You started off as a tape op at Olympic?
Yes, in 1967. My brother, Glyn, who was, like, the first freelance engineer in England, ended up doing a lot of work at Olympic and got me an interview there. I was lucky to start off at Olympic because it was extremely popular with rock 'n' roll bands. In the course of a week there would be sessions with Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix, Manfred Mann, Mick Jagger producing something. At the same time during the day there would be orchestral sessions because they did a lot of movie soundtracks. I learned a lot from that, too.
Did you move quickly to engineering?
Yes. Now it's awful. I see guys now — they're janitors, then they're assistant engineers after a year or something and then they can stay doing that forever and ever and ever. Back when I started it was, "Hello", sit in on a session and then in two days they were putting you on dates. There wasn't as much to know back then and the engineer did a lot of the patching and stuff, where nowadays assistant engineers really do everything, which is fine with me! So, as soon as they saw you could get away with it, they'd put you on sessions as an engineer. Back then when new clients called up they wouldn't ask for a specific engineer, they'd just book time. They would show up and you would say, "Hello my name is __ and I'm your engineer," and they were none the wiser. Then, if you impressed them they would ask for you again. So, because the competition wasn't very strong back then, within a year of me starting to do engineer sessions I had a pretty solid clientele. I had already done some pretty big bands — Blind Faith and Humble Pie — so I was able to go out on my own and make a little bit of money, which was great at 19 years old — to have some cash. At 19 you don't have any responsibilities, but then I spent 360 days of the year in the studio!
So you didn't have much social life...
The only people I met were people at the studio. In fact, my first wife, I married her because she was about the only girl I saw for two years! She was the receptionist at a studio, so that's how glamorous it all was!
It's funny you say that, because one could credit you and your brother for making engineering a glamour profession!
Well, let's not forget Uncle Eddie Kramer as well! He made sure that he was noted. When I came along they had just started putting the engineer's name on album covers. Because, as much as anything, of Sgt. Pepper's... The general public realized there was a lot of hocus-pocus that went on in the studio and it kind of validated that part of the profession, and you got your name on the record and you didn't have to ask. But I used to like to get my picture on, too, if possible. That's how awful I was back then!
Did you meet Eddie Kramer at Olympic?
Eddie Kramer sort of trained me on the Axis: Bold as Love sessions. And he was somewhat of a taskmaster. But I learned a lot from him. Eddie is very clever.
Now, did you work on Physical Graffiti together?
Well, no.
You're both in the credits...
The reason I'm on there is probably the reason Eddie is too. They [Led Zeppelin] were working with Ron Nevison at this point. I'd had my falling out with them but there was stuff left over from previous sessions. There were two or three tracks that were credited to me as engineer but they were probably from the third or fourth album. Maybe they did work with Eddie in New York.
I heard a rumor you did a mix of Tommy at the age of 19.
No, I'd been actually engineering things for about three months and I hadn't got a clue. Kit Lambert shows up wanting me to mix "Pinball Wizard". I put the tape up and it didn't sound very good. The studio that I worked at, you know, sometimes the tape didn't sound very good because sometimes you take a tape from one place to another and its not compatible. So I put Tommy up and it didn't sound very good and I said, "This is ghastly work! Who did this? I can do much better. Bring the band tomorrow and we'll see what a real engineer can do!" or something dreadful like that. [laughs] And they showed up the next day, and it was the worst session I've ever done. I couldn't get a sound on fucking anything! It was a total and utter nightmare. And then it started snowing and we all got snowed in. While we were waiting for them to dig us out, I was the butt of all the jokes. So that was a good learning experience about ego and how you shouldn't do things when you don't know what you're talking about! I did little bits with them later — Keith Moon liked me so he'd row me in on a few things — but The Who were my brother's territory.
But you worked with your brother a lot.
Yeah, there were several albums from about '69-'73. I would do some and he would do some. That's how it was back then.
What kind of gear are we talking about in the Olympic era?
