Finally, it was the way they were miked. Older drummers were miked with an overhead mic, or one way in front with more distance, which allowed the sound to breathe, capturing the natural sound you hear when you walk into a room and hear a band playing.
John Bonham’s drums were the only real exception to the bad-drum sound rule of the ’70s because either he or Jimmy Page was smart enough to record his drums in a stairwell with plenty of room sound.
I had my eye on other factors too. The Engineer, for instance. I was looking for an Engineer who could get great sounds and do it quickly. Maureen was familiar with the studio scene from when she was going with Mitch Mitchell, the genius drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and had traveled from Woodstock to London and back with them. She remembered a guy named Bob Clearmountain, who had impressed her with his speed at a couple of sessions at Media Sound in midtown Manhattan, right across the street from where we lived at the time.
As Fate would have it, Max Weinberg mentioned he was going to the Power Station to do an Ian Hunter album, and the Engineer was going to be Clearmountain. I asked him to pay close attention to two things. Was he using room mics, and how fast did he get a drum sound? The torture of struggling and ultimately failing to get decent drums on Darkness was not an experience I intended to repeat.
Max came back with a favorable review, so I suggested to Bruce we use Clearmountain and the Power Station, where the bigger live room would give us a fighting chance to get a sound.
Bruce had switched managers by then. As I previously mentioned, Jon, with his vast knowledge of film, literature, and music, was helping Bruce refine his ideas during the game-changing Darkness sessions. They expanded my consciousness just from what I overheard!
Now Bruce had two trusted lieutenants. Jon took care of the record company, career planning, and big-picture conceptualizing, while I was free to focus on the music and the sound. My job, as I saw it, was to make sure every song was a joy to record.
So while they talked, I made the record.
Kidding.
But I had the studio and the Engineer I wanted. I made sure that every instrument sounded right and that everybody was playing the right thing, easy enough with the greatest band in the world. They literally produced themselves.
When the sessions for the new record started, it sounded great right away. This was gonna be fun! Bob was stupid fast, as advertised.
“Roulette” was recorded and mixed on the same day. I regularly got two mixes a day out of Bob when he used the manual, no automation, old analog Neve board. When things got automated later on that damn digital Solid State, everything slowed down. And never sounded as good again! (I’m exaggerating a little. Bob still gets good sounds with the digital crap. And he still does two mixes a day for me!)
The second thing we did was return to “Hungry Heart.”
I felt this was our best shot at a hit single since Jimmy Iovine’s genius theft of “Because the Night.”
But it wasn’t that simple. Remember, this was right in the middle of the Rock era, and a hit single had to be organic. If a song was seen as a conscious attempt to get a hit, it could hurt or even kill an artist’s credibility. Once a song crossed over to AM, FM stopped playing it. And if you weren’t careful, FM would stop playing you, period. Led Zeppelin became FM darlings partly by forbidding Atlantic to release any singles.
The dividing line had been Sgt. Pepper. The Beatles, the true kings of Pop/Rock, released no singles from their masterpiece. It made the irrefutable statement: We just single-handedly evolved the Artform we helped invent.
From 1967 through most of the ’70s, the new lingua franca of Rock music would be the album. By the ’80s, if it felt right, singles returned to the hip column.
“Hungry Heart” felt right. It had a universal sensibility, simplicity with substance. It was also a song that posed its own unique set of challenges.
For starters, it had an unusual structure, in that the verse and chorus were the same, which was very hard to make work if you weren’t James Brown. Because of that, I suggested the modulation for the solo. A modulation is simply a key change implemented to surprise the ears. It’s part of the fun of Arranging to jump to an odd key and then have to find your way back to where you started. Or not.
The rest of the song came together. For the Beach Boys–style harmonies in the chorus, I suggested we bring in the Turtles, aka Flo and Eddie, aka Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. I had seen their show at the Bottom Line and loved it. The session made Mark and Howard relevant again. They’d thank me by later overcharging for a Jukes session and reneging on a deal for a benefit, but nobody’s perfect.
Then there were the drums. Even tuned, struck, and miked correctly, there was still the challenge of the mix.
The mix is exactly what it sounds like. You take all your tracks of instruments and mix them down to two tracks. You balance the instruments, add equalization (makes the instrument brighter or fatter, etc.), compression, reverb, etc.
I could hear how close we were to the drum sound I wanted. But we weren’t quite there. I kept telling Bob to turn up the room mics. He edged them up a millimeter at a time, the way good Engineers were taught. I’m sure he thought I was just the guitar player being a pain in the ass, and that no one had explained to him my new status as co-Producer.
I took Bruce out to the hallway. “Listen, man,” I said. “We are close to the promised land, no pun intended. Nirvana is in sight. Bob won’t take me seriously until you explain to him I am coproducing this fucking thing, but right now when you go back in push those drum-room mic motherfucking faders all the way up.”
He did. And there it was. The sound I’d been looking for my whole recording life. The sound that would influence everybody in the ’80s.
