Luther Russell: How did you end up working with Stevie in the first place?
I ended up working with Stevie because a long-time friend of mine, Bob Margouleff, was working with him. He and Malcolm Cecil. I went to visit them a bunch of times in New York when they were working at Electric Lady. I struck up a friendship with Stevie. Sometime later they decided they were leaving New York for LA and started working at my studio, Crystal. Then they moved, Stevie, Bob and Malcolm, to the Record Plant, who pretty much gave them whatever they wanted — such as a room for themselves. We only had one big recording room so we couldn't accommodate our clients. We were doing a lot of Motown at the time, and them. So anyway, they moved to the Record Plant and one day I got a call and it was Stevie and he said, "Do you have any time today at the studio?" [chuckles] and I said, "Uh, yeah we have some time." Then he asks, "Well, if I come can you engineer the sessions?" and I said, "Sure. Why not." So he came over with his assistant engineer, Gary Olazabal, who became my partner in recording Songs in the Key of Life, and that's kinda how that all happened. It went on for two years almost every day, many hours and huge amounts of material. I guess it was really his most prolific time — he did more songs in those two years I think than he had done before. Something like 200 songs.
Larry Crane: Like started demo-ing them, at least get them sketched out?
Yeah, some would be sketched out, some were more finished than others and we just kept working until he had what he wanted. The last song we cut was "I Wish" and . When that was done we knew that was at least the end of recording. Then began the very long and intricate mixing process. For some reason the three of us decided edits were no good — Stevie didn't want to do any edits, splicing and the like, but he wanted a bunch of extra sounds, like kids laughing, his daughter Aisha in the bathtub, you know just all this other stuff. So all that was assembled on a 24-track. Then my partner built a mixer, a mixer in that it had faders on it, no EQ or anything just stereo faders, and we had three 2-track machines and the 24-track. You would put songs 1, 3, and 5 on one 2-track, songs 2, 4, and 6 on the other 2-track and the third 2-track was the master recorder. When it came time to add effects you would bring them in off the 24 track and mix in real time with tape machine 'A' to the master recorder. And when that song ended fade to tape machine 'B' adding effects cued on the 24 track all to the master recorder until you were done with all the songs. Live. So when you fucked up you had to do it all over again. We cut everything to vinyl, which was also done at Crystal because we had a mastering room as well.
LC: It sounds sort of like a group consensus, but how did the idea of no splicing tape come about?
You know what? I really don't know. The same kind of consensus was taken on echo or reverb. When we did Songs in the Key of Life there really wasn't reverb but we had echo chambers. Actually in the end we did have reverb, the first EMT-250 in the country. It cost something like $20,000 dollars. We had decided we would use as little reverb as possible though, so on that record it was really just room sounds and distant micing techniques that just added up.
LR: What drove you to mic the horns on "Sir Duke" with the horns facing the wall?
We were after a very particular sound and I had a friend, who is now the head of Infinity speakers, he had a stereo shop and he said, "Hey, you gotta try these microphones." I thought, "Oh yeah — right, in a stereo store they're going to have really great microphones." I was on my way to New York, we were going to work there for awhile, and so he said, "Take one with you and try it out." It was a microphone on a long thin aluminum shaft and the capsule was at the end — it was omni-directional and it had a little power supply with a volume control on it. We were doing a session and I set it up on an acoustic guitar — I thought, "Y'know, we'll try it and see what it does." We put it on there and it was unbelievable. It was like you had already put beautiful EQ and gorgeous echo on it all at once — you didn't have to do anything to it. Eventually we thought, "Well shit, lets try it for vocals." And that's what we did. Tried it on vocals and it was brilliant. I had noticed that when horn players, especially sax players, were warming up would always walk up to a wall and play facing against it. So I stood there to hear what it is they're hearing and they're hearing kind of this backwash of sound and it fills out what they're hearing. Otherwise I guess they really just hear a lot of the reed in their mouth and resonance.
LR: You had a great wall there at Crystal too.
