When did you start becoming a working musician?
I started learning the guitar in seventh or eighth grade. By ninth grade I was taking lessons. I took to it pretty quickly. Then it was the natural progression of my first high school band, playing in someone's living room. One day someone's dad came in and said, "There's someone having a party. They want a band." I don't even remember what we played, but I'm sure it was all covers at the time. There were a bunch of bands playing together, all very competitive. That's when it started for me, pretty much high school and all the way up. We won a couple Battle of the Bands later on. Russell Javors, who went on to be Billy Joel's rhythm guitar player for many, many years, was also part of that same clique.
How did you get into recording?
I remember when I was about ten years old one of my uncles got me a present; it was Christmas. It was a little battery-powered tape recorder with three and a half inch [cassette] reels. It had some kind of little microphone attached to it. Mono. I wore that thing out. I was doing my own "DJ" show. I was imitating The Good Guys from WMCA. I'd run down my own Top10. I actually wrote my first song on that; it was a song imitating the Beach Boys, about a car, or an engine, or something. My dad brought some dictaphone machines from his office. He actually cut little records; very floppy and green, maybe four-inch. Machines they used for dictation. It sounded terrible, but it was like, "Wow, look at this!" It was basically useless, but it was still fun. Then, my senior year, I got my first little 2-track, 1/4-inch Ampex machine. I did my research. It had a sound on sound knob.
With sound on sound, what were your capabilities?
I'd record my acoustic guitar, and then I could take the acoustic guitar, and with this knob, I could now record on the other track while I played along.
And you could hear properly?
Yeah, I could hear the first track. Then I started ping-ponging. It was just a quarter-track machine; two tracks in one direction, and two tracks in the other. I'd just keep going until the tape hiss got unbearable.
Did you start learning how to bounce tracks?
Yes. Then I realized that if I did the drums first, I was going to bury them. I thought, "What can I do?" That's how we did it then. I started recording my high school band. I remember we did a version of The Beatles' "Revolution" that probably still exists somewhere. It's like, "Okay, first track is bass, drums, and everything. Then we have guitar overdubs." Then we sang. That Ampex 750 was a workhorse. I wore those heads out, no doubt. I brought it to college, and it was the '60s. We were doing a lot of psychedelic music. I discovered that if I turned the sound on sound up really far then it started to get a little bit of a delay effect, and it started feeding back to get some wild sonics. I think there was another setting where you could create an echo, as opposed to just the sound on sound. It was a pretty freaking good little machine. That's how it all started. Sound on sound. That one little knob made all the difference.
Did you record your band?
Yeah. We recorded my high school band. There was also a very early studio experience on Long Island, when we were still a high school band. I remember a couple of the dads drove us to this place in Rockville Center. It wasn't much of a studio, now that I remember. The guy had like a 2-track machine, 7 1/2" reels over in the corner, and he had some mics in this room with some rugs on the walls. I don't even remember what we played, or where that tape is or anything. That was really the first experience of going to a place to record.
What did you do after high school?
In college I began doing the songwriters and the coffee house thing. My next-door neighbor, Ron Fierstein, turned out to be a music freak too, and we started a folk duo. He was into Cat Stevens. I was into James Taylor. I could play pretty well. He was more the singer, as well as doing the chords. He wrote a lot of songs. I started writing some more. We never really co-wrote anything. It was just his songs, or my songs. We started doing some shows at Stony Brook University, where I went to school. Then we founded a band called Arbuckle. Somehow we got a record deal my senior year of college, on Musicor Records.
Oh, I didn't know that.
That's how it all started. One of the members of our band was working at Billboard. There were these guys who were looking for a young band to produce. It turns out it was Victor Millrose and Alan Bernstein, the songwriters of "This Girl is a Woman Now."
Oh, wow. The hit for Gary Puckett & The Union Gap?
Yeah. They were successful and decided they were going to be producers. They liked us and signed us to a deal. Part of the deal was we got to record an album. We immediately signed away our publishing – we had no idea. I don't even think our parents looked at the freaking contracts. But they brought us into Media Sound.
That was a great studio.
So here I was, in 1972, driving in from Stony Brook and doing evening sessions at Media Sound on 57th Street. At that point, already, it was a 16-track machine. I don't think it was 24.
An old church space, right?
