Paul Marotta | TapeOp

Where were you in 1973? Maybe you were a 10 year old kid like me, or maybe a bit older and checking out you older siblings record collections. Hell, maybe you weren't even born yet. I bet you weren't running around Cleveland in a VW bus full of recording gear and instruments. I'll also bet you weren't ever credited with being in a "punk" band before punk even existed.

Paul Marotta was there. He's a man of many talents and contradictions. Maybe he helped usher in the early art-punk scene in Cleveland but now he manages the not-for-profit New World Records, a classical, jazz, folk, and world-beat label. He created some of the most whacked out music ever heard but he'll suggest that musicianship is a very important quality. He's also considerably gracious and a blast to talk to! Consider this quote from Paul (from the recently released Those Were Different Times CD booklet on Scat Records):

"Our personalities, musical and otherwise, forced us to work in a vacuum. There were no record labels who would pay for recordings, no "producers" to help us get a sound, no engineers to teach us about recording. Low-cost home recording equipment wasn't invented yet. None of the bands even had a guy hanging out to do sound for us at our gigs. Consequently, the master tapes I used were either live cassettes (the mid 70's was still relatively early in the development of cassette recording technology), basement tapes, and some studio recordings; all of widely varying quality."

So what was the gig you just had? Was that a Styrenes gig?

Umm, no. I also play bass in a swinging bachelor-type band. It's a nice, easy gig and I just like to play. We did a CD that just came out and that's nice too. Then, last night, we did a Styrenes session at a 24 track studio here.

No way.

We did four new songs.

Who all's in the band at this point?

Well, Mike Hudson [of the Pagans] is still singing with us. The bass player 's Al Margolis and the guitar player's a friend of mine who I'd played with his band in Germany and he came in for the week so he played guitar with us. That was piano, guitar, bass, drums and vocals.

Did you have a good time with it?

We had a great time. It was a good, hard session. One of the problems that I have leading Styrenes is that I play the piano and that means that most small studios don't have pianos. If I want to play a piano that's got any kind of tone to it I have to go to an expensive studio. That's okay. There's a 24 track here, it's a big studio, and the rate's $65 an hour including engineer. You know, we cut four songs last night and we're gonna have to redo the vocals, but essentially we're almost done. The session and tape, together, cost me about $900. It's not bad.

It should sound like a piano, not like some strange, muffled, over EQ'd thing.

Right.

Well, this conversation's mostly gonna be about the ... Different Times CD. It mentioned in the liner notes that you pulled up in the micro-bus with all this recording gear. Was that in '74?

Actually in '73.

What kind of stuff did you have back then? I think a lot of our readers can't understand that you couldn't even get 4 track cassette decks back then.

Right! At that time what I would have brought was a tube reel to reel deck, º" 7Ω ips. A cassette deck. Four small mixers. Cables. Mostly lots of microphones and cables; with all that crud you've got to patch it all. That's where it starts to get weird. We used to use Shure Vocalmasters as recording mixers and one of the advantages to that particular unit was you didn't need to have speakers plugged into it. Most PA amplifiers, if you don't have a load on it, it blows out. The Vocalmaster was always cool because you didn't need to have speakers plugged into it.

So you could just use it as a mixer.

Like you said, people forget that those things didn't exist. A board that had line outs was unusual.

Would you record a lot of stuff as a practice session and a home recording session?

What I liked to do a lot was to double-tape microphones [together] so that the band would play as if they were regularly practicing and not really pay attention to the recording and not try to worry about the sound. Then there'd be a second microphone that was essentially taped right to it. That feed would go into the recording. That way, if the singer needed to get on top of the microphone for rehearsal, he could do so without blowing up the recording.

So you would have that running to a separate mixer and have that going to your reel to reel.

Right.

You see that in older films of bands playing where they used to do that before they figured out mic splitting.

All the stuff that's been out by the Electric Eels was recorded that way.

Totally home made. Did you know any other people doing stuff like that back then?

Around that time there was another group... they were more a bunch of jazz-bo's. They called themselves Moonbeams or Moondream or something like that. They actually had a four track Ampex and I thought that was pretty cool. We bought our first four track Teac 3440 in 1975 and I think it ran us about $1700. In 1975 dollars, man that was expensive!

When you got ahold of that thing did that open up a world for you there?