It was a big plaster wall in back. So we decided we'll mic them as we normally do, from the front, but then we'll use two of these 419Zs, these mics were made by a company that builds radio telescopes, and mic them from behind with the mics pointed at the wall. .
LR: There is a really distinct sound on those horns, I remember hearing them when I was a kid and just thinking, "Wow". Do you still have any of those mics?
Yeah, I still have two. We wanted more of them and we finally tracked down the guy who made them and of course there were no more to be had. He did have a couple of capsules and he put them into aluminum poles for Stevie, but I have the originals. I need to have the power supplies worked on, but man, they were amazing. You'd put your fingers up in front of them and just barely rub them together and these mics would catch every line of your finger prints as they met the other. You'd put them on piano and they were just unbelievable. In "Village Ghetto Land" we used them [stereo] on vocals and , you know? [laughs] They remind of the really high quality Earthworks mics.
LC: Like a fixed-charge electret type condenser?
Yeah. Incredible. They didn't make that many. They also made this little pickup called the Buffalo. It was glued to a buffalo-head nickel and you'd use this kind of special wax and you'd stick it on the guitar. They were cool but not as great as the 419s. One of the great things about working on that album was the amount of freedom the engineers had to try different things. If we thought we could come up with a more interesting sound, we had that freedom to say, "Stevie, let's try this..." We'd turn cymbals upside down and load it down with nuts and bolts. If we thought a different drum set would sound good on a song we'd get one down there and try it. He was open to most suggestions. Not all of them though.
LR: What things was he stubborn about?
Certain things he'd lay on tape in a particular order that didn't make sense to me. He'd already hear it as a complete song. He'd lay strange harmonies and you'd be like, "I don't know..." and he'd tell you to shut up — he had it sketched out in his head and to just wait. Doubling vocals was pretty much useless because he could double a vocal so perfectly you couldn't even tell it was there. As far as being a studio professional, I've never worked with anyone as in their element as Stevie. There are lots of bands that are great, they play great, sing great, but you get them in the studio and they are kind of lost. They don't know how to 'work the mic', and Stevie just has all the nuances down. He knows how to control everything in the studio. He is a brilliant man.
LC: How do you feel about the 24 bit re-mastered reissue of Songs in the Key of Life? Does it sound right to you?
I think they did an incredible job. I was so impressed I had to look up who did it and I called him and told him he did a great job. He didn't really fuck with it. I was afraid that they would do what they do with a lot of re-mastering jobs which is that they compress it, pump it up and make it 'pop'. It's not a "2000 pop" record, it was a 1976 gem, you know? You should leave it alone, and they did a great job doing that. They listened to a lot of old masters and pressings and just did a great job.
LC: We were listening to that Bill Withers live CD the other day and you were, "What the hell did they do to this?"
Yeah. I mean, I think what happens with the reissues is the guys who get that job are not the guys that do the great mastering jobs. All they know is 'turn the compressor on and let her rip' and then they EQ it to their taste — which is like an assembly line kind of setting. You should just leave them alone. They sounded good the first time around and there was different equipment back then. What I'd mix now I might not have then, so I'd just leave it.
LR: Can you tell the "Joy Inside My Tears" story? Trying to nail a mix....
Part of it is, when you do a rough mix, for the most part, a lot of people just use the monitor section and add a little echo and the only thing in the chain is a fader. The sounds come off the tape really nicely, there are no transformers, no anything, it just goes on pure. When you transfer everything to a line input and start adding EQ and echo and whatever, it changes everything. We had a monitor mixer that was totally separate from the console and you would sit to the left of the console with your right ear facing the speaker so you weren't even facing the speakers. So anyway, I decided I wanted to mix "Joy Inside My Tears" and so . No EQ, nothing. Maybe a little echo and it sounded excellent. And we tried it with a bunch of EQ and this and that and it just wasn't as good. So ever since then I've been a real proponent of as little tweaking as possible. Unless you are looking for a particular effect. Just normal sounds. It's all about a good mic selection and placement. A decent preamp and you are set.
LR: You end up with a lot more of the natural timbre of the instruments.