The church space was upstairs. That was Studio A. Studio B, where we were, was the downstairs studio. Lower ceilings, but still a really nice space down there. The engineer was a young guy named Michael DeLugg, who went on to do the live mix for David Letterman for years. He was just graduating from assistant to engineer. He was really nice and good. I remember I was trying to do a solo really fast. I played it once, and the producer said, "Oh, that's incredible!" I said, "No, it's terrible. It's all messy." Michael said, "Let him do it a couple of times!" He came to my rescue, and I got the take I wanted.
Was it several sessions there?
It was weeks. We did a full ten or twelve songs. We did basic tracks, then we did vocals, harmonies, and overdubs. I guess I was there for the mix too. I'm sure it was a couple of weeks of going there. It made an impression. That was really my first major studio. The album came out, and we got a chance to open for Bruce Springsteen in Philadelphia when he drew 300 people. Then I went on to drive a taxicab, and Bruce was on the cover of Time magazine the next year. I was slugging it out in the city, playing in a lot of country bars. Then college was over, and the draft was over, thank god. I went on the road for a while with an offshoot of Arbuckle; the drummer, the bass player, and I formed a country trio. We played in the city; we'd also go on the road and play Top-40 and country. In 1973 I had moved out to New Jersey, and I got my first 4-track; the Dokorder. You couldn't really punch-in on the thing; I was kind of frustrated. It seemed like a good deal. The TEAC decks were a little more expensive. Eventually I sold that Dokorder and got a TEAC 3340.
What was the first artist who you recorded? That's a big step for somebody.
That is. We were doing well as musicians on the road, playing five or six nights a week and making good money for about four or five years. The Top-40 thing was getting a little tired for me around 1975. We hooked up with a show band, which was actually an oldies band called The Happenings, who had big hits in the '60s, including "See You in September" and "I've Got Rhythm." We toured the East Coast, but it was lounges and polyester suits. It was embarrassing. The music was good, and Bob Miranda's a great singer. He's still doing it. We had to sing our asses off. It was a great thing, but once again, after about a year and a half of that I was like, "I can't keep doing this." There's no doubt my chops and my singing were getting better. We had the opportunity to go with them into the studio a few times, because they were still trying to have another hit. We did a couple out at House of Music in West Orange, [NJ].
That was a great place.
No longer there. The basement of a house. The ceilings were pretty low! It was the first time I saw an MCI console. With The Happenings we also did one session at The Hit Factory with Hank Medress and Dave Appell, producer of The Tokens. There were some great studio players I got to watch. We just sang on it; we didn't play. That was the first time I saw a studio musician work. The guitar player's name was Jeff Mironov. He was great on slide and everything. He was very impressive. At that point, I was tearing my hair out because I didn't want to go back on the road or play bars anymore. The next day, I was sitting at my apartment on 12th Street thinking, "How am I going to get out of this?" I called up the engineer and said, "Hey, how do I get a job there?" He said, "You've gotta know something." I said, "I have an electrical engineering degree, and I'm a musician." I got interviewed by Eddie Germano. They were looking for some help in the maintenance department. He saw that I had an engineering degree, and that was it. "You're hired. Show up here at 8 o'clock Monday morning and we'll teach you how to do it."
That was the first Hit Factory?
That's the one on 48th Street. That was the Mecca for a while. They had the second floor, fifth floor, and sixth floor going. The sixth floor is now Sear Sound [Tape Op #41]. That place has been a studio since the '70s. What an education that was!
How long were you there for?
I was at the Hit Factory only for about a year and a half, actually. Germano had a reputation of burning through people, and he was kind of relentless. He was quite the studio owner. I went in there knowing how to put a tape machine into record, but not really knowing how to align one. I also did not really know what the intricacies of a studio were, including the wiring, running microphone cables, and echo chambers. Within about three months, I just inhaled it all. I went in the first week or two, and they had this stack of McIntosh amplifiers in the corner. They said, "They don't work." One by one, I started to get them going in my spare time. Germano looked at me like, "Who is this guy?" I'd always be down there figuring out better ways to do the cue system, or walking into the middle of the session when things were going up in smoke and getting things going [smoothly]. I really gained the trust of all the engineers rapidly. I became Chief of Maintenance in six months. At that point they were going to Studer 24-tracks. We got the first MCI inline console there, a 500-series. I knew things had shifted when I was teaching these engineers who had been working there forever how to maneuver an MCI console. It was a very different design in those days; an inline console, as opposed to what we called the recording section and jukebox. There were two separate sections on most consoles. The inline console was a very modern; new designs by Harrison and MCI. They came out with them and engineers were a little befuddled at first, because they didn't understand it.