Ironically, incredibly, and much to my eternal aggravation, just a few months later some smart-ass invented sampling! After all my painstaking research and experimenting, all they had to do was push a fucking button for an instant magnificent snare. Usually, one of Clearmountain’s!
There was one more thing bothering me. Bruce just didn’t have a Pop voice.
On Born to Run and Darkness, he had been writing older than he was, thinking older than he was, and singing older. He made his voice big and dramatic and rough and lived in, which fit the songs perfectly. Remember the singer is always an actor acting out the script that is the song.
But to be a Pop hit, “Hungry Heart” required something else. Never mind that the subject, a guy abandoning his wife and kids, was not exactly ideal for a younger audience. I have always believed lyrics are icing on the cake, mostly ignored by everyone except critics and the most fanatical fans.
For a song to be a hit, it has to sound like a hit. Ideally it’s a bright, uplifting sound that appeals to a Pop audience that will respond to the ear candy far more readily than the actual substance. So how could we make the record brighter in general?
And then it hit me. Speed the tape up! His big voice would become smaller. Thinner. Younger! Remember the Chipmunks? Same science, taller Artist. I stayed late with Neil Dorfsman, our Engineer.
The song was better faster! I sped it up a little more, and a little more. It took some getting used to, but it felt natural enough. If you’d never heard the original, you’d never notice the difference.
The next day I played it for everybody. They all laughed. When he saw I was serious, Bruce said I might be on to something, but it was too much. They slowed it back down, then sped it up one step at a time until it was a notch slower than my version.
When Charlie Plotkin mastered it months later, he sped it back up that last notch to my original speed and got the credit. It’s OK. He’s a good guy.
The River had a completely different atmosphere than the previous two albums. Bruce’s identity had settled into the rural, stand-and-fight, speaking-from-the-working-class-perspective persona of Darkness. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t still in his write-and-record-a-million-songs-and-find-the-album-in-
there-later mode. But at least this batch sounded great. So it was a much more pleasant atmosphere for our endless song arguments, which I usually lost. And The River was a double album, which meant more room for some fun songs along with the substance.
Bruce kept “Hungry Heart” but threw out classics like “Loose Ends,” “Take ’Em as They Come,” “Roulette,” and “Restless Nights.”
Who needs ’em?
I happen to like “Crush on You,” but in place of “Where the Bands Are,” or “Mary Lou,” or “I Wanna Be with You”?
I don’t know.
The other subject that was discussed enthusiastically was the treatment of slow songs. Bruce and Jon were together on this, the sparser the better. Bruce was always so concentrated on his writing on the page, with good reason and great results, that I’m not sure he ever fully understood the difference between a song and a record.
My attention deficit disorder couldn’t take it. I was constantly trying to add production and arrangement ideas to songs like “Racing in the Streets” and “Wreck on the Highway,” and he wanted stark and stoic because that’s what the cinematic lyrics suggested.
But a record ain’t a movie. It’s a fine line how sparse you can make something, without the visual assistance, before you lose an audience. There’s no right or wrong here—that’s what makes the longest discussions—but according to my ADD, they’d occasionally go too far. Check out the two versions of “Racing in the Street” for a good example. But Bruce preferred erring on the side of desolation. And you have to respect the discipline of sacrificing the musicality of a song to make a point.
Whatever. If he’s happy, I’m happy.
I am very proud of The River, which remains my favorite “official” album, but too many of the best songs ended up on the second disc of Tracks.
We did a couple of benefits in that period.
No Nukes at Madison Square Garden was promoted under the auspices of Musicians United for Safe Energy, or MUSE, which was founded by Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, John Hall, and Graham Nash.
It’s where Tom Petty, not known for his wild and crazy sense of humor, delivered his most memorable punch line. The organizers told him that the Garden was Bruce’s home turf, so he shouldn’t be bothered if he heard the crowd booing. They were just saying “Bruce.”
“What the fuck’s the difference?” Tom lovingly contributed to infamy.
That benefit was the first political thing I was ever part of. I understand it better now, but back then I didn’t get it. What was preaching to the converted supposed to accomplish? How was a concert and audience full of hippies supposed to affect Ronald Reagan’s decision-making process?
The best part of the event for me was meeting Jackson Browne, who would become an important major friend and affect my life greatly very soon.
The event would help me when I eventually established my own results-oriented political methodology, which was a better fit for my ADD.
A little later, in Los Angeles, we did a much-needed tribute for Vietnam vets. Bruce had become friendly with Bobby Muller, the president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and I was glad he decided to do that one. A friend from my neighborhood, Rod Paladino, had been spit on when he came home from the war, so it was personal to me.
But mainly, we were looking toward to our new record’s release. Landau had done his homework, learning the… complexities of the Pop world, and that homework ensured my first work as part of the official production team would get its shot.
“Hungry Heart” started up the charts. And as much as the modern Pop world would forever be a foreign planet, having that first hit was quite a thrill. Album sales went from a few hundred thousand to three million. That was around the average ratio of hit singles to the insane album sales at that time. Every hit single meant around three million album sales in the gold rush ’80s. Our half-filled theaters turned into sold-out arenas.
