Issue 160

Fans longing for new music from legendary Canadian progressive rocker Alex Lifeson of Rush will have to wait no longer, as the guitar virtuoso’s newest group, Envy of None, has delivered some of the most inventive and surprisingly vital work of the 68-year old’s career. Envy of None, their debut album, was released on April 8.

Listeners will be delighted to a cohesive blend of alternative and indie, with hints of industrial sprinkled across the soundscape. Along with Lifeson, the cast of players includes bassist Andy Curran (of Coney Hatch), actress turned singer/songwriter, Maiah Wynne, and guitarist Alfio Annibalini.

When asked about the project, Lifeson quipped that Envy of None “had no rules,” an approach that seems to be an ongoing and most successful methodology for the veteran axe-slinger. To see that the old dog can in fact be taught some new tricks is nothing short of delightful.

I talked with Andy Curran and Maiah Wynne about the uber-surprising Envy of None project.

Andrew Daly: Tell us about Envy Of None.

Maiah Wynne: I first started working on some songs with Andy around five years ago. The project started out slowly, with zero pressure. It was just for the fun of making some cool music together. Even when Alex [Lifeson] got on board, there was never any pressure to do anything differently or try to make any sort of big hit song. It wasn’t until four years and ten songs later that we decided [to] officially release it.

The music is diverse, and I love that about the project. There [are] heavier songs like “Dogs Life,” and “Enemy,” [and softer and sweeter songs like “Old Strings” and “Western Sunset.” Any song idea was on the table, and we just enjoyed the process of creating together.

Andrew Curran: Envy Of None was really four like-minded musicians adding their ideas to seeds of songs that just seemed to ooze out of all of us. It had been in the works with no real master plan, and no label or management driving us. It wasn’t until Alex Lifeson asked me one day, “Andy, what are we going to do with all these songs?” that we felt we should share it with some music industry people. “Liar” was requested for the Netflix series Tiny Pretty Things, and then, when the team at K-Scope/Snapper Music heard the music, this caught fire, and we then had a mission to finish, record and release [the album].

AD: How did everyone in the band meet?

MW: I met Andy through a song contest I won five years ago. One of my prizes was a mentorship with Andy through Zoom. We got to talking about an industrial-sounding song of mine that he really liked. Andy had been working on some similar music, and I offered to add vocals to them – not having any clue about who Andy was at that point. Alf [Annibalini] was already Andy’s creative partner. About two songs into working together, Andy called me out of the blue and said, “Alex [Lifeson] really likes the songs, and wants to add some guitars.” I flew to Toronto and met everyone. That was a really exciting day.

AC: Alex Lifeson and I have known each other for years, and at one time were label mates on Anthem Records (Rush’s label). I [had] an A&R job at Anthem and had worked together with Rush for over a decade. Alf and I met when I was recording an album with the band Leisureworld, and we instantly hit it off. I met Maiah when she [did the] online radio competition. I played Alex a song called “Shadow” that we co-wrote. He added some guitars and loved Maiah’s voice and the vibe, and bingo – we had a lineup!

AD: What first got both of you hooked on music?

MW: One of my earliest memories is playing the piano at three years old and figuring out notes that sounded good together. I vividly remember the rush of excitement that gave me. I loved piano lessons. I took choir and band in school and always loved singing harmonies. At 13, I started teaching myself guitar and drums, and that’s when I really got the bug for learning new instruments. I still get that same rush now, branching out into synth and MIDI instruments and music production.

AC: I grew up in a household where music was all around. My grandpa, Joe Curran, was a professional musician and played in the BBC Symphony Orchestra. My dad played piano and guitar, and my sisters and older brother Mike introduced me to so many cool bands. But it wasn’t until I saw the Edgar Winter Group perform at Maple Leaf Gardens that I was really hooked. That was a defining moment where I remember thinking, that’s what I wanna do. Oh, and the opening act was Bad Company…my mind was officially blown.

AD: What themes are you exploring with your new music? How has your background brought you to this point in your musical journey?

MW: A big part of music for me is working through whatever I’m going through. I tried to bring a lot of personal perspective to the lyrics for Envy Of None. Most of the songs were co-written, where Andy would have a few specific words, and I’d build the rest of the song around them. In retrospect, we probably used the word “darkness” a few too many times! A lot of the songs are pretty dark. It might make a fun drinking game while you listen to the record. [Laughs].

Envy of None, album cover.

AC: I felt it was time to move outside my [musical] comfort zone. [My previous band] Coney Hatch was full-on hard rock, and with [the band] Soho, I started leaning a little more alternative. By the time Caramel and Leisureworld were written, I’d gone into a much darker alt-rock vibe [but with] some melodic hooks. During those years, I started writing a lot more “chilled” stuff, playing more keyboards, Moog bass lines, fretless bass, and guitars. I was listening to a lot of ambient, dub [artists]. It certainly influenced my writing, and that’s where a lot of the Envy Of None material started.

Lyrically, I’ve never changed my approach. There are so many things that happen to me daily, so there’s no shortage of lyrical ideas that sit right under my nose.

AD: How about the production side of things?

MW: The four of us co-produced the record. Everyone was sort of in charge of recording and producing their own [songs], with some crossover at the end of the process. On many tracks, Aliephant, a producer I work with, co-produced the vocals, adding some cool effects layers. Alex Lifeson mixed a few of the songs and Alf mixed the rest.

AC: Everyone had the freedom to do what they felt was needed to develop the song. The only time we went outside our bubble was to play a few songs for our friend [Canadian record producer] David Bottrill to get some feedback. He said, “you guys are doing great, the material and sonics are really good,” offered a few tips, and sent us on our way. It was a nice confidence booster.

AD: What went into the decision to release “Liar” as the first single?

MW: We let the label decide the singles. I think we all agreed that “Liar” was a great first track, and it was an easy choice.

AC: I was on board just for the fuzz bass alone (laughs).

AD: Who are some of your early influences?

MW: My dad. He played piano and I would watch his hands. My grandpa plays banjo and mandolin. I listened to a lot of No Doubt, Radiohead, Norah Jones, Aimee Mann, Duran Duran, Queen, and the Pixies with my parents. Around 13, I was learning the drums and listened to ACϟDC, Led Zeppelin, Rush, and pretty much anything that I discovered while playing Guitar Hero. I then went through an indie phase and listened to artists like Daughter, Iron and Wine, Florence and The Machine, Ben Harper, and Feist.

AC: Like I said, Edgar Winter was a big one for me, [also] bands like Aerosmith, UFO, Cheap Trick…and Rush! When I started learning bass, that’s when Yes, Genesis, Return to Forever, Weather Report, and Jeff Beck were on my turntable 24/7.

AD: What are a few of your favorite albums, and why?

MW: Some of my favorite albums are Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Fiona Apple’s Tidal, and Radiohead’s OK Computer. They feel really cohesive from beginning to end.

AC: Some of my new favorite records are from Tame Impala, Bones UK, and a Toronto artist called Jaguar Sun. They’re not new, but I love Middle Class Rut. This is a darn good playlist if I do say so myself. (laughs)

Top row: Maiah Wynne, Alex Lifeson. Bottom row: Alfio Annibalini, Andy Curran. Courtesy of Troy William Dunn, Richard Sibbald and Jaden D.

AD: What other passions do both of you have? How do they inform your music?

MW: I love acting. I hope I can pursue a career in acting as well as music. There is a lot of crossover between the two worlds, especially when putting on a concert. In order to give a good musical performance, you have to be a good entertainer, and that includes channeling emotion and having a good rapport with the audience. I also enjoy writing poetry and that informs my lyrics at times.

AC: Those who know me well will tell you hockey is a big passion. I was skating three times a week all year until COVID hit and rinks were shut down. I’m a die-hard Chicago Blackhawks fan.

My family means the world to me, and that includes my four-legged canine friends. Those personal connections certainly find their way into my lyrics. Hockey not so much. (laughs)

AD: In your opinions, what is the state of the music business these days? Should artists be hopeful? Scared? Both?

MW: I think the state of the music industry today is a double-edged sword. There are benefits to everything being so accessible, like any artist being able to share their music with the world, and anyone being able to listen to them across the globe. However, digital music platforms have devalued music to the point where artists can’t make money easily anymore. An already challenging career path has become ten times harder. On top of that, COVID and the inability to tour safely and easily have created a huge deficit for artists trying to survive.

I don’t see us resolving these issues anytime soon. Unless someone can create a digital streaming platform as convenient and cheaper than Spotify that treats artists more fairly, I don’t think the average person is going to take the time to change the way they listen to music. I would like to believe there will be a better solution in the future, but it is going to take work and a conscious effort from a large number of people.

AC: I really feel hopeful. There are so many great opportunities for young artists to get their music out there. The internet has leveled the playing field in terms of [having] a destination to share music. You have an uphill battle to get your music heard, and poke your head above the pack, but if I compare [the situation] to when I started, unless you had a label behind you there was no way your music was going to get out to a global marketplace.

The live scene has shrunk for sure, but as my friend, [Canadian music executive] Ray Danniels will say, “nothing can get in the way of a great song.” Persistence and patience are the names of the game.

Header image courtesy of Richard Sibbald.

As a male of 67 years (as of this writing), I’ve recognized for some time that my ears are not the golden performers they once were. I’ve recently confirmed through formal testing that I’m suffering mild hearing loss from the upper-mid frequencies on up, no doubt helped along by rock concert attendance in my 20s and 30s, before I came to understand the permanent damage they cause, and knew to invest in quality earplugs.

I’ve known my hearing was diminishing for a couple of years – I’ve had progressively more difficulty understanding conversations in loud environments, or in the monthly public meetings my job requires me to attend. Even television broadcasts aren’t as clear as they used to be. For some time, I’ve claimed it was a change in the way broadcasts are produced – that engineers these days deliberately push loud backgrounds and music over simultaneous speech, making it hard to understand. They bump up crowd noise during broadcast sports to make it sound more exciting, despite the fact it makes the announcers impossible to understand. I continued to think, it can’t be me; it must be them. It can’t be hearing loss, because I don’t need more volume, I just need more clarity. Turns out that was wrong, and hearing aids are now on their way.

Why am I writing about this? First, to discuss an apparent dichotomy between our ears’ performance limits and the qualities of audio reproduction that make certain recordings sound lifelike; and second, as a means to fend off as much as possible the trepidation I feel as I make this latest transition to senior-hood, with all the ramifications that hearing aids might have for my ego and my status as an “audiophile.” Kind of like whistling past my audio grave, if you will.

Craig Burgess.

When I was cutting my hi-fi teeth in the 1970s, one of the prime performance characteristics touted by manufacturers and reviewers alike was extended frequency response. Even if a pair of young, healthy ears topped out at 16 – 18 kHz (or lower – even a pure 12 kHz tone sounded impossibly high), the consensus was that we really needed reproduction that pushed 20 kHz or beyond, in order to provide the micro-cues that our brains needed to recognize things like “air,” texture, accurate timbre, or the leading edge of transients of all kinds. So, we pursued that performance, and kidded ourselves that we really heard, or at least somehow perceived, those sounds, even though the frequency sweeps and tones of our test records made it clear we couldn’t hear anything close to them. We just assumed that those test records were labeled wrong, or the system wasn’t performing correctly, or that regardless, we possessed some kind of bat- or dog-like sense we couldn’t explain but that nevertheless responded to these signals we clearly weren’t hearing, all in order to explain the quality we found in recordings that our systems reproduced well. And by “well,” I mean with a palpable sense of realism, not simply spectacular hi-fi bombast. I mean sounds that can fool you into thinking they’re coming from a person or instrument, loud or soft, that’s there, in your presence.

So what is it in the recording/mixing/mastering process, the manufacturing of the physical medium, or the reproduction chain (or a combination of the three) that results in these “realistic” recordings? We all possess records and CDs that have great knock-your-socks-off sound, but even among those, I would wager we each have a smaller subset of recordings that go beyond a purely impressive range of frequency and dynamics, beyond the punch of a bass drum and the sparkle of a cymbal, and that provide a genuine you-are-there quality. I suspect the path to that sound is not fully understood, at least by many, or all recordings would possess it.

I’m coming to realize, though, that extended high-frequency response is not the answer, at least to the exclusion of other factors. Every hi-fi enthusiast that I know personally has confirmed to me that they’ve experienced the phenomenon of hearing a recording for the first time in an environment less than conducive to critical reproduction or critical listening, and still noticing the germ of quality in what they heard. It could a noisy car interior, or playback through a mobile phone or a small, tinny Bluetooth speaker. Regardless, something catches our ear/brain and makes us think, “this one is worth listening to at home, on the nice system. I bet it sounds great.” I’m sure that has happened to most of you. So, what are those auditory cues that produce that reaction? I suspect they’re unrelated to extended high-frequency response, since those systems and environments are surely missing (or masking) that information, just as they’re assuredly limiting dynamic range and a host of other qualities we think of as critical to high-fidelity music reproduction. But something is there, something perceptible, that hints at genuinely realistic sound quality if given the right playback circumstances.

Which brings me back to where I started. Since my hearing loss is limited to a specific band of higher frequencies, this gives me some hope that the world of high-quality, realistic music reproduction isn’t being closed off to me completely by the fact that I’ll be using hearing aids soon. It suggests to me that the audio qualities I treasure in listening may lie outside that limited set of performance characteristics. Otherwise, I’d find my system provides progressively worse performance as I get older, but in fact it doesn’t. As it stands now, it’s producing the finest sound I’ve ever heard from it during its evolution of the past 45 or so  years. There are questions remaining, to be sure – will I be able to enjoy the system just as well once I’ve started using the devices and are accustomed to them, or will I discover I need to remove them when listening to music? Will my brain treat them like eyeglasses, where initial optical distortions are eventually compensated for by the brain? All those questions will be answered in time. Whether my audiophile cred or my ego will take irredeemable hits are different matters. We’ll see about those.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts about what makes for a realistic recording, and if you wear them, stories about audiophile life with hearing aids.

About the Author

Craig Burgess is a registered architect who is currently appointed Building Commissioner of the State of Indiana. His love of music dates back to grade school band, in which he played cornet; he later moved on to bluegrass banjo, acoustic guitar and piano. His love of hi-fi began in high school, and it was kicked into high gear while in college, when he discovered The Absolute Sound and the high end.

Header image: hearing aids, from the Lively website.

Recently I picked up my four-year-old grandson Henry after preschool, and upon getting him buckled securely into his car seat, we headed off to our lunch destination. My car stereo has a USB input, and I have a 32 GB flash drive inserted that has about 19 days worth of MP3 music scattered across a variety of genres and is set to play everything randomly. A Beatles’ song immediately came on – “Blackbird” from the White Album – and Henry exclaimed, “Is this blackbird singing in the dead of night? Can you play Magical Mystery Tour?” Stunned by this request, I immediately surfed to the correct folder and played Magical Mystery Tour in its entirety, continuing through lunch and into our afternoon excursions – and Henry sang along to many of the songs, seemingly knowing most of the words. This included “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but the song that really captivated him was “All You Need Is Love,” and he proceeded to belt it out at maximum volume from the rear of my Hyundai. “Aww you need is wuv, wuv…wuv is aww you need!” It was indeed a magical moment.

Henry, having a few Skittles after lunch.

