I came to know your work mostly through Tim Lawrence’s book about Arthur Russell, Hold On to Your Dreams [Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992].
Tim did a great job on that book. I'm 73 now, so Tim's book came out around retirement age for me. We may look back now at the ‘70s no wave and think, “Wow! That was an important time for music!” But at the time we were on the fringes. I would work on a disco record that would go to sell millions of copies, and at the same time we were in the studio with groups like DNA or Arthur Russell, who were so obscure to the mainstream. But the way it's worked out is that now that’s what people are into.
The scales of time have balanced it out.
Yeah, the art has triumphed!
That’s encouraging to hear. I caught the tail end of the big studio system, and it was very homogenous and sterile. I was at Sony NYC at the turn of the millennium.
Do you know Dominick Costanzo? We worked together at Delta Recording in 1973. That's how we started out.
Get out of town. Really?
Yeah. We’re still friends to this day. As you know, he went on to be a big cheese in the tech world; maintenance, construction, and all of that. But back then, we were both desperate, young, 22 year olds. I certainly understand what the music business was like in the early 2000s; those monolithic places like Sony or Hit Factory, which was probably the zenith of all that. When I was growing up on Long Island, I was a loner kid, I loved to draw. In school I was in the arts program with the art kids; people who eventually became big deals in the commercial art world. Mark Larson was one of my classmates; he was the art director for CBS and Arista Records. Also Guy Trebay, who until about last year was writing the “Style” section for the New York Times.
How did you end up recording music?
I was always into electronics. I had built a radio station out of my house when I was about 12 years old and had been building recording equipment as well. One of my schoolmates and friends was Michael Altshuler. His father, Robert Altshuler, was a big deal at Columbia Records. Mike said, “I have a basement and a band. Let's do stuff.” So, we put together a recording studio with some RCA microphones in his father's record library. We wound up making some recordings, and I said, “This is cool!” I had no musical experience at that time.
You weren't playing music?
No, I wasn't playing.
But you were building gear?
When Michael and I decided to do this, I built a mixer, and we recorded to 2-track. I figured out overdubbing by listening to records from The Beatles and whatnot. It was eye-opening because there I was, doing this stuff; we were just making it up and there was no Tape Op! [laughter] Another one of my classmates was Deborah Walker, and her father was Saul Walker – one of the founders of Automated Processes Inc. [API]. In 1966 or 1967, we went into the city to the AES Show and entered this obscure world, away from the mainstream kids. I thought, “Okay, so this is how they make records!” I saw these 8-track tape recorders there, and they were all shiny and amazing! The first 8-track I saw was a Scully 284, and they would let us move the controls. I saw this world and I said, “This is for me!” I wound up picking up the guitar and learning it, just doing what I could do. The next step was I went to Woodstock, and I had my mind blown. From that, I wound up moving to New Mexico with a friend of mine who's a drummer. We landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the winter of ’69/’70. I traded my acoustic guitar for a Fender Telecaster and an amp. I had brought a little Ampex 600 [tape deck] with me, as well as two microphones. We started making some records, and I became an engineer over at the local studio. When Bo Diddley came through town and needed to make a demo, I was like, “Oh man!” I joined a group called Fast Eddie – actually named after a guy called Fast Eddie – and eventually I became his roommate. He was from Lubbock, Texas, so one time we drove out to Lubbock and wound up going into Norman Petty Studios [in Clovis, NM] and I engineered some demos. The studio was mostly Ampex MX-10 mixers, and it had one of those green Altec [436C] compressors, which had the world's slowest attack time! Anyway, I was working with these people and wound up in local bands that backed up some traveling musicians. The University [of New Mexico] would have performances – at the time Route 66 was still a thing – and we would get people like Bo Diddley, Carl Perkins, or Chuck Berry. In 1970 or 1971 these artists were already considered “from the past.”
What got you back to New York?
Two things happened that were important: I was broke, and I needed money! [laughter] Also, I realized that I needed to be in a more mainstream place because nobody there considered what they did important. I know that sounds maybe…
…for some of us it's more of a calling than a hobby.
