A roly poly Neapolitan-looking guy barreled into the control room. He quickly shook our hands and introduced himself as Don Costa, one of Sinatra’s favorite musical arrangers and producers from that time, who was there to facilitate the process.
“Frank just left Jilly’s and he’ll be here in a few minutes,” he said, as he hurriedly prepared the pages of the musical score that Sinatra would be using to reference the lyrics and melody.
Jilly’s, a saloon just up the block on 52nd between Broadway and 8th, run by his friend Jilly Rizzo, was one of Frank’s favorite hangs.
My adrenaline spiked when a massive gentleman with slick black hair and a threatening demeanor ambled into the control room to size up the joint. This was clearly Sinatra’s bodyguard.
The large man was intimidating as intended and I would be sure to show him the appropriate deference. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be brought into service if Frank was displeased with our choice of microphone.
In his raspy, Little Italy voice, he said, “Mr. Sinatra is about to arrive.”
A few moments later, Frank strode jauntily into the A-1 control room. He was dressed in a well-tailored charcoal suit, his face broadened by waning middle-age, his graying toupee perfectly plausible. At sixty, he was the epitome of fluidity and confidence.
In the world’s most recognizable voice, he said, “Good evening men!”
He was in fine fettle and appeared to be in a good mood. I saw Blakin take a deep breath. Maybe we’d be OK. Still, it was early. We couldn’t let ourselves get overconfident. There was a long road ahead before we got the final take.
Then Frank said, “Let’s go.”
With a footman’s hand motion and small bow, I opened the door that led out of the control room and into the studio. The bodyguard walked through first, then Costa and Blakin, and finally, Sinatra.
I led them into the air lock that separated the control room from the studio for sound-proofing purposes and pushed open the heavy door that took us into the grand recording room.
As Sinatra passed, he turned to me and said with derision, “I see you got rid of Mitch Miller’s stink.”
I had no idea what he was referring to, so I chuckled, guessing this was a joke. I knew enough to know that one always laughed at the emperor’s asides. He raised an approving eyebrow and flashed the smile that had made a billion bobby-soxers swoon.
Later, I found out the story. Miller had been the head of “A and R” at Columbia Records in the 1950’s when Sinatra was on that label. A and R stood for Artist and Repertoire. This was the cat who signed the artists and decided what material they would record. The gig was the most coveted spot in the record company hierarchy.
Though the studio I worked for was called A&R, it had nothing to do with this aspect of the business. It was simply the initials of the names of the two men who started the company, a business man named Jack Arnold, and of course, the inimitable Phil Ramone.
(One day, a young man who seemed quite befuddled came up to our studio and asked if he could play us a tape. I agreed, telling him there was nothing I could do with it but I’d be happy to listen. The tape was garbled and I soon realized that this guy was probably mentally ill. I asked why he had come up to our studio to play this tape and he said that he was told he should find the “A and R man.” He assumed he would find him at A&R Studios. An honest mistake.)
Mitch Miller, who was the real “A and R man” in those days, had the job because he made enormously successful records even though his taste ran somewhere between the conventional and crap. He was a sucker for novelty tunes, songs with some kind of gimmick that made them stick in the mind of the lowest common denominator.
Among the many cringe-worthy tunes he tried to foist on Sinatra, Miller browbeat him into making a record of a song that featured barking dogs called “Mama Will Bark,” sung as a duet with a large-breasted TV celebrity named Dagmar, who couldn’t sing. This song is considered by many to be the nadir in Sinatra’s canon, and marked a low-point in his popularity. Though by the time I was listening to him in the mid-‘70s, when Sinatra could sometimes verge on making a parody of himself, he was generally a man of unerring, impeccable taste who made the most artistic recordings of his era. He found that barking record to be a great embarrassment. Thus cemented a lifetime of enmity between Sinatra and that A and R man named Mitch.
This very room we stood in, having once been Columbia’s studio, was the place where Sinatra recorded during Miller’s reign. It was here that he had sung with the starlet and the dogs. Hence the “Miller’s stink” remark.
