Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music (13 page)

I can’t overstate how much Atlantic Records engineer and producer Tom Dowd influenced my work. I met Tom through Bill Schwartau and Al Schmitt, both of whom worked with him years before at Coastal Recording.

When it came to recording, Tom was a maverick. He embraced early eight-track recording and had a knack for placing instruments on separate tracks so you could work with the individual parts later on. He was a forward thinker who tested the limits of the technology, and that impressed me.

Because of our affiliation with Atlantic, our business grew quickly. I wanted our studio to become recognized as the finest in New York City, so I experimented with mikes, equalization, and compression to find just the right sound for each artist and group.

The room at 112 West Forty-eighth Street had a nice, dry sound: the walls were wood covered in soft drapes, the ceiling was lined with acoustic tiles arranged in a zigzag pattern, and the floor was made of soft cement and vermiculite.

Whether you were recording a big band or a quartet, everyone
could hear themselves and the rest of the band in the studio at 112 West Forty-eighth Street. Musicians especially loved the room because of the way the sound of their instruments reflected off the floor.

What made the floor so special?

When the Mogull Film studio originally built the room, they laid a base coat of cement but never put a finish coat over it. The unfinished concrete powdered, and when we set up folding chairs or rolled a piano across the floor it created minute fissures on the surface. The softness of the floor helped absorb certain frequencies, which altered the sound. The cracks were tiny, but with all the foot traffic, they created a chalky dust. The joke around town was that if you saw a violin player walking down Forty-eighth Street and he had dust halfway up his black pants, you knew that he’d been working at A&R!

Don Frey and I experimented with all kinds of floor treatment to duplicate the floor’s special properties. Eventually we found a man who analyzed the floor’s surface and formulated a topical seal. He patented the product; we later applied it to the floors in Studio A2 (at 799 Seventh Avenue), and Studios R1 and R2 (at 322 West Forty-eighth Street).

Another characteristic that set A&R apart was the echo, which was produced by portable units called EMT plates.

The EMT unit was a four-by-eight-foot soundproof box with a thin plate of sheet metal suspended in the four corners. A small transducer mounted on the plate caused it to vibrate. Two microphone-like pickups captured the sound reflecting off the edges of the vibrating plate and fed it back to the board in the control room.

When we set up our first EMT we discovered that it sounded flabby, like coiled springs or cheap guitar echo. We took the side of the box off and began experimenting with the tension on the springs. I found that if we tightened it, I could tap the plate with my fingernail and it changed the tone of the
ping
.

The secret to improving the sound of the EMT was tuning its tempered steel plate, and we worked endlessly to vary the tension
on the springs that held the plate in place. Once the tension was equal (similar to the way the lug nuts on a tire are equally tightened) it sounded spectacular. The sound of the EMT-produced reverb was much better than what we got from the tiled bathroom we’d been using.

When A&R started showing a profit, we bought more EMT chambers so we could have a separate echo unit for strings, horns, vocals, and rhythm instruments.

After carefully tuning them, we suspended the EMT units from the ceilings of several rooms in the basement. The output from the basement chambers was fed to the upstairs rooms through a patch bay. I treated those EMT rooms like a bank vault; once the chambers were in place the doors were locked, and anyone who wanted to get in had to see me to get the keys.

My belief was that if you recorded with the right microphones and you had the right blend of leakage and presence, you could create wondrous echoes. Keeping the echo chambers separated gave us better control over each channel.

People began talking about the high-quality sound of the records we were making at A&R. While I was doing record dates, Don Frey and the staff engineers were recording and editing some very big commercials and jingles for the New York Yankees, Pepsi-Cola, and Marlboro cigarettes. The bulletin board in the lobby at A&R was a hub of activity; the place was like a beehive at nine o’clock in the morning.

Jingle dates were booked as all-day sessions, and they were recorded in segments. At nine o’clock the six-man rhythm section (bass, drums, piano, two guitars, and percussion) would come in. From ten to eleven we recorded the brass. Strings came in from eleven to one, and from one to three you’d have the singers. Finally, you’d mix and edit from four to five. Sessions like that were happening in each studio.

When the musicians got their hourly break they’d rush to the
bulletin board, pull off their messages, and call Radio Registry—the musicians’ answering service—from the direct phone lines we’d installed in the lobby.

The studio got a big boost when Burt Bacharach and Hal David booked a date to record one of their young singers—a girl named Dionne Warwick. The triumvirate usually recorded at Bell Sound. One day, Bell was busy; Burt had heard about A&R and me, and he called. Suddenly, I found myself engineering a string of Dionne Warwick’s hits, songs such as “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “Look of Love,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “This Girl’s in Love with You,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Promises, Promises,” “Alfie,” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”

As a composer and arranger, Burt Bacharach has distinguished himself as one of the true innovators in the world of pop music.

What sets Burt’s music apart?

First, the idiosyncratic way that he structures a melody. Burt is audacious in pushing beyond the traditional songwriting form; his compositions are replete with unusual chord progressions, bitonal harmonies, arresting rhythmic patterns, unexpected key changes, nonsymmetrical phrasing, and offbeat time signatures—most of which are rarely found in a standard pop tune. Burt also weaves fabulous contrasts and textures into his arrangements.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David, circa 1968
Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archive

A Bacharach arrangement typically features airy, sustained strings, expansive woodwinds, felicitous brass solos (flugelhorn has been one of his favorites), throbbing timpani, and drum parts that ascend to precise, thundering crescendos.

The combination of instruments that Burt uses also adds immeasurably to the feel of his records: Rim shots, played concurrently with light brush strokes on the snare drum head, characteristically delineate the beat. Strings, voiced with the horns, thicken the sound without weighing it down.