Oh yeah. We did all the things that any goofy person does when they get their first 4 track. The way we ping-ponged was; I would take the four tracks and mix it down to two. We had a pretty good Tascam mixdown machine. It was a half-track with a split preamp section and came in a large, rolling, console. So we'd mix down to the 2 track and then I would take that exact same reel and put it back onto the 4 track and it would open up two more tracks. The pitch was a little funky but you could essentially get six tracks with only one reduction.

That's pretty amazing.

A lot of the stuff on the Styrenes CD was recorded like that. Some of the overdubbed stuff that's coming out on the Different Times record was done on two reel to reels or two cassettes bounced back and forth for each overdub.

You're playing it back and playing to it and mixing them together.

Mixing them together. Of course, you don't get remix capabilities!

I know later on you guys had some sessions on 1" 8 track. Was that Earthman Studios?

No. Earthman was our 4 track! The 1" 8 track was at Owl in Columbus. That was a 1" Scully... actually it was the one inch machine from Woodstock. That's a really cool way to record. Even in the 80's there was a studio here that ran 1" 8 track at 30 ips. It was really quiet, really nice. I've got some of those masters and I have no place to play them back any more. You can put the 1" tape on a 1" 16 track and they'll play back pretty good.

You gang up the channels.

I think one of the tracks on the Different Times collection says recorded at Owl and remixed at Noise New York. That's exactly what we did. That was a 1" 16 track.

I've heard you can play a 16 track 2" on a 24 track machine. You can gang up certain tracks and actually mix it.

I don't know if I would do it with the bass guitar tracks but most of the overdub tracks you can usually squeeze a little space out. The 1" 8 track... they had a homemade board and it was a little noisy. They were somewhere in between wanting to do a recording studio and wanting to do live sound. Jack of all trades, master of none sort of thing. Their mic technique was not particularly great and the studio vibe... it was hard to work there. The isolation booths didn't have glass in between them. The piano was 75 feet away from the band in a room where you can't hear or see anything.

It's not set up to be comfortable.

My overriding philosophy of recording has been that the recording process should never diminish the musicians enjoyment. It's almost a cliche' but it really happens. The musicians should just play and not pay attention to the wires and everything. That's the engineer's job to do that. Which is why so much of the stuff we recorded didn't come out good. The main reason we were there was to play and make music. It wasn't necessary to make recordings. We were playing way too loud. It's ridiculous to have a band rehearsing in a basement using the size amplifiers we did. That was part of the 70's. The idea of playing through a Fender Princeton amp would have been offensive. That's probably what we should have been doing. Instead of having Vox Super Beatles we should have had Vox Pacemakers, with one 10" speaker and 18 watts. It would have been plenty!

But no one wants to do that.

I'm playing in a band (Amoeba Raft Boy) with John Morton from the Eels. We've got small Marshalls; 25 watts. They're great. Any place you play that's big enough is gonna mic you any way and we've got the stage sound down, together, finally. It took us 25 fuckin' years. We finally don't overpower each other. We did a cut on the Cle sampler that we recorded in our rehearsal studio. The studio has a Mackie board and it's got enough sends that we recorded right to DAT and it came out okay.

That's an economical way to go. With all the gear you used to use, what kind of mics and headphones did you have?

The mics were AKG D1000's or Shure SM 57's and 58's. Around '76 or '77 Audio Technica brought in this line of battery powered condenser mics. I forget the model numbers but they were great! You couldn't phantom power them but that was okay because the boards that we had didn't have phantom power. They used to eat batteries like crazy. Boy, what a difference that made for recording the vocal track.

Just for the clarity...

Uh huh. They were cheap; just 60 or 70 bucks. If they still made them here now, I'd buy some. People ask me all the time what kind of mic you can use for cheap vocal recording and there isn't such a thing, really.

Everything's got its fault.

But the Shure SM 57 is still such a standard. We didn't bother with headphones. In the basement where we recorded the Mirrors and early Styrenes stuff I walled off a small area where I put the mixers and keyboards and sometimes I would play, walled off from the band so I could monitor a little bit. I had some Koss headphones that were so tight on your ears that it was painful. It was good for playing with the band 'cause you didn't hear the band. I used these really cheap Radio Shack mixers with no preamps.

Those little black ones with the four faders?

Yeah. I used to hook a speaker send through them so I could run the monitor back out through the PA so they could hear what's going on.

We're delving into some very primitive techniques that all worked. So later you got the 4 track.

We bought some Tascam equipment. We went from the model 2 to the model 3 to model 5 and had a couple of model 5's ganged together.

The mixers?

