Home Recordings For Fun (Not Profit)
Dayron originally planned on becoming a teacher, having left his New York City home at 16 "just to get the hell out of there," he says. Musically, he preferred classical or jazz. "I didn't listen to blues at all," he recalls. "I had a pretty good ear — I'd taken piano and violin as a kid. I was never any good, but I could get by. I knew something about music." At the University of Chicago he met others who shared his new love of the blues: Paul Butterfield, guitarist Elvin Bishop, vocalist Nick Gravenites, harpist Charlie Musselwhite, keyboardist Mark Naftalin... and Michael Bloomfield. "On the South side, on a summer night, there'd be guys sitting on the stoop, playing guitars," Dayron says. "So I saw there was this unique music, and I just started to really like it."
Born in 1943, Bloomfield was sitting in with blues greats like Muddy Waters while still a teenager. Even then, however, his style transcended the idiom — as the brisk acoustic picking of his "Bullet Rag" or the traditional "J.P. Morgan" demonstrates. Both tracks represented "probably the first semi-serious recordings that Michael ever made anywhere," says Dayron, who captured them at his apartment on January 28, 1964. He compiled those tracks for a CD that accompanies
Wolkin's book, and used an Electro-Voice 654 omni- directional mic, and a cardioid 666, "a high-tech lookin' mic, at the time," Dayron recalls. They accomplished Bloomfield's first overdubbing on another track, "Kingpin," by cutting the Tandberg tape recorder's erase head wire. "If you were sensitive to the volume changes, you could overdub in mono — maybe 20 tracks," says Dayron. "It would just record, and record, and eventually stuff would just disappear into the ozone." The CD also showcases some jaw-dropping snapshots of Bloomfield's 21-year-old guitar fury ("Blues For Roy", "Country Boy", and "Gotta Call Susie"), recorded at Big John's on October 15, 1964. Norman used an Ampex 601 recorder with seven-inch reels, and hung a Neumann U-67 mic from a rafter in the room's "sweet spot", which varied, depending on how many people stood in the room. "In some places there'd be a 'suck- out', where the bass would just disappear," says Dayron — then "you'd walk four or five feet over, and all of a sudden, the bass would be there." He then ran a cable to his tape recorder, and taped an Altec mic ("the size of a big salt shaker") to the PA mic, which he separated with a piece of sponge rubber. "Then, I would just mix the vocal with the band," says Dayron. "I'd pick up the whole band sound with the Neumann, and get the vocal with the Altec."
Studio Seasoning (For A Reduced Salary)
Because his University of Chicago scholarship only covered tuition, Dayron took a job cleaning up after sessions at Chicago's legendary blues label, Chess Records. "During the sessions, people would throw up on the recording board," he laughs. By 1965, "for a reduction in salary," Dayron became an apprentice engineer. For "another reduction in salary," he moved to apprentice producer, learning from people like Willie Dixon ("he was like a conductor").
Bloomfield's crisp slide guitar had also made its mark on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (1965), the modal peaks of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's East-West and the blues-funk-gospel-rock fusion of the Electric Flag's A Long Time Comin' (1967). Dayron's production debut came on Fathers And Sons (1969), which teamed Bloomfield and Butterfield with the men they considered their mentors: Muddy Waters and his pianist Otis Spann. "We used Chess Studio A. Believe it or not, it had a 12-track Scully recorder, a Neumann console, and Fairchild compressors," recalls Dayron. "They had a lot of the old Pultec tube equalizers."
The album's popularity encouraged another Chess all-star outing, The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions (1970) — with heavyweights like guitarist Eric Clapton, keyboardist Steve Winwood, and the Rolling Stones' rhythm section, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, being used to augment Wolf's raw vocal style. Again, Dayron produced and Glyn Johns [Tape Op #109] engineered. Recording occurred at London's Olympic Studio. "It was more of a classical music studio actually. They had all these great condenser microphones," recalls Dayron, "U-67s and 47s, and Telefunken 251s [for classical recordings]." However, he laughs, "I had learned to record using all that other shit" — since Chess only had Electro-Voice dynamics, which they got through a deal with the company. Condenser mics "have more high-end, less mid-range punch," says Dayron. "If you took a U-47 and put it inside a kick drum, you'd probably blow the mic — if you didn't you'd probably get a distorted sound."
