I followed his every order, in total respect, and stunned shock, at the full weight of the reality that Ramone — Ramone — fucked up this badly, and it came back to kick him up the keister at the worst possible moment. (Then I said a prayer of gratitude that none of my fuck ups, no matter how bad, had reached this epic level. At least not yet.) But at the same time that he was a giant screw up, he was also the guy who could rally and do the impossible, saving the project from imminent destruction.
Untold hours later, his flight postponed, drenched in sweat and blind with exhaustion, he completed the fix. We made a safety with Ramone turning the screw for 40 straight minutes. He did it in one pass, so there would be no edits.
We removed the original tape from the box labeled “master” and replaced it with the doctored copy. Ramone took the new tape, put it in his bag, and got into a limo to take him to the airport. We put the original master in a box marked “Safety copy.” That tape was sent to the bowels of the library.
We never spoke of that incident again.
The glory of my first project with a major artist had been irretrievably sullied. A vague echo of shame reverberated within me.
Had I passed my first test? All signs said that I was in with Ramone. I now held a huge secret, and that offered some leverage, not that I would ever think of using it. But somehow, even though it appeared that I had crossed the first threshold, I felt something less than elated.
After the loss of my father, whom I saw as a weak failure, all I wanted was to be mentored by men I could look up to and admire, respect, emulate. I longed to find men who were good, honest, and powerful, so they could teach me how to be a man. But how could I make sense out of this? Who were these people: the superstar, Simon, whose music provided succor to the masses, but was so cold; and Ramone, my teacher, so successful and heroic, and yet so out of control, and capable of such incompetence?
I started to absorb the confusing reality that great people were just as screwed up as anyone else. Maybe more so. My firm and rigid beliefs about the world started to unravel. Black and white began to bleed into each other. In my old worldview, there were good people and bad, truth-tellers and bullshitters, champions and villains. Now, I found all those qualities to exist in one person.
As my perspective of the world turned gray, my emotions also blended together. Only now, looking back from this great distance, have I been able to distinguish the multiple and subtle shades of feeling that I was suffering.
I can still feel the echoes of my disappointment that these men gave me neither the love I sought, nor the modeling I craved. I felt this as a personal wound, as if they had some obligation to be what I needed them to be, and took their limitations as a personal rejection.
I can sense the burning ambition and murderous competitiveness that lived in me, that led me to want to supplant them, and my smoldering resentment when they out-maneuvered and prevented me from doing so.
With hindsight, I can appreciate the confidence I was beginning to possess from having survived the game with the big boys.
I can admit to the awe I felt in the presence of these men who gave their all, risking so much, without guarantee of success, with a quality of caring that I could not allow myself to have. I can own my fear then, doubting my capacity for such courage.
I can mourn the numbness I forced on myself, in order to endure the humiliations I was put through and to appear strong.
And I can still get in touch with the envy I felt at being in the presence of such talent that seemed so inscrutable yet so close. I was right there, next to these titans, who appeared so ordinary, yet managed to create things of subtle beauty that seemed infinitely inaccessible to me.
All of those varied emotional colors roiled inside of me, but at that time, I was only aware of one feeling, one I had learned from all of the men I had been working with over the previous year. It was the only acceptable emotion at A&R Studios.
I was mad.
TRACK FIVE
Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks: The Untold Story
In 1974, Bob Dylan was looking for renewal. His marriage to his wife Sara was broken. Over the previous few years, he had made two records for Asylum Records. He had been disappointed with sales and didn’t cotton to David Geffen, Asylum’s leader.
That September, Ramone excitedly came to find me after a phone call. Dylan was returning to Columbia Records, the venerable label he’d started with, and he was going to record his new album with us! This was the way it was in those days. We were hot. Amazing projects were coming in one after another.
The date that Dylan picked to begin recording was propitious: September 16th, which was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The recording was to take place in studio A-1. This room had once belonged to Columbia, until they sold it to Ramone in 1968. This was Columbia’s earliest recording room, operational since the 1930s. The walls echoed with past sessions featuring the likes of Sinatra and Streisand. Dylan had done his early work there. Not least of the astounding hits recorded in that room was “Like a Rolling Stone,” his signature.
From the street, you could see this big box with a peaked copper roof (the copper was there to keep out stray electronic interference), stuck on top of the building. It has since been torn down and replaced with the Equitable Insurance Building. (So has my city of dreams descended from music to finance.)
Dylan was doing what the Akan people of Ghana call a sankofa, a return to beginnings to move into the future. And I would be there to witness the sacred ritual.
It was a central part of my job to make the artists we were working with feel safe. Only then could they create freely. There were a few ways to do this. One was to be cool in their presence. Blasé was the order of the day. The other was to do all we could to protect the star’s privacy. Discretion had been drilled into me.
I was used to spoiled artists and was trained to cosset them. But Dylan’s reputation for self-protection was unmatched. Phil, in his nervous way, made an extra point to warn me about him.
