Can we start with how you got to Motown and what you knew before you got there?
I decided in sixth grade that I wanted to be a radio or recording engineer because I was on a little radio drama we did in our grade school. They had a radio drama program they did in junior high and high school, so I took that. In high school, as soon as I could drive, I started hanging out Saturdays at United Sound, which was the biggest independent studio in Detroit. It was open on Saturday, and it was the only one that was open on Saturday. Then I decided I wanted to try and get a summer job in a studio — I'd been hanging out at United for a couple years, going out and helping one of the engineers there do his own personal remotes. This was a guy named Danny Dallas, who had actually been the engineer for the Lone Ranger! I'd been going around helping on remotes with him and had gotten my first taste of gospel music, which completely blew me away. So I decided I'd like a summer job and literally, as a joke, Danny said, "Well why don't you go down to Motown." I'd practically not even heard of Motown. I was a big classical music fan and I liked big band stuff and orchestral-acoustic kinds of things.
This is '64?
Yeah. So, I walked in the door and was taken to Smokey Robinson's office and they sat me down at his desk handed me an employment application and an IQ test! I filled in these things and then they sent me down in the basement to go talk to the chief engineer, Mike McLean. Mike gave me a tour of the place, which included seeing the first actually working sel-sync 8-track, which of course completely put my jaw on the floor. And I saw their Neumann half-speed cutting system which was just incredible. Mike was also a big classical music fan and a hi-fi nut and I wound up not getting a job at that time but becoming friends with him and wound up going over to his Friday night parties. I got to know a bunch of people and continued interning around town with other people until eventually they hired me in '65 as a mastering trainee.
They didn't want mastering as we tend to think of it now, changing the whole mix with the EQ slope, compression, etc.
Berry Gordy had the experience of getting burned by trying to do that. He had learned early on the hard way that if you didn't get it right you really couldn't do anything about it. And of course, with vinyl that was a lot more the case than with compact discs. They were very, very concerned that things not be particularly modified in the transfer. They'd rather do a new mix than try and fix anything in mastering. So I started out pretty much doing really hot flat transfers, although if we heard something that seemed obvious to change, we could throw on some EQ and send an alternative version labeled with what we did.
Eight track mixing room known as "the Mastering Room". Mono and stereo Studer C-37s flank the console. An interesting feature was that you could turn the panel of eight faders upside down and a relay would switch the channels so they still corresponded left to right. I think you could turn the meters off too. Monitors are an Altec 604E for mono and Acoustic Research AR-3s for stereo. That's the third Moog modular synthesizer ever made in the background. The timer on the left was used to make sure you had faded by 3 minutes because the level of a 45 dropped like a rock at that point.
You mastered a lot of stuff, including many hits.
I did, along with others, yup.
When you hear "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" on the radio, do you think "I should have done something different?" or "That's perfect?" Do you get those sorts of impressions listening to the things you did there?
Well, the way it worked, I actually mastered probably 10 or 15 different mixes, and they picked the one that came out the best. They were very into internal quality control. The basic idea was that it was better for something to be a flop inside the company than to get out in the world and have it be a flop there.
So by '65 they had a sel-sync 8 track?
Yeah, from what I understand, the first tune ever done on it was .
When you were working in the studio what kind of gear were you using? You described it once as a "project studio".
Essentially the whole place was Berry Gordy's home studio. I mean, obviously after they became successful they were able to buy some very fancy gear and they had a lot of home-made gear, but it must be borne in mind that this really was the guy's home! On the other hand I think Abbey Road was built in somebody's mansion, so it's not an unprecedented thing. I think too big a deal is made of this home studio versus the non-home studio. A studio's just a studio and there's good ones and bad ones and some of them are in homes and some of them are built from the ground up.
I think everybody would be interested what the typical set-up there was. Was everybody in the same room, or was there a vocal booth?
Well, we were seriously into overdubbing, so live vocals were very rarely done. The setup — you mean for rhythm session?
