Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music (18 page)

Paul’s international recording adventures on
Rhythm of the Saints
weren’t confined to Rio—or the studio.

One evening, Paul, Mazzola, and I left Transamerica after a
session and drove to the countryside for dinner. While driving back to our hotel, we passed through Salvador, Bahia.

It was a hot, muggy night, nearly eleven o’clock, and the car’s windows were open. We’d had a long, fruitful day in the studio, and a satisfying (albeit late) meal. Both enhanced our weariness, and as Mazzola whisked us home, our conversation ebbed. When it became quiet, we heard the sound of drums in the distance.

I instinctively perked up, knowing that Paul would want to investigate.

“Drive in the direction they’re coming from,” we begged.

Mazzola wound his way through the narrow streets of cobblestone, and we soon found ourselves in front of a cluster of buildings.

“Let me get out first,” the producer implored. “I don’t know if this is a safe area, and I don’t want either of you getting hurt.” Ignoring Mazzola’s warning, Paul and I sprang from the car, intent on finding the musicians.

When we did, we were speechless.

There, playing in the street, was what appeared to be a marching band. The heart-thumping resonance of the sound their drums produced was mesmerizing.

Paul and I looked at each other knowingly.

The visceral punch of the sound reverberating off the buildings was unlike anything we had ever heard in a recording studio, and would fit perfectly on
Rhythm of the Saints.

Mazzola spoke to the group, and discovered their name was Olodum.

Using Mazzola as an interpreter, Paul hastily explained what he was doing in Brazil, and that he wanted to record their music for
Rhythm of the Saints
. They expressed interest, and he made arrangements to return and discuss the details the following day.

During their meeting, Paul learned that a recording agreement would come with stipulations.

First, Olodum was eager to publicize their social and political
agenda, and they wanted a worldwide forum. Then, any recording sessions would have to take place outdoors, in Pelourinho Square.

Paul was sympathetic—and persuasive. Concessions were made, and the session planned. I was excited by the prospect of recording the ensemble, but concerned with the lack of suitable facilities.

“What the hell are we going to record this on?” I asked Paul.

We were lucky to have gotten permission to bring a few rolls of multitrack tape into the country for the studio sessions; we didn’t have extra recording tape, nor did we have any portable recording equipment. But Mazzola—God love him—scrounged up a battered eight-track recorder, ten or eleven dynamic microphones, a few mike stands, and two reels of tape.

Paul’s manager alerted the media.

When we returned to Pelourinho Square at the appointed time, we found Olodum’s members dressed in snappy uniforms: white shirts with red sashes. The walls of the courtyard had been painted a brilliant white, which accentuated the starkness of their dress.

The scenario was very theatrical; everything that Olodum did was deliberate—and aimed at maximizing their exposure. I was surprised at the number of people who gathered in the square and impressed with the considerable press coverage that Paul’s publicist had arranged.

The working conditions were, as expected, primitive.

I’ll never forget what happened when I asked for some electrical power. The man who was helping me set up calmly reached into the street, lifted a manhole cover, and pulled two bare wires from the opening. “Here,” he said, shoving them in my direction. As I backed away, he touched them together. They began to spark. “These will do,” he said, calmly taping them up.

We had enough tape for an hour’s worth of recording, and I didn’t have complete faith in our power source. I put a few microphones on stands and slung the rest over the branches of nearby
trees. Motion played a major role in Olodum’s sound, and I wanted to impart the spatial depth of the performance as Olodum briskly moved through their routine.

After a quick run-through for levels I started the tape machine, and the band’s director—Antonio Luis Alves de Souza—gave the drummers their cue. The music wrought from the session added a marvelous texture to “The Obvious Child,” which became the opening song on
Rhythm of the Saints
.

The impromptu location session in Brazil was the kind of zany situation that I came to expect with Paul, and is indicative of the unexpected directions that my recording life sometimes takes me in.

Paul’s
Graceland
and
Rhythm of the Saints
are momentous musical records, but they made their mark technically and socially too. It’s important for a songwriter or musician to blend the music of many worlds, but downright heroic to go as far as Paul does to preserve its authenticity.

When Billy Joel makes a record, spontaneity trumps all.

There was seldom any fixing or polishing on Billy’s records; if there were minor flaws in the performance, they stayed in.

As I touched on earlier, Billy’s method of writing songs during his recording sessions was unlike anyone else’s.

With Billy, the melody came first.

He would sit at the piano and start with a riff that caught his ear, and build the melody around that. As he played the basic chords, the band would fall in, improvising a head arrangement; one that came together as they played. After a time we’d play back these attempts, then continue to experiment with the instrumentation.

During the playbacks, Billy and I would talk about instrumental nuances that we each thought would improve the song.

When I listen to a song and imagine how it might be arranged, I listen for melodic lines in the background—a haunting phrase that’s not fully developed—or another piece of the melody that could benefit from emphasis.

With Billy, when such a phrase popped out we might double its line by having him play it on piano with his left hand (lower notes). Or, we might notice a phrase that Billy was playing with his right hand (higher notes) that clearly said, “This theme should be repeated elsewhere in the song.”

