Issue 119

Philip Newell has been professionally involved in audio since 1966. He has done it all, from an apprenticeship in audio electronics while studying radio and television servicing, to doing live sound for internationally renowned musicians, from working in recording studios (and at Pye Records) to becoming the Technical Director of Virgin Records. He has designed and built world-class studios, mobile recording trucks, cinemas and dubbing theatres. Newell has published research papers, presented in conferences and has sponsored academic research. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s a licensed pilot and has flown airplanes and seaplanes, having owned a fleet of seaplanes, and acted as a flight instructor and examiner.

Throughout his career, Philip Newell has worked on a large number of recordings by world famous artists including Queen, The Who, Hawkwind, Patti Smith, The Band, Gong, Can, Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield, all the way to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, The Duke Ellington Orchestra, Dizzy Gillespie and others.

Philip has worked in over 30 different countries. He is a fellow of the Institute of Acoustics in the UK and is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the Seaplane Pilots Association.

He has written eight books published by Focal Press, including Loudspeakers, Studio Monitoring Design and Recording Studio Design, all of which I would highly recommend to anyone wishing to dive deeper into these subjects.

In this two-part interview Philip shares his perspective into the past and present of the music industry, as well as thoughts about the laws of aerodynamics and acoustics.

J.I. Agnew:

You have been professionally involved in the world of music since 1966. What drew you to this sector, of all the options open to a 17-year-old in 1960s Britain?

Philip Newell:

The music of the late 1950s and the 1960s completely captivated me. My nickname at school was “Prof” (or “The Professor”) and it was assumed that I would go to university and study the sciences. However, when I was in my penultimate year of school, primarily studying “double mathematics” and physics, I saw an apprenticeship job advertised, which was in music-related electronics, so I shocked the school-teachers by announcing my departure and “getting a job.”

They were sure that I had made a huge mistake, but the job was like a magnet for me. Very soon after, I was offered a job in live sound, working closely with musicians, and as I had been formally educated in piano playing I could easily converse with them. We got along very well, and I soon got asked to work at larger venues, which took me to London.

JIA: How did your friends and family react to your decision to get a job instead of continuing on to university education at the time?

PN: I think my parents could see how much I wanted the job, and they knew that music, electronics and loudspeakers had already been my main hobbies for several years. The job also involved spending one day each week at Blackburn Technical College, to study electronics, so at least they could see some further education for me. Most of my friends had already left school a year earlier, after our O Level examinations, so they were not surprised that I should also leave school. In fact, continuing to A Levels and universities was not usual in those days, and I had already done one year of the A Level course.

JIA: How did the shift happen from you working at live music events to working in recording studios?

PN: Once I was at the Orchid Ballroom, in Purley, I found myself working with some of the top British session musicians. They played in the resident bands of the ballroom about three nights a week (Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays), but spent much of their weekdays in the London recording studios, playing on many of the famous records for the top artistes. One of the musicians eventually invited me to help to supervise the building of his new recording studio, in Clapham (South London).

Incidentally, in the Orchid Ballroom on Sunday and Monday there would be visiting bands, which were often world-famous groups or singers, such as Stax, Atlantic and Motown artistes. Having the chance to work on the sound for such people was enormously educating.

By 1970, I went to work for Pye Recording Studios, which was one of London’s “big three” studios [along] with Abbey Road and Decca, but I very much enjoyed working with their mobile-recording team, which often recorded live events, as well as doing other location recordings. Originally, we carried “loose” recording equipment, such as a Neve mixing console [that was transported] in three sections, but I later helped to install the equipment in their mobile recording truck – designed by Ray Prickett and overseen by Peter Duncan. I enjoyed the challenges of live recording. Every day was different.

JIA: There was a certain situation in the UK around the 1960s which led to the advent of several radio stations on boats and abandoned military platforms (in what was still international waters), broadcasting the kind of music you most likely were captivated by. Were you ever involved with this scene?

PN: I was not involved personally, but David Hawkins (a friend who had also worked at Pye, and who now owns Eastlake Audio) was on (I think it was) Radio London. However, these stations radically changed the 1960s music scene in the UK, and in a very positive way. I spent a great deal of time listening to Radio Caroline North, and it was probably the biggest single influence on me feeling that I had to work in music. In fact, I would probably not have left school if there had been no Radio Caroline North. It was such a major source for hearing what I thought was great music. No other radio stations in the north of England were playing this music.

JIA: Early on, you started being involved in designing and constructing recording studios, mobile recording trucks and monitor loudspeakers. What was the inspiration that made you go from using studios and loudspeakers that others had designed, to designing your own?

PN: As my work was quite “mobile,” involving listening in many studios and recording in many locations, it was very obvious to me and to many others that there was very poor compatibility between their monitoring conditions, yet the very term “monitoring” suggested working to some sort of reference standard. However, to a large degree, studio acoustics was considered to be a black art, involving some sort of sorcery, and the “broadcast standards” that frequently were applied (which were originally intended for radio and TV studios) seemed to me to be largely misplaced. It was like trying to judge an orange by a standard set for apples. Yes; they are both fruit, but they are also very different, with different characteristics. I was absolutely certain that there were better ways of doing things regarding the control rooms and the loudspeaker systems, because at that time, what was being done just didn’t make sense to me.

JIA: Has the industry changed much since the 1960s?

PN: I would say that in the 1960s there was much more emphasis placed on finding a great song to record. Probably the majority of the songs recorded by the great artistes were the products of specialized songwriters, so it was then the job of the artistes to interpret the songs and make them “their own.” Even groups such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Animals did this, as did the greats such as Elvis Presley, Joe Cocker, Tom Jones and Tina Turner, for example. None of these singers wrote many songs themselves, and not all great songwriters are great singers, either. The musical arrangements were also largely prepared before they went into a studio, so the principal job of any studio was to make the best recording of an already selected song. There is no doubt that this concept of specialized singers, songwriters and arrangers produced some real classics.

JIA: Your transition from a very successful career in the music industry to becoming a professional seaplane pilot and instructor hardly seems like a natural career progression; what prompted such a radical change?

PN: In 1978, Richard Branson [founder of Virgin Records, later the Virgin Group] bought Necker Island, in the British Virgin Islands. The original intention was to build a recording studio on the island, as a tax-haven for the big-earning artistes. When I first went there it was a totally deserted island, and seaplanes were a common form of transport in the Virgin Islands. I had already learned to fly landplanes at Kidlington (now Oxford) Airport, which was only about 2 kilometres from The Manor Studio [where I had been working], so I studied to add the “seaplanes and amphibians” rating to my licence, to facilitate my access to the island during the intended construction of the studio.

When the idea to build the studio was abandoned, due to a huge fall in the maximum tax rates in the UK after the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, I was already hooked on the seaplanes.

JIA: Is there any common ground between the skills required of an audio/music professional and a pilot?

PN: Although the discipline of the flying world was in huge contrast to the music industry, I realised that the laws of aerodynamics were unbendable. If you disregarded them, they could kill you, but if you respected them, they could also save you. Almost by chance, after taking part in an air display on Southampton Water, I found myself in contact with the aerodynamics people at the University of Southampton, which was coincidentally in the same building as the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR). I soon realised that the laws of acoustics were just as dependable as the laws of aerodynamics if you obeyed the rules, so this led me into looking at control rooms and monitor systems from a different perspective. As with aerodynamics, if you obey the rules, the outcome is repeatable and guaranteed. No sorcery is involved!

JIA: Were you involved further with Necker Island after the studio idea was abandoned?

PN: No; I never went back there. However, one day, who knows? I am sure it is not out of the question.

 

In Part Two Philip will talk about fitting huge fuel tanks to the Manor Mobile recording truck during the 1973 oil crisis, life at Virgin Records, advice for people breaking into the record business and more.

Sometimes it takes a while to find your true purpose in life. Patty Griffin had just been through a divorce when she decided to try singing professionally in 1994 at the age of 30. She’d been playing guitar and writing songs since she was 16, but it hadn’t seemed like a career option until the upheaval in her personal life. Since then, she’s become a two-time Grammy-winner whose songs have been performed by the likes of Emmylou Harris and Kelly Clarkson.

Once Griffin signed with A&M Records, she got to work on her first album, Living with Ghosts (1996), a simple, folky affair with just voice and guitar. All the songs were original – in the best sense of the word. They weren’t quite like anything else out there.

The debut opens with “Moses,” unusual enough for its aching meditation on the importance of self-care to heal a wounded heart. And then there’s Griffin’s voice: piercing, slightly pinched, not soothing and easy but demanding of the listener’s emotional engagement. The melody is also odd, repeating upward motions against the guitar’s chords like a desperate prayer. This is the work of somebody defying conventions for the sake of her art.

 

Griffin got more attention for her second album, Flaming Red (1998), which hit the No. 12 spot on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart for emerging artists. For these sessions, Griffin brought in a backing band to support her, and the results are satisfyingly rich.

Several of the songs were composed by Jay Joyce, who was also debuting as a record producer. Joyce’s tune “Big Daddy” starts in a weird, dissonant sound world that could reasonably be mistaken for Radiohead. Griffin digs into the melancholy with the breathy low end of her voice.

 

Although Griffin recorded one more album for A&M, Silver Bell, the company dropped her before the record could be released. She quickly signed with the ATO label, founded by Dave Matthews, and by 2002 had put out the album 1,000 Kisses.

“Nobody’s Crying” is by Griffin and demonstrates the stripped-down sound of this album. There are plenty of session musicians on hand, but you don’t get the sense that they’re all playing all the time. Griffin and her guitar are the feature, and her piercing voice goes right to the heart.

 

Her next album, Impossible Dream (2004) may be no less melancholy, but it does have a lusher sound. The rich orchestrations include several brass instruments and two types of organ. No arranger is credited on the otherwise detailed personnel list. Craig Ross, who specializes in working with country songwriters with an indie bent, produced the album.

Impossible Dream does, in fact, include Griffin singing the famous song from the musical Man of La Mancha. But its most remarkable song has to be “Mother of God,” originally recorded for Silver Bell. This seems to be a song about living with a loved one’s mental illness. What starts as a spare piano accompaniment thickens and grows verse by verse, both through the addition of other instruments and the use of reverb and other engineering tricks.

 

Griffin’s final album for ATO was Children Running Through (2007). As was also true of the past several albums, Emmylou Harris joined in on some vocals for a couple of tracks. This album seems to have been a particular inspiration to country superstar Kelly Clarkson, who performed both “Up to the Mountain (MLK Song)” – accompanied by Jeff Beck – and “No Bad News” on prime-time television shows.

Here’s Griffin’s album version of “No Bad News” in a bluegrass-influenced arrangement. Nashville session guitarist Doug Lancio provided the almost frantic autoharp strumming pattern. That bright, metallic sound is intriguingly contrasted by the mellow brass section before the last verse.

 

In 2009 Griffin was invited to join gospel legend Mavis Staples on a track for a compilation album. An executive for EMI’s Christian music branch heard the song and contacted Griffin about doing a gospel album. She agreed, bringing along bandmember Buddy Miller to produce. Downtown Church (2010), named after the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville where it was recorded for the Credential label, won Griffin her first Grammy Award.

But it wasn’t any kind of conventional gospel album. Nestled among traditional spirituals are songs by Hank Williams and Big Mama Thornton. And then there’s “I Smell a Rat,” Leiber and Stoller’s bluesy rock and roll number. It might not be about religion, but Griffin applies her best gospel vocal chops to sell this snide warning to an unfaithful mate.

 

During this period, Griffin was in both a musical and personal relationship with British rock star Robert Plant. They lived together, toured together, and even cut a few tracks together. Meanwhile, Griffin continued her solo career. She released American Kid in 2013 on the label New West. This album was dedicated to her father, who had recently died.

Rather than record only new works about her father, Griffin blended in some interesting old material. One venerable choice is “Mom and Dad’s Waltz,” a bittersweet classic by Lefty Frizzell (1928 – 1975). Griffin doesn’t try to turn it into anything but what it is: a wonderful trip back in time to the formative days of country music.

 

In the past five years, Griffin has self-released two albums, marketed by a distribution service called Thirty Tigers. Her lack of an industry label has not lessened either her writing or the sonic integrity of her studio output, although her voice is coarser than it used to be. The first of these efforts was Servant of Love (2015), which includes the thunderous, chugging “Gunpowder.” Ephraim Owens tears it up on the trumpet.

 

Sidelined for a few years by breast cancer, Griffin not only survived but seems to be flourishing. Maybe the title of her 2019 release, Patty Griffin, is a sign of her sense of renewal. She’s digging into her folk influences here, channeling Appalachia in this beautiful new ballad called “Bluebeard.” The illness took her voice away completely, but she’s built it back, now rough-edged with experience.

 

Before COVID-19 shut everything down, Patty Griffin was out touring. She told an interviewer last year that she’d been looking back at her career, listening to her old recordings, and was not at all displeased with what she heard. It was “something kind of magical,” she admitted. Her fans could have told her that.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/d&e, cropped to fit format.