That's so true. So, I went back to New York with my guitar, got a room in a flop house, and I wound up getting a job in a recording studio. I took the first job I could get, and it worked out to be a great job. I ended up at Sanders Recording Studio on 48th Street between 6th and 7th Ave. Manny's Music and Sam Ash Music were right across the street.
That was the block. Music Row.
Yeah, I was in this recording studio that had an Ampex MX-10 mixer, an Ampex 351 mono machine, and an Ampex 354 2-track. The big highlight were the Presto cutting lathes. We would make these recordings and then go out in the other room and cut a disc. Or if the artist was really cheap, we would just hit record on the cutting lathe and go straight to disc. One of the artists that came out of Sanders Recording Studio was Tiny Tim. I remember thinking, “This is cool!” On one hand I wanted to have a hit record and to be the name on that record. But on the other hand, I thought, “You’re never going to see shit like this!” I mean, Tiny Tim was pretty weird, especially then. I wound up moving to the Village and getting a studio apartment there. I was in a jam band with Richie Ash from Sam Ash Music, and I started working with lots of people. What happens in these situations when you're very young is that people come up and say things like, “We don't have any money, but this could be a great opportunity.” I was being taken out to a studio in New Jersey after work every night that was owned by Russ Damon, meeting all sorts of people. Finally, I wound up saying, “It's time for me to transition out of Sanders.” I walked over to the Palace Theater, which was on the corner of 47th and Times Square. There was a studio [Delta Recording Studio] up there, and I walked up and asked for a job. I must have come in at the right time. Dominick Costanzo was there – he was interested in recording, but more so the technology and science of it. Jon Fausty had just left, and he was a big name in the Latin music world. I walked in and they said, “Do you know anything about Latin music?” Of course I said, “Sure, sure.” But I really knew nothing, and now I had to record a Latin band. I was looking around and I said, “Wait a minute. I don't see a drum set.” I saw timbales, an upright bass, a piano, a big smokin’ horn section, and I'm thinking, “I have no clue!” So, I made friends with the musicians, talked to them, and they helped me figure out where the mics should go. It ended up being great! Now, in New York at that time, rock ‘n’ roll was not a thing. There was rock ‘n’ roll, but that was not the music of the city. It was these types of Latin bands. They would play eight hours a night at the clubs, and their music was very sophisticated.
These guys are always playing, and they’ve got chops. They can read down a chart and can sit in and just…
…do it. Right. It used to freak me out when there was a 2 chord in a 1, 4, 5 progression. These guys are playing these major, major parts, and it’s all very cool. I fell in love with this. These guys were playing in bands at night, but during the day they would be doing jingles and sessions – they would do one after another. One of the guys that I met at that time, Mickey Sevilla, eventually wound up with [Dr. Buzzard's Original] Savannah Band, which was August Darnell’s [Thomas Browder, aka Kid Creole] band, who I wound up doing many records with. I met the superstars of Latin music, like Tito Puente coming in.
What was the studio like at Delta?
They had a Scully 8-track. If you came up on these things, you know that 8-track technology definitely informed the way music happened. We wound up getting a 16-track. The owners were best friends with the head technician at RCA Studios, and we got an [Ampex] MM 1000, which is a monster. If you wanted to punch in on two different tracks, you’d be standing there like an octopus with your hands on the buttons and everything. In those days, studio [control rooms] were not really for musicians or producers. I'd be sitting there and right behind me would be all the machines. We had all fluorescent lights in the control room! We had a very reflective live room, and Dominick had read somewhere that if you use a big patio umbrella over the drums it focused the sound, so he built this device with this big patio umbrella that was like, “Wow!” I bought some track lighting and put that in the control room.
Were you guys getting the run of the show from the owners, and working most of the sessions without much supervision?
