Dylan turned to us in the control room and snarled sarcastically, “Was that since-e-e-re enough?”
Vertigo. I was spinning like the fat tape on the machine. Ramone gave me the signal and I hit the stop button. Rewind.
I looked down at my feet and watched the last floorboard give way. I fell. A lifetime of ideals washed away in one sentence.
What could this possibly mean? I had taken the oath, that’s what you did when you apprenticed to the master in the house of recorded art, you’d go to any length for the sake of rock and roll music, the highest state of truth yet created by human design. And now the high priest of it all was just a guy behind a curtain yanking the world’s chain? He’d murdered his musicians with the aplomb of a psychopath; he recorded his album sloppily in a day and then did it again two times more, and now this? Was it fucking sincere enough? I was ready to puke.
The egotistical pricks I’d indulged were all good fun compared to this. The icon of an age, the guy who punctured all pretense, who brought down the whole hypocritical building, the guy who sneered at sanctimony — totally full of shit?
I was lost. And I was to stay lost on a dark journey that was to last twenty years. Disillusionment can really mess with your head.
Dylan didn’t show up for the mix. While most artists were using the studio like an instrument, he didn’t care about the recording thing. He left it in Ramone’s hands. At that time we were working twenty hour days. I hadn’t slept more than three or four hours a night in a year. That week we were working with Mick Jagger during the day, mixing live tapes from the Stones’ 1973 European tour for a King Biscuit Flower Hour radio broadcast. But that’s another story for a later chapter. We had to cram in the Dylan mixes after we were done with the rest.
It was after midnight, just me and Ramone left in the studio, with one tech guy asleep down the hall.
Lighting was a big deal in the rooms. It was all about setting the mood for creativity. I turned most of the lights off. All was black except a glow over the flying-V mixing console. When you blocked out all external stimuli and listened for endless hours, the space between the beats would expand to the point where you could hear inside the sounds all the way down to their quarks.
The mixes were just Dylan and the bass mostly, so the sound of the voice and the guitar was the whole thing. Ramone spent a long time messing with the reverb. This was the signature Phil Ramone sound. He had these big boxes, called EMT’s, in the basement that, when tweaked just right made this beautiful echo, rich and evocative of something you couldn’t quite name. Ramone got it right, as he always did, and we were ripping through the mixes.
I wanted to know all the secrets. I was trying to grasp onto any shred of sense, any rule, that would give me something to hold onto when the bottom had fallen out. How did you make great art? Paul Simon, one brilliant guy, did it one way. Dylan, another master, couldn’t have been more different. What was I to believe anymore? I still wanted to know.
I sat behind Ramone watching, listening. Exhausted from lack of sleep and too many drugs, I struggled to focus. I noticed that the meters looked strange. Usually they all lined up, bouncing up and down in parallel, but this time they were lopsided. What was Ramone up to? What was he doing to get his incredible sound? How did he get it so good that the heaviest cats in the world flocked to his door? I wanted to know the magician’s spell so I could have the power, too.
With the clients breathing down our necks, we rarely had time to talk. And given how erratic Ramone could be, I hardly dared to open my mouth. Mostly, I had to learn by screwing up and getting drained and dressed. If you learned how to take it, you could become a major cat. But here was a chance, I thought, with no one around, to learn from my sensei.
Between takes, I said, “Phil, can I ask you a question? I notice the meters are uneven. What are you hearing? Why are you doing that?”
He didn’t answer for one minute, then two, as we sat there in silence.
Then, without warning, he twirled around, his face purple and trembling with rage, his breath smelling like Chinese pork ribs.
“Who the fuck do you think you are asking the great Ramone a question? You are just a little piece of worthless shit. You don’t question what I do! I do everything I do because I am the great Ramone! You will never be one percent of what I am! You think you’re going to be a recording engineer? You don’t have ears. You’ll never make it! You should just be content to sit behind me and wipe my ass! You don’t question, you just obey!”
I realized that Ramone must’ve thought I was busting him for a mistake. That wasn’t my intention at all, but clearly I had stepped in it. I tried to protest, to tell him I meant no harm, I just wanted to learn … but every word just incensed him further.