While in my late twenties, with my toddler daughter Julie generally always at my side, I lived my life, which included listening regularly to the music I loved. We heard lots of Beatles, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Blue Öyster Cult, and Yes, as well as healthy doses of Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Nick Drake, along with a generous portion of classic jazz and classical music thrown in for good measure. I never asked four-year-old Julie what she wanted to listen to, and I never thought that anything that constantly played as the soundtrack of our lives at the time would probably even register with her. I never ignored her wants or needs, I was a doting father – but my musical choices as the house DJ were never called into question at the time. My ten and twelve-year-old stepsons were almost always outside or with friends.

Her brothers’ lack of interest and input soon changed as they hit their teens, when suddenly my music was being challenged by the likes of Nirvana, Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, Suicidal Tendencies, and soon after, Metallica. Both boys styled themselves as street surfers with skateboards constantly in tow, and their musical choices reflected that surf attitude. And they wanted to hear what they perceived to be the soundtrack of their lives. I generally won the battle of volume levels in the house, as my access to many hundreds of watts pumped over large speakers could easily drown out the sound of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” emanating from a boombox.

But that continually developing musical dynamic also managed to shape everyone’s sensibilities and tastes. I actually started paying attention to the same groups the boys were so enamored with. They even checked out my music; I’ll never forget the afternoon when Yes’ “Roundabout” was playing, and the oldest, Joe, came downstairs right after Rick Wakeman’s extended keyboard solo in the song’s center. “Dude…” he said, “could you play that again? Holy crap, he’s really wailing on those keyboards!” We actually found some common ground, and I think, in retrospect, our shared appreciation for music has helped cement our ongoing relationship over time. And oddly, as the years have gone along, I tend to listen more regularly to the type of music the boys were into, and each of them listens to a lot more Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

A few years later, I picked up then-eight-year-old Julie after school one day, and she asked me, with a level of curious incredulity, “Did you know that Paul McCartney was one of the Beatles?” After what seemed like an eternity of my force-feeding the music of the Beatles to her toddler self, we were finally having this conversation – and she wanted to know everything! Suddenly, Julie was totally obsessed with the music of the Beatles. We played the White Album, Abbey Road, Magical Mystery Tour, Let It Be, Sgt. Pepper, Revolver – you name it, she was interested. She borrowed frequently from my CD library, eventually adding many of them to her iPod. I actually felt like my mission in life had been accomplished – and when young Henry started belting out “Aww you need is wuv!” I was ecstatic, to say the least!

I’ve been on a bit of a buying spree over the last six months or so, and have acquired all the 24/96 digital download files that are currently available from the Beatles, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. I also recently found the two-disc set for The Beatles’ Love, where the second disc is a DVD that can be ripped to obtain the 24/96 files. As many of us know, all the songs were remixed and remastered by Giles Martin, and while Love is not a Beatles catalog album per se, I still find it to be a refreshing departure from the usual Beatles fare. I’d gotten the 24/96 digital download for Abbey Road last year, and was truly impressed with it. And I’ve actually been searching out multi-disc sets from a host of other artists that include a DVD (or DVDs) with the 24/96 files, but I’m apparently very late to the party for most of them. Especially for the Beatles, where the cost of the multi-disc reissues was never cheap, but has gotten prohibitively expensive as of late. I did a lot of research on the 24/96 downloads for the Beatles, watched my e-mail inbox scrupulously for catalog sales offers from HDtracks and Qobuz, and managed to get them all for not too much cash – at least not a suitcase full of it!

What really prompted most of this was watching Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary series on Disney+ last December, which I found really interesting and entertaining. And that was despite my personal feelings about Let It Be – both the album and the movie – which was that it was a completely boring, monotonous farce (particularly the movie). However, I felt that The Beatles: Get Back re-cast the proceedings effectively, and really humanized the Beatles in a way I’d never thought possible, even though it was crazy long at around seven hours. The first hour or so of the first segment was a really tough watch (though nowhere nearly as tough as the original movie!), but it very quickly became more interesting, and was a fascinating observation on the Beatles’ work process. I found the third segment, where the rooftop concert takes place, nothing less than revelatory, and was thoroughly impressed with the professionalism and musicianship displayed by a band only mere months away from splintering apart forever. Anyway, at the point when the 24/96 digital download became available for Let It Be, I grabbed it for less than $13, and was so impressed, I started methodically getting the other titles I didn’t yet have.

I’m really hoping Giles Martin will continue with his excellent work and eventually get around to the remix and remaster of Magical Mystery Tour – which is probably one of the least-impressive-sounding Beatles albums currently on digital. Most Beatles scholars point to a mid-seventies’ German import LP as being the finest sounding version of the album ever, and we really need this classic updated in a high-resolution digital format. Some folks might consider the work Giles Martin is doing as a bastardization of the originals, but my personal impression of them is very positive; I don’t think the Beatles’ music as heard on the current group of remix/remasters has ever sounded better. Despite Martin’s occasional wandering from the absolute original intent, I still think they sound pretty amazing on a really good digital system like the Euphony Audio setup I currently have access to. Along with Magical Mystery Tour, there’s Yellow Submarine (the song-track version vs. the soundtrack), the group of songs that ended up being the Hey Jude EP (in the US, anyway), and perhaps Revolver and Rubber Soul. In my book, that pretty much covers every album by the fully-formed, more modern version of the group. That said, I still have pretty much everything by the Beatles in regular rotation (at least in my car, anyway), and should Giles Martin decide to remix/remaster the early albums as well, I have zero doubts that I’d buy them all too.

I’ve seen a lot of press online recently about the Dolby Atmos encoded versions of classic album titles that are appearing on Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal. At least one of The Beatles’ albums, the singles compilation disc 1 along with a maxi-single that includes “Strawberry Fields Forever”/”Penny Lane” has also been made available in Dolby Atmos. Giles Martin has been at the helm of those efforts, along with Sam Okell, but let’s hope that doesn’t distract him from continuing to remix/remaster additional catalog titles. I personally haven’t heard any of the Dolby Atmos releases, and I don’t currently have a surround-sound setup available to experience any of them, but I’ve read and heard several less-than-enthusiastic reviews of some of the recent releases. I’m always suspicious when movie theater surround software is applied to classic catalog albums – the results for me have always been a mixed bag.

Coda

My life as an adult has always been a tug of war between a desire for a relatively simplistic lifestyle and the lure of material things – you know, nice house, nice car, really nice stereo! But that has always been tempered by an overwhelming desire for peacefulness. In fact, Julie and I have this ongoing ritual where every year she asks me for a Christmas list, and the first item on that list is always “world peace.” That sentiment was thoroughly impressed on me as a young man by – you guessed it, the Beatles – because “All You Need Is Love.” John, George, and Ringo (especially of late) were vocal about peace and love throughout their careers, both with and beyond the Beatles.

But I also have to admit that well into the point where Julie had suddenly immersed herself in the Beatles, whenever “All You Need Is Love” would play, I’d sing along and jokingly paraphrase it, with the main response being, “All You Need Is Love…and a shiny suitcase full of money!” When the lottery arrived in Georgia, that got further paraphrased to, “All You Need Is Love…and a half a billion bucks!” (Which I felt actually flowed better with the music.) Yes, I had obviously sold out – at least in spirit, because that shiny suitcase full of money or the half a billion bucks never showed up. (At least, not yet!) Every time my wife and I are out and about and she sees an armored truck, she always comments, “that’s the kind of SUV I really want – and fully loaded!” The appeal of truckloads of cash is undeniable.

Henry, with a green tongue after a Popsicle.

But in a world filled with hunger, strife, and war, love is what we truly need more than anything today. And it’s really refreshing that a younger generation of music lovers – like my grandson Henry – can fully embrace a message of love. Even when it’s being delivered by a group from over half a century ago.

All images courtesy of the author, except header image, courtesy of Apple Corps.

I’m sure it was pizza and ice cream that soothed my ego the day after Frank and Barbara abandoned me in the parking lot of Christina’s school. I learned to get over stuff like that by cultivating various addictions. Although Frank treated me like a stranger, his valet, Mikey, did not, and Mikey was back at the house to pick up the Sinatras’ effects before they all headed back to California. And out of nowhere, Mikey asked if I wanted to stay at the hotel tonight while he packed up Mr. S’s suite. Yes! Finally, someone was repaying everything I had done for Frank. I really earned this perk.

My mother quickly gave her permission for me to go on an overnight trip to Manhattan with a man we barely knew – being a parent was different back in 1979. But, I wasn’t worried. Mikey seemed like a solid guy, and I risked my life in Times Square whenever my friends and I waded through perverts, pushers, and predators as we shopped for porn magazines, bongs, and records. Plus, I was going to be safely inside a hotel most of the time. With $20 in my wallet and a change of clothes in my school bag, I was ready to leave – until my mother made me repack my “nice pants and shirt” into a proper leather suitcase, the same baby blue one I had carried around since age four. She wanted me to make a good impression as her envoy to the Waldorf Astoria.

At dusk, Mikey picked me up in a boat-length two-door Cadillac, and we flew down the Saw Mill River Parkway blasting the radio, not at all concerned about cops and speeding tickets. I didn’t know what possibilities the night held but my excitement grew as Manhattan’s skyline became more visible along the Henry Hudson Parkway. We made our way into Midtown, eastbound down the canyon of 57^th Street, bathed by street lamps and smoggy warm air. He took the longer scenic route to unwind before the night’s work, and without having to provide directions, I could sit back and relax. I thought we would cruise around for a bit, maybe drink a six-pack of beer or smoke pot the way I did with some of my older friends – being a teen was different back in 1979. I was up for anything, but Mikey turned out to be a complete square. I was really disappointed when the trip abruptly ended at the hotel’s side entrance. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to have a bunch of attendants running around, opening and closing my doors, parking the car, and assisting me with my petit overnight bag. I felt so important for once.

The Waldorf Astoria in 2008. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Jordi Sabaté.

We were taken directly to the 33rd floor of the Waldorf Towers (an exclusive section of the hotel between the 27^th and 42^nd floors); the elevator operator stopped for no other passengers. I knew Frank’s hotel room would be nicer than any my family stayed in, but his cavernous “room” seemed to continue endlessly. After a long walk through the entrance halls and past a kitchen and dining area, we finally arrived in the parlor. “HOLY SH*T! How big is this place, and where the hell are the beds?!” I asked naively, having never been in a suite before.

“The beds are in the bedrooms. It’s an apartment, probably the biggest in the building.” Mikey said “bedrooms,” as in five, each with its own private bathroom. Frank’s suite was bigger than any of my friends’ houses.

I was dying to snoop around the place to see how Frank lived, but Mikey walked me over to a couch in the living room and instructed me to sit and not touch anything. All I could do was gaze out the windows, one whole side facing south towards the Pan Am building and other looking over the East River, and take in a sky with airplanes and helicopters darting like fireflies, streets flowing with gold and red car lights, and the peaks of buildings twinkling like Christmas trees as far as my eye could see. I had never seen Manhattan from this perspective before. Little did I know that I was already in the best part of the apartment. This is where Cole Porter played his piano named “High Society” while living in Suite 33A between 1939 and 1964. The hotel gifted him the ornate mahogany baby grand Steinway, which makes one wonder how many hits were written on High Society. Sometimes, Frank Sinatra would join him, and other times musicians accompanied Porter on an adjoining baby grand piano set curve to curve. With the roster of artists who walked the halls and worked the Starlight Roof and the Empire Room during its golden age, there’s no telling how many celebrities sat where I sat – it could have been Count Basie, Benny Goodman, George M. Cohan, Glenn Miller, or Lena Horne. After Porter’s death in 1964, Frank and Barbara Sinatra moved into the suite and rented it for one million dollars per year until 1988.

After the porters brought everything up from the car, including my suitcase, Mikey took me down to his room in the regular part of the Waldorf. The quarters were spacious and pleasant but nothing like the Towers where royalty, presidents, and world-renowned celebrities could be found any day of the week. “You can have anything in my fridge,” Mikey instructed. “I’ll call you early in the morning, so answer the phone but don’t make any calls. Lock the door and don’t leave the room. They won’t let you back up.” As much I wanted to run around the lobby and neighborhood, I had to stay put. Who would believe that I was Frank Sinatra’s guest if I got stopped in the lobby? I didn’t even know Mikey’s last name.

I stayed up most of the night watching late-night TV, splashing around in the deluxe bathtub, helping myself to everything in the mini-fridge, and studying the hotel guide on the desk. There were a bunch of bars and restaurants where I was itching to spend my $20 the next day: Sir Harry’s, Peacock Alley, Oscar’s, or The Bull and Bear.

Sometime during my solo all-night party, the phone rang. Figuring it was Mikey, I answered in a familiar tone, “Hell-oooooo,” I said in the high-pitched voice of 13-year-old boy.

The man on the other end was taken aback, “Whooz dis?”

“Tommy!”

“Dis is Jilly… Where’s Mikey?”

You don’t ever forget a man nicknamed Jilly. Ermenigildo Rizzo sounded tough with his native New York accent.

I’d never met him, but I heard his name whenever Frank was around. Jilly was always stopping by the house or taking Frank somewhere, and he seemed to be Mikey’s boss when Frank wasn’t there.

Snapping to, I said, “He’s in Mr. S’s room!” I tried to sound like I was part of the organization and not someone who snuck into the room, “I’m Mikey’s friend. Frank and Barbara are staying at our house!” I pictured Jilly kicking me out onto Park Avenue in the middle of the night, “And don’t forget your periwinkle valise, ya bum!” as all the doormen laughed. I guess Jilly called right over, because Mikey came down and said Mr. Rizzo wanted to know why some broad named “Tammy” answered the phone. I’m not sure how Mikey explained who I was or what I was doing there, but he assured me I wasn’t in any trouble.

It would make life worth living if I had been placed in that hotel room as a pawn in some nefarious scheme. Maybe Mikey had a dame stashed in Frank’s place, or he needed to leave the hotel to “take care of business.” Whatever it was, I would certainly vouch that he was in Frank’s apartment packing if anyone asked. I’ll never know, but I reveled in the unlikely possibility of being a minor character in the plot: “Ya need someone loyal. How about that kid you’re drivin’ around with, you know, the one who found them tomatoes? He’s not too sharp, anyways. Put him in the room and let him answer the phone. If anyone starts nosing around, just tell ’em his mother needed you to keep an eye on him for the night. It’s an airtight alibi.”

I slept a few hours before check-out and the looming train ride back to the suburbs. Mikey called my room to tell me the bellhop was bringing me down to the big clock in the lobby. I thought Mikey and I were going to have breakfast at Oscar’s, but he was flying to Los Angeles. He offered me a ride to Grand Central just eight blocks away, but I wanted to explore the parts of the hotel I hadn’t seen. I passed by lounges, restaurants, and shops, and perused old black and white photographs of famous residents and extravagant galas.

I probably walked by Cole Porter’s piano without realizing it. He’d bequeathed it to the Waldorf, and it had been in the lobby since 1964. Then I marveled at the hotel’s daytime exterior, an entire city block from 49th to 50th Streets between Park and Lexington Avenues. The lettering of “The Waldorf Astoria” shimmered in gold. I wished I could have stayed there forever as Frank’s guest instead of returning to my boring life in Mount Kisco.

I didn’t get to revisit the Waldorf until our honeymoon. My wife and I happened to get a suite in the Waldorf Towers, just a few floors below Frank and Barbara’s old apartment. As a paying guest, I could soak in the Art Deco nostalgia of the lobby without the fear of not being let back upstairs. Unlike my last visit, I had a room key to prove that I belonged there, at least for a little while. We had drinks at Peacock Alley and imagined celebrities and socialites crowding the lobby and ballrooms. Best of all, Cole Porter’s piano was still in the grand lobby and being played regularly by Ms. Daryl Sherman from 1994 to 2008. This was the very tail end of an era when elegant hotels employed musicians to create a sophisticated ambience. I enjoyed the luxury and opulence, but it never fails to remind of the anonymous people laboring away behind the scenes like my parents who spent ten years serving, cooking, and cleaning for rich people. But even with all the complications, embarrassment, and loneliness of feeling like a second-class citizen in other people’s mansions, I am now wealthy with memories and experiences from living on all those magnificent properties.

