How did you get the bug that this might be something you'd like to do?
I took a class through The Free School in Boulder, Colorado, which was kind of like The New School [in NYC]. The class was in modern recording techniques. The book called Modern Recording Techniques (by Robert Runstein) was the manual. After I took that class somebody that was involved with it knew of a job in this studio — I think maybe one of the classes might have actually been at this particular studio in Denver. I was offered a job through them, and I quit school to take it. I remember lying awake that night thinking about it — I had moved from New York to Boulder to establish residency to go to college, and I had just started.
You must have really felt a connection with it to do that.
Well, I was a math guy a little bit in school, but once I got to the college level I knew that I could be a math teacher, if I was lucky. I really had just gotten involved in hearing music on that kind of level. The idea of making it seemed like a great career thing, and like a lot of fun. I guess I could have easily been a roadie. I was in this 8-track studio for two years — from '76 to '78 — and it was really about
learning, editing, voiceovers, some jingles and being quick. It was a great experience. Paul Vastola was the chief engineer. I was his assistant, and he was a great teacher.
You were doing razor-blade edits?
It was a 1-inch, 8-track Ampex 440. We had an Ampex 440 2-track for stereo, but we had a mono [deck]- I think it was a 350 or 351, with the medal headgate with the little knob on it that you'd pull off. You learned how to align it — you would record to 1/4- inch, full-track mono. That's the best it gets, you know? I learned on that stuff. The summer of '78 I moved back to New York. In the late '70s there were no technical academies or schools to learn the basics of engineering — the only way to really learn was to do an internship. It was all about the particular studios and their pedigrees. There were famous studios in England, New York and Los Angeles that had unique sounds to them. What you hoped to do was catch on as an intern. The other way that I discovered was to go to the phone book, and that's what I did when I first moved back to New York. I started in the As, and AAA had no answer, and then A-1 [Sound Studios] answered, and I got in for an interview. A-1 was the studio of Herb Abramson — one of the founders of Atlantic Records. There was an echo chamber that was his daughter's bedroom. Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun had decided to part their ways, so he took the equipment and a couple of the R&B and comedy acts. A-1 Sound was on Broadway next to the Beacon Theater. I remember going there for the interview and seeing these tape boxes — Patti Smith and David Johansen — I had been getting into Talking Heads, who were my favorite band. It was a real cheap place after what I had been used to. People would pay in cash. I was at A-1 for about six weeks or so, as I realized what the heck was going on there. The tapes for Patti Smith and stuff were sort of an aberration. We did some crazy stuff recording and project-wise. Since the Talking Heads were one of my favorite groups, and their first record [Talking Heads: 77] was recorded [by the guys that started] Power Station, I looked up where that was and I went over to ask for a job. That was October of '78.
You walked into Tony Bongiovi's office to ask for a job?
I put on a white shirt and I went to Power Station. When the building had been bought, it was a Con Edison power station, so it's a huge concrete building with four or five levels. Tony Bongiovi and Lance Quinn
[the owners] were very involved with the productions and had a relationship with Sire Records and Seymour Stein, [so they did] that Talking Heads record, which I loved. I walked into Power Station at 53rd and 10th and up a flight of stairs — the main lobby was still under construction and the executive offices were up on the second floor.
Did they already have the two studios, or was it just Studio A?
They did have two, but B was still being worked on. A was the main room that had a Neve console and a beautiful, temple-like design of wood.
Were you applying for a job as an intern or as an engineer?
As an assistant. Even though I considered myself an engineer, I wanted to get in there. I had the same mentality that you have when you first start out, which is just, "Get me on a winning team and I'll take care of it."
And that turned out to be a pretty amazing team...
Bob Clearmountain was the chief engineer, and he was fantastic. Neil Dorfsman went on to win a Grammy as a producer and also an engineer. James Farber is still really active. He works mostly with jazz artists and he's great. But Tony Bongiovi — there's legend
around him. One of the ones that he liked to tell was that [at 17] he had written a letter to Motown telling them exactly how he knew what reverb they had made and how they had gotten certain sounds on records. Apparently they were so impressed with the knowledge of this kid that they flew him out to Detroit [in the summers], and he ended up mixing "Love Child" by The Supremes. I'll tell you one thing about Tony: he is an amazing mixer. I remember one of my earliest sessions at Power Station, when I was assisting him on a mix. He did a mix in about 10 minutes — with one echo chamber and one slapback echo — that sounded like "Bridge Over Troubled Water." It was the most unbelievable thing I'd ever heard.
Tony wouldn't spend more than an hour and-a-half on a mix.
