For a guy who's associated with some of the most renowned albums in history, rumor has it you never planned on a career in the music business.
I had gotten a Master's Degree in Communications from UMass in 1972. I came back to New York hoping to be a documentary filmmaker, either at one of the networks, public television or radio — anywhere I could continue on the communications path. One night at a party, I met a guy who worked at Record Plant Studios. I was a huge music fan at that point — I played guitar and had been in a couple of bands I was totally intrigued. He told me that occasionally they needed people to help with remote recording. So I said, "Listen, if you ever have any work, I'd be interested." At the time I was selling shoes in Flushing, Queens. About a month later, the guy called me and asked if I knew how to drive a truck. I had done a lot of construction work in college so I knew how to do it. He told me he needed someone to drive a truck down to Duke University to record Yes on the Close to the Edge tour. That's how I got into this business.
Did you do anything on that gig besides drive the truck?
I carried wires up to the stage and back, and broke stuff down — putting mics and other things back into their cases. Basically grunt work.
What happened when the gig was over?
One of the engineers on the truck said, "Hey, you should come around the studio sometime. They need guys to help out." I said, "Hey, I'll do anything. I love music." I didn't expect it to turn into anything; I was just thrilled to be involved in music and recording. Things grew out from there. I got a job in the studio as a general assistant. We had a lot of jingle dates [music for advertising], so I had to put the microphones out for the engineers. I learned about mic placement from setting up sessions for the engineers to tweak. The people working there at the time were a huge amount of fun.
Who was working at the Record Plant with you back then?
When I started it was Jack Douglas, Jay Messina, Shelly Yakus as well as Jimmy Iovine, Thom Panunzio, David Thoener, Dennis Ferrante, and Rod O'Brien, who were all assistants. It was a fantastic group of guys. Some of them were more receptive than others to teaching me, so I had to basically pretend I knew how to do things in the studio. I remember one time I was alone with Todd Rundgren on a session and he asked me to patch in a Teletronix [LA-2A], or some other piece of gear. I said, "I don't really know how to work the patchbay." He just stared at me, like he couldn't believe what I was saying. I truly knew nothing. But little by little, I would come in on the weekends and learn from the other assistants.
How did you get into mastering?
My late friend Tom Rabstenek had taken over the cutting room at the Record Plant after only about a year of experience. George Marino, who's been with me here for 35 years, left the cutting room to go to Sterling Sound. Tom was left with a stack of cutting notes for some phenomenal albums, like Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and the Allman Brothers — he had to cut lacquers on from George's notes. Tom couldn't do all the mechanical changes by himself because everything was done by hand back then; from changing EQ, to moving the fader and running the lathe. Tom was going crazy by himself, so I would go up and help him.
Did you have any idea how to cut lacquer at that point?
He showed me. He would say, "For this EQ, you turn this to +2, then after the song is over you put it back to zero." So I would do that. Then he would say, "Move the fader here, and run the machine here," etc. So the two of us were doing all these mechanical changes cutting lacquers. I learned how to work the cutting lathe from him. I knew so little when I started; I was actually afraid to turn the monitor pot up while I was working, because I didn't know if it was in the signal path or not! That means you know nothing. I learned by watching and talking. There were no books to read, or schools to go to back then. You learned on the job.
What kind of gear did you use to master records back then?
There was a Neve standup console with four Neve equalizers, a Roger Mayer EQ, some kind of peak limiter and a Scully 2-track quarter-inch tape machine. You basically had to work the lathe, and you learned by the mistakes you made. I would look into the microscope and see the overcuts I made; slowly I learned how to get it right. Something happens when you are constantly looking at VU meters. It adds to your understanding of dynamics.
What other albums and artists were you working with at that time?
All kinds of projects. I worked on Haitian albums and salsa records for the Fania label. Plus, all of the mixers in the studio would come upstairs to the mastering room with whatever projects they were working on. I developed my approach to connect with the creatives behind an album to give them what they wanted. People would ask me, "Is the bass too loud?" Or, "Do you think the vocal's loud enough?" I would listen, and my first response would be, "You're asking me? I've only been doing this for three months!" But then I realized that the same guy downstairs in the studio, who was so confident in front of his client, was actually terribly insecure. It cemented in me the idea that these decisions were very difficult. What's "right" and what's "wrong" when you're mastering records is incredibly fluid. There was a certain humility people could have with me that they couldn't have with their clients. This was before automation, where every "re do" had to basically be done from scratch. It was a very different process of actually committing to something, before computers allowed the ability to not commit to anything.