But you had engineering training.
I wasn't so tied to the old way of doing it. [It was wonderful] watching all those great engineers work, and getting sounds. We did some incredible records there. We had Tom Scott, Robert Fripp, Hall & Oates, Rick Derringer, Tim Curry, and the list goes on. We had three studios going around the clock. There was a 24-hour maintenance department, so there was always somebody on call. I spent many 16-hour shifts there. I'd go in at six o'clock for the night shift and come out at ten in the morning. We were building a new console; an API modular console, with API components. I was working with the API engineers to put the thing together properly. They could see that I understood what they were talking about, so it was really fortuitous for Hit Factory and myself. We built a freaking console from scratch! Frank Comentale was with me, and he designed a lot of the beautiful metalwork and woodwork. Together we wired the thing and figured the whole signal path out with the help of the API engineers. I even designed a little circuit board because I knew how to do that. It was a pretty sleek console. We got into it deep. I can still fix electronics down to the component level.
I've seen you do it!
You've seen me do it in the middle of sessions. That was all a very fertile training ground for me, in terms of learning the architecture and the mysteries of what's underneath the floor of the console, down to where every wire goes. If I had to hire a maintenance guy every time something went down, we wouldn't be here now. It is just impossible to do it financially in this climate now. I don't want my musicians or the people I'm working with, my artists, to experience technology. I want them to experience music in their head and the Zen of their performance, the space they're in, and not to disturb that.
How did you get into the studio as a recording engineer?
In my days at Hit Factory there would be a times when the studio was empty. They let me in. I had the keys to the place; I brought my friends in and started playing. I think one of the earliest demos I did was for my friend Jon Gordon. He's one of my tenants now. I was starting to step out and do sessions at other little studios. The first time I met Shawn Colvin I think was at one of those sessions. I was confident enough to go out and start to engineer a little bit. Not producing, but just engineering and running a session, because I'd had enough experience at Hit Factory to watch how it was done. I was never really an official assistant engineer; I was always the maintenance guy. I heard Sterling Sound was looking for a maintenance guy. Lee Hulko, who was the owner, had done all the maintenance himself. He was a great disc cutter. So he hired me. That was like going from a battle zone to a calm oasis. Sterling Sound's hours were from ten to six. "That's when we work." Great sound, great equipment, and whatever you need. They were going to build some mix rooms, which is why I went there, but that actually never happened. I was at Sterling Sound for about five years. I worked with all the great mastering guys. When I got there, it was George Marino, Greg Calbi [Tape Op #86], José Rodriguez, Jack Skinner, and Ted Jensen. I remember the one or two Saturdays George Marino ever worked, because he never worked on Saturdays, Greg Ladanyi came in with the Toto [Toto IV] master. He'd come from California to master with George. I said, "I'll cover that with you." We put on the 1/2-inch tape, and "Rosanna" came blasting out of the speakers. It was like, "What the hell is that? What a freaking mix!" Then "Africa." It's like, "How the hell do you do that?" That was it. When they decided not to build the mix studio, I was kind of at a loss. As much as I liked the science of mastering and the mystery, it wasn't "making" the music. A little studio across town had opened up, called Celestial Sound.
I happened to do some of the first Bongos recordings at Celestial Sound.
Celestial had just opened in '79. This might have been '80 or '81. I was jonesing for a place to record. They didn't have any maintenance people. I said, "I've got a good job at Sterling. I don't need to get paid. I'll trade you maintenance time for studio time. I'll keep the place going, whatever you need, but when it's empty can I use it?" It was a win-win for us. Michael Jay had helped design the studio. Celeste and Tony Pinelli were the owners, a couple. It was on the fourth floor above the Green Garden Deli on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 48th Street. Up three flights of stairs. That studio was there from '79 to '88. It started off a little slow, but then it picked up steam. A lot of R&B people worked there. We had Kashif, Melba Moore, and Evelyn "Champagne" King. At Celestial I finally had a studio I could go in and use. I was starting to do demos with bands and friends. I was doing anything I could, and also engineering there sometimes when they needed help on a record. Then, around 1983, Celestial got very busy. We were locking up two 24-track machines and it didn't always work. I think around '83 they went to a Studer A-80, which was the crown jewel of the Studer legacy. You didn't have to worry about it much. It had its own issues, but once we got that it was a lot easier to run those things. The '80s were an absolutely crazy time for music. Disco and synthesizers were starting. Twelve truckloads of synthesizers would arrive at the door. We'd be wiring up MIDI forever, getting all the buzzes and hums out, and then they'd be looking for sounds forever. We were going to 48-track and spending three days on drum sounds. God bless the record companies with the budgets in those days. We all took a lot of pride in the records that came through our place. We had a big hit at Celestial with Get Loose, the Evelyn "Champagne" King record. That's when I got my first gold record. I didn't engineer a lot on that, but I engineered some.