During the day, we worked with voice recording and jobs like that and we were very professional. But we were having success in the Latin field, and people would show up who eventually became very, very big names. We ended up recording Jimmy Sabater, the lead singer for the Joe Cuba sextet back in the 1960s. Their song, “To Be With You,” had been a big hit in the city. We wound up recording a disco version because it was such an iconic New York song. Nobody back then thought past New York City, as far as the disco world was concerned. Bobby Marin was the producer, and he and I worked on many projects together. Bobby was buddies with Louie Ramirez, Jimmy, and everyone; we all hung out, smoked a ton of dope in the control room, and it was like a big party. My girlfriend at the time, Gretchen Studier, would sing the background lines. When this record came out in ’76, I didn't know the disco world; I knew the Latin world. This underground thing with Latin artists was the beginning of making disco records for me. Bobby called from Frankford/Wayne Mastering Labs asking, “How do we cut this?” There was this new thing where they cut a 12-inch at 45 RPM instead of 33.
Because it’s louder?
It's hotter, right? I was like, “Sure let's do it.” If you ever get the record, it runs at 45. It was strange.
The 12-inch single became a new format. The speed that a single was able to get into a DJ’s hands, and into the clubs, became important for the workflow in your studio later, right?
You have to realize that until the late-‘60s you only made an album when you had a hit single. It wasn’t until the mid-‘60s, with The Beatles and the British invasion, that full-length albums had any meaning. But what you're saying is true. People would say on a Monday, “Put out a record and get it in the clubs by the weekend!” That's important. Albums were not that important in that world for a lot of reasons. One of them was speed, the other is that there was almost as much money to be made in just putting out a 12-inch. You only had to do two recordings!
Of course, less studio time. How did Blank Tape studio come together?
While I was at Delta, I had also been working in the studio in New Jersey owned by Russ Damon. They had a console sitting in a closet with Fairchild components, so I traded him work for the console. I got a loft right in Chelsea – at this time anything below 42nd Street was considered ridiculous. There was Electric Lady Studios, but that was an anomaly. I found the loft space, which in New York was defined as 20 feet by 30 feet, so I bought two spaces – the corner piece. You would see this “build to suit” sign at these places, and so one day a guy comes in and asks, “Where do you want the walls?” I said, “Oh, great! Put one here, here, and leave a hole here so I can put a window in for the control room.”
No blueprints or anything?
Right. As the walls were going up I put in fiberglass insulation and stapled burlap over it. I worked on the console parts that I had, and it was just a question of how quickly I could put it together. In the meantime, I was working in this recording studio in New Jersey and making some money. I would make some cash and go down to what was called Radio Row. I would walk down the street and there'd be an open bin of capacitors, or an open bin of army surplus parts. I would spend all my money on parts and then go back home to the loft and put it all together. I built an Ampex 4-track, 1/2-inch machine from a 3-track and some spare parts my friend got in trade. And I built the console for 16 channels. Once that came together, I would record whatever came through the door! I would record these beat poets from downtown. One day this poetry guy said, “I'm bringing in a bass player and I’m going to play saxophone.” He came in, and the bassist he brought was Ron Carter. This guy said, “Someday Ron Carter will be famous, and this will be an important record.” I guess he was right, but at the time it was this weird thing. And that's what I wound up doing – a lot of strange stuff!
But you were working! How long was it until those clients that you developed longer relationships with started coming through the door?
I needed a piano – a real grand piano – and a 16-track tape machine. I needed the financing, so I got partners. We went to Steinway Hall and played about six pianos with a piano player. We liked the Model M series, so one of the partners pulled out a roll of bills and paid for it in cash. It was nuts! [laughs] After this, we had a lot of jazz artists coming in, like Stanley Turrentine. The musicians would say, “Oh, it's good. I'm going to tell my friends.” All of a sudden, we’re working with Adelphi Records and a lot of the more obscure jazz labels from that time. They seemed to like the vibe and how I recorded them. I worked with a guy who had come down from Harlem, and he said, “I'm going to have my backer call you.” The backer was Bobby Robinson, who's a legend up in Harlem; he had Bobby’s Records and Tape Center store. Bobby would book a few hours on Saturdays, and he would send down these artists who would come in and do their thing. The perspective is funny when you're sitting in a recording studio and the world is coming to you. You don't feel any real need to go out. I hear questions like, “How did how did you meet the artists you were producing?” I never left the studio! I went to a disco two times, and that was when my wife, Lola Love, had the record “Wax the Van” and started performing at The [Paradise] Garage. It was thousands of guys dancing, going nuts, and I had no clue!
