Chuck listened to Willie mumble to himself as he tuned the piano. He knew that the black box with the spinning orange wheel was the electronic device Willie used to keep the pitch accurate. Willie’s ears weren’t what they once were, and he depended on this clunky device to keep his tuning honest. Chuck decided to have some fun. He snuck close to the piano and started to hum the note Willie was working on, but slightly off-key. The wheels spun crazily, and Willie couldn’t get the bars to line up, which signaled that he could not find the center of the note. Willie couldn’t figure out why his electronic tuner was going haywire. His mumbling got louder. When he realized Chuck had been messing with his head, he started to yell.
“What the hell you doin’ that for? Ah yah …”
Chuck laughed and put his hand on Willie’s shoulder. “I’m just goofin’ on ya, old man.”
Willie grumbled and went back to work.
A new layer of the orchestration was added with the arrival of Kenny, the delivery man from Carroll Music, the music instrument rental company. He wheeled the xylophone, glockenspiel, marimba, bass marimba, temple blocks, and two large, black containers filled with hand percussion to the rear right corner, next to the guitars. Then he and an assistant unveiled three electronic keyboards and set them up around the piano: a Fender Rhodes electric piano, a Roxichord, and a Clavinette.
The newest schlepper arrived to stock the control room and, like all good dreamers, took a moment to stand at the threshold of the recording room, enviously watching Chuck work, hoping to be him one day.
A bull of a man with a handlebar moustache, Bobby Flynn the maintenance guy, burst into the control room, harried as usual. He slammed the alignment tape of tones on the two-inch machine to set it to optimal recording quality.
Nine o’clock marked the arrival of the senior mixer, the star of the technical side of this show, the guy who would be flying this starship to heaven. That would be me. I swaggered in, confident and pumped, dressed in a white jumpsuit, with the words Elton John-1975 Tour embroidered on the back in blue, a gift from Bernie Taupin, Elton’s first lyricist, when we had worked together on a demo for a singer named Karon Bihari. My red hair was now coiffed late seventies-style, narrow on the sides, high and curly on top. To top the look off, I wore green glasses.
As I watched the pre-session activity, I took in a deep breath. All these people were now working for me. I had made it. I was at the top of my game. I was twenty-three years old. The year was 1979, and by that time, I was most definitely a major cat. I was doing a huge film date. This was the first session for the new musical by the multiple-award-winning choreographer/director Bob Fosse. It was going to be called All That Jazz, and I was the recording engineer of record.
I checked out Chuck’s work in the studio. He knew what mics and set-up I liked. I straightened some chairs and microphones so they were precisely parallel and evenly spaced. With everything balanced and aligned, I signaled my approval and walked into the control room. Plotnik was hollering down from his perch: “Putz! Could you patch in the audio? I’m gonna come down there and give you a nootzle!”
The maintenance guy bent over the quarter-inch machine, turning a screw, trying to get the needle to hold still at “0 VU.” “Fuck off, Plotnik! Why don’t you suck my dick!”
I sat at the console. My console, now. I ran my hand along the leather strip at the bottom of the desk. Chuck ran into the control room, and I got out of his way. He placed the strip of masking tape under the row of faders and notated with a black Sharpie which microphone was plugged into which input. I wrote out a track sheet, determining which mics would be assigned to which tracks.
At the board, I pushed up one fader at a time, rotating the preamp to one o’clock, as Chuck walked through the mics, saying “check” into each one.
I patched in the electronic metronome, the click track, so it would play through the cans. Chuck checked to see that every player had a set of headphones and listened to the rhythmic tock to make sure that all the cans were functioning as well. The click track would keep the players at the correct tempo so the arranger’s scores matched the film, as he intended.
As we got closer to the downbeat I could feel my adrenaline rise. Then Emile Charlap, the copyist and contractor, came in. Charlap was the classic irascible guy with the heart of gold. He had the posture of someone who spent too many hours at a desk with a calligraphy pen in his hand. His shoulders stooped, and his head hung in front of his body. He spoke from his throat, in an Italian-American accent with a breathy rasp.
