Oh great, I thought. I sure would like to have a conversation with that therapist.
Ralph turned the last screw and ran out of the control room before he could get smacked down any more.
I put up the end of the master mix of “Duncan” on one playback tape machine. I set up the chosen applause on the second machine, then added the beginning of the next song, “The Boxer,” on a third machine.
I hit play for the end of “Duncan.” At Ramone’s cue, as the music died out, after the flutes exited and Simon finished the song with a descending lick on his guitar, I hit the play button on the audience machine. Ramone faded in the warm, devoted applause at just the right moment. As the clapping diminished, and at Phil’s next cue, I started the beginning of the incoming track “The Boxer,” and Ramone faded up the new track, with Simon tuning his guitar before beginning the song.
We recorded this entire crossfade onto the fourth machine. Once we got it right, we edited in what we had just created — end of song, applause, beginning of new song — in between the two master mixes of “Duncan” and” The Boxer,” connecting the end of the previous song to the beginning of the next.
We did that with each song until we had a final master of a seamless, whole concert album.
On the last day of creating these crossfades, after endless hours, days, and months of working on this thing, there was one final decision to be made.
As much as Paul treated me, and just about everyone else, as objects, he wasn’t above leaving some of the most critical decisions about his records in the hands of the guy who delivered the pastrami sandwiches. If some bike messenger walked into the control room and said he liked something, there it stayed in perpetuity. But beyond that, Paul was the ultimate and final arbiter of all things. There was no detail that he would leave unmanaged — so driven was he by some mysterious demon that relentlessly demanded ever-increasing perfection.
The last thing to be done was to put the applause tracks at the end of the last song on the album. Should it be long, or short? For the first time in six months, Paul was stymied, unable to make up his mind. He turned to Phil, who couldn’t decide, either.
The two lifetime-achievement Grammy winners couldn’t come to this final, rather inconsequential decision about the length of the applause. After billions of choices along the way, now, just when it was about to be born, the baby got stuck in the birth canal.
It was hard to let go. I could understand. They’d put more of their soul into this project than anything I’d ever encountered. With this last decision, the project would be declared officially complete, done, finito. They were unable to proclaim, as they say in Italian, basta, “it suffices like that.”
After a long silence, and in a panic, they both turned and looked at me. And for the first time during all those grueling hours we’d worked together, they asked me for an opinion.
“Glenn, what do you think? Which one do you like? The long one or the short one?”
Up until that moment, I had barely been a peripheral blur in Simon’s universe. I wasn’t sure if he even recognized me as a sentient being.
I had long given up hope of ever being considered a creature with a neo-cortex, and on the four-hundred and seventy thousandth rewind, I had finally numbed to the point of Buddhist non-existence. I was without opinion. But, suddenly roused from my stupor by Paul and Phil’s query about the final applause, I figured here was my big chance to make an impression on Paul. I could give the answer that would save the project, turn it into a hit, make it as big as Bridge, have him ask me to go out on the road, fire Phil, become the new Artie. Simon and Bergfunkel!
But instead, everything went fuzzy. They looked at me in torment. I had to speak. I did have an opinion somewhere, but I couldn’t seem to find it.
At that point in my life, everything I had been taught was to not have a point of view. And now I was being asked for one. Was this a trick question? Was there a right answer? I had to figure out how to respond without getting in trouble because the silence in the room was growing unbearable.
I opened my mouth and the words that came out were: “Well, the long one is really exciting, but the short one ends nice and fast.”
They both looked at me with crushing disappointment. And in that moment, that perplexing riddle, which I had failed to solve, brought me to what’s called satori. That’s Japanese for a moment of enlightenment. I got it. The only way to learn the lesson is the hard way, but couldn’t I have learned it in advance of fucking up my one shot at immortal record production?
The answer was: any answer would have been fine. I should’ve said, “The long one,” because Paul would have then said, “Let’s use the short one,” and we would have gotten out of the stuck moment. At these times in life, the answer doesn’t matter at all. What matters is just giving any answer. (Honey, which dress do you like, the blue one or the green one? The blue one.)
The reality is, they should have used the short one. With a live album, the listener doesn’t want to be in the middle of a climactic, romantic moment and have to either endure listening to endless applause or get up to turn the goddamn thing off. Once the album is over, you want to move on to something else. You’ve got to think about how these things will fly on repeated listenings, and applause gets tedious fast. Anyway, I think I kind of knew that then but couldn’t find it in my brain to say it.
Once we put on the, long, wrong applause, we finally finished the project.
Working on this live album of hits gave me a chance to live with many of Paul’s classics every day for months, penetrating their depths, memorizing their every nuance. Immersing myself in songs like “America,” “Homeward Bound,” and “El Condor Pasa,” I grew to love his music. Strange that these songs possessed such deep humanity, when Paul himself seemed so devoid of this quality at the time.
Once we were finally done, the master tape was an endless puzzle of stitched-together fragments, made up of pieces from different mixes that were done days, weeks, or months apart; the cross-fades where we used four different machines to create the effect of one track going into the other; and other fixes that turned what was supposed to be a snapshot of a moment in time into a constructed artwork. I learned that I was right about Simon faking it. What came as a revelation was when I came to understand just how much artifice was required to make something sound “real.”
