White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  I had been stunned by John Cale’s arrangements on Nico’s The Marble Index and shocked that Elektra failed to pick up its option for a second LP. I convinced Warner Brothers to finance a sequel and after a week of recording in New York, Cale flew to London to help me finish off Desertshore. After a session one day, he put his feet up on the mixing desk, waved his arm imperially at John Wood, and said, ‘Let’s hear what else you guys are working on.’ We played him a few things, and eventually got to Nick. Cale was amazed. ‘Who the fuck is this guy? I have to meet him, where is he? I mean, where is he right now!’ I rang Nick and told him that John Cale would be over in half an hour. Nick said, ‘Oh, uh, OK.’ I wrote out Nick’s address, John grabbed it and ran down the stairs.

  The next morning I had a call from Cale. ‘We’re going to need a pick-up for the viola, an amp, a Fender bass and bass amp, a celeste and a Hammond B-3 organ. This afternoon.’ I had scheduled a mix on another project that day but Cale had decided it was time to record ‘Northern Sky’ and ‘Fly’. They arrived together, John with a wild look in his eyes and Nick trailing behind. Despite his domineering manner, Cale was very solicitous towards Nick, who seemed to be guardedly enjoying himself: his only choice was to relax and be carried along.

  Bryter Layter is one of my favourite albums, a record I can sit back and listen to without wishing to redo this or that. The playing of the rhythm sections, Robert’s arrangements and the contributions of McGregor, Cale, Richard Thompson, sax and flute man Ray Warleigh and Doris Troy and P.P. Arnold are a constant source of pleasure. John Wood never got a better sound and we mixed it over and over until we were absolutely satisfied. But when the album was finished, Nick told me he wanted to make his next record alone – no arrangements, no sidemen, nothing.

  Looking back, I can see that we were all so enamoured of Nick’s music we moved happily into the vacuum created by his diffidence. Nick, I think, felt left out of his own album. His refusal to include my favourite – ‘Things Behind The Sun’ – and his insistence on including those three instrumentals were his way of stamping his foot. His ghost is having the last laugh: the stark Pink Moon is his biggest selling album, while Bryter Layter trails in third place after Five Leaves Left.

  Since then I have listened to more than one man’s fair share of anglophone singer-songwriters. When I ran the Hannibal label, I had a box for demos marked ‘WPSEs’ – White People Singing in English. Many claimed Nick as their primary influence: gentle breathy vocals, sad introspective lyrics and arpeggio guitar figures. Next! Few bear comparison to Nick’s form, much less his essence. The only ones who even slightly reminded me of Nick turned out to be unaware of him.

  Chapter 24

  NICK SEEMED HAPPIER AT Sound Techniques than anywhere else (with the possible exception of Bob Squire’s kitchen). I was pretty happy there myself. It was a former dairy – a plaster cow’s head marked the doorway – on a side street off the King’s Road near the World’s End. Across from the studio, where Manolo Blahnik now has his flagship shoe store, was a ‘provisioner’, a throw-back grocery that sold potatoes, onions, carrots and canned or packaged goods. I stopped in during a recording session in 1966 and saw a blackboard listing ‘fresh-cut’ ham sandwiches and cheese sandwiches. Being American, I asked for a ham and cheese sandwich. The two ageing white-smocked proprietors looked at me blankly: they made ham sandwiches or cheese sandwiches, but the combination was not on the menu. I stared back in disbelief. After a brief stand-off, I ordered one of each, threw two slices of bread on the counter, stuffed the ham in alongside the cheese and walked out the door.

  In talking about how we used to make records I sometimes feel like one of those ruddy, besmocked shopkeepers who refused to countenance the concept of ham and cheese. I have never used a drum machine, never sequenced anything, never sampled. Whenever I pass the old dairy and see the flats that have replaced the studio, I feel a wrench. It is hard to find places like Sound Techniques today. There is a small anti-digital movement, but even studios with this approach rarely have a room that sounds anywhere near as good.

