Issue 137

 

The aspect that I probably find most disconcerting about my current disc playback setup is the DAC complement of the BDA-1060, which includes a single Texas Instruments PCM1795 chipset shared by both channels. That chipset is not exactly the current state-of-the-art in audio playback, and the individual chips sell for a little over $3 each – not exactly what I’d call my current ideal for delivering audiophile-quality sound from any kind of disc, be it CD or SACD. Competent, yes, but ne plus ultra? Hardly.

I’ve previously mentioned that my digital music playback setup currently includes a dual-box server/streamer combo from Euphony Audio, with linear power supplies from PliXiR; my digital-to-analog converter is a very good-sounding and capable PS Audio GainCell DAC. Everything is wired to my home network, and I only need my tablet or Android phone to get playback started. It’s the most elegant setup I’ve ever had the pleasure to enjoy in my audio system, and provides a level of musicality and realism that just boggles me every time I take a listen. The PS Audio DAC utilizes an ESS Sabre 9018 DAC chipset; its level of quality far exceeds that of the Yamaha BDA-1060. When I occasionally listen to a CD, I always play back using a coax digital cable through the PS Audio GainCell DAC. Direct playback to my DAC, of course, is not possible for me with SACD and Blu-ray, and the main reason I was so keen to recently learn how to rip SACDs (see my article in Issue 135).

My assertion that direct-to-DAC playback of high-res discs is not possible isn’t entirely correct; I probably should have qualified that. PS Audio manufactures their own high-end transport and pays the licensing fees to Sony so that the SACD handshake works between their DirectStream series of disc players and DACs. So for a somewhat princely price, you’ll get native DSD output. But if you’re intent on maintaining a more budget-friendly yet audiophile-quality spinning digital disc setup, there are options, especially if you have a player that provides fairly noiseless and stable disc transport (another area in which I find the Yamaha lacking).

There are adapters that are available from China ($50-100 USD on eBay) that purportedly will allow you to stream the DSD content directly via an I2S connection to your DAC. Whaaat...I2S? I2S and HDMI are related technologies, but not exactly identical, and your disc player has to have an HDMI output with a pin configuration that’s compatible with the I2S adapter box you choose. Reports vary widely as to their effectiveness, and compatibility issues abound. And your DAC has to have an I2S input, but that seems to be predominantly the norm these days. I’ve seriously looked into this, and it appears to me to be fairly hit-or-miss, but those who have gotten it to work seem very impressed with the results. If you're thinking about heading down this route, I’d really do my homework to try to figure out if the HDMI pin configuration on your setup will likely work. I guess for under a hundred bucks, it might be worth a shot, and the results could be impressive. One of the devices I’ve been playing with for a few weeks is a Fiio M-9 digital audio player. It sells for about $300 USD, and in addition to offering playback of just about any digital file type, it can also be configured as a USB DAC to use with any system. Here’s the kicker: the M-9 uses a pair of AKM AK4490EN DAC chips – one for each channel — and I’ve had it hooked up to my system as a USB DAC for about a week to gauge just how capable I think it is for that purpose. No full-size DAC I currently have in-house offers independent chips for each channel. The AKM chipset is just a couple of notches below their top-of-the-line, and Fiio offers a choice of five different digital filters to customize the sound – which is shockingly good from such a small device played back through my big rig. Despite offering DSD playback, as a USB DAC, it’s currently limited to PCM file playback, but the Fiio people assure me that a firmware update is on the way that will rectify that situation.

Regardless, the AKM chipset is remarkably good-sounding with PCM material of any resolution. I’d even venture to say that it betters my PS Audio DAC in that regard. A few years back, I reviewed the superb Audioengine HD6 powered loudspeakers for Positive Feedback (you can read the review here). They’re about the size of a pair of British mini monitors, and when fed a direct audio signal from any audio source, delivered compellingly good sound. Such that I even went so far as to say that if need be, I could live with them as my only loudspeakers – they’re really that good. So if my wife really does force me to take my show on the road, and Fiio upgrades the M-9 to DSD DAC capability, at least I’ll have the possibility of taking really good high-resolution sound with me, even if on a much smaller scale.

Header image: HDMI connector pin configuration.

HIFIMAN manufactures high-end headphones, headphone amps, portable music players, headphone cables, and other products. The company was founded in by Dr. Fang Bian in 2007 in China and, two years later, introduced the HM-801, the first portable digital audio player to feature high-performance sound from a pocket-size form factor. Since then, HIFIMAN has developed an extensive selection of rave-reviewed audio components and products that have earned the company world-class status among audiophiles.

John Seetoo: Growing up in China, did you come from a family where music was important? What kind of music did you listen to growing up, and do you still reference that music when testing your latest HIFIMAN products?

Dr. Fang Bian: I grew up in a family of medical doctors who worked for a huge coal mine plant. My parents don’t listen to music, but there were some speakers in the playground in the primary school [I attended] that played music in the background when we did our morning exercises, and they also played classical music in the afternoon. This was the beginning of my interest in music.

In my middle school years, I got my first cassette Walkman. Immediately, I started listening to light music in middle school, and rock and roll in high school. I still reference both Dire Straits and Richard Wagner when I test our products.

 

JS: You have stated in other interviews that your interest in personal audio began with listening to a Walkman at age 10. At what point did you realize the wide range of sound quality available from different headphones, and what were your favorite models to listen with before forming your own company and building your own designs? Are there any elements from those favorite models that show up in HIFIMAN products, including your entry-level DEVA model?

FB: In the 1980s and 1990s, the average income in China was only $50 – $200USD per month, so the Walkman was considered an expensive product. Around this time, I started collecting relatively inexpensive earbuds to improve the sound quality of my portable music system.

I noticed that every model of earbud sounded different, and [that] more expensive models didn’t [necessarily] sound better than cheaper options. Some Sony earbuds like the ’80s MDR-E252 model sounded very good, but later models didn’t measure up to the same quality.

Later, in the ’90s, the HD580 and HD565 from Sennheiser marked a real improvement in personal audio. All of these products gave me a clear idea of how to achieve the best sound from an audio product. However, it was the Boston Symphony Orchestra and venues like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall that inspired the direction of our current sound signature.

JS: What were the design and manufacturing hurdles when you started your company with the HE5, a high-end planar headphone, as your first product? Why did you decide to design planar magnetic headphones? What led you to choose wood for the ear cups, and what properties among different woods determined your final choice?

FB: The first HIFIMAN product was [actually] an in-ear earphone called the RE2. To be clear, I didn’t design the HE5. HIFIMAN’s co-founder Mr. He is responsible for introducing planar and electrostatic technology to HIFIMAN’s engineering team.

Initially, we focused on the development of the Jade electrostatic headphones. Later on, [but still in our] earlier years at HIFIMAN, we noticed that electrostatic designs were not practical commercial concepts without [having the benefit of] a dedicated engineering team and lab. Planar, on the other hand, sounds great and is easier to manufacture and sell at reasonable prices.

We chose wood because it produces impressive midrange frequencies, and wood parts don’t require expensive tooling.

JS: HIFIMAN’s HM Series of portable high-resolution music players have become a breakthrough device that have succeeded where products with higher profiles, such as Neil Young’s Pono, failed. Why do you think HIFIMAN’s HM portable players have been more widely accepted? Also, can you explain how the Minibox, balanced, and your other swappable amplifier cards work?

MegaMini high-resolution portable music player.

FB: We were the first manufacturer to bring high-fidelity portable players to market. HIFIMAN products include an audiophile-grade DAC and a sophisticated headphone amplifier in a portable device.

Given that there are so many different headphones on the market, we designed [our[ amplifier module as a standard [configuration that could be tailored using interchangeable plug-in amplifier cards], so that people can easily change amplifier settings to accommodate nearly every [type of] headphones, including high- and low-impedance models, IEMs (in-ear monitors], and so on.

JS: The HIFIMAN EF-6 headphone amplifier was your flagship headphone amplifier and could also serve as a preamp. You have since discontinued it, as well as several tube amps. In what ways was the EF-6 being used as a preamp and will HIFIMAN be coming out with an improved version of it or other tube amps in the future? Are the Shangri-La, Shangri-La Jr. models and Jade II electrostatic headphone/amplifier packages the only high-end amp systems currently being offered?

Shangri-La Jr. electrostatic headphones and amplifier.

FB: We just released the EF6se in China last month. We plan to release it in the West later this year. The EF6se features a significantly improved volume control and overall cosmetics.

JS: You have mentioned in the past that you are very sensitive to cable quality for HIFIMAN headphones and use high-quality “crystalline” silver and copper cables of a proprietary nature. In what areas of the audio spectrum and in what examples of music did you notice a significant enough difference to convince you to use crystalline silver and copper over other types of cables?

FB: Silver has a totally “V-shaped” sound signature [EQ curve], but copper gives better midrange response. However, the sound signature changes significantly according to the structural design changes [of the cable construction].

JS: I was able to audition the Shangri-La, Susvara and Deva models at the 2020 New York CanJam headphones show and was floored by all three. However, although the differences were more readily apparent when listening to acoustic or orchestral music, I was amazed that the $299 Deva came very close to the $6,000 Susvara when listening to rock and R&B music, especially via Bluetooth. What percentage of the Deva headphones’ full audio range can be heard through Bluetooth vs. through a USB-C or its 3.5mm plug cable? This question is about Fang Bian’s personal opinion, not the listed specs.

Sundara headphones, exploded diagram.

FB: The USB input always gives better detail than Bluetooth, because Bluetooth [offers] much less bandwidth than USB. But a 3.5mm cable [also] gives Deva the flexibility to be driven by different headphone amps. Some well-designed headphone amps will get more out of Deva, but its built-in amp beats a lot of the outboard amps on the market.

JS: You have mentioned that Dire Straits’ Alchemy is your favorite record. As that is a live recording, is the reproduction of a live concert hall experience, which you have stated is the goal of HIFIMAN headphone design, your main benchmark for critical testing? What other live recordings would you use to audition a random headphone model from the HIFIMAN assembly line, and why?  Which studio recordings, if any, and why?

FB: I like the analogue version of Alchemy very much. But the digital version sounds too bright. I’d rather listen to “Sultans of Swing” (from the Dire Straits album) when I need to do critical testing. Also, Supertramp’s albums are recorded extremely well.

When listening to classical music, I like The Ring Without Words performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.

HE-R10D headphones.

Other favorites include L’Chaim (To Life): The Ultimate Jewish Music Collection. And, for critical listening of female vocals, I’m a big fan of Jennifer Warnes, Esther Ofarim, Ayako Hosokawa, and many others.

JS: Your selection of HIFIMAN IEMs appear to all be designed with dynamic drivers rather than balanced armature designs. Nelson Tackett of HEAR Technologies shares that preference, citing that balanced armature technology has too many moving parts to properly reproduce each frequency range, and is more prone to malfunction. Why does HIFIMAN primarily use dynamic driver technology in its IEMs? Also, are there any plans to design an IEM for the professional performing musician in the future?

FB: The HIFIMAN team developed a powerful technology called “Topology Diaphragm,” that allows us to make great-sounding, ultra-small dynamic drivers. [Topology Diaphragm technology involves coating the diaphragm with nanoparticles that are distributed in distinct geometric patterns. By varying the patterns and the compound and its thickness, the audio performance of the diaphragm can be controlled. – Ed.] We prefer dynamic drivers over armature designs because dynamic drivers sound more lifelike and authentic [compared] to other options.

For now, there aren’t plans to design products for the pro market. Perhaps we will take a closer look at the pro market at another time.

JS: The HIFIMAN website also offers dynamic headphones. Is this to meet a market need or a price point, or do you just want to offer different sonic flavors to listeners?

FB: We applied our Topology Diaphragm technology to full-size headphones with great results; that’s the HE-R10D closed-back headphone. It sounds great and compares well to our planar models at similar prices.