If Billy became impatient or discouraged, I would urge him to keep at it. I never wanted him to settle.

Once the framework was established, the band would start playing the song to get its general feel. When I sensed that Billy and the band were headed for a peak moment, I’d signal for Jim Boyer or Bradshaw Leigh to start rolling the twenty-four-track machines. Most of Billy’s songs were recorded in three or four takes.

If for some reason a tune
didn’t
feel great, we’d put it aside, then try it again a few days later, or after Billy played it at a few concerts. The rationale was that a song sounded better after they’d played it on the road and worked out the kinks.

The process of writing and recording continued every day and by the third or fourth week of work, we’d have hit our stride. Billy would cheer when he passed what he thought was the halfway mark and say, “Phil, I think we’ve broken the back of the album!”

Bradshaw Leigh became my engineer in 1979, while Billy was making
Glass Houses
. Here, he recalls what impressed him most about Billy’s sessions:

“The thrill of working with Billy was watching him sit down, jam on the piano, and come up with an idea,” Brad explains. “Witnessing him write and polish a song was invaluable. It was like watching your favorite band in concert for the first time, every time.

“For me, the most incredible part of the process was what would happen
after
Billy and the band had recorded a particular song.

“Let’s say that Billy and the band had worked through the initial phases of laying down a tune: Billy had delineated an idea, he and Phil had worked out a skeletal arrangement, and the band had gotten comfortable with it. They would run through it a few times, and then record it. What was in the can at this point was, for all intents and purposes, the final master—a perfectly acceptable performance.

“We would move on to other songs. Two or three days, maybe even a week might go by, and the band would be running down yet another tune that was ‘in-progress.’ Suddenly—just for fun—Billy would count off the song they’d completed a few days before, and the band would launch right into it.

“Nine times out of ten the band would hit it dead on, and that impromptu take would supplant the earlier one, because it had so damned much energy! It usually sounded better because in the band’s minds, the pressure was off—the master take from the previous session was already in the can.

“I was twenty-one years old, and I was amazed by what I was seeing and hearing. I have never seen anything like it in all the years I spent engineering, and I’ll probably never see it again,” Leigh believes.

When Billy discovered what he wanted to say musically, the palette was wide open. I always felt that we could be irreverent; I wouldn’t dare stifle Billy by restricting tempo, style, or feel.

Because of our mutual flexibility, “Just the Way You Are” moved from a somewhat stiff nightclub ballad into an endearing love song; “Allentown” became a ballsy anthem; “Only the Good Die Young” went from reggae to rock; “The Stranger” evolved into an evocative mood piece; “Stiletto” developed a discernible edge; and “Zanzibar” dripped with the ambiance of a sultry, after-hours jazz club.

Billy’s willingness to experiment with offbeat instrumentation also gave us wide latitude.

One example of a seemingly outlandish idea that worked is the effect we achieved on the tag line of “Pressure” (
The Nylon Curtain
) in which the piquant sound of the balalaika—a three-string Russian guitar with a triangular body and elongated neck—imparts a decidedly peculiar sound.

Balalaika players weren’t exactly clamoring for work in New York City at the time, but I happened upon a balalaika band from Brooklyn one day and asked them to come to the studio. The musicians were accustomed to performing at Russian Orthodox weddings—they had no idea who Billy Joel was. But they graciously appeared, and their contribution helped make “Pressure” one of the more unusual pop records of its day.

Another area where I enjoyed freedom was with vocal effects.

Billy liked to hear vocal effects when he was singing, and to help him find the right voice when he was recording I made him a control box with Echoplexes, MXR phasers, and flangers. We labeled the buttons “Elvis,” “Doo-wop,” “R&B,” etc., and put it right on the piano so he could switch the effects around until he hit on one that he liked.

He loved Jimi Hendrix’s
Electric Ladyland
, and when Billy made
The Nylon Curtain
we experimented extensively with panning, phasing, and compression. Almost every song on
The Nylon Curtain
has a different vocal effect.

On “Goodnight Saigon,” for example, we used an echo chamber with a noise gate to cancel out the normal ringing effect. The combination gave his voice the sweet, high “youthful innocence” that he wanted, but at the same time it made him sound breathless, frightened, and agitated.

After my first few sessions with Billy, I made an interesting observation: He never warmed up by singing his own songs—not even the ones we were currently working on.

Instead, he would start a session by doing impersonations.

“Remember when Otis Redding sang this?” he’d ask, and start singing like Otis Redding. Then he would slide into a Ray Charles song, or start wailing Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” He did the same thing when he overdubbed background vocals.

It was odd: Here I was trying to get Billy Joel to sound like Billy Joel, while he was trying to sound like anyone but. I was curious, and it took two albums before I had the nerve to ask, “When are you going to just come in and sing like Billy Joel?”

What I learned was that singing in different styles not only helped Billy warm up before a concert or session; it helped him break through his shyness and fear, too.

Billy once explained his love-hate relationship with singing:

“The human voice has lots of nuance, and I like to use humor to drive my point home. I don’t think of myself as a singer; I’m a piano player and songwriter. I don’t have a lot of confidence in my singing voice, so I’m constantly fooling around with it. When I have to listen to my voice cold in the studio, I cringe. I try to give it a ‘live-in the-arena’ setting on record because I think it’s pretty boring.