There was no arguing. His voice got louder and louder, the screams more incoherent, the insults more vicious. “You’re nothing! To you I am a god! You’re the lowest piece of shit in the presence of a god! You will never be anything!”
“But, Phil, but Phil …”
It all started to swirl around me: the hours, the brutalization, the cocaine, “Idiot Wind,” the lack of sleep, nineteen years old, “was it sinceeeeeeeeere enough …”
I hit the stop button on the tape machine. I thought I saw blood on my fingers, I couldn’t hold onto the edge of the cliff any longer. My face started to crumble, there was no way I could hide it. I was going down. I ran out of the control room and through the silent hallway to the bathroom. Under the glaring fluorescent lights, 2 a.m., I sat on the pot, putting my hands over my face, and blubbered.
My only passion had been to sit in the engineer’s chair. Since I was eleven years old and first heard “Land of 1000 Dances” by Wilson Pickett, I wanted nothing else but to make those mind-blowing things called records. But at that moment, as I sat on the toilet in that grim stall, I wondered if the whole thing was worth it. Ramone was probably right. I didn’t have what it takes.
Despite my new-found certainty that I was utterly worthless, I knew that Ramone needed me to get through the mix. The folks at Columbia were expecting the final product the next day. I had made the blood promise. I had to pull it up from somewhere and do my job. I dug deep, wiped my eyes with the particular brand of fancy-ass toilet paper that Ramone insisted we have in the bathrooms, and breathed.
I staggered back into the control room. The room was empty. I walked over to the flying V console. I sat down in Ramone’s chair and touched the sacred knobs. I saw little scraps of paper crumpled up on the board. I unfolded one, and in a mangled scrawl was written “Ramone is God.”
Suddenly feeling nervous, I recrumpled the scrap, got up, and silently took the schlepper’s seat next to the tape machine. With box and take sheet in hand, I was ready to keep my mouth shut for the next century and just do my job, or at least till this long night was over.
Ramone came back in with a big smile on his face as if nothing had happened. I knew what this meant. I’d been through this routine before. He had popped a tranq and was mellowing into a good mood.
“Glenn, we’re going to get out of this place. We’re going to build a studio together, you and me; it’ll be the most amazing place where everything will always work. Who do you want to record? Stevie Wonder? We’ll get Stevie in and you’ll be his personal engineer. Stick with me, kid. We’ll do amazing things.”
Phil wanted to do that with me? Really? Ok, Phil, I’ll go all night, I’ll take any abuse … I was back in all the way.
We finished the record that night. I stayed up ‘til the bagels arrived at the crack of dawn, sequencing the thing, splicing together the master mixes with a razor blade and tape into the final order of songs. Watch out for the blade, especially late at night. You never knew when it could meet your flesh instead of the acetate.
The record was to be released after the first of the year. The studio life was insane, but I was back to believing the dream. 1975 looked like it would be a great year. At the peak was to be the release of the Dyl
an album. With this run, my star was ascending.
Phil and I started on our next amazing project, Judith by Judy Collins. While we were sitting in the control room of studio R-2 working on over-dubs for that record, the phone rang. This must have been an important call to interrupt Phil during a session.
I heard Phil say, “Bob, it’s amazing. Really, probably your best album ever. Don’t worry. It’s great.”
Phil looked over at me with a perplexed look on his face. We shook our heads in disbelief. Dylan insecure? Huh?
This went on, week after week, with Bob calling Phil for reassurance again and again as we approached the New Year deadline.
When we returned from the Christmas holiday, Phil sat down with me, pale and dispirited. Bob had panicked. While visiting his family in Minnesota over the break, he had decided to re-record a bunch of the tracks in the nearby twin cities. Minneapolis was in its pre-Prince days; a recording nowhere-land. The only studio and musicians available were from the local jingle studio, where they recorded commercials for Mom’s Biscuits and the Oldsmobile dealership on Nicolett Avenue.