I only found out all that later as part of my ongoing musical education. For now, the leader of the Rat Pack sat on the stool and, being the ultimate professional, graciously allowed me to adjust the mic.
Rich asked which headphone or speaker he wanted to use. He said it didn’t matter to him. He picked up the single-sided headset. I unplugged and removed the other headphone and pulled the small speaker out of the way.
Costa draped the chart over the music stand.
I followed Costa and Blakin out of the studio and almost bumped into the hefty bodyguard, my slight frame coming up about level to his protruding belly. If my heart had not already been beating at 160 bpm, it jumped another 30 or 40 in that second. I managed to roll around his gargantuan stomach and not touch him. I smiled obsequiously as I looked up at the towering figure and produced a small wave. He glowered. I scampered back into the control room.
Sinatra said, “I’ll run it down for you one time so you can set levels.”
Rich hit the talk back and said, “Great.”
I hit play and “record.” I had learned by now that you record everything, from the first run-through to the last take of the session. You never know when the magic will hit and, even though he said this was just for levels, if he asked afterwards if we’d recorded it, we’d want our answer to be yes.
Watching the meters and Blakin’s hand, we were both astonished. Sinatra was able to increase his volume and intensity while the needle hardly moved. How could he do that?
With most singers, we needed to be deft with the “pot” or potentiometer, the knob with which we controlled the recording volume. If the singer got loud, we would turn the knob down so the tape wouldn’t be saturated and cause distortion. If the singer got too soft, we would turn the knob up so the signal would not be too scant and buried in the floor-level of noise that was on all analog recording tape. If we did not trust our hands to do the job well enough, we would patch in that technical device called a limiter, or a compressor, which electrically narrowed a signal’s dynamic range. This device would lower the highest volumes, and in the case of the compressor, increase the lowest ones. It turned out that, with Sinatra, the job for Blakin was easy. He barely needed to nudge the dial at all.
We watched Sinatra to figure out how he did it. Listening to his own vocals through the headphones, he carefully and subtly moved toward the mic during the softer passages and moved away from it during the louder parts. He “rode” his own levels according to how close to, or far from, the microphone he stood. In this way, while his intensity would increase, the recording volume stayed within the narrow range that the equipment liked best. This is called good mic technique, and I’ve never seen anyone use it as effectively as Frank.
Watching Sinatra sing, I thought about his importance in the history of music. While there were many factors, I mused, that made him such a phenomenon, it wasn’t until now that I realized that one of them was the way in which he used recordings and the microphone.
Just a few years before Sinatra, there had been no mics, amplifiers, sound systems, or recordings. As a result, most singers learned, as central to their technique, projection. That was a big part of what determined their vocal quality. You can hear what I mean by listening to opera. While that kind of singing limits emotional subtlety and can even sound false today, at the time it was necessary in order to reach the cheap seats of the great concert halls so everyone cou
ld hear the words over the pounding orchestra.
Remnants of that style can be heard even in early recordings by belter Al Jolson or crooner Rudy Vallee, who were the big popular singing stars before Sinatra. You can hear the style changing and becoming more real with America’s next huge vocalist, Bing Crosby. Recording made it possible for people to sing in a more natural style because they didn’t have to project in the same way. The vocal was amplified electronically on stage and the balance between vocalist and orchestra could be manipulated in the studio. At home, people listened with their ears by the speakers and turned up the music as loud as they wanted.
By using impeccable mic technique and taking full advantage of the recording medium, Sinatra created an intimate effect where it sounded like he was singing only to you, whispering directly into your ear. It is incredibly sexy. Sinatra was the ultimate modern vocalist. He changed our sense of what vocals were meant to sound like. His emotional directness made everything that came before it seem overwrought. He was an everyman, a kid from the street, the son of immigrants, a hot, skinny Italian guy lying next to you in bed, seducing you. That is, he embodied the American male of the World War II generation, the guy you hoped would come home alive from the war and make a baby with you.
And there I was, the son of a man from that era, looking through the glass, at the man.