“I like to compose and play in such a way that I don’t have to sing all that many round notes, keeping the emphasis on syllabic bursts filled in with drum beats and guitar licks. I sound better when I’m socking out a tune to one degree or another than when I’m crooning.”

A vocalist is far more exposed when singing a ballad than when they’re singing an up-tempo tune, because it’s easier to hide a crack in the voice behind the brashness of a busier arrangement. Belting ’em out definitely brought fullness and vigor to Billy’s vocals.

So did singing at the piano.

When Billy sang and played simultaneously, he put his entire body into the performance. The crook in his neck and the way he faced the mike are what gave him his sound.

Billy plays an extremely full piano, and to help isolate it from his vocal mike I built a “doghouse” shell for the piano and draped it with thick blankets. The studio was arranged so that the piano was in a direct line with Liberty, who was six or eight feet away on a small platform.

I was big on putting the drums right near Billy and having Liberty DeVitto play as loud as he wanted. The pressure from the two instruments sounded like a hundred tons spilling into each other, and the leakage is why Billy’s records have such incredible energy. It also didn’t hurt that Doug Stegmeyer could play the electric bass as ferociously as Billy played piano.

“Doug Stegmeyer, God rest his soul, was like Billy’s left hand,” explains Richie Cannata. “When musicians talk about Billy playing a ‘full’ piano, it meant that he played the way a singer playing in a piano bar would—using the keyboard broadly. Doug embellished the bass notes [that Billy was playing with his left hand] by following it exactly.”

The guys in Billy’s band weren’t shy when it came to sharing ideas.

Billy Joel recording at the piano, New York City, circa 1986
Courtesy of Sony/BMG Music Entertainment

They had plenty of opinions, and the discussions that followed a take would usually end with good-natured attacks on each other. Things could get wild during the sessions. Billy had what we called the “Billy Joel Guilt Complex” because of his relationship with the guys in his band—Liberty in particular.

As a drummer, Liberty had control and power, and he asserted it in a positive way. He didn’t like to play to a track without lyrics—he needed to hear words. Billy knew that, but he’d sometimes come in after the weekend, and we’d discover that he hadn’t made much progress insofar as lyrics were concerned. Billy would feel bad if he had only the words for one song, and
really
awful if he didn’t have any at all.

If Billy hadn’t come up with any lyrics by the time we were ready to record a song, he would hum the main melody, or make up nonsensical words. There were lots of dummy lyrics (usually devised by Liberty) that filled in for as-yet-unwritten words. Some of them were quite funny: An early incarnation of “She’s Always A Woman to Me” was “She’s Only A Widow to Me,” and in lieu of a firm song title, the word
sodomy
was substituted for “Honesty” when we were making
52nd Street
.

Like most drummers, Liberty was the band’s engine: he drove everyone, and he made Billy toe the line. Liberty thought nothing of chiding Billy for not completing his work; he’d throw his drumsticks across the room and say,
“I’m not playing this shit
—
go finish it!”
And Billy would do it.

Liberty also wasn’t averse to telling Billy when something was awful. In fact, I think he sadistically delighted in doing so, and I laughed like hell one time when Billy jibed him back. Liberty had written a song, and he played it for Billy in the car. Billy listened and said, “Hmm, that’s not bad.” Then, he caught himself. He sneered at Liberty and said, “I’m gonna do what you do to me. That
sucks!
”

In those days there was an untenable bond between the guys in Billy’s band, and sessions were as wild as a garage band’s rehearsal.

As Billy explained:

“If someone ever saw footage of our recording sessions and it looks like we’re fooling around too much, it’s because we were. It’s a recording technique we came up with. If the musicians are having fun—if they’re having a good time—it shows in the music. You have to do things to relax because recording is tense. You’re creating something out of nothing; you’re conjuring something out of thin air. It’s a source of amazement to the musicians, too, that we’re doing this. There’s a joyful feeling you get when something works. It’s like, ‘Wow, we did it!’ It’s exhilarating.”

“We were a bunch of twenty-year-old guys, and it was effortless,” says Richie Cannata. “But it’s important to mention that Phil was the fifth member of the band—the glue. He had the facility to give us leeway, but he knew how—and when—to bring it all together.”

Food was a source of fun for the band, and I kept the studio stocked with snacks, in case someone came down with an acute case of the munchies.

There was always a big bowl of candy on the table: Three Musketeers, Baby Ruth, and Snickers bars. I’d also put out a few jars of peanut butter and jelly, a loaf of white bread, and some fruit. On breaks the band would have peanut butter and jelly tasting contests. They’d give an assistant a few bucks and say, “Get a jar of Jif, and a jar of Skippy—both crunchy and smooth.” Then they’d make sandwiches, and debate over which peanut butter tasted best.

Leaving the studio for meal breaks interrupts the flow of a session. It changes everyone’s attitude, and more often than not, neither the food nor the break ends up being fulfilling. After four or five hours of intense work, it’s better to bring in some food, turn on a ballgame, and hang out in the lounge.