When I met Bruce in ’65, we were two teenage misfits who shared an impossible fantasy. And now, a decade and a half of hard work later, we’d made it. What a difference the right hit single at the right time made. Of course my gratitude only lasted until our second single bombed. “Fade Away” not being a hit was, as far as I was concerned, a crime against humanity.
We were on top of the world. Audience enthusiasm was unparalleled. And then a traumatic event diluted our bliss. On the first American leg of the tour, on the night we played the Spectrum in Philadelphia, we lost John Lennon.
I remember hearing the news and being surprised by how upset I was. The Beatles had stopped touring in the mid-’60s. They hadn’t been a band for a decade. I had never followed their solo work very closely. But it felt like losing a brother or a father.
Brian Jones’s death was important to me. Jimi Hendrix’s, even more so. But my relationships with those artists had lasted three or four years. The Beatles had been my mentors for fifteen years. Plus, they had been first. They communicated such hope and joy. They saved my life. Lennon’s murder hit me so hard that I expected we’d cancel. But Bruce gave me a wonderful speech about how people needed us more than ever in moments like this.
I remember opening with “Born to Run” and crying all the way through it. Once again, we were reminded by History to embrace those rare blissful moments with all your strength when you find them, because who knows what rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem is just around the corner waiting to be born.
fourteen
Checkpoint Charlie
(1980)
Checkpoint Charlie,
Brothers and sisters on the other side,
Livin’ in the shadow of a wall so high,
Make me wanna cry, baby.
—“CHECKPOINT CHARLIE,” FROM VOICE OF AMERICA
Dystopian.
Fifty steps took us from a technicolor Hogan’s Heroes episode to a black-and-white, postapocalyptic sci-fi flick.
The farmers on the billboards all looked similarly creepy/George Romero, and after a while I started missing the vapid, consciousness-colorizing advertising that I usually despise.
Bruce and I had decided to go through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin. While the wall was still up.
I have lots of German friends, some of the sweetest people in the world, but Germans are one of those ethnic groups that can be really scary when they want to be.
And when the nasty fuck at the border takes your passport and says, “OK, you’re on your own,” it gives you a little shot of anxiety.
We walked in, and within a few blocks we were in the Twilight Zone. Very quiet. We looked at some shops. Not much on the shelves.
We might’ve gone into a bar and had a drink or something, but I don’t remember striking up a conversation with anyone, all of whom reminded me of the Transylvanian townspeople who stop talking when the victims walk into the tavern.
We didn’t stay long. The thought of people living in that atmosphere of acute paranoia was quite depressing.
I wrote a song for them.
Sometimes that’s all a po’ boy can do.
Frank Barsalona had insisted we go to Europe.
We had played just four shows in Europe after Born to Run, and none for Darkness because of our perilous financial situation. The River Tour went all over Europe—Germany, France, Belgium, England, Scotland, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway—you name it.
That tour began a love affair with European audiences that continues to this day. But at first, the culture shock was… shocking.
It was hard relating to the food, for starters. Not that we cared that much about food in those days, but the only hamburger in Europe was at the newly opened Hard Rock Cafe in London. The only burger in ten countries. I shit you not!
And no peanut butter!
And London is all about teatime, right? But ask for iced tea and they looked at you like you’re an escaped mental patient and they’re considering whether to report you to the authorities or not.
If I had the e
ntrepreneurial gene, there were business opportunities everywhere. Of course, I didn’t act on them. But looking back, I always had those kinds of ideas, those entrepreneurial compulsions, flying by in my head.
Thinking about it now, I think there are two reasons to be at least a little bit of a businessman. The first is a totally legit and in fact essential reason, and that is to protect your Art. This is serious. You have to force yourself to understand what the fuck your lawyers and accountants are talking about. If you get lucky, they might be smart and actually care, but you can’t depend on that.
The second reason is a little scary.
It is getting into business because you are not confident enough that your own artistic talent will find an audience. I think this is my problem, which by the way has proven to be true.
Without that confidence, deep down you feel what your parents always said, which is that you need the dreaded something to fall back on.
I get shivers just writing those words, but it is funny how the older you get, the smarter your parents become.
In Germany, after we left the Twilight Zone and were back on the West Berlin side of the wall, a kid came up to me on the street. “Why are you putting missiles in my country?” he said.
What? Whatever you’re smoking, give me some! The kid asked me again.
“Look, friend, come to the show tonight, on me. I’ll show you it’s a guitar in that case, not a fucking missile.”
I walked on and that was that. Except it wasn’t. I couldn’t get what he said off of my mind. Why was it bugging me so much?
That’s the government, not me, I said to myself. I’ve got nothing whatsoever to do with what my government does. Just because he’s a naive foreigner and doesn’t know any better, I shouldn’t let that get to me. Just because he thinks I live in a democracy…
Unrequited Infatuations Page 14