While the saying, "days drag, years fly by" is annoying---it does seem to be true. Welcome to December: notable for three issues ofCopper!
...and, oh, some holidays. For starters, Happy Hanukkah!
The Copper Interviewis back with our friendsJohn SeetooandTom Fine---we get the skinny on Tom's remastering ofMercury Living Presencerecordings for release on vinyl, by Chad Kassem's Analogue Productionslabel. Chad, of course, was interviewed by John back in issue#33.
On to our regulars: Larry Schenbeck writes about musicalcollaborators; Dan Schwartz'slook atBernie Leadonis revisited; Richard Murison writes above my pay grade andintellectuallevel; Jay Jay French brings us a very cool story about alittle-known mover and shakerin the NYC music scene; Roy Hall bringstales of food and families; Anne E. Johnson brings us lesser-known work from the hugeHeartcatalog; Christian James Handdeconstructs the Stevie Nicks song,"Stand Back" ; Woody Woodward concludes his two-parter on Bessie Smith; and Itrip the laser light fantastic in phono technology, and look atmagical materialsin audio.
Don Kaplanis back with the answer to the musical question, "does this make my sackbut look big?"---Okay, it's about the vitalearly music scenein the SF Bay area....
Copper#73 wraps up withinvestment advicefrom Charles Rodrigues, and a striking Parting Shot fromBrazil.
Enjoy, and we'll see you in two weeks!
Cheers, Leebs. [Everyone knows the Sandy Denny and Judy Collins versions---I think Nina Simone's rather wistful tone fits the lyrics better.]
In earlier installments of this series, we’ve focused upon the various types of phono cartridges—pickup cartridges, if you prefer. Though wildly different in their internal construction, all these cartridges have one thing in common: a stylus (needle) that traces the record groove.
But: in terms of minimal record wear and plain old blue-sky theoretical elegance, wouldn’t the best needle benoneedle?
Through the decades a number of designers have thought so, but actual working devices didn’t appear until lasers were readily available, and a commercial product—well, sort of commercial—only appeared after mass-acceptance of CD players.
TheLaser Discfirst appeared in 1978, and was the first consumer product to utilize a laser to scan a disc. Admittedly, Laser Disc players would only play, well, Laser Discs—which may have been the size of an LP, but were shiny aluminum/polycarbonate discs that presaged CDs. The Laser Disc player and disc were designed hand and hand as an optical scanning system.
The same year that Laser Discs first appeared—1978—saw the appearance of an article in the June issue ofAudiothat fascinated me then, and which still has serious tweak appeal. In“A New Standard in Turntable Speed Consistency”, [scroll to page 78, et seq—Ed.] three physicists at the University of Virginia describe how an extremely stable and consistently-rotating turntable could be used to examine three distinct fields of interest:
” 1)We wish to do a laboratory experiment in which we can unambiguously test the theories which predict that the force of gravity gets weaker as time goes on; 2) another experiment(currently underway) is one in which a study of the motion of rotating cylinders would tell us whether or not matter is being created in the universe and, 3) it appears that we can test the earth’s rotational speed fluctuation and wobble, measure latitude fluctuations, and study other geophysical phenomena by observing the forces acting on small masses placed on an almost totally constant -speed turntable.”
Who knew you could do all that with a turntable?
The snag in all this? A really, really consistent rotational speed was needed. As in “between 10,000 and 10,000,000 times better than the finest commercially available turntables.”
Obviously, getting an old BSR at a yard sale wasn’t going to work. The UVA physics crew must have still had a decent experimental budget back then,judging by the rig they built for their experiments:
“The turntable we are currently using for these experiments is shown in Fig. 1. It is a 95 -lb. brass disc that has been mounted on an air bearing with no mechanical contact between the bearing surfaces. Instead, the rotor of the bearing floats on a cushion of air approximately 0.0001 -inch thick. The turntable (moment of inertia 500 Ib.-in.2′) is mounted on a 500 -lb. granite block which rests on damped pneumatic springs which sit on an 8000 -lb.granite block. This, in turn, sits on four damping isolators, each consisting of eight steel plates separated by ribbed neoprene pads.”
The Big Rig. Note the LP.
Given that the device described weighed in at nearly 8600 pounds even without the steel isolators, their experimental set up wasn’t housed in an old Army barracks.
So given this remarkable construction, what did those physicists do? They figured out how to play records on it. Clearly no SME tonearm with a Shure V-15 would do for such an exotic set-up.(Ironically, the same issue ofAudiois chock-full of ads for cartridges and turntables, as well as an article on the current state of phono cartridges, written by six engineers at Shure. There’s also an article on disco—but we’re getting way off-topic.)
From the article: “Finally, such a turntable needs a suitable cartridge and tonearm. In a future article we hope to report on the laser -optical pickup system we have conceived. Finely -focused laser light is guided to and servoed onto the record grove; then position -sensing detectors produce the two components of the stereophonic signals. A microprocessor sorts out the signal from record imperfections (the noise) by spectral analysis and provides appropriate control for the light beam as well as processing the signal. Such a system will be most useful if it can function with current records, and it seems likely that it can. The overwhelming advantage of such an arm is the delicacy with which it treats your records. The “stylus force” is only 0.000000000000000000000001 gram.”
I don’t think Shure ever approached that sort of tracking weight!
The disappointing aspect of this project? I’m not sure the laser playback system was ever built—the article says “we have conceived” the system, not “we have built”.
As I mentioned, the article fascinated me, and buried itself in the back of my brain. Back in 2001 I finally took the time to check up on the three authors of the article, and discovered that Prof. George Gillies—seen in the pic—was still at UVA. I emailed Professor Gillies, asking if the apparatus still existed.
I was disappointed by his response: “Although we gave up the precision rotations experiments years ago, we still do keep a finger in the gravitational physics pie with some experimental searches for anomalous effects in gravity. A couple of relevant publications are:
Ritter, R. C., Winkler, L. I., and Gillies, G. T., “Search for Anomalous Spin-Dependent Forces with a Polarized-Mass Torsion Pendulum,” Physical Review Letters, Vol. 70 (1993), pp. 701-704.
Ritter, R. C., Goldblum, C. E., Ni, W.-T., Gillies, G. T., and Speake, C. C., “Experimental Test of Equivalence Principle with Polarized Masses,” Physical Review D, Vol. 42 (1990), pp. 977-991.
“These are not exactly recent, but they are representative of the type of work that goes on here in that area.
“Most of my effort these days is in medical physics and biomedical engineering. ”
I asked what was to me an obvious question: what do you do with a 4-ton block of granite?”
Gillies responded, “One of the nuclear physics groups here took over that lab and use the block as a stable base-plate for some precision work of their own.”
And doggone it, I never asked about the laser playback system. I have to email Gillies, who is still at UVA. He may well think he has the world’s most patient stalker. [I did hear from Dr. Gillies on December 3rd, and he confirmed that the laser playback system was never built.—Ed.]
As Yogi Berra supposedly opined, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they ain’t.”
Next time inCopper, we’ll take a look at what happens when laser record playback goes from theory into practice.
[Ken Fritz has abilities and ambition that put most of us to shame. Ken decided to build his own speakers—and the listening room for them. As you’ll see, he did everything in a big way. Having produced tooling for the cast polymer baffle for the Thiel CS5, Ken says, “I thought I’d cast baffles for this system also.” As one would. ;->
The scope of the work required to build both speakers and room will take at least two articles to convey—maybe three. Meanwhile: take a look, and be amazed. Part 1 of the article appeared inCopper#72— Ed.]
Like Paul McGowan, I too have gone to extremes to build a music room, loud speakers, and electronics to produce music that I will listen to until I go to my grave.
The room is 30 x 55 ft., with a 12 ft. ceiling at the front and 17 ft. at the rear. I appropriated the ceiling design from a concert hall in Osaka, Japan. It changes height 5 times from the front to the back.
The walls are 12-inch cinder block that was laid with Durawall steel mesh between each course. Each vertical cavity was filled with 1-inch rebar and then with 3500 PSI pea gravel concrete.
The walls were then fired out with 2×6 studs on 12-inch centers, and purlins every 2 feet vertically. Next, 4 x 8 x 3/4 plywood was glued and screwed to the studs. Then, two layers of 5/8-inch fire code sheetrock glued with Durabond 90 and screwed to the plywood. This construction technique was suggested to me by Jim Thiel. My company did the patterns, masters, and production fiberglass molds for the Thiel CS5 loudspeakers.
[Tom Fine is a second-generation audio engineer, specializing in mastering and analog-to-digital transfers. The son of audiophile pioneers C. Robert and Wilma Cozart Fine, he grew up steeped in music and sound. His father owned Fine Sound and Fine Recording studios in New York City from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. His mother was director of Mercury Records’ classical division, and a corporate Vice President, in charge of the famed Mercury Living Presence recordings. These classic albums, most of them produced by his mother and recorded by his father, achieved state of the art high fidelity using 3 spaced omni-directional microphones feeding 3 tape tracks, which were then mixed to stereo directly in front of the LP cutting lathe (and, later, to a CD mastering chain). Since 2010, Tom Fine has been overseeing Mercury Living Presence remastering, working with state-of-the-art modern digital technology. He recently took a turn in the audiophile all-analog world.
The latest Mercury Living Presence reissues feature cellist Janos Starker: Bach’s Six Cello Suites and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, to be released on 45RPM 200g vinyl by Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions label. Tom Fine previously spoke withCopperabout his parent’s work in issues #49,50, and51, and we are grateful for an opportunity to revisit with him about his latest works. Tom replied to questions posed byCopper’sJohn Seetoo, via email.]
John Seetoo: How did you and Chad Kassem of Analogue Productions, Acoustic Sounds, and Quality Record Pressings (interviewed inCopper#33) meet, and what were the circumstances that led to your new collaboration?
Tom Fine: I’ve watched Chad’s companies for years. I have some of the earliest Analogue Productions reissue LPs, going back to the 1990s. In more recent times, Chad bought out the assets of what had been Classic Records. In the mid 1990s, my mother had made a few all-analog LP reissues for Classic Records, which now sell for decent coin on eBay. They were made the same way as the original MLP records – a “live” 3-2 mix from the first-generation 3-track edited master, directly to the cutting lathe, no EQ and no dynamics control. This, by the way, is also how she made the approximately 125 CD reissues she did in the ‘90s. For the Classic all-analog platters, she worked with Bernie Grundman, a lacquer cutting legend.