JS: The X100 Desktop Audio System is the only HIFIMAN product that uses speakers. (The X100 includes two speakers, a subwoofer and a power amplifier.) Are there any plans for HIFIMAN speakers in the future?

On another note, what components comprise Fang Bian’s personal hi-fi system and would any of those elements play a part in the design of a HIFIMAN speaker?

FB: The X100 is a good [first] speaker product [for us].  I currently use TAD Laboratories’ Compact Reference One [loudspeakers], and some hand-built speakers from our team. But we are not yet prepared to bring our speakers to market.

JS: What are some other things that you think set HIFIMAN apart from other manufacturers?

FB: Our mission is to create great-sounding products that stand out and have the potential to change the game. We are not interested in repeating ourselves for the sake of increasing sales.

JS: How has the pandemic affected HIFIMAN’s business and its customers? Have any products in particular become more in demand, and has manufacturing become affected due to sourcing components from China?

FB: The demand for full-size headphones increased during the pandemic because people stayed at home and needed to listen to music, but without intruding on others in the household.

So far, our business is unaffected by a trade war, but shipping fees and the prices of chips are becoming problems.

JS: What other product areas or plans are in store for HIFIMAN going forward?

FB: We will continue to concentrate on personal audio and will make further inroads in the headphones-for-business category in the near future.

HE400se headphones.

Header image: Dr. Fang Bian of HIFIMAN.

 

 

“Where?”

She pointed to the opposite side of the hall. “Over there.” I couldn’t read the first line let alone the third one.

“Uhh, better put these on.” I grabbed my glasses and read the third line.

“OK, look inside this box and tell me which squares are darker.” This is more my kind of test. I told her which squares were dark including two at which I guessed.

“You’re going to have to wear glasses while driving,” she said in a voice normally reserved for religious recitations. “Please go over to the camera line and have your picture taken!”

That I could handle. I waited in line and hoped I didn’t look too ragged after an afternoon on the bike.

“Next!” hollered the clerk above the din. He took my photo before I had time to pull a credible smile.

“Would you take it again?” I asked.

“This one is fine, NEXT!”

Turned out to be one of those smiles you see in prom photos when the preferred date wasn’t available.

I went back to wicket 21 as instructed and waited in line again. By now, it was four minutes till 5 PM.

“OK,” she said, “You’re done. Your new license will come in the mail.”

“That’s it?” I responded reflexively, careful to avoid any reference to “written test.”

“Yup, you’re done.”

I walked out of there like OJ at his murder trial. Choosing the last appointment of the day had paid off.

“How’d you do, Hon?” My wife asked when I got back home,

“Didn’t get any wrong,” I truthfully boasted.

“Good for you!” she exclaimed. “I got two wrong on my last driver’s test.”

She won’t know the rest of the story ‘till she reads this article.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Beyond My Ken.

I wonder if a lot of Copper readers are record collectors. Well, I suppose that’s like asking if dogs like bones.

Record collecting can be fun or frustrating, cheap or expensive. Finding a mint original copy of an RCA Living Stereo Reiner Scheherazade or Meet the Beatles at a garage sale for 50 cents – an adrenaline rush. Going to Capital Audio Fest and seeing that rare Elektra Records copy of Methuselah for $100 – more disappointing than being rejected for a high school date.

My first LP records were the ones my parents bought for me as a child. Tom Thumb, The Chipmunk Songbook, Quick Draw McGraw. Growing up, I’d request an album for my birthdays or Hanukkah/Christmas – Hot Rats, Electric Ladyland, many others. The first album I bought with my own money was Golden Greats by The Ventures. Records became prized possessions, objects of desire, gateways into an exotic world of rock and later jazz, pop and classical music. I’d read the liner notes and look at the pictures over and over again.

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When attending the State University of New York at Albany I would try to buy an album a week no matter how much or little money I had (usually the latter), from Just-A-Song or the Last Vestige Music Shop, run by Jim Furlong, the first truly fanatical record collector I’d ever met. After graduation I bought a couple of albums a month, often waiting until E.J. Korvette had an All-Label Sale. But I hadn’t been bitten by the record collecting bug. Yet.

 

You know where to find records. When I started buying records in the 1960s, we’d go to department stores or Sam Goody, and then, independent record stores, which were often combination record stores and head shops. (How quaint that term sounds now.) Later, in addition to garage sales I started combing thrift shops and antique stores. But nothing could prepare me for the sensory overload of…

Record collectors’ conventions. Ecstasy under the roof of a VFW hall! Thousands of records! Dozens of vendors! Buy one for $5, three for $10! A vinyl junkie’s dream. I was in my mid-20s when I discovered and attended my first, and walked out with more than 100 albums. You might pay anything from a buck to a crazy-expensive price, but the odds of finding what you want, and the smorgasbord of vinyl, make these conventions flame to us vinyl moths.

Perhaps you’ve paid the extra fee for early admission. Or set up a table as a dealer, only to roam the convention and spend more on buying records than you sold at your table.

Of course nowadays the internet, online retailers and eBay (sadly, Reverb LP is no more) make looking for records almost effortless, but for that adrenaline rush, there’s nothing like shopping for physical media – variable ratio and variable interval reinforcement will get you every time.

You make friends with fellow record collectors. Then you get really annoyed when you see them show up at a garage sale before you do.

Then really, really annoyed when you see them walking away with a stack of records and a big grin. In retaliation, you get into the habit of looking up garage sales on Craigslist and contacting the seller before the sale, asking for a private showing. Or, parking your car at the garage sale an hour before it starts in the hopes of being the first one in. And getting monumentally irritated when you see a fellow collector sitting in their car down the street.

You go to a garage sale or a thrift store, start flipping through the records and immediately know they’ve been picked over. No RCA Living Stereo or Mercury Living Presence or Verve V6 or Impulse or Blue Note jazz albums? Yep, someone like you has already vacuumed them up. So, you make the rounds of the local thrifts way more than what would be considered psychologically healthy, in the hopes of being the first when a new batch of old records hits the stacks. When that happens, and it does, it’s like pulling a full house on a video poker machine while killing time at CES. But I digress.

Do I even need to say this? You own a record collecting machine.

(Oops! I meant to say “record cleaning machine.” Thanks Josh Waller for pointing out my brain freeze in the Comments below. Although I’ve seen people comb through record racks with machine-like speed.) 

You read Steve Hoffman’s forum.

You still own the first record you ever bought. If not, you’ve purchased a replacement.

You’ve wanted a record. Really badly. Passed it up. More than once. Then, looked for it on eBay and online, five, 10, 20 times. Maybe even put it in your cart, gone through the whole checkout process and then decided at the last minute that it was too expensive or something. Then a day or a week or a month later, perhaps on a late-night had-one-drink-too-many buying binge or after a bad day at the home office, when you’ve finally convinced yourself that you deserve the darn thing after all the stress you’ve been through, you buy the record.

Hard-core record collector bonus points option: after it arrives, you never play it.

Then you immediately start the process again for the next record you have to have.

To be continued…

Header image: Authentic Music From Another Planet, one of the author’s most prized records. According to the liner notes, a man from Saturn played this music for Howard Menger “on a Saturnian instrument very much like our piano.” Menger then transcribed and recorded it “to bring this music to the attention of the people here on Earth.”

 

On the road there was a continuing and vexing problem. On numerous occasions, we would receive the wrong lighting and sound equipment than what was required and specified in the signed contract rider. The concert promoter had to provide specific lights and sound and certain musical equipment, but it was not happening. About half the shows were college dates that were run by student college committees that tended to have scant experience. The other half were handled by independent promoters. The cast and crew were getting rightfully upset with these frequent oversights.

An advance man was thought to be the answer. Now that the new manager was involved and handling the business, Bruce had less work at the office. It was decided that Bruce would become Superstar’s road manager. He was the more experienced of the two of us, and for more than that one reason the decision was made and I would become the advance man. In hindsight we both took a step down.

I thought being an advance man was going to be a drag but immediately, it worked! My initial feelings turned out to be wrong. I took to the work and I enjoyed being on my own. I would call the promoters a few days before the concert to review our rider requirements and then book an appointment to meet at the facility the day before the show. Now the promoters knew I was coming in early and that we were serious about our rider. That put them on notice and gave them a few days to get their act together.

The office supplied me with an American Express authorized rep card, and that eliminated the need for expense reports. I would always rent a full-size Hertz car and since I did not have passengers, I could get some cool rides. Mustangs, GTOs; even the Plymouth Duster (based on the lowly budget Plymouth Valiant) had a sports model. Many times, these cars had less than one thousand miles on them, so they were effectively new cars.

There were times in the quiet early morning hours before the sun came up that I would be racing through the small towns of America. It seemed as if I was the only one awake. It was a unique experience for me.

Early in the tour we had a date in Lewiston, Maine. I drove into town and there was a river alongside the road. The river had massive amounts of yellowish foam floating down; it seemed like a giant washing machine had exploded. It was all over the shoreline and gobs of it were moving down the river. I had witnessed air pollution with its brown haze hanging over most every city in America, but this? I have never seen anything like it. When I checked into my hotel, I asked the front desk people, “what was that?” They told me it was pollution from a printing plant and a massive lumber yard upstream. “How can that be allowed to exist?” I asked. The front desk guy said, “If you find out, clue me in because no one around here knows why. We just know where it comes from.”

 

At a good hotel in San Antonio, we stumbled into comedian Mort Sahl having breakfast and we joined him. He was genuinely nice, asking the cast members questions; he smiled often and was quite charming. We spent at least a month zigzagging around Texas. We did about 24 dates and there were protesters at a few of them. At the time some Christian groups were upset by Jesus Christ Superstar. Later they embraced it. When we were in Dallas (the last Texas date) we were all in the hotel lobby and a bunch of Dallas Cowboys were also there, waiting to board their bus to practice. Bruce got ahold of one of the big football players and set up a prank, without my knowledge. This tremendous lineman, probably 350 pounds and about six foot eight comes over to me and starts asking me questions. “Who are you? Why the long hair and hippie looks?” I start to tell him, and he seems to get annoyed. I am like, what the? Then he laughs and Bruce steps over and this football player tells me it was Bruce’s idea. “Ha ha,” I said, while glaring at Bruce – and then we all laughed.

 

Christmas is coming up and we have 18 days off for the holidays. I decide to go to London for five days and four nights. I ask Susan to come with, but she is not interested. John Grant, our outrageous and flamboyant six foot five, 280-pound travel agent books me a hotel near the Kensington Market (as requested). He gets me a ticket on Pan American, round-trip JFK to Heathrow and back for a fare of 200 bucks.

The London weather is good. I settle in and head out for a walk. I am trying to stay awake till nighttime to minimize jet lag; it kinda worked. Next morning, I call Marty Kristian of the folk-rock band the New Seekers and arrange to have dinner the next night. I had previously toured with them for Elektra Records in the States. We had dinner and it was nice to see him.

In London at lunchtime, if the restaurant takes orders at the counter (without having waitresses), it is customary to take any open seat, even if other diners are already at that table. I figure this as a way for me to meet new people. I go into a lunch spot that is made from a couple of old converted train cars, and with my food on my tray I survey the place, looking for an open seat, preferably at a table with cool people. As luck would have it, I see three people who fit the description. They are two long-haired guys with a gal, all in their early twenties. I ask to sit in the open seat, and they say sure, have a seat. I join ’em and as soon as I open my mouth, they know I am a Yank. We are chatting and one of the guys tells me there is a party the next night and I was welcome to come.

It was walkable from my hotel. It was on the ground floor of a big townhouse and I was welcomed in. There was plenty of beer and the music was loud. The girls kept on yelling, “play Rod!” (meaning, Rod Stewart), and they did. We danced till 1:00 in the morning. Then I took a couple of days shopping for hip clothing and boots. My four nights were up and it was time to get back on the pond hopper and fly home.

