Were they designed as acoustic chambers?

Well they actually had been sheet-rocked over and shellacked so they weren’t square and they were very reflective.

And did you use a spring as well?

We had a Fender spring, we had a Binson Echolette, we had a...

Wow, the Echolette, those sound great.

We had a—what’s the most common one?

Echoplex?

Yes, and they were all rack mounted and came up in the patch bay.

What were some of the other things in the studio? We had LA 2’s and we had Fairchild 670s. Twenty grand to buy one now Yeah and we were so glad to get rid of them! (laughs)

You have no idea how good the LA2a looked when the only thing you had was a Fairchild! Because yeah, in some things a Fairchild is fine but, when its the only limiter you’ve got...

And you had Electrodyne modules?

We had Electrodyne limiters. They made a little two or three rack mount. We bought some Electrodyne mixing consoles. And we had two of these consoles in Detroit, and one on the west coast. It was a very interesting console because it used a sub grouping system, and it used, I think it was called Hall effect devices for attenuators - I forget, I think that’s what it was.

They were from an old homemade console automation system that we designed in the ‘60s. That’s very possibly the first automated console though I understand there was a secret one at EMI. It’s hard to say who went first, but we tried it, and they had a shoot out of the automated console versus basically mixing by hand and splicing up mixes from pieces, and the spliced up mixes beat the automated mixes so bad it wasn’t even funny.

Were you aware at the time, because it’s harder when you’re in something, were you aware how good this stuff was?

No! (laughs)

No?

Not at all. I didn’t have any idea how far ahead we were of the rest of the industry, until I left in 1972 and came to California and it completely blew my mind that everybody wasn’t doing what we had been doing.

You knew that these were talented people though

Oh yeah. Well, this was kind of the amazing thing about the whole thing. The average level of intelligence in that company was absolutely spectacular. I mean those are the brightest people.

Hence the I.Q. test

(laughs.) I mean, I didn’t particularly fit in there, but I’ve always really liked being around people that seem obviously brighter than I am, and this was heaven. Almost everybody there was just brilliant, which was very inspiring. Also one thing that was kind of neat is that Berry Gordy really did not tolerate ego trips; I mean, you were not allowed to have ‘em.

How did you like cutting vinyl?

Oh I miss it. It’s wonderful. I wish. Who knows, maybe I will again. I never thought I’d work with those musicians again and here I’m working—moving to Nashville and getting—apparently getting right back into it, so....

You worked with James Jamerson a lot.

Yeah, you had to deal with him, he was a real character. (laughs)

He seemed like a big part of the sound

He is and he isn’t. You know, the funny thing is that when I ‘d remix old pieces, actually the key element always turned out to be the original drummer, Benny Benjamin. Without him, it was okay, you put him in and there was the magic. Very, very interesting. I think he was in many ways more of what gave it the character than Jamerson did, ironically.

I mean, for sure, Jamerson’s contributions were incredible. Although Bob Babbit is not credited—there’s a lot of stuff that Babbitt did that people assume Jamerson did! He’s just very modest and has never made a big deal about it.

You worked a lot in different capacities, on some of those later Marvin Gaye records, especially “What’s Going On.”

Yeah, well I did vocals and I was in on the strings, and sax solo.

That’s a great record, and it has a very different feel. Was it more of his record than Berry Gordy’s at that point?

Yeah. A lot more so. when Holland-Dozier-Holland left, our job immediately became reinventing Motown. First off there was that, second, looking at it in retrospect, I think I now really understand what was happening a lot more. I don’t think they were really making that much money on the singles.

I mean we were hitting ‘em into the top 10, but I think it was costing us more money to hit em into the top ten than we could make. And so there was a big push to get albums happening and a pretty big push to more or less reinvent the company.

And the sound had changed by this point

We were trying to get experimental and trying to come up with something different because we saw ourselves as competing with the rest of the world at that point rather than trying to be our own little unique thing. We wanted to have a unique take on the same kind of sound that other people did.

One thing a lot of people don’t realize is that Berry Gordy didn’t want to be Atlantic records. He wanted to be RCA or Columbia. Before, there had been a kind of factory approach where you were you had somebody supervising everything you did and there was a standard way you were supposed do everything and so forth.

When Holland-Dozier-Holland left and took Lawrence Horn, the chief recording engineer with them, we wound up working under Cal Harris, who’d been hired from California, and it turns out that Cal Harris started out on the Beach Boys (laughs) and that’s a little bit of a different sound!

Yeah!

(laughs) And Cal basically threw out all of the production line stuff and really allowed us to become conventional recording engineers. I doubt that I would have been able to work in the industry had Motown stayed how it was when I started out there. Certainly a number of people did come out of engineering there and managed to have real good careers, it’s not impossible but, but for me, Cal Harris really made it happen.

