Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music Read Online Free PDF

chagrin saw that Morris had created his own discount. He’d only paid us eight thousand dollars! When I got back, everyone applauded my courage. What’s the big deal? I thought. Our meeting was unremarkable; we were simply two adults treating each other with respect.
    Dealing with Morris was never dull, but he was always cordial to me. After that meeting he’d drop by the studio whenever there was a Roulette session, and compliment my work. And the studio always got paid something —even if it took a while to collect.
    Because I was young and inexperienced, my one-on-one with Morris Levy didn’t unnerve me. But, my heart was in my throat during a session at which Atlantic Records producer Tom Dowd modeled the way to calmly handle an impending disaster in another area of my life—the control room.
    We were recording the double jazz quartets of Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, and Tom arranged the two groups facing each other, placing the microphones in between. I cued up a four-track tape machine, and we began recording.
    As any music fan knows, jazz is all about improvisation—and beboppers like Coleman and Dolphy were renowned for their abstract, impressionistic approach to a melody. Well, the first piece the group played just went on and on. Ten minutes, eleven minutes, twelve minutes. We were all getting lost in the endless barrage of solos when I realized that we only had three minutes left on the reel of four-track tape.
    If the solos continued unabated, the tape would surely run out before the band was finished. I was contemplating how to reload without losing too much of the performance when Tom looked toward the tape machines. I didn’t have to explain; Tom’s intuition and experience made him a quick study. His eyes darted around the room, and he spotted the two-track Ampex recorder that I used for mixdowns sitting off to the side. Luckily, there was a fresh reel of tape on the machine. “Get that two-track going!” he said.
    As the second recorder started, Tom nimbly fed the mix from the four-track to the two-track. It wasn’t the ideal way to make a transition, but since Tom’s live mix was so good there was no loss of quality, and we captured the entire performance without interruption.
    I was embarrassed that I hadn’t caught the problem sooner, and the smooth, proactive way that Tom Dowd responded—to the problem, and to me—became part of my modus operandi.
    I didn’t think much about the Coleman-Dolphy date until years later, when an assistant engineer fumbled during a session I was doing with Guns ’n Roses guitarist Slash. It was an error I still shudder over.
    We were taping a segment for a tribute to Les Paul in Studio B at Electric Lady, the New York studio designed and built for Jimi Hendrix in 1970. Slash was in a jovial mood, his fingers blazing over the strings of the Les Paul Standard under his command.
    The guitarist’s playfulness was contagious; drummer Kenny Aronoff’s ferocity behind his kit pushed the rhythm of the song to a whole different level. Sensing that we were headed for a peak moment, I asked the assistant to change tapes. It should have taken a minute—or less.
    Like the musicians on the other side of the glass, I was lost in the music. I turned to my left, gazing at the spools of tape rewinding at top speed. I froze.
    The tape shouldn’t be rewinding like that, I thought.
    To my dismay, the assistant had taken it upon himself to rewindbefore reloading the machine with fresh tape, and we’d lost some of the performance.
    “What are you doing?” I asked. “I told you to change reels!”
    The assistant’s face flushed. “Oh, I’m sorry—we rewind before changing tapes here,” he mumbled. “It’s our studio’s policy.”
    Anyone who works with me regularly knows that rewinding tape before you change reels is not the thing to do.
    One can’t predict when inspiration will arrive, and those few minutes might have represented Slash’s finest playing ever on