How did you get involved in recording?
Sound and music were my hobbies as a teenager. I aimed to be a poet, philosopher or a scientist. The year and a half I spent in college, I took a triple load of majors, but when it came time to make a living, I ended up working in record stores. I worked at the original Sam Goody here in New York (the biggest and best of the old time record stores). After I had sold LPs for a while, they asked me if I knew anything about hi-fi, so I set up the hi-fi department. I ended up working on Madison Avenue, installing high-end hi-fi systems for wealthy people. By then I had decided that I wanted to be recording engineer and an avant-garde composer. I started off working for Sherman Fairchild, famous audio pioneer and the richest man in America at the time. I also did live sound for a lot of clubs around the village and for a number folk music acts. Then I got my hands on a tape recorder, some microphones and a little tube mixer and just started recording. I began engineering by just doing it. I started with live recording because I didn't have a studio of my own. I recorded some stuff on the sly at the Village Gate. I built and ran the sound system there and I hid a microphone above the stage. My career started with the guy who did the lighting there, Chip Monck. Chip convinced everyone I was a great recording engineer, and that's how I got my first major gig recording Nina Simone. I recorded Nina's Live at the Village Gate and then I did her album, Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall. The Thelonius Monk that I surreptitiously recorded at the Gate [Live at the Village Gate] was eventually issued commercially and I was given producer credit. The Dylan recordings that I made after-hours at the Gaslight Cafe during this period were issued on Starbucks [Live at The Gaslight 1962] a couple years back (unaccountably uncredited). After I'd been on the road with Harry Belafonte doing live sound with a system of my own design (Harry was the first artist to carry his own gear), Dylan's manager [Albert Grossman] asked me to do the same thing for Bob on the '65-'66 tour with members of The Band.
Dylan's infamous "electric" tour.
I built Dylan's road systems for this tour. I built one system for the western leg (Hawaii and Australia) and a second one for Europe. But more than anything I wanted my own recording studio in New York. Dylan said, "Do the sound on this tour and I'll help build you a recording studio when we're finished." Unfortunately, by the time his tour was over, we were burned out with each other and went our separate ways.
You were the front-of-house sound guy?
Front-of, back-of, wherever!
Fans complained about the excessive volume of those Dylan shows.
In fact it wasn't loud enough. We didn't have the equipment to properly fill the halls we were in. The music itself was some of the most incandescent rock 'n' roll ever made. If the audience thought it too loud, it was because they wanted to hear some acoustic folk from Bob. The audiences we played for just didn't get it. They were way behind Bob's evolution as an artist. The backup group was The Hawks (soon to be known as The Band) without Levon Helm [on drums]. Levon was replaced by this kickass drummer from Texas [Mickey Jones]. Mickey actually put out a video of the tour, but it's only backstage stuff, not performances [Bob Dylan — World Tour 1966: The Home Movies]. You can see me in that. There was also a movie made [by D.A. Pennebaker] that was never finished, called Eat the Document, and that's got me in it too. A lot of Eat the Document was later incorporated into the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. I'm on screen quite a bit in this, and also mysteriously uncredited.
It seems like Dylan was hard to deal with.
Not particularly. I was pretty wild and hard to deal with myself. Bob had a lot going on after that '66 tour, and helping me build a studio was obviously not high on his list. When Belafonte asked me again to go back on the road with him, I said, "Only if you invest in my recording studio." Finally, Harry became my partner and put up enough money up to make our studio very well equipped.
You already had a space?
Yes. A friend of mine who was a painter had come to me and said, "I found this place on West 65th Street for $200 a month. The building's been condemned, but who knows when they'll tear it down?" They didn't tear it down for seven or eight years. It had no hot water, no heat and it was pretty small. A young lady I knew from the Village who had some family money bankrolled me for a seven-foot Yamaha grand piano and some basic equipment. We started off very simple with a 2-track, some Altec tube mixers and a couple of microphones. The studio was about 30 by 25 feet, and the recording booth was 6 feet deep by 12 feet wide — quite small. It was first called RLA (my initials), and after Belafonte invested it was renamed Impact Recording. Harry recorded some really good tracks of his own at Impact, which for unknown reasons have never been released. We had one of the first 8-track tape machines ever, 4- and 2-track Ampex decks, a big EMT stereo plate and a transistor-based recording console that I assembled myself. I'm not really a genius electronic engineer, but I'm a good at DIY. That's where all the '60s recordings and the ESP Records stuff was done.
