When you started in the sixties, how were producers different than they are now?
First and foremost, they worked for the record companies. They were the A&R guys. That was the most important thing. They were finding the talent. They were finding the repertoire for the talent, the songs that they would sing. They would take them into the studio and it would be their vision. Then they would also discuss with marketing — not that there were particularly big marketing departments back then — but they'd see it through. It was their baby and they'd sink or swim by it. Producers back then didn't get points, so that was interesting.
Would you say the producer in that era was also a kind of liaison between the technical and the artist?
It's like that these days, if it's not an engineer that's producing.
When you were doing work at Trident, there were a lot of producers that didn't engineer. You were an engineer during that period. How did that work — who did you like as a producer and what were their good qualities?
It's that whole thing of "familiarity breeds contempt." I hope I've taken the best. The strangest one was probably Bob Johnston, who I worked with on a Lindisfarne album, because he didn't appear to do anything. He said very little. He just sat at the back, but whatever it was, he pulled out the best of me and the best from the band. I've thought about him on many occasions and tried to puzzle out, "How the hell did he do that?" Nothing obvious.
I've heard a lot of times that one of Bob's greatest assets was being a buffer between the artists and the label.
But back then the labels didn't come down anyway — so there wasn't that much to do.
I guess this happened more so in the Dylan case.
He was so big and people wanted to go in and see him. With Bowie, moving into the '70s, I never saw a single record company person come down. I only had one contact with the record company with regard to any of the albums and that was just, "Could you remix one song?"
What was the reason for the remix?
I had purposely, when I set up the original mix — it was "Watch That Man" — and I had chosen [that] the power should come from the band and the voice should be mixed really low. It should almost just be one of the instruments. I got a phone call from MainMan [Bowie's management] first saying, "Could you try another mix with more vocal?" and I said, "Sure!" and I explained why I had done it that way, sent it to them and they said, "You're right. Go with the first one." Then about a week later I heard from RCA, "Could you try another mix on 'Watch That Man' and bring the vocal up?" I said, "I've already done it once, I can do it again." I did it without the original. Now I listen to the original and I think, "Oh why the hell did I do that? He's so far back, it's unreal."
Is there a tendency to want to go back and revise history like that? Or are you happy to accept how it is?
Oh, no. I have to accept the way [it is]. I always found that when it was vinyl, you'd go through the mastering process and get a playback acetate and listen to it and then you'd have to wait for the test pressings to okay those. That period of time between the playback acetate and the test pressing was, "Oh, why didn't I do that? Oh shit, I should've done that." Then as soon as I got the test pressing, I knew it was too late to go back and it was, "Bang. Yeah, now I can sit back and enjoy it." Much as when revisiting All Things Must Pass, both George [Harrison] and I would have dearly loved to have de-Spector-ized.
He mentioned that in the liner notes too.
We would have loved to. Sitting there, listening to it in the studio, it sounded so over-the-top and dated.
What elements of Phil's sound were you thinking dated it and made it.
I don't know. It was just so over the top — don't forget by the end there, for some time, George had been the one that didn't want reverb on anything. He wanted everything very dry.
You told me this story once about working with Phil Spector.
I was doing a track for Ronnie Spector and he was down in the studio teaching the session guys the song. I was upstairs turning knobs, getting to what I would consider to be my normal sound and he finished teaching, came up, listened to it. He said, "Okay, can you do this?" It was a minor change. "Can you do this?" A minor change. "Can you do this?" A minor change. Suddenly it had gone from my sound, completely to his. I've wracked my brains ever since. What did he make me change so that I can do it on other things? I have no idea. They were so minimal. I wouldn't have known five minutes later what that [was] that made all that difference.
It's just sort of amazing that someone could really carry that in their head, not being all that technical either, just coaxing stuff out of people it seems.
Sometimes it's that non-technical — that you don't know what's possible and what's not. That was The Beatles so much. They had no idea what they could do. Experiment, experiment, experiment. But along with that, knowing when it wasn't working, they wouldn't beleaguer it and take it to its death and, "Oh my god. What are we going to do now?" It would be, "Oh, let's try this. Oh, it's not working? Okay, on to the next thing."