Right — he had no patience. This place was built on that session philosophy, where it's like, cut two A-sides in a three-hour session. It was before the days of the long, crazy mixing sessions. The session that I had before the mix with Tony was to sit in with Bob Clearmountain and just observe. It was the recording of vocals for Sister Sledge, the album that Chic [Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers] produced, We Are Family. It was a song called "He's the Greatest Dancer." This was Studio B, so it was still kind of under construction. I was supposed to sit and be quiet, and I remember hearing that session and thinking, "This is what a hit record sounds like." I had never been in a situation like that before. Once the bar is set at a certain height, you can't think about going under it anymore. It was like, "I get it. It's gotta be this good." You don't have to convince somebody that this is major. Bob was engineering — Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards — it blew my mind. So I kept my mouth shut. It turned out a full staff engineer ended up getting sick [a short time later], and I took over the session. Then I stayed an engineer. I'd still get really nervous if I had to engineer something, and I'd make sure everything worked. I would get up for sessions like it was like a sporting event and get excited. I'd not be able to sleep the night before, because there were a lot of things riding on it. It was the big time. The clients that Power Station was getting were major league. As Woody Allen says, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." That opportunity is not really as available as much today for people that are breaking in. I had really great mentors and I really learned. I tried to do the job right and I wasn't a fuck up.
You did two mixes in three hours for The dB's [in 1980], and we were blown away by everything. We'd been recording at Blue Rock Studios [in Soho]. Tom Verlaine was recording and Clearmountain had mixed it and we thought, "That makes sense." We called Power Station and they said, "You can book time, but you'll have to pay $200 on top of the session fee [for Bob Clearmountain]." And we thought, "We're not going to give him $200, plus pay for the studio." They said, "Scott's really good."
Did that really happen? Bob did a few mixes that were world famous, and one of them was when Bob mixed the "Miss You" 12-inch for The Rolling Stones — the sound of that really captivated people. He had done "Good Times" for Chic — he was on fire. He had a great sound going, and it was undeniable. Those were the days before mixers had a manager or agent, so the studio's like, "We can get more for him." I think they were trying to break me as a mixer, too. They saw the good sense of having a number of people that were on staff that were really good. If that was 1980, I'd been there for over a year, and they liked my work.
In three hours you nailed two mixes that were never touched again.
It's funny that you say that, because the idea of mixing two songs in one session is lost now. In those days, if you had a certain amount of time and you wanted to try to get to two songs, you'd do the first one and then the next one you'd do in an hour. You go with your first instinct. If an effect is set up and you forgot to take it down and all of a sudden it's on there, it's like, "Whoa." You tend to go off on a tangent a little bit more in that situation, wouldn't you agree?
Yeah, I think it's great.
Those sounds still hold up.
One thing I remember is you would make the decision pretty quick that maybe there were a couple of tracks that were too out of tune or kind of crummy. So you'd cut them and it would really, really open things up.
That's a really good way to put it, because in a mixing situation that's very true. I never would have thought about that myself, but that's exactly what I do. It's breaking it down into bite-sized pieces. I think if you're putting something in a record that's obscuring, that it's covering up for something that's not right in something else. Getting into layering and all those sounds is not really my thing — maybe dating back to the 8-track days of getting it down into your hands. It's making sure your drums and bass and vocal are working and then going from there, filling in melodic instruments and stuff like that. I'll tell you, I've become much more conscious of tuning than I used to be.
I think you were always really good about that.
I grew up listening to WABC radio in New York, and it was The Supremes, The Beatles and Motown. You've got to imagine then going to work at Power Station, and with Chic, that you learn you've got to lay it back — don't rush. It's usually in the backbeat's hands. I really have prided myself on my records of it being kind of soulful. It had to lock and the bass had to be with the bass drum. When I [started] mixing you would learn to technically lock in the bass and the bass drum sonically — EQ- wise, arrangement-wise and everything. If you could make those two things sing together, you were on your way.
I remember you once telling me that Nile Rodgers used to say, "Once you get the bass and the vocal right, the rest takes care of itself."
It's the bass, but I don't know if it is anymore. Prince kind of dispelled that, because he was doing soul music, and there's not a lot of bass in those songs. He'll use different sounds on the bass drum and things that are hitting on certain beats to make it sound like the bass. I think there's a lot of that now in pop music — bass doesn't translate well. It's like you feel it, but you don't necessarily always hear it. It'd be nice if it made a comeback.
Mixing past the 15-minute point — you've kind of figured out what's not so good. What are you thinking about with something you've never heard before that you're mixing?
That sound. I want to figure out what I can punch up. Then I try to make each of those things as kind of big as possible, unless there's a part that's meant to be low in the mix. I would figure out what was going on in the track. Then I would start with the left [of the console], which is usually the bass drum and the bass and instruments. I'd work individually on each sound, and then put them in a certain stereo perspective. Try to start to get an idea of visualizing what's happening — try to make it sound like each of the instruments has its own kind of area, unless of course you're working toward a leakage/live kind of thing. If you can't do it with EQ, you start resorting to effects. But it's really good to try to do it with equalization, because high frequencies make something sound closer, and less high frequency tends to be farther back — it doesn't make it to your ear as quickly.