I never heard from Mikey again. Except for Christina and my mother, most of the participants in this story have died, and the Greens’ estate was sold long ago. Yet anytime I think of the Waldorf Astoria, mash up a can of San Marzanos, or buy fresh basil at the farmers market, I am reminded of that kid forty years ago, begrudgingly spending a few hours with Frank Sinatra. I can see us standing in the garden among the herbs as he says, “Ah, there it is… basilico. You can always smell it.”

Header image: Capitol Records promo photo, circa 1955.

Previous installments appeared in Issue 158 and Issue 159.

Many years back, along with about a dozen fellow audio club members, I attended a product demonstration at a well-known high-end audio writer’s home that made me question my sanity.

Our host put on a selection of music most of us were familiar with – which sounded good – as you would expect from a six-figure system set up by professionals. At the end of the track, he asked attendees in the back row to get up for a second so that he could move one side of the couch away from the wall. He then placed the product – a small, heavy, well-made machined brass disk-shaped quantum harmonizer thingy – right there on the carpeted floor behind the fluffy couch.

After he returned the large piece of furniture to its place, he went back to his chair and replayed the track. Ever the stickler for protocol in A/B comparisons, I was watching to ensure that the volume control was not inadvertently changed – which is crucial, since systems usually sound better even with small increases in sound pressure, potentially giving the component or tweak credit it may not have deserved.

I still don’t understand it – but there it was. Within a few seconds of listening to the same selection, at the same volume, from the same seat, the soundstage blew open with extended width and depth and the music felt much more natural and alive than mere minutes before. We all heard the difference. Then, he reversed things by playing the track again after the thingy was taken out of the room. Immediately, the magical soundstage collapsed. We were dumbfounded. I think I remember shouting, “How is that even possible?!” in my usual calm and reserved manner.

Questions erupted in my disoriented mind. How on Earth could a small piece of machined metal behind a sound-absorbing couch in the back of the room affect my listening experience in the front row so dramatically? Was this an illusion set up by our collective brains like some mass hypnosis? If someone would have told me that this would happen, or if I read it in a review, I don’t think I would have believed it.

I recognize that this was a life-altering moment in my audiophile journey. It’s not that I now believe everything I read or hear about; I just garnered a newfound respect for what I could not explain. You could say I began making room in my crowded mind for the possibility of magic.

Transformative: the High-End Electronics Novum PMR Initium Mk II Passive Multi-Vocal Resonator.

Over these last 40 years, I’ve had many discussions with fellow audiophiles about innovative new gear, system tweaks, and what some would call “snake oil.” In these conversations, whether in-person or on online forums, my questions and comments at times elicited very strong opinions or conjectures that denigrated a product or the design principles behind it, solely because its efficacy seemed impossible – judgements people had formed without having had the experience themselves.

Enthusiasts usually have an opinion on the validity or worth of any given product or tweak. Audiophiles, in general, when presented with an innovative new idea, product or unfamiliar technology, will keep an open mind – but I’ve also met those (especially on high-end audio forums) who, when an innovation does not fit into conventional and accepted parameters, have no compunction about ridiculing and disavowing not just the product, but the very character of those bringing it to market.

I have no problem with rowdy discourse, but what makes me absolutely crazy is that these detractors probably just read about the product somewhere and formed an opinion which was likely a regurgitation of someone else’s thoughts and experience –  someone who may have done the same thing themselves.

Regardless of the nature of the technology or the cost of the product being discussed, and despite how much resistance (and sometimes righteous anger) a new and unfamiliar product can stir up in some people (in which case I suggest therapy) …the only opinion about a product that is truly useful and valid is one that comes from someone who has auditioned it with their own ears –with bonus points awarded to those who have actually heard the product in question in their own system.

Our level of satisfaction is predicated by how our system’s components hang together to re-create music…basically, synergy, or even more appropriately, harmony. This is why I believe we can create extraordinary music reproduction at a wide range of system price points, from a few thousand dollars to “should I buy this audio product or another Formula 1 race car?”

A selection of room-tuning products from High-End Electronics.

So, getting to the point: Why it’s important to join or start a local audiophile club. First and foremost, if you love music and exceptional high-end gear, you would probably explode if you tried to hold it all in without sharing your excitement with other humans. Being active in ongoing discussions as part of a local audiophile community is an opportunity to expand your knowledge and participate in cutting-edge conversations that explore new ideas, new terrain…to boldly go where no man has gone before (sorry, Gene) and to ask questions of industry pundits as they present the fruits of their labors. Most importantly, this involvement in community encourages us to test what we’ve learned in our own systems and hear what’s true for us. No audio product is “the best”…it can only be the best for you (for now), because all of our ears are wired differently.

As a neutral source of audiophile education, the leadership team of a club should take care to not promote one product or technology over another – they should leave that judgment up to you and your ears.

At our club, the San Francisco Audiophile Society, most, if not all of our events highlight designers, manufacturers and providers of high-end audio equipment or services. There are no sales pitches; we ask our guest speakers to focus on educating our members on the technology and design criteria they’ve used to create their product or service. This way, any resulting product sales become a natural extension of good, clear teaching and an informed customer.

We’ve been very fortunate to learn from industry luminaries like the late Albert Von Schweikert, Michael Fremer, Dr. Rob Robinson, the late Roger Modjeski, Andrew Jones, Rick Schultz, Alon Wolf, Allen Perkins, Richard Schram, Frank Doris, Paul McGowan, Nelson Pass, Galen Gareis, John Curl, Peter Ledermann, David Solomon, George and Carolyn Counnas, EveAnna Manley, Bill Dudleston, and Steve Guttenberg…to name, well, a bunch.

Personally, like most life-long audiophiles, I can’t resist this stuff. Whether it’s cabinet design, room correction, ripping vinyl, choosing tubes, or something completely different that I don’t quite understand…I want to know! I love learning about audio and when I’m lucky enough to be in the conversation when a cool new technology makes its appearance, it flat-out thrills me. I never feel the need to believe or “buy in” to the concept being presented – I just show up with an open mind and open ears, ask questions, enjoy the process, and decide for myself.

In conjunction with audio clubs, well-educated high-end audio dealers are a tremendous asset in our industry, allowing us to hear a product in their system and, if they get a good feeling about our seriousness as a potential client, let us audition it in our homes. If any of this strikes a chord, it’ll be worth it to find your local community of fellow audiophiles who would be happy to explore the wonders of our obsession with you.

I believe that this is one of the significant ways in which technology progresses – by expanding the box that everyone is trying to think their way out of, and by bringing forward bold new ideas that welcome the unconventional. This is especially critical for small audio companies, as getting traction and support from happy customers and racking up a few good reviews can pave the way to success…at which point the detractors will say, “oh, sure, it was obvious all along!” Yeah, of course it was.

So, since the pandemic is receding and you’re already a part of the Copper worldwide community: go, find your local people, live long and prosper…and upgrade when needed.

Note: The beginning of this article references a product which I auditioned many years ago. As hard as I’ve tried, the name of the company that manufactured the expensive brass tweaks eludes me, but it could be the one pictured, or something similar.

******

Copper Community Engagement:

Have you joined or started an audio club? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences!

Have you auditioned a crazy audio tweak that shouldn’t have worked, but rocked your world anyway? Tell us about it by leaving a comment below.

Thanks for reading!

Alón Sagee is Chairman and Chief Troublemaker of the San Francisco Audiophile Society. Alón’s writings for Copper can be found in the following issues:

• The Audiophile’s Brain
• The Audiophile’s Cat
• Chinese Food for Thought
• The Not-So-Great Wall
• Everest, Part 1
• Everest, Part 2
• Everest, Part 3
• Mongolia, Part 1
• Mongolia, Part 2
• Two Hands Clapping
• Sublime Moments

Also, please note:

• Alón’s biography for the Francisco Audiophile Society

Header image: Michael Fremer of Stereophile and Analog Planet speaking to the San Francisco Audiophile Society.

In ancient Greek mythology, Semele is a mortal woman favored by the god Zeus. She becomes pregnant with his child. When Zeus’ wife, Hera, finds out, she disguises herself as an old hag and convinces Semele to demand an amazing gift from her lover. Semele insists that Zeus show himself to her in all his immortal glory, an experience that Zeus knows no mortal can withstand. But he’s bound by his promise, and the overwhelmed Semele dies. From her body Zeus rescues the unborn demi-god Dionysus.

There was something about this story that intrigued composers and librettists during the Baroque period. Most famously, George Frideric Handel set it as a sort of hybrid of opera and oratorio. The work, using a pre-existing libretto by William Congreve, was premiered in 1744.

But Handel was not alone in his attraction to this fantasy filled with passion, violence, and deceit. Nor was he the first to adapt it. In around 1707, John Eccles set that same Congreve libretto. Then the Parisian composer Marin Marais (1656 – 1728) wrote an opera based on the Semele story in 1709, and ten years later another Frenchman named André Destouches (1672 – 1749) used it as material for a chamber cantata. All four are represented on some (relatively) recent recordings.

It’s always interesting to compare how different creative teams handle the same source material. As its title suggest, Sémélé: Haendel, Marais & Destouches on Mirare Records does just that. This is a project by the French ensemble Les Ombres, for which Margaux Blanchard and Sylvain Sartre shared the role of artistic director.

Les Ombres’s recording is based on a concert program they developed in 2013. The 30 tracks include the overture and some arias from each version, plus some other Handel works as fillers, including his complete Concerto Grosso No. 4. It’s hard to know why they felt they needed this extraneous Handel rather than including more excerpts from the three Semele operas; perhaps it made more sense in the live show.

Marais’s version of Semele uses a libretto by French novelist Antoine Houdar de la Motte. It is labeled as a Tragédie en musique, the kind of melodramatic sung tragedy with dancing that was an obsession for King Louis XIV, who was still France’s monarch at the time. A hallmark of any French lyric tragedy was its stately ouverture. Les Ombres directors Blanchard and Sartre avoid too much emphasis on “over-dotting” – lengthening the first part of every beat, considered a standard conceit of the early Baroque performance practice – instead making the dotted rhythms more relaxed. As a result, they capture the fluidity of Marais’s masterful ensemble writing.

As far as I could find, the Destouches Semele has never been recorded as a complete opera. Only a few movements of it are included here. One interesting thing about Destouches’s version is that he chose not to have Semele die in screaming terror when Zeus reveals his godly grandeur, but instead allows her to be overcome in a fit of ecstasy. The mellifluous contralto voice of Mélodie Ruvio is an ideal match for the courageous Semele. Here she sings “Est-il un destin plus heureux” (Is there a happier fate):

A similar comparative project was recently undertaken on the Harmonia Mundi label, but with less specific focus on Semele. On its album Portraits de la Folie, Ensemble Amarillis includes two arias from the Destouches version and one from the Marais, along with a wide range of other 17th-century vocal music expressing the madness of love. The soloist is mezzo-soprano Stéphanie D’Oustrac, whose nimble yet powerful voice has utterly mastered early-Baroque ornaments for emotional effect. The performance is directed by Héloïse Gaillard. There are no free-streaming excerpts available, but you can hear the whole album on Qobuz. (Recommended track: Destouches’s aria “Ne cesse pointe le m’enflamme”):

You have to go back to 2007 for a complete recording of the Marais Semele, when Le Concert Spirituel, led by Hervé Niquet, released it on Glossa Music. Not so incidentally, the same group also made a recording of Destouches’s forgotten opera Callirhoé.

Marais had a gift for creating orchestral richness. He was himself one of the greatest viola da gamba players of his time, so among his compositional secret weapons was the way he used the middle and lower instrumental voices to develop his sound. (I’ll be writing more about this exceptional composer soon, so keep an eye on this column.) Niquet’s recording wonderfully captures that luxurious texture.

Yet Marais wrote equally well for brass and winds, and the interplay between those sections and the strings is on display in the aria “Gouton icy les plus doux charmes” (Taste here the sweetest charms) sung by Jaël Azzaretti as the High Priestess of Dionysus. You will find it at the 13:10 mark on this complete recording:

About two years older than Marais’s Semele is the one by British composer John Eccles. It can now be heard in its entirety thanks to the Academy of Ancient Music, conducted by Julian Perkins, on the AAM’s own label. To mark the first recording of the work, this two-CD set comes with a booklet packed with interesting essays, including one about how English opera might have grown up post-Purcell if Handel hadn’t brought all his Italian ideas into the mix when he relocated to London.

Eccles worked with librettist William Congreve to adapt the Semele story as it appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The language is poetic yet not highly ornamented. The same might be said for the music. One thing to note is the simplicity of form, a spare ABA form without the length and complexity that would later be found in Handel’s “dal segno” arias. The numbers themselves are therefore very short. Here is tenor Williams Wallace, singing as Athamas, a prince of Boeotia.

The music has clarity and charm, and comparisons to Henry Purcell are impossible to avoid. The performance by the Academy of Ancient Music sculpts every phrase with an exquisite gallantry. Listen to the delicate introduction and ritornello of “Turn, Hopeless Lover, Turn Thy Eyes,” an aria for Semele’s sister Ino, sung by Aoife Miskelly.

Eccles’ Semele is a gem, and fans of the early Baroque are lucky to have this beautiful recording of it. But we must not ignore the elephant in the room. Handel did, after all, move to London, and his effect on opera and oratorio was enormous.

For his Semele, Handel used the same Congreve libretto written for Eccles. The fact that it’s in English and features complex choral writing are both traits typical of Handel’s oratorios. But Semele also deals with a decidedly non-Christian topic and tells a story through sung dialogue rather than narration and commentary, making it like an opera. The composer simply labeled it as a “musical drama.”

Because it’s Handel, there are numerous recordings out there. The newest is from 2022, a release on Ricercar by the Choeur de Chambre de Namur and the Millennium Orchestra, with Leonardo García-Alarcón conducting. Bass-baritone Andreas Wolf sings Cadmus, King of Thebes, and soprano Ana Maria Labin is the title character. Although Labin’s voice gets a bit overcome with vibrato on longer notes, she is fearless on the brutal, high-speed melismas Handel saddles her character with, for example in “No, I’ll Take Less.” And the orchestra genuinely sparkles.

For all his contributions to the development of music at the end of the Baroque, Handel’s writing for chorus is arguably his greatest accomplishment. It’s interesting to hear him use his estimable polyphonic skills on a text that would never show up in one of the Old Testament stories he relied on for his oratorios. In “Endless Pleasure, Endless Love,” the Namur choir lacks the passion required for the words, but Handel’s writing is exemplary.

Previous installments covered the earlier history of Neumann and Scully lathes.

A Neumann SX-74 cutter head, with helium tub in the front. Courtesy of Greg Reierson, Rare Form Mastering, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Neumann SX-74 cutter head, introduced to accompany the company’s VMS-70 record cutting lathe, shared its external parts with the very similar Neumann SX-68. Both of these cutter heads were based on the long-established principle of motional feedback employed instead of mechanical damping, to create a transducer with a linear response across the audible spectrum. The earlier Teldec/Neumann ZS 90/45, SX-45, SX-15 cutter heads had also used motional feedback (but in a different configuration), as did their monophonic ES-59, and many competing products. The Westrex, HAECO, Ortofon and Fairchild stereophonic cutter heads, predating the SX-74, also all relied on motional feedback. So did a few monophonic cutter heads, apart from the aforementioned ES-59. The Westrex 2B used motional feedback, as well as some early Ortofon monophonic heads, but the originators of the idea were Leonard Vieth and Charles F. Wiebusch, who patented the concept for a vertical recording head in the 1930s. It was very similar in layout to one half of a Neumann SX-74 (or a Westrex 3D for that matter).

