What about the Martin Luther King record?

That was something very special. In fact, Motown has donated the copyright to the masters to the family, and a lot of documentary people are really angry, because his family is insisting that they get paid for using it unless they think somebody deserves permission.

This was something that you mastered?

Yeah. And I think Larry Miles did the transfers and editing. He went through and listened to the whole thing and made a transcript. I think they had to cut a few things out for time, get rid of some coughs and that kind of stuff.

That was ‘68, an important year.

Well, what’s been going down is kinda frustrating. We worked very, very hard and we’ve all made a big difference, but we didn’t make anywhere near as much of a difference as we wanted to. There’s still a lot of work to be done. “Dancing in the Streets” was supposed to be about us all dancing in the streets TOGETHER!

I guess you probably want to avoid the discussion of Quicksilver Messenger Service?

(laughs) uh. I don’t know...

It says here in your resume, “The album was soundly panned.”

Oh wow, what to say on the record! ( laughs.) I don’t like to get into grisly details when people are still alive. Unfortunately there are a bunch of rock critics who thought that Quicksilver should be one thing, and Gary Duncan, who is the lifeblood of the group, had some very different ideas and was into a very contemporary approach and never doing the same thing twice. A number of the critics didn’t like that to begin with and then they completely missed some of his humor and took it seriously. It had promotion problems too. The president of the label completely disappeared a week after the record came out!

When looking at your discography, there’s a radical change in there. You start doing an entirely different kind of music. Is this just where the work led you, or is this something that you wanted to do?

It’s really where the work led me coming out of Motown is, there’s no such thing as a home studio. I got bit by “Wow, we can actually afford to buy a 4-track!”when the Sony 854 came out and the 3340 TEAC the early home studio stuff. I wondered what would it be like to not be under time pressure and do recording because, of course at Motown, the clock was ticking and there was either tremendous pressure to get a release out or tremendous pressure in terms of - you know - $15,000 in salaries on a string session.

So it was a real dream, “Well, gee, what if you could do it at home and not have all that pressure, what could you come up with.” One of the early people that saw that possibility was a person who I met shortly after coming to the Bay area, Stephen Hill. He was an engineer at KQED, and he built a studio to record unusual acoustic and electronic music, because he was into it and I was into it, in that we’d had the second Moog modular synthesizer at Motown.

How did you guys get that?

Somebody sent Brian Holland an acetate of “A Day in the Life” long before it came out, and it pretty much blew everybody’s mind. It was radical enough when it came out, but if you can imagine hearing that almost, between six months and a year before it came out, it was really something.

Mike McLean had been familiar with Moog because he’d been writing up what he was doing in the AES journal. So they went out and bought a Moog modular synthesizer. Now, unfortunately the Moog modular synthesizer wasn’t stable enough to do the same thing twice in a row, and so it was pretty useless! (laughs)

I mean we kind of whacked away at it, trying to get something out of it. used it for some signal processing, a little bit. There was a lot of promise there but it is still absolutely amazing that Wendy Carlos was able to actually produce an album on that thing.

That’s true, yeah

It would never do the same thing twice, so you basically had to set it up, and record it, and keep recording until you lucked out and got what you wanted. At any rate, I’d had an interest in that, and everybody that’d been around Motown had an interest in that, and I’m sure that’s where Stevie got his interest in synthesizers also.

He does a unique thing with them. For one thing, it’s so involved in the bass lines without crowding anything.

Yes, he does. It’s been kind of frustrating to me to have people watch him and jump to conclusions about why he was doing what he was doing and try and duplicate it. Because Stevie is a musicologist. he knows everything that’s been done in American music since 1900 and the main reason he was playing all of his own parts was because he basically was putting together combinations of dead musicians.

You know, what would happen if so and so played this part and so forth. He has both the knowledge and the ability to emulate different people. I mean, it’s just an amazing, amazing ability, so everybody was real into encouraging him to play all his own parts and do all his own thing because if you were him, that was absolutely the best way to do it. But I have serious reservations about that being the best way for everybody else to do it.

Oh sure. And of course, he is unintentionally responsible for a lot of what’s wrong with modern soul music, because they emulate just the thinnest skin of it.

Yeah, and unfortunately, a lot of it is just plain economics. They can get paid the same amount if they use session players or if they do it all themselves, and its turned into being all hype. And I think it’s finally reached the point where it has become necessary to use so much hype that it isn’t a profitable industry anymore.

That’s one of the stultifying things about watching MTV, it’s so hyperbolic that you couldn’t possibly exaggerate it. It’s so meretricious, you couldn’t really explain it to someone who had never seen it.

Yeah, well it’s to the point where they’re really selling TV stars not music. Records are being made like movies and movies are being made like records!

Well here’s a classic tape op interview question for you: how do you feel about digital?

