Two articles in Tape Op magazine about a few of these masters recently
caught my attention…
My
take-away from both articles was vibe.
Good
producers set a vibe for creativity to flourish and optimum conditions for
musicians to do their best work.
The first article
interviewed the multi-instrumentalist/producer/engineer, Jon Brion as he was working
on the soundtrack for P.T. Anderson's
magnum opus, Magnolia.
Brion
discussed playing a session where the producer, T-Bone Burnett, set
a good vibe:
It was a song about Texas... we played a take and it wasn't great. It was completely proficient, everybody in the room was proficient. There was no question that everybody could play and there was no question that everybody wanted to do the right thing for the song. Nobody was hot-dogging anything, but it didn't feel right. People came in to listen and it was a take that maybe a lot of people would have even kept, because it was proficient. Everything was right, not in a clinical way. It was right, it just wasn't magical. T-Bone looked around the room and said, "You guys have all been to Texas, right?" We all nodded and he said, "Do you know how when you're standing in Texas and you look around and see miles in every direction?" He starts leaning over the board and making this big sweeping motion with his arms. We all nodded. He said, "That's how it has got to be." We proceeded to march in and in one take we played the shit out of the thing. That's not an accident, that's not a bullshitty little thing. That's the real thing. To me, one of the biggest jobs of production is "taking" the people who go into the room. I think it's the most important part of production.
Coincidentally,
the other night I was watching a doco on Elvis Costello in which T-Bone Burnett
seemed to reinforce Brion's opinion that good producing entailed “taking” a
room of people and setting the right vibe, but this time the tone was set by a
veteran jazz bassist. Apparently, Burnett was producing one of Costello's
songs with Ray Brown on bass, and not unlike his directions to Jon Brion
about Texas, just before a take, Ray Brown turned to the musicians in the room
and said something to the effect of, "Don't none of you play any
ideas." In other words, the implication was don't play tons of notes
or licks -- don't play for yourself -- play for the song. Or as Kendrick might put it, "Bitch, don't kill my vibe!"
Another
interesting part of the Brion interview was when he talked about the
(d)evolution of music production starting in the early '60's and the benefit of
intimacy when playing quieter:
I used to listen to records and go, "Why are all these '50s jazz records perfect?" We figured out some way to record musicians in a room in an appealing fashion. It's not truly realistic, but give us a sense of what it was like to be there. It's like looking at a good photograph. I started thinking about why records started sounding like shit in '63 or '64, and they did. All the early British rock records sound like dog shit. They have no bandwidth. Eventually I realized that when musicians started playing louder, the old mics couldn't handle the level. So, they invented dynamic mics, which you could put right up on guitar amps and drums. Then, things sounded shitty again, they could take the level, but they didn't have the bandwidth. Then people figured out ways of doing the hyper-real sound, which became popular in the '70s. You've got dynamic mics right up everything's ass and then you've got EQ and different things to get the sound together and thus began the era of hitting a snare drum for a day.
Ouch!
No wonder recording budgets were so bloated in the '70's. (Aside from the
blow, of course… but I guess that’s just another way to induce good vibes, no?)
The second Tape Op article was a 1999 interview with Phill Brown, who produced my two favorite Talk Talk records, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. Brown described the vibe in the studio making
those two records:
Brown
started out in the 1960's as a tape operator at Olympic Studios in London and
worked his way up to producer, but he still considers himself an engineer,
mostly:
I guess I see my trade as an engineer. Even though I produce things and co-produce things I see what I do as an engineer. I tend to work the same whether you give me credit as an engineer or a producer. It's hard to say. The kind of producers I worked with originally were people like Jimmy Miller or Steve Smith … who were producers who set up a situation and controlled things but they were vibe merchants. Jimmy Miller was this incredible kind of energy and drive and force. He made the session feel like you wanted to be there and make music. But he wasn't a hands on producer...
Jimmy Miller, the "vibe merchant" Brown mentioned, produced two of my favorite (and arguably best)
Stones records, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, the latter (in)famous
for the vibe created while recording it in the basement of a mansion on the French Riviera as depicted below. (Miller's the one lying on the floor. You can also go here for more pix.)
Brown
got the job working with Talk Talk after a... ahem, talk with Mark Hollis, their
lead singer, about studio vibes:
I dropped him off at the tube station. As he got out of the car he said, "What sums up Olympic in the '60's for you?" I said, "It's got to be one o'clock in the morning, November 1967." It was a Traffic session I did. I was 17 years old and it was a new job. That particular night we were doing "Mr. Fantasy" and there was just this fantastic atmosphere with low lights and people were a bit out, wasted. I mentioned this to Mark and he said, "Oh, cool." After a few weeks I got a phone call saying he'd like to get involved. And we met up and went into the studio Mark said, "Let's set this up as if it's one o'clock in the morning, November 1967!"
These guys knew it, as did Brian Wilson...
It's all about good, good, good, good vibrations!
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