Never Say No To A Rock Star

by Berger, Glenn

  I called out the moves. “Track 13! Fade it out! Cross-fade to 12! Push the charango, now!” The musical measures went by; we were getting it all right. Ramone started tapping his foot, on the ball, and then the heel. When that happened, I knew we had something. The closer we got to the end, and the greater the excitement, the scarier it became. Ramone reached his hands over his large belly, delicately manipulating the faders. Simon barked, “Careful with the quena! Goose the vocal!” The end of the song came into sight. Ramone pumped it, the needles going into the red, loading all the magnetism onto the tape that he could. Finally, the horse leaped skyward into some spontaneous, unpredictable, emotionally radiant moment of brilliance, revelation, and ecstasy.

  Big finish, the song ended. Silence, and then Ramone nodded to me, and I artfully pulled down the master fader. We let the tape roll for a few seconds of bias tape. It was always a scary adventure to live through those three or four minutes, but when he nailed it, it burned. I was sure this was the take.

  Phil said, triumphantly, “Playback.”

  I rewound the quarter-inch to the top. I listened with more trepidation than satisfaction, but I couldn’t clamp down on my hope all the way. The beauty still took my breath away. When it was done, Simon turned to Ramone and said, “Let’s do one more.”

  What the hell more could he want? Whatever it was, I couldn’t hear it. I just wanted to go home and get some sleep.

  As the days wore on, and we couldn’t get anything that made Paul happy, Ramone got increasingly frazzled. After our eight-hour days with Simon, at night we were recording Phoebe Snow’s first album. At 3 a.m., when we were done, Ramone would crawl up to his couch in his office on the second floor and sleep the few hours before it was time to begin again. One of the world’s most successful recording engineers didn’t even sleep in a bed. He almost never went home to his wife in Pound Ridge. He’d shuffle down to the studio in the morning, dressed like shit, his beard unkempt. Every day he seemed to get fatter. He ate pork ribs from the House of Chan for dinner every night. The lack of sleep, the bad diet, and Simon’s inhumane treatment were putting him into an increasingly foul mood.

  In the same way that Paul could not find a complete performance that he liked—he barely approved of any complete mix—so too was Ramone forced to edit together the mix fragments. At one point, after chopping for hours, Ramone turned to me and said, “Berger, get over here. You do this one.” The surgeon held out his hand, passing me the scalpel to make the cut.

  I stood at the machine, with one hand on each reel, and rocked the tape over the playback head, listening for the optimal spot at which to sever it. I tried to keep my knees steady, while Simon stood an inch from me on one side, and Ramone hovered on the other. With their eyes focused on my fingers, I stood at the chopping block, slicing the acetate with the one-sided blade. It was surgery on their baby, with the mean old daddies breathing down my actual neck. Keep the hand steady, show no fear, cut cleanly…patient lives, I told myself. I imagined, if I blew it, my own head under the blade, clean cut, right into the bucket. I had to do this to survive, and I did. The edit worked. Nobody applauded. Simon said nothing, walked back to the producer’s table, and sipped his coffee.

  During one of these editing marathons, just about at the end of the day, with tiny ribbons of audio tape all over the control room, Phil made a cut. Listening back, Paul said, “It just doesn’t sound right, does it?”

  By this point, Ramone’s hands could barely handle the blade. He muttered under his breath, “Fucking shit.”

  Frantically, he cut out an inch of tape, to see if that would work better. We listened again, and Paul said, “Nah, that’s worse.”

  Now Ramone’s frustration started boiling over. “Fucking, goddamn …”

  Paul said, “I don’t know. Maybe the first one wasn’t so bad. Let’s go back to what we had and listen to it again.” Amongst the scraps of tape scattered around the machine, Phil found the one inch of audio tape, and put it back in where he had taken it out. He hit play back. However, when we listened to it this time, it sounded different, weird.