Bruce and I were the founders of Superstar (and before that, involved with the Peace Parade show which itself evolved from the Broadway cast of Hair), But, gone were the days of Bruce and me paying ourselves handsomely out of the profits. The situation settled down, and with the new management, it came down to Bruce and me being on salary. Superstar toured for over a year until the Broadway show Jesus Christ Superstar opened.

We had a good run. Bruce and I are still tight. We frequently talk of those good times.

Header image: the cast of Superstar, The Original American Touring Company.

 

One, the sub has been specifically designed from the ground up to handle only bass frequencies, with good bass extension and without struggling to do so. Two, the subwoofer typically has a built-in power amplifier that is optimized to the driver. Three, a subwoofer can be placed very specifically in the room. Four, it has dedicated controls for gain (volume) crossover frequency and phase. Five, in a home theatre system it specifically reproduces the LFE (low-frequency effects) channel, which can result in a cleaner overall sound. But most of all, a dedicated subwoofer can provide an omnipresent and enveloping low-frequency effect, and when properly dialed in, can magically disappear in its support of a more realistic soundstage. For those who don’t think they need a subwoofer in their stereo audio system, consider the fact that with certain speakers and rooms it may in fact revolutionize an already good-sounding system into something awesome.

When you think about the bass amplifiers used in a recording of a band you enjoy listening to, or if you’ve seen them live, likely the bass player was either using a cabinet with a 15- or 18-inch speaker, or multiple 10-, 12-, and 15-inch drivers. That’s a lot of moving air. And live, the bass guitar is also run through the PA system. That’s really a lot of moving air. Then we have the drummer’s kick drum and tom toms and maybe low frequencies from the synth players. Many if not most speakers just simply do not reproduce the bass frequencies at anywhere near 20 Hz, generally considered the lowest frequency of human hearing. Orchestral music also has a lot of low-frequency content.

In the same way that the musicians and engineers who created the music have controlled what bass you hear on a recording, you too can control the bass response in your room. With a good quality subwoofer or multiple subs, you can use the controls they are equipped with and take back control of the steering wheel in your musical journey.

In a coming issue, we’ll give tips on setting up and placing subwoofers in the effort to maximize your listening pleasure. You may be surprised at how simple it can be to get greatly improved results without spending much time or money. Becoming submissive to the merits of bass management can be empowering.

Header image: The REL T/9i, subwoofer royalty!

Record producer to the stars and Hollywood film composer C.J. Vanston has more talents than seems humanly possible. Not only is he a go-to record producer and first-call film composer, he plays keys, drums, bass, accordion and more. He has worked with Prince, Jeff Beck, Celine Dion, Spinal Tap, Richard Marx, Steve Lukather, Tina Turner and Joseph Williams to name a few. In Part One of this interview I asked for insights into his career. Part Two will look at the C.J. Vanston approach on how to mix music – the right way.

 

 

 

Russ Welton: You have worked with some of the most talented musicians on the planet. Tell us about some memories where there has been extra special musical collaborative chemistry.

C.J. Vanston: Well, Joe Cocker comes to mind immediately. We had a link right from the beginning in the studio, and it transferred to [the] stage. We fed off of each other’s energy in a very big way. Another was working with Tina Turner on the movie What’s Love Got to Do with It. We recreated a bunch of her early hits, and one of them was “Proud Mary.” I’ll be honest and tell you I never liked that song, mostly because I had to play it [over and over again] in cover bands. Well, we started playing it and when she came in…WHAM…electricity. I turned to look at her – she was in the booth literally six feet from me – and she was gyrating and belting out the chorus…and I finally “got” the song.

As far as musicians, I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last 35 years working with the greatest players on planet Earth. Luke [Steve Lukather of Toto and noted session musician] and I have always had an almost Siamese Twins thing going on; I have the same thing with Jeff “Skunk” Baxter [Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers and others], Jim Keltner and Lee Sklar [See our Copper article in Issue 114]. Too many great players to list, really. I’ve been thinking of writing them all down for my website.

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, C.J. Vanston and Michael McDonald.

RW: Could you tell us about your mentoring from singer/songwriter Richard Marx’s father, Dick Marx?

CJV: I moved to Chicago in the early ’80s with the goal of becoming a studio musician. Dick Marx was the undisputed king of jingle producers there and had his own studio. I made a keyboard demo tape and loaded my bike up with about a hundred cassettes.

Then, I sat in front of Universal Recording for many weeks and months and handed the tapes out. The manager, Foote Kirkpatrick, finally came out and said, “you can’t just sit here every day, you’re taking up space in the client waiting room.” So, I gathered up my stuff with a defeated look on my face…and she said, “OK, what are you handing out?” I told her I was a keyboardist and that my dream was to be a session player, and that this was my demo.

“Give me one.”

So, I gave her a tape. A few weeks later, my phone rang, and it was the head of one of the biggest jingle production companies in Chicago. They hired me for my first session because of Foote, and because of that tape. In about six months I was the first-call keyboard player in Chicago. I still have a couple of copies of that tape somewhere…

After that I started hanging out in the lobby of the studio that Dick worked out of, Garrett Sound. The engineer, Garry Elghammer, was nice enough to let me sit on the couch in the control room a few times, and I ended up running for sandwiches for the A-list players who worked for Dick. Sitting on the other side of the glass was torture. I wanted to be a session player. I [eventually] started chatting with some of the players and told them, “I’m gonna be playing with you someday.” I was 22 and looked 15, and they kind of said, “yeah kid…that’s cute.”

I finally got a tape into Dick Marx’s hands, and he actually listened to it and hired me for a session. I could [sight] read just about anything already at that age, but I was still super nervous. I played well – fear and panic are great motivators – and thought I had nailed the date. Afterwards, Dick walked up, put his arm around me and said, “kid, you sucked today. But you’re gonna be great and I’m gonna stick with you.” He did, and I ended up being his keyboard player for the next decade.

Dick could be super tough – he didn’t stand for any bullsh*t, like being late. And he was a stickler for the right notes and feel. Sometimes he’d stop a session and say, “keyboard player! Measure 29! One-two-three-four!” I’d have to play my part solo in front of the entire band or orchestra. You learn to get good from this kind of pressure or you’re out the door.

I remember pulling up to Capitol Records a few years ago for a really big session and feeling some butterflies in my stomach. As the gate opened up, I said to myself, “Hey…I worked for Dick Marx, this is nothin’!” I learned to crave the red light, to raise up another level when the “Record” light was on.

RW: How did your approach to the Toto albums you played on adapt to the different line-ups of musicians they had as their recording career progressed?

CJV: No different approach. The different players all have their personalities, yes, but the band and their sound are the top of the pyramid. Any player who is qualified enough to play with Toto is top, top shelf pro, and they get what this amazing band of virtuosos is all about. I have known a lot of great musicians in my life, but the studio cats are on another level.

C.J. with David Paich (Toto), Steve Lukather (Toto), Tal Wilkenfeld and Joseph Williams (Toto).

RW: Luke enjoys having big production values on his albums. As a producer, do you get a brief on what to do? How do you accommodate the artist’s musical requirements and vocal personality, for example?

CJV: We come from the same school of what we grew up listening to and what we like. We both love a rich soundscape with layers and atmospheres. We never once discussed it [in particular]. The people who don’t like big productions are usually the ones who have to pay for them. I had a record company executive say to me once, “Hey mate, I just did a record with a band…five guys…they went out in a room and played live, did an album in two days.” Like that was supposed to impress me. I said, “You don’t think I can make five phone calls and have five of the best musicians in the world here in an hour? You don’t think we know how to do that? Name me a great pop or rock album in the last forty years that was done that way. It wasn’t Sgt. Pepper…or Thriller…or The Dark Side of the Moon…or Rumours…those records took months and years to make.”

Here’s a Toto video with C.J. on synthesizer:

 

 

 

There is an art to making a record that is way different than five guys jamming in the studio. And if having many layers makes it “overproduction,” then the worst offender in history was Beethoven. He needed 90 players to perform his “overproduced” music. Hogwash.

RW: Do you recall your first hi-fi system and what it was?

CJV: Yes, of course – it was a fold-down turntable with hinged speakers that you could detach. I would put the speakers at each end of my dresser. I then found a chair that I could back into the dresser, so I could lean back on a pillow so each speaker was playing into each ear. Super stereo image! I learned so much about production this way. Grew up with a lot of mono records, but later on, artists like Neil Diamond and Jim Croce started making really well-produced records with doubled acoustic guitars [and so on]. That really opened my ears up for what followed, all those great records by Elton John, the Who, the Doobie Brothers, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles…

Part Two will appear in Issue 138.

Musician, engineer, producer,  professor of 18^th Century English literature?!

You may not be familiar with the name Patrick Gleeson, but he has quite a résumé. He ditched a career as a college instructor to become an electronic music pioneer in the late 1960s and 1970s. He created a synthesized version of Gustav Holst’s The Planets that was nominated for a Grammy, composed soundtrack music for television and independent films, ran a recording studio in San Francisco (Different Fur Trading Company), and was a member of Herbie Hancock’s band. Gleeson also recorded synthesizer performances of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and the music from Star Wars, along with collaborations with other jazz and electronic music artists.

Part One of this interview appeared in Issue 131 with Part Two in Issue 132.

Rich Isaacs: Who were the other Grammy nominees for the Best Engineered Album, Classical the year you were nominated?

Patrick Gleeson: I don’t know the other nominees who didn’t win, but the winner had figured out a way to extract the piano part of an old recording of a Gershwin piece and surrounded it with a new recording. 1976 sounds right to me. [It was 1976, for Beyond the Sun: An Electronic Portrait of Holst’s The Planets – Ed.]

 

RI: You mentioned working with  (Santana drummer) Michael Shrieve and (Miles Davis saxophonist) Sam Morrison earlier. Have you done any recordings yet?

PG: Oh, yeah, a lot, but the whole situation has been so messed up. We did a live performance that we recorded with a professional engineer in Seattle, a great performance. Since then, I’ve moved the music forward, so we need to have new recordings. We’ve been trying to do that in three different studios, and it’s really almost hopeless because you can’t react in real time to what the other person is doing [because of the latency inherent in recording remotely]. I think at this point, I’m ready to put that on hold until the coronavirus is over. Just by chance, this very morning, KamranV called me – an interesting, interesting man. I just love being around people who are a whole lot smarter than me, and he’s certainly one of them! He started out as, I think, the chief technical officer for maybe Yahoo. He left there early with a whole pile of money in his early 20s, and at that point, he just decided he could do what he wanted. He was the producer of the first Moogfest. Since then, he’s bought this huge, huge building in downtown LA and turned it into a music center with recording studios, rehearsal studios, and all kinds of things that are access points for musicians.

What he’s done with his own time – this guy is seriously smart – he’s developed a means by which you can take a stereo turntable, and with the software and hardware that he has been able to package at a very low price, under $300, you can turn that into a quadraphonic system. I imagine you probably have to put in a different [stylus], but I’m not sure about that.

RI: Yes, when they were doing the SQ and the QS quad formats back in the ’70s, a different stylus was required to play back quadraphonic records because the stylus had to be able reproduce much higher frequencies than what stereo recordings required – around 30 kilohertz.

PG: Well, what he’s done, he now has this package available. You can buy the system itself to make the recordings. You can buy what you need to cut your own vinyl for I think about $2,000.

RI: He’s not talking about converting existing stereo recordings into quadraphonic?

