“Bob, you gotta listen when I talk!”
“Yes sir, Mr. Brown.”
“Five dollars.”
A short, rotund man in a black suit nodded and marked something on a pad.
Mr. Brown? Wait, I know who that guy is, I thought. It’s James Brown! The Godfather of Soul, Mr. Hot Pants, the Papa with a Brand New Bag! Holy shit!
I hadn’t really thought of James Brown for a couple of years, probably not since his last hit, “Sex Machine,” and two years was a long time back then. I assumed his best days were behind him, but he was definitely a legend. I was in the room with my first Star.
“That track is fine,” Brown said. “Now this is what we’re gonna do next. This young lady and I are going to work the bridge on the ballad.”
Mr. Brown put his hand on the waist of a sexy looking woman wearing a tight-fitting polyester dress that clung to her ample butt. “I’ll show you what to do,” Mr. Brown said to her.
He turned to Holley and said, “Set up the mics.”
Holley ran out into the studio and pushed some microphone stands into position in the center of the room.
James Brown started to speak with a voice that sounded like someone had shredded his vocal chords into a thousand pieces and then poured crazy glue on them to put them back together. “Here is the situation in the country today. The black man is finally beginning to assume his power. The princes of Africa, you know that most slaves were descendants of African princes, right? The princes of Africa are no longer going to play this role of bowing down to the white man. And the white man is afraid, because he knows that when the black man finally wakes up, he will be in a lot of trouble. Now here is what every one of you got to do.”
His coterie stood rapt around him, listening to his every utterance, nodding approvingly. The tape machine I was rewinding was coming close to the top of the reel. I hit the fast-forward button to break the speed, and hit stop when it slowed to a crawl. Then I hit play and “record.” I felt slick.
James Brown continued.
“You must be proud. Say it loud,” he bellowed in that famous rasp, “I’m black and I’m proud! We are not the ones who are going to ruin this country. White men can do that job good enough themselves. We are the ones who are going to save it! It’s time for payback! Get out of my way!”
I wanted to shout out, right on, James Brown! Power to the people! But then I remembered that I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. Also, I was a skinny white kid who was the assistant’s intern. Good idea to keep quiet. But man, this guy could be funky and political all at the same time. I dug it.
Holley came back into the control room and with deference said, “We’re ready, Mr. Brown.”
“Get up!” Mr. Brown cackled. “Thank you, Holley.” And then, “Bob, you lame-ass white mother fucker, what are you doing? Put up the ballad and go to the bridge. Let’s go!” And then, with charm, “Come on, young lady, follow James into the studio and I’ll show you what to do.”
The engineer fiddled with some knobs to prepare for the new track.
As James Brown walked out of the control room and into the studio, a man with gold-rimmed glasses, a droopy moustache and a scraggly head of hair with a growing bald spot in the back got up from the row of movie theatre chairs that were at the front of the recording console.
He said to no one in particular, “Is this man not the funkiest cat on the planet?” still groovin’ to a beat that had stopped long before.
This guy looked familiar, too. I rifled through my brain’s memory drive, and up came the cover of the very first record album I bought and loved when I was five years old in 1960. It was called Peter, Paul and Mary. The scraggly dude, in a somewhat younger version, was on that cover. The man in front of me was Peter Yarrow from this hit-making folk trio. He was the guy who wrote “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”
Now I knew I was a little high, but this was a weird combo: the godfather of soul and the pot-smoking pederast! (Yarrow had pleaded guilty for taking “immoral and improper liberties” with a 14-year-old in 1970, and “Puff” was presumably about weed.)
I barely had time to incorporate what was going on when Brown, standing in front of the mics with the young lady, commanded, “Bob, play the track through the speakers and record this!”
Bob the engineer hit the talkback and said nervously, while playing with his hair, “Mr. Brown, if we play it through the speakers that will leak into the mic, which won’t be great for the sound. Could you put on your headphones?”
“Bob! Just do what I say. You make it work. Wait. Let me explain it to you. It’s not about the sound, it’s all about the feel. Who cares about the leakage?”