Anyway, when Chad bought Classic’s assets, I reached out to see if he had acquired any usable production parts from those 1990s LPs. He had not, but we began a long-running conversation. Earlier this year, Chad reached out to let me know he had gained release rights for those two Janos Starker titles. We talked about how he might proceed and, to his great credit, he opted to go the route of the highest sound quality. I was hired on as reissue producer and we were able to gain access to the first-generation 3-track tapes.
It’s important to know, these new LPs are only the third time Mercury Living Presence has been cut to vinyl directly from the first-generation tapes. Of course, all of the original LPs were made this way, the stereo records spanning from 1958 to about 1967. And then my mother made those 6 reissues for Classic Records in the 1990s. Otherwise, all other issues of Mercury titles on vinyl have been cut from either second-generation tapes or digital sources. It’s more of a production to work with the 3-track tapes, but that is how you get closest to the original recording session.
JS: I understand you did restoration work on the tapes at your studio. Can you detail the process you used at your studio and what challenges you encountered?
TF: These tapes are old and somewhat fragile. They contain many splices, which over time ooze glue and stick to adjoining layers of tape. I very carefully spool through the tapes and clean the splice goo so the tapes move smoothly through a tape transport. Some splices need to be replaced, which has to be done very carefully. I’ve now done this for a few dozen MLP tapes, so I know the drill. The key is patience; nothing can be rushed and everything must be done carefully and precisely. I guess that’s the key to all this reissue work – patience and precision. It’s definitely a specific skill set, a craft.
After I restored the tapes to good playing condition, I took them to Sterling Sound’s wonderful new facility in Nashville and worked with young lacquer cutting ace Ryan Smith. Ryan learned from the late George Marino, and has over the past decade or so made a long list of vinyl remasters that have been well received in the audiophile community. Sterling’s facility is purpose-built and really fantastic. Thestoryof how Ryan ended up in Nashville is interesting.
Mastering Engineer Ryan K. Smith stands in his studio at Sterling Sound, Nashville. Behind him is a customized Ampex ATR-100 with a Mercury 3-track cued up and ready, and a Neumann VMS-80 lathe. Photo Credit: Tom Fine.
JS: Did you actually personally transport the master tapes on a flight to Nashville? Were there any issues due to the enhanced FAA and DHS protocols at the airports?
TF: Well, the DHS people couldn’t have been nicer. None of them had seen reels of magnetic tapes before. So, each tape got opened up and swiped with the explosives-detection swabs. They were careful about x-raying the tapes and no damage was done. I had more trouble with the jar of BBQ sauce I tried to take home with me. They wouldn’t let me keep it! Someone at Nashville airport got a nice bonus that day.
JS: Was Nashville where the 3 to 2 transfers were made? Can you walk us through the process from tape to cutting lathe masters, and what, if any, problems cropped up that you needed to resolve?
TF: So, when I got to Sterling, the first thing Ryan and I did for each album was listen to the tape in his room and on his system. Then we worked out a 3-2 mix. This went quickly, more so than I expected, because we basically agreed on each step. We compared the tape playback sound to the CDs my mother did in the 1990s and used her 3-2 mix as a guideline.
With the Cello Suites, we decided to take a slightly different approach to previous issues. We focused the mix more on Starker himself, a man in a big room, rather than a somewhat diffuse image of a cello spread across the full width of the speakers. I think this is a more modern use of stereophony, because speakers and headphones today are more precise with how they reproduce a stereo image. Back in the day, especially with an old console stereo system, the “full-width cello” image would have worked just fine. What we noticed on the tapes was how physical this music is, how Starker is leaning in and playing, it’s a real workout! I think our mix brought that out more by focusing more on the man and the cello front and center. This, in turn, brings out more of the subtle aspects of Bach’s wonderful music.
With the Dvorak Concerto, I went at the 3-2 mix the same way I’ve done all previous remasters of orchestral music. With a modern playback, these tapes reveal all sorts of inner details, you can actually see the orchestration as you hear it because of the precise and steady placement of individual instruments within the stereo sound-field. What I go for is a realistic balance of how the orchestra sounded in front of the microphones, with each instrument and section in acoustic balance and in its proper place across the sound-stage.
As for problems and challenges, the biggest thing with cutting LPs is getting your lacquer to sound close to the tape. Ryan’s superb cutting chain can do that. He’s got a custom 3-2 mixer, very simple and direct circuitry, which then feeds his mastering console and the Neumann VMS-80 cutting lathe. That was Neumann’s last-generation record-cutting system, so they had worked out a lot of problems that persisted when the original MLP records were made (early in the stereo era). You can cut greater dynamics with less distortion and background noise, and there is no drifting of the bass instruments toward the center. The double basses are clearly right there on the right side, where they were in front of the microphones.
Now, when you cut a lacquer, it goes right out to the pressing plant for plating. You can’t hear what you cut until they make test pressings. We did test cuts before we committed to a final mix, but lacquer quality varies these days (there are only two suppliers left in the world and each have had their share of QC problems), and thus each cut is a bit of a crap shoot. Ryan also had challenges. Because we were cutting directly from a 3-2 mix, he couldn’t use the usual preview-computer system, which automatically controls the groove margin and depth. These computer systems date from the mid ‘60s, so back when the original MLP records were cut, they were done “on the fly” too. Back then, my mother would read ahead in the music score and use hand signals to alert cutting engineer George Piros (another legend of the lacquers) when loud and soft parts were coming up. He would then open or close the groove accordingly. You do this in order to accommodate the wide and deep groove of loud parts, and tighten up the groove in order to preserve “real estate” during quiet parts, thus allowing for more time to be cut on a side. Ryan did this with a modern twist. We had the waveform display of the 1990s CDs on his big computer monitor screen, so he could see when loud and quiet parts were coming up. Anyway, Ryan did a great job “cutting without a net” and we ended up with nice, dynamic, fully trackable sides.
Ryan Smith inspects a freshly-cut lacquer on his Neumann VMS-80 lathe at Sterling Sound, Nashville. Photo Credit: Tom Fine.
A closeup of a Mercury Living Presence lacquer being cut on Sterling Sound’s VMS-80 lathe with SX-74 cutterhead. Photo Credit: Tom Fine.
JS: Mastering engineer Steve Hoffman (interviewed inCopper#36and37) is another die-hard analog guy who does his own tape splicing. He detailed with us the challenges he had in remastering Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, which had a section during the second verse where the tape had been stretched and was unusable. Have you encountered any similar problems so far in the analog realm, and if so, what methods do you deploy to fix them?
TF: Luckily, the MLP tapes are in generally good condition and haven’t been abused by previous playbacks and handling along the way. As long as the splices are cleaned up, they go through a tape transport OK. Ryan’s tape machine, a custom Ampex ATR-100 with Greg Orton heads and transformerless electronics by the late Mike Spitz, is gentle on the old tapes. He had previously remastered a series of RCA Living Stereo albums for Analogue Productions, so he has plenty experienced with fragile old tapes.
Most of the horror stories you hear about tapes “self destructing” are due to ignorance and misuse. For instance, old tapes should never be fast-wound, and I’ve heard stories of really ignorant protocols about baking tapes (a tape shouldn’t be baked unless you’re sure it needs to be baked and you’re sure it’s the type of tape and type of problem that responds to baking), and of course storage issues. Associations like AES and ARSC try to spread factual knowledge. Earlier this year I attended a superb AES Conference on preservation and archiving at the Library of Congress’s Packard Center in Culpeper, VA. My message to people who handle tapes is this: the factual knowledge is out there.Learn it before messing with old fragile tapes.
A Mercury Living Presence lacquer being cut in Ryan K. Smith’s mastering room (Nashville, TN). In the foreground is the customized ATR-100 tape machine playing the 3-track master. In the background is Sterling Sound’s Neumann VMS-80 lathe. Photo Credit: Tom Fine.
[Part 2 of John Seetoo’s interview with Tom Fine will appear inCopper#74—Ed.]
Some companies seem to have a hard time staying out of the news: thinkGibson,Sears, andMonster Products—which most of us still think of asMonster Cable. Welast lookedat the bumpy ride of this long-lived company inCopper#65, when the company’s implausible offering of cryptocurrency was shot down by the SEC.
So what are Noel Lee and crew up to now?
Unless you have access to SEC reports, the only place where you’ll find news of Monster’s current status is on Ted Green’sStrata-gee.com, which we also cited in our last article. Long story short: in the last quarter reported (ending June 30), Monster’s sales were down to $9.1 M, compared to $13.1 M in the same quarter of last year. The good news is that losses for the quarter were $6.9 M, down from $7.2 M loss during the same quarter last year. As good news goes—that’s pretty bad.
During the 9 months preceding June 30, Monster lost $31.3 M—2 1/2 times the losses incurred during the same 9-month period last year.
It’s hard to imagine that this can continue indefinitely—after all, they’re not Sears. __________________________________________________________
InCopper#65, we also wrote about the initial public offering ofSonos. At the end of the first day of trading, the stock closed just under $20/share. Around the time of the launch, many analysts expressed skepticism about the company’s potential strength; as we mentioned back then, CNBC’s “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer comparedSonos to Fitbit: “…Fitbit’s stock has been a total, unmitigated disaster…I got burned by that one. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.”
Cramer and his bearish colleagues may have been right. Shortly after the IPO, Sonos’ stock went as high as $23.60, but it’s mostly been downhill ever since. Having bottomed at $11.09, the stock is presently just above $12. To put it mildly,losing 40%in the span of 4 months is generally not viewed with favor on Wall Street—or anywhere else, for that matter.
It’s well-known for its fog, iconic bridge, wineries, redwood forests, and cable cars. It’s also known to early music enthusiasts as a world-class early music research center, for being home to one of our nation’s oldest and most prominent early music societies (SFEMS–the San Francisco Early Music Society), and for sponsoring one of the three most important early music festivals in Europe and America, the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition (BFX). The Bay Area has been called “the real center of historical performance in the United States” (San Francisco Classical Voice) and its early music festival has “become a remarkable institution on the American musical scene” (The New York Times).
How did the Bay Area become such an important location for early music performance and scholarship? And why does that community continue to thrive?
The Bay Area was notable after WW2 for its cultural diversity and experimentation in music and all the arts. This environment enabled musicians to interact and generate new ensembles, projects, and repertory. Amateur singing groups and community choruses with an early music emphasis were encouraged to grow. Schools began offering programs that inspired young musicians to pursue careers in early music, some of whom (like mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson) went on to become acclaimed artists.