Our friend Allan was the Sherriff of Galilee. At least that’s what we called him. In actuality he was a commander in the border police and was often called on to settle disputes between Israeli and Jordanian farmers whose land abutted the Jordan river. He lived in one of the most beautiful spots in Israel, Kfar Kish. The Moshav (a cooperative community of farmers) in the eastern end of the Jezreel Valley, faced Mount Tabor. As Bible readers may remember, Mount Tabor is believed to be the place where Jesus began to radiate light and talk to the prophets Moses and Elijah. It is also the site of a battle between the Israelite army and the Canaanites. (the Israelites won after God intervened by sowing panic among the Canaanites). In those days, the drive up to the Church of the Transfiguration at the top was quite perilous but you were rewarded with a magnificent view of the Jezreel Valley and the fabled site of Armageddon.

Once when visiting Allan and his wife, Maxine, we were introduced to a neighbor who was a beekeeper. His honey produced from wildflowers was renowned and we often took some home.

Motti, the beekeeper, was in his mid-forties, very fit, completely bald and had piercing blue eyes that gazed with intensity. He was soft spoken and amiable. After he left, Allan asked me what I thought of him.

“He looks like a killer,” I replied.

Allan laughed.

“During the Lebanese war which was started to eradicate the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), soft- spoken Motti and few of his commando friends commandeered a Jeep and drove right into the heart of western Beirut where the PLO had their stronghold. They toured around the neighborhood taking photos. They were totally fearless.”

“Once,” he continued, “A friend was having an issue with the harassment of his girlfriend so he and Motti visited the guy to ask him to desist. The guy took one look at Motti, who didn’t say a word, and turned white and forever disappeared.”

From then on, his honey tasted better.

______

My first job in Israel was selling high-quality Danish furniture. The store was called Danish Interiors and was owned by a South African. It was a great place to work because the staff were mainly ex-pats like myself, young, educated and interesting. Some of my best friendships started in “Danish,” as we called it. This was a time (early seventies) when there was a large emigration from the west and as most of us were ex-pats, making new friends was really important.

It was also a great pick-up place; a good percentage of the clientele were wealthy Israeli women whose husbands were often somewhere else.

One day an Israeli man approached me and placed an order for a large quantity of furniture. It was a special order and I explained that it would take four months to arrive.

“Is this a guaranteed time frame?” He asked.

“Yes.” I replied, “We do this all the time and four months is highly accurate.”

He looked me in the eye, held out his hand, and said, “I work in the diamond trade and shaking hands is the only guarantee we need.”

I clasped his hand and shook it.

I placed the order and about once a month, I called him advising him of the progress of his order.

In the third month, I phoned and told him that the order was booked to be loaded in a container the following week and it would arrive on schedule in Haifa Port.

That week, the Yom Kippur War broke out. All ships and their containers scheduled for Israel were commandeered by the defense forces and used to transport urgent materiel for the war effort.

I called my customer and of course he understood as he himself was just leaving for the front.

Not being an Israeli citizen, I was not conscripted so my wife and I volunteered to work in a kibbutz in the north where we had the mind-numbing, all-day job of sorting apples by size.

The war over, I was recalled to “Danish” to resume my job. As many of the staff were still in the army, I became a delivery man, a furniture assembler and a trouble-shooter before I returned to my sales job.

I received word that my client’s shipment was finally on the water. I called him.

“It’s on the way. The boat will dock on Tuesday, it will take a couple of days to unload and sort and we are planning to deliver the order sometime next week.”

He thanked me for the good customer service and said that he would recommend me to his friends. This was great as I worked on commission.

The boat docked in Haifa and the unloading began. In those days, containers were lifted off the boat using the kind of large cranes you often see in docks. While transferring my container, the chain snapped and the whole box dropped into Haifa bay.

The final phone call was not easy.

______

The drive to the Sinai was magical. The road that parallels the Dead Sea is particularly beautiful in the early morning when the sun illuminates the Negev desert as it rises above the Jordanian mountains to the east. This was 1972 and Israel, at that time, controlled the Sinai Peninsula so travel into the desert was easy. We had been living in Israel for about a year when we decided to visit Sinai for a few days during the Yom Kippur holiday. (Yom Kippur is the holiest day for religious Jews.)

Passing through Eilat we continued south until we reached Nuweiba on the Gulf of Aqaba. It was there that we set up our tent and sleeping bag. Nuweiba is now a small town but back then, it consisted of a couple of makeshift shacks run by local Bedouins selling basic foodstuffs and swimming gear. After an al fresco dinner, we went for a swim in the crystal-clear waters of the Gulf and settled down to watch the sunset turn the hills of Saudi Arabia orange, pink and blood red. We stayed in Nuweiba for a couple of days, doing nothing more than swimming, eating and talking to other Israelis and Bedouin. We then packed up our gear and moved south to Dahab which was as desolate as Nuweiba. Dahab has wonderful coral reefs and we did do some snorkeling. There was a Bedouin camp nearby where we bought water and food. We often chatted with some of the tribesmen and found them to be very friendly and inquisitive.

This, our first vacation since we moved to Israel, was idyllic. The vast expanse of the desert, the colors, the light and the waters of the gulf all conspired to calm and seduce us.

As a child, in my bedroom at night in cold, rainy Glasgow, I would read stories about exotic places like the Sinai, dreaming of visiting them someday and now, here I was, living that adventure.

We drove home on Yom Kippur taking the more westerly road through the Negev. We were, with one exception, the only car on the road. The journey was quite long as we were about 250 miles from home but the lack of traffic made it go quickly.

When we approached Yavne, a small town south of Tel Aviv, the road narrowed as we entered the town center. Our car was a Triumph Herald convertible and we drove with the windows down. The car had no air conditioning and it was too hot during the day to open the roof. Up ahead, we saw a crowd of people. This was odd as, until that point, the countryside and towns had been deserted. As we got closer, we saw that the crowd consisted of young, orthodox teenagers. They started to yell and as we passed, a deluge of stones hit us. Some were quite big and we managed to roll up the windows before any came inside. Then a large rock landed on one of the side windows, breaking it. Many others left dents on the sides of the car. Shocked and frightened, we continued driving trepidatiously hoping to avoid a repeat performance. We made it home and vowed never to venture out again on Yom Kippur.

The following year, as a safety measure, we stayed home. Food was bought and some friends stayed over. We awoke to the sounds of tanks rumbling by; it was 1973 and the Yom Kippur war had just started.

Header image: view from Mount Tabor, Israel. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Zairon.

Walter Trout – Ordinary Madness

Walter Trout is a blues survivor, and will turn seventy next March. He started playing in the late sixties, and spent the next two-and-a-half decades on the road, playing with the likes of Big Mama Thornton, Joe Tex, and John Lee Hooker throughout the conclusion of the seventies. And then spent time up until the early nineties with Canned Heat and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, before finally breaking out on his own. That time on the road was hard-earned, and Trout suffered through various addictions, along with a drinking problem that required a liver transplant with multiple surgeries that darn near killed him. To say that he’s paid his dues is a serious understatement, and Trout stated in a 2018 European radio interview that the only thing that saved him in his descent into alcohol and substance abuse was an encounter with Carlos Santana, and the sage advice he offered to help get on the road towards recovery.

Trout formed The Walter Trout Band in 1990, and has lived and performed mostly in Scandinavia and throughout Europe since, where he has a huge following. He’s played on countless records over the course of his career, with eight studio albums under the WTB banner, and he has five albums under the name of Walter Trout and the Radicals. His new album, Ordinary Madness, is his eleventh studio album performing simply as Walter Trout, and in Europe, many of his records have sold in excess of 100,000 copies. He appears regularly on many European-based blues magazine awards lists, and his face has graced the covers of many European-based blues and guitar magazines. Despite all this, he’s a virtual unknown here in his native country. If there’s any justice at all in the music world, the superb blues-rock of Ordinary Madness should change all that.

Most of the songs reflect on Trout’s own ordeals, as well as telling stories that deal with the human condition. On the title track, “Ordinary Madness,” Trout sings about the madness we all experience in our everyday lives to an impressive blues vamp; Trout’s voice isn’t an exceptional instrument, but you can sense a certain road-weariness in it that serves the music well. His Fender Strat, on the other hand, does most of the talking; on the solo midway through the track, it truly sings and Trout wrings every level of expressiveness from it. “Heartland” tells the tale of a young girl leaving her home for a life on the road, with a thrilling concluding guitar solo. “All Out of Tears” is the musical centerpiece of the album, and has Walter Trout giving his impressions of an oft-explored blues meditation; the center and concluding solos are among the very best on the entire album. And Trout shows that he’s no dinosaur, and that he has a great sense of humor in touch with modern culture, with the tune “OK Boomer,” with its refrain of “I like my music loud, I’m a geriatric, and I’m proud! I don’t care what you say, I’m a Boomer, and I’m OK!” His backing band, consisting of guitarist Anthony Grisham, bassist Johnny Griparic, drummer Michael Leasure, and Teddy “Zig Zag” Andreadis on harmonica and keys, are crack musicians and provide the perfect backing for Walter Trout’s guitar leads.

Walter Trout plays a pair of ‘73 Fender Strats and uses Mesa Boogie amps exclusively, and his guitar tone is sublime. The 24/96 sound of this album as streamed via Qobuz was absolutely superb as it played through my PrimaLuna tube amp and Zu Audio Omen loudspeakers — tubes, blues, and compression-driver loudspeakers are definitely a match made in heaven. Ordinary Madness comes very highly recommended — I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to find out about Walter Trout, and I’ll definitely be digging into his back catalogue. And if you’re into vinyl, there’s a translucent red double LP available [here] on Trout’s website. Ordinary Madness is not to be missed!

Provogue Records, CD/LP (download/streaming [24/96] from Qobuz, Tidal, Amazon Music, Google Play Music, Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Pandora, Deezer, TuneIn)

 

Angel Olsen – Whole New Mess

Angel’s Olsen’s 2019 release and fifth overall studio album, All Mirrors, was released to critical acclaim, and peaked at number 52 on the Billboard charts, which is a pretty good accomplishment for an indie artist. The song selection — the album came on the heels the breakup of a longstanding relationship — consisted of Olsen’s vocals with her guitar and synth accompaniments, and was augmented by drums, additional synths, and a fourteen-piece string orchestra on many of the tunes. And the songs were definitely outstanding, with most of them wearing well with repeat listens. The album was apparently intended to be more of a barebones affair to reflect the somewhat depressing nature of the songs, but once the tapes got rolling and the string section appeared, Olsen was all in, and the results speak for themselves in songs that mostly deal with love, loss, and the ambivalence of our lives.

So it comes as no surprise that in the midst of the great pandemic, she decided to revisit All Mirrors, stripping the songs down to just the guitar and vocal originals. The result is her new album, Whole New Mess, which has taken the core group of tunes and reworked many of them — even to the point of changing some of the titles, and adding in a couple of new songs for good measure. And not all the synths have been abandoned either, though the vocals are not as purely recorded as on the original, with some additional processing and effects added. Nonetheless, the results are equally striking, even with the stark quality of the vocals and the spare instrumentation. There’s actually very little in Whole New Mess that bears much of a resemblance to All Mirrors, at all.

Most of the vocals throughout have some degree of echo and reverb added, and it gives the stripped-down presentation of the songs a very haunting sort of quality. And her soprano has a very waifish quality to it, almost as though her vocals have been sprinkled with fairy dust (or Angel dust?!). In “Too Easy (Bigger Than Us)” she sings, “Some things happen for a reason, cancel all these plans I’m dreaming, you walked in and now I feel I’m not alone.” The dissolution of that relationship left an awfully big hole in her life; but when compared to the version of the song on All Mirrors, the previous version seems much less desperate or evocative than the current, stripped-down version. In fact, that’s an undercurrent that runs through Angel Olsen’s body of work; it’s amazing how different versions of the same song from her can seem both uplifting in one reading and filled with disillusionment in the next. The song from which the previous album took its title, “(We Are All Mirrors),” is probably the surrealistic peak of a very surreal record. “Standin’, facin’, all mirrors are erasin’, losin’ beauty, at least at times it knew me” — the image Angel Olsen (or any of us) is seeing in the mirror isn’t always the true reflection of who we really are — or were.

Whole New Mess is both a difficult and simultaneously beautiful album, and the duality of the songs leaves the listener with plenty of room to find his (or her) own meaning; taking a listen to the previous release, All Mirrors, is pretty much required listening here, and could either clear things up significantly, or compound the confusion. Regardless, the 24 bit/44.1 kHz digital files from Qobuz made for superior listening, despite the relatively lo-fi approach of the album. YMMV, but I found Whole New Mess very enjoyable. Recommended.

Jagjaguar, CD/LP (download/streaming [24/44.1] from Qobuz, Tidal, Amazon, Google Play Music, Pandora, Deezer, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, TuneIn)

Elliott Smith – Elliott Smith: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition 

Singer/songwriter Elliott Smith is another of the many performers who made something of a splash, but then died much too early. But he’s made a tremendous impression on many new artists in the years since his death; the number of artists who credit Smith as an influence on their styles is extensive. He’s often been described as something of a modern day Nick Drake — another very influential artist who died much too young. While their vocal styles and guitar playing techniques are quite similar, Smith’s lyrical rawness is often in pretty stark contrast to the more poetic leanings of Nick Drake. And while Drake came to true prominence many years after his death, Elliott Smith was on the cusp of his big commercial breakthrough when he was found dead of multiple stab wounds in 2003 at age 34. The official police inquiry was “inconclusive,” and it was never determined if Smith was indeed murdered, or perhaps died at his own hand, and with the passing of years, the investigation will likely never be reopened.

