A multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, educator, programmer, and author, Sandy Stone’s lived a full enough life to fill several books. With a list of credits that includes Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison, Crosby & Stills, Mississippi John Hurt, Marty Balin, and The Byrds, Sandy’s portfolio is that of an engineering titan. Becoming the house engineer for Olivia Records in 1974 should be an achievement in itself, yet her name is rarely invoked alongside those of her recording peers. Her obscurity is partially because her later, and very important, work in academia eclipses that of her earlier career. Sandy is transgender, and noted as a founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies. She began her career in the early ‘50s, scoring and engineering movie soundtracks while still in high school.
“The first thing I remember recording, that wasn’t content I generated, was The Steve Allen Show [off the] television. I had built a recorder with a vacuum cleaner motor for the capstan. I had to file it down, because it was the wrong size and a little egg-shaped. Plus, I think the shaft was magnetized. [laughs] After that I started recording loops. That would’ve been around 1954. There were a lot of junkyards. I learned how to break in, so I had a large supply of random junk to build things out of. A lot of it was fumbling around in the dark until it either worked or I gave up.”
Graduating at 16, she audited classes at universities across the East Coast, and landed jobs at Bell Labs and the National Institutes of Health before pursuing work as an audio engineer. Early on, Sandy recorded Mississippi John Hurt’s Folk Songs and Blues in 1963 in her log cabin studio.
“He [musicologist Richard ‘Dick’ Spottswood] contacted me through an intermediary. What may have attracted him was that I didn’t have a traditional recording studio: I had a log cabin with tape recorders in the bedroom. My bedroom was set up as a control room and microphones in the living room. Dick and John moved in for three days, and we did something like 30 reels. I learned what to do if you’re trying to play and have arthritis. What John did was immerse his fingers in whiskey glasses full of kerosene and rock salt. He’d learned that from his grandma. That was life for three days; eating, sleeping, and recording. The noises of my home were going on in the background, including a little cuckoo clock that I forgot to turn off for the first few takes. I used a Capps CM2030 [microphone]. It was very carefully placed. I have to add one thing: Capps did not build their microphones to be put on microphone stands. They were built to be hung. Getting a mic near John was a very tricky proposition, involving gaffer tape and all sorts of other stuff. [laughs]”
Stone’s career began to take off upon being hired at The Record Plant in NYC. Her job interview to become a maintenance person? They had a broken reel-to-reel and asked if she could repair it
“It was a Scully 12-track. It had Lipps heads, that Fred Lipps had made, because there weren’t any 12-track heads around. I did get it to run, they hired me, and I lived in the basement. I slept on a pile of Jimi [Hendrix’s] capes. He was keeping all his tour equipment down there, because The Record Plant had this enormous basement with a large freight elevator. After I finished up in the studio, I would get on the freight elevator and go down and sleep on Jimi’s capes. Then I would get up in the morning, use the bathroom to get washed, and go back and do whatever I was doing in the studio. Tony Bongiovi [Tape Op #127] was working with Jimi at that time, and occasionally Gary [Kellgren, co-owner of The Record Plant]. I was, as usual, behind him [Tony Bongiovi] watching. At one point he turned around to me and said, ‘I’m feeling sick, kid. I don’t wanna finish this date. You take over.’ He got up and left, and I sat down at the board. I had fantasies of lightning coming out of my head and St. Elmo’s fire coming out of my fingertips. It was a completely unexpected, stunning, moment. The odd thing was, Jimi loved what I was doing. He asked if I could go on doing it. And Gary, having his own fish to fry, said, ‘Sure.’ Every night Jimi would come in, we’d lay down something, and then he’d put on overdubs. And overdubs, and overdubs, and overdubs. Eventually, Noel [Redding, bass] and Mitch [Mitchell, drums] would get bored out of their minds and quietly sneak out to The Scene, which was a private club for musicians. A couple of hours would go by, Jimi would be ready for an overdub with drums and bass, and Noel and Mitch would be gone. Jimi would look so crestfallen. And I’d go, ‘It’s okay, Jimi, they’re at The Scene. Let’s go get ‘em.’”
Asked to supervise the creation of additional Record Plants, Stone instead elected to pursue recording in California. There she would successfully work at a variety of high-profile facilities, including Wally Heider Studios, and later – in a full circle moment – the Sausalito branch of The Record Plant.
“A lot intervened between the time I began and the time I walked into Wally Heider Studios, but I essentially gave them the same line. They said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’m the greatest engineer in the world.’ They looked at me askance – the way Gary did at The Record Plant in New York – and said, ‘Well, what do you have to say for what you’ve done?’ I said, ‘Jimi Hendrix,’ and they said, ‘Oh! Come in, come in.’ [laughter] Wally Heider Studios was probably the best recording studio in San Francisco at that time. Wally was friends with Bill Putnam [Tape Op #24], and Bill had designed studios for Wally. Wally was himself an engineer, and he did the dates at first. He was really good, and he got a huge clientele. Everybody who was anybody in San Francisco came through, just like everybody came through Record Plant [in New York].”
At Wally Heider Studios, Sandy worked with some of the big names of the era.
“Let me explain; when you were working at Heider, you were involved in one way or another with everything that comes through. [David] Crosby, [Stephen] Stills, Van Morrison, Marty Balin, Jefferson Airplane, The [Grateful] Dead, and War. You’re either working on it, seconding it, moving mics around, or simply there helping out. Everybody rotates through those as best they can. So, 40 years later it all kinda blurs together! We were all engineers for The Grateful Dead. I was working on Live/Dead with them. I’m not credited on the album, but I’m there. There were no live tracks on Live/Dead , only the audience reaction tracks. One by one we went through every one of the tracks on that album and replaced it with a studio track and then added the audience reaction tracks back. The idea was to take a mediocre live show and turn it into a great live show. Which they did.”