According to former SFEMS President and BFX Artistic Director Robert Cole, the lifestyle in the Bay Area was different from other places in the ’60s. “There’s always been a spirit of diverse community…very much a freelance kind of world where you tried things out and performed with different groups instead of working with a single orchestra. During the ’70s, areas like the high tech industry showed a similar tendency. A number of tech people didn’t want to be part of a large organization and left places like New York for the Bay Area to start their own businesses…in a region that’s also attractive and a major tourist destination.” Cole explains that SFEMS was able to develop and flourish primarily because of its Bay Area location and, in turn, helped strengthen the region’s early music scene. “There’s no other organization quite like it, at least of any size…. It’s unique in offering such a broad range of services: community services that have helped dozens of ensembles get off the ground, education programs that have taught thousands of aspiring professional and amateur musicians, and production of the biennial Berkeley Festival—an event that’s earned the organization international recognition.” (The next Festival will be held in 2020.)
Harvey Malloy, the current Executive Director of SFEMS, refers to the Society as a pioneer: “It was one of the first organizations to create opportunities for musicians and offer nationally recognized workshops and classes.” Malloy agrees that SFEMS has played a central role in turning the Bay Area into a thriving world center of historical performance through presentations showcasing the finest early music performers, by opening the world of early music to adults and children, and training members of the next generation of artists.
SFEMS’ Affiliate Program has contributed to the success of numerous local artists and organizations by providing support and publicity. (The nation’s leading period instrument orchestra, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, was originally an affiliate.) SFEMS’ concert series has always drawn a variety of internationally acclaimed early music artists to the Bay Area including Emma Kirkby, Joshua Rifkin, Anonymous 4, the Hilliard Ensemble, Jordi Savall, and Gustav Leonhardt. The current season, SFEMS’ 42nd, continues to feature a wide variety of programs including performances by The Choir of New College Oxford–founded in 1379 and one of Britain’s most acclaimed choral ensembles, Antic Faces–a newly formed Renaissance band presenting Elizabethan entertainments, the Grammy Award nominated Ars Lyrica Houston Chamber Players performing works for violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord, Iestyn Davies–one of England’s greatest countertenors accompanied by lutenist Thomas Dunford, and El Mundo–a chamber group dedicated to recreating Latin sounds of the old and new worlds.
The Bay Area early music scene also continues to thrive because of the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition. The biannual BFX has a large number of formal “mainstage” concerts performed by local, national, and international artists, as well dozens of more informal artist-produced concerts. The weeklong festival has been the place to find everything from medieval to 19th-century music, risqué chansons and erotic madrigals fitted with new sacred texts, ribald folksongs transformed into prayerful polyphony, a rediscovered mass in 40 and 60 parts that hadn’t been performed in close to 450 years, early music film festivals, impromptu performances, a sing along, and a fully staged Baroque opera/ballet about an ugly water nymph who believes the king of the gods is in love and wants to marry her. During performances and in the exhibition hall you’re likely to come across a variety of period instruments including Bladder pipes, Eunuch flutes, Shawms, Vihuelas, Hurdy-gurdys, Racketts, Ouds, Sackbuts, Crumhorns, and Citterns that were precursors of modern instruments or were popular for a while then went out of style.
Robert Cole again: “The BFX is the spirit of historical performance—seeking to know and understand music in its full historical context, its artifacts, it practices, its meaning to those who composed and heard it. And from that knowledge and experience, we hope to know ourselves and our own world better, as we make fresh and hear anew the thoughts and sentiments of souls singing to one another across the ages”–statements that apply to the entire early music scene as well.
Of course you don’t have to travel to the Bay Area to hear early music: Performances are readily available on vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and from downloads. If you’re just starting to investigate early music or already enjoying it, try listening to recordings by some of the following period instrument groups: The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Musica Pacifica, Magnificat, Archetti Baroque String Ensemble, Ensemble Vermillion, and Vajra Voices…all with roots in the Bay Area.
I am always interested in transitory events whether they be political, biographical, or musical. The emergence of the blues as first a song form and eventually an art form is one of the most fascinating and simplest.
Think of the state of the American song in the late 19thcentury. Stephen Foster, born in 1826 wrote some of the most popular, deriving from European influences but setting a uniquely American tone. Songs like “Camptown Races,” “I Dream of Jeannie (With the Light Brown Hair),” and “Old Folks at Home” (also called “Swanee River”), are indelibly etched into the American art psyche.
Foster also attempted, with some success, the minstrel form with songs like “Old Black Joe” and “Massa’s in De Cold Cold Ground” but he was more popular for his light-hearted pop songs. But, despite their popularity Foster was not a smart businessman. In 1848 he sold “Oh! Susanna” for $100 and the publisher made $10,000. By 1857 Foster was experiencing financial difficulties, so regardless of his songs’ popularity he sold the future rights to all his songs for $1900 and proceeded to drink himself to an early death in 1864.
But my point is these songs were light and airy ditties that live in American lore and continually pop back into recording culture but hardly can be considered revolutionary. It was the introduction of the rhythms and tragedy of the African American slaves that boiled over and gave rise to a new style of expression that Ma Rainey first heard from that local girl at a tent show and labeled ‘the Blues’. This form was as different from “Camptown Races” as cherry pie from mud. And man was it dirty.
We went over Bessie’s life in part 1 of this essay and saw how she and Ma Rainey embraced this form and incorporated it into what can only be termed their acts. These women, and especially Smith, were not primarily singers.
Bessie Smith was first known as a performer. By the early 1920’s Bessie with Frank Walker was producing and traveling with lavish shows using vaudeville routines and minstrel songs to entertain white and black audiences with dancing girls, bawdy comedic skits, and the blues tunes. She traveled the country from coast to coast with a troupe of characters, primarily in the South and Southwest where her brand of theater was most appreciated. She recorded in New York and Chicago as well as performing there but when she hit the road, she would kick it off in places like Atlanta.
The blues is what she is known for today despite her talent for entertaining audiences with her raucous behavior on stage she could sing the shit out of a blues song. By 1925 she had begun recording with Fletcher Henderson who ten years later would be instrumental in developing the Big Band Swing style first with his own orchestra and eventually with Benny Goodman. In January 1925 Henderson introduced Frank Walker to his 23-year-old cornet player, Louis Armstrong.
Walker hired Armstrong for a series of recordings at a session in New York. This was one of just a handful of sessions these two giants recorded together but the influence Smith had on Armstrong cannot be overstated. Here was a major flash point in blues and jazz history.
Armstrong in a 1952 interview called her “the madam of the Blues” and talked about that first session as one of his favorites of all his many. “It was wonderful how she’d stand there all day and make the blues, and give them titles. It’s a wonderful thing you know. We’d meet about nine o’clock in the morning and when she’d finish a blues I’d say ‘What’s that one Bessie?’ and they were all different and pretty. So you know she was a creator.”
That session stands out as a watershed moment in jazz history. Several iconic songs were recorded including “St. Louis Blues” which Armstrong would use in his repertoire for the rest of his career. The combination of Bessie’s power and Louis’s sharp cornet soloing produced a model sound that became imitated for decades.
The last recording from this session was Armstrong’s favorite, and is considered a classic in traditional jazz repertoire. “You’ve Been a Good Ole Wagon” shows off Bessie’s ability to wring soul from a ballad about sending her man out to graze, and Louis’s muted cornet not only evokes and sways with Bessie’s wail but shows a humor that would forever be a part of his style.
Bessie Smith came by this humor and tragedy very naturally. Her personal life was a gas to research. I wish I could have partied with that gal. Having been brought up in the South she had developed a taste for corn liquor or moonshine, and no matter how much money she made she would never touch store bought liquor and claimed it made her sick. She was such a strong personality she wouldn’t allow her drinking partners to touch anything but this bathtub gin as long as she was paying.
She’d stay out all night and sometimes would disappear for days. She was married to a bounder named Jack Gee during her heyday who discouraged her drinking so when he wasn’t along for the tent tours Bessie would cut loose, sleeping with men and women from her show and shacking up in hotels for days with various crew members. Jack caught her a few times and the fights were glorious. The girl could handle herself and few men or women could back her down.
Because of Jim Crow laws throughout the North and South there were few places where African Americans could party legally, especially in the rural hamlets that were used by the Theater Owners Bookings Association, or TOBA, that booked African American acts around the country. What naturally sprang up were party houses, often abandoned houses in very rural areas, where local blacks could congregate, drink, carouse, and play music, with little interference from the officers of the law.
Bessie knew all of them, and would frequent these crazy houses with mostly female crew members. Her niece Ruby, who traveled and performed with the troupe, remembers a story of such a house in rural Georgia during a tour.
Bessie had heard there was a party going on in this house and she got her gals together to blow off some steam. They got all dressed up and walked out to where the house was. It was a country place and surrounded by mud so the girls got their clothes messed up going out there. But when they arrived the atmosphere was one to Bessie’s liking. There was a band in the living room playing up a storm, folks of all types dancing and hollering, going in and out of rooms upstairs, and in the kitchen was a big pot of collard greens. Bessie grabbed a plate of greens, a glass of moonshine to wash it down, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.
The girls were not as fond of the surroundings and cowered in the corner of the kitchen watching the proceedings with wide-eyed dread. They were there only because when Bessie wanted to party and said you were going, you were going. A drunk came into the kitchen and tried to get Ruby to dance with him. Ruby was frightened, and declined. The drunk got ugly and started to push Ruby into the living room.
Without a word Bessie got up from the table and cold cocked the guy, then sat down to finish her supper. Some friends of the drunk dragged him off. The guy was yelling about revenge but was too scared of Smith to really follow it up. Ruby recounts they spent most of the night at the party.
As they left toward morning the idiot drunk appeared from behind a tree, yelling and waving a gun. Bessie walked right up to him, grabbed his arm, and took the gun away from him. The clown took off but Bessie took off her high heels and chased the guy through the mud, shooting the gun into the air and screaming laughter. Atta girl.
Smith was doing well enough by 1925 to have a railroad car built that could house her troupe as well as store the show’s equipment. She was understandably proud of this and all her accomplishments and when she was doing well she gave lavish gifts to her friends and especially her husband. Jack Gee was an untalented cad who claimed to be producing her shows, but the shows were in fact managed by Bessie’s brother Clarence. But often she would feel guilty about her extracurricular activities and spend money on Jack for jewelry, clothes, and cars. There’s a great story that Bessie would retell about a car dealership in Chicago.
Jack and Bessie were walking down a sidewalk when Jack’s eye was caught by a unique new Cadillac convertible in a showroom. Bessie resolved to buy the car for Jack and went inside.
The white salesman scurried over with the obvious intention to get these two out of the showroom before anyway saw them.
“Ma’am, let me show you some different cars outside, less expensive cars.”
Bessie. “No I want that one.”
She was insistent until the exasperated salesman finally said “Well it’ll cost you $5000.”
