you. If you can tell the difference between when she’s singing live and when I’m covering her with the prerecording, I’ll agree that she should lip-synch the entire show.”

We prerecorded the numbers, and I placed a microphone inside the chest of Liza’s costume. She and I rehearsed so that when she was coasting she’d sing live, and when she was dancing full out I could fade up the prerecorded vocal track so she could lip-synch. I said, “When it comes to a part where you’re singing live, slam the mike on your chest with your hand so it bangs—that way people will know it’s live.”

As Liza later said:

“Bob Fosse told me, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we can do this.’ So we
did a test: when Phil signaled me from the back, I would stop singing and my prerecorded voice would come on but my mouth would keep moving. Phil figured out how it went from playback to real voice and back again without the audience ever knowing it, and they were sitting right there. It had never been done before. Bob Fosse couldn’t tell the difference. It was a time in our lives when Phil and I were both starting out, and were in top form.”

Liza with a “Z”
won four Emmys and a Peabody Award, but for years remained a cult classic—the kind of show that cabaret fans raved about but the mainstream audience forgot.

Then, in 2000, Liza’s friend Michael Arick—a film editor and restoration expert—located the original film and multitrack audio tapes, and digitally restored them to reflect the vibrancy of the performance we saw in the theater on the night of May 31, 1972. Cleaned up and remixed for 5.1 surround,
Liza with a “Z”
looks and sounds more brilliant than ever.

Another close friend who I’ve worked frequently with on television productions is Elton John.

Original tape box and reel for Elton’s WABC Radio concert of 11-17-70
Phil Ramone Collection

Elton and I met when I engineered and produced his first live broadcast in America, which aired on New York’s WABC-FM
(WPLJ) on November 17, 1970. The concert—hosted by Dave Herman—was part of a series that included performances by B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Procol Harum, Don McLean, and the Allman Brothers.

We broadcast the shows from A&R Studio A1 on Seventh Avenue, in front of a small, invited audience. The concerts were informal, and I tried to create a casual atmosphere by putting up stage lights with colored gels, scattering overstuffed throw pillows on the floor, and passing around some wine. It was cozy, and the audience loved being part of it.

Stereo radio was in its infancy in 1970, but there was a small contingency of rock-and-roll loyalists who routinely taped FM stereo simulcasts at home on sophisticated reel-to-reel equipment. When bootleg albums of the Elton John show appeared shortly after the concert aired, Elton’s record company (MCA) decided to release it officially as
11-17-70
.

While he admits to being impatient with recording live for broadcast, Elton understands the imperfection of taping a radio or television show:

With Elton John
Phil Ramone Collection

“There’s a hell of a lot to do behind the scenes when you’re recording live,” he explains. “You’re conscious of the fact that you’re being recorded. It’s complicated enough doing a studio album, but
getting everyone to sound good—and getting everything to come up through the [mixing] board for a live show—is a miracle. There are so many things that can go wrong at a live gig, but I don’t have to worry about the recording, because I know that Phil has all of the technical problems under control.”

I didn’t think we’d ever get past the dress rehearsal for Elton’s
One Night Only
concert, recorded at Madison Square Garden in 2000.

There was a lot of movement in the lights, and Elton wasn’t pleased with the set design. But the lights and other details that Elton complained about were things he could see. What he
couldn’t
see was the chaos unfolding in the recording truck: The computer on the mixing board had frozen in the middle of a song.

Once the computer crashed, we were unable to change anything in the mix. Fortunately, our mix—especially Elton’s vocal—was in great shape, and the frozen board was still passing the audio signal through to the recorders. Because of the crew’s quick response, nothing was lost—and a catastrophe was avoided.

No one expected what came next.

Halfway through the show, Elton made an announcement:
“This will be my last performance.”

We were stunned.

After completing the concert Elton went backstage, packed up, and left the Garden. I was in the recording truck, so I didn’t get the chance to speak to him after the show. When I saw him later, I didn’t mention my concern.

Moments like this create drama, and the crew was anxious.

“Are we here tomorrow?” they asked.

“Are you booked for tomorrow?” I sputtered. “You’ll be here! And trust me: if Elton’s not here, the show will be quite dull.”

The next day, the lighting and set were redesigned, the tempos adjusted, and the audio problems corrected. Elton was placated, and the show went on without incident.

Somewhere in the middle of the concert—at roughly the same point as the night before—Elton again addressed the audience. “Last night I said I wasn’t going to do this anymore,” he said. “I was full of shit!”

Everyone was nervous because we had committed to delivering
One Night Only
within a week of the concert’s recording. We did the run-through on Friday, taped on Saturday night, began mixing at eight o’clock Sunday morning, and did all of the editing and mastering between Monday and Thursday. We delivered the album at the end of the week; by the following Tuesday, it was in the stores.

If
One Night Only
tested our skill, we were pushed to the limit when we recorded Elton’s shows at Radio City Music Hall in June 2004.

The Radio City gig wasn’t a typical Elton John event.

Instead of a hits-packed concert, Elton tailored the engagement to include early songs that he rarely performed live. It was refreshing and indicative of the uncanny knack Elton has for reinventing his live shows.

The concerts had four separate musical components for our engineers to deal with: Elton (piano and vocals), his band, a sixty-voice gospel choir, and an eighty-piece symphony orchestra. Leakage is one thing; having all of these disparate musical groupings on one stage with Nigel Olsson and the band playing right next to them is quite another!

In all we had 104 channels of audio being fed via fiber-optic line from the stage to the two recording trucks parked near the stage door on Fifty-first Street. In one truck, engineer John Harris was receiving and mixing the choir and strings (each violin, viola, and cello was miked individually, under the instrument’s tailpiece), and feeding his mix to the second truck.

Back in the second truck (the control center), Frank Filipetti was mixing Elton and the band, while adding in John Harris’s orchestra and choir mix from the first truck. Balancing the strings
with piano and vocals—and a rock band on top of it all—was monumental. If Audio-Technica hadn’t generously sent over all the extra microphones, we might not have heard the strings at all.

The beauty of mixing a show like Elton’s Radio City concert in 5.1 surround sound is that it allows us to purposefully design the mix to make the listener feel as though they’re sitting in a certain spot in the venue. I think it’s cool to bring the listener onto the stage, giving them the sense that he or she is standing right next to Elton and his piano. There’s something about that close proximity that allows for a lot of detail to be heard—detail that you would
never
hear if you were watching the concert in a big arena.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the satisfaction I’ve gotten from working on the annual Grammy Awards telecast.