One of your earliest jobs was working for Bob Weinstock at Prestige Records. I know you visited various studios back then, including Rudy Van Gelder's place in Englewood, NJ.
Rudy Van Gelder [Tape Op #43] was the first engineer I had the privilege of watching in a studio. He was amazing and the sounds he put on tape were beautiful. I worked with Frank Laico, Fred Catero, Larry Keyes, Don Puluse and others at Columbia. Bob Fine and George Piros at Fine Recording were amazing too — same with Bob Auger in London. All of these people knew their studios and knew how to get great sounds. The guys in Nashville were terrific too. They were brilliant at getting basic guitar and rhythm section sounds. There was a lot of stuff that they were doing that was very foreign to what I had grown to like in New York and London. In the early days, Nashville, Philadelphia and Detroit recordings often had a tremendous amount of compression and massive amounts of echo. Sometimes the levels on tape were either too low or too high — I love distinctive records and am not worried about how other people make records. I started engineering my own records at Cinderella Sound in Madison, Tennessee, partly because Wayne Moss, who owned the studio, was playing guitar on those records. In other studios it was easier for me to move a mic or change something on the console than to explain it to the engineer on the session. I do not want the process to get in the way of the music. That is a big part of my producing effort. New York players worked three- hour sessions, but they were jazz and classical players playing pop and rock. It was so easy for them to do that. In Nashville, many were country players doing folk rock or rock. Often it was a stretch. We cut a famous Beatles tune and one of the soloists told me after the take that he had never heard the Beatles' version. On the other hand, the Nashville players loved learning new stuff. Some of them came from an R&B background. Kenny Buttrey, Charlie McCoy, Wayne Moss, Mac Gayden, David Briggs and Norbert Putnam all had played R&B and rock. Charlie McCoy and the Escorts were an amazing rock/R&B band. I spent most of my time in the studio — not in the control room. I do not like being in the control room during recording sessions. I like being with the band. It gives me a sense of who they are, a sense of what they need in order to get a great performance.
From an artistic and musical standpoint as opposed to a technological standpoint?
There's a sign over Neil Young's studio that says, "Be great or be gone." I think Tim Mulligan put that up years ago. Tim's been with Neil for many, many years doing wonderful work for him. Getting a great take of a cool song is most important. But my goal is to record as much stuff as possible live in the studio. We often fix and replace stuff, but to me one has to capture the essence of the song in the best way possible. The easiest way of doing this is to make the original session as complete sounding as possible. Neil Young records everything live in the studio. If the engineer distorts his voice and the take is great otherwise, the song could be released with the distorted voice. People like "serial recording," and there are wonderful records made that way as well. For me, rule number one is that there are no rules.
Was Cinderella Sound your first session in Nashville?
I had done a record in Nashville in '63 at the Quonset Hut [Columbia Studio A, originally owned by Owen and Harold Bradley]. I was helping produce Trío Los Panchos for Columbia. That is where I first met the Nashville guys. I worked with the "A-Team" at that time. A lot of my evolution to engineering happened at Cinderella Sound. I produced Linda Ronstadt, Jake Holmes, Ken Lauber and we did Area Code 615 there. Wayne Moss, a phenomenal guitar picker, built Cinderella Sound, which was a two car garage in Madison, Tennessee — right around the corner from Colonel Parker's house [Elvis' Manager]. Cinderella came equipped with an Aunt Lucy, who made great iced tea and food. That was my second introduction to Bill Putnam's [Universal Audio, Tape Op #24] gear, which I still use today. The 610 mic preamps have been on almost every record that I've ever done — as mic preamps and to color mixes. Wayne had a 12x3 Bill Putnam console feeding an 8-track. The control room was about the size of a couch with tiny speakers, and the rest of the garage was the "live room." Wayne and Kenny Buttrey built the drum area. I don't know what kind of mics they used on the drums, but the sound was amazing!
Quadrafonic Studios, from what I read, was a two-story Victorian house.
My partners bought the house for a small amount of money and then gutted it. The ceiling was the regular ceiling. The control room was the old porch. The living room and the dining room became the two live rooms, and the kitchen became a drum area.
Sometimes old houses are wonderful- sounding just the way they are.