The record sounded gorgeous. We were done—but for the final disaster.
Ramone was supposed to fly the final product out to the coast for mastering. That was the part of the process where some genius figured out a way to squash all that good stuff from the tape onto a petroleum product known as a master disk. This master would be used to make metal negatives and these would be pressed into hot vinyl, i.e. the records you’d buy in the record store.
The album was due to be released in a matter of days. Phil was getting ready to leave for the airport in a few hours. While he was heading up to the 2nd floor to complain about something or other, he gave the order to me and Ralph to make a safety copy of the master tape, in case the plane crashed and the original was incinerated. Ramone might have gone down in flames, but we’d still have the record. Ramone would’ve agreed that that was the most important thing.
In that age of analog, every time you made a copy, you lost something in the transfer. You got more noise and distortion. With every copy of a copy, the record got a little further away from the crisp, punchy thing you started with in the studio. The track was sure to lose some of its edge through the production process, from the cutting of the original track to it coming out of your squeaky car radio. That’s why a hit record better sound damn near like a jack hammer when you first recorded it.
But we made the safety copy just in case, even though it was a slight bastardization of the original. And with this album, considering all the edits, cross fades, and remixes, we’d already lost a lot of the pristine quality along the way.
I hung in the control room with Ralph, finally r
elaxing, while he made the transfer. He was all bouncy — he loved the recording thing, and here was a cool, fresh master tape of a yet to be released album by a monster artist, performing his biggest hits. As we listened to the completed work, he gleefully jumped around the studio. I felt pretty puffy myself. This was the first huge album I’d worked on, and the first time in my life I had the fulfillment that comes from suffering for something way bigger than myself. I leaned back, basking in the glow of the hardest job I had done in my young life, well done.
Ralph flew over to the console and hit a square switch with a white light. Then, something very scary happened. It sounded like someone had put cotton balls in my ears. The crackle and crisp all got sucked away and the tape sounded like a dull, muffled mush. I looked at him, and he looked back at me, terror in his eyes.
He stopped dancing. He flipped the glowing, singular, thumb-sized lever on the board back to its original position. As if the tape had been fished out of the toilet where it seemed to have dropped a moment before, the happy highs came rushing back, someone pulled the cotton out of my ears, and it all sounded fine. Relief.
Until Ralph re-flipped the switch, and again it sounded like something coming from an apartment three floors away. But wait — it was weirder than that. The sound started to swish, like a whirlpool of sound, drifting off into the murky depths, then flipping around into a crash of treble, and swirling back into muffled darkness. Another flip of the switch, and the sound was back to normal.
In a frenzy, Ralph flipped the switch back and forth. Swish, clear, gone, clear, swish, clear, gone-clear, gone-clear! With each flip I could see his comb-over get increasingly damp as he pushed the pathetic strands back on his head, his pallor increasing, his eyes growing wider with panic.
I sat at the edge of my chair. “Ralph, what is going on?” I screamed. I knew something was terribly wrong. I could hear the roar of an approaching tsunami and there was nowhere to run. This was months and months of work, thousands and thousands of dollars, Phil Ramone and Paul Simon, for Christ’s sake!
Ralph looked at me with pathetic despair in his eyes. “Da fu …”
“Ralph …”
He stopped the tape. He sat down in a chair opposite me. “OK. We’ve got to figure out what to do.”
“Would you tell me what the hell is going on?”
“That switch. It’s the mono switch. It takes your stereo mix and it combines the two tracks together and makes it mono. You’ve got to be able to play the thing in mono. When they master it, they’re going to check the mono, because somewhere, on your radio, or something, someone will listen to it, hear it, in mono, instead of stereo.”
“But why does it do that? I mean, why does it sound like someone is flushing it down the toilet when you switch it to mono? Is that what is supposed to happen?”
“No, no, no that is exactly what is NOT supposed to happen! The tape is totally fucked up!”
“What? How?”
“The azimuth — the azimuth must have been off, off on one or more of the quarter-inch machines.” Then with a tear in his voice, “Maybe they were all fucked up! I don’t know!”
“Can you talk in English? I’m freaking out!”
A complete novice, I had no idea what any of this meant.
“A stereo recording has two tracks. To make it seem like a sound is coming out of the middle of the two speakers, the same sound is recorded onto the two tracks in equal volume. The two sounds add together and you get this big sound in the middle. That’s why when you listen to this stereo tape, it appears as if the sound of Paul’s vocal hovers in the middle of the air between the two speakers, as if he is on stage and you can almost see him. And the different instruments seem to be in different parts of the sound picture in front of you – that funny high guitar to one side, the flute to the other, just like they were playing in front of you. That’s the glory of stereo.
“But if the ‘record’ head on the tape machine, the thing that magnetizes the iron filings in a certain pattern, is not exactly straight, not perpendicular to the tape, then when you play the tape back on a head that is completely straight, the sounds that are supposed to be in the middle subtract instead of add. And it happens to the high frequencies worse. You don’t notice it in stereo, but when you put the signals together in mono, it’s like all the high-end is sucked out of the tape.”