The tonalities produced by the rhythm section are extremely important to Burt, and we always experimented to attain the exact feeling that he desired. If the snare drum sounded too bright or had too much “ring,” we’d dampen the head by covering it with tape. After a time, we discovered that taping a wallet to the top head cut the sharpness and reduced the ring to just the right degree. Thereafter, a wallet was taped to the snare head before every one of Burt’s sessions.

Burt’s essential gift is the ability to express drama without being melodramatic, as Dionne Warwick’s achingly intense recording of “This Girl’s in Love with You” demonstrates. Although Don Sebesky wrote the arrangement, it has Burt’s inimitable fingerprints all over it.

Throughout the song, Dionne sounds laid-back: She never loses her cool, measured approach—even when the music swells and explodes around her. Biting, edgy percussion pushes the beat along, while the strings offer a wisp of romantic warmth. The piano part could have been lifted from a country-and-western chart, and the tightly muted trumpet solo—voiced melodically—offers a sparkling contrast.

Listen, too, for the winsome flute accents that metaphorically suggest a pair of quivering hands in the line “My hands are shaking,” and the urgency imparted by the percussion crescendos and timpani flourishes that punctuate the line, “I need your love…I want your love.”

From top to bottom, Dionne Warwick’s recording of “This Girl’s in Love with You” is pop songwriting and arranging at its very best.

As a technician, recording Dionne Warwick was like immersing myself in a master class.

For instance, I learned that I should never shut down the string mikes—even when the strings weren’t playing—because the leakage from those microphones lent an extra dimension to the sound. People thought I was crazy, but doing these things gave the A&R sound its edge.

More than this, the Bacharach-David-Warwick sessions taught me how to think like a record producer.

Burt and Hal always produced their sessions with Dionne, and they had an interesting working dynamic.

As with most teams, one person is the type A personality, the nervous one who chomps at the bit. That’s Burt. He’d be out in the studio, waving his hands in the air, conducting, moving around constantly. Hal was the quiet one; he’d stay in the control room and chain-smoke, speaking softly, just taking it all in.

Once a song was recorded, Burt and Hal would listen to the playback and discuss how they felt about it. If they couldn’t make a decision, I was given the chance to offer my opinion. If I felt that part of a take was special, I’d say, “I think take two had a better intro—we should keep it.”

Burt and Hal had an easy give-and-take, and they were gracious in letting me join in. When we got friendly and started to understand one another, Burt stopped rushing into the control room after every take to hear the playback. I’ll forever be grateful to them for being the first people to put my name on a single; seeing “Engineered by Phil Ramone” on one of Dionne Warwick’s Scepter records gave me a thrill beyond compare!

Burt’s parents would usually come by at the end of our sessions, and when he began dating Angie Dickinson, she’d come too.

Burt sometimes had so many visitors in the control room that I’d have to say, “Burt, can you ask them to settle down?” He would simply turn around and give them the quiet sign.

Hal David would
never
yell at anyone.

“Shhhhh,”
he’d say, and the room would quiet down until the second we were rolling. Florence Greenberg, the founder and president of Scepter Records, would often be in the control room and she’d cheer—
loudly
—when a song was played back.

Even my mom, Minnie—who rarely came to the studio—was drawn into the fun.

The first big hit that I engineered for Dionne Warwick was “Alfie” in 1967, and my mom attended the session. Mom was a character in the best sense of the word: a sociable lady who attracted all sorts of actors, actresses, singers, and dancers—all of whom adored her.

On the day that Dionne recorded “Alfie,” Mom stopped by to say hello to composer-producer Burt Bacharach. Burt was charming, and he and my mother got along famously. After the session, Minnie knit Burt a scarf.

Meanwhile, “Alfie” roared up the charts.

At the next Dionne Warwick session we cut “I Say a Little Prayer,” and Mom visited again, to give Burt the scarf. He was flattered, and they chatted up a storm.

“I Say a Little Prayer” went up the charts, too.

When it came time for Dionne to cut another record, Burt booked time at A&R. Everyone arrived, but my mom was conspicuously absent. Burt got nervous. “Where is Minnie? How come she’s not here?” he asked. I couldn’t resist the urge to tease him. “Look, Burt, I’m just not used to making records with my mother in the room!”

But Burt was serious; he insisted that my mother’s presence had something to do with “Alfie” and “I Say a Little Prayer” becoming hits, and he wouldn’t start the session without her.

I called my mother at work. “Burt would really love to see you,” I explained. “He’s got it in his head that you’re his and Dionne’s good luck charm. Can you grab a cab and come right to the studio?”

As you can imagine, my mom was bowled over by Burt’s faith in her.

She didn’t let him down.

The song we recorded that day—“Do You Know the Way to San Jose”—hit the Top Ten and won Dionne a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance, Female, of 1968.

We recorded a lot of pop dates at A&R, but the jazz guys loved the studio too. Our proximity to Jim & Andy’s bar—the city’s premiere hangout for all musicians—didn’t hurt.

As soon as we’d call a break the musicians would stream out of the studio, down the stairs, and into the brownstone next door for a cocktail or two. More often than not, I’d have to retrieve them when the producer called for the session to resume.

On one memorable session, jazz vibraphonist Eddie Costa poked his head into the booth while we were recording a song and said, “How many bars [of music] do I have?” “Sixty-four,” I replied. “Be right back!” Eddie darted out of the studio and flew down the stairs to Jim & Andy’s. “Give me a shot and a beer,” he asked. Eddie threw back the shot, gulped his beer, and ran right back up the steps. He looked into the control room, and I signaled “thirty-two bars left” with my fingers. He was back behind the vibes with his mallets in hand with time to spare.