Frustrated. (laughs) There’s so many great things about it and yet - there was a thing at the AES called ‘When Vinyl Ruled” - this was incredible. I hope to heaven that they let them do it again but I can see how a lot of manufacturers would not let them do it again. T

They set up a state of the art 1962 control room and played back a bunch of old three-track safety masters from that era. The sound destroyed everything at the show. I mean, it was a no-brainer better than anything we’re doing now, it’s sickening. And at one point, Doug Botnik, who used to be at Sunset Sound turned to me and said, “Man I remember the first time I tried to do a session on a transistor board I wanted to slit my wrists.” (laughs)
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Yet the coveted stuff in audio is really the discrete stuff. Most people want tube compressors but they don’t want tube boards, they want Neve and API.

Well they want big. I mean that’s the thing. They want a million inputs, and the old boards didn’t have million inputs. People want to do things in real complicated ways, and the old ways were really very simple. You know the magic happened out in front of the mic, and if the magic didn’t happen in front of the mike, it sounded awful, and you did it again.

If you play some damn music, you’ll get some damn sound

Yeah. And to a large degree that’s true. Part of it was in the ‘50s, the songwriters had an absolute stranglehold on the record business. Basically, the songwriters would come up with a hit song, shop it around the labels and it would go to the highest bidder. Labels did not like that, and that’s a lot of what allowed the self contained group thing to come in, because the labels said, okay we’re only going to sign people that write their own material.

You come partly from audiophile side of things and a lot of those people still reject digital. one of the first things that struck me and I think it struck a lot of people, was that 44.1 was kind of a random and not very satisfactory sampling rate. You know, it was low.

Yeah, it was primarily because you could use a video machine as an editor. You could encode it on videotape, edit the videotape. You had to edit digital audio; that was the whole thing.

Do you think that the day will come when high definition digital or something fixes all these problems with digital?

It’s very hard to say. We keep hoping! (laughs). It’s a real catch-22 because a lot of the problem with digital is that fewer and fewer recording engineers are working on things. It’s become a thing of now you just ask anybody who’s hanging around to do the tracking and then you save lousy tracking in the mix, save lousy mixing in the mastering, etc. One of the biggest problems with digital is just that it is not idiot proof.

You need to know that every time you perform some math on that signal, you’re gonna degrade it and it’s not magic. It’s like analog: with analog you just really carefully thought through “How can I go the least number of generations, how can I not damage this.” With digital, it’s been sold as this bulletproof thing, so people often just don’t realize that they’re completely ruining their audio.

I’ve been terrified in mastering, the way that once it gets into the digital domain, people don’t care about a how many copies they make or on what.

Oh yeah, and you add lossy coding to THAT...

And it just seems so capricious, and I’m back at home waving my arms saying “Wait! Wait!”

Well, the cart is ahead of the horse in most of this and ultimately, it’ll bring it down. Already it’s become real obvious that the record business is a lot less profitable than people think it is, and is not very profitable at all other than for artists they just promote the hell out of. if they spend a million dollars promoting a CD, yeah, they can have unprecedented sales of that CD, but even then, it becomes a question of well how much profit are they making. are they actually turning a profit on that, or are they just building a name and maybe someday be able to make some money.

For some reason or another, people like to blame the record company on not being profitable and I’m not even sure the record companies are profitable at this point, because when you start adding up the math, I mean the record store is getting at least half of the price of a compact disc and right now we’re in an interesting situation, in that the record stores are calling all of the shots!

So basically you have to pay for placement in a record store, you have to pay for a listening station, I mean on space music releases, I’ve had deadlines like you would have on an Elvis Presley single in the 60s! (laughs). Because they had scheduled thousand of dollars worth of listening stations in some chain, and you gotta have the CDs there or those listening stations are gonna be empty but they’ve still paid for it.

It’s kind of a bizarre situation right now where I think a lot of the whole industry is gonna have to reinvent itself. But it has a number of times in the past and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t again, so I’m actually feeling kind of upbeat as the whole thing comes crumbling down, cause in some ways it’s a mess that needs to be straightened out, needs to start being run by people inside the music business rather than outside accountants.

I think we’re gonna see some very interesting stuff happening in the next three or four years because everybody that I’ve talked to think that these major label consolidations and acquisitions have made no financial sense at all and, you know, I root for the independent, I mean I will never in my life forget that at one point we at Motown were selling more records than RCA and Columbia! You know, it CAN be done.

Through the history of recording, there’ve been these things which ostensibly are supposed to save time, and make you freer to do what you want, but often they do the opposite. One is console automation and another is Pro Tools.

Automation was implemented not so much to help with mixing but to solve the problem of being able to come up with identical first generation masters. I mean in some ways, digital recording made automation obsolete only people had decided that this was the “professional” way to do it, (laughs) so they keep doing it. But the original reason was because you didn’t want to take the generation hit from copies and so, if you could automate a mix, then you could run three or four mixes and you’d have three or four first generation master tapes.

