Chapter Thirteen
I was lucky to have Lou Adler as a producer and Hank Cicalo as a recording engineer. Some producers claimed to be able to “fix it in the mix,” but that phrase was never in Hank’s or Lou’s vocabulary. They knew that a mix could turn out well only if they had captured a great performance, and they created an environment in the studio and control room that would be most favorable to that outcome. They also knew that a bad mix could ruin a great performance and they worked diligently to make sure that never happened on their watch. I believe that along with the talent of all the writers and musicians, it was Hank’s skills in the mixing room combined with Lou’s instinct and A&M’s state-of-the-art equipment that put Tapestry across the finish line.
In the early seventies, state-of-the-art equipment included a console that I found beyond my ability to comprehend until an assistant engineer explained that it consisted of multiple identical modules. Sound was recorded through magnetic reel-to-reel tape and analog recording machines with calibrated motors that moved the spools of tape at a predetermined speed. If we wanted to lower the key so I could reach a high note, Hank slowed the machine down and then brought it back up to speed after I had sung the note. Did I sound like a chipmunk? No one would notice. An editing or splicing block with slots for a straight or angled cut allowed an engineer to cut and reconnect audiotape with precision. Did we want to take out everything between the end of the first verse and the beginning of the third chorus? A skilled engineer with a sharp razor blade and an even sharper sense of where the downbeats matched could do that.
During the overdub phase of Tapestry, Lou suggested that I layer background vocals in my own voice on some of the tracks. In the early sixties Gerry and I had accomplished layering by recording back and forth between two machines, but after a few overdubs the tape became too noisy. That didn’t stop Donnie from releasing Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.” Most people would say that the first sound on that recording was the locomotive snare drum. Not so. The first sound on that track was tape hiss from all the overdubs back and forth. But a clean recording of layered overdubs was possible in the early seventies because of Sel-Sync,* an innovation that allowed me to hear previously recorded material through a “play” head at the same time as I played or sang new material onto a blank track through a “record” head. Somehow the technology compensated for the physical gap between the play head and the record head and synchronized the timing of the old material with the new. For an artist who thrived on improvising new layers over previous ones, Sel-Sync was a godsend.
After mixing came mastering. A master was a disc cut on a lathe with a stylus that converted the recorded signal into grooves on the disc. The master was used to stamp out the mothers from which vinyl records were pressed. Like photo negatives, mothers were the reverse of the final product. Where masters had grooves, mothers had ridges that would recreate the grooves in the vinyl. I understood master-mother-vinyl, but I would never understand how sound became grooves. The good news was, I didn’t need to. My job was to create a song and perform it, then watch in awe as highly skilled people used technology to convey music from microphones to tape, then to a master, a mother, and ultimately a vinyl disc with a label and a hole in the middle.
In the fifties and early sixties singles were predominant. Singles were seven-inch black vinyl discs that played at 45 revolutions per minute, with a one-and-a-half-inch hole in the middle of each disc. On a multispeed phonograph, playing 45s required individual plastic adapters or a drop changer that fit over the spindle. A drop changer held up to ten 45s stacked several inches above the turntable. When the phonograph was turned on, the first 45 would drop and the sound would be transmitted through the stylus to an amplifier and speakers. After the first disc finished and the needle reached a predetermined spot near the center post, the machine swung the arm out of the way. The second disc would drop down, and so on, one at a time, until all ten discs were stacked on the turntable. Sometimes the needle got stuck and played a scratchy sound until the arm was lifted manually. It was beyond our imagination that producers of something called “hip-hop” would deliberately put the sound of scratching from a stuck needle on a track and call it music.
In the early seventies long-playing albums (LPs) were favored by most music fans. LPs were twelve-inch vinyl discs meant to be played at 33
revolutions per minute. Singles were still being pressed but were used mostly for promotion. Artists were shunning the industry’s prior custom of releasing albums with one hit and eleven tracks of filler. Instead they strove to include as many high-quality tracks as a disc could accommodate. Other advantages of an LP were that a listener didn’t have to get up as often to change the record, and the twelve-inch-square covers could be adorned with the psychedelic art, photos, lyrics, and liner notes that listeners prized almost as much as the music.
Continuous-loop eight-track players were popular in rural communities because they traveled well in cars and trucks. Cassette tapes took over in the eighties until compact discs replaced them in the nineties. By the dawn of the twenty-first century most people’s CD collections had disappeared into their computers, where they reappeared on the screen as MP3s and other dots, letters, and numbers that enabled consumers to download for free what they used to have to pay for. Distraught record companies aimed lawsuits at consumers like buckshot until Apple hit the bull’s-eye with iTunes.
The equipment we used in 1970 was a link in a chain of audio technology that some say began with the sixteen-inch transcription discs, or V-discs, on which Billie Holiday’s performances were recorded. Today we can see audio on a computer screen. We can record, change, manipulate, and even create notes, sounds, tempos, loops, and other elements of rhythm, melody, and words. If I sing “tonigh” and I want to hear that final “t,” I can copy and paste an audio image of the “t” from the end of the word “beat” elsewhere in the song, so then we hear “tonight” as I intended to sing it. Using software such as Pro Tools and Auto-Tune, an artist can record a sophisticated, multilayered track on a laptop at a desk in a hotel room for (depending on which hotel) less than it cost back in the day to rent, let alone purchase, a studio-quality multitrack machine. The technology is changing so rapidly that some recording applications in use today could be obsolete by the time you read this.
Technology is not necessarily helpful in my hands. Trying to record and manipulate audio takes me away from the emotional trajectory of a song. In the hands of engineers such as Hank Cicalo and, in my later studio work, Rudy Guess, technology can be another instrument. Some might argue that it’s the most important instrument because it records and enhances all the others. Others believe technology is making music less musical. Which brings me to a question I’m asked consistently in interviews and discussions:
“Has today’s technology lowered the quality of music from that of previous generations?”
I believe that as long as people have hearts and minds and the capacity to laugh, cry, dance, feel, and fall in and out of love, a good song will always find an audience because it connects us to our humanity. If technology can help people make that connection, I’m a fan.