Never Say No To A Rock Star

by Berger, Glenn

  Unencumbered by messenger gear, I said good morning to the receptionist, Lana. Automatically cooler now, I sat down on her desk for a minute, and we chatted amiably. She asked if I wanted anything for breakfast. Of course, she whispered, it would go on Paul’s tab. That was new. Anything? I ordered a couple of scrambled eggs on a toasted English muffin with cheese, and a coffee with milk. This was a sure sign that I had made it up a rung on the ladder.

  I walked into R-2 and picked up the booking sheet to see what was on tap for the day. Paul Simon. 16-Track Playback. There were no further instructions.

  There were piles of two-inch tapes with names of venues from across the country, like Knickerbocker Arena, Cornell University, and Boston Music Hall. Fragments of the ultra-wide tape were hung on the walls, or draped over the massive 3M multi-track tape machine. I did not dare touch anything and was at a loss for what to do.

  Habituated to the task, I made sure all the pencils were sharp. While straightening up, I worried, What would Simon be like? Would I be able to get him to like me? I tried to fortify myself with the notion that I had always got on best with the toughest teachers in my school. As the moments passed, with the clock approaching our start time of 10:00 a.m. and no sign of Ramone, I grew increasingly worried. How could I prepare for the date without any direction?

  Minutes before the downbeat, Ramone blew into the room. With a winning smile, he said, “It’s you and me now, kid. You ready? Do you want to be a world-class engineer? Because that’s what you’ll be when I’m done with you. We’re going to make beautiful music together.”

  I felt a small pang of love at first sight. Wow. Me and the big guy? Really? World-class? This guy wasn’t the typical borough-tough that I found in so much of the rest of the staff. He was charming. He instantly won me over. Maybe he wasn’t the monster that he was reputed to be. After all, he’d been nice to me so far.

  Standing at attention, I waited for his command. I assumed that Ramone would provide me with some kind of indoctrination, some guide to the Master’s method. But he said nothing.

  He took his seat by the console. With no indication of what to do, I took my spot on the assistant’s stool by the multitrack and waited for what was going to happen next. It took all of my powers of self-control to appear steady.

  Phil stared at a small video monitor, high on the wall, among the pre-amps and outboard gear. It showed a vague black and white image of the studio’s entrance. A blurry figure approached the door on the screen. Phil started breathing heavily. “Ok,” he gulped, nodding his head two or three times. “Here he comes. Here he comes.”

  Huh? Was the great Phil Ramone scared of Paul Simon? This possibility amplified my own fear. If the alpha-dog was nervous, how should the pup assistant feel? My body tensed, but I knew I needed to keep my cool and not let my nervousness show.

  A few moments later, the door opened, and my first superstar entered the control room.

  Phil stood up and, appearing to tremble, seemed to almost bow and greeted him in what appeared to me as an overly-solicitous tone of voice. “Good morning, Paul.”

  Phil must have warned Paul to expect someone new in the room, as he showed no surprise at my presence. “Paul, let me introduce you to our new assistant engineer, Glenn Berger.” I managed to smile. Paul looked through me. He didn’t reach out his hand. He didn’t even say hello. His basic vibe communicated, Don’t think of existing in my presence, and we’ll be fine. I wasn’t completely surprised. He was, at least, willing to let me sit in a room with him and watch him work. Creating music was a sensitive endeavor, and artists didn’t let people in these rooms easily. Still, I felt bruised. I retreated to the safety of my stool.

  While I appeared impassive, it didn’t escape my awareness that I sat in proximity to a man who had sold a few records in his day. His catalogue was impressive enough, but it wasn’t really that hard for me to be cool. The tautness coming off of him made me wary, but I wasn’t particularly star-struck. I had never been a fan. As I stewed, wincing at his dismissal of me, I thought, I never liked Simon and Garfunkel, anyway.