Was there anybody else in the neighborhood doing anything similar?
Down the block from me was a place called Sundragon Studios. They were known because they recorded the first Talking Heads album [Talking Heads: 77]. I was working with a group called Television. They said, “We're going to do our album at Sundragon, but the room is a bit claustrophobic.” They would come to me to do the demos for that. Between me and Sundragon was a rehearsal studio that had a little TEAC 4-track. Across the street was a place that eventually became important in the jingle world, Elias Audio Branding, so the street had a lot of activity. We were on the corner of 20th and 6th Avenue – if you know the neighborhood there's this big loft building and that's where we were. Also on the corner was a deconsecrated church that eventually became The Limelight disco. The disco world was a very niche thing. Now, if you think about it, selling a 100,000 copies in five or six weeks would be considered amazing. But back then, it was like, “That's not the big time! Big time is when you sell two million albums.” The people who did this kind of music were people like Arthur [Russell] and his crowd. Ernie Brooks, from The Modern Lovers, was in the studio with Arthur and The Necessaries. We had Television in, and they made “Little Johnny Jewel” on the 4-track in 1975. [Their first 7-inch. -Ed.]
One of the people that you worked with was Patrick Adams, who was famous as a dance music producer.
At the time, I was also working with Bobby Robinson's people. Leroy Burgess, a prolific songwriter, came down and said, “I’ve got a friend, Patrick Adams.” Patrick Adams came down and recorded a version of a song for Barclay records in France. He said, "I like this studio. It's great.” Patrick was a one man band. We had a UREI [962 Digital] Metronome – no beats per minute, it was frames per beat! He took the sound of the metronome, we rolled off the highs and would boost the bass, and all of a sudden we had a bass drum! Then he'd play on top of that.
I remember reading that story and thinking, “Okay, this is a super creative person.” No one gives you permission to do something like that. But you, as an engineer and studio owner, were able to offer an environment where he felt free enough to be able to do these things.
That's how I first started working with him. He couldn't go into a major studio in New York on the cheap, and they were not that comfortable. He would say, “Give me the evening.” Sometimes I would just leave him the keys. There was the freedom to do that. Remember, a lot of disco, and a lot of this underground stuff, was made by really weird people. Arthur Russell came in the studio one day with a newspaper folded into a tri-corner hat.
That's on the cover of the Another Thought record.
Yeah! I was like, “Oh, hey, Arthur.” [laughs] That was the whole thing about the vibe. For instance, I actually used Jessica Cleaves from Parliament Funkadelic to sing the vocal on “Over Like a Fat Rat,” which is a record I produced that eventually wound up with Fonda Rae. Nobody was a “star” back then, even if they were stars. By the time I sold the studio, everybody was coming in and we were working with all that celebrity crap.
You had a huge disco hit with Patrick’s Musique and “(Push Push) In the Bush.” With that came a lot of attention. Were you hanging onto a rocket that was taking off?
It was successful, and I didn't really know how to capitalize on that success. If I had been smart, I would have made appointments at all the major record labels in Midtown or gone to the major recording studios and said, “I recorded this record. Give me a job.” But I didn't because I had no idea. I guess I thought that I could build a better mousetrap. So, the record came out and I didn’t have a way to follow it up. What happened over the next couple of years is that artists realized that I personally had the ability to take their music and give it a commercial sound. That’s when we started to take off. ZE Records decided that they wanted this for their non-commercial music, and eventually the R&B and disco crowd realized that my strength was helping them doing remixes. Back in the day, it was very much an engineer's work to make the remixes. Records were 3 minutes long, and remixing was mostly just copying pieces and doubling them. That was the creation of the disco remix. The early people who were working on those were basically just editing tape.
Some of the earliest remixes were being done at your studio. I know Walter Gibbons had been developing the technique of extending the break as a DJ, at the same time that DJ Kool Herc was doing that same thing up in the Bronx. There’s a story of Walter working out the Double Exposure “Ten Percent” remix at Blank Tape, and this is considered by many to be the first real 12-inch single.