Analog EQ has a lot of phase shift in it, so when you start adding all the different mics, like on a drum kit, each one is interacting with the other one and bleeding, unless you gate it all to death, which hopefully we're over (re: the '80s). I just find you get a lot of cancellation and for me it's defeating. For a lot of guys, they use 2 or 3 channels of EQ and get what they want. I just don't seem to be able to do that. I just get in trouble. You know, I've been using Royers [R-121 ribbon mic] on overheads and I find they are really tolerant of other microphones. Ribbon mics just aren't 'phasey' like a cardiod mic has phase problems. You just don't get that with the Royers. I think what happens is you get a sound, or you hear it in your head, and you go for it and in the end, like you've said in your articles, "Don't look at the knob and try and think", just grab it and go for it.
LR: When did you open Crystal and what events lead you to opening your own studio?
When I came in it was already open. Andrew Berliner had built a studio. He built the console and my friend, Chris Houston, recommended the studio to me. I was going to do the first Carole King album Writer. And he said, "Oh, we've been using Crystal to do Eric Burden and War". And I said, "Okay, I'll go over there and give it a try", and I never left. It was comfortable. At the time I wasn't really an engineer but after doing some production I realized that maybe it was a good idea to know what the engineers were doing so that you could tell them what to do.
LR: How did you end up producing?
I was friends with Carole King and I started doing her demos for the publishing house. We started doing these really crazy things on tape and it all happened from there. I had this bright idea, my friend James Taylor was making an album for Apple, and I thought maybe Carole ought to be a singer/songwriter. She was with a group called The City and they had just made an album and it was kind of over. So we went to Lou Adler and he said to go ahead and make a record and that's how Writer came to be.
LC: So you ended up working with Andrew? In the '70s it wasn't too uncommon to make your own console.
At that time you could build a much better console than you could buy — quieter, better features and just overall better built. Audio had gotten behind a bit and then the '70s brought forth a slew of home studios, and the record company studios weren't as in use. Younger artists didn't really want to work with union engineers that were 65 years old. They wanted to work with their peers. End of the '60s start of the '70s — the young kids were hippies and they didn't want to work with someone straight. [laughs] All of a sudden there was all this new gear, solid state, computers, and that really changed everything. Not for mixing but for things like reverb. All of a sudden you could have an EMT-250. Which originally you couldn't send to a communist-block country because they were the fastest computers in the world. We started off with a Scully 8-track, then an Ampex MM1000 (master muncher) which we got rid of for a 3M, and then the 3M gave way to Studers in '72.
LR: What year did you join Crystal?
1970. All the way thru to the end. I was full partner. It was fun to own a studio back then. To own a major studio today is really difficult. First of all it is truly big business, you have to be a really great businessman and bring in all the different kinds of work you can. Most studios can't survive on just recording music. You have to do post-production, jingles, whatever they can do to survive. We had a lot of great musicians come through Crystal. Hit after hit after hit. All the Motown stuff, Reo Speedwagon, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, all kinds of music. On top of Stevie, who is a lot of hours.
LR: I noticed in the documentary with Stevie [on making 'Songs in the Key of Life'] the board broke down. Was it as touchy then?
In the video it was 20 years old. You let something with faders and pots sit around they go bad. The capacitors get screwed up and in the end it didn't work. But the Dream Machine works perfectly.
LR: This thing was just huge, like as big as a wall or something?
You should have seen the speaker cabinets with it — they were 6 feet tall.
LR: Who built that?
Yamaha. It looked like a big organ and it had 3 manuals on top plus a glissando ribbon and pedals. But it was a synthesizer, not really an organ. They imported 3 into the country before the union bitched so much that they had to stop. They were $50,000 in 1974. That was a lot of money, but it was worth it because all of a sudden you had a polyphonic instrument, which we hadn't had before. We had to do a lot of tracking and bouncing before we got it and it was just brutal. Then we got Dream Machine and all of a sudden it was so much easier. This thing was just great, it had a keyboard on it that was pressure sensitive, velocity sensitive, and you could move the keys from side to side to get vibrato. Plus it had one of the best rhythm machines going at the time.