Bessie drew up her skirt where she kept a carpenter’s apron full of cash and pulled out a fistful of money. She loved this story as an obvious triumph over white attitudes towards even well-known African Americans.
Sadly the marriage wouldn’t last, and as Bessie’s career started to decline towards 1929 they split up and Bessie had to sell that railroad car. The early 30’s were lean years for Bessie as tastes changed, and the advent of ‘talking’ pictures made the traveling show an anachronism.
She experienced a revival with the boom of Swing in 1935-1936 and Smith’s popularity returned as she could swing with the best of them. But on the morning of September 26, 1937 she was traveling in an automobile with her lover Richard Morgan and an accident took her life. It was estimated that 10,000 fans attended the funeral of the Empress of the Blues and the largest selling recording artist of her day.
Here’s a treat. This is a video a guy made featuring his 1925 Victrola playing a copy of Bessie’s last recording “Gimme a Pigfoot.” A lady to the end.
A lot of the material for this article came from the excellent and definitive biography of Bessie Smith,Bessieby Chris Albertson. Highly recommend.
January 29th is not JUST my Mum’s birthday, it’s also the day, in 1983, that Stevie Nicks and then husband Kim Anderson were making their way up the PCH to celebrate their wedding when Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” came on the radio. Stevie started to sing a melody over the bits in-between Prince’s lyrics and found herself inspired. She and Kim pulled into a little town as soon as one appeared and purchased a tape-recorder so that she could commit the idea in some way.
Once the honeymoon was over, she entered the studio in Los Angeles to get working on her second solo album The Wild Heart. Herfirst solo record, 1981’s Bella Donna had been a critical and commercial success, so they had high hopes for this sophomore release. It was recorded after the emotional roller-coaster of the death of her best friend, Robin Anderson, the birth of Robin’s child right before her death, who Stevie was Godmother to, and the subsequent 3-month marriage to Robin’s widower, Kim. You can’t make this stuff up. That’s a LOT of inspiration! The record eventually went double platinum and delivered one of Nicks’ most celebrated tracks.
“Stand Back” is one of those songs that was written and recorded in the Halcyon Days of the Record Industry. It’s a SINGLE song, but just look at the personnel involved:
Stevie Nicks – vocals
Jimmy Iovine – producer
David Williams – guitar
Sandy Stewart – synthesizer
Prince – synthesizer
Bobbye Hall – percussion
Waddy Wachtel – guitar
Ian Wallace – percussion
Russ Kunkel – drum overdubs
Steve Lukather – guitar
Marvin Caruso – drums
David Bluefield – OB-Xa synthesizer and DMX drum machine programming
Sharon Celani – background vocals
Lori Perry-Nicks – background vocals
Shelly Yakus – engineer
Chris Lord-Alge – mixer
There is NO way, in 2018, that one song would garner this much focus from so many MONSTER players. It’s a veritable “Who’s Who?” of session musicians, each bringing their own individual perspective and talents to bear. And that’s why it’s SO good.
TO THE TAPE!!
It appears that David Bluefield is the man responsible for the main drum-loop on this thing. A delicious example of the form. The Phil Collins “Face-Hugger” snare sound in full effect. Rich analogue samples. A tight texture, as I like to call it. “But there are TWO drummers listed in the credits,” I hear you think. Yup, there are. And one of those is Russ Kunkel, a player of great repute. He has graced the kit on recordings from Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Neil Diamond, Joe Walsh, and Bob Dylan, to name just a few, oh and he was ALSO Eric “Stumpy Joe” Childs, one of the ill-fated drummers for the band Spinal Tap. On this recording, I believe that it is he who provides the real toms being used at the end and during certain segments of the verses. This was something that happened a lot back in the 80’s. The anemic sounds of the MANDATORY drum-machine would be bolstered by real players layering acoustic drums over the top of the samples. It lends a more “organic” feel and helps to seat the groove in a 3D way that is hard to do when it is generated by just the machine. Hardly ever happens these days. But it should.
There’s also a wonderful percussion part being played by Bobbye Hall. She’s is one of the most respected percussionists in the biz and has appeared on 58 Top 100 singles, 22 Top 10 hits, and 6 #1’s. Not too shabby. My only complaint is how low it sits in the mix…you can hardly hear the bloody thing!
The bass part is a rich, growly, bit of synth magic, I believe also played by Bluefield. The looping dance of its arpeggio weaves throughout the track and bears its Prince influence pretty brazenly. BUT…if it ain’t broke! There is a wonderful innocence to these early synth-pop parts. You can almost hear the joy in them, the discovery of new textures, hitherto unheard. What an incredible time to have been making music at this level. The budgets, the freedom, the equipment, none of these things had existed prior. And these were the players who could truly exploit the technology and bend it to their will. This entire rhythm track is baller. It wouldn’t have been out of place in a roller-skate jam like Expose’s “Point Of No Return.” Another of my favs. I’m pretty sure we roller-skated to this at Good Skates, Long Island. “Couples Only!”
Upon entering the studio to work on the album, and this song specifically, Nicks reached-out to his Purple Majesty to see if he would be interested in playing on the song that he had inspired. To Stevie’s surprise, he showed-up a couple of hours later, entered the studio, walked to the Oberhiem synth, and proceeded to lay down the amazing part that, pretty much, makes the song so recognizable. It’s an interesting exercise to imagine the song WITHOUT this texture. What would it have been? It’s hard to hear it as a song without this signature riff. There’s a lot to be said for serendipity when it comes to the recording studio. We’ll never know what part may have been written instead had Prince not shown up. But, it’s FAIRLY guaranteed that it wouldn’t have been THIS good. Nicks said that it took him little over an hour to write and track the part, and at its conclusion he left the studio and she never heard from him again. Nicks has stated that it was all “like a dream.” It is also one of her great regrets that she didn’t ever get to perform it live with him. She did, however, give him a 50/50 split on the song-writing which, considering the success of the track, and the album, was no small gift. And is ALSO testament to what a solid chick she is. Well played, Stevie, well played. This particular track on this record is one of the few times you get to hear Prince outside of his solo work. Enjoy.
There are THREE blokes credited with the guitar playing on this song. Yup, three! David Williams, the legend Waddy Wachtel, and, as was seemingly MANDATORY in this era, Toto’s badass Steve Lukather. Dude was EVERYWHERE. It makes sense that the lead on the track is Luke, but the other parts, especially the Nile Rogers-esque “Funk Vibe” are hard to pin down. Chances are it’s Waddy, but if you know better please leave a comment with the correct credit. All of the parts are so good and the various flavors meld together perfectly. It’s a great compliment to the entire team that it’s actually hard to nail down just EXACTLY what kind of song this IS! Dance? Synth-Pop? Rock? All of them? It’s just MUSIC, really. This goes back to my comment about the freedom of this moment. All of the new instruments and sounds being layered with the “classics” made for a fertile environment to make records in. Everyone creating at 11. Awesome. It’s interesting to note that Stevie sings over the top of Lukather’s entire solo. She is The Queen, after-all. One must know one’s place.
It’s also hard to work out who is playing what on the additional synth tracks. Once we clear Prince out of the way we are left with some great ear-candy bits that help bolster the choruses with the inter-weaving “Atari” sounds juxtaposed against the bass synth and the chanky guitar. This is why it’s so important to have experts playing on your tracks. They know their shit! These arrangements are so good. They seem simple, but once parsed-out it reveals a complexity and thought that is easily over-looked. Everything fits together perfectly. There’s NO fat on this jam. Is that a mixed metaphor?
And now? The vocal. Man, Stevie’s voice is an instrument. She gained a little weariness by this point in her career. And the emotional turmoil that preceded the recording of this song is in each syllable. The whiskey-soaked, 2 packs-a-day, huskiness lends itself to the lyric. The performance is a thing of beauty. There are fragile moments, strong moments, and the final moment that I highlight in the audio segment is perfection. Sharon Celani and Lori Perry-Nicks had been singing back-ups for Stevie since her prior album and their voices are a perfect counterpoint to Nicks’. They have a clarity and bell-like focus that allows Stevie to provide the emotional weight without having to over-perform. When she reaches for the higher notes in the pre-chorus, I get chills every time. And hers’ is such a unique texture, whenever you hear it…you know its Stevie Nicks. There’s a reason that this song is still being played in the Fleetwood Mac live sets. It’s a FANTASTIC piece of synth-rock-pop-whateveritis.
The Radio Bit:
The rest of the team involved in the process of making this track ALSO cast long shadows. If he was ONLY known as a Producer, the bloke, named Jimmy Iovine, would have an enviable career. He went from the studio to the Board Rooms of the Industry to the rarefied air of The Billionaires Club. Who’d’ve thought it back in 1983? Not many, I’ll bet. The mixing on the album was managed by a bloke named Chris Lord-Alge, who has gone on to become one of the highest paid, and most respected, mixing engineers of all time. If it’s on the radio, there’s a chance that CLA (as he is known) was involved. A brilliant example of how wide a brush he can paint with is Green Day’s American Idiot. It’s a high-water mark of his career. Another BRILLIANT record.
Of course, no song recorded in the early 80’s was complete without a video that featured the “Moonlighting Filter,” a choreographed dance routine, wind machines, and random sets constructed to look like period pieces from Victorian England. Once again, the innocence of this time is an adorable thing to look back on. I have also attached the much MORE ridiculous “Scarlet Version” of the video, which was scotched due to Stevie thinking that she looked too fat in it. This version of the video somehow manages to OUT 80’s the OTHER video! Quite an accomplishment.
Enjoy the attached audio from the radio segment. It’s SO good!
Alright, I’m off to go and listen to Mac’s Tango In The Night, may favorite of their albums. If you haven’t listened to that one lately, I urge a re-visit. Epic record!
Have a great couple of weeks. See you at the next one.
Not a slow-opening-of-my-eyes awake. More a slap-in-the-face awake. My eyes open wide and I see the nurse standing over me.
A few days before this, I had awoken feeling lousy. It was a depressing feeling with some tightness in my chest—not severe enough to indicate anything serious, more like a bad case of indigestion. I ignored it and spent the day working. The following morning, feeling just as badly, I drove over to the gym. During the session I had little energy.
“Roy, you don’t look well,” my trainer said. “Maybe you should get checked.”
I didn’t want to go to the emergency room but as my cardiologist was nearby, I decided to go there instead. I explained my problem to the receptionist and the cardiologist saw me immediately. He did an EKG and told me to wait. He soon returned saying I was booked into nearby St. Francis Hospital for an angiogram and probably angioplasty.
