How did your career begin?
I started out as a musician. I'd be begging and pleading to get studio time. "Yeah, I'll come in at two o'clock in the morning." That's not the case anymore. People have a studio in their house. They don't know how to use it, but they have it. [laughter]
How did you end up working at Sugar Hill, and who were your recording mentors?
My mentor was a magazine: Modern Recording. I read that like mad. I was doing a bunch of demos on a 4-track. I had fooled around on multitrack, but I didn't have any mentors. I knew a guy who was working at a record company in New Jersey, called All Platinum Records. He hated engineering and wanted to be a folk singer. I said, "When you quit, would you call me up and tell me?" I was living on 81st and First Avenue in Manhattan. I got a call from him. "I just quit." I called them up and I talked to Joe Robinson. I said, "I understand you need an engineer." He goes, "Yeah, could you work tonight?" I took a bus to the subway and a bus across the George Washington Bridge; it took me an hour and a half to go 12 miles. I got there, I got the job, and I started working there. Sylvia Robinson and Joe Robinson owned the place. Sylvia had been in Mickey & Sylvia, with the song "Love is Strange." Soon after I arrived, they changed the name, All Platinum Records, to Sugar Hill Records, which is a neighborhood in Harlem. When I first got there, there was a guy doing some recording and playing back on the console. On every channel, the bass was turned full blast. He had it at 100 Hz and they were all wide-open. They certainly needed an engineer to work there that time. They were happy to have me in there doing anything I wanted to do in the studio. They gave me the keys, and I would go in there and experiment. There was an engineer there, Steve Jerome, and his claim to fame was "Walk Away Renée".
Oh, The Left Banke!
Yeah. He recorded there. They had a Quad Eight board, the same kind they had in Motown, an 8-track Scully, and they had the other room at the top of the hill, in Englewood. When I first got there, they had just had [the Sugarhill Gang's] "Rapper's Delight" and they made all this money, so they built a new room. I was there with them when they hired [audio consultant Hamilton] "Ham" Brosius and Eastlake Audio while they were building a room. I learned so much about the booth. It was amazing, wiring up everything. They built a room with an MCI 600 with parametric EQ, an MCI 24-track, MCI 2-tracks, and an old EMT plate. It was pretty great.
Did you end up working on some early hip-hop there?
I recorded the first record scratching on [Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five's "The Adventures of] Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel." I learned about beauty from the Crash Crew. We cut a song for them, with horns and the whole full production. They came into the studio, and they said, "Shut that off." I said, "Really? Okay." Then they said, "And shut that off." They're muting all these tracks, and it comes down to be this simple thing that was just earthy. I was like, "Wow!" The fact that they shut off a bunch of overdubs really opened my eyes to being able to mute tracks. A couple years later, we recorded a song with Grandmaster Flash, and Dizzy Gillespie came in and played a trumpet solo. Remember Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet goes like this. It did that turn up?
Yeah, it points up.
That way he could be looking at sheet music and play to the audience. But when he was doing the solo, he was holding the trumpet; it's pointing way up, and he's moving. I had to put two U87s up there, so he played between them. At the end, to me it didn't work in the song, so I muted him.
Oof.
That was what they liked at the record company. After I had got away from Sugar Hill, and mixed Bob Marley's Legend, I was in the Bahamas and met Robert Palmer. We were talking about working together, and I said, "Just remember this. I've muted bigger names than you!" We had a good laugh about that. He was great.
As you know, the less elements in a mix the better everything sounds.
Right. The more important each element is. When I was working at Sugar Hill Records, they owned the Chess [Records] catalog. They didn't own the music; they owned the actual physical tapes. I put together, with Marshall Chess, a whole bunch of albums of Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and all these artists. Going through them, they would run the mono machine and they would keep doing takes and takes and takes. When they came to one where they said, "Okay, that's the final," they would leader that on and leave it on the reel. Make a copy of that, and then that's what they sent off to be mastered. We were listening to first generation [tapes]. It was pretty great.
Going back to the original with tape is always so much better.
As a matter of fact, they stored some of those on rubber reels, and the rubber wore narrow on one side. I had to cut those off and hand wind them onto another reel. I can tell you, 1500 feet is a lot of feet! But, going through it all, it was really great to hear. When I was doing that, I heard when they got their first compressor. They put it on the bass.
That's smart.
Yeah, it was. They wanted to keep that more in the mix. When I got to mastering it, I went to Sterling [Sound] and I said, "It would be great if I could split it into frequencies, put a compressor on each one of those frequencies, and then recombine it." They built something for me at Sterling, and it worked great. When the guitar solo came in and overtook everything, we didn't lose all the cymbals and the bottom end. We have all those tools like that now.
People jump into the plug-ins, like multi-band compression, way before they even understand how to set a single-band compressor!
Right, exactly. They come with a lot of presets, hopefully.
It's easy to destroy the sound if you're not careful.
That's right. And if you don't know how to use compressors, you can't take advantage of what they give you. As opposed to just compressing, they give you more than that. You can make more energy out of parts, and more attack.
Yeah. How much to let through before you clamp it down?
Exactly. How fast the release is, if you can stand hearing it compressing?
When you started out, a studio's console was an important factor.