  My 8th grade English teacher, Ms. Kantor, in an attempt to turn us on to poetry, had once played us S and G’s song version of “Richard Cory,” a poem about a guy who’s got it all, but ends up shooting himself in the head because he figures out he’s a jerk. I automatically had to hate anything my 8th grade English teacher liked. She was a priss.

  What was it about Simon and Garfunkel that I found such a turn-off? It wasn’t that I was a rocker and found them too soft; I liked all kinds of pop hits. I was a big fan of Todd Rundgren, The Incredible String Band, and The Band, none of whom could be considered heavy metal. I didn’t like Simon and his taller half because I thought they were, to use Holden Caulfield’s favorite word, phony.

  I was sure that I was an expert on the truth. I judged like a wrathful god, and no one escaped the piercing eyeball. The thing that determined whether someone got membership in the Rock and Roll pantheon was, were they real? That’s what rock was all about. So as far as I was concerned: it was and always had been, at its purest, a reaction against bullshit. Parsley, Sage — give me a break with the chicken spices.

  I mistrusted the duo’s folksiness. I thought it was just put on because it was the trend. The name, Simon and Garfunkel, was a good marketing move. It was the “next big thing,” in the development of folk/rock branding. It sounded goofy, ethnic, anti-establishment, but sincere. It stuck out, in just the right way, for that mid-‘60s moment. Others would follow in this trend, descending in the end to totally constructed shams like Engelbert Humperdinck.

  I was convinced that Paul was a top-notch crap-meister, and his instant attitude toward me did nothing to dispel this notion.

  But once I was able to watch him create in the studio, I got a different take. The first thing that Paul said was, “I’m working on a new song for my next album, and I want to record a guitar and vocal demo of what I have so far.”

  That was my cue. I asked Ramone which mics he wanted me to use. He told me to choose whatever I liked. That made me feel uncertain, but I didn’t have time to hesitate, because the next thing he said was, “Move it!”

  I boogied out to the studio to set up. Paul came out to the recording room to tune his guitar. As I adjusted the mics I had selected, standing inches from him, I felt a little awkward. I wasn’t tall myself, but I towered over the guy. His Martin acoustic guitar almost engulfed his body. I noticed he moved deliberately, as if every motion was prepared in advance. There was something both impressive and creepy about that. I wanted to say something, just to make conversation, but I couldn’t think of any words.

  Paul said, “Move that mic over a little bit.” And that was it.

  I went back into the control room. Phil turned to me, and in an exasperated voice, as if he was saying something any idiot should have known, said, “Why didn’t you use the C-22 for the acoustic guitar?”

  I wanted to tell him that he told me to use anything I wanted, but I thought better of it. Instead, I said, “I’ll go change it,” and made a move to go out in the studio.

  But before I could move, with his voice getting urgent, he said, “Forget it. Let’s go, time to record!” I had two legs moving in opposite directions. First he told me to use any mic, then he told me I used the wrong one, and then he told me to leave it.

  Ramone hit the talkback, and the tone of his voice changed completely from the pressured splash of cold water I had received, to a deep, warm, maple syrup. “We’re ready, sweetheart.”

  Then he turned to me again, and the insistence came back. “Hit it! Hit it!”

  “Record?”

  “Yes, come on! Now!”

  I hit play and “record.” The red lights came on and the tape started to turn.

  I watched Paul finger-pick the strings on his guitar. I’d never seen anyone play the way he did. The sound was inimitable— a hard thing to do on that wooden box with six strings where you can only put your fingers
in so many places.

  Then he began to sing some as yet unknown lyrics to a song that would later become “Still Crazy After All These Years.” No one but us had heard this song before. He finished the second refrain, and then said, “Not sure where it goes from here,” and the song petered out.

  But what he already had composed was a finely cut jewel. You could hear the whole thing with just him and guitar. It needed no production. Way too many songs are slight and gain their credibility through the production jizz that’s floofed around them. Listen to those songs naked and they are all fashion with no body. Not Paul’s. This song was bright, clear, and done from the raw bones of it. Any arrangement or additional instrumentation would just put the jewel in the proper setting. Every note was there for a reason, every word the perfect choice.