St. Francis Hospital in Manhasset, NY is wonderful. Most local hospitals in my area are great but the emergency rooms are noisy, crowded and tension-provoking. St. Francis, run by nuns, is calm and reassuring. Checked in and vitals taken, I was told to wait (what turned out to be around six hours) until my procedure. I was given a bed in a cubicle with a curtain betwixt me and the other occupant. She was an elderly woman who kept shitting herself and stinking up the place. The waft was so terrible that, not wanting to die before my procedure, I moved to a chair in the hallway for the rest of my stay.
That evening I was wheeled into the operating room. A catheter would be inserted in my groin and moved up through my arteries to remove the blockage. I awoke sometime later and a doctor told me I had three obstructions, which couldn’t be unblocked. Therefore I was scheduled for open-heart bypass surgery on Monday morning. This was Friday night.
My pre-op stay was mostly uneventful save for the afternoon before surgery. My wife Rita invited some friends over for a visit. In addition to good food, Rita produced two bottles of wine and it turned into quite a raucous affair. I shared the room with another patient who was recovering from oral surgery and had a bandaged mouth so he couldn’t say a word. At some point the ward sister appeared, looked at the empty wine bottles and said angrily,
“What are these doing here?”
We eyed her and laughed. I said something about lack of signage re: alcohol. This enraged her even more and I thought she was going to rap my knuckles with a ruler. She stormed out of the room, saying that she was going to call my surgeon and report me. One of our friends said as he was leaving the room, “This was best hospital visit – ever.”
The next morning I asked the surgeon how he had responded to the sister.
“Wouldn’t you want a drink or two beforeyouhad open heart surgery?” he said, smiling.
That same night, the eve of Passover, a nun visited me who, knowing I was Jewish, asked if I would like to speak to the Jewish chaplain. I declined, as I am defiantly anti-religious. We did talk god a little but then she told me that I was in god’s hands.
“I prefer to be in the surgeon’s hands, not gods,” I said.
“He is a great surgeon because god had blessed his hands,” she said.
As she was leaving she said to me, in Yiddish, “A Zissen Pesach” (a sweet Passover).
I was rolled into the vestibule of the operating theater. A very charming aid shaved my whole body from my neck to my toes. Every hair was removed. The anesthesiologist introduced himself, said that there was a delay, and asked if I would like a Valium.
“Sure, why not?” was my reply.
I later learned that I was so stoned that every 10 minutes or so I would try to expose myself to my wife and daughter and ask, “Do you know that they shaved me all over?”
The surgeon was amazing and I woke up with some tubes sticking out of my chest but no pain. The operation had gone well. Before going in, the doctor had advised me to try to walk as soon as possible. I asked to get up and accompanied by the nurse, my wife and an array of tubes attached to machines, I shuffled my way forward. I didn’t have much energy but walked a little. I repeated this process six times in the first day, venturing deeper into the recovery area of the hospital. This impressed the doctors so much that next day they deemed me healthy enough to be moved to the regular ward. Before leaving, the two tubes attached to my chest had to be removed. One drained the heart, the other, the lungs. The nurse removed the tape and then, while pressing on my chest, she started tugging. For the first time ever I felt an alien object moving inside of me. The tube was ribbed like a bendy straw and I squirmed as it slowly pop, pop, popped out of me. This was repeated and of all the procedures I have experienced thus far, this was the most gruesome.
I was discharged a few days later. Home stay was somewhat boring. Rita was a great nurse and did whatever she could to make me comfortable but apparently—and I have no memory of this—I was a terrible patient. I constantly complained about her cooking, and the fact that I was housebound and stuck staring at the clock drove her crazy for a while.
I couldn’t drive for the first three weeks, in case there was an accident and the airbag deployed—this could rupture the stiches and titanium wires inside my sternum. I was thus relegated to the back of the car, clutching my red heart-shaped pillow given to me by the hospital. (I do admit to sneaking out one day and driving to get beer. This caused another fight.) I clutched the pillow to my chest whenever I coughed, which happened often.
I really hated the opioids given me for pain so my daughter suggested I smoke some pot for relief. Stupidly, I tried this and it started a coughing jag, which was excruciatingly painful. Clutching my pillow I coughed for about 10-15 minutes, hoping my chest wouldn’t explode. When it was over and I had calmed down, I found that my lungs were now completely clear and my breathing was deeper. Who says marijuana isn’t medicinal?
I continued walking as much as I could and in week six I signed up for the hospital’s rehabilitation program. This was a three-month program consisting of three one-hour sessions every week.
The De Matteis Center for Cardiac Research in Greenvale, NY is an amazing place. Basically, it’s a gym with nurses and a doctor on staff. It caters almost exclusively to cardiac patients recovering from heart surgery. A short while after orientation I paid my first visit. The routine was the same every time: attach three electrodes on your chest, plug in a transmitter, have your blood pressure taken and move. Three laps around the gym, five minutes on a machine, three laps round the room, etc., for a whole hour. At first it was exhausting just walking, but rather quickly I found it more doable. As my strength increased, the staff assigned me to different machines. At the beginning most of the machines were operated by foot power but as my chest healed up I graduated to machines that used my arms and chest muscles. Most of my fellow inmates were like me: recovering with a desire to get well as soon as possible.
But there is always the exception. Josh was in his sixties. A triple bypass patient with a bad knee that forced him to use a cane. Every morning, Josh would come in at eight, pour himself a cup of coffee, open a brown paper bag, remove a bagel with about one inch of cream cheese on it and proceed to eat it. This ritual took about half an hour, after which he would finish his meal, clear the table, then stagger to the nearest machine to slowly pedal for a short while. Full recovery was just a dream for him.
Halfway through each session someone would check my blood pressure and if it was okay, I could continue. Only once I was stopped from leaving as my heart rate was more than 10 beats faster than when I entered. I had to wait a few minutes until it calmed down.
I cannot stress how much the staff at this facility helped me to recover. I was assigned a nurse who regularly discussed my progress and medication. At one point, as I felt the beta blocker I was taking was slowing my heart down and inhibiting my recovery, she suggested I call my cardiologist to reduce the dose. I did this and it made a huge improvement. On my last day I felt back to normal, fit and very much alive. My nurse asked me to give some advice to a new patient who was just starting that day. He looked frail and nervous. I smiled and said, “Stick with the program and do what you are told. You’ll be healthy in no time at all.” And I meant it.
Many patients and their families suffer depression after surgery. The specter of death and the uncertainty of the outcome adds enormous stress to a pressure-filled time.
Fortunately, this did not affect my wife or me. My father had died from his second heart attack at age 63 and other members of both our families had suffered from heart disease. So, when I got sick, I wasn’t surprised. I realized that I had been waiting all my life for this moment. Both of us felt that death wasn’t an option; that this was just a repair.
When I moved to Manhattan in the mid-seventies things were not expensive, but I was almost always penniless. My wife, a student at Parsons School of Design, worked part-time as a cashier in a supermarket, and I had various jobs in the retail field. I didn’t earn much, so money was tight.
Rents in those days were cheap, however. We had a one-bedroom apartment on Greene Street and University Place, which costs us the princely sum of $300 a month. The down side was that the city was broke and crime was high. One morning, I exited my apartment to find the chalk mark of a body on the sidewalk surrounding a large pool of blood. The streets were pretty grimy and all sorts of weird-looking people lived on them. Washington Square, which we could see from our bedroom window, wastheplace for drugs. Walking through it was an adventure. “Smokes? Ups? Downs? Acid? Horse?” In summer the park transformed itself into an outdoor theater and we would watch all sorts of performers for free. There were bands and singers and gymnasts and quite a few stand-up comedians trying out their material.
I loved the place.
Every once in a while, budget permitting, we would go out to eat. We had found an Italian restaurant on Grand Street on the edge of little Italy. The food was copious, tasty, and cheap. The only problem was the wine. It was really bad and no matter which bottle I chose, it was lousy. One day, when ordering, I asked the waiter to help choose a wine. I explained that the food was great but the wine we had previously, was just not up to par. He nodded, looked at the list, pointed to one and said,
“Try this one, we get fewer complaints.”
Two.
My son Ilan was a line cook in Casa Mono in Manhattan, a tapas place modeled on Barcelona’s Cal Pep restaurant and Pinotxo Bar in La Boqueria food market. Casa Mono was his training ground, and working there gave him the experience to eventually winTop Chef, season 2. A fellow chef asked him if he could put up his cousin Maria, who was visiting New York from Barcelona.
Although his studio apartment on 13thSt. was tiny, Ilan agreed and the girl, who was unbelievably beautiful, moved in for a few days and subsequently stayed for quite a few months. Ilan had a girlfriend at the time so no romance occurred but they became fast friends.
A couple of years later, shortly after he wonTop Chef, we decided to take Ilan and our daughter Tess on a vacation to Spain. We rented an apartment in Barcelona, and after a few days of eating amazing food and exploring one of my favorite cities, Ilan contacted Maria. She and her family invited us up to Malgrat de Mar on the Costa del Sol for lunch.
Maria’s family was incredibly beautiful—everyone, including her father, looked like a film star. At some point they introduced us to Maria’s sister who they described as, “The pretty one” and boy, was she pretty. The family lived in a cluster of houses near the main square and the grandmother resided in one of them. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease but as the family lived next door, one member or another constantly supervised her. The father invited us to join them for lunch in a local restaurant that was their favorite. We all walked—including the grandmother—a couple of blocks to the restaurant. The dining room had wooden beams on the ceiling and white walls with paintings on them. We sat around a large circular table that accommodated all of us. The food was delicious from—thepan con tomate(bread smeared with tomato, olive oil and garlic) to theesqueixada(salted cod salad with tomato and onions), andcargols a la llauna(cooked snails).
The conversation was lively; everyone except the grandmother spoke English. In fact, she didn’t speak at all. She seemed in her own dream world and the only sign of cognizance was her finger occasionally pointing at the wine bottle for a refill. Maria’s father was thrilled that Ilan had accommodated her for so long in New York and couldn’t thank him enough for his generosity. Suddenly, the grandmother lifted her head up, opened her eyes, and looked at us.
She said, “What a beautiful family.”
Looking at my wife, Rita: “What a beautiful woman.”
Then my daughter: “What a lovely girl.”
Then my son: “What a handsome boy.”
Finally she looked at me long and hard. “Not so much!”
She then returned to her food and never said another word.
If I titled this story “The Strange Life & Times of Richard Alderson,” chances are:
a) My readers wouldn’t be too excited
b) You probably wouldn’t read past the title, and…
Fair enough.
In fact, this article is, in part, about the strange life of a NYC record producer named Richard Alderson, and his experiences in the NYC music scene in the sixties. He is the piece that ties it all together.