PG: No, he’s talking about cutting quadrophonic recordings. In fact, he has produced a record of Suzanne Ciani’s that’s in quad. The guy is not into the money so the release format is somewhere between a little bit bratty, and poignant. You pay a little under $300, and there are slightly under 300 releases of this album forever, and your album includes the vinyl and the hardware and software you need to turn this into a quadraphonic release into four different speakers. He’s a delightful guy, one of these guys that seems to be very happy about life. We’re going to do a quad album. He had a busy schedule, he was in Europe for a while, but he’s ready to work on our album. So I’m going to put the trio album with Michael and Sam on hold until the virus is over – it’ll be so much better, I would love to record it at Different Fur. I’m going to start the quad album with KamranV. And the piece you heard this morning is one of the pieces.

RI: About the trio with Michael and Sam, do you have any other musicians involved?

PG: You never know, but at this point, we’re thinking just a trio. And when we did it in Seattle, people loved it. It was really great. It was one long set with a 20-minute break, and when we came back for the second half of the evening, they stood up and applauded after every piece. I’d never seen that before. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a performing band, but if you have, you can kinda tell how well your music went over by how long people hang around afterwards. If they really love it, they just stay on forever. And with this music, I was annoyed at several different venues because the promoter was saying, “we really have to close up now,” [but] we didn’t mind sticking around. People want a piece of you in that experience. Of course, they’ve had it and it’s not reproducible.

 

RI: How did Devo end up at your studio?

PG: (Independent filmmaker) Bruce Cotter. I used to go down with Bruce and watch [Devo] at the Mabuhay Gardens [in San Francisco]. Bruce became a very close friend of mine and kind of an art guru. I think Bruce understood who I was musically 10 years before I did, and he was a very eccentric man. [Which is] like saying, “King Kong was large.” He would come up and say, “Let’s hear what you’re doing.” And he would just sit there and listen. One time, he said, “I want to ask you a question: Why does the music that you’re playing now and the music you make for my movies, why doesn’t any of your other music sound like that?” Well, he was ten years ahead of me: It all should’ve sounded like that. But at the time, I think I lacked the confidence to just venture off into that kind of weirdness. In a way, he was a guiding light for me.

RI: I recorded those two Devo shows on a reel-to-reel. I can actually lay claim to being the engineer and producer of the first full Devo album, because somebody to whom I gave a copy bootlegged it. It was a direct mono feed from the board – I had asked their permission and they said “yeah.” So in August and September of 1977, I was recording those shows at the Mabuhay.

PG: You put one over on Devo. They kinda put one over on me. I produced two of the songs on one of their albums, but they didn’t give me credit. We didn’t actually ever file suit, but my lawyer sent them a letter of advice, and they finally paid me I think $10,000, but claimed they couldn’t give me credit because the album had already been released. It just wasn’t worth going through suing them.

RI: It was funny the way I found out about the bootleg. I was managing the store Aquarius Records in the middle of ’77 during the whole punk thing, so I got to know some of the KSAN DJs. In fact I ended up helping Norman Davis on his import music show for several months. Sean Donohue called me up one day and said, “Hey, I just wanted to congratulate the producer of the first Devo album.” I went, “What the hell are you talking about?” He said, “Didn’t you hear? Your recording’s been bootlegged.” And I thought, “They’re gonna kill me!” They had my name and address – I had been totally upfront. But I was just naïve about giving people copies of it. People saw me recording at the show and they knew where I worked. They would come in and ask for a copy of it, and I’d say sure. I actually have two different bootleg LP pressings that are sourced from my original recordings. Of course, I have the reel-to-reel masters and those bootlegs were done from cassette dubs, but it was still such a clean feed that it sounds pretty good.

PG: For some reason or other, mono sounds fine for punk. They weren’t exactly punk, but they were punk-ish, punk adjacent.

RI: Who were some of your biggest influences?

PG: The three people in my life who were most influential musically were Herbie Hancock, Gil Evans, and Bruce. I was so lucky to have those three guys take enough of an interest in what I was doing to help me out. They were amazing! Herbie, in two years on the road, probably made five comments or suggestions – maybe five – but he led by example. I learned from him every single night. And the most important lesson I learned from Herbie is: the only thing that matters is how well you listen to everybody else. Especially in improvisation. Gil said the same thing.

The first night I ever played live with Herbie was at the Village Vanguard, and guess who was in the audience? Gil Evans and his best friend, Miles Davis. I literally almost crapped my pants. There was a period of about 20 minutes where I was thinking, “Oh, God, I hope I don’t disgrace myself.” I was so flustered and scared. Then Gil invited me back to his pad in Westbeth (www.westbeth.org), which was this beautiful sort of special housing unit for artists only that New York has. He would sit down and use a little cassette recorder to record the Village Vanguard evenings, and then he’d have me come back the next day and we’d listen to them together. And that was like five master classes in a row.

We would listen together and every once in a while he would just say something. One thing I remember so clearly. I was in real trouble [musically], and Gil heard it. He stopped the recorder and he said, “So what’s going on there?” I said, “I couldn’t think of a thing to play. I didn’t know what to play next.” Gil said to me, “Yeah, that happens to me a lot. But you know what I find? When that happens, I just put my hands in my lap and listen, and pretty soon I find that I’m playing again.” If that isn’t incredibly valuable advice! And bigger than what he said, was what he meant: that listening is more important than chops, more important than anything. Sometimes I hear very young, very talented musicians who are, understandably, just wild about their chops. It’s all about their chops. That’s like stage two [in your musical development], but there are more than two stages.

 

RI: There were a couple of your albums that I was listening to for the first time over the last few days, and I was really interested in the album Slide. I noticed that you had musicians from Group 87, the Yellowjackets, and (Kronos Quartet cellist) Joan Jeanrenaud on there – was she your wife at the time?

 

PG: Yes.

RI: Was there anyone else? It seems like there was some percussion.

PG: The percussion was me. There was just Marc Russo and Joan and Peter Maunu.

RI: Related to that, on the Bennie Maupin album, Driving While Black, there was quite a mix of electronic percussion and acoustic drums, and I was wondering if you were involved in the programming of the electronic stuff.

PG: Yes, it was just Bennie and me. The way that album was put together…I had already produced one or two albums for him, and then we’d been in the band together and had played on other records by other people. So I really understood Bennie. I deeply understand where he’s coming from musically, to the extent that I’m able to understand anything – I’m limited, of course. I’m deeply sympathetic to what he’s doing. So what I did with that album was, we talked about where we were going to go. I sent him some very, very early versions of every tune – one of which he rejected. He said it was just way too close to something from a Miles album. He was undoubtedly right: I’ve been stealing from Miles all my life.

 

Then I just completed the whole album – quote “completed” unquote the whole album – and Benny came over to my house and studio. I said, “Do you want to listen to what we’re going to be recording?” and he said, “Nah, let’s just start it.” So what you hear is a combination of the first take, second take, and the third take – but mostly, I would say, 60 to 70 percent the first take, maybe five percent I took from the third take. And this is the first time he’s heard the music, he doesn’t know where it’s going – he’s improvising. We did it in, I think, two afternoons. And after he left, I went back and pared down what I was doing and redid some stuff to match what he was doing. I’ve always found that a very friendly way of coming to a recording. If you’re going to have to do a synthesized orchestration for the guys to know where you’re going, then be very, very willing to change that orchestration drastically to match what they’re doing. If you do it right, it sounds like it was all recorded together. Slide was done that way.

RI: Was it just the two of you?

PG: Yes.

RI: So you did the drums and the electronic drums?

PG: Yes, but they’re all electric.

RI: But it sounded in places like some of it was acoustic.

PG: They were originally acoustic samples.

RI: But it’s all done through programming?

PG: Yeah.

RI: Arthur Brown (of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown) was one of the very first recording artists to use a drum machine with his band Kingdom Come (not the “hair metal” band of the 80s) – it was the Ace Tone Rhythm Ace drum machine, and it was a precursor to the Roland and Linn drum machines. Arthur tells a story about one gig at the Marquee Club where damp conditions caused it to misfire, and they had to follow it for 75 minutes. So do you have some weird stories like that to tell?

PG: I did a concert with a West Coast orchestra. I had two double-manual Prophet 10 synthesizers. And one of them, after a certain number of minutes, overheated and in the middle of this live orchestral performance, the second Prophet 10 began doing random sequencing. The conductor and orchestra stopped, and I just turned that machine off, and we started the piece over again.

RI: Who are some of the people you have most enjoyed working with?

PG: Well, Herbie, of course. Highest on the list, I suppose. Probably Lenny White’s high up on that list. Bennie Maupin. All the people I played with on Slide are certainly people I enjoyed working with. Those are the ones that first come to mind.

RI: You wrote in your bio that you told yourself you’d stop scoring films when it stopped scaring you. What was it about doing soundtracks that was frightening?

PG: Number one, I’d never done a soundtrack in my life, and suddenly I’m now hired to do a network series. I’d never scored to image in my life, except avant-garde stuff with Bruce. So I’m not competent. I may be talented, I may have a potential, but it’s not yet been realized, and I’ve got four days to realize it.

RI: What was that TV series?

PG: I can’t think of the name of it now. It was a story line of four little girls living with this man who’s their guardian, in this big house. One is Black – I can’t remember her name but she went on to be a pretty well-known actress – and one I think was maybe Latin or Asian. It was a comedy and supposed to be about the 1950s. I got my first introduction to what TV scoring was going to be about when they called me in after the third episode. J. Peter Robinson was doing the series before that, and he started getting feature offers. So Peter called the producer, Len Hill, and said, “I’ll do the next couple of shows for you, but then I want to move on.” And Len, being the a-hole he was, said, “I’m going to be very disappointed in you unless you can find me someone of similar caliber.”

Peter gave three of us (potential scorers) examples of what he was doing with the show and had us submit tapes, asking us basically to do something that was a rip-off. And I got the gig. The producer said, “now, Pat, what you’re doing is very nice, but it’s not exactly what we need. We need an underscore – what you’re doing is more like an overscore.” He also said: “just so we get off on a premise we both agree on: you’re coming in hard on all these cues. Start every cue with like a two- or three-second drift into the cue.” Then another thing happened that got us off to a rather strange start – when we talked about [what the score needed], he said, “it’s ‘50s rock-n-roll high school.” I said, “oh, perfect! Chuck Berry!” He said, “yeah, Chuck Berry – that’d be great!” Well, every time he hears a Chuck Berry tune [in the score], the guy craps! Way too energetic. Took up way too much audio space. So it turned out just to be another dreary TV sitcom. But it paid $10,000 a week to start. At one point, I was making $25,000 a week.

PG: I can see why, in your bio, you called it “stupid money.”

RI: And there were repercussions to that that went on and on. What happened was, the colleges – may they roast in hell – looked at what was happening in the TV industry and realized here was a great new opportunity to enroll students in film-scoring programs. First there was just Columbia, UCLA and USC – and they had all very good instructors and very good programs. But within two or three years after [the colleges] realized what the f*ck was going on, and particularly when you could do all this with synthesizers, [you’d see] film programs at Podunk U by a guy who had once scored a local McDonald’s commercial. It was just incredible.

And then, the next thing that happened in my life – this is the mid-‘80s – I was getting calls from young guys, it was all guys at that time, [and the conversations would go something like this]:

“Mr. Gleeson, I want to get some advice from you. I’ve graduated from (wherever) and I’ve been out of school for over a year and I’ve never gotten a gig.”

“Yes, it’s tough to get started.”

“Now I do have an opportunity, but I don’t know whether or not to take it.”

“I’m sure, whatever it is, you should take it.”

“They’re willing to have me score (something for television), but they don’t want to pay anything for it.”

I construed that as meaning very low pay, and I responded with that understanding until [the guy would get] very upset with me.

“No, you don’t understand. They don’t want to pay me anything. They say it will be good for my bio.”

“That’s just terrible, but at least you’ll get the writer’s share of publishing.”

“They’re taking that, too.”

