You started your career in music as a child violin prodigy. Obviously from the very beginning, musicianship and a musician's ear were very important concerns to you.
I think that sometimes we're very fortunate to get the basics. By the time I was 11 or 12, I certainly was more versed in classical music. But my passion was to try to play jazz on the violin. I did anything and everything to try to translate to the violin what Les Paul and all those people were doing electronically with overdub recording. I was listening to Charlie Parker and a lot of great artists of the time, and I figured out that if I could learn about what the electronics were, I might have a better shot of trying to make these sounds on the violin. So I started messing with creating an electric violin — or trying to find one that sounded different, using effects. I befriended a guy who was in a recording studio in New York, who was a great engineer. His name was Bill Schwartau — and a guy named Charlie Layton had a little demo studio called JAC. By the time I was in the latter part of my teens, I was already learning how to make demos really fast, how to write string lines, how to engineer, how to cut a disc. So my background was more about understanding the treasure of what the marriage of musicianship and engineering could be.
It's a different approach from what a lot of people are doing today.
Yeah. But we're much better off now in many ways, because there are really good schools like Berklee and Full Sail. In the early '70s, I was part of a studio called A&R Recording. At that studio, we trained our own people. We started our own aural school, so to speak. We took people like Elliot Scheiner and other folks. Everybody has gone on to do great work, but the common denominator was that they all came from bands like Dave Green and David Smith, and the people who came to work for me all had some kind of technical background. I gave a lot of credit to the real high-end technical people who never stopped imagining what could be better, or why it should be better. as a child working as a fiddle player and getting into studios, by the time I was in my teens, I was playing several sessions a week. When I really got involved in the process, I realized that engineers were separate from us. They treated you a little bit more elusively. They trusted what they had to do, but if you messed up or didn't play in the style they were expecting you to, they didn't talk to you. There were also very strict rules. I learned to break all those rules — correctly. I felt that I got the trust of the musicians that I wouldn't have had otherwise — not being rebellious, but understanding what the musician went through and what the mic'ing of that person was, and what it could mean if you had real contact with them, if you got their help. I recorded in a room that wasn't really big, but it was big enough. This was at the original A&R, the very first building, which was up the street from where we are right now. It became famous because of the attitude. All of us were so willing to work many, many hours, and the records that were made there — the Bacharach and David records, the Neil Diamond records — quite a few records were made there.
Your discography is astounding! It's my entire record collection.
You can have the discography, but I worry about it. Even now, I think about it. Sometimes it rounds out to be too braggadocio and it's not me.
You didn't just happen to be there while all of this amazing music happened around you?
No. We were the first of a group of independent studios that came out of the workings of the major labels. I think a lot of the great engineers — the Al Schmitts and all — either went to work for RCA or Atlantic like Tommy Dowd, who was a major influence in my life. That's because he had blind faith in me. He saw me do things and he gave me some tricks. His attitude was the key. Many a time we'd be in a nightclub where people might not be comfortable with us recording. It was very crude — there were no trucks. We would bring in equipment and take out a booth. The owner of the club hated you for that — it took out four people at ten bucks minimum. But I got to do all of the late night jazz and R&B dates, and the first rock and roll dates. No sane engineer wanted to deal with some amps blowing out. They didn't want to blow out their ears! They were happy not to do a 7 pm date, a band that took four hours just to get a sound.
What was the first thing that you engineered that you consider to be part of your catalog?
There were several things that happened to me — the big jazz band stuff, like Count Basie, and watching Bill Schwartau and other people engineer. I never let up because he would be like the pilot who would say, "Take over." That's when you learn, because you've watched and watched. I feel like I've trained a lot of people, because if you're paying attention you see what's going on in the room, if you're not reading comic books or Tape Op. [laughs] And it's important not to be afraid ego-wise to share your information. A lot of people won't. I don't ask to have your secrets, but why are they secrets? If it's art, there should be no secrets.
