As you walk into the offices of ABKCO Music & Records on New York's Fifth Avenue, you're immediately aware that you are entering the center of a rock 'n' roll universe. Winding through the middle of the modern, open-plan office space (featuring a chandelier made from hanging microphones) is a wall covered in black and white images of artists and releases, one that comprises a legacy that is the envy of the music business. ABKCO was founded in the late 1950s by the colorful, legendary, and controversial business manager Allen Klein, who by the end of the '60s was managing both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The label's catalogue has made ABKCO one of the world's leading independent entertainment companies, featuring many of the works of Sam Cooke, the Rolling Stones, Bobby Womack, Eric Burdon, The Animals, Herman's Hermits, Marianne Faithfull, and The Kinks. Past the wall, in the back of the offices, is the studio of Teri Landi, the Grammy-award winning chief audio engineer for ABKCO. She is responsible for keeping this precious, historic library alive and vibrant. She also oversees lavish restoration and remastering projects with a sense of respect and attention to detail that would make any artist proud. Stacks of Rolling Stones' 1/4-inch tape boxes, Cameo-Parkway 45s, and a combination of current and vintage audio gear cluttered her studio in the most delightful way; it is here where we sat to talk about the power and glory of music that continues to excite and inspire.
As you walk into the offices of ABKCO Music & Records on New York's Fifth Avenue, you're immediately aware that you are entering the center of a rock 'n' roll universe. Winding through the middle of the modern, open-plan office space (featuring a chandelier made from hanging microphones) is a wall covered in black and white images of artists and releases, one that comprises a legacy that is the envy of the music business. ABKCO was founded in the late 1950s by the colorful, legendary, and controversial business manager Allen Klein, who by the end of the '60s was managing both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The label's catalogue has made ABKCO one of the world's leading independent entertainment companies, featuring many of the works of Sam Cooke, the Rolling Stones, Bobby Womack, Eric Burdon, The Animals, Herman's Hermits, Marianne Faithfull, and The Kinks. Past the wall, in the back of the offices, is the studio of Teri Landi, the Grammy-award winning chief audio engineer for ABKCO. She is responsible for keeping this precious, historic library alive and vibrant. She also oversees lavish restoration and remastering projects with a sense of respect and attention to detail that would make any artist proud. Stacks of Rolling Stones' 1/4-inch tape boxes, Cameo-Parkway 45s, and a combination of current and vintage audio gear cluttered her studio in the most delightful way; it is here where we sat to talk about the power and glory of music that continues to excite and inspire.
What's your earliest memory of being aware of audio recording and technology?
I guess it would start with my recollections of how much music moved me. People in my family noticed I was physically engaged with the sound of music; they could always find me playing with the family radio or record player. We had a tiny tape recorder that I was fascinated by, with little 3-inch reels. I had a little General Electric cassette recorder, and I used it to record the very short-lived Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell show off television.
He had the Bay City Rollers on one of his first shows.
That's one of the things I recorded! Somewhere that tape is sitting in storage now.
So you were already archiving?
I was, I guess! Little teenybopper that I was. The Bay City Rollers were the first rock band that really caught my attention. I was the prime age, 11, in 1975 when they hit these shores.
I like that your family picked up that you were interested in music early on.
They encouraged it, which was great. My mom did encourage me to play an instrument, mandolin, prior to teaching myself how to play acoustic guitar. That led to a fascination with records, and records led to a fascination with stereo equipment. My mom used to take me to Harmony Records in the Bronx when I was really young. The guy had the bins and a list of the singles, and they were pretty much in order of how they were on the charts. I would go in there and select two records, and my mom would buy them for me. I'd come home and play them over, and over again, and drive everybody crazy.
But they're magic, right?
They are magic. They were these little three minute masterpieces on this 7-inch disc. I started to get interested in how records were made. I was born in 1964, so at that time there was mono recording, then stereo, then 3-track into 4-track; my listening sensibility evolved with the expansion of the number of tracks that were being recorded. The tape started to get wider and wider. It's this magical period between 1962 to about 1967, where it was all developing. Some of my favorite musical experiences of all time. When I got into my teen years, I started looking at the record covers and the credits. I noticed a pattern in the names I was seeing, whether they were songwriters, producers, arrangers, engineers, or people like that. I started to put two and two together, with how different the sounds were with certain producers and engineers. Someone like Richard Perry comes to mind: Carly Simon, [Harry] Nilsson, and Ringo [Starr].
Did you ever pursue audio engineering in an academic way?
