Your brother, Phill Brown [Tape Op #12], has been featured in Tape Op and in his memoir Are We Still Rolling? Did you two have recording equipment at home growing up?
It’s interesting that you mention that. Other than playing in a rock band called The Jaguars, I hadn’t taken music too seriously and we didn’t have gear at home. It wasn’t until I got the gig at Olympic Studios in the West End of London that I saw what recording was all about. The studios were custom-built by Keith Grant and Richard Swettenham (later of Helios Electronics), so I learned on a console of his design. The board had a unique magic to it and it sounded beautiful. I began working there as one of Keith Grant’s tape ops, a vital part of how the room ran. If you were dropping in on the second verse, you had to locate that on the tape and find it quickly. We recorded many artists, like Barbra Streisand and Dusty Springfield, and the level of studio musicianship was so high. Jimmy Page was a regular on rhythm guitar and was just "one of the boys," until he became one of THE boys! [laughs] Keith was amazing; a great engineer whom I learned so much from. One day his car broke down and I had to jump in to engineer a brass big band and rhythm section for a commercial. Keith liked what he heard, so he gave me The Who’s “Substitute” session a few weeks later.
I can’t believe your first engineering session was “Substitute”! What an exciting time, recording in London in the mid- to late-‘60s.
It’s so different to how it works today. Back then I'd pop into work and hear, “The Who is coming in today,” and I'd just think, “Okay, great.” [laughs] I didn’t really think much about it! I must admit that it was a great session and a thrill to work with those guys. I then worked for a spell at Lansdowne Studios with Adrian Kerridge, another amazing engineer. I recorded some great music there, like Procol Harum's “Homburg” and Donovan's “Mellow Yellow.” John Paul Jones did the arrangement for “Mellow Yellow,” and Paul McCartney came to the session for the "party" sounds during the instrumental break. I also recorded Cream’s “I’m So Glad,” but I don't think it was the version that was released. Back in those days you never got credited the way you do now. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was on a record or not.
The fate of the working engineer! After Lansdowne, what brought you back to Olympic at their new location in southwest London?
I had started to build Morgan Studios, an offshoot of Lansdowne headed by Monty Babson and Barry Morgan. While that was in progress, I set up shop in the smaller studio at the new Olympic. That’s where I recorded the basic tracks for Jimi Hendrix’s “EXP” off of Axis: Bold as Love. He was a regular at the studio; we used to sit in the staircase, drink coffee, and hang. I was at the new Olympic location for about eight months, working on The Move and Procol Harum’s first LPs with producer Denny Cordell [Move, Procol Harum], Manfred Mann’s “Quinn the Eskimo,” and Mary Hopkin with Tony Visconti [Tape Op #29] producing. Then Doug Riley (aka Dr. Music) came over from Canada to work on music for a Labatt 50 beer commercial, and we hit it off. Sometime later, I heard they had to rerecord those spots, so I went to Toronto to work on those for the J. Walter Thompson [ad agency]. It’s funny, because my father worked for JWT for years in Berkeley Square. When I got to Canada, there weren’t any facilities that were on par with what I was used to, so Doug Riley and I hatched the idea to open our own studio, Toronto Sound Studio. They moved me over Jan 1, 1969, and I had the second ever Cadac console shipped over, designed by Clive Green from Lansdowne – the first was in Morgan Studios. We had the Ampex MM-1000 16- and 24-track machines, nice microphones, and great staff. We’d do commercials from morning until lunch, and then the bands would come in. That’s how I ended up recording Rush's “Finding My Way” and mixing their first album [Rush] over the course of two or three days.
Was Rush's next album, Fly By Night, a breakout project for you?
Absolutely. It was a two-week session, including mixing, but it was a lot of fun to do. Great tunes, and they played so well. The live room was maybe 22 ft by 18 ft, so it wasn’t too big. We set up baffling in order to provide separation for guitar overdubs. It wasn’t all live off the floor. The drum flanging on “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” was all done with tape, the way I learned from George Chkiantz at Olympic. He invented the effect (as heard on The Small Faces “Itchycoo Park”) where you have two tape machines playing the same material, and you subtly adjust the speed of one of the sources. You need an original and a duplicate in order to "flange" the frequencies against each other.
Did that lead to your long-standing relationship with Rush? I’d classify Fly By Night, Caress of Steel, and 2112 as the "Toronto Sound Studios" albums.
I was still operating the studio and working on a lot of other projects. After Fly By Night, the band was gone for three or four months on the road, and I’d be working on other things until they’d return. They offered me a deal to be co-producer, so I thought, “Why not?” [laughs] I loved the band and wanted to make more records with them. The studio business in Toronto started to get super competitive, and we were no longer the only game in town. You don’t get rich running a studio – maybe in a few odd cases, but generally speaking it’s an expensive proposition. Certainly, a lot of bands came to the studio to try and get that Rush sound!
You traveled to Rockfield Studios in Wales for A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres. Was it liberating to work outside of Toronto?
It was a nice break, to be honest. Pat Moran engineered, so I was just producing which was a nice change in and of itself. Being in a new studio with new equipment was very helpful. The gear wasn’t dramatically different from what we had in Toronto, it was just a new environment. For the intro of "A Farewell to Kings," we recorded Alex Lifeson’s classical guitar with the percussion in the courtyard. The weather was nice, so we set up mics and recorded everybody outdoors for the fun of it. "La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self-Indulgence)" was a heavy lift in the studio and needed a lot of attention to get it right. They could play it all the way through, and it sounded pretty darn cool, but it wasn’t what we wanted to be on the record. So, we cut it into three parts and cut one section at a time, fine tuning as we went. At 30 ips we could only get 15 minutes per reel, so we could only get a take or two of a particular section. We wouldn’t get the whole tune unless we were really lucky. [laughs] I was only there for those two records, otherwise I was back in Toronto. Regarding synths, we got our feet wet on 2112 with Hugh Syme, but with A Farewell to Kings Geddy [Lee] got much more involved and had his own synths and a tech, Tony Geranios. We had to tear some synths down and build them back up to get them working properly. We recorded all of the vocals for A Farewell to Kings before we went to London to mix, whereas with Hemispheres we ran out of time to do vocals at Rockfield. We spent the two weeks set aside for mixing to cut the Hemispheres vocals in London, went back to Canada and then returned to Trident [Studios] to mix. Hemispheres was a tough record to make, and the guys wanted to be back closer home moving forward.