When did you really shift into engineering a session?
It was pretty much at Celestial more than anywhere, where I was starting to work on the R&B sessions, doing The Manhattans' records. It's where I met Joe McEwen from Columbia Records, doing vocals with those guys, which was incredible. I was working on R&B records I wasn't producing, but I was in the engineering seat. Then, on my own time, when I had my time to myself in the studio, I'd be working with my own bands, doing a song or two. My old buddy, Ron Fierstein, went off to law school. He was fairly successful. We ran into each other in Chinatown in 1983, and he said, "Let's go have lunch." We sat down and he said, "I hate being a lawyer. I want to get back into music." I was at the point where I had a couple of things I'd done that sounded pretty good to me. I'd brought The Happenings in to do a couple of tracks. I was starting to take the role of the producer, and was doing some arranging. I started to learn how to arrange a band for the studio, which is not the same as arranging for live [performances]. It's totally different. Having those skills, starting to be able to use them, as well as having Celestial at my fingertips and bringing in bands; it was starting to gel. Ron said, "You do the music, I'll do the business, we'll form a company and try to find an artist. You've got access to a studio." We asked around, and a month or two later one of Ron's friends said, "You should go check out this girl [Suzanne Vega]." We went down to [Gerde's] Folk City. I think she was actually playing electric guitar. She had a bass player with her, Billy Merchant. This skinny girl comes out, with her dimples and black tuxedo jacket, and starts singing "Tom's Diner." I was like, "That's pretty bold to come out and sing a cappella." She did it, and it was good. She was interesting. She had a nice voice. Ron and I went up to her and said, "Hi, we're a production company." She looked at us like, "Who the hell are you guys? What have you done?" I said, "No strings attached. I have access to a really nice studio. If you want to come up and play, let's just see what happens." So she said, "What do I have to lose?" I still have the original tape, live to 2-track Studer. She really liked it. I have a pretty good bedside manner in the studio, so I made her comfortable. She sat down and played basically eight or nine of the songs that became the first record. I think it was the first time she'd ever heard herself really well, mic'd up, with big speakers playing back. She did songs like "Undertow," "Cracking," "Small Blue Thing," "Freeze Tag," "The Queen and the Soldier," "Some Journey," and basically all the songs that made it to the first record. I sat there listening and was like, "This is really good." Her guitar style was very unusual. She wasn't playing standard D chords. She did little clusters with a vertical picking style. We became friends, and I started playing live with her. I started adding other acoustic guitars and electric guitar. I also added the 12-string part on "The Queen and the Soldier." I demoed that originally on my 4-track; I had her come to my living room on 12th Street. She sang her basic track and went home. I put on the 12-string part; I had my [Prophet] Pro One [synth] at that point, and I put on a low bass synth. We were doing a lot of live gigs together. We added Jon Gordon on guitar, so Jon and I would switch off between keyboard, synth, and guitar. It started to get a buzz in the Village. At Celestial we brought in extra musicians and were trying to actually make a record, as opposed to a folk-y demo with some overdubs. Ron's job was to shop them around. He had a few contacts. We really wanted to go on A&M Records, because Cat Stevens was one of their artists.
They were considered very artist-friendly, and owned by an artist.
Very artist-friendly. Yeah, of course; Herb Alpert. But we got turned down everywhere. Just like, "No." Girl with a guitar, in the '80s? Forget it. We kept playing and we were packing places. Nancy Jeffries eventually came down and saw it.
She'd recently gone to A&M Records from RCA.
She wanted to sign somebody. It was just one of those nights when it all worked. With Suzanne's crystal-clear voice and her really spiky, articulate guitar playing, and then some electric guitar and synthesizer. On "Neighborhood Girls" we dared to have a drum machine in a folk club. This was groundbreaking, I guess, but people were loving it because we never got in the way of her. We'd gotten A&M to give us a $2,500 demo budget. At that point, no one knew who I was as a producer, engineer, or anything. They weren't going to give me a $150,000 budget to do it. Nancy Jeffries introduced us to Lenny Kaye, and then Lenny and I co-produced the demo for A&M.