In 2021, it is relatively easy for someone to change their name mid-career without jeopardizing their legacy. In the ‘70s, before the internet, when media was physical and immutable, this was not the case. As such, it is difficult to find a comprehensive credit list for Stone. She often recorded under pseudonyms, some of which are public knowledge (like Doc Storch or Sandy Fisher). Stone herself isn’t sure of everything she’s engineered; she worked long hours and participated in a flood of records. But one aspect of her recording work is well-known and important: From 1974 to 1978 Sandy was The Olivia Collective’s house engineer, recording seminal works by Cris Williamson, Linda Tillery, Meg Christian, and Mary Watkins. Later known as Olivia Records, this was an important label for showcasing women songwriters.
“We’d work together, and sometimes live together. Sharing responsibilities, obligations, and rewards, more or less equally. There was a sense of shared responsibility and purpose. That’s what, in practice, the Olivia Collective meant. I was used to working with gig musicians. There was a percussion part on one track; it had a number of hits in the break, and they brought in a woman who played timbales to lay those down. Normally we would punch the phrase, but that was an unfamiliar way of working to the musician. We had to do a reality synchronization. I couldn’t work in that way with those musicians because they had never done it before. It became more about me learning from them. I came with the ‘Hollywood’ engineering fragrance still oozing off me. My mode of working was, ‘The clock is ticking, there’s big money going by!’ I’d do things as quickly as I could, while remaining consistent with getting a good performance. I had to learn to slow down. To think, ‘We’re working with human beings.’”
Getting Drum Sounds
“It depends on the drums and the drummer. The important thing is to check phase. Make sure the snare sound is not what a snare sounds like in a room, but what a person at home imagines a snare sounds like. You have to muck it up and put a lot of weight on it. I’d put the drummer’s wallet on, my wallet on, or both of them. Gaffer tape. I’d do that, to a lesser extent, with other drums.”
Keeping with her early experiences, much of Olivia’s studio was built by Sandy.
“I built the mic stands and the snake. We had a ‘snake soldering party,’ where a lot of women came in and we all worked on it. I built the board and the speakers. I had an aquarium that I filled with etching solution to etch the circuit boards for the console. Of course, it turned out that aquarium pumps are not designed to run etchant solution, so after a number of hours of etching boards the aquarium pump exploded! [To build a mic, I’d] take half an eggshell, and wind thin copper wire [into a] coil and glue it to the eggshell. Then you get a magnet in there, so the coil is in a magnetic field. Put the whole thing in a PVC tube and you have a microphone. Getting it to be linear is a whole other universe. It’s difficult to get an eggshell linear!”
A recording school for women was even in the works.
“This was our dream. The school to teach women recording skills was going to be in the next house over. We were going to make that living room into a combined studio and school. I began to write a ‘how-to’ manual for women to learn electronics. But the whole TERF [trans exclusionary radical feminist] thing threw such a monkey wrench into what we were doing that we never got there. We began to get mail from women talking about how they didn’t like how our albums sounded. How the drums should have been pushed back, and the acoustic instruments should’ve been featured. They would talk about how lovely the older albums were. They wanted us to go back to an older way of recording, when it was one woman with a guitar in a garage. This was exactly the thing we were trying to move on from. We wanted to improve the production values, put out product that could stand toe-to-toe with anything that mainstream music was doing – except done entirely by women.”
Jimi Hendrix
“Jimi’s Marshall stack was so loud that going into the same room with it was like walking through butter. You had to push your way through the air. Consequently, it didn’t matter where you put the microphone. I used a [Neumann] U 87 with its pads on, and then more padding at the console. That worked, but I could’ve put the microphone in the next room, and it would’ve sounded the same.”
Sandy in her room at the Olivia Collective at the mixing board she built, circa 1976-77. On the wall is the prep sheet for Meg Christian's Face the Music album.
But during Olivia’s “Varied Voices of Black Women tour” – headlined by four Black women: Gwen Avery, Mary Watkins, Linda Tillery, and Pat Parker – threats came to a head.
“Things took a dark turn. We went on tour, and when we approached the Seattle part of the tour, we heard there was a group called the Gorgons that was planning on killing me. These were women who shaved their heads, wore camo gear, carried live weapons, lived out in the woods, and did weapons drills. At that time, the idea [that] ultra-right-wing women would try to kill me was totally out of left field. Some of us thought, ‘Naw, that’s not really going to happen.’ I was inclined to agree; until we got there, and it turned out the Gorgons were real. I don’t know if they would’ve actually shot at me, but we had security at that gig. It was frightening. The Gorgons were a 1970s version of radical white separatists. Looking back at the whole thing, it’s like something completely outside of this universe. We were trying to change the world by empowering women, and then this group of women tries to kill me. What is that about?”
There is this false narrative that Sandy gave up and quit engineering music. She went into academia, and, in 1991, as the world’s first openly transgender academic, she published a foundational text of Transgender Studies: “The Empire Strikes Back: A Transsexual Manifesto.” But she never stopped engineering.
“I have a 48-track, full analog studio. It’s my little dream. At this point in my life I only do projects whose music I like. I have digital tools now that I didn’t have then. I can be a lot more creative with what I have. So, no. I never left engineering. After Olivia, I did a lot more album projects right away. I recorded a number of other women musicians who had expected they would do albums with me while I was with Olivia. I’m chief engineer for KSQD [community radio in Santa Cruz, California]. That doesn’t involve making music, but it involves my supporting a large organization of people who make music, as well as making sure that they can do what they do best. I also find that very rewarding.”
www.sandystone.com
Jane Chiles is an engineer thriving in Birmingham, Alabama.