A drawing of the internal construction of Vieth and Wiebusch, from their patent, Vieth et. al Vibratory System, June 6, 1939.

For pretty much the entire stereophonic era, vinyl records were cut using motional feedback cutter heads. While the concept has been encountered in loudspeaker design, its implementation in cutter heads warrants some explanation. We can begin by looking at a plain-vanilla woofer design. We have a magnet system where the magnetic field is concentrated in a gap, and in this gap is placed the voice coil, consisting of wire wound around a former. At the end of this former, the speaker cone is attached. At the narrow end of that cone (in the middle of the driver) is what is called a spider, a flexible membrane that allows linear motion in and out, but limits lateral or rotary motion.

At the wide end of the cone is the surround, which again is designed to permit linear motion in and out, but to limit lateral or rotary motion.

The spider and surround form the suspension system of the loudspeaker driver, guiding it along the range of its excursion. The suspension system is what keeps the coil centered in the gap of the magnetic circuit and provides the restoring (mechanical) force for the coil to return to its rest position after traveling in or out. In a typical loudspeaker driver, the suspension components are made of rubber, fabric, or other resilient materials, that also provide damping.

Loudspeaker drivers, cutter heads, microphones and other similar transducers are resonant systems (as are many musical instruments). Their resonant frequency depends on the moving mass and the stiffness of the system. A resonant system will grossly accentuate the resonant frequency and will therefore not have a linear frequency response. Unless, that is, some means of damping is provided, to reduce the amplitude of the resonance and flatten the response of the system. In loudspeaker drivers, this damping is provided primarily by the suspension components.

Early monophonic cutter heads employed similar concepts, all of which broadly fall under the category of mechanical damping.

A selection of Presto monophonic cutter heads, employing mechanical damping, in the author’s lab, where repairs and modifications of such equipment frequently takes place. Courtesy of Agnew Analog Reference Instruments.

Cutter heads do not have spiders and surrounds, and they do not have cones either, as they don’t need to move air; they need to move a microscopic cutting stylus. Typically, early cutter heads would rely on pieces of rubber attached to the moving armature to provide damping. If the damping material deteriorated with age or became damaged, the system’s response would no longer be flat.

Motional feedback cutter heads, on the other hand, don’t require any damping materials. They did away with mechanical damping entirely and replaced it with electrical damping. Here, the coil suspension is essentially a spring, with no damping properties other than some unintentional friction. The open-loop response of the system (with the motional feedback disconnected) is very far from flat, with an extremely pronounced resonant frequency. A typical example of such a system consists of two coils: a drive coil that sets the system in motion, driven by a cutting amplifier, and a feedback coil, which produces a signal proportional to the velocity of the moving system. At the system’s resonant frequency, the velocity of the drive coil is much greater than at other frequencies, for the same amount of power  to the drive coil. Conversely, the output of the feedback coil is also much greater. The feedback coil signal is inverted to be of opposite polarity to the signal going to the cutter head, and sent back to the cutting amplifier as negative feedback.

The Westrex 2B cutter head, one of the biggest, heaviest and best-sounding monophonic motional feedback cutter heads out there. Courtesy of Agnew Analog Reference Instruments.

The negative feedback signal essentially regulates the output of the cutting amplifier, reducing its output at resonance and increasing it at other frequencies. The closed-loop response of the system (with motional feedback applied) is therefore flat. However, this flattening is only effective within the range of accurate operation of the feedback coil. Outside this range, the response falls off rapidly. There are several factors conspiring to reduce the accuracy of such a system, so it is not a trivial task to ensure stable operation. Instability can be quite dramatic. In the case of the SX-74, it is normally used with the Neuman SAL-74 cutting amplifier, which is capable of putting out 1200 watts of peak momentary power, which would melt the coils in milliseconds at that power dissipation! Instability can be caused by phase shift between the signal to the drive coil and the signal generated by the feedback coil, as a result of a combination of electromechanical system parameters. If any instability occurs, it can cause the system to oscillate at full power, at a very high frequency, instantly destroying the cutter head and sometimes also the amplifier electronics! By the time the smoke becomes visible there is not much left of the coils, and nothing you can do about it other than sending the head off for repair. This type of repair on a Neumann SX-74 can easily cost upwards of $5,000, along with significant downtime.

A block diagram of a motional feedback cutter head system, from “An Investigation of Motional Feedback Disk Recording System Design” by author J. I. Agnew, in the November 2018 issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society.

The feedback loop is comprised of not only the cutter head, but also the cutting amplifier electronics, which consist of the drive amplifier, feedback amplifier, current and temperature measuring instrumentation, cutter head protection devices, and even the wiring. Excessive wiring capacitance, for instance, can also cause instability. As such, the electronics are very much part of the entire cutter head system, as evidenced by the fact that even as far back as the 1930s, the patents of Vieth and Wiebusch covered both the cutter head and the associated electronics all working together.

In the next episode, we will navigate our time capsule deeper into the coiled paths of cutter head territory!

Previous installments appeared in Issues 159, 158, 157, 156, 155, 154, 153, 152, and 151.

Header image: Neumann SX-74 cutter head on a Neumann VMS-70 lathe. Courtesy of Greg Reierson, Rare Form Mastering.

For most country musicians, long stints touring first with Lester Flatt and then Johnny Cash would add up to a fulfilling career. But guitarist, mandolinist, and singer Marty Stuart was determined to break out on his own. And so he has, finding great success over the past 40 years.

Stuart is a Mississippi native. From the moment he was born in 1958, he seemed fated for country greatness: his mom named him after Marty Robbins. Stuart was only 13 when Roland White, who played mandolin in Lester Flatt’s band, recruited him to join the group. It was a long association, lasting until Flatt retired in 1978. Then Stuart played with Johnny Cash, which he did on and off for years as he got his solo career rolling.

The roster of Stuart’s solo albums numbers nearly two dozen, not including the many times he’s been a special guest on other artists’ projects. No matter how many records he makes or how many years he plays, he has kept Johnny Cash close to his heart. In fact, Cash sang on Stuart’s second solo effort, Busy Bee Café (1982). “One More Ride” was written by Bob Nolan. Stuart and Cash’s vocal harmony is as tight as the interplay of their guitars.

A few years later, in 1989, Stuart made Hillbilly Rock. Cash was present on this one, too, as the composer of the album’s biggest hit, “Cry, Cry, Cry.” There are plenty of members of Nashville royalty filling the session chairs: country hit-writers Kostas and Paul Kennerley sing background vocals, and on piano is Glen Hardin, who has worked with Emmylou Harris, John Denver, and even Elvis Presley.

Besides writing some of his own material, Stuart also borrows from many contemporaries. An example, from Hillbilly Rock, is Joe Ely’s “Me and Billy the Kid.” As the album title suggests, there’s a heavy rock influence here, especially in the drums and bass. But Stuart’s mandolin rises like a tiny giant, piercing through the blanket of heavier sounds.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were Stuart’s heyday in terms of record sales. Tempted (1991) produced four Top 20 singles, with the title song, written by Stuart and Kennerley, reaching No. 5. The Eddie Miller track “Burn Me Down” was another big hit.

Tempted opens with a rousing rendition of the Bill Monroe and Hank Williams classic, “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome.” But maybe the most surprising choice on the set list is Neil Young’s “Get Back to the Country.” Stuart’s version is significantly slicker than Young’s (and with significantly less jaw harp!), but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in great energy. Mark O’Connor’s fiddling is like a train engine, barreling along the Tennessee countryside.

[Editor’s Note: Marty Stuart owns one of the most famous guitars in country-music history: the 1954 Telecaster formerly owned by Clarence White of the Byrds and the Kentucky Colonels. Click on this link for more information.]

The music business is known for making some dubious decisions over fears for its bottom line. Take Let There Be Country, an album that Stuart recorded in 1988. At the time, Columbia Records shelved it because Stuart didn’t have much of a track record, and the label predicted it wouldn’t sell. That was right before Stuart hit it really big, of course. Four years later, Columbia realized they should reach into their vaults.

This album is a fine example of neotraditional country. By the time it saw the light of day, that style was well established in Nashville, but when it was recorded, it was a newish trend to go back to the bluegrass licks, mountain vocal harmonies, and blues and gospel chords from which the country genre had originally formed. A fine example is Stuart’s interpretation of Bill Monroe’s “Get Down on Your Knees and Pray.” There’s even a clanky piano that sounds like it could be in a bar room in the old west.

By 1996, when Stuart released Honky Tonkin’s What I Do Best, he was well established with the MCA Nashville label. His records still reached the Top 40, but his Top 10 days were in a lull. That doesn’t mean his output had dropped in quality. As Wendy Newcomer put it in her 1996 review for Cash Box, “With each new album, Marty Stuart comes closer and closer to filling the shoes of the legends with which he once toured.” Fair enough.

A lot of his success comes from the wonderful arrangements he uses and the many great artists he consistently surrounds himself with. These include Nashville session stalwarts like drummer Steve Turner, bass guitarist Michael Rhodes, and fiddler Stuart Duncan. The song “Country Girls,” with its driving guitar rhythm, was written by Stuart and frequent songwriting partner Paul Kennerley.

The history of country music is tangled up in the history of gospel, and it’s part of the neotraditional philosophy to acknowledge that relationship. Stuart did just that in 2005 with the album Soul’s Chapel. It was his second with his new band, the Fabulous Superlatives, on his new label, Superlatone.

Like every major genre category, “gospel” can be many different things. Stuart acknowledges that, tapping into the diverse cultures and time periods that have formed this distinctively American music of non-liturgical worship. Soul’s Chapel includes some originals and some classics, like Roebuck Staples’ “Somebody Saved Me.” All the members of the Fabulous Superlatives sing, and they craft some gripping harmony here, accompanied by a lone, lonesome guitar.

As with his gospel album, Stuart often uses neotraditionalism as a starting point for bringing country history back to life. He did this in an unusual way for the 2010 album Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions. The title refers to RCA Studio B in Nashville, a legendary recording studio that had been out of service for a long time, coopted by the Country Music Hall of Fame as an archive and exhibit space. Thinking that was a waste of top-notch acoustic design, Stuart asked if he could make a record there.

Besides its recording venue, Ghost Train ended up being historically important for another reason. For the album, Stuart visited an ailing Johnny Cash, and the two of them co-wrote a song called “Hangman.” It turned out to be the last song Cash ever wrote; he died a few days later. The spirit of Stuart’s old friend is present in this wistful performance.

Marty Stuart is far from finished making his mark in country music. He also keeps finding great people to work with. In 2017 he made Way Out West, produced by Mike Campbell, best known as the guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The idea was to give the songs a California edge.

The album, which was a big hit, is different from many of his previous records for its small personnel list. It’s just the Fabulous Superlatives: joining Stuart are Chris Scruggs on bass guitar, Harry Stinson on drums, and Kenny Vaughan on electric guitar. As you can hear on “Air Mail Special,” those four men don’t need any help to land solidly in a bluegrass groove.

As if he needed the validation after decades of well-appreciated work in the studio and on stage, Marty Stuart was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2021. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving musician.

Header image: Marty Stuart with the legendary 1954 Telecaster formerly owned by Clarence White. Courtesy of Alysse Gafkjen.

Following on from last month’s litany of offenses attributed to the manufacturers of pre-recorded tapes, please be aware that not all the misdeeds were committed by the record labels. Once you start buying vintage tapes online in any quantity, you will soon find yourself cursing the original owners – not, I hasten to add, the vendors, who (if eBay is anything to go by) have no idea what open-reel tapes are or were.

Just as most of the hi-fi sold on eBay says “For Parts Only” to cover any eventuality and to protect the seller, so often does the word “untested” appear that I sometimes wonder if eBay has turned into a gambling site: caveat emptor. The vendors cannot test the tapes as they admit to not having tape decks, or they just don’t know what these weird-looking spools are.

Yes, buying used tapes is risky, but no more so than acquiring used LPs. Let me illustrate this, before going into full-strength rant mode. I have now curated around 1,300 tapes out of all the tapes acquired during the past four years, which means cleaning them up, re-spooling, adding leader and tail, and ultimately listening to and rating them. As I am no longer buying tapes, I should be able to finish cleaning and testing the rest of my haul over the coming year.

My system is simple: I place a green sticker on the box for VG+ to Near-Mint copies (and on the few tapes I’ve been fortunate to find in an unplayed, still-sealed state). A yellow sticker goes on each tape which is playable but with minor flaws, and I use a red sticker for damaged tapes which are just about playable. The red-marked tapes are kept until better copies turn up, which has happened more than a few times.

Here’s an illustration partly to put this in context, but also to prove that – for the most part and in direct contradiction to what you’ll read shortly – the tapes’ original owners took better care than most LP users do. How so? Let’s go with some numbers, though this is but a sampling of one person’s library, and some of you might not consider 1,300 tapes a reasonable example. But bear with me.

Out of these 1,300 fully-tested tapes, which I have listened to in real time, only 23 have been thrown out completely. By that I mean they were totally unsalvageable, e.g., partially erased, chewed-up, spliced multiple times, wrong tape on the spool, stretched, etc. I can be so precise about the number I’ve had to discard because I kept the empty boxes, should a better copy but with a tatty box turn up. Fewer than 80 tapes have red dots, and maybe another hundred earned yellow dots. In other words, over 1,000 tapes out of 1300 are excellent, not merely acceptable, by any measure.

Now, let’s compare that to LPs. If you bought 2,500 LPs from multiple, random eBay vendors, all of them citing “Not Tested” to cover their butts, what percentage would be utterly scratch-, skip-, fingerprint- or dirt-free? I doubt 90 percent would be VG+. I say this to put the remainder of this column into perspective, because what follows is a long, whining kvetch despite my good fortune. And I have, overall, been lucky.

Everything I have experienced with used pre-recorded open-reel tapes defies all the naysayers who refuse to believe that magnetic tapes can survive, especially when poorly stored and/or unplayed, for 40 to 60 years. I can only recall audible print-through on two tapes, and not enough to be downgraded to a yellow sticker. None have visibly shed their oxides. I remain both delighted and baffled by the survival rate.

Thus, in my experience of used tapes vs used LPs, the anti-tape brigade needs a serious re-think. As I write this, I’m listening to a well-preserved copy of von Karajan conducting Schubert No. 7 on Deutsche Grammophon from 1969, one of my “younger” tapes, and it is simply above reproach. It is indicative of the majority of my acquisitions from over 100 different vendors. Their dads and grandfathers must have been fastidious audiophiles.

Now, time for me to go full-on OCD. Two issues ago (Issue 158), I regaled you with the incident in February when a staffer at a local record shop told me how the newbie LP buyers don’t know how to handle vinyl, and how they get customers coming back with utterly savaged albums, wondering why they won’t play. I suspect or imagine that 60 years ago, some buyers of pre-recorded tapes might have been similarly lacking in the know-how required for handling tapes properly.