Little did any of us know at that time that in a few decades, with the advent of hip-hop and sampling, when artists could cadge a few measures from any record and use it as the basis of their own art, these nasty, low-tech James Brown recordings (probably from his album The Payback) would become some of the most popular “samples” in the genre.
In exasperation, Bob turned back to Holley and threw up his hands. Holley, always smiling and nodding, leaned over Bob to push some buttons and turn some knobs. He then turned to the multi-track tape machine and hit the red button. A black velvet, slow groove chugged through the speakers. James directed the girl.
“Now you just follow what I do with what you do. Just do whatever comes to your soul, girl. Just be real.”
The instrumental mid-section of the song began, and James moaned, “Ooo yeah, baby, unh.”
He nodded to the girl. She took it up. “Yeah, I like it like that.”
Then James, “Get it on, get it on, girl, get it on.”
“Sweet, sweet, James, give it to me good.”
This went on for a couple of minutes. It was bad! I started to writhe in my seat, the snaky groove crawling up my spine. I couldn’t help but get into it.
In a swoon, I was startled to feel someone poking my shoulder. I turned my head and there was Tony, the studio manager. With his thumb, he motioned for me to get up and get out, as if I was being sent to the principal’s office. Was grinding not allowed?
When we got into the hall, he said, “OK kid, here’s your first gig so don’t screw up. See these mics?”
I sighed with relief. I wasn’t in trouble yet.
In the hallway were two 7-foot tall Atlas mic stands. At the end of each hung a microphone the size of a liter soda bottle.
“Bring the U-47 into A-1. There’s a guy in there named Blakin. Make sure he gets it.”
Tony turned and walked away. I took a breath and tried to push the enormous, heavy metal unit to the big room. I could barely steer it, and the mic swung perilously close to the walls. Inching along, I made it after what felt like a half hour, sweating, relieved that nothing broke on the way and no one was there to see it.
Richard Blakin, impeccably tailored in a black vest, black pants, wireless glasses, and a “patch cord” around his neck, grabbed the mic from me. He flipped a switch on the mic and said, “Wrong one. I need the 47, not the 48. You see, let me show you. This one is figure-8. The 47 is omni.”
“Oh,” I said, not wanting to reveal my utter ignorance as to what “figure-eight” or “omni” meant. What I did know was that, out of the two mics in the hall, I had picked the wrong one, and now I had to go through the treacherous exercise of getting the other one down the hall without shattering it.
I guess Blakin saw the fear in my eyes, or he knew he needed the mic faster than I’d get it. “Come with me,” he said, with teacherly patience.
I followed him down the hall.
“Let me show you how to do this.”
He deftly grabbed the giant stand. He unlocked a big knob on the side, lowered the upper boom parallel to the floor, tightened the knob, grabbed the mic in one hand and the lower part of the stand in the other, and pushed the whole thing into the studio in about four seconds. Ah-ha.
He loosened another knob, lifted the upper stand high in the air, and deftl
y swung the boom into the middle of a semi-circle of five black gospel performers singing in powerful harmony, being directed by a little white guy.
Wait. The guy directing them is very short, I noticed. It’s Paul Simon. Paul Simon? Of course the thought that got stuck in my head was, Wow. He is really short. For some reason, when I looked at him I didn’t feel excited. I felt cold. A little scared.
But the singers! The sound of their rich, blended gospel voices in that sweet, big room was stirring. I got a little teary.
I followed Blakin into the control room where we were alone. Hiding my trembling voice, I asked, “Who are those singers?”
“The Dixie Hummingbirds. Name of the song is, ‘Loves Me Like a Rock.’” (This track, which eventually charted as a number two single, would be released on Simon’s forthcoming album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.)
Blakin gave me my now familiar seat next to what I was to find out was called the “echo machine.” The machine added a delay to the reverb, giving the effect a rich depth. I was starting to get into my gig of rewinding that tape back to the top when it got to the end and hitting the play and “record” button. Also, I felt safe and secure hidden in this corner of the room with something to do.
