When was that?

That was August of 1967 when I started there, a kid fresh out of Boston.

How did you get the job?

That was interesting. A year before, my dad had a client that wanted to get some records pressed, and they used to use Decca Records to do their pressings. So if a client wanted a thousand 45s, they would do the recording and mixing there and then send me down to New York to bring it to Decca for mastering. I remember going there, and while I was there—I had never been to a New York studio before and it was incredibly interesting to me. And so I remember saying to one of the mastering engineers, “I would love to see some more studios in New York.” The mastering engineer told me that the guy who had just walked in the room five minutes before, that guy said I should go over to Mirror Sound where Brooks Arthur was working. Brooks Arthur was a guy that that had top twenty records all the time, did a lot of those Red Bird records…so anyway, I got into see him. As matter of fact, they introduced me to this guy name Max Rupfel(?), and I didn’t quite understand who this guy was. He was going around to all these studios. He said, “Come with me, kid, and I’ll take you around, I’m going to visit a bunch of studios.” And he would walk in like he owned these places. I couldn’t understand how he could get into all these places I finally found out that he was the musician’s union representative. In those days, it was against the rules to overdub. If you got caught overdubbing, you had to pay these tremendous fines, you had to pay the whole orchestra again. So he got me in all these amazing studios.

So one studio he took me two was A&R, and I saw Phil Ramone doing a session on 48th Street, which was their original studio, and Donny Hahn was his assistant engineer, and he went on to become a great engineer.

He also took me over to Mirror Sound, this really unusual studio where Brooks Arthur worked, he was engineering this really unusual song, I think it was “Give Us Your Blessings” on Red Bird Records. He had a whole bunch of songs as a engineer and mixer on the charts every week, a remarkable career. What was most amazing to me there was, when I came in the room, there was this tape machine against the wall, and then this tape coming off it in a loop that went across the room and around the mic stand, and it had thunder and lightening on it. It was part of this record they were mixing. They would bring up a fader and you’d hear thunder, but it was a long loop so you wouldn’t hear the same thunder twice. I was watching them do this and I was thinking, “Holy shit, listen to how creative this is, look what they’re doing here.”

So did you start looking around for a job at that point?

No, not right away. It was approximately a year later I came back to do another mastering job, and I went back to Mirror Sound again to see Brooks Arthur, because I had made the contact. They told me he didn’t work there anymore, he was working up at A&R Recording. So I went over there, and he was off that day, but I met Roy Cicala. Roy took me around and showed me the place. Every great group was recording in that studio. It was remarkable. I asked if I could apply for a job there. He said, well, yes you can, but it takes some time to get an appointment. I told him I was going back to Boston that day, so he got me an appointment with Don Fry, one of the owners. He interviewed me, I left and went back to Boston, and for a while in between I worked at WMUR TV in Manchester, New Hampshire. I was a cameraman for the Uncle Gus kids show and the New Hampshire Bandstand, which they would do in the parking lot. While I was up there, I got this call from A&R, and they asked if I was still interested in a job there. I said yeah, and they asked how soon I could be there. I gave my two weeks notice and headed down, and stayed in the YMCA.

So you started, obviously, as a second?

Actually, on my first session at A&R, I was the second to the second engineer. I was assisting a guy name Major Little, who was a professional second engineer. He had no desire to be a mixer or producer, just a great assistant. They put me with him, and the first session we worked on was Dionne Warwick produced by Bert Bachrach and Hal David, with probably a forty-piece orchestra. I’m helping him set this thing up. Phil Ramone was the engineer. I don’t remember all three songs, but I think two of them were “Valley of the Dolls” and “Alfie.” That was my first day on the job, to see this incredible piece of music being done. This stuff sounded amazing. After that I worked on Leontyne Price and the Vienna Boys Choir, with sixty musicians and forty kids, something like that. She was in the booth, but it was all live.

Shelly with his favorite Telefunken ELA M251

And then we used to do stuff like Oscar Peterson and Count Basie. A&R was an amazing training ground. Bob Ludwig and Elliot Scheiner and I probably started within three weeks of each other. They start by teaching you to set up sessions, then they put you in the mastering room for a while, they wanted you to be well rounded. I avoided the mastering room, but Bob loved it.

They used to do three sessions a day in each room. One of the rooms, the large room, they would book ten to one o’clock, usually a large band doing a commercial or a piece of music, two or three songs. You had an hour to break that down for another session, which was two to five, plus one, which means you had the option of taking another hour if you needed it. Then at seven o’clock at night, the rock’n’ roll started, and that’s what I was interested in, because Roy Cicala would do most of that. He would stay there until all hours of the night.