So that’s what happened because guys like me, and J. Peter Robinson, and Cory Lerios from Pablo Cruise – we all got onto the Synclavier [an early digital synthesizer – Ed.] early. Of course, you had to have money, because the Synclavier was so expensive – which was very nice for all of us because it limited the number of people [who had access to the instrument]. Then it almost became de rigueur for a few years that to score a network series, you had to do it with the Synclavier, if you weren’t doing it with a live orchestra.

It was such a good thing that we ruined it for ourselves. When I started, there were maybe 250 people worldwide doing what we were doing.  Supply and demand then created a glut of composers. I now know a guy who’s won a couple Emmys, and he’s working for about $4,000 a week, which is just stupid. There are expenses that come with that – you’re buying new equipment and new software. So $4,000 a week doesn’t leave a lot of profit.

 

RI: Because Copper magazine is produced with audio and music enthusiasts in mind, we’re always interested in hearing about what sound systems musicians have, although it seems like an awful lot of musicians do not seem to care about really high-end reproduction at home. I’m wondering where you stand on that.

PG: In my studio, I have the medium-sized PMC monitor speakers, which are now ridiculously expensive. I think the ones I have now sell for $11,000 a pair. I didn’t pay that much for them. When I got mine 17 years ago, I think they were $5,600 a pair. I have Bryston amps [and] now that I’m going quad, I just acquired a couple of nice medium-sized Hafler [amps]. Downstairs – you would just scoff – we have a little disc player/music system, and you can plug your iPhone into the back of it. It’s a little box about 14 inches wide and 10 inches deep with built-in speakers.

My wife Charmaine listens to music in the house more than I do. I find it difficult to do anything else when I’m listening to music, and vice versa. I think that started to happen when I was with Herbie. When I first joined [his band], I was humiliated to discover about myself that I would space out, having little fantasies of this and that while on the bandstand. When you do that with a band like Herbie’s, you’re lost. So, quickly, I disciplined myself.

Then I discovered that the reverse was [also] true. Billy Hart was the drummer in Herbie’s band, an amazing guy with a strange, wonderful sense of humor. Once Billy and I were staying on the tenth floor of a hotel together. We got into the elevator and Billy started talking to me. At the ground floor he said, “You haven’t heard a word I said.” They were playing Muzak in the elevator and one of the violins was out of tune, and that’s all I heard for 10 floors all the way down.

Courtesy of Paul's Posts reader Joseph Pickel: “My grandmother worked for Victor Talking Machines in Camden, New Jersey. Throughout the years, she had saved a few ads and I thought you might appreciate the enclosed from 1913.” We certainly do.

Pioneer Personna S-99V audio system, 1980s? Is that a real ribbon tweeter? I Googled it and only got information on razor blades.

"Stereo at it's upright best." Well, maybe. The Mitsubishi InterPlay X-10 audio system, circa 1980s.

"A modern summer home," according to this 1963 ad, complete with Motorola audio system. Summertime, and the livin' is easy.

 

In the very early days of magnetic recording, DC bias was used, which was not ideal for high-fidelity recording, but was necessary to linearize the medium, since one of its inherent limitations is magnetic hysteresis. In plain English, if you try to magnetize an unmagnetized ferromagnetic material, at first it resists magnetization. As the magnetizing field is increased, the material ultimately becomes magnetized. At this point, if the magnetizing field is removed, the material will retain some of its magnetization. To bring it back to an unmagnetized state, a magnetizing field of opposite polarity is required and so on.

If we were to try to directly record an electrical audio signal to tape without bias, the recording head would present an alternating magnetizing field to a ferromagnetic object rolling past it. As the ferromagnetic object would refuse to precisely play along, severe distortion would occur, along with high levels of noise due to several magnetic domains remaining at random orientations, which would generate a random signal (noise) upon playback.

DC bias could overcome these issues to some extent, but with side effects, by pushing the tape to a permanently magnetized state along the B-H curve (which is the curve that indicates how a material will respond to an externally-applied magnetizing field), where the hysteresis effect is reduced.

The major breakthrough in magnetic recording was the advent of AC bias. A high-frequency signal, significantly above the audible range (typically 150 kHz on many 1970s tape machines and 432 kHz on the Ampex ATR-100 Series), is used to magnetically bias the tape. This signal effectively remains recorded on the tape, and is rejected by the playback electronics of a conventional tape machine, allowing only the audio signal to reach the output.

Regardless of the exact choice of bias frequency, this signal is supposed to remain extremely constant, as the oscillator circuits used to generate it were very stable, and their output was tuned to the recording head, very much in the same way that RF circuits are tuned to resonance.

As such, any variation in the frequency of the bias signal would be due to tape transport errors, the effects of which would be detrimental to the audio frequency content, as it would essentially be reproduced at the wrong speed, or with speed instability. However, since tape machine playback electronics typically reject this signal, there is usually no way of knowing what is going on in this regard. Unless, that is, the playback electronics do not reject the bias signal! This is exactly how the Plangent Processes approach works.

The bias signal is captured along with the audio and used as a reference to correct any tape machine errors. If you can make the bias signal stable again, the audio will be made stable along with it.  Sometimes these effects are rather subtle and not immediately obvious to the untrained ear, just by listening to the sound. Variations in the bias signal can be detected by measurement instruments, at magnitudes below threshold of audibility in playback of the sound. There is, of course, a lot more to audio restoration than this, but I shall prefer to let David tell you more about it:

J.I. Agnew: How did you get professionally involved in audio?

David Glasser: My first professional audio job was operating the tape duplication systems of the Boston Symphony Transcription Trust, a radio syndication service, in the days when that meant shipping tapes to subscriber stations weekly. After several years, I also helped record concerts by the Boston Symphony and Pops orchestras at the legendary Symphony Hall.

JIA: What made you choose the ATR-100 for your work?

DG: My first professional tape machine was an Ampex ATR-102, but that particular deck was finicky and the transport was difficult to align. I replaced it with a Sony APR-5000, an excellent but not a very popular machine. Thirty to forty percent of my mastering work was from 1/4-inch and 1/2-inch analog tape, so owning a first-class machine was essential. In 1995, the APR-5000 was replaced by a Studer A820, which I still own and use. A very discerning client was not sold on a master created using the A820, so I borrowed an ATR-100, and that did the trick.

That convinced me that having several playback options was the way to go. The ATR has four playback electronics options: [getting the audio signal] direct from the stock audio cards, [using the] stock input and output, [using a] transformerless input/output, and [utilizing the] Plangent Processes electronics.

 

I purchased an ATR-104 in poor condition and had Mike Spitz of ATR Services, Inc. totally restore it and add several modifications. That’s been my preferred machine for 20 years.

JIA: What are the challenges in restoration work?

DG: There are several challenges. The key is [achieving] proper playback. Many older master [tapes] do not have alignment tones, so setting the playback EQ is trial and error, and adjusting [tape head] azimuth can be challenging. Sometimes the track format of the tape is unknown: a magnetic viewer, a variety of playback head stacks, and a selection of MRL (Magnetic Reference Laboratory) test tapes are needed. If the tapes are from the era of “sticky-shed” [the deterioration of the binders, or adhesive, that hold the magnetic particles onto the backing – Ed.] we can bake them in a laboratory incubator. With many older acetate tapes, the splices dry out and fail. Just rewinding a reel and fixing all the splices as you go can take a half-hour or more.

 

JIA: Listening to all of the old recordings that go through your hands, and then the new ones, are there any striking differences in sound, approach, or musical performances, between then and now?

DG: I’d say the biggest difference between older analog recordings and newer recordings – analog or digital – is [that] it sounds to my ears that engineers back in the day delivered mixes that were closer to the desired finished product. This was likely because when cutting lacquers [in] real time from tape, there is not as much opportunity to address mix issues as there is in a DAW (computer-based digital audio workstation).

JIA: How important is your monitoring environment for your work?

DG: Monitoring is crucial! Speakers plus room. I’ve been using the same Dunlavy SC-V loudspeakers for the past 23 years, in a control room designed by Sam Berkow of SIA Acoustics. Monitoring should be the starting point in any studio design. Even in a setup for just doing transfers, monitoring is crucial.

 

JIA: Do you have a personal favorite tape format (in terms of tape width, speed and equalization)?

DG: Favorite tape format – hard to say, but most of the classic albums that sound so good, and [that] we all love were recorded on 1/4-inch tape at 15 ips (inches per second). That said, 1/2-inch at 30 ips with Flux Magnetics heads has a lot of depth, and I sometimes use that when clients want to bounce their digital mixes to tape. Some of the most realistic-sounding recordings I’ve heard are 1/2-inch 3-track, 15 ips on Scotch 111 tape.

In the next episode, we will move on to a different beast of a tape machine!

Header image of Airshow Mastering and other images courtesy of David Glasser.

 

 

 

Photo shot at Peña Blanca Lake, Coronado National Forest, Arizona.

In our last installment (Issue 136; Part One appeared in Issue 135), we left you at the Banzai Pipeline, surfing your way to one of Henry Mancini’s greatest big band tunes.

To start off, it’s not quite jazz this time around, but let’s share a little rarity. This tune was released only on a 45 RPM single, and on the occasional Mancini anthology. This was the main title theme from the film A Shot in the Dark, the Peter Sellers vehicle that served as a sequel to The Pink Panther, and introduced Jacques Clouseau’s trusty sidekick Cato (summarily destroying Clouseau’s apartment in the process). The flip side of the single, “Shadows of Paris,” was the tune that backed the cloak and dagger opening montage of the film.

 

Now, we’ll touch on another jazz album, Mancini ’67. It has some solid recordings on it, but this is also around the time that RCA’s albums began to suffer from a stuffy and distant sound that takes away much of their impact. Thankfully the performances hold their own.

Hank gave his soloists a lot of room to shine on the classic “’Round Midnight.”

 

He picks up the pace on “Cherokee (Indian Love Song).”

 

An early Quincy Jones tune, “Stockholm Sweetnin’” also gets a nice cover:

 

One of the better-known (but still not wildly popular) films that Mancini penned music for was Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil. The soundtrack had some memorable work but unfortunately, the sources for the CD versions are lacking in sound quality. In a nod to this film score, Mancini gave the main title theme a redo on the album The Big Latin Band of Henry Mancini.

 

Mancini would record many soundtracks from this point onward, but it wasn’t until 1972 that he got back into styles other than orchestral or solo piano (such as his Warm Shade of Ivory album, which gave him his only No. 1 Billboard hit with “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet”).  In 1972, a short-run TV series called The Mancini Generation, hosted by Mancini himself, featured a some jazz tunes among the features, including a new version of “Charade”:

 

…and a cover of the Benny Golson tune “Killer Joe” with a rather odd melody line on synthesizer:

 

The album Symphonic Soul from 1976 featured primarily soul and funk tunes set to strings, with some jazz soloing over the top of them. The jazz standout here, though, is “Peter Gunn (New Version),” which gets a total funky redo. Not only that, the roster on this tune includes Abe Laboriel on bass, Harvey Mason on drums, Joe Sample on the organ solo, and Bud Brisbois on the piccolo trumpet solos. Guitarist Lee Ritenour also appears on this album. Abe Laboriel was originally a guitar player, but Mancini convinced him to play electric bass on this tune, and the rest is history.

 

To close this out, let’s circle all the way back to Mancini’s first “big one,” the original theme to Peter Gunn, so you can compare them directly. All these years later, it still oozes a coolness that few other tunes can touch. Enjoy!

 

If you are shopping for any of Mancini’s albums, I can vouch for the high-resolution versions on Qobuz as sounding excellent, perhaps with better mastering than any other digital versions I have heard. I own five LP copies of Uniquely Mancini and am split on which version sounds better – the earlier Dynagroove pressings (with the silver “RCA Victor” name at the top of the label) have more of a punch to them, where the later pressings (with the white “RCA Victor”) seem to be slightly dulled but have a richer midrange. I have yet to hear a digital version that sounds as good as the vinyl.