Lenny was, and still is, the guitar player for the Patti Smith Group.
It made sense to Nancy, Patti Smith being a very lyrical, word-based artist. She knew Lenny, although he didn't have very many production credits either, at that point, he had good credibility. Super-sweet guy. He really facilitated me working on that record. He understood people; he saw how Suzanne and I worked together, that she trusted me, and that we kind of spoke the same language. He never interfered. He added when he could, supported us, made suggestions, and was right in there with us. He did plenty. He brought some of his musicians in. But A&M first turned us down. The guy on the West Coast wrote us one of those famous rejection letters about how this will never happen, she has no sense of melody, and blah blah blah. We kept at it. We did a show at Folk City and the Times film critic, Stephen Holden, was in the audience. The next day there was an article in the New York Times called "Heir to the Joni Mitchell Throne."
Incredible.
Game-changer! The phone rings, and it's Ron. He said, "David Geffen just tracked me down. He wants us in his office tomorrow." Here we were. A&M wanted Suzanne, and Geffen wanted Suzanne, so we had a bidding war on our first act!
And two great labels.
Two great labels. We were a little bit skeptical of Geffen. Ron and I went to lunch with Michael Leon, who was the head of the office, and Nancy's boss. We said, "Listen, we want to sign with A&M. Just sweeten the pot a little bit. You don't have to equal it, but sweeten the pot." They did it, and we signed with A&M. I remember the conversation at A&M with Nancy. It was like, "You guys will probably sell 30,000 records on the first record, and that's okay. We're going to build this career." In America alone, we wound up selling 90,000 on the first record and hundreds of thousands overseas in Europe, Holland, and England. I think "Marlene…" peaked at Number 21 or something on the British charts. Then, when we finally signed a deal, I gave my notice to Sterling and said, "I'm going out there and trying to do this." We had a production deal. It was an emotional time, and a freaking scary time, because I really had no other source of income. It wasn't like I was making a fortune at Sterling, but it was a steady job. But I had to try it. I was 34 or 35 at the time, with no kids or anything.
It must have been scary to leave a studio where you're working.
Leaving a steady job with benefits, and all that. But it was time. I can't say I wasn't scared. I was just so happy to be able to have that chance, and for Suzanne to have faith in me. She liked what I added to her music. I didn't step on it; I enhanced it. We worked well together in the studio. I pushed her; it wasn't like I'd let her go out and do whatever she wanted. There was one scene in the first album. It was the first time I'd actually seen Lenny get frustrated with her vocals, and Lenny's the most chill person ever. Suzanne was of the school of, "I sang it three times. That's enough. It's good." I said, "No, it's not." She stormed out of the studio and went downstairs. She was going to go home, but she left her shoes in the studio. When she came up, I said, "Listen, Suzanne, let's just try the vocals one more time, but this time just put your guitar on." We had done the basic tracking, and then we'd done the overdubs, and now she was just singing her vocals. I thought, "Maybe if she's holding the guitar, there will be something about it." She put on the guitar and sang it. It was like, "Holy shit, that's the vocal!" The fact of the body posture, and just holding the guitar. Maybe she was used to that position, singing live. Something about being in the studio with your hands on the headphones; you have no place to put your hands, you're tense, and you're pissed at your producer because he's making you sing it four times. Standing in a room by yourself singing into a microphone is a lonely task.
Yeah. You're really vulnerable.
It's the most vulnerable part of the record. To this day, it's the sessions that I feel most comfortable doing, because I think there's a way in which I can get people to relax. I can get them to forget about whatever things are going on in their head and really work on a performance. I think working on a vocal performance these days is really becoming a lost art. People think they can do ten tracks, comp it later, and then they'll have a good vocal. That's the furthest from my experience. You can have ten tracks that are wrong. It's just not produced and not finessed to the point where you're making sure every word counts. There's diction. There's clarity. There's a storyline. There's an emotional thread to it. There's an arc of dynamics, and it all makes for an interesting listen. It's easily swallowed up in our technology today of multitracks, editing, and everything else that can make it "perfect" but meaningless. I think it's a real danger. I'm not saying digital or analog... I love it all. I'm not saying I don't comp vocals, but I'm comping from performances. I'm not comping from people just singing it over and over again.
How did your work with Suzanne go after the first album?