His breakthrough album was Elliott Smith, his second studio effort and his first after being signed to the Kill Rock Stars label. The album was a mostly sparsely orchestrated affair, with many of the songs consisting of nothing more than Smith’s almost whispery vocals and his acoustic guitar accompaniment. The album has been often compared to Nick Drake’s final album, Pink Moon, which was the most stark and sparely instrumented of an all-too-brief three album career. Nick Drake is believed to have died of an accidental overdose of prescription anti-depressants; Elliott Smith also struggled with depression, and also had alcohol and substance abuse problems, which definitely contributed to the very austere nature of many of his songs. Elliott Smith: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition, offers newly remixed versions of all twelve songs from the original album release, and there’s no bonus material in terms of unreleased songs or alternate takes. But there is an entire disc’s worth of previously unreleased live material from a September, 1994 date at Umbra Penumbra, a small club in Elliott’s then adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon. All the songs are either from Elliott Smith, or were common in his live performances at the time.

The remixed versions have much greater clarity, with a much improved vocal presentation than that heard in previous issues, and the entire project was overseen by Larry Crane. Crane is also a resident of Portland, and runs a local mixing studio, where he’s done work for not only Elliott Smith, but also Sleater-Kinney, The Go-Betweens, The Decemberists, and She & Him among others. He’s also the editor of Tape Op Magazine, and serves as the official archivist for Elliott Smith’s estate. Crane had access to the original tapes for the studio portion of the album, and the live album came from a cassette provided by big-time Elliott Smith fan Casey Cyrnes. Crane says the live tracks have only been available as fan-traded bootleg MP3s from unofficial sources, and the sound quality from the cassette version will blow away true fans anxious to hear the earliest known live recordings of Elliott Smith that exist. I can verify that the remixed/remastered studio tracks are outstanding in terms of sound quality, and the live tracks sound exceptional to have come from such a questionable source.

Qobuz’s 24/96 digital stream sounds fantastic, and if you’re a big fan of Elliott Smith, you might want to also spring for the double-LP version. This also includes a 52-page coffee-table style book with Smith’s handwritten lyrics, reminisces from his friends and colleagues, and dozens of rare and unseen photos by JJ Gonson, who also photographed the original album cover. Portia Sabin of Kill Rock Stars contacted Gonson on a whim, to see if maybe she had taken any more photos of Elliott Smith around the time of her photo shoot for the album cover; as it turns out, she had, and was able to locate several rolls of film that had never seen the light of day. You can find information about the LP release here. Kill Rock Stars has done this one up right, and if you’re a big fan, you’ll be impressed with the results. Highly recommended.

Kill Rock Stars, CD/2 LPs (download/streaming [24/96] from Qobuz, Tidal, Amazon, Google Play Music, Deezer, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, TuneIn)

 

The Allman Betts Band – Bless Your Heart

The Allman Brothers Band was legendary guitarist Duane Allman’s group, from the time of its inception to his untimely death due to a motorcycle accident in October, 1971, at a point when the band’s popularity was at its apex. While brother Gregg Allman was, as the band’s principal vocalist, the face of the band, he became the de facto leader after Duane Allman’s death. Bassist Berry Oakley also died a year later, also in a motorcycle accident, and only a block away from where Duane had died. The last ABB album to feature Duane Allman, Eat A Peach, also marked Dickie Betts’ ascent into the lead guitar role with the group, and the song “Blue Sky” became his first lead vocal and signature tune. The next ABB release, Brothers and Sisters, marked Berry Oakley’s last appearance with the band, and the addition of new bassist Lamar Williams and keyboardist Chuck Leavell, which ushered in the new era of the Allman Brothers Band. Brothers and Sisters reached Number 1 on the charts and sold over a million copies, and the Dickie Betts’ penned and sung “Ramblin’ Man” became the band’s biggest hit. But all the commercial success didn’t bode well for the future of the band. Squabbling within the group — predominantly between Gregg Allman and Dickie Betts — and a much publicized drug trial involving members of the band’s road crew, where Gregg Allman testified in the trial, splintered their camaraderie. Although various incarnations of the band recorded together over the next few decades, it was never quite the same with the ABB. Gregg Allman seemed to completely chill in later years as he approached his death, but Dickie Betts just seemed to become a more polarizing figure as the years rolled on.

When the Allman Betts Band first came to my attention last year, I really didn’t pay any attention; I simply assumed it was some kind of empty ploy by Dickie Betts to cash in on his ABB legacy. I didn’t realize until I listened to this excellent new release a couple of days ago, that the band has nothing to do with Dickie Betts, but is made up of guitarists Devon Allman and Duane Betts — the sons of Gregg Allman and Dickie Betts — along with bassist Berry Duane Oakley, the son of original ABB bassist Berry Oakley. Holy cow! The group is rounded out by guitarist Johnny Stachela, keyboardist John Ginty, R. Scott Bryan on percussion and backing vocals, and John Lum on drums. Allman, Betts, and Oakley serve as the principal vocalists for the band. Fortunately, for fans of Southern fried rock and roll, the quarrels of the talented fathers are not always visited on the equally talented sons.

Listening to the Allman Betts Band’s new album, Bless Your Heart, is an absolute blast from the past. The album’s title is really provocative: as a native southerner, I know that the expression “Bless Your Heart!” doesn’t always exactly carry the kind hearted sentimentality that the verbiage would suggest — it can indeed convey what it expresses, but it can just as often express something more along the lines of a complete insult. According to the Urban Dictionary: “Bless Your Heart” is “The most Southern ‘f*ck you’ there is” and that has always been my experience, especially depending upon its context when conversationally involved with true Southerners, especially Southern women. ABB’s debut album, Down To The River, which was released last year about this time, was literally the very first time these guys had played together in a studio, and was a warm tribute to the Allman Brothers’ classic sound. Leading up to that point, the band played classic Allman Brothers tunes at live shows to hone their chops and help develop their own sound. Bless Your Heart has seen the band gel as a unit in ways that have to be heard to be believed, and the new record is a distillation of the classic Allman Brothers sound — which is their birthright — and their own sound they’ve been fine-tuning for the last year or so.

Bless Your Heart was recorded at Alabama’s legendary Muscle Shoals Studios; Devon Allman’s uncle, the late Duane Allman was a regular fixture on the Muscle Shoals scene as a session player on some of the finest R&B and blues records produced in the mid-sixties prior to forming the Allman Brothers Band. The album has an authentic Southern rock sound, and some of the songs are eerily reminiscent of the Allman Brothers at their creative peak. From the slow fade-in of the opening track of “Pale Horse Rider,” you’re greeted with at first screaming, then harmonizing twin guitars and a howling Hammond B3 organ that would have made the fathers of everyone involved very proud indeed. “Magnolia Road” features a Devon Allman vocal that’s eerily reminiscent of his late father Gregg Allman — it’s super spooky, to say the least! The album’s centerpiece is the 12-plus minute long instrumental, “Savannah’s Dream,” which has an intro not unlike “Les Brers in A Minor” from Eat A Peach, but the Allman Betts Band makes the tune entirely their own. That Hammond B3 wails away in the background, and the dual guitar leads craft a southern rock tune as memorable as anything I’ve heard in the last couple of decades.

The 16/44.1 CD quality digital files from Qobuz sounded magnificent. This album is just a joy to listen to; there’s a bit of electronic haze that’s apparent from time to time, but the overall sound is that of a band that’s carving out a place in music history. Very highly recommended!

BMG Rights Management, CD/LP (download/streaming [16/44.1] from Qobuz, Tidal, Amazon, Google Play Music, Deezer, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube)

Header image of Walter Trout courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Roberta.

This ad made you want to groove on a Marantz receiver, man! Circa 1973.

Who knew you didn't have to go to school to be an audio engineer? Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Ed Berg.

Guess they ran out of money for speaker stands, and we'll make no jokes about box colorations. From Audio, October 1959.

I need my Dextrafix, man!

Before Doc Brown was building time machines, he was designing pickup arms. From Audio, April 1957.

I got my first transistor radio in 1961. It was cheap, made in Japan, and the brand was Lloyd’s — anybody remember that one? I couldn’t wait to listen to it. At first, I thought that when the DJ said, “Here’s Neil Sedaka with his latest hit, ‘Hey Little Devil,’” that Neil was there in the studio performing! Hey, I was only nine years old and a little naïve. That was the first song I heard on that new radio, and I wanted to buy the record. It wasn’t until a year later, on a family trip through Central California, that I found a copy at (nostalgia alert!) a Ben Franklin five and dime store.

The next 45s that I bought included “Telstar” by The Tornadoes, “Out of Limits” by The Marketts, “Mother-in-Law” by Ernie K-Doe, “Bumble Boogie” by B. Bumble and the Stingers, and “Talk Talk” by The Music Machine. Even then, my taste was all over the place. I also bought “She Loves You” b/w “I’ll Get You” when The Beatles burst onto the scene. It was on Swan Records, and the label included the admonishment “Don’t Drop Out.”

There were three Top 40 stations in the Bay Area at the time – KYA and KEWB out of San Francisco, and KLIV from San Jose. The first LP I ever bought was a KEWB compilation record called Disc/Coveries, with 12 hits of the day, including “Cathy’s Clown,” Walk, Don’t Run,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Quiet Village,” “Sleep Walk,” and “Alley Oop.”

 My father had assembled a “hi-fi” system from the fifties that included a Bogen tube amp and a Garrard changer. He played the piano and sang in choral groups, so there was a lot of music in the house. My parents had a Sony reel-to-reel recorder with speakers that folded up into a sort of suitcase, and my brother and I had great fun with that, doing fake interviews and speeding up the tape to make us sound like The Chipmunks.

My first record player was a battery-powered portable made by Singer (yes, the sewing machine company). It had a built-in speaker, but I installed a headphone jack so I could listen to ‘phones or an external speaker. The case was plastic, so I opened it up, cut the wires to the speaker, and hooked them up to the kind of headphone jack that cut the signal when a plug was inserted. I drilled a hole in the side of the case to mount the jack. For the external speaker, I took an old television speaker and mounted it in a gallon ice cream tub for the enclosure (no jokes about “tubby” sound – it was definitely better than the original).

My first real audio equipment was bought when I was in high school. I had a Garrard SL-55 turntable that I stripped down to semi-automatic by removing the changer arm, installing the single-play spindle, and blocking the off/on/changer switch from going all the way. It was fitted with a Shure M44E cartridge. I bought a cheap Nikko TRM-40 amplifier with separate tone controls for each channel, a Sony 355 reel-to-reel, and Pioneer SE-30 headphones (those white semi-spherical ones). My speakers were towers by Pickering (!) that my father bought in 1948. Actually, he had only bought one, but I happened to find another one languishing in a local Radio Shack store. The original drivers were replaced with Wharfedale 8-inch two-ways, and the cabinets had a tunable port on the back. I borrowed albums from friends and taped them, ultimately amassing a collection of over 90 reels with two LPs on each. I recorded stuff from The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chicago Transit Authority, Sly and the Family Stone, and Pink Floyd, among many others.

 A Garrard turntable similar to the one Rich owned.

Orange crates were the budget storage medium of choice in those days, but the sag factor meant that you had to put a good solid board between them if you wanted to stack them. Once I got to six crates (three high on either side of the audio equipment), it was time to build real shelving. Another collector that I knew had made open-back shelves using 48 x 12 x ¾ particleboard, and I copied his basic design. I made four-foot, three-foot, and two-foot modules, ultimately totaling 75 linear feet.

When Jimmy Smith was growing up near Philadelphia in the 1930s, he taught himself to play boogie-woogie piano well enough to win a radio-sponsored contest. He discovered the joys of the Hammond organ when he was in his early 20s, and soon became the go-to guy for area jazz bands who loved his sound. His hero was Wild Bill Davis, about ten years his senior, who practically invented the genre of jazz electric organ when he played with Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five.

With money from a loan shark, Smith bought a Hammond and installed it in an empty warehouse so he could practice. The risk paid off in 1956, when Blue Note Records co-founder Alfred Lion heard him play in Philadelphia and immediately signed him. In the eight years he was with Blue Note, Smith made about 40 records. The label always billed him as “The Incredible Jimmy Smith,” and they weren’t wrong. He signed with Verve in 1962. His solo albums alone number nearly 100, and that doesn’t include the many sessions he worked as a sideman.

Smith died in 2005. His innovations in jazz organ technique and style, not to mention the way he stretched the instrument beyond jazz into R&B, remain influential. Enjoy these eight great tracks by Jimmy Smith.

1. Track: “The Champ”
   Album: A New Sound, A New Star: Jimmy Smith at the Organ, Vol. 2
   Label: Blue Note
   Year: 1956

This album was recorded at the beginning of Smith’s time with Blue Note, the second installment of a two-volume set that came out in 1956. Smith is joined by Thornel Schwartz on guitar and Donald Bailey on drums.