The three 45 RPM Analogue Productions reissue LPs are my go-to versions for The Music from Peter Gunn, Hatari!, and The Music from The Pink Panther; they also produced SACD versions of these titles. The original “Living Stereo” versions of his earlier albums do sound good as well, and a clean Dynagroove pressing should serve you well for the ’60s titles. The later Dynagrooves (with the white “RCA Victor”) marked a time when RCA’s mastering tended to be on the dull side. And the ’70s albums I always felt were weak in the bass.

Despite the sound, there is a lot of good music to explore.  Don’t be shy – give the jazz tracks a listen and enjoy!

As I often do, I’ve compiled a Qobuz playlist of most of these tracks and a handful of others.  Some of his albums are not available on Qobuz, but I have substituted a few from compilations where possible. “Walkin’ Bass” and “My Manne Shelly” are from More Music from Peter Gunn.  Since The Blues and The Beat is also not available, the track “Sing, Sing, Sing” from that album was pulled from his 3-CD Days of Wine and Roses box set, which is one of the best career retrospectives out there.

https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/5961562

 

Sometimes a goofy gag turns out to be a brilliant idea. The name “The Doobie Brothers” was supposed to be a puerile reference to the amount of pot the band smoked, a filler name until they could come up with something real. Now, 51 years after its founding, the band still takes that moniker to the bank.

An early iteration of the group was called Pud, formed when Virginia-born drummer John Hartman moved to San Jose, California and looked up one of his favorite musicians, singer-songwriter Skip Spence (of Moby Grape). Spence’s friend and fellow singer Tom Johnston joined the effort, bringing his power-chord guitar style along. In 1970, with Spence pretty much out of the picture, they added bassist Dave Shogren and another singer-songwriter, Patrick Simmons, who had the bonus skill of being an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist. At that point, a pal jokingly suggested they call themselves the Doobie Brothers.

With all those singers, the band was destined to become known for its vocal harmonies. They helped push the polyphonic approach of groups like the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas into a funkier, more instrument-focused sound. When a Warner Bros. A&R man heard a Doobie Brothers demo, he knew he had struck gold and convinced the musicians to come to North Hollywood to lay down some music at Amigo Studios.

The band’s debut, The Doobie Brothers, came out in 1971. Its tracks were mostly written by Johnston, with a few by Simmons and a cover of Randy Newman’s “Beehive State.” None of that album’s three singles charted, but the record itself reached the Top 100.

Johnston, who wrote “Greenwood Creek,” also plays the harmonica solo halfway through. Despite the song’s laid-back California saunter, the instruments have a tight rhythmic energy, and occasional unexpected pitches defy predictability, making the sound distinctive.

 

At the end of 1971, Shogren left, and bass guitarist and singer Tiran Porter took his place. Porter’s voice was lower than Shogren’s, enriching their harmonies even more. The band also added a second drummer, Michael Hossack, who had already toured with them to provide a double-drum sound for live shows. This new lineup recorded Toulouse Street in 1972, and their updated sound profile hit the jackpot. They had Top 40 hits with “Jesus Is Just Alright” and “Listen to the Music.”

The album’s title song, “Toulouse Street,” refers to a historic street in New Orleans. The minor key and multiple tracks of fingerpicked acoustic guitar gives the song a mysterious, melancholic mood.

 

The success of Toulouse Street was surpassed by that of The Captain and Me in 1973, with the album reaching the No. 7 spot, and the singles “China Grove” and “Long Train Running” performing well. The following year came What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits, whose third single, “Black Water,” provided the band’s first No. 1 hit. If you’re an Arlo Guthrie fan like me, it’s amusing to know that he sat in on autoharp for that track.

In general, that album is bathed in rich orchestrations, with session guests ranging from the Memphis Horns to percussionist Milt Holland, who came armed with instruments from all over the world. Besides playing marimba, pandeiro, and vibraphone on various tracks, Holland takes on the Indian tabla for “Tell Me What You Want (And I’ll Give You What You Need).”

 

Stampede was next, in 1975; its biggest single was “Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me).” Michael Hossack did not participate in this album, so the second drummer was Keith Knudsen, who also sang. There are some fun guest artists on these sessions, from English jazz marimba player Victor Feldman to Little Feat’s pianist Bill Payne, who specialized in barrelhouse blues. Payne would eventually join up as a touring band member.

Ry Cooder contributes some classy slide guitar work on “Rainy Day Crossroad Blues” while Porter’s crisp, light-footed bass rhythm keeps things moving.

 

Little did the band members know they were on the cusp of major change when they recorded Stampede. Johnston, who had been acting as their main singer and songwriter since the early days, was having health problems. By the time they were touring in support of Stampede, he developed a bleeding ulcer and had to drop out. They replaced him on the road with Michael McDonald, who had been singing with Steely Dan. McDonald’s soaring, expressive voice was such a magical match with the Doobies’ sound that he stuck around for the next seven years. The title single off their first album with McDonald, Takin’ It to the Streets (1976), confirmed the commercial wisdom of this decision.

They followed that success with Livin’ on the Fault Line (1977), which sold well as an album but did not produce any hit singles. Apparently its smooth jazz sounds and David Paich’s lush string arrangements worked better on home stereos than on rock radio. Even the rhythmically complex “Chinatown” seems to be slathered in a thick sonic gloss.

 

Minute by Minute (1978) and One Step Closer (1980) were the last two albums before the band called it quits. But the breakup didn’t last. In 1987 Tom Johnston showed up along with Hossack and Hartman for the group’s revival, and Cycles (1989) became their first new record in nine years. Although McDonald did not sing on the album, he did contribute one song, “Tonight I’m Coming Through,” co-written with percussionist Bobby LaKind.

The session musicians included, count ’em, five keyboard players, along with the Memphis Horns. The resulting background depth can be heard on tracks like this lively cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Need a Little Taste of Love.”

 

Since then, the band has continued to put out albums at irregular intervals. The most recent collection of new material was World Gone Crazy (2010), which did surprisingly well on the charts. McDonald even appeared as a featured guest on one track. They brought back their old producer from the 1970s, Ted Templeman. But sadly, this was the band’s last opportunity to play with Hossack, who died in 2012.

The album’s highlight is the Johnston-penned “Old Juarez,” which captures a Santana-like Latin spirit with able support from percussionist Karl Perazzo plus Guy Allison on Hammond organ.

 

The Doobie Brothers are still a going concern, planning to resume in-person concert touring in July of 2021. Johnston, Simmons, and Payne remain in the lineup, bolstered by four other seasoned musicians. Seems like a joint that will never go out.

 

Header image: the Doobie Brothers in 1974.

Sometimes a career is all about meeting the right people at the right time. That was the case when teenaged alto saxophonist Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet got to play for Nat “King” Cole, who then introduced him to Lionel Hampton. Hampton offered him a job in his band, but only if he would focus on tenor sax. The moment Jacquet agreed, a jazz legend was born.

Jacquet, the son of Louisiana Creoles, was born in 1922. His family moved to Houston when he was a young child, and he grew up in a household of siblings and parents who played instruments. The Hampton band’s record of the tune “Flying Home” in 1942 was Jacquet’s first studio experience. The single was a hit and became an in-demand live tune for Hampton, largely thanks to his solo.

Before he moved to New York City, Jacquet took advantage of the West Coast, playing on-screen in a couple of films, including the Lena Horne-led Stormy Weather. Meanwhile, he worked the chitlin’ circuit, the tour of vaudeville houses that welcomed Black artists. For a while he had a small group with Charles Mingus. But things really took off in 1946, when he moved east to replace the great Lester Young in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

He worked steadily for the rest of his life, leading his own big band in the 1980s and becoming the first jazz musician named artist-in-residence at Harvard University. He died in 2004 in his longtime home of Jamaica, Queens, where a performance space in Prospect Cemetery is now named after him.

Enjoy these eight great tracks by Illinois Jacquet.

1. Track: “I Wrote This for the Kid”
   Album: The Kid and the Brute
   Label: Clef/Verve
   Year: 1954

This is from a duo recording with fellow saxophonist Ben Webster. Jacquet was the kid in the title, and Webster the brute. Jacquet is joined here by his brother trumpeter Russell Jacquet, with whom he often played.

Webster composed “I Wrote This for the Kid,” which opens Side A. The two lead players’ brash phrasing is in perfect sync. The contrastingly graceful decorations at the keyboard are provided by John Acea.

 

2. Track: “Lullaby of the Leaves”
   Album: Swing’s the Thing
   Label: Clef
   Year: 1956

The title of this album does not lie. Far from the angular proto-bop of the previous example, this album features the rich smoothness found in the best of swing bands. It helped to pack the studio with a power quintet: Jacquet plus Roy Eldridge (a particularly nice trumpet solo on this track), Jimmy Jones (piano), Herb Ellis (guitar), Ray Brown (bass), and Jo Jones (drums).

“Lullaby of the Leaves” is a Tin Pan Alley tune composed in 1932 by Bernice Petkere. As swing-era standards go, it’s somewhat unusual for having a lot of syncopation in its basic tune, offering layers of rhythmic potential for improvisation.

 

3. Track: “Bassoon Blues”
   Album: The Message
   Label: Argo
   Year: 1963

This was the first of two consecutive albums with guitarist Kenny Burrell. Jacquet is playing his own composition, “Bassoon Blues.” Ralph Smith is on organ.

It is common for saxophonists to have a good handle on flute or clarinet. But on this track, Jacquet offers his skills as a bassoonist, which is much less common. It’s a different technique: the bassoon is a double-reed instrument, notoriously hard to control in detailed passages, whereas clarinet and sax have a single-reed mouthpiece. That he can pull a swinging sound out of a bassoon is quite an impressive feat.

 

4. Track: “Do I Love You”
   Album: Bosses of the Ballad
   Label: Argo
   Year: 1964

 

Subtitled Illinois Jacquet and Strings play Cole Porter, this album utilizes arrangements by Tom McIntosh and Benny Golson performed by a 19-piece pickup orchestra. Oddly, given that subtitle, there are wind and percussion instruments along with the strings.

The arrangements are very much of their era: schmaltzy in timbre with that distinctive, lightly dissonant sheen that came to be known as “jazz harmony” among a certain set. But Jacquet is, of course, the real deal. Hopefully, if you can tone down the overreaching orchestra in your mind, you will appreciate this plaintive tenor saxophone rendition of a Gershwin classic.

 

5. Track: “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)”
   Album: Go Power!
   Label: Cadet
   Year: 1966

Jacquet’s sound always blended well with an organ, and this live album gives a heaping helping of evidence for that claim. Milt Buckner rocks the Hammond organ. Alan Dawson on drums completes the trio.

“On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)” is the standard by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner. The three musicians find a lot of humor in the melody, not to mention an unexpected Latin vibe that melds into a bebop free-for-all and then a sultry romp.

 

6. Track: “Caravan”
   Album: The King!
   Label: Prestige
   Year: 1968

There is hardly a greater tune than Duke Ellington’s “Caravan,” so it’s always worthwhile seeing what a top-notch artist has to say with this material. On The King! Jacquet attacks from below, leaning into the tune’s bass range as well as its exotic aspects on his bassoon.

The multifaceted textures in the background are provided by a combination of Montego Joe’s bongos and the plucked sounds of Billy Butler’s guitar and Al Lucas’ pizzicato bass. It’s a thoroughly original arrangement.

 

7. Track: “Every Day I Have the Blues”
   Album: The Blues; That’s Me!
   Label: Prestige
   Year: 1969

On The Blues; That’s Me! Jacquet leads a quintet with Wynton Kelly on piano, Tiny Grimes on guitar, Buster Williams on bass, and Oliver Jackson on drums. On this album, you can hear Jacquet inching his way into the R&B sound, while maintaining both swing and bebop elements.