In 67-69 it went from 4-track to 8-track, then by '71 everyone had 16-track and the theory then was, "Golly gee, with all these extra tacks there's going to be a lot more tape noise," so everyone bought Dolby. No one had really thought the problem through, of course. You don't really get more tape noise with extra tracks because it means for each track you add you turn the others that much down. After one or two projects we threw the Dolby away. The best thing about Olympic is we had this guy Dick Swettenham who built their mixers and later started the company Helios. He built these absolutely brilliant mixers. It was the first time you saw mixers that you would recognize as the basic format for a mixer these days. Simple stuff that you wouldn't think was that innovative. Back then having a pan pot on every channel was a big deal.
It was all left, right, center.
Yeah, or you don't use two channels, I mean stereo. Really, people didn't mix much in stereo to start with. That was because people didn't have stereo systems. So it was L-R-C and if you wanted to pan something, they gave you a pan pot. I'll never forget at Sunset Sound mixing Zeppelin stuff and I said, "Excuse me, I need to pan something." And the guy went, "Oh, hang on," and he got on the phone and said, "Bring Andy the pan pot"! [laughs] And they brought this thing in the size of a woman's handbag, very proudly, a big knob on a gurney, and presented it! So yeah, he had inserts on every channel, you could EQ the midrange — unheard of! And it was all laid out ergonomically, very pleasantly, and it all sounded great.
Your first Stones record was Sticky Fingers?
Gee, it's such a long time ago. Some of that stuff was from Muscle Shoals and I mixed it. And some were Glyn's recordings and I mixed it and then I recorded four or five songs on there, the more rock 'n' roll things. "Moonlight Mile" I remember I recorded because it was the Stones' truck and I did the very first sessions on the truck [RSM] — that was about halfway through the album.
Glyn had been doing it for longer than you had. Did you feel sort of like Mycroft Holmes?
Well, yes. It was always, "Well, hello you're Glyn's younger brother," and that went on forever and ever. Now I'm 52, I don't get that so much. But that was one of the reasons I was more comfortable working over here, because it was, "Hello, you're Andy Johns," not "Hello you're Glyn's little brother." Because after a few years I got fed up with that. I was doing pretty good work on my own and it wasn't a case of 'Screw Glyn' but, you know, "Screw you."
Had you yet developed a particular way you liked to record a band back then or was it more dictated situationally?
Well, I suppose I knew which microphones I wanted to use. And, from very early on I liked experimenting with different surface areas and getting things livened up, because what people were doing back then — which was pretty silly — was building things deader, deader and deader. With the theory being, "Wow, we got all this great new gear, we can get the sound with the gear," which is totally ridiculous. Because the sound doesn't come out of the mixer, the sound comes out of the room.
So they'd baffle more and you'd have to work harder to get tones.
Yes. I was happy to do this thing with the Stones' truck because that was big education for me and I got to do my first album in a house as opposed to a studio. The house that we used, Stargroves, was ideally suited because it was a big mansion and a kind of grand hall with a gallery around with bedroom doors and a staircase. Big fireplace, big bay window — you could put Charlie in the bay window. Off the main hall there were other rooms you could put people in. We did stuff like "Bitch" there, and you can hear on "Moonlight Mile" when , it sounds very live, because it was! Four or five in the morning, with the sun about to come up, getting takes. It was all very heady stuff for a young chap!
And you continued on with them, including going to the south of France to do Exile on Main Street.
Yes, that was actually pretty soon after finishing that record.
Well, tell us about Exile... by all means!
That record changed the way I thought about things. Up until that point I was extremely fast — that was one of the qualities people admired. If they could do a run through with five or six or eight pieces and you had your sound by the end of their run through, because you never know — "They-may-never-get-it- the-same-again-and-they're-artists," and all that — so, I was very quick, BUT Exile... actually took a year. I grew up as a person and was less intimidated by the musicians and all that, and I started taking my own sweet time a bit more after Exile...
Jimmy Miller was producing.
Jimmy Miller was the one that got me in with the Stones.
What would he do?
Jimmy, when he first worked with the Stones, had some cool ideas, especially as far as getting grooves — that was Jimmy' s forte. He would play a percussion instrument on the basic track to get Charlie in the pocket and he was quite innovative. I learned from Jimmy about getting tracks that felt great. And he also was very interested in getting new and different sounds. As it went on with the Stones, they started listening to him less and less and in time he got shoved to the side and it fucked him up. Because you sit in the room day after day with people who treat you as if you are unimportant, it will get to you after a while.