Phil handed me the new master tapes. It was my job to cut out the tracks we had worked on, and splice in the new ones he had done in bum-fuck Minnesota. My breathing stopped as I listened to the stuff that was going to replace what we had done.
Dink, doink, dink doink, bum, bum, bum …
These searing, wrenching, burning, bloody songs…turned into bouncy little jingles? What?
I cut into the tape like an old, drunken, western surgeon with a rusty knife. I cut out pink, vibrating, living, breathing body parts and left them bleeding on the floor. It wasn’t my job to choose, it was my job to plunge in the blade and kill the baby that I had helped deliver.
The album came out a few weeks later. When I got a copy, I quickly flipped it to the back. That’s where the unsung heroes of recording look first. We take it all for the glory, but we also like the credit. I looked at every word of the smallest type but was to find myself suffering the final indignity. No credit. My name nowhere on the cover.
Blood on the Tracks went on to become a number one record and has been heralded as one of the greatest albums of all time, some saying it is Dylan’s best. So what do I know? What do I know about anything, really? Have I really learned the lessons of those days? I learned what a trickster is — a mythical archetype — the shape shifter. Bob Dylan as Bugs Bunny. Hey, what’s up doc? Always popping up from a hole you don’t expect, outwitting us slow-witted mortals. He’s meant to confuse, to upend the money-changers in the temple. The artist is not supposed to be nice. He’s on a mission from beyond. He goes down, deeper into himself than any of us dare, goes through hell on the journey, steals the sacred fire, and brings it up to share with the rest of us. Who are we to judge the way he behaves when he does that much for us?
And Phil. He’s left a legacy that will endure for generations. His job was to break me down so he could put me back together as a man. I carry his vision and standard with me in my fingers right to this moment as I write this. “That sucks, Berger, do it again,” I hear him say. I’m fighting with Phil to this day, father and son, locked in the eternal struggle for domination of the universe. The old man still wins every time, damn him.
Ramone and Dylan taught me, but I don’t know how well. I’ve certainly been a major jerk in my day but never made anything immortal like these guys.
To look at me now, in my fifties, in my trickster uniform of middle-aged shrink, you’d never know I’d ever been there. Recently, I ran into another dad, a major record exec at one of my kid’s birthday parties, the only place I’m likely to meet a guy like that now. Looking for something to chat about, I told him I’d been in the biz, and he asked if I worked with anyone big. I said my usual sentence: I worked on the album the hip New York radio station, WFUV, named the greatest album of all time, Blood on the Tracks, by Bob Dylan. He looked at me skeptically and said nothing and the conversation ended awkwardly. I slithered away in embarrassment.
When I was driving home, I thought about the guy’s expression. I imagined him Googling the credits to the album, and, not finding my name, deciding I was full of shit. I began to wonder, had I been there or was I making it all up?
Then I remembered, there was proof. My name was on those take sheets that I filled out as part of the schlepper’s humble job. It was the place where I wrote down the names of the songs and the take numbers. In the top right-hand corner of that sheet’s notations of the sessions’ events, there would be a slot that said “Engineer: Phil/Glenn.” I had written those words myself.
I knew the internet had everything and there were some major Dylan freaks out there. Maybe I could dig this up. Maybe I needed to prove it to myself. I Googled “take sheets for Blood on the Tracks.” Amazingly, a guy named Michael Krogsgaard had found the take sheets of every Dylan recording, and posted the data on the web.
I scrolled down the page to find the information from our album. I read the words: Studio A, A&R Recording, September 16, 1974. New York City. 6PM - Midnight.
Here it was! Or, so I thought. The next line read: Engineer: Phil/ Lenn.
Ah well. Another drop of blood. Dylan’s final joke.
Blood on the tracks. It is painful to be an artist. That’s why so many of them break. Dylan poured his guts into these songs, and that’s why they will long endure. He was plugged in in a way that I can only sweetly envy. I can see the prize, I can almost taste it, but it eludes my grasp like the fruit above the mythical tortured Tantalus. I had stood so close that the blades of brilliance ripped my flesh, but it was always on the outside, apart from me.