“Every Day I Have the Blues” demonstrates this melting pot of genres admirably. The tune was written by Peter Chatman, a.k.a. Memphis Slim, a pianist who specialized in jump blues (think Fats Waller’s style). Jacquet’s group tempers the jump with a low-key, soulful energy.

 

8. Track: “On the Sunny Side of the Street, No. 1”
   Album: Illinois Jacquet with Milt and Jo
   Label: Black and Blue
   Year: 1974

The “Milt and Jo” in the title are Jacquet’s old friends, pianist (and sometime organist) Milt Buckner and drummer Jo Jones. Apparently, they couldn’t decide how they wanted to play the classic Depression-era “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” so they included two versions on this album.

While the second version has a standard swing sensibility, this first one has a harder-hitting two-feel, more vertical than horizontal motion, you might say. Roland Lobligeois corrals the proceedings with his rock-steady walking bassline.

The 1970s dawned with a blistering hangover as the 1960s bled right into the new decade. On September 13, 1969, just before Abbey Road began dominating end-of-’60s radio, John Lennon sang at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, an early 1950s festival. He called his pickup group the Plastic Ono Band: Eric Clapton (lead guitar), Klaus Voorman (bass) and Alan White (drums). They launched with standards, “Blue Suede Shoes, “Money,” and then “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” before turning to Lennon’s “Yer Blues,” an unreleased “Cold Turkey,” and “Give Peace a Chance,” his anti-war chant. Then he turned the stage over to his Japanese-American wife, Yoko Ono, who screamed against Lennon’s guitar feedback for almost half an hour. It stupefied the audience. One week later, at an Apple business meeting in London, Lennon told the other Beatles he wanted a “divorce.” However, Lennon agreed to keep a lid on his departure – they were in the middle of contract negotiations, and if word got out, they could lose leverage. From that point on, the chronology went extremely fuzzy for most fans, as the overlap between Beatles group releases overlapped with the members’ early solo records. Plans progressed for a Let It Be album and film early in 1970 (shot in January 1969) as the breakup remained a secret.

 

 

Alongside all the racist hate mail John and Yoko received at their home that season, a book arrived, called The Primal Scream, by a California therapist named Arthur Janov. It had an unusual pull for Lennon, who found himself agonizing. (“You seem to need them even more than they need you,” his first wife Cynthia once remarked.) He spent the summer of 1970 in workshops with Janov in California, where he bereaved his childhood (both parents abandoning him to an Auntie), considered the nature of God, and chased Ono’s first husband Tony Cox around seeking custody of Yoko’s daughter Kyoko. Then, on August 1, Ono miscarried a second Lennon child.

In America, the violence continued, as if 1968 had never ended. The week after Nixon expanded the Vietnam war with an illegal incursion into Cambodia, the National Guard killed four non-violent protesters at Kent State (May 4). In April, without consulting the other three, McCartney put out a press release the week his solo debut, McCartney, appeared, announcing that he was leaving the band. Headlines flared around the world. It felt like a bad joke: this utopian ensemble, that made rock and roll a powerfully redemptive global force, crash-landing into tabloid lawsuits and countersuits. Along with secretly buying up stock in the Lennon-McCartney publishing company (Northern Songs Ltd) behind Lennon’s back in the spring of 1969, McCartney’s move compounded his betrayals in Lennon’s mind. The greatest songwriting team of the era now entered its doom phase of litigation, recriminations through song, and a public fallout that deflated their idealized brotherhood.

When the fall of 1970 rolled around, Lennon had a batch of new material reflecting his state of mind, and called on Ringo Starr to drum beside Voormann. He wanted a spare rock guitar/piano trio for most numbers, drenched in 1950s Elvis Sun sessions vocal reverb. Recording started in September and ran right through Lennon’s 30th birthday on October 9th, a stretch that saw the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. A year after the Stones watched a Hells Angel murder a Black fan, 18-year-old Meredith Hunter, in the front row of Altamont, the rock era seemed to keep unraveling, and a broken-hearted counterculture no longer had the Beatles as communal avatars.

Context proves all-important for this 50th anniversary reissue of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (The Ultimate Collection), even if it steps around time and speaks to us ever more urgently coming out of a global pandemic. For anyone over 40, this music bespeaks the emptiness that gathered around the Beatles’ demise, a cloud that hovered over early 1970s pop even as mini pseudo-Beatles prospered (Badfinger, the Raspberries, and Elton John). Remastering engineer Paul Hicks has boosted the original orchestral sweep (by Richard Lush and Phil McDonald) with a bracing, miraculous clarity, and a sequence of outtakes, “elements mixes” (cross-fades between source and digital refinements), jams and demos, and Yoko Ono’s disc (plus two Blu-ray sides). You can also opt for a brief two-CD summary or vinyl-only set. Each comes with a War Is Over poster and handsome booklet.

 

 

Beyond most other remastered blowouts, this one forces you to consider how listeners heard this material Then versus Now. At the time, Plastic Ono Band felt both inseparable from its Beatles foreground and a scrappy, unfathomable break. It held a pillow down on the ’60s togetherness, and made the utopian spirit seem infinitely fragile, and fleeting. The album made sense only by knowing what came before, as Lennon’s familiar voice suddenly turned barbed and fraught, as if breaking free from some mythical trap. The songs’ irreducible simplicity masked oceans of complicated feelings expressed with utmost economy, impossible to grasp in a single hearing. This makes it the most unconventional of rock classics: not swift, digestible and expedient pop, but burdened, dense, difficult, and hard to fathom even fifty years on.

Now, of course, we hear it as Peak Lennon, a record you return to as much in your mind as on your stereo, from which the rest of his career coasts, or looks away from. It’s a sweeping mess, a warts-and-all manifesto where the scars inform its poetic layers, and the high points rank with “I Should Have Known Better” or even “Don’t Let Me Down.” A songwriter’s gauntlet, a drummer’s post-doctoral thesis, and a track sequence linked by vocal delirium, Plastic Ono Band has the classic rock feel that humbles superlatives while remaining the furthest thing from a party record. It lassos a storm of emotions that veers between unfiltered rage and white-knuckle control.

Lennon’s first formal solo entry into the post-Beatles era countered McCartney’s and Starr’s debuts (McCartney’s “wedding announcement” with its huge single, “Maybe I’m Amazed,” and Ringo’s Sentimental Journey, in April), but that summer’s Let It Be soundtrack and then movie made it seem like the band still had plenty of chemistry. Plastic Ono Band transcends this context quickly, so you put it on simply for the expansive vocals that redeem even the weaker material (like “Love,” with the meekest, almost ambivalent delivery), or string together stray outtakes of “Well Well Well” and “I Found Out” for their addictively cleansing guitar distortion on a loop (that glorious “Revolution” overhang). Or just revel in Ringo Starr’s sublime patterns, which sound as though he’s been saving up his best moves for some post-Beatles oblivion.

 

 

Few remember this record’s opening sounds. The excruciatingly slowed peal of church bells that greets “Mother” carry a heavy, yoked weight, as though the End of Beatles signaled End Times. Tolling church bells mystified Beatles fans in the winter of 1970, and made the new decade feel perilous. It’s the detail most people forget about Plastic Ono Band, the sonic sample that fixes it in time so firmly. Those bells loom over the entire record like a glowering moon. (And Lennon heard “Mother” as a radio single.)

As Lennon leaps from that void and starts singing (“Mother… you had me”), he slices open the band’s mythic largesse with soaring leap, and the moment ripens with danger and risk; it’s a dive into the great unknown. The mood – searing, spectral, elegiac – reminds you of the way he sang “Money” or “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” in Toronto the previous September as a middle-aged scrimmage, a way of measuring himself against his past, an emotional purge he couldn’t quite summon yet in his own material. That Toronto band has plenty of verve and kick, and the excitement of Lennon with new players in front of an audience seeps into the sound. But “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” had been a fireball for the Beatles, Lennon answering McCartney’s Little Richard impersonation with his own Larry Williams homage, a turret announcing how rock and roll’s freedoms had intoxicated him, how done right it could inebriate everybody within earshot. Without the Beatles around him, these familiar (now canonic) numbers turned into something he had to rediscover, redefine, and wrap his head around anew. The open throttle of “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” sounded like a different challenge approaching 30, a teenager’s ideal circling darkened orbits. Some of the others appeared in Toronto as oldies acts (Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard); Lennon performed as an ongoing project, surging uneasily into middle age.

 

 

In the Beatles catalog, covers of older records seemed charged by supernatural forces: as metaphorical rejuvenation through past glories, wellsprings of sturdy ideas, neon signposts, trick mirrors, musical vitamins, rhythmic nutrients, nostalgic Miracle-Gro sprinkled on the most familiar Chuck Berry tropes, accelerants slipping on ice. Here, Lennon renewed those ideals as something worth hanging on to in adulthood, another way to make sense of it.

For Lennon, these oldies were barely in the past; they seemed to him as alive and worthwhile as yesterday, as the sixties both shrank and expanded time, singing oldies made an incident-heavy era seem ripe with color and cascading revelation. By the evidence of the Get Back sessions, this material had saved the band time and again. There’s an entire disc here devoted to the oldies this trio cut to warm up, Lennon forgetting the words, mashing up verses, and settling down into a tone that grounds the record in the R&B and doo-wop that only a true obsessive can access. (He leans into “Johnny B. Goode,” “Honey Don’t,” and at one point lapses into “Get Back,” a half-baked pipe dream.)

When “Mother” enters its tunneling coda (those whelping “Momma don’t go! Daddy come home!”), he sounds like he’s whipping the track, punishing it for saying exactly what he intended; the mood “Cold Turkey” latched onto has suddenly been set loose. His increasingly distended vocals shred the track as it disintegrates into the fadeout.

Two non-Plastic Ono Band numbers in this compilation underscore its context, and reframe the new material. 1970 began with “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On),” a song he dashed off and recorded on January 26th, with Phil Spector in the booth and George Harrison leading a spontaneous troupe of singers. Lennon wanted to get the single in the shops by the following week (a goal he nearly achieved). In these outtakes, Harrison calmly leads the backup crew. The song steered Lennon into a new vocal register, an answer to the constraints of “Cold Turkey” (which the Beatles had turned down), and a path forward. (The alternate “Cold Turkey” cuts here, clawing and feral, rival the final release; the home demo finds him echoing Ono’s pinched quivers.)

 

These six discs could have easily been trimmed down to three or four, but the largesse here opens the wider frame to Lennon’s process, and how it informs the material. “Love” still doesn’t quite work, but its sessions outline a delicious bit of rock star manipulation: Lennon asks Spector to come sit at the piano and try it himself, and soon abandons his guitar as they coax a new arrangement from rehearsals. If Spector ever thought he could control a session, it’s a masterful switch: the singer yanking the producer straight into the lion’s den.

All the Beatles references add color to its precedents. By bookending with “Mother” and then the mordant lullaby, “My Mummy’s Dead,” Lennon accents how he lost his mother twice, once as a boy, and again at 17 when she was struck by a car. These numbers also noose “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Two ballads: “Look At Me,” and “Hold On,” approach the intricate mood he explored in “Julia,” and then turn into an oasis of calm amidst a hurricane. And the satirical doo-wop (“bang-bang, shoot-shoot”) in “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” gets slowed to a gospel groove in “God,” turning the most clichéd harmonic progression quasi-metaphysical.