I wound up working with Salsoul Records, who were in Philadelphia. They would hire Tom Moulton to make a remix down at Sigma Sound [Tape Op #68]. Tom was old school, and his work was flawless. At the same time, I would be sent the same record, and I would get people like Walter, Nicky Siano, or Larry Levan to come in. We knew that Tom Moulton was going to do this slick, million-selling mix, so we would go nuts. “What if everything dropped out except for the bass drum here?” Or, “Let's bring up this one guitar and edit it, then splice these parts together.” Walter and I became friends. “Ten Percent” is an 8 min cut. They started at bar 1, and at bar 200 they stopped playing. All those riffs and everything, they were written. So, Walter would come in with an idea and say, “Set up the mix, make it sound good, and then just leave me in the room.” He would hit play and mute everything; mute the bass drum, mute this, mute that, and then he would edit parts together in our back room. What made him amazing is that he was able to structure these more like a film editor, and that was very unique at the time.
Talking about methods of record production, what else was going on in the scene at that time?
Well, Arthur Russell loved disco, he loved that sound. We recorded Dinosaur L and [Loose Joints’] “Is it All Over My Face?” He had what’s maybe a bit of a cliché now, which was, “First take, best take.” Of course, it’s a great theory. No matter what happens, I was supposed to start the tape running the moment I sat down. Musicians tend to gravitate to what they feel at the moment, and if they're not looking at a chart what they feel is a groove so the takes always sounded great. But the rhythm section came up from Philly, and they were so pissed that we kept the first take!
They had reputations as these tight, funky guys but Arthur had another vision. He was putting a lot of energy and attention into this record but doing it in this really left way.
Yeah, yeah. That is what made him a genius, and this is why the downtown music scene at that time was so important – because we had a musician who came in and did something like that. I remember Pat Place, who was a guitarist for a group called the Bush Tetras and played with James Chance and the Contortions. She was a great player, but she would close her eyes and just, “BANG!” because it's all emotion. She explained to me that a lot of the people performing downtown were using instruments as an artistic expression, not for musicianship. They weren’t going to learn how to play a guitar, they were just banging on it, scraping it, or whatever. I thought that was very important.
You said that the Dinosaur L sessions with Arthur opened your mind to what music could be; that it didn't always have to fit a form. As an engineer and producer, when these moments happen they tend to stay with you and change your ways of working.
I remember this to this day: I worked with a producer named Dan Doyle doing a Johnny Copeland album. They were a southern Texas blues band. Dan makes an order, and a guy comes in with a 6 pack. I asked, “What's up with the beer?” He said, “Look, I love this band when I'm just standing at the bar, having a beer.” Dan starts going through the 6 pack, and as the beers went down he’s getting a different vibe. The musicians all saw him, and all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, yeah!” From that, they got the feeling of being in a club from him. These people were playing, and they started to feel whatever it is that Dan was feeling… I never forgot that. After that time, my production attitude changed quite a lot. If you think about it, there are many ways that you can produce a record. You can get a musician who's super musical and who says, “Okay, right here, we need this or that.” Then there are producers who basically say, “Hey, come into my living room. Do what you want to do.” To me, it's that; those are the moments. That's the music that stays that has importance. I remember reading about Steely Dan spending weeks moving something by millimeters, and I thought, “I could never do that.” Some of the best music I've ever heard was jammed out live, right in front of me, and the music is all interactive. My job was to make it audible and usable. Some of these records I made, like “In The Bush” by Musique, that was a budget record! The album was done very quickly. Patrick wrote the charts on the console as the musicians were walking in! It only has three songs on it because that's all the budget had! The ones that are important to me are the ones that hit my heart and hit my soul.
Right! Going through your catalog, there is definitely an energy that translates. I can feel the people playing in the room. Speaking of the sonics, what was going on with that in-your-face drum sound you were getting?