Right, and I can understand that, but it seemed to suck a lot of the boldness out of the way that people mixed

Oh sure, it took it left-brain.

Obviously, with all of these things, the argument is always, yes, the most talented person who understands it can do a good job and use it in the right way, and of course that’s true. But I don’t hear the infinite possibilities of the technology when I turn on the radio, I just hear people moving things over on the grid.

Yeah, it’s sad. You need performance. In getting into the new age stuff and so forth, I learned a lot about Indian music, and the theory of Indian music. An integral part of the theory of Indian music is that the effect music has on a listener is how it affects their breath. The fascinating thing is that I had realized at Motown while I was recording Levi Stubbs, that I could ride the gain right if I sang along with the singer in my mind; if I could breathe with the singer, I could tell where they were gonna breath and I could tell when they were gonna get louder, when they were going to get softer and ride gain on the vocal much more effectively.

Of course, nobody rides gain on the vocal anymore, which is insane. Anyhow, I discovered that, and then when I learned about Indian music, it kinda went one step further and I realized that the way that a person breathes when they’re doing a performance, when they’ve gotta get through something that’s hard, and they’ve gotta get all the way through it, is a very exhilarating thing to breathe along with. I think that this is actually a big commercial factor in how much people enjoy listening to a recording is the ability of feeling like the artist when they achieve the performance.

Of course, if the artists are just singing one chorus and splicing it all together, and there’s no heat on the artist to perform, then its all gonna be limp, dead. So I think that’s a lot of what’s wrong today. I don’t know that I can just blame it on Pro Tools. I think that you can blame it on Pro Tools in that it hasn’t got the risk of cutting tape, which intimidated people and made people really think twice about whether they wanted to do it, whereas with digital you just throw it together and do it. it definitely allows for a lot of what I call the “good enough syndrome” where people do things until they’re “good enough” as opposed to doing them until they can’t do them any better.

Certainly at Motown it was about doing it until we couldn’t do it better and there was no such thing as “good enough.” You tried to make it as good as you could and you generally were not very satisfied. I mean I’m still pretty embarrassed about what a lot of the things sounded like, but I know they had to sound that way because of the production that we were doing, it just had to be that way.

It was the best combination of what we had to work it with and was the best we could come up with given the combination of the artist, the arrangement, the song, the whole thing. It was a solution. In fact this is one thing that is really kind of missing from today’s production - nobody commits to anything.

That’s very true.

Back then, you had to make final decisions as you went. You had to be willing to throw out a track. Brian Holland used to point to his bottom desk drawer, it was full of tapes, and say “the only reason I’m successful is that I threw out more basic tracks than anybody else around here.” I think I told somebody “Sgt. Pepper’s is not a recording, Sgt. Pepper’s was the solution to the various problems they came up with in the process of producing the record.”

You put something on and then you have to figure out something to put with it that’ll make it work and you couldn’t go back whereas now, you’ve got this huge palette and you can do anything, but you wind up with it all being so conceptual that it’s lame. There’s no magic, no opportunity for the recording to come out any better than your concepts.

It's a problem, all the way around, because I think that people learn by rote so much now, that what they’re gonna do is paste something together in Pro Tools or comp 25 takes of a vocal that they don’t encourage the artist to do it the right way.

Oh yeah, over-engineering is rampant.

So what’s your advice to all your readers?

(laughs) Good luck! No - I guess its “hang in there.” I think we’re at a low point. It’s like we’re at the Frankie Avalon age of rock n’ roll and something new is sure to happen. I think radio is about to explode because Internet and satellite radio is going to put so much pressure on the over the air radio stations that they’re going to be forced to going back to being creative again and we’re going to see a return of the deejay and we’re gonna see a return of interesting music that’s successful, that carries its own weight. I mean there used to be a saying, “you can’t stop a hit record” and certainly the experience of a lot of the ones back then was very much that: You literally felt that you couldn’t have screwed it up if you’d wanted to.

The record has its own soul, so to speak, and it tells you what to do. I think our problem now is that we don’t have records that have enough of that magical quality that causes the record to sell itself and so we’ve become very dependent on very expensive promotion and publicity and video - and all of these ancillary things. I mean think of the absurdity, that people are being asked to buy a record that the video cost more than the CD to make. I mean, what’s wrong with this picture? (laughs). I think that we’ve got to start investing in records again, not doing them the cheapest possible way and it think there’s gotta be a return to records that are so a exceptional that they sell themselves.

Something you can’t stop. So, I guess we should call this article “Nowhere to run?”

There you go!

(Editor’s Note: Our sincerest thanks to Philip Stevens and Tape Op for providing this article and the ability to present it to our audience in full.)