Of course.
He wasn't going to leave the gig because it was so prestigious but it got to old Jimmy and it didn't get to me because I could be whatever I wanted with them. I could sit there and take the abuse or I could tell them to get fucked or I could come up with ideas or not participate for two or three days and then participate.
They did a lot of arranging in the studio?
Yeah, they would come in with just an idea.
A lot of people would say those Stones records from Beggars Banquet to Exile... are it. That's the best run.
They were doing the blues-based rock 'n' roll troubadour thing then, which is my favorite form of music to start with, so, yeah, being on the sessions for what ended up being a little over three or four years. I couldn't have been happier, especially because Mick Taylor was perfect for them. He was just a marvel.
Yes!
Also, after a little while I got my sea legs with them and they'd let me make fairly solid suggestions to them even as far as with the material and stuff. It was a good learning experience for me after I got over the fact that they were The Rolling Stones. It prepared me for later on when I started producing exclusively.
What a lot of new producers lack are the people skills — getting the performances out of the artist.
Well, that's an acquired art. When I was a kid I thought, "Oh, you have to be such a psychiatrist." Well, it's not true. If there's something wrong in the arrangement you just have to figure it out and then you have to quite quickly explain it. Like the drummer or someone, if you're trying to change his figure. If it doesn't work then you look like a bit of a chump, but it's only rock 'n' roll, you know, and it's fairly obvious what it should be! So once you've done that once or twice, you've now gained the man's confidence, because it makes him sound better — it makes everything sound better and, you know, off we go! So you don't start by taking huge risks the first few days. I learned a lot of that from watching Jimmy and then by the time we go to Jamaica to do the Goats Head Soup record, I'd gotten to know all of them fairly well. I was spending a lot more time with Mick and Keith while they were sitting fiddling around writing things. I was really watching that stuff so I was able to get a bit more creative on my end instead of just putting an amplifier up a chimney or something! [laughs]
How long did you work with Led Zeppelin?
Zep II, there were two or three songs I did the basic tracks for and some overdubs and then they came back and wanted to do a third album. I'd known Jimmy Page since I was about 14 or 15. Now, according to Jimmy, the third album [III] was done all over the place, when in fact the whole thing was done at studio 2 at Olympic. I remember for sure, then I got them to go to Island where we did the mixes. And that went pretty well. They used to work very quickly. So, we had done the third album, which was received okay, you know — some people liked it, some people didn't. There are some good things on there. And then I got the call to do the fourth album ["Zoso..."], and I had used the Stones' truck on several things, so I suggested to Jimmy that we go to Mick's house, Stargroves, and use the Stones' truck. When we found out that Mick would actually charge for the house as well as the truck Jimmy says, "No, no, no. I can find somewhere a lot cheaper than that," and we ended up at this other place, Headly Grange, which was a great place, too. That's where I got the "When the Levee Breaks" drum sound.
Ah. One of the biggest legends in drum sounds. Two Beyer M160s?
Correct! Two M160s.
But... it's the drummer, not the gear?
Well, I don't mind taking some credit for it. Bonzo, the way he tuned his kit — it sounded fabulous. And you would stand next to Bonham and wonder, "How can I get this damn sound?" But even if you got a good drum sound in the more formal approach, oh well, yeah, you knew it was alright, but you knew he wasn't particularly blown away, because it wasn't as good as if you stood in the room with him. I'd been experimenting with distant mic'ing by this time but there was really no way to get the drums in a separate room where you could get the mics a distance back from them. Where are the other musicians going to go? I hadn't figured that out yet. And at Headly Grange we started recording in the main living room downstairs where they could all fit. And we got a couple of things in there, the "Rock and Roll" song and some other stuff, but outside when you walked in the front door there was the main hallway, which was square, more or less, and there were three floors and stairways going up to landings. A bit like a hotel. They went to go to the pub or something and I asked Bonzo, "Can you stay behind? Let's put your drums out in this hallway." "Oh, okay," and I got a couple of M160s and out the steps up the first staircase, and then just compressed those and we had a Binson Echorec, which Jimmy Page had brought, which is like...