Yeah. That worked pretty good. We used those for a live PA as well. At one point, where we started to work with the acoustic piano a little more, in a live setting, we bought tri-amped stereo hookup for the PA. That was, again, carrying ridiculous amounts of equipment with us. We were able to bring acoustic piano in a punk rock setting and actually make it work. We had bass bins, mid range horns and tweeters. Everything powered by separate amplifiers of course.

You'd haul all this stuff around to every gig?

We used to haul the piano around. It was very different. Clubs didn't have PA's then. You we're expected to come in to a show and do four of five sets.

There's probably a lot of bands that wouldn't bother if that was the case these days.

That's for sure. Here in New York, without any transportation it'd be impossible.

Did you ever look into getting some 8 track gear?

No. We moved to New York in 1979. When we had our studio in Cleveland we were renting it out and we were able to get $25 an hour for a 4 track. That was in '78. By 1979 and '80 we came to New York and 16 track time you could get for $10 an hour. Nobody was gonna book our studio. We came here with these big plans and after 4 months we realized, "This is bullshit!" The truth is that I sold all the recording gear. The technology was changing so fast it was the last business on earth I wanted to be in. Although, in one of the most harebrained things I've ever done, we bought a one inch 8 track, model number three. Literally, this was the third one that Ampex built in 1969 and they built it for the Motown studios. They built two of them for Atlantic and then this one for Motown. When Motown moved to LA they sold it at an auction. We had this idea that we were gonna open up an all tube studio. This was in the late 80's. All the electronics were custom made by Ampex. The thing generated enough heat that you could heat your livingroom with it. The signal to noise ratio was 55 dB. I think cassettes are better than that. It was pretty cool but it never happened. I couldn't find anybody to work on it. Jaime [Klimek] still has it. We bought a tube board. In the 80's there was so much tube equipment that the professional places were just filled with this stuff. Anyway, the last stuff that we did a few years ago was done at this place in New Jersey that had the Abbey Road board. Lenny Kravitz owns the studio. He's a tube recording freak and he bought all the Abbey Road stuff. That was kinda cool.

How did it sound?

It sounds okay. Essentially that was his toy. He didn't like to let people use it. They had other stuff. Let's see... Tape configurations were a little bit different in the 70's. We had a lot of flaking going on. I work at a label now, and they started in 1976. The tapes that we did in '76 we're having a big problem with now when we reissue them on CD. They almost all have to be baked. Stuff I have from the early 70's I have no problem playing.

I heard that had to do with whale oil.

I heard that too. It could be 'cause they were experimenting with different tape configurations.

At some point in the 70's they stopped using whale oil as an adhesive . When they started using synthetics to hold the tape to the backing it was actually not working as well. It's a strange story. So you're able to bake a lot of those for the label?

Actually, they just plain bake them.

Kinda low for a few hours...

Yeah! And you don't really know if it works until you make a pass. We haven't lost anything yet though. What else can I tell you? Mic'ing technique?

Sure.

Well, we didn't use a lot of microphones 'cause it would just make more and more bleed. The idea was to use as few as possible. We had a lot of success mic'ing drums with just two microphones... usually placed fairly close to the bass drum rather than overhead. Usually, with younger, more energetic type drummers, they're bashing the fuck out of the cymbals anyway. They're cutting through. We even bothered to do it in stereo.

So you put them down low?

And the vocal mics end up picking up a lot of the bleed of the drums. There was always so much going on. The hardest thing to get was any good low end. It was really easy to get a good distorted guitar sound but to get some kind of clarity on a bass drum...

Did you try taking a line out on the bass?

Just mics. It really was hit or miss. Hell, there where no compressors around! We never found anything that really worked that we could keep coming back to over and over again. If you listen to the Electric Eels stuff, in particular, we'd started to get some sense of what we were doing recording wise, but there's a distinct difference in the groups of tracks. Five songs sound one way and four songs sound the other way and they were recorded a few days apart. They didn't do anything different — they had the same amplifiers!

As far as outboard gear, you guys were lucky if you could patch in a guitar effect.

There was no patching. I had an early DBX unit that was sold for stereos. It was made to be patched into home stereos and was designed to be a DBX noise reduction unit but it worked great as a compressor.

Just to squeeze it a little?

What we used it for was to eliminate background noise, like a noise gate, on the vocal tracks. I just got rid of it no more than six months ago. A strange looking little device with controls that made no sense whatsoever. No LED's or anything. I'm trying to remember why we bought that. Somebody must have seen us coming and said, "Try this guys." There were no reverb units. Echoplex. The MXR phase shifters had just come out! Fuzztone. That's what you had for effects was a fuzztone.