  “What the fuck?” Now Ramone’s voice was getting louder. He took the piece out again, and put it back in, pushing down hard on the adhesive tape that held the fragments together. Again, it sounded wrong. How could that be? He had merely taken the tiny fragment out, and put it back in again. Why did it sound so strange?

  Now he lost it. Ramone kicked the tape machine. “Goddamn mother-fucking piece of goddamn shit!”

  I backed off into a corner, scared.

  He stomped around the control room like a giant toddler who couldn’t get his way. He threw the pile of take sheets onto the floor. He knocked over a pile of empty metal reels. All the while screaming, “Shit!”

  The guy had snapped. I felt bad for him, and offered to help. “Phil, do you want me to give it a shot?”

  “What the fuck are you going to be able to do? What the fuck is wrong with this goddamn …?” And he kicked the machine again.

  At least I tried to help. I looked over to the other grown-up in the room, hoping for some assistance. Simon was wholly aloof, as he glanced at a magazine. He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  One word of reassurance from Simon would have been nice, something like, Don’t worry, I’m sure if we give it a break, you’ll figure it out tomorrow. Maybe that would have helped to calm Phil down. But this was not Simon’s style.

  After he left, Ramone stormed out of the control room, screaming. I peeled myself off the wall.

  That night, as I lay in bed at around four in the morning, almost hallucinating from the lack of sleep, the answer came to me like a revelation.

  The next morning, I couldn’t wait to get to the control room. Sure that I was right, I thought, Now I’ll show these guys! I removed the fragment of tape, and turned it upside down. I put it back in, and played it. It was, as we used to say, tight as a duck’s booty. Yes.

  When the masters appeared, I hit the button, and played the tape back for them. Simon looked over at Ramone. Phil raised an eyebrow, and almost grimaced. He barely mumbled, “How did you do that?”

  I tried to suppress a boast, and said, “Trade secret.”

  Simon showed no pleasure in my trick, but he smirked, because he could tell that Ramone had been outdone by the schlepper.

  It was obvious that Paul was not the kind of cinema verité artist who was comfortable with revealing his own flaws. Our job was to make the record — a patchwork of performances, edits, and overdubs — seamless, like one perfect, spontaneous performance. This was no easy thing to accomplish. Live albums usually took a few days to mix. We worried this thing for months.

  One day, we were all sitting in our usual spots: me, on my stool by the tape machine in the back of the control room; Ramone at the console; Simon at the producer’s desk next to Phil. We were eating lunch from the Gaiety Deli, a rare moment when we were not engaged in some microscopic surgery.

  Breaking the silence between bites, without making eye contact, Simon said to Ramone, “My friends are saying this album is taking a long time to get done.”

  Phil didn’t respond, but, although this remark seemed fairly innocuous on the surface, the air suddenly got thick, and there was a distinctly noticeable shift in the room. All you could hear was the crumple of wax paper and the chewing of corned beef on rye.

  When the session finally ended, Ramone put his head in his hands. “My career is ruined! Paul thinks I’m too slow. You have no idea what that one statement could mean!”

  I felt a moment of panic. Phil and I had just started our beautiful music thing, and his career was about to end? Could this really be true? After all, if it were up to Phil and me, we would’ve put this colicky baby to bed a long time ago. It was Paul’s ultra-perfectionism that was making this thing take forever. Oh, it dawned on me, he’s not going to get fired. A wave of derision moved through me, as I rolled my eyes behind Ramone’s
back. What a drama queen.

  Then, out of nowhere, another wave of emotion, this time, anxiety, crawled up my spine like the time I got an electric shock from putting a live patch cord into my mouth. It wasn’t only the schlepper who could feel the icy slap from Paul. I had just witnessed how Simon could maim with the precision of a medieval assassin, pulling his bodkin from out of its hiding place, placing it precisely in the space between Ramone’s ribs, and having it back behind his cloak before anyone would notice. To crush the schlepper was one thing. But nailing Ramone right where it hurt? Was this why Phil panted every time Paul came into the studio?