It was magical. I don't recall when the house that became Quadrafonic Sound Studios was built, but it was in the early 1900s. We used a carpenter who had worked with Owen Bradley and had built the Quonset Hut and Bradley's Barn. The drum area at Bradley's Barn was like a gazebo in the middle of the studio with a little roof on top of it — it was a fantastic sounding studio. The Who worked there. Pete's amps were so loud that they had to put him outside. Quadrafonic had a similar drum area — we were lucky to have had such an experienced carpenter build our studio. Troy Seals, an amazing singer/writer, helped to build Quad as well.
You've been very fortunate to have produced and engineered some true rock legends.
Producing is mostly about knowing what you want to achieve and being able to achieve it. The good news is that it takes no technical skill or experience to produce a hit record. With a vision, a song and the musicians, one can find an engineer who can do the technical stuff. I too learn from magazines like Tape Op and from listening to recorded and live music, but when it comes to making a record I try to find the best engineer for the project.
Tell me more about your work with Neil Young.
It's incredibly thrilling to work with someone like Neil Young. He and I have been friends since 1971. I have a call with him scheduled for later today to talk about Blu-ray. Neil's developed a platform for his archive called "The Shaky Platform". It affords him something he's always wanted — to give the consumer the ability to look at his archive in a linear way and click chronologically to hear great versions of songs — hear how "Down By the River" sounded in 1967, or hear how it sounded in 1974 or hear how it sounded when he played it with Booker T. & the MGs in 1981. Neil and I love technology and history, so we're always thinking about these kinds of things. What's interesting about my relationship with Neil is not how I see it or how Neil sees it, but how the outside world sees it. I don't control that, of course. I used to say I had five names — "Elliot 'Neil Young's Producer' Mazer" — which was incredibly flattering, but also limiting. I have a whole world of other stuff that I'm interested in and love doing, and Neil's made many wonderful records with other people. If you go to England, there's a lot of other stuff that people there know me for, more than they know my work with Neil. They love the Janis Joplin work I did. I still work on her catalog.
In the early '70s you did a bunch of freelancing in the U.K.
I like England because of the unique way things sound over there. Studios are different. Engineers are different. Eventually it all melded and created what I don't like, which is "McRecord" — but back then you'd go into a studio in London and they would use different mics and different techniques. They sounded like British records. If you were working on a record over there and here, you'd have to tweak it a little bit to make the finished product sound cohesive. In America people were used to placing mics in the right place, but at British studios they had a lot of the same mics and if they didn't sound right they just put a tremendous amount of EQ on the track — which is one of the reasons that Trident EQs or Neve EQs always had plus or minus fifteen dB. American EQs had plus or minus eight. That's why SSL consoles became so popular. They had many, many channels of EQ. It was more of a non-literal way of making records in Britain — at least then. In a lot of British studios you would see about 25 U67s and maybe one Shure mic or one Beyerdynamic. If you listen to an Elton John album, it's a really wonderful sounding record, but it's not a literal recording of his voice and piano. It's highly processed stuff, and it sounds amazing! Beatles records — the same thing.
I read that Harvest had no compression of any kind?
That is correct — no compression on the original recordings or in the mix. At least one of the songs on Harvest is from a live 2-track we ran during the sessions.
It sounds very real. It's not processed or changed in any way.
It's an in-your-face kind of recording. It's honest and it doesn't hide behind anything. And it creates a sonic mood. The incredible dynamics of that band with Kenny Buttrey were absolute magic. Kenny was a very talented drummer and a wonderful person — he passed away a few years ago. He defined a lot of how I think about music and how I think about drums and rhythm sections. He played on a huge number of my records and we were friends for years. His playing with Neil is amazing. Neil was very specific about what he wanted. When Neil Young plays a song, his body language dictates everything about the arrangement. Neil sat in the control room of Quadrafonic and played "Heart of Gold". Kenny and I looked at each other, and we both knew it was a number one record. He and I talked about it years ago. We heard the song and all we had to do was move Neil into the studio and get the band out there, start the machine and make it sound good. It was incredible! At one point on another song, Neil said to Kenny that his hi-hat was too busy, so Kenny said, "Fine. I'll sit on my right hand." He played the whole take sitting on his right hand.
From Quad you moved to San Francisco and opened a studio called His Master's Wheels.
Neil gave me that name. The His Master's Wheels truck landed at Neil's ranch years ago. It houses Neil's tape restoration system, which is engineered by John Nowland, who worked for HMW as well. The San Francisco studio was in Pacific High Studios. The Dead had worked there and Alembic's guitar store was in front. The live room was 50 feet wide by 38 feet deep. The ceiling was 14 to 16 feet. The acoustics were amazing! We had skylights in the studio. Crosby and Nash recorded their "[To the Last ]Whale" song there, but had trouble with low frequency noise from a train track a half mile away. We did a lot of great records there with CSNY, The Grateful Dead, The Tubes, Frankie Miller and Sheryl Milnes.
