Remembering Bob Power

When a life is big, the details that make a person special tend to get washed away in the broad strokes of their success and influence. This has been true of Bob Power [Tape Op #60], one of the most important engineer/producers of his generation. As someone who knew him, I hope to shed some light onto what it was about Bob that made him so successful.

If you don’t know the broad strokes, Bob had his hands on seminal works of hip-hop (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, The Roots), neo-soul (Chaka Khan, Erykah Badu, D'Angelo, Meshell Ndegeocello) and a whole lot more. A quick internet search can fill in his discography, accolades, and various achievements.

What I think set Bob apart were two seemingly incompatible qualities that loomed large in his personality: meticulousness and warmheartedness. How often are those two qualities at odds – especially in high-pressure situations like expensive recording sessions – and yet, both are essential to success in the recording biz. If you can balance them you’ve got a chance of succeeding as Bob did.

Bob may be partially responsible for Hudson, NY, becoming the cultural center it is today. He bought a house near there in the 1990s, when the city was still a slum clinging to a largely shuttered post-industrial main drag. I remember Bob telling me that he thought mowing a lawn was “bourgeois bullshit” until he learned that an un-mowed lawn invited all kinds of critters into the foundation of his house, not to mention potential threats to his beloved Dobermans. Ndegeocello followed Bob up to Hudson, and a few decades later the town is booming with music studios and venues alike. I'm pretty sure he was the first.

I bring up Bob's country house because it was there that Bob’s meticulousness and warmheartedness burst (literally) onto my partner and I one weekend. We visited him there often, but it was kind of nerve-wracking to inhabit such a meticulously clean and organized home. Printed instructions for the espresso machine alone went onto two pages, which I followed with an assistant engineer’s nervous diligence only to have a full tamper of scolding espresso grounds splatter across Bob’s immaculate kitchen. Bob wasn’t a morning person, but the explosion must have roused him. Panic ensued. I was wiping coffee off the fridge, windows, and walls as he shuffled into the kitchen and set me at ease, explaining that the point was, of course, just to make as delicious a cup of coffee as possible. And that’s Bob in a nutshell: meticulously pursuing perfection down to the micro-detail of your espresso's crema, yet warmhearted enough to forgive a total face-plant and invite you back.

Shortly after Bob and I met, his apartment in NYC’s Union Square burnt. Everything was destroyed. He wanted me to see it for some reason, and I was shocked when we walked into the colorless shambles. Beautiful vintage mics and ultra-delicate red-wine glasses were his greatest lament. “I just sold the [Neumann] U 67, thank God,” I remember him saying, but other mics were destroyed. He held up a delicate red wine glass, fogged with soot, and said, "I hope I can salvage these.” Even in the face of disaster, delicate aesthetics were paramount. We did drink from those wine glasses over a year later in his rebuilt apartment, a delicious Barolo, I recall.

Why Bob and I were comparing two identical Soundelux ELUX 251s I can’t remember, but Bob said, “Get a triangle. If it can do metal on metal, it’s a good one.” I got a triangle, we recorded it, A-B’d the tracks, and, sure enough, one of those 251s took those harsh transients better than the other. Guess which one Bob insisted I hang onto?

When I listen to A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory, I can’t help but picture Bob as the unrelenting perfectionist and, simultaneously, warmhearted enough to let those Outerboro kids break every rule in that recording studio to achieve their vision. I think it’s hard for us to imagine how unorthodox those methods were at the time, how difficult it was to incorporate DJ turntables, primitive samplers, and crude MIDI-sync units into an analog studio. New York City was then the avant-garde edge of creative recording, and Bob was among the great pioneers willing to try anything. But he never let his high standards down, every single dB managed with the kind of concern that made the man type up two pages of instructions for his espresso machine. The sonic results speak for themselves.

I hadn’t seen Bob in a while. I left recording behind ten years ago, and we lost touch in the absence of sharing the classroom or studio, with the pandemic of no help. He did come over for dinner some years ago, and I think this was the last time we hung out in person. I had an old John Coltrane record on the turntable as I was cooking, and Bob pulled a dining room chair over and sat down to form an exact equilateral triangle with the speakers. He closed his eyes and listened with that focus we engineers know not to disturb. After about five minutes, he called out to me, “Allen, it took me that long to realize this shit is in mono!” We laughed, ate dinner, and talked into the night about what I can’t remember now, but I do remember his going on about some obscure David Crosby solo album he was obsessing over. There was always some record blowing Bob's mind.

I encourage those of you unfamiliar with Bob’s recordings to listen closely. He spoke of “tall mixes,” which meant that they extended well into the bass and treble regions (he thought the mid-fi sound I tinkered with in the 'oughts was goofy, and he was right). Bob related sonic tallness to “vertical arrangements,” which he believed needed one element in each octave for full sonic impact (he’s right again, ask any symphonic composer). Listen to those Roland TR-808s on a Tribe record and know that there’s not much below 80 Hz there (pro tip: Neve 1073 with 60 Hz cranked against the 80 Hz low pass filter). The hugeness of those kicks is the result of Bob's careful management of arrangements and frequencies that is, when you think about it, what making records boils down to. But keep in mind, too, that it took a big open heart for Bob to care that much about everyone else’s recordings.