We nailed the drums to the floor. We had drums set up, and we had a mic’ing pattern set up, and we never changed it. Come in on a Monday and it was the same microphone on a Tuesday. With 16-track, there were maybe three or four tracks for drums, and I just did not want to reinvent the wheel every day. The bass had an Ampeg B-15 amplifier with a direct box sitting there. We had Fender Super Reverbs, and we said, “This is the thing we're going to do, always.” When you're like me, engineering 15 hours a day, this makes things easy. When we built our other studio, we bought the exact same drums and put the exact same mics in there. Now, as a sound person, you know that the same microphone in front of the same amp is not always going to sound exactly the same, and a lot of that is because of the player. We did things this way though, and there was still a lot of consistency. It was ergonomic. I could change the monitor mix without even looking at the board because I knew that the bass was on track 6. You don't get hired to go, “Wow, man, look at all these mics! What the fuck am I going to do?” [laughter] I'm self-taught. I don't really know! But what am I going to do? There's a little bit of bravado, because you hope that you're perfectly right. But we did have other engineers at the studio. John Bradley came to us; he was great. Butch Jones was on our staff. He eventually wound up working on all those records with the Talking Heads.
One of the Lydia Lunch records you worked on, Queen of Siam, is very different from her other work. It’s tough to pin down, but there’s that familiar element of taking chances, having fun, lots of tape manipulations, and things like that.
That album points out just how diverse the music scene was at that time, and how diverse we were! Billy VerPlanck, who is the arranger, wrote all that music behind her poetry. I met him and his wife, Marlene, who's a well-known jazz singer. They would come in and do all these corporate type things during the daytime for IBM and all these other big companies. He had never heard of Lydia Lunch, and she had no idea of him, but I was in the studio making corporate music as well as the punk stuff, so I was in my element. When Robert Quine came in – he’s playing guitar on some of this – he said, “I don't really want to play. I don't want to be too recognizable, so can we play it all backwards?” Now, let me tell you how scary flipping a 24-track tape is! Exactly which track is it that you’re recording on to? It would be different on every take because you have an orchestra on that record! On three songs you have vibes, or whatever it might be on track whatever, and it’s different on every song.
There was no command Z to get a track back if you erased it!
It was crazy. We did a lot of stuff like that because it was supposed to sound like the “Peter Gunn” theme, or a 1950’s TV show about cool jazz guys, but she didn’t want that. The charts were all written out and there were strings. There was a choir in there too, but we never recorded that because she said, “This is good enough.” It was written as this whole symphonic piece. We would have all these different people interacting. That, to me, was the music business at that time. I think that if there was any longevity to my name on records, it was that I never turned down a job. The only jobs I turned down were rock ‘n’ roll jobs.
Yeah, you said you never wanted to work with rock bands. Why is that?
I did work with tons of rock bands, but they were all odd bands. That time – the ‘70s into the ‘80s – was all sludgy and corny. The rock god thing, the KISS thing, and all of that – I never enjoyed it. But I can work with some guy from Harlem, and we can work for four hours and do some music like that!
You had that studio with your name on it for only 10 years, but things were moving quickly. One of the big changes happened when disco crashed.
The end of ’79.
What was happening for you at the studio with this change in the industry?
Well, you can pinpoint a day when a radio station changes format and doesn't play something, or you can pinpoint when a big record comes out. That’s how this thing changed. But remember, Salsoul Records had a deal with RCA, and nobody said to them, “Okay, now just get out of the business.” A lot of the product we were working on in 1982 were productions that had been started years before. That's the nature of things. You don't just say, “Throw away all those masters and start again!” You hear something catch on, and then you make a more stripped down sound or whatever it might be. Music doesn't change that quickly. Producers who are making a product for a tiny niche, guys who only knew how to do one thing, they got screwed. I don't mean to sound immodest, but I like to think I had a little more range than that. The studio had a very, very diverse group of people working there. I remember in the mid-‘80s still making dance records. I mean, we worked on songs like “Heartbeat” by Taana Gardner.
That is a great record. The remix by Larry Levan is just bananas.
Well, there are quotes about me and Larry floating around out there that will tell you how those records happened. More importantly, artists are still artists through those periods.
What was going on for you in this later period of owning the studio?
