How did you get involved in recording?
Sound and music were my hobbies as a teenager. I aimed to be a poet, philosopher or a scientist. The year and a half I spent in college, I took a triple load of majors, but when it came time to make a living, I ended up working in record stores. I worked at the original Sam Goody here in New York (the biggest and best of the old time record stores). After I had sold LPs for a while, they asked me if I knew anything about hi-fi, so I set up the hi-fi department. I ended up working on Madison Avenue, installing high-end hi-fi systems for wealthy people. By then I had decided that I wanted to be recording engineer and an avant-garde composer. I started off working for Sherman Fairchild, famous audio pioneer and the richest man in America at the time. I also did live sound for a lot of clubs around the village and for a number folk music acts. Then I got my hands on a tape recorder, some microphones and a little tube mixer and just started recording. I began engineering by just doing it. I started with live recording because I didn't have a studio of my own. I recorded some stuff on the sly at the Village Gate. I built and ran the sound system there and I hid a microphone above the stage. My career started with the guy who did the lighting there, Chip Monck. Chip convinced everyone I was a great recording engineer, and that's how I got my first major gig recording Nina Simone. I recorded Nina's Live at the Village Gate and then I did her album, Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall. The Thelonius Monk that I surreptitiously recorded at the Gate [Live at the Village Gate] was eventually issued commercially and I was given producer credit. The Dylan recordings that I made after-hours at the Gaslight Cafe during this period were issued on Starbucks [Live at The Gaslight 1962] a couple years back (unaccountably uncredited). After I'd been on the road with Harry Belafonte doing live sound with a system of my own design (Harry was the first artist to carry his own gear), Dylan's manager [Albert Grossman] asked me to do the same thing for Bob on the '65-'66 tour with members of The Band.
Dylan's infamous "electric" tour.
I built Dylan's road systems for this tour. I built one system for the western leg (Hawaii and Australia) and a second one for Europe. But more than anything I wanted my own recording studio in New York. Dylan said, "Do the sound on this tour and I'll help build you a recording studio when we're finished." Unfortunately, by the time his tour was over, we were burned out with each other and went our separate ways.
You were the front-of-house sound guy?
Front-of, back-of, wherever!
Fans complained about the excessive volume of those Dylan shows.
In fact it wasn't loud enough. We didn't have the equipment to properly fill the halls we were in. The music itself was some of the most incandescent rock 'n' roll ever made. If the audience thought it too loud, it was because they wanted to hear some acoustic folk from Bob. The audiences we played for just didn't get it. They were way behind Bob's evolution as an artist. The backup group was The Hawks (soon to be known as The Band) without Levon Helm [on drums]. Levon was replaced by this kickass drummer from Texas [Mickey Jones]. Mickey actually put out a video of the tour, but it's only backstage stuff, not performances [Bob Dylan — World Tour 1966: The Home Movies]. You can see me in that. There was also a movie made [by D.A. Pennebaker] that was never finished, called Eat the Document, and that's got me in it too. A lot of Eat the Document was later incorporated into the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. I'm on screen quite a bit in this, and also mysteriously uncredited.
It seems like Dylan was hard to deal with.
Not particularly. I was pretty wild and hard to deal with myself. Bob had a lot going on after that '66 tour, and helping me build a studio was obviously not high on his list. When Belafonte asked me again to go back on the road with him, I said, "Only if you invest in my recording studio." Finally, Harry became my partner and put up enough money up to make our studio very well equipped.
You already had a space?
Yes. A friend of mine who was a painter had come to me and said, "I found this place on West 65th Street for $200 a month. The building's been condemned, but who knows when they'll tear it down?" They didn't tear it down for seven or eight years. It had no hot water, no heat and it was pretty small. A young lady I knew from the Village who had some family money bankrolled me for a seven-foot Yamaha grand piano and some basic equipment. We started off very simple with a 2-track, some Altec tube mixers and a couple of microphones. The studio was about 30 by 25 feet, and the recording booth was 6 feet deep by 12 feet wide — quite small. It was first called RLA (my initials), and after Belafonte invested it was renamed Impact Recording. Harry recorded some really good tracks of his own at Impact, which for unknown reasons have never been released. We had one of the first 8-track tape machines ever, 4- and 2-track Ampex decks, a big EMT stereo plate and a transistor-based recording console that I assembled myself. I'm not really a genius electronic engineer, but I'm a good at DIY. That's where all the '60s recordings and the ESP Records stuff was done.