To make this all the more convoluted and fascinating, I will add this:
In 1965, I was in my first band. It was a 3-piece with Paul Herman on drums, a Chinese kid who lived across the street from me, named Bing Gong, on vocals, and me (my born name was John Segall).
We called ourselves John, Paul & Bingo!
We rehearsed 2 songs for an 8th grade school talent show:
Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” and the Fugs “I Couldn’t Get High.”
Needless to say, halfway through “I Couldn’t Get High” my guidance counselor stopped the show and threw us off the stage. I guess that a 13-year-old singing about not getting high wasn’t exactly appropriate for a 13-year-old!
At that very moment (fall of ‘65) I was thrown off stage at the “Battle of the Bands,” Richard Alderson was soon to get a call to be Dylan’s live sound engineer on his 1966 European tour, and, ironically, he had just produced the song “I couldn’t Get High” for the Fugs.
At 13 years of age, although I didn’t know Richard at the time, I crossed some kind of path with Richard Alderson.
Now that, my friends, is some kind of coincidence. But wait…there’s more.
Richard went on to marry one of my oldest and dearest high school friends, Jane Raab. Jane has gone on to produce major TV shows like “Sex & The City” and currently, “Blue Bloods.”
Over the years, over dinners, Richard would tell me stories about The Village in the early ‘60s. About seeing Dylan perform for the first time at the Gaslight Café when Richard was just 24.
Richard was doing live sound for Harry Belafonte, who was one of the few artists who traveled with his own sound system.
Richard was also an archivist who just so happened to be at the right place, at the right time, in music history.
Here is an excerpt of my interview with Richard:
JJ: When you saw Dylan at the Gaslight for the first time, I presume the manager Albert Grossman wasn’t yet involved. Do you remember hearing that Dylan had signed with him?
Richard Alderson: When I recorded Bob at the Gaslight, he had just signed with Grossman. I knew both Bob and Grossman from The Village about a year before I recorded him at the Gaslight. I was at the Gaslight a lot; I knew the owners Clarence Hood and his sons. I had built the Gaslight a simple sound system, and I also built a larger sound system for the Village Gate at that time.
JJ: Did Dylan go back and forth from the Gaslight to Gerde’s Folk City?
RA: No idea. Dylan was writing songs at Chip Monck’s digs behind The Village Gate when I was there, and Bob was given some attention from Adele Suhl, a coffeehouse waitress, who would eventually become my 2ndwife.
As fate would have it, sometime in October of 1962, Richard brought his Nagra mono tape recorder to the Gaslight, and, on the second of a 2-night stand, Dylan debuted his newly written material.
This is where Richard (and the rest of the world) heard, for the first time, in front of maybe 25 people, songs like “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Dylan debuted the songs he wrote at Chip’s place, and everyone at the Gaslight that night was gobsmacked! This was the night that Dylan became “Dylan”!
In 1966, Albert Grossman called Richard because he really liked the way that Harry Belafonte sounded live. He offered Richard the job of mixing Dylan’s entire Australian and European tour, billed as Bob Dylan & The Hawks, that April and May. The Hawks consisted of Robbie Robertson on guitar, Richard Manuel on piano, Garth Hudson on organ, Rick Danko on bass and vocals, and Mickey Jones on drums.
Richard recorded all of those shows, that were somehow forgotten for many years by Columbia Records, but were finally found and released in a 36-disk box set on Sony Legacy, in 2016, with Richard finally getting the recognition he so richly deserved!
As legendary as that Dylan tour was to the ongoing myth of Bob Dylan, what I didn’t know, until recently, was a story about Richard meeting the Beatles in England during Dylan’s tour.
The Beatles loved Dylan and some members came to the Royal Albert Hall shows. During the bands time in London, Richard accompanied Dylan to one of the Beatles’ flats to hang out. During that afternoon, they all listened to the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and were all blown away, just like all the stories reported (I can’t even imagine what it must have been like), except Richard was there!
Richard then asked to go to Abbey Road to check out how recording was done in the UK, and went by himself.
As he was part of Dylan’s inner circle, he was allowed into a Beatles recording session.
Richard was a producer and was as interested in the gear being used. As he was walking around the studio while the Beatles were recording, Lennon quipped (in a very Lennon like fashion), “Come to check out our wires, eh?”
After hanging out for a while, the session ended and Richard asked them if they wanted to go back to the hotel and hang out with Bob.
John & George took up the offer, and offered Richard a ride back to the hotel with them.
As they were driving to the hotel, they were smoking so much hash in the car that the windows were fogged over. A small roadster pulled up next to their car, and the window came down to reveal Mick Jagger driving alone. Having recognized the car that John & George were in, Mick tapped on the window (with smoke billowing out) and asked where they all were going.
According to Richard, it was commonly known in the inner sanctum of the hierarchy of the British music scene that Dylan did not like Mick Jagger, personally. Moreover, John also knew that and teased Jagger with this, saying, “We’re going over to Dylan’s hotel to hang out. Wanna join us?”, knowing full well that Jagger would come up with some excuse. And he did…he said, “Can’t at the moment, I’m off to a recording session.” According to Richard, Lennon replied, “Call us if you need a real rhythm section!”
Richard, who still builds sound systems and recording studios, produced legendary underground artists, such as the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine, and was responsible for producing almost the entire output of the artists on the ESP label.
Richard Alderson has had an amazingly full life. You can read all about his incredible musical journeys in his forthcoming new book, co-written by Joe Hagan (the author ofSticky Fingers,The life & times of Jann Wenner, andRolling StoneMagazine), calledOpen The Door, Richard!Also, Sony Legacy will soon be releasingDylan at the Gaslighton CD.
Suppose you phone me up and dictate a written message to me. I write it down and save it in a text file. Beyond certain obvious (and maybe not-so-obvious) limitations, once I have written it down I have fully and completely captured that message. The resultant text file then fully and completely captures the entirety of your message to me.
Now what about those limitations? Well, these include the following:
I cannot capture the tone and inflection of your voice.
What you said may not be what was written.
What I write may not be what you said.
You must limit what you say to things you know I can write down.
So, if it is important that the resultant text file accurately conveys your message, then it follows that the process of delivering that message starts with ensuring that the message itself is unambiguously phrased. Those of you who read my column inCopper #63will understand the above in the context of the famous cold war “Hot Line,” and why it was implemented as a text messaging system and not as a person-to-person voice telephone link.
Anyhow, given that you have taken great pains to phrase your message in clear and unambiguous terms, my text file can now be read over and over, copied to different recipients, and incorporated into further messages, all without any loss or change to the original message. The text of the original message is the “information” contained within it. When it comes to the notion of “information,” digital representations are the easiest way to conceptualize the idea, since there is no nuance to numbers. The information is either there or it isn’t, and mathematics gives you the tools to determine one or the other categorically. [We’re ignoring a third option, which is that the informationcouldbe there, but you’d need additional information in order to enable you to find it.]
The obvious take-away is the direct parallel with digital audio. It reflects (i) the ability of a digital audio stream to fully represent the information comprising the original sound, and (ii) the fact that this information has to be accurately and unambiguously transcribed in the first place for this to be the case. The first part is by far the simplest to deal with, as it is now well understood that while 16/44.1 PCM is marginally capable of representing the information contained in acoustic music, formats like 24/192 and DSD are capable of fully and completely representing it. Therefore, the second part represents the bigger challenge – digital audio is, in practical terms, more fundamentally limited by our ability to accurately transcribe it, both in the A-to-D and D-to-A stages.
That being said, this column is about the fact that once we have our audio data encoded in digital form, it is possible to be totally precise as to the impact of any processing that we subject it to. By this, I mean that we can stipulate exactly what that impact will be. We can (with a couple of important qualifiers that I don’t have space to go into here), quantify it in great detail, and in its entirety. This contrasts starkly with the situation in analog space. Once a signal is represented in analog form, we can only describe any signal processing that we might perform in gross terms. And there are aspects to those analogue processes that continue to elude us, not only in terms of measuring or quantifying them, but also in terms of understanding how they operate and what their mechanisms of impact might be… or even, sometimes, whether they exist at all! Well-known examples include the sonic impact of individual components such as capacitors and resistors, or that huge bugaboo, interconnects. This isn’t the case with digital audio data. In many cases – if not in most cases – digital audio allows us to be remarkably precise and specific about the impact of any digital process upon audio data.
This brings us nicely to my key point here, which is that once you capture it accurately in that form, digital audio is arguably in a perfect place, where if we need to perform an operation on the signal, we can (in principle at least) find tools to perform that operation with a guaranteed preservation of information. Virtually any DSP operation can be analyzed in terms of its impact on frequency response and phase response, and we can stipulate what degree of data precision would be needed to implement it losslessly. Sometimes the mathematics of such an analysis would be stupefyingly complex, and not worth the effort given the purpose of the operation (an example might be a dynamic range compressor), but at least it can in principle be performed. In any case, for everyday operations such as filters, DSP can be a perfectible process.
I want to illustrate that with a trivial example. Let me take a 16-bit 44.1kHz audio stream. If I take a DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) of it, that transform is typically massaged to generate the frequency spectrum of the signal. But at its core, the Fourier Transform is actually a complex mathematical formula that tells you how to reconstruct the exact original audio signalat any point in time. This means we can map out the waveform continuously, anywhere between the sampled values of the 44.1kHz data stream. So, we can use it to calculate, for example, what the data points would have been if the same audio stream had originally been sampled at 88.2kHz. In other words, we can use it to perfectly upsample the signal to 88.2kHz…so let’s do that. My new 88.2kHz data stream comprises my original 44.1kHz data stream, interleaved with a bunch of new data points positioned exactly half way between them.
At this point, from a perspective of information theory, even though I have upsampled my original audio stream from 44.1kHz to 88.2kHz, there is not a jot of additional information that has been added to the picture. I have twice as much data, but it is conveying exactly the same amount of information. Let’s do something to emphasize that.
As I mentioned, my 88.2kHz data stream comprises my original 44.1kHz data stream, precisely interleaved with a bunch of new data points. If I then extracted the original 44.1kHz data points and put them into a file, that file would obviously be a copy of my original 44.1kHz data file. This is blindingly obvious, but I’m stating it anyway. And I can do exactly the same thing with the remaining ‘interleaved’ data points. I could extract those and put them in a file of their own. This would be another 44.1kHz data file, and it would containthe exact same musicas its companion, the original 44.1kHz data file, because it was created using the exact mathematical formula for the music.