  When I took up my London post, Elektra was already using Sound Techniques for an instrumental series of Holzman’s devising called Signs of the Zodiac (string players in London were better and cheaper than in New York). I had to bring a wad of cash down there one day in February 1966 to pay the musicians and started chatting with John Wood, the heavy-set engineer. We got along pretty well and I liked the feel of the place. The control room looked down on the studio from a box above one side while the offices were built over the opposite side. It looked awkward, but the differing ceiling levels meant that you had three different acoustics in the same studio; you could move things around until you found the sweet spot for an instrument or a singer.

  These days most engineers confronted with a displeasing sound reach for the knobs on the console and tweak the high, mid or low frequencies. When that process is inflicted on more and more tracks of a multi-channel recording the sound passes through dozens of transistors, resulting in a narrower, more confined sound. With the added limitations of digital sound, you end up with a bright and shiny, thin and two-dimensional recording. To my ears, anyway. When John heard a sound he didn’t like, he would lift his bulky frame off the chair and lumber down the stairs, muttering all the way. I began to be able to predict whether he was going to try a different microphone, reposition the existing one or shift the offending musician to another part of the studio. When I listen to records we made together in the sixties, I can still hear the air in the studio and the full dimension of the sounds the musicians created for us. I can hear the depth of Nick Drake’s breath as well as his voice, the grit in the crude strings of Robin Williamson’s gimbri and Dave Mattacks’s drum technique spread out warmly in aural Technicolor across the stereo spectrum.

  John started out as an editor at Decca, taking a razor blade to recordings of operas and symphonies. When I brought the Incredible String Band into Sound Techniques, he had never heard anything like them. He took care of the sound, I looked after the musical side of things and we learned from each other. When I wanted to do something he thought unwise, he would give me a withering sneer. ‘You want to what?!?’ If I were sure of my ground, I would tell him to just do it and not give me any shit. If my resolve melted in the face of his contempt, it probably wasn’t such a good idea in the first place. Professional session musicians regarded the pair of us with curiosity: the normal deference of engineer towards producer didn’t seem to apply. Later, in California, when I worked with yes-men engineers, it was hard to adapt.

  Most studios now have large control rooms so outboard gear can be plugged directly into the console: drum machines, electronic keyboards, sequencers, etc. Most music recorded today is created by performers – or operators – sitting beside the engineer; it passes directly on to a hard disk rather than reverberating in the air to be captured by microphones. As a result, the ‘studio’ room itself is often shrunk to a modest space for vocalists or single instruments. The ideal acoustic is now a dead one: digital reverb can supposedly synthesize any atmosphere from Madison Square Garden to your bathroom. In the quest for the perfect track, each part is added separately so that any mistakes can be easily corrected; inflexible rhythms are generated by a machine. Musicians in the sixties were still recording a large part of each track playing together in the same room at the same time, maintaining at least some of the excitement of a live performance, with vocals and solos usually added later. Rhythm sections breathed with the other musicians, accenting and retarding the beat as mood dictated. The acoustics of different studios varied widely, as did the styles of engineering and production. Computers theoretically let musicians and producers choose from an endless palate of varied sounds, but modern digital recordings are far more monochromatically similar to each other than were older analogue tracks.

  When Fairport Convention visited Los Angeles for the first time, their ambition was to record at Gold Star, where Phil Spector built his f
amous ‘wall of sound’. A&M, their American label, booked a day for us there and we recorded a couple of tracks. The control room still had ‘rotary pots’ (Bakelite dials) to calibrate the levels instead of faders. The acoustic was amazing; sounds jumped out of the speakers and off the tape. When we got back to London with our rough mixes, we listened in awe: the punch of the recording was astounding. But our Gold Star tracks were never completed and the studio was torn down soon afterwards to make room for a strip mall.