Challenging that supposed presence of ignorance vis-à-vis tapes are two facts. The first is that tape decks were expensive, thus ruling out a younger demographic, while the second is even more suggestive of careful owners: pre-recorded tapes cost typically double that of LPs. So who in his or her right mind would treat them with such abandon and neglect, if not contempt?

Here, then, are the myriad malfeasances one must anticipate when buying pre-recorded tapes:

1) The Tape Loop of Death

Some spool types have a pin in the center of the aperture where you thread the tape for spooling. If the owner used a closed loop, the tape will not come loose at the end of play. Thus, if you happen to leave it unattended, when the side ends, the tape will tug on the mechanism, and/or stretch itself to unplayability.

Why anyone would make a permanent fixing loop escapes me. I realize that there are numerous methods to activate auto-reverse machines – a recorded tone, metallic sensor tape, etc. – so I can only imagine that some auto-reverse decks must have required a tug at the end of the side, which this loop would accomplish. I was caught out by this twice, ruining two tapes. I don’t know if it inflicted any damage on the machine. That said, it’s one of my pet (tape) hates.

An example of the Tape Loop of Death.

2) Splicing Two Tapes Onto One Spool

Aside from major classical works, hardly any pre-recorded tapes fill a 7-inch spool. For some owners, however, space-saving took precedent over preserving each album on its own spool, thus throwing cataloguing out the window. Usually, they would splice two tapes from the same artist onto one spool, but often a different performer. I must have had 20 examples of this, which – because I am so anally-retentive – forced me to separate them and to find a spare, empty spool and box to house the second tape. Bye-bye original box and reel, but hello bonus albums if, say, I bought a box of ten tapes and it turned out each contained an extra, unexpected tape. This one’s more annoying than aggravating.

3) A and B Sides Flipped

Is it really that difficult to turn over the spool so the label-side (A-side) contains the start? I stopped counting the tapes that arrived like this. As it’s easily corrected by flipping the spool over when the first side is played through, this is merely an inconvenience, if still an indicator of a lack of care for an expensive item.

4) Tape Twisted So the Play Surface Is On the Outside

This has happened more times that you might think, probably because the user was sloppy and put a twist in the tape when spooling it up if rewinding. It happens. This is easily remedied by putting a twist back in when curating it to get it right-side-out. (Note: I have been informed that there were machines made in Germany that had the recorded surface of the tape on the outside, but I have no further information.)

5) Chewed So Much of Beginning of the Tape As To Lose Recorded Material

This is a direct result of the record labels not fitting leader tape and tail. Careless users would thread the tape poorly, chewing up or tangling so much of the tape that it would eventually break off, taking with it the opening of Side A and the end of the last track on Side B. I must have had 10 or 12 tapes so butchered.

6) Turning a 1/2-Track Tape Into 1/4-Track

Yes, you’ve read that correctly, and so far I have only found one tape where this has happened. I put the tape on as the box instructed – 1/2-track – but it was clearly 1/4-track. Two things caused me to make this strange discovery. The first was that the track listing was for the 1/2-track version. The second was when I flipped it over to play the B-Side, it was a completely different performer. What I deduced is that some cheap b*stard, to save tape, put it onto 1/4-track machine and recorded the other material, reducing the original recording’s track width. Sure, it’s clever lateral thinking, but about as tight-fisted as ordering clothes online, wearing them for the weekend, and sending them back for a refund.

7) Accidental and/or Deliberate Dropouts

A few of my tapes have short portions that are completely blank or silent (and only on one side, so I know the tape is physically intact), which suggests that the user accidentally hit Record. I find this hard to understand, as every tape deck I have owned requires quite deliberate activating of a record mode, usually pressing Record and Play simultaneously, or some other safety feature. As this cost me a playable copy of one of the rarest Beatles tapes, I curse the inconsiderate a*shole who was too cheap to buy a blank tape to record garbled children’s noises.

8) Mold, Tears, Mouse Droppings

A regular pre-recorded tape, and by that I mean a single album with a playing time of 35 minutes or so, cost anywhere between $8 and $13 in 1960, or $80-$125 in today’s money. What, then, would a premium item consisting of two tapes filled to the edges, with a total playing time of 165 minutes, have cost? And yet a deluxe set of Handel’s 12 Concerti Grossi Op. 6 was treated with the same disdain as a discarded Big Mac container: torn lid, and split sides, with one of the tapes stretched and impossible to spool properly.

This is no way to treat Handel.

There’s worse. I have had moldy, mildewed boxes, some with mouse turds inside, chewed corners, water stains from obvious flooding, bits of food, scribbles from a child let loose with a crayon, and other signs of neglect such that a friend warned me to wear gloves when handling them and not to breathe in too deeply. It comes with the territory, which is why I am preparing you if you are about to embark on the pursuit of used tapes.

But as I said earlier, the abused tapes are outnumbered by good, clean examples, and by more than 10 to one. As for the vendors – probably the children or grandchildren of the original owners, who found the tapes in an attic or cellar – they cannot be blamed because they simply don’t know any better. Or (he said, in full-on schadenfreude mode) what they’re missing.

Header image: scandalous treatment of open-reel tapes. All photos courtesy of Ken Kessler.

Every so often I find it’s generally good practice to recalibrate my room to make sure that my system is performing well. This is not just so that I can check to ensure well-balanced output from each of the speakers, but also because of wanting to check in relation to my own hearing.

It can be easy to think that once you have set up your system then you’re golden, and no more adjustments are required. If you’re like me, though, no doubt you continue to hunt the ever-desirable sonic improvements that may be had.

Also, it’s true that as we age, our hearing gradually degenerates to some extent, but if we wish, we can do something to compensate for it with the settings on our A/V receiver (or preamp/processor).

We know that when setting up loudspeakers for best in-room response, the measurements taken by calibration microphones can yield quite significant frequency response differences when taken just fractions of an inch or a few centimeters apart from each other. So, how much importance would you place on checking your system if you thought one of your speakers had been accidentally moved, or perhaps you’d mis-adjusted their toe-in, or you suspect your listening position might be more off-axis than it should be. (Has my center imaging been compromised?)

What prompted this further tweakery on my part was finding out about the useful software developed by Audio Advice, an audio/video retailer and systems integrator. ​​Headed by CEO Scott Newnam, they have showrooms in Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, and have created a free-to-use online interactive utility that I think you will enjoy playing with, even if you don’t make use of its powerful visualization benefits – of which there are many. It’s called the Audio Advice Home Theater Designer.

I have always had great respect for an architect’s ability to pre-visualize the building they perceive in their mind’s eye. To be able to take a design concept they have in their head and then create what they have envisioned, as a practical living space you can inhabit, walk around in and interact with, truly is an art form. In particular, understanding how the light will fall and where it will reflect, to enhance the living experience, is an incredible art form in my humble opinion.

Given that I am not an architect, as well as perhaps the majority of our readers, the Audio Advice Home Theater Designer may provide you with just what you are after, particularly if you are endeavoring to have a new home theater, stereo system or entertainment room built from scratch. Even if not, I challenge you not to be tempted to try it, to see if you may not be able to take something away from its powerfully useful interface.

Initially, you create your “virtual” room by inputting its dimensions. The program is limited to rectangular/square form factors, and will only display solid walls, so you’ll have to take mental note of any doors or windows in your room. Nonetheless, the Home Theater Designer has a few brilliant tricks up its sleeve. Once you have entered your room proportions (and you’ll see the “virtual” room change size as you do this – pretty neat), you may then populate your room with the number and rows of seats you want, and even their size. You can also enter the screen size of the video display and the distance from the display to the seats, the number and type of main, surround and height speakers and subwoofers, and even the width of the aisle you may want. Other factors can also be entered.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. You can use your mouse to rotate the room in 3-D to see what the setup looks like from different angles. You can also move your seating position closer to or farther away from the front wall – and the speakers will change their positions in the room to indicate their new optimum locations! If you move the seating position too close to the front wall or rear wall, the software will warn you of inappropriate seating placement.

Home Theater Designer demo.

When you’re done, you can save all the parameters, and the software will then give you measurements of where to place all the speakers, how far the video display should be from the floor (found in your saved summary file, which you access by logging into your saved rooms), and other factors, including the amount of acoustic paneling recommended for the room. (You can even save multiple room configuration options.)

At a glance, you may spot things that you simply hadn’t noticed before. For example, in my quadraphonic system, my surround speakers were not in ideal locations and the toeing-in was off with respect to the primary seating position. I was able to quickly rectify that, and then re-run my A/V receiver’s speaker level and distance calibration to accommodate the new speaker positionings. Because I tend to sit to one side of my listening sofa, my center imaging was off. After re-measuring the distances, levels and positions of my front mains and adjusting my listening position, I could hear an appreciable improvement in imaging.

When you run the Home Theater Designer software, you may be forgiven for initially thinking it’s oversimplified and that there’s not much to gain from using it. However, there are some very useful additional features. For example, I have large bookshelves (not bookshelf speakers), to the right and left of my front main speakers, which limit how far apart the speakers may be placed apart from each other. Using the software, I can bring my main seating position in as close to the front wall as I want to, and the main speakers will then move to their proper distance from each other, in real time. However, once the speakers are too close together to produce an acceptable soundstage, the software will not permit them to get any closer, and it even gives a warning that you’ve exceeded the recommended distance. (Of course, you should also consult your loudspeaker owner’s manual for placement recommendations, and don’t discount your own ears!) You’ll quickly see some traditional triangular left speaker-listener-right speaker layouts come to life. (I also found it worth experimenting with the main seating position being about twenty percent further back from the front main speakers compared to the distance between them.)

With this software I now had the ability to see how much leeway I could take advantage of by alternatively setting up a closer-field listening experience.

Additionally, there’s a useful semi-translucent overlay that represents the sound emanating from your system as a blue “light” source. This is particularly nice as you widen your speaker placement, as you can see the expected sound field open accordingly along with your relative seating position within it. To better visualize the main speakers, you can temporarily turn off the Atmos in-ceiling speakers by setting their value to zero, and then, from a top-down view, more readily see the sound dispersion across the room for stereo imaging. You may want to use this perspective when visualizing your seating distance from the front speakers.

Home Theater Designer software showing speaker dispersion, top view.

It must be stressed that Home Theater Designer won’t magically replace a professional custom-installation specialist, who can provide valuable advice in dealing with subwoofer placement, managing room nulls, treating a room’s first reflections via diffusers and absorbers, and many other essential considerations.

I recently purchased a new eARC (Enhanced Audio Return Channel) TV, and Home Theater Designer proved useful for another reason. If you click on the software’s top-down view and move your seating either farther toward or away from your viewing screen, you will get a readout of your screen viewing angle and how it changes respectively. This allows you to make design choices to maintain more of a cinematic viewing angle, if you choose a THX 36-degree recommended viewing angle, or the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) minimum 30-degree recommendation.

Returning to the benefits of reviewing my setup for audio: Home Theater Designer made me reexamine the all-critical bass output from my subwoofer. I had already re-measured its phase and delay for what I considered to be optimal integration with my front stereo speaker pair, but after making adjustments to the rest of the system’s levels using Home Theater Designer, I increased the subwoofer’s SPL, and heard more improvement in the richness, textural depth, and overall emotional engagement in my music. (To measure SPL, I used the basic but effective Smart Tools Sound Meter smartphone app.

Although billed as a home theater design tool, Home Theater Designer’s practical visualization merits helped me recognize areas for improvement, initiate fresh work on my audio system, and gain better results from it. Perhaps it can provide inspiration for you too.

I asked Audio Advice’s Scott Newnam to give us some additional insight.

Audio Advice’s Scott Newnam.

Russ Welton: How did you come to make this available for everyone rather than a chargeable service upfront?

Scott Newnam: At first we considered charging a fee to use the tool to help offset the high investment costs of it. However, it launched in the middle of the pandemic when there was a lot of turmoil, so we scrapped plans to charge and just made it free to everyone.

RW: What would you say are the most advantageous applications most often overlooked by end users?

SN: There are two things that are probably taken for granted by most people using the tool. The first is that it dynamically moves speakers and all other components in the system to achieve an optimal theater design as you change dimensions and speaker layout. In other words, it not only places speakers within Dolby specifications but will optimize speaker locations dynamically if you remove speakers or add a row of seats or anything else. If you remove the side surrounds, for instance, it will shift the rears to provide better audio immersion.

The second is that it will turn any part of the design orange if it goes out of specification. So, as you move your seats forward or backward it will constantly adjust speaker locations to provide an optimal experience within specification until it can no longer stay within specification. Then the seats might turn orange if you have them too far forward for example. Many users don’t realize they can then just grab the seats with their mouse and move them forward or backward until all of the orange is gone and everything is within specification.

RW: What are any plans for its future development, perhaps regarding subwoofer placement or something else?

SN: We have a long list of enhancements we want to do. We have prioritized them and are rolling them out incrementally. For instance, we had a lot of people from Europe and other parts of the world using the tool. They kept e-mailing and asking if we would enable the tool to use the metric system. We literally just rolled out a toggle button that is in meters and centimeters. We also enabled six Atmos channels instead of four. You can imagine all of the cool things we have on the list to add – keep watching and you’ll see them roll out one by one.

RW: What do you wish you were asked but either never or rarely are?

SN: What is the business model behind providing the free tool and all of the free buyer’s guides and videos on your site? The model is pretty straightforward. We provide enormous amounts of free advice through the tool, as well as buyers’ guides and how-to videos and reviews on our website. We then back this up with a top-notch team of system designers across the country who answer questions on the phone and via chat – none of whom are on commission. Then we offer quality audio and home theater products with a price guarantee, two-day shipping, hassle-free returns, and lifetime support. The result is that we get the chance to help a lot of people with their audio and home theater systems, which is really our number one goal. We are fortunate enough that a good number of those people ultimately like our value proposition and our experience, and decide to support us with their purchases.

Our interview with Scott Newnam will continue in Issue 161, where he will talk more about stereo and home theater speaker and subwoofer setup.

The lead single off of The Kinks’ 1978 album Misfits was “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy.” In the song Ray Davies sings, “The King is dead, rock is done. You might be through, but I’ve just begun.” There isn’t a more fitting rock lyric to describe the singular mission of The Handcuffs, a Chicago-based band that celebrates the very essence of what the Kinks at that moment were trying to champion.

Led by drummer Brad Elvis and vocalist/rhythm guitarist Chloe F. Orwell, The Handcuffs are a band that might just bring rock back to its rightful place within our collective cultural conscience. They are about to release their fourth studio album, Burn the Rails. There they explore the sonic territory forged by acts like T-Rex, Spiders from Mars-era David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music, and early Blondie. Their read on this rich moment in rock is completely modern and makes a big, bold splashy statement within each of its thirteen tracks.

Elvis and Orwell met in Big Hello, their first band together, which released three indie-label records and toured from coast to coast. When that band dissolved, the duo decided to explore new territory with music that aligned more with their influences and broad range of musical tastes. The Handcuffs began as primarily a studio project, in which Elvis and Orwell wrote and recorded most of the material. But during that process, they realized that they missed the live band experience, and completed their lineup with bassist Emily Togni, lead guitarist Jeffrey Kmieciak, and keyboardist Alison Hinderliter. Together they deliver electrifying, high-energy live performances, and have received rave reviews from outlets like the Chicago Sun-Times. Here they are doing Eno’s “Needles in the Camel’s Eye”:

The new album was tracked at Kingsize Sound Labs in Chicago with producer/engineer Mike Hagler (Wilco, Neko Case, Billy Bragg, Mavis Staples, My Morning Jacket) and is being released by Pravda Records on June 3, with a 12-inch vinyl LP to arrive later this year. We had a chance to catch up with Elvis and Orwell and talk not just about the new record, but why the glam rock through early new wave musical period is so important, and why their take on it just might ignite a renewed interest in the power, persuasiveness, and possibilities that rock and roll has always presented.