In those days, every musical part needed to be written out by hand. That was the job of the copyist. Emile would personally translate the arranger’s chicken scratches into a gorgeous master score with the twirl of clefs, the key signatures with their flats and sharps, the notes, rests, and dynamic markings. He hired a number of down-on-their-heels musicians to copy out the rest of the individual musical parts. For a big date like this, with a rhythm section, brass, woodwinds, and percussion, that would be over twenty copying jobs for every cue in the film, some of which were two or three minutes long.
Emile walked around the studio, placing a copied part on the music stand in front of each musician’s chair. He took the master score and unfolded it on the conductor’s podium.
The final notes of the piano now tuned, Willie took a moment to luxuriate in the sound of the luscious instrument. He played a bit of a Beethoven piano sonata. No one ever paid attention to the poor piano tuner but for this moment we all stopped and listened. We could sense for that moment emanating from within this little, ugly man with the big head and the funny voice the beauty of his soul and the yearning of his heart as his playing rang out from the wondrous Steinway and reverberated against the walls of the grand studio. He closed his eyes as he played, no doubt imagining himself on stage, playing the great repertoire. But then, as if realizing the truth that he would never be the guy on the date, he stopped and sighed. It was his task to prepare the instrument but never to play it for the crowd. And besides, he had more pianos to tune that day. He packed up his wares in his black leather doctor’s bag and, as the musicians arrived, waddled inconspicuously out of the studio.
Now the musicians on the gig started wandering in. The room, silent and slumbering just hours before, came to life with sound. Barry Lazarowitz, the young drummer with a floppy moustache, went over to the kit and we kibitzed while I placed the mics in precise positions. I zipped back into the control room to set levels and get sounds as he tuned the tom-toms.
The legendary trumpeter Marky Markowitz sat in the center chair of the horn section. He was booked on this date due to his expertise at playing the rowdy, mid-west, strip-club gutbucket style that was popular in the 1930s and which would be prominently featured on this soundtrack. His cheeks red with the burst capillaries that never healed from spending his life blowing hard on his brass mouthpiece, he had a perpetual grin on his face. He pulled out his horn and mutes, placed his mouthpiece in his axe, and started to warm up with arpeggios.
Soon, the room became a palette of musical colors: the goose-like glissandi calls of the clarinets; the dark farts of the bones; the thud of the kick drum; the wacka-wacka of the electric guitars; the stanky funk of the Clavinette.
I was busy now, getting sounds where I could. A slight fellow with sweet blue eyes and a sprout of white hair and moustache bounded into the control room. He glowed with enthusiasm. It was Ralph Burns, the musical composer and arranger for the film.
Emile pulled Ralph toward me. Emile was not only the copyist. He was also the contractor. That meant that he was responsible for selecting and hiring the appropriate musicians for the date. He also picked the engineer. He had had a long, close relationship with Burns. When Ralph asked Emile to recommend an engineer, he had suggested me. “Berger, this is Ralph Burns. Be nice to him. He’s a good guy. Ralph, this is your young hot-shot engineer, Glenn Berger.” I shook Ralph’s hand. We smiled at each other. I felt an immediate simpatico vibe between us.<
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Ralph said, “Yeah, man!” and chuckled. “Emile says good things about you, man. I’m looking forward to this!” He crackled with energy.
My heart swelled with excitement and pride, and I exclaimed, “Me, too!” This cat was a legend. He’d been around for decades, writing jazz hits for Woody Herman, playing with Charlie Barnet and Stan Getz, composing for Aretha Franklin, doing string arrangements for Ray Charles, including his classic “Georgia on My Mind.” Among lots of other awards, he’d won the Oscar for his score for Fosse’s smash hit film, Cabaret.
“Hey, man, let’s make sure we catch some of that great Italian food down at Ponte Vecchio in the Village, OK?”
