And they would let you do it?

The problem is, producers were scared of this. I would tell them that I’m putting this echo on the track and they would say “Oh no, don’t, you can’t do that!” And we would talk about it. I would express why I thought it was better, and some would allow me to do it. But most wouldn’t. They would say, “Well, what if I want it dry in the mix?” I’d say, “When’s the last time you’ve had a dry snare?” “Well, never, but what if I do?”

I used to put tape delay right on the electric guitar. The producer would say, “What are you doing?” “Don’t you like the sound of the guitar?” “Yeah, it’s great, but don’t put it on the tape.” But I’d tell them that if you try to do it later, it won’t be the same, it won’t sound as good.

Back to Big Pink. What was your role in that project?

I was both first engineer and assistant. Donny Hahn did most of the recording at A&R. He wasn’t a rock ‘n roll engineer, he did mostly big band stuff and commercials. He knew that I was working on all the rock’n’ roll stuff. He asked me to be his assistant. He had a fabulous sense of balance. I started as the assistant, but during the recording I worked up to his equal, which is why they gave me credit. It was not an easy album to record. It took a lot of fooling around, putting cardboard partitions between the drums, figuring out how to record them to sound like they sounded to us in the room.

The mixed that album twice, both times at A&R. I think Tony May did the mixing. On the first one they had horns, and they didn’t like that one. They were doing it on an Altec board with limited EQ and not a whole lot of outboard gear. It had to be on the tracks or you couldn’t take it very far in the mix. So I think Donny Hahn and I really captured the essence of that group. And the way we laid it out in the room was unique. I remember Robbie Robertson had a speaker, shaped like a cube--I had never seen this before. I had it sitting on two wooden chairs, stretched between the two, and he would throw the switch and it would start rocking back and forth. He said it was a spaker in there, spinning around.

But it wasn’t a Leslie?

No, I’d never seen it before. I saw things going on in that room I had never heard of. I think they had a lot of stuff made for them. The most remarkable sound was, on one song where Garth played what I remember was a Lowery organ , on a lot of the songs he had the signal from the organ, before it went to the Leslie, go through telegraph key, and on the telegraph key you have a tension spring so that you could adjust. He loosened the spring, and whacked this key, and it started bouncing up and down so it was making and breaking contact, and then started playing the into to one of those songs. Can you imagine me standing in the studio, watching this key go up and down, hearing this sound coming out of his organ…well, I’d been in the studio since I was a kid and I was seeing shit go down that I’d never seen before. Remember, there were no racks of digital boxes back then, so people had to be very clever to come up with new sounds.

Did they do many overdubs?

They did some horn overdubs, but those weren’t used on the final mix.

Do you remember how the drums were miked?

It’s hard to remember for sure, but I would suspect we used a Telfunken 251 as the overhead, and an Altec ‘salt shaker” on the snare. The bass drum was probably an E-V 666. We had mics on the toms as well, but I’m not sure what those were. I do remember we worked a lot on getting the drums to not ring in sympathy the other drums, because we didn’t have gates back then.

I can see the session like it was yesterday. I remember how they were set up in the room, around this seven foot Steinway grand. All the players were really close to each other, in a large room—the same one we used for Dionne Warwick with the orchestra—but only a small part of it was used. It had a beautiful hardwood floor, high ceilings, and the room itself just had a great sound. There was a drum riser, it kind of like a half wall of three sides of the drums.

Why the drum riser?

Drum risers change the sound of drums a lot. It’s very hard to find a good sounding drum riser but when you get one, the perspective of drums in the mix is totally different. It changes the way the drums sit in the mix. When they are not connected to the floor, it becomes a whole different animal. It’s the same if you have a guitar amp on the floor. It couples with the floor, and the floor becomes and extension of the speaker, so you get all this low stuff that you have to roll off or filter out. The same thing happens with drums. They become part of the floor. You get more clarity with the riser, usually with even more bottom. In the final mix, the drums are in a place that is a better place than being on the floor. I’ve tried building risers at various times, using the heaviest lumber, but sometimes it just doesn’t work well. They are hard to do.

Let’s move along to another album that endures as a classic, Van Morrison’s Moondance.

