Let's talk about how you got into this, and why. I mean, because obviously you started out as a musician...
Well, I still am. I don't think of myself as a producer, that's like way down the list of things that I think about.
Well how did even fall into knowing how to even run a tape machine?
Oh, just always interested as a kid, just like a lot of people are, you know. I bought a little Pintron tape recorder, it was before cassettes had been invented, so it was like one of these little tape recorders with tiny little reels, and make little tapes. I always loved to sing. I went out to California between my junior and senior years in high school, worked on a wildlife refuge, and made a bunch of money, like $2.70 and hour which was a lot back then! This was in the summer of '68. I came home with all the money I'd saved up and bought a Panasonic sound-on-sound tape recorder. When I was in junior high school, I chose to play bass because of the control that it offered. I played a little guitar; played a lot of things by ear. There was the coolest band in town, where the organ player played bass on pedals, and I knew they needed a bass player. I like the fact that, if somebody's playing a C-chord, and I'm playing an A, it was an A minor seven. That's something that I figured out on piano. I like the compositional control of the bass. I bought a bass, one of those great Danelectro Silvertones, and I wish I had it back. From Sears for $79. Then a few months later I really liked upright, so I found an old upright in a church in Charlotte, and just was sort of self-taught on those things, but I could read music.
I began doing some sessions, there was a jazz guy named Louis McGloughn in Charlotte, which was the closest big town to where I grew up. He had seen our band and he was always looking for a young guy who could play upright to do sessions and stuff so I started doing sessions with him. That was sort of my introduction, when I was 15 or 16, to the studio. And I was interested in recording, so I'd sit around and make up my own Jimi Hendrix songs in funny tunings, and record that stuff on my old Pintron that I had bought for $30, and then I saved up and bought that nice Panasonic... So I was always just interested in the sound of things, and was working on sessions and doing things....
So you were around studio stuff....
Yeah, there were a couple of decent studios in Charlotte. Charlotte had been in the 30's like a little Nashville, with a lot of bluegrass and blues recorded there in the 30's. And then there was a guy named Arthur Smith who had a really nice studio, a real professional studio there in Charlotte, which is where I did most of my recording.
What kind of stuff are we talking about?
Well, you know, he probably had a Scully eight track...
Which was quarter-inch or half-inch?
Oh no, the Scully would have been a one-inch. The formats went this way: everything was on one-inch, those one-inch four tracks that were used for all the Beatles records, and then the four track standard in the United States was half-inch, and then they did the one-inch eight. Later the two-inch technology was really picked up from the two-inch video transport technology, the MM1000 Ampex machines, which were basically a whole bunch of 440 electronics on this bed that had been made as a video transport. Because video went from two-inch to one-inch pretty fast, less than probably five years, they used those old two-inch transports to build their sixteen track machines. It all kind of happened real fast and then it just stopped there. I mean, they tried to come out with a three-inch machine for a while, and that Stevens guy came out with that 40 track two-inch machine, which was a nightmare for alignment. The Stevens electronics actually sound pretty good because they're very simple. You can't do much to it, but you can put something on tape that's got a lot of juice to it.
So he [Smith] probably had some U-47's or something?
He had great mics. Everybody back then always had great mics.
Well you could probably go buy a Neumann for about $200 at that point or something?
But again, people worked all day in a factory for about $30, so that was still a lot of money by any standards.
But it just seems like everyone had them back then.
There were no budget microphones. The budget microphones were CB/Turner mics, and then the good microphones were good microphones. You bought Telefunkens or Neumanns. AKG was not even really in the big-time ballgame here in the United States. They were in Europe.
EV to an extent at that point, right?
Well, EV was good, I mean EV had the RE 20 which was a great mic. Shure had a couple of good mics...
Like the 545, was that one of the early ones?
Yeah, and the RCA 77DX.
And they had the 44, which was a smaller version of that. So, um, you're at that point, you're a teenager, you're out of high school at this point, then...
I went to college in Chapel Hill, and we got a band together, that turned into Arrogance, and we learned allof the first Black Sabbath album, which was an import only. That kind of metal, they really invented it. And then we would do most of the Beatles' Abbey Road. An interesting combination of stuff. And lots of heavy blues songs, like a few Ten Years After versions of songs.
So that would have been when?