So even if something was recorded with a great condenser mic, if you were going to imagine it sitting back, you would dull it up? Yeah, I would if it was ahead of the beat — and in those days you couldn't move it. You
might use delays and things to make it seem like it's farther back in the room, or you're hearing a reflection from it, which means it's in the hallway or something to that effect. You'd try to get the band sounding solid by using those techniques: EQ and effects to put it in the pocket. At the same time you can make everything sound like it's got it's own little thing going on, but you can't always do it.
You're not afraid to pan pretty wide?
I'm still discovering things about panning. I don't think I've learned the best ways yet. I don't think you need a speaker behind you to make something sound like it's coming from behind you. I want to get better at that. I'm thinking it's down to phase correlations, the way that boom boxes have surround sound — that's a phase-related thing if you can really zone in on that. The ideal studio for me would be where they sell car speakers — there's a panel and you can hit all these different buttons and it has a different mix coming up at you. You listen to some of the early mono recordings, and they're so beautiful. Panning now usually applies to a lot of things that are recorded in stereo and put left and right — it's not quite the same.
I've always been fascinated by Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine."
That was in '85 when I had been freelance for a couple of years. I still had a relationship with Power Station, where I could bring stuff in and they'd give me a decent rate — I still loved the studio. I had been getting my mixing and producing chops together in England and Canada. I was asked to mix Katrina and the Waves' first album [Walking on Sunshine]. I was in the U.K. and I mixed it there for Capitol Records, but they had one last song, which was "Walking on Sunshine." If I recall correctly, it was a drum machine, and I think the horns were on it — it wasn't finished.
I was thinking you re-cut the horns...
I remember the last thing being the drums, and we did them at about 2 a.m. at Power Station in Studio B. Alex [Cooper] played great, and the song exploded. I kept looking over at the record button to make sure it's getting it as he's playing this — it was a magical thing. The next few hours was kind of a blur of flying things around, but I remember the last thing of cutting that intro of the "do-dak-a" drum stuff — definitely Motown meets [Wham!'s] "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." I remember finishing it at 7 a.m., going out into the lobby and thinking, "This sounds really good." Engineer Jason Corsaro was working with the group Power Station — Robert Palmer, Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson, with Andy and John Taylor of Duran Duran. He came into Studio B and I played him "Walking on Sunshine" and he said, "That's really good." I said, "Let me come up and hear what you're doing." By this time Power Station had a third studio — Studio C — which was an SSL console. I'd been up all night and feeling pretty good about things. The album was done and this single sounds really good. I go upstairs and he plays me a mix they had finished, which was the [Power Station] song "Some Like it Hot." Those drums — it sounded like it was from another planet. I was excited about "Walking on Sunshine" for about 20 minutes until I heard that. I was like, "What have I been doing?" Both those records finished on the same morning, and they were very different.
Even today it sounds more current than the Power Station single. That sounds pretty dated.
I don't know. I would tend to say that if you listen to Power Station again, I have a feeling that those sounds are going to hold up. I just do. They were different, but they were good. Jason plugging the [Yamaha] Rev-1 into the Rev-7 [digital reverbs] and making a "Rev-8" out of it! It was the greatest thing ever.
So this was a period where you were freelance and you worked at a lot of places.
I left Power Station in about 1983 to become freelance. That was basically because I had been told that I could make a lot more money not being on a weekly salary and stuff like that. Even though I really liked Power Station, it was time to move, not with small credit to The dB's [Repercussion], which was my first production.
You were around producers at Power Station and you were engineering, and now you wanted to produce?
I usually use this comparison, but being an engineer is really like being a cinematographer and being a producer is like being the director of a film. It seemed logical. I'd seen too many sessions where things had been turned around by hitting the right knob at the right time. My musical knowledge at the time was not really astute, but I was lucky enough to be around amazing musicians. As 1983 got rolling, it was the beginning of post-punk or college rock, later to become alternative — if you want to use those kind of words. The dB's were on the cutting edge of that. Through you guys R.E.M. heard my work. As I became more involved in doing low budget, college radio productions, I couldn't do them at Power Station because it was too expensive to use the studio. The budgets couldn't afford it. When I would travel I would see that college radio was really cool in a lot of places. In New York it wasn't. Talking about leaving New York — the community there kind of sucked. Everybody was competing against each other in a negative way. There wasn't a community where you could get together with other engineers or producers and hang out. Everybody was trying to beat everybody.