Just think about that. I now have two files, both of them containing identical information, that information being the music contained in the original 44.1kHz file. But none of the numbers in the two files are the same.None of them. Exact same information. Different numbers. Cool, eh? [Well, strictly speaking, not theexactsame information. Each contains the exact same information as the other,plusa time offset corresponding to the interval between consecutive samples at 88.2kHz sample rate. Somebody is bound to point that out.]
Upsampling PCM digital audio can always (in principle, at least) be performed perfectly, although it rarely is (partly because of the processing complexity, and partly because doing so presents some additional difficulties if it needs to be done in real time). This is because upsampling requires no loss of information. All information that is contained within a signal at one sample rate can be faithfully preserved at a higher sample rate. The converse is not true. The extra data space in a higher sample rate signal means that it can contain information that cannot be represented at the lower sample rate. Therefore, when downsampling, this additional information – if present – must be filtered out (and therefore lost) as part of the downsampling process.
Information theory also tells us some important things about what can and cannot be done using DSD. For example, DSD contains huge amounts of ultrasonic noise mixed in with the audio data. For DSD64, this ultrasonic noise starts to rise measurably starting at about 20kHz, and by about 50kHz it totally subsumes any signal that might be present in the clean audio signal. It is interesting that the signal bandwidth that DSD encoding is able to capture is quite colossal, extending up into the hundreds and hundreds of kHz. Unlike PCM, which simply cannot encode any signals above its Nyquist frequency, DSD will faithfully capture them, but then adds in a whole bunch of noise that drowns it out.
Information theory tells us that it is not possible to unconditionally separate signal from noise (otherwise it wouldn’t be noise). However, if the noise exists predominantly in one frequency band, you have the possibility to eliminate it by removing that frequency band with a filter. Your problem is that in doing so you must also remove any of the original audio data that was also present in that frequency band. DSD works so well because, to a first approximation, the noise is all above 20kHz, and the audio signal is all below 20kHz. One of the intriguing aspects of DSD playback is that it leaves the designer with a choice about what type of filter they wish to implement. You can preserve more of the high-bandwidth end of the original audio signal if you prefer, but at the expense of retaining some of the unwanted ultrasonic noise as well. At BitPerfect, for example, we definitely obtain a cleaner sound by following this approach, although many purists argue against it.
Another important point about DSD is regrettably lost – quite irretrievably apparently – on some of its strongest adherents. And there are two aspects to it. The first is that, while conversion from DSD to PCM can be performed with a minimal loss of information (and therefore fidelity), the opposite is not the case, for reasons I don’t have space to go into. Suffice to say that PCM-to-DSD conversions suffer from distortions and other sonic deficiencies which technology has not yet found ways to eliminate. To be quite fair, these are not grave failings – DSD can sound quite magnificent – but when taking the state-of-the-art to its extremes, DSD-to-PCM conversions are far superior to their PCM-to-DSD counterparts, and at their best are (to my ears) flawless.
Where I diverge in opinion for some of DSD’s strongest proponents is that DSD-to-DSD conversions inherently require a three-step process that involves (i) DSD-to-PCM conversion, (ii) PCM resampling, and (iii) PCM-to-DSD conversion. Therefore, if (as is the case with most DSD studios these days) a recording was originally made in DSD256, versions converted to DSD128 or DSD64 can be expected to sound slightly inferior to versions converted directly to 24/352.8 or 24/176.4 PCM, provided that in each case the best possible algorithms were used in the conversions. Which is not what some people want to hear.
If I am sounding a little controversial here, you must bear two things in mind. First, the foregoing is primarily based on technical considerations, rather than exhaustive, thorough, and comprehensive listening tests, although my own personal experiences do tend to bear them out. Second, when playing back high-end audio, whether DSD or PCM, once the audio data goes into your DAC the digital massaging is far from over, and you have no control over (nor, to be honest, much knowledge of) what that massaging entails. Therefore, if you wished to make serious comparisons of the sound quality of, say DSD vs PCM, your choice of DAC is likely to have a dominant impact on the outcome.
Back inCopper#66, I wrote aCyniccolumn entitled “Nothing New Under the Sun?“—and judging from the comments on that article, my point was either unclear, elusive, or misunderstood. I’m about to comment on a similar topic, and will do my best to be clear—clear as a flawless diamond, a material which will be mentioned momentarily.
I’m a materials science nerd, and I make no bones about that. I worked in the world of racing engines, where there were frequent debates over the comparative properties of 4340 steel versus 5140 or 300M (materials used in forged or billet connecting rods and crankshafts), where titanium is preferred to steel (again, rods), tool steel versus metal matrix composite (pushrods), 4032 versus 2618 (aluminum alloys used in forged pistons), and on and on. I found it fascinating, and in recent decades, the number of newly-developed materials has exploded—metaphorically, one hopes.
In the audio world, the use of advanced or newly-developed material seems to go in waves. Think of what Stephen Jay Gould called“punctuated equilibrium“: put briefly, Gould postulated that things stay the same until they don’t. –Yes, that does sound a bit like a zen koan. To be more precise: rather than viewing evolution as a continuous, linear process, Gould indicated that new species appear in a sort of a blip—“punctuations”—and then continue in stasis.
Back at the beginnings of audio technology —say, the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th— materials used were largely natural. Gramophone soundboxes used proprietary blends of materials for their diaphragms, in search of the magic combination of durability, low resonance, and extended frequency range. In some ways the requirements are conflicting, and that continued as cone drivers began to be developed: cones were generally molded or stamped pulp paper, with competing brands extolling the virtues of their particular mix. Cone surrounds were either an accordion continuation of the cone itself, or leather, or cloth. The materials used generally possessed alow Q-–meaning that they were not highly resonant.
Not surprisingly, the concept of Q first appeared in work conducted by Western Electric, where much of the fundamental development of early audio and electronic products occurred (as discussed . The term was originally used to describe the tendency of an inductor to resonate, but the term’s usage broadened to include mechanical resonance (or lack of damping), as well as the roll-off characteristics of a loudspeaker enclosure.
As speakers were developed with more-extended high frequency response compared to a standard cone driver, the conflicting requirements of stiffness/rigidity (to allow controlled movement) and lack of resonance (to enable flatter frequency response and greater listenability) came into play. Again, Western Electric was involved; the legendary 555 was developed in 1926, and is generally considered the first compression driver. The 555 used a carefully formed domed diaphragm of fairly soft aluminum, with an attached surround formed from the same piece. The diaphragm’s “swirly” surround would be carried forward in almost all compression drivers, and can still be seen in modern units.
It’s been nearly a century since the 555 was developed, and those conflicting demands haven’t vanished. In the last decade or so, the benefits of ever-stiffer cones, domes, and diaphragms have been trumpeted, using everything from beryllium, ceramics, even vapor-deposited diamond. Tweeters using such materials generally have response well above the range of audibility, but those very stiff materials can do very ugly things when they go into breakup mode. Paper cones or soft domes simply mush out, so to speak, when they break up, with fairly low-Q resonance modes, and just won’t go any higher. The ultra-rigid driver materials, on the other hand, can generate very high-Q resonant spikes that are inharmonic and offensive to the ear. Careful crossover design becomes extremely important for such drivers, to ensure that they are never driven at their breakup frequencies.
Newly-formulated materials aren’t always a panacea, and sometimes seem to be used more for marketing value than for their performance. Even the cost of certain materials—like diamond or to a lesser extent, carbon fiber—can have a certain status appeal completely separate from their performance. Indeed, if the “snobby” material is used improperly, performance may be worse than good ol’ paper and plywood.
Exotic materials can be used in audio in almost any application, from cartridge cantilevers to speaker boxes. Whether speaker enclosures of aluminum, proprietary laminate, or carbon fiber perform better than the old standards of medium density fibreboard or plywood, has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Our friend Peter Ledermann at Soundsmith makes a wonderful cartridge with a cantilever made from a treated cactus needle, for goodness’ sake. Generalizations are just generalizations—not fact.
Audio is both fascinating and frustrating, simply because there are no easy answers. No one approach is IT.
For those dogmatists who extol the virtues of their ONE TRUE WAY on audio forums, I say: have fun! …But you’re wrong. ;->
Bernie came to some notice in the late ’60s, as a member, first, ofDillard & Clark, and then ofThe Flying Burrito Brothers. And then cameThe Eagles, and he entered everybody’s consciousness.
I saw them on their first tour, opening forYes(of all bands!). I really liked them — and then heard the albums, which I found pretty disappointing and I didn’t really pay much attention for more than 20 years. He famously quit the band in ’75 or ’76 by pouring a beer over Glenn Frey’s head with the statement, “I’m going surfing.” He didn’t come back.
In the mid-90s I asked Rick Turner to suggest a guitarist with whom I could form a duet. He could only think of Bernie, but Bernie had moved across the country to Nashville. I encountered him at the AES [Audio Engineering Society] convention in San Francisco in 1998 when I exhibited there as the American distributor of the professional line of EAR (he bought a couple EAR 660 limiters).
In the early 2000s, a drummer friend of mine, David Kemper, was being very mysterious about a project he was working on. It turned out to be Bernie’s second solo album, “Mirror” (the first was recorded 27 years earlier). When they did a barely-announced show in October of 2003, I was there. Bernie opened with a deep, deep song called “God Ain’t Done with Me Yet.” This was my first night out since cancer surgery two months before. I was IN. If he wanted me, I was in.
We hung out the next day, he called a couple weeks after that, and in early December, David and I were in Hohenwald, TN, rehearsing, along with fiddler/mandolin player Tommy Burroughs. So let me tell you about Bernie. Here’s a man who, when he learned I preferred songs with no chord changes (like “Tomorrow Never Knows” or “Within You Without You”), had one written by the next time I came to Nashville. And what a song:
Indian Summer Morning (it’s all goin’ on)
A dewdrop on a blade of grass
Twistin’ slowly on the breeze
Winkin’ rainbow morse code messages
Confidentially (up) at me
Indian summer morning
Fall colors comin’ on
Late blooming flowers bravely rise
Seize their moment in the sun
It’s all goin’ on
It’s all goin’ on
Silence isn’t silent
It’s filled with subtle sounds
The crickets’ 2-stroke engines
(River) white-noise all around
The birds are busy chattin’ up
Their chicks about leavin’ town
For the Mexican Riviera
They say we should come on down
It’s all goin’ on
It’s all goin’ on
And back in town the kids hang out
In a parking lot in a swarm
Bookin’ their rites of passage
Gotta make hay while it’s warm
Testin’ their wings and other things
What with winter comin’ on
By spring she’ll be showin’
(Then) showin’ off off-spring
Nature’s wheel has turned
Mouth to mouth, skin on skin
Heart to heart, hand in hand
In this moment, in this now
In this life, show me how
Give up worry, give up scare
Give up lonely, this is where
Mouth to mouth, skin on skin
Heart to heart, come on in
It’s all goin’ on
It’s all goin’ on
I mean, holy crap. I played this one as invisibly as possible — Bernie played it in an open tuning, moving his hand up and down the fingerboard, and I just tracked his fingers an octave down, brushing the index finger on my right hand back and forth on my detuned lowest string.