Ray Chelstowski: I’ve read that you have other musical influences that are less gritty, raw, and glam. Why did you choose to explore this genre with this record?

Brad Elvis: Just listen to it! This sound probably started in 1969, or slightly before that. But in the 1970s it was like we all grew up. It was like rock and roll did away with the politeness of the ’60s. It all just kept evolving.

Chloe F. Orwell: Truth be told, the instrumentation in that music can be found in our band. I just felt like we could do this.

RC: How did you begin to work with producer Mike Hagler? His background producing My Morning Jacket and Neko Case seems much different than what your vision for this record and band has been.

BE: Years ago, we actually went to his studio and we weren’t that thrilled with the results we got from the person we worked with, who is no longer there. When you find a producer who “gets” what you’re doing, they almost become another band member. Sometimes, though, when you arrive at a studio you can see that the person at the board doesn’t get what you are all really about. Fast forward a few years later to a show we were doing here in Chicago and Mike was there. He told us that he had heard that we hadn’t been happy with our experience at his studio, and [he] wanted to make things right. So that night with him we found a place and a person that we totally get along with.

CFO: After that show where we connected, we ended up talking to him until the wee hours of the morning. We just hit it off as people. It was this insane, magical thing. We sort of evolve with each album and he’s evolved with us. He also became one of our very best friends, like family.

RC: What’s the creative process like for you? Brad’s drums sit so front and center that it seems like they were an important part of the initial thinking on every song.

BE: I think that having played with so many bands over the years on so many albums that I’ve developed a distinct drumming style. So, there’s that. And I’m mindful of the drum hooks that I grew up with from Hal Blaine, or Keith Moon, or Charlie Watts or Ginger Baker. They all had drum hooks that stood out. But we start out with a (guitar) riff and build around it.

The Handcuffs. Courtesy of Catherine Gass.

CFO: We are constantly finding random sounds from things like driving around Chicago and hearing car horns that we think might make a really cool riff. Then we’ll come home and write a song. We really do get inspired by our environment.

RC: There is a drum kit featured on your website that has the two floor toms. Is that the setup you used on this record?

CFO: He has about a dozen kits. Lately he has been playing vintage Ludwig drums. It’s basically a four- to five-piece kit. He writes songs, not necessarily as a drummer, but his songs always find a way for the drums to serve the song’s purpose. He knows how to maximize the minimum and plays in that old-school way. It’s always first for the song and not just about himself as a drummer.

RC: The record is a full-out rock ride. It never slows down, not for a moment.

CFO: For this record we were inspired by that old-school album-oriented rock where when you listen to something like a Mott the Hoople album, you hear it all flow together. That’s what we wanted to do.

RC: You open and close the record with instrumentals. What was the thinking behind that approach to the tracking?

BE: It’s almost like a little live intro thing. The opener is called “Grapefruit” and at the time that’s what I was eating for breakfast. It was almost like, “how do you start your day?” It kind of represents the vibe of the entire album and then we move on. It’s got the drums and a hook and a beat and riffs. Then at the end of the album we move into “Tobogganing,” which is a cool kind of psychedelic jam out kind of thing.

RC: How did you get Mott the Hoople keyboardist Morgan Fisher to contribute to the record?

CFO: We went to the Mott the Hoople reunion show in 2019, and I wrote a review on Facebook. It was just a quick review of the show and it went viral. A magazine asked to publish it so I cleaned it up and Morgan Fisher saw it and loved the review. He contacted me through Facebook, we became friends, and he told us that he’d love to play on one of our records. So, we picked two tracks and the rest is history.

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RC: Do you intend to cover any music from the glam rock era when you take this album to the stage?

BE: We usually throw a few songs into the mix. Right now, we are doing Brian Eno’s “Needles in the Camel’s Eye”; we’ve done “Vicious” by Lou Reed, so yes, we’ll throw in a few songs and of course make them our own.

RC: The Handcuffs could easily be considered a female act. Was that your intent when rounding out the group?

CFO: Not at all. We didn’t decide to weight the band in any way, it just happened. Emily (Togni) our bass player was the first and longest-standing member of the band. Alison (Hinderliter) our keyboardist was in a couple of well-known bands, including one that a friend of ours fronted. When he moved to Los Angeles we said, “oh good! Now we can poach Alison!” And then our guitarist Jeff (Kmieciak) came on a few years ago through Alison. So, it wasn’t a planned thing. It was about whether we get along with them and they fit.

RC: This record seems to have come at just the right time. When you were making it you probably didn’t think it could save rock, but did you think that it could at least spark wider interest in that great moment of 1970s glam rock?

CFO: I just want to say “yes, yes, yes” to all of that. We do like all kinds of music. We’re not music snobs. A good song is a good song. We just want rock and roll to be understood for being [the reason] why all of this other music is around.

Header image courtesy of Christy Bassman.

I was not thinking about much; mostly I was just channel surfing, at home watching television, half paying attention at midnight on a Sunday night. I was in bed but not yet ready to fall asleep. I’m going through the higher channels and I come across Jim Chladek on public-access Channel C.

He is live, with one fixed camera on him, sitting behind a desk in his television studio located nearby at 110 East 23rd Street, a commercial building just one door west of Manhattan Cable’s headquarters. Jim is talking about the ease and the whys and wherefores of having a public-access or a leased-access television show on Manhattan Cable TV. Really? I am more than interested.

It was the mid-1980s and people had fewer distractions. Personal computers were not really a thing yet and cell phones were just a blip on the radar. Cell service was new and ridiculously expensive. At the time I was working for an electronics installer (phone systems, stereos and so on), on the 3 pm to 11 pm shift. My boss, Gary, had recently bought a car/portable cell phone. With the battery and receiver cradle on top, it was the size of a box of cereal, and he carried it everywhere. Calls only, no internet. His first month’s bill was about $3,000. That was the end of that, and he went back to pagers.

Late-night alternative television watching was then a secret activity practiced by thousands of insomniacs. It made sense. New York is the city that never sleeps. Public-access television was getting attention in the US, especially in New York City, due to the advent of cable TV’s spreading footprint in the seventies and eighties. At first it was because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required them to offer public-access TV, but then the idea of public access became a way for the monopolistic cable companies to win over local municipalities.

According to HowStuffWorks: “The advent of public access TV occurred in the early 1970s under Section 611 of the Communications Act, a decision that gave local franchising authorities the ability to require cable companies to set aside channels for public, educational or governmental (PEG).”

I was watching Channel C that late night and Jim was talking about the available time slots and how to go about applying for one, and why MCTV (Manhattan Cable) had to approve any programming. He explained that it was required by the city that the cable company had to dedicate two channels for public access, and one channel for leased access. Leased-access could be commercial and have advertising, whereas public-access allowed no advertising. I am pretty certain that this was and still is a requirement for many of America’s cable companies. The reality was that the licensing for the cable franchises had to be approved by a city’s councils. They considered public-access a platform for free speech. (Cable companies had control over what channels would be aired.) To sum it up, it seems the thinking was that the public should have the ability to make its own programming without editorial (i.e., commercial network) restrictions, and no enforcement unless there was a complaint and even then, maybe.  Enforcement was little to none to say the least. Personally, I do not think MCTV or the later MNN actually watched these shows, so unless there was a complaint we did whatever we wanted to.

Cable companies spend a ton of money to create their infrastructure. The cost to lay the cable, mostly underground, and then to send the wired signal to each apartment building and to the homes of subscribers is substantial. These franchises do come up for renewal, but really, municipalities had no choice but to renew. Though I am aware of some changes of ownership, I don’t know of any cases of any cable company’s licenses not being renewed.

If you consider the initial cost to build a cable TV system, expand it, and maintain it, then there had to be some kind of protection for the cable companies. Also, the revenue in tax dollars from these companies is significant for government. Having said that, a surprising amount of the cable company’s expenses and certain construction costs become the financial burden of the subscribers. There really was not much more the cities could ask for from the cable TV companies. New York City Council did ask for better customer service, which was a big issue, though it has improved over the years. However, public access was one request that local governments could all agree on. It was not much of a burden on the cable franchises, and the reality of it is that the cost is passed on to the cable subscribers. Look for the PEG fee on your cable bill. Mine is $2.30 per month. The New York City government loves to tout its support for freedom of speech and its position that the cable companies do not have a death grip on all of their content.

It was a given that practically any adult resident could get a time slot for their taped show, or even a live show from select studios. The producer agreed to supply 26 weekly programs of 28, and in a few cases, 58 minutes. There were general requirements – the shows could not contain advertising or violate hard-core pornography standards. The technical rules were that the videotapes had to be in 3/4-inch U-matic cassette or Betamax, and with an opening countdown with two seconds of black prior to the first frame of video. At the time, the smaller local newscasts used the commercial 3/4-inch format, mostly for their B-roll videos. (B-roll is supplemental footage that is intercut with the main footage or broadcast.)  It provided a higher resolution than VHS and Beta consumer tapes. With all that taken care of and a contract signed, the producer was sent off to create.

Sony U-matic SP video tape recorder. Courtesy of Wikipedia/DRs Kulturarvsprojekt.

A couple of things to keep in mind were that if you did not regularly submit shows, you could lose your time slot. Also, you did not own your time slot, and after a six-month period MCTV (and from 1992, MCTV created the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, MNN) could move you to a different slot to accommodate a new show. The use of reruns was discouraged.

I was intrigued enough to apply for a public access show. Shortly after, I had a time slot for my show. The process was easy. I went to MCTV, filled out a couple of forms, showed ID, and a few days later I was approved. The Cable Doctor Show ran on both MCTV and Paragon Cable, covering all of the Manhattan. That was over one million potential viewers. My first time slot was on Channel D (17) at 11:30 pm on Thursdays. It might surprise readers that this was an excellent time slot. It goes against the common assumption that prime time would be the best, but that is not so. Public-access programming cannot compete with prime time network shows. The sweet spot for public-access audiences is 11:00 pm to 2:00 am, and sometimes even later, up until early morning. To a lesser extent, afternoons up until 5:00 pm are also good.

The programming in those early days was varied to say the least. There were quite a number of outrageous shows, including soft-core porn for late-night. Early on Manhattan viewers could watch Ugly George, who would lug a heavy video camera around and somehow convince women to disrobe and conduct interviews on camera. Midnight Blue was hosted by Al Goldstein, the owner of Screw magazine. He had a 58-minute show on leased-access. He was outspoken and gave a lot of on-air editorials. Midnight Blue also included some visual content. It was all sex-related. Leased-access is not free; at thei time it cost $100 for a half-hour. Because it is leased-access, the shows can be commercial (for-profit). Like public-access, a certain amount of leased-access airtime is mandated by the FCC.

Ugly George in post-production at his midtown loft for his public-access show The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex and Violence. From the 1988 documentary Rate It X by POV Docs.

The Robin Byrd Show on public-access and leased-access featured strippers who were performing at local clubs. The strip clubs sponsored Robin’s show in order to increase their attendance. Think Stormy Daniels on tour, though this was way before her time. By today’s ratings these shows would be seriously R-rated. The Robin Byrd Show is still on the air today, on Manhattan’s Spectrum Cable.

Public-access was a great platform and a terrific way to promote an idea. Psychics had call-in shows. A dentist had a show. Behind the Velvet Rope featured fashion and runway events and interviews with designers. Another show featured songwriter John Wallowitch, who appeared on the air live, seated behind the studio’s slightly out-of-tune piano with a money-stuffed brandy snifter and a brass-framed picture of his mother, and took viewer requests. He used to say, “this is the only piano bar of the airwaves,” and he found himself playing ”Fly Me to the Moon” quite a bit. Sometimes he was on after my show. He told me he had a permanent gig at a piano bar on First Avenue in the lower Fifties. Production on these shows was varied, but certainly not of network quality.

These were also exciting times in the field of home electronics technology. The VCR started to really take hold in the 1980s, giving a previously-unheard-of ability to record off your cable box. Sony’s Betamax format had slightly better video quality than JVC’s VHS (for Video Home System), but the recording time on Beta was more limited, so eventually Sony bowed out of that battle. The U-matic professional video recording system was the precursor to these consumer recording formats, though earlier video recorders existed as far back as 1963.

It occurred to me to use my public-access TV show to explain new consumer tech to people. My hope was to eventually establish an installation and service business. One thing that spurred the idea was that the VCR had become a big seller. However, the number one complaint I heard from folks was the annoying blinking of a VCR’s clock at 12:00. Most people could not set the clock, and thusly could not program the devices to record. The blinking light was driving people – Luddites – crazy. Hence, my inspiration for The Cable Doctor Show. This was my first of three different cable TV shows I created, and I had close to a dozen time slots over the years.

The Cable Doctor Show was a live broadcast with call-in tech questions, like an AM radio call-in talk shows, but focused on technology. In order to broadcast live, the show had to be telecast out of Jim Chladek’s studio at a cost of $100. That money bought me a live two-camera shoot in the studio, and the use of the control room with a call-in line. The number was posted on the screen along with a chroma key composited background. If you wanted a copy of the show, you could buy a blank U-matic tape for $10 and the studio would record the show for you. The tape could be used for reruns or just as a permanent record.

Things were really starting to happen in the consumer video world. S-Video came out, and now you could videotape-record at up to 400 lines of resolution. Standard VHS was only 320, so this was an improvement. Portable video cameras were starting to become in vogue, though they were big, the size of the cameras the networks used. The resolution was just standard video, only good enough for home recording.

At first The Cable Doctor Show was live call-in with questions. There never was a shortage of calls. After a couple of months, I decided to break up the 29-minute show by segments. I would start the show with calls, then do a setup or installation demo. For instance, a segment on how to install an A/B switch box and why a viewer would want one.

We were off to a good start, and just in a couple of months I was getting recognition.

You never know what is going to happen next. You try your best and you gotta believe. The unknown is not necessarily a terrible thing.

The year was 1962. A singer/trumpet player in Los Angeles, inspired by the sounds of a Tijuana bullfight, turned a song called “Twinkle Star” written by a composer and bandleader friend into a mariachi-themed hit record, and launched a new record label in the process. It would grow to become the biggest independent record label in the music business.

Rewind to 1961. A young musician named Herb Alpert had previously written a handful of tunes with a collaborator, Lou Adler, who he had met a few years earlier. They found success with songs like “Wonderful World” (recorded by Sam Cooke and later Herman’s Hermits) and also produced Jan and Dean during their time at Doré Records. While Alpert and Adler had some success, they ultimately and amicably split. Alpert then tried his luck at RCA with a few vocal singles under the name Dore Alpert.

A chance meeting with record promotion man Jerry Moss that year led Alpert to introduce Moss to his song “Tell It To The Birds,” and they formed a partnership by chipping in $100 each to create a new label called Carnival Records. Carnival single #701 (Dore Alpert, “Tell It To the Birds”), its first release, caught the attention of Dot Records, who purchased the master and released it on their own label. Carnival released one other single, “Love is Back in Style” by Charlie Robinson, an artist Moss was promoting, who had Alpert contribute his trumpet to the track.

Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Courtesy of A&M Records.