A drum and wire echo unit...
You know about them, they're great! And I just put some of that on Bonzo and brought it up in the compressor as well, and bingo! And I thought, 'Fucking hell. He's really going to like this, this is really something!' 'Cause really, we had never heard anything like that before and everyone came in and was very excited, but the funny thing is that it didn't occur to me back then that I should do this all the time, even though it worked so well! And I didn't start using room mics all the time until years later, because then they went on to do "Kashmir", which Page obviously mixed the sound, and fair enough. Why not? It worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the song we were doing wasn't that tempo where the compressor is breathing with the room sound. It wasn't until the middle '70s that I realized you should put up some room mics and figure a way to get the amps out of the room.
Which compressors were you using on "...Levee"?
The board compressors, the Helios ones. Lovely compressors. So there you go, that's the story of "....Levee Breaks".
Your work has a very natural sound. It wears well. A lot of modern recordings don't. They are too fatiguing to listen to over and over. Did you set out with a specific sound in your head you always tried to get, or is your style more an evolved product of the way you were taught to do things?
Well, I suppose it's just the way I like to hear stuff because in those days no one really taught you to do anything — the only lessons you really got were making the musicians happy. A lot of the situations I was in, there was no producer — there was the band and there was me. And my job was just to keep them happy and obviously you want to keep yourself happy as well. You're not doing it just for money or because it's better than watching TV, you're doing it because you love to do it. The engineering thing was mostly something I fell into, anyway, it wasn't something I set out to do — I was going to be a rock star like everyone else! And just working in the studio I thought would be a good stepping stone, meeting a lot of musicians, and I started doing some engineering and all of a sudden people wanted to work with me. So I didn't set out to learn any stuff or read any books, I just kind of picked it up, you know? And as far as the thing sounding natural I suppose it's because I've always liked rock 'n' roll bands, so my idea, even if I've done a lot of overdubs and put a lot of things on the tracks, is really to integrate them so it sounds like you're at the best rehearsal the band ever did. Just like one big lovely noise.
Instruments sound like instruments and it sounds like people are playing them...
Yes! People playing as opposed some fucking sample repeating itself over and over.
It's sad that some people will grow up never having heard that "people playing" sound.
Yeah, it's good for me, though. It means the competition's thinning out! [laughs]
You worked with Rod Stewart when he had come to America. Now, the Faces' records seem to have a very English sensibility, particularly in their sense of humor and looseness. Is it fair to say he was trying to Americanize his sound?
Well, he hooked up with Tom Dowd. And Tom took him to — I don't know what studios they did that shit in — but Tom was a very American producer and he had musicians he liked to use, so that Atlantic Crossing album was basically Rod Stewart meets Tom Dowd and his buddies. But when I first worked with Rod...
...Foot Loose & Fancy Free?
Yeah, that's probably right. Rod got me in specifically because he wanted to get the sound that I got and told Dowd to leave me alone. Rod sits me and Dowd down in a room and says to Tom, "I don't want you interfering with Andy," which was, "Thank you very much, Rod," because I had admired Tom's work for years and I'd met him all over the place and "Mr. Dowd" I called him almost, you know? So, obviously Tom, who had the ego the size of a fucking house, didn't like that much, but he shut up about it for a couple of years. And I was lucky because I learned a hell of a lot about arranging from Tom. He was just brilliant at it. I learned from Tom that if there's a problem, all you've got to do is sit down and keep bearing away at it, and you can figure out what it is. So thank you very much, Mr. Dowd! So Rod wanted me there because he wanted the more raucous rock 'n' roll-type sound that I would get, and by this time he had an English band, except for Carmine [Appice] and the bass player...
...Phil Chen?
Yes, who was Chinese-Jamaican but was really from England. So the humor and the practical jokes — which sometimes almost got out of hand — I enjoyed all that because I had been working with Americans all the time, now it was fun to hang out with the limeys now and again and have a bit of a booze up and play some practical jokes on each other. You know, humiliate people and bring them to tears, you know, that sort of fun!