That's a great question. There's always the economics about it. I would walk in saying, “I hope this is a hit record.” Let's face it, everybody does that. But I think what happened is eventually I realized that was not the important thing. We were trying to keep hit records coming, sure. But for me, I decided in the mid-‘80s to stop making remixes and sitting in the studio all night. What I liked in the studio was the speed of things happening, and the remixes were now taking 20 hours for the same 3-minute song. It got crazy. I wound up doing jingles. From 10 to 1 o'clock you'd have top musicians playing some groove: 12 bars of music. Then from 3 to 7 the top singers would come in. It was so different working with stone professional musicians who had it all together. Every note was perfect, and it was great. Another thing I was able to start doing was soundtracks, TV shows, and things like that. I was able to be the guy who knows how to record the string section. Then, after I sold the studio, I moved to Connecticut. I started recording Chaka Khan and all that up there. It was much different in my attic recording with my 24-track than it was in the city. I worked with remixers like Paul Simpson and Dave Shaw. I remember that it was important for me to not feel that I was reinventing the wheel all the time.
You’ve mentioned in selling the studio that you felt like you got out at the right time. Did you feel as though you wound up working for the business at a certain point?
Oh, yeah. We had MCI equipment, and we had bought an MCI JH-542 console, which was in our room three. We were starting to do a lot of work that had sync-to-video, and my partner said, “You know there's a new version of this console coming out. It’s a 652.” Well, the 652 has all that stuff, but here’s the thing – the console didn't work. The MCI automation just did not work! We realized that some studios were putting in SSLs. That console was almost a half of a million dollars at that time. Me and my partners financed the SSL, it went in, and immediately we started getting big time work. I had some amazing artists coming in. I worked with Sting, Davy Jones of The Monkees, the Rolling Stones, and all types of great artists. But I was sitting there working on these projects, and I started realizing that I wasn’t seeing any of the people that I knew. Arthur Russell couldn't afford the rates of the SSL room, and record companies weren't going to send in a new, untried artist at those rates. It was scary paying off a half-million dollar console in this giant studio. Hoping that you don't fuck up and some big artist leaves and takes their $100,000 budget out of there. Also, it’s expensive running those things. There was an 8-inch floppy disk for the SSL backup. Each disc was $10, and this was in a time when lunch was $4.50. Now you think about it, “What’s $10?” But we’d use ten of them in a session to save and make copies every day. I was thinking, “Fuck! That's more money than I spend in a month on my car payment, and all in one day!” I would go home, and I'd be freaking out. I was a father with a with a 9-year-old. I'm thinking, “Fuck, this is a house of cards! What do we do?” I started accepting anything. Jingles made a lot of money, and we could get that $200 an hour because they would spend it. I started realizing, "Shit, I’m working for this company. And I have to. It has to work.” I remember once that SSL went in, that was when I decided I wanted to sell. You're right. I did feel a lot of pressure on that. When I moved to Connecticut I didn't put an SSL in. I bought Yamaha DMP7s – these little units – and I built a console of those. I didn't feel that pressure anymore.
In Connecticut, you were continuing to have a string of hits. What else was going on around this period?
A guy [Anthony Heilbut] called me up the day after I sold the studio and said, “I wrote a book called The Gospel Sound and I have a record label. What I want to do is record the gospel singers from the past. They're older now, and they need a voice.” I started working with him for a year or so, and we won Grammys on this. It was singers that mainstream people had never heard of, but they were very successful in the gospel field. We'd record them and make these records. I thought I was in the middle of the music business, but here was another middle.
Finding those new places where you can continue to learn, and to grow, and to shine.
You're right. Now, I'm not as involved in the music business as I was. But when I was in my 40s, I was very much involved in the music business, and people were still calling me to do remixes and all sorts of things. I'll give you an example from this time period: Phil Ramone [Tape Op #50] lived about 20 minutes away from me in Connecticut. A friend of mine had been asked to work on a record with Phil, and he recommended me. Phil Ramone was a very well-known record producer, and he was also known as a recording engineer. So, when he called I was thinking, “Oh, my god.” He says, “I have this recording studio in the back of my house, and Billy Joel’s band uses it to practice. I'd like to make it more of a demo recording studio.” I was thinking, “This is what I signed up for?” But I started working with the musicians in his house and I thought, “Yeah, this is the record business too.” It's a whole other world. I had never thought about making demos as a main thing, but this was interesting. I was lucky that I wasn't so pigheaded to think that it was beneath me, or it was something that was too outside of some professional level I was on. I loved working with him, and I got to be somewhat friends with him. Why did it happen? It might have been me, but it was also that I was 20 minutes away, this friend recommended me, and I knew what to do. It's funny how life zigs and zags if you leave yourself open.