With the profit from the Dore Alpert single, Alpert put together a small recording studio in his garage in Los Angeles and began working on “Twinkle Star,” a song written by Sol Lake. Taking a break in recording, the two attended a bullfight in Tijuana, and the inspiration came to give the song a Mariachi feel. By the time the single was ready for release, Alpert and Moss discovered that another label had taken the name Carnival Records. Using the initials of their surnames to name their label A&M Records, they released “The Lonely Bull” in August 1962, which climbed to Number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and sold around 700,000 copies. A complete album of the same name followed, released in December 1962, and A&M was off and running.

A&M Records operated out of Alpert’s garage. But once he had recorded the second Tijuana Brass album (Volume 2) to modest success, they relocated the label’s offices to Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

A&M’s early artist roster featured an easygoing pop vocal sound, with such artists as The Sandpipers, Claudine Longet, Chris Montez, and We Five. Instrumentally, the Tijuana Brass went onto great success, at one point placing as many four albums in the top ten of Billboard’s album chart simultaneously. A spinoff group featuring session percussionist and former Martin Denny sideman Julius Wechter, called the Baja Marimba Band, extended the mariachi sound. And Alpert’s inspired signing of a young, rising musician from Brazil resulted in a handful of acclaimed albums by Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. A&M would also sign composer Burt Bacharach to the label as an instrumentalist.

The success of the label was the result of the partnership of Alpert and Moss. Herb Alpert was the artist with a musical ear that recognized potential talent, his ear and patience helping create many successful careers. Jerry Moss was the businessman, inking the deals and promoting the product to make the label successful. That partnership would bear fruit until 1989, when they sold the company they built on that initial $200 investment to Polygram for $500 million dollars.

This Copper series celebrates A&M’s 60^th anniversary. I will highlight notable recordings along the way, mixed with a few rarities that have not gotten much attention over the years. I won’t get too in-depth with biographical information of the individual artists, but will include signposts of changing trends as A&M Records evolved with the musical landscape.

With The Lonely Bull well on its way, A&M’s second album release featured this now long-forgotten singer. Once a part of the gospel group The Pilgrim Travelers (of which Lou Rawls was also a member), bass singer George McCurn was offered the chance to record an album with A&M, enlisting jazz bandleader Shorty Rogers to provide the vocal and instrumental arrangements for the album.

While he was not well-known throughout most of the country, keyboardist Dave Lewis was an influential figure in R&B and rock music in the Pacific Northwest. He enjoyed the same musical environment that brought us music by The Kingsmen. Little-known fact: Lewis’s father, also a musician, tutored the trumpet-playing son of the Jones family who had moved in next door; that son, Quincy, would become an A&M artist in the late 1960s, and go on to produce some of the biggest albums in music history. A&M released an album of Lewis’s songs, including the title track and hit, “Little Green Thing.”

Chris Montez had a million-seller with his 1962 hit single “Let’s Dance.” Performing with Tommy Roe, Montez was one of the artists who had a burgeoning British band open for him: the Beatles. When he signed with A&M, Alpert suggested he try a softer approach to his music, and Montez was groomed as a pop music crooner for a series of A&M albums. This is “Call Me,” from his first A&M album.

Formed in the 1960s, a trio of folk-rock singers calling themselves The Grads (Mike Piano, Richard Shoff and Jim Brady) recorded a single for A&M, which did not chart. After a name change to The Sandpipers, producer Tommy LiPuma suggested they record a Cuban song, “Guantanamera,” and it became the trio’s biggest hit record as well as the title track to their first album.

Slightly predating the psychedelic folk/rock that would make San Francisco popular, the singer/guitarist quintet We Five released a remake of an Ian & Sylvia song, “You Were On My Mind” which reached Number 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Mike Stewart (brother of John Stewart of the Kingston Trio) arranged and led the group, while singer Beverly Bivens carried the lead vocals. Their only other Top 40 hit would be “Let’s Get Together,” from the album Make Someone Happy, which was released months after the original lineup of the group had split up.

One of the young label’s most fortuitous signings was Sergio Mendes who, with his Brasil ’66 group, melded Brazilian music, jazz, rock and (as the liner notes of their first album say) “a little sex” to create a new sound for the label. While Herb Alpert’s ear was firmly on the group’s music, one might say that his eye was on the group’s lead singer, Lani Hall; they would marry several years later, and remain a couple to this day. Not only was “Mas Que Nada” a hit for the group, it would become Mendes’s signature song throughout his career, being recorded many times, including a version for the hit animated film Rio.

One mid-’60s album in particular has become a cult favorite among fans of California pop music. Composer Roger Nichols (who often collaborated with lyricists Paul Williams, Tony Asher and Bill Lane) released only one album on A&M, Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends. Produced by Tommy LiPuma and assisted by the brother/sister duo of Murray and Linda McLeod and LA session musicians Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman (among others), the group recorded an album of originals and cover tunes. “Love So Fine” seems as though it’s a lost hit, but only appeared as a B-side. The album did not sell well initially, but was successful enough that Alpert hired Nichols as a staff songwriter for A&M.

The Parade (which Murray McLeod was a member of, along with Jerry Riopelle and Smoky Roberds) recorded a similar pop album, yet A&M chose not to release anything but the title song from this record. A reissue label in the CD era would eventually release this lost California pop classic by The Parade. Here is The Parade’s single, “Sunshine Girl.”

A&M Records would score several charting hits during these early years.  While Herb Alpert’s albums sold in fair numbers, and his recording of “Mexican Shuffle” would be featured in a gum commercial as the “Teaberry Shuffle,” the fortunes of his Tijuana Brass would receive a major boost in 1965 when the iconic album Whipped Cream & Other Delights was released (as famous for its stop/start arrangement of “A Taste of Honey” as it would be for its then-provocative album cover).

After releasing the follow-up album Going Places, the Brass became (and remain, to this day) the only act to simultaneously place four albums in the Top Ten of Billboard’s Top LPs chart.  Alpert would also record his and A&M’s first Number 1 hit in 1968, “This Guy’s In Love with You,” thanks to the song being used in the Brass’s Beat of the Brass television special.

This first installment in the A&M 60^th Anniversary series provides a partial snapshot of the sound of the label in its earliest days. In Part Two, we’ll look how the label’s musical landscape changed. Or, did it? A&M would move in a new direction, but with one awkward exception that would prove to be one of the label’s biggest hit acts.

When the legendary Al Schmitt passed away on April 26, 2021 at age 91, he left behind a tremendous musical legacy. He was one of the last of the great, surviving music recording engineers to have worked during the post-World War II era through to the present. In addition to 20 Grammy wins, Schmitt amassed credits for over 150 RIAA-certified Gold and Platinum albums. Like his mentor Tom Dowd, Schmitt was musically omnivorous and worked in almost every genre of popular music, with artists including Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Jefferson Airplane, Toto, Steely Dan, Jackson Browne, Diana Krall, Shelby Lynne, Henry Mancini, Luis Miguel, Trisha Yearwood, and The Mavericks, just to name a few.

As he entered semi-retirement in 2018 (although he continued to work on records in 2019), Schmitt published his autobiography, Al Schmitt On the Record: The Magic Behind the Music. I was fortunate to briefly meet Mr. Schmitt in 2019, following a presentation he gave for Mixing With The Masters at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference in New York. Although authorship of the book is credited to Schmitt with Maureen Droney (senior managing director of the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing), the stories and explanations that comprise the bulk of the memoirs are unmistakably in Schmitt’s gruff voice, and his hardscrabble Brooklyn roots and attitude permeate through every page.

Inspired by his uncle, who was an audio engineer prior to World War II, Schmitt and his younger brother Richy would follow the same path after Schmitt finished his service in the US Navy. As a fresh-faced assistant to Tom Dowd, Al Schmitt recalled his baptism of fire: being mistakenly scheduled as the recording engineer for a session with the Mercer Ellington band, with Duke Ellington in attendance. Schmitt had no experience as a main recording engineer and, knowing who Duke Ellington was, went into a panic. However, Duke reassured and encouraged him. Emerging from the experience successful and confident, Schmitt would snowball the serendipitous Ellington session accident into a career that covered a wide cross section of the last 70 years of popular music.

Al Schmitt. Courtesy of Chris Schmitt.

Two of the most remarkable aspects of Al Schmitt’s approach to producing and mixing were his sublimation of ego, and his open-mindedness towards new technology, the latter particularly striking when compared to the number of his peers and younger colleagues who long wistfully for the older sounds of analog equipment and gear.

Schmitt’s ability to put his ego out of the way was a huge part of why he was constantly active long into his 80s. His willingness to work in any music genre and to deliver the best sound possible for the artist, without injecting his own trademarks, (like Phil Spector, for example), resonated across the industry, making him the first-choice request of producers like Tommy LiPuma and Phil Ramone (a top-notch engineer in his own right), and such a diverse range of artists.

The incongruous relationship between hippie counterculture forerunners Jefferson Airplane and Schmitt, the ex-Navy Brooklynite who always came to the studio in a suit and tie, was especially fascinating. Schmitt recalled that the sessions were nothing like he had ever previously experienced, with long hours throughout the night as the Airplane composed much of After Bathing at Baxter’s (1967) in the studio, with the number of takes of a song running into the mid-hundreds at times. Unhappy with producer Rick Jerrard, who had put the band on the map with the previous album Surrealistic Pillow (1967) and its iconic singles “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” the Airplane told RCA Records that they specifically wanted Schmitt, whom they liked personally after meeting him, to produce their next LP. (Schmitt was working for RCA at the time.) They were apparently unaware of his past work with Sam Cooke and others, but his patience, experience, and musical sensibilities proved invaluable, with Grace Slick especially singling out Schmitt as the one who “saved all their asses” in the studio during the recording of Baxter’s.

For his part, Schmitt, who likened his job of producing the Airplane to being “the dogcatcher with the butterfly net,” was able to look past the chaotic goings-on and appreciate the musical virtuosity of bassist Jack Casady (in spite of his volume, which required his speaker cabinets to be recorded from a separate room!) and lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, as well as the studio discipline of vocalist Slick, who was practical, a perfectionist, and as Schmitt recalled: “…she was smart, a Vassar girl, you know.”

Schmitt went on to continue as Jefferson Airplane’s producer for Crown of Creation (1968), Bless Its Pointed Little Head (1969), and Volunteers (1969), the last one as an independent producer apart from RCA. He also would produce the first three albums for Kaukonen and Casady’s spinoff band Hot Tuna, as well as Paul Kantner’s Jefferson Starship debut, Blows Against the Empire (1970). The personal relationship continued until Schmitt’s death, with Schmitt recounting in the book that he still spoke regularly with Kaukonen and Casady, whom he described as having since transformed from drugged-out hippies to the “salt of the earth.”

Schmitt recalled the making of his collaboration with producer LiPuma on George Benson’s groundbreaking Breezin’, the first record to feature the hotshot jazz guitarist as a vocalist. Excited about the prospect of showcasing his singing talents, Benson nailed a number of the songs, including the hit “This Masquerade,” on the first takes. Schmitt’s use of a cheap Electro-Voice 666 mic, originally intended solely for a guide vocal scratch track, wound up becoming Benson’s lucky charm, and he superstitiously stuck by it for his subsequent records. Schmitt also recalled the problems of recording the strings in a Munich, Germany studio, as the multi-track tapes were recorded at 30 ips and the main studios there only recorded at 7-1/2 and 15 ips. They finally located the only studio in Munich with a 24-track recorder operating at 30 ips, but the room was so small that the violinists’ bows were hitting the ceiling when they played. Needless to say, the lack of air and the quality of the sound in the room made for string tracks that fell considerably below Schmitt’s professional standards.

Ironically, Schmitt won an engineering Grammy in 1976 for Breezin’. Upon hearing that he was nominated, Schmitt laughed, and his response was: “Really? Has anybody listened to the strings?”

In the book, Benson comments that Schmitt’s recording of his guitar was “the best he had ever heard” when they first worked together on Breezin’. In another story indicative of Schmitt’s innate instincts for when a performance was stellar, and the benefits of his fastidious work habits, Benson cited his hit rendition of “On Broadway” from Weekend in L.A. Recorded with the Wally Heider mobile unit, Benson felt that his second show’s performance of “On Broadway” was “magnificent,” and Schmitt made him a cassette copy. After the shows were completed, Benson and producer Tommy LiPuma met to review the tapes to mixdown to 2-track, but could not locate the second performance of “On Broadway.” The multitrack reel was nowhere to be found, and LiPuma was concerned that it had been erased and recorded over, as the concerts had run longer than anticipated, and LiPuma had re-recorded over the first show’s reels to continue recording, since Benson was less than satisfied with the first show’s performance.

However, Schmitt had also realized that the second show’s “On Broadway” was exceptional, and had safely stored the multitrack master tape away. Benson considers “On Broadway” one of the most important songs he has ever recorded and credits Schmitt with saving his career as a result.

One of Al Schmitt’s more unique workarounds is the now-famous tape loop he created for Jeff Porcaro’s drum track from Toto’s signature song “Africa.” In pre-digital-age 1982, the only way to create a repeating musical loop was by splicing a length of tape into an actual loop. Although Toto was comprised of some of the finest studio musicians in Los Angeles and Porcaro was one of the top A-list drummers in the industry, he and percussionist Lenny Castro were unable to play the part envisioned for “Africa” with the metronomic precision Porcaro wanted for the entire track. Choosing the best two bars, Schmitt had to create a tape loop that would be long enough for the repeating two-bar section. As a result, the tape loop “had to go from the left reel of the tape machine, around the mic stand [a few feet away], and then back to the right reel of the tape machine.”

Schmitt was open-minded enough to embrace technology, but without becoming dependent on it, in pursuit of maintaining his professional standards. As someone who had learned audio engineering in the early direct-to-acetate mono recording era, a key component of Schmitt’s ability to capture such great sounds and performances was via his skillful use of microphones. Unlike other engineers, Schmitt’s school of thought focused on capturing the desired sound at the source – the mic – which would subsequently introduce less noise and/or artificiality into the sound by requiring less equalization and other processing during the mixing stage, and result in a more pristine final product. Schmitt’s encyclopedic knowledge of microphones, their applications, and their tonal qualities determined his infallible microphone selections for every vocalist, instrument, producer’s demands, or task at hand. Schmitt would choose each mic for its unique qualities and ability to match the kind of room it would be used in and where it should be placed, and the playing or singing style of the artist. All of these decisions were things Schmitt would determine based on a combination of instinct, experience, and mental calculations of acoustic physics.

While he had vintage Neumann, Sennheiser, RCA and other microphones in his huge personal collection, Schmitt’s focus on quality led him to eschew preconceived biases and objectively add microphones from Audio-Technica and other newer manufacturers to his rotation whenever they would better deliver the sounds he was pursuing. Schmitt’s longtime recording venue of choice was Capitol Studios, and Schmitt worked there so frequently that he had an office on the premises and jokingly referred to manager Paula Salvatore as his “other wife.”

Al Schmitt’s use of Capitol’s legendary echo chambers and the studio’s famous mic collection also became a mainstay of his M.O. As Schmitt’s longtime assistant Steve Genewick details in Appendix A of the book, Schmitt would routinely blend Capitol’s chamber Four – his favorite – with a Lexicon 480 digital reverb processor, his personal Bricasti reverb, and Capitol’s EMT 250 plate reverb in order to quickly create a sense of space and depth that he felt would best enhance a mix.

Al Schmitt On the Record: The Magic Behind the Music not only contains the author’s philosophies and perspectives on music and the industry, but freely includes very specific details about Schmitt’s methodologies, equipment choices, and microphone placement secrets.