In some markets, the album was called The Champ after the opening track. “The Champ” is a be-bop tune by trumpet master Dizzy Gillespie. It is immediately apparent that Smith is doing something new and completely original with the Hammond. While the standard was (and continued to be in rock music later) to use the organ for its sustaining capabilities, Smith is treating it like a jazz piano with an array of nifty tone colors.

 

2. Track: “What’s New?”
   Album: Crazy! Baby
   Label: Blue Note
   Year: 1960

This is the first of many albums that Smith recorded at the New Jersey studio of Rudy Van Gelder, who also engineered the recording. Blue Note Records’ Alfred Lion produced. Donald Bailey returns on drums, and this time guitar is provided by Quentin Warren, who recorded with Smith throughout the 1960s.

Bob Haggart and Johnny Burke wrote “What’s New?” in 1939, and Bing Crosby had a hit with it. By 1960 it had been recorded by many jazz vocalists and instrumentalists. Although not as sentimental as, say, Sinatra’s version, Smith starts off very cool, taking advantage of the Hammond’s famous warbling sustain. But he still manages to craft a number of experimental effects, at first as segues between phrases and then integrated into the main melody.

 

3. Track: “Honeysuckle Rose”
   Album: Jimmy Smith Plays Fats Waller
   Label: Blue Note
   Year: 1963

Smith was the ideal vessel for the creations of Fats Waller, as one keyboard genius to another. Like the piano star Waller, Smith could express humor through his virtuosity. Backed by Warren and Bailey, the organist uses his instrument to intensify the best elements of Waller’s music

Waller co-wrote the charming “Honeysuckle Rose” with lyricist Andy Razaf, who also provided the words for his most famous song “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Smith gives the whimsical tune a touch of gravity, thanks to a particularly weighty bass line. Meanwhile, that treble voice is floating and spinning like Cupid with his bow.

 

4. Track: “Greensleeves”
   Album: Organ Grinder Swing
   Label: Verve
   Year: 1965

After a few albums with larger ensembles, Smith is back in trio mode with guitarist Kenny Burrell and drummer Grady Tate. There’s a particularly nice mix of tunes on this record, including Ellington/Strayhorn’s “Satin Doll” and the title track by big-band leader Will Hudson. But the most interesting choice is “Greensleeves.”

It’s surprising to discover this English Renaissance tune (a melody better known in America as the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?”) among the offerings. Originally a courtly dance in 6/8 time, the meter is tricked by Smith into widening its rhythmic pathways, making room for be-bop explorations. He approaches it as a jazz waltz, so you get a strong sense of syncopated triple time (whereas in 6/8, the more prominent feel is duple).

 

5. Track: “James and Wes”
   Album: Jimmy & Wes: The Dynamic Duo
   Label: Verve
   Year: 1966

Jazz guitar master Wes Montgomery was a few years older than Smith and a fellow artist at Verve. When they entered the studio together, they found their styles so compatible that they churned out material for two albums. They’re joined by about a dozen session musicians. Over half of Side A is devoted to a jam on the traditional American song “Down by the Riverside.”

Side B opens with a Smith original, “James and Wes,” written for the occasion. It suits the album’s cover photo of the two great friends sharing a sandwich – innocent and sweet at first glance, but crunchy and spicy once you bite down.

 

6. Track: “Let’s Stay Together”
   Album: Root Down! Jimmy Smith Live
   Label: Verve
   Year: 1972

Around 1970, Smith relocated to Los Angeles, where he opened Jimmy Smith’s Supper Club to give himself and his friends a regular gig. Root Down! was recorded there. The album got a second life and a whole different kind of exposure when the Beastie Boys sampled from it on their EP Root Down in 1995.

Smith hooks into a soul vibe for his version of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” The emotional lines on the organ are enhanced by Buck Clarke’s delicate textures on percussion and the intermingling of Arthur Adams’ guitar.

 

7. Track: “Can’t Hide Love”
   Album: Sit on It!
   Label: Verve
   Year: 1977

The arrangements and vibe on this album are as quintessentially 1970s as its title. Film score fans will be interested to note that Alan Silvestri (who scored the Avengers movies for Marvel plus countless others) is both the arranger and session guitarist!

Afreeka Trees contributes vocals to the Skip Scarborough song “Can’t Hide Love,” made famous by Earth, Wind & Fire. It’s a good example of Smith as a generous ensemble player, providing atmosphere when he’s not creating solos that blend seamlessly into the tapestry of sound.

 

8. Track: “Serpentine Fire”
   Album: Unfinished Business
   Label: Mercury
   Year: 1978

A big cohort of musicians was called in for this album, among them Ronnie Foster, who both played the electric piano and arranged and conducted the horn section.

For the album’s last track, “Serpentine Fire,” it’s all hands on deck. The funk arrangement gets crucial assistance from bassist Abraham Laboriel. Smith plays staccato during his repeating patterns in the melody, so he’s constantly ready to launch into lightning-speed improv.

 

Header image from the back cover of the album Jimmy Smith, Any Number Can Win, Verve V6-8552.

That was my first and last Record Store Day. To add insult to injury, the store had an “absolutely no returns whatsoever” policy on RSD purchases, and one of the three I picked out was defective. It goes without saying that I’ve never set foot in that store ever again. And I’ve never attended another Record Store Day event.

Sour grapes after only one attendance? There is more to it than that.

For the Record Store Day events since then, I’ve perused the lists of RSD releases multiple times, hoping I haven’t missed anything I might want. The more I look at the lists, the more I realize that so many of these releases seem to fall into familiar categories. There are the reissues of long-out-of-print albums, singles and EPs, some in alternate versions than what we are familiar with (alternate mixes, bonus content, etc.). There are the “bottom scrapings,” as I call them, which are unreleased tracks from the studio that were obviously not on the finished albums for a reason. There are live performances, many of which are not all that different from what was already out there, and were likely never released in the past for a reason. And novelty releases. Seriously, as much as I like Toto’s hit “Africa,” do I really need an Africa-shaped picture disc of it?

Not only that, my musical interests fall outside rock/pop music most of the time, so most of the titles are irrelevant for me. As for jazz, very few of the titles available (of which there are fewer in number) are of interest to me, so that compounds the issue. Beyond that, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a classical title released, or much of anything else besides rock, pop and jazz (other than the occasional soundtrack album). In short, if they want to maintain the interest of all music lovers inclusively, their tunnel vision is not doing buyers like me any favors.

After a couple of years of perusing these painfully long release lists to see if there was anything that I was missing (there usually wasn’t), I began feeling as though RSD had lost its way. What was originally a boost to the record stores was hijacked by the record labels, in my eyes.

The interesting side of all this? In the years since my one and only visit, I have been able to find anything I have wanted online, with no chaos, at a lower price than what the record stores were originally charging. A couple of titles, in fact, surprised me in that they were RSD releases – I didn’t find out until they arrived with RSD hype stickers on the shrink wrap. So much for the hyped-up “rarity” of RSD releases.

What also appalled me were some of the prices on items I had considered buying. There was a 7-inch 45 RPM single I had an eye on. OK, maybe I’d pay $3 – $4 for it. I get up to the rack and it’s $9.  Seriously? Pass. An anthology by an artist I had a passing interest in was near $40 for a 2-LP set…and it was not an audiophile release by any means. Just a reissue of what was already on CD for years. Pass.  I did pick up a mono version of an album for a friend on the east coast, and that was fairly priced. The 12-inch EP I bought was also not too out of line, but the 10-inch LP reissue (Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers) was out of line for what it was. (And that was the defective record I purchased that day; my replacement copy, which is flawless, cost far less from an online seller. In that case, the alleged “rarity” is what made me buy that original flawed copy, thinking I might not see another one.)

To add insult to injury, many of the items purchased at already inflated prices are flipped within hours online at much higher prices – you see plenty of these listed on eBay and Discogs. Those who have good connections (read: frequent customers) at some of the record stores can get preferential treatment and get the titles they want set aside for them.

The event has also turned into a feeding frenzy. I’ve seen friends of mine, who already have sizeable record collections, purchase two or three dozen titles on Record Store Day. A couple of them have a backlog of dozens upon dozens of records they’ve purchased in the past that they’ve never even opened or played. It would be interesting to see how many of these releases they played more than once, if that. To put it into perspective, I probably bought fewer records (LPs) in all of 2019 than some pals spent on one single Record Store Day.

I don’t exactly hate Record Store Day, but I don’t like the direction it has taken. What was ever wrong with having a day with maybe a dozen or two high-profile new releases as an added perk to accompany music lovers converging on the store and buy up some of their existing inventory the process? Record collecting is as much about the community and hanging out with like-minded enthusiasts as it is the acquisition of new records to listen to. Record labels, especially the majors, are feeding into this frenzy in a big way and overfeeding the fish at any chance they can. When Big Money gets involved, the fun goes out of it. Many of the releases I’ve seen listed are titles that just about all of us could have lived without.

Why can’t the stores have a Saturday every month where they offer a few deals and host a special event to treat their loyal customers and draw in new ones, without having to worry about juggling hundreds of new titles and the customers frantically grabbing them before they sell out?

I certainly don’t mean to take anything away from these record stores either. Business can be so sporadic these days that all it takes is a family illness or a rent hike to put a store out of business. Especially in these times we live in, where local mandates often force stores to close to the public for extended periods of time, we must do all we can to support them if we want to continue having places to shop for records where we can browse through the bins.

Most importantly, there is a Record Store Day organization that tirelessly promotes all these independent record stores throughout the year. They are the element in this which we all need to be thankful for, even if we do not take part in the RSD events each year.

Personally, though, I am done with Record Store Day. My idea of visiting a record store is to leisurely browse through bins like we all used to do back in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. I also feel those of us who still buy records should be supporting our stores throughout the year, not just on a single day with the Black Friday mentality at the back of every shopper’s mind, and perhaps the record labels should be doing the same to spread the business out for these independent merchants. For those who enjoy it? Feel free. Go out and enjoy yourselves. I’m just one less person in your way to the register at the front of the store, and have a few more dollars in my pocket for the titles I really want to purchase.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Mr. Cup/Fabien Barral.

After that listening session, as was always the case, we left the equipment on so it would always be warmed up at its sonic best. (I am told Harry’s electric bills were mind-boggling but the person who paid them would never show them to me.) One listening session shortly after, I went to check the system and noticed the Mimesis 3 amp, resting on isolation cones, was placed crookedly. This irritated me so I went to straighten the amp out.

YEOW! The top of the amp was blazing hot to the touch! I mean, maybe egg-frying hot. I was surprised the amp wasn’t a congealed mess of melted wiring and parts. I knew the amp was supposed to run hot but what the heck?

I found a pencil and gingerly pushed the power button to turn the amp off, literally not wanting to touch it. I figured I must have done something wrong and would have to explain it to Goldmund. Taking a deep breath, I called and told my guy there the situation.

To my surprise he shrugged it off and said something like, “oh, there’s nothing wrong with the amp; it’s just trying to amplify RF.” What? “Yes, the amp is very wide bandwidth and will amplify anything that goes into it.” He patiently explained further about the high-frequency oscillation that could occur with such a wide-bandwidth amplifier. I was clueless.

“But,” I replied, “wouldn’t you want to put in some kind of circuitry that would prevent this?”

“That would ruin the sound!”

That was one of the early moments in my career when I started to realize just how passionate and adamant audio people could be about their creations.

“Replace the interconnects you have in there now with something better that won’t act as antennas,” he patiently explained. He also reassured me that no harm was done to the amp after my heated encounter.

Only thing was, the cables were MIT Shotgun and at the time, Harry would not use anything else. So, what was I supposed to do? The more techno-geek readers may guess where this is going. I figured, if the interconnects were antennas, I’d just move them to where they’d get bad reception! I moved the amp to a few different spots, turned it on and held my hand over it and soon found a favorable location where the amp wasn’t too hot. Harry and I then listened happily for a good long time.

______

I like to engage in tube rolling on occasion. For those unfamiliar with the term, “tube rolling” is the practice of replacing the stock tubes the manufacturer supplied with other brands, to see if there’s a sonic improvement (or not). Certain NOS (New Old Stock) tubes are especially prized. Mention Amperex “Bugle Boys” or RCA black plates to some tube aficionados and watch them get misty-eyed.

The thing to do is listen to the tubes that are already in there, then swap them out and listen to the replacement tubes and decide if you like the second set better. Or third, or fourth…however, tubes are hot, especially power tubes, so it takes time to shut off the component, wait for the tubes to cool down, replace them and fire up the second set of tubes – precious minutes where your sonic memory of the first tube set is fading.

I get impatient.

And hey, preamp and small-signal tubes don’t get that hot, right?

When you're a tube roller, you tend to accumulate a lot of them.

You guessed it – I can’t count the times I’ve burned my fingers on a hot tube. At times I’ve tried to cheat and grab a power tube with a rag. And then reflexively dropped the tube or jerked it flying out of my hand. Which can create a big mess on your floor or dent your bank account.

Sometimes tubes get microphonic and the classic test for that is to tap on them with a pencil eraser and see if they ring or clunk. Well, in today’s busy world who has time to look for a pencil? So yep, one’s index finger makes a handy tapping tool. I’ve learned by trial and error which tubes you can sort of get away with tapping on, like a 12AT7 for example, and which ones you really shouldn’t do this with – touching a live 6L6GC power tube will really make you wish you hadn’t.