We recorded a lot of Moondance on eight track, I’m pretty sure. I don’t remember the studio being sixteen at the time. The band played great. It went very fast. Van didn’t talk much at all. He’s a very introverted guy. The only thing I remember him saying during all those sessions, was, “Can you put more bottom on my voice, “ because he has a very thin sounding voice.

And those sessions were all done at A&R?

Yes, but in two different rooms.

How did you get assigned to those sessions?

It was all up to the girls who did the book at the studio, who assigned the engineers for the sessions. Producers would call and book the studio, and they would ask who’s available. Those girls could make or break your career.

On Moondance, what else different, compared to Big Pink.

It’s not all vintage here. Pro Tools monitor in background.

Van recorded the vocals live, in a booth, and I had a Pultec on him. It was simply a matter of capturing the sound of him and his band, but in my way. You see, if you listen to the records I’ve done, you’ll hear that they all sound different, because I’m recording different bands or the same band at different times in their career. Each one has their own personality and sound.

But I suppose you can hear me, maybe you can hear my drum sound, and my overall thing—whatever it is I do, just trying to capture the band but in the process developing my own sound. But all of those bands were totally different, not like today where a lot of what you hear all sound like they were done by the same producer on the same board in the same studio. There’s a sameness to the sound. I was on a committee to pick the nominees for the best engineered record for the Grammy awards, and we had over 170 CDs to listen to, and out of the I only found five that really sounded different. But that didn’t happen back then. I have to be careful about talking about, “back in the day,” because people say, “Well, that’s old.” Well, just because it’s old doesn’t it’s wrong, and just because it was the original way or recording doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value today.

So what’s the reason? It is technology, or MTV or just a different aesthetic in music today?

I’m not sure. But I know one thing that doesn’t change. Guys who do what we do for a living, we are emotional salesmen. At the end of the day, all we are doing is selling emotion. You can slice it or dice it and hold these pieces up to the light all you want, but it’s all the same thing. It’s about the song, it’s about the performance, and it’s about getting that across to the listening public. If as the recording engineer and mixer, if I can get that across to the listener, even being squeezed through MP3, even in a department store with the speakers twenty feet up, then my client wins.

That’s the theory I talk about to my clients. In a car, at sixty miles an hour, with the windows down and maybe the top down in a convertible, and you can’t really hear the bass and you can barely hear the words, but you still get the effect, you still get the feeling of that song. Or the woman who is vacuuming in the bedroom and the radio is in the kitchen, over this noise you can get a little beat of the melody. So if you can get it across to them, then you can move them to go out an buy it. So I think the only way that you can get records in people’s collection that they will listen to over and over is to get that feeling, that emotion, across the distance between the speakers and their ears.

The next landmark of you career was working with John Lennon. Did you find that intimidating?

Are you kidding? I had skid marks in my underwear, I had fudgey drawers! You know, here’s a guy who had been around the block several thousand times by then, and I could tell he know, he just simply knows. So I’m hoping that I can give him what he needs. He’s used to working with George Martin, for God’s sake!

He was producing, right?

He was. So I wanted it to go smoothly. It was a very professional session, so you do your best to make everybody happy and come up with a sound that works. It turned out to be really terrific sessions.

And that was at Record Plant?

Yes, I was a staff engineer there at the time. I was there for ten years, from 1970 to 1980, though I did start some freelancing by 1978.

Was that where you hooked up with Jimmy Iovine, there at Record Plant?

Yes, he started out as my assistant. But he was sharp. It didn’t take him long to figure out there was no money in engineering, so he wanted to be a producer. The first thing we did together was Patti Smith’s “Because the Night.” I mixed that with him. It turned out to be a big hit, so we figured we could have some success together. “Why don’t we do more stuff?” he said, and he was seven years younger than me, just a kid 23 years old. He’s talking to me about going out and doing stuff, but I was thinking, “Hey, I get a paycheck here every week.” I’m supposed to leave here and take a chance with this kid? So I did! (Laughs.) So we got this opportunity to do Tom Petty, and many more opportunities followed after that.

Coming in future installments: Tom Petty, U2, Bob Seger and others.

For a complete listing of Shelly’s credits, click here.

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