  Musicians were obsessed with ‘sounds’ in those days. Drummers often asked John whether he had heard the latest by so-and-so and what he thought of the drum sound. When we recorded Liege and Lief, Dave Mattacks wanted to match Levon Helm’s snare sound on The Band’s Big Pink. Drummers usually want their snare to have a lot of ‘edge’ so the backbeat jumps out of the mix, but Levon had gone the other way, producing a sound that resembled an expensive cardboard box being struck with a pair of velvet slippers. John would impatiently explain that you can’t just create sounds, you had to actually play like that. ‘Records get the sound they deserve’ was his motto. John could be infuriating, but no Witchseason musician wanted to work with anyone else. With John you knew no nasty surprises were awaiting when it came time to mix. I am a great believer in ‘bad news first’, and with John you got all the bad news, all the time.

  When Warner Brothers asked me to produce an album with Geoff and Maria Muldaur after the Kweskin Jug Band broke up, John and I settled in at a Boston studio where aspiring comedian Martin Mull was the assistant engineer. Pottery Pie got some nice reviews, sold a few copies, and is immortalized as the source of the version of ‘Brazil’ that is repeated throughout Terry Gilliam’s film. That track was recorded as guitarist Amos Garrett’s departure for his flight home loomed ever closer. The more Amos pressed, the worse it got. Finally, he gave up and hailed a taxi. John pieced together one composite verse from various takes, mixed it down to stereo and copied it back to the multi-track four times for four verses. Then we added the vocals and the rest of the over-dubs. A primitive form of sampling, I suppose, but without today’s computers it was certainly more of a challenge.

  As we were mixing another track we found flakes of Ampex tape on the floor in front of the eight-track recorder. The tape was falling apart! There was a huge chunk missing from the vocal track and we couldn’t ask Geoff to re-sing it as all the other tracks were full. John recorded a new vocal verse on a mono tape, getting it in synch with the master by listening through a set of headphones, speeding it up with his finger or slowing it down with the heel of his hand so I could insert the missing word into the mix at exactly the right spot. He ended up with blood on his shirt and the tape console but the mix sounds perfect.

  As the pace of my recordings picked up during 1969 and 1970, I would block out weeks at a time in Sound Techniques, go to the office in the mornings for a couple of hours, then head to the studio, where John and I would stay until midnight. It seemed natural that when I left London for California in the early 1970s, he would take over as producer for many of the Witchseason artists. But without our ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine, they were left with just the latter. When other producers hired him as an engineer, they were appalled at the way he sassed them back. He produced some great records in the 1970s, including the early Squeeze albums, but eventually moved to Scotland and opened a hotel. Strong-minded artists and I periodically drag him out of retirement.

  One artist relationship of John’s that was never in question was with Nick. He adored John and John’s wife doted on him. They would invite him out to Greenwich for a home-cooked meal when he began to look pale. John could sense when Nick was uncomfortable with something I suggested and would give me a hard time on Nick’s behalf, which Nick appreciated enormously. In early 1971, after I had moved to California, he produced Pink Moon as starkly and simply as Nick intended.

  The five years I spent making records in London saw huge leaps in technology. From the four tracks I began with, we went to eight, then sixteen, each increase doubling the tape’s width. Just before I left for California came the beginning of the decline: some bright spark figured out how to squeeze twenty-four tracks on to the two-inch tape that previously held sixteen. The reduction in track width significantly degraded the sound quality. A few young engineers today realize how great two-inch sixteen-track recording sounds. The best sound of all, of course, is straight to stereo, no mixing, no over-dubbing – and no digits.

  Listeners may not know why they like something, but it is a good bet the response to an album of ‘performed’ music recorded properly will be much better than to the same thing recorded in modern hi-tech over-dubbed fashion. An engineer who used to work at Sound Techniques is now the torch-bearer for traditional values. Jerry Boys runs Livingston Studios in North London and started travelling with me for world music projects in the late 1980s. When we got back from Havana in 1995 with the first Cubanismo CD, Nick Gold at World Circuit hired Jerry to go back to Cuba for a project with Ry Cooder.