I can’t be the only one who has been this dumb around hot tubes…can I?

______

Ever seen a speaker go on fire? I’m not talking about merely blowing drivers but actually seeing a speaker go up in smoke. It happens when you push the voice coil way too hard. When I was a teenager I was curious about how much power a speaker could take until it blew. I hooked my Kustom 100 guitar amp head to a 6 by 9-inch car speaker and cranked it up until I got a righteous distorted Dave Davies sound. Cool! Then after a while the sound didn’t get any louder…and then I heard a bbbbfffttttt! sound and saw smoke and fire coming out of the middle of the speaker. Even cooler! Until I panicked and realized I’d better not set my parents’ house ablaze. Luckily the speaker stopped burning after about half a minute. I quickly disposed of the evidence, and no one was around to complain about the smell.

 

 

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A few years ago I had a festive Fourth of July celebration. For whatever reason I was home alone and thought, hey, I can listen to music undisturbed. I turned my system on…and about a minute later something odd caught the corner of my eye. My amplifier was on fire! In a spectacular fashion – since the amp was resting on cones, flames were shooting out of the bottom of the amp! I panicked, yanked the power cord and scrambled for the fire extinguisher but in the course of a few seconds the fire died out. Turns out a resistor had failed. File under stuff happens, and the amp was repairable. And no, I was not listening to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the time.

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While not strictly involving fire, I gotta tell this one and it does involve thermodynamics after all. In the 1980s Michael Elliot of audio manufacturer Counterpoint (no longer in business) hosted a party in California at the time of a Stereophile show. A who’s who of audio was there, including John Iverson, head of Electron Kinetics and Electro Research who had also worked for Marantz. A colorful character to say the least, John’s reputation for genius and eccentricity was fueled by his mysterious disappearance in 1992. (Where he went has never been confirmed.)

Someone introduced me to him. He did not need much prompting to begin talking and quickly started delving into some pretty esoteric stuff, to the point where those around us politely drifted away. Not me.

At one point I asked him what the best speaker he ever heard was. He brightened up and said, “No question about it – the plasma speaker.” I replied, “You mean the Hill Plasmatronics?” He scoffed and said something along the lines of, “No, not that thing! I’m talking about an experimental full-range speaker that I worked on. It’s makes every other speaker sound like a joke. However, it can’t be put into production.”

I asked, why not, thinking it would involve large tanks of helium gas, high voltages, oxygen depletion or outrageous expense. Iverson replied, “It’s too dangerous.”

“What could be so dangerous?” Iverson looked me straight in the eye. “One time we were listening to the speakers and a fly flew into the room. Then the fly flew between the speakers…and disappeared.”

Had I heard that right? “The fly disappeared?”

“Yes. I think the fly flew into another dimension. Somehow the loudspeakers created a gateway into another dimension.”

He didn’t want to go into detail. Meanwhile I was thinking, nyah-aah-aaahhhh!

Postscript: about a year ago a a friend and I had the opportunity to listen to an Electron Kinetics Eagle 2A amplifier in my system. We were shocked at how good this decades-old design sounded. It can hold its own in today’s high-end audio world.

 

Header image courtesy of Pixabay/Jacqueline Macou.

Although they performed to several hundred people standing on a gymnasium floor, Motörhead gave the same quality show in an obscure venue as they did at Madison Square Garden. They were ferocious yet musical, chaotic yet precise. Motörhead spent most of its run as a trio, a concept that should not work, but it did because Phil was a one-man guitar orchestra, and Lemmy was much more than a bassist. Lemmy played guitar for two bands, Sam Gopal and The Rockin' Vicars, before picking up the bass for Hawkwind. In Motörhead, Lemmy treated his 4000 Series Rickenbacker like a rhythm guitar. There was no slapping, plucking, or smooth walking bass lines, just thundering power chords played through the mid frequencies on his 1976 Marshall (model 1992) Super Bass tube amp head.

 

Back at the hotel, I checked and rechecked that I still had my backstage pass before I got a few hours of sleep. It would be proof that the show was not a dream. The next day, I drank in the Hütte from the rails one last time, never expecting to find the tarnished fossil so engaging. In the early morning light, red steel had taken on patinas of wood, brick, and stone: the monstrous arrangement of tanks, smokestacks, and pipes had transformed into domes, turrets, and steeples. I departed for school with ringing ears and an appreciation for the town that gave me Motörhead. There was no better way of saying auf wiedersehen to my host country.

When I returned home, the German department at my college was not too impressed with how I spent my time as a Fulbrighter. Two thousand kilometers of pub crawling, wurst eating, and concert attendance did not compensate for my lack of fluency and overall scholarship. Yale was even less impressed and rejected me. I once envied colleagues who went to Europe and found love, friends, and internships parlayed into professions. But before all else, I am a lifelong Motörhead-banger, and I got the most unexpected yet custom-fit adventure any fan could wish for. Twenty-two years later, it remains the highlight of my university years.

I have seen Motörhead so many times that I’ve lost count. The last was at the Trocadero Theatre in Philadelphia in March 2005, where Ned worked as the marketing manager. Hanging out with bands, late-night boozing, and free shows won out over confessions, sermons, and psalms. As Lemmy aged, touring slowed, and so did his tempo. Lemmy started playing with Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats and Danny B. Harvey in a rockabilly group named The Head Cat. After 40-years of thrashing with Motörhead, Lemmy went back to the roots of it all. As a schoolboy in Benllech, Wales, Lemmy was there at the dawn of rock and roll and likely heard the songs by Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly he went on to cover so lovingly.

Motörhead disbanded upon Lemmy’s passing on December 28th, 2015, just days after his 70th birthday on Christmas Eve. Like a man who knows death follows his last day at the factory, Lemmy died with his custom boots on, drinking, smoking, and performing despite cancer, diabetes, and heart problems.

These days, I listen to a single Motörhead CD: Everything Louder than Everyone Else, their sixth live album recorded in Hamburg during my year in Germany. And, I’ve added a new record to my collection: Fool’s Paradise by The Head Cat pressed on shiny white vinyl. I never thought Lemmy would turn me on to 1950s rock and roll – not at this late stage in my listening career. And I never thought Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Not Fade Away” would sound so genuine and straightforward in Lemmy’s road-worn gravelly voice. It was an unexpected and unforeseen final turn in his career, and, in the end, it turned out beautifully.

In Part One (Issue 118) we covered Stevie Wonder and George Benson, Metallica and Lang Lang, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and Adele and Paul Weller. Here we continue to look into unlikely musical collaborations and guest appearances – for better or worse!

Prince and Savion Glover – “Joint 2 Joint”

Prince’s estate has easily over ten albums’ worth of unreleased material, according to its caretakers and Warner Bros. As someone who was constantly pushing musical boundaries, this news about Prince is not a surprise. The list of people he’s collaborated with is vast: Maceo Parker, Lenny Kravitz, Cassandra Wilson, Larry Graham, Mavis Staples, Stevie Nicks, The Bangles, Sheena Easton, Alicia Keys, Patti LaBelle, Stevie Wonder, H.E.R., Janelle Monae…

All these artists are well-known in their own right. Refusing to buckle under to conventional commercial constraints, only a genius of Prince’s caliber would think about collaborating with other artists of this level on a record. One such example is “Joint 2 Joint” from his 1996 3-CD set, Emancipation. “Joint 2 Joint” showcases Prince’s funky grooves and guitar solos, adding a guest rap from Ninety-9 and a tap dance solo from one whom Prince might truly have deemed a peer: Savion Glover.

Dance has always been an important part of Prince’s art. His live shows and videos all feature copious amounts of flashy Prince dance moves, some of it “borrowed spontaneity” from James Brown and break dancers, some of it choreographed, and all informing the infectious dance groove DNA of hits like “1999,” “Kiss,” “U Got the Look” and countless others.

A child prodigy not unlike Prince himself, Savion Glover absorbed all the techniques and history of tap dancing, which is a unique form of percussion stretching from the 1800s and its roots in Juba dance, Irish jigs, English clog dancing and vaudeville through the Bill Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines eras of popularity. Gregory Hines, whom many considered the genre’s finest tap dancer from his performances in films like White Nights, The Cotton Club, Bojangles and Tap, referenced Glover in a CBS News interview: “We’re not talking about a good tap dancer. We’ve got to establish that right away. He could arguably be the best tap dancer that ever lived. He’s a genius.”

At age 22 Glover single-handedly revived declining interest in tap dancing with his 1996 multiple Tony Award-winning Broadway show, Bring in da’ Noise, Bring in da’ Funk. Its celebration of the styles, range and breadth of expression of tap dancing, linked to African-American history, must have made an impression on Prince, who would later echo these same musical themes in his 2004 release, Musicology.

The song begins with a trip-hop groove and a repeated synth part with Prince softly singing. At 2:10 the band kicks in with a heavier attack and Ninety-9’s rap starts at 2:30.

Glover’s tap dance solo begins at 3:10. His syncopated taps and “rolls” are actually not unlike the percussion solo breaks that Prince has often featured from Sheila E. in concert. Prince’s guitar solo starts at 5:17, and his atonal distorted shredding is more akin to his later records with 3^rd Eye Girl than with his Revolution-era band.

 

Postscript: 23 years later, none other than the “Godfather of Grunge,” Neil Young, had guitarist Nils Lofgren record a tap dancing solo on “Eternity” from the album Colorado (2019). Lofgren, a member of Crazy Horse and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and a trained gymnast and dancer, has acknowledged Glover as an inspiration for studying tap.

One can only wonder as to the other musical gems locked in Prince’s vaults.

Jefferson Airplane and Stephen Stills – “Turn My Life Down”
Billy Porter and Stephen Stills – “For What It’s Worth”

Co-founder of Crosby, Stills and Nash, Stephen Stills has had a storied career, including multiple gold and platinum albums and membership in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On the first CSN record, Stills handled the bulk of the instrumentation apart from drums. As a solo artist, he has had guest-guitarist jamming buddies Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page contribute guitar parts to his records. Stills himself also enjoyed a brief, but significant period of session work in the late 1960s, between the collapse of Buffalo Springfield and the formalization of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as a stadium rock supergroup.

His best known sideman appearances on lead guitar were on Al Kooper’s best-selling Super Session, which also included volatile guitarist Mike Bloomfield, and on Bill Withers’ Just as I Am album that yielded his breakout single, “Ain’t No Sunshine.”

Stephen Stills’ sole credited session appearance on a record by a major artist was playing organ on “Turn My Life Down” from Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers (1969). Lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen wrote “Turn My Life Down,” which was sung by Marty Balin. Stills comes in with a brief, but effective gospel-type Hammond organ part at 2:18, supporting and playing counterpoint to Kaukonen’s guitar solo.

 

 

 

Time, unfortunately, has not been good to Stephen Stills. He has experienced hearing loss, vocal issues and other ailments in the last few decades, resulting in a dearth of new material. While a recent duet album with former flame Judy Collins showed a partial return to form, his recent attempt to update his 1960s protest song “For What It’s Worth” with Pose actor Billy Porter met with mixed reactions from puzzled to scathing.

Love and Jimi Hendrix

Who was the first Black creative rock music genius to embrace the psychedelic 1960s and release a record hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 of all time? Most would answer “Jimi Hendrix” – and they would be wrong.

Multi-instrumentalist Arthur Lee of the band Love predated Hendrix by several years. Based in Los Angeles, Lee was taken under the wing of Elektra Records’ Jac Holzman in 1965 after already writing and producing for his own group and other artists. His flamboyant clothes and studio experimentation had already begun while Hendrix was still a jacket-and-tie-attired R&B sideman for the Isley Brothers.

In 1964 Lee wrote and produced “My Diary” for singer Rosa Lee Brooks. Seeking a guitarist who could play like Curtis Mayfield, Lee hired the Isleys’ guitar player, Jimi Hendrix, for the session. (A few years later, Hendrix’s brother Leon informed Arthur Lee that Jimi copied Lee’s psychedelic image for the Jimi Hendrix Experience.)

Lee and Hendrix maintained a friendship, which resulted in Hendrix’s guest lead guitar appearance on Love’s “The Everlasting First” from their 1970 album False Start. According to Lee’s authorized biography, Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love, Hendrix and the band were high on mescaline during the session at Olympic Studios. Hendrix’s distorted, wah-wah soloing is unmistakable – no one else could have sounded like it.

 

 

 

This session also yielded a recording of Hendrix’s “Ezy Ryder,” which later appeared on the flip side of “Loon,” an untitled jam, to which Lee added lyrics and vocals and which circulated after Lee’s death as a bootleg acetate.

 

While not a commercial success, Love was held in high regard by their peers and have become critics’ favorites and gained greater appreciation over the decades. The group’s proto-punk/folk/psychedelic sound was a decade ahead of its time and their use of orchestral instruments and electronics in a rock context influenced Prince, Ryan Adams and bands such as The Dream Academy. Drugs and a 12-year jail sentence plagued Lee after breaking up Love, and he passed away from leukemia in 2006.

Jorma Kaukonen with Jaco Pastorius and Rashied Ali

Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady have been playing music together for over six decades, starting as teenagers and continuing through to rock and roll history with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. However, from 1979 to 1985, they took a hiatus from playing together, with Casady forming SVT and Kaukonen performing solo and with There Goes the Neighborhood. Based in New York during that time, Kaukonen was caring for his first wife, Margaretta, whose health was deteriorating.