I learned a great deal in my brief time with him. I spent most of the time in his truck; we drove together, and the rest of the guys drove in a van. We talked about many things, but primarily spiritual matters. I would say Bernie’s a spiritual person, but to my way of thinking, we all are, and it’s just a matter of us finding our way towards each other.
For my money, the best show we did was one that, beforehand, I thought would be terrible: the Tin Angel, in Philadelphia. It was late in the tour, and I recall seeing Bernie walking up the stairs to the club lugging a bunch of guitars, and looking ready to kill. I thought, “Oh, this isn’t good.” In fact, I thought, this is over. David had to literally climb over his kit to get to it; the stage was that small. But: that small stage meant we could play more quietly, we could all hear perfectly, and suddenly we played like magic.
The next show was at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. The soundman told me to turn down my bass. I told him that I set my volume by how hard David played his kick drum. But he pointed to the overall sound starting to feed back. So, thinking about the show the night before, I suggested that he just turn us ALL down. “You mean pull down the master fader?” he asked, incredulous. But again, magic.
We’re still close, though we don’t talk a lot. But when we do, it’s like it always was. I want to leave this with a story about a minor debacle, and again, I learned from it.
On one of my trips to Nashville, we did a radio broadcast from a club. On one song, Bernie forgot his capo. No big deal, right? But I couldn’t hear myself, so I didn’t hear the disparity between Bernie and I until the song was half way done. I instantly dropped to play the song in the key he was playing in. But, to my mind, the damage was done — a very high profile gig, and I was playing it a whole step away from him. Good god.
When my daughter Claire was learning to play piano, I would occasionally remind her of that tale when she was nervous before recitals. No matter how pulled together you think you are, shit happens.
Nearly all the great creative musicians were goodcollaborators. It obviously worked for George Frideric Handel (1685–175). Eccentric country squire Charles Jennens (1700–1773) wrote several libretti for him; Handel set them to music as the oratoriosSaul,L’Allegro, Belshazzar, and—most famously—Messiah.Jennens does not appear to have been a perfect gentleman, although “gentle” he surely was, i.e., a man of independent means and cultivated tastes. Infamously self-regarding and fond of ostentation, Jennens acquired the epithet “Suleyman the Magnificent” from Samuel Johnson himself.
As alitterateur, he actually was magnificent. Many a member of the 18th-century landed gentry became a “man of letters” as a respectable fallback, but that doesn’t mean they all lacked talent. Thomas Morell, Newburgh Hamilton, and other Handel librettists knew what they were doing, and Handel was only too glad to receive their “word-books.”
Jennens and Handel have been described as close friends. Perhaps they were. Handel certainly found Jennens valuable, and Jennens must have sensed that his best shot at immortality lay in working with Handel. Apart from his literary skill, Jennens’ self-assured frankness, bolstered by privilege, was exactly what Handel needed. Here’s what Jennens wrote to a friend in September 1738 during the gestation ofSaul:
Mr. Handel’s head is more full of maggots than ever. I found yesterday in his room a very queer instrument which he calls carillon (Anglice, a bell) and says some call it a Tubalcain. . . . ‘Tis played upon with keys like a Harpsichord and with this Cyclopean instrument he designs to make poor Saul stark mad. His second maggot is an organ of £500 price which (because he is overstocked with money) he has bespoke of one Moss of Barnet. . . . His third maggot is a Hallelujah whichhe has trump’d up at the end of his oratorio since I went into the Country, because he thought the conclusion of the oratorio not Grand enough; tho’ if that were the case ‘twas his own fault, forthe words would have bore as Grand Musick as he could have set ‘em to: but this Hallelujah, Grand as it is, comes in very nonsensically, having no manner of relation to what goes before. And this is the more extraordinary, because he refused to set a Hallelujah at the end of the first Chorus in the Oratorio,where I had placed one and where it was to be introduced with the utmost propriety.[underlining added]
About that “Hallelujah,” Jennens was quite right. Handel restored it to Act I,where Jennens had put it as a climax to general rejoicing, Goliath having fallen. After Jennens’ visit, Handel also restructured Act III (into which he had planned to paste chunks of hisFuneral Ode for Queen Caroline) by depictinginter aliaSaul’s desperate encounter with the Witch at Endor, who summons forth the Ghost of Samuel. It is one of the most haunting moments in Baroque drama. (YouTube audio:No. 73 at 7:06.)
Jennens later took offense at the slapdash manner in which Handel setMessiah.His displeasure grew when the composer took that show on the road, premiering it in Dublin. After the oratorio’s (mixed) London reception, he wrote:
[January 1743:]Handel has borrow’d a dozen [pieces of music sent by a friend, Edward Holdsworth] & I dare say I shall catch him stealing from them, as I have formerly, both from Scarlatti & Vinci. He has compos’d an exceeding fine Oratorio,[Samson], with which he is to begin Lent.His Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great hast, tho’ he said he would be a year about it, & make it the best of all his Compositions.I shall put no more Sacred Words into his hands, to be thus abus’d.
[April 1743:]Messiah was perform’d last night, & will be again to morrow. . . . Tis after all, in the main a fine Composition, notwithstanding some weak parts, which he wastoo idle & too obstinate to retouch,tho’ I us’d great importunity to perswade him to it.
[September 1743:]I hear Handel is perfectly recover’d [from a stroke], & has compos’d a new [Dettingen] Te Deum & a new Anthem. . . . I don’t yet despair ofmaking him retouch the Messiah, at least he shall suffer for his negligence; nay I am inform’d that he has suffr’d for he told Ld. Guernsey that a letter I wrote him about it contributed to the bringing of his last illness upon him; . . . This shews that I gall’d him: but I have not done with him yet . . .
Holdsworth scolded him for this:
[October 1743:]You have staid too long [in Leicestershire] already; it has had an ill effect upon you, and made you quarrel with your best friends,Virgil& Handel. You have contributed, by yr. own confession, to give poor Handel a fever, and now He is pretty well recover’d, you seem resolv’d to attack him again. . . . This is really ungenerous, & not like Mr. Jennens. Pray be merciful; and don’t you turn Samson, & use him like a Philistine . . .
Apparently this shut him up. Handel scored resounding successes with two secular oratorios,SemeleandHercules,and then renewed his collaboration with Jennens, writing:
[June 1744:]It gave me great Pleasure to hear Your safe arrival in the Country, and that Your Health was much improuved. I hope it is by this time firmly established, and I wish You with all my Heart the Continuation of it, and all the Prosperity. As You do me the Honour to encourage my Musical undertakings, and even to promote them with a particular kindness, . . . Now should I be extreamly glad to receive the first Act, or what is ready, of the new Oratorio with which you intend to favour me. . . .
The “new Oratorio” wasBelshazzar,at which Handel worked diligently that summer, continually pressing Jennens for more material. All was forgiven.
* * *
Here Icouldswitch to the 21st century and survey more recent collaborations, but everyone has beaten me to it. See, for example, Thomas Brothers’Help! The Beatles, Duke Ellington and the Magic of Collaboration,now gettingstrong reviews. (For Dominic Green’s longer discussion in theWSJ,you’ll need a subscription. Or you could just buy the book.)
The landscape has certainly changed. In Nashville, you can’t sell a song these days unless you’ve co-written it. If you’re Beyoncé, you book two stories of a hotel, fill it with creative specialists (a beats person, a hooks person, some lyricists), then blend, season, and bake: there’s your new LP. What if your minions quarrel? Well, they work foryou,so they’ll just have to keep it positive.
Here I offer one other golden example of modern collaboration:Marnie.The 1961 novel by Winston Graham is nowan opera, which means it’s become a tale told by many. Director Michael Mayer, Tony winner forSpring Awakening,suggested the property to composer Nico Muhly, who enlisted librettist Nicholas Wright; they quickly brought in set designer Julian Crouch, costumer Arianne Phillips, and choreographer Lynne Page, all working at the top of their game.
Of reviews available online, themost balanced assessmentcomes from Alex Ross of theNew Yorker.He gets the big picture, sympathizes with the attempt to tell this story from a female protagonist’s point of view, and describes key scenes with an unmatched command of musical detail. His plot summary:
Marnie is a sociopathic young woman who routinely invents new identities, steals from her employers, and then vanishes. The story is, on its face, a stereotypical male fantasy of female neurosis: theHitchcock versionborders on misogynist hysteria.
In the past Muhly’s music has struck me as derivative. Yet I lovedMarniewhen I caught it at the local multiplex. Many cooks made thin broth work! You could say it worked preciselybecauseof its many cooks:Marnieis that rarity, a perfectly engineered musical clock. The dazzling stage movement (choreographydoesn’t begin to describe it), the chic Technicolor outfits of the “shadow Marnies”—indeed, the concept itself—the brilliant orchestral writing, the singing and acting of mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and her colleagues—all function effectively, and more importantly, to equal effect. If you’re looking for an opera with memorable music, keep looking. But if you are looking for a riveting evening of theatre in which every element, including the music, makes a crucial contribution, get the inevitable Blu-ray. Or see it at the Met when it’s revived, as it should be.
Closing thoughts: Wright’s libretto has been disparaged as verbose and commonplace, but I heard characters who spoke with authentic voices. The banality of the dialogue perfectly evoked the limited viewpoints and crippled insights of this late-‘50s scenario. Its true cinematic father-figure is not Hitchcock butDouglas Sirk, who was directingWritten on the WindandImitation of Lifejust as Graham was writingMarnie.For years Sirk was dismissed as a skilled hack, master of a negligible genre, the “woman’s movie.” Then Godard, Sarris, Ebert,James Harveyand others woke up to what he was doing—with camerawork, art direction, lush color—and to the symbolism and irony it (barely) masked. Sirk’s characters could behave badly and show little self-awareness. But millions of moviegoers recognized these women and their social entrapment, and that recognition opened wellsprings of emotion buried deep within.
AsMarniethe opera ends, Marnie herself experiences a liberating epiphany. Law and circumstance have closed in. It’s almost too late. Nevertheless she owns this moment, and Muhly gives her just enough new musical color to suggest triumph, not tragedy.Marniein its final scene again offers us more than the sum of its parts. It’s a phenomenal product of collaboration.