  I have seen people enter pubs and bars where the Buena Vista Social Club CD is playing and look around for the source of the music; they seem startled to be entering a three-dimensional acoustic space. There were many recordings already on the market with similar Cuban singers and material when Buena Vista was released. Its success is usually ascribed to Cooder, the film or the brilliant marketing, all of which were certainly relevant. But I am convinced that the sound of the record was equally if not more important. Not only is it music from another era, magically preserved in the time capsule of Castro’s communism, but it was recorded using equally outdated techniques and painstakingly transferred to a digital master so that it retained as much of its analogue warmth as possible. The old Egrem studio in Havana is huge, an excellent but unforgiving room. Jerry, Cooder and Gold experimented a great deal with microphone placement. The recording captures the full sound of the three-dimensional space in which the musicians performed – live. If it had been made at one of the new digital studios in Havana, trying so hard to be ‘modern’ with their tiny dead recording spaces and big control rooms, I doubt very much whether anyone beyond a few thousand Latin music enthusiasts would even know it existed.

  On second thoughts, make that a straight cheese sandwich, please.

  Chapter 25

  LIAR DICE INVOLVES FIVE poker dice and any number of people around a smooth-topped table. It resembles poker but with more treachery and no betting. It helps if the players are fuelled by cups of strong English tea and good Afghan hashish. This was the regular après-studio entertainment for a number of Witchseason artists and its proprietors. The venue was Bob Squire’s kitchen.

  Hapshash & The Coloured Coat – Nigel Waymouth and Michael English – designed their posters in a small studio near Holland Park. Arriving to collect artwork for the printers one day, I noticed a green Morris Minor convertible outside the house next door with a FOR SALE, ENQUIRE WITHIN sign. As my ‘sit-up-and-beg’ Rover was on its last legs, I rang the doorbell. It was answered by a seedy-looking man in a string vest and braces, a roll-up dangling from his mouth, two days’ growth of grey-flecked stubble and dark, thinning hair. We haggled a bit, he asked me in for a cup of tea, and the deal was done. Bob Squire had entered our lives.

  Bob was East End Jewish. He had been a tout for strip clubs in the West End and vaguely knew the Kray twins. In the early sixties, he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was given a ‘grace and favour’ flat in Princedale Road by a villain who owed Bob an obligation – I never dared ask why. He had a wife and two kids and made ends meet buying and selling used cars, stolen goods and hashish (which he learned to love while stationed in Palestine after the war). Besides his addiction to PG Tips (loose in a strainer, boiling water poured slowly through into the cup, milk in first, three sugars), he had a prescription for three Nembutals a day.

  He started looking after the transportation needs of my various groups: driving the Incredible String Band to gigs in his Ford Sedan; finding
a van for Fairport Convention; having John Martyn’s motor repaired. We found his company so agreeable that we would stop by late at night to smoke dope, drink tea, chew the fat, listen to music and play liar dice or kaluki.

  The cramped space with its linoleum floor, a few wobbly chairs and a Formica-topped table became a haven for us. The pressures of coming up with new songs, finishing mixes in time for release dates or juggling cash flows seemed to evaporate in its benign confines. His musical tastes were impeccable: Jimmy Smith and Stanley Turrentine were favourites and he was always playing Dr John’s Night Tripper. The cockney clichés flew thick and fast: ‘If you drink the water you die. And if you don’t drink the water you die’; ‘He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind’; ‘Needs must when the Devil drives’. Money was counted in ‘ponies’, ‘monkeys’ and ‘scores’. No one ever chickened out, he ‘dropped his bottle’. Your face was your ‘boat’ (race); you got high on ‘sausage’ (and mash); and drank cups of ‘Rosie’ (Lee). No one was ever ‘an arsehole’, they were the double rhyme of ‘a right Charley’ (Smirk, the jockey; then Berkshire Hunt). The police didn’t warrant a rhyme, they were simply ‘the Old Bill’ or ‘the Filth’.

  I came across an anthology called The Elizabethan Underworld with a piece by Robert Greene, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. In it he describes a con man who is forever saying, ‘Needs must when the Devil drives.’ Bob would dismiss an annoying person by calling them a ‘shmurry abbott’. The only clue to this mysterious insult was the ancient church of St Mary Abbott’s a short distance away. I felt Bob was part of a long and deep river flowing underneath all the kings, prime ministers, playwrights and poets of England.