The bloody wounds of those days have mellowed into impressive scars, leaving me with the bittersweet satisfaction that one time, long ago, I had sacrificed and suffered for a cause greater than myself — art.
I know it’s Dylan’s blood that’s on those tracks, and that’s what makes those songs so great. But I take some small measure of solace for what my life has been by telling myself that, along with his blood, there is also a little bit of mine.
TRACK SIX
Judy Collins and Arif Mardin: A Turkishly Delightful New Years
It was New Year’s Eve. We were about to enter 1975, one of the low point years in recent New York City history, but the Big Apple’s woes made it possible for a kid like me and my best friend, Duke, to afford to share an apartment on 73rd Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan. The rent was $240 a month for the two-room, 4th floor walk-up apartment, so we each paid $120. You can barely get a decent bagel for $120 in New York these days.
We were relatively new in town, and New York is a hard nut to crack. Still, all things considered, we were living a pretty glamorous life.
Duke was an actor and was about to perform with an offshoot of the Performance Group, the coolest avant-garde theatre troupe anywhere. It made its home in an off-beat neighborhood of abandoned industrial warehouses called Soho, which is so trendy now, but at that time was virtually unknown. The first time I went to see the Group do their thing at the Performance Garage on Wooster Street in 1972, tumbleweeds blew through the wind-swept streets of what was essentially a ghost town. I was blown away by the ensemble’s adaptation of Sam Shepard’s “The Tooth of Crime,” not only because of Shepard’s archetypal tale of the battle between a cowboy and a rocker, but also the acting and production, in which the audience was encouraged to move around the industrial space to be intimately close to the action. These were heady days in the New York culture scene.
While Duke was cool for hanging with these über-hipsters, I wasn’t doing too bad myself, for a nineteen year-old kid. Apprenticed to the master-maniac, Phil Ramone, I had just helped finish recording an album by Judy Collins called Judith. It was to become one of her most popular albums, featuring the perennial hit “Send in the Clowns.” Participating in the recording of that album during the autumn of 1974 was an honor and a joy.
We cut the tracks in the big room, Studio A-1. After a tak
e, Judy would come join us in the control room for the playback and stand next to me behind the recording console. Reviewing freshly cut tracks was always a serious affair. Was this the version that had the magic? Was there something subtly off that would render it a useless outtake? The control room was hushed, and everyone listened with the deepest concentration.
When the song ended, Judy, inches from me, looked at me with her intense, blue eyes. She leaned over so close, her long, flaxen hair would brush against me and she whispered, “What do you think?” A pure thrill spread through my adolescent body.
I’m not sure why she asked. Judy had unerring taste. She had put together the premier production team in the business to create this masterwork. The legendary Arif Mardin was the album’s producer. His equal, Phil Ramone, was on the engineering controls. Jonathan Tunick was the orchestral arranger. Yet she encouraged me to find my own way to evaluating the merit of the recording. She helped me learn how to listen.
Of course she had a great ear and knew how to pick the best songs. She was responsible for virtually discovering Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. She herself received profound artistic mentorship from her teacher, Antonia Brico, the first female conductor, whom she spoke of with reverence.
Judy was one of my great teachers. Perhaps the deepest learning I gained in getting to work with Judy was about this artistic sensibility. I came to appreciate that this sensibility is in an attitude, a way of being in the world, and a sensitivity and responsiveness to the highest levels of quality and feeling. It is an approach to life and work that involves aspiring to the most penetrating insight into truth. It demands that we be willing to put all of ourselves into everything we do with total passion. Simply being in the presence of that ethos to living and work helped inspire and teach me how to be.
After I had assisted on two of her albums, Judy gave me the opportunity to engineer on my own, one of the first artists to do so. I had the incredible fortune to engineer her retrospective album So Early in the Spring, which covered her career from 1961 – 1976. I got to listen to all of her recordings and learned to appreciate the early work of this master on the deepest level. Judy was not only a role model in mentoring me, but by giving me the opportunity to work as her engineer, she advanced my career and artistic development.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 10