Arrangers were the best, and I dug Ralph right away. He was cool.
It started to hit me that this was going to be good. I loved film and recording and now I had a chance to work on a huge musical movie with a big band and a great arranger. This was my kind of thing. Film dates were demanding. There was no time for dilly-dallying—you had to get stuff down on tape right and fast. The clock was ticking with a lot of union scale out in the room. The pressure would be on, and it was live or die. This was going to be fun!
SCENE TWO:
Meeting Bob Fosse
Everything was checked and double-checked. We were ready to rock. I watched the clock as it moved closer to the ten o’clock downbeat. Now, there was only one person missing.
The door opened to the control room. The energy coming off the guy who entered was so intense it felt like the camera zoomed in for a close up with everyone around him going out of focus.
He was dressed all in black. Black shit-kicker boots, tight jeans, a black button-down shirt, with a few buttons open, and a black vest on top of that. The only objects that broke the black were a silver metal whistle around his neck and a white cigarette dangling off his bottom lip.
There was an immediate hush in the control room. Chuck and I stole a look at each other and nodded. Burns, who was talking details with Charlap, sensed the star entering the room, too. He turned, and said, “Bob! Great to see you!” I could tell Ralph was excited, nervous, eager-to-please, and somewhat in awe. He walked over and they hugged warmly.
“Bob! Let me introduce you to our engineer. This here is Glenn Berger. He is the man right now.”
He smiled a beautiful, radiant, sexy smile, and extended a hand for a shake. I knew it right away. I thought, This is Bob Fosse. And then, Wow, this guy is deep. In that moment, it was like nothing else in the world existed, except for him.
For endless seconds we held eye contact. He was balding, with a golden-brown and greying beard. He had an Irish pixie face, with piercing blue eyes. His winning smile shifted to a pre-occupied seriousness. His lithe body was bent in the shape of a question mark, as if his entire being was asking the question, “Whaddya think?” There was something slightly imploring in his expression. He looked deep in my eyes, scrutinizing me, the way someone would look at his heart surgeon before allowing them to put in the knife. Would I be able to keep him alive? In a soft, high warm voice, he said, “Hi. Nice to meet ya.”
This dude was a klieg light of charisma. Through his handshake I was instantly filled with the energy of the universe, what the ancient Chinese called the “floodlike Ch’i.”
I didn’t really know what it meant to be working with Bob Fosse. I didn’t know that he was the only guy at that time to have won an Emmy, Tony, and Oscar, all in the same year. I didn’t realize he was the guy who won the Best Director Oscar, beating out Coppola the year he made The Godfather. I didn’t know that he’d won eight Tonys for choreography and had invented an entire style of dance that would influence that art form for decades to come. But somehow, I knew I was in the presence of brilliance.
I could tell right away that all the music-biz characters I’d met ‘til then were small fry — immature kids. A film director was different. Fosse was a towering figure. He was magnificent.
He looked around and quietly said to me, “Where’s the screen?”
I pointed out into the studio through the glass, straight across from where we stood — I on one side of the console, he on the other.
Politely, he asked, “Can I have a chair? Anything will do.” I walked to his side of the console and grabbed one.
“Right here.” He sat down as close to the glass as possible, as close to the screen as he could get, under the giant studio monitors. He clearly wasn’t interested in what he would hear; he was singularly focused on what he would see. He lit a cigarette, faced the blank screen, and waited.
As he stared at the screen with a preternatural intensity, I felt this powerful longing for him to approve of me, to notice me, to like me, to — no, I couldn’t think it — even love me.
I just wanted to look at him, but I knew I had a gig to do. The clock’s big hand hit the twelve. It was ten o’clock: downbeat. Ralph stood on the riser, in front of the conductor’s podium, opened up his score, and raised his baton.
The room went quiet. You could feel the anticipation. Ralph said, “OK. Six beats. From the top. Let’s go!”
After a few rehearsals, which gave me a chance to balance the entire band, I turned to my assistant. “Roll tape!” Chuck hit the multi, and he also recorded a rough mix on the quarter-inch machine.