  Ramone thrived on chaos. He used this lunacy as part of his alchemical brew to summon up the magical muses. He had this amazing psychic capacity to cause equipment to break down just by walking into a room. Unprepared for whatever was about to happen in a recording session, he’d come in late, and just at the worst possible moment, gear would simply stop functioning. It was standard that Ramone would push the craziness to the lip of catastrophe.

  We were working day and night, and when Paul wasn’t in the studio, there was always something else going on. One Monday morning, with Paul out of town, Phil booked a date in A-1. I didn’t know who it was for or what we would be doing.

  The standard procedure was that the instrumentation for a recording date would be called in by a producer, arranger, or contractor, and Tony would write it out on a booking order. That sheet was the first thing I looked for when I arrived in the morning: that was where I got my instructions for that session’s set up.

  On this day, I came in to find the sheet blank. That meant I couldn’t do my job of putting out the chairs, placing the microphones, giving all the players headsets, plugging everything in, and setting up the console, so the engineer could walk in, sit down, and start the session, knowing everything was set, checked, and ready to go.

  Depending on how big the session was — and in A-1, 40-piece orchestras were the norm— it could take up to ninety minutes to get everything prepared. Once I got my chops together, I could move faster than anyone, but it still took time. I didn’t like pushing things too close. I wanted enough time to check everything twice. Murphy’s Law had proved itself too many times: if something could go wrong, it inevitably did. And the price for being even a minute late could be enormous. Going overtime with forty musicians getting paid scale was a pretty penny.

  When I got there at 8:30 a.m. and saw the empty sheet, I called Tony in the booking office. By this point, with Ramone as my guide, I was earning the status to become obnoxious. “Where the hell is my goddamn set-up?”

  “Beats me, Berger. Ramone booked the session and he didn’t give up any info. I guess you’ll just have to wait till he shows up.”

  “Where is he? Can’t we find him and figure out what he wants?”

  “No can do, pal. Relax. It is what it is.”

  That didn’t exactly soothe me. In my own exhausted frustration, I thought, Fine. Fuck it. It’s his fucking fault if this becomes a nightmare.

  At about 9:40, with a 10:00 a.m. downbeat (the time the session was supposed to begin), Ramone walked in to find the studio empty, without a single microphone, chair, or headphone set up.

  He started to panic and scream: “Why the fuck isn’t the studio set up?”

  Foolishly, I tried to argue by using logic. “But Phil, there’s nothing on the set-up sheet — how was I supposed to know what to set up?”

  I long forgot that sweet guy I saw on our first day together. That had been merely a ruse to lure me onto the hook. Once I was securely in, his legendary brutality emerged. He answered with his own impeccable logic. “Are you a complete useless idiot? It’s your job to know!”

  And he was right. Ramone was the kind of guy who taught you nothing but expected you to know everything and, if you got it wrong he, to put it politely, disemboweled you. That was his style and the way you had to learn, like it or not. I realized in that moment that it was my job to anticipate his fuck-ups and to cover his ass.

  He had neglected to alert anyone at the studio that we were going to be recording a 60-piece orchestra for that guy with the quaint name, Engelbert Humperdinck. But that didn’t stop him from blaming me.

  In a panic, with minutes to go before the session was due to start, Ramone hollered like some large, extinct, carnivorous cat, inspiring shock and awe.

  He picked up the phone and called Tony. “I want the entire staff in here NOW! I want every microphone in the studio, every baffle, every platform, every headphone, every piece of equipment in this studio in the next five minutes!”

  Instantly, his command was fulfilled. The troops frantically ran through the halls; Holley, Tony, Plotnik, the other assistants, the maintenance guys, Blalock the janitor, wide-eyed and panting, schlepped every piece of gear into the big room. With everyone scampering around like ants running away from a descending shoe, and with me commanding the troops, we set up for the orchestra.

  “Put the podium in the middle! Three chairs for the trumpets there! Three for the french horns there! Five woodwinds! Sixteen fiddles! Six chairs for the cellos!”