There Goes the Neighborhood’s circulating roster included a pair of very unlikely highly-pedigreed jazz musicians: ex-Weather Report electric bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius and ex-John Coltrane Quintet drummer Rashied Ali.

In his autobiography Been So Long, Kaukonen expressed his own amazement that such celebrated jazz musicians would deign to play blues-rock with him, but they would perform regularly at Manhattan’s Lone Star café. They rarely rehearsed; Ali would approach a song differently each time but would always find a groove. The volatile and unpredictable Pastorius would sometimes miss a gig and when he did appear, could be alternately brilliant and a train wreck, sometimes within the same song.

I attended a show in which Pastorius played well for the first two songs, then did an amazing solo before ignoring the rest of the group to play themes from The Wizard of Oz for the next 20 minutes (albeit in the same key as Kaukonen).

The tragic story of the bipolar and drug-addicted Jaco Pastorius was the subject of a documentary, Jaco, produced by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo. Downloads from bootlegged cassette recordings of some of these There Goes the Neighborhood shows still circulate.

Jorma Kaukonen continues to play with Hot Tuna, and his Saturday night pandemic streaming concerts on YouTube have garnered high praise from critics, claiming they’ve been some of Jorma’s best work.

 

 

 

Sting and Robert Downey, Jr. – “Every Breath You Take,” “Driven to Tears”

With over $14 billion in box office grosses in films he’s starred in, actor Robert Downey Jr. is best known for his portrayal of Tony Stark, whose superhero identity of Iron Man became the linchpin for the multi-billion dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe. Less publicized apart from other notable starring roles including Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chaplin, Downey is also an excellent singer. He recorded a 2004 album, The Futurist, and has sung occasionally on screen.

In 2000, Downey was cast as a love interest for the title character in the series Ally MacBeal. One of the more notable scenes is a serenade his character performs of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” which evolves into a duet with Sting himself.

 

 

 

Downey was also a surprise guest performer at Sting’s 60th birthday concert at New York’s Beacon Theater on October 1, 2011, where they performed “Driven to Tears” together.

 

 

 

Self-effacing and full of humor, Downey recalled on Howard Stern’s radio show about his early musical aspirations and how he fantasized about how giving Sting his demo tape would make him a musical star. His lack of pretension and humility make it difficult to be jealous of his abundant talents.

 

Downey’s vocal register almost matches Sting’s so he sings both songs in Sting’s key.  He credibly sings with nuance and emotion, and gives a nod to Sting with mimicry of the latter’s trademark “yo-yo-yo” wails in between verses. On the duet sections, Sting takes the harmony part, which allows Downey to own the melody. Overall, an enviably strong performance.

Martin Simpson and Wu Man – Music for the Motherless Child

I had the pleasure of interviewing Water Lily Acoustics’ founder Kavi Alexander for Copper  Issue 45 and 46. A true world music visionary, Kavi and Water Lily’s catalog consists largely of some of the most unusual and gorgeous musical “mash-ups” ever recorded. A roster sampling includes artists such as David Hidalgo, L. Subramaniam, Ry Cooder, Jerry Douglas, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Jon Hassell, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Bela Fleck, Hossein Alizadeh, and Taj Mahal.

Alexander’s modus operandi has been this: bring the musicians, who usually had never met and frequently had never even heard of one another let alone each other’s music, into an acoustically inviting space, set up the mics, roll tape, and let the magic and inspiration come. Fully embracing the aesthetic of music as a universal language, Water Lily Acoustics’ catalog is a testament to that philosophy, as many of the musicians had no common language apart from music – and the finished music often defied cultural and logistical boundaries.

One of Water Lily’s best releases is Music for the Motherless Child (1996), by British acoustic guitarist Martin Simpson and Chinese pipa enchantress Wu Man. A totally improvised record, the songs are simultaneously a dialogue and a duet between two virtuosos at the top of their games without a hint of competition or ego.

Best known for his pristine fingerpicking and slide guitar interpretations of blues and Celtic folk music, Simpson’s playing has often shown the musical links between Scottish Highlands music and Appalachian bluegrass and folk music and how they converged with Delta blues.

Perhaps China’s foremost ambassador of the 4-string pipa, Wu Man’s eclectic approach to music has exploded the boundaries of the instrument’s limitations through her work with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, Philip Glass, Emanuel Ax, The Kronos Quartet, Ravi Shankar, and others. She received international acclaim for her pipa solos in composer Tan Dun’s soundtrack from the blockbuster Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. A true non-traditionalist, Wu Man even has YouTube videos of her pipa versions of heavy metal songs by Black Sabbath, and is not hesitant to use guitar effects pedals.

Although the entire CD is well worth repeated listening, here are a few samples:

“One More Day”:

 

 

 

“White Snow in Spring”:

 

 

 

“A-Minor Blues”:

 

 

 

Copper readers: I have compiled a list of musical collaborations worth noting for possible future articles. If any of you wish to submit your own suggestions, I will be happy to include the three most-mentioned that are not on my current list. Thanks, and I look forward to your picks!

Header image: Savion Glover promotional photo.

In Part One (Issue 118) Pat Quilter and John Seetoo talked about the beginnings of Quilter Audio Labs and QSC Audio, the history of recorded sound, non-amplified vs. amplified live acoustic music and more. The interview continues here.

John Seetoo: What do you see as the differences between pro and home audio? There are obvious ones like the room sizes you have to deal with and SPL requirements – but let’s say if QSC decided to enter the home audio arena, how would you approach it?

Pat Quilter: The home market is a lot different than pro audio. We always like to use the metaphor that pro audio is like an 18-wheeler and home audio is like a pickup truck. They can both haul stuff and most peoples’ needs can be met with the pickup truck. But if you’re going to carry heavy tonnage on the highway, you’re going to need an 18-wheeler. You need a heavy duty rig that can not only carry a heavy load but do so reliably day in and day out. That’s the main difference. Pro audio gear is designed to perform at a high average output level, reliably, for long periods of time; way more than what you would ever need in the home.

At the same time, in order to get that performance, especially with loudspeakers, you have to resort to things like horn-loaded transducers that don’t necessarily sound as good as the best direct radiators, but can project a large amount of sound over great distances. With the right design, you can get them to sound pretty good, which is where I think QSC’s acoustic design team has done very well. We try to aim for that quality of “natural presence” which is at the heart of any good hi-fi system. But at the end of the day we have to make it go loud without breaking up or breaking down. This imposes some design decisions that you would never really use in the home.

For example, my own personal listening system uses a couple of large-format air motion transformers that were made by an obscure little company in Redondo Beach quite a few years back. If you’re familiar with the air motion transformer concept, it’s basically a way to take a ribbon tweeter [with a relatively large surface area], and by folding it up into kind of an accordion, you can compress the frontal area down to, in my case, about five inches tall and two inches wide. Yet it has the surface area and power handling of a 5-inch by 20-inch Mylar film.

So you get that wonderfully liquid, non-diaphragmatic reproduction of an almost infinitesimally lightweight ribbon transducer, but coming out of a smaller area, so it has a little more dispersion. At higher frequencies it can get fairly loud but not nearly as loud as a large compression driver, but at “polite” levels, I think the speakers sound great. I can listen to a performance and not really be distracted by the feeling that it’s coming through something. But it’s not very practical for a pro audio application.

In fact, some of QSC’s smaller 5-inch 2-way speakers with dome tweeters are wonderful-sounding speakers for any normal utility purpose. My brother uses a pair of them in his Volkswagen bus. I could enjoy listening to music through QSC’s larger powered PA speakers and not feel like I was grinding my teeth, but it wouldn’t be as good as an optimized home audio system designed for maximum liquidity at a living room level.

 

 

 

PQ: I agree that there are regional differences in peoples’ expectations of sound. Europe and North America are probably pretty unified in what we want to hear. Some cultures seem to want less bass. The main problem with customers in India and China is that they often don’t have the budgets to buy top-of-the-line stuff, so they need cheap gear that projects impressive amounts of sound but without some of the nuances we expect in our high-end systems. There are a lot of outdoor village movie experiences in India and China that still use PA horns like we used to have here in the 1950s.

Frankly, QSC can’t compete at this price level, so our strategy is to offer much higher fidelity at the best price we can, and hope the customers eventually work their way up. The audiences now routinely hear full-range music of at least “fair” quality via streaming and computer/TV speakers, so they appreciate having a better quality at a public event. I’ve had many people tell me that QSC speakers “don’t hurt our ears!”  I think it was Pete Townshend who said, back in the day, “We mix our music to sound good through a four inch phonograph speaker!” (laughs) Because that was their expected audience, you know? Teeny-boppers listening through a little portable phonograph. But today, even tiny smart speakers actually have notable bass response.

JS: QSC’s online webinars and material about sound reinforcement, acoustics, physics, and music sound reproduction are excellent and detailed. Is the strategy behind this comparable to what Apple does in targeting its computers to schools, to create an educated market that will be comfortable and conversant with its products?

 

PQ: There’s obviously an element of that. QSC is able to take advantage of our size to underwrite the cost of this educational material. But it’s also in our direct interest, because the more customers understand what’s possible and how to get good results, particularly from our equipment, the more they appreciate the efforts we put into making good stuff, and understand why it is worth investing at a higher level.

JS: In designing and testing QSC equipment, do your R&D (research and development) and QC (quality control) departments use pre-recorded music and other sonic references? Can you tell us what that process is like and what your criteria is to meet your standards?

PQ: For electronics, we pretty much qualify everything on the bench using meter readings and a good understanding of where the pitfalls lie. It’s electric in/electric out, the device has a transfer function, so it’s easy to explore its full range, measure results, and thus know if it’s delivering flat response and low distortion into all the expected loads. We also have a long list of stress tests to validate the robustness of the design.

 

 

Transducers have a lot more going on, and voicing loudspeakers is still an art form. Yes, there are certain measurements that get you in the zone. QSC has invested in sophisticated speaker measurement capabilities, including an anechoic chamber and a concert-sized listening room, with an array of microphones spaced every five degrees so we can capture the entire sound field of a speaker, not just its front-facing response. The question still remains why two “reasonably flat” speakers can actually sound remarkably different in use. Off-axis response is one variable, because the off-axis sound bounces around in the room, gets to your ears eventually and affects your perception of the on-axis sound. Professional speakers are expected to have definite coverage areas and output volumes, so these constraints affect the frequency response and need to be artfully balanced. There are also possible resonances and breakup modes that don’t obviously affect the frequency response curve but are still audible to our ears, which need to be chased down. And I’m always amazed that our ears can listen through levels of loudspeaker distortion that would sound terrible in an amplifier.

So there are tradeoffs. You can’t get perfect off-axis and on-axis response from any practical loudspeaker. There are lobing effects and cabinet diffraction and various other side effects that prevent you from getting perfect coverage in the room, even with theoretically perfect drivers. So inevitably, there comes a point where balancing the tradeoffs involves listening tests, comparing A vs. B vs. C, using a panel of people in the company who have been in the field long enough to have good perspectives on sound quality and practical constraints. We have a professional audio crew that takes our stuff out and does roadshows with it. So they know what works and what doesn’t in a real-life environment. They’re part of the auditioning team, along with the product designers.

 

Although pink noise will quickly disclose resonances and other colorations, we assess dynamic range and the overall “tone quality” using a library of familiar music of various popular styles, that we’ve heard through a zillion different speakers. I also insist that the speaker be pushed to ensure that it doesn’t exhibit any distracting or even self-destructive behaviors even outside [its] comfort zone. And of course, our products also undergo long-term life testing and rigorous safety-agency approvals to ensure that they will provide long-term reliability and safe performance.

Part Three will conclude with discussions on musical instrument amps, vacuum tubes, the mysterious Optigan, the evolution of musical styles and more.

Header image: QSC Touch Mix 16 mixer.

I’m sitting with my sister Ellen at an outdoor coffee shop on the ocean in Venice Beach, California, and we’re talking about our dad. Hard to be exact; it had to be the mid 1990s and what the point of the conversation was I am not sure, but we were disagreeing. Not strongly, but we had different memories.

She glances over my shoulder, points, and says, “he gets what I mean.” The place was empty in the late afternoon and I thought we were alone. I swivel around in my chair and to my surprise there sits a grinning Carl Anderson.

I say, “Carl!” And he looks puzzled; he does not recognize me. “It is me, Ken Sander. I was your road manager.” It clicks and his eyes widen, and he flashes his wonderful smile. Carl then tells me that he never forgot me for the showbiz advice I gave him when we were in Bermuda.

Carl was a singer and actor who played Judas in the movie and Broadway versions of Jesus Christ Superstar. He played Reverend Samuel in the movie The Color Purple and success as a soul and R&B singer with songs like “How Deep Does It Go” and “Pieces of A Heart,” and “Friends and Lovers,” his 1986 duet with Gloria Loring, reached number two on the charts.