Reminiscences from Shelby Lynne (whose Dusty Springfield tribute, Just a Little Lovin’ has been praised for its pristine sound) on working with Schmitt and producer Phil Ramone were effusive, and somewhat ironic, as she chose Schmitt specifically for his engineering expertise because she wanted to record to analog multitrack, and Schmitt was initially reluctant, as he had been working so often in digital!

In addition to his meticulous use of microphones, Schmitt developed a habit of recording with the final mix already in mind, unlike other engineers who focused more on capturing individual sounds with mixing decisions left for later. Engineers Steve Genewick, Niko Bolas and Bill Smith all learned from Schmitt and believe that Schmitt’s unique approach was borne from his long experience in recording from the mono days all the way through multitrack tape and then to digital. Schmitt’s knowledge of what the actual instruments should sound like when played together played a huge part in his expertise, and he would choose new tools that enhanced his main objectives of making records, but without becoming dependent on them, and losing his fundamental principles, which stemmed from the ability to make records using bare bones equipment.

Al Schmitt On the Record: The Magic Behind the Music is a fitting legacy for a titan of the music recording industry. It contains a wealth of information not only for audio engineering enthusiasts, but for music historians and readers who are curious about the making of iconic records, some of which are likely to be part of their music libraries.

The 1970s was a landmark era for both technological and artistic breakthroughs in the field of music recording. The 8-track recorder had just given way to 16-track models, transistor technology was coming into its own as a sonically viable alternative to tube technology for microphones, consoles and outboard gear, and new artists were emerging who saw greater creative possibilities for multi-track recording beyond what the Beatles had pioneered with their 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

With a combination of musical talent, incredible ears, a yeoman-like work ethic and an uncompromising drive towards excellence, multiple Grammy Award-winning engineer Bill Schnee serendipitously took a moribund career playing keyboards and parlayed it into becoming one of the top engineers and producers in the music industry. A partial list of artists whose records he engineered (and sometimes also produced) can be found in the record collections of practically any popular music fan born prior to 1990:

Schnee’s autobiographical memoir, Chairman at the Board: Recording the Soundtrack of a Generation, is a fascinating insight into the challenges, missteps, battles and victories undertaken to create such memorable recordings as Steely Dan’s Aja, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” and No Secrets LP, Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love Of All” and self-titled debut album, and perhaps the only true Beatles reunion record: the Richard Perry produced Ringo, in which Schnee was able to record Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon together, later flying to England for Paul McCartney’s contributions, as the latter was at the time barred from entering the US over a previous marijuana bust.

Additionally, the book has a special treat for audiophile Copper readers who may be aware of Bill Schnee’s pioneering work with Sheffield Lab Records. Sheffield launched the first audiophile targeted direct-to-disc recordings, including Schnee’s production and engineering of Thelma Houston’s Grammy-nominated I’ve Got The Music In Me, as well as Lincoln Mayorga’s Distinguished Colleagues records. The book goes into minute detail on the pressures of recording a large ensemble with horns, live in the studio without overdubs or post-production mixing, essentially creating an audiophile-level version of how recordings were initially performed on Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder recorder nearly a century earlier.

Ironically, the song “Pressure Cooker” from I’ve Got The Music In Me became a sample backing track for “Pressure,” a 2006 rap record by Lupe Fiasco and Jay-Z that was itself subsequently nominated for three Grammys, including Best Rap Album.

Some of the anecdotes debunk rock legends. For example, Steely Dan, known for taking painstakingly long to make their records, was surprisingly efficient when Schnee recorded Aja, which earned him a Grammy engineering award. The album is frequently used by many producers as a reference disc for checking monitors in an unfamiliar studio, due to the record’s famously pristine sound. While many a studio musician has spun horror tales of having to do countless takes in the quest for the sonic realization of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s musical visions, Schnee recalls the Aja sessions as being relaxed and professional, starting promptly in the afternoon and ending by early evening. In the meantime, he would take cassettes of rough mixes with him on his drive home, fascinated by the amalgam of jazz, rock, pop and blues that would make Aja eventually a perennial Top 100 music critic album favorite.

Bill Schnee. Courtesy of Sallie Schnee.

Perhaps due to his own experiences as a musician and in working with producers like Richard Perry, Bill Schnee’s book gives equal weight to the importance of all musicians in the making of his many classic recording projects, not just the stars. For example, he is quick to cite the crucial role that drummers, such as Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner, Steve Gadd, Jim Gordon, Bernard Purdie, and others served in creating the musical backbones that could mean the difference between a hit or stiff record. He is also quick to praise the under-appreciated traits and professional standards of some of the artists he’s worked with. Some examples:

• When working on the Jacksons’ album Victory, Schnee recalls that Michael Jackson refused to accept anything less than his personal best when recording his vocals, and would do countless takes to get it right, eschewing his prima donna media image and even taking naps in the studio while burning the midnight oil. This was something none of the other Jacksons had any interest in, despite Victory essentially being a gift from Michael, by then a megastar on his own, to his family, as the Jackson brand had faltered since leaving Motown.
• In another debunking of diva reputations, Schnee’s work on the Barbra Joan Streisand album went very smoothly, and Schnee marveled at how Streisand was able to control her vocal delivery with her performance and mic technique without any drama, in spite of producer Richard Perry’s penchant for driving singers to tears with his demands.
• Schnee was amazed at Paul McCartney deciding to do his solo for “You’re Sixteen,” one of his contributions to the Ringo album, as “Mouth Sax” – basically a vocal emulation of a sax part similar to the vocalizing of a cappella specialist Bobby McFerrin. Schnee added some distortion at the console to create the illusion of a kazoo sound, which most listeners assumed was the instrument on the record.

The obstacles to making and releasing some records can be due to accident, ego, financial or political concerns, or a number of other reasons beyond the control of the people involved. For example, during the making of Steely Dan’s Gaucho, which garnered Schnee another engineering Grammy (due to the inclusion of the song “Third World Man,”), Steely Dan encountered the following stumbling blocks:

• They faced legal problems with their label.
• Becker’s girlfriend died of a drug overdose.
• Becker himself was hit by a taxicab.
• Fascinated with technology, during the recording of Gaucho Fagen and Becker pursued the “perfect” drum track by utilizing “Wendel,” one of the first-ever drum sample computers created by engineer Roger Nichols. This resulted in even lengthier studio sessions.
• An assistant accidentally erased most of the tracks for the song “The Second Arrangement,” which led to “Third World Man” – left over from the Aja sessions – replacing it on Gaucho.

In the case of Marvin Gaye, an album of ballads that the singer had recorded earlier in his career was shelved by Berry Gordy. Due to the success of Schnee’s recording of Marvin Gaye Live! with the Wally Heider remote recording truck, he was later offered a chance to mix a number of Gaye recordings from the Motown vaults and was able to mix the album, Love Songs: Bedroom Ballads, which was subsequently released posthumously after Gaye’s murder.

With numerous multi-platinum hits, Boz Scaggs needed to take an eight-year hiatus because of his divorce and child custody battle. Other Roads, the record that he finally delivered to CBS, was engineered and produced by Schnee. However, by that time, CBS had a new president and new A&R department people, who weren’t happy about all of the money being paid to Scaggs, which their budget could have allocated to other acts. Additionally, Scaggs’ former manager, Irving Azoff, not only was the one who had renegotiated Scaggs’ contract with CBS, but had since become head of MCA Records and had poached top-selling band Chicago away from the Columbia label. Adding insult to injury, Azoff also had overseen several best-selling movie soundtrack albums, such as Urban Cowboy. CBS’ A&R department claimed to have hated Other Roads and added re-recordings of several songs that made the album disjointed, sound-wise. It subsequently stalled at Number 47 on the Billboard pop album charts.

Before falling out with production partner Jerry Bruckheimer, Don Simpson had sizable Hollywood clout thanks to the success of films like Top Gun, Dirty Dancing, and Beverly Hills Cop, among others. An Officer and a Gentleman director Taylor Hackford was unhappy with the mix of the song “Up Where We Belong,” performed by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, and Schnee was called in to remix it. Simpson vigorously fought to have the song removed, but was outvoted by the other producers. Don Simpson hated the song so much that he even made a bet with music coordinator Joel Sill that the song would flop. Simpson wound up having to pay off the bet to Sill when “Up Where We Belong” won an Academy Award for Best Original Song and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo Or Group.

During the recording of “I Will Always Love You,” Schnee recounts how Whitney Houston found the long a cappella beginning intimidating and got a temporary case of the yips before nailing the performance on takes four and five, the last one especially captivating with the addition of an incredible Kirk Whalum sax solo. Producer David Foster took Schnee’s rough mixes as references, and then added extra strings, percussion, and guitars, and mixed it for presentation to Arista honcho Clive Davis. However, Davis wound up choosing a rougher mix over the slicker finished version, which did not showcase Houston’s soaring vocals the way the rough mix did. The result: the biggest-selling female artist single of all time, with a record-setting 14 weeks at Number 1 on the Billboard charts.

In an unusually humble part of his autobiography, Schnee is forthcoming about projects in which he documents some of his failures in addition to his many landmark triumphs. He unashamedly describes the difficulties he had in trying to mix certain projects when he realized that his attempts were falling far below his professional standards of excellence.

He also is honest about mistakes he realizes he made when looking back, and the lessons learned. For example, on the album Hard at Play by Huey Lewis and the News, which he produced and engineered, he came to the candid conclusion that he was too close to the material to be able to render an objectively professional mix, so he swallowed his pride and brought in Jack Joseph Puig.

Gracious to a fault, Schnee is unfailingly profuse in his praise for those he considers mentors, specifically singling out mastering engineer Doug Sax for his guidance and instruction.

While Schnee doesn’t delve too deeply into the techno-geek world of audio gear, he does offer some retrospective observations on how the music industry has changed over the past half century, such as:

• Records in his heyday were made in professional studios that had signature sounds due to their design and equipment, and those sounds would often play a part in the making of a record. Present technology allows for digital simulations of much of the actual vintage gear, ironically resulting in everyone having access to the same plug-ins and emulations, thus homogenizing the overall sound between artists.
• Records made in the past were predominantly based at capturing an ensemble performance for a moment in time, and any minor mistakes or quirks added character to the recording. With unlimited track counts and the continued closings of many of the venerable recording studios of yesteryear, the bulk of today’s records are being recorded as overdubbed tracks submitted by various individuals on their respective digital audio workstations (DAW), thus sacrificing the magic of spontaneous group collaboration in favor of isolated-track “perfection.”

Despite all of the changes over the years, Bill Schnee keeps going, working out of his own studio and from Blackbird Studio in Nashville. His overriding principle is for the production and engineering to be in service to the song and the music. Chairman at the Board: Recording the Soundtrack of a Generation documents how Schnee did it for many famous records. It is an excellent guide for music fans, audiophiles, historians, and the next generation of engineers and producers.

Octave Records has released Dreams of You by vocalist and alto saxophonist Jeremy Mohney. It’s a recording that hearkens back to classic swing-era and traditional jazz, yet is up to the minute, with a set of all-original songs recorded in high-resolution DSD and SACD sound.

The swing’s the thing here, and Mohney’s music has a propulsive bounce that evokes the ballrooms of a bygone era. Songs like “The Octave Stomp,” “Show Me What You Got (and Swing It)” and “Let Go” have a toe-tapping groove, thanks to the infectious singing and playing of Mohney and his fellow musicians: Conner Hollingsworth on upright bass, Braxton Kahn on drums, Andrew McNew on trombone, and the standout guitar and banjo playing of Matt Cantor, who provides a rich chordal and rhythmic accompaniment and inventive soloing.

How did a modern-day musician like Jeremy Mohney get so steeped in the sounds of swing? “I was close to my grandfather and from a very early age he played me music like Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw. It just kind of stuck with me,” Mohney noted. “I was also into the Beatles and Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. But in the 1920s, people like Louis Armstrong redefined what music could be and basically made everything that followed possible.”

Jeremy Mohney.

Dreams of You was recorded at Animal Lane Studios in Lyons, Colorado using Octave Records’ Pure DSD process and the Sonoma multi-track DSD recording system. It was mixed at PS Audio in Boulder, CO. Dreams of You is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible only using a PS Audio SACD transport, or by copying the DSD tracks on the included DVD data discs.

In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for download (including DSD64, DSDDirect Mastered 192kHz/24-bit, 96kHz/24-bit and 44.1kHz/16-bit PCM) from psaudio.com at this link. The album was recorded by Jay Elliott, produced by Thom LaFond, and mixed by Elliott and LaFond. Giselle Collazo assisted, and Octave Records’ Jessica Carson was the executive producer.

We talked more with Jeremy Mohney about the new album.

Frank Doris: Since you mentioned being influenced by this music from an early age, I’m guessing you were in a high school stage band or something like that?

Jeremy Mohney: Yeah, I was, and that made my grade point average look halfway decent.

FD: How did you meet the other musicians who play on Dreams of You?

JM: It sort of built over the years. I’ve been playing with guitarist Matt Cantor for about 11 years. I’ve known our bass player, Conner Hollingsworth, for about three or four years now. Lineups have changed, but in the last couple of years I’ve been able to work with a more reliable group, not having to hire substitutes all the time. That’s kinda big.

FD: Your guitar player Matt Cantor is something else. His playing really gives you that authentic sound.

Matt Cantor, Braxton Kahn, Jeremy Mohney, Andrew McNew and Conner Hollingsworth.

JM: We really try to get inside that music. Maybe the way they would’ve 80 years ago.

FD: Do you write out charts or just play it off the tops of your heads?

JM: We write out chord charts and the rest of it is memorizing melodies and riffs. I can read, but not enough to hurt me much!

FD: As the saying goes.

JM: Think about the way they would’ve done it back in the day. Maybe they read the music, but didn’t want to be confined into playing it one certain way the whole time.

FD: How do you write the songs? They’re all originals.

JM: I usually start out [with] a chord progression on the guitar and then we just sort of jam over the chord progression and come up with a melody. Maybe if I’m lucky a melody will just pop into my head right away. Every song’s kind of a different animal, you know?

FD:  The title song, “Dreams of You”; did somebody in particular inspire that?

JM: There was…(pause)

FD: You don’t want to reveal the mystery!

It doesn’t sound like you guys are playing at trying to sound like a swing band. It sounds like you are one.

JM:  That’s exactly what we’re going for.

Braxton Kahn.

FD: Who are some of your other inspirations?

JM: As far as my playing goes, Glenn Miller has always been my favorite. I can’t explain why. It just has so much sentimental value, his music and [how it relates to my] relationship with my grandfather. And, Sidney Bechet, Benny Carter, and Lester Young of course. Billie Holiday.

FD: How did the pandemic affect your ability to make music?

JM: Well, it was pretty sad there for a while because gigs dried up, and we were all scared to even get together at all for a couple of months there.

It’s always been tough [being] a musician. And who knows what it’s gonna be like in the future.

Matt Cantor.

FD: I think it’s going to be a balance between two things. A lot venues either went away or are going to decide they can’t afford live music anymore. On the other hand, people are so pent up in wanting to go out and hear live music – that will be the opposing factor.

JM: I’ve done quite a few private things like weddings and some corporate events, but haven’t been playing too much in public. The swing dance scene is where we do most of our public gigs and that’s just [been] hard to keep afloat. There have been a few people who are willing to go out and dance, but nothing like there were before.

FD: So, you’d play covers and not your originals on those gigs.

JM: We do play a lot of standards. We’ve started recording some covers of public domain tunes. Before 1926 is now the year that you’re allowed to record and publish on your own.

FD: You’re keeping that part of jazz history alive.

JM: The older jazz is definitely a different animal – that you can dance to.