Blakin pointed to a fat guy with a beard who hovered close to Simon out in the studio.
“That’s Ramone. Phil Ramone. The guy who owns the place. Look, steer clear of him. He’s a genius, and he can be a little volatile on occasion. Your job is to be invisible. If you can manage that, you’ll survive. Don’t do anything unless I tell you to.”
So that was the legendary recording engineer Phil Ramone.
It was great being invisible. As I watched these musical giants at work, I wondered, what are they really like? I still had a little buzz on, and I thought this enhanced my powers of perception. I imagined I could see more deeply into things.
Ramone seemed an inexplicable combination of sensitivity, strength, confidence, and anxiety all rolled into one. He followed Simon around, hanging on his every word. I was shocked to see this studio legend treat Simon with such deference. I could see their whole relationship in a flash. It was as if Phil was simply an excellent butler to the lord of the manor. This bugged me. I felt a resistance in my working-class liberal-hippie belly. I couldn’t do that, even for a superstar like Simon. Judgments came up: Ramone is acting like such a pussy. And look how Simon expects to be treated this way.
Blakin turned a knob on the V-shaped console, and we listened in to Simon’s work through the mic he had placed in front of the singers. Simon rehearsed the choir relentlessly, singing the same few lines over and over. He must have heard something different each time they did it, but it all sounded the same to me.
Suffused with an intolerable boredom from the endless repetition of the whole thing, my mind wandered. As I looked out into the big room, I traveled back to Nov. 17, 1970. On that night, I had listened to a live radio broadcast of a concert by Elton John, recorded in this very studio, with Ramone at the helm. That had been the day my father died. I had listened to that concert in my room as I waited to put my father in the ground.
A few weeks before my dad died, I came home from school one day to find him in his wheelchair in our living room, crying. I had never seen my father cry before. I felt a tightness in my jaw that made me want to lower my eyes and turn away. Sitting opposite him, on a plastic covered chair, I asked him what was wrong. He said that he had never achieved anything in his life except have his children.
Hearing those words, I felt a rising panic. How horrible. I told myself in that moment that I would never, ever find myself in that position. I would start doing something with my life, now.
Little did I know that two years later I would be sitting with Ramone and Paul Simon, of all people, in the very room where Elton played the night my father died.
The coke was wearing thin. I started coming down, my euphoria mixing with melancholy.
Simon started recording the background singers over the pre-recorded rhythm section. He kept doing take after take. I rewound my echo tape over and over again. The dregs of the coke left me feeling edgy. What with the volume, the repetition, and all that had happened that day, I hit overload. I told Blakin I had to go. He grunted, preoccupied, at the ready, his eyes on Ramone and Simon, his fingers on the buttons. I slunk, invisibly and silently, out of the control room and down the hall.
I crammed back into the front elevator, relieved that I had survived, glad to be out of there, and excited that I would be coming back again.
On the way down to the lobby, I looked at all the students, oblivious to what was going on right above them, to what had just happened to me. I felt strangely apart from them as their bodies shoved against me. Somehow, I was different. I had gone through the very first steps of an initiation that had already transformed me in ways I could barely understand.
As I made it into the street, back in the real world, surrounded by the chaos and grandeur of the city, revived by a blast of oxygen, the experience of that day suddenly hit me. James Brown, Peter Yarrow, and Paul Simon. Day one. I could confidently say I was doing something with my life. Remembering my first lesson, I jumped up, pumping my fist in the air, and yelled, yes!
TRACK TWO
The Schlepper
After three months of interning, in March of ‘73, I got a phone call from Tony at my girlfriend Kathy’s house in Tenafly, New Jersey. Uh-oh, I thought, I must’ve screwed something up. I’m cooked. I was in trouble. Just not the way I thought.
“Berger. You’ve got a job. You’re gonna be the schlepper. Be here Monday morning, 8 AM. And be on time, you little scumbag.”
I thought I detected a small smile in his voice.
“Yes, sir!”