How has the mastering process changed with the advent of computers and infinite, instant recall?
There's a very deep difference in the creative approach between then and now. For example, I read that when William Faulkner wrote his books, he sat at a typewriter and just wrote. Everything was configured in his head before he started typing. That's very similar to the mindset of being in a studio and knowing everything has to be correct from the start. There was an intense degree of discipline required to pull it off back then, from the recording to the mastering, vocal and background levels and relationships to one another, to guitars and solo levels and so forth. We had to do things in mastering back then with EQ to fix mix problems. Someone would shout, "Oh my God, the guitar solo's too low. What are we gonna do?" So we'd put some midrange in the guitar solo. We'd make a list of all these different cues and, while the tape was running, you had to boost 2 dB at 1400 Hz at approximately 10:12. So you can imagine if a record was coming out on a major label, you might have to do six or eight passes to make six or eight lacquers to send to the plant. You had to make your notes extremely clear and focused — listening to the album note by note, intro to verse to chorus, from top to bottom. You really had to follow the music. You had to know how to work the cutting lathe, which I did. Remember, this was before cassettes — if you wanted to take a reference home, you had to cut acetate. I remember John Lennon was working on the song "#9 Dream" from Walls and Bridges, and I probably cut between 10 and 20 mixes of it.
What do you remember most about the work you did with Lennon?
John was everywhere at the Record Plant. He had a rehearsal space right next to the cutting room that we would play ping-pong in when he wasn't using it. He was virtually on staff there. It was his playground at that point. John did most of his listening and tweaking in the mix room, but because of the huge budgets he had he would do an endless amount of remixes. The song he did with Harry Nilsson, "Many Rivers to Cross" from the album Pussy Cats, had 10 or 15 different mixes. He didn't sit down and tweak around with you the way some people do. He just wasn't into it on that level.
But you interacted with him?
Oh yeah. I remember one time arguing with him because the vocal level was really low. Here I was, a 24-year- old kid — he's one of the Beatles and I'm telling him, "The vocals are too low." I remember I actually said to him, "You're one of the greatest singers in the history of rock and roll and you don't mix your vocals loud?" He said, "I hate my voice." One time I was working on a jazz album that had no reel to it, only tape on a hub. The tape was wound so loosely that when I picked it up, the whole thing fell apart. There was literally a pile of tape all over the place. So I put it in a box and, when I had time, I would wind it by hand back onto a reel. There was no rush because it was a catalogue record, but I wanted to fix it before I put it away. One day John came in and saw the pile of tape in the box and said, "What's that?" So I told him the story and he said, "Is there any way we can make it look like that's my master?" I told him that I could cut the end of one of the songs onto his tape, put his tape onto the machine and attach it so it would look like it flew off the machine. He said, "That's it. Call [Record Plant owner and chief engineer] Roy Cicala up!" So John gets on the phone with Roy, screaming, saying, "This fucking kid just ruined my tape!" Roy came in, pale as a ghost. I had never seen him like that — he had no blood in his face. He walked over to the machine and said, "I can fix it. I can fix it. Don't worry!" He was befuddled. Then John started cracking up and I started snickering. It took Roy about 10 seconds to realize we had punked him. He said to me, "I'm gonna get you." But he never managed to get me back. That's what it was like in those days at the Record Plant.
Not long into your tenure at the Record Plant, you basically became one of the "go to" guys in the mastering world. To what do you attribute your rapid ascent?
I was lucky that I had a certain amount of credibility with some of those great engineers at the time. Some mastering guys are very authoritarian and some are interactive. I'm much more interactive, and it was the right way to be at the time. Plus, I had the luck to master a platinum album after less than a year there with [Eric Carmen's debut album] Eric Carmen. I got the gig because Jimmy Ienner, who produced the album, liked working with me and he used me for mastering. When 1975 hit, I worked on Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run and David Bowie's Young Americans, which was an incredibly difficult mastering job.
How so?