 

 

We had worked together about 20 years earlier at The Forty Thieves club. One night backstage, Carl suddenly started getting sick and in a short time, he had a fever. This came on quickly and he felt so bad that he did not think he could perform. I said to Carl, “sick or not you got to try.” He looked doubtful so then I said, “Once you hit the stage the adrenaline will kick in and you’ll feel fine, you’ll have a good show.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Carl asked. “In that case,” I responded, “you do a very short set and apologize to the audience and tell them that you are sick, and then two things will have happened. First, you showed up and tried to make a go of it, people get that, and second, no one will blame you for being sick and you will have fulfilled your contract. If the club does not have to give refunds, they’re happy. Trust me, Carl, It’s both gracious and sincere.” You have heard the expression, “the show must go on,” I said, smiling.

Not sure that this was the right approach, Carl walks onto the stage. And bang, he is going 90 MPH, you guessed it, He aced it, Carl really tore it up. It was one of his best shows. At the end of the set Carl bounds offstage dripping in sweat (nothing new about that), and he’s totally amazed and thrilled at his transformation and the way the show had gone. He’d felt great on stage, though after ten minutes or so when he cooled down his fever came back. Got to admit it made me feel good that I had such a positive impact on Carl.

This all began in Al D’Marino’s office at Creative Management Associates (CMA) in the early summer of 1974. Al was a vice president in the company’s rock department and one of his clients was Dionne Warwick. Her manager, Guy Draper, was based out of Washington DC. Guy’s other client was Carl Anderson. Al wanted me to work with Carl.

In July Carl had some club dates around the DC area. Then in August, we found ourselves at the Forty Thieves Club.

The Forty Thieves Club was on Front Street in Hamilton, Bermuda, right on the waterfront where the docks were located. It was a month-long gig, most of August through Labor Day. Till then the weather is beautiful, but after Labor Day the season is over and the weather starts to turn nasty quickly.

Mind you, this was over forty years ago and Bermuda has changed since that time. Originally Bermuda was a quaint British colony; okay, granted, the label “colony” is very 19th century. Nowadays Bermuda is referred to as an overseas territory of the United Kingdom.” In the 1600s Bermuda was a popular port of call for swashbuckling pirates. The pirates had a nod and a wink relationship with the British Navy, and to keep things that way they built some special elevated booty storage caves on the water outside of Hamilton.

The pirates could back up their ships to the cave’s opening and unload their pirate booty before sailing into Hamilton. The reason for offloading their booty was that Hamilton was a popular hangout for pirates and if they just sailed into the port of Hamilton their ship might be looted by other pirates or some other unsavory sorts. Additionally, they never knew if the British Navy would hassle them and it wouldn’t be wise to rub the Navy’s nose in the fact that they were pirates, so they stored their booty in those hidey caves on the rocky sides of one of the seven main islands and about 170 additional islets and rocks. Then they would sail an empty ship into Hamilton and party.

Carl, the band and I stayed in a middle class 1930s era house that was big enough for all of us to have separate bedrooms. Staying in the house was part of the engagement deal with the Forty Thieves Club, and each of us were also provided with Honda two-stroke mopeds for our transportation. Every night we would drive to the club and do a show or two, depending on the night. The opening act or rather the house band was a calypso band called the Bermuda Strollers. They were local musicians who were just like most of the other locals who worked in the hospitality industry. After Labor Day and before the winter many of the locals left the island for cities like Boston or Montreal. For the most part, Bermuda is a summer island with a very small winter population. The year-round residents usually work in businesses like banking, finance and shipping that require their presence and have little to do with tourists.

I took to going to the beach most days. one day I met this beautiful young girl, who attached herself to me. Her father was a manager of one of the large hotels and she was spending her summer with him. We became friendly. She was gorgeous, and too young for me to romance, but she glued herself to me and I was kinda flattered. It got to the point where she would come to the house just about every morning and wake me up. We would go for breakfast at her hotel’s snack bar and after that we’d hit the beach or explore the island. We spent our days together and part of the time at dusk as well.

After I left Bermuda she went back to Europe and I never saw her again.

At the end of August Carl, the band and I flew back to Washington DC, gig over. I had to bring the balance of the box office money to Guy Draper. I had a little over two thousand dollars left after I paid the band, myself, and other relevant touring expenses. My instructions from Guy were for me to take a cab that night to a house in the DC area and slip the cash along with my expense report through the mail slot on the front door. I never ended a tour settling up like that. I was concerned. What if Guy did not get the money or said he did not get the money? It felt dangerous. I am thinking jeez, I am going to a strange house at night in a neighborhood I did not know. What if I made a mistake and went to the wrong address and slipped the money in the wrong door or something like that? I did not know DC.

The cab pulled up to this darkened house with only one outside light on. I asked the driver to wait and was as careful as possible while being hyper-aware of the surroundings. After double-checking I slipped the money in, hoping it was the correct mail slot. This was one of the most off-the-wall things that I ever did in my music business career.

It turned out that everything was fine. The job was over, though I did kind of hold my breath for a few days.

I never heard from Guy so I assumed no news was good news. The next morning, I checked out of my hotel and took the Amtrak back to New York City. Carl went on with his career and I had not seen him since that gig.

Now here it was 20 some years later and Carl, my sister Ellen and I are sitting there in Venice Beach, talking and catching up.

Danny Glover is walking up from the beach and Carl spots him and calls him over. Danny had just finished his jog and is wiping his face with a small towel. He knew Carl and they were friendly, after all, show business is a small community. Carl introduced Ellen and me to Danny we all chatted for a few minutes.

That was the last time I ever saw Carl. He died of leukemia 1n 2004. He was a talented and sweet man. He worked at a high level in show business. He never had a breakout hit record, but he did make the charts a few times and he entertained many, though he was not a household name. I miss him. Lots of people miss him.

 

 

Philip Newell has been professionally involved in audio since 1966. He has done it all, from an apprenticeship in audio electronics while studying radio and television servicing, to doing live sound for internationally renowned musicians, from working in recording studios (and at Pye Records) to becoming the Technical Director of Virgin Records. He has designed and built world-class studios, mobile recording trucks, cinemas and dubbing theatres. Newell has published research papers, presented in conferences and has sponsored academic research. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s a licensed pilot and has flown airplanes and seaplanes, having owned a fleet of seaplanes, and acted as a flight instructor and examiner. Throughout his career, Philip Newell has worked on a large number of recordings by world famous artists including Queen, The Who, Hawkwind, Patti Smith, The Band, Gong, Can, Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield, all the way to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, The Duke Ellington Orchestra, Dizzy Gillespie and others. Philip has worked in over 30 different countries. He is a fellow of the Institute of Acoustics in the UK and is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the Seaplane Pilots Association. He has written eight books published by Focal Press, including Loudspeakers, Studio Monitoring Design and Recording Studio Design, all of which I would highly recommend to anyone wishing to dive deeper into these subjects. In this two-part interview Philip shares his perspective into the past and present of the music industry, as well as thoughts about the laws of aerodynamics and acoustics. J.I. Agnew: You have been professionally involved in the world of music since 1966. What drew you to this sector, of all the options open to a 17-year-old in 1960s Britain? Philip Newell: The music of the late 1950s and the 1960s completely captivated me. My nickname at school was “Prof” (or “The Professor”) and it was assumed that I would go to university and study the sciences. However, when I was in my penultimate year of school, primarily studying “double mathematics” and physics, I saw an apprenticeship job advertised, which was in music-related electronics, so I shocked the school-teachers by announcing my departure and “getting a job.” They were sure that I had made a huge mistake, but the job was like a magnet for me. Very soon after, I was offered a job in live sound, working closely with musicians, and as I had been formally educated in piano playing I could easily converse with them. We got along very well, and I soon got asked to work at larger venues, which took me to London. JIA: How did your friends and family react to your decision to get a job instead of continuing on to university education at the time? PN: I think my parents could see how much I wanted the job, and they knew that music, electronics and loudspeakers had already been my main hobbies for several years. The job also involved spending one day each week at Blackburn Technical College, to study electronics, so at least they could see some further education for me. Most of my friends had already left school a year earlier, after our O Level examinations, so they were not surprised that I should also leave school. In fact, continuing to A Levels and universities was not usual in those days, and I had already done one year of the A Level course. JIA: How did the shift happen from you working at live music events to working in recording studios? PN: Once I was at the Orchid Ballroom, in Purley, I found myself working with some of the top British session musicians. They played in the resident bands of the ballroom about three nights a week (Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays), but spent much of their weekdays in the London recording studios, playing on many of the famous records for the top artistes. One of the musicians eventually invited me to help to supervise the building of his new recording studio, in Clapham (South London). Incidentally, in the Orchid Ballroom on Sunday and Monday there would be visiting bands, which were often world-famous groups or singers, such as Stax, Atlantic and Motown artistes. Having the chance to work on the sound for such people was enormously educating. By 1970, I went to work for Pye Recording Studios, which was one of London’s “big three” studios with Abbey Road and Decca, but I very much enjoyed working with their mobile-recording team, which often recorded live events, as well as doing other location recordings. Originally, we carried “loose” recording equipment, such as a Neve mixing console in three sections, but I later helped to install the equipment in their mobile recording truck – designed by Ray Prickett and overseen by Peter Duncan. I enjoyed the challenges of live recording. Every day was different.

The control room of The Town House in Shepherd's Bush, London in 1978, with a 32-track Telefunken M15A tape machine.

JIA: There was a certain situation in the UK around the 1960s which led to the advent of several radio stations on boats and abandoned military platforms (in what was still international waters), broadcasting the kind of music you most likely were captivated by. Were you ever involved with this scene? PN: I was not involved personally, but David Hawkins (a friend who had also worked at Pye, and who now owns Eastlake Audio) was on (I think it was) Radio London. However, these stations radically changed the 1960s music scene in the UK, and in a very positive way. I spent a great deal of time listening to Radio Caroline North, and it was probably the biggest single influence on me feeling that I had to work in music. In fact, I would probably not have left school if there had been no Radio Caroline North. It was such a major source for hearing what I thought was great music. No other radio stations in the north of England were playing this music. JIA: Early on, you started being involved in designing and constructing recording studios, mobile recording trucks and monitor loudspeakers. What was the inspiration that made you go from using studios and loudspeakers that others had designed, to designing your own?

The two Manor Mobile recording trucks in 1980.

PN: As my work was quite “mobile,” involving listening in many studios and recording in many locations, it was very obvious to me and to many others that there was very poor compatibility between their monitoring conditions, yet the very term “monitoring” suggested working to some sort of reference standard. However, to a large degree, studio acoustics was considered to be a black art, involving some sort of sorcery, and the “broadcast standards” that frequently were applied (which were originally intended for radio and TV studios) seemed to me to be largely misplaced. It was like trying to judge an orange by a standard set for apples. Yes; they are both fruit, but they are also very different, with different characteristics. I was absolutely certain that there were better ways of doing things regarding the control rooms and the loudspeaker systems, because at that time, what was being done just didn’t make sense to me.

The mobile control room in one of the Manor Mobile remote recording trucks during the 1970s.

JIA: Has the industry changed much since the 1960s? PN: I would say that in the 1960s there was much more emphasis placed on finding a great song to record. Probably the majority of the songs recorded by the great artistes were the products of specialized songwriters, so it was then the job of the artistes to interpret the songs and make them “their own.” Even groups such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Animals did this, as did the greats such as Elvis Presley, Joe Cocker, Tom Jones and Tina Turner, for example. None of these singers wrote many songs themselves, and not all great songwriters are great singers, either. The musical arrangements were also largely prepared before they went into a studio, so the principal job of any studio was to make the best recording of an already selected song. There is no doubt that this concept of specialized singers, songwriters and arrangers produced some real classics. JIA: Your transition from a very successful career in the music industry to becoming a professional seaplane pilot and instructor hardly seems like a natural career progression; what prompted such a radical change? PN: In 1978, Richard Branson bought Necker Island, in the British Virgin Islands. The original intention was to build a recording studio on the island, as a tax-haven for the big-earning artistes. When I first went there it was a totally deserted island, and seaplanes were a common form of transport in the Virgin Islands. I had already learned to fly landplanes at Kidlington (now Oxford) Airport, which was only about 2 kilometres from The Manor Studio , so I studied to add the “seaplanes and amphibians” rating to my licence, to facilitate my access to the island during the intended construction of the studio.

The Manor Studio during the late 1970s.

When the idea to build the studio was abandoned, due to a huge fall in the maximum tax rates in the UK after the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, I was already hooked on the seaplanes. JIA: Is there any common ground between the skills required of an audio/music professional and a pilot? PN: Although the discipline of the flying world was in huge contrast to the music industry, I realised that the laws of aerodynamics were unbendable. If you disregarded them, they could kill you, but if you respected them, they could also save you. Almost by chance, after taking part in an air display on Southampton Water, I found myself in contact with the aerodynamics people at the University of Southampton, which was coincidentally in the same building as the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR). I soon realised that the laws of acoustics were just as dependable as the laws of aerodynamics if you obeyed the rules, so this led me into looking at control rooms and monitor systems from a different perspective. As with aerodynamics, if you obey the rules, the outcome is repeatable and guaranteed. No sorcery is involved!

One of the Lake Buccaneer seaplanes owned by Philip, on River Thames.

JIA: Were you involved further with Necker Island after the studio idea was abandoned? PN: No; I never went back there. However, one day, who knows? I am sure it is not out of the question.