I think the learning has been on the job, but I did go to The Institute of Audio Research [in New York, closed December 2017]. I learned the basics there. At that time, everything was really still pretty much analog. We were just learning digital technology, but not really its application. After that I went to work for Howard Schwartz Recording, and that's where I got my schooling. I worked as a messenger, made coffee, got the bagels, and ran packages around town. At the end of the night I was wrapping cables, putting away microphones, and getting to handle these precious commodities. Three months later I was thrown into the duplication room to start learning. I learned about tape, how to handle it, and how to make one-to-one copies. We were also working with big mag dubbers, because they did a lot of film there at the time. They would record voiceovers that would be sent off to be matched with picture, so I learned a little bit about sync. I learned about working with some old machines, and I learned the difference between full-track mono and 2-track stereo. It came in handy when I came to ABKCO and started to rummage through the large archive of tapes. I started to really understand how different a full-track mono tape sounded.
I hadn't even thought about that.
Yes. When you put it up on a full-track mono head, which was how it was recorded, and then you put it up on a stereo head, they will sound very different. It loses a lot if you put it up on a stereo head. A great deal of what we were doing was mono, because we were dealing with AM radio commercials. I learned a lot about working with tape, because we had these great big duplicating machines. We used to run off hundreds of reel-to-reels of 60 and 30 second spots, so I learned a lot about editing. That was incredibly useful when I got hired at ABKCO.
I love The Rolling Stones in Mono box set that ABKCO put out. That experience must have been very helpful, to have the feel for mono when you were doing that restoration project.
Yeah, absolutely. Keith Richards said that the very early Stones - when they were really focused on being an R&B/blues band - you can't listen to those records unless they're in mono. Even going into Aftermath and Between the Buttons. Prior to Aftermath, the stereo versions that were released in the United States were phony stereo. They were electronically reprocessed to give you a stereo image, but they were not true stereo. Aftermath began that true stereo period, but I prefer Aftermath in mono. The mixes are better. Their Satanic Majesties Request I love in stereo - it's meant for stereo. You have all those left and right only sounds happening, and you have the center to hold it all together, which is pretty much missing on Between the Buttons and Aftermath.
Hard left and hard right panning?
Yes, very hard. It's very '60s stereo. You really want something in the middle. That was dictated by the technology. Aftermath was on 4-track. The rhythm section would be on one track, and then guitar - maybe acoustic guitar, but generally a lead guitar, would be on its own track by itself; then maybe piano on another track, and then vocals. In order to create some kind of stereo image, and make it really obvious that it's stereo, they'd do a hard pan on a lot of this. The rhythm section's all the way off to the left channel, and there's nothing holding it together in the center. You really are missing something, and it doesn't feel right. When you get that mono, it's so solid and so earthy. It's the glue.
It's interesting that you deal with making it sound right for "now." Listeners' ears are different than they would have been when these records were first released.
Sure. The advantage that we have now with digital, and now high-resolution digital, is that you can avoid some of that distortion. If you listen to a lot of the old vinyl, you get distortion. There's something that you love about it, and at the same time - especially with high-resolution digital - it's wonderful to hear something that's a lot closer to the actual analog master tape. Albeit digital, but still.
Sometimes on older 7-inch singles, you did get distortion. I always wondered how much of that is on the master tape.
Oh, sure; sometimes I've worked with tapes that are like that. I wonder, "What were they doing in the studio?"
Maybe it's because of tape compression?
Absolutely. On a lot of the early Decca Rolling Stones tapes, there actually is a little red sticker with white lettering that says, "Distortion is intentional." When they were finished with the mixes, they edited everything together with leaders, and you had your final cutting master. That was going to go to the person who cut the lacquers.
Talking about your first jobs in the studio, I was wondering if there's some lesson that you might have learned then that you still use today.
Sure. Don't make mistakes! No matter how good you are at what you do, and no matter how focused you are, there's always that chance you could make a mistake. We're human; it happens. It's heartbreaking when that happens, especially when you're working really, really hard to make sure that it does not happen. I remember being at Howard Schwartz, and I could not make a mistake, because we were sending a dub of a spot to radio stations. It better be the right spot, because you're dealing with clients.
Did you ever have a mistake like that?
We all did, but you paid a hefty price when you did that.
Who's someone you might have been a fan of as a younger person, and now you're working with their material?
I think all of it. When I first came here I knew ABKCO had the Stones' catalog, The Animals, Herman's Hermits, and they were acquiring the rights to the Phil Spector catalog. It was blowing my mind that I would get to work with all of this material. It was a switch from the radio/television/recording studio atmosphere to coming right into something that was actually the music business.
How long have you been here at ABKCO?
I started working here in February of '89. A friend I worked with at Howard Schwartz, when I told him where I was going to work, he said, "Wow, that's like somebody created a job for Teri Landi." I felt like I'd found my niche. They knew they needed somebody to go through thousands and thousands of reels. They've kept me; I think they like me.
I didn't realize you'd been here since '89.