Sugar Hill had one studio with an MCI 500 [mixer] and one with a 600 with parametric EQ. It was fine. Matter of fact, in the Bahamas [Compass Point Studios] they had one room with the SSL and one room with the MCI 500. I worked with Eurythmics on the MCI 500. A lot of the heavy metal bands would come there – Judas Priest, Iron Maiden – and they'd record in the MCI room.
Those consoles had a thickness to the sound. I don't know how to explain it.
That's right. Think about all that music from Saturday Night Fever. The Bee Gees was all MCI.
Oh, like from Criteria Studios in Miami [Florida]?
Yep. It sounded great. Then Studer came out with that A827 tape deck, with the peak and the VU meters. That was the last machine I had gotten into.
Right. I worked on those a few times. It sounded so clean.
Just before all this digital they came out with Dolby SR [noise reduction], which sounded great. I found that when I mixed with an SR [encoder], I had to bring the two channels of SR [decoding] to the mastering room, because each one of those SRs was different than the previous one. I never took a multitrack between rooms, but I would take the 2-track to the mastering room, and I learned that I had to bring the encoders.
I've heard you were pretty adamant about attending mastering sessions, to see the process through.
Right. Well, I first started that in England. I'd be working in England, go to the mastering room, and the first thing the mastering engineer would do is put this button in that makes all the bottom collapse into the middle.
Right, mono it.
There's no bottom on the outside channels! That's supposed to be used if there's a problem. If there isn't a problem, you don't have to do that to my record. I would make them back off a little bit. These days, I'll say, "Look, I'm not into the volume war. I don't want my mixes to look like two pieces of masking tape." There are no dynamics. No nothing.
Brick-walled.
A brick wall, exactly. Doing vinyl, we'd limit how long we would make it on each side so that we could get some [volume] level. Then we would do all kinds of little moves in order to get it as loud as we could. Massaging it in order to get it to not fry the esses. I started doing half-speed mastering. We would figure it all out and then divide everything in half. For the cutting lathe, they made me one of those buckets we would put in for each speed that we were doing. They made me a 16 and two thirds [bucket] so that I could do 33 and a third at half speed. It was amazing. We got it down so much that the plating place, the place where they would make the stampers, started complaining that it took too long because the grooves were too deep. They wanted to get paid more for the amount of chrome they were using on the stampers. But the records were really loud!
How did you end up working with Talking Heads?
When I went to the Bahamas and met Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth [drums and bass of Talking Heads], they had the Tom-Tom Club. They were familiar with my work. They had just finished Stop Making Sense, and nobody liked the mixes for the record. They said, "Would you like to try to mix it?" I went and got the gig, which was wonderful. The first song I heard from them was "Once in a Lifetime." I said to Chris, "This is a rap band. It's right up my alley." There was a thing David [Byrne, Tape Op #79] would do on that song. His voice would disappear. I was trying to figure it out, and eventually, when I saw the movie, [I realized] he was doing this [slaps hand to forehead] with his head!
Oh, yeah! Did you have to do automation rides to keep vocals in place?
Yeah, exactly. Especially with all that bopping his head out of the way. That was the first song. I hadn't seen the film until long after I'd done the record.
It's so much easier today to have a video running while mixing a live concert recording.
I couldn't see anything!
That must have been all analog?
It was 24-track analog, yeah.
It feels like back then you were wrangling technology just to get the job done.
We were wrangling with gear. We'd be swearing at the freaking SMPTE [tape sync timecode]. I recorded [Talking Heads'] True Stories at Sigma [Sound, New York]. Then, David was going to Texas to shoot the film. He was in the film. I made a submixed second tape [to be synched up later]. I used 8 tracks, with the drums mixed, and SMPTE printed on track 24. I send it to Texas. It comes back from Texas, and we go into a place in Toluca Lake [California]. It used to be Leon Russell's place [Paradise Studios], but they didn't have a SMPTE reader. I put it up, and I see there's something at -20 dB on track 24. I did all these overdubs on the tape. We go over to Village Recorder, and it won't lock up. Finally, I listen to track 24, and someone had erased the SMPTE and put 60 Hz down. They had 15 other tracks they could have put it on, but they erased my SMPTE! Oh, shit! So, I recorded SMPTE across from the master, up to where the song started, so that I could line it up right when the song started. Then I put on another track and started recording SMPTE, regenerating it from the master. I would line it up, be recording that, and right when it got to the end of the SMPTE, I'd flip it into external and listen to the bass drums. I phased them all the way through the song. As long as they were always phasing, then I was okay. Every fucking song. What kind of people were these? They've never heard of SMPTE?
You and Jerry Harrison [See Jerry's interview this issue.] have had a long career working together since Stop Making Sense.
Yeah, right.
What's the secret of dividing the workflow and trusting each other?
We hit it off after I met him with Talking Heads. Chris and Tina got me involved, and then I met Jerry. Jerry is really into the technology, too. When we were dealing with all that SMPTE mess, Jerry would get right in there with me. They would say, "It's the Jerry and ET show." I talk to him three or four times a week. He's a fun guy, really smart, and great to deal with. We work together well.
The Talking Heads records you worked on were produced by the band, with you engineering.
Right.
Was it ever contentious or difficult? I know the band had eras where it was fraught between them and David.
Right. I would always stay with the music and not get involved with any of it. They would take their issues to the lounge while I was working, and I never got involved in that. That's always been my style. I'm all about the music. Whatever else is going on, that's about those guys. That's the only way to deal with it.