“I’m not sure I understand that, but how does that happen, how could it have been off?”
“With all the banging around these machines get, being pushed from room to room, it knocks the heads out of alignment. I should check the azimuth on every session, but who had the time to check four different machines? Ramone was always yelling at me to finish up, because fucking Paul Simon doesn’t like to wait, and,” his voice trailing off, “I just didn’t always have the time to check everything.”
I looked over at the four old machines in their beaten and battered metal boxes. “Is there any way to fix it?”
“Sure. I mean, normally. If the whole thing had been mixed down to one tape machine, and the whole thing was off consistently throughout, you’d just have to adjust the playback head on the mastering machine so it was at the same angle that the record head was on the original mix machine. You’d correct for the error in the mastering, and it would eliminate the problem.
“But you can’t do that in this case, because this was mixed on so many different machines and different pieces were mixed from different machines all with different mistakes. That’s why, instead of just the deep-in-the-toilet muffled sound, you get the swishing thing. It’s kind of like that phasing sound on the hit by the Doobie Brothers, ‘Listen to the Music,’ except it’s awful, and most definitely not what Paul wanted. And I can’t think of any way to fix that.”
I saw the specter of death before my eyes. Six months of work, ruined? The new Paul Simon album…destroyed? Discovered on the day that Phil is supposed to take the tape to get it mastered so it could be released in days? No. This could not be happening!
My panic started flowing over. “Whatever you do, don’t tell Phil, look, I’ve got to get out of here. I’m, I’m leaving. I don’t know where I’m going to go, but it’s over. Anyway, maybe he’ll never hit the mono button. If he doesn’t, he’ll never know. He never hit the mono button once during the whole six months … I mean …” Then the shock flooded me. “Should he have?”
Ralph started speaking softly, as if there was a microphone in the room, listening in. “Of course he should’ve checked. You’ve always got to check. That was his job. He should have checked the mono after every mix. If he had, he would have caught this right at the beginning.”
I grew numb. Could Ramone have fucked up that badly? No Way!
Ralph must have been processing the same thing. Ralph couldn’t accept that answer either. “It was my fault. Goddamn it! I should have insisted on taking the time, Phil and Paul be damned! How could I have been such a … Look we have to tell Phil. We have to tell him.”
Ralph called upstairs and asked Phil to come down. As I waited in the control room, silently glued to my chair, I had post-traumatic flashbacks dancing before my eyes of every time Phil had been a complete and utter maniac. He would just as likely throw a chair at my head if my breathing was too loud. The sound of his screams rang in my ears, a volcanic, Jurassic vomiting that would rip your toenails off. And his favorite rant played over and over: “You’ve destroyed my reputation! You’ve ended my career!” Though I came to understand that his explosions were usually histrionic bullshit, this time there was some merit to the argument. If he bit off large chunks of people’s legs for far less than this, how would he react to this, this news, comparable to the annihilation of the solar system?
Phil walked into the control room. Ralph asked him to sit down. Ralph spoke deliberately, in quiet tones, like someone telling a parent that his child had terminal cancer.
Ralph told him the worst of it. Everything in my head was telling me to run, but when I looked down
and saw my own body, I didn’t know what it was there for. I felt something more than fear, an anticipation of horror, a blackness so complete, like an antelope that plays dead, knowing it is on the verge of being eaten by a lion.
Phil was quiet. Then he, too, spoke in slow, measured tones. His voice was different than I’d ever heard from him. I was surprised. There was no yelling. “This couldn’t be worse. I’m supposed to bring this tape to Roy Halee, the guy who did the Simon and Garfunkel records. The engineer I respect more than anyone in the world. He will definitely hit the button, he’ll hear it. He’ll know.” He paused. “I can’t let that happen. I can’t do that.”
I watched Ramone dig deep. This crisis was too real for him to pull some diva stunt. He could be a preening cocker spaniel with each day-to-day crisis, yapping and nipping and pissing all over the studio floor in some neurotic hissy-fit. But when things got really, truly, horribly bad, Ramone turned Olympian.
“All right,” he said, nodding with a fierce, determined look in his eye. “Get me the Allen-head screwdriver.”
Ralph knew what he wanted. He wanted the screwdriver that would change the azimuth.
Ramone straddled the tape machine, his mammoth belly pressed up against the metal box. He held the screwdriver over the six-sided metal post that jutted out from the top of the head-stack used to adjust the angle of the tape head. He breathed deep and hit the play button, listening to the sickening sound in mono.
As the timbre went from squeaky to mud and back again, Ramone twisted the screw, following the random changes. When the highs disappeared down the wormhole, he’d twist the screw in one direction, causing the sound to become clear; then as they thinned, he’d twist it in the other direction, and the sounds would once more become full.
He rode that Allen-head screw like he was in a car chase on the Riviera, screeching around hairpin turns, barely staying on the road. For hours, in total concentration, Ramone played the master tape endless times, learning the curves, the hills, the dips, the cliffs, the falls, bit by bit, of a 40-minute album.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 8