It's letting people in and having them mix around and seeing what can happen.
Yeah, Blank Tape was in a loft building with a big, long hallway. We had three studios, and each one opened up into the same hallway. We’d go in the hallway and there would be interactions with all the musicians. We had a cigarette machine, a Pac-Man game, and that was where a lot of people would hang out and meet. I remember working with August Darnell, and David Byrne [Tape Op #79] came in the hall, and we just hung out. He’d never met him. He'd been working on an album at the other end of the studio, and all of a sudden there's synergy going on. That was the music business that I loved.
There are some interesting stories of Arthur Russell coming up to your studio in Connecticut.
Did you hear about the car? Arthur was from the Midwest, and apparently he went back to his folks’ home, and he drove back in this old, beat up 1951 Ford. Bench seats and one manual windshield wiper. He said, “Can I trade this for some time at your studio?” I wish I had a picture of this car! [laughs] The car sat there for a while and eventually I sold it. What can you do? Arthur was never without something crazy like that happening. He used to get grant money, and that's how he financed so much of his stuff. He'd say, “I have this grant. Here’s the money. Tell me when to stop.” [laughter]
How long can you keep the tab open? That’s a classic dilemma.
He'd come up by the day. The studio was in my bedroom. Eventually, I'd say I had to go to sleep, and I’d put him on a train. But this is how I remember him: I’d walk up the stairs to the attic, I’d hear his music, and if he said, “Help me with this,” that would mean we'd work for a few hours. Sometimes he just said, “Leave me alone. Let me do something.” You never appreciate these things until they stop. You're sitting there at the time going, “If I have to hear this guy playing this tune one more time I'm going to kill myself.” But in 15 years if someone asks, you're going to say, “Oh man, he was the best. So cool!” [laughs]
Your idea of how it is to make a record leans heavily on the social element – being with the people while it's happening, capturing the energy and the emotion, and not getting lost in the details.
Exactly. To be honest, that's what I live for – to get a bunch of people in to play some music and catch that moment. If you go to see a live concert, you don't go there to hear how perfectly the guy plays. You hope to hear the bass player and the drummer groove together. You can feel that. As a sound person, you're hearing this big soundscape, and you can go, “Oh, too much highs on the high hat” or whatever. You and I can do that. I always had that, but I did not have the concentration to do that for more than a little bit. I realized that I would rather hear the whole package. I was very detailed, but everything was done very quickly. I did not obsess over something. It's hard to capture a moment, and that’s the thing.
Is there any big takeaway or any philosophy you’ve developed from all of this?
Yeah, I look back and I think I did the right thing by staying with the strange music, because now nobody wants to hear about the hits. Nobody needs to hear how that record was made. But they definitely want to know how Arthur came up with that thing where he had a little package of 3-inch floppy disks, started hitting them, and that became the rhythm part. I’m sure that I look back at my history through rose-colored glasses, but that's all I remember. I remember things like Mick Jagger sitting on the couch hitting on the keyboard player's girlfriend, and the keyboard player is being all, “Yeah, yeah,” about it, and playing in some ridiculous, goofy way. I remember those times.
I think Phil Ramone was asked, “What do you remember about your time in the studios making records?” And his response was something along the lines of, “It’s nothing about the gear. It’s always the jokes, and whatever's happening between the people. That's the thing."
Just to wrap it up: One of the engineers who worked with me, Butch Jones – nicest guy in the world – he worked with all sorts of people and did all the rock stuff. To this day, he's working with the same musicians. They're doing the same things. He's out in Long Island. I see him on Facebook and they're all smiling and laughing. They’re friends, and they're doing friendly things. I don't know if Butch is contemporary, musically or whatever, but he is in a world where he has people he's worked with for 30 and 40 years, and they're smiling and having fun. And I mean, what could be better than that? 