You also became involved around that time in The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where they developed the technologies that led to Sonic Solutions, FM Synthesis and the Yamaha DX7.
That experience tremendously changed my understanding of technology. There's a guy there named Max Matthews who, when he was at Princeton, figured out the use of the Nyquist formula for digital audio.
You also were also instrumental in developing a technology called AirCheck.
My first attempt at making a label was in the early '80s. I had a distribution deal with Columbia and I was sitting in an office one day in New York when I heard an argument between a guy and a label person on the phone. They were saying, "Your song wasn't on the radio and therefore we shouldn't ship any records to St. Louis (or wherever it was)." He hung up and I said, "You mean nobody knows what's on the radio?" He said, "No." I said, "You're kidding. All this money is spent and all these marketing efforts are put out and nobody knows if there's any demand?" He said, "No." I developed a system called AirCheck with some friends. We sold it to a company in New York called RCS that I was also part of for many years. Clear Channel now owns it. That technology is still in use. It monitors radio and television using a sonic signature — fingerprint technology.
In the mid-eighties you were an audio consultant for Apple Computer. What did you do there?
Here's a funny story. They said they had a problem because the audio coming out of the Macs themselves was terrible — you know, just the speaker. I went to Ed Long, a speaker designer who did all the time align stuff, and we looked at the situation and figured out what it would cost them to make the best sound, considering the size of the available space and what Apple could build amplifier- and speaker-wise. They asked me for my presentation, so I stood up and faced the wall. I said quietly, "Put the speaker in the front of the computer." Nobody heard me. I said it again. Finally, the VP of engineering stood up and turned around and said, "The son of a bitch said, 'Put the speaker in the front of the computer!'" Dave Nagel, who was then the senior tech guy at Apple said, "What does that mean?" I said, "Well, if the speaker is facing the ear, the intelligibility will be a lot better. The speaker will be away from the fan and the power supply — less noise." Half the people were thrilled and half of the people were pissed off. The next question was, "Where to put the microphone?" I said, "That's simple. Put it on the mouse." That would be the closest thing to the mouth, and if the person wanted it to sound better they could just lift up the mouse. The first Mac with the speaker in the front was the Macintosh IIfx. But they didn't go for the mic on the mouse.
You moved on from being a studio owner at some point?
I know what happened. About four years after we started His Master's Wheels, I enjoyed the studio, but it was too much business responsibility for me. I didn't like that I was spending a lot of time taking care of business. I liked that bands such as The Tubes and The Grateful Dead would book the studio for six or eight months at a time, and I'd be off making my records in London or somewhere else.
Double the bang for your buck!
Yeah, and at that point I felt that the most important thing I did as a professional was to produce records. Having studios was a means to that end — not an end in and of itself. Around that time I was involved with the Bay Area Music Archives, and I was on various committees and groups. I was also involved with the film industry — I had a lot of friends at Lucasfilm and Dolby. I also watched Silicon Valley invent itself and grow up. Friends from CCRMA became very successful in business, while I had completely let that go by — which is fine, because I still don't necessarily see myself sitting in a high rise building in Santa Clara running a technology company. What happened was I had a chance to think about things. I decided I was going to do other things in addition to making records.
You made a conscious decision to branch out.
Yeah. The '80s was a weird time for the music business — not as weird as it is now, but there was the major push of the CD as a new technology, which meant rehashing and putting out reissues of mediocre versions of great records that didn't sound as good as the originals.
Does the audiophile still exist today, or is this a dying breed?
The audiophile breed is disappearing. They mostly don't listen to music anyway — they listen to sound. There are a few record labels that specialize in that market. They produce "high fidelity" recordings of music that sells equipment.
What is the correlation between recording quality and listener enjoyment?
Any improvement in the original recording process is obvious — even on that little twenty-dollar Samsung phone that you hear on the subway. I think that the better you make your recording, the better you are. The recording medium itself — be it a computer hard drive, be it a piece of tape — shouldn't influence the way the thing sounds. The message is the message, not the medium. It's my job to create media using whatever tools I have that will translate down to the lowest common listening experience and still be cool.
That's well put.