Necker Island, in the British Virgin Islands, owned by Richard Branson, when Philip first flew there.

In Part Two Philip will talk about fitting huge fuel tanks to the Manor Mobile recording truck during the 1973 oil crisis, life at Virgin Records, advice for people breaking into the record business and more.

The Song of the Summer is not an official title. It’s not a Grammy category, not (usually) quantifiable by chart position or mass success. Nor does it have to have the word “summer” in its title: That would be a “summer song,” such as “Summer Breeze,” “Summer Wind,” or even Love’s “Bummer in the Summer” from 1967’s Forever Changes.

Now 1967: the Summer of Love was ablaze with Songs of the Summer: Just start with any and all of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, strategically released by the Beatles June 1 (UK) and June 2 (USA) for maximum UV exposure. Just thinking back, off the top of my head, I’d say “A Day in the Life” and the Doors’ “Light My Fire” were my songs of the summer of 1967, speaking to my moods, memories, reflections and experiences. But what about the entire Moby Grape album, “Omaha” and “Hey Grandma” and “Mr. Blues” in particular? You could add dozens of others from the summer of 1967 – Aretha’s “Respect,” the Rascals’ “Groovin’” and “A Girl Like You – and you wouldn’t be wrong.

 

 

My affection for songs of summer began with the rock era’s eminent 1958 summer song, “Summertime, Summertime,” by the Jamies, one-hit wonders (unless you count the fact that the song was re-released and charted again briefly in 1962) from Dorchester, Massachusetts. And you can’t think about the summer of 1960 without hearing the giggles abounding in the presence of Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini,” though I was so young I wasn’t sure what a bikini was, and whether it was a minor affront to standards of the time because it was itsy and bitsy, or it had yellow polka dots. It was as shocking in its time as Snoop Dogg’s “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” was in 1993, sort of.

I’ll never forget the summer of 1963, when armed with a new transistor radio I would run to my friend Kenny’s house across the street every time I sensed a station was about to play Little Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips Part 2.” (The drummer at that Motown club session, designed for an ensemble live album that was never released, was Marvin Gaye.)

There was no summer of 1965 without the historic roll call including Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” and “Help!,” not to mention the Four Tops’ double-header of  “I Can’t Help Myself”’ and the aptly titled but still wonderful “It’s the Same Old Song,” a made in Motown summer long mixtape.

I can’t imagine a summer of 1966 without “Wild Thing,” by the Troggs, “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells, and the Beach Boys, founded on the notion of endless summer, with “Sloop John B.” But the Song of the Summer for 1966 is also one of the most durable summer songs: “Summer in the City” by the Lovin’ Spoonful,” capturing the pitiless heat, humidity and noise of urban life on the edge. In 1969, summer song met Song of the Summer again with Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime.”

 

 

Things are different now.

The AM top 40 monoculture gave way to album-oriented FM rock in the 1970s, to the 1980s fragmentation of the audience into genre-silos. Bruce Springsteen managed to bring most of the U.S.A. to the New Jersey boardwalk in the summer of 1984 with “Dancing in the Dark,” and 1985 with “Glory Days.”

But Prince was the ruler of the Songs of Summer during the 1980s, with “1999” (in 1983), “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy” (1984), “Raspberry Beret” (1985), and “Batdance” (1989).

There are many others who will associate the summer of 1991 with Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.” I recall being unable to escape that song during a family vacation in Lake Winnipesaukee, N.H., where I imagined myself as Bill Murray in What About Bob? looking for my own Dr. Leo Marvin (played by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie) or someone else to drive crazy in addition to my family during vacation.

At least in those days, people listened to music, sometimes unappealing and often too loud, on their radios in public. Since listening to music all the time was my job, I had to develop a tolerance for people who liked to blast their favorite tunes on vacation.

That’s no longer a problem. In my Writing About Music classes at St. John’s University in New York, I survey my students about how they listen. Over the last few years, listening to music has become a solitary experience thanks to streaming media (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and others), and the universal use of mini-headphones or pods, either by wire or Bluetooth. In the last six months, Covid, isolation and quarantine has forced more solitary listening even for those few who use (usually their parents’) audio systems.

Add that to the lack of a consensus culture that agrees on anything, and the Song of the Summer of 2020 is a particularly personal choice. It’s not that consensus never happens: the summer of 2017 gave us “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, which got an extra demographic boost when Justin Bieber was added to the mix, and the video. The summer of 2019 was owned by “Old Town Road,” a hick-hop groove by Lil’ Nas X that was too subtle to cross over to a more diverse audience until Billy Ray Cyrus emphasized the song’s country bona fides.

 

 

There’s nothing like that I can find this summer. In an interview with WBUR in Boston, NPR music critic Tim Riley and longtime record producer and engineer Prince Charles Alexander discussed the lack of a cohesive choice. Alexander thought the medium beats of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” was technically related to the slow beat of “Old Town Road.” But what propelled “Savage” to a Song of the Summer contender was the viral dance competitions on social media site Tik Tok. Riley, meanwhile, expected more from the Black country side of the Lil Nas X phenomenon, noting his embrace of “Black Like Me” by Nashville-based singer Mickey Guyton. Neither the poignant song nor its lyric video have taken off this troubled summer, when the Dixie Chicks sliced their own once-monumental brand, removing Dixie and reemerging as the Chicks. I had hopes the Chicks would provide me with a Song of the Summer, but found the drum-heavy sound of their new album and first single “Gaslighter” unappealing. The video, however, is a potent expression of the personal and political. Personally, I’ve been going back to the bracing performance by the Chicks fronted by Beyoncé performing Bey’s “Daddy Lessons” filmed at the 2016 Country Music Awards show.

There are also other strong statements by independent women, including Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion’s frankly filthy “WAP.” Empowerment or self-exploitation? You decide. Taylor Swift snuck in a few weeks ago with Cardigan, a winsome album and title song recorded in isolation and co-written with Aaron Dessner of the alt-rock faves, The National.

After all the searching, my song(s) of the year comes down to the familiar yet fresh new Bob Dylan songs, “False Prophet” and “My Favorite Version of You”: I think of these sequential tracks from Rough and Rowdy Ways as a two-sided single. Even if I’m taking a five minute drive to the supermarket, I’ll take five minutes setting up Bluetooth and my music library on my phone, just to hear these two songs to and from the store.

 

 

“False Prophet,” my “A” side, is Dylan’s latest renunciation of any special visionary attributes projected upon him almost from the moment he picked up a guitar. Now his voice has the harsh, guttural feel to put across the Howlin’ Wolf/Willie Dixon style of delivery that makes his words of personal sacrifice, his protectiveness of privacy, so effective. He sings of “anger, bitterness, and doubt”: “I know how it happened, I saw it begin/I opened my heart to the world and the world came in.” And he insists: “I ain’t no false prophet/I just know what I know/I go where only the lonely can go.” It’s not the stuff of pop hits these days, if it ever was. Listening to this Dylan is like listening to Sinatra in the autumn of his years: you need to have been around the block a few times to identify.

“My Own Version of You,” which teases a little from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,” is about building a Frankenstein’s monster. It is likely not autobiographical.

Header image: The Beach Boys' Surfer Girl album.

There has been a lot said about the importance of Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town. It was a transitional album for Bruce, taking him from beachside drifter to working class hero. The sound that he would carry forward was established here. The origins of how that evolved and the influence that Jon Landau had in shaping what we now know as “Bruce” are best captured in the masterful book, Mansion on the Hill. It’s a terrific tale.

What isn’t talked about often is the influence that Darkness had on a number of other artists. There of course were the castaways, the songs that guys like Southside Johnny and Gary US Bonds made their own. But then there was Patti Smith. Her cover of “Because the Night” took the Springsteen sound and made it something she could own; that she could co-op. There’s an epic aspect to the production. At the same time there is a haunting simplicity to the song’s structure. It feels like a Springsteen song and yet you begin to believe that it’s really Patti’s. It was perfectly performed and instantly became her biggest hit. The single caught the attention of Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler and he reached out to Jimmy Iovine –the architect behind the song – to produce the band’s next record.

Jimmy Iovine has said publicly that third albums are a charm. That’s what excited him most about the opportunity to produce this third Dire Straits album. The band’s self-titled first release was an amazing record, selling over six million copies. Its follow-up, Communiqué, like most follow-ups was rushed to market by the record label and didn’t get the kind of attention it needed to be commercially viable. Iovine has contended that the third record is always so important that bands need to treat it with the kind of care that almost insures that they arrive at the studio with some of their best work. Having written songs for over six months after touring in support of Communiqué, Mark Knopfler did just that.

To help Dire Straits capture the sound the Patti Smith Group had achieved on their Easter album (which yielded “Because the Night,”) Jimmy convinced Springsteen’s E Street Band pianist Roy Bittan to join with Dire Straits as they began to record at the Power Station in NYC. It was at this time that Mark’s brother David decided to leave the band. The void that Bittan filled on keys would forever restructure the band and keyboards would be part of their lineup moving forward.

Together Bittan and Iovine led the band to the powerful sound that comes across throughout the record. As the album opens with “Tunnel of Love” it explodes with a fiery guitar solo that is reminiscent of Springsteen’s song “Badlands.” The guitar slides into the track and the vocals launch. Often compared to Bob Dylan because of his singing style and tone, Knopfler here bridges the narrow divide between Bruce and Bob. The band delivers the kind of energy that you find in Springsteen songs like “Prove It All Night” with vocals that connect to Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming.”

 

 

As a fan of Dire Straits, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have heard this record, Making Movies, for the first time. It’s such a departure from the first two releases. Ironically the band would never record anything that sounded like this again. Somehow by simply adding Iovine and Bittan, drummer Pick Withers begins to sound a lot like Springsteen’s powerhouse drummer Max Weinberg. John Illsley starts to anchor the rhythm like Springsteen bassist Gary Tallent. And Knopfler himself, much more the accomplished player, more technical and skilled, loosens up the strings a bit and plays with a different kind of authority. Just when you think, “OK, here’s that Dire Straits sound I’ve come to know,” Bittan steps forward and it’s as though we are in the booth at the Record Plant listening to outtakes from the Darkness sessions.

I’d also suggest that lyrically this is some of Knopfler’s best work. The songs are beautifully written. The first four tracks, “Tunnel of Love,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Skateaway” and “Expresso Love” alone being worth the price of admission.

The single, “Romeo and Juliet,” an instant hit, is best known for the lyric:

A love struck Romeo sang the streets of serenade
Laying everybody low with a love song that he made
Finds a streetlight steps out of the shade
Says something like, “you and me babe, how about it?”

 

 

In fact, this verse may be moment that the band is best-known for among loyal fans. Sure, Dire Straits would soar to even greater heights with Brothers in Arms. But that record is such a departure from what they did here that you may as well consider them a different band by then. Here, Knopfler writes with a confidence and style that is both clever and profound. You can also make connections to the topics, themes and references found in songs by Bruce at that time. “Tunnel of Love” references an amusement park named Spanish City that Knopfler frequented as a child in Newcastle. It was his personal Jersey Boardwalk.

And the big wheel keeps on turning neon burning up above
And I’m just high on the world
Come on and take a low ride with me girl
On the tunnel of love

Knopfler’s “Tunnel of Love” has all of the amusement park, Ferris wheel ride, carnival arcade, carousel and shooting gallery references of Bruce’s own “Tunnel of Love” but this story is that of a romance about to begin, about to bloom, that’s innocent and new.

This is a fun ride. I’m not sure that Dire Straits ever really rocked again. This record tracks a moment in time when Springsteen not only charted his own course but also impacted the work of so many others.  Putting the right people in a room together doesn’t always mean that you are going to make history. But in that two month window during the summer of 1980 Dire Straits did. As David Fricke of Rolling Stone said at the time:

Making Movies the record on which Mark Knopfler comes out from behind his influences and Dire Straits come out from behind Mark Knopfler. The combination of the star’s lyrical script, his intense vocal performances and the band’s cutting-edge rock and roll soundtrack is breathtaking – everything the first two albums should have been but weren’t. If Making Movies really were a film, it might win a flock of Academy Awards.

There’s not much more that needs to be said. The record is as big and expansive as a major motion picture. It’s also as lasting.

 

 

 

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Heinrich Klaffs.

Summer CES 1993, taken before The Mondial Experience jam session and party. For a few years, former audio manufacturer Mondial Designs would rent a club or big room, supply a full stage and ask people in the high-end audio industry who were musicians to get onstage and play. Hundreds of people would be invited and Mondial supplied the free food and drinks, so much revelry ensued.

Those in the band and their affiliations at the time: Back row – Elliot Kanshin Kallen (The Tweak Shop), Tony Federici (Mondial), Bob Reina (The Absolute Sound), John Atkinson (Stereophile), Michael Fremer (The Absolute Sound), Allen Perkins (Immedia). Front row – Paul Rosenberg (Mondial), Corey Greenberg (Stereophile), Frank Doris (The Absolute Sound), Steven Stone (Stereophile). In the band but not shown – Rob Sample (Paradigm), Neil Sinclair (Theta Digital) and Roland Marconi (Mondial).

Sadly, Tony, Bob and Paul are no longer with us. RIP.

Photo by Allen Perkins.