“That call I got from Columbia? They told me he’s totally paranoid about exposure, so we’ve got to keep the room off limits to everyone. He’s coming in with a protector. It’ll just be you and me in the control room— and you…stay clear.”
Minutes before the date was supposed to start, Ramone told me that Dylan had asked him to put a band together. However, given the holiday, there were few cats around. Phil found Eric Weissberg, banjo and guitar player extraordinaire. Weissberg put out the call to the “Deliverance Band,” a bunch of top players who were famous for having done the soundtrack for the movie of the same name.
The musicians started showing up for the gig, Weissberg the first to arrive. He was a lovely, friendly man, as most studio musicians were. Even though I was just the schlepper who set up the chairs and the microphones, he greeted me warmly. Once Eric told me who was coming in, I set up for the band: drums, bass, guitars, keyboard. I put Dylan’s mic in the middle of the room.
During all this hubbub, Dylan skulked in with his gatekeeper, a Columbia exec, and his main squeeze of the moment Ellen Bernstein. He grunted hello and retreated to the farthest corner of the control room, keeping his head down, ignoring us all. No one dared enter his private circle.
As I dashed around the studio and control room getting everything prepared, John Hammond arrived. This lightened up the room. Hammond, a visionary record-man who discovered and promoted artists from Billie Holiday to Bruce Springsteen, was the guy who had originally signed Dylan to Columbia. He and Bob hugged briefly but then barely interacted. Hammond was unruffled. I guess he knew the guy.
Hammond sat behind the producer’s desk, massive disks for blue eyes, a spike of salt and pepper hair, and the big smile of a true fan on his face. To any Dylan aficionado, this was a classic moment: Dylan and Hammond in this studio, together again for Bob’s comeback to Columbia.
The studio cats, who spent their days and nights working with the best in the biz on groundbreaking s
hit and who usually embodied the essence of cool, were palpably pumped. It wasn’t every day that you got to work with Dylan. You could feel the buzz in the room.
I ran as fast as I could to get it all together so we could get the session going. Having checked out all the gear, I gave Ramone the go-ahead, and he got sounds on everyone in minutes. We were ready to rock.
I gingerly approached Dylan in the corner and told him we could start whenever he liked. He nodded and let me lead him out to the studio. He slung his acoustic guitar over his shoulder and placed the signature harmonica holder around his neck. Standing inches from him, I brought the mics in close. We used our venerable Neumann microphones, the kind he would’ve used in the early ‘60s. I adjusted the position of the mics precisely for optimal pick up.
Time stopped and the snapshot became clear. I’m standing next to Dylan: the little wiry body, the hipster-rabbi black vest and white shirt, the tangled up Jew-fro. He was thirty-three years old. He looked past me, to some place in another dimension. Maybe he muttered thanks. I retreated into the control room.
He called off a tune.
“Let’s do, ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’.”
He ran through the song twice. The players were just beginning to figure out the changes and what to play. On the third try, he played the opening chord on his guitar, but then threw everyone off by singing the lyrics and melody to a different song, “You’re a Big Girl Now.” The song was in the same key, but the chord changes and structure were nowhere near the same. The musicians stumbled. They hadn’t been prepared for this. The chords they played, from the previous tune, clashed against what Bob was playing. The cacophony jarred. Quickly, the cats tried to pick up on the new harmonies, but the keyboard player wasn’t fast enough. Dylan waved his hand, like shooing off an annoying gnat, signaling him to drop out.
The musicians were rattled. They scrambled to pick up the new tune. Barely having recovered from the shock, after a run-through or two, Dylan changed songs in midstream, again, without letting anyone know. This time, it was to “Simple Twist of Fate.” Another of the cats crashed a wrong chord into what Dylan was playing, and he got swiped down, too.
The excitement in the studio began to fizzle, like air leaving a balloon, replaced with fear and tension. No one would tell him he couldn’t do this. After all, he was Dylan. But this was wrong. You’re at least supposed to tell the musicians what song you are doing, let them learn the chords, and come up with an arrangement. You’ve got to give them a chance.
One by one, the musicians were told to stop playing. Like swatted bugs, they writhed on the ground, waiting to die.
Studio musicians are a tough lot; they’re hired to do whatever it takes. They might work on a basic track for twelve hours in search of an impossible perfection, but they’d never say no or show the slightest bit of attitude. Those were the rules.
This, on the other hand, hurt. You could see it in the musicians’ eyes, as they sat silently behind their instruments, forced not to play by the mercurial whim of the guy painting his masterpiece with finger-paints.
The feeling went from tense to grim. We stole looks at each other, not understanding what was going on, not knowing what to do, hardly believing it. It slowly began to dawn on the musicians that the dream of playing on a Dylan record was not going to happen.
