"Buzz Me In: Inside Record Plant Studios": https://shorturl.at/CkwqG
Just when you think every story's been told...
I couldn't put this book down. I started it yesterday and finished it today. And I'm a slow reader. I want to devour every word. I'm memorizing without even realizing it. Because that's just how much I care.
The same way I read every scrap of music business news...before there became too much and the stars were cut down to our size, no matter what the press would want us to believe. The starmaking machinery is not turning out a new Joni Mitchel, no one is close. And we never did get a new Beatles, forget a new Dylan. And we might soon be saying we never got a new Springsteen...
Who recorded at the Record Plant.
It's not like the history of the various Record Plant studios is unknown. And if you were a newshound back then, you read Lucian K. Truscott IV's "New Times" story about Gary Kellgren and the studios...
"New Times." It was the best news magazine of that era. Did you read the exposé of Gregg Allman's drug bust and trial?
Probably not.
And you probably aren't even aware of the eighties' best magazine, "Manhattan, Inc.," Clay Felker's tour-de-force.
Then again that's when writers could still compete with rock stars. When we had an entirely new generation of scribes. Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins and Tom McGuane.
And there was a clear dividing line between the stars and us. We all wanted access. To be inside the room where it happens, as "Hamilton" delineates.
And boy did it happen. There are pictures of albums recorded at the various Record Plants and the only one I didn't recognize, didn't know by heart from buying it or seeing it in the bins, was one by the Attitudes. Then again, this supergroup comprised of Danny Kortchmar, Jim Keltner, the then-unknown David Foster and bassist Paull Stallworth's two albums only came out in Japan. That's what Wikipedia tells me, but it's not always right, nor are the timeline and some of the facts in this book, but the mistakes are minor. And it was a long, long time ago (and "American Pie" was recorded at Record Plant N.Y.)
So you've got the stories of the engineer Gary Kellgren, who had the creative vision, Chris Stone who had the business chops, and a Revlon heiress who invested the initial capital? I didn't know that.
And if you're a student of the game, you know the outlines of the stories, but this book puts you directly in front of the console. Hell, I know a lot of these people and I still learned a bunch of stuff. I spoke at length with Robert Margouleff for an aborted podcast, but still I learned more about Stevie Wonder and TONTO and Malcolm Cecil and the music they made.
What you've got here is a musical engineering school, where everybody was taught a little, and then thrown into the deep end. Roy Cicala would start the session and then disappear without notice, that's how Jimmy Iovine became the engineer for "Born to Run."
Jack Douglas? Thom Panunzio? They worked their way up the food chain. Not that all of them can still work today, not all of them are even alive.
It was a golden era. And that's what all the wankers who say it's no different today than it ever was have wrong. You see they were inventing it as they went along. Kind of like the internet, before Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft became established enemies.
Studios were ratholes. But there were technological breakthroughs. The Scully 12 track, which seems to now be completely forgotten. Forget SSL, these studios didn't even have NEVEs! API was the breakthrough, and by the eighties most front liners didn't want to work on that board, even though it's come back into vogue, a little bit.
Man, I know Bob Ezrin well, but they tell stories of Bob in his heyday... I knew he taped Peter Gabriel to the wall in Toronto, but that was a regular feature of Ezrin's sessions, taping people to chairs, all kinds of nonsense/shenanigans. And when Bob works with KISS he says his goal is to entertain THEM, to keep them energized.
Sure, there are some production tips. But it's more of a dive into a lost era. Dead Sea Scrolls. There was so much money raining down that you could pad expenses... Forget billing the label for studio time, they billed the companies for drugs and equipment broken by the acts. There was so much MONEY!
And the goal of the Record Plant was to keep you coming back, assuming they didn't get you to lease a studio for years, like they did with Stevie Wonder.
And it was a floating party. And you'd occasionally see these people out and about. In the Rainbow parking lot, next door in the Roxy... But you could never ever enter the circle. The days of expensive privates had not arrived. Rock stars were gods, and everybody wanted to touch them, gain access.
Now those who haven't died have lost some of their charisma, but the music they made, it's set in amber, it's for all time. There are even stories of how they came up with some of these legendary tunes, often only in a matter of minutes.
And how some acts couldn't let go, they wanted to record and remix forever.
And there's a more accurate depiction of Phil Spector than I've seen anywhere else. When he fires a gun right next to John Lennon. When he was constantly drunk. When he held tapes hostage.
These are the stories behind the records. The people who made them and how they made them. And I think young people don't give a sh*t. They don't care about this history. I grew up and TV was de rigueur. But for my mother, it was a breakthrough! Ditto on my generation and the internet.
As for the acts, some will be rediscovered, many have never left the playing field...you can hear their records in regular rotation on ClassicVinyl and DeepTracks.
This particular book has not been written before. We've got books listing all the sessions, but exactly what went down inside the buildings...some of us care, and if you do...
The book made me feel good, it made me feel like my life was worth living, that my choices were good.
And it's hard these days. When everything is topsy-turvy. If you want to know which way the wind blows, you don't listen to a record. We had the Drake/Kendrick cartoon rap battle... It's entertainment. Never mind the acts making musical pabulum believing this is what the public wants. The acts back then didn't care a whit what the public wanted, they needed to put down what THEY wanted.
Today you can cut at home on your laptop on almost an infinite number of tracks. Time is not money. But it used to be. And it was spent.
To go into the studio back in the day... There was a magic, your skin tingled...
And that feeling is captured in this book.
--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
Listen to the podcast:
-iHeart: https://ihr.fm/2Gi5PFj
-Apple: https://apple.co/2ndmpvp
--
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1
If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=unsubscribe&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25
To change your email address http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=preferences&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25