My reverie was broken when the song ended.
Sinatra said, “Did you get what you need?”
Blakin said, “It’s perfect, Mr. Sinatra.”
“Well, let’s do it then.”
I rewound the tape to the top while Sinatra waited patiently. When I got there, Blakin gave me the nod and I hit “record” and play again, saving the first vocal on one track and recording the second on another.
Sinatra finished the song a second time. When he was done, Costa hit the talkback and said, “Sounds great, Frank.”
The Voice took off his headphone and walked into the control room. He said, “Let’s do a playback.”
We listened together silently with the reverence that always befits such moments.
Sinatra’s rendering was stellar. In 1975 he was certainly past his prime. His voice shook at moments but this only added poignancy to the lyrics of loss and time gone by. This touching song, written by Michel Le Grand and interpreted by the consummate master, resonated with what the Spanish called duende, a magical quality that comes from aging and pain and is suffused with an awareness of death.
As the melancholic French horns announced the arrival of the chorus, Frank sang Carl Sigman’s poetic lyrics of the sadness of our lives when we are haunted by our hurts, our losses, and when our dreams no longer have any chance of coming true.
As I listened, I thought of my dad who had died at age 49 a few years before, a guy who looked a bit like a Jewish version of Frank. He would have loved to know that I got to sit in a room with Frank Sinatra, got to hit the “record” button for this guy, got to adjust his microphone. We were an audience of four: Costa, Frank’s bodyguard, Blakin, and me. My dad would have loved that. But my old man was gone, and he would never know. The duende hit me, and my eyes brimmed with tears.
The track came to its end. I hit stop. Frank nodded and smiled. Most singers would worry a track like this for many hours, days, or weeks. But not Frank. He nailed it in one take. The whole thing was over in half an hour.
He walked over to Blakin and me. He shook our hands and said thank you. He turned and walked toward the control room door, followed by Costa and the big fella, and was gone.
Rich and I had hung with a lot of stars. On the average day, we no longer had to fake the cool. Whoever was behind the glass, it was usually just another day’s work. But this was Sinatra. We looked at each other, both shook our heads, and said, “Wow!”
And then we busted into grins. “We did it!” We’d survived. Like the master Japanese calligraphers who after decades of practice would produce their masterwork in an instant, our years of hard work paid off. We had achieved the pinnacle. Frank Sinatra, the toughest, most demanding, magnificent son-of-a-bitch in the business, had walked out a satisfied client.
Now what? We had nothing left to do. We expected the session to go over by at least a few hours. So we rolled a fat one and breathed in deep. Blakin committed a 1/4” rough mix to tape for posterity and we listened back dozens of times to our day’s work, each time amazed at the nuances we found that we hadn’t noticed before, happy to be alive.
Frank had taken our game to a whole new level. This was the reason we were all there. We put up with all the lunacy for moments like this. In the end, for us, it wasn’t about the size of the celebrity. It was about the beauty and the greatness of the artist.
Now I sit here, a guy almost as old as Sinatra was when he sang that song, remembering that moment and the dreams of mine that have been lost in the time that has passed since then. I can hear my father’s voice, and Frank’s, but they live now only in my memory, and that’s the saddest thing of all.
TRACK THIRTEEN
All That Bob Fosse
ACT ONE: THE MEETING
SCENE ONE:
The Studio
The lofty room was silent and dim, except for one pale light illuminating the cluster of Atlas microphone stands. The tall booms, with cylindrical microphones hanging off the top connector, made them look like a weird, metallic family of giraffes, snoozing on the veldt. The smaller mic stands, with their triangular bases, were arranged symmetrically, the children of the larger creatures. Thick, dusty, black microphone cables, neatly coiled, hung on the mic stands’ boom knobs. Green metal chairs were obediently folded and stacked against the wall. Black music stands were lined up next to them, as if waiting for their chance at the big time.