I hit the talk back and slated. “Cue one, take one.”
I grabbed the intercom and screamed at Plotnik, “Roll film!”
I heard him stomp across the little room above and behind me. “Alright, Berger!”
Then I heard the big motor slowly start to turn and pick up steam with the characteristic thirty-frames-per-second clickety-clack of the film’s sprocket holes being grabbed by the machine’s gears.
My finger was on the button to start the click machine. Timing was everything now. A black and white clip started to run on the screen. First three white dots, one after the other, and then a double set of white dots. I started to count in my head, one, two, three. On the fourth beat, when the double circles came, I hit the click.
Immediately, Ralph counted off. “One, Two, three, four, One AND!” He lowered his baton, and the band hit.
The cats were hot. Great readers, they were precise from the start. My hands flew over the faders, adjusting levels, blending the instruments, getting the headphone mix right. The complex arrangement of horns, winds, rhythm section, and percussion kept me busy. Fosse squinted at the screen, the ash dangling off the end of his cigarette butt. Ralph conducted, keeping the band in sync, with one eye on the screen, making sure that the musical accents hit the right events at the right time in the film. The cue came to an end.
To Plotnik: “Stop film! Rewind to the top!”
To Chuck: “Hold tape!”
Then Ralph, from the studio, “Playback!”
I flipped a switch on the console and flew around to the quarter-inch machine that had the rough mix. I hit rewind and gave the motor a boost, twirling the left reel with my finger. I edged the head-cover toward the tape heads just close enough so I could hear the sound of the tape rewinding over the heads, but not so close that the sound would screech and hurt your ears. When I heard the garbled sound stop, I hit fast-forward to slow the tape down and ran my fingers over the take-up reel, to act as a manual brake. I stopped the tape and hit play. When I got to the top of Ralph’s count, I hit stop, and rocked the tape across the heads so that when I hit play it would begin precisely on his first word. We didn’t have fast rewind for the film, so we had to wait for Plotnik to get the cue to the top. Ralph came into the control room.
On the intercom, to Plotnik: “Roll as soon as you’re ready!”
“Don’t pressure me, Berger!”
“Move it, fat man!”
Plotnik hit the start button, and again the film began to play. I watched the white circles, and counted, and on the fourth, hit play. Perfect. Right on cue. The music matched the film like a dream. I was on. The drums popped, the horns were clean. The balance was full and transparent. Ralph turned to m
e with a smile, and nodded. He turned to Bob. Fosse whispered in his ear.
I heard Ralph say, “Oh, oh, yeah, got it, sure.” He went back out into the studio and scribbled some notes on his score and gave directions to the band.
We did another take, the music and performance better. These were the best studio musicians in the world. Their sound was fat, their rhythm was tight, their pitch perfect. And, they could swing.
Playback. I was at the peak of my powers, the flower and the glory of my youth. I was fast and flawless, skilled and experienced, confident, sure, arrogant even. I danced around the control room with my jazz and tap moves, flying through the air, my hands and fingers deft, my timing precisely on the beat. Gliding and twirling to the quarter-inch machine, moving with brilliant speed, landing at the precise mark, I did a chai’nes, a pivot step, and a pas de bourree.’
I had the giddy feeling of mastery, when everything works because you are sure that it will. I tweaked the balance so you could hear every contrapuntal part with exquisite clarity. I found the magical mix that makes the music dance out of the speakers.
After the playback I beamed at Fosse. He smiled and said, “Nice.” I was in.
I felt the camaraderie of being a cat; picked by the best, accepted by the elite corps, it meant I was one of the best. I was the youngest prodigy in town, twenty-three years-old and working on a surefire Oscar-winning hit movie.
The job that was to fill the next year of my life had begun. I knew that I was working on a once-in-a-lifetime project. I had achieved the skill where I could record and mix anything, and this movie stretched every limit, demanded it all.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 19