One of your earliest jobs was working for Bob Weinstock at Prestige Records. I know you visited various studios back then, including Rudy Van Gelder's place in Englewood, NJ.
Rudy Van Gelder [Tape Op #43] was the first engineer I had the privilege of watching in a studio. He was amazing and the sounds he put on tape were beautiful. I worked with Frank Laico, Fred Catero, Larry Keyes, Don Puluse and others at Columbia. Bob Fine and George Piros at Fine Recording were amazing too — same with Bob Auger in London. All of these people knew their studios and knew how to get great sounds. The guys in Nashville were terrific too. They were brilliant at getting basic guitar and rhythm section sounds. There was a lot of stuff that they were doing that was very foreign to what I had grown to like in New York and London. In the early days, Nashville, Philadelphia and Detroit recordings often had a tremendous amount of compression and massive amounts of echo. Sometimes the levels on tape were either too low or too high — I love distinctive records and am not worried about how other people make records. I started engineering my own records at Cinderella Sound in Madison, Tennessee, partly because Wayne Moss, who owned the studio, was playing guitar on those records. In other studios it was easier for me to move a mic or change something on the console than to explain it to the engineer on the session. I do not want the process to get in the way of the music. That is a big part of my producing effort. New York players worked three- hour sessions, but they were jazz and classical players playing pop and rock. It was so easy for them to do that. In Nashville, many were country players doing folk rock or rock. Often it was a stretch. We cut a famous Beatles tune and one of the soloists told me after the take that he had never heard the Beatles' version. On the other hand, the Nashville players loved learning new stuff. Some of them came from an R&B background. Kenny Buttrey, Charlie McCoy, Wayne Moss, Mac Gayden, David Briggs and Norbert Putnam all had played R&B and rock. Charlie McCoy and the Escorts were an amazing rock/R&B band. I spent most of my time in the studio — not in the control room. I do not like being in the control room during recording sessions. I like being with the band. It gives me a sense of who they are, a sense of what they need in order to get a great performance.
From an artistic and musical standpoint as opposed to a technological standpoint?
There's a sign over Neil Young's studio that says, "Be great or be gone." I think Tim Mulligan put that up years ago. Tim's been with Neil for many, many years doing wonderful work for him. Getting a great take of a cool song is most important. But my goal is to record as much stuff as possible live in the studio. We often fix and replace stuff, but to me one has to capture the essence of the song in the best way possible. The easiest way of doing this is to make the original session as complete sounding as possible. Neil Young records everything live in the studio. If the engineer distorts his voice and the take is great otherwise, the song could be released with the distorted voice. People like "serial recording," and there are wonderful records made that way as well. For me, rule number one is that there are no rules.
Was Cinderella Sound your first session in Nashville?
I had done a record in Nashville in '63 at the Quonset Hut [Columbia Studio A, originally owned by Owen and Harold Bradley]. I was helping produce Trío Los Panchos for Columbia. That is where I first met the Nashville guys. I worked with the "A-Team" at that time. A lot of my evolution to engineering happened at Cinderella Sound. I produced Linda Ronstadt, Jake Holmes, Ken Lauber and we did Area Code 615 there. Wayne Moss, a phenomenal guitar picker, built Cinderella Sound, which was a two car garage in Madison, Tennessee — right around the corner from Colonel Parker's house [Elvis' Manager]. Cinderella came equipped with an Aunt Lucy, who made great iced tea and food. That was my second introduction to Bill Putnam's [Universal Audio, Tape Op #24] gear, which I still use today. The 610 mic preamps have been on almost every record that I've ever done — as mic preamps and to color mixes. Wayne had a 12x3 Bill Putnam console feeding an 8-track. The control room was about the size of a couch with tiny speakers, and the rest of the garage was the "live room." Wayne and Kenny Buttrey built the drum area. I don't know what kind of mics they used on the drums, but the sound was amazing!
Quadrafonic Studios, from what I read, was a two-story Victorian house.
My partners bought the house for a small amount of money and then gutted it. The ceiling was the regular ceiling. The control room was the old porch. The living room and the dining room became the two live rooms, and the kitchen became a drum area.
Sometimes old houses are wonderful- sounding just the way they are.