  Listening to him play that song was like being woken up by blinding sunshine. It left me dazed and sweaty. So this is what brilliant songwriting is, I said to myself. Maybe I had been wrong about this dude.

  The impact was enhanced by my first experience of hearing something being created in the studio, with just a microphone and a super-clean preamp between what was coming fresh from the mind and hands of the creator and the giant speakers on the wall. There is something about hearing music in the studio that brings you all the way into the heart of the thing. But even with the sonic enhancement, it was clear that this guy was deep. Maybe if I paid close enough attention, I could learn how to make great records from this cat.

  He listened back, yet seemed unimpressed with himself. He sighed and, almost as if talking to himself, said, “I’m not sure where to take this song next.” He slowly lifted his coffee cup in a perfect arc, and looking off into some melancholy distance, took a sip and put it down.

  Phil said, “It’s brilliant. It’s going to be great.”

  “Let’s move on” was all Paul said.

  This demo of his new song was just a distraction from our main purpose. I began my gig in the middle of Paul working on his album Live Rhymin’. Paul had been a solo performer for a few years now, and had established himself as a hit maker on his own with his first two albums, the eponymously titled Paul Simon and There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.

  In May of 1973, he’d gone on his first solo tour with the Andean band Urubamba and the gospel group The Jessy Dixon Singers. Phil captured these American and European shows on tape, and we were now making a live album out of those recordings.

  I was shocked to discover that the record was not so live that it couldn’t be rejiggered twenty ways from Sunday.

  Phil directed me to put up “El Condor Pasa,” from the show recorded earlier that year in May at Carnegie Hall. Phil made a rough mix of the track. When the recording came to the end, Simon spoke to me for the first time with a phrase I was soon to hear incessantly from him. Without looking, he waved his hand, and said, “Back it up.”

  I rewound the tape. We listened again and again. After several playbacks, Paul said, “I like the second verse, but that’s it. Let’s hear Santa Monica.”

  I put up that version, and again we listened, repeatedly.

  It went on like this for days, with Paul and Phil closely scrutinizing all the recorded performances from around the country. The monotony was numbing. Paul was not satisfied with the whole performance of that tune from any of the shows. So, painstakingly, Phil created a complete song by editing together fragments of multitrack from different performances across America, from California to the New Jersey Turnpike. We took a few measures from the concert in San Francisco, then a chorus from a theatre in Uniondale, finally a verse from Notre Dame in Indiana.

  Next we worked the song “America,” which was just guitar and vocal. Again, after endless investigations, Paul couldn’t find one whole live, vocal performance that he liked, so he decided to replace much of his singing by overdubbing it in the studio. While listening to his live guitar through his headphones, he recorded a number of vocal takes on several empty tracks on the multitrack. Then, he wrote out the lyrics and “comped” together a complete performance, taking one line from one track and a word from another. He put a circle around the number eleven for one line, while adding another lyric that came from track fifteen.

  As I watched Simon replace each organic musical part with their bionic replacements, I began to wonder what “live” really meant.

  Throughout this endless, tedious work, Paul continued to treat me like little more than a well-trained monkey, which fit my job description. I pressed buttons: play, record, stop, rewind, play, record.

  There was an absence of feeling that blew like a cold wind from him. He was obviously keenly intelligent. I had always thought of myself as pretty smart, but in his presence, I felt my own confidence shrivel, and I became unusually stupid and inarticulate. Outside of taking a lunch order, I kept my mouth shut. As Simon finessed some musical detail on a single measure of music, his only words to me were the automatic phrase, “Back it up. Back it up.”

  After air-brushing all of his presumably live musical parts on Live Rhymin’ to make them into something between real and fantastic, it was time to mix. This is when the engineer blends together all the disparate musical elements of a track into a coherent whole. One part of the job is to set the relative volumes between the instruments. For example, how loud should the drums be in relation to the vocals? But creating the proportion and relationship between the musical elements is only one aspect of the sonic landscape that can be controlled in the mix, which is what makes, for instance, Radiohead sound different from The Beach Boys.