When you did something like cut strings for “What’s Going On,” how would you do it: Would you have an orchestra, or a small string section?

It was nine violins, four violas, three cellos and one or two basses, often, depending on what the arranger wrote. Typically it was that instrumentation, and we’d double it.

Stereo miking ever?

No, (laughs). Actually when we first got the 16-track I did a stereo miking of it, and put it on two tracks and I almost got fired for it. cause the head of the A&R dept didn’t realize that I’d also done the usual mono tracks. (laughs.) You couldn’t control how loud the cellos were on the stereo tracks, so I think they eventually wound up going over my stereo tracks, but I wanted to do stereo, I mean, all the talk was about quad, and I figured, “Well, gee, we haven’t really ever done stereo!”

First things first! (laughs.) In fact that’s kind of the great irony to me of this whole surround sound thing now is that I’ve never met a really top producer who didn’t prefer mono.

I mean, if you tell them “this is mono, this is stereo,” they’ll probably tell you they prefer the stereo, but if you don’t tell them what it is, nine times out of 10 they prefer the mono!

Well there’s something about it—it’s not phasey and it’s really punchy.

Yeah exactly, and it’s sort of the strange irony of the consumer electronics manufacturers versus the production thing. In fact the funny part is that among audiophiles- which I am actually, that was part of my original interest and I’m still real into that community, there’s a strong preference for records before about 1965, very early stereo, which is fascinating, because those are the ones that they were real stereo because they did separate mono and stereo recording at that time.

And the stereo was usually done in the back room by engineers while the producer and artists hovered over the people doing the mono. So it was real stereo at first and then the retail stores started demanding single inventory, and so in many ways, stereo lost out to mono and we started to doing what we do now, which is everything important in the middle.

Except for the early ones where hard panning runs amok. We all know when you listen to a Beatles stereo mixes, if one side of your stereo goes out you don’t getany lead vocal!

Yeah, well that was never the intention. I visited EMI at Abbey Road about 1969 and they were absolutely livid that Capitol had taken the 4 tracks and just spread them and put ‘em out as a stereo record.

Well, it is an odd thing.

It was done by Capitol and nobody in the production team had anything to do with it at all and they had never intended any of it to be stereo. I believe Sgt. Pepper’s was the first actual stereo mix that was done and even then, everybody told me, “Get the mono, that’s the one.” I think it is the one. So, why hasn’t recording Improved?

(laughs) Uh, why hasn’t it improved? Well, I think basically it’s been a steady progression of getting cheaper. I think economics tend to drive it. In the early days, when people did full dates, the cheapest way to record was to use the best musicians you could get your hands on and get it done in a hurry. That was just the cheapest way to do the job.

When you were shelling out that kind of money in salaries, what was important for a studio was that the engineers be fast, and that the equipment be reliable and sound quality was really small change in the equation of things: it didn’t cost that much more to make something sound good as well as be reliable. Then it became a glamorous industry. One thing to understand is that I went from the AV crew to being a recording engineer, I mean there were not people beating down the doors to become recording engineers in 1964.

And there is some cache to it now.

You probably could blame that on Glynn Johns, maybe. The Rolling Stones started making a big deal about some of the recording engineers, including him, and of course the Beatles became a big deal and George Martin had used all these radio drama techniques on their records which was a very radical thing, to most people.

With my background in radio drama it was sort of a shrug of the shoulders, because we’d already done it all! (laughs.) I mean it was very standard procedure and Parlaphone was the spoken word label of EMI, so, of course, George Martin had been doing comedy records and using radio techniques, and he applied them to the Beatles. To the Beatles credit they really got off on it and picked up the opportunity and really did a lot of very creative amazing things. I think they expanded the palette of what you could do in pop music like nobody has.

Certainly.

Hopefully somebody will do that again. Now it seems like everything’s a rehash.

Well, the question is what was the last time things weren’t a rehash.

I guess probably the late 1940s, early 1950s, when Wall Street said that radio was obsolete and about to be replaced by television. And then the music industry rushed right in and that “obsolete” technology became rock n’ roll. (chuckles.)

You have worked with some very interesting people who you wouldn’t normally be associated with. Of course I’d like to mention Willie Tyler and Lester here, because I really want to know how you mike up a ventriloquist dummy!

(laughs) Oh my! Well, I met them. I didn’t actually record them - I think I did the mastering on the LP. (laughs) But I’m sure it was pretty easy. you know, one mic! He was really funny but I don’t think anything ever came of it. I think he might have done a few television shots.

But he couldn’t work blue on TV

Yeah.