I slammed down the phone, screamed and whooped, and gave Kathy a hug. I was truly in the door! I felt the gentle hand of the universe aiding me. Then the hand turned cold. Could I really escape the dregs of Brooklyn where fate had indiscriminately born and bred me? The next test was upon me.
To schlep: to drag, to carry with shame, to slave.
Schlepper: he, or she, who is at the bottom.
A&R had studios in two buildings, one at 7th Avenue and 52nd Street and the other at 48th between 8th and 9th. Avenue. Someone had to schlep a hand-truck of tapes from one building to the other across midtown Manhattan.
$80 a week, $64 take-home after taxes.
Me!
Within days the glow of victory began to fade. The ignominy of my newly achieved status settled into my bones like a virus. The job was easy enough. That I could handle. But would I be able to tolerate the weary ache of my days?
Each morning I assumed the mantle of schlepperhood by descending to the recording Underworld. Now that I was an insider, I knew not to travel up the front elevators crammed with the hoi polloi. Instead, I entered the building through the freight entrance on 52nd Street. This portal was reminiscent of Dante’s entrance to hell. (If you want to know what it looked like, it was immortalized on the cover of Billy Joel’s album, 52nd Street). The scene was pure New York ‘70s: grotty, filthy, perfect as a place for some homeless drunk to sleep it off.
I passed through the unmarked entrance and slid down the fetid, greasy steps, rank with the smell of rancid french-fry oil oozing from the Golden Griddle Coffee Shop on the corner, and headed to the basement.
There I passed the office of Doug McTeague, the Southern superintendent, with its walls covered in cheap nudie shots. I barely waved, while he said, “How-dee!”
“How fuckin’ dee to you,” I mumbled to myself.
I pushed open a bent metal door and entered my work home, the studio’s tape library, filled with thousands of audiotapes created over the previous decade.
I’d spend my bored hours snooping through the shelves, occasionally stumbling on some amazing classic. One day I opened a box whose spine read “The Crackers” and found the original multi-track masters of the Big Pink album by The Band, the first album by one of t
he greatest groups of the rock era.
I plopped down on a ripped Naugahyde chair held together with silver duct tape, skeevy with ancient cum and coffee stains. Like the water torture victim anticipating the next drop to fall, I waited for the phone to ring. Within minutes, after I’d barely had time to take a sip of my coffee with milk and sugar, the metal clapper vibrated on the bell of the black phone that sat on my desk. Cringing, I picked up the handset to stop the clanging, and heard the dreaded voice of that hook-nosed, pipe-smoking, jive-ass Tony, whose favorite thing in the world was to make me start my day miserable.
With a derisive snarl in his voice, he said, “It’s that time, pal.”
This meant that I got to take the freight elevator up to heaven, to the studio floor. I walked through those halls, empty at this time of day. No self-respecting cat would be seen alive there at 8:15 a.m. Tony handed me a re-used manila envelope with the day’s schedule of sessions and pointed to the hand-truck full of tapes that I was to push across midtown to what we called the “other side,” meaning the studios on 48th street.
“Move it!” was the closest he got to “good morning.”
I rolled the hand-truck down the hall, made a right turn to the back and pushed it into the freight elevator. The elevator operator was a guy named Reverend Blalock. He was like Vasudeva, the ferryman in the Herman Hesse novel Siddhartha, who teaches the young Buddha about the path to enlightenment.
As Blalock took me back down to the ground floor and the early morning midtown street, I asked, “How you doin’, Brother Bob?”
“Up and down brother, up and down,” he would answer.
True enough, Brother Bob, true enough.
I hit the sidewalk. New York in 1973 was a nasty, dangerous place. You had to navigate the streets with a constant vigilance, knowing how to sidestep, cross, avoid. When you were in the groove, you could feel the danger coming and it would never touch you. That’s why it was always the tourists from Saginaw who got mugged on 42nd Street between Broadway and 8th, the very intestines of the neighborhood where I went to my version of college, Screw U. That’s where I got a 4.0 in the “don’t fuck wit me” class.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 3