  Just as I was checking the last microphones, the docile string players started shuffling in, chomping their cigars, with their Wall Street Journal under their arms. The clock struck ten, the conductor tapped the podium to bring the cats to attention, and Ramone was behind the board, ready to set levels.

  No one, no matter their official job, complained. Although Ramone could induce deep chaos, he could also in turn inspire those around him to seemingly impossible heights. That was a key to his hit-making genius. He showed his leadership in his ability to enroll us as egoless participants in the creation of his masterworks. Whatever it took, we were all willing to do it, as crazy as it might be. He convinced us that we were the cream. A&R studios may not have had the slickest equipment or the fanciest furniture. But what we did have was our unsurpassable staff, all trained by the fat man himself, Ramone. Our team could not be topped.

  One reason why we didn’t have the best gear and our stuff was breaking all the time was that, despite its success, A&R was — much like the rest of New York in the ‘70s — on the verge of bankruptcy. Ramone had lost a million bucks on a record company that had flopped and, unbeknownst to us lowlifes, the studio was on a long road toward paying off that boondoggle. In the same way that New York’s infrastructure was collapsing at the seams, our brutalized and overused equipment was falling apart, and there wasn’t any money to pay enough maintenance guys to keep it all working.

  It was also hard to find good technical guys because everyone wanted the glory of being the engineer, rather than performing the selfless task of keeping the old crap working. In reality, the maintenance guys had a brutal gig. We were working twenty-four hours a day, and the gear just couldn’t keep up. Add to this, the technology was changing all the time. Phil was constantly pushing against the boundaries of the possible, using equipment in ways that no one had tried before. Without the time needed to test-drive the stuff, the gear was more likely to blow up than work.

  When everything busted to pieces, Phil would yell at me and anyone else in earshot, blaming us for all that was going wrong. It took me months to learn to swing with this and still keep the boat afloat while the smoke and flames climbed around us.

  In the midst of all this madness, we faced the greatest challenge in the making of Paul’s album. Getting the right mixes of each individual song was not the final step in putting together this classic.

  As this was a live album, at least in theory, we wanted it to have the feel of a concert. We would achieve this by creating the illusion that one tune flowed naturally into the next, just as if Paul was actually doing a show. This all had to be concocted, because each song came from different venues, on different nights, in a different order.

  The first step in this process was to fake the applause. The real audience response didn’t always sound convincing. Stealing recorded applause from anywhere we could f
ind it, we created an applause tape with many options: pleasant clapping, cheers of recognition, respectful, heartfelt acclamation, insane stomping, standing ovations, whatever canned business we thought would fly.

  Then, in order to create the flow of a show, we needed to place this applause between one song and the next. Today you could achieve this kind of effect on your Aunt Tillie’s laptop, but in those analog days, it took a lot more than that.

  First thing in the morning, while I gnawed on my English muffin, Ralph, the head maintenance guy, scurried into the control room, pushing and banging the busted up metal box on wheels that housed a quarter-inch tape machine. Then he ran out and did that three more times. We would need to use these four different quarter-inch machines to get the job done.

  Ralph’s job as our technical maven was to turn a bunch of knobs and screws to align these finicky analog monsters for optimum performance.

  He pushed his comb-over back, eyes bulging out of his head, as he stared at the clock. He knew what was coming. Phil walked in, and saw that it was almost 10:00 a.m., and Ralph hadn’t finished the alignment yet.

  Ramone slammed his fist on the producer’s desk. “I can’t get any cooperation around here! Do I have to do everything myself? Ralph, could you move any slower? Don’t you realize that Paul Simon will be walking in here any minute? Paul Simon does not wait for anyone!” Ramone held his breath and took a quick glance at the front door monitor. He started to pace and reached for a cigarette.

  I walked toward Phil and tried to calm him down. “Phil, it’s going to be ok. He’ll be done in time.”

  This was the wrong strategy. “Don’t EVER tell me to calm down! My shrink told me I need to express my feelings!”