What sessions happened there before ESP work came in?
I didn't have that much business initially. Then I started working with Don Schlitten from Prestige Records, for whom I recorded quite a number of excellent, straight-ahead jazz records. Unfortunately these sessions often don't get properly credited on CD reissues. The session information either just gets left off, or they assume that Rudy Van Gelder [issue #43] was the engineer.
When did you start doing sessions for ESP Records and Bernard Stollman?
Before I even finished the studio, I did a couple of things for Bernard. The Bells LP with Albert Ayler and Charles Tyler live at Town Hall was the first thing I did for ESP.
Was Bernard in the studio for any of the sessions?
Very seldom. Two or three times he showed up, said very little and left quietly. I recorded 90 percent of the ESP catalog on my own, just myself and the artists. After I recorded the Bells concert at Town Hall, I became friendly with Albert Ayler. He was the only one of all those free jazz players that I got to know well. Regrettably we only did one studio recording together. Other than Ayler, my favorite free jazz artist was Sun Ra. I had a lot of respect for him, and I did some great recordings of his Arkestra.
The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra albums must have been a challenge to record.
Unfortunately I wasn't ever given much information about the instrumentation or personnel for ESP sessions in advance. The studio was completely overcrowded with Sun Ra's big band. Just getting all the instruments in the room was a challenge. Because I didn't have enough microphones, channels or space to separate everybody, groups of horns were on single microphones. Only the piano, the bass and drums had their own mics. Sun Ra and the band were happy with it. I feel that I captured the emotional focus of the band very well.
You recorded Patty Waters' underrated debut, Sings.
That was unforgettable. [Pianist] Burton Greene really had to stretch to figure out what she was going to do on "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair". She seemed right on the edge of madness. Patty was really unique, performing with complete abandon and extreme intensity. I encouraged her not to hold back.
ESP became known for supporting free jazz music.
The free jazz thing took off because Stollman encouraged it. Those artists would show up, blow their brains out for a couple of hours on tape and then ESP would issue it. We were just trying to capture the force and flavor of whatever the artists intended. It is generally assumed that the free jazz players and so-called psychedelic folkies I recorded and produced were stoned out freaks. That is an exaggeration.
I wouldn't think so from their music.
A lot of people around me had reputations of being drugged out. It does often sound like they were stoned and crazy, but it's just not generally true. It is difficult to be stoned out and consistently creative.
They were just naturally eccentric?
Tom Rapp (Pearls Before Swine) was not a druggie. Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg (The Fugs) were pretty sober guys, all said. The free jazz players weren't any more stoned than many more straight-ahead jazz artists, as far as I could tell. There were some leaders and band members who had bad habits, and I personally never met a drug I didn't like back in those days.
The Fugs and others have said that Bernard and ESP didn't treat them well financially.
I've never gotten one cent as a producer from Stollman, even though whatever serious money ESP made was (by Bernard's admission) from sessions I had produced. I got my session recording fees and that was it. Nobody has gotten serious money out of Bernard, period. I don't think any large fortune has gotten into Stollmans's pocket either. Every five years or so, he calls me up out of the blue and says, "I owe you a lot of money and a lot of credit." And I say, "That's right Bernard, send me a check and give me some producer/engineer credit." That's the last I hear from him-until the next time.
What was the incentive for you, if the session fees weren't that much?
Working on ESP albums wasn't the same tame thing over and over again, like many of the conventional sessions that I did. The Fugs and Pearls Before Swine allowed me to be creative as a producer when nothing else did. I did expect to profit from those productions eventually. Was I was dreaming?