We were at the classic 1700 Broadway space, but I still remember the room that I was in. It was a very big conference room that was converted into a studio. This space here, the walls were actually built to contain the studio. This is a real studio that is sonically sound. We have done mixes in this room, and you couldn't really do that in the old space.
Were you aware of ABKCO before you came here?
Oh, absolutely. I already had quite a few ABKCO records in my own collection. I was definitely aware of who Allen Klein was, and what the history was. It really blew my mind to come here and interview.
ABKCO was one of the first companies I can think of that branched out into film and multimedia, with projects like The Concert for Bangladesh. As we know, Allen managed The Beatles' Apple Records, which was a multimedia company early on. There are a lot of film scores that ABKCO has been involved with over the years.
Yeah, and also the association with [director] Alejandro Jodorowsky, because his El Topo film soundtrack was released on Apple Records. That association started there, continued after that, and re-continued many years later. We do distribute a certain amount of his films and soundtracks. I guess you could say that it's fitting that by the time of the mid-2000s and through to present-day, we've been the manufacturer of a lot of soundtracks. We've also done some for television shows, like Big Little Lies and Californication. We've put out the Wes Anderson soundtracks since The Darjeeling Limited. That's a really great association that we have, not only with these incredible films, but these wonderfully-crafted soundtracks that are works of art unto themselves. There's magnificent sequencing and placement with these. We're a one-stop-shop in many ways; we have a licensing department that can deal with the manufacturing arm, as well as the distribution via our association with Universal. The licensing department really can take care of everything.
Do you feel that ABKCO has two basic missions right now? One is the restoration and maintenance of their incredible catalog, and the other being the film soundtrack world?
Of course there is score music where the masters end up being controlled by ABKCO as well, but there's also the licensing arm of ABKCO - the licensing of our own master catalog for television shows, films, commercials, and shows like The Voice. That's a big part of what we do on a daily basis. One of the things I do is send off master files for something we've licensed nearly every day. Or licensing a track for a CD compilation that is being produced overseas.
That's great. So ABKCO really has a few different functions.
Yeah, and publishing of course. Sometimes there is master ownership, plus the publishing, and sometimes it's just the publishing. We have publishing on the Stones, The Who, The Kinks, and Donovan.
Let's talk about the studio for a minute. What do you actually do here, and what gets sent out for final mastering?
Generally, a lot of the pre-mastering work is done here. If it's material that's mixed, it would start with transfers. It could be 1/4-inch or 1/2-inch tape. I've got two Mike Spitz re-built [Ampex] ATR-102 tape decks. They have ARIA Class-A electronics, and the 1/4-inch machine is fitted with a stereo head, a full-track mono head, and a quarter-track head as well. The 1/4-inch is playback only. For the 1/2-inch machine I have two separate head stacks: a 2-track head stack, which also has a record head, and then I have playback only. With the 1/2-inch head stack, it has the 3- and 4-track heads, and of course it's playback only with those. A lot of work is done with 1/4-inch material here, so I will do the transfers into high-resolution PCM and into DSD. We will do any work that needs to be done with those masters for premastering in this room.
Gotcha.
I have original Olympic Sound Studio EQs, acquired from Keith Grant. Grant was one of the principal people behind the creation of Olympic Sound Studios. He helped design it and everything - a wonderful person. I met with him and found out that he was selling EQs and mic pres from the original boards. We were able to secure two of the mic pre/EQ modules from the Studio One board, which is the room that you see in the film Sympathy for the Devil, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. One Plus One was its original title. Also, from Studio Three - we have EQs and new old stock mic pres. We've used them on some work; they're amazing. You put a track through and it sounds like it did in the original mix. One other piece of gear that we have here is a modified Ampex 351 tube [tape] machine that has a stereo head, a mono head, and three sets of electronics. I've used that on certain transfers. And we have a Sony JH-24 with an 8-track head stack, a 16-track head stack, and a 24-track head stack that can go in there for 1-inch and 2-inch tapes. The electronics really rock.
Do you ever remix here?
We've done some mixing, and we've mixed films in here. We did mixing for [the Rolling Stones documentary] Charlie Is My Darling, because all that live material came from 3-track. We did the [Stones'] Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! bonus live material here. We've done lots of good things in this room.
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, that was an ABKCO release?
Yes. We did that at The Magic Shop.
As a kid, Rock and Roll Circus was this mysterious "did it ever really happen?" thing. When Steve Rosenthal [Tape Op #66] mentioned that was being remixed, that was a mindblower to me.
Yes, and it was a long time coming. We worked on it a very, very long time. We had the musical part of it to mix, so we were doing mixes for the CD issue, but we were also doing mixes that would be used for the film, because it was two different kinds of mixing. It was a lot of fun to work on.