Dayron's world changed drastically when Leonard Chess — who'd run the label with his brother, Phil — died of a heart attack, shortly after London Sessions' release. The survivors sold off the company. Unsure of his next move, Dayron called Bloomfield, who'd re- established himself in California, and Michael suggested forming a partnership to produce records, including his own. The pair ended up living blocks apart in Mill Valley, just outside of San Francisco. To supplement "long periods of no work," Dayron invented and taught a recording arts class for about a year at New College of California, in nearby Sausalito. Students spent one night per week at his home. "I would play records, and ask them to identify all the parts. Then, on weekends, they'd work up their songs in producer Elliot Mazer's Alembic Studio. It was very cool, because nobody had ever done that — you could not, in '72, pay a small tuition fee," says Dayron, "and be trained to be an recording engineer, musician or producer."
Labors For Love (Not Money)
The Bloomfield-Dayron partnership reached an early zenith with If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em As You Please (1976) — an instructional record issued through Guitar Player's short-lived label. The album featured blues, country and folk tracks, with Bloomfield briefly explaining how he played each one — and restored the critical stock he'd blown after his brief dalliance with the ill-fated supergroup KGB. While Bloomfield got the production credit, "I was pretty much the co-producer of that, putting everything together," Dayron says.
The venue was Blossom Studios, a "spit-and-glue- baling-wire home studio" literally "slapped together" by its owner, hippie engineer-musician David Blossom. Several Bloomfield projects had already been done there, including the Andy's Bad soundtrack. "He [Blossom] had an old Ampex 8-track in-line recorder that looked like Les Paul had built it!" exclaims Dayron. "I don't know what his board was — every piece of equipment was some kind of spare parts that he found in junkyards or cannibalized."
Analine (1977), found Bloomfield in an acoustic setting on banjo, mandolin, and ukelele, with nods to blues ("Mr. Johnson And Mr. Dunn") folk ("Frankie And Johnny") and jazz (Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" — the tune played at his funeral). He also got to use San Francisco's Zoetrope Studios — which was built by engineer Richard Beggs, and belonged to director Francis Ford Coppola and his father, Carmine Coppola. "I think it had 16 tracks and a Trident board," says Dayron. "For San Francisco — which was not a great high-tech recording area — it was pretty good. Richard was a pretty good engineer — he knew how to take whatever equipment he had, and get a sound."
Count Talent & The Originals (1978) on the other hand became "the ultimate usual suspects album," with many cohorts writ large in Bloomfield's address book — including Naftalin, bassist Roger "Jelly Roll" Troy, vocalist Anna Rizzo, drummer Bob Jones and his girlfriend, bassist Soma. TK Records owner Henry Stone — a veteran record man who'd known the Chess brothers, and was now surfing the disco wave — lavished a "completely atypical" $50,000, for the production's budget, according to Dayron. "The Takoma albums were $1,500 to $2,000 tops, everything but artwork. For the TK record, all the musicians were paid decently — I can't say that for the other ones," he adds.
The musicians worked with engineer Bob Rose at Xanadu Recording, "a real out-of-the-way studio" located about 50 miles from Marin, Dayron recalls. "It had an MCI board, and the usual assortment of Sennheiser, Shure, and Neumann microphones. The multi-track was an old Ampex 16-track tape recorder, one of these things that looks like a soda fountain, an 1100 model, I think," he adds. "The atmosphere was quite informal — we would all show up at the studio, and work everything out in the studio."
"We Did Have To Mix Back Through The Board"
Michael Bloomfield (1979) trimmed Count Talent's extended lineup, with Bloomfield playing most of the parts, anchored by Jones, bassist Dave Shorey, and Ira Kamin's piano overdubs. They worked in Mill Valley, where Pete Adams and Alan Rice had built a garage studio, which had "very marginal equipment," according to Dayron, including "a Tascam eight-track recorder with one-inch tape, and a Tascam board." The record section of a Tascam board in the early '70s was a nightmare — tinny, brittle, distorted, no headroom, so if you exceeded the volume by one tiny amount, "it would go ballistic, and distort," he explains. Dayron would plug a Schoeps or Neumann mic into an outboard mic preamp — in this case, a Neve — "and go directly into a channel of the one-inch tape recorder. I could just go to the tracks, and mix them later." The scheme took more effort but paid off where it counted most, in Dayron's eyes. "We did have to mix back through the board. The playback section was fine, because they were just line inputs, and we did not have to go through the shitty Japanese mic preamps."