  In the same way that Paul scrutinized every note, creating the perfect “live” performance, he also quested after the ultimate mix. We mixed each song several times, as Paul was always finding something wrong with what we had already done.

  Back in the 1970s, there was no automation of mixes. Since the advent of digital technology in the following decades, every move in a mix can be remembered — you make a modification once and the computer will replicate that change eternally. But in ye olde days, we crafted mixes by hand, starting fresh each time. It was artisanal. Though this method could be nerve-wracking, it had its advantages; it allowed for the serendipitous moment. Sometimes an imperceptible nudge of a fader would allow magic to occur.

  On this day, we were mixing “The Boxer” for the four-thousandth time. In order to redo it, I began by recreating all of the settings from the last time we had mixed it. Getting to the studio early, I set all of the relative volumes and the reverb; I patched in, and tweaked, all the out-board equalizers to modify the timbre; and I set the limiters and compressors to narrow a track’s volume swings, called dynamic range. After whipping all that together, my breakfast having arrived from the deli, I collapsed in utter exhaustion, because I’d only slept two or three hours the night before.

  I had completed the recipe just moments before the heavies arrived. We got right to work. Simon sat down next to Phil on one side, to supervise the mix, and I sat on the other, to lend my helping hand.

  The mix was Ramone’s chance to perform. As the song unfolded, with the instruments entering and falling out, with parts rising up to prominence and then blending back into the background, Phil continuously massaged the sliding volume controls called faders. He finessed these subtle relationships to create an emotional arc, in search of the combination that would have that spark where it all came together, sounded right, and most important, felt right.

  We rehearsed all the changes in volume and proportion throughout the song, learning what Phil called the “choreography.” I memorized all the moves as he perfected them. With each run through, as I learned the parts, I called out the alterations to him.

  Simon’s blank, sharklike stare made Ramone’s hands shake. No matter how many subtle refinements Phil would make, Simon would hear something else that needed to be fine-tuned. Once every last detail had finally been considered, Phil gave me the go-ahead to start recording the mixes to quarter-inch tape. I hit “record” and pressed th
e talkback button to lay down an identifying slate at the top. “The Boxer, take one.” I hit play on the multi. We started the mix. Right in the intro, Simon said, “Let’s do it again. Let’s move the charango a little bit to the left, and duck it a smidge at its entrance.”

  We started again from the beginning. “Take two.”

  This time we got to the first interlude. Ramone missed the entrance of the quena. “Shit!”

  Simon, to me, “Back it up.”

  This went on and on. Simon never had an encouraging word. In his single-minded hunt for greatness, there was no space for human consideration. This could wear anyone down.

  I could feel Ramone’s frustration building. He added some midrange to the reverb. Unhappy with the sound of the acoustic guitar, he zoomed to the back of the control room to change the setting of an equalizer. Seeing where it had been set, he stamped his feet and threw his hands up in the air. “No wonder! Berger, you fucked it up again! I’d never set EQ like that!”

  But I knew he had. He could get into such a fugue state when he was mixing that he could wail a knob and have no memory of what he had done.

  The more the hours passed, the more relentlessly Simon drove Ramone. And equivalently, the harder Ramone pushed me. “Berger, let’s do it, come on, faster! And don’t fuck up that vocal switch in the outro.”

  We were always one wrong moment away from blowing the whole mix. This pressure got Phil deeper into the groove, and he worked the thing, hard. His hands became one with the band. Following the shifting feelings of the song, he “rode” the levels of the instruments like he was riding a winged stallion, building the song, hitting escape velocity, rising off the ground, pulling it back, creating tension, galloping, then another burst, building to a bigger peak, emphasizing the antara here, then the vocal, closing his eyes, breathing deep, putting his emotional back into it.