Do you have a cassette four track at home these days?

No. It's funny, 'cause I've been looking and thinking about doing it. For home recording now, I'm not sure what I would buy. I was ready to buy a four track cassette but I thought maybe I should buy an eight track cassette. There's these MiniDisc recorders... apparently you can do all the real digital editing and the cross-fading on them. They're about $1000. Should I wait a year and see how technology changes? Then I'm looking at the Yamaha 4 track cassette and it looks pretty good. $600 and you can record on all four channels. Also, I've got the concept down so I really think things through in my head without needing the four track.

You've written and played music for a number of years. You also seem to be the one who had the most training in music. You knew about recording but also played a few different instruments.

Well. The musical training is somewhat accidental. This is probably a theoretical thing, and a discussion that could go on forever, but, personally, I do not believe it is ever wrong to have knowledge. I think that one of the biggest fallacies is when I hear rock players say, "Oh, I don't want to learn to play good because that'll make me think stupid thoughts." I think that's just so bogus. I think that culture has bought into that. Because you can play good doesn't mean you have to. I have no problem throwing out every bit of knowledge I have to play a one note guitar solo but I want to be able to do a run, from the bottom of the guitar to the top, if I choose to. If you don't have the skill you can't do that. I think that if your physical technique limits your mental vision then that's a problem. I still play hard edged, simple, two chord stuff and I also still take piano lessons.

But I think you find a lot of players that can't step back and play a Lou Reed song or something. They think it's dumb and smirk at the simplicity of it.

One of the guys who plays in the bachelor pad band I play in is always making rude comments about rock players. He drives me crazy. I can't stand that attitude. The guy can't play a fucking major chord. He's gotta throw a 9th into it. I really believe that the bass guitar should just play the root. I think finger popping on the bass is the worst thing that could ever have happened. It's a sound I don't ever want to hear in my entire life. Walking bass lines, I think, are bullshit. Keep it simple and get out of the way.

Switch to guitar, buddy. Back to your current job... What is your job there anyway?

I'm the managing director of the company. I still do some producing. I tend to do the things that are really weird. The label I work for is a classical/jazz label and a not-for-profit foundation. The PBS of the record business. We do a lot of classical and jazz but we also do folk, bluegrass, Native American and Americana. I produced a session of "shape note" singers. It's a kind of rural, religious music that's open harmonies, a capella style and it's done in a community setting where a different person is called up to lead every single song. They sit in a square, divided up by their vocal parts. I produced that. I'm producing a 19th century brass band that uses 19th century instruments. They have a 24" snare drum and a 32" bass drum. I'm doing that in about two months in Michigan. I'm not sure how the hell I'm gonna record them because they make so much sound. It was made to be played outside. Every city in America, in the 19th century, had a brass band that used to come out and play on Sunday morning. They kind of wanted to go into a studio and I'm thinking, "Maybe we should just go right outside, dammit!" I'm not sure what we're gonna do. They did music in the baseball show that Ken Burns did and that was done in the studio. These are academic fans and they got a taste of studio life and the "big time" and they thought that was pretty cool. I have booked a classical engineering company called Soundbite to record them two track digital. I'm not sure yet what we're gonna do. It might be just two microphones. It depends how much they want to walk around, 'cause they like to walk when they play.

This sounds like a nightmare!

I enjoy this kind of stuff. The regular classical recording bores me.

It's very structured...

It's structured and it's just, God, you make so many takes and you edit it together in so many small pieces. Uggh... It's too tedious for me.

With the shape note singers... did you do it live on location?

Yeah. It was a church in rural Alabama down by the Florida border. I contracted a heavy metal PA company to come out and give me an electrical feed off the power line 'cause there was no good electricity in the church. They didn't even have a telephone. We built a small metal scaffold around the edges of the church up over the top for microphone poles. It was essentially three microphones. We had a stereo cross-pair and then there was one for the leader of each song. Being a bunch of New Yorker's coming down to a rural town I really wanted to be inconspicuous.

That's great that you still get to play with recording. It's a big part of your life.

I can't say I've got any complaints about that. I suppose if I got to drive a Mercedes and made a lot of money that'd be the icing on the cake. That's okay... I get to learn interesting things.

So yeah, check out Those were Different Times, a compilation of tracks by the Electric Eels, The Mirrors, and the Styrenes, all bands Paul was involved in. See the review elsewhere in this issue for more details... Paul Marotta can be contacted through Scat Records, 6226 Southwood, St Louis, MO 63105.