 

The album’s two centerpieces don’t hold up: “Working Class Hero” and “God” now sound like the self-help bromides that would turn into self-parodies, from Werner Erhard’s EST seminars to Rolfing to macrobiotics and “Have a Nice Day.” That the self-help movement proved uniquely American phenomenon (Janov seemed a pure product of California) spoke to Lennon’s innate yet complicated optimism, which he could only express through barbed conceits and splashy gestures (those Bed-In pressers). “Working Class Hero” more than any other song except “Imagine” gives future generations the wrong idea about Lennon, mostly because (American listeners in particular) mishear the irony. It’s now received wisdom that Lennon himself was a “working class hero,” when he was the only Beatle to have toilet plumbing in his semi-detached house his Aunt Mimi raised him in in the relatively well-off Liverpool suburb of Woolton. He’s not encouraging anybody to be a working class hero, he’s lamenting the whole class system hustle, and how anybody in the rock era still falls for it. If he had called it “The Great American Dream” it might have translated better, but then people (and the British especially) still take the title of The Great Gatsby literally, and right-wingers pump their fists to Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Imagine any other rock star telling their audience “You’re f*cking peasants as far as I can see,” or “I don’t expect you to understand after you’ve caused so much pain/But then again you’re not to blame/You’re just a human/a victim of the insane…” and retaining our affection. Lennon has so much good will in the bank we’re willing to let him get some ugly ideas off his chest.

And while “God” has an epic feel and tone, the lyric sags, especially when he gets to his bullet list of unbelief. The restoration, again, lies in his vocal, and the way he can make even the hoariest self-help cliché seem almost plausible (“God is a concept by which we measure our pain…”). At his most ambitious, Lennon conjures some reductive notions, hubris mixed with infantilism.

Another part of his greatness stems from his generosity, in particular towards Ringo, and how he let the humblest Beatle command a star role in his ego trip. Ringo’s drum sound here rivals the White Album and Abbey Road for color and punch, and a lot of this work still sounds ripe for sampling. Starr hits his drums differently on every album, and for this record he masters a range of flavors from his tom-toms mixed with thrilling pauses. His set gets miked in a way that makes him sound both vast and compressed. As usual, Starr remains invisible except for those choice moments where he chimes in to answer a Lennon guitar lick or bolster a scream, and those moments have such resounding support they bring the ensemble up to near Beatles levels. (Voormann shines on “I Found Out,” and “Remember,” even when he jumps cues.) Did Ringo somehow save himself for this record? Or did this Lennon phase simply goad Ringo to the next level?

Lennon nailing himself to the cross he flirted with by saying “bigger than Christ” (in 1966) and in “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (“they’re gonna crucify me,” 1969) can still ring out as “toxically smug,” as Ian Penman once put it. On the other hand, this music vividly enacts how a huge chunk of Lennon’s voice got strangled inside the Beatles, and how far his muse still drove him – beyond a band that had already transformed the music and its world beyond all imagining. How can you leave the world’s biggest band only to reveal even bigger ambitions?

 

 

In the end it’s an album of absolution, and an album of questions: where had this inner Lennon been hiding? How did such an outsized personality submerge himself so completely into his band identity? If he sounds barely contained within the Beatles, here he sounds sublimely cut loose, and even his strengths seem to earn credibility through his flaws; very few singers could get away with some of these lyrics (Barbra Streisand approached “Mother” as a pop-gospel showcase, and found her herself cowed). The album also throws down an intimidating precedent to the other Beatles, especially in how it upstages McCartney, who returned the next year to double down on…Whimsy (with Ram). And at the end of this tirade, with his most delicate conclusion (“I just believe in me… Yoko and me… and that’s reality”), Lennon stakes his new identity with a new intimate partner. In this distant moment, when political demonstrations largely failed, the war expanded, and state-sponsored killing breached college campuses, Lennon’s vocals work as a massive trump card to answer McCartney’s sly, understated gall (“No Beatles, no problem. Let’s have a cuppa…”) What starts out as self-pity and glaring insecurity somehow lands in the realm of respite and relief. The arrogance somehow burns off the top, and we’re left sharing something like shared redemption.

 

 

 

Header image: photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting in front of the gypsy caravan they purchased for John’s son Julian in the gardens of Tittenhurst Park, Ascot, Berkshire, January 27, 1970. Photo: Richard DiLello © Yoko Ono Lennon.

 

I discovered Richard X. Heyman by chance, really. Upon release, the cover of his 1988 debut album Living Room just kind of caught my eye as I was browsing through a record store. Looking like a mix between a young Keith Richards and a member of the Small Faces, the image of Heyman on that cover was the perfect welcome to what has since become a thirty-year appreciation of great power pop music.

There I found a complete artist whose music was bright, upbeat, and full of an energy that was simply contagious, striking a chord as deep as the 1960s bands that inspired his sound. You can hear the influence of British Invasion groups, West Coast pop, Motown, and New York-based bands like the Rascals. These all come together in a manner that is quite singular, delivering a dynamic that he has carried forward with each new album.

Heyman is about to release his fourteenth studio record. Titled Copious Notes, the record finds Richard X. Heyman in a familiar sonic place. His trademark wall of guitars and keyboards is balanced by orchestrations that include brass, woodwinds, strings and big, bold drum parts. Along with his wife Nancy, who engineered and played bass on many tracks, Heyman played all instruments and completed the album at their home studio, The Kit Factory. The songs range from melodic pop to all-out rock and roll with just a few ballads to round things out. The results are extraordinary with some already calling Copious Notes one of his best to date.

 

 

Over the years, Heyman has augmented his solo work by taking on drumming duties behind artists like Link Wray and Brian Wilson. As a guitarist, he performed with Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, and played keyboards with Ben E. King. These experiences have informed his creative process, have helped his craft continue to grow, and have taken his art to even greater heights.

We spoke with Richard about the new record, his many musical influences, and about the centerpiece to his musical journey – drumming. The exchange was a wonderful reminder of how his music has always transcended what is popular by shimmering with an originality that warrants broader discovery.

Ray Chelstowski: The video you released to tease the new record playfully addressed the album-naming process. What actually inspired the name?

Richard X. Heyman: Well, I have used puns in my titles in the past and that phrase just came to me. “Notes” has a good double meaning in that you have the kind of notes a college student is taking in a lecture hall. Then you have the musical notes. I felt that it applies to the lyrics, to the music, and then I thought of the visual of me made just out of notes, which we did for the album artwork.

 

RC: Are these all new songs or did you have some older material that you revisited?

RXH: Well, the album reflects [being in] quarantine and the past year, a sense of isolation and the mood of the entire pandemic era we had been living in. You couldn’t escape it. That kind of crept into the music. What happened was that I had put out my previous album, Pop Circles. After that record came out I experienced a kind of burnout and I lost interest in putting out any more music. This went on for months and months. Then the pandemic hit. It wasn’t a case of writer’s block. I just didn’t want to do any music for some reason.

Then one day I just started noodling again on the piano and some ideas came. Every now and then Nancy would stick her head in the door and when she heard something she liked she’d ask, “What’s that?!” That became the cue for what I should demo. So things got started with what were all just piano instrumentals. Then I decided to try and turn some of them into songs. I went back and found the song “Choices We Make.” That was a song we had recorded earlier for another album. We didn’t include it then because we weren’t getting it just right. This time I decided to try horns on it and that seemed to do the trick so we put it on the album. The rest are pretty new. There is one song called “Sink Or Swim” that was a song that I had done with The Doughboys. That was actually a “Coolest Song in the World” on Little Steven’s Underground Garage. So I thought that I’d take a crack at trying it myself.

RC: When you released your first album, Living Room, over thirty years ago, was it your plan to build a career against a power pop sound that continues to tip your hat to acts like the Beatles?

RXH: I didn’t think it through that seriously. I just have my influences. Some I wear on my sleeve, others I tuck inside my pockets. I just do what I can do. I try to write songs that kind of move me in a certain way and they tend to be influenced by early rock and roll. I kind of rejected where it all was going after that. Some stuff from the 1970s I like a lot of course. But in general, the 1960s produced music that was not only of high quality but very popular at the same time.

RC: That said, are there any acts that catch your attention that tap into those same inspirations and make new music?

RXH: Well, I’m so attached to the baby boomer ethics of the 1960s. That had a direct impact on me. I always go back to that more than contemporary music, because the baby boom generation were the fans of the really great era of rock and roll. There’s no one who can hold a candle to say someone like Ray Davies or Bob Dylan. Now that’s not to say that there hasn’t been some really great music since that era, but that’s the music that inspires me. I keep coming back to it.

I did have a period where I was really listening to Sufjan Stevens. I thought he was an interesting new artist. There’s still a lot of good music being made but you have to seek it out. I’m always open to hearing new music but it rarely holds up because I end up comparing it to the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks or the Who. That’s a pretty tall order.

RC: You release records on your own label and are known as a perfectionist in the studio. How do you know when an album is done?

RXH: I never make that decision; Nancy does. There’s that old saying that “art is never finished. It’s only abandoned.” That’s the way it is around here. You keep nitpicking, going after some perfection that you can’t attain. That’s just the way I look at it. I just keep trying to get it as close to that as possible. At some point though you just have to abandon it and say, “we’re done!” That’s where Nancy steps in (laughs) and it works out well.

RC: For those not familiar with your music, which song from the new record would you recommend as a good point of entry to your catalog?

RXH: I always put the song that I want people to hear first, first. So I would say “Nearly There” is a good example of what I do. So is the last song, “The Greater Good,” Even though it has horns it’s in the style of music that I do best.

 

 

 

RC: How has being a sideman for some really big acts impacted your own music and career?

RXH: I think the thing that I gain most from those experiences is getting to understand what type of people they are, their personalities and the ways [in which] they interact with other people. That’s very inspiring, like Mary Weiss from The Shangri-Las. She’s a nice, fun person and very easy to work with. I played drums for Link Wray back in the 1970s and it was the same thing. He’s such an interesting person and dedicated to his craft. It’s more that side of it. Musically, people do things that are unique to them. But there’s nothing more fun for me than being in a situation where you get to play a song that you’ve heard on the radio. There’s something magical about that.

RC: You play many instruments, but which one in particular gives you the greatest pleasure?

RXH: Oh the drums for sure, also because I’m the most proficient on it. It was my first instrument. It just comes naturally to me, whether I’m playing them with my own stuff or as an accompanist. After that it would be piano, because with just one little movement of your fingers you’re hitting chords that you would never even dream of on guitar. Most of my new music was written on piano and sometimes entire songs were transcribed to guitar, so the piano is buried in there. In those moments it’s an anchor to the mix but you can’t even really hear it anymore.

 

 

RC: How has your drum kit evolved over the years?

RXH: I started with your basic kit. Then at some point I was inspired by Mitch Mitchell who was in the Jimi Hendrix Experience [see our article about Mitchell in Copper Issue 136 – Ed.]. He was playing with a double floor tom and I thought that was interesting because I always liked the way Buddy Rich had two floor toms. There was a period where I did the double bass and the three toms across – à la Keith Moon. Then I got into very large drums, inspired by John Bonham. I went really big. I had a 28-inch bass drum. Now I’ve settled into using 24-inch bass drums, with a single tom and double floor toms. That’s how I have been playing for the last decade or so.

RC: As a lifelong Beatles fan, where does Ringo Starr rank among your top drummers of all time?

RXH: He sits very high. I’d put him in my top five of rock inspirations. He did the job and played what was right for the songs. He also had unbelievable timing. The fact that they wouldn’t think twice about doing an edit [splice] between two different takes is because they assumed that Ringo had nailed it, and he always did. And like [Beatles producer] George Martin has commented, not only was his playing great but the sound that he got out of his drums was fantastic. His use of cymbals and his decisions on when to play fills or just do a solid back beat are in part why he is so amazing. I’m also a fan of Dino Danelli from the Rascals. He’s got a groove that’s all his own. It’s soulful and he’s the best showman of them all.

RC: What do you want to accomplish with Copious Notes?

RXH: The most complimentary review that I ever received was when someone said that there was joy in my music. That meant a lot to me because that’s what it’s really all about, making people feel good. That’s the magic of music!

 

Header image of Richard X. Heyman courtesy of Nancy Leigh.