After a few disastrous takes, it ended up with just Bob and the bass player, Tony Brown. Tony sat inches from him, watching his hands, trying to follow the chord changes as Bob played them, never knowing what chord or song was to come in the next moment. This was particularly treacherous, because Dylan was using an “open tuning,” which meant that he wasn’t placing his fingers in the conventional positions on the guitar’s fret board, which would signal what chord he was playing. Dylan was on his own wavelength: you either were on it or you didn’t exist.
Listening in the control room, we heard some clacking sound, Bob’s button against the guitar, or something. We’d usually stop a take to get rid of that kind of imperfection. But even Ramone was too freaked to say anything. He didn’t want to be the next to go.
We cut an entire album’s worth of material like that in six hours. That blew my mind. I was nineteen years old and trying to learn how to make art. The style of the time was set by guys I was working with like Paul Simon, who would take weeks to record a guitar part only to throw it away. I thought that was the way one was supposed to do it: one note at a time and a year to make an album. Dylan did the whole thing on a Monday night. I was flabbergasted. It was like the floor, barely built under my young soul, was being ripped apart, board by board.
As if I wasn’t confused enough, Dylan came back in on Tuesday and recorded most of the album again. The full band, except for Tony the bass player, had been officially fired. This time he had the keyboard player Paul Griffin come in to try it out. Paul, a garrulous guy, tried to sunny up the date with his charm and smile. But he, too, didn’t make the cut. His smile gone, he shrugged, and departed with his tail between his legs.
Wednesday we cut one song and did some overdubs.
On Thursday we recorded the album for a third time, this time just with the bass. The dark and painful vibe in the studio reflected the material Bob was recording. The songs of loss and heartache were riveting.
I sat on a stool with a tape box and a take sheet on my lap. My job was humble. It was to get the thing down on tape. The goal of the recording engineer, as Ramone taught me, was to capture an eternal universal truth so you could stick it in your ear and listen to it, without the artist ever knowing you’d done it. Any screw up on my part would bring Dylan’s attention to the proceedings. That was why I needed to be flawless.
I was in the groove. The studio gear hummed. The instant Dylan moved in front of the mics, my hands flew to the multi-track tape machine. In a flash, I’d hit the red button.
Ramone was at the “flying V,” what we called the custom-made recording console in A-1. In the 21st century, all consoles are manufactured by a handful of companies. Then, in the ancient 20th, everything was being invented. New techniques and methods came out daily, and we were always adapting: 8-track, 16, and then 24. The consoles were made by individuals, by hand. Ramone had a crazy concept for this board. There were knobs in multi-colors in the shape of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades.
This ship was like Han Solo’s in Star Wars — that was the era — the 1970s. It wasn’t the antiseptic space cruiser of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Our cockpit was dirty and falling apart. Right before we were ready to go, the machine began to sputter, and sparks flew from the patch bay. I picked up the intercom and screamed for the tech crew: MAINTENANCE! The whole thing stopped working, and if we didn’t get it up and running fast enough we might lose the moment of inspiration. The technical guys flew in. They stood frozen with a perplexed look.
Ramone bellowed, “Come on, you stupid fuckers! Bob Dylan is ready!”
One guy took a shot and kicked a metal box in the right place. The console shuddered, the lights came back on, and we were traveling through hyper-space again. We were on tenterhooks like that, always one transistor away from the damn thing failing.
We were ready just in time. I could feel the burn of creation from the other side of the glass. Dylan. Songs were bursting out of him like lava spewing from a volcano. He was mainlined to the source. What they call genius. I saw him write a song’s lyrics on a yellow legal pad like he was taking dictation, he couldn’t write fast enough. And the songs would rewrite themselves as he sang them. Take 1 would have a verse that sounded so good you could gasp with revelation, and then he’d do Take 2 and it would blow away the last one like so much ash after a fire.
We could feel it coming fast, and when that happened the pressure was on to capture it. Ramone’s foot would start tapping, his hands on the big round black knobs, controlling the levels, making sure that what went down on tape was clean. One chance, no going back. He whipped around to me,
“Roll tape, roll tape!”
Dylan! Holy shit! Me, nineteen years old watching rock and roll history being made right before my eyes and ears, seeing the spit flying out of his mouth against the U-87 microphone that I placed there.
The whole studio throbbed, the big box with the copper roof about to blow off with all the pain, the anger, the truth. The tape machine flew in circles, the tape whirred, it seemed faster and faster than the thirty inches per second that I knew it travelled, the red lights seemed brighter, the needles pushed into the red zone, Ramone’s shoulders tensed, his total focus on what was in his hands, temperature rising, I started to hallucinate, the red lights turned to blood, the blood ran on to the tape machine, blood on the tracks …
The plaintive moan of his harmonica, then the final, clangorous chord.
Then silence.
The song over. No one speaks when a take is done.
We sat and waited. Just the sound of the tape machine still whirring: flap, flap, flap. Now the needles still. The blood back to lights glowing, telling us it was all down on tape. We waited.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 9