The squeak and bang of the manual elevator’s metal accordion door broke the silence. A tall black man with close cropped salt and pepper hair in an olive-green uniform walked down the back hallway. This was Reverend Blalock, the janitor and elevator operator, about to enter Recording Studio A-1, the crown jewel of A&R Studios, one of the best recording studios in the world.
He opened the heavy, sound-proofed doors and flicked the row of light switches on the wall, one at a time. With each, the fluorescents illuminated sections of the room. First to be lit was the rhythm section area to the right, with its raised platforms and amps for the bass and electric guitars and a square for the drums, walled in by baffles. Furthest to the rear-right was the percussion corner. At the back of the room was the large vocal booth and a smaller booth. These rooms within the larger room were used to isolate musicians and singers with sounds too delicate to record amid the blare of the band. Above the booth was a large movie screen. Then off to the rear left, the violin area and, next to that, opposite the drum platform, was the place where the celli, violas, and orchestral basses did their thing. Following the circle to the door where Blalock stood was the area for the harp and French horns. Next to that, in the part closest to the glass of the control room, was the Hammond B-3 organ and the room’s ebony jewel, the seven-foot Steinway grand. The clock on the far wall read 8 a.m.
The Reverend wheeled his bucket of soapy water into the room and began to mop the light pine floor. The swish of the mop and the occasional splash of water provided the first rhythm of the day.
A short man in a rumpled suit entered the studio, carrying a black leather bag. He had a large head shaped like Charlie Brown’s with a single tuft of scraggly, mousy hair. His lips were frozen in a permanent grimace, and he mumbled as he shuffled anxiously into the room, dwarfed by the huge space with its thirty-foot peaked ceiling.
This was Willie Lanin, the old piano tuner.
Willie was one of ten boys. His brother, Lester, was a famous society bandleader. Willie was musical, too, but without the luck of looks or charm, he was relegated to this humbler task behind the scenes.
He walked over to the piano, pushed up the lid, and placed a stick under the cover to keep it open. Sitting down on the piano bench, h
e placed his bag at his side, and unpacked it. He set a black cube on the corner of the piano, plugged a power cord from the box into an outlet on the floor, flipped the “on” switch, and an orange half-circle glowed in the center of the gizmo. He pulled out a piano lever and a set of rubber mutes from the bag, and placed them on top of the piano. He put the mutes into some strings, placed the lever over a pin, put his foot on the piano’s pedal, and struck a piano key. The first note of the day had been sounded, adding melody to the rhythm of the Reverend’s swishing mop. The orange circle sprang to life with a pattern of black bars bouncing back and forth, going in and out of focus. He twisted the pin and hit the note again. This time, it sounded a little flatter. Again, and this time sharper. When the rotating bars became clear and still, he moved on to the next string.
As Willie moved up the scale, his banal melody was suddenly interrupted.
“Blalock, I’m gonna get you!” Plotnik, a large Jew with curly, dark hair on his head and a wild hair up his ass, stood at the studio door with a demonic grin on his face. He would be running the film for today’s date. Blalock picked up his mop and, in mock rage, charged at Plotnik. For a minute, in a game they played every morning, they chased each other around the studio—Blalock in his green cleaning-man’s outfit, and Plotnik, with his heavy bones and fat ass jiggling. Out of breath, they collapsed in laughter, hugged, and then feigned fury, before separating to return to their respective mundane tasks.
Plotnik repaired to the duplication room behind the studio and climbed the short flight of wooden stairs to the small projection booth, where he found the pile of metal canisters filled with the rough-cut cues we would be scoring that day.
At 8:30, Chuck arrived. He was my assistant, the set-up man. He was a chubby twenty-year-old black guy with long sideburns. He pushed the conductor’s podium on its raised platform out into the middle of the room and placed the booking sheet, with the info for the day’s set-up, on top of it.
He wheeled seven mic stands over to the drums and set up three chairs and three music stands for the trumpets in a semi-circle right in front of the podium. He then placed five chairs and stands in a row in front of the vocal booth for the flute, clarinet, alto, tenor, and baritone saxes. Completing the section, he set up three chairs for the trombones